drafting "... as Cognitive Illusion"

Not totally settled on which title/slug I want, but I at least figured
out how to start the prose.

diff --git a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md
index 0dc006e..1a8a4bb 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md
+++ b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md
@@ -1,9 +1,25 @@
-Title: Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
+Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or, Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion
 Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
 Category: commentary
 Tags: categorization, epistemology
 Status: draft
 
+A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right?
+
+It can't _actually_ work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you _really mean_ by the word.
+
+What's a _woman_? An adult human female. (Let's [not play dumb about this](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) today.) Okay, but then what's a _female_? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs.
+
+That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace _real_ world—but not in _the world of the imagination!_ We could _imagine_ the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, _except_ that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So that would be a _female_ and presumably a _woman_, according to our definitions, yes?
+
+According to our definitions, yes. [But you don't actually want to call such a person a woman]
+
+What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are short labels that [...]
+
+To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 bit strings. 
+
+
+
 Outline—
 
  * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on