KyaryPamyu

Is the "experience", an experience of the "self" being a "spatio-temporal being", or is this to imply that everything is a thought? In a nutshell, If I think about Selena Gomez, then I'm responsible for having Selena present in my head. If I see a car on the street, then that sight was not my own doing. Some external objects made contact with my eyeballs, thus I saw a car. Can't do much about that. The premise of Schelling's system is that your own thinking is not a primary. There's another thinking activity, separate from yours, somewhere in the back, that produces: - The cars that you see on the street - The you, a human person of a particular gender, age and height, who sees cars and can also freely think about Selena The reason you're unconscious of that force in the back is because thinking-as-such cannot come into conscious awareness. Try it: think about mangoes and then catch yourself in the act. 1. Mangoes 2. I'm thinking about mangoes 3. I'm thinking about thinking about mangoes 4. (Goes on forever) Hence, for Fichte and the early Schelling, there's only two (indirect) ways for humans to discover that hidden, unconscious force: - Transcendental deduction, see the OP for what that is - Art, in which case it appears in the form of certain unplanned things bleeding into the artwork. ----- A third possibility which they don't explore (due to not knowing much about it), is the one proposed by certain schools of Eastern philosophy. If you represent that unconscious side with '0' and the conscious side of being a human person reading this post with '1', like this: 0-|-|-|-|-|-|-1 Then there are certain meditative practices that allow the conscious side to go from this: 0-|-|-|-|-|-|-1 ...to this 0-|-|-|-|-1-|-| ...to this 0-|-1-|-|-|-|-| ....all the way up to this 0-1-|-|-|-|-|-| In other words, you can at least become conscious of the intermediary steps between the unconscious impulse and the full fledged reality you experience right now.

That's a funny thing to say, considering that O'ists don't care much for philosophy, if at all. Which is ironic, considering that Objectivism is a philosophy. I've seen people on this forum complain about discussing 'esoteric' metaphysics stuff when people could be discussing what's realy important, which is the current political events. Bringing up things like emergence, mathematics or idealism is simply way outside the scope of why many O'ists adopted O'ism in the first place: to ground a political stance in a rational foundation, and/or to hold a rational alternative to the mainstream 'cults'. It serves as a clear-cut and complete-ish worldview, while simultaneously minimizing the need to window-shop for other philosophies.

Of course. It means to lift your hat up I've never written any philosophy papers (nor have I ever felt the temptation), but I do have my own preferences regarding what I read. If possible, I go with a scholar that specializes in that particular thinker. I noticed from my career in classical music that Jack-of-all-trades musicians are very limited in their grasp of the genres they play compared to musicians that immerse every ounce of their energy into a single musical period (even a single composer). In philosophy as well, this sort of immersion often leads to unearthing many flaws of past scholarship. I don't think it's a good idea to read the originals until one has first read the work of somebody who dedicates the bulk of his career to that thinker. That scholar usually does the heavy-work when it comes to pointing out very subtle differences between seemingly identical statements made by other thinkers of that tradition. Most importantly, there are often differences between the early and later versions of a philosophical system. Many times, the author of that system never points that out, creating the misconception that it's still the same Coca-Cola. I don't doubt 2046's advice is in good spirit. I've gone through my share of academic pains. Although I always stress, to myself, the importance of keeping context in any discussion, online or in person. Yes, a prime example of blowing out the consequences of an idea out of proportion. I highly recommend the paper on Fichte I linked in my previous post. No other Kantian has as many (strong and loose) affinities with Rand.

No, it's not: --- From different premises, that's the whole point. Despite seemingly deal-breaking differences, both Rand and Kant were adults living in a world where success requires acquring a lot of practical wisdom. Combine that with their ferocious intellects and you're bound to learn a lot of profound lessons from reading both. The injustice done to Kant by O'ist thinkers is also important, but pales in comparision to this. The list is extracted from the OP. The context is there, though anybody who wants more on this can search it up. Never said that. No, you need that for your specific purposes. Not 'we' - as in, the whole forum. The premise you're smuggling in here is that there's one, and only one, proper way to discuss books, such as your and if you don't do it like that, that's not in accord with the Rules of Philosophy, section 73, paragraph 2. I do whatever I want. The OP is a presentation in a language that (I hope) a five-year old or layman could understand. I'm not doing something as grandiose as defending a thesis, dressed in formal wear with PowerPoint presentations behind my back, being very careful about what my distinguished colleagues/blog readers might think about how I phrased paragraph 42. ----- You're right Stephen, there is dissonance between Kant and Rand regarding this issue. Though this is not also true of Fichte and the early Schelling, who wanted to 'finish' Kant's project. My interest is in exploring affinities between O'ism and Kantianism, including other (major) Kantians. Fichte also dissolves the duty-pleasure dichotomy:

