KyaryPamyu

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.

You might be referring to Tenderlysharp's post from a while back. From the founder's mission statement: They do publish every style under the sun, so it's mostly of interest to those that want to keep up with what's going on in the poetry world. There's far more rhymed poetry in the older issues (1912 onwards). Like The New Yorker, the magazine has an 'open door' policy where they publish poems even if you're not famous. They receive about 90.000 submissions/year, with a publication rate below 1%, making it one of the hardest literary magazines to get published in. They even reject submissions from Pulitzer prize winners (and sometimes publish the resulting hate-mail as well).

I know poetry is the most hot-button issue on this forum, but I'm chiming in with yet another installment, this time on modern poetry. Usually when we talk, we use whatever words, metaphors and styles help us effectively communicate the message. In poetry, however, the form is not passive, but an active participant in achieving the desired meaning and effect. We all know that rhyme and meter are artificial, but check this out, if I write the next words Like This there is a special kind of emphasis which would not be achieved by conventional prose. Or, if I said that the sentence you're reading right now raises in your mind like a hungover woman getting up from a bathroom floor, there is disconnect of style that is not strictly necessitated by communicating the gist of the message, but irreplaceable if you want to achieve that exact meaning and effect. Put more simply, poetry is a bona-fide syncretic art, much more than regular prose literature is. This description only takes form in consideration, and remains silent regarding the possible (legitimate) uses of things like opacity an incomprehensibility in poetry (and other art forms). Ayn Rand was against concrete-bound rules when it comes to art, so one can only imagine if she would've been open to modern poetry if she head a rational defense of it. Peikoff, in one of the few treatments of poetry given by an O'ist, thinks that poetry is synonymous with works by western authors. But rhyme and rhytm are not the only kinds of formal artifice employed historically. Tanka poetry uses the 5-7-5-7-7 scheme (number of sylables per line); Greek epics have no rhyming scheme and their meter is meant to facilitate memorization. And many other examples. My newest addiction is looking for gems in Poetry magazine. You have to plough through the 98% of questionable stuff in order to find the 2% of gems, but when you do... it's uncanny how precisely things you deemed incommunicable can be put on a page when you give free reign to form. There's also no particular literary school or theory associated with the magazine, so it's impossible to predict what you'll find when you turn the page to the next poem. All issues can be read on the website. ...though I will occasionaly encounter the full-blown type of subjectivism which claims that an artwork is an artwork because the author said so (the advice is this work is mostly good, by the way). Either way, here are some modern poems to kick-start this thread (which I'm sure will break the OO.com servers due to the massive influx of comments from modern poetry enthusiasts). I don't necessarily condone the values contained inside, only the interesting execution. Some have audio as well (use the play button near the titles) Peripheral (Hannah Emerson) I'm not a religious person but (Chen Chen) New Rooms (Kay Ryan) End of Side A (Adrian Matejka) (an inspiration for this thread, though I like this one of his better, awesome reader)

In the 19th century, German Romantic philosophy was in part a reaction to the reductionism of English philosophy. Germans protested against the implications of reductionism to morality: if a man killing another man is just a bundle of atoms acting on another bundle of atoms, and those atoms act in one way and only one way (i.e. according to past events), then the universe is determined and your free thoughts are, in fact, unfree movements of atoms - and so is your moral outrage at rape or genocide. Agreeing with the Brits, the Germans claimed that the only way to save things like selfhood, love, punishment of evil etc. was to do away with matter (materiality) entirely. If you start with mind and derrive the world from that, you don't have to worry that life, free will and emotion are mere mechanical effects of blind lawfulness. Johann Fichte, the father of German Idealism (a movement distinct from Kant's Transcendental Idealism) proposed that the self is only truly a self if it is an independent agent, its own thing - not a sum of completely foreign parts determining every single thing about its identity. His theory was that when the self asserts its own existence (I am I), it conceptualizes the Self in contradistinction to anything other than that (he calls this Not-Self, or nature), and in distinction from a self that is not itself (hence the plurality of selves aggregating into families and nations). He deduces Kant's categories out of a primordial act of self-recognition, Ich=Ich. Ayn Rand disagrees with the reductionists, but does not go the idealist route like Fichte. O'ism is anti-reductionism. Paraphrasing Peikoff in OPAR pg. 193, a man and a bullet are not 'interchangeable' because they are both a collection of atoms; one collection can die, the other can't. Likewise, what's out there is not a collection of neat rational constructs, such that you can deduce the nature of reality from mathematical equations or boxing observations into a pre-established notion of what a concept should reasonably mean in practice. That type of rationalism is what makes reductionists deny what's right under their nose, e.g. the existence of consciousness, because their logical deduction denies that such consciousness is real. A while back, a poster on this forum argued against emergence, opting for an interesting theory that mind and biological evolution are impossible, magical, unless you hold that mind has always existed, and that mind and matter 'inter-penetrate', neither having metaphysical primacy. I think he would have some interesting takes on the arguments in this thread.

This is a historical claim. Was it based on research, or was it asserted without studying the issue? A cursory glance at articles such as this one will give an account of when and where the concept began to be used in relation to chemistry.

No. It means that the natures of each 'X' might be such that their mere joining (with no additional consequence) is not possible. The sticknes of the puppet can be explained by its parts, the sticks. The gaseousness of water can't be explained by its parts, the gasses, because water is not gaseous, it's liquid. If X represents the gasses, then the cause of liquidity is not wholy in hydrogen, nor wholy in oxygen, but in their interaction. 2+2X adds up to 4X, because you've properly taken the natures of the X's in account, you're not merely playing with empty abstractions. If X represents the sticks, the cause of the puppet's stickness is wholy in the sticks, as their joining does not lead to, for example, a gelatin-like substance distinct from wood. Nothing in the quoted post warrants your interpretation. I refer you to OPAR pg. 192-193 for a statement on reductionism.

Yes, precisely. Every 'pile' of something will exhibit, as a whole, different properties than its components. It seems that, here, this is what emergence is claimed to be. It's not. To answer this as well: Emergent properties result not from joining things, but from the reactions caused by the joining. Water is not merely two gasses stitched togheter, with your mind seeing the collage as 'watern-ness'. The 'stick-ness' of the puppet can be reduced to its components, the sticks. The liquidity of water cannot be reduced to the gaseousness of its components if you can't differentiate between the two examples. The claim to 'epistemological artifact' turns all properties into a way of regarding two things glued togheter as a whole, putting (for example) consciousness on equal footing with piles of vinyl discs adding to a stack.

Are you claiming that, for example, life cannot be shown to depend on chemistry for its arising? If your reply is that this is simply a causal connection (no life without chemistry), then you are right, but also missing the point. If you put togheter a few wooden sticks, you might get a stick puppet, but in the end, the sticks add up to a pile of sticks. In contrast, take two atoms of hydrogen, add one atom of oxygen and you get a water molecule with completely different properties. You have an 'emergent' property, unlike the previous example. Perhaps this answers your question:

Here is an analogy: motion, alteration, destruction etc. are things that can happen to entities. These concepts are not a separate process from causation, but instances of it. This does not make motion, alteration and destruction 'useless' concepts; in life, we need much more than metaphysical concepts in order to understand the world. You'd be hard pressed to find things that are not in motion, and likewise, things which are not emergent. Nevertheless, what is the difference between a thing in motion, and one not in motion? The same as that between an emergent and non-emergent thing.