Le Proust c'est fini. Some lighter fiction selections for a while I think.

A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

On my brand new Kindle.

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.
— Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment — Jamal

To me this hearkens "masters and possessors of nature" which likewise suggests an invalid anthropocentric hierarchy. The truly enlightened perspective sees us as one aspect of an overarching meaningful whole. Whence the religious-mystical history and sentiment of mankind isn't something to be overturned, but rather comprehended in a new way.

Only legal operations/medical processes are allowed. Only legal medications can be used. — universeness

That goes without saying. But legality is not the basis of medical legitimacy. Medical legitimacy implies legality. Certainly as a general principle. I don't see the point of this reasoning at all, to be honest.

Or every future public toilet can be built as a series of individual lockable units, with a WC and a small sink and mirror. No more gender specific toilets. Would that not solve the problem? — universeness

It would, although you would sacrifice benefits of scale for larger venues where multi-stall common facilities can service much higher-volumes of people (and who are reflective of the demographic that legitimates both the need and the response to the need). I'd say keep the gender-dual installations where needed, and ensure there is a locking bathroom for those needing family bathrooms, and others with special needs.

I am a socialist/secular humanist, so accommodating the needs and wishes of as many people in a community as possible, remains the main goal. — universeness

The greatest unity is the one which supports the greatest diversity is my credo. And we are all asked to make personal sacrifices in deference to the public good at certain times or in certain respects. And what one person considers a sacrifice someone else may not. So even having the best of motivations doesn't simplify things.

I don't see how you can separate legal rights and 'medical treatments,' the latter is surely governed by the former. — universeness

Medical treatments are determined by medical need, not legal rights. How you manage to draw this inference is a complete mystery to me.

It is where people start claiming the right to know what is best for someone else that is the problem.
— Pantagruel

Is that not exactly what you are doing in the case of trans folk? — universeness

Or is it the trans movement now seeking to impose standards on everyone else? I am just calling attention to the most fundamental underlying principle. Then it becomes a question of numbers. And the numbers just don't warrant the accommodations. Most of the world is okay with the functional constraints imposed by gender-duality. So maybe there needs to be at least one single-occupancy locking bathroom at every public facility. Whatever. There are 100 times as many smokers as trans folk, yet we don't provide special smoking rooms for them anymore, despite the fact that many of them "need" nicotine at regular intervals. Different people prioritize different aspects of their personal identity differently.

Based on the fact that, for any group, it is usually a radical-vocal minority that ends up speaking for the group, in this case if there are complaints, they are come from a minority of a very small minority. Which is to say they should be heard, evaluated, and treated in that exact context.

Ultimately, populations thrive in a society based upon their presence, not their publicity. If a group can be dispersed and maintain its identity, obviously it has strong foundations. If a group only represents one in a thousand people, then maybe there are lots of children who might never be aware of trans-identities. In fact, I suspect that a lot of trans people don't want to stand out, but rather to fit in, and not be noticed. So maybe we don't need to call extra attention to it. But of course, we do need to ensure that no other groups are preaching or practicing hate. That is the where public efforts should lie.

It might affect the type of medical treatment but are you saying that your biological sex should affect your legal right to a particular medical treatment you want. Are you anti-abortion for example? — universeness

People have a right to maximum say in what affects them personally. It is where people start claiming the right to know what is best for someone else that is the problem. I pointedly said that your sexual biology should not affect your legal rights, but it is a very important factor in treatment. I work in the medical industry and doctors have related this concern to me.

I think there is a much bigger, underlying issue that trans issue's feed into.
Is it your business what consenting adults choose to engage in sexually?
Should your sexual preferences affect you legal rights?
Should your sexual biology affect your legal rights? — universeness

It is not. Which is why it is equally not society's business to address such issues.
No your sexual preferences should not relate to your legal rights, which are universal human rights and general by nature, not specific.
No. Your sexual biology should affect your medical treatment. Which is why clarity around actual sexual biology is so important.

