Starblade

Actually, the word stands for "Fornification Under the Consent of the King". At least as far as I know. The reason why we don't use sex to refer only to sexual intercourse is because we already have a word for sexual intercourse, whereas we DON'T have a word for non-intercourse forms of sexual behaviour other than sodomy. What are we supposed to say when we brag to our friends that we've had non intercourse sex? That we engaged in sodomy? That may be simply being accurate, according to you, but I'm afraid the term sodomy implies that the form of sexual relations was 'unnatural'. While sexual intercourse, which does in fact specifically mean penile-vaginal sex, may be preferable, what's so wrong with oral sex that it deserves to be considered unnatural, or otherwise does not deserve to be called sex?

To whom are you responding? You can't define sex by how it's used popularly. That is ultimately the subjectivist's response. Likewise, you can't define sex by some arbitrary 'outside' standard, since that is an intrincisist's response. The Objectivist definition of sex is something like Piekoff's answer. I can't seem to find that at the moment, however. Does anyone else know where it is?

The whole point of allowing moral existants of homosexuality isn't to exempt it from moral evaluation. It's to make it moral in certain contexts. I don't see what's so hard to understand about that. It all depends upon what the fundamentals of sex are, and that's more hotly contested than the fundamentals of art. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means, expect to get a LOT of different answers from different people, even ones who think very much alike, and even agree to the same basic premises of metaphysics. If sex is "an activity whereupon all the participating animals are either stimulating the sexual organs of others of having their sexual organs stimulated by others" in its BROADEST sense, then where must we start to show which kinds of sex is moral? Obviously it's not in the nature of any animal to engage in sex with those outside their species, and less obviously it does not naturally occur with more than two animals. Meaning for humans, it is naturally between two individual people. It also stands to reason that it's a celebration of values for those who are capable of doing so. I won't go into the details here. Anything else is controversial, though I'd expect that not to get in the way of the actual truth of the matter, and it hardly affects our ability to reason the truth out, it does change how able we are to argue the case with others. Anyway, just one other thing. You can't read into the details of the motives of other people without some kind of thorough knowledge. All you can do is determine whether or not those motives are rational. One more thing: Post 1000. Woohoo!

That's not exactly a good interpretation of quantum mechanics. Also, you seem to be thinking of causality in terms of cause and effect. A view that things act according to their nature, and that the nature of things are statistical at some level, is a lot more coherent. So the nature of quantum systems is that space/time and particle/waves are causal agents that follow the law of statistics in large numbers, though they seem quite random in small numbers. A quantum fluctuation would have an extremely little influence on the world, and several quantum fluctuations act according to their statistical nature, so the influence of a whole system of quantum fluctuations would have very little variation. So we are not at the whim of quantum fluctuations. The only systems that ARE at the whim of quantum fluctuations are chaotic systems, because of their nature of having large influences derive from very small ones.

