Leonid

State is protector of rights. Children are also people and their rights should be protected. Of course it's a difference between mere spanking and physical or emotional abuse. The state is separated from the church and it goes in both ways. State shouldn't interfere in any matters which belong to the realm of mind, faith, ideology. If state has to prohibit parents to teach their children religion on the ground that it is irrational, mystical faith, then state also has to prohibit teaching of communism, parapsychology, belief in alien invasion, scientology, smoking, fast food chains etc...Parents don't have any rights in regard to their children, but have certain responsibilities in regard to their well being. The obligation follows from the fact that they took a conscious decision to have children. Obviously, different people mean by well being different things, but as long as child's life and health is not under threat, state shouldn't interfere.

StrictluLogical "Color and texture and solidity are properties which are emergent if we consider the behavior of solitary electrons, protons, and neutrons, none of which possess these properties." Color, texture, solidity are not properties but percepts. This is how we perceive these properties. This is a phenomenon which belongs to the realm of epistemology, not metaphysics. You cannot reduce percepts to the properties. In spite the fact that perception is a valid representation of reality, it is a mental phenomenon. You can only say that certain atomic structure is responsible for reflection of light waves of certain frequency and length which we perceive as a red color.

1. No. The system behaves in accordance with its biological nature. 2. The parts of biological system are inanimate objects and behave in accordance with their nature. 3. Emergent property of biological objects expresses kind of nature which is different from that of inanimate objects. 4. Life is a natural strong emergent property of the natural system. This is a property of the system as a whole and cannot be reduced to the properties of its parts by definition. Living system cannot express the nature of its parts because life is a process of self-initiated self-sustained goal-orientated action and therefore is driven by self-causation. Inanimate objects don't act but acted upon and are driven by an antecedent cause. Mind is an emergent property of life. Any attempt to reduce the properties of these systems to their parts leads to the death alley of explanatory gap which puzzles philosophers of mind for decades.

Hi, Tony. " Socrates, in Plato's "Symposium", explained two types of love or Eros—Vulgar Eros or earthly love and Divine Eros or divine love. Vulgar Eros is nothing but mere material attraction towards a beautiful body for physical pleasure and reproduction. Divine Eros begins the journey from physical attraction i.e. attraction towards beautiful form or body but transcends gradually to love for Supreme Beauty. This concept of Divine Eros is later transformed into the term Platonic love." ( Wikipedia) The meaning of this divine love is sublimation of sexual desire, mind-body dichotomy, " contemptible hypocrisy.

Well, that obscure. If one has a strong sexual desire, doesn't act on it, but also doesn't suppresses or sublimate it, what he does with it?

Emergent properties are not supernatural. But in the case of the living organism the basic emergent property is self-causation which implies a different kind of nature which cannot be reducible to inanimated objects driven by antecedent causes. Consider for example such a property as locomotion. We know the molecular mechanism responsible for such a property, but cannot reduce it to molecules. Only living organism as a whole can initiate the goal-orientated movement.

Suppose you shoot an animal and animal died. The bullet is an antecedent cause of death. But if animal is not dead, only wounded and eventually recovered, nobody would claim that the bullet is an antecedent cause of the healing process. Such a process initiated by organism itself. This is self-causation. The final cause ( goal) becomes an effective cause, a driven power of action.

I think we all know what temporary means. It means short, brief, transitory. Of cause short is also relative concept and needs a frame of reference, which is in regard to human affairs usually a man's life span. So ten years is a significant chunk of human life and hardly could be referred as short or temporary. If you ask your employer for temporary leave, you both understand that it's not a 10 year absence. Besides, you imply that our protagonists are omniscient and omnipotent. They knew from the beginning how long their strike would last and they knew they are going to prevail in the end. Of cause they didn't, so for them the situation was permanent. As for a quote, it doesn't talk about sex at all. It postulates that an idea unexpressed in action is contemptible hypocrisy as Platonic love. Why? Because the meaning of this is mind-body dichotomy. "You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil." (GS) A man with romantic passion who voluntary suppresses his sexual expression is a soul without body, a ghost, a fake. And so is Platonic love. "Romantic love—the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act" Observe, that mind-body unity expressed in sex for Rand is a necessary condition of Romantic love. Exactly this kind of unity our protagonists failed to demonstrate. Whatever kind of love Galt or Francisco felt toward Dagny it wasn't Romantic love. Not per Ayn Rand.

