No, it is not a choice. Perhaps it us as much of a choice as breathing, but that just drops the conversation to absurd levels.
When you say on the one hand All identity is pretense, but on the other that identity is a choice, then you have made an explicit stance that all people are perfectly logical. But we aren’t, and there are frequently biological imperatives that take ‘choice’ and ‘pretense’ out of the picture.
Like was mentioned above there are no spherical cows, and we are big bags of squishy meat.
Okay, we get to the kernal of this particular disagreement. I am my ideas and behaviors. They are inseperable from my identity. Which means I can be correct, incorrect, right, wring, moral or amoral.
And I to you, in return. So if we all pay it forward, the respect we’d like for our own opinions, we might do well.
For my part, I come across as an ass, but look at what I respond that way to. Because it’s exactly this gap. I choose to be an ass to make a point when other people expect special rules for their own opinions that they do not offer in return. Special rules only means one thing, bullying.
Nobody wants to fight, but someone has to know how to.
I don’t think anyone here really is an ass, at least not significantly more than I occasionally am. But I should close the browser, since I don’t think I have anything useful left to say.
Obviously you’ve already declared this “overly bellicose” so I’m not going to dwell on it, but I don’t think that’s problematic. If identity is a pretense that that is no more or less true whether you are cis or trans.
That is exactly the point being argued. What are you? It would seem to me like @popobawa4u thinks that a person is actually a thing that is apart from their beliefs and behaviours. @AcerPlatanoides thinks people are behaviours, rather than ideas and behaviours. Depending on which day you catch me on I would argue either one of those things or I would argue that a person is a bag of meat and ideas and behaviours are the bag of meat equivalents of the tendrils grown by slime mold.
I know that sounds like philosophy class talk that doesn’t mean much in the real world. It sounds to me, though, that the idea @popobawa4u keeps presenting that is hard for people to understand is that we could actually apply that “philosophy class nonsense” (which, in this case, isn’t so much nonsense as it is a probably better empirical view of reality) to actual life.
It’s feels like a huge relief to see someone resort of talking about existence or lack of a boundary between the organism that they refer to as themselves for social purposes and the world outside that organism. Rather than “accurate” I would say “socially necessary” to describe why I would use the word “I” to ambiguously refer to some combination of that organism, the mind that exists most prominently in that organism and the movements that organism takes. I can see how it is “accurate” in the sense that it probably hits the mark being aimed for. I feel like it’s a lie I have to tell because the truth in inexpressible.
I suppose it can! Maybe there is a continuum between all or nothing? Something can be automatic, but still become far more optimal with practice. To extend your example, I actually do practice my breathing! So I can breathe better generally and in many more ways than I did originally. The same can be said of any sort of “discipline”, such as hygiene, athletics, or education. Just because there is some baseline of circumstance need not imply that we cannot do something with it. Some people have actually complained to me that not choosing to have a self is the same as one denying that they exist! Not choosing to have an identity doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen on its own. But through not being attached to it, I feel more able than I would be otherwise to navigate it’s inconsistencies, rather than taking it for granted.
But we are our organism. When I have a stroke at 70 I will not be the same. My mind is not going to be uploaded to the singularity. And when I pass I hope to make some damn fine tomato fertilizer. There are no spirits, no external consciousness, and nothing besides organic material in this wonderful dance of entropy.
It may sound dark, but I think acknowledging our imperfections/compartmentalized behaviors and owning it to be enlightening.
When somebody – me, certainly, and just about everybody I know except you – says “you’re wrong” or “you’re right” they are indulging in metonymy - they are substituting “you” for “that thing that you were talking about that I don’t feel the need to go into extraordinary detail about because the context should be clear to anybody that isn’t a stateless bag of logic.”
So, you’re wrong.
@anon50609448 - my wording may be overly bellicose, but the idea that gender and sexuality is a choice (which then suggests that one can choose not to be gay or straight, a stance with which I widely hold no truck) or that ones identity can be ignored, so that if somebody tells me they are woman I can than say “nope, you’re a trans-woman, and that ain’t no thang at all thangyouverrahmuch” is another no-truck-with situation.
