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Does consciousness have a gender?

#1
C C Offline
https://iai.tv/articles/does-consciousne...-auid-2033

EXCERPTS: “What is it like,” a man might ask, “to be a woman?”

“Well, what is it like,” a woman might retort, “to be a man?”

[...] One well-known source for what-it-is-like questions is Thomas Nagel’s classic paper "What is it like to be a bat?". Nagel thinks that it is obviously true that there is something it is like to be a bat; there are facts about what it is like to be a bat; bats have consciousness, just as we do. But bats and humans have very different kinds of consciousness...

[...] Sex is distinct from gender; I’ll explain how in a moment. So this question also can be divided in two. We can ask whether there is anything it is distinctively like to be female or male (a question about sex). And we can ask whether there is anything it is distinctively like to be feminine or masculine (a question about gender).

I think the answer to both these questions is “Obviously yes”. Why yes? And why obviously?

There is something it is distinctively like to be male or female, because a crucial-and overwhelmingly obvious-aspect of what it is like to be human is bodiliness. [...] But male and female bodies differ, and in distinctive ways.

As male and female they are typically differently shaped, e.g. in genitalia, in having or lacking breasts, in distribution of body-fat and body-hair, in size, and in musculature. They are subject to different sensibilities: females feel the cold more, males are less good at coping with sleep-deprivation. They are affected by different hormonal secretions, and on different timescales, and these different hormones have different effects on their moods and their inclinations. Very crudely, females (or most of them within a certain age-range) experience the menstrual cycle, while males (same caveat) experience… testosterone. Male and female bodies even smell different (I gather this is related to the hormonal differences).

In the case of the sex distinction, male/female, what matters is the physical; in the case of the gender distinction, masculine/feminine, what matters is the political. Male and female consciousnesses differ because male and female bodies differ; but masculine and feminine consciousnesses differ because male and female political roles have differed. So there is something it is distinctively like to be masculine or feminine, because a crucial-and overwhelmingly obvious-aspect of what it is like to be human is political life.

I mean this in a broad sense of “political”. Wherever there are humans, there are power-relations. One foundation of these power-relations is the management of expectation. The task of predicting the behaviour of other humans (whether groups or individuals) is intractably huge. We reduce this task to manageable proportions via conventions and taboos, expectations and reliances, contracts and understandings, traditions and rules: from this fact, over time, grows ideology.

[...] Our concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” are, precisely, stories of this kind. That such stories can and do encode not only power-relations but also oppression, and that this has been their function throughout history, is obvious from the beginning of our culture.

“But hang on,” some people might object at this point, “consciousness is just subjective awareness of the world! What does politics have to do with whether consciousness is gendered?” The answer is that this objection attributes a false-and ideologically-driven-unworldly purity to consciousness.

The philosophy of mind is not, pace so many of its contemporary exponents, an ethically neutral or ideologically innocent study. The philosophy of mind is a part of “human science”; politics has everything to do with it. So when Karl Marx coined the phrase “class consciousness” (Klassenbewusstsein), this use of “consciousness” was not a mere homophony. We humans are both physical and political beings: our political condition shapes our awareness of the world as surely as our physical condition.

[...] Consciousness is not a bloodless abstraction: it is, among other things, politically charged. Neither is oppression a mere abstraction: for the oppressed, it shapes every aspect of how they see their environment, the obstacles and the affordances, the threats and the opportunities, in their way. To transpose a remark of Wittgenstein’s (Tractatus 6.43), the world of the oppressed person is a different world from the world of the free person.

In sum, then: consciousness is gendered, and obviously gendered, because the political realities of what it is like to be masculine, and what it is like to be feminine, are distinctively different. Moreover, consciousness is sexed too, and obviously sexed, because the physical realities of what it is like to be male, and what it is like to be female, are distinctively different. And that is why the answer to our two questions is not just “Yes”, but “Obviously yes.”

At this point I predict that I will face two objections: one (so to speak) from the right, and the other from the left.

The right-wing objection will be about what I have just said about masculine/ feminine and political oppression. It will be: “You can’t argue that gender is oppressive now by pointing out that it was oppressive then!”

The left-wing objection, by contrast, will be about what I said earlier about male/ female and physical difference, and it will be: “Wow, innate differences between males and females on the basis of their bodies? What a sexist you are.” ... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - -

Hadassah Feuerstein: "Karl Marx is the scholarly father of past and contemporary social justice activity. Any grateful, candid opponent of oppression and privilege will highlight this in their historical accounts and influence attributions. Perhaps it is possible, at least in theory, to have a different rootstock than the conspirative preconceptions and interpretive apparatus of a collectivist, socioeconomic struggle of population-groups, school of thought. But as of yet this is an unrealized potentiality."
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#2
confused2 Offline
Many years ago a friend of mine had a cat called Perce.
For reasons that are unimportant here he had Perce castrated.
Perce wasn't the same cat after that.
In later years he said he regretted having it done to Perce.
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#3
C C Offline
(Jan 29, 2022 10:15 PM)confused2 Wrote: Many years ago a friend of mine had a cat called Perce.
For reasons that are unimportant here he had Perce castrated.
Perce wasn't the same cat after that.
In later years he said he regretted having it done to Perce.

