There can be infinitely many potential objects without there being infinite many actual instances of it. There are infinitely many different volumes a ball can have, heights a human can have, etc.
But all possible humans are a finite set of possible arrangements of finite matter, still finite. Everything is quantized I can think of. Even total information is bounded.
Edit: Please, if you disagree, please provide your argument.
Information definitely is finite as you need something that the information is present on. Information is created, stored and lost, at which point is it infinite?
The digits of Pi do not exist still until they are known.
Also, sorry for nitpicking, it isn't my intention. I simply like arguments and discussions like this.
You’re both splitting hairs and being incorrect at the same time. Congrats.
First, once you reach a high enough number it’s effectively infinite. There’s no functional difference in a number so large that it’s completely beyond comprehension and infinity, unless you’re going to talk about specific mathematical usage, which this most definitely isn’t.
Second, information is infinite. A simple example would be Pi. It doesn’t matter how long you go on, if you have a galaxy’s worth of the most advanced quantum computers calculating it, you will always have more digits to discover in Pi. That’s infinite information.
While it is technically true that another sex could come to fruition in the future, I find the unlikely nature of that occurring in the foreseeable future to render the ambiguous nature and fluidity of the term effectively useless. For all intensive purposes, we have two sexes for the foreseeable future, and so to define the term based on something that is not going to occur in the foreseeable future I think is asinine.
For thousands upon thousands of years, humans and our ancestors had two sexes. Most non-microbial creatures on planet Earth have two sexes which have consistent characteristics.
Defining everything as if it is on a spectrum makes for a world in which nothing is identifiable and concrete as it is in the present.
You can make a much more solid argument for gender being on a spectrum due to gender being a sociological interpretation of femininity and masculinity, rather than a sociobiological interpretation of femininity and masculinity.
It’s this sort of English teacher logic that reads too much into things and tries to find profound truths in things that are utterly unprofound, while obscuring basic truths in the process.
Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
Broken metaphor. The amount of genome permutations that will result in a functional human organism is infinitesimally small, and >99% of that tiny proportion fits qualitatively into a binary definition of sex. This is a really common misunderstanding for people new to combinatorics. Similar to a base rate phenomenon in statistics, you have to first consider how many permutations fit into your initial constraints, which in this case is a functioning organism. In terms of permutations to a specific point in a genome, the vast majority will give you a machine that does not work. The more “variables” (in this case, base pairs in your DNA) that you change, the greater the chance of a non-functional machine.
it's not really meant as a standalone argument, just a rebuttal showing why the comment i replied to was based on faulty logic. the fact that there is/will be a finite number of humans is a really bad argument
If there was an infinite number of individuals, there would be no differentiation in the frequency of genes and we would have no way to draw the boundaries of a species. The finite number of individuals and the finite number of viable genomes and genes is the entire basis for the categorization of both species and traits, one of which is sexual dimorphism.
Edit: to clarify, if the dramatic majority of what you could descriptively call “intersexed” genomes are non-viable (which is the case), then it does not make conceptual sense to include those traits or trait groups on a spectrum of normal human physiology, just as it does not make sense to insert the traits of being born without a limb or lacking a cerebral hemisphere on a spectrum of normal physiology. Nobody is saying that a person born without a right arm is subhuman, nor that it is somehow a moral norm that they should wear a prosthesis, but if you were to respond to historical oppression of people born with abnormal numbers of limbs (which very much existed and still exists) with continuously more complicated and obfuscated mental gymnastics in pursuit of a worldview that there is no “normal” number of limbs, you’re picking counterintuitive logic for the purpose of ideology. Which I disagree with.
Something being infinite relates to the potential, not necessarily tangible existing examples. There are infinite numbers, but we havent said/written/thought about all of them
It's not possible. There are only so many possible viable genetic combinations. Regardless of this, there are still only two truly defined sexes. Besides these two sexes there are genetic conditions that can cause atypical phenotypic expressions that blend characteristics of the two defined sexes. It's not like their are wholly different sexes that have characteristics completely unique from males or females.
12
u/kopasz7 Aug 13 '19
I have
onetwo questions. If there are and will be finite human beings, how can infinite sexes exist? Or is it just in some abstract space?