Boydstun

The United States is producing more oil than any country in history

Justices won’t block Illinois ban on assault-style weapons

In the preceding case for the state law in New York, the US Supreme Court struck down the law as in violation of the individual right to bear arms.

Reykjanes Peninsula – 12/18/23

Yes. Strictly speaking, Yes. Information is to fact as truth is to fact. Information and truth are registrations of fact by a purposive system. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Information as a Topic in Philosophy Biological Information Information and the Origin of Life Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information

1. Life. 2. Life. But in the future, artificial life could have artificial intelligence with a consciousness.

No. Although Rand may have had a view here or there that suggested dualism, her general metaphysics and biocentric ethics and psychology would not be consistent with dualism. At least not in the sense of dualism as usually meant: of some sort of fundamental dichotomy of the physical and the mental. Rand did not have a fundamental dichotomy between the inanimate and the animate, even though the latter has a profoundly different character than the former. Living systems can have even the feature of non-intentional, non-conscious teleological causes of individual life cycles, ways of life, and reproduction to continue the species, which is entirely absent in the inanimate components whose activities make possible that overall ends-pursuits of the living system. It would be untrue to all that reality to deny the existence of either the living things or the non-living things and their very deep differences in character (or the relationships in which they stand to each other). One does not have to choose between eliminative reduction of life to the inanimate on the one hand or dualism of the living things and the non-living things on the other. Similarly, conscious mind is not a biological feature that one must think of as either really just non-conscious living activities on the one hand or dualism on the other. Those alternatives are not the only ones under which one might comprehend the relation between conscious mind and the physical. Indeed they leave out the alternative relation that is the truth (for which one needs neuroscience and not only the philosopher's armchair).

In Rand's Galt's Speech (GS, 1957), she broaches the topic of sensory illusions, which she takes to be only illusions insofar as one has made an error in judgement-identifications about what is there. And this was because the sensory systems are purely physical, therefore purely deterministic, and being without free will, unlike conscious thinking, the senses have no power to "deceive" one. It's an old philosophic picture—held most famously by Kant: the inerrancy of the senses. Own up to it or not, that picture put forth in GS implies there are no perceptual illusions that one cannot expunge from experience by intellectual understanding of how they are caused. That picture of Rand (and others) is false, beginning to end. There is no such physical determinism even in the classical regular regime of physical law when one gets down to real physical processes taken in their intersecting independent causal streams as in nature. (I don't care how many thousands of times that phony picture of physical determinism in the classical regime has been repeated by way of introducing the "problem of free will", it is still baloney, as ever it was down from LaPlace.) As Peter noted above, Rand held to the modern view which, most reasonably, takes all occasions of consciousness to be features of living animal brain. She writes in GS that mind is not possible without physical life: "Your mind is your life" and "neither is possible without the other." Also, in an oral exchange a dozen years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: "It's a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That's what the concept means." (ITOE App., 252; cf. Binswanger 2014, 30–41; and the article by Robert Efron in The Objectivist which Peter mentioned earlier.) Any free will and any volitional, fallible consciousness are undergirded by living brain processes. Just as when we drift on habit, engage in evasion, or get things right. None of my retuning of Rand on classical physical process (including living sensory process), which I published in Objectivity in the 1990's and was likewise put forth later by Alan Gotthelf in his little book On Ayn Rand (only with my talk of independent causal 'streams' replaced with independent causal 'chains' and without remarking that he was departing from Rand) affects at all the fundamental principle permeating good epistemology that consciousness is identification (focally, of existence).

OCON 2024 June 13–18 Anaheim Marriott

A Man to Man

Trump Gag Order Is Partially Upheld in Jan. 6 Case

When visiting a big city or San Francisco, some people give alms to bums who come on with a really elaborate cock-and-bull story of their plight. The handout is for quality of the lie, not for human need. No creative, elaborate tale? then no handout. The dissemblances being put to this site, particularly in questions by "new members", should not win reward of Oz's need for running down the site by responses to faux often-banal questions unless they put on a really good dissemblance to the point of seeming closely like a real live person. For my part, I'll take a break from answering any questions.

