Karl

Well you have the right to call me whatever you like, but it doesn't make it so. As it is you are a million miles wide of the mark. I'm against the initiation of force by anyone.

That's missing the point entirely. There is no 'right' for anyone to be accepted by anyone. Again, I'm entirely indifferent to someone who wishes to make themselves look something they are more happy with, it has nothing to do with me. My point is where do they go from there ? What has really changed ? Have things got better or worse ? At least if you are homosexual you know exactly what you are and there is no deception unless you are kidding the opposite sex. A transvestite can only deceive for a short time, so anything intimate will require truthfulness. Sure it's tougher being gay than being heterosexual, but then being blind is tougher than being sighted, being black is tougher than being white. None of this alters the way we obtain values. We can choose to obtain values fraudulently or honestly. A gay person can have exactly those same virtues of independence, rationality, productivity, integrity, honesty and pride than a heterosexual, a black, cripple, blind or any other person. At present there are laws forcing people to accept homosexuality. This is a violation of rights. It is using force to get values that are unearned. The laws should be preventing gay people from being the victims of force, not forcing homosexual lifestyles on others. Neither should their be laws preventing homosexuals from doing whatever they wish with other consenting adults. There should be no laws preventing them from being married, but churches should not be forced to marry homosexuals. This obsession with using force to gain unearned value is the source of much, if not all of the worlds misery. For me personally, I don't care what somebody is. They can be gay, straight, transvestite, body modified, black, blue or a mixture of them all. I only care that they are honest and trust worthy. That they have high moral values and stick to them. I can be friends with anyone who shows those virtues, their skin/sexuality doesn't matter a jot.

Is easy to be an intellectual rationalist when considering these things in a virtual framework. You are an expert on your own moral values and you know where deception gets you. The reality is that the values you try to obtain don't manifest. Instead of love, there is guilt, instead of happiness there is misery. What value is being sought ? An hour of self titivation in the privacy of the bedroom, or the feeling that one is fooling the people in the street ? The 'trans gendered' person cannot simply wipe away all memory, all past history, friends, family or develop the biological ability to conceive children. At each and every turn there will be lies, conflict, unhappiness and misery. Being dishonest has repercussions. They must be honest or fail to gain value, unless their is to obtain a twisted kind of pleasure by deception-which would be strange considering they had felt dishonest in their previous gender guise. Reality is inescapable. Trying to cheat it brings unhappiness for the fraudster.

I don't object to anyone that decides to modify their bodies. Let me ask you a question and then let's look at the problem in a concrete form. Do you think obtaining a value that you have not fairly earned is a good thing ? Let's look at the case in which a man decides to modify his body to become a female, outwardly indistinguishable from a pretty woman. So far so good. Then he finds herself attracted to a man and the man to him. He has the choice of admitting he is in fact a man, or lying. If he admits it and the other man doesn't care, then everything is fine. The problems start when he lies. He obtains a value-love-that he did not earn. He did so by deception. Now, if he is a sociopathic liar then they will not care what value they obtain illegitimately, but I suspect someone who has taken the step to try and become what they believe they are, are already concerned about moral appropriation of value. Lying will take its toll. It's the same if he wishes to form a strong friendship with a woman. If he doesn't come clean he will always know he is obtaining the value of friendship fraudulently. The same happens when looking for employment. Obtaining a value fraudulently is destructive on the fraudster. They spend their lives denying reality and are forced into a world in which lies are piled on the top of lies. This is intolerable to an average person.

Feeling something doesn't make it reality. If someone thinks, feels, believes or otherwise that they aren't in the right skin, then that's unfortunate. Making a word up to cover the mental/physical anguish is senseless. They cannot change gender no matter how good the modifications are. If they feel better for it then I have no issues with it. I don't mind if they use the men's, of women's toilets, changing rooms etc, I will happily treat them like women, but they remain the gender they were born and nothing can change that. To call yourself transgender is ridiculous, as it makes it patently clear you are avoiding the reality-Either a man posing as a woman, or a woman as a man. It's interesting to note that the second option is not common.

Yes I agree with most of that-once we are at the biological level I claim no expertise, but they still have a fixed number of chromosomes. They can be perhaps regarded as less female/more male, in the same way that the colour red can tend towards orange, but they can still be gendered. Someone isn't born exactly both genders and then they can choose to slide between them as whim dictates. I always think that if a definition doesn't apply in some area then the definition must be incorrect.

I find feelings can be useful even if the cause isn't entirely clear at the time.