There is the ideal me – the Platonic solid that is perfectly vapid; and the real me – imperfectly dense.
I don’t think acknowledging that people have an identity construct of some kind is the same thing as imagine that everyone has an identity construct of some kind. I dont’ think that @popobawa4u has to understand what it feels like to have an identity, to have an identity construct, or to care about such things. But I think that’s different than being able to understand that people DO have identity constructs and what that means for others. I think there are probably ways to acknowledge things you don’t understand, rather than dismissing out of hand, which is the sense of I get from @popobawa4u. I’m more than happy to acknowledge the fact that an identity construct isn’t in the cards, desirable, or even understandable for some. That doesn’t make them any less human and worthy of respect.
But pretense is also off-putting, in the sense that it comes off as dismissive of the whole thing. Just because something is constructed socially or individually, doesn’t mean its any less real or that it has less power. I’m not here to exclude the way that @popobawa4u imagines themselve, just to address why some people find them off-putting on issues like this.
I agree that your mind can’t be uploaded to the singularity, but if it the technology existed it could be slowly replaced piece by piece, like Theseus’ ship. If we can make a prosthetic for a single neuron then we can eventually build a brain piece by piece and the brain will never know the difference.
There are no spirits, but instead of saying “Spirits are a silly legend” I’d rather ask “Is there something in the actual universe that people were trying to get at when they talked about spirits?” The answer may still be no, but it might not be. After all, people knew that things they dropped fell a long time before we had our modern conception of gravity, but their idea of things falling bore no relation to the real world as we currently know it. If we believe in reality, then it makes sense to think about what thing in actual reality might correspond to that thing that people keep talking about.
There is consciousness external to every consciousness, the fact that the only consciousness we are aware of exists in brains right now doesn’t mean that’s the only kind of consciousness there can be. At some point we will be able to build a machine that perfectly simulates a brain, if consciousness is merely a function of a brain (I think it is, by the way) then that machine will be conscious, to think otherwise is to engage in just the kind of magical thinking you are denying.
So are we just our organisms? If I write down an address on a sheet of paper and then later need to recall it, some neurons fire telling my hands to lift it so my eyes can see it then light bounces off of it into my optic nerve and that gets processed so that other neurons do whatever they do that makes me know the address. I could have just remembered it, and then the same process would have happened but without paper, the arm, the light and the optic nerve. Is there some magical difference between those two processes? When the information leaves my organism and travels out into the sheet of paper and through the air as light, is that so fundamentally different than traveling through ion channels and neurochemicals? That’s that barrier between my organism and the outside world that I acknowledge for social reasons but that is kind of nonsense. I mean, the particles that make us up are only probabilistically inside that barrier and it’s probably impossible that all of them actually are. The experimental evidence (e.g., sight, touch) that tells us we are solid things comes from very flawed instruments.
Fundamentally, me remembering the address is a part of my brain that enacting needing-to-know-the-address to set of a chain of physical events to result in part of my brain enacting knowing-the-results. Whether that all stays inside my skull or whether it passes outside my skull and bounces off a piece of paper is a pretty minor difference considering by the time I remember the address I’ll be hundreds of meters away from where I started by the Earth’s movement around the sun alone.
If a person says, “You’re not the person I fell in love with” to their spouse, is that likely because of how they have acted, where they were, something they said, or because they lost an arm. No one would ever use that phrase for a lost arm. None of us thinks we are our organism. But they might say that if their spouse murdered someone, which might be a function of how thick or thin the other persons’ skull was. Whether you are you or not could depend on factors totally external to you.
We are not organisms, we are ideas, ideas that have mass and volume and exist as part of reality. But the ideas are much larger than our organisms are. At a minimum they probably span our homes, our places of work, and the internet infrastructure that connects our computers to the boingboing BBS. Those are all physically part of what I think I should properly regard as myself.
