ruveyn1
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Posts posted by ruveyn1
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I understand how a slate or a piece of paper can be blank. I do not see how to extend this attribute to the workings of a human brain.
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Does anyone here know how to take an electron apart?
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For a thermosat to function no consciousness is necessary? Given the full context of reality , for a thermostat to function no consciousness is necessary?
That was an example of a negative feedback control. There are plenty of negative feedback systems in nature without a scintilla of consciousness.
It is the -principle- of negative feedback I was getting at.
Here is a climatic negative feed-back loop. The earth gets warmer, the oceans evaporate off lots of water vapor, lots of clouds form. The clouds reflect the light of the sun back into space and that acts to cool of their earth. Evaporation and cloud formation moderate temperature increases. It is a cooling system that works by negative-feedback and there is not a bit of consciousness to it.
ruveyn1
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Sorry I really want to try and understand, but as far as I can tell, all of your posts seem logically unconnected to each other and to mine. Okay, sure, having no law is bad, but who in the world said we should have no law? What does that have to do with Hobbes as previously discussed?
Hobbes' basic thesis is that men living in a state of no law, each man doing as he sees fit will live in a state of perpetual war. There will be no industry, no culture and as Hobbes put it,. the life of man will be nasty, brutish and short. I concur with his assumption. Where there is no law or authority to deter violence the strong plunder, rape, injure and kill the weak. Look at Africa in the lawless countries. It is just as Hobbes presumed.
So Hobbes thesis that an authority to impose constraints on the community is necessary for any kind of social peace and order is correct.
A lawless land will become a desolation of destruction and woe.
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Now you're making a completely different third claim. Okay cool, Walter Block has written criticisms of Stephen Pinker's empirical claims about the state and less violence. Sure, Hobbes may have thought cooperation impossible because he saw lots of war. But what does that have to do with your claims that, hey, law is a good thing. Still totally different from Hobbes' claims. Still doesn't tell us whether or not Hobbes claim that social cooperation without an absolute sovereign is justified.
Law has its dark side, to be sure, but look at a country where there is no law. Somalia. I would want to live in anything like that. Without some kind of adjusting, adjudicating regulatory function to discourage really bad behavior we would be in for a world of pain.
And here is a practical question: Without a central taxing authority how would we afford a defense against countries who are perfectly willing to steal from their citizens and subjects the money to make very heavy duty military material. Do you think we could maintain a sufficiently good Army on a voluntary subscription system?
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Huh? What am I wishing? Are you clueless about what Hobbes actually says?
That's not really what Hobbes says though. The argument wasn't simply, that gee, we need laws and order and security, and that these are good things. The argument he gives is that it is literally impossible for two people to cooperate, that they will be like wolves and eat each other up, unless a third party is like a wolf to both of them, ergo, we must have an absolute sovereign. Quite a different claim than the trivial one of, oh well we need laws and rules to prevent crime.
Consider the times in which Hobbes lived. The hundred years war that lasted 116 years and the mayhem that took place between Catholics and Protestants on the continent. Hobbes was empirically correct in his skepticism about natural "good behavior" between humans. Stephen Pinker has pointed out that per capita the world is much less violent now than it was during Hobbes time.
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This isn't particularly relevant to the folks at Skeptic, but it is relevant to the discussion in general. Everybody's favorite anarchist, Stefan Molyneux, beleives the climate debate is primarily about feedback systems. That is a conclusion I came to independently, but he presents it much better than I could. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gDErDwXqhc.
There it is. The models are wrong. If we had a scientific theory that produce such poor predictions it would have been busted and discarded by now. But all we have are those damned models.
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You haven't answered my questions. I understand the power of destruction. I just don't think you understand what I am trying to get at here. By the logical implications of total destruction of the enemy as you and pretty much any other Objectivist, including me, says in regards to war, the U.S. would never consider anything less than total annihilation of any city standing in our way with nukes, etc. What is the point of having a standing army, other than the possible invasion of the homeland? We would never put any troops on the ground anywhere, but simply go nuke crazy. Terrorists launch attacks from Iraq, we go nuke every major city, bomb every major military installation, wipe everybody out, and be done with it? Never, no matter what, put our troops in harms way?
Look at it this way, is there a difference between bombing a mosque despite human shields to get the insurgents (like we refuse to do in many circumstances today), and nuking an entire city to get an insurgent "regiment" despite the whole cities populace being used as a human shield?
The difference is in the body count. The principle is the same: kill the enemy and damn the collateral damage.
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The bigger the government (in either scope of function or geographical extent) the more incompetent it is.
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When I consider the law against stealing property which belongs to others, and realize that it is always a beneficial law regardless of the society in which it is utilized, it suggests to me something of a more objective nature than just arbitrarily "made up". To me it is evidence of a natural moral law governing the behavior of humans, much like the natural law of gravity governs the behavior of physical objects.
Now, popular collective societal consensus can either choose to uphold the law against stealing... or it can choose reject it and accept the consequences. But it seems to me that that objective moral law is always there just like physical law is...
...and the only difference is in how we respond to it.