I wonder: Did you feel a call to the ministry? Were you good at it? Were you able to help some people needing advice on personal problems? Do you still believe in God? If not, do you find yourself more benevolent towards all humanity more than ever? Do you have an interest in teaching math or science? Have you seen the movie First Reformed? (I like it a lot.) I suggest: If you don't believe in God any more, tell your wife and children, explain why you've changed your mind, explain that you cannot simply choose what your mind takes as true, that you love them as ever and will always love them, and that you want them together in loving spirit with you. Those relationshiips might continue to grow, in somewhat new ways of value. If you do still believe in God, and want only to leave the ministry, the adjustment for them is less colossal, I imagine, than the challenge of them having to accept that you are atheist. If you have become atheist, don't lie to your loved ones about it. Be square and definitive about it, but not aggressive and militant about it. Find in your own thinking What in secular, natural terms is correspondent with elements in what the religious folk treasure in religion. You be agape. Getting prepared to teach math or physical science might bring you some renewal of the old joy and love of these old friends. I bet you CAN restore this knowledge in yourself and even get farther with it than ever. Struggle and hope. Look to the future, not redo of the past, and look to organic unity from all good in your past to a future. Teaching math and physical science might have some joy of participation now in a goodness in the world even after you die. Growth and resilience are beautiful.

Wooden Spool Mother had fashioned of thick thread a harness for the summer locust, thread run through the hole of the empty spool, the locust to pull across the floor, the children to smile. None could know the invisible thread spool-full, the rough unwindings of tomorrows and dreams, tough rewindings, revisions. The older boy to marriage and break and poverty and roughneck and loss of one arm and women lost and wealth won and death by cancer at fifty-four. The younger boy to no woman, no child, to books and pen ablaze, to man life-love, from nineteen, same age, to that man’s death at forty-one. Orbits six more, to new man life-love. The young girl, alone Mother’s own child, to marriage, children, and theirs, to failed health, non-stop pain, and death at sixty-six. That summer, its locusts, that wooden spool a while more in the second boy alone still unwinding the invisible to visible.

US Diplomat Indicted as Spy for Cuba

KE, Any advance in understanding the world and one's place in it as the human animal is part of a person, and in that broad sense of the personal, I'd say that for me Rand's drawing out of a thing I'd somehow known but not explicitly was beneficial: that life is the final end in itself. In terms of benefit to understanding, I'd say also Rand's discovery that and how life—focally, individual human life—is the arena and ultimate basis of any value or meaningfulness. Also of personal benefit, in the broad sense of the personal, for me, is Rand's main timbers for metaphysics: Existence is identity; consciousness is identification (focally, of existents). This is a good frame for examinations of other wide frameworks in which I for one have a life-long interest in knowing, from the Greeks to the present. In the narrower and more usual sense of the personal, for me, that benefit came when I was a young man, about five decades ago and continues to old age: mental health. In particular, learning that (i) rationality in one's thought, values, and action suffices for authentic value, and (ii) the goodness of loving oneself, esteeming oneself. Concerning misconceptions of Objectivism, two come to mind: that it is primarily a political viewpoint, and that it can be adopted simultaneously with holding onto some belief in the supernatural. These are good questions, and I'm looking forward to what others at this site have to say on them.

EC, discussion at posting boards like this one have fewer participants than years back, I suggest, overwhelmingly because of what has gradually become on offer at Facebook for them. The participants I've joined with here have shown themselves through the years, to the present, to be worthwhile to communicate with, and I'm glad the owner now allows opinion pieces promoting non-Objectivist ideas here, which has led to some good discussions. The FB format and this one each have advantages. FB can have much visual material such as photos of people or text. The format here allows space for normal writing as in a journal or a book, and it is in such writing venues, paper or screen, that the most serious of human thought can be reached by the originator and carefully, precisely held to account by themselves and others. Also, at this site, but not Facebook, you can see how many hits something you posted has gotten, an important feedback. My experience is that the more work at information and thought I've put into a post, the more hits it gets over time. Following number of hits, by the way, suggests that for the handful of people who write anything here, there are about 20 times that many who do not post here, but who hit my more substantive posts.

