Economic Freedom

>There is no proof that when you perceive a string from which you have suspended a bob, you are not perceiving perfect verticality. When you perceive a string suspending a bob, you are perceive a string suspending a bob. Period. Where did you suddenly make the jump from "string suspending a bob" to *PERFECT* verticality? You believe you're actually perceiving something called "perfection"? I don't think so. I think that's a classic example of what Rand criticized so many others of doing: concept stealing; i.e., sneaking in implicit concepts to help their conclusions hold together. You're avoiding the argument. Where does "perfect" verticality; "perfect" circularity; etc. come from, since it obviously doesn't physically exist, and therefore (according to ITOE) cannot be a percept. It's a so-called "abstraction"? You can only abstract (per ITOE) from percepts. Cite for me the percepts -- percept-to-percept -- leading from "string suspending a bob (um, under the influence of gravity, in still air; not, for example, underwater or under conditions of high wind) to "this is an acceptable example of a perfectly straight vertical line"? I don't see any percepts allowing you to make such a conceptual leap.

>t's only 'clearly' not part of logic if one holds the position that concepts lead to percepts, and not the reverse. I didn't say anything about "concepts." I merely said "thinking."

>Two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, change their status into a liquid when combined. You're wrong on a number of assumptions. 1) merely mixing hydrogen gas and oxygen gas together in a room won't form anything. You'll have free-floating hydrogen gas and free-floating oxygen gas. Big deal. 2) When you provide an adequate heat source to cause a reaction between hydrogen gas and oxygen gas to form water, the water doesn't have any properties that cannot be explained by means of the properties of its constituent parts. Water is pretty much the sum of its constituent parts. 3) Hydrogen gas and oxygen gas are governed by the overarching 4 Laws of Thermodynamics (the 0th Law, the 1st Law, the 2nd Law (i.e., entropy), and the 3rd Law. The resultant combination -- water -- is itself governed by the 4 overarching Laws of Thermodynamics. Not so with life. The difference between "living" and "non-living" doesn't reside in chemical elements under the rule of the 4 Laws of Thermodynamics. The difference between "living" and "non-living" resides in the fact that the former is made possible by a system of coded-chemistry, while the latter is not. Evidence? Chemically analyze a living person on his death bed, and then perform the same chemical analysis just after he dies. Same chemicals. Yet the first entity was alive and the second one was not. Obviously, the difference is not simply chemistry. The genetic code is 1) universal (all living things that we know about have the same coded-chemistry, differing only in details); and 2) a true code, no different in structure from any other code, such as Morse Code and ASCII. There is no plausible way to get from "chemicals under the rule of only thermodynamic considerations" to "chemicals that are *not only* under the rule of thermodynamic considerations but that also obey an arbitrary system of coded signals between structures. By "arbitrary", I mean that the genetic code itself cannot be derived as necessarily having been formed by the nature of the chemicals involved in life (water, salt, phosphorous, magnesium, ribose, etc.). Similarly, Morse Code is an arbitrary code invented by the mind of Samuel Morse; the assignation of symbols to the English alphabet (e.g., "..." is assigned to the letter "S"; "---" is assigned to the letter "O"; etc.) was strictly a matter of arbitrary choice by Mr. Morse, and cannot be derived from the chemical composition of pencil lead on paper, or the sound-wave properties of a telegraph device. Codes -- including the genetic code -- are always products of mind.

>Mentally conceiving something depends on the prior existence of that which is doing the conceiving I don't think I wrote anything about mentally *conceiving* something. A though process is required to take physical stimuli and integrate them into a percept. "Percepts" are interior and subjective; they don't exist "out there"; they exist in the mind only. Modern science agrees on this: the only things that exist "out there" (that is, independent of mind) are particles of various sorts and empty space between the particles. Mainly empty space. The upshot is that, while the particles might be the same for a human and a non-human, a percept formed by their respective thought processes might be very different. Percepts are subjective.

