Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

JMeganSnow

Admin
  • Posts

    4091
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    13

Everything posted by JMeganSnow

  1. I've been playing D&D Online recently (it's free!), as Lehren Ratbreed on the Thelanis server.
  2. Personally, I don't really like the idea of being replaced by silicon parts, though. Computers break down/wear out after 10 years or so, I've been alive for 30 without any major malfunctions. Clearly the organic parts are far superior.
  3. It is important to note that Ayn Rand's discussion of ethics included a discussion of "what IS ethics?" Ethics is a normative science, a guide to action. It pressupposes a being which can act and possesses volition. A being which cannot act requires no guide to action. A being which has no volition needs no guide to action. She then goes on to explain (using the example of the immortal, indestructible robot) that choice and action only mean anything in the face of an alternative, and there's only one fundamental alternative: life or death. To understand the basis of the Objectivist ethics, you need to go back to epistemology and to metaphysics and understand these underpinnings. Then you will understand why we base our ethics on this fundamental alternative and on the choice to live. Kant, on the other hand, considered reason impotent and reality unknowable--the CI is based on a mystic metaphysics. You don't reject Kant on the basis of his ethics, you reject Kant's ethics on the basis that he was totally mistaken about the nature of reality and of reason.
  4. That, and the very concept of proof presupposes the axioms of Existence, Consciousness, and Identity. You can't PROVE that other people exist (or that anything exists), only validate it. It is the material of proof, which is presupposed by any process of proof. Ask him to prove that HE exists.
  5. Personally, I kind of like some of Heinlein's proposals from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for replacing the "pick from this list" representative selection method. My personal favorite is the idea that to become a representative, you have to accrue a certain large number of signatures from supporters. You then represent those people positively, instead of having a large portion of people in your constituency who voted for the other guy. It would be interesting to see the result. On one hand, the legislature might be so large that it couldn't get anything passed (not necessarily bad), or it might be so small that only the very best people could get into it. Personally, I'd like to see FEWER positions elected. Why am I voting for District Attorney again?
  6. Not as far as I'm aware. It depends on why you're not interested in sex or romantic relationships. If you're rejecting sex as "icky" as a part of some sort of ascetic lifestyle, that's one thing (and bad), but if you just don't have much, if any, sex drive, that's another thing.
  7. Tomas Sowell talks a bit about this in his book Applied Economics. America doesn't pay for the research and development of most new drugs, it's simply one of the few remaining countries where there is some incentive for pharmaceutical companies to continue research and development on new treatments. It's not as straightforward as the fact that the FDA has looser standards than other agencies in other countries, however, it has to do more with patent protection and government price mandates in other countries where drug prices are subsidized or outright controlled. It is often easier to get drugs developed in the U.S. approved for sale in other countries, and often easier to conduct trials there as well. But the fact that the drug companies can actually make a profit in the U.S. on their EXISTING drugs (even if only for a short time, until the product goes generic) means that there's still drug research here. It also helps contribute to the high prices Americans must pay for drugs--we're subsidizing everyone else. If pharma here falls to the same pricing mandates as exist in other countries, expect research to vanish.
  8. From what I've seen, most people generally become interested in philosophy (that is, in forming some kind of integrated view of existence) starting around puberty and peaking in college. Some go downhill after that, some continue to work on ideas.
  9. Welcome to the forum, Joe. Academia is a bad place to look for rational people nowadays--so much of it is completely divorced from any connection with reality. I found, once I got out of the academic world, that my apprehensions about how rational people were increased dramatically.
  10. Also, this question forgets that values are hierarchical--the achievement of some values depends logically upon other values. The Objectivist "cardinal" virtues are that because they are fundamental. How long could you continue to be happy and love your family and your life if you have to fake in order to do so? How long will THEY continue to love YOU and be happy when you become angry and resentful about this procedure? How long will it matter to you either way if you blank out the facts in order not to show that you're increasingly dissatisfied? As you cannot build a house by starting with the roof, you cannot build a happy life by starting with a bunch of derivative values (THIS job, THIS family situation) and trying to go from there. Even if it hurts and upsets a lot of things, when you realize that your foundation is shot you NEED to go back and fix it. If you don't do it NOW, you'll wind up having to do it later whether you want to or not, and by then your situation may be so bad due to neglect that you may wind up with a lot greater loss than if you'd bitten the bullet up front.
  11. Welcome, Lee. There's a really great quote in Atlas Shrugged that helps me when I'm feeling emotionally overwhelmed: It's easy to feel lost and adrift in a period of transition, and a lot of people seem to take away from reading Ayn Rand that there's something wrong in asking for and receiving help--in the very act of wanting something from other people. This is incredibly counter-productive, and you'll realize it if you just look around you. Look at all the things in your life that were improved and made possible by other people. Are those things bad because you didn't create them all yourself in your life on some desert island somewhere? No! The idea is, rather, that you don't have the right to demand what you want out of other people--you must trade for it. You must bring something to the table. And a lot of the time people in your position suffer from self-esteem issues where they really, truly believe they have nothing to offer; they feel like beggars hoping for some scraps of attention. But this forum doesn't exist because the forum members are gracious dispensers of charity. The more knowledgeable people around here are here because we enjoy discussing and observing other people's intellectual progress. Oh, not every thread is perfect and people do sometimes get snippy with each other, but ultimately we're happy to have you here and we get a lot of enjoyment (that is, payment) out of discussing with you. So don't feel like you have to strain yourself through insane contortions in order to discuss here. If people don't want to talk with you, they won't, but you can be assured that there's no shame in asking for help (albeit, you may not GET much quality help here, so be aware) or enjoying company.
  12. I get that part, what I'm wondering is, could you theoretically have reason without volition? It's an arbitrary assertion in any case since we've never seen it (and probably never will), I'm just wondering if there might be something that I don't know about in that area.
  13. There's a difference between being asked to define your terms and being asked to needlessly play a sort of "synonym swap". You should only have to define once (perhaps at length, if clarity is an issue), then you're done.
  14. I'm not sure I understand the difference in the sense that you mean--when I introspect, I apprehend both as requiring a mental switch, a mental effort (also a physical effort with the eyes). The primary difference seems to be that focusing to think requires me to continuously maintain the effort, whereas once I've focused my eyes on something, I don't really have to keep on focusing in order to maintain it. I think that we very definitely need good terminology that adequately describes the difference between what non-conceptual animals do when they, er, operate and what humans do when they think. It's not really possible for us to project the operations of a non-conceptual consciousness, which is what leads to all of this anthropomorphizing of animal activities as being volitional. (Heck, if they're being lazy, people even do this with computers, weather, and just about everything else that "acts", regardless.) One of the major flaws of these studies of animals using sign language or (sheesh) "money" are that they neglect the fact that animals (humans included) are terrific imitators and what might be described as "fiddlers". So, yeah, if you introduce something new to animals, they're going to imitate the researchers and fiddle around with it. I do this myself--when I'm, say, trying to figure out how to open a difficult package, I'm not thinking in any conceptual way. I'm not saying to myself, "hmm, let's try this corner, oh, there's a tab here, I wonder what it does . . .", I'm just running it around in my fingers and feeling for a gap in the shrink-wrap. The higher animals seem quite capable of this level of functioning. However, if I were to attempt to design a shrink-wrap package that would be easy to open, THAT would require conceptual level thinking. I couldn't just start with a pile of shrink wrap and start fiddling around with it and hope to arrive at any useful conclusion. Animals lack this ability to "run ahead" of perceptual data (or anticipate it or whatever you want to call it). If you ever watch animals in their "fiddling", this lack is apparent. When a human is focused, their actions are all very purposeful and direct, very economical. (You can tell when someone is mentally preoccupied or distracted, too, because they start displaying a lot of aimless body language.) Animals almost always display this aimless body language. (I won't say always, but from watching animals I can't recall times when I haven't seen it.) They pause, hesitate, restart a task, put it down, wander away, come back, start it up again, and they're never thorough. Even when they're doing something that you'd think ought to require a directed strategy (like killing prey), they're likely to decide to, say, change their grip at an inopportune moment and lose it. It always cracks me up when people, say, describe lions or sharks as "killing machines", when if you actually watch them they don't seem very machine-like at all, more like a committee of concerned neighbors trying to approach a difficult person about the homeowner's association rules. I'm also not so sure about this co-extensive thing. I could see saying that reason and volition are co-extensive IN HUMANS, and since we haven't run across any other species with either there's absolutely no reason to say that they aren't generally co-extensive, but doesn't Dr. Peikoff use an example of a hypothetical race of angels who reason automatically and without volition in OPAR? (I think when he's talking about how rights are derivative of the way reason operates in humans.) Now, I realize that the purpose of this hypothetical lay in talking about rights, but is there an established causal connection between reason and volition or is that, also, hypothetical at this point? I'm not sure it's appropriate to say that reason *requires* volition, period, until we know more about the causal connection there.
