Boydstun

Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution by Anne O'Donnell. The Individualists by Matt Zwolinsky and John Tomasi

I was able to attend this Meeting of APA and this particular session. Massimino's presentation shadowed his paper in the final issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies last summer. Abstract of that fine paper: The author argues Ayn Rand made a genuinely novel, but often overlooked and underappreciated, contribution in her synthesis of Aristotelianism and liberalism. Aristotelianism, a philosophy of flourishing, and liberalism, a politics of freedom, have been viewed throughout history as largely incompatible doctrines, often understandably so. The author discusses the history of these concepts, especially their tensions, as a backdrop to further explore and contextualize the work of Rand, who argued that Aristotelian ideas about flourishing and liberal ideas about freedom are natural allies, and in fact strengthen each other. Rand's "Aristotelian liberalism" is a fruitful synthesis. Other presentations at this APA session, which was organized by Prof. Roderick Long: "The Problem of Pervasive Historic Injustice" by Prof. Jason Lee Byas "A Radical Liberal Approach to LGBTQ Emancipation" by Dr. Nathan Goodman These presentations and their follow-on Q&A's were informative and incisive. Roderick organized another session Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression which I did not attend because in that time slot I was shopping. The Ayn Rand Society did not have a session at this Eastern APA meeting. Perhaps Greg and Jim will pull something together for Central (New Orleans) or Pacific (Portland).

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche (continued, completed) I remarked earlier: "Notwithstanding his naturalism, Nietzsche comes up short of admitting the absolute, complete finality of the end of one’s one and only sequence of episodes of life, the life engaging one last week, yesterday, and at this moment." I suggest that Nietzsche's elaborate wrestling with an eternal return of the same is a self-deceit decked out in a Yes-saying to a false contrivance. (Contrast with the commendation by John Richardson in his Nietzsche's Values [2020].) The real gravity Nietzsche cannot get rid of is mundane and plain: his own death will necessarily occur, and that will be his complete annihilation. Some non-metaphorical and sensible lifting of that gravity is here: Nietzsche moved his pen to much upset of Christian doctrines. (His father was a Lutheran minister.) One erroneous view he failed to jettison in his own philosophy is the presumption (of Moses, Socrates, and many others) that knowledge of human constitution is the most important kind of knowledge for the human world, whether life of the individual or situation of the species. It is important, I say, though not most important and most-maker of humanity’s epochs. Knowledge more important in making the human world: how to make a spear and a bow for arrows; script for language; a wheel and its bearing; a plow; metals from minerals; irrigation channels; working animals; power from water wheels, combustion engines, and electric motors; computation, communication, and illumination from electromagnetism; and scientific medicine. Rand championed such knowledge as that, but for her atypical miss of the productivity of the gardener in the myth of the Garden of Eden. “All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind” (AS 1021). Frankly, one is not going to have supper on the table or fire in the fireplace without some labor and some thinking mind preparing those results, and either there are going to be some sparkles of creativity all along the way or the required thinking and the result will not be attained. Rand held advances in science, mathematics, logic, and engineering to be exemplars of noblest human morality. That in man which makes those advances possible and actuated is identically moral goodness, both-and-one of which man should be rightly pleased and proud. “A rational process is a moral process” (AS 1017). Nietzsche disdained and belittled such knowledge. He fancied new epochs in the human world by new ways in new religions (viz., as when Christianity overran Greco-Roman religions) and new philosophies (for the future, particularly his own philosophy) bringing forth from man the following: higher, nobler, more active beings (who evidently omit working for a living) (GM I.10). Nietzsche thinks European fellows of his time are a value-dead, sorry lot much in need of new, exciting values now that God is no longer a live source of credible values. So far as I know, this claim of deficiency in his fellows and their consequent need of a solution is a fake, a sham. It remains an unfounded estimate concerning plebeians, folks in production and trade, nothing more. Nietzsche writes, plausibly, that he cannot refrain from philosophic thought, such as he conceives such thought, and its continual improvement in himself (GM I.2). He claims of himself a durable will to knowledge, but only knowledge of a sort he would enshrine as the purpose of scientific knowledge. Nietzsche was in fact an ignoramus concerning scientific, mathematical, and engineering advances of his own time, and what interest he had in them was for twisting them into bolsters for his psycho-dynamical speculations, his favorite activity. Nietzsche is awake to the existence of physical goods such as life on earth. He is awake to psychological goods such as the absence of suffering and unearned guilt. He knows to reject moralities of guilt, Sin, Original Sin, debt to God, and duty; moralities against sexual enjoyment (GM II.21, III.16, III.22–22). He and Rand, in their different ways, survey past moralities and expose their defects. Nietzsche failed to find any new, coherent morality corrective of the past ones and based in life and its enjoyments. Rand succeeded.

