Severian

When talking about wave particle duality, you might find this post I made a while a ago useful. I will try and go into more detail later when I have more time, but for now let me say that light is a consequence of the phase symmetry in Quantum Mechanics. In QM, physical things only depend on the square of the wavefunction, so if you multiply the wavefunction by a complex phase nothing changes. This is a symmetry and light is a consequence of requiring that symmetry to be local, that is, I can make the phase shift differently depending on where I am.

I would say it is about both. I am certainly aware that there are members of the gay and lesbian community campaigning for the name marriage, and are not happy without it. So it is certainly an issue for them. However, I am probably more interested in reasons why we should let gay people have any sort of legal union recognised by the state.

Yeah, well, since the wavefunction is a probability, you are rather fixed at having the total probability equal to one.

It is a position measurement. Once the electron (photon experiments are a bit unimpressive since we always knew light was a wave!) hits the screen, you collapse its (position space) wavefunction to a point, and get a data point. When you add them all up you see the interference pattern (in a double slit experiment).

I disagree. Any 'measurement' does change the system state (unless the system is already in an eigenstate of the variable you are measuring). So if you measure a particle's momentum, for example, after your measurement, the state will be a momentum eigenstate, even if it wasn't before.

Yes, but that isn't really special to QM. In a classical system you have a fixed number of normal modes for example. Also, ironically, in QM having a discrete number of particles is put in by hand. There is no way of changing particle number, so it remains fixed at whatever you started with. You need Quantum Field Theory to change particle number (using creation and annihilation operators). It isn't just interaction though. Even with interactions you can tell (when you make a set of measurements) that you get a coherent sum over all possible histories. We don't have any understanding of the mechanism of wavefunction collapse. (And I would content that we can't ever have such an understanding since we can't separate ourselves, as observers, from the experiment.)

Quantum mechanical wavefunctions are only quantized if you set boundary conditions. And this is not really a 'quantum' phenomena, as ordinary waves are similarly quantized (pluck a guitar string and you get one note). The unique thing about QM is that observations change the state of the system, so it would have been better to incorporate that into a name (Observer modified mechanics or something).

I does annoy me a little bit, but not so much because I can't help thinking that Quantum Mechanics is such a stupid name for the theory anyway.

Would you be happy with civil unions if they really did offer the same rights? (I must admit, I thought they did in the US, probably because they do in my country.)

I would disapprove of course, just as I disapprove of gay marriage generally, and for that matter heterosexual marriage. I think many people would have said something similar about gay relationships before they became so 'fashionable'.

I am not interested in slippery slope arguments. I am more interested in what you feel the differences are.

My wife can have sex with whomever she wants.

Really!? But isn't is fairly normal for sex to last over 4 hours?

Sorry - I misunderstood you. I thought you meant 'fixed' as in, the same for everyone. But this point of view is also interesting, because many people would say your morality should be flexible enough to adapt to new situations and experiences. I was going to add this (I had it written in) but then decided not to muddy the waters any. However, I would not go quite as far as you. I would tolerate anyone who believed that raping and killing was OK, but if they did it, or encouraged others to do it, I would lock them up for the good of society. For the same reason, I object to the word 'justice' being used by the state, because it assumes a definition of right and wrong. The state should only be concerned with legal and illegal.

Why can't these rights be granted to civil unions? Then this is an issue for adoption, not marriage. It also discriminates again stable heterosexual relationships where the couple is not married.

As another spin-off from the gay marriage thread (not wanting to take it off-topic), I wondered if anyone could come up with any relevant secular reasons to oppose marriage between close relations, such as brother and sister or mother and son? Let's qualify this a bit by saying that both should be of consenting age. Also, let's right away quash the argument that the off-spring of such marriages have a higher rate of birth defects. This is a flawed argument for 2 reasons. Firstly, having children is not a required for a marriage (plenty of married couples chose not to have children), nor is it restricted to marriage (plenty of unmarried couples have kids). Secondly, there is a precedent - we allow people who have a high risk of passing on seriously debilitating genes to have children.

