SpookyKitty

If the price of bread were raised from $2.00 to $20.00, would that stop you from buying bread?

Ok, first thing's first. The 2011 Prize did not go to Arto Annila. Second, the dude is a complete and absolute crank. He is spewing absolute gibberish in that article. Third, he claims to have proven that P = NP (HA!), that DNA is not the primary carrier of genetic material (double HA!), among other kinds of nonsense about sigmoid functions and whatnot. The article posted does absolutely nothing to disprove dark matter.

I would pull the switch.

Do you bother to even look at the relevant data before posting your opinions on here? There are many public schools which are very successful. By what I am sure is just pure coincidence, all of these schools are in affluent upper middle class neighborhoods, while all of the failing schools are in poor neighborhoods. Overall funding for public education has not at all increased. Local governments continue to cut funding to schools and then pray that the feds will make up the difference.

I have no idea what you're even talking about.

I think it's a miscommunication problem.

Exactly. So what's so complicated about all this?

Let me ask you this. Would you expel people from the US for the crime of holding some opinion?

THANK you. And he's a supposed 'Objectivist' too.

Then they are threatening to use force. Wow that was hard. There are no inherently poisonous people, just inherently poisonous actions and choices. An individual should be judged on the basis of his actions alone, and not on his ethnic or national background.

People have a right to live wherever they want no matter what country they happen to be born in. You are right. You don't have a right to live here because you need to live here. You have a right to immigrate to the US because you are an individual and no one can tell you otherwise (so long as you respect the rights of others). As far as I can tell, illegal immigration (in and of itself) does not violate the rights of any individual. It should therefore be legal.

Here's a treasure trove: I doubt that a more horrific passage exists anywhere.

I think we should resolve any disagreements and misunderstanding on this topic ASAP. Ok, first of all, the set of fundamental entities is not "built up" by action functions in any sense. The set of fundamental entities is assumed to be given. How one determines how many fundamental entities there are and what their action functions are either requires further assumptions and/or principles, and it is very likely an empirical matter anyway. Let me try to formalize the crap out of this, just to make things as crystal clear as possible. 1. There is a set of fundamental entities, E. (How many entities are in it is not specified, and is therefore left to a choice of model for the theory.) 2. There is a binary relation defined over this set, called "acts on at time t" which I will denote using ">_t". 3. This relation is symmetric, i.e. a >_t b implies b >_t a. 4. An action function of an entity x is a function on the power set of E, that is a_x: P(E) -> P(E). 5. Each entity is associated with a unique action function. (which action function is associated with which entity is a modeling issue). 6. The circumstance of an entity x at time t is the set of all y, elements of E, such that y >_t x, denoted by [y,x]_t 7. The action of an entity x at time t is the set of all y, elements of E, such that x >_t y, denoted by [x,y]_t 8. The action of an entity x at time t+1 is given by a_x([y,x]_t) = [x,y]_(t+1). I understand that disembodied actions and entities that don't act would be a problem if they arose. However, I don't see why it is true that not assuming that there exists an inherent characteristic of physical extension implies either of these things, nor do I understand what it is you mean by "disembodied actions". If by "disembodied action" you mean an action not associated with any entity, that is necessarily impossible due to 2 above. An entity that never acts is not necessarily ruled out, but if one exists, then it is the only such entity because of 5 above. Ruling it out would require a further principle.

There is no "building up" of a set. The set of fundamental entities (and therefore, the set of possible actions) is fixed. To reiterate, the argument of the action function is not a fundamental entity, but a set of fundamental entities, and the output is not an entity or an action, but another set of entities. For example, let's say that we have only three fundamental entities A,B,C. The domain and range of the action function is {{},{A},{B},{C},{A,B},{A,C},{B,C},{A,B,C}} and not {A,B,C}. Fundamental entities and their actions do not act on reality, they are reality. Now, I think it is quite obvious that real things have physical extension, but I think that physical extension is not a fundamental characteristic, but is instead a consequence of the interactions among fundamental entities. As I've said before, the reason I don't think that physical extension is not a fundamental characteristc of fundamental entities is because a) it isn't necessary in the first place and b ) it can be reduced to entities and actions in any case.

I don't understand your question. 'X' is not itself a fundamental entity nor even necessarily an entity (unless we assume that any collection of fundamental entities is itself an entity which is not unreasonable). It is a set of fundamental entities, and specifically, the set of fundamental entities which act on a given entity at a specific time. The action function is not a function from an entity to another entity, but from a collection of entities to another collection of entities. Does this resolve the problem? Because I am totally confused as to why you think a fundamental entity would need physical extension. Becuase it is either true or it isn't that a fundamental entity has a characterist such as shape, and we don't know whether or not it is true. To answer the question, we assume that it is true, and see if that assumption is consistent with what we already know. If it is not, then it is false. In this case, my argument is that if fundamental entities have a shape, then they can be thought of as two fundamental entities with no shape. Hence they are not fundamental, which is a contradiction. Therefore, fundamental entities do not have a shape.

