I've always appreciated your critique of cartesianism. His ethos only makes sense in philosophy classes and academia. Not the real world. Not unlike many contemporary ideologies.
You may not be aware but your insight is supported by research spanning psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, cybernetics, neurobiology, statistical thermodynamics, neuropharmacology, even AI and computational anatomy and other fields of thought relating to self-organizing systems.
It’s unusual to read excellent focused writing in a complex subject.
Not only are we and our mind our body but our body is also perpetually constructed by our mind. The state of being conscious involves neural systems constantly predicting what our embodied self will sense, to maintain life through homeostatic processes including maintaining the integrity of our body.
Should the mind predict one thing through a model it maintains of the world (projective reality), and the body sense another, the difference between prediction and sensation (often called “surprise”) causes the mind to use energy to either update its model (allostasis) or direct the body to adjust environment (homeostasis). That’s a large part of what consciousness means in an abstract way.
Should “surprise” persist it can be exhausting and debilitating because the constant energy we expend to minimize cognitive error between prediction and perception. A small amount of surprise is managed all the time through our “default mode network”. Big surprises trigger other very energy intensive networks (Ventral Attention, Somatomotor, etc.)
This is well characterized mathematically in cognitive science through the Friston Free Energy principle.
A problem occurs when the model of the world (reality) neural systems maintain is irrevocably faulty. In general psychosis, the conscious mind presents a reality that cannot be confirmed by sensation - you see things not there, hear things and so forth; the neural system cannot track reality presented by embodied senses, energy intensive networks are activated (SN, DAN, CEN, Limbic for “fight or flight”)
An organic example of this is the time-tested striking issue that in various psychoses (one being schizophrenia) eyes cannot accurately track moving objects - “Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements” (SPEM). Cognitive systems in such individuals cannot effectively model the position of moving objects and send signals to the eye muscles to accurately track them. It is a semi-conscious reflexive ability which is entirely predicated on our cognitive system being able to, with millisecond accuracy, predict reality. The effect is so strong and specific - and heritable - that you can accurately assume that 1st degree relatives of people with faulty tracking are also faulty, but may not necessarily have psychoses. This SPEM is irrevocable. Drugs to moderate psychosis have a neutral or negative effect on this state.
Another key example of an irrevocably faulty neural predictive system is in patients which have phantom limb sensation. It’s somewhat known that patients who have had a limb amputated will often, permanently, retain a variety of sensations, including pain. What’s not widely known is that people who are born without limbs can also have phantom limb sensations, as has been documented for centuries. The result of this fault is that the person’s cognitive version of embodied reality is perpetually wrong and the signals the mind creates to correct the phantom error are ever present, a recipe for exhaustive unhappiness; dysphoria. Imagine constantly feeling you are in imminent danger of body damage.
Why this is important is the opposite case - not where the person’s mental model of their body has a limb not present, but when they have a cognitive model which doesn’t include part of their body. The effect is somewhat the same.
As I started out saying: should the mind predict one thing through a model it maintains of reality, and the body sense another, the difference between prediction and sensation (often called “surprise”) causes the mind to use energy to either update its model or direct the body to adjust context.
An “extra” leg or a “missing” leg both cause persistent irrevocable distress due to faulty predictive modeling, or what we think of as reality and consciousness.
Genitals are part of the body, and are also subject to the same problems of embodiment and projective reality.
Men who have had for different reasons genitals amputated often still feel an utterly realistic phantom penis, even erections, and orgasms. Women with breasts or genitals removed can similarly feel the phantom organs, even penetration of the vagina and orgasm.
That’s where the fundamental problem and paradox with trans lies.
Considering trans men, some tiny percentage of them who are not fetishists or delusional, some group of them will feel that their real penis is not part of their body because their cognitive model of the body has no genitals (though of course they still feel their penis) as some people feel a real leg is not part of their body because their cognitive model has no leg. It is not because they necessarily believe they are “female” it is because they do not believe they have a penis. For these men, it’s possible that everything else about the reaction to their cognitive misprojection of their body is an attempt to rationalize the condition as being female. They also get exhaustive triggers to high-energy neural systems as though responding to a threat.
[Considering Intersex individuals, genital amputations and mutilations can never “match” their body to anything. Unless they had an irrevocable cognitive defect, the model of reality presented to their consciousness is that of the genitals they have. Altering them is a tragic example of iatrogenic (medical) damage. ]
With trans the paradox lies in the fact that removing a penis doesn’t actually remove the penis from their cognitive projection of reality. They can continue to sense a penis, felt not to be theirs, as part of the body and in (phantom) sensation.
