Pansexuality and its two meanings

Someone who is pansexual is sexually attracted to people of all genders.  It's sort of like bisexual, although perhaps not exactly like it.  The particular differences between pansexuality and bisexuality are in dispute, because people don't always use the words in consistent ways.

Central to the dispute is that there are at least two different motivations for using "pansexual".  The first motivation is a political one: "pansexual" is thought to be better or more inclusive than "bisexual".  The second motivation is to actually make a distinction between bisexual and pansexual patterns of attraction.

These two motivations are in conflict.  On the one hand, you have people who use bisexual and pansexual to refer to different patterns of attraction.  On the other hand, you have people (not necessarily the same people) who say that "bisexual" is problematic.  If we take both ideas seriously, the takeaway message is that some people are naturally bisexual, and their very existence is problematic.  That's not what anybody is trying to say, but we managed to say it anyway with the power of teamwork.

To determine the best resolution, we need to take a deeper look into the two meanings of pansexual.

The political problem with "bisexual" is that "bi" suggests two.  Two what?  Genders?  The trouble is that there are lots of people (henceforth "non-binary people") who do not fall into the boxes of "men" and "women".  People can be between men and women, or be both, or neither.  "Bisexual" was obviously created in a time when people just didn't think about that stuff.  "Pansexual" is a better word because it doesn't have the assumption of two genders.

But there are counterarguments.  One is that "bi" can refer to "same gender" and "different genders" rather than "men" and "women".  This removes the assumption of two genders, even if it was there earlier in the word's history.  People have also argued that there is a major cost to insisting that a group, whose major obstacle is invisibility, relinquish their most visible word (eg see Julia Serano, and also I've made some general arguments about the costs of language reform).

Some people have taken "pansexual" in a different direction, saying that it describes different patterns of attraction from "bisexual".  For example, consider this illustrated definition:

That's something I made in 2013, although I'm not sure how much I stand by it.  In general, when people make definitional distinctions between bisexual and pansexual, they pick and choose from the following ideas:

• Bisexual people are not attracted to non-binary genders
• Pansexual people are necessarily attracted to non-binary genders
• Pansexual people are attracted to all genders equally (ie to the same degree)
• Pansexual people are attracted to all genders in the same ways
• Pansexual people don't "see" gender in their attraction
• Pansexuality may be mutually exclusive with bisexuality, a subset, or an overlapping group

I outright reject the first bullet point as prejudicial, since I've never heard any bisexual people supporting the idea that they aren't attracted to non-binary people.

I also think that most people just don't know whether they're attracted to non-binary people, except by extrapolation.  If I say I'm attracted to women, that might mean that out of every ten women, I find one of them attractive.  So let's suppose that I'm very unusual: not only is my best friend non-binary, all five of my best friends are non-binary.  And I'm not attracted to any of them.  How can I know whether I'm attracted to non-binary people or not?  (And it gets even messier when we realize that there are multiple non-binary genders.)

Therefore, I'm not sure how useful these definitional distinctions really are.  What good does it do us to separate out people based on their attraction to non-binary people?  I think in practice, most people don't really know, and are choosing their label based on politics.  And what good does it do to have a separate label for people who are attracted to all genders equally?  Are there any unique issues associated with this equal-attraction experience, as opposed to the general bisexual experience?

I have mixed feelings about pansexuality.  I really hate to minimize the way that non-binary people are erased by our basic language, but I also hate the way that proponents of "pansexual" minimize the difficulties associated with getting rid of "bisexual".  It's tempting to depoliticize the word and say that pansexual and bisexual simply refer to different groups.  But I'm not sure there's much use in distinguishing between pansexual and bisexual patterns of attraction.

Note that "pansexual" is not alone in having two conflicting definitions.  A much more infamous example is "queer".   People use "queer" for the radical political connotations, but they also use it as a way of including a larger group without having to specify every letter in the alphabet soup.  This is a cause of much conflict, although you'll notice that it hasn't stopped me from using "queer" on a regular basis.

Sleeping Beauty and other kinds of multiverses

After I wrote that post about Quantum Sleeping Beauty, Sean Carroll wrote about it too.  At the risk of too much Sleeping Beauty, I also want to discuss the implications not just on Everettian Quantum Mechanics (EQM), but on other multiverse scenarios.

Yes, there are multiple multiverse scenarios.  For our purposes, we can use Max Tegmark's four-fold classification of multiverses:

Level I: There are different worlds separated by extremely large distances.  For example, if you believe that the universe is uniform and infinite, then obviously the observable universe, which is limited by the speed of light, is much smaller than the universe as a whole.  Thus there will be many copies of the observable universe with arbitrary configurations of stuff in them.