What privilege? Calling a relationship 'marriage' is not a privilege - it is a definition, a label. Am I being discriminated against by not being allowed to label myself as English (rather than Scottish) even though it makes no difference to my actual rights? A bone-fide in those view? Your own? Would you think more highly of a gay couple because they were 'married'? That is not what I meant. You said that the labelling is "an important factor in fostering and adoption decisions on the psychological level". I was asking did you mean to imply that the there was some issue with the psychological development of the child, or that it was a psychological factor in the mind of the person making the decision? Far enough. But you have not demonstrated that a society that recognises gay marriage is more free. This is a completely different situation and not relevant at all. The examples you gave are of laws which prevent people from particular actions. Keeping marriage heterosexual by definition does not restrict the freedoms (to act) of gay people in any way. It is only a labelling distinction. Ha! If you are going to claim that the gay marriage benefits society as a whole, it is not legitimate to claim that single people are 'irrelevant'. For the record, I don't think they do benefit society as a whole. But even if 'marriage' in the traditional sense did, then you would need to show that the various inherent mechanisms for providing this mechanism arose from 'marriage' (rather than just cohabitation) and were also applicable to gay couples. I would be interested to hear your argument why this is the case.

I didn't know that. 4 hours seems awfully short. Is there a restriction on how often you can take them? Can you take another one after four hours, to carry on where you left off, so to speak?

So how are gay couples disadvantaged by not having gay marriage? You said: "Increased number of couples able to foster and adopt," which I perhaps foolishly interpreted as saying that gay marriage increased the number of 'couples able to foster and adopt'. If this is not a legality issue, do you think that couples who are not married are unable to foster and adopt in principle? When you say "on the psychological level", whose psychology are you referring to? No it isn't. The subject is, "Are there any relevant secular reasons to support gay marriage?"

Why would you want to? For me, I think, the most important moral position is tolerance. I want to adopt a position where I am tolerant of other people's moral stance. Once I have that, I only care about other people's shifting morality in the sense that I care about them as a friend.

Does Viagra have warnings about erections lasting longer than four hours? Is there a medical problem with erections lasting a long time?

I happen to agree with you that I prefer a society which recognises as many personal freedoms as possible, but that is just an opinion. Can you demonstrate to me that it leads to a "better" society? Even more significantly, once we have recognised that we do (and must!) restrict personal freedoms in some ways, can you demonstrate to me that recognising this personal freedom makes society better in a measurable way? Taking this further, gay couples can do everything that heterosexual couples do (in terms of rights) so isn't it restricting my personal freedoms to insist that I recognise their relationship as a marriage? Again, I agree that they shouldn't be paying for our (metaphorical) house painting either. But that is not an argument for reciprocating. Look at it from the point of view of a single person - why should they have to pay more taxes to support a gay relationship?

I am giving him the benefit of the doubt. I am just a nice guy I agree, but then the proper statement is "there is no scientific evidence of any effect, other than natural selection, directing evolution". Not the same thing at all. Huh? Why shouldn't you refer to established evidence? Do you think that would be constructive? The end of the ice age does have good established evidence, so it is not the same thing at all. So you don't think it is relevant to challenge unsupported statements made earlier in the thread?

That's a slippery slope argument. Basically you are saying (or implying) that if we restrict people's abilities to do whatever the hell they want, then we will end up with a totalitarian regime where we are not allowed any freedoms whatsoever. My edit for your edit: Except that they are asking me to pay for part of the cost of painting their house blue.

Well, water flows still have a direction. You can predict that it will move downhill. Similarly evolution has a direction. It will more towards organisms which can better reproduce. iNow's assertion "Evolution does not have a direction. It is not guided." is in contradiction with that. But on a deeper level, I presume that iNow's statement was meant to say that it is not guided by any mechanism other than natural selection. So I think the question remains, can he prove that? It seems like quite a strong statement to make. If he can't prove it, he should stop making baseless assertions.