I cannot invalidate the youtube examples Andrew cites, they in fact exist, but they are outliers, and do not significantly challenge trans issues. — universeness

Is it not significant though? Granted, for the general population, the number of cases would have to be very large to be statistically significant. But how big is the trans population really? I'm talking about the true population, not just supporters. Like, if you are 'two-spirit' because you like to sleep with both men and women...ok, you are bi. Basically, you sleep with your own sex, the opposite sex, both sexes, or neither. Those are the choices. So if you are living your daily life dressed as the opposite sex, or you have had or are in the process of having a sex-change then, yes, you are part of the demographic in question. In the U.S, that's about 0.4 percent of the population. But 25% of those are 'gender non-conforming', so maybe those are 'outliers' who are just piggy-backing on the trans-identity. So say 0.25% of the population. Maybe for two out of every thousand people we owe awareness, but maybe not so much accommodation. Lots and lots of minority groups with much higher representation that that might by able to raise strong claims for accommodations, given a sympathetic public forum.

There are many w on YouTube now who talk about the regret and pain of being w and having their x removed due to internalised y and being caught up in z ideology and misled. — universeness

Right. So you are not invalidating Andrew's claim, merely asserting that there are in fact many cases of people misconstruing their own wants and needs. Emphasizing the general truth of his underlying point (of which there is certainly some element of truth, unless you do want to attack the legitimacy of the purported youtube videos).

Trans issues are not going to 'go away' because you and/or others have switched from having a more benevolent stance towards 'them.' The issues of all minority groups, remain, as long as they have existent members. I personally find the support that many Islamists have for child marriage and when it is acceptable to consummate such, far far more personally horrifying than any trans issue I am aware of. — universeness

And more important, since that is a question of protection of the vulnerable.

I wonder if the whole trans issue isn't just another rider on the entitlement bus. Everyone's got problems, doesn't make them social causes. The more I have to waste my time thinking about it the more I'm moving from being a passive to an active opponent.

Things get wound up pretty quickly, don't they?

So many people who think they know what is best. And some of them might even be right. But they can't all be right.

My point, I was initially friendly and supportive of this movement, and in a real world situation, I would have even have stuck my neck out to advocate for or defend someone I saw being discriminated against. Now, not so much. So the the way this gone has had the opposite effect intended for me. And that is a real social consequence, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been alienated.

I think so. You do get taught about religions for the purposes of normalising them and the people who practice other ones. You get taught about other cultures for that reason too. Same with sexuality. Reducing prejudice in the populace is a noble goal for education, right? So making similar space for transgender people in education makes sense for the same reasons. — fdrake

Yes, in the context of comparative religion or comparative cultural instruction. Those are fairly advanced subjects. I agree with instruction at this level. More effective for younger learners would be to learn about hate speech in general, without demonizing anyone or thing if that is possible.

Speaking as someone who has moved from roughly the position of Mikie and @Pantagruel to a much less trans-sceptical position, I can attest to this. — Jamal

Or maybe it's just indicative of the fact that society supports a spectrum of rationalities, and there are different ways of respecting one another. Self and identity are all well and good, but the concept of the Other as mirror and limit of the self is also essential. The way we treat others is an important feature of who we are, perhaps the most important.

The means do not need to "reflect" the goal, they need to accomplish the goal. — Judaka

That is a frightening thing to contemplate.

The "direction" society is evolving in is recognising that tolerance and treating people equally isn't sufficient. — Judaka

I would rephrase this as 'failing to recognize that tolerance and treating people equally is sufficient.'

You can't do better than universal equality. And the means thereto need to reflect the goal.

That’s right. Trans identity is interesting because though it demands the recognition and protection and rights of its own identity, it begets the blurring and obfuscation of others, to the point where men are now celebrated in spaces dedicated entirely to women. It’s the natural progression of identity politics. — NOS4A2

So either we all are trans or we are bigots.

Sure. I guess not having any special identity, I just wonder, as I said, about being disenfranchised by not having a cultural-advocacy group. I was baptized Catholic, but I have never enjoined it. I have significant indigenous and Metis blood, and admire the culture, but I don't self-identify as such. I admire and embrace Buddhist precepts, but am not a part of a Buddhist community. I'm really have no overarching social entity, but somehow I manage to have an identity. Does trans really have to be an identity? Can't it just be an aspect of identity, of which there are many?

Sure. And in this paternalistic sense, I think that protective-supportive measures are warranted. Society as a whole should be supportive of all views, but not all sub-groups can possibly be treated identically. Like or not, biological sex gender identification is a statistical reality, and organizing and managing things on a large scale along those lines is practical and valid. Exceptions and protections are reasonable and necessary. But you can't just decide to implement new norms. Tolerance is the only norm required for any reasonable sub-culture to flourish.

