Yeah, I'm aware of that, and considered also bringing up the Gnostics who seem to take Platonism even more to heart than mainstream Christians, but all of those are essentially not-Plato-centric religions, so they didn't seem an appropriate example of Platonism as a religion itself.

Throw some azure in there (and especially some green too) and you've got a nicely balanced color scheme. Green grass, azure sky, grapes and oranges to make sangria... sounds like a lovely countryside.

With regards to whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy, may I offer a counterfactual parallel scenario to illustrate how it could possibly be both?

"The European philosophical tradition is [...] a series of footnotes to Plato", right? I mean, not really, but kinda, yeah? Imagine if, in addition to that philosophical tradition, you also had some people who took Plato as some kind of a holy figure who had solved philosophy and venerated his words and created rituals surrounding him. Now, in that counterfactual universe, where you've got folks like us who read and study Plato along with all the "footnotes" to him and question all of it, but you've also got those people in old Greek temples reciting prayers to the Form of the Good, doing ritual shadow puppet shows to reenact the Allegory of the Cave, and listening to sermons that recite passages from the Republic... in that world, is Platonism a philosophy or a religion?

It can be two things.

Death is inescapable — Bitter Crank

[Citation needed]

In my book the defining characterization of religion is appeal to faith, whether that means in your own gut feelings, popular tradition, or some kind of supposed authority. Philosophy on the other hand is characterized by incessant questioning of everything, the exact opposite of taking things on faith. The conclusions reached and the topics covered can be the same, it’s the methodology that differs.

Everyone always forgets about the other half of Dunning-Kruger: people who truly know a significant amount about something, enough to know how much they don’t know, tend to think lowly of their knowledge, even though it’s much greater than others. (See also the legend of Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi).

I sometimes find myself wondering about the reflexivity of Dunning-Kruger. If it seems to me that I know a lot about things, and I know about Dunning-Kruger, and so conclude that I probably don’t actually know very much at all, does Dunning-Kruger then suggest that I probably do actually know more than, due to Dunning-Kruger, I think I do? Or conversely if I am well aware of the vast sea of knowledge I’ve yet wade more than knee deep in, but knowing about Dunning-Kruger, I therefore conclude that I probably know more than most people, does Dunning-Kruger then suggest that I probably know less than I, due to Dunning-Kruger, think I do?

Or what about jacks of all trades? My general impression of my own abilities is that, for most X, I am better than most people, but worst than most Xers, at Xing, such that most people think I’m an expert on most things except the thing they’re an expert on. What does Dunning-Kruger say about that?

i.e. of having a different sexual essence, no? — bongo fury

No. Bearing has nothing to do with any “essence”. It has to do with how you feel about your physical sex. Orientation isn’t a social construct either: it’s a fact about what kind of person someone wants to fuck. Bearing is a similar fact about the kind of person someone wants to BE. Physically. No weird social or metaphysical anything about it.

FWIW I think I mostly disagree with Willow about the metaphysics/language of all this.

Edit to elaborate: I think I mostly disagree with Willow inasmuch as I don't think there are metaphysical essences of anything at all, a general principle with no focus on gender specifically. The closest thing there are to essences are defining characteristics, which is a linguistic matter, not a metaphysical one (how are words defined?). In my proposal about bearing I'm not taking any stance at all on what the proper referents of the words "man" and "woman" are. In general I operate on the principle that words mean what people agree that they mean, and while I expect that most people mean to refer to sexes when they say "man" or "woman", I understand that trans people and allies more usually mean genders or bearings, and so in conversation with them I just roll with the understanding that that's what they mean. I find it an unfortunate circumstance that there is this purely linguistic split that unnecessarily implies some kind of deep metaphysical divide when it's really all about the referents of some words, and I kind of hope that philosophical clarification of all the surrounding topics, like my introduction of the concept of bearing, could help to eventually clear that up.

Inescapable suffering is bad. Buddhism offers an escape from suffering by not desiring. But not desiring is still bad, relative to the good of satisfying desires. But still better than suffering from unsatisfied desires.

