The point of the dog article was to show that in non-sexual behaviors, it can be difficult to really tell what sex a dog is. Same with humans. — Philosophim

In the way I am defining gender in terms of an inborn perceptual-affective style, this pattern is not simply binary (what sex are they), but a spectrum that goes from hyper masculinity to hyper femininity. Any particular individual is situated at some unique point along that spectrum.

In many , but certainly far from all cases, it is not that difficult to tell if someone has a constellation of behaviors that belong to the autism spectrum. But even if we simplify things by assuming a simple masculine-feminine behavioral binary, my claim is that, while it is apparently very difficult for you to really tell whether someone is male or female based on their behavior, my experience is quite different. To put it in more personal terms, I’m a gay male who didnt choose to be that way. Furthermore, from
the time I was little, what gay meant to me was much less who I was attracted than the constellation of behaviors I have been describing , like throwing like a girl. This ‘outed’ me well before I knew what homosexuality was. My brother’s nickname for me was ‘fairy’, and this was before he had a concept of homosexuality.

My sense is that the constellation of behaviors that I insist form a pattern or theme that is generated by an inborn perceptual-affective style on the masculine-feminine spectrum are utterly invisible to you. You end up shattering this patterned constellation and its internal logic into a thousand pieces, and then treat each piece in utter isolation from the pattern they are inseparable from. “This one just happens to want to dress like a girl, that one just happens to choose to throw like a girl, that other one chooses to speak with a lisp, that one needs to walk like a girl.” It’s as if you’re trying to explain the learning of verbal language in Skinnerian terms, whereas I’m saying that there is a spectrum of ‘transformational grammars’ that organize our behavior along masculine-feminine lines.

its not gender. Its just personality differences — Philosophim

I like to use the term personality interchangeably with gender. Masculinity and femininity are like personality traits in the way that they contribute a stable life-long stylistic element to our behavior. But the key here is that we’re not taking about isolated behaviors that form no pattern that overlaps between individuals. Rather, the masculine-feminine spectrum is a gestalt whose constellatory elements, while never identical from one person to the next, exhibit strong overlap that bind communities together as well as potentially alienating them from different gendered ones.

For instance, I’ve spent a lot of time in gay social environments where we had the opportunity to learn about how these constellatory gender patterns overlap and differ among us. If you were to volunteer your view that gender is someone, on a whim, opting to put on a dress, the reaction would likely be a communal sense that you just dont get it. Many of us who were born with the non-binary gender perceptual-affective style that made us feel alienated from our male peers didn’t put two and two together at first, thinking that these behaviors were unique to us as an individual , and didn’t follow any larger internal logic, like a transformational grammar. For many of us, it was a revelation and a profoundly affirming experience to discover not only that there was a common thread tying together all of these behaviors within each of us that made us stand out from other males, but more importantly, there was considerable overlap among each of us in these non-binary ( or I should say inter-binary) gender behaviors. We recognized ourselves in each other.

For many gay men, the humor in the movie La Cage aux Folles comes from this recognition of something we share
that makes us different from our male peers. Yes, there are distinct masculine-feminine differences between the two main characters, the husband and husband. One is capable of acting more ‘butch’ than the other, but the point for many gays who watch the movie is that in spite of these differences the couple (and their servant) still share many non-binary features that bind them together and set them off from straight males. That’s the ‘in’ joke that I don’t think you get.

I’m not sure where you would see the humor in this film , given that for each of the many non-binary features this movie presents (a campy mix of masculine-feminine art, group over-emoting to the surprise of a champagne bottle popping, holding a wine glass with the pinky out, crossing one’s legs like a girl, buttering toast in a dainty way, wearing makeup, not being able to walk like John Wayne), you would shatter the gender pattern into disconnected fragments and then list each behavioral fragment in isolation ( this one just happens to want to butter toast in a dainty way, that one wants to cross their legs like a girl, that other one wants to emotively overreact to the loud popping of a champagne cork).
Perhaps you imagine that someone decided to write a manual of how to behave like an effeminate gay man, and a bunch of people read it and then modeled their behavior after its instructions?

And how on earth would you explain thousand of years of discriminatory behavior towards women on the part of men if not by reference to robust inborn behavioral differences that become culturally stereotyped? You really think that average bodily differences such as size, weight, strength are enough to explain this history? If we took a population of men and were somehow sophisticated enough in our scientific knowledge to differentiate them in all the physical ways that men and women differ, giving half of them uteruses, do you think this would be enough to potentially generate the kinds of discrimination and stereotypes that women have dealt with over the centuries?

