Does consciousness have a gender?

Consciousness is not a bloodless abstraction

What is it like to be a bat? And is there a difference between the consciousness of male and female bats? Thomas Nagel didn’t ask that second question. All of us only have our own experience of the world. So, comparing consciousness across any lines is difficult, though, not impossible, writes Sophie-Grace Chappell.

 

“What is it like,” a man might ask, “to be a woman?”

“Well, what is it like,” a woman might retort, “to be a man?”

What-is-it-like questions are always intriguing. And, some might add, impossible to answer. If a woman could say what it is like to be a man (or vice versa), that would mean that she could occupy his very viewpoint on the world. It would mean that his consciousness, his subjective viewpoint, could turn into her consciousness.

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Daniel Silva 30 July 2023

Are you saying experience and counsiouness are the same thing? Consiousness is the fact that we have awareness, not how we are aware.
"The answer is that this objection attributes a false—and ideologically-driven—unworldly purity to consciousness." Coudn't it also be that you are attributing a false—and ideologically-driven— political genderness to consciousness?
Why would knowing, seeing and feeling that you are of a gender make your consiousness gendered?

As far as I'm concerned, there isn't any difference between men and women if not for the body.

myth rh 12 February 2022

Are you conflating identity and consciousness? If yes, then it's a problem. At least as per eastern philosophy, consciousness is THE transcendental origin (Derridian arguments won't apply) of everything and everybeing.

Roger Cain 25 January 2022

I stopped reading when she described gender differences only in terms of what she calls "politics". I think it is obvious that there are given, natural differences between masculine and feminine ways that are not reducible to politics. These differences are essential to the question of the two genders, or the two sexes, "knowing" each other.