Hal

I was under the impression that it was - gravity is a result of the curvature of spacetime and so on? I don't claim to know much about physics so I could well be mistaken. Ok, then I'm in full agreement with you (and presumably Peikoff as well) Thanks for the historical information (both here and above); it's interesting.

Again, mental representations of things are not the things themselves. The idea of unicorns does not have horns, nor does the idea of Santa Claus bring presents to children on Christmas day. When I say "all horses have 4 legs" I am not talking about the idea of horses, I am talking about horses themselves. When I say 'unicorns have horns', this sentence is identical in form to the preceding one, and deserves to be treated in the same way. Consider the statement "unicorns do not exist". What does the phrase 'unicorns' in this sentence refer to? If it refers to the idea of unicorns then the statement is false - the idea of unicorns certainly does exist (I have it in my mind). If it refers to unicorns themselves then you will need to explain how a term can refer to something that does not exist. Universals are universals. Concepts of universals are concepts of universals - again, you're confusing the idea of a thing with the thing itself. In order to form the concept of 'red', I must first encounter red things. The concept that I form is a concept of a universal. The red things themselves are universals. Rand's theory explains how we form these concepts - it does not explain what the things itself actually are or whether they exist. A tree exists whether or not I experience it. If all humans died tomorrow, trees would still exist. If all humans died tomorrow, would 'redness' still exist? By redness I do not mean the lightwaves which are assumed to produce the experience of 'red' in the human subject - I mean redness itself. This, essentially, is the problem of universals. Where, specifically in IOE, (and I would like a page cite, rather than being told I "have not read the work"), does Rand answer this question and give arguments for her answer.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'exist within the fiction', can you clarify? A fictional book might present a description of a character, which may cause the readers to form an idea of said character. But the character itself does not exist. An idea of a thing is not the thing.

If you're new to programming I wouldnt advise you to begin with C++ (in fact I wouldnt advise you to use it all, unless you believe that it will be necessary for your career at some point). But, assuming you do want to learn it, I think you're probably better off with an actual textbook rather than an online tutorial - online guides might give you the basics, but they tend to gloss over the details. I personally learned C++ using Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours and I think this series of books are generally quite good for introductory teaching. In terms of online resources though, Bruce Eckel's entire textbook "Thinking in C++" is available here (yes, this is legal - he chose to publish it online). I've never read it so I can't make any specific comments regarding it. From reading the preface though, I think it assumes that the reader is already familar with programming, and specifically has knowledge of C.

Existentialism, as the term is normally used, is a bit of a pseudo-concept since it tends to group together a wide variety of thinkers who really have very little in common. The only person I can think of who held a belief similar to "you must never hinder the freedom of others" would be Jean Paul Sartre. He believed that since there is no such thing as a universal human nature, it is up to the own individual to both define himself and choose his own self-interpretation. Supposedly, this also necessitates choosing a vision for humanity as a whole (in a sense this is similar to the Kantian "act as if your actions would be universal law for all man"). One of the examples Sartre uses is that if I choose to get married, this means that I believe that being married is the best choice for all humans. Sartre doesn't really make any arguments to support this claim - I think he thought that it was self-evident but I'm not entirely sure why, since it seems obviously wrong. But anyway, this provided the grounds for his 'act to increase the freedom of others' statement. Since an authentic life involves the resolute acceptance of one's own freedom (according to Sartre), choosing freedom for myself automatically means choosing freedom for humanity as a whole. And since, apparently, the best way to guarantee my freedom is to live amongst men who are also free, I should act so as to promote the freedom of others. Personally I think this whole idea was probably tied to his Marxism, at least subconsciously - he wanted to lay down _some_ moral maxims in order to justify fighting for Communism, but Existentialism almost by definition prevents one from doing this. Hence his having to resort to fairly dodgy reasoning in order to support his position.

Yes, I agree that the specific desire for deoderant didnt exist before mass advertising. But didn't other desires exist? People had unfufilled desires before the days of mass production and aggressive advertising, and they would still have them if advertising were to end - they would just be for different things. I realise that, I was referring more to adbusters in general. I would also agree with this. I've never encountered a person who admits to being influenced by advertising, so it would appear that either advertising influences are more subversive than most people believe, or a lot of companies are wasting vast sums of money on something that doesnt work. I know what one I think is more likely.

