frank harley
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Posts posted by frank harley
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Frank said:
Its clear by now that the argument clearly lies in what science is. The hypothetical deductive method relies on a rejection of the "arbitrary as unworthy of consideration" mindset....
Well, no. the arbitrary is just as good as any other notion...or 'concept'!
That's because the philo-epistemo-metaphysical-logical status means nothing. What's only of importance is if the statement can be made into a testable hypotheses. Again, 'null hypotheses' means all unproven hypotheses are equally void of content.
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Illya , your wasting your time. As before, your hoped for integrations are a result of your own misintegrations.
Your (and Blavatsky and Sheldrakes) desire to be accepted by advocates of reason will never be obtained. Mystics have nothing to trade with.
You have no idea what reason or mysticism is and that's why you want to fit the square peg of mysticism, the attempt to gain knowledge through means besides reason, into the round hole of science, the systematic use of reason to identify facts.
Illya said:
The misunderstanding is yours! If you and Blavatsky, Armour and whoever else, want to redefine mysticism and religion as something that uses reason to obtain truth, then you will have to remember that you are attacking a straw man when you use your nonsensical usage as a foil against the Oist position on mysticism!
Science is the method of obtaining truth via the identification of the facts of reality using reason. Religion is the belief in supernatural nonsense that is the result of using an invalid method of justification. Mysticism is differentiated from reason by its method of justification in particular the use of emotions as justifiers.
Illya said:
What is groundless is your attack of a strawman. You don't know what mysticism is. Oist don't accept your categorization of mysticism or religion.
Illya said:
listen carefully Illya. Oist regard mysticism as EVIL. A moral individual hates evil! A moral man wants no part of evil ideas or those who practice them. Its called sanction. Mysticism is a destroyer of civilization. The practice of mysticism prevents one from identifying the values required of ones life. Ms. Rand stated things as they are and let others confront the facts reality how they choose. Her indictment of mystics is an expression of her moral courage and integrity.
Illya said:
This is complete nonsense. " The heart has neurons and complex neurological nets that are independent from the brain. The heart also has more and stronger connections to the brain than the brain has to the heart" is a completely irrational and contradictory statement. My toe is connected to my foot exactly the same way my foot is connected to my toe. You don't know what a connection is either.
Illya said:
You are equivocating on value here. Your values are not hers because in this instance you are not talking about the same thing! You are attacking a strawman....
Illya said:
Another instance of you categorizing science and reason differently from Oist. Many-valued logic is not scientific or reasonable to Oist. This is your rationalization for embracing contradictions via misintegration.
Illya said:
Oh, she did indeed, and righteously! The attempt to turn the law of identity into a "habit" (Sheldrake) is evil. The attempt to make the irrational and the rational the same thing is evil, one could not survive doing so.
Your barking up the wrong tree. We eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil around here.....Judge and prepare to be judged....
>>> Many-valued logic is not scientific or reasonable to Oist.>>>>
...etc... The key to science is the possibility that 'any' concept can be converted into a testable hypotheses. This would include those brought about by a mystical vision. To this end, we speak of science using 'null hypotheses' that 'all' hypothese are equally null from the start. it would therefore stand to reason that concepts, that form hypotheses, are all null in equal measure.
Science does not favor binary logic. Rather the opposite case can be better made that tested results and internal competition for the best answer indicates fuzzy logic of the 'sort of-kind of' variety.
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Beautiful. Naturalized concept is Conception that precedes Sensation, and hypotheses are its free expressions. That's change in the making and evolution toward true knowledge (scientia).
As for math being fundamental to nature, I have my own understanding. I have mentioned that conception is fundamental to a reality. The reality I meant was the Reality of realities, that is, our physical reality (Body--Environment) is a subset of this absolute, superset Reality. It is the metaphysical Reality of absolute everything and absolute nothing, also simply known as Existence--Nonexistence. This is as much philosophy as I can master.
I did not say that numbers are not real. In fact, numbers are reality. They are pure consciousness. They are not things. They and their geometries help us visualize our context. They also help (re)connect Perception with Conception and to Sensations. I have no problem with mathematics, especially structural math, but I do have a problem when others are confusing concepts for actual things.
As for consciousness affecting things, there is no such scientific consensus in QM. It's like saying that space causes change in objects. What space does cause though is the context where the objects can exist. Once objects exist, they can adapt to space and integrate themselves within it, changing it to match their will as they go along. Objects with consciousness that allows them to extend throughout space. This is not quackery; it is real. Particles and galaxies do it, and all we need is to apply it to our human philosophy and life and off we go!
Well. no: naturalized concepts are those that purport to explain how nature works. The problem is that scientists don't like the term because it sounds philosopihical (mirable dictu!).
Wigner spoke for himself, not for the community. His point, internally speaking, was that while most of his fellow QMers took a Godel-influenced Platonic view of math, they nevertheless insisted that their discoveries were subject-independently real.
Again, Wigner's point was that the match was too close. There comes a point (long-crossed in his opinion) at which math ceases to become only a tool, rather, begins to direct the outcome.
This has nothing to do with our conscious minds bending an outcome.
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I don't know where you got that info, but it's inaccurate. What you see on my avatar picture is the bioelectromagnetic field of the heart that they study. They can measure it; it is physical.
P.S. Only because they are the only ones doing this research does not mean that they are wrong.
Electromagnetic fields are just that, regardless of their source. There would be a measurable EM field due to the rather large nerve that creates an elecrochemical charge. that's because all nerves run on...electrochemical, auto-created impulses.
When you get excited, or run a lot, or have sex, the nerve activity increases, telling the heart to pump more blood, faster, to supply tthe brain with more oxygen (among other things!). But this is high-school biology, not serious research.
Moreover, a good high school biology teacher would never say, "bio-electromagnetic'.
The info i obtained was by listening to your peeple talk on youtube while i was typing.
And as for 'only ones doing the research' this doesn't pass the laugh test. research that's not shared is assumed to be prima facie fraudulent, or non-existent.
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One of the most annoying sights when watching the news lately has to be the endless international bullshitting going on between nations, for example the "tension" between the Ukraine and Russia. To me it is a huge sign of the shift in global culture. Objectivists tend to talk about changes in the American culture, rightly so because it can be argued to be the best we have right now. But the global culture probably says a bit more about man's fundamental beliefs, especially since the world is more interconnected, people can know within minutes what has happened on the opposite side of the world. In an international setting where there is no easily identified global culture people tend to search for a commonality when thinking about world events. Pre-WW1 I would assume when word reached about a nation invading another nation, people would choose sides, "who is right?", "which nation should we support?", "should we even care?", etc. People we're generally more self-interested or at least asserted an opinion if it was not self-interested. WW1 and after everything shifted to what is in the best interests of the world, how do we keep the peace, etc. Today, it has degraded even further to just avoiding war outright, force is not even considered to try to keep the peace (an already bad idea, but at least it was some sort of goal). When nations have issues with each other the last thing on their minds is war, armed forces if used are used to posture, everything has to be brought to the negotiation tables. The best example of this is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, endless forced "negotiations" at the behest of the U.S. on Israel, and more than half a century of continual petty violence.
All of this is the D mentality on a grand scale, using Peikoff's DIM idea. I think it is a really bad sign, because either it is going to continue like this for awhile, our balls castrated metaphorically, or someone will grab power out of the chaos.
People today have developed an anti-war mindset precisely because of the horrors of the two world wars.
Otherwise, I believe that your suggestion that the US is somehow whimping out is far off base. To this end, perhaps you might explain DIM to the un-initiated, such as I
Lastly in two specific cases that you mentioned:
* I believe that 'bullshit' and 'tension' are poor words to describe the Ukranian situation. You have the overthrow of an unpopular, pro-russian government whose support was located in the Crimea, and Don Bass. Now it's evident that a regional majority want to become part of Russia. Fighting it out is lose-lose.
** Re Israel-Palestine, yes, we're forcing both sides to negotiate because all-out war would de-stabilize the entire region, from which we derive oil.
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Permit me to offer a Spinozan perspective into the debate regarding Walmart:in particular and coroprations in general:
In his 'political tract' he noted that the '-cracy' in democracy, meant the people are empowered to change things,(kratos in greek means more like 'direct' than 'rule' as such).
Having empowerment but not using it is a definite statement that one accepts the status quo--that there is nothing to direct.
Walmart builds huge boxes, pays poorly and refuses to hire full-time--all in the name of economic efficiency.
Oth, all corporations are chartered by the states, who have the power to set wage, full-time status, and assess large-scale efficiency againt environmentl impact and the sociocultural benefits of promoting smallness of business scale.
Ditto for lobbyists as they're registered under a code of conduct -
I think you are escaping the context of the situations. Buying the store as some business representative and buying everything in the store as a customer are different contexts, right? Why would you mix them when not required? Merchandise is a collection of things for sale in the store. I asked everything of merchandise or every thing of merchandise. Is this clearer now?
Compare to my understanding: the most fundamental nature of existence is conceptual, not sensational. By fundamental here I do not mean our reality.
So conceptual "unit" is unique to individual? "Man" being an open set is not unique to an individual. In fact, it is not unique, unless you just like picking different words for the fun of it. It seems that "unit" is a particular way Miss Rand thinks. She applies her thoughts mathematically, not visually. More so, her conceptual side refers to further concepts, like "man," where man is not an exact individual in a specific context, but merely an unbounded set of such individuals who may not exist. This is an instance when she took her conceptual side farther than the real.
There are no numbers in nature. Numbers are basically points on an imaginary coordinate grid. We may refer this grid to reality, but we may also not do so and keep it purely numerical. This is another instance where Rand goes beyond reality. I also want to note that people do not behave like numbers, unless they are machines, in which case the concept of "man" will have to be redefined. Differentially relationships may resemble numerical, but I think Rand ignores any kind of changes that are non two-valued.
>>> the most fundamental nature of existence is conceptual, not sensational. By fundamental here I do not mean our reality<<<<
I agree. To conceptualize is part of our DNA. Oth, there is nothing that assures us that our concepts will lead to science.
Speaking of which....my experience in science indicates that its practitioners have a really hard time with the c-word. Rather, a 'concept' to science is nothing but an idea, or generalized thought that hasn't found it's usable form as a hypotheses. to this end, a 'naturalized concept is one that corresponds to how nature works,by way of the possibiity of forming a hypotheses.
You've explained Rand's use of 'unit' quite well, thank you. That it does not correspond to set theory is fine,as i can easily adapt.
If numbers are not real, then you fall into the obligation of explaining your way out of the 'Wigner conundrum'. As a truly great QM Physicist, his later book questioned how QM can explain nature, insofar the match between QM results and the math is far too intimate. So if math is mind-dependent, so is QM!
In other words, the results of QM would not exist independently of our minds...
A good example of his claim came ten years ago--after his passing-- with Dyson's discovery that the algorythmic sequence of spectral lines matched the infamous Z-function of Riemann, created in 1824!
In any case, yes, there's a strong argument for the naturalization of math--that it's discovered like everything else in nature. First developed by Quine, the latest is by Penny Maddy, who's actually out at U Cal irvine, a short walk from the Rand Institute, btw.
In fact, Dyson is convinced that Maddy offers the best epistemic explanation for his self-labeled 'discovery'. Wigner, for his part, died a hard -core Platonist.
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The quantification of emotional response began in the 1930's with Schracter. it's a measurement of response from the optic thalmus.
Things are far more sophisticated now; perhaps this is what the 'heart/math is all about(?), which I'll check out & respond accordingly.
My particular pov is that economic transactions are far too emotional-- which is nothing more than to say that we're victimized by advertising into making the wrong purchasing decisions.
<<sex is rational-emotional when money is rational-rational>>
Perhaps you meant 'while' for 'when'? No on both, imho. There are rational elements in sex and emotional in money...