Just to be clear, my previous post was in response to Redcairo. Trans gender is a meaningless word. It isn't a definition, it's a corruption of a concept. Gays and Lesbians are definitions. They are people who prefer to have sexual relations with their own sex. Gender is male or female. That's it. There isn't any halfway house or metaphorphis. It isn't possible to have a 'sex change' operation. You can have body modifications and hormone therapy, but there is no change of gender, it's fixed. Just as I can't have a tail grafted onto my spine and call myself a dog. No idea what you mean by 'living in the wild West' or my preferences or otherwise? but certainly men are men regardless of the historical period. If people want to experiment with sexuality I say good luck to them. It shouldn't be against the law as long as it's consenting adults. If people wish to modify themselves, or dress up as the opposite gender, or crawl on all fours as dogs then they should go ahead. However, when they start messing about with definitions and hence reality I'm going to get mad.

You are conflating gender with sexuality. Gender is either male or female in humans. Cutting off the genitals, taking hormones, dressing as a women, or having homosexual relationships doesn't alter that fact. It no longer surprises me that gender blurring is becoming ever more prevalent in our society. The implications should be clear. This is the subjective pragmatism of societal decay. The blurring of definitions is a denial of reality, a denial of reality means the death of morality. It is not the activity itself that is dangerous, but the floating abstractions which are becoming acceptable. Once it becomes acceptable to blur some definitions, then the canker will spread to all definitions. Morality becomes an impossibility in a world in which every definition is a floating abstraction-where a thing means whatever anyone deems it to mean. It is impossible to reason or integrate any knowledge based on floating abstractions. We may as well give up words and speech, grunt incoherently, rut like animals and kill each other for fun. Forget science and law, or any form of advanced civilisation if we give up reason.

Transgender is a symptom of the collapse of civilisation. The feminising of males, feminism and the destruction of the family. That's not the fault of transgender, transsexual, gay, lesbians or any other mixed group, they are simply victims of a new, pragmatic world in which there is no identity and reality has been vanquished. We see the same in economics, art, philosophy, education, literature. The world has become Alice's garden party. When people lose their identity and reality distorts perception like a magic mirror, then identity hopping is the result. In Japan the young men are no longer interested in young women, these young males see no value in forming families-they see no purpose in it, or having a male identity so they have developed a kind of androgynous personality.

Ignorance more than anything else. I certainly remember that feeling of waiting for something. My book contains elements big chunks of that struggle. I thought I had solved it by 'living in the moment' and all that it entails.

Hence the wink ; I didn't think it would be something you would wish to read. My book wouldn't help. It doesn't really represent my current thinking. Likely I will re-read it on day and have a good laugh, but everyone has to begin somewhere. I'm proud of the effort even though I now see it as severely flawed philosophically. I saw WFG years ago, but nothing clicked at the time.

Well at least I'm keeping up the charm offensive Des and I'm consistent :-) Broadly objectivist with the caveats in the post preceding this one. I suggest Atlas Shrugged, or We the Living then ;-) Funnily enough I was just thinking about Rands answer when asked if she was a philosopher or a novelist. Her reply was 'both'. It reminded me of the editor of my book who said that Dickens would always be more popular than Kant. Dickens allegedly incorporated a lot of political/social propaganda into his work to support a Fabian agenda. Rand does the same, but she is nowhere close to being as slick, or as beautifully written as Dickens. It can therefore be a touch wordy, turgid and lumpy as a novel and not as precise as a philosophical treaty. My wife enjoyed Atlas Shrugged and got a lot from it. Considering its roundly condemned and criticised negatively, it remains one of the best selling books of the 20ty century. Quite a feat for an average novelist.

That's a task. It's not explicit but implied as an extrapolation of the materialist viewpoint. Naturally they reject consciousness completely and by doing so are relegated to supporting a version of mysticism without deity. In effect they follow the intrincisist path but without the religious bent. In effect they wipe out self determination and spiritual consciousness, then substitute a material consciousness in place of the divine nature of religion. Hence they advocate the primacy of material [ consciousness]. That's as short as I can make it. In fact there is a current thread on this forum about humans as 'process'. Which is in effect materialism on approach. In that case man is simply a process of the planet like a white blood cell and the consciousness is in the planet. In other words it is the planet that provides the primacy of consciousness. I'm an broadly an objectivist (in answer to Des), it's a philosophy that rejects both materialism and idealism explicitly. I don't say I'm completely objectivist because I continue to use reason in order to explore the ideas contained within it. In fact I have one or two additions/deletions. It certainly isn't fixed in stone but is a broad base from which to spring.

That may well be true for the materialist/rationalist/empiricist who also share your underlying view on the primacy of consciousness.

