Easy Truth

As I understand Ayn Rand's approach to such questions, she makes a threefold distinction.  (I am solely responsible for the wording used in this post.)
This refers to the nature and status of abstractions, so it is an epistemological question rather than an ontological one.
Intrinsicists hold that abstractions have an existence or status independent of the human mind.  (E. g. Platonic forms, Aristotelian essences.)
Subjectivists hold that abstractions are arbitrary creations of human consciousness, and can't be evaluated by any criterion having to do with validity or truth, but only by criteria such as convenience.
Objectivists hold that abstractions are mental tools.  They are created by the human mind for use in dealing with reality.  Like any tools, they can be evaluated according to how well they serve their purpose (and how well they are made).  Considerations of validity and truth are an essential part of such an evaluation.  (Conceivably a person might be a lower-case objectivist in this sense but disagree with Ayn Rand enough in other respects not to be an upper-case Objectivist.)
I have stated this in a general way.  To make it more precise, we need to distinguish between the realm of epistemology and the realm of ethics.
A separate issue that can be referred to using two of the same words is primacy of existence (objectivism) versus primacy of consciousness (subjectivism). 

The relationship between brain or DNA and “pattern” is not “is a”. A brain is an organ composed primarily of neurons and secondarily of glial cells, and it has the potential to do certain things, at least when attached to a living being. DNA is a molecule with a particular structure, just as sucrose is a molecule with a particular structure. DNA likewise has the potential to do certain things, and that potential is less tied to the organism being alive.
In comparing your definitions to Rand’s, I notice that Rand’s are very focused and minimalist: they concisely say what the essential characteristics of “life” are. Your definitions say much more, which is a disadvantage. The purpose of a definition is to reduce the difference between two sets of referents to be distinguished, and befitting its cognitive function, it should be a minimal statement of what makes life distinct from anything else. A definition is not a catalogue of all or most knowledge about an existent.
You expand Rand’s definition of life to include having “the ultimate purpose of flourishment”. Why should this be part of the definition? What, indeed, is flourishment? What necessitates this complication of the definition of life? We can still reach conclusions about rational goals and flurishing even if we don’t complicate the definition of life – see various works of Tara Smith on the topic, who adheres to the classical definition of life.

No, there can be no boundary.  Whenever you think you might be able to imagine something outside or beyond the Universe, it expands to include it.  It is the intent of the concept Universe to encompass everything by definition.  All concepts are like that, having open-ended referents.

Is not the view actually put in the positive sense, that it is claimed time is only inside the universe?  Time is an attribute of what exists.  Outside of the whole of existence there is nothing.  Nothing can have no attributes.  Nothing can be claimed about what is not-existence.
All of that is merely laying out foundations of straight thinking in metaphysics to rule out some mysticism.   I would not read Rand as making wild claims about the ultimate fate of the universe, whether it exists endlessly or not or in what form.
 

I would start by focusing on this part of what he said: "This shows". What shows? If the question is "Why should we have private roads", the answer is "Individual rights". If the question is "How can you defend the notion of private roads in light of the well-known disasterous Crapleby Roads Ltd. system of roads in Durham County between 1957 and 1961", then your answer would be very different. (I made the example up, if it's not obvious). The primary argument is the moral argument, and it is up to your opponent to prove that private ownership of roads is impractical in order to tarnish the moral argument. You can't do that until you actually have that supposed proof, and I'm suggesting that you should not act as though it's well-known that there is a problem needing to be addressed by capitalism.
Suppose for instance that your opponent had granted the moral principle of individual rights and then claims that individual rights must give way to The Needs of Society; the response is that individual rights are a need of society, and that violating human rights does not in any way better satisfy the Needs of Society. When they respond by saying "But poor people would not be able to afford the roads, and only rich people would be allowed to leave their homes", then you can ask for their evidence to support that outlandish conclusion.

Just in general, I think it's best to put the burden of proof on you opponent.

