Seeker

1. I explained perfectly well the "special value significance" of existence (which is what life expectancy maximization results in). It is that which an entity whose existence is conditional acts to achieve. Why act? In order to exist. Why exist? The answer is presupposed (if that is what you wish to question, say so, and we can investigate it in more depth - but please make that explicit). 2. My emotional attitude should not be relevant here. The discussion is intended to be rational. So, no, my attitude doesn't tell us anything. Let's stick to reason. 3. Other than that, you don't seem to question the validity of what I said - can I therefore infer that you agree with me that Rand's ethical foundation is sound?

I am going to take a different tack. Consider the indestructible robot. The indestructible robot doesn't need a code of values because it never needs to act. Its existence is guaranteed. When a weakness is introduced, however, an entity must continually act to preserve its existence. The ultimate goal of that action is to exist - to overcome the weakness and (to the extent possible) achieve the perpetual existence of the indestructible robot. The weakness, the capacity to die, is a deficit. It creates a gap; purposeful action is what bridges that gap. Clearly that purpose depends upon the reason that action was needed in the first place. Hence, the only proper standard by which to evaluate choices of action is whether they further the preservation of existence or threaten it. Since an entity cannot ever know how much failure can occur before death occurs, it must always choose the action that furthers, not threatens, its preservation. It must continually bridge that gap as much as possible, overcome the weakness that was introduced, so as to exist. An entity's conditional nature is the weakness that the process of living action overcomes. The perfect, ultimate end of all action is existence. Think of a line with two endpoints: 0 and 1. 0 is non-existence (death), 1 is existence (life). Every incorrect choice (failure to act correctly) moves us closer to 0; every correct choice (correct action) moves us closer to or sustains us at 1. A perfect life in which every action was chosen correctly would keep us at 1 for as long our lives could possibly last. But a series of incorrect choices would move us closer to 0 until eventually, we hit 0 and die. So ultimately, you would be correct to assert that lifespan maximization is the standard. Given a choice between 80 years of building empires and 150 years on the life-support machine, the correct choice is to choose the machine. Choosing the empire would be irrational because, by your example, it doesn't give you the opportunity to beat the 150 years of the machine. So by the standard of value, 150 years is the better choice. If that result seems absurd, then it is only because your example is absurd. Not only did you have to introduce the machine, you had to foreclose the possibility that building an empire would enable you to amass enough wealth to live even longer than the 150-year machine would allow. Of course, this presumes that the individual could make such a choice: his unchosen psychological nature might well prevent it. In that case, the life-by-machine would not be an option. Anyway, in reality we don't have such a machine. We each have to take purposeful action to further our existence. We need to amass as much knowledge and wealth as we can to be as safe as possible. We have to use our minds as perfectly as we can, so we have to keep them healthy and functioning. We have psychological needs that must be met. We have the need to let other minds be free, so that we can profit from them. We have alternative types of productive work from which to choose. We have metaphysically given facts about ourselves that we need to learn in order to maximize our potential and reach the greatest lifespan possible. You may point out that man has immutable characteristics that render him mortal, and that this is bad for him, and you would be correct - but as those are beyond his capacity to act to correct, they are not open to ethical consideration. An ideal man always makes the choices that furthers his life. If immortality were a possibility open to him, the ideal man would achieve it. If not, then he would choose his actions so as to live to the greatest extent within the bounds imposed by reality.

Are you asking why metaphysically man has to exercise his potential to be productive? That should be obvious. Are you asking how much he needs to produce? As much as he can, depending on his potential. Just as you can never have "enough" rationality, safety, or longevity, you can never have "enough" wealth. Not if your life is the standard of value.

I see 1 and 2 as the same thing expressed differently. Maybe a quick edit can clear it up: 1) To examine man in relation to the to the goal of life span maximization of the entity in question, of man, as he in fact exists to find out effective means to this established end. 2) To posit that that there is an fundamental alternative between existence and non existence, where existence means "exist as man does in fact exist", and then claim that now we only have to find out how man does in fact exist. My reference to productiveness was included so that you would not forget its place among man's virtues. I think that is beyond dispute.

