Kevin Brown

Johnny Gaskins and the End of Law http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson267.html Earlier this month, Gaskins was convicted in a Raleigh federal court for depositing [legal after tax cash] money in a bank and faces prison for the rest of his life as a result. Lacking effective checks on abuse of power, the State becomes an end unto itself, "e.g.", a tyranny.

Hello: Your statement is preposterous nonsense, self-refuting, and contradicts Rand's doctrine. Go back and reread the Rand quotes I posted earlier. The law is a social construct in the form of agreements between citizens of the State. It is the joint or majority agreement of Citizens in the form of mutually assented to rules of conduct that gives each of the Citizens their moral (goodness) license to good actions and protects them from bandits or brigands. I pointed out Rand's contradiction in my earlier post. However, the implication of her assertion in Galt's speech that rights are sourced from the LOI tautology cannot but fail her alleged purpose because there is nothing intrinsic about existence that proclaims that Homo Sapiens must necessarily live. There are no gods to mandate that Homo Sapiens necessarily live and exist. Primacy of consciousness metaphysics are false. There is no collective consciousness or universal consciousness, nor a world consciousness that dictates Homo Sapiens have some moral license to action apart from associative interactions. The "Universe" is the name we give to the set of all things that exist and not one tinsy-weensy bit of it gives a shit about Homo Sapiens such that a magical categorical imperative is imparted to compel Homo Sapiens to necessarily exist. This conditional statement is subject to a material conditional truth table. The antecedent conditional if clause betrays Rand’s false presumption. By conceptually loading the conditional if clause with an enthymeme presupposition that Homo Sapiens are somehow magically endowed with a necessary mandate to exist, she denied the the fact of existence that existence is not consciousness. She did a stolen concept here by asserting the LOI while denying that existence doesn't give a shit about Homo Sapiens. This means that the antecedent premise cannot be true, but the inference is true because if the Rand's supernatural presumption was fact then her conclusion would be true. Her conclusion is, nevertheless, necessarily false, and thus the conditional statement is false. ( see http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html for conditional truth table ) The fact that Homo Sapiens want to live is due to genetic configuration resultant from evolutionary development. However, as Objectivism rejects all versions of evolutionary ethics stemming from universal common descent and ignores that all life forms on Earth are related by DNA inheritances, no valid case from the facts of material existence can be made for Homo Sapiens having a LOI constitution consisting in part of intrinsic natural rights within the confines of Objectivism. Consequently, any rights a person has stems from their association with others in the form of a set of rules by which they agree upon to abide, "e.g.", the Law of a State. That which comes from a consciousness is subjective. Rights come from the State and are subjective stemming from Homo Sapien's consciousness in the form of agreed upon social constructs. Thus rights are subjective and not objective. Your assertion is contra Rand: If Rand was correct, then there can only be rights to moral or good actions. The State as representative of the association of citizens would, if the citizens so directed it, compel moral action by punishing non-moral, "i.e.", non-good actions and or rewarding moral and good actions. Hitherto wit, there can be no rights to non-moral or non-good actions. Your statements are false on their face. Best Wishes and Regards

Greetings: Of course I reject all versions of primacy of consciousness metaphysics and thus all forms of Theism, supernaturalism, collectivism, and Romanticism, so I also reject creationism; however, I take issue with the idea that human beings have rights as an intrinsic attribute of their basal material existence. I assert rights are social conventions that people agree to honor in order to facilitate and ease living in association. As such rights constitute licenses we grant to one another to behave morally in pursuit of our own personal self-interest. If a lone Homo Sapien lived on a remote uninhabited, except for herself, island, she would have no rights because there would be nobody else with whom to establish interactive rules of conduct. (She could still be morally good by committing actions that resulted in her survival and enhancement.) Rand's confusion on the topic can be used as one fork of a dichotomy dilemma via the Law of Excluded Middle because either rights actually exist as a basal component of material existence or they do not. Here she indicated that she thought rights to be social conventions used to protect Homo Sapien from associations of other Homo Sapiens. Placing her assertion that rights are part of material existence in the mouth of Galt required her to hold an unsupported presupposition that the evolution of Homo Sapien was deterministically casual and could have been no other way. But that proposition is not in evidence since the fact is that great apes do have volitional will. It is both possible and plausible and thus to some extent probable that the common ancestor species of hominids and great apes had volitional will. If so, then the fact of Homo Sapien's survival and existence was by chance and not deterministically casual meaning there is no categorical imperative for "Man Qua Man" to live as Rand presupposed in Galt's speech. Thus the fact that I need such and such to survive can not be a basis for any moral license granted me from an by others to perform actions to acquire the needed substances or circumstances. If that is true, then rights are indeed mere conventions comprising rules of conduct applicable to circumstances wherein Homo Sapiens interact one with another so that individuals either acquire needed substances or at least incur no harm. Since Rand tried to have it both ways and since she can't have her cake and eat it too, then her argument for rights sourced from "A is A—and Man is Man." cannot but fail. It may be objected that Homo Sapiens have a genetically programmed drive or overwhelming desire to live that functions in place of Rand's presupposed categorical imperative. To the best of my humble knowledge, no philosopher has yet been able to make a case for evolutionary-biological altruism in Homo Sapiens accepted by any Objectivist philosopher. If that is the case, then an appeal to a genetically programmed drive to live cannot relieve Rand's self-contradiction. That which is self-contradictory cannot obtain. The negation of her predicates ala Galt's speech holds and the dichotomy dilemma via LEM means Rights are social conventions. Further regarding the appeal to creationism in the DOI, ironically, if the superstitions of the primacy of consciousness mystics and Theists were to be the case, then nobody would have rights, nor could they; for then, there would not be any material existence. All would be mere appearance and complete skepticism would reign. In such a scenario, lacking existence and identity, nothing could be known as the foundational prerequisites of cognition would not be present. Only complete entropy and chaos would attend, but even that is questionable. How funny it is to think that one of the best, if not the best, States on the planet is founded on ideas that if true would render life incomprehensible. <flame proof underwear on> Best Wishes for Your Success

