MinorityOfOne

At risk of being accused of being a Atlas-Thumper, I thought it might be useful to take a look at the thoughts of somebody a bit smarter than ourselves. From the appendex to ITOE: AR: ... the concept "existence," at least the way I use it, is in a certain way close to the concept "universe" -- all that which exists. [241] Prof B: I would be completely satisfied on this if you could clarify one more thing for me, which is: why call the universe an entity, rather than simply a collection, since it doesn't act as a whole? AR: Well, you can't really call it an entity in that sense. I don't think the term applies. The universe is really the sum of everything that exists. It isn't an entity in the sense in which you call a table, a chair, or a man an entity. Actually, do you know what we can ascribe to the universe as such, apart from scientific discovery? Only those fundamentals that we can grasp about existence. Not in the sense of switching contexts and ascribing particular characteristics to the universe, but we can say: since everything possesses identity, the universe possesses identity. Since everything is finite, the universe is finite. But we can't ascribe space or time or a lot of other things to the universe as a whole. [273] I think one of the things that might be confusing here is this. Take the question, "is there a specific number of existents in the universe?" Well, first of all, we can't count existents, but only entities. So switch the question to entities. (I make a point of stating this, because it's a very different question, and some people have been equivocating.) One thing to notice is that this isn't a very interesting question, in a sense. The universe is not a sum of all entities; it's the sum of all existents. (In other words, it's a metaphysical issue, not an epistemological one.) So even treating it as a strict sum, counting the number of entities in the universe, if you could, wouldn't give you anything like a full understanding of the universe. Ok, but take the question in reference to entities. Now here's why I think somebody might think this is a valid question. Let's say your room is the sum of all the entities that are in it, as well as those that make up its structure. So you count all the stuff in your room, and that's the number of entities in your room. Obvious enough. Now you broaden the scope of the question: what's the number of entities in your house? You go ahead and count all the stuff outside your room, you add it to the number of entities in your room, and there you have it. The idea might be that you could keep doing this until you've hit the whole universe, and then you've got a count. There are a lot of problems here. Entities depend on a human perspective, and there's often a contextual issue involved in what is considered as an autonomous entity. If you want to find out how much you've been smoking, you'll consider each of the cigarettes in your ashtray as entities to be counted. If you want to clean your room, they're just a pile of butts. Which is appropriate for counting entities? It's totally optional. That's one problem. Another is, entities change. By the time you completed counting all the entities in your room, tons of entities elsewhere have changed into other entities, split, merged, whatever they do. Somebody dies in the next state over. Their body, over time, dissolves into its constituent chemicals. Now that one entity is a *whole bunch* of entities! Plus, you'd have to assume you could count all the entities at a given time, at all. But how are you gonna apply a single standard of time to the entire universe at once? Right, so I think that's enough on that, but there's plenty more to be said. (I'm not going to take the time.) Similar issues would apply to questions like "how large is the universe" -- how large, measured from where? And how, when entities have a habit of *moving*, and it takes time for any method of measuring to occur? Some other implications. DAC, you said that the universe is the sum of all matter and energy. That's a big leap. How do you know that all there is, is matter and energy? One need not suggest, arbitrarily, that there *is* (or even possibly is) another form of existents in order to say that it's inappropriate to define anything else out of existence. Another obvious implication is that RadCap is wrong in saying that the concept "universe" means the number of existents. In fact, the idea "number of existents" doesn't make much sense. In what sense is the universe finite? Whatever it is, it's that and nothing else.

DAC, Hope you don't mind if I jump in. It sounds like you want there to be specific environmental laws so that people can know in advance exactly what is and what is not permitted. The problem is, there are so many contextual issues that this can only be dealt with in broader legal principles. In order to specify in legislation what constitutes a threat on a given property, you'd have to specify *everything relevant* about that property. The number of laws would be stunning. Rather, such issues can be dealt with by laws we already have. Assuming the neighbor isn't dumping toxic waste for the purpose of harming you, here are a few you could call on. Negligent damage of another's property is punishable in civil law, and in some cases (though probably not this one, unless it amounted to manslaughter) criminal law; or, if the waste has not yet damaged your property but you can prove that it will, there is enormous precedent for putting an injunction on the dumper, commanding him to find another way to dispose of the waste. In other words, the relevant *legal* principle isn't so broad as "don't initiate force". That IS what underlies it, ultimately, but obviously that's too abstract a principle to constitute an entire legal system. What it is, is the *standard* of a proper legal system. RadCap is right to point out that overly specific regulative laws would have the effect of prohibiting dumping in cases where there was no harm to be done. (i.e., punishing without proof.) The goal is not to have a law which will determine in every case whether or not harm will be done; that's what a hearing or trial, using expert witnesses (or whatever) is for. Rather, the law is a mechanism to specify the type of rights violation occurring in such a case, and to specify the proper range of punishment/restitution. The important point here is that the likelihood of damage has to be proved, in *each case*, beyond a reasonable doubt. Does this help? I'm having a bit of trouble pinpointing your exact difficulty, but I think it might be somewhere in what I just wrote...

