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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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It's just that arguing it's the best tie breaker for sex seems rather arbitrary. I don't see a good reason why it should work for sex and and not dollar bills.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world. Since the evidence on humans having pheromones is mixed, and the existence of porn seems to indicate that the mere visual presence of a woman is enough to arouse a man, I think the argument that there is something like a sex determination module that leverages visual information is pretty strong.

The visual information is based on a subset of the morphology of a person being looked at.

Now, it has been a broader trend in science to move away from morphology as a primary basis for classification, as we have developed more sophisticated tools for observing "hidden" things like DNA, hormones and microscopic structures, so I understand why genetic or gametic models of sex are popular among people who want solid and fixed definitions. But part of my argument is that the "hidden" things we can now measure are less psychologically fundamental than the visual (and thus morphology-based) sex determination module in the brain.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world.

I think that's a sleight of hand. It's like saying a stick bug is de facto a stick, because my brain's bug determination module is using that standard about bugs and sticks in the world.

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