Intellectual Honesty and Trans Theory

The other day you might have seen an optical illusion I had uploaded, featuring two spinning yellow and blue circles which seemed to change in the direction the two arrows inside indicated without ever moving. 

The video was also accompanied with this text:

Essentiality

Social constructionism, the idea that social frameworks create our perception of reality in toto, is wrong. 

Perception itself first is biological, not ideological. We can see here plainly that symbols convey information on a pre-personal level, that is, archetypically. 

There's not an idea or culture that will change that function. Pointing is essential. It is universal. It is baked into the hardware. It is stable. It is lightning fast. It is not a stereotype. 

Since the very fact of essentiality breaks Progressivism, and does so essentially, and because Progressivism is the hegemonic ideology of our era in the West, you have most likely been propagandized to ignore, doubt, and forget what essentiality means. Even many reactionaries are confused on this point. 

We have forgotten that there is an objectivity to subjectivity. 

There is an essence in arrows.

..

It turns I was wrong. The optical illusion is not produced by the arrows at all. The illusion occurs by the manipulation of two thin strips of yellow and blue lining the insides and outsides of the spinning circle. As @brbla points out, you can actually cover the arrows with your fingers and find the circles still seem to move. @esotariq goes further, saying that the effect still works even with a monochrome filter!

Which is all well, fine and good. It just so happens to break the point I wanted to make hilariously. If I wanted to illustrate a concept of an innate essence as being a pre-personal, perceptual process, I unwittingly demonstrated instead the power of suggestion. One imagines an essence in arrows as powerful enough to produce the optical illusion, which would indeed be profound if true. It would be as though our evolutionarily recent, slower symbolic cognition could predominate our quicker and more reliable visual cognition, which has been formed by a far more ancient evolutionary history. Preposterous!

The post uses this magical effect not only to confer the power of visual cognition onto symbolic cognition, but also implicates a failure mode of Progressivism grand in scope and just as profoundly resting on faulty foundations. So it would seem it all crashes down and 'essentiality' isn't really a thing other than yet another ideological instrument of symbolic manipulation, which I accuse everyone else of misunderstanding, thus revealing a sudden pomposity in this writing style, etc.

It would be a blow to my credibility if it didn't present such an awesome opportunity. We can ask, is essentiality so discounted then? Does my reader feel the limb inside, the crashing ego, pre-existing the suggestion? Does he suspect any claims I make given this error? 

He should! Though it is pleasurable and useful to loosen cognitive regulation for the shaman's hypnosis, the spirit of science and objectivity remains to be found within an active practice of intellectual honesty. Doubt is always necessary. I must always be open to being wrong.

Thomas Metzinger in his essay 'Intellectual Honesty and Spirituality' (video version here) provides the reasoning for how hypnosis and intellectual honesty may bridge, both being instances of a specific epistemological stance, a spiritual stance, in which a present-moment, phenomenal practice delivers us inner knowledge. Perhaps scandalously, Metzinger proposes that it is 'spirituality' in this sense as an ongoing process that stands as religion's opposite, not science per se. 

Religion is institutional, collectively organized dogma. It is top-down. Conversely, spirituality is bottom-up, often ritualized, emergent, individual.

Intellectual honesty is a special instance of spirituality. It is a practice in the commitment of not lying to oneself, even if no one is there to raise an eyebrow. The scientific method is then a formalized process of intellectual honesty, but still a spiritual method rather than a religious method. 

We live in a time where science is being called upon by Progressives in this religious sense. When challenged on the merit of trans theory, for example, we are asked to "listen to the science" of organizations like the World Medical Association which have delivered statements regarding the legitimacy of sex/gender classifications. Their method of doing so is not the scientific method; the process is as opaque as it is globally authoritative. Sex is thus distinct from gender. Who are we to question the science?

Like protected economies, we become fragile if we do allow ourselves to fail. Our interpretive systems lose their adherence to reality, thereby allowing a hyperreal opportunism to corrupt all foundations. Thus science and intellectual honesty is a practice intending not only to understand the world (certainly not intending to change it) but specifically to maintain the integrity of our systems of understanding ie the purity of our souls.

Is sex distinct from gender?

Is essentialism false and unscientific?

On a culture war battlefield one can imagine the constructionist warrior slamming home the point without return. I had falsely referred to essentiality as actually the symbolic function of arrows powerful enough to effect visual illusions. The original post rests a confidence on this false point then as yet another example of the inescapability of social construction, it would be reasoned. Out in enemy territory, capitulation is the rule, the totalization to nil a vision zero technique. The primary opportunity tends to be the lock-on narcissistic wound as rule over hearts and minds exposed. Social construction is formed as such and all. Essentialism can be corrupted by a wishful thinking, an opportunism, is used by immoral unpersons, and therefore always wrong. While biology may play some part, the social constructionist tends to render nature as playing maybe 5% of the equation. 95% of all we are and do and perceive is imposed.

