Certainly, other animals are not conscious to the same degree as humans. — Sapientia

And some humans are not conscious to the same degree as other humans - therefore the degree of consciousness should not be a measuring stick for deciding who lives and who dies.

Animals don't feel pain — Michael

It looks like your whole argument is based on very shaky ground. How do you know animals do not feel pain and other humans do? Are not humans animals?

Does anyone here eat animals, while also adhering to the moral trifecta (Empathy, compassion and ethical consistency)? If so, I'd like to know how? — chatterbears

If lions, tigers, and alligators do it, then why would it be wrong? Here we go into another thread asking a subjective question as if it had an objective answer.

I admit that the word has connotations of being a member of something bigger. Earth is an object, but the universe isn't really thought of that way, unless in context of something larger like a god and his creation-object that he puts on the shelf next to his five other ones. — noAxioms

..or a multiverse.

Surely I'm not the first to consider all this. It must have a name and maybe an article somewhere. — noAxioms

Process philosophy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6cDp0C-I8

"The universe is a set of relationships between relationships, between relationships - all of which change over time. None of these relationships is ever static."

Is your existence dependent upon the existence of our conversation?

What is the difference between the relationship of the Moon and a mailbox and the moon and yourself? Doesn't the differences lie in the attributes that make up the objects of those relationships?

And you keep cherry-picking my post, ignoring the point I keep making about the universal structure itself needing a relationship with something else in order for it to exist. How do you prevent yourself from falling into an infinite regress?

Your example is inappropriate. The color of the dress isn't equivalent to seeing a unicorn in a blotch of paint. Apples and oranges. I'm talking about color, you are talking about subjective interpretations after the fact of the colors presenting themselves in a certain way. You can choose to see a blotch of paint or see a unicorn. You cannot control the colors you see on the dress because it is already determined by the fabric of the dress and the structure of your eye and its cones and rods.

What's the difference? Try having an experience without eyes and a brain.

But each of us existed prior to our conversation. In order for our relationship to exist, we must exist prior to our conversation. Our conversation is a relationship, but not one that is necessary for each of our existence.

The universe existed prior to any relationship. If not then, it needs a relationship with a non-universe to exist. Again what keeps you from falling into the bottomless pit of an infinite regress? Why does the universe not need something else in relation to it to say that it exists?

I see a white and gold dress. You see a black and blue dress. But we're both looking at the same thing. One can say that the object of perception is determined by the quality of the experience and not by the external stimulus. — Michael

One could also say that the state of the sensory organs and the brain, along with the state of the object being perceived by said sensory organs, help determine what is experienced.

Well, the wording there wasn't my best effort. I'm not claiming ontological existence of anything, or of the relations. The opposite sides of a square have a relation of being parallel. That doesn't make the square exist or the relation exist. It means that squares have that property. If only existent squares have that property, then either platonic existence is necessarily true, or the opposite sides of squares are not parallel because there are no actual squares, only abstractions/concepts, and concepts don't have sides that can be said to be parallel.

Similar, the moon and I stand in relation to each other, and so I say it exists in relation to me, but that is not a declaration of absolute ontology. Yes, the view is a form of ontological nihilism, but I've read up on nihilism, and it is something else. — noAxioms

If you are not claiming the ontological existence of anything, then what are you actually saying? You are not saying anything interesting or meaningful.
Are you describing a state-of-affairs that exists, or no? Are we actually having this conversation or no?

If things need other things to exist and those things are defined by their relationships with other things, why would relationships themselves be excempt from this rule? Wouldn't relationships need the existence of non-relationships to exist as relationships?

I found that all my views have come from exploring two simple questions, one of which is “Why is there something, not nothing?”. This seeming paradox has been brought up in many threads, including the cosmological argument for God, but they all seem like rationalizations. So I noticed the question presumes there is something. What if there wasn’t? What empirical difference would that make? While difficult to get past the bias that there needs to be something, it turns out there is no difference. — noAxioms

What empirical difference would that make? That question does not make sense. If there is empirical evidence, then there is something. If not, then there could still be something that is not evident empirically. Being quantified by the senses does not give some thing existence. Experiences are representations of things and are not necessary for the existence of those things.

