DiscoveryJoy

Hi there! Didn't know there is such a thread about this topic here! Even if it's some years old. Just my thoughts on it after going through these posts: I gather that this thread has been revolving around the question, whether physical attraction by the opposite sex and desires that follow from it are necessarily based on the assessment of a person's character or not. And whether one must be a victim of some "mind-body-dichotomy", if one is already attracted "only by the looks". I think it depends on what you mean by "based on". But I also think there's no such thing

I never understood how sex can be a topic for philosophy to make such statements on in the first place. This is a highly concrete and specialized issue that depends on an individual's concrete values, psychology and physical constitution. Who is to make statements about what your own concrete and objective values are? What values to look for in another person? How abstract they are to be? And in order to fulfill which actual needs of interaction with them and to what extend? And knowing that Objectivism enters into this topic, I typically detect certain ideas surrounding and rel

Okay, fair enough, I wasn't using the term "proof" in that strict of a sense, but merely indicating that something is somehow "demonstrated" or "made to surface" by my argument.

Here's another one: It is said that any society is guided by and needs philosophers. How is this possible, if on the other hand a people is said to be "at fault" when a Dictator gets into power?

I see. Fits to what I discovered in my reply to softwareNerd.

I see. See also my reply to softwareNerd.

I see. Seems to have more to do with the gender roles Ayn Rand expects in romantic love due to physical differences in strength among the sexes, and therefore perhaps some esthetic disharmony that Rand would ascribe to a woman being on top of all the men around her.

What's the difference? If you've proven that free will is an axiom, you have proven it's metaphysically given existence.

From my understanding there is very little required to prove free will: Determinism is a self-contradiction! If you had no free will, how would you even know you have no free will? Does that knowledge flow to you automatically? Yes? So it's not actually true that there's no free will, it's just those damn genes or whatever "forcing" you to think that?

Another one: It is said that you shouldn't be guided by your emotions but that emotions are what you should live for. Seems to me like a contradiction by itself. To aim at something (an emotion) is to be guided by that goal, or is it not? Even if it is the prospect of a future emotion grasped only cognitively now, you are still using that emotion as a guiding argument, therefore "being guided by your emotion". Put another way: It is said that acting rationally is fundamentally different to acting on your desires. But if after the end of all thinking and extrapolating

Okay, let's start with the first. It is my understanding that Rand considered men and woman equal in intellectual capability. And that all humans are capable of moral perfection. But then a horror-strickenly uttered sentence I heard from Rand herself in one of Donahue's shows rings in my ear. It was about the idea of a female US president and went something like: "A woman as a head of command of the armed forces?! Are you kidding me?" How does this fit together? If a woman really was to be considered incapable of pulling the trigger if necessary, wouldn't this mean she is also i

Hi, I would like to use this thread to resolve certain statements by Objectivists in certain contexts that seem to contradict each other and try to resolve those contradictions.

Not sure about what the recent posts have to do with the thread's topic, but I, too, hope that at least some top students of Objectivism are among the posters here. For professional assistance, I think it is still a good idea to tune into the Yaron Brook Show and ask questions, or to post your questions to peikoff.com

Not sure about what your thoughts are on my recent replies, since many of my questions remained unanswered. But I am meanwhile reflecting about the following proposal: The fact that a lower values suffers by itself does not make it right to give up a higher value for it. The degree of the suffering is irrelevant. It is therefore wrong to engage in empathy on the sensual level by inflicting slight doses of physical pain to yourself only in order to be in touch with the degree of the suffering, in order to be able to include it in a calculus of the kind: "How much value for me minus ho

Just "not at the moment"? Or possibly "not even at all"? Assuming that it is true that you don't need to feel them now, is it then even necessary to feel them ever? As your answer is that you can create a perceptual basis by reasoning and conceptual thought, it seems like you want to construct a perceptual concrete in the mind from some memorized concretes, so that the result resembles the would-be real experience? Some "ultra-light" dose of that same intensity that somehow lets you stay in touch with how it would feel like, but not so strong as to overwhelm your ability to loose

I don't have a problem with not literally seeing birds, I'm confident of grasping their reality when thinking about them. The reason is that I have experienced birds in reality. Just have a hard time comparing such emotionless object-grasping like birds to the grasping of pain on the highest level. It is my understanding that according to http://www.healthcentral.com/chronic-pain/coping-403768-5_2.html there are up to ten levels of pain. How is it possible to claim to be able to conceive of levels 9 and 10, if experiencing such levels would actually require causing serious damage to your

