Mathematics and Porn

Glenn Reynolds, who, in allegiance to the Alliance, I refuse to grant a link, has a typically terse post today about Australia’s Labor Party considering blocking porn on the Internet. Glenn hopes that people will vote against the Labor party because of it. I totally disagree.

Repeated exposure to something acclimates you to it. My son can now hit 70 mph fastballs because I’ve taken him to the batting cages repeatedly. I can type quickly because I have typed a lot in my life.

In a neural network model, the connections in your brain adjust themselves mathematically to stimuli in order to provide a desired response. Learning is all about exposing yourself to a subject until you understand it. Exposure is the input and understanding is the brain adapting itself to that input.

The brain doesn’t have one set of mechanisms for learning Spanish and another set for viewing porn. It’s all the same. When I see K T Cat, I think of the word “cat”. Repeated exposure to Spanish will help me also associate her with the word “gato.” Mathematically, my mind reconfigures its internal equations to eliminate the barrier I have to associating K T with another word.

In a neural network sense, there is a local minima wherein my brain takes the input of seeing K T and it outputs “cat” and “gato.” It rejects all other alternatives. Learning a new language is the act of altering that rejection process so that yet another word can be associated with K T Cat.

Morality can be described the same way. As a child coming from a Catholic school education, my brain had adapted itself so that a pornographic image was immediately associated with “bad.” Repeated exposure to porn in a positive setting, such as one where pleasure is derived, will change the internal equations of my brain so that porn will be associated with “fun.”

There’s nothing mysterious or political about this at all. Change the subject from porn to trigonometry and you get the same results. Repeated exposure acclimates you to that subject.

Having spent a lot of time studying mathematics, I frequently solve problems using a mathematical toolset. When doing woodworking, I think in terms of angles, radii and tangents. Confronted with a problem in cutting a piece of wood, I solve it with the mental tools with which I am most comfortable.

If confronted with sexual needs and having been repeatedly exposed to pornography, I will have a mental toolset to solve that problem, too. My mind will have formed its connections to accept women as objects for gratification and that’s the way I shall use them.

Porn is a huge industry. Just like cigarette manufacturers tried to hide the connection between cigarettes and cancer, the porn industry tries to hide the connection between exposure to porn and crimes like sexual assault.

A very brief search on the Internet will reveal the correlation between sex crimes and porn. It is statistically undeniable and the mechanism is well known.

What is the cost-benefits trade-off for unfettered access to porn? In exchange for more restrictive censorship, we reduce the stimuli that help make sex crimes more common.

Glenn does no one any good at all by parroting a simplistic libertarian line about censorship and free press and ignoring this trade-off. He ought to know better.