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Arkanin

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Everything posted by Arkanin

  1. If you don't like the mainstream candidates, why not vote libertarian? Why not vote for somebody else who represents your values, or at least represents them slightly more than either mainstream candidate? Sure, your guy will never get elected, but you do send a message. You affect the numbers, and those numbers help tell mainstream parties when to change. Case in point, the libertarian party is on the radar and growing. If tons of people went out and voted libertarian, and it got 12% of the vote instead of 3%, you can bet mainstream politicians would notice they have a large group to 'mine' for votes by appealing to their issues.
  2. Could I phrase that as: what type of social system allows everyone to persue their self-interest in a way that is equally fair, in principle? (Mind you, not that everyone *is* equal or will succeed equally, or even has the same resources)
  3. So non-consensual, non-self-defense violence is wrong, and this emerges from a larger concept of personal rights. Would you say the concept of personal rights emerges a priori from the principle of self-interest, from the principle of self-interest combined with practical observations about the world, or that it is sort of a separate principle?
  4. This is a multi-parter. A.) When do you believe the use of violence is justified? B.) Is this clearly harmonious with your moral absolute of rational self-interest? (E.g., "Violence is justified when it is in accordance with my rational self-interest" is obviously harmonious with a principle of rational self-interest) C.) If they aren't obviously harmonious -- what is the linchpin, the argument or idea, that reconciles the two? Thanks!
  5. Perhaps these people are simply tired of being judged at face-value as though they are cattle by shallow people? Next time someone winces when you tell them you're an atheist, think of the fat people and ask yourself if those who judge you are so different.
  6. If he was right, it seems coincidental. I don't see any way to infer discrete units of time and space from Zeno's paradox. By all means, if you have some kind of substantive logical or mathematical argument for the leap from one to the other, I would be happy to argue about it or even accept that you are right if it is very good. I do see that there is some kind of argument that you are trying to make about the nature of infinitely small units, but until there is more elaboration about that, all I can do is look stupid.
  7. I am becoming suspicious that there is either some equivocation in the way Objectivists define rationality, or that the position that humans ought to behave entirely rationally does not always benefit the goal of living. I've made some effort to document the premises, arguments, counterarguments, and so on discussed for clarity. Let me explain: beliefs which are fact-based and grounded in reality are always treated as rational, while those not are irrtational (1). Behaviors which benefit living one's life are also always treated as rational (2). These statements cannot comport unless one believes that humans are always capable of behaving in a way which best supports their life when they apply a rational mind to the best information they have access to (1, 2, implicit). This final statement would imply that people are most lively when rational, but at face value, this would defy modern neuroscience. Our conscious mind is quite good at dealing with easily dissected logical problems: for example, parsing how a microchip works or deciding not to stand in front of a bus. On the other hand, unless we are a master at acting, analyzing how to best react in an interpersonal situation will cause us to seem immature, awkward, or insincere (A1). This can be resolved by saying our rational mind should know to cede its control to the centers of our brain that are not essentially rational to perform in a way that causes the most rational, life-embracing results. However, in the case of ceding our rationality to embrace a false belief that will improve our emotional state and cause us to be more successful, we have implicitly rejected (1). An Objectivist could respond (let's call this counterargument C1) that (1) need not be rejected because this cannot happen, but it is easy to show easily conceivable situations where this could emerge in the real world (Let's call this R1, response to counterargument 1). This leads us to another solution: we can try to escape all of this by accepting a third premise: life is living rationally. The premises would become as follows: 1.) Beliefs which are grounded in rational are always rational to be held. 2.) Behaviors which benefit living are always rational. (1, 2, implicit) Humans are always capable of behaving in a way which best supports their life when they apply a rational mind to the best information they have access to. 3.) Living is merely being rational, and not-living is merely non-rational. At this point in time, we can mean one of three things: A.) Rationality, really, is just doing what gives us the best life, as we objectively quantify living fully. (This necessitates implicit rejection of (1) via A1; see C1 and R1). B.) We have decided to see living as being rational. C.) We are equivocating by equating life and rationality, but later treating them as if they have entirely different meanings. This seems to go on often. B.) is an interesting if somewhat arbitrary position, but it represents a misleading contortion of the concept of "living". Because we could easily demonstrate situations in which said 'thinking rationally' leads to behaviors that are not conducive to fullest self-benefit (A1), said individuals might be capable of "living fully" in a way which causes them to have unhappy lives, lives with no reproductive success, or so on. Living is reduced to a state of "thinking rationally and acting on those thoughts", even when said rationality is demonstrably not always the best tool for ends we could quantify as meaningful biological success. Awaiting your responses, Ark
