I agree that philosophy and neuroscience haven’t confirmed that the qualia I perceive as red is the same thing as the qualia you experience when you look at something red. My red could be your blue, etc. (Or, more likely, completely unrelated sensations chosen randomly from trillions of possibilities.) Similarly, we can’t know exactly what it’s like to be someone else, or to be an animal or something.
However, it’s perfectly reasonable to group all possible human experiences into one set, and group all possible things that an ant might experience in another. If you scanned the brains of a trillion ants and a trillion humans, and ran them as digital simulations, it would be easy for someone to look at them and know which was which.
Similarly, if you scanned 3^^^3 artists and 3^^^3 programmers, I’d bet that you could find certain patterns and systematic differences in how they think. After looking at all those minds, you could easily look at another one and tell whether they were an artist or an programmer. Same for men/women, or republicans/democrats, etc.
This is despite potentially huge differences in the internal subjective experiences of programmers. It’s not that there’s one single “what it’s like to be an programmer” experience or anything, but there is a single set of all programmer minds. This includes qualia and programming methods of thought, and whatever else.
Maybe you could even measure these differences with even crude MRI scans of people’s brains. It would be interesting to scan a thousand cis men after certain verbal prompts asking how they feel about their gender identity. If OP’s hypothesis is true, then confident trans men should look pretty similar to confident cis men, and trans men worrying “am I really an X” should look a lot like cis men questioning their own gender identity.
You should get about the same result if you ran the experiment again on cis and trans women. Obviously there would be some confounders, like hormone levels and any physical differences between people born biologically male or female. However, this sort of thing seems easy enough to control for. The bigger issue I see is that all those MRIs would cost a fortune, and we may not even have sufficiently high resolution technology to even see the differences we’re looking for.
But, doing philosophy is cheap, and it seems to me that hypotheses like these have decent odds of being true. I agree that reasoning about individual differences may be as hopeless as wondering what it’s like to be a bat, but reasoning about huge classes of mind states seems entirely valid.
Maybe you could even measure these differences with even crude MRI scans of people’s brains. It would be interesting to scan a thousand cis men after certain verbal prompts asking how they feel about their gender identity. [...] You should get about the same result if you ran the experiment again on cis and trans women.
I claim that we already have enough empirical evidence to conclude with very high confidence that “gender identity” is not a useful construct for understanding the psychology of gender dysphoria.
For the trans women in particular, I claim that a solid majority of them will have an “autogynephilic” etiology: that is, non-exclusively-androphilic trans women are basically straight men who let their fixation on erotic cross-dressing and cross-gender fantasy spiral out of control and get reified into a highly-valued self-identity. (Something like this may be true of a minority of trans men, but that’s much rarer.) This claim predicts that self-reported confidence in one’s gender identity will not correlate with any sexually-dimorphic brain features in MRI studies.
For more information on the findings supporting these claims, see Kay Brown’s FAQ, or Anne Lawrence’s monograph Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism.
I agree that philosophy and neuroscience haven’t confirmed that the qualia I perceive as red is the same thing as the qualia you experience when you look at something red.
Deeper than that. Nobody’s even credibly suggested that it’s possible to such a thing exists in the measurable, physical world or how anyone might even start to confirm this.
Even if you talk about measurable things, it’s not about “exact”, it’s about the relative amount of overlap with different clusters of other. Taking for an example whether a transwoman is more like a ciswoman or a cisman, scanning doesn’t give you much help, no matter how much data you collect. The overlap of scans with ants is pretty small, and there’s no significant difference between the overlap of (for example) ciswomen compared to queen ants versus transwomen compared to queen ants.
There is a TON of differences and a TON of overlap (depending on granularity of scan) between ciswomen, cismen, and transwomen, and asking “is the average transwoman closer to the average cisman or the average ciswoman” is just a useless thing. It depends on how you weight the differences, and in most cases the differences between individuals in the same category are as significant as the difference in average across categories.
No matter what objective evidence you put together, it’s going to come down to “there’s some clustering, but it’s kind of arbitrary whether you think it’s important”. How you feel is internal and unmeasurable.
If you want to talk about something other than politics or other people’s expectations (same thing), dissolve the topic—are you talking about feelings, or biological/behavior clustering? In either case, why do you care about “typical”, as opposed to “existent” or “experienced” feelings/behaviors/measurements?
I agree that philosophy and neuroscience haven’t confirmed that the qualia I perceive as red is the same thing as the qualia you experience when you look at something red. My red could be your blue, etc. (Or, more likely, completely unrelated sensations chosen randomly from trillions of possibilities.) Similarly, we can’t know exactly what it’s like to be someone else, or to be an animal or something.
However, it’s perfectly reasonable to group all possible human experiences into one set, and group all possible things that an ant might experience in another. If you scanned the brains of a trillion ants and a trillion humans, and ran them as digital simulations, it would be easy for someone to look at them and know which was which.
Similarly, if you scanned 3^^^3 artists and 3^^^3 programmers, I’d bet that you could find certain patterns and systematic differences in how they think. After looking at all those minds, you could easily look at another one and tell whether they were an artist or an programmer. Same for men/women, or republicans/democrats, etc.
This is despite potentially huge differences in the internal subjective experiences of programmers. It’s not that there’s one single “what it’s like to be an programmer” experience or anything, but there is a single set of all programmer minds. This includes qualia and programming methods of thought, and whatever else.
Maybe you could even measure these differences with even crude MRI scans of people’s brains. It would be interesting to scan a thousand cis men after certain verbal prompts asking how they feel about their gender identity. If OP’s hypothesis is true, then confident trans men should look pretty similar to confident cis men, and trans men worrying “am I really an X” should look a lot like cis men questioning their own gender identity.
You should get about the same result if you ran the experiment again on cis and trans women. Obviously there would be some confounders, like hormone levels and any physical differences between people born biologically male or female. However, this sort of thing seems easy enough to control for. The bigger issue I see is that all those MRIs would cost a fortune, and we may not even have sufficiently high resolution technology to even see the differences we’re looking for.
But, doing philosophy is cheap, and it seems to me that hypotheses like these have decent odds of being true. I agree that reasoning about individual differences may be as hopeless as wondering what it’s like to be a bat, but reasoning about huge classes of mind states seems entirely valid.
I claim that we already have enough empirical evidence to conclude with very high confidence that “gender identity” is not a useful construct for understanding the psychology of gender dysphoria.
For the trans women in particular, I claim that a solid majority of them will have an “autogynephilic” etiology: that is, non-exclusively-androphilic trans women are basically straight men who let their fixation on erotic cross-dressing and cross-gender fantasy spiral out of control and get reified into a highly-valued self-identity. (Something like this may be true of a minority of trans men, but that’s much rarer.) This claim predicts that self-reported confidence in one’s gender identity will not correlate with any sexually-dimorphic brain features in MRI studies.
For more information on the findings supporting these claims, see Kay Brown’s FAQ, or Anne Lawrence’s monograph Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism.
Deeper than that. Nobody’s even credibly suggested that it’s possible to such a thing exists in the measurable, physical world or how anyone might even start to confirm this.
Even if you talk about measurable things, it’s not about “exact”, it’s about the relative amount of overlap with different clusters of other. Taking for an example whether a transwoman is more like a ciswoman or a cisman, scanning doesn’t give you much help, no matter how much data you collect. The overlap of scans with ants is pretty small, and there’s no significant difference between the overlap of (for example) ciswomen compared to queen ants versus transwomen compared to queen ants.
There is a TON of differences and a TON of overlap (depending on granularity of scan) between ciswomen, cismen, and transwomen, and asking “is the average transwoman closer to the average cisman or the average ciswoman” is just a useless thing. It depends on how you weight the differences, and in most cases the differences between individuals in the same category are as significant as the difference in average across categories.
No matter what objective evidence you put together, it’s going to come down to “there’s some clustering, but it’s kind of arbitrary whether you think it’s important”. How you feel is internal and unmeasurable.
If you want to talk about something other than politics or other people’s expectations (same thing), dissolve the topic—are you talking about feelings, or biological/behavior clustering? In either case, why do you care about “typical”, as opposed to “existent” or “experienced” feelings/behaviors/measurements?