QuestionScreaming Into The Void is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I'd like you to come up with a means to distinguish between biological sex as an evolutionary established physical phenotype and the confusion with social gender roles and gender identity. since this is so perplexing
Is your conversation with "Claude" with an actual implementation of ChatGPT or equivalent? Arguably, ChatGPT is no better than a golem, probably why they're so prone to "hallucinations", more so than the "substrate" it is built on.
But not terribly impressed with "his" commentary, mostly a dog's breakfast and incoherent blathering -- the cacophony of the mob, sound and fury and all that. This in particular:
Claude: "Biological sex refers to the physical traits we associate with maleness and femaleness."
"He" really hasn't defined what he means by "male" and "female" in the first place, only listed a bunch of traits that may or may not correlate, to a greater or lesser extent, with organisms that actually are members of those categories. He hasn't specified anything at all in the way of "necessary and sufficient conditions" for category membership.
You might consider the standard biological definitions, from various reputable sources, for the sexes that I've quoted and linked to in this Note:
By those definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS. That is IT. Pretty much everything else that Claude referred to are, at best, no more than accidental properties and not essential ones:
Is your conversation with "Claude" with an actual implementation of ChatGPT or equivalent? Arguably, ChatGPT is no better than a golem, probably why they're so prone to "hallucinations", more so than the "substrate" it is built on.
But not terribly impressed with "his" commentary, mostly a dog's breakfast and incoherent blathering -- the cacophony of the mob, sound and fury and all that. This in particular:
Claude: "Biological sex refers to the physical traits we associate with maleness and femaleness."
"He" really hasn't defined what he means by "male" and "female" in the first place, only listed a bunch of traits that may or may not correlate, to a greater or lesser extent, with organisms that actually are members of those categories. He hasn't specified anything at all in the way of "necessary and sufficient conditions" for category membership.
You might consider the standard biological definitions, from various reputable sources, for the sexes that I've quoted and linked to in this Note:
https://substack.com/@humanuseofhumanbeings/note/c-18162459
By those definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS. That is IT. Pretty much everything else that Claude referred to are, at best, no more than accidental properties and not essential ones:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/