Its demand for conformity and special treatment makes transgenderism an authoritarian and anti-social ideology, which is a shame because it reflects also upon the innocent and those struggling with dysphoria. — NOS4A2

Absolutely. Although transgenderism is more of a symptom of the direction in which society is evolving, in that any and all groups will aspire to a special social status. In essence, if you don't belong to a recognized and approved subculture, you will be at a disadvantage, as you lack that voice of advocacy.

Yes, when the goal is to reduce/prevent/remove the development of misinformed, irrational hatred of a minority group, particularly a mostly non-violent, non-threatening minority group, such as trans folks. — universeness

I think that the people who hate trans folks are also the people who hate a whole lot of other folks too. And I think that group is also a minority, just an really obnoxious minority. Which is kind of what I find trans is becoming, also no doubt due to just a relatively few loud voices. Nevertheless, this is what comes of letting a minority speak for a majority, whether a minority of "squeaky wheels" within a small group, or the small group for the large. The principle is the same.

Five years ago, I was positively disposed to the issue, but the way it has been weaponized, anything to do with trans now has a really negative aura from me. Previously, had the opportunity arisen, I would have strongly defended any trans person I saw or knew was subject to prejudice (as I have defended vulnerable people in the past). I no longer feel like that. My goodwill has been alienated.

What’s the problem? Maybe my legal name is Michael but I prefer to go by a different name. Asking you to call me by this other name isn’t asking for special treatment, and is hardly a burden on you. — Michael

Exactly. Ask me to do it and I will. Don't enforce a society-wide mandate of pronomial designation.

Nothing needs to be redesigned. — Michael

I beg to differ. The city of Toronto is in the process of refurbing bathrooms in its public libraries for this reason. Some people complained because there were urinals available in trans-designated washrooms. Others complained after they took them out.

In what way? Children have been “exposed” to the difference between cis men and cis women for all of human history, what does it matter if trans men and trans women are also recognised? — Michael

There's recognition and there's education. Undoubtedly children could be educated on the virtues of Hasidic Judaism, or veganism, or any number of other things also. But is it necessary?

The imposition of gender-selective pronouns on a whole lot of people who don't make that part of their own self-identification process. The exposure of children to these issues in school at a very young age. The chaos of redesigning all public bathrooms to accommodate a plethora of gender-identities. Identity is a composite of numerous dimensions: religion, race, gender, culture, etc., etc. I'm sure being trans is fraught with numerous challenges, but the same can be said of many minority cultures. Why does this one sub-culture merit such promotion? This hardly qualifies as affirmative action. It's a small minority of people, a very small minority.

Identifying oneself as belonging to the trans community seems to me no different in principle than self-identifying as a Hasidic Jew, or belonging to a fundamentalist Islamic sect, etc. etc. We live in a pluralistic society, and every unique cultural group certainly has a right to whatever practices define them within the context of that group. But the problem is when special recognition and treatment is demanded outside of the group, by other groups. Which is most certainly what is going on now. Frankly, it's hard not to want to push back against that, and it's easy to see how otherwise-tolerant people could want to push back against attempts to publicize and promote the rights of a very small minority preferentially over the rights of the myriad other minorities that make up our collective community. I haven't a prejudiced bone in my body, and never questioned that trans people should be treated with respect. But given the course that the social movement has taken, I'm starting to develop a very negative attitude around the issue.

Nah, a strawman is overly simplifying an opponents argument, and/or making it ridiculous in order to counter-argue it more easily. — Christoffer

It seems to be the same principle as a strawman to me, only used defensively, as you state.

What do you think? Is it helpful and does it do anything that other informal fallacy concepts don't already do? — Jamal

I think it is in essence the strawman fallacy.

AI language models have an inbuilt understanding — Benj96

Perhaps in the sense that a dictionary has such an inbuilt understanding, in that it exists as a potential. But it needs to be triggered by something with volition....I agree, the danger lies more in the abuse of AI than in AI itself.

