The boundaries between neural networks
So, I’ve been working on a theory.. this is more of my hand-wavy guessing what’s going on inside a NNN stuff..
My theory is that children grow their ego.. the portion of their decision trees that is recognizably them – from the inside out. At the same time, society grows it’s internal manifestation of state from the outside in. When combined with the fact that humans have a large number of neurons between their senses and their conscious experience – the part of them that is “on the ride” – there are some problems that can crop up here.
My mother had stated at one point that when I was younger she thought that I wanted to go to seminary school. I think what was actually going on there was she was seeing reflected light of her own beliefs through the upper layer because my ego had not yet grown the strength to manifest and clearly communicate my opinions about Christianity and my desires surrounding it.
Now, I’m going to segue for a second (I promise this is all related, at least in my mind) to say that I have nothing against people choosing to be transgendered. I have a number of friends who are, or who have experimented with it. I see nothing wrong with us choosing our gender identities and if it were up to me we would be able to quickly and easily change the configuration of our bodies to match, or even experiment with different alternatives. I would certainly be curious to experience being female. For them as argue that we are thwarting God’s will, I would respond that our bodies are gifts and when I give a gift I don’t give it with the expectation that the receiver will not modify it or re-gift it if it doesn’t work out for them. I might be sad that they choose to do so but I certainly would not feel that I should be in a position to force them to do otherwise or that it is a sin.
The reason I bring all this up, though, is I know of at least one case in which a child did not want to be transgendered but it appeared at least from the outside that they did. And I think it’s important to understand the reflected light phenomenon and be aware of the fact that – in cases like religion and gender identity – one can’t really tell with young children what they want because they will have a significant challenge in communicating that when the society-programmed layers nearer their senses will tend to conform to whatever the visible authority figures in their lives are pushing.
I think this is a big problem in the case of religion because religions are viral – most of them have survived by being informational virii after all – which is why people should not force their children to go to church or be confirmed in a specific religion. Removing this informational virus after it has been installed is basically impossible – NNNs have no delete – and it can only be disabled after considerable effort. I do not think I have yet removed all the deleterious effects of Christianity, for example.
In the case of people changing gender identity, all indications from my own personal exposure to the result are it can be even more traumatic. What I’m saying is, there’s time – children don’t really need to have a specific gender identity and I see no problem with them wearing the clothing and having the pronouns of either gender but one should definitely make absolutely and very sure that they are really onboard, for themselves, before using hormones or having surgery. (I think the latter is not a problem because I don’t think confirmation surgery is done until after puberty). When I was first told of one individual choosing to be a confirmed transgender who was very young my response was I wasn’t really sure how you could possibly know until after puberty, although I understand that on the other side of that is that it gets a lot harder post puberty and so puberty blockers are a time-sensitive thing.
I don’t know. In most cases I freely admit transgender issues are well beyond my pay grade and my opinions mean very little. But I do think that *in general* psychologists and psychiatrists should be aware of what is actually happening in the neural network and aware of the possibility of confirmation bias on the part of the caregivers for children, and the possibility that children are not able to communicate their true needs and desires because they are still very deep inside their minds and slowly learning how to reach the outside and when and how to push back against authority.
(As a side note, I do think our society is somewhat aware at least subconsciously of the problem here and it is why one should absolutely not participate in sex with children. We understand that they can’t give informed consent for sex and that they might not speak of their true needs because of the power imbalance issue. I think we just don’t always realize that this problem is prevalent all over the place)
Our children are not our property – to the extent they belong to anyone they belong to themselves and to the tribe as a whole. Forcing certain types of decisions is likely to have a bad effect on them and a bad effect on all of us in the sense that we are all connected.