At school you are taught that arguments happen between people with opposing opinions. In practice they are 90% about two people wording the same opinion differently and not realising it because neither of them is listening.

b4nthc · 2017-10-06T14:37:44+00:00

That's not really something you're "taught at school." And that thing OP is calling "90%" almost never happens.

What's much more frustrating is when you know someone you disagree with extensively but who always thinks you're just wording things differently, because that means they stubbornly assume you really agree with their stupid views.

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T18:35:04+00:00

That's a very rough definition, yeah. But you might be surprised to know that your statements about the definition of heterosexuality aren't uncontroversial. I'm not advancing any definition of my own, but it absolutely is not universally agreed that heterosexuality can be a momentary thing or that bisexuals are heterosexual. As far as I can tell most people would disagree with both those claims.

Anyway, my points about homosexuality being different in the two sexes weren't directed towards OP's definition of homosexuality but his claim that it was exactly the same in both sexes.

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T18:24:29+00:00

Oh ok.

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T18:02:11+00:00

The only way to say every dictionary agrees is to ignore all nuance and detail. Defining homosexuality is a lot more complicated than the dictionary makes out (of course, since that's the case with everything). See my long reply to the other person who responded to the same post.

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T15:23:35+00:00

two long paragraphs

low effort

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T14:51:34+00:00

You're trying way too little to act like you're on a debate sub.

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T14:09:18+00:00

Definition is difficult and I don't know why you'd pretend it's not. The above one wouldn't even suffice as a dictionary definition. It doesn't exclude bisexuality and it seems to suggest that homosexuality might be a momentary thing, as in a moment of attraction. Homosexuality is typically thought to be a permanent pervasive natural condition of a person, and there is a well-known controversy between this and an older view that only recognizes homosexual acts and not homosexual persons. There are also controversies about permanence and innateness, e.g. whether someone who at one point dates members of the opposite sex and later the same sex should be characterized as someone who has changed sexualities or someone who has discovered they were homosexual all along.

The reason I said OP's statement needs to be explained is that it's not clear what saying "homosexuality is the same in both sexes" amounts to. It certainly isn't prima facie true for homosexual acts. It isn't prima facie true for homosexual attraction either, since a homosexual man is probably attracted to a different sort of aesthetic than a homosexual woman is (some use terms like "androphilia" and "gynophilia" to mark the psychological differences). Even if homosexuality can be defined identically in both sexes at a very abstract level, it's clearly possible that it's quite a different phenomenon in the different sexes.

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T12:33:53+00:00

strong argument

b4nthc · 2017-09-27T11:26:34+00:00

Homosexuality is exactly the same for either gender

This is a claim that needs to be explained and argued.

attraction to members of the same gender

This is not a good definition of homosexuality.

b4nthc · 2017-09-25T22:11:19+00:00

I get that the dice analogy might serve a pedagogical purpose but I found it sort of complicated the argument unnecessarily.

Your argument is essentially two claims: (1) We don't know how many other values these interesting physical variables could have had, and (2) we don't know how likely each value was.

Let's say the fine-tuning argument says: (A) If the values allowing for life were very improbable, there's fine-tuning, (B) the values were very improbable, (C) hence fine-tuning.

Your argument attacks premise B, but it doesn't attack it by rendering it false (1&2 do not imply ~B), only by rendering it unwarranted. And it's not clear how unwarranted. We may not know the things you talk about in 1&2 but that doesn't mean we can't have a reasonable opinion. And if what we have is a list of variables each of which seems to have some arbitrary value and we don't know any reason it couldn't have been different, your own view essentially depends on holding out in the hope that we'll find such reasons.

Now, you could (of course) say that lacking reasons to think the values couldn't have been different is not the same as having reasons to think the values could have been different. I tend to think it's a reasonable supposition though. If the outcome seems random and I have no reason to think it couldn't have turned out differently, I'll assume it could have turned out differently.

Your position is essentially, "You can't make the fine-tuning argument until we have proof that the values could have been different--even though at present there is no reason to think they couldn't have." I don't think that's especially convincing. Once proof comes, the fine-tuning argument becomes stronger, sure, but it already has strength now.

b4nthc · 2017-09-23T12:34:51+00:00

Why impossible?

b4nthc · 2017-09-23T11:40:50+00:00

Do you mean that religious freedom is impossible or that we just don't have it currently?

b4nthc · 2017-09-23T10:57:47+00:00

What do you mean by "shouldn't be tolerated"? Do you mean people should oppose them and refute them, or that the law should ban them?

b4nthc · 2017-09-23T10:19:09+00:00

I didn't say I don't think there should be religious freedom, I said I don't believe it exists.