Post scriptum:
heart/math is utter nonsense. for one, they're talking of ;'their' reserch, 'their' laboratories, ad nauseum...
'Unseen energetic level' ??? Please. Earth's energetic system interaction????
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I should have said that emotion is ought to be an act of volition and that we would need to learn how to regulate our emotions. Emotional economy (E) is a such motivational base.
The act of purchasing can be with a different currency, viz., with emotions, as I explained. Sex is just another side of explicit trade. If you want to compare it with money, sex is rational-emotional when money is rational-rational. Both are explicit when noncontradictory by having rational as their dominant elements. Implicit relationships are much different from them. So, for example, (true, social) friendship will be emotional-emotional, when E currency is emotional-rational. These are crude dichotomies, I know, but hopefully you get the gist of variability.
Emotions have been found to be physical and quantifiable. Check the Institute of HeartMath research. Semantics will only be applied when gradations of emotions will be differentiated by the technological means.
The quantification of emotional response began in the 1930's with Schracter. it's a measurement of response from the optic thalmus.
Things are far more sophisticated now; perhaps this is what the 'heart/math is all about(?), which I'll check out & respond accordingly.
My particular pov is that economic transactions are far too emotional-- which is nothing more than to say that we're victimized by advertising into making the wrong purchasing decisions.
<<sex is rational-emotional when money is rational-rational>>
Perhaps you meant 'while' for 'when'? No on both, imho. There are rational elements in sex and emotional in money...
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Miss Rand notes that "unit" lies at the base of both the conceptual (as a unique perspective of an existent) and math (the number 1)
On the conceptual side, she uses an analogy with the concept like "man" being like an open ended set that includes every man that is, was and will be.
On the numerical side, Pat Corvini makes the case that every instance of 3 is exactly the same (relationship of a group of members with one of its members taken as a unit),
Thanks for the response. it would seem as if she's saying that 'unit' is a naturalized concept--ie gender and numbers are natural?
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Units are not concepts.
Here i'm requesting an objectivist explanation:
In set theory a 'unit' is defined as an aggregate of two or more facts or things that have something in common.
Yet because we can find commonalities in any two things or facts, the number of units consists of a larger infinity than the infinite number of facts and things themself.
The same can be said of 'concept' if we're dealing with qualities of things-- ie 'money' for all objects used as purchasing power, etc...at the same time they might be classed with either 'worthless trinkets', or "status symbol."
In other words, the human use of concepts seems hyper fluid: things get aggregated and conceptualized according to moment to moment utility. My own opinionm is that this mental adaptiveness is an evolutionay trait. Thisis why I'm of the school that says concept fundamentally ferers to meaning.
Yet to have a 'natural' concept would indicate a particular way of aggregation that's somewhat set in stone. Moreover, in point of fact, 'objectivism' outside of its Randian context means just that!
In any case, philosophies are what they are because the adherents feel that their way of grouping into concepts is more important than others. Or perhaps you disagree, and contend that the objectivist way is 'natural'?
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1) Emotion is an act of volition. This act may be grounded in logic (like in Objectivism) or not. That's "internally" speaking. "Externally," emotional responses are given to trade for goods, services, or some value from another person. In other words, volition is first, and then the response. For example, you are not forced to buy things in a store, but you should pay for them, not steal them. You select an item by volition, and pay for it by emotion. The difference is that the payment itself will not be considered invalid if it is not based on purely mental disposition.
2) I consider money an explicit currency that thus involves explicit payments. As far as its usage is explicit (not merely thinking about money, but actually using it), it is rational. On the other hand, emotions are inherently implicit payments that are objectified in signals. It's like paying by faith. Faith, in this instance, is merely an emotional state of a person.
I would say that emotion contains volitional elements.that form the content of what's being expressed. Oth, the expression of emotion is not; we all know how importantly difficult it is to keep emotions under control.
