Widening and narrowing

Clean at the extremes. Lethal disease is widening. Cosmetic selection is narrowing.

Two categories make the test. Editing that widens the future person’s corridor is maintenance. Editing that narrows it to serve someone else’s preference is parasitic contraction of that person’s capacity to choose. The two run together as one test.

Widening

An edit widens when it removes a condition that would otherwise have closed the future person’s corridor, or narrowed it badly.

Some genetic conditions kill in early childhood. Tay-Sachs. Some forms of leukodystrophy. The most severe metabolic conditions. They close the corridor before the person’s capacity to choose has fully grown.

An edit that prevents the condition widens the future corridor. It takes the future person from the closing the condition would have produced. To a corridor at the width the larger human structure supplies.

That widening is maintenance.

The future person inherits a corridor they can read from, register in and commit within. The edit has acted on their behalf, in the exact sense the chapter needs. It has supplied the corridor their capacity to choose will work in.

Narrowing

An edit narrows when it installs a feature the future person would otherwise have been free to develop along. It selects one path and closes the others.

Take a cosmetic selection. Eye colour. Hair texture. Height tuned to someone else’s idea of how a person should look. Left alone, the future person’s body would have settled somewhere across a wider range. The selection closes the paths the person would have stood among.

That narrowing is parasitic contraction before the person can choose.

The editor has used their own capacity to choose to shrink the future person’s paths. In a direction the future person, had their choice existed, might have chosen otherwise. Or might not have cared about at all.

Clean at the extremes

The two categories run cleanly at the ends. Correcting a lethal disease is widening. Cosmetic selection is narrowing. The test reads each cleanly. The verdict is unambiguous in either direction.

This is the axiom running. The future person’s capacity to choose is real before that person exists in the way you exist now. The edit acts on the corridor they will stand in.

The four conditions produce the corridor. The corridor produces the paths a person can take. The edit widens or narrows the paths the future person will one day choose among.

The widening and narrowing test is what the structure produces when the axiom runs before a person can choose.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 6 — Genetic Engineering. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/06-genetic-engineering/. The film, The room before the occupant: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-6.1 to APP-6.5.