LoBagola

The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made from Philosophy who needs it So you take the metaphysically given and the man-made and package them. Then you reverse the two elements. So the metaphysically given becomes something that didn't have to be, and the man-made becomes? I don't follow. Why do they assert man is unpredictable? because of his volition? I thought that's what most philosophers deny. And what does the argument "man is unpredictable, therefore nature is unpredictable" have to do with reversing the metaphysically given and the man-made? And how does the argument go to "Nature possesses volition, man does not..." I've posted about this. I continuously see it throughout Rand's texts. I've met a lot of people who would think that's empty academic talk and they're showing no signs of quiet hopelessness, nagging uncertainty or a grey despair. Sure, I can't extrospect into their own mental state and I could be wrong. But I don't think Rand had direct access to their emotional states either. So why is she concluding this? What logical deliberation am I missing?

Chapter 4 Objectivity 'Knowledge as Contextual' The first thing I thought of reading the first paragraph was about people who tell me 'We're all connected' and 'We're all just vibrations / energy'. What kind of connection does everything have to everything else? If I lift my hand in the air right now, did that affect you? How? I understand that concepts must have a context, and nothing can be treated as isolated and in a vacuum. But I don't see why a thing is connected to and affects every other thing. Second paragraph. How do we logically deduce that if we were exposed to an undifferentiated expanse of blue we wouldn't be able to see it? Isn't this context dropping? Since it ignores everything that would be required for us to be in a place where one only saw blue. If your saying well yes, that's the point. But why not say.... if one were exposed to a .... he wouldn't exist. there would be nothing.

Hmm okay. I guess as you get to higher level of abstractions it can become a skill. Since you need to know how concepts are form and how to reduce them back to the perceptual level (in order to check for contradictions). And this is the process of non-contradictory identification. But on some basic level it isn't a skill. I can't deny that right now I'm sitting on a chair. That non-contradictory identification isn't a skill.It ties into a more complicated issue of mine, when am I morally responsible for something and when is it a mistake. If I don't have the skills then I can't take the blame for my immoral acts

Why is logic defined as an art? And what is the meaning of "art" in this context?

I haven't watched a movie for nearly 2 years, and this was the first. I walked out after less than an hour. Within that hour there was fuck fuck fuck, money, money, cocaine, hot bitches. Great. Real entertaining. Did anyone here like this? Why?

Ok so then understanding the nature of X means to conceptualize X, since a concept refers to what an entity is in all respects.

I've read OPAR and plan on finishing and working through ITOE + many more books. I think it helps when studying to post, write, think AND talk / articulate your thoughts.Talking / articulating is difficult when no one in physical proximity shares the same interest as you. Any interest in a skype group where we can have weekly discussions on certain concepts we read up on before hand? Could be entries from the Rand Lexicon.

Reading "What is capitalism?". The "nature of" resources was not defined in 19th century political economy (See first page of the essay). I realized I don't know what "the nature of" means. I kinda / sort-a know, but not in a clear, properly integrated way. Vaguely I answered "more details" about something. Looking up the word I found this definition: the basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something. some resources have qualities, but I don't think this is what is being talked about. E.g. the colour of gold is a quality, the taste of food is a quality etc and all have been discussed in political economy. What about character? resources don't have character. "Feature" seems more promising. Defined as "a distinctive attribute or aspect of something." Is this what is meant? In that case that would be a differentia, right? The nature of something is what differentiates it from other things. I.e. if you don't define the nature of resources, you are not defining the concept resource. Am I on the right track?

Ahh I'm so happy you get what I mean. I was worried I might be starting to see patterns where none exist. But I keep seeing them. EVERY DAY. Last night I went for dinner with someone. He saw me doing something that impressed him. He told me "YOUR FUCKING AMAZING. LOOK AROUND YOU. NO ONE DOES WHAT YOU DO". All these people around you. But it's irrelevant. The fact is, if you think like that your implicitly counting on the worst within others. I know the quote doesn't provide the full-context. I can't do that. But you'll have to trust that it was power dervied by comparison. I was telling him I want / should be / could be doing more. Two nights ago I caught my flatmate watching some trashy reality tv crime show. I imitated someone being interviewed. He said :"but doesn't watching it make you feel so much better atyourself???""!!!!! Ahh!

