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Grames

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Posts 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.)

    image.thumb.jpeg.2e9b40fc7d79cf1fd4a6ae6624783209.jpeg

  2. 3 hours ago, tadmjones said:

    So the efficacy of the hormone replacement therapy is to counteract malformed psychological effects of cultural brainwashing? 

    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. 6 hours ago, necrovore said:

    The way I think of it is:

    • Intrinsicism holds that abstractions (including "value") are functions of the object only, and not the person.
    • Subjectivism holds that abstractions are functions of the person only, and not the object.
    • Objectivity holds that the abstraction is a function of both.

    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.

  4. On 1/9/2024 at 8:58 PM, Easy Truth said:

    There is the perspective of "value" as being that which is good for you. But I would argue that is a "moral value" rather than just a value. There are things we like that we regret, or that we know are bad for us. I love bacon. It is the worst food for me.
    Value has to mean simply what you consider valuable and it can be an immediate experience, as in the entity "delicious pizza". 

    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.

     

  5. On 1/4/2024 at 6:43 PM, whYNOT said:

    st. "Behavior" per group is a hard one to pin down, it's logic that every group has its obnoxious to likable to admirable folk, and one can't fault "the group". Or conclude that one person ~defines~ the group. The Jews seem to be "out there" and more successful, so many esp. Lefties in politics, media, academia and entertainment are annoying, I admit. The *ethnic* non religious Jews-by-birth who have been and would at present again be identified, targeted and violated by racist, anti-semites--for having no more than a Jewish name? As would be the many ethnic Jewish intellectuals who are well-represented in Objectivism. One Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum? I think it's more that Jews are made keenly aware early on of their small and vulnerable tribe's repressed history and know there forever will be prejudices against them, individually and collectively, making them be convenient go-to culprits for outsiders' failures, varying only in how covert or overt the prejudice is. The effect, often one of acute sensitivity to others, over-compensation or pushiness.

    Jews_leave_Guatemala.thumb.png.c3cd5b6008e44732b6e1298dbf8f41e1.png

  6. On 1/2/2024 at 1:37 PM, whYNOT said:

    The criticism about Israel being Zionist-apartheid, rests on this, at times deliberate by those who know better.  The nation is condemned for its "discriminatory" and/or "supremacist-racist" practice of being highly selective on who immigrates there, for the large part, limited to ethnic or ethnic-religious or converted Jews. Since a free and protective homeland for international Jews of all sorts was its intended identity. Open the borders to all comers and that identity disappears and the Jewish population would flee and make for easier targets in other countries. With the new resurgence of racism, original Zionism has proved its necessity again.

    But it is such a mystery, why do people keep picking on the Jews?

     

     

    The_Main_Cause_of_Antisemitism.jpg

  7. On 12/14/2023 at 7:32 AM, tadmjones said:

    Information is identity? A way to view or conceptualize identity with a bent toward epistemology as opposed to a consciousness independent frame of reference ?

    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.

  8. 21 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

    As a starting point, data and information do not exist in a universe without a consciousnesses.

    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.

    Quote

     

    The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

    If the number of messages in the set is finite then this number or any monotonic function of this number can be regarded as a measure of the information produced when one message is chosen from the set, all choices being equally likely. As was pointed out by Hartley the most natural choice is the logarithmic function. Although this definition must be generalized considerably when we consider the influence of the statistics of the message and when we have a continuous range of messages, we will in all cases use an essentially logarithmic measure.

    The logarithmic measure is more convenient for various reasons:

    1. It is practically more useful. Parameters of engineering importance such as time, bandwidth, number of relays, etc., tend to vary linearly with the logarithm of the number of possibilities. For example, adding one relay to a group doubles the number of possible states of the relays. It adds 1 to the base 2 logarithm of this number. Doubling the time roughly squares the number of possible messages, or doubles the logarithm, etc.

    2. It is nearer to our intuitive feeling as to the proper measure. This is closely related to (1) since we intuitively measures entities by linear comparison with common standards. One feels, for example, that two punched cards should have twice the capacity of one for information storage, and two identical channels twice the capacity of one for transmitting information.

    3. It is mathematically more suitable. Many of the limiting operations are simple in terms of the logarithm but would require clumsy restatement in terms of the number of possibilities.

    The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey. A device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit, can store one bit of information. N such devices can store N bits, since the total number of possible states is 2^N and log2 2^N = N.

     

    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)

    Quote

     

    1. Information is physical

    Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation. It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This ties the handling of information to all the possibilities and restrictions of our real physical word, its laws of physics and its storehouse of available parts.


    This view was implicit in Szilard's discussion of Maxwell's demon [1]. Szilard's discussion, while a major milestone in the elucidation of the demon, was by no means an unambiguous resolution. The history of that can be found in Refs. [ 2,3 ]. The acceptance of the view, however, that information is a physical entity, has been slow. Penrose [4], for example, argues for the Platonic reality of mathematics, independent of any manipulation. He tells us "... devices can yield only approximations to a structure that has a deep and 'computer-independent' existence of its own." Indeed, our assertion that information is physical amounts to an assertion that mathematics and computer science are a part of physics. We cannot expect our colleagues in mathematics and in computer science to be cheerful about surrendering their independence. Mathematicians, in particular, have long assumed that mathematics was there first, and that physics needed that to describe the universe. We will, instead, ask for a more self-consistent framework in Sec. V.

