Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

merjet

Regulars
  • Posts

    638
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    24

Everything posted by merjet

  1. At what time in the video does Peikoff deny that animals have volition? Starting at about 46:00 he says that volition doesn't become manifest to a human child until well after birth (after it becomes aware of its own consciousness). Starting at about 1:42 he says he doesn't know if other animals can make choices or have volition or not. A bit later he says it appears as if they do based on his observations, but doesn't know if an animal's attention is totally controlled by external forces or some element originates from within. He says nothing at all about the nature of the nervous system, with both efferent and afferent nerves (link), a scientific fact I regard as pertinent to both selective attention and self-initiated motion.
  2. By logic, I attribute to vertebrates the some powers of choice - especially selective attention and self-initiated motion - based on observed behavior and the nature of their nervous systems (link). Nobody here has blended human volition and animal volition equally into an amorphous mess except you. To wit: "ANY goal-directed action is volitional. And: Volition = goal-directed. Unconscious, involuntary, semi-conscious or fully conscious."
  3. The following have all been asserted by whYNOT: Page 1 "men have and need a volitional consciousness, animals don't." Page 1 "They [higher animals] are not self-conscious, nor conscious of their relation to existence, therefore are of non-volitional consciousness." Page 3 "Only a volitional consciousness [like humans have] can select acts among a few or many options." Page 4 "Animals don't *need* to "choose" and cannot." Page 5 "An animal lacks volition so doesn't learn." Page 7 "I think you might have found that no argument for 'animal volition' is tenable" Page 8 'Physical' volition, we (men and all life forms) possess. But ANY goal-directed action is volitional. And: Volition = goal-directed. Unconscious, involuntary, semi-conscious or fully conscious." The last quote from page 8 massively contradicts his assertions on pages 1-7.
  4. Nobody else here has claimed such nonsense. You just fabricated it on another of your irrational rants.
  5. I agree to the extent "anthropomorphic" means attributing human attributes to animals when based in reality. Humans perceive, pay attention selectively, locomote, and otherwise move body parts. So do other animals. Identifying the similarities and differences is pertinent. Identifying similarities is not cavalier anthropomorphism. Despite whYNOT's wild accusations, nobody here has attributed a human-like volitional conceptual consciousness to other animals. Ayn Rand claimed that man has a volitional consciousness (VoS and Galt's speech). Her saying a volitional conceptual consciousness would have been more accurate, and construing her claim as 'nonhuman animals have no volitional capacity whatever' is absurd. For example, a lion or other cat scans its surroundings, notices some movement in its peripheral vision, and then turns it head to bring where the movement occurred into focus. That is moving part of its body to selectively pay attention to identify whatever moved. A fox or a jackal moving its ears to better pay attention to where a sound came from and what made it is a similar kind of volitional action. It should also help us to acknowledge the extent of concrete bound volition (to percepts rather than concepts), which I take the lion or cat moving its head and the fox or jackal moving its ears to be.
  6. Both humans and other vertebrates have a nervous system. The nervous systems of different species have a multitude of similarities. "In vertebrates [the nervous system] consists of two main parts, the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord. The PNS consists mainly of nerves, which are enclosed bundles of the long fibers or axons, that connect the CNS to every other part of the body. Nerves that transmit signals from the brain are called motor nerves or efferent nerves, while those nerves that transmit information from the body to the CNS are called sensory nerves or afferent. Spinal nerves are mixed nerves that serve both functions. The PNS is divided into three separate subsystems, the somatic, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems. Somatic nerves mediate voluntary movement" (my bold). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nervous_system "The somatic nervous system (SNS), or voluntary nervous system is the part of the peripheral nervous system associated with the voluntary control of body movements via skeletal muscles" (my bold). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_nervous_system A voluntary action is one done by choice, i.e. volitionally.
  7. Animals have volition. Not near as much as humans, but it's still volition -- the abilities of selective attention and self-initiating locomotion (and more bodily movements). How do you know what happens in the mind of a dog or a cougar on the prowl for prey or any other animal? Clairvoyance? You apparently quote Rand (no specific source stated). "Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking)." Apparently you don't understand what she wrote and skipped over. 1. She wrote "living organisms", not "only humans". 2. She then leaped to volition in the form of "self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking)" by humans, skipping over how an animal's locomotion could be self-initiating. Rand: "His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them." Huh? Then how does man have the power to alter the elements of reality?
  8. This suggests or implies there are nonvolitional choices. I have no idea of what they might be. What dilution? The terms volition and volitional existed long before Rand used them. Living organisms exhibit various levels of self-regulation that are implemented by choosing (often only by selective attention), i.e. using the faculty of volition. Ayn Rand chose to write about volition mainly regarding a human's control of his or her conceptual capacity, even "reducing" that "to think or not." That she chose to do so does does eliminate other levels of self-regulation, i.e. volition, that exist in non-human animals as well.
  9. What is consciousness for? "So, our primary hypothesis is: The ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. Consciousness evolved as a platform for volitional attention; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. Volitional movement (including any automatized components) is the sole causal payoff, the “cash value” of volitional attention and thus of all conscious processes. There is no adaptive1 benefit to being conscious unless it leads to volitional movement. With volition, the organism is better able to direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction." 1 By “adaptive” we mean “providing an organism with survival and reproductive benefits.”
  10. There are more to moral rules than an action being voluntary. Nonhuman animals aren't as self-aware as humans and they don't understand that human have such rules or the language they are expressed in. I hope that helps.