I know. I get it. What I'm saying though, is that when I took that quote out as my own, while dropping it's original context in Zarathustra, it's power was derived by the emphasis on OTHER PEOPLE. When all that should matter is: Something is good. Your doing it. "We danced" FULL STOP. Maybe there were other people in the scene, thinking I was insane, but they should have never been there in my thoughts. They should have never had a place in a quote that summarises the experience. Why should I even need to re-assure myself that I'm good, by comparison, and some people just can't hear my music. It's like when I used to tell someone about who I was and why I was special, the specialness was derived by comparison. I am "different" because x... Implicitly what I was saying was "I'm great because no one else is X and X is good". Whereas it should just be I am X. Nothing else matters. And you think it doesn't matter, but it does because the root cause of that attitude filters through to every action you take and every interaction you have with every person.

I used to love the quote by Nietzsche "Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music". That was a theme quote I had with a girlfriend, once. I hate that quote now. It depends how you view it. But I viewed it thus... "Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music". The glory in the quote being the superiority over others. Whereas it should really just be "We were dancing" and nothing else matters. To most this would seem an unnecessary observation, but I'm convinced this is evidence of issues deeply rooted in psychology, and that while it may not seem like a big deal these issues give birth to escape clauses from living to one's full potential.

I've recently been thinking about how it's so easy to destroy, but so hard to create. E.g. if I spent 5 years working towards landing a job I love, I could nullify all that work in an instant by punching someone at work, or shouting obscenities for no reason. Yet, I cannot just take one action and land that job. I know there is no why. This is the given. Achievement takes effort. That is metaphysically given. It is only from the metaphysically given that we can derive a why. But I'm curious if anyone has thought about this and has some insight to provide.

I understand the concepts denoted by "I", "soul", "ego", "self" to be exactly the same. That is: "A man’s self is his mind—the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values." http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/self.html I think ego and soul may often be used with additional meaning. Including sense of life or character. In the fountainhead Roark describes a man of "self-sufficient ego" and you've often heard people talk about "selling your soul". Then a person's self or I is independent of his facial expressions, body language and moral character, since his ability to perceive reality, form judgements and choose values is volitional, no matter his history. Correct? So to say "I've changed", "I'm no longer evil" is not strictly correct. The "I" is constant. What is meant by these statements is "I've changed my character".

After reading the fountainhead I've become much more aware of how much second-handedness is ingrained in our culture, and how much of it is part of my psychology too. Of course I retain much of my own thoughts and independence (only when conscious and thinking) and strive to continue developing that, but I am constantly caught out by automated parts of my psychology. I can think of a few phrases or patterns which capture this dependency on others. I'd love for anyone else to contribute if they have picked up on similar patterns. I'm constantly picking up on more. "Get ahead in life" Get ahead of who? "Your not doing so bad, look at person(s) X" This can serve to temporarily alleviate an anxiety about one's shortcomings "X makes you appreciate what you have" This has some legitimacy. E.g. the feeling I have getting into bed or taking a shower after a multi-day survival trek. I still strive for more but everything I have, no matter how simple, gives me so much more pleasure. Yet there is another meaning that I think encourages someone to strive for less. This is when you look at another culture suffering and then conclude that "we shouldn't complain" about something so minor as a bad regulation. "Mediocrity" I've often wanted to avoid "mediocrity", but introspection revealed my standards were often set by looking at other people (or arbitrarily invented) and wanting to be better than them at something. "We're different"..."We're weird"..."We're special" I used to think I was somehow special or superior, but the trick was leaving that feeling undefined and unidentified. After more experiences interacting with people I'm finding it to be quite a common feeling. Numerous friends throughout my life have often told me they feel weird, special or better than others (in some vague undefined way). Of course they may be. Everyone is different. But the statement often comes from a place of comparing oneself to others. I think very often it should not arise in the first place. I could write much more on this. Like how I think it often serves as a pretence at self-respect and esteem. The consequences are reality smashing you in the face in the future; losing self-respect and needing to rebuild, missing out on amazing friendships due to incorrect assumptions about people and many more. "I'm bad at .... but it's very common" This relates to the previous example. I have often found myself alleviating pain by comparing myself to others when I've found a weakness. E.g. I'm too dependent on others in X manner, but it seems to be a common cultural thing. Therefore I'm not so bad. Moral evaluation of myself is a separate matter, but the point is the actual act of comparison alleviates the pain/anxiety. There are many more, but they are random concrete events rather then something I can subsume under a phrase. One worth mentioning is actually a post in this forum where I said that there must be something about Rand's theory on sex that I don't get because she's really good at making wide integrations. JASKN said he thinks she's wrong and that just because she may be incredibly good at making wide integrations does not mean she is correct. It hit me that very often in my life I'd taken anything given by someone intelligent as necessarily true. I remember once looking up what Einstein had to say on God. If Einstein said God existed then surely something was wrong with the way I was thinking about it - that was the psychology.