Down, RadCap! Down boy! Y_Feld has made some screw-ups. However, I just reread through all his posts here and I see no reason to think he's being intellectually dishonest. You've pointed out some of the problems in his posts, but you either haven't grasped his context or haven't made allowances for it such that he could understand *why* they're problems. Because of this, your posts are coming across as dogmatic and rude. If I may offer a suggestion, in the future you might want to just drop conversations with people who exasperate you rather than allowing them to escalate to the level of name-calling.

At least as he is using the term, "sum" is pretty piss-poor. Normally, a sum is the added total of a bounded set. Since he's arguing that the universe is unbounded, he's obviously got a different meaning in mind... and I haven't a clue what it is. Here's the problem regarding finiteness. As a really general term, it basically means that "whatever characteristics a thing has, it has them in a specific amount." (At least, that's how I think of it.) The alternative is that it *doesn't* have them in a specific amount, which is a violation of the law of identity. Silverman seems like he's dodging this, but not very successfully: he says the universe is finite, but doesn't say what characteristics it has. (And eliminates just about all the possibilities.) I've got one idea about this, but I want to toss it around in my head a bit more and see if it makes sense. I thought it did a minute ago, but it got a bit fuzzy while I was writing. (Plus, I've got a midterm in two and a half hours to study for) Matt Bateman, if you're going to argue that finiteness doesn't apply to the universe, you'll also have to argue that the concept of quantity doesn't apply to the universe. Ok -- if it's unbounded, how would it? But we're still hitting a dead end. Seems like every concept you try to apply to the universe leads to a contradiction, and it's precisely because the universe is unbounded. "Unbounded" leads to something suspiciously like the "some, but any" principle. I'll have to think it through further, but I'm worried that Silverman is trying to turn the universe into one big abstraction. If so, and if it's because of "unboundedness", then that idea needs to be dropped. I don't live in an abstraction. DAC, by the way, the fallacy of composition doesn't say that a thing *can't* have the characteristics of its constituent parts. It can; it just doesn't have to. "X is made of Y's; all Y's are A; therefore, X is A" is not a logical inference, but that doesn't mean the negation of the conclusion follows from the premises either.

I've read that article before, and I found it even more interesting the second time around. I still have to digest some of the ideas in it and see if they work out, but there's one thing I'd like to toss up for discussion. Silverman says that the universe is finite. He also says that in order for something to be finite, it must be finite with respect to something. But he doesn't say what the universe is finite with respect to -- just that it *has* to be finite, since it exists. So what's finite about it? (I'm not in any way implying that the universe is infinite. It's not, that'd be a violation of identity. But Silverman has knocked down a lot of his options...)

Yeah, do. It sounds like your ideal would be a world in which people don't need to think in order to make the right decisions. They'd accept Objectivism, and see a politician who says "Hey, I'm an Objectivist!" and vote for him. Or, they'd read an op-ed on the ARI site and vote according to whatever it recommends. If you think it through further, I think you'd see that such a world is not possible and, if it were, wouldn't be good.

I actually don't see the big deal here. How will they decide? Well, that first of all presupposes that they will. We're largely talking about people whose theoretical interest in Objectivism would be, by stipulation, comparatively shallow. Why would they care to even *try* to evaluate the merit of various organizations based on the sort of complex philosophical criteria you have in mind? Most people probably have better things to do with their time. (I've met plenty of Objectivists who simply don't care about such matters, and I'm pretty sympathetic to that.) Now assume that they do decide to try to evaluate various philosophical organizations. How would they do it? Well, how do they reach *any* conclusion? They'll have to either decide to think it through for themselves to the best of their ability, or not.

Yep, it's a monumental task. The worst part isn't the content of the bad ideas in the culture, but the methodology. If you take a severe rationalist and expose them to Objectivism, and they like it, expect all sorts of horrible things to happen. (But then, if they keep at it, wait a few years. Usually they'll start to improve. I did.)