The moment you let go of happiness, you have pulled a thread that will eventually unwind the entire tapestry of your life. Life is a self-sustaining, self-generating process of action that, for man, results in happiness. So why are you treating happiness as an option? This is what I don't understand. The life in bed is contrary to the facts of man's nature. Man needs more than that psychologically. You might say that's bad for him. Perhaps so. It's bad for man that man is mortal. But ethics cannot concern itself with such facts, only with things about which man has a choice. You ask how we can come to know these facts. That's what induction is for. Would it be nice if Rand had laid out specific methods of psychological self-knowledge in greater detail? I suppose. I don't think it's essential to understanding her ethical framework. To say that man's ethics must rely upon facts is enough. And she does give us plenty of facts about man. We just need to work out the facts of our own unique natures to complete the process. You mention colors as though choosing a favorite color is an ethical choice, rather than a fact of oneself that one must simply discover. As such a fact, there is no right or wrong to it, it just is. That puts it outside the realm of ethical consideration. Existence is most certainly essential to the argument, but it entails different things at different levels of conceptual abstraction. It means one thing at the level of abstraction of living organism, it means another at the level of animal, it means another at the level of man. That's not changing the definition, but applying the same definition at different levels of abstraction. Hope this helps.

The part that seems to cause trouble just when you are headed in the right direction is that determining the metaphysically given facts of man and reality is hard. But that, I submit, does not invalidate Rand's ethics. It just means we have to put effort into learning what man is (and you have to put effort into learning what you are), so that the correct oughts can be derived from what is. On this subject I would certainly recommend reading or reviewing (or re-reviewing) Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, because it offers much clarity. You continue to pose what I think is a false choice, in effect, between survival and flourishing. When I say false choice I mean exactly that: there is no tension between the two, they do not deviate, they are one and the same. And the reason they are one and the same is that who you are is a flourishing being, and if you don't flourish, then you don't exist. Not fully. Not as you. Not as the you that you truly are. That's how I think you should look at this. Don't start with existence as an organism as your standard of value and question why happiness should be added, start with you in your highest, happiest, most glorious and productive potential and say "this is who I am, and my most solemn purpose is to preserve myself in this radiant, wonderful state. This is what the fundamental choice means for me: to exist or not as this." Do that, and everything else will follow. Beyond that, I'm afraid I can't help. If you insist upon choosing something other than your life as your standard - if you choose to live as an organism hooked up to a machine, not as the person you are, then I cannot stop you, but I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, that it is not Objectivism that compels that result.

No, I did not mean an impaired cognitive capacity. To clarify, the beings are programmed to deal with their percepts in a perfectly rational manner. They have the finest internal processing algorithm possible. They are capable of abstraction and learning. Best of all, they are free of volition, and can never go wrong. As to whether they could "evolve", of course they cannot evolve in the Darwinian sense (because they don't reproduce), but they can most certainly increase their knowledge, integrate new experiences, etc. Their limitation is their senses and their limited capacity to act in their world. Those things are part of their immutable nature, and cannot be improved upon.

The example is inapt because to enter the field of laws, i.e. the sphere of principles governing the preservation of man's rights, imposes rational constraints. You are in effect suggesting that the person is irrational. That possibility is cut off at a higher level of abstraction than the individual as himself: it is cut off at the level of abstraction of man, who is defined as a rational animal. Could there be examples of men with diseased, irrational minds? Of course there could, but those are the exceptions, to be dealt with as such. A rational man may despise cat torture, but cannot rationally support a law against it if such a law were irrational (I won't get into that discussion per se, but assume for the sake of this topic that it is). His only task then is to examine the idea that is the source of his irrational desire for such a law and correct it. That is, in fact, an essential feature of a mind devoted to rationality: the continuous detection and correction of contradictory and mistaken beliefs. Also, where you say "preconceived", I would say "metaphysically given". It is facts that concern us, not preconceived whims.

