Nerian

Well, the whole thesis of life as the standard of value, yet morality starts with a choice to live. Why choose to live? That the value in life is to be happy, but life is the standard of value, which makes all other values have value, and you be happy by achieving life, why achieve life, well to be happy, why be happy, to survive, why survive, cause happy. It's circular and sterile. And it contradicts what is understood about evolution and human psychology. And it even contradicts direct personal experience. And it even contradicts Objectivism's view that life's value is the things we enjoy in it. Which is it? And the answer in OPAR is just moralizing assuming the premise. Problems with the view of happiness and survival. Happiness is good because it helps survival, but the point of living is to be happy, but to be happy you must be successful at living, but being successful at living is the point of being happy. We really just want to be happy for its own sake. The way you want an orgasm 'cause it feels good. Pleasure is really the intrinsic value in life. And what we find pleasure in, and what makes us happy, is at root unchosen. Once you go looking into psychology, you find a world of interesting ideas about what we want for its own sake. What our innate drives are. That takes us onto tabula rasa in the face of all the logic and evidence counter to it. Innate drives and inclinations are almost self evident at this point. Especially if you recognize humans are animals like any other. It seems to me also that Objectivism makes no attempt to integrate itself with facts of human nature, what is understood about psychology and cognitive science, how desires and motivations actually work, where they come from and how they interact with our beliefs. Because of this, you find claims that are in gross contradiction with reality, such as reason can determine what is worth doing, that reason can motivate. And I believe it can cause suffering and emotional distress amongst believers. Rand's issues in her life initially surprised me, back when I read her biographies, but not anymore. They follow logically. Living in contradiction with reality is often painful.

I do have an affinity for compatibilist arguments, but it seems to me that there is a point to the retort that it's merely shifting the definition and moving the goal post, not resolving the actual issue.

That is true. Unfortunately, I've experienced the type of Objectivist who thinks failing so solve all questions in philosophy means one cannot be happy, is suspect morally, and cannot even hope to live on this earth without inevitable self destruction looming. But I can accept most are not like this.

I'm not sure if I detect an accusatory tone or not. If asked, I'm happy to elaborate a bit. If you want elaboration and some amount of proof to accept a claim, that's natural, of course so, but you can't expect a full elaboration and proof every time someone states any opinion on a forum. Not only is that just impractical, it'd make any normal discussion impossible. You'd have to write an essay or a book in some cases. Hopefully that's not your attitude, and I misread the tone. If you determine there to be a genuine contradiction, one way to resolve it is to discard one or both of the contradicting premises. If neither premise can be discarded, the contradiction is left unresolved, and that is life. I note this problem and as stated try to resolve if I can. I may never. I don't think I have everything figured out. This may seem strange to Objectivists, to have unresolved questions. One example for me is the contradiction between my direct experience of my free will and the fact that there's no conception of free will that makes any sense in a universe with cause and effect. From subjective first person view it seems directly apparent that I have free will, but it also makes no sense from a third person view of the universe for free will to exist. (I don't find the Objectivist arguments persuasive.) Since I cannot get rid of cause and effect, and I see no way to resolve the contradiction. I have no resolution. One or both premises must be incorrect, but nevertheless I cannot determine which. I can only point out what I think are contradictions. The only fair and complete treatment would require me to go through OPAR line by line and point out exactly where it goes wrong in my view. I accept reason and evidence as the only way to know and understand anything about reality. Insofar as we know and understand anything about reality, we do so by reason (and evidence). a combination of statements, ideas, or features which are opposed to one another a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions a statement that is at variance with itself Yes. lol

Try to resolve them where possible. I try to build a consistent and empirically verifiable world view. There are linguistic slight of hands, contradictions and plain empirically false premises in Objectivism too. That's why I have to discard a lot of it. Keeping only what makes sense and is verifiable. Sometimes when reading philosophy you can see how something is not quite right, but onto something important, has a point, while not being totally correct.

But now we are talking on two seperate levels of reason for doing things. My subjective reason for doing things, and the reason for my psychology being set up to enjoy certain things. We enjoy sugar because it has calories and that helps our survival, but in the first person subjective experience, I don't eat to survive, I eat because I feel hungry or because I enjoy the sweet taste. Oftentimes, what we enjoy doing is counter to our survival. From the first person perspective, I enjoy myself for its own sake. It's what makes being alive even worth it in the first place. Survival is just a prerequisite, merely an instrumental value, to get what I really want.

