trivas7

Yes, what one perceives is existence; my point is that consciousness IS awareness, it doesn't get reduplicated as "content of consciousness". Is this a valid point?

No, "what's in the consciousness" is a euphemism for "what one perceives"; a human consciousness's content isn't in a location like "what's in the box".

"But ultimately the content of your consciousness, since it begins tabula rasa, consists entirely of your awareness of the outside world." -- Rand ITOE 146. What is it you think "it" refers to here? I say it refers to "consciousness", not "the content", which would be nonsensical. Well, you can choose to ignore the science. I'll follow Steven Pinker re this.

My point is that cognitive studies since the 50's and developmental psychology show that distinctive modes of processing experience come on line early in life and that infants have a basic grasp of objects, numbers, faces, tools, language and other domains of human cognition. How one squares this w/ the proposition that the mind is a blank slate at birth is beyond me.

Tell this to Mr. Odden, since he holds that the content of consciousness is not the outside world.

Mr. Odden references p.146 in the expanded edition.

How can the outside world -- which is the content of consciousness -- begin w/o content? I don't know what you mean to say. I have.

Nonsense; how do the concepts get there in the first place? The mind cannot be a Blank Slate, b/c blank slates don't do anything. Since the cognitive revolution of the 1950's we have learned about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan. Data will sit forever unless something notices patterns in them, combines them w/ patterns learned at other times, uses the combinations to scribble new thoughts on the slate. Locke recognized the problem and alluded to something called the understanding. Leibnitz repeated the empiricist motto: "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses," then added, "except the intellect itself." Something in the mind must be innate, if it is only the mechanisms that does the learning, the comparing, etc. Something has to see the world of objects rather than a whirl of shimmering pixels. Something has to infer the meaning of a sentence rather than hear mere sound; something has to decide that two properties are similar other than the objects themselves.

This demonstrates that the mind isn't a tabla rasa; we are born w/ minds that are able to make implicit comparisons. Do you really believe that animals -- cats and dogs -- perceive similarity and differences?

You seem to be saying that although similarity isn't a object of perception, the grounds for similarity are found on the perceptual level. But the grounds for any abstraction are found on the perceptual level. "imilarity is someone [some property?] one notices about the entities on the perceptual level" -- agreed, it is the entities one notices, a judgment is made as to whether or not they share similar properties. Your examples are similar in color, dissimilar in typeface. The context of the judgment is all your life's experience with classifying things in various ways. This doesn't make similarity non-objective, it makes similarity a conceptual judgment re things.

While if pressed I would probably agree w/ you that universals don't exist, IMO similarities aren't perceived. One must use an act of judgment to decide whether or not (and within what range) two things or attributes are similar. Just as one doesn't perceive the triangularity of triangles or the circularity of circles, similarity isn't any kind of sensual object of perception.

What is the relationship bt reason and the mind? From the cognitive revolution in the '50s we have learned that the mind is not one faculty, but a complex system composed of many interacting parts.

Re Rand's conceptualism despite her explicit rejection see Carolyn Ray: http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/es...diss/index.html. On the problem of universals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

You ask a vexed question of Objectivism; the problem of universals in never dealt w/ adequately IMO. If one reads closely one sees that Miss Rand offers an epistemology that is basically empiricist in outlook but arrived at and developed by relying on principles or premises that properly belong to rationalistic idealism.

Cognitive therapy comes closest to what you seem to be looking for. Nathaniel Brandon's early attempts to marry psychology w/ Objectivist priniciples was a disaster IMO. Just as there can be no such thing as Objectivist mathematics or Objectivst sociology, there can be Objectivist philosophic consulting services as such. Your post highlights for me something I think about: the manner and extent to which a system of ideas can be healthy and beneficial to one. Obviously it depends on each individual and their sense of life; I personally know many neurotics that are the most logical of thinkers, committed to principles of rationality. Just as religion proposes the ideal of human perfectibility, there is danger in the belief that a philosophy provides intellectual certainty.