Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Grames

Regulars
  • Posts

    4514
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    155

Everything posted by Grames

  1. The U.S. state of Texas and the U.S. federal gov't are disputing control of Texas border. Court cases are in progress, injunctions awarded and then vacated, 25 other states are siding with Texas. Into this Russia decides to start talking shit. I find it amusing. (Make a point even if fake news.)
  2. I suspect that the cultural brainwashing could not possibly work as well as it does if children did not grow up drenched in chemicals from plants and plastics that emulated estrogens. Excreted body fluids contain the remnants of all birth control pills ever taken, which all flow downstream into water supplies.
  3. Trump's policy positions are why he has any popularity whatsoever. There is no cult. MAGA doesn't end when Trump goes away.
  4. Someday, in a month or so, I'll make a thread about religion and title it "Critical Semite Theory". Then we'll find out some things.
  5. Intrincism holds that value is not an abstraction, but a concrete. Perhaps an ethereal or spiritual concrete rather than a tangible one, but concrete in that it is not a function of any person's valuing or abstracting.
  6. The "Principle of Two Definitions" applies here. See Notes on "Unity in Ethics and Epistemology" Lecture 3 Rand stated that there three theories of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective and the objective. It looks to me you are just now realizing what "intrinsic" value actually means in practice. An object's intrinsic value has its value as part of its identity because there is nothing to distinguish intrinsic value from any of its other attributes. Mass, volume, color, flammability, holiness ... its just another entry in a list of attributes.
  7. Once again I have over estimated Russian military competence. The war is still dragging on and it seems to be deliberate strategy on Russia's part to make the war last as long as possible. None of the Abrams have been to the front yet even months after delivery. What's up with that?
  8. But it is such a mystery, why do people keep picking on the Jews?
  9. Existence is identity. Information is an aspect of identity, and so it is an aspect of existing. It is valid to ask how much of an aspect, is this a detail that can be neglected? Before Einstein one could extract a certain amount energy from burning a log in a fireplace or a boiler. After Einstein it is possible to calculate how much energy exists simply by virtue of the mass of the log and by the mass-energy equivalence of E = m * c^2 that is an amount of energy many orders of magnitude greater than is possible to release by combustion. A similar ratio obtains when comparing the amount information we handle on a daily basis to the amount of information that is embodied in what exists. The information encoded in a letter or word carved on a log is dwarfed by the information of the matter of the wood.
  10. Data and information are two very different things. Data has some semantic context to determine what it means, but the concept of information omits semantic context. Data depends upon consciousness but information is mind independent. Focus upon communication as an engineering problem has shed light on this previously unappreciated aspect of existence, its information content. But what is being measured and how to measure it? From the first pages of Claude Shannon's paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication by C. E. SHANNON from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948. But is it physical? From The Physical Nature of Information by Rolf Landauer from Physics Letters A 217 (1996) 188-193 (a link to a copy) A discussion of Maxwell's demon (not to be confused with Descartes' demon) in popular science literature is available here: (Quanta Magazine: How Maxwell's Demon Continues to Startle Scientists) Maxwell's demon has been reduced to experimental forms and demonstrates the physical nature of information. A philosophical implication is that the Pythagorean/Platonic notion of mathematics being an independent or a priori realm apart from physical reality is refuted. This satisfies my confirmation bias as an Objectivist that Existence exists is the broadest possible axiom and that mathematics must be about and within a prior Existence.
  11. "Mirroring", "equation", "equals". Yes, you are correct that this kind of thinking leads to serious problems. But these are not describing Rand's thinking, or Peikoff's or Kelley's (or mine.) When you are sufficiently motivated to find a more rigorous understanding of what is wrong and right in correspondence theory then I would strongly suggest Kelley.
