Male and Female Robots

I’ve used materialist and people thought I was Marxist. Naturalist…hm. I think it is a confused term because I think supernatural is a confused term. The dichotomy, since on the one hand it sounds like an ontological claim - there are only natural things not supernatural ones - but is also an epistemological one - and this would mean that if, say, science discovered ghosts in fifty years, they would be natural, or at least real, begs questions, I think. IOW it treats the unknown, especially if it seems to contradict current models and both unreal and not possible. But we know that this is not always true and in fact has been with regularity false. Things that if real woudl contradict models have turned out to be real. I think most scientists would call themselves physicalists so I go there. There really isn’t a good term. I’ve spent a lot of time tearing up ‘physicalism’ since I think it has metaphysical baggage and seems in denial that regardless, utterly regardless of the qualities of something or lack of qualities of something, if scientists think it is real, they think it is real. And then they call it physical. I think they should call themselves verificationists or something. It’s not what is real, the substance of it, it is that it is real and the process through which they decide this. In a sense I think it leads to some of the same messes as natural/supernatural does, where suddenly one can deduce something is not real since it is supernatural, which, well ain’t science. So out of the sloppy mess of this paragraph my conclusions is I don’t like any of the terms. But Carleas seems to accept physicalism and this one most directly and clearly points out the problems precisely because of its ‘substance baggage’.

And I wouldn’t necessarily stop people and an even more radical version of this is coming through the transhumanists, who might happily transform themselves into a sapien ocelot with an AI instead of their left brain lobe. They actually worry me more than the confusion trans issues are throwing down the pike at growing children. But that’s a whole nother can of worms.

I agree with you that there is a soft implication of duality in suggesting you might mentally or subjectively be the thing, that your body is not… but I think Carleas is forging this distinction along a different dimension, namely the social sphere… you might mimic and adopt traditional male behavior from an existing preference for it and thus qualify, within the social paradigm, as male… if you also make an effort to look the part, he argues, you could effectively be described as male with sufficient accuracy so as to render that description true enough for most contexts, within that social paradigm…

At least, that’s how I’ve understood his argument to me, thus far.

Yes. But once he named the Ship of Thebes (though he did call it Theseus) it seemed like his point was that at a certain point you would have to accept that what was in front of you was a man, despite the original ‘ship’s’ sex. But I think that has an internal backlash, because then it was not one before.

As far as his social approach…I’m much happier, as I’ve told him, with women and men being allowed to pursue their desires and not be boxed in because they are outliers on bell curves. If you are woman who likes to sit with her legs spread, elbows on knees and you are a plumber who likes to have short hair. Go for it.

I dislike the idea that now we will, implicitly tell this person with ovaries and attraction to me, should she have it, that really she’s a gay man.

Now I know that Carleas is not going to say that to anyone and even most transsupporters are not. But down through the ether that idea is entering the minds of children. That if you feel inside certain ways that are male and you were born a woman, you are really a man.

And I think it ends up being, pardon my french, a brain fuck. Because at the same time a more traditional feminist message is also being aimed at children. That they need not be limited or cornered by their sex. I am much more aligned with this one.

Put the two together and you are damaging people. It’s toxic double bind communication.

KT & Carleas

As much as I hate to say it, despite his many attempts here to prove me wrong, I think Carleas is trying and failing to rationalize addressing people according to their chosen gender.
It’s easier to identify the goal he has set himself, than it is to identify any definition or “ontology” that he’s presenting.

However, I think we’re nearing what’s at the heart of this whole thing. KT’s worry about sending mixed signals to kids made it clear that we’re missing something.
Because I don’t think we’re sending kids a mixed message at all… we’re giving them postmodern relativism, which amounts to “reality is whatever we agree it is”
It’s liberating you to be a woman and act hyper masculine or even hyper feminine and yet still call yourself a man and if we all agree to go along with it, then it’s functionally (if only socially) true.
This is not too dissimilar from where I think Carleas wants to end up…

But the terrible downside is that since this fairytale is only true (or false) by virtue of our intersubjective agreement about it, dissent becomes dangerous, destructive, tyrannical even.
That person would have been a man, had you but agreed to “grant” them their identity… because of your dissent their gender is denied, no different to actively stripping it from them, you monster!
From this vantage we can see how we’re only one step removed from wanting to purge or reform the non-believers who would so casually destroy our idyllic fantasy-scape.

