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Ellis's part of the debate was a synopsis of his criticisms in that book. The book is his angry version. Well, thanks anyway. By the way, a PDF of Is Objectivism a Religion? is available for free reading online.

Probably not. They had a contract whereby either one could veto written or recorded dissemination of the contents, and Branden chose to invoke his veto, explaining his reasons in The Objectivist. Branden also said that Is Objectivism a Religion was the material Ellis prepared for the debate, so it should give a good idea of his thinking on the topic.

The consequences were foreseeable and written in plain text by Objectivists right after 9/11.

For a friend.

Their ruminations on consciousness and awareness. I'm extremely attracted to Advaita Vedanta.

I think Trump was hoodwinked into implementing anti-freedom/private property policies and expanding military/government powers as response to Covid. What part of the job of POTUS did Trump perform evilly?

Producing things of objective value is unconditionally a virtue. Not everything created is an objective value (example: Das Kapital; Mein Kampf). Keeping with the context of Trump as our Supreme Leader, it is irrelevant whether he produces value in real estate, since the job of POTUS is to execute the laws of the United States, not to manipulate the economy or make a profit off of real estate deals. Applying the relevant criteria, Trump is an anti-virtue, as president.

Thank you, Monart, for that possibility that "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" could be restatements of Rand's corollary axiom from the axiom "Existence exists", her corollary axiom "that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Yes, "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" can be a restatement of her corollary axiom, but I'd say that in the restatement the status as corollary axiom is lost, and in this particular restatement, Rand is moving on to a further important and grand exposition of ontology and philosophy of mind. Rand's notion of such a thing as a "corollary axiom" was an innovation. The closest thing to it I've found is something we could notice when following Euclid in geometry. After reading his axioms, postulates, and definitions, one could step back and realize "I'm going to need means of drawing and a straightedge and a compass to make the labeled diagrams required to do these ensuing demonstrations." That is only an analogy with Rand's stepping back after the assertion "Existence exists." In philosophy, there is a similarity with Descartes's movement of mind as susceptible to deception to existence of human mind. Aquinas had mentioned that move, but not in a context of Descartes-like description of or excuse for pretended super-duper state of doubt by a sane mind. Descartes's move is backwards in our order of knowing: One already has to know one exists to follow (pretend along with Descartes) the exercises of the MEDITATIONS. So that is not really much similarity in fundamental moves between Rand and Descartes. That Rand has axioms is like Spinoza, but the likeness does not amount to much. Spinoza does not have something like "corollary axiom". He is using axioms from which to deduce further propositions. That was not Rand's use of axioms and not her program. She was using 'Existence exists and is Identity' as a touchstone for right thought and right inquiry and as bar to metaphysics of being that had been crafted by the Arabs and Latins to have a niche in being for existence of God of the sort in which they had faith. Also a bar against radical epistemological skepticism. She was not using 'Existence exists and is identity', and 'consciousness is fundamentally consciousness of existence and is identification' as a basis for proving further propositions. I have not included in the present presentation the axiomatic aspect that my metaphysics can take on (which is detailed in my paper "Existence, We"). Like Rand, my program is at odds with Descartes and with Spinoza. Although I don't go into the possibility in this monograph of axiomatic structure being lain on my metaphysics, my invocation of the character of examples and counterexamples per se in arguing for the necessity of my categories resonates with Rand's efforts to prove that existence requires identity (efforts along the lines of Aristotle in defending the Principle of (Non)Contradiction).

My grasp of the integrated mind-body improvement of one's health and the self-realization of one's purpose through rational, productive living in consonance with objective reality, is satisfying and sufficient to link my self to Existence. In your quest, what in Vedic philosophies attracts you?

So, you explain that "Existence is Identity", and "Consciousness is Identification" are not exactly condensed re-statements of “...something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists”? I understood it as being such, since Rand, a few paragraphs later, writes, "...the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." You explain why this isn't a re-statement, but a more derivative inference. I'll continue to reflect on that.

