Here's an interesting conversation recap: Person: "When you say I wouldn't want to be hearing it kind of comes across as offensive." Me: "Really would you want to be deafblind?" Them (immediately and emphatically) "NO!" Me: "so let me get this straight, it's offensive when I say I wouldn't want to be hearing but you saying you wouldn't want to be deafblind is OK? This is a you problem, not a me problem. Then there was a lot of backpedaling? Protip, I get to like the way I experience the world!
I think that ableds are so used to seeing disability as a tragedy and there are for sure people who feel this way and their feelings are valid. I don't feel like that. There are so many things I love about being deafblind I wouldn't want to be able to either hear or see. I love my life, enthusiastically, joyfully. If people are bothered by that and find it offensive, again, not my problem, people don't know what to do with a disabled person who doesn't hate themselves or their disability
I'm curious about this approach. When I think about some sense I don't have (say, ability to see polarization of light[0], or ability to feel magnetic fields), I would nearly always like to be able to at least experience having it once, and usually would prefer to have it (as long as I could ignore it whenever I wanted to). I can think of a few reasons I would not want to have a sense: either because it gives me information I would not want to have to keep interactions with other people reasonable (so, no mind reading) or because it would be extremely noisy in my daily life (so, preference for being able to ignore it).
It seems to me that you're clearly thinking in some other way. Would you mind pointing out what you think are the important differences?
[0] Haidinger's brush nonwithstanding
Ah, I see: the lack of ability to turn things off seems to be the most important downside. Thanks.
@robryk Also I'm autistic and have a lot of sensory issues. Things like touch, smell and taste can be very overwhelming for me. Also I'm used to the way I do things. Think about it, you wake up and you make the coffee, you know what everything looks like, I know what it feels like, now I suddenly have to relearn a bunch of shit when I can make coffee perfectly fine right now lol.
I understand the first part, but am somewhat surprised about the having to relearn things part: I would expect that -- if we assume that we've magically prevented the problem of being overwhelmed with input -- more input of different categories would not make things worse[1]. Is this about some different kind of being overwhelmed, or am I looking at the whole thing from a weird perspective?
[1] I don't really know of any situations when something like this happened to me or someone I know though; closest ones I can recall are friends getting better sense of smell after septum surgery and getting measurement tools as a kid -- and they both are different in ways that obviously can matter a lot.
@robryk I have read quite a few books about blind people who regained, or gained sight and they all kind of have a theme of holy fuck what have I done to myself haha. I mean the long and short of it is the therapy and training you'd need to do along with recovery from surgery like I'm too busy doing actual life for any of that business.
Do you have one or two such books to recommend?
@robryk When you talk about being able to see/hear you are talking surgery. So it's not like glasses where you take them off when it gets too overwhelming. I mean I guess you could close your eyes but you can't close your ears. Would I like to be able to do it for maybe 5 minutes to play around but I would want to be able to go back to my real life. I don't want to read print, I love braille. how would I know what anything looked like like... ... the learning curve would be... wild.