Boydstun

I'm nearly finished with Dipert~B, and I'll be posting it in "Books to Mind" soon. To the list in the first note of ~B shown above, I should now add also: Christopher Hill's Perceptual Experieince (2022). Ned Block's The Border between Seeing and Thinking (2023).

Where did I say that anyone was engaged in insurrection in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol?

Battle for Abortion Pills

TJ, there is no King of the Law in America. There were no supporters of BLM or Antifa storming the Capitol, notwithstanding Fox putting about that lie on that day and others repeating it on social media, all of them desperately trying to disbelieve the plain before their eyes and to distract others from who were these factions in violent revolt (however delusional) against America and who was their inspiration. (So Pres. Trump tells these rioters who were allegedly secretly BLM or Antifa to stand down, and immediately they did stand down? Anyone who honestly believed that is an idiot or devoid of objectivity.) I recall one woman exiting the violent scene, saying "The police pepper-sprayed me. We were just patriots." What an obscenity.

Jon and Tucker: The circumstance that many citizens assembled in DC on 6 January 2021 and behaved peacefully, not trespassing nor damaging property or persons does not affect one whit the circumstance that many citizens did commit such crimes there that day. President Trump called off the riot on that day by calling out to the rioters to stop. For hours he waited to do that. I hope his body in not permitted to lie in state under the Rotunda when he deceases and is no longer able to call for his American "brown shirts" to intimidate through violence and threat of violence to the ends of having him in power and de facto abolition of our processes of constitutional, republican representative democracy. I had realized many years ago that Mr. Trump was a con artist, but I'd not realized until he was President that he had become our subjectivist-in-chief and that he was a narcissist* loving his personal power ultimately more than our country. The other evening I watched Mr. Trump in his new Presidential bid proclaim "I am your justice." Instantly my fist shot up with my reply: "'God is my justice.' in case you forgot." (A lesson for real persons of the Christian faith he'd not likely care to remember from that Dumas novel.) I am not a theist, but that is the way any audience member who is authentically a Christian should respond. Evil men in power, such as Mr. Trump (and the misleading bootlicker Mr. Carlson), will come and go. I expect our system to continue, as Paine envisioned: the Law is King.

My spirit does not "revolt against limitation, all limitation." Without limitations there is no such thing as freedom or a bed that has been made or a word that has been said or written. Without limitations of structure and dynamics, there is no such thing as life, from amoeba to us. Limitations and our creativity utilizing them is all our engineering and all loveliness made by us.

This thread more appropriately belongs in the "Current Events" sector, and not as a continuing hegemony of political thought in the "Metaphysics and Epistemology" sector. It was fine in the beginning on the topic of personal identity, but look where it drifted: the usual.

Definitely do try links here to your material. Better yet, post whole essays here. There are some good thinkers and responders here. And there are ten to a hundred times more viewers here than the number we see posting here. Another path to a larger audience, if you join Facebook, is to search there for a group called "Ayn Rand" and try to join it. It has a very large readership and participation. If you are admitted into the group, read the posts a good while, then join in the comments on posts. You might then consider posting an essay. It might not be approved for dissemination. You might then try another essay. I found some good responders there and some good threads to join in making comments. I also found some there who were hostile to anything said deviating from Rand, and not willing to think further about anything (the one guy I encountered like that was an old fellow). I eventually left the group because the gatekeepers were not liberal enough in what new threads they would allow. With Facebook you are always able to edit or delete anything you post. So, notwithstanding the wide appreciation of the audience there on threads I was permitted to start there, eventually I decided the owners did not deserve my participation, I deleted all my threads and left the group. But try it out. You might find a right fit, and worthwhile for a long while.

