I know that this isn't really the right place to discuss this...

Nice insight smart guy

Nice, you know that's a thing, then I got a conundrum for you.
You ever got your DNA tested? Checked what chromosomes you actually got? What if it's XX and you're a biological female with cock and balls, would you insist people calling you a she from now on?, or just accept people interacting with you as the member of the sex you pass as?

You're dismissing a whole lot of science in one broad stroke there. That basically eliminates any type of study on the human brain or consciousness, and basically all of philosophy.
I dismiss any type of study on the brain that is not neuroscience, yes. Psychology is not a science and we have found that basically none of our supposed discoveries in the history of that field are actually reproducible. Philosophy is not a science either, but that doesn't mean it has no value (except the philosophy of morality/ethics, which is worse than useless).

It is efficient at that, yes. What's your point, and how does it to relate to whether or not morality exists?

I feel like this is a trick question. Maybe I do want to live a happy life as a soul-sucking capitalist (I don't), but it's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make. I'm not an egoist.

Plenty are. Gender and Morality are not among them.

I mean, if you are thinking about entirely self interested things, I guess that can work, but as soon as you involve other people, morality IS involved whether you like it or not. If you acted without any moral sense, you would just murder the first person you saw if you liked their jacket just to take it.

That's not correct. Even higher mammals have a sense of morality and fairness, primates will react angrily if two of them work together to complete a task, and then one is given 5 bananas and the other 1. They instinctively understand some concept of ethics. Granted, it is simplistic, and society builds on top of it.

As user pointed out we can't decide this without morality. Without morality there is no concept of benefit to anyone. It's reasonable to wipe out mankind or it's reasonable to repaint your local football pitch for the kids.

see above

I have no better word for it because you CANNOT make a value judgement without morality. Call it reasonable, fair, equitable, moral, whatever, all those words have no meaning without morality.

What about freeze tag, is freeze tag real?

What about a story in a writer's head that hasn't been written down? What if hes told the story to people already? Is it real yet?

Debating wether something is real is fucking stupid, if it affects people it's a reality of our existence, wether you think it's real or not

Not really, if it meant that you would go to prison you would not do it in order to avoid punishment.

You forget that evolution is about having children and passing on your genes. Moral tribes and societies will protect children and future generations in general better. In addition, it's easy to get a short term advantage through immoral behaviour, but eventually it would often catch up to you. Granted, today, evil people get away with it more often than not due to our complex society and legal system, but in the past, if you consistently stole berries from the communal collection, you were likely to eventually end up with your head caved in, or exiled, which is as good as dead.

Well, yes, it does, morality is ultimately enforced by the individual upon themselves, you will feel guilt for doing something you know is wrong, because it went against your survival instincts, the same as how rotten food smells bad and you don't want to eat it, because humans have developed an aversion to it because it will harm us.

I have a feeling sociopathy is exceptionally rare in the sciences.

True enough, I had a feeling someone would say that, and that is a separate issue of course, there's no real situation where you can do something immoral and KNOW you will never get caught, so the justice system acts as a kind of moral enforcement. The point is that without an understanding of morality, a justice system could never have emerged to begin with, and indeed, a complex society could never have emerged. Perhaps it would be a more apt example to say that without an instinctual morality, Grugg and Ugg would have just killed each other, instead of decided to trade one's fish for the other's berries so they could have a more tasty and healthy diet. And so, society and civilisation emerged from our instinctual moral sense.

I agree with you completely, I think this is real problem that is generally not acknowledged at all. These days a huge percentage of children grow up with single moms, so you have couple of assholes fathering a disproportionately large part of the future population while making the “nicer” people pay for it.

I think that they are attracted to positions that are "social" where they can optimally exploit others, so gnerally finance, business, law, politics, entertainment etc.they just do not really have an advantage much from their privilige when doing math or whatever.

I suppose in that case I would be biologically intersex, is that correct? I am admittedly not well read on this subject.

In that situation, I would just carry on as I had before. But I would have discovered that I was not actually a male. This would have no practical influence on my life, aside from perhaps having to have the sex listed on my passport changed. This doesn't mean I "identify as a male". I am a male myself (I think!) and I don't "feel" or "identify" as one. If I discovered I was actually intersex, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to me.