If there is such a thing as "natural moral law" why are there so many moral and ethical systems. In the realm of physical science you do not find that kind of variety. There are at most a few plausible systems. I agree that moral law is constrained by biological necessity. Any moral doctrine that precludes the maintaining and preservation of human life is bound to fail if for no other reason than its practicioners will become extinct.
Even so, these biological constraints do not uniquely determine moral codes or even trim them down to a few.
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The only proper government function is to put the use of retaliatory force under the strict control of objective law. Even today government doesn't run law enforcement agencies-the police officers do. It doesn't run courts-judges suppose to be independent. Government even doesn't pay for these services-it doesn't create any wealth. Government only provides laws for police and courts to act which is its legitimate function and forces population to pay for it, which is violation of rights and initiation of force. So how a government which very existence is based on the violation of rights can protect rights? Only privately and voluntary funded law enforcement agencies and courts are compatible with the free objectivist society. The only proper government function, the legislation, would be voluntary funded by those who need it most-private security companies and courts.
What is your working definition of "objective law"?
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You said:
. But then this gets into trickier questions such as whether any perfectly rational country has ever existed, or whether one can exist, who really initiated the war, or how to divide blame for a war based on which side was more irrational than the other, and that's definitely beyond my level.I respond:
If you say let he who is without sin cast the first stone, the sinners shall surely win.
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Theorizing how human brains came to be so complex (ie: evolved from a more primitive form) is not invalid at all. See wiki's entry on the human brain or on the evolution of human intelligence.
The universe isn't a conscious entity capable of tuning, or making adjustments wherever necessary. def universe: All existing matter and space considered as a whole
"fine tuning" is an unfortunate phrase. It implies conscious adjustment. However adjustment and modification can occur with no consciousness. A negative feedback control loop functions strictly according to physical laws. Not an ounce of consciousness there.
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That's not really what Hobbes says though. The argument wasn't simply, that gee, we need laws and order and security, and that these are good things. The argument he gives is that it is literally impossible for two people to cooperate, that they will be like wolves and eat each other up, unless a third party is like a wolf to both of them, ergo, we must have an absolute sovereign. Quite a different claim than the trivial one of, oh well we need laws and rules to prevent crime.
Wish all you will. Out there are people who regard their own judgement as supreme and will act on that assumption. That means that someone is going to make life miserable for others. The best way to handle this is for sane people to get together and establish a system of rules (i.e. law) and someone to enforce the law (without enforcement the law is worthless).
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Personally, I don't think it even MATTERS if there is AGW or not, the only proper solution is to wait for the market to sort it out. Or, sort it out yourself and make gobs of money out of it.
Oh, and not buy beachfront property.
Markets are not a magic bullet. Climate change is a physical problem and has to be addressed scientifically before it can be decided what steps (if any) are appropriate to take. First, there is little doubt that we live in a warming era. Since the end of the Little Ice Age (circa 1715 c.e.) the weather has been warming. Second, the next thing to determine is what are the major drivers of this warming trend. As a related question it behooves us to work out what human activities (if any) are driving this trend and how do they compare with natural drivers (such as orbital variation, variation of the tilt of the Earth's axis, cloud formation moderated by tertiary cosmic radiation). Are there countervailing trends due to natural drivers?
Right now the biggest problem is that we do not have a real climate science. What we have are climate models. Unfortunately models have many adjustable parameters and with appropriate fiddling a model can be cooked up to fit any data. We are lacking a rigorous climate science. Why? Because climate is average weather and weather is a physical process based on chaotic dynamics, which our mathematical methods are not all that good at handling.
Here is a snippet from the Wiki article on turbulence:
Although it is possible to find some particular solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations governing fluid motion, all such solutions are unstable to finite perturbations at large Reynolds numbers. Sensitive dependence on the initial and boundary conditions makes fluid flow irregular both in time and in space so that a statistical description is needed. Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov proposed the first statistical theory of turbulence, based on the aforementioned notion of the energy cascade (an idea originally introduced by Richardson) and the concept of self-similarity. As a result, the Kolmogorov microscales were named after him. It is now known that the self-similarity is broken so the statistical description is presently modified.[3] Still, a complete description of turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics.
Until we have such a description, we do not have a rigorous science of weather and climate
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>To say, "I support anarchy," is the same as saying, "I support the rights of individuals to engage in acts of non-objective justice,"
But isn't "objective justice" simply a floating abstraction? Is there any example of such justice anywhere in human history?
English Common Laws built up over centuries of prior judicial decisions. The kind of decisions that held sway indicate or where reflective of an underlying ethical understanding of how people should interact in a community. The decisions that subsequent judges agreed with held by stare decisis. Other decisions were over ruled in subsequent cases.
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Murdering someone is wrong because it violates that person's right to life (obviously). But if we believe in rights, then we must respect the rights of others, or they are not bound to respect ours. To murder someone else, you sacrifice your own right to life in the process. I would say that is why murder is wrong, it is wrong because the murderer sacrifices his own right to life, (and liberty and property). It is not really selfish to murder, but self-destructive.
