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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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There's actually a rather interesting Yudkowsky essay in an obscure part of the Sequences, where he unintentially obliterates trans ideology IMO. It's not enough even to change the chromosomes, hips, skin, face and so on...

You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain. There'd probably still be some male part of you that wants to penetrate women, you'd have to change that too. There are whole bits of the Y chromosome that aren't found in the X chromosome, so you'd have to take those out. What does taking out parts of your chromosome mean for the brain circuitry relying on them?

What would happen if you had a male-type brain hooked up to a female body? Something bad, probably. I believe male brains have slightly bigger volume, so you've got some practical engineering issues too (though studies differ on this). And how do you design the intermediate stages of transferring the male brain to a female brain (the equivalent of neuron-by-neuron upload)?

What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life's memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?

Sounds complicated, doesn't it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can't just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.

You certainly wouldn't have the experience of being a woman either, going through high school and gossiping with the girls or other female experiences I don't know about because I'm not a woman. It's an intimidatingly vast problem. One day we might have Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], female body (Made in China), male mind, remastered memories, phase three psychotherapeutics. And yet we might still have TERFs saying 'if you weren't born a woman, you aren't a woman, simple as. No matter how many factory-made memories you buy, you don't have our authentic female experiences.'

I'd rather we took up vast bodies of steel and inhuman power, let's leave all this behind.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions

You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain.

Because the relevant parts form from the same cells and then differentiate later in pregnancy, they each have analogous equivalents in the opposite sex. Testes and ovaries develop from the same tissue. The clitoris develops from the same tissue that forms the glans and shaft of the penis. This is why there are no intersex people born with both sets of reproductive systems being fully functional. I don't see any reason to think these hook up to the brain differently enough to matter.

Besides, the tool-using speciality of the human brain is surprising adept at treating new additions as an appendage of the self. Not that present technology can do this, but I see nothing preventing e.g. a robo-cock sending the right feedback to the brain to become recognised as part of the self.

Now now, behind the times old person, there is such a thing as a feminine penis which is totally different to a male penis and trans lesbians are valid real lesbians and if you don't want to sleep with her just because she still has her dick, then you are a filthy TERF bigot.

We zoomed right on from "gender is not the same thing as sex" to "cotton ceiling is violence" really fast. Luckily, since I am a reactionary dinosaur, I've never had to do the spinning weathercock bit of "yesterday I was progressive, today I am liberal, tomorrow I am conservative" as my views haven't changed.

Mind you, the objections for transferring male-you to a female body/brain hold for transferring flesh-you to a steely and inhumanly powerful body:

How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?

Flesh brain memories as a pattern superimposed on a silicon CPU mean how can you 'remember' being you?

That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person.

Mind you, the objections for transferring male-you to a female body/brain hold for transferring flesh-you to a steely and inhumanly powerful body:

Ah but you'd have a much greater target area to aim for! You wouldn't have an issue with 'male brain in a female body not being female', there'd hopefully be no traditional robots calling you out as an interloper.

Flesh brain memories as a pattern superimposed on a silicon CPU mean how can you 'remember' being you?

Well hopefully you'd be doing the rewiring of the brain step by step, replacing each neuron for something else in real time, not creating a clone or anything.

You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain. There'd probably still be some male part of you that wants to penetrate women, you'd have to change that too.

Do all (cisgender) men want to penetrate women?

No, but there's probably something in the male brain that makes them inclined towards penetrating.

Not all men are aggressive but nearly all are more aggressive than nearly all women. There's probably a part of the male brain or hormone-regulatory system inclined towards aggression.

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