I wouldn’t call it learned through habit, more like social conditioning that once served an evolutionary purpose.

To add a more modern analogy, it’s like how we develop machine learning AI, you feed it a BUNCH of data and try to make it sort it. That sorting is done by pre-defined algorithms, which means, that there are going to be expected parameters.

Humans are born, though thousands of years of genetics, with pre-defined algorithms on how we should interpret gender. Those gender roles may have had a use in the past but, they don’t now.

Butler basically would say, we need to have new data sets throw at our programming to break the pre-defined algorithms.

Also, I don’t think butler would say that gender roles are bad, just limiting(the major feminist criticism of her work comes from how to deal with trans people, as her model kinda ignores them)

A very important aspect of being human in my eyes is feeling and judging things into good and bad- as all life does. Up to now. AIs don‘t have a body, so they can‘t feel, and to my knowledge, they don‘t categoryze into good and bad, so I don‘t think they are anyway close to consciousceness - they are just well-trained textprocessing programs .

My main contention is that I feel like they're too focused on habit developed through reward and punishment. Of course I think it plays a role, but like... Well, I think it makes sense to relate it to something "performative" in the more colloquial sense of the word, which is dance. I don't think there's such a thing as a dance that is not socially constructed in some way, that is not imitive. But I don't think that is the driving force of dance: the driving force of dance is the affectual experience of music. Actually, I'm in the process of developing this concept of passion that draws from Deleuze and Guattari's writing on desire. Anyway!

Repetition can make dance feel less natural: you can lose the feeling of it and start going through the motions. I know it's different: I do think one thing Butler is talking about is how we "go through the motions" with gendered behavior; we don't even think about what we're doing, and that's why they feel natural. Even so, I feel like perhaps hormones and center of gravity play a bigger role than Butler gives them credit for.

All that having been said, I haven't read as much Butler as much as I could have. You seem to be very familiar with them, though; what do you think?

>At the right dosage people can be awake yet very little to none of their experience during intoxication is stored into memory.

Now that's something. Yeah, similar to "black-out drunk", where they simply don't form any lasting memories of their actions.

KEY FACTOR: They do not RETAIN any memory of events. Hand someone wacked out of their gourd a banana phone and say "ring ring" and they'll answer it. For that to happen they have to have at least some persistence of state between "that's a phone" and "what do I do when I answer a phone". And that state is stored in memory. They're not brain-dead. GHB impairs memory. It doesn't just stop memory all together. ...Yeah, this has been studied. The booze stops the transfer from short-term to long-term memory. Remember what I said about memory being "of any sort"? Even if you later forget, it doesn't mean you weren't conscious when it happened.

I mean, that's a real good try. But the science doesn't back it up.

>How are they different? > both are biomechanistically determined?

...movement? wtf does the mechanical properties of biology have to do with sleeping? We lay still when we sleep? Surely you're trying to talk about something else. Bruh, don't attempt to pull wool with dem dar big'ol words. You're chatting with someone who can call bullshit on it.

>Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of episodic memory

(And sensory input going in otherwise it's all just solipsism. And something to make sense of it. YEAH! Isn't it GREAT when we find out we're all on the same page and agree with each other? )

>and linguistic (or perhaps symbolic?) activation thereof.

I'm willing to posit that whatever you think "symbolic activation of memory" entails, it might as well be called "intelligence". Consider, an image of a snake. If a cows sees a snake, there's a jumble of electrochemical signals which the cow has been trained to know SYMBOLIZES a danger.

Language though? My first blush is to call that out as just plain silly. What's special about language? Humans (and most social animals) have portions of our brains dedicated to language, sure. But this is a weird thing to hinge consciousness on. Social sharks are conscious, while solitary polar bears are not?

>We can talk ourselves into accessing our memories

I mean, so can smells. Sounds. Being in the dark. We've taught children raised by wolves language later in life and they confirm there's still memory even without language. I mean, how else would anything ever learn. I'm really not following this marriage between language and memory that you've made.

>> Show me how your consciousness is fundamentally different than that of a cow.

>We have episodic memory

Why on earth would you believe cows don't? (You understand "episodic" just means long-term memory that we can review, like an episode, right?) This is real silly for anyone who's ever put a cow inside an electric fence. They certainly learn how the fence works. Likewise, smart cows are a problem in feedlots and such. When one learns how to get a latch open, the others all learn it. And, you know, retain that knowledge. In long-term memory. Which can be handy for the later when they try to open a latch.

>and symbolic language to access it

Animals have language. ...no promises about cows specifically though. I mean, they're pretty dumb. But moving the discussion to crows doesn't change much here.

Betrand Russels „A History of Western Philosophy“ will give you a good overall knowledge about the most important ideas in Western Philosophy. It‘s a bit lengthy( 1000 pages), but comparatively easy to read.

Excellent article, thanks

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Karen Barad draws from them but also critiques them. I mean, that's not the whole point of the book, but... Well, "Meeting the Universe Halfway" is a fantastic book! The argument is that the relationship between the social and material is not one of unidirectional restraint

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How the fuck is Nietzsche a good substitute for Stoicism. Like, you could at least suggested something remotely reasonable.

Nietzsche is great, but you never go full Nietzsche.

““grievable life”, which draws attention to the ways in which some lives are not publicly mourned, because they were never publicly acknowledged as being properly alive in the first place.” So does changing pronouns fix this? I don’t understand how the movement that gender is fluid fixes hate on a minority.

What buzzwords would that be?

I tried ChatGPT with antinatalism, it gave me very crappy generic answers.

Yes, and it seems like the West is picking up on it more and more

>>In these works, Butler sets out to challenge “essentialist” understandings of gender: in other words, assumptions that masculinity and femininity are naturally or biologically given, that masculinity should be performed by male bodies and femininity by female bodies, and that these bodies naturally desire their “opposite”.

This is the essence of why these ideas are seen as dangerous to society.

There is a practical need for male bodies and female bodies to come together in order to make babies, because society needs new people to replace the ones that die in order to continue. Gender norms are largely about making it more likely this happens, and to encourage the parents to stay together and raise the resulting children.

That's the "essential" truth that matters. We already have a working model of how to solve an existential question. And the likelihood that rethinking it from the ground up is going to lead to a significantly different, but adequately effective, and generally more satisfying for the average member of society solution is isn't great enough to justify the existential risk. Maybe we can redefine masculinity as preferring homosexual sex (male bodies desiring similar bodies), but what do we, as a society, actually gain from doing so?... Less heterosexual relationships, leading to less babies, leading to a dying society?... Where is the value in that?

Someone's reding blue lock 💀💀💀

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>You still owe me What drugs makes someone "awake and unconscious"?

This is an example of one but there are many others in the vein of date-rape drugs that have the effect I'm referencing. At the right dosage people can be awake yet very little to none of their experience during intoxication is stored into memory. That's essentially being unconscious and awake at the same time. Another example? Alcohol when people "black out" while drinking.

>C'mon man, I said consciousness is being awake. The obvious rebuttal is explaining how they're two different things. If you're just going to skip over the hard questions, you've already left the conversation even if you're still here.

I have a clearer idea of what it means to be awake and asleep than I do conscious and unconscious. I believe both are biomechanistically determined. Awake and asleep are actively adapting cyclical states regulated by the circadian rhythm (which I'll assume you're familiar with).

Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of episodic memory and linguistic (or perhaps symbolic?) activation thereof. We can talk ourselves into accessing our memories as well as talk ourselves into explaining them. I guess if I were to take a stab at a precise definition of consciousness, it is the act of using symbols (language and representation of language) to engage memory processes.

Unconscious is the state of a being capable of consciousness who is temporarily unable to do so.

Not conscious is the state of a being that lacks the ability to be conscious.

>Show me how your consciousness is fundamentally different than that of a cow.

We have episodic memory and symbolic language to access it, which emerges as consciousness. That would be my best answer to that question at this time.

I don’t understand. What does asexuality have to do with gender? That’s a sexuality.

I think they’d observe the same ideas we have about sex in regard to humans, yes, but they wouldn’t adopt the ideals because they’re not human.

Overall I’m really confused about your comment

The argument about biological sex is that it's a social classification

it is defined by people using it

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>We literally can not exist outside of gender and sex because of the way society forces it on us.

Let's say aliens that are asexual came to earth and studies humans or other manuals.

Do you think these aliens would come up with similar/same ideas as sex as us?

I think they would, which would suggest it's something more innate to the biology rather than something society has told us.

Reproductive organs exist and separate the behaviors and life cycles of the members of a species... whether or not human culture exists to assign them significance.

So if the argument is that sex characteristics, of which reproductive organs most certainly are one, have no meaning or power outside of that which society places on them, then it's obviously false. Because we see throughout the animal world that sexual characteristics drive and define behavior even in species with nothing we would recognize as a society.

There is significance to sex and sex organs/characteristics outside of what society places upon them. Because sex is how (many) species reproduce, and most individuals have a strong biological drive to reproduce (or at least to take part in the sex act which would normally risk reproduction). Whatever else society does or doesn't pile on top of this, this significance predates both it, and society itself.