Here's an interesting one

[redbird]

rho compares gender and quantum physics, noting that relatively few people have both the math and the gender theory to understand this.

I'm a bit short on both, but intrigued. rysmiel? elusis? misia?

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Its interesting, and I can see some validity in this...

Of course one thing that needs to be remembered is that ones position in gender-Hilbert-space will not be fixed - this is a time dependent quantity. So the response to a given operator will (or at least may) be different at different times.

[redbird]

The variability is one reason I find this appealing, given that I've had to reconsider my orientation/labeling at least twice (the first being when I realized/admitted that yes, I'm attracted to some few men as well as to women, the second when I noticed that I am in fact capable of pursuing a relationship with someone that I didn't already know).

[rho]

Oh, absolutely a time dependance, I just can't think of any good, simple way to model it. The analysis with quantum physics seems to break down there, as far as I can see, because it would be so difficult to come up with any definite set of rules for how one's position in gender-hilbert-space evolves with time; much of it seems too arbitrary. I guess you could make an argument that the change over time would be concrete and follow definite rules in between observations, but since the observations are so frequent, and the change so slow, I don't think that sort of approach would be useful.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

It would be a Hamiltonian, but that's as far as I'm willing to go... I don't think there's any reason to think that the evolution will be slow, and even if the evolution of the system itself is slow, the evolution of observables might be quite discontinuous.

One vaguely QM thing that also does comes to mind is that observations themselves may purturb the system, making things even more difficult to predict.

Basically - this is a good metaphor, but it has explainatory, not predictive, power.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I like it, but I'm not convinced that one needs a Hilbert space or anything like it, I have an intuition - entirely unrooted in anything sounder than observation of real human beings and a lot of four and five-dimensional thinking while doing database design in my day-job - that a dozen dimensions probably suffice, and also that moving away from labelling the axes is not a good thing, because coherent and consistent labels, for all their possible abuses, do make a deal of difference in how easy it is to figure out whether someone is actually compatible with you.

I also think of people's sexualities not as points within this space but as shapes within it; so that people who very much like a certain specific thing and not much else could be mapped onto it as small fairly regular shapes, and people who like rather a lot as more diffuse clouds, and people who like X only with Y and W sometimes but not with Z occupy more complicated shapes. This then leads me into thoughts about the smoothness of the surface of people's preferences, and fractional dimensionalities, which I think I may well post on my own journal.

[redbird]

rysmiel obliged with a journal entry containing a multi-dimensional model. I wrote a few paragraphs in response, which I'm reproducing here:

This seems like a useful starting point, although many of us will have trouble visualizing the resulting shapes (I can't do even four spatial dimensions).

I do like "person W who's not much interested in all this icky sex stuff at all can stand outside the diagram and read their book."

Another useful axis might be degree/intensity of interest in sex, with room for (for example) people who are interested only at certain times of the month, or under the influence of some specific chemical; liliaren's phrasing "the sex drive of a rhododendron" seems relevant here.

Are "subdimensions" an actual geometric concept I haven't met yet, or just quick shorthand?

I am now wondering how many people actually care about the chromosomal configuration of their actual/potential partners: it seems to me that even those who feel strongly that they don't want to be involved with transgendered people aren't going to actually check that that woman over there has chromosome configuration XX, rather than any of the other things that can manifest phenotypically as female.

[elemy.livejournal.com]

Hi! I've been pointed here by livredor and am absolutely fascinated.

To what extent would you expect it to be possible to model the evolution of someone's gender independently? I imagine it would have some non-trivial interaction with ones other personality traits and experiences. It's not terribly ethical to set up Young's slit experiments with people's genders, so we may never find out what this interaction is, but there's no reason to suppose it's not there and well-defined.