Aristotle wrote that we choose our children's emonal responses for them thru education (paideia). For example, if I were to say 'Dogaloo akbar- the dog is great', it would not definately not be in a mosque in Cairo among a bunch of teenage theology students.
Money is nothing but purchasing power. That said, yes, there's a willfull, emotive desire on the part of a few to have more than others. Likewise, the act of purchasing contains an emotive element. That's why it's so easily linked to sex on teevee commercials.
Yes, there's a semantics to emotions: 'I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm in love', etc....The problem here is that the expression of language precludes further discussion, which is to say that the signing is direct, unidimensional, and rebukes the courtesey of a response.
To express an emotion is to leave the linguistic field, which is what kant called 'delirium'. A sane person does this on occasion, while the insane person, by definition lives by his/her emotions.
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Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with what I know so far, and am still learning of Aristotelian logic. Appeals to mathematics, demonstration or even proof presuppose the validity of several different issues than what you have eluded with here.
I'll have to look more into the School of Salamanca. It's nice to know that the reading of Aquinas may have contributed to not only natural rights theory but Austrian economic theory and just war theory as well. If Aquinas' writing has the power to influence the School of Salamanca, what influence do you think Aristotle's writing may have had on Aquinas? (Rhetorical question. There's no need to answer)
From the 'Organon', 'Peri hermeneis'. or 'Regarding interpretation' is the standard Aristotelian text that deals with propositions and language.. Most readers neglect the significance of Book 9 and the infamous 'problem of future contingents'; a sea battle either will or will not take place tomorrow.
Otherwise, this is more or less proof that Aristotle considered cases in which null and negative values are as real as positive assertions. Therefore, a general theory of logic (which Aristotle never developed) would have to account for all possibilities. This would include 'null-A', Lukasiewicz, et al...
I disagree with Aquinas' use of Aristotle. Therefore, although deeply admired for their intent, this indicates that, regrettably, there's a serious flaw in the Salamanca arguments. Humans simply don't exist in a state of nature as 'naturally good' because the contrary is seen everywhere as well.
Aquinas bootlegged Aristortelian 'fusis' (what's natural is what's found in nature, everywhere, into the social realm in which various competing philosophers state what's 'natural' for humans. and then deductively pound away.
We admire Salamanca for supporting the Indians against Spanish genocide, and Locke for opposing an idiotic king's claim to own everything in his realm. But we're a bit edgy about Nietzsche's natural superiority of the few, and sickened over Robbie George's claim that homosexuality should be made illegal because it's unnaturallly unable to procreate.
But the base argument is common to all: that we're better off listeninh to naturalist explanations than not.
Oth, I vote with Aristotle that humans are zoon politikon. We believe more or less what our society thinks is right, and the best way to change individuals is to change societal ethos. Claims of 'naturalness' are nothing more than non-reflection on how norms, customs and laws came to be.
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Out of curiosity, frank, how were you persuaded to follow (or not) Objectivism?
Rand's literature is about the constitution of The Sunject. So without even having read her pure philsophy, her work would be deemed philosophically important because, after all, the most important question you can ask in philosophy is 'What accounts for subjectivity?'
Galt and Roarke struggle to maintain an identity. As over-achievers, they (rightfully feel that their reward are insufficient. Moreover, both raise the issue as to how deprived the world would be without their services.
Then I began reading the 'pure' philosophy. Since I do have a background in philsophy (masters thesis on Kant), I do have disagreements as to how he's treated. Yet these are minor compared to Rand's major thrust which, most agreeably, is to place philosophy on scientific grounds. hence, 'Objectivism'.
Via her epistemology, her theory of language would be considered 'causal-referential', which is a remarkable insight.. Truth is justified (ostensibly the function of epistemology) by the creation of concepts. In this sense, there is nothing to be said of anything outside of the unit of reference--the word itself--which creates meaning.
In short, she has squared a circle by standing both as an exemplary novelist and a philosoper of serious reference.
That being said, I reject all -isms because this suffix implies that the particular belief is beyond scrutiny and criticism.