IME trans people only accidentally sound like they are employing gender essentialism because of the conflation of gender with what I have dubbed “bearing”. The whole point of the OP is to create the language and conceptual framework necessary for trans people to discuss the phenomenological experience that makes them trans without having to use language that suggests they are claiming a social construct (gender) is somehow essential to their being.

I know how to do a lot of crazy shit with digital audio, but I don't know the first thing about "warm" colors. You might as well have said...any other word. But yeah, it looks like s***. — Noble Dust

Do you know about colors of noise? Warm and cool colors are analogous (or vice versa, really). Warm colors feature more low frequencies and are therefore redder, while cool colors feature more high frequencies and are therefore bluer. Brown is a warm grey, for example.

That is exactly what this thread is about. I'm proposing a new term or concept, "bearing", to distinguish the feelings about body stuff, in isolation, from any kind of social identification.

I've been trying not to talk about myself any more because Swan is an asshole and I don't want to expose myself personally to that, but I feel like I am the best example I have of the way that those two things can come apart, and my own experience is the prime motivating factor I had to start thinking about this to begin with.

With regards to my physical body, I was born male, and haven't done anything explicitly to change that, though apparently somehow or another I seem to have rather feminine breasts. to the point that multiple people have commented on them, including someone once asking if they were real (all of them friendly, not taunting or anything). I never really thought I looked particularly femme for most of my life, though I wanted to, so those comments always made me feel good.

As for how I feel about that body, I don't have bad feelings about the maleness of it. I wouldn't call myself dysphoric. I feel positively good about some traditionally male, unfeminine things, like my height and strength. But I get good feelings at the thought of being more feminine, just physically, not talking about anything social yet. When I shave my face or body hair I feel better about my body. When I wear clothes that accentuate feminine curves (e.g. some shirts hide my breasts, some enhance them) I feel better about t my body. If I use one of those machine learning face-changing apps to see myself as a woman, I like what I see. If we lived in an immersive virtual reality embodied in lifelike avatars that we could customize to our liking, I would full time wear the body of myself-if-I-hadn't-had-a-Y-chromosome, but at my current height and strength, and with a penis for a clitoris. It's just cost and risk and quality and other pragmatic factors, combined with the lack of any particularly pressing unhappiness with my current body, that keep me from trying to approximate that in real life more than I do.

As for social identification, presentation, and role: I couldn't give a damn about pronouns. Most people gender me male and it doesn't bother me at all, it's normal and I don't think anything of it. Depending on how I'm presenting, people occasionally gender me female, and I feel a little like I've been complimented. I work from home and while there (so most of my time) I wear dresses or skirts. When I go outside I'm usually doing some kind of physical activity like hiking so I wear pants (men's, because pockets are useful), but often with women's shirts, but not always. I have long wavy hair all the time. I'm really busy and stressed so I'm lazy about shaving, just once or twice a week, but if I had the time I'd be clean-shaven all the time (and I wish I could just be hairless always without shaving).

So if someone asks me what my gender is... I don't have a straightforward answer with the terminology that we use now. To my ear as a native English speaker "man" and "woman" mean, descriptively, to most people, male and female, so I'm a "man" in that, yeah, I'm male, if that's what you're asking. But if you're asking how I want to be treated... I don't think men and women should be treated differently, so it doesn't matter, just be nice to me. Are you asking what pronouns you should use? I don't care, whatever feels natural to you, it doesn't mean anything to me and language ideally wouldn't compel us to gender people anyway. Are you asking what sex I'd like to be? Mostly female, but it's complicated (see above), and you're probably not really interested in that anyway. But that's the only aspect of "gender" that matters at all to me personally, so it'd be nice to have a way of talking about it, without implying anything about what pronouns you should use for me or anything else like that.

Color me embarrassed. — praxis

Sure thing. Which color is that though?

Thanks!

I guess I've been operating from a viewpoint that sees gender essentialism as obviously if not definitionally false (if it's something biological then it's not gender, it's sex; if it's social then it's not sex, it's gender), so I hadn't really considered that. From that viewpoint, it's entirely a scientific, not philosophical, question as to how much sex (biology), bearing (psychology), and gender (sociology) affect each other and in what ways.

I was playing off of your joke, and also being funny myself with "anti-".

Purple is red and blue combined, so you can't hate one more than the other. Identity and whatnot.

But despite purple being the anti-green, it is also acceptably neutral, being equal parts warm and cold, while green is neither. Like a compromise where everyone is equally unhappy, in lieu of a collaborative solution that makes everyone happy. Though this particular purple is cooler than a true neutral magenta... but blue is better than red anyway so I'll allow it.

I'm curious though, do you care in general whether the sensations of dis/accord are always socially mediated? — fdrake

It’s an interesting scientific question, but not of much philosophical interest, and I’m a little suspicious of putting too much emphasis on it for sociopolitical reasons. I’d say it’s similar to the question of what makes someone gay. Maybe there’s a gay gene, maybe fetal hormones are responsible, maybe it’s something about upbringing, maybe it’s as much a choice as what kind of food or music you like. That’s a valid scientific question, but not really of philosophical interest, and when someone seems to care exceptionally much about it, it makes me wonder why; gay/trans people are what they are regardless of why they are, and it shouldn’t make any sociopolitical difference... unless you think there’s something wrong with being like that and looking to prevent it.

Sensations associated with bearing = sensations associated with felt disaccord with one's sex characteristics which are not socially influenced OR sensations associated with felt disaccord with one's sex characteristics which are socially influenced. — fdrake

I think that's close to logically equivalent to what I'm saying, but that seems a weird way to put it.

The "close to" part is that bearing isn't just about disaccord, but also about accord; or equivalently, since accord is often invisible, not just about having the feelings, but also about not having the feelings. People who feel nothing in particular at all about their physical sex still have a bearing, it's just a different bearing than those who do feel something or another about that. Just like people who are indifferent to who they have sex with still have a sexual orientation.

The "weird way to put it" part is that you phrase it as the disjunction of two things regarding social influence, when social influence is kind of an irrelevant afterthought. Conversely, "not necessarily concerning social matters" is an important part of the definition of bearing, the part that distinguishes it from gender identity.

So I would rephrase that as: Bearing = felt (dis)accord with one's sex characteristics, which are not necessarily concerning social matters (whether or not they are socially influenced).

And for the purposes of this thread, you don't care whether there are no sensations associated with felt disaccord with one's sex characteristics which are not socially influenced? (IE, all sensations of felt disaccord with one's sex characteristics are socially influenced) — fdrake

Pretty much. I'm not saying anything about whether or not that is the case, but it has no bearing (pun intended) on defining the concept of bearing, which is all I'm doing here.

I’m not sure we have any disagreement. You say I won’t “bracket the aetiology” but unless you mean something very different by that than I do, that’s not true. I am explicitly bracketing aetiology and speaking only of phenomenological things. That us to say, I’m only proposing a term for feelings that do not concern social factors, but I’m not saying anything at all about the causes of those feelings.

Grey is almost as acceptable as green.

Aristotle should agree that green is the best color because it's the (ironically) golden mean, the middle color, neither warm nor cool, but perfectly balanced.

By listening to people talk about it? I'm still not clear if by "socially mediated" you're talking about causation of bearing, or semantic complication of bearing with gender identity. All I'm saying is that you can have feelings about the sex of your body, and at the same time, not necessarily have any particular feeling or another about social stuff; that those two things can in concept vary independently, and saying something about one doesn't have to say something about the other. I'm saying nothing at all about what does or does not cause the feelings about the sex of your body.

Again, it's like orientation. Saying that someone is straight or gay isn't saying anything at all about why they feel attracted to the sex they do, just that they feel that way. Likewise, bearing is nothing at all to do with why someone feels some way, just that they feel some way. How can we establish that someone is gay or straight or bi? By asking them who they find attractive. Likewise, you establish someone's bearing by asking how they feel about the prospect of having this or that body.

