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Ghatanathoah comments on Disability Culture Meets the Transhumanist Condition - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure what I wrote that gave you this idea. I do think that queer people approve of being queer. What I'm talking about when I say "approval" is preferences that are ego-syntonic, that are line with the kind of person they want to be. Most queer people consider their preference to be ego-syntonic. Being queer is the kind of person they want to be and they would not change it if they could. Those who do not are usually motivated by mistaken religious ideas, rather than clearly reasoned disapproval.
What I am trying to say is that being queer is a statement about what people want to do. When we say that someone is queer that means that they have a desire to engage in romantic and sexual relationships that are different from the heterosexual norm. This desire is ego-syntonic, it is approved of.
Being deaf, by contrast, is a statement about what people are able do. They lack the ability to hear things.
If you removed someone's deafness, none of their desires would change. They would still want everything they wanted before they were deaf. If they were really attached to their current lifestyle they could buy earplugs. By contrast, if you changed a queer person into a straight person, they would stop wanting to have non-heteronormative relationships. They'd be able to continue their current lifestyle (or at least, as able as anyone is in a heteronormative society), but they wouldn't want to.
There are some people who claim that they prefer being deaf to being able to hear, and that being deaf is ego-syntonic. I believe that they are confused. I think what they really value isn't being deaf, it's the community that they have built with other deaf people. They are confusing their preference to display loyalty to their community with with a preference to not be able to hear. In addition I think they are confused for some other reasons:
To sum it up, I believe that being queer is an ego-syntonic desire. I believe that being deaf is not ego-syntonic, but people say it is out of a desire to have self-esteem and be proud of and loyal to the deaf community.
It seems to me that most people lack the ability to be aroused by people--typically, their ability is seriously limited, to half of the population at most.
I suspect that most, if not all, queers have a preference to be queer (if they do) for this reason. But it's not clear to me how to even test this one way or the other--even if one asked the hypothetical question "if there were a pill to make you straight, would you take it?" that puts one into far-mode, not near-mode, and it's very possible that people will pick answers to please the community of potential romantic partners. (If you say "yes, I'd like to be straight," that'll increase your attractiveness to opposite-sex partners, but not actually increase their attractiveness to you!)
(I have thought, at times, 'how convenient to be gay, since I probably would get along much better with men than women!', but I can't claim that I would choose to be gay for that reason, starting from emptiness. Why not bisexuality? Why not asexuality?)
When I was talking about being queer I wasn't just talking about the experience of being aroused, I was talking about the desire to have that experience, and that experience being egosyntonic. It's fairly easy to rephrase any preference a person has to sound like an ability or lack thereof. For instance, you could say that I lack the ability to enjoy skinning people alive. But that's because I don't want to skin people alive, or to enjoy it! That's a terminal value, the buck stops there.
Some other factors to consider:
Starting from emptiness you would be completely indifferent to everything, including changes to your future preferences. To paraphrase Eliezer, you would be a rock, not a perfectly impartial being.
At some point you just have to say "These are my terminal values, the buck stops here."
Now, while I would not say it is impossible to create a creature that assigns a terminal value to deafness, I find it unlikely that humans are such creatures. The way human psychology works makes me assign a much higher probability to their being self-deceived for group status purposes.
Then I see how your claim that most queers are egosyntonic flows through, but it seems like reversing the order of how things go. I visualize the typical experience as something like "id wants X -> ego understands id wants X -> superego approves of id wanting X," with each arrow representing a step that not everyone takes.
I agree, but I observe that there's a difficulty in using egosyntonicity (which I would describe as both wanting X and wanting to want X) without a clear theory of meta-values (i.e. "I want to want X because wanting X is consistent with my other wants" is what it looks like to use consistency as a meta-value).
I was unclear--I meant emptiness with regards to sexual orientation, not values in general. One could imagine, say, someone who wants to become a priest choosing asexuality, and someone who wants to get ahead in fashion design choosing to be gay, someone who wants to have kids naturally choosing to be heterosexual, and so on. If you kept all of my values the same and deleted my sexual orientation, what would regrow? Compare to the "if you deleted all proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem from my mind, would I be able to reinvent it?" thought experiment.
(Since we are talking about values instead of beliefs, and it's not obvious that values would 'regrow' similar to beliefs, it may be clearer to consider counterfactual mes of every possible sexual orientation, and comparing the justifications they can come up with for why it's egosyntonic to have the orientation that they have. It seems some of them will have an easier time of it than others, but that all of them will have an easy enough time that it's not clear I should count my justification as worth much.)
I think that maybe all of them would be perfectly justifying in saying that their sexual orientation is a terminal value and the buck stops there.
On the other hand, I'm nowhere near 100% sure I wouldn't take a pill to make me bisexual.
I think a way to help tease out your intuition would be Bostrom's reversal test. If transhumanist scientists invented a new kind of sexual orientation, a new kind of sexual experiences, and so on, would you want to be modified to be able to enjoy this new, never before seen type of sex. I don't know how you'd reply, for me it would probably be yes or no, depending on specific details of the new kind of sex.
I think the reason I would sometimes say yes is that I have a strong preexisting preference for novelty and novel experiences. So my desire for new sexual preferences would grow out of that.
Incidentally, Bostrom's reversal test also supports my intuitions about deafness. If transhumanists invented new senses that no human has ever had before, would I want to have them if there were no side effects? Of course I would! I especially want to be able to sense magnetic fields like sharks can.