P.445. This is a scene where Toohey joins Dominique and Keating for dinner. Dominique has married Keating, and left Roark. I remember a quote like this "a love triangle with murder at the hypotenuse" and was wondering if there is any historic use of this "love triangle" symbol I'm unaware of. Why is Toohey replacing Roark an appropriate substition? Is this sarcasm? Is there any meaning to Roark being the hypotenuse? I understand that a triangle can symbolise a 3-way love relationship, but here there is not 3 way love.

Dominique Francon, the Fountainhead, Page 143 I understand that the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are trying to contrast moral perfection vs degeneracy through illustration, but I'm curious if Rand felt this way about the men around her? If you do? I look around and see a lot of really hard working people doing well within the context of their knowledge. The fact that someone supports all kinds of welfare programs and states to believes in altruism doesn't mean they're evil. I remember a friend once told me rich people should pay to help the poor and that actually hurt me, worried me about mankind in general and made me angry. I felt like I was being attacked, that everything good was being attacked but within the context of her knowledge and conceptual development maybe it wasn't evil. I'm thinking to when I first read OPAR and it took me over a month to accept the identity axiom. I was in such a state of mental confusion that I'd ask "well how do I actually know a leaf can't be red and green at the same time? sure I see that it is, but how do I know that it actually is?". If it takes me over a month of study to understand that then how can we call anyone else evil when they support all kinds of ideas which could be considered evil, e.g. altruism. I hear so many irrational things every day and it used to drive me nuts but now I'm thinking there's so much room for real human error which I never gave much thought. I used to hate the common saying "don't judge" (in the non-religious context) - and I still do. But now I'm thinking it came about because we have all these arbitrary standards that make no sense and it is actually extremely difficult to evaluate the entire moral character of a man. What is your view on the moral character of mankind in general and the men and women around your life (not necessarily in your life)?

Is there one man responsible for it's corruption or is there a movement? I want to be morally perfect. If I tell that to anyone other than an Objectivist I know what reaction to receive. Who is responsible for making the word perfection, in the context of morality, denote nothing. If the word perfect refers to the non-existents then we might as well say "no one is lalala" because it denotes the same thing, i.e. nothing. Did the word used to have some meaning that existed in this world? Who killed it? Or was it always dead? I think this word has so much power.

I just re-read Rand's "philosophy who needs it" and I'm wondering about the following: But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation--or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown. How can a contradiction be undefined? If you hold two contradictory ideas they would not be ideas if they weren't defined. Didn't Rand mean unidentified or ignored contradictions? Undigest slogans means what? I'm thinking phrases which somehow one comes to accepts but never thinks about. How do these phrases then dictate our actions? Do we start associating concretes to those phrases that suit whatever emotion they and the phrase arouses? Unidentified wishes. I'm confused by this. I'm guessing this may refer to some end result of a subconscious philosophy? but then why is that considered a wish?

"LoBagola's highly favorable, if somewhat limited sample of Americans, was formed primarily by meeting American travelers and Americans on the internet (another form of travel); specifically, Americans abroad or in cyberspace who are further removed from the body politic that represents them. My question to him is, does he have a similarly favorable view of American politics, as the representation of those travelers he's met personally, or is he simply connecting their act of travel, i.e., of showing interest in something beyond ones borders, as being open minded and knowledgeable??" My view is favourable not because I've drawn some conclusion on the general population but because many of the Americans I met are "outlier" types who I have trouble finding anywhere else. E.g. a self-taught engineer designing 3D printers in China, self-taught freelance programmer who's well read on the most esoteric topics, sustainability engineer who's fluent in Mandarin and many many more (that's only on a backpacking trip to China). Then tons more elsewhere while traveling. My view is favourable because while there may be "narrow-minded" or "ignorant" (whatever that means - I don't know) people in America it seems to me like there are a lot more extremely intelligent and non-conventional types too. I've met many unusually intelligent people here too but they all seem to fit some instituional mold. E.g. intelligent economics student - knows everything he's been taught at university but hasn't read that much in his own time or really thought extensively about connecting his knowledge to other fields or challenging pre-existing ideas. Whereas I've met an economics grad from America who taught himself a bunch of programming languages, read lots of books on logic, philosophy and enviromental sustainibility. So one's knowledge is contained in a vacuum, the other seems to have thought much wider and done a lot more on his own. This could just be chance. I don't know. I'm a student - I meet a lot of very smart people right here in my country and yet it just seems like thinking beyond what your taught and self-teaching is much more common in America. This is what I meant by my favourable view.

