Boydstun

Frank, I'd take correctness as one thing and brilliance another. I'd take brilliance in this context as correctness that is not found elsewhere. Knowledge of the brilliance, then, would requiring knowing what is to be found elsewhere, i.e., in the history of philosophy to the present. Finding out why so many professional philosophers would not consider Objectivism a valid philosophy would require getting hold of their specific criticisms and thinking them over. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any professional philosophers put their criticisms into writing, actually be competent in what the Objectivist view is in the major areas of philosophy, and be able to step out of, for a moment, the presumptions of their own philosophic school. I'd say just keep on studying other philosophers until you can for yourself identify the ways in which they are different from Objectivism, and where they agree, and which, if any, of the positions (Objectivist or not) are correct by your lights.

Research Center on Development of Causal Inference It would seem that saying what something is entails having come to know that things have natures. When we state a definition of a thing, we state its nature. We know some of the natures of things by experience before acquiring language. Prior to linguistic skill required for stating definitions, we embed our notion of what a thing is into action-schemas, i.e., what we can do with it and what it can do. Just playing with a bouncing ball on the floor has got the notion of having a nature going already, balls as capable of bouncing, floors as places on which balls can be bounced. Children of grade-school age make a shift—at different ages for various domains of knowledge—from verbal thinking of things in terms of characteristic features to verbal thinking of things in terms of definitions ("Capturing Concepts", pp. 35–38). I wouldn't sell physical "musts" short. It's a necessity very worth having and the base of any notional "musts" whatever. Fallible knowledge is good. And knowledge thought infallible, but really fallible, is also good. The notion of the self-evident is a conceptual one, I notice. Also, if one of the interlocutors finds something not self-evident, proofs might be offered to them nonetheless for the truth of a proposition. The fact that something is self-evident to one does not preclude it also being provable from other propositions self-evident to all the interlocutors. Even the old self-evident proposition that nothing comes from nothing can be derived from other truths, hopefully evident as true to all.

Rupee, welcome to Objectivism Online. A Material Theory of Induction "Which are the good inductive inferences or the proper relations of inductive support? We have sought for millennia to answer by means of universally applicable formal rules or schema. These efforts have failed. Background facts, not rules, ultimately determine which are the good inductive inferences. No formal rule applies universally. Each is confined to a restricted domain whose background facts there authorize them." Whewell "Induction on Identity" <– See pp. 13–15 on how the existence of atoms became knowledge. A related question is how certain perceptually discernible things in ordinary experience come to be also conceptual knowledge: 1. Children discern pretty early between objects living and ones not living. Later they will get a conceptual understanding of what is life. 2. Children discern what is human in contrast to what is not human. Later they will get a conceptual grasp of what is a human. Rand gives an interesting account of how this development comes about in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 3. A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later they get the conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics. Rupee, your question includes question of when to bring knowledge of experts into your own chest of what you know. Such knowledge we acquire becomes our knowledge, as you indicate. Christian Wolff, a disciple of Leibniz, made the dominant philosophy in German lands in the 1700's, which was the philosophy received by Kant at his start. Wolff wrote a great deal on criteria for when one should accept the testimony of others as true. That issue has been given a lot of attention by philosophers ever since. As you remarked, we sometimes (often) are getting information from others such as data gathered by Darwin (nineteenth century) and his reasoning over the data, joined with results from later researchers, that make up a knowledge we haven't gathered up by our own experience and reasoning in the domain; we take their first-hand knowledge into our own treasure chest of truth. One elementary point I'd mention on that sort of knowledge is that it is our own assessment, developing from very early on, as to when a person speaking to you is sincerely trying to convey knowledge to you. There are cases too in which one is not simply receiving information from another, but learning a skill. Learning to count is such a case, and it is not something one discovers spontaneously on one's own. I don't mean simply learning to place a sequence of labels on a sequence of items, but the conceptual feat of really counting: assign one-label-for-one-item, keep stable the order of number labels recited, assign final recited number as the number of items in the counted collection, realize that any sort of items can be counted, and realize that the order in which the items are counted is irrelevant.

