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The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal. When I was around 12, I felt disgusted by teens, sexuality in general and was a somewhat odd kid to begin with. At that time there already was lots of talk about nonstandard sexualities and I strongly identified with asexuals. I also thought that I was very far from the average male, among other things refusing any kind of violence (I distinctly remember refusing to even watch shows/movies or play games portraying violence), an intellectual above all kinds of base instincts. Typical arrogant nerd stuff. Especially early puberty then felt like shit, very moody & scared of what happens with me. Then sometime in late puberty all of that went out of the window, suddenly I was a temperamentally fairly stereotypical guy. And even in retrospect, I had been to some degree in denial even when younger. In elementary school I was often beating up other kids for various reasons. I just learned that I was going nowhere with that attitude, so I had to force myself out of it and pretended that it never happened. Which combined with my otherwise bookish personality naturally led to the described intellectual self-image.
Conditionals are obviously hard to prove, but I could easily see my pre-puberty self taking puberty blockers to not become a disgusting, violent, sexual men. Especially with the argument that oh, it's reversible anyway, so just try it out. It would have been a grave mistake, but I wouldn't have known, and in particular it's easy then to then just stay the course and tell yourself you took the right option.
My wife is very similar in the other direction; She always was a tomboy who felt more comfortable with boys, then puberty hit and she changed. She also could see herself mistakenly choosing to take puberty blockers in her youth. And now our daughter is just the same, so we make sure to always tell her that her mom had the same struggles. Imagining her mistakenly getting talked into puberty blockers is horrifying, and worse, very plausible.
So overall while I have quite some sympathy, going through puberty seems like the less-bad option even for the majority of those who feel somewhat uncomfortable with their sex.
I'm going to play Devil's Doctor here:
You underwent a drastic change in your personality as a consequence of a hormonal surge that was out of your control. That's 'normal'. It's puberty.
Yet the person you became isn't the same person as the one before. I mean, puberty hit me hard, but I never felt as if my values or goals changed because of it (beyond being even more eager for the company of the fairer sex).
This seems to me to be analogous to a person who, for their entire life, had sworn off addictive substances, but ended up on benzos or opioids for Medical Reason and found themselves hooked, and are now unwilling to try and become sober.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as 50% infant mortality rates, dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
Nature, a blind and indifferent force, cares nothing for our individual well-being or our carefully constructed notions of self. To equate "natural" with "good" or "desirable" is a fundamental error, a logical fallacy we often fall prey to.
In the UK, the laws around consent for minors are relatively simple. Past the age of 16, they're assumed to be competent to consent to or decline medical procedures until proven otherwise. Below that age, there's no strict cut-off, if they can prove to their clinician that they are able to weigh the risks and benefits, they are able to consent or withhold it, and even override parental demands.
Someone who wishes to be the opposite sex is someone I pity. Medical science as it currently stands can't provide them more a hollow facsimile of that transition, it's Singularity-complete based off my knowledge of biology. Even so, the desire is one I consider as valid as any.
If they understand that:
A)Puberty blockers have risks and might not be truly reversible if they change their mind.
B) It won't solve all their problems, it won't physically make them indistinguishable from their desired sex.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision. If they're forced to pass through puberty, they might desist, or they might spend their life wracked with regret that they didn't pull the trigger (hopefully not literally). You can pass far easier before testosterone wracks your body. It's a helluva drug/hormone.
A lot of life-changing decisions can be ones that change the person making them irrevocably, and into a person who would affirm them in retrospect. But I would yell at someone who suggested that couples who are iffy about childbirth be forced to have a child in the hopes that'll change their mind, or fix their marriage or some other well-intentioned goal. Or if we suddenly were to say that everyone should be made to try alcohol and cigarettes because the kind of people who try them tend to stick to it.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desires when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Want to be more muscular? Try tren, if you know what you're in for. Want to lose weight? Take ozempic, while keeping an eye on your eyesight and pancreas. Want to be the other sex? This is the closest we can get you today.
