Can't believe you teased us with this but then said we have to wait until March.

If gender is entirely and exclusively a social construct, as many feminists and even trans people like to say, then trans women are just men who want access to women's spaces.

On the other hand if gender has a real biological/psychological basis, then it seems at least imaginable that there could be people born with a penis but who are nevertheless psychologically or neurologically "female".

For what it's worth, I don't think gender is entirely and exclusively a social construct, and I believe a large fraction of trans people have some biological, neurological real explanation for their transness that science has yet to discover.

I don't think there's as much presupposition as you think - I think moreso, it's about the obvious fact that we can experiment on the physical world and come up with causal explanations in a way that we can't do with the "non physical mental world" you suppose exists.

I can hit a ball into another ball and watch the second ball consistently and reliably react in physical space. If I know both of their masses and the first balls speed, I can fairly consistently calculate the next sequence of events - I can calculate, given the surface they're on, how far the second ball will roll before it stops, and I'll be pretty darn close to right if I'm using the right equations.

There's nothing comparable about this mental world. Nobody's even sure if there is a mental world separate from the physical world. Some people suppose there is, but nobody has the faintest idea about how it's supposed to work.

So of course there's no literature, right? What are they going to write about? Experiments they can't do on a substance they can't observe?

The closest we have is psychology, and there's no lack of literature on that.

there's naturally not a lot of literature because the ideas in that other thread are pure speculation - possibly worse than pure speculation.

I consider all physical particles as the physical substance. Different particles are manifestations of different vibration modes of a single string at the end. — MoK

That seems like just a made up view to justify your current line of thought.

You think you need multiple substances to interact. It just so happens physics already has multiple interacting substances. Arbitrary reasons to decide that for you, those don't count as multiple substances is... Not it man.

Obviously that doesn't mean there aren't any non physical substances at play, it just means you haven't proven it with your logic here.

Therefore, we are left with vertical causation, which requires at least two substances, namely the Mind and matter. — MoK

Physical already includes multiple substances. There are many interacting quantum fields. If all this proves is that you need multiple substances, you haven't proven anything.

I don't think this proves you need multiple substances anyway, of course. Without any disrespectful intent, this doesn't seem like a particular deep or meaningful train of thought. Conway's game of life is an apparent example of a causal universe with a single "substance", that substance being the cells in the game.

That seems not to be quite right to me. It seems reasonable to say "I do prefer not to have existed.", but to claim that in case one had not existed one would have preferred it, is a step too far. That my existence is unhappy, does not entail that my non-existence is happy. — unenlightened

I think you're reading too much into it lol. "I'd prefer" is just a colloquial phrase.

But as T Clark points out, one's own happiness and preference is unimportant; it's other people's happiness that makes a wonderful life — unenlightened

Nobody would be missing much in my absence, and my life isn't wonderful.

I'd prefer to not have existed.

Two spam bots in the same thread? Do you two know each other or is this just a wild coincidence?

You're supposed to just accept that his hands are functioning scissors and not to delve too deeply into how the prop functions. — Nils Loc

When I watch the movie that's exactly what I do. This thread is just for fun really.

no picture?

The spring scissors are more flexible. — boethius

I don't know what that is. You mean spring loaded scissors or something else?

the problem is scissors aren't freely moving joints that just happen to connect sometimes. The blades in a pair of scissors rotate such that the blades are always rubbing against each other, not just when the angle is just right.

they can make as scissoring motion when placed next to another wrist, just like knuckles can. Any joint can.

that can, among other things, provide a scissoring motion — boethius

Lots of things can provide a scissoring motion. My wrists can provide a scissoring motion, that doesn't make my hands scissors

The chef accidentally scissored his thumb — frank

Does that make his thumbs scissors

well obviously knuckles provide that connection of two blades. — boethius

Is that obvious to you? It's not to me. Each of my knuckles is connected to one finger only, and allows a pretty wide range of motion that the blades of scissors don't have.

do you call two knives "scissors" just because you momentarily rub them against each other?

The fingers are connected together at the fulcrum that is the knuckle — boethius

You must have very very different knuckles from the rest of us.

You can see in this clip that they are moving independently of each other - he can rotate one without keeping it in friction with any adjacent ones, just like your own fingers.

https://youtube.com/shorts/KikEXZ95ygQ

As for others, it's a safe bet that they are beings just as I am - that everyone is 'me' but from their own unique perspective. Hence the maxim to 'treat others as you yourself would be treated'. — Wayfarer

Only humans? Or all conscious creatures?

right, so you saying table is concrete and photon is not is... not quite it then is it? Our mental facilities are set up to receive tables as concrete objects, whereas it takes a lot of work for us to even learn that photons are a thing, but that's a human limitation and not a fact about the world.

and you think that's not true of a photon?

