Suppose on some alien planet there lives a fairly complex sentient humanoid society where feelings such as pain and pleasure never evolved

In The Wrath of Khan (1982), Spock says, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Captain Kirk answers, “Or the one.”

She didn't have to make a choice to stay the way she was. Many people lead lives of quiet desperation yearning to be what they could be yet remaining the way they are, only a few are strong enough to go against similar societal norms.

Yes I agree that she realized that was who she is, but she still had to make the choice and a very serious commitment to make this realization possible...her gender choice is a choice because she is assuming a role that she will manifestly play on the social stage, one that 'she' could not realistically play as a man.

Well I am not transgender, but I have a good friend going through a transition right now taking hormone therapy. He is in process of becoming a she and she tells me that she felt for a long time that something was out of wack with her life as a man, she decided, along with therapy to do the transition, she is about 6 months down a 2 year road to full transition.

No surprises here guys

No you need to learn how to read...tks

:down:

"Like" is metaphorical...

More like a compulsion, I think.

The only sense of gender that can't be chosen is the one you are born with.

How can someone choose their social role when it is a physical relationship with others? How is gender a social role if it can't be chosen, rather it is a physical relationship?

Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e., the state of being male, female, or an intersex variation), sex-based social structures (i.e., gender roles), or gender identity. People who do not identify as men or women or with masculine or feminine gender pronouns are often grouped under the umbrella terms non-binary or genderqueer.

Wikipedia

As I said the word 'Gender' has multiple senses.

Gender as a biological state vs Gender as a learned social role. We have no choice of biological state but we can choose social roles. There are different senses to the word `Gender` but it can have the same referent.

If you are suggesting that we can not appreciate animal behavior as an animal appreciates it, I agree. Yet it is apparent to me that their behavior is an instinctual reaction to what they can sense.

I am traveling but I recall Adorno`'s statement in his Aesthetics where he asks who could fail to be moved by the song of a Robin after a rain in the spring. He suggested that the bird is caught in the spirit of its song which we oddly find beautiful.

There have been a number of studies of the song of song birds. They indicate that baby birds learn their songs from their parents and birds that don't learn (there is a specific time period) will not be able to attract a mate. Other studies have followed how these songs have changed over several generations.

I read a recent study of Finch`s song, apparently the male Finch has brain structure that enable its vocalizations these structures are not found in the female Finch. The study suggested that the female Finch chooses a mate based on their appreciation of the song of competing males.

So yes, I think animals like these birds make choices based on their instinctual reactions to what is aesthetic available to them. This is an instinctual process and it may have some relationship to what is described as the aesthetic effect in humans (note some cave paintings in Europe now dated back 64,000 yrs), however no animal paints images like man.

Man can't survive alone in nature. Nature compels man to become a social creature, a citizen. Nature's negative compulsion resulted in man conquering nature thereby freeing man from nature, and enabling him to create new ends which foster socialization...morality.

K, see it now. Is it the Z06? very fast.

Link is not working

He could always fail to do it even if he knows how to do it.

Sufficient but not necessary

"Neo-China arrives from the future." Nick Land

Lawrence Lek (Chinese: 陆明龙;) a multimedia artist based in London, of Malaysian Chinese descent has put together an amazing video Sinofuturism (1839 - 2046 AD) that outlines China's characteristics.

https://vimeo.com/179509486

"Sinofuturism is an invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes. Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists.

The point about inspiration since I think it is critical. I too am not sure that society is the sole factor, which is why I qualified my initial statement, but I suspect that inspiration cannot transcend its time. Sure flights of the imagination maybe; and I am, as I have said not totally discounting that it is possible, but maybe you have an example?

The phenomenal world appears (to me) to be structured by rules. I doubt we can experience chaos, we are by who we are, the way we are, where are to forced to structure on what we experience in order to be able to find it meaningful at all.
— Cavacava

Can you expand? I’m not sure I know what you mean, or agree, if I do get it.

Our experience of the world is coherent, we do not experience a buzzing mass of sense data, with little effort on our part we fit a myriad of impressions into a coherent experience. The way it is fit together suggest to me that what is manifest is structured. It is not a chaotic mass of impressions, one thing happens after another, we inductively experience and learn from cause and effect.

There is no chaos of words or sounds, there are words and there are sounds, but these are rarely chaotic. Is the sound of a robin chaotic? Language is built on grammar.

So creative inspiration comes from/is contained within culture? How? What are the indications that this is so?

Think of how the Christianity of the Renaissance affected what Michelangelo and others did and achieved in their works, their sublime inspirations came from their view of man at the time, which was based on the role the church played in their society. I think this is an ongoing process though out history.

Hi and welcome to TPF.

I think RD is right but because of the way you have framed your question. While there may be no "ultimate standard of morality", morality is very much a social construction which does have ultimate local authority and I think it can be viewed on pragmatic terms as successful or unsuccessful behavior.

I don't think "that nature in which the forces of enmity, ruin and chaos are at work" works, nature is indifferent to enmity, ruin or chaos, these are very human characterizations.

He goes on to state:

From sensations and impressions all unaware of meaning, knowledge is derived, from elemental subconscious instincts and attractions the beauty of a moral form takes shape, out of an ugly world beauty is captured. In all this there is something miraculous from the point of view of the world, this given empirical world.

The phenomenal world appears (to me) to be structured by rules. I doubt we can experience chaos, we are by who we are, the way we are, where are to forced to structure on what we experience in order to be able to find it meaningful at all.

And creative power has an eschatological element in it. It is an end of this world and a beginning of the new world. The world is created not by God only, but also by man. Creation is a divine-human work. And the crowning point of world creation is the end of this world. The world must be turned into an image of beauty, it must be dissolved in creative ecstasy.