2046, The OP is a book summary. I focus on what the book says and try to convey it in straightforward language. There's no connection between the terms I use and their professional academic usage. The actual term Schelling uses is 'dogmatism'. According to Merriam-Webster, this word is commonly used to mean but in this book it's actually an antiquated technical term: (note: 'objective' is an antiquated way of saying 'object') Dogmatism, when used to mean the rival of idealism, has also been called materialism. But even that term is connected to an outdated theory of matter. By focusing on the content of my writing (not the fancy words), it's clear that I replace 'dogmatism' with a modern-sounding moniker ('physicalism') for the first of the two possible starting-principles/axioms: Note that I personally have no interest in philosophy except as lessons I can apply to my life. I couldn't care less about academic technicalities - I know that precision is important if you want to distinguish between thinkers and establish taxonomies. Here, I choose to communicate some broad essentials that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel played with in various ways. I believe that there are others in the same boat as me, even on philosophy forums, so I would only be worried about anachronism if I have clear indications that this is relevant to the topic being discussed. The 'main thesis' is that Kantianism and Objectivism share some points of affinity, despite being grounded in quite incompatible premises. This affinity is not restricted to any topic in particular. For illustration, I used Schelling's system, which re-organizes the Kantian essentials by grounding them in a different principle: the self's activity. Yes, not in an external reality, which is doubly shocking for the conscientious Objectivist. This is precisely what makes the book a great tool for illustration. Examples of this affinity: - The status of perceptual form - The 'subjugation' of nature (production) as central to morality - Retraining from the initiation of physical force, also central to morality - Free will as compatible with lawful nature. - The artwork as a world-in-miniature (not mentioned in my summary), beauty as the pleasure resulting from overcoming tension. The purpose of this thread is to show that Kantianism is not what O'ist thinkers (misleadingly) represent it to be. No, it's not about reality as social-consensus, wishes controlling reality, the form of perception being evil etc. Just listen to Peikoff's lecture on Hegel, then tell me whether this topic, however scatterbrained it may come across to be in your reading, is useful or not. Again, my interest is in the essentials. Does your mind conform to external reality, yes or no? If yes, then you're comfortable with the idea that forms (color, echolocation, Kantian categories) do not exclude a perfect mind-to-reality correspondence. Distinguishing between self and nature, and the form in which that occurs, doesn't compromise anything. Kant's skepticism has a lot more to do with the limits of knowledge. He says that if you use things from experience to explain experience, it's kind of like saying the Bible is true because the Bible says so. Peikoff distinguishes between awareness and means of awareness in OPAR p. 39. I don't see what this changes, though. Any affectation of the means (sense perception) will also affect the end (consciousness); whether consciousness is immaterial or physical is irrelevant, its content would still be conditioned by the whole impinging business. Peikoff's position is that reductionism does not erase the fact of consciousness (Source). To expand on that quip I wrote about Peikoff, he basically looks at his consciousness and says 'look, I can't choose to not see the color green. My consciousness has identity, therefore reality is primary and consciousness is passive in regard to it! it's only a mirror! Q.E.D.' I chose Schelling's book because he theorizes about a free activity that creates its own passivity, i.e. it unconsciously limits itself. Every part of my summary is relevant to this central thesis. Yes, even the part about art, which is his solution-of-sorts. Thanks, Stephen. Lots of interesting points.

