KurtColville

If it benefits man's life, by his nature as a rational being.

None that I know of, Tom. But the settlers wouldn't have to be Objectivists -- the founders basically would, though. All they need to be is people who will live by their own effort, leave others free to do the same, and support (if only implicitly) the rational, philosophical underpinnings of the culture. Such an endeavor is a tremendous challenge, but it seems to be the only way for civilized man to survive in the near future. I'm ready, too.

Sorry -- my reply may not have answered this satisfactorily, so here it is directly. To the skeptic, I would say, "If you believe in the primacy of consciousness, if even in some qualified sense, then it's up to you to show why it's true, and how on earth consciousness can sometimes be fundamental and at other times it's existence. Good luck!"

Right, that's just what I was thinking when you wrote that. A person could claim that under certain conditions (such as when they're threatened by a volcano), their consciousness is cut off from reality, and they can't merely wish an escape route into existence, but then that person is conceding that reality is independent of their consciousness, if even in this bizarrely delimited context. In that case, the argument I would present to the skeptic is, "Now that you recognize that consciousness is not metaphysically fundamental to existence, go the rest of the way and apply that discovery to every other scenario in which you still hold on to the primacy of consciousness. You'll find that there are no scenarios in which it stands up to verification. At the end of the day, you'll never be able to affirm the primacy of consciousness, because you'll never be able to show evidence that reality (even in delimited instances) is an illusion and that your consciousness is truly all that there is."

Why would a man be free to conjure up a threat, but not free to conjure up salvation? The primacy of consciousness is a metaphysical concept, i.e., it applies to reality as such, which includes scenarios involving both threats and safety (and everything else).

Organize to create one -- more specifically, create a new, free country. Appeal to those who are sick of enslavement, but who can't conceive of a rational alternative.

Yes, that would be another category of motivation for being irrational. An example would be an aggressive driver, who has a "screw 'em!" attitude about how he menaces others behind the wheel. I see a mentality of "I don't want to have to respect others. I don't want others to be a restraint on my whims." Bullying was discussed in another thread, and that definitely fits with "acting out fantasies of omnipotence" and the hatred of respecting others. I guess sheer nihilism would be another class of motivation; habitualized irrationality because of a hatred of the good and the pleasure gained in destroying it.

I hope I'm not throwing the thread off-track, but I wanted to ask if language is a prerequisite for concept formation. This may well have been answered elsewhere. It seems to me that it must; I can't conceive of any way to mentally hold concepts without a lingual form. Thanks in advance.

Some examples that come to mind are social acceptance by a person or group (partying with other vacuous twits); advancement at work by following an irrational or immoral protocol (pick any government bureaucrat); personal self-assurance (such as that offered by religion or New Age mysticism); finanical/material gain (dropping morality to apply for a government favor). Seems like most irrational values fall into one of those categories. Yep. Pragmatism is all the rage.

Even though Eiuol's question of "how can one be taught to be rational" is more important, you certainly can be taught to be irrational, and there is no shortage of people who work very hard at practicing and perfecting the method of "how". If you aren't objective, your standard of truth will not be conformity to reality. Instead, you'll rationalize what constitutes successful action, and that will become your standard. For example, people who have abandoned logic in the evaluation of abstract arguments will typically operate on emotional outbursts. Instead of thinking, they'll respond, "Oh, you just want to argue," or "That's what you say." Some form of irrationality will take over: evasion, subjectivism, something. These people weren't born to act irrationally. They had to be shown that certain actions lead to success -- to something that they value -- and they decide to adapt the method that leads to such success to their own thinking. They are choosing the easy, immediate payoff of peer approval, or baseless self-esteem, or material gain, because the irrational way gets you what you want, you don't have to fight the crowd, and reality won't smite you at the first hint of irrationality. This pathetic, rationalized, anti-life standard of successful action is what pragmatists champion. You can easily observe (in public schools or wherever) people teaching some method of irrationality. Mostly it is implicit. They'll get some result that they know people will value, and thay can count on others to figure out how they got that result, and apply that irrational method to their own pursuit of values. And sometimes it is explicit, such as in education, where an instructor or textbook lays out in detail how to wage war against reality and "win". To key to recognizing how it can be that people accept the teaching of irrationality is recognizing that they view the results of irrationality as efficacious, and that frees them from worrying about the fact that they are irrational and its consquential hazards.