At "the bottom" are fundamental entities, not actions. No action is disembodied. Every action has an entity that acts and an entity which is acted on. I don't see any need for characteristics. I agree. That does not follow. If an action is real, something must exhibit that action, but it is not necessarily true that that thing must have physical extension. Any further decomposition from what?

Yes, fundamental entities without shape cannot be decomposed further, but "fundamental" entities with shape can which is why they aren't fundamental. I don't see why we should assume that physical extension is a pre-condition for action. Physical extension may, however, be a necessary consequence of entities and their actions, though.

No?

Suppose that fundamental entities have an inherent characteristic of shape. Suppose that this shape can only be one of two, cube or sphere. It is possible to decompose such an entity into two entities with no shape. This generalizes to any collection of characteristics with any possible number of values.

^ No, because then Objectivism has no metaphysics. If all Objectivism refers to in its metaphysics is epistemological relations between metaphysical concepts, then it is only talking about Being qua concept, but not Being qua Being.

Yes. I'm saying that it is possible that two distinct entities could have the same actions under the same circumstance for all possible circumstances.

@Eiuol @Plasmatic I will respond to your answers to the 5 questions jointly, because you both seem to have given the same answers. So first off, by "fundamental entity" I mean, not an entity which is most directly perceived, but the kind of entity which cannot be decomposed into any further entities. From now on, whenever I say "entity" I mean "fundamental entity" unless otherwise stated. By "action" I mean, the kind of action which occurs between fundamental entities. That is, the kind of action which is not "direct" or "indirect", but whose only defining features are the entity performing it and the entity it is being performed on. What I mean may be clearer if I state my intent with regard to these definitions. What I ultimately want to do is "boil down" the concept of fundamental entity so that it has no characteristics apart from its actions. That is, the identity of every entity should come down to only what it does under all possible circumstances ("the circumstance of an entity" meaning that which is determined solely by the collection of entities that are acting upon the entity in question). Some further questions. 1) Since you both accept that a fundamental entity can act on itself, and Plasmatic furthermore thinks that all such "self-generated action" is a property of living things, then does that mean that fundamental entities which can act on themselves are living things? 4) You both seem to deny that actions between entities are transative. What I was asking in the original question was whether or not it is the case that if A acts directly on B and if B acts directly on C, then does A necessarily act directly on C? (Note that there should be no fundamental distinctions among actions between fundamental entities other than whatever entities they act upon. Now let me explain the motivation for my definition of the identity of an entity as what it does under every possible circumsance. Mathematically, if x is the set of entities currently acting on the given entity, then f(x) is the set of entities that the given entity will act upon "right after", Call this, the entity's "action function". I'm sure you will both agree that the identity of any entity is, at least in principle, completely knowable. The way we determine the identity of an entity in this scheme is to take the entity and then systematically put it under every possible circumstance and see what it does. In order to be consistent with the law of identity, the same entity should always perform the same action under the same circumstances. Now if entities had inherent characteristics apart from their action functions, then it is possible that two distinct entities could perform the same actions under all possible circumstances and fail to be identical. The inherent characteristcs would then not be discoverable through any possible observation. I am sure you will both agree that this is absurd. So therefore, entities should have no properties besides their action functions. Yay or nay?

@Plasmatic @Eiuol I'll respond to your other posts as soon as I can, but wouldn't it be a good idea to draw a distinction between metaphysical and conceptual primaries? Isn't it possible that metaphysical primaries are not conceptually primary?

Peikoff, in OPAR, p. 13 So which entities are fundamental? Are fundamental entities more like people, rocks, and chairs, or are they more like subatomic particles? I think that they are more like subatomic particles. On p.14 he says, What constitues the circumstances which determine the action of a given entity? Since the world consists only of entities and their actions, I think that the most reasonable answer is that the circumstances under which the action of an entity is completely determined consists only of the entities which act on the entity in question "just before" it performs its action. But there are a few questions we need to consider. 1) Can an entity act on itself? 2) Can a fundamental entity act on itself? 3) If one entity acts on another, is it true that the other also acts on the first? 4) If entity A acts on entity B and entity B acts on C, does A act on C? EDIT: Oh and one final question, do actions exist in the same sense that entities do?

So after spending some time with Google, I've discovered that a floating abstraction is not necessarily an invalid concept. And Eiuol makes a good point in that, just because it may be hard to reduce a concept, doesn't mean it's impossible.