Gender, when used as a thing separate from sex, often means the social aspect of it, the relationships between humans that arise from the physical part of being male or female. "Feeling" like a sex would be wanting to participate in society as one sex/gender, despite being physically another.

There is no objective morality (some people are of the opinion that there is, but I have never been able to understand their position), but morality is useful despite being subjective and made up.

That our instinctual feelings are moral is subjective.

So what? That it is not is just your opinion.

How do you make decisions then? Seeking what will make you feel good, at any cost?

You're doing morality, you're simply disagreeing with some other system of morality and justifying things through your system of morality.

Sociopaths would have a huge advantage in academia, especially in a field like O chem where half the professors are predictable narcissists ripe for manipulation. Science hasn't been about science for at least 50 years tbh

I mean, I suppose you're right in a sense, there should be stricter regulations around who can be parents in general IMO. I would prefer if children were 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out' as mother nature determined.

I'm not saying out instinctual feelings are always right, often doing the right thing will feel wrong, but they are a very simple foundation that morals are built on. As I said, we needed those instincts to tell us to try to talk to our fellow prehistoric man instead of just kill him for his stuff.

Sure, that doesn't mean it isn't important though. My morality is as close to as objective as I personally can make it - since I have access to no other perspective on life than my own (like everyone), I must treat my morality as rationally justified and therefore important. Therefore if I see someone about to kill a kid, I would stop them. If it conflicts with their morality, they will try to stop me in turn. Thus, society emerges from the general consensus about what is right.

Sorry, I got a little left behind in this discussion, but as I started the thread I still feel I should answer you even if I'm treading old ground.

It's obviously not in my self interest to murder someone for their jacket. I shouldn't need to explain why, and if you ask me to I'm going to assume you are arguing in bad faith. Perhaps it would be if we were both freezing to death and they wouldn't share or huddle, but an extreme situation like that is a difficult one even for moralists. (Knowing that by not huddling he is dooming you both to death, isn't it "morally better" to kill him so at least you might survive by wearing his clothes and sheltering in his corpse?)

I hate to be that guy, but doesn't it seem more likely that the primate is just angry that he got less bananas full stop, and that fairness has nothing to do with it?

This is just poor wording on my part. Call it "collective interest" instead of "benefit to humanity" if you prefer. I hope you see the distinction.

That's my point.

Whether society agrees on the reality of certain concepts has a huge impact on how we organise ourselves. To use the simplest and most obvious example, because we believe that gender exists, we encourage the mentally ill to take hormones and mutilate themselves. If we collectively denied the reality of gender, we would instead by pouring huge amounts of money into research for a cure.

Lol ne we'd just throw anti depressants at them like we do everyone else

But yes, trying to influence public opinion or debating how to do that is much more productive than arguing wether something is "real" because "real" is subjective

This is just mental illness.

Seeking what is in your self interest, yes (N.B. this is not the same thing as what makes you feel good). More often than not, this overlaps with the interest of the group you participate in.

I address this here:
It was just poor wording from me.

We do that because hormones and bottom surgery are proven to be the most effective at alleviating gender dysphoria. Or is gender dysphoria, along with all other mental illness, not real because it can't be isolated and observed in a lab?

Reality is not subjective. I'm surprised there are any idealists on an explicitly communist board.

As I said, perhaps it's better to relate this back to pre-society. My point was that without morality the lives of others do not only have a low value, they are absolutely valueless. There is no way that a society could exist in those circumstances. Therefore morality is essential for society, culture, civilisation, and so on, and for man to reach even a fraction of his potential.

Isn't that the same thing? The monkey is perfectly happy when he gets a cucumber for his pebble, but when he sees that the other monkey is getting grapes for his pebble, he is angry because that is unfair and he would rather have grapes. Perhaps it's a better proof though that the very highest primates will actually offer some of their reward to their partners if it is given out unfairly.

npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/09/18/349514734/life-s-unfair-but-chimps-and-humans-know-when-to-even-the-score?t=1562262340078

Not really, to be honest. Let's put it like this to match the earlier example: You have 7 billion winter coats to hand out to 7 billion humans. For the sake of example lets say eveyone needs a winter coat equally badly (that is they all get equally cold) and they won't wear out. How do you allocate the coats? You may say it's intuitive that everyone should get 1 coat, and that's true, but it isn't objective. If someone else was to say, well, I'll give 7 coats each to 1 billion people, as is roughly analogous to capitalism, how can you say that is wrong without morality? You can say: well, the other 6 billion will freeze without coats - you are asserting that people freezing is bad, morality. Or you can say, that isn't fair, everyone should get one, since none of them did any more than anyone else to deserve it, morality. You can say, everyone should get one each, because humans are essentially of equal value and should be provided for equally, that again is morality.

