@51 thumbs up. I understand the point that you're afraid of sensory over-load and the time it would take to adjust but rather die than see I can't understand.

We all have our own opinion on this of course but it saddens me to see people view there blindness as this disease.  It's who you are.

hi, its not alwais a sikness, i becaime blind because of a fucking untraned dok

@55
I hate this kind of thinking.  If you get your vision back you're whoever you are now with whatever capabilities you currently have, the same likes, dislikes, personality, etc.  Vision doesn't change that.  But it does let you do tons more.  Me plus vision is still me, except now I can drive a car, read math textbooks, travel the world, do who knows what else.  Never have to worry about if an app is accessible again.  Play any sighted videogame.

I don't wake up every morning and go "man I still don't have vision today".  Few of us do.  But it'd be really nice.  I'm not differently gifted.  Neither are you.  We're versions of ourselves that are currently without vision.  That doesn't make us less capable.  But if we did have vision, we'd all instantly become incredibly more capable.  It wouldn't solve our problems.  But it goes a long way.

It surprises me how few people get this, and I have a great deal of trouble seeing "vision is part of your identity" as anything but "I can't come to terms with being less capable than someone else, so I'll relabel it identity instead of disability".

Maybe the cure will be expensive.  Maybe the cure will have side effects.  Maybe the cure will be "you get vision but you die in 1 year".  But all of those hypotheticals aren't likely, and without them there's literally no rational reason to sit here and go "I'll pass on that cure, thanks".

@60
And yet, irregardless of what you think, you are objectively and provably less capable than an equivalent version of you that also had sight.  That's not an opinion.  You plus sight could do tons more things.  Maybe you don't want to do those things, but since those things include "drive to the store on your own" and a whole variety of similar daily tasks, good luck convincing me or most anyone else here of that.

Ironically enough, I'm a programmer, and a pretty good one, certainly better than a majority of sighted programmers.  But there are tons of things I can't ever do in the field of programming because I am blind and they require various inaccessible things--and for a lot of it, for instance some of the steps involved in using FPGAs--you can't just make it accessible somehow because it's fundamentally visual, and trying to shove it into something auditory or tactile is like trying to watch Netflix over dialup from the 90s.

I'm not using capable as in worth.  It's not about whether you're a person.  But having vision expands your possibilities drastically, and you can't actually dispute that.  The best you can do is decide that you don't care about them.  But it's almost certainly literally worth money, if you want a practical way to put it.  Instacart, living near public transportation, etc. are all expensive things, and by being less efficient at your job you are making less money than you could otherwise be for the same amount of work.  Yes, you can work at the level of a sighted person, and I do too.  But that doesn't mean I'm not aware that sighted me could be faster/better than blind me.

And again, that's before you even get to our inability to participate in modern culture, to travel, to just go out and experience the world on a whim because we want to.  Hell, look at Covid.  There's very little you can share with sighted friends without being in the same room, at least unless you're already well past the point where you're getting to know each other.  Online games, sharing pictures of dinner, "look at my cute dog"--none of that is stuff we get.  Modern communication itself is starting to change, even, to a picture-centric model where you'll send messages with a picture and a couple words about it.  It's literally to the point where I could see us being pushed out of online discourse in 10 years, just because young people grow up in this world where you don't even need to use English anymore to get your point across.  Not that it matters, though, because broadly speaking blind people can't spell anyway.

Thing about these points is you can't actually debate them.  You can just stick your head in the sand and say "Well but I personally feel that" and seriously, stop.  You don't have to be miserable that you're blind.  In fact being blind doesn't even mean being less happy than someone sighted.  But "It's part of my identity and I'm already as good as a sighted person": no.  If it's part of your identity, getting vision isn't going to actually change your identity because it's already done what it's going to.  And you might be as capable as some sighted people, but you're not as capable as the only sighted person that should matter, namely yourself with vision.

If someone said here's a free $1000, no strings attached I'd take it.  If someone said here's some free vision, no strings attached, I'd also take it, for the same reasons.  And for the same reasons, I consider anyone trying the "but it's identity, I don't need it" rhetoric to be very flawed.  Maybe you don't need the $1000, but the $1000 didn't take the $1000 from someone else and you're $1000 richer.  And if you ever decided that you really didn't want the $1000 you could give it to charity, in the same way that if you ever really decided you wanted to be blind again you could arrange for that.

