Doug Morris

There are two kinds of questions here. One is the question of what government should have to say about abortion; the other has to do with the complexity of moral, medical, and psychological issues a woman needs to consider when deciding about abortion. I do not claim to have a good understanding of the latter and am not trying to address it. I am trying to address the former. Not only is this a "hot" current issue, but it is a very important issue, because government, by trying to control abortion, has a big impact on people's lives, and because it relates to fundamental issues about rights and government. Also, it is the issue Ayn Rand was trying to address when she said life begins at birth. It is in connection with this issue that the question becomes, at what point does an individual acquire rights. The question I am trying to address requires us to determine what people's rights are in the sense relevant to what the law should say. Ayn Rand has given us a basic approach to determining this objectively. We need to carry this further and to teach it to others. Children who are using concepts like "food" and "chair" are using their faculty of reason to a sufficient extent to qualify as humans with rights. This is true even if they are not speaking. Once people acquire rights, they retain them even if they lose their faculty of reason. They are within their political rights to do this. Whether it is rational is an entirely different question. Because of the way the law works, it must involve the drawing of lines. I am stating my position and giving some indication of my reasons for it, in order to indicate some of the breadth of issues that must be considered in order to have a sound approach to the issue of what the government should have to say about abortion. I realize that further discussion may be necessary for persuasion. I addressed this in the second part of my answer.

e) Numbering the elements of the sequence 1, 2, 3, etc, the following works for 1 thru 6, but I don't know how to tweak it to include 7. Pick a random permutation of the integers 1 through n. What is the probability that you will get a permutation that includes a 3-cycle that either does not include 5 or 6, or includes 4, 5, and 6. (It's OK to have two 3-cycles.)

Yes. Explicit premises win out over implicit ones Implicit premises are of limited value in achieving understanding.

There are two kinds of issues relating to abortion. One is the question of what government should have to do with it; this reduces to the question of rights. The other has to do with all the other moral and psychological issues relating to abortion; this is more complicated. (People out there who do not understand the nature of government will tend not to understand this distinction.)

As I understand the point, it is not that this other objectivity exists, but that it does not exist, and that it is twisted to think that it does. It is twisted to think that mice have rights, or that plants have consciousness, or that rocks have life; they do not.

We need to determine at what point an individual acquires rights. We have rights, not because we are alive, as plants and bacteria are, and not because we are conscious, as cats and mice are, and not even because we possess the faculty of reason, but because we use our faculty of reason to live and flourish. To me, this indicates that an individual must be using their faculty of reason to possess rights. It is not enough to be conscious and perceiving, like the cats and mice. Admittedly, this criterion would be difficult to implement in law; we might have to draw the legal line a fixed short period of time after birth.

Each individual property owner is entitled to decide this for himself or herself. Property owners are entitled to do this too. Anyone who disapproves is entitled to condemn them and/or boycott them, but not to sic the government on them.

How many people attend a candidate's rallies does not necessarily correlate well with how many vote for that candidate, especially if candidates are using different strategies, and especially if their followers tend to differ in attitudes and motivations.

How realistic is this goal? Especially for those of us who are getting on in years. What degree of soonness is possible? You change it by spreading Ayn Rand's ideas. You are describing one way to do this. Another way is to discuss the ideas with individuals or small groups who are willing to listen. Another way is to encourage people to read Objectivist books. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

The entropy of the entire system always increases, even when the entropy of parts of it decreases. This is true whether the decrease of entropy in part of the system is due to purposeful, goal-directed, teleological action or to some other cause. Natural selection does not operate at random in the long run. It is capable of producing low-entropy results in parts of a system whose total entropy is always increasing. It is not purposeful and does not need to be. We do not yet know exactly how life began. The appropriate reaction to this situation is to investigate and to find out as much as we can, not to arbitrarily say a purposeful being had to do it.

In this post I made clear that I was talking about consciousness. I stand by the entire post as true and valid. Some of the other posts used the word "mind". Perhaps the reason we have had trouble with this is that people are using the word "mind" in different senses. Some have used it to mean consciousness, but EF may have been using it in a sense that includes non-conscious processes.

Do we need to be relevant on the national stage all the time? We're still at an early stage of gaining adherents.

