Boydstun

Measuring Civilization (by Jay Friedenberg and other bright lights) I think the Morris book he takes up is THE MEASURE OF CIVILIZATION: HOW SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT DECIDES THE FATE OF NATIONS. Jay is a friend of mine. Another friend David Potts has introduced me to the thought of Joseph Henrich, whose book THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD – HOW THE WEST BECAME PSYCHOLOGICALLY PECULIAR AND PARTICULARLY PROSPEROUS complements the one by Ian Morris.

30 years ago, I placed the following quotation at the front of Objectivity V1N6. “Avoiding obstacles is easy in 68-dimensional space.” –Hinton, Plaut, and Shallice I had taken that sentence from an article the authors published that year in Scientific American, titled “Simulating Brain Damage.” The teaser reads: “Adults with brain damage make some bizarre errors when reading words. If a network of simulated neurons is trained to read and then is damaged, it produces strikingly similar behavior.” From the New York Times 5/1/23 “The Godfather of A. I.” Hinton finally became alarmed, and has now resigned his job at Google so he can sound the alarm. As the systems began to use larger amounts of data, it got scary. He still thinks that the systems are inferior to the human brain in some ways, but in other ways, maybe what is going on in these systems “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.” In the near term, his concern is that the internet will become flooded with false pictures, videos, and text. The average person will no longer be able to know what is true. In the longer term, his concern is that individuals and companies will allow the systems to not only generate computer code, but to actually run the code on their own. Truly autonomous weapons could become a reality, and unlike nuclear weapons, global regulation (detection) of their development will not be feasible.

A recent fine composition from Marc Champagne: Kantian Humility and Randian Hubris?

Conclusion Kant and Rand are completely opposed concerning what counts as rational metaphysics. Walsh errs in representing the two as closer than they are. Kant’s method for arriving at metaphysical conclusions is not Rand’s. Kant takes the status of metaphysical knowledge to be synthetic and a priori, Rand denies that metaphysical knowledge (or any knowledge) is a priori. Walsh is right, though, that Rand’s representation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is generally incorrect. The concerns in Kant’s theoretical philosophy are not Rand’s concerns. Kant’s question of how metaphysics is possible, though not a central question of Rand’s, is answered in her theoretical philosophy. Rand’s inattention to Kant’s question of how geometry is possible is a gap in her empirical epistemology. The differences between Rand’s metaphysics and the metaphysics of the German Rationalists of Kant’s time make Rand’s view impervious to Kant’s critique of those Rationalist systems. Miller’s defense of Rand’s system as against Kant’s is based on mistakenly attributing to Kant a coherence theory of truth. Kant, I argue, has a correspondence theory of truth. While Rand and Kant do not differ about that, Rand invokes many more correspondences to empirical reality than does Kant in their accounts of metaphysical knowledge and of conceptual, discursive knowledge in general.

Paper and Comment at 1992 session of the Ayn Rand Society: my assessment of them.

Kant versus Rand: Much No to Walsh and Miller (pages 71–96) ~Kant’s Big Questions Are Not Rand’s ~Misdiagnoses of Kant’s Fundamental Errors ~The Springs of Form

A Festschrift for Fred D. Miller, Jr.

Another book pertinent to this thread: The Tyranny of Need by Peter Schwartz

2020 Rand's Misunderstood Position on Altruism

Link in initial post did not take. Here it is again: 2024 United States Senate Elections

In Virginia, my State, Tim Kaine will be up for re-election. If the Republicans field a candidate committed to outlawing abortion, I'll vote for Kaine to do my bit against such a Republican candidate (as is likely – sigh!).

2024 US Senate Elections

SEP – Thomas Kuhn

Where the deed was done.

21 April 2023 Ruling (temporary stay)

The books I've noticed removed and then put back were about Roberto Clemente and about Hank Aaron. In the end, the authorities decided it was OK if youth learned about the racial discrimination in those days. That's a good put-back. Ninth-graders reading of strap-on dildos—what on earth is wrong with that? I heard nowadays they've even legally prohibited high schoolers in some places from having sexual relations with each other. The State should butt out. PS – The mother of their Lord and Savior was about 14. That's about Eighth grade.

Do you know, Jon, if explicit was saying what sex means physically? My older brother was the one who informed me about the way things really are. He let me know there was no Santa Claus. It was several years later—maybe I was 10—when he let me know what the grownups were secretly doing. And all of them were doing it. At first I was incredulous, then shocked and appalled. The grandson in our family is now 21. He loved to be read stories when a small child. I'm confident none of us read him stories about sex. Likewise at school or Sunday School. Except for that bit about the Virgin Mary. If any children pressed the adults about the meaning of virgin, I'd suspect some folk knowledge had already been passed down to a new generation of Americans. I know eventually the grandson got things figured out because he sometimes wears a T-shirt labeling himself as "God's gift to woman." When I was in high school, it was not easy to find out what was meant by the word homosexual. You could look it up in the dictionary or encyclopedia and take it in as something simply psychological. That there was something physical about it never occurred to me. My older brother never apprised me on the topic. I didn't find out until a couple of years into college, when my best friend, who adored me, let me know he wanted my body. I don't think there is really a need for children to know about sexual things from the older set. It all worked out fine. Higher Education