Presuppositional Apologetics Foundationalist Theories of Epistemology Traditional Foundationalism Is Not Rand's Truth of Rand's axioms is by observation of the world. Arguments against supposing there is something not conforming to the axioms are arguments showing the necessity of these truths. Some contemporary conceptions of foundationalism in epistemology are more extensive than the jobs Rand or I have for our foundationalism. Lee Braver writes that foundationalism is “the attempt to trace all knowledge back to a source or set of claims that, as necessarily true, secure the truth that is derived from them” (2012, 273). I do not, and Rand did not, take a set of claims as what is the ultimate source of truth and necessity. Realities, not claims, are our epistemological foundations, or frameworks, our ultimate sources of all truth and—together with abstractive grasping mind—ultimate co-source of formal necessities. Our axioms and corollaries and other broad foundational assertions aim to state widest realities. Our foundational propositions provide widest organizations of our knowledge; they strengthen, by economy and express structure, all our knowledge and advance of knowledge. Rand’s axioms and corollaries are discerned as self-evidently true in the sense that they are seen as true of the world and the mind and as not requiring or even allowing empirical evidential challenge. They would be presupposed in any challenge. Though they can be elucidated, they cannot be proven without circularity. “Proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved” (AS 1039–40). Whatever experience and intellectual development led to their apprehension, it leaves Rand’s axioms and corollaries with that self-evidential character shared with some postulates in arithmetic and geometry. Because axiomatic comprehensive propositions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, or without otherwise abridging logical or mathematical principles and their performative attendants, negation of these philosophic axioms is necessarily error, the axioms cannot stand in possibility of correction, only further specification, and we have here a form of epistemological foundationalism. These axioms and corollaries are not axiomatic in the sense of being foundations from which all true propositions (even if supplemented with auxiliary foundational principles) are derivable without further perceptions beyond those that led one to recognize truth of the axioms and corollaries. These axioms and corollaries are foundations of integrated organization of perceptual experience. Before acquisition of these axioms and corollaries, perceptual experience silently according with them had been foundation of them, and it continues to found, at least remotely, all propositions of existence. Specific proofs of necessities of philosophic axioms; impossibility of any counterexample. This is enormously different from apologetics for beliefs based on revelations and prophecies, rather than on sensory experience. Much challenge of rational epistemology, including epistemological foundationalist rational epistemology has been motivated by way of bolstering religious beliefs. Ancient skepticisms argued by the Pyrrhyronists and by the later characters at Plato's Academy were put to use in saving Christian belief against rational philosophy. Well before the Christian era, Pyhyrronists would say concerning all the philosophical issues being thought about: Stop it. Be content. Be not a pursuer and pretender of knowledge” (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I.xxix–xxxiii). Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was the nephew of the famed humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Giovanni and the infamous Counter-Reformation Savonarola had resided at the Convent of San Marco* in Florence, where the Medici library containing ancient texts had come to be housed. Gianfrancesco turned Phyronnism to Christian service by adding to the Phyronnists’ stance above: Turn from philosophy (notably Aristotle) as a source of knowledge, turn to those with the gift of prophesy (e.g. Savonarola) and to Christian Revelation. Petrus Valentia (d. 1584) saw the ancient skeptics as able to bring one to the realization that the ancient dogmatists did not find the truth, that Jesus alone is the sage, and one should turn from philosophers to God.

Bill, We need to be very cautious in claiming, as in your example, that, nothing else having changed points us to the reason for a change (with all due respect to the profitability of Mill's Methods). As I recall, Lorenz's explanation for length contraction was that it must be due to some unknown character in the molecular bonds making up the material apparatus. Einstein formulated the alternative that if we revised our kinematics—a systematic revision motivated by various E-M findings—length contraction falls out of the new kinematics, obviating need for an explanation in terms of molecular character in solid materials. In other words, we need to be cautious when concluding that some explanation is the only possible one. (And it does not redeem our error that it was the only or best possible explanation within our present context of knowledge. We do not fully know what is our context of knowledge, and even if we did, we should constantly strive to enlarge what that context is.) I'm wary of the idea that quantum indeterminism is is due to our need to physically interact with things to observe them. That seems at odds with the circumstance that the indeterminacy relations are only between dynamically conjugate variables; simultaneous determination of values of quantities not conjugate to each other in the Hamiltonian mechanics (and correspondingly in QM) are available in the quantum regime for endlessly more accurate precision. I know that Heisenberg gave the interaction account in his lectures at University of Chicago in 1929, but on this general explanatory point, I think he got it wrong at that stage of his thought. Unfortunately, those lectures were gathered into a book which became read very widely by the educated lay public.

David Kelley also became awake to that when he first began his independent organization for study and promulgation of Objectivism. Slide over to about 34 minutes in this link. A case like that came up here yesterday. A newcomer to the site laid out particulars of their paranoia and psychosis here where the proper name Objectivism is within the name of the site and pervades its discussions. (Of course, the poster may have been someone hostile to seeing Objectivism taken so seriously as it is here and by such manifestly intelligent people that he or she feigned psychosis in their post to help run down quality of this site in public perception.) I don't know why it is that Objectivist online discussion spots should attract any crackpots. I'd think their subjectivism would rather incline them to stay clean away from a place such as this. Maybe its just that the internet-posting medium gave more of those mentally ill and those of very low intelligence a free soapbox for broadcasting their views than was available before this medium of communication, and some might try every forum they find available for sharing their very poor quality of mind.