Tegmark did a pretty good job of demonstrating how our universe could be nothing more than such a mathematical structure. I think he then went a bit into Plato territory and presumed the existence of this structure. Not sure of this, since the structure itself is all that matters, and that doesn't change with ontology. A square still has 4 equal angles whether it has platonic existence or is just abstract. — noAxioms

How can relativism say that there is nothing more than some thing (like a mathematical structure)? It seems to me that in order for relativism to hold true, then the mathematical structure would need a non-mathematical structure in relation to it to exist and to say that it is a mathematical structure. In other words, relativism leads to an dualistic infinite regress. Realism does not seem to have that problem when it implies a final cause.

Well, it has a name relative to me, but it isn't a mathematical structure. Nothing is the lack of anything. There is no thing that has objective existence, not even the fact of there not being anything. Not only is the set of things that exist an empty set, but that set itself doesn't exist. — noAxioms

Any time you talk about some thing that exists independent of our senses you are implying that it has an objective existence. By Tegmark claiming that everything is nothing more than a mathematical structure, he has implied that the mathematical structure is not dependent on other things to exist, then it must have an objective existence. In order to say that nothing is objective, you'd have jump head-first in the the bottomless pit of infinite regress.

Thank you for showing that it is arbitrary - which has been my point all along.

That's not how the title is worded. That's just one interpretation of it. I interpreted it differently. It's down to the person behind the title to clarify its meaning. If the question is whether some people are better than others, as per the title and opening post, then my answer is yes, in some respects they are. Some people are better than others at the 100 metres, for example. — Sapientia

If the OP intended the title to mean the way you interpreted it, it would say, "Are Some People Better Than Others At Certain Things?"

If that were the case, then yes, some people are better than others at certain things - but that would be a boring topic as everyone would agree that we have objective measuring sticks of who is a better runner, or ball player. But being a better runner or ball player does not make you a better person.

The question makes little-to-no sense outside of that context. — Sapientia

Exactly. That is why I said earlier, "It is nonsensical to ask a subjective question as if it had an objective answer."

But that isnt relevant to the title of the thread. Does being better at the 100 meters make you a better person? Doesnt it depend on if one values running speed over other qualities? If someone doesnt value making valid arguments (like yourself), then making valid arguments doesnt make one a better person. What makes one a better person and who decides?

I would like to know how it follows that anything humans do is better, or superior, when it is possible that we just might become extinct like the dinosaurs, and we just might take the whole planet down with us. How does that make us better than any other species? Would aliens think that they are a better species than humans? Would they be right? What would make them right? Would that then entitle them to exterminate us?

Better, greater and superior are all value statements and as such are subjective. It is nonsensical to ask a subjective question as if it has an objective answer.

Define "better".

The only difference between physics and metaphysics is that claims made by the physicists are falsifiable, while metaphysical claims are not. Eventually they both have to be compatible with each other and cannot contradict each other.

Without us, or anything like us, there would be nobody to observe and understand the universe. Worse yet, there couldn't even be a universe in the first place because the concept of a universe is a human invention.

Without us, nothing is describable because descriptions require a set of conventions called language and is invented by human society. If humans never existed, then everything would be completely indescribable. To call something a universe would be an act of description. So without us, there would be nothing that you can describe as a universe. — Purple Pond

You seem confused. Are you saying that what we call the "universe" simply would not exist if we were not here to call it that?

What we call the "universe" exists independent of our labeling of it. Does a cat know that it is a "cat"? If it doesn't, does that mean that it does not exist? Before humans came along and started labeling everything with symbols, did the universe not exist even though there were non-linguistic animals that could perceive their environment and react to it?

This is something that I've talked about many times here. What seems to be missing in this thread is "Natural Selection". Evolution is the effect of natural selection. Natural selection acts on everything, including the inorganic, hence everything evolves or changes through time. Planets and stars evolve as a result of natural selection. These objects accumulate mass over time and gravity forces these objects into spherical shapes. They can have gravitational influence on each other, and are the result of the accumulation of unique elements that make them up, which leads to different conditions on their surfaces. Natural selection is an environmental feedback mechanism where objects are influenced by the forces and processes in their environment and being part of that environment means that the object influences it's environment as well.

This is no different from how animals are influenced by their environment and how they - as part of their environment have an impact on it as well. Predators can be an influence on how their prey evolve, and prey can have an impact on how those predators evolve. Each organism is a unique subset of the gene pool that arrived at this condition through the pressures of the environment, which can include it's own body.

Mr Chomsky's answer was "Introspection reveals to me that i think in words." — Gary McKinnon

You should have asked Mr Chomsky, "What are words, if not sounds and visual scribbles? You think in sounds and visual scribbles."

