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lex_aver

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Posts posted by lex_aver

  1. Identifying matter with entity is a contradiction, because that means any entity is identical to any other entity, and that is pure defiance of axiom of identity itself, which leads to inability to identify matter with entity.

    Actually, disregard that. "If all A are B and all C are B then all A are C" is a classical example of invalid syllogism.

    Does matter necessarily entail entity? (I've gotten two opposing opinions on this question)

    Yes, it does. Although you can take only a part of the ring, it is still finite quantity of its consistuent parts. Reality is finite and quantinized.

    Does entity necessarily entail matter? (ditto)

    Yes, it does. Even if you take immaterial enitities like consciousness, you'll find that they pertain to material things like living being in this case. Nothing immaterial can exist by itself, e.g. there are no ghosts.

  2. Photons have 0 rest mass. However they are never at rest. In any reference frame they have a velocity whose magnitude is c. Photons may have 0 rest mass, but they manage to bang electrons about. Photons exist. They account for the photoelectric effect and the Compton effect

    Movement with constant speed is inertial state, so photon's mass is zero. Their ability to "bang" electrons has nothing to do with Newtonian force F = ma. When photon is absorbed by electron, its energy E = hν is added to electron's, and electron is elevated to the higher subshell, if it is a part of atom. If it is not a part of atom, but is a part of beta-particles ray, for example, then its change of motion is due to addition of photon's momentum p = hν/c.

  3. Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space.

    First of all, matter is not identical to entity. Pen probably consists of matter, but is not matter as such. Identifying matter with entity is a contradiction, because that means any entity is identical to any other entity, and that is pure defiance of axiom of identity itself, which leads to inability to identify matter with entity. It can be that matter is not homogenous and identity is manifestation of particular state of the matter, but then entity is not just matter, but is matter + identity. That would explain Primacy of Existence, by the way: no faculty can exist by itself, without matter.

    Secondly, photons have no mass in state of inertial motion, which is a proven fact at odds with school definition.

    May I recommend for your edification the translations of -Physics- and -Metaphysics- done by Joe Sachs.

    Thank you, I'd love to read them if I will be able to afford the delivery. The copy I was trying to read is the most obscure of the works read by me up to the date.

  4. I am struggling to grasp what matter is, but with no luck so far. In philosophic dictionary, I found the following definition: "Matter is the philosophic category for sensory, material world". It is an obvious tautology. Also, under this definition, a pen does not consist of matter, but matter consists of pens, as well as other objects.

    I have developed several possible hypothesa myself:

    1) Matter is hypothetical substance from which all physical objects are made of.

    2) Matter is ontologically erroneous. Material object is a concept for existents existing by themselves, not as faculties. Matter was merely a result of naive ontologizing by Ancient Greeks, just like Aristotle's forms were.

    Yet I am not completely satisfied with either: in the first case the matter is an anti-concept for all entities except elementary particles, and in the second case I find my self at odds with Ayn Rand, who frequently used it in Galt's Speech, for example, as well as all other philosophers I know. It is ok by itself, but makes me uneasy. Is there something I missed or misinterpreted?

  5. Welcome to the forum!

    Identity of existence is not given in consciousness, only hinted. When you merely see a table, you aren't aware that what you see is actually a table, you are only aware that you see something. It is up to your reason to discover the nature of what you see based on your observations.

    I haven't read Satre, so can you expand on what he meant by positional consciousness, please? According to Objectivism, consciousness is a faculty, so it cannot leave the body it belongs to, in part or whole.

  6. I disagree with Tenure. I haven't read the book, however, so maybe I just don't know better Beowulf. I like the story, it is a story about a hero, and it succeeds in showing that integrity is the source of heroism: hero falls seduced by evil, but finally manages to reclaim his heroic nature.

    "Pride is a curse" is a disturbing sign, though, especially after hearing Beowulf saying that "Chirstian god killed heroes".

  7. Man forms concepts by measurement omission, by taking only what's in common in some concretes. For example, it is not important if a table is made from wood or plastic, it is still a table if it has flat surface that rests on supports. Concept formation, however, does not always involve differentiation. For example, the concept “existent” refers to anything that exists, and the concept “existence”, or “reality”, is everything that exists.

    Now, man has inborn ablity to form concepts. That ability does not require having concepts to function, but only being able to perceive reality. And at the beginning it is not an easy process — you won't find little baby dealing with abstract categories, only with basic concepts like “man”, “toy” or “food”.

  8. Yep, I was a big Pooh fan too, and I still am. Marvellous stories, although with slightly bitter ending.

    Disney series are bad, I agree. But original Disney adaptaion was brilliant!