too sexually explicit or honest about history and presence of racism in America Meanwhile, near Lebanon: “Take me with you, and we will run together; bring me into your chamber, O king. “Like an apricot-tree among the trees of wood, so is my beloved among boys. “I was faint with love. His left arm was under my head, his right arm was round me. “When my beloved slipped his hand through the latch-hole, my bowels stirred within me. “The liquid myrrh from my fingers ran over the knobs of the bolt. “His legs are pillars of marble . . . .” “How beautiful, how entrancing you are, my loved one, daughter of delights! You are stately as a palm-tree, and your breasts are the clusters of dates. . . . your whispers like spiced wine flowing smoothly to welcome my caresses, gliding down through lips and teeth.” —Glad tidings in print from God

So extend lower taxes to everyone. I've never visited such a place, but many have reported it runs well and underscore the cleanliness of its streets. Continuation of the regulation and staffing the regulating committee with your political cronies is not genuine reversal.

On the US Horizon

SL, The "deep state" is not a useful concept for attaining better protections of individual rights against the government. The term means different things to different people who find it useful to say. Many of them have no concept of individual rights (which admittedly is not an easy concept). Different people with allegiance to the term and its shifty idea include different things in it. It is witch-doctor fakery to list what is part of the "deep state". On the face of the term, the deepest state in America is the US Constitution together with acknowledgement by citizens and law enforcement that that is the source of power to make any laws at all and how they may be executed. Many of us are in favor of that "deep state" and its social compact here, which gives us what protection of individual rights effected here there are against the government and against private aggressors. For many the "deep state" is whatever politically the don't like, bundled into a personification, like the workings of the Devil in the world. Each morning they wake to the new task set for themselves of divining the latest doings of this imaginary coherent beast. Some of my high school classmates do the same activity each day with regard to the Devil, and they gravitate to each other as a sort of club over the internet in which they compose what they pass off online, as a supposed prayer to God, whatever they have imagined in the tea leaves. "Deep State" rhetoric is not thought nor helpful. In its place can always be placed specific things in established terms with settled definitions, and with those one can proceed to call out what is wrong in it for individual rights.

Nuclear Power in Germany No advances in types of reactors will dissuade the anti-nuclear political faction from the complete elimination of nuclear generation of electricity. And no advances in design can ensure there are no human-operator errors. The safety of nuclear operations in West Germany and then in Reunited Germany has been superb; no major accidents.* The reactors in East Germany had to be closed immediately, upon reunification, because they were unsafe. There are safe means also for storage of spent fuel and other radioactive waste. The anti-nuclear faction in Germany has along the way gotten the government to halt research on new sorts of reactors in Germany. They have fought the continued operation of existing reactors as well as all plans for dealing with spent fuel. They are just against nuclear power, and there is no level-headed basis for it.* Fortunately, in the US, after the accident in Japan, President Obama reaffirmed that we are keeping open the nuclear sector of electrical generation. When we were children in mid-century USA, our dreams of the technological future assumed a lot of work getting done by nuclear means. More than was feasible, given the danger from exposure to radioactive materials. We also dreamed there would be breakthroughs in physics such that means for powering every electrical machine from within the machine itself would be developed. Then central production of electricity would be no longer required, and all of these debated issues today on central generation would be irrelevant. Unfortunately, such a discovery in physics has not occurred, and that of course could be simply because there is no such energy source, waiting to be discovered. Still, for all we know, such a decentralizing breakthrough in the future cannot be ruled out.

Left and Right: Codependent Foes

The anti-nuclear Greens in Germany have at last succeeded in ending production of electricity by nuclear fission for their country.

The moral is what should be done or permissibly may be done given certain sorts of factors marked off as moral considerations. In Rand’s view, and in mine, rational process is what distinctively moral process comes to. What is the nature of rational process? For the imagined scenario, if it is being asked whether the entertained action would be moral, within the Objectivist ethics, then I’d argue No. It would not be morally permissible on account of the virtues of Pride, Productivity, and Justice. The last entails treating people as ends in themselves. Even if they are losing their powers for autonomy, homage to autonomous life-making they formerly had or had possible is within what may and should be respected by the rational agent in Rand’s sense of human rationality. Rand’s virtuous human buoys the best possible to humans. Similarly, if a person said all their life that they wished their body to be cremated upon their death, it is against human rationality to instead bury the body upon their death, assuming cremation was indeed feasible, with the rationalization: “Well, it can’t matter to the deceased.” Respectful behavior for a life and autonomous person that had been or had been a potential in youth is within the ambit of Randian rationality and self-respect. To focus on the getting of money by lottery, inheritance, or design of tort, is betrayal of the virtue of production and trade in the context of human existence and failure at holding productivity as the central organizing purpose of one’s life. Then too, as Rand had it, the getting of money is not the only rational human pursuit, and the pretension that her ethics entails such foolishness concerning values is a patent distortion of her thought (one she denounced expressly). The virtue of Pride in the Objectivist system of ethics entails moral ambitiousness. The making of objectively grounded self-esteem has a precondition: “that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit.”