Hal

I dont think this is accurate, I think its misleading. The word 'interpretation' normally implies something which we do to the information given in perception - for instance, I interpret a book I'm reading, or a fight which I witness in a bar. However, this is not what happens in the case of perception- the processing of the sensory data is performed prior to my becoming aware/conscious of it. I do not first see a pattern of black and white marks on a bit of paper and then 'interpret' is as being an old/young woman - I just see the old/young woman. The people in the experiment I mentioned above didnt first see a mark on the card which they then interpreted as a heart - they just saw a heart. When youre talking about what goes on prior to consciousness, the term 'interpretation' is misleading. Interpretation is what we do after we become conscious of something.

Its worth pointing out that these are 2 very different questions; 'letting someone die by your inaction' could include (eg) not giving money to a starving man, or not risking your life to save someone who was drowning. In these sorts of cases there are no rights violated at any time and it would be absurd to criminalise these actions. Although you can make a stronger argument for the 'murder' case where there are actually rights violated at some point, I dont think it should be illegal either. Only active violations of rights should be punished by the legal system - if I fail to warn <someone> about <something> then I am neither directly violating their rights nor initiating force against them.

Not quite - perception has been shown to be influenced by background assumptions; for instance, a famous experiment involved showing subjects a brief (< 1/2 second) picture of various playing cards and asking them to name what they saw. In order to make things interesting, a 'fake' card was included in the deck, with circles instead of hearts. The vast majority of test subjects didnt realise that anything was amiss, and described the circle card as showing hearts, since that was what they were expecting to see. Later, they were told that one of the cards was fake, and the experiment was repeated. Since they knew what they were looking for, most of the subjects now correctly described the fake card. Another example would be the perception of optical illusions which can be seen in more than one way, for instance the 2 faces which can be seen as a vase, or the old/young woman picture. Different people can perceive these as being completely different things, and not realise that there is another possible way of seeing the picture until it is explictly pointed out to them. I remember reading somewhere about a more dramatic experiment where someone 'stabbed' another person with a banana in front of a large group of people, and the 'stabbed' person collapsed to the ground and simulated pain. In a later interview, a lot of the witnesses claimed that they had seen a knife in the assailants hand instead of a yellow banana. To some degree, what you perceive is a function of what you expect to perceive in a given context (compare to repeatedly 'seeing' the face of a person you are expecting to meet in a crowd of people when they are late and you are looking for them). I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing which the original poster means though.

Yeah, pretty much. I dont think threres anything wrong with saying that (eg) a dog can be happy. Some dogs do seem happier than others - they are bouncier, spend less time lying around, and generally have a disposition to behave in an energetic and outgoing way. I think most people whove owned a pet for a reasonable length of time will understand sentences like "my dog/cat has seemed depressed lately". If you want to limit use of the word 'happy' to humans, then you could introduce another word to use for animals like 'cheerful' or whatever, but I personally think 'happy' is more natural. Obviously a dog being happy is different from a human being happy though, due to the whole conceptual nature/'long range' thing. It takes more for a human to be happy than regular food, petting, and lots of time spent outside.

If you define masculine to mean 'being attracted to women' then obviously gay men cant be masculine, but the onus is on you to justify such an absurd definition.

But different people can find different things funny, even though what they are 'destroying' is the same. For instance, some people dont like slapstick comedy, regardless of the subject material. The British sense of humour is slightly different from the American, and some people just arent going to find things like Monty Python/Brasseye/Black Adder (or equivalently, Married With Children, Friends, Seinfeld) funny because they dont like that style of comedy. Similarly, I can find clever parody funny if its well done, even if its attacking something which I value. Lewis Black is hilarious for instance, even though a lot of what he says is anti-capitalist. Ditto with Bill Hicks, and George Carlin. Clever racist jokes can be funny even though I dont agree with racism. And so on. Again, theres a cultural factors involved here; British people are more willing to laugh about 'serious' things than Americans - for instance, a lot of people here were making jokes about the London bombings last year the day after they happened, and this would never have happened in (mainstream) America after (eg) 9/11. "Keep a stiff upper lip" and all that. I dont think this is entirely objective.

Who said it should be? I can think of several reasons why not reporting a murder might be justifable; for instance, if the murderers are part of an influencial gang (eg mafia) and you have grounds to expect retaliation if you get involved.