  8. The only possible world in which believing irrational things is tantamount to acting irrationally for survival is one in which people have only conscious, emotionally detached minds. It is a fact that we evolved from... animals! In conclusion, this would be fine, but this simply isn't how our brains work. I can understand the position that "people ought to behave entirely rationally" in the sense that their whole should behave in a way that embraces life and acts rationally, but it is an absurd leap of logic (and it defies modern neuroscience) to conclude that all such 'rational processes' must be dissectable by our own conscious mind in a way that appears 'rational' to it. That would be an aggregious equivocation of the meaning of 'rational' and given the fact that we do have emotions, the two concepts would be put at odds: surely one, or the other, is meant, and not both.
  9. TBH, I tend to define maturity as "you know it when you see it". I guess I should set people free to answer the question by their own reasonable understanding of what the word means. I imagine you could think of maturity as a kind of "special intelligence" where "conventional intelligence" is someone's capacity for quantitative reasoning whereas "special intelligence" is conventional intelligence in conjunction with mental survivability, talent for empathy, ability to rationally self-examine, trust one's "gut" feelings, and so on. This definition seems OK although it is rarely what people conventionally mean when they refer to intelligence. At any, I don't mean to trigger a debate about the semantics of intelligence and so on. I mainly ask it to know which is more valuable to everybody -- conventional intelligence or conventional maturity -- using our practical commonplace definitions. as I am merely trying to see how people feel. noted
  10. But that's not the point. If a person (information parser, whatever) can give the correct answer 100% of the time and still be 'irrational', what kind of definition of rationality can you offer which is not strictly relativistic? At this point, any meaningful discussion of "rational" or "irrational" thought would seem to completely disintegrate.
  11. The problem with saying this is that you would be conflating "wrong" with "random". People who come up with ideas through an allegedly "wrong" process do not do so randomly or arbitrarily. They are a semantic machine that parses various concepts and then respond in a non-arbitrary non-random fashion, even if they respond incorrectly or correctly through "incorrect" means. i think your analogy would require something always give the correct answer given correct inputs and somehow still be wrong. The underlying problem I am driving at is that when examining people or clocks as entities which process information, we are necessarily forced to accept that their rightness is determined by their ability to be correct all the time; otherwise, you'd have to propose some other criteria for being "correct" other than "Giving the correct answer for any given input", and at this point the concept of rightness would almost certainly become subjective. This is why I think it's important to acknowledge a stopped clock does tell the right time twice a day and also think this fact is the sort of distinction that can make or break an entire philosophy of mind; it seems that to think otherwise is absolutely disastrous for objectivism, as it forces us to accept an essentially subjective concept of correctness if not a kind of dualism )in the case of the dualism, for reasons I have not listed here). Another important distinction needs to be made: if I make a decision without thinking, and my decision is better for having not thought, is it "stupid" for me to analyze the decision (even if there is no time limit on the decision)? The end of what I am asking is whether disuse of conscious intelligence is stupidity (which equals immorality) or if the sum of our person's behaving foolishly is stupidity. This latter would seem to be a special definition of stupidty used by Objectivists, that is similar if not the same as immorality (It also seems to me that immorality here has a slightly special definition as well). TBH this is the answer I was hoping not to hear. It seems to me that an intelligent but immature person will virtually never do or accomplish anything worthy with their intelligence -- for theirself, included -- at which point they'd just as well be an immature retarded person. This would seem especially true when choosing someone to be your friend. An intelligent immature person can give you masturbatory debates that are sometimes superficially interesting, but a mature friend can give you companionship and understanding. So I am curious, why would you choose someone intelligent over someone mature?
