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Sorry about this, but I forgot to mention that the prisoners must not communicate.

During a conversation, I sometimes realize that I'm not able to express my whole knowledge on a subject being discussed, unless I am prepared for it. Very often I also come up with a good answer to something only when the conversation is over because of this. This even happens when the conversation is not something one must be knowledgeable about (such as exchanging witty remarks or compliments, etc.) What I'd like to know is if there is a way, and how to train myself to be able to come up with better than average responses (in any conversation) when the conversation is still on (rather than when it's over). Also, I noticed I can sometimes discern how people are feeling about a topic from the choice of their words, their facial expression, their grimaces, or their gestures, or even the opinion which they are not willing to share with me from their goofs. However, I cannot incorporate this information into the conversation, because of, I think, the same reason as that of the above. I think that being able to do this, it would be an invaluable asset to my communication skills, so if anyone has any hints on how I might go about improving myself in this aspect, I'd appreciate the help. Thanks.

Here's a puzzle: There are three prisoners in a prison, and they are given the chance to be released. Two or three prisoners will be released, but only if they can correctly guess what color hat they're wearing. The prisoners are given these hats according to this rule: There are either two white hats and one red, or two red hats and one white. They are then lined up so that one prisoner stands behind another. Each prisoner cannot see his own hat, but he can see the hats of those who are standing in front of him. Therefore, the first prisoner can't see anyone wearing hats. The second can see the first, and the third can see the first and the second. The prisoners have unlimited time to answer, and they do so by raising a hand and the providing the correct answer. If any prisoner offers an incorrect answer, all three prisoners are shot. If a prisoner doesn't want to answer, he stays in jail. Assuming that a prisoner will raise his hand to offer an answer as soon as he knows it, and they are completely rational, how can any two prisoners save themselves in any situation? In which cases is it possible that all three prisoners will save themselves?

Thank you, you have been very helpful. I did read OPAR a while ago, in fact, but I don't have it with me at the moment. What I didn't understand was that logic works as a tool which helps us deal with reality because deep on an axiomatic level, it correlates with reality. Thanks for clearing this up.

How would you know if a discovery reduces to the axiomatic, if it was not something which is obvious, and you've read about it in a popular magazine for example? In order to have a valid opinion of your own, don't you have to research deeper than what that magazine said?

I'm not asking for a proof of the axioms. I know the axioms cannot be reduced. I'm asking how is it that we formulated them, and why in the form in which we did. I'm not asking about the axiom, I'm asking about its formulation. We say things are what they are - do we come to this claim by mere observation of things that are, or is there more to it? Does this then explain why logic and mathematics are then tools good enough to help us deal with reality?

David, your answer seems to imply that the results science offers are necessarily easily understandable and obvious (such as gravity). But this is not true! Take Coriolis force as an example. It doesn't really affect our daily lives much, but it's there. For someone who isn't demonstrated the effect of this force it might just as well seem like hogwash. But there is this other side of the coin! What if someone, for reasons unknown, decides to invent a new kind of force (let's call it a Foo force), and makes sure the media announces his "discovery" to the public. Let's go wild and say that the Foo force is the force the Earthlings were able to notice within the referent system of our planet, which is in fact the result of forces that make the universe spin around its axis. It sounds quite plausible - the universe spins, so the Earth with its solar system and the galaxy spins with the universe too. And the Foo force is the resulting force we feel here on Earth, because of all this spinning. So, what basis do you have to reject this "scientific" result, assuming you are NOT a scientist and you are probably not going to attempt to repeat the experiments? Oh, the scientific community may object - but doesn't it always? Every scientific result is thoroughly questioned over and over again, so there are bound to be objections. And this is not even far-fetched! If you look at the controversies surrounding the results of scientific observations regarding climate and climate changes, then it is clear that something's wrong. There are researchers claiming one thing, and then there are those claiming the direct opposite. There are studies showing that the ice-age is coming, and studies showing the polar caps melting, and those claiming both, and those saying neither of this will happen. So pick your side.

Although it was not a starting point to the thread of thought which brought me to write this post, I remembered my physics professor once saying that nobody knows why laws of nature can be described using mathematics. According to him, it is just accepted because it seems to be so. My original confusion (which brought me here) was about logic. Why does logic work? Ultimately, why do axioms work? Why do things have identity; why are they what they are? I assume it is more than simply a matter of us putting it neatly into words in this way, but I'm not quite sure what. Did we arrive at the idea of axioms by observation of reality, which then led to logic, and then on to mathematics - so it is BECAUSE we derived mathematics from axioms we arrived to by observation that mathematics describes laws of nature - or is it something else? Can someone please elaborate more on this?

I think those paragraphs are well written. Here is what I think that you should answer your professor. Take these answers with reservation - you don't have to quote me literally, just get the general idea and then come up with your own. Your answer: I can and I did. They thought that a man could never walk on the Moon, yet he did. I think Ayn Rand has given a rather comical answer to this, as well, though I forgot where. If she did, she took as an example a man who invented a camera which takes a photo and immediately produces one. Nobody at the time thought this was possible; in fact, everyone thought he was mad; yet he did it. You can, perhaps, take this as a guideline for your paper. Before you start defining individual rights, explain why people on death row don't matter in the creation of this definition. Explain why a criminal cannot be considered a standard by which we are to tailor the guiding principles of a free society. Create a context in which individual rights are absolute. This will help you stick to the subject, and reduce the number of diversions you need to make before you actually define what individual rights are. The first sentence is not true. People don't need society to survive, they need it to prosper. Also, his argument about redistributive measures existing and societies not having collapsed, is invalid. Saying that they eventually will if nothing changes may sound prophetic, but there is a better argument to prove him wrong. His argument is that your assumptions don't seem to be true, because these societies have not collapsed. There is quite a difference between that which is, and that which seems to be. He cannot, by any logical means, assume the invalidity of the empiric observations which have led to the conception of individual rights, on the basis of a new observation of a society that "seems to work" by violating individual rights. Note that there is also no logical connection between the two observations. To arrive at the concept of individual rights, one must first and foremost observe that there is a certain mode of man's survival. As you pointed out in your paper, this leads to the right to life. Another observation is that a man must act in a certain way to sustain this life (leads to liberty) and that he must be able to keep the products of his work (ownership). Your professor's observation is "this society, which violates individual rights, seems to work". This observation alone can never prove the concept of individual rights as being wrong. It can, at its very best (which it is not), suggest that there may be something even better. Limiting ourselves to the real world, sanity, health and clear mind, no empirical observation can ever invalidate our previous empirical observations. It can only invalidate our explanations of the phenomena we have observed, and change them. Your professor's observation can't even do that. Edit: Fixed quotes.

Thanks to both. I've intensified the search myself in the last days and I found out that one of the songs I have is Metamorphosis by Culture Beat. Requiem, however, does not play in the movie. I know because I have soundtracks of all three movies, and I've seen them a couple of times (extended editions). Also, thanks for the links, but none of the links points to the music I have. Also, that other site is only for the US, and I'm from Croatia. There is one other song. I've made a 60 second clip and uploaded it to my site. If anyone knows the artist and the title, I'd be greatful. The link is: http://www.sourcedev.org/search/Song1.mp3 I remember that a long time ago, the song was entitled "Final Fantasy Theme" or "Final Fantasy End Titles". I know it's not the motion picture because I saw it, and listened to the clips from the soundtrack. And soundtracks for games are hard to find, and even then there's no clips. But then again, my original post was not about finding out what these unknown songs are, although that would be nice. It was about whether it is morally OK to keep the song and search for the artist, or should I delete it?

I'm sure. Most of the music I labelled as not having right to having it, I got from a colleague. He had them on an MP3 compilation CD a very long time ago, and as it usually is with pirated/illegal music, he's forgotten all about it. When I downloaded music, I always changed its file name into correct artist and title. Maybe someone here would know about the song I do have a title and artist of. It's "Ajax Projection - Requiem for the Ring" (it plays on one of the LOTR: TTT trailers). A forum I found mentions that the original artist had a site where this music could be downloaded, but it's now down.

There is no lyrics. Just music.

A while ago, I decided to get rid of all the music I had on my hard drive, but which I had no right to. However, since some songs were really good, I kept all the files on my hard drive, so as to sort them out over the course of time into artists I want to buy music from and artists I don't want to buy music from (and then delete them). So, I didn't listen to them. Now the job is done, but there are still some songs I'm having a dilemma about. This is mainly music whose artist and even title is unknown to me. What would be the right course of action for me concerning these songs? I really really like them, and if I knew their author, I'd buy their CD's. But I don't. For one song I know both the artist and the title, but I'm not able to find anything else about it (for example, the author's page, or a CD to buy). I know if I delete these songs from my hard drive, I would be losing them forever; but on the other hand, keeping and listening to them is a violation of copyright. Can someone help, please?

Wow! I mean... WOW!!! There was a debate recently on the newsgroups and this video covers ALL the topics we talked about, and more. I posted the links there as a follow-up. I'm posting it on my croatian blog too. No! I'm posting it wherever I think it will be appropriate! Thank you so much, dondigitalia.

It works now. Thanks.

