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Evidence or argument establishing or helping to establish a fact or the truth of something.

If there's no free will, how do you define "proof"?

What is Ayn Rand's proof that free will exists? Or any other Objectivist's proof? To say "Ayn Rand defined it" is not an answer, since it is possible to define things that don't exist such as "Martian": extraterrestrial beings originating from the planet Mars.

Thanks to this "cognitive guardian", more and more people can now keep in mind that if a thing exists, then it exists 🤷‍♀️ IMO, the "axiom", if there is any, is this: Conscious experience of determinate objects. Notice that I didn't say "consciousness of determinate objects." I said "conscious experience of determinate objects". The difference is not insignificant: - The referent of "experience" is just that: experience (regardless of its type, origin etc.); no other assumptions are made. - The referent of "consciousness of" is: an existential relationship between a physical object and a faculty of consciousness. Objectivism starts with the latter, i.e. with an existential fact, rather than with the former. Quite a feat! If someone sees nothing wrong with this, then he should stick with whatever makes him happy.

"Advaita . . . it's pure metaphysics." But any philosophical metaphysics has epistemological, ethical, and political implications, even if not explicated. If Advaita is "much like poetry", and less like philosophical metaphysics, then, yes, Advaita could be interpreted to suit a given ethics. Yes, "existence" as an axiomatic concept "collects", subsumes, contains, refers to all things that exist, at the same time that it underscores and reiterates the fundamental fact that if they exist, they exist. This repetition is a reminder and a cognitive guardian against the absurdity of denying that existence exists, i.e., that existence does not exist. One of Rand's innovation is her axiomatic conceptualization of reality as: "Existence exists. Existence is identity. Consciousness is identification." Without explicit grasp of these axioms is why "they've been fighting for millennia over what exists".

Sounds like Allister wears a red hat.

Via the Harry Binswanger Letter, I learned of a fantastic editorial from the British press regarding the situation in Iran and what the West ought to do. In "Iran Is About to Start a Nuclear World War -- and the West Is Determined to Lose," Allister Heath makes the following statement, which would have been obvious decades ago, but is controversial today:I agree that the West should take care of Iran's military while the Iranians deal with this guy and his buddies. (Image modified from image at Wikimedia Commons, license.)If Joe Biden were a serious president, he would announce that the mullahs in Tehran have crossed a red line, that they are an existential menace to civilised nations. He would declare that enough is enough, that no country can shoot hundreds of drones and missiles at one of its neighbours with impunity, that no government can go on funding terrorism, rape, torture and murder on an industrial scale. He would understand the need to deter other rogue states through a show of strength. He would state that the Iranian regime must be treated like the global pariah that it has become, that all of its proxies must be destroyed, and that, above all, it will never be allowed to get anywhere near nuclear weapons. He would put together a coalition, including as many of Iran's Arab neighbours as possible. He would impose extreme sanctions. He would allow Israel to finish off Hamas. He would help hit Hezbollah. Heath contrasts this with the actual policy of evasion and appeasement the West is continuing instead, which he demonstrates is a serious danger by placing this conflict within its broader context of warmongering by the authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, and North Korea: "[T]he Islamic Republic is the weakest link, the least difficult one to deal with today, if we had the sense to act." I highly recommend reading this rare jewel of clarity and urgent call to action, and publicizing it by whatever means one has. -- CAVLink to Original

Ogg, you may recall that Rand worked with different sorts of 'musts' (as do we all) if you recall what you read in her essay "Causality versus Duty." That all animals must die is a must from a necessity in nature. That one must pay taxes is a man-made must. Another division of "musts" is between the unconditional ones and conditional ones. The latter are of the if-then form: "If such-and-such is to be accomplished, then condition so-and-so must obtain." So there are four kinds of 'musts'. For man-made and conditional, we have: "If you don't want to suffer the penalties of a legal violation, you must pay your taxes." For nature-given and conditional, we have: "If there is to be a fire here, there must be oxygen" and "If you are to breathe, there must be oxygen" and "If you want to live and enjoy yourself, you must do certain things and not others." For man-made and unconditional, there is apparently no such thing (maybe you can think of one). For nature-given and unconditional, we have: "Angular momentum must be conserved" (meaning only it always will be conserved come what may).

Even though things like X-rays are out of the reach of our senses we can infer their existence from evidence. So what's the noumenal domain needed for? Sounds to me like it's nothing but a cover for bullshit.

In my opinion, it doesn't. I briefly explain why in this post.

It may be humorous to non-Objectivists that Objectivism recognizes that a baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball. But when Leonard Peikoff declares that science must conform to HIS philosophy, and you find out that his philosophy can’t accept 20th century science because it doesn’t agree with whatever Peikoff’s senses tell him is true, it ceases to be funny. It becomes hilarious. This is what happens when philosophy rejects the noumenal domain, the realm of amazing possibilities that lies just out of reach of your senses.

That is to say, logic and lawfulness comes, not from us as with Kant, but from outside of us. And since this determination of order comes through the senses, it appeals to the idea that all reality, not just the macro realm, must conform to the same logic and lawfulness that we perceive. Therefore, Objectivists such as Harriman or Peikoff, who are following their philosophy's conclusions to the letter, will declare that quantum particles cannot behave a-causally. Nor can they come into and go out of existence.

Greg Nyquist linked Peikoff's desperate attempt to subordinate science to HIS philosophy to ancient Greek philosophy: https://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2010/09/objectivism-metaphysics-part-12.html

I'm arguing that Existence exists isn't related to the idea that existents exist among other existents. I postulated a universe (an existence) in which the only existent was a hydrogen atom. The rest was just me trying to use a lot of words starting with E, hopefully while using the concepts in a consistent way, and putting 'permanence' together with 'change' in a way that makes sense. Permanence, being, is the laws of nature that make change predictable to us. "Beingness," which may not be a traditional concept in ontology, points to the quality of lawfulness in existents. I was also showing that I can play the ontology game too, even without lots of followers whom I neither want nor need. But now that you mention it, 'Existence exists' would be nothing but an empty tautology without Being to give it metaphysical permanence. I wouldn't except a monism of Being. But existence without Being is chaos, or non-existence. As for philosophers catching up and getting with the scientific program, Objectivism, with its reliance on the validity of the senses, can't make sense of any physics after Newton. David Harriman, author of The Logical Leap, and Leonard Peikoff say that modern physics must comply with Objectivist principles. But if it does, Relativity and QM will vanish overnight. https://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2010/09/objectivism-metaphysics-part-12.html This Dave Harriman, mentioned by Peikoff, is an amusing enough fellow. His attacks on relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory, etc. are filled with clever quips and amusing juxtapositions. Consider what he has to say of space:

When we bought our first real estate, we had just retired. It is a couple of acres with many trees, often large. At first I would walk around thinking this tree is mine, touch another and think this tree is mine, and so forth. Only then could I have a live sense of saying all these trees are mine or this acreage is mine. Similarly, by the time one was reading Atlas Shrugged, one already had known that pencils and telephones and books and . . . . exist. That comes before any live sense in observing "All these things exist. Call that sum Existence. Existence exists." Not every aspect of a particular belonging to all particulars (such as pairs of electric potential differences between all pairs of objects of non-zero rest mass) is an aspect that can be attributed also to the Universe. Existence is one thing that can be so boosted to the whole from the particular. And one does not know that Existence exists except by knowing that there are particular existents. This particular existent has to sleep now. Well, OK, one copy-and-paste: The concept and referent mass-energy is able to hold both stasis and activity. Its amount is constant although mass can be at rest or moving uniformly or accelerating or being turned into pure energy by collision with its corresponding anti-matter. So let the philosophers catch up and get with the scientific program. Rand/Peikoff took all of these to be existents: baseball, its striking the bat and motion to right field, the spin on the ball, and the materials of which it was made. I agree. The shift from Scholastic talk of being to existence is good. One way in which being was divided was as unqualified being (also called absolute being) and qualified being. I'm with Rand/Peikoff and others in thinking there is no such thing as unqualified being (other than non-being, one might sputter). Anything that is is with qualifications, i.e., with identity. We are univocal in our view of existence, as Scotus was in his view of being. I have an Objectivist philosopher friend who disagrees. Against our univocal-existence view, I should try to understand more fully Kris McDaniel's The Fragmentation of Being (2017). When someone says there is at least one absolute being, they are mistaken. Even the totality of existence, i.e., the universe, is qualified by having a certain total mass-energy.

Kant agreed with shifting away from Being.

From this forum’s homepage: "Man must act for his own rational self-interest" "The purpose of morality is to teach you[...] to enjoy yourself and live" ”Man MUST act for his own rational self-interest.” MUST. Okay then, MAKE me. Because last I heard there are only two things that people MUST do: pay taxes, and die.

The concept and referent mass-energy is able to hold both. Its amount is constant although mass can be at rest or moving uniformly or accelerating or being turned into pure energy by collision with its corresponding anti-matter. So let the philosophers catch up and get with the scientific program. Rand/Peikoff took all of these to be existents: baseball, its striking the bat and motion to right field, the spin on the ball, and the materials of which it was made. I agree. The shift from Scholastic talk of being to existence is good. One way in which being was divided was as unqualified being (also called absolute being) and qualified being. I'm with Rand/Peikoff and others in thinking there is no such thing as unqualified being (other than non-being, one might sputter). Anything that is is with qualifications, i.e., with identity. We are univocal in our view of existence, as Scotus was in his view of being. I have an Objectivist philosopher friend who disagrees. Against our univocal-existence view, I should try to understand more fully Kris McDaniel's The Fragmentation of Being (2017). When someone says there is at least one absolute being, they are mistaken. Even the totality of existence, i.e., the universe, is qualified by having a certain total mass-energy.

I don't see that concept being derived from objective fact here http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/productiveness.html. I see where she calls non-thinkers (the majority of men) "blanks" and "brutes." And I see a lot of Rand telling people what they MUST do, as if they had to listen to her.

I didn't say her principles were correct because she identified them. I said she showed how to derive them from objective fact.

Well, the way I see it anyway, is like this: Rationality: she got it from Aristotle Productiveness: she got it from Locke. Pride: she got it from NB who was a psychology student during a time when "self-esteem" and "self-actualization" were trending in universities. ------------ Euclid was meant for blind obedience, because people were blindly obedient to his geometry until the early 19th century. People identify things all the time, but that doesn't make them correct.

I fully grant that existence does indeed exist. However, that statement is rather ambiguous, as traditional philosophy makes a distinction between existence and Being -- with the emphasis often placed on one over the other -- because the idea of Being is not present in the empty tautology "existence exists." It is not to say that the concept of "existence" exists, as that would be obvious; but that a thing called existence exists that is not itself and can never be an existent. Because existents exist within existence. "Existence" is therefore synonymous with "universe," as the sum-total of all that exists, that is, of all existents. I had to clarify this because the idea that "existence exists" is a mere tautology; it doesn't prove that existents exist among other existents. It does not prove that multiple existents exist at all, because a universe or existence containing a single existent, even if it's just a hydrogen atom, is all that is required for the concept of "existence" to be valid. To bring traditional philosophy back into this, existence is Being, but we posit that existents possess the quality of Beingness (to break with traditional ontology). Because Being is traditionally the permanent in ontology. It's seen as something that is not itself an existent but is an unchanging and fundamental quality that underlies all existents, such as the constants of physics. Individual existents change, but Being itself is permanent. And while existents themselves may exist in a flux, as Heraclites pointed out, they change in a regular, lawful, non-chaotic manner. So the monistic tendency of declaring that "existence exists" falls to the dualism of stating that, yes, existence exists, and not merely as an empty tautology, but that it also cannot exist without at least one existent contained within it (and not just subsumed beneath it as if they were mere concepts). That singular existent, however, is not existence. Existence is something more; it contains the regulated lawfulness of the hydrogen atom in my example: the Beingness. Existence not only contains, it controls the existent, the hydrogen atom, as it changes, bringing to it a modicum of predictability. The term "beingness" is simply used to indicate that the existence of the existent is ongoing, permanent, that it may change its form but never cease to exist. "Beingness" only serves as a pointer to the permanence that exists in the existent. I am not therefore saying that "Beingness" is anything more than a concept. The existence is not Being itself, but we can posit that it possesses the attribute of Beingness without declaring that Beingness is itself an existent.

Individualism does not equate to being able to rewrite reality. Ayn Rand did not hand out a set of "commandments," and even wrote that such a thing was offensive. She did identify principles of morality. She claimed that they were derivable from objective fact. She showed how to derive them. This is similar to the way Newton identified principles of physics. Newton is not opposed to individualism merely because he came up with Newton's Laws and then claimed they were universal and not subject to individual choice. Newton, like Rand, showed how he came up with his principles. The description of how is more important than the principles themselves, but his work would have been incomplete if he had merely described the "how" and left the principles themselves to implication. So it is with Rand. The identification of Newton's Laws was a major breakthrough in Enlightenment thought because it showed, on a scale never before seen at that time, the power of the mind to grasp reality. Ayn Rand's morality does the same thing (although historically later). Her principles are not meant for the kind of "blind obedience" that religionists encourage from people. If some people take her principles that way, it's because those people have probably grown up with religion and they don't know any other way to handle such principles. People new to Objectivism sometimes enthusiastically graft it onto what they already "know" without realizing that they're still acting on unidentified anti-Objectivist principles. (Then others observe their behavior and think it's Objectivist behavior when it isn't.) Newton was obviously not meant for blind obedience, either, and it was not the final word on physics. Future discoveries made Einstein possible (and necessary). The same thing is probably also true with Rand. There are probably moral principles yet to be discovered, that apply in situations Rand didn't consider, but they would still have to be validated by reference to reality and the requirements of human life. (Besides, applying the principles correctly, to your own circumstances, can require considerable amounts of "thinking for yourself.")

Parmenides dealt with the question of Being and Existence. Your viewpoint is very similar to his, although Parmenides emphasized Being (permanence) over Existence (change, Heraclitean flux).

"Yes" demonstrates to me that you are a philosopher, even if an amateur, and that you can think for yourself. But then again, you're not exactly an Objectivist, as you stated.