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I'm going to play Devil's Doctor here:
You underwent a drastic change in your personality as a consequence of a hormonal surge that was out of your control. That's 'normal'. It's puberty.
Yet the person you became isn't the same person as the one before. I mean, puberty hit me hard, but I never felt as if my values or goals changed because of it (beyond being even more eager for the company of the fairer sex).
This seems to me to be analogous to a person who, for their entire life, had sworn off addictive substances, but ended up on benzos or opioids for Medical Reason and found themselves hooked, and are now unwilling to try and become sober.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as 50% infant mortality rates, dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
Nature, a blind and indifferent force, cares nothing for our individual well-being or our carefully constructed notions of self. To equate "natural" with "good" or "desirable" is a fundamental error, a logical fallacy we often fall prey to.
In the UK, the laws around consent for minors are relatively simple. Past the age of 16, they're assumed to be competent to consent to or decline medical procedures until proven otherwise. Below that age, there's no strict cut-off, if they can prove to their clinician that they are able to weigh the risks and benefits, they are able to consent or withhold it, and even override parental demands.
Someone who wishes to be the opposite sex is someone I pity. Medical science as it currently stands can't provide them more a hollow facsimile of that transition, it's Singularity-complete based off my knowledge of biology. Even so, the desire is one I consider as valid as any.
If they understand that:
A)Puberty blockers have risks and might not be truly reversible if they change their mind.
B) It won't solve all their problems, it won't physically make them indistinguishable from their desired sex.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision. If they're forced to pass through puberty, they might desist, or they might spend their life wracked with regret that they didn't pull the trigger (hopefully not literally). You can pass far easier before testosterone wracks your body. It's a helluva drug/hormone.
A lot of life-changing decisions can be ones that change the person making them irrevocably, and into a person who would affirm them in retrospect. But I would yell at someone who suggested that couples who are iffy about childbirth be forced to have a child in the hopes that'll change their mind, or fix their marriage or some other well-intentioned goal. Or if we suddenly were to say that everyone should be made to try alcohol and cigarettes because the kind of people who try them tend to stick to it.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desires when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Want to be more muscular? Try tren, if you know what you're in for. Want to lose weight? Take ozempic, while keeping an eye on your eyesight and pancreas. Want to be the other sex? This is the closest we can get you today.
Good news! You get to choose the entire genome for your next kid.
Bad news: It's only two choices.
Worse: It's a) a naturally occuring genome and b) a randomly generated genome.
So what'll be?
I know I'm being mean here, but the premium natural gets is justified. Natural evolution doesn't really care about us, certainly not our feeling, but it leads to something that works. On the other hand, the average for careless major deviations from natural is oh my god fuck fuck what have I done and the best case is something like Down's.
And don't get me wrong, I'm the kind of guy who dreams about replacing his full body with improved cybernetics one day. But you have to be serious about this. Natural gives us a pretty high floor, all things considered. Especially if you get to choose the best among all natural options (which is what, for example, embryo selection with PRS is). You're correct it's not a categorical difference, but getting over this floor is damn hard. I'm not aware of any currently available major change to basic human biology that a) improves overall wellbeing and b) isn't just a correction towards a different, better natural option. Yes running blades let you run damn fast, no they're not overall better than regular feet.
Unless you're intersex or have other major biological sexual deformities the honest answer to "should I try to change to a whole different sex" is "sorry, we're not there yet". Sure that sucks and it doesn't mean we shouldn't keep on improving, but the current reality of trans medicine is much worse.
That said I have very little problem with letting adults to crazy stuff to themselves out of their own pocket. But it should be discouraged, it shouldn't be for kids, and it certainly shouldn't be paid for by society.
hello would you like to pick between my position and random bullshit that's nowhere near your position
Sure as I said, the beginning was a bit of a digression and it was somewhat mean. But that's because I'm quite annoyed nowadays by the blanket "natural doesn't mean good", and his stated position, as far as I understand it, is that natural shouldn't be privileged at all.
And to that no, actually, natural biology is pretty good, and improving on it is very, very hard. It absolutely should be privileged. Any deviation is most likely bad, which means even if the preliminary evidence looks decent, it'll still probably turn out to be bad. Medical transition already was quite questionable based on the early evidence, and now with more evidence, it seems worse. Which was expected, because see the sentence before it.
Edit: Also, after reading some of the other replies here by him ... Classifying, for example, "brushing teeth" as transhumanism and equating it with major changes to your own biology is far more silly. Firstly because brushing teeth isn't even necessary in the natural state, it's merely a solution to a problem of modernity, namely excessive sugar. And second, because it's just a variation of the very natural behaviour of cleaning yourself.