By definition Platonic love is "a close relationship between two persons in which sexual desire is nonexistent or has been suppressed or sublimated" .( Merriam Webster dictionary). Since it is evident that AS protagonists did have very strong sexual desire toward Dagny but suppressed it, avoided to express it in action, Ayn Rand's characterization of Romantic love , that -is sexual desire, unexpressed in action, applies to them, and rightly so. Such a behavior is an epitome of mind-body dichotomy. Ayn Rand learned from the mistakes of her heroes and when she developed a strong desire toward Branden she didn't hesitate to express it in action. I still puzzled however why she ascribed such a contemptible ( in her own words) behavior to her most noble protagonists?

Platonic love by definition refers to non-sexual love or to suppressed or sublimated sexual desire. Since our protagonists expressed very strong sexual desire toward Dagny what they did is a suppression and sublimation-Galt implicitly, by inaction and Francisco explicitly, by explaining to Dagny that he loves her, terribly wants to sleep with her but cannot do that and the Galt Gulch is a substitute for his love. ( See quote above). Even to Rearden it took couple of years of sexual fantasies and repression before he, guilt ridden ,consummated his love with Dagny. None of them ever expressed non-romantic, that is-nonsexual feelings toward her. Dagny herself was much more open in this regard. She never suppressed or sublimed her passion.My greatest achievement, she said, is that I was sleeping with Rearden. In your case scenario, it's a tragedy, the whole world literature is about this kind of situations. What rational person could do? Apparently he would go through the normal process of grief, sense of lose, anger, blame but eventually, acceptance. His feelings toward the person should become non-romantic. That what Rearden did when he lost Dagny as a lover ( I always knew I'm not your final choice) and that what Francisco had to do but he didn't. As for Galt, there was no reason whatsoever for him to suppress his desire for decade. His struggle wouldn't be affected by his love. And the same applies to Francisco. In "Fountainhead" Dominic tried to destroy Roark pretty much as Galt tried to destroy Dagny. Yet it never stopped Roark and Dominic to be lovers.