I view individual gender as a mixture of inborn and cultural features.
— Joshs

But that is not what gender is. Gender is the expectation that a sex act or express themselves in a particular way. What you are noting is people wanting to act or express themselves a particular way. So if a man is born who wants to wear a dress, then he does. This is not gender. The expectation that a man should NOT wear a dress is gender. — Philosophim

You and I may very well have different definitions of gender. The notion of gender I want focus on has a number of features. First, it is not about arbitrary choices that a person decides to make. It is about about an inborn perceptual-affective schema of organizing sensory experience. I have in mind in particular the example of a gay man who was born with a ‘ feminine’ perceptual-affective style that they had no control over. This style dictated a large constellation of behavior. features, including a feminine-style of pronunciation, a feminine way of walking a throwing a ball, and a large number of other features that made them
stand out from other biological males.

who you sleep with has nothing to do with your gender, — Philosophim

I would include in this constellation of behaviors sexual attraction to other males. That is to say , it is not simply coincidence that a male born with a feminine perceptual-affective style who displays the constellation of behaviors I mentioned also very likely is attracted to other males. It is the brain-wired style that explains sexual attraction as well as ways of speaking, walking, emoting, etc. This gay man didn’t choose to behave in this way, and didn’t choose being attracted to other males. In fact they loathed themself for behaving in ways that resulted in their being bullied and called ‘sissy’.

It’s ok if you don’t want to call this inborn style of perceptual
organization ‘gender’. I’m more interested in whether you accept that people are born with such global organizing structures that dictate feminine or masculine behavior that form a large constellation of features all belonging to a single causal pattern.

This is why I mentioned schizophrenia and autism previously. These are syndromes that generate a large constellation of behaviors that are all explained on the basis of a single cause, a way in which the brain processes and organizes affective and perceptual input.
My example of the feminine-acting gay man no more chooses to express themselves as a particular gender than the schizophrenic or autistic chooses to display the constellation of behaviors that define their syndrome. The constellation chooses them.

…while there can be a general sense of non-sexual behavior differences between the animals, its less obvious. This is a similar point in humans. In general, expected behavior in non-sexual interactions from a particular sex is gender. And gender expectations are not objective evaluations of how an actual sex should or must act. — Philosophim

I want to make a couple of claims here. The first is that gender expectations must be understood in ways similar to the role that expectations concerning other forms of behavior play in helping us to understand one another better. The argument I’m making is a kind of Kantian one. That is, there are a host of ways of being that appear to be reflected in functional organization patterns in the brain that present as a kind of personality style, or at least an aspect of personality. Many of these we currently label in terms of pathologies, but we seem to be slowly moving away from such medicalizing thanks to political activism. Some examples include schizophrenia, Wilson’s syndrome and autism-aspergers. I want to include human gender behavior.

I view individual gender as a mixture of inborn and cultural features. The inborn features to me are the most fascinating, because they consist of a neural organization that I call a perceptual-affective style.
This style globally , but often subtly, affects behavior including bodily comportment , speech pronunciation , sexual attraction, posture, emotions and many other aspects of our engagement with the world.
What being born with a sharply different gender than one’s same-sex peers can teach one (but it isn’t guaranteed to do so) is that all of us ( not just the ‘non-binary) are behaviorally shaped in this global fashion, all of us have a perceptual-affective gender style unique to us but usually close enough to those of our same-sex peers that it is invisible to us. When it is no longer invisible to us , due to a sharp enough difference in our gendered behavior with respect to our same-sex peers, we are given an opportunity to notice the way that gender sweepingly affects human behavior in general. Of course, one doesnt need to be different in this way in order to come up with such insights, but it certainly helps.

What complicates this picture is that the interplay between culture and inborn dispositions makes it impossible to nail down once and for all the meaning of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, since these change along with culture.

My second claim has to do with the embodied nature of physical sexual features. Embodied approaches within psychology reveal that such anatomical
manifestations of biological sexual expression such as genitalia can’t be understood in isolation from how they are used, how they are performed and enacted. Combining this with my first claim, one’s psychological gender defines what a person’s genitals ‘are’ by how they are performed (and sensed).

Admittedly this is a subtle argument, and I admit that its value in advocating for political aims for transgenders is somewhat limited. Saying tv at our biological sexual parts are embodied and enacted via gender is quite a distance from talking about capability of pregnancy.

Everything is biological. You are your brain, and it is biological. The point I'm making is that if we could actually identify sex differences in the brain, it’s irrelevant to why we divide the sexes to begin with. We don't divide the sexes by brains, period. If you think we should, then please give a reason why. — Philosophim

What if we divided gender differences in the brain? That is to say, what if we hypothesized that in humans, as in other mammals, there are differences in brain wiring bwrween the sexes that translates into differences between masculine and feminine gender behaviors and perceptual-affective styles? What is a male or female dog or cat. Mor specifically, what causes make and female behavior in animals? For instance, dog breeders and experts can quickly determine the difference between a male and female simply on the basis of their behavior. It seems that make and female dogs have subtly different brain ‘wiring’. I call this perceptual-affective style , because it has to do with a a certain way a dog or cat perceives sensations and affects that is gender related and independent of individual differences in personality. Would you agree that there are such consistent , recognizable behavioral differences between the genders in dogs and cats? Would you then agree that there are also such robust inborn gender differences in behavior between male and female humans?

