Self Made

So has anyone heard the podcast by Leonard Peikoff on this issue? I think many of you will find it very surprising.

As do I. Mystery and ambiguity are tools for art, not the end in themselves. The essentials of the piece should never contain mystery or ambiguity. It would be like building something on mud, it won't hold up, but a little mud collecting around the building or on the roof wouldn't make any difference to the integrity of it. That is how I include mystery in my work.

They each should be worthy of each other. the means doesn't justify the ends just as the ends doesn't justify the means especially in fine art. Art is about the relationship of consciousness to reality. The viewer should not separate process from result as integrating the mental and physical is an essential aspect of art.

Thank you......I am also very fond of Bryan Larsen's work. I put multiple self portraits into one to represent a disintegrated self as contrast to my current, more integrated, self. I enjoy your piece too. I have wanted to try creating an entire image on Illustrator. Do you use an electronic pad to do that?

....and here is some of my glass work. these are stained glass: and this is a couple of my lamp-worked(glass blown with a table torch) pieces: glass pendant: but there is much more: Visit My Website

I thought i would show my fine art. I'm primarily an oil painter but also work in glass. I consider my paintings to be transforming more from naturalism to romantic realism. heres some of my favorite romantic pieces. and heres my site: www.wosart.com

Situations that occur prior to the programing, you are usually a child and are saved by the reason of your parents, otherwise they would most likely die. I never said there was a ghost in the machine. My holding that I have a "self" in no way requires that the "self" is a separate entity from a human. It is a conceptual distinction. Don't patronize me. The Fountainhead is not the only thing out there that is based on a reasonable system. There are other things out there that rest on a rational framework. I should have rephrased that statement, you are right, the Fountainhead was a catalyst, but Objectivism is what saved me. exactly.....he would be dead. I thought there is no you, then what is preferring? What enjoys sharing? Reason exists within nature, nature is a distinctive existent within existence. Reason is the best way of taking care of life. Our "life" would not exist if not for reason. I can see now that this thing on the computer keeps jumping from a metaphysical context to an epistemological one. Therefore there is nothing more to be said. It must just be a virus on my computer cause its trying to tell me it doesn't exist.

you have said nothing here in regard to what Daneil Casper pointed out;"That 'split-second reaction' is made possible only by your previous rational identifications, which allows you to make a split-second judgment." Hes saying that reason programs your mind to be able to make that split second decision. Your statement of "the mind has insufficient time to reason in certain situations" is a true statement but is only restating what you said in the first place in regard to this, and in no way proves that we are still not using reason as something that has programed your instant reactions. these two statement contradict each other. If there is no separate "you" apart from nature to either control or not control your thoughts, then who is the decider and the doer? And if reason can't act, then how can reason "act" as ones adviser/servant? That is false. I was born with this disability and it wrecked havoc on me psychologically along with the current zeitgeist. I was suicidal through most of my adolescence until in college I really tried to commit suicide and came very close to dying. I decided to really look for the answer but as I searched i would find my self going down the same path, epistemologically. It was reading the Fountainhead that broke me of my bad view of existence. I very much surrendered to my disorder until I realized an accurate philosophy. Nothing exists outside the boundaries of nature, and I haven't said otherwise. I do not see reason as not being a part of nature. I can know a certain action is in my nature if it leads to the destruction of my life. No the action is not what reveals your nature, it is the Law of Identity which reveals your nature, the action the entity takes reveals the efficiency of that entity to maintain its current state of existence within nature, or its identity. Speak for yourself. Conceptual understanding is exactly what fulfills me. If you are not fulfilled by conceptual understanding of existence maybe you aren't conceptualizing properly. And I never pretended or said that existence is a mystery, you did, I was merely quoting your post. if thoughts who are free of delusion have no need of philosophy then why are they writing on it. If nature determines our thoughts then there is no need for you to try to persuade anyone because nature will supposedly take care of it for you.

How can you say this......it is self evident that I exist apart from nature and do have control over reality in a very distinct context. Your statement also implies that you then don't have control over your thoughts so then why are we even discussing this if nature already has determined the thoughts we must have. You are not making any room for the fact that humans choose to go against their own nature all the time, yes reality will be the final judge but non the less it shows we have free will. We are not a lion, a lion's will is natures will because it doesn't have reason and reason's corollary free will. My point is that our free will's existence is proven by the fact that we can act against our biological nature. I'm not saying that we should. but take for example myself. i have a genetic bone disorder that causes my bones to fracture very easily. if it weren't for my free will I would be a pile of flesh in a bed, or even dead. If it were not for reason my biological nature would have terminated me. My very existence is proof of free will. Are you implying that concepts have no relation to reality? No the concept water won't quench your thirst, but it can tell you how to quench your thirst. Nature can tell you that you are thirsty but how to quench it, in the best most efficient way, is for reason to tell.

I have been thinking about this and have come up with a thought. If entropy always graphs out to be a power-law curve in both systems of physics and systems of the man-made it is not saying anything about free will, it is only stating that the degradation of a system happens this way every time. it doesn't mean it is a cause which would seem to contradict freewill. But if I understand correctly the power-law curve is an exponentially degenerating thing. I would say it to be a fact that things that inevitably must degenerate will do it exponentially, and this is easy to conceptualize with complex systems. the fact that it is a system implys that they are interconnected so when there is even one weak link in the system it will slowly infect the rest at first but become exponentially worse and worse, as you are showing with diseases, dynasties, etc. I'm pretty sure Ayn even has written about the exponential decline of capitalism due to altruism. and this is when I thought of it. What if the power law curve is a graph of entropy for physics and a graph for irrationality in epistemology. Cause you wouldn't say that the graph is the cause of entropy in physics it is just a graph of the cause. Could the power-law curve be graphing the inevitable consequence of evasion, or holding a contradiction. it is almost like a graph for what will happen whenever reason isn't held as an absolute. Which I think we could say about all of human history. Does this make sense?

Math guy, just out of curiosity, does your theory have any relation to Terence McKenna's Time wave zero theory. I find that to have some of the same problems as you are running into. I have a friend who is very into him and has discussed his ideas with me. His theory I thought was based on the idea that when you throw out a certain number of sticks or rocks that over many throws the randomness can actually be graphed as a fractal. i only bring this up because you say that throwing a six sided die randomly doesn't follow the power-law curve, yet Mckenna claims it does(I thought, though I may be completely confused).

are you then suggesting by this that nothing is in our control? will my body continue to function when I decide not to control feeding myself? Will my legs automatically take me to shelter and warmth. yes metaphysically reality will continue with or without you but your life will not. some things are in our control and some things aren't. just because nature came before reason doesn't mean reason is automatically the more limited of the two. You have to use reason to come to your idea that reason can't give answers to the mystery of our existence. So according to your own reasoning you have come up with an aspect of the answer to the mystery of our own existence, therefore showing that reason has told us something about the mystery of our own existence.

I was mostly referring to Marijuana........higher doses of shrooms I would agree to be much more distorting.

Here's another smear piece, but a book review called "Ayn Rand's Revenge" in the New york times on one of Ayn's new biographies "Ayn Rand and the World she made". http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/re...amp;_r=1&hp The review should be titled "Adam Kirsch's Revenge"