Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

dream_weaver

Admin
  • Posts

    5525
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    235

Reputation Activity

  1. Thanks
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Biologists Replicate Key Evolutionary Step   
    How did life on Earth begin? The chemical puzzle just became clearer.
    Story by Kasha Patel
    <snip>
    People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab.
    </snip>
  2. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Pokyt in A new Staff Member/Moderator   
    I was provided evidence of Pokyt's appointment when I received several e-mail notifications informing me of warnings being issued.
    I added EC to the roster as well.
    As I mentioned last year, of late I've limited myself to updating the forum software with Invision sends out a notification that the software has been updated.
  3. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in A new Staff Member/Moderator   
    I was provided evidence of Pokyt's appointment when I received several e-mail notifications informing me of warnings being issued.
    I added EC to the roster as well.
    As I mentioned last year, of late I've limited myself to updating the forum software with Invision sends out a notification that the software has been updated.
  4. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Grames in Israelo-Palestinian Conflict: 2023 Edition   
    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. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in A Study of Galt's Speech, by Onkar Ghate   
    Onkar's talk has run its course, and has been started anew from the beginning in the mobile university.
    Drawing from Galt's speech, Onkar reiterates to whom the speech is directed, the remnant of rational minds still remaining in the world, asking them to join the strike and hasten the reclamation of a world to be reshaped by moral virtue. Onkar indicated that Galt gave his speech thus, contrasting it with the Declaration of Independence being a public declaration of the causes underscoring them as a rational appeal to the rest of the world citing:
    When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
    By writing Atlas Shrugged, Rand likewise broadcasts Galt's speech to mankind, speaking to any mind that reads it, and reaching any mind that understands it. While not as dramatic as hijacking the radio-waves of the entire world for three hours, equally impressive is that the message is being continuously broadcast via a medium available anytime someone wants to settle down with her novel in the privacy of their own mind.
    She lays out the incontrovertible demonstration of morality's foundation to and in existence, and in pondering this, consider the incontrovertible demonstrations provided by the ancient Greeks in geometry and mathematics that are universally held today. She shows morality is just, and like justice, can preserve or destroy depending on adherence to it or abandonment of it.
    Onkar breaks Galt's Speech up as follows:
    The introduction (as the first 19 paragraphs per For The New Intellectual)
    The morality of life (paragraphs 20 through 88)
    The morality of death (paragraphs 89 through 206)
    Your choice is either the morality of life or the morality of death (paragraphs 207 through 296)
    The course outline breaks these groupings up further by identifying the paragraphs in accordance with his outline of Galt's Speech provided for the presentation.
  6. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Grames in Israelo-Palestinian Conflict: 2023 Edition   
    Interesting reading: American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
  7. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to AlexL in Israelo-Palestinian Conflict: 2023 Edition   
    Israel's War -- Update | Yaron Brook
     
     
  8. Haha
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in A bit of humor   
    Reminds me of a purported sign on a fence:
     
