this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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AskBeehaw
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I'm way overthinking this, but I'm going with finite. It could be an unfathomably large number, but gender is a human construct and there are a finite number of humans. Let's say each human that ever lives has a unique gender identity - there could be billions or trillions, but it would still be finite.
but you could birth a new person who didn't fit that finite number
there will always be a hypothetical new person who could exist
me, pedantically giving birth to a new child in order to prove the n+1 case
Countries have been trying gamification and incentivization to increase birth rates, when they should have been appealing to our pedantic impulses all along.
There are finite number of possible humans due to there being a finite number of states a brain can be in.
There is an argument for moral realism that takes advantage of finiteness and computability of mental processes to show that there could be an objective morality
@askbeehaw
there are infinite ways to arrange and configure finite neurons
are mental processes entirely computable though? you kind of run into a halting-problem-style issue because if you can compute your response to anything that should imply that you can never make a decision that surprises the computation. but if you feed knowledge of the computation's result into your decision making process you can just pick the opposite
hm? i don't see how this is true at all. a finite of anything in a finite space can only have finite configurations.
The universe might be discrete.
If mental states are finite, then the space of all possible human minds is finite and includes the one that believes they have knowledge of the computation's result. It is possible for mental states of 2 minds to be different but extensionally behave like the same person. We would exclude human minds whose models don't map well onto the physics of our universe though. You might not be willing to pick the opposite if we are talking about morality also @askbeehaw
It's possible that brains act stochastically such that two discrete identical brains produce a range of outputs under identical conditions. In that case, mental states would be confined by the space of outputs of minds, and if that's the real numbers then it would be uncountably many.
what about Genders Georg, who lives in a cave and has uncountably many genders all by xemself?
I thought something similar, but the human brain is finite, so I don't think a single person could have an uncountably infinite gender; unfathomably large, maybe, but it would still be finite.
Edit: I'm not trying to be bigoted here. If someone does identify that way I don't want to discredit your identity.
A single human brain is finite, but the possible configurations of neurons across any possible hypothetical brain is decidedly infinite.
I'm no mathematician, but I don't think that's how it works. A quick Google says there are 100 billion neurons. So you would have
100000000000!possible combinations, unfathomably large, but finite. Granted, a human brain is more complex than the configuration of neurons, but I don't know how it becomes infinite.I'm also way past the point of overthinking this.
yeah, but the relative positions and relative lengths and relative widths and relative densities and relative conductivities of those neurons are real numbers
Now we are getting into the quantum physics question of if the universe is discrete or continuous. Which seems to be unsolved.
So I guess that's my answer. If the universe is discrete then there are finite genders, and if it's continuous then there could be infinite genders.
I fucking love where this went, as I was thinking the exact same responses while reading this thread! Love it when a question about gender results in fundamental ideas surrounding mathematics and the nature of reality.
so at the very least, the lower bound is the natural numbers, or a countably infinite number
I was going to write up a similar argument, but does a gender exist if no one has it? Because then we might be able to "fill in the gaps" and get it to uncountably infinite.
Yeah, I got to that point in my thinking and then just gave up and posted my first thought.