Greetings Friends Over at the Internet Infidels Discussion Board on Link to Thread a commenter, Red Dave, claims that Relativity Theory disproves the law of identity, A=A. Link to thread Does Red Daves complaint from 2004 have merit? Does Special Relativity imply the Law of Identity only holds in special cases? What constitutes a valid and sound argument against Dave's view? Many thanks in advance for your input on this issue.

A gratuitous Peikoff quote regarding God belief from OPAR

Greetings Mr. Miovas: I admire your prose and think you are intelligent and articulate. Thank you for your speedy reply. I shall address your questions in what seems to me best. My brief post was typed in English. The reply was intended as a snappy come back to DavidOdden's parting shot that: "Thus ontology is not the same as phylogeny." Having spent some ink in discussions related to the Evolution vs Creation issue, I am aware of Ernst Haeckel's mistaken argument from his purposefully distorted embryological drawings in support of Evolution. Creationist seize upon that unfortunate episode in the history of science to make a sorry and false case for their fake god. Haeckel's theme was that "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny"; that is the development of embryos repeats the organism's ancestral evolutionary stages in the course of its development. Mr Odden's metaphor then was that study of the nature of existence was not the same as the evolutionary development of a particular group of organisms. I took this to be in support of his Nominalist assertion that "White" is actually a mental state". In reply to that I noted that Helen Keller, blind and deaf from birth, would be unable to have knowledge of White. Physical material instantiated things exist and have properties. To be conscious of those things requires the conscious organic being to somehow perceive sensations from its sensory organs. To mentally envision White, a conscious organic being must have had at sometime an experience of the sensation of perceiving White. This is because without a perceptional referent a reasoning mind cannot integrate to a concept. Knowledge is held in the from of concepts and is derived from reality. Helen Keller could no more have knowledge of White than Billy Graham can have knowledge of GOD and for the same reason. No sensory perception => no discrete units to subsume => no integration into a concept. Consequently, direct empirical experience from actual reality is necessary to know what White is. The religious people are very good at believing all sorts of things about their gods. Is there a way for some other conscious mind to distinguish a difference between what they believe about their god or what Helen Keller believed about White or radio waves and what they may be imagining? Does imagination make reality? Or is imagination dependent and contingent to reality? Hey, cool. Thanks for the info. One class of knowledge comes from reality via perception while another comes from extension of perception through instrumentation and thereby propositional abstractions. I respectfully disagree. Concepts are built by integrating perceptions by way of subsuming discrete units using measurement omission. Concepts are what constitutes knowledge and are derived from existence. Without memories of sensory perception or direct sensory perception, a conscious mind would be lost in a fantasy. I agree with you. However, I distinguish classes of knowledge. One based on direct sensory experience and another based on abstraction from propositional assertions. I do not know what to call them, and I strongly suspect that others have made the same distinction. What would knowledge based on sensory perception be called as distinguished from knowledge based on abstractions founded on propositional information. I gave it a try. As time passes, I'll learn more and become more knowledgeable in both ways. BTW, you are a handsome devil. Do people remark that Brent Spinner, TV actor who played Mr. Data on Star Trek, bears a striking resemblance to you? I bet you get all the girls.

Mr. Thomas. Please forgive my very late question. Could you define in simple terms what you mean by similarity-as-such and commensurability-as-such.? Thank you. Best Regards.

Helen Keller was blind from birth and would have had no memory of "white". She would then be unable to have imagined "white". Despite Ernst Haeckel's mistaken idea regarding embryological parallelism, ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny when it comes to mental states.