Over at Reason, John Stossel notes that "The Labor Department just imposed 300 pages of new regulations to reclassify many individual contractors as payroll employees." Great. I guess that's why our tax preparer had all sorts of questions about gig work for us this year. Naturally, news media uncritically parrot the administration's alleged justifications for the changes, despite the fact that, as Stossel reminds us, this terrible idea has already been tried and failed in California:Four years ago, unions got then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D -- San Diego) to push through a new law that reclassified gig workers. They were told they'd get higher wages, overtime, and other benefits. Clueless media liked that. Vox called the law "a victory for workers everywhere." Ha! A few months later, Vox media laid off hundreds of freelancers. "They expected that all these companies were going to reclassify independent contractors as employees," freelance musician Ari Herstand told me. "In reality, they're just letting them go!" Herstand was dismayed to learn that when he wants other musicians to join him, he could no longer just write them a check. "I have to put that drummer on payroll, W2 him, get workers' comp insurance, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes!" he complains. "I have to hire a payroll company." [links omitted]Stossel also notes correctly that (a) some professions managed to get exemptions in California, and (b) Biden wants to make that law nationwide and without exemptions. Never mind that it was so unpopular that even Californians partially clawed it back at the ballot box. It's too bad that the best we can hope for in the next election is divided government. The Democrats would ram this down our throats if left unchecked. The cash value of Trump "owning the libs" through easily-overturned means is zero. Case in point: Keystone XL never got built. (Image by Office of the President of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)And the Republicans? I seriously doubt that the current iteration of the Republican Party will do anything positive to protect gig work, much less roll back the regulatory state that makes moves like this possible: They'll be too busy infighting, or pursuing a theocratic and xenophobic agenda to worry about such unfashionable things as a free economy. Maybe -- if he wins and he feels like it, and as he did for some things during his term -- Trump will roll back the new regulations, as if the Democrats will never come back into power again. Spoiler alert: When they do, a future Democrat can reintroduce these regulations or worse. (For an example from the world of Executive Orders, see also: The Keystone XL Pipeline.) And that last, Trump supporters, is what is known as "owning" the libs without defeating them. -- CAVLink to Original

Correction of * link in preceding post.

These Hours of Radiant Existence* This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy. The ten short chapters in this monograph are: I. Existence II. Other III. Divisions of Existence IV. Entities V. Passage VI. Situation VII. Character VIII. Science and Mathematics IX. Logic X. Mortal Life and Value ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

Productivity is conditionally virtuous in O’ism?

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I would venture that the mind that builds Starships for self betterment and added betterment to the universe, was on an implicit level rebelling and being 'finished with fire' as it were, while being subjected to the consequences of being surrounded by poverty, especially an unjust poverty. Having been born in the US, I was blessed to not have been subjected to poverty. While never 'wealthy' or free of mundane monetary concerns , I nonetheless have never experienced existential want. The 'tie in' I'm looking for is a satisfying ontology that reduces the 'cause' or describes a fundamental base to the subjectivity of my awareness. Having become recently introduced to Vedic philosophies, I've been checking a whole lot of premises !!

It's possible, today in the US-C of A, to live healthily to a hundred or more. I, myself, have a healthy-hundred as my goal. At 74, I'm as fit mentally and physically, overall, as the usual 64 or younger (even with the poor start of my malnourished childhood in the poverty of Maoist China). Whatever one's age or condition, one could live more healthily and longer. See "The Five Doctors" and the Comment following it. The key to a healthy self and a longer life is to be healthy every day in every way for the rest of your life. A healthy self is integral to the continual betterment of one's life-long self-knowledge and self-realization. Could this help you to "tie in [your] selfish subjective experience/relation to . . . objective reality"?

Was the power he wielded evil? And so by wielding he became evil, or did he corrupt the wielding of a prior established power that was uncorrupted?

