My firm conviction is that h.sapiens transcends biology, and is able to realise horizons of being that are, as far as we know, unique to us. — Wayfarer

I do accept that humans beings have proven capable of a wide array of almost transcendent things through thought and deed including the worst depravity and greatest self sacrifice, feats of thought art and technology.

But I feel biology trumps psychology and for a wide range of people that and circumstances places severe limitations on them.
My older brother was disabled for most of His adult life by Multiple sclerosis and was eventually paralysed by MS and communicated by blinking and was simply unable to a lot of things before dying prematurely at 47.

I don't believe people can do anything or anything they put their mind to or that they are existentially free.

However I have just been reminded of a Woman with Locked in Syndrome who completed a degree by Blinking facilitated technology which is amazing.

What sex or gender a person chooses to be, worries me a lot less, (in fact it pales into insignificance in comparison) — universeness

Is that because you are not a women in sheltered accommodation? Is that because your penis or vagina is still intact and you are not poisoning yourself with wrong sex hormones?

Is that because you are not an a elite female sports woman having to share a changing room with a penis that then goes onto to beat you at your sport because he has gone through a male puberty and has bigger stronger bone structure and larger lungs and is over 6ft.

Is that because you don't have MS, early on set dementia or cardiac arrest due to poisoning yourself with cross sex hormones that your body does not want or need.

Or is it because you are not a gender non conforming gay child who is being told he must be born in the wrong body?

Or maybe it is because you are not a member of the gay community whose reputation is being trashed?

The gay rights movement eventually improved the lives of folks like Andrew4Handel significantly, in many countries of the world. An openly gay person can now become a political leader.
It's a pity he can't find it in himself to help achieve for another minority group what has been achieved for him, after what seems to me to have been a very very hard fought fight. — universeness

This is ridiculous. It indicates you have barely read any of my posts on this topic.

Calling a group a minority does not make them credible or sympathetic. Terrorists, Paedophiles and murderers are minorities.

So here is a list of a few criticism I have made of gender ideology and trans identity none of which can be levelled at homosexuality.

1. Women's rights are compromised by allowing men to identify as them
1.(b) There are no longer women only spaces
2. No one can change sex
3.Gender identities are meaningless and incoherent
4. Phalloplasties and inverting penises are genital mutilation.
5. Puberty Blockers are harmful and chemically castrate children and stunt their development.
6. Gay people are same sex attracted and are having their identity , reputation and spaces undermined.
7. Gay detransitioners regret castrating themselves or having double mastectomies due to internal and external homophobia
8. Gender ideology is homophobic and misogynistic and encourages children to reject their bodies.
9. Gender affirming health care is experimental and being increasingly discredited
10. Gender critical beliefs are protected by law in the UK.
11. We should not be forced to have to affirm peoples self beliefs.

Nobody has ever changed sex or inhabited a special gender like non binary. So I do not believe Trans exists just bodily adjustments in males and females and performance of stereotypes.

I have met four males identifying as women. Two of them through the local autistic services I have used and the other two exhibiting autistic traits and complex mental health issues none of them passed as the desired "gender"

I don't know where you are meeting your trans identified people, I also follow gender related forums and twitter closely so now have a wide knowledge of issues in this area from surgeries to definitions, gender theory , to being a member of the categories "gay" and "autistic".

Religious people are never going to go away it seems but that doesn't mean we have to respect there questionable or fictional beliefs and structure society around them.

What harm is there in allowing people to be who they need to be? — Tom Storm

Unethical surgeries that are causing increasingly well documented harms. A woman on excess testosterone increases her chances of dementia, stroke and Multiple sclerosis.

Woman are a real biological category and allowing men in their spaces and awards and sports is undermining their privacy dignity and security.

Lia Thomas won women swimming medals that biological women strove hard to get. They were exposed to his intact naked male body in the changing rooms (more of this is coming out as we speak.) This is misogynistic abuse and gas lighting. Gender identity does impact other people it is a state enforced religion and it should not be taught as a fact in schools.

It is far from harmless and you are in denial about the harms and my support for it decreases my the day the more the harms become evident.