Yeah, that made sense. I dont know what it is about usenet - it seems to attract people who are deranged to the point of being almost psychotic. Even from my brief skim of the HPO archives, there are quite a few people who seem obsessive to the extent that they are bordering on mentally ill. When you couple the loonybin atmosphere of usenet with something as controversial as Objectivism, and then leave it unmoderated, I suppose its asking for trouble. Still, some interesting threads there.

In what sense would the stone triangle still exist? Without our brain to process the representations, all youd have would be a jumble of atoms floating around. Why would there be any boundary between the stone and (eg) the grass its sitting on - its all just atoms, atoms, atoms. In order to talk about the angles in a triangle, you first need someone to pick out a particular group of particles and say 'this is a triangle'. The existence of objects as individual objects with definite shapes is consciousness dependent, since you need consciousness in order to impose discrete boundaries on existence - without us, all that exists is an undifferentiated mass of subatomic particles. And of course, a conscious alien might have a mind/brain which imposes a non-Euclidean geometry on its representations. In which case, the 180 degree rule would be false for them.

My words are my property and hes taking them without my permission and against my will, hence its theft (this is exactly the same argument that people here use to justify intellectual property legislation).

Heh. I've only skimmed the archives of HPO but I didnt expect to find anyone else as bad as Steve Grossman. Why did everyone stop using it? There seemed to be a lot of really interesting discussions up till around 2000/2001.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean here. It makes perfect sense to say in ordinary English that a glass is exactly half full, just like it makes sense to say that I arrived for dinner at exactly 9pm. And, it would be correct to say that I arrived at exactly 9pm even if I actually arrived 4 seconds earlier. The word "exact" isnt normally used to mean "idealised mathematical exactness as measured under perfect idealised laboratory conditions" - there is normally a surrounding context which defines what classes as 'exactness' in any particular situation. What counts as "exactness" when meeting a friend for dinner might not count as 'exact' when you are (eg) timing a 100m sprint in the Olympics, or the time taken for light to travel 1 meter.

Here she is discussing things within the context of the cold war. The world has changed; Cuba is not a threat to the US and there is no more reason to block trade with it than there is with any other Latin American country. Also, many countries the US freely trades with, such as Saudi Arabia, have governments just as authoritarian as Cuba. But then I suppose they have oil so a trade embargo would be out of the question. This doesnt really make sense. If the US initiated an embargo against pretty much any Latin American country then the result would be devastating. The fact that Cuba happens to be socialist is completely irrelevant here - poor countries generally rely on international trade regardless of their form of government. Why not? What if it were a state owned company, such as (eg) Rolls Royce when it was owned by the British government? I really dont see a relevant difference here.

Compared to where? Other Latin American countries? Chile? Should it be illegal for Americans to buy from corporations which receive government subsidies?

Interesting post SN. This is the key point for me; suppose this actually did happen - the kid didnt seem disappointed, but he was adament that he did really want the chocolate icecream they never had. Do you want to say that this is impossible? In my opinion, although this would be unusual, theres no obvious reason why it couldnt happen.

The idea of someone like 50 Cent doing a rap version of a Shakespearian sonnet is quite amusing. But yeah, I'm surprised this sort of thing doesnt get done more often. You occasionally get adaptions of old folk songs (eg Metallica - Whiskey in the Jar), but not poetry as such.

As far as I can tell, the only reason to support the trade embargo on Cuba is to help keep the country poor so that you can make snide comments about communism failing there. But seriously, theres no possible justification for trade embaragoes other than direct demonstrable national security reasons. And this certainly doesnt apply to Cuba at present.

Whats wrong with IRC? I dont understand why you'd choose to pay for a chatroom when you can set up an IRC channel for free - plus the dedicated client software is normally far nicer to use than horrible brower-based 'webchat' stuff. But you can set up web-based interfaces to IRC channels using CGI:IRC or whatever if you really want to, and you can write a script to log the channel and upload the results easily enough. If you dont want to rely on a different network hosting your channel, you could run a dedicated OO.net irc server.

The standard interpretation of Greek pre-Socratic philosophy is that Zeno was trying to show that motion was an illusion, and hence that change didnt occur. One of the main 'problems' for the Greeks was how change was possible. Parmenides held that the reality 'underneath' our sensations was eternal and hence couldnt actually change - Zeno's arguments were intended to illustrate this point. Compare it (for instance) to Democritus' argument that one thing could change into another because the world was actually made up of indivisible eternal atoms, and change was only a change in the configuration of these atoms rather than anything new coming into being. Personally I'm sceptical about how much sense it makes to interpret the Ancient Greeks in this way - it seems like we are throwing our own ideas onto their work. The whole Greek worldview really was radically different from our post-Descartes/Kant framework, which makes interpretation very difficult. Its really easy (and popular) to read thinkers like Parmenides and Zeno as being proto-Kantians, but I think this could be a misinterpretation.

