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Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/05/22 in all areas

  1. Sakkijarvin Polka a cappella (The Swingle Singers) https://youtu.be/q98Y86jfXaY
    1 point
  2. Boydstun

    Theory of Mind

    KyaryPamyu, You added “+ things it comes in contact with actually exist.” That is on the correct line, meaning line to truth, I say. From our science we know that lines, their orientations, and object shapes are actually in the distal stimulus that results in the proximate stimulus—the photo-receptors at the retina, whose stimulations get processed at LGN and visual cortex with all their interconnections. No concepts are needed for the integral shape of a baseball in one's hand to be discerned by hand and by vision. No economization by unit-economies or set-memberships are in necessary play at that perception of shape. In Kan’t mine/not-mine view of sensory perception, he had the matter or content of the sensation be the matter or the content of the “sensible intuition,” be the not-mine component, and the spatial form such as line, configuration, and shape be the mine component, even though in experience, we do not have a sense of it as mine, but as not mine. His arguments that spatial forms are really mine rather than not-mine are really aimed at explaining how Euclidean geometry, true of the empirical world as we experience it, is possible, given the methods we actually use in Euclid and the universality and necessity we arrive at in truths of geometry. His explanation of how it is possible—that space and its Euclidean relations are form contributed by the faculty of sensible intuition—is false and fantastical. But Rand and her intellectual comrades failed at refuting or displacing Kant’s explanation, wrong and (to modern heads) laughable as that explanation might be. Talking about perceptual form in a sophisticated modern, realist theory of perception, and talking about theory of concepts in which set- and unit-ways of looking at things subsumed under concepts do nothing to explain how the method used in geometry (synthetic geometry, not analytic geometry) is successful in attaining truths with the character of necessity and generality they possess come about, indeed how they are possible. Rand should have opposed Kant’s tenet that all formality is necessarily the product of the subject in episodes of perception. There is elementary form—such as the betweenness-relations (my right index finger is between my right thumb and right middle finger), a right-hand glove is an inversion of a left-hand glove, and so forth—belonging to concrete particulars and belonging to them as particulars and independently of our perception or any overt cognitive process concerning them. Kant’s notion that formalities in our perceptions and understanding do and must bar our discernment of mind-independent reality then dissolves. The betweenness-relations among my fingers may require some conceptualization to fully firm in mind, but like some similarities and magnitude-relations, which Rand did notice (ITOE App. 217, 199–200, 278–79), those betweenness-relations are physical relations lying in the physical, extra-mental world. Hilbert lifted betweenness-relations to the honor of primitive relations useful for a rigorous Euclidean geometry. Their residence, I notice, is not only as elements of an abstract geometry but in given physical reality. Rand understood that some similarities and comparative degrees of similarity found in perception lead the formation of concepts tuned to the world given by perception. However, Rand’s theory is an account suitable to only concepts of kinds of things and their contrasts and their taxonomic hierarchies. It is not an account aiming to account for our conceptual knowledge of spatial relationships or adequate to account for conceptual geometric knowledge. How from sensory experience do we learn that two points determine a line? Randian empirical abstraction from sensory experience to the concept line (straight line) together with the concept points will not yield the certain truth that any two points determine a unique straight line containing them (cf. A25 B39–40). And we do not come to know definitively such a thing by empirical testing such as eventually we came to know the existence of atoms. Kant innovated a theory of how we have such conceptual geometric knowledge (B40–41), a horribly mistaken one, needing outright detailed replacement, which is not to be found in Rand (directly).
    1 point
  3. Here is another to complement the Barber: Korngold Violin Concerto
    1 point
  4. EC

    Theory of Mind

    There is no contradiction if the our "universe" is actually a holographic diorama of the entire Universe which is a multiverse of multiverses such that E^\[Pi]I +\[CurlyPhi] [HBar] = G\[Mu]\[Nu]
    0 points
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