Spearmint

Does this mean that a concept such as 'unicorn' is meaningless? Or even 'characters in Ayn Rand novels'? Or what about cases where you are unsure whether a concept actually has a referent in reality (for example 'quarks')?

http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?iss...022&n=1&id=3645

Yahoo! web-beacons aren't even remotely similar to what gmail is doing. Perhaps you should endeavour to understand the precise issues that people have with gmail's privacy policy before you accuse them of being 'morons'.

This isn't really true. The Greek's idea of Zeus wasnt supernatural; he was a perfectly defined entity which had (supposed) identity and entailed no intrinsic contradictions. The same applies to the gods of many other cultures. Perhaps you are referring specifically to the god of judeo-christian tradition, but the initial post in this thread made no reference to any specific concept of god.

Fred Well I wasn't meaning that people should/could assign exact numerical values to how certain they were about something, I was just trying to get across that your certainty about something would be measured relative to your certainty about everything else (as in 'more' certain or 'less' certain) rather than as a binary relation where you either had certainty or you didnt. Numbers help to make this point, but I'm not saying people should actually think in terms of them. Let's take 'love' as an analogy. Love isnt a binary thing either - its not a case of either you love someone or you dont, because its possible to love two people yet love one more than the other. I would describe love in the same way as I described certainty, namely to think of it as being a line with one end corresponding to 'absolute true love!" and the other end being "no love whatsoever", which could be represented by 100% love and 0% love respectively. In practice, you wouldnt ever think something like "Well I loved my ex-girlfiriend 88.3543% yet I only love you 82.2%", you'd just think "I love you slightly less than my ex girlfriend". I was using numbers to illustrate this principle, not as a way I'd expect people to actually function. (edit: and like certainty, you wouldnt need '100% love' in order to claim that you loved someone. If you only loved a person 93% or so it would still be perfectly rational to claim that there was love. To remove the numbers, I might love my wife, get divorced, and then meet someone that I end up loving even more. Does this mean that I didnt 'actually' love my wife because it was possible for me to feel a greater degree of love towards someone else? No, it just meant that I didnt actually have '100% love' in the first case, so to speak).

DPW I agree with you here. Certainty is essential precisely because we are infalliable - its a way of describing degrees of belief. If we were infallible then we would just say that we were either 0% or 100% about everything in the wolrd (depending on whether it was false or true respectively) - in a way certainty would become synonymous with knowledge. As this is not the case, certainty is useful for describing how confident we are about something - in other words, how much faith we have in our predictions. No. I explicitly said that it would be irrational to doubt something of which you are 99% certain. The fact that something isnt 100% certain does not mean that it is open to doubt. I do not have doubts that I will make it home safely whenever I leave my house, although obviously I cannot claim 100% certainty on this fact.

I don't think youre using 'certainty' in the way that most people use the term. "Certainty" would relate to your degree of believe that you HAVE discovered all the relevant conditions, and that your context of knowledge isnt to expand to the point of invalidating what you currently know (within the new context) For instance, I am absolutely certain that 2 + 2 = 4. There are no 'new conditions' that are going to ever invalidate this knowledge, nor is there anything that I could possibly discover about the universe that is going to stop 2 + 2 equalling 4. If you are admitting possible new conditions under which your knowledge may not hold then you cannot claim absolute certainty, unless you are redefining the word. Using what I am assuming your definitions are, I would translate Hume as saying "No matter what we discover about the empirical universe, it is always possible that our context of knowledge will be expanded in ways we cannot now predict", which I think is in agreement with what you have said.

