tadmjones

My Ethical Theory and Rand’s
Perception of mind-independent existence is fundamental to human consciousness, though not the whole of what is fundamental in human consciousness. “Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
No one understanding the statement “Existence exists,” whether uttered, signed, or written, has such an occasion of consciousness without co-referential history and ongoing context of his or her language and intellectual community. The reader is not without the writer, and the thinker addresses a standing audience of others, however unspecified, as well as self. Co-reference precedes the one-word stage of language acquisition, and ever after the acquisition of language, the standing suitability for co-reference attends every thought that something is the case. Co-referential potential of thought, and the mutual recognition of intentional being that requires, is a condition of one’s existence as a thinker in language. Indeed, pronominal other person is in and with oneself as existence is in and with oneself. In one’s conscious and subconscious existence is resonance with existence in general, resonance with living existence, and special of the latter, resonance with other person.
“Existence exists” is registration of existing among other existents. Further, the act of grasping the statement “Existence exists,” I observe, implies performance of and grasp of acts, not only acts of consciousness, but acts of living body. There are no acts of and grasps of consciousness without acts of and intentional grasps with one’s living body. There is no grasp of the externality of existence to subject without grasps of externality to one’s body. If one observes one’s consciousness, one is acquainted with one’s living body and one’s actions with it. Moreover, one knows in any episodes of post-linguistic observational consciousness others of one’s acting and conscious kind. Then too, one had always (in a practical sense of always) known Mother or other caregiver.
“Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
There is normativity in that most basic metaphysical frame (mine, not Rand’s). We are given, dedicated to grasping reality in awareness concerted with other and in coordinated acts with other. This is automatic animal engineering-performance-norm of operation. We are given, already loving truth, truth-getting, act, self, and other.
With later education, we learn that life ends, that it requires maintenance, and in our human case, that it requires production and education and social cooperative conventions. We learn that those means to life require a waking state and adequate sleep. Going beyond the original grasp of life in breath and cry and suckle, learning more of life and its requirements requires some focused effort. The plenty and exuberance of human life of today required individual creativity, initiative, and freedom coordinated at the large social scale by moral- and rights-constraints on treatments of others.
Human moral life arises in the milieu of learned character of life, all within and ever with the basic frame “Existence exists, we live.” In learning life beyond the basic knowing, we can grasp the concept of “alternative” mined by Ayn Rand: Only with advent of the ends-getting organized matter that is life do alternatives enter nature.
I observe, in addition: We say that when we've got the accelerator on, a given electron is either going to encounter a positron or not. That saying is true to nature, but it, unlike identity, is not something in nature independently of a striving mind. Either-Or, I wrote in "Existence, We", is based in identities in nature, but is only in nature where living systems are in nature facing nature. That is, the Law of Excluded Middle for thought rises as high-animal mind rises by organic evolutionary layers on vegetative neuronal control systems of animals. The electron will either encounter a positron or it will not, but the electron does not face an alternative of continued existence or not. We see the possibilities, but the electron, unlike a living cell, does not face them. We and all living things face the alternative of continued existence or not, and from that fundamental alternative, all alternative is born.
In moral life, we elect to keep life going, including to keep going life known in the basic frame. Once we have the developed powers, we elect to keep thinking, coordinating, creating, and producing. The moral virtue of truth-telling is rooted in the basic frame, constantly at hand. Life known in the basic frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specs. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves.
Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.
The preceding is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence.
Famously, for part of Rand’s ethical base, she characterized life in complete generality as self-generating and self-maintaining. This she took from standard biology along with the findings that all organismic life is cellular the findings of ontogeny and of evolution from Darwin to the present. It is quite true that self-generation and self-maintenance are features of any life. Even if we humans become creators of life from inanimate matter, our success will mean that we created means for the appearance of matter organized such that it is self-generating and self-maintaining. We are relying on that character when we plant, water, and fertilize crops, even if we only dimly notice that the crops do the growing themselves and possess various ranges of adaptability themselves under changes in surrounding conditions.
That living things have functions in their subsystems to the preservation and replication of the whole organism and that living things have powers of self-generation and self-maintenance might better have some elements such as growth drawn out more, but I’ll stay with Rand’s broad meanings of self-generation and self-maintenance. Notice that these steps are not necessarily only suited for a ladder to ethical egoism.