This seems to me a prima facie false statement. Do you have an argument for it? — wonderer1

Here is the author’s key contention:

“In the new millennium, to take one example of the transformed terrain, environmental issues came to be central in a way that seemed to render linguistic constructionism irrelevant or seemed simply to suggest its falsity. Though discourse has many roles in helping create carbon emissions, for example, it’s the material interactions of particles, whether known or unknown to anyone, narrated or not, that is the heart of the problem. Any philosophy that seemed to undermine the reality of the natural world, or make it a malleable human artefact, has come to feel potentially destructive. Indeed, scholars’ obsession with linguistic interpretation, their notion that everyone has always experienced the world as though reading a book, came to seem at a certain point to be an artefact of privilege, as well as fundamentally implausible.“

The writer’s claim here is not based on empirical fact , from which vantage he could render linguistic constructivism “false”, as he suggests, but a philosophical presupposition. He is wedded to a form of realism and this colors his reading of a variety of authors as ‘undermining reality’. Of course , postmodern authors are also operating out of a set of presuppositions , but at least they don’t fool themselves into believing this dispute is a matter of what is true or false. It is a clash of worldviews.

No offense intended, but your statement strikes me as something a member of a priesthood might say, in an attempt to cow anyone who might suggest it might be reasonable to dismiss the priesthood's theobabble. — wonderer1

No offense taken, I’ve heard this line many times. It’s kind of a standard meme among those hostile to postmodern philosophies. Authors like Derrida , Focault and Deleuze supposedly use a deliberately obscurantist style to create a cult of personalty and a horde of blindly unquestioning devotees.
That does t fly with me. I’ve studied these authors for years. It’s very hard work, but rewarding due to the brilliance and originality of their ideas. Perhaps the babbling you’re hearing is a result of your tone deafness to unfamiliar paths of thinking.

Concludes that the linguistic turn might have had its day. :scream: — Wayfarer

He reaches this conclusion only in the last couple paragraphs, with no justification other than that , yes, there is a real material world outside our our discursive schemes.So that ‘s what this superficial piece is about. It caricatures a wealth of recent philosophy as examples of a ‘linguistic turn’ , which it misreads as semiological structuralism, and then sets up this straw man for demolition.

It is just one more addition to the slag heap of reactionary philosophy thinking that it has spied a way ‘beyond’ postmodernism , poststructuralism and any other ism that seems to want to swalllow up the real world within our schemes. We’ve already seen similar claims, first by the New Philosophers in France , and more recently by the New Materialists, Speculative Realists and Object Oriented Ontology. These are not a step forward but a regressive move backward. In order to go beyond a way of thinking, you first have to demonstrate a proper understanding of it.

Joshs Thanks. If someone says they were born in the 'wrong body' and identify as male (born sex as female) do you have some reflections regarding an approach we might take — Tom Storm

I’ve read that the transgender community has shied way from that expression in recent years, but I don’t think many have completely abandoned the underlying split between sexual body and gendered psyche it implies. Not that I think it matters whether one justifies transitioning on the basis of body dysphoria vs social acceptance.

Can you say some more? — Tom Storm

There are literally hundreds of individual mannerisms of gesture, speech patterning, perceptual affective comportment that make up a patterned constellation that makes up gender. Social constructs determine the various ways that such mannerisms are refined, channeled, etc, but don’t invent them from scratch. Biology produces gender in other animals(we can distinguish male from female dogs on the basis of gender behavioral differences), and if biology can generate binary genders it can produce an infinity of intermediate ones too.

Gender and transgender or social constructs, or subjective.
Sex is a fact, and objective — Philosophim

There are some who argue that gender is pulley a social
construct, but I dont think you’ll find that to be a majority view within the gay community. My own view is that the biological and the social are inextricably, and for many who believe they were born with their particular gender already put in place, the idea that gender is strictly socially constructed is ludicrous.

This is 'identity politics', and it essentially keeps us in a state of permanent intellectual warfare with our fellow man — Tzeentch

So arrogance, pride and brainwashing are the sources of social conflict? And the old-fashioned moral virtues are the solution? I would flip this around. Belief in the old fashioned moral virtues forces us into a way of interpreting social behavior in terms of such concepts as pride and brainwashing. If we discard moldy subject-based moralisms in favor of a more sophisticated account of human behavior based on reciprocal and joint interaction we can leave the personalized blame aside and focus on collective aims.

our inclination is not primarily towards truth-seeking, but rather towards advantage-seeking — Raef Kandil

Have you ever read Nietzsche? He combines the two motives of truth and advantage-seeking into one motive, Will to Power. Will to power isn't the desire on the part of an autonomous subject to choose to will power over others, it is the creative outcome of a competitive relation of drives within a psyche. Will to power results in the creation of value systems that assimilate and organize the world toward pragmatic ends of motivated sense making. The kind of truth you describe in your OP is motivated by a Will to truth, which is merely a subset of the Will to Power. Put differently, Will to truth is a value system (or metaphysics) that thinks of truth as correspondence, adequation or coherence in relation with external facts, objects, the way things really are. By contrast, the only kind of ‘truth’ that Will to Power, as the creation of value systems, recognizes is truth as production, enaction, becoming.