There is no state of being in a state you need to be in. That is subjective. "I need to be a Hollywood celebrity." "I need their to be an afterlife." I need a million pounds. Our basic needs are biological and psychological needs are an inherently problematic area.

Anyone can claim anything to be necessary for psychological flourishing. Absolutely anything. It is self identified and subjective and unfalsifiable. But nobody can change sex or live as the opposite sex. A defleshed inverted penis is literally not a vagina and it is a misogynistic insult to call it so. Women's biology is how we all entered the world.

It is only after some time that they begin to associate the name their parents use to refer to them, as something they are, or possess, something that refers to them — Benj96

Personally, I am somebody who does not associate my name with my personal identity. It only becomes relevant when people call my name out or if it is on a form.

I have no idea what I thought as a baby and I believe it is not possible to really know how a baby perceives the world. Some claims about babies in psychology have been overturned or challenged like babies being egotists, selfish and not having empathy (they have been underestimated in various respects.

What I find interesting is the transition from non-being to being. My earliest memories constitute my awareness of being/becoming but seems completely arbitrary being arbitrarily bought into existence in a particular body on a particular planet.

I think that we are always all inherently at the centre of our own universe-perspective but as someone on the autistic spectrum who spends a lot of time on his own, this sense could be exacerbated for me.

I don't know if we can get in touch with a true self uninfluenced by society (which may conflict with my last point.) The people inhabiting our universe have a big impact on us but there is a subjective element in how we perceive each other and each others intentions. But may be we should be on a quest to uncover some kind of true inherent self/destiny?

Might work for AGI machines (like Asimov's "Law of Robotics") but we're primates, first and foremost, driven by territorial, hierarchical, reproductive & tribal instincts amplified by a sliver of forebrain grey matter into (mal/adaptive) cognitive biases which reinforce in each one of us "I am special" (i.e. "more special than you"). Eusocially constrained self-serving organisms – delusional and struggling. To wit: if we "treat" everyone "as if we are special", Andrew, then no one will be "special". Human facticity – problems for us endure, or strive against, not for us to solve. — 180 Proof

Are you claiming everyone is driven by instincts or are their exceptions? I suffer from a lack of drive, motivation and reproductive urges so instincts seem to have bypassed me.

My notion of specialness is not a case of more special or conflicting rights.

I believe in human equality. I could look up the definition and etymology of specialness and discuss that but in my sense I am referring to unique human attributes shared by most humans and latent in other humans (babies/the unconscious etc)

I said we should be treated "as if" we are special which leaves open the possibility we are not but raises us up temporarily for respect and gives us reason to protect each others interests. I feel like some political and scientific systems treat humans as expendable, cogs in a machine etc or systems and tokens to be manipulated.

But societies are moving away from that with human rights language and welfare systems. And this also requires inherent compromise where we cannot all just do what we want and flourish or cohere.

People who believe peoples gender identity claims should also believe peoples religious claims.

Like when people say the gods or God has/have spoken to them. Like people who say they recieved a sign or had a near death experience or witnessed a miracle. And All sorts of equally subjective religious anecdotes and then they should also advocate that these things to be enshrined in law as well as transracial and trans abled identities.

But I doubt people support this position and this would lead to outcomes of fantasy and conflicting ideological beliefs. Secularism should include secularism about gender identity and not inflicting other peoples self beliefs on other people.

You can see now that there is a global fight back against this ideology because people do not believe iot and are resisting.

Also I think the success of a human ideology is not proof of its truth. At most people religions and ideologies tell us something about human aspirations and insecurities and unconscious forces.

I believe that humans could be unique in facing existential dilemmas.

We appear to be the only entities with a concept of truth and facts but as Hume pointed out you cannot get an "ought" from and "is".

Facts about reality do not compel us to behave a certain way or say how we ought to act or shape reality.

So I think a diverse range of things like law, social norms, taboos, gender ideology and religion may not have inherent truth value. But certain claims can be proven false like in the case of the bible containing falsities and contradictions.

I think falsity is the closest we can come to an ought in the sense that we can reject falsity as an unjustified grounds for action. Biological facts exclude gender identity from being true. Religions do not provide truthful justified grounds for actions.

In the case of human fabrications like laws and social structures we can treat them pragmatically as convenient fictions.

It is not a choice.

I am an antinatalist and one of the reasons is because life is imposed on us without consent.

Also it is because I recognise how special human experience is and life can be an affront and suffering and our own bodies cause us great suffering.

But I believe that once we come to exist people should be protected and valued and encouraging delusions and compromising women's rights by allowing men to identify as them is pure dysfunction and reality denial.

It seems humans are the only creature able to discern the truth and our quest for the truth is somewhat noble. Gender ideology is a perversion of the truth.
Creating a world based on fictions could be described as escapism.

I believe that humans should be treated as if we are special.

This would entail:

a) Not randomly creating humans en masse without putting extreme thought and care into the creation of human life.

b) Not enslaving humans

c) Treating everyone with dignity and intelligence

d) Respecting issues of consent

f) Not creating societies and models and paradigms that worsen or debase the human condition

Discursive metacognition. — 180 Proof

Do you class this as a physical or mental attribute?

Some humans I believe we recognise as human without them displaying various human cognitive dispositions such as babies and the mentally disabled. I feel that the aspect of humanity found in our cognition is rather abstract and elusive.

Although I do accept it as probably unique to us.

As a species, we produce knowledge by which we ratchet-up ourselves out from every ecological niche we've inhabited (so far). — 180 Proof

You could say we are ubiquitous although we seem to bring various other creatures along on our coattails like cats, dogs and birds and rats. I am someone who has not been abroad and doesn't like much travel. I wonder how much concepts and location and home play a role in being human? In This way we have a diversity of inclinations among humans. On this note there are immobile humans who travel in their minds far distances.

Outies and Innies (i.e. yin and yang). — 180 Proof

I feel like bearing a child for some women may be a transcendent experience. Notwithstanding reluctant and abusive and neglectful mothers. As a men I feel like some female experiences are more profound than any male ones.

We have celebrated (and vilified) men and women and gender diverse in different ways in art and culture. I think we (people) may be in a state of conflict over what it means to be human male and female that may be a hall mark of our species. And we have the massive body of art, literature sociology etc that we have devoted to examining in ourselves.

This issue makes me think about the concept of properties of reality. I think the big bang concept and the idea of reducing things to few basic laws of physics is an attempt to reduce down or explain away emergent properties as being dependent on simple basic elements.
So more complex properties are subservient to basic atom interactions and physical laws.

In this sense phenomena like, pain, thought, dreams, imagination, personality, consciousness and pain and so on that form part of being human are promised to be subsumed into some kind of basic unified model of reality.

But I don't see these things as being reducible to something simpler so I see the emergence of Human traits as more profound and you might say we currently are the thing in reality that contains the most challenging complex and unique properties. And some of these properties like consciousness have been argued to be fundamental.

Our religions (as far as I know other animals don't have spiritual practices or engage in philosophy — Benj96

Religion is a strange human phenomena and the way we treat the dead and consider the afterlife and the wide variety of religious beliefs and mythologies. These things appear to be internal in terms of personal beliefs but with external manifestations like churches and temples and iconography, prose music and ritual.

These seem to be intellectual, mental or cognitive traits of humans that you could not guess at by looking at us. But do they rely on our embodiment in a human physical form?

Some religions have a male monotheistic and paternalistic deity, others have male and female gods and goddesses with capricious behaviours and others have animal or alien deities.

This seems to illustrate an crazy diversity in human behaviour that seems to set us miles apart from other living things. Although some animals do display mourning and ritualistic behaviours towards the dead.

Sometimes being human seems mundane and stifling but reflecting on our capacities seems to imbue us with specialness. And then we seem to be the only philosophic creature prone to existential crises.

annnnnnd only Humans are capable of magical thinking, delusion, believing you can change sex and be born in the wrong body and that you can turn a penis into a vagina and medical malpractice.

So's an eraser..... but what's the point? — Vera Mont

Being an eraser would be a weak emergent property.

The attributes of humans are the most profound and sophisticated ones of anything on earth.

You couldn't have this conversation with an eraser could you? Or a bee.

The point about the male-female distinction and you can include intersex conditions here is that what makes us human must transcend sex differences. So being human could not rest on the ability to give birth or produce sperm because these things are sex specific.

Having a heart is not unique to humans so it seems features like these found in many other species could not be what makes us human.

For what purpose is it important to define what human is? — Vera Mont

It strikes me that a human is a real definable entity distinct from other things.

Some thinkers have already argued for us having unique traits such as a very sophisticated language with thousands of words and numerous uses as well as story telling, inventiveness, creativity, awareness of our mortality and our ability to think about things like infinity and mathematics.

Some of these things do not seem to rely on our body as opposed to our mental architecture but they combine mental and physical to make who we are.

I am wondering if we are just random arbitrary creations or some how maybe an inevitable product of nature or maybe something we can never pin down or ethereal.

I believe we do have unique abilities but I wonder if our physical body is like an arbitrary vessel from which our mental life exhibits itself.

Initially though I was wondering what makes male and females both humans. Is it just our brains or our genetics? In some species male and female are very different looking, one tiny one large for example and in some species both sexes are quite similar. And there are things only females can do like carry a child. So I also feel as if my sexed body may form a substantial part of my self.

I am rambling a bit sorry.. In sum. I feel like I know what it is to be human but also I don't and am puzzled.

I think what constitutes and identity is unclear and plays no role in biology/ anatomy text books.

Whether you say "transsexual" or "transgender" is controversial. The idea you are born in the wrong body and change sex has fallen out of fashion. But with one of the first ever person to undergo any gender affirming care Lily Elbe they medical experimented on his body to make it resemble a woman's and they went to the extent of implanting a uterus to fulfil his desire of being a mother.

"In 1931, Elbe returned for her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal.[8][9][37][7] This made her one of the earliest transgender women to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.[30]"

The surgery and it's subsequent attack by his immune system killed him shortly after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Elbe

But back to the topic of identity. Other than genetic and biological facts what we choose as someone's identity seems arbitrary. A lot of people occasionally pick their nose and eat what they find. But no one would want that to form part of their identity I imagine. We all breathe until dead so is that part of out identity? We have a huge range of preferences and beliefs but none of these can be said to be owned by one sex or the other.

Rachel Dolezal identified as black with no recent African Heritage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Nkechi Amare Diallo (/nɪˈkeɪtʃiː əˈmɑːreɪ diːˈɑːloʊ/; born Rachel Anne Dolezal, November 12, 1977)[fn 1] (/ˈdoʊləʒɑːl/)[9] is an American former college instructor and activist known for presenting herself as a black woman despite being white. In addition to claiming black ancestry, she also claimed Native American descent.[10] She is also a former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter president.

The whole Rachel Dolezal saga is really relevant to this issue despite people protesting it isn't and it highlights the inconsistency/hypocrisy of identity politics. Woman's identities are not sacred but black peoples are.

I think you are mistaken to see transgender people as 'impersonators', meaning 'fake'. That is because as Judith Butler argued gender is performance — Jack Cummins

What is this gender you are referring to and what is this performance?

Women have innate traits based on their biology including characteristics that enable a woman to carry a child like large hips, breasts to feed a child etc. It is biological traits that are being impersonated as well as stereotypes.

I come from a family where none of the women have modified their appearance and most of the females do not wear make up they are unmistakeably female. I look unmistakeably male but I don't like sports or cars or laddish behaviour and happily read my sisters romance novels as a teenager. I don't feel less male dependent on my diversity of interests and behaviour.

If people are putting on a performance I would see that that was unhealthy unless it was solely for fun such as dressing up to go out or to enhance preexisting femininity.

I do not accept the concept of gender which seems synonymous with harmful stereotypes. Some one should not be labelled a woman because they are feminine, like makeup etc as if not conforming to trite stereotypes mean you need hormones and surgeries.

