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Grames

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Everything posted by Grames

  1. Henry Mark Holzer, former attorney for Ayn Rand, has blog which was linked by Instapundit today. The current post is The Alan Greenspan Story: From Objectivist to Statist Judging by the title of his book Supreme Court Opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas (1991--2006): A Conservative's Analysis. he considers himself a conservative. I do not know what that is about, but the blog looks worthy of monitoring.
  2. In your original post you didn't appeal to the novel feature of Aspect-like experiments at all, only the results of EPR-Bell type experiments. What I was getting at was that your original post makes the strong point that: That this is a fundamental fact of reality and therefore important, is the most significant content of your original book review not merely the "negation of the negative" of refuting TEW in the eyes of that book's intended audience (laypersons). The positive value of your original post is primarily that it teaches an unfamiliar truth, only secondarily that a particular falsehood is pointed out. You could have followed the path of pointing out that reverse wave theories are ruled out by Aspect, but that would not teach anything about locality. I'm glad you composed the argument as you did, otherwise I for one would not have learned anything new. That does clarify, thanks.
  3. I'm currently working through your "J.S. Bell's Concept of Local Causality" paper so that I can get straight the several ideas causality/locality/determinism/non-locality/indeterminism. I haven't found it hard so far, just long. But there is one followup question I would like to ask before moving on to that having to do with your chosen method of demonstrating the falsity of TEW. I'm pretty sure now that the Aspect experiment is why I personally ruled out TEW back in the day. You could have appealed to Aspect in your original post, but chose not to. I could guess why, but so long as you are here it would better if you could explain why you chose the more general, but harder to understand refutation over the more specific but easier to grasp refutation. (Yes, I am presuming Aspect is easy to understand, in that the idea that the photons can't change after they are produced is easy to understand.) Right. Thanks for translating my question from a vague suspicion into a specific objection. And λ is Unicode character 03BB in the Arial font which I copied and pasted from a standard Windows program in Accessories/System Tools called "Character Map". The whole greek alphabet is available in upper and lowercase, as well as several other languages and symbols. If you use a Mac or unix work-alike I have no suggestions. Not all fonts have all the unicode characters. I understood that up until the parenthetical "in addition". There multiple types of non-local causation? As mentioned above I'm reading further into this. Got it. Possible followup questions on the way if you choose to stick around.
  4. To recap point 16: 16. To ensure justice prevails, Government shall impose a negative consequence of no greater or lesser magnitude than that which resulted from the Injustice. Point 16 keys on the magnitude of the consequence, not the magnitude of the injustice. A dead man is just as dead whether he was killed intentionally or accidentally. Thus the "magnitude of the consequence" doesn't permit distinguishing between manslaughter and murder to scale the punishment. Gravity of the injustice does, so that is better. The epistemological argument against capital punishment is that you can't bring an executed murderer back to life if he is subsequently exonerated of his crime. This can be extended to justify different punishments scaled to meet the different evidentiary standards met by the prosecution in securing a conviction (less certainty causes less punishment). Is gravity of the Injustice a function only of the charges bought or also modified by findings of the judge and jury? On a different point, I think it is great that you can point to a body of work such as the writings of Ayn Rand to set the context for interpretation of the Charter. Wouldn't having the Charter refer to that context explictly build in a resistance to wayward or rationalistic interpretations? It would also lighten the burden of having the document be stand-alone by internally defining every single idea it uses.
  5. Hi Travis, I have completed reading the Bertlmann's Socks paper and refamiliarized myself with the Aspect experiment. Didn't TEW at one time incorporate reverse waves from the detectors/polarizers to the photon source? Of course Aspect (setting the polarizers only after the photons are in flight) is not compatible with any reverse wave theory. The general derivation of Bell's inequality (correlation <= 2) is from the statistical independence of two variables, the measurements A and B. Quantum mechanics predicts a specific correlation value, -2√2. The experiment measures -2√2. The conclusion must be made that the measurements A and B are not independent. One thing I don't follow is equation 10, where the presence of possible multiple factors lambda in computing both M and N doesn't prevent the claim that M and N incorporate a hypothesis of local causality. Sure M|a,λ is no function of b, but it is of λ whch also appears in N|b,λ. Is the presence of 'a' enough to make M independent from N? (I suppose it is but I wonder why). I understand the argument that EPR inferred determinism from local causality (page 4). Can determinism still follow from non-local causality? (I would think yes.)
  6. How does one objectively (legal sense) identify a spiritual value? This government will have none of that hairsplitting between manslaughter and murder, and all convicted murderers get the death penalty. Hmm. What about evidentiary standards, and the epistemological problem of convicting the wrong man?
  7. How does the second gov't use its science and technology and keep it secret at the same time? If it doesn't keep it secret, it in no way outpaces the first which will also use the same knowledge. If it does keep secrets, what use is it? Anyway, one of the themes of the book is that in the long run, the second gov't is not compatible with a technological and industrial society. So your hypothetical wouldn't work.
  8. Capitalism for Dummies ? Fully emotionally neutral vocabulary makes for boring writing. Reserve emotional vocabulary for deployment at the right spots. Generally this is sound writing advice.