In this photo, Moses is testifying in his own defense against four charges brought against him by Ayn Rand. I find he was falsely accused on three of the four counts when one looks into what he wrote.

The Pope continues his political campaigning for secular laws banning abortions, assisted suicide, and surrogacy. Altar-Throne impetus you have with you always. It must, for liberty, be actively opposed with your vote.

Traitor for ideology Traitor for money

ET, In the case of the table (and other objects), I'd think part of the value of the table for anyone would be its facilities for human actions such as providing a way to keep things off the floor (not stepping on things or tripping on them) and a feasible way to support a book while reading or supporting a plate one is eating from. Those facts about the entry of a table into human actions are objective. They are relative to human actors, but the mechanics of these actors and the facilities the table can fulfill for those actors (there are some such facilities and not others) are matters of objective fact. Even if one went big-generalization, such as in Dewey, and took objects' identities in our identifications to be all reducible to the possible facilities they can provide for us, it would not make those facilities and identities subjective in the sense of being basically dependent on caprice. The facilities are objective relations between objects and minded actors, minded subjects. The subject-relations in whether something is good for one as maintained by Protagoras in Plato's dialogue of that name was squeezed into a case for the idea that right values are intrinsic in things, independent of subjects, by Socrates/Plato/Catholicism by casting the relativity of the utility of things for man as a matter of human variations decried as inconstancy and caprice. They try to press the conception of objective valuations such as talked of in the preceding paragraph (Rand's view), which is the correct view, into caprice-subjectivism as in a false dichotomy with intrincism. (Part of the identities, for my part, would be objective relations among objects that are not our bodies.) Esthetic experiences occasioned by design of tables also seem independent of caprice, yet, as with the facilitations, relative to constitutions of persons having the experiences. Excellent issues, the market value issues also.