But actually my emphasis on the proposed essentialism is not derived from the optical illusion -- that because the arrows seemed to produce the effect, therefore essentiality holds radical importance -- but by the essay of Metziner's I had linked, on Intellectual Honesty and Spirituality:

"Our theories about ourselves and especially about our own minds are changing. Elsewhere, I call this second and simultaneously unfolding process the “naturalistic turn in the image of humankind” : genetics, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and contemporary philosophy of mind are successively providing us with a new image of ourselves, an increasingly detailed theoretical understanding of our cognitive deep structure, its neural basis and biological history. Whether we like it or not, we are beginning to view our mental abilities as natural properties with a biological history of their own, as properties that can be explained using the methods of science, that can in principle be controlled technologically and can maybe even be implemented on non-biological carrier systems. Clearly, this development is also an intellectual challenge for humanity as a whole. Subjectively, many experience it as a further threat, as a potential insult and what Freud would call a narcissistic wound, a new danger for the integrity of our inner world."

Relatedly, the self model-in-world model is the essential organization of consciousness. You can see for yourself. Have you ever not been a self in a world? What would it mean to be sentient and not be in a world at all? Perhaps it is easier to imagine a world without a self? 

We can see again what we might mean by essentiality here if we hold up an unintuitive proposition against it .. let's imagine, relatedly, the self-string theory-in-cactus is the essential organization of consciousness. The abstract absurdity of the proposition, the difficulty of a phenomenal check, or basic sense of it, reveals the importance of intuition to the question of essentiality. Intuition can be phenomenally accessed by the phrase 'immediately before immediacy.' The phenomenal is essential because experience is the original medium whereby all knowledge claims can be expressed. 

The reality of our minds or mind-independent reality may not by intuitive for the simple fact that there are aspects of reality which are not phenomenally accessible, that is, they cannot be directly represented to ourselves eg. the possibility of a time-independent universe. There's nothing stopping reality for being counterintuitive. But, intuition itself must be intuitive. The processes in reality which governs intuition may be counterintuitive in the way that a maps methods of depicting the territory may not itself be recorded by the map -- but the relation of maps and territory is essential. 

Whether a map reflects the territory or not, whether it's wrong or not, whether it is useful or not, are all essential questions. Because they are functional questions. The function is in the relation between maps and territories. It is an essential fact that the brain considers truth as what is true enough. We simply do not have resources to determine reality in direct exactitude. In fact, while this naive realism that we are in direct contact with reality is the given default, it is phenomenologically impossible to conceive of what an actual realism could even mean. Phenomenology without virtuality is impossible.

We can relate the 'self vs world' model to 'nature vs nurture' and see a fascinating complexity in the relation. For, it is not enough to say 'self' is 'nature' and 'world' is 'nurture.' It maps cleanly enough. But does it represent the territory? 

We could intuit that 'organism vs environment' also maps cleanly onto both 'self vs world' and 'nature vs nurture,' and we could then see that these things could not be simply the same, because it is also true that within the 'organism' is the 'self vs world'. We are organisms which use 'self vs world' pattern-matching as an evolved strategy to efficiently organize, synchronize, and regulate various functions through adequate representations. 'Self vs world', 'nature vs nurture,' 'organism vs environment,' 'emergent vs designed,' 'bottom-up vs top-down' all neatly stack on one another. But their relations also are highly complex, nested at multiple levels of analysis, and contingent. 

All this is to say the critique of trans theory is actually very straightforward: 'sex vs gender' is a simple ideological instrument. It is a port from 'nature vs nurture.' Trans theory, as the avant-garde of contemporary, intersectional Progressivism, is designed to leverage 'sex vs gender' as a dichotomous framework. 'Nature vs nurture' is entangled, irreducible and contingent at every level of analysis. Even the act of analyzing always carries both biological, essential characteristics and characteristics born of the context of the environment. Trans theory is wrong because it is a method to treat 'nature and nurture' with 'sex and gender' as decoupled, disentangled and causally independent, relying instead on a model of totalized, top-down, authoritative imposition. Sex is assigned, it is not emergent.

In 1984, Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." 

In trans theory, it is not The Author Is Dead. It is The Author is Law. 

Though of course I may be wrong.