In other words, you can defeat Ayn Rand's arguments by refusing to grant meanings to words.
 
Is that it?

Isn't it reasonable to doubt what you said? What is your motive in participating in this forum if its backbone is so useless?

It can be anything, even the old belief.
That's not evasion. To be exact, it's probably not repression, but acknowledging the fact they were shot but then focusing on more important things at the moment.
The fallacy of logical omniscience is not a type of evasion. It's accusing someone of evasion or bad reasoning, but wrongly. Just because we both know that Socrates is a man, doesn't mean we both know that Socrates is mortal. The fallacy would be that I say you're evading because you claim you don't know that Socrates is mortal, despite knowing Socrates is a man. It might make more sense actually to call it a cognitive bias.
Logical omniscience is the idea that if you know A, it also implies that you know everything that follows from A.

If you picked up a log from a fire that was glowing with red embers for its entire length and circumference with your bare hands, I would expect the yell that followed to be loud. In order for concepts to be objective, two things must be present. The object of consciousness and the consciousness of the object.
By moving closer to the fire, I can become aware of the heat radiating from it. The conceptual identification that it is hot converts a fact into a perceptual 'device' that can communicate to you, and be held conceptually by me, even after leaving the vicinity of the fire. The sensations only last for their respective durations.

I see much has been said in this thread but I need some clarification to decide whether to bother to read it fully:

QUESTION:  Anyone here (anyone at all) care to explicitly tell me whether the "Fallacy of Logical Omniscience" is meant to be presented as an actual fallacy in the use of logic, akin to "strawman fallacy", "ad hominem", "equivocation", "begging the question" etc.?
 
Logic and Fallacy

Logic primarily is a process of thinking in which induction and deduction are applied to percepts, premises, knowledge, etc. to arrive at a conclusion which is logically valid (non contradictory and integrative of reality).  Logic is the process of thinking, its beneficiary is the thinker. 
To be sure logic can suffer from fallacy, and men can err.  The urgent need for man to think properly motivates the identification of potential pitfalls and traps he may, in the process of thinking, unknowingly engage in, which undermines his ability to think and hence his ability to live.  As such, the identification and avoidance of logical fallacies is of utmost importance to man.
I fail to see any evidence of an identified logical fallacy in the alleged "Fallacy of Logical Omniscience" and accordingly no requisite urgency for its identification nor its avoidance.
Logic does not depend upon nor have anything to do with the mental states, emotions, knowledge, and certainly not the logical ability or Disability etc. of others.
 
Communication and Misidentification of Audience

PRESENTATION of a logical argument to an audience is effective to the extent it is communicated fully and completely, i.e. all of the premises, knowledge, and all of the steps of integration and deduction leading to the valid conclusion.  In order to present such a topic concisely and efficiently one must make some presumptions about the audience's knowledge and logical ability, as such a "complete presentation" must be chosen within reason, after all one cannot present the sum of all knowledge every time a logical argument is presented.
Arriving at a perfectly valid logical conclusion, does not guarantee any particular attempt at presentation of it will qualify as a full and complete and hence objectively effective communication.  But such a lack of ability to persuade or communicate how a valid conclusion is reached does not reflect badly upon the logical ability of the thinker, and certainly not the validity of the conclusion, although it may indicate a lack of communication skills.
Moreover, were the thinker able to present an objectively full and complete communication (within reason), even that does not guarantee any particular person will (or is willing to) understand.
A failure of communication is not a fallacy of logic.
 
The Error

Presuming the logical ability or knowledge of an audience incorrectly when crafting a particular presentation of a logical argument will generally lead to an ineffective communication, because it results in the presenter presenting too much or too little of one or more aspects, however, this does not give rise to anything like a logical fallacy, it is an empirical error in the identification of the skill and knowledge of that audience.  There being people who actually have the requisite skill and knowledge, this could also be chalked up to "misidentifying what kind of person, i.e. what caliber of mind, one is dealing with."