But the fact that morality is not objective doesn't mean it is not valuable. The value of a piece of art is subjective, the value of a human life, that doesn't mean those values don't matter.

Gender objectively exists, it hasn't always existed and changed depending on the circumstances of a given society but there objectively are behaviours, forms of dress, social roles and a multitude of things associated with those which clustered into categories. These are sometimes, but not always, related to, but distinct from, sex. And people absolutely can and do feel a multitude of ways about these categories and clusters of signifiers and how they relate to them.
Same goes for morality, it objectively exists, we assign moral values to things and have moral preferences for things that are fairly universal and intuitive, that boiling children alive for fun is wrong, that it is better to not suffer than to suffer, etc. Denying the validity of these face value intuitions is also not tenable since it implies the invalidity of epistemological intuitions and global scepticism which is inconsistent with any actions or beliefs whatsoever. Moral facts exist and operate within society, their denial by you doesn't change this.

The constant here seems to be your confusion regarding what makes something real or 'existing', society does in fact exist, there are things that humans do and think that are real, regardless of whether they have a basis outside human behaviour. Love, suffering, property, trade, value, race, class, family, none of these things are any more real than gender and morality if you were consistent in your anti-realism. However we all know they're real, they exist, they feature plentifully in our lives.

I won't comment on the gender/sex issue, since my knowledge of biology is zero.

Yes indeed. This is one of the chores of scientific socialism.

Lenin agreed with the phrase: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". However, this does not mean that moral is not necessary; because we have a certain moral, we have ends. What this means is that scientific socialism is not moralism, as romantic socialism was before Marx. We don't believe that workers exploitation is bad because a great deal of people suffers; we believe it's bad because a great deal of people suffers when this suffering could perfectly be avoided. It's not that we are SWJ bitches complaining about everything. On the very contrary, we are rational. We believe that if we have a better way to achieve something, then that's the correct way. Moralism, i.e. complaining and denouncing every bad thing that happens on earth, will lead us nowhere. And a socialist state of things won't be heaven on earth either. People will still have to work and will still be compelled to do so; coercive power will still exist. But it will be better than capitalism.

Fuck off.

I can disagree and say: no, morals come from some set of principles that I will pick arbitrarily.

Why should it be considered illness, and even if it should, why can it not be accomodated for?

Interesting. How so? Do you mean forsaking immediate feeling good for long term gain? That would still be maximising feeling good.

The primary goal of medicine, mental and physical, is to cure illness, not to alleviate symptoms (primary being the operative word here, don't nitpick). You could perhaps argue that it would be okay to treat the symptoms as a stopgap while were seeking a cure, but that's not what's happening. In fact, those advocating for symptomatic treatment are blocking the possibility of a cure on purely ideological grounds.

And that's fine, /your/ moral compass can be based on whatever is important to you, but without the sense that morality is important that is part of our genes, you would not care about morality to begin with. Does the cuckoo bird feel bad about destroying the egg of another mother that she replaces with her own? Does she ponder and think perhaps she should not have done it, only to construct a moral system where it is allowable despite her feelings that it might be wrong? No, of course not, she just does what is in her instincts and doesn't even have the capacity to consider it as a moral action.

Things that influence reality are "real". If this is your definition of real then morality and gender are real, or at least a certain pattern of brain activity corresponding to these immaterial concepts is real. My point is debating wether or not something is real is not productive, if anything is idealist it's your concept of real

He said "collective interest" and 6/7 people would not have their interest met by your solution, so unless you weigh some people more than others it does optimally satisfy collective interest.

What most people here call sociopathy should be better called plain old careerism. Most sociopaths IRL aren't charming movie types who bend the hidden rules of society to their will, because of faulty theory of mind it's hard for them to understand the rules in the first place. Unironically this misclassification on the part of a lot of posters on this board is caused by substituting analysis of people's behavior with empty moralism, maybe in an attempt to avoid biological determinism and other bullshit generally popular in the chans. It's not hard nor generally considered bad in the context of the 1st world to get 'normal' people to treat each other as disposable in any number of scenarios. For whatever reason the justification that "it's all they could have done" is treated as proper and feeling bad is not really an obstacle but the only way a person can commit sins without thinking of themselves as a sinner.

