CriticalThinker2000

Because by 'only two', it means that the entity still maintains identity. Something that could literally do anything, at any moment, is not real. It lacks identity. I'm saying that you're offering a false alternative, either something acts in one and only one way or it acts in any way and has no identity. If that's the alternative then of course you choose the alternative that's consistent with identity, but that's not the only alternative. This formulation of causality, that an entity must act in one way and one way only under the same circumstances, just doesn't follow from the law of identity. I'm not saying it's not true, with respect to the material world, I'm just saying it's not axiomatic or a corollary of an axiom. You definitely can induce that the material world follows a mechanistic form of causality. I agree that to induce higher truths you need to have already recognized this generalization, but that doesn't mean that it's not induced. It just means that it's low in the hierarchy of knowledge. You asked "how do we know they can't" act any way at any time. We know they can't because that would violate the law of identity. We also know that the material can act in one way only under the same circumstances because we have made the generalization properly and we can apply it to each new observed instance, just like other inductions we make.

Yes, our ideas are not very popular in the culture so we continue to move towards statism. How does having no government make our ideas relevant? Ok but what about the one guy who isn't willing? I don't really get what you're saying but suppose you're right, then he's made a mistake. The fact remains that there must be some way to enforce the arbitration. OK, I'll have to look up your arguments there.

I would agree with you if I thought man was incapable of error. People have honest disputes regarding contracts, property lines, etc all the time. But all this means is that the constitution of a country must be unequivocally clear and that a majority of people agree with it. It doesn't require that every single person in the society understands individual rights. But that IS necessary (along with the constituents being infallible) for what you're arguing for. But again, I posit the scenario of an honest dispute over a contract. The loser of the dispute, despite being honest and rational, may very well believe that he has had his property stolen. An entity with a monopoly on force is necessary to enforce the decision, lest he take action to recover 'his property'. The idea that rational people will never have an honest dispute over something important requires that they are infallible. It's utopian.

Well you obviously didn't come right out and say it. You implied it. This isn't a matter of what I want or don't want, as if I made some bald assertion based on subjective belief. I gave you reasons and justifications for why force is not an economic good. Economics deals with production and the voluntary exchange of values. Force can ONLY destroy. It is not exempt from economics, it is the antithesis of economics. You continue to compare 'security' (force) with goods and services (values). They are fundamentally different.

Isn't using the phrase 'profit motive' to describe this guy's motivations just as disingenuous as describing his actions as 'selfish'? If he were worried about profit why would he scam his customers thereby destroying his career, ensuring that he will never make another penny, and ruining his own life? This is not the profit motive at work and identifying it as such seems like a package deal smear on the term, which is used to describe the rational motivations of actors in a free market.

It seems to me that it's like any kind of self-motivated study. It is what you make of it. You can copy and paste answers or you can think about the concepts, concretize them in your own words, and chew them. It's hard to retain abstract ideas by simply reading them.

lol alright, sorry, sorry. I'll limit my generalization to James. You don't think two honest people can have a disagreement that needs to be settled by an objective entity? I actually think you're very intellectually honest and rational, and obviously I think I'm honest and rational, yet we are disagreeing right now. Even honest, rational people can have disputes over property rights and all sorts of other things. Even honest rational people require an objective court system with a monopoly over an area of land to arbitrate, and ultimately enforce the results of the arbitration. Rand wasn't a utopian because she recognized that even rational people make errors and that there will always be criminals in a society. It's strange to regard freedom as coercive. It's a contradiction in terms. A proper government merely says, if you pull a gun, then we're going to pull one on you. You can't be coerced in to be uncoerced. <- that strips 'coercion' of all of its meaning.