And just like being gay doesn't necessarily imply anything about wearing dresses or anything social like that, neither does being (as I'd term it) transphoric. The meaning of a bearing label is meant to impart no information about any social gender stuff at all. There might be a causal relationship between social gender things, bearing, orientation, sex, and so on, but we can't even talk about what those relationships might be without terminology to identify each of the different things.

All I am proposing is a term term to talk about one of those things without having to say anything about another of them at the same time. With such terminology established, you could do whatever kind of science you want to to investigate why people feel this way or that. My proposal is not taking any stance at all on the conclusions of those investigations.

I've never tried to be saying anything at all about aetiology, or particularly about intensity.

That all sounds good to me, although the way you use the term "phorics" seems a little odd to me. Etymologically, someone who is "dysphoric" isn't the opposite of someone who is "phoric": "-phor" means "to bear" (hence "bearing"), and "dysphoria" thus means "bearing poorly". "Euphoria" is the usual antonym, meaning "bearing well". The new terms I propose are "transphoric" for those who are "bearing across" that abstract space of sexual characteristics (who is thus dysphoric about the side they're coming from and/or euphoric about the side they're headed toward), and "cisphoric" for those who are "bearing to the same side" of it that they're already on (and, thus, not moving; but also, resistant to being moved from there); plus also "aphoric" for those just "drifting" nowhere in particular, "biphoric" for those who cross back and forth, "panphoric" for those who sail any which way they please, etc.

I noticed it being green earlier. Green is objectively the best color. It should go back to that.

What seems intuitive to me is that cisgender people are so identified (enfleshed?) with their sex that it becomes transparent to them, there are no distinctions and sites of tension that would furnish any Bearing1 sensations — fdrake

I've never disagreed with this. Comfort is transparent; if everything feels fine, it doesn't feel like much at all. I made the analogy earlier to race: white people don't have to think about their race because it's the invisible default and nobody makes a big deal out of it, but that doesn't mean there is no such race as white. Also similar is the concept of "privilege" in general: privilege is equivalent to the absence of problems other people have, so people who have it don't notice it, you only notice the lack of it (that is, the lack of the absence of your problems, which is just to say, you notice your problems).

I can't make any sense of Swan's nonsense, but it sounds like he thinks I'm saying that everybody has dysphoria? If so, that's absolutely not the case. I'm saying that dysphoria/euphoria about your physical sex is a separate thing from anything to do with social identification, presentation, role, etc; that you can have or lack those -phoric feelings either way regardless of any of the other social stuff.

A little bit of history of my views of this, for illustration: when I was a teenager, and first talking to someone else about imagining what it would be like to have a more female body, that one other guy I talked to agreed with me, so I spent quite a long while after that thinking that of course every guy would enjoy being able to body-swap with a woman like fdrake describes. Then years later I met guys who were absolutely repulsed by the idea and said they would be freaked the fuck out and sickened if they found themselves in a woman's body.

So I understand that people who feel no particular discomfort with the bodies they were born with -- and to clarify, I am okay with the body I was born with, and wouldn't call myself dysphoric, which is why I don't call myself trans -- who wouldn't mind if their bodies were different might think, like I did for a while, that everybody who isn't trans is like that. But there are other people who are much more strongly "un-trans" than that, and I'm pretty sure that those people are supposed to be the referents of "cis", with people in between being something in between. And, just like the Kinsey scale results show that a lot more people are more bisexual/pansexual/etc than we think, I suspect that a lot more people are somewhere more toward the middle of the spectrum than strictly cis, even if they still lean toward the cis side of things.

I don't want to tell someone that they're "identifying wrongly" or anything, but your description of your feelings sound like textbook "agender". I think a lot of people think of themselves as "cis" just because they're not "trans", but there's a whole spectrum in between.

Consider it by analogy with orientation. "Straight" doesn't just mean "not gay", it means "only attracted to the opposite sex; not interested in sex with the same sex". If you're indifferent about who you have sex with, that's not straight. It's also not gay. It's bisexual, or pansexual, or maybe asexual if you just don't care at all about whether or not you have sex with anyone.

