What do you mean not actually solving it? How isn't the demonstration that the problem doesn't exist in the first place a solution to it? It resolves the entire conundrum that arises out of it. — Agustino

Assuming that your present teleological distinctions represent complete descriptions is the same inductive leap which you accuse Hume of fumbling... I don't get how you you actually demonstrate that there is no induction problem...

We should employ Aristotle's "four causes" model because this model enables us to do ontology and metaphysics - in other words it enables us to understand the structure of reality and the way things fit together with each other. The approach to knowledge of modern science is opportunistic - it aims to create models of the world which enable predictability and which can be translated into mathematical terms. This isn't a problem so long as all you do with it is calculate and predict - but it is a problem if you are trying to understand the nature of reality. The motivation of the activity you engage in will alter the decisions you take, which can lead you to become blind to certain other truths.

The scientific approach, for this reason, offers merely useful models, but there are problems with those models when you attempt to abstract an ontology from them without any other theoretical alterations. They don't much care for coherency except in-so-far as it is required for predictability. This is exactly the disagreement MU and I are having with apokrisis in another thread - the metaphysics science adopts is opportunistic and does not much care for coherency. — Agustino

The problem with ontology and metaphysics though is that they tend to prevent us from doing good science:

In constructing your categories and classifications, you imbue your prior assumptions about "the structure of reality and the way things fit together" into their framework and case-work .

People like to point out that today's science might be tomorrows pseudo-science due to new evidence... This is actually a good thing though; science creates categories and descriptions like "mass" and "electron" but it does not open with the assumption that these labels and categories necessarily represent objective, complete, and universal truth (such as in many ontological approaches). Science leaves room for it's initial assumptions and place-holder models to continuously improve, whereas the assumptions involved in the four cause model are either permanent or quite difficult to alter.

So I guess your induction jump, and is ought gap transfer (yay skateboarding!) goes a little something like this:

P1: There are objective categories and classifications that things belong to, and homo-sapien sapien is one of these categories.

P2: observing humans allows me to define elements of the objective homo-sapien sapien category

P3: humans who willfully deviate from the objectively human set of behaviors are bad/immoral humans

P4: promiscuity is not an objectively human behavior

C1: it can be stated with objective and normative certainty that willfully engaging in promiscuity is immoral

Premise one isn't so controversial, but as I've pointed out there are issues with assuming that the human category will be clean and straightforward like cups and watches. Premise two is where the induction problem rests, and I don't actually see how you demonstrate it doesn't exist by assuming it doesn't. Premise three I think is controversial mostly because it works from a limited (narrow) conception of the human category and the assumption that all humans must share every element from an objective list of properties. Deviation is a mechanism of progress and evolution which is not in and of itself harmful or immoral (if we're to include evolution in our understanding that is). Rather than a linear list of elements, the human category actually is more akin to a list whose elements are intentionally varied across individuals and depending on the environment we happen to exist for the specific purpose of ensuring the success and survival of our species.

If we really whittle down the definition of human to what is truly essential and universal, we're left with almost nothing useful. Is a mutated still-born fetus a human? Genetically, mostly or yes, but does it bear any other resemblance to what you would thrust as "essentially human"? What truly makes a human human? Are human vegetables human? If so why do we call them vegetables? Is to be human merely to be the thinking analyzing kind of creature that we pride ourselves in being? What does merely "is a thinking and feeling creature" tell us about what we morally ought to think or the astounding variance in what humans actually do think? What objective moral standards can you draw from these basic observations of what is universal?

It's more difficult to reason from a basic principle instead of a more specific one like "monogamy is essential to intimacy and fulfillment and promiscuity prevents monogamy", but the end results are moral positions which are more universally applicable and more universally universally persuasive.

The coherence of science doesn't come from starting premises which indicate objectively certain knowledge though. It' coherence comes from the fact that it continuously expands and improves it's existing theories, models, and predictive powers, such that overtime it begins to approximate objective truth. The approximately objective truths that science has been known to produce don't come with the guarantee of objective and absolute certainty, but they do come with the guarantee that they're more useful and robust than the "truths" that every other methodology or school of thought has produced (save perhaps mathematics). The body of science coheres over time, and as a whole it's already more useful, coherent and sophisticated than anything that has come before it.

Well, I think you've picked on the wrong cause from Aristotle's model. That cause, the efficient cause, is actually precisely the one science says we do need to understand a thing. Efficient causes are important to understand because they show the link between causes and effects. The efficient cause of a statue is the sculptor. In this case, knowledge of the efficient cause shows us how the state comes about, and that it is the effect of another cause. But this efficient cause doesn't necessarily have to be external to the formal cause of an object (or to its essence) - such as in the case of radioactive decay. — Agustino

We want to understand what things are, and generally we need to understand how they came about in order to do that, but in some cases it's irrelevant. In order to understand how given computer works, you need to understand it's design (it's form), but you don't need to know who designed it or the processes involved in actually designing it. You also don't need to know how it was physically fabricated in order to have useful mastery over it's actual workings (our predictive power). Science is concerned with the non-agent that is the physical world.

I'm curious though; do you just take the accepted and cutting edges of science transmute them into your overall teleology? That is to say, does science actually do all the real work of classification and discovery while you sit back and cherry pick it's descriptions to hit with the "objective telos" stamp?

Well, the causes are all related to each other. Without an efficient cause, you cannot understand how the material and formal causes are related together towards the production of the final cause. How would you make sense of them then? — Agustino

Well we could start by not assuming we know the full extent of "final cause" (which then forces us to bend interpretation to fit our expectations), and we could let the various fields of science slowly do the work for us of proposing models (models which don't necessarily conform to the 4 cause rubric) that have predictive power (and are thus falsifiable), where over time stronger and more detailed theories will be developed which can basically answer every question you might have about birds or bees.

Until deeper and more fundamental models are constructed (reductionism) science humbly asks you to settle for place-holder theories (future pseudo-sciences) that happen to have stronger predictive power in their subject than anything else we have available.

basically understanding one particular aspect of existence is always performed by placing it in connection with all other aspects of existence and seeing how it connects. Like a piece within a puzzle. You cannot understand the piece except by classifying it in its proper context. — Agustino

Understanding what something is made of, versus how it came into existence, versus how it actually functions can be almost entirely discreet from one-another. I'm not saying we should never ask one or more of these questions, I'm saying we shouldn't labor under the assumption that by connecting these arbitrary dots we come to ultimate and objective truth.

Also, the slight suggestion above that categories prevent differences and variations isn't the understanding Aristotle had. Obviously, a particular triangle isn't the same as triangularity. But a particular triangle is a particular instantiation of triangularity, even though it may have features that only approximate the nature of triangularity. So there's obviously differences between particular things and universals. — Agustino

When things exist on a spectrum (color, mass, distance, quantity, IQ, force, devotion, etc...) and we arbitrarily delineate categories (like red-blue-green, light-heavy, near-far, few-many, stupid-smart, weak-strong, purposeless-fulfilled), we can have a somewhat difficult time noticing when something actually falls in-between categories rather than cleanly into one or the other. It could just be because we need more delineation between points on the spectrum, but because unknown spurious factors might be giving rise to variation that we're not even noticing, we therefore never need to explain and alter our theories. So my point here is that you have essentially created the two categories natural, and unnatural, and because of your hard and fast assumptions about what lands you in either category you have wound up failing to understand more than half the population who in so many ways exhibit behavior that doesn't meet the standards of your definition of what humans objectively ought to do.

this isn't at all true. I don't know why you conceive of Aristotle as some idiot savage that couldn't tell his right hand from his left hand and couldn't see that there exists variation between animals, that children don't inherit all the traits of their parents, and so on. He clearly did know this, in fact, Aristotle was the first to dissect a chicken egg and analyse the embryo and how it develops, including identifying that the embryo has a heartbeat. Doing so, he analysed exactly the evolution of the particular animal and noticed that this process was somewhat different and not exactly identical except in certain forms (patterns of organisation), between different particular eggs.

Aristotle was as scientific as you get in terms of mindset. In fact, he criticised Plato's Academy for spoon-feeding students imaginary things about Realms of Forms, etc. and not anchoring them in concrete and multi-faceted reality as his Lyceum did. — Agustino

Guesstimating four causes and calling it objective truth was the best Aristotle could do because he didn't have what modern science had: breakthrough discoveries and instruments. Understanding how the sun formed, or the goings-on of microbiology (including the ramifications of a genetically proven evolutionary biology) were not accessible to him. I'm not hating on the guy, I'm just saying that his four cause model seems like what a laymen would come up with had they never been introduced to the methods and tools of empirical science. The four cause model won't get you a better understanding of the physical world than science will; you can put metaphysical lipstick on science's prized inductive pig, but it's still an inductive pig.

Darwin's understanding is not at odds with Aristotle's model of causality. First of all, it couldn't be, because Aristotle's model is metaphysical anyway. It's important to understand this distinction between physical facts and metaphysics. But more importantly, the "complex worldly forces" are nothing but causal agents themselves, which fits perfectly into Aristotle's model. — Agustino

So what then does the leap into your metaphysical world actually grant us other than a frail excuse to claim the objectivity ("coherence") that you deny is a product of science?

My understanding of metaphysics is admittedly fraught with bias: I conceive that it is like some hypothetical external-external reality where concepts can be tangible facts, where morality and the laws of physics are actually written in stone, where some kind of ultimate and certain truth dwells, and where physical evidence doesn't matter because we have no direct access to that realm anyway...

Metaphysics can be whatever you want them to be. Certain, uncertain; changing.

What is so important to you about adding or preserving a metaphysical component to your world view?

I wouldn't say an organism's behaviour, in this case, is its final cause. No, not at all - it's final cause is that for the sake of which it behaves in the first place. And there's nothing in an organisms adaptability to its environment that stops us from comprehending it using the 4 cause model. Indeed, it is only within this model that we can understand how and why the organism uses its environment the way it does. — Agustino

Not all human action is directed towards reproduction though. If only by evolutionary accident, many humans are born destined to never reproduce. Our behavior doesn't necessarily obey our biological imperatives. The conscious and intelligent mind which makes humans so unique ensures that we have many chances of not simply living for the sake of reproduction. People choose to live for the sake of living; living is the final cause: the freedom to behave as we choose. You're missing the point though: you cannot authoritatively interpret what evolutionary mechanisms exist in humans because you understand too little evolutionary theory and too little human biology. You assume that sexual monogamy is the method of reproduction we were designed for but in reality life-long pair bonding is just one of many sexual and social arrangements that human biology is capable of expressing and sustaining. Genghis khan supposedly impregnated thousands of women, so what might that say about the biology of his descendants?

