Vaush Debates An Expert w/ No Prep, Makes Crazy Arguments...

i don't think vosh is like an idiot one of the reasons why i hold him to a higher sense i think he's like fairly intelligent he just does fit for optics sometimes whatever but this man this brave warrior decided that he was gonna go head strong blinders on into a debate about a sex gender distinction with a philosophy phd who's authored a paper on this topic with absolutely no preparation and he was going to rely on the surface level philosophy that he picked up from me in 2018 to do it can i just get some claps in chat for the absolute bravery of this mad lad i'm sorry this isn't true that water has not always been h2o yeah all you have to do is cross the mexican border and over there it's aqua that's h2o not water aqua means water aqua is water it's a different actually oh dude i can't wait to watch this this is gonna be the highlight of my life is gonna be this debate okay oh my god i hadn't seen this video damn now i feel a little bit bad because um i kind of defended vosh during the jk rowling i was like oh i didn't think he said anything that bad he just needs to be a little bit more chill bro what bro what what was going on here [Music] oh no so i'm sorry if my points have seemed childish so far but a good chunk of vaush's arguments arguments being a generous word involved picking apart my accent my appearance my outfit and my persona you know all the things 12 year old girls go for when they're feeling particularly [ __ ] so it's difficult to be serious when i'm not given anything serious to work with and then because apparently he really wanted to prove my point about male feminists he said this uh she a pick me no wonder she's dressed like this she's wearing a [ __ ] skirt with stockings she just wants to live in med what does that mean bro that's such a standard girl outfit is a skirt with stockings doesn't mean that it's like what dude this whole video is wild i wonder she's dressed like this she's wearing a [ __ ] skirt with stockings she just wants to live in mad men and be sexually harassed by like the the [ __ ] the office boys i'm sorry i beg your pardon sir what was that what do i want she just wants to live in mad men and be sexually harassed yes what what is happening dude i missed um [Laughter] i don't know why you would maybe he's maybe he was doing the uh ultra instinct ultra irony arc trying to like i was jesus um ninu this is the guy that said he could get [ __ ] at any time and tinder wept because he left the dating scene wait is this guy seriously saying that i can't get laid incredible i'll give you 5 000 if you can get poontang before january 1st do you have any idea who the [ __ ] you're talking to when i got off tin when i got off tinder because the [ __ ] quarantine tacoma wept even like ignoring the fact that i have a girlfriend even if we're just talking like randos i'm two hours away right now from being inside somebody else this is one i have two skills and it's non-monogamy and speaking publicly okay do some [ __ ] research sorry uh well we won't watch this whole video is that [ __ ] you tweeted about washing the periodic table real oh bro cynical brit oh we haven't gotten to that yet oh [ __ ] i don't want to spoil that's like that's like three hours of the stream damn dude okay stop i'm getting distracted okay okay so yesterday i said something to book smarts something along the lines of like i'm sorry i think i said something along the lines of like i don't think bosh is like an idiot i actually one of the reasons why i hold him to a higher sense i think he's like fairly intelligent um i would say he's like fairly intelligent he just does [ __ ] for optics sometimes whatever um but this man this brave warrior decided that he was going to go head strong blinders on into a debate about a sex gender distinction with a with a philosophy phd who's authored a paper on this topic with absolutely no preparation and he was going to rely on the surface level philosophy that he picked up from me in 2018 to do it i just wanna can i get some clappas can i just get some claps in chat for the absolute bravery of this mad lad to think that to think that he could he could try to take the philosophy that i knew [ __ ] i'm insecure about my skinny arm four years ago before i knew what [ __ ] ontology meant and go and argue with a philosophy phd over sex gender distinctions i just that's just claps for that okay thank you ziggy 90. um that was true even before we knew about chemistry that was the definition of water before anybody knew anything about chemistry before we knew about h2o back when aristotle thought it water was just an element nevertheless this was h2o i'm sorry this isn't true that water has not always been h2o yeah all you have to do is cross the mexican border and over there it's aqua that's h2o not water aqua means water aqua is water it's a different actually oh dude i can't wait to watch this this is gonna be the highlight of my life is gonna be this debate i have i there is like this i used to do this so 100 i'll cringe it myself this is why i hate everything somebody asked me a while ago what do you think is the most cringiest video you've ever done and i basically say every time you go back two or three years all of my videos are cringy because i'm constantly like understanding new things and updating my understanding um people that have like this elementary grasp of philosophy and think that they can just reinvent everything on the fly like bro people have written books and books and books on [ __ ] like this okay like you're not [ __ ] victon stein jr at age 29 with no formal background whatsoever and you're about to give us a whole new theory of language okay like what do you think are you going to do it's not aqua right and we're referring to terms and definitions here no i'm referring to water the stuff that fills lakes and rivers there's stuff about the word one many things fill lakes and rivers okay um do you honestly not know what i mean when i talk about water or iceberg i think you you made a mistake before you began that argument which is that you said just because it sounds like 23 when he wrote his first book yeah but he was probably some spoiled rich kid that spent way too much time reading philosophy like a [ __ ] loser okay no one cares because people didn't always know something it doesn't mean that it can't be true but that can't be the case when we're talking about definitions things that are okay we'll watch this from the beginning okay um what do we even start i don't even know where to start okay let's start with shoe and head so in case you guys didn't know so in the destiny community we have the ls okay we've got the lauren southern question um in vosh's community they have the show on hood question and both communities constantly vie to throw these two women at each other to see which streamer man is more of a simp or worse human being basically so one of the problems that vaush's community has is that i'm trying to think if i need to build a bridge to shoe right now because she might be stranded in the ocean no actually i hate you um one of the problems that shu has is that shu is and she's self-aware about this i don't feel bad saying this she was i'm trying to be too mean she doesn't have the best she doesn't have the best mind for politics okay she kind of um she just she's kind of a wild a loose cannon okay that's not supposed to be sexual she's a she just kind of says what she pops into her head at any particular point in time and it's not always the most insightful thing so okay there we go all right the um [Music] how is that sexual well i don't want somebody thinking i said like loose like oh she's a [ __ ] or something i don't know if you guys are weird okay um unread messages i don't care okay but the um the problem is that i think she recently was um she recently gave a take where somebody tweeted out a um i only checked vausha's subreddit in the morning when i wake up so i don't i don't keep 100 to do this but i think somebody tweeted out like oh here's a disgusting drag person that's doing something for children or whatever and it ended up not being the case um it ended up not being something that it was either a straight person or it was it was something different and um the um the problem is that shoe it was a burlesque dancer that's it it wasn't an lgbt thing it was shoot it was a it was a burlesque dancer the problem is that when shu amplified this tweet i think that her tweet the original tweet got like 2 000 likes and i think her tweet ended up getting like 20 000 likes it was like it was she amplified the [ __ ] out of it and then she ended up going on to make some huge apology where she's like listen guys like politics is like kind of for fun for me and i don't know anything about politics and don't judge me and um oh thank you yeah thanks i should have i should have documented this more closely oh here it is the crazy part about the direct the kids drag show was that it was a nothing burger that oh the crazy part about the kids drag show that was a nothing burger is that the loser that infiltrated it maybe he means initiated it got less than 2 000 likes and she got 59 000 likes and made it viral oh she actually got it do you think she got it on i didn't click next did she actually get it onto tucker carlson oh no oh my god represented i didn't even click next on these representative slayton says he will file a bill to ban drag shows in the presence of minors in texas damn shoe on head is more legislatively affected than vosh with a single tweet what a queen apparently tucker did a segment on it jesus that wasn't the burlesque photo was it not at all related it looks like shoe tweeted the same thing what are you talking about or it might be something different but it's part of like the stuff that she was tweeting i think is what people are trying to say no listen she's ch now because i don't listen to varsity team enough i've never listened to vaj defense shoe so i don't actually know if he does um i don't know if he does defend her or what but apparently people feel like he's defending her people feel like he's running defense oh i also see because i get brought up on here didn't vosh imply shu's boyfriend wasn't a nazi on stream yesterday anyone uses the term cultural marxism is oftentimes an anti-semite the leaps and bounty goes into defending this woman is insane to me reminds me a lot of destiny with lauren southern do i get brought up a lot in here and d doesn't even defend loin as much as watch defense shoe damn oh no oh the back and forth but anyway [ __ ] vosh if he sees his throat and doubles down gaslighting us he can [ __ ] join destiny and the pieces of [ __ ] not worth taking seriously at that point since destiny [ __ ] talks about being a trans ally but [ __ ] shits on the transmitting on any day that ends in y just like vosh says he's part of a community but [ __ ] defended choose nazi boyfriend you suck dickvosh well so do i but unlike you i ain't given a nazi head just to sit for some mediocre negative iq [ __ ] the um jesus christ um [ __ ] what else was it there was one guy that made a thread i'm not gonna be able to find it oh so they made this thread washer dressed the shoe problem and his response was that we were all insane that we are the problem we are talking because we think shu's boyfriend is fascist and we are all being feds and then he got and this guy got permabanned and he locked the thread at 140 comments this is from yesterday yeah i wonder how many people got banned in here this got me banned and i'm not even a dj dude damn dude that fortress do you remember what i said about nazis guys this is what i said listen if you want to be a race realist fine okay get rid of all the brown and black people but once you've done that and there's only white people left you're not going to see all white people you're going to see people with brown hair you're going to see people with [ __ ] blonde hair you know and once you've gotten rid of all the brown haired people you're not going to see a whole bunch of white people with blonde hair you're going to see people that have green eyes people that have blue eyes right you're always going to divide on these differences and that's what's happening in the fortress they uh they got rid of all the outsiders and now they're slowly whittling down what's left on the inside oh no i should have went link hunting before this vosh reacting on stream oh [ __ ] hold on i didn't see this one i shouldn't namely downplaying the extent that she was before as an anti-lgbtq fascist the funny thing is i read through um i read through shu on head's boyfriend shu one head's boyfriend's tweets [ __ ] i thought i had this up oh no wait can somebody link me the thread with all of his tweets and um i hate to i don't want to run defense for shoe on head or her boyfriend because i don't give a [ __ ] about either of them and none of them would give me any amount of charity oh 550 but the thing is her boyfriend's twitter just kind of reads like a guy that's listened to way too much jordan peterson um i don't know if he's actually like a fascist or nazi but here here are the six tweets that this guy took out i think one of these is a little sussy but they've gotten a majority of the western world to believe that men can become women if they convince us of that everything else is fair game i'm almost positive i've heard this by from jordan peterson um like verbatim nobody man or woman should have freedom dude what they want with their bodies this sounds like a jordan peterson take to me these aren't rights about systemic racism or george floyd they're not about police brutality all that was the catalyst for the first wave of cultural marxist uprising you reading this tweet may roll your eyes of this now let's see if this sounds cultural marxism it doesn't didn't jordan peterson talk about this [ __ ] a ton i don't know if he has recently it is intellectually morally bankrupt it's just an american political parties engaging any kind of genocide against any group of people other than against the unborn perpetual by the democratic party this is a pretty standard conservative talking point they talk about how black conservatives especially will talk about like the genocide against black babies um i've talked to a black conservative i don't remember his name a couple of times my stream about that party of freedom except when your freedom clashes with my religion liberty does not equals license you moral infant it's wanting to prevent evil including abortion also including contraception so these are the um these are the the evidence brought forth to prove that his boyfriend is a fascist which is these tweets are cringe to be clear the guy is clearly like a jp [ __ ] fanatic um but they i guess these guys i guess actually if you asked vasha's subreddit they would probably um they'd probably think that jordan peterson is a fascist as well right but um didn't it's it's just i like watching them eat themselves because now this is something where wash truly vosh truly only has himself to blame because like if you're going to come on and call like scalia and george bush fascists and you're going to throw around fascists all the time you can't really be that surprised when people are calling like shoe and head's boyfriend a fascist right you can't you can't really be you can't really be that shocked about it vosh is definitely called jordan peterson of fascists oh well didn't vosh imply shu's boyfriend wasn't a nazi on stream yesterday anyone uses the term cultural marxism oftentimes anyways oh we're gonna read this this is leave some bounce blah blah blah this is nazi talk and she's dating a nazi vash is the one vosh is wrong on this one in his gasoline tries to found this behavior it's just sad as to why he keeps defending her these are also old tweets so who knows as many pointed out the last was from two weeks ago oh apparently they're in they're in the gc guys apparently they all share a group chat together and i guess vosh must have referenced that once because i saw a lot of comments on this trip but it's like vosh said he's calling the group chat it's disgusting cultural marxism stuff is at least fascist adjacent um i think it came from the old ideas of that cultural bolshevism or whatever um which was nazi propaganda but like i think a lot of people have like contemporaneously adopted like the cultural marxist post-modernist [ __ ] like i'm i'm i feel pretty confident that jordan peterson is not a fascist i think he's i'm pretty sure he's like actually like a liberal with like some pretty whatever beliefs um i i i don't think jordan peters is a fascist i know that he's talked about that cultural marxist [ __ ] a lot um i'm not to say that it's good i think it's cringe when people bring it up but i don't think uh i don't think jordan peterson is a fascist okay jordan peterson doesn't use the term cultural marxism he uses post-modern neo-marxist i've heard him say that before but i swear to god i've heard him talk about cultural marxism too i feel like i almost positive i don't know about recently but when i'm sorry hold on when i say liberal sorry [ __ ] my brain is international right now when i say jordan peterson is a liberal what i mean is like he's not a fascist and he's not a socialist i don't mean he's a liberal that he's like left-leaning or like a democrat or whatever um he's probably like whatever whatever part of the political spectrum you put joe rogan on is probably where jordan peterson is he talks about cultural marxism in 12 roles okay gotcha gotcha um i don't mean liberal in the sense he's like democratic or left-leaning why anyone continues to support shu is beyond me sympology is a very dangerous ideology imagine finding this piece of [ __ ] attractive oh my god post it all my friend there's a lot i didn't even post please our community deserves the truth on this if wash really wants to make this community into the base pro queer safe space fortress then we've got to know when a snake is snuck through the gates shoe and head is a threat to our queer and trans comrades that much is obvious now she has not apologized she hasn't apologized since her supposed i ain't buying it she still thinks she was right remember when i was like there's no point in apologizing to these people there really isn't um don't let that nazi scum [ __ ] boyfriend off the hook this [ __ ] wants to torture queer and trans people with conversion therapy nuke his ass with all the screenshots i beg you thanks what you've done already though i'm so proud of how this queen's responded this painful stressful situation she didn't really apologize though really i didn't i saw her big she made like 10 tweet a 10 tweet thread about some [ __ ] that i read but normally i'd be against using the opinions of someone's partner to criticize them but i think it's just for you really would you really normally be against that really if somebody told you they were dating a nazi you're telling me that you would normally be against using their opinions to crucify that person okay chief hey that's me i really laid it on thick oh casey from kcj from ella it is you why are you in both of our communities i super don't understand how people can watch both me and vosh i don't understand you guys how can you watch us both i feel like it was so different unless you're hate watching now oh [ __ ] five hours ago mr moon anti-fan oh we got so many jumps to go through okay we gotta finish watching the bears clip sorry hold on i shouldn't namely downplaying the extent that she was bf as an anti-lgbtq fascist oh this is the post i saw this i think before i went to sleep or no was when i when was this posted [ __ ] probably done with vosh after the gaslighting about the shoe situation check out this guy check out this post okay also if this guy got banned that's fair game i ban people to do this all the time so i don't even judge you vosh i don't even judge you if you um if you ban this guy okay because these posts are cringe as [ __ ] but when it's happening to other people it's based as [ __ ] so wait hold on wait what did this guy in chat say destiny that was me bro i am the psyops dgg for lighting okay but you got you got 55 upvotes in this okay hold on you guys have to chill you guys have to chill or else people like osan are actually going to start seeing you in the walls okay stop doing this is all of us subreddit just a bunch of alternate accounts from dg are there any watch fans i'm just kidding okay 1.3 000 people logged in right now damn um okay they are sleeper agents true they're just waiting you guys are waiting like the guys at the end of before ended up for my manifesto to come okay you will be rewarded okay it might be in the afterlife but you will be rewarded okay we're watching this i should name me down playing the extent that she was before oh let me uh i don't know if he's going to read this whole post but is he i don't think she i don't know namely downplaying the extent that shu's bf is an anti-lgbtq fascist he's giving shu so much leeway where he'd give other creators zero before lashing on it ranting and raving over the slightest criticism of him true i've gotta say i'm starting to wonder vosh has been this toxic and manipulative all along i've just been drinking the kool-aid i mean there's got to be a legit reason everybody outside his community hates him oh no i mean really think of any defensive wash anytime something gets linked with wash sang or writing some saucy [ __ ] the response is always yeah he did do and say that but here are a million caveats that make this okay i mean obviously a lot of hate and criticism is ridiculous but after some reflection i think he's generally a very dishonest actor i think he's very manipulative to his fan base and he's been outright abusive to other creators before and let's be honest the poppy thing was really [ __ ] we shouldn't have forgiven him so easily or at all any time the community starts to turn on voge vos just begins to purge his community of anybody who critiques him and his remaining audience just moves on business as usual vosh can't take criticism and lashes out terribly any time he receives and i don't really feel safe in his community anymore oh no are they downplaying the extent that she was before as an anti-lgbtq fascist literally i just said in a group chat i thought in a group chat he's the group chat he's chilling the gc guys he's so cool with the group chat imagine that lauren southern guy she's cool on the group chat do you think vasha let me get away with that one shoot that's not what gaslighting means by the way um he's going to shoot so much leeway or give other creators zero before lashing out and ranting a ravenclaw's criticism i gotta start i wonder if vosh has been this toxic and manipulative all along dude teaching psychiatric terms to zoomers was such a [ __ ] mistake wait i just i thought i was about to get a repeat teaching psychiatric terms assuming such a mistake we'll probably see it in the debate but it's so funny this is one of the funniest things i've ever heard in my entire life there's going to be another part in um there's going to be another part later on where he goes off on how what did he say it's like people learning elementary psychology elementary philosophy terms was the worst thing to ever happen on the internet to debate i was like yeah true vosh um we'll probably get to that one later that i think that comes in his is this clip quiet or am i crazy that unsound arguments i mean you said they wouldn't care about circus i don't know why you're talking about circular arguments when i haven't provided a circular argument i have no idea what this the i swear to god teaching mediocre people online what philosophy terms are has been the greatest mistake humanity's ever made i hope absolutely true and i hate myself for it absolutely true holy [ __ ] it has led to an exponential increase in the number of people making bad arguments using larger words i i just i he's got to be [ __ ] with me he's [ __ ] with me right now he's [ __ ] with me i know he's [ __ ] with me he must be he's got i think he i actually i rescind my reception resention what's the what do you call somebody something that is rescinded i'm rescinding the thing that i rescinded before vosh is i said he was intelligent and i was like no i think he's dumb as [ __ ] now actually i think he's hyper intelligent i think that vosh turns the stream off and he's like oh my god destiny's gonna be so [ __ ] triggered that i just explained myself to a t and i'm gonna be acting like i have no self-awareness about it at all like when like two days ago when he was like i think we should hold people accountable with betting i think that'd be a really good idea and i think you know yeah after he calls me a scumbag for trying to bet him on the genocide [ __ ] i think that i think he actually plans this out in advance and i think he's thinking he's like oh my god like he's probably the one that made this clip he might be in my chat right now and he's like jesse's gonna be so [ __ ] then i'm gonna get free air time on his stream for the next 12 hours by saying just the dumbest [ __ ] unimaginably like stupid [ __ ] it has led to an exponential increase in the number of people making bad arguments using larger words i i swear to god i've you could you listen go out to [ __ ] bristol go to some goddamn northern english province where everyone speaks in an incomprehensible accent and asked them about gender issues and i swear to god you're going to get as much coherence as your average [ __ ] philosophy bro online okay sorry anyway we keep taking a break from this clip i mean there's got to be a legit reason everyone outside this community hates him is this a psyop it might be the poppy thing was really [ __ ] that we shouldn't have forgiven him so easily or at all okay this is a dg 100 the poppy thing happened before i started my channel oh no the fortress has been infiltrated guys it's just a psyop yeah um it's destiny himself yeah is it it might be yeah it's gotta be um pepe i didn't actually read it based never read uh uh reddit comments before banning the people who made them wait hold on there's a removed post from nine days ago called y'all finally ready to admit you were wrong about the vaccines now he's a conservative he must be a destiny fan sorry what is the implication there stupid oh wait he keeps posting anti-vaxx [ __ ] holy [ __ ] this guy's committed so definitely ddg oh 100 all dj gears are anti-facts very true true i think he's being sarcastic there oh this one got locked in hating your life andy oh this one would have had more comments this got locked at 557 comments okay what is that if you're asking do i believe we should believe things that are wrong if it makes us happy uh then no if that was the case i wouldn't be talking about how republicans um that would be a destiny argument where um be quiet about the fact that republicans are trying to destroy our democracy and like enable genocidal conditions because it makes people upset spaghetti to learn about that um but i'm you know i'm a i'm a rigid adherent to uh to reality tragically unhappy as it makes people in my community the truth sayer now if you're asking do i believe we should believe things that are wrong um this has to be bait um dude i can't tell anymore i truly don't know i have been that my conditions have been ameliorated such that i am no longer capable of facilitating salient thought okay i find a lot of concerns um okay let me watch this real quick a fan emailed me this one said he fought with charlie kirk for a minute it just makes like the potentiality argument like oh it's going to be alive but i don't think we value potentiality because it seems like an inconsistent position because at what point do we consider like the life potentially beginning like i feel like we can do it when the couple meets we have the sperm and egg meat yeah that's when a couple why wouldn't it win a couple of minutes before that no here's why because i knew dna is informing you on a date so we value dna yeah dna is pretty important dna is the building blocks of your entire life story whether you're brown hair or blue eyes that's a special thing you'll even agree right you go into a library like whoa that's a pretty amazing genome at that moment your whole how you look after if charlie cook wants to make this argument you can make that argument but you can't make an argument for i don't think you can make an argument for potential life if you're talking about the creation of a zygote because you're talking about that particular life now you're talking about a thing not a potential thing right so you have to defend the existence of that thing not a potential thing no puberty how you'll age all that stuff it's built right there in that dna my opinion is because that whole road map your story your book is right there like don't terminate i i think you could fight on that more but um okay oh [ __ ] so the whole reason why i even started digging into the voice over a bit more so yesterday vosh decided to debate a phd guy on the gender sex distinction and this is a guy who's written a paper apparently on this and he was confident enough to do this debate with no prep good luck guys here we go watch the opening statements from bosh's point of view at least he coped so hard all right let me watch this plenty of if you want there you go all right here we go good luck let's see it's still white for me okay we'll watch vacher's point of view since you guys want to watch the cope i guess oh there oh okay now i think it's two seconds let me just adjust the size and then there it is okay i see it and then let me just good and then if we could just because last time a speaker was doing share screen and their slides would advance on that's not a shirt wearing a circle there's slides with yeah ninu when are we having our merch out this is a cute shirt it is a cute shirt i know you guys want it look at how [ __ ] nice it is look at this look at that it's cute look at him look at him you want it i know you want it it's an awesome shirt okay it's on their side but they were not advancing for the audience can you just click to the next slide just so we can be sure that they'll see it okay good so i don't have any slides why is this a person so yep it's working and then i don't have any slides guys cool good there so [Music] and then yeah and yeah once you're uh once you plan on pulling it up if you let me know if you say all right i'm gonna share my screen and then i'll pull it up so that way the audience can see it okay and then otherwise any last questions guys that's it i think i think i'm gonna make them all set awesome well i'm excited this is fun thanks for being here guys and i'm going to jump on screen for that cold open or like i said i'll kick it over to you bosh so here i go in three two one boom hey everybody tonight we're debating whether or not trans women are women and we're starting right now with vasha's opening statement thanks so much for being with us bosh the floor is all yours hello uh i'm vosh okay so there are two basic arguments here first of all the idea of sex and gender being distinct uh categories they obviously are i don't think anybody disbelieves this there are obviously things that we refer to which are in the purview of the experience of being a man and a woman which are not defined biologically whether it be light blue and pink being distinguished gendered colors the clothing that we wear the way we style our hair these are things which are not derivative of our biology they are derivative of social standards which change you can look at other parts of the world in which they're different you can look at different points in time within our own country and they are different there's no getting around that it's not like biology is changing rapidly year to year as the fashions do if if people don't like you know the idea of gender and sex being separate that we can simply say that when i refer to gender i'm referring to some other separate category that is not sex but describes social differences um that tend to be associated with sexual ones damn i would have written out a statement for this but bosh is a braver man than i good luck and once you have that you know nailed down the following argument is one of utility uh we construct definitions oh no he's already kind of sort of stumbled into both arguments that are addressed on the paper so he's kind of when he's talking about like colored things uh i don't know if he's gonna make like well i guess he's making an argument for like the changing nature of gendered stuff culturally which i think is addressed a couple times throughout the paper and now in this argument here um the following argument is one of utility uh the argument of utility i think is addressed pretty well in his first response on this paper where he essentially says well for an argument of utility we're not getting to the truth of the matter of if there's a sex gender distinction where now you're just telling me that it's an inconvenient truth and we want to lie about it to make people feel better oh no all right good luck we construct definitions we do it to serve our own purposes as humans the only reason definitions exist is because they serve us we are their masters and if i believe as is the case by the way of many medical and psychiatric institutions if we believe that the uh definition of woman uh being one tied entirely to sexual differentiation is arbitrary inconsistent and harmful um and that there is a better a more utility serving what is your position um my position is that i feel like they're um so here is my issue okay so here here's how i think scientific categories change i guess yeah i guess we do minds before they start this way so it feels like you create like this scientific category because it provides a lot of explanation for a lot of things um but every now and then what will happen is it'll seem like we'll discover a couple facts that don't seem to be accounted for in our original model so we have to find a way to either expand our model or radically change our model in order to account for these new things so it would seem to me that if if trans people didn't exist i would probably say that sex and gender or like gender is almost like an abstraction of sex in some ways gender is i maybe even i would say butler is like it's a it's a performative thing where gender is just like a performance we have in society um sex is like the biological fact of the matter or whatever um however i think trans people represent a problem because it seems like there are people that have a strong innate feeling that their something is not matching their sex um so insofar as that is concerned i don't know how to account for that other than to recognize that there must be some separate internal feeling of what your gender is that is separated from the biological reality of what your sex is that seems to be the case um and then i would challenge um i would need some way to account for how trans people feel and the phenomena that they seem to experience that i i need i need a way to account for that and the only way i can account for that is that it's like i don't even know if i call this a sex gender distinction i might say that there's like there's some internal feeling of sex and then you've got like the biological features or phenotypes of a person that seems to resemble what their sex is um that would be like something that i would need somebody to account for explain to me how people can have a incongruent internal experience of sex or gender um that is incongruent with their like sexual expression um that would be what i would want i don't think that was any of the arguments given in the um in any of those feminists or philosopher papers though so i don't know how much this is believed on by anybody i'm not sure one could use say by self-identification then that is the one that i will use i have no interest whatsoever in abiding by some harmful arbitrary standard out of a need to stick to tradition when there's a perfectly serviceable and better one that makes people more happy and hurts nobody lying right there and that is why i say prescriptively that trans women are women and descriptively they have been treated as women uh historically in our society uh in varying extents throughout history depending on the culture and time period it's a complicated business but we can get there you got it thank you very much for that opening bosch and if it's your first time here at modern day debate want to let you know folks we're a neutral platform posting debates panels and discussions on virtually every topic wanna let you know we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from and we're going to kick it over to dr book artist for his opening as well want to remind you the speaker's views are their own so the speakers are not speaking on behalf of any institution that they are affiliated with or have been affiliated with and dr thomas mcartis is an associate professor of philosophy he earned his phd from the university of texas and works in the areas of epistemology philosophy of mind and philosophy of gender you can find his publications on oh man dude just hearing that how are you so common ah yeah i'll [ __ ] this dude up no problem did i read any of his papers nah i don't give a [ __ ] don't know any of that [ __ ] don't know don't care let's go oh man his website googling his name and both guests are linked in the description right now with that doctor dr josh right now did you just link the chest thing the kid with the chest thing i know that's what me just like i'm connected to your brain will kill forever i'm connected to your brain oh [ __ ] that's not what you linked we're not connected never mind i thought we were connected but we're not you link to [ __ ] meme instead well guardis thanks for being with us the floor is all yours for opening as well i'm sorry it wasn't a ship can i share my screen you bet okay um so everybody can see that yeah yep okay um so if you're unable to see this for some reason you should know that the slides are available at tinyurl.com modern day debate june uh the month of june and there's no spaces or capitals in there okay i'm just going to start my timer right now so um the topic of our conversation today is um the philosopher while listening to vash's opening like the i don't condone this language like zoinks scoob i think she's got an extra chromosome real real raggy right i don't get down that language show slides you can see it in the teleport what do you want me to do this sentence trans women are women whether trans women or women and what i want to try to do is explain um why this is such a persistent philosophical question i started thinking about this about six or seven years ago and so i'm going to share some of the things i've learned in that time and try to convey to you the the landscape of the debate as i see it in a way that i hope will be useful and interesting no matter what your views are on this topic and to try to explain why it's a persistent philosophical question um specifically what i'm going to do is try to show how on six common interpretations of this sentence trans women are women including five that vosh has explored and endorsed uh the sentence turns out not to be true oh no he's actually done research into vosh oh my god the phd guy researched his [ __ ] academic layman opponent and vash has done no prep work how is wash so confident this dude is wild i admire the bravado like jesus don't kill me hold on sorry no but i need your blood okay so um just a quick i think obvious clarification i think it's pretty obvious to everyone that when people say trans women are women what they mean is all trans women are women not just some so i think that's the question under under consideration whether all trans women are women now to see whether that's true or false to evaluate whether that's true or false i think we would have to get clear on what it means to be a woman we'd have to think about the meaning of that word woman in order to see whether it's true that all trans women are women and so now i'm going to consider those views i promised a second ago the first view is what we might call a biological view according to which women are adult human females now i think this is the sort of traditional historical ordinary sense of the word this is what the word ordinarily means there are a few reasons to think that we can talk about these in the discussion period if you'd like first of all there's words for other species that we use for the adult males and the adult females of those species and it would be pretty surprising if we didn't have similar words for the adult males and adult females of our species uh this is the definition that virtually all dictionaries give of course wait are you guys getting cussed i don't see any drops on my end so if you're getting cucks just on youtube's end are we okay dictionaries aren't infallible they make mistakes but the fact that this is what dictionaries say is some evidence that this is the way the word is ordinarily used but most importantly i think the strongest bit of evidence is that um as far as i can tell virtually all trans-inclusive philosophers agree that this is the ordinary use of the word um that's that's what doesn't mean they have a brush for it but they acknowledge and concede that this is what people ordinarily mean i'm not sure whether vash agrees he's said some things that sound like he might disagree just a few days ago he said there's so much arbitrarity with how these terms get posed i don't think that a biologically prescriptivist attitude towards gender is the historically correct one so possibly bosch disagrees with this but as i said a lot of trans-inclusive philosophers agree that this is the way the word is used in dominant mainstream contexts so here are some quotations i'll let you read those on your own but robin dembrov murray mikola sally haslinger jennifer saul these are all philosophers working very much from a trans-inclusive direction simone de beauvoir seems to use the word in this ordinary biological way as well again that's not to mean they recommend this definition a lot of these philosophers think that this is a problem and we need to change it because when you think about the question whether all trans women are women if being a woman requires being biologically female then these philosophers think it's going to turn out that not all trans women are women in fact none are and they consider that to be a problem here's a quotation from catherine jenkins saying as much saying that if you fail to respect the gender identifications of trans people that's a serious harm and i think vosh would agree that that is a problem back in 2021 said if someone makes an argument that a person isn't a woman when they claim to be a woman i would say that's transphobic and then here's another quotation saying something similar i'll let you read okay so as i say a lot of philosophers wish to move away from this view of what it means to be a woman and one alternative that they've explored is what we might call a social role view according to which uh to be a woman is to be someone who functions or behaves or is treated a certain way socially um now sometimes vosh seems to endorse this sort of view here's an example from back in march so he says i am a gender abolitionist so i don't want these designations at all but as long as they exist these designations men and women we're talking about social roles and again just a few days ago so he says um given how arbitrary these definitions are i think one where we acknowledge that man and woman as we refer to it generally is a social media roster in the powerpoint the whole time he's calling the dude a nerd or saying he probably gets no [ __ ] or [ __ ] like that from vaush's chat a bunch of like suicidal mentally ill kids or calling somebody else a nerd i mean okay something which refers to social roles and attitudes not biology that's probably the one that hurts the few fewest people okay so that's the social role view and now the question before us is does this sentence come out as true or false on the social rules here's something that's interesting um and i've kind of i've made arguments relating to social harm before and i think it's legitimate to like analyze some things related to like what are the harms they cause for the definitions but they use it's a little bit hard to get into that though when you're trying to make like factual distinctions because here's a question let's say somebody said look at all the social harm that's caused by defining woman as biological and male and man is biological right well because of the harm that causes the trans people we need to change the definitions i would i might actually challenge somebody and i might say do you actually believe that argument because let's say it was the case that cisgender people started committing suicide because we've changed the definitions of man and woman if more cis people killed themselves then trans people killed themselves would you walk that argument back and go well actually because of like how harmful it is to cis people to have trans people given the same like gender terms or sex terms as them now we need to go back and change the definitions because of the harm cost of cis people i don't know if they i don't know if they would actually say that i think they would i think that when you'd push them there i think they would throw that argument out they go okay well nevermind okay so we can't measure based on who's harmed more i guess that's kind of silly and i think you'd have to move on to the next part of the argument all of you will it be true that all trans women are women um well to figure that out we'd have to know exactly what social role we're talking about what is the social role that is taken to be definitive of womanhood and turns out it's pretty hard to say what social role we're talking about exactly given as vosh said in his opening statement all the variation across time and culture it's hard to say what social role is had in common by all and only women throughout time and place but even if you found one and said there that's the social role that's definitive of being a woman there's a problem because there's no guarantee that all trans women will play that role wolf will occupy that position in society catherine jenkins again a trans-inclusive philosopher criticizes the social worldview on those grounds saying there could there may well be and there easily could be and there may in fact be trans individuals who do not present as women and so are not treated as women don't play this role don't occupy this position in society or there could be um no no no do present as women but aren't read as women or aren't taken seriously or aren't treated as women um in which case they won't occupy the right position in society in order to count as a woman on this social role view hello so um my sense of the state of play obama in the current philosophical debate is philosophers have moved away from the social worldview because it turns out false that all trans women are women on this view um and at least in the popular culture and even in the philosophical literature the view that's sort of rising to prominence is a self-id view i think that's coming to be the most popular view as i said at least at the popular level so on this view um we're told to be a woman is to be someone who identifies as a warm coffin and i won't be the first to notice that oh well here's a quotation from bosch endorsing that by the way okay it looks like there's a threat of circularity here i don't know where my phone is we were asked or we asked what a woman is and the definition used the word woman um when defining the term [ __ ] but it may be that there's no actual circularity here if the word woman in the definition means something else than um the meaning we're supposed to get from this definition so let me give you one example here's something vosh said he said if you want you can say a woman is a person who would like to internally and externally adhere to the social roles and expectations associated with a woman or at the very least a social archetype so again threat of circularity because we're using the word woman there but suppose we meant woman in the ordinary sense adult human females just suppose that's what was meant so it's not the very same sense to be defined it's another sense well the problem is that um many women won't want that um many women don't wish to adhere to the social roles and expectations associated with being an adult human female as catherine jenkins has pointed out yeah that's true too i notice it does i don't know if i'm the only autistic person that does this does anybody else besides me take notes during arguments like i feel like it's really important if i want to address everything somebody says or maybe i just have a smaller brain so i can't remember everything maybe vosh is actually remembering every single argument with salience in his brain right now but i feel like now would probably be a good time to take notes no um or maybe just oh irritate does this yeah because she's copying me obviously everybody everybody is for a hamster is he in chat right now everybody slurp for a hamster during argu during arguments with my mom yes good good job wow true self ideas about calvin jenkins for example not shaving legs um elizabeth barnes another trans-inclusive philosopher points out that there might be some women with cognitive disabilities such that they lack the ability to have this desire to conceptualize this desire to want to adhere to these social roles and um more relevant for our purposes oh [ __ ] i don't know if did i ever go over the vosh bad song on stream do you guys know why he doesn't have that as a donut alert anymore did we ever talk about this the um apparently the vosh bad guy is an anti-fan now i guess i guess he doesn't like vosh anymore so he unlisted the song on the internet and i think he added to like the description of the song or an or a comment he's like i don't i don't like vosh anymore so i prefer if he doesn't use my [ __ ] or something like that or find the original comment so this is like a miss phrasing but damn rip not good it turned out that some trans women might not like to adhere to these social roles or these expectations um for example some trans women who say they don't owe you femininity um so the first point was just if this is not circular then whatever the word woman means in the definition it's going to turn out that not all trans women are women what if it is circular what if we're told no to be a woman is to identify as a woman in the very same sense to be defined so vash is not so sure that there's a problem here back in may he said my definition of gender which is just a woman as someone who identifies as one people complain about it being circular but i don't think that matters so i think it does matter for at least two reasons that i'll try to explain um one is that a circular definition can't convey any meaning true it can't actually tell you what the word means um but secondly even if the word has a meaning it didn't get it from this definition but suppose it has a meaning the statement that to be a woman is to identify as a woman has to be false it's necessarily false so he's not even debating with vosh and the president he's debating past well it's just opening statements uh they're just doing opening statements right now oh here it is i think the bit has run its course if you still manage to find this video through whatever means i actually wanted to delete the video for a while because i hated it was convinced it had to make its run through the culture first it's hard to take pride in something you made in about four hours total of manic frenzy just unlisting for the insane schizos like me that saved this and want to come back to relive the days when vosh was a good streamer sorry i'll explain these two in turn so one problem is that circular definitions can't convey meaning here's one way to see that what we're being told is that someone is a woman if and only if she identifies as a woman but now suppose we ask well what does it mean what does woman mean there in the definition what are you identifying as when you identify as a woman on this alternative we're being told the very same sense to be defined so what you're identifying as is someone who identifies as a woman that's what you're identifying as because that's what a woman is but notice woman shows up again in the definition and so suppose we do another round of recursion and now the definition says to be a woman is to be someone who identifies this is um rgr's argument one of the arguments she used against demon mama actually this recursive argument that but i mean like this is such a silly obvious argument you you can't have circular definitions for a wide variety of reasons if we accept circularity for definitions then the logical end to that is literally the destruction of language right words no longer convey meaning and without meaning you just have a bunch of private language meaning people are just uttering things and no one knows what anybody means with anything right someone who identifies as someone who identifies as and you see that this will just keep going will never eliminate the circularity it goes on forever you've got this infinite descent and there's this irredeemable void there in the definition um which means that the definition never expresses any proposition it never actually tells you what the word means it just keeps promising you a meaning if you just do one more recursion but you never get there so that's one way to see why um circular definitions are deficient here's another way it's sort of a little sillier but um suppose i tell you that you know people collect baseball cards and pogs i don't really know what a pog is um i collect blargs and suppose you wonder what a blarg is and i define it for you in a circular way a block is just anything that has this really cool feature it's a blarg so clearly that's a circular definition now if you really think that there's no problem with circular definitions getting ready for my closing statement you should be able to find me a blark especially if i give you a hint that there's one in the room with you now and i offer you fifty dollars if you could just find that blog and bring it to me so if there's nothing wrong with circular definitions you should be able to find a blark you should be in a position to know what a blog is but obviously you're not in that position muted of course you can't find this black you can use stop what are you saying bro circular definitions by definition don't give you anything because that's why that's what the circularity means you can't define it with respect to something else if you're saying that there's some other way to find a definition for it then it no longer becomes circular right that's another way damn dude wash is going the ultimate skeptic well here i am i'm actually here to define circularity i'm gonna i'm or not define i'm here to defend circular meanings like bro good luck oh my god dude this is going to be brutal okay to see why because you're referring to an archetype that shares that term okay but suppose that somehow the word woman got meaning independently maybe by pointing or ostension that's a way that we define words commonly i think still even if the word does have a meaning the claim that to be a woman is to identify as a woman someone's a woman if and only if she identifies as a woman that has to be false and here's why on this view on this proposal if that phrase being a woman refers to anything then we're told it refers to a very interesting characteristic a very interesting feature it's a feature that someone has if and only if she identifies as having it there's this tight connection between having the feature being a woman and identifying as having the future identifying as a woman but if you think about it i think you'll realize that there simply is no feature like that there's no characteristic that you could have if and only if you identify as having it there's no way you could be if and only if you identify as being that way just think about ordinary features like being funny or being tall or being rich or something like that it's one thing to be rich it's something else to identify as being rich you could be rich without identifying as being rich you could identify as being rich without actually being rich and so on and this just holds generally for every feature any property you choose any feature you choose and so what that means what one and two entail here is on this view the phrase being a woman doesn't refer to anything because there's no feature that answers to this definition there's no such thing and so a kind of surprising result is on this view it looks like there are no women and there are no trans women therefore and for our purposes what follows is um it's false that all trans women are women or at least it's not true um in fact it looks like lennar because there are no women that would be all right if there are no okay um here's a couple of overviews i think those are no i think that that statement when he said that like well it can't he didn't say well it can't be false but it's probably not true i think that would mean it's like indefinable right undefinable um it can't be it can't be true that all trends around are women if there is no even like coherent definition for women but it can't be false either just like undefinable at that point right sort of the big three but here are some other views that have been discussed by vosh one is gender abolition on this view ideally there are no genders so ideally women don't exist here's vash expressing that sort of view i think gender is a destructive concept he says so eventually i want it gone sally haslinger trans-inclusive philosopher at mit says something similar she adopted a social role view she thought to be a woman is to be oppressed so she says a main um part of the project of feminism is to eliminate women which sounds kind of surprising but that was her view so um i think we can at least agree that on this view if you ask um how things should be ideally um they would say ideally there are no women at all and they would say ideally there are no trans women so that's a kind of surprising implication of that view here's another one which i think raj might want to defend today he says in his opening statements that he says prescriptively trans women are women so that's another view that i've heard expressed in his videos um on this view when you say trans women or women um what you're actually doing is giving a kind of command or prescription you're saying you should speak and act as though trans women or women is literally true you should speak and act as though trans women are women as literally it comes to the boundaries why is lost justified by utility by good consequences by benefits so here's a statement of wash uh sort of expressing that so he says um what people mean when they say they're women it's prescription women is a social category i'd like to be a part of i want to think of myself as a as part of it and be thought of as part of it um talia may better trans philosopher says something similar in trans-inclusive and queer communities gender presentation indicates how you will sometimes i think vosh misses like levels of definitions um i don't know how to it's very hard to like explain this well i guess you could argue i don't understand it well if i can't explain it well vosh does like a weird thing where um how can i say this he'll like he'll miss a level like he'll say something like this every single no matter how many options you have it's binary and i'll be like wait what do you mean like let's say i have seven options that's not binary there's seven options and he'll say well there are either seven options or there aren't seven options therefore it's truly actually binary i'm like well no not real kind he's like well it's binary there either are there are right he'll make a statement that's true but he's like he's applying it to the wrong level or like he's not contextualizing i don't know contextualizing level i don't know how i don't have the formal diction to like explain this but there's like he isn't applying it to the right level of the conversation sometimes and then things get really weird i think that happens in i think this happens in this conversation at the very very end i didn't listen to much of this but want to be treated so if you think that we should treat people how they want to be treated then when you say trans women or women what you might be communicating is we should treat people how they want to be treated we should treat trans women how they want to be treated okay and again it's justified by utilities so i'll just point out with respect to the prescriptive claim whether this is something we should do something that doesn't seem to enter into everybody's moral calculations is whether or not what we're saying is true and 60 seconds left 60 seconds left and given what i've said so far it looks like this statement trans women are women is uh literally not true what and so we can at least agree on that wait we asked this prescriptivist view strictly speaking literally are all trans women women i think given what we've said that you have to agree with has to say no okay let's see if i can fit this in i ran out of space on my slide but sometimes vosh seems to be a nihilist or an anti-realist about gender sometimes he says gender concepts are arbitrary social designations and in reality there are no men no women etc here's a quotation from bosch back in 2019 saying all categories are socially constructed they don't exist in nature that's true we built them so if you hold that view and then you ask well really literally um are all trans women women i think the view has to say no in reality no okay so i tried to show that the statement trans women and women is not true on every view we've looked at including five from bosch thank you for your attention oh thank you very much for that opening and with check twitter wait did the guy respond to me i don't have a discussion i'm not sure i could do it unfortunately i'm sort of in a decompression stage of the wash bait i did a lot of prep for that i thought a lot about it and the thought of doing another one is a little daunting at the moment oh no i think he's uh he's worried that i want to have like a hardcore debate which i don't really i just kind of want to poke his brain a little bit and see um what his thoughts are but if this if this conversation he says he needs to decompress after or maybe i shouldn't lick his dooms i guess would um if this conversation is as brutal as i think it's going to be i can understand him being like i don't want to talk to another [ __ ] youtuber debate bro on this [ __ ] and have like another 12-hour like back and forth with some guy that's just like trying to you know gotcha me the entire time with that we're going to jump into open conversation want to say folks thrilled to let you know we have a lot of upcoming debates you don't want to miss them so for example just confirm today at the bottom right of your screen whether or not it is okay for kids to go to drag queen shows with you betcha bosh and alex stein go to drag queen shows with you i'm going to miss it hit the subscribe button so you don't miss it and with that we're going to jump into open conversation thanks so much gentlemen the floor is all yours all right i'm sure that you won't mind after that if i take a moment to respond to your premises as i have plenty of you to say as we as we it seems we both do so the issue i have here is that every um i feel as though you've misrepresented some of my views and definitions here and what's more all of these views are incoherent the the construct i often find is that people treat the biological view as though because it's the traditionally accepted one it's the coherent one but in reality it's nothing but there's a reason why nature the arguably one of the most respected scientific journals in the history of the species has been putting out article after op-ed about how the idea that sex and gender are the same or that gender should be considered an extension of a biological category is ahistorical a scientific and just false okay you have to be careful with this um if i am debating layman i will cite expert opinion and say this is why you're wrong or you need to contend with this study okay but if you want to have a discussion with somebody who's not a layman it's actually not enough for you to just cite expert opinion because arguably this person is an expert and two um they they're gonna want to like argue about what's being cited it's not just enough um it's not just enough for you to say well nature says this because he would say well i would disagree and then you have to substantiate the disagreement you can say well nature said it that's not enough in these types of conversation uh in these types of conversations um to just say well the journal said this and the reason for that is because what you obfuscate when you refer to the biological sex version of gender is the literal millennia of arguments and inconsistencies over what exactly it means to draw that line of course for most of humans history we have no idea what chromosomes or even hormone washes are so only recently has a full understanding of the actual things that differentiate biological males and females even known to us but even leaving that aside long-standing have been the practices of intersex people having their genitals mutilated by doctors who want to get them cleanly fit in one category i i i feel like so i've said this before um this is something i notice when i'm debating people that whenever you hear me try to cool down a conversation this is why um and i'm starting to see it happen already and this one at the beginning um whenever whenever somebody feels like they're losing a conversation it feels like they start to go for like okay i'm not gonna win this on whatever grounds we're gonna start going for optics wins and it feels like vosh is already doing that although maybe i'm judging a bit too hastily we'll see but we'll see for another biologically male or biologically female often to the psychological detriment of those people because those doctors are trying to force people into a binary construct that just doesn't work in the existence of intersex people at all simply destroys the concept of a sex-based gender because a binary is just that ah this is an argument that vosh would be smart enough not to make if he'd at least just read that paper i know it took me an hour to read it on a stream but i was reading about probably 20 30 minute paper it's not long if somebody's going to give you a 20 20 18 page paper where you can skip the footnotes this argument is already completely addressed in that paper right just because you don't have a clean and like we i can already play the next like 10 minutes of argumentation around this line not good wash a binary you can't have a system you claim it's like a cheat sheet to um every argument the suit is going to make yeah because remember in this guy's um remember this guy has already argued around vash is making the argument from biola from biologically intersex people and vagueness and the guys already like pretty cleanly summarizes in a syllogism pretty cleanly responded to the syllogism and vash is just gonna retread all of these arguments without even realizing that he's walking into a trap really of his own making because he didn't he didn't read his paper coherent when it's like well 99 of people fit to it well 99 of people leaves out millions and what are those millions then aberrant counter examples no the system never functioned and it never made that much sense and it never survived scrutiny by the way it's not as though medieval french peasants were under why do you think vosh continually refuses to do the bare amount of work to prepare for debates or talks or even [ __ ] coverage of the news um because you because there's no viewership who [ __ ] cares nobody wants to watch you like like i lost like i think 700 viewers reading the paper nobody wants to watch you read papers and i probably only kept those viewers because i had washed his name like baited in my tuttle right um people uh yeah there's just not there's not a there's not a big payoff in media for like doing homework generally it's like just like blood sports and [ __ ] going significant sociological analysis of the concept of the social construction of sex they didn't have sociology back then it's a fairly modern construction when it comes to what we talk about like with the prescription of gender and all statements of definition are prescriptive by the way because we do create these definitions we didn't unearth them in stone tablets that's really weird that's a really [ __ ] weird strange and queer argument the all definitions are prescriptive because definitions aren't discovered in nature like that like using that line of argumentation i can almost argue that like every single thing ever is prescriptive because nothing is technically found in nature like trees are prescriptive because by defining a tree i'm telling a tree or i'm telling you what a tree ought to be like that's a very very very very very weird very strange yikes okay i wonder if this i wonder if this guy because this guy's a philosophy phd i wonder if he starts to hear this and he's like oh [ __ ] kill me because it's not even like undergrads well maybe i'm trying to think do streamers sound like undergrads or do they sound like uneducated grad students because a grad student at least knows some things but like damn dude it's like i think i tweeted this last night like my favorite thing is like debate streamer reinvents philosophy and science like on the fly well it's written by god you know we had to make efforts to understand them um what we're really doing is trying to find what serves us best now there is meaningful utility and understanding the difference between a biological male and a biological female there are categorical differences that are worth respecting in a biological sense but that doesn't encompass the wide variety of social differences between most men and most women that are largely socially ascribed so when you have this dissonance here where so much of what it means to be a man isn't actually what it means to be biologically male in both the modern world and throughout history in many cultures there are differences between those two things we have an issue what is a consistent rigorous 100 of the time effective applicable mode of gender what works the answer is nothing it simply doesn't it's just do you think he'd be able to get any grant from the phd on the subject or just focus on talking about the philosophical objectivity i'm just curious about his thoughts on i'm just curious if he has a way to reconcile that some people seem to have a different understanding of their sex and their mind than what their body presents and then if he doesn't have a gender sex distinction i wonder how he would draw that distinction there i'm just curious what he would say i don't really want to debate him because i don't even know how much we disagree on things i'm just curious how we respond to that it feels like the term social construct is ruined every discussion for the past three years yeah i i take the blame for that um and i've said as much on stream i've tried to undo this over the past two years um i would use terms like socially constructed a lot to show you that we are able to reconstruct terms if we need to do that but one thing that i didn't do a good job at saying is just because something is a social a construct doesn't one it doesn't mean that there are no underlying facts of the matter and two it doesn't mean that it's arbitrary or worthless wash says this says this a lot social contracts are arbitrary that's not true it's the opposite arbitrary implies a randomness social construction implies a purposefulness the social construct is not arbitrary it's purposefully done we've purposefully drawn a box around something because there is some meaning for it um but he uses these words like social construct and arbitrary to like he basically gives him this this this like ethereal position where he can attack and defend any concept at any point in time every time he wants to he has this ability to maneuver around topics like throwing out these loose philosophy terms where on one end he'll be arguing that like trans women are women because women is a gender and that performance can be anything and then the next sentence will be like also i'm a gender abolitionist i don't actually believe gender is even real as a thing and then in the next sentence he'll be arguing about like something like he just has the ability to slide between all of these positions because he is like the ultimate skeptic on epistemology he said as much right the winners decide if the holocaust even happened or not um he's the ultimate skeptic in regards to metaphysics like anything can be anything at any point because it's all socially constructed um he's the ultimate skeptic in ethics well what is good is what is good and what is bad is what is bad and the only and that goodness is with respect to my axioms as being good and that badness is because it disagrees with my accidents but to them it would be good and consequently whatever's like he just he's he's constructed like all of these black hole positions through from from epistemology to mad ethics to um or from epistemology to ethics to metaphysics he has all of these black hole positions where he can simultaneously attack and defend every single thing from any point in time because he like bit a few philosophy terms for my stream and he employs them in the worst ways possible it's like it's but it's just really funny to watch it happen um yeah we could make like an ai bot to throw out like vosh philosophy sentences and it would probably predict a lot of what he would say stupid concept and we really shouldn't be respecting it much as a social construct at all as long as people do respect it we should go by the definitions that hurt people the least that is after all why we build our definitions to serve human utility and to that effect uh you call it the self id view the prescriptive view i don't think is inconsistent but i stand by this what we mean when we say woman a woman is a person who chooses to adhere to a broad constructed collection of values aesthetics forms rules and the funny thing is vosh will start talking and i don't think he realizes he doesn't even agree with what he's saying so like what are you saying right here well a woman is somebody that adheres to a broad set of really so if somebody were a super tomboyish presenting person but then they id'd as a woman would you say that's not a woman what do you mean by what do you mean by that vosh because now you're arguing against self idea when you're saying that a woman is and now you're going to go on to to define a set of characteristics of what a woman is now you no longer believe in self id because self id is inherently contradictory to any rigid definition you give because self id is amorphous it can be anything right so he doesn't even believe a lot of the times or this is kind of debating washington philosophy be hard because my go-to for debates is usually to put on inconsistencies but every time vosh utters a new statement it it must be like um i don't know like if you've got if you're like coding and you're like in a compiler like every time you add a new line of code you're somehow creating like like one new line of code gives you like 400 more errors every single time you add a line and that's like what vash is right like doesn't compile goes to fix one thing 400 more bugs goes to fix when we think 400 more bucks like every time he speaks it is like riddled with inconsistencies with everything he said before polls and but he might say that inconsistency is actually a socially constructed thing it's not like inconsistencies are found in nature like there is no like the desire for consistency in and of itself is a prescriptive thing that is arbitrary in nature and has no like actual foundation in the real world i don't know maybe he would say that you know who the [ __ ] knows the principle of explosion actually isn't a bad thing explosions being bad is just a socially constructed thing but what about the explosions that happen in the in the center of the sun that heats our planet earth so if you said the principle of explosion is bad but i think explosions are good because the fusion that happens in the sun actually allows us to survive so well i don't know you might actually say something like that i have no idea you know jesus oh okay let's let's sit down okay jesus christ perspectives that we consider to be a part of what it means to be a woman there is no consistency here and you'll never find it no more than you can high level ideas the definition of what it means to be cool you know find me a fine line on that point in the room where the cool you know the cool protons are or the cool radiation it just it's not present and you'll never find it um but still we have a challenge for ideas about what it means to be cool and we argue but the arguments are for a purpose because finding out who's cool what's really cool is socially useful as is whatever definition we arrive the sad thing is i bet his [ __ ] chat is sewing the [ __ ] out thinking that he's like dominating the guy right now i bet his chat is all like i i'm too lazy to read it but pool what's really cool is socially useful as is whatever definition we arrive at which hurts these guys hate philosophy too no no they like philosophy who do they hate perspective philosophy is what they have smallest number of people uh concerning and that is why i believe trans women are women because all definitional statements are necessarily prescriptive and as long as we are dealing with a system that is fundamentally constructively absurd we should at least refer to it in ways that harm people uh in the uh to the to the least possible extent i'm so curious like what where this guy's brain is right now like how the [ __ ] he even wants to begin to climb through the tangled mess of that statement oh my goodness let's see what he does okay um so you started that by saying you were going to respond to my premises but oh he does i'm struggling to see how any of this responded to any premise of any argument i gave so let's go through some of the things you said um you said all of these views are incoherent you said there's no coherent concept of gender is that is that right did i get you right there you will not find me a definition of gender that i like out it's so weird saying josh do this because he's normally he i thought maybe he's a smart guy any time here's another indicator that somebody is like knows they're [ __ ] in a debate you'll see this happen with me a lot i'll ask i'll try to restate somebody's argument like so would you agree with this or that and they'll never ever ever agree with the rest statement they always have to add more words because they because in their mind this is where they're thinking [ __ ] if he's accurately restating my argument and he's not worried he's probably about to [ __ ] knock it down i can't let him rest in my argument because he's got a knock down for it so every time like so when you said one plus one equals two just or one plus two equals three you so if i reverse it's like two plus one you would also say equals three right and they're like well well when i said one plus two equals three i like if you had like well for two plus one if it was two piles of hay and one pile of paint they couldn't together that would equal one and i'm like wait hold on wait i'm just trying to like i'm just trying to understand what the [ __ ] you're talking about wait hold on wait a second are you changing it like they'll never ever ever let you restate whatever the [ __ ] they've said because they're worried that if you restate it accurately you have an accurate knockdown coming next it's so frustrating when i'm in a debate and people do this to me god it triggers the [ __ ] out of me but is that right did i get you right there you will not find me a definition of gender that is 100 consistent and all-encompassing and has no flaws in it there are no such things you'll see it can't be found so there's no consistent definition of gender so no matter who i asked if i asked anybody what is a woman no matter what they say um you think there's going to be some sort of impossibility or contradiction or inconsistency you will always be able to find a hole or an exception whether they have a biological or a self-id a social role or an ability like you can just say yes bosh like notice that like he's essentially kind of restating part of the just say yes it's okay he summarized your view accurately that's okay perspective there will always be well gender abolition is a prescription not a description this is i think this is a nervous habit too where people are like uh they kind of want to keep rattling too because they feel a little bit nervous that they have to keep going and going and going yeah burn gender states but no matter what a person's definition of a woman is there is always going to be something you can pin them on okay so then it sounds like your view entails there are no women because there's no true definition of woman no not at all there are plenty of social constructions that i think have meaning and serve utility even if there are no consistencies to it i think cool people exist but i don't think i could ever find a single definition of cool that is perfectly delineates in all cat like categories and situations between cool and uncool people okay so you said the concepts are incoherent and inconsistent but i think what you just mean is perhaps vague so allow for borderline cases or difficult to articulate i think maybe that's what you mean when you say all definitions are incoherent and inconsistent all definitions so again remember vash would have read the paper this guy's already argued relating to borderline cases so wash should recognize that he's about to step into this guy's already formalized argument here but i don't think he has any idea but we'll see gender anyway i think what you mean is they allow for borderline cases they'll be vague in various ways um and was the second thing i said vague in various ways and hard to articulate difficult to articulate it'll be hard to come up with or express or verbalize a definition that includes everyone who should be included and excludes everyone who should be excluded so that's the view i guess i would agree with that yeah definitions are hard to come by typically and most of them especially in biology are vague and admit of borderline cases but nevertheless they may be true um there may be true definitions even if they're difficult to express or articulate you gave the example one of your arguments against the biological definition of uh woman was that we didn't know about chromosomes many years ago well first of all i don't think biological sex is defined in terms of chromosomes um but let's just use the example of water maybe we could agree that water is h2o um that was true even before we knew about chemistry oh no that was the definition of water before anybody knew anything about chemistry before we knew about h2o back when aristotle thought it water was just an element nevertheless this was h2o i'm sorry this isn't true that water has not always been h2o yeah all you have to do is cross the mexican border and over there it's aqua that's h2o not water aqua means water aqua is water it's a deformation actually it's oh no this guy has to be like what the [ __ ] did i agree to oh [ __ ] dude it's too much referring to terms and definitions here no i'm referring to water the stuff that fills lakes and rivers he's referring to the thing itself he's not oh [ __ ] i wish i knew i feel like i have so many problems with philosophy and everybody says oh victim talks about this maybe one day i'll read his book i never will or any of his books [ __ ] that loser okay um but there is there is a difference between a thing and like a reference to a thing ram might know the distinction here but like there's a difference between the thing that is water and then like the word the reference to water and the philosopher here he's oh a use mentioned distinction might be the philosopher guy here is talking about the thing itself that's why he says h2o not the label of the thing not the reference to the thing um like um yeah