  9. There is more to be said than that. When courts vitiate any evidence gathered when the police fail to 'Mirandize' the suspects, especially in the absence of any formal police interrogation, they are elevating procedural justice above objective justice (the truth of the case). This is bad. caveat: I am not a lawyer.
  10. When I worked at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the fees collected by the Office paid for all operations and provided a significant surplus, which was used to subsidize other operations of the government. edit- significant compared to the size of the USPTO budget, not the total federal budget.
  11. Different contexts of knowledge may prompt one to form a concept in any number of different ways. However, the two methods you described are a right way and a wrong way. If I understand your intent correctly, you are trying to describe the process of forming a rationalization in the second method. This is from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology ch. 3 Abstraction from Abstractions.
  12. These kinds of patents came about as a result of a policy change implemented during the Clinton administration. A new 'customer service' credo held that the Patent Office was in the business of issuing patents, and the more the better. If an application could be put into correct format and no documented prior art blocked patentability, it would be allowed. Thus, examiners could no longer use common sense in applying a utility standard, they had to have a paper. Who the hell documents how they play with their cat? Thus, the cat plus laser pointer patent issues. The pragmatic rationalization of this policy runs like this: The applicant is happy with the patent he wanted. This increased the fees collected for the Office and subsidizes operations. Truly useless patents are economically harmless in that they are unenforcable in court, or for only trivial amounts far less than legal fees. The objection is that the entire patent system has its credibility undermined. But as in any pragmatist argument against integrity, an abstraction like 'credibility' has no value.
  13. I may yet post such a question, but I was in the middle of reading something else when the thread erupted. I have the Bertlmann's Socks paper in hand.
  14. I believe she is, and so do I. Only man-made facts can be subject to property rights. What is your problem with that?
  15. Thanks for your time. I am not concerned with physicists (they have experiment to refer to), but with philosophers (amateur or professional) who try to be armchair physicists. So I was actually reconciling metaphysics with the physics. It is indeed hard to argue with people who don't know what they are talking about, but I just wanted to demonstrate the logical plausibility of the quantum ontology clearly enough for laymen to undercut those who (like Little) claim that the whole quantum enterprise is corrupt. Since the doctrine that there are no actual infinities is a part of Objectivism, if applying the idea leads to contradictions with experiment that would be good to know! Objectivism would require revision. Since what I was up to in checking the premises of Objectivist metaphysics was a kind of curve fitting exercise (we know what metaphysics can't contradict), this isn't a priori rationalizing so long as it is the theory that must be jiggered to fit the facts and not the other way around. Postdiction as opposed to prediction, as some theorists like to describe their work. I have Bohm's Quantum Theory but I find the math stiff going since I no longer use it in my daily work. Just 2 weeks ago I read Feynman's QED, where he explains quantum electrodynamics in terms of his path integral method (without the math) and Feynman diagrams. Interestingly he doesn't even try to say what a photon or electron are, he only describes what they do. What we see electrons and photons do is a vector resultant of all possible paths. Feynman is quite emphatic about still calling them particles, but that is to dissuade the reader that they could be waves. Not using the word particles at all in relation to the underlying phenomena would be less confusing. Your clear description of the Bell inequality motivates to me refamiliarize myself with a subject I used to follow more closely. Thanks especially for that.
  16. But there was nothing ironic or biting or bitter about that snippet. I call that inability to write sarcasm. Known is of course exactly what it means. Not easy, possible. And since the thread is about patents, intellectual property and even property in general, the legal context is the appropriate context to keep in mind. Objective law is not "Objectivist Law™", it is just law properly crafted with the principle of objectivity, lowercase and not trademarked. And because we can't read each other's minds objectivity does usually reduce to the material. It always does in property law. Even so-called intellectual property is only protectable to the extent that it is cast in a specific form, pure knowledge cannot be protected. Here is an article by Harry Binswanger WHAT IS OBJECTIVE LAW? But there are no facts at issue, it is the absence of a fact that is to be proven. This is a matter of civil law, so there is no prosecutor. As explained at this helpful reference Civil Law vs Criminal Law in civil litigation the burden of proofs is initially on the plaintiff and then switches to the defendants. Both sides have to make their case. However, official acts by the government (specifically patents and copyrights in this context) have the presumption of validity, which means the defendants attacking a patent have a higher standard of evidence to meet than in regular civil court cases (clear and convincing evidence versus a simple perponderance of the evidence). So if you couldn't prove what music was playing at a party you attended years ago that would blow your case about the Beatles song. (I'm mixing patents and copyrights here, but the evidentiary problem is the same.) The evidentiary problem is so severe that in the case of patents the independent inventor's only defense is to prove his technology predates the patent by a year, and in copyrights prior publication. Also, as I said before the same standards have to be applied to all patent and copyright issues. If you have to be novel or original to get a patent or copyright, by definition anyone who comes along later is not novel or original. Permitting special pleading in the form of "but I didn't know about that other patent/song!" would apply a different and subjective standard than was applied to the original work. That would be just plain nonobjective and unjust.