I don't live in America and I've met only a handful of Americans over my life, but my impression is highly favorable (but this is based on meeting American travelers and Americans on the internet, a biased sample). Yet, I so frequently run into people who tell me Americans are "narrow-minded", "close minded", "clueless" etc. As far as getting the person to explain to me what they mean, an explanation will usually consist of American's not being able to tell you something like what the capital of Turkey, where France is, that they are stupid, only concerned with themselves and their own country. I don't get this and I don't like it at all. In my own country and every other country I've traveled to there are loads of uneducated, bigoted and clueless people. I hate that it's said with this air of superiority and that they are generalizing it to most Americans... as if our country and it's people are somehow better. So why is it that Americans are always singled out? Why is it so fashionable to attack them? Is there some element of truth to these attacks? Has anyone else experienced this attitude?

Leonard Peikoff The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture 2 http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/character.html “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto, 25 http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html I'm unsure how to distinguish between the two. I'm thinking character is subsumed by sense of life since sense of life may include factors not relevant to your volitional choices such as environment.

That's it! Imagine the day when man is man. He can fail in achieving his value, he can lose his value(s) but he knows through a formal theory of induction that the failure was not natural, that it was not normal, that he cannot conclude that *that* instance of failure reflects any inability or moral imperfection on his part and that achievement and happiness is always open to him. Imagine from birth he is set on that path where is given the chance to grow with right premises. Imagine all the time saved in thought. The time saved from frustrating, guilty, sad, confused internal monologues groping to understand, groping to make sense of things. Trying but falling short of complete and total integration. This time which is then directed towards productive ventures, thoughts, discoveries and joy. This is the superman! But no it is not really the superman it’s man as he should be. A is A. Man is Man. Man with the highest feeling possible! The highest ! Just imagine all those people who are against reason but want feeling. They don’t know that in reason is where they can find the highest and most amazing feeling possible. We... even though we seek this may never get there in our lives. I’m trying. I now know what Galt meant when he said … See! Everything is and can be connected! I love this!

Ok here's what I'm thinking now. It ties into the point of my discussion. I've been doing a lot of introspection in the attempt to uproot my bad premises and I'm finding that many of them a rationalistic catch phrases thrown onto a set of memories combined with emotions. So I might remember 5 separate incidents where I failed at something and then conclude "life is unfair", "existence is misery". I may even use anti-concepts or noises (learned via parrot epistemology) in my catch phrases. So in a sense it's not knowledge but still it is something there underneath dictating my actions and sense of life. It's based of memory, images tied together by catch phrases (beliefs). In the case of Cheryl I believe this is what happened. She connected together certain events and while she may not have had a catch phrase for it she still experienced the feeling as it was tied together by something in her mind. It is not knowledge in the formal sense but she was right even though she never validated it (she didn't know how!). What do you guys think? As a side note in addition to all the reading I've done on introspection I've began exploring CBT and I'm seeing where Objective thinking will be an ENORMOUS help in mending the roots of my mind. You need some way to determine whether your beliefs are true/false. A formal theory of induction would be of huge help here too but I see we are far off from it. I'm happy but so sad at the same time because I think if these ideas would have had time to develop and be taught at a young age we would all be superhuman by today's standards.

After reading your reply I'm starting to think they can be retained. But it's not the same type of retention achieved with the designation of visual-auditory symbols. This will be a psycho-epistemological or emotional retention - if you reach a conclusion. I can retain a few things in my mind in any given moment and put them together to make some kind of conclusion. Once that conclusion is accepted it's then stored in my subconscious and will be part of my psycho-epistemology or emotional responses. However, if I come up with some concept but never name nor do I make any conclusion about what it means to me or how it connects to other concepts I don't think it can be retained long-term and accessible to consciousness (as opposed to the subconscious). This relates to the crow epistemology; you can hold 5 un-named units in mind but as soon as you focus on something else those un-named concepts need to be formed again. But in that moment you might make some conclusion which will send the un-named concepts to your subconscious. If this is true then it may mean that you may not have any articulate conclusion for a given emotional response - EVEN if you introspect. It might just be automated based on concepts strung together which you held in that moment and have now forgotten. Then in seek to repair one's subconscious you may not be able to dig out the underlying premises - only infer them and 'guess'. You would seek to store new knowledge to replace whatever unknown conclusion was there. Does this make sense? The process of concept formation is volitional - shouldn't that mean conscious and not subconscious? Right assigning words to concepts is the final step of the process. Like you said it serves the purpose of mental economy. Cheryl Of course

I checked out her books. They seem primarily aimed at communicating with teenagers and kids though. Anything in particular you recommend?