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Notes -
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
Interesting article! Thanks for linking.
I've heard these comparisons, and as I've mentioned before I'm extremely bullish on the social contagion hypothesis for the majority of mental illness cases. It's an especially pernicious problem because once an illness becomes too 'saturated' like anorexia has been, the cultural cachet of the diagnoses plummets and the fad moves on. All that's left is hordes of people with broken lives and nothing to show for it.
I'm convinced that the modern world's turn away from religion is the main culprit here. That being said, I've been an agnostic for most of my life, so I don't think anyone is necessarily to blame when it comes to turning our backs on old religions. Unfortunately it's just extremely difficult to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with old religious worldviews. I think what many religious people, especially on this forum, miss is that for many agnostics or athiests it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism.
Only because of an implicit scientism that is pervasive in our society, which is particularly popular among liberal atheistic/agnostic types. I can't speak for every religion but the Catholic Church believes that there is no conflict between (Catholic Christian) religion and science, a belief I share.
The issue with this scientism is really quite obvious when you ask a straight-forward question: is all knowledge (or all truths) discernable via science or the scientific method? The answer to this question to me is clearly no, and that some truths (e.g. moral truths) cannot be discerned through science, and this enters the realm of philosophy and ultimately religion or faith. Many a philosopher has attempted derive moral truths through scientific/materialist means (including atheist star Sam Harris, if we want to call him a philosopher), but these projects inevitably end up as failures trying to square the circle. The alternative is moral nihilism and a completely materialist outlook, but very few atheists seem to actually want to bite that bullet.
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
I’m an atheist and consider myself a moral relativist, which is to me is quite distinct from being a moral nihilist. Morality, to me, is a subjective human construct but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it exists in that same sphere as concepts, ideas and beliefs. It’s based on axioms which are essentially arbitrary; the only thing you can do is point out logical contradictions ensuing from them. In that manner, it’s quite similar to maths, which also don’t materially exist but certainly can be studied.
I find the very concept that morality could ever be objective to be logically incoherent; whatever moral “truth” you come up with, I can immediately just invent another worldview that contradicts it due to having different axioms. Even if God existed, I don’t see why I couldn’t disagree with his morality. The fact that he created me or the universe doesn’t grant him any philosophical authority any more than my parents, and being omnipotent just makes him a cosmic dictator with the power to punish me if I stray from his own personal beliefs.
Isn't math usually seen as objective - i.e. its truth or falseness is mind-independent? After all, we use it to come up with falsifiable theories of how the universe works. In fact, one line of argument for theism is that math is unreasonably useful here.
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IIRC from my physics class in college a long time ago, this isn't even a "somehow." It's that complex numbers were formulated and used because they were useful in physics, specifically for modeling behaviors of real-world objects, not some obscure electromagnetism effects happening in a circuit or whatever. I wish I could remember the details and/or how apocryphal the story was, but it's certainly one of the less intuitive things that square-roots of negative numbers are so useful in real-world physics, looking at math from the outside.
This isn't true. They were originally developed to solve equations. The physics applications came much later
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Nah; the whole reason imaginary numbers are called "imaginary" is that they were first used in formal, temporary, intermediate results in algorithms for calculating the "real" cubic/quartic polynomial roots that people care about. That was like 1600. I think Euler's formula a century later was when engineers and physicists first really started treating complex numbers as things of non-temporary interest, and quantum mechanics was when complex numbers started to feel more "real" than real ones.
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