To be a fair characterization of life in general, we must understand “self” in self-generating and self-maintaining in a broad and indeed rather shifty way. Overwhelmingly, life gets started from life. Other life. Self as individual organism and self as its species work back and forth for continuation of those two selves. An individual life can be just a quickly disposable trial tool in the function of preserving the species, although overall, the species requires individual organisms. Of course.
I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one's ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running.
Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. And that means continuing to pursue the facts and the coordination with others in that pursuit. Rand has it that rationality is our overarching method for getting the facts and making good uses of them. That is fine, but I contest the picture in which one was just going along alone rationally pursuing the facts and how to use them and then as it were noticed, secondarily, that the existence of other people is enjoyable, knowledge-boosting, and economically advantageous.
The higher intelligence of humans does indeed have launchings spontaneously in individuals. Young children will spontaneously seriate a group of rods according to their lengths; none of our closest primate pals do that. But we have been in intelligent human company all along our individual active existence, from precautions and playing to learning common nouns, proper names, verbs, classification, and predication. Rationality is profoundly social in one from the get-go, even as its acquisition by each person consists in individual facility in its operation independently of direction from others and self-direction in seeking information or in seeking specialized skills from others.
Rationality is seen by Rand as the basic moral virtue because it is the necessary general operation needed for the human form of life. She takes the other virtues in her ethical system to be salient strands of rationality aimed at individual survival. I say, rather, that rationality is the given proper being of a human and the proper responsiveness to persons, other and self. Rationality is the grand means of human survival, as Rand held, but that is not the whole of its story.
Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway.
Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives.
Ayn Rand offered an ethical egoism in which rationality took its place as central overall virtue for a person due to the need for rationality in making one’s reality-according individual human life. She tried to weave the prima facie virtue of truth-telling to others as a derivative of the need to be honest with oneself about the facts. That is not plausibly the basic reason one wants to and should want to be honest with others. Rand’s account of honesty is inadequate by reliance on a purely egoistic basis. Ethical egoism, a genuine one such as hers, one attempting to derive all its moral virtues purely from self-interest, is false. It rests on an inadequate view of what is the constitution of the human self.
Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.
The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue. One failing to have it is in human failure, including moral failure.
Although my account builds on a social nature of human individuals running deeper than social nature as characterized by Rand, I land in much agreement with Rand on general characterization of life as self-generated and self-maintaining action and as teleological action (even for vegetative actions such as gravitropic plant roots) and with life as the phenomenon among existents with which such things as function, needs, alternatives, problems, and solutions enter the world at all. All of those features are in stark contrast to inanimate matter in our ordinary experience and as in our modern science. In the case of human selves and lives, all of those glories are reached in coordination with others, living or long deceased, and humans have greater choice than other animals in shaping longer arcs in their lives. As with Rand's ethics, Rationality remains the overarching human virtue, although, into my reasons for that there is not only the instrumental value of rationality (solo and in cooperation) for successful continuation of life, but the inherent value of rationality to human self and life, including joint participation of rationality in lives and selves. Rationality is inherently self-directed, so independence in a social environment (in thought and in making a life) remains a virtue, as with Rand. Creativity and productivity and integrity and benevolence and voluntary association are also part and parcel of my broadened notion of rational human nature.
There is an additional distinctive feature in Rand's general characterization of life I'd like address: Life is an end in itself. I endorse that characterization also, although what constitutes individual human life is deeper in its connections to others, than in Rand's characterization of it, and that is so, even though in maturity choice is a factor in which relationships are instituted. Rand had the circumstance that life is an end in itself in a beautiful dual role in her ethics. (i) Directed to one's general moral conduct in all circumstances, it has one rightly treating oneself as an end in itself; self-interest is the ultimate criterion for any decisions or actions. (ii) Directed to one's conduct towards others, Rand adds that they too are ends in themselves and that conformance to individual rights correctly has each treated as an end in himself and makes possible each continuing self-direction all together in coordination.
The second (ii) is correct within my system. The first (i) is not, because self-interest (or other-interest) are inadequate moral criteria stemming from inadequate understanding of human nature.
Life known in my basic metaphysical frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specifications. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves.
Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.
Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.
The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue.