Carleas has staked out playing along as merely “good manners” that permits him the social recourse of treating dissent as rude behavior and to punish it accordingly…
Someone less magnanimous (or less moderate), might rather seek recourse in the law… maybe prevent such dissent by mandatory re-education/sensitivity courses… make sure to bring your kids.
Or better yet, never mind, we’ll get to your kids through the schools.

That’s just one of the messages. The other message is essentialist. Transpersonism is essentialist, that inside men and women are different and this is not dependent on bodies. It is, essentially, an essentialist spiritualism, founded on a dualism. In some sense there must be souls and these are male or female. This cuts against physicalism, but also feminism, at least the bulk of it. And, more important in relation to Carleas, it cuts against gender and sex being intersubjective. It is not intersubjective, these are essential qualities.

Yes, I think we need to stay out of all heads. If someone things you seem to be a man, take it like a woman and believe in yourself.

Well, on other issues, that is already the case. Start actually rsponding emotionally to things around you and you will get put on meds, will lose your job, will lose custody of your children…and so on.

Imagine actually honestly responding to corporate bs while working there. Everything from team building, PR, marketing, corporate culture, ‘doing great’, vision statements, day to day office politics, boss behavior…you’ll get shit out of there faster than you can say ‘nice tie’.

Which is happening.

Addendum

I fear that what we’re observing is the reenactment of a story well known but rarely read nor absorbed, a very close adaptation at that…

That’s how the emperor acquired his new “social” clothes… :wink:

I think we’re referring to the same ship.

This is a bigger topic than what we’re dealing with here, but I’ll give you my take to see if it’s compatible, or if this is another deeper diconnect that underpins our disagreements in this thread.

It’s true that a person is her body, and in some sense a person, like a river, only exists in a single moment, and changes in the next as calories are burned, cells are born and die, and neuronal connections form, strengthen, weaken, or die. Every moment, the set of contingencies around an individual changes. That’s true whether that individual is receiving hormone therapy or just typing on a philosophy forum. There is a very pedantic sense in which the continuity of personhood is illusory.

In practice, people ignore that, and it’s a pragmatic choice. We treat people as though they are the same person from day to day, from year to year; we punish sober people for crimes they commit while drunk; we keep people in prison for decades. We think of ourselves as continuations of the people we were before puberty, even though our thoughts, motivations, and physical and mental abilities are mostly different. We do that because it’s useful, it’s predictive, it’s pragmatic.

So too should we treat a person who undergoes a hypothetical complete sex change as still the same person they were. Not because they are identical in every detail, but because the change is comparable to other changes in which we recognize continuous personhood: normal human aging; significant bodily injury; drug use; etc.

There’s a different question, as I allude to in invoking the Ship of Thesesus, of at what point e.g. a man becomes a woman in the process of the complete sex change. I agree with your point that the hypothetical relies on the premise that at the beginning we have a man, and at the end we have a woman, and I think that’s correct. I don’t know if most trans advocates would agree with me, but I don’t know that we can have a consistent ontology of gender without that; if an earlier version of themselves self-identified as their birth sex and sought to conform with societal expectations of that sex, it is difficult to say on what grounds we would say they were not (other than an assumption of e.g. a female soul in a male body that is inherently female no matter what it believes about itself).

But that doesn’t touch personhood. I don’t disagree that it would entail behavior and thought changes, and that’s my understanding of what trans people report about the effects of hormone therapy. But personhood is generally accepted to survive such changes.

I think this is significantly more of a constraint than you seem to think. People aren’t going to be convinced of things that are obviously empirically false, so getting everyone to agree about something entails getting a bunch of people to independently verify the world and align their descriptions of it. When we run tests in a laboratory setting, having many sensors that agree on the outcome is a good thing, and that agreement is taken as a strong indication about what the reality is.

And to preempt your rebuttal that the present case is a case of people being “convinced of [something that is] obviously empirically false”, again I will point out that that would be question begging. When a transwoman says “I am a woman”, she isn’t making a claim about chromosomes, and she would happily acknowledge that such a claim would be obviously empirically false.

Let me provide a few defeaters for two distinct claims:

Claim: there is a widely accept sense of “woman”/“man” that does not depend on biology.
If you could demonstrate that people don’t think of Princess Toadstool as a woman (and, perhaps more importantly, didn’t before she got voice-overs from human women). If people didn’t see her and other fictional characters, who lack biology and are only sex-defined by their superficial social sexual signaling, as actually being the social sex which is being signaled, that would be strong evidence that my claim is false.