Precisely, but more than that; my own life is valueless. Moral values do not exist.

I just disagree completely.

No it absolutely isn't. He's not thinking "Oh my god, it's totally unfair that Terrence got 5 bananas and I only got 1". He's not thinking anything at all. He just wants bananas. I think you could disprove this by running a study where the primate already has more bananas than he can eat himself and then distributing more in an "unfair" way.

No, this is no better. Sharing among your group is more often than not in your self-interest.

I would allocate them according to my self interest, which might be 1:1 or it might not. But what I would do personally is irrelevant. These sorts of thought experiments distract from and obscure the real discussion, which is whether or not morality exists (objectively or otherwise).

I'm not saying it doesn't have value because it's not objective, I'm saying there is no such thing as moral value at all. I feel like we might just be talking past each other at this point, and I don't think I'm smart enough to articulate my thoughts in a way that might help you understand my perspective. I'll work on that. Thank you for your time user, sincerely.

I'd say there's no strong evidence either way. Some neurological studies have observed differences between the brains of cis and trans people, but that doesn't tell us anything about what qualia they experience. It's certainly not impossible that they feel like the opposite gender though.
In either case, there's no harm in humoring them. We've got bigger things to worry about like capitalism.

Without some kind of axioms about what is good and bad you can't argue for or against any course of action. You just end up in a quagmire of nihilism. Agonizing pain is logically no worse than ecstatic bliss because both are just arbitrary configurations of subatomic particles.
As Hume said, you can't get from an is to an ought by logical deduction.

This is the best post so far. Thank you user. You've not convinced me, but you've given me something to think about.

My initial reaction: the issue is that human beings have become so intelligent that we can conjure up things in our minds that aren't real, but through us they influence reality. There's no material basis for gender or morality, they are a product of human thought, and therefore are not real. Depending on your definition, the other things you mention may or may not exist:

The bond created by oxytocin? Objectively real.
The chemical reaction to pain and stress? Objectively real.
The physical objects themselves? Objectively real.

et cetera. I could say more on this but I really want to think it over more. Thanks again. I'd appreciate a response from you, even if it's just to further elaborate on your perspective rather than to address my post directly.

If an illness has no symptoms, it's not even called an illness.
Yes, there are transmissible diseases which might not cause symptoms in every host but are still treated by doctors, but that's because they cause symptoms in at least a few hosts. If an infection doesn't have any harmful effect on its hosts, it's just considered part of the normal human microbiome.

Is human thought real?

Attached: thinking gorillaman.jpg (600x928, 85.96K)

Thanks for the post. I broadly agree, though I think I'm a little more extreme than you. For example, I don't agree with this:

It's not "bad" at all, moral values do not exist. It's just not in the collective interest of humanity.

It is illness by definition: a condition which causes serious disorder in a person's behaviour or thinking. Disordered behaviour and thinking should be cured, not accommodated, and I think this is self-evident. Please let me know why you disagree, I'm genuinely interested.

Sorry, forgot to address your second point.

All I can say is that self-interest and hedonism are not the same thing. I'm not sure that explaining this in detail is conducive to the aim of this thread.

This is literally idealism. I do not believe this.

Debating it is productive if doing so brings about change (which I believe it would do) as I mentioned in a previous post.

Not him, but I basically disagree because the definition of what makes particular thought patters "ordered" or "disordered" is completely arbitrary. You're insisting that because someone is human they must be forced to conform to what is considered normal for human biology and psychology. I disagree. It's more important to make people happy than it is to force conformity. If their body doesn't match how they want their body to be, we should strive to change their body. That even goes as far as assisted suicide too. The mind has ultimate supremacy over the body. If there's a disagreement, the mind must always be prioritized. The only exception is if that change would hurt other humans, and that's definitely not the case for trans people.