Well, at least he or she seems to be an actual human, seriously engaged in a two-way flow of information, argument, and learning. Unlike that apologist for Putin who came on here a few months ago only to preach and indicate he/she/it had nothing to learn from anyone else writing here or from Rand's philosophy.

That post may have been a couple of hours before the one of yours, Tad, that I quote below, but it was not very far upstream of yours. Did you not see it? But don't you see that Israel was taken by surprise exactly because communications of Hamas could not be monitored because Hamas was able to use the tunnels for all communications among themselves with hardwire communication lines in the tunnels? As I said to you earlier.

What strikes me is that Objectivism could not exist in its current form without the emergence of the institution of money, of savings and lending, nor without the industrial revolution nor without the continuing (and even increasing) ideal of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. Rand's response to those things in our culture were rather unusual. There is not yet any complete convergence in the wide society (thanks to Ayn Rand) to a settled answer concerning the moral merit of self-sacrifice or the idea that each individual is an end in themselves and should be treated as such. Sacrifices made by humans for spirits and sacrifices of humans by other humans does have indeed a long history, and its convergence in modern religions and in the secular social organization is flatly at odds with the moral ideals of Rand. There is not agreement between Rand and the modern Judeo-Christian culture on whether Pride and Self-Esteem are good things. Nor Pity, nor Mercy. The goodness of what outcomes an idea has produced is not something agreed on by all minds. It is perhaps because religious wars were eventually thought by all sides to be worse than reinforcement of their religious beliefs that they all came to greater religious tolerance. And perhaps many sects came to accept the reasoning (civil peace and business prosperity) entered by Locke into the Carolina Compact that began legality of having many (non-Catholic) sects, Christian and Jewish, operating side by side in the colonial city of Charleston. But I think it implausible that the shifting away from, in every colony become a state in the Union, the Blackstone penalty of death by fire of homosexuals had anything to do with "outcomes" and a unison estimation of them. I think it had more to do with creeping humanism, a creeping change in hierarchies of values. That, I think is what also explains the US Supreme Court decision in 1986 letting stand State criminal law against homosexual acts being reversed in 2003, making same-sex relations legal throughout the land. A cultural revolution had happened. At its core, I think, was the humanism brought out and elevated in people seeing the horrible disintegration and death of the victims of AIDS (eg. Rock Hudson), who were mainly gays in this country. Gay guys became more fully human in more minds. Shared humanism in those minds, not bumping into outcomes with humanism set aside.

Surely part of that reality is human history and anthropology and the extent of free will and the degree to which rational people will disagree about what is right, what are the proper purposes of government, and so forth. That reality basis should also include and structure of strategic games. When many of us think of at the term reality, is firstly of the physical world. I just want to stress that the pertinent reality should not stop there and with an image of one's thought and action based simply looking to the physical world (an image making too small much human individual development and education—everyone's). The fully pertinent reality has to be human nature in both its natural and social surround. I notice too, that many others have based conclusions on reality so far as they got it, and reached logical conclusions for law and political organization. Some conclude: most right is classical liberalism, indeed a free-market economy. Where Objectivism is radical in the sense of fundamental is where some of those are fundamental (Spencer or Mill or Nozick or * ) in diving down for what truly is human nature and truly right ideals, rationally discerned.

PERSERVERANCE Mars Rover

Tad, —Lieber Institute – West Point I noticed also, on the offensive side (in the attack 10/7/23 on Israel by Hamas), the tunnels allowed for surprise because communications were by hardwire in the tunnels and could not be intercepted for indication of the mustering of an attack, even a large one. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Future helper

"The IDF say they have destroyed 500 'terror tunnel' shafts used by Hamas in Gaza, out of the 800 they say have been found so far." –3 December 2023

Transfixing Paint