I actually think a table is MORE abstract than a photon. A table is emergent at best. A photon has fundamental causal real-ness to it. A table is half way towards being a figment of the imagination.

sorry buddy, "table" is a concept in the English language, and concepts are something abstract.

material and immaterial — RussellA

So give me an example of something material.

You said

"photon" is a concept in the English language, and concepts are something abstract.

So give me an example of something that I can't say that sort of argument about please.

But "photon" is a concept in the English language, and concepts are something abstract. — RussellA

So is "chair", so is "photon", so is "atom". Have we now debased the word "immaterial" so much that EVERYTHING is now immaterial?

Words need boundaries. Words without boundaries are usually words without meaning. If everything is immaterial, the designation "immaterial" has no weight.

Whether a photon is material or immaterial depends on one's particular viewpoint. — RussellA

Sure, BUT if you're calling photons "immaterial" as if to compare them to something abstract, I think that's a mistake. Matter or not, mass or not, they're a part of physics.

Other physicists say that matter is categorically distinct from energy. For example, Matt Strassler. — RussellA

That article also says unambiguously that photons are STUFF, like matter. So if we're going by that article, photons are material, as are electrons and protons and neutrons

I think the very concept of original and duplicate breaks down entirely.

What's interesting is that the universe doesn't have a sense of identity for things like atoms. At a fundamental level, the universe can't tell the difference between one electron and another one, one atom and another one.

So if a god steps in and separates all the atoms in your body, and then puts together a bunch of "different" atoms in the exact same arrangement half a meter to your left... who is to say that those aren't "your atoms"? Atoms have no identity, so they have just as much a claim to being your atoms as any other atoms do.

you didn't give any reasons in that post I replied to. Did you give reasons somewhere else?

If done perfectly, the replica would not know he wasn't me. But he wouldn't be. — Patterner

Why? Because he doesn't have your soul?

what do you think of the answer? I think it's really weird that someone can say something everyone knows, and it still be used as if it were new information.

I'm not being pedantic. Read the whole original post. I don't care if you call her a shaman or guru or whatever, that's not the point of what I said. Whether you call her a shaman or a guru, if you read the whole post, you'll see that it's given what this person says. That's not the question.

Right at the end:

"I can see someone who has blue eyes."

Who leaves the island, and on what night? — flannel jesus

All the shaman has to say is — Illuminati

Nobody asked you what the shaman has to say though. I told you what the shaman says. You've solved a question that isn't being asked.

have you seen the canonical answer?

we know that materialism fails since it cannot explain how ideas emerge and how they can be causally efficacious in the world, given that ideas are irreducible and have no parts — MoK

Maybe that's a given for you. Idk what "we" you're referring to, there's no expert consensus that that's the case.

there is no physicalist guess as to how it might work. That makes a non physicalist approach speaking — Patterner

Well it's fine if you think that, but you should equally hold it against non physicalism that there's no non physicalist guess as to how it might work. It's not like you're abandoning a non working idea for a working idea - you're abandoning a lack of an idea for another lack of an idea.

That doesn't mean non physicalism is false, but it certainly shouldn't leave anybody with extreme confidence that it's true.

I think that our understanding of them probably happens in our brains. So your only interaction with those concepts is from a physical basis, yes.

But that's all beside the point anyway. My point really is the non physical is merely a realm of mystery, a realm of ignorance, and so it seems natural to place mysterious phenomena into a mysterious realm - but I think that natural reflex is mistaken, it's anti explanatory.

Might this be how you're thinking of the 'non-physical'? — Wayfarer

I'm not thinking about it at all, because there's no model to think about. It's a placeholder thought, not a rich thought. There's no attempt to understand how it works - and that's exactly why it's so appealing, I think, as an explanation for consciousness. Because it's mysterious, and consciousness is mysterious. The more mysterious it remains, the more it remains a valid explanation for consciousness to these people. The second it loses it's mystery and we get some kind of real understanding of it, the "hard problem" comes back.

It's like an anti explanation, more than an explanation. It's a mystery substance to un-explain a mystery phenomenon.

it's yet to be proven that consciousness is outside the scope of the physical world though, so...