I am kind of new here. And I was wondering, is it not possible for a woman to look up to a man in some contexts, and for a man to look up to a woman in others? Are men naturally better able to support their own flourishing better than women, or do women possess some unique traits that men do not in the same way that men possess some unique traits that women do not? Two things have been pointed out here. First, a man is physically stronger than a woman. Second, a woman's hemispheres are more connected than a man's. I could go on about physical characteristics a woman has that a man does not, and about mental characteristics a man has that a woman does not, both of which aid not only in the survival but the flourishing of people, but these examples should suffice. Should not a woman look up to a man for his strength in contexts where his strength is more virtuous and a man look up to a woman for her connectedness in contexts where her connectedness is more virtuous? This would not imply a contradiction because of the separation via context. Likewise, when neither strength nor connectedness is more virtuous than one another, a man and a woman can look to each other with a feeling of mutual respect. Also, as for the biological argument for homosexuality, how do we know that homosexuality and these biological factors don't share a common cause? It seems to me that there is a relation between reversed role heterosexuality and homosexuality in general. So I will ask this question. Is it possible for a woman's femininity to be so potent that a male loved her to the point of worship, in the same way that it's possible for a man's masculinity to be so potent that a female loved him to the point of worship? I believe that ultimately this is all psychological, and since psychology involves integration between philosophy and science, we cannot answer this question on philosophical premises alone, nor on scientific premises alone for that matter. I for one have a theory on how sexuality develops. Once one has the ability to develop emotional affection for an ideal interaction between two beings capable of action, one has the framework for developing some form of sexuality. I discovered what I was most interested in when I was around four years old, though I wouldn't say at that time it was sexual. It merely established what it was for which I had affection. Once puberty hit, I became sexually aroused. For fear of being thought suicidal/homicidal, or downright nutty, I won't mention what, specifically, it is. It could be anything. Just imagine it being that as what you wish to imagine it. I also mention that about now I realize an argument for heterosexuality over homosexuality is that to obtain intimate knowledge through direct experience the opposite sex through another in the same way that one does with the same sex through oneself is clearly a value, if one is to appreciate the facts of male and female nature in the most effective way. By engaging in sex, one is sharing both body AND mind, and a male-female relationship in this regard is superior because of complementation. What this complementation is specifically relates to masculinity and femininity. Now the issue I have with polarism is that masculinity is a positive and femininity is a negative. Why should one not choose bipolarism, in which both masculinity and femininity are positives or negatives in their own proper context? Back to homosexuality... maybe we should look to it as an adaptation of person to them self. When the overall total effect of adaptation of the world to self is exceeded by the overall total effect of adaptation of the self to world, isn't it justified? Likewise, when a person is faced with an immutable fact of oneself and a mutable fact of oneself, isn't it more natural to accept the immutable fact and adjust the mutable fact than to attempt to do the opposite? It is like someone who is physically of mentally impaired, and must choose to live ones lifestyle differently from the norm. That is to say, heterosexuality is the rule, but homosexuality is an exception to the rule. Then there's asexuality and bisexuality. Maybe we need a more general rule for romantic interpersonal relationships that apply regardless of specific details, IE a concept of romantic interpersonal relationship that omits the specific measurements. It's a bad word, I know, Rand should've just chosen to say details, but measurement omission is that with which we are all familiar. From that we can infer what is implied about romantic interpersonal relationships, and give a process which allows us to put the 'measurements' back in. IE the details about ones own sexuality. That will give a general theory for an individualist approach. What do you think?

Saying that 'certain actions take place' presupposes the question. Why is it assumed that 'proper time' and 'reference frame time' must, <i>at all scales and in all contexts</i> coincide? By reference frame time, I mean the direction that 'proper times' flow GENERALLY with respect to other 'proper times'. By generally, I mean in the contexts we deal with daily. No current model of quantum physics that explains a sufficient amount of facts about this manifold - or as we can call it without evidence of other manifolds, universe - comes without the idea that at certain scales of spacetime, IE scales of spacetime at which the number h plays a large role, some particles/waves go against the flow. (Obviously they wouldn't all go against the flow, since that would define a different 'direction' of time, and obviously at larger scales you wouldn't have even a few particle/waves going against the flow, otherwise there WOULD be contradictions, since at that scale 'h' doesn't play much of a role at all.) Proper time can be assumed to go in one direction, because of causality, but why should reference frame time? It just happens to do so, but is that because of some metaphysical property, or because of the law of statistics? I'm arguing the latter, but some people argue the former, which means that, without any SCIENTIFIC evidence against a theory, we must reject it for PHILOSOPHICAL reasons. If science explains something, isn't that a good enough reason to accept something as not violating philosophical premises, since science derives from philosophy? (I do not believe there to be a dichotomy between science and philosophy, so that's why I brought this question, which was originally philosophical, to the realm of the scientific.)

Ah, okay. However, back to my original question... why did Ayn Rand tend to use the term metaphysical for something that was purely physical AND for something that was purely ontic? I can understand that certain things are metaphysical, but not sex. Sex depends on the PARTICULAR state of existence, that is, that biologically the dominant life forms reproduce sexually. Even sensations are tenative, since existence doesn't say that the universe exists in particulars, but consciousness implies that there exists something conscious, and something of which to be conscious. Still, the means by which this happens... isn't it entirely physical? That is, I'd put sex and sensation as epistemic, not metaphysical. So, my question remains: What's so metaphysical about sex?

