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  1. monart

    "Project Starship"

    ["Project Starship" is a very young and serious man's description of a romantic and philosophic vision of the future – and of the present, too. It's dedicated to the heroic genius of Ayn Rand, upon whose work this conception of starship is largely based. It's an answer to my previous post here, "What Can One Do?" ] ---------- Project Starship 3rd Edition Monart Pon © Copyright 1976, 2001, 2023 Monart Pon The Starship (General) In the boundless universe of stars, in a small region called the Milky Way Galaxy, is one star called the Sun. Spinning around this Sun, on a planet called Earth, is an organism called Man. This man is tapping the energy of the Sun and transforming the material of Earth to build his starship, his starship to seek, hold, and give the beauty that brings him his happiness. The starship that man creates is an expression of his mastery over his own destiny, a mastery that breaks the circle of nature with a straight line, a line that reaches from this earth to touch the farthest stars. The structure of the starship is the product of man’s shining his cool, strong light of reason upon the wilderness of reality to tame it into the home that supports his life. Growing from this work of discovering and unifying truth, goodness, and beauty, the starship is a selective re-arrangement of various aspects of reality into those forms that further his well-being. Abstractly, starship is a complex concept, integrating the knowledge that leads to the success of human life. Concretely, the starship is an artificial planet, an earth re-created into a hierarchical unity of arts and machines, performing the functions of sustaining and enriching man’s spiritual/material health. Symbolically, the starship is a badge that signifies man’s ultimate purpose, his central activity, his highest achievement. The starship for beautifying man can inspire him on his quest for new arts, new machines, new adventure: on a voyage that blasts off from this port of Earth and shoots outwards to other ports of other worlds--outwards to the countless stars of the countless galaxies of the unbounded universe. The Project (Introduction) Project Starship is an adventure to the stars, a romance for the ideal of starship--a consecration to the ultimate purpose of creating a world comprised of all those things from which comes the experience called happiness. Project Starship grows from the acceptance and expression of one’s responsibility as a special kind of being, whose honor is one’s volition and whose glory is one’s starship. Project Starship begins with understanding these facts: a. Starship is the integrated structure of knowledge and processes, of arts and machines, of ideas, values, and inventions that, together, can nurture the continual growth of life and happiness. b. The necessity of starship is based on the volitional nature of human life, the rational process of one’s consciousness, and the unlimited capability of one’s actions. c. The starship’s vital core is one’s conceptual consciousness, one’s mind, one’s reason, the basic faculty that discovers and invents the ship’s knowledge and processes. d. The starship’s most basic and crucial knowledge is philosophy, the knowledge of fundamental principles, the knowledge that integrates and guides all other knowledge, the knowledge that yields an attitude of romanticism for the wisdom as summarized in this way: Man is a rational animal, whose existence in objective reality is sustained by the volitional operation of his conceptual consciousness called reason towards the cognition, evaluation, and invention of his starship to happiness. I. The Basis Man is a living, conscious, volitional being. Starship is an expression of this volitional nature. Man, like all living things, is alive conditionally upon his generation of a series of successful internal-external actions to fulfill the needs for his life’s existence. Like other conscious living things, man uses his faculty of consciousness, his power of being aware of reality, to understand the meaning of the information gathered by his senses. This consciousness is a power to determine the good, or life-enhancing, and evil, or life-destroying, aspects of reality. It is a power to guide the course of actions towards the production of the good, and a power to experience, through emotion, the resulting state of life called happiness. Unlike other conscious things, however, man has volition. He has direct control over the operation of his process of awareness, and, therefore, over his life. He can choose to be conscious and live, or to be unconscious and die. He can choose to be sharply or vaguely conscious: he can raise his level of awareness, sharpen its focus, enlarge its field, increase its cognitive efficacy, or he can blur, shrink, blank out and sabotage its processes. Volition begins with the choice to drive the mind to the highest achievement of successful life, or to leave it to stagnate to a rotting death. Born ignorant and naked, man is innately ignorant of what is good or harmful to life, and is inherently naked of the tools to achieve the good and fight the evil. He has no instincts, no fur, fangs, or claws. To acquire knowledge and tools, man has to discover them by means of his mind. To fulfill the needs for his life’s health, he has to earn them by directing his mind towards the understanding of reality, the detection of possible good, and the invention of those extensions and augmentations to himself that can achieve the good. To attain the successful state of life called happiness, man must accept and express his responsibility as a volitional being: he must deserve his honor as the driver of his own mind, the master of his own life, the maker of his own destiny. This honor and responsibility of volition grants man the freedom of a potentially unlimited capacity of awareness, a potential to know the simplest, or most complex, part of reality, a potential whose limit is essentially determined by man’s own choice and desire. At his command, man can enhance, elevate, focus, his level of awareness, from the automatic but limited, perceptual state of non-volitional beings, towards the virtually unlimited, conceptual field that only he can achieve. The conceptual mode of consciousness brings into his grasp a vivid understanding of the nature of himself and his world--an understanding that can transcend the immediate moment and place around him, to ultimately span an eternity of time and an infinity of space. Given this kind of volitional awareness, an awareness unlimited in possibility of clarity, depth and scope, then the kind of actions possible to man is also unlimited. The sophistication of a conceptual consciousness can guide the most complex series of actions, the kind that can significantly alter the environment to suit human life, and that can enrich man’s health and extend his life-span. Man’s possession of a conceptual, volitional consciousness distinguishes his life as, symbolically, a straight line, an endless line transcending the immediate bounds of this Earth, of this Sun, of this Galaxy, to ultimately touch all parts of the vast realm of stars. To complement this volitional life, to clothe his nakedness and replace his ignorance, to glorify his honor as a master, to seek his happiness--man creates the starship. Starship could be the highest expression and achievement of human rational being. It is a ship of knowledge and processes: an integrated mobile environment that provides man with nourishment for growth, shelter against decay, and locomotion to explore his boundless realm. It is a starship because its primary source of energy and inspiration emanates from the stars. It is a starship because it is the kind of structure that can house and fly, comfort and move, man’s life on an astro-adventure. It is a starship because it can inspire man to be starbound, to seek new knowledge, new powers, new beauty--to seek his happiness and glory by sailing the endless sea of stars. II. The Constitution Starship is an integrated structure of the knowledge and processes, the arts and machines, the truths, goods, and beauties that, together, can enhance the continual growth of man’s life. The starship’s vital core is man’s consciousness called reason. Reason is the creator, commander, coordinator, of the starship’s every part. Reason builds, organizes, integrates and maintains the ship’s entire structure by forming ideas, values, and inventions. It conducts the long and complex process that begins with raw materials and energies of the universe and ends with pro-man products. Reason is the basic generator of man’s happiness and the starship’s potent dynamo. Reason performs the three general stages of starship-building: cognition, evaluation and re-creation. Cognition is the process of identifying the facts of reality, of discovering the properties and relationships of entities, of determining what is available for transformation. Evaluation is the process of detecting values and goals, the process of judging the possible good. Re-creation is the process of re-shaping, re-arranging, converting the raw elements of reality into those forms that can further life. The knowledge thus acquired, the ideas, values, and inventions, is integrated into the structure of the starship, constituting part of what may be called the starship’s intellect and spirit. Reason’s supreme power of creativity is made possible by its conceptual manner of perceiving and understanding reality. The rational, conceptual process is one of perceiving, identifying, and integrating the data received by the senses, condensing the multitude of observations into simplified groups called concepts. A concept is a mental unit concretized by a word and individualized by a definition. It is a condensed unit of knowledge formed by the differentiation and integration of essential attributes and relationships among entities. A concept reduces a multitude of facts about reality into easily grasped essentials, thereby freeing the mind from routine in order to study the new. Each concept thus formed is further combined with others to form larger concepts, or is divided into smaller ones, continuing this process of differentiating and integration indefinitely, bringing in ever-more organized knowledge, forever expanding the scope of man’s awareness. The starship’s knowledge may be divided into science and technology. Science is the faculty of facts, the faculty that studies what is. Technology is the faculty of fancy, the faculty that, based on the sciences, studies what could be. Linking the two is ethics, the faculty of morals, the department of philosophy that studies what should be. Directing science and technology is philosophy, the faculty of axioms and fundamental principles--the faculty that studies the basic nature of, and relationship between, man, reality, and the starship. Philosophy is the starship’s most crucial knowledge, the knowledge that unifies all the complexities of science and technology, the knowledge that gives a comprehensive framework of principles guiding and inspiring the conduct of all other knowledge. Philosophy identifies the underlying nature of existence, of that which exists, of what is real, describing reality’s meta-laws, defining the principles of reason’s conceptual process, and prescribing the basic principles of life-seeking actions. Two axiomatic concepts of existence that philosophy studies are “identity” and “causality”. Identity is the concept that an existent, any existent, if it exists, then it exists with an identity--with a set of characteristics that distinguishes it from all other existents, making that existent a thing, not a nothing and not just anything, but a something. Identity thus distinguishes the real from the unreal, the natural from the supernatural. Causality is the concept that an action or process is generated by specific entities, generated in a specific manner, resulting in a specific effect, according to the identity of the entity generating the action. Every action, every effect, presupposes an entity that generated or caused that effect. All of reality’s processes, including man’s, are accountable by certain properties or principles governing those processes. Causality thus distinguishes the kind of actions that an entity can generate from those it cannot, those actions that are explainable from those that are miraculous. These axiomatic concepts are the basis, integrator and compass of all other concepts of the starship, guiding the ship’s science and technology to study the specific identities of entities and their actions. Applied to man’s actions, “identity” and “causality” yield the ethical derivatives of “honesty” and “justice”. Honesty is the principle of being natural, of being true to reality, of perceiving reality as it is. It is the principle that since reality is objective and since man is a rational being, then to be true to nature, to be human, is to be conscious and conceptual. This means to pay attention, to understand reality with the clearest and fullest focus of the mind, with the widest context of knowledge, according to the law of identity. Honesty thus distinguishes the kind of thinking that man must perform to understand the nature and meaning of his life. Justice is the principle of being fair, of being true to man, of treating men as they are. It is the principle of men acting to seek, grant, and accept only the earned and deserved from each other. It is the principle that since every effect presupposes its causal agent and since one’s desired effects are not achieved without cause, then every part of the starship must be earned, earned by exerting effort in a specific manner according to the law of causality. Justice thus distinguishes the kind of actions that man must perform to achieve the happiness of his life. Honesty and justice form the basis of ethics, the set of principles (independence, integrity, courage, etc.) that guide the actions of the starship’s creation, the set of values that helps to unite the major faculties of science and technology, linking the facts of raw nature with the fancies of man’s desire. Science is the faculty that scrutinizes the kinds of entities and processes that exist. Science systematically analyzes the properties of existents, determines their relationships, defines the methods of measurements, and categorizes the results into ideas. Technology is the faculty that imagines the possible beauty that could come from the ideas of science and invents the techniques of re-creation to concretize the imagined ideals--creating the forms of artistry that enhance man’s spiritual life, and the forms of machinery that enhance man’s physical life. Thus, the starship is generally a structure constituted by the knowledge of science and technology, and by the products of arts and machines, integrated by philosophy for the purpose of man’s happiness. III. The Crew The crew of a starship is a society of individuals. Each member of the starship’s crew is guided by the principles of honesty and justice. He is a specialist in some industry of the starship for a certain period of time, trading his particular service for that of other members. Some may be scientists trading with technologists or philosophers with artists. Whatever the relationship, each concentrates his energy on some specific profession, and combines his effort with others in trades that yield industries too difficult for one man. Some benefits of this co-operation are the diversity of services and products, an amplification in the power of an individual to seek his happiness, and a more efficient, faster creation of the starship. The benefits of such a social starship are protected by an agency devoted towards the defense of a man’s right to his own life. This political instrument functions as a police and court to secure the individual from possible interference and destruction caused by the physical force of other men. It governs the retaliatory use of force to defend against initiated force, and may be called upon to resolve peaceful disputes. Today’s government at times protects the freedom of men to pursue their happiness, and yet, other times, commits (for the sake of cowards and parasites) the very crimes against which it is commissioned to fight. This legalized violation of rights causes injury, hardships, and unnecessary obstacles, and must be opposed morally and politically, in order to free man’s achievement of his starship to happiness. The Project (Conclusion) . Project Starship is a life-long purpose, an industry of philosophy, science, and technology, a career of understanding man, reality, and the starship--a study and practice of creating the starship’s basis, constitution, and crew. The first symbolic step in the starship project, for those who choose it, is the naming of one’s starship (e.g., Starship Pegasus, Starship Phoenix, Starship Prometheus). The name serves to symbolize and unify the specific stages of one’s project and serves as the banner of one’s quest, the emblem of one’s home. In the name of one’s starship, an introductory study of philosophy is undertaken. The study of philosophy begins with gathering the knowledge with which to understand such subjects as: the nature of objective reality, the nature of man’s mind and emotion, the principles of moral action, the preconditions of a rightful society, and the nature of the romantic spirit. This knowledge will aid in the identification of what the starship is, why man needs it, and how he can build it. The place to initiate the study of philosophy is Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivist philosophy provides the principles for the starship project described in this article. Specifically, the starting point is Ayn Rand's essay, “Apollo 11", in which she wrote: "Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of reason. Yes, reason can solve human problems--but nothing else on earth or beyond it, can…. Let us hope that some men will learn it. But it will not be learned by most of today’s intellectuals, since the core and motor of all their incredible constructs is the attempt to establish human tyranny as an escape from what they call “the tyranny” of reason and reality….. If the lesson is learned in time, the flight of Apollo 11 will be the first achievement of a great new age; if not, it will be a glorious last--not forever, but for a long, long time to come." ("Apollo 11", The Objectivist, vol. 8, no.9, September, 1969; also in the anthology, Voice of Reason, 1989; also online ) ----------
    3 points
  2. Boydstun