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Aside from the mathmatical reference, you appear to have stated my point in different terms.
I have little use for basic set theory (ZFC) in my line of endeavors. Nor have I familiarized my self with Born's Equation. I do recall that at one time, it had been mathematically demonstrated that bumblebees cannot fly. Believe it or not, it was discovered that the math was wrong.
Epistemic justification starts with recognising that there is difference between infallible knowledge and falliblle knowledge. Trying to understand this by referencing QM might have something to do with the confusion.
The reason you do not step out in front of a speeding truck is because you know that answer is not 'nothing' is the real outcome.
I was thinking more about how they laid the foundation for the discovery and implementation of man's rights, as a natural endowment.
I cited ZFC as an example that the notion of nullity having real value has integrated itself into the philosophy of logic and set theory.
Born we-wrote the Heisenberg ;uncertainty equation' in a from which demonstrated mathematically that A do not equal A with respect to communitivity within his matrix algebra.
In terms of physics, the epistemology of infallable causation -- standing in front of a speeding truck-- is simply a probability of '1'. So for the sake of epistemological argument, yes, one might say that all non-1 probabilities are 'fallable'. Or 'uncertain' in the words of Heisenberg and Born.
And yes, again, people have a hard time grasping that 99.9% of all science deals with probalities less than '1'. That's because all want to be certain in a Humean sort of way.
This disjuncture between science and daliy commonalities/avoidences begain with Darwin. Mutations are gradual and probabalistic, only gradually leading to a new, adaptive outcome.
Re Locke and Paine: Their concern ,as written, was the freedom of citizens with respect to the crown. This involved the rightful ownership of property because under kingly domain, he owned everything. An excellent example of this would be the Doomsday Book of William the Normand, after Hastings,
The principle, as stated was that a farmer is entitled to the land that he/she works. For both, and Rousseau as well, the notion of any absentee ownership/rentier was unnatural. By this logic, half of America's farmland woud be owned by Mexican day-laborers.
The notion of property belonging to labor refers back to the old Roman law which , later, the Graccii Brothers struggled to uphold.
Likewise, again, Natural human rights began with the Salamanca school's reading of Aquinas. We like to say Locke-Rousseau-Paine because, with the exception of Binswanger, we all understand the intimate connection between the French and American Revolutions.
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Like all corporations, Walmart is chartered by individual states. The 'charter' is a glorified license to practice bizness.
States elect their congress and gub-nor by a democratic process. That i may or may not be satisfied with the results is therefore beside the point. For example, here in Gaw-ga,one is free to eleect offishuls who do or do not have sex with barnyard animals while on duty.
Likewise, the elected people may or may not choose to pass laws restrain either/both lobbyists and/or corporations. These laws may include open disclosure, registration and contact forms for lobbyists with restraints on gifts.
Big box proposals may or may not be rejected based upon merit--such as wage rate, full-time commitment, environment impact, and efficiency cost-benefit versus social benefit of small business.
My opinion is that those congress-persons who have sex with barnyard animals are also inclined to take bribes. And since Walmart can afford bigger bribes, they win hands down over Ma & Pa. But ultimately, in a democracy. right-ness resides with the majority--with due respect to individual rights, of course.
In this case, I maintain that said majority simply isn't aware of the power that they really have...
Now this leads to my second point, which concerns inevitability and natural law. To this end, yes, the mechanisms behind market forces are said to be natural. So yes, big does eat small, and bigness permits the spread of risk, the cheeper purchasing of goods to sell, and the ability to maintain lower profit.
But since we all know that, it would be as foolish to say , 'Hooray for market forces' in the same sense that we would pull for all viruses and bacteria just because we make cheese, wine, and certain antibiotics from them.
Likewise, we don't blithely ascribe airplane crashes to gravity; rather, why were we unable to better counteract gravitational pull?
In other words, being human means having the capacity to use natural forces to our advantage, To this end, yes, the discreet use of market forces is beneficial. This we ascribe under the rubric of 'capitalism'. Offering carte blance, however, is to hopelessly confuse naturalism with moral obligation.
