[RD] Gender is a social construct.

[NinjaCow64]

That's a very dumb question.

No it isn’t. You say:

Take Plato and Aristotle, who were once at the root, the pillar of Western philosophy: man has a fundamental physical nature, but he has also a deeper ontological, "spiritual" nature. As in "spiritual", is closely tied to the way his beigness, his objective functioning as a being who also possess a nature that is fundamentally irreducible to his mechanical parts, functions.

How can this deeper ontological, “spiritual” nature be anything but supernatural if it cannot be broken down into material parts?

And in this sense, in this framework how can you claim knowledge of any trans person’s ontological “spiritual” nature? How can you be so certain that they are not merely altering their material body to align better with their spirit?

 

[Kyriakos]

Though imo the subject is way too distant from the one in the thread, it may help noting that with current tech there is no point in making a distinction between mental organization and a hypothetical model where it would be neatly contained by any specific level of matter. For all we know, material divisions may never end (what now are identified as elementary particles, can themselves break to more etc).
In my view such isn't needed in this thread, given I don't think we have covered any of the far closer to the surface levels. I trust no one here is seriously claiming that their model of how gender works is analyzed to the degree of elemental thoughts (inferred: there may be no such final division, and even if there was, you won't be sensing it, so as to claim you construct stuff from the core level) in a brain and their connections to endless billions of substrates. Let's not pretend otherwise. At best each person has a formed view that has very clear subjective edges, as can become evident by simply presenting it.

It is related that the very reality which imposes on human thought to operate with vagueness and subjectivity (sensed or not sensed), is what allows for so many different views on systems which by their nature are not rising from a defined basis. Ala any general political or sociological thought. The vagueness and subjectivity has effect on all systems, of course, but some have a built-in sieve to prevent ambiguity (or rather ambiguity in the surface of the system).

 

[MPorciusCatoCivver]

"How can this deeper ontological, “spiritual” nature be anything but supernatural if it cannot be broken down into material parts?"

That is again a silly question. There's nothing "supernatural" in Aristotle, but there's definitely the metaphysical.

The thing is what Aristotle calls nature "physis" is closely related to Being qua Being, hence nature is fundamentally ontological. And not just a mechanistic, post-Enlightenment collection of parts.

That's what makes Aristotle the most immediately acessible non-Enlightenment thinker for starters. And one of the pillars of correctly deducing why materialism is tosh and why believing in religion is feasible and intellectully relevant.

As for what Kyriakos said, I sign below him. An intelligent, even if overly generalistic, addendum to this discussion.

I would like to add that the very fact that machines don't have a subjectivity, don't really deal well with or compute subjectivity well (but are instead stuck with a series of predictable sequences based on binary logic), is one of the things that makes us different and also still superior to them, even if they calculate faster than us.

 

[NinjaCow64]

That is again a silly question. There's nothing "supernatural" in Aristotle, but there's definitely the metaphysical.

Okay sure. I’ll rephrase the question then:

In this framework how can you claim knowledge of any trans person’s ontological metaphysical nature? How can you be so certain that they are not merely altering their material body to align better with their ontological and metaphysical nature?

That's what makes Aristotle the most immediately acessible non-Enlightenment thinker for starters. And one of the pillars of correctly deducing why materialism is tosh and why believing in religion is feasible and intellectully relevant.

How can you say that the supernatural doesn’t exist in Aristotle yet claim also that he teaches that belief in religion is feasible? Isn’t belief in religion inherently tied to belief in the supernatural?

 

[MPorciusCatoCivver]

There's nothing supernatural or dualistic in Aristotle. "To on", is not a fundamentally "supernatural" conception to begin with, but one that fundamentally grounds the structure of reality in a non-mechanistic term.

If anything, like Ed Feser, who's a pro phil by the way, it's the diehard materialist who has to inevitably ground himself and explain everything away in some mysterious ontological dualism. Descartes tried it, and failed it.

The simplest refutation to materialism is numbers: a diehard determinist and materialist would have to deny the nature and existence of numbers. Because numbers are the pillars of Science, they explain everything in nature but they're not reducible to any particular aspect of nature, numbers are posited in axioms that themselves are not truly naturalistic or even "materially tangible", therefore, they're not material. So a diehard, materialistic stance is inevitably going to deny that numbers can exist as we know them, and as such, fall into complete incosistency because you're going to obliterate 99% of science together with this assumption.

