Grames
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Posts posted by Grames
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2 hours ago, AlexL said:
She says:
0:50 I don't know what happened but I want to know. This [Seymour Hersh] is a man who doesn't make claims lightly, a man with contacts [...]
Why does she say she doesn't know what happened? She said a few seconds before that Seymour Hersh did find out exactly what happened - planed and executed by United States and Norway!
Seymour Hersh is a man with a track record, but he is just one guy. No need to commit to any particular theory at this time. What is most scandalous of all and particularly damning in its implication, is the immense silence, the conspiracy of silence.
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3 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:
I agree. But what about the following propositions?
(A) I detect a percept.
(B) This percept exists.
(C) This percept is A.
I take it that you'd agree that C can be identified as true or false; what about A and B? I would say that they, too, can be identified as true or false.
I'll agree that perception qua perceptual data cannot be since truth or falsity are conceptual qua propositional, i.e., corresponds with reality.
I agree. A and B as propositions about what has already happened are either true or false.
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13 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
Hi Frank,
I have pondered this question a lot myself. In my experience, O'ist arguments against the primacy of consciousness can be divided into four classes:
From my notes on Dr. Kelley's "Evidence of the Senses" the outline of his take on the issue is as follows:
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II. Primacy of Existence cannot be proven
A. Proof cannot begin by premising facts external to consciousness because that begs the question
B. Proof cannot begin by premising facts about consciousness as that contradicts the thesis that facts external to consciousness must be known first before awareness of awareness is possible
C. There are no other kinds of premises
D. Primacy of Existence cannot be a conclusion
E. "P of E" is self-evident not arbitrary or an act of faith
F. "P of E" is axiomatic because existence is implicit in any and all instances of awareness, any attempt to deny it affirms it
G. The third person external perspective when used to explain consciousness is implicitly a primacy of existence perspective.
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This and more, all in the first chapter. I wonder if you are familiar with the work?
- KyaryPamyu and Boydstun
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My watershed moment was the Nordstream sabotage. Madmen are calling the shots and must be stopped.
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On 2/1/2022 at 12:36 PM, The Laws of Biology said:
Is it impossible, or unethical, to probe or investigate into the inner dynamics of the phenomenon that ancient philosophers and theologians first called "free will"?
It is neither. Ayn Rand first wrestled with this problem in print in "The Fountainhead" with the idea of the 'second-hander'. For the second-hander the nature of reality is first and primarily other people. That is a fundamental framework at the level of a metaphysical theory that shapes what kinds of concepts and strategies will occur to a person. Only a psychological theory could explain why a person would cling to this throughout a lifetime, and even then that just pushes the question one level further on to "why do people cling to their psychological problems?" So Rand went on a little further, arriving in "Atlas Shrugged" at the idea of "choosing to live" via "choosing to value".
Some people just don't know how to value or to choose to live, others actively choose not to live.
The above is based upon Salmieri's "Ayn Rand's Conception of Valuing" which is about "Philosophically significant observations about valuing can be had by revisiting the fiction." Relevant Rand quotes are there pulled together conveniently including one or two from her journals. (The hand-out accompanying the course is no longer available.)
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Most of the bullshit that is intellectual crime is itself arm chair philosophizing, why should it not be able to be refuted from an arm chair? One can refer to reality from an arm chair as easily as evade it.
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On 2/14/2023 at 4:56 PM, RupeeRoundhouse said:
Fair enough. But if the perceptual evidence is self-evident, then the faculty of reason identifies the existence of the percept as true, yes?
No. Percepts are not true or false. Percepts are the result of the deterministic operations of the body's sensing and perceiving physiology. What makes an idea true or false is its correspondence with reality, but percepts automatically correspond with reality. It is always the conceptual judgement identifying what a percept is presenting where an error may lie.
Dr. Kelley goes into this subject in some depth in his book "The Evidence of the Senses". Some relevant excerpts from my outline notes (the notes are linked in my signature below):
QuoteFirst Principle of Justified Perceptual Judgment:
For a judgment to be justified by perception, the person judging must perceptually discriminate the object he takes to be an instance of the concept predicated.
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Only in relation to our concepts can we identify any form of perception as illusory. Abnormal conditions are those in which we perceive objects in illusory forms.
Definition of Normal Condition- any condition of perception within a range that allows discrimination of the similarity to other objects subsumed by the same concept.
QuoteSecond Principle of Justified Perceptual Judgment
One must perceive the object in a form which is normal for the perception of F objects (F a concept of a sensory quality).
QuoteThird Principle of Justified Perceptual Judgment
One must take into account any evidence one has that the conditions of perception are abnormal.
The conceptual override - Using background knowledge of what F looks like in abnormal conditions to make a judgment makes that judgment an inference.
Justified error - An object which is Not-F may be perceived in the form and normal conditions for the perception of F. One can be perceptually justified in judging a Not-F is F.
Two concepts of justification:
• "Being in a position to know" is what justifies - meaning in contact with reality. Knowledge is the correct identification of things as they are independently of our beliefs. By this theory an hallucinator is not in a position to know what he asserts, and neither is the subject of an illusion.
• "Reasonableness" What justifies is what makes it reasonable to think so. Justification is normative, a standard of what ought to be cognitive conduct. But "ought implies can", a person cannot be held accountable to a standard impossible to apply in a given case. By this theory the subject of an illusion is reasonable in forming the judgment to which his experience prompts him, and so is the hallucinator.
Holding to either theory of justification in disregard of the other is another manifestation of issues discussed in Chapter 1. The first theory disregards the process of knowing {intrinsicism}, the second theory discards reality as the standard {subjectivism}. Objectively, a percept, even an illusory percept, arises from the interaction of object, senses and conditions. A subject takes an object to be F on the basis of similarities that are the real product of perceptual contact with reality. Hallucinations can be reasonably interpreted in certain ways, but there can be no perceptual justification without perceptual contact with reality. The subject of an illusion can be justified, an hallucinator cannot.
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13 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:
and an implication is that 99% of people don't actually know that evolution is fact.
This is true. There is so much pseudo-knowledge out there, stories taken as true because everyone else does or at least everyone in one's social circle. Flat Earth Theory is possible for the same reason, people don't actually know the Earth is round so they can be shaken when challenged. Knowing a thing means knowing what causes it to be true.
To add another small point, a distinction can be made between knowing what evolution is and how it works derived from observations of hundreds or thousands of generations of microbes and a specific application to the specific case of human evolution in the distant past with spotty evidence. That humans evolved on Earth is an inference not a fact, even if a strong inference. The ultimate proof of human evolution would be a genealogy of named individuals (with genetic samples) going back a million years until the individuals are of a different species. Strong inferences can be accepted as true and as knowledge but calling an inference a fact is inaccurate.
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13 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:
Per page 15 of OPAR (italics added for emphasis):
Isn't self-evidence perceptual-level, i.e., automatic?
The evidence is presented by the things-in-themselves, but the conclusion is not reached explicitly unless thought through. Evidence is not conclusion.
13 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:but how does perception establish the relationship "that an entity must act in accordance with its nature" as opposed to merely acting whether in accordance with its nature?
The contribution of perception is to gather the evidence. It does not "establish" the conclusion, which is a separate act by a different faculty.
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On 2/12/2023 at 8:16 PM, dream_weaver said:
Would you be interested in more control over the threads you start,
Holy hell, don't go down that road of censoring messages or users. Dividing people up into ever smaller bubbles that only are permitted to agree with each other is unethical and impractical. Fobbing thread moderation off onto the thread originator is giving power to the people who are the least objective about the thread. The topic of the Ukraine war is of broad enough interest that no matter who made it there would a lot of posts, AlexL has no control over that aspect and shouldn't be held responsible for it.
If you did follow through on this there would be multiple threads on the same topic with contrary editorial and censoring policies. If you want duplicate threads on every controversy, then do this because that is how you get duplicate threads.
- necrovore, dream_weaver and AlexL
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21 hours ago, tadmjones said:
This framing of US foreign policy is certainly consistent with an objective view of lead up and execution of the current war in Ukraine.