Tell me again how transgenderism is a totally different thing from transhumanism.
I bet I already have.
If not, I'll answer your rhetorical quasi-question:
Transhumanism seeks to liberate us from the existing limits of the human flesh. The exact goal can vary, be it practical immortality, becoming superintelligent or immune to disease. The only common thread is looking at the Human Condition, deeming it deeply suboptimal, and aspiring to do better through technology.
Transgenderism? That could mean anything from affirming that a desire to change sex is Valid™, that it is desirable to do so, or claims that we can do so. Some might say that people who have made efforts to emulate the opposite sex should be extended the polite courtesy/social fiction of being treated like them. Hardliners might say that they are the opposite sex, and any efforts to distinguish them from those natally blessed is bigotry.
They have superficial similarities. Both sides are usually less than pleased with their current bodies and wish to remedy that.
If you're happy that I'm conceding some kind of point you've made, then I will helpfully point out that if you consider them equal and indistinguishable:
Are all sterling examples of transhumanism! The evidence is clear for all to behold, are they not all examples of overcoming human limitations through technology?
Look at this featherless biped, is he not a fine specimen of Man?
If your wife were to dye her hair blonde, would you divorce her as a reckless transhumanist obsessed with undermining the sanctity of the human form she was blessed with? Probably not.
Ahem.
I'm a transhumanist. I'm not a transgenderist in any meaningful sense. I'm very happy being a man rather than a woman. I'd be even happier as a post-gender Matrioshka Brain.
If you want to restrict yourself to the kind of trans-activism that demands people who disagree make concessions beyond minor ones like going along with a new name or remembering new pronouns, then they're usually making some kind of metaphysical claim that a trans-woman is as female as a born woman.
Which I think is nonsense. At the very least it's not possible to pull off today, no matter how much surgery or gene therapy they can afford or survive.
When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.
I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.
This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?
Self identification only equals identity if I asked you about which football club you're a fan of. I haven't actually met someone with who asked me to use different pronouns in real life, if they did, I'd probably oblige them because I'm a polite person with better hills to die on. If they saw me in a treatment room, I'd put their birth sex in the charts and helpfully append "trans" or "identifies as X" alongside it.
Dont your body, your brain chemistry, your experiences and limitations make you "you"? Matrioshka Brain Self_Made_Human wouldn't be you. It would be something entirely different, akin to a Praying Mantis Self_Made_Human or a Spider Self_Made_Human. To me, it sounds like you are okay with killing yourself and replacing yourself with something that was created from you but is not fundamentally you.
I don't know if that makes sense, this statement just sounded utterly alien to me.
I'm the dancer, not the dance. I'm the waves, not the water.
To be a little more concrete:
Every part of your body is endlessly recycled while you're alive. This is true for every structure more complicated than fundamental particles. If two electrons have the same mass, spin, charge and other quantum numbers, then it's impossible to distinguish between them.
The majority of the atoms in my body have swapped around since I was born. I have a consistent self-identity that is conserved even if I have a banana for breakfast or take a big dump, or if I go to bed and wake up tomorrow. I'm never the exact same, any more than a river is. Yet a river and a self_made_human are consistent entities about which it possible to make broad statements.
So it can't be pure and perfect identity. It can't be truly continuous consciousness, unless one wishes to believe that sleep is lethal.
What remains are the patterns of information and the algorithms that act on them. If I copy a png of a flower and share it with you, there is nothing lost or gained in the process, assuming standard error correction.
Right now, these algorithms and their data are instantiated in meat machinery: neurons.
Yet the neurons churn. And eventually, without advanced technological intervention, will die and take me with them.
If you can perform addition using both an abacus, a TI-84 and a supercomputer, in a very real sense they're all doing the same thing. It doesn't make much sense to say that your CPU can't actually add numbers.