While advertisements are certainly responsible for the production of desires, do you believe that such desires would decline if advertising were to end? People have generally followed the values and desires of their community since the beginning of recorded human history, whereas aggressive advertisement is a fairly recent phenonenon. Yes, the desire for designer clothing probably would not exist without the false prestige created around them by television, but wouldnt this desires simply be replaced by something else? It's not as if ending advertisements is going to make most people content with what they have, or to direct their desires towards more 'rational' ends. Rather than focusing on eliminating advertising, wouldn't a better antidote to rampant consumerism be the promotion of rational values? If people are consuming material goods solely to fill a void in their lives, would it not be more sensible to focus on diagnosing and eliminating this void, rather than attacking material goods? Consumerism seems to be a symptom of certain aspects of modern society rather than a problem in itself, and initiatives such as adbusters seem to be more concerned with treating these symptoms rather than curing the disease. Although perhaps I'm being unfair. From a quick look around their site I wouldnt be surprised if they advocated communism as a cure for the "capitalist disease".

The initial claim was that Europe is significantly more socialist/statist than America. Every single thing you have listed also apply to the US, as well as many things you havent listed such as bans on pornography, gay marriage, and stem cell research. If Germany and Britain qualify as socialist/statist countries, then America certainly does too.

A libertarian political philosopher. He wrote Anarchy, State and Utopia, a fairly comprehensive defence of lassaiz-faire capitalism which includes a few chapters attacking anarcho-capitalism.

I dont know much about the history of AI, but I have read a few contemporary textbooks and the vast majority of what I have encountered pertains to producing machines which solve problems, rather than producing consciousness. A search of an academic AI research journal results in 0 matches for 'consciousness'. The fact that some AI researchers might believe that machine consciousness is possible, or even the ultimate goal of their discipline, doesnt seem particularly relevant. Many people in philosophy, including the 'founders' of the subject held that it constitutes merely the disinterested pursuit of "knowledge for the sake of knowledge". Many physicists believe that physics has no goal other than to produce models that adequately describe empirical phenomena. Does this mean that we should dismiss philosophy and physics as being invalid disciplines? Or should we instead concentrate on the positive things that they have achieved whlie ignoring the more irrational comments coming from individual practitioners?

Ok, that makes sense and I agree. I intially misintepreted your statements and assumed you were advocating something akin to Kuhnian incommeasurability. To clarify, assuming that an actual (casual) theory of gravity such as GR were to be replaced with a new theory which explained phenonemon in areas where GR broke down, became widely accepted as true, but contradicted GR conceptually in various places (eg it necessitated that space was Euclidean), would you say that GR had been contradicted? It's predictions would still be valid within the domain it was formulated, but its casual explainations would have been shown to be wrong. Or to take another example, if some method of accelerating objects beyond the speed of light were to be discovered, would you hold that SR had been contradicted? I'm aware of Newton's beliefs regarding his work, but I was referring to physicists in general - ie those that had come after Newton and witnessed the power of his theory, including the discovery of Neptune. Surely it would not have been irrational for them to suppose that Newtonian mechanics was valid on all scales? I accept your point that this would have merely been a supposition since a casual explanation had not yet been found - but I'm not sure what basis you are giving them for even being more entitled to suppose Newton's laws would hold at the macroscopic scale than to suppose they wouldnt. It's surely rational to assume that one's ideas hold in undiscovered contexts even when they are not grounded upon casual explanations, but your position seems to result in this becoming an arbitrary belief.

It seems strange, to say the least, that I can quite sensibly use a name and understand other people using the name, without actually knowing who it refers to. In fact, it's entirely possible that Homer wasn't a person, in the sense that Homer has historically been thought to be the person who wrote both the Iliad and the Odysses, whereas modern scholarship suggests that it is likely that these works were written by different people.

