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TomL

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  1. Not at all. This thread is indeed about physical attraction. I originally said and still maintain that physical attraction to a person should be primarily based on character traits, and if that if your subconscious does not work in that manner then it is ill-trained and unsuited for the task. When you look at your beloved, they should look better to you than when you first met them. Knowing their character should change your subconscious estimate of their appearance. Most women almost certainly know what I'm talking about because they work that way almost by default. In general, men have to work at it, and put up great resistance to it which I cannot understand. Now I'm sure many will reject the idea that the physical appearance of anyone can be an indicator of their character -- that outward appearance has nothing to do with the conscious mind of the individual. I can't disagree more on that point. If you identify some physical trait you do think contributes to beauty but you cannot connect it to some fact of reality, for example health-related or character-related, then you should eradicate that faulty premise from your subconsciousness. My favorite example of this is hair color. A particular hair color has no benefit to one's life in reality -- blondes are not more healthy than brunettes, or vice versa. Neither are they more honest or more productive. There is only in some men a psychological attachment to one particular hair color. This is the sort of thing that, if one finds oneself wanting, then the subconscious mind has subsumed something it shouldn't have, and its source must be rooted out and dealt with. On the other hand, relative body fat does say a great deal about one's character. Whether or not one has all of one's appendages and has no visible physical trauma or defects are certainly valid health concerns. I think it should be obvious to anyone understanding my reasoning that many, many women can be considered beautiful by these standards. Remember that the subconscious mind is under your control if you choose to take control of it, you can train it to subsume whatever premises you can rationally determine. You do not have to be its slave.
  2. I gave that answer. Acoustic waves have a period, like any sort of wave. The periods of harmonic sounds have a common multiplicative factor N: the peaks and valleys of the wave periods intersect every N periods. This is why they sound the way they do when they are played together. Without this very real intersection of wave periods, the sounds would not sound harmonious. It is thus not a purely psychological selection, and thus a tabula rasa being in touch with reality cannot be trained to find pleasure in noise or atonality. Only a deranged, physchologically distraught malfeasant could fool their subconscious into something like that (not that it hasn't been done, the current state of popular music is proof enough). Actually I have hinted at it, but really I don't need to. The fact is that the purpose of valuation is to add value to ones life, and that the subject of valuation in the case of human beings are existents which do possess character. Thus, any valuation which sets aside that character and attempts to determine the value of that person to one's own life is in error. It's very simple. If you attempt purposely to do so you are evading the fact that a person has a character. If you follow your subconscious valuations which do not include character, ditto. What remains is this: a properly and fully integrated individual will subsume into their subconscious valuations all relevant traits for selecting values that should add to the valuators life. This means one does not confuse a beautiful body with a beautiful person. End of story.
  3. You asked a question pertaining to a culture and I asked for relevant information. Don't context-switch that into a question of an individual nature. Each person decides for himself, while a question of cultural trend is just that, and nothing more. If there is second-handedness in a culture, that's not the fault of the idea but of the individuals in that culture. Do you decide what is attractive and what isn't based on everyone else in your culture? How first-handed is your sense of beauty?
  4. Not at all. Many women athletes are not healthy women. Is there a long-standing or recurring food shortage in this culture? A fat woman would have reserves during a famine and would be better able to survive than her skinny sisters. Even if you have no interest in children, as I do not, that doesn't change the fact that a woman is a woman, and has that capability. Wide hips are a trait of femininity, and femininity is what a man seeks in a partner.
  5. Yea. Here's where the harmony comes from: In music, a harmony is multiple notes in the same musical scale. Musical scales are actually quite mathematic -- there is a reason that certain notes, though different, sound pleasant together. It has to do with the way the peaks and valleys of the multiple frequencies align periodically. In valuation of female beauty, the harmony the female has is with her ability to live as a female. If she is healthy, she will most likely not get sick and place an undue burden upon the man. She will be able to contribute her share of work to the partnership's benefit. She will be strong and able to carry pregnancy with less complication and with less loss of function during pregnancy. And so on. So in each case, real beauty is harmony with actual facts of reality that have real positive value, not with "innate ideas", "genetic subconscious content", "beauty in itself", or anything else. The biggest errors made are by second-handedness. "Lots of people think woman A is beautiful, so she must be beautiful". This is what goes on implicitly in the mind of a prepubescent male in our current culture, and it does make things very difficult for him later on.
  6. I think that is correct, which is why I have been mentioning the subconscious and "summation" (with respect to beauty as value-judgement) over and over again in this thread. A valuation of something as beautiful is an emotional response. The fact that the emotions themselves are based on facts of reality doesn't make the valuation any less emotional. If you judge something as being beautiful right before it strikes out to kill you -- you have some errors or omissions in your subconsciousness.
