Grames

No. The ultimate purpose of businesses and the people in those businesses is to make a living to make extortionate profits by bleeding the market for all it will bear, not to serve the convenience of the end users. Customer service is a means to an end. Curtailing intellectual property rights will benefit no one as each new invention is immediately commoditized. Commodity businesses are low margin and do not attract the kinds of minds and innovations you take for granted as characterizing the tech industry.

Can I have all your stuff then?

Black Hawk down was a dramatization of the actual events. Distorting the events in order to shoehorn in a plot would be contrary to the purpose of the work which was to tell the story of what happened. Dramatizations should be judged by same standards as documentaries. It is unclear to me what relation The Hurt Locker is supposed to have to any actual events, or even what it claims.

This will be released in the US in "spring 2009".

Just now checked Tara Smith's Menace of Pragatism talk at ARC with no problem. Over at ARI the Cultural Change videos are working fine also (I checked #2 only). edit- not using Real, although it is installed. I let the page use the flash player it wants.

You are doing it wrong. The puck is far too small and fast to be seen well on TV. Hockey has to be attended in person at a live event.

That which is fundamental about a thing is so because it causes the other aspects of its nature. Philosophy must rely on observation. To think that there are two kinds of truth, those that must be true because they are axiomatic and those that are only true because we observe them, is a philosophical falsehood. There is only one kind of truth because there is only one kind of reality. The axioms of Objectivism are axiomatic because they are unavoidable, but that is not what makes them true. The axioms are true because of demonstration by means of the evidence of the senses, the same standard as for every other truth. Furthermore, it is not enough to merely know the axioms. The axioms are about metaphysics but this is of limited application when considering a specifically human existence and ethics. The "metaphysical nature of man" is the set of observations required to make ethics possible. Since you have access to Peikoff's Objectivism: Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR), the argument presented in chapter 6 appears to be about the same topic as this thread. What would be metaphysical about such an urge? Again, that which is fundamental about a thing is so because it causes the other aspects of its nature. This causation is what makes it possible to be objective about which "interpretation" is correct.

Being addicted does not make a person incapable of rationally rejecting the drug. People break addictions all the time on their own. Certain drugs may make a person incapable of being rational, but the craving and the addiction behavior takes place in the absence of the drug, between fixes.

I find this quite humorous.

Alternative here means that the continued existence of a living thing is conditional. If circumstances permit, its actions will succeed and life goes on. If conditions do not permit, then life stops. These three words: conditional, alternative, goal are different facets of the same phenomenon. The continued existence of life is conditional upon achieving a preferred alternative, which is the goal toward which its action is directed.

I agree that gaining a psychological problem is not necessarily irrational, but preferring to keep one is. The psychological problems you have described in your last two posts are examples of the general problem of learning. One should unlearn the wrong lessons and learn the right lessons. It doesn't matter if the context is studying Objectivism or engineering or kung fu or happiness understood as mental health. The applicable methods are the same.

A plant must take action to gather water and sunlight in order to turn to them use in the furtherance of its life. In the gravity example, there is no "gathering of gravity". Merely having mass is not an action. Goal does not imply inevitability in the sense of regardless of circumstance. But yes in the sense that if the environmental conditions are right then a goal can and will be achieved. If that wasn't true then there could be no life, or target seeking torpedoes. Not every living thing or torpedoe will achieve its goal, but some will and those who succeed are responsible for the continued existence of that class of entity. (Only indirectly in the case of the torpedoes, but if no torpedoes ever worked people would stop building them.) I think it can be helpful to chew on what "goal-directed" means by exploring why it does not apply to evolution. "Goal-directed" implies causation and an additional element I call control, specifically a feedback mechanism. In typical feedback it is the same entity that takes the original action and receives the feedback. In evolution the organism that did the reproducing is not the organism whose fitness is evaluated. Thus the unit of heritability that evolution works upon is not a whole individual but a part of it, a gene which can be held in common by two different organisms. If evolution were goal-directed, then the entities capable of acting and receiving feedback would be the genes, and the goals in question would have to be ascribed to the genes. The fitness evalution is imposed on an organism externally, not an action by that organism. It is not possible for an organism or any of its genes to revise its identity or actions in response to the feedback because it is either already dead or already successfully reproduced. Evolution is what has already happened, and no additional action is required to achieve it. If no action is possible to the gene then it certainly cannot be taking goal-directed action. If the gene is not taking goal-directed action then nothing is, and evolution is not goal-directed.