  9. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to DavidOdden in How much education do we OWE our children?   
    By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child.
    Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing.
    Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.
  10. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?   
    Michigan’s Extreme 1931 Abortion Repealed
  11. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Reidy in The Nietzschean Origins of Skyscrapers   
    An article that makes for interesting reading in connection with The Fountainhead and Rand's theories about art. Sullivan was her model for Henry Cameron.
    The author's observation that highrise is on the decline in the US but going strong in China raises a question: has technology decentralized work so that such buildings are obsolete? If so, you'd expect freer markets to catch on sooner. On the other hand, maybe politics brought this on by making big cities more expensive, dilapidated and dangerous.
  12. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Math and reality   
    Oops, I got the terms mixed up. Geroch's term was "appropriate," not "adequate." It's his meaning of his term I have in mind: everything in the mathematics has physical meaning and all of the physics one wishes to talk about is describable in terms of the mathematics. Such is an appropriate mathematics for the physics.
    Some of our mathematics used in physics, I say, hopefully uncontroversially, is clearly a matter of chosen tool, not the mathematical character of the physical reality. Such would be using base 10 in arithmetic calculations and using various coordinate systems. As fruitful as it was to realize that curves can be described by algebraic equations written with reference to a coordinate system, when it comes to geometric facts of curves in the Euclidean plane, which we may take for planes of the physical geometry around us, the method of Euclid we learn in high school for bisecting a line segment is perfect location and physical; no coordinates lain over things by us and used to describe the curves and their intersections add something physical, which we get directly by synthetic geometry (Euclid's way being an example of synthetic geometry, as distinct from analytic geometry).
  13. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to StrictlyLogical in Math and reality   
    Language, concept, number, these we are possessed of and are all part of our grasping of and our relating ourselves to entities.
    Entities themselves, however, are not in any way possessed of any of language, concept, or number.
    That we "find" them poetic or majestic, of a kind or a phenotype, or multitudinous or stochastic, although somethings of them, something about their identity, is touchable and accessible by our various abstraction apparatuses, those somethings of them are not themselves linguistic, conceptual, or mathematical. 
    For those, are only us, as they only ever could and should be.
  14. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to KyaryPamyu in Freedom Versus 'Freedom'   
    Institutes like ARI and TAS follow a specific 'marketing plan', so I think it's worth considering what can and cannot be achieved by those plans. For the rest of us, who didn't choose a career in promoting Objectivism, I wholly agree with you on simply doing our thing and enjoying life.
    History abounds with philosopher-writers: Schiller, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus are prime examples. I noticed that many of them have at least one organization attached to their name. I think the Ayn Rand Institute is exactly that: an organization dedicated to promoting Ayn Rand's work - of which Objectivism is but one strand among many. Such an organization can expect precisely what, for example, the Albert Camus Society can expect: bringing together veteran fans, attracting a few new ones, and encouraging new scholarly research. 
    In this respect, I think the Atlas Society (the open-system advocate) is different from ARI. Imagine that a few intellectuals took it upon themselves to expand the philosophy of Camus. Well, you obviously can't do that, because Camus is Camus. So I think that TAS is, in fact, offering an alternative to Rand's system-as-she-left-it. (Of course, offering such an alternative is compatible with promoting Ayn Rand the philosopher-writer).
    If, let's say, 10% of the population read Camus, quoted Camus, attended lectures on Camus every summer, adopted his terminology verbatim, imitated his manner of acting, and excommunicated various individuals, what would we call that? A cult, or a fanatical fan base. Human knowledge is a decentralized business. People can accept Camus' ideas without liking his novels or haircut. No one is commiting a folly by choosing to never read Camus himself, and relying instead on accurate presentations by other authors. This is what it means for knowledge to successfully 'infect' the world. Science and philosophy cannot have Jesus-figures.
    Anyone who is committed to promoting Objectivism should imagine the following scenario: a world where everybody learns Objectivist ideas from K-pop and TV dramas, but barely anyone has heard of Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand. If said promoters find no problem with this picture, there's a high chance they're committed to spreading the philosophy, rather than to spreading Ayn Rand's writings.
  15. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Freedom Versus 'Freedom'   
    KyaryPamyu
    Among people I’ve known who have read Rand’s novels and were critical of them, it was because on about every page, she brings on some ideological or philosophical point. And either they find that a defect in literature as literature or they are grabbed by the ideas, and if they don’t like them, they start ridiculing the characters and story as replacement for arguing out the ideas. For many years, people I met who responded positively to Rand’s novels and ideas were one or two standard deviations above average intelligence. Since the handy internet has come about, I’ve gotten to see the lower levels who respond positively and who are a little sad in their limited ability to stick with reasoning and to make or adopt a consistent and well-understood philosophy of life for themselves.
    I do not “get” talk about how to market the philosophy. What is the purpose? Trying to make the world a better place? I don’t think that is actually a sensible goal in life. Just making your own life and the lives of others as individuals better seems the sensible thing to me. But then one’s focus is on individuals one gets to know and interact with as individual persons, not their falling into statistical groups for what looks like political hopes, which is sensibly a second-thought concern in a well-lived life.
    I like the local focus of Henry Rearden. Make products. Find traders for it. His focus is on that work, for satisfaction and for making a lot of money. He attends also to persons who are not commercial traders such as the young government man Tony, whom Rearden inspires, and to the philosophical guy Francisco, who gives Rearden much psychological liberation, and of course, he attends to the with-benefits of that trader whose suit he gets into thinking about putting his hand under. 
  16. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to DavidV in Objectivism Online is Twenty Years Old!   
    20 years ago, I came back from my internship at the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON conference excited to meet other Objectivists. 
    This was a year before Facebook when IRC Chat was still the most popular venue for Objectivists to chat. So I decided to start my own Objectivism Forum - Objectivism (then )
    Here is the post announcing the new site:  
     
     
    After I graduated college in 2004, I handed off management to a series of admins and moderators, continuing to this day.  I've continued to host the forum over that time, accumulating the following totals:
    10,160 members 31,374 discussions 337,656 posts The site was most popular for the first few years, hosting events such as a live chat with Onkar Ghate, all sorts of features like The Objectivist Metablog, hosting for Ayn Rand clubs, event calendars, hosted email accounts, photo galleries, and much more.  At live events, we would have hundreds of people participating and hundreds of posts per day.  After Facebook became popular in 2009, traffic dropped off a lot, but as you can see, the site is still active today.  



