StrictlyLogical

If some thing exists then it has physical extension in the Universe.  This is true for thoughts, ideas, emotions, life, the brain, the mind, etc.

Absolutely! 
 
One of those peeps could cure cancer, or write your favorite song... or just do some good accounting work for the company that supplies ECM chips to the automaker you buy a car from in 3 years that saves your life because it has a redundancy failure protection.... on the other hand you could run them over saving 20 seconds and 2 millijoules of effort.  Really there is no contest.
 
This sort of evaluation of potential benefit of men to other men requires a view to the long range and wide perspective on consequences and causation ...
but a single realization is important : man IS a producer of value, its not a zero sum game, value is created on both sides of every transaction, and when you touch anything manmade of value to you it resulted from a long chain of events which all required the ABSENCE of chains on the people who played a part.
 
The fewer the chains the more benefit you can get... you get the picture.
 
 
Upholding rights, is like putting gas in your car.
 
 
It would be eminently UNSELFISH for you (NOT in your selfish best interests long range) to simply run them over.... and as such, and only as such, immoral.

I am not going to define rights.  You quoted from OPAR (in another thread) what they are and I think it is a good definition.
 
I would like to try to illustrate the "root" in reality of rights by a concretization:
 
Imagine there is an Objectivist, Jim, who has finally decided not to live in isolation, he resolves to form social relationships and as a first step drafts a kind of "agreement in principle" type document which stipulates his requirements and limits for others if they are to have social arrangements with him, one on one.
 
Of course this document is informed by Jim's ethics and morality, his choice to live etc.  Clearly Jim will insist, if he is to have a relationship with any other individual, that the other individual is not to interfere with Jim in such a way that directly acts against his life, or interferes with Jim's ability to lead a life in accordance with his morality.  Of course Jim wants to trade but he does need nor want to make anyone promise to trade with him... he will let opportunities come and go as they do and he anticipates much good will come of everyday commerce.
 
This is a good start.  Jim then realizes that if he approaches you (say another Objectivist), and he selfishly does want to have a relationship with you, that you too have certain requirements and limits for forming the relationship.  Not unlike what Jim just spent hours to draft in his own agreement in principle.  Jim not only has to realize you come with these and that you can and will refuse to enter into an agreement with him if these are not up to your standards, he also realizes that the entire purpose of the arrangement to him, i.e. your being able to benefit Jim, depends upon your ability to be of most benefit to yourself, specifically, to flourish as a rational, productive, thinking entity.  As such your nature informs what limits there should be in the relationship to ensure you can be of greatest benefit to Jim, even if you do not know them and even if you do not demand them.
 
In either case and for both reasons, Jim includes in the "agreement in principle" those requirements and limits.  Insofar as and to the extend that Jim is rational, understands his nature and reality, and chooses life, and insofar as you also understands your nature and reality and choose life, the requirements and limits are agreeable to both yourself and Jim and maximize your benefits to yourselves, and thereby each other, without imposing undue restrictions on your living as independent individuals who voluntarily trade with each other.
 
This process, which is Objective, taking into account facts of reality but nothing mystical or "intrinsically prescriptive", is a concretization of what rights are at their root.  Someone comes to you with requirements of their nature and of their choices which to benefit from them in your society are to be recognized (to the extent the choices are rational, etc.).  The next step is to socialize the agreements in principle to a society of like minded people by for example a sort of constitution.
 
Other than taking an abstract route which risks rationalism... (although if one is careful and smart one can do this), I think the above illustrates (or at least indicates) in concrete fashion what rights are and why they are.

"Emergent properties," is a pseudo-concept. The properties of physical things are always explained in terms of their components and the relationship of those components to each other, their structure. Nothing is "just a collection" of components or parts. When is anything ever explained by reducing it to its component parts, without including the relationship of those parts to each other? In some rare cases, the structure of an entity will be determined by the properties of its components, but that structure is still part of the understanding of the entity.

Something that identifies everything, identifies nothing. If emergent properties are whatever properties a thing has when its components are organized in a certain way, then the properties of every existent there is, are "emergent." It identifies nothing new because the fact that a thing's properties are determined by its components and structure is all that can be known.

If "brick-buildingness" is a property of brick buildings emerging from the way bricks are organized into a structure, than when bricks are dumped higgily-piggily into a pile, the attribute "pileness" is emergent. Absurd.

All these pseudo-concepts: emergent properties, self-organizing systems, symmetry-breaking systems, holism, etc. are the inventions of physicalists to argue that physical components can be organized in such a way that life just, "emerges," as a property. Let it be demonstrated, just once, that physical components without life (not already living components) can be organized into a living organism. By inventing concepts for processes or attributes that have never been observed to "prove" something is the worst kind of rationalization. Nevertheless, some very intelligent people are taken in by them.