You Can Leave Your Hat On Original Sham

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche (continued) Allowing ‘tree” as metaphor for any organically unified process and resulting formation, the “tree of life” in the Garden of Eden is a sham: there is no provider of eternal life ready-made for humans to take. The “tree of knowledge” in the Garden of Eden can be metaphor for something not entirely a sham, though its dedicated fruit (bringing knowledge of good and evil [most particularly, knowing of sexuality]) and the reverence accorded exclusively to that specific sort of knowledge is the stock in trade of shaman and tribalist, and it is in truth not superior to knowledge of how to cultivate a garden. There is only one valid tree for human existence, and this is a tree of limited, but growing knowledge protecting and improving mortal, human life. In all that, I think this apple (my mind) does not fall far from the tree Objectivism. Here are thoughts from Rand on Original Sin. This is some great writing, but for inaccuracy in what the old story says. The story says that man was made in the image of God. A reasonable and traditional reading of that is that man was given the power of reason. He was given the rule to not eat from a certain tree, and at that stage, there is no indication that the man lacked the power of free choice in that matter. It was not from eating the forbidden fruit that man got reason or free will in the picture set forth in the Garden of Eden story. “The devil made me do it” would not have been a valid defense if we stick to the scenario crafted in Genesis. Rand is of course correct in condemning the subsequent determinism towards evil of humans who were descendants of Adam and Eve. That is, she is correct, like many before, to condemn the doctrine of heritable evil in human nature (humans with healthy brain), which is from the doctrine of Original Sin (which does not mean merely the first sin) lain over the story of The Fall and expulsion from Eden, lain over by early Christian theologians.[1] [2] It has occurred to many a thinking Christian that the concept of Original Sin is unjust and does not square with the manifest free will of individuals. They are told by the higher-level defenders of the faith that God’s justice is not the same as human justice, and we cannot fathom the rightness of all the actions of God. There is excellent human irrationality at that Stop sign. Rand errs again, as many do, in thinking of Adam as not already a producer in the Garden of Eden. But the old story says he was a gardener (unlike Tarzan). And he was allowed to eat most any of the produce far as I see in the story. That arrangement might reasonably be seen as commercial transaction in which one’s only asset is one’s labor. Getting expelled and cursed meant for the gardener not that he would have to begin working for a living, only that there would be less success in agriculture, more pain in the labor of it, and a need for overalls. The old story goes that God breathed life into his creature Adam. It would seem unlikely that God needed a garden or gardener, but It might realize a man needs purposeful projects. The Genesis story of the origin of man on the earth does not entail condemnation of human life, reason, morality, or productivity. From Augustine’s sick angle, the story does entail taking sexuality as evil. He and many others take Adam hiding from God after eating the forbidden fruit to be on account of Adam coming to have sexiness in his naked body and to know that sense is shameful. I’d think it more obvious in the story that Adam was hiding mainly because he figured he was in a heap of trouble, regardless of his excuse that he was hiding because he did not want to be seen naked. But, heaven knows, social regulation of sex is ever a burning issue of religions from tribes to Bible-thumpers of today. Kyle Harper concludes in a meticulous study of the Christian transformation of sexual morality in late antiquity: The next installment will be the last in the present study. There I’ll let Nietzsche have his say. To be continued. Notes [1] On the power and the glory of human free will, highly recommended: East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1953), his masterpiece. [2] When I was a child in the 1950’s in America, there was an additional determinism of human nature being put about by millions of Christians. The tale was that Negroes were descendants of a son (or grandson of Noah. Noah's son, in that Bible story, had seen his drunken father lying naked, for which Noah awarded a batch of curses and made the grandson a slave. Going beyond the biblical text, the linkage of the cursed son (or grandson) of Noah to Negros—accursed man begetting the Negros—was part of a characterization by Whites of Negroes as being by nature inferior to Whites. I heard that story a lot. I have other memories of ordinary thinking in those days of badness in individuals being due to “bad blood” at the level of family heredity and hatreds. But enough. References Harper, K. 2013. From Shame to Sin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche I said the Original Sham was that death was not naturally inherent in life. A little-sister sham is misrepresentation in the thought that one’s death is one’s eternal nonexistence. The truth is that a nonexistent has no passage, no situations, and no character. Those are the fundamental categories of things in existence. Some traces of one’s existence from before its end—traces in existents continuing to exist, with their passage, situation, and character, beyond one’s own death—indicate to succeeding humans some of the particular passage, situation (and situating), and character that had been oneself. There is an eternal nonexistence of one before one lived and after one lived, but those do not belong to one. Talk of one’s eternal nonexistence is a lie if the eternity is insinuated to be something attaching to one or endured. Posters reading “Where will you spend eternity?” are a sham multiple times over. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) famously formulates putatively rational arguments—which are known under the umbrella “The Wager Argument,” for why it is not irrational to believe in God.