  15. What, exactly, is a "defining characteristic"? From the way I usually hear this term used, it means that characteristic is a sine qua non (a "without which not"). For example, in the case of an automobile, you might declare that the defining characteristic is that it must have a motor in order to qualify as an automobile. Other characteristics, such as possession of a windshield, catalytic converter, or bucket seats, are not essential. However, the fact that a certain characteristic is essential in this way does NOT mean that you can replace the concept with this characteristic. You can't say that, because an automobile MUST have a motor to qualify as an automobile, therefore anything with a motor thus qualifies AS an automobile. This would result in airplanes, boats, and washing machines being classified as automobiles. Anyway, it is not man's possession of a rational faculty that means man needs rights, it is the fact that this rational faculty operates in a certain way (volitionally) and is necessary for man's survival. You need to read the rest of what Rawls has said in this thread before you go around making assertions about him being "right".
  16. Wow, projecting much? I think I can see your brain up your nasal passages. I'm sure Mr. Watkins will be thrilled to hear that you think he has "potential"--since he's the editor of Impact and a contributor to The Objective Standard. Granted, this does not necessarily mean that all of his work is of exceptional merit, but his article on Broken Units really helped me to clarify some bits of epistemological confusion I was having. Elaborating on logical ramifications for those of us who may not have discovered ALL of them for ourselves is the JOB of intellectuals, so it makes absolutely no sense to complain that Mr. Watkins was simply elaborating on what Ayn Rand already wrote. Heck, Ayn Rand herself criticized this idea quite severely in The Art of Non-Fiction via a hilarious reductio ad absurdum where she declared that if you take this attitude, no one could say anything new after Aristotle figured out that A is A, because everything is included within the law of Identity. Are broken units fundamental? Certainly not as fundamental as, say, measurement-omission. However, it does help to make a bridge between what might be described as "pure conceptualization" and actual use of language, whereby a brainless baby (or a brainless adult) is nevertheless referred to as a man (or a human) in common parlance. Knowing that these broken units DO in fact fall under the purview of the concept (they fit in the "file folder") even though they lack an essential characteristic is important to understanding the precise operation of the conceptual faculty. Precise understanding of this operation is vital to being able to defend the Objectivist Epistemology. So I hardly think this is unnecessary even if it isn't some sort of major innovation. However, if this is all so "illusory" and unworthy in your mind, perhaps you'll provide us with some valuable article YOU'VE written elaborating a salient point of epistemology instead of just going around belittling other people's work.
  17. Her facial proportions have always looked really off to me. Chin too short, forehead too large, jaw too wide (for the size of her chin, that is, I like wide jaws on women most of the time). Not that she's not pretty enough in her way, the proportions just bug me. I have similar problems with Jennifer Garner, quite apart from her permanent vapid look. Anyway, Cuddy insisting on payment was not inappropriate--she was doing her job. It was a bit inappropriate for Chase to go ahead and reattach the thumb without permission, but if the guy had come in unconscious they'd have done it anyway without asking. It might have been appropriate to demand that Chase pay for the part of the surgery that wasn't covered by the insurance because Chase took it upon himself to make the decision, but that would have set a bad precedent in the world that hospitals must operate in nowadays. Trying to convince the beneficiary to accept the *rational* conclusion that he'd benefited from the surgery and was, indeed, obligated to make good was a perfectly appropriate thing to do. And notice that when he sent in a check to start making payments, Cuddy tore it up, which was also an appropriate and *generous* thing to do. With the new 12% payment plan from Atlantic Net, they could probably afford to write off the $16K hit as long as the insurance company wasn't suing them. It's easy, as an outside observer, to sit back and say "The guy wants to be irrational? Fine, fuck him." We're not dealing with a hurt and frightened man and a thumb that's already starting to decay. We're not trying to size up the legitimate possibility that he might sue for malpractice if we DON'T reattach his thumb. (After all, in retrospect, he was clearly not in his right mind when he made that decision.) The thing I didn't get about that scenario, though, was "why doesn't this man have Workers' Comp?" Unless he was at home working on a personal carpentry project, whatever company he was working for is liable for the costs of his injury. (I broke my arm on the job and they paid for the X-Rays and doctor's visits.) Even if you're an independent contractor, the person/company that hires you is still liable. (Found that out in New York--the company I worked for was required to purchase Workers' Comp insurance for our contractors even though they lived in different states and worked out of their living rooms.) Oh well, in creating drama, writers often miss out on little details like that.