 

[NinjaCow64]

The simplest refutation to materialism is numbers: a diehard determinist and materialist would have to deny the nature and existence of numbers. Because numbers are the pillars of Science, they explain everything in nature but they're not reducible to any particular aspect of nature, numbers are posited in axioms that themselves are not truly naturalistic or even "materially tangible", therefore, they're not material. So a diehard, materialistic stance is inevitably going to deny that numbers can exist as we know them, and as such, fall into complete incosistency because you're going to obliterate 99% of science together with this assumption.

You think materialists can’t explain numbers? Oh, honey.

None of this answers my question by the way. Why do you keep tip toeing around my question?

 

[Kyriakos]

The problem with numbers is that, arguably, nothing in nature has a final decimal (wouldn't have even if your meter had "perfect accuracy", which for similar reasons it cannot possess).
The integers being the basis for human thought, on the other hand, is pretty obvious. And there is nothing less natural than an integer; it owes its existence to the ability to pick up stuff as a unity as well as divisions.
Of course all that is (literally) ancient knowledge. Since Plato was already mentioned, they predate him by at least a couple of centuries. In Plato the main dialogue dealing with this is the one titled Parmenides.

Though I can't be sure which angle MPorcius is approaching this from, integers of course are also the basis for computer tech, due to the formal logic system which can only incorporate the Peano axioms (axioms about integers). This is related to different sets with infinite members - you need the lowest (smallest cardinality) such set, which is of the integers, and you also need something to juxtapose it to. Various important computer-related proofs are based on that, including the very old Turing Halting problem.

 

[NinjaCow64]

your meter

Aren’t you Greek, don’t you lot use meters as well?

 

[Kyriakos]

Aren’t you Greek, don’t you lot use meters as well?

Yes
But here I meant it as a type, meaning "regardless of what you use to measure stuff". This wiki article mentions various material constructions of the meter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
But still, human tech only limits us to some accuracy, beyond which no construction of the meter (or any other length) is accurate. Still, as a notion it exists perfectly fine.

 

[MPorciusCatoCivver]

"None of this answers my question by the way. Why do you keep tip toeing around my question?"

Because it is relevant.

Materialism is a metaphysical belief. Just like belief in witches, or Catholic nature-supernature dualism. It is not axiomatic or self-evident in any instance.

As for Kyriakos' own questioning of the Peano axioms, well, that's way too much math for me lol. I was never good at it. Though I'm a kinda of like a 60% Platonist, when you start delving too much into number theory my brain goes tilt.

Let's take Ed Feser's classic Aristotelian take on the subject though: if you deny that numbers are more than logical instances, even if they're grounded fundamentally on the mind, ergo by taking an Aristotelian view of the universal, you're implicitly stating that numbers are purely virtual and do not exist outside of your mind. That is something which leads to a myriad of problems which philo also kinda took in after Descartes, which also leads us into the path of solipsism.

For Kant as well as for Aristotle, a virtual, logical distinction needs a way to go before it gets into something "real", that is, not just a thought. IIRC, there are ways to deal with it using number theory, but all of these exclude hard determinism as being unfeasible on all grounds. Hard determinism entails the denial of all our conceptions of number and mathematics.

 

[NovaKart]

I don’t really get why trans racial is so verboten. I can see cases where someone has lived among a group of people for a long time and accepted as a member. And race is more of a social construct than gender and certainly than sex.

 

[NinjaCow64]

I don’t really get why trans racial is so verboten. I can see cases where someone has lived among a group of people for a long time and accepted as a member. And race is more of a social construct than gender and certainly than sex.

Because 99% of the time its brought up as a bad faith argument by conservatives saying some variation on “me, a white man, am a black woman now XD transgender liberals DESTROYED!!!”

Because it is relevant.

Materialism is a metaphysical belief. Just like belief in witches, or Catholic nature-supernature dualism. It is not axiomatic or self-evident in any instance.

What does this have to do with how you think gender works? If it was relevant why didn’t you thread it back into what the thread is supposed to be about?

 

[NinjaCow64]

Let's take Ed Feser's classic Aristotelian take on the subject though: if you deny that numbers are more than logical instances, even if they're grounded fundamentally on the mind, ergo by taking an Aristotelian view of the universal, you're implicitly stating that numbers are purely virtual and do not exist outside of your mind. That is something which leads to a myriad of problems which philo also kinda took in after Descartes, which also leads us into the path of solipsism.