Instead of a "Fallacy of Logical Omniscience" I would say, there is "Ineffective Communication due to Inaccurate Presumption of Caliber of the Audience."

Bertrand Russell ( 1872 -1970 ) famed British mathematician and philosopher once remarked to a large lecture audience at Cambridge that “....nobody can be certain of anything!” contrary to his insistence on previous occasions that mathematical knowledge was a certain and a provable science. He  wasn't being funny. He of course was being very serious. How his epistamology changed we can only speculate but his lecture did proclaim to the whole world that no absolutes can exist, the tree you see or the car you drive or the meal you eat is not real, forgetting substanuously and unknowingly that he was uttering an absolute of his own.This type of evasion is like stating that the pursuit of knowledge is not only fruitless but pointless at best:that reality is unknowable, that the syllogism is corruptible and prone to error and that thee brain doesn't work; therefore rendering the mind impotent. If one accepts Russell’s quotation above as true, the logical conclusion would be that, if nobody can be certain of anything then everybody can be certain of everything that he pleases. Since nothing can be refuted anything and everything would be permissible. In politics this is called the “double twist” used to confuse voters into accepting facts that are not only untrue but to fall into the condition where a voter voluntarily gives up his independent judgement and concedes to the politician in question that he/she must know something better/more than I do (regardless of the true facts) This is the biggest reason America is falling into an ever lowering ring of fatalism that she may not be able to recover from and that my fellow Objectivists would truly be a shame.

It's hard to know when you reach the point where a conclusion is evident for the other person. 
1) You need to know that you spoke clearly. I think a lot of people take for granted that they actually spoke as clearly as possible. Many times, I've seen people get upset at me because I said that what they said doesn't make sense.
2) You need to know that the other person understands your terminology. I've gotten into many disagreements that are resolved just by ironing out what it is we're both referring to.
3) You need to know that they are capable of reaching your conclusion. Some conclusions would require extensive experience in a field. If a physicist explains something to me, and I don't get it, it doesn't mean I am evading. I might genuinely have a hard time reaching a conclusion unless I studied physics extensively.
4) You need to understand other commitments they might have, meaning that they might have other things going on in their life that need more attention right now. If someone stops talking to you, it doesn't necessarily mean they are avoiding the topic.
Because of these issues and difficulties, if you want to jar somebody, if you suspect they are evading, use their own words. Quote them word for word, especially if two quotes next to each other are in direct opposition. That way, you can ask them about it.
One way to know if somebody is evading could be their emotional reaction to you. If they engage in personal attacks, appeal to emotion, getting visibly upset even if you are very calm, passive aggression, are all possible signs that the person is evading. It's not foolproof, it might mean they are impatient and need to learn how to calm down. That's also a moral error, but it's not nearly as bad as evasion.

That which is random is out-of-bounds to human knowledge; you cannot predict or understand it. 
For instance, you could tell me that there's a 1/6 chance of a die landing on any given side or a 1/2 chance of a coin flip landing heads or tails; I assert that this doesn't count as functional knowledge.
If you had to build cars or skyscrapers that way, we would end up "knowing" that only 1/6th of people who use them will die horribly.  If you planted crops with statistical and probabilistic knowledge, you would starve one year in six.
 
For something to "truly" be random is for it to be causeless (because there's supposedly no reason for any one outcome, instead of another) which ultimately defies the law of identity.  Truly random particles would behave illogically.
 
That which has no identity is beyond the scope of human understanding; that which is out-of-bounds to reason, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist.
It's semantically null to debate over the nature of things we cannot understand; it is as futile as debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  So if there are parts of the universe which we can never understand, there is no reason whatsoever to discuss or even think about them.
 
If you can't understand it then it's a waste of time to try- if you cannot think about something then it "exists" in exactly the same way that unicorns do.
 