Yep. It's absurd. Throw it out. What makes life worth living has nothing to do with conditional state of existence. The idea that an immortal human would have no reason to act totally ignores the reality of human psychology. If I'm immortal, I can still enjoy the same things, so why wouldn't I? I don't enjoy myself to survive, I enjoy myself to enjoy myself.

I really think not with the exception of a few who have become academic philosophers. When I had my disillusionment with Objectivism, I discovered a wonderful world of ideas beyond. Then I could come back and find a renewed appreciation for the good parts in Objectivist philosophy. Objectivism is like most other philosophies, it has its good parts, and it has its bad parts. Many Objectivists who hate Nietzsche, Hume and Kant and existentialism haven't really read them or given them a proper go. The intense moralizing makes it nearly impossible. I'm reminded of Bruce Lee's saying. 'Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.' - A great piece of meta-philosophical advice. I'll take the good ideas and discard the rest.

Hell yes. I care not for Objectivism. I care for truth. In my estimation, there's a great deal of truth in Objectivism. I can hear Peikoff yelling in the distance, "if you reject any part, you must reject the whole for it is an integrated system!!!" lol I wanted to say this because it's the most salient thing that jumped out at me, but I want to go to the gym very soon, so that I may pursue the value of an aesthetic physique, so I may attract the women that I arbitrarily find sexually attractive due to my monkey brain wiring, so that I may satisfy my arbitrary monkey drives, and thereby experience pleasure, which is the only reason to live, but I was told to reply to everything in one post, rather than making several consecutive posts, but maybe moderators can understand that to do that I would have to type up everything all at once, read everything, formulate all my responses to everything into one large post, and then post it, or else I'm not allowed to respond to that which I have not responded yet, and I don't have the patience nor the stretches of time to sit here and respond to everything all at once. Is there any way I can get a pass for responding in dribs and drabs? Pleeeeeeaaaase. Or shall I just construct a gigantic response in a word document over a period of time and dump it all at once? Is this the fate to which I am cast? Grand overlords?

If I'm saying we do not choose our values, and that they are innate, then I guess I'm arguing against Objectivism proper.

Why do you enjoy laughing? Is it really because you sat down and decided life is your standard of value and then determined these things serve your life so I better damn well feel good when I do them? I simply do not think it works that way, and we all know damn well we enjoyed laughing with friends long before we learned of Objectivism.

Around the 35:00 mark he says BOOM. Game. Set. Match. He just admitted it. They mean the joy, the positive emotional experience, that is what gives it the value, that's why you choose it as a value. But he then glosses over this as if he didn't just admit it was the joy, the feeling, that gives it meaning. But then what is it? Do these values make you feel joy because you achieve them? Or do you achieve them because they give you joy? I think they have it backwards. How could anyone choose them? Oh yeah, you really sat down and decided that logically friendship is good for you objectively, so therefore you are going to enjoy spending time with friends? Yeah, no. It doesn’t work that way! You enjoy their company and then you go, "god damn I like having friends!" and so friends are a value to you.

A hilarious quote with a kernel of truth to it Albert Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether or not you should commit suicide. Not sure I agree, but isn't it a legitimate question? Why live at all? I find your arguments convincing but I'm still on the fence if it's amoral. I have heard Kelly's explanation in his lectures 'Choosing life' but I can't remember what his conclusion was. I do remember he pointed out the absurdity of trying to condemn a man morally for not wanting to live. For someone who doesn't want to live, he says really the thing to do is to get them to connect with values. In other words, to get them to do things they enjoy... and we come full circle back to pleasure being the whole point - could one even say that it's the only reason anyone would choose to live. For anyone interested in these lectures they are on YouTube: I am listening to this lecture again, and it is very interesting. It has so much more meaning in the context of my recent questions about value and pleasure. Have a coffee... or suicide?

