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  1. Yet you still have no personal evidence to support your position, it is entirely based on believing the claims of other people. That would be fine, if those other people are shown to be credible and trustworthy. I have no reason to believe that Massey is trustworthy, and based on my reading of her FOI-related posts, I conclude that she is not trustworthy w.r.t. this particular issue (which is whether covid exists). You on the other hand, apparently have faith in her belief, and use her postion as the basis for your own argument. Your challenge to the covid-existence is ineffective, because you have not provided any evidence that supports the claim that covid does not exist, which is necessary to overcome the direct evidence of the senses, which cannot be rationally denied, that covid does exist. You might imaginably argue that there has been a specific misidentification, for example you could claim that covid is a bacterium, not a virus, or you could argue with the specific scientific classification of covid, but you have not done that. Your argument also seems to depend on an invalid package deal, a mixed wall of scientific and political claims. All of the political issues such as lockdowns and mask mandates are red herrings w.r.t. the scientific question of the existence of covid. Every known Objectivist, as far as I have been able to discern, holds that it is not the proper role of government to show down businesses, mandate a suspension of property rights, force vaccinations and mask-wearing etc. irrespective of their scientific beliefs about the nature of the disease. Feel free to challenge improper governmental action, but don’t lump in nihilistic unscientific claims there covid doesn’t even exist. As I mentioned before, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides prima facie scientific evidence, of the type that you demanded, for isolation, purification and distinct identification of the virus. Scientists have shouldered the burden of proof, now the burden rests on those who deny that proof. You claim, in broad terms that many such studies “on closer examination, have not actually done so”, but you do not provide any evidence in support of that assertion. The subsequent sentence “Numerous FOI requests worldwide for records of isolation have resulted in "no records found" (any administrative exclusions notwithstanding)” is irrelevant as I explained above (FOI requests provide evidence of government records, not scientific results). My main point here is that science is a specialized kind of knowledge, not the same as philosophy, and making any scientific claim requires the integration of massive amounts of existing knowledge. At best, you can reasonable declare that you are personally not persuaded that covid exists, just as you could reasonable declare that you are personally not persuaded that the Earth is a sphere since you have not directly seen any evidence supporting that claim and you do not accept the claims of myriad others who claim that the Earth is a sphere. I do not actually accept your premise that “isolation, purification and distinct identification” is a logical requirement for an existential proof of an existent, but I have acceded to the demand and provided one reference, in the hopes that you would engage the science and abandon the irrelevant political rhetoric.
    5 points
  2. No, that would be secondhanded, I did it to prevent myself from getting Covid and studied mRNA vaccines before taking the vaccines. This is ridiculous and I'm not taking part in this strange discussion anymore and will read to moderate it against arbitrary conspiracy theories and from those seeking to ignore reason, evidence, and proper epistemology.
    4 points
  3. Monart, here's a link to Brownstone Institute and their many articles https://brownstone.org/ the gold standard for all things pandemic, good science, optimal health and freedom-orientated, fronted by the heroic Jeffrey Tucker ("Liberty or Lockdown?"). They have been my bright reference point
    4 points
  4. When you imply that someone is a conspiracy theorist, that is a statement about the person rather than the argument they are making. Saying that someone "must be irrational if they support X, Y, or Z" can be an argument from intimidation, like "Oh, you can't claim to be an Objectivist if you believe X, Y, or Z, because then you'd be irrational, and Objectivists have to be rational." It's an appeal to Objectivist peer pressure, especially trying to say that "this is supposed to be an Objectivist board so only Objectivist points of view should be able to be posted here," etc. And both are a form of psychologizing -- attacking a statement by going into the mental state of the person making it, instead of attacking it by comparing it to reality. If you want to show that some statement X is mistaken, then you have to show why without reference to the person making the statement. If you want to show that a statement is arbitrary then you need to show that no evidence, of any kind, could establish its truth or falsehood -- that it is "detached from reality" in the specific sense that reality wouldn't make any difference to it. (It's possible for something to be arbitrary "in practice" and to prove this by using other facts about the world to establish that it is arbitrary; it is valid, for example, to say that a statement is arbitrary because the current state of technology is such that nobody could know today whether it is true or false -- even if in principle it might become known someday. This is how you deal with the claim of the teapot orbiting Venus.) Finally, it's not always possible to prove something definitively on any sort of forum. This is why civilization as such sometimes requires people to agree to disagree. It is also one of the reasons why freedom is important. There can be a difference between what you know and what you can prove to others.
    4 points
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. As I mentioned at least twice above, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides the proof that you have demanded, which incidentally is an unreasonable demand (evidence is evidence, you don’t get to arbitrarily stipulate what constitutes evidence). You have not addressed the facts, instead you retreat behind automatic denial as a means of evading the science. In the face of evidence having been presented, it is incumbent on you to disprove that evidence. Indeed, I have no evidence that you have even looked at that article, and I can think of no rational reason for your refusal to directly address the science. You offer no alternative conclusion regarding the axiomatic (the myriad scientific observations of covid), instead you just repeat your denial without evidence to support an alternative, nor do you even state what such an alternative is. In other words, you are engaging in selective epistemological nihilism. My current counter-offer is that you should provide evidence that malaria exists: I will take the position that you have taken, which is to just deny that malaria exists. I sincerely hope that you do not hold a political-consequences theory of epistemology, that the standards of proof depends not on the logic of the claim and the objective nature of the existent, but are determined by whether the existent has been misused to support initiation of force. Under which logic, I substitute measles, smallpox or Spanish flu in my challenge to you, all of which triggered tyrannical governmental responses. I would like to see what you consider to be acceptable proof that malaria exists, and see some reasoning as to why you find that evidence to be sufficient (unless, of course, you are also a malaria-denier).