[i know the pseudo-concepts I've listed are used to put over a number of other very bad ideas, like societies being "emergent" organisms, etc.]

I like the concrete. A second way to make it concrete is to imagine Jim really never had much choice about interacting with people, since they were all around him, for many hundreds of miles. Even if they did not raid his home, they did impact him. Even if he does not wish to trade with the kooky folk across the stream, he wants to reach an agreement over how they use the commons, and perhaps he even comes up with a concept of property.
Your concrete example highlights that rights come from the value-seeking behavior: trading value for value. This alternative concrete highlights that rights can also protect against the encroachment of "dis-value". In this role, they are not rules for trade, but rules that keep everyone out of everyone else's business.

I am not going to define rights.  You quoted from OPAR (in another thread) what they are and I think it is a good definition.
 
I would like to try to illustrate the "root" in reality of rights by a concretization:
 
Imagine there is an Objectivist, Jim, who has finally decided not to live in isolation, he resolves to form social relationships and as a first step drafts a kind of "agreement in principle" type document which stipulates his requirements and limits for others if they are to have social arrangements with him, one on one.
 
Of course this document is informed by Jim's ethics and morality, his choice to live etc.  Clearly Jim will insist, if he is to have a relationship with any other individual, that the other individual is not to interfere with Jim in such a way that directly acts against his life, or interferes with Jim's ability to lead a life in accordance with his morality.  Of course Jim wants to trade but he does need nor want to make anyone promise to trade with him... he will let opportunities come and go as they do and he anticipates much good will come of everyday commerce.
 
This is a good start.  Jim then realizes that if he approaches you (say another Objectivist), and he selfishly does want to have a relationship with you, that you too have certain requirements and limits for forming the relationship.  Not unlike what Jim just spent hours to draft in his own agreement in principle.  Jim not only has to realize you come with these and that you can and will refuse to enter into an agreement with him if these are not up to your standards, he also realizes that the entire purpose of the arrangement to him, i.e. your being able to benefit Jim, depends upon your ability to be of most benefit to yourself, specifically, to flourish as a rational, productive, thinking entity.  As such your nature informs what limits there should be in the relationship to ensure you can be of greatest benefit to Jim, even if you do not know them and even if you do not demand them.
 
In either case and for both reasons, Jim includes in the "agreement in principle" those requirements and limits.  Insofar as and to the extend that Jim is rational, understands his nature and reality, and chooses life, and insofar as you also understands your nature and reality and choose life, the requirements and limits are agreeable to both yourself and Jim and maximize your benefits to yourselves, and thereby each other, without imposing undue restrictions on your living as independent individuals who voluntarily trade with each other.
 
This process, which is Objective, taking into account facts of reality but nothing mystical or "intrinsically prescriptive", is a concretization of what rights are at their root.  Someone comes to you with requirements of their nature and of their choices which to benefit from them in your society are to be recognized (to the extent the choices are rational, etc.).  The next step is to socialize the agreements in principle to a society of like minded people by for example a sort of constitution.
 
Other than taking an abstract route which risks rationalism... (although if one is careful and smart one can do this), I think the above illustrates (or at least indicates) in concrete fashion what rights are and why they are.

What does this mean? I suppose you agree that Objectivism does not say that rights come from the mere fact of being alive. So, what do you mean when you say rights are "founded on" life as a value?
 
Yes, being alive is a pre-condition for having rights; but that's trivial (even being a good commie is founded on being alive), so i assume you do not mean life is a  "pre-condition".
In addition if all one wanted to do were to die, one would need that one narrow right, but none of the rich variety of actions that we subsume under the concept of rights. So, we clearly need rights in order to pursue our life, but does the mere fact that we need rights mean we have rights?
 
In what sense, then, are rights "founded" on the "value of life"?

Imagine you find in a book store a "Guide to Making your Vehicle Last" or a "Guide to Keeping your Computer at Maximum Performance"
 
Suppose you determine you want your vehicle to last, or you want your computer to work at maximum performance, a "pre-adoption" choice so to speak.
 
 
How do you know the book is useful? 
 
It also must not be a reflection of mere subjective wishes. You would not want the book to be arbitrary or subjective, if subjective means the advice is not true or is incomplete.  The author may have an unfair bias or a feeling which would make the work inaccurate.  Your hope is that a rational mind not guided by emotionalism or intuition wrote it.
 