Confused? I'll summarize one of the main texts of the Kantian tradition. How compatible is the Kantian framework with Objectivism? You be the judge. The book is F.W.J. Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), a famous work that enjoys the same status in the philosophical tradition as, let's say, Beethoven's Eroica symphony does in music. (Also check out Boydstun's thread on the same book, and some of his other explorations of Kantianism. ---------------- What causes the changes that occur in consciousness? Two possibilities: 1. Consciousness arises out of physical objects impinging upon physical organs or 2. The experience of being a spatio-temporal being is a thought, produced by the act of thinking. -------- According to Schelling (and his predecesors Kant and Fichte), neither possibility can be proved. Knowledge is contextual. If physicalism is the basic premise, then I have to explain consciousness in a way consistent with physicalism. Conversely, if thinking is the more fundamental premise, then I have to explain why I can't control some parts of my conscious experience, even though my premise says that I think all of my reality. Since we check the validity of a claim by verifying if it contradicts other stuff we know, we need something to start off with, some axioms. ---------------- Pros and cons of each starting principle To know is to identify something, e.g. I identify that I have five fingers on each hand. There has to be some things to identify out there, otherwise the identification faculty (consciousness) will get bored. Whatever you identify, you cannot deny the identification (consciousness) of that which you identify (identity/existence). Objectivism puts consciousness in a secondary role, on quite sensible grounds: - Consciousness is one of many things that may exist - Consciousness is, well, consciousness. There has to be something to identify, otherwise no identification occurs. This does miss an important detail though. Consciousness can study its own doing. This is what Rand did when developing her epistemology - she did things with her mind, then looked back at what she did and neatly documented it in ITOE. The possibility that Rand and Peikoff doesn't explore is this: the activity of producing thoughts, if it exists to begin with, can be conscious of its own self. Just as you, the reader, have a self-image (positive or negative). This other posibility will be the starting point of Schelling's system. As Fichte did, he treats philosophy like Geometry: you start with a theorem, which you then prove by actually constructing the figure. Here, the theorem is that self-consciousnss can only occur in the form of a spatio-temporal individual. Only through proceeding with the construction will the hypothesis be proven or disproven. ---------------- The transcendental deduction Don't confuse a transcendental deduction with a logical deduction. A transcendental deduction asks 'what allows this action to occur?' Let's say you teach a kid about apples. You place two apples in front of him, and point to both in succesion saying 'apple...apple'. The child points at them and repeats 'apple'. He's formed the concept 'apple' from experience, and now he can expand the concept to include other details, such as 'apples are a fruit', 'sweet', and so on. But, says Kant, that child wouldn't have been able to do that without the ability to distinguish one point in space from another. Despite the apples looking similar, the kid could tell they're not the same thing because one's there and the other's over there. Space is the condition for the ability to pick apples. If regular philosophers comment on the footbal game from the audience, the transcendental philosopher gets down-and-dirty by playing in the field. His method goes something like this: 1. He thinks something he wants to find the conditions for 2. While thinking it, his mind necessarily performs an additional act that enables the first act to be succesfully performed 3. He takes note of that additional act and freely recapitulates it. This causes yet another involuntary act to occur alongside it. 4. Rinse and repeat until the limit is reached. Kant was the first to perform such a deduction. He asked what the mind has to do in order to distinguish between two kinds of mental content: sensations from outside and sensations authored by the self. This is because both of them are united in the same self: I think both P and Q and therefore a differentiation is necessary. Rand says that Kant equivocates between content and form. This is certainly true under her framework, where the same content can be detected in many different forms. For instance, the same content - location - can be detected in forms such as sight (humans), echolocation (whales), and magnetoreception (pigeons). However, for Kant, the content is already taken care of by whatever detection mecahnism you have in place. That's the level of sensation. His concern is, in fact, with the form in which the difference between 'inner' and 'outer' sensations is grasped. To find out the answer, Kant does the only thing he can do, which is to study his own mind in the act of distinguishing the two. He concludes that categories such as quality, quantity and causality are needed for this. Note that he doesn't rule out the actual existence of quality and quantity, out there in the world. His argument is actually much more simple (paraphrasing his Critique) 'About my own mind, I know certain things for sure. I know that I must actually see Bob to know whether he's tall or not. Consciousness is my turf, hence I can do that kind of study. The external world is, well, not my turf. Only it could study itself like that'. Contra Peikoff, Kant's skepticism has nothing to do with the fact that consciousness grasps in a specific form, and thus all consciousness is disqualified from perceiving reality as it really is (even a godly consciousness). Amusingly enough, Peikoff himself takes a somewhat Kantian route in OPAR, on page 45 where he asks you to imagine that So the mental effect of shape and size corresponds to something out there. In this same way, Kant's theory of perceptual form doesn't pose any problem for this mind-reality correspondence. Regardless, Kant is concerned with studying the character of human knowledge. Metaphysics is for another discussion. ---------------- We now turn back to Schelling - which, I remind you, does not ground his proof on physicalism, but on the act of producing thoughts. He dispenses with the external world, which might or not exist - it's not his business anyway. If the act of producing thoughts tries to sense itself, here's what happens: - I think - I think that I think - I think that I think that I think Ad infintum. The activity of producing thoughts can only, well... produce thoughts. Sensing the production is not possible, except by representing it with yet another thought. The cycle goes on forever and ever. John Galt notes, in his speech, that consciousness has to already be there in order for you to identify it as consciousness. This is also true on an idealistic account. The sequence goes like this: 1. You produce the thought (obviously, you're aware of that thought) 2. You distinguish yourself as the thinker of that thought (self-consciousness) Now let's perform that transcendental deduction thingy. By studying my mind while performing that act of differentiation, I discover that I was able to distinguish myself as the thinker with the help of this criteria: - The thinking act is felt as being in my control. I can analyze, count, think about celebrity gossip etc. - The other side is felt as being outside of my control, i.e. indifferent to my wish. And, in turn, what are the conditions of this? The side that is recalcitrant to my will is represented as the limit to my 'jurisdiction' - extensity/space. And, just as Nature limits my turf, I in turn limit how far it can go by imposing my will upon it ('Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed'). Although my bondage to Nature is permanent, it's actually valid to say that progress can be made. In fact: - I cannot make progress unless there's something to make progress in (the boundary). - The 21st century is better than the Middle Ages, so there's progress even though the list of things I could improve goes on forever. The tracking of your progress, in turn, is going to be made possible by the Kantian categories (causality, quality, quantity etc.) You can look these up, because for now we'll move to the next crucial thing. ---------------- Selfhood (self-image) depends on two related 'shocks' to the self: 1. Distinguishing 'Self' from, well, non-self. We've already covered that. 2. Affirming oneself as oneself, not some other wannabe self. Expanding a bit on that, to recognize yourself you need Nature to serve as the foil, the 'not-self', which threatens your survival by not listening to your wishes, thus forcing you into a self-assertive, 'lord-over-nature' mode of operation. The natural companion (no pun intended) is the clash with other Selves. This makes you realize that whatever you think, see and feel applies to your consciousness only - this is the crucial condition for sensing yourself as an individual self. Fichte and Schelling stress that a 'self-as-such' is a mere abatraction. It can, in fact, only exist as an individual, embodied self. This has important political implications. If your will does not belong to you, then it will be part of somebody outside of your own self (slavery). To be free from others forcefully imposing on you, the Randian principle of physical force is a selfish necessity. ---------------- As stated before, any attempt to sense the production of thoughts simply ends up creating yet another drasted thought, forever and ever. The development of the universe, from its basic elements all the way to organic matter and the biosphere, represents the dialectic by which the Self continually 'improves' its mental representation of itself, but never quite makes it (as is to be expected). The philosophy of nature is yet another fascinating aspect of the system we'll have to skip for now. These abortive and self-refining attempts eventually lead, through an evolutiomary chain, to the human being, whose reasoning faculties allow it to trace back the history of self-consciousness by philosophizing. In other words, what we did just now. Turns out, this strategy doesn't work either. Recapitulating the history of self-consciousness is fine and all, but we started by wanting to sense thinking as a productivity. Philosophy responds 'sure, all you have to do is perform this roundabout feat of mental gymnastics, step after step after step, and you'll get to it for sure!'. ---------------- Riddle: can you be unconscious of having produced some part of your experience? Because this is the number one thing L. Peikoff will bring up when arguing for physicalism. He'll say that you can't control the features of your own consciousness. Then he'll conflate 'consciousness has identity' with physicalism. A possible alternative has been provided by the previous deduction, but we want something more concrete. Solution: Consciously produce something you don't recognize as your own. This solution turns to Kant's aesthetic theory, specifically his treatment of artistic genius. There's plenty of artists with baffling craftsmanship, but no poetry. And just as many artists with splendid sense but no skill. The genius is one for whom nature was so generous as to provide him/her with both. During the creation of a painting, a play, or even a whole mythology (as civilizations do), things go haywire and the artwork is infused with a kind of wisdom that the artist clealry doesn't possess. The kind of wisdom that applies universally to all epochs. The artist is not the author, and yet he is. Sounds familiar? Nature doesn't care whether its channel of expression - the artist - even knows what the hell his painting means. That painting is an instance of Nature being driven by its frustration to properly represent itself as a productivity, and not as a product - the same frustration that caused all of its other attempts. It finally succeeds within the world of art, because in an artwork, the unconscious wisdom that makes a clandestine appearance alongside the consciously executed parts is a document that attests for a Nature that produces on and on and on, without conscious awareness of doing so. This is the conclusion of the system. Since consciousness, through man, is finally able to grasp its nature as an unceasing productivity, the dialectic tensions come to a halt and 'infinite satisfaction' is achieved. It's no coincidence that Beauty is defined as a sense of harmony. Ayn Rand seems to agree.

