#drivel

This also applies to terms like "mythology" or "religion". I study myths for a living and. It impresses me how much people use words like "this is just a myth", to disqualify an opponent's argument, as if it belonged to an inferior mode of thinking, when they themselves use the same thing, use hypothesis that are beyond assessment or criticism, self-evident truths beyond repproach, you know, like a myth.

The point they're making here seems to be:

You think your worldview is based on truth.

Other worldviews seem like myths to you.

Your own beliefs are myths too.

This kind of relativism is built on a foundation of muddy semantics and half-digested postmodernism. It claims that everyone lives by unexamined assumptions and therefore nobody can claim the truth about anything.

This isn't just false, it's a profoundly terrible argument on multiple levels.

As I am fond of repeating:

Words Mean Things. Specific Things.

Myth can refer to:

A symbolic story (e.g., creation myths)

A false belief (e.g., the myth of multitasking)

An unexamined cultural assumption (Barthes)

These are not the same. Treating them as interchangeable is at best clueless, at worst dishonest.

The fact that randomnumbers751650 conflates these makes me doubt their claim to "study myths for a living."

They've also clearly never studied the philosophy or history of science, or they'd know that Scientific hypotheses ≠ myths

A scientific hypothesis is:

Falsifiable

Testable

Provisional and subject to revision from the moment it is proposed

Calling a hypothesis a myth requires ignorance of how both words are defined.

Propaganda ≠ myth ≠ science ≠ religion

Propaganda is deliberate mass persuasion.

Religion (in most cases) is faith-based belief or communal practice.

Science is a falsifiable method.

Myth is symbolic or cultural narrative.

These have different goals, standards, and truth claims. Treating them as the same turns any meaningful discussion into nonsensical gibberish.

What's happening in this argument's rhetoric?

It switches definitions of "myth" mid-sentence

It falsely flattens all truth claims into the same category

It avoids asking whether a belief is true

This perspective, if embraced, removes the tools needed to evaluate any belief at all.

Words mean things. Specific things.

Other important terms people should know.

Post-truth Relativism

Epistemology

The MTMTE/LL universe probably has my favourite canon take on Cybertronian anatomy, but the one thing that kind of bugs me is the existence of “nervecircuits.”

It seems to exist to make the characters feel the bodily pain they go through, but for transformers/robot characters in general, I don’t think it makes much sense for their species to have this, or is necessary.

Don’t get me wrong, the body horror in the series is phenomenal. But I think it all still works fine without the implication that Cybertronians have robo-nerves? Like the decapitated Ratchet scene was so effective because he woke up and couldn’t feel anything wrong with his body and the horror hits like a truck when it’s revealed what Pharma did to him.

(From MTMTE issue #18)

(From MTMTE issue #19)

Like I said before, I don’t really understand this when I think about it. The implications I read from these panels are:

1. They have “nervecircuitry” - this likely is circuitry that lines the bodies of Cybertronians that allow them to feel pain and other sensations

2. They have the ability to re-route nervecircuits somewhere else in their frame

3. From the decapitated Ratchet scene, there is some way to block all nervecircuitry. Or perhaps they cannot “feel” anything when they are offline/in stasis?

Why wouldn’t they constantly have their nervecircuits turned off when they’re war machines and constantly being torn apart and wrecked? And okay, I’ll turn to human anatomy for the answer: pain allows us to understand that something is wrong with our body and lets us know where and how to fix it. So it’s probably the same with Cybertronians. Maybe they turn their nervecircuits off for battle (though if I remember correctly, there are cases where characters are expressing pain during battle, and also why would Ambulon even have his on in this scene?) and then after battle when they are being treated by the medic, they are turned back on to diagnose what is wrong.

But… there are in-universe ways to diagnose what is wrong that work much better in my opinion? They are super robots. I’m sure they are advanced enough to get an error message flashed on their optics when a piston breaks or whatever (I think we’ve seen that in canon as well… I cannot think of an example rn though). And we constantly see bots hooked up to medical gizmos in medbays or scanned with doohickies by medics… we have also seen bots blown up and offline that medics are able to fix back up without them expressing their pain. If they had physical lines/circuitry throughout their frames dedicated to feeling, they would constantly be shredded to bits and impractical.

I do like the canon choice of Cybertronian’s sparks being able to feel touch. This to me makes more sense than them having pain receptors, and also scratches the itch of still allowing them to be physically intimate with each other that we all crave (I love the concept of spark-merging as a form of sex/intimateness/tender vulnerability).

(From MTMTE issue #19)

A lot of fics I’ve read use the idea that Cybertronians can feel touch, and I situate that within what I call “sticky universe anatomy.” The sticky universe encompasses any Transformers fan work that subscribes to elements from sticky sexual interfacing headcanons. Fanfics may not include any sexual content, but they might use anatomy headcanons that come from wanting Transformers to have sex. There isn’t anything wrong with that (I for one like to partake in this literature from time to time) but it relies on giving them human attributes and human bodily functions which for me personally, provides a disconnect that these are alien robots, and I lie awake at night overthinking Cybertronian anatomy (Ok but seriously, someone explain to me the conundrum of Cybertronian mouth anatomy). I have read a few fics that justify sticky sexual anatomy in great detail, but none that have justified the idea of nervecircuits.

I think physical contact is inherently something a lot of people crave in their romance and so it is inserted into their fics, which is sweet. But I also love to read unique headcanons or anatomy quirks people come up with that explore the innate mechanical-ness of Cybertronians.