the wife beating verse

[Darkstar]

I think it has something to do with brain development.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892678/

I think it has to do with going over your head, and being philosophically braindead.

As long as you are not in a form of perfect stasis, your brain should always be developing. This includes after you have died. Future development, in no matter what way, has utterly no bearing upon the current status of a mind. If a mind is already 'mature' (to ANY EXTENT WHATSOEVER), then it is, by definition: mature. It might be barely mature, or mature beyond the scope of mankind... but it *is* mature.

I guess this is because "mature" has no clear cut definition.

Okay, technically you're right about that, but by that same logic "aging" isn't determined by age either, is it?

No, further aging of a body is not determined by its current age, but the effects of the environment upon it in time yet to come. Nor is aging inherently positive or negative.

"No"? I wasn't being sarcastic, I was serious. Nor was I suggesting that the rate of aging is affected by age. However, it is not difficult to argue that older people tend to be physically older than younger people, no?

I suppose one could make a theoretical argument that aging isn't aging, nor that anything is "determined by" anything else, if it can be influenced by other factors.

The process that is aging is defined as aging, so by most accounts, you would be wrong. You may feel free to redefine aging as you wish (an identified being becoming older than how it might earlier have been identified), but then you wouldn't be talking about the same thing anymore.

Sure, one can make any argument ever. That doesn't mean the argument isn't a shaky one, of course

I think this is another problem of definition. Above, you stated that even slightly mature is still technically mature, which is correct. This is not what I had originally thought you meant by "mature" and I doubt it is what Al-Fatihah meant when he said she was "marture" at age nine. Here, I was referring to the physical process of aging. Some things can accelerate or decellerate this process, so it can be influenced by things other then age (i.e. someone looking younger than they are or older than they are). Now if you are referring to aging as in getting older, completely seperate from the body, then of course it is determined by age or, more precicely, it determines age (by definition), though not necessarily physical age.

A better way I could have worded it would have been "physical/sexual maturity is influenced by age" in that naturally these things progress with age. Maybe science really could speed things up in the future (probably could) but they couldn't in that era.

And you would still be wrong. Physical and sexual maturity have absolutely nothing to do with aging (as if you put someone in stasis for a billion years, they will have the same physical and sexual maturity of a billion years ago).

Again, I think definitions have been mixed up. If people did not physically age then they would indeed not mature physically either. I misuderstood what you meant by aging.

Age CORRELATES with maturity... maybe. You have *YET* to define maturity, and I will not respond again until you tell me exactly what this mysterious adjective means.

I don't disagree with that. In fact, the entire heart of the matter is the fact that "mature" is so hard to define. If anyone needs to define mature, it is Al-Fatihah, as he is the one who argued a nine year old was "mature" enough to have sex with a grown man. I do not know what he meant by it; he could have meant sexually (as he said "has reached puberty and is mature") or emotionally.