MisterSwig

Maybe I've finally understood your position. It seems now that you place "achievement" as man's purpose in life. Despite all else, man must achieve the most that is possible to him. Anything less is sacrificing one's full potential. Is that it?

That has more to do with epistemology than ethics. Though it might be related to the virtue of honesty. Morality, however, is generally about forming a system of values that you use to figure out how to behave in particular situations, both in short-term and long-term scenarios. It's not about being devoted to living for the sake of life itself. And it's not about suffering through endless, tormenting pain for the sake of a joyless life. It's about making the right choices and seeking the right values based on your purpose in life. If your top purpose is survival, then you will tolerate hell for eternity rather than kill yourself. If your top purpose is happiness, then you won't.

We aren't talking about knee pain here. You realize that, right? As I type this I'm living with neuropathy in my right leg down to my toes. And we aren't even talking about that sort of pain. So, let's keep some perspective.

One begins to wonder what you would consider to be "a problem."

No. Watch the movie Concussion. I think you should study real examples of people who kill themselves for extraordinary reasons, before expecting resilience from such people. There are cases where these people were likely ten times more resilient than you or I could ever be. We're talking about people who went into battle as a career, either on the football field or in an actual war. And here you are pontificating on a philosophy forum, generally suggesting that they were cowards for committing suicide when they suffered from crippling diseases.

Is it "resilience" to so thoroughly depend upon the assistance of able-bodied people in order to simply survive? Or to be able to breathe even? If I'm totally paralyzed, it's not resilience that keeps me alive and going. It's my willingness to live as a fully dependent entity. I must be willing to burden others with my prolonged desire to live. These are the sorts of details you miss and don't consider when you make living a kind of duty. When you decide that life itself is valuable, regardless of the kind of life it is.

That term "faux awakening" brought back a memory of something weird that has happened to me a couple times. Once or twice, before fully waking up, I have felt like I was awake but couldn't move my head to look around. It was like I was frozen in my own body, stuck looking in one spot. I'm not sure how much of the room I was aware of, but I was definitely aware of being in bed. And I remember wanting to look around but being unable to do it. This state went on for a short time and then suddenly I realized that I was fully awake and could start moving again. I have no idea if that was a kind of lucid dream or not. I always chalked it up to being temporarily stuck in a stage of waking up.

This is absurd, and only further reveals your spiteful animosity to Objectivism as a distinctive philosophy in the history of man. In no sense does any Objectivist, including Ayn Rand herself, believe that she and her philosophy emerged full-grown and god-like from nothing. You sound like the liberal academics who hate Objectivism.

Actually, it was only Aristotle. I don't think she felt indebted to Aquinas, but acknowledged that he revived Aristotle's ideas and helped bring the West out of the Dark Ages. She also acknowledged other great thinkers, like John Locke and the Founding Fathers of America. But her real debt, at the fundamental levels of thought, was always to Aristotle. It's true that this fact isolates her philosophy from most of the Academic world, which has a Platonic, Kantian base. But let's not separate fact from value here. The fact of Objectivism's relative isolation does not mean that "there have been no real advances in the philosophy." It simply means that the philosophy is not as widespread or influential as others. But there are Objectivist thinkers making advances and writing books purporting to discover new things based on Rand's ideas. That's a fact.

Like Aristotle, Rand's philosophy will percolate through cultures with free speech until it develops a large enough root system to sustain another golden age of reason. Our job as individual roots in that system must first be to achieve our own happiness and be as great as we can possibly be at whatever we enjoy doing. We need more great Objectivists to figure out great ways to influence others and bring them to our side of the intellectual battle.

I actually think the system favors the Democrats, but the Democrats are too intellectually bankrupt and systematically corrupted to pick their best candidate. Trump won because he had a slightly better strategy and a slightly more popular message in key states. The Right outsmarted the Left. And they will probably do so no matter what electoral system is in place, as long as it's a fair system. The liberals are literally quaking with fear in the face of the reborn Right's triumph. Most of them have no clue what's happening, and don't know what to do about it.

Thanks for the tips. After you wake up from a lucid dream, is your recall of that dream any easier or clearer than after having non-lucid dreams? Thanks.

I know. Because you're trying to reduce it to physics. I'm done correcting your evasions for the time being. I need a break from this ridiculous thread. Anyone who thinks that Ayn Rand would have taken Dual-Aspect theory seriously is living in a fantasy world. You can look up the quotes yourself where she refers to consciousness as the "soul" and the "mind" and often draws the distinction between matter (material) and consciousness, clearly placing them in separate conceptual categories. True, we may at some point find a common existential unit between the two realms, but that will never change the fact that one is mental in nature and the other is not. I don't care what you call the physical world. It's not the mental one. And for those struggling with understanding what's wrong with Dual-Aspect theory, here's a clue. It's neo-reductionism dressed up to look like a kind of mind-body integration. But it's main purpose is to further destroy important concepts. In this case it wants to fool you into believing that a process of an entity is actually only an "aspect" of one. In this way the mind (consciousness) becomes a mere "aspect" of the brain. Thus, the mind is reduced to the physical entity level, which reduces it to the science of physics. Of course, the neo-reductionist gives lip-service to "mental processes," but read more closely and you'll see that he doesn't mean what you think he means. "... mental processes are actually mental physical brain processes." You see, there is this thing called a "brain process," but we can't actually see that "underlying" process. All we can see are the two "forms" of that process (or two "aspects") which manifest themselves as the "physical brain process," which we detect extrospectively, and as the "mental brain process," which we perceive introspectively. And ya'll are accusing me of being the Platonist? Once I recover from the shock of Objectivism being infiltrated by reductionism, maybe I'll return to the forum. But I need a little break from this nonsense.