I was supposed to include the following in my post before last, but failed to do so. In her paper “The Objectivist Ethics” that Rand delivered at a Symposium at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, she said: “Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the organism’s life.” It becomes clear in the full context of the essay that by “the organism’s life” she meant the individual organism’s life, not the species. Since she was in that paragraph talking of organisms in their physical, automatic operations, she could pretty smoothly be talking not only about life of the particular individual life, where there are individuals, as well as life of colonies, where that is the life form, and as well of continued life of a species. But she never took up that line. Her talk just stuck with individual organisms. She didn’t talk of organization of the organism as directed not only to individual survival but to reproduction as well. She could well have done that. It would complicate her move from biology to ethical egoism only slightly. She could have it that in the human animal, there is enough controlling of itself and its surroundings such that it can leave off the major physical end of reproduction, leave that to one’s fellows, and sensibly continue, in an elaborate way, the other main end, which is individual survival. When Rand published her paper “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), she added a footnote to the paragraph I quoted above. In the Note, she elaborated the paragraph further:

Greg, I see it now in the next-to-last paragraph of "The Missing Link." I had checked for Rand's little speculation on the beginning of human thinking in that essay, but I had not spotted it there. Now I see it. By the way, the phrase "missing link" insofar as it has been used with any allusion to biological evolution, as you may know, has served to insinuate that there is something wrong with evolutionary theory and to reinforce that false claim. It's use should be avoided. Every link found gives rise to two new missing links for the religious Believer impervious to findings of science concerning biological evolution.* I notice a more recent use of "missing link" in the title of a philosophy paper: "Ein Missing Link in der Geschicte der Transzendentalphilosophie – De Longue Durée des akademischen Aristotelismus bie Kant." Again, here too, that common-currency usage of "missing link" should be avoided because of its anti-evolutionary baggage and reinforcement thereof. Here is that little speculation of Rand's we should note: "A certain hypothesis has haunted me for years: I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man's consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focussed primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. But the development of a man's consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice." Now that I type that paragraph out, I'm not so sure it's the one I was recalling after all. But, anyway, concerning this paragraph I've just now quoted, it bears our consideration in the present discussion, and on this quoted paragraph, I should say: NO. The great apes of today and we humans share a common ancestor. There is no evidence that the great apes today, other than us, had any advance in consciousness at all since our divergence a couple of million years ago. For the human line, we have evidence of tremendous evolutionary development of brain (biologically heritable) since the divergence, and there is evidence that these changes in human-species brain ran with changes in ability for representations, iconic, idexical, and linguistic/symbolic, as set forth in The Symbolic Species (1997) by Terrance Deacon. These are hypotheses of how we humans got our common brain ability for acquiring language and concepts in the way we do in childhood and beyond. Rand is right, down from Galt's Speech, to characterize the present human species and each specimen to be either rational animal or suicidal animal. She is right to characterize today's human individuals as beings of volitional human-level consciousness. But it is illicit to read that volitional character of human conceptual consciousness back into the evolutionary rise of the brain constitution making that sort of volition possible.

Evolution and Human Nature - by Grandpa Hays Grandpa Boydstun highly recommends A Naural History of Human Thinking (2013) by Michael Tomasello. Also Ascent to Volitional Consciousness by John Enright. The correct link to Neil Parille's "Ayn Rand and Evolution" is here. In 1981, a year before her death, Rand remarked at a public forum: “I must state, incidentally, that I am not a student of biology and am, therefore, neither an advocate nor an opponent of the theory of evolution. But I have read a lot of valid evidence to support it, and it is the only scientific theory in the field.” The great work on the reception of Darwinian evolution and impacts of it on social theory in Russia is Darwin in Russian Thought (1988) by Alexander Vucinich. In college in Petrograd, Rand took a course in biology and passed as Highly Satisfactory. One can read a bit about biology professors at her university in that era in "The Rand Transcript Revisited" in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, V21N2, Dec. 2021 and references cited therein, by Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Pavel Solovyev. Evolution and all of biology is an important input into philosophical anthropology. It bears on the question What is Man? It bears on the nature of the human mind and human values. When Rand speaks of Man as a moral ideal for each human in Galt's Speech, what Man consists of is informed partly by biology. And that is so implicitly even if life is not such a leading idea in one's philosophy as in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Guyau, Bergson, or Rand. Rand had an essay in which she speculated about the rise of the mind of humans, their conceptual faculty, in the far past. I don't find which essay it was just now, but I'll make a note of it here when I find it. Her picture has the advance being made by an individual man, with the advance then being adopted by other members of his species. In a similar vein, she had the most basic function of art to be not in social sharing or communication, but in a need attending the conceptual way of life, which is individual human life. She had the most basic function of language to be the enablement of cognition by the individual human mind, not communication. That last is flatly athwart the book I mentioned above by Tomasello in which from evolutionary history and individual early childhood development in humans (modern scientific findings), it is argued that advantage of better communication comes first, upon which the greater ability for thought and objectivity arise. Dr. Hays, I think that that book is what contains the truly square way in which Rand's ideas about what is the human being, thence what should be the human's ideals, get fumbled on account, ultimately, of modern evolutionary biology.

necrovore, I agree that OPAR is the best single book on Rand's philosophy, at least of books addressing only her philosophy. You wrote that OPAR gathers up the essentials of Rand's philosophy into a single book. In speaking informally, that statement is not objectionable. However, I want to stress that it is incorrect strictly speaking. Peikoff's book OPAR contains Rand's philosophy, but it needs to be stressed that not everything in Rand's philosophy is essential to her philosophy and not everything in OPAR is essential to Rand's philosophy. Her theory of art, for example, is not an essential. That is because it was not included in Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged. Rand's philosophy is contained in Galt's speech, and that means that all the essentials of Rand's philosophy in also contained therein. Why do I say that Rand's philosophy is contained in Galt's Speech? Because at the heading of the reprint of the Speech in her book For the New Intellectual, she placed these words: "This is the philosophy of Objectivism." Anything that is essential to Objectivism is contained in Galt's Speech. Nothing added to the philosophy thereafter is essential to it, excepting such things as could be said to be briskly implicit in Galt's Speech, such as the positive points that Rand wrote in her later essays "The Metaphysical and the Man-Made" and "Kant versus Sullivan". Perfectly consistently with what I have just stated, it should be understood that not everything in Galt's Speech is philosophy at all, and so not part of Rand's philosophy—such would be any representations of the history of philosophy or the psychologies and motives of religionists and of materialists (e.g. Marxists, Behaviorists) and psychologies of savages and of dictators.

I've known of Andy many years. He is a treat to hear. I like his little books on capitalism and on the hero in literature. The other man is Robert Begley. I've seen him deliver dramatic renditions of famous American speeches, what we used to call standard oratory in the old speech tournaments. He is an Objectivist and is the husband of philosopher Carrie-Ann Biondi, whom you may know of. Dang, Andy had to mention IHOP. Sweet bird of youth.

Dream Weaver, those guys, and I also, are too old and sedentary to be eating pancakes. I concur with you that maple syrup is best. I have it on my Kashi cereal every morning. Occasionally, I still make cornbread, and when I put syrup on it, that would be real maple syrup. There is another sort of syrup, which is called Log Cabin. It is made from brown rice, and I find it a good fit with Rice Krispies. I expect the name Log Cabin will not be crashing under the consciousness-raising efforts. Although, there is perhaps opposition from some that my ancestors cut down trees to make shelters such as log cabins. I cut them down when dead or dying and use them for firewood, and I shall not be moved. I watched Gone with the Wind the last two evenings. Melanie and Mammy are the best characters, notwithstanding the good of breaking by us of the stereotype of black people conveyed in the film (and too much sympathy for the Confederacy and the slavery era). James Baldwin once remarked that it was the best bad movie ever made. Mammy is never going to be abolished or forgotten, and that actress is not going to be forgotten either as superb, even as minds with better understanding of race relations and their possibilities for betterment see the film.

KyaryPamyu, I doubt that a robot which was not artificial life could obtain any understanding at all or is capable of meaning anything to itself in its computations. And without those, an OR scenario for the robot cannot take on meaningfulness that choices of alternatives for animals have. Hence choice of alternative by a silicone brain, not living and not in a living robot, cannot amount to a volition. Of related interest: Ascent to Volitional Consciousness by John Enright.

Lines In the line Round: round to wider round, race and trace one’s arc farther to farther one’s start, pressing through the space of this magnanimous earth. In the line Alive: the dance, the chase, romance, the smiles, the glance, the kiss, undress. The touch. In the line Time: ray through all days slowing, olding, palely knowing. Scribe of my line, this me, passing into dispersing, swirling tomorrows of companions.