    "Project Starship"

    Sight of Superlative Achievement Stephen Boydstun (2007) My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is John Galt. One of the crucial traits of this character is his extraordinary technical ability. I can adore a fictional character, and part of the reason I adore this one is his possession of that trait. Adoration is one thing, admiration is another. Galt’s technical genius is admirable only in the derivative sense that I would admire that trait in a real person. I cannot admire a fictional character. I can admire the character’s creator as creator, but not the character. Fortunately, there are in our time many individuals whose mathematical and scientific accomplishments are at the high level of the fictional character John Galt. They are not well known to the general public. I want to tell you about one such man. Eli Yablonovitch invented the concept of a photonic band gap. He arrived at this concept in 1987 while doing research on making telecommunication lasers more efficient. Another physicist Sajeev John arrived at the concept independently that same year. John came to the concept in the course of pure research attempting to create light localization. Four years later, Yablonovitch was the first to create a successful photonic band-gap crystal. He used a variant of the crystal structure of diamond, a variant now called yablonovite. The structure was formed by drilling three intersecting arrays of holes, 400 nanometers in diameter, into a block of ceramic material. This structure, at this scale, was able to eliminate the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Photonic band-gap crystals are yielding a new generation of optical fibers capable of carrying much more information, and they are contributing to the realization of nanoscopic lasers and photonic integrated circuits. The name photonic crystal sounds like a crystal made of light. That is incorrect. A photonic crystal is an artificial crystal (or quasicrystal) made usually of solids such as dielectrics or semiconductors. The electrical properties of a semiconductor are intermediate between a dielectric (an insulator) and a conductor. In a dielectric material, the valence electrons of the atoms are tightly bound to them. They are confined to energy levels within the band of levels called the valence band. Above that band of levels is a broad band of energies inaccessible to the electrons under the laws of quantum mechanics. That forbidden band is called the band gap. Above the band gap is a band in which electrons could move freely in the material if only enough energy were applied to them to raise them to that band of energy levels. This band is called the conduction band. In a semiconductor, the valence electrons are less tightly bound to atoms than they are in a dielectric. The band gap is smaller. A smaller boost of energy is needed to induce the flow of electrons, a current. The degree of electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be precisely controlled by doping one semiconductor chemical element with small amounts of another. When an electron is promoted across the band gap, an effective positive charge called a hole is created in the valence levels below the gap. The holes, like the electrons, can be entrained into currents. By controlling the supply of electrons and holes above and below the band gap, carefully designed semiconductors are able to perform electronic switching, modulating, and logic functions. They can also be contrived to serve as media for photo detectors, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, thermistors, and solar cells. The properties of an electronic band gap depend on the type of atoms and their crystal structure in the solid semiconductor. To comprehend and manipulate the electronic properties of matter, electrons and their alterations must be treated not only in their character as particles, but in their character as quantum-mechanical waves. The interatomic spacing of the atoms in matter is right for wave-interference effects among electrons. This circumstance yields the electronic band gaps in semiconductors as well as the conductive ability of conductors. A photonic band gap is a range of energies of electromagnetic waves for which their propagation through the crystal is forbidden in every direction. The interatomic spacing in semiconductors are on the order of a few tenths of a nanometer, and that is too small for effecting photonic band gaps in the visible, infrared, microwave, or radio ranges of the spectrum. Creation of photonic band gaps for these very useful wavelengths requires spatial organizations in matter at scales on the order of a few hundred nanometers and above. In the 70’s and 80’s, researchers had been forming, in semiconductors, structures called superlattices. These were periodic variations in semiconductor composition in which repetitions were at scales a few times larger than the repetitions in the atomic lattice. The variations could consist of alternating layers of two types of semiconductors or in cyclic variations in the amount of selected impurities in a single type of semiconductor. These artificial lattices allowed designers, guided by the quantum theory of solids, to create new types of electronic band gaps and new opticoelectronic properties in semiconductors. Photonic crystals are superlattices in which the repeating variation is a variation in the refractive index of the medium. It is by refractions and internal partial reflections that photonic band gaps are created. The array of holes that Yablonovitch and his associates drilled for the first photonic crystal formed a superlattice of air in the surrounding dielectric solid. Additional workable forms of photonic-crystal superlattice have been demonstrated since that first one. Costas Soukoulis and colleagues created a crystal of crisscrossed rods, and it has yielded photonic band gaps in the infrared part of the spectrum. Photonic crystals have been created mostly in dielectric or semiconductor media, but Shawn Yu Lin and associates have created them in tungsten. These may prove useful in telecommunications and in the conversion of infrared radiation into electricity. In 2001 Eli Yablonovitch co-founded the company Luxtera, which is now a leading commercial developer of silicon photonic products. Photonic crystals, manipulators of light, they are alive “because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form.” –AR 1957 (re diesel-electric) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientific American 1983 (Nov) “Solid-State Superlattices” –G.H. Dohler 1984 (Aug) “Quasicrystals” –D.R. Nelson 1986 (Oct) “Photonic Materials” –J.M. Rowell 1991 (Nov) “Microlasers” –J.L. Jewell, J.P. Harbison, and A. Scherer 1998 (Mar) “Nanolasers” –P.L. Gourley 2001 (Dec) “Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light” –E. Yablonovitch 2007 (Feb) “Making Silicon Lase” –B. Jalali Science News 1991 (Nov 2) “Drilling Holes to Keep Photons in the Dark” –I. Peterson 1993 (Sep 25) “A Novel Architecture for Excluding Photons” –I. Peterson 1996 (Nov 16) “Light Gets the Bends in a Photonic Crystal” –C. Wu 1998 (Oct 24) “Crystal Bends Light Hard, Saves Space” –P. Weiss 2003 (Oct 4) “Hot Crystal” –P. Weiss 2005 (Nov 5) “Light Pedaling” –P. Weiss Nature Photonics 2007 (1:91–92) “Bandgap Engineering: Quasicrystals Enter Third Dimension” –C.T. Chan Fundamental Papers – Physical Review Letters 1987 (May 18) “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” –E. Yablonovitch 1987 (Jun 8 ) “Strong Localization of Photons in Certain Disordered Dielectric Superlattices” –S. John 1989 (Oct 30) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case” –E. Yablonovitch and T.M. Gmitter 1990 (Nov 19) “Full Vector Wave Calculation of Photonic Band Structures in Face-Centered-Cubic Dielectric Media” –K.M. Leung and Y.F. Liu 1990 (Nov 19) “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures: Bloch Wave Solution of Maxwell’s Equations” –Z. Zhang and S. Satpathy 1990 (Dec 17) “Existence of a Photonic Gap in Periodic Dielectric Structures” –K.M. Ho, C.T. Chan, and C.M. Soukoulis 1991 (Oct 21) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case Employing Non-Spherical Atoms” –E. Yablonovitch, T.J. Gmitter, and K.M. Leung
    3 points
  3. OO is supposed to serve a particular purpose, which is not the same as the purpose of Twit-Face or alt.philosophy.objectivism and its spawn HPO, if you remember them. When content deviates from that purpose, it is right for management to take corrective action. My judgment is that adherence to that purpose here is not strict, and it has gotten much looser since I first joined about 20 years ago. Every person who contributes here should be able to articulate their justification for contributing, to say what value you receive in exchange for your posts. If you can’t do that, you should re-evaluate your self-sacrifice. In fact, very many former contributors have done so (by which I mean, the vast majority). There are loose guidelines which state what the purpose of OO is and what contributors should and should not do. Intellectual honesty is one of those requirements, the problem is that intellectual dishonesty comes in many flavors, one being evasion and the other being unreasoned reliance on authoritative statements. The covid thread reeks of evasion and was worthy of closing on those grounds. I concluded that there was no rational value to be had in the thread, and that put paid to my participation there. I might, in another incarnation, contemplate whether just leaving the thread open does any harm. There have been many fora for Objectivism, most of which have fallen into complete inactivity. When you peruse the content of other Objectivist fora, ask yourself if you would want to be associated with that group and if not, why not? My judgment is, “No: crappy content” (NB this explicitly does not refer to HBL). The potential harm of crappy content to Objectivism should be obvious, so now we know the basis for closing crappy threads, what remains is a specific evaluation of one or more threads, to decide if they are overall above that crappiness threshold (I will not engage in a specific autopsy here). I would like to avoid reaching the “crappy content” conclusion w.r.t. OO.
    3 points
  4. The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct? The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith. The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality. These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith. If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings). Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians. -- There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct. Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too. Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons. But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?
    2 points
  5. Do Christians really think that self-interest is immoral? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. They couldn't even live beyond a week thinking something so blatantly irrational/immoral. If they actually "believed" such a irrational thing they would all hold their breath, not eat, not drink water, do absolutely not and just die.
    2 points
  6. Correct, Monart. This got to be a longer road than I had in mind at the beginning, but that is giving it full due weight. And I'm going to get to each promised component.
    2 points
  7. monart

    Motive Power

    Motivation is a key to human action, to its initiation, sustenance, and completion. Based on one’s values, motivation comes in many forms, such as financial, legal, ethical, promissory, logical, intellectual, and esthetic. At its core, motivation is emotive, i.e., e-motion: that which “-moves out”, that which is the motive power of action. An example of esthetic motivation is the following. Motive Power The motive power of life is the engine of directed motion, the generator and creator of life’s ambition, driving actions forward in life’s continuous sustenance and realization. In music, as in life, there’s a motive power that pulls music outward, a keynote that carries the flow of melody in harmony on a constant beat toward resolution and arrival. In literature, as in music and in life, there is a motive power that draws out the words and names the concepts that inform and inspire thought onward to envision real ideals. The source of motive power, in literature, music, and life, is: integration – it’s choosing to clarify and unify words, tones, and actions with integrity and purpose, all aiming for the climax, crescendo, and ecstasy that await. As three models of motive power, behold: In real life is the person and character of genius and benefactor Ayn Rand (see 100 voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand and The Letters of Ayn Rand, In music and literature, are the following two complementary works: one a motion-picture in sounds, the other, a motion-picture in words; the music “Collision” may be heard as a short prelude to the scene from Atlas Shrugged. All models are worth repeated visits for reflection and re-motivation. ===== “Collision”, by John Mills-Cockell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiIe3PjiYp4 And his other similar earlier works from 1970s, such as “Melina’s Torch”. “Tillicum”, “Aurora Spinray”, “December Angel”, "Appaloosa and Pegasus" – all can be heard on Youtube. Also, especially noteworthy is his 2004 Concerto of Deliverance, commissioned as a tribute to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. http://www.starshipaurora.com/concertoofdeliverance.html ===== Dagny riding the John Galt Line (especially p. 245-246, Atlas Shrugged😞 She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine's heart. For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long, rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips. She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in 'the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled "High Voltage." Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines? -- she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?" -- like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel. They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power -- of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time. They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going -- not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again -- not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages -- the power of a living mind -- the power of thought and choice and purpose. She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt . . . . =======
    2 points
  8. tadmjones

