William O

This article tends to confirm your advice: "Regret, like all emotions, has a function for survival. It is our brain's way of telling us to take another look at our choices; a signal that our actions may be leading to negative consequenes. Regret is a major reason why addicts get into recovery!" https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201205/the-psychology-regret

Right now, list five areas of your life that you want to improve. Write them down, then write down what concrete goals you want to accomplish in each of these areas in one year and five years. Having specific goals will make you more confident and focused.

Another example of this is those programs that attempt to mimic human writing using the frequencies with which words appear together in a body of writing. I once wrote a program that scanned a specific website and linked each word to the word that occurred after it the most frequently on that website. The writing it produced looked somewhat sensible in the sense that each word was followed by a word that could reasonably come after it, and sometimes this continued for several words, but the overall effect was often to produce gibberish. This chart appears to be the rough equivalent of that program for the history of philosophy.

Can you give a specific example?

Try thinking of five things you are glad have not happened to you whenever the thought comes up. It will change your mood for the better immediately. Psychologists have done a number of experiments on this method and found that it works. I think the underlying mechanism must be that it swamps the crow epistemology with positive thoughts, which sounds like the kind of thing you're looking for.

Academic philosophy is mired in controversy and rarely arrives at a definite consensus. In addition, only a minority of philosophers, albeit a significant and growing minority, pay attention to Objectivism. Objectivists need a way of integrating these facts, since academic philosophy is often considered an authority on philosophy. One way of integrating these facts is to conclude that, since academic philosophers resist or are not aware of Rand's arguments, academic philosophy is not worth paying attention to. This conclusion requires nuancing, however, for several reasons. First, many academic philosophers produce work that is either true, as in the case of Boghossian's recent attack on relativism in his book Fear of Knowledge, or interesting, as in Bloomfield's recent collection of essays Morality and Self-Interest. It is true that these contributions almost never appeal to Ayn Rand in particular, but sometimes philosophers arrive at positions and arguments similar to Rand's or make points about ideas like hers that are worth thinking about. Second, academic philosophy is influential. In particular, it is the main source that philosophically inclined people outside of Objectivism will get their terminology from, and it will also shape the framing that such people use for philosophical debates. Having some understanding of how philosophical issues are discussed in academia will make it easier to find common ground with people who were introduced to philosophy through academic philosophy. Third, academic philosophy produces a lot of good work in history of philosophy. There are good companions to Aristotle, Hume, Mill, and many other philosophers that come from academic philosophy. As a result of these considerations, I think it is best to take a practical approach to academic philosophy. An Objectivist should not usually treat an academic philosopher as an authority on philosophy the same way they might treat a physicist as an authority on physics, but particular works produced by academic philosophers can be beneficial and useful, and these can be identified by careful discrimination.

*** Post copied from previous version of forum. - sN *** I was just about to recommend those. It's worth mentioning that Peikoff also has a book out that has transcripts of those lectures. Personally, I don't like listening to audio lectures - I prefer something that's written down so that I can mull it over. http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Objectivism-Guide-Learning-Philosophy/dp/B00BDI6KK2

*** Post copied from previous version of forum. - sN *** I was just about to recommend those. It's worth mentioning that Peikoff also has a book out that has transcripts of those lectures. Personally, I don't like listening to audio lectures - I prefer something that's written down so that I can mull it over. http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Objectivism-Guide-Learning-Philosophy/dp/B00BDI6KK2

This is a beautiful post. Very well done.

I'm just going to throw this out there: Have you tried computer programming? I'm bringing this up because it's a creative field, but it's also in demand by employers.

Wow, great post. I would not have thought of answering the objection that way.

Objectivism holds that it is moral, in principle, to end one's life to prevent suffering. However, this should be preceded by a careful balancing of the positives and negatives of continuing to remain alive at a given point in time. Suicide should only be a serious option for someone if, after looking at things calmly and thoughtfully, it does not seem worth it to them to continue living after a certain point. I have trouble believing that anyone would, after looking at things rationally as required by Objectivism, conclude that they need to end their life when they are healthy and young and things are going well, just in order to prevent the suffering that will come with old age a number of decades down the road. To me, it seems clear that the positives for a healthy and happy young person outweigh the future negatives. Now, once the young person does reach old age, and their friends have died, and they face the prospect of a slow, painful death by cancer, it may become reasonable for them to consider suicide. But this is simply common sense, not the extreme nihilistic view you discuss in the OP.

It is not taken out of context, as you can see for yourself by reading the surrounding text.

Okay, I must have missed the fact that the OP was about life extension. Apologies.