Essentialy, certain things require more attention/effort to fully grasp than others. In such a situation, you can choose to 'work' in order to arrive at a clear understanding, or you can choose not to. As per Rand, this is the basic choice inasmuch as it affects all other choices. Put differently, you're choosing the quality of your choices. You seem to have your own view of what volition is. In O'ist theory, volition is not the 'freedom' to put your attention on whatever you find interesting. Quite the contrary, it's the ability to second-guess what you happen to find interesting, and act accordingly. 'Existence' in O'ism designates the totality of everything that is - consciousness, trees, chocolate milkshakes and whatever else. Consciousness is distinguished from its absence, as well as from anything that is not an instance of conscious experience. If you're an idealist, grasping yourself is held to require a grasp of what you are not, hence those two are never apart in the act of self-knowledge.

So, 1. Intelligence is 'a process carried on using consciousness' 2. Body processes are not carried on using consciousness 3. Therefore body processes are not intelligent. Q.E.D Except it's precisely the first premise that's been called into question in this thread, i.e. that intelligent acts are always performed with consciousness. Counter-examples have been provided: your mind comming up with solutions to problems when you're not consciously thinking about those problems; and certain literary pieces being produced in a 'blind-trance', surprising the writer as they come. You've simply sidestepped that part, asserted your view of intelligence with no justification/evidence, then made a blatantly obvious logical deduction based on it.

See here for context. I'm using Harry Binswanger's term, as applied to adjusting your degree of mental focus.