If I was a next door neighbor and had cats, I'd still be glad he did it to poor Perce. Which is to say, who likes seeing their spouse drown kittens? But fortunately, that's why I've never had and don't want or like cats to begin with. Wink

Hey... Finally, I can know this...

C2, is "Perce" pronounced like "purse" or "per-see"? Or is it akin to "Pierce Brosnan" with the "i" dropped?

There's supposedly a 1961 episode of "Gunsmoke" featuring an ex-convict called Perce McCall, but no clue as to how it was uttered. 

However, with respect to the "per-see" pronunciation, I directly remember an episode of The Rifleman titled "Hostages to Fortune", that featured a kid named Percy, who was a son of the new owner of the Decoven place.   

EXCERPT: A couple of the boys were waiting for Percy on his way home from school -- Melvin and Jake.

"Here comes Percy now!"

Percy tried to be friendly, he introduced himself and offered to shake hands, but all they did was make fun of his name.

"Hello. My name's Percy."

"Percy, what a name!"

"My name is not funny! The Percy family defended northern England against the Scots for six centuries! Their battle cry was A Percy! A Percy!"

Melvin laughs and sarcastically repeats it: "A Percy, a Percy!"

While Melvin made fun, Jake got behind Percy. When Melvin pushed Percy, he fell to the ground.

"I shall slap you for that you fat bully!" yelled Percy.


Scene above starts at the 5:17 mark.

The Rifleman: "Hostages to Fortune" (episode 160)

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3LdW1uXRG5w
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#4
confused2 Offline
CC Wrote:.. is "Perce" pronounced like "purse" or "per-see"? Or is it akin to "Pierce Brosnan" with the "i" dropped?
Perce the cat was definitely "purse" - I think that is the general rule for a perce. A Percy would be a purseee. Pierce Brosnan - my instint says "Peers" but as I've never heard the name spoken (maybe nobody knows) I can't be sure that would be correct.

I think Perce's experience bears out the OP proposition that consciousness is gender dependent. From what I saw of him post-op he behaved rather like I would expect a lobotomised cat to behave. Probably a lot of females would suspect that if you take a male (cat) and remove the male (cat) ego - there won't be much left.

I did (on telly (TV?)) see a female (male>female) transvestite threaten to sort someone out in the car park afterwards - which didn't seem very ladylike. Maybe they were pretending to be a transvestite, or something.

Not a cat person myself, either. Hamsters - aah. There's a country where the hamsters (might) have covid and they want to kill them all. If I had a hamster and the hamster police came for it I'd say "Over my dead body." and mean it. I think there might be a hamster railroad set up to smuggle them out.

They don't make programmes like "The Rifleman" anymore. Back then you could tell why people were paid for acting.
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#5
Magical Realist Offline
I would say that consciousness does have a gender, but not because there is any such thing as an objective state of maleness or femaleness. Consciousness assumes a role that society assigns it with. I am a boy. I am a girl. Gender is a social construct for classifying human beings. It is just one more among many qualities like race, career, personality traits and social status descriptive of being an objective bodily person. It imparts a more effortless navigability in the objective social realm to play along with this scheme of classification. The transgender person becomes, as a result, an anomaly, an outsider, a pariah. Such is the hefty price for trying to be true to the core of your being. For being a slippery not-to-be-trusted subversive boat rocker.
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#6
Syne Offline
Consciousness, itself, has no gender, but neither is gender just a social construct. Gender is largely behaviors built upon millions of years of evolutionary psychology. It is not nurtured into you by your contemporaries, nor is it malleable aside from some form of trauma. And aside from said trauma or objectively diagnosible genetic abnormality (like the actual intersex), gender matches sex. Nature determines sex and then evolutionary psychology determines sexually dimorphic behavior.
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#7
Magical Realist Offline
I suspect that the physical differentiation of the sexes in humans was a long term naturally selected result of socially constructed reproductive types. The ideal of the man as muscular and athletic. The ideal of the woman as graceful and fertile. We bear in our very flesh and bones, even down to our own DNA, those traits that make us male or female because being such an immediately recognizable type enhanced our passage of genes over millions of years. Gender evolved it's own physically entrenched characteristics, which allowed us to more easily fit into and compete in the social game of mating and reproduction.
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#8
Syne Offline
(Feb 3, 2022 06:48 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I suspect that the physical differentiation of the sexes in humans was a long term naturally selected result of socially constructed reproductive types.
That's some serious anti-science nonsense right there. The fact is that a long gestation period in humans necessary made females more vulnerable, reliant upon others, and less likely to evolve the physique of the naturally more independent and competitive males. Had nothing to do with social construction.

Quote:The ideal of the man as muscular and athletic. The ideal of the woman as graceful and fertile. We bear in our very flesh and bones, even down to our own DNA, those traits that make us male or female because being such an immediately recognizable type enhanced our passage of genes over millions of years. Gender evolved it's own physically entrenched characteristics, which allowed us to fit into and compete in the social game of mating and reproduction.

Those ideals are based in nature, not vice versa. And without those natural traits, there's no basis for human behavior, especially related to mating. Thinking thousands of years of human evolutionary psychology can be changed by contemporary social norms and pressures is hubris, at best. At worse, it denies some fundamentals of evolutionary science.
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