Dishonesty is unfastening from full reality and precludes the possibility of genuinely protecting objective values. I've seen only one public figure in the US tell possibly as many big lies as Sergei Lavrov in his public career: our recent President, Donald Trump. The name Lavrov is rightly joined with the title Liar whenever he's at the mic for year after many year. Depend on it: what he says in any years to come, as in all his past, will be a tissue of lies upon lies. Why the Kremlin Lies

Yes. A "preemptive" strike, whether by Bush in Iraq or by Putin in Ukraine, is aggression. Bush and Putin were solely to blame in ultimate responsibility. (True, Saddam was a murderous dictator. Nevertheless Bush's "preemptive" invasion was an aggression, and should be forever condemned unequivocally.) Putin's continued war-making in Ukraine is continued human depravity, and does not merit a bit of sympathy from civilized peoples, who instead should rally for taking the tiger to dust.

Rand writes in her mature philosophy “Your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver” (AS 1020).* This line is consistent on its face with Descartes’ doctrine that the human body is a machine, although Rand would contradict Descartes’ accompanying picture in which all nonhuman animals are devoid of consciousness. Rand had benefit of our diesel-electric locomotives, our particle physics, our chemistry, and our biology, profoundly enriching, over the four centuries since Descartes, what is “mechanical,” what is a “machine,” and what is mind in animals and humans. We can more easily see than Descartes could see the driver of the bodily machine as requiring the brain not only as means for sensory reception, imagination, and direction of the body, but as means of the driver’s own and only existence. With advance of science and without Descartes’ religious constraints, bolstered by his radical divide of extension and thought, we bind the entire driver: with brain and with perceptions of world and body and with the life and mortality of the body. Rand shares a pair of errors with Descartes in supposing that automatic mechanical sensory and motor responses cannot be in error—cannot present a falsehood apart from subsequent judgment—and that purely mechanical mind could not be free.(<–from Foundational Frames: Descartes and Rand) *Mind can be not only controller of the instrument, but at the same time, the song of the instrument. "I am my own song and the harp on which it is played" (Anthem, 1938, p.236 ; cf. Phaedo 85e–86d, 93a–95a and De Anima 407b27–408a29). Veridical perception, I say, is neuronal system indicating in consciousness things as they are. Illusions are neuronal system indicating in consciousness things in some ways as they are not. I say percepts are leaders to reality, due to our constitution. Percepts not only present. They indicate, due to our constitution. Their character of automatically indicating in consciousness is what makes percepts components in empirical cognition. The proverbial straight stick partially in air and partially in water indicates a bent stick. Understanding how it comes to look bent does nothing to change the circumstance that the perceptual presentation is misleading (contra Branden 2009 [c.1968], 47–48; Kelley [. . .]; Peikoff [. . .]). The stick’s looking bent is not on account of some inference we have made, not even an inference unconsciously made.

Since the death of Alan Gotthelf in 2013, attendance at sessions of the Ayn Rand Society at APA meetings have greatly declined. Last month there was an ARS session in which a paper was read and a prepared Comment was presented. There was no one in the audience. This Eastern APA meeting was in Montreal. I did not attend because train service beyond Albany has not yet been restored, and I'd not have wanted to be flying in and out of Montreal with the risk of snowstorms so great at that time of year. The present leaders of ARS are going to consider whether to continue having in-person sessions. I still expect the ARS book comparing the philosophies of Aristotle and Rand to brought to completion, whether or not ARS in-person sessions continue.

Some of what we know about of brainworks of human memory and concepts: Brainworks. Great helps: Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain by Stephen Grossberg (2021). Principles of Neural Science, Part IX, edited by Eric Kandel et al. (2013, 5th edition).

I'd like to add another link to a paper (2019) examining the Gibson affordance concept in perception: On the Evolution of a Radical Concept: Affordances According to Gibson and Their Subsequent Use and Development.