The question is - put in a nutshell - which is worse: Loosing a higher value (being with a partner) for good, or a lesser value (e.g. a close family member) suffering permanently under extreme pain? A scenario was constructed in which a mutually exclusive choice has to be made among these two. Since witnessing a value suffering involves empathy, there is a perceived dilemma: Engaging in empathy at the price of seemingly loosing a clear focus on one's own values, versus cutting down on empathy at the price of seemingly loosing contact with the reality of the suffering. While

Let's go deeper: What about having the urge to seek the empathy in the first place, in order to stay in touch with reality, with what's going on? If that's at the root of the problem, would that itself already be poor emotional control? Or just a natural consequence of one's chosen principles, proper under normal circumstances? That's why I call it "the dilemma of choosing empathy". If you agree with my 3 distinctions, would acting based on the knowledge of one's "poor emotional control" still leave the metaphysical value hierarchy unaffected? "It's actually a higher value, but unfortunat

I didn't really get what you mean by the "balancing act" from the part where you introduced that term. Do you mean a view that culture itself just practically doesn't make any difference at all? Not the view that they lead to different results that should both be respected? But the view that they just are not an influencing factor, do not produce any difference in the existential result? Why not call it a view of a general insignificance or impotence of culture? Well, there is a legitimacy to that view, if you really define culture just in the "look-and-feel" sense I described. Weari

So let's get back to the scenario in a less graphical way, because your mentioning of trauma suggests to me that you are still picturing the scenario the wrong way: The scenario is such, that there isn't even any time for trauma, the victim is being tortured in perpetuity, while you as a closely related person have to deal with it in perpetuity. So there is no "after the event" like a trauma, because there is no single "event", just ongoing torture for the rest of the victim's life. So you as the observer have to decide: Stay with the partner and deal with the emotional consequences

Well it depends on 1) for what length of time you choose to empathize and 2) whether you are the one in trouble, doesn't it? Emotions are quick? Only a few moments? Are you saying that most of the time in our lives there's nothing really to enjoy? And are you saying that if thrown and locked into cell with a 100 degree Celsius hot floor for hours, it will all be over "quickly"? Well I believe you, if the pain made you unconscious after a few moments, its so unbearable. But otherwise? You're kidding, right? ;-) I hope you agree that this example, too, deals with emotions? Emot

I'm not an economist, but there was a time shortly after the financial crisis where I used to follow everything by Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers etc., really thinking that they're up to something. Meanwhile I'm more sceptical about such people's ability to predict such things in the short term. In the long run, they're right of course, but in the short run, a lot of other things have the power of delaying things: Wealth is very elastic. Once you've created a certain oversupply, you can go on for decades before really paying the full price for your mistakes, never actually feeling that somethi

I thought it's called multiculturalism. Although I don't think that most people really understand what that officially means. Usually, when we think of culture, we think of everything but abstract ideas. We think of concrete customs, aesthetics, ethnicity and the like. The look and feel of it. For example, if you think of Italian culture, you think of Pizza, you think of Pasta, you think of Opera Music, you think of predominantly European men and women with dark hair, you think of typical old Italian Roman-style houses with thick roofing tiles surrounded by Mediterranean cypresses, y

What about the anti-value perception, the pain? Grasping it requires perceiving it and allowing the instant flow you describe to happen. Then comparing it against a positive value requires recreating that space in your mind. Which requires shutting down the previous negative emotion. Which requires blanking out the percept that created it, to prevent this overwhelming instant flow. Which means being left with no two things to compare any more, just one. It seems to be impossible to hold both the extreme negative and the extreme positive in consciousness simultaneously. That's where I see

Interesting. Never thought of the term of "compassionate duty". How do you draw the line between compassionate duty and a legitimate attempt at knowing the reality of the pain that someone you care about is going through? To what extend would inflicting physical pain onto oneself in order to grasp the nature of his pain, i.e. to stay in touch with that reality, be justified? And wouldn't it be an act of evasion not to make such an attempt? Why would it lead to destroying one's empathic feelings, if you're actually providing yourself with more sense data? Shouldn't it rather enhance those