Well, "absurd" isn't really a counterargument. I'll be here when you've got some explanation as to what gender "feels" like rather than just a knee-jerk dismissal. — NKBJ

I'm not sure what it feels like exactly for others, as one only ever really feels one's own experiences. But I think it makes sense for me, for example, to say what it feels like to be male. I have some feelings, experiences and responses to stimuli which are very much a consequence of my being male. That seems uncontroversial enough.

Are we talking about genders or gender roles? They are different.

Gender doesn't feeeeel like anything. And neither does biological sex. — NKBJ

This seems absurd to me.

Others might be who cooks, cleans, and likes pretty things versus watching sports, working outside of the house, etc. — NKBJ

These are activities, not genders.

Social construction is just egotism: I can be anything I want to be! — Bitter Crank

That's not social construction.

Nor are people with genuine gender disphoria, as far as I understand, in a position to freely choose what gender to identify with, any more than gay people choose to be gay.

Gender is by definition a social construct. — NKBJ

What does 'gender' mean then? And can you give some examples of it?

I think gender roles, or gender stereotypes, are at least partly socially constructed. But I don't think what gender people feel they are is predominantly socially constructed. What one feels oneself to be and the roles one adopts in society are logically distinct things.

What follows from existence? Some or all of the following: distinguishability, perceptibility, reasonable inferrability, etc. I'm not sure where that gets us, and why this is interesting. We can do the same with anything. I grant you your horse, but the only thing I grant you is its existence. What follows from that? I'm struggling to understand the significance of this line of enquiry.

None of that actually logically follows from god's existence, though. It only follows if we assume a variety of beliefs about god. — Terrapin Station

Oh, I see, sorry that was a prescription of the OP. I didn't read it properly, my bad.

In that we case we do need to delve into what it means to believe 'God exists'. We need a minimum set of characteristics or properties of God that the OP has granted. As it stands, the term 'God' is an empty variable. It's not clear what the OP has generously granted us theists. Is it just physical existence? That's not enough to capture any concept of God though. Physically, I think God is space, but that's because it fits some other traditionally Goddish qualities, like invisibility, omnipresence, solidity, partlessness, simplicity, immortality, self-movingness, etc.

So what if God exists?

- takes the pressure off life a bit if there is some kind of afterlife (could also be seen as a negative thing)
- helps with finding value in suffering - good for mental health in adversity
- good for mental health to believe that one's innermost centre is indestructible
- helpful in cultivating a sense of oneness with the natural world
- helpful in developing creatively to believe in an inner spontaneous source of newness, and the imperative to create and express
- helpful to believe that death is not the ultimate evil - avoidance of death can result in inauthentic living
- helps in understanding the world as panpsychic

I don't mean to imply any exclusivity here. Atheists and other kinds of theists also can develop attitudes, values and ways of thinking from which they can derive similar benefits, no doubt.

I could also come up with a list of negative ones, but most of them would be for a God I did not believe in.

Sure. There are tensions within Harry's position.

Thanks Baden, but it's one that Harry made I think. It's odd that the WHO didn't come up with something as simple and easy to understand as the NHS definition.

I do think the WHO definition, and the dictionary definition linked to, do not reflect the usage of the word in the circles I mix in. Many autistic people experience gender disphoria, and I think it is genuine (at least in all the cases I have met), and the identity they claim is rooted in how they feel, not in what roles and behaviour they adopt or are expected to adopt.

The NHS has a much better definition that refers to experience and how a person feels:

Gender dysphoria is a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there's a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity. It's sometimes known as gender incongruence.

Biological sex is assigned at birth, depending on the appearance of the genitals. Gender identity is the gender that a person "identifies" with or feels themselves to be.

While biological sex and gender identity are the same for most people, this isn't the case for everyone. For example, some people may have the anatomy of a man, but identify themselves as a woman, while others may not feel they're definitively either male or female. — NHS

Consider this video if you are interested in gender in autism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bVg855hZOk

The WHO definition of gender seems too objective to me. You could unfailingly deduce someone's gender identity from their behaviour according to that. But that ignores the phenomenology. It is logically possible for a biological woman to strongly feel that she is most essentially male, that she has the wrong type of body, but because she doesn't want to deal with all the bullshit she marries a man and lives the life of a perfect stereotypical 50s housewife. Yet she would surely identify as male, at least in her own head. The WHO definition does not capture her. Does it?

Also some examples of gender identities would be awfully useful in the WHO definition.

BTW, I am not a medical man, but does anyone else think that "Everything the body does has it's origin in the brain?" That is news to me. — SophistiCat

I know which part of my body most of my actions originate from.

