Mindy
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Posts posted by Mindy
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Just one question out of curiosity (not directly linked with the arguments):
How is that a doctor in the USA can practice medicine if his license has been suspended? Did I understand correctly? If so, what would be the case for the license?
(i am not advocating government licensing, it just sounded weird to me)
If an M.D. has his license suspended, he cannot continue to practice medicine.
Mindy
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It is equally true that any attempt to deduce facts from metaphysics is pure rationalism.
In Philosophy, Who Needs It? Rand imagines a spaceship crashed onto an unknown planet. How will, and should the astronauts act? This, She says, is where philosophy is of vital importance. They know nothing about the world they have landed on. But, they know that whatever it is like, it has identity and that they can discover that identity, and make plans accordingly.
Whatever exists has identity; This planet exists; This planet has identity.
The nature of a thing can be discovered. This planet has a nature (identity;) We can discover the nature of this planet.
Isn't that deduction from metaphysics, in a most practical situation?
Mindy
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Fraud is misrepresentation of a material fact regarding an exchange, in order to obtain consent. That's what fraud means. There is no bookstore in the real world where payment is optional.
As I understand his story, he did pay for the book.
Mindy
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There are legal aspects, certainly. How will you get there? You must travel by land. Someone has property rights to the vehicle you use, and the land you go across.
So, your example DOES have legal aspects to it, as does all action by a human in society, as men have rights to property, and all action employs property in some manner, and so you must be concerned with the property rights to the material you employ in any action you take. Conversely, there is no such thing as a purely legal thing, as all such things are actions by people, whose moral purpose is their rational self-interest, then all "purely legal things" also have moral components.
I would direct your attention to the issue of abstraction. When we talk about something in a given respect, other facets are ignored. The fact that I am female is not relevant to whether I am logical. An argument that says, you can't be logical without being a rational animal, and you can't be a rational animal without being of one or the other sex, so your sexual nature is relevant to your being logical, is badly lacking in focus. Without being able to speak of aspects of a thing, all we could ever say would be, "It exists."
There is no legal aspect to the promise to pick up a friend. You aren't allowed to add details to the scenario, and, on that basis, find a legal aspect. That means you can't suppose the promise was part of a contract, and thus picking up my friend was, indeed, legal or illegal as fulfilling or contravening that contract.
All action by a human in society does not have legal aspects. The quality of a piece of music I write is not, per se, a legal matter. What sort of ice-cream I snack on has no legal ramifications. The fact that I purchased it is immaterial to my choice of snack. This is a difficult point to convey, I hope this gets it across.
Further, the legal aspects of a thing and the (otherwise) moral aspects are not disjunct as you assume in your statements. Legality--proper legality, which is what we are assuming in this thread--is a subset of morality. What is legal is also moral, what is moral is not illegal. The point is whether the legal aspects of a given interaction exhaust the moral considerations. If all the moral issues embodied in a situation are also legal ones, the legal considerations settle the moral question.
It is absolutely necessary to be able to respond to a question as it is framed. If one does not address it in the proper abstract way, you are not on subject at all.
Mindy
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The OP, and some responses to him, seem to accept a thought-emotion disconnect that isn't natural to Objectivism.
Objectivism does not tell you to repress your emotions, nor to ignore them, regard them with suspicion, etc. It says emotions do not provide cognitive guidance. Just because you feel scared, it doesn't follow that there is in fact anything to feel scared of.
The problem emotions present is that they reveal the inconsistencies in our beliefs and knowledge. As the effects of past thinking, they can't be assessed, immediately, as being accurate or inaccurate evaluations. That is why the rule is to rely on your thinking when your emotions conflict with it.
Assuming you are a consistent thinker and reasonable, your emotions will make sense to you, and seem right and valid. (What a good feeling that is.) So, in romantic situations, unleash your emotions, and be yourself entirely. There is no proper, useful, or effective way to suppress your emotions while you think, emergencies aside.
Mindy
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If you would like to be a moderator of this forum, please let me know. If you are not happy with the way this forum is run, this is your chance to influence it.
I am in principle interested in being a moderator, but I don't know exactly what is involved.
Mindy Newton
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Just wanted to reiterate that geometry has nothing to do with metaphysics and ontology. All attempts to answer these questions by consulting special
knowledge is a non-sequitor.
If it is true that geometry has nothing to do with metaphysics and ontology, it is still not true that metaphysics and ontology have nothing to do with geometry. Philosophy covers everything. What "special knowledge" cannot do is contradict, replace, or make moot the rest of our knowledge.
Mindy
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I think the connection between evil and malevolence is complex. Malevolence means ill-will. It means wanting someone or something to be damaged or destroyed. Malevolence is a psychological phenomenon, an attitude and motive. However, malevolence towards something that is evil can't itself be evil.
On the other hand, if one develops a malevolent attitude towards life itself, he becomes evil. Evil aims to defeat the essence of good, the possibility of good. That is why Kant, who sacrificed reason to religion, may be called evil. Toohey was evil, because he attacked whomever and whatever proved man's life is feasible. He wanted life to be tragic, so he could offer solace. That made people dependent on him, made him "powerful."
On the everyday scale, people who cheat and steal are criminal, immmoral, and despicable, but they may not be evil. Their aim is to acquire goods. They evade facts, and twist priorities. They violate fundamental rights, but they aren't trying to eliminate those rights. A teacher, on the other hand, who, told by a student that there's an error in the book, says, "Shut up," is evil. Her attack is on the mind itself, and thus man's viability.
The significance of this is that while I would define evil as malevolence on a philosophically large scale, mundane actions are not ruled out as being evil.
Mindy
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When one consults his own doctor, there is no conflict of interest in receiving good advice and treatment. (Though there are abuses of this.) But in an experimental trial, the interests of the institution running subjects is different from those of the individuals who might participate. It takes some inducement to get people to participate.
It is the conflict of interest, occurring in a situation at the cutting edge of technical knowledge, that makes an outside agency necessary, for all but the rare individual.
Mindy
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The crisis in education is not a matter of teacher pay or hiring and firing. The crisis in education is that the children do not get an education. They do not get an education because their teachers are for the most part very poorly educated, and do not bother to educate the children in their classes.
Here we have all the moaning and groaning and desperation to find funding, and mobilize the "powers that be," and hit up the parents, etc. in order to do what? Save the Cantonese bi-lingual program?
We are undergoing a situation that is so ugly and degraded that it cannot be acknowledged. A conscientious parent would not send their child to school Monday morning if they realized the truth, and how would the world go on in that case?
I have nothing but scorn for teachers who ignore the schools' failure to educate, and indulge in complaining about funding. Monsters.
Mindy
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This is a good place to note that Rand concept of value is biological and includes the actions of nonsentient life: microbes, trees, dogs.
Hey, watch whom you call nonsentient!
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Thanks for your response, mindy.
I have two questions:
Who sould be paying for the salaries and overall functioning of that professional, private organization (Ethics Committee)?
When you say that such an organization (Ethics Committee) is needed, are you hinting that no patient could take under his sole responsibility to participate in a clinical trial? Could a patient agree to participating even if the EC has rejected the trial?
It is to the experimenters' advantage that subjects sign up, so it would ultimately be they who foot the bill. Certainly, some subjects would have the education and specific knowledge to evaluate participation themselves. About one in a million. When there are unknowns involved, which is always the case in experimentation, there is an added layer of danger and of complication to the process of evaluating danger.
Of course people would be legally allowed to participate even if "an" EC rejected the trial. My whole thought is about non-governmental evaluations and assurances. However, a wise organization wouldn't hold trials that reputable ECs had rejected. Just asking for law suits!
Obviously, the potential for an EC to be in the hospital/research lab/pharmaceutical company's pocket looms large. But as long as the government stays out of it, and suitable penalties are in place for misrepresentation, there is no reason such an organization couldn't succeed at the task.
I imagine a TV commercial soliciting people with A and B symptoms, bragging that their protocol had been approved by such-and-such Ethics Committee, like the Better Homes and Gardens Seal of Approval, on steroids.
Mindy
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Food for thought...
If there is in fact a metric expansion of space, entities can, in a certain sense, be "infinitely" far apart, i.e., they can become causally disconnected, unable to interact with each other by any possible means.
Consider a couple of examples of how large distances are measured, e.g., RADAR or laser ranging of the moon. Over very large distances and in a metrically expanding space, there is the possibility that the radio or light wave never "catches up" with the receding entity. In effect, that entity is "infinitely" far away in the sense that no physical thing, even light, can ever get "there" from "here".
This seems to confuse ontology with epistemology. It is about measuring distances, not about extension itself. I don't see the logic of resorting to the term "infinite" because it is alone in its position. (If that is just a calculational convenience, I see its use, but in this discussion, I think it may be confusing.)
Mindy
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I'm don't think that one can meaningfully talk about the extent of the universe unless it is qualified, e.g., the extent of the observable universe. Surely it's true that the distance between any two entities in the universe is finite and surely it's true that the extent of any entity is finite. I think, in this sense, it is correct to say that the universe is not infinite, i.e., that there are no infinite distances, infinite extents, etc.
Nonetheless, there is no logical reason that distances and extents cannot be arbitrarily large, i.e., have no upper bound.
Why must talk of the extent of the universe be limited to the observed universe?
Mindy
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Expand? Into what? The universe is all that is. If the new area it 'expanded' into existed, it was already part of the universe to begin with by definition. Sounds a little pardoxical, does it not?
I don't believe "into what" is logically required to assert a thing (or collection of them) expands.
Mindy
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My first question concerns the section of Chapter 7 subtitled "Life" as the Essential Root of "Value." First a couple of quotes from the book.
"The conecpt of value presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative... Goal-directed behavior is possible only because an entity's action, its pursuit of a certain end, can make a difference to the outcome." (Peikoff, p. 208)
"Ayn Rand describes the alternative of life or death as fundamental... The alternative of existence or nonexistence is the precondition of all values. If an entity were not confronted by this alternative, it could not pursue goals, not of any kind." (Peikoff, p. 209)
I am having difficulty accepting the statement that "The alternative of existence or nonexistence is the precondition of all values."
It seems to me that the assumption that the immortal robot has no ends is begging the question, i.e. by assuming the robot has no ends, the argument assumes that existence itself is the only thing worth valuing in order to prove that existence is the only thing worth valuing.... We could go a step further and look to heroin use, which involves people valuing pleasure as a goal in itself even though it decreases their ability to exist. How can it be said of such an individual that he "[does] not exist in order to pursue values. [He] pursue value in order to exist?" (Peikoff, p. 211)
I don't see why even an immortal robot, for whom non-existence is impossible, could not place value on things such as knowledge or wealth for their own sakes, or for the sake of some goal other than existence. Any insight you all have would be appreciated.
The immortal robot is an example, not an argument. It is an illustration of the point. Of course it assumes the position it sets out to embody. That is not a fallacy.
Your heroin user pursues the value of relief/feeling of well-being. He pursues a counterfeit of successful living. He evades the knowledge that what he gains will be short-lived and overall leave him worse off. It is an irrational choice, but it a choice aimed at life-values.
Think of being unable to feel pleasure or pain, comfort/illness/hunger/boredom/etc. Unable to have sensory or bodily feelings at all, just knowledge-related ones. Would you act at all? Why? If you answer that you would act because you have the knowledge that you should do so, what, I would then ask, is the meaning of this "should?" If it is some authority, why do you heed them? If it is your own thought, I would ask, you believe you "should" so that what?