    3 points
  9. My "overall purpose" on this topic is to expose the truth by challenging believers in "SARS-CoV-2" and "Covid-19" to check their premises, think for themselves, and hold reason as absolute. I myself did that, and have been pointing to what I and others have found. Am I mistaken? Lying? Deluded? Ill-willed? What else have I posted, here or elsewhere? I appreciate and am grateful that, in response to this challenge, each one of you have given it attention and posted your replies. I have learned and am encouraged that there are Objectivists here who are curious and caring about the truth of covid. My will was good, and I've received goodwill in return.
    3 points
  10. Or more specifically, they still maintain their rights, but because they initiated force, it isn't a violation of their rights to respond with self-defense. For whatever reason, people supportive of individual rights like to argue that people "lose" their rights if they initiate force. But that's not true. And anyway, it's not as if Palestinians are equivalent to Hamas!
    3 points
  11. You are thus refuting your own unqualified claim that "the tunnel network is a defensive utility for the terrorists"
    3 points
  12. Posting to subscribe to the thread. I really don't care about this conflict because I am neither jewish nor muslim. I would just like to remind everyone of the big picture: modern Isreal exists because of the ideology of Zionism and jewish supremacism embedded within it. If Zionism is invalid then anything which is a consequence of Zionism is invalid.
    3 points
  13. Israel's War -- Update | Yaron Brook
    3 points
  14. Since the preceding post by Alex, Putin and Prigozhin reached an agreement, avoiding armed conflict among the Russian mercenary group and the regular Russian troops. I see this as a victory for Putin in his Ukraine quest. Those mercenary troops, as well as the Chechen mercenary troops, are now returned to Ukraine to continue Putin's aggression and hegemony. Prigozhin in exile in Belarus is surely a dead man walking, although Putin may leave him alive until he has secured unity of the Wagner troops with the regular Russian troops, all under regular Russian military command. I still think Putin will not enter negotiations bringing peace to Ukraine until after the US elections of 2024, hoping for Republican wins that might cut US Military aid to Ukraine and bring him advances in the war for bargaining position or perhaps victory.
    3 points
  15. Boydstun

    Is it moral?

    The moral is what should be done or permissibly may be done given certain sorts of factors marked off as moral considerations. In Rand’s view, and in mine, rational process is what distinctively moral process comes to. What is the nature of rational process? For the imagined scenario, if it is being asked whether the entertained action would be moral, within the Objectivist ethics, then I’d argue No. It would not be morally permissible on account of the virtues of Pride, Productivity, and Justice. The last entails treating people as ends in themselves. Even if they are losing their powers for autonomy, homage to autonomous life-making they formerly had or had possible is within what may and should be respected by the rational agent in Rand’s sense of human rationality. Rand’s virtuous human buoys the best possible to humans. Similarly, if a person said all their life that they wished their body to be cremated upon their death, it is against human rationality to instead bury the body upon their death, assuming cremation was indeed feasible, with the rationalization: “Well, it can’t matter to the deceased.” Respectful behavior for a life and autonomous person that had been or had been a potential in youth is within the ambit of Randian rationality and self-respect. To focus on the getting of money by lottery, inheritance, or design of tort, is betrayal of the virtue of production and trade in the context of human existence and failure at holding productivity as the central organizing purpose of one’s life. Then too, as Rand had it, the getting of money is not the only rational human pursuit, and the pretension that her ethics entails such foolishness concerning values is a patent distortion of her thought (one she denounced expressly). The virtue of Pride in the Objectivist system of ethics entails moral ambitiousness. The making of objectively grounded self-esteem has a precondition: “that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit.”
    3 points
  16. Breaking News -- Israel Under Attack
    2 points
  17. DavidOdden

    Victim of gang stalking

    As I think you know, things tend to spin out of control here and everywhere else on the intenet. So to mostly return to the initial problem, you face a problem, so how do you make the problem go away? To avoid repeating what has been said, we can just say that the problem is trespassing, which is illegal. When someone violates your rights in that manner, you can’t (shouldn’t) take direct action by way of using retaliatory force against The Others (just an arbitrary label for the sake of convenience in talking about the problem). This is really the job of the police. Now perhaps there are things you can do, analogous to “bring your bike inside, don’t leave it on the porch”, maybe techno-sanitizing your phone if it has been infected with malware. But for the most part, this isn’t something that anyone here can help with, and is hardly a problem that you can solve yourself – unless you just disappear without a trace and start a new life somewhere else. You have identified a problem with your roommate, but I guess that is resolved? Then there is the problem with the others. So what you hav to do is file a formal, written complaint with the police, giving as much concrete evidence as you can which could lead to identifying and apprehending them. “Concrete evidence” isn’t the same as “conjectured explanations”, it refers to the axiomatic: things that you directly observe. You can’t directly observe that your phone is hacked, that is a conjecture based on something else, something that you observed at a specific time and place. What did you observe that led you to conclude that this is the work of a “huge group” rather than one person, or two persons? Don’t tell me, write it down. Have they ever communicated to you in a fashion that supports the conclusion that they are altruistic/collectivist/statists who are attacking you as an Objectivist? Why you attribute the behavior to a particular political agenda rather than simply assuming that they are punks, like in Death Wish 3? It isn’t important what the motivation is, so I would advise dropping from consideration all non-essentials. The essential question is, what have they done? It would be nice if you could connect specific actions to named individuals, but that’s not always possible. Specific descriptions of events, eliminate conjectures about cause. Put it in writing. Retain copies.
    2 points
  18. We have here a balanced struggle between law and politics. The bureaucracy exists because laws were passed, and they were passed for political reasons. The law is self-protective, not just at the level of agencies promulgating rules, but in the Constitution itself (the president does not get to name the Speaker of the House, or write the rules that govern Congress or the courts). In order to achieve politically-desirable goals (leaving aside who desires them), Trump operated both illegally and un-traditionally. If Congress doesn’t like his un-traditional actions, they can pass a law forbidding it (that’s why we have the Administrative Procedures Act). Proper criticism of POTUS as executive officer is directed at illegality, not unconventionality. Should we cheer the outcome, means be damned, or should we as-enthusiastically cheer an undesirable outcome that was properly implemented? That is, should be declare that a contradiction is possible? I insist that there are no contradictions, and we should condemn both evil means and evil outcomes, even when Mussolini gets the trains to run on time.