By limited nature I was referring primarily to the limitations of the creatures' sense perceptions vis-a-vis the world they inhabit. As I replied to Inspector above, we can know that electrons exist because we are able to reduce our means of knowing that, ultimately, to the level of our senses. By contrast, the beings might have (virtually) unlimited cognitive capacity yet not be able to conceive of very much on account of their limited perceptive abilities (in this example, limited to the ability to perceive themselves and other such objects in the virtual world).

You lost me. She doesn't say to work out the ethics - the ethics have been worked out. What remains to be worked out is the facts of your specific nature, to determine how to fulfill your purpose using your life as the standard of value. What part of it doesn't work? I thought I gave a fairly reasonable explanation of how to discover and validate what you need to do to achieve your purpose in the context of fully existing, i.e. in all the aspects necessary for you to sustain your life across the whole of your lifespan.

Yes, it does. I think we are in agreement now.

I was trying to show that the beings couldn't necessarily discover me. I thought that Kendall was saying that if beings had the conceptual faculty, perception, and the ability to act upon their world that those three characteristics would be sufficient to enable them to breach any barrier and discover their Greek god. I had to show that the virtual world was such that this was not necessarily the case, that the "barrier" of the virtual world was impenetrable despite being in the same universe as mine - that with virtual worlds, the frame of reference can indeed be an impenetrable barrier to the discovery of a transcendent God even by creatures possessing those three characteristics, due to their limited natures. Your point about speculation is interesting. Are you suggesting that a rational being could reasonably speculate as to the existence of a Greek god given certain evidence? I suppose that the answer is yes, if that's where the evidence pointed, but we had better be careful to employ our methods of induction scrupulously, eh?

The following is my understanding of what Objectivism has to say about this. Others are free to agree or disagree. I think the crux of what you are asking is two-fold: first, what attributes of an entity are the "essential" ones, the process of preserving which is the standard of value (in the most personal and fundamental way possible, "who are you?"), and second, by what process is that to be determined? The answer to the first clearly depends upon the nature of the entity in question, and it reduces to that which is necessary for the process of life to continue. As an organism, this entails physical survival; as a man, this entails mental survival (i.e. of the rational mind); as you in particular, it involves the maintenance of your ongoing happiness. With these, "you" are capable of taking action to perpetuate your existence. But behind that word "happiness" is an immense complex of factors that you have to understand and serve. For that, you must "know thyself". In objective terms, you must undertake a searching self-examination to discover what your happiness requires, what your mind requires, what your body requires. The first is a complex psychological question that requires an orderly process of introspection to determine the objective facts of your psychological nature. Again, the question is essentially one of the nature of the entity in question. If Hitler was acting immorally, then he was acting against what his own nature required of him and was engaged in a slow process of death. He lost his happiness, his mind, and finally his body. But he was not fully existing after the first stage of death. By existence I mean full existence, in all of man's essential aspects as I outlined. As to odd stretches of words, I would urge you to consider the validity of the underlying concepts and accept valid results regardless of whether they fit preconceived ideas of oddness. I am sure that to many people unfamiliar with Objectivism, much of what it has to say seems odd at first. It should be evaluated for its validity, not its oddity or lack thereof.

Yet in the case of electrons we can perform a reduction on our means of knowledge back to our level of sense perception. So in that sense, we do have the "apparatus" necessary to know they exist. The creatures lack such ability because of their limited natures. Now I am curious as to what it would take for these creatures to be considered conceptual, if not the ability to process abstractions based on their limited percepts according to a specified algorithm, that they use to make evaluative decisions, then what exactly?

Hmmm - interesting. Supposing I gave them a rudimentary ability to process similarities among percepts of other objects into "conceptual" groupings and store those in their memory. For example, they could detect the attributes of other objects and form abstractions of their similarities to make conceptual groupings or "object classes". This would enable them to predict other objects' behavior depending upon class membership and choose actions accordingly. Would that make them "conceptual"? If so, would it enable them to discover me? I think the answer is that they would be conceptual but they could not discover me because their ability to perceive reality is limited to the context of their virtual world. That was why they couldn't detect me - that was the point I was trying to make.

Okay, maybe I should start at the beginning ... in computer software there is an idea known as object-oriented programming (OO) that you may be familiar with. The programmer defines "classes" of objects and then instantiates (creates instances of) them in the computer memory by way of a main program. These objects possess internal states (variables or attributes), accessor methods (so that other objects can read their states), and have an ability to detect other such objects and pass messages by invoking "methods" on other objects. The perception here is extremely limited - it's the ability to "see" and pass messages to other objects. The conceptual faculty that results from this limited perception would enable these objects to conceive of nothing other than themselves and each other because that's all there is, to them. There's not three-dimensional space, as such. They can "remember" what happens, but not much happens for them to remember. I programmed these objects; there is no "free will" from my perspective, it's all deterministic. The "cognition" exists solely to choose from a short menu of options using some sort of value-maximizing function that I specify when I program them. Every time I run the program, the same thing will happen, every time. The computer I/O ports aren't accessible in any way to these objects. They're in a virtual box, so to speak, and can't get out. It's like a really dumbed-down version of "The Matrix". The main characteristic of the machine world that I was trying to present was one of limited capacity for perception and action within a limited frame of reference. I don't see how these limited creatures could get past the limitation of the nature of their existence in the machine and detect me. The most they could do is trace back their memory to their point of creation when their memories were empty, or have a very limited catalogue of observed cause and effect. I don't think a thorough validation of my machine world example is necessary: I thought that we agreed that a "greek" God was not impossible but arbitrary: Thus, you would be correct to assert that discussion of a frame of reference outside ours is inadmissible, unless and until evidence is given (of the sort I gave my computer creatures at the end of the example, when I revealed everything to them). We dismiss it as arbitrary. My point was that we couldn't disprove the existence of the transcendent God in the example, and indeed this is correct: we can disprove a supernatural God as impossible and violating the axioms, because that's what a supernatural God does by definition, but a natural or Greek god is to be dismissed as arbitrary. I would disagree however that the example wasn't useful - it enabled me to clarify terms and aided my understanding of the topic of disproving the existence of God depending on what type of God it is. I thought before that the atheist position was one of disproving the greek God, and I no longer believe that to be true. It's to be dismissed as arbitrary. Yes?

Also, I am still having difficulty seeing how the three characteristics you mentioned would enable the computer beings to one day discover me. I think that either there is something about my example that I haven't expressed well enough, or else you seem to be saying that those three characteristics eventually result in omniscience.

Is this a disagreement as to my mis-use of the term "supernatural" in my example? I'm sorry about that. Inspector corrected me - "supernatural" violates the axioms of existence, and I did not intend my computer world to do that. It was a mistaken use of the term, one that I was most emphatically NOT urging. I think that "transcendent" would have been a better word. I was intending to create a visualization for you of how a nested frame of reference could exist and be transcended by "God", without violating the axioms of existence.

The difference though is that we were able to develop the means of (indirectly) perceiving atoms. The computer beings have no such means of indirect perceptual development. How they would infer "God" by the existence of cause and effect, I don't know. Can you clarify, please?

In that case, it should take even less time for them to figure out that their view is self-contradictory and impossible, but that doesn't happen, either.

I wasn't suggesting acknowledging anything other than reality - the fact that there are people who describe themselves as agnostics for reasons other than the one that Peikoff explains as being cowardly. If we are to label a group of people as cowardly, we need to know who it is we are labeling and why, and we had better be right. As to the computer creatures, I expressly stated that their perceptive abilities were so limited as to prevent them discovering me. So it is not true that they have sense perception of the same reality I do, until at the end I chose to give it to them.