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Briefly, I agree that you that arguments from nature can be fraught but I think that we can show more discernment here.
I think it’s fair to say that your body is naturally designed to mature during puberty, your heart is designed to pump blood at an appropriate pressure and rate, and that women are naturally designed to be able to produce healthy children without dying in the process.
These processes sometimes fail in the ancestral environment for various reasons, thus eg. 50% child mortality or angina. These processes are pretty clearly failures of function rather than successes.
Therefore I think we can say quite confidently that puberty is a natural process of human maturity whilst excluding heart failure.
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Because puberty is a necessary step to making babies. Which we need to continue society and the human race. Your other examples are not analogous to puberty because they lack what is, not just a redeeming feature, but an excellent feature of a generally excellent process. Few people in this world were more capable human beings at 11 than at 25, and those few usually had something unusual happen on the way.
Were there a way to mad science up some reproductive capacity without requiring puberty, would opting out then become acceptable?
I half suspect that, between cloning and the Monkey testicular transplant experiment, the mad science could have been there by now, had we been performing the mostly-unethical experiments to master the tech.
Although some transhumanists shriek in horror at the mere implication, there are factions in both pro- and anti-trans movements who believe the transgender debate is actually a transhumanism debate. Your answer to this will depend on your answer to that question vs Natural Law. I'm a Natural Law guy, much like I believe Yudkovskian schemes of uploading your body and freezing your brain, or whatever, is suicide with extra steps, unrolling these kind of body modifications throughout the human species effectively means extinction.
I might be ok with letting the willing do it, but not in a multicultural framework, where they get to advertise their ideas to the naive and impressionable.
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Yes this.
But also yes to the "puberty is part of the process" catch 22. Why do you have to die to appreciate who you were/are/will be?
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Tell me again how transgenderism is a totally different thing from transhumanism.
I bet I already have.
If not, I'll answer your rhetorical quasi-question:
Transhumanism seeks to liberate us from the existing limits of the human flesh. The exact goal can vary, be it practical immortality, becoming superintelligent or immune to disease. The only common thread is looking at the Human Condition, deeming it deeply suboptimal, and aspiring to do better through technology.
Transgenderism? That could mean anything from affirming that a desire to change sex is Valid™, that it is desirable to do so, or claims that we can do so. Some might say that people who have made efforts to emulate the opposite sex should be extended the polite courtesy/social fiction of being treated like them. Hardliners might say that they are the opposite sex, and any efforts to distinguish them from those natally blessed is bigotry.
They have superficial similarities. Both sides are usually less than pleased with their current bodies and wish to remedy that.
If you're happy that I'm conceding some kind of point you've made, then I will helpfully point out that if you consider them equal and indistinguishable:
Are all sterling examples of transhumanism! The evidence is clear for all to behold, are they not all examples of overcoming human limitations through technology?
Look at this featherless biped, is he not a fine specimen of Man?
If your wife were to dye her hair blonde, would you divorce her as a reckless transhumanist obsessed with undermining the sanctity of the human form she was blessed with? Probably not.
Ahem.
I'm a transhumanist. I'm not a transgenderist in any meaningful sense. I'm very happy being a man rather than a woman. I'd be even happier as a post-gender Matrioshka Brain.
If you want to restrict yourself to the kind of trans-activism that demands people who disagree make concessions beyond minor ones like going along with a new name or remembering new pronouns, then they're usually making some kind of metaphysical claim that a trans-woman is as female as a born woman.
Which I think is nonsense. At the very least it's not possible to pull off today, no matter how much surgery or gene therapy they can afford or survive.
When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.
I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.
This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?
Self identification only equals identity if I asked you about which football club you're a fan of. I haven't actually met someone with who asked me to use different pronouns in real life, if they did, I'd probably oblige them because I'm a polite person with better hills to die on. If they saw me in a treatment room, I'd put their birth sex in the charts and helpfully append "trans" or "identifies as X" alongside it.
I doubt you wouldn't be able to get into Mensa legitimately, the IQ bar is not that high. Save your bribing for some other exclusive club!
Good, 9 inch heels and a urgent medical care when I trip and break something is expensive enough as is!
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I get that you don't care for all the talk about identities and validity, but I don't think the similarity is superficial, and I think transhumanism tends to go far beyond remedying the lack of satisfaction one has with one's body. With the examples you gave, you've expanded transhumanism to include all humans, and at this point I have to ask what's so "trans" about it? I mean, hell, arguably you even included several non-human species. Are crows fashioning a wire into a hook to get to a snack trapped in a bottle transcrowists? Are beavers building dams transbeaverists, and ants building anthills transantists?