  7. Let me add this rather large hint to those readers trying to figure out what facts of reality give rise to the valuation of a particular woman's body as being beautiful or not. A lot of it has to do with overall health. A healthy woman is a beautiful woman, an unhealthy woman is not. A healthy woman makes a more valuable mate, both in terms of adding value to the partnership and in terms of child-bearing ability. Child-bearing ability is itself also a fact of reality that contributes to beauty -- for example, wide hips are better suited for birthing. That should get you started
  8. What purpose does the projection serve? For me, if I view some particular person and they have some physically beautiful feature, I can select it and identify the specific feature and connect that to the facts of reality which cause me to value it -- in other words, put it in its proper place. If I were to lust after them or judge them to be a beautiful person, or act differently towards them because of it even without (or despite!) knowing their character, I would be mindless to not introspect on that and root out the error so that the next time I would not make it. Actually, I don't think we're too far off from agreement, either. The point I want to make is that one's value-judgements have a purpose, and to act on them and shrug off errors as DPW suggested without corresponding introspection to identify the source of the error and reprogram the subconscious is to idle cognitively and not try to improve oneself. Make no mistake: to judge something as valuable and then find out later it is not valuable as previously judged means an error has been made. It is an even graver error to not do something about it.
  9. No. These other objects have no character as a human has character. They cannot be judged for something they do not have. And yes, they can still be judged as beautiful, because of the values they do possess and grant to a man's life. But beauty itself is not a value, it is a value-judgement. But why you would want to equivocate between non-humans and humans in the realm of value-judgement I cannot surmise. Your thinking is this area is where the term "objectifying women" comes from. Here, let me mail order you a gorgeous blow-up doll -- if realistic it should be just as "beautiful" as any real woman you know. Insufficient. To take music as an example, a "harmony" is when two instruments or signers complement each others notes with notes from the same scale, but not the same notes. There is no harmony without {a} the scale, and {b} the first instrument. Then and only there is there something to harmonize to. Non-character based objects add value to man's life, just as character based ones do. The problem I see is judging a character-based object as if its character were somehow a separate value from its physical body, when in fact you cannot have one without the other. Of course not. But if the object does possess a consciousness, then its consciousness should not be excluded from the subconscious integrations resulting in the end value-judgement. What I mean is this: a woman can have a beautiful face or a beautiful body, but that does not make her beautiful. It is unsubstantiated and arbitrary to say that a woman does possess character? It is unsubstatiated and arbitrary to say that a value-judgement is an integration of many facts of reality, and that the exclusion of any of those facts leads one's subconscious to incorrect conclusions? It is not wrong to view a woman who may have a beautiful body and declare the woman to be beautiful? If so, I gladly depart.
  10. Let me put this a different way. Finding something beautiful is a valuation of its worth to one's life. If that is true, then the beauty is not itself the value, but the method of valuation. If beauty itself were the value, then beauty could not be a valuation. Either beauty presupposes a valuation, or a valuation is made presupposing beauty. You can't have it both ways.
  11. Why would you evaluate a feature of a human being simply to valuate it for its "harmony" (to something nebulous and fuzzy, apparently) and for no other purpose? What value does this add to your life? How does it make you a happier man? To determine that something has beauty is to say that it has some value to your life. There is no other purpose for doing so. Unless you care to introspect on the nature of this "harmony" and name its subject, we won't go any farther.
  12. Right back at ya, minus that last erroneous sentence.
  13. If that is correct, then I appreciate the correction. Note, however, that Roark is still not included in the list. To be honest I had forgotten about Ragnar as he seemed to be a very minor, background character. Upon reflection I can imagine that Francisco did not make any errors in the novel, either.
  14. For what purpose? When evaluating another human being in any way, you are looking for the potential value to your own life. That is the purpose of valuation. There is no such thing as valuation for valuation's sake. What added value to one's life is gained by looking at another human being -- an existent one can only gain value from in some sort of social or political context -- a relationship of some kind -- and identifying physical characteristics apart from the character with which one would interact in a relationship? How will this process improve the happiness in your life? Nada.
  15. It sounds like a man who has done exactly what I said -- implicitly. The fact is, he did think of her and he was astonished. Ayn Rand did not choose the word "seemed" lightly here. Certainly it was of great importance that he would be thinking of her now, or she wouldn't have written about it. Even if I'm wrong about this, its not as if The Fountainhead is a manual describing the ideal relationship. They go years being in love without being together, Dominique marries someone else... the ways in which their lives develop is far from ideal, but this too served a purpose in the book. And on top of it all, Roark is hardly morally perfect. John Galt is the only morally perfect character Ayn Rand created -- everyone else made some moral error or other.