Yep, Aristotle inferred his four causes out of an analysis of motion and change. — Agustino

So Aristotle thought that if you ask and answer a few basic and obvious questions when confronted with a world of change using prima facie observations, that he could catalog and therefore understand all objects in existence? It feels vaguely scientific, but it's child's play compared to the breadth and complexity of empirical science. "Humans" aren't just a category of thing with four tidy or digestable causes, they're a thing of immense complexity whose function and behavior we're still working to comprehend, and which entails the comprehension of countless sub-theories and parts (which themselves have sub-theories and parts) with no end in sight.

No, as I said above, the final cause is that for the sake of which the thing acts. This is not the same as what the thing does. — Agustino

People consciously have sex because it feels good, not necessarily because they want to reproduce. You can say they're frustrating the evolutionary purpose of sex, but why should they give a fuck for evolution? Aren't the ends of the moral agent more important than the ends of evolution or their efficient cause?

To a certain extent yes, not necessarily a moral human. Why not? Because certain things that make a good human being - such as health for example - aren't entirely within one's control. So if a human being is sick, they're obviously not immoral, even though they are a bad human being in-so-far as they are sick, since they do not choose to be sick. That's why morality involves the application of free will with regards to teleology. — Agustino

Now I know what you meant by nature is slavery: you think that if we consciously act in any way which you can conceive as counter-productive to our evolutionary trajectory that we're being immoral, and so to be moral must be slaves to our biology by living conservative monogamous lives and create a new generation so it can create another generation which can then create another generation which can then create anoth-....

What's so morally obligatory about marriage and reproduction again? The sake of the species?

The obvious fact that non-adherence to it would logically imply choosing to harm one's self in more or less damaging ways. — Agustino

If you could legitimately flesh out the harm in the things you decry as unnatural you would actually persuade me to agree with you. I happen to currently hold the position that the level of sexual repression you advocate for is too harmful for too many (in terms of both health and happiness) to justify the bump in successful marriage rates.

It's harmful because it frustrates their telos, because frustrating their telos is harmful. [INSERT ARBITRARY TELOS HERE]

Well no, it's not entirely beyond our current level of understanding. Extreme variation of behaviour (more extreme in humans than in other animals) is easily accounted for by the form of the human being - man is a rational animal and as such has freedom of choice. Out of freedom of choice we would indeed expect to see very varied behaviour. — Agustino

"Humans have freedom of choice, therefore variance". Are you saying that variance is naturally built-in to the behavior of humans via reason?

If the variance that results from our evolutionary caused rational minds is part and parcel with it's function, design, and well-being, why do you contest that variance from some arbitrary standard is necessarily harmful. (I.E, irreversible vascetomies are immoral becausechildren are too important to try to not have, promiscuity is immoral because it appears to threaten standard western monogamy, tattoos are immoral because permanently marking your body damages it's purity, and having casual sex is immoral because it harms the intimacy that you might have with a future spouse).

You cannot just assume what the proper human telos is and then state that whatever goes against that telos is harmful and therefore immoral.

I can't tell when you're reasoning that something is harmful because it's unnatural and when you're reasoning it's unnatural because it's harmful

All people are teleologically oriented towards the same end - eudaimonia as Aristotle would say - but they each think there are different ways to get there. This does not mean that each particular human being is as wise as he can be in any way or that the ways he chooses are the right ones. The presence of choice and reason make chosing the wrong thing entirely possible in ignorance. — Agustino

Why would evolution endow us with enduring variability if there was only one correct answer to how to live?

No, just like the reductionism that Michael attempted before, this actually obfuscates the issues. Saying that we're identified merely by a set of genes may be, strictly speaking, correct, but it gives off the idea that we can be reduced to those genes in isolation, just how for Michael, sexual attraction can be reduced to the chemical happenings in one brain, in isolation from other brains. This is wrong. — Agustino

Obviously a fingernail isn't a human, but this is my point. We cant adequately reduce or summarize "human" into a consistent and universally applicable category because we're simply too complex and diverse.

A lot of things. They are negentropic biological systems far from equilibrium, which means they need to take in nutrients and pass out waste products (these are absolutely constant, it cannot ever be otherwise given our physical laws), — Agustino

Settle down there Spock...

humans are rational creatures with free will — Agustino

The illusion of free will, sure (you won't believe it's not real free will!), but some of us are more rational than others... Does that mean rational blokes like you and me ought to be getting a lion's share of the reproductive opportunities?

The reason and choice thing is more or less what gives rise to moral questions in the first-place, but it doesn't clearly point us in any objective moral directions.

we are subject to disease and aging (which are also inevtiable), women have to be pregnant for 9 months, — Agustino

*sigh...

The 9 month gestation thing again...

What is it about a 9 month gestation period that makes it useful for deriving normative arguments about healthy living again? That women need help giving birth?

Is that really the breakthrough understanding of the universe that Aristotle had in mind?

there's a lot of invariant structures in what makes a human being human - much more than there are in triangles actually — Agustino

And humans are born with feet usually, and eyeballs too, usually, and we like a body temp of around 37 Celsius...

If we put all these basic facts about humans into your moral calculator, what results do we get? That we need to live monogamously to rear children successfully for the sake of propagating the species under the delusion of a scape-goat-god who forgives us for our natural god-given deviances, thereby alleviating our guilt and emotional distress which allows us to live truly free and moral lives?

The presence of variation though does not in any way affect what the objective standard is. There's also sick people in the world, does that mean that sickness is an objective standard of goodness, or that we cannot understand that sickness is bad? :s Of course not. The presence of variation in terms of health does not prevent us from understanding what a healthy human being is, and that health is good. — Agustino

Your insistence that the arbitrary standard you have identified is the objective one, and that any deviation from that standard is like a sickness, encapsulates the main fault with your reasoning... Just because something is not practiced or approved by the majority, or you, doesn't make that thing inherently sick or harmful or immoral.

You should abandon teleology as a moral framework altogether and just stick to arguing that your objective standard is the universal best and that deviating from it is harmful.

In fact, it is precisely an understanding of human form, however vague, and of human teleology, that enables us to universally accept that health is good and to be desired, and illness is bad and to be avoided. And if some human being freely chose to be ill, we would classify them as diseased, not as normal. — Agustino

You would classify someone with a tattoo as self-harming and immoral, all because you have made the logical leap of accepting that your teleological assessments have some ultimate and metaphysically objective quality; they're based on your own personal sentiments.

...Variation is exactly what we would expect, especially given the form of human beings which allows for freedom of choice, even when that freedom of choice goes against the organism's interests.... — Agustino

You allude that things are against an organism's interests, and you will say this is because it goes against their teleology (their final cause of reproduction and your vision of mental and sexual health) but at no point do you actually explain how things like homosexuality/promiscuity are actually harmful except in terms like "it frustrates their interests" or some unsubstantiated and unpersuasive hokum about intimacy and ludicrously slippery slopes ending with the fall of western society. You will give examples like "suicide" and "cannibalism" to illustrate how choosing to engage in harmful things is immoral, but you will never actually show in detail why the things you claim are immoral are actually themselves harmful. It's ultimately circular: X is harmful because it goes against our telos, X is against our telos because it is harmful.

No, I cannot accept that, because it implies that feeling happy is all that happiness consists of. That's wrong. A murderer can feel happy, it doesn't follow from that that he really is happy. Indeed, the more happy he is, the more unhappy he is in reality. — Agustino

It follows from the statement "a murderer feels happy" that "the murderer is happy".

"The more happy he is, the more unhappy he is" is just nonsense.

Yeah, freedom to choose is actually part of what it means to be human - you know, those invariant structures of being human that you don't really want to accept. — Agustino

Sounds like you are saying humans are invariantly variant.

Got it. Nine months in the womb, we eat shit sleep and die, and we're invariantly variant. 10/10 definition; would actually employ.

That's like saying that willingly putting your hand in the fire doesn't seem to be a clear case of harm and immorality. It's just playing with words. By definition that is a case of harm and immorality. Repressing a side of yourself by definition is harming yourself - that's what repressing it means - forcing it to stay quiet, disregarding it, not caring for it. — Agustino

Which side of myself is the natural one, the side of intimacy or the side of promiscuity? Why do you get to decide which is healthy and unhealthy?

Don't you see the circularity in saying "repressing a side of yourself is by definition a case of harm and immorality" when you have yourself subjectively and haphazardly chosen what is to be repressed and what is not to be repressed based on your own puritan like sexual standards?

Yeah, I can see that you are confused. Probably because you haven't much studied psychoanalysis before. — Agustino

So much of psycho-analysis is bull-shit, I really don't see why buying into facile theories like your model/rival scenario is worthwhile...

All rivalry leads to inability to enjoy objects. It's very simple how. The rival is an obstacle to your enjoyment of the object - by definition. Capitalism leads to the concentration of wealth in a few hands, hence the inability of the many to enjoy wealth. Promiscuity leads to the gradual impossibility of intimacy and sexual fulfilment. And so forth. — Agustino

Oh me.. Oh my...

So you're against capitalism then I take it?

In any case, in my experience promiscuity actually leads to sexual fulfillment and intimacy (maybe even life long monogamous intimacy). But these platitudes and maxims do not objective arguments make.

"Promiscuity leads to the gradual (and harmful) impossibility of sexual fulfillment"...

Without saying "because it's true", please explain why the above isn't bull shit?

And what is this if not fascination with rivals in the sexual game? :s — Agustino

Fascination with persuasion in a social and intellectual ideas game. I wanted to know all the ways in which people are actually persuaded to change or develop their beliefs so that I can myself be more resistant to irrational forms of persuasion and utilize fully what rational forms of persuasion are available (and maybe the irrational one's on occasion, but I know you wont hold that against me!).

Yes that is a logical possibility, you have yet to show that it holds in practice. Furthermore, intimacy isn't some kind of currency that you have a limited amount of, so until you formulate a clear understanding of intimacy it is pointless to discuss this. — Agustino

You have yet to show that "promiscuity prevents intimacy" holds in practice, and since you're the one making that normative claim, the burden of proof is on you to actually demonstrate the strength and validity of your position with reason and evidence Once you show that promiscuity does destroy intimacy, then you can begin trying to show why intimacy is required for health and happiness in the first place.

I raised the question to show how easy it is to make a weak claim about what is possible and reveal how utterly unsupported the centerpieces of your moral stances on sex and sexuality are.

If I can say "well gee golly, what if casual sex isn't actually harmful and stuff?" and you're response is "that's possible, prove it" It makes your position seem very weakly defended. You should be able to prove to me why casual sex is harmful. I know I've asked you to explain it many times, but it always comes out as a string of hasty assumptions on a slippery slope which ranges from intimacy problems to the collapse of western society.

Right, even in our society we do need families in order to adequately take care of infants. Some people can do without this, precisely because the majority doesn't do without it. — Agustino

You mean the masses cannot take advantage of the massive daycare/nanny industry that is the public school system?