Women's rights and space and awards should be solely preserved for the reality of the biological sex. female.
I don't like women claiming they are men and having male experiences because they have no clue what is like to be truly biological male. I am not performing masculinity. I am male bodied from birth with male health issues like prostate problems. My identity is not a costume nor my decades of struggles as a male.

I had a late diagnosis of autism a few years ago at 42/43.

I had a lot of problems before then but from my experience a lot of them were caused by other people.

Autistic people are at a high risk of bullying and one survey found that 90% of the ASD people polled were bullied in school and it was often constant bullying and that happened to me.

My family was also dysfunctional and I was bullied outside of school as a well. And work organisations rarely cater for people on the spectrum and there is very little effort to shape society to help autistic people in the same way there have been laws and provisions for disabled people and for racial and sex equality. (This is gradually changing)

So I don't know how it is possible to claim society is not the cause for a significant amount of autistic peoples distress. We also have one of the lowest life expectancies as a group and I myself became suicidal as a teen but it is not just caused by disease processes.

I think one benefit of managing illness, disability and difference is it can improve other peoples lives in ingenious ways with unforeseen consequences. I don't want to live in a monocultural society of well functioning drones. In alleviating distress and symptoms I believe we should try a multifaceted set of exhaustive approaches including medications which I am on myself, societal adjustments, therapies and anything else. Drama, literature. Meetings between neurotypicals and cognitively diverse groups.

If you were having heart surgery would you want to be treated by someone who trained as a heart surgeon or someone who identified as a heart surgeon.?

If you were catching a plane somewhere would you want to be flown by someone with a legitimate Pilot's license or someone who had been giving a replica pilots license out of sympathy?

This appears to be the only area in life we allow someone to identify as something or someone they are not and identify into a category that is already taken. And it sets a bad precedence and undermines the truth.

One of the biggest issues posed for a feminist viewpoint is actually getting at a definition of unison among all woman and therefore the rights such a group therefore deserves to be given — substantivalism

Woman as word is derived from the biological reality of women in whose wombs every human being grew. There is a whole field of medicine dedicated to women's bodies.

Whatever a woman's socio-economic status, class, political leanings and ethnicity only a woman can have endometritis, get pregnant, miscarry, menstruate, go through menopause or have an abortion.

There are enough commonalities among women as well as historical and current inequalities based on biological sex to make them a clear and distinct protected category with rights aimed at their unique experiences and needs.
If one group of women deserved a bigger voice than others it would be working class women. Afghan women, young girls and so on.
But gender ideology is promoted by middle class well off women and people attending university not by women in prison who may end up sharing a cell with a male bodied person or women who already have the least protections.
I believe biological real world distinctions need to be protected by everyone and feminist viewpoints that undermine women's biological reality and give women's spaces and rights to men are pernicious and misogynistic.

As gay man I feel the same way about how my own identity is being compromised by other gay people without my input or permission. There should not be an elite group of feminists setting standards and policy for all other women.

I don't know if you read my whole post because I pressed enter too early by accident.

I was drawing a distinction between accidentally being mistaken for the opposite sex and impersonating the opposite sex and imitating how you believe they act and think (which in Dylan Mulvaney's case is an offensive parody).

Legally if anyone born male/ with male DNA etc is allowed to identify as a women there are literally no more women's only spaces or women's rights.

It is a fundamental attack on the identity of a vulnerable group that has become more aggressive in recent years and the consequences are becoming more blatant each year.

For example two female inmates in the USA were impregnated by a trans identified male in a women's prison and male born people have started to take more and more women's sporting trophies with the consequence that they have had to ban people who went through male puberty (men) from women's swimming, cycling and athletic.

And this is a dystopian and draconian policing of thought and language as well to impose someone else's inner desires on feelings on everyone else. Apart from that there is a surge of detransitioners with damaged bodies that are getting harder to ignore. So it is an unsustainable situation.

The current situation is that men can legally identify as women and enter women only spaces and awards.

It is the equivalent to me having plastic surgery to look Chinese and winning Chinese business man of the year.
Or like the actual case of Rachael Dolezal who impersonated a black person and took a job advertised for a black person.