    2 points
  19. The main legal reason is that “abuse of power” is not a federal crime. There actually is a criminal law against “abuse of office” in 25 CFR § 11.448, which applies to tribal police and courts, thus is not applicable to Trump, though given the vague metaphorical slop in the indictment it is a little surprising that they didn’t overlook the limit in the scope of the law. Trump did abuse his power while in office, and the courts did rule against him (see for example travel ban 1.0). But SCOTUS can only say “no, you can’t do that”, they cannot punish a president for exceeding authority. This is the essence of objective law: that a person know in advance what things are forbidden. If there is no law against it, you cannot charge a person. The matter of intent to deceive is a fundamental tenet of criminal fraud. I doubt that the defense will try to argue that the election fraud charges are true, since that would be an irrelevant side-show. The prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant knew that the claims were actually false, which would require proof that he said something crazy like “What if we make up some story about there being massive voter fraud in those states?”. OTOH, Nixon did have a tape recorder running in his office when he confessed to his crimes, so stranger things have happened.
    2 points
  20. There are two separate questions here. The first is the merits of a “discussion” with a chatbot. It is indeed irrational to discuss anything with a chatbot in the way that you would discuss issues with a rational being. It can however be amusing, and educational to see what sort of pseudo-consciousness the program has. The ability to look up text snippets is not the same as abstractly understanding a philosophy, or any other thing. As for the “parental sacrifice” question, there is no evidence that the parents sacrificed themselves, there is only evidence that they died, as did 45 other people. Rand would conclude that we cannot possibly speak to their motivation, based on thin available evidence – the dim recollections of an 11 year old child. The honorable thing to assume is that the parents attempted to save all of their lives, but were not successful. The underlying premise that one would take no risks whatsoever to save a loved one is a complete perversion of the Objectivist notion of self-interest.
    2 points
  21. The first count raises an interesting interpretive question. The law says that If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both and one should wonder “who / what is the United States?” as far as this law is concerned? Words are often specially-defined for particular statutes. The term is defined: The term “United States”, as used in this title in a territorial sense, includes all places and waters, continental or insular, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, except the Canal Zone. The three main interpretations that would be sensible would be “the government of the United States”, “the entire United States including the government and all of the population”, or “some entity in the United States”. We can rule out “some entity in the United States”, since that would make it a federal crime for two people to conspire to “commit any offense” against me. It is settled law that the federal government does not have jurisdiction over every offense committed in the US. To be valid federal law, the federal government would have to have personal jurisdiction – for example, acts against the federal government, or acts against specified federal workers. The addendum “or any agency thereof ” clearly indicates that an agency of the US government is supposed to me included in the scope of “against the United States”. ¶10(a) of the indictment asserts that “The Defendant and co-conspirators used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate election results and change electoral votes for the Defendant's opponent”. However, said legislators and “election officials” are not part of the government of the United States. Maybe a case could be mounted in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, but you can’t make a federal matter out of a state offense. The claim is that there was an attempt to “defraud” the government of the United States. Therefore we need to turn to the chapter on fraud which brings us to infamous 18 USC 1001 (used to imprison Martha Stewart), which says that whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry goes to jail. The term “matter within the jurisdiction…” means, for example, “a court proceeding”, or “a Congressional investigation” or “an FBI investigation”, it does not make it a federal crime to tell a lie in the US. There is no “matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States” (the election of president is not within the jurisdiction of the United States, it is with the jurisdiction of the several states). There are a handful of other references to fraud in that chapter: all of then involve something rather specific such as fraudulent contract bids, forging documents and identification instruments, accessing computers (any computer connected to the internet), some violations of the Atomic Energy Act… A knowingly false claim that there had been electoral fraud is not “fraud” in the federally-relevant sense, and by the same logic, the indictment itself is fraudulent (however, not actionable, since one cannot be prosecuted over an indictment no matter how egregiously false it is). The defense will of course attack everything, but the most important thing to attack, and the most significant crime against rights being mounted by the Biden Administration, is the “weaponizing” of words like “fraud”, and the usurpation of individual states’ interest in properly addressing these acts – or not.
    2 points
  22. Another article summing up what has been discovered so far: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-superconductor-new-developments
    2 points
  23. tadmjones

    2020 election

    Covid was not as deadly as reported , it was dangerous to the elderly and those with compromised health, not the 'general' or even close to the majority of the population. The mitigation efforts of masking and distancing were known by the implementers of the policies to be ineffective. The lockdowns and school closures were morally and constitutionally abusive and solely facilitated by spreading the falsehood of the 'deadly contagion'. HCQ and Ivermectin along with vitamin D and zinc supplementation in non toxic doses showed efficacy especially when used as a prophylactic. Suppressing the efficacy of safe and available treatments and protections enabled the issuance of the EUA allowing the use and distribution of an experimental medical treatment. Facilitated by the public's belief of the presence of a 'deadly contagion'. Hospital beds have been declining as a percentage of the population for decades, added to the fact that most medical facilities curtailed staffing , services and wards that resulted in ' the crush'. Inaccurate and faulty testing and testing regimes were deployed to promote the idea that daily life was dangerous. The recommended( read mandated) standard of care coupled with patient isolation practices were at best medically inappropriate and at worst lethal. All facilitated by the rationalization of a 'deadly contagion'. Historic medical and scientific practices and methodologies were discarded or 'officially ' changed( mass inoculation in the face of a novel infection, three months of safety and effectiveness testing equals five real world years) Unconstitutional changes to balloting laws across the country were facilitated by the acceptance of the public of being in the midst of a 'deadly contagion'. Aside from the actual infection , the reaction and the public's acquiescence to the state's response were facilitated by the propaganda fomented by 'the media' along with active suppression of any dissent to the 'narrative'. Do you believe the falsehoods spread were the continued result of separate organizations all making the same mistakes as to the accuracy of their 'reporting'? Obama , the FBI and DOJ were briefed on the fact that the DNC/Hillary Clinton were going to perpetuate a fraudulent story about Russian/Trump collusion , allowed it to happen and facilitated its happening. The Mueller report was a joke as was Mueller 2.0 ( the Durham Report) , it's is a laughable idea that the people that perpetuated the hoax would 'investigate' and report out their own complicity. Hunter Biden's laptop is and was always 'real' and no one thought otherwise, as is Joe Biden's corruption documented on the laptop. All cause excess death has been running about 10% higher than the five year average for about two years now, numbers that will soon if not already rival the numbers from the deadly delta wave, and cardiac and circulatory problems are on the rise (especially among a younger cohort but no media is talking about it, somehow it seems all of 'the media' is just unaware of it , along with the CDC and the WHO. I suggest you stop 'listening' to the thoroughly discredited 'media' outlets you seem to follow.
    2 points
  24. That is to say: You already asked that a few days ago, and I took some time to compose a response. Then you post as if the previous exchange never took place. How is this worthwhile? I'll not bother further with this trivia and "talking to hear your teeth rattle."
    2 points
  25. The core practice of “scientism”, as framed by Hayek, is that the methods of Science are appropriate in “their proper sphere”, but are not appropriate when they are the “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science”. This applies most pointedly to the social sciences. The questions that immediately should spring to mind is, what is the nature of scientific methods, and to what are they appropriately applicable? If we know that, we might have some idea when the application of those methods to some other sphere of knowledge is “slavish”. In fact I agree that methods are often applied slavishly, even in the hard sciences. This leads us to our first definition of scientism, as being “the uncritical application of a methodology in pursuit of knowledge, motivated purely because of the unjustified belief ‘that’s how (this) science works’”. I am familiar with various scientific sins in the acoustic analysis of speech, the problem being that numerical methods (signal processing) are often applied inappropriately because “that is how we do it”. Application of the methods of physical sciences to human behavior suffers from a particular defect that might lead one to conclude that human behavior cannot be studied scientifically. We should pause for a moment to consider what the alternative to science is. You might say that rather than drawing any general conclusions, a social scientist should only passively record what happened at a particular time and place (old-school ethnography). The enterprise of acquiring knowledge – science – is not just limited to making concrete observations, it involves reasoning about causation behind the behavior. The problem with many scientific theories of human behavior is that we can’t plug in a number or equation that accounts for the fact that humans chose their actions (well, their chosen actions, you don’t choose for your blood to circulate, it happens automatically). Some people ignore free will in their attempts to scientifically model human behavior; some people eschew the attempt to devise causal models of human behavior. One thing that Objectivists bring to this discussion is our epistemological stance, that the universe is knowable; and, we should check our premises. We operate in terms of well-defined concepts, not floating abstractions – Objectivism is the scientific method applied to everything, even art! Science focuses on what objectively is, not on subjective appearance, and so does Objectivism. Hayek’s objection to “inappropriate scientism” is really an attack on a particular view of science which is incapable of yielding scientific knowledge about human behavior. The anti-cognitive, positivist behaviorist view that held sway over social sciences has been beaten back somewhat, to the point that his objections would need to be reconsidered in the contemporary millieu. Politicized science is really something completely different: it is the rejection of the scientific method in the hard sciences.
    2 points
  26. As an example of algorithmic ‘serendipity’ , YouTube presented this video to me on Whitehead and though not touching on any politicization of science and obviously nothing on O’ist definitions, the lecture speaks to the connection of science to metaphysics and the role philosophy should play in distinguishing a hierarchy with a view toward how western science has made progress to rational understanding but underscores ,I think, a divide or in-congruency that could lead to “scientism”. Though I do not know the O’ist stance toward Whitehead ‘officially’ , listening to the lecture is a good exercise in detecting similarities and differences in theories and explanations eg the mechanisms of concept formation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2vDesht8o
    2 points
  27. Pretty nice. One misrepresentation: "But the core of her belief system is quite simple: Individuals are inherently "heroic," while governments only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness." No. The core of her philosophy, even the human-value part of it, is not anything political. And within the political, it is false that Rand held that all governments "only restrict human freedom, potential and happiness." That is someone else's political view, not Rand's. On this point the author was doing the usual of distorting Rand's views to suit his own or his boss.
    2 points
  28. A rational man acts according to his nature, which means that he survives by reason. An irrational man does not live by reason: he may behave randomly, in exact opposition to reason, or according to emotion. We have a moral code which we apply to our choices that says what exactly that entails, therefore I know that it would be immoral for me to blow out my brains right now since life is great (that’s a fact about the current context, not the idea of blowing out one’s brains qua absolute). We can apply that moral code to the evaluation of others, and conclude that Putin is, by nature, immoral (not just once, but as a general fact of his character). I am currently under irrational government compulsion to hand over part of my wealth to the government robbers (multiple governments!). I would not do this if I had a free choice, however, the government threatens me with force if I do not comply. A person’s response to force is by nature outside of the scope of reason – force is the denial of reason. Me paying taxes is not “rational”, it is the best I can come up with in light of reality and my hierarchy of values. You have drawn a dichotomy between moral and immoral, but there is actually a trichotomy. The actions that another takes when under compulsion cannot be morally evaluated. The slave’s choices are outside the scope of moral evaluation, precisely because of the contradiction created by force. A further problem with your scenario, and with many hypothetical moral philosophy scenarios, is that it isn’t epistemologically consistent, instead it flits between the perspective of the individual and an observer. As an observer, we do not know the slave’s hierarchy of values – his actions cannot be morally evaluated. Evaluating the choices of others in such an epistemologically-impoverished circumstances is not reasonable, I might even say irrational, but I won’t. The more interesting question is, what would you do in this circumstance, and why? I pay my taxes because even though I value freedom, I also value my life, and I recognize that knuckling under to the demands of government is necessary in order for me to live my life qua me (as opposed to living off the grid in the Sahara desert, where the weather sucks). I recognize that surviving purely by reason is impossible, but I have discovered that living is still possible. That means that the choice to exist, the primary choice, still remains at the very top of my hierarchy of values. Your scenario adds a strange complication, that the master will free the slave if he engages in a silly symbolic act that he would never otherwise engage in. Equally “applicable” would be the mandate to drink a cup of kombucha in order to gain freedom. At this point, I am starting to think that the slave is not simply “failing to act purely by reason”, I think he is positively insane, in refusing to rectify his enslavement because he has been the victim of force. Change the scenario just a little: a person is subject to improper government compulsion, and he is given the choice of replacing the existing dictatorship with a less-cruel but still not perfectly rational government which still uses improper force. He would ordinarily not choose an irrational government which employs improper force. Since my hierarchy of values is different from that of the slave whose highest value is to not be the victim of force, I have a hard time evaluating this guy. Since one’s hierarchy of values is chosen, I would conjecture that the person is indeed irrational because he bought into a contradictory philosophy which makes “be free from compulsion” be his primary choice. I would try to get the guy to read Galt’s Speech, to see if that might straighten out his crazy hierarchy of values.
    2 points
  29. Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Robert N. Bellah (Harvard 2017) https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975347&content=toc Start with chapter 7 for your interest in Ancient Greeks and their prelude. Jump back to earlier material in the book for needed wider layout and the terminology (use Index). The Beginnings of Western Science – The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 David C. Lindberg (Chicago 2007, 2nd edition) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5550077.html 1. SCIENCE BEFORE THE GREEKS What Is Science? Prehistoric Attitudes toward Nature The Beginnings of Science in Egypt and Mesopotamia 2. THE GREEKS AND THE COSMOS The World of Homer and Hesiod The First Greek Philosophers The Milesians and the Question of Underlying Reality The Question of Change The Problem of Knowledge Plato’s World of Forms Plato’s Cosmology The Achievement of Early Greek Philosophy 3. ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE Life and Works Metaphysics and Epistemology Nature and Change Cosmology Motion, Terrestrial and Celestial Aristotle as a Biologist Aristotle’s Achievement . . .
    2 points
  30. Savage is not a philosophically precise word. But she is still talking about specific cultures with specific standards and methods of operation. Or lack of standards in this case, in her view. As your quotes show, she characterized different cultures as savage, such that they have no legitimate political claims. As far as concerns about borders, Rand's comments about Native Americans are all we have, most likely against people who said that Europeans "stole" land from the natives. But this doesn't at all get into people who are leaving the so-called savage culture into the more advanced culture politically speaking. Whatever she thought, incorrectly, about natives, she may give a completely different evaluation when talking to people seeking out the stronger and more developed country. Being an immigrant herself, almost certainly viewing Russia as savage politically, I don't think she would use the reasoning that "people choosing to leave savage cultures are more likely to be savage themselves". If anything, Rand would say that people choosing to remain within savage cultures are savage themselves. What Rand did is classify cultures as savage, whether she did that rightly or wrongly is another question. What you seem to be doing is classifying people as savage based on nothing but their country of origin. Maybe Rand would say that many people in Africa are savages when it comes to the way they treat politics and technology, but immigrating to the US or Western Europe for example usually indicates recognizing that there is something better and worthwhile. I think she would recognize this fact too.
    2 points
  31. David Tyson sensibly takes inference to include these varieties: deduction, induction, and abduction. He takes recognition of presuppositions to also be a kind of inference. This last strains the English word inference. Tyson’s program, however, of setting up two distinguished kinds of foundationalism, presuppositional v. deductive, can get underway (and crash just as well) without casting recognition of presuppositions as a kind of inference. Tyson makes his distinction of those two sorts of foundationalism as follows: “Deductive foundationalism evaluates whether a certain item of knowledge is foundational [α] in terms of being most prior through deduction or entailment, and foundational knowledge is [β] held in the form of deductive axioms that serve as premises from which necessary conclusions can be inferred by deduction or entailment. “Presuppositional foundationalism evaluates the foundational status of knowledge [α’] in terms of being logically most prior, and foundational knowledge is [β’] held in presuppositional axioms, which serve as presuppositions that provide the necessary conditions that make the rest of knowledge possible.” (155) Tyson makes the intellectual-history claim that until the last century deductive foundationalism was the model of knowledge. He claims that Euclidean geometry and Aristotle set that model. On that model, there is basic knowledge that supports, or founds, all other knowledge and justifies it. If the relation between the basic knowledge and non-basic knowledge is deduction and entailment, we have deductive foundationalism. If the relation between basic and non-basic knowledge is by presupposition, we have presuppositional foundationalism. Tyson does not cite the precise places in Aristotle for what is here being called deductive foundationalism. But Tyson refers us to a nice online survey of foundationalism by philosopher Ted Poston, and there we are told to look to Posterior Analytics. As I recall, it is at II.19 that we find the influential model of knowledge (most snobbish sort of knowledge—science), and this is not the same as the structure of knowledge we find in Euclid, though both employ deduction in their ramifications. One version of foundationalism that Poston discusses is that of Descartes. Tyson places Descartes’s foundationalism under his class “deductive foundationalism.” True to Tyson’s criteria for that class, Descartes did allege that the philosophic bases he established in Meditations were necessary support for scientific knowledge such as geometry. Descartes rightly got some flack over that particular “founding” since it is plain that geometers proceed the same whether or not they know that the soundness of procedures in geometry rest on the demonstration that there is a non-deceiving God settling that soundness of them. As for the knowledge-structure of Meditations itself, Descartes regarded putting it into a deductive form wherein there are postulates, axioms, and definitions from which his conclusions are drawn–he rated such as that inferior to the process he chose in Meditations for bringing the reader into the light. Then too, the procedure that Descartes touted for justifying his scientific successes (such as his theory of the rainbow) was not the procedure set out by Aristotle for scientific knowledge. So I don’t think Descartes is suitable as instance of Tyson’s deductive foundationalism. Spinoza or Wolff are suitable, I notice. Μοre precisely, the metaphysics of Spinoza and of Wolff fall under [β] rather than [β’]. The distinction between [α] and [α’] is none, so I don’t expect any philosophy can be brought forth which falls under the one but not the other. Tyson attempts to fortify his distinction between deductive foundationalism and presuppositional foundationalism by having the former establish the correctness of its axioms by intuition and having the latter establish the correctness of its axioms by showing them to be undeniable on pain of self-contradiction. To which should we consign Spinoza’s axiom “Whatever is, is either in itself or in another.”? I do not recommend Tyson’s distinction between “deductive foundationalism” and “presuppositional foundationalism” as a clarifying one for analyses of foundational philosophies. There are bits of misinformation in Tyson’s paper which I should squiggly-underline. He tries to demarcate the distinction(s) in philosophy between implication and entailment as technical terms, and stumbles (158–59). Solid online information on entailment is available in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Check within the entry on Bolzano and the entry on Relevance Logic. Tyson sows confusion when he writes: “5. Entailment is progressive and synthetic (not regressive and analytic)—that is, it moves forward from premises to conclusion by deductive inference. (Example: Euclidean geometry, which draws theorems and other conclusions from axioms, is synthetic.[6])” Note 6 is a quotation from Morris Klein introducing the distinction between synthetic and analytic geometry, which is unrelated to the distinction in logic, from Aristotle, between the synthetic and the analytic. The result is the impression that Euclidean geometry is only synthetic geometry, not analytic geometry. And that is incorrect. Euclidean geometry as Euclid presents it and we learn it in high school is a synthetic geometry, but it can also be cast as an analytic geometry, as when we write (in a coordinate system) the equations of two intersecting lines, equate them, and solve for the location of the point(s) they have in common.