  17. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Some of the Breads of Life   
    Many things going on outside the world of the Objectivism Online Forum.
    Discovered, over the course of a year, that I was able to live within an anticipated budget, and that I would likely not have to return to the 'working 9-5' world.
    Such was not to be. I received a call asking me if I'd take on a part-time position. After 40+ years with my nose to the grindstone, a year vacation softened my resolve. The work offers the flexibility to take on more varied activities, with the added bonus of not eating into the seedcorn.
    I've watched the Ayn Rand Center U.K. ramp up activities with a rather different approach to the Ayn Rand Institute, one centered more on Objectivism, as a philosophy for living on earth. The focus has been noticeably on values and their pursuit. In a style reminiscent of Andrew Bernstein's suggestion that Objectivists should live as value-intoxicated people.
    Back in early 2012, I started a thread here: Biologists Replicate Key Evolutionary Step. It dealt with yeast in bread and evolution. The latest of the 29 current posts was added at the end of September 2021. Shortly after reaching a separation agreement at the end of 2022, I saw an article in my Android news feed with a picture of a loaf of Challah bread.

    The Golden One (Photo by Greg Lewis, February 12, 2023)
    I can do that. This picture is of the 19th loaf after receiving "The Perfect Loaf" for Christmas, done in Sourdough.
    Granted, it has not provided me with an evolutionary step, but after 7 days of nursing a glob of mixed flour and water, the active yeast in the environment manifests itself as a result of the processes.
    The sourdough process versus commercial active yeast provides a thought of division of the domesticated versus the wild.
    After following a recipe for making sourdough bagels, an appreciation for the bakeries that can turn them out more efficiently comes into sharper focus.
    Additionally the idea of proofing the yeast, and proofing the dough come into play, where both provide evidence of the yeast's vitality.
    After almost a day in the kitchen, you get to enjoy one of the fruits of your labor.
  18. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to StrictlyLogical in Hypothetically, if scientific consensus became that objects do not exist independent of consciousness, could Objectivism stand?   
    The Dark Ages were a long time ago.  Something more recent is Lysenkoism:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
    This is the very definition of a "scientific consensus" in Soviet Russia.  It's not so much that correct genetics "stood" during that time, but that it was "rediscovered" when the incorrect "consensus" withered away, as it had to.
    Consensus is not science and in fact has nothing to do with science. 
    The scientific method, when used by independent individual thinkers is, and always has been, that which shatters ideological based consensus, especially when masquerading as "Truth" or "The Science".
     
     
  19. Like
  20. Thanks
    dream_weaver reacted to Grames in The need for developing Philosophic Forensic Science   
    Most of the bullshit that is intellectual crime is itself arm chair philosophizing, why should it not be able to be refuted from an arm chair?  One can refer to reality from an arm chair as easily as evade it.
  21. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in OBJECTIVITY Journal   
    The Rise of Man
  22. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in What is the explanation for why some people live according to reason, and others don't?   
    Steven Pinker suggested this in his recent book, Rationality, Chapter 10: What's Wrong With People?
    "The obvious reason people avoid getting onto a train of reasoning is that they don't like where it takes them." Page 289
  23. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in The need for developing Philosophic Forensic Science   
    On the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Policy page is the Forensic Science section.
    In the 'About' section, it reads:
    Forensic science is a critical element of the criminal justice system.  Forensic scientists examine and analyze evidence from crime scenes and elsewhere to develop objective findings that can assist in the investigation and prosecution of perpetrators of crime or absolve an innocent person from suspicion.
    In Ayn Rand's essay, Philosophical Detection, a passage reads:
    A philosophical detective must seek to determine the truth or falsehood of an abstract system and thus discover whether he is dealing with a great achievement or an intellectual crime.
     
    The Forensic Files provide brief insightful looks into the world of solving murder cases. In the American legal system, the oft-touted claim is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. The episodes introduce the viewer to some of the behind-the-scenes looks at the processes of validating evidence.
    If the desire is to provide an equivalent in philosophical matters, the methods need to be impeccable as possible, be they for a great achievement or an intellectual crime.
     
  24. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Frank in Am I stupid for thinking Objectivist epistemology and metaphysics are brilliant?   
    By what measure(s) did you refer to the fundamental metaphysics and epistemology as being inescapably correct?
  25. Thanks
    dream_weaver reacted to Grames in The Golden Mean, or All Things in Moderation   
    Holy hell, don't go down that road of censoring messages or users.  Dividing people up into ever smaller bubbles that only are permitted to agree with each other is unethical and impractical.  Fobbing thread moderation off onto the thread originator is giving power to the people who are the least objective about the thread.  The topic of the Ukraine war is of broad enough interest that no matter who made it there would a lot of posts, AlexL has no control over that aspect and shouldn't be held responsible for it.  
    If you did follow through on this there would be multiple threads on the same topic with contrary editorial and censoring policies.  If you want duplicate threads on every controversy, then do this because that is how you get duplicate threads.
×
×
  • Create New...