Peikoff said something along the lines of "a word means a concept and nothing else. A concept means that which it refers to, and nothing else" (IOE - The Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy). Elsewhere in IOE, Rand states that a concept with no referents is invalid. This seems to conflict with the fact that I am perfectly able to understand sentences containing concepts which have no referents, such as 'unicorn' and 'characters in Atlas Shrugged'. My fault, bad example. I was using the word pegasus as a concept, not a proper name ('winged horses' in general, rather than 'the particular winged horse in greek mythology' ). I realise this is misleading - I should have used unicorn instead, I wasnt thinking properly. I would be interested what 'modern theories' you think treat the problem of universals as one of epistemology. The standard problem of universals, namely "Do they exist?", is quite clearly a metaphysical question since it pertains to what exists in reality, rather than to any question of our knowledge. Once this question has been answered, there is a second question, namely "How do we derive knowledge of universals?" which is epistemologica in nature. Realists answer 'yes' to the former question while nominalists answer 'no', and then both schools try to account for our universal concepts (eg 18th century nominalists believed our knowledge of universals constituted singular pictures, which somehow managed to 'stand for' every object of their type). From my reading of IOE, Rand gives no answer to the first question (the correct approach in my opinion, since it's poorly formed), and puts forward a theory that explains how we derive our notion of universal concepts. Plato's idea that universal forms exist in a supra-sensible reality for instance is quite clearly a metaphysical statement, as is Aristotle's belief than essences dwell 'inside' particulars (I realise this is a simplification). On the other hand, Plato's idea that we acquire knowledge of these universals through some kind of supernatural philosophical disclosure would be an epistemological claim.

Why Scalia? I was under the impression that his judgements were consistently closer to the letter of the Constitution than any other of the Supreme Court justices.

nemethnm - what preciselu do you mean by Democracy? 'Pure' democracy, in a 'the majority gets whatever it wants' sense, or a more limited democracy, such as one where the majority are constrained by (eg) constitutional means? I think that this is a very important point, and one that needs to be emphasized. Anarcho-capitalism as a whole is largely based upon delusions caused by language, and the failure to adequately define key terms. The majority of anarchists don't seem to realise that when one 'private protection agency' has taken control of a territory, it is a government in everything but name. Choosing to call something a 'protection agency' rather than a 'government' does not affect the reality of what it is - if a group claims a monopoly on force over a given region and has the power to back it up, then it is a government by definition of the word. The only way 'anarchy' could actually exist other than as continuing warfare would be if several different competing protection agencies could simultaneously co-exist within a given region, and I think that Robert Nozick, amongst others, has conclusively disproven the suggestion that this is possible.

I find this interesting, could you clarify what you mean with regards to a specific example; Newtonian mechanics? Now, one can say that Newtonian mechanics was, and still is, valid within its domain of applicability in the sense that it gives acceptable results when dealing with the right size of objects at the right scale of measurement. However a physical theory is more than a formal mathematical system as you correctly point out, hence there is more to Newtonian mechanics that its symbolic formalization and predictive power - it is also necessarily committed to certain metaphysical claims about reality (for instance, that gravity travels at instantaneous velocity), and these claims have turned out to be false. So in this sense, Newtonian mechanics has certainly been contradicted by later findings. The predictions of Newtonian mechancis are still valid at the scale they were initially made, but the conceptual aspects of the system - ie the things that make it a physical theory as opposed to a predictive mathematical system - are simply wrong. Would you agree? Secondly, what constitutes asserting that our knowledge applies to a broader context than it properly does? I noticed Peikoff made a similar claim in OPAR, and to me it seems unnecessarily sceptical. For instance, I don't think there would be anything wrong in supposing that the laws of physics, as we have discovered them within the very small portion of the universe which we have access to, are valid universe wide. If someone were to suggest that there might be a galaxy far away where objects could travel faster than the speed of light, it would surely be correct to dismiss such a claim as arbitrary. But on my reading of OPAR, we would have have no more grounds to assert that our physical laws are valid universe-wide than to assert that they weren't, since both claims would involve assuming that our knowledge applies to a broader context than that in which we have tested it. Similarly, surely the 18th century physicist's belief that Newtonian mechanics was vaild "all the way down" and "all the way up" was perfectly legitimate. What possible reason would he have had for assuming that it wasn't?

'Artificial intelligence', both as a term and as a discipline, has very little to do with trying to develop machine consciousness and I would be curious as to why you thought the field was founded on "bad philosophy". Most research in AI, as far as I know, has to do with developing systems capable of performing actions which had previously been associated solely with intelligent entities (hence the term 'artificial' intelligence) - for instance natural language parsing, perception, expert systems, playing convincing games of chess, and so on. The purpose, generally speaking, is not to build machines with 'volitional consciousness' or whatever, but rather to a) design systems which are able to deal with practical problems in an efficient manner, and mimic certain aspects of the behavior of 'naturally' intelligent entities. Saying that a computer capable of passing the Turing test, for instance, is artifically intelligent sounds like a perfect valid application of the term, and doesnt in any way commit the speaker to any beliefs regarding consciousness.