I think that the cleverest response to this specific example of gravity, is that any resultant acceleration of an entity is due to the uncoordinated forces of attraction from other entities, so what happens is out of control of the accelerated entity and cannot be said to be directed at all. No. Although there are mathematical reasons explaining why starting from a low complexity life would gain more complexity over time, the overall direction of evolution is not directed at all. The appearance of a direction is just hindsight on our part. Individuals do not evolve, species do. But species do not exist in the primary sense that individuals do, a species is a human concept for a collection of organisms based on their similarity. "Goal-directed" implies a relationship including an element in addition to cause and effect. I think the additional element is "control", the ability to modulate the cause to achieve a particular effect. This implies a feedback loop. At this point I don't think we are still doing philosophy, but the topic is interesting and I'm certainly willing to continue. I'm interpreting your postulated inevitability of rational consciousness as a principle, and denying the validity of it as a principle. I do not deny what has actually happened here on earth. All of the entities prior to the first humans had no volition thus there was an inevitability to what happened here. But this is only evidence for the theory that evolution is necessary for, but not sufficient to cause, rational consciousness to emerge.

"Goal-directed" does not mean that the "goal" is actively "directing" a process, but that a process has a direction (has an identity), which is named the "goal". -edit "Goal-directed" is an adjective modifying the word "action". It leaves unspecified from where the goal originated. Consider a plant with a strong phototropic response that keeps its leaves toward the sun. Now consider a solar power facility with an engineered mechanism that has a sun tracking mechanism. Is it true that one is goal-directed and one is not? An engineered mechanism does not know what it wants anymore than the plant does. Both can be described as goal-directed, or neither should. If neither, a new word is needed for the concept containing these behaviors as examples. Multiplying terms beyond that required is a deprecated practice, so stick with goal-directed applying to both.

Yes, she created a specifically delimited version of "goal" for this context which excluded any trace of consciousness or teleology. I can only guess that the reason she did was a writer's reason, she didn't want to be compelled to construct sentences containing both the terms "result-directed" and "result" due to the repetition. "Goal" also refers to a particular result, whereas all of the potential ends of a process are also the result, and if you want to refer to a particular result you have to use additional words. I can't imagine Rand permitting some wordy atrocity like "life-result-directed action" to appear under her name. So slightly modifying "goal" definitely solves a problem for this context only.

I agree that your response to the student himself was a good one. If in your experience it is a common error to think theft is wrong due to the possibility of getting caught then that was a good and relevant point to bring up. Further, I conclude from the course description the class is actually all about the classic "prudent predator" or "Ring of Gyges" problem not any version of ethical egoism. The only way to address this problem is by identifying principles and their necessity. A good answer would be crafted in accordance with the principle of the hierarchy of knowledge. Such an answer would both serve the student and the class. Of course one would not leap to "existence exists", the hierarchy of knowledge should be traversed one step at a time with the connection explained at each step. Stating that "a thief can't be happy because he neglects earning" is as fully a leap into the darkness as responding with "existence exists", and for the same reason: it jumps to a different place in the hierarchy of knowledge with no derivation.The scope of the discussion can legitamately end before getting to the three axioms, context is everything here. I applaud your various efforts to explain and advocate Objectivism but I urge you to also integrate the hierarchy of knowledge more fully into your practice. It could only make you more effective.