Homo liber nulla de re minus quam de morte cogitat; et ejus sapientia non mortis sed vitae meditatio est. SPINOZA'S Ethics, Pt IV, Prop. 67 (There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.) Reductionism and its corollary, Determinism are deeply enrooted in the fabric of the modern mainstream philosophy. There are leftovers of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy. Instead to reject this notion altogether Reductionists simply choose the other, bodily side of this loaded coin. Now they reached a blind alley in their attempts to explain life in terms of lifelessness. As Hans Jonas observed: “Vitalistic monism is replaced by mechanistic monism, in whose rules of evidence the standard of life is exchanged for that of death.” (The Phenomenon of Life, pg 11). Since Mind and Free Will are biological phenomena which cannot be explained in terms of non-life, Reductionists are necessary Determinists. Hard Determinists reject the notion of Free Will (and therefore Mind) completely; soft Determinists and Compatibalists are still trying to find explanation of Free Will in the indeterminate realm of Quantum mechanics, in stochastic rules of Chaos theory or in the mystical realm of Tao. I maintain that Free Will is a manifestation on the conceptual level of the very essential property of life itself which is biological self causation. “Freedom must denote an objectively discernible mode of being, i.e., a manner of executing existence, distinctive of the organic per se” (Ibid pg 3). Law of Causality is law of Identity applied to action (Ayn Rand). Since biological action is self-generated goal orientated action (SIGA) , such an action cannot be predetermined by any antecedent cause. On the contrary, any antecedent or proximate action could be only detrimental to the healthy living process. As Rosen put it: “it is perfectly respectable to talk about a category of final causation and to a component as the effect of its final cause…In this sense, then, a component is entailed by its function… a material system is an organism if and only if , it is closed to efficient causation.” (Life Itself, pg 135). In other words the process of biological causation is a process in which a final cause (a goal), becomes its efficient cause. Traditionally, the notion of the final cause associated with Aristotle’s primary mover, some divine, supernatural source. However, this is not a case of mysticism, far from it. Life emerged as result of self-organization of abiotic elements. Camazine et al. (2001: 8) define self-organization: ‘‘as a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower level components of the system. The system has properties that are emergent, if they are not intrinsically found within any of the parts, and exist only at a higher level of description....’’ From this definition follows that 1. A process of self-organization doesn't have an antecedent cause. 2. Emergent properties of such a system are different from the properties of its components and therefore cannot be explained by means of reductionism. In other words properties of such a system are not defined by antecedent cause. Life is self-organizing, self-regulated material structure which is able to produce self-generated goal orientated action when the goal is preservation and betterment of itself. This new emergent identity which applied to biotic action defines new type of causation-self causation. Harry Binswanger observed “All levels of living action, from a cell’s protein-synthesis to a scientist’s investigations, are goal-directed. In vegetative action, past instances of the “final cause” act as “efficient cause.”(1992). This is the mechanism of self-causation. Now is clear why any action imposed on the organism and driven by antecedent cause could be only detrimental-it inevitable would interfere with self-generated action of the organism. Each and every organism is its own primary mover. In the low organisms the degree of freedom of action is limited by their genetic set up. However even low organisms like fungi for example able to overcome this genetic determinism. “During a critical period, variability is generated by the fact that, a system becomes conditioned by all the factors influencing the spontaneous emergence of symmetry-breaking event. In such a context variability does not reflect an environmental perturbation in expression of a pre-existing (genetic) program of development…It is expression of a process of individuation.” (Trewavas, 1999) SIGA is limited by organism’s perceptual ability and capacity to process the sensory input. The process of evolution is a process of development of these qualities, since organism’s survival depends on them. More freedom of action means better chances of survival. The end product of such a process is Free Will and self-awareness, that is-human mind. Free Will therefore is an expression of self-causation on the level of self-awareness The human abilities to choose goals consciously and to act rationally in order to achieve them turn biology to ethics .But the origin of these abilities lie in the very fundamental property of any living being. This property is self-generated goal orientated action driven by self causation. Any attempt to reduce this property to the set of biochemical reactions or to undetermined behavior of subatomic particles is doomed to fail. Ayn Rand profoundly summarized the meaning of life in “We, The Living”. “I know what I want, and to know HOW TO WANT-isn’t it life itself?”

Nothing is mystical in emergent properties and yet they cannot be reduced to the properties of parts by definition. Take for example two halves of the ball. None of them can roll. But if you put them together you will get an emergent property of rolling. None of inanimate objects have a property of self-initiated goal orientated action, (SIGA) let alone consciousness and free Will. That applies as well to the very complex macromolecules which are the building blocks of the living organisms. However, the process of their self-organization created a living organisms with such an emergent properties. It would be an useless exercise to try and explain SIGA on molecular level. Life starts on the level of cell and that why the term " Molecular Biology" is oxymoron. The living organisms act and not acted upon. In the words of Robert Rosen, they are systems which closed to antecedent cause. Unlike inanimate objects they are driven by self-causation. This is the rational explanation of emergent properties of life and consciousness, Such a property cannot be reduced to the physical processes driven by antecedent causality. During the process of evolution SIGA developed to the level of self-awareness. The property of self-causation expresses itself on this level as Free Will. The whole process is very complex and best explained here http://homepage.univ...lityCorrect.pdf . Reductionism is a literally dead end in the inquiry of life and consciousness. Free Will cannot be found in autopsy, on the level of macromolecules or subatomic particles. As Hans Jonas observed: "Vitalistic monism is replaced by mechanistic monism, in whose rules of evidence the standard of life is exchanged for that of death.” (The Phenomenon of Life, pg 11).

Nothing is mystical in emergent properties and yet they cannot be reduced to the properties of parts by definition. Take for example two halves of the ball. None of them can roll. But if you put them together you will get an emergent property of rolling. None of inanimate objects have a property of self-initiated goal orientated action, (SIGA)let alone consciousness and free Will. That applies as well to the very complex macromolecules which are the building blocks of the living organisms. However, the process of their self-organization created a living organisms with such an emergent properties. It would be an useless exercise to try and explain SIGA on molecular level. Life starts on the level of cell and that why the term " Molecular Biology" is oxymoron. The living organisms act and not acted upon. In the words of Robert Rosen, they are systems which closed to antecedent cause. Unlike inanimate objects they are driven by self-causation. Such a property cannot be reduced to the physical processes driven by antecedent causality. During the process of evolution SIGA developed to the level of self-awareness. The property of self-causation expresses itself on this level as Free Will. The whole process is very complex and best explained here.