Consider, is this not a distinction without a difference? We can distinguish between material and immaterial reality without denying the objective real properties of one.
The point is that you're not really providing any argument for why something being a product of human thought makes it not real.
There is a significant gap between 'love' and 'the bond created by oxytocin' and its disingenuous to suggest otherwise, love is a widely experienced phenomenon which while amalgamated of various neuro-chemical processes in our brains, like our entire experience in general, is psychological, not neuro or physiological, and comprises a vast array of social features such as romantic relationships which have no material basis whatsoever yet we have no issue acknowledging their existence which is brazenly obvious to us.
The same goes for suffering.
You are utterly confused when it comes to property, of course property is not 'the physical objects themselves', that you typed that out makes me think you're responding for the sake of responding rather than any intellectual engagement. Since we can take two identical objects, one of which is someone's property, private or otherwise, and one which is not, there is nothing material that distinguishes them, there is not material reality of property of any kind, it is solely a social institution made up by humans, very much real and affecting reality, yet having no 'objective' material basis. Fundamentally you can't object to the reality of socially constructed facts any more than you can object to the reality of constructed buildings as not existing on some fundamental 'natural' level, by which I mean you can deny it but you'll end up running face first into a wall.

Isn't "collective interest of humanity" a moral value as well? You might as well be completely individualistic, hedonistic and just think in your lifespan regardless of what happens with humanity; that would be completely inmoral.

I would say that still entails some kind of moral axioms, even if the only axiom is "maximize my personal pleasure".

I'd say there can't really be evidence in the scientific sense one way or the other. It's purely intellectual.
Of course there is; more than anyone else, it harms those afflicted.
This is, of course, undeniably true.

I'm sorry, I'm a little slow; I don't quite understand the point you are making here. Could you elaborate for me please?

The thoughts themselves? Yes. The things being thought of? Not necessarily.

I disagree. Certainly, it's much more difficult to determine what constitutes a mental illness than a physical one, but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary.

Of course, but I think wording it like that is unfair. Really what this means is "I think that physical and mental illnesses and disabilities should be cured".

These things are one and the same. Physical and mental illnesses and disabilities cause unhappiness.

What they "want" is a delusion. You wouldn't mutilate someone who "felt" like they wanted to be quadriplegic, you would attempt to cure the delusion.

This I might actually agree with, though I'm not convinced either way. It seems to me entirely possible that it could be in someone's rational self-interest to die; this desire is not always caused by mental illness.

If you accept the existence of mental illness per se, this seems a very strange position to take.

Why? To both assertions.

Let's say I have a device which can fundamentally alter your brain structure.
While you're asleep, and without your consent, I modify your brain to remedy all of your problems. All of your irrational fears are gone. You no longer feel depression, anxiety, or self-doubt. You are more intelligent and have a full university education in a STEM subject. You are confident, have good dress sense, can win over anyone with smooth conversational skills, and can basically earn as much as you like and fuck whoever you like. Every part of your brain which could be considered sub-optimal is optimized to make you into the best possible person.

Would you say I helped you?
Personally I'd say I killed you and replaced you with a completely different person.

No, I think there is an immediate and important distinction between reality and thought.
We'd then just be having the same materialist vs idealist debate that's raged for millennia. I'd rather not do that. Honestly, I didn't expect to find any idealists on Zig Forums, so I hadn't considered that I might need to make the case for materialism when I made this thread.

As for the rest of your post: it seems that you have entirely misunderstood me. It's more than likely my fault, so I apologise for that. However, I object to your accusation that I am not engaging intellectually. I find it hard to believe that you could read my posts in this thread and come to that conclusion. The important part of my post was:

I listed off materialist interpretations of the meanings of the words you provided, and the implication was that the definitions you had intended when you wrote those words were not real. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Therefore:

The psychological "love" is not real.
The psychological "suffering" is not real
"Property" as in ownership is not real.

No, I don't believe so. Do you think self-interest is a moral value? If so, why, and if not, how could collective interest be?

You are right of course. Your mistake is in what you hold to be the implications of what you just said. Even if gender isn't real, it maintains a certain reality in the fact that people believe in it. Gender doesn't exist, but the superstition of gender is materially real. Whether or not you know gender to be false is irrelevant. People in your society propagate the idea, and hence gender continues to exert a force over them.

Thus being transgender is entirely valid. A transgender individual doesn't have to believe in the reality of gender themselves, they merely have to believe that they will be perceived as some gender. These qualities that will be imposed on them do not conform to what they understand themselves to authentically be, or wish to be, and this creates the tension usually referred to as "gender dysphoria." Since humans are inherently social creatures, this perception by others can weigh very heavily on a person. So they choose to "transition" from one gender spook to another.