You will see that it is the issue of life and death that answers that "so that what?" You speak of the robot's valuing knowledge for its own sake. What is that? What is the sake of having knowledge? In order to act successfully. And why does one wish to act successfully? To survive or flourish. What, otherwise, is the "sake" of having knowledge? If it "pleases" the robot, you are back to pleasure and pain, the programming man has by virtue of his being an animal, which the robot isn't, and can't experience.
Choice implies a standard. If the alternative of living, feeling pleasure and satisfaction, versus dying, feeling pain and disease, etc. were not fundamental to your makeup, what standard could you craft, and why would you adhere to it if you did?
Only living things prefer, only they value.
Hope this helps.
Mindy
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Social Work is necessary in the case of Child-Protective Services, and, I suppose, just her niche, some prisoners.
I think you'll find that Rand's discrediting social workers relates to the idea that people are by nature overwhelmed by life, and require assistance of all sorts just to get by. It is social work as diminishing man that she wrote against.
And, that has been the major attitude of social work as an academic subject, and a profession for many decades.
The degree itself can't be immoral, but it might be light-weight for a psychotherapist.
Your friend's status depends entirely, IMO, on how she answers the question of whether man is fit to live on earth, or whether he requires help, in principle. If she's essentially a clinician working with individuals who need therapy, that's great.
Mindy
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The knowledge required for the average patient to make an informed decision to participate is way outside the educational norm. Someone informed, but uninterested in the commercial aspects of the project is needed. That is what the Ethics Committees you deal with represent, and it is wholly valid.
However, it needn't be, and shouldn't be, connected with government, as you intimate. Perhaps the experimenters would have their experiment rated by a professional organization, who insured the participant against certain adverse effects. The professional rating company would be something like an accounting firm. Potential participants would rely on the rating the experiment gets, knowing what financial penalties were agreed to if their rating proved incorrect.
One way or another, I think demand would soon be met with supply. The overall safety of the scheme depends just on our constitutionally-guaranteed rights, where fraud, reckless endangerment, etc., are grounds for criminal and civil penalties.
Mindy
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The more I read of this the more confused I get. I went back and searched for earlier threads on bounded or unbounded universe, and came across some great stuff.
mroctor, 1-16-2010, wrote that "unbounded" means "can increase without limit' but that that doesn't imply infinity, because an unbounded variable always has a particular, finite value.
That makes sense to me as a description of the finite universe. What happens as the javelins of the "Two javelin experiment" travel to (or, say, one of them reaches) the furthest point of the universe? Well, if it has enough energy to continue (its progress would be slowed by the gravity of the whole universe, now opposing its motion, and, of course, it started out with a finite amount of energy,) if it has the energy to continue, it continues, and, in doing so, it expands the universe. Presumably it could continue indefinitely, though it would always have traveled a finite distance, and the universe would remain finite in extent.
This leaves me struggling for the proper language. Some things are unbounded and lack a boundary, some are bounded but lack a boundary. Some are unbounded and have a boundary, and some are unbounded and have no boundary. If I've got it sorted out correctly, I want to say the universe is unbounded, in that it can expand, and without a boundary, in that there is nothing "outside" or apart from the universe to represent a limit to its extension. Yet, it is always finite.
Add all the extended things up, and you get a size, and that is the size of the universe. Same for time, though the highly relative nature of measurement of time needs to be respected. Space is an aspect of existing things. Time is an ordering of changes of all sorts. Extended things undergoing changes make up the universe, so it has a sum of extension and time "within" it.
That doesn't contradict Rand's statement that we can't ascribe space or time ...to the universe as a whole. If I understand correctly, she was saying we can't ask where the universe is in space, or when in time.
Mindy
p.s. Being finite means it has an actual extent. But there is no metaphysical significance to what its present extent is. If there is nothing that limits the expansion of the universe, are the "infinite universe" people satisfied?
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(1) Where is the center of the surface of the Earth?
(2) If the universe has a boundary, what is it that is ending and what is it that's beginning?
While a bound implies that something is ending, does it also require that something is beginning?
Mindy
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Many seem to have lived by their religion. Catholic and Mormon priests didn't always, but the evidence of some religious leaders, like Augustine, insincerely preaching or writing is scant.