According to Plato, known existents are actually shadows or copies of pure Ideas located in the Hyperuranion. Likewise, in a materialist framework, mental "existents" (percepts) are mere shadows or copies of pure Things located in the Physical™ world.
The idea is that mind-stuff is unable to produce matter, because of the Law of Identity: mind-stuff has an identity that is toto genere different from the identity of matter. On the other hand, matter can easily produce mind-stuff because.. it just can, okay?
Peikoff is constantly oscillating between different meanings of the word "consciousness", according to what is convenient for his purposes. At the beginning of the quoted part, he takes "consciousness" to mean passive awareness of objects; he then shifts to a broader meaning which encompasses volitional aspects, like fantasizing/desiring that the food disappears.
It doesn't seem to occur to Peikoff that, as per the Law of Identity, even if a mind was able to productively create the entirety of the contents of consciousness, the creative process itself would not be "free", but constrained by certain laws. I'm free to draw a line in my mind, but I'm not free to do so without making use of point and space. The laws of geometry are the necessary "stage" for freely drawing the line, which is to say: the mind produces not just one kind of representation (drawing the line) but also the representation of the lawful backdrop (point and space).
Metaphysics is not as simple as trying to make food disappear.
Here is the original claim:
And this cannot be stressed enough. Man can err, yet at the same time be completely convinced that he is merely "following reality". Try to challenge his assertions, and you're met with replies such as "Well.. is 2+2=4?!", implying that, since he was merely following "reality", his conclusion was pristine and perfect.
The only "authority" is intellectual honesty when dealing with reality.

That is what I meant. O'ism understood in that frame says reality is dualistic and assigns primacy to one pole. Not very parsimonious.

It also occurs to me that the idea that it is irrational to entertain even the possibility of a supernatural being leads to censorship of the mind. This is the rational taking to an extreme. 

I disagree on both fronts.
"Miss Manners" is completely correct and whoever's writing in needs to get out of their own head a little, because that's the only place where any guilt or shame is coming from here. People choose not to donate in front of me all the time, and I could go either way depending on what I think is appropriate at the time. The only reaction I've ever gotten either way is a quick "thank you" if I say yes. If it was common to get some other reaction, then I think you'd have a point, but that simply isn't the case. No one cares whether or not you donate to charities when you're buying groceries.
Altruism does play a role in this person's letter, but that's limited to their own psyche. At least subconsciously, they feel guilty for not donating to charity, and that insecurity has caused them to feel victimized by charities that are doing nothing but existing, and store clerks who couldn't care less. Also, regarding the charities, saying that they're doing something wrong by accepting donations from grocery store checkout lines is pretty silly. It's not as if they're extorting anyone; they're trying to raise money and that's an efficient way to do it. There's nothing wrong with that.

Formal logical systems require self-referential reasoning capacities that may resist full materialization or resolution in physical formalities alone. See Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems published in 1931.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems exposed that any sufficiently expressive formal system will contain true statements about the system's own codifiable operations that cannot be derived by the system's proof procedures alone. There are inherent limitations to what can be captured in a purely formal-syntactic manner. Thus Rand's requirement of using intuition, not reason, to derive axioms. Rand's epistemology, privileging intuition over reason for axioms with the proposed idea that formal systems, require non-formalizable self-referential capacities.
The issue is that while physical formalities can encode and manipulate meaningful symbols according to rules, the full semantic interpretations, referential models and self-reflective capacities that underlie logical reasoning may resist complete materialization or resolution just in those formalized physical symbol games.
There appears to be an irreducible mental or abstract dimension to genuine logical reasoning that goes beyond just shuffling physical tokens according to prescribed rules. Self-referential reasoning seems to require some explicit representational capacities that may not be fully reducible to physical formalities alone.
While formal logic can be abstractly specified and token-manipulations can 'mimic' derivations behaviorally, the full semantic grasp of what logic is, what truth, validity and soundness mean, and the ability to self-reflect on systems, seems to rely on an abstract cognitive dimension that transcends mere physical formalities and symbol pushing.
The human mind, with its capacities for explicit conceptual representation and self-reflective meta-reasoning, appears to underlie logic in a way that cannot be simply reduced to physically instantiating syntax games, no matter how complex. An irreducible abstract dimension of understanding appears indispensable for genuine logical reasoning, as we humans recognize it.
So while logic and mathematics can be partially implemented in physical systems, the contention is that their complete self-referential semantic grasp and soundness may ultimately depend on more than just material symbol manipulation - requiring mental capacities of representation and reflection that fundamentally transcend the physical.

According to some Objectivists, "Identity" presupposes that the Universe is comprised of more than one single existent. That is, no doubt, an observation from experience. When we say that an object is "finite", we mean that it has a boundary; precisely where that object ends, another one begins. So we say, for example, that the US "ends" where Canada begins (in the north), or where Mexico begins (in the south), etc.
People seem to intuitively grasp this concept. Suppose that someone is experiencing an existential crisis. His friend asks "What are you so anxious about?" to which the other replies "Nothing in particular". In other words, there's no particular offending "thing" or "object" to narrow down, because everything is the issue. By contrast, a determinate "thing" is a delimitation, a narrowing down from the "All".
Keeping this metaphysical preamble in mind, we can now turn to the fate of humanity.
In the beginning stages of humanity, the difference between man and beast was not very pronounced; it's almost impossible to imagine primitive people committing suicide over existential angst. On the contrary: the more difficult life was, the stronger people clung to it. Fast forward to our current times, and we've climbed to a stage where being eaten by animals or getting bashed in the head with a rock is a lot less common. By all metrics, life today is better than it used to be. But if Schopenhauer's observation is correct, then:
When life is free of problems, our mind compensates by turning trifles into big issues. (*)
So long as we are determinate beings (finite), there is always something external to us that can potentially cause trouble for ourselves. Therefore, there is no end to "progress". When we successfully solve a pressing problem, there is a brief period of celebration, after which we begin to notice another crack in the wall. In truth, that crack was always there, but we were too busy with other things to notice it:
What real value is there for a man
In all the gains he makes beneath the sun?
(...)
The eye never has enough of seeing,
Nor the ear enough of hearing.
Only that shall happen
Which has happened,
Only that occur
Which has occurred;
There is nothing new
Beneath the sun!
(Ecclesiastes)
At our stage of history, most people do not have the luxury to ponder existential questions. But if at some point in the future, humanity at large becomes disappointed with the futility of problem-solving, people might change their strategy and pour all of their efforts into a new project: the mind. After all, happiness is in the brain, so to speak.
If scientists discover a way to modify the human brain in such a way that unhappiness becomes physically impossible to experience, it's quite likely that many people will opt for this modification. At this hypothetical stage of history, we'd see a grim spectacle: billions of people standing still, in their synthetic bodies made of very resilient materials, enjoying continuous bliss for millions of years until the Sun finally swallows up the Earth. In essence, human progress might not be a "straight line" which extends into infinity, but rather an "arch" that begins with a rise to glory and ends with a descent into non-life.
In the previous installment, we explored Fichte's claim that Nature fulfills a formal role: to make us aware of our freedom. We, speaking regulatively, can modify Fichte's theory, and say that futility fulfills a formal role in the human soul:
Only in a world where "doing a good job" is not necessarily followed by a just reward, can we stop acting for "rewards" and instead, pursue excellence because it's enjoyable.   "Those who [are] always looking ahead and impatiently anticipating what is coming, as something which will make them happy when they get it, are, in spite of their very clever airs, exactly like those donkeys one sees in Italy, whose pace may be hurried by fixing a stick on their heads with a wisp of hay at the end of it; this is always just in front of them, and they keep on trying to get it. Such people are in a constant state of illusion as to their whole existence; they go on living ad interim, until at last they die." (Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, §5).  