We all think in the form that our sensory impressions take.

When this topic comes up I like to mention this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words

Does Chomsky think that this man had no thoughts for the first part of his life because he was never taught a language? How does Chomsky explain how we learn a language if we don't think prior to learning it?

I haven't said that (at least not deliberately). I said that tithing is a moral issue, the decision about whether to tithe is one of that group of decisions we label 'moral'. I'm not saying that tithing is a moral act because people say it is. I'm saying the decision whether to tithe or not is a moral one because people say it is. None of this has the slightest bearing on whether we should tithe or not.

I'm appealing to popular agreement to define what kinds of decisions are 'moral' ones, only for the sake of discussions about ethics. To me, they're all just decisions and science can answer them, it's an artefact of those who think morality is something else that some types of decision are put in a special group, I'd almost be happy to do away with the word entirely. — Pseudonym

You're still appealing to popularity. I'll ask a different question: Why do people say that the decision to tithe or not is a moral one?

This is actually a question you should be asking yourself because you keep going in circles. The fact that you haven't seems to indicate that you don't intend to be intellectually honest. Do you ever play devil's advocate with your own ideas?

Whose feelings matter the most? — Harry Hindu

No, the consequences on other people's feelings are often what generate our own feelings. We have mirror neurons which mimic the emotions of others, we literally feel their pain, it's an evolved mechanism, probably to aid co-operation but the jury is still out on that. We're already programmed to care about other people's feelings, it's going to happen anyway. Science can tell us how best to bring about the happiness in others we seem to want to generate (when we're not already sure how to do it). — Pseudonym

Now it's becoming clear that you're just avoiding the questions.

I asked you whose feelings matter the most? We are not already programmed to care about other people's feelings. If we were then there would never be any moral dilemmas.

How so? I'm arguing that science can determine the answer to moral problems, not that science can decide what words we use to describe what type of thing. Science doesn't decide that the tall thing with leaves on is going to be called a 'tree', but neither does philosophy, it's just the evolution of language. The fact is that some decision has to me made about tithing because the issue exists. What we call it is irrelevant, we could call it a 'fligitybit' issue, if you like. — Pseudonym

That's not what I meant. I wasn't talking about the actual string of symbols we use to refer to things. The fact that we have different languages (different symbols) that refer to the same things shows that language is arbitrary. I was talking about you mentioning that since people agree that tithing is moral, that that makes it moral. That is also arbitrary. We didn't agree that animals evolved from others by natural selection. They simply do, and did before we became aware of it and devised an explanation using language to represent it. We agreed that this is the case, not as a result of popularity, but by being made aware of the fact by observations by everyone. So again I ask you, how is tithing a moral issue without appealing to popularity?

Fine, moral issues are those types of decision which might affect another organism's goals. I have no problem with that definition, we're still on language here though, you're still just describing the family resemblance that groups together all the types of decision we call Moral. We could take your word for it, or we could ask everyone in the world what types of decision they would use the word 'moral' to cover and use some sort of standard deviation around the mean for our definition. None of this has the slightest impact on how we actually make such decisions (ethics). — Pseudonym

No, we're not still on language. Again, language itself is arbitrary. What language refers to isn't, or at least shouldn't be when we are talking about objective attributes of reality. You were appealing to popularity. I'm not.

Yes, but I'm not one of them (or at least my current theory is that I'm not, and said theory has yet to be falsified), so I don't see how this is relevant. I'm not trying to claim that the answers science would give us to moral dilemmas would also apply to Lions. — Pseudonym

It is relevant because it shows that what is good for one species isn't good for another, and it is based on the way we're designed by natural selection. There are many features we do share with these animals - like the feeling of pain.

There absolutely is, that's the point of ethical naturalism (or at least my specific brand). The way we want to feel after certain decisions is a natural fact determined by evolution, and the means to obtain that feeling is a logical cause/effect system which scientific experiment can determine the probable relations wthin. Therefore science absolutely can tell us which person to save, the one which experiments have shown will provide us with the feeling which experiments have shown we are bound to want. — Pseudonym

But about the person that dies as a result of you referencing some scientific formula? Do you think that they give a damn about science at that moment? They simply have a goal to survive and their feeling of being neglected at their moment of need would not be anything like your feeling after saving someone else. Are you saying that you wouldn't at least feel bad about the person you couldn't save? I find that hard to believe. So I don't see how science can help you feel better in this situation.