FYI - We're dealing with a bunch of reductionists. I suggest schooling yourself on the subject before re-entering the arena. There's a great, old article about it in The Objectivist anthology called "Biology Without Consciousness--And Its Consequences" by Robert Efron. I suggest taking the time to read it carefully.

Are you saying that nothing can be fundamentally different from anything else, because everything has something in common? If we ever discover the basic, raw stuff of the universe, a rock would still be fundamentally different from water. One is a solid, the other is a liquid.

Even if that's true, it doesn't change the widely accepted understanding of mental realm as meaning that which pertains to the mind. Since when do Objectivists believe that consciousness is a physical thing? Maybe I'm at the wrong forum.

Ah, then we are not working with the same definitions. The mental realm simply means the mind. You can define it however you want, causal or not, physical or not. That's all part of the debate. I was assuming that, as Objectivists, we agreed that the mind exists, in some manner, and is fundamentally different from the physical. If that's wrong, then let's re-establish our baseline. I don't want my version of the realm to be assumed. I'm trying to make arguments for it.

Would you mind fleshing out this point a little, please? So I have a better idea of what you mean. Thanks.

But the whole point is to find a neutral ground from which I can attack the supernatural position. I'm not neutral regarding supernaturalism. I'm neutral regarding the battlefield, which is the mental realm. And the opposition doesn't have to be a supernaturalist either. He could be a materialist or determinist, or whatever other brand of thinkers want to join in the discussion.

Yes, brain damage results in weird behaviors. In this case, I would say that the subject must have previously automatized knowledge of the word and its related object. Therefore he needn't be able to define the word intellectually for his brain to automatically link it with the correct object. Not all human behaviour is volitional.

It's not agnostic. It's neutral. We use such neutral terms to reach a common ground upon which we can then argue for our opposing views. Agnostic would be like saying there is no way of knowing one way or the other whether the mind is a natural or supernatural phenomenon. Neutral means that we are agreeing that our base concept takes no specific position either way. We are agreeing simply that the mental is fundamentally different from the physical, and now we will argue whether it's natural or supernatural.

While interesting, I don't see how subvocalization or micro-muscular movements weakens my position. It's not seeing the word that produces the bodily reaction. It's reading the word, which then affects your brain in such a way that compels it to send signals to your larynx. Your mind is trying to tell your body to vocalize whatever it's reading. So the inner voice precedes the automatized muscle twitches. It's your mind trying to will yourself to talk the words. And it takes an effortful standing order to suppress the speech. Consider what happens when you try to read language symbols that you don't even know how to pronounce, such as Chinese characters or ancient hieroglyphics. They are words. But looking at them does nothing but produce a stare. Your larynx won't react, because there is no brain signal going to your speaking muscles.

Perhaps because we've sufficiently integrated those ideas into the rest of our knowledge. It would serve no conceptual purpose to keep talking about the living versus nonliving realms. Such ideas belong in the waste basket. They would only clutter up our thinking.

Because realm suggests a part of reality that is distinctive and governed by unique laws or forces, without directly suggesting a supernatural aspect. Etymologically, its roots are in Latin and Middle English words for "government" and "kingdom." Philologically, the meaning has been applied to the wider context of "kingdoms" within nature, which are "ruled" by different "laws." Addendum: Upon further consideration, perhaps realm is a favored concept because it doesn't identify the domain as being natural or supernatural, thus allowing both naturalists and mystics to agree upon terms while the debate rages.

Don't think of it as dividing reality. Think of it as recognizing different classifications of reality. Imagine that we weren't already so knowledgeable about nature and the differences between inanimate versus animate matter. We might notice that some things move around and some things don't. But occasionally those things that don't normally move will move, like a rock might occasionally tumble down a mountain. And sometimes those things that normally move will stop moving, like when a tribal elder doesn't get up again after going to bed at night, or a river becomes solid and hard in the cold time. How might we break out of this ignorance? Well, for starters, by recognizing and conceptualizing two types of fundamentally different things, inanimate things versus animate things. In the early stages of this understanding, we might even consider them to be two different realms, requiring supernatural forces, like gods, capable of creating animate from inanimate and moving large objects like the sun around in chariots. We wouldn't be able yet to understand the natural forces that produced life or cause inanimate things to move. But it would still be crucial to maintain the idea of the two realms until we discover how they are connected by some common, non-supernatural aspect of reality. Otherwise we'd revert back to our prior, even worse ignorance about the world. Likewise, we must recognize and conceptualize the differences between the physical and mental realms, until we figure out what is going on. You might not agree with my conception of it, but I hope we can at least agree that it's crucial to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between our mind and physical reality. And since we are Objectivists, I hope we can also agree that there must be a natural connection between these two realms.