Nevertheless, they are both conscious and they both posess volition. Concepts requires measurement omission, yet you are stuck on the details. If the details about the general differences between men and women are important, then why not the details about the specific differences between any given man and any given woman, or any given man and any other given man, or any given woman and any other given woman? What gives us justification to go THIS far and not THAT far in discriminating? BTW, this doesn't mean I reject Ayn Rand's sexuality. I just believe this to be a general case, not an all encompassing, individual ignoring ought.

That's not what I meant by metaphysically the same. Sorry, I wasn't thinking clearly. I meant that consciousness was a metaphysical concept but that male and female were epistemological ones. You can destinguish between male and female physically but not in terms of the way their consciousness works.

I have not read Leonard Piekoff's book about the philosophy of Ayn Rand, but I am wondering why sex is something metaphysical rather than just physical. Furthermore, isn't the idea that heterosexual sex is better than homosexual sex an epistemological idea, just as the laws of physics themselves are epistemological and not metaphysical? From http://attitudeadjustment.tripod.com/Books/OPAR.htm it seems that it could go either way according to the metaphysics of sex, so it leads me to believe that sex is in some way epistemological, in the sense that it's not just sex that is good, but some version of sex that is good. Otherwise, since men and women are metaphysically the same in that they both posess consciousness and volition, but epistemologically different in that one is the concept of a man and one is the concept of a woman, there would be no basis to metaphysically discriminate between the sexes, and thus, no basis to discriminate between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

I don't see Eric Dennis as having posted on that link. Also, I believe it's intellectually sloppy to hold onto intrinicist views of space and time. Same with subjectivist views of space and time. I will elaborate on what I mean later.

How is that heroic? I read your earlier post, and I can hardly call what he did heroic.

Define causality and identity first. Then we'll apply logical standards to see if these definitions contradict anything already known about our universe. Or you are wrong in that your interpretation of modern physics and Objectivism within eachother's contexts is wrong. If you can tell us why your premises and the conclusions that follow are correct, then you'll at least have a case. There have been many people here who have argued something different than what Objectivism says. This is allowed. What ISN'T allowed is illogical adherence to alternate philosophies. People must bare out the logic behind their judgements. The rules may say something that is different in its details, but from what I read, simply holding a view different from what Ayn Rand says is not against the rules. Can you read specifically where it says one must agree with Ayn Rand in all instances?

That is an abuse of logic. A thing can exist without having precice characterstics. Imagine that there is only one thing in the universe. We know this is not true, but just bear with me. How would this one thing have ANY characteristics other than existing if there were no other things in the universe? Did you even READ the lego block analogy? Even if it HAS a precice identity, does that necessarily mean that the characteristics we identify at large scales compose it in smaller portions at smaller scales? If you really believe that, you are engaging in the fallacy of division. That is false. You are engaging in the fallacy of composition. Though I bet you do know anyway. Why, exactly, you would engage in such a fallacy to defend a concept proven WRONG by experimentation is beyond me. BTW, I suggest you read this page. It might help. This goes for EVERYONE who believes in the 'common identity' line of reasoning given against modern physics.

I hate to break this to you, but philosophical principles just do not derive from a vacuum. They derive from our knowledge of reality. If that knowledge of reality is wrong then the philosophical principles are wrong. The concept of identity does not have to be changed in its general form, but that a thing has an identity does not imply that a thing HAS to also have the characteristics we normally associate with objects. See the lego brick analogy. That a thing has an identity does NOT imply that it has precicely measurable characteristics OR hidden variables. In fact, it doesn't even imply that we can form any level of precision. As for causality, we know as a fact that things have natures, but implicit in your discussion about causality is that it involves pure time, IE time as something through which we MUST travel and NOT go back. This we only know because of our experience, but we've experienced much different on particle scales than on cosmological scales. If causality requires pure time, then we need another word for causality, one that's not based on a fallacy. Well it's not THAT off my topic. It related to causality and identity.