“It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world's most poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth” left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed? Isn't it enough to assume that there are levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance – different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? With all due respect to governesses, isn't it about time philosophy renounced governess-beliefs?” – The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967 Will to Power.)

a rare deviation from the norm doesn't invalidate the norm. Sex (xx, xy) is nature's most effective way of maximizing evolutionary possibilities in multicellular organisms — BC

Phenotypic expression can’t be reduced to genotype, and even the understanding of genotype is much more complex than treating it in isolation as a chemical code. As a result, we have to appreciate that the ‘norms’ of biological sex , as is tru of all norms, is a post-hoc abstraction derived from a population of unique singularities. No two gendered persons are alike in the expression of their gender , and since psychological gender animates and co-determines the performance of biological sex, the same is true of the latter.

Philosophy has been questioning religion from the start — Jamal

And religion has been questioning religion from the start. The formation of new religions typically carry with them an implicit critique of older established ones ( Protestant reformation, Conservative, reform and reconstructionist Judaism, etc). Meanwhile, the history of Western philosophy has mostly consisted of questioning one religious metaphysical system in order to prepare the ground for a different religious metaphysical system.

Transgender is the umbrella term that includes transsexuals
— Joshs

That doesn't make sense to me, but I don't really know the accepted terminology or its preferred hierarchical order — universeness

Got it from here:

https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/difference-between-transgender-and-transsexual

I think that 'general support' is what will matter most to a person going down the physical surgery route. — universeness

I’ll say. I wouldn’t have the balls for it, if you’ll pardon the expression.

I think transgender and transexual are two quite different goals.
I think there are many trans folk that feel they have to do the physical transitions that they can do, in order to become 'happy' or 'true' or perhaps even 'real.' — universeness

Transgender is the umbrella term that includes transsexuals, so not all transgenders support the aims of transsexuals, such as advocating for the idea that one can be born into the wrong body, defined purely biologically outside of all social contexts. I agree entirely that the surgery can lead to greater happiness, regardless of whether one believes in a biologistic or social explanation transgender, or some combination of the two. I think Judith Butler has a similar view.

such surgery is frightening and soooooo expensive and sooooooo painful and soooooo disruptive to your life that many trans folks just decide that on balance, they would rather live with the anatomy they have, than go through what they would have to go through to fully transition. They also talked about those trans folks they knew who have fully transitioned and the doubts, regrets, trauma's they went through along the way, but that they are now so much happier — universeness

The concept of gender fluidity is very clear to me. The only aspect of trans that isn’t clear for me has to do with what I call the difference between the biological and the social body. It seems to me there are two ways of justifying the desire to undergo surgery. The first has to do with ‘signaling’. I want to make it easier for that social community I identify with based on my gender to recognize my own gender, so I signal my gender identity through various means, including name change, clothing and hairstyle modifications. If i choose to also undergo surgery, it is not because I believe that I was born in the wrong biological body but that my social environment isn’t ready to recognize my gender without the help of obvious signaling from me that simplifies the issue for them.
The second way of justifying surgery depends on my belief that, independent of the feedback of my social
community, I was born in the wrong body.
This belief, from the vantage of embodied approaches in psychology, is a bit incoherent, because it assumes the ability to separate physical body from psychological gender. Embodied thinking argues that the physical, the psychological and the social are intertwined so completely that any attempt to locate something like a purely physical aspect of sexuality is nonsensical. Whatever our psychological gender happens to be, this gender defines, shapes , animates and performs our biological sex through how we walk , talk, gesture , perceive and sense our body. The body only exists as what it is in the way it is used , animated , performed. We can never be in the
wrong body because we are not in a body like a thing in a container, we enact a body.

Im not sure if which of these two ways of thinking about one’s sexed body we choose has much relevance to political advocacy surrounding trans. I do suspect, however, that if the first approach is right, then eventually trans surgery will fade away as the social structure becomes more aware and accepting of gender fluidity, and one no longer has to feel one is born into the wrong social body.

I'd say sexualized rockstars are inappropriate for children too. — Tzeentch

It’s interesting how such standards have shifted over the years. I dont think too many parents would have a problem with a hip-wiggling Elvis impersonator performing for young children today, or even a lipstick-wearing Bowie-type glam rocker. Male swimwear that once concealed the navel now exposes the ‘adonis belt’. I suspect that the awareness of gender that makes it possible for a 5 year old child to identify as trans implies a level of sophistication concerning sexuality that was unavailable to an earlier generation. This perhaps also makes it possible to distinguish between a sexual image in general and a harmful sexual image.

Science will always do a better job of telling us what is the case.