I hope you're not under the imagination that those women would be happy to be shared. — Agustino

Depends on the culture and the person unfortunately... There are many accounts of genuinely non brainwashed women who have no negative feelings because of the polygamous relationship they're in. Assuming that we all need to live and behave in this one way to be happy is the endemic problem with your stances toward sex.

I think it's a bit on the lenient side, which is probably for the best. Perhaps there have been cases of over-censorship, I'm not aware of any.

Thank you very much to all the moderators who take the time to keep this place as spam and troll free as it is!

Continued due to character limit...

Do not underestimate the violent effects upon the psyche of promiscuity and of looking at the other as object. If you look at the first woman as an object, what would prevent you from seeing your wife in the same way? It is now a habit of your mind. "Many people feel that" is just a rationalisation - these same "many people" also divorce at a 50%+ rate. — Agustino

This whole "objectifying" shtick is intellectually bankrupt. At no point when my penis consensually enters the vagina of a woman (even during casual sex) do I cease to perceive that the woman is a person rather than an in-animate object or cattle-like beast of burden. I in fact retain my cognitive faculties even during sex. You're operating on the ridiculous myth of rape culture peddled by third wave feminism.

The is-ought gap does not even exist on my metaphysical framework. It only exits on your Humean and impoverished metaphysics as a problem that you desperately cannot resolve because you have rejected teleology. But in my system of metaphysics, there is no is-ought gap, or better said, there is no gap between facts and values, and hence no gap between is and ought. Values are in-built already into facts — Agustino

Whether or not you acknowledge the gap, I can still attack your conception of what is as inaccurate. Your immensely peculiar description of homosexuality when queried on it's evolutionary counter-productiveness is testament to that inaccuracy...

For example. It is the essence of triangularity that makes us conclude that a squiggly triangle with jagged edges is a bad triangle. And this judgement is objective. It really is a bad triangle because it fails to instantiate what it seeks to instantiate through its telos, namely triangularity. The value - fact distinction only comes into play if we assume a priori that values are subjective and not rooted into the objective nature of things, which is precisely what I don't assume. It's what you assume - hence you raise up the dust and then complain that you can no longer see... For me the good is objective, we have objective standards by which we can determine it. We see that it is objective. — Agustino

I cannot for the life of me figure out why you bring up "good triangles" to try and illustrate why morality is built into an objective human nature unless you think that the "good" in "good triangle" is the same as "good" in the moral statement "good man". Being a good human in the same sense that a triangle is a good triangle doesn't make us moral... Someone with the cranial pathology of a serial killer could be effective at doing murder, a "good serial killer"... You could even say that's what fulfills them. Does that make them moral?

I am all for evolving and adapting, but evolution and adaptation need to be intelligent, not blind at the human level. Purposefully trying to enact tendencies which we know are bad since they go against our permanent biological structure [CITATION NEEDED] which has remained unchanged are useless. Instead, we should focus on variation and adaptation where there is room for it - variation that depends on our immediate and changing environment. Not everything about us needs to change and to vary since there are some unchanging elements in our environment. — Agustino

Evolution and adaptation use chaos for progress. Human invention and innovation uses intelligence, but evolution is precisely blind at individual level.

It's currently a part of our permanent biological structure that anal sex (and pleasure derived from it) is possible. Yes it's gross, I know, but it's there thanks to evolution. Bonobo monkeys engage in non-stop casual sex, including homosexual sex, as a way to relieve stress. It's an adaptation which reduces rivalry and conflict (something you are opposed to right?). Human behavior evidently shares some possible component and permutation of homosexuality, and so you cannot really say it's unnatural or counter-evolutionary.

You'll never solve this problem until you look at what the underlying facts are. This is what you refuse to see by saying that they are subjective, and there are actually no facts to see there. — Agustino

I'm not saying any facts are subjective, I'm saying the facts you thrust are inaccurate (i.e: promiscuity is inherently harmful to everyone). The fact is that not everyone is happy to abide your strict sexually puritanical standards despite your insistence that it is unhealthy for them to be disregarded.

Yes, the world is diverse and changing, but it is also constant and unchanging in other respects. We still need to eat. That's constant. Babies still require protection for a long time until they can live on their own. That's still constant. Pregnancy still takes 9 months for a woman - that's still constant. And so on so forth. You cannot deny the constancy of these facts of our biological existence, and hence the idea that there is one way to be adapted to these constant facts that is the best way is actually entirely rooted in our evolutionary history. — Agustino

How do you go from "humans have a 9 month gestation period" to "therefore promiscuity will collapse society" without your massively overblown slippery slope of trumped up harm, spiritual self-neglect, sexual hysteria, and sense of entitlement to a guaranteed wife and nuclear family of your own?

Something like this: Promiscuity makes you emotionally incapable of staying with a spouse, so alleges the statistics, and divorce causes harm to the children, which causes them to grow up and be more promiscuous, which amplifies the cycle of promiscuity, which leads to divorce and homosexuality, which undermines the entire institution of marriage, until finally society collapses into one big orgy pile of it's own foul and aberrant bodily fluids...[i/]

There are no individuals. See this is the problem, you come up with all sorts of unquestioned metaphysical presupposition - like the individual :s . What the hell is the individual?! Desires are learned, most of them aren't inborn. — Agustino

I'm an individual and you are an individual. If your desires are learned thoug, what's so unhealthy about different humans learning different desires? Should we all be encouraged to have the same desires to that society is neat and homogenous, because, reasons???

No, what would happen is that they would imitate each other's acquisitive desires, since human beings are mimetic, and soon the whole society would erupt in a violent conflict of all against all. Then this violence will transfer unto a victim who is chosen at random from them, who will be deemed responsible for all this conflict and they will all unite against the victim and kill him or her. Then the victim, because of the peace it has brought unto the community, will be sacralized as a god. Then both rituals - re-enactment of the murder - and prohibitions against desire - would be installed in place, and they would be identical to those that you consider to be religion. They would aim at the prevention of unanimous violence. — Agustino

Oh sweet sweet lord. No Agustino, when you look people in a room they do not essentially replicate the mythical formation of Christianity. Nice try though, you almost snuck that one past me for true...

There are no "individuals". Because, as Aristotle said, man is the most imitative of all animals, all humans are inter-individuals because they take desires from each other. So there would be no question of what they would consider, there would simply be the fact of the matter - they will imitate each other's desires, and when these desires land on the same object - as they are BOUND 100% to land, there will be conflict, which will only intensify desires on both sides unless something external - like the law or the scapegoat, intervenes to stop the process. — Agustino

I assure you Agustino, there ARE individuals. Sometimes people have the same desire and sometimes there is conflict as a result, but there are individuals. For example, us!

As far as replacement metaphysics goes, nobody needs metaphysics. Absolute certainty is not the flavor of science or any self-critical philosophy...

As far as the commonalities between humans goes, I've touched on this a few times before: there are a handful of nearly universally agreed upon values which provide ample enough moral complexity for us to work through without employing highly contested values for people's own good.

How many gay people do you actually know? (aside from Bitter Crank that is!) What's so unhealthy about their lifestyle besides not contributing to already severe population growth by frustrating their reproductive potency?

It is better to think in terms of final causes instead of purpose. (Purpose is only a specific instance of final causality in conscious agents). Aristotle identified final causes as necessary in order to account for the directionality of all causes towards their effects. If you remove teleology, then you can no longer make sense of induction for example, and then you end up with Hume's problem of induction. Final causes are that in virtue of which causes have a tendency to produce a specific range of effects and only that range....

...

So if you want to reject this clear metaphysical view which depends on final causality to account for reality, you should propose another one, preferably one which is simpler and can account for all the observable phenomena that we see without producing left-over strands such as is-ought gaps, problems of induction, and the like that cannot be solved.

So I would be careful if I were you with identifying teleology with the study of purpose. It's the study of final causality. — Agustino

Teleology such as you wield it can be a kind of strategic assumption which you use to skip over the problem of induction, sure, but it's not actually solved by it. I'm not opposed to using empirical observations to classify the behavior of energy and matter (which is inevitably inductive), but why employ Aristotle's antiquated "four causes" model to do so rather than the approach to knowledge of modern science? Aristotle's model is cumbersome, for instance: we don't need to know the "designer" of something, nor how something came into existence, for us to classify or understand the material/formal and final causes of a thing. We often ask specific origin questions, especially concerning natural things, but in some ways things are not defined by their agent cause. I'm not explicitly interested in classifying things so much as I am interested in understanding things; there are many possible ways to classify and delineate things and sets of things from one another, and the enduring problem with doing so is that when we become accustomed to our own discrete categories (which are oft haphazardly constructed and notably incomplete) we have a hard time recognizing things which don't fit neatly into one category or the other. Spectrums become unobvious.

"What agent designed it" must have been a naturally attractive question for Aristotle because he lived in a world so utterly bereft of evidence based explanations for how all the variance in heaven and earth came into existence. If Darwin could have explain it to him, Aristotle probably would have altered his model radically. Agency would have been replaced with complex worldly forces and factors (with a necessary case study into each instance), "moving cause" would eventually be as it is today: is it's own massively complex melange of physics and biophysics, "formal cause" would be that same melange of biophysics with taxonomical dilemmas added on top, and final cause would be the an accompanying cacophony of behavioral and evolutionary sciences.

A major nuance that the 4 cause model seems to lacks is the fact that in different environments particular "forms" can exhibit drastically varying behavior. The complexity of the human organism makes it too difficult to comprehend all the ways in which we are evolutionary designed to react and adapt (behavior is final cause). The limitation with identifying a specific range of effects is that we also must identify how that specific range changes over a range of changing environments. Once we start considering multiple environmental factors, the intuitive ease of the 4 cause model breaks down due to complexity and variance in outcomes.

Final cause as an account for reality ormetaphysical bottom floor is a ruse. We can use physical evidence to infer physical law and regimes of physical behavior, but we cannot make that magical leap into the non-land of metaphysics and absolute certainty (or even mere robust certainty, which we could all settle for) from weak appeals to tradition and scare scarce physical evidence (and in the case of our moral disagreement, the presence of contradictory evidence).

Because you conceive teleology solely within terms of purpose, you only think of man-made objects in your examples. But the moon has a final cause of revolving around the Earth too - it is directed towards the production of this effect and not other effects such as transforming into a cute butterfly. — Agustino

Since your moral argument hinges on formal and final cause I'm trying my best to illustrate what is relevant: the final cause of something is what that thing does (or as you might argue on a case by case business, what it's form implies it should do, or creator or designer intends it to do).

No, this is a misrepresentation. "Moral good" exists only for agents that possess free will. A watch is not morally good, but it is a good or a bad watch. A moon isn't a good or a bad moon - the distinction doesn't exist because the moon doesn't "choose" its purpose, and its purpose is given by the First Cause, which it follows unaware of it as it were. So it can never be "bad" - it can only be good. That's why the distinction doesn't exist there. It only exists in agents that possess free will.