* Pascal first argues that because God would be without limit in Its nature, we who are finite, can know by reason neither the existence or nature of God. I should say such a conception of something, here labeled God, ensures that it does not exist. A thing without limit in its nature can be identically one with my axe and not identically one with my axe. Existence is Identity, as Rand would say. More specifically, and in terms of my own metaphysical categories, Existence is passage, situation, and character. The existent is not free of those limitations (as I have proven elsewhere). Further, if God is not conceived as a particular, indeed a concrete particular, then Its worth is a batch of empty words. Should we allow Pascal, for the sake of further examination of his wager, his false premise that we cannot know by reason whether an infinite thing called God exists? No. His argument requires one enter a game-choice situation in which one is being invited to base belief on desirability of outcome rather than on grasp of fact. Rather, what should be done is this: set aside such morally disrespectful tom-foolery and find the truth. Virtue lies in aiming for truth, and we have gotten it (as surely as we’ve gotten that there are no contradictions in reality because we’ve gotten the Law of Identity): There is no such thing as God or anything supernatural and no such thing as eternal life nor any happiness, suffering, or perspective of one before one existed or after one existed. Nor is there an infinitely long period of non-existence attaching to one before and after one existed. From Pascal’s Pensées: Pascal was a booster of the Original Sin idea. In §446 Pascal relays text he takes from a text he thought to be Jewish; it was really written by a Christian monk: Nietzsche does not throw Pascal’s faculty of “heart” out the window. He throws philosophy without such faculty out the window. “Carefree, mocking, violent—this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior” Nietzsche writes (GM III, §1, 68). For Nietzsche, finding truth is a ravishment, with the press of perspective that requires. The possibility of an objective standpoint for metaphysics and morals, such as Rand’s standpoint, is out the window. Nietzsche and Rand rejected the supernatural and, along with it, traditional stories on the origin and mortality of human life. The natural and plain view, when supernaturalism is set aside, would be, I say: a person’s self being identically a living process, when an individual dies, it is the complete end of that individual, that self.[1] Notwithstanding his naturalism, Nietzsche comes up short of admitting the absolute, complete finality of the end of one’s one and only sequence of episodes of life, the life engaging one last week, yesterday, and at this moment. I’ll return to this in the sequel. Rand takes religions to contain some amount of mysticism, and that seems correct to me. In her Atlas Shrugged, she takes religious folk to be “mystics of spirit.”[2] In my experience, that picture by Rand of what is going on in the heads of mystics is a poor fit with what is going on (I say in part from my own case). The mysticisms I’m much acquainted with are those holding as part of their faith the Genesis story of the origin of the earth and humans. Probably those were also the faiths most familiar to Rand. She evidently understood, correctly, that much mysticism is planted in the minds of children (see her next paragraph), but she imputes lack of critical, independent mind in the child, as in the adult, to a failure in choices. “Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others” (ibid., 1045). Applied to a first-grader, that is an equivocation on the word “faith.” It is a fact rationally known to the child that the knowledge of adults is superior to her own knowledge. Applied to an adult in the audience of a Billy Graham crusade at the time Atlas Shrugged was published, yes, then the word “faith” is used in constant voice in that statement: a willful suspension of one’s critical independent rationality, thereby aligning with the views of others. I should add, however, that a man getting “saved” at the crusade was able to change his belief about the world and his situation in it only because of the ability of humans to let (to some extent) their beliefs be taken on board by some overriding feelings and wishes, which is intellectual dishonesty and a malfunction of mind. Rand is mistaken in taking placement of other minds above one’s own authority as the root of mysticism of spirit. What will be the content of a mystic’s belief will have been contoured by sermons and childhood indoctrinating stories, to be sure. But the root of all mysticism of spirit is hard-mystic experience. That is a solitary thing. It can spring from miscreant brain states and can be set to holding in abeyance primal fears of absolute annihilation at death. Such a solitary experience was pivotal in the life and mind of Pascal (Hawton 1952, chap. III). One is blameless for accepting mystical beliefs, such as Original Sin, in childhood from one’s elders. In adulthood one is intellectually capable and responsible, and, due to one’s love of God and one’s love of any other faith-imbued family members, one is intellectually courageous to disabuse oneself of such beliefs and the method of faith. Einstein’s childhood religious faith ended abruptly at age twelve. I was eighteen, and the shift was likewise abrupt. No doubt it came to me with my growing background in modern science, but the explicit thought was elementary: Is it possible the universe is just holding itself up, just existing, without assistance from anything supernatural, namely God?—parallel the earth holding itself up without a character such as Atlas? This was somewhat before I began to read Ayn Rand. As soon as I allowed the question to come seriously before my mind, I conceded the affirmative, indeed the actuality of the possibility (and felt a great cleanness, followed by feeling a great benevolence towards all mankind). Rand draws attention to some elements of the Garden of Eden story in its Original-Sin overlay that are profoundly false and morally perverse. Nietzsche rates highly, in some respects, the mindset of Pascal, as we have seen. Nietzsche rejects, however, the supernatural and the notion of Sin. He sees Pascal as of noble soul, but crushed by “the Christian understanding of the weakness and depravity of man” (Pippin 2010, 10). To be continued. Notes [1] Likewise for the species: When the last members needed for reproduction die, the species is ended absolutely, left to nature. [2] Close kin of mystics of spirit would be the idealists in metaphysics from the traditional spectrum idealist-realist-materialist, as well as epistemological skeptics. References Hawton, H. 1952. The Feast of Unreason. London: Watts. Nietzsche, F. 1887. On the Genealogy of Morality. C. Diethe, translator. 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, B. 1662. Pensees. W.F. Trotter, translator. 1958. New York: Dutton. Pippin, R.B. 2010. Nietzsche, Pychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.

