From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 07:50:12 MST
On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, the animated silicon love doll wrote:
> I've found myself in the same situation wrt being transgendered.
> However, I'd hardly consider you (or anyone on this list) a "mundane".
Closed communities tend to rapidly develop their own languages, rendering
them progressively incomprehensible to outsiders. This is a spontaneous
process. You have to compensate for that, not encourage it.
You would want to minimize neologisms, or running danger of being
mislabeled as cult, thus biasing communication mode from neutral to
hostile, as memetic immunoprotection kicks in.
> Personally, I think that the binary gender system is one of the things that
> will quickly be left behind when people start to become non-biological (ie,
> uploads), so I'd say that gender discussions can be relevant. But that's
> me.
Sexual dimorphism is an autocatalytic symmetry breaking of agents in an
evolutionary theatre. If you recombine properties of agents, getting more
than two agents to contribute constructively is nontrivial (empirically,
it's hard enough with only two of them already), hence it's just two
sexes.
Making beings in the material domain could start this anew. If the
supporting matrix makes copies/recombination arbitrarily cheap (which
seems to exclude operation directly on the physical layer), the drive
would be absent but for sexual selection nonlinearities. What those will
eventually wind up with is everybody's guess.
> In the end, I think g-neutral pronouns are an issue of respect. Do you
> respect me (or anyone else) enough, as a fellow Extropian and human
> being, to use the proper pronoun? You're perfectly welcome not to,
This is a rather strange definition of respect. You're trying to make me
use your own special language when referring to you, but nobody else.
> though I'd probably start referring to you with g-neutral or female
> pronouns (yes, I'm vindictive, why do you ask?).
I could hardly care less how you refer to me. Last time I looked we didn't
live in a magical universe.
> >Sometime gender can be ignored, sometimes its use conveys valuable
> >information.
>
> So let's ignore it when it can be ignored, and make not of it when that
> information is valuable.
This whole discussion on the background of what we're trying to achieve is
so monstrously pointless. I don't know about you, but I'd rather spend a
scarce resource (mentation) on engineering first, rather than chrome.
Thinking about best sounding meat sounds when talking about communication
mode of beings made from bits or dry polymer... the mind boggles.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:12:48 MST