Claim: calling a trans person by their chosen (i.e. sincerely and accurately signaled) sex accurately describes the world.
If you could show me that people’s expectations are significantly misaligned by calling a trans woman a “woman” or a trans man a “man”, e.g. in a contrived setting in which someone describes a non-present trans person using their chosen sex and is then asked about how they expect that person to look, act, think, etc., and see how well those expectations align as compared with control cases of their birth sex or third options like “transsexual”. Similarly, measuring their surprise using something like pupil dilation when that person walks in following various descriptions (this test may need to be normed against other similarly uncommon traits and their various descriptions).

This is useful for clarifying what we’re even disagreeing about. I note than one aspect of our disagreement is that I am more focused on descriptive claims about how we use language, and how language is understood, and you are more interested in normative claims about how we should use or understand language. For example, I learned recently of the idea of corpus linguistics, the study of language through statistical analysis of a given corpus, and I think that would be very probative to my claims, but not say very much about your claims (except to the extent that the actual use of language in a speaker population goes to the utility because being understood is a big part of the utility of language).

My concern most recently in the thread was not the situation where the person identifies as a man then becomes a woman, but rather that person X feels they are a woman. They feel this in that male body. Then they change that body as radically as they can. The feel of their new body, for a physicalist, cannot match whatever they felt in their old body. The have radically changed the body that felt like a woman. Whatever they feel right now cannot be what they felt then.

OK, I agree, though I’m not sure I see the relevance. In line with what I’ve been arguing here, I think when someone says “I feel like a woman”, they are not mostly referring to the physical feeling, but to the social feeling, e.g. “I feel that I should be treated and be expected to act like a woman”.

Is that responsive to what you were getting at?

The above statement is question begging… in that you are assuming your conclusion when you assume “I am a woman” could, much less should, have a subject other than a person’s biology.

My rebuttal of that is not question begging, Carleas, I’m not making any assumptions… I’m doing what you are doing with gender to show you the absurdity that is generated.
That act of sophistry where you split something equally into the social component we associate with it.

When the people kept saying how wonderful the clothes were they knew full well they couldn’t physically see any clothes.
What they were communicating was that their social behavior was going to conform to that of people that could see clothes… and in that sense they were telling the truth.
People behave differently when they see clothes and when they don’t… and so we can say the “social” behavior of seeing clothes is just as critical a component of clothes.

All you have to do to erase the lie from anything, is to split the subject equally into a social component and the social part will be true, if it’s acted out.

And as for how you could be convinced… I have to give up.

The emperor did in fact have new SOCIAL clothes, until he didn’t, that much can’t be disputed… I’d lose the argument if that’s where you plant the flag.
Given the prevalence of woke PC nonsense these days, it’s trivially easy for you to find some gender studies saps to point to as an example of this nonsense being “commonly accepted”

But no one saw the clothes! You’re premising your comparison on the idea that no one who calls a transwoman a woman has a sincere belief behind it, that the only motivation is adherence to dogma or keeping up appearances, and that everyone really agrees with you completely and if they say otherwise the only explanation is that they’re lying. And you cast the transwomen themselves as “the swindlers”, who are insincere and are scamming their way into riches (which are what in this parallel?) through what can only possibly be a LIE (always in all caps, because that helps to convey something important, maybe how big the lie is?).

In comparing this case to the Emperor’s Clothes, you’re dismissing out of hand the possibility that people just don’t mean by their statements what you would mean by those statements, and that they sincerely parse the world differently.

Are you saying that transwomen think they have XX chromosomes?

I’ll have to feel into that more, but that’s not the main thing I’ve heard. That their dysphoria is very physical and in reaction to the body. I think they are necessarily dualists.

sophiagubb.com/what-does-it- … ansgender/
and

and

I think we should consider gender dysphoria evidence, if weak, of dualism, especially if we take them seriously.

I think it would be oddly condescending to support trans rights but consider them deluded. One can try to make gender mean nothing really, which I think at root is your approach Carleas, but they sure don’t think so. I mean, why go through the pain of the operations and the social pain if gender is nothing.

On the surface your support their rights and you want people to be kind in relation to their wishes, but on another, philosophical level, you are fundamentally denying their experiences or really their interpretations of their experiences.

The swindle doesn’t exclusively or even predominantly come from trans people, but it is this: If you don’t “grant” (i.e. see) their “chosen gender” it’s because that gender is invisible to fools and bigots… so which are you?
Cue the sophistry and mental gymnastics to make it so… everyone is now scrambling to see this gender in one light or another.