I suggest that a machine—say, a learning machine such as an artificial neural network one—has not educed a human concept even if it has been designed to learn dimensions of similarity among a group of items and even if its groupings according to degrees of similarity along those dimensions are registered by measure values and even if a label for each of those comparatively similar-member collections were to be given by the machine, these distinguished collections would not be like human concepts, and for three reasons: (1) Human perceptual comparative-similarity groupings are made against a background of possible actions upon them and uses for them by the agent who is on his way to forming a concept. This is contemporary Ecological Psychology continuing its research down from James and Eleanor Gibson, who acknowledged that their leading idea of "affordances" in perception had been a gift from William James and John Dewey. Rand, Peikoff, and Kelley did not put enough emphasis on this aspect of perception. Rand did set out that while the human is learning what things are, he has a parallel assessment going on as to whether the item might be to be avoided or might be desirable. Rand once mentioned, correctly, that most concepts are amenable to definition. In my 1990 paper "Capturing Concepts" I proposed than prior to learning to make sentences, the toddler (all of us) embed our single-word utterances and concepts into action-schemata. To get nearer to human concepts, even the most elementary concepts, a machine probably would need to be a robot, an agent, given a set of values and their interrelations by human designers and given ability to register and assess affordances. Perhaps the lab at MIT has been working on this. (2) Human perceptual learning is as part of a process of development towards acquisition of discursive thought and communication. Single-word stage of human conceptual consciousness and the predicative multi-word stage are motivated very much from urge to more and more precise communication with other humans. With this motivation not attending machine learning, and coloring its concepts and their interconnections, I think machine concepts would be but a stick-man of ours. Indeed, getting outputs from the learning machine we desire does make the machine operations in some community with humans, though not directly with other learning machines. This condition and its profundity in human conceptualizing was silently passed over by Rand, but it should not be neglected in a fully realistic picture of human conceptual operations. (3) A machine able to learn comparative similarity groupings among items would be doing something that humans can do, though perhaps without the affordances and background sociality of human cognition concerning the items. Other analyses of similarity computations besides the measurement ones given by Rand have been set out in the psychological literature. One could program a machine to detect particular similarities using these various computational schemes, but unless the results have different advantages, I don't see how one could determine whether Rand's measurement-analysis of similarity was receiving some confirmation that it is the better. And in the case of learning machines, I'm unsure if it can be determined which of the computational schemes is doing the work in learning to sort. Further, to show such sorting capability does not show conceptual ability. If a test for conceptual ability could be shown—say, passing a Turing test—and it were shown that machines using Rand's measurement-omission scheme for forming concepts from similarity groupings were the most successful in the machine, then we might say Rand's distinctive idea concerning the nature of concepts has received some recommendation from trials in machines. But that is a big IF, and unless we take passing a Turing test as showing understanding (and using sets in knowing concepts and numbers!), we'd not want to conclude that the machine has human-like concepts at all. And between you and me and the fence post, I don't think understanding at all is possible without the agent being conscious and, therefore, alive.

Vegetative Robots and Value

Happy Moment (in the early 1950's, I think)

KyaryPamyu, thank you for the mention and link. From my fundamental paper "Existence, We" in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (V21N1, July 2021):

Frank, have you ever read or heard someone claim "objective reality does not exist." Or are you thinking of when someone, such as George Berkeley, argues that there is nothing real that is not being discerned by a mind? That is, when you consider the possible claim "objective reality does not exist", are you really considering the possible claim "all things to be real must be discerned by a mind, and they aren't anything until discerned. So there are no physical things not depending on mind."? Nothing in this post is rhetorical. I'm simply asking you, Frank, which meaning do you have in mind. I'd like to know which. But meanwhile I think you are on to something when you note that a claim that "objective reality [is] unreal can just as easily refute mind as well." The being God is alleged to exist, to be immaterial, to be all-knowing, and to not require any sort of process for Its knowledge. It has been said to speak things to humans, and to non-existent things to bring them into existence. Before speaking the world into existence, It would not seem sensible for God to say to Itself "I and my speaking do not exist". And supposing It did not say that, but upon the occasion of speaking the world into existence, it followed by remarking "the world does not exist." It seems this being would be disinclined to make either such statement in those situations. And characters like Leibniz would argue that God would not make such remarks as those. Then too, if a regular person, a human being, were to say "objective reality does not exist," that would be inconsistent with any claim to have made such a statement. To claim "objective reality does not exist, and I made that claim" really puts me in a pickle because the act of making a claim is an existent.

Abel Prize 2022

I should paraphrase Dagny ("Why have we left it all to the fools?"): Why have we left the platonic realm of mathematics to mystical platonism? The great empiricist account of this realm, which takes history of mathematics as essential in constituting the realm, is Philip Kitcher's The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge.*