If we insist that all these things are trans*ism, what do we call people who are ok with using tools and body modification to restore original function, but are against modifications that go beyond that? That seems to be the major similarity between between transhumanists and transgenderists. Are you just trying to redefine the word that describes you, so that it includes everyone, in order to claim that this means everyone must agree with you? (That might be another similarity to the transgender movement)
My examples like brushing teeth or wearing clothes were intended as a reductio ad absurdum against the knee jerk reaction that any modification or augmentation of the "natural" human state is inherently suspect or falls under some grand, unified theory of "trans*ism". If we define transhumanism simply as "using technology to overcome a limitation," then yes, by that absurdly broad definition, a crow with a wire hook is a transcrowist, and anyone who wears shoes is a transhumanist. That wasn't my serious definition, but rather a way to point out that the boundary between "natural human" and "technologically augmented human" is not some bright, sacred line. Humans have always used tools and modified their environment and even their bodies.
If you are able to note that entirely normal behaviors that most humans, and even some smarter non-human animals engage in can be distinguished from transhumanism despite lying on a clear continuum, then please consider the obvious differences between it and transgenderism.
After all, I'm not the one who asked:
If you can't appreciate the rather minimal and nuanced differences between getting a haircut and uploading a brain into a computer, then I suppose that's a reasonable question to ask.
There's no bright line between "fixing issues" and "making things better than they were, and on average, are". If you went to an ophthalmologist for LASIK when you developed myopia, you wouldn't get a refund if your complaint was that he'd ended up giving you better than 20/20 vision.
The fact that I don't go about saying how desperately I wish to be the opposite sex and how I could achieve that with modern technology makes me rather different from the average trans ideologue.
There you go. Majority similarities aren't the same as equivalence, and implies major differences. Communism isn't Fascism even if they're both authoritarian in practice. White ethnonationalism isn't the Nation of Islam.
The majority of trans advocates believe that the changes we can make at present, through makeup, surgery, hormones and asking other people nicely, are enough to justify treating a transperson just like a natal individual of the same identified sex. This has next to nothing to do with transhumanism.
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Since I wrote it in another comment and I consider it unfair to "write behind someones back": Classifying "brushing teeth" as transhumanism and equating it with major changes to your own biology is quite silly. Firstly because brushing teeth isn't even necessary in the natural state, it's merely a solution to a problem of modernity, namely excessive sugar. And second, because it's just a variation of the very natural behaviour of cleaning yourself. Similar arguments go for most of the examples; Riding a bike changes nothing about your nature, and clothes have been, evolutionary speaking, long part of our natural state. A genuine example of transhumanism is imo only the pacemaker.
And the pacemaker is designed to make sure that a natural part of the body does its job in the natural way.
Yeah. But it itself is a genuine piece of non-natural object added to your body that improves its function. So for me it's good enough to count, even if it's with some caveats.
I appreciate that I’m being a pedant here but it seems relevant that a pacemaker doesn’t and AFAIK can’t improve a naturally functioning heart. We use it to turn a malfunctioning (unnatural?) heart into a functional ‘naturally’ healthy heart. A trans human alternative would be actually improving the function through hyperoxygenation or something. (But all the methods we know of to do this have long term issues, fitting your original point).
Same with glasses - they correct my deformed eyeballs to give me natural human vision. Transhumanism would be something like a telescope and again lens physics doesn’t really allow for massively expanding the kinds of things you’re able to see. Being able to infrared or something would be neat though.
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Dont your body, your brain chemistry, your experiences and limitations make you "you"? Matrioshka Brain Self_Made_Human wouldn't be you. It would be something entirely different, akin to a Praying Mantis Self_Made_Human or a Spider Self_Made_Human. To me, it sounds like you are okay with killing yourself and replacing yourself with something that was created from you but is not fundamentally you.
I don't know if that makes sense, this statement just sounded utterly alien to me.
I'm the dancer, not the dance. I'm the waves, not the water.
To be a little more concrete:
Every part of your body is endlessly recycled while you're alive. This is true for every structure more complicated than fundamental particles. If two electrons have the same mass, spin, charge and other quantum numbers, then it's impossible to distinguish between them.
The majority of the atoms in my body have swapped around since I was born. I have a consistent self-identity that is conserved even if I have a banana for breakfast or take a big dump, or if I go to bed and wake up tomorrow. I'm never the exact same, any more than a river is. Yet a river and a self_made_human are consistent entities about which it possible to make broad statements.
So it can't be pure and perfect identity. It can't be truly continuous consciousness, unless one wishes to believe that sleep is lethal.