>Any legitimate discovery - philosophical or scientific - is made through the same method: induction. "Legitimate" discovery? Can you cite an example of an "illegitimate" discovery? Seems to be an oxymoron. "0", "i", the "real number line", "complex numbers", were not discoveries. They were inventions. Quite different from "discovery." The New World was discovered; the mathematical limit used in calculus was invented. In any case, scientific theories are testable (i.e., potentially falsifiable) by experimentation; philosophies and religions are not. That says nothing about truth, falsity, or usefulness. It means philosophies are unlike scientific theories and one doesn't go about showing flaws in them by the same means. There are no controlled experiments one can do to demonstrate the flaws in ITOE. As for "induction," it's clearly not a part of the study of logic. There is no "inductive logic" or "logic of induction." Logic is strictly deductive, starting from premises and then deriving a conclusion by means of a simple process of comparing the logical terms: the major term, the minor term, and the middle term. "Induction" is actually a form of "argument from analogy" whose purpose is to *persuade*, not to *prove* or *demonstrate* (induction can never prove or demonstrate anything). It therefore belongs to the study of Rhetoric (the study of arguments for the sake of persuasion), and not the study of Logic. See "Elements of Logic" and "Elements of Rhetoric" by Richard Whately.

>A line is a percept Maybe to a graphic designer, but not to a mathematician. A "line" is simply an idea. It can be represented by a percept, or it can be represented by an algebraic relation (y=mx + b). One doesn't even need to perceive the algebraic symbols; one merely needs to understand their meaning. You're confused between the idea of a "sign" (something that points) and the "signified" (the thing or idea being pointed at). The former is nothing more than an aid to the latter. Also, there are many concepts -- especially in mathematics, but probably in other fields, too -- that don't depend on perception because they cannot be perceived: infinity (whether extensively, as in a number line; or intensively, as in a mathematical limit used in calculus); the imaginary number "i" (square root of -1, or "i^2 = -1") is simply an idea. Come to think of it, "0" is an idea, too. In physics, there are no perceptions of an electron going through the 2-slit experiment because any attempt to "perceive" the electron requires you to interact with it in some way, and interacting with it changes the outcome of its behavior. It can't even be imagined: something that's simultaneously a particle (self-contained and occupying a given volume of space) and a wave (something that's not self-contained but instead "concentrated" or "peaked" at a certain location but then receding to all other areas of space to infinity). Feynman was clear about that in his Cornell lectures. He affirmed that no one "really understands" quantum mechanics because the sub-atomic world in which strict deterministic causality appears to break down is just too weird, bearing no relation to the macroscopic world. Finally, I'll point out something that many Objectivist Fundamentalists omit from their catechism of quoting ITOE and other "inerrant" texts: percepts themselves are not fundamental. What enters the eyes and ears (as well as other sense organs) is nothing but sensation -- physical stimuli. The integration of various stimuli into a whole known as a "percept" is done by an act of thought -- it's entirely mental. So thinking precedes perception. If the thinking does not occur, then the percept remains what the psychologist William James called it in his Principles of Psychology (1890): "A blooming, buzzing confusion."

>If anyone proves that there are lots of flaws in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, It's up to Objectivists to prove they are right, and not to make arbitrary, unsupported assertions and demand everyone else prove they are wrong. Objectivists -- beginning with Miss Rand herself -- haven't done this because 1) they tolerate no serious criticism from within their ranks, and 2) they refuse to debate people on fundamental issue from outside their ranks. That is why since Rand's death, Objectivists have splintered into myriad subgroups, each one claiming to be the true inheritors of her teachings. It's most clearly shown -- though not limited to -- the split between Peikoff ("Objectivism is a closed system; there's nothing else fundamentally in philosophy to discover") and Kelley ("Objectivism is an open system, a system basically of inquiry; i.e., stimulating questions, not a system of pre-digested answers that "students of Objectivism" should merely memorize and spit back out".) So Peikoff (as well as Yaron Brook) is an Objectivist Fundamentalist, reverting to texts that are taken to be "inerrant"; while Kelley (the apostate!) is the leader of the Objectivist Reformation Movement, paying due respect to the texts but also stressing the importance of the individual's conscience to assess and interpret those texts in ways that might differ, one from the other. >or in Einstein's theory of relativity, You're a Newbie at this. Note well: Einstein's theory of relativity is a *scientific theory* that can be tested experimentally and therefore, falsified in principle. As a matter of fact, the theory has been extensively tested experimentally since the 1930s and no experiment to date has succeeded in falsifying the theory's predictions. Same with quantum mechanics, by the way. Conversely, Objectivism is a philosophical system -- not a scientific theory -- so it's not amenable to experimental falsification. That you suggested finding flaws in a philosophical system as being the same kind of activity as finding flaws in a scientific theory proves what I said above: you're a newbie. Needless to say, the same goes for your statement regarding "the theory of evolution as formulated by modern biologists", as if there's a monolithic bloc called "modern biologists" who collectively formulated a "theory of evolution." Modern biologists, especially in the field of biochemistry, pay scant attention to any theory, or hypothesis, of evolution because such ideas generally cannot be tested experimentally, instead relying on imagined scenarios of what might or might not have occurred, unobserved by anyone, billions of years ago. What modern biology -- especially modern biochemistry -- has shown is that 1) the gap between non-living/non-self-replicating molecules and even a primitive, living, self-replicating cell (something with a genetic code capable of passing on information about the structure of the organism so that the progeny cell is similar to the parent cell) is so wide -- with so many malevolent natural forces (chemical and physical) arrayed against it, that it cannot be accomplished by pure dumb luck in the mere 14x[10^9] years allotted for its completion. I got that insight from Sir Francis Crick, a Nobel Laureate as the co-discoverer of the structure and function of DNA. He's the one who said that. Assuming that "non-living/non-self-replicating" predates "living/self-replicating" (an assumption), then the gap was closed with the help of something that could bypass the pure-dumb-luck processes of chemistry and physics always ready to demolish structures that might have been constructed. This is why tornadoes demolish barns, turning them into piles of wooden rubble, rather than turning piles of wooden rubble into barns...despite the fact that no physicist denies that no natural laws or constants are violated by the latter process. Richard Feynman was clear about that in one of his videotaped lectures at Cornell University in the 1960s. You can find them online. I mention this because many modern biologists remain resolutely quiet about Darwinian evolution and abiogenesis ("chemical evolution") because most of the recent findings in their field flatly contradict the basic assumptions of a purely undirected, material, random, hypothesis regarding the origin of life, let alone the origin of diverse species of life. Some of these modern biologists are good, card-carrying atheists, just like Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. For starters, read "Evolution: A View from the 21st Century" by James Shapiro (professor, University of Chicago). But I digress. Finding flaws in a philosophy is categorically different from finding flaws in a scientific theory.

