And including things that may not even be currently _known_. _I_ certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios _mean_ psychologically, but my map is not the territory: it doesn't mean some future sufficiently-advanced neuroscience won't be able to say what the difference means about female and male minds, and some sufficiently advanced evolutionary psychology, under what selection pressures it evolved.
-_Speaking_ future advances in knowledge, the _Unit of Caring_ author continues to her second objection—
+_Speaking_ future advances in knowledge, the author continues to her second objection—
> 2) Someday people are just going to be able to generate the exact physical body they want to inhabit. At that point, "biological" anything isn't going to apply.
In my youth, I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of _present-day humans_, but _in general_ ..." felt like a relevant and useful form of argument.
-These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles depending on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
+These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
-I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their happy lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which we [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even exist](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/) and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards that grand future (_n.b.,_ _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where our means don't match our ambitions, and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
+I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their happy lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which we [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even exist](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/) and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards a better future (_n.b._, _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where [our means don't match our ambitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
> If your definition of a 'woman' is one where trans people will be their preferred gender once the tech catches up, then I think you should probably reflect on what actually changes about anyone's lived experience on that magic day when our cyborgs hit your threshold. And if it isn't, then you're stuck asserting that if a woman is cell-for-cell identical to me then she still might not be a 'biological woman'. That's a sign that this isn't actually about biology.
-I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the [Sorites paradox](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/), the ancient challenge to applying discrete categories to a continuous world. If one grain of sand doesn't make a heap (the argument goes), and the addition of one more grain of sand can't change whether something is a heap, then we can conclude from [the principle of mathematical induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction) that no number _n_ ∈ ℕ of grains make a heap. (Or, alternatively, that the absence of any sand constitutes a ["heap of zero grains"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nso8WXdjHLLHkJKhr/the-conscious-sorites-paradox).)
-
-[TODO: analogy between heap size and transition outcomes needs to be made explicit]
+I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the [Sorites paradox](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/), the ancient challenge to applying discrete categories to a continuous world. If one grain of sand doesn't make a heap (the argument goes), and the addition of one more grain of sand can't change whether something is a heap, then we can conclude from [the principle of mathematical induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction) that no number _n_ ∈ ℕ of grains make a heap. (Or, alternatively, that the absence of any sand constitutes a ["heap of zero grains"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nso8WXdjHLLHkJKhr/the-conscious-sorites-paradox).) Analogously, if a sufficiently small change in MtF transition outcome can't change whether someone is a woman, then we are seemingly forced to accept that everyone is a woman or no one is.
While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesistate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
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+> If that's the side of this question you come down on, then I encourage you to ask yourself why that trans women still doesn't count. I expect that whatever your answer, that's the real definition you’re using, not "biological".
-on AGP being a different thing: /2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/
+I definitely agree that this is a valuable thought experiment: in this limit of perfect physical transition technology, what possible reasons could there be to deny that trans women are women? Allow me to give a conditional answer.
-/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/
+_If_ psychological sex differences aren't real, then there aren't any: _ex hypothesi_, the physiological differences between females and males are the only thing for the word _woman_ to attach to, and _ex hypothesi_, we know how to fix those.
-https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/172814125686/are-you-able-to-describe-the-felt-experience-of
+Alternatively, _if_ psychological sex differences _are_ a thing, _and_ transness is a brain intersex condition such that pre-transition trans women are _already_ psychologically female, then again, there aren't any.
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard
+However, if we should be so unlucky to live in a world where psychological sex differences are a thing _and_ most trans women are motivated to transition by some _other_ reason than already having female minds, then we have some nontrivial difficulties.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff