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Jul 19, 2022Liked by Frederick R Prete

I heard about the bee/fish thing. As you say, makes no sense from a taxonomic perspective, but plenty of sense from a pragmatic let’s-save-the-bees-using-available-tools perspective.

I wonder if there’s a part 3 to be had here? In this Part 2, you wrote, “Whether or not we can know what’s going on in another organism’s “mind” is an unanswerable philosophical question...” In these essays, you’re talking about whether humans can understand the inner workings of the mind of another species. But can we ever really know what’s going on even in another human’s mind? This is one of my counterarguments to the whole gender identity thing. I don’t claim to know what it means to “feel like” (or think like) a woman. I only know what it feels like to be me. So to hear people insist they “are” of the opposite sex to their biology because that’s how they “feel” -- how does that even make sense? How can they know what it “feels like” to be something they are not? (Of course, it becomes tautological, which is why such arguments are rarely satisfying. Once they deny biological reality -- how dare we assume someone’s sex/gender based on their anatomy -- it’s all downhill from there.)

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