What remains are the patterns of information and the algorithms that act on them. If I copy a png of a flower and share it with you, there is nothing lost or gained in the process, assuming standard error correction.
Right now, these algorithms and their data are instantiated in meat machinery: neurons.
Yet the neurons churn. And eventually, without advanced technological intervention, will die and take me with them.
If you can perform addition using both an abacus, a TI-84 and a supercomputer, in a very real sense they're all doing the same thing. It doesn't make much sense to say that your CPU can't actually add numbers.
(Ignore details such as how the floating point arithmetic would work, that's beside the point)
I think there's no fundamental barrier to extracting the algorithms and information in my neurons and creating a replica in-silico. It is a ridiculously difficult engineering challenge, but not something forbidden by the laws of physics.
I can dig up a link, but we already know that that artifical neural networks can near perfectly replicate the behavior of their biological counterparts (usually in a 1000:1 ratio). You can make them arbitrarily more precise, to the point where the original brain is noisier.
Hence, I want my mind to be uploaded into a computer. It's more robust than flesh, and unlocks far more scope for improvement. Going from a dumb baby to a reasonably intelligent adult didn't kill me, so I don't think becoming more intelligent will.
I'm also fine with multiple copies of myself running around. All that matters is that they begin as indistinguishable in terms of behavior to a blinded observer. If there's a "copy" of myself sitting in a black box, which says the exact same things, acts like me in simulation, and so on, then I accept that as me.
Consciousness isn't computation - it's fundamentally embedded into the biological processes. It also doesn't emerge from neural networks regardless of how well they mimic behaviours of real humans. Neural networks are statistical models, while you are your un-statistical emotions, you are your hormonal systems, microbiomes, other physical systems within your body. If you just extract the consciousness + the memories, just the raw contents of your brain and put them into the machine, you lose everything else, which is arguably the most important part. You get alien consciousness. Your consciousness is your consciousness BECAUSE of all of those icky yucky things attached to your brain, not DESPITE. If your replace them, why do you assume continuity?
All of this irreducible complexity can't be reimplemented by assuming that everything is an algorithm. Emotions aren't algorithmic abstract patterns, they are complex interactions between neurons and other biological systems and they are a fundamental part of the biological reality that makes you "you". Omitting them makes you a spider, an alien.
Hang on. Please note that you're just saying these things.
Why isn't consciousness computational? I mean, I can't prove that it is either, but that's just assuming the opposite side. The correct stance is agnosticism, albeit I think it'll turn out to have a mechanistic explanation eventually.
How do you know with, any confidence at all, that something like an LLM isn't conscious? It might not be conscious in the same manner as humans, but the same might be true for birds or octopi. They demonstrate all the hallmarks of intelligence, even if it's not the human kind.
The human body operates on biology. Which is abstracted chemistry. Which is abstracted physics. Which can be mathematically modeled. There's nothing in the human body or brain that violates the laws of physics, you need supernovae or massive particle collides to produce behavior the Standard Model can't explain (leaving aside dark matter and energy, which aren't relevant to human biology).
That physics, while intractable to compute at the quantum level or even the microscopic scale, still holds true. A lot of it can be usefully described and wrangled with statistics.
Well, emulate the body too! The neurons are electro-chemical, and surprisingly binary, in the sense that they're either firing or they aren't. This behavior can be well approximated.
If a disconnected brain emulation goes nuts, then if you have that kind of tech, you can trivially design a virtual body with the usual sensory modalities.
The brain is also very noisy. You can probably get away with saving a lot of computation by approximating events at the chemical scale. Not every random jiggle of proteins matters, it simply can't at scale.
I am not convinced that this complexity is irreducible at all. A single neuron, or even a thousand, misfiring: Happens all the time. Doesn't matter. An emulation can withstand a lot of noise, because the object it's representing is also noisy.
Emotions can be both algorithmic patterns and the product of a complex interplay between systems. All that really changes is that the algorithms in question become more complex.
This is already accounted for. Estimates for the amount of compute needed for a brain emulation vary multiple orders of magnitude. I never said this would be easy. It just isn't impossible, look, something evolution cobbled up manages. We even have our own alien artifical intelligences that can run on your phone.
If that was really the outcome, I'd take it over death when my fragile biological form fails me. I don't think this is likely at all, beyond the first imperfect uploads.
Thank you for the discussion! I think it heavily veers into sci-fi territory, but it's fun to think about.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GKnAWcWnJJc
It turned out I must have already watched that video as YouTube shows that I liked it haha.
Of course, everything I've said is speculative, but it's modestly informed speculation. All future advances are sci-fi until they're not, we'll have to strap in for the ride and see where it takes us.