Without that swindle, without that garbage, it would be what it is… these are people who are suffering from some neurological condition that is making them very unhappy in their own bodies.
Maybe us LARPING with them truly is the best medicine we have… and if that is the case, I don’t see what’s so wrong with lying for a good cause.
Well apparently a lot… because that means we don’t see it, which means we’re either fools or bigots…
#-o

So no, I don’t see gender-dysphoric people as liers or swindlers or any such thing… your suspicions in that regard only underlines the success of the swindlers.
I see them as victims of a pretty horrific condition from which they are seeking relief… and I’d be happy to give them an escape, if I could… even if it is within a fantasy.

Isn’t that what it is to be a philosopher?

But seriously, I don’t think supporting their rights and giving primacy to their self-identity entails accepting their ontology or metaphysics of mind. Some trans people may be dualists, and I think they’re wrong to the extent that they are. But I don’t think it’s condescending to disagree with someone about that. Trans people have no special insight into the experience of being a mind, so unlike e.g. their statements about their most appropriate sexual social role, they aren’t the local expert on the nature of mind. Nor are they inherently more expert on the ontology of sex (though I imagine many become significantly better versed in the philosophy and biology of sex in seeking to understand and explain their experiences and defend their choices).

But in any case: what are we to take away from the physical aspect of some people’s dysphoria? Is that to say that it isn’t social? I’m not sure that that follows. People have a relationship with themselves as a social being: we choose (within our ability) a haircut, wardrobe, posture, style of speech, etc. When someone doesn’t like their body, it’s largely about its social appearance: it doesn’t look like they want it to look. I don’t think having an Adams apple is something you feel internally, rather you feel it externally (i.e. with your hands) or see in the mirror. That is to say, a lot of the way we interact with our own bodies is social, to the extent we evaluate them as representing who we want to be socially.

I don’t think that’s the only way in which we relate to our bodies; people can evaluate themselves in terms of strength and flexibility and coordination in non-social ways too. But note that the people you quote aren’t talking about the many internal or mostly-functional ways in which men’s bodies differ from women’s. They aren’t saying “my bone density is all wrong!”, they’re pointing to prominent external features, things that they can see in the mirror, and that other people would notice immediately, that mark them as not the sex they want to be seen as.

But you don’t have to pretend to see, you do see, immediately. When you meet a coworker with long hair and a dress and a blouse and earrings and makeup, you see immediately what they are trying to tell you about their social sex. I don’t even have to tell you what social sex it is, because you know from a superficial description what sex it is. If we put those superficial indicia on a toaster, you would know immediately that we’re trying to convey that the toaster has that social sex, and if you say things like, “Oh, Ms. Cuisinart Metal Classic CPT-180, aren’t you looking lovely today!”, everyone will know why you’re saying that, but if you say to the dressed-up toaster, “Hey bro, you check out that football tackle last night?”, it will be seen as incongruous.

What is invisible about that?

If the dude in the dress has a square jaw, a giant adam’s apple and sporting a five o’clock shadow… What am I not seeing?
I’m not seeing a woman… how is any of this unclear to you?

Since I first started posting in this thread I have rejected your conception of “social sex” as meaningless sophistry… Yet you appeal to this concept over and over again as though deaf to my objections.
Not even two posts ago, I underlined how devoid of value this concept is… and yet you appeal to it again without addressing the criticism.

At this point I’ve written literally pages worth of arguments, all laid out for you to examine and respond to…

There’s a critical error somewhere in our communication, if you still think appealing to “social sex” is worthwhile, or worse laboring under the illusion that I would agree.

You could see the “social clothes” the Emperor had… and yet he was still naked.

I think that’s an odd question. It depends on the philosophical arguments and positions being put forward.

Of course. But your philosophy will have effects. I am not saying you should suggest a different interpersonal ethics or change your ontology. I am pointing out that there is a split and now I am being explicit in saying that this can cause them problems.

No, but the whole project becomes that we should treat these deluded people with respect for reasons X, Y and Z. And Y will be one that implies that they are deluded. That has real world consequences.

or there particular situation actually does give them insight into it. They may even be correct about their insight. Given that we do not have access…or better put a person who does not have access to that insight given his or her situation need not be convinced by the trans-dualist, but this in turn does not mean that the transperson is wrong about their insight.

And feel and be able to do. I don’t read those transpersons I quoted as saying it was socially, I read it directly not recognizing the body they had.