    2 points
  32. Readers Digest, January 1944, pp. 88-90 The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it. Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ``the common good.´´ Throughout history, no tyrant ever rose to power except on the claim of representing ``the common good.´´ Napoleon ``served the common good´´ of France. Hitler is ``serving the common good´´ of Germany. Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by ``altruists´´ who justify themselves by-the common good. No tyrant has ever lasted long by force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good. No dictator could rise if men held as a sacred faith the conviction that they have inalienable rights of which they cannot be deprived for any cause whatsoever, by any man whatsoever, neither by evildoer nor supposed benefactor. This is the basic tenet of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. Individualism holds that man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness in a society where men deal with one another as equals. The American system is founded on individualism. If it is to survive, we must understand the principles of individualism and hold them as our standard in any public question, in every issue we face. We must have a positive credo, a clear consistent faith. We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees. The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual. The right of liberty means man's right to individual action, individual choice, individual initiative and individual property. Without the right to private property no independent action is possible. The right to the pursuit of happiness means man's right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own, private, personal happiness and to work for its achievement. Each individual is the sole and final judge in this choice. A man's happiness cannot be prescribed to him by another man or by any number of other men. These rights are the unconditional, personal, private, individual possession of every man, granted to him by the fact of his birth and requiring no other sanction. Such was the conception of the founders of our country, who placed individual rights above any and all collective claims. Society can only be a traffic policeman in the intercourse of men with one another. From the beginning of history, two antagonists have stood face to face, two opposite types of men: the Active and the Passive. The Active Man is the producer, the creator, the originator, the individualist. His basic need is independence — in order to think and work. He neither needs nor seeks power over other men — nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion. Every type of good work — from laying bricks to writing a symphony — is done by the Active Man. Degrees of human ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence and initiative determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. The Passive Man is found on every level of society, in mansions and in slums, and his identification mark is his dread of independence. He is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told. He welcomes collectivism, which eliminates any chance that he might have to think or act on his own initiative. When a society is based on the needs of the Passive Man it destroys the Active; but when the Active is destroyed, the Passive can no longer be cared for. When a society is based on the needs of the Active Man, he carries the Passive ones along on his energy and raises them as he rises, as the whole society rises. This has been the pattern of all human progress. Some humanitarians demand a collective state because of their pity for the incompetent or Passive Man. For his sake they wish to harness the Active. But the Active Man cannot function in harness. And once he is destroyed, the destruction of the Passive Man follows automatically. So if pity is the humanitarians' first consideration, then in the name of pity, if nothing else, they should leave the Active Man free to function, in order to help the Passive. There is no other way to help him in the long run. The history of mankind is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the collective. The countries which have produced the happiest men, the highest standards of living and the greatest cultural advances have been the countries where the power of the collective — of the government, of the state — was limited and the individual was given freedom of independent action. As examples: The rise of Rome, with its conception of law based on a citizen's rights, over the collectivist barbarism of its time. The rise of England, with a system of government based on the Magna Carta, over collectivist, totalitarian Spain. The rise of the United States to a degree of achievement unequaled in history — by grace of the individual freedom and independence which our Constitution gave each citizen against the collective. While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. We are now facing a choice: to go forward or to go back. Collectivism is not the ``New Order of Tomorrow.´´ It is the order of a very dark yesterday. But there is a New Order of Tomorrow. It belongs to Individual Man — the only creator of any tomorrows humanity has ever been granted.
    2 points
  33. Congratulations on your achievement.
    2 points
  34. I suggest that moral responsibility for training and education of children lies firstly with the child's parents, although not as part of a package of responsibility attaching merely to having caused the child's existence. That Objectivist position focussing on causal relationship, down from the era of N. Branden in the 1960's, was off the mark. Moral responsibility for training and educating the child lies firstly with the child's parents, I suggest, because of the moral goodness of responsiveness to persons and the potential person they may become, responsiveness to persons as persons. That responsiveness is, I say, the core of moral relations among people (and indeed, differently, relations of a self to itself). That is the preciousness that is the moral in a social setting. This position is a cashing out of the concept of moral justice, treating a thing as the kind of thing it is—that moral virtue. What a thing is includes its internal systems, but as well its distinctive external relations, actual and potential. The relations of responsiveness to persons as persons have a specially intense and distinctive character in the relation between the persons who are parent and child (natural parent most strongly, of course, but strong with adoptive parents as well). Additionally, there is a moral goodness in the benevolent protectiveness—that responsiveness—between any adult and any child. That such responsiveness fosters continuance of the species human as human may well be the underlying biological reason for this responsiveness. But that is not the reason the responsiveness of parent or other adult to the child and responsiveness of the child to them as persons is moral. Rather, the nature of value in the life of individual humans together, which is their best situation in the world, is the source of the moral goodness of such responsiveness to persons as persons.