like if i if i show you like um i can't well like here's like if i show you this and i ask you what is this do you know what this is and you guys say a phone i would say no you dumb [ __ ] it's a pixel on your computer screen how stupid are you and you'd be like well yeah obviously or if i show you like a map someone so many chats at a map if i show you a map and i go what is this you're like oh that's america no it's a [ __ ] map you [ __ ] what do you mean it's america if i show you a map about where you're like well yeah but it's referring to the thing of america obviously right it's like no it's a map like this is like uh a mentally i don't even know what you would say for like a person that can't understand the difference between these two things and i'm sure bosch would understand the difference he just hasn't yeah jesus but there's enough to feel about the word many things fill lakes and rivers and now he's trying to fight because bosch is looking like if i could just get this [ __ ] to not defy wash is the [ __ ] flip side of the conservative that i argued that that tried to argue that clouds were alive because he thought if he could define clouds as being alive he could protect um a pro-life stance he was like yeah i think clouds are living and now vash is like well if i just don't let this mother this slimy [ __ ] if he can't define what water is no way will he be able to define what woman is that's like that i guarantee that's his thought process on his head right now right and we're referring to terms and definitions here no i'm referring to water the stuff that fills lakes and rivers there's stuff about the word one many things filled lakes and rivers okay um do you honestly he doesn't even know that she doesn't even know how to respond he actually gets so [ __ ] owned this is actually the first monster w for washer this guy just got his mouth [ __ ] in he's like [ __ ] me you're right dude many things do fill lakes and rivers i don't know how to respond to that i want vosh to sit on a board where they do like uh like like thesis uh defenses or whatever it would just be so [ __ ] funny it's here no i'm referring to water the stuff that fills lakes and rivers there's enough to feel about the world many things fill lakes and rivers okay um do you honestly not know what i mean when i talk about water or ice i think you you made a mistake before you began that argument which is that you said just because people didn't always know something doesn't mean that it can't be true but that can't be the case when we're talking about definitions things that are true have constructed premises that lead necessarily to an outcome a resolution what did he just say things that are true have constructed premises that lead to an out i don't know i don't know what he's saying i can't actually things that are deductively true will stem naturally from premises if that's what he's means or things that are true like facts of the matter things that are found in nature i don't know what he actually means here but a definition is so this guy's looking off to the side he's trying to figure out what the [ __ ] did this guy just say i wonder if he's worried and say like am i getting intellectually outpaced right now is this guy like on seven levels of philosophy deeper than me applied presuppositionally you can separately constructed premises that lead necessary we're talking about definitions things that are true have constructed premises that lead necessarily to an outcome a resolution but a definition is something applied presuppositionally you can say for example that the light the the spectrum of light that we see the visible spectrum a definition is applied presuppositionally um i don't know if there's a difference between a presupposition and an axiom but like i think a presupposition is a statement given as is with no justification i don't know if a definition can be given as is with no with like a definition seems by definition to have a reference to something that justifies it but i i don't know i'm not i'm not sure i don't vosh is working on levels of philosophy that are out of reach to me right now okay i can't get this i can't access these thoughts right here light is something that exists outside of our perception and that is certainly true but how we perceive it is not existentially correct and what's more the definition between red orange and yellow is not something that you can find proven uh anywhere uh in the real world we have to arrive at arbitrary distinction it's even that's kind of weird because if he wants to go with colors if i was the philosophy i would jump on this if you want to go with colors that's fine because we can have a somewhat socially constructed reference but we're grouped around things that are probably factually true and in this case we're talking about the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation right we could very specifically say that like well you agree that this wavelength is different than this wavelength right unless wash is going to say like magnets or not magnets sorry math and everything is socially constructed and words are zoom calls are socially concerned i have no i don't know where the [ __ ] we're at right now but okay um so that's that's can i just ask you about water again do you do you not think water is h2o but i think we've come up with a term to describe what we refer to as water there are of course other cultures that i've had talking about we came up with a term to talk about water talking about the same as water and we came up with terms to talk about hydrogen and oxygen but what's here here's a sentence water is h2o you know what those terms mean now think about what idea is expressed by the words what's the thought that's expressed we could express it in many different languages now think about the thought that's expressed by that sentence that's true isn't it the thought that is expressed by the sentences water is h2o what do you think and it was you can't answer long before we got here long before humans got here water i don't know if i this is kind of a prediction i'm making i don't know if vosh will ever agree because i think i feel like i've already identified that like he's kind of been i don't wanna say bad faith mode but he's like he's gonna be squirming for the rest of us i don't know if vosh is going to answer a single question for the rest of this conversation i think he's going to like pivot and do this like dumb like well i don't know if anything is real for probably the rest of the talk but we'll see maybe not it's been h2o well ice of course is also h2o but water is it is defined as within a given you know state ice is also water it's not liquid water yeah but colloquially people refer to ice as ice and water as water and whether or not they're going to use either of those definitions is going to come down to context and what about heavy water 2h2o or dieterium oxide which is referred to as water and is in fact a type of water and isotope 2h2o i believe that notation just means you have two elements of h2o am i forgetting chemistry or does he mean to say h2o2 because h2o2 would not be an isotope an isotope if i can remember an isotope uses the same formula but it'll have a is it a positive or negative based on um [ __ ] i don't remember it's been [ __ ] chemistry he means deuterium um is deuterium an extra proton is that what deuterium means uh i hate chemistry dude [ __ ] that he means d2o or an extra neutron okay uh but it's no no in fact h2o there's an extra hydrogen atom holding on there making the substance oh no okay this is why i'm gonna give a tip to all of the all of the budding philosophers in chat okay there's a reason okay and then i'm gonna trigger the [ __ ] out of all the science people there's a reason why people always talk about quantum physics and stuff because nobody actually knows anything about quantum entanglement that means information can travel faster than light uh like uncertainty principle that means many worlds is true uh there's a reason why people use quantum phys because nobody knows about quantum physics okay in um chemistry is a little bit more uh a little bit more defined okay if you have a certain molecule you can't change if you change the number of atoms in a molecule it's going to be something different water is always going to be h2o if you have like h2o2 or h4o4 i don't even know there's if you do biochemistry you can't just add atoms to it have the same molecule you're creating a totally different thing you can't like don't just don't go to chemistry if you want to [ __ ] about knowing anything about science okay just go to quantum physics because everybody just says random [ __ ] about quantum physics all the [ __ ] time don't don't don't do chemistry because too many people will remember from their high school chemistry class that you have no idea what the [ __ ] you're talking about and before somebody emails me and i'm actually totally wrong but sir um so if this is taking heavy water my let's see if i can remember this isn't heavy water water that has a higher concentration of deuterium um isotopes or something in it as as opposed to like normal water it's just like the composition of [Music] is a form of water that contains only deuterium oh maybe it's only deuterium and it's not necessarily the composition of normal water to normal rather than common hydrogen one isotope presence of hydrogen isotopes gets water different nuclear properties increase the masculine law okay back to chemistry class but um did you say deuterium is that right is that heavy water yes if that's just an isotope is it an isotope of oxygen that makes that if that's an isotope it's still oxygen and it's still h2o and that is still h2o that's still water a different chemical compound than water certainly if people wanted to refer to it as a different type of thing not water but let's say they chose the term waterium i don't know if scientists come up with wacky names if they wonder i think he misspoke because he said extra atom well no because now he's using words like compound um which like we're talking like compounds or mixtures i don't think that's anything to do with molecules compounds i think are two different molecules mixed together that don't that like dissolve into each other is that everything's going to compound in a mixture or is that a solution in mixture i don't know i just like if you if you're if you want to have an argument about chemistry i feel like you should probably know a lot of chemistry before you come in and like like start to well i'm going to debate you on like the differences in like these like highly they're not even advanced but like these pretty new ones like chemical ideas it seems kind of weird to just bring this up to nowhere because now the conversation's gonna get ultra bogged down and like random [ __ ] um he corrects himself it's not a matter that he corrects so he's my guess now maybe this sounds bad it sounds like he's just reading chat and copy pasting arguments from chat and he doesn't actually have a good understanding of like that to describe it they would have a significant taxonomical distinction to refer to a different molecular composition but we refer to it as water you might say it's trans water a bit of a difference but fundamentally very similar okay if even if the philosophy dude now he might just be tired because of how absurd all of these logic trees are but couldn't couldn't the guy actually say so wait so you're telling me that like heavy water and normal water are actually factually different things because going by this weird [ __ ] road that we just followed with wash wash is actually making that trans women aren't women that heavy water isn't water that these are like factually there is a fact of the matter to be understood here that's not arbitrary but that is like fact based in the world that is different from like one or the other right like but so you're resisting me on the claim that water is h2o um let me try a different one i'm resisting you on definitional prescriptivism i think that we have wait how can you resist on definitional prescriptivism i thought you said all definitions were prescriptive what does that even mean to resist on definitional prescriptiveness i'm wondering i get i'm fully admitted i might be the one that's like behind here and i just don't understand but i'm curious like what is the philosophy dude thinking that vash is intending with anything he ever [ __ ] says ever like uh i'm not prescribing any definitions i'm just saying water is h2o true or false and it sounds like you're reluctant to say true no i know i agree i i agree that water and we we referred to h2o's water colloquially yeah of course i'm crazy so water's h2o and it was h2o long before humans came along water wasn't a concept back then i know but nevertheless water was there actually water's never been a concept um water's always been a molecule well we have a concept of water but the concept is not itself you wanted to technically go i think like very anal like theory of science or philosophy of science to say that water is al was always a molecule that statement is actually probably not defensible because a molecule is like a contemporary arrangement of how we understand but that's that gets into weird [ __ ] but he would probably agree i would imagine he's probably just trying to get vosh to like get to some point where they can have an actual conversation because right now they can't water but our understanding of it and the differentiations that we make when we distinguish it from things like heavy water these are socially constructed after all you just someone on youtube chat said it technically a molecule would be a model right that's we can argue about the existence of a model is a little bit different than the existence of a thing but like we can understand what he's getting at there probably is something some arrangement of matter that we call water that's been here regardless of human concept or not right we can i think most people agree with that said it's still fundamentally water but we're talking about a different molecular shape now that's because you've arbitrarily branched these two within a category that because there's a relationship between them but that's a social phenomenon the universe doesn't give a [ __ ] whether you refer to heavy water as water or some other you know molecule that's this guy's argument utterly indifferent to your perception of reality but we still choose to prescribe and that i think a lot of people when it comes down to definitional games you know they start doing this well these things are these things and you know we have a lot of power over that some animals are different species but we distinguish what makes something a different species the taxonomy for what refers to species differentiation we made that up we didn't it we we invented it we didn't discover it yeah i i'm surprised the philosopher guy can't understand what's happening here they're lost on the reference versus the thing because the philosophy i should agree yes i agree that we've created the reference so like water or h2o or molecule these things but the thing was always there um that's the thing that vosh is failing to understand right now the philosopher guy doesn't seem to understand to be fair this conversation is really confusing i can pause and review from the outside so it's easier for me to see what's going on it's always going to be the case um but that that's where the the trouble is right now he gets into that okay maybe he'll figure out i agree with you that species are um the distinction between species is less clear than distinctions we would find in physics and chemistry so that's why um no surprise i'm focusing on physics and chemistry how do we feel about the claim that gold is atomic number 79 do you would you agree with that or are you skeptical of that too i i think that's how we refer to it as sure i'll take your word but i don't have the the the periodic table memorized yeah well um i'm benefiting from the fact that this is a bit of a commonly used uh philosophical example um yeah gold that term in english refers to um a certain element that has 79 protons it's atomic number 79. so gold has been around for a long time keep in mind that like if vosh had read that [ __ ] dude's paper before doing this argument we know exactly what this guy is about to talk about right because in his paper he mentions this idea of how there can be a category of something that's like golden um but that doesn't necessarily make it gold he's arguing this is the vague concept thing that he's already talked about in his paper here but far she's unfamiliar but here we go time long before the word gold came on the scene the gold predates the word gold so anyway this is just supposed to be an example of a definition that's true and we went down a rabbit hole a little bit what do you mean by true if if we had taken another definition if we had created another definition to say gold and the term gold referred to a collection of uh of elements so let's say gold and lead and the term gold was something people used to refer to both that definition would be as true as the one we used today for gold they would have simply made the choice to include two different elements in their definition just as you've included standard water and the isotope of heavy water in the definition of water it's just a definitional game as long as they distinguish between the two subcategories of gold and iron with their respective atomic weights the singular term like how we have terms for metals uh we have terms for uh for for the um the uh the gases the inert gases help me out you know more than me the um the noble noble gases yes we invented those distinctions we saw the terms we invented the terms yeah because like noble gases like have certain properties that exist in the world there's a reason why we recognize them as being what they are and it's not just because we're like randomly wanted to have them be those things you can argue that we draw borders randomly but like they're drawn around facts of the matter like there's like a factual thing that we're drawing borders around the terms because the distinctions are only meaningful when we notice them the universe doesn't care whether or not we think there's something meaningful or significant about noble gases versus the other stuff we just saw those differences and we're like there was a difference though so we saw the differences the differences were there yeah differences are real the fact of the matter we came along and decided you know what we're going to name these differences we're going to assign some names to these different um elements a grade yeah okay now i'm trying to remember why why we started down this rabbit hole um i didn't get very far through the things you said oh it's i just the first thing i brought up was you had said all these views are incoherent um but then we kind of clarified that what you meant was um any any of the popular views of women that have been proposed are vague and difficult to articulate and then i guess i was just trying to point out that um a definition might exist and be true even if it hasn't been articulated um so like rewind before humans came on the scene i would have thought water was h2o even before anyone was around to okay hold on [ __ ] you the periodic table is so universal that is the most it is the thing most often cited that aliens would understand it i made that argument on stream a long time ago and all of you [ __ ] disagreed with me rem might have even come on to debate with me about it [ __ ] all of you i always said that two things that aliens would be able to probably communicate with humans would be math like basic mathematical truths and um and the periodic table of elements and everybody wanted to fight with me on that so [ __ ] you [ __ ] okay who are you talking to i'm talking to affidina or whatever the [ __ ] dgg chat name water or to realize its chemical essence um so i was just disagreeing with that point about um how definitions work i don't think definitions um properly understood are linguistic entities i think there are facts out there in the world there are anything i have to challenge that there are facts in the world but definitions are categorically linguistic we create them because we identify differences and things that we see in the world the facts of the world there are many the the spectrum of light that we consider to be blue contains within an infinite range of potential blue values but we don't have an infinite number of names to describe them there may be a set number of facts in the world but the categories we use to separate those facts are entirely up to us in our perceptions so another example of this for would be like in terms of gender prescription there are cultures historically that have had third genders for a long time often the third gender is a biological it's not really true uh a gender class that adopts roles that are much more similar to the biologically female actually that is non-human animals that do this as well you know it's it's not it's not unique to us um and in that case there's there's a separate category and maybe they felt clearly they felt that the categorical difference between these more feminized biological males and the regular biological males was something worth distinguishing in a in a gender-oriented taxonomical sense but that's not any more right or wrong than what we do they just see different meaningful differences and apply different terms so you can't make these objective arguments about terms terms may refer to the facts of the world but we draw the borders the land on earth might be uh uh you know um objective but the borders of the nations that we build over them those we rule on on paper we just have to be you know considerate of human need when we're describing what here we actually want to build yeah okay gosh there was a there's a lot i disagree with in there but i'm trying to be um trying to be selective or efficient with our time here um maybe let me just ask you this um it sounded like in your response to me you raised some objections to um the biological view that i expressed that women are adult human females and you brought up um well you thought you said you know we haven't always known about chromosomes again i don't think that chromosomes figure into the definition of biological sex you also mentioned intersex people so it sounded like you were trying to argue against the the reality of males and females but then at other times you say you know there are other cultures that have a third gender that are biologically male and i think you might agree that there are animals that are biologically male and biologically female so i guess just let me let me get clear on your view do you think that there are males and females of course out there in the world i believe it's bimodal there are males and females and most people will fall pretty solidly on either end of the spectrum but i do feel there are a significant number of people who are closer to the middle in terms of interest okay to be clear sex is not bimodal there are traits that can be bimodal and that like for instance not all men are five foot ten and not all women are five foot four but like the differentiation in like traits will be bimodal we tend to have like a this curve and then like a this curve and there's a lot of overlap but sex is generally seen as two distinctly different things right possessing um two different or like one of each of the gametes or whatever either the the male [ __ ] dude or the female eggy dude sex expression oh well if you also think that there are adults in humans then um what exactly is wrong with the definition that women women are adult human females you believe in adults you believe in humans you believe in females is it just you think there are counter examples to this definition is that the problem my belief in the value of a definition it should be said first is not determined by its consistency there are consistent definitions that are still morally wrong for example um the nazis grouped humans into taxonomical categories which at times were consistent usually because they were very blunt and lacking in nuance they were just monstrous and unnecessary so now vash has stepped into a second argument that he's making that has to do with um whether or not there's like an immorality of a definition that this guy also is i think a decent enough knockdown for um uh but you know what are you gonna do they were suitable to the nazis in a political sense because they allowed for the dehumanization of large groups of people but i don't think we review them in retrospect based on their consistency like oh well they say any of the descendants of the 12 tribes of israel are subhuman ah well that's easy to find out with a 23andme of course not so i just i'm not saying you're doing that i'm only saying that my concern here first and foremost is not one of consistency even if the biological model was perfectly consistent i would oppose it but it's not um because chromosomal abnormalities are all it takes to throw this up for a loop now we're going back to the argument to vagueness which is also addressed in the paper when you transition you know you do change your sex to an extent not entirely but certainly there are categories of sex that are altered when you have chromosomes of a certain designation it determines the hormone washes that you receive uh both during puberty and um in the womb and that determines the shape your body takes the genitalia you form the ways in which your body develop but if you have a trans woman who took puberty blockers before she hit puberty then transitioned medically you a person who is let's say a doctor would not call them a biological male in terms of the risk of breast cancer prostate cancer a wide variety of bone and heart related conditions this is not a person who'd be going to the doctor and saying yep i'm a male and the doctor would go yep your problems are male problems it just it just it wouldn't so if that's the case you know where does that line fall what about people who have the xxy chromosomal uh abnormality or people whose y chromosome doesn't mean these categories are not called for and that's why traditionally doctors have just cut off the aberrant genitalia of intersex people or try to force people into roles that made them fit a binary it just doesn't always work okay yes um i have watched some of your videos and i've heard your views on biological sex and um i think it's a commonly held view i love sex what biological sex consistent um i think it is based on a misunderstanding i don't think that biological sex is defined in terms of chromosomes or genitals or hormone levels and you can see that by just considering the full range of the plant and animal kingdom and how the sexes are realized across the plant and animal kingdom and you'll see that there's no no facts about genitals figuring the definition nothing about hormones nothing about chromosomes um so we can talk about that a little more if you'd like and try to get clear on what biological sex really is but i just wanted to quickly point out that in my opening statement what i argued was on all these proposals it turns out that not all trans women are women on every proposal it is false that all trans women are women so i disagree i'm not really in a position that i need to defend the biological view if you want to beat up on it and criticize it and reject it okay all i said was if this is what wayne is okay wait is this guy canadian yes we agree on that um but i thought it would have been more pressing given your views to try to defend the charges that all those other proposals also entail that not all trans women are women and as far as i can tell you haven't tried to do that yet well the prescriptive view would you like to talk about biological sex or should we move on to something a little more relevant uh well the biological sex thing if it's something you feel the need to defend we can i assume this is your you you're the believer of course that a woman is defined by biology um if you are asking me what does the word ordinarily mean hold on sorry game time oh i thought it just glitched and i didn't get the