  9. Long story short, I decided to quit gaming and concentrate on more productive endaevours. Because of that, I think that selling my PC and buying iMac will be benefatical (I'm really excited about iLife and in the whole, this OS's utitlites look a lot better than the ones I currently have). But I need advice from those who have or had Macs.

    The one special feature I need from any computer I buy is that it should not limit me in software developing. I can stand forfeiting MFC and stuff in favor of cross-platform framework, but I'm much more touchy about .NET and Visual Studio (AFAIK, only GCC-based IDE comes with iMac right away).

    The other thing I need advice on is what Mac to choose. Since I'm not going for gaming anymore, I don't want top performance, but watching HD-video and using iMovie and stuff is still a priority.

    I would also appreciate some general review of Mac and its comparison with Windows.

  10. Actually, I just understood that mistake as such cannot be morally judged. Morality is not a criterion for judging whether the action was benefetical or whether it had expected results. Moral code is a guide to life, a set of virtues that man has to posess if he wants to thrive consistently, not by accident. So what's judged by proper moral code is not correctness of a decision, but rather the way it was made: rational or irrational. If mistake was made involuntarily — it is called honest mistake — you cannot condemn man for making it, it was not his fault, he acted rationally. But if there was an act of evasion, choosing to mistake, it is worth condemning, because that was irrational, improper for man.

  11. Wow, the discussion has grown really big!

    If you decide that a lion is a cuddly animal you´d like to hug, it will still eat you no matter how noble your intentions were. Nature is devoid of any morality - it is what it is.

    Here you judge the wrong "man": a lion is non-volitional animal, it can't be moral or not; you are totally correct here. Who you should judge is the man who decided to hug a lion.

    We derive our values from nature and not the other way around. In my opinion there needs to be a feedback loop - your actions need to be judged by their consequences. If you don't condemn mistakes as bad, you'll repeat them. Is it unfair to condemn a man when he did the best he could? No. It's neither fair nor unfair - it's reality.

    They are — your action is moral if it advances your life, and vice versa. However, you can't just assume that act that turned out to be benefatical by accident is moral or that malevolent action was caused by honest mistake is immoral.

    Sure, any action is either good for man or bad for man, but in order to prosper, you can't act randomly hoping that your actions will somehow advance your life. You must identify what is the proper way for man to make a decision. Man does not act automatically, he must choose how to act volitionally. And because man's only valid tool of cognition is reason, his every action ought to be done after rational evaluation. But human must be judged by human standard, not a standard of some omniscient supreme being. You can't condemn a man for not being omniscient, because qua man he has no potential to be omniscient, his fallibility is not a result of his choice. You can't condemn a man for making honest mistakes.

    Nature has no sense of fairness or unfairness and it is the ultimate judge of our actions.

    You are right in that reality is the ultimate arbiter. It will punish you for every mistake you make, yet you can't brand every mistake as immoral.

    How is it willful ignorance if you have been indoctrinated from birth? In each step they did good according to the only standards they had been taught?

    You have a capacity to judge any moral system by its merit, and you have a capacity to learn from reality, not others. If it weren't so, a weel hadn't been created, let alone philosophy as such.

    You are forgetting that you are operating against a model of reality. You get feedback from actual reality, but that also is processed through your conceptual model of it.

    Concepts, when formed properly, omit only qualities irrelevant in the context. You don't have to know what's ball's color to predict its trajectory. Conceptualizing is not the same as oversimplifying, if done properly.

    If we eliminate all the solipsism nonsense and the noumenon irrelevancies we get down to our biological hardware. We are apes - African apes to be specific. Humans have changed little in the last 50,000 years in terms of intellectual capacity but our societies have changed greatly. Our technological and social progress are side effects of the capabilities we evolved that increased survivability when we roamed the plains of Africa in small family hunter-gatherer groups. To assume the resulting information processing system (the brain) would the ultimately optimal solution for anything else is not justifiable. How we see the world and how we reason about it is a consequence of our biological past.

    Our reasoning and our conceptual model of reality are the result of our brains. To claim that our reasoning is only acceptable if our model of reality is accurate says nothing. The two issues are linked: our reasoning forms our model of the world and our model of the world forms our reasoning.

    Here you fall in Kant's trap: you assert that man's understanding of reality is never correct and never complete, in any context. The thing is that such viewpoint is inherently contradictory — you basically say that it is wrong, just as anything you say.