But, again, this isn't metaphysical but epistemological.  Note that nowhere in here did I assert whether or not the Copenhagen Interpretation is true; all I'm saying is that even IF it's true, it renders itself irrelevant to the whole of humanity and utterly meaningless.

This is going to be an uphill battle, because the person you're debating with is not being honest. I can tell that just from your description of him above: He claimed that he didn't understand the axioms of existence and identity, but the axioms of existence and identity are self evident, so he is not being honest.
You might try mockery. His claiming not to know anything provides plenty of material for that - he has to assume he has knowledge just to type out his posts on his keyboard. You will also need to point out all of the stolen concepts and fallacies of self exclusion that he is doubtlessly committing with every post.
He has free will, so if he doesn't want to look at reality then he won't.

The passage you quoted defines intuition as a "non-inferential knowledge or grasp, as of a proposition, concept, or entity, that is not based on perception, memory, or introspection" then gives yellow as an example as if it were not based on perception.  It also claims that yellow is not definable but with a moments thought I can come up with "the color of ripe bananas and dandelion flowers" and can recall Rand's insistence that an ostensive definition is valid.  Academic philosophy is quite frustrating for me to deal with.
Intuition is how one gains access to a priori knowledge.  It is a secular version of divine revelation and should denounced wherever it appears.  I think the relation to rationalism is that it allows rationalists to make the rhetorical ploy of an appeal to authority without having to appeal to God.  

That is a great explanation but I think one has to go one step further and spell it out.
In both cases, stick in the water and out of the water, the senses are what is being relied upon. One can't say the senses fool me and yet determine the truth using the senses.

That would be the Pope.

The entire problem with your argument is considering the actual, the concrete to be an "appearance" while considering your abstractions to be "actual" reality (and somehow invalidates the former or relegates them into an "appearance"). This is easily resolved since abstraction, as such, do not exist.

First of all, non-X is either a negation, i.e. specifies absence of X, or specifies an opposite of X, but only if an opposite of X actually exists.  So keep that in mind when formulating or coining terms such as "non-egoistic"
Also recall altruism is an ethical term, it means "otherism" in ETHICS, that is what it means.  It would be a misuse of the term, even if you tried to limit it contextually, to claim you are an "altruist" when "people watching" at a coffee shop because you spend much more time watching other people than staring at yourself in a handheld mirror... There is no valid usage of the term "altruism" in the context of people watching.
 
1. Correct.  non-egoistic means anything inconsistent with egoism, including ethical nihilism.  That said, altruism is non-egoistic.  Black does not MEAN crows, but crows are black.
2.  see 1
3.  "other focused" simply means "focused on others" it has its own meaning and multiple possible contexts.  You CAN be focused on others when people watching.
4.  In the realm of ethics, IF you are focused on others rather than on an egoistic standard of morality, then you are by definition (in that instance" being non-egoistic.   IF you are focused on others FOR egoistic reasons, and it is BASED on an egoistic standard of morality, then in this instance "other focused" is egoistic.

I hope you are not going to speak against sweatshops now.
If I have 5 apples and you have 5 oranges, when I give up 2 apples for one of your oranges, it is because that orange is worth (more than) 2 apples to me.
Some God-type being (or a Marx like being) might think "Gee, that's not fair". -it's not equal: one apple for one orange.
The only thing that is equal in this scenario is in the sameness in the decision to trade. 
The value/benefit received and given may or may not be equal.
But more importantly, the idea that the traded benefits should be equal (especially to some third party) goes against free market principles.
 

How does one objectively and accurately know what the other guy is "truly" gaining
(or losing for that matter)? 
The act of bargaining or bidding is supposed to be gauged by what is to one's self-interest. When we speak of one's own interest, is that based on what one sees at the moment or based on hindsight or some third party judging it?
This could end up going toward the idea of having a third party regulator determining who got what benefit and what is fair.
 