That which is described in the book must correspond with reality and must work... i.e. the consequences claimed in the books should obtain when enacted upon the vehicle or the computer.  The books should also be capable of independent validation, anyone can read the book and if knowledgeable enough about the nature of vehicles or computers (or if they were so inclined would be able to perform endless experiments to test the advice of the books) would be able to tell you if the books were valid, true to the claims with respect to consequences if certain actions are taken (in connection with the vehicle or computer).
 
Certainly it cannot be a fantasy, or a floating castle in the sky with no basis in reality.  Anyone who claimed the books reflected an intrinsic prescriptive edict of reality, were written on gold tablets by a ghost or are written in the very fabric of space-time itself should be eyed suspiciously.  You know that the rules in these books are not duplications by revelation of rules and edicts written in the universe somewhere else, they are not an intrinsic additional feature of the universe, no karma or lightening will haunt you, no grade, gauge or status in the universe will change when you follow the actions in the book. 
 
The only connection of the book with reality (if it is true, accurate) is that the book records truths about what would happen if one did certain things.  If one does x with a vehicle or y with a computer it will or will not last longer or respectively perform maximally. 
 
In Summary:
IF the books are accurate, originating from rational thought and knowledge of the nature of vehicles or cars and the nature of reality of consequences specifically what obtains when you take actions in regard to the vehicle or the computer, is it not safe to say that the books are Objective?  The reason why is simply that they are accurate i.e. true.
 
 
Consider a Guidebook for a human "How to Sustain and improve your Life".  Is it not the same?

DA
 
You completely miss the basis upon which Objectivist ethics is built, the choice to live and the nature of reality (which includes man), and you miss the fact that "society" and "rights" according to Objectivism are built on that ethics and the nature of reality and not built on anything intrinsic to the universe like some set of commandments written in space time.
 
You deny that you are conceiving of an intrinsic or mystical "right" and "wrong" and yet you refer to them in almost every post you make.  You appeal to feelings, sympathy, empathy, intuition, a sense of right and wrong etc. as though those were determinative in ANY WAY of what "right" and "wrong" and "rights" are according to Objectivism.  According to Objectivism rational analysis of reality and ourselves in combination with the choice to live are what determines those things, and once integrated we may have emotions and a sense of justice, but that "sense of moral life" arise from the discovery of morality and its acceptance ,, but do not form morality's origin.
 
Ethics and ethical rights are not about altruism, not about "respect" for other things in the Christian sense.  I don't disrespect your deep beliefs and convictions, I was once a Christian myself.  however, an Objectivist is an Atheist who rejects emotion, intuition , feeling, revelation, etc as sources of knowledge, and rejects them also as a guides to action or insight into anything.
 
 
You clearly have strong convictions and I do not want to change your feelings and beliefs. but it would have been nice if you understood our thinking.
 
I don't believe what you believe, but I accept and understand that you believe it.  All this talk and you still do not or will not SEE what it is we think...
 
It is sad.

I suspect that you have posed your question with a false premise (solitude is value) and which ignores the reality of the value a rational individual can have for another rational individual, in order to elicit an answer which you want to hear: killing someone is OK.
 
What you fail to realize is that according to Objectivism, killing someone is not the correct course of action to take in a vast majority of contexts and situations.  An Objectivist cannot justify any action on a false premise nor on the complete misunderstanding of value, and this includes the contrived context you have spun with erroneous assumptions and misidentification/ignorance of values.  Objectivism holds man as a rational animal is of incredible value to other men though mutual respect (non-interference) and trade.
 
I suggest you ask direct questions, open ended ones, rather than proffering bizzare scenarios, ... that is if you actually want to learn anything about Objectivism. 

Nobody who doesn't believe in animal rights argues that there aren't similarities between humans and other animals, or that humans aren't animals, or that animal (including "human animal") brains don't have some similarities. They argue that humans can reason, an enormous, unique difference which alters everything about how we deal with animals who can't reason.

Why don't rocks have rights? Why shouldn't you leave a boulder be, to be altered only by the chance of the universe? Why use life as your fundamental to dictate what you can or can't do while existing in the universe? What about bugs who ruin crops? The standard isn't anything but you and your life. Animals don't have rights because they don't have the ability to recognize yours. You use animals for your life because it's advantageous for you to do so.

"Their behavior is obvious to each other."

What's your point?

If you live on deserted island alone, the question of rights doesn't even exist. This is a need of protection of your life and property from initiation of force against you brings up the whole concept of rights. But animals live by force. Therefore the whole concept is inapplicable to them. In regard to the treatment of animals one should talk not about rights but  compassion.

