From 6f40a63a348804b8ed01a3d7224e67e73d603d41 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 29 May 2021 21:04:55 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] drafting "... as Cognitive Illusion" Not totally settled on which title/slug I want, but I at least figured out how to start the prose. --- .../gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md | 18 +++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md index 0dc006e..1a8a4bb 100644 --- a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md +++ b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md @@ -1,9 +1,25 @@ -Title: Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes +Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or, Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion Date: 2021-06-01 05:00 Category: commentary Tags: categorization, epistemology Status: draft +A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right? + +It can't _actually_ work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you _really mean_ by the word. + +What's a _woman_? An adult human female. (Let's [not play dumb about this](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) today.) Okay, but then what's a _female_? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs. + +That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace _real_ world—but not in _the world of the imagination!_ We could _imagine_ the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, _except_ that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So that would be a _female_ and presumably a _woman_, according to our definitions, yes? + +According to our definitions, yes. [But you don't actually want to call such a person a woman] + +What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are short labels that [...] + +To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 bit strings. + + + Outline— * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on -- 2.17.1