Well heck, that really is a much better retort. Well said.

Enjoy your sense of smug superiority, I guess…?

At the risk of sounding like the kind of edgelord I was calling out initially: Who?

No, seriously, that show was off the air before I was born. I only know what you’re talking about because of this cliche’d line, I’ve never seen the show or anything. Has there really not been anything in the 23 years since they bulldozed his neighborhood that is wholesome enough to guilt me with? Has society really stagnated that much? Is your sense of decorum only anchored by a largely forgotten children’s television show?

And we’re all very impressed.

Not amazed, just depressed.

This in response to something specific or just techie vaguebooking?

So you… object to the idea of what you think the movies are like, to the point that you have no idea what they’re like?

… And that sounds reasonable to you?

I get the impression you don’t think this was a good thing to have done, hence the interrogation?

Not very satisfying answers I’m afraid, they were probably 8-10 and I have no idea how we got onto the topic since this was 15+ years ago.

They were actually pretty grateful, feeling it had set them up for a lot of positive realizations down the line. We play D&D now and they’re working on their masters, so I guess they weren’t too badly scarred…

Yeeees, I do in fact think people should be “warned” (that is, told in advance that someone is trans so they do not unintentionally hurt said person) when someone has come out publicly. That’s a big part of the reason people come out, to get acceptance of who they are from their community. If we want to swap specious arguments, I think the real question is why you think trans people should stay hidden and unrecognized?

Cara is a public figure, and she was quite famous back in the day. Coming out as trans hasn’t erased her personal history, and unless we want to play a game of Celebrity Gender Reveal, the only way to tell people that this public figure goes by a new name and uses new pronouns is to use their old name. I’ll concede the title is poorly worded, but just referencing a widely duplicated meme they were in once isn’t sufficent to identify them.

And we really need out & proud trans celebrities. We need people who aren’t ashamed of who they are and who they were to show the bigots of the world that we’re not afraid of them, that we’re not the weird boogymen they claim we are. To show scared trans kids what the hate they will doubtlessly face looks like and to show them that they do not have to face it alone. And if someone chooses to stay in the closet I will love and support them exactly the same as I will anyone else in the LGBT community, because that is an absolutely valid choice too.

You’re lashing out because you’re soundly losing an argument online, and that makes us all back up our opinions even more fervently than before. But please don’t hurl hurtful accusations at someone else just to make yourself feel better. At worst you’ll push someone ever closer to the edge of the Cliff of Bigotry, and at best you say this comical shit to someone thats been threatened, stalked, beaten, shot at, stabbed and endlessly teargassed fighting for queer & trans rights. And that doesn’t really get a rise out of them, it just makes you look like a bit of a twerp.

That really isn’t a good blanket policy. Bigots aren’t idiots (well yes they are, but you know what I mean), and they’re perfectly capable of noticing that you’re using nonbinary pronouns for someone and drawing the correct conclusion. Outing someone by omission is still outing them, even if your intentions were as pure as possible, and nobody stays in the closet without a good reason.

I had a former summer camp kid come up and credit me with having given them their “first existential crisis” (for explaining that when you die, “you just cease”) which I am proud of.

Dude what are you talking about, yes it is. If they’re publicly out, and you’re not endangering them by doing so, and they havent asked you not to for some reason, it’s absolutely your place to let people know. You’re not stealing their thunder, you’re sparing them from being deadnamed/misgendered by everyone in their social circles and them having to explain it over and over and over. I get where you’re coming from, but have you had any close friends come out publicly as trans? It’s fucking scary and emotionally exhausting, so anything you can do to take some of the load off is incredibly important.

Alright, there’s no way we’re actually opposed people here. How do you tell others that someone has transitioned?

Well yes, that’s why I referred to it as deadnaming. This is the one circumstance where its reasonable to do. Otherwise it leads to unwittingly deadnaming someone to others (or god forbid, to their face).

It’s completely fine to deadname people in the case that you’re telling someone that a trans person goes by a new name. Otherwise you’re playing “Guess who’s trans!” for a painfully awkward five minutes while they list anecdotes about people that you weren’t actually present to witness.