No, there are not only theories why, there are theories about what the consequences will be and how we will feel about those consequences. There are also theories demonstrating what feelings we wish to obtain and which we wish to avoid, thus we can determine which action's consequences produce the feelings we wish to obtain. — Pseudonym

That's all well and good, but you seem to be forgetting a major aspect of morality - and that is the consequences of your actions on other's feelings, not just your own. That is my point. Whose feelings matter the most?

This is yet again a question that has been skirted around in several recent threads. It deals with mental content. What's going on within our own minds, thoughts, and beliefs? What do our mental ongoings consist of? What are they existentially dependent upon? Can we know this? If so... how? Furthermore, does our knowledge of this allow us to draw true conclusions regarding what's going on in the 'minds' of non-linguistic creatures? — creativesoul

You mean like infants? Mothers seem to know what their infants want, though new mothers have more trouble than experienced mothers in understanding what infants want. Why do you think that is? Using a language is just one means of communicating. We are communicating all the time whether we know it or not - simply by our behavior.

Tithing is a moral issue because it is an example of that class of decisions most people agree to label 'moral'. What I'm interested in as an ethicist, is what properties the members of that class share. It the same as the class 'animal' is that class of object which have a non-walled cell. A zoologist studies the things in this class. We could argue about what 'should' be in and out of each class by means of similarity, and that argument will never be conclusive, but the decision we make in moot cases does not tell us anything about the class, only language. — Pseudonym

So you're saying that tithing is a moral issue because others say so? It's arbitrary? That doesn't seem to help your argument much.

The thing is, despite this ambiguity no-one thinks choosing the colour of my new hat is a moral decision and no-one thinks a table is an animal, so we usually have enough agreement on terms to be going on with. — Pseudonym

Exactly. No one's goals are affected by your choice of color of hat. If it did affect others goals, then it would be a moral issue. That is my point - that organisms have goals. Tables and hats do not.

1. I want to maximise the feeling of well-being I get from living in a mutually supportive society. This is not something I've decided to want, I just find I do. I also find others feel this way too, so any conclusions I draw from my investigation of the best way to achieve this might be useful to others. — Pseudonym

Yes, because you were designed that way by natural selection. You are a social animal among other social animals.

On examination, I can see how such a feeling could have evolved (mutually supportive communities would out compete those with in-fighting), so I'm happy that this feeling is not something superficially conditioned into me. (I can explain why this matters if necessary). — Pseudonym

There are plenty of other species that have in-fighting and they have been around longer than humans. Males in many species fight (sometimes to the death) for territory and mates.

2. Given that I want what I want, I then have to employ rational thought to the evidence that I have to arrive at a solution. This is where science helps. — Pseudonym

Well yes, you use logic to determine the best course of action. This is done for any kind of decision - moral or not. You use reason to make any decision whether it be which ice cream flavor to eat, or who to save when you find more than one person drowning and can only save one. The other person drowning that you are not saving wishes that you would save them. In other words, moral dilemmas arise out of a conflict of interests. There is no scientific theory that tells us which person you should save. There are only theories that explain why you saved one over another (you share more of your genes with the person you saved as they are a family member, or if they are both strangers, you save the one with the least amount of risk to yourself).

Whether to give a tithe to the poor might be an example, I'm not sure where this is leading, obviously you're not thinking I'd be unable to come up with a moral dilemma, so maybe I'm missing your point here? — Pseudonym

Heh, yeah you're missing the point because you're jumping ahead of it. Be patient. How is tithing a moral issue? Why would you choose to tithe, or not?

Now the issue is, can you have both? Can you maximise the satisfaction of your desires. again this is not the objective because it 'should' be, it simply is, like it or not, you're a biological machine and you're going to do what you're going to do. Again, the theory is that science can (eventually) answer that question. If we know what sorts of thing really satisfy the desires we seem to have, the extent to which they do so, how long such satisfaction lasts etc. then we can derive strategies which maximise satisfaction. — Pseudonym

I'm not sure that I'm following you. Natural selection "selected" the traits in organisms that maximizes procreation and survival. Each organism has it's own goals and because it shares its genes with other members of its species, it will share many goals with its members. It is when the individual goal comes into conflict with the goals of another that a moral issue arises, or when you are deciding which path to take that will maximize your happiness. Our actions can have an effect on others and the consequences may not be conductive to happiness in the long-run as opposed to the short-run. So it is a matter of choosing the right path to achieve happiness for yourself, not others.