It's unlikely to be you personally thats been banned, they normally ban a range of IPs or even an entire ISP. Possibly they've had trouble with people in the past connecting from your ISP and have decided to just ban the whole thing. Anyway, as I said, you can connect to another server instead. Your best bet would be download an actual IRC client which allows you to to specify which server you connect to. A popular one for windows is mIRC. Once you've got that, you can find a list of Undernet servers here. Quick guide: download mIRC and install it. Once its installed, open it up, type in what name you want to use and then type /server XXX where XXX is a server from that list (so something like /server Miami.FL.US.Undernet.org). That'll connect you to the server, then just type /join #aynrand

Rand took reason to be the tool used to integrate sensory perceptions and form/analyze concepts, rather than the detached "pure thought" that others defined it as. "Reason" as Rand uses the term is significantly different from it's use in the writings of someone like Kant or Descartes.

I'd say 0% certainty would just be complete lack of knowledge with absolutely no rational justfication for believing any particular hypothesis. For instance if a stranger stopped me in street and asked me to guess his name, then I'd say I had something close to 0% certainty in any particular guess that I came up with (I say 'close to 0%' rather than 0%, because although I'd have no rational justifcation for believing his name was "Stuart", I would have more certainty of it being "Stuart" than of it being something like "Zycholpikkantis")

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, can you clarify?

But 100% absolute certainty _does_ mean infalliabilty, which is why its unobtainable in most contexts (I exclude trivial situations where 'contextless certainty' is possible, such as when evaluating "there are no square circles" and so on). If one of your beliefs turns out to have been wrong, then you couldnt have been 100% certain about it unless youre redefining the meaning of the word. I think our disagreement is that you're thinking of certainty as being some kind of binary quantity, where a person either "is certain" or "isnt certain". However, I dont think this is a particularly good way of describing certainty. For instance, I'm certain that I have a pint of milk in my fridge. However I'm even _more_ certain that my computer wont blow up with in the next 5 seconds, and my certainty that gravity wont reverse ,causing things to fall upwards, even exceeds my certainty of the previous 2 events. As such, it makes more sense to think of certainty as being some kind of scale, such as Absolute 100% --------------------------------------------------------- 0% Lack of

How is this different from claiming that it's acceptable to murder socialists and communists? After all, they have no concept of individual rights, right? In any case, its not like the colonists had a particularly strong concept of rights either. The whole situation was the most primitive assertion of property claims imaginable - namely you took whatever it was in your power to obtain and defend. As it happened, the colonists had slightly more power than the indians, and hence claimed a far greater amount of land. It sounds like complete rationalism to say that they were somehow 'morally superior' in this regard. edit: I'm not demonising all the colonists or to romantically portray the indians as enjoying some kind of blessed nomadic lifestyle either - it isnt like the colonists arrived there and systematically began a campaign of genocide against the peace-loving indians (although this did come later). I'm sure there were some colonists who wanted to live in peace, just as there were probably some indians who felt likewise. As a whole however, it was little more than a brute force struggle for territory between the two sides, which the indians lost. I would say that the later actions on the part of the colonists and their government are completely indefensible however.

It depends what you mean by 'doubt'. It's never possible to achieve absolute 100% certainty, but it would be extremely irrational to doubt when faced with a 99.9999% chance. It's often claimed that the inability to achieve 100% certainty means that human's can never obtain 'true knowledge', but all it actually represents is the fact that humans aren't omniscient. If you have no rational grounds on which to doubt something then it is correct to say that you have certainty - to claim otherwise is to commit the fallacy that Rand accused Kant of commiting, namely to assert that because all knowledge must be contextual to a given consciousness, it pales when compared to "real" knowledge which is somehow obtained without the use of means of perception (in other words, to forget that consciousness has identity).

I'd say that Hume's argument here is correct, it just doesn't have the implications that many beiieve it does. All hes really saying is that its impossible to obtain knowledge of some kind of 'transcendental' casuality rather than the sequencing between events that we obtain via our senses. Since Objectivism rejects outright the possibility of non-contextual knowledge such as this, it isnt really a problem. The other part of Hume's argument is (to simplify) that you can't validate induction by means of deduction. This is also correct - you can't validate deduction by means of induction either. The fallacy comes when the claim is made that this somehow makes induction invalid, when in fact both induction and deduction are primary but independent sources of gaining knowledge. Technically, you couldn't follow a deductive argument without relying on induction anyway ("how do I know these symbols mean what I think they do? I remember reading their definitions in a book, but how can I prove my memory is valid?" "Did I actually prove this argument five minutes ago? I'm almost certain that I remember doing so, but I can't be sure!")