This depends on whether all non-conscious entities convey information in the same manner, or if there are differences between them in this regard. Note that the body tissue responsible for the subconscious mind might also interact with other non-conscious entities in the body. If talking specifically about subconscious processes, then I do not consider the process of spitting out an Atlas scene the same as:

Let's start by accepting this premise, that automatic body processes, carried on without consciousness, do not involve intelligence. The thing is, subconscious processes qualify as both 1) automatic body processes, and 2) carried on without consciousness (the sub in 'subconscious' is there precisely to indicate that the process is outside of conscious awareness). If you take this in account, then does not hold true under your own premise. You can indirectly control the subconscious mind, e.g. give it a problem to solve and the solution might 'pop' in your conscious awareness later. But you can also indirectly control other automatic body processes, such as your heartbeat. Just imagine a stressful situation and you'll notice that your heart speeds up. You can argue that the conscious mind is like a CEO who delegates lots of complex tasks to his employee, Mr. Subconscious. The boss can then revise the employee's work, but claiming that the employee did not use intelligence to complete his work seems to contradict the results.

(In O'ism) causality means: the way a thing behaves is an aspect of what that thing is like. To illustrate this in the case of volition: Identity -> the nervous system Causality -> the nervous system is configured in a way that allows for self-regulation Volition -> self-regulation is currently in use 'Identity' covers everything about the nervous system; 'causality' covers only one thing: that you can trace its behaviour back to its features. Put differently, causality is to identity as 'jumping' is to kangaroos. There is no case where you are not 'ascribing' causality to identity, since causality is simply a narrow statement about identity. Ascribing 'sober dryness' to truth is only proper if you've already bought into the premise that the way things actually are is not exciting, beautiful, cool etc. Sure, if no human existed to evaluate an apple in relation to his goal of survival, then there would be no such thing as 'healthy', 'pleasant' etc. But introduce humans into the picture and things change. Now in addition to the fact that nature just is, there are additional facts such as 'nature is a nice/horrible place to be in - for humans'. Value-judgements such as poetic and beautiful are not just BS imposed on the 'just-isness' of nature. Value-judgements identify true facts regarding a thing's effect on your survival. For Rand, the two most basic value-judgemets for humans are: 'the world is good/bad', and 'I am good/bad'. The first, she called the benevolent/malevolent universe premise; the second, 'self-esteem' (I am capable or incapable to live in the universe).

About inspired writing sessions, Rand said: (Art of Fiction, ch. 1) The credit for the 'almost perfect' scene obviously goes to intelligence, yet here she puts some stress on: not knowing what's coming; being surprised as it comes; feeling as if somebody else is dictating the text; and some 'blindness' being at play. This is not too far removed from what the Romantics referred to as an unconscious intelligence in the human psyche and in other organisms.

Intelligence is a natural phenomena. So is life. You probably mean that not all goal-oriented action is volitional. That's true when talking about plants, but the philosophers I'm referencing don't use 'intelligence' as a synonym for volition. They measure goal-orientation in degrees, with rocks showing virtually none and volition being the most potent and developed form of goal-orientation. This is probably obvious, but people don't typically adopt claims if they think they have no backing and evidence. This question is like saying "if you're homeless... why not buy a house!" The whole scientific and philosophic enterprise consists of validating and proving things. Needless to say, philosophers tend to be a bit more meticulous than average. If they claim something that's non-intuitive, they probably have some good reason for it (and that reason is seldom nihilism, or similar )

My inquiry hardly has the 'depth' that you mention. I'm actually merely presenting ideas from famous philosophers. It's not my understanding that's developed, it's the topic itself that has received a lot of development historically. If you read any material on this, you might change your mind about the 'depth' part. My personal experience shows that as time passes, more and more insights develop from things I've studied or thought about in the past. I doubt this phenomenon will ever have an end. So I can almost guarantee that I am utterly unable to predict what will suddenly 'click' in my mind months from now, completely shaking off my previous assumptions. This post I wrote a few months ago is the anthitesis of the ideas presented in this thread. There, I tried to give an O'ist rebuttal of idealism without using the cringe-worthy canned responses that O'ists like to repeat as if quoting from the Gospel. Your body will heal your finger if you cut it, and will switch to burning stored fat if you starve it. This is an unconscious form of intelligence, different from the kind involved in planning your weekend. If consciousness is an active and dynamic process, then all of your perceptions are infused with life, whether you're conscious of your own freedom, or of some dead object like the bed in your room. So if you postulate a self-sustaining, self-generated consciousness (which is not a by-product of something else), you can study its way of grasping things. For instance, to conceptualize your own freedom, you need a process of differentiation, i.e. a complementary grasp of what the alternative is (something completely unfree and subject to mechanism -> Nature).

Absolutely nothing to do with Plato. This is not about empty logical gymnastics, but about the living, breathing process we're all acquainted with. To translate the banana/orange analogy: When you think, you think about a specific topic - a determinate object of inquiry. But you achieve this 'fixation' by means of an ongoing buzzing activity, the lively process of thinking. When you look back at your actions, you turn your previous dynamic activity into a static object of inquiry. If you remove either the activity, or the resulting experience of determinate objects, you destroy both intelligence and nature. (Nature here is used to mean: that which does not appear to be intelligent, dynamic or alive). Under this view, the identity of consciousness is a 'self-sustaing and self-generated process', to paraphrase Rand's definition of life. By the way, those ideas are borrowed from 19th century philisophy and are not my personal theories or endorsements. It'll probably be a long time until I reach a personal position on this matter.