(Ignore details such as how the floating point arithmetic would work, that's beside the point)
I think there's no fundamental barrier to extracting the algorithms and information in my neurons and creating a replica in-silico. It is a ridiculously difficult engineering challenge, but not something forbidden by the laws of physics.
I can dig up a link, but we already know that that artifical neural networks can near perfectly replicate the behavior of their biological counterparts (usually in a 1000:1 ratio). You can make them arbitrarily more precise, to the point where the original brain is noisier.
Hence, I want my mind to be uploaded into a computer. It's more robust than flesh, and unlocks far more scope for improvement. Going from a dumb baby to a reasonably intelligent adult didn't kill me, so I don't think becoming more intelligent will.
I'm also fine with multiple copies of myself running around. All that matters is that they begin as indistinguishable in terms of behavior to a blinded observer. If there's a "copy" of myself sitting in a black box, which says the exact same things, acts like me in simulation, and so on, then I accept that as me.
Consciousness isn't computation - it's fundamentally embedded into the biological processes. It also doesn't emerge from neural networks regardless of how well they mimic behaviours of real humans. Neural networks are statistical models, while you are your un-statistical emotions, you are your hormonal systems, microbiomes, other physical systems within your body. If you just extract the consciousness + the memories, just the raw contents of your brain and put them into the machine, you lose everything else, which is arguably the most important part. You get alien consciousness. Your consciousness is your consciousness BECAUSE of all of those icky yucky things attached to your brain, not DESPITE. If your replace them, why do you assume continuity?
All of this irreducible complexity can't be reimplemented by assuming that everything is an algorithm. Emotions aren't algorithmic abstract patterns, they are complex interactions between neurons and other biological systems and they are a fundamental part of the biological reality that makes you "you". Omitting them makes you a spider, an alien.
Hang on. Please note that you're just saying these things.
Why isn't consciousness computational? I mean, I can't prove that it is either, but that's just assuming the opposite side. The correct stance is agnosticism, albeit I think it'll turn out to have a mechanistic explanation eventually.
How do you know with, any confidence at all, that something like an LLM isn't conscious? It might not be conscious in the same manner as humans, but the same might be true for birds or octopi. They demonstrate all the hallmarks of intelligence, even if it's not the human kind.
The human body operates on biology. Which is abstracted chemistry. Which is abstracted physics. Which can be mathematically modeled. There's nothing in the human body or brain that violates the laws of physics, you need supernovae or massive particle collides to produce behavior the Standard Model can't explain (leaving aside dark matter and energy, which aren't relevant to human biology).
That physics, while intractable to compute at the quantum level or even the microscopic scale, still holds true. A lot of it can be usefully described and wrangled with statistics.
Well, emulate the body too! The neurons are electro-chemical, and surprisingly binary, in the sense that they're either firing or they aren't. This behavior can be well approximated.
If a disconnected brain emulation goes nuts, then if you have that kind of tech, you can trivially design a virtual body with the usual sensory modalities.
The brain is also very noisy. You can probably get away with saving a lot of computation by approximating events at the chemical scale. Not every random jiggle of proteins matters, it simply can't at scale.
I am not convinced that this complexity is irreducible at all. A single neuron, or even a thousand, misfiring: Happens all the time. Doesn't matter. An emulation can withstand a lot of noise, because the object it's representing is also noisy.
Emotions can be both algorithmic patterns and the product of a complex interplay between systems. All that really changes is that the algorithms in question become more complex.
This is already accounted for. Estimates for the amount of compute needed for a brain emulation vary multiple orders of magnitude. I never said this would be easy. It just isn't impossible, look, something evolution cobbled up manages. We even have our own alien artifical intelligences that can run on your phone.
If that was really the outcome, I'd take it over death when my fragile biological form fails me. I don't think this is likely at all, beyond the first imperfect uploads.
Thank you for the discussion! I think it heavily veers into sci-fi territory, but it's fun to think about.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GKnAWcWnJJc
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