OGHoosier

@MrShorty I promised I would come back to the issue. Here are my thoughts. Technology, ultimately, is the root of the current moment's vicissitudes. Throughout the vast majority of human history, the roles of men and women were delineated by biological capacity. Men could not (still can't) have babies, and in an era before readily available preserved milk men couldn't even reliably feed babies. Women, in the meantime, were at a distinct disadvantage in martial roles on average, or in labor requiring the sudden application of force (for which men's bodies are primed). Furthermore, men are "reproductively cheap" whereas women are not - a woman takes 9 months to produce 1 baby whereas men (absent social conventions forbidding it) can be a lot more prolific. Complex societies formed around these facts - if you have women marching away on campaign or corvee labor you won't be able to sustain your society's population at scale. The embodied sexual binary was not merely a fact of life but an organizing fulcrum of all society - to deviate from it at scale would be nonsensical. The economics wouldn't allow it, and ideology tends to follow economics. From this milieu comes the "default position" of traditional religions - there would be no reason or option to support any other schema. Technology, both social and mechanical, changed all of this. The levy cycle of campaigning disappeared as militaries professionalized. Modern technology has made it so most jobs can be done equally productively by men and women. If a man can buy formula he can feed a baby. Large industrial states remove the urgency to maintain population (well, for now...) Modern medical technology allows for interventions that can approximate the body to that of the opposite sex. The sex binary is less central than it once was, less "real." As scarcity recedes, society's focus is less on survival and stewardship and more on aspirational fulfillment. Only under such circumstances could the sex binary plausibly be treated as a construction as opposed to a fact. Economics have led ideology once again. What we are dealing with here is a fundamental reconstruction of what is "real." The idea of a premortal life with a significant connection to this one requires premortal spirits to be sexed...up until the last few decades. It was just that big a part of life. Did God just...stop doing that, now that sex isn't as important as it was? In my mind, that is what would require a revelation, not the origin of LDS gender-criticism. We have the origins of LDS belief in premortal spirits well documented; that is the null hypothesis. Is that not true of the reverse as well? Can't God sort it out no matter what happens? To be honest, I see your position as calling for us to go where we need revelatory permission to tread before the fact - acting as if the null hypothesis were false before the data. If such revelation comes, I will follow - heaven knows it would ease a lot of things for myself and others. But, as I elaborate below, I wouldn't bet on it. At the risk of a politics violation, I don't think the current American social consensus on sex will hold over the long-term. In 2011 Dr. Eric Kaufmann published Shall The Religious Inherit the Earth: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, arguing that conservative religious groups have a demographic advantage and can literally out-procreate secular societies worldwide. The results of the Global Religious Futures Project, published by the Pew Research Trust and the John Templeton Foundation in 2022, largely bore Dr. Kaufmann's predictions out; the share of global population belonging to conservative religions is projected to expand, not contract, throughout the 21st century. The most important fact of the 21st century, the character of which is slowly coming into view, is this: modern, secular industrial societies just don't have kids. It's not just that industrialized countries have fewer kids than non-industrialized countries, they don't have enough to replace their own populations. There's only one "First World" state in the world with above-replacement levels of fertility (it's Israel, a unique ideological garrison state, and the growth is driven by the religiously conservative Haredi population). Some cocktail of causes in our social and economic water is a fertility shredder, one that gets worse and worse each year. Which means that the social conditions dominant across the industrialized world today are simply doomed. Only groups with strongly countercultural (countercultural to the industrialized West anyway) and pro-natalist norms surrounding sex are going to sustain themselves through the Second Demographic Transition. And those norms will have to be organic, they cannot be bespoke - see the collapse of mainline Protestantism, which tried to be "the American establishment at prayer" and is now moribund. God knows the fall of every sparrow, but He must also consider the fate of nations. It is a responsibility I cannot comprehend, consequently I cannot tell Him what to do. I will wait upon His word. And, for what it's worth, it does seem like the disintegration of the family is poised to bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. Turning and turning in the widening gyre...socioeconomic shifts this big do not pass easily.

I have not, unfortunately. The Matter With Things, I'm told, essentially recaps and expands on The Master and His Emissary - in interviews McGilchrist described the former as his magnum opus and the condensation of his whole worldview. I decided to start with that, maybe I'll visit Master and His Emissary if I find the time. I've gone back and forth on audiobooks; my attention span is low and thus far resistant to reform, so I struggle to keep the thread of audiobooks. Still, life does not offer as much time for contemplative reading as I wish, so I might start audiobooks and hope I get used to them.

Forget methodological naturalism, this is just methodological chauvinism. Gazzaniga's research says that, when exposed to certain stimuli, commissurotomy patients react in certain ways. The significance of those findings depends on how consciousness is defined, whether its functions are indivisible, the properties of conscious minds, and a handful of other philosophical considerations. This is the case with all science: it is natural philosophy, and both its rules and the operationalization of its findings are framed by non-obvious concepts which analytic philosophy must define. I didn't accuse you of that. The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist, particularly the first volume. His discussion of neuroscientific findings across the past 70 years manages to be both broad and rigorous. You might not consider it "science" per se, but The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Substance Dualism by Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland.