Butter me up! heh heh heh. Well, no I don't think that's fair but we're clearly talking past each other so let's figure out where the misunderstanding lies. I believe a major part of the problem lies in how you're using the term 'man-made'. I think that this lies at the root of your mistake because you keep drawing a distinction between land and other forms of property based upon this concept, 'man-made'. Could you explain why is a glass man-made but a sowed field is not? They are both instances of raw materials that have only the potential to become values, sand for the glass and an empty field for the farm, which become values when man applies his thought and effort to them, heating the sand for the glass and sowing the field. At this point they become values secured to the creator of the value. So how you're using the term 'man-made' must be very different than I am interpreting it. What makes something man-made is not that the physical matter has been created but rather that man has shaped the raw material into a value. Others in the thread are right to mention that property rights are freedoms to act. To be clear, a property right over a piece of land is the freedom to use the land as you see fit. In your second post you said: How do I have the right to the crops I'm growing if I do not have a right to the land I've planted the crops into? This is an arbitrary distinction you're drawing. A field of crops IS a farm. What do you mean by, a farm is made out of materials but the land is not? The land IS a raw material. It may, once farmed by man, give rise to other raw materials, like cotton, but land is as much a raw material as cotton is. Neither have value in and of themselves although both have the potential to become values when they're transformed. Looking at rights as a political idea that exists to give man the ability to live his own life for his own sake, I don't understand how you could exclude land as property. What happens when I want to build a house on a strip of land? Who decides whether I can? It's not as simple as saying 'that is just logic' when you don't have a proper understanding of what wealth and property actually are.

Her views on a coercive business monopoly do not apply to her views on government for the simple reason that production and force are not interchangeable. Yet this equivocation is always made by anarchists. You talk about competition between governments. You are stealing that concept from economics, where it means competition in production- competition in the creation of value, and applying it to competition in the realm of force- competition in destruction. Force and production are opposites. Production is about creating values. The best force can do is stop the destruction of values by destroying the destroyer. Destruction is the nature of force. Competition in production presupposes that force has been extracted from the interaction between people. This is why the idea of a market for force is a stolen concept. A market presupposes the extraction of force. Competition in force (anarchy) leads to exactly what it sounds like it would lead to: competing gangs and a spiral of escalating... force.

But that is not a philosophic starting point. That is a derivative idea that depends on prior knowledge and context. It depends on a proper understanding of wealth and production, among other things. You keep saying that and making this distinction between land and other property. Is it true that the glass in my hand is not property because the sand it's made of preexists my mind and labor? I'm just repeating myself now but all production (at the root) is a rearrangement of entities that preexist man.

Bodies of water are publicly owned in this country. Using them as an example is probably not going to lead to a fruitful discussion. In any event, the type of property right that you have over a given piece of property is determined by the nature of that property. Intellectual property is not identical in to land rights which are not identical to personal property rights which are not identical to water rights. Notice that libertarians make the same mistake with respect to intellectual property. They compare IP to land, and when it's discovered that the two forms of property are not exactly the same, they declare IP to be invalid. The philosophical foundation of all property is what is important. Land is NOT a source of material values. The mind is the source of material values. Land does not just give us values. Land has to be shaped and formed and toiled with such that it becomes a value. A big stretch of arid desert is not a value and neither is a field in Iowa until a person takes the actions (directed by the mind) to make it a value. You say that land is not man-made but what does it mean for a value to be 'man-made'? It means that man has re-arranged a metaphysically given piece of matter such that it becomes a value. No raw material is man-made. The plastic fork I'm holding is no more of a man-made value than the land being farmed in Iowa. The plastic fork is a rearrangement of metaphysically given oil molecules that existed before man just as the field in Iowa is a rearrangement of a metaphysically given stretch of earth that existed before man. The philosophic foundation of why both values are property is the same, but that does not mean that the property rights protecting a fork (personal property) and a piece of land (or a lake of water) are the same. I agree with Snerd's point. Who then, if not private individuals, should have control over the ground you walk on? Who should decided what you can and cannot do in a specific area? Snerd is reminding us (and I needed reminding) that the institution of private property exists to give man control over the values he creates so that he has control over his own life. Viewed from this framework, land is a foundational form of private property. That's probably why it is a focus of Locke's work, although I never really thought about that before.