So, a cup which holds and delivers liquid well is a good and moral cup, and a watch which tells time effectively and accurately is a morally good watch... — VagabondSpectre

This is just BS. — Agustino

This was legitimately how you put it to me in a past thread, but to clarify, what then is your argument that performing one's function well equates to moral goodness? If a functional watch is a good watch, then a functional human is a good human, but not necessarily a moral human, right? Even if you could define the truest teleological assessment of humans, what would make adhering to it's conclusions the moral course of action?

Here you probably just mean that all the causes are related to the object's final cause in the end. Which is true. That's why the final cause is the "causes of causes". — Agustino

Well yes and no. We can offer up some robust quality of assessment when we look at cups and watches because they are easy to understand and categorize, and we don't even need these colloquial categories to be especially robust. With cups we can say "Here's why it was designed, why it was created, how it can be used, and what it's used for". With something so complex as biological life though, it's more like "The complexity of how life was designed is beyond our current level of understanding; the origin and full scope of life and reproduction are beyond our current level of understanding; the adaptability, variance, and data contained in the human genome is beyond our current level of understanding; extreme variance of human behavior is evident and defies classification of humans by final cause, but we do know that variance acts like an experimental force that drives evolution, and that evolution itself is an ongoing process" (further frustrating even mere taxonomical issues, let alone full descriptions of actual organisms.). Yes I understand that your 4 causes model flows through "final cause", but my point is that your explanation for what amounts to moral human behavior is merely your personal analysis of "how humans behave/what humans do". You generalize behavior to determine purpose because it's too complex to reason from agent cause (design; evolution),efficient cause, and formal cause (biology; more evolution), and so your supposedly objective moral conclusions are rife with your own personal and cultural bias. Human is as human does, correct?

Well if we are human, aren't we human in virtue of having something together which is the same? All triangles, whether isoceles, scalene or equilateral have something in common by virtue of which they are triangles and not rectangles. So do human beings. I hope you're not going to reject this, otherwise I will ask you what makes us all human beings ;) . — Agustino

It might be persuasively in my favor to reduce our entire discussion to this question (and to convince you what we're all not) but really looking at this as an epistemic dilemma in the first place is what I would prefer. Humans are identifiable by having a human set of genes, basically. There is a lot of variance within what we call "the human genome" so there are some nuanced issues even with this basic assertion, (but it seems to be robust enough for us to try out). But what if we spliced frog DNA into a fertilized human ovum? Would the child be human if it had mostly human DNA? Would it depend on how the child turns out? Would they not be human? What if doses of a certain hormone would suppress all expressions of the frog DNA, making them appear and function as a normal human in every way? Would a person with 95% human DNA have a 95% human telos?

At what point does speciation occur? To what extent are ethnic distinctions meaningful or impactful on "final cause" such that they differ?

Triangles are incredibly simple. Three straight lines enclosing a space. What do ALL humans really have in common? We're alive? Most of us want to continue to be alive and to be free? Beyond that it's mostly too complex with too much variance; that's why humans are so hard to define.

Yeah, just like the sun could suddenly disappear tomorrow, vanish :B - it's not sufficient to tell me something could be logically plausible, you have to justify why it actually is the case in practice, not only in theory. You tell me acting contrary to human telos could be morally praiseworthy - what do you mean by that? What is acting contrary to human telos? What is human telos? What is moral praiseworthiness and how is it determined? By what criteria do we determine moral praiseworthiness? In arguing this with me, you need to provide an alternative framework. If you cannot solve the same theoretical difficulties that my metaphysics solves without creating new ones, then you have not shown the:

lack of theoretical validity of Agustino's "moral goodness from telos" — VagabondSpectre — Agustino

I understand If I'm to actually persuade you in this discussion that I need to unpack an alternative, but with only a slight modification (a reduction perhaps) of your present framework I think that we could come into moral agreement on most issues: You base your objective standards on a supposed universal human form, but the overwhelming evidence shows that deviation from any standard is actually an ingrained biological mechanism (which helps to ensure adaptability through variance), and there are overwhelming numbers of deviant humans. Many of your standards aren't objective because they simply don't apply to everyone; what you consider to be harmful or abhorrent is actually not harmful or enjoyable to some people. You can recognize that your morality will never persuade or appeal to them in any way (because it describes them as merely broken and offers them nothing; doesn't apply to them) OR you can recognize that you're working with a set of overblown standards that may apply very well to you and your sentiments about what is harmful, but that they are not shared by everyone. The answer is to work with better starting premises (as universal starting moral values) rather than such contested ones.

We have to come up with moral positions using much more general but broadly accepted (nearly universally, as I like to say) tenets that are actually shared by all of us. Things like "the freedom to go on living" is an excellent starting value because it appeals to almost every human, and generally those who do not want to go on living don't care how the rest of us get on with life (in truth they do, but suicidal persons in need of help aren't going to be harmed by moral arguments in favor of saving lives).

Accept that pursuing happiness even by frustrating one's own reproductive potency isn't inherently harmful if that's what makes the consciousness happy, and that their freedom to choose how to look and how to live is an acceptable variant of the very wide (and widening) range of human behaviors. The indeed authoritarian approach of old world moral systems have themselves become harmful in the modern environment.

Yes, it is rather that the choice of a free agent to frustrate his potencies is ultimately a choice of self-rejection and abnegation. There's also a reason why the later Christians conceptualised this as disobeying the Will of God. Doing something that frustrates your own nature is equivalent to disobeying the Will of God. — Agustino

Don't you see how this looks one big overblown appeal to nature vis-a-vis cherry picked norms?

Generally destroying things for no reason would be irrational and hence immoral yes. — Agustino

For enjoyment? What if it would impress a woman and get her to agree to enter into a lifelong monogamous sexual relationship with me?

You deny or abandon the "good watch - moral man" position, so we need not go further down this tangent. But you will still be left with an empty persuasive bag at the end of this if you cannot demonstrate that there is an objective sexual puritanical standard we all morally (or otherwise) ought to follow.

Now you're starting to understand that free will is required for morality. — Agustino

Let's not get into the free will debate just yet; watches cannot make moral decisions (free, coerced or otherwise determined) and feel/perceive nothing, which I think is what makes them not moral agents and not worthy of moral consideration.

Well, you are a biological creature so long as you have a body, so if you ignore your body and biological life you are repressing a side of yourself. Just like if you ignore your spiritual longings you are repressing a side of yourself. That's just an objective fact, which you cannot deny. There is, as Plato would say, a metaxy that must be maintained between matter and spirit. — Agustino

"Spirit" aside, "repressing a side of yourself" doesn't seem to be a clear case of harm or immorality. Which "sides of ourselves" (what is a side of ourselves exactly?) should we repress and which should we encourage? Why is repressing the reproductive side of ourselves actually harmful? Just because we have genitals and can reproduce we morally should "not frustrate our own reproductive potency"??? What logic are you using...

What makes embracing the allegedly objective human sides of ourselves and repressing the objectively broken parts of ourselves (per your assessments) morally good? What reasoning are you using to establish that generic human function objectively indicates moral value?

No, there are many reasons why promiscuity is immoral, and those reasons exist on multiple levels.

First, there are psychological reasons. Engaging in promiscuity trains your mind to be in the habit of looking at others as objects that are there ready for you to use in whatever ways suits your purpose. It denies the personality of the other, and by virtue of that action it denies your own personality. You cannot use others as objects without you yourself becoming an object. And this is what happens in the promiscuous relationship - both partners use the other unaware that the other is using them. Mutual flagellation. By lying to yourself in such a way, you ultimately destroy the very foundation of your rational faculty, leading to the effects of what Plato termed "the lie in the soul". You are no longer capable to distinguish truth from desire and falsehood. — Agustino

Actually, I'm not a mentally dissociated (by proxy) Pavlovian trained homunculus who has become sociopathically unable to distinguish between myself, others, desires, and "truth", after allowing myself to have casual sex. Thanks for the warning though, I'll be on the look out for sudden urges to treat people and myself like objects and for the sudden unexplained destruction of the foundation of my rational faculties...

Are you..... Wait..... Are you just describing your idea of what sex is like? Just because the penis goes into the vagina, the woman, and the man by proxy, do not become "objects" ; The only lapse of rational faculty would be due to sexual ecstasy during an orgasm...

There's also social reasons. Promiscuity has always been legislated against because it leads to rivalry, and rivalry leads to violence and death - the inability to enjoy the object of desire, and the fascination with the model and the rival. — Agustino

The model o.0? Like... Purty womerns?

This seems kind of like a silly objection though. Rivalry drives progress in addition to creating inevitable losers. It's the economic basis of Capitalism! I don't know why promiscuity leads to inability to enjoy the object though. I like my packaged gifts and my anticipation for opening them in equal parts please!

Fascinated with the rival?

I'm confused.

Why are you interested in PUA? Because you are fascinated with the model and the rival that is the obstacle that stands in the way of the object of desire. — Agustino

Actually no, my interest in PUA stemmed mainly from my interest in persuasion and the surrounding pseudo sciences which, yes, peddle a lot of bull shit, but also do offer some interesting information. As a man I found it interesting and entertaining that people are out there using quasi-rigorous systems for "pulling" women, and I admit I've used a few of the confidence and presentation tricks that the PUA crowd will peddle, but no, I'm not a PUA. I read a few PUA e-books in the years before it became rather ubiquitous online...

The removal of the law hasn't removed the obstacle - the law was never an obstacle, it never scandalised you. But the other becomes an obstacle, and they scanadalise you once the law has been removed. At least the law is impersonal and applies equally to all, and thus prevents rivalry and conflict. Hence the growing trend of rising divorce rates with dwindling sexual mores. — Agustino

You act like divorce and dwindling sexual mores are the worst thing since paganism. The freedom that results in social obstacles (obstacles toward obtaining a faithful wife?) is the same kind of freedom that results in innovation, but more importantly, happiness.

A law which guarantees the same for all in such a freedom restricting manner seems counter-productive. The sexual market filled with rivalry of conflict produces some big winners and many losers, but many people do not wish to live a society where they cannot be free to make their own sexual decisions for the marital sake of others.

Then there's also the spiritual reasons. Promiscuity frustrates the ability to develop intimacy and spiritual union with the beloved. It closes this aspect of existence to the practitioner, instead forcing him to remain in the chains of lust. — Agustino

Maybe.... Maybe some promiscuity enhances one's ability to develop intimacy... Why is intimacy a zero sum game where we only have so much of it to dole out in one life-time?