  12. Let's say "Evasively non-integrated" then; not a real belief but a false one. I think this is just a semantic problem. I have a copy of that on hand (it's the book by Peikoff I've read); can you suggest a page number or section? Strange or not, my question has some important implications for objectivist epistemology and morality. Is the meaning of your response that an answer arrived at through bad mechanisms is not correct at all? If reason is fundamentally grounded in reality, then the bad answer -- still reflecting ontological reality -- would be reasonable in its factual correctness regardless of whether it was arrived at through rational processes. If Objectivists see epistemological correctness as rational, and non-evasive thought processes as rational, but they believe there can be epistemological correctness sans rational thought-process, this would imply some kind of dualism in the nature of what is rational. That is not what Objectivists mean to say, so something is wrong here. An Objectivist could solve this by saying epistemological correctness is nothing more than rationality, but this solution has dangerous implications I doubt objectivists would accept; i.e., relativism. Honestly, I think this is a very important criticsm to be made. However, it doesn't seem unreasonable to just say a stopped clock tells the wrong time twice a day, evading the whole problem. At that... TBH, this comparison between an irrational person and a stopped clock does not make any sense, as a person who has evasively found the "correct" belief will give you the correct answer every hour and through a real semantic information-parsing process, whereas a stopped clock simply sits there without doing much. A more appropriate analogy would then be that we are dealing with some sort of evasive and irrational clock that will give you the correct answer 24 hours a day, but not through unevasive reasoning processes, so while it always provides the correct answer, it can't be trusted (that shifty clock). When you think about trying to apply this to a fundamentally materialistic thing like a clock, it does not make much sense. Being fundamentally materialistic, it does not much make sense when applied to the human mind either. If anything, by comparing humans to a clock, your analogy illustrates a problem of mind that emerges when someone judges one process grounded in reality as 'reasonable' and another 'unreasonable'. I understand that Objectivists make a distinction between that which survives and flourishes but this creates an entirely new problem, as not all which flourishes is rational and not all which is rational flourishes unless it is so by definition. But if 'rational' is 'that which flourishes' I would pragmatically observe it is often more rational to be dumb than not. In its adherence to Objectivism, this cannot be what it means either.
  13. I think you're mistaken. I do not recall Rand discussing this particular topic in that book. She discusses topics somewhat relevant to this, but not about this particular overlap between metaphysics and ethics. You must keep in mind that I am not an Objectivist, so it is not as easy for me to make inferences from or conclusions about the system that you might make with little difficulty. At any rate, if I am mistaken, just show me where to open up to and I will take a look at the discussion of this particular topic for myself.
  14. To answer your question literally, yes it does. There is an important distinction to be made between "Telling the right time" and "Telling time rightly (by the right means)" and this distinction entails both epistemology and morality, especially to an objectivist, as "by the right means" is the same as "rationally". It is true that a stopped clock has basically no utility but a stopped clock is not the same as an irrational belief in this way.
  15. Do you mean to say that it is practically impossible to arrive at a rational position such as Objectivism through irrational processes, or that if someone arrived at a correct idea such as Objectivism through irrational processes, their idea (in this case Objectivism) would still be irrational? This is the clarification I was hoping for, so I thank you for offering it. I hope we can agree that the distinction between capitalism being the best system and the perfect system is a very important one for a lot of different reasons.