The EU is hardly comparable to either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, and I would be interested as to why you feel it is moving towards 'anarchy' given that the problem many have with the EU is the increasing centralization of power.

It provides a nice enviornment in which to talk to interesting people/friends, and a general sense of community which neither message boards or 1-on-1 chat (such as MSN) can realy provide.

If true, I'd attribute this largely to the fact that it was founded upon the notion of human rights, rather than as a direct result of the structure of government (ie Constitutional Republic). The key question here is that, assuming we are given a country that has a clear concept of both rights and things as they should be, what form of government is best for maintaining this and preventing the country from degenerating into statism? In this regard, America has failed completely and utterly. Maybe this is partly due to the form of government it used - it might be that an aristocratic government would be more effective at maintaining the status quo than a republic.

IRC is fantastic

Its nothing to do with #aynrand. Think of an IRC server such as Undernet as being a shopping mall, and individual channels as being the shops inside it. The channels are hosted on the irc server in the same way the shops are contained in the mall. In order to join a particular channel, you first have to connect to the server (which is akin to going to the shopping mall) and then once you are connected, you can enter whatever channels you wish (which would be the same as entering a particular shop). If a channel owner decides to ban you from his channel then you are still free to enter any other channel on the network (this would be like the mall's Burger King choosing not to serve you, causing you to have to resort to McDonalds instead). What has happened to you in the current case is that the server itself has banned you. To go back to our analogy, this would be like not being allowed into the actual shopping mall as a whole - the banning is a result of the shopping mall policy itself and it has nothing to do with the owners of any individual shops (indeed they wouldnt even know about it). As it happens though these are magical shops which don't exist in normal 3 dimensional space, and as such they are actually contained in hundreds of different shopping malls all at once. Since one mall has banned you, your best option would be to find another mall which also allows you access to the original shops (the analogy kind of breaks down at this point as you might have noticed, heh)

Radcap is correct. A k-line is server specific, so your best bet would be to try other undernet servers until you find one that works. Taken from the relevant part of the Undernet FAQ

I don't think there is an "Objectivist" definition of space and time; questions pertainng to the nature of these entities would lie within the field of physics, not philosophy. The space-time interval is a concept from the scientific theory of special relativity. Im sure someone else would be able to recommend you an introductory level book on the subject if you're interested.

Yeah, that's what I thought. I've read quite a few ether debates now (both here and elsewhere) and I can't getting the feeling that the thing seems to be very semantical - everyone appears to be using the word 'ether' to mean completely different things, and hence people end up talking past each other. I suppose using the word 'plenum' avoids some of this confusion, but it's not really that well defined either.

I know some people here don't like TOC, but they had an article on the child/parent 'debt' that seems spot on http://www.objectivistcenter.org/objectivi...vism-family.asp If a parent continues to support a child after the child was able to survive for himself and could feasibly deny the help (say over the age of 14 or something similar), then I would certainly say the child certainly has a moral obligation towards his parents.

I'm bumping this thread because I want to ask a related quesiton. I was rereading the IOE appendix a few nights ago, and noticed a part where Rand said that the existence of an ether wasnt a necessity (Im paraphrasing because I dont have a copy of the book handy - it was in the section on induction and she was commenting on the way in which scientists dismissed the concept of ether on the basis of a single experiment; her actual words were something along the lines of "now I'm not saying the ether has to exist, but..."). Would she be talking purely about the historical ether here (as in the one connected with the propagation of waves), or about the ether as synonymous with plenum? In other words, would she have regarded the plenum as a purely scientific question, or as one that lies a priori within the realm of philosophy?