If you have a fetish of being female, or a delusion, or a cognitive failure to feel your penis is yours, even removing it will not obliterate it from consciousness. There is no way out except to learn to cope with the feelings the fetish, delusion, or cognitive failure.
Your body and mind are created together and are inseparable; consciousness relies on the body to perpetually confirm reality, projective reality without body sensation is psychosis or delusion. Mind and body cannot operate independently. Should the mind and body not confirm reality together it is the result of irrevocable defects. These defects are exhausting since the mind and body the perpetually attempt to remediate the lack of confirmation, errors or surprise through activation of defensive cognitive processes. These ideas are true for all categories for mind-body reality projective errors.
Is it really possible to beat the trickster philosophers who invented gender identity ideology at their own game?
An alternative to reasoning our way out of the trap is to show conclusively that there is no scientific basis for the imaginary phenomenon called gender. Instead, what’s happening is that people are learning about gender. It’s a socially transmitted set of attitudes and beliefs that suits the needs of people predisposed to lose their grip on biology, facts and reality. I hope qualified scholars are working on this thesis right now.
I agree it's worthy of study but I'd suggest that your hypothesis is almost certainly false. Not everything about gender is socially learned or constructed.
Some facts:
- brains of males and females can be reliably distinguished by machine learning.
- big five traits, which are considered fairly reliable through replication studies have shown an association with sex
- psychological conditions, which include behaviors and affect are associated with sex (eg autism).
- eye movement studies of infants shows boys are more likely to pay attention to objects and girls dolls (not sure on replication standing)
- teachers and parents have intuitive understanding of girls tending to be different from boys, particularly at certain stages of development. Girls more conscientious, boys rowdier more physically aggressive.
- other mammalian species without culture show sex differences in behavior.
- development in the brain is influenced by sex hormones and sex chromosomes
Now of course you might for most of them say it is learned (not sure how you'd account for infant differences). And these are associations over populations.
But it's very unlikely that evolution would just stop at physical differences and not encode other factors or that brain differences are solely the result of physical differences.
As a thought experiment why would females be more likely to be high in neuroticism? It's apparent from my experience that this gendered neuroticism is especially notable with regard to one's children. In my experience women tend to worry more about a lost child than a man. This would make complete sense from an evolutionary perspective and when you see it, it doesn't come across as learned behavior, it is deeply primal.
Men are more violent and do more risky activities. Women tend to be more communicative. While there's cultural components why wouldn't our evolutionary history, confirmed in our physical biology, also affect such things? How could it not?
Now quite a lot is social and learned and changeable but not everything. The hard bit is recognizing which is which.
I reread the comment and realise I misread gender here - it's gender as in gender ideology/ gender identity and I see your point that sex is really the underpinning reality.
I suppose part of me would like to explore gender as the interaction of sex and culture but the current times don't allow it as the word has been incorporated into ideology.
Gender is also attributes associated with men and women, hence the language of masculine and feminine qualities, not just clothing changes. To reduce gender to the purely cultural is overly reductive, though I can see the value in getting rid of the word altogether in the current times.
Lipstick is gendered but not purely cultural learning I would argue.
Indeed, the Mind can serve as a refuge from overwhelming sensory experience, which is why I think we have the capacity--life can definitely get overwhelming! It doesn't change the facts of our experience, just the perception (or not) of it. In my experience, it's only a temporary reprieve, while we gather the necessary resources to, as you say, protect and understand ourselves. In my case, befriend my Self--all that awareness will allow, because my body has knowing that my mind can't know. Like how to heal. It's an inside job!
“Born in the wrong body” is the most idiotic idea that anyone can have. People who fall for this ridiculous assertion, obviously have a psychological problem. Nobody ever said such an insane thing before this whole gender ideology was invented.
I am my body, but I am also not just my physical body. My physical body is not in my consciousness, and my un-consciousness is not necessarily stuck in my physical body, when I am asleep and dreaming. When I am meditating, my consciousness may be aware outside the body. But when I am in the physical body, in the here and now of 3D, I have a female body. And according to many psychologists who have used hypnotic regression, we choose our parents and we choose our bodies before we come into life. We did not choose the wrong body for this life. Read the books of Michael Newton PhD, and the Michael Newton Institute.
We are sensing beings before we are able to be thinking beings, sensing comes before thinking. Our consciousness is only able to be experienced through our embodiment. Everything that we are able to be conscious of is because of our embodiment. All your dreams, meditating, hypnotic regression, are all based on embodied experiences. Without these embodied experiences, there would be nothing to build in your imagination. What you are describing about "regression" is a world organizing belief that you think with your mind, whether it is true or not, your embodied experiences in the here and now are the only experiences you have access to.