I should add that I don't mean the statements in OPAR could be used out of context. In isolation, they'd be nearly useless. But you don't need to be a genius to make sense out of them, particularly if you have seen them concretized in fictional form before. (I'll also add that Rand's novels are hardly the only artworks which concretize proper virtues, so the objection that "not everybody is smart enough to read Galt's Speech" doesn't hold up very well either.)

Again, it's an issue of how much depth somebody needs. Take a look in OPAR and see if any of the virtues, in their basic statements (at the beginning of each section on virtue) are so complicated that the average man-on-the-street wouldn't be able to use them as a guide to his life. To be sure, there can be circumstances that require a more fleshed-out understanding of the virtues to resolve, but they're rare. Two other things to bear in mind. 1) Having Rand's fictional portrayals of heroic characters is a great benefit. There's perhaps some danger of people trying to emulate them in detail instead of principle, but I suspect that's the sort of thing people can work out for themselves. (I've heard stories of at least one person back in the early NBI days dying his hair orange to be more like Roark. I can't imagine he kept it up for very long, though I don't know for sure. People usually manage to take care of their own silliness in the long-term.) Some people have told me they find it useful to use her characters as a way to ground themselves, so to speak, when thinking about applying abstract principles to concrete actions. "What would Roark do?" I've never found this useful, personally, but I can see why somebody might.) 2) Some of this has to do, simply, with culture. People who are less capable of intellectual innovation, less capable of critical thinking and so forth, will necessarily be less able to separate themselves from the cultural status quo. (If they do, it'll be more for sense-of-life reasons than for intellectual reasons, and this may lead to serious conflict.) So while there might be some merit in the claim *as applied to our culture now*, there isn't *in principle*. For example: it's true that many people in our culture think that the only way you can have morality is through religion. Perhaps it's also true that some of them, if they were convinced that religion is false, would flip to the other side of the coin and become hedonists/amoralists. This just identifies that there is a pervasive and deep philosophical problem in our culture that needs to be addressed. Again, it's evidence that Objectivism *is* needed, not the opposite. Saying "Somebody might misinterpret Objectivism, so we shouldn't advocate it" is like banning water because somebody might drown.

For what it's worth, all the Google hits for that phrase reference either Rand or Goodkind.

The question to ask, re: the second paragraph, is: why ought anything do anything? Why does the whole issue come up at all? If the person responds by saying "we need morality to live" or some such answer, you can work from there. If they say something like "I just feel that it's right," or "it's just something you have to take on faith", I doubt you'll get much out of further discussion. You can't win 'em all... there's no argument that can force people to think. As for the last, you might point out that they're holding a double-standard. The average church-goer doesn't understand his religion as well as a theologian, right? But there's an assumption that they are capable of following the religion's moral code. Well, the same thing applies to philosophy. You don't need a PH.D. to be moral. Understanding the basic ideas of a philosophy doesn't require a whole ton of study. Lots of people say just reading Atlas Shrugged changed their life; they may not have the most precise formulations of their principles, and their context may be pretty limited, but they've got *something*. To the extent of their intelligence and needs, they can always improve that with further study. (If you've got time, the "spiral theory of knowledge" might be a useful thing to mention here. But it can take a bit of explaining.) Ok, the last point. "People are too irrational for philosophy to be a proper moral guide." Too irrational in what sense? Do they mean it broadly, that they hold lots of false beliefs that mislead them? If that's the case, that's all the more reason that they *do* need religion. Or do they mean that people just refuse to think? If that's the case, it's hard to see why they'd be better bound by religion than by philosophy. There's a lot more that could be said on that, but it'd depend a lot on precisely what they have in mind underlying those broad generalities. Last bit of advice I'd give you is to spend some time seriously trying to understand exactly where they're coming from. Do a little philosophical detection.

I've recently started working out myself, so I'll toss in a few comments here. Mentzer is a really fun read. I just got his book "High Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way", and I've been picking through it a bit at a time. From the research I've done, I'm not convinced that his method is totally sound, but there are some very worthwhile elements to it. I'm currently working with a slightly modified version of the Foundation Routine set up on the hardgainer.com website. If you're very new to weightlifting, the idea behind it is that you use a few basic compound exercises, on a three-day-a-week schedule, to give yourself the groundwork for all your future progress. I've literally just started with it -- I've gone to the gym twice since I decided on this routine. However, looking at some of the logs that people post of their progress, it looks like it works fairly well. I'm hardly an expert in these matters, but if you say what you're trying to accomplish, I might be able to give some general advice based on what I've read. A better idea would be to go to a fitness website of some sort and post in their forum. (Check first to make sure it's not full of nutcases though; lots of them are.)

Sure, here's one that's as direct as you can