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That was a failed experiment on this thread. I have learned from my mistakes. Also, this thread is only about the Objectivist Rhetoric. I simply wrote my background for the new viewers, who may be unfamiliar with the kinds of debates I have been leading on this forum.
So, let me start this again. I was a Marxist, and I was persuaded to learn Objectivism exactly because it is diametrically opposite to what I knew before. Now I am not a Marxist. Yet, I am also not completely persuaded by Objectivism. So, how were you persuaded to follow (or not) Objectivism?
In a Kantian sense, going from one 'diametric opposite' to another is an example of what he called the 'fallacy of antinomies'.
That the mind is pre-rigged to formulate in a manner of 'If A, then non-A' says nothing as to where reality might lie.
To this end, formulating contraries as competing conjectures is a sound method IFF one fairly ascribes a 'null hypotheses' value to each....
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The central nervous system refers to your brain and spinal chord.
The peripheral nervous system refers to all of the various nerves which permeate the rest of your body.
The human heart does, in fact, have its own dedicated neural net. So do the intestines. That these areas might exhibit consciousness is . . . another matter.
This clearly does not contradict your post; I mention it simply because you might find it interesting.
Let's just say that the notion that we feel from the heart is an outworn metaphor. Emotions are derived from the brain.
Another goodie would be 'spirit' Prior to the discovery of metabolism--or the body's ability to produce its own energy-- humans believed that 'breath' (pnuma, atman, spiritus etc,,,) abandons the body upon death. And then it floats upwards to heaven because heat rises!
By contrast, n present day usage, 'spirit' has no material foundation.
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1.) Yes, the positive result served to exclude her involvement. There is nothing in Aristotelian logic that prohibits this. If all of the evidence points thus, and there is nothing that contradicts it, nothing in this sense indicates an absence of evidence . . . not an evidence of absence (of nothing, or of nothingness).
2.) Epistemic justification is based on the self-evidency of the law of identity in conjunction with other developments in the field of epistemology.
3.) Essence is not a metaphysical quest. Aristotle missed this point as well.
4.) Human beings, as a species, are bound by natural law. In this sense, I admire some developments brought about by Cicero, Locke, and Paine,
*No, pleople have a hard time with the notion that zero is just as good a number as any other one. Moreover that, say, 'negative' results on a Pap smear means that you're healthy.
In law, again, 'no result' for a DNA test means that, criminally speaking, you were not present.
These, in any case are just a few examples as to why null set is included as a real entity in basic set theory (ZFC). Disagreeing Objectivists are free to express themselves accordingly while tested, and flunk.. LIkewise, that because Born's Equation demonstrates in-your-face non- communitivity of basic arithmetic, all of QM makes no Aristotelian sense.
*Yes, epistemic justification follows logic.And the logic of photon polarization (spin) is that the second particle measured from an emission will always be opposite that of the first, although we don't know the spin of the first until it's measured.
Logically, then, the particles must talk to each other at a speed far in excess of their own velocity. But Feynman himself said that this was 'illogical'...So help me...i'm confused....
* Aristotle saw that his fellow Greeks, et al, had demonstrated many ways of classifying the world of things. His 'meta', in this case, was simply to say that the essential way of classification is by causal reference, of which they're four.
The birth of Phenomenology, centered on Husserl's project, was in great measure a reaction to Wittgenstein's proclamation in the Tractatus that, in essence, all metaphysics is nonsense. In this sense, phenomenology tries (or tried) to chart a causal reference of subjective human experience. In other words, what are we, essentially, in terms of how we feel? A
Again, Sartre's answer was that we should acknowledge the answer is 'nothing' as a real outcome in so far that is has real consequences.
*Locke and Paine's 'naturalism' refers more to an application of Aquinas pace Aristotle: That humans were born free is evinced by the anthropology of the native americans, ostensibly a 'natural state as opposed to the chains of their civilization.