Ayn Rand used "goal-directed" in the context of philosophizing about the metaphysical nature of life, attempting to discern what unites the animate and distinguishes it from the inanimate. The technique she employed was apparently to describe the actions that living entities engage in, which inanimate entities do not. Examples of "goal-directed" phenomena include regulation of body temperature, regulation of blood pressure, and phototropism and photosynthesis in plants. These phenomena can be conceptually isolated but are vital to the life of the organism while not equal to it as a living organism typically is a collection of such phenomena. The result of a mammal's body temperature regulation is primarily a body of a certain temperature, and only secondarily and in conjunction with other processes the organism's life. Binswanger extends the use of "goal-directed" actions to the behavior of machines such as a target-seeking torpedo. The acts of machines are derivative of the intentions of their creators, and so are not self-generated, nor self-sustaining in that they serve a purpose imposed by the designer and not the continued existence of the machine. So having goal-directed action does not by itself make a living entity. Both Binswanger and Rand use "goal" in a fashion interchangeable with "result" in this context. Thus, "self-sustaining" "self-generated" and "goal-directed" are all needed in conjunction together to have a living entity. Note that this definition has no specific criteria derived from the science of biology, nor was any necessary in this context. Dictionaries don't have authors, they have staffs nowadays, and one or more editors. Demanding to know the name of the author of a dictionary or dictionary entry so as to compare his or her credibility against Rand's is the wrong way to go about dictionary criticism. Dictionaries are considered better or worse on the basis of how well they identify the concept associated with a word. I think the dictionary.com entry for "goal" adequately indicated the gist of the concept with the first entry, and the subsequent entries were clearly derivative.

The meaning of a concept is its referents. The course description well described the concept at the heart of the course, a criminal cross between Nietzsche and a pragmatist having a low cunning able to calculate what he can get away with and rejecting the possibility of morality as such, and used the word egoist to stand for it or alternately amoralist. The definition of the concept was not arbitrary, just the word selection. One could possibly win this dispute with the instructor during an aside before the class proper even begins with a selection of citations showing ethical egoism already has a meaning in literature which is not this, with the result that the instructor uses the word amoralist instead. If not, the path forward is still the same: demonstrate this fool's inability to cope with reality is directly due to his inability to deal in principles. I can't see how one could defend an amoralist as not really being amoral, that's a sure loser.

I have a copy of that, I darned if know where I stashed it. If anyone has a copy to hand, throw us some relevant quotes. I'm drawing a blank on useful things to say and blame it on too much coffee.

Defining life definitively probably isn't going to happen here, if biologists can't even get it straight. But according to Objectivist epistemology, the meaning of a concept is its referents, not its definition. If I were to point at series of entities as examples of living things I would never point at a star or a flame. Would you?

"The first part of the course addresses the challenge that the egoist (sometimes called the amoralist) poses for moral philosophy…The egoist is a person who doesn’t care about morality – all the egoist cares about is his or her own advantage and happiness, and he or she will be prepared to break any of our standard moral rules in order to secure it- just as long, that is, as he or she can get away with it." "By relying on himself, not on others." -this is not a description of how an amoralist acts. Attempting to use this definition in class would be nonresponsive to the subject at hand. Egoist as described above would not be an Objectivist, and could only be described as a criminal. When a definition is provided for a word with a variety of uses, stick with the definition provided in the context. And this is a devastating critique because any arbitrary rule can work as a principle? You know better than that. They don't and need it to be explained to them. Lame response overall, Marc.

No, "goal-directed" is part of Ayn Rand's definition of life. From the Lexicon: Goal-directed action

I took my time constructing a PM reply, so wasn't paying attention to the forum and this new thread. Anyway, in my last message I proposed that living entities such as plants can be distinguished from nonliving entities such as stars by their internal negative entropy.

It is a generalization inferred from human nature. It is as fully true as the sky is high. But one cannot claim that a specific individual will choose to be happy, or that everyone will choose to be happy. Individuals have volition and can choose otherwise, therefore the statement must remain in a non-specific and qualitative formulation.

Presenting the likely response of another's opposing viewpoint instead of your own is called "playing the Devil's Advocate". That is what i did in those quotes of mine. I have no objection to any of your response beyond what I have already posted above.