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I basically agree with you about values and freedom. I guess my main fear is around the information environment we provide re: "This is the closest we can get you today." I'm not an expert but I get the impression that many (maybe most?) people who attempt to transition are deeply mislead about both the best and worst-case outcomes. I just don't expect any modern Western institution to be able to honest about what wretched results most transitioners end up having, nor about what most people honestly think of them.
Relatedly, Blanchard wrote about how his MtF patients could usually see that the other MtF patients clearly did not pass, but believed that they themselves did.
I think you could make similar arguments about the information environment surrounding lots of other early life choices, or educational choices such as pursuing arts degrees. But most of those are less catastrophic and irreversible. I guess at least Western society now does a pretty good job of showing the downsides of joining the army.
I have no opposition to making every reasonable effort to expose people to reality. Of course, with the matter as politicized as it is, easier said than done. There are just as many people committed to cracking eggs at all costs as there people who will claim that puberty blockers gave their cancer cancer.
At any rate, if I had solutions for people making bad decisions, I'd probably be accepting a dozen Nobel prizes right now. All I can say is that we should let people make their own choices, and if they're hard and risky choices, do our best to ensure they're exposed to the facts they need.
I don't think that's true. Or at least, my impression is that almost every elementary through high school teacher in north america who talks about the issue gives the impression that it's basically possible to successfully transition.
I don't think I'm willing to bite the libertarian bullet here. E.g. I don't want my kids to have the option to do heroin, even if it's paired with a pamphlet explaining the real likely outcomes. However, I don't even think that that's a viable option. Seems like our options are: ban and demonize heroin, or legalize it and subsidize its use (as was recently done in British Columbia).
Same with transitioning kids: I don't see how we ever get to a world where it's both legal and the pros and cons are presented honestly. So I think I'd rather throw the few kids who could conceivably benefit from it under the bus and ban it for everybody.
What if they need surgery and a helpful anesthetist asks them if they'd like some diamorphine for the pain and hands them a brochure? That's heroin.
I like neither option, or at least not the "subsidize its use". We live in a world where heroin can be legally used, in the appropriate context. I reject all the bad options and advocate for the good ones. If that doesn't suffice, then I'll choose the least bad one, as I presume you would too.
There are plenty of psychiatric interventions I grapple with at work that require careful scrutiny and vetting! Electroshock therapy was highly controversial and demonized. It's still being used as ECT, and saves lives.
A prospective filter would have to be very expensive to outweigh my other goal, which is to increase personal liberty. Someone who doesn't value the latter is entirely correct if they have a lower threshold for giving up early. We would have the issue of having similar values, but weighting them separately depending on the context.
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It's because it's both natural and we have a long track record of that path working.
It's a very difficult problem to come up with an alternative pathway that leads to physically and mentally healthy humans at our current level of tech. Unconstrained thinking is probably not a good idea when it comes to complex biological and psychological changes.
It becomes even more absurd to even attempt this in the name of people with disordered relations to their own body, when puberty itself may help resolve that disordered relationship.
Maybe people's intuitions that living their values will make them happy are just wrong. Maybe this is especially true for a group that is prone to a bunch of other mental disorders.
...
We can't exactly take it for granted that mentally ill people are holding values that will actually make them happy , or that they have a reasonable understanding of the risk they're taking on (especially when faced with dubious information from medical practitioners)or have reasonable expectations for these treatments.
Or hell, that their stated euphoria and relief will be lasting.
Society is entitled to say no. My doctor won't give me SARMs for some reason.
Discussions like this make you feel the void left by any natural law or common understanding of virtue.
I did stress that I'm playing Devil's
AdvocateDoctor. I don't want puberty blockers, if I had the misfortune of having a child who desired them, I would do almost anything in my power to dissuade them. I'm not in the business of prescribing them either, I'm not a psychiatrist for kids and teenagers. In fact, the UK is cracking down on even the relatively few (compared to the US) "legitimate" gender transitioning clinics.That being said: Natural law is bullshit. There is no coherent collection of principles that the term usefully refers to. Most adherents ignore the literal meaning and embrace a gazillion unprincipled exceptions. The closest it has to a working definition is status-quo bias.
Even teleological definitions have absurd conclusions. Is the meaning of life to maximize entropy? It is, if the outcome of a process defines its purpose.
Even mild exposure to different cultures and their associated values will tell you that beyond a small core (often contentious itself) there's no "common understanding of virtue".
Even simple sounding ideas, like "don't murder, or steal from your neighbors" will have people arguing ad-nauseum what counts murder or stealing or even a neighbor.
If I pity people who want to be the opposite of the sex they were at birth, then I pity people who genuinely believe in natural law or "objective" morality even more.