And finally, we have evolutionary needs. Promiscuity is counter-productive to the aims of reproduction, especially for humans where the human infant spends a very long period of time being defenceless and requiring others for its survival. In fact, the human infant is special amongst all other animals in requiring such a long time until it can survive on its own. In addition, the female also requires protection during pregnancy in order to survive - — Agustino

You do realize we don't live in the jungles of Darkest Africa, right?

We aren't out on the plains with spears in hand to abate the savage beasts, with sore backs and calloused hands as in our evolutionary past. Our environment has changed. You can appeal to evolutionary needs, but you cannot give the reason why evolutionary needs equate to moral needs even if you can actually show monogamy is essential.

it cannot fend for herself. — Agustino

:D

It can defend itself, it can go to Lamaze class with a friend, it can puts the lotion on it's skin, all the things it requires to survive...

The family is thus rooted in our biology as much as it is rooted in our psychology, society, and soul. — Agustino

Why not polygamy given the fact that males have higher rates of death than females (so there are more women to go around) and the fact that the few very successful men can provide better for more women than many men can provide for one?

Doesn't our biology also root polygamy in our souls?

What if... What if death due to child-birth caused a deficit of females.... Shouldn't we then be polyandrists (multiple husbands to one wife)?

What if women are capable of rearing children on their own?

What if.... What if MEN are capable if rearing children on their own!?

*Gears clanking...*

*The steep descending stairway suddenly changes into a greased slope, and our hero is sent tumbling inexorably downward into the darkness...*

You are under a mirage if you think the law is more narrow than the state of nature. Freedom is the law, and the state of nature is precisely slavery. — Agustino

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I'm not talking about law but rather your constrictive moral positions concerning what amounts to proper sexual behavior. They're too strict for everyone to be happy with, so what can you offer to those people?

The point that different individuals have different desires that they think will be fulfilling does not invalidate what I've said with regards to a common human nature. It is already a well-known psychological fact that humans are more often than not deceived in what they think will make them happy - in their desires. Desire is indeed, on many psychoanalytical grounds, a blind alley for determining the good. This isn't to say that I think people should be forced to be good - precisely because by being forced they wouldn't be able to be good. Being morally good requires freedom of will as its presupposition. Rather people should question their own desires honestly. — Agustino

Whenever people on this forum say "It is a well known fact that..." it always seems to be not a fact, but an aphorism at best, and vague and untrue at worst.

" Humans are more often than not deceived in what they think will make them happy". Bullocks! I'm sure humans often wield naive desires, but to say that we're mostly deceived about what will make us happy is a very suspicious claim indeed. Are you formally putting happiness up as a main offer then? (not a guarantee sure, but at least a probabilistic incentive?)

It's an aphorism that when we get what we want we find something new to want, but i'm pretty sure getting what we want tends to make us happy, if only temporarily.

I've never stated that. Rather I've stated that lifelong marriage and premarital chastity are the only way to reconcile the otherwise contradictory impulses and tensions that are found in the soul. This means reconciling the biological, spiritual, psychological and social aspects of the human being into a harmonious whole. — Agustino

And just how do you quantify the "soul"? I don't know how you know so much about souls...

Maybe it may be their personal way of trying to be happy and fulfilled, but how do you know they really are? You'd have to analyze their life by some objective standards, you wouldn't be able simply to take their word for it - they may be repressing certain aspects of their personalities for example. — Agustino

So you're just doubtful that promiscuous or gay or trans or any sexually deviant person can actually be happy?

Can you source this doubt in anything other than appealing to vague culturally informed perspectives like "casual sex is harmful" and "monogamy is necessary for fulfillment"?

this is so wrong that it's funny. On the contrary, homosexuality in many of its forms is known to arise out of a certain fascination with the rival and model and intensification of desire which decouples it from the biological object and shifts it to the model. — Agustino

This really seems like jargon filled nonsense, so let me put it into common vernacular:

"Homosexuality of all kinds results from an obsession with hot men and women and increased sexual desire which causes heterosexual attraction to shift to homosexual attraction".

I feel like I need to dumb this down even further to appraise it:

"Too much sex and you'll grow hair on your penis become homosexual"...

I don't know why but I'm skeptical of this... Were it true, why should we even care morally speaking?

You want others to know that you have sex with her. And so forth - it is the others which end up becoming fascinating, not the object. This is because desire always projects a fullness of being onto the other - if the other wants this object it must be because it is really valuable and they know - it must be because this object can grant you a similar fullness of being to the one that you imagine they must be enjoying. And the more you want it, the more they want it. At a certain point of intensity, desire decouples from the object, and attaches unto the model and the rival, since it is perceived that they are the source of the object's value. This is homosexuality - when desire hypostasizes the rival and decouples the normal teleology of the sexual impulse from the biological level onto the mimetic one. In some forms it can be latent - such as in Dostoyevsky's Eternal Husband who is always fascinated with his rival, who always has sex with the women he likes, including his wife. — Agustino

You had to throw a cuck in there didn't you? :D

So all of this pseudo above board psychoanalysis is well and good and all, but it doesn't address my point about "evolutionary needs". I brought up the fact that homosexuality has very plausible benefits in certain social environments. The strange and mysterious sexual process you describe is secondary to the fact that humans, genetically speaking at least, have the capacity for homosexuality; all it takes is a really hot woman and a man standing next to her according to the above...

Thus homosexuality far from being an element that illustrates the stability of a society, is an element that illustrates its instability [CITATION NEEDED]. That is why in the Bible Sodoma and Gomorrah are shown the be unilaterally destroyed on the background of the inversed scapegoat victim Lot, who alone escapes. The community effectively erupts in violence of all against all as desire spirals out of control and the model becomes more and more rival, and hence violence escalates. Homosexuality is hence a sign of the proximity of violence and the dissolution of all social structure into unanimous violence which eradicates all differences reducing everything to identity, which is exactly why religions have almost universally prohibited homosexuality in an effort to prevent desire from spiralling out of control in their communities. — Agustino

I think you've read a bit too far into the connection between homosexuality and societal collapse. I also wouldn't call the bible a reputable source of information. I think that the writers of Christian doctrine may not have wanted any sexual deviance to ensure "fruitfulness" (which helps explain the popularity of the religion), but we shouldn't take it for granted that homosexuality results in god turning innocent women to salt pillars and committing genocide...

Yes, but you've ignored the evolutionary explanation for the great similarities between humans. Namely that the fundamental biological structures that constrain our existence will not change and have not changed for millions of years. The so-called environmental changes you mention have been, so far, minor in comparison to everything that has stayed constant. The need to eat is still there. The need to have sex to reproduce is still there. The need to take care of infants for a very long time is still there. The fragility of life is still there. The need for others to survive is still there. The presence of disease and infirmity are still there. And on and on. These structural needs of our biology remain unchanged, and hence they have solidified in virtually one way of being in certain regards (including the sexual arrangements in this case). — Agustino

Our need to eat is irrelevant to our moral disagreements; the desire to go on living is the broad value which covers it, and I expect we agree it is a valid starting moral value.

There is a need to have sex to reproduce, but not everyone needs to reproduce for the species to carry on, and I don't see any reason why individuals are obligated to contribute to the propagation of the species in any case. What's so immoral about them fucking off?

The fact that children take a long time to raise doesn't lead to necessary or sufficient harm by permitting the existence of promiscuity or homosexuality (in fact homosexuals can be great parents... *A trap door above you slams shut*).

So as long as people don't starve or freeze, and we think of the children, where's the moral beef?

It is inherently disordered because it promotes tendencies that are likely to disintegrate the marriage — Agustino

"Promotes tendencies"? Am I a child or a dog incapable of reasoned thought and self control?

The marriage is not all. I don't think it a significant or even high penalty risk, I'd rather enjoy life.

There is a reason why we observe that statistically, the most stable marriages are those of people who have never had other partners before. — Agustino

You ever consider that the same sort of culture which had them marry their first sexual partner also has something to do with keeping them together?

Agustino's moral views are not predicated on creation myths or pseudo science, and I'm fully confident that we can agree on some standards for evidence... The prospects for the discussion I'm intending to have are unscathed.

But if you get to casually disregard the objections I've raised by describing them as expressions of western liberalism opposed to what it sees as authoritative Christian morality where the individual is the sole arbiter of what is right and true, then I get to bring up actual examples of belief without evidence, such as the numerous creation myths we have, as well as the numerous pseudosciences and superstitions that too many humans subscribe to. This thread isn't about Christianity though, it is a mere footnote and afterthought.

Metaphysical solipsists believe that they are the arbiters of what is true, and I am not a metaphysical solipsist. I did try to wait and respond more properly to your post, but before I could give it the time it seems to require you chimed in to advocate for the deletion of this thread. Perhaps I felt the need to respond promptly in-case my entire thread got deleted...

But I read most of the objections to traditionalist morality in this OP, as being the expressions of Western liberal individualism to what it sees as the intrusive and authoritarian morality of Christianity, generally. — Wayfarer

@VagabondSpectre, I consider this post inappropriate and I've flagged it...

... For you to authoritatively interpret what Agustino believes is insulting and disrespectful. You should stop. — T Clark

↪T Clark, Actually now you say that, I do agree, if the mods want to delete this thread including my comment on it, no objection from myself. — Wayfarer

I read these objections to traditionalist dialogue as being an expression of fear for the future of Christianity from what it sees as the continual erosion of it's once unchallenged moral authority...

This traditionalist morality that I can only assume you subscribe to describes those who do not adhere to it as sinful and immoral; it's used to persecute. I'm not against sexual conservatism per se, but I AM against the moral/ideological supposition/enforcement that sexual conservatism is morally obligatory.

That's because for liberal individualism, when it severs connection from the Judeo-Christian culture that gave rise to it, there is 'no higher truth than self' - nihil ultra ego. In other words, the individual is the sole arbiter of what is right and true. — Wayfarer

You make it seem like our entire epistemic foundation comes crashing down the moment we cease appealing to Christianity... What is right is, as I have described, more complex a matter than merely what the self wants (it's in fact about reconciling the many wants of many selves). As far as what is true goes, the only people who seem be the arbiter of their own reality are those with standards low enough to accept things without evidence, such as creation myths and pseudoscience.

It's not a question of whether it's appropriate to hold people accountable for their positions on this forum. Of course it is. That's the whole point.

I still think the post is inappropriate for this forum. I am comfortable the moderators can decide. — T Clark

Why exactly is this post inappropriate? Does it break any rules written or unwritten?

Have I not to the best of my ability described Agustino's genuine position with some degree of detail?

Have I relied on ad hominem or some other fallacious reasoning to outline my objections?

Is my post rife with grammatical or spelling errors?

Have I attacked him personally in any way, or have I attacked ideas he openly shares? I just don't get it. Don't you think encouraging debate is intellectually healthy and stimulating?

Should I have written this entire thread about Agustino's moral framework in the abstract, not ever mentioning that it's Agustino who maintains it, for some pretense of ego preservation?