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Bill, I’ve gathered that in the history of mathematized physics right up to the present, people invoke some sort of intellectual sense of when some implication of the mathematics characterizing some physical relations would be something not plausibly physical and should not be the mathematical characterization without mitigation (I'm thinking of infinities [and renormalization] and spacetimes rejected as not plausibly real.) This intellectual sense is fallible, as I imagine the history of resistance to characterizations of physical reality using complex numbers would show. (I keep in mind too that for physical outcomes in QM that wave function gets conjugated to yield real-number values for physical detectability of outcomes.) To be sure, the applicability of higher mathematics in physics, indeed by now the indispensability of it for further advance in physics, has seemed amazing. Additional applicability of complex numbers and thought about their mathematical character is put forth here by an applied mathematician who is an Objectivist. It seems to me too strong, however, to say that history has shown that there is no area of mathematics that does not eventually show physical application. I wonder if topological spaces that are not Hausdorff have found a job in characterizing something physical. Or if any mathematics that has its only proof by using Zorn’s lemma has found physical work. If not, we might say that it is a reasonable conjecture (not guaranteed), based on history, to suppose that there is some physical applicability of those things that we simply have not discovered so far. An additional tie between physics and mathematics is the history of how much mathematics has been invented/discovered on account of some specific need(s) for it in mathematical characterization of some physical realm. It seems to me that all the amazing ties of mathematics to physics, and to engineering, support the idea that mathematics is grounded, or at least partly grounded, in physical reality. However, I think there are other aspects of a grounding account that need to get specified in order make a dispositive case that mathematics is grounded ultimately in physical reality. We need a plausible specification of what sorts of things perceived in the physical world are mathematical sorts of things, we need a specification of our means of such perceptions and how it differs from the sort of perception that gets us started towards physics,* and we need a specification of how those different sorts of perceptual starts are joined to the different sorts of method we use in discovering higher mathematics and in making scientific discovery of more and more of physical reality. *My perceptual discernment that in the case of a music staff and in the case of the fingers of my right hand the number of spaces between the staff lines and between my fingers is one less than the number of lines or number of fingers is a different sort of discernment than the perceptual discernment that keeping a tight grip with both hands is a good idea for safety when using an axe or baseball bat. And perceptually discerning that the number of spaces between longitude lines on the globe in the office equals the number of those lines seems quite a different sort of perceptual discernment than discerning that, having removed the globe from its stand, it is not a good ball for dribbling.

I think my argument there was unsound because I think I have a counterexample whose import is not phased by that argument. The spin-axis of the earth would seem to be an existent that is not caused. Of the infinite number of lines passing through the center of mass of the earth, we could say that the one that is the spin-axis of the earth's rotation is determined by the rotation of the earth. That determination is not equivalent to the causation in play between the rotation of the earth and the Coriolis effect on fluids of the earth. I suggest the argument should be rerun with causality replaced by the more general "determined by" relation. And Rand's paragraph at the top of page 39 in ITOE should be read, for perfect truth and greatest generality, with "affected [causally] by" replaced with "determined by." And Rand's statement of her Law of Causality in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made" (p. 25) should be altered: "All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe . . . are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved" with "caused and determined" replaced by "caused or otherwise determined." The Law might be better called the Law of Determination.

Rupee, it seems to me: Any more particular goal such as making more money or producing art or architecture or keeping transcontinental passenger rail service afloat will be enmeshed in more general purposive structure standing in the background, which would be moral values attained by moral virtues: a self-composed human life and happiness chronically attending such life-making is kept going by adherence to the many ramifications of the virtue of rationality and by particular lines of action, such as a career in architecture together with making a family. Changing the amount of time (including changing to zero) dedicated to one's various particular lines of actions can be and would be sensibly gauged off one's comparative emotional stresses and rewards. But that guage does not generalize to moral virtues and responsibilities. It is strenuous to be rational, but if it is emotionally painful to be rational, that would seem to be a signal to get to work on some self-recomposing.

To take this as a right analogy to the standing of realism to the world vs. idealism is to presume your thesis concerning the standing of realism and idealism to the world.