Not that Trump, I’m referring to the once and future president. Trump in office, as wielder of the executive power. I could care less about his real estate operation.

Trump the producer and creator of value, is evil on an O'ist forum ?

You know what I'm reminded of? "The operation was successful but the patient died". There's what happens when (total) context is dropped, and foreseeable consequences of actions ignored, and reality/real lives shoe-horned into pre-selected and usually inappropriate principles. I do not consider this is "acting on principles"

Subsequent to Rand, authoritarianism/intrinsicism has caused divisiveness among Objectivists. No, I don't take Brooks (or Peikoff) as 'the final word' (specifically, on applications - implementations of O'ism to reality).

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology. Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective. This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary? So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil. To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

Monart, By we in this context, I mean only the combination self and other. On day of birth one is already immersed in other humans around one. Indeed, before birth, one was already immersed in the human thing that is one's mother's voice. I reject the view, often put forward by classical empiricists, that one performs an inference to know there are other humans, things like oneself, with inner life. Although, at the beginning we have no language, so no articulation of any of that in mind (and we have only begun to develop powers of memory.) I'd have to look up when we get the idea of we. (We begin to use the personal pronouns "I, me" at age two.) But as adults or near-adults, we can examine our elementary episodes of consciousness and know there is a pronominal other in all of them, an element that is accessible if we turn to that feature in our consciousness, and by adulthood, we know the "we" in those episodes. This presence of other forming the we in all human consciousness perhaps contributes to many peoples' sense that God is with them. If so, that is just a mistake; the presence with themselves is other humans, taken in an open unspecified pronoun-type way. My viewpoint on this, I later learned, had been put forward by some existentialists last century. However, they were engaged in an archeology of subjectivity, whereas in my system, existence standing independently of apprehension and comprehension is the objective prize we are joined with by other. I'd like to mention also, concerning the Objectivist metaphysics, that it was not "Existence is Identity" that Rand posed as a corollary of "Existence exists." It was something else, something one could infer if one were making the statement "Existence exists." The thesis "Existence is Identity" can be argued to be something fundamental about Existence, and it can be shown that under Rand's various categories, looking to deny "Existence is Identity" lands in contradiction, and is therefore false. The thesis "Consciousness is identification" is also not a corollary, but a definition of what is the most fundamental sort of consciousness, with any others, such as in dreams or perceptual illusions, being derivative with respect to the fundamental consciousness. Philosophers of mind today have called success consciousness that type of consciousness Rand took for fundamental. Rand’s “corollary axiom” with “Existence exists,” you recall, runs this way: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (Rand 1957, 1015). The counterpart in my system: ‘Existence exists, we live’. The act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Rand erred in omitting express, elementary knowing of aliveness of self and others in elementary knowing of consciousness. Rand did not omit altogether elementary knowing of aliveness in elementary knowing of consciousness in her mature philosophy, although that elementary nexus is not highlighted. Some sort of impossibility of mind without life is affirmed later in the speech when Rand writes of the alternative “your mind or your life” that “neither is possible to man without the other” (1957, 1022). Then too, when something she wrote in Galt’s speech “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible” (1013) is joined with something else in the speech “A rational process is a moral process” (1017), it could be inferred that, at least in higher, rational consciousness, its aliveness is implicit in its episodes and this fact is reflectively accessible within such consciousness. Also, in oral exchange years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: “It’s a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That’s what the concept means” (ITOE App. 252).

Yeah, because my position, Dr. Peikoff's position, and Yaron Brooks position is a "floating" principle and the alternative has "worked" over the last 20+ years. Oh yeah, it hasn't and thousands have died, a dictatorship of evil has been appeased and passively had it's very immoral existence sanctioned when it has zero right to exist while enslaving its own citizens with the goal of enslaving the entire world and/or destroying it in the process while leaving the door open for the mass death of all 8 billion people on the planet.