@62: Yes, if someone wants to go blind, they should be allowed to do that IMO. If you want to do something with your body that doesn't harm other people, you should be allowed to do that. I also believe assisted suicide, for example, should be allowed but that's another subject entirely. IMO it wouldn't be a smart move because we live in a sighted world and that's not going to change any time soon, but if that's what you want to do, go for it I guess. And yes, it's largely a social issue for me, although not entirely. A lot of it is being able to play video games not just for the social prospects of being able to talk about them or participate in them with your friends, but just for the entertainment prospects. Part of my reasoning for wanting to drive would be to easily meet up with friends, but most of it is just because I want to go places and would prefer taking a car that I own to them. There are plenty of examples in this thread that aren't social.
Also, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything, unless you mean retroactively applying these treatments in babies, or whatever. If there were no more blind people, I guess there would be no more audiogames, which IMO would be fine. Why would there need to be? Mainstream games are like 20 years ahead of our most advanced ones, and developing in parallel is a waste of time.

Hi there,
@50: eyes transplantation is a quite complicated thing, primarily for two reasons. The firstone is the muscular structure around eyes. Muscles like thigh muscle or arm muscle (I don't know the proper english names) are quite simple, as they are big and work in rather simple way. Muscles around eyes are much smaller, fitted in a small area, and expected to move eyes in various directions, controll your caps etc. This is not easy to reproduce during a transplantation, everything must fit perfectly, otherwise the patient would have quite hot times after waking up.
But this problem is not that significant compared to the secondone, consisting of joining patient's optical nerve to the new eye. This is a real trouble, where things get stuck, as nerves can't be simply joined with glue or something like that. They must grow together, what is a quite unpleasant fact considering, that neurons and neural paths do all possible sorts of things just not growing.
Neurons are one of the longest living cells in human body, most of them are already created when a baby is born, and last for the whole lifetime. Neuroscientists believe, that some neural paths are built during development of brain, but after the circuits are set, they don't grow or reproduce anymore.
Thus, it's not that hard to understand, how challenging is to get these two things to join together.
There were some very interesting progresses in this problem in recent years, with successful restoring sight of mouses with cut optical nerves.
But the methods are not strong enough yet to work on humans, so further research is necessary.

As for moral aspect of transplanting an eye, I wouldn't have problems myself with it. These sorts of transplantations are done already with other organs, so eyes would be just another entry on the list. The person originally wearing them won't need them anymore, and they would decay after some time anyway, so making use of them is the best thing to do. And if the person wants them in his grave so strongly, I can still return them after my death.
But seriously, as far as I know, you must give an agreement to use your organs for transplantations after your death, noone will be opening corpses with "you know, we need something from this guy. Don't worry, he will look normally again after we close him."
That means, that the person explicitly wanted his eyes to be donored, and thus having them transplanted is okay.

Best regards

Rastislav

You know it's interesting.  Someone could see this on the web via a search and they would see people on this website saying, "hear yee, hear yee, the blind are inferior!"  What message does this send?  It's bad enough so many people look at us sideways and even think we should be locked away.  It is a shame.  Ah but by all means, keep taking the stance that it is best not to be blind.  Sorry internet.

I don't like the science fiction future. It sounds weirdly alienating. I don't know why. Extreme transhumanism and/or brain-linked simulations are clearly the only way to Live the Life I want™. But whenever I hear people talk about those things, it just sounds sad. I am confused.
But yeah, if I had to pick one futuristic perk, it would not be sight. I'd need to know what futuristic perks are actually on the hypofuturistical table before picking one, but I'd much rather have perfect teeth / no RSI / other biomancies. Things where I know the quality-of-life improvement is unambiguous and positive and without major tradeoffs or concerns. But were I offerred 5 ... eh, maybe. I'd have to actually try and make the list to be sure. But it feels like an obligation more than like something I'd actually want.