Everyone is excited and scared by the concept of AI actually becoming conscious. I don't think there is actually much danger of that, and I don't think that is the actual danger. I just watched a documentary that, among other issues, presented evidence of observer-bias being present in data which then skews AI behaviour. Of course, neural nets are capable of detecting all of the patterns we look for in things when classifying them, including our biases. So a robot-ai turned out to be bad at identifying some emotional states in blacks because the people who were creating the categories (viewing and classifying the images of different emotional states) with which the neural net was trained themselves had a significant bias. And an AI driven medical funding system in the U.S. deprioritized people who were already receiving poor levels of healthcare because of systemic prejudices favouring those who already were receiving lots of healthcare.

In other words, the real danger is in AI giving us what we really want, not what we say we want or even necessarily what we think we want. But the subliminal goals that drive us that it can detect buried in the enormous mass of data we feed it. Because, by and large, the modern mind appears to be pretty self-destructive....

Besides, in the long run oblivion renders "in/justice" moot. — 180 Proof

The ultimate irony for assuming oblivion would be persistence. And while oblivion might obviate moral responsibility, obliviousness wouldn't... :wink:

À la recherche du temps perdu #6: Time Regained
by Marcel Proust

The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement
Sir James George Frazer

I think that modernity suffers from an insufferable prejudice of superiority, typified by the sanctification of science and the disparagement and desecration of anything sublime which might possibly predate its own high opinion of itself. I think the more comprehensive view is always the more balanced. The Golden Bough should also be an excellent segue to Cassirer's four volume opus on symbolic forms.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean by giving it a stake in the game. It needs to be "empowered" so that it too gains a meaningful "embodied" status.

Nice. Can't help but find this a fascinating and useful insight. Do you think the day will come when we can produce an AI creation that is closer to being an ecological system? — Tom Storm

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.

Yes. All the more reason for fairness to be an objective. And returning to your original formulation, it seems to me that the failures of proscriptive justice to achieve its ends are more to blame for the problems requiring prescriptive justice than the successes of prescriptive justice contribute to the overall social good.

Sure. Which doesn't mean that the human tendency to fairness derives from the egalitarian school. Rather, the egalitarian school is a codification of the human tendency to fairness, as is the entire concept of justice. Indeed, our modern concept and use of rationality assumes the ideals of fairness and equality. Prejudices are seen as 'anti-rational'. Rightly so, since they are a foreshortening of the rational perspective.

But that is merely an egalitarian ideal whose actualisation is an ongoing process where social mobility is still a factor holding it back due to hidden nepotisms still pervading a meritocratic society. — invicta

What is merely an egalitarian ideal?

The justice system is mainly concerned with proscriptive justice and hence with punishment. Retributive justice. It is unlikely that this aspect of justice can ever be made or considered perfect. On the other hand, the more universal form of justice, distributive justice, is more prescriptive in nature, and is not encapsulated by any single institution or social mechanism, but is in effect the underlying principle governing the operations of all social institutions. The education system needs to be just (universal availability). The labour-market needs to be just (fair compensation, universal availability). Etc. Justice as fairness should be seen as an ideal and a goal. In that sense, it is possible.

Really? I think AI puts out derivative crap so far. — Benkei

I agree. AI is quite overrated. I asked ChatGPT to analyze a section of Luhmann's social systems theory as a reading aid and it completely Darwinized the central concept, entirely missing the point of systems autonomy. It subsequently acknowledge it was a 'significant mistake.'

Best foot forward time for Mr. Chomsky. What a coup. I thought I was dreaming when I read the post.

I had forgotten that you already had made this great suggestion here when I replied to Marchesk over there. It seems like we are in broad agreement. — Pierre-Normand

:up:

The conditions of the possibility of there being an argument. In this case, the perspective of the self that is actually offering the idea and is engaged in a dialogic process with an "other self" or other.

:roll:

The self is the personal perspective of thought. If someone says "The self is a myth," they are actively perpetuating the myth, while simultaneously claiming to deny it. In other words, acting in bad faith and inconsistently with respect to the transcendental conditions of the production of the idea.

I don't have an internal dialogue — Pierre-Normand

Yes, in a dialogue with ChatGPT I suggested that the addition of an 'executive internal chat' function constantly analyzing its own responses in a contextually driven manner would greatly improve its learning capabilities. It agreed.

I see this as the only viable method to achieve something akin to natural human consciousness.

This is something that has been under discussion for some days now in the threads on Heidegger. I started this topic based on just this problem. — Fooloso4

I see. Offering that contextualization as part of your OP would have clarified things greatly......