Likewise with "gender" in the sense that I'm calling "bearing"; I'll use both the usual "-gender" terms and my proposed "-phoric" alternatives for clarity. "Cisgender"/"cisphoric" doesn't just mean "not transgender/transphoric", it means "only comfortable as one's birth sex; not interested at all in being (like) the opposite sex". If you're indifferent about what sex you are (like), that's not cisgender/cisphoric. It's also not transgender/transphoric. It's bigender/biphoric, pangender/panphoric, or maybe agender/aphoric if you just don't care at all about what sex you are (like).


And Swan, you're the one being incoherent. A mod said as much last night. This entire thread is about trying to clear up the incoherence already present in the existing discourse, and you're the one objecting to the very having of that conversation. I'm not going to dignify your nonsense with a more detailed response.

Though perhaps you imagine Bearing1 generating feelings of disaccord with the performative aspect of sociological gender and disaccord with social norms, so there's never any mediation of our sensations through the social contexts learned in the experiential history of our bodies. — fdrake

Yes, that's more or less what I'm thinking. I don't see there being any such thing as Bearing2; I see that as just ordinary gender identity in its strict sense, that I'm trying to disambiguate bearing from. Though I'm not necessarily denying that social factors can have a causative influence on bearing. I'm not postulating anything about the origins of the feelings one has about one's body shape, just terminology to talk about those feelings independently from talking about feelings about social factors.

Something I was thinking about on the way home was if we imagine a scenario of a baby growing up in a cell with no human contact, it's fed by an automatic feeding tube. Trying to convey to the adult produced by this what affection felt like would probably require describing it in terms of the feeding tube and hunger; and to those of us who have felt affection, we know this could never suffice. — fdrake

The difference with bearing, I think, is that it should be easy for a cis person to imagine how they would feel if they had bodily features of the opposite sex, and so get a comparable mental picture of how someone who feels discomfort with their body feels. (If said person does not find themselves imagining discomfort at that scenario, then I would say by definition that makes them not cis. Maybe not trans either, but some kind of nonbinary.)

Disambiguation is inherently about reducing semantic confusion. What do you think "disambiguate" means? It means there's a word that has an imprecise, ambiguous meaning, and we're trying to rectify that situation. Some people talk about "gender" and do mean those stereotypes; that's the main complaint TERFs have about transwomen, that they "reinforce sexist stereotypes". Trans people on the other hand talk about "gender" and often mean "I hate the way my body is shaped, I wish it was shaped like that instead". You can see why it would be useful to be able to talk about one of these things without being confused for talking about the other, right?

But you don't want anybody talking about either of them so you'll just keep disrupting any attempt to think about it by spewing more bigotry and insults. You're worse than a TERF, you apparently like the old fashioned gender dichotomy; TERFs at least think they're fighting sexism. I don't see how you can possibly think of yourself as left-wing with such conservative social attitudes.

That is true, but entirely besides the point, and it feels like deliberately missing the point. You understand that I'm not talking about "feeling like I am an [x]", but feeling (dis)comfort with specific bodily features generally correlated with males and females, right? Feeling (dis)comfort about having a penis/vag, breasts, body hair, etc? This is not about "identification as a" whatever, internal or external. It's about feelings about external sex features. I don't know how many time I need to repeat that.

At this point I'm pretty sure you're just willfully misinterpreting everything so that you can continue being a bigoted asshat.

I didn't say that there was no nurture aspect to the causal origin of the having of the feelings about one's body. I said that one can have feelings about one thing, without necessarily having any particular feelings about the other thing. One does not have to want to wear dresses and stay at home doing housework to want to have breasts and a vag and little body hair, or vice versa.

Repeating the same incoherent nonsense isn't going to make it any more correct.

People can have feelings about the shape of their bodies independent of social factors, and vice versa. I have first and second hand experience of this (recall the transwomen tomboys I mentioned earlier), and it such an obvious thing I cannot believe it generates any controversy. All I'm proposing is that we use different words for the different things so that we can talk about that without confusion.

But you're an obvious bigot who just said both gender neutral societies and trans people are "incoherent", so I don't know why I'm violating my policy of ignoring you to say this.