One of them is a matter of personal values. The other is basing your moral foundations on wishful thinking.
I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist. I know my values are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's. I also happen to think they're better, with the implicit understanding that to use such a comparative term necessarily needs an observer by whose light it is better or worse (me). Anyone who has convinced themselves that there's objective grounding to their morality, well, I don't want to have what they're smoking.
Quite a few gynecologists and many endocrinologists would be out of a job if the outcome of human hormones acting as they would always had the desired outcome.
I don't contest that the overwhelming majority of people are neutral or slightly positive towards puberty, assuming they even cared to reflect on it.
I would be the last person to disagree about the limits of modern science, engineering and medicine. I also think we should be improving our tech (and we are).
On the other hand, constraining thinking to only that which is known to be possible is... a choice.
You might have gotten away with it a thousand years back, when the lives you and your grandpa lived were nigh interchangeable. That's not the case today, we're living in a scifi novel with reality's rather lax attitude towards plausibility.
And it might not. The rate of desistance with puberty is not 100%. A non-zero number of people will find themselves still wanting to transition, and face even greater hardship for even less change.
I'm for reflecting on whether or not that risk is worth taking, from the perspective of someone who has to:
They need to add up the benefits and risks themselves.
I do not hold happiness as the only terminal value, nor do most people. If they disagree, then they're welcome to start a fent habit.
Whether doing something will make a person happier, either in the short-term, in the long term, or just on average, is far from the only consideration when making a choice.
There are plenty of people who are just depressed, so we wouldn't be out of a job.
Mental illnesses are not made equal.
Someone who had an overwhelming desire to fly and tried to do so might have been better off in an insane asylum if they were born in the 1700s.
Today, they might be a hang-glider hobbyist, a pilot, an astronaut.
Did the people who jumped off cliffs or the Eiffel Tower with inadequate parachutes or mechanical contraptions count as mentally ill or suicidal? Not by most definitions I've heard of. They would still have been "better off" if society had caged them, or at least lived longer. Yet today, we soar.
Your argument argues, just as strongly, for doing our level best to present reliable information to patients. You could also force doctors to present information that better represented reality, on the pain of liability. You could have people be grilled by a different doctor or some other Authoritative Individual who had to be convinced that the patient understood the risks and benefits. This is already common practice in psychiatry, at least where I work. Things like detention under the Mental Health Act or forced treatment require multiple people uninvolved with the original case to sign off. This isn't trivially gamed either, I've seen the headaches my bosses get went they're trying to put these in place without unimpeachable evidence.
Death, be it ours, or that of the universe, doesn't mean temporary endeavors are worthless. At least not to me.
Even in the short term, the hedonic treadmill goes brrr. I'd love to win the lottery, even if a year later my happiness would have regressed to near baseline levels.
You should try a different doctor. Some are more flexible. If I had a patient who understood the risks and benefits, and I wasn't violating laws (because I wish to keep my license, my own moral proclivities aside), then I'd prescribe them.
There are many things that would nice if they were real. You know, a benevolent Creator, objective morality, a pill that changes your gender with no consequences.
Sometimes, you're shit out of luck. Sometimes you can make something just as good. Sometimes you pick the lesser evil out of available options while working on making better ones.
If you have a god-shaped hole, in a universe that doesn't have a god, make one yourself from applying linear algebra to {the majority of text Mankind has written}. If you can't become the opposite sex today, maybe settle for the terrible ersatź substitute.
All I say is maybe.
Hooo buddy, have I got some news to break to you about natural science. People debate conceptual primitives and what "counts" as them all the bloody time. I presume that you pity people who genuinely believe in natural physical law or "objective" reality, too?
These sentences contradict one another and result in something that is conceptually incoherent.
Ontology is a matter of convenience. All models are flawed, some models are useful. If there are two different models of reality that output the same results for all ranges of possible inputs, then choosing between them is a matter of convenience. If, for some reason, it became relevant, you could then worry about which one had the lowest Kolmogorov complexity or something.
Objective reality is a very useful concept to have, even if establishing it is likely unreachable. I can happily concede that the universe might be a cosmic dream, that this could be a simulation, that I'm perhaps a brain in a vat or a Boltzmann brain while happily acting as if this reality is shared, stable and predictable. The ability to compartmentalize or hold multiple levels of abstraction in your head when necessary can be handy.
There is certainly far more evidence for consistent and universal laws of physics than there is for objective and universal morality. Physicists can predict the outcome of systems spanning dozens of orders of magnitude within the limits of experimental error. Philosophers are lucky if they can get their buddy reading Kant in the cafeteria to agree with them.