There is a physical explanation for the universe being eternal: the fact that the concept "eternal" refers to something outside of time, or to which time is inapplicable, and the fact that the universe (being everything that exists) does not exist in time, but vice-versa -- time exists in the universe. Physical reality is where we go to get those determining facts. It's an understandably difficult idea to grasp. But it will help to recognize that time presupposes two measuring points: a starting event and a final event. To apply time to the universe, to ask how old it is, we need to know the universe's starting point. But that's the problem: there is no starting point to existence. There is nothing to refer to to use as your starting point that precedes the existence of something. There is nothing that you can refer to and say, "Okay, here is when nothing existed, and that's when I'm starting my measurement of elapsed time in the universe." (This, by the way, is exactly the line of thinking that cosmologists do use in addressing the age of the universe... unfortunately.) The question requires non-existence to contrast with existence, so that you can tell when existence starts. But how do you identify non-existence? How do you place a nothing in time or place? We will indeed have to wait, and we'll need less rationalism in physics to get the answers. The good news is that with each advancement in telescopy, some long-held rationalizations get thrown in the garbage in light of conclusive new data, bringing us a little bit closer to the answers all the time. Good questions, though, and I hope this helps. And a hearty "Hopp Schwyz!" from a former resident of Zurich and passionate fan of Switzerland.

Yep.

Well, there's no physical law that rules out a "Big Crunch". It's just that we observe an acceleration of the most distant objects away from each, with the rate of acceleration increasing with distance. Some force, which physicists mysteriously label "dark energy", appears to be pushing things apart faster than gravity can pull them together. However, there is still a lot of science to be done, principally in the analysis of redshifts, before the verdict is in. Were it to turn out that there is some repulsive, anti-gravitational force that is fundamental to the universe, like gravity is, then we could rule out a Big Crunch. We'll just have to see. Since a "thermal death" of the universe, as you have described, would necessitate a violation of the conservation of energy (and no small violation at that), I'd vote for that scenario as being the greater nonsense.

Marc and Grames, seriously. Tony, thanks. My deterministic consciousness is telling me it was a bad choice to participate.

Determinism exists where volition doesn't. Whereas the dynamics of particles apart from a volitional entity are deterministic (their actions are necessary), the dynamics of the particles within a volitional entity are governed by its consciousness -- an agent that can tell the particles, "do this, rather than that." The same brain particles can be taken out of a mind, and they will act deterministically. The difference is the presence of volition. What physiological, particulate agent is responsible for volition? Who knows? Science hasn't figured that out yet. But something is responsible for volition, and that something is in the brain.

I'm just now perusing this thread, but I see your confusion. As long as you recognize that "God" is an anti-concept, there's a chance to make sense of this argument. What is relevant to Western culture isn't God, or even the supposed concept of God, but the constantly shifting, contradictory referents that have been packaged as God throughout history. If you change the above sentence to, "Even though God is imaginary, people's rationalistic use of this word to denote all sorts of phenomena, real and imagined, plays a critical role and forms a basis for Western culture," then that's true. It isn't God that influenced the West, but what people irrationally imagined God to be. You should be easily able to see the error in stating that "this imaginary God" is part of reality. There is no way that a non-existent can be thought of as part of reality, in any fashion. What you are referring to is a delusion -- the treatment of a non-existent as an existent. The delusion is real; the supposed referent of the delusion (God) is not. I don't think anyone here is oblivious to the potency and pervasiveness of the rationalization that is God. As to God being relevant to concepts of method, how does an anti-concept help you understand anything about reality? Citing imaginary numbers, despite the fact that they have no physical referent, they are indispensible concepts of method in treating sinusoidal waves as abstractions. Those are real things; a concept of method tied to reality is necessary to understand them. To make an analogy, "multiculturalism" is, like God, an anti-concept. It is rationally unusable; it has no referent in reality, and the "meaning" which it is meant to hint at is rubbery on demand, limited only by the fact that its audience isn't 100% detached from reality (e.g. "multiculturalism" can be used in the context of "moral relativism", but not in the context of "banana"). Multiculturalism doesn't give one insight into anything, because it isn't anything. But when you look at how people rationalize generalized group characteristics, and slap the mystery label of "multiculturalism" on it, then you have something to examine, which, again, reduces to examining a popularized delusion. When you talk about God being a shaping force in history, it isn't God that you're talking about, but what people make of a loosely agreed-upon fantasy.