If Bert1 is a rigid designator that refers to you, then you cannot be other than Bert1. — Banno

Which me? The bert1 I refer to when I refer just to my consciousness, or the bert1 I refer to when I refer to the flesh-memory complex you can take a photo of?

If you reject that distinction that's fine, but that just means we have different metaphysics, not different grammars, no?

Because only you can be you and I can only be me. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

But why?

Is the answer 'because that's how grammar works?' Or is there more to it than that?

Do you see any separation between your own subjectivity, and all the (ever-shifting) things that go up to make ArguingWAristotleTiff?

I'll hazard a theory of logic:

The capacity of consciousness to relate two or more of its contents and perceive their relationship.

It's a bit more general than andrewk's and makes no reference to brains. We're a bit obsessed with brains. I'll make a topic about that when I get a mo I think.

A soul is a blob of invisible ectoplasm. This is bullshit, but it's nothing to do with grammar.

Do you think the sentence: "Why is my soul in this body?" has grammatical issues?

There is no mind-body problem. The body (including the CNS) produces "the mind". "The mind" is the noise the brain makes. No brain: silence. — Bitter Crank

Here is a pristine mind untouched by philosophy. Bitter Crank has spent years frequenting this forum and the previous one and yet retains his philosophical virginity.

However, it just follows from being Bert(n), that you are Bert(n). There is nothing here to explain. — Banno

Sure, but only with certain assumptions. The assumptions are that 'Bert1' or 'Bert2' is not vague and does not vary in its meaning, nor the entity that it designates, which may be fine assumptions for most purposes. But for many speakers these assumptions are not always made in certain contexts. Consider Barney, who believes in reincarnation. Barney says "Phew, I might have been a snail. I could have been a snail had I not done that good deed in a previous life. I am Barney, rather than Sammy the Snail, because I did the right thing."

Barney might be mistaken or deluded in his metaphysics, but is he literally gibbering? I think not. He is making perfectly good sense on the assumption that his most essential self is his soul and his body is more of a happy accident. You understand what he means don't you?

Yep, that's obvious. — schopenhauer1

No, it isn't!

Rocks are insentient. — Wayfarer

No they aren't.

Dualism is normally contrasted with monism rather than materialism. Materialism is only one form of monism. The other main monisms are idealism (one substance and it is primarily mental), and neutral monism (one substance which is in itself neither mental nor physical but gives rise to these two). There is also property dualism which could be construed as a substance monism, namely that there is one substance which has both mental and physical properties which are not reducible to one another. I guess I am a panpsychist property dualist monist. Spread that on your toast. :)

Can you make sense of this? "In some possible world, Bert is not Bert"? — Banno

Crucially, that's not what I said! I said that I might not be bert1. This is exactly what is at stake, whether the words 'I' and 'bert1' have the same meaning, or perhaps referent, or not, and under what circumstances. And whether this is a grammatical or metaphysical issue.

Metaphysically, I take the view that consciousness (bear with me with the 'c' word, this is relevant) is not complex. There are not different kinds of it. By contrast, the content of consciousness, namely what we are aware of, admits of limitless complexity and variety. In my metaphysics there is a duality between the observer and the observed; they are not the same thing. The observer is not an object in the world. I know you don't agree with this and I'm not trying to argue for it here. The point is that there is a metaphysical assumption behind my language use, such that the referent of 'I' and 'bert1' can be separated under some circumstances. For the purpose of this thread, a question like 'Why am I bert1?' can be made sense of by separating the referents of 'I' and 'bert1', such that I do not gibber. By 'I' I mean consciousness (in this context) and by 'bert1' I mean a certain set of content to that consciousness.

However, if you take a different metaphysical view, in which there is no separation between observer and observed, and no metaphysical difference between the referent of 'I' (when bert1 is speaking) and 'bert1', then indeed, any such questions such as 'Why am I bert1?' is rendered vacuous, based on a grammatical muddle. And I take it this is your view.

Do you agree, then, that there is a metaphysical element to this issue, not just a grammatical one?

Perhaps you think that the grammatical error causes the metaphysical error?

(I don't want to persuade you you are wrong about the metaphysics, just that you are wrong to say this is a grammatical problem rather than a metaphysical one).

That is not to say that people who ask such questions are never muddled about grammar, they might be I suppose, but I think it far more likely that they simply have different metaphysical assumptions that make sense of their utterances.

Thanks Banno, that's better. The rigid designator thing is perhaps relevant here I think. I'll reply properly later when I have more time.