I don't think anyone has ever lived by religion. One can't live by a contradiction. Do you practice "eye-for-an-eye" justice or "turn-the-other-cheek" tolerance? Do you really look on newborn babies as disgustingly sinful? It's not possible outside a pathological personality.
Could St. Augustine have been a sincere, benevolent person? I suppose so. He had to reject much of established religion, and set himself to straighten out its errors. That he didn't see all its errors is not a condemnation. But he would have had to be a rebel in his heart, if not in his public persona. And that means he did not live by the religion of his day, even if he bowed to the social/political need to appear to do so.
Mindy
p.s. I've been assuming Christianity is the religion in question. Regarding the Eastern religions, it does appear that some religious figures have lived by their precepts, meditating and begging and wandering throughout their lives. Were you considering such people?
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So what's the conclusion of this...?
This is what I think:
- Any identification made by the use of concepts or concept-formation, is induction.
- Any process of applying previously induced knowledge to an existent that you´ve identified as being an instance of a conecpt's referent, is deduction.
Also, regarding my quotation earlier, I think now that concepts make induction necessary as a means to achieve them, and concepts also make induction possible on higher levels of abstraction.
Please comment.
I suggest that it is misleading to call conceptualizing induction. The process is only akin to induction. Induction proper is the formation of general propositions like All S is P. Trying to form an undifferentiated concept of induction that applies equally to the process of forming such general propositions and to conceptualizing existents is a mistake.
Same, of course, for deduction. Applying concepts you alredy possess to a particular thing is akin to deduction, but only that. Don't try to understand deduction as something that encompasses deductive logic and conceptual identification of new particulars.
It is worthwhile, to repeat myself, to understand how concept-formation is like induction, and how applying concepts is like deduction. It is a mistake to regard those similarities as defining. Keep the four concepts distinct. Know how they relate.
Mindy
- Any identification made by the use of concepts or concept-formation, is induction.
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Maybe another definition-pull will help here (this time from Wolfram's MathWorld)
The standard "center" of a circle/sphere is right where you think it is, and it defines the circle/sphere. Alfred Centauri was discussing the curve of the circle / surface of the sphere. The definition above does not say the center must be unique, so any point on the circle's curve or sphere's surface can be considered a center, since every point has "symmetric placement" with respect to the metric on the curve/surface (i.e. the sum of the distances from the chosen point to all other points is zero).
I'm not sure I understand your conclusion. A circle is defined as the group of points equidistant from a point in a plane. That point is its center. A circle is not a disc, but the circle that is the circumference of a disc shares centers with the center of the disc. In the case of the disc, the center is a part of the disc itself. In the case of the circle, it is not.
I realize we are talking about the surface of a sphere, but, as an analogy to a circle proper, doesn't the center of a sphere's surface coincide with the center of the solid sphere of which it is the surface?
Mindy
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Genus-species and set-subset relations refer to the same kind of relationship based on similarity due to possessing a commensurable characteristic. Species and subsets are differentiated from other species and subsets. It is species-species relations are based on recognizing a difference. (Genus-species terminology is not restricted to biology, it is the elemental relation in every taxonomy on any subject.)
Your claim that genus-species relationships are examples of cause is the subject under discussion. The relation is assymetrical. The species possesses all the characteristics of the genus, but not vice versa. That cannot be called similarity, which is a symmetrical relation.
One can't resolve the genus-species relation into species-species relations, because the first species formed could be the only species formed--to that point. The orphaned members of the genus do not necessarily form a species of their own.
The only possibility I can think of is that, e.g., "being a rational animal causes one to be an animal." That is foolishness, of course.
Mindy
How do you define evil and malevolence?
in Ethics
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Yes, we are considering deliberate acts.
We would say they have mixed premises.
The issue of character that you rely on here is interesting. Your friends' altruistic acts are, perhaps, reckless. Would you say therefore that their character is reckless? Perhaps this should be a new thread.
Mindy