The axioms of mathematics are based on observations of reality and that is why we are able to glean truths of the universe out of them.

Even if it wasn’t, the thoughts in our head are material. The writings we make about mathematics are material. None of this disproves materialism.

You go on and on about disproving what I believe about reality but you keep refusing to engage in my very mild scrutiny about your conception of gender. And I thought the transphobes were the ones who would keep complaining about how no one wanted to debate them, good grief.

 

[amadeus]

I don’t really get why trans racial is so verboten. I can see cases where someone has lived among a group of people for a long time and accepted as a member. And race is more of a social construct than gender and certainly than sex.

I’ve been living in Japan for over a decade, largely assimilated, still white. So white I got mayonnaise on my Pat Boone records.

 

[Kyriakos]

The axioms of mathematics are based on observations of reality and that is why we are able to glean truths of the universe out of them.

Even if it wasn’t, the thoughts in our head are material. The writings we make about mathematics are material. None of this disproves materialism.

Though I agree this is a bit of a too different level to the immediate one in the topic,

1) the axioms of mathematics aren't "based on observations of reality", unless one stretches that out to basically mean nothing. Various systems have arbitrary axioms, and many famous examples have axioms that negate their counterpart (a good case would be Euclidiean vs non Euclidian geometries; formed by different axioms about the parallel lines postulate).
2) doesn't matter if "the thoughts in our head are material" or not, since we have no tech to pick up any lower level of divisions. In other words, even if thoughts can be modeled in a material way, they currently cannot be=> you won't find backing for a thought system in a physics experiment=>gender views aren't to be proven as more correct that way.

 

[NovaKart]

I’ve been living in Japan for over a decade, largely assimilated, still white. So white I got mayonnaise on my Pat Boone records.

That’s not everyone’s situation though. Probably Japan is more rigid than other cultures.

 

[Narz]

Totally wrong on the Buddha. He said the citta, the nous, is our only real nature but thta is apophatic, it cannot be defined by means of analogy with material concepts

That's not my understanding but if you want to cling to an idea of selfhood and free will I can understand.

 

[MPorciusCatoCivver]

"The axioms of mathematics are based on observations of reality and that is why we are able to glean truths of the universe out of them."

Nope, just wrong. There is no way to substantiate mathematics in a purely empirical fashion. Nominalism, which is the stance that most materialists take unconsciously for granted and which Feser critiques, makes stuff 100% worse: by denying that numbers have perhaps more than a logical existence, you're effectively saying that all maths is just virtual and has no relation with reality. Which is flat out wrong, even if most or many mathematical constructs are just virtual.

"Even if it wasn’t, the thoughts in our head are material."

That's just flat out wrong.

Kyriakos has replied in a correct fashion, but I'm going to add this: there's no way to prove that the thoughts in our head are material. And if you take a hard determinist approach, by saying that this stuff just happens because of mechanical necessity or laws of nature or whatever, this is so inconsistent in the ways I've shown that you basically can be easily refuted just by showing up how the nature of numbers would collapse if hard determinism were in any way true. But there's a myriad of other instances.

Hard determinism also takes in a form of causality that is simplistic in the extreme, and really, I would not be able to picture the mind as mere series of efficient causes. Ed Feser also critiques tha much better than I do, but essentially, it's hard and self contradictory on 99% of all aspects to argue that the mind is a computer. It is not. There's no concrete proof of it.

 

[Narz]

The simplest refutation to materialism is numbers: a diehard determinist and materialist would have to deny the nature and existence of numbers. Because numbers are the pillars of Science, they explain everything in nature but they're not reducible to any particular aspect of nature, numbers are posited in axioms that themselves are not truly naturalistic or even "materially tangible", therefore, they're not material. So a diehard, materialistic stance is inevitably going to deny that numbers can exist as we know them, and as such, fall into complete incosistency because you're going to obliterate 99% of science together with this assumption.

You should start a new thread on this, hard to keep track of all the woo.

Not sure why materialists can't use something like numbers to measure things? I thought materialists love measuring things

 

[NinjaCow64]

Not sure why materialists can't use something like numbers to measure things? I thought materialists love measuring things

Apparently our brains are immaterial? I’ve lost track at this point.