Our genes are the governing factor in making any moral decision. As a matter of fact, the organism counts as almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. What matters is the survival and propagation of the genes within the gene pool and we behave in social ways in order to maximize that. This means that while altruistic actions can diminish the chances of the individual getting what they want, their actions improve the conditions of others that share their genes. This is also why we are more altruistic with family members as opposed to strangers. If you find a stranger drowning at the same time as a family member, and you could only save one, who would you save and why?

No. The issue is one of incongruence between their gender identity and their biological sex, not in believing that they have some illness or physical defect. You're just taking advantage of ambiguous language. Transgenderism isn't the sort of condition that psychiatrists are talking about when they talk about somatic delusions. — Michael

Like I said in the post you just cherry-picked. If they claim that they are woman in a man's body - that is claiming that you have a physical defect - that you are the wrong sex. To say that the issue is one of incongruence is to say that their feeling is true and their body is wrong - or defective. How do we know that it is the body that is defective and not the mind?

Psychiatrists are simply being inconsistent in order to not be labeled by society as being transgender phobes. Science is heavily influenced by culture - unfotunately.

Whether that's the case is the big question that is nowhere near answered - to what extent human sexual stereotypical behaviour is based on genes vs how they were raised. We can't learn much from other animals because those that are social enough to have a culture will have the same dilemma. We can learn from observing sexual differentiation of behaviour in non-social animals, but it's hard to draw any inferences from that to humans, since non-social animals are much more different from humans than the social ones (eg all the great apes are social (actually, I'm not sure about orang-utans. Are they social?)). — andrewk

Just think of the things that women can do that men can't and vice versa simply based on their anatomy. Many species have sexual dimorphisms where the size and shape of the bodies can vary between sexes and each one has their own possible behaviors bases on their design. It's obvious you don't know enough about biology and psychology by the claims you are making.

But even if it were to be conclusively demonstrated that genes make boys enjoy playing rugby more than girls, I would like to live in a world where girls are allowed to play rugby, and are not looked down on, or regarded as 'not a proper girl' for doing so. — andrewk

I never said that girls can't play rugby. The problem comes when a man thinks he is a woman and wants to play with the women. The problem is the result of the physical differences between men and women.

In ethical naturalism, a moral dilemma is the rational weighing of two possible methods for achieving the 'right' outcome to see which is most 'right'. Our genetics, coupled with our environment produces the concept of what is 'right', so that can be considered a brute fact, scientific investigation can determine what course of action is most likely to bring it about.

I'm not seeing what your problem is with this approach, you just keep reiterating that morality is subjective. Perhaps you could explain why you think it must be? — Pseudonym

Okay, so give me an example situation that represents a moral dilemma.

What do you mean by the environment and our genetics producing the concept of what is 'right'? If all we needed were genetics and environment, wouldn't that mean we would always be 'right' in everything we do?

Did Sam Harris provide the name of the scientific field that studies what is right or wrong? — Harry Hindu


No, meta-ethics is the name of the field which studies what is right or wrong. As far as I know the term was coined by GE Moore.

What about any falsifiable theories on what if moral - did he provide any of that? — Harry Hindu


He would probably like to say he did, but personally I don't read anything very new in his work. It's really just some further justification for theories already put forward by philosophers like Williams and Foot. — Pseudonym

You've given me names of philosophers but not specifically any scientists, so I still don't see where the relationship between what is right and wrong and science is other than science being able to explain what it is and why it helps us to survive and procreate.

Is human survival and procreation a good thing? It may depend on who else you ask in the rest of the animal kingdom, or even in the rest of the universe for that matter.

This view on "essence" might be false, but it isn't a somatic delusion. — Michael

Somatic: An individual believes that he or she is experiencing physical sensations or bodily dysfunctions, such as foul odors or insects crawling on or under the skin, or is suffering from a general medical condition or defect.
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/delusional-disorder

Somatic type: delusions that the person has some physical defect or general medical condition
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder

Does the transgender find themselves suffering from a physical defect? If not, then why do they attempt to change themselves physically, by going to a physician, to feel "better"?

A better example would be believing that you are Elvis reincarnated and you dress and behave like him. You even go have a sex change (if you were a woman) and plastic surgery to look like him. When people try to tell you that you might be taking this to far, you berate them for being trans-Elvis-phobes.

Then they are confusing their mental state and/or behavior and their sex. Again, how do they know what it feels like to be the opposite sex?