No I couldn't, that would be impossible. As I am always me (construing 'me' as the objective form of 'I') and could be nothing else. However it is possible (at east logically, if not practically) that I could be someone other than bert1.

Indeed. Perhaps we agree after all. Rather than me try to guess what you think the grammatical muddle is, could you spell it out?

'I am I' tells me nothing about the world.

'bert1 is bert1' tells me nothing about the world.

'I am bert1,' prima facie, tells me something about the world.

What's going on here Banno and Street?

Yeah, I think it is a real issue. As for an answer, I am not sure. I think it might be "Because I am most interested in being this one."

The most convincing way to me is to come up with a plausible definition of 'God' that has a referent.

Definition:
'God' refers to that which is:
unified and continuous (not made of parts),
eternal (not in the sense of infinite time, but in the sense of non-temporal, absolute simultaneity),
omnipresent (spatially everywhere, i.e. is space),
omniscient (not in the sense of knowing the set of all facts but in the sense of an omnipresent conscious substance aware of its behaviours)
omnipotent (not in the sense of being able to perform any act described in any random sentence with a verb (e.g. kill something that's dead), but in the sense that there is no power which is not God's. All existing things are relatively stable behaviour-patters of God's body. This power to self-move, do Big Bangs, create particles which then persist seemingly autonomously, is God's omnipotence.)

Objection1: Why on earth call that 'God'? That's just the universe, or reality.
Answer: Because the universe or reality is not commonly considered to be conscious and intentional. This definition makes that explicit. Surely a conscious universe is about as Goddish as you can get, but I'm not bothered if you don't want to call it 'God', especially if you want to avoid a whole lot of other false and pernicious baggage that often goes with the word.

But consciousness emerged late in the history of the universe.
This is the big substantive question that cannot be solved by making a definition. No, it didn't, in my view. Consciousness is not emergent. Panpsychism is true. See every other post on the forum I have ever made ad nauseum.

Objection2 Even if I agree with this definition and that the universe is conscious, I still don't see what this has got to do with the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, and all the holy texts and creation myths of any religion that espouses a creator God consistent with your definition. Nor do I see why such belief means we should hate fags, suicide bomb people and deny evolution.

Answer: That's all fair enough. As far as holy texts and creation myths are concerned, there tends to be very little metaphysical commitments in them (unless you take them literally of course, which would be foolish). The reason I might want to maintain a connection between such texts and a belief in the conscious reality defined above is that I think it might be the case that such stories contain subjective metaphorical accounts of what it feels like to create an universe, and may provide insights into the relationship between the creator and the created and the intentions behind such actions. Science is clearly much better placed to provide an objective non-metaphorical account of the physical details of what happens, but it is silent on what it feels like to be the substance undergoing those processes. There are no characters or drama in physics, and as such it is incomplete.

Also, I have no problem with cherry-picking. Just because I find one bit of the Bible edifying, I don't have to swallow the lot.

In summary, this approach is defining God as the reality-as-continuum we already know.

In short, these links (posted in the previous comments) show that only sketchy images are passed from the retinas to the rest of the brain... :) — Damir Ibrisimovic

Sure, but what has that got to do with subjective experience?

I'm not defending SteveKlinko's sketch towards a theory of consciousness, I think it is wrong. What I am defending is his characterisation of the problem which his theory is a genuine attempt to grapple with. Yet you still have not stated the problem yourself, and I am doubtful you understand what it is.

You quoted my question, but did not answer it. Here is wikipedia's characterisation of the problem:

"The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why sentient organisms have qualia or phenomenal experiences—how and why it is that some internal states are felt states, such as heat or pain, rather than unfelt states, as in a thermostat or a toaster."

My preferred solution to this is to deny that there are unfelt states, and suggest that consciousness is an intrinsic property of everything. That brings its own problems, but it is a putative solution to the problem.

Can you have another go at stating the problem, and then say what your solution is?

We know that neural processing must have something critical to do with qualitative experience. — apokrisis

We don't know that. That's a hasty generalisation.

Isn't this all solved by panpsychism?

Your thoughts? Let me hear about arguments to be had over the metaphysical significance. — HuggetZukker

There was a great thread on the old forum involving an attempt to disprove physicalism by attempting to show that there is some information that is non-physical, namely indexical information. The idea is that even if you know every single bit of objective public information about the world (which is an intuitive, if crude and perhaps wrong) characterisation of 'physical' information, and you are situated in this world, you still can't tell which person in the world you are until you open you eyes and make a local observation. Only then will you know which bit of the world you are in. No amount of studying the point-of-view-invariant stuff about the world will give you that bit of information. Therefore this is non-physical information. Therefore physicalism is false. There were lots of objections, mostly about the details of the thought experiment that the peoster concocted to illustrate this. There were better objections. some objected that this was an impoverished concept of physicalism. Some said that even if this does show that indexical information is not analysable in terms of non-indexical information, this proves nothing about consciousness - why can't a non-conscious robot make a local 'observation' and figure out which one of the many different robots it is? Another guy went further and said that all information is actually indexical information. I'm not sure where I stand on all this. I don't think I agree with the robot objection - I think if we want to imagine the robot has a point of view we are tacitly importing our own point of view into the robot. But then I have always had idealist sympathies.

