critical minds want to know the answer to this question

  • jeff 👨‍💻@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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      3 months ago

      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

      • Match!!@pawb.social
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        3 months ago

        me, pedantically giving birth to a new child in order to prove the n+1 case

        • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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          3 months ago

          Countries have been trying gamification and incentivization to increase birth rates, when they should have been appealing to our pedantic impulses all along.

      • J Lou@mastodon.social
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        3 months ago

        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

        • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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          3 months ago

          a finite number of states a brain can be in

          there are infinite ways to arrange and configure finite neurons

          computability of mental processes

          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

          • Zadig@beehaw.org
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            3 months ago

            there are infinite ways to arrange and configure finite neurons

            hm? i don’t see how this is true at all. a finite of anything in a finite space can only have finite configurations.

          • J Lou@mastodon.social
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            3 months ago

            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

            • Match!!@pawb.social
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              3 months ago

              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.

    • Match!!@pawb.social
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      3 months ago

      what about Genders Georg, who lives in a cave and has uncountably many genders all by xemself?

      • jeff 👨‍💻@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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          3 months ago

          A single human brain is finite, but the possible configurations of neurons across any possible hypothetical brain is decidedly infinite.

          • jeff 👨‍💻@programming.dev
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            3 months ago

            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.

            • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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              3 months ago

              yeah, but the relative positions and relative lengths and relative widths and relative densities and relative conductivities of those neurons are real numbers

              • jeff 👨‍💻@programming.dev
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                3 months ago

                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.

                • knokelmaat@beehaw.org
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                  3 months ago

                  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.

                • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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                  3 months ago

                  so at the very least, the lower bound is the natural numbers, or a countably infinite number

    • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      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.

  • sculd@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    Countable infinite. Infinite because there are infinite possibilities. (Spectrum) Countable because the number of human beings is countable.

  • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    A finite number of genders will be experienced by people, but there are an uncountably infinite number of genders.

    The set of genders is like the real number line. You can throw a dart at it and pick out a new gender for every person, but you will never be able to throw enough darts to exhaust the set, even given infinite time.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      Some people may even have a gender experience variable over time, maybe repeating cyclically, or maybe more or less randomly jumping across a set, or maybe sliding across a real section, or maybe sliding in multiple dimensions.

      If we were to define gender as each person’s “gender experience”, the number would be g∈ℕ, since the number of people is going to be finite.

      However, if we try to define a “gender experience” as a function of common genders, then g:[f(n∈ℝ),…], making it an uncountable infinite.

      Interesting paradox: finite as long as one doesn’t count them, but uncountable infinite as soon as one tries to.

  • h6a@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    With enough funding, I will finish my research on the Hilbert space of genders where every particle in every possible reality has a one-to-one correspondence to a gender. I call it the “Everettian gender hypercontinuum”.

  • its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    I just respect everyone and never assume their identity is what I initially (subconsciously?) think. It took a long time to get there, but I just take every person as a person worthy of respect and dignity as my default.

  • RadioRat (he/they)@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    I guess it depends on whether we’re willing to say a gender exists if theoretically possible though not ever embodied. Will artificial sapients have gender identities?

  • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
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    3 months ago

    I’d say finite, up to 8.1 billion options. My throught process is that what isn’t alive doesn’t count.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      That begs the question: is “gender” exclusively a human experience, or is it a construct or quality that describes something? What about animals, plants, other living begins, viruses, AIs, etc.? If it isn’t exclusively human, then where do we put the line? Does Earth as a whole have a gender?

    • Crotaro@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      Understandable, but I would say the entire set would include genders and gender variations that haven’t been seen in the wild yet.

      Similar to how you don’t need to write down all the possible numbers between 0 and 1 to know that they do exist.