The part that “sounds dark” is that the one thing we can be certain is going to shut off like a light switch one day is the ego - the thing that actually regards itself as important and existent. That thing looking out through your eyes? Yes, it’s days are numbered. It is also (conveniently) the thing that feels terror at that idea, if anything does.
Terry Pratchett just left us with: “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away." (Not that it is a Terry Pratchett original or anything, but you know, timely) That idea isn’t a pleasant fiction, it’s a physical truth. But yes, the light will shut off. The you that observes, that knows, that cares, will not be around to care that much of the rest of you is still around. But the you that observes and knows and cares is kind of trash anyway.
It isn’t that there is no spirit, people haven’t been talking about nothing for thousands of years. It’s that the spirit looks about as much like ancient people thought it would as actual momentum/inertia look like impetus, or actual heat looks like phlogiston - probably even less. It’s a complex physical phenomenon that is like what people talked about in certain ways but that doesn’t really do what they thought it did, and one that would probably be a very sore disappointment to anyone who really wanted to end up in heaven. But to deny it is real doesn’t make any more sense than saying that two thousand years ago when people say “hot” and “cold” they were talking about nothing at all.
I 100% agree that saying gender is a choice is far more misleading than saying it is not a choice, especially in the time and place we find ourselves. I do think we can talk about identity as a pretense (some Zen master might say an illusion) and say that is equally true for all people. I don’t think that’s the same at all as saying, “Well, couldn’t you just choose a different gender identity?” Maybe as a matter of physical fact there is so way to hack your brain (which is made of meat) that could do that for some individuals, I really have no idea. But just asking that question brings up other questions like, “Why are we focusing on whether we can change gender identity and not on any other aspect of identity?” and “You really have a problem with trans people, don’t you?”
If you want to know what sex someone is, you either ask them (in an appropriate setting) or you suck it up and mind your own damn business. Thinking that consciousness is an illusion is fine, making a special case where part of the consciousness of trans people is an illusion but cis people have it all figured out is buuuuuuuuuulllshit
Like I said, I think I went off topic because I don’t think I’m really expressing ideas similar to those @popobawa4u is expressing (I’m pretty sure I have, on multiple occasions, replied to @popobawa4u to say that I thought a post was outright denying reality). But I noticed those expressions differ from the norm in a way that is similar to how my thoughts differ from the norm.
Say my friend has Borderline Personality Disorder. Now if you look at the literature what kinds of problems do people with BPD have in their lives? Well, they have trouble maintaining interpersonal relationships, trouble keeping jobs, and even sometimes trouble keeping therapists (I know a psychologist who has told me that professional psychologists sometimes commiserate over their BPD patients). Basically they are insufferable and no one likes them. So if you have BPD, it’s probably a good idea to be in the closet, which as we know, means self-censoring and controlling behaviours to not act as if you have BPD because, not just not admitting it. Being closeted about anything is acting as thought there is a witch hunt on for you.
It’s awful. So when I see the things @popobawa4u is saying in this thread, even though they aren’t like the things I would say - like I say, it’s a huge relief. But at the same time, the negative reaction just helps confirm that this really isn’t the place for it (and nowhere else is).
That’s not necessarily unfair. It must be shitty to be a pedophile because having sex with children is totally wrong and I don’t know how much a person can really hope to change that fact about themselves. But if they do the thing that feels so compelling to them then they are awful, and they probably know that, and the fact that they were in a shitty situation to begin with doesn’t really mitigate it. It must be shitty to have impulses to be violent because being violent is wrong, no matter how natural or right it feels to you. So talking in a way that strikes other people as dismissive is still probably a bad thing to do (in the BPD example, people with BPD can’t keep relationships because they actually are insufferable). But it’s also something my friend deeply sympathizes with.
On the other hand, a lot of people think that autistic people are rude, and that’s just shitty. Maybe there is some middle ground where the person who acts in an ordinarily unacceptable way can have some space made for them (although, obviously, from my extreme examples above, maybe not).