Yes, we can all choose to "believe" aka THINK anything about our embodied experience, but the only PLACE to think these beliefs are AS embodied beings. I don't believe that understanding ourselves as embodied beings is limiting in any way. The experiences we have in the here and now ARE infinite, mysterious, and beautiful. Anything that our consciousness is or isn't IS embodied. All my best to you and thank you for the engagement and conversation.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
"External alterations made in the name of identity congruence are just that, external, superficial, and cosmetic. Our physical being remains constant."
So much time, $, surgical pain, self-hating wasted for a LIE, for a cult ideology.
Great post that gets to the heart of the matter in very clear writing. As you point to--the trans project, while it might perform a queerying role in culture --is still just a role, a persona. It is a desperate kind of existential entrapment to try to be something you are fundamentally not, there's no way to win there.
Buddhist ideas are another approach where it might become apparent that wanting to be something is a thought and is already a thought arising from an embodied awareness that is primary. Saying that I did once read of a transgender monk and it doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps where these people end up in terms of rationale is simply they feel more comfortable as appearing as the other sex without any metaphysical claims. But I think there must be a culture bound component to even that stance, and probably a hidden romanticism or transcendence claim about a true self or some such.
So very profound. The deepest Magick is our connection to All.. to the Great Mother, to All of Nature through our Body/ Mind/ Spirit. It is One. There are deep deep womyns Mysteries and many many Ways to be Female...and express Oursrlves...through our Female bodies. I have found such Mysteries on womyns Land Festivals, ONLY in the company of other womyn.....XX all the way.
Wow!
I am my body!
I've always appreciated your critique of cartesianism. His ethos only makes sense in philosophy classes and academia. Not the real world. Not unlike many contemporary ideologies.
Thanks, Amy. Sending lots of love!
Thank you, Gillian.
Great piece!
You may not be aware but your insight is supported by research spanning psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, cybernetics, neurobiology, statistical thermodynamics, neuropharmacology, even AI and computational anatomy and other fields of thought relating to self-organizing systems.
It’s unusual to read excellent focused writing in a complex subject.
Not only are we and our mind our body but our body is also perpetually constructed by our mind. The state of being conscious involves neural systems constantly predicting what our embodied self will sense, to maintain life through homeostatic processes including maintaining the integrity of our body.
Should the mind predict one thing through a model it maintains of the world (projective reality), and the body sense another, the difference between prediction and sensation (often called “surprise”) causes the mind to use energy to either update its model (allostasis) or direct the body to adjust environment (homeostasis). That’s a large part of what consciousness means in an abstract way.
Should “surprise” persist it can be exhausting and debilitating because the constant energy we expend to minimize cognitive error between prediction and perception. A small amount of surprise is managed all the time through our “default mode network”. Big surprises trigger other very energy intensive networks (Ventral Attention, Somatomotor, etc.)
This is well characterized mathematically in cognitive science through the Friston Free Energy principle.
A problem occurs when the model of the world (reality) neural systems maintain is irrevocably faulty. In general psychosis, the conscious mind presents a reality that cannot be confirmed by sensation - you see things not there, hear things and so forth; the neural system cannot track reality presented by embodied senses, energy intensive networks are activated (SN, DAN, CEN, Limbic for “fight or flight”)
An organic example of this is the time-tested striking issue that in various psychoses (one being schizophrenia) eyes cannot accurately track moving objects - “Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements” (SPEM). Cognitive systems in such individuals cannot effectively model the position of moving objects and send signals to the eye muscles to accurately track them. It is a semi-conscious reflexive ability which is entirely predicated on our cognitive system being able to, with millisecond accuracy, predict reality. The effect is so strong and specific - and heritable - that you can accurately assume that 1st degree relatives of people with faulty tracking are also faulty, but may not necessarily have psychoses. This SPEM is irrevocable. Drugs to moderate psychosis have a neutral or negative effect on this state.
Another key example of an irrevocably faulty neural predictive system is in patients which have phantom limb sensation. It’s somewhat known that patients who have had a limb amputated will often, permanently, retain a variety of sensations, including pain. What’s not widely known is that people who are born without limbs can also have phantom limb sensations, as has been documented for centuries. The result of this fault is that the person’s cognitive version of embodied reality is perpetually wrong and the signals the mind creates to correct the phantom error are ever present, a recipe for exhaustive unhappiness; dysphoria. Imagine constantly feeling you are in imminent danger of body damage.