Men do not tend to look like women especially because women tend to have prominent breasts and wide hips so having surgery and hormones to look like woman and try and act like a women is an impersonation not a accidentical misidentification.

I think that in order to define something as a woman there has to be something concrete being referred to and in this case it is the reality of biological human females in whose womb we all grew and that automatically excludes all men from the category woman.

If there is nothing concrete that the word "Woman" refers to then it refers to nothing.

So it is conceptually impossible for a biological human male to be a female without making terms meaningless.

If a man goes in oestrogen and grows breasts he is trying to emulate a woman because oestrogen is linked to developmental features in actual women. So once again he is modelling himself on a real biological phenomena found in nature not on a mental concept of gender identity. Which is identical to blackface and someone emulating the features of an African.

I feel that definitional issues around truth may be misleading.

Definitions always seem to be a problem because we are trying to create words to describe something by discerning what features warrant a word attached to them to talk about them.

For example we could describe a dog as a four legged animal with fur and a tail but this would also describe a cat. In the end to correctly verbally describe a dog we may have to say an animal that barks and even eventually go right down to the level of genetic differences.

But in reality I would hazard to say that everyone can identify what is a cat and what is a dog.

So in the case of truth and falsity very young children understand and utilise truth and falsity by seeking to deceive their parents. Such as when a parent asks "did you make a mess in the kitchen?" and the child says "no".

Surely, natural selection is easy to explain under naturalism, but other forms of suffering are unexplainable. — Ishika

I think that suffering by definition requires consciousness. So this issue falls underneath the mystery of consciousness.

I can imagine nature being made like a machine with machine like interactions and behaviourists went down this route making consciousness epiphenomenal (causally non efficacious). And there are similar no free will positions which make pain seem unnecessary if we cannot act using our own volition.

But for me the efficacy of pain proves we have free will because people with congenital pain defect don't experience pain and other people lose pain sensation and are all prone to serious injury. If we could not freely act on conscious sensation and perception there would be no need of pain as a warning of physical damage.

But pain doesn't have an explanation based on a model of reality as insentient unconscious particle interactions. And it is not clear how pain could arise through natural selection (pain appears to only exist in the realm of minds).

But if gods created deliberately created the capacity for pain including extreme pain then that seems malicious and indeed religious versions of gods are often malicious. So pain is a puzzle to me because it seems to be either something cruel, accidentally discovered/created by nature or something inflicted on us by a creator.

In Buddhism they do believe in ending the cycle of life and death and in this sense it seems may be suffering is a cycle we are challenged to end (Buddhism appears like it should be antinatalist to fulfil this stated aim.)

Some theists and deists have argued that this is the only possible world a deity could have created and it is hard to imagine a world without pain for its aforementioned survival efficacy and death and predation because we eat living things and things are required to die for finite space not to become quickly overpopulated.

I think the idea that religion is an evil is very valid but then you have to defend the notion of evil.

Which becomes kind of paradoxical as evil is a quasi religious notion. What objective moral calculus is being applied?

I believe suffering is an evil and we should do everything in our power to eradicate most of it. I thinking coexisting with suffering is problematic unless you become apathetic and just focus on making your own life as liveable as possible.

The problem of evil seems to be that some aspects of reality are so terrible that there can't be a loving God but if you believe this and hence rejects the gods you are still left with an evil Universe but with no hope.

That appears to objectively be a worst outcome. And then you can't blame anyone but humans for their plight.

I think most antinatalists accept this view and are mostly atheists and accept the negative prognosis of the human condition.
On the other hand secular optimists appear to have an unwarranted optimism. They don't accept the criticism of ther outlook but exhibit faith like behaviours in reason and progress but I also think they also sometimes have an apathetic attitude to the presence and historical ubiquity of evil. Whereas the religious seem to take the reality of evil more seriously as a curse and moral problem.

I believe that the Nazis, The Holocaust and World War Two were evil. Man made evils with malice and intent and not natural accidents. Deliberate destruction and torture.