  16. That is exactly what I'm talking about, and more -- so I don't think we are as far apart on this topic as you seem to think. If your value-judgements turned out to be wrong, i.e. you found her strikingly beautiful and then found out she was a moronic buffoon, then do something about your erroneous value-judgements. You should be aiming to train your subconscious to identify by an emotional response -- the emotional response that a woman is "strikingly beautiful", for example -- the people who do posses the qualities of character you wish to seek out in others. You should want to involve your whole being in that process, not merely follow your existing subconscious summations, whatever they are, simply because you are either too lazy or too incapable of doing that level of introspection -- and then shrug off the frustration when they lead you astray, taking no corrective action, and doomed to repeat the misidentification and waste of time with the same poorly trained subconscious. They are more than merely "intertwined", they are one and the same thing. All judgements of "pure physical attractiveness" are in fact value-judgements, whether you like it or not. It is not a baseless claim; it stems from the idea of tabula rasa. I, as well as most rational men I would imagine, have no "preferences" of a purely physical nature that cannot be connected directly to some fact of reality which holds important meaning for me. This would have unnecessarily limited my available selection of mates, for one thing. Long straight black hair is beautiful, and wavy blonde hair is beautiful as well, so long as both are worn in a feminine way. I have no preference for one over the other. There are specific physical attributes for which I do hold what you would probably call a "purely physical" preference, but I know that they are not purely physical. Unfortunately for this discussion, the concretes in this area are too personal for me to share, so I won't be doing that.
  17. I do. Harmonious with what ? Not at all. I am saying that they are value-judgements. Preferences are a particular type of value-judgement -- the type that has no moral consequence in a particular context. No value-judgement is a preference in all possible contexts. A preference for female blonde hair over black may be a preference in the context of your employment, or your friendship with your buddies, but in your own romantic life it most certainly is not a preference. It does, by definition, have a moral consequence if it influences the decisions and actions you take in living your life. And if it has a moral consequence, then it is no "preference" in that context.
  18. You don't really know that, do you? Just because Rand didn't write down explicitly that Roark did it doesn't mean that Roark didn't do it. It can be inferred from the rest of his character that you do know. No, that is not quite what I said. What I said was that the projection is not a valid cause for action if the value-judgements used in making the projection have not been validated. If they have, then project away. Of course, you'll have the ensure after the fact that the projection was not based on any unvalidated value-judgements, which again requires a process of introspection. So in that sense I am saying that there will never come a time in a person's life when it is OK to act on their feelings, relying totally upon them, without any thought or validation. Actually, it make Roark a very mindful and well-integrated character, if you know what to look for. It is not necessary to sit down and have an explicit talk about values and principles in order to properly judge an individual's sense of life.
  19. What I expressed was doubt, and even used the word explicitly. I claim no certainty on that topic at this point. Yes, I have. You just didn't catch it. If you are doing that, then you are using some value-judgements even if you don't know what they are or their nature. Clearly those value-judgements have little or nothing to do with character, do they? I don't deny it is possible, or even that it can be done properly. It can. But to do so without validating those value-judgements being used against reality is a form of whim-worship. I am unaware of Ayn Rand's comments regarding her own appearance, and cannot comment. I would ask, why are we not talking about a normative case? And even in the emergent situation; how did he get into that accident? Obviously the accident doesn't alter his moral character, but it may alter my judgement of his moral character. If he's the sort of guy to get into disfiguring accidents through his own negligence, then "negligent" was his trait before the accident.
  20. The question actually is when is projection acceptable? If you project value-judgements and you can't explicitly tie those judgements to valid premises, then you have a problem. In other words, if you like long, blonde hair (or short, black hair, or whatever else) but you can't explain why and connect that value-judgement to reality, then to be rational you cannot act on it. You should instead introspect on it and tie it to reality before proceeding. If on the other hand, you can, then and only then is at acceptable for you to act on that automatic, subconscious summation. I realize that I am suggesting introspection on things which people generally hold as being somehow intrinsic or something they were born with -- that is the whole point. Tabula rasa means just that, and that means that every value-judgement you make can and should be explitized and validated against the rest of your knowledge.
  21. I would be surprised indeed if she said that. I would believe that she was ttracted to him because of her immense amount of integration, not in spite of it. I doubt whatever statement she made on the subject has been interpreted correctly by you. Roark's actions are also because of his integration, not in spite of it, Felipe. You missed something.
  22. I didn't say that it never happened. Certainly it has happened, but I have been (and am still) retraining my subconscious towards the ideal -- a fully integrated sense of character and beauty.
  23. I can't disagree more. This is explicitly a manifestation of mind/body dichotomy, giving primacy to the body. In a properly integrated subconscious, there should be no estimate of "physical beauty" prior to the discovery of the person's character.
  24. If you find physical beauty where you do not find beauty of character, then you have a poorly integrated subconscious summation of the components of physical beauty. This is extremely common because in the course of one's life, this particular subconscious integration is made before explicit philosophic premise selection, and because our current culture bombards the pubescent with misinformation on the subject which one can't help but add in to one's subconsciousness. If you think that physical appearance has nothing to do with one's philosophic premises, then you are sadly mistaken. Obesity and slovenliness are far greater evils than many that people get all fired up about.
  25. Hogwash. The senses (in this case the ears) process the thing called sound. The experience of doing so is called hearing. Case closed. Who cares? The creature or color blind person would still acknowledge the causal factor as soundwaves or light waves, and in any communication with such creature they would be equivalent, because the sound waves/light waves in reality would be the same. There is no need to cook up some fantastic concept just to say that color blind people don't see all light waves.
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