    2 points
  35. Arguendo "wanting" to have or keep raising children MEANS being prepared for, and earnestly and genuinely loving and caring for another person who starts out deeply dependent. Whether it fits any philosophical standard, humans DO literally need love to grow into a sane and moral adult.. it is not a psychological luxury, it is a deep human necessity. Perhaps it is only moral to "have" and/or be the guardian of anyone, if and only if you actually WANT to be one, with everything that entails, and ALL that it means. Summary: Have a kid you don't want and/or cannot care for? Just f#@&ing give it up for adoption as soon/early as you know, so someone else can do so. Our world would be a MUCH better place, and so many people SO much better off, if everyone followed this.
    2 points
  36. By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child. Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing. Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.
    2 points
  37. I believe the people I mentioned are reputable for the usual reasons – and AlexL knows full well what those reasons are: Their credentials, their past, their manner, their logical presentation, is what they say consistent with itself, is what they say consistent with what I know, etc. All this is obvious. AlexL is engaging in “How do you know that you know?” ==> “You can’t know anything.” ==> “You are wrong.” baloney. He writes: “PS: some illustrious names are missing, like William Scott Ritter, John Mark Dougan and other darlings of the Russia’s governmental media...” – what a nasty piece of work is this AlexL.
    2 points
  38. The problem is that it is not just a legal entity. Rather, it is a government entity, empowered with government functions and powers, and controlled by a single corporation. That corporation obtained that special privilege in the '60s by corrupting the Florida legislature. Let's be clear—Disney is not some free market hero who fought government and improved property rights for all. Rather, they bribed and corrupted a state legislature to gain exemptions from law, special privileges and their own local government, for themselves. That is not capitalism, it is crony-statism.
    2 points
  39. Only indirectly, as a reaction to the horrors of AI “reasoning”. Of course I am using “can” in the standard Objectivist way, as “possible, based on evidence”, not “imaginable, where anything is possible” and one can “imagine” A and Not A being simultaneously true. I have wasted some time trying to understand the “epistemology” of ChatGPT, and conclude that its greatest weakness is that there is little if anything that passes for a relationship between evidence, and evaluation of evidence. I was puzzled about how something so fundamental could be missed, but then I realized that this is because the system doesn’t have anything like a conceptual system that constitutes its knowledge of the universe, it has a vast repository of sensory impressions – a gruel of “information”. But furthermore: it cannot actually observe the universe, it can only store raw experiences that a volitional consciousness of the genus homo hands it. If you ask about the basis for one of its statements (ordinary statements of observable fact, not high-level abstractions), it just gives templatic answers about “a wide variety of sources and experts”. It does react to a user rejecting one of its statements, apologizing for any confusion, embracing the contradiction, then saying that usually A and Not A are not both true. It is perfectly happy to just make up facts. Sometimes it says that there are many possible answers, it depends on context, then if you give it some context it will make up an answer. Human reasoning is centered around conceptual and propositional abstractions that subsume observations, where the notion of “prediction” is central to evaluation of knowledge. Competing theories are central to human knowledge, so when we encounter a fact that can be handled by one theory but not another, we have gained knowledge that affects our evaluation of the competing systems. These AIs do not seem to evaluate knowledge, or even data. Instead, they filter responses based on something – it seems to be centered around "the current conversation".
    2 points
  40. necrovore

    2020 election

    I saw a post by Dr. Michael Hurd on his web page which summarizes the issues with the 2020 election. The post itself is here: https://drhurd.com/2023/04/26/john-roberts-temporary-lapse-of-understanding-the-constitution/ I'll duplicate the whole thing; it's worth reading.
    2 points
  41. People everywhere are coming to see that smear as nothing more than an evasion aid for information that upsets one's worldview, information the implications of which one is not comfortable facing. For example, "covid hospitalizations" and "covid deaths" overcounting has been an easily confirmable fact since the beginning of the Scamdemic. But normie simpletons refused to look at the information and relied instead on their favorite smear. The truth is that very few people, including self-identifying Objectivists, are willing to think for themselves. Too often people will reject objective evidence they don't like with smears of the messenger and wait until "respectable outlets" (or Mr. Brook) tell them what to think.
    2 points
  42. Austin's remarks in full: Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley Hold a Post-Ukraine Defense Contact Group Press Conference, Ramstein Air Base, Germany In a fuller context: Now, we also heard today from the European Union on its proposal to speed up the production and delivery of ammunition for Ukraine, and more countries are thinking about how they can increase industrial production not just for the near term, but also for the medium term and the long term, and that is a powerful reminder that we stand with Ukraine's defenders for the long haul. You know, Putin made a series of grave miscalculations when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago. He thought that Ukraine wouldn't dare to fight back, but Ukraine is standing strong with the help of its partners. Putin thought that our unity would fracture, but Russia's cruel war of choice has only brought us closer together. And I'd note that Finland, which has long taken part in this contact group, is here today as a new NATO ally. I expect that Sweden will soon follow, and that makes something crystal clear — Putin's war of choice is not the result of NATO enlargement, Putin's war is the cause of NATO's enlargement. You know, when I first convened this contact group, I saw nations of goodwill that were eager to help Ukraine resist Russia's imperial aggression, I saw a coalition that stood united and firm, I saw countries determined to stand up for an open and secure world of rights and rules, and all of that was just as true at Ramstein today as it was a year ago. The Ukrainians are still standing strong in their fight for their freedom and they have the courage and the capability for the road ahead and we will have their backs for as long as it takes. Alternatively, imperialism of the Russian kind is not popular in the West. If the supreme ruler of the Russian Federation had not miscalculated ... More war reporting from the folks at Kyiv Independent: https://kyivindependent.com/tag/russias-war/
    2 points
  43. Among my favorite fiction books of all time are: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte , The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland, Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil , and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood.