1 to 4 establish the relativism. 5-7 explain why that's not a barrier for me preferring my morality over all others, as I believe that it both needs no justification beyond personal preference and that there isn't any more deep-seated justification for anyone's morality.
In other words: "Because there's no objective standard, all moralities are equally ungrounded. However, from my subjective viewpoint, I find my own morality preferable, and therefore I advocate for it." I avoid claiming objective superiority while still asserting subjective preference and a desire for propagation.
Please, do tell me me how these two concepts are impossible to reconcile. I think I just did that, so there's an existence proof for you. I would be much obliged if you also established reasons for there being an "objective" morality, or a reason why I should prefer that of someone else's over myself.
If you somehow succeed, I will either concede the point, or disappear into a gibbering mess of congealing brain matter from the cognitive dissonance I expect to experience.
...and yet, you must pity people who actually believe it, right?
Let's start with, "What does this sentence mean?" What does it mean for values to be "just as valid (or not)"? You seem to have not touched on this at all in your latest comment.
The same way I pity someone with a bad haircut. It's not a big deal, or a lot of pity.
It means precisely that from any imagined objective standpoint (which I argue doesn't exist for morality), no set of values has a greater claim to inherent correctness or truth than any other. They are "equally valid" in the sense that they are all subjective constructs, arising from individuals or cultures. They are "equally (or not)" valid because the very concept of objective validation is moot here – they are all equally ungrounded in objective truth. Think of it like favourite colours: saying my favourite colour (blue) is "just as valid" as yours (red) means neither has an objective claim to being the 'correct' favourite colour; the concept doesn't apply.
This lack of objective grounding doesn't prevent me, as a subject, from having preferences. I prefer my moral framework. I find it more consistent, more conducive to the kind of world I want to live in, etc. That's the chauvinism. But it's a preference asserted without the illusion of objective backing. It's saying "I prefer blue and think others should too because I find it aesthetically superior," not "Blue is objectively the best colour according to the laws of the universe."
Not that I feel like this point requires elaboration, I strongly expect that if you had an actual way to show me up as incoherent, you'd have produced it by now.
Why not? Why the difference?
This is just restating that you think values are subjective, not telling me what you think it means for such subjective values to be "valid" or not... or multiple values to be "equally valid".
Precisely as I expected. You have absolutely no explanation of what your own sentence meant; only what it did not mean. Your sentence lacked any semantic content and was incoherent in your view. Once one tries to include any semantic content in it, it contradicts the prior sentence. It's extremely bad form to use sentences that you sneakily think are incoherent.
[EDIT: Let's change the syntax to make it clear. Suppose you had said, "I know my values are just as blurf (or not) as everyone else's." Suppose I inquired as to what you meant by values being blurf or not, or multiple values being equally blurf. It's not really helpful to say that there is nothing objective about blurf. It still simply fails to tell me anything about what blurf actually means.]
Of course, if I proceeded with your attitude, I'd say that I strongly expect that if you had an actual way to make your own statements coherent/consistent in your view, you'd have produced it by now.
You're just wasting my time, and have been for a while.
I've explained my stance, that moral views are just as inherently subjective as opinions on favorite colors. That's it.
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I know. You just run into places in these discussions where you're clearly in need of a common touchstone, even if we can't get back.
True. But, practically, internal dissension seems more relevant than the inability to get the entire human race to agree. Nobody in America is overly bothered by the fact that Saudis have a different moral code.
Although the balance has shifted with how connected we are.
This is the majority of philosophers btw. I personally don't take a strong stance on metaethics (another way to put it is that I'm too lazy to read enough to formulate one and always puts it off) but that always gives me pause here. What many people find very unintuitive is the consensus position.
It doesn't disprove the "narrow is the path and few find it" argument if even otherwise healthy people have issues that require correction imo. Seems like it does the opposite.
The standard for any treatment (or social convention for that matter) has never been that it's 100% successful.
I actually think that's part of the problem: society is constantly being overturned in the name of smaller and smaller minorities until we hit one where the tradeoffs for doing so are actually serious and visible.
The situation before the general pullback, where public cachet was redistributed to a small number of people who would likely be even smaller given healthy puberty, combined with credulous diagnosing and taboos against "conversion therapy" seems totally backwards.
I meant it in the broader sense. I suppose what the Greeks would call eudaimonia and now philosophers translate as "human flourishing", to avoid exactly these problems.
And I suppose that's a coherent personal position. However, society clearly has certain standards for medical treatment.
