That your passing desire means you get to derail a woman’s life whenever you feel like it is the absolute definition of male privilege. Kieron Gillen (writer of one of my favorite comics, Phonogram) on sexism.
There’s been a lot of chatter about “post-genderism” and the like with the news of this recent work:
Virtual reality can get downright unreal. In this simulated realm, grown men given a new perspective on the world suddenly find themselves convinced that they inhabit the body of a young girl.
I understand the value of these experiments as a stepping stone in which we are learning how to project our experiences into a different sort of body and environment, and I understand the potential benefits that can come from this research (phantom limb mirror-boxes, for example, as well as some of the interesting work done by Henrik Ehrsson.)
But for people thinking that projecting into the body of a female somehow means you experience in the world as a female? You need to learn a lot more about phenomenal experience, cognitive science, and neuroscience. This may seem strange coming from someone who stresses the role of the body in cognition, but it really isn’t. This all calls for a much larger post than I’m planning to make here, but if you take seriously the brain-body-environment complex, you know that you can’t swap one aspect for a brief time and fundamentally change anything. A male doesn’t understand what it means to be female by changing what the body looks like any more than I understand what it feels like to be a female in a middle-eastern culture just by virtue of both of us having a uterus. These three things, brain, body, and environment, build up and create who we are over time. Having a female body is one small part of that process, but much more important is the way you are treated by your culture over time that builds the experience of being female (in that culture at that time, since there is no essential “feminine experience”). These experiments are mildly interesting as a step on the path, but they do not in any way, shape, or form, belong alongside the label “post-gender.”
Link to “Grown Men Swap Bodies with Virtual Girl” on Discovery.com
“Programs are encoded information that is contiguous and continuous with the information in our heads, and in the world. ” … Joe Berkovitz on Apple’s restrictive development rules, making an Andy Clark-esque Extended Mind argument in the process. (H/T Joshua).
I’ll be asking this repeatedly via all of my web-presences, but since this one sits idle these days I probably won’t have to ask more than once here; it’ll just stay on top since I never blog.
I’m teaching a First Year Initiatives course in the Fall. These are basically first-year seminar classes designed to teach college- and learning-based skills to incoming students. The content is meant to be highly interdisciplinary, but the content is also secondary in these courses. The primary goal is to give them training in critical reading and writing, public speaking, etc., as well as get them introduced to the college environment and the surrounding community and its needs.
I’m teaching a class with a cyborg theme, because the knitting theme I wanted to do just seemed too tough to sell (I wanted to attract the right sorts of students and I haven’t figured out how to do that with a knitting-themed course yet). I’ll be working on my syllabus once the semester is over (May) and I hope to have a sizable list of books, stories, and articles, both fiction and non-fiction, to examine and consider for the class by then. I have a few non-fiction items already to look at, but I don’t have many fiction pieces (aside from “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). I welcome recommendations, and the ideal pieces will examine multiple facets of the cyborg concept (Hayles, Haraway, Stelarc, for example). The fiction pieces should do more than look only at the human-machine blending, although good fiction will always deal with more than one dimension. The social aspects, the economic aspects, and the philosophical aspects are all as important as the biological.
Please leave comments with recommendations, or also feel free to email me if you’d prefer that. And thanks in advance if anyone is still reading here and has something to contribute!
So, you want to take the reporting on this with the usual “science-writing caveat,” (which I don’t normally have to give for Wired Science, but I think this time it’s necessary). I’m not thrilled with the methodology of the study itself, as there have been abundant rigorous studies done that already show the effects being described are real. I’m more intrigued by the fact that the scientific community is starting to take seriously some of the philosophical phenomenological arguments, which is what I’ve been basically yelling my head off about for the last 8 or 9 years.
An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.
The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.
Link to article at Wired Science, with the title “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You.”
“Vision of tomorrow! Vision of tomorrow!”
“Is there a verb for making your own echoes? It seems like there should be a verb for making your own echoes.”
-Dinosaur Comics at qwantz.com (This obviously works better with the comic! My layout disallows such things. I hope Ryan North intended this to be as critical of futurism as I’m reading it to be.)
This one is worthy of a post in the Big Important Column of Things You Really Ought to Take Notice Of.
Scalzi succinctly and beautifully suggests a course of action for the SF Boys Club folk:
At this late date, when one of these quailing wonders appears, stuttering petulantly that women are unfit to touch the genre he’s already claimed with his smudgy, sticky fingerprints, the thing to do is not to solemnly intone about how far science fiction has yet to go. Science fiction does have a distance to go, but these fellows aren’t interested in taking the journey, and I don’t want to have to rideshare with them anyway. So the thing to do is to point and laugh.
There are few things I love more than a wonderful writer who, when exposed on a day-to-day basis, continues to be brilliant. When I read columns or blogs by authors whose books I otherwise adored only to learn they’re backwards, close-minded fools, their books become tainted and unreadable. Scalzi’s books take on an aura of betterness when I read his blog.
“The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay… So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.” Link to the Office of the Prime Minster’s Website.
“I can’t help but think neurodiveristy is an area in which science fiction and fantasy fans are a long, long ways ahead of society in general.” Ponderings by Jason Henninger at Tor.com
A CAMPAIGN has been launched to win a posthumous apology for computer pioneer Alan Turing over his conviction for homosexuality. Read more here. Sign the petition here if you’re British. Please.