kill sorry we're back then i think those um trans-inclusive philosophers that i quoted are correct that is what the word ordinarily means i think that's what it ordinarily means what do you think it means what does it mean to be a woman what does it mean to be a woman well i if you were to ask me what does it mean to be a computer or a television or i'm just pointing at things in the room i would take that question to be asking what do those words ordinarily mean i don't have my own private language i communicate i communicate using a public language that we all share and so if you ask me what a word means i would i mean and i didn't know i might check the dictionary to see your definition is entirely informed by tradition you're you're if you you're aware of course of the fact that the majority of americans today believe in accepting the identity of trans people by a slim margin in 20 years my view will be more popular than yours will you switch over then are you going to defer entirely to what you see in the dictionary then it would no longer be true that that's what the word ordinarily means so okay well then sure then that's fine by me if we're to hear if we're here to make prescriptions then sure um my problem need any prescriptions you defer to the prescriptions of others all definitions are fought for from the from the definition of soil in the books of of geologists to the definition of skyscraper in the book of civil engineers everything is fought for and i will fight for the definition um the prescriptive so noble that trans women are women um because they fight harm and inconsistency presence and other definitions um okay can you can you tell me what the definition is that you defend sure i think that woman like the concept i think voss should have held him here to give a definition of woman if you're attacking bosh's so in his paper and he has one too which is strange where he wouldn't like posit it um he has a traditionalist view or he calls it the traditionalist view of gender i don't know why he didn't put that definition forward um unless maybe he just wanted to argue against this idea that he has a personal definition because he's referring to that concept of private language that nobody can have nobody can utter something that means something only to them there's no such thing as a private language they're just meaningless utterances but woman is an arbitrary and vague collection of aesthetics values roles he has to stop saying arbitrary arbitrary implies a randomness or a lack of purposefulness in selecting things when we create a category it is by definition not arbitrary well unless it is by definition arbitrary like you're using a random number generator or something right like uh a bunch of social constructions that are typically tied to sex uh that just sort of float in the public conscious they vary depending on where you are what a woman is expected to be in the bible belt south is very different from what they're expected to be in like seattle or whatever hold on a second so when you said in the bible belt south there's something that a woman is expected to be can you tell me who it is that's expected to be this way what does a woman mean in that sentence well whoever they would consider to be a woman would be biologically female people uh whoever they would consider to be a woman um and what did women mean there when you said like well let's check who they would consider to be a woman i already said biologically female you don't need to prompt it i already said it vascular magically realizes he just [ __ ] was all human females well we are talking about adult humans i i assume okay so you're saying what woman means is it's this collection of aesthetics rules and perspectives um that are associated with women and by women you mean adult human females yes so this is another the the performativity um when he talks about butler's definition of gender i think in this paper it's it's actually so sad that vash has managed to so i thought that the academic definitions given of the sex gender distinction that is his name thompson that he addresses in this paper actually really [ __ ] now i don't know if most professional philosophers just suck or if when it comes to gender people turn their brains off but they seem like pretty easy to not like i feel like i could write in response to how dog [ __ ] a lot of these things are um and his argumentation is counter argumentation seems like pretty easy to follow which i think is probably bad because if i can follow it then your it seems like your difference is really [ __ ] but it's interesting that um it's interesting that vosh has managed to hop around to like almost every single [ __ ] academic definition of the sex gender divide that this guy is like given in his paper this it truly is like a cheat sheet for how this debate was going to go if vosh would have just read this one paper he would he could have done this in 30 minutes off stream typically wow role of woman in a social construct is one which is tied to sex but that doesn't mean that it's prescriptively tied to sex or to give another example uh you're going to see types of music preferences which are heavily associated with people's racial groups or nationalities but that doesn't mean that there's an inherent uh prescriptive association there only that circumstantially these arbitrary associations came to be no one i don't even know what he's saying he just really [ __ ] eventually it was funny for a little bit but i think i'm gonna start getting triggered he just he manages to word vomit out like so much of nothing like like no one is arguing that like different people can't have different preferences um now he's getting into he's digging into this biological essentialist argument almost that he um that thompson argues against here the idea like well just because you are a woman doesn't necessarily mean that you have to believe in a certain set of things or be a certain set of actions or aesthetics but just because there are those certain set of actions or aesthetics doesn't mean that there aren't women as well or even if we wanted to eliminate those like compulsory things really gender doesn't mean we're we're creating a sex gender distinction either like none of these things logically follow he's just like he's like just saying so much random [ __ ] or to put it another way the type of music that you're going to hear in thailand hit like number one charts is pretty different to what you're going to hear like number one charting over here in america but that doesn't mean that people over there are biologically inclined to that music as opposed to ours it's due to proximate bias people in that area of the world listen to that music because that's the thing it's thomas that's the music they have they pass it down to other people who are around who happen to be people in that part of the world and likewise you know you have an example here of woman a sort of broad definition that we do prescribe to biological females but that's precisely my argument see i'm uh i don't know if i don't know if the philosopher guy just doesn't want to tackle this because of a dog [ __ ] this this concept is that bosch keeps reintroducing this idea that like you're prescribing a definition all definitions are prescriptions everything is a prescription every time i open my mouth it's a prescription maybe he just doesn't want to touch that because it's such a [ __ ] weird can of worms to get into or i don't know i'm kind of curious what his thoughts are on that a libertarian here in the classical sense i don't believe it's right to impart roles and responsibilities onto a person based on their birth genitalia it's very weird to me i'm not looking for an end to sex like he's not even saying that and then again wash is giving one of the one of the arguments that are knocked down in this paper that um bosh is giving this argument if adult female humans are adult female humans then biological determinism is true with respect to them and adult human females social psychological behavior traits are inevitable being determined by her by like this is just i'm sorry i'll stop i'll stop revisiting it but okay i'm glad that this came up though i wanted to read the paper in advance to show you that like even if you're willing to do like a the tiniest amount a modicum of preparation just a little bit of preparation it usually will pay off for conversations um wash reading this paper would have improved his conversation with this guy a million-fold instead of walking into arguments over and over and over and over again he's and he's not even maintaining one consistent train of thought he's got like six different lines running right now that all happened to be different academic arguments so this guy's already given knockdown arguments for his paper so at the very least if wash was familiar with the arguments or the guys knock downs he could be ready to respond better but jesus christ logical sex is always going to be a category we have to deal with you know for the foreseeable future at least what i'm against is the idea that some arbitrary hormone washes you received while in the womb should decide a massive category of expectations and behaviors that are assigned to you afterwards and that's what i'm talking about prescriptively i don't think we should be saddled with that true identity should be self-ascribed which in this case i believe they are so this sounds like a view that i that was expressed in one of the quotations i provided in my slides it sounds like you're giving voice to a social role view according to which to be a woman is to as you said in that quotation um want to internally and externally adhere to a certain set a certain set of aesthetic [ __ ] destroyed pog owned [Laughter] rules perspective etc um that's what it is to be a woman um to want to or to actually occupy um a certain social role or a certain social position or it's associated with women i don't think it makes you a woman though oh but i had asked you what your definition of woman is what makes someone a woman that's i thought you had answered that but now we're going to get a different answer these go into what woman is the concept of woman in my prescriptive view is simply a person who prefers to be associated with that broad range of archetypes any person who prefers to be associated right yeah that's the social worldview so what do you make of my argument that on that definition not all trans women will be women no they would pref they want to be associated with that broad range of archetypes but what if they don't want to be associated with that broad range would you have a tomboy trans woman what of her then is she not a trans woman why i wish the philosopher would ask that i mean that their identity is dependent on fulfilling those roles there are cisgender trans women not all trans women will want to be associated with those aesthetics and rules exactly perspectives or whatever but they are nonetheless by choosing to refer to themselves as women no sorry do you do you want to adhere to these expectations and roles and so on i would have thought it's totally possible and probably actual for some trans women to say no thanks yeah sure i mean some women some women say no thanks right some cis women um so then won't it follow then on this view that you're expressing that not all trans women are women no because they still subscribe to the archetype the archetype merely contains the collection of social values that we associate with women there are cis and trans women who for example want to be women but fervently reject elements of what women are expected to be but this doesn't make them any less limited i'm only saying they've still chosen to associate themselves with that archetype much as i choose to associate myself with the archetype of being a man and there are roles associated with being a man that i'm not interested in adopting or fulfilling okay so there's this archetype archetypal woman um and i guess if i had asked you what this archetypal woman archetypal women is you would say where's a dress and where's pink no no what would you say it's a collection of categories i don't think there could be one architectural women's not going to give any there are so many uh i was worried it was going to be really viciously stereotypical no no there there can't be one woman because these concepts are arbitrary and stupid for example when you say women subscribe to the archetype what is the what does that mean what is the architect is defined by its name and all we type no what do you mean you can't the [ __ ] that's not how definitions work what is the definition of flabbergasted i mean it is to be flabbergasted it's defined by the name no that's not what that means that's not a definition to it to give you an example a woman a stereotypical woman can be a very maternal motherly kind gentle person but they can also be like a jersey sore jersey shore like bratty mal hopping selfish type now those are two archetypes of woman and femininity that are completely contradictory you can't simultaneously be no you can't that dude i i don't even [ __ ] it's getting boring hold on i'm gonna order food this is irritating now there must be something in common or there must be some way then that you're appealing to something if you're telling me that you're giving me two entirely contradictory definitions of things contradictory not just different contradictory but they're both women then they're you're repealing this because it's funny because again vash is making an argument he's actually giving this guy's argument in this paper vash is making an incredibly strong argument for sex being real by saying even though these two people have totally different gender norms on the outside they're both still women well that's interesting you think so wash what's making them women um this is similar to the argument this guy has given um for uh i think it's a better argument we can imagine a world where the cultural roles normally assigned to the basis of sex are inverted females dress like men males dress like women stereotypical traits and behaviors are assigned to each group here it isn't clear how to apply the terms man and woman does physical sex or cultural rule determine category membership but then he gives the knockdown argument to this um basically saying that like yeah you would say that they're men wearing dresses and women that are not wearing dresses but like you're providing a stronger argument that these categories exist by virtue of saying men wearing dresses you're implying there's something else that's like differentiating them here um like this social there's a social role thing that this that washington's bringing up it's like it's just not it's not a good argument um calm caring and motherly while also being you know selfish [ __ ] and like you know money-grubbing those don't fit but nonetheless they're both considered archetypes of femininity so it's about associating yourself with the collection of categories rather than representing the singular archetype of those categories do you have a better argument i would say that like women and male or woman female and male or woman and man i guess i don't know i i would be interested in talking to this guy by the way there are things that i've thought about but i can't really test them because conservatives are brain dead so i don't really have anybody to argue against when i'm thinking of things like gender and progressives are also brain dead so i don't have anything to argue against when i'm talking about gender sex um for sex i think sex is fairly easy to define we have a binary understanding of the different like gametes related to sexual reproduction things that have sperm things that have eggs right and then there's like usually a set of primary and secondary sexual characteristics that go along with these two individual um gametes right i think it's generally how we view things um and i think for the most part biologically i think that works pretty well i feel like gender is something a bit different um because the way that we observe with it the way that we interact with it seems to be there are ways that our gender roles map onto our sex but they can also be totally disassociated and i don't think people would um like if i were to give you like blaire white for instance in society like it would be really really really hard to call blair white a man it would be hard for her to want to go into the male bathroom it'd be hard for her to want to act like a man in terms of what our social expectations for how men and women act it would just be very difficult so it feels like um gender uh may be borrowing a little bit from um from judith butler right that gender is like a sort of performance that we have there are it does gender isn't really sex now a lot of the ways that we perform gender are kind of like informed by our sex but not necessarily um i that's kind of how i view that anything like gender and sex but uh gender is kind of like a performance that we have although often times it's very tied into what our sex is um but but that but this is all separate even from trans issues um have you talked with any professor about this no i haven't which is why i think it'd be interesting to talk to this guy um i think that a gender sex distinction i don't even think it's necessarily needed to talk about trans people that's a whole other thing though actually i would go a step further than i would argue gender sex distinctions have nothing to do with trans people i think you can have trans people with gender and sex distinctions and i think you know trans people without gender sex distinctions um but that's a that's a different idea but i i don't have any conservative people to talk with about this because most of them are [ __ ] brain dead as soon as you even approach these types of topics but destiny clearly how people feel is play some rule no say that someone looks like a man talks like a man dressed like a man but has a uterus and says they're a woman is it a woman yeah well that's what i'm saying it feels like in that case socially like there are there's something going on where our determination of who is a man and a woman it feels like there's a difference between the biological fact of the matter versus the gender roles that's why i'm saying um that's why i'm saying it seems like there's a different thing going on here like if i were to give you a room filled with femme boys or like ultra [ __ ] feminine like crossdressers like not like drag people but like people that are very convincingly men dressed as women and i was like do you feel like you're in a room full of men or women like you might want to say man but you have no way of knowing unless you're gonna go dick check everybody which people don't do we often make determinations of gender um 99 of the time or in chat's case 100 of the time without ever seeing somebody else's set of genitals right so it feels like there's like a distinction here there's something different going on here um yeah i i would be interested in yeah i don't know destiny do you not agree that the definition of woman is variable with culture and time the definition of the gender of woman the performance of that sex or the performance of that gender i think has changed throughout history culturally but of the sex no i don't think so sorry we haven't finished this yet so maybe vosh could turn this around but somebody linked this this was funny vasha's debate with the philosophy phd vosh did a great job handling the pale sophistry of that guy for a sociology major he has a solid philosophical foundation if he ever gets around to reading some of the spicier thinkers he'll be a [ __ ] voice of nature in this kind of debate speaking of someone who has read more philosophy than is probably good for me i just want to give everyone blanket permission to immediately cut through whatever gordian knots pendants and sophists put to you make them clearly define their jargon make them give examples make them justify the criteria in simpler terms in this case vosh would have been well within his rights to insist on a clear definition of a woman at the very beginning of the discussion to completely reject the chemistry metaphors especially after conjured up with the brilliant after he conjured up with a brilliant heavy water argument and to make the doctor actually sum up his argument a couple sentences rather than gesture to a [ __ ] powerpoint presentation philosophy isn't supposed to be like this by the way but unfortunately the discipline is split between pedants who worship aristotle and kant and get trapped in some analytic cul-de-sac because of political conservatism and temperamental timidity timothy or something and creative thinkers who actually read and challenge the full pantheon of philosophical thought from ontologic from ontology to political economy and can at least try to make these ideas accessible to everyone and not boring is this real thinking about it he would demolish anyone three times over if he even just gave us if if even just one of us gave him three months worth of coaching in the history of western philosophy like his biggest weakness in these arguments is a lack of familiarity making him sound like an arrogant amateur academics but he would easily run circles around anyone from kirk to today's dumb ass even pseudo-academic [ __ ] like alt history their logic is childishly misinterpreted and their philosophy bases are so ahistorical they're almost made up like super simple define all the branches then go through an examiner heraclitus gorgeous plato aristotle aquinas echinus aquinas um aquinas i think it's aquinas thomas aquinas right scotus lock descartes spinoza hume kant hegel mill kierkegaard nish nichi russell victenstein popper sart sarder i don't remember any set since i'm assuming he already knows most of the political and later thinkers he cited foucault before just today one basic threat a few possible ones i get is this like is this all psyops i can't tell if these are psyops posts or not i truly don't know but okay sorry anyway so you had said a woman is anyone who subscribes to the archetype of woman and then when i said what is this archetype you said is it is defined by the name woman i guess the collection of all we associate with it yeah and we associate many things with women very few of which i think have to do with biology there's a whole lot of social crap on top that you kind of layer um there was another quotation i didn't include where you had said something like this and a way to avoid the circularity worry with a self-id version of a self-id definition of woman is to say that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman and then mention the word don't use the word just mention the word anyone who is willing to say things like i am a woman anyone who's willing to um attribute that word to themselves so then you avoid the circularity worry but i said well as i said in my opening statement if this definition isn't circular then whatever you whatever the definition means um it's gonna exclude some trans women and here's how it's going to work in this case this this definition you just provided is going to make it so that being a woman is an english-speaking affair so there are no women outside of the english-speaking world you would have to be familiar with the word woman attribute it to yourself and so an implication is there are no non-english speaking women and there were no women before english came along um i find those to be pretty implausible implications i think that the category of woman didn't really exist in the form that it does as much as six months ago let alone throughout all of human history you know the the archetype i'm referring to this broad collection of tropes and categories that i refer to as like the woman that we that women associate themselves with you're right it may not exist to people who don't speak english but by the time they learn there will be a different one and it's different in every culture in every neighborhood in every society at every point in time it will constantly kind of true i don't think there's an objective definition here this is true but the problem is that vash is missing the point the other guy's making the guy is making the point that if this is true that the definition of woman is constantly shifting all of these things and that's what we want to we want to believe that then not all trans women are women because now you're trying to say that there is some like fact of the matter what is a woman but you have to acknowledge that if you're going to define it in any way not everybody is going to like meet your threshold for what a woman is most likely but if you're looking for some truly exclusionary stuff i would agree that any person who was raised by wolves in the forest and had never come into contact with human society could not be described as having a gender i think their gender would have to be a some kind of uh uh recursive um it would have to be like a product of their engagement with social roles and expectations that they would have to develop even if you could easily identify those but also you can also attack this on i hate to say like logical not logical uh like um inductive grounds maybe that like okay sure vosh do you think that if you say the definition changes every six months if i show you a woman from six months ago will you be able to identify her as a woman what about from six years ago what about from 60 years ago what about from 60 000 years ago because that would seem to undermine his argument that like oh yeah like it changes like every few months does it though does it really would you truly not be able to identify a woman from even you know 60 000 years ago you probably would be able to so this argument probably isn't the best one probably doesn't seem like a great argument facts but that's the only case i think where a human has no contact with gender roles because they're pretty ubiquitous all over all over the world we've got to jump into the q a shortly so oh goodness time flies have fun sorry okay well let me just respond quickly to a couple things you said you said um it seemed like you were willing to concede that the category of woman didn't exist six months ago you said not this category yeah so then it sounds like you agree with me that your view does entail there are no women outside of english speaking contexts and in fact you might even agree there were no women eight months ago um so these are these are surprising implications to say the least with respect wait if i may with respect not to get into linguistic traps here because the concept changes that doesn't mean that there weren't equivalents across time culture and society german well if there are equivalents then what do you mean when you say the concept changes then it feels like there's not much of a change now it feels like you're playing word games what do you mean by the concept changes or if anything if the philosophy guys is is quick here if the concept is changing but there's still equivalence throughout all of time in history now it sounds like you're making the strongest argument ever for there to be a more rigid definition of woman that there is some underlying fact of the matter about what is a woman and even though overall concepts overarching concepts might change there is going to be some underlying fact of the matter that is persistent so now you're making an even stronger argument for the concept of woman women have a concept of frau you know the spanish have more whatever the [ __ ] the spanish term for for a woman is you know um i don't literally mean the arc the concept you know the the social collection the word popped into existence here but you're right because depending on what word you use to refer to women whatever word you have for that it's going to be a different collection who would you be referring to there you said whatever words you used to refer to women who would you be referring to there there yes who are you referring to that's the whole issue that's the mean of the who are you referring to because it seems like you're you're referring to something similar the entire time that's the issue right well anyone no anyone anyone hold on it can't be anyone the whole