    2 points
  44. Here is a link to an article about one success in restraining the power of the administrative state: https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-rules-against-ftc-sec-in-jurisdictional-fight-f63f1c0b?st=xr51uj3q44n7m8t&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
    2 points
  45. necrovore

    Is it moral?

    I say it isn't moral. I wouldn't want to be the type of person who would do such a thing, or to owe my money to having done such a thing.
    2 points
  46. Isn't it fun that we haven't seen a single one of Epstein and Maxwell's elite politician/billionaire child sex trafficking clients indicted, but instead Trump gets indicted, on charges that Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz describes as "Micky Mouse charges made against a man running for President" ... "this is American injustice at its worst." https://rumble.com/v2gdjco-liberal-media-cancels-dershowitz-for-exposing-fraud-theory-alvin-bragg-conc.html
    2 points
  47. The election tampering in Georgia and inciting the insurrection on January 6 are both attacks on our political system that need to be prosecuted. If there are serious grounds for accusing Trump of recklessness with classified material, that is also pretty serious and may need to be prosecuted. Bragg's prosecution may be iffier, but if there is an ulterior motive involved, it may have more to do with the other three cases and/or Trump's much-greater-than-usual dishonesty than with his being a political opponent.
    2 points
  48. Isn't this a trip down memory lane? Eleven years ago in this very thread I declined to nominate California's high-speed rail on the grounds that it might never happen. It still hasn't happened.
    2 points
  49. An article that makes for interesting reading in connection with The Fountainhead and Rand's theories about art. Sullivan was her model for Henry Cameron. The author's observation that highrise is on the decline in the US but going strong in China raises a question: has technology decentralized work so that such buildings are obsolete? If so, you'd expect freer markets to catch on sooner. On the other hand, maybe politics brought this on by making big cities more expensive, dilapidated and dangerous.
    2 points
  50. Rand on Discernment of That and What Nathaniel Branden: “Percepts constitute the actual starting-point of human knowledge, in the sense that percepts are man’s first fully aware cognitive contact with the world” (c.1968, 38). The term percept is from Peirce and his contemporaries (see Moore 1961, cited in Rand 1966–67, 2; further, Wilson 2016, 190–95, 204–5). Rand had written in the 1957 exposition of her philosophy: “The task of [man’s] senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.” She defined man’s reason as “the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses.” (Rand was still using that definition in her 1960.) She took human knowledge to run part-and-sum “from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end” (1016). “Sensations are . . . an automatic form of knowledge” (1961a, 18). A sensation is “a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments” (1966–67). Rand took knowledge broadly enough at times such that sensation, which informs perceivers only that something exists, not what exists, counts as some knowledge. Knowledge for humans would be, in full, “a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation” (1966–67, 45; further, 1970, 84–87). Rand had taken all consciousness fundamentally to be identification (1957, 1016). So all perception, even perception of a first ray of light in infancy, would be an identification. It is therefore not surprising that in her later articulation of Objectivism she would contract her definition of reason to simply: “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses” (1961a, 20) in place of “perceives, identifies and integrates . . . .” Rand had it that “sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically by the brain of a man or of an animal” (1961b, 14). Those perceptions in humans are volitionally integrated into conceptual comprehension by reason. Sensations are transitory identifications, not identifying what, only that. Unless a sensation is itself focused upon—say, in neuropsychology—it is not, in Rand’s meaning of the concept sensation, retained in memory, which I cash to mean specifically not retained in working memory or in episodic or semantic memory (i.e., retained only in iconic memory). Conceptualization, conjecture, and inference come under the name reason for Rand by falling under the volitional identification and integration of material from the senses. In Rand’s view, as with Reid and Peirce, the conscious uptake from the senses for the makings of reason is sensory information already automatically integrated into percepts. (See further, Kelley 1986, 31, 44–51, 141–74.) “A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. . . . Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident” (1966–67, 5). Animals capable of percepts, perceive entities, in Rand’s categoreal sense of that term. Percepts and their objects are susceptible to retention in memory. Peirce had stressed that sense impressions are not first in our knowledge. We are not shut out from the external world, Once Rand had taken on percept and its position in cognition from sensation to reason, I think she really needed to do a little refinement on her 1957 statement that it is only by reason that we discern what an existent is. Animals capable of percepts have some of what a perceived thing is and what actions a thing affords right there. So do we. It remains, of course, that with reason we grasp more, much more, of what a perceived thing is. Additionally, by now it is overwhelming in the neurobiological evidence that into neural activity streams feeding into a percept is a good deal of what a thing is.* None of that formation is volitional, and all of it remains as the given, for conceptualization and reasoning on it. That is, such rich percepts, giving some what in addition to that, can remain first cognitive, aware, contact with the world and sound foundation for knowledge. When we have a percept, it includes places, motions, and some temporal relations in a scene. Are these part of the what a thing is? Or are they only part of the that a thing is? In Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, she articulated some additional metaphysics, and among these additions was the thesis that no existent is without relation to other things. A thing purported to stand in no such relations would be nothing (ITOE 39). That is, there are no concrete existents that do not stand in some external relations. That tunes well with Aristotle: Things “are not such that nothing that pertains to one kind is related to another, but there is some relation” (Metaphysics, 1075a16–17). External relations are there, ready for conscious recognition in percepts and concepts and predications. I suggest that in Rand’s metaphysics and her concept of percepts, her system needs a minor repair by acknowledgement that wheres and whens are within percepts, delivered as aspects of concrete existents, delivered both as that and what of existents *E.g. "Feedforward, Horizontal, and Feedback Processing in the Visual Cortex" by Lamme, Supèr, and Spekreise in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 1998, 8:529–35. (I'll try to list the References in a later post.)
    2 points
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