What makes it objective is the thorough consideration of all aspects of U.S. foreign policy and all possible explanations offered to get an integrated theory. The U.S. is an empire because it has the attributes of an empire and acts like an empire. I'll quote the portion that impressed me with it's succinctness:
Traditional Explanations
The Logic of US Foreign Policy by Sylvan and Majeski offers a consistent explanation for American interventions of the past several decades. In contrast, the usual explanations – by proponents as well as opponents of these wars – are mostly pretexts, rationalizations or at best partial aspects, as the following overview shows.
- Defending democracy and human rights: This traditional justification is not very convincing, since democratic governments have been overthrown (A, M, N), autocrats have been supported (E and I), human rights and international law have been violated or violations tolerated by the US.
- Combating terrorism: Paramilitary groups – including Islamist organizations – have been used for decades by the US to eliminate opposing regimes (N and R).
- Specific threats or aggressions against the US: In retrospect, most of these claims turned out to be incorrect or made-up (#13; e.g. Tonkin, incubator babies and WMD claims).
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Raw materials (especially oil and gas): Even enemy states generally want to sell their raw materials to the West, but are prevented from doing so by means of sanctions or war. This is because from an imperial point of view, their independence and influence is seen as a threat.
- Was the Iraq war about oil? Hardly. Already prior to 2003, Iraq had supplied its oil mainly to the West; the Iraqi oil sector was not privatized after the war, and production licences were also issued to corporations in France, Russia and China (which opposed the war).
- Was the Syrian war about natural gas pipelines? No (see here and here). The plans for regime change and war against geopolitically independent Syria had existed for decades and were to be implemented during the so-called “Arab Spring”. (See also a comment by the Syrian president).
- Was the Afghanistan war about a natural gas pipeline? No. The Taliban were and are interested in the TAPI pipeline, but didn’t accept US political and military demands.
- Was the Libya war about oil reserves? No. Libya was already one of Europe’s most important suppliers of oil under Gaddafi, and security of supply has declined significantly since the war. Libya, however, pursued an independent and comprehensive Africa policy – financed by its oil wealth – which collided with the plans of the US and France.
- Was the Iranian regime change in 1953 about the nationalization of oil? No. The US tried to mediate in the British-Iranian oil dispute and urged the British to compromise. Only when Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh cooperated with the Communist Tudeh Party and opened the country to the Soviet Union did the CIA intervene. Iranian oil, however, remained nationalized even after the coup.
- What was the 2019 Venezuela coup attempt about? See Venezuela: It’s Not About Oil.
- Could renewable energies solve the raw materials problem? Hardly, because renewable energies, storage technologies and high-tech electronics require rare-earth metals, 97% of which are currently produced by China, and conflict minerals such as coltan from the Congo.
- The “Petro-Dollar”: The petro-dollar thesis was developed in the course of the Iraq war. However, the significance of the US dollar does not derive from oil, but from US economic power. While many states naturally prefer the stable dollar for their raw material exports, enemy states often have to switch to other currencies in order to circumvent sanctions (L, e.g. Iran).
- Capitalism: In 1917 Lenin described “imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism,” since capitalist states would have to conquer markets for their overproduction. However, even enemy states want to trade with the West, but are prevented from doing so by sanctions or war. Moreover, pre-capitalist states like Rome and Spain and even anti-capitalist states like the Soviet Union had already waged imperial wars.
- National debt: The national debt is also no reason for US wars, as the US is creating its own money by using the Fed. Moreover, wars themselves contribute immensely to national expenses.
- Arms industry: In 1961 US President Eisenhower warned of the increasing influence of the “military-industrial complex”. The latter is certainly one of the main profiteers of wars, but this applies as well to countries such as Russia, China, Sweden and Switzerland. Moreover, US wars are not arbitrary, but follow a certain logic; after all, even the Roman Empire did not conduct its wars merely to produce as many weapons as possible.
- The “Israel Lobby”: This aspect was emphasized in the book of the same name by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. The Israeli government and pro-Israeli organizations such as AIPAC lobbied for the 2003 Iraq War and a war against Iran. As a hegemonic power, however, the US must intervene from East Asia to Central Africa and South America, and even the wars in the Middle East follow a superordinate logic. (More: The “Israel Lobby”: Facts and Myths)
- Neoconservatives: Another hypothesis proposes that US wars are driven by the so-called neoconservatives. This idea is disconfirmed, for instance, by the numerous wars initiated or continued by the liberal Clinton and Obama administrations (Yugoslavia, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, etc.)
»We’ve got about five or ten years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes
– Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.«
Pentagon policy chief Paul Wolfowitz to General Wesley Clark in 1991 (FORA) -
On 2/10/2023 at 10:04 AM, Eiuol said:
... The US is a democracy, if sometimes illegitimate, so it has some valid moral claims.
The U.S. is not and never has been a democracy. Not should it ever be. Democracy is not a good thing. The U.S. is a republic and the U.S. Constitution requires that every state have a republican form of government. "Republic" means "not ruled by a monarch" but the U.S. Constitution also has provisions against the forming of an aristocracy. To have "republican spirit" as exhibited during the French Revolution is not to be merely anti-monarchist but to be fully committed to egalitarianism.
Technically Russia is also a republic, as is China and North Korea. A country's form of government and its practice with respect to human rights are two different issues which can be in complete contradiction.
Any moral claims the U.S. might have due to its intermittent internal respect of human rights have no impact on what it may do in foreign policy. Being a good boy at home does not justify a world wide war of conquest. Everyone has rights, at home and abroad. The CIA and the State Department and its "NGO" apparatuses such as the National Endowment for Democracy or The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has no formal requirement to respect or recognize the rights of people in other countries to self-governance, so they don't.
Next up is an operation against Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary.
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7 hours ago, AlexL said:
So, in your view, if a government does what a government is supposed to do, then it is… legitimate! But you somehow forgot to quote Ayn Rand for defining a legitimate government, which is the one and only the one which „protects man's rights”.by protecting him from violence. But with this clarification Putin’s government legitimacy is OUT! Notice that you were the one who tried to use Ayn Rand’s authority, but did it very selectively.
Ayn Rand has no authority, she is the standard for clear thinking here.
I don't to write the full essay all at once, it gets boring to read and to write.
There is no legitimate gov't on Earth by Rand's standard. All this breast-beating about illegitimacy by Americans is self-serving moralistic rationalizing so you don't have to feel guilty about sending hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths. Make no mistake, that is what has happened here and America is the cause and bears responsibility.
- Jon Letendre and tadmjones
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Famed reporter Seymour Hersh explains in some detail How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
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20 hours ago, AlexL said:
1. Can YOU prove that the West supplied the Ukraine's military before 2014) ? @whYNOTdidn't (yet?).
2. Can you prove that "CIA toppled the existing legi[ti]mate government of the Ukraine in 2014" ?
1. There wasn't much urgency to accomplish anything prior to 2014. The U.S. throws around unconscionable amounts of military aid routinely, Ukraine may have gotten some of this. It would be not significant in quantity but would establish channels and contacts.
2. Well there is the famous leaked recording of Victoria Nuland and pals deciding who would be in the next Ukrainian gov't before it formed.
Here's a post on Quora which is well sourced:
Is there any credible evidence that Ukraine's 2014 revolution was due to a CIA coup?
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15 hours ago, Boydstun said:
KyaryPamyu, I doubt that a robot which was not artificial life could obtain any understanding at all or is capable of meaning anything to itself in its computations.
I agree. Rand used a thought experiment of an immortal and indestructible robot the show that values would be impossible to such an entity. But indestructibility and immortality are in fact impossible even in simple machines or piles of stone such as the Pyramids of Egypt. A mortal and destructible robot endowed with a "sufficiently advanced" AI to comprehend its own nature and ultimate peril may be able to value.
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22 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
The assertion is If it exists, it can be recreated. Isn't it epistemologically inappropriate to ask for an antecedent cause of something that is axiomatic (be it existence, consciousness, volition).
No. The point of identifying axioms is to aid in identifying and rejecting contradictory conclusions. It is impossible to disprove volition by investigating volition. It is possible to investigate volition and validate it in ever greater detail.
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15 hours ago, AlexL said:I admire your courage😁
But first, an introductory remark:
Well, the unthinkable happened: the newly created Russian Federation recognized the newly created Ukraine in its 1991 borders, that is including Crimea. It did this in several multilateral and bilateral treaties. The last of the treaties was signed by Putin (2010); you understand what it means. It means that Putin cannot blame Yeltsin for treason for "giving up" Crimea. OTOH, talking about signing treaties/accords in good faith 😁: where is Putin's good faith in the 2010 signature? Now he not only denied the belonging of Crimea to Ukraine, but also the legitimacy of Ukraine itself !
Now the main point:
And this is supposed to prove that Putin has a legitimate right to the control of Crimean Peninsula? OK. Then: how and why history and language provides a right and legitimacy to this right? According to what principles?
Putin apparently expected good prospects for further cooperation with Ukraine in the future on the basis of past ties and shared history and ongoing economic involvement. When the U.S. simply overthrew the gov't in 2014 Putin should have begun to realize the ruthlessness of the opponent he was dealing with. All agreements ever made with the Ukraine government had been abrogated when the U.S. dissolved that gov't in 2014 and made it a U.S. puppet state.
So what makes a government legitimate? What does "legitimate" mean in this context? There must be an objective definition of "government" so that we know what the referents are before it is possible to distinguish better or worse within the category. Calling the Russian government illegitimate doesn't make it go away or make it any less of a government. You must admit it to the category of government before you can begin to apply the standards of a proper government to it.
Rand's definition of government A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.
Defining and defending the territorial integrity of a country is one of the essential defining attributes of government. The Russian government is not illegitimate for doing what a government does by its very nature and identity. Anytime a government does something wrongly or incorrectly it does not cease to be the government (if only government reform could be so easy!).
Also from the Lexicon, from Galt's speech we have The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” The objective form in which consent manifests is acting in compliance with the government exercise of authority. Governments collapse when a critical mass of people simply stop complying with it. Up until the moment that happens governments wield real authority.
The distinction between wielding real actual authority and wielding legitimate authority is reached by applying a normative standard to government actions. The Objectivist philosophy of government is that government action should be about defending human rights. There are people in this world who are not Objectivists and not even philosophical who have different opinions about what government action should be about. Objectivists do not have the right to murder people with different philosophies or no philosophies because those people are still humans with their own rights. The American government, which is not in the hands of Objectivists, does not have that right.
- AlexL, dream_weaver, Jon Letendre and 1 other
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3 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:
You want to recreate it?
Where does this word "recreate" come from? If its implied by something I wrote, please spell it out in the long version using short words and simple sentences so I can understand.
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4 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:
But what does information processing mean?
A deliberately vague term carefully chosen to refer to that physical substrate that handles the flow of information within it and into and out of it. I will not be solving the problem of "how much is enough for consciousness" here or anywhere else. I would offer that planets and tables are not conscious and could never be conscious because of the lack of the means.
Causation is not consciousness. Consciousness is caused. Consciousness is a specific type of causation that by its nature (its identity) requires a certain means in order to exist. If the most fundamental modes of existence bear a single bit of information then they certainly could could not be conscious. I will not be solving the problem of "how much is enough for consciousness" here or anywhere else.
I have considered the animist worldview but have rejected it as psychological projection of self-awareness outward on a large scale, and essentially being simply another version of the mind-body dichotomy (perhaps the original version). It is an eye-opening and mind-expanding break from the worldviews of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) so well worth the time to look into it.
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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:
You know as well as I do that conflict goes even further back than that. It's not like problems with Putin's Russia started with Crimea.
Russia is a small population and small economy country that is getting older and smaller demographically every year so "problems with Putin's Russia" have never really mattered. Eventually Russia will not even be able to afford its nuclear weapons, or will reduce to a merely token nuclear capability along the lines of North Korea or Pakistan. Russia is not a threat, it a bogeyman displayed to secure funding for bloated American bureaucracies that have no purpose without an enemy to fight.
