Carl-Richard

A circular definition is fundamentally inconsistent, which is what I was referring to. A circular definition is actually not a definition at all. You just want people to not use definitions?

Welcome! My prescription is daily meditation and watching some videos of somebody like Rupert Spira

Which scientists specifically? ?

That is so cool. My MD mom says me feeling good when eating a lot of veggies is probably placebo. No, mom, I'm feeding my little minions ?

Ah, I thought you meant "pre-non-logical" and "trans-non-logical", which didn't make much logical sense

Yeah, same with the logical one

I guess I forgot this category existed for a second :

Do you do this for something like "mailman", "toothbrush" or "toilet"? Oh yeah, so you're just some ethereal smut without a body that floats around in the sky disconnected from all of society and human endeavors? Stop it. I'm asking for your preferences as a human, not for a lesson on metaphysics.

That is all true, but regardless of calling people by their preferred pronouns or not, if you were to choose the definition which makes the most sense (or the one you like the most), which one would you pick?

Ok, so I'll address both of your points. You're using the self-identification definition, which is a circular definition which doesn't make sense in a purely analytical sense. Now, referring back to my earlier point, most people don't really care about definitions making logical sense or not — they simply use words to communicate and to relate to other people, and judging by how you're using an illogical definition, you probably fall under that category, and most trans activists do as well. I'm saying that is actually fine, but now your movement is no longer about being logically consistent but solely promoting social responsibility, which means your focus should be on how people actually treat each other and not stuffing definitions down people's throats, because while most people don't give a fuck, some people actually prefer their definitions to be logically consistent, and you have no leverage there. So, when I say "I think the bio-essentialist definition makes the most sense, but I'll still call trans people by their preferred pronouns", you should be very happy, because I'm following your social demands AND you have no business telling me which definitions make logical sense.

What is your definition of woman? According to you, you can't know if Roy is a transphobe by observing him interacting with a trans person. Roy only becomes a transphobe if you interrogate him about his internal state and pin him down on a fucking descriptive definition of a word, not something like a hidden emotional reaction of disgust or a negative belief about trans people. This is a standard that does not exist for any other "phobia" as far as I'm aware.

Btw, something that also helped was incorporating regular masturbation back into my life, even if you're not particularly horny. It seems like sexual energy gets converted to spiritual energy when you reach a certain level of "refinement", and opening the crane at a lower level can help to empty out some of it.

You should not use meditation to avoid anything. Then you're doing it wrong. Meditation teaches you the exact opposite: to face reality head on.

Crying in meditation is the best thing you can ever do.

Ah, I already made my point though. We'll try to get this moderation issue straight among the mod team.

Now I have to reveal the point I was building up to ? People generally don't care about the definitions of words and whether they make sense or not. They just use words to talk and relate to others (pragmatics), and like you said, social cohesion is a big aspect of this. I know about a few definitions, but the biological essentialist definition makes the most sense to me. That doesn't mean I will speak to a transwoman and call them a man.

I'm just asking for definitions

Do you have a definition of woman?

Ait, so 3 people mentioned the biological essentialist definition of woman. Anybody got a different definition?

Huh?

12 posts in, still nobody has defined what a woman is ?

Discussions involve thinking, and people who're better at thinking generally do it better Wisdom and emotional intelligence are probably better predictors though.

@Tyler Robinson Yes, I do believe that more people became spiritually mature when more people were seriously studying the teachings of the Vedas, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad etc. and it held center stage in the collective consciousness. Everything you know about nonduality today has been known for thousands of years, arguably for all of human history.

Note: this is not a developmental model, nor is it about determining which framework is better or worse. What does it do? It shows how these different metaphysical frameworks differ in terms of the trade-off between comprehensiveness and specificity, which realms they're mainly operating under (hyper-dimensional vs. three-dimensional reality), and which explanatory constraints they're operating under (mysticism vs. naturalism vs. myth). Explaining the different explanatory constraints Mysticism - deals with methods, metaphors, anecdotes and stories that aim to facilitate the direct phenomenological experience of God/reality, and these explanations of reality are seen as a means rather than an end. There are no general guidelines for these types of explanations, only that they aim to encapsulate the nature of God. Naturalism - deals with analytic philosophy, the scientific method and scientific theories. The goal is to explain a phenomena by reducing it to some other known phenomena that is compatible with the naturalistic paradigm, e.g. explaining rivers by referring to the structural-functional properties of water. The general guidelines for a naturalistic metaphysics is coherence, internal logical consistency, conceptual parsimony, empirical adequacy, and explanatory power. Myth - deals with metaphors, anecdotes and stories in order to explain the nature of reality. For example, God created Eve from one of Adam's ribs, which explains the origin of man vs. woman. The general guidelines are specific to each tradition. General -> specific, and hyper-dimensional vs. 3D human realm The first distinction is a hierarchical one: the closer something is to the top, the more general, comprehensive, holistic, all-encompassing, and big-picture it is, and conversely, the closer something is to the bottom, the more specific and concrete it is. There is an inherent trade-off between these levels, meaning you can only have so much of one or the other, but the different levels also don't have to necessarily contradict each other (although sometimes they do): For instance, the statement or metaphor "you are imagining everything" of psychedelic mysticism is able to encompass the experiences you encounter in the hyper-dimensional realm ("my couch just talked to me") as well as those in the 3D human realm ("my friend just talked to me"), but it seems to lack more specific explanatory power for the 3D realm. The same applies to nondual mysticism: "there is no separation" doesn't really explain the apparent illusion of separation (or at least the particularities of it, e.g. "why am I able to pick up a cat and not a car?"). On the other hand, the naturalistic frameworks are tied to conventional scientific investigation and analytical standards of reasoning, and these are more able to account for specific things in the 3D realm, like the weight of cats vs. cars, technological innovation and subsequent questions like "is AI sentient?" But these again lose some comprehensiveness, in that some things are either hard or impossible to explain: One such example is the "Hard problem of consciousness", which has remained unsolved under physicalism (but is solved in analytic idealism, but conversely, it faces the "Decombination problem" which is solved under physicalism). However, analytic idealism seems to have a plausible solution for the Decombination problem (i.e. "dissociation"), but the research around that is still in its infancy. Mysticism has none of these problems, because again, it simply relies on metaphors, anecdotes and fuzzy concepts, not analytic philosophy and science. Specific -> Pseudo-specific On a less important note, with respect to the two "Myth" frameworks on the bottom, I denoted the tendency towards "pseudo-specific" in the sense that they're both less specific and incredibly specific compared to the naturalistic frameworks. For example, while physicalism can point to things like particles, forces and phase states to explain things like rain and fire, an animist explanation would for example be a "rain spirit" or "fire spirit" for each phenomena. Merely denoting these phenomena as "spirit" doesn't tell you much about their specific properties compared to say their chemical structure, but each explanation is in another sense incredibly specific to the phenomena. Why did I make this? Because I often see what I consider a harmful tendency towards "naive skepticism", i.e. to dismiss or deny especially analytically rigorous styles of investigation (philosophy & science). I think carefully spelling out these different levels of investigation and seeing the pros and cons in a visual way can help with that. The most important point in this respect is the naturalism vs. mysticism distinction, and that in any sort of inquiry, be it spiritual, self-help or intellectual, one should acknowledge the constraints of each framework and avoid blindly choosing one over the other.

I'm not contesting that. I'm saying that despite the blessings of the enlightened saints and sages that created the world's religions, pre-modern society did not abolish slavery. The Age of Enlightenment is considered to be the spiritual Dark Ages, but despite that, we abolished slavery.