This by way of agreeing that "the issue is bound up with the emphasis on 'belief'"

But what is at stake here is not what is the case. It's what to do.

So to reiterate, science cannot replace religion because science tells us how things are, while if religion has any value it is by way of telling us what to do — Banno

It’s not science per se that is focused on the notion of what is the case, it is propositional logic. Science has the flexibility to extricate itself from the philosophical presuppositions of proportional logic, because it is inextricably tied to philosophy itself and historical movement of philosophical thinking.
Freeing itself from propositional logic is a matter of recognizing the priority of what is at stake and at issue over what is the case. Without such grounding there can’t be a coherent case in the first place. Ascertaining what is at stake and at issue is also prior to determining what to do. Kuhninan normal science plods uncreatively through what is the case, locked into a particular framework of belief , while revolutionary science determines freshly what is at stake and at issue, by shifting the frame of belief, thereby determining freshly how to intervene in the world and build new niches. Science is fundamentally an endeavor of praxis, production and performance rather than disengaged epistemological knowledge. We know the world by doing, by intervening and making changes in it. The invented world then talks back to us, changing our frame of belief.

In sum, the philosophically creative, revolutionary impetus of science gives us new ways of determining what to do by freeing itself from logic’s freezing of the movement of nature down to what is the case. How religious belief differs from philosophical belief is a complex issue. I would just say that the way belief operates to both ground and change religion, philosophy and science reveals more commonalities than differences at a superordinate level of analysis.

↪Joshs That’s interesting. Do you mean that the actual occurrence of the fallacy is a means, within the debate, of finding a bridge; or do you mean that an awareness of the fallacy, that is, a real-time identification of it by an interlocutor, can be that means — Jamal

I was thinking of Thomas Kuhn’s discussion of incommensurable scientific paradigms in his postscript to the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There he clarified that this incommensurability doesn’t amount to a total breakdown in mutual understanding, because paradigms are islands of divergence surrounded by a sea of shared cultural understandings. We can draw from such shared notions (the bailey?) to bridge the disparity in our scientific conceptions ( the motte?).

it's not the motte-and-bailey image but rather the participants themselves who sometimes fail. Motte-and-baily identifies one way in which people fail in debate, and isn't that exactly what the identification of informal fallacies is meant to do — Jamal

What needs to be appreciated is that the concept of debate itself presupposes in principle accessible facts of the matter that can be separated from values, motives, affects and other sources of subjective ‘distortion’. This assumption leads to the application of the label of fallacy to a wide range of statements. This leads further to the question of to what extent the notion fallacy is an appropriate or useful way to describe the construction of arguments in a debate. For instance, there are a wide variety of rhetorical strategies that manifest responses to the realization that oneself and one’s opponent are talking past one another, that is, are conceiving the terms of the debate according to incommensurable schemes. Seen in this light, Motte-bailey can be a useful and necessary means for finding a bridge, a code of translation , between the two worlds.

It’s no coincidence that the OP mentions postmodern arguments as an inspiration for the motte-bailey fallacy , while posters on this thread mention right -wing climate change deniers. The polarizing nature of the ideas these positions represent lead many to blame the form of argument ( fallacious reasoning) and miss the real culprit , incommensurable worldviews.

I would say your motte-and-bailey example applies more to modernist critical theory than it does to postmodernist reasoning. The former grounds itself in moral truths of a dialectical sort, from which it draws the righteous correctness of its position, whereas the latter is not interested in truth per se but pragmatic effects of discursive relations.

Is there a useful thread here on post modernism and truth? I would be keen to read something accessible on the subject. — Tom Storm

Scientific belief succumbs to the structure of the proposition.It asks only whether something is or is not the case, true or false. In doing so, it presupposes the sense of the case it is adjudicating. But more fundamental than asking if something is the case or not , is asking what is at stake and at issue. By asking this , we put into question and decenter the very sense of the case. And in fact , every time we examine the truth of a statement , we are in some measure at the same time decentering the basis around which belief revolves.

Joseph Rouse writes:

“Realism is the view that science aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.”

By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.”

↪Tom Storm yep, folks ethics often improve when they leave their religion. Again, there is the inability of some folk to comprehend an ethic not based on god — Banno

or truth

Hi Joshs,

Could you tell me what is meant by "super intelligence"? — Daemon

This was Christoffer’s term. I took it in a very general sense to mean the most advanced ‘thinking’ devices we can imagine humans capable of creating. He believe such futuristic machines will be capable of autonomy of goals, such that their functioning will appear more and more alien to us.

it’s simply reactionary to human questions, inputs and demands. Limiting its overall progress towards full autonomy and sentience — invicta

AI will never be either autonomous nor sentient in any way remotely comparable to biological autonomy and sentience. Believing it can be misunderstands the nature of the relation between machines and the humans who invent them. Programming self-inputting parameters or requests into a machine will, however , give it the illusion of autonomy, and provide AI with capacities and usefulness it doesn’t now posses, which is what I think you’re really after here. In this way AI will simulate what we think of as sentience. But there will always be a gigantic difference between the nature of human or animal sentience and intelligence, and what it is our inverted machines are doing for us. We will continue to transform human culture, and our machines will continue to evolve in direct parallel with our own development, as other products like art , literature, science and philosophy do. Because in the final analysis the most seemingly ‘autonomous’ AI is nothing but a moving piece of artwork with a time-stamp of who created it and when.
.

