How can I draw a line around one part of my brain and say that this is the autistic part, and the rest of me is something else? That way of looking at autism is predicated on the strange idea that there was or is a normal person somewhere inside me, hidden by autism, and struggling to get out. That’s not reality.
Ari Ne’eman, member of Obama’s National Council on Disability, on whether he’d take a cure for autism.
Here’s something to chew on: we identify with our minds. You could change every part of your body, but if your mind was still intact, you’d still be you. If you installed a different mind in your body, though, would it be you? I’d say it’d be someone else in your body. In this way, voluntarily undergoing a radical overnight transformation of your mind is akin to suicide: the part that is most intensely you is replaced with something “better”. Suppose that the neural patterns that cause the symptoms necessary for getting diagnosed as autistic are so complicated that to “cure” someone of autism, they would need to undergo such a radical transformation. Suppose, then, someone offered an autist a pill that would “cure” them overnight. Thought experiment: someone says to you, sleep well, because tomorrow, someone else’s mind will occupy your body, and your current mind will be gone. Would you accept that? In what ways are you and the autist not in the same position? Is it weird, then, that some autists would not take a cure?
Oct 12, 2010