Further, it is entirely possible to rationally understand gender to be meaningless, but nonetheless continue to believe in gender stereotypes in day-to-day reality. A transgender person might find themselves unable to shake the gendered categories they were brought up with from their self-perception, even if they know them to be irrational. You cannot "cure" this mental illness for them individually. They're simply engaging in the cultural norms of our society. To resolve the problem would require a larger cultural transformation, a true abolition of gender.

Of course

In that case, I'm not sure I understand how you define personhood.

I mean that doctors only really care about curing symptoms because if they can cure all the symptoms then, by definition, what's left has no effect on your well-being. They only want to cure the underlying problem because that's the best way to cure all of the symptoms. Symptoms are the reason why we want to cure diseases in the first place.

If you were told you have "flumgumbus" but it has no measurable effect on you or anyone else, would you pay for a doctor to treat you?

Okay, here's another thought experiment which I believe is exactly ethically equivalent:
The Borg come to Earth, abduct you, and alter your consciousness so that you derive extreme pleasure from serving the collective. You are in bliss, but you're also a cybernetic drone living in a metal cube with flickering green lights everywhere. Your job, which you deeply enjoy, involves invading other planets and infecting their citizens with the same nanites you were infected with. If asked, you would say you are much happier in your new life.

I assume you would consider that a bad thing, right?

Let me rephrase: matter, or states of matter, that interacts with other matter or states of matter, is real. Abstract ideas like gender or morality are states of matter in a material brain

Well, damn. That's the best argument for morality existing that I've heard. Thanks.

"Disorder" here only means deviation from what you consider "normal". What if instead we started considering it one of the "normal" behaviours?

Transgenderism cannot be "cured" with present knowledge, so it's hard to discuss whether cure would always be desirable without knowing what it would entail.

Obesity is an illness, and it is curable. Yet we do accomodate for obese people in society. Many eyesight disorders are left untreated, and society does not reprehend those who for lack of treating their eyesight disorders need to move closer to read things. Being too tall could be considered a disorder, yet we as a society do not absolutely refuse any kind of accomodation for height and see shortening surgery as the only reasonable option.

I'm curious as to how self-interest differs from "feeling good". Though you might imagine a more noble purpose in whatever thing you accomplish, you only judge its worth in how good you feel about it. No?

Great post, and I hope I'm not just saying that because I agree with it. I am indeed arguing for the abolition of gender.

I see where I've misunderstood you. I took you a little too literally when you said "alleviate" (make less severe) gender dysphoria. If you had said "cure" gender dysphoria, I would have just disagreed that hormones and surgery is a cure.

Of course. I don't believe that those two thought experiments are equivalent, however. It's not in my self-interest to be absorbed into the collective against my will, and to assert otherwise is to conflate hedonism and self-interest, as has happened elsewhere in this thread. In contrast, it is in my interest to cure my mental deficiencies, as in your previous example. Although having typed that out, I'm less sure of myself. I'll think on this a little more. Thank you user.

How do you define self-interest then?

Thought is most definitely real although not material, to deny this is incoherent nonsense, however that is not what I was referring to at all, I am referring to the reality of immaterial things, specifically socially constructed reality as no less real than material reality. The law, family, property, morality and gender are not thoughts, they exist in thoughts but also outside them, they exist in our behaviour, in our social life, in our daily existence and experience.
I get the impression that you do not understand what the terms idealism and materialism mean, no one in this thread has advanced an idealist position, in arguing that social constructs no one is claiming they are a priori of material reality or exist independently, in fact my argument from the start asserted that these things such as gender haven't always existed, they are not intrinsic and are historically and socially contingent, this is a thoroughly materialist position.
This discussion is not one of materialism vs idealism but rather of moral and epistemic realism and anti-realism.
But they are objectively real, we experience them and they affect us, our entire lives are structured around them, you can't coherently argue that property isn't real because to do so with any consistency would lead to you self-destroying, anti-realism of this degree is untenable. By committing yourself to this nonsensical position that only that which is material is real and reject the reality of social constructs you place yourself in an impossible position. This should make you stop and reconsider whether you're right or not and whether you're just placing an arbitrary and useless qualification in a misguided quest for supposed objectivity.