Bs stereotypes are irresistible. If the SS says you are a Jew, you're a Jew. — unenlightened

Exactly.

Still, our knowledge of all these things is ultimately based on sensory data. — Echarmion

Exactly, all of our observation of things besides the direct occasions of our experience are indirect. We have a sensory experience, we notice patterns in that sensory experience, we postulate the existence of things to explain those patterns in our experience, and check to see if the patterns continue to hold up to those we would expect from those explanations. The most concrete reality is just sense-data; everything else, from ordinary objects like rocks and trees to neutrinos and quantum fields, is an abstraction from that sense-data projected "behind" it (so to speak) in an attempt to explain it.

Yes, because the concept of "gender" is used both to refer to the social stuff and to the feelings about your physical sex, and I want to disambiguate that, so that we can talk about one without having to talk about the other.

I’m curious to hear you elaborate on how my definition of access consciousness differs from Block’s because I wasn’t aiming to / didn’t realize I was saying anything different.

Anyway, access consciousness as I mean it is an entirely functional thing and so can be studied of human brains just like the function of any other physical thing can be studied.

You’re talking about something unrelated to the topic of this thread. This isn’t about “identifying” or any other social thing, this is about having the language to talk about how people feel about their bodies without referencing all that social stuff. Not about pronouns, not about clothes, not about who you want to fuck. And if we’re not referencing social things at all, we can’t be referencing stereotypes.

Everyone seems to want to use this thread as an excuse to rehash the same tired old opinions about social gender, when the entire point of it is to create a way that we don’t have to talk about that stuff.

Specifying which you mean with "verbal qualification" is important because there's two very different senses of the word "consciousness", one of which is entirely amenable to scientific study and the other not. I argue that the kind that is not is trivial and there isn't really anything more to say about it, and the kind that is is the important kind that distinguishes things like humans from things like rocks. It sounds like you're talking about the trivial kind, so I don't have much more to say on that subject (besides the differentiation of it in the essay I just linked).

Are you talking about phenomenal consciousness or access consciousness? Very different things.

I think the thrust of the idea is to place the onus on sensations or senses of accord with one's body as it regards gender, like 'how does my immersion in social constructions impact my relationship with my body?' — fdrake

As the originator of the idea (of bearing): no, not really. It's meant to be about "sensations or senses of accord with one's body as it regards" sex, the physical stuff, not gender the social stuff. If you're stranded alone on a deserted island with no clothes and no other people and no job but to eat from the plentiful tropical fruits as desired, how do you feel when you look down your body and see your chest and crotch and so on? Nothing in particular because it's fine and normal? Revulsion and discomfort because it's wrong wrong wrong? "Okay I guess" but you'd rather some things be different? That's the thing I'm calling "bearing", and it is definitionally independent of social factors. (But, as elaborated before, social factors may be partially dependent on it).

"Identifying" is a social matter, already covered by the usual term "gender identity". I'm not proposing anything new with regards to that, but rather distinguishing something else as different from that. I guess to use your bins analogy, the closest thing to it would be the contents of the bin, which are different from its color or the label on it; but there's a bit of a problem with that analogy because the contents of a bin depend on how people use the bin, which makes this still an analogy for social things.

Unpacking the analogy: if green bins are for composting and blue bins are for recycling, but there's some green bin that people put bottles and cans in for some reason, then it makes sense to call that a recycle bin, not a compost bin, because that's what it's used for, even though it's green like a compost bin. That's "gender" the social construct: a recycle bin is a bin used for recycling, regardless of color; a woman is someone treated as a woman, regardless of sex. Putting a label on a bin / identifying as a gender is a signal to treat the bin / person in that way.

But bins don't have feelings. A blue bin can't want to be green. But a male person can want to be female. So the analogy breaks when you try to use it to talk about the actual topic of this thread, this new concept "bearing" I'm coining: the analogous thing would be "what color the bin wants to be", not what label it has, not what's inside of it, not what color it is. But bins don't want things, so there is no analogue there.