@61: yeah, I basically see refusing as leaving money on the ground. I worry about things that might come with it because I know what living in my head is like. Fixing this one thing by itself, without fixing the other things... I could probably cope, but, like, the kind where I'm not sure?
@64: You know, of the three drop-routes they gave me at LCB, I mostly liked the first one and was kinda "meh" about the other two. The first one was an adventure. The second was just a long walk because apparently that weird texture sound on Alabama Ave extends a mile past Tech Drive. And the third was lame because I'd already found Lowe's before so immediately knew where I was (I heard the intercom while passing by while looking for someplace else, and went in to check the address). The first one, though, they just dropped me off in a tiny parking lot in the middle of the woods on some obscure backroad I'd never come within a mile of.
The "find this address" assignment that originally led to my finding Lowe's, though, does demonstrate a #blindproblem, though. I found the right block, and the right street, but there was a shared parking lot with the driveway on a completely different road. I have no idea how I was expected to find that out. There wasn't anyone reasonably close to ask. I finally just picked a spot that sounded clearish, and charged up the hill to see if there was a way to reach the parking lot that way. I don't remember if I left the same way, or actually found the driveway on my way out. But yeah, I still have no idea how I was supposed to guess that the driveway was on the perpendicular, and a sighted person would have known immediately, and even if I had only the sight I had in the 1990s, I could have seen the parking lot and just did what I wound up doing an hour earlier.
Which is to say: this is like the second or third time I've heard you suggest that independent travel in an unknown place is impossible. I felt that way and whined about it a lot on this very forum, then tested the limits experimentally (and would have done it sooner if I had more conscientiousness than a stump), and, empirically, I can just ask Siri or Google Maps just like everybody else, and not need rescuing ... at least 2/3 of the time. And Indianapolis was my own damn fault (but the panicking civilians didn't make things easier). ... And also empirically, I still ran into "how was I supposed to figure that out blindly?" things on occasion. I can't tell if I'm splitting hairs or not, here. Sorry if I got this completely wrong

This feels weird. Like, in 2013-14, I was complaining about how you basically had to be some kind of demigod to overcome such and such problem. Then I overcame said problem. So either you don't have to be a demigod, or I am a demigod. I don't think it's the latter. I think maybe I'm unusually visually-minded or something? It'd explain the travel skills, and the geometry, and the platformers, and the intermittent attempts at doing things with graphics. Eh, I don't buy it.

Ugh. Can a GP prescribe Adderall? I feel like I'm making more ADHD-addled narcissistic posts than usual. Oh, hey, if I wasn't blind, I wouldn't have Medicaid, would I? ... What insurance would I have now, and what would I have had 5 years ago? Hmm. Well, whatever it would have been, it wouldn't have had the restriction about not being able to get stimulants when neither employed nor a student.

camlorn, i don't really think that a "Society of the blind" is really what's necessary. More a social revolution for disability in general (as in, how we approach how we think about disability). After all these are issues that intersect many disabled issues at large, although blindness is a specific presentation with unique circumstances. The problem with implants is that we organize our healthcare based around the idea of a healthy person, so much more resources is invested into it. this is actually a big reason why accessibility gets a lot less funding than expensive surgeries despite being more effective at presenting a social solution to blindness - its because we socially want people to be healthy. So by submitting to transplants we don't actually give the possibility for more lives, but actually less, by eliminating the blind way of life, along with other disabilities, instead of accommodating them.

This isn't to say that these surgeries are bad by the way - but rather the way that we socially look at them is based around treating blind people, rather than giving blind people options. And that actually LIMITS options for blind people, by forcing them to live as a sighted person if they can, in this theoretical scenario.

Furthermore I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with the idea of their bodies being modified without their will. consider the huge ethical issues surrounding intersex surgeries for example. You're talking about a full scale technological invasion of people's own bodies, which will likely be driven by some large corporation or government organization. I do not trust that one bit. Then there are the children who aren't given autonomy over their own bodies, with both disability and gender, that are forced to suffer through treatments their parents think is best for them instead of deciding for themselves. They can't even say no. This is a source of a lot of trauma in many disability and queer communities.

The problem with this kind of science fiction future is that it doesn't recognize the inherent structures that drive our decisions, which leads to an eventual path towards elimination of differentiated experiences. The idea that along with a cure for blindness we bring forward a cure for sightedness ignores the social pressures involved. Consider that we could literally blind anyone we wanted permanently right now quite easily by simply removing their eyes but this option is not socially available. Why is that? Simple - because the healthy person excludes blindness.

@70 - I understand your pessimism but remember that almost all of those things you listed are hard for blind people to use because of how we socially structure society based around vision. Most of those things are either tools that have crappy accessibility or tools that blind people can't use but people are expected to use. It's just that blind people have to deal with so many crappy design choices because of assumptions based around healthy people. It's worth stressing that these design choices also impact a lot of other disabled people as well, so its a process that extends across a wide group of people, not just the blind; so i feel its necessary to at least try to change, since it impacts so many people.