Some handy helpful background: Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Kant famously wrote: "out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated" (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 1784, translation by Allen Wood). The context of this quote is an acknowledgement that formation and exercise of a political constitution for a society, is in human hands and minds, which means no constitution and its exercise can be perfect. The conclusion, I say, is fair enough truth, but the antecedent thought that humans are made of crooked timber—human nature is corrupt—seems very likely nothing original with Kant; rather, a common view, come down from the likes of Augustine and put about from Christian pulpits of Kant's era (and ours). Grace, Predestination, and Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Catholic Encyclopedia – ORIGINAL SIN

The Original Sham was that mortality was not naturally inherent in life. According to this sham, death as a general phenomenon among humans needed an explanation outside the nature of life, the explanation on offer being that there had been an artificial devising of a systematic preclusion of endless life, making all humans mortal. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and care for it. He told the man ‘You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not form the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die’. . . . “God answered ’Who told you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you? , , , , “To the woman he said: ‘I will increase your labour and your groaning, and in labour you shall bear children. You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master’. “And to the man he said: ‘Because you . . . have eaten fruit from the tree which I forbade you, accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken. Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’ “The Lord God said, ‘The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out his hand and takes fruit from the tree of life also, eats it and lives forever? So the Lord God drove him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he had been taken.” So there I was, a child in the 1950’s tilling the ground, where we would raise all the fruits and vegetables our family would need for a year. It was hot as promised, and there were sand burrs, goat heads, and thistle, and thorns on the dewberry vines for getting your hands all scratched up. We canned; we stored—in the basement of the house we built—jars of green beans, lima beans, black-eyed peas, stewed tomatoes, (pared, sliced, cooked) apples with a cinnamon stick, peaches, apricots, cherries, pickles, pickled crab apples, strawberry preserves, and apple butter; along with honey from my beehives, wine we made, potatoes and sweet potatoes, onions, and pork we had butchered on the farm of relatives and which we sugar-cured in our basement. Someone had invented freezers, and we stored food also in there. Including bread made by our stepmother. Wheat was grown on farms of wider family, but at that stage of economic development, we bought the flour in a grocery store. Unlike the family of Adam and Eve, we were smarter and more fortunate than the Lord God had hoped, and we did not have to eat none but wild plants. We did pick wild sand plums that grew along roads such as Rt. 66, but they were wonderful, boiled for dessert or made into jelly. There are many puzzles arising from the text I have quoted from the New English Bible. Theologians of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions have thought about them for hundreds of years. I’m sure they have many interesting things to say about this story known as The Fall and the attendant doctrines of Original Sin and mortality, heritable from Adam and Eve on down to me picking off potato bugs. I have too many researches going on at this time to dig into the writings of those great theologians. It is another, shorter study I’ve wanted to do for years that I’ll finally do in this thread. That is a comparison of what Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche had to say about the doctrine of Original Sin, which became a setup for the Christian story of salvation from death and terrors of death. (To be continued.)