Hello, Greetings: I come in peace. "Klaatu barada nikto!" I like your article. It is well written and makes good points. Morality does indeed arise from reality. Departing from almost all objectivists, I think there is sufficient scientific evidence to show that some animals have violational will and are self conscious of there own minds. The former is indicated by: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/...80606102607.htm wherein is the following -> "Research along these lines conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University recently allowed monkeys to feed themselves using a robotic limb that they controlled only with their thoughts. Their thoughts were picked up via an array of electrodes sitting on top of the primary motor cortex, a lower level brain region responsible for carrying out motor functions." The monkey, if devoid of free will, would not be able to make the robot arm move food to its mouth. The later is suggested by: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/...80111175323.htm Here the scientists found that different mechanisms regulate consciousness "by showing that the cellular pathway for emerging from anesthesia is different from the one that drugs take to put patients to sleep during operations." If the mice subjected to the tests were not self conscious, then why would different cellular pathways activate for undergoing anesthesia versus emerging from the influence of the drugs? This is not to suggest that Homo Sapiens are subject to determinism.

Greetings to Mephistopheles and the forum regulars from Kevin Brown, a near complete newbie to objectivism. I too initially thought a priori knowledge was innate to a human mind by default. Descartes was wrong. The Cogito fails not only because of the missing premises, but because of the axiom of existence. Existence Exists means that reality is absolute. This is not question begging because the Axiom of Identity shows that which exists exists as something specific. The corollary Law of Causality indicates that existents conform to their specific nature. Dr. Michael Martin in his now famous TANG argument against the existence of God validated the Law of Identity by questioning how it could be that New Zealand could both be south of China and not south of China.(a) Since reality conforms to the Law of Identity and does so consistently as a brute fact of material existence, then the Axiom of Identity is validated. Consider 1. Logic is necessary to human understanding. 2. If it is true that you are a brain in a vat or a victim of the Cartesian Demon or a simulation in an advanced computer, then you live in a universe where anything goes and reality is not fixed. 3. If you live in a universe where anything goes and reality is not fixed, then all in the universe is contingent to your mad scientist. or your Demon, or your programmer, and nothing in the universe is necessary. 4. If (3) is true, then Logic cannot be necessary to human understanding. (from 2 and 3) 5. (3) is false. (from 1 and 4) The validity of Logic and the Uniformity of Nature together are sufficient to validate the Axiom of Existence. But just to make sure, I will try to use my amazing psychic power to change my computer mouse's position. Here goes - grunt - moan - uugh! - strain - concentrate - focus - be the mouse - Mouse! - I command you to move! - sigh. To no avail, my mouse did not move. Consciousness cannot move a mouse. Funny, I always get that same result when I try to do the bend the spoon thing too. Darn. Consciousness cannot modify, manipulate, or amend existence. I like Anton Thorn's Objectivism web site since it focus' on refuting theism and god belief. Thorn has this to say about consciousness. "Consciousness is consciousness of existence, and is therefore dependent upon existence for three primary reasons: first, since consciousness is consciousness of objects, i.e., of existence, any act of consciousness presupposes existence cognitively in that it has an object(s) (i.e., there can be no consciousness without existence, without something to be conscious of); second, cosciousness presupposes existence biologically (the senses and perceptual integration, neurology, etc.), and therefore a physical body; third, consciousness presupposes existence teleologically in that it has a purpose, namely the survival activity of the organism possessing consciousness. " ( b ) If a person asserts that consciousness has metaphysical primacy over existence, that is called the fallacy of asserting the primacy of consciousness. Since consciousness is, at its most common denominative rung on the metaphorical ladder of complexity, awareness of existence, then existence must exist prior to and be necessary for consciousness to develop. I think that means that assertions of a priori knowledge along the lines of Descartes meditations or Kant's critique make that fallacy. Certainly the god believers do this. I've been using an argument I devised based on Ayn Rand's quote from Galt's speech in "For The New Intellectual" p.124. "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness. Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it . . . Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." © Here is my argument against gods based on Rand's quote just above. Christians run away when they read this. 1. To believe that a theistic creator deity exists and is responsible for existence, the believer must imagine their deity was in some timeless fashion akin to "before" existence alone in a non-spatial, void, without matter, energy, location, dimensions, fields, concepts, knowledge, symbols, perceptions, physical natural law, logic, or referents. And that their deity was a primordial consciousness that wished existence to instantiate. 2. Consciousness is an axiomatic irreducible primary that at the most common denominative rung on the ladder of complexity consists of awareness of existence. 3. Consciousness of consciousness necessarily requires primary consciousness to first obtain as awareness of existence. 4. Prior to existence there could not have been anything to be aware of. 5. Without anything to be aware of, there could not have been any awareness. 6. Without awareness there could not have been any consciousness. 7. From 4, 5, 6 there could not have been a primordial consciousness prior to existence. 8. Creator gods are defined as primordial consciousness. 9. From 8 and 9 Creator gods cannot exist. Ha, LOL. So far no religious believer has successfully engaged this. Do any of you think this sort of argument could be turned to deductively validate the axiom of existence? Could that be done despite the fact that existence is a blatantly obvious axiomatic primary needing no validation? Could that be done without making a stolen concept or some other fallacy? Thanks for reading my first post to the forum. It is my hope to learn a thing or two by hanging out here. Best Regards and Wishes (a) http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mic...frame/tang.html ( b ) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/101...initions.htm#Co © http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html