    "Project Starship"

    Nay, you shall see a bold fellow many times do Mahomet's miracle. Mahomet made the people believe that he would call an hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers, for the observers of his law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill. So these men, when they have promised great matters, and failed most shamefully, yet (if they have the perfection of boldness) they will but slight it over, and make a turn, and no more ado. Bacon, Francis, chapter 12, Of Boldness, in his Essays.
    2 points
  9. Commenting on just this part: If you torture a man for 14 years and he dies a month later, you don’t say he died of natural causes. Good grief. What’s under the ellipsis – “the Devil or” – mocks the truth.
    2 points
  10. Craig Murray in the UK has written extensively about the incarceration and trials of Julian Assange. About the publication of the unredacted documents see "Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor" by Chris Hedges. But what the WSJ (mainstream media beholden to the Deep State) says as well as the above is irrelevant. The CIA is in large part a pack of murders – good riddance to bad rubbish.
    2 points
  11. A forum is a space for discussions/debates. What you are describing is an unmoderated forum (= zero control over content). The owner defines what, who and how. It is not "pretty much true by definition" that a forum is unmoderated. My understanding is that @Boydstun described various choices as to how to moderate a forum, not choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. One does not have an a priori freedom of speech on a private forum. It is implicit in the attributes of private property. The non-owners are guest and are subjected to the rules of the house. Harmed is that owner who does not want his property to be used in ways he does not desire, for example to spread ideas he hates.
    2 points
  12. Brian Greene explicitly aligns with determinism. Kaku is indeed a defender of free will; I mistook him for someone else. Solvreven, I think the easiest way to get an opinion might be to provide your own short summary of Sapolski's view. I'm not familiar with his claims, so I searched on Reddit for a brief overview of his argument. I found one with lots of votes, so I'll extract the essential premise from it: "[O]ur bodies are subconsciously (unintentionally without our own input) acting on a series of electric waves in the brain and chemicals and hormones." (Source) I take the above to mean the following (which I'll write as if it were an argument): a) Everything that happens in my first-person perspective has a "twin" in the real world. Love and affection? Dopamine secretions. Anxiety? Cortisol. And so on. b) Dopamine and cortisol are physical things. c) Physical things act lawfully. If you drop a ball, it falls. If you touch an electric fence, you get electrocuted. d) Therefore, dopamine and cortisol act lawfully. e) Corollary: the mental "twins" of dopamine and cortisol (love and stress) also act lawfully. I will now give you my opinion on this. Physical things act lawfully. If a recording device observes reality for a quintillion years, it will only ever record physical things acting in a perfectly lawful manner. Now, let's put physical things aside for a moment. We still have one more thing to investigate: subjective first-person experience. For clarity, examples of first-person experience include: controlling how fast I'm walking on the street; deciding whether to get McDonald's tomorrow; and so on. Since our recording device can only observe one thing, namely physical objects, it is incapable (by design) to observe first-person subjective experience. It is cut off from some information, it works with incomplete data. However, human beings are privileged. They are not limited to observing their limbs, skin, toenails, organs. They have access to what is hidden from the recording device: subjective first-person experience. In addition to seeing everything that the device sees, they also know what it feels like to love, to jump, to look at a Raphael painting. We can now add the finishing touch: what you see introspectively is perfectly real. You really are controlling how fast you're walking, you really are deciding whether to get McDonald's. But science will deny this, and indeed, must deny this. Why so? Science, as it is today, does not consider introspection to be a form of faithfully perceiving something that exists. On the contrary: according to science, only the so-called outer senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting) record that which exists, while introspection is something that must be stripped away from science, to prevent poisoning the data with subjective elements. So for now, we must take refuge in philosophy. From a philosophical perspective, one possible solution to our problem can be simply stated as follows: the will is something eminently real. Of course, the will's existence cannot be inferred from physical objects. From the recorder's point of view, plants and animals just move in a determinate way, according to electrical and hormonal causes. However, from an animal's point of view, it acts exactly as it wants to act. With these results in hand, we can now look at what Objectivism claims, or rather, what Objectivists claim (since Rand wrote very little on free will). Some Objectivists think that "free will" is a pleonasm: where there's will, there's agency; conversely, where there's agency, there's will. This must be put to the test. Quoting my own example: Immediately, a new possibility shows itself to us, and it can be stated as follows: choice does not entail freedom. It just entails choice, period. Choice is choice, and nothing else. Human beings choose to focus, to live, to eat. This really does happen, it is no illusion. However, all choices can be traced to a sufficient explanation. It's up to philosophy to explain this harmony. I have already suggested compatibilism as a framework worth looking into.
    1 point
  13. Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.
    1 point
  14. I find reading compositions more exact and facilitating of serious thought than videos. I've not got Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Life of Science without Free Will (2023). I may get it to add to the following of mine: Free Will – Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong, editors (2022) Naturally Free Action by Oisín Deery (2021) Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell (2023) A Metaphysics for Freedom(* & on to next page) by Helen Steward (2012) Laws, Mind, and Free Will by Steven Horst (2011) Deep Control by John Fischer (2013) Causes, Laws, and Free Will – Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin (2013) Why Free Will Is Real by Christian List (2019) ~Also, to the free will side~ "Volitional Synapses" –Part 1 –Part 2 –Part 3 "Ascent to Volitional Consciousness" –Abstract –Article
    1 point
  15. You will likely continue seeing even more, since this is the default, or "mainstream" position among popular scientists like Michio Kaku, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Names like these will quickly pop up when you search for "free will" on YouTube. The meaning that Objectivism attaches to free will is quite fine and useful, namely: that you will not perform at your best in any endeavor unless you monitor yourself: "Will this sentence I'm writing get the meaning across without ambiguity?"; "Did I pick an over-complicated solution to a simple problem?" and so on. This type of self-monitoring is what Rand calls "focus," and it's not automatic. Doing it is up to you. Now, here's the thing. The ability to make choices, even the choice to focus or not, is not what most (philosopher) determinists typically deny. They make a much more reasonable claim: that all choices have a sufficient explanation. I will illustrate what I mean with a very general example. Let's say that you make a mistake. Did you do it on purpose? Of course not. Had you known in advance that you were about to make a mistake, you would have acted fast enough to avert the mistake. Now, onto the next question: what caused that mistake to happen? A sufficient reason will quickly come up: "I didn't know something like that could happen!". And what was the reason for that? "I had never encountered such a situation before, either in real life or in my education. But now I have, and will probably make use of the lesson in the future". And what is the reason for that? "Because I don't like problems." This can continue indefinitely. If one's definition of determinism aligns with this example, then it becomes clear that arguments like "I can make choices," or "I can focus" mean absolutely nothing. They do, however, point to the possibility of a compatibilist view (the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible). If you haven't done so already, check up Schopenhauer's prize essay, On the Freedom of the Will. It will put any modern arguments for determinism into perspective.
    1 point
  16. A comparison of Reality as "Existence Exists" and God as "Being qua Being" may help in understanding how some Christians (and theists in general) would become Objectivsts and how they could recover from their previous Christianity. I estimate that many if not most Objectivists are recovering Christians/theists. Tara Smith and Ben Bayer, of the Ayn Rand Institute, have stated that they, too, are/were recovering Catholics. (I, myself, haven't been a Christian or theist, but was born in a Daoist-Buddhist culture.) Another helpful examination is the esthetic comparison between John Galt and Jesus Christ. (I've read your excerpts of "Existence, We" and am curious but will have to wait until I have access to it. Thanks.)
    1 point
  17. If Venezuela's Chavista regime held actual elections, they would probably lose the next one, according to a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Corina Yoris, the 80-year old grandmother whose 10-party coalition carefully vetted her and applied for her to run as their standard-bearer against Nicolás Maduro, the leftist dictator of Venezuela. This they did after their previous candidate, Maria Corina Machado, was blocked from running:Though respondents to a poll by the American company ClearPath Strategies haven't heard of Yoris, the results clearly showed that Venezuelans want change -- reflecting previous polls by other companies. In the past decade, the economy contracted 80% as oil output fell precipitously, and inflation at one point hit 2 million percent. The poll showed that an opposition candidate backed by Machado would win 49% to 27% for Maduro. Even a candidate who doesn't have her support would squeak out victory over Maduro, 35% to 27%, the poll shows. And though Maduro's regime has jailed political activists -- including seven of Machado's campaign workers -- the poll shows that 76% of opposition and undecided voters want a chance to cast a ballot. [bold added]The candidate, unlike the two incoherent old men running for President in the United States, is someone I might support. For one thing, she advocates free markets:Yoris is opposed to socialism and communism; she says that the free market regulates prices, that communism was responsible for the death of millions and that the ideology resulted with Venezuela becoming divided.For another, she is in full possession of her mental faculties, unlike her American counterparts, and uses them more effectively than most people do at half her age:Image by Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Asked what she, as president, would do for Venezuela she recalled the democratic years when the country, though flawed in many ways, appealed to immigrants escaping Latin American dictatorships and hardship in southern Europe. "I want to give Venezuela what Venezuela has given me," she said. "I could study in this country. I could educate my children in this country. I could do all manner of things in this country." While not a politician, Yoris said she has taught classes on logic and such esoteric disciplines as the philosophy of argumentation, where she has delved into the concepts of Chaïm Perelman, a Belgian who was one of the 20th Century's most renowned argumentation theorists, and British philosopher Stephen Toulmin. Two years ago, she was named by civil-society groups to serve on an opposition-led commission, which was responsible for organizing the primary elections last year that Machado won by a wide margin. ... "I'm totally for Madrid, and people laugh a lot about this," said Yoris, who during a recent match tweeted out: "This is a scandal! The referee ends the game and takes a goal away from Real Madrid." And though she fires off messages about blackouts and the work of Albert Camus, she also takes photos of the fog-covered hills, flowers and fruit stands overflowing with Venezuela's bounty. She explained that her desire is to show beauty. "It's a message of joy because we've been submitted to a very ugly dark cloud," she said. "So I try to send out a message of optimism, and I take photographs of my surroundings." [bold added]Oh, and she is also much more benevolent than the two bitter old men we have here. Sadly for Venezuela, the Maduro regime, scared of this kind, elderly lady and the optimistic, sunny view of the world she represents, has, predictably, blocked her election bid, like the cowards that they are. -- CAVLink to Original
    1 point
  18. I’m perplexed with the notion that self describes subjective experience a part from any description of mental products or operations of cognition, ie the ontological basis of the ‘first person’ perspective of experience. As per Rand , and Stephen , consciousness is the act of perceiving that which exists. Would an irreducible subjectiveness be non perceivable and render it without identity and therefore non existent?
    1 point
  19. tadmjones

    How To Be Happy

    This article offers a different frame of interpretation of what was ‘captured’. It seems a better view of the image is to see at as capturing the interactions between light’s ’energy’ and target particles , the light isn’t ‘seen’ or imaged as exhibiting dual aspects as much as what is depicted in the image is the history of the reactions between particles and light as akin to an interference pattern. https://www.insidescience.org/blog/2015/03/13/no-you-cannot-catch-individual-photon-acting-simultaneously-pure-particle-and-wave
    1 point
  20. Necessity and Form in Truths In this study, I firstly examine the Objectivist account of how Rand’s theory of concepts dissolves the customary distinction of truths into ones true in virtue of meaning and ones true in virtue of experience. Although that particular character of concepts in Rand’s mold of them does dissolve that wrong divide of truths—the analytic-synthetic divide—I advance an additional character of her theory, one more peculiar to hers, that also dissolves the A-S division, at least when her theory is set in my ontology. In that residence, concretes as in the world, as in fact, possess form in their situation, passage, and character, I show that the two sorts of necessity traditionally attached respectively to analytic truths and synthetic truths are rightly dissolved and replaced by a single necessity attending a single compounded formula of truth familiar from Rand. This necessity is not a compound of the two necessities, logical and physical, characterized by supporters of the A-S division. It is, rather, a compound of necessity-for of life and of living mind in grasping fact, the realm of necessity-that. I exhibit this single necessity attending truths in logic, truths in mathematics, and truths of concretes tooled by logical and mathematical truths.
    1 point
  21. Thanks. I'll accept your recommendations.
    1 point
  22. The local university library has a copy of the Norton 2021 book, so I'll do a reading of it. I'll also read your "Induction on Identity" paper. Thanks.
    1 point
  23. I suppose Hindus are better salesmen then , lol.
    1 point
  24. Boydstun

    How To Be Happy

    The mind-independent universe is mass-energy, not philosopher-armchair substance. Knowledge of mass-energy and evidence for its amount in the whole universe being conserved back to and including the Initial Singularity is a glorious fruitful quest of science alone. Whether there are extensionless points in spacetime is, in the armchairs of philosophers, as stuck in the mud as all the centuries they wasted over the question of whether matter was atomic or continuous. Science got the answers and subtleties of that and delivered a solid stage for bringing the world into our service. Elementary particle physics has it that leptons, in their particle mode, are extensionless particles, perfect points of mass. The old sayings of philosophers that extension is more fundamental than weight is sensibly (on account of modern science) left back in those moldy old armchairs. Additional Note
    1 point
  25. Is that to mean Rand and Augustine agree that embracing God is a negation of the self or the mind? both? or are they one and the same? I've long thought that mind and self were the same, but lately I'm perplexed with the notion that self contains the mind as an aspect. That the more fundamental self is consciousness as such. The underlying awareness of the functioning of the mind and its contents are objects to the self.
    1 point
  26. Augustine had it that to embrace God is to turn away from oneself. Rand had it that to suspend one’s critical rationality in any question, including the existence of God, is a sacrifice of one’s mind, which is one’s self, and I agree. I think the standpoint of the author Mr. Brunton is like one of those exercise platforms with a hemisphere as its underside. His standpoint is unstable and a frame of cognitive dissonance. At least he is an independent thinker. Thanks for the notice. That egoism of God on display in the Isaiah passage seems overly concerned with social image. More importantly: Is the kind of love traditionally attributed to God, traditionally called agape, is it, when shorn of a Christian sacrificial cast, is such purely outgoing love egoistic? As a matter of fact, it is (though not in the sense of being for benefit firstly to oneself). It was stolen from man and placed in God, just as in truth the making and control of fire was stolen from man and credited to the gods in the setup for the myth of Prometheus. Nonsacrificial agape is our fundamental love, the human-level experience and instantiation of outward striving, the joy in agency and dance, an essential of life itself in the human. Such agape in oneself is because one is a living self. I'm speaking of mortal life, which is to say, real life.
    1 point
  27. (OK. A sour-cream coffee cake, very fine.) A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later she gets conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. Does that account solve The Problem of Induction ? How far was it a well-defined problem? Was solution of that problem what Rand had in mind in calling for a validation of induction in FNI? I imagine it was, as she would know of Hume’s making shallow of induction and causation and the hero worship Hume received by Philosophy of Science instructors (approximately Logical Empiricists) in the 1960’s (such as my instructor). Does Harriman’s book contain a solution to that problem? I rather imagine it does; I’d have to look at it freshly and closely as well as at the problem. But with the link to SEP on that problem, you might do yourself well in a close look at Harriman with that problem in view. I rather imagine Harriman had a good hold on that because of his portrayal of our modern sure inference to the existence and character of atoms. I told that story also in my “Induction on Identity.” We ended up in somewhat different years on when that thesis could no longer be at all doubted, rationally speaking. Harriman was a bit more liberal on that than I. Can’t recall just now if Harriman gave William Whewell credit for the process of the “concilliance of inductions” that played out in that case after Whewell’s time. Kant had an answer to Hume’s critique of causality. It would be good to know with exactly whose picture of causality Hume had been arguing against and was that prior picture also wrong from the vista of an Objectivist non-Humean system. Kant pulled the premise-rug out from under Hume by exposing that Hume et al. were empty-handed on what was human experience for which Hume could find no necessary connection from episode to episode. Kant’s own hand on what was human experience such that there were necessary connections between its episodes was fantastical. Classic modern philosophers Locke to Kant on this are getting a good replacement today with all the philosophers of perception, direct realist and representational realist who master and incorporate the pertinent science, neurological and psychological. I’ll be taking care of Kant in the sequel of this paper, with a modern realist replacement, my own, which was aided by Rand’s system. You asked about yet-to-come extension of Rand’s measurement structure for concepts. I did take a first step on that 20 years ago in my paper Universals and Measurement. I don’t know how far I might get back to developing that further in connection with science within my projects in view for however farther I live. (I have no indications on specific future failures of health, but I’m 75, so reasonably, the final grade I give myself in advance is “incomplete.”) Within chapter 7 of Harriman’s book, he discusses “Physics as Inherently Mathematical”. He has nothing original to say; and no mention of the many contemporaries of ours imminently qualified who have contributed to further understanding on that circumstance first really solidly seen in Newton (gravity, not optics), and rocketed by Maxwell; and he seemed to not actually know what it was from Galileo that was actually crucial for Newton’s advance; and he seemed ignorant of the middle man Descartes between Galileo and Newton concerning the law of inertia and, additionally, how it was that rotational motion came to be seen as a form of acceleration in the first place*; and he did nothing by way of showing a way (if there is one) that Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts is usefully related to uses of mathematics in modern physics. There are other aspects in Rand’s epistemological ideas that are shown to be at work in the practice of physics, but these aspects are not unique to Rand. If one is a beginner, this book can introduce some history and techniques of physics. Additional literature on those is vast, and some leads to it are in the endnotes of The Logical Leap. I don’t recall if Harriman discussed abduction teamed with induction in science methods, but that is part of the full picture.
    1 point
  28. The books by John D. Norton on induction look excellent: The Material Theory of Induction (2021) and The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference* (forthcoming, 2024) look to be illuminating. They would not be expressly hooked to Rand's metaphysics or theory of concepts. Upon studying these Norton books, concord and discord with Rand's theoretical philosophy is something most any participant here could do for themselves. A case for basing induction on Rand's Law of Identity is made in my Induction on Identity in the early 1990's (one way to access the text of the paper is to click on bolded text in the Abstract linked here). (I received a complimentary personal note on that paper from Jude Dougherty who was at that time head of the phi department at the Catholic University of America and was editor of the professional journal The Review of Metaphysics.) For deductive logic, the principle of noncontradiction looms large. It is a powerful tool. (Hilbert used only PNC in making the mathematical proof that was his Ph.D. thesis, for example.) Leibniz, Kant, and others of their eras recognized, as did Rand 1957, that PNC is a normative principle of cognition based on the Law of Identity. In some deductive inferences, we rely directly on identity: "All animals are mortal, you and I are animals, therefore we are mortal." One sense in which one might try to validate induction would be to try to prove that if PNC is securely based on Identity, then so is induction based on identity. I think that the history of trying to link induction very closely to deduction has been widely deemed unsuccessful, and perhaps that route suggested in the previous sentence would fall prey to those criticisms. Another sense in which one might try to "validate" induction would be to try to elicit it's correctness for cognition as a corollary from Rand's general metaphysics (taken for true), in the way that OPAR elicits "corollaries" (not deductive theorems) from the most elementary theses and concepts of Rand's general metaphysics. I approve, notwithstanding the usual charge of circularity one receives for any attempts to discursively defend inference principles, deductive or inductive. Another way to validate induction might be to point to vegetative "induction" in the activities of organic neural networks in bringing about sensory perception. Having validated the deliverances of the senses, one then might argue for goodness of consciously engaging in induction for tracking reality (but, again a circularity (benign?) because the first validation had to enlist some induction). Rand suggested in ITOE that induction was intimate with abstraction in her (or other, really) account of concepts. This would be abstractive induction, which I mentioned even in the Abstract of my "Induction on Identity" linked above. That genre of induction was the topic of Peikoff's paper "Aristotle's 'Intuitive Induction'" (1985 The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99), which was a bit taken from his Ph.D. dissertation. ‘Intuitive Induction’ and ‘Abstractive Induction’ are two traditional names for the same genre of induction. Harriman’s book is nice in his illustrations from the history of physics on the methods we often call induction. That is the standard and very helpful way in contemporary philosophy of science. Scroll down in the pdf link for Norton to his Table of Contents, Part II. I was thrilled in Harriman’s book when I came to text I recognized as taken from old Harvard case studies by Duane Roller, the volume on electric charge, which I had read in my History of Science course in undergraduate around 1970. Roller had joined our faculty at University of Oklahoma. (I’m sorry, but I need to break off just now. I’ll try later tonight to come back and finish what else I wanted to reply for you, Monart. For the present, my husband is calling me away, hoping that I’ll get our dessert made for this evening’s meal.)
    1 point
  29. "Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby." -- Penn Jillette *** Lately, articles about the increasing percentage of Americans who aren't "religious" -- like this and this -- have been popping up. Please consider the italicized quote above any time you encounter one of these. Why? Because (1) In today's increasingly tribalistic, anti-individualist Zeitgeist, it would appear that the first impulse is to lump together any group of people to which one can apply a label. (2) So many people lack intellectual rigor that many labels are next to meaningless, anyway. The first piece, about "nonreligious" people includes some whose stated beliefs include all the hallmarks of religion; they just aren't enrolled in a church:Although he doesn't believe in organized religion, he believes in God and basic ethical precepts. "People should be treated equally as long as they treat other people equally. That's my spirituality if you want to call it that."Indeed, somewhere, buried in the piece, is the closest thing it comes to offering its own definition of "nonreligious:" They. Really. Don't. Like. Organized. Religion. Given how "the nones' diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups," don't expect to be able to learn anything meaningful from the rest of the piece. Even the second article, about "atheists" talks about people I'd say are actually religious:Image by François Barraud, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Atheists also have different interpretations of what it means to not believe. While nearly all self-described atheists don't believe in the God described in the Judeo-Christian Bible, 23% do believe in God or some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe, according to a Pew Research Center report published in January. [bold added]With that much latitude in the term, it is ridiculous to wonder -- as the article starts out doing -- why more atheists are reluctant to volunteer that fact about themselves. The negative stereotypes and bigotry on the part of many religious people don't help, but if a term has been emptied of all meaning, why bandy it about? I am an atheist, and would describe myself as circumspect, but not shy about it. I reject nearly everything about religion, especially professing to believe things absent evidence, and equating morality to a set of supernatural orders that have nothing to do with reason or life on earth. These two things are direct threats to a life proper to a rational animal. If I have a realistic chance of making my world a better place by challenging these evil practices, I will do so. (This is the not shy part.) If doing so will change nothing, except expose me or loved ones to harm by bigots or actual thugs, I will not. (This is the circumspect part.) Self-sacrifice is against my moral code. But simply saying I'm an atheist, or I'm not religious at all is only the start of a conversation. Religion is not the only alternative out there for moral guidance or reflection. Not adhering to religion is not the only aspect of my thinking and my personality. Stating that I am an atheist is thus something that I would hope would at least provoke thought in another, and perhaps require a conversation on my part. The person hearing that from me, or the occasion calling for me to say this, has to be worth it. I find the widespread need to "come out" as something that is so common today both sad and puzzling. Our culture causes most people to feel alienated because it is increasingly blind to or disdainful of the individual. Many people yearn for some measure of visibility, and aren't getting it. But past a certain point, it is puzzling that many people have such a weak sense of themselves that they will compromise on almost anything to "belong." I'm not sure what to say about that, except, perhaps to advise that one should well understand one's reasons for disclosing one's beliefs, or not. Fashion is probably the worst reason to do either. -- CAVLink to Original
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  30. I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details. The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.
    1 point
  31. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’ How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area. But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B. Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation). That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013). From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329). William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science. From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls. Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism). Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1] The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014. Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2] In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own. (To be continued.) Notes [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes. [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. References Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library. Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet. ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press. ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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  32. #3, The gentle push, is a technique Peter Keating used in order to get rid of a rival. He even lined up a client for his rival.
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  33. What follows is Zelenskyy is currently president for life, or for as long as martial law is not rescinded. So elections do not matter at this time in the Ukraine, if they ever did, really. I inferred from Stephen's post that he was criticizing the 'undemocratic' nature of dictatorships. By citing official statistics from regimes that charade about elections. I suspect too , that he is throwing shade at what he thinks Trump supporters believe about our recent and present cycle(s). Surely he must realize that Biden is a titular President, his own AG finds him incompetent to stand trial.
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  34. How is Zelenskkyyii polling in this cycle ?
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  35. Over at Hot Air, Jazz Shaw discusses the decision by Democrat strategist Hal Malchow to go abroad in order to end his own life on his own terms, before he loses his mind to Alzheimer's Disease. Before this story broke, I was unaware that even in American states that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, the laws apply only to people with a fatal condition who will die in a few months. Malchow, after seeing his mother deteriorate with the disease, got himself tested for its genetic markers and discovered that he would eventually succumb to the same fate:Legal Status of Euthanasia Worldwide. (Image by Michael Jester, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)Malchow returned to the vow he had made half a life earlier about what he would do when Alzheimer's arrived: "I knew that if it happened, I was not going to let all this play out to the end." He had seen how responsibility for his mother had fallen on those around her, and he believed it would be unfair to his wife, Anne Marsh, who already suffered from multiple sclerosis. Several American states, including New Mexico, permit physician-assisted suicide under so-called death-with-dignity laws, but all require a candidate to have a fatal condition with only months left to live. Malchow did not qualify and had no interest in living until he did. "What's the point? You know, why sit around the house and watch a little piece of your brain disappear every day?" he says. "And the ordeal for the caretaker is terrible." [bold added]Malchow had to travel to Switzerland to do something that should be a matter of making one's intent legally clear, settling one's affairs, and going to a hospital. This should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who would want the option to end life on one's own terms in the event of a catastrophic illness that involves a lengthy period of deterioration. Legal protection of the right to seek out assistance in suicide faces two major obstacles, one a legitimate concern and one not. Malchow's story mentions one along the way:Last September, Malchow contacted Dignitas, a nonprofit advocacy group that facilitates assisted death, to begin making arrangements. He had to submit a two-page autobiography -- a task, he imagined, to ensure he'd deliberated on his options and was not acting impulsively -- alongside medical records that a Swiss psychiatrist reviewed to grant a "provisional green light" to proceed with planning. [bold added]Because the law exists to protect the individual's rights, it should be non-trivial to exercise this right, because of the possibility of a momentary lapse of sound judgement or pressure from, say, relatives hoping for an early inheritance. These are legitimate concerns, and it appears -- contrary to theocratic smears -- that jurisdictions that recognize this right have accounted for them. And speaking of theocratic smears, Jazz Shaw brings up the other, illegitimate obstacle:Some will argue that this decision is in defiance of God's will and that he will pay a price for it. Perhaps you are correct, but that's a chance that Hal is willing to take and none of us truly knows for sure. Others may wish to turn away because the story is too painful to contemplate. But it's one that we will all face sooner or later unless we are suddenly and unexpectedly swept away from this mortal coil in an accident or otherwise. [bold added]They may argue, but the argument is based on an arbitrary premise that has no place as a basis for law. Or, as I said last year:It think it is clear why the "rights are a gift from God" crowd opposes physician-assisted suicide: It is because they imagine that it displeases a being (that they imagine out of whole cloth), and their whole conception of morality begins and ends at a list of commands having everything to do with "pleasing" this being -- and nothing to do with reason, with living on this earth, or with happiness.If the law permits euthanasia, and the state is barred from ordering executions, then anyone worried about offending an imaginary being can choose to continue suffering. I find it interesting that the same religion that condemns suicide was fine with "Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own," back when it held power. Those who claim that death and suffering are God's will bring exactly those things to those who will not fight against them. They did it on a grand scale in the Middle Ages, and they do it now, every time someone who would want a dignified end to an inhuman future is denied that end by a superstitious taboo enshrined as law. -- CAVLink to Original
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  36. They are many, we are few -- so? They control us through the welfare state. So? We can refute and resist them. We know truly and can speak clearly of this: Self-Defense in a Welfare State You the welfare statist government say you are here to “help” and “serve” us with “welfare” by taxing, licensing, and regulating us. We the individualists are here to repudiate you the welfare statist government and your electors. . . . . . To reject and remove from you the power to violate our rights and so restrict you to your proper role of just protecting individual rights. We do not need or want your false help. We choose to truly help and live for and by own selves. We are self-sufficient, self-respecting, autonomous individuals. We own and support our lives by thinking and working for our own purpose and profit. We defend our rights to our property, liberty, and the pursuit of our happiness. We reject your welfare statist tyranny and refute the self-sacrifice and self-immolation of the altruism that spawned you. We recognize and uphold the supremacy of reason and reality, not the faith or force of the rights-violating State. We trade and associate with each other freely, without coercion, for mutual benefit with mutual consent. We don’t violate anyone’s rights and won’t accept any violation of ours. If we help each other in times of misfortune, we do so voluntarily, based on value not force. We value each other as individual free agents, as fellow humane, reasoning beings, living productive and proud lives. We seek each other’s benevolent company and appreciate each other’s unique, singular sovereignty. And we stand together against any tyranny with the full moral, rational certainty of our individual rights. So, we neither want nor need your welfare statism, your taxing and regulating our conversation and commerce. While we may comply when we are forced by law, we will not be martyrs or willing victims. We will resist, protest, and seek restitution where provided by law. You tax, license, and regulate, but you must also grant subsidies, relief, insurance, pensions, exemptions, deductions, and all such “welfare services and entitlements” so as to maintain the pretext for your statist tyranny. Where we could and care to, we will make claims on such “welfare” as a form of restitution, in self-defense, but without either agreeing or supporting your welfare statism. We will not vote for any member of any of your welfare parties of any color. We will vote only for legislators who stand for individual rights, and for the ethics of reason and reality that’s its foundation. These individualist politicians will oppose and seek to repeal all welfare statist laws and reform the constitution to affirm explicitly, definitively, the supremacy of individual rights, and to remove the government’s power to violate them, in anyone’s name, not the State, Society, or God. Meanwhile, we will continue to live and let live, to make the best of what’s possible to us, even in this welfare statist tyranny. There are and have been other worst states of tyranny than here now in the US-Canadian America, where it's still, overall, the freest in the world. But being the freest is not yet being all free. There's still a long way to go, but it will be soon enough. The legacy of Aristotelian Enlightenment is still a strong source of philosophy against any tyranny, especially when fortified by the rational individualist philosophy in our own times formulated by Ayn Rand. That the Ayn Rand Institute teaching her ideas of Objectivism continues to grow, 35 years after her death, and that her books continue to be bestsellers, is a positive cultural barometer of the progress of a rational, romantic civilization. More and more, there are politicians who acknowledge Ayn Rand’s positive influence on them. As we live on in the frontiers of freedom, we will avoid, as best we can, your welfare statist interference and distraction from our pursuit of our noble purpose, which, ultimately, is our own happiness. We will keep strengthening our understanding of the philosophy of reality, reason, rights, and romance – seeking continuous self-realization and self-betterment. There’s always a better way, as we’ll teach our children, a better and benevolent way through self-knowledge, self-sufficiency, and self-defense. Our children of liberty are the mothers and fathers of freedom’s future. With truth, courage, and love, we cheer them on. You, Welfare State, your days are numbered!
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  37. Thank you for your comparisons between Rand-Peikoff's and the others' rejection of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, the latter of which I knew little about before. I'm just beginning to browse through your prolific work on philosophy llisted on your profile. And I'm looking forward to further postings from you on this topic of necessary truths, and to your explanation of necessity as "a compound of necessity-for of life and of living mind in grasping fact, the realm of necessity-that".
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  38. SIDEBAR In his 2016, Greg Salmieri notes that it is curious that Peikoff 1967 does not mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” Salmeiri points out some ways the Rand-Peikoff diagnoses of and remedies for the errors in analytic-versus-synthetic doctrines differ from Quine’s. Salmieri understands the later challenge of AvS from Kripke and Putnam to have more in common with the Objectivist challenge, though Putnam differs importantly from Rand on definitions and essences, which looms large in the Objectivist challenge (2016, 304n34, 311n87). Salmieri points to the book-review article, in JARS in 2005, by Roderick Long for thoughts on some relations between Randian theory of meaning and those of Kripke and Putnam. Long’s 2005 review of Greg Browne’s book Necessary Factual Truth was followed a year later by a substantial reply from Browne and rejoinder by Long (JARS V7N1). From May to September of 2007, Prof. Browne engaged in a very generous exchange (his own words coming to about 19,000) in a thread at Objectivist Living* defending the rejection by Peikoff of AvS and defending his own kindred rejection of AvS. Browne had in his arsenal the Kripke-Putnam developments that had been savaging AvS in the years since Peikoff 1967. Browne vigorously countered, in that thread, devotees of Logical Empiricism (and of Popper) who criticized (and poorly understood the revolution afoot, such as in) Peikoff 1967. Late in that thread, Robert Campbell entered it to ask Browne if he had any thoughts on why Peikoff had not addressed the famous Quine paper in his (Peikoff’s) dissertation, which Campbell had lately acquired. Browne had not seen the dissertation and had not much to conjecture on that peculiarity. (Remember, Peikoff 1964 is not written as a champion of Ayn Rand’s philosophic views, but, in an even-handed way, by an author acknowledging his background preference for some rehabilitated sort of logical ontologism and pointing near the end of the dissertation to some of that rehabilitation, such as fresh thinking on the nature of definitions and essence; distance between Quine’s views on logic and on AvS and Randian Peikoff views would not be the reason for no Quine in Peikoff 1964.) I should suggest that Quine, Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein raise such a briar patch of technicalities that it was better (and enough for deserving a Ph.D.) to stick with the more accessible and manageable Ayer, Nagel, Dewey, and Lewis to get the dissertation (already more than an armful in history assimilated) finally completed. I'll be digging through the Carnap-Quine briar patch in the next installment of the present study (along with Neo-Kantianism, Logical Empiricism, and of course Kant). *I stopped posting at that site a year ago, when the owner covertly deleted a post of mine partly critical of Donald Trump. ~References~ Browne, G. M. 2001. Necessary Factual Truth. Lanham: University Press of America. Gotthelf, A. and G. Salmieri, editors, 2016. A Companion to Ayn Rand. Wiley Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Long, R. T. 2005. Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? —Review of Brown 2001. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7(1):209–28. Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Salmieri, G. 2016. The Objectivist Epistemology. In Gotthelf and Salmieri 2016.
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  39. A Vox article about the Boeing safety scandal cites the following example of what it calls the FAA "get[ting it] right about airplane regulation:"Image by Kenny Eliason, via Unsplash, license.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) strongly recommends that you get a separate, secured seat for even a very young child below the age of 2 -- but they haven't banned the practice of carrying your child on your lap in your own seat. ... I've seen this policy criticized. "A kid being held would have been torn from the hands of their parents, and they would have been sucked out the plane," aviation safety expert Kwasi Adjekum told the Washington Post, referring to what happened to Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on January 5. The National Transportation Safety Board has repeatedly recommended that the FAA ban lap children. [links omitted, bold added]The FAA doesn't ban the practice because car travel -- which many people might choose if lap children were banned -- is much less safe than air travel, even when children are held on a lap rather than in a separate seat. The author praises this as an example of big-picture thinking and she is correct that the way the FAA chose to regulate does improve overall safety. But I have argued in the past that such examples of regulations that mimic rational behavior often fail to account for the cost of lost individual freedom inherent in the uncontested premise that it is appropriate for the state to do our risk calculations for us. Indeed, thanks to the regulatory state, we are lucky lap children aren't outlawed. I'd prefer not to leave something like that to chance. I will grant one cheer for the FAA on this matter: So long as we are saddled with a regulatory state (rather than advisory bodies), the least it can do is base its laws on hard science and err on the side of liberty. But the fact that we have dual agencies in disagreement should illustrate the peril inherent in the regulatory state. That is the big picture that the entire regulatory state misses, but which our founders well understood and hoped to protect us against when, long ago, they declared:The only legitimate purpose of government is make sure that these individual rights are protected...I, for one, would rather make up my own mind about what is safest for myself and my children, than have my safety and my options hemmed in by the whims of bureaucrats. In the big picture, the best way for the government to protect my safety would be for it to protect my freedom to look after myself. -- CAVLink to Original
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  40. Boydstun

    Oldest Forest

    Earliest Sub-Canopy Tree – Another Summary – Original Paper
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  41. KyaryPamyu

    How To Be Happy

    A bit more context on the Will, from Frederick Beiser's Weltschmerz (2016). "When Schopenhauer wrote Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in the early 1800, Naturphilosophie was in its heyday. Although Schopenhauer was critical of its wild and poetical speculations, he still makes clear in §27 of book II that he endorses some of its fundamental principles; he then proceeds to outline a conception of nature in accord with them. In the early 1800s, it was clear for Schopenhauer, and indeed most of his generation, that the mechanical view of the world had broken down entirely, and that it was no longer possible to explain matter as inert extension. The old Cartesian physics had shown itself to be utterly incapable of explaining the most basic phenomena, viz., magnetism, electricity and action at a distance. To overcome these shortcomings, it was necessary to adopt a dynamic conception of matter, according to which matter consists not in dead extension but in the interrelations of attractive and dynamic force. Even the occupation of space, which seemed primitive to the Cartesians, had to be explained in dynamic terms as the power to resist any body that would occupy the same place. Such was Kant’s argument in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften, which was crucial for the development of romantic Naturphilosophie. However, the romantics (viz., Schelling, Baader, Oken, Eschenmeyer), went one significant step beyond Kant. They maintained that matter should be understood not only dynamically but also organically. A dynamic conception understands matter in terms of the interrelations of its forces; an organic conception conceives it in terms of an internal nisus, a spontaneous striving to realize an inner force. Only this organic concept of matter would explain—so it was argued—phenomena like electricity and magnetism, and only it could underpin the continuum of nature ruptured by Cartesian dualism. If we place Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in this context, then it ceases to appear like wild speculation. On the contrary, it was based on scientific orthodoxy, the best normal science of its day. Since it was founded on the latest thinking in the natural sciences, Schopenhauer could claim that his metaphysics is based upon the facts of experience after all. There is indeed nothing extravagant in calling the inner nature of inorganic things the will if we use the term in the broad sense that Schopenhauer recommends. The nisus was not simply energy or power, but also a striving, a spontaneous urging and impulse, just as Schopenhauer described it. Schopenhauer’s claim that self-consciousness of my willing is consciousness of the thing-in-itself then amounts to the thesis that the awareness I have of my willing is of the same striving, urging and impulse that is found throughout all of nature. The microcosm inside myself reflects the macrocosm outside myself (I. 238; P 162). This is hardly extravagant at all; it is at least a plausible hypothesis." --- ". . .In his Über den Willen in der Natur, which first appeared in 1836, he provided all kinds of evidence from every field of natural science—physiology, anatomy, botany, astronomy—to show that the will is the ultimate cause of organic and inorganic phenomena. If this were indeed the case, then Schopenhauer could claim that his metaphysics was keeping within his empirical guidelines, and that he was doing nothing more than interpreting and explaining appearances."
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  42. Boydstun

    "Project Starship"