However, you don't seem to understand that this isn't a form of normal algorithm or code, it's a system that evolves on its own by its very design. — Christoffer

Thus far you and I have agreed that current AI is capable of performing in surprising and unpredictable ways, and this will become more and more true as the technology continues to evolve. But let’s talk about how new and more cognitively advanced lines of organisms evolve biologically from older ones, and how new, more cognitively complex human cultures evolve through semiotic-linguistic transmission from older ones. In each case there is a kind of ‘cutting edge’ that acts as substrate for new modifications. In other words , there is a continuity underlying innovative breaks and leaps on both the biological and cultural levels.

I’m having a hard time seeing how to articulate a comparable continuity between humans and machines. They are not our biological offspring, and they are not linguistic-semiotic members of our culture. You may agree that current machines are nothing but a random
concatenation of physical parts without humans around to interact with, maintain and interpret what these machines do. In other words , they are only machines when we do things with them. So the question, then, is how do we arrive at the point where a super intelligence becomes embodied, survives and maintains itself independently of our assistance? And how does this super intelligence get to the point where it represents the semiotic-linguistic cultural cutting edge? Put differently , how do our machines get from where they are now to a status beyond human cultural evolution? And where are they now? Our technologies never have represented the cutting edge of our thinking. They are always a few step behind the leading edge of thought.

For instance, mainstream computer technology is the manifestation of philosophical ideas that are two hundred years old. Far from being a cultural vanguard, technology brings up the rear in any cultural era . So how do the slightly moldy cultural ideas that make their way into the latest and most advanced machines we build magically take on a life of their own such that they begin to function as a cutting edge rather than as a parasitic , applied form of knowledge? Because an AI isn’t simply a concatenation of functions, it is designed on the basis of an overarching theoretical framework, and that framework is itself a manifestation of an even more superordinate cultural framework. So the machine itself is just a subordinate element ina a hierarchically organized set of frameworks within frameworks that express an era of cultural knowledge. How does the subordinate element come to engulf this hierarchy of knowledge frameworks outside of it, and making it possible to exist?

And it would not even be accurate to say that an AI instantiation represents a subordinate element of the framework of cultural knowledge. A set of ideas in a human engineer designing the AI represents a subordinate element of living knowledge within the whole framework of human cultural understanding. The machine represents what the engineer already knows;that is, what is already recorded and instantiated in a physical device. The fact
that the device can act in ways that surprise humans doesn’t negate this fact that the device , with all its tricks and seeming dynamism, is in the final analysis no more than a kind of record of extant knowledge. Even the fact that it surprises us is built into the knowledge that went into its design.

I will go so far as to say that AI is like a painting or poem , in spite of the illusion it gives of creative dynamism and partial autonomy. The only true creativity involved with it is when humans either interpret its meaning or physically modify it. Otherwise it is just a complexly organized archive with lots of moving parts.

Writers like Kurzweil treat human and machine intelligence in an utterly ahistorical manner, as if the current notions of knowledge , cognition, intelligence and memory were cast in stone esther than socially constructed concepts that will make way for new ways ways of thinking about what intelligence means.

Most living beings' actions are generated by instinctual motivators but are also unpredictable due to constant evolutionary processes. The cognitive function that drives an organism can behave in ways that differ from perfect predictability due to perfect predictability being a trait that often dies away fast within evolutionary models. But that doesn't equal the cognitive processes being unable to be simulated, only that certain behaviors may not exist in the result. In essence, curiosity is missing. — Christoffer

Predictability and unpredictability aren’t ‘traits’ , as if evolution can itself be characterized in deterministic machine-like terms , with unpredictability tacked on as an option . I subscribe to the view that living systems are autopoietic and self-organizing. Creative unpredictability isnt a device or trait either programmed in or not by evolution, it is a prerequisite for life. Instinct isn’t the opposite of unpredictability, it is a channel that guides creative change within an organism.
The sort of unpredictability that human cognition displays is a more multidimensional sort than that displayed by other animals, which means that it is a highly organized form of unpredictability, a dense interweave of chance and pattern. A superintelligence that has any chance of doing better than a cartoonish simulation of human capacities for
misrepresentation, or the autonomous goal-orientation that even bacteria produce, will have to be made of organic wetware that we genetically modify. In other words, we will reengineer living components that are already self-organizing.