Occupation Finder might show some things you want to know.

What is it in the New Testament that applauds selfishness in material matters? When Christians behave selfishly in the sense of making themselves beneficiaries of dollars, they are not taking direction from the Bible. Then too, Christians reading the New Testament, having accordingly put Christ in the center of their "heart" and, further, accepting the account that death was introduced into human life by Eve and Adam breaking bad and, further, (again setting aside their critical rationality) accepting that Christ removes the death sentence hanging over any human putting faith in these teachings—are not getting from the Bible their behavior of grieving over the death of a "saved" loved one. I should add that anyone thinking or calling themselves Christian, yet rejecting the Christian viewpoints I just mentioned, are simply wrong in thinking they are Christian. One might say, "well, I'll still be a Christian if I reject only the sayings in Revelations." That might be fair enough, but to reject the Gospels or the entries by Paul and yet go under the label Christian is absurd. Things humans or pre-humans have taken up and converged upon on account of outcomes: cooking meat before consumption, plowing fields, riding horses, replacing clay and flint utilities with iron ones, replacing sails with engines, and replacing mules with tractors. We know the histories of why human sacrifices and slavery ended, and it was not on account of "outcomes." We know how a free press emerged in this country and some others, and it was not on account of "outcomes." The right stuff: Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, by Robert Bellah. The Axial Age and Its Consequences, edited by Bellah and Joas. A Natural History of Human Thinking, by Michael Tomasello. A Natural History of Human Morality, by Tomasello. Sacrifice Regained – Morality and Self-Interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham, by Roger Crisp. Emergence of a Free Press, by Leonard Levy.

Molly

Happiness and Life “Happiness is a particular form of life.” – Aristotle (Metaphysics 1050b1 [Tredennick]; cf. NE 1098a12–18.) I should say that happiness is sequence and network of occasions of joys and contentments that are an essential part of one’s life from the inside of its central long-arc control systems. That inside, cognitive and affective, is what is one’s living self, a human one. Aristotle’s remark is right. Happiness is life within life of the human being. “Happiness is the successful state of life . . . Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” – Rand (Atlas Shrugged 1014) “Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values . . . . not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest powers” (AS 1022). “The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. . . . Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward, and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself—the kind that makes one think: ‘This is worth living for’—what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.” – Rand (The Objectivist Ethics 29) All that Rand writes above is correct and important. She is correct as well in saying that suppression of the pursuit of happiness as self-benefitting is not a right moral ideal, but a moral corruption. “A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altar of others, is giving you death as your standard” (AS 1014). Correct. Rand is mistaken, I should say, in thinking that either one must hold one’s own life as one’s highest ultimate value and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose or hold as highest value and purpose the life and happiness of someone else (OE 29). There are extreme circumstances in which one has to make a weighty choice between those alternatives, but not routinely in my life. Ordinarily, it suffices to work under the nearer purposes one has set for one’s days, particularly the days at hand. To be sure, that entails, usually only incidentally, dances with others and modest situations of choosing as priority benefitting oneself or others. I had to turn down a friend asking us to give him residence in our home for a couple of years under his initial probationary supervision upon release from federal prison. Because he could not get such a gift either from me, his long-time friend, or from his sisters, he had to remain yet another year, his ninth, in prison. The terms of this possible early-release probation for him, together with the layout of our house, entailed that my computer would be subject to FBI warrantless search (for whatever my friend might do on it), which would mean taking away my computer to the lab. Without my access to my intellectual past on the machine, I’d be very nearly without intellectual future, and my continued full-court intellectual press of many years would be broken. So I chose me over my friend. I have not had such weighty exclusive alternatives of me vs. others come up on most days of my long life. I hope your life has also not been a relentless choosing on that sort of alternative. Rand erred also by leaving off fundamental aspects of rationally consonant human nature and the depth of their entrenchments in us. One can have joys, adding to one’s treasury of happiness, over the birth of a child, even one not one’s own. The treasure is still entirely an occasion of life from the inside of one’s own human life. It is part of human nature, healthy human being, to feel joy at new human life. It is also human nature, right human nature, to want to have others to love and protect. The child singing “Away in a Manger” is being satisfied in having an (alleged, named, but really generic) infant in the world to love and one (baby Jesus) worthy of great esteem, indeed the beginning of an exalted human. I’m all for human exaltation, as in the fictional protagonists of Ayn Rand’s novels and the real-life high achievers in the hard sciences or mathematics. Through the centuries, the Christian faithfuls would bring not only cases of loving one’s neighbor, but burning homosexuals at the stake (etc.). So the baby-Jesus story heralds in fact armies for evil, not only for good. All the same, it is a natural and right human joy we have in new human life. Our own individual lives are rightly, emotionally and rationally tethered from our beginning to our end in the sea of other human life around us—those beginnings and fulfillments of ends in themselves—a sea seething in value, human value.

