My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
And yet I know that, because free will is an illusion, it's all predetermined who will descend into akinetic mutism and who won't. There's nothing anyone can do about it - you can't choose the effect the Predictor has on you. Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and me sending this warning won't alter those proportions. So why did I do it?
Because I had no choice.

(Ted Chiang "What's Expected Of Us")

(..) The one relevant here is prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize people by their faces. A prosopagnosic can't recognize friends or family members unless they say something; he can't even identify his own face in a photograph. It's not a cognitive or perceptual problem; prosopagnosics can identify people by their hairstyle, clothing, perfume, even the way they walk. The deficit is restricted purely to faces.

(Ted Chiang "Liking What You See: A Documentary")

And I know someone will say, what about when the technology gets better? Maybe one day they will be able to insert an expert system into your brain, one that goes, "Is this an appropriate situation to apprehend beauty? if so, enjoy it, else, ignore it." Would that be okay? Would that be the assisted maturity" you hear people talking about? No, it wouldn't. That wouldn't be maturity; it'd be letting an expert system make your decisions for you. Maturity means seeing the differences but realizing that they don't matter. There is no technological shortcut.

(Ted Chiang "Liking What You See: A Documentary")