  17. I'll be damned, but you are a troll. Well done sir, well done. But you've exposed yourself at last so we're done here.
  18. Stolen concept. Next! Objectivity and logic. It is not logically consistent to use the prior art standard to prove an invention is not novel, and then ignore the prior art standard for a second-to-invent case. But that can never be proven. It would require a complete inventory and re-examination of a life and evertything in it. Short of that, the only rational way to interpret the exact recreation of the Beatles song would be that it was heard, somehow. Even if the Beatles song was honestly recreated, the inability to disprove the default hypothesis that the song was the product of hearing the original song would require any judge or jury to find copyright violation. Law is practiced by human beings, none of whom have access to the omniscient perspective of a theoretical God. If you consider this a fault you are simply unreasonable. That the copyright is on the form of work regardless of how it was created is the only objective and practical way to enforce copyright law.
  19. Philippines, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, United States! All third world failures because of their religious element!
  20. Thank you for taking the time to do that. I have heard of the TEW via other students of Objectivism but never looked into it, and now I never will. I wonder if you could take a moment to critique my own modest crackpot attempt to rationalize the particles of quantum theory and reconcile it with metaphysics? It is very short. The reasoning below produces a picture that at least has the virtue of not contradicting experiment and the quantum theory of particles. It may be useless as physics, but if it stops armchair philosophers from attacking physicists much time would be saved all around. Fully consistent application of the metaphysical principle that there are no actual infinities leads to the following reasoning. An electron can be considered a point particle on the basis that it has no detectable internal structure and at large enough distances the away from it both the mass and charge are equivalent to a point source. But this is an approximation of convenience. It can't possibly actually be a point particle because it would have an infinite mass density and charge density. Therefore an electron must have an extent in space. This principle also applies to the boundary of an electron. A sharp rigid boundary would also be an infinitesimally thin space with a fixed amount of mass or charge within it, next to another infinitesimally thin space with zero mass and charge. This is another infinity that cannot exist. In mathematical terms there can be no discontinuity in the first derivative of the mass or charge distribution. So not only must an electron have a non-zero extension, its mass and charge must shade off toward zero only gradually. At great distances the mass and charge can only approach zero asymptotically and never quite reach it, or there would again be a discontinuity.
  21. Thomas M. Miovas first addressed the validation of property in post #16 of this thread. There was some further discusion after that. Property rights lead to property laws. Next. WHY anything works (knowledge) can't be patented, not because knowledge is not man-made but because it is not actual value but only a potential value. Due to the requirement for objectivity, products and methods with economic consequences are the domain of law and abstractions are not. That abstractions are not property has already been discussed in this thread starting with blackdiamond's question about equations. If you have any new questions or objections, please state them.
  22. For as long as you care to propose alternate basis I will be happy to demonstrate their shortcomings. Patents are published and public. The very standard of novelty incorporates a standard a familiarity with all of the prior art by one of ordinary skill. Ignorance of the prior art is no excuse for infringement. In general, ignorance of the law is never a defense. Patents have the status of laws for their duration. The burden of proof is not being switched around arbitrarily, or at all. Official actions by governments have a presumption of validity, because they are official. Patents are granted on a first-come first-serve basis because everyone who comes after the first is presumed to be familiar with the prior art. Ignorance is not a defense. Well I did consult the Lexicon entry for patents and copyrights just before writing that, so it is a paraphrase. qua –adverb as; as being; in the character or capacity of: The work of art qua art can be judged by aesthetic criteria only. Discoveries and inventions are both facts, and in the character or capacity of being a fact can be judged as metaphysical or man-made. The man-made facts are the ones that exist only because someone created them, the metaphysical facts are all the others. As the two kinds of facts are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive no contradiction is possible. Don't try to be clever by pointing out that discoveries are made by people. That would be the logical fallacy of equivocating the meaning of discovery, because discovery is used in the first sense as referring to the subject matter discovered, and in the second sense as an act by a person. In contrasting discoveries and inventions it is not the act of discovery that Rand (and I) compare with the act of invention, but the thing discovered with the thing invented.
  23. Abandoning land surrenders claim to it after a certain amount of time, a few years. Those who actually occupy the land and mix their labor with it cause it to be theirs. But how do you argue against God's pronouncements with people who accept God?
  24. Your proposed "interaction with nature" basis cannot be objectively determined. Once patented, any subsequent inventor would have the burden of proof that his invention was derived independently from the patent. Proving the negative proposition that the inventor did not see or read about the original invention is practically impossible, except for the case of an invention that predated the patented one (which is not subsequent after all). Patents are granted on a "first-come, first-serve" basis because it is the only objective basis. Causality is the basis of property but the requirement that law be objective limits the claims that can be made. The defining characteristic of a discovery versus an invention parallels the distinction of kinds of facts as metaphysical or man-made. Mere declarations of truth do not create those truths. Practical applications qua facts exist only because someone created them. Embedding a previously undiscovered truth in a new patented invention creates no claim on the underlying truth. And yes, surgical methods are patentable.
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