Penis and breasts on the other hand, size and bone density of a body. and more, on the other hand.

I think this aspect is also present and part of the transpersons, like many conservative persons and others, belief that sex is essentialist not merely social. IOW the social roles are rooted in bodies and also in souls that are gendered not neutral.

Well, it was a quick online survey but it was not them saying they were not allow to engage in some traditionally female activity. Of course they have this also, because transpersons, in the vast majority, think that men and women have different minds, emotions, attitudes, roles and interpersonal dynamics. And you can certainly tell them that really all this is intersubjective and arbritrary, just as their feelings that their bodies do not fit who they are ‘inside’ is based on a confused ontology. Or tell them indirectly while defending their interpersonal rights with cis people. But I think it is passing on implicit judgments. And these are the ones your philosophy has and, no, that does not mean you should just jump over to their ontology of bodies and selves and men and women. However I think it is an advocacy that in the long run is a mixed bag for them.

If someone says they are Napoleon reborn, then one can of course decide that it is respectful not to keep telling them it is a delusion based on schizophrenia or naivte in relation to New Age beliefs. One can argue that we as a society should allow people to identify with people we think are not longer alive and who had different bodies and that we should respect that, while at the same time believing that person is deluded. No contradiction.

But that position ends up being condescending and this will have consequences. I am not sure it helps that person in the long run, regardless of whether they are right or wrong.

And then children get a very odd set of messages to try to unravel about how to interpret their own feelings and experiences. A kind of collateral damage.

Early on, you expressly acknowledged it as “representational”. And you say of referring to a map as ‘New York’, “can be correct or incorrect depending on where on the map we point”; the analogy to sex would be that it be “correct or incorrect” to call your office-mate a woman depending on whether she’s wearing a dress and a blouse and earrings and make-up or a flannel shirt and jeans and a beard.

Indeed, in the same post, you acknowledge that “[g]ender certainly can be and often is separable from biological sex”. Perhaps you were engaging in meaningless sophistry here? It doesn’t seem meaningless, it seems to be acknowledging that there is a social component of sex. That, together with your description of it as a “representation”, and your map-of-New-York analogy, suggests that it’s appropriate to refer to someone as a certain sex based on the separable, representational gender, rather than on the pedantic appeal to biology, which in your analogy would be like insisting that the lines on the map aren’t roads, they’re just ink on paper.

That’s how any of this is unclear to me: you seem to have acknowledged from the start the sense in which the office mate is a woman, just as you acknowledge the sense in which the map is New York. And 7 pages later, you’re literally calling that sense invisible and “meaningless sophistry”. When I appeal to social sex, I’m appealing to a concept you’ve previously acknowledged as meaningful, if representational.

Sure. But the rejection of Y implies that I am deluded, i.e. I have a philosophy of mind that contradicts their philosophy of mind, and so one of us is wrong about our philosophy of mind. I think they’re deluded in the sense that I think utilitarians and deontologists are deluded about morality, or marxists are deluded about political philosophy.

But I think ‘deluded’ is a loaded term here; though it is perhaps literally true, it’s wrong in its connotations, particularly in a context where mental illness is salient. Rather, I think they are mistaken about their philosophy of mind. That’s a much less incendiary claim.

I don’t believe that though. Rather, I don’t think feeling like their body doesn’t fit who they are depends on a dualist philosophy of mind.

I think you are using “condescending” here differently than I would use it. Do you see all disagreement as condescending?

[Edited - typos upon typos]

When you appeal to social sex to establish sex, you’re equivocating…

We’ve been over this… since page 1

Between what distinct meanings of what word or words?

That’s my point. Your representation analysis of sex is an acknowledgement that there is a non-biological aspect of sex, and you say that in so many words.

We’re returning to this because, with your emperor’s clothes analogy, you seem to be taking the position that that aspect of sex doesn’t even exist, as though we’re lying when we talk of the roads on the map. It looks to me like you contradicting yourself; more likely, either I don’t understand what you mean when you say “[g]ender certainly can be and often is separable from biological sex”, or I don’t understand what you mean when you say “I have rejected your conception of “social sex” as meaningless sophistry”. Those two claims, as I understand them, are in tension.

I’m at a loss for how on earth you got there, from what I said… clearly there’s a misunderstanding taking place.

Social sex is not “another aspect of sex” it is another aspect of culture… to confuse the two is to equivocate.
If Bob from the office changes his “social sex” with a dress, makeup and effeminate behavior, has he changed his sex, or merely defied the cultural norms for his sex?