When searching phrases (like so: "sense of life"), why does the engine check whether every word in the phrase is 4 letters or longer? I can't find anything I need because of this, because in the abovementioned phrase, the engine reports an error when it encounters the word "of", because it is not a 4-or-more letter word. This makes no sense, as I'm searching for the exact phrase, which is 13 letters (including spaces) long. And there is no way around this, that I know of. If I try to set a search to something like +sense +life, then I get results which are not even close to the topic I'm looking for (which is sense of life), and needless to say, they are numerous.

This is the paradox of Achilles and a tortoise. It's already been answered by mathematics. 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = Sum[i = 0 to infinity] (1/2^i) - 1 = 1/(1 - 1/2) - 1 = 1/(1/2) - 1 = 2 - 1 = 1 Ayn Rand said she was never a great mathematician.

I'm surprised nobody replied to this, because this sort of thinking is dead wrong. A mere complexity of whatever system does not imply its validity. In fact, it is often the apparent complexity of the mystic's systems of belief which they use to confuse the one they preach it to. They use this to hide the inconsistencies in this system, from someone who would rather not try to analyze it critically; who would rather take it all on faith. Also how do you conclude that "...all of this complexity ... [leads] to a person's personality..."? On what basis? Did the man on the seminar ever explain this miraculous bond between Jupiter's position and a child's body and soul at his second of birth? Or did he say something to the effect of "Jupiter in such and such position causes such and such things within a child's soul"? This claim is unbased; never proven and never questioned. It must be taken on faith. If you want to see what's wrong with such beliefs, then question statements such as these. Sooner or later you'll find either an inconsistency or a claim which no observation or proof leads to.

I've been hearing this term mentioned in the media very often, but I have no idea what it is, and I can't find its definition. From the context in which I heard the term mentioned, I figured out that such a thing is not even capitalism, and besides the term itself sounds like an oxymoron (wild as in wilderness, and capitalism as in the only civilized social system). So, I'm wondering if anyone here knows what exactly are people referring to when they say "wild capitalism"? Sorry if this is in the wrong section; I'm not sure where to put it, as it is not really a question about Objectivism.

True, but I think that parents don't know that the norms they teach their children are irrational, and are not aware of the consequences of teaching such norms to their children. It is a norm to believe in a god, in almost all societies in the world. Many see no harm in it, but it is still an irrational norm. Are the parents, who do not see the irrationality of it, still immoral when they teach this norm to their children? I mean, is the very act of teaching them immoral just because an irrational norm is being taught, or is it immoral because it is immoral not to think about norms critically before and if they are taught?

I have no filters on that account, other than that performed by the server itself, and that one I think only blocks viruses.

My answer comes a little late. I've been busy at college for the past few weeks and didn't even post here. Depends on what stupid behavior is exactly. If it means behavior which is not thought through to the best of one's ability, then all stupid behavior is evil. Errors in judgment may become clear afterwards, but that would not mean that the taken course of behavior was neccessarily evil. Evil would be to ignore the error and pursue this behavior without rethinking it. However, there are evil actions which are thought through, so not all evil is neccessarily stupid (in the meaning I gave above). I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'mistreat'. It is immoral to initiate physical force against anyone, and that includes stupid people. No it isn't immoral. However, to promote this as an imperative is immoral, because to do that you would need to initiate force. And I already said that initiation of force is immoral. Morality is not relative. Societies in different parts of the world approve of very different things, so by what you are saying, morality would be relative to where you currently are. This is not so. A society cannot tell an individual what to do - this it could do only by initiating force against that individual. The parents could raise their child to accept their social norms and this would be moral, but if it refuses to do so, they would be immoral trying to force their child to behave as they desire. Morally, force can only be applied against the one who initiated it (note that I am only speaking of physical force - "force" such as denying their child pocket-money in order to get him to accept their norms is not an immoral means). The government in a rational society differs from parents (by analogy) in that the government does no make money. It does not produce, thus it does not earn, thus it cannot cut allowance to their citizens. Thus the government cannot "raise" their citizens to respect the norms which it desires, but it CAN force them to be moral - though even then it is limited to utilizing force only in retaliation, never initiation. "Socially approved" does not even exist in my dictionary! Intelligence. Yes. Oh, dear. This is a false dichotomy. The correct answer is Patrick Stewart!

I had the same problem yesterday. I changed my e-mail and the validation message never got through. I requested it again, but still nothing. I don't know how I am able to post now, because I never validated my new e-mail, and in my controls, the system has accepted my new e-mail.

Also, a cracker can be, but is not neccessarily a hacker (and vice versa). This is owing to the fact that other crackers (who were also hackers) developed programs which enable simple cracking.

Aha! I see now! Objectivism merely answers WHAT a government should do. HOW it should do it is a technical matter, not to be discussed philosophically. Thus in constructing an efficient government, we are to take its purpose and principles from philosophy, and then construct it in the best possible way, so that it fulfills such a purpose and works on these principles. Am I correct?