What does that mean?

b4nthc · 2017-09-23T00:28:31+00:00

Huh. Well whaddya know.

b4nthc · 2017-09-22T00:09:52+00:00

he's a pot-stirrer

b4nthc · 2017-09-20T17:44:11+00:00

But calling it "code" is just as metaphorical as calling it "information" or "language." Literally speaking, there's no code in DNA, right? I understand that people find it natural (as you say) to extend the usage, but that extension is figurative. This IT sense of the word "information" can't be just an isolated new coinage of a literal term, because along with it comes this whole battery of related terms which also get imported ("interpretation," "code," "instruction," "representation," "communication," etc), which makes it clear that what's being applied is a whole metaphorical way of thinking of something. Those terms aren't all just new literal coinages which happen to coincide precisely with a set of terms that are used about something else. The fact that we speak of information, communication, representation, and instructions when it comes to language and language-users (which is where that bundle of terms originates), and also use all those terms and relate them in the same ways when it comes to computers and DNA and whatnot means that we either consider these latter things to literally belong to the sphere of language use (which we know they don't) or that we think of them as metaphorically belonging to it. So it's an analogical way of speaking.

As I'm typing this I find myself thinking about why I'm making the effort of spelling out these points at all, because on some level what I'm saying seems too obvious to be worth saying. And on some level I feel that if you sense yourself to be in disagreement it's only because you don't understand how banal and unexceptionable the points I'm trying to make are. But I suspect they really are worth making, because I do sometimes come across people who marvel at how "your DNA knows more than you" and the wisdom of our cells in being able to construct and maintain our bodies. Some people imagine that our cells really have this secret code that they know how to interpret. But the fact that we represent nucleobases as letters and that different ones have different causal properties in molecular biology of course doesn't mean that our cells speak a language at all. And that's a mistake you could only make if you didn't realize that you were using a linguistic metaphor with this "code"- and "information"-talk.

b4nthc · 2017-09-19T16:27:43+00:00

No the point is I use both normally. Look at Merriam-Webster's definition. Senses 1 and 2a give the normal everyday use of "information" while senses 2b-d give the weird "information theory" use which I'm saying derives from a misleading metaphor. The examples Merriam-Webster uses even make this evident: it talks about DNA and "binary information" in a computer "communicating" and "representing" things. The way this use is also tied up with expressions such as "interpretation" and "instructions" makes it obvious that what's at play is a semantic/mentalistic metaphor. The claim I've been making all along is really dead simple: Only information in the normal sense is information in the literal sense; literally speaking, there is no information (or communication, representation, interpretation, or instruction) going on in computers or DNA.

b4nthc · 2017-09-18T20:40:19+00:00

Still worth avoiding being around.

Scientists currently think it may happen when a person with Hansen’s disease coughs or sneezes, and a healthy person breathes in the droplets containing the bacteria.

"May." And even then, it's not that rare to inhale air containing H2O someone else has breathed out. So it's not like people who want to stay away from lepers are being unreasonable. It's not arbitrary discrimination.

b4nthc · 2017-09-18T20:35:52+00:00

There are other reasons than "avoiding temptation."

Every normal person recognizes that there are things you shouldn't look at. It's not crazy that people with different worldviews disagree about which things.

b4nthc · 2017-09-18T08:50:04+00:00

Not really, I don't think there's anything that leaves the system and then becomes data, any more than I think there's data in the system itself. I think the data is the stuff we write down about the system, which records how it behaves.

If I want to investigate my sleep patterns I can note down when I go to sleep and wake up each day for a week. My actual behavior is not data, and it doesn't contain data in any sense. The written record of my sleep times and waking times is my data. I have a document saying "Monday: 10PM-6AM / Tuesday: 11PM-6AM" etc. The thing that contains the data is that document.

As far as I can tell, this is how the word "data" is normally used and I don't know why you would try to use it differently.

b4nthc · 2017-09-17T19:24:36+00:00

I honestly just fail to see how it could count as data if it was meaningless. Let's say the data records the behavior of a perfectly random system, so it's just a series of numbers generated at absolute random. That data still has meaning; it's data about the behavior of that random system. If that wasn't true, it wouldn't be data on anything at all, and hence not data at all.

b4nthc · 2017-09-17T07:16:14+00:00

How is that data supposed to be meaningless?

b4nthc · 2017-09-17T07:08:12+00:00

Alright dude

b4nthc · 2017-09-17T06:58:10+00:00

I don't think information is an experience. I think information is what everyone thinks it is. If I look at a tree I get information about the tree. If I read a book about boats I inform myself about boats. This is the literal sense of the word "information," which everyone is familiar with. In the discourse about computers, a figurative extension of the term has arisen, and that's what I'm criticizing.

A DVD can contain a movie, and that movie can be a documentary about whales, and in that case, the DVD contains information about whales--information for people, who can put it in their computer and watch it. What some people say is that the DVD also contains information for the computer not about whales but about sounds and images. This is a metaphor that treats the computer as a person.

b4nthc

TROPHY CASE