Nope, this is way past general statements about consciousness or the world, such as the fact that they exist or that they are what they are (identity). I want to find out actual, specific information about the nature/identity of consciousness, which means axioms are as relevant here as they'd be for inquiring into the best way to cook chicken. For example, I'm asking whether nature and conscious intelligence are two things, like a banana and an orange; or, whether 'nature' and 'intelligence' are two perspectives on one thing, just as 'round' and 'sweet' are perspectives on one orange.

Not sure how to make this clearer: and: Where exactly do you see the slightest hint of "non-existence"? Does consciousness not exist to you?

Actually, it's the idea of teleology that is based on the earlier, more fundamental issue of whether existence is intelligent. Not the reverse, as you state. Ditto, politics is higher in the knowledge chain and is based on earlier, more fundamental issues such as metaphysics. Rand and Peikoff never made claims about consciousness or existence with some pre-established agenda of attacking altruism, collectivism, or warning about the destructive effects of authoritarianism. Those things might naturally follow from certain conclusions in the more fundamental areas. Not relevant. To benefit you in any way, your appraisal of reality must be accurate. Then other considerations follow. Arbitrary, in this case, means deciding beforehand what consciousness is like. Specifically, based on empty logical deductions, such as: "Awareness is awareness of something, therefore that particular something must precede the being-aware of it". An impressive feat of logic, but it ommits an important fact: consciousness is also something. It's as much a something as a fruit smoothie or a music CD. In its glorious something-ness, consciousness is not barred from the benefits of fellow somethings. If you make the case that a fruit smoothie can still exist even if all consciousness suddenly perishes, you can make the reverse claim as well: consciousness might still exist if the universe perishes. You can't make the second claim if you've already decided on a framework where consciousness must be a by-product of blind, non-conscious stuff. But what exactly is that confident "must" based on? On deducing from a definition of consciousness that is already in accord with the 'by-product' theory. Oops. Somehow we missed the step where that has to be first proved rather than uncritically accepted from the get-go. Ditto. ---- So, how do we prove either alternative? Is non-intelligent nature here first and consciousness develops later, with no prior examples of intelligence in Nature? Or is nature a by-product of understanding onself in conceptual terms, i.e. of needing to differentiate 'self-hood' from what it is not (blind mechanism)? The problem is, until you disprove the second hypothesis, all the scientific experiments that you can perceive (courtesy of consciousness) could be an example of how having a determinate conception of oneself is exactly that: determinate, meaning: not some other conception -> limitation and lawfulness are inherent in the enterprise. O'ism is a fantastic philosophy that can benefit human life tremendously, but something needs to be done ASAP about the handwaving of those fundamental issues, and the relative lack of critical analysis of them by O'ists.

Yes. For Rand, it's about deciding which is first, consciousness or existence, with the vote going to Existence. The logic being that awareness of something presupposes the existence of that something. As early as a century and a half before Rand, philosophers already advanced beyond the chicken and egg problem and expanded the inquiry to other possibilities, such as whether Existence appears as intelligence if looked from one side, and as non-intelligent blind nature when looked from another side. This topic is too rich to even begin scratching here, I give some indications in my previous posts. Regardless of Peikoff's assertions, in most such systems it's not about social consensus or wishes over reality. It's actually an analysis and explanation of nature's ironclad laws and why the master is not your wish, but the nature of understanding. If you've read Rand's ITOE, you know what I'm talking about: to grasp something conceptually, you need differentiation and integration, knowledge is contextual etc.; these requirements of the mind, when applied to the task of self-conceptualization, ironically lead idealist philosophers exactly to where Rand also ends up: 'you can't eat the cake and have it too'. There are many approaches to meditation but the goal is mostly the same for all techniques. The meditation I practice is not based on focus, since focus is like caffeine or weight-lifting for the body and mind. This prevents what you're after. Instead, you let go of any effort and manipulation, which gradually lowers you metabolism. Your breathing stops ocassionaly, you might also blank-out (since you're conditioned to fall asleep everytime you pass a certain treshold of relaxation and inactivity). With repeated experience, your nervous system adjusts itself and stops blanking out at those theta and alpha states. It remains highly alert, as alert as during normal daily activity. Yes, likely. Although the activity of Aristotle's Prime Mover has nothing contradictory about it.