"Thoughts become things" and " the world is your beliefs out pictured" is subjectivism-which is the primacy of consciousness. It may help to understand this well developed philosophy by taking a course on the history of philosophy. Starting with the Sophists and Sceptics of Ancient Greece through Plato to Descartes, Hobbes, Hulme, Locke, Kant and Hegel. Part of subjectivist philosophy dovetails with intrincisism. In the West, our key understanding is rooted in the teachings of the Christian church. The well known sayings of Jesus "do not judge lest you be judged", "turn the other cheek", "love thy neighbour as thyself" etc. Good thoughts can either be intrinsic-the product of some divinity/deity, or entirely arbitrary and so based on whatever a ruler, or latterly, the collective approve. It's common in the West to combine the philosophies with a strong dose of religion in order to please all the people all the time (the church being inordinately powerful at that time). Most of the combined philosophies come out of the mouths of British philosophers. Once you come to recognise these philosophies they can be seen very easily. They jump off the page as they are read. Personally I think Dao/Tao developed out of necessity. The Chinese people were so subjugated by the immense bureaucracy and cruelty of the empire that they suffered badly. The only freedom they had was to mentally shun the harsh reality of life. In collectivist political systems such as in Stalinist Russia people had only three means of escape; either to physically escape (impossible in ancient China), to commit suicide, or to find a way of living with the terror by the use of drink/drugs/meditation to enter a mental state which rejected the reality of their situation in order to survive in the most comfortable way they could.

I understand precisely what your saying, but it makes no difference to me. You have admitted to volitionally surrendering your mind and that's all there is to it. I can only hope you don't succeed and eventually come to your senses. I wish you well Nickolai.

Exactly. Not a thing we can do about it either. That is where we began.For you science is anything that you think it is, for me it is a specific methodology based on Aristotlian philosophy. Yours is the pragmatist view. Kantian/Descartian subjectivism is very much the ruling philosophy today. I fear we will lose the scientific method completely at some point. That is already in evidence as some scientists are claiming consensus validates theory. That science is a social good in the way of Kant. This is why we have climate scientists that are driving political policy.

I understand exactly what you are saying, but I fundamentally disagree.

The problem is making the explanation concise enough without the context which outlines the ramifications of the two approaches. The difficulty is increased because you already accept the primacy of consciousness as your philosophical base line. I don't want to offer an argument as to which one is the right one, only to lay down both arguments and say 'choose'. You can have one or the other, but not both. Because these arguments sit at the base of all human knowledge, understanding, morality and ethics, then each alters all of them in direct contradiction to the other. I can therefore only say directly that primacy of consciousness is the view that consciousness precedes existence and primacy of existence is the view that existence precedes consciousness. The first says that mans mind is redundant for grasping existence because consciousness is the active creator of existence. The second that mans consciousness is the passive faculty for grasping existence.

Concept formation, abstraction, mental integration, imagination. These are purely mental processes. Ultimately they rely on sensory experience as perceptual knowledge, but are not bounded by it. The world is full of man made inventions that are a result of those inductive leaps-things that never existed previously. We did not need to have experienced a steam engine to create a steam engine, even the later scientific developments of thermodynamics were not created until after man had built the engine he had imagined.

Depends how you percieve a higher self. Certainly to seek greater wisdom and therefore an action inspired by that greater wisdom can only be a good thing in my book. The problem is in the knowing that you have achieved what you set out to achieve.

Primacy of consciousness vs primacy of existence. The operative word here is primacy.

Both the intrinsic and subjective views are ultimately about the primacy of consciousness. Both mean sacrifice (suicide) of the individual to some other ideal. Generally the intrincisist chooses some deity to other supernatural source, the subjectivist usually to a society/state/ruler. Intertwined around these base philosophies are hundreds of mixtures and variations, but they boil down to the same thing in the final analysis. The primacy of consciousness vs the primacy of existence. I choose the latter. Either we are capable of holding independently derived virtues that support the values to which we ascribe to hold and gain, or we aren't. Either man is capable of rational, independent, volitional active thought, or his mind has no purpose at all. We can either know reality directly or we are simply floating nothingness-puppets of some greater thing we can't know. The only question for me-and it's unequivocal and straight forward-is, can I do business with this person ? I don't mean just in the sense of traditional business, but in any form of trade. Would I trust a person that was committed to suicide to fly my plane ? Would I trust a person who's philosophy bid them to obey a dogma (such as a God), or who felt that my survival was secondary to the social good? No to both. I could not trust either of these people. On one hand a potential religious Jihadist and on the other a committed Nazi/Stalinist. I will actively defend myself against such people. If they wish to expire peacefully in a quiet corner, then I certainly would not encourage such action, but that's a decision they must make for themselves.

That agrees with objectivist philosophy. Just enjoy the moment if you can.