Applying the Hard Problem framework to gender identity and subjective experience

[catsmate]

It's a remarkably accurate tool - more for acute pain than chronic pain.

Yes it is. That 8 had me planning to sever my right fingers. For the doc I compared it to putting the pad of my thumb down on a hot cigarette lighter. She winced and got the message.....

 

[Helen]

I was almost ready to kill, watching my mother go through a 10 (peritonitis) - her, the helpless nurses, or the doctor who didn't comes as fast i felt she should have. Or all the above, including myself.

 

[JayUtah]

It doesn't have to be pain. I can report a "ringing in my ears" and the doctor understands that as data supporting a diagnosis of tinnitus. Amputees report phantom limbs, and this is also data that helps us create knowledge. I want to know the OP's understanding of the nature of a "gap" between a nueroscientific understanding of, say, the phantom limb and the practice of listening to patient sensation of one. My impression so far is that the "gap" is just a manufactured opening to let Chalmers in wearing a fake mustache.

 

[Darat]

And of course we can deliberately and directly manipulate the brain and create sensations and so on. Whatever ever goes on in-between the ears it is certainly very, very, very highly correlated to the mushy, fatty heat exchanger.

 

[theprestige]

@Gubiosak , what questions are you trying to answer, by applying the "hard problem framework" to a specific instance of qualia?

Nothing about this or any other concrete example changes my understanding or opinion of the "hard problem of consciousness". Nothing about this example changes my mind about what to do with consciousness and qualia in public policy, moral philosophy, or any other practical applications.

 

[JayUtah]

@Gubiosak , what questions are you trying to answer, by applying the "hard problem framework" to a specific instance of qualia?

And why pick one so fraught with emotion and controversy that will inevitably overshadow any debate? Surely there are others like body integrity identity disorder or age fluidity that would provide less inflammatory examples of felt or experienced identity.

I'm still trying to figure out how you can open with, "Let's apply this framework to this problem," and then pivot immediately to, "Okay, the framework is irrelevant, but let's talk about the problem anyway." As you correctly noted, we have a thread for that already.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

why pick one so fraught with emotion and controversy that will inevitably overshadow any debate?

The OP says:-

my intent here isn't to rehash the social or definitions-based debate on what gender identity is.

However this was a good pick, because...

If the consensus here is that first-person reports in this context are purely functional ("Easy Problem") or illusory, I’m interested in the specific epistemological criteria used to make that distinction without falling into physicalist reductionism.

In other threads discussing gender dysphoria, some posters have argued that that even if the feelings are genuine they are illusory. Ignoring the fact that the brains of transgender people are shifted towards their gender identity, what logical reason is there to think that such thoughts cannot be real?

The common argument is that biology determines sex, end of story. If a person feels they are a different gender then they are simply deluded. However this implies that the mind's 'actual' gender is determined purely by sex, with no possibility of a variation between the brain and body. Problem is we don't know how the brain gets its gender identity, so how can we say that it must match a person's sex? Unless we have proof of a mechanism that cannot fail, we can't make that determination, and have to accept the possibility that the feeling of being a different gender is 'real', ie. imprinted onto the brain at an early age just like cis gender is.

The OP asks:-

Is the subjective "felt sense" of gender strictly a functional output of neural architecture (an "Easy Problem" in principle)?

Yes. All thoughts are the result of neural output. If a person thinks they are trans gender it's because their brain's memories and 'wiring' are telling them that. "felt sense" is neural output.

Or does the gap between third-person brain data and first-person subjective reporting highlight the limits of observational physicalism?

No. theoretically we could map the exact configuration of person's brain and so determine exactly what they are thinking. Only current technical constraints prevent us from 'reading minds'. We already have people with brain implants that directly 'read' (a small part of) their minds. In the future we may develop ways to 'see' the state of neurons associated with particular thoughts. To decode the data the subject could 'train' the mind reading device, perhaps using AI to recognize patterns and create a simulation of the mind in 'third-person' form.

 

[theprestige]

In other threads discussing gender dysphoria, some posters have argued that that even if the feelings are genuine they are illusory. Ignoring the fact that the brains of transgender people are shifted towards their gender identity, what logical reason is there to think that such thoughts cannot be real?

Not a fact; you're misrepresenting the data.

You know where to go, if you want to defend this claim.

(And if you don't want to defend this claim in the proper venue, we can reasonably dismiss it. As we should.)