"Humiliate" you said...

Do you hear that Agustino? I know you won't let him get away with that :D !

I consider this post inappropriate and I've flagged it. We'll see if the powers that be agree.

The fact that you set up the discussion to focus on a particular forum member and their beliefs without their participation makes me suspicious that the purpose of the post is to humiliate rather than to enlighten. For you to authoritatively interpret what Agustino believes is insulting and disrespectful. You should stop. — T Clark

I don't exactly see a need to respond to this comment but here goes:

If you think taking pains to describe, appraise, and criticize a set of ideas because some people happen to hold belief in them, then you're in the wrong place. Ideas are fair game.

If you think it is improper to address the moral views of Agustino, who expresses them openly and in detail on a philosophical forum meant designed to create dialogue, within a thread designed to create (continue actually) dialogue, then you're in the wrong place.

If you think that attacking ideas is wrong because it humiliates those who hold then, then i regret to humiliate respectfully inform you: sparing critical thought to spoil the ego rots the mind.

If I haven't been clear enough, I think it's utterly ridiculous that anyone here should think this thread improper merely because it is informally addressed to a particular poster.

If any of you linger in doubt, consider the fact that myself and Agustino have conversed on this subject to such extents that threads have been hijacked and shut down by just the two of us. I promised him this thread several months ago to get to the bottom of our disagreements and now I'm delivering...

So spare me your victim cries; I asked for discussion about the subject matter my OP addresses, and Agustino is more than capable of rising to his own defense.

I'd rather have no responses that dishonest responses — Hachem

This kind of unwarranted snobbery is also going to scare people away. You shouldn't say "I'm not educated in physics at all and am hoping to have my errors explained to me", and then when people actually start explaining things say "I'm going to basically ignore and disregard everything you write by labeling it as a dishonest appeal to authority".

It's lazy and transparent. Sophistry at best, gibberish at worst...

Let's carry on!

I never say there should be a link, only that if photons were propagated in all directions, that there should be a reaction of the matter between us and the beam. For instance, chalk dust should light up. — Hachem

why should only the chalk between us and the beam be illuminated? if the room was filled with chalk dust, there would be a glow around the actual laser beam, but it probably wouldn't be strong enough to illuminate the entire room. Did you read my last post? I explained this already...

It does not, and your answer is well known enough — Hachem

My answer is not well known enough?

I still don't know what you're really trying to say with "for instance, chalk dust should light up" because you're so vague and imprecise in describing things. Which chalk should light up? The chalk between us and the laser? Again, why should only the chalk between us and the laser light up?

What makes us see object is still a puzzle, but the contemporary theory of light does not convince me. — Hachem

You don't understand the contemporary theories concerning light.

How do you explain the pictures I made of a laser beam that look so much like Newton rings, or cases of interference?

Face my empirical queries or give it a rest. — Hachem

I don't know because you have so poorly described your "experiment" (just like "why isn't there a link between us and the beam") that nobody has any sweet clue what exactly you're talking about.

In a lab they measure everything with precision and give exact and plentiful instructions for how the experiment is to be duplicated. The most amount of info that I have is that you have a Nikon camera, a pinhole lens, a laser pointer, and have been screwing around with it. I don't even know if the photos you took are actually interference patterns and not some other phenomenon...

Nobody is going to try and debug your poorly executed experiments...

But if I leave you alone you won't get any responses...

Your strained writing skills and inability to clearly explain anything stop half of your would be respondents, and the sheer ridiculousness of your ideas stops the other half. I'm either stupid or very patient for even making the effort to respond.

Presently you want me to address your claim that there should be a visible "link" between a laser beam and a camera it points away from. What do you mean? Like a shaft of light? No, because dust diffracts and reflects light in many directions, not just toward the camera (therefore we should see a field of light, not random or single shafts emanating from the main laser) and because light reflecting off dust particles get partially absorbed, which weakens it, and because as diffuse light expands outward in many directions it becomes less intense.

A laser beam in fog will have a slight glow around the beam but it's not going to visibly illuminate the entire sky due to atmospheric diffraction and reflection; the light isn't strong enough to do so...

If you think that a visible shaft of light should appear between a laser beam and a camera it is pointing away from if you blow talcum dust through it, then you evidently still do not understand the scientific description of light.

When we blow talcum powder into a laser, that's why it becomes visible; we are seeing photons which bounce off particles and travel in our direction (but remember it travels in many directions, not just towards our eyes). The ambient light or "diffuse light" created from a laser and some dust isn't always significant though, so while it might appear like you can see the beam itself and are "cloaked in darkness", you're actually not seeing the beam, you're seeing light from it reflected off dust particles, and you're not cloaked in darkness, you're being illuminated (albeit at low or undetectable levels) by the same mechanism which allows you to "see the beam", light reflecting off dust particles.

Look at this picture:

It is a laser pointer being made visible by snow. Do you see the glow which surrounds the laser? This is due to light being reflected off snow. Notice how the beam gets noticeably weaker the further it travels, this is because more and more of it has been diffracted and reflected by snow. The glow is strongest where the beam is strongest (at the beginning) and steadily gets weaker until it becomes undetectable.

There is no missing shaft or link...

But I am presenting you with empirical claims. The wet dream of every scientist — Hachem

The wet dream of every scientist is an intuitive theory with empirical evidence to back it up.

Please provide evidence that shows we can see collimated beams of light in a vacuum...

Totally. But I think there are more than a handful of issues which men need to talk about -- for their own good, the good of women, and society as a whole. — Bitter Crank

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of any individual issue, and maybe in some ways, a movement of a certain size ought to take place to address them, but I'd prefer conversations and smaller movements take place for each individual issue rather than ham-fisting them all into one sloppy emotional package like the usual movements of late.

I just want to get the public and myself closer to actually comprehending the issues so that we have even a chance of solving them.

This is all aided and abetted by the assumption that men and women are radically different needs, and have radically different needs. — Bitter Crank

Radically different, in some ways and in some cases, sure, but in a lot of ways our differences amount to nothing important.

Just how different men and women really are though seems to be an uncomfortable truth to someone seeking to bestow all the boons of manhood onto the female population...

Whether we should blame third wave feminism, post modernism, identity politics, exhibitionists on talk shows, or something else, we seem to have lost important and useful terms. Yes, the personal is political -- but so much discussion seems to be nothing but personal. We need some larger categories.

Class is a larger category that doesn't get much mention, lately. Ordinary men have no more inherent power than ordinary women. Pair sex and wealth, and the power that wealth provides, and men and/or women have real power as part of a self-conscious class of people. More wealth, more power -- whether one is male or female. — Bitter Crank

Occupy Wallstreet, as misguided as it all seemed, was at least asking the right questions. They had no coherent demands but they understood the shrinking middle class and the growing wealth gap as main issues. In my opinion, all of the effort BLM has spent could have been better used in trying to address poverty directly, but like men's vs women's rights issues, the presumptive frame work of oppressors and the oppressed causes emotion and resentment to grind any and all useful discussion to a halt.

Another trend that produces a lot of rubbishy discourse is the heavy focus on individual uniqueness. It isn't narcissism, it's the assumption that everyone is different and unique, except one's opponents who are all alike and are all stupid, to boot. We need the corrective of recognizing the ways in which we are all alike -- men like women, women like men, blacks like whites like asians, young like old, and so on. — Bitter Crank

But Mr. Crank! Shouldn't we place inherent value someone's ideas especially if they (the person or the ideas) are unique!?

Surely the world is obligated to contort itself into whatever twisted mental shape is required to placate and digest my own individual lunacy, lest, heaven forbid, I be offended.

Humans do tend to think in these cognitively relative terms though: we ourselves are individual and complex; an excuse for everything. Our detractors are monolithic and uniform; to be inherently blamed for everything.

what are you afraid of? — Hachem

I'm afraid that after taking the time to read and respond (by trying to explain simple proven science to you) you will just bail on the conversation by saying "you're appealing to the gospel of accepted science" or something like it and open a new and equally challenged thread.

stop trying to hit me and hit me! — Hachem

This isn't how debates work. Your confused view of light stems from faulty presumptions like "like beams are visible" or "a particle of dust in between me and an illuminated particle of dust should be visible".

I'm just about the only one bothering to make any responses to your threads, so if you want to get anything out of them other then you need to address the content of my objections.

When you say "why isn't the particle between me and the illuminated beam visible?" and i respond " because the light reflected off a few particles isn't bright enough to then detect by looking at another particle with the naked eye", then it's your turn to respond and actually address the current point of contention

around 1:55 mn. You can see the beam, but no link to the subject.

But then, that was because the photons are invisible and too few, right? — Hachem

and at 2:07-2:09 you can see the cloud of talcum powder reflecting the normal ambient light when he blows it.

What do you mean "link" to the subject? ("link" left undefined makes your point here incoherent). Why would there be a "link"? The talcum powder reflects light in random directions, not just toward observers.

Why don't you comment on my pictures concerning double slit, newton rings and interference? That would be very precise and empirical. Your chance to show that I just don't get it. — Hachem

Your slit "experiment" wasn't controlled or well described and defined to any reasonable degree of precision, nor were your interpretations of the results clear, nor were your conclusions warranted. Half of what you write borders incoherence.

"Light doesn't travel in waves because I don't understand this interference pattern" isn't scientific, precise, or empirical, therefore i cannot address it as such.

Why do you claim that laser beams are themselves visible?

Let us give up the pretension that we could ever agree on even the simplest of tests. — Hachem

How about you respond directly to the dialogues you keep initiating on this forum?

I asked you to prove that lasers pointed away from us are visible without something to reflect them. Please do so.

Let us be clear on the test, and I will keep searching.

1) The subject shines a beam of light away from it at another object * in this case a lens).
2) He blows a handful of chalk dust in the air to make the beam visible.
3) the beam becomes visible, but no dust linking the beam to the subject is visible.

Agreed? — Hachem

I asked you to prove that lasers pointed away from us are visible without something to reflect them.

This experiment demonstrates nothing as ive already explained: the diffused light coming from the chalk particles within the laser beam probably wont reflect sufficient light to make chalk particles outside the beam visible.

I do not feel like repeating our long and boring discussion where you stick to the official theory and I have to defend myself — Hachem

Prove to me that the beam is visible then. Show me the youtube video. Personally, I do not feel like repeating our long and boring discussion where you don't defend yourself.

I notice that all you are doing is reciting the Optics gospel. You are not answering my question which could put an end to this sterile discussion. — Hachem

I notice that you have failed to address any of my objections yet again by labeling me as religious. you should be aware that this is nothing more than a puerile attempt to avoid the blatant problems with your ideas.

The beam pointed away from you is invisible unless something is there to reflect it. If enough light gets reflected from a beam maybe adequate light would be available to see the white powder you sprinkle about your person.

