Another post in this vein that had a huge impact on me was ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). As an illustration of how [the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard) technical difficulties, Yudkowsky sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.
-It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
+It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything Just Work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not _really_ a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff