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G.K. Chesterton is mostly right. 'I stated later that objectivism [sic] posits goals “that are not even desirable: commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one’s understanding and knowledge, and to never permitting oneself contradictions. If any individual were truly as devoted to these goals as the objectivists [sic] urge him to be, he would be compulsively rational­­ and therefore inhuman and irrational.' -Albert Ellis, Is Objectivism a Religion?

Monart, let me respond to these last two secondary posts of yours together in this note. On the Rand question, I don't have an answer either way, at least not thinking of it as what a definite deceased person would think. Our loved ones in life are continually surprising us and delighting us with some amount of unpredictability in their thought and expressions. Our experience of that part of them is part of our loss when they die. I'll allow as at least a slight possibility that Rand would agree with me as you posed. However, if she did, and if she wanted to say that her philosophy had not changed in any of its essentials by this change, that might take quite some tall argumentation. On your second post, there has been some deliberate public not-mention of Boydstun perhaps, but I think that can be for all the reasons you mentioned at the same time. Also, for the reason of not advertising alternatives or extensions (notably, as mere extension, my 2004 "Universals and Measurement") that were not worked through and published with the imprimatur of their own organization. Three professional Objectivist philosophers have very possibly picked up original ideas of mine (published in the 1990's, also the 2004) and incorporated them in their written presentations without giving any credit: Gotthelf – my idea of independent causal chains in connection with physics and free will; Binswanger – introducing into his expositions the Moh's hardness scale for exemplification of ordinal measurement in the physical realm (re Rand's theory of concepts) and gravitropisms in some plant roots for best contrast of gravity pulling a stone into rolling down a hill (re teleology of vegetative life); and Rheins – mention that the law of identity does not strictly imply uniqueness of outcomes from same initial conditions in physics (which, he neglects to mention, Rand and Peikoff had always supposed it did). All of these presentations tried to pass off these tidbits and outlooks as part of Rand's thought, which they most certainly were not, and which in the ordinal measurement topic, she flatly contradicted. But as you suggest, on to our own frontier. The flowering of online forums and of FB has allowed us to get our thought before more eyes and minds for these several years and perhaps will be here for future minds beyond our lifetimes. Minds communicating with minds is the core. All record of it is erased by thermodynamics eventually, just as all record that humans ever existed. What mattered was only while life was.

Ooops! Resonant, not Radiant. Maybe praise from MP was close in my head. Or maybe it was some sort of Freudian slip (when you say one thing, but mean your mother).

Productivity itself is context-laden, and in fact it is you who are taking it out of context. Something that causes a loss is not productive, it is counter-productive. False. There is no such thing as excessive pride. Arrogance is false pride, it's a pretense, because it doesn't have the reality to back it up. False. Emotional repression is false rationality, it's a pretense that consists of evading one's emotions. False. A workaholic lifestyle is a pretense, not an excess, and it does not lead to productivity.

Life is the residence of all value. And the value of all value. Notice the analogical projection of life into nature of an immaterial god-mind by Plato, Philo, Pseudo-Dionysus, Boethius, Anselm, Avicenna, Albert, Aquinas, and Luther. The apostle Paul writes of “the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein” (Acts 14:15; also Deut. 32:40 and Psalm 18:46). Consider too the breaths of life from God to men (Genesis 2:7 and Psalm 104:30). Aristotle on God’s mind and ours: “And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality” (Metaph. 1072b26–27; also 1022a32 and Top. 136b3–7). Why do all these impute life to God? Because of a suspicion that life is the source of all value, and God has no value without life. (Full disclosure: if something is alive, it is mortal. So, if God is immortal, It is not living.) Until life enters the universe, there is no such thing as value (or questions or solutions).

Man's Craving for Nothingness According to Schopenhauer, pleasure does not come to us originally and of itself; instead, pleasure is only able to exist as a removal of a pre-existing pain or want, while pain (which signals a threat to survival) directly and immediately proclaims itself to our perception. This is mirrored in Objectivist theory: "Pleasure—using the term for a moment to designate any form of enjoyment—is an effect. Its cause is the gaining of a value, whether it be a meal when one is hungry, an invitation to a party, a diamond necklace, or a long-sought promotion at work. The root of values, in turn, is the requirements of survival. Self-preservation, in other words, entails goal-directed action, success at which leads (in conscious organisms) to pleasure." (OPAR, Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man) We could also state this idea as follows: the constant entropic pull, which wants to disintegrate our bodies, is the root of all pleasure. And we certainly like pleasure, so it's no surprise that the most desirable life for us is the one least troubled by debilitating sickness, distracting pain, mental over-strain, hunger, social conflict and the like. Thus, man's deepest desire, his most sought-after jewel, is Invincibility; he wants the ability to act purely for acquiring pleasure (motivation from love), without worrying that, in his pursuit of joy, he might mess something up and bring Nature's wrath upon his head (motivation from pain). To be invincible then, is to be worry-less, like a child that has not yet been acquainted with the realities of life. Like sleeping infants the gods breathe without plan or purpose; the spirit flowers continually within them, chastely cherished, as in a small bud, and their holy eyes look out in still eternal clearness. (Friedrich Hölderlin - Hyperion's Song of Fate) Yet this kind of Invincibility is impossible to man: But to us no resting place is given. As suffering humans we decline and blindly fall from one hour to the next, like water thrown from cliff to cliff, year after year, down into the Unknown. Before he decided that philosophy can't compete with poetry, the celebrated German poet Friedrich Hölderlin studied philosophy at the Tübinger Stift, where he was friends and roommates with two giants of philosophy, Hegel and Schelling. In his philosophical thought, Hölderlin was primarily reacting to the then-trending philosophy of Fichte. According to Fichte, "I act" literally means "I am disrupting the current state", and that current state is obviously inert matter. Regardless of whether Nature truly exists or not, human cognition needs it in order to make possible the consciousness of free agency. Apart from that, Nature has no other value, thought Fichte. Hölderlin was not a fan of this. After all, things like scientific and poetic talent are generously offered by Nature, and are not generated by us ex nihilo. Fichte's theory also worsens the rift between free beings and mechanistic "nature", by turning Nature into a mere instrument for human projects. Furthermore, since: no external inhibition = no possibility of freedom Fichte declared that "freedom from limitations" is an infinite goal of morality, an imaginary ideal we can only approach step by step, with no end in sight. This did not go well with the younger generation, which was just recovering from the failure of the French Revolution to deliver its promised utopia. Riffing on the same theme, Hölderlin held that the human condition is characterized by two opposing drives: 1) the desire to be Myself, as against "That"; 2) the desire to attain "That", precisely because it is separate from Myself, therefore threatening my autonomy and Invincibility As Hölderlin's preference for poetry over philosophy suggests, he locates the resolution of this conflict in the feeling of Beauty. In Aesthetic contemplation, we (spiritually) attain the end-goal of all moral striving, i.e. we feel both infinite and determinate (limited) at the same time. It is different for the real world. Here, "survival" and "life" are synonymous. The day this impossible Indestructibility is achieved is the day where "survival/life" is no longer a thing. Thus, the striving for our most sought-after jewel, for Invincibility, is paradoxically an open striving for destruction. ___ (My source for Hölderlin's metaphysics was Edward Kanterian's excellent recorded lecture delivered at the University of Kent, 23 November 2012.)

Nature doesn't 'have' non contradictory thermodynamics, Science does, Nature supersedes 'our' contradictions all the time. That's why we need the guardian of the method of science, to thwart Science.

In asking the "what would Ayn Rand..." question, I am presuming that she and you were both seeking the truth and each would change one's mind according to facts and logic when presented with them. So if she could grasp your reasoning as valid, she would revise her ideas, or if she could refute your reasoning, you would revise. Those Objectivist philosophers: If it weren't merely the result of coincidental independent work and they didn't credit you, it's a serious injustice that engenders unpleasant resentment. Life is tenacious, especially human life. Before thermodynamics could eventually wipe out humanity, the unending power of reason will find a solution, including maybe discovering laws that supersede (but not contradict) thermodynamics.

"Advaita . . . it's pure metaphysics." But any philosophical metaphysics has epistemological, ethical, and political implications, even if not explicated. If Advaita is "much like poetry", and less like philosophical metaphysics, then, yes, Advaita could be interpreted to suit a given ethics. Yes, "existence" as an axiomatic concept "collects", subsumes, contains, refers to all things that exist, at the same time that it underscores and reiterates the fundamental fact that if they exist, they exist. This repetition is a reminder and a cognitive guardian against the absurdity of denying that existence exists, i.e., that existence does not exist. One of Rand's innovation is her axiomatic conceptualization of reality as: "Existence exists. Existence is identity. Consciousness is identification." Without explicit grasp of these axioms is why "they've been fighting for millennia over what exists".

Via the Harry Binswanger Letter, I learned of a fantastic editorial from the British press regarding the situation in Iran and what the West ought to do. In "Iran Is About to Start a Nuclear World War -- and the West Is Determined to Lose," Allister Heath makes the following statement, which would have been obvious decades ago, but is controversial today:I agree that the West should take care of Iran's military while the Iranians deal with this guy and his buddies. (Image modified from image at Wikimedia Commons, license.)If Joe Biden were a serious president, he would announce that the mullahs in Tehran have crossed a red line, that they are an existential menace to civilised nations. He would declare that enough is enough, that no country can shoot hundreds of drones and missiles at one of its neighbours with impunity, that no government can go on funding terrorism, rape, torture and murder on an industrial scale. He would understand the need to deter other rogue states through a show of strength. He would state that the Iranian regime must be treated like the global pariah that it has become, that all of its proxies must be destroyed, and that, above all, it will never be allowed to get anywhere near nuclear weapons. He would put together a coalition, including as many of Iran's Arab neighbours as possible. He would impose extreme sanctions. He would allow Israel to finish off Hamas. He would help hit Hezbollah. Heath contrasts this with the actual policy of evasion and appeasement the West is continuing instead, which he demonstrates is a serious danger by placing this conflict within its broader context of warmongering by the authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, and North Korea: "[T]he Islamic Republic is the weakest link, the least difficult one to deal with today, if we had the sense to act." I highly recommend reading this rare jewel of clarity and urgent call to action, and publicizing it by whatever means one has. -- CAVLink to Original

I didn't say her principles were correct because she identified them. I said she showed how to derive them from objective fact.

When you say "it" are you referring to materialism? If so, yes, materialism today about living things would be the discreteness of cells. But that is not a conjecture or implication of any modern philosophical position; it is just the result of nineteeth century biology that all living matter is made of cells. It is a further speculation, such as I would make, that all consciousness and experience and memories are results in living matter engaged with the world and the organism's own internal regulations. That would be a modern materialism of consciousness and pals. That the matter is cellular is only from science. In the portion of what I said that you quoted, I was thinking only of general ontology and Rand's point about it in that first paragraph at the top of page 39 in ITOE, with which I mainly agree. I don't see that as implying an ontologic discreteness, rather, an absence of any absolute disconnection of any existent from any other existents at all (except the existent that is the entirety of existence, of course). And I don't see that position in general ontology as implying any sort of materialism.

I always learn something from these conversations. It just so happens that I am used to addressing first generation Objectivists who were, on the whole, completely obsessed with Rand's philosophy. I'm aware that this attitude may have toned down with the new generation. But my primary experience with Objectivism is with the first generation, and they were quite shrill, I can assure you. And they still are, those that are still around anyway. For example, "But Kant said..." <BLOCKED> If you are a first-generation Objectivist with a more open mind, then I salute you.

Here's a good article from John Eastman, who represented Trump before the Supreme Court concerning the 2020 election, about some of the information he was given in the course of doing his job: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/most-secure-election-american-history-john-eastman Interesting read!

Yes as to the level of indigenous adherents, but Shankarya widely associated with Advaita is a cultural touchstone because of his purported( various historical disputes with crediting) realignment of Vedic traditions in the sense of establishing Indian nationhood. Vikekananda called on that history in his advocacy of ending the British mandate. Kind of like in the US everybody 'knows' George Washington, but they aren't all or even many freemasons, lol. But also I think you are right in the that the philosophy is more known among seekers, just my fanboy buttons getting pushed, lol

The preceding (X) is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. It is not a moral code so far as it is now developed. There are some virtues that may be drawn from this basis, however, and in this it will be helpful to compare with Rand and with Kant. As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence. Famously, for part of Rand’s ethical base, she characterized life in complete generality as self-generating and self-maintaining. This she took from standard biology along with the findings that all organismic life is cellular the findings of ontogeny and of evolution from Darwin to the present. It is quite true that self-generation and self-maintenance are features (which is character in my general ontology) of any life. Even if we humans become creators of life from inanimate matter, our success will mean that we created means for the appearance of matter organized such that it is self-generating and self-maintaining. We are relying on that character when we plant, water, and fertilize crops, even if we only dimly notice that the crops do the growing themselves and possess various ranges of adaptability themselves under changes in surrounding conditions. That living things have functions in their subsystems to the preservation and replication of the whole organism and that living things have powers of self-generation and self-maintenance might better have some elements such as growth drawn out more, but I’ll stay with Rand’s broad meanings of self-generation and self-maintenance. Notice that these steps are not necessarily only suited for a ladder to ethical egoism. To be a fair characterization of life in general, we must understand “self” in self-generating and self-maintaining in a broad and indeed rather shifty way. Overwhelmingly, life gets started from life. Other life. Self as individual organism and self as its species work back and forth for continuation of those two selves. An individual life can be just a quickly disposable trial tool in the function of preserving the species, although overall, the species requires individual organisms. Of course. I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one's ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running. Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. And that means, as stated in the monograph, continuing to pursue the facts and the coordination with others in that pursuit. Rand has it that rationality is our overarching method for getting the facts and making good uses of them. That is fine, but I contest the picture in which one was just going along alone rationally pursuing the facts and how to use them and then as it were noticed, secondarily, that the existence of other people is enjoyable, knowledge-boosting, and economically advantageous. The higher intelligence of humans does indeed have launchings spontaneously in individuals. Young children will spontaneously seriate a group of rods according to their lengths; none of our closest primate pals do that. But we have been in intelligent human company all along our individual active existence, from precautions and playing to learning common nouns, proper names, verbs, classification, and predication. Rationality is profoundly social in one from the get-go, even as its acquisition by each person consists in individual facility in its operation independently of direction from others and self-direction in seeking information or specialized skills from others Rationality is seen by Rand as the basic moral virtue because it is the necessary general operation needed for the human form of life. She takes the other virtues in her ethical system to be salient strands of rationality aimed at individual survival. I say, rather, that rationality is the given proper being of a human and the proper responsiveness to persons, other and self. Rationality is the grand means of human survival, as Rand held, but that is not the whole of its story. Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway. Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives. Ayn Rand offered an ethical egoism in which rationality took its place as central overall virtue for a person due to the need for rationality in making one’s reality-according individual human life. She tried to weave the prima facie virtue of truth-telling to others as a derivative of the need to be honest with oneself about the facts. That is not plausibly the basic reason one wants to and should want to be honest with others. Rand’s account of honesty is inadequate by reliance on a purely egoistic basis. Ethical egoism, a genuine one such as hers, one attempting to derive all its moral virtues purely from self-interest, is false. It rests on an inadequate view of what is the constitution of the human self. (To be continued.)

I don't think that Rand should go along with "We live" at the same level as "Existence exists." That is for two reasons. One is that she would be more comfortable offhand just putting first acknowledgement of life (at an elementary apprehension of it) with the acknowledgement of consciousness, which is in that second moment, the stepping back from the statement and assertion "Existence exists" and reporting her corollary axiom as she did. To consciousness in that second axiom, I doubt she should have any problem with a parenthetical ("there is no grasp of consciousness without attendant grasp that one is living") And similarly forward from statement of her axioms getting out the primacy of existence to consciousness, on to the following statement, Rand should be comfortable acceding that wherever consciousness puts in an appearance, so does life: "Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness— are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at it its end." My difference with Rand on these starting points, as you know, is that leaves out some of what is among the firsts in the first ground from that first ray of light to the final lights out: being alive and with other. The second reason Rand would not go along with "We Live" being yoked at the ground level with "Existence exists" nor go along with the more expansive second moment of mine replacing hers of 1957 is that it ends up kicking down the ladder to ethical egoism. This was not evident to me until a couple of days ago, when I wrote chapter X of the monograph; I had not known that a ladder alternate to the egoism one can be stood well suited to and intimate with my version of first philosophy I had completed and published in 2021 (and again shown, less technically, in the online FB monograph). But anyone will be able to see how that goes in the next post I make in this thread. By the way, professional philosophers have noted before the amazing absence of other in Descartes ground floor he arrives at in Meditations. I notice, however, that God is left there with him in his final elements withstanding his (faux) radical skeptical doubt exercise for getting the first floor and what is in it (also, he ends up with enough elements to construct an Ontological proof of God's existence). And I, perhaps I alone, have noticed the amazing absence of aliveness of his ego at the ground floor. Of course he was set on having life understood as machines joined with spirits, and he had just gone through an exercise trying scoot machines off the table along with a lot of other physical-world stuff. From my perspective (this point being taken from Rand) the perfection Descartes would put into the concept God is a stolen concept once he has scooted life off the table on account of its machine component. No, I never saw Rand give any lectures or Q&A's. I got to see her on television a couple of times on the Johnny Carson Show, and on a tape recording (in 1977), I got to hear her participating in the Q&A's of the Peikoff lecture series "The Philosophy of Objectivism." Of course there is plenty of video of her speaking online now. I did not hear any lectures of Nathaniel Branden during his time teamed with Rand. However, I did get to see him give a couple of lectures with Q&A around the turn into the present century. More importantly, in a way, was hearing him speak in the early 1970's to a group of maybe 25 people in a room at O'Hare airport between his flights. He was then a master of group control, or maybe something like hypnosis; you could have heard a pin drop. He was talking about psychology, which had figured prominently in Rand's writings too at least into the '70's. Too prominently. I was refreshed to see the decline of that with the rise of Peikoff and Gotthelf as Rand's important protege's. I have not communicated with any philosophers associated with ARI on the philosophy I have developed; one is a Facebook 'friend' and can get any feedback he has for me to me easily; I don't expect any. As you see from "likes" and encouraging words on the FB post of it, there are other professional philosophers to whom what I have made brings at least a smile. I have one personal friend who is a professional philosopher (and some personal acquaintance with professors from whom I took courses last century and this). He first got a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, then a second Ph.D., which was the philosophy one. He is wrapping up a career of teaching philosophy in California this year, and he and wife will be moving to Michigan in retirement, last I heard. Anyway, he said something amusing once during our interval of me sending him early drafts of parts of my original philosophy and he sending feedback. He quipped something like "No-man-is-an-island individualism."

Since he became speaker based solely on his loyalty to Trump -- a man who would throw his own mother under the bus on a whim -- I had an extremely low estimate of Speaker Mike Johnson. After he ignored such luminaries as Marjorie Taylor Greene to pass a military aid package, that estimate is slightly higher: He would seem possessed of enough low cunning or even common sense to know when and how to work with political opponents to achieve a goal. Writing at UnHerd, Fred Bauer outlines the ways the other Trump loyalists (who are now calling for Johnson's head) screwed themselves by preemptively writing off any and all cooperation with the Democrats:Probably a RINO, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Image by United States Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)... Because of the centrality of Ukraine for the Biden White House's foreign policy, Democrats might well have eventually accepted a legislative package that paired border control measures with Ukraine-Israel funding. Republicans could have passed a broader national security grand bargain in the House and then dared the Democratic-controlled Senate not to act. The precedent would have been the 2023 debt-ceiling standoff, in which House Republicans passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling and forced the White House and Senate Democrats to the negotiating table. Instead, recalcitrant populists in the House performed judo against themselves. Rather than leveraging the border to get Ukraine funding, they used performative opposition to Ukraine funding to block action on the border. Speaker Johnson put the matter bluntly the other day: "If I put Ukraine in any package, it can't also be with the border because I lose Republican votes on that rule." [bold added]Just as Bauer accurately describes how the populist kook wing of the GOP got nothing by demanding everything, I believe he pretty accurately foretells the future when he considers the deep reflection this should cause among them, but won't:... For some populists, this complete sacrifice of legislative leverage may be a policy disappointment but a messaging opportunity. Perhaps the most prized ornament among many Republicans on Capitol Hill is a badge of angry defeat -- won during the shutdowns and failed "Obamacare" repeals of the past. This debacle is another chance to rage against the "uniparty", fret about the betrayal by the Republican "establishment", and sneer at "America Last" foreign policy. [bold added]The likes of Greene are so blinded by rage at the left that they cannot see how stupid they are behaving or entertain the idea of achieving part of what they want, under the current political makeup of the legislative and judicial branches. I am no fan of Joe Biden, but this is a textbook example of how not to win against a political opponent, and I can't think of a political faction I'd want doing this more. The silver lining here is that Johnson has shown that there is room for a halfway sane legislative agenda to get passed in a closely-divided House: There will be enough center-left and center-right votes to pass measures that aren't too nutty for every member of either party to block, and that the authoritarian wings of each party can be marginalized. One cheer for Mike Johnson. -- CAVLink to Original

PWNI doesn't mention Kant by name. It does illustrate the practical consequences of certain philosophical ideas -- if and to the extent that you take them seriously and try to apply them in a given situation. Even Kantians can somehow manage to make it to the store and buy groceries, even though their minds allegedly are incapable of understanding the store and the groceries as they really are, and can only understand them as they appear to be. In a sense the astronaut is an exaggeration just to make the point. In another sense, though, the whole problem with certain philosophical ideas is that you can't take them to their logical conclusions without causing disaster to ensue... and if that's the case, there must be something wrong with those ideas. I don't think that's "vilification." That's just calling attention to a problem. (Of course I don't think the real intention of those bad philosophical ideas is for people to go all-in with them -- rather, it's to use them as an excuse or an escape hatch whenever they want to do something irrational.)

I am not going to say that it is, because it would require a very large scale full-text search of both Rand and Kant. Peikoff did say that Kant had "occasional fig leaves," which means we can't say that Kant was wrong about everything. (I suppose a complete lie would be more easily rejected than one that verifiably tells the truth some of the time.) We can say that Kant was wrong about fundamental ideas -- like the whole division into noumenal and phenomenal worlds. On fundamental ideas, Rand and Kant are completely different. If Kant were right about something, his fundamentals would tend to undermine it (sort of like if someone were saying that 2+2=4 because of extraterrestrials). Rhetorically, at least, I'm sure there were places where Rand would take the other side of one of Kant's formulations. But if she were to say that 2+2=4 she would probably (rightly) leave Kant out of it, even if he said the same thing at some point or other.

Existence may be both Resonant and Radiant, thanks to Mother's Love. . . . . . Which reminds of this: At Sunrise (Against the Wall) By Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni They pushed him straight against the wall; The firing squad dropped in a row; And why he stood on tiptoes, Those men shall never know. He wore a smile across his face As he stood primly there, The guns straight aiming at his heart, The sun upon his hair; For he remembered, in a flash, Those days beyond recall, When his proud mother took his height Against the bedroom wall.

Advaita Vedanta starts with experience, awareness as primary and subjective. It says all experience involves a subject that is aware of an object and that finding the locus of the awareness is the finding of, or the realization of the self, the witness consciousness. The analytic meditation technique they employ is called "neti, neti", when translated from Sanskrit it mostly means "not this, not that". To 'see' the locus of the consciousness you identify all of the subject/ object relationships in an 'act' of experience to discern the 'ultimate' subject/subjectivity. An example would be to sit in front of a vase with a flower in it and analyze the experience of seeing the bloom. Right away it is obvious that the flower is not you it is an object of your awareness. You notice you are using your eyes to see the flower but that the 'seeing' isn't 'in the eyes'. You then notice the eyes 'convey' the visual image to the mind/brain for contemplation, discrimination and identification of the object. And then you notice that the experience of the knowing that you see the flower is the awareness of the object or product of the brain/mind. You can also notice that the awareness that 'sees' the flower, and all 'seen' things, is a static ever present locus. It was the same awareness prior to that particular experience of the flower and continues to be that locus, irrespective of the changing conditions and functioning of the eyes and mind. In Advaita Vedanta Consciousness is: not the body, not the mind, not an object, not many and not two. Non dual.

It doesn't refer to "Existence", which Ayn Rand took to be the collection of all existents. The Absolute is what those existents have in common, i.e. their genetic origin. Here's an analogy. Ayn Rand looks at the world and says "Look, clay objects!" (existents); Advaita looks at the same world and says: "Look, clay!" (the Absolute). As for consciousness and intelligence, we can use the analogy of the color spectrum. At some point in the spectrum, the color red ends and the color orange begins. Objectivists look at the color orange and say "Look, here's where color comes into existence. Before orange came about, no other colors existed". By contrast, Advaita sees consciousness as a spectrum. The consciousness spectrum starts with mechanical causes (pressure and impulse), ascends to stimuli (plants), climbs up to first-person experience (higher animals) and culminates with conceptual consciousness (humans). From the ultimate standpoint, the Absolute has nothing to be aware of but its own self. Knower and Known are the same entity. Advanced consciousness represents the Knower as "mind-stuff" and the Known as "matter-stuff". Neither mind nor matter are real. To say that mind and matter are unreal is similar to saying that music doesn't really exist and that the ultimate reality is air molecules vibrating. Again, there's no evil demon tricking you. Mind (Knower) and matter (Known) are unreal only in the sense that Knower and Known are fundamentally the very same entity, separately represented only in consciousness. If you're wondering why there exists more than one knowing subject, it's because the consciousness of the Absolute is perspectival. An imperfect analogy for this is how the very same person can view himself as: a father, man, brother, musician, gourmet, young etc. All of these perspectives are partial, but do not contradict the unity of the person. In the consciousness of the Absolute, those "roles" and the relationships between each role are generated according to stringent laws. Of course, if one views consciousness as a "mirror", they'll probably scratch their heads at this concept; the Advaita view of consciousness is analogous to how a poem (conscious experience) can very exuberantly express something very plain (the Absolute).

(I am posting the tenth chapter of my monograph here partly so that I can point to it exactly in finally following up on a request from SL for specification on my differences with Rand in Ethics.) X. Mortal Life and Care “Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. There is normativity in that most basic metaphysical frame, with that immediate implication and explication. We are given, dedicated to grasping reality in awareness concerted with other and in coordinated acts with other. This is automatic animal engineering-performance-norm of operation. We are given, already loving truth, truth-getting, act, self, and other. With later education, we learn that life ends, that it requires maintenance, and in our human case, that it requires production and education and social cooperative conventions. We learn that those means to life require a waking state and adequate sleep. Going beyond the original grasp of life in breath and cry and suckle, learning more of life and its requirements requires some focused effort. The plenty and exuberance of human life of today required individual creativity, initiative, and freedom coordinated at the large social scale by moral- and rights-constraints on treatments of others. Human moral life arises in the milieu of learned character of life, all within and ever with the basic frame “Existence exists, we live.” In learning life beyond the basic knowing, we can grasp the concept of “alternative” mined by Ayn Rand: Only with advent of the ends-getting organized matter that is life do alternatives enter nature. I observe, in addition: We say that when we've got the accelerator on, a given electron is either going to encounter a positron or not. That saying is true to nature, but it, unlike identity, is not something in nature independently of a striving mind. Either-Or, I wrote in "Existence, We", is based in identities in nature, but is only in nature where living systems are in nature facing nature. That is, the Law of Excluded Middle for thought rises as high-animal mind rises by organic evolutionary layers on vegetative neuronal control systems of animals. The electron will either encounter a positron or it will not, but the electron does not face an alternative of continued existence or not. We see the possibilities, but the electron, unlike a living cell, does not face them. We and all living things face the alternative of continued existence or not, and from that fundamental alternative, all alternative is born. In moral life, we elect to keep life going, including to keep going life known in the basic frame. Once we have the developed powers, we elect to keep thinking, coordinating, creating, and producing. The moral virtue of truth-telling is rooted in the basic frame, constantly at hand. Life known in the basic frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specs. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves. Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.

My monograph These Hours of Resonant Existence sets out the philosophy I have created, in ten brief chapters, in a way hopefully accessible to some of the generally educated public: no traditional technical terminology from philosophy, and, unlike my usual substantive papers, no citations or references, supporting or contrasting. I have not yet composed two of the chapters: VIII. Science and Mathematics and IX. Logic. These will be more technical due to their topics. I have excellent education for them, and, should I live a few years more (which I expect), I’ll get those done, although their lengths may be longer than the other chapters. I had minored in Philosophy in my first college degree, which was from University of Oklahoma (Physics major) in 1971. I continued to learn more philosophy across the decades, but it was not until January of 2014, that it occurred to me that I likely had a pretty full original philosophy in my head, and that I should try to get what was there on paper and work on it. I had not earlier set out to create a new philosophy. I had simply loved philosophy and never stopped learning it and mulling it over. One Saturday in the 1980’s, I got home from work at my commercial job, and, no sooner had I come in the door, I announced to Jerry:* “I figured out what I’ve been doing all these years.” “What?” “I’ve been making a mind.” Now I know also I was making a philosophy. In the history of Western philosophy (which I know a bit about), the two philosophies most worth comparing and contrasting with mine are Rand’s and Kant’s. In my next post in this thread, hopefully tomorrow, I’ll try to do a run-through of significant likenesses and conflicts between my philosophy of Resonant Existence, as shown in the monograph so far, and Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

I did consider briefly if your "existence exists, we live" is a "yoked pair", each equally at the same axiomatic base, but I took the sequence as indicating an abbreviated movement from the former to the latter, and sought to explicate the intermediate corollaries. I will think more on this.

If one is an independent thinker, living in objective reality, one would say, "What are the facts?" If one isn't, then one may say, "conspiracy theorist" or "conspiracist", and not really know what one is saying. "The labelling of (ill-defined) "conspiracist" is frequently used to intimidate, discourage, and dismiss examination of facts that contradict the official, authorized, mainstream narrative. "Conspiracy Theories", as a pejorative label, was first propagated to marginalize those who pointed out counterfacts to the official "lone-gunman" explanation of the JFK assassination. And again employed against the 9/11 "Truthers". So, it's not unexpected, that it's being used against the "covid deniers". But being used here in a forum of independently thinking Objectivists should be just an aberration." (From here.) "How do you define "conspiracist"? You repeatedly resort to using "conspiracist" as if it can wipe away facts; in this case, the fact that no documentation has been found or presented for the isolation, purification, and distinctive identification of SARS-CoV-2 (with properties that causes the deadly and contagious Covid-19). " (From here.)

The Golden Mean is contextual and rational. "False. A workaholic lifestyle is a pretense, not an excess." Obviously wrong. It could be pretentious excess, but it is still excessive. "False. There is no such thing as excessive pride. Arrogance is false pride, it's a pretense, because it doesn't have the reality to back it up." False pride and arrogance are similar but not synonymous. Arrogance does not equal false pride. Perhaps you should use an older dictionary. "False. Emotional repression is false rationality, it's a pretense that consists of evading one's emotions." Emotional repression is not the same as "false rationality." They aren't even in the same category. Productivity, as used by Rand, is a floating abstraction. "All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind."(?) The idea that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, while obviously false, would include the writing of Mein Kampf and Das Kapital as creative, productive works. From: https://www.objectivistliving.com/topic/12562-albert-ellis-n-branden-debate/ It's the "nothing but" type of thinking that takes it to the extreme. "Nothing but" productivity? Workaholism. "Nothing but" rationality? Emotional repression. If you say emotions are included in rationality, you got it from Rand who got it from NB. "Nothing but" pride? Arrogance. Lack of humility. "Nothing but" independence? This leads to missing out on the valuable insights of others. "Nothing but" justice? This leads to a "show no mercy" mentality. "Nothing but" integrity? This leads to unnecessary moral rigidity. "Nothing but" honesty? Sure, if you like hurting people's feelings. But we don't care about that, do we.

Being productive is a virtuous thing, but pretending like ends of that productivity are irrelevant is silly. The act of Hitler writing Mein Kampf was about as virtuous as a Neo-Nazi typing and posting "death to all Jews" on Twitter. So not very.

Plainly, this forum has degenerated to the point that intellectual honesty is no longer a value

I have now posted* at Facebook the first seven chapters and the tenth one (whose title has been changed to Mortal Life and Care).

"The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum." David Odden

Not illusory as in "evil demon is tricking you", but more like "underneath all of this breathtaking diversity there's just plain atoms/some basic unity". People at a more complete stage of knowledge accept both diversity and its underlying unity as non-contradictory perspectives on the same world. Advaita Vedanta echoes Spinoza's observation that two existents can't be classified into the same class (world) if they're radically different. For example, in popular culture we say that god is not situated on the Moon or in the Andromeda galaxy - he's located in another dimension entirely. That's an intuitive grasp of Spinoza's observation: god is too different to be classified into the same world as the objects we know. With this, a famous problem enters the philosophical scene. A basketball has weight, size, rigidity, and as a consequence it can hit or push other objects (that likewise have weight, size, rigidity). In contrast, the mind totally lacks any of those qualities, so it's impotent to hit or push material objects. Its impotence extents to the entirety of the vast material universe, with the sole exception of one's physical body. According to Spinoza, both mind and matter are in the same world, as against being separated in different dimensions (like we envision god and the world to be). So what is the basis for classifying mind and matter into the same world/class? Well, we could look at Nature and observe that from a physical object, there emerges other physical phenomena, e.g. from a candle there emerges fire, from hot tea emerges smoke. Now, if only we could extend this principle, and say that non-physical mind emerges from matter, just like physical smoke emerges from hot tea! It would certainly solve Spinoza's problem. Advaita Vedanta opts for a different solution: mind and matter are classifiable together because they are aspects of the same Absolute. For all intents and purposes, "mind" and "matter" are related to the Absolute as "woman" and "daughter" are related to Taylor Swift. They are aspects of the thing in question, not ingredients making it up. "Nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature." ["Natur ist hiernach der sichtbare Geist, Geist die unsichtbare Natur"] - F.W.J. Schelling, Ideen

Where you say "Consciousness is conscious," I think you really need "Consciousness is conscious of existence". I know that the latter is included in what you mean in the shorter, but readers outside of Rand readers (might you be having their audience) would not. But to your sequencing: When you state "Consciousness is alive" that looks to be a third-person sort of statement. That is fine, and we and biologists and neuroscientist take that standpoint usefully all the time. My view is that we have not only that outside look: consciousness is alive. We have also and firstly the inside experience of it. That elementary take on life is not, as I observed in the text, so extensive on what all is life, such as one can learn later (e.g. that life ends, requires maintenance, and in the human form, requires production). The elementary knowing of life in breathing and in elementary knowing of consciousness is what I place back earlier in the sequence. I lay it right with "Existence exists", but not in the form "Consciousness is alive." Rather: "Existence exists, we live". (Or, as we have discussed "I and other live.") That is what is most basic with us. I should mention also, as I wrote in the paper "Existence, We", this "we live" does not arise in that second-moment 'corollary axiom' movement. No. This "we live" is right there in the first phase containing "existence exists." The two are a yoked pair right there at the base. So my way with this is would be in parallel with a recoiling from Descartes for whom the basic things (after God) are matter and mind, i.e., extension and thought. A recoiling to Augustine, where knowing one's aliveness is primitive and whose form of Descartes's later skeptical exercise is that even being under a deception, one knows that one lives. Though, in my basic knowing, the life of self known is companioned: another lives.

"In the course of my initial presentation during the debate, I quoted Miss Rand's statement (from "The Objectivist Ethics") that 'happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions'. Could anyone ever be happy when held to this extreme standard? I asked. And scores of voices from the audience screamed back (somewhat to my surprise): Yes!!!" (294). That reminded me of GK Chesterton, in the 2nd chapter of his Orthodoxy , presents his oft quoted aphorism "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason". And ends it with " But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. "

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

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

Yeah, it's nice to meet you, too. Honestly, and people wonder why there aren't more objectivists when this is how we treat each other. Flaming is not fun at all. Who wants to join a philosophy where your own fellow compatriots treat you just as terribly as they'd treat a welfare parasite? If you actually want to have a civilized discussion about this, then I'm all for it, but I don't think you're open to changing your mind anyway. But for now I will say that whoever you import has no "right" to vote for a socialist party. Or, preferably, no right to vote at all.

If you get between me and an immigrant/foreigner who I want to trade/associate with on my property, you can just plain fuck off. I don't care what philosophy or "objectivism" you think you've modeled, your "right" to force me can go to hell.

This is unsubstantiated. Since this is a disagreement, you'd need to go a step further and cite a source. I can't find evidence to say you are wrong unless I know how you got information that's different than mine. I don't think there is any evidence that assimilation is as pervasive an issue as you suggest. But then there is a racist claim as part of your reasoning. You say Third World culture is based on reason. That's fair. But how does that mean the immigrants who leave are a cause of that. They're -leaving- that country. The only way I see to suggest that immigrants from those countries worsen the US due to being from there. In other words, this reasoning is tribalistic (and such tribalism isn't tolerated for long 'round these parts). Your line on the Chinese is probably most racist of all. Ok, pamphlets. This is a far cry from an attempt to invade. Jurisdiction. It's a practical extent to which rights-protection is feasible. As long as the people in the jurisidiction respect rights (invading armies and rights-violating criminals aren't those) their rights out to be protected and defended. But my issue is that here you are saying Mexico is a narco-terrorist state based on apparently fears of how those Mexicans, will -of course- be parasites, criminals, or savages.