Why this is important is the opposite case - not where the person’s mental model of their body has a limb not present, but when they have a cognitive model which doesn’t include part of their body. The effect is somewhat the same.
As I started out saying: should the mind predict one thing through a model it maintains of reality, and the body sense another, the difference between prediction and sensation (often called “surprise”) causes the mind to use energy to either update its model or direct the body to adjust context.
An “extra” leg or a “missing” leg both cause persistent irrevocable distress due to faulty predictive modeling, or what we think of as reality and consciousness.
Genitals are part of the body, and are also subject to the same problems of embodiment and projective reality.
Men who have had for different reasons genitals amputated often still feel an utterly realistic phantom penis, even erections, and orgasms. Women with breasts or genitals removed can similarly feel the phantom organs, even penetration of the vagina and orgasm.
That’s where the fundamental problem and paradox with trans lies.
Considering trans men, some tiny percentage of them who are not fetishists or delusional, some group of them will feel that their real penis is not part of their body because their cognitive model of the body has no genitals (though of course they still feel their penis) as some people feel a real leg is not part of their body because their cognitive model has no leg. It is not because they necessarily believe they are “female” it is because they do not believe they have a penis. For these men, it’s possible that everything else about the reaction to their cognitive misprojection of their body is an attempt to rationalize the condition as being female. They also get exhaustive triggers to high-energy neural systems as though responding to a threat.
[Considering Intersex individuals, genital amputations and mutilations can never “match” their body to anything. Unless they had an irrevocable cognitive defect, the model of reality presented to their consciousness is that of the genitals they have. Altering them is a tragic example of iatrogenic (medical) damage. ]
With trans the paradox lies in the fact that removing a penis doesn’t actually remove the penis from their cognitive projection of reality. They can continue to sense a penis, felt not to be theirs, as part of the body and in (phantom) sensation.
If you have a fetish of being female, or a delusion, or a cognitive failure to feel your penis is yours, even removing it will not obliterate it from consciousness. There is no way out except to learn to cope with the feelings the fetish, delusion, or cognitive failure.
Your body and mind are created together and are inseparable; consciousness relies on the body to perpetually confirm reality, projective reality without body sensation is psychosis or delusion. Mind and body cannot operate independently. Should the mind and body not confirm reality together it is the result of irrevocable defects. These defects are exhausting since the mind and body the perpetually attempt to remediate the lack of confirmation, errors or surprise through activation of defensive cognitive processes. These ideas are true for all categories for mind-body reality projective errors.
Is it really possible to beat the trickster philosophers who invented gender identity ideology at their own game?
An alternative to reasoning our way out of the trap is to show conclusively that there is no scientific basis for the imaginary phenomenon called gender. Instead, what’s happening is that people are learning about gender. It’s a socially transmitted set of attitudes and beliefs that suits the needs of people predisposed to lose their grip on biology, facts and reality. I hope qualified scholars are working on this thesis right now.
I agree it's worthy of study but I'd suggest that your hypothesis is almost certainly false. Not everything about gender is socially learned or constructed.
Some facts:
- brains of males and females can be reliably distinguished by machine learning.
- big five traits, which are considered fairly reliable through replication studies have shown an association with sex
- psychological conditions, which include behaviors and affect are associated with sex (eg autism).
- eye movement studies of infants shows boys are more likely to pay attention to objects and girls dolls (not sure on replication standing)
- teachers and parents have intuitive understanding of girls tending to be different from boys, particularly at certain stages of development. Girls more conscientious, boys rowdier more physically aggressive.
- other mammalian species without culture show sex differences in behavior.
- development in the brain is influenced by sex hormones and sex chromosomes
Now of course you might for most of them say it is learned (not sure how you'd account for infant differences). And these are associations over populations.
But it's very unlikely that evolution would just stop at physical differences and not encode other factors or that brain differences are solely the result of physical differences.
As a thought experiment why would females be more likely to be high in neuroticism? It's apparent from my experience that this gendered neuroticism is especially notable with regard to one's children. In my experience women tend to worry more about a lost child than a man. This would make complete sense from an evolutionary perspective and when you see it, it doesn't come across as learned behavior, it is deeply primal.
Men are more violent and do more risky activities. Women tend to be more communicative. While there's cultural components why wouldn't our evolutionary history, confirmed in our physical biology, also affect such things? How could it not?
Now quite a lot is social and learned and changeable but not everything. The hard bit is recognizing which is which.
Yes. What you are describing has to do with SEX. These things are biological.