  11. As much as somebody might insist it does, I hold that volition doesn't pertain to merely what happens in an organism's mind or brain or nerves. Bodily movements are also relevant. When considering whether or not, or to what extent, nonhuman animals have volition, ignoring bodily movements is bound to undercut understanding the scope of volition. Consider a mountain lion on the prowl for its next meal. What the lion sees, hears, and smells inform it about its locale. What about its locomotion? To insist that its movements are entirely automatic or random strikes me as absurd. No, it at least seems to select and control its movements based on what it perceives holds greater promise of reaching its goal of obtaining something to eat. Are deer or vicuna more likely to be in this direction or that direction? Where is that enticing scent coming from? When the lion sees a group of deer or vicuna, which one would be easier to catch and kill? Which one it does select bears upon its subsequent movement. I believe similar questions apply to many other species of animals that hunt or explore in order to obtain food, even insects. I wish I had thought of this particular topic when I wrote Scope of Volition 15 years ago. Still, better late than never.
  12. ESG advocates nominated an alternative slate of directors that included four new people to join the ExxonMobil board against the wishes of the Chairman-CEO and the other directors. The nominees were picked by a small hedge fund, Engine No. 1, that owns only 0.02% of ExxonMobil shares. Three of its nominees won. Three large public employee pension funds -- CalSTRS, CalPERS, and New York State Common Retirement Fund -- probably voted all their millions of shares for the new candidates. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobeccles/2021/05/18/dear-exxonmobil-i-see-a-bad-moon-rising-for-you/ https://www.fastcompany.com/90641041/the-inside-story-of-how-tiny-hedge-fund-engine-no-1-just-reshaped-exxons-board One of the new directors worked at the U.S Department of Energy and has worked for wind power companies.
  13. Major league baseball batting slump || Car rental prices
  14. I agree completely. It would be strange if I didn't, since I wrote the Analysis and Solutions section of the Wikipedia article. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only person who has ever resolved the paradox based on cycloids. Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes deals with the paradox and mentions cycloids, but says the solution is that the smaller circle slips. "Skids" is better than "slips", but even "skids" is based on a flawed analogy. The behavior of the smaller circle is partly similar to that of a real-world wheel skidding, such as caused by the driver of a car braking hard and the wheel losing traction due to ice or snow on the road. One can peek at the relevant pages of Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes using Amazon's "look inside" feature and the search terms "dime" and "cycloid." The author uses a dime and half-dollar glued together to illustrate the paradox. The analogy fails because the dime does not lose traction and is not even on its own surface.
  15. Google Books is better is some ways, worse in others. Google Books does not show on what page the search term appears. If lucky, the page will have a Chapter heading or section heading that can help to find the page number. Absent that, good luck!
  16. Amazon changed the feature for the worse. Searching for a particular word or phrase before the change often allowed seeing some pages before and after the "hit" page and backtracking to see the other pages where the search word or phrase appeared. No longer. For example, I searched for "volition" in OPAR. It appears on page 37, 38, 39, and many others. If I click to look on page 37, that is the only page shown. I cannot backtrack to see what's on page 38, 39 or any other page where it appears. I can only restart the search for "volition."
  17. Allowing for translation from Greek to English, that is true, although Aristotle did write about will. About what we call volition, Aristotle expressed his ideas in terms of voluntary, deliberation and choice. Most of what he wrote about these is in Book III of Nicomachean Ethics -- Chapter 1 for voluntary and Chapters 3-5 for deliberation and choice. The full text can be seen at multiple places on the Internet. One is http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html.
  18. Coronavirus - new mask guidelines
  19. Stephen Boydstun and I have different views of "measurement omission" in Ayn Rand's theory of concepts. My article titled 'Omissions and Measurement' was published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 2006). It can be read online for free here at JSTOR.org. Ayn Rand wrote, "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted" (ITOE 13, Expanded Second Edition, paperback). This implies that all differences between between/among members of a particular concept are ones of measurement, or in Stephen's words, have "measure values." My article gives several examples to show this is not the case -- that many of these difference are only qualitative. "Consider the concept book. Some attributes of books are measurable, e.g. height, width and thickness. However, some important ones are not. Consider the language in which it, or part of it, is written – English, Spanish, German, C++ (the computer programming language), musical notation, mathematical notation. The last three are not ordinary languages. Yet all are congruous – all are ways of conveying ideas in writing. However, these languages are not commensurable. The differences between them that need to be omitted to form the concept book are qualitative, not measurable. "Consider also the content of the book. Some books are fiction and others are non-fiction. Types of fiction are mystery, romance, children’s stories, etc. Types of nonfiction are history, science, mathematics, music, food recipes, etc. These various contents are congruous but not commensurable. The differences between them that need to be omitted to form the concept book are qualitative, not measurable" (my article, page 394). The article does not mentioned this, but the number of pages a book has is a count, not a measurement, difference. Later in ITOE Ayn Rand considers concepts of consciousness (p. 32-35). There she refers to omitting particular contents instead of omitting particular measurements. Stephen's response to these difficulties with "measurements omitted" in Ayn Rand's theory is invoking the term "substitution units" when "measure values" can't be found. I agree, and assume Stephen agrees, with Rand on similarities being the bedrock of concepts. I was stunned to find this is not the case for any theories given in the article 'Concepts' (link) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  20. http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Jetton/Scope_of_Volition.shtml
  21. China's government's view of cryptocurrency || Truth versus image-making
  22. Thanks for the reminder. This topic is made difficult by "interest" having several definitions and people using it in such a wide variety of ways. Also, what counts as interest within the phrase "conflict of interest" is also very diverse, even among OO members. As I said here the one somewhat common meaning of the phrase is not the least bit recognized in Ayn Rand's essay. It seems she took it for granted there is a widely-used, common meaning for the phrase. Obviously there is no such thing.
×
×
  • Create New...