  16. So, the rationality or irrationality of a person can't be found in their positions; all the same, whether their positions are rational are indicators of the probability that they have evasively integrated an idea? A very important distinction between evasion and dishonesty must be made, too, in that dishonesty implies intentional irrationality a person is aware of, whereas evasion might be a result of subconscious desires or other intangibles (thus, all dishonesty is evasive, but while not all evasion is dishonest, it is still in defiance of rationality and therefore immoral), correct? This would cause your semantic choice of "evasion" over a choice such as "dishonesty" to be very meaningful. Regarding the 'nature of the beast', I think it's best to assume a person sincerely disagrees with or doesn't understand you, because if you should determine they do understand you and are just trying to be an ass, there's essentially no reason to continue talking with them at all. Do most Objectivists regard capitalism a special metaphysical ideal or the most ideal of imperfect options humanity has access to? I think more importantly, if a perfect capitalistic society can never functionally exist, and reason is just the most important tool for mankind's survival and benefit, it would seem meaningful to say the ideal itself exists. At this point the difference between "Capitalism is really good; it's the best we have" and "Capitalism is the least awful thing we have" are not so far removed. If you think this is a bad place to make such a criticism, probably so. It is central to both the root of Objectivist epistemology and political theory, so it is probably the first criticism I have made whose best response is justifiably "go read several books about objectivism and then write a 60-page paper explaining your criticism".
  17. Sure, I will be happy to tell you that story (it's kind of an interesting one, too, as are most stories involving hitmen ). Before I go further, I would ask you to clarify about something. Morality would not be entirely dependent on self-interest if another person's past actions (rape, murder, and so on) were a factor when deciding if it is moral to do a certain thing to that person. For example, let's propose two universes: World A: "Steven is a professional drug-dealer who lives alone in a mansion. You will get paid $100,000 for killing him." World B: "Steven is not a professional drug-dealer who lives alone in a mansion. You will get paid $100,000 for killing him." Let's say that in either case, Steven is fairly well-liked by the community and all other factors are held constant. If your chances of getting caught, the penalties for getting caught, and the odds of receiving payment are the same in both situations, is it possible for one choice to be moral and the other immoral? (And if you would answer "yes", could you explain why?) At any rate, on to my grandfather. He grew up in Mexico City which (believe me) is not the nicest place for a kid in his time. These were very bad times, before the big decades of mexican economic growth. He became involved in booze and drug smuggling and found out that killing people in the states payed well. He managed to make enough money to illegally get into the US, where he pretty much killed people for a living (he was better at killing people than smuggling). He was careful, talented, and took his job seriously, so he got a good professional reputation. After making quite a bit of money, he laundered it, made an agreement with his boss to "get out", and then used the money to open a Mexican restaraunt in Texas with my grandmother. Let's say 95% of criminals are dumb and get caught. Of the ones who are smart, most of them don't have the instincts and talent necessary to be a very good criminal, so a good 90% of the smart 5% probably get caught too. Of the ones who are good criminals, they usually behave impulsively and stupidly anyway, so they aren't that rationally self-interested, either. At the same time, it would seem that even if a minute fraction of a percentage of killers do so out of rational self-interest, they exist all the same in principle. At that, it seems indisputable that a person can be born into this kind of hopeless poverty in a society with no "safety net" as libertarians like us propose. I am a libertarian but I do acknowledge this as an innate flaw in capitalism (I regard capitalism as "horribly inefficient but still far more efficient than everything else" ) That's a negatory, by all means please go ahead
  18. I imagine you realize that "the rational composition of meaning in communication" is not what got under my skin and it is disrespectful to put words in my mouth, so I would ask you not to do so again. I'm annoyed by Inspector's last post. I was annoyed by the one before, too, but the second one feels like "Yes, if you're wondering, I'm trying to be condescending on purpose" when you set aside pedantic BS. I did not come here to start a flamewar, so if anyone asks about anything I said in this paragraph, it's best I don't answer. At any rate, I do appreciate the comments that you made earlier. Getting back on topic -- and I should have asked this earlier -- are many of the positions Peikoff or Rand defend in Objectivist works considered unnecessary for objectivism? For example, I just finished reading a paper by Peikoff supporting the position that some ideas themselves are inherently dishonest and that if a person holds that idea, they are automatically party to intellectual dishonesty. Is that considered central to objectivism? It wouldn't seem so to me, but I'm curious.
  19. TBH, I find this dialog childish. If you want to discuss something else, happily, but I otherwise think it would be best I spoke with someone else.
  20. Thank you for your polite response. Still, this is troubling for me, as taken literally, it would fly in the face of modern psychology. One's rational beliefs do not account for the myriad psychological factors that define the nature of a person's inner workings. If this is actually your position, I will be respectful and try not to argue with you further, but I would also be very surprised to hear this is what you mean. I do understand the difference between having a sincerely mistaken belief and a dishonest belief, but it would seem there is a more important problem. Particularly, sincere or insincere, our conscious beliefs are only one factor in our individual personality that defines our decision-making processes. Why do you give me a task and then tell me not to bother? There is a backspace key on your keyboard. So I would imagine that you must want me to demonstrate, or you would not say such a thing. True story: my grandfather was a professional hitman who did not ever even have a slight risk of getting caught. His options were that or die in a slum. He ended up saving his money, getting an education for himself, and moving to the states... on the money he made killing people. Mind you, I'm not sure any objectivists would make good self-interested murderers. The point is just that in principle, they exist, and one of them was my grandfather. In conclusion, either you are defending an extraordinary claim or I do not understand the nature of your position. If I do not understand it, let me know where my logic goes awry. I'm sorry if you do not find my style of communication pleasing. If I seem vague, it is because I consider it important that I don't actually say anything I don't mean to say. As a result, I often feel obliged to pad my words carefully, because I might otherwise say something I don't mean to say. I will do my best to be more precise, all the same. TBH, I receive the impression I am not being viewed in a positive light. I am not comfortable feeling scorned for having sincere philosophical criticisms, especially when I admit that I do not adequately understand the philosophy after having read many books about it.
  21. "Am I following you correctly here? You started off this topic with a story about a guy that treated you badly who claimed to be an Objectivist. This gave you a bad impression of the philosophy. But now you find it disturbing that an Objectivist would not kill an innocent?" I mean to say (and I hope it can be seen in my semantics) that I would be very disturbed were I mistaken; I.E., I would be very disturbed if Ayn Rand said that she would kill someone innocent. I doubt she would say this, as well, of course. So for clarification, I mean exactly the opposite of what you have inferred. "Another question. How steeped are you in Kantian philosophy? These conversations are going to get pretty twisted since the 2 philosophies are diametrical opposites." I dislike Kant for some of his strange metaphysical claims, and Kantian work has been pretty irrelevant to my life's persuit of philosophy. That said, this strikes me as a very strange question. I am also curious that if you ask this question to evaluate whether I am moral, how do you make a distinction between the beliefs of a person and their intentions? Or is the distinction moot? I have to admit that mere ideology has always struck me as a very strange and impractical way to evaluate someone's character, as it does not account for intentions, information they have received, emotional maturity, and the subconscious. This is a serious beef with Objectivism that I do have, admittedly. TBH, my philosophies of living are not very applicable to either philosophy and they definitely can't be put on an axis between the two. My political and epistemological philosophies are much like those of Objectivism, but my moral philosophy is very different and disctinctly independent of either.
  22. After rereading, I see what you mean, then. What I am getting at is that if it is good that each person be self-interested, it would be ideally moral to uphold others' right to other lawful self-interest, within reason, for reasons that do not revolve around our own benefit. The reason for this would be very abstract, but would revolve around the idea of making an ethical principle universally realized. If in another sense, it is our good that we be self-interested, it is our duty to uphold our own desires. Truthfully, the earlier makes more sense to me than the latter, but this is a huge, sweeping and critical distinction. The principle that it can never be of self-interested personal net benefit to murder a person who has not wronged you is demonstrably false. I am not making an argument, but I am saying, surely neither you nor rand mean this, do you? It would be very silly for a philosophy to make demonstrably false claims that are effectively falsified by the real world. I am not saying it is smart to kill people willy-nilly, but one in a thousand people might rationally receive benefit from killing someone who did not wrong them. So the principle is very important. This is why I make this distinction, as it would give objectivists a much better metaphysical basis for their principles, it seems to me. This is decent as a rule, but not a principle, as I can create a situation and demonstrably show you that murdering another person can be to ones rational self-interest if all they care about is their own happiness. If your flat response to the question "Would you hypothetically kill someone innocent if, by extraordinary circumstances, you were positive it were to your net benefit" were "yes" I am not sure what to say. It still seems reasonable for me to ask you to answer a hypothetical question, though, even if you are convinced such a situation can never occur. I guess you might make an interesting abstraction about morality by answering "yes" but because "By giving me that opportunity, they have inadvertently or intentionally done something stupid and / or immoral, so I can consider their action 'evil'". This would make the principle tautologically legitimate by way of showing that if a person has given us benefit by killing them, they have acted immorally, and so the killing is a priori justified for reasons that regard the failings of the other person rather than the morality of the self. At the same time, I do not think Rand would have answered "Yes" to this question and I do not think she would have been lying. I guess I could be mistaken, and truthfully, that would be disturbing.