Alex, I inserted "linear" (with square brackets indicating the word was an addition by me to the quoted material) because I thought (am I wrong?) that conservation of angular momentum falls out under reorientations, unlike conservation of linear momentum which falls out under translations.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems (and the halting problem) may well be profound, but not in the pedestrian way of profound: taking them to bolster skepticism. Gödel's incompleteness theorems are, at least, splendid limitative theorems about formal systems, as are his completeness proofs. Some more resources: Set Theory, Logic and Their Limitations Perspectives in Computation by Geroch Computability – Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond

Alex, ". . . conservation of [linear] momentum follows from the translation invariance, that is from the homogeneity of space (and time)." From the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics (meaning non-relativistic), invariance under temporal translation implies conservation of energy, not conservation of momentum. Were you adding the parenthetical "and time" due to energy-momentum four-vector for the wider special relativity formulation of Hamiltonian mechanics? That is, due to meaning by "momentum" in the part I quoted the "relativistic 4-momentum"? The conservation of energy is implied also via the Bianchi identities in the Einstein Field Equation, as I recall. But this is not such a jolt as the jolt you mention concerning the Wigner demonstration concerning E-M field, as Bill described it, because of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass in GR. The Wigner showing is especially jolting to me because of Einstein's failure to find his much-hunted classical unified field theory. And in all of the derivation of E-M from SR by Rosser in his Classical Electromagnetism via Relativity, you have to have introduced the extra-mechanics concept electric charge.

You don't need to disprove idealism any more than you need to disprove skepticism or theism. Though they don't know the names for them (or for anything) at the time, every human being (with intact brain) begins as a natural realist, not an idealist (nor possessed of the concept of the transcendent); as a dogmatist, not a skeptic; and as an atheist, not a theist. That is why Bishop Berkeley had to do all that work composing arguments against the idea of matter, against the idea that being requires no perception of it, and that God exists. Justified belief does not begin with discursive proofs. The idea that realism; that access to physical environment, as it is, in actions and in mentation; and that all the real is physical needs for justification a discursive refutation of idealism (or skepticism or theism), which latter one knows of and has made habitual in mental framework only through higher instruction and childhood religious instruction, is incorrect. Rand and others correctly discerned that we stand in no need of discursive defense of our knowing the existence of and some particulars of the agent-independent, subject-independent world. She erred in thinking that we do not know the world as physical until at an advanced level of conceptual development. One was dealing with and learning about only the physical world from the start, just as one was interacting with and learning about humans not oneself before one had a concept of them (and oneself) as animals with potential of rationality.

In The Evidence of the Senses, David Kelley maintained that consciousness is not metaphysically creative (1987, 58–59, 69–70). That passivity is not overturned by the facts that our sensory receptors are active and follow-on information to and within the brain is actively processed. That stream of processing is automatic and the associated awareness, whether in laboratory testing or the course of ordinary perception in the stream of daily consciousness, is passive throughout that entirely automatic (in a context of trained-by-nature living neural nets) neuronal perceptual process. Perceptions in which we engage in voluntary active maneuvers in order to better identify what is being perceived and sort effects of the sensors from external objects, activities, and conditions (e.g. ferreting out floaters or after-images in visual perception of a scene) also does not overturn the metaphysical passivity of perceptual awareness.That is because what maneuvers we make and the outcomes of them are determinate rather than drifting free in some arena of no determinate character. One can take a realist "spectator view" of actions, their possibilities (just as in geometry we can take a correspondence view when stating [what is now thoroughly proven] that it is not possible to trisect an angle using only a straightedge and compass), and their outcomes in service of perceptual awareness. I do not see how talk of the distinction Kelley makes between two perspectives on perception—causal neuronal sensory pickup and processing (called external perspective, as when a brain surgeon is looking at the living brain) and perceptual awareness [called internal perspective])—is sensible conception without laddering up from the distinction one got early on between what is outside one's body and what is not. Any sense that any occasion of distinguishing between something external to consciousness and something internal to consciousness can be logical and legitimate when one has kicked away that conceptual ladder or ignored it is only habitual thinking, not real logical thinking. That goes also for notions of representations and for the idea of giving a conceptual priority over objects to the subject or priority to the relation between object and subject, but I'll address that in the balance of my ongoing series on Kelley's Kant (the balance of what Prof. Dipert had to say). Similarly the conceptual ladder for "grasp in consciousness" is planted in grasp of an object in one's hand. 2046 mentioned the importance of understanding precisely what is the problem, and for the present topic, I'd like to point to the sustained pursuit of what exactly is or is not the problem in A. D. Smith's The Problem of Perception.

Hear! Hear! Can you say anything, Bill, about how operator representations in QM meld into algebraic-variable representations in the classical regime?

Our friend singing the song I made from my poem YES.