Rand states that Aristotle failed to identify the why of ethics, and she proceeds to do so (VoS, p. 14). It's not redefining the word "exist" to incorporate "as oneself". Everything that exists, exists as itself. That's axiomatic. My reference to "nothing" was only meant to refer to non-existence, meaning non-existence as a particular thing. So if you fail to exist as you, then most assuredly you do not exist, and are nothing. I did not intend to speculate as to the existence of the writhing, miserable creature that would exist in your stead, or to pose it as a "viable alternative". Personally I have no difficulty whatsoever in accepting the natural import of Rand's argument. It makes perfect sense. It starts with the fundamental alternative of existence or non-existence and applies it to increasingly narrower abstractions: from living organism, to plants and animals, to man - and finally, at the concrete level, to oneself. At this level, survival means happiness - the moral purpose of your life. Does this leave you with the incredibly difficult task of discovering the facts of your nature? Of course it does. You have to discover what you specifically are good at, what your unique abilities are, what productive work is best for you, what makes you truly happy, etc. These are facts about yourself that you have to discover and validate by self-examination, experience, and effort. It is not a recipe for living according to emotional whims: your task is to define your central purpose across the whole of your lifespan, ensuring that it is objectively valid, and proceed to make smaller decisions and choose goals accordingly. That's a big task. It could take a long time to sort out depending on your state of psychological health, but it's crucially necessary. Your life as a moral being - as you - depends upon it. I also was surprised and a bit disappointed at first that Rand couldn't give me all the answers I needed straight away, that one would have to undertake a searching self-examination (in my case, to validate objectively what I thought I already knew about myself - which is where most people probably are in the process - very few have no idea at all what their major purpose in life ought to be, at least I hope it's very few). That doesn't mean I reject the basis of Rand's ethics, to the contrary: I accept the responsibility it places on me, as a being of self-made soul, to discover and live as the best that I can be. That's not only rational, it's very inspiring and is a tremendous contribution by Rand.

That's fine for us, but it doesn't help us address ourselves to those self-described agnostics. They're avoiding the term "atheist" for a reason - because it involves a claim to knowledge of God's non-existence that they don't agree with according to their contextually bound understanding of God (the Santa version, as David puts it). Since their belief stands in contrast to two positive claims that they dismiss as arbitrary, they use the term agnostic to distinguish themselves on the matter they consider most essential. I don't think it's necessary to approve of their definition, merely to acknowledge the diversity of beliefs that the term actually encompasses.

The problem is that agnosticism suffers from terminological ambiguity that Peikoff doesn't seem to acknowledge. I think that there are self-described "agnostics" who, in effect, consider the claim arbitrary and dismiss it for want of evidence. Personally I always thought that's what agnosticism was, because that's what the people I knew who described themselves as agnostics did. They didn't entertain any notion of God other than to shrug it off, saying, in effect, "show me the evidence". By "maybe" they meant "arbitrary", using our confused common parlance. I am happy to modify my definition and call myself an atheist, and to take whatever definitions are appropriate here for this discussion, but I think that our concern here goes beyond that and includes what self-described agnostists believe and how they define the term. That's where I differ with Peikoff - not with his logic, but with his seemingly over-inclusive choice of labels.

I see. Certainly if that is the meaning of CG I cannot argue. The problem I have with that explanation is that if you were to ask an agnostic whether he thinks that Christians believe that God exists, is himself, and has consciousness, he would say "yes, yes, and yes", which implies that he thinks that CG obeys the axioms. CG's essential qualities are transcendent, not supernatural in that sense (transcendent of the physical universe as we know it, i.e. transcending man's frame of reference, just as I transcended the machine world's frame of reference). All of the powers of CG including omniscience and omnipotence seem to relate to a particular existential context, because that is what CG transcends. An agnostic may be someone who, at a very early age, resolved the contradiction by adding the contextual limitation I described. That would hardly be a surprise - the purpose of man's mind is noncontradictory identification. No wonder you can't convince him that God cannot exist. You're addressing yourself to a concept that he never held. Perhaps knowing this possibility will help us to understand how to approach individual agnostics in addressing this issue, rather than dismissing them all as cowards.