You cannot see the beam: do this test yourself; it's a test which has been performed many times. If you have a laser pointer you can do the test yourself.

As far as a men's rights movement goes though, we don't actually need one. It would be enough for the women's rights movements to merely get back on sane rails.

Some people have brought up that since feminism is meant to be about gender equity, feminism itself can be used by men to confront issues disproportionately facing men (such as suicide). The issue with this is that most feminist schools of thought begin with the presumption that women are currently oppressed by men who hold all the power in society, therefore any analysis of cause and prescribed solutions will come in the form of simply blaming males for male (and all other) problems, and will inevitably suggest female/non-white empowerment (paradoxically in this case as a means to reduce male suicide) as a panacea.

In America, right now, if I tried to organize an event on a random university campus to raise awareness about male suicide, it would be protested and perhaps shut down by angry feminists who believe that any issue afflicting a particular gender must be approached through the looking glass of "intersectional feminism", or else it's misogynistic hate mongering and rape apology. The rhetoric is so charged and spurious that it leads to the formation of social media mobs (and a few real life mobs too) who are only interested in harming and shutting down the rapists, misogynists, fascists, supremacists, etc... This kind of punch first, ask questions never mentality drives most people far away from the feminist brand, and more than a few into various politically alternative corners. And thus the cycle continues...

We need a movement of conversation and less victim-hood outrage so that the handful of issues which do afflict men can be looked at and addressed without violent opposition from confused college students and their terribly naive ideas.

This procedure would not be used primarily to prevent STDs, other than HIV. — Bitter Crank

Fair enough. I can imagine the popularity of circumcision rising along with the prevalence of HIV if it can or is it thought to reduce the risk...

Still though, we do have some strange as hell cultural norms surrounding the penis. In some ways to have (to be) a penis is to be resistant to physical or emotional harm (and thereby be expected to endure it). Female genital circumcision is almost universally accepted as abhorrent and immoral (mutilation), but male genital circumcision isn't even seen as mutilation by the average person.

Somehow the vagina is a sacred part of the female body, but the penis viewed as corrupting and dangerous; to be rebuked and reviled... This might be a tad anecdotal or over used, but this clip from a talk show really does demonstrate the double standard that men are treated with compared to women:

(they are talking about a case where a woman cut off her partners penis and ground it in a garbage disposal (IIRC he cheated on her))



Could you imagine the outrage (and rightfully so) that would be raised if a man cut off his wife's clitoris for cheating? Since it happened to a man though, emotionally people don't seem to have much empathy...

I find this a very strange assertion in this context. We are talking about visible light, like for instance a beam of light directed towards or away from us. We can see this beam of light if the medium allows it.
As for instance in a swimming pool where the water is not "pure". — Hachem

The "medium" (like fog or something?) reflects the "beam" in many directions ("diffuses it"). Some of that light enters our eyes, allowing us to perceive some of the light from the beam. If it didn't enter our eyes we would not see anything. If there was nothing in the medium to reflect the "beam" (ie: vacuum, empty space), then we would not see it. This is an experiment you can try out for yourself.

The question now is: will making the opening smaller make both images darker, or only the second one? — Hachem

Fewer photons will be entering the camera to be spread out over a given area, so generally, yes..

he light coming through the opening seems to brighten all the closeby space, and the more light there is, the wider the bright space becomes. — Hachem

We've been through this... Space cannot be "bright". If you're referring to the light reflected from particles floating around in space, this is something different. It's been long proven that you cannot see photons without having them enter our eyes or else through some form of "detector" (i.e: something for them to strike)

That would be the only reason for projected images to become darker by smaller aperture — Hachem

The reason why smaller apertures result in less bright images is because fewer photons (electromagnetic light waves) make it through the aperture and strike the array of sensors. The lens redirects the incoming light waves onto the array, so if more light is coming in then more will be focused onto the photo-sensitive array, resulting in a brighter image. On a polaroid style camera the image becomes brighter because more photons strike the light sensitive coating on the photo, causing cumulative chemical reactions to create brighter and darker spots.

At the same time, that is only possible if the images are not directly projected by light rays, since otherwise they should keep the same brightness as long as the same scene is projected. — Hachem

Since diffuse light expands outward in all directions (and gets weaker as it does so) light from an object should not magically retain some "brightness" component when viewed from different distances. Brightness has more to do with "how many waves of light are available for detection" and "how sensitive is the detector (i.e: what is the minimum number of light waves required for it to register a unit of "brightness", and what is the maximum number of light waves it can detect in a given time period before it registers "maximum brightness".)

We wear sunglasses because they reflect a great deal of light which makes objects appear less bright.

How can that be under your presumptive regime?

Camera sensors react to light first, to color second. Or maybe the other way around. It does not matter. — Hachem

Do you have any sweet clue how different kinds of cameras actually work?

If not, what makes you so confident that anything you say about them is accurate?

Did you know how "color" is determined? If I explain it to you, will you listen?

The eye cells also react this way. A white beam directed into the eye can give different color impressions, and different cells can give the same visual impression, whatever their first inclination. — Hachem

A "white" beam is "white" because it appears "white". I don't know what you're trying to say here though; it's incoherent. What do you mean "their first inclination"? Which eye cells exactly?

It seems you accept that cellular biology is real, but how can you trust data from traditional/electron microscopes if you cannot see cells with your eyeball by getting really close to them?

There is no reason to believe that increased sensitivity has to come at the cost of sharpness, and the latter becomes anyway irrelevant the darker it is. — Hachem

Generally sensitivity comes at the cost of sharpness because it's very hard to fit more sensitive light detectors next to to each-other in an array. You can use the same array to produce an image that is more sensitive, but you will have fewer pixels in the end because instead of a single photo-receptor being used for a single pixel, groups of adjacent photo-receptors all waiting to detect light will all be used together to produce a more "sensitive" photo-receptor for a single pixel (thereby reducing the number of overall pixels).

It is known that the eye cells need to be refreshed, and that happens through constant eye movements. When projecting an image directly on the retina, and having the image follow the eye movements so that the same cells are perceiving constantly the same image, the image disappears from perception. My interpretation of this fact is that we are simply in presence of overexposure, and not some mysterious neural program that would stop the eye cells from functioning if the image does not chan — Hachem

I am having a hard time deciphering what you mean. Which eye cells?

What do you mean by "the image follow the eye movements so that the same cells are percieving constantly the same image, the image disappears from perception"? The way that eye movements contribute to "eye cell" refreshing is by changing the light that is activating given "eye cells" which gives them a movement to regenerate their light sensing capability. Blinking achieves the same effect. If you stare at a light bulb and look away or close your eyes you can still see an "image" of the light bulb which "follows your eye movements" because the "eye cells" there are taking longer to regenerate than their surrounding "eye cells".

This all means according to me that in fact ambient light is contributing only indirectly to image formation. Larger apertures, or longer exposure, would apparently make the wall or the screen in the camera obscura, the film or the sensor chips, more sensitive, up to a certain limit. — Hachem

"Ambient light" is just diffuse light from some external source or "the light that is already present in a scene". Bigger photo-sensitive arrays, longer exposure times, larger apertures, all means more light data can be collected, which means more detail and contrast can be put into the images we can create

If you look at some of the pictures carefully, you will see some dark shadows where light did not enter even after months of exposure. — Hachem

I don't actually see evidence of this, although the idea is that where less light strikes the photo-sensitive film there is less chemical reaction, so there should be some darker spots....

1) When beams of light travel through space, they leave their bright traces behind them. — Hachem

No, long exposure times show that light leaves traces when photo-receptors detect them

2) Ambient light is only additive up to an extent. Non-moving objects which are not in shadow nor in the path of light beams, keep most of their details even after hours, days, or months of exposure. (I find this puzzling) — Hachem

Define ambient light.

Objects like a tree will keep their details because they move very little, and so over time the few photons per minute which actually strike the film take the same shape. When something is moving though, you get blurred streaks as the moving object throws light from different directions (which strikes the film at different places).

3) There remain places from which bright scenes can be observed, which themselves remain cloaked in shadow. — Hachem

You haven't even mentioned anything pertaining to this mechanic in this post; you're just throwing it on at the end as if you have demonstrated it. Please explain the error with the following info-graphic:



If you can see the stars on a moonless night, then you are bathed in starlight (not darkness). If you are under a tree on a starry but moonless night, then you are bathed in the ambient light being reflected from the surrounding objects that are being struck by starlight. If you are locked inside of a box with no internal light source, then you are not visible unless you have something special like a thermal camera. Since all objects above zero kelvin do emit some EM waves (thermal radiation) you would need to be in a box and at zero kelvin in order to be in a true absence of light... I could dig out the other info-graphic but you get the idea...

There are legitimate men's rights issues that tend to get overlooked due to how we view men culturally and legally...

The most common "batterer intervention program" in the US is known as the Duluth model which basically was born out of the same hum-drum feminist pseudo-science that runs the contemporary SJW racket.

It begins with the assumption that men desire power and reinforce that power by oppressing women and children (in the home, in this case) because they have been culturally/ideologically inducted into a patriarchy where they are entitled to do so. It demonizes men as oppressive homunculi and categorizes women as innocent by default.

Determining custody and visitation rights following a divorce falls heavily in favor of women, and while there may be some biological basis for this there do appear to be numerous horror stories where children are left with mothers who are far less fit parents than the father.

Circumcision is actually not a moral thing to do to a child if you think about it, for both males and females. Dozens, perhaps over one hundred, male children die each year because of circumcision in the US. Blood loss, anesthetic complications, infections, painkillers, and other fatal complications can and do arise each year as direct or indirect results of circumcision. The reasoning typically given (other than the standard: "god told us to mutilate our genitals") is that it reduces the risk of contracting STDs (there was a circumcision fad in the 80's that promoted that idea). What it also does is drastically reduces sensitivity of the penile glans, which I can only imagine makes sex less pleasurable (maybe they just have less sex in general...). Is that not a decision we should let them make when they're an adult? If your child asked you if they could have a circumcision, would you allow it?

The idea that a man cannot be raped, and also the idea that we're living in a rape culture perpetuated by men, are the result of the victim-oppressor mentality run amok. Why should a man be insulted, laughed at, and shamed if he should allege that they have been "raped" by a woman? "A boner is consent" is the same argument as "physical pleasure on the part of the woman is consent". It takes some thinking about, but without even getting into the ethics of inebriants and positions of authority, it's pretty clear there is a cultural double standard: man can be raped, it's just that nobody cares.

Men die at work and in wars (yes, more than women), and (supposedly) we don't get a reserved spot on any lifeboats. Men are culturally expected to be providers, which can be a boon or a burden depending on your lot in life. When Boko Haram kidnaps bus loads of schoolgirls, there are no kidnapped boys around because they've either been sent into the jungle to huff glue and become a child soldier, or were long since executed. In the first world, the floundering middle class is perhaps marginally impacted by most of these issues; I don't know if a full blown movement to address them need be called for.