Level II: In some theories of cosmology, physical constants are also ultimately made of stuff, albeit the kind of stuff that gets decided very early on in a universe, and which is very stable thereafter.  But some inflationary cosmology scenarios predict many pocket universes forming, each with possibly different physical constants.

Level III: This is the multiverse described by EQM.

Level IV: The particular laws which govern our universe are arbitrary, and the equations could have had many other arrangements.  A level IV multiverse theory says that universes described by different math are not merely possible, but real.

[blockquote for organization, not because I'm quoting Tegmark]

As I explained in 2012, multiverses are not scientific theories by themselves, since they can't really be experimentally verified.  Rather, they are predictions of larger scientific theories.  The level I multiverse is predicted by most theories of uniform cosmology.  Level II is predicted by inflationary cosmology.  Level III is predicted by quantum mechanics, depending on your interpretation.  Level IV... well I think that's just speculation.

Multiverse scenarios live or die based on the larger theory that predicts them.  Nonetheless, some people, even physicists, have suggested that multiverses themselves can be confirmed or disconfirmed.  For instance, physicists argue that one of the reasons to prefer inflationary cosmology to other theories is because it predicts a Level II multiverse.  A Level II multiverse would explain why physical constants seem to be fine-tuned for the existence of life.  Thus, the very fact that we exist is evidence for a Level II multiverse, and thus a confirmation of inflationary cosmology.

What does this all have to do with Sleeping Beauty?

Imagine that God is a philosopher.  God flips a coin, and if it's heads, then he creates a multiverse, where there are many copies of Sleeping Beauty.  If it's tails, he creates a universe where there are very few copies of Sleeping Beauty (or maybe none at all).  Sleeping Beauty knows all this, and has just woken up.  What probability should Sleeping Beauty assign to waking up in the multiverse?

If you take the thirder position on Sleeping Beauty, then Sleeping Beauty should conclude that she most likely woke up in a multiverse.*  Possibly vastly more likely.  Possibly infinitely more likely.  In fact, you might ask why we even bother considering any non-multiverse theories.  Seen this way, the unimaginable largeness of the multiverse is itself evidence for the multiverse.

*Here I'm talking about Level I, II, or IV multiverse.  The case of the level III multiverse is analogous to the Quantum Sleeping Beauty problem discussed in the previous post.  That post argued that you can consistently take a thirder position in the classical Sleeping Beauty problem, and a halfer position in the Quantum Sleeping Beauty problem.

But that doesn't seem right.  My physicist intuition goes against it.  Even if the multiverse explains fine-tuned constants, this is at best very weak evidence for the multiverse.  Even physicists who make that argument don't take it to the inevitable conclusion that we are infinitely more likely to live in a multiverse.

Nonetheless, the philosophical consensus is that the thirder position is correct.  Mind you, philosophy consensuses are rarely very strong, and maybe it's just wrong in this case. But still, the thirder arguments are pretty solid, and this is a conflict that needs to be resolved.

To summarize, we have three options:

1. Physicists are wrong, and multiverse theories are infinitely preferred over their alternatives.
2. Philosophers are wrong, and the thirder view is incorrect.
3. There is a problem with the analogy between the two cases.

Some light can be shed by adopting the phenomenalist view of the Sleeping Beauty problem, which is a sort of middle ground between the halfers and thirders that everyone can agree with.  The phenomenalist observes that the problem becomes trivial when we attach consequences to the probabilities.

Say that Sleeping Beauty (in the original problem) gets a reward every time she guesses the coin flip correctly.  Therefore, she should make bets as if she were a thirder, because if the coin is heads, she'll get double the usual payoff.  On the other hand, say that Sleeping Beauty only gets a single reward after the experiment if she guessed correctly.  In this case, she should make bets as if she were a halfer.

Now take the Sleeping Beauty multiverse problem.  If each copy of Sleeping Beauty gets a reward for guessing correctly, then it seems better to guess that she's in a multiverse.  That way, many copies of Sleeping Beauty get rewards.  On the other hand, what exactly do we care about?  Do we care about the average* reward given to Sleeping Beauty copies?  Or do we care about the sum total of the rewards to all copies?  If the former, then Sleeping Beauty should make bets as a halfer.  If the latter, then Sleeping Beauty should make bets as a thirder.

*Tangentially, there's another complication when we talk about the average Sleeping Beauty in a multiverse with infinitely many copies of her.  How do we average over infinite copies?  We can't even average over finite volumes of space, because volume isn't even constant in inflationary cosmology.  This is known as the measure problem.

But this doesn't seem to be a very satisfying solution.  "Is there a multiverse or not?"  is not satisfyingly answered by "It depends, do you think average utility or total utility is more important?"  Philosophers need to get on this and figure out what's going on.