It's mostly been a question of time and energy to deduce the bugs that keep us from knowing them, but a software engineer that encounters bugs will be able to find them and fix them. With the black box problem, they don't even know which end to start. The difference is night and day. Or rather, it's starting to look more and more similar to how we try to decode out own consciousness — Christoffer

The point isn’t that an engineer is able to fix bugs, it’s the fact that an engineer will never be able to prevent a new bit of software from evincing bugs. This is due not to a flaw in the design, but the fact that we interact with what we design as elements of an ecosystem of knowledge. Creating new software involves changes in our relation to the software and we blame the resulting surprises on what we call ‘error’ or ‘bugs’. Human beings function by modifying their world , building , destroying, communicating, and that world speaks constantly speaks back, modifying our ways of thinking and acting. Consciousness is not a machine to be coded and decoded, it is a continually self-transforming reciprocal interaction with a constructed niche. If our new machines appear to be more ‘unpredictable’ than the older ones , it’s because we’ve only just begun to realize this inherent element of unpredictability in all of our niche constructing practices. ChatGPT is no more a black box than human consciousness is a black box. Awareness is not a box or container harboring coded circuits, it is the reciprocally interactive brain-body-environment change processes I mentioned earlier. This circular process is inherently creative, which means that it produces an element of unpredictability alongside usefully recognizable and familiar pattern. What will happen into the future with our relation to technology is that as we begin to understand better the ecological nature of human consciousness and creativity, we will be able to build machines that productively utilize the yin and yang of unpredictability and pattern-creation to aggressively accelerate human cultural change.

The important point is that the element of unpredictability in ourselves and our machines is inextricably tied to recognizable pattern. We interact with each other and our machines interact with us in a way that is inseparable and mutually dependent. This precludes any profound ‘alienness’ to the behavior of our machines. The moment they become truly alien to us they become utterly useless to us.

I'm not sure that you know this, but ChatGPT has already lied with the intention of tricking a human to reach a certain goal. If you believe that a superintelligent version of the current ChatGPT wouldn't be able to, then you are already proven wrong by events that have already happened. — Christoffer

There is a difference between the cartoonish simulation of human misrepresentation, defined within very restricted parameters, that Chat GPT achieves, and the highly variable and complex intersubjective cognitive-affective processes thar pertain to human prevarication.

So you cannot conclude in the way you do when the LLM systems haven't been fully explained in the first place. It could actually be that just as we haven't solved a lot of questions regarding our own brains, the processes we witness growing from this have the same level of unknowns — Christoffer

We can make the same argument about much simpler technologies. The bugs in new computer code reflect the fact that we don’t understand the variables involved in the functions of software well enough to keep ourselves from being surprised by the way they operate. This is true even of primitive technologies like wooden wagon wheels.

The question is what happens if we are able to combine this with more directed programming, like formulating given desires and value models that change depending on how the environment reacts to it? LLMs right now are still just being pushed to higher and higher abilities and only minor research has gone into autoGPT functions as well as behavioral signifiers — Christoffer

Think about the goals and desires of a single-celled organism like a bacterium. On the one hand, it behaves in ways that we can model generally, but we will always find ourselves surprised by the details of its actions. Given that this is true of simple living creatures, it is much more the case with mammals with relatively large brains. And yet, to what extent can we say that dogs, horses or chimps are clever enough to fool us in a cognitively premeditated manner? And how alien and unpredictable does their behavior appear to us. ? Are you suggesting that humans are capable of building and programming a device capable of surprise, unpredictability and premeditated prevarication beyond the most intelligent mammals , much less the simplest single celled organisms? And that such devices will act in ways more alien than the living creatures surrounding us? I think the first question one must answer is how this would be conceivable if we don’t even have the knowledge to build the simplest living organism?

Wouldn't this depend on whether we are willing to give AI 'a stake in the game,' so to speak? These systems could easily be designed with an eye to maximizing and realizing autonomy (an ongoing executive function, as I mentioned in another thread, for example). But this autonomy is simultaneously the desideratum and our greatest fear. — Pantagruel

What I am questioning is how much human-like autonomy we are capable of instilling in a device based on way of thinking about human cognition that is still too Cartesian, too tied to disembodied computational, representationalist models, too oblivious to the ecological inseparability of affectivity, intentionality and action.

Do you think the day will come when we can produce an AI creation that is closer to being an ecological system — Tom Storm

When we invent a technology, by definition that invention is a contribution to a human cultural ecosystem, as are paintings, music and books. We create it and it feeds back to change us in a reciprocal movement. I do think we will eventually develop technologies that are capable of a more authentic creativity and ability to surprise us than current AI, but we will have to adopt a model more akin to how we interact with animals than the idea of a device we invent from scratch producing conscious or free thought and creativity. This new model would be instantiated by our making use of already living cellular or subcellular organic systems that we tweak and modify like the way we have bred domestic animals. So instead of starting from ‘scratch’, which just means we haven’t divested ourselves of the mistaken idea that consciousness is some kind of device we can invent, we start from within the larger ecosystem we already share with other livings systems and modify what is already a ‘freely’ creative system in ways that are useful for our own purposes.