Not quite. The planck length/time are the smallest units of space/time that can currently be given a physical meaning, but this doesnt imply that length/time are discrete. In loop quantum gravity (a not-widely-accepted theory of quantum gravity) however, I think that areas/volumes are quantized.

Perhaps try finding a mathematics computer program that combines learning arithmetic with playing simple games - I remember I used to enjoy them at primary school. Also, get her to practice multiplying 2 digit numbers using a pen and paper - over time I think this will end up making her ingrain the 1 digit times tables since you need to use these implicitly to multiply bigger numbers. I think the popular idea that you shouldnt do something advanced until youve mastered the basics is incorrect - doing more advanced things often lets you practice the basics in a more interesting way, and shines light on them. Also, dont stress about not knowing the times tables for bigger numbers (ie between maybe 6 and 10) - its not that important. As long as you can 'work out' the answers by (eg) reasoning that since 7*5 is 35 and 7*2 is 14, 7*7 must be 35+14=49. You dont need to learn the 9 times table either, since you can just do it on your fingers using that cool way you get taught in primary school. I'm currently doing a masters degree in mathematics and I still use my fingers for the 9 times table, and need to explictly work out what 7*8 and 8*6 are (I never ingrained the 8 times table). Memorisation isnt that important really as long as you know the method for working these things out. The times tables for the 'lower' numbers (1-5) are important though so youll probably need a way to internalise them. As I said, the most important thing is to learn the basic laws of arithmetic such as associativity, so you are able to work out that 8*7 = (4*7)+(4*7) and calculate it like that. I dont think this sort of thing is taught in schools to the extent that it should be - the focus tends to be on brute memorisation rather than learning techniques for working things out. Also once youve got this internalised, multiplying big numbers shouldnt be a problem either because you can just 'see' intuitively that (eg) 56*27 = (50*27)+(6*27) = (5*270)+(6*20)+(6*7) = (5*200 + 5*70) + (120) +(42) = (1000+350)+(120)+(42) = 1512 and do it in your head in seconds. I honestly think that the focus on memorisation rather than technique at primary school is the reason why most people are terrible at arithemetic and cant do basic multiplication involving numbers bigger than (say) 20 in their heads. Also, memorisation is exceptionally boring and is probably part of the reason why a lot of people grow up hating maths, and thinking its boring. It certainly is boring, the way its taught at school. I'm not a teacher either and know nothing about the teaching of mathematics or developmental psychology, so take all this with a large amount of scepticism.

50% of them in fact, assuming that intelligence is normally distributed. Anyway, the argument that 'most people are dumb' is generally used to justifiy all form of statism. Why is this any different from (eg) saying that pension saving should be compulsory because people 'too dumb' to be trusted to save for themselves? Or that drugs should be illegal because people 'arent capable' of deciding for themselves what is and isnt dangerous?

Which one?

There couldnt possibly be anything outside the universe because the word 'universe' means, in Objectivist writing, 'everything that exists'. The only time it could make sense to talk about existence outside the universe would be if you were using the word in a different way (and there are circles where this is actually done). There are two ways to deal with a question; the first is to answer it, and the second is to show that it is confused or misguided. The question "why does existence exist?" is similar to "what is north of the north pole?" or "what happened before the beginning of time?". It arises from a misunderstanding about how certain words function within our language - it makes sense in everyday life to ask about why particular things happen, so people assume that it must automatically make sense to ask why anything at all happens. But not all questions are coherent and admit sensible answers once you drop the context in which they normally arise. AR does give a short discussion of the question "why does existence exist?" (or rather "why doesnt nothing exist?") in ITOE. But she argues that its misformed, rather than attempting to answer it head-on.

Well, thats not quite true. We obtained knowledge of non-Euclidean geometries even though there was no reason to think that anything in the real world was non-Euclidean. Similarly, theres no reason why people living in a non-Euclidean universe couldnt develop Euclidean geometry on an axiomatic basis even though there were no parallel (in the euclidean sense) lines. Arithmetic is similar - its a fact about humans that we normally learn mathematics by progressing from counting, to natural numbers, to fractions, to negative numbers, to real numbers, to complex numbers. But this is a psychological fact, not a logical one - theres no reason to develop the number systems in this order when doing mathematics.