Do you mind ?

I mostly disagree with this. There are large parts which could simply be written as, "people's circumstances influence which ideas they're receptive to". I don't think transhumanism or Cartesian dualism (I read the Meditations recently, but I have to read it again before blogging it) are inherently anti-feminist, but, at the same time, the fact that certain demographics are treated differently does give them a different perspective. Dualism could (and almost certainly would) have arisen in a different way, but that doesn't mean the process bt which it did isn't worth examining.

Likewise, there are some articles which discuss how ideas arise that I find intensely annoying. This isn't because the origin of ideas isn't very interesting in itself, because it usually is (e.g. the purely philosophical reasons the ancient Greeks postulated the existence of atoms, which had little to do with observations). What I find annoying is when an article implies that because the origin process can be understood, this somehow invalidates the idea. It doesn't. Descartes may have had one very good set of reasons for dualism and the Princess Elizabeth another, equally good set, for rejecting it, but that doesn't mean their roles couldn't have been reversed. Nevertheless, I found this bit interesting :

It’s not that Elisabeth simply rejected Descartes’s views without critical reflection, or fell back to simply asserting her subjective opinion. It’s that her particular life experience inclined her to develop different intuitions to him, and gave her good reasons to doubt the plausibility of dualism. As the philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford has argued, the contingencies of what happens to us in life – the people who have shaped us, the challenges we have overcome – invariably shape the sorts of claims that we’ll find persuasive or the arguments we’re inclined to doubt. 

Here, it seems to me that Elisabeth’s experience as a woman meant that she did not have the luxury of entertaining anxieties about the stark separation of mind and matter. One might think that her concerns – as for many women, in fact, and other oppressed peoples throughout history – were not really about how to bridge a gaping chasm between some enclosed inner world and a remote outer one. Rather, Elisabeth’s worry might well have been about how to preserve an inner sense of self against the relentless pressing-in of the world’s demands; about how to assert an entitlement to be a full person with distinct projects; and about how to carve out space to flourish in a society that relies on exploiting you.

While I object to the idea that transhumanism and dualism are just the fantasies of misogynist playboy billionaires, I do think there's a good point here. Because of the way women were treated, their outlook would have been necessarily different (reading the Meditations, I look into myself and find my own awareness to be a singular, utterly unalterable thing : that this is not necessarily so is fascinating). But it could equally have happened the other way around, e.g. with men being seen as overly-emotional and irrational and thus with women trying to aspire to free themselves of such burdens. Of course, we should be extremely wary about drawing too many conclusions from a single example, especially a princess.

The second point I found interesting was the origin of the suppression of women :

Thus when de Beauvoir makes the oft-quoted point that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’, she is not just saying that women’s minds and selves are socially constructed. More trenchantly, she is arguing that women become women precisely so that men can become Human. While the Human has access to Cartesian qualities of reason, truth and clarity, the Other is linked to irrationality, emotion and vagueness; where the Human has civilisation and culture, the Other is aligned with nature and matter; and where the Human has a honed and powerful mind, the Other is at the mercy of the body.

Which makes sense - it feels good to have enemies. I will fiercely defend feminism on the grounds that there is unjustly unequal gender-based treatment of women (and men) in society, and thus, while it's true that all minds matter (to borrow from the article's title and annoying internet-based movements), the present focus is on the unfair treatment of women. Different perspectives on philosophy are valuable, but again, that doesn't mean the underlying ideas are invalid.

The final point I'll comment on is the view of the computational theory of the mind. I don't think this is at all incompatible with feminism, nor does this so-called "embodied cognition" present any difficulties :

New frontiers are opening up that view the body as something more than just a brain-carrying robot. In doing so, they have created the potential for alliances with feminist thinkers influenced by the likes of Fausto-Sterling. Within a broad church that can be called – not uncontentiously – embodied cognition, a growing number of psychologists, scientists and theorists are approaching mental life as something that is not just contingent on, but constituted by, the state of our bodies. In the place of a Cartesian computer, the mind becomes more like a clay pot thrown on a wheel.

Yeah, but I don't see any problem with this except in an overly-strict Descartesian sense. True, if you take mind-body duality very literally indeed, then yes, there are big problems. Clearly the body does influence the mind, if only because the mind relies on external senses - even though the actual perception may be an internal analysis of electrochemcial flows, that process is still triggered by external events. It isn't just the mind making stuff up, that would be preposterous. It's the same as the supposed problems with identity.

The way I see it, the mind is more like an object in an object-oriented programming language : it has its own identity which is independent of, but strongly influenced by, its current properties. The mind processes what it receives externally, just as any computational system does. It doesn't have its own mystical direct perception of the external world - it necessarily receives information via senses. Perception is an internal model that provides a way for us to interpret the external impulses, but that absolutely does not mean the external impulses aren't real, for heaven's sake. It just means the model is to a degree inaccurate and incomplete, not that it's entirely wrong or meaningless.

All this talk of expectations and affordances leads to a potentially troublesome consequence: cognition can no longer be cleaved apart neatly from politics. If I am black, my prediction of what a police officer might afford me is likely to be very different to that of my white friend, as well as eliciting very different felt responses and perceptions. Undoing such expectations (which it might well be reasonable for me to hold) is not just a matter of changing my beliefs, but of modifying longstanding embodied reactions. Similarly, as a woman, I might not expect a dark and deserted street to afford me walking down it at night, while my male partner might feel entirely at ease in that space. The fact that I feel myself to be vulnerable, in a very visceral way, means that I will avoid putting myself in that position, and so my predictions will be tacitly reinforced.

Yes, because your experiences are different to everyone else's. This is hardly much of a revelation. It's an important statement, which implies that direct experience is a more powerful teacher than classroom lectures, but again, not exactly a novel one. Nor do I see any incompatibility with the idea that the brain processes information in a manner analogous to a computer. The only way I can see a conflict there is if the mind is really, absolutely independent of the body, which is ludicrous - I'm not sure even Descartes went that far.

Feminists never bought the idea of a mind set free from its body - Sally Davies | Aeon Essays

We are shackled to the pangs and shocks of life, wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), 'as bodies to wild horses'. Or are we? Serge Faguet, a Russian-born tech entrepreneur and self-declared 'extreme biohacker', believes otherwise.