There is a movie that really drove home the importance of emotions and pleasure to me. It actually really helped me recognize how much everything we do comes down to feelings. Logic and reason is the means to get what we want, but what we desire is the positive feelings we get from certain experiences: be it the experience of dancing, or something more abstract like the experience of beholding one's hard earned achievement. In either case, without the psychological rewarding feeling, the meaning would be stripped. Imagine life without feelings, positive or negative. Even negative feelings are important. They lets us experience the reality of losses. It makes our values mean so much more. Sometimes we need some valleys to get to higher peaks, I think. That is better than flattening out the graph. Never caring enough about anything. Here are two clips from the movie Equilibrium that were very powerful moments for me. The premise of the movie is human emotions are stripped with a drug, positive and negative, so that society can be peaceful. But in doing so, they lose the whole purpose of being alive. "It's circular. You exist to continue your existence. What's the point?" Exactly. "It's as vital breath. Without it, without love, without anger, without sorrow, breath is just a clock, ticking." Amazing. Art is banned in this society and Preston here stumbled upon hidden art contraband. You can see all this stuff in this room, the art, the pictures, the Newton's craddle, all this stuff some people often think of as trivial, is not trivial at all, it's rhyme and reason is how it makes us feel, and how things make us feel is not only not trivial, it's the most profound thing there is. For me, a very technical minded person, this realization has opened up a flourishing in my appreciation for art, music, everything. I no longer poo poo it all like I used to and I've already felt so much richer for it. Embracing my feelings, and now trying to learn to embrace my desires.

Agreed, but I think it is possible to experience 'pain' or 'discomfort' with a positive emotional veneer. When I'm lifting weights, the pain definitely accompanied with a positive emotional response It feels pretty awesome to feel the burn. When I'm on the bike, I embrace the burn in my legs, I feel a sense of power when I'm pushing hard, and the 'discomfort' has a positive veneer. It is possible to psychologically embrace the suck, so to speak.

Exactly! This reminds me of a short recording of Rand. And I'll amend that life is experience through consciousness and value in consciousness is experienced through pleasure. Pleasure is the purpose pleasure! There are some constaints about our nature that we must abide by to maximize 'the area under the curve' as Softwarenerd so elegantly explained, but god damn it, the only bloody justification for maximizing the area under the curve is the experience of it! This would appear to be a contradiction because Rand's ethics is supposed to prescribe to us what will make us happy, right? In the full sense, she never meant to tell us what we should pursue concretely. Ethics is just the ground rules. Since material and spiritual functioning rely on certain factors, we cannot ignore those factors if we wish to pursue pleasure (Psychological pleasure AND physical pleasure). It's the meta-values that allow us to maximize the area under the curve by not setting our bliss against our well-being. When she says "and can prove to yourself rationally". I don't think she meant that you can prove that the cheesecake is rational to eat, but that you can prove rationally that your meta-values are set in accordance with your nature and not against it. If you set the meta-values against your nature qua man, you will necessarily not be maximizing the area under the curve. If life-as-survival were the standard, then suicide would never be permissable, and we know Rand expressed the view that when 'life proper to man' were impossible suicide is justifiable. She clearly doesn't mean life-as-survival. I think the following is also illuminating... I distinguished between psychological and physical pleasure. I think Rand made the same distinction but called it positive-negative emotion and pleasure-pain. But I disagree here somewhat. Some things give me positive emotions, and I have no idea why, and it has nothing to do with life as my standard of value. I enjoy music. I enjoy dancing. Some people do not. I enjoy the sound of the French language, and I dislike the sound of Chinese. Some people experience the opposite. I like skinny girls, some people like plump girls. Whence come such emotional responses? Values. Whence come those values??? If they are not chosen, they are either random, conditioned by environment or innate, but in every case where such values are unchosen they are pretty arbitrary. I think many such values are innate. I know this goes against Objectivist doctrine. And after years of self doubt, repression and wondering how I can justify what I want, I feel like I'm coming round to embracing the absurdity of the arbitrary desires I have. "Screw it. It gives me joy. What more justification do I need?"

Step back for a moment and really think about this... We are trying to justify enjoying ourselves for the sake of enjoying ourselves. I think therein lies an obvious absurdity.

Rand said man's purpose is happiness. Productive work is a means to happiness. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/happiness.html

Wow! I will write a full response later, but I want to first say that this is so strange because your thoughts are along the lines of what I have been thinking. I want to show you a chat thread I had just yesterday with a philosopher friend. He said to me that Rand said 'life' as a euphemism for as 'experential consciousness'. It struck a chord with me because it gets to the root of it in my mind. Here is the conversation thread: I think you're on to something.