Granted, defining each term will make my inquiry clearer: 1. A focus exclusively on one topic, namely yourself, in isolation from all other topics -> consciousness only of oneself. This can be sensory, conceptual, Yogic etc. 2. You are aware of something, then you notice moments later that you are aware of that something -> consciousness of being conscious. 3. Being aware that you are conscious, without first being conscious -> a contradiction, akin to not eating but being aware that you're eating. It seems that Galt is talking about the third example. There are various moments in Galt's speech where he criticizes popular philosophic views; if that's the case here as well, then he is denouncing a claim that almost nobody in philosophy has ever made. Most professional philosophers know that the claim Galt dismisses is silly; noticing this doesn't even require philosophical chops. When Idealist thinkers talk about consciousness being conscious of itself, they mean something different, and they argue for it in a very careful and thorough manner. One popular theme is that 'identity' is not synonymous with 'static'. A watefall, marathon or music concert represent a definite identity, which can, of course, be referred to as static. What isn't static is how the warerfall, as a whole, is brought into being through multiple steps. Same with the marathon and music concert. Another key question for idealism is whether a distinction between a 'static' or 'dynamic' thing is meaningful at all. Nobody denies that a waterfall is a waterfall, A is A, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a waterfall that is not a dynamic process. Rand points out that an action is something a thing does. If there's no thing to do stuff = no action is being performed. Idealists are well aware of this as well. Rather than claiming that actions-without-entities exist, they make this hypothesis: seeing a generative action, or an entity, is akin to seeing a waterfall as a process, or as a thing. Regard those two as separate identities and you go astray. O'ism is critical about being concerned with what a thing should be like, to the point of ignoring obvious evidence to the contrary. Rand called the Marxists 'mystics of muscle' because they deny the existence of consciousness on the grounds that it contradicts their views on matter. Idealists opt for a model in which consciousness (a specific idenity) has power over itself: it's somehow a self-regulating and self-shaping phenomena akin to living organisms, which work on themselves like a diamond that chisels itself. There is no talk about which comes first - the generative process or the entity - because they're not two distinct things, Nature and Intelligence are identical. Under the model above, self-consciousness means this: retrospective awareness, i.e. looking back at one's own acts and objectifying them. As an example, I wrote this post in steps but I can mentally regard the writing of it as one single unit. The task of most idealist systems is to show how this retrospective look requires more than just one little step. To allude to the famous beginning of Hegel's 'logic', saying that I exist with no specific details as to what/when/how is not satisfacatory, since the claim which I'm opposing (that I don't exist) is equaly devoid of that what/when/how. These things must be overcome, for the self-conception to be adequate. My point is that neither existence, consciousness nor identity are incongruent with those examples, and that Galt's dismissal of idealism consists in denouncing a claim that's virtually non-existent in serious philosophy. This is not enough - I wish some professional Objectivists will talk about topics like this in the future, as this area is severely lacking...

Being aware of your own existence is definitely awareness of something, even if you are cut off from other kinds of perception. My point is that Galt dimisses the possibility of such an awareness (only of oneself) in a context where this kind of self-only awareness is widely practiced for millenia in Eastern countries. Its characteristics can be studied using EEG and what not. Certainly there are patterns of movement, such as straight or zigzag. No movement = no shape of movement. You're right that the primacy of existence is used in O'ist circles to underline the 'passive' nature of consciousness, as in: wishing doesn't make it so, consciousness must conform to what is. Also, definite claims about the nature of consciousness (apart from the fact that it is of a certain identity) are wisely delegated to the special sciences. What strikes me is that the claims of Idealist philosophers aren't usually a claim that consciousness has no nature; instead, they are speculations about what that nature is (I gave examples in the OP). Sometimes, O'ist intellectuals invoke the fact that 'consciousness has identity' as if the cause of idealism was a denial that consciousness has identity (which is not the case).