The missing link is the Salamanca School of c1560 which wrote of universal human rights
OTH a modern critique of existentialism wrote that humans are subject not only to biological inevitability but constrained by social laws as well. In the case of Sartre, it was the encounter with Marx via Althusser: "Class struggle is the motor of history".
As for Cicero, yes, he wrote as a Stoic that we must accept things we cannot change because they're written 'rerum natura', or facts of nature. Human activity must therefore engage the sphere of activity that's changable. Indeed, I find him compelling, too.
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1. This switches the context. Of course, if DNA is found at the murder scene, and the identification of the DNA matches Guesde's it demonstrates that the DNA is Guesde's, not Amanda's. Why is there a need to introduce null-ness?
2. A is A gives no indication as to what 'A' is. True. Reality does not come pre-labeled. A is A serves a principle, something to guide a method of labeling, of identification - where contradictory identification is to be avoided.
3. I'm not much of a Sarte fan.
1) Because the trial was for Knox; Guesde had already confessed. His positive DNA served as a control to establish that the test worked. Knox's negative therefore proved that she wasn't there. In any case, there arte countless cases --legal and otherwise-in which negative results have significant meaning.
2) If A=A cannot indicate what A is (a point to wjhich I wholeheartedly agree) then the expression cannot served as an epistemological tool . This is because Epistemology is about how we justify our beliefs that certain things and exprtessions are true.
3) You're free to disagree with Sartre in three ways: a) maintain the Hussseain search for essences.
claim that Husserl's project was not worth the effort to unend and c) Agree with Sartre that the search for essences is over, but disagree with him that the solution is absolute freedom.If ©, you'll more or less be obliged to take a naturalist account of humans as opposed to a phenomenological one. In other words, as a species, we're more or less conditioned by natural law, as are other animals.
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having read through the posts, permit me two clarifications:
1) Emotive response is not automatic. Rather, it's tied to the cerebral cortex into the mid-brain, or thalmic region.
In brief, we learn what we should have emotive responses to as society teaches us. This, btw, is Aristotle 101 : 'ethos pathein. Ethics is what we've learned to show passion for.
2) Money might be said to have an emotive value in so far tthat it's utility is based upon faith. Throughout far most of monetary history, money was not baed upon something else of real value. Moreover, the experience of the 19th century revealed that far from stabilizing the economy, both gold and silver served to de-dtabilize, and for obvious reason: The speculation against the metals reverbirated to the price of goods.
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I see that you are an individual who is very learned in economics. Please, can you give a critique of my Neo-objectivist economic theory?
Ilya,
What you're offering is a political economy--not 'Economics' as such.
Economics tries to deal with the allocation of scarce commodities regardless of the political system, while your offering a vison that's based on the workings of a particular system.
As such, i promise to read tonight and reply in some detail.
BH
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#162 harley
"Part of this ethical refusal involves anecdotes of exception---my boils, my aunt's need of a transplant, etc...a bit more justifiable is indeed the question of moral hazzard as to how doctors might exploit government participation."
In reality the refusal is based on , to paraphrase Thatcher, free hospitals are great but hard to build when you run out of other peoples' bricks
"everyone else' in the world? is going on by pretending that socialism is practical(will work), so far America is still holding out on that , but I'm not holding my breath
Thatcher gained a degree of both admiration and hatred in equal measure for her cliche-mongering that replaced number crunching. What's sad is that she did have a capacity for science, having studied under perhaps the most famous biologist in England. Regrettably, that makes her far more the liar than the ignoramus.
Basic number crunching reveals that americans pay nearly twice as much as europeans for the same quality of health care. But she knew this....
Without dealing in large-scale isms (which serve far more to obscure real issues), certain economic segments seem wore practically agreeable to a collectivist/taxation approach than others.
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Philosophy is the science that answers the questions all the other sciences presuppose you have already answered....
For sure. philosophy is the only 'science' that has no need of either measuring or quantification.
Does Objectivism integrate philosophy and science well?
in Questions about Objectivism
Posted
The scientific method says that the only real content is that of a tested & supported hypotheses.