Gender is something like pink is for girls. Blue is for boys. This is totally socially constructed and changes across time and cultures.
I reread the comment and realise I misread gender here - it's gender as in gender ideology/ gender identity and I see your point that sex is really the underpinning reality.
I suppose part of me would like to explore gender as the interaction of sex and culture but the current times don't allow it as the word has been incorporated into ideology.
Gender is also attributes associated with men and women, hence the language of masculine and feminine qualities, not just clothing changes. To reduce gender to the purely cultural is overly reductive, though I can see the value in getting rid of the word altogether in the current times.
Lipstick is gendered but not purely cultural learning I would argue.
Indeed, the Mind can serve as a refuge from overwhelming sensory experience, which is why I think we have the capacity--life can definitely get overwhelming! It doesn't change the facts of our experience, just the perception (or not) of it. In my experience, it's only a temporary reprieve, while we gather the necessary resources to, as you say, protect and understand ourselves. In my case, befriend my Self--all that awareness will allow, because my body has knowing that my mind can't know. Like how to heal. It's an inside job!
Love this! "Healing is an inside job!"
“Born in the wrong body” is the most idiotic idea that anyone can have. People who fall for this ridiculous assertion, obviously have a psychological problem. Nobody ever said such an insane thing before this whole gender ideology was invented.
Thank you for putting this into real perspective.
Thank you!
I am my body, but I am also not just my physical body. My physical body is not in my consciousness, and my un-consciousness is not necessarily stuck in my physical body, when I am asleep and dreaming. When I am meditating, my consciousness may be aware outside the body. But when I am in the physical body, in the here and now of 3D, I have a female body. And according to many psychologists who have used hypnotic regression, we choose our parents and we choose our bodies before we come into life. We did not choose the wrong body for this life. Read the books of Michael Newton PhD, and the Michael Newton Institute.
We are sensing beings before we are able to be thinking beings, sensing comes before thinking. Our consciousness is only able to be experienced through our embodiment. Everything that we are able to be conscious of is because of our embodiment. All your dreams, meditating, hypnotic regression, are all based on embodied experiences. Without these embodied experiences, there would be nothing to build in your imagination. What you are describing about "regression" is a world organizing belief that you think with your mind, whether it is true or not, your embodied experiences in the here and now are the only experiences you have access to.
You can choose to believe that. I know there is much more to us.
Yes, we can all choose to "believe" aka THINK anything about our embodied experience, but the only PLACE to think these beliefs are AS embodied beings. I don't believe that understanding ourselves as embodied beings is limiting in any way. The experiences we have in the here and now ARE infinite, mysterious, and beautiful. Anything that our consciousness is or isn't IS embodied. All my best to you and thank you for the engagement and conversation.
Because we are eternal multidimensional beings.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
This is a must read, must examine, must think about, must do something, and do something about immediately post. Please read. https://open.substack.com/pub/heininger/p/tipping-point-how-middle-eastern?r=16lm0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That's awesome, Amy.
I hope you are doing well.
"External alterations made in the name of identity congruence are just that, external, superficial, and cosmetic. Our physical being remains constant."
So much time, $, surgical pain, self-hating wasted for a LIE, for a cult ideology.
It's just crazy. Get some therapy, transers.
An exceptional analysis. I have been saying for years that to replace the vb to be with " i identify as" is the beginning of commodification.
Great post that gets to the heart of the matter in very clear writing. As you point to--the trans project, while it might perform a queerying role in culture --is still just a role, a persona. It is a desperate kind of existential entrapment to try to be something you are fundamentally not, there's no way to win there.
Buddhist ideas are another approach where it might become apparent that wanting to be something is a thought and is already a thought arising from an embodied awareness that is primary. Saying that I did once read of a transgender monk and it doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps where these people end up in terms of rationale is simply they feel more comfortable as appearing as the other sex without any metaphysical claims. But I think there must be a culture bound component to even that stance, and probably a hidden romanticism or transcendence claim about a true self or some such.
Again thanks for such an enlightening post.
So very profound. The deepest Magick is our connection to All.. to the Great Mother, to All of Nature through our Body/ Mind/ Spirit. It is One. There are deep deep womyns Mysteries and many many Ways to be Female...and express Oursrlves...through our Female bodies. I have found such Mysteries on womyns Land Festivals, ONLY in the company of other womyn.....XX all the way.
Agree.
Yet we/XX should support XY on their path of embodiment through the Hero's Journey, a different but equally valid path for XY.
There is no "trans" path.
Great analysis, Amy, thanks
Have cross posted
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/people-die-every-day
Dusty