  18. This is not to say that your *career* is synonymous with your *job*. It is perfectly legitimate to have a job that pays the bills so you can pursue a career that doesn't, however, if you do this, be prepared for everyone to refer to your productive career as a "hobby".
  19. Normally, I'd close this thread because discussing with Rawls is amazingly pointless, but I'm enjoying reading what the thoughtful members are responding, so carry on. Diana Hsieh had an interesting post a couple of days ago about "volition" in animals. Before the subject comes up, yes, apparently some apes and possibly dolphins can be taught to use a symbolic "language" to, say, ask for a banana. Supposedly they will even teach this "understanding" to other apes/dolphins in their social unit. However, as David said more briefly, this does not mean that they are conceptualizing. Humans will often use concepts as percepts (Ayn Rand even writes about this in "The Missing Link") without going through the full process of measurement-omission et al. They can form associations and utilize them from memory, but this is not the same as forming concepts out of whole cloth, which quite young humans do with astonishing alacrity. My brother Gareth, for instance, did quite a lot of inventing new words for things and insisting on using HIS words in favor of the English ones when he was a baby. We know that other humans possess a rational capacity the same way we know everything--though a process of observation and induction. And we know that animals do not in the same way.
  20. Oh, excuse me. All of us--except you, since you deny it--possess the capacity to choose to be rational or irrational, within the limitations of our mental capacity, of course. And, no, rights don't only exist because a rational being is capable of using reason to determine how it ought to act. Imagine, for instance, a mythical perfectly-rational being which has no volition about its rationality/use of reason. (Dr. Peikoff uses this same example in OPAR, I believe). Such a being cannot decide to be irrational, its consciousness is perfect, automatic, and non-volitional. It is because the use of human reason is NOT infalliable, automatic, and non-volitional that we need rights, NOT because we have reason and can use it to decide what to do, but because we have to CHOOSE to think and constantly monitor how well we think if we're to arrive at a rational conclusion and afterwards act in a rational manner. *Because* we have the capacity to err, either through irrationality or simply a lack of severity or misinformation, we require freedom--freedom to experiment, see the consequences, change our minds, and always pursue better thinking and more rational decisions. Reason is a constant process in motion and a lack of political freedom and respect for rights leads to mental stagnation, the antithesis of human life. Oh, and in that earlier post it should have been "stolen concept".
  21. Um, actually this article and his other work in the same area are one of the major reasons why Don Watkins is now working for the Ayn Rand Institute.
  22. Names in particular can be difficult to remember because, alone, they are essentially meaningless. (Dates are the same way--when I read, say, a history book, the dates generally wind up in my memory as "some number, I don't know what"). So, in trying to remember them, you're basically trying to perform an act of memorization with only a single (or very few) repetitions. The solution is to put them in some sort of CONTEXT with something so that they take on some kind of meaning. I remember the names of FICTIONAL characters VERY well because I often think about and/or discuss the meaning of their characterization, so their name becomes fraught with meaning. So, treating real people as characters and doing the same sort of mental analysis might help you remember the names. With dates, it's usually helpful for me if I relate it to something else that was going on at the same time, as in "oh, that was about the same time as X". It's not the number that's difficult to remember, as I can remember all the two-weapon-fighting modifiers in D&D quite well. It's the total lack of meaning that's the problem.
  23. Ultimately, this entire discussion is a huge example of concept-dropping. People only need rights because reason does not function automatically--i.e. we all possess equally the capacity to be rational OR irrational. The very concept of rights is genetically dependent upon the volitional function of reason.
×
×
  • Create New...