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

Man's Craving for Nothingness
According to Schopenhauer, pleasure does not come to us originally and of itself; instead, pleasure is only able to exist as a removal of a pre-existing pain or want, while pain (which signals a threat to survival) directly and immediately proclaims itself to our perception. This is mirrored in Objectivist theory:
"Pleasure—using the term for a moment to designate any form of enjoyment—is an effect. Its cause is the gaining of a value, whether it be a meal when one is hungry, an invitation to a party, a diamond necklace, or a long-sought promotion at work. The root of values, in turn, is the requirements of survival. Self-preservation, in other words, entails goal-directed action, success at which leads (in conscious organisms) to pleasure." (OPAR, Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man)
We could also state this idea as follows: the constant entropic pull, which wants to disintegrate our bodies, is the root of all pleasure. And we certainly like pleasure, so it's no surprise that the most desirable life for us is the one least troubled by debilitating sickness, distracting pain, mental over-strain, hunger, social conflict and the like.
Thus, man's deepest desire, his most sought-after jewel, is Invincibility; he wants the ability to act purely for acquiring pleasure (motivation from love), without worrying that, in his pursuit of joy, he might mess something up and bring Nature's wrath upon his head (motivation from pain). To be invincible then, is to be worry-less, like a child that has not yet been acquainted with the realities of life.
Like sleeping infants the gods
   breathe without plan or purpose;
      the spirit flowers
         continually within them,
            chastely cherished,
               as in a small bud,
                  and their holy eyes
                     look out in still
                        eternal clearness.
(Friedrich Hölderlin - Hyperion's Song of Fate)
Yet this kind of Invincibility is impossible to man:
But to us no resting
   place is given. As
      suffering humans we
         decline and blindly fall
            from one hour to the next,
               like water thrown
                  from cliff to cliff,
                     year after year, down
                        into the Unknown.

Before he decided that philosophy can't compete with poetry, the celebrated German poet Friedrich Hölderlin studied philosophy at the Tübinger Stift, where he was friends and roommates with two giants of philosophy, Hegel and Schelling. In his philosophical thought, Hölderlin was primarily reacting to the then-trending philosophy of Fichte.
According to Fichte, "I act" literally means "I am disrupting the current state", and that current state is obviously inert matter. Regardless of whether Nature truly exists or not, human cognition needs it in order to make possible the consciousness of free agency. Apart from that, Nature has no other value, thought Fichte.
Hölderlin was not a fan of this. After all, things like scientific and poetic talent are generously offered by Nature, and are not generated by us ex nihilo. Fichte's theory also worsens the rift between free beings and mechanistic "nature", by turning Nature into a mere instrument for human projects. Furthermore, since:
no external inhibition = no possibility of freedom
Fichte declared that "freedom from limitations" is an infinite goal of morality, an imaginary ideal we can only approach step by step, with no end in sight. This did not go well with the younger generation, which was just recovering from the failure of the French Revolution to deliver its promised utopia.
Riffing on the same theme, Hölderlin held that the human condition is characterized by two opposing drives:
1) the desire to be Myself, as against "That"; 2) the desire to attain "That", precisely because it is separate from Myself, therefore threatening my autonomy and Invincibility As Hölderlin's preference for poetry over philosophy suggests, he locates the resolution of this conflict in the feeling of Beauty. In Aesthetic contemplation, we (spiritually) attain the end-goal of all moral striving, i.e. we feel both infinite and determinate (limited) at the same time.
It is different for the real world. Here, "survival" and "life" are synonymous. The day this impossible Indestructibility is achieved is the day where "survival/life" is no longer a thing. Thus, the striving for our most sought-after jewel, for Invincibility, is paradoxically an open striving for destruction.
___
(My source for Hölderlin's metaphysics was Edward Kanterian's excellent recorded lecture delivered at the University of Kent, 23 November 2012.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Conspiracy theorist.

"Buffoon"? Who cares how he comes across - and although of another nationality, I care very much about America's future direction and particularly its moral stance. When Trump says of something, "That's a bad deal!" -  what does that say?  A bad deal is surely when you get less out of something than what you've put in. In other words, losing a greater value for a lesser; In short, self-sacrificial altruism. Why, I can't understand, has this central aspect never been picked up (that I've seen) by Objectivists? For whatever his (very likely), businesslike pragmatism, your president has one overall principle, and that's to pull back the USA from further descent into its dutiful sacrificial altruism, which all other nations have taken as 'a given' for so long. Make no bones about it, beneath the enraged/scornful opposition (we get here too from our self-righteous Left-liberals) they ~know~ what's going on. No one will mention, or always explicitly understand, the basic ideology at stake, but this unbelievable, unceasing opposition to Trump, especially the hatred seen from the loathsome CNN, can't be taken any other way. It shows me their fear, and that a threat to their altruism is implicit in whatever they're  doing.
Like I say, what do I care about what he says, or acts like. We are feeling his shakeup in many places in the world, all to the better.