Among the more absurd things that have happened within your lifetime, the change within the Democratic party from Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State visiting Vladimir Putin with her misspelled "Reset" button and Barack Obama at a presidential debate looking on with bemused incredulity as Mitt Romney claimed Russia was a threat to America to the present day Democratic party and the same people now seeing a Russian behind every rock should give you whiplash. The pattern is: the party out of power uses Russia as an external enemy to rally support under a fake patriotism appeal.
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On 2/6/2023 at 7:17 PM, AlexL said:
Neither did you justify your - implicit - premise that Putin has a legitimate right to the control of Crimean Peninsula.
Allow me.
I incorporate by the reference the basic facts about Catherine the Great, in particular "..With the support of Great Britain, Russia colonised the territories of New Russia along the coasts of the Black and Azov Seas. " and " ... Many cities and towns were founded on Catherine's orders in the newly conquered lands, most notably Odessa, Yekaterinoslav (to-day known as Dnipro), Kherson, Nikolayev, and Sevastopol. "
Crimea as it is known today in its non-Muslim form is Russian. It was founded by the Russian government by Russian people speaking the Russian language and keeping the Russian cultural norms in entirely new cities. To this day it still is populated by Russians speaking Russian and keeping Russian cultural norms. Crimea has been Russian for longer than Texas has been American. Khrushchev reassigned administrative control of the Crimea region to the Ukraine region for some reason, some kind of political payoff or perhaps he just wanted to reduce the paperwork crossing his desk. In no way did this administrative maneuver change anything about who was living in the Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed the technicality of Khrushchev's act meant Russia lost control of Crimea. It is as absurd to think Russia would just let the Crimea go as to think America would let Texas go back to Mexico or become independent if some irregularity were newly discovered in the process of Texas' admission to the Union of States.
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On 2/2/2023 at 11:45 PM, Easy Truth said:
Are you conceding that human animals are machines with volition?
What does "machine" mean and imply? There is an error in philosophy Rand to referred to as the "mind-body dichotomy" which insisted consciousness and all things spiritual was immaterial and that the body was material and therefore mechanical. "Machine" means and implies the "body" side of the mind-body dichotomy and so by definition cannot be conscious or ever volitional. In addition to all the arguments against the mind-body dichotomy which Rand had made I have my own ontological insight which I owe to modernity and science.
Philosophy is often said to start with Thales who tried to assert "everything was water". Fast forwarding through thousands of years, we have Newton and others teaching that there is matter and energy. Then Einstein taught that matter and energy are the same thing, in that one can be transformed into the other. But the man the people forget is Claude Shannon who founded information theory as a field of study. Fundamentally what exists is matter/energy and information. All information exists in the form of some mass/energy and no mass/energy can exist without bearing information. There can be no "pure mind" or "pure body", only ever a comingling of both.
All discrete systems from inert rocks to microbes to people can be graded on a spectrum as to how elaborate is their information processing capacity. Somewhere on the higher end consciousness becomes possible and then beyond that volition. This is why I conclude volition is possible in non-human and even non-organic forms.
- KyaryPamyu and Easy Truth
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On 2/5/2023 at 9:53 AM, Easy Truth said:
The implication of all this is that "free will" should not be axiomatic. That is can be created, or that it does have a reason.
"Axiomatic" is not a synonym for "God-given". All kinds of things that are axiomatic are also not philosophical primaries, that is things that are not composed of parts and not analyzable. Even 'Existence' as we are given it is the ordinary scale of human life, its rocks and trees and banana peels and puppy dogs, not subatomic particles and quantum fields.
So yes volition could in principle be recreated in other than human form and that would not alter the axiomatic nature of consciousness or volition.
Hypothetically, if scientific consensus became that objects do not exist independent of consciousness, could Objectivism stand?
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
Words refer to concepts, and the concepts referred to may be well-formed or ill-formed. Hegel's 'immanent critique' has similarity to Rand's analysis of 'anti-concepts' which claim to be one thing but are actually another. It is equivocation fallacy to use the term correspondence to stand for a percept's relation to what exists and a word's relation to what it refers to and to then claim these are the same kind of relationship. Correspondence in the first sense is a real causal relation but in the second sense can be arbitrarily assigned.