But what does need to be called for is a movement against general stupidity and ignorance concerning the political, statistical, and ethical realities of the ideologies, issues, and proposed policies which we are facing. If you think explicitly paying individual women more than men for the same work (in order to even out the un-examined raw statistics) is praiseworthy, then you need to learn about statistics and economics. If you think that street violence is the best way to oppose fascist, supremacist, (but not authoritarian?) ideologies and rallies then you need to learn how to have a discussion or a debate. If you think that cash payments to minorities ("reparations") will change anything then you don't understand poverty and why it's growing.

We've been fighting so hard for equality for women and minorities since the 60's that we've created an industry out of it. But once that industry achieves the goals it was designed for, what happens to it? It looks for forms of oppression where there atren't any, invents new forms of oppression to decry, and eventually begins cannibalizing itself. Occupy Wallstreet was much closer to having a useful premise with "equitable minimum standards for all" as opposed to "more for individuals with specific and arbitrary demographic identities"...

The difference between faith and science is that science yields to evidence...

We currently communicate with satellites orbiting Mars and we understand very well the delay caused by the distance between us... Telescopes aren't magical such as you describe, they're just fancy eyeballs that enhance resolution. I don't understand why you believe your experiment would prove you correct.

I encourage you to seek a more formal education of physics. It shouldn't take too long before you realize just how fundamentally reliable and demonstrable the current model actually is...

If you want to get anywhere in science though, then forget your faith. You need to modify your intuition and theories to fit with what the evidence shows, not with how you think things should be.

We seem to have left the realm of Physics altogether. — Hachem

Yes, and entered the realm of quantum physics (which describes itself as strange, but really it's all physics)...

I also have great difficulties with the Maxwellian model of electric field creating or calling up a magnetic field, which in turn... — Hachem

We don't know why moving electrons create large electromagnetic fields and even electromagnetic waves in the form of photons, we just know that they do. (we don't yet really know what an electron is).

I will ignore my mistake for now, and plod further. This is a moment of great mystery for me, photons that go on indefinitely unless they are stopped.
I also have great difficulties with the Maxwellian model of electric field creating or calling up a magnetic field, which in turn...
Both these phenomena reek of pepertuum mobile. Don't you think? — Hachem

So...

If you throw a ball in empty space, why should it slow or stop? If an electromagnetic wave throws a photon into empty space, why should it slow or stop?

Beyond this things get genuinely complicated if you want to understand the behavior of individual photons ("EM waves").

When you create and launch an individual electron or photon, it's "position" can be legitimately described as a wave like function of possible positions. While it's in wave or "photon" form there is no way to describe it as physical. It's a very mysterious thing we sometimes call a "particle-wave". When this wave comes into contact with something, it gets absorbed at a particular spot along an arc or function of possible positions that it could have "appeared" and gotten absorbed at.

The electric torch is shining forward, that is the direction of the beam. When the photons coming out of the torch hit the air particles light is produced that is reflected in all directions. My first question, and let us take it one step at a time, is: how far is the light reflected off the particles? — Hachem

You've already made a mistake though. Photons come out of the torch (zillions of them) and a lot of them are sharing similar directions (they're in a "beam"). When individual photons in this beam happen to strike particles (dust, water molecules, etc...) they get "reflected". The reason why "color" is interpretable from the resulting reflected photon is because a portion of it's energy is absorbed (pertaining to R-G-B wavelengths on the light spectrum). One reason why light doesn't reflect off of objects for eternity is because eventually they will be entirely adsorbed by the atoms they collide with. An interesting side note here is that when electrons absorb light energy they become more "excited" which basically translates to heat energy that distributes through it's atomic structure. Black tends to reflect very little visible light (which is why it appears dark) and absorbs much of it. This is why a dark surface will heat up much more quickly when exposed to direct sunlight!!!

So to reiterate, when photons strike particles, they are reflected and a portion of their energy may be absorbed, which can change where that light falls on the color spectrum. New photons are not generated from a single photon striking a surface or particle (not without a "photoelectric effect"), and individual photons are reflected according to the angle that they happen to strike a given surface or particle.

If you understand the above, the answer to your question is that individual photons will keep traveling until they encounter some obstacle or are absorbed by something. I cannot tell you at what distance the photons become too spread out for us to detect, but individual photons themselves will go on until interrupted.

Like this?



What you're seeing there are particles (like dust and water vapor) reflecting photons from the "beam" of light that flashlights produce. If the air was perfectly clear (a vacuum) you would not be able to see the beam whatsoever.

Regular atmosphere also reflects photons, but it since it's pretty thin the effect is very minimal (unless we're talking about many kilometers of thickness, which essentially is what causes the greenhouse effect...).

I mean the beam coming out of the torch. — Hachem

You mean a scene like this? :



There is no beam. Can you show me a specific example of what you're referring to? Fire generally doesn't create "beams" of light, or at least not very strong ones. The fire is illuminated because that's where the photons are coming from.

If I understand you correctly, each time we shine a light, we are in fact, as it were, using a bulb, and not a spotlight, as far as photons are concerned, since every photon has its own direction? — Hachem

Spotlight's have bulbs, but that's not the point... My point is that a beam consists of many photons which have been prepared to head in the same direction (that's what makes the "beam"). Each photon in the beam has it's own mass and it's own direction, although in such a beam all their individual directions happens to be the same or almost exactly the same.

1) photons are in themselves invisible, they need to hit matter to create light. — Hachem

1) Photons ARE visible light; they are the thing we use to to see. They are what our mechanical eyes gather and detect to produce and abstract visual data like color, shape, and position. Photons need to enter our eyes in order for us to see anything. If you want to see matter with your eyes, then it's required for photons bouncing of it (or being emitted from it) to enter your eyes.

2) When looking at a beam that is directed away from us, we cannot see the beam. It's only if somehow the photons are redirected and actually make it into our eyeballs that we can see it. The reason we can see someone who is in a bright place when we are in darkness is because light from the bright place bounces off the person (in all directions) and some of it is gathered by the eyeballs of the viewer in the darker place; light from the bright place travels to the dark place...

3) I'm sure there are many convoluted mechanics of nearly perfect collimated beams, but you've got to remember that the laws of energy conservation cannot be broken. As the nearly collimated beam that is your laser slowly expands/diffracts/diverges, it becomes less focused. Laser beams may be enhanced by some self-correcting phenomenon, but the energy involved is definitely not self-creating.

4) In a beam, each photon has it's own electromagnetic field and it's own direction. The energy required to create and send them on their way must be expended when they are originally created (from a bulb, a star, etc...). The only "infinite movement" I can think of is newtons Idea that an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. If photons could duplicate and diverge without losing energy then energy conservation laws would be broken (energy will have been created from nothing), which is impossible.

After all, a collimated beam, like a laser beam, is not supposed to propagate any photons sideways. The fact that the beam hits dust particles which make it visible would of course explain the creation of new photons. But we do not see lines of light reaching out to us from the beam. We only see the beam itself. — Hachem

You still don't understand: the particles reflect the light, they aren't generating visible light themselves. Particles will diffuse the light in random directions, which will provide a kind of ambient light effect. Individual photons going in many directions (reflected by particles) do not constitute a beam.

Read again everything I've written in this thread. You've not addressed a singly solitary point of contention and instead have seen fit to constantly say things like "you obviously havn't read what I've wrote", or, "Read this other thing I wrote a year ago", or "you're clearly being dishonest", or "I'm not going to continue to put in effort because you clearly bla bla bla"...

Almost nobody responds to this thread, NOT because your posts are poorly communicated and poorly defended, but mainly because the ideas you communicate are themselves utterly malformed. Saying things like "you have to deal with miraculous photon duplication" is simply asanine. If you have no sweet clue how photons are generated (again, electromagnetic waves: look it up), fine, but maybe you should rethink your confidence in debunking a scientifically accepted theory that you have little to no introduction to and no demonstrable comprehension of. This was never a discussion. I tried to explain why your assumptions are demonstrably wrong and you tried to hold on to your intellectual dignity by shoving your head in the sand.

There's no visible light down there...

The fact that we see a light beam that is directed away from us , should be a hint that we need something else but photons to explain vision. — Hachem

We cannot see beams of light that are directed away from us unless something reflects it toward us (like dust particles or a solid surface).

So, if photons do not multiply, what are all the people seeing? — Hachem

Photons are created at a given light source, and they bounce off of objects and are altered (thus reflecting aspects of color) or are absorbed by them (thus transferring some energy). For the intents and purposes of this thread: photons are created and by vibrating/excited electrons, and are also absorbed by them (which excites them)...

It is funny that suddenly the number of photons has become insurmountable, when all scientific experiments concerning photons, among those the photoelectric effect, are aimed at controlling the number of photons emitted and received. I admit not being a scientist and I am sure I would get all kind of details wrong, but when I hear somebody as Richard Feynman speaking of a minimum of 5 photons to get a visual impression, and I hear your objections, then I am ready to take whatever figure will suit you. Just tell me which, approximate, minimum number of photons is necessary for a visual impression by one individual, and then explain to me then how so many people can get the same visual impression at the same time. — Hachem

Do you understand how eyeballs work? There is a membrane of photosensitive cells that the lens in your eye projects incoming photons onto. When enough photons strike a particular cell, then a "signal" can then be sent to the image processing parts of your brain which it then interprets into RGB light and a particular coordinate in your field of view.

So, if 5 consecutive photons strike a particular cell in your photo-sensitive membrane, let's assume that this is sufficient to cause it to fire off a signal with some color data. What you might actually see is a momentary blip of light. If there aren't enough photons striking particular photo-sensitive cells or if the photons in question are too weak to be detected then no "image" might be formed.

I'll ignore the massive host of issues with the following, but just to humor your desire for numbers, here you go:

Google says that the resolution of human eyesight is around 500 megapixels (or, 500 million individual pixels). In order to completely fill a human field of view, let's just guess that 500 million photons are required (per frame) in order cover our entire photo-sensitive membranes...

Let's also assume that the human eye sees at around 1000 frames per second (a generous estimate)...

So, if a single light bulb emits 10^20 photons per second, then a single viewer is going to consume 500 thousand million photons per second. All we need to do is divide the total number of photons emitted per second by the number of photons consumed by an eyeball per second:

1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 / 500 000 000 000 = 2 000 000 000

This means that there are enough photons being thrown from a single light-bulb to fill the view of 2 billion viewers.

The real issue you're trying to get at is the sensitivity of various light detectors, the mechanics of which we could get into, but it has nothing to do with Romers experiments or contradicting the finite speed of light.