I think that you've misunderstood my point due to my poor wording. Causality says, an entity can only act in accordance with its nature. Suppose that an entity could act in two different ways (and only those two ways) under the same circumstances. It would not be a violation of the law of causality. The way you're formulating causality, as 'an entity has to act in the same exact way given the same exact circumstances', is actually the law of causality plus an induction made regarding physical matter. When I said that all matter acts the same way in the same circumstances I did not mean to imply that helium acts the same as carbon dioxide. Rather I meant to say that carbon dioxide, under the same circumstances, will always act in the exact same way. And separately, helium, under the same circumstances, will always act in exactly the same way. This is true of all physical matter, but this fact is an induction and does not follow as a corollary from 'to be is to be something' (identity). You cannot specify the number of ways in which something can act in the same circumstances merely from the law of identity. This is Binswanger's point regarding consciousness. Consciousness does not violate the law of causality because man MUST choose. This is the nature of his identity. But he can choose to focus or not and does not have to choose the same thing in two different circumstances. Consciousness is an irreducible phenomenon and it is not matter. It therefore does not fall under the induction which is applicable to matter. Remember that first quote from Binswanger that William cited in the other thread: This is what Binswanger meant (I believe) by 'the specific form of causality exhibited by matter'. And what Rand was saying in her extemporaneous discussion on the issue: Edit: With respect to your comment about what chemistry would look like if people accepted that physical matter could act in more than one way under the same circumstances, I agree with you. That a given piece of matter acts in one way and one way only is true, which is why denying it would cause disaster in the physical sciences. But that does not mean that the induction, which again can only be made by observing reality- not as a corollary of identity, applies to consciousness which is a non-material, irreducible phenomenon. I point you back to Rand's quote above. I can't remember if the metaphor came from someone in the previous thread or from How We Know or from my head, but I remember someone likening it to a magnetic field: An electrically induced magnetic field is dependent on the electrons flowing through a wire (as consciousness is dependent on the brain), but it does not follow that the magnetic field is the same as electricity (that consciousness is matter). I would not push this metaphor too far but I think it illustrates the point.

I don't know if I agree with that, as I haven't thought about it much, but I see what you're saying. I don't understand why you're making a distinction with respect to land. What is a farm if not the land? When I plant a row of crops into the ground, controlling the production of my crops requires control over the land into which I planted the crops. How can you sow a field without using the field? The fundamental issue is this: no matter is man-made. The sticks which make up a basket are not man-made. Even the plastic used to build my headphones is a re-organization of metaphysically given matter. The plastic itself is a man-made creation but the constituent parts of the plastic are not. All material production is the re-arrangement of the metaphysically given in such a way that a human value is created. Whether that means taking sticks and weaving them into a basket, or writing a piece of software, or developing a plastic headphone, or hoeing a piece of land, the fact remains the same. When a value is created, the value becomes the property of the creator.

What do you mean 'his wages'? Does the concept of a wage really apply to a person picking sticks in the forest? And why are you distinguishing 'wages' from 'capital'? The Objectivist perspective on property is that the institution exists to give man control, not merely over physical entities in reality, but over the value man creates. Locke's views on land and what he calls the 'mixing of labor' are very good (although it's the mind- not labor- that is the fundamental source of the value created), in my opinion. Land becomes property when you mix your labor with it, ie. when you create value. That's why The Homestead Act was well executed. It gave individuals ownership over land once they made it valuable (by farming it). Once all of the land is privately owned, as Nicky points out, the question becomes: what grounds do you have for excluding land from the institution of private property? What right do you have to take the land from the owner? Edit: Oh, and welcome to the forum

Philosophically, I don't think it's right to formulate the law of causality in those terms, specifically the 'exactly one way' part. The law of identity says that to be is to be something, or in other words, to exist is to have a finite identity. How does one get from that to, 'a thing in one set of circumstances will act in exactly one way'? It's clear to me how you would get from 'to exist is to have a finite identity' to 'no actions taken by an entity will contradict the identity of the entity', or as John Galt puts it, "The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act". I think that your formulation there, while intuitive, smuggles in a (valid) induction regarding physical matter. Namely, the fact that all matter, in the same circumstances, acts in the same way.

I'm sorry I sort of abandoned the other thread on free will. I went away for the weekend and wasn't able to respond, although I've been thinking about the issues a lot lately. I will hopefully be returning to it soon. But in response to this question, remember that the law of causality is a corollary of the law of identity. Your question is the same as the following: "Suppose we observe something which we don't understand. We can attribute the observation to a violation of the law of identity (ie. the idea that contradictions exist), or to a lack of knowledge. Which explanation should be used?" Clearly, when phrased this way, we shouldn't throw up our hands in defeat when we don't understand something and claim that contradictions exist in reality. Similarly, when we observe a phenomenon which we did not predict or are ignorant of, we do not say that the law of causality has been sidestepped. We just acknowledge our current state of knowledge (or lack thereof). What would be the state of science if we attributed every unknown action to a violation of the law of causality? What would Galileo have been able to achieve if he had looked at the movement of the stars, and upon observing their unusual motion, concluded that the heavenly bodies are violating the law of causality?