It is easy both to imagine a universe with no pain or sentience (like the moon) and with no mal intent. I don't think everything can be reduced to particle interactions that does away the need to explain malice and cruelty. If humans were simply helpless victims of natural cruelty that would be a different story.

I think evil only doesn't exist through a reductionist lense that only accepts scientific language.

I don't see the benefit to explaining evil by dispensing of God/gods.

The religious narrative of mans sinful nature and possibility of redemption is more optimistic than the idea we are frequently facing evil and suffering with no reason and no redemption.

As much as religion has caused evil so have secular systems including communism and capitalism, Nationalism and Dictators.

I do not favour the view we can embrace an atheist, materialist/physicalist view and it not have negative connotations.

I am concerned that the millions of victims of war, famine, slavery and genocide and other cruelty and injustice will never see recompense without afterlife justice or Karma.

I don't think you can blame gods for suffering if they don't exist and if they do exist you could not pin any particular event on gods.

Any optimism I have is based on agnosticism and hope that there is some kind of fundamental justice system underlying reality. If there is not ultimate justice I think the atrocious things that have happened and are happening are an unmitigated evil ( and one of the many reasons I am antinatalist).

Another thing folk miss is the difference between a list of things that are true and an explanation of truth, between what is true and what being "true" is. I think you and I do understand what it is for a sentence to be true. So I don't think a definition of truth is needed. I think were we differ is in which sentences we think are true. Some sentences you think are true, other folk think are false. — Banno

I think that my brain is veering between these two things. There is the concept of truth and a possibly infinite array of truths.

There is a concept of truth that only seems to apply to sentences and mental states and seems to imply a match between the content or representation of a sentence and reality. It seems to be relevant in terms of action in the sense that false beliefs may make you act inappropriately.

Another concept of truth seems to be the ultimate truth as in what is the underlying cause of reality or essences.

I think the situation in Ukraine highlights the problem for moral truths and truths that are created solely through language like property rights, politics and a countries boundaries.

Ukraine is fighting a war for it's survival, for the survival of its identity and political system and for the consistent application of rule of law in the world and national integrity.

But people can dispute property claims, political claims, legal claims and boundary claims. This is why I believe we have a problem with asserting as truth things that don't simply represent the current state of affairs.

I think that skepticism about these kinds of truth does not favour either side of a dispute but calls for a compromise where we are forced to cooperate or be in a constant state of war over our values.

If Russia defeats Ukraine it will be a loss for all of us for the value placed on notions like territorial integrity, democracy and so on. But these kind of human inventions seem to be defeasible. And social structures and values etc have to be defended by force or threat of force.

The concept of moral truth seems irrelevant if it unenforceable. Truths seem to just be what is and not what we want to be the case. We may have to acknowledge that political, ethical and similar statements are just statements of preference that we are going to battle for supremacy over. Or may be nature will just let us destroy ourselves through war or climate disaster or something else.

If you mean that all facts are true - well, yes. — Banno

No I mean reality would be strange if reality relied on human statements and equations. I don't think you need to make a statement for something to be the true state of affairs. Maybe the statement itself counts as an assertion that we are confident about something to the point that it seems to capture a true state of affairs.

I have an uncertainty that we can know the true state of affairs and reason for being. So I suppose what I value about truth is aiming towards it. Always aiming towards it.

I suppose as well from my religious background they have an overriding narrative about reasons for existence and strong claim about their truths to the point of infallibility. It suggests a difficulty in dealing with uncertainty.

But there was supposed to be a day of enlightenment when you met God in heaven and all would be revealed to you. I am still partially waiting for that moment of revelation. it would be strange to die and not know what on earth an of this was fundamentally about.

I feel a lot of groups and ideologies try to have some kind of certainties for psychological reasons with the exception of Buddhists and their notion of impermanence although I don't know how effective that really is because I read one article that said Buddhists showed higher levels of fear of death than average.

If we cannot define truth can we defend it?

Some people believe that the truth always comes out eventually. But does it? Probably not. (Unsolved murders and so on.) Conspiracy theories run rampant vying for attention and the idea of a post-truth society.