Also under "Related" – D, E

Page 89 In that last full paragraph on page 89, I had written: "Contrary to the doctrines of Heidegger, time exists, and there is no originating or primordial time of being from which nature-time arises.[58] Being is only Existence, only Existence and its nature-time relations of existents." The note [58] lists good reads on Heidegger's view: Heidegger [1927] 2010, 329/314; Blattner 2005; Ruin 2005, 168–69. Those references are: Heidegger's BEING AND TIME and the contribution of William Blattner and the contribution of Hans Ruin in the collection A COMPANION TO HEIDEGGER (Blackwell). There are some other notions of a metaphysical sort of time allegedly distinct from physical time besides Heidegger's notion of a metaphysical time. These are nicely lain out by Henrik Zinkernagel within his paper "Did Time Have a Beginning?" (2008) which is available online here. To HZ's title question, by the way, he argues that time, physical time, did have a beginning. This is on account of current scientific cosmology, under General Relativity, concerning the history of spacetime. His conclusion does not, however, form a counter-example to the thesis that there are no existents (say, the total mass-energy of the universe, a constant from now back to the Initial Singularity) that exist ever with their present or past character outside of physical time. Related: A, B, C

Howard, I’m with the character who said “There is no such thing as an honest revolt against reason.” People do not have to wait for Aristotle to articulate for them the principle of non-contradiction to begin conforming to it. They knew the possible penalties of contradicting certain persons, and they knew to appear without self-contradiction for advantages of appearing honest with their fellows. Writing helps one in seeing more subtle contradictions. I don’t think any serious systematic philosophy gets going in pre-literate societies. Offhand, I don’t think any systematic philosophizing gets going in a society that has no religions and no sacred texts. The vision of rationality being a good and running to every issue seems to comes after written religious stories have taken hold. With the advent of comprehensive rationality come into view, it becomes the case full-weight that “there is no such thing as an honest revolt against reason.” The advent of money and advances in agriculture seem also to be prerequisites to the flowering of philosophy (full-weight rationality). The Epicureans did not accede to alleged sanctions of the gods. They had a sort of natural, biological basis for morals. Having articulated morals, arguments about alternative views, and having reading and writings, I think it is fair to say they had a philosophy, even a purely secular one. They would argue with Ayn Rand in her mature philosophy. They would defend lack of interest in new scientific discovery and technological innovation. They would defend not pursuing great wealth or great anything. They have a philosophy. Some of the reason it is not the Objectivist philosophy is due to the stage of science and useful invention at the time and lack of a correct concept of individual rights and those rights being the prime value properly protected by a state. At the centuries of the Epicureans, philosophy was happening, and there were ones more affirming of realism and life than others. Epicurus and Rand

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.