point of a category is to include some things and exclude other things you can't have a by definition you can't have a category that includes everyone except for the category called everyone why would you say this what no matter what word you use to refer to women as an archetype as that will inform to an extent what you imagine women to be and this is self-evidently true go to india they don't have the word woman for woman but they have very different expectations of what it means to be a woman over there do you think that there are no women in india now i'm going to be honest with you i have not been to india but i personally would be pretty shocked if indians didn't have an understanding of like male and female now maybe they don't but better than we do over here massively so and they have a lot of women there despite the fact that the weird woman doesn't exist yup vash is making his argument even though they don't have that concept you're still saying there are women there right that's the issue yeah i agree wait with with respect i feel like i don't know if how you're interpreting what i'm saying here they don't use the term woman they have i don't know what the indian term for woman is i'm sure they do but yeah well i'm sure of them do you speak english right go in when i say it actually it wouldn't surprise me if there were more english speakers in india than in the united states actually there probably are but well let's check actually how many indian people speak english oh damn it's actually way less than i thought 125 million people wait hold on there's a thing that i heard a long time ago that must be fake i thought there were more english-speaking people in china than there were in the united states but this is saying india is the second largest english-speaking population besides the u.s those number whatever i've heard before must be totally inflated um it's only the elite yeah it's gonna typically be people around like major metropolitan areas and [ __ ] um probably not people in rural areas how many english speakers in china in china it's fewer than 10 million people damn that's a fun fact that i've heard repeated a lot that's actually completely wrong holy [ __ ] okay oh it's good to know the term doesn't exist outside the definition of woman what i'm saying is that it is a multi-faceted gem that changes with time and we see it from different facets depending on where we are and what we are what a woman is is so different to like a southern conservative bell than it is to a progressive living new york city in fact they're such different concepts in terms of the social roles involved that we they they're practically two different genders honest to god but like let's ask ourselves is that actually true if i were to go to the south and i was from san francisco would i have any trouble pointing out who is a woman would i actually be not be able to do that because they're so different would that be the case for almost any country or culture and on the planet i don't know if that's the case oh that woman got fired the washington post fires if she did get fired thank god absolutely based oh my god the boomerang is happening boys we're coming back hopefully we don't go too far back in the other direction um that's all i'm referring to so i'm not literally saying that the archetype the range of concepts popped up into existence six months ago and exclusively exists in english i'm only saying it's so multivariate so arbitrary so meaningless that there are a million variants of it right now and there were a million more yesterday this might be but that oh god it's just such a it's so it's just so much dog [ __ ] it's just so much dog [ __ ] damn i wonder what this guy what the philosophy guys think i'm so curious what's going on in his mind right now it'll be a decent time to jump into the q a i know that you've got another round in the chamber ready to fire both of you guys i know you do but i do want to jump into these because folks i got to tell you is like saved by the bell so hardcore he's got to feel like so good about himself that he was like clearly has no idea what the [ __ ] is happening in this conversation but managed to like hold on desperately until the very end and now he like comes out looking actually way better than he should have probably because of um probably because the other guy is like a little bit nice and he's not like trying to be an ultra debate bro dude i tried to spam the chat and let you know we can't take any more questions we've gotten a ton of questions we have a limited time for the q a these are both busy guys we want to get them out of here at a decent time so we're going to jump into it right now thanks very much elusive viper says can you identify someone whose favorite color is red without identifying quote-unquote red as your favorite color was this a question for me yeah they hadn't specified in this one can you identify some can you repeat the question can you identify someone yep they said can you identify as someone whose favorite color is red without identifying red as your favorite color can you identify as someone whose favorite color is red without without wet having red as your favorite color without identifying red as your favorite color oh without identifying oh i think this is supposed to be um a counter example to my claim that there's no feature such that you have it if and only if you identify as having it and maybe what this person is asking is isn't this an example um having the feature of your favorite color is red or you as they put it identify um your favorite color is red okay so suppose we're thinking of that feature having red as a favorite color is that going to be necessarily coextensive with identifying as having red as a favorite color so no i don't think so i don't think so i think that's going to be another example just like being rich and being funny and being taller whatever um it is possible for your favorite color to be red and not know that your favorite color is red and not identify as having the favorite colors of and as having a favorite color of um i don't even know how to finish that sentence stumbling uh-oh she's got him on the ropes um suppose you're just new to colors you you were colorblind from birth but a surgery was performed and now you're seeing colors for the first time but it's just color splotches on the wall and you don't know which color is which but you know that one's his favorite frazzled um so your favorite color is red but you don't know that this color is red you don't identify as having a favorite color as red so that would be an example to show how those two could come apart um can i just button really quick and say um i meant to um start the debate in a more sort of irenic way and say something nice about vosh but then we just got straight into the straight in the definition stuff i wanted to say that um when i first got in this invitation i mean i didn't know about this corner of youtube or twitch or wherever i am right now i i didn't know about it um but after watching a lot of videos in this corner of the internet um i was really heartened and encouraged by the sort of thing that bosh has engaged in um you know debating and exchanging arguments evaluating arguments giving objections um sometimes you know a middle-aged person like me worries about kids these days um and how they're not really interested in arguments or evidence anymore so i was just happy to see that there's this community thriving again on i don't even really know what twitch is but if that's where it is good for you and i'm happy you're doing it um and i encourage you to keep doing what you're doing wanted to say that before time ran out i'll respond when i get a question then you got it this one coming in from sphincter of doom i think this is for you watch they say intersex people are still one of two sexes because sex is defined in humans as to what gametes are produced and every human every has only produced at most one of two gametes for reproduction um so yeah that's just not true you can look at any biological journal if you want um wait there are humans that have produced both eggs and sperm i thought that the hardware for doing this was separate can you actually produce both is there is there a genetic um because that would mean you could get pregnant with yourself which would be [ __ ] based oh you literally clone yourself can you actually um can you actually produce both separate things i saw a house episode about it funny thing is is that like the definition keeps receding as it keeps getting proven wrong like at first it was like genitalia but that doesn't correspond perfectly to biological sex and then it was chromosomes and that doesn't correspond either because there are chromosomal abnormalities that correspond with like intersex and then it's like gametes you know it's like and they keep running back and running back running back eventually like people who are super harped in this argument are going to settle on a definition of sex that has absolutely no utility you know like their definition of sex is going to be like okay here we finally found something consistent there are only one of two possible outcomes whether or not like the the the half-life decay of this atom spun left or spun right in the in the exact moment the cell was fertilized and that's the one thing that determines sex and it's like okay at this point like what are you talking about shut the [ __ ] up um yeah that's just not true um but like they can believe whatever they want epic owns um because like at the end of the day the biological argument on this has been more or less settled you know all the major biological journals are talking about the ambiguity of sex and how well this has been more or less um um yeah that's just not true um but like they can believe whatever they want about biological sex um because like at the end of the day the the the biological argument on this has been more or less settled you know all that has been settled jesus academic vosh do you want to cite a single paper there claiming that the the all these questions are related to sex have you ever been settled okay dude sure biological journals epic vosh ownership moment ownage talking about the ambiguity of sex and how it's bi-modal and so on so i feel like at this point there are people far more qualified than i to make that argument about how much variance there is and to follow uh to follow up on that i enjoyed talking with you very much thomas uh dr regardless i should say you see i'm sorry you can call me thomas cal thomas i'm so used to talking to youtubers um you know it's it's it's wonderful to um uh to speak with with people with a higher education um especially ones who take my argument seriously enough to quote me in their powerpoint presentations uh no it's been a delight thank you for being on here next up from brenton langle a long time friend of the channel says h2o is a symbol dr bogardus i think that you are confusing the symbol for the real thing it refers to all symbols and definitions are flawed as if they weren't they would be the thing itself and not the symbol all right um was that that wasn't really a question though correct that's true um so the claim was h2o is a symbol so um that is true h2o is a symbol you have to clarify if you're referring to h2o the concept or if you're referring to what h2o it refers to are you referring to the reference to the thing itself that is true you have to make that distinction speaking verbally it's hard to make a use-mentioned distinction if the person meant quote h2o is a symbol well yeah i agree you mean like that symbol h2o yeah that's a symbol but if you meant h2o like the thing that's in this bottle no that's not a symbol that's a molecule that we drink i just wanted to say we're not getting to refer to the heavy water the isotope of h2o as trans water that was like the highlight of the scene that was a lot of fun the term h2o and mentioning the term um so we use the term when we say you know there's h2o in that lake over there we mention the term when we say h2o features the letter h or something so i i guess i don't disagree with what the person said as long as the person meant mentioning h2o it's a symbol yeah i agree water has five letters yeah with quotation marks water has five letters yes water has five letters no water doesn't have any letters at all the stuff that we drink doesn't have anything else it's literally an isotope um that's a pretty basic distinction but i think it's like an extra electron to uh recognize an appropriate hydrogen all right you got it signature of doing strikes again says heavy water isn't neutron an extra hydrogen it's an extra neutron in the hydrogen it's still h2o yes okay so i think i got that wrong if i said it was an isotope of oxygen that makes it is it deuterium did we say that so it's an isotope hydrogen it's an isotope of hydrogen so i guess it's one proton and one neutron is that right whatever still h2o though um yeah well i guess i i guess i need to wait until it's appropriate to respond to the biological sex stuff um so maybe i'll get a question about that i'll just hold tight you got it this one from sid dave says i can answer that question let's see no they are not no matter how many surgeries let's see okay that's not as the brenton langley fisheries says h2o is not water in the same sense that the pipe and rene magrittes let me know if i'm saying that wrong treachery of images is not a pipe you are falling for the treachery of concepts yeah right so i think they're referring to that painting of a pipe and then it says this is not a pipe i don't know what this is it's a painting it's not a pipe so it's doing the equivalent of mentioning a pipe but there's no actual pipe there um so i think this is the same as the last sort of statement i got when i was told h2o is a symbol not a molecule yeah h2o is a symbol but h2o the stuff in lakes and rivers is not a symbol this is just a difference between word and object but i can assure you i appreciate that distinction and i i hope we all do i'm not looking up anything that's funny you got it this one from david crackle says if ice can be water why can't a trans woman be a woman if ice can be water which it can be i think it is water because it's h2o why can't a trans woman be a woman i assume that questions for me well ice is water because um come to find out it's the same stuff that liquid water is um it's all the same stuff just in different phases it's all h2o it's the same thing just in different arrangements that's why isis aren't everything it's not like everything solid water protons and electrons so now the question is well that would depend on you're saying like depending on where you arbitrarily draw the lines whatever you use arbitrary is it the case that being a trans woman guarantees that you're a woman in that sense and i think the reason as i said this is such a persistent philosophical puzzle is it turns out that um on all the views that are sort of being discussed in the literature the answer is no um it doesn't turn out that all trans women are women whatever woman means it's going to be possible for someone to identify as a woman while being assigned male at birth but not meet that definition of woman i feel like that wasn't a problem with my videos this one for vosh made by jim bob says if the term woman is a construct doesn't that mean quote trans women are women isn't actually true and is just a construct itself something everything being true aren't mutually exclusive most things that we say when we're referring to interpersonal interactions are only true in a constructed sense but i still think that they're true you know um otherwise i mean what what does it mean for a person to be tall you know there's no set definition of what percentage or what like how many orders of magnitude above the average height of a given type of person a given type of variable like polish there's a comparison just because something's constructed that's not true you know you can say a person seven feet tall and be true as hell to that but finding a concrete definition a non-constructed definition of tall is not something you're going to be able to do um yeah so there's nothing wrong with something being socially constructed i just think we should be aware of how much power we have to rearrange these terms as we see fit that's not playing god that's what we've always done we've always done that forever it's all we can do we made language you know um i just think that we should use it responsibly you got it syndra doom strikes again this one for you bosh says sex is the reproductive conduct condition of an organism in humans this is achieved via gametes and there are only two gametes in humans that leads to reproduction chromosomal anaploidy which meaning whether there's a lack of chromosome or an extra chromosome compared to usual is irrelevant they say so keep switching up the definition of what sex is it was all chromosome years ago no again like the biological community has made its mark on this the idea that sex is purely binary and not bimodal is just not something taken seriously i wish he wouldn't say that without i think you need to cite at least one author in the field if you're going to say something like that because that's you're making a pretty outstanding claim right and i wish that i think the professor's trying really hard to be amenable um he's trying to be friendly i i think he should push him like when you say that it's not taken seriously at all what do you mean by that watch like give me like one paper that you're referencing or something like and um in in studies to this effect so it's it seems quite silly look again like even if you could even if you could like 100 percent male female differences amicable is what i'm thinking of amicable not amenable amicable amicable you could make it you know so flatly and unchangeably biologically male and female with nothing in between and i would still say what i say it's not really relevant to my arguments it's only the fact that you're wrong gives credit to the argument that the biological uh wait amenable no this is a word too [ __ ] you and yourselves differentiation is inconsistent at best and quite harmful as well um you know also who talking about gametes like like anyone looks at a person's gametes when they're trying to gender a person come on that's always been the silliest argument right they start going back before first it was what genitals are like you have tits or not or what your hair looks like and then it goes further and further in you know uh i'm telling you it's going to be the half-life the radioactive decay that that spin that you're going to get and that'll that'll determine it we'll just judge our we'll decide whether people wear suits or dresses based on that spin made by jim bob says vosh can someone with ben benjamin button disease you guys uh namely like aging backwards claim and age inconsistent with birth date but consistent with their apparent biological age i don't entirely know what that means but if the art if this is a question of like being trans age or whatever um keep in mind we're talking about magic here i mean you would have a person who's like what five years old but has every imaginable uh you know um a trait associated with an 85 year old or something i i have no i you know i got to tell you i don't know how the legal system or the philosophical community would handle the existence of such a person um you know i i imagine if they had the knowledge and wisdom and experience of an 80 year old even if they were only five years old they would probably be treated as like an eight-year-old because they're like they look and act like one i don't really know though you know you got when that happens okay you can try to stump me okay you got it this one coming in from raymond ryder appreciate it i think they all hate me wait i've already clicked on this what is this oh we've seen this bosh is it the case that you're engaging in an ameliorative project when you mentioned normative standards for definitions isn't this just shifting the subject i love to ameliorate the the the conjugated definition of the of the superlative wait what was it i can't tell that oh no when i initially listened to this i thought this was a vash meme it was a joke don't know but i don't think this is a meme it's actually um the emulator of the ameliorative inquiry that this guy brought up here relating to um or actually it might have been a washroom i don't know was it actually a reference to that when the guy talks about this in the paper or do you think it was or do you think it was a donor meme i'm not actually sure i don't know i was if that was a real question if it was making fun of how i talk which either way fair i could i could explain it if you want that was a sort of question for me it was an actual question whenever i hear the word ameliorate i've seen people making fun of me because i use that word most people the way most people use um's you know wait can you wait james can you repeat it i just need to hear it again i'll take it more seriously the first i've or in this case it's a technical term from the literature i'd be happy to just tell you what it means if you want no i know what it means i just wasn't listening to the question because i assumed i was listening for like i know what it means to know what it means that's what i meant they said vosh seems to be engaging in an ameliorative project when he mentioned normative standards for definitions isn't this shifting the subject um no i don't think there are any types of other arguments that you can make when it comes to definitions i think that at the end of the day even when you're making descriptive arguments about definitions of statement that we should adhere to the commonly accepted decrypters uh descriptive statement i don't think there's a crypto what after all these are things that we construct i mean these are things that we ameliorate it's a little bit like right like slavery right you know like people make arguments for and against it or at least they used to well they still do but they did more in the past you know um but if a person's only statement on the subject is slavery exists for x reasons even though that would be a descriptive argument if that was all they contributed to the discussion it would still serve the role of a soft prescriptive argument in favor of the institution because when something exists and has the capacity to be changed and acceptance of and passive defense of the purpose of such a system is considered to be um a kind of soft prescriptive argument for it so of course i'm not saying this all slaves ameliorated slavery in this debate are you saying that in the like specifically the word ameliorative is a concept or term from the philosophy of gender relative ameliorative inquiry is a little phrase that has a very specific meaning in this um philosophy of gender literature yes oh okay yeah do you want me to tell you what it means i'm curious okay it's just um it's sometimes called um conceptual engineering and it's the project i described when i said like hey we've got this biological definition even trans-inclusive philosophers agree that's what the word has traditionally historically meant but then when i said like they don't they don't like that they don't recommend it they think that we should use the word woman to express a different concept and when they're deciding which concept to express with the word woman they call this this is ameliorative inquiry it's a kind of inquiry or attempt at coming up with an analysis that is meant to make the world a better place to ameliorate injustices and so there are um explicitly moral inputs into the project they're asking their so they're asking themselves what concept would do the most good in the world and so i think vosh is engaged in this sort of project um but yeah it is a 99 super chat from ricardo franco felicia samnez got fired yeah we saw that i'll unpause my donuts in a bit the technical term from the literature um so the worry is by doing that by self-consciously using an old word to express a new concept you're just you're changing the subject so feminism was about the cause of women adult human females but now we're just using the word woman and expressing a new concept maybe the social role view or the self-id view or something like that and so we're not talking about women anymore we're talking about something else we've changed the subject so this is a common worry about the whole conceptual engineering project we'll just be changing the subject but i think that's just for what it's worth i think that's the least serious worry i think that the more serious worry is all the definitions that have been proposed are trans exclusive you got it and this one from mr saxokey says dr bogardus what is your own definition though of woman and by your own logic it can't be cultural nor social nor plastic nor prescriptive more plastic oh wow more very descriptive um so again if you just ask me what is my definition i would say that i said plastic probably like change private language um i speak a language shared by a community and so i think the question is just what does this word ordinarily mean um what has it meant for the history of feminism up until at least the second wave what did it mean um and again trans-inclusive philosophers agree ordinarily historically traditionally um it's meant adult human female and i'm just going to use this opportunity to say what it is to be female or what it is to be male so i agree that if you ask people what is biological sex or what is it to be male or what is it to be female you'll often get from ordinary people answers in terms of genitals or chromosomes no hormone levels or maybe like stereotypes um i don't know if you watched that matt walsh documentary but he asks people you know what is it to be a woman and you get these sorts of definitions in terms of i don't even use my all genitals but as we briefly discussed during our little back and forth if you accept that um sexual reproduction it occurs across the animal and plant kingdom and has been going on for a very long time longer than saturn has had has had rings it turns out longer than polaris the north star has existed this is a very old sort of strategy that organisms have used to reproduce um you'll realize that genitals are not required um i'm told i haven't actually checked but i'm told that a lot of male birds just lack external genitals entirely um there's no particular sort of chromosome structure that you need in order to be male or female if you just think about how plants do it it's super complicated think about how a platypus does it it's very very different from how we do it um hormone levels is something called i think it's pronounced placazoa or something a placozoa and it's only a couple thousand for a hyper cells definition that nobody uses when they think of a woman but then he's like i just differ some of them produce sperm some of them produce eggs that's all that biologists have ever meant by male and female now i agree that ordinary people have been confused about what it means to be male and female and sometimes they're confused by a sort of chauvinism about our own species how can they be confused if you just think about the common definition of this mean when they study other organisms when they say of a flower here are the male parts and here are the female parts they are talking about gametes and when they say males produce sperm females produce ova they mean the same sort of thing that they would mean if they said hearts pump blood kidneys filter waste they mean wind functioning properly this may be interfered with due to age disease injury etc um but when functioning properly that's what happens wait i i have to jump in briefly how can you how can you defer to traditional definitions when using one that you have to correct the majority of people on the majority of humans when asked what it means to be a man or a woman are not going to give the definition you just provided they're like the common definition was the one you were referring to earlier the traditional one the one you use in in in light of a or an absence of a prescriptive one but now you're making a prescriptive statement that