Leaderboard

Hello Boydstun Nice of you to say hello and the friendly feedback. I became in as much as it is my main consideration in rational argument and used in my Substance Misuse Worker career an Objectivist in 2019 after reading the Fountainhead around Easter of that year. I picked it up in a Charity Shop in North Wales and cherish this battered old book. NO other book has given me so much beauty. I forced my way through Atlas Shrugged over a long period. I remain unconvinced grand political theories and live in much cherished social housing and value my NHS. For a while after reading Fountainhead and beginning Atlas Shrugged I couldn't understand why I kept coming back to a book that said to me (left wing as I was) such shocking truths, or why I found Dagny so beautiful and Hank and Eddie so relatable. In the end I gave in to the fact that beauty exists and to try to treat everyone like they have goodness and good intentions is futile. It also made me value people around me a lot more for their virtues. The joke is in any conversation I have with my wife, who doesn't read Rand at all, she MAKES RAND'S arguments as if Rand has possessed her. I find her very beautiful anyway, but when I hear her passion when she speaks about right and wrong it is gorgeous. I had to accept in the end that what I loved turned out for too long to have been told to me rather than realised by me.

Lawrence Edward Richard, firstly, welcome. I wondered if you are related to the Lawrence Edward Richard who died in 2011, because a Facebook man of that name stopped posting there at that time and recently that page has started again having posts under that name. I wondered if perhaps you were his son or other relation. Anyway, welcome to Objectivism Online. I enjoy your posts, as so many others here. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I think Rand, as any person in a sensible moment, would squarely object to the statement of Feynman’s as stated, which William Hobba rightly disputed, at the root post of this thread. In its context, which is unknown to me, we might see some better sense to Feynman’s remark. To the remark as it stands here, I would add to Mr. Hobba’s remark that Newton’s definition of Force, as well as its expanded formula by Einstein/Planck, is precise. They are both precise. That the later one is wider in correct application and contains the earlier one in the appropriate physical limit, does not make the later one more precise, but more widely correct. On and on, there is precise definition in physics. The definition of what are canonically conjugate pairs of dynamical variables is precise. The indeterminacy of their precise joint values in the quantum regime is precise. The definition of what is a Feynman Diagram is precise. Rand praised modern science a lot, but had criticisms of a number of general things being said about science by ’57, quoted from the fictitious book Why Do You Think You Think? (AS 340-41). Also in Atlas Shrugged, she made a couple of criticisms of some particular modern science. Most famously, she criticized Behaviorist psychology, which critique she extend in a later essay concerning Skinner. She indicated what was by her lights a wise attitude towards QM, with its “Uncertainty Principle” so salient with the educated public at the time, through words of the fictional character Dr. Stadler (346). She never returned to QM physics stuff herself, but she put her stamp of approval on all the contents of Peikoff’s 1976 lecture series “The Philosophy of Objectivism” which included his understanding and critique of the “measurement problem” in QM. Rand’s rejection of Behaviorism and (with Branden) of human instincts (under some prominent meanings) and the subconscious (under some prominent meanings) was under her view in what is usually called philosophical psychology. Her conception of What is a human being? was at odds with those quasi- or pseudo-scientific psychology schematics. Rand carried in The Objectivist a serial article on epistemological issues in biology that was authored by Robert Efron, a distinguished neuroscientist (Christoff Koch was a student of his). The title was “Biology without Consciousness” (1968). Rand savaged a paper by philosopher of science Feyerabend in her 1970 essay “Kant v. Sullivan.” Rand’s philosophy has also had some interface with science in her conceptions of what sort of thing could or could not be a cause anything.

Welcome to the forum, Giemel, Your experience seems similar to my own. Reading through the many posts, you will find that there are as many differing views contesting to be the most rational point of view. I wouldn't worry too much about trying to identify as Objectivist, as I would see it more as an aspiration, rather than an identity. Most people I've discussed ideas with have never heard of Ayn Rand, let alone any philosophical school of thought. Most people are religious and anti-intellectual. There's little you can do about it. In conversation, I usually identify as "rational egoist," if that's any help to you. If they wish to know more, they need to listen, or it's their loss. In any case, it's a comfort to know our ranks are growing.

CF - exactly. The project is just a blank-check support of an undefined and unidentified political platform that mouths vague platitudes about achieving 'liberty' - but without providing any intellectual basis (or even definition) for that liberty.