    Guilt or not is not in dispute, but degree of guilt is. Suppose you are playing Russian roulette for a huge reward. Is one bullet in the chamber ethically equal to five? Hardly. In the first case there is a 1/6 probability of disaster and 5/6 probability of reward. In the second case the odds are reversed. The first case is still very dangerous but the second is positively suicidal. Are the two cases equally "black" or "white"?

    I would like to comment on "Black & White" analogy in general. It is flawed. The thing is that two people can be both good, yet one of them is better than the other. It is impossible with colors: if one grayscale tint is whiter than the other, at least one of them is gray. The same distinction applies to evil and black color.

  12. Actually, you are still making the same mistake, except you have transferred the impulse from external conditions denying free will to internal impulses denying free will. In other words, free won't is only one aspect of free will -- the ability to act on a thought or an impulse or not -- but free will in the primary sense is what you thought it meant in the first part of your reply. Free will is to initiate an action via consciousness by the deliberate choice to do so; and not just suppressing an impulse that happens to pop up.

    Yes, now I understand that if Liben was correct, man wouldn't be able to awake from comatosed state, which is untrue: man has full control on his level of focus, given that his brain is not sedated or otherwise harmed. Moreover, my comment on me not deciding to do something that turns out to be a murder was an error implicitly relying on the assumption that my decisions are not defined by my nature, but are random, which is also a mistake. So, nevermind Liben.

    Besides, suppressing an impulse is not an act of evasion. Evasion does not mean taking control of what you choose to act on; evasion means disregarding knowledge that you already have but are unwilling to consider. A very good example is near the beginning of Atlas Shrugged where James Taggart is refusing to make a decision regarding a section of his railroad that needs to be refurbished. He knows it needs to be refurbished, but he is unwilling to take the appropriate action to refurbish it, which is why Dagny needs to take over and make the decision as the Vice President in Charge of Operations.

    Evasion is refusal to think based on the assumption that A is not A until you call it so. Ayn Rand describes evasion as "blanking out", suppressing your conceptual faculty, refusal to think. There is simply no other way of ignoring your knowledge.

  13. So I was wondering if the same would be true with humans who are so retarded they do not have any rational capacity. Maybe they can walk around, but cannot talk, don't understand concepts (I assume they were born this way) and lets say have less of a brain than a dog. And because of the nature of their problems they will not at any point in the future have a rational capacity

    Now assuming no one wants to support this person by charity could this person be bought by companies and have similar things done to it? Like have parts of their skin removed to give it to burn victims, or amputate appendages to give to soldiers, etc?

    Leonard Peikoff explained that in his latest podcast.

    In short, as rational being, man has rights. A retarded man is still a man, so he has rights too, as well as comatosed man or a newborn child. And because he has rights, no one can buy him - that would violate his right to life.

    Now about dogs, cruelty is evil. Period.

  14. At my Eglish class, I was asked to write 200-words composition on what determines man's motivation and can its level be changed in adulthood or is it fixed at childhood. So, that's what I wrote:

    On Motivation

    Contrary to the popular belief, a difference between motivated and unmotivated individuals is not a result of deep character differences, but a consequence of one constant choice: whether to accept reality or to evade it. Choosing the first alternative makes one understand that nothing is ever gained without an effort and that happiness is to be achieved actively, by productive work. Realizing this leads to the increase of motivation.

    Choosing the second one, by contrast, makes one deceive oneself into thinking that happiness can be achieved automatically. That leads to idleness.

    Consider the following example: two individuals get bad quarter marks. They both know what these marks mean and how it is important for them to get better. One of them immediately doubles the effort, while the other doesn’t. “It used to happen before”, he thinks, “Things will sort out, somehow”. But they won’t. In reality there is no ‘somehow’, no effect without a cause, no product without a work.

    One’s success is defined by how often one champions reality in this crucial choice. That’s why Leonard Peikoff said, “To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is to think”.

    Any comments are welcomed.

  15. Another thing. I'm excited to find exact workings of volition. If my memory does not decieve me, we had a thread about Libet earlier, but nevertheless...

    From Wikipedia:

    A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether the readiness potential corresponded to the felt intention to move. To determine when the subject felt the intention to move, he asked her to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position when she felt that she had the conscious will to move.[64]

    Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that she had decided to move.[64][65] Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of her will was only due to her retrospective perspective on the event.

    ...

    Despite these findings, Libet himself does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will—he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds.[73] According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject (sometimes referred to as "free won't"). A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing a club several times before striking the ball. The action simply gets a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond.