I think that should go without saying. I’ve known plenty of people (especially children) on the spectrum, and have never met one that upset me or that I thought was rude. Of course, if I met someone and didn’t know they were autistic, and felt they acted rude, then I guess I wouldn’t know that. But even then, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and when I don’t I kind of kick myself a little bit.
You cover a lot of ground there in a very lucid manner, Humbabella.
Yes, this is what I was getting at. I think that what we are describing here is quite empowering, and tends to help avoiding many of the misunderstandings which often recur between people and groups alike. Perhaps instead of "accurate " I could have said “a closer approximation”. And, by way of disclaimer, I have never been in a philosophy class. Not that it matters, but I’ve been accused of being a philosophy student fairly often. This stuff has been relevant to me outside of any academic environment, without being aloof from quotidian concerns.
Not always, but in this topic I think you expressed something like I meant, sans my terse, crudely-functional verbiage!
For better or worse, I don’t really pass for “normal”. But I try to treat other people well, even if that means my “golden rule” is to offer many different perspectives. If ideas are the most valuable thing in the world, it wouldn’t be nice for me to hoard them. And then, what would we have to talk about?
Somehow this reminds me of YMOs “I Tre Merli”, with lyrics by Willam Burroughs from his essay in “The Job”
What I am here to learn is a new way of thinking.
There are no lessons and no teachers.
There are no books and no work to be done.
I do almost nothing.
So mock up a run of imaginary errands.
Now mock up some thinking you don’t have to do.
Select a person whose way of life is completely different from yours
and mock up his thinking.
I have never been formally diagnosed, but people who I trust have joked that if anybody is a high-functioning autistic, I am. The classification would be more or less accurate, despite my lack of interest in formalizing it. Like many other things in life, I think it is basically a stereotype which isn’t very useful, and says more about the person who feels it’s easier to use the label than to understand what/who it applies to. Your examples of pedophilia and violence illustrate what I think is a deep social insecurity which plays upon this, the notion that people are conditioned to accept that the psychic “censor” of people’s identity and actions must be seen to reside outside of themselves because it yields populations which can be subjected to normative processes. This might even be why the illusion is so popular. An autistic person who espouses free love and revolution is probably nightmare fuel for some people! But, be that as it may, I prefer to strive to treat people well rather than cater to their preconceptions - sometimes these seem so disparate as to be mutually exclusive. I try to be polite, but if I need to choose between polite and fair, I choose “fair”. And then examine why the conventionally polite option seems to be the unfair one.
Some jokingly ask “What is normal, anyway?” - but it’s worth giving real consideration to this before subjecting others to such standards.
Maybe “creator of the phrase ‘stateless bag of logic’”
for the record, I enjoy arguing with you, @popobawa4u. You seldom make me angry-angry. @AcerPlatanoides can do that on occassion, and there are some others against whom I will furiously bang on the keyboard (NOT bang up against the keyboard, g-ds no!), but I don’t enjoy them and wish they’d go away.
You are fun. A black box. An nigh-impenetrable black box, but that’s part of the fun.
not fun in a “I like to light its tail on fire” kind of way. a good way. I hope.
And if you say I’m wrong, I’ll light your tail on fire.
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together!
Duality, personality, and time only exist as subjective phenomena imposed by the workings of the meat engine of which our individual consciousnesses are an emergent property.
I know this makes no sense, but the world contains plenty of people who interpret a failure to wave, a failure to say hello, or a failure to smile as rudeness. Sure, that says more about them than it does about the people they find rude, but it’s part of life that people on the autism spectrum have to deal with more than the rest of us (and it certainly doesn’t help that those people will likely never tell the person that they’ve been rude but rather just label them as a rude person in their own mind and maybe gossip about them causing others to have vague negative thoughts about them, etc. And then, of course, a person on the autism spectrum is less likely than normal to notice and be able to address these reactions, and excluding them becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in a system that is apparently designed to exclude people who behave differently than the norm).