As usual, @Analytics, your posts inspire a fruitful sharpening of concepts. I'm gonna quote a lot of articles, with emphasis, all of which is mine. I'm not as confident that Gazzaniga's evidence shows what he claims it to show. Gazzaniga claims that the halves of the brain, when split by commissurotomy, form two conscious entities with separate senses of self. This is derived from experimental findings like those described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Unity of Consciousness: The article continues: Section 4.2's coverage of Bayne's theory: I have not been able to acquire a copy of Brooks 2015 within my price range (academic monographs are prohibitively expensive for me rn) but I will try. In the meantime, Bayne has written elsewhere on the evidential basis for his theory. From a Scholarpedia article which he curates: If Gazzaniga remarks on chimeric stimuli, I would be pleased to know it. As I do not own a copy of Gazzaniga's work and will not be able to get to my university library for the next few days, I shall have to depend on you to provide such a reference if it so exists. For my part, I think split-brain research validates an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) approach to the mind in which perception and locomotion are material capacities, whereas abstract intellection is not. There clearly are not two competing wills or intellects in the heads of commisurotomy patients, the only differences of which I am aware are seen in cases of perception and simple locomotion. A-T thus incorporates split-brain findings with basic human intuition and philosophical observations regarding intentionality, qualia, and experiences of extra-corporeal consciousness. If A-T is right, then the writing hemisphere need not have conscious experience at all to display the effects observed by Sperry. This has finally spurred me to get off my butt and send to Baylor for a dissertation I've been meaning to read, Brandon Rickabaugh's The Conscious Mind Unified (2020). Should be an interesting and recent revisiting of the issue. When I can get through the digital copy I will send notes.

I don't have time to write a full response right now, I will return to this tonight because I do want to discuss this issue seriously. I am apprehensive - this thread is likely to become a rhetorical Chernobyl - but I want to do it. But I want to start by examining how the tradition came about. I'm a big believer in Chesterton's Fence by nature, I would like to understand the function of the tradition before discarding it. That's probably where I'll start. @mfbukowski I'm getting there man, I'm getting there. Sliding closer to your views each day. I just needed to get my reflexive acceptance of correspondence theory shaken up a bit.

Metaphysical idealism, the belief that reality is inseparable from perception. There's no steadfast structure out there which would just keep ticking regardless of whether or not it was observed. It's the polar opposite of materialism. They're both monistic schools of thought - saying that there's only one kind of stuff out there. In the case of materialism, the stuff is matter, and that which we percieve to be mind is just matter misunderstood. For the idealist, it's all mind, and our human minds are just nodes or facets of a bigger mental whole which encompasses all of observable reality - or in other words, all of reality. For a crude metaphor, the world is the Matrix but without anything (robots, human bodies in pods, computer mainframe, etc.) outside of it. Can't be a simulation if there's nothing to simulate - at that point it's just real. If idealism is accepted then the mind-matter or matter-spirit distinction collapses and matter just means "whatever we are." I don't think Joseph Smith compels me to accept monism (thank you Samuel Brown), but if I were to accept a form of monism it would be idealism as I think the evidence against materialism is really just overwhelming.

Are there people out there who truly believe that no cure for deafness should be pursued? I get not wanting such a cure for oneself - but to be against a cure in principle?

Maybe idealism is true after all.

I'd say that the core germ of each of us is an intelligence which is truly immaterial - it can't be tied to any specific particle but is instead more like a localized law that manifests in discrete packets of material. A chip or aspect of the True Light (here I borrow a concept from Samuel Morris Brown's Dialogue essay "Mormons Probably Aren't Materialists"). This intelligence can manifest in a body made of spirit matter (whatever it is), physical, or some variety of fusion. The influence does not flow in just one direction, however, and so being layered on with a body leaves imprints in the intelligence. So we have a spirit body to train us in observing spiritual things, then we trade it for a physical body but carry with us "muscle memory" for perceiving spiritual things down here. When life is over and we no longer need distance from God, we get a new celestial body that is a fusion model that enables maximal access to the sensory domains of the universe.

I must ask if we're assuming that the premortal spirit stays intact after contact with the mortal body. I really doubt this is the case, or even could be the case - our bodies clearly are not just meat puppets or meat Legos. To be honest I've come to think that the spirit body is dissolved upon incarnation as the intelligence it housed moves to the physical body. To believe otherwise is to believe that at all times an infant is surrounded by an astral form of an adult that he will only be identical to for a short period of his life. So it's an open question to what degree the old spirit body is controlling on our experience in the tabernacle of flesh.

I don't think you can accuse the Telegraph of "spin" when the BBC interprets it substantially the same: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68923861 Even the BBC notes that the stress on biological sex is a novelty compared to recent policy.

Scotland finally gets a temple! May the memes rest in peace.

Let's wait until authentication to pop the Martinelli's.

The things this will do to our already bad birthrate (a civilizational meta-issue) are horrendous. Part of the reason I can't get too caught up in the sexual debates is that we're in the early stages of a world-historic selection event which will likely redefine our entire set of priors regarding family and sexuality over the long-term.

Haters gonna hate.