DA:
 
The point is Objectivists, would form a society with rights because it is in each individual's selfish interests, given the facts of reality to form such a society with rights.  The choice to form such a society is NOT altruism, it is not granting of rights in the form of generosity or recognition of Life's necessities merely to arbitrarily define rights.  Forming a society is a SELFISH trade with others struck in the context of those necessities, the terms are required by the parties and the eventual success of the arrangement -> this context necessitates rights.
 
To say "animals should have rights" must be proven with evidence that those individual Objectivists would selfishly benefit from creating a society with animals and extending rights to them.
 
This is precisely what is missing from your argument and it is central to the "morality" (based in reality) of Objectivists.

Your characterization of solitude as a value is a bald assertion, an error which you have buried and disguised in a not so carefully constructed "question".
 
Solitude is an absence of people not a value.  In general individuals can and are of great value.  If you think killing the man on the beach is right given the above scenario alone, you would be wrong. 
 
You don't buy your own fake logic. So why would we?
 
 
Now pseudo-repeat what I have said in your reply which is a statement formed as a question, and do so for the next 50 pages and 2 months and delight in telling your buddies how we Objectivists are clueless because we aren't like the skeptics, mystics, or rationalists or whatever-have-you type of individual the only members club you actually belong to is comprised of.   

Free Will is an ability to choose on the conceptual level of self-awareness. To paraphrase Ayn Rand in order to say " I want" one should be able first to say " I". Animals don't consciously form societies, this is an instinctive trait. Rights is a freedom of action in the social context which animals evidently don't have. Does lion respect right to live of his prey? The question of animal rights doesn't exist in the animal kingdom. It's only pertain to humans. As for infants, they are humans, in spite their rights are very limited. 

Grames, thanks for responding, your response is a good foil for my clarification. I figured that my post appeared as a strawman. The stolen concept involved is not obvious.

Ms. Rands reduction of the concepts society, groups, etc are an excellent foil for this whole thread.:

"Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members."

"Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it."

"Modern collectivists . . . see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members."

"The philosophy of collectivism upholds the existence of a mystic (and unperceivable) social organism, while denying the reality of perceived individuals—a view which implies that man’s senses are not a valid instrument for perceiving reality. "

The above reductions demonstrating the stolen concepts involved, like individual rights, depend on the existence of the individuals AS individuals. The basis of all rights is the ontological fact that men are individual living entities. True, the relationships man engages in make, or cause dynamic effects not possible to the individuals alone. But these effects depend on the attribute the individuals posses that make the CONCEPT of society meaningful, consciousness.

Likewise relationships are not some super-entity apart from the entities relating. Society exist, groups, exist, guitars and pianos exist, and yes, concertos exist, but concertos are effects of the dynamically interacting individuals. A great concerto can cause an emotion but your previous comments on ontology lead me to think you mean something different by relations being causes, something ontologically relevant to the "patterns and configurations" of Campbell's paper. Something leading you earlier to claim that "not even an entity ontology" can be claimed. No?

Edit: we do NOT perceive forces! If we did the whole ontological debate over abstract/theoretical concepts in the scientific realism debate would be meaningless. We perceive the EFFECTS of one entity upon another with no observable intermediary. Conceptualizing the ontological facts making this possible is the whole problem of the scientific realism debate over observation language vs abstract language.

Repairman
Atheism is not a core tenet of O'ism, it is a refutation of the supernatural. It is a consequence of applying rationality to an idea that itself is a product of using faith to gain knowledge. The obliteration of the use of faith in gaining knowledge , I would say, is a core tenet of O'ism. Atheism or the denial of the concept of god is philosophically as significant as the refutation of the idea that 2+2 could at sometime in someway equal 5.

Let's say I have two “plus balls”.

I take one ball and see what I can do with it. After some experimenting, I discover that it can roll on the ground, bounce against the wall, and squeak when I squeeze it in my hand.

Done playing, I put the ball back on the shelf next to the other ball. They push each other apart.

According to Wikipedia, “Strong emergence describes the direct causal action of a high-level system upon its components; qualities produced this way are irreducible to the system's constituent parts.”

So, someone might say that this pushing apart is an emergent property that can not be explained in terms of explanations the individual balls (which involve rolling, bouncing, and squeaking).

This emergence is described epistemologically (in terms of reduction); let's look at it metaphysically. It's a relationship between two balls. Does the relationship exist outside of the balls? No. So how can the relationship's explanation exist outside that of the balls? Every explanation about a ball describes its potential to have relationships; with the ground, the wall, my hand. The system isn't some third party that also gets a say. Saying that it is in control, but not its parts, would be some kind of reification.