But reality, luckily for us, has innate consistency imbedded within it. A consistency that we can follow/track, and it makes sense to us. — Benj96

Cannot illusions can be consistent? Some illusions like The uneven lines and bent stick in water illusions persist consistently. I think modern technologies including the internet and interface technology has a made the brain in vat scenario more plausible and to the extent people are happy to spend hours at home in the same spot interacting with a computer screen in increasingly sophisticated ways.

I am not sure if science is showing us one uniting ubiquitous principle because we also have the creativity and novelty of human invention and technology including in the arts like an endless emergence of novelty. There appears to be combination of order and chaos.

So there seems to be a uniting reason for the occurrence and behaviour of all things. — Benj96

Is this uniting reason likely to be a law of physics? God? Logic? In the case of logic what is it and what is it derived from? I feel these fundamental kind unanswered questions can leave us up a creek without a paddle. Not on safe grounds for belief formation. But maybe you have an optimistic personality and I have a pessimistic one?

If the God of the Jews in 1500 BCE said it was wrong — Vera Mont

The bible doesn't mention abortion as far I can remember nor does it mention paedophilia. It is morally and in other ways very contradictory. The bible is also not as sexist as you might imagine. I have found that some religious positions seems to originate from culture rather than religion or were probably invented as a source of power and control.

From my experience I think beliefs are maintained by schisms that create new churches based on minor as well as major disagreements. So everyone in the immediate circle confirms or supports each others beliefs.

As a child I think it is hard to believe that your parents would constantly lie to you about reality so you tend to accept their religious beliefs until it becomes untenable. So in a sense I suppose their could be an emotional component to strong beliefs motivating them.

I hope that there are more complex psychological mechanisms at work to explain human beliefs rather than come to a misanthropic appraisal of peoples character.

and belief is quite different from truth, for the reasons given. — Banno

I am saying that it is the belief that is true or false not that they are the same thing.

A statement only seems to be true after it has been understood and in a context.

I don't see how a written sentence can convey anything without a mind. But I think the actual nature of reality cannot depend on notions like truth or falsity but just is.

It seems to me like conscious states provide us with detailed information that can be translated into ideas that don't need to have truth value but some times accurately map onto a state of the world.

I find it hard to believe that people really believe extreme positions.

Like saying abortion is murder. As people have pointed out many pregnancies end in miscarriage (10 to 20%) and people don't tend to hold funerals.

And sometimes the pregnancy fails very early on and I don't believe people think that the fertilised egg a few days after conception is equivalent to a nearly full term baby.

I don't believe gun advocates feel they need guns to protect against a corrupt government.

It is hard to tell how serious people are about some positions but unfortunately when they are serious that is a problem.

It's statements that are true or false. — Banno

I think that a statement like "Matt is taller than Oliver" is meaningful but becomes true in a context where it refers to a Matt that is taller than Oliver

But it is false in a situation where it refers to an Oliver who is taller than a Matt.
So a statement seems to be only true in certain context and it could accidentally be true such as if you say "It will rain of Friday" and it happens to rain on Friday and False if the predication was wrong..

The cat is either on the mat or not, regardless of the attitudes that any particular person has towards the cat and the mat. — Banno

This seems like we are saying that something exists regardless of our evaluation which I agree with but it doesn't seem to capture concept of truth.

I feel that truth seems to require a mental state where we have a belief and the belief is not false. I don't think language and written statements can mean anything outside of our minds ability to interpret symbols.

I feel like we care about the truth for psychological reasons but not always and not when the truth seems to sabotage us (which links into the selective skepticism topic)

I am not opposed to idealism but I don't know what the implication of a reality that is mind based would be. But some things like pain, language, music, mathematics and beliefs and thoughts seem to be entirely mind dependent.

I think claims like "abortion is murder" or "The unborn baby is a parasite" are hyperbole and the chances of a reasoned debate is already sabotaged.
So Then we rely on experts, ethicists, the government and jurisprudence to make the best legal decisions on behalf of the masses.

Even then people won't be happy and can reject the law.

The government will be unfortunately thinking of their electoral chances when making some policies. So the government needs to face effective campaigns for the positions you support.