This sounds like the romanticism that @apokrisis harps on about :razz: I think the inspiration that some artists are able to reach is based on their ability to tap into in the consciousness of the societies that nurtured them where they work. Their ability to create truth that juts out of the matter of their creation, which opens our eyes when we view, hear or touch it, is inspired. There is a destructive element essential to art, like the mythological Phoenix, it is only out of the selective destruction of the old that the new is possible.

#MeToo explicitly relies on patriarchy as both cultural context and target. It sees women as objects of sexualised male domination. Men, we are told, have an interest in furthering, or at least maintaining, misogynistic forms of social control over women. They are assumed to want to go ‘as far’ as they can before being confronted with a woman’s expression of non-consent to sex. This picture provides, at best, an idiosyncratic and regressive picture of human sexuality. At worst, it encourages us to police sexuality in conservative ways.

Western society has only recently gone from banning of explicit sexual constants and practices to celebrating them. The practices that put Oscar Wilde in prison, are now celebrated in marriage. Society in the process of liberating sex, and its associated practices, has created a moral (& a legal) maze for all genders.

Van Badham in her Globe piece (2/1/2018) quotes an "eloquent truth":

“The only sexual rule today is ‘consent’, and men have been taught that women are potentially always sexually available because that is what ‘liberation’ means.”

Van Badham points to the generational issues surrounding various feminist claims. The freedom of agency that older feminists sought so long and hard to achieve, younger feminists now want to circumscribe. Lili Loofbourow cultural critic for The Week interestingly states:

The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is is just how men are, and how sex is.

Perhaps it is "our instinct is to normalize", the control that society puts over agency, that is shaping what 'consent' entails, which is worrying from a feminist position because the Male view is dominant in Western Culture.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. As far as I am aware very few of those #MeToo has called out are under legal indictment and I wonder how it will pan out for those "monsters" who have been charged. Cosby's trail has gone on and on and picks up again next month. Remember OJ was exonerated of murder because of the force of his legal defense and I wonder if many public prosecutors or victims will be able to withstand the legal force that those 'monsters' will employ to defend themselves.

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PR for NRA-TV

It apparently is going to fight media attacks against the NRA on their own channel. Listened a little to it, its like Fox on steroids.

Do you think that knowledge 'that' is subordinate to knowledge 'how'?

That learning how to ride a bike exceeds any propositional statement regarding this fact.

I don't think the mirror matters. The only thing that matters is what ever is apparent. If you want to explain why it is apparent, fine...but it does not add anything to what is apparent.

At the fringes of the Everglades, the ARM Loxahatchee NWR not that far away from me
What a beautiful day, bright, clear, dry and not too hot...it was perfect

Yes. One thing has to be the consequence of natural selection; the sheer infinite variety. Variety is explicable in terms of the process but simply cannot be REDUCED to survival.
ALL variations, all traits must precede adaptations. For the natural process to work towards the resultant evolution the variation must be there to select. Nature does not and cannot pre choose, predict, or prepare. Thus characteristic are not explained by their evolved states; characteristics explain evolution.

When a species becomes by natural circumstances isolated from others of its kind it would seem that the ability to adapt becomes critical, and superior to any inherent dominant trait. Only those of a species who can adapt will survive. Maybe this is how some resessive traits can become dominant.

It is the similar to the actions that Bush and Obama took. Bush raised steel tariffs 30%

In March 2002, President George W. Bush imposed a 30% tariff on Chinese steel. The results were chaotic. In a report put out by Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition in February of that year, the coalition found the tariffs against China boosted the overall prices of steel and cost the U.S. 200,000 jobs in businesses that buy steel, representing $4 billion.

...in September 2009, President Obama imposed a three-year tariff on car tires from China. Chinese imports went down, but the tires were simply sourced from other countries, the LA Times noted. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, 1,200 tire jobs were saved in the U.S., but through costs passed along to American consumers, 2,500 jobs were lost indirectly.

Both of these presidents were reelected to a second term.

The President desperately wants to shore up his support with Rust Belt voters who voted for him based on his promise to fight for their jobs. This has become especially important as his support is now, as Axios noted, falling with nearly all demographic groups, including those who backed him until now.

CNN

Moving back to Trump, what do people think of his tariffs on Steel and Aluminium Tariffs?

Reelection move. It gives him a helluva talking point in the Rust Belt which he must win.

I think if there is a god it is nature, and if so, then it is completely indifferent to our psychological valuations of good and evil.

Are other creatures capable of learning conscious in the same way then? Or is there something more to humans that allow us to have that capability.

You might enjoy neuroscientist Sarah Woolley, PhD Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute
fascinating discussion about song bird learning.

https://youtu.be/4gnACxmMD2g

Hi, and welcome to TPF

“Self-consciousness” could be considered, an individual being conscious of themself. The factor of which they are accessing within memory data, would be themself (and whatever they perceive themself to consist of, as saved in their memory data). The interaction of the factor (themself) would be the causes and effects of the existence of themselves, and how their existence relates to their surroundings (or whichever perception they have saved in memory data, of the settings regarding their presence).

I think we learn to become self conscious by means of differentiation. Early on infants identify with their care givers and they do not consider them separate entities, but eventually in following others actions, and constructing theories on why things are occur as they do, children learn that care givers are acting purposely, causally and in this manner they learn that they are not their care givers. In making this distinction the child learns its own agency, its ability to act self consciously, to change and not be able to change things according to its desires.

Yes, but can you say that there is no pain or pleasure present in the process of desiring to know and understanding?

No, but as I said "limiting happiness's scope to pleasure and pain does not differentiate man from beast" which is not to say that these emotions don't motivate us, but rather that they are not the entire story, that the differentia between man and beast is knowledge.

Some suggest that 'I think, I am' is a performative truth that is epistemically valid only when it is thought.