>This does not follow. LOL. Yes, it does. "Yes, if only everyone had read, learned, believed, and *followed* Objectivism throughout history, things would've been just as Miss Rand imagines them to be in the happy valley of Galt's Gulch...on the other hand, that wouldn't have been possible because Atlas Shrugged, the Virtue of Selfishness, and ITOE didn't exist yet." In other words, if only a fantasized, factually impossible scenario had been real, things would've been different (and, needless to say, better). In other words, "If pigs had wings, they could fly." Of course, even that last statement is wrong: chickens and turkeys have wings yet they don't fly. How do we know that "winged pigs" -- should they ever exist -- won't be flightless like chickens? As Leonard Peikoff once said about the old dichotomy between logical necessity vs. logical contingency, "That confuses logic with Walt Disney." (I paraphrase him from memory.)

> I know that he said some people by nature are slaves. Since the "nature" of something = its "identity"; and since the "nature/identity" of a thing = that which persists in the thing throughout time (otherwise, its identity would change over time, right?); then the statement "by nature are slaves" = "they are permanently slaves". It's their nature, so it's also their identity, therefore it's permanent. I hope that's clear. >I don't deny that he said that. But I still don't see where you are getting the idea that he said most people should be permanently enslaved. I proffered no opinion regarding "some", "most", "all", "any", etc. You're quibbling and splitting hairs. A statement was posted earlier denying that Aristotle supported slavery. I quoted a statement by Aristotle contradicting that. There are possibly more statements by Aristotle regarding slavery throughout the "Politics". Find a PDF copy and do a word search.

>I just realized, you just said you are LB I was unmistakably speaking on behalf of myself. LB wasn't confused by my post but it seems you were. It also seems you have taken it upon yourself to be LB's spokesperson. Is your intervention requested by LB or is it unsolicited? In any case: if someone posts a statement about Aristotle, he or she should open a book by Aristotle and check to confirm it, or disconfirm it. It's called "research." Objectivists are great about opening books by Ayn Rand and quoting her verbatim, but they often fail to open anyone else's books to confirm or disconfirm their statements about the authors. It's not only called "research"; it's called "checking your premises." Sadly, Miss Rand herself was guilty of such a practice. Her statement about Emerson is one small example; her "review" of John Rawls's book on a Theory of Justice in The Ayn Rand Letter – which, by her own admission, she "wouldn't bother reading" – is another. If you haven't read a book, don't waste a reader's time by pretending to "review" it.