That’s kind of the point. Because gender doesn’t objectively exist, there’s no reason to treat as more than a subjective experience.

That's a serious reach, isn't it?

It doesn't matter what we consider normal to be. Normal exists. Determining what normal is is the difficult part. But just because it's hard, perhaps even impossible, does not mean normal is arbitrary.

I think I disagree, but it depends on what you're implying with "what it would entail". If the cure is just "take these pills twice a day and you will have no gender dysphoria", I think it would be very hard to argue that that isn't desirable.

Perhaps if we didn't, there would be less obese people. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Of course, the equivalent of this would be people who just live with their gender dysphoria and make do as best as they can.

I don't like physical analogies because they just really don't apply very well, and it muddies the waters.

No. There are plenty of things I have done in the past, and continue to do now, that make me absolutely miserable, but they are in my self-interest to do; not because they hurt in the short-term but make me "feel good" in the long term, but (as an example) because in doing them I fulfill my responsibilities. I don't "feel good" when I meet my obligations, yet I do them because to do otherwise would negatively affect my life.

I am afraid I have to concede to you. You are obviously more intelligent and well read, and I can't argue on the same level that you can.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into your posts due to insecurity, but it seems like you are trying to win the argument and prove me wrong, rather than to help me to understand why I am wrong. I'm not a fan of the confrontational style of debating, because I get nothing from it except a bruised ego. I hope at least that some anons were able to read our exchange and benefit from it in some way. Thanks for your time.

No. Normal is what we say it is.

Well yes pretty much, but also feeling like one gender can be a big part of a person's identity so if they lived as a transgender for a while and didn't want to change that then I wouldn't say it was a wrong choice either.

Which is what happens. So what's the point of questioning gender, again?

You would feel bad by the way avoiding responsibilities would negatively affect your life, so you fulfil them. Not feeling bad is a degree of feeling good.

Recent research suggests that electrical activity in the brain is almost constantly subcritical to a phase change in patterns

Further assuming materialism, the claim is a priori philosophically if the brain is the material seat of the mind

You seem sophisticated enough to have a good counterargument or be able to find a flaw in my reasoning, since you had the nous to notice the claim appeared naive

You have my attention user, state your case

Its indisputable if you're a materialist

The only possible counter argument I can think of involves something to do with vocalization, reading and writing as a hint OP
Just in case you're stuck
I'm sure you'll deliver and the case you make will surprise and impress me

I deny that it exists subjectively. I deny that anyone "feels" like a sex, and I assert that anyone who claims they do is mentally ill.

No. Normal exists independently of what we say normal is.

I'd say it is inherently wrong to live with delusion. Their desire to not change is based on delusion. If they were no longer deluded, they would have no desire to change back.

This is exactly what I mean about physical analogies. We're just talking past each other now, and nothing we are saying relates at all to the original question, which is does gender exist?

This is reductionist. If the fulfilling of obligations made me personally more miserable than not fulfilling them would, it would be a net negative to fulfill them from a hedonist perspective. However, it could well still be in my self-interest if fulfilling them is good for my offspring, for example. If you try to claim that fulfilling parental obligations makes me "feel good", I will accuse you of not being a parent.

Assuming you are sincere, you have unfortunately overestimated my sophistication and I shall now have to disappoint you. Did you not see the nazi flag? That should have been a dead giveaway.

Electrical activity in the brain gives rise to thoughts; this is indisputable, as says. I reject the claim that this activity IS the thought. The thought is a subjective interpretation of the activity. Two people can think of the same thing, and the electrical activity that gives rise to those two identical thoughts would be completely different. You can't claim that this abstract idea is both sets of activity at the same time; to do so you would have to then concede that any brain activity could be any thought, and furthermore, that with an infinite number of brains, every possible combination of activity and thought exists. This makes the relationship between activity and thought meaningless.