     

    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.

  9. 26 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

    I am not well versed in correspondence ‘theory’ so perhaps the following observations may not pertain to a rigorous understanding. But..

    If knowledge is a correspondence between awareness, consciousness, or experience, the ‘in here’ portion or side cannot be a mirroring of the ‘out there’ side, because of the cause and effect nature of entropy, no?

    If the ‘in here’ side of the equation equals the ‘out there’ side of the equation ,

    "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.

  10. On 12/7/2023 at 4:18 PM, StrictlyLogical said:

    Do you contend information exists as a physical part of any physical system, does it exist independently of, over and above , or in addition to, all the other physical characteristics we can observe but traditionally have not identified as "information" as such?

    What happens to physical system we observe when the information is removed from the physical system?

    What is the distinction between a first universe where we merely identify and perceive information about a physical thing, the information existing only in our minds as and because we create it by thinking of and referring to those things, and a second universe where the information is in the things themselves?

    Specifically, what is different about those things themselves which we observe in those two universes?

    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.

  11. On 12/6/2023 at 10:10 AM, tadmjones said:

    Do you mean that the concept of 'purely physical' now includes abstraction being in the same category as 'physical'?

     

    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.  

  12. On 12/4/2023 at 8:38 AM, stansfield123 said:

    Someone with no regard for philosophy will make better decisions than someone who follows philosophy without understanding the reason for it.

    "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.

  13. 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.

     

  14. 15 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

    There have been times in the past when this wasn't true.  For example, Muslims invented algebra.  Does anyone have any thoughts on why the difference?

    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.  

  15. 3 hours ago, stansfield123 said:

    ISRAEL IS LESS RELIGIOUS THAN THE US.

    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.

  16. 23 minutes ago, necrovore said:

    At best, all it proves is the existence of one crackpot.

    No, this guy is what passes for establishment today.  From https://cis.org/Steinlight

     

    Quote

     

    Stephen Steinlight

     

    Fellow

    One of the nation’s most insightful voices on immigration, Dr. Stephen Steinlight is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, DC. He focuses on ascending trends in immigration and immigration policy, America’s changing demography and culture, the politics of immigration, the impact of immigration on the nation’s social cohesion, and the consequences of massive low-skill immigration on America’s most vulnerable groups. He is also concerned with the nexus between immigration and national security in an age of Jihadist terrorism and significant Muslim migration to Western Europe and the United States.

    Dr. Steinlight has testified before the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives and the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. He has also provided expert testimony before state legislatures and State Freedom of Information Commissions. He has shared podiums with members of the House and presidential candidates. He has also addressed hundreds of state legislator and civic and religious groups across the country, been a panelist at conferences and public forums, and is frequently interviewed on radio and TV. He has written extensively on many of the central issues in the immigration debate.

    Prior to joining CIS, he was Executive Director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, the Boston-based abolitionist organization. For eight years he was National Affairs Director at the American Jewish Committee (AJC) where he oversaw its public policy agenda centered on First Amendment issues, civil rights, immigration, and social policy. While at AJC, Dr. Steinlight was a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and founded and served as Senior Advisor to the critically-acclaimed commonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations.

    He also served as Vice President of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) for three years. He convened the first global interreligious dialogues involving dissident Muslim scholars; played a lead role in propagating community-oriented policing; worked on issues affecting Native Americans; and directed the largest survey of intergroup attitudes ever undertaken in America: Taking America’s Pulse: A Survey of Intergroup Attitudes in the United States.

    Prior to joining NCCJ, he was Director of Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the body responsible for developing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Steinlight was co-creator of the Museum’s “Remember the Children Exhibition.”

    A magna cum laude graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University, upon graduation he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and received the Columbia College Alumni Merit Award. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Kellett Fellow, and a Marshall Scholar at the University of Sussex, England, where he received his M.Phil and PhD. He was a professor of English and Victorian Studies for 20 years, teaching at the University of Sussex, the State University of New York; the Institút Britannique de Paris; and the School of Graduate Studies, New York University. The recipient of numerous academic honors and visiting professorship, he has been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently an Associate Fellow at Timothy Dwight College, Yale University.

    Dr. Steinlight is author of two books: Fractious Nation? Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life (UC-Berkeley Press, 2003); and Children of Abraham (K’TAV 2002): An Introduction to Islam and Islamism co-authored with one of the foremost scholar/opponents of Islamism, the late Khalid Durán. Both authors received fatwas for having written the book. Dr. Steinlight was also selected by the United States Council for Peace to join a team of conflict-resolution and civil society experts sent to Macedonia in 2003 to maintain the ceasefire in that nation’s civil war and create a process for President Trajkovski and his cabinet to work with leading jurists and former rebels to amend its constitution.

    Dr. Steinlight lives in New York City.

     

     

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