Do you think Miss Rand viewed the dominantly anti-life philisophy facing her as grounds for budging one inch on Objectivism? Your entire objection boils down to the use of one word: "reposition". If AllMenAreIslands quote read thusly, would you agree: "Objectivism/Capitalism ought to reject all of them as irrational, while claiming its rightful place as the rational alternative to statism."

Why be ashamed? You can't beat yourself up for not concluding something for which you did not have the requisite knowledge. Addressing atheism vs. agnosticism requires a fairly advanced understanding of epistemology, and specifically, of the valid bases for forming conclusions. You live in a culture that has almost no clue about this, and is increasingly contemptuous of it, preferring rampant, bullying skepticism. You have essentially no intellectual support from the society you live in, so you're faced with having to figure this out from the ground up, and yet you did something that utterly dwarfs any blame you might wish to accept for ever being agnostic: you considered that agnosticism might be wrong, you recognized that the question was worth solving, you correctly identified a good place to go to solve it, and most importantly, you were honest with yourself and reality in solving it. Give yourself a pat on the back -- you deserve it.

It's probably useful, though, that you point this out. The publisher may be able to get Barnes and Noble to remedy this. Kudos.

Damn good post, David.

I think you're right about making fundamental parts of a constitution off-limits to amendment, but I want to point out an essential condition in the formulation and honoring of any constitution. A constitution is only as good as the philosophy of those that it governs, and more directly, the philosophy of those legislators that apply the constitution to governance. Constitutions don't enforce themselves. There are no magic words that can withstand the public's will to put men into office who violate the constitution on the grounds that it doesn't say what you think it says, that their violation isn't actually a violation, or who flat out ignore it because they can get away with it. If no one kicks up a stink at its being breached, a constitution is mere empty symbols on a page. To have a properly airtight constitution, you need a philosophically airtight society -- one in which a rational philosophy defines the culture, as opposed to existing in every single inhabitant.

Thanks very much for posting this. Your notes are great!

My view of it doesn't get me quite as worked up as you (), but I think you make a good point. Having grown up with only two siblings, I can't relate at all to family life with seven or eight siblings. That may have advantages that outweigh the disadvantage of lessened parental attention, but I rather doubt it. From my very casual observation, there seems to be a happy medium of 2-5 kids for a family. I've known many numerous large families, and they always seem to have a crazy family life, and the parents run around like madmen. The five strong personalities in our family was plenty; I can't imagine one of much more.

That's a great introduction. I hope you get a lot out of your interest in Ayn Rand's philosophy. Welcome aboard!

Your assessment ignores two essential facts. First, none of these men consistently put their ideas into action. They allowed their actions to be determined by a contradicting soup of ideas and whims. Second, Obama stands to be a more dangerous pragmatist than the others because of the degree to which he embraces socialism and rejects freedom. Yes, they all wanted America to be powerful and their plans were flawed. That does not mean they were/are all equally destructive. They all drift pragmatically between the narrow extremes of liberalism and conservatism, but they drift over considerably different ranges. Hence the source over which people argue politics. [Added]: Not to be ignored in this discussion is the power of persuasion. Two politicians may have the same ideology, but the one who is more articulate and charismatic will get more of his goals realized. This is an advantage that Obama has over Bush.