Voted Metropolis; the bigger the better. I live in a large city and I like the fact that I'm always able to locate a place which can provide me with whatever goods or services I require, regardless of how obscure they may be. For instance a few months ago I decided that I would like to take up a martial art, and living in a large city allowed me to make a proper choice since I knew I would be able to find someone that trained whatever I decided upon, even if it happened to be a lot less popular than karate/tae-kwon-do/whatever.

Practically speaking, isn't focus often 'caused' by environmental factors, such as running into difficulties or encountering problems? In day-to-day life I may be unfocused - perhaps day-dreaming, or thinking about something not relevant to that going on around me - when some event will occur which causes me to take notice of my surroundings and start to concentrate. Perhaps I will be driving in my car, totally absorbed in either music from the radio or my own thought, with the task of driving essentially on auto-pilot. But then, when I encounter a non-standard situation, such as another driver behaving recklessly, my attention will be aroused and I will start to focus - my 'switch will be thrown' to use source's term. Or maybe I will be writing an essay - completely lost in the task and again unaware of my surroundings. But then my pencil will break, causing me to become conscious of where I am and what I'm doing, in order to resolve the problem and get back to work. Once I'm 'focused', however that came about, I am then able to make the specific choice on what to focus.

How about in the cases where the named object doesnt exist, or isnt known to exist? To take an example, when I say 'Homer wrote the Iliad', it would be problematic to say that the name 'Homer' here refers to a person, since (as far as I know) it's debateable question whether such a person even existed. If referring is taken to be a direct relation between a word and an object, then difficulties arise when no such object exists. I'm not sure what you mean, could you clarify? The issue of universals doesn't seem to have anything to do with human cognition - the question is one of metaphysics rather than epistemology or science... Perhaps a theory of cognition would explain how humans gain knowledge of universal concepts (along the lines of IOE), but this is an entirely different issue. Would 'horse' also refer to an idea (well, concept)? The word 'horse' refers to the concept of horse, which in turn refers to all the horses that will ever exist?

I like to write a lot of notes as I go along, both to summarize arguements and to record what I was thinking at the time. I also find it helps to write mini-essays on important sections to ensure I understand them - forcing myself to root through the text for specific quotations to back up my initial reading oftens prevents misinterpretation. It's not uncommon for me to write notes spanning 30-50 sides of A4 on a first reading of a particularly difficult and I find doing this to be absolutely essential to my understanding - I'd get completely lost without constantly going back to clarify and summarize what I'd read. I think a good textual companion helps too - if there's a part of the text that just doesnt make any sense at all (hardly a rarity with Kant), It's useful having somewhere to turn for a second opinion. Not reading when I'm tired helps too - once I get into something I often feel like I 'have' to finish it, which leads to me wanting to read it even if I'm not really in the right state of mind. I've gradually learned to stop doing this, since it leads to me understanding very little.

I've found a dissertation which was apparently written by an Objectivist as a PhD dissertation, and it seems quite interesting. That's the kind of thing I was looking for anyway.

I was more interested in an Objectivist perspective, I'm broadly familiar with the standard answers within academic philosophy and none particularly satisfy me. Some issues concerned with meaning appear to be bound up in Ayn Rand's theory of concepts, and there are quite a few unaddressed questions which I'd like to read a more extended answer to. For instance, Peikoff's claim that concepts mean the objects they refer to is something that would need to be developed further, and that would most likely involve an analysis of language to some degree (eg how can we understand a concept like 'pegasus' if it supposedly has no meaning?).

I wasnt talking about linguistics, I was talking about philosophy of language. Philosophy of language isnt linguistics in the same sense that philosophy of science isnt science, and philosophy of law isnt law; it's more to do with the study of 'meaning' than any particular language - for instance how do words 'mean' things, and so on. I own Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, and that doesnt address what I was looking for; it's primarilly a work of epistemology.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me whether there are any Objectivist writings that address issues within the philosophy of language. It's one area of philosophy that particularly interests me but I there wasnt much about it in OPAR, and Ayn Rand didn't list it under her subdivisions of philosophy, hence I'm assuming she didnt write anything on this topic?, If I'm correct, have any other Objectivist writers done so? (I couldnt find anything at the aynrandbookstore), Im particularly interested in the Objectivist theory of names if there is such a thing, eg what do proper names (and names for universals) refer to. I think I remember Peikoff saying that concepts 'mean' the concrete they subsume, so are there any writings that develop this idea further, and address the standard problems associated with reference theories of meaning?