Do transgenders have a problem with their hair color, eye color, skin color, etc.? Is it only their sex organs? It's not that they want to belong to a different body. It's that they want to have different sex organs.

Believing that you belong to another body is saying that your body is wrong.

How do you know this? — Pseudonym

What is a moral dilemma, and why is it a dilemma?

Let me ask you this: Did Sam Harris provide the name of the scientific field that studies what is right or wrong? What about any falsifiable theories of what is moral and immoral - did he provide any of that?

That has lead to many forms asking for people's gender when they actually mean sex. Simone de Beauvoir saw gender as an oppressive collection of cultural expectations about behaviour, based on people's sex, and she wished it would disappear. — andrewk

Simone de Beauvoir herself was probably confused about her own gender/sex by how she developed. This particular line in her Wikipedia article is telling:

"De Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fuelled by her father's encouragement; he reportedly would boast, "Simone thinks like a man!" — Wikipedia

Even IF gender and sex were not synonyms based on the way that they are being defined (physiology vs. behavior), physiology normally defines one's behavior. In every other species, each organism reacts to, and interacts with, another based on their perception of the attributes of the other - like their health and sex. In other words, males not only act like males but are treated as such by others of it's kind.

In humans you find this tiny fraction of the population confused about it's sex because of how they were interacted with as they developed from a very young age.

I understand that such a position exists, but it is not proven to be the case, its a meta-ethical position, a matter for debate, and has been for thousands of years.

Are there people within "Scientism" who are actually claiming that science proves morality is objective, certainly Sam Harris hasn't claimed that (to my knowledge). His claim is that morality seems to be objective (a meta-ethical argument), and therefore, science can tell us what is moral. You might not agree, but I don't see what is wrong with the position such as to justify a pejorative use of the term. I just sounds like an old, well-travelled philosophical position to me. — Pseudonym

Like I said, science can tell us what morality is. Morality is the subjective perspective of another's influence on one's personal and group goals. Are you saying that science can tell us what is right or wrong? Aren't those value judgments? How can science make a value judgment? It makes observations and simply tries to explain those observations in a consistent way.

So body dysmorphia is when you think your body is other than it really is whereas sex dysmorphia is when you think your body should be other than it really is. — Michael

With more time to think on it. It really isn't any different. They both believe that something is wrong with their body, which falls under the umbrella of a somatic delusion.

There is also enough evidence to suggest they are "born with it". — yatagarasu

People are born with mental disorders. I also mentioned that it has to do with how they were raised. Is there a study on trans people and how they were raised, like how their parents treated them as they developed (cross-dressing them, etc.). And at what point does a child actually choose his gender as opposed to it being chosen for them by their parents in how they treat them and interact with them?

I did - in the sentence after the one you quoted. — Harry Hindu

Read that part of this discussion again. — BlueBanana

Huh? I'm willing to have whatever conversation you want - anywhere - at least until the mods start deleting posts for being off-topic (like they have deleted mine for being off-topic). You just need to make more sense.

Here is the sentence I was referring to:

Every species has a specialty that enables it to survive in unique ways. — Harry Hindu

My point was that you are engaging in anthropomorphism by claiming that humans are somehow special or separate from nature because of their physiology (big brain) and behavior (which their big brain drives). Humans are just as natural as everything else in the universe. If the universe itself is natural, then how is it that one of its constituents isn't?

So body dysmorphia is when you think your body is other than it really is whereas sex dysmorphia is when you think your body should be other than it really is. — Michael

Then it comes down to my question of how they know that their body is something other than it should be. How do they know what the opposite of sex feels like to say that their body should be like that?

No it's not if you bring it up to back up your point. You can't make a claim and then claim I'm off-topic and should make a new thread when I refute it. — BlueBanana

I did - in the sentence after the one you quoted.

So was I. One can't be an obese anorexic. Anorexia is partly defined by whether one is obese. — BlueBanana

You don't know what you are talking about:

DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA

To be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa according to the DSM-5, the following criteria must be met:

Restriction of energy intake relative to requirements leading to a significantly low body weight in the context of age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical health.
Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though underweight.
Disturbance in the way in which one's body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight.

https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/by-eating-disorder/anorexia

And humans cannot be claimed to be entirely natural anymore. We have sociocultural structures. We have the mental capacity to think objectively about ourselves and understand abstract ideas and describe them linguistically. — BlueBanana

Whether or not humans cannot be claimed to be entirely natural anymore is a point of contention for another thread. Every species has a specialty that enables it to survive in unique ways.