    Even were your accomplishments (not to be confused with your general drifts and aspirations) what you claim and presumably what you think you know, why ever would one want to leave this glorious earth and companion life here. The trush were singing out back waking me this morning. Human steps right on earth can travel unlimited roads if we love these steps and don't pretend we can get around them. I've had a much better quality of life than King Henry VIII. Not due to "recreational drugs," but the regular, amazing medicines of today. Also, due to music on CD's and the internal combustion engine and this electronic means of communication. Yes, there is still human failure, such as those who do not love their mind (and life and the lives of others) enough to stay away from recreational drugs. Leave them, not Earth and the glory on it. The humans going away with you are going to have none of what you want to get away from here on earth? Seek out the good here (e.g. next post).
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  43. I do not advocate any of these things. I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do. Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.) I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them. I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement. Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it. Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large censorship moderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.) Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.
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  44. There can be options in concept formation; the Japanese color 青い covers blue and also blue-green and maybe green in some contexts, and there are probably other examples where concepts in different languages overlap but don't coincide. If this sort of overlap can happen between languages, it can also be possible between people who share the same language but perhaps aren't using a dictionary or aren't using the same dictionary. This doesn't mean that either one is non-objective, just as the difference in colors between English and Japanese doesn't indicate that either language is non-objective. The result of the difference is a lack of precision but not necessarily accuracy. Obviously, with differences in the units, the accuracy is slightly less, just like a translator might have to determine whether to translate 青い as "blue" or "green" in a particular context. It's easier to be precise and to agree with things like the "meter" which can be measured easily than with things like the exact line of demarcation where a forum becomes something more like a magazine. One could ask, what is the essential characteristic of a forum? I was thinking of "openness" as an essential characteristic, and the reason I think it's essential is that a "forum" that isn't open is useless, not just to me but to everyone else; that's what makes openness essential. This is not to say that "magazines" are invalid. There may be certain people whose opinions I care enough about that I might want them accurately represented. I might subscribe to their magazines. But it is telling that Leonard Peikoff, for example, hosted a Q&A, where he would answer questions, and he could pick and choose which questions he wanted to answer, and the answers were unambiguously his as opposed to what someone else thought he might say. It was a Q&A, not a "forum." He didn't host a "forum," invite people to post, and then ban opinions he disagreed with. Also, Peikoff had already built his reputation, so people were interested in what he, in particular, had to say. What if you come up with a new idea? Where do you put it? Assuming you are not famous. Nobody approves of your idea yet because nobody knows what it is. Do you want to take a chance that you will get banned because people disapprove of it? Is it fair that you should have to take that chance? And what if you want to find new ideas that might have been come up with by other people, who aren't themselves famous enough to create their own forums? Where do you go to look for them? How can you find someone who runs a forum that allows new ideas, given that the forum owner has to take the risk that the new ideas might be wrong and that he has therefore sponsored wrong ideas? If people have to censor ideas that they disagree with, people must have been grossly immoral for publishing Ayn Rand's books and ideas, since after all those people could not have agreed with the ideas already, since they were new. (Or else they were taking a chance on being immoral, sort of like shooting off a gun in random directions and being lucky enough not to have hit anyone. Which is also immoral. But anyway...) A personal attack is an ad hominem, it's a fallacy. But the reason for banning personal attacks is not because they're ad hominem: the fact that they're ad hominem is what allows us to get away with banning personal attacks, because we know we're not accidentally banning any legitimate ideas. The reason for the ban is because personal attacks tend to turn away the contributors who are attacked, and thus renders the whole forum useless to them, and less useful to others who might have wanted to read those contributions, or other contributions which might have never gotten made. I don't know if I want to try to run an open forum, because people might join and then demand that I suppress other people's views based on arbitrary criteria. Or if I didn't have time to moderate it myself, I'd have to trust someone else, and then they might start banning people for disagreeing with their views, and they might do a lot of damage before I stop them. I wouldn't want to run a forum where I banned people for disagreeing with me, either. What if I ban someone on an incorrect basis? It would ruin the forum for everyone and destroy its value. Wikipedia used to be great, until a cabal of editors formed who decided to take it upon themselves to rid Wikipedia of views they thought didn't have sufficient "notoriety" (because it was embarrassing to them that some articles about popular TV shows were longer than articles about important historical events -- so all they did was go around deleting articles because they lacked "notoriety"). This mostly happened on the English-speaking Wikipedia. Later, another cabal took over, this one consisting of leftists (or maybe it was the same cabal), with the idea of suppressing anything critical of leftism. As a result, Wikipedia has become less valuable and less useful, unless you are a leftist. (You can still use it if you are looking for an idea a leftist wouldn't disagree with.) That could happen here, too. The site might end up supporting, not Objectivism per se, but a particular flavor of it, and it could easily be the wrong flavor or a distortion, and no one would be able to say anything about it if it were. It would become an echo chamber. I suppose this is a problem of the culture at large, that people no longer tolerate views they disagree with, and that they wish to silence those views rather than engaging them in debate (and they can't accept the idea of just leaving their opponents alone, either; they have to silence them). The silencing of people is the main thing I am objecting to here; if there is some error in my definitions of "forum" and "magazine" then that error is not essential to my objection. Maybe this tendency to reject opposing views is a product of the current educational system (because I suspect that a lot of the people calling for this are younger than I am and it certainly aligns well with the leftists who are taking over the culture at large). Maybe it's also a problem that people don't want to see views they disagree with, so they hope some moderator will step in and ban those views before they have to see them. That sounds like the "safe spaces" that are being promoted in schools and universities, too, and it's the exact opposite of "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," which at least requires that you know what those facts and opinions are.
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  45. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α A sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, propositions, and judgments had been important in the modern empiricist philosophy received by Quine. In the present Part and the next, I set out the relation of Quine’s opposition to the distinction in the 1950’s to the Peikoff-Rand opposition to the distinction in the following decade. I emphasize a major problem, tackled earlier by Kant, as reason the dichotomous distinction had been important. That is, I emphasize the problem it had been set to solve in a way not Kant’s. The characterization and responsibilities of analytic statements in sharp contrast to synthetic statements put forth in Logical Empiricism (also called Logical Positivism) constituted an alternative solution to that old problem, alternative to Kant’s solution. I shall step back in the next Part to more of Carnap and the response of Quine to him, and step back to the epistemological problem that had arisen in Kant. I’ll formulate a new solution, one in some affiliation with Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value. Form and necessity will enter, and I’ll assess Peikoff’s ASD against my layout.[1] “[Quine] is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction). This argument, however, should be seen as part of a comprehensive world-view which makes no sharp distinction between philosophy and empirical science, and thus requires a wholesale reorientation of the subject” (Hylton and Kemp 2023) Quine held that the best science we have garnered is the best ultimate truth at present we have of the world. He did not see logical principles such as the law of excluded middle as arising from ontology, but as a principle of convenience pervasive in knowledge. I should say that dichotomy between those two candidate bases is false. I go with Rand’s picture of elementary logic, as a certain pervasive character of method in successful identifications of reality. Such existence-based logic infuses any higher logic naturally appropriate in attainment of ordinary and scientific knowledge. I add that excluded middle is a tooling formality for a living mind. It is not a formality belonging to concretes in their actuality and independently of the existence of living mind discerning them, by thought, in their concrete identities. Further, in my system (2023), alternatives of any sort do not exist in the universe at all until life enters the scene, and all alternatives, however high in the intellect, are descendants of the fundamental alternative that Rand exposed as uniquely facing the living: continuation of maintaining life or termination of life. We have mind, I say, capable of getting knowledge of concretes in part by use of principles of logic and mathematics tooled from formalities that belong to concretes. Identities of concretes—their characters, situations, and passages—can be formalities belonging to concrete existents, where discernment of those formalities is by thought engaged in elementary experience of ordinary objects in the world. Belonging-formalities such as a broad-form principle of identity “Existents have identity, and existence of the latter in full just is the former” can be assimilated and tooled by thought into further formalities tethered to belonging-formalities. The principle of excluded middle, for example, can have a tether to belonging-identities as well as to the high-powered human mind. In other words, we need not begin with logic, then use it in grasping the world, as Quine would have it. No, we begin with the world, including its identities in belonging-formalities, the world in ordinary human experience. When retaking the world in science, we wield formal tools with some tethers, by ancestry, from the world of ordinary experience. Which tooled formalities of logic and mathematics are best suited to which parts of the world is a further intellectual enterprise. Minkowski geometry can be weighed against 4D Euclidean geometry for most faithful and most effective tool for comprehending physical flat spacetime. Aristotle’s syllogistic and second-order logic can be weighed against Quine’s choice.[2] Quine aimed to integrate knowledge historical, knowledge scientific, including psychology, and knowledge philosophical. I notice, whole truth be told, he ended up smashing against early-childhood cognitive developmental psychology in the second half of the twentieth century, from his armchair. Elizabeth Spelke remarked: “Our research provides evidence, counter to the views of Quine (1960) and others, that the organization of the world into objects [in comprehension] precedes the development of language and thus does not depend upon it. I suspect, moreover, that language plays no important role in the spontaneous elaboration of physical knowledge” (Spelke 1989, 181). The reorientation between science and philosophy sought by Quine is wholesome, I should say. Ayn Rand remained in the old outlook from the philosopher’s chair. She took the sciences, including the modern hard sciences, to be in a one-way need of philosophy, especially in epistemology.[3] “Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man’s mind, the integrator of his knowledge, . . .” (Rand 1975, 82; also ITOE 74). “Science was born as a result and consequences of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base” (Rand 1961, 44; also 26–27). Rand acknowledged that scientific biology informed her concept of the general nature of life that she employed in her theory of ethics. (More generally, on the influence of biology on philosophy, see Smith 2017.) A bit of measurement theory informed Rand’s theory of concepts. A bit of Helmholtz, her thoughts on music. Rand acknowledges no cases in which science begat or informed philosophy in metaphysics or epistemology. I disagree. Harmonics, geometry, and astronomy existed before Aristotle, before his metaphysics or his theory of science or his organization of logical deduction. Aristotle’s empiricism was a boost to sciences (De Groot 2014), but harmonics, geometry, and astronomy were not inaugurated by systematic explicit philosophy (see e.g. Graham 2013). The idea of a physical law mathematical in expression was not invented by philosophers. Nor the need to look for certain symmetries and symmetry breaking in comprehending parts of physical reality (see Schwichtenberg 2018 [2015]; Healey 2007). From Plato-Aristotle to the present, where theoretical philosophy flourished, it was shaped by received mathematics and science (Netz 1999; Bochner 1966). Concerning science in our own time, contra Rand, it has not declined in comparison to advances in the nineteenth century, which Rand had maintained in support of the idea that bad strains of modern philosophy have led to a decline in scientific achievements (Rand 1975, 78). Modern hard sciences have continued their stampede to the present time, and cognitive developmental psychology arising in the second half of the twentieth century continues bringing new light to the present. To be sure, scientists operate within a general metaphysics they hold, and as Michael Friedman has illustrated, this may be especially useful for resolutions during a time of fundamental innovations in the course of science (2001, chap. 4). Scientists have also been innovators in methods of investigation, theoretical, observational, and experimental. In that we might say they have on a philosophical hat. But I object to the picture that full-tilt philosophers come up with valid methods of rational scientific inquiry independently of existing science, methods not already in the heads and hands of scientists rolling back the darkness. (To be continued.) Notes [1] Recall that “Resonant Existence” is my own philosophy, whose fundamentals in theoretical philosophy are set out in my paper “Existence, We.” The overlap between my philosophy and Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value are extensive, although, the differences are substantial. [2] Bivalent, first-order https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-firstorder-emergence/ predicate logic with identity [such has been proven complete]) for best truth-preserving tool in science. I might add, it seems fine tooling-form logical structure of natural-language thought on the world, at least when this much classical logic is bound additionally to existence by relevance logic. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/ [3] But consider Sciabarra 2013 [1995], 121–23. References Bochner, S. 1966. The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Friedman, M. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI. De Groot, J. 2014. Aristotle’s Empiricism. Las Vegas: Parmenides. Graham, D.W. 2013. Science before Socrates. New York: Oxford University Press. Healey, R. 2007. Gauging What’s Real – The Conceptual Foundations of Contemporary Gauge Theories. New York: Oxford University Press. Hylton, P. and G. Kemp 2023. Willard Van Orman Quine. Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Netz, R. 1999. The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics – A Study in Cognitive History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. New York: Signet. ——. 1975. From the Horse’s Mouth. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Schwichtenberg, J. 2018 [2015]. Physics from Symmetry. 2nd edition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sciabarra, C. 2013 [1995]. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd edition. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Smith, D.L., editor, 2017. How Biology Shapes Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spelke, E. 1989. The Origins of Physical Knowledge. In Weiskrantz 1989. Weiskrantz, L. editor, 1989. Thought without Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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  46. Part 2 – Morton White* Let me abbreviate the title of White’s 1952 paper by UD (for Untenable Dualism). White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (1952, 330). He urged rejection of both of these affiliates due to the divisional sharpness falsely maintained for them. White noted two kinds of statements that had lately been regarded as analytic. The first are purely formal logical truths such as “A is A” and “A or not-A.” The second are cases of “what is traditionally known as essential predication” (UD 318). He ponders especially the example “All men are rational animals.” That statement is logically the same as “Any man is a rational animal” or “A man is a rational animal.” This last expression of the proposition is one of Leonard Peikoff’s examples of a purportedly analytic statement in “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD 90). White did not pursue in this paper whether it is correct to characterize logical truths as analytic (UD 318–19). It will be recalled that Peikoff held forth Rand’s conception of logical truth against that of A. J. Ayer, who had maintained: “The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. . . . In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies” (Ayer 1946, 77; ASD 94, 101, 111–18; Branden 1963, 7). Whether one were to take analytical truths to be identical with or based on logical truths, I say that the Objectivist view of logic (with which I agree) does not allow the inference of Ayer and others that logical truths are not informed by fact. Logic on our view is a tool we use in identifications of existents. Logical truths are in no way prior to other truths, ones having empirical content. We learn the logical principle of Excluded Middle in an elementary logic course, but that learning is really an explicit articulation of a principle we have already found effective and reliable in thinking about the world we are negotiating. Either there is a bear sleeping beside the mail box OR there is not. Either I will continue to work on this project non-stop for two more hours from now OR not. Either vampires exist OR not. But there is a limited proper vista on the world within which the principle is sensible if our use of it is in pursuit of identifications of existents. It is nonsense to say that either there are some things existing in the world OR not. The effectiveness and range of sensible employment of the logical principle is learned from experience, and the concept of existence and its totality is learned by experience. The fact that the sensible range of the principle is so wide that it is convenient to indicate its general form as “A or Not-A” does not give us license to suppose there are no limits on sensible “applications” of the Principle of Excluded Middle or to suppose we do not learn that principle by experience. With that Objectivist view of elementary logic, they can say one thing what Morton White did not say: One’s concept of what is an analytic truth by identifying the analytic with the logical or basing the analytical on the logical does nothing to show that any purported analytical truth is entirely independent of experience, that it bears no information about existence at all, or that a purported analytical truth is made true and derives its necessity of being true by social convention untethered from facts of the empirical world. As with Quine’s “Two Dogmas,” White undermined the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic by finding fault with various explications of what analyticity amounts to. They concluded there is no durable articulate way of classifying propositions and truths as analytic in sharp contrast to synthetic. One way of conceiving an analytic statement is as expressing a proposition deducible from a logical truth by substitution of a synonym of one of its terms. (i) Every A is A. Therefore, (ii) Every man is a man. With “rational animal” as synonym for “man”, by substitution of identicals, we obtain (iii) Every man is a rational animal (UD 319). So some might propose that analyticity is explicated in terms of logical truth and synonymy, as in the preceding paragraph. White rejects the view that whether “man” and “rational animal” are synonymous is a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Similarly, that “man” and “animal who can skip” (my example, demonstrated, along with other distinctly human moves here [Tina]) are not synonymous is not a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Natural language is not like an artificial logical language in which meanings of terms are set entirely by stipulation (UD 321–24). Could analytic statements be defined instead as those whose denials are self-contradictory? (UD 325–26). White argues that denials of such propositions as “Not every man is a rational animal” are not contradictions, but his concept of contradiction is, in step with dominate contemporary views of logic, too narrow, as I have elaborated above in connection with Ayer. White did not relate this criterion for analyticity to Kant, but I should do so. One of Kant’s characterizations of analytic judgments is that in them the predicate is “thought through identity” with thought of the subject. Synthetic judgments connect predicate to subject, but not in the relation of identity (KrV A6–8 B10–12), where simple complete identity is meant, not Rand’s more expansive notion of identity as some or other distinctive traits belonging necessarily to anything that exists.[1] According to Kant, all judgments must conform to the principle of self-consistency, but only judgments certifiable by self-contradiction upon denial alone, apart from their truth in experience, are analytic (A151–53 B190–93; 1783, 4:266–70; 1790, 8:228–30, 244–45; Allison 2004, 89–93; Garrett 2008, 204–6). I object that contradiction upon denial is no genuine grounding of any truth. If we start with a truth and then show that upon denial of it we arrive at a contradiction, well isn’t that cute? But establishment of its truth is elsewhere. Morton White found that appealing to synonymies in the language is not illuminating in the absence of objective criteria for synonymy (UD 324). If it is said that one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” differs from one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a skipper,” White responds that that is surely only a matter of degree, not a sharp difference in kind. Between one’s response to contradiction of “Man is a rational animal” and contradiction of “Man is a skipper,” there is not a sharp difference in kind. If self-contradiction upon denial of a proposition is the criterion for analyticity of the proposition, then there is no sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic (UD 325–26). Objectivism can add that there is no qualitative divide in the purported divide analytic/synthetic because elementary logic is based on the widest-frame, worldly facts that existence exists and existence is identity, in Rand’s expansive sense of identity. White did not surmise that the merely-difference-of-degree in our sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” and in “Man is not a skipper” might be because a thing is everything that it is, as was later underscored by Peikoff in ASD. White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (UD 330). This kinship was also recognized in Peikoff (ASD 95), as I remarked earlier. But Peikoff went further: He observed that essentials of a thing do not exhaust what a thing is. No concepts of a subject are concepts of only what are the essentials in the definition of the subject. (To be continued.) Note [1] Joseph Butler (1692–1752) stated: “Everything is something or other.” Taken as the Principle of Identity, it is expansive. This expansive concept of identity is championed in Oderberg 2007, chap. 5. References Allison, H. 2004 [1983]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Revised and enlarged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Allison, H., and P. Heath, editors, 2002. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ayer, A. 1946. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover. Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8. Garrett, D. 2008. Should Hume Have Been a Transcendental Idealist? In Kant and the Early Moderns. D. Garber and B. Longuenesse, editors. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kant, I. 1781(A), 1787(B). Critique of Pure Reason. W. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett. ——. 1783. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. G. Hatfield, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002. ——. 1790. On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One. H. Allison, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002. Oderberg, D. 2007. Real Essentialism. New York: Routledge. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Quine, W. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. White, M. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004. ——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton.
