Comment on Lemmy is the best social media
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 1 week agoOf course the science is in support of trans people. Realism is anti-science. The scientific method points us inexorably towards antirealism. Soulists oppose the manufactured, false consensus reality which denies trans lives experiences. Because we’re awesome. Mainstream movements say pre-transition trans women are female on the inside, but soulists say the outside body is a mental construct, and cannot be taken as fact in any sense.
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Absolute nonsense.
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
You should watch cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman’s TED talk about how our bodies aren’t real. And here’s a youtube link in case you have trouble with TED’s website.
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I watched the whole 20 minute video, just for you. I’m not interested in reading more from him as I was not impressed.
Welcome to philosophy. These ideas are not remotely new, they’ve been discussed for literally thousands of years. Obviously there’s a difference between sensation and perception, and obviously it’s possible for senses to be fooled, and obviously optical illusions exist. No one denies these things.
One thing that he is wrong about near the end is the idea that reason and logic are somehow magically immune to evolutionary pressures. The whole host of cognitive biases we experience as humans are grounded in the fact that we evolved in contexts where group cohesion was important to survival. He doesn’t seem like a particularly knowledgeable cognitive scientist if he either isn’t aware of the bandwagon effect (for instance), or if he can’t see the obvious connection between that and the need to fit in with a tribal community.
But more to the point of his thesis, the reason it’s trash is because it fails it’s own test. It’s indeed possible that, contrary to all evidence and observations, we’re living in a simulation, or whatever gobbledyremoved he said about conscious beings creating reality - the problem is, so what? By definition, this theory is unfalsifiable, and it is not capable of helping us do anything at all.
There is a saying in science, “All models are wrong - but some are useful.” Physicists are well aware that when we draw a diagram of an atom on a piece of paper, it differs from an actual atom in several crucial ways. It’s very large, for instance, meaning that the drawing can absorb and emit photons without really changing. Our mental models of atoms are necessarily imperfect, the only perfect representation of an atom is the atom itself. However, we still use these imperfect drawings and mental models because they help us navigate reality and predict events. This person’s theory does none of that.
It appears that he has conjured up an imaginary, unobservable world, that does not interact with us in any way, and he has, for some bizarre reason, chosen to dub that with the moniker of “reality,” instead of the actual, you know, reality that we can sense and perceive, that is testable and verifiable, that is necessary to navigate in order to survive. Why he’s chosen to call his fantasy reality and reality an illusion, I don’t know.
Now look, this whole thing you’ve come up with seems like a fun little form of escapism, and I don’t have a problem with that in itself. The problem I have is when you start trying to interject it into actual politics, when you actively try to divert energy away from engaging with reality, the thing that actually exists and can measurably improve or harm people mental and physical states, and instead towards your fantasy. That’s when it starts sounding more like a cult.
Your kind of thinking is responsible for countless New Age spiritualists telling people they don’t need medicine, that they can just cure diseases, like AIDS, through the power of belief. You can indulge whatever fantasy you feel like, but when push comes to shove, medicine fucking works, the train will kill you if you step in front of it, etc. The speaker in your video at least acknowledged that, even if by doing so, he undermined everything else he said - at the end of the day, he has to submit to that which he labeled “illusory” and deny that which he labeled “real.” And so should you. And that means that you have to engage with materialist and empirically backed theories of psychology, sociology, politics, economics, etc. Which means, get your nonsense ideology out of here.
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The benefit Hoffman’s theory does us is that is reveals the universe is governed not by physical laws, but by cognitive laws, of which apparent physical laws are a contextually dependent subset. And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology. Imagine a civilisation only using half of science! It would look to the average person like a society practicing biology and medicine without ever discovering chemistry or physics. That’s precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in. We are only using half the science that is available to us, and half of the technologies we could have already invented by now. Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality. And that the public embrace such psychological technologies as have already been invented. For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form. That technology is essential to preventing suicides and many people refuse to adopt it. We are fighting an anti-science platform pushed by transphobes who want trans people dead.