maybe one in a thousand humans would even get in the ballpark of and you can't even defer to scientific definitions either because the science on this matter if you go to american scientific or nature.com don't agree with you you're deferring to nature.com scientific oh no or commonly accepted so why earlier were you talking about how you just deferred to the commonly accepted one and you said that you don't want to talk you know you just go with what's commonly accepted that's not the case at all it's not commonly accepted what it means to be a woman is literally one of the most hotly discussed topics today it's hugely contentious i mean 99 of people though and you're like well i go by the historical definition of honor but there is no single historical definition of honor certainly not one used today it varies massively it feels like you're trying to assume the legitimacy of the common definition when the one you use is used neither commonly nor specifically by scientists oh my god wash moment i think this is a good point vash and this really brings up something that we disagree very deeply about namely i think when you use the word definition what you really mean is like the conception that people have in their minds when they use a word um so if i were to ask someone what does male mean they might say xy chromosomes or something like that and you say that's their definition but i don't think that's right i don't think that's the right use of the word definition i would have thought um that you don't look towards their conceptions the sort of associations they have in their mind when they use a word and you don't even look at the way people use words because it's possible for a word to be systematically misused what you should look at is what the word actually refers to it might be commonly misused and people might have mistaken conceptions about what it is um but the true definition no shot and this goes across the screen the divine definition like all the people are wrong the scientist well we do investigation let me give let me give you an example if you had asked aristotle what is water he would have he might have given you his conception and he would have said something like it's an element although he would have said it in greek um yeah and it might have been possible yeah it's probably possible that some people have systematically misused the word water if they were unwilling to attribute it to ice but here's how we figured out what water is we did some chemistry and we investigated the lakes and the rivers and the ice and we found out oh wow turns out water is not an element it's a molecule it's h2o we did something similar with biological sex we notice this water is not a molecule it's an element maybe he's misspeaking i don't understand what the point of this is lakes in the rivers and the ice and we found out oh wow turns out water is not an element it's a molecule it's h2o we did something similar with biological sex we noticed this oh no wait he said the opposite water's on elements molecules sorry never i'm just kidding he ameliorated that statement just kidding interesting distinction in nature which i think you yourself acknowledge there's this phenomenon of sexual reproduction and we get these two subtypes within a lot of species some of them produce sperm some of them produce um ova at least when functioning properly we're talking about what it means to be a woman though i was talking about what biological sex is a moment ago well i don't understand why vosh never asks him is this really the best all why doesn't voiceover ask him what do you think a woman is like why doesn't he push him for that he does later on but by the q and a sex which you think infers what a woman is which i think implies what a woman is i agree that it might imply it i don't think that implication is necessarily prescriptive determination though yeah no i'm sorry it's just being a little pedantic there um inference is something that people do implication is something propositions do don't worry about it um so i guess you're referring to the fact that i said ordinarily the meaning of the word woman is adult human female that's the meaning my my issue is that it feels like earlier you were taking a non-prescriptive tone but vosh isn't trying to like understand or like get into like a subject it feels like vosh trying to find like he's like one thing that like i can give you an insight into the mind of the debate bro because i used to do this a lot one thing that people will do is if they realize they're completely outclassed in an argument bosh has done this before when you've listened to it is what you do is you try to find like um that's not gold is it no shot can i just mine gold no it's [ __ ] sulfur um instead of actually trying to engage sub substantially with sup with the substance of an argument um what people will do is instead they're just trying to like listen very carefully to see if they can pick out a single contradiction because contradiction is something that you can um figure out without truly understanding an argument you don't have to know what the other person is saying you can just try to figure like uh you said this we also said that and i don't i think this is a hundred degrees and then it's like a way to kind of like score debate points without having any [ __ ] idea what's actually going on in the conversation um and it feels like vosh is like hyper fixated on this guy trying to walk the line between like having a strict definition versus appealing to like popular definition or whatever and he feels like he's found like blood in the water here where you were just substantively accepted definitions which only work if you're thinking about like modern history the west because when you brought out the hello the real question is for as obsessed as we are with vosh why do we not have a vosh text to speak there are plenty of counter examples but but then when it comes to like okay well what do i believe then you have a hyper-specific definition and you justify the validity of that definition by saying that it differs not from utility not from common acceptance not from popular use but rather from it being a true definition which seems like like an ontological distinction that you're receiving from god but i'm afraid i'm not hearing the voices in my head i don't know what that means jesus yeah oh boy so a lot just happened there um so when i described that biological view i did claim this is what the word ordinarily means i might have said this is the way it's ordinarily used and i think that's right i don't think it's being ordinarily um misused um but if i were going to state the claim as precisely as possible i would say this is what the word ordinarily means and when i say that i don't mean to say this is what people ordinarily have in mind when they express the word because obviously they don't if you ask ordinary people what is a woman they're like this is something socrates discovered you know you ask people about ordinary terms and they're at a loss to articulate a definition so when i say this is what the word ordinarily means i don't mean this is what people have in mind when they use the word i don't even mean necessarily this is the way the word is ordinarily used because again use is at best an imperfect guy what do you mean what i mean is this is what the word um refers to as it's ordinarily used i don't think it's misused this is what the word refers to how do you decide what it refers to so the same way we did with water um aristotle was interested in the same sort of stuff that we were interested in we have different words for it um he thought it was an element we have discovered through scientific investigation and symbolic now this is really interesting because when this guy writes a paper about these the gender sex distinction he seems to want to get at the truth of the matter the fact of the matter but in this part of the argument he's almost appealing to popular consensus kind of in terms of what a word refers to well what most people say it refers to is that um is there no is there no underlying fact of the matter here i think he's a little inconsistent with his arguments here i don't know if wall should be able to call him out on it but cool and now we know water is h2o we did that through scientific investigation we did something similar with biological sex i mean aristotle was aware of this phenomenon but he was not aware of the gametes involved we have discovered the scientific essence of biological maleness and biological femaleness through scientific personnel i also i don't like him i don't like that statement like we just covered water is h2o like like h2o is another another model now i feel like he's getting or i'm not getting a clear distinction between like mentioned versus like actual um like uh mention versus uh oh god is it use mentioned what was the distinction like are you referring to the name of a thing or the model of a thing or the thing itself um no such thing as a scientific essence you can discover facts of the world but the categories that you apply on top of those facts are something that we have to make decisions about so you can look at water and determine consistently that you know h2o this number hating your life then working classes observable fact of the universe but as soon as you start to draw lines between things and assign names to those different categories you are engaging in arbitrary speculation ones which can only be defined through the utility served by doing so all of this differentiation that we talk about the only reason we distinguish between males and females is because we feel it provides us some utility but when we talk about what we're referring to on a fundamental level the fact of the matter is this is not the case um could you not also notice it could we not conceive of two things neither of which provides any utility whatsoever to mankind but we were able to differentiate between them because they've got different physical properties isn't that the case like i i i don't know if i buy this 100 and when it comes to sex there's a ton of variants not just in our own species but others it's not just chromosomes there are sex characteristics that vary tremendously even within cis people and there's no hard line when we look at those things and i don't think there's a perfect track record of assigning that like categorization onto gender either in fact they know for a fact there isn't because there are cultures with third genders so i i don't know what you mean by the true essence here but i don't feel as though this this mode of investigation gives us a better understanding of what it means to be a woman so when i said um we've discovered this the scientific essence of water what i meant was h2o we've discovered the essence of gold which is atomic number 79 this is something we've discovered through chemical investigation that's all that's necessary to be gold is to be atomic number 79. of course the greeks were aware of gold um humans throughout time and place have been aware of gold they weren't aware of what it is essentially um chemistry disclosed that to us that's what i meant by scientific essence and i think biologists did something similar with biological sex there were sort of crude theories about how sexual reproduction is accomplished back in the early days of science we have since discovered facts about sperm and eggs and that was a discovery of the scientific essence of biological systems like the fact that we consider isotopes to still be a member of that element and if an isotope has one extra neutron we consider that to be a member of the same element but just a different isotope of it but if we wanted to we could have simply said oh that's just another element it's another element with a separate name that has a separate molecular structure and they would have pointed at it and gone ah yeah well that's you know obviously it's very similar to this other element but it's this is true everyone's gonna [ __ ] on wash because you're all just like the channel box but this is actually true this guy needs a better this guy's gonna need a better argument for this you can see there's an extra neutron so it can't possibly be the same you know as this previous one um but that's what i mean like like discovering facts of the world is not the same as taxonomy it's not the same as categorization i want to give dr bogardus the last word just because the question was originally for him and then we've got one last question for the q and a before we wrap up i kind of forgot what the original question was at this point um i guess i'll just be back i don't really want the last word to be about noble gases but here we go um i guess i just deny that when we're investigating the world our primary interest when we like decide elements are defined what words should we introduce with this yeah i don't think our primary interest is just rather we're interested in the truth like if it had somehow turned out that not distinguishing between the noble gases had somehow benefited humanity like if we had learned that you know if we just stick with aristotle's view or we've just got these five elements humans will be much better off scientists wouldn't have done it they wouldn't have cared they just wanted to know the truth and they saw these distinctions between the noble gases and they were like let's introduce some terms to name what's already there i think that's what we did in physics and chemistry and um in biology this one what are you talking about go ahead i didn't interrupt nah that was that's probably as good a time as any to stop we'll jump in with this last question and then i want to remind you folks our guests are linked in the description so if you have not heard enough if you're like i want to hear more i want to learn more about their views you certainly can by clicking on those links in the description box below and here is that question brandon hanson ask bosh can a person who has male genitalia x y chromosomes has absolutely no values slash archetypes that has ever been associated with any vague definition of women but takes the name of woman [Music] are they yes though i have to say i have no idea what a human would have to be in order for their behavior personality to have no overlap with any of the many incompatible incoherent and self-contradictory values we associate with what it means to be a woman they would have to be remarkable i'm trying to think of like a like a male actor like even dwayne the rock johnson acts like kindly and charitable sometimes you know every time he smiles well smiling is considered a feminine characteristic so yeah i don't know you you would have to find i don't know you know like a proper brick but you know god god bless her you know transitioning saved her you got it and with that want to say folks we really do appreciate our guests as i mentioned you can find their links down below in the description box that includes if you're listening at the podcast because we put our guest links in the description box there too so i want to say one last thank you it's been a true pleasure for this very cordial stimulating conversation bosch and dr bogardus it's been a true pleasure thank you thank you both it's been a tremendous pleasure thank you very much 100 stick around folks i'll be right back with a post-credits scene letting you know about upcoming debates that you don't want to miss with that thanks so much one last time to our guest and i'll be right back in just a moment and we're backstage thanks guys thanks okay appreciate it bash it was good meeting you good talking to you thank you guys have a good night i just feel if it's it's the back room so i i mute myself and i mute them oh i didn't mute them did i oh i forgot to mute them oh i just muted me oh i'm so [ __ ] dumb knew i forgot something well whatever it's not like anything got leaked okay listen this is the point that i'm trying to make at the end okay definitions in and of themselves can't be right or wrong definitions can be contradictory but that only means the two are contradictory not that one of them is right and one of them is wrong definitions can also be useful or not useful but again that's not the same as being right or wrong um so here's here's an example of what i mean i don't think we can allow for contradiction i don't know if you can allow for contradictory definitions it seems like you've languages become absurd at that point if we if we are truly willing to accept that the contradictions can be contradictory or that the definition will be contradictory could it be a contradictory definition i don't think so i don't think you can have that because from contradictions you could prove literally everything right it would in dialects you can i don't know somebody's gonna mention some para consistent logic [ __ ] and then you're gonna get banned for it hold on one second okay right here the periodic table okay so he was distinguishing between utility and truth but there's no contrast because the thing the thing that he kept doing was he kept conflating between the obtaining of facts of the world and the categorization of those facts he kept saying like well you find the truth of things like the way we did with water okay but that's that we're referring to a fact of the world not categorizing those facts so an example would be if you take a look at the periodic table everything here is a fact of the world the number of protons and atomic weight and everything like that's a fact of the world that should that exists whether or not we do okay but the decision to group noble gases don't get me wrong noble gases do have plenty of things in common i don't know what they are i'm not i'm not a i'm not a chemist you know they do have things in common but the reason we group them we didn't group them because like the universe distinguished them the only reason the periodic table is shaped this way is because of human need have you ever wondered why one with hydrogen starts over two and then helium is on the other side all the way over here and then three four five six seven eight nine we grouped it arbitrarily in order i just there is a world there is a world where vasha's statements here can make more sense he needs to bootstrap way more onto this to get there but like i feel like the periodic table elements is like the worst possible thing it's like the worst example in all of science that he could choose in terms of things that are constructed arbitrarily he needs to uh he needs to never use this word again i think okay here i'm going to give vaj the best intellectual advice ever now maybe it's not the best stream here's the best intellectual advice wash could ever get on a stream if vash could literally get rid of the word the phrase social construct and the word arbitrary the quality of his understanding of the world and conversations would increase like a hundred fold um like he just needs to eliminate those two words and he would be he'd be doing so much better in all of these conversations because holy [ __ ] in order to like collect um elements that have similar features but their similarity is determined by our perception of their usefulness you know like even that is just a weird term their similarity is determined by our perceptions is it kind of like is it is it our perception of the usefulness of like how many v like how many valence electrons like something has or like how empty or full the the electron shells are the spdf whatever the [ __ ] like is that really like our like kind of but it's also kind of like a feature of the world um it's just this is just a really bad example of or maybe it's the best example because it's literally the hardest possible one to defend um arbitrary arbitrary arbitrary did you read the reddit post defending what vosh said um no because i already know it's gonna be some [ __ ] [ __ ] that's gonna be like well actually destiny uh there's a couple of different ways you can arrange a periodic table so why is that correct when he says arbitrary how we listed out we really only listed out like i already i guarantee you what is this i'll be real i think that's it was mega unfair would watch that about the periodic table i don't think watched anything was incredibly down i think this is normally unfair to watch or spite driven um even sometimes being unreasonably charitable watch my understanding what vosh says the period tables arranged in such a way that the characters are used for us to quickly analyze properties we find interesting the yeah but it's not just necessarily properties it's also like underlying probably fact of the matters which that cause these properties to emerge periodic table exists because there are characteristics of different elements that are useful to distinguish and compare kind of that's kind of true but i just i want to push back against this like social construct arbitrary everything is social construct arbitrary social arbitrary like there are these underlying fact of the matters that are going to lead us to arrange things in certain ways right like i just vashti vasha's like used this bosch has used this word so much what i mean like i've said i've said this before about like the way def like the way things become useful or whatever okay but like i'm trying i'm trying to think of like okay imagine that like humans the civilization ends all right and all of our [ __ ] gets washed away by time and our ruins fade to dust and a million years from now aliens come to earth and they find like a rubble and all of this [ __ ] is meaningless to them they have absolutely no understanding what anything they're looking at means and this is also kind of one of the things and i can't tell where what his underpinnings are in terms of his understanding of some of these systems i've said this in the past i've said this on this stream two times i'll say the third time aliens would probably be able to understand basic mathematical truths like basic mathematical axioms and um aliens would also probably have something similar to a periodic table of elements it's just such a fundamental building block of the universe unless they have some totally different way of understanding like they have a different sense that i can't conceive of maybe or access to like a different type of universe maybe i guess we could conceive of like other universes maybe or maybe my definitions are inconceivable maybe there might be an inconceivable universe where these things are different but like we're getting pretty out there at that point there's no clue no clue like because it's so damaged like they have no idea their technology is way beyond ours ours was back when we died off like whatever okay like the way they would group and categorize things from our culture is not the way we would group and categorize things like i would group and categorize stuff based on its usefulness it's that's it's possible but it's so hard to imagine like that this grouping on the periodic table ambulance is just like totally like oh no like they might just group it based on like the color that the elements have when they're in a gaseous form or something it's that it's it's conceivable but so hard to imagine to me water bottle helps me drink when i'm not near the sink game controller helps me lose an elden ring uh this uh berserk shirkah and guts clock is cool and i like looking at it you know a chicken is a chicken like that's what all this means to that like to me right but to them like they wouldn't have the same associated meanings they might group things based on elemental composition or based on color you know like they might look through these ruins see nothing but aesthetic value because nothing here is practically useful and they might just collect things based on texture or color you know like that's the thing and they wouldn't be wrong to do so it's just like the usefulness relative to them does that make sense do people get what i'm talking about we're just like we're engaging in such weird levels of i don't even know what you would call this like like everything like in nihilistic meaninglessness of everything at this point i just i don't know like how to even i don't know i don't i can't even i can't even i can't even guys i can't even you just call me babe i call everyone babe and i don't feel special uh that was uh quite something yeah good times fun times i think i uh like in 10 years time right do we really think that because this is the thing like if i were someone like you like i had your kind of pulling platform like like bosch or hassan does like you can become public um intellectuals in a sense who are rigorous about their arguments right so you want to leave a history like a good history rebuild like an absolute dumb [ __ ] right and just that one minute where he talks about the periodic table and he can't he doesn't understand what the noble gases are i mean well i think the issue is that i don't think a lot of people i i don't know [ __ ] i feel like i learned this in high school periodic table elements is has is like very very very rigid in terms of not only its organization but like the properties that it predicts like there are a lot of elements that we can predict the features of and then we did in the past like we predicted the behavior of certain elements that hadn't been discovered yet because of how because of the arrangement um of how of how it's arranged but yeah i don't know he just doesn't know that but yeah i don't know well someone said that this isn't irrelevant i guess it is well i mean everything else but but i mean i at the end of the day a lot of what bosh said i think is like i i disagree a lot with um whoever the the professor was um not because i think like they're stupid i just like all right they're very much coming from a different um avenue um but vosh just does the thing where like because this didn't used to be his position although at the end he did say that self id is all that is necessary well he tries to maintain that throughout because the more radical left groups that he hangs out with like constantly maintain that so he's forced to regardless of whether or not he leaves that position he'll never change his mind right because people like demon mama and catholes are pushing that and he has to like stay loyal to that camp it's like a political group kind of right and then he shifts over to sort of my camp and what i thought was your gamba at least last time you talked about this it's been a while um that you know womanhood or or manhood or any sort of gender um it's definition it's pluralistic and it contains a multitude of things that changes over the course of time uh and i think like like fosh said i mean i think it depends also on culture i mean you said like on average you'd be able to successfully point out what is a man and what is a woman right you would probably get that right in most societies i like almost all throughout like temp time and space of course of course like but like i i don't but like that's just sort of a i would say a quirk of of nature i mean that doesn't say anything about what it's supposed to be it's just so i think i think it speaks a little bit to the idea that there's probably some underlying fact of the matter pointing to male and female having some congruent definition through time that it's not just this amorphous nebulous esoteric thing that we are fooling ourselves into believing exists it's probably something no no i mean of course it's not that i just i mean i think it's so [Music] my point is largely uh if we look at the history of um i mean because there there have been societies and i mean bosh said this of course and probably people laugh but i mean there are societies where there are uh individuals who don't fall into either gender role and i think looking at them you wouldn't be able to actually successfully identify them now these people are rare yeah i don't i don't actually know if i agree with that anymore i used to but um i've gotten so much email from a couple of indigenous scholars and then a couple of history people that um like it feels like when we quote things like two-spirit um we try to have this western understanding like oh look they had trans people um oh no i mean they're not trans yeah the reality is that it's usually are often times