Applying this to people:

If you say that a person has a strongly emergent property not reducible to their parts, what are you saying? Like before, the person doesn't exist outside of the parts, so what of the explanation of the person? Would you be suggesting the person may cause their parts to do something that the parts are not individually explained to do? Then the explanations of the parts are incomplete; the parts also have the capacity to have a person-relation.

But not every part is directly related to every other part; the entire relation is based on many smaller relations. This is reduction.

In short:
~Strong emergence says the system can't be explained by the explanations of the parts.
~But the system is the relations the parts.
~The explanations of the parts must include these relations.
~So, the behavior of the system must be explained by the explanations of the parts.

So, strong emergence makes no sense to me.

I think it is clear that a pre-emptive strike is appropriate in some circumstances, read "context".
 
When the threat is real and sufficiently imminent so as to raise the probability of actual harm it becomes necessary to strike.  Like waiting to see if  you should abandon your home while a tornado approaches there will be a level of certainty when the decision to flee must be taken.  Unlike a tornado threatening your home with which you actually cannot engage in discussions, attempt to educate, persuade, or threaten, to alter its course, other individuals have volition and it is of the utmost importance, especially as the threat increases, to attempt all of these in an effort to avert disaster rationally and peacefully.
 
Every Objectivist would agree it is better to trade ideas, goods, and services rather than corpses, destroyed cities, and calamity.  

No such thing as a "country's best interest"; only individuals have interests. And that which is in an individual's best interest where government is concerned is upholding individual rights. We should not argue for less.

I think a country may reasonably have border security procedures to ensure that people crossing those borders aren't wanted criminals or similar, but apart from that, what business is it of the government who goes where? Private property holders may insist that no one can trespass against their rightfully owned land, but the government has no similar claim over "it's territory."

Tadmjones you will glad to know that as one with a physics degree I tend to agree with you.
 
There is nothing in experimental or theoretical physics which relies upon an interpretation of space or time as "entities" in reality, separate and apart from existents, be they tables, stars, or positrons.  Space and time fundamentally are quantifications of relationships between existents.
 
All of physics is entirely consistent with an interpretation of space and time, or any other dimension (e.g. supersymmetry) as values or placeholders which are descriptive of relationships between existents.  A mathematical background which keeps track of those relationships.  To be sure this background is not necessarily "empty" but the activity occurring in any n-dimensional "volume" is to be distinguished from the values we associate with the position and time etc. of those activities. 
 
Those relationships, which we refer to with values of space and time, change in specific ways for specific reasons, but it is not space or time that changes (relativity dismisses any concept such as absolute space or the "ether"), it is the way entities behave in relation to each other under certain circumstances.
 
Length is not a thing, the space between two particles is not a thing, and neither is the position of an existent a thing.   

Very top-down, it all seems. It's not the job of government to protect a citizen from the unjust or immoral or whatever, tariffs of another nation's government. All this talk of nations and governments seems to defeat the purpose of laissez-faire. Individual rights cannot extend off-shore to the economic philosophies elsewhere. Caveat emptor. Morally, each person must be free to make his own judgements and mistakes. It means throwing away any and all concepts of 'government' and tit-for-tat protectionism, as they exist right now.

This premise is flawed:
 
"If all values are equal no choice is possible."
 
The truth is "If all values are equal ALL choices are possible"
 
Imagine the animal approaching a single bail of hay in reaction to a hunger it has chosen to satisfy, as it nears they hay bail it realizes that the bail of hay is not rectilinear but is actually a  small angular section of a circle of hay and lo and behold the animal is at its center, all of the hay now being equidistant from its snout.  This I suppose paralyzes the animal, because all of the hay it was it intending to eat is now equidistant and it "cannot" choose which way to go? 
 
The answer here is not that there is no way to choose, it is IT DOES NOT MATTER which way is chosen.
 
 
Here  the choice is to eat or die, the particular patch of hay chosen for munching is immaterial.
 
 
Please note, the choice to not place any significance upon the particular bit of hay to eat is not non-rational, in a choice between life and death, choosing life and ignoring the irrelevant is imminently rational.
 
 
I'm afraid this flawed thought experiment, in addition to being flawed in more ways than one, simply does not prove anything.

I'm sorry, but as far as I know humans and animals choose between equal values all the time.  Watch your dog eat a bowl of dog food.  Every pellet is for the purposes of the dog's hunger and even by the standard of the dog's "differentiating capacity" perfectly identical.
 
Again the truth is "If all values are equal ALL choices are possible"
 
 
 
As for a halting problem, in an artificial system that really would require bad programming (equal values to cause inaction causing lack of value), and from a biological evolutionary standpoint if ever such a mechanism appeared in the variation of species, it would almost certainly ensure extinction of that new species within a paltry few generations.