Assuming you are sincere, you have unfortunately overestimated my sophistication and I shall now have to disappoint you.
No sir, I did not, and you did not
I must raise my cup to toast you
Thank you, it is not often I am surprised

You are welcome here any time user

More research is required

the creative functions of the neocortex are not gendered because there you may select which genetic pool's hive reatity you'd like to subscribe to
you gendering someone is a remnant from the hive of gene pools which were necessary to advance intelligence to the point where there is an aware choice, but from within you cannot know. escape the gene pools
i sleep

Cultural morality seems to stem from accountability. When people are unaccountable for their actions they tend to act more immoral. Case in point with all the trolley morality problems (notice how its based on if you never get caught). I think there is a basis for morality rooted in things you wish wouldn't happen to yourself. Besides that, morality is just a concept. When it comes to gender, gender is a social feature that seems to change by culture. Some cultures have different gender norms and the only dominant gender norm seems to come from imperialist nations and philosophy, considering imperialism also destroys culture in the process.

Gender norms are things that are taught to people, its not like boys come out the vagoo shooting guns and playing basketball while girls come out playing dress up and applying makeup and shit. Most kids identify with what their parents do and get taught the gender norms through parenting and obervation of their peers. Theres a reason why the term sex and gender are seperate. Sex is the physical characteristics at birth (muh dick, or muh puss) while gender is the expressed trait that is considered normal for each sex. Im not saying that this is in a vacuum and that kids born in the wild would have gender-less characteristics, but they obviously wouldn't know any social norms and definitely wouldn't be considered (normal) by any means.

Attached: 27a42b023f635fd46ebc7093c3f06d40893ba4af2bac05e5f592897314235e48.png (1400x2225, 3.7M)

I think this is just another factor, them being unaccountable for their actions that is, that adds up to "acting immoral".
But what I wonder is what are the other things that play on in such a situation, because, for example, moral behavior is closely tied with empathy, moral "thought", but also the general context of the situation at hand.
Since I am unsure what the word is in english, I will go ahead and keep using (moral thought)
So anyhow, moral thought =/= moral behavior, where one is thinking "whats the right thing to do" while the other one is actually taking action.
A good example of this could be portrayed by the Heinz Dilemma, or honestly any sort of "moral dilemma" type of experiment, where "decisions to help others" was moving from 25% to 88% as you go through the stages of moral development.
(Pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional)
To those unfamiliar, the Heinz Dilemma basically is:
And after hearing the story a number of questions is asked.
Going back to the stadiums I mentioned.
Obeying laws and regulations without question in an attempt to avoid punishment.

You're 100% correct, trans ideology completely contradicts materialist ideology and the marxist line on women's liberation.

wew

Attached: 1mde5mxce1x01.png (500x429, 204.73K)

Without morality you can't say that human flourishing is better than human suffering. Nor can you even define either of those.

And you would be right, which is why I don't use either of those as a baseline. "Morality" historically is simply a question of power and the material conditions of society, with societies, groups, and even classes adopting moral ideals or ideas based on their position and conditions whether to justify them or for material benefit. In reality though, human flourishing isn't inherently better or worse then human suffering. Whether something is good or bad doesn't factor into me being a communist, because communism isn't something that comes about due to some ideal of it being better. It is something which comes about through the resolution a continuous historical material dialectic that began with the first human societies. It stands as a historical necessity not because of our feelings regarding how nice communism would be, but because it exists as a consequential constant which comes about by the progression and resolution of material antagonisms. The only decision then is to decide whether to accept the constant and work to resolve the antagonisms which lead to it, or push against it, which is a Sisyphean affair. Neither is "wrong", but only one holds universal "permanency" past the other.

To quote Zizek (inb4 Zizek), "communists experience themselves as instruments in which to exercise a historical necessity". That's more or less how I would say I view things.

If communism is inevitable and so on, why should we even do anything? This shit is hard, I'd happily give up on it. It just seems like you're overexplaining things.

good post, im .
I could of gone into further analysis but I decided to not really go super deep into it (I had some time constraints considering I had to do something else) but your input is greatly appreciated.
The explanations of the different levels of morality for age ranges is something I would of addressed if I had more time to write my original response.

Attached: 27a42b023f635fd46ebc7093c3f06d40893ba4af2bac05e5f592897314235e48.png (1400x2225, 3.7M)

Communism being inevitable doesn't negate us being a part of that inevitability. We are the tools which exist within the dialectic that moves it forward. You can find personal reasons for you doing so and you may feel motivated to become a communist initially for "moral" reasons, but the material dialectic remains the same with any "moral" understanding simply being an adornment on top of a continual immortal process. You're free to ignore this and just insert your own personal "moral" reason, but for me such a process itself is only thing that can be said to really hold any real consequence and effect and thus "meaning".