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  47. Part 1 – Leonard Peikoff* By truths I mean, as Ayn Rand meant, “recognitions of facts of reality” which is to say “identifications of existents” (ITOE 48). Without living, fallible minds, there are no truths in this sense of the word. The world would have facts, but until some are recognized, no truth would have come into the world. Truth is sometimes used to mean what here is meant by fact. That is not the way I mean truth here nor the way Rand or Peikoff used it. Leonard Peikoff’s 1967 essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD) set out the basics of the contrasting sorts of truths—analytic and synthetic—the way the distinction had been cast up to middle of the 20th century. Analytic truths had been lately taken as true in virtue of their meaning. Rationality and animality would be included in the meaning of the concept man. So the truth “man is a rational animal” would be an analytic truth, a truth made so by definition, which under contemporary nominalism had become a matter of social convention, pretty arbitrary, free of much constraint by facts of the world. Necessity in such a truth would be from the say-so in our definitional prescription.[1] That choice of convention, I notice, satisfies a necessity of self-consistent, coherent thinking and talking. Such necessity lies among the class of necessities for a purpose, necessities for an end. I call this class necessity-for. The truth “man has only two eyes” would not be analytic, the story went, because the feature of having only two eyes is not part of the meaning of the concept man. Such a truth is known as synthetic. Unlike analytic truths, which are necessarily true, a synthetic truth is said to be only contingently true. Peikoff argued this to be a false dichotomy among truths. The historical root of this widespread falsehood in philosophy, Peikoff maintained, is the Platonic theory that only essential characteristics of a thing are part of the form of a thing and its definition. The inessential, which is from the material aspects of a thing, not its formal aspects, are not part of a thing’s definition. I concur in Peikoff’s discernment that the false dichotomy in truths between those analytic and those synthetic has a distant ancestor in a false dichotomy in Plato. In Cratylus Plato has Socrates uphold the principle that contrary attributes never belong to a fully real thing simultaneously and the principle that “things have some fixed being or essence of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature” (386d–e; see also Euthyphro 6d–e; Phaedo 65d, 75c–d, 78d, 100c; Republic 475e–76d, 479–80). Each thing has attributes such as shape, sound, or color; but in addition, each thing has a being or essence. Indeed, “color or sound each have a being or essence, just like every other thing that we say ‘is’” (Cra. 423d–e). Plato maintained moreover that what each thing essentially is, such as Man, Good, Size, or Strength is not discovered by sight or hearing, but by reason when it is most free from bodily, sensory distractions (Phd. 65, 74–75, 78c–79d, 83, 86, 96–105; Theaetetus 184b–87a). The character of each thing that is always the same is a kind—call it a Form—that is “a being itself by itself” (Parmenides 135a–c). Sensory perceptions are as shadows and reflections of these intelligible forms, these intrinsic natures, these essences and being of things (Rep. 509d–e). Plato had no notion of ideas or concepts encompassing both visible forms (such as shapes, sounds, or colors) and intelligible forms.[2] Modern notions of concepts or ideas are, in Plato’s frame, only our thoughts grasping intelligible forms.[3] Peikoff acknowledged, correctly, that Aristotle breathed new life into this Platonic error by bringing essences down from some purely intellectual nether-realm to the material world open to regular senses.[4] Aristotle is the heavy-weight instigator of the necessary-contingent divide and the essence-accident divide. These doctrines constrained Scholastic theories of universals, concepts, and predication, and facilitated the modern A-S divide. Peikoff observed that Rand’s conception of the concept of a thing, and her conception of the essential in the concept, rules out an A-S partition of the kinds of conceptual truth in our possession. A thing is all the things that it is (ASD 98). I might add that Rand took a thing’s external relationships as part of what a thing is, a blunt contrast with Plato (ITOE 39). And in Rand’s epistemology, we can have a conception of all that a thing is, including all its external relationships and all its potentials, even though we know our present concept of the thing contains only a portion of that totality of its identity. In Rand’s conception of right concepts, they are “classifications of observed existents according to their relationships to other observed existents” (ITOE 47).[5] Furthermore: “Concepts stand for specific kinds of existents, including all the characteristics of these existents, observed and not-yet-observed, known and unknown” (ITOE 65). Objectivist epistemology does not regard the essential and the non-essential characteristics of existents as simply given, as if in an intellectual intuition. Rather, that distinction is based on our context of knowledge of the facts of existents (ITOE 52; ASD 107, 101–103). “To designate a certain characteristic as ‘essential’ or ‘defining’ is to select, from the total content of the concept, the characteristic that best condenses and differentiates that content in a specific cognitive context. Such a selection [in Objectivist epistemology] presupposes the relationship between the concept and its units [its member elements in reality regarded as substitutable for each other under suspension of their particular measure-values of their shared characteristics]: it presupposes that the concept is an integration of units, and that its content consists of its units, including all their characteristics.” (ASD 103) Nelson Goodman had written in a 1953 footnote: “Perhaps I should explain for the sake of some unusually sheltered reader that the notion of a necessary connection of ideas, or of an absolutely analytic statement, is no longer sacrosanct. Some, like Quine and White, have forthrightly attacked the notion; others, like myself, have simply discarded it; and still others have begun to feel acutely uncomfortable about it” (60). I’ll examine the cases mounted against the A-S distinction by White and by Quine, and compare them to the Objectivist case, in the next two installments.[6] (To be continued.) Notes [1] Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the A-S distinction), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join. Against say-so free of constraints from conditions of the world being the source of necessity in necessary truths, see Rasmussen 1982. On the nature and need of understanding for truth, see Haugeland 1998. [2] Cf. Metaphysics 987b1–13; Notomi 2005, 193–201. [3] See further, Kraut 1992, 7–12; White 1992. [4] ASD 95. See also Peikoff 1972, 191, on Aristotle’s influential division of the necessary and the contingent. On medieval and early modern roots of the false A-S dichotomy, see Peikoff 1964, 15–16, 45–59. [5] Concept empiricism is defended and a version of it, thickly informed by pertinent modern science, is formulated in Prinz 2002. [6] White 1952 appeared originally in Hook 1950. Sidney Hook would a few years later become Peikoff’s dissertation advisor. Recent defense of the A-S distinction against the attack by Quine is Russell 2008. Additional contemporary debate on the issue is Juhl and Loomis 2010. I’ll not undertake assimilation of these in the present study. References Aristotle B.C.E. 348–322. Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. Indianapolis: Hackett. Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8. Goodman, N. 1953. The New Riddle of Induction. In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. 4th edition. 1983. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haugeland, J. 1998. Truth and Rule-Following. In Having Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Hook, S., editor, 1950. John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom. New York: Dial Press. Juhl, C., and E. Loomis. 2010. Analyticity. New York: Routledge. Kraut, R. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge. Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Illinois. Notomi, N. 2005. Plato’s Metaphysics and Dialectic. In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy. M. L. Gill and P. Pellegrin, editors. Wiley-Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1964. The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classical Logical Ontologism. Ph.D. ProQuest. ——. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. ——. 1972. Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume. Lectures by Leonard Peikoff. M. Berliner, editor. 2023. Santa Ana, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press. Plato c. 428–348 B.C. Plato – Complete Works. J. M. Cooper, editor. 1997. Indianapolis: Hackett. Prinz J., 2002. Furnishing the Mind – Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Rasmussen, D. 1982. Necessary Truth, the Game Analogy, and the Meaning-Is-Use Thesis. The Thomist 46(3):423–40. Russell, G. 2008. Truth in Virtue of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. White, M. G. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004. http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/.../White%20-%20Analytic... ——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton: Princeton University Press. White, N. 1992. Plato’s Metaphysical Epistemology. In Kraut 1992.
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  48. Before the GOP became a nationalist/theocratic cesspit, it was a band of cowards who would soil themselves the moment some leftist brought up poverty while they posed as champions of capitalism. Today, they have found a way to be even more disgraceful: Throw capitalism under the bus, and adapt left-wing arguments to be deployed against ... porn. This is both a trial balloon and a proof-of concept. If this succeeds, just wait to see how else they'll try cram their religious strictures down your throat. The below is buried within a Reason Magazine article, about Mike Lee's (R-Utah) PROTECT Act, which could ban all existing pornography from the internet as it is written today. The rationale will sound familiar to anyone who grew up (as I did) while the South was under the thumb of Southern Baptists and to anyone whose has suffered an RSI to his eye muscles (as mine have) by rolling his eyes every time some mealy-mouthed leftist has used poverty as an excuse for crime (individual theft not sanctioned by the state) or redistributionism (theft performed by the state):What's next? Banning alcohol (again)? (Image by unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)And in all cases, we're left with this broad and vague definition of consent as a guiding principle. The bill states that consent "does not include coerced consent" and defines "coerced consent" to include not just any consent obtained through "fraud, duress, misrepresentation, undue influence, or nondisclosure" or consent from someone who "lacks capacity" (i.e., a minor) but also consent obtained "though exploiting or leveraging the person's immigration status; pregnancy; disability; addiction; juvenile status; or economic circumstances." With such broad parameters of coercion, all you may have to say is "I only did this because I was poor" or "I only did this because I was addicted to drugs" and your consent could be ruled invalid -- entitling you to collect tens of thousands of dollars from anyone who distributed the content or a tech platform that didn't remove it quickly enough. Even if the tech company or porn distributor or individual uploader ultimately prevailed in such lawsuits, that would only come after suffering the time and expense of fending the suits off. [bold added]That's right. After decades of being too frightened to contest the idea that one man's need is another man's moral duty, conservatives haven't bothered to think for themselves for once, or (if they ever did) finally dared to say Nobody owes another anything simply because he needs it. No. They have instead chosen to say, Okay. Men are obligated to arrange their lives around the needs of others, and we declare that others 'need' to be unable to see porn -- or anything else we decide is 'offensive' to the deity we have never proved exists and whose will we claim to know. What's next? Welfare for "porn exploitation survivors"? Don't laugh: Conservatives are now big fans of welfare for women whom they've denied abortions to. I said years ago that the moment a religious conservative saw a conflict between his religion and freedom, he would throw freedom under the bus. As usual, I was right. Today, they're going after the porn industry, an easily demonized target. What will they do tomorrow? Rank-and-file conservatives would do well to stop cheering abuses like this, and salivating over what they hope people like Mike Lee will target next. Rather, they should consider something they like that some nut from a religion not their own somewhere might object to, and think about that getting banned on some equally ridiculous pretext. -- CAVLink to Original
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  49. https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/8/issue/25/world-court-finds-us-attacks-iranian-oil-platforms-1987-1988-were-not I had not heard of the military action prior to clicking on the link and not sure how much credence to put on ICJ proceedings but seems they determined the US strikes on the oil platforms were not consistent a with self defense, defense. I think the destruction of the Iranian Navy would have to precede from a declaration of war, no ?
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  50. PS – earlier helpful information In Kant’s view, our experience of space does not consist of separate disconnected bits nor of less than three dimensions. We experience spatial form directly and as a unified whole. The presentation that is space is an intuition. That presentation is one whose constituent parts are not prior their whole, not parts whose accumulation makes their whole, and not instances under a concept of that whole. Rather, the parts of intuitive presentations, such as the parts of space, are by limitations and divisions of a singular, unified whole. All objects encountered or even possible in sensory experience have their places in that unitary space. Our abstract geometric reasoning, Euclidean geometry, is not disconnected from the space of our sensory experience (KrV A22–30 B37–45; B162; A140–42 B180–82; A162–66 B202–7; A223–24 B271–72; A712–24 B740–52). Our experience of time, in Kant’s view, is also of a continuous unified whole. All objects, whether in sensory or inner experience, have their places in that one time. Physical things endure and have their motions in determinate ways obligating our perception of them in just those temporal and spatial ways (KrV A30–41 B46–58; A103–10; B136–40; B150–56; B162–63; A140–45 B181–85; A189–211 B232–56). Kant’s faculty of understanding is a part of what has traditionally been called reason. The power of understanding is the power of concepts. Our rational faculties beyond the understanding are two, which Kant called the faculties of judgment and reason. The powers of reason, in this narrower sense, are of inference and cognitive management (KrV A130–31 B169–70; A686–87 B714–15; A723–38 B751–76). The three higher faculties work together, and each is a grand cognitive unifier (A67–234 B93–294; A669–704 B697–732). Kant joined his philosophy of experience and understanding to fundamental physics (1786). He further elaborated our cognitive powers to enfold our esthetic capabilities (1790). In the power he called reason, he located the keys to morality. Between reason and morality, there is no divide (KrV A800–819 B828–47; 1785, 4:389–90, 403–4, 408, 411–13, 426–40, 446–48, 453–63; 1788, 5:15–16, 31, 42–57, 89–110, 119–21, 131–32, 134–48; 1797, 6:213–21, 375–78, 396–97). Yet, the reality of moral law, free will, and God largely transcend reality accessible by our intuition and understanding. Kant inherited entrenched problematic divides in philosophy. Older among them would be the divide between the material world of the senses and the immaterial realm of thought, soul, and God; the divide between inclination and moral obligation; and the divide between reason and faith. More recent among them would be the divide between the deterministic world of science and the inner world of freedom; the divide between the value-absent world of reason and the value-full world of action and feeling; and the divide between things and their effects on us. Where Kant attempted to smooth together those divisions, he succeeded little. Kant deepened and hardened the divide between inclination and moral obligation. However many ties he made between sensing and thinking, he deepened and hardened the divide between them. Moreover, he deepened and hardened the divide between things and their effects on us. His embrace and expansion of that divide entailed that all the unity and structure he would give to experience, understanding, and morality must come from the side of the subject. Space, time, objects, identity, causality, and moral reasons—all of them, systematically and fantastically, and seductively to many bright thinkers, must come from the constitution of an articulate subject striving for and touched by things as they are in themselves, things as they cannot be in our grasp, things with their own articulation unknowable to us. Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel would innovate their own further integrations to bridge or dissolve problematic divides as they stood in Kant’s philosophy, but their solutions further increased the crafting of reality by subjectivity and, of course, continued to make room for the supernatural. Leonard Peikoff was partly right, though in considerable exaggeration, to call Kant’s philosophy anti-integration (2012, 34–35). That was part of Kant’s endeavor, a result overachieved, alongside his achievements of integration. Rand’s world and ours is only one world. There is life, condition of consciousness and value. Human consciousness and valuation are open to human choice, within the one, natural world. In all the one world, existence is identity. Consciousness is identification, the grasp of what is and exclusion of what is not. Consciousness is an active process of differentiation and integration. We grasp the world in its given particulars, settings, dimensions, interactions, and magnitude structures. We detect and measure in perception, joined to the magnitude structures there in the world. Our concepts, at their best, rearticulate the world’s own articulation, including its magnitude structures. We are highly integrated in our cognitive powers and highly integrated with the only world, the one available for perception, comprehension, enjoyment, and action. References Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason (KrV). W. S. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Hackett. ——. 1785. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. M. J. Gregor, translator. In Immanuel Kant – Practical Philosophy. 1996. Cambridge. ——. 1786. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. M. Friedman, translator. In Immanuel Kant – Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. H. Allison and P. Heath, editors. 2002. Cambridge. ——. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason. M. J. Gregor, translator. In Practical Philosophy. 1996. Cambridge. ——. 1790. Critique of Judgment. W. S. Pluhar, translator. 1987. Hackett. ——. 1797. The Metaphysics of Morals. M. J. Gregor, translator. In Practical Philosophy. 1996. Cambridge. Peikoff, L. 2012. The DIM Hypothesis. NAL.
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