Yes, it would be better if everyone was given accurate information on blockers. But that's not the only medical ethic. It seems like we have some pretty high standards for things like amputations which is precisely why exuberant claims were made about the necessity of transition to save a child's life. Even my opponents have implicitly yielded the point: the goal is not short-term gender euphoria in exchange for things we know tend to give people meaning like the ability to experience sexual pleasure and have children or not suffer side-effects from cross-sex hormones.
It's to literally save lives and improve human flourishing. It is not like your own personal decision to spend $3 on a lottery ticket (which costs you almost nothing and doesn't require any medical professional to be complicit).
Maybe that's what I see myself as doing, but for society.
The arguments against a lot of TRA claims and medical practices to help them are usually on pragmatic grounds.
I've done my best to explore what drives philosophers to endorse objective morality, and found all their arguments lacking. It would help if the people who believed in objective morality could agree with each other on what it looked like, but alas.
I belong to the most oppressed minority of all,
gamers, individuals. It doesn't get any smaller than that.I also strongly value personal liberty. It's far from my only consideration, but it is a powerful one. The same arguments, namely paternalism, thinking that you can't allow such far-fetched thinking, would also restrict me.
I'm willing to support people in their quest for personal liberty, even if I think they're misguided, for the same reason that you want the right to free speech to cover heinous kinds as well. Nobody needs to have speech that's popular and favored protected by law.
Society isn't actually a monolithic entity (I'm not claiming that you're saying this, you appear to appreciate nuance). It's made of individuals, and some of them, like medical professionals or regulators, have disproportionate influence.
As the former, if not the latter, I consider it my duty to explain my views. At the absolute very least, I'm painfully self-consistent, and many of my opponents (the average philosopher, for example) aren't. There's plenty of vagueness and moral gray in that field, let alone when it becomes political.
It is certainly not consistent. As @RovScam helpfully illustrates in his own comment, it is trivial to consider an isomorphic example where almost nobody would consider it their business to interfere if the patient, their parents and the treating physicians were all on board.
Modus ponens, modus tollens. I've addressed the specific example of elective limb amputation before. To summarize, if the person was otherwise sane (or at least had capacity), couldn't be dissuaded despite plenty of effort, found a surgeon willing to help, and could afford it, then I see that as entirely fine. I wouldn't like to pay for it with my taxes, there are better things to waste them on.
Young teens make many life changing decisions with uncertain payoffs. Opting for a less conventional field of scholarship might be one.
"We know that leaving school at 11 and then tilling the fields leads to a satisfying and happy life, why bother with the stress and expense of uni".
If someone is busy sacrificing their ability to party with friends in high school in exchange for grinding for med school, what of it? They'd definitely be getting more sexual pleasure in the short term, and likely have more kids if they didn't have to finish residency.
The issue is that the people you're trying to look out for vehemently disagree on what counts as human flourishing. They certainly don't appreciate your attempts to dictate what they should choose, even if you good intentions.
If money is the biggest factor, then I have little objection to saying such procedures shouldn't be paid for by the public, any more than breast implants or a boob job typically are. I say typically for a reason, because someone who had a mastectomy for cancer might qualify.
The core of this is that meme:
"I consent." Says a distressed young child. "I consent." Says their worried but loving parents, and some doctor making sure they're ticking the consent boxes. "I don't-" Says someone whose consent seems entirely unnecessary to me, at least when they're not paying for this.
As a matter of such longstanding custom or clear law that it can easily be said to be "society's" position.
If we lived in a libertarian world where people were expected to take on all of the costs of a procedure and balance the risks themselves I think your personal take would be coherent for society to adopt.
In practice, neither of those things may be the case. Society collectively pays for a bunch of services and we insist on rigorous epistemic and ethical standards even when people might willingly take the risk. Even the people arguing for the specific case we're discussing pay deference to that expectation.
I think this status quo has a lot to recommend it but, even if I could be convinced it should change, I'd like to know why this topic (given how I feel about the object-level issue) should motivate that change.
tl;dr: They can have it when I have the same easy access to steroids.
The consequences of majoring in programming right now with AI is unclear. The consequences of lopping of your limb are.
We seem to think that matters, which is why one involves far more ethical requirements.
I'm not sure they actually do though?
The argument for gender affirming care has always been that it will reduce things like suicide rates and suicide ideation and the comorbidities associated with trans identification and thus it functions as medicine, as it's commonly understood. The controversy is about whether gender affirming care achieves some broad definition of human flourishing but the general goal it should be achieving if it is effective medicine (and a brief, heroin-like moment of bliss doesn't count) doesn't seem to be controversial.
The whole emotional blackmail line of "dead son or live daughter" has this assumption built in.
If it turns out that the evidence isn't good for this then their case falls apart by its own standards.
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