In other words,  Trump has that in common with the people Binswanger used as examples in his essay that you linked.  But those what are called "normal people", non-intellectual ordinary Americans whom we know Rand was a great fan of because of their "sense of life" as she put it.  Rand was frustrated by America's non-intellectuality but she didn't disapprove of the country because of it.  Trump as president  is like the common man as president, and her opinions of the common (American) man are probably the most relevant to Trump.
I haven't seen much commentary on Trump's sense of life, but that is really what got him elected.  His optimism, his vivaciousness, his high energy, his guilt free enjoyment of life and his immensely entertaining Twitter taunts all make him tremendously appealing.   But these are non-intellectual factors and incomprehensible to someone committed to rationalism as a professional duty.  That would be many ARI people and often Binswanger.

Alright, I'm going to riff this piece, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. The piece is enough of a joke, might as well joke about it.
Except for Odd Thomas, and the ARI.
lol
Well obviously, Trump loves Russia and Rand was from Russia. Makes total sense to the fake news mindset.
Whole, as in "all." Quite a wager considering that Trump agrees with Objectivism on quite a few key political goals... preserving the 2A, repealing regulations, repealing Obamacare, standing up to the Global Warming fraud, destroying radical Islam instead of making excuses for it, etc.
So what does our prophetess have to say exactly, Mr. Ghate?
She obviously didn't foresee the rise of the Internet.
Except for Ron Paul, a far more intellectual and principled candidate than Trump, which the ARI opposed because... uh, why exactly?
A limit which apparently led for her to vote for Nixon, a far worse candidate than Trump, over McGovern, a far better candidate than Hillary.
and who channel a dead woman... oh wait, that's the ARI.
Yes, the first candidate in 30 years to not thank God in his acceptance speech, and who says that he has "nothing to be forgiven for" is a "mystic." He might as well be a closet atheist who pays lip-service to religion because politics and votes.
No, what's illuminating is your attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole.
You mean like government-sanctioned torture, or the Waco raid? That sort of justice?
None of which are evident in Trump's decades of honest business dealings, Mr. Ghate would assert. If he had been a Madoff-like crook, surely evidence for it would have arisen by now.
Apparently calling out fake news represents "disdain for the truth."
Ah, Anderson Cooper, a bastion of journalistic integrity.
Because he's not a liar.
Apparently YouTube viewers don't count.
Apparently respect for women involves denying one's own sexuality and the beauty of the female form.
Ghate would have us equate spur-of-the-moment tweets with Trump's considered opinion.
No, it's because none of the things you just mentioned were lies.
Actually it captures basic marketing principles. The defenders of capitalism sure don't know much about how business works.
Says the ARI, an organization which hired Carl Barney, former Scientology church owner and current college swindler, and takes his dirty money. Obviously they would assert that they only hired him because people can change. Well then, we had objective evidence that Trump no longer desired to be part of the swamp and only had to be in order to run his business effectively.
Apparently concepts like slogans and the process for choosing them to reach mass appeal are alien to the ARI. No wonder there are so few objectivists.
And apparently unless you constantly repeat those things, your own inherent goodness means nothing.
"It's true because I want it to be true" actually perfectly captures the tone of this hit piece.
I'd rather have a man who acts moral but never talks about it, than a man who never acts moral but preaches how moral he is.
Fine people want to preserve their history for the sake of remembering, not tear it down for the sake of nothing. Not every person defending the confederate statue at that rally was a neo-Nazi.
No other president actually stood up to North Korea and forced China to play nice. I'd call that quite an accomplishment. In addition to the hundreds of regulations that Trump has repealed. If Ghate and Brook had their way, Hillary would be president and these would still be on the books.
Don't forget about Jesus and Buddha while you're making your fake list of people who Trump never said that he's better than.
Or, you know, it was a joke.
Yes, how dare he be loyal to America first instead of globalists.
I guess that Trump's business achievements count for nothing.
As opposed to the objective thing to do, which would be to hire men who would betray him.
As it should be, given Comey's lack of fidelity to justice in the case of Clinton.
What you're hearing is patriotism towards America, not tribalism. I know, it's hard to recognize for a member of an organization like the ARI that puts Israel above America.
And Hillary apparently would've played no part in this drift.
Political hucksters rely on strawmen, such as saying that Trump blamed "all" the country's problems on any particular group.
By this logic we should never elect a county sheriff who pledges to crack down on criminals. That would be tribalism, apparently.
You mean like Hillary calling half the country "deplorables?"
Oh look, a nugget of truth!
You're forgetting some qualifying adjectives. Illegal immigrants, dishonest journalists, globalist "free" traders, and corrupt elites. Trump opposed none of those things intrinsically.
Sales should be soaring, but the ARI fails at marketing so they're not.
With funny names like Floyd Ferris, Wesely Mouch, and Onkar Ghate.
You mean like how Leonard Peikoff squandered Ayn Rand's intellectual heritage? That sort of progeny?
I'd trust a snake oil salesman like Alex Jones before I'd trust Anderson Cooper or wherever Mr. Ghate gets his "news."
And by letting in the entire Third World into America all at once. She also advocated that, apparently.
America to Israel, America to globalists... just kidding, he doesn't say that.
So this is what makes you happy? Writing baseless schlock about the president?
What about the Convention of States? Oh wait, the ARI hates states' rights.
I mean, I think that she would have said that too, but not in the way that you mean. After all that bloviating, this is the best you could come up with that Rand might have said?