>His particular example is not relevant to his point here... he could point to North Korea for example. And yet he didn't point to an obvious example like North Korea. He pointed to Ukraine, indicating that he uncritically believes the narrative spun by mainstream media. Look up "Operation Mockingbird". And note this interesting declaration regarding intentionally planted misinformation (i.e., "disinformation") in the news cycle presented to the public by the established news venues (i.e., today they are The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Fox): "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" William J. Casey Director of the CIA, 1981-1987

Sure, I mean, who can tell, right? So "reason" -- the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by perception -- is not mental at all but actually physical, right? And if someone has a superior reasoning faculty, it must because he or she has superior genes underlying that faculty. Similarly, if someone has an inferior reasoning faculty, it can only be because he or she has inferior genes. Sounds like something out of an early 20th century book on eugenics. By the way, you're aware that genetics has established that the great majority of chance mutations to the genome are either injurious to the organism, or simply neutral (i.e., they don't change the organism in any fundamental way, e.g., blue eyes and blond hair vs. brown eyes and brown hair). The idea that a random, chance, pure-dumb-luck mutation from a DNA copying error, or a stray cosmic ray hitting the genome, caused a fundamental and beneficial change in an animal species to such a large extent -- acquisition of reason, acquisition of language, etc. -- is far-fetched, with no compelling evidence except, of course, philosophical bias (which is not evidence at all). And you're aware that Ayn Rand herself implicitly expressed some skepticism about Darwinian evolution at a Ford Hall Forum lecture in the 1970s? Someone in the audience asked her about evolution and she said simply, "I'm not a student of Darwin's theory." The truth is that Darwin's notion of dumb-luck combined with natural selection is not a theory at all but, at best, a hypothesis . . . and one that is not well supported either by the fossil record (which mainly shows long periods of stasis punctuated by rapid change, with few or no intermediates) or by modern biochemistry (which shows genetics to be based on a system of coded-chemistry, and which also shows biological systems -- the cell, for example -- to be hierarchical, with systems being dependent on lower, more fundamental systems. The systems could not have "evolved" piecemeal, element by element, because the entire system needs to be in place simultaneously for other systems to function at all. So the "slow-and-steady-over-long-periods-of-time" notion of classical Darwinism doesn't work in the laboratory, regardless of how attractive it might be to a philosophically naïve-materialism bias). Finally: The genome determines protein synthesis (the "proteome"). There's no evidence that proteins of any sort cause or lie at the foundation of "mind", "consciousness", or of a power or faculty of mind or consciousness such as "reason." To assume otherwise is simply arbitrary.

First you say "Yes", and then you say "That would've been impossible" (which is the same as saying "No"). You're aware that Marxists claim that if only everyone had followed Marx, history would've been better; Christians claim if only everyone followed the teachings of Jesus and the writings of St. Paul, history would've been better; and of course, Bill Maher and Sam Harris claim that if only there had never been religion, history would've been better (no wars, no mass murders, etc. . . . despite the fact that in 20th century history, all of the mass murders and crimes against humanity were committed by atheist regimes). >and then people have to learn it . . . Right. And what if they learn it and then find lots of flaws in it?

Yep. And your assertion is that if only everyone throughout the course of human history had been a "true" Objectivist like, e.g., Leonard Peikoff, there would not have been wars, mass murders, or "mistakes." Correct?

> There is plenty of evidence, including but not limited to comparisons of genomes, that we share common ancestors with all other animals, none of which are rational as we are. So certain genetic changes -- caused by a chance mutation, which was then retained by natural selection -- in "non-rational" animals caused a subset of those animals (i.e., humans) to acquire reason. Correct?

>Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses. One crucial feature is the ability to form concepts, as discussed in ITOE Thanks for quoting Rand. I was hoping for a definition that was more substantial.

Many are now saying that Taiwan has the same corruption issues as Ukraine, and that PRC under Xi might invade it for the same reason. Tramp asserted that about 2 months ago in an interview. The difference, I think, is that PRC might want to annex Taiwan, whereas I don't believe Putin is going to do that to Ukraine. Putin could've invaded and annexed Ukraine back in 2014 under the militarily weak Obama administration with no meaningful objections from the U.S.

