I'll start with a criticism about Harris' argumentative styling. He often makes jumps from one concept to another with his weak explanations glossed over with his boisterous and aggressive language choices. These are important hinges for his overall narrative and he doesn't seem to be aware of the possibility that not everyone made the jump with him. For example, this whole book seems to assume that the lack of immorality is the same thing as morality (and that there are no degrees of morality and immorality). Anyone who's ever had to make a tough moral decision will beg to differ. Another example is his jump from "The imperative to do good " to "The imperative to make things better." Many would interpret that instead as "The imperative to help those less fortunate" or maybe "The imperative to minimize bad". The concept is vast and largely up for personal interpretation, which is effected by any number of personal traits. It doesn't make sense for to assume that we all think of it the same way that he does.
In terms of these particular chapters, I feel that Harris makes another jump when he seems to claim all therapy as enhancement. One example is vaccines. He provides a quote from an opponent about vaccines being an acceptable alternation because it's stimulating a natural function of the immune system and then proceeds to attack it's nuance with a ham-fisted argument. He says that, similarly, a medical processes that made the brain grow 10% additional cells would be natural because the brain creates cells on it's own. That takes about 2 seconds of thought to dismantle. An immune system would produce antibodies after defeating an illness, whether or not humans intervened. A mostly-dead virus is just easier to for a immune system to handle. No process within the body makes the brain 10% bigger. Either he is unable to understand nuance or he just doesn't care. He uses this line of thinking and then moves on to all therapy being enhancement while I, for one, was thoroughly unconvinced and therefore did not believe his successive arguments held water since they were based on this one.
On his subject of Normalcy: I believe he thinks his opponents all worship normalcy and, by extension, nature like pagans. This is not the entirety of the desire to err toward normalcy. The Eco-system and our bodies are incomprehensibly complicated. It took millions of years for it to become this way, and we can never predict what will happen if we mess with it, or if we will be able to fix it/ it will be able to right it's self. Frankly, we are lucky it's worked out so vastly in our favor. As many-a grandfather will say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
In chapter 4, he attempts to address the population problem that would arise if people stopped dying but... I didn't really see an argument in that section of the chapter. All he says is that people will still die of disease and accidents, but if we had the technology to enable immortality by his own logic we would have the technology to almost completely prevent and treat disease. And those wealthy enough to afford the technology aren't likely to meet the kind of accidents that kill. Then he goes on to say people may live until they are 5,000. So? What was the argument? People will still have more children. Did he just ignore this important point?
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