I was at a talk Yaron Brook gave a few months ago, and he said Bernie Madoff wasn't really living the virtue of selfishness because he sacrificed his own right to liberty and property when he defrauded people. He sacrificed his own integrity. It isn't properly selfish to sacrifice yourself like that, "selling your soul for a nickel," like Ayn Rand would say.
What is your position on collateral damage and death during a war. Little children are blasted to gobbets by falling bombs. Has their -right- to life been violated?
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Who cares what Hobbes said? The real question is, is this what YOU say? Apparently you agree otherwise you wouldn't have posted it. You (and Hobbes) are wrong.
The problem isn't that humans have an ego and MUST make judgments according to their own understanding: this is a FACT of nature and a requirement of life. The problem is those who don't think for themselves are swayed by some other authority, such as society or god or whim, and they take that authority on faith. Doing so they are unable to convince others and thus turn to FORCE others to accept their point of view.
Force is the evil here not "egotistical beings who claim their own judgment as authority". Our own judgment is all we can go by, who elses judgment would you have us go by?
What is your purpose on this forum? It seems it is only to bash Ayn Rand. You understand this is forum dedicated to Ayn Rand right?
You have made many assertions which you seem unwilling or unable to defend. In another thread you claim that Ayn Rand made errors and I asked you to name a few. You haven't done so, so I will ask again: name specifically some things you think Ayn Rand got wrong.
I agree with Hobbes. If there is no government or no authority then there will be strife a-aplenty and the evil strong will eat up the less strong or at least eat their lunch.
Every human society that has ever existed and survived for any significant length of time has has some form of regulating behavior within the society to prevent widespread plunder and violence.
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No tuning implies a 'conscious' choice between alternatives.
A thermostat - furnace system will tune the ambient temperature to oscillate gently around its set point. No consciousness is necessary.
All that is required is a negative-feedback regulating function.
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It's fine to regard ourselves as rational animals as long as we know better than to use animals as models for our behavior.
We model ourselves after other animals. Our teachers, our parents and our heroes.
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ruveyn1,
Any means, at any time, and in any situation? If we were to commit ourselves to destroy in capital letters, the Iranian regime, militarily and spirtually, and taking out their government leaders would obviously be an essential, would there be any thought to how we did it, or would we just nuke Tehran perhaps several times, ensuring no one was left alive? Or would we decide that that is not necassary, despite the fact that we don't owe the Iranian people anything (self-interest and so forth), and only "tactically" bomb their government and spiritual leaders? Taking the latter choice over the former, may leave us slightely (to the extent we don't have perfect knowledge of their leaders whereabouts) in harms way, but the former may seem a bit over kill, wouldn't you say?
So is it the case that if we don't have perfect knowledge of the situation, that whenever we go to war with some puny third world nation, we should nuke first, don't take the chance of leaving anyone alive, and never clean up later (which I agree with, we shouldn't clean up, unless whoever is left learns their lesson)?
In reference to the Marquis of Queensbury rules, I am not saying there should be some outside rules set by polite society. I am just saying that with the might of our armed forces, we have a lot of options, not only nukes. Is there a justification of using "conventional" weapons over nukes?
Learn from history. How did the Romans finally deal with Carthage? They leveled it to the ground. Delenda Cartago est! It is said of the Romans they create a desolation and call it peace.
The Roman republic and empire lasted 1200 years. How long will the U.S. last?
ruveyn
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Do you consider becoming reconciled to a bad thing, a good thing?
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Any means which secures our survival (and perhaps triumph) in the face of religious insanity are permissible. The object is to survive and that mean the object is to win the struggle. Victory or death. Victory AND death. Our victory, their death.
It is as simple as that. The end (our survival) justifies the means (nuclear and even chemical weapons).
When Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate General was asked what to do about the Yankees who put Fredricksburg VA to the torch, he answered simple:
kill them. Kill them all.
Playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules against opponents who fight dirty is high stupidity. We not only want to sink to the level of our adversaries. We want to go lower still so that we attack them from below.
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According to Christian myth even the Angelic Beings require the rulership of God. One third of the Angels rebelled against God and were cast down from Heaven.
Here is the thing. As long as there are egotistical beings who claim their own judgement as authority there will be strife. That was the point Hobbes made in arguing for the necessity of government.
Two rational beings can look at the same events and facts of nature and come to not only differently conclusions, but contradictory conclusions. It happens all the time.
Reblogged: Government Science vs. Economic Growth
in The Objectivism Meta-Blog Discussion
Posted
Some of the scientific advance in the U.S. prior to the rise of Hitler in Germany was a direct result of state subsidize science in France and German. An American physicist who wanted to excel in quantum physics simple -had to go to Germany-. Quantum physics prior to Hitler was a German cottage industry. Our very own J. Robert. Oppenheimer (American) got his PhD in physics at Goetingen.
Our later pre-eminence in science was in part the result of the purge of Jewish scientists in Europe. Thus we got Einstein, Teller, von Neuman and Fermi. What can I say? Thank you Adolph?