>What are your grounds for this accusation? You're serious? Statements by the Azov Battalion espousing Nazism. Many are saying that their members shouldn't even be called "Neo-Nazis"; they're simply good, old-fashioned Nazis, similar to the Ukrainians in WWII who sided with the 3rd Reich. There are also many statements by Ukrainians regarding atrocities against them by the Ukrainian army (not the Russian Federation army). Watch, also news from Europe, especially the French journalist living in Ukraine, Anne-Laure Bonnel. Ukraine (the government, not the majority of the people) is a hotbed of corruption, including bioweapons manufacturing (which they call "research", and which our State Department is now calling "Defensive"), human trafficking, and money laundering. That's why, before the military intervention, Putin asserted that he was "De-Nazifying Ukraine." Indeed. Just so.

>Evolution in this way is how we acquired the faculty of reason. So, humans were originally irrational (evidence of that?), and then through Darwinian evolution (i.e., chance mutation plus natural selection) the faculty of reason (definition of that, please?) simply appeared (as a beneficial mutation). Then humans thought really hard, and then they acquired morality. Got it. Sounds a bit like like one of those "Just So" stories by Rudyard Kipling (how the giraffe "acquired" its long neck; how the leopard "acquired" its spots; etc. Highly recommended fiction reading.)

>The latter is literaly impossible without the starting point of perception. A *materialist* assertion with no supporting evidence.

>Geometry presupposes the ability to perceive shape, size and position No it doesn't. That's an assertion with no proof, and certainly no historical basis. It has to do with conceiving perfection (which is the reason it can be thought of but not conceived as a picture): perfect angles, perfect circles, perfect diameters, perfect circumferences, etc. Since we cannot perceive "perfection", it stands to reason that geometry is not "derived" from perception. Perception -- a form of experience -- confirms, or validates, geometric truths, but it isn't "derived" from perception. As for "Pi", it depends on the intellectual -- i.e., mental only -- concept of a perfect circle. If you actually draw circles in the sand, or on a piece of paper, and physically measure the circumference and diameter, you will never be able to calculate the exact number "Pi"; every circle, diameter, and circumference you draw will give you a slightly different ratio. Finally, by relying on perception, you will also never have concepts in mathematics such as negative numbers, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, or transcendental numbers. The notion that our knowledge base exclusively rests on, or is somehow exclusively derived from, perception, is (frankly) nonsense.

*** Split from: Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism? *** >Just today I saw a news report that a gov't official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia's current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps. What was the news source? Most of what mainstream media has presented to the public regarding Ukraine has been propaganda. Even many images have been shown to be hoaxes. Ethnic Russians who speak Russian but live in Ukraine don't want to live under a Ukraine government run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion) with a puppet president (Zelensky). The Ukraine government has been shelling the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine since 2014 and thousands of those Ukrainians have been killed. Additionally, as Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, has confirmed in a recent videotaped Senate hearing, Ukraine has a number of bioweapons laboratories (she called them "research facilities") that we now know through documents released by the Pentagon, were and are, financed by the U.S. Apparently, Mr. Putin doesn't like the idea of U.S.-backed bio-weapons labs on his doorstep, especially given what is now know via leaked emails, etc., from Fauci, Daszak, Baric, et al., regarding gain-of-function research on viruses that began in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina, Fort Dietrich) and continued in Wuhan, China at their Institute of Virology. Can't understand why anyone would uncritically believe the narrative spun by mainstream media.

>because the concepts used in reasoning are derived from perception I don't understand that statement. How are the concepts of an "asymptote" or a "limit", for example, derived from perception, unless the meaning of "derived" is taken very loosely. No one has ever perceived either one. For that matter, no one has ever perceived a perfect circle, yet the concept of "pi" depends on there being such a thing. Actual, concrete, perceived circles -- with actual, concrete, perceivable diameters and circumferences -- will not yield "pi"; in fact, they will yield different values for the ratio of the latter to the former in each concrete case one tries to measure it. Obviously, concepts are categorically different from percepts, though the latter might an aid in forming or clarifying the former. That percepts might aid in the formation or clarification of concepts does not mean concepts are derived from percepts.

> Some hold the view that a woman should have the right to get an abortion until the point of birth And the California legislature is considering passing a law that allows a baby to be killed up to 2 weeks after birth. Many of us believe this is nothing more than an attempt to legalize infanticide.

I sometimes wonder why committed Objectivists will not read source materials by authors they criticize. They seem to rely on statements by self-proclaimed authorities on Objectivism (e.g., Peikoff, Kelley, et al.), but closer inspection of those authorities often reveals that they haven't read the source materials either. Sadly, this was sometimes true of Rand herself. For example, she once made an offhand criticism of Emerson by misquoting his statement about consistency. She claimed he said "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", when in fact, he wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Something quite different.