Rand considers a government necessary in order to place force under objective control. A society of 'competing' governments is not a society with objective law. When there is a dispute amongst two groups, who decides? Whose law is to be followed? There is no answer. There is no objectivity. But the problem with anarchy is deeper than the practical issues. You have to understand that Rand's views on force are different than the traditional libertarian view. Rand identifies force as evil because it is anti-mind, anti-value, and therefore anti-life. Force is not a good to be transacted in, as 2046 believes it is: Market competition in force is a contradiction in terms. A 'market' presupposes that force has been extracted from the trade. Competition in the realm of force is anti-mind and it's clear what this kind of 'competition' leads to in practice. Contrast Rand's view with the traditional libertarian view of force as evil. Why is force is evil? It just is. They then attempt to apply the non-initiation of force principle as a context-less absolute. This ultimately leads to the complete hatred of the state. Look at the libertarian magazine, Reason. They constantly post stories bashing policemen. According to Objectivism, a state limited to the protection of individual rights is not a necessary evil. It is a necessary good.

Honesty is volitional adherence to the facts. Dishonesty is volitional non-adherence to the facts, if I can put it that way. What would it mean to be honest or dishonest if you couldn't choose your views? Your views would be neither honest nor dishonest, they'd just be your views through no choice of your own. I think that you're right on target but what that quote does or does not imply is not obvious without the context to support it. And it does seem just wrong to compare this view to Descarte's view, though as I've stated several times, I'm not familiar with what the word 'dualism' has meant historically.

Alright everyone holdya horses! Before we go about arguing this don't you think we should really understand Binswanger's position? As I thought, that quote is very misleading when not in context. The Oist view of causality is that an entity acts in accordance with its nature. When Binswanger says that consciousness does not adhere to the same law of causality that matter does he is not contradicting this view. I thought very highly of this book and recommend it to everyone interested in this thread. I quote at length (brackets and errors mine): What I just quoted spans several pages. I don't know what constitutes fair use, but given that we are discussing Binswanger's views and only two of us seem to have read this book, I think that it's appropriate to quote him so he's not misrepresented. I also think all of that context is necessary to understanding that quote William posted. All that being said, I agree with him. I think that's some fantastic stuff.

Very interesting, I'm going to have to go back and re-read that to grasp the relevant context. Thanks.

OK, but he didn't explicitly say that consciousness adheres to different laws of nature, right? Anyway, I don't know enough about any of this to have an opinion.

Just an FYI, William is not referring to that paper, he's referring to Binswanger's views in his new book How We Know. I read How We Know and did not notice this. I think I would have definitely noticed it had it been stated explicitly like that (which is why I don't think it was). How We Know is an incredibly dense work of philosophy deserving of a LOT of study before I would personally be comfortable drawing a conclusion like that, or even refuting the claim that it implies this view.

It seems like this question arises from the false view of causality again. Are you looking for an action that caused the action rather than the entity that caused the action? Or am I misinterpreting? I go back to the billiard ball example: Why did the billiard ball roll off at a 45 degree angle? Because it was struck and it is inherent to the identity of a billiard ball to roll when struck by an outside force. Why did the man act the way he did? Because he chose to and it is inherent to the identity of man to choose. I don't get what you mean here. I don't think that would be an inference though, maybe more like a judgement of my honesty, but could you expand on your point?

About what? If you're determined to believe that against your will (since you don't even have one) how do you know he's right? Edit: woops I see what you're referring to now.

But we do know what causes men to act in certain ways. The man himself (the entity) causes his actions by making a choice. I agree that if man did not cause his actions there wouldn't be any need for 'rights', or anything else. You'd just lay down and die, I guess. On the contrary, if your choices were causally necessitated then morality is meaningless. It's only because you are able to make a choice (caused by the nature of man) that morality does have meaning. Also, came across this if you're interested in reading on the subject (it's not too long): http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdspace.mit.edu%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F1721.1%2F45195%2F26114938.pdf%3Fseque&ei=tksQVJG7F4_wgwTS6oGgBw&usg=AFQjCNGwIWOBaD8mv-IRU5l8gdCom6uPQA&bvm=bv.74649129,d.eXY&cad=rja