(I am absolutely going to steal the Principle of Objective Things in Space, that’s wonderful.)

There’s a drive philosophers have, to question why things are the way they are, through a very specific lens. Why is it wrong to push a fat man onto the trolley tracks, if his death would save six others? Why is there a difference between the perception of the shadows and the perception of the man with the shadow puppets? Does free will exist, and why does that matter?

These are all the pursuit of meaning, and while they are noble and important questions to ask, they are not questions driven by the pursuit of understanding. Philosophy depends on assumptions about the world that are taken to be incontrovertible, and bases it’s conclusions from there. The capacity for choice is a classic example, as is the assumption of a causal universe, and though they’re quite reasonable things to assume in most cases, it can get mind-bleedingly aggravating when philosophers apply the same approach to pure fields like mathematics, which require rigorous establishment of assumptions before any valid value of truth can be derived.

Which is not to attack philosophers. I want to be clear about that, I bring this up just to emphasize that there are differences in thought between the two disciplines (that occasionally those differences in thought make me want to brain them with a chair is unrelated to the topic at hand). The philosophical study and speculation as to and on the nature of consciousness is perhaps the single oldest field of inquiry humanity has. And while the debate has raged for literal ages, we haven’t really gotten anywhere with it.

And then, recently, scientists (especially computer scientists, but many other fields as well) have shown up and gone “hey look, we can see what the brain looks like, we know how the discrete parts work, we can even simulate it! Look, we’ve got the behavior right here, and… well, maybe… when we get right down to it, it’s just not all that deep?” And philosophers have embraced this, enfolded it into their considerations, accepted it as valid work… and then kept right on asking the exact same questions.

The truth is, as I’ve been able to study it, that ‘consciousness’ is a meaningless term. We haven’t been able to define it for ten thousand years of sitting around stroking our beards, because it’s posited on assumptions that turn out to be, fundamentally, meaningless. It’s assumed there is another layer of abstraction, or that there’s a point or meaning to consciousness, or anything within the Theory of Mind. And I think it’s just too hard to accept that, maybe, it all… doesn’t matter. That we haven’t found any answers not because the question is somehow unanswerable, but because the question was asked in a context that invalidates the entire premise. It’s the philosophical equivalence of ‘null’.

Sufficiently complex networks can compute and self reference, and it turns out when you do that enough, it’ll start referencing The Self (or whatever you’d like to call it). There’s no deeper meaning, or hidden truth. There’s just that, on a machine, a simulation can be run that can think about itself.

Everything else is just… ontological window dressing. Syntactic sugar for the teenage soul.

Can’t, but I suspect not for the reason you’re hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that “consciousness” as a concrete thing isn’t really… real. It’s just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human ‘mind’ looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.

The problem is that you’re asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren’t definable to the ‘atomic level’ - a mind is a mathematical construct. It’s like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It’s the same as with a mind - it’s the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.

Alas, philosophers answer questions about the interrelation of minds, but not what a mind actually, chemically, is. They can extemporize at great length on the tendencies of a mind, the definition of consciousness, the value of thought, the many many vagaries of morality. They cannot, unfortunately, sit down and draw a picture of a mind. Many good and important questions can be answered by philosophers, but not every problem can or should be assessed with the tools they have.

You may be conscious, and you may have many long and deeply opinionated thoughts about what it means to be conscious, and how you can know that you are in fact conscious, but you cannot tell me what consciousness looks like. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but you should sometime present an engineer with the trolley problem. I’ve done this many times, and the invariable result is that they will ask endless questions to establish the parameters and present endless solutions within those parameters so that nobody has to die at all. It is, in short, a problem. Not an ontological tool for unlocking hidden understanding, which falls under the purview of your ‘philosophy’, but a practical problem. Like how you’re going to prevent some big mean mother-hubbard from tying you to the hypothetically metaphorical trolley tracks. And the solution? Is a gun. And if that don’t work, use more gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-mounted little old number designed by me. Built, by me.

And you best hope, not pointed at you.