    The last part is the most interesting. At first, I thought that volition consists in initiating action: you decide to act, and then your nature decides how :thumbsup: However, this approach is unsound (I don't remember allowing me to do something which then turned out to be murder :)) and Libet's theory is much more rational: you act according to your nature, but can volitionally refrain from acting. Now, as a collorary observation, how's vetoing a thought (a kind of action) called? Evasion. Another punch in multiculturalists abdomenen :P

  16. The connotation of "collective person" does raise some suspicion.

    Corporate person is an kind of collective person and as such it is exactly the same contradiction - collective pertains to a group of people and is not a person. So individual rights by definition cannot apply to a corporation as entity. How would you define a right of corporation to life, anyway?

    The right to property, however, can apply to a group of people as an instance of consistuent individuals' right to property: individuals agree to share some of their property on some objective conditions. Corporations, trusts, cartels, families are examples of such group.

    Other rights also apply to a group of people in the same fasion, e.g. catholics have a right to life and builders have a right to pursue of happiness. But in these cases, "right of a group" is simply a formalism acknowledging that man is still man, whatever group he's in: there is no way to share some of your life or some of your pursue of happiness with other in the same sense of the word 'share' as in case of right to property.

    Now speaking about the article, corporation's right to speech cannot pertain to the corporation as an entity, given that no corporation can't speak. What can such right mean to is that members of a group (and corporation, in particular) have a right to appoint a man to speak out for the whole group. Limiting such a right means limiting the group-members' right to life.

  17. Well, it is still unclear to me:

    1) Is it in the nature of an elementary particle to act in only one way in any situation?

    2) If so, how is it possible that man, who consists of such particles, can act in different ways in a situation?

    I think that if (1) is true, then (2) cannot be true. The fact that man is more than his particles does not mean that there are some properties of man that mystically appear whan he is assembled from the particles and cannot be explained in terms of these particles' interaction. Or, am I wrong here?

  18. Alright.

    Here is how I understand Objectivist Metaphysics.

    Existence exists. What we experience are manifestations of real entities, even if we erroneously grasp their identity, or nature, which is a specific [blank space] that can viewed as a set of specific non-contradictory properties. Identity is what entity is and how it relates to other entities. This rule applies to change, or motion (or, if critic's quote is correct, action), as well. No entity can become just anything - it can only become what it has potential to become.

    Suppose, I throw a ball. What happens, metaphysically speaking? First, I choose to throw a ball. I know that it won't fly on my mere whim, so I must first interact with it. Then I act - wave my hand with the ball in such manner to give s certain momentum to it. Thus, I change the ball's state (I'm not sure whether I change its identity, but I think I do - after all, momentum is a property). According to its identity, ball now must move - and it does move. That's how I throw balls :).

    To generalize, any causal chain, like a path in a graph, is like identity -> action -> identity -> action and so on. However, it cannot start with action, it must begin with some entity's identity. Let's take another example. Suppose there is a universe in which there are just two balls and nothing more. In a point of time that we'll accept as starting point, they are motionless. Initially, there is no relation between them. But in a moment the whole picture changes: it is in nature of both balls to obey laws of gravity, so they start moving towards each other. Thus, a causal chain begins. It's worth noting that, at least on the macro level, this chain is predetermined - knowing balls' identity one can calculate system's state in any future point of time.

    What I don't quite get is why man can choose how to act and balls don't. As I understand, volition is a property of a conscious being that in some state there is more than one way it can act. What I don't understand is how a man, who is in principle consists of a few zillions particles, just like a ball, is volitional, and ball isn't. It can be explained that particles are not deterministic, thus while ball has rather homogenous structure and variations in particles' behavior collapse, man's brain isn't. But having initial assumption that elementary particles have undefined momentum is a contradiction - every entity must have specific identity. But if we suppose that particle's momentum is definite, then man's brain is no different from the ball - it is just another particle system which is completely predictable. Thus, no free will.

    The above is what I'm confused with - either there is law of causality that determines all thing does and can possibly do, or there is free will. The third case I can think of is that man's mind is more than his brain's faculty - but that would suggest Objective Idealist explanation, like Aristotle's forms. But it is completely inappropriate - any idea or concept is a product of man's mind - but causality existed long before man.

    It may be that I misunderstand the concept of volition. Maybe volition is not randomness in action, but rather a property that in some cases being acts not automatically by simple laws or external "push", but after evaluating several alternatives in thought process. That would resolve a conflict, but it would mean that free will does not actually means that the man could have acted otherwise literally, but that he saw alternatives and acted after evaluating them, which just means that he's smart, yet completely predictable, given that predictor knows his nature. That hypothesis seems very plausible to me - I CAN predict how others will act in some degree, after all, and the better I know the person, the better I can predict how he'll act.

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