like men that couldn't fulfill like the social roles of like man so they basically get like relegated to this like don't don't say that what do you mean well i mean these are the history you're gonna have to give me a better argument like with a story because like a couple people that are like very historically minded like email me and like also wanted to send me books and citation [ __ ] where they're like it's just nobody like the progressive understanding of trans never existed in any of these cultures when people like oh they had third genders um it was never like oh like a progressive understanding sometimes like in ancient history it was like they had third gender so that like high status men could [ __ ] low status men without it being gay so they'd have like a third gender created for them stuff like that um but i mean if you disagree with that that's right but like i at the very least i would push back against the notion that like there was ever like a progressive understanding in ancient history of like third genders i don't think that was ever existed well i mean but if you look at like the history of biology for example the the idea of there being two biological sexes is uh and i mean if you look at the hist well going even back to the ancient greeks i mean i this idea of two divergent biological sexes is in at least in western science i don't know enough about eastern science it is a relatively recent invention um maybe like the under maybe the formalization of the concepts but the arrangement of society around them is probably as old as human history itself oh yeah i'm not denying that there have been concepts uh that people use that generally include you know hair in certain places certain genitalia and at times also what i would include social roles um uh certain behaviors um groups that you participate in the people that you interact with i think that those things also are included in the concept of gender and i i seem to remember you agreeing with me on that last time right um yeah i don't think you said anything i could even disagree with right right well are you accusing me of being too vague um well i mean like the like the way that gender is performed across history has varied like at different times like i think yeah i would probably agree with that right okay and so you would just probably disagree with this guy who was trying to tie it to he was trying to basically say that the meaning of these terms lies ultimately in their reference well i well i don't know if this guy would disagree with that statement that like how genders are performed or whatever but i think he would argue that that wood performativity least according to his paper no i think he would say that um he would say that like there might be different gender roles throughout time but that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't necessitate a gender sex distinction that that socially the spaces that men and women occupy might be different but it doesn't mean that we need a different thing to describe what's going on that doesn't include just like men or women can i can i float something by you and see what you think about it um if you want to um just because we see uh a constant correlation between something in nature doesn't mean that we need to ascribe to it any sort of special status would you agree with that um i'm not saying that it's i i'm not saying that yeah there's there are things we can observe that like we'd like the way a particular raindrop falls or something maybe doesn't need like some special classification or something sure right and we don't need to assign certain significance to it and my point in bringing this up is that i at least from what i had i didn't read the whole thing uh and based on what i heard and regardless of whether this professor thinks or not i mean this is what a lot of people think they a lot of transmedicalists they do attach it to specific biological concepts or a group of biological concepts which i mean if anything often um sort of goes counter to their point because they usually don't know the history of the science but well wait hold on i don't know what's what's the problem so far like attaching things to certain biological concepts what do you mean like i would attach sex to certain biological concepts my point is that by attaching like you agree that with like what bosch said and you even agreed with this that definitions are very that by their very nature you know they are prescriptive right um i i don't think i like that statement that statement seems really vacuous but i don't i don't mean they're prescriptive in the sense that every time we do it we're making a conscious decision that we ought to do i mean only in the sense that they're rule following i don't mean anything heavy by that what do you mean by rule following that you're making a statement about what is a thing by you are participating like you can imagine it like a game like everybody has been using this specific sound and it tends to correlate with this and these situations and i'm going to follow that pattern okay right you agree with that i don't know but i mean like no i wait [ __ ] you gotta explain more i don't understand do you say say this how does that make a definition prescriptive i i don't sorry i shouldn't have used the word prescriptive yeah that's because that's confusing to me yes sorry a better word would be rule following sure right so that's what that means there's a publicly accessible language because this is what that the professor was saying because we don't have private languages and so when they said well what's your definition what he was trying to say is well i mean i don't you know i i you know i because he was he's pointing to the the very true thing that i mean if you were to ask 20 people in the room you'd all get different answers but him as someone who i think believes in a causal theory of meaning um is going to say that we have come to actually know the meaning of these things even if it's not totally clear in our minds yet we are getting aspects of that meaning from our scientific investigations and i think that's what he's grounding gender in is those biological um those biological facts of the matter that are then making their way into public language um yeah possibly i i would have to i'm uncomfortable ascribing something to him that i don't 100 know but it's i mean i could conceive of that being the case but do you think that that is a valid position that we are that we through our investigations we're learning more about what biological sex is even if we were able to ascertain like figure out like what it is even without these scientific investigations or um that meaning that the meaning of words like woman or man comes down ultimately what that what that is specifically picking out in the world sure but i think the argument would be that like woman and man as concepts have always referred to some unchanging thing throughout all of human history that well i don't know what that means exactly as in like if i go back in time or if i travel through any any land like even if the definition of man and woman is changing over time it's still referring to something that's going to be identifiable across all cultures like i'm going to be able to go back to any indigenous tribe or any ancient historical civilization i don't want to find oh like that's a man that's a woman that's a man that's like very easily very quickly even though these things have dramatically changed over time like what the roles are the addresses are and everything can i i would object to that by giving an analogy you can say if you don't like it um what's that fish that first came on the land coelacanth i think it's what's the [ __ ] idea but it's basically it's the middle line between reptiles and and fish okay the coelacanth you know for the most part if we were on the on the planet okay we can basically determine what is a reptile and what is a fish and we're pretending coelacanths are still alive in yadda yadda but then we come across a bunch of coelacanths all sort of in maybe different species and different stages of evolution if our definition can't account for these things then clearly there's not only something missing but that this missing something has to come from presumably you know social factors as i think most people admit i have no idea what that meant can you elucidate um are you saying that if i can go back in time and there's like a thing that i have a word that i use to describe even if that thing is different then that shows that myself yeah i was just giving an example because i could come up with a bunch of people to another point society uh who we what might consider women now and it is true that it might very well be that a culture would identify them all as men for example like maybe you'd want to do that okay yeah so for that i disagree i think they would call them men with female characteristics i don't think they would call them female so like friends if i were to go back to the 60s 70s 80s and i were to take a white man from today and go back in time to the 70s and 80s and i would assure them look at this white man he's wearing earrings he has other jewelry on and he has long hair and a man back then would go these are things that women do he wouldn't say wow that's a woman i'm actually genuinely confused on the topics or on the concepts he would say that's a man with long hair a man that has earrings and a man that wears jewelry yeah no and i i don't think that such a recent example is really if i were to go back to 5 000 years or however much the prehistoric society or not prehistoric yes um or pre-human history or even having to go back like two thousand years at the time of jesus or whatever i could pull out men and women and bring them to today and nobody would be confused about who a man is and who a woman is everybody would pretty much know i'm not but i'm not disagreeing with that my only point is that if we're going to give a definition that's going to be vague and needs to account for people that don't easily fit within those two categories then we need to broaden the definition of what gender ultimately is um yeah well now we're arguing for for broadening like i don't necessarily disagree with that that like we can have broader understandings of like the roles that people can have when performing their gender right i don't think that encompass more than just like the biological uh yeah i mean i would argue it seems like gender the performance of gender is something that is abstracted from biology or something that seems to exist a little bit differently than it's a different thing right what do you mean by abs that so we might have certain generals so men might have like the gender role of being like more honorable and more of a like a caretaker for their family and that's not something that's necessarily found in biology but it might be found in biology that men tend to be um stronger and faster and they're hunters right so abstracted from biology we might get to a thing where like men are the caretakers even if that's not strictly biologically found that gender performance is somewhat abstracted from the from the biological underpinnings of it right right but i like again the only thing i'm have and i think this is what vash is saying as well um is that our understandings of gender needs to encompass more biology to encompass those very roles that you're talking about no no that's i have no problem with that and that would be easy but i think he's trying to say that these categories aren't real or don't exist at all or are totally arbitrary or arbitrary yes but they're not arbitrary wrong yes yeah you're right yeah and i took but so that's ultimately what this [ __ ] all this i mean he just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about i how many cycles of this debate are are going to get are going to happen well i mean i have no idea however many times he does this debate i guess huh well didn't i thought it was all settled like last year and then i guess that was over um well there's always i mean like trans issues are always going to be culture war issues right so yeah what do you think about uh trans racialism um i don't like it interesting why um so when it comes to trans issues um i'm fully by the way a transmedicalist now i don't know if you've caught up with everything uh on ironically really yes um when it comes to tradition what do you mean wait wait wait so what do you mean by that if you're not if you don't have some experience of dysphoria i don't consider you a trans person i think there's something way different well isn't that true by definition of what careful no that's not necessarily true because the current thing is you are whatever you identify as so anyone that says their trans is trans that's what the current definition is but then why would you ever feel the need to you they don't that's but that's the issue there's a lot of quote unquote trans people that never want to transition never want to have a gender expression that matches their whatever they say their gender identity is um but yeah that's like where the conversation is right now publicly oh i think i must have missed a memo or something well okay well i mean if you disagree that then you would be a transmedicalist as well right the the negative connotations with transmedical so anything that's not self id is transmedicalism basically yeah well i i will say this that in practice i suppose i am self id like if in practice yeah you kind of have to be a little bit because we're relying on people reports but it's not even i have to it's that i want to because i and this is what i say to everybody especially [ __ ] [ __ ] and twitch chats right is that if someone wants you to call them by a certain set of pronouns just [ __ ] do it well sure but that says we're dipping back into the topic that wash and this guy were arguing about there's a difference between respecting what somebody says they are and somebody actually being what they say they are of course of course and i think we can have that discussion but i also think it's important to remember that like in day-to-day practice like this is just i don't ever really see it coming up well so this is the issue that i have now the reason why i think it's important to have this distinction between those with dysphoria and those that aren't is um i have this right in my manifesto there i think there are three reasons that i list one would you let me proofread your manifesto maybe one is come on i'll fancy it up make it all right okay so one is that the public needs to understand something that they don't which is what trans people are if you don't if you can't about understanding that you're [ __ ] so that's number one um number two is that trans people need to be able to sort themselves into appropriate communities if they need support or help um and then i had a third reason but i don't remember what it was um but those first two are like i think the big two um that yeah the public needs to have an understanding of like what it means to be trans or what that even is and then trans people should be able to have communities for themselves that they can sort themselves into if they want support or whatever yeah i mean i i think that that's roughly sort of the the right position i mean it's difficult it's difficult because he just keeps changing his um well so vaj to be clear is full on on self id period that's what vosh believes but his arguments aren't ever for that really no well his arguments are all over the place they're so bad yeah his arguments are all over the place but he has to he's necessarily bought into self id full stop because that's where um like demon mama and the rest of his quote unquote allies are on the internet right now so he's just completely he has to be bought into that argument oh my god even though that's hilarious um but uh specifically like with respect to that debate i don't think that professor did very um like i think he said i think he was being too amiable yeah he should have pushed back harder in some areas and made it harder to figure out but i don't know where his mind was after the opening statement even from vaj uh his mind might have been in a million different areas we're not we're not like academic philosophers are not debate bros really like i have never met a i've never met a professor who i'm like oh they're gonna [ __ ] own me in the debate sure like except for that one from um god's not dead who wants to own his your one philosophy student who's a christian on whether or not god is real but i know what you mean yeah true but uh where do you fall right now with respect to um like skepticism um i i'm pretty much unchanged on that like the foundational core of who i am is still like ultimately skeptical but i mean like i just don't entertain those notions for conversation because it's kind of stupid to do so so yeah i mean but i feel like i'm the exact same way with respect to being a natural skeptic um oh cool but do you think that there exists not i'm not into the moral stuff right now but in terms of do you think like epistemic do you think that there is a corrupt conception of the truth um these all feel like human concepts to me um and if there is something like that i feel like it would be inaccessible to us because we have no way to like perceive it or sense it yes yeah yeah unless you want to do some weird conscience like logically i can construct all of these things but i'm too i don't speak enough german i understand that so [ __ ] well i mean like that sort of it like the whole point is you want to delimit how far i mean this is my issue with a lot of philosophers and like for example like hegelians who come on right i think that they they try to do too much they try to extend themselves far beyond like what we can i mean i think like al most of religion is that right all these theological arguments are an attempt to talk about and comprehend something that's beyond comprehensible well yeah because you want to be able to make statements like you want to be able to make strong moral statements but like in my totally uneducated am i totally uneducated opinion like the grounding for these statements is going to exist outside of our world so you almost necessarily need to like get theological if you want to feel like you can say like with absolute certainty this is morally correct or this is like a moral truth that is 100 correct and grounded completely like it feels like you have to step outside of this world to do so and theology is kind of like the easiest way to do that well i mean that's where the constructivist sort of framework comes in and and aims to establish moral objectivity from you know the self and sort of your own consciousness and the way that it is structured i mean obviously that's really complicated but the ethical case is way harder than like the epistemic case because i think you i like everyone can pretend like bosh can pretend to reject and be like this epistemic like hyper anti-realist but there are just certain facts of the matter i mean they're not strictly facts they're um descriptions of our experience but there are certain ways that our experiences just have to be right and for them to be otherwise we would have no ability to experience it right and that's that's the that type of healthy skepticism yeah i mean i understand what you're saying but like we're like depending on how like anal you want to get about the topic right we like i can like pose like the carts demon to you like you don't even know if your experiences are real maybe it's just a demon showing you and lying to you i can't that's that's perfectly fine because this is i'm i'm trying to i'm not giving any names on or any say in any positions i just i think you'll like i think it might be a new argument that you can employ um if you agree with it you might actually completely disagree uh with where i'm going um but i if you were to give me descartes demon for example like describe to me what that would encompass that like well if you tell me that like through i guess through a constructivist lens through our experiences or whatever we can build some truths out of that i like i mean i could even couldn't i argue that like well maybe even your experiences are lies um so if not to card steven in the modern variation of that of like brain in a vat or something right right so yeah it's it's a like it's a lie like meaning that there is so like let's let's just get that out of the way we'll say that and i'm just gonna call it the transcendental object okay uh but we can call it the thing in itself right we'll never have true knowledge of that okay and so for example what people are talking about in theology what i think a lot of people are talking about in theoretical physics not all of science but a lot of areas of favor like dark matter and stuff um uh facts probably about human consciousness i i think a lot of this stuff is beyond our our you know capabilities as as human beings or or as rational beings um and essentially this argument against any kind of skepticism you give me is going to be that regardless of how i'm deceived whether they match up with reality or not i'm always presented in the same kind of necessary way well i mean maybe but again this is why like that's why if you get ultimately skeptical it becomes ultimately or um because like like like i could say that like for instance like the universe is inconsistent and you might say well no it's not and i'll say oh well yes actually all of your memories have been wiped and now all the rules have changed and you would have no way of even knowing that right so i feel like this this is why i like i don't try to consider anything related to ultimate skepticism because it's always like a nihilistic black hole of meaning and i i don't i mean i don't think so i mean i think it's really hard right and i think that that's i mean something that we see on display from people like bosh right like these are are really complicated and difficult you know ideas and people spend thousands of papers working and building building blocks and and frameworks and definitions all to explain pick out you know very nuanced slicings of you know these certain cognitive behaviors and you know uh like bosh who is just sort of just like going with whatever the [ __ ] that he wants but again regardless of whether we're being deceived or not whether my beliefs match up with what is actually out there in the world it's not even conceivable to me like for example just consider the fact that all of our experience goes through time [Music] okay right it can because it doesn't even make sense to comprehend any any form of experience that doesn't run through time in the exact same fashion sure if we were to do that it would no longer be right so there's necessary truth and knowledge that you have right i mean assuming that never changes sure but well we have to assume that that that's sort of the point is that i don't disagree i make all these assumptions this is how i function yeah i don't assume that like tomorrow time is going to disappear ever for any of my arguments or anything like that sure but it's not just an assumption well i mean it is an assumption right well you think well i want to convince you that it's not an assumption there's no way you can convince me though right if you're ultimately skeptical i'm not going to try to prove i ca i can never prove to you that it it mirrors that our world of appearance is mirrors how things really are but i can say or i feel confident in saying that uh we necessarily have to perceive and experience the world in a certain way to even be considered someone capable of having experience right maybe okay what's the next topic we're circling with what you can't you can't back up all your uh met uh your philosophical positions now huh well no it's just i'm just gonna keep repeating the same thing over and over again because there's no this is why it's called ultimate skepticism not penultimate skepticism there's not it's not like the step before you figure it all out like it's just it's a it's a circling the drain of like stupid questions well why why why why why it's like philosophy for two-year-olds is what i'm just gonna keep saying right right but the point at which you start to admit of truth is like from which everything else is going to flow right yeah but it's the point at which i agree i want to agree with that but the the reality is is that it that the the real thing is like you're going to say like okay well when do i just want to stop asking questions because this is [ __ ] boring and that's when you can start doing real philosophy so like some default assumptions should probably be like i can probably trust the sense data i get about the world i can probably trust like some basic like axiomatic truths i can probably trust things like deduction and then from there because it seems like these things are unchangeable and can never change um and will never change so then you move from there but there's no reason to really think that like they could all change tomorrow theoretically you have to admit that tomorrow you could literally be born in a different body not know it not have any recollection of memory where you are now and you might be in an alternate universe where time goes backwards that's possible right inconceivable but possible but like right but and there's no way to like argue against that but at some point you're just like okay well this is like mental masturbation let's just make some assumptions and then go from there right but it's not just like anti-probabilistic it's that like there would be like what you're describing is i guess metaphysically impossible because there would be loss of a subject i mean you say metaphysically impossible but maybe the metaphysics of a different type of universe would allow for it right i vote by meta metaphysical possibility meaning within our current metaphysical laws and but if you're already giving that constraint then it seems like you've already conceded that like well the metaphysics yeah i i would never rule out logical but but there's no you know contradiction or inconsistency in acknowledging the logical possibility but only that us right now as human agents are necessarily going to be experiencing the world in a certain set of ways yeah i understand but like what if you're part of a computer program and your metaphysics is just whatever the code of that computer program is so i'm not i'm not making any claims about the actual entities that they are it's it's almost purely relational well if you're oh well if you're not well i mean but even relationships could be defined by a system right theoretically even relationships could theoretically be defined by a system and those relationships could theoretically change too again like tomorrow you could wake up in a different order maybe tomorrow you wake up as a chair you're not even conscious of it you're just a chair and you just well no but i disagree i disagree with that because i'm no i cannot be a chair how do you know that yeah well i know you don't understand i mean that's the whole point yeah tell me i well i wouldn't know because i'm stuck in this system right because it's not possible and that's that's the point okay right well like you can't just say like oh i could be a rock like if i'm saying you and obviously there's like a cognizing thinking subject i mean for now there is sure but maybe that would be still maybe once the computer program reprograms me maybe i would be something different well that's fine as long as like again and this is where i accept like a functional like i'm not tied to any sort of material right um i'm very neutral i'm metaphysically neutral ontologically neutral you [ __ ] add whatever entities you want okay um round squares gotcha okay i went out of the ultimate schedule because i'm just gonna keep asking the same question over and over again okay what's the next thing or do you want to talk about anything else

Channel: Destiny

Views: 1,152,533

Keywords: steven bonnell, destiny, destiny streamer, destiny debates, destiny twitch, destiny vods, politics, news, livestreamfail, lsf

Id: 9W_Hz_I6o0I

Length: 219min 2sec (13142 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022