CreativeChaos

What shall we do if we obtain the technology to change ourselves, our brains? Who shall we be? Should we all have high IQs? Should we all be extraverts? Could we make ourselves into "artistic" types, excelling in music. Or "administrative types" becoming CEOs of organizations. What?

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Multi -Lingual Type Forum - need translators
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birdfeed25

As with practically everything else, too much of a good thing can be bad. Being able to cure brain disorders would be a huge advance in the medical field and would no doubt be embraced by everyone. However, my delving further into shaping the mind I feel that we would only create more problems down the road. I do not feel that doctors should be able to program our minds to make us a certain type of person. Life is about balance, so by creating a race of super-high-IQ, extroverted, artistic CEO's our entire society would be thrown out of sync. The extrovert needs the introvert, the CEO needs to have people under them, the artist needs... well non-artists to appreciate his/her work. Being a religious person I believe that we were all created uniquely for a purpose and it is not science's place to disturb that.

Pascale

"Well did the Greeks assign an ancient word for butterfly—psyche—to the soul or mind. Beautiful, super-real, hard to catch.) But the net is poised."

Though this is a seductive thought, psyche was not the ancient word for butterfly. I studied the Classics in university, the Greek language in particular, so I was a little surprised by what you wrote. The heroine Psyche was depicted with butterfly wings in paintings and the Greeks may have associated dreams and the meandering butterfly, but if I look under Psyche in my trustee Liddell and Scott Greek-English dictionary, I find:
"psyche: breath, esp. as a sign of life, life, spirit. II the soul of man, as opposed to the body. 1) In Homer, only a departed soul, spirit, ghost, which still retained the shape of its living owner. 2) generally, the soul or spirit of man (latin anima); 3) also as the seat of the will, desires, and passions, the soul, heart. III the soul, mind, reason, understanding.

And the Liddell-Scott is quite thorough. It's been the standard dictionary for students of Greek since the 19th century. To change the subject a little, there's an interesting connection between the co-author Henry Liddell (dean of Christ Church, pronounced "liddle" as in "little") and Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll was an resident at Christ Church his whole life, where he taught math, and it was Liddell's daughter Alice that he befriended and immortalized in his tale "Alice in Wonderland". But perhaps you already knew that...