  23. Inspector and Marteen, It would seem to me that your positions are at their fundamental core different in nature. What I mean to say is that (Marteen), you seem to me to be saying that it is wrong to alienate others' rights to moral persuit of self-interest because it lacks pragmatism, at least, in the case of murder. On the other hand, it would seem to me that Inspector is saying it is wrong to alienate others' rights to moral persuit of self-interest because for this ethic of moral persuit of self-interest to be made universal, it is necessary and right in and of itself that we respect and do not violate the inherent good of another person's rational persuit of self-interest. While identical in result, the underlying motivations for these actions have significant implications for Objectivism as a philosophy, and I guess you would say I am trying to ascertain which of these positions is right. If there is not an agreement, that is OK, but this would suggest to me that there is a fundamental and far-reaching divide among objectivists that I am not aware of.
  24. Also, this important. Is it implicitly meant that in the objectivist "Virtue of Selfishness" that unjustly infringing on another person's right to persue their own self-interest is fundamentally life-denying and therefore evil? For example, Stalin's pogroms might have been highly self-interested, but because they unjustly crushed many others' right to persue their own self-interest, they were still evil, even if the decisions were of net benefit to Stalin? Hence, it is immoral to, say, kill someone, even if it will be in your rational self-interest, because it infringes on and destroys their right to persue their own rational self-interest?
  25. FYI, using Amanda Tapping as your answer is cheating and the correct answer was "William Shatner" "When dealing with unjust governments, a moral person should always try to take as much as possible and give as little back as possible." I think what I am getting at is that the hippy commune (or even the socialistic, giving person) could be viewed as microcosm of socialistic government, but that this isn't necessary, so I am curious to hear whether many Objectivists would treat it the same way. There are some significant differences, too, of course; in other words, I wonder if Objectivists would attribute the same vices to communal people or small communes that they would tack on big governments. I imagine a person could take either stance and still be an Objectivist, and I should have been more clear about this. "Like some of the other posters have asked: how do you define evil?" I define evil a certain way, but what is important to me in this post is how objectivists define evil. What I mean is that objectivism certainly defines and ascribes morality to certain actions, so I am hoping to understand how Objectivism would define it. I've heard how it is defined many times, but something does not quite make sense to me. Can you define moral normative please? It is a redundant choice of words, but I mean to imply an "ought" that is grounded in some kind belief about morality. For example, "You ought not eat the cookies in the cookie jar, because that is disobedient and disobedience is immoral" would be the sort of "ought" moral statement I am referring to. What youre essentially saying is "people necessarily hold the same moral beliefs as the society around them", which is just obviously false. I think this is true, but the problem is with my semantics. What I am wondering is this: semantically, when 98% of people discuss morality, they are referring to certain concepts of morality that are universally rooted in the same part of the brain. Objectivists seem to have a radically different view of morality, so what I wonder is why one should convert it into an imperative and semantically link it to this old normative in that it is inherently right? I think there is something I do not understand here. I would say that all evil behavior is stupid (by which I mean counter to the interests of the evil-doer), but not all stupid behavior is evil. To give concrete examples, it would be stupid for me to go rob a bank, because I would be worse off for it in the long run, because I would get caught eventually. I guess I should ask, and more importantly, is it moral to do something that greatly injures someone else if you are fairly sure your behavior will be of high net benefit to you, after properly weighing the risks?
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