 

Interesting, I had not made the connection between "arbitrary" and anything is possible. (now that you mention it, it's embarrassingly obvious)
So that is at the heart of it. It is what the whole exercise it all about.
We are beings that need to know "the possible" to survive.
We are like hungry mouths, waiting to be nourished by "the possible", and sometimes we take in a trash/poison/virus that is "the arbitrary" that looks like food.
The arbitrary misguides us when we miscategorized it as possible, it will take us well ... to the arbitrary. (sometimes the impossible, after all, it's arbitrary)
And Objectivism is saying that it does not have to be that way. In fact, it should not be that way.
The defense/disinfection starts with "I can know the difference".
Sad to note that they refuse the healing respect we provide when they reject it with "who am I to know?"
 

It may be useful to look at some more arbitrary statements which might actually be true: “Easy Truth has red hair”; “StrictlyLogical is 6 ft. tall”, “Invictus2017 owns a Ford Explorer”. Each of these statements does, on linguistic grounds, either describe a fact, or else it describes a non-fact – they are objectively true or false. But I personally have no basis in knowledge for making those statements, and they do not contitute the recognition of a fact of reality. They differ from Peikoff’s parrot or sand message examples where there is no proposition (the thing you see or hear merely physically resembles what could be speech or writing in another context). His savage math example needs to be modified since it is unclear what his point is, so I’ll rewrite that as an illiterate and innumerate person uttering the sentence “the fourth power of 3 is 81” (you can say this based on experience, without understanding what it means, since in English, you can put words like “second, fourth” before “power” and follow that with another number). This statement too is arbitrary, and in that context it is like the parrot utterance in that the person utters the word “power” without grasping what that term refers to. In fact, I would not even call the sand / parrot / savage math examples “statements”.

So compare my examples to Peikoff’s “soul survives”, “fate determined by date of birth”, “sixth sense” and “convention of gremlins”. In those examples, the arbitrariness of the statement largely depends on the fact that the statements presuppose the existence of entities for which there is no evidence. In my examples, all of the concepts involved do unquestionably exist: I just made up relations between actual existents, without any factual basis for claiming those relationships. Arbitrary statements are not necessarily utterly devoid of relationship to reality, because they can refer to actual existents and invoke no mythical entities.

In How we know, Binswanger has an extended analysis of “arbitrary”, which you may find clarifies the nature of the arbitrary.



"Global warming" (which is nowadays not even a statement, it's just a noun phrase assumed to represent some statement), is an example of the arbitrary: it is asserted as self-evident, needing no evidence.

There is a distinction to be made between a floating abstraction and the arbitrary. 
You can arrive at a floating abstraction in your mind, without accepting any arbitrary statements, by accepting statements without judgment, or holding concepts before you have tied them to reality.
E.g. Someone first introduces you to "justice" before you have the conceptual framework or experience for you to fit it into your hierarchy of concepts.  As a word, a part of the language, you keep a tenuous hold on it in the framework of semantics, without really understanding (before validly forming) a concept of justice.  So you speak with other people using the word "justice"... perhaps accept what other say about "justice" and what it means and how it relates to other concepts, but until you go through the exercise of thinking, and until your concept finally has some attachment to a part of your (valid) knowledge, it remains "floating".  Holding a concept as floating temporarily is not necessarily a vice... sometimes it is a necessary stage, prior to your integration of it.  Rationally you "should" (according to prioritization of time, effort, and your value hierarchy etc.) decide how important the concept is to your life, and if it is important, to undergo the process of thinking required to anchor it to knowledge.
Observe the statement about "justice" might not have been arbitrary, indeed it could have been true.  Suppose, having never really thought of politics or even ethics, you heard it directly from, say Leonard Peikoff, and your closest family and trusted friends, all of whom told you they thought very long and hard about it, and even provided you with an explanation tied to reality, which, unfortunately you could not fully understand... yet.  You can see some basis but cannot form all the connections. You also have independently judged the quality of thought of these people based on other claims they have made.  Here there is at least some evidence for the statement, i.e. that it is not arbitrary, and sweeping it from your mind would be a mistake.  [[If you insist on personally re-investigating the sum of human knowledge in every minute detail ALL THE TIME, and expecting omniscience for validating knowledge, you would never take any medication, step on any plane, or do anything which involved ANY INFINITESIMAL LEVEL of dependence or trust on others knowledge of reality.  Rational trust in something someone says is not blind faith in a statement which is arbitrary, but an assessment of everything you know about, reality, the person, and what they have said]]  Here, the concept "justice" could be a floating abstraction for a time, but with the kinds of non-arbitrary statements of Peikoff, you could start thinking about it, chewing and building the ladder of abstractions connecting justice to reality until the concept is no longer floating. 
In the final equation the hierarchy of knowledge is yours, thinking is something you do by yourself, and the knowledge you build must be built by your own mind.
 
In a sense, a floating abstraction is not (yet?) a validly formed concept (contextually for you), but there is enough evidence not to dismiss it altogether...i.e. that although you have not yet gone through the process of conceptualization and integration, there is some indication or evidence that it is a valid concept capable of integration.  Of course you might conclude after enough thought and weighing of evidence that a floating abstraction is actually an invalid and arbitrary concept.
The arbitrary is not so much a floating abstraction as an invalid concept, a concept for which no evidence exists, i.e. which was reached entirely arbitrarily.  This bespeaks Rand's genius in her naming of it.

Permission is not required for a person to leave premises, not under an Objectivist view of rights or indeed anywhere in the world. It may be impolite to just walk out on a host, but that is a matter of civility and does not get entangled with issues of rights. Permission is required to enter, and once granted it can be withdrawn. This stems from the fact that the property owner has a right to his property, meaning he can do what he wants to with it: you need my permission to use my property. The owner controls the property, not the people on it, so permission cannot be required to depart.
I don’t know what you mean by owning the information that you have, but under a fairly literal interpretation of the expression, this is simply false that societies may decide that you initially “own” all the information you have. If I know (am in possession of the information) that gas is $3.18 at the Quickymart, I do not have the exclusive and enforcible right to know that fact: the mind of others cannot be forced. Intellectual property laws do grant a person the exclusive right to certain intangible things that can be classified as a kind of information. It may be that some dictatorships will use force to get a person to divulge information, but this is not a matter of “owning information”, it is simply a reflection of the fact that dictatorships are not concerned with the concept of rights.
It appears that you’re trying to resolve the matter of subpoenas by reference to “permission”, “contract” and “ownership of information”, and I think that is a serious mistake. First, information cannot be owned. Second, contracts are voluntary agreements, and force negates all contractual concepts: a subpoena is an in involuntary requirements imposed by force, and thus is entirely outside the domain of concepts of permission and contract. There is no contract or other agreement involved when you live in the US, or any other country. The concept of privacy is fundamentally about property (see A. Peikoff The right to privacy), and contracts become relevant only to the extent that once may negotiate away some of one’s “right to privacy” by contractually relinquishing some control over your property. Subpoenas do not involve contracts, so the concept of privacy is irrelevant to an analysis of the subpoena issue.
In an Objectivist country, you will probably voluntarily pay for legal protection, but that is not a requirement; there is no agreement involved when it comes to the protection of your rights by the government. You do not enter into a contract with the government: that is the anarcho-capitalist view, that there would be no real governments, there would be competing vigilante squads that you would choose between to enforce your particular view of your “rights”. In the Objectivist view, you may lose your right to invoke the concept “rights” (and thus the claim to protection) if you have been living like a predatory animal, denying the concept of rights to others. Failing to comply with a subpoena is not a violation of anyone’s rights, and it is consistent with your right to act freely as long as you respect the rights of others.