Another thread about indexicals was an attempt to reduce indexical propositions to non-indexical ones. So relative, context-dependent propositions involving indexicals were replaced by ones with 'objective' reference points. So "I am here now" could be rendered "Bert1 is in the train station at 10:15". And then the inevitable objection and responses:
"Yes, but which Bert1, which year and which train station? You still need an indexical to disambiguate."
"No, still no need for an indexical: Bert1 with a mole on his arse, Portaloo train station in 3466".
"OK, but there are two Bert1s with moles on their arses, two Portaloo train stations and I don't know which civilisation's calendar you are using. You still need an indexical."
"No, it is the Bert1 who is speaking, not any other."
"But there are two Bert1s speaking in all the relevant train stations in each calendar time. I still don't know which one you are."
...and so on and so on. The idea is that by duplicating all 'objective' frames of reference you render them ambiguous, thus making indexicals necessary to disabiguate. Of course, for any practical purpose, it is possible (albeit inconvenient) to do without indexicals. But if you take it to its extreme logical conclusion, it seems to me that propositions involving indexicals can still be shown to be non-reducible to non-indexical propositions.

Either way, you are having 2) happening on undecided 1) relations. I could claim a relation too... :)
But I do not. You are still looking for the totality of visual impressions somewhere in the brain... :) And that's unrealistic, to put it mildly... — Damir Ibrisimovic

This is unclear Damir. It's not clear you actually understand the difficulty SteveKlinko is describing. Maybe you do understand it, and you have a good answer, but so far nothing you have said indicates that (not that I have really understood much of what you have said). Can you state in your own words the philosophical problem that SteveKlinko is patiently and repeatedly raising?

Dfpolis

Thanks for mentioning Stace. I had not heard of Stace before. My only brush with analyses of mystical reports is William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

It's an unfortunate feature of pathologically argumentative philosophers (like me) that that we tend only to talk to people with whom we disagree over a point we find interesting. I have to make an extra effort to even acknowledge helpful and interesting posts that I do not find disagreeable in some important way, hence this reply.

I am not averse to some forms of panpsychism. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) shows how consciousness higher than protoconsciousness might emerge. IIT is a panpsychist (or maybe panprotopsychist?) theory, and I'm not averse to it. It could well have the answer, but I'm not decided on the matter. — HuggetZukker

I'm a full-on panpsychist as I can't really make sense of the notion of proto-consciousness. Even if there's a smidge of subjective awareness, there's subjective awareness, and that's just full consciousness in the relevant sense it seems to me. I can't make sense of the idea that there is something somewhat similar to, or a more basic form of, subjective awareness, but isn't quite subjective awareness.

IIT is very interesting. I do think it is a panpsychist theory, but I also think it is false for the same reason I think many theories of consciousness are false, namely it is reductive. It says that consciousness just is integrated information. That's just wrong. Integrated information is integrated information. Consciousness is consciousness. The hard problem us untouched. To avoid reductionism, it would have to say something like 'consciouness arises from, or is caused by integrated information', but then we have a mystery again as to how exactly that happens. (Reductions are theoretically good when we can get away with them, because they don't involve mysteries.) I do, however, think that the IIT is a valuable theory. It may well be a decent theory of identity - that is to say, a conscious individual is defined as the system that integrates information, perhaps. Any system that integrates information has a roughly unitary consciouness that persists as long as the system persists and keeps functioning. Searle's tough objection to panpsychism: "What are the units supposed to be?" might find its answer: "The units are systems that integrate information." It's an interesting and plausible possibility it seems to me.

I'll reply to the stuff about indexicals when I can find a bit more time.

Damir,

Are you aware this is a philosophy forum? You seem innocent of the philosophical issues.

This is a floppy OP with no interesting philosophical question. It may as well be "Hey guys, some dumb people believe in spooky stuff! Are you dumb too?"

Based upon scientific research, there is no "detailed graphics" in our brain. So, I suggest that we see what our retinas see... :) — Damir Ibrisimovic

Thanks for your reply. I think we are struggling to communicate.