Arguably, the most important point upon which Objectivism rests is the fact that consciousness presupposes the thing that you are conscious of. No thing to be aware of = no awareness. Quoting Galt in Atlas Shrugged: It always surprised me how little Rand talked about this subject (beyond Galt's terse statement), considering the rich history of philosophical discussion on this subject. So much of Objectivism relies on it, and yet its often treated like a passing remark to throw in once in a while before going into meatier topics. What got me thinking about it again is my daily practice of NSR (the inexpensive version of Transcendental Meditation). TM is a famous (and infamous) form of meditation for which there are some available medical studies that describe the physiological and psychological markers of the meditative state. I can only speak from my own experience, but during meditation there are periods when I am unconscious. Except, it's not the unconsciousness of sleep, where upon waking up you rely on the clock to know how many hours have passed since you've been unconscious. Instead, after meditating I look back at the preceding 15 minutes and realize that I was completely awake throughout the whole thing - I never once actually fell asleep. So, instead of having been unconscious, I was in fact simply cut off from the senses and from thought processes, an experience akin to unconsciousness but somehow missing the part where you "pass out". Under this model, the argument that 'consciousness is consciousness of something' still holds true. Implicit in the 'conscious sleep' I mentioned is a simple sense of I am - just, not grasped through sensory experience or intellectual processes. The problem with Galt's argument is in the second part of the quote, where he uses the initial premise to deduce that 'a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms'. This can't be deduced logically but needs to be verified medically using data about the human brain and nervous system. Regardless of whether you can be awake and aware without sensory experience or not, Galt's conclusion is not actually necessary if one wants to make a point for the primacy of existence. The axioms of existence and identity are used in every proof. Of course, the concept of identity applies not only to objects, but to every aspect of reality, including fundamental forces such as gravity. One key question of 19th century philosophy was whether there is a sort of 'force', a specific instance of identity, whose characteristic is that it dynamically generates things. After all, things are often the result of a process, of small steps working in concert to bring it into existence. Remove the process, and the thing evaporates as well. Wanting to account for the intelligent aspect of existence, such as biological life and freedom, the German Romantics proposed the following: at the very root, existence is neither mechanical nor intelligent. Rather: existence appears either mechanical OR intelligent depending on what the human subject looks at when studying it. To clarify this, it's possible for a human to think of a shape divorced from the actual object that is of that shape; however, a 'floating' shape is not possible in real life, only in your head. Similarly, you can consider intelligent productiveness and blind static existence as two distinct things, but they might not be possible without each other, the same way a shapeless object is not possible in reality. For F.W.J. Schelling, this is impossible to grasp intellectually, because ''blind mechanism" and 'intelligence' appear to be antonyms, kind of like left and right, cold and hot. His proposed solution in his 1800 System was not Yoga (which was probably unknown to him), but works of Art. If free productive intelligence and its opposite, dead mechanism, are perspectives on the same one thing, Schelling argues that you require some method to show this in experience. Philosophy will not satisfy you, because discursive explanations rely on concepts, and the concept "freedom" is partly defined by what it is not (i.e. not unfreedom). So how are we to grasp that freedom and unfreedom are actually the same one thing? Not through philosophy, that's for sure. Schelling proposes, instead, an extra-philosophic solution: it should be possible for humans to produce something using one's fully conscious and intelligent intention, but end up with a product whose characteristics are unrecognizable and not reducible to that conscious process. More clearly, a consciously planned activity that leads to a foreign, unrecognizable result. For Schelling, this is precisely the distinguishing characteristic of artworks produced by genius (natural talent). The way talented artists achieve certain feats with no conscious knowledge of how they did it is simply a sharper, clearer-than-normal example of the non-difference between freedom and unfreedom, conscious and unconscious aspects of existence. In the end, humans can come to grasp this unity through 'aesthetic intuition'. When Galt says that 'a consciousness conscious only if itself' is impossible, he is in agreement Kant's assesment that direct knowledge of one's existence is impossible without sense experience and concepts (or only to a god, maybe). However, not only does Indian philosophy have a notion of direct self-knowledge, it also has a method to experience it for oneself: Yoga. In meditation, you remain fully conscious as your body and intellect go into a profound state of sleep and diminished activity. This allows you to experience the quiet and minimally-active state at the root of the subsequent analytical stirrings of the intellect (more on this later). ----- Kant's succesor, Johann Fichte, came up with a criticism of the conventional idea that you can explain consciousness by analizing it. For example, you use your mind to reflect back on the actions of your mind. Then, you look at how you used your mind to look at how you used your mind to look at the actions of your mind. This can go on ad infinitum. Fichte argues that you can't 'catch' yourself in the act of thinking; you can only catch yourself BY thinking, i.e. through first doing the deed. Thus, the move from unconsciousness to consciousness can only be deduced intellectually as a necessary assumption, but it can never experienced directly or studied philosophically. According to Vedic philosophy, the structure of the perceived universe is based precisely on looking back at the first, most rudimentary conscious experience (see beginning of this thread). Awareness looks back at itself, then looks back at how it looked back at itself etc, analizes the differences and similarities between those acts, and thus comes to entertain multiple perspectives on its own powers; but those multiple perspectives are still the actions of that one single stream of awareness, which (as was the case with Fichte) can never grasp itself directly. The act of consciousness is beyond all possible means of cognizing it (Para Brahman). In this model, Existence's repertoire of self-perspectives range from ~wakefulness empty of content~ (the simplest perspective, experienced in Yoga) all the way to the narrowest possible perspectives that can be generated by analizing it. Diversity and multiplicity are literally in the Universe's 'head', and all things and beings are somehow one. This ties back to Kant's succesors, who had a similar task of showing how the categories that make up conscious experience (causality etc.) are simply the manner in which awareness comes to grasp itself in some form. For the Schelling of 1800, the goal of full self-knowledge is reached in art, for Hegel in philosophy, and for Indians, it seems, in a direct physiological experience called Turiya (the fourth state of consciousness after Waking, Dreaming and Sleeping). I wonder if any prominent Objectivist intellectual has explored this topic in more detail somewhere... let me know if you have any leads.

Objectivists typically dismiss the 'thing-in-itself' when understood to mean 'thing as it really is'. Since there's no thing that isn't the way it is, the 'really' part is redundant. Mind and matter are types of things adding up to the totality (Existence). It's this totality that has primacy, not the specific kinds of things that comprise it. If you tweak either the biological tissue making up the sensory apparatus, or the objects it interacts with, you create a change in the result; hence, 'thing-as-perceived' refers to an existential event between the two elements. Dismissing the notion of 'reality as it really is' still allows for a lack of knowledge regarding certain things. We can know things about the bat's experience in a human conceptual form, but cannot ever directly experience what the bat experiences.