We have direct evidence that Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged. There is no evidence of any sort of purposeful being guiding evolution. There is no need to suppose such a being, since genetic mutation and natural selection are enough to account for evolution. The process of genetic change may be complicated and involve action by living cells, but this does not make any of it purposeful. So some changes were sudden, at least on a geological time scale. This does not make any of it purposeful. Here is an abstract of that book from PhilArchive: Abstract Information Theory, Evolution and The Origin ofLife: The Origin and Evolution of Life as a Digital Message: How Life Resembles a Computer, Second Edition. Hu- bert P. Yockey, 2005, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 400 pages, index; hardcover, US $60.00; ISBN: 0-521-80293-8. The reason that there are principles of biology that cannot be derived from the laws of physics and chemistry lies simply in the fact that the genetic information content of the genome for constructing even the simplest organisms is much larger than the information content of these laws. Yockey in his previous book (1992, 335) In this new book, Information Theory, Evolution and The Origin ofLife, Hubert Yockey points out that the digital, segregated, and linear character of the genetic information system has a fundamental significance. If inheritance would blend and not segregate, Darwinian evolution would not occur. If inheritance would be analog, instead of digital, evolution would be also impossible, because it would be impossible to remove the effect of noise. In this way, life is guided by information, and so information is a central concept in molecular biology. The author presents a picture of how the main concepts of the genetic code were developed. He was able to show that despite Francis Crick's belief that the Central Dogma is only a hypothesis, the Central Dogma of Francis Crick is a mathematical consequence of the redundant nature of the genetic code. The redundancy arises from the fact that the DNA and mRNA alphabet is formed by triplets of 4 nucleotides, and so the number of letters (triplets) is 64, whereas the proteome alphabet has only 20 letters (20 amino acids), and so the translation from the larger alphabet to the smaller one is necessarily redundant. Except for Tryptohan and Methionine, all amino acids are coded by more than one triplet, therefore, it is undecidable which source code letter was actually sent from mRNA. This proof has a corollary telling that there are no such mathematical constraints for protein-protein communication. With this clarification, Yockey contributes to diminishing the widespread confusion related to such a central concept like the Central Dogma. Thus the Central Dogma prohibits the origin of life "proteins first." Proteins can not be generated by "self-organization." Understanding this property of the Central Dogma will have a serious impact on research on the origin of life. This sounds very different from what you said. From the Wikipedia article on the Central Dogma: The central dogma of molecular biology is an explanation of the flow of genetic information within a biological system. It is often stated as "DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein",[1] although this is not its original meaning. It was first stated by Francis Crick in 1957,[2][3] then published in 1958:[4][5] He re-stated it in a Nature paper published in 1970: "The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid."[6] Information flow in biological systems A second version of the central dogma is popular but incorrect. This is the simplistic DNA → RNA → protein pathway published by James Watson in the first edition of The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965). Watson's version differs from Crick's because Watson describes a two-step (DNA → RNA and RNA → protein) process as the central dogma.[7] While the dogma, as originally stated by Crick, remains valid today,[6] Watson's version does not.[2] Again, this sounds very different from what you said.

If you are saying that genetics is complicated enough that some changes can happen quickly, or that Darwin knew nothing of genetics, you probably have a point, but this is irrelevant to the question whether reason evolved. If you are saying evolution is guided by purposeful choices, please explain why this is not just a form of mysticism. If you are saying something else, please clarify.

Are you saying that there have been rational beings as long as there has been time? Or are you saying there can be reason without rational beings?

What are your grounds for this accusation?

"as" should be "a". Sorry for the typo.

The discussion about evolution started when, as LB, you stated You did not give any reason why this statement about human nature should be taken seriously in philosophical inquiry. I asked you to back up your claim about Darwin and, as EF, you said It would be more precise to say "Teleology – goal-oriented approach – has no part in Darwin's view of how human morality came to exist." I then indicated the distinction between acquiring reason and acquiring morality by saying You then blew this off by crudely and imprecisely restating my point and comparing it to I think much of the rest of the debate about evolution in this thread has been a smokescreen generated by you to cover up how weak your argument is philosophically. Obviously, we could not have acquired the faculty of reason by means of reason. We acquired it by biological evolution. This is not relevant to a discussion of what we did once we acquired the faculty of reason, which includes arriving at morality.

What I read about lucid dreaming indicated that in some cases the lucid dreamer can deliberately influence the dream.

If the planet, instead of being a spinning approximate sphere of limited extent, were a spinning approximate paraboloid of unlimited extent, there would be only one pole. There are two poles, in a certain sense interdependent, because of the specific nature of the planet.

If there were no minds, trees would still photosynthesize, grow, and reproduce, clouds would still block light and in some cases produce raindrops, it would still take more force to break up a rock than as clod of dirt, butterflies would still move by flying and would still reproduce, etc. They are not just creations of consciousness.

I already answered this with what you called a "nice save". Did you limit your reply to calling it a "nice save" because you don't really know how to answer it?

You are defining "senses" narrowly to include only the workings of the sense organs, and maybe not even all of that. Epistemologically, the senses include the entire process, some of which probably takes place in the brain, by which perceptions are presented to consciousness.

You seem to be conflating two processes. There is the automatic functioning of the senses that organizes sensations into perceptions; this precedes thought. There is thought, a mental process that starts with the perceptions provided by the senses.

No, you never understood or answered my question. What are your grounds for saying the "Azov Regiment" or "Azov Battalion" runs the government there? What are your grounds for saying President Zelensky is a puppet?