This is the key point. 
I should have used the term individual rights to stay within the established jargon for Objectivist discourse on rights.  And yes i do stress the "formal".
Rights are a principle from Objectivist ethics.  
The concept of rights is most often used in a political and legal context, but it should not be forgotten that rights are an ethical principle.  You say rights are primarily legal (perhaps because of usage?), I would say rights are essentially ethical because of the epistemological derivation and justification.  I agree that rights are about action within a social context.
"Social context" is not equivalent to "legal context".  It is wrong to obtain values by lying, but not every lie can be made illegal.  The reason for that is law ought to have strict requirements for objectivity.  A man might maintain multiple girlfriends by lying, girlfriends who would not agree to be one of a harem if they knew of the others.   A man may not maintain multiple wives by lying because there is an explicit legal agreement of monogamy in marriage.  In the first example, who is a girlfriend or not and who is regarded as a girlfriend or not and even what it means to be a girlfriend are all subjective mental states of the participants.  The law cannot sort out what should be done in this case because there are no objective facts to work with.   The law can work in a case of multiple marriages because the status and obligations of the participants are objective.  This is an example where ethics can say what is right based on rights but the law must remain silent.
The range of situations and contexts which are amenable to legal rulings on rights is necessarily less than the range over which ethical judgements can be made based on rights.  This is because of the more stringent requirement of objectivity for a legal context, and also because legal systems have jurisdictions, defined finite geographic regions of power and of citizenship.
With respect to warrants, they are a procedural limitation on law enforcement actions with the goal of protecting rights.  Warrants are not themselves rights in any ethical sense.  It is necessarily valid that different procedures may apply to citizens and non-citizens if the idea of citizenship and jurisdiction means anything at all because in a reduction-to-concretes sense those differences are what it means to be a citizen or not.
 

These Hours of Radiant Existence*
This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy.
The ten short chapters in this monograph are:
I.     Existence
II.    Other
III.   Divisions of Existence
IV.   Entities
V.    Passage
VI.  Situation
VII.  Character
VIII. Science and Mathematics
IX.   Logic
X.    Mortal Life and Value
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

It's possible, today in the US-C of A, to live healthily to a hundred or more. I, myself, have a healthy-hundred as my goal. At 74, I'm as fit mentally and physically, overall, as the usual 64 or younger (even with the poor start of my malnourished childhood in the poverty of Maoist China). Whatever one's age or condition, one could live more healthily and longer. See "The Five Doctors" and the Comment following it. The key to a healthy self and a longer life is to be healthy every day in every way for the rest of your life. A healthy self is integral to the continual betterment of one's life-long self-knowledge and self-realization. Could this help you to "tie in [your] selfish subjective experience/relation to . . . objective reality"?

Ayn Rand lived long enough to discover and present an immense system of thought as that guide you seek. If Stephen lives to a hundred, he may write a magnum opus to also help you further along.

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.