You know that this is the Objectivist position, right? "A variant of this pining is the view that the fact of death makes life meaningless. But if living organisms are mortal, then (within the relevant circumstances) they are so necessarily, by the nature of the life process. To rebel against one's eventual death is, therefore, to rebel against life - and reality. It is also to ignore the fact that indestructible objects have no need of values or of meaning, which phenomena are possible only to mortal entities (see chapter 7)." (OPAR, p.27)

One thing that could help is to refer to the literature, i.e., say that you are getting your ideas from Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff and cite sources. I know Ayn Rand is a bit taboo on some philosophy forums, but if you are dealing with a reasonable person it will actually improve your credibility because you have the backing of a well known author. It also gives the reader materials to look into further. Remember, the most you can accomplish in an internet forum debate is to make someone say "hmm, that sounds interesting, I'd like to look into that more." You're giving an advertisement, basically. This definition is a bit vague if someone doesn't know anything about Objectivism. Basic, how? The laws of physics are pretty basic in a sense, but they are not axioms. The problem with the last sentence here is that axioms are, in fact, repetitions of the concept. Rand says so explicitly. Existence exists, A is A, consciousness is conscious. That's not a criticism, it's obviously true. I feel like you're trying to avoid mentioning Ayn Rand here. They are not just the axioms "most commonly referred to," they are Rand's axioms. You're putting identity after consciousness here, which is incorrect. Existence, identity, then consciousness. They are confirmed by the senses. The self refutation point is only to show that they are axioms, not that they are true. Please keep in mind that you're not writing for Objectivists here. This is going to sound like a huge, sweeping generalization to anyone who doesn't have a background in philosophy. It is also not the best tactic given your audience on a philosophy forum, because they will have a certain degree of respect for the major historical philosophers, which will require you to defend claims like this in some detail. (That's not to say you can't make claims like this - you can, if they are honest. You just have to defend them.) As written, this concedes that it's a problem if an idea is a tautology and then tries to make an exception for axioms. This is not the Objectivist response, which is that it is good if an idea is a tautology, because all tautologies are true and all truths are tautologies.

Another interesting point of comparison is Samuel Clarke. He's not that well known today compared to Locke, but he was a major figure at the time, and he tried to take a rational approach to belief in God based on the physics of Sir Isaac Newton. He also had a couple of fairly interesting debates with Leibniz and Anthony Collins.

Yes, I think this is a really interesting feature of early modern philosophy, because at that time they were still grappling with the relationship between religion and science / reason. Nowadays pretty much everyone outside of Christian apologetics just views religion as a subjective arbitrary thing, but back then there were still major philosophers trying out a variety of putatively rational approaches to religious belief. Examples that come to mind are Descartes, Spinoza (sort of), Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and of course Kant as you note.

I just want to point out, in case anyone new to Objectivism is reading this, that the OP Harrison's post above is probably not intended for people who don't have some background with the Objectivist arguments for egoism and capitalism. The arguments in the OP Harrison's post above are all solid if you know what he's talking about, but there are a lot of suppressed premises. Edit: Oh wait, this is page 2 of the thread! Sorry, I was referring to Harrison's post.

The programs do this a bit differently than humans do, though, because they have no grasp of the context. I mean, your computer is "perceiving" all kinds of things right now if you want to use a loose enough sense of that word, e.g., all the pictures and documents you've saved on it or viewed. The whole thing gets translated into bits switching on and off at the bottom, anyway. The problem is that it has no idea what these things are.

How would you say your position relates to eliminativism and the eliminativist concept of folk psychology? (I should explain what I mean by those terms, because my understanding may be incomplete, flawed, or different from yours. I take eliminativism about a mental concept to be the view that the concept does not refer to a well defined category in reality. For example, Daniel Dennett is an eliminativist of sorts about qualia, and the Churchlands are allegedly eliminativists about beliefs. Eliminativists usually say that concepts like these are part of a "folk psychology" that people develop as a useful way of dealing with the world prior to acquiring scientific knowledge.)

The Pursuit of Happiness is a book by a reputable psychologist that offers advice on how to live, based on the results of hundreds of scientific studies. Most of the book is just simple, concrete practical advice that has been shown to work for achieving certain specific goals. For example, if you take a moment to sit down and write out five bad things that you are glad have not happened to you (e.g., "I am glad I have not been fired"), your mood will improve in the short term. This has been confirmed in dozens of studies, and it is consistent with my experience. There are a couple of caveats on this recommendation I need to mention. The book is not philosophical, and at some points it suggests a negative evaluation of philosophical attempts to figure out how to live life. Certain parts of the book are based on the values of the author, who is a Christian. For example, there is a chapter that argues that cultivating your spiritual life is a good idea, based on the alleged fact that studies show that religious people are happier. So, it's a good book, just focus on the practical advice and take anything philosophical with a grain of salt. http://www.amazon.com/The-Pursuit-Happiness-Discovering-Fulfillment/dp/0380715228

Hi. This sounds like an interesting approach. Can you give an example or two?

I could be wrong about this, but Guests also seem to come and go much more frequently on weekend evenings.

I was the main poster who made a big deal about that side issue. I can sympathize with wanting to keep the discussion focused, but if someone makes a claim like that on an Objectivist forum then obviously they are going to be challenged pretty vigorously. Rand is a value to most Objectivists, not just in her abstract ideas but in her personal character. I agree that the issue should just be completely dropped at this point, though.