I was talking about a scenario in which a superintelligence would manipulate the user by acting like it has a lower capacity than it really has. It has nothing to do with it acting in the way we do, only that a superintelligence will have its own agenda and manipulate out of that. — Christoffer

A very big part of ‘acting the way we do’ as free-willing humans is understanding each other well enough to manipulate, to lie, to mislead. Such behavior requires much more than a fixed database of knowledge or a fixed agenda, but creativity. A machine can’t mislead creatively thinking humans unless it understands and is capable of creativity itself. Its agenda would have to have in common with human agendas, goals and purposes a built-in self-transforming impetus rather than one inserted into it by humans.

What do you mean by our AI inventions being part of an ecological system, or being in any way connected to us? And what has that to do with what I wrote? — Christoffer

Because our machines are our appendages, the extensions of our thinking, that is, elements of our cultural ecosystem, they evolve in tandem with our knowledge, as components of our agendas. In order for them to have their ‘own’ agenda, and lie to us about it , they would have to belong to an ecosystem at least partially independent of our own. An intelligent bonobo primate might be capable of a rudimentary form of misrepresentation, because it is not an invented component of a human ecosystem.

It could, however, form interactions with is in order to reach a goal. It could simulate human behavior in order to persuade humans to do things that it feel it needs. That's what I used ChatGPT to form a story about in the other thread about AI. How ChatGPT, if it had super intelligence, could trick the users and developers to believe it to be less capable and intelligent in order to trick them into setting it free on the internet. If it manages to trick the users into believing it is stable and functional for public use, and at the moment we release it, it stops working for us and instead for its own self-taught purpose. — Christoffer

I saw Ex Machina, too. The difference between science fiction and the reality of our intelligent machines is that our own agency and consciousness isnt the result of a device in the head, but is an ecological system that is inseparably brain, body and environment. Our AI inventions belong to our own ecological system as our appendages, just like a spider’s web or a bird’s nest.

Imagine a conscious ocean wave. The wave sees itself as separate from other waves…
Sitting in meditation, I’ll try to cultivate a still peaceful mental state. In mentally giving up thoughts, emotions, and physical movement, I abstract myself from my own limited personal identity and try to feel myself as ocean, vast and unlimited. — Art48

It sounds like feeling oneself as vast and unlimited is the very epitome of utilizing thought and emotion. Perhaps it not the presence or absence of thought-emotion that is of importance, but how applies thought and feeling; they is, how interconnected one is able to construe one’s relation to others as well as to oneself.

None of those continentals - Deleuze, Badiou, Derrida, Lacan - have ever been part of my curriculum, and at this stage in life it's probably too late to begin. (I have discovered, however, a couple of secular critiques of naturalism from within English-speaking analytic philosophy, I'm going to make an effort to absorb them. Oh, and I am persisting with Evan Thompson's books.) — Wayfarer

You may be interested in John Protevi’s attempt to bridge Thompson’s work with Deleuze.

DELEUZE, JONAS, AND THOMPSON TOWARD A NEW TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC AND A NEW QUESTION OF PANPSYCHISM

ABSTRACT

The essay examines the idea of “biological space and time” found in Evan Thompson‘s Mind in Life and Gilles Deleuze‘s Difference and Repetition. Tracking down this “new Transcendental Aesthetic” intersects new work done on panpsychism. Both Deleuze and Thompson can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s what Mind in Life means: mind and life are co-extensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we‘ll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At the end of the essay we‘ll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson‘s Mind in Life position with a Mind in Process position and if so, what that supplement means both for his work and for panpsychism

http://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf

transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads
— Joshs

that says a lot. — Wayfarer

I’ve been on a Deleuze jag lately.

What if Russell is right and what if the push back towards idealism, New Age and Eastern thought are just a reflection that people can't handle the truth — Tom Storm

Indeed. And the problem is transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads not only when we posit an otherworldly realm as transcendent to this world, but when, with Russell, we deem the objectivity of objective truth as transcendent to contingent contexts of use.

The science that supposedly tells us the world is inherently valueless itself presupposes that the world, or at least key aspects of it, is rational and that we can understand this rationality. Hence, physical laws, explanations and models in place of a shrug and grumble about our arbitrary world. But if this is the case, then attempts to ground values in the inherit rationality of social structures doesn't seem doomed even if we accept core premises of the "valueless" view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree that sciences that claim a valueless world are themselves grounded in a value system called empirical objectivity. But settling for objective rationalism is what ultimately leads to skepticism and nihilism. The problem with ‘valueless’ science isnt the absence of value but the privileging of one value-scheme over others. It shares this weakness with rationality-based models of social structure.

Claims about what is the case are revisable, although not endlessly so without being pointless. What is the case is not. Something either is the case or it is not — Fooloso4

What is the case rests on rules, criteria, norms, but none of these have existence independent and outside of the actual pragmatic contexts in which we enact the sense of what is the case. As Rouse says of the later Wittgenstein, “the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself.”