  12. Information exists as a physical part of any physical system in addition to all the other physical characteristics we can observe but traditionally have not identified as "information" as such. All matter and energy is also information, and no information can exist apart from matter or energy. Information is an attribute of everything that exists. If "the information" of a system refers to the total of all information of a system then the answer is that it cannot be completely removed, only partially reduced. Reducing the information of a system makes it more uniform and orderly in the same sense as used in thermodynamics. The ultimate possible reduction of a system's information is reducing it to or very near the temperature of absolute zero. For some forms of matter the removal of even the most miniscule differences of energy/information distinguishing one atom from another can provoke the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, multiple atoms all having the same position and the same momentum and described by a single wave function of quantum physics. Your "two universes" questions rely upon a premise that information is either "out there" or "in here" but which is a false dichotomy. Information is everywhere, "out there" and "in here". Knowledge is when the information "in here" exists in a certain relation to the information "out there", a relation broadly referred to as correspondence. Correspondence is created by the causal chain of sensing, perceiving and finally conceiving.
  13. Abstraction must occur by some physical means. The products of abstraction are not necessarily error free or true. Bits are metaphysical, ontological. They exist. Information is an attribute of matter and energy. Manipulation of bits has energy requirement. A given bandwidth has a finite data rate that can be transmitted through it. Studying the potential paradoxes of black hole physics suggests a need for a "conservation of information" law to prevent logical impossibilities.
  14. "Someone with no regard for philosophy" vs. "someone who follows philosophy without understanding the reason for it" These are the same thing. They are descriptions of the same person from different perspectives. Rand's answer to the question "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" was: everyone. Before her some wit remarked upon how everyone is the slave of some dead philosopher without even knowing it. However, it seems that no one can be a slave of Rand without knowing it and needing to exert effort to know how.
  15. Consciousness is indeed an axiomatic concept. However all axioms and axiomatic concepts belong to epistemology, because they provide certain guidance about how to think and know. "Consciousness exists", which affirms that it is real and of this world. Rand claims that consciousness is "the faculty of perceiving that which exists", so it is not only thinking humans that have consciousness but anything alive possessing a faculty for perceiving what exists. It is the year 2023. "Purely physical" now includes information theory: bits, bandwidth, coding and compression theory and all the rest of it. It is not a problem to assert consciousness is purely physical.
  16. Managing expectations. Shifting the goalposts. Redefining success.
  17. I wonder if the forum will embed tweets? Anyway, I deny being an Iranian propagandist of a useful tool of Iranian propagandists. All Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) need to be put down forever. https://x.com/samparkersenate/status/1724434234264183240?
  18. Muslims contributed to algebra but did not invent it entirely. A contributing factor was the increasing use of a more compact notation for numbers instead of the Roman numerals, what is now called the Arabic numerals. But the Arabic numerals were not Arabic, they first occurred in India. This gives the clue that Arab culture flourished when they could be peaceful trading empires. Unfortunately for those peoples who were not part of the Arab culture, such periods of peace only occur after victorious jihads that leave behind no handy additional targets for conquest.
  19. This is quite correct, and even worse than a theocracy. Jewishness is based on blood. Israel is an ethno-state. Jews not observing the religion are still counted as jews (all over the world, not just the practice in Israel). The very notion of jewishness is intrinsically racist in that poisonous supremacist fashion that marked Hitler's racism. Ironically it is jews leading the way in crusading against racism and encouraging mass immigration and ethnicity mixing everywhere except in Israel. Actually, if you think about it is not ironic at all. Muslims are more prone to theocracy and less to racism.
  20. No, this guy is what passes for establishment today. From https://cis.org/Steinlight
  21. It used to be the case that America was run by a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. It isn't anymore. Those who are the elite consider themselves a people apart. This link still works https://archive.is/5yeSC
  22. It occurs to me that the end of Israel would be the end of AIPAC, the political action committee responsible to funding the entirety of the existing corrupt political establishment of the American government. And so I think about this and about what I should desire to see happen..
  23. Interesting reading: American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
  24. Numbers only, no lurid stories here https://www.dci-palestine.org/child_fatalities_by_age_group
×
×
  • Create New...