Leaderboard

Human brain is for improving nature, improving lot of human individual and fellows in nature, because it is possible to us and we choose it. In a hundred years humans are unlikely to leave reproduction to sex. They will put reproduction to production, though the joys of bringing up infants and children will remain. Many functions of human brain areas and functions appearing in ancestral species were repurposed in the evolution of the human brain arrived at by 25,000 years ago. And what the species did by their inventions and cultural developments since then is fantastic, including better health, less hunger, and rising treatment of women as first-rate self-directing human agents, not reproductive chattel for direction by the tribal witch doctors, and including liberation of humankind from the tribe for the enjoyment of individual life and bodily pleasure and choice in bonding and a liberating recognition of the virtue of those. Even by his time, Kant recognized and welcomed that with humans, sex had repurposed primarily to sexual enjoyment (Lectures on Anthropology). Some moral constraints have rational bases, and to find them, we don't need intonations of demands and brute-law left over from the witch doctors (Kant was a step more decent than that, contra Rand's caricature), still sprung from the same primordial suspicion that someone is actually happy in and with life from brain down to the fingertips and the same primordial urge for domination. Nature's evolutionary purposes are something to keep an eye on, including on the urge to domination, and all the while humans have and do and should remake the materials supplied by nature; do our own engineering (the Pill; the IUD; the condom—conspicuously absent from Mr. Grames' list of preventatives) for us. The regressive, subjectivist, fantastical hearing Nature or God disapproving human redirections of natural teleology by human intelligence and choices are delusional and deaf to the glory of human being, however much bolstering they get from Notre Dame or the Supreme Court. There is nothing modest or decent about those drums.

The grounds for the judgments are relevant. Aren't a lot of anti-abortion people really anti-sex?

Leaving aside knowing of private experience of others and leaving aside mathematical theses that have been proven to be unprovable, can we show that, for humans, there is nothing unknowable? That is, can it be shown that there is nothing empirical that cannot be known from the “third-person” perspective? By empirical facts, I mean ones at a level not all the way down to particularities, the level above particularities that is usually aimed for in this issue. The fact that the next guest to step through the front door will lead with either the left foot or the right foot, together with the circumstance that I don’t know who will be the next guest nor which foot will lead is not the level of empirical knowledge of significance and interest, not the level of empirical knowledge of concern in our question. We firstly should prove there are things at present unknown to us, a precondition to the question of whether there are in fact empirical things unknowable to us. That there are things presently unknown to us seems to be a point on which all interlocutors agree; so it should require no argument. I think, however, when one’s concern is having the fullest possible truth and not merely having enough to convince someone in argument concerning points of disagreement, then we should show there are things presently unknown and how we know that. Might we show that the reason no one bothers to establish this circumstance as preface to making an argument is that it is derivative from axiomatic truths that everyone mentally competent accepts even though they do not know they know them? That is, let us try for a demonstration from “Existence is Identity, and Consciousness is Identification” to “There is empirical knowledge we do not yet have.” The concept ‘identification,’ I say, presupposes the idea that there are things we do not yet know. That there are things we do not yet know is a presupposition of the endeavor to construct an argument or make an investigation by empirical observations. So, we safely do have a sensible question if we ask if all significant empirically unknown things are knowable. Some will say that due to the indeterminacies discovered in quantum mechanics, we have a counterexample to the thesis that all unknown empirical things are knowable. As a counterexample, this is just confusion. That canonical dynamically conjugate quantities in Hamiltonian classical mechanics were found later, in the 1920’s, to take on simultaneous values jointly determinate only down to a certain minimum value not zero, as a physical fact, is part of our physical knowledge and not a counterexample to the thesis under question here: are there significant empirical fact unknowable to us. Knowing that there is no contiunuum of quantity on down to zero in amount physically occurring in instances of the quantity called action in physics (action being any quantity having the same units of measure had by angular momentum), which yields the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle, is a case of empirical knowing, not unknowability. The absence of counterexample to the thesis does not mean we have shown the thesis true. So I don’t yet have a proof that all unknown significant empirical facts are knowable. Rand’s thesis that, for all existents, part of their identity is that they stand in some external relations would seem to at least pile on support to the thesis that all unknown significant empirical facts are knowable. It does more than that. There are things we already know of all empirical things unknown to us at present. We know that each is a particular and specific identity. We know that each is its complete identity. We know that we ourselves are also in that condition in the existence of our bodies. If we add Rand’s thesis that any existent stands in relations to existents not itself—let us say that the universe as the whole of existence stands in external relations to its parts and to its past phases—then among the components of the identity of each unknown empirical existent are its external relations. All Existents not us standing in such relations to other existents and our own bodies standing in such external relations, yields a network of relations. If our minds are able to grasp one relation between two of those existents not us, there is at least the potential of our minds to grasp all such relations. Beyond two existents not us having relations between them and to us, there are yet other relations they have to other existents not themselves and to us, and so forth, such that all told, they constitute all the part-to-part relations constituting the whole of relations within the whole of physical existence. That includes us. Our own bodily relations to some existents not our bodies connects us indirectly to all existents not our own bodies. Knowing one relation between existents not our body and their relation to our body entails a potential, given far more time than we actually have, to know all presently unknown significant empirical facts. A counterexample is an example. An example is in relation to other existents. There can be no existents in a counterexample that are not capable of being in relations to other existents. Then there can be no significant empirical fact for counterexample to the thesis that all significant empirical facts are knowable, given Rand's external-relations thesis. Therewith, all significant empirical facts are knowable.