It's easy for the people to substitute "I" for "WE" in order the get pseudo-security and self-esteem. And which "WE" could be more natural than ethnic or racial identity? Communists tried to change ethnic " WE" to the class "WE" and failed. During WWII Stalin left internationalism and class solidarity and went back to the old "good" nationalism.

Of course Platonic love which is unexpressed in action is not romantic love. And i also mentioned that there are many other forms of love which are not romantic. But the whole problem is that Ayn Rand describes romantic relationships as like as they were platonic or non-romantic. And yet nobody can claim that when Francisco expressed his love to Dagny he meant brotherly love.

You are welcome. In fact the question of causation belongs to the realm of philosophy. Science supplies evidence.

Something to think about is self-awareness. The first conscious thought which appears around age of 18 months is realization of " I". But there is is much more than that. All living objects act when inanimate objects acted upon. In other words animate objects are capable to initiate action all by themselves without antecedent cause and that means they are driven by self-causation This is a huge topic which i cannot even start to discuss on this thread. if you interested you may read a book by Dr. Binswanger " The Biological basis of teleological concepts". But if one accepts the theory of self-causation, then Free Will could be explained as self-causation on the cognitive level of self-awareness. This is also a reason why Free Will, " animolition" or any self-initiated goal orientated action of any organism couldn't be reduced to the chemical or physical processes. Molecules and atoms are not living objects. Life starts on the level of cell.

In VOS Ayn Rand simply postulates that man has different means of survival, his mind and Free will. She doesn't explicitly explain how Free Will developed and what are its evolutionary precursors. This is a fascinating question which I try to resolve. In fact such a question has been addressed by philosophers, psychologists and neurobiologists. The ideas which are closest to the satisfactory solution i found here http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Fitch2008NanointentionalityCorrect.pdf

Yes I think it would be proper to ascribe such a faculty to infants as well.

Ronald Merrill in his book " The Ideas of Ayn Rand" calls it romantic surrealism and I tend to agree with him. In AS she created an improbably world which has very little in common with reality as we know it. This is a philosophical science fiction which was necessary to highlight ideas of Objectivism, something like her extended version of indestructible robot, a thought experiment. The same in much lesser degree applies to " Fountainhead". Do you think that real court in real life would ever acquit a Dynamiter? Nevertheless both novels were written in order to present the ideas of Objectivism and therefore I still puzzled by the fact that Rand's fiction directly collides with her non-fiction.

Eiuol "To have a romantic relationship, yes, but it doesn't follow that feeling love can only ever properly be expressed with sex. "Just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love". It only says physical action - don't you think of Rand meant to say sex, she would have said so?" And she did ."Man is an end in himself. Romantic love—the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act—is the living testimony to that principle." (Of Living Death,”The Voice of Reason, 55–56)

Consciousness is a emergent phenomenon and cannot be reduced to neurophysiological processes as phenomenon of life cannot be reduced to molecular biology. . In his book “Biological Self-organization” Camazine et al. (2001: 8) defines self-organization: ‘‘as a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower level components of the system. The system has properties that are emergent, if they are not intrinsically found within any of the parts, and exist only at a higher level of description....’’

Ayn Rand clearly indicated that she is not in favor of strike in the real life as long as country is not a totalitarian dictatorship. She was an advocate of reason and maintained that as long as people can freely exchange ideas there is a chance to change a dominant philosophy and people's mind set.

what about them?

Eventually, given enough time they always prove themselves this way or another. It's nothing inherently sinister in ethnic or racial identity. A person can identify himself as an Indian, African, Jew etc...The problem only starts when such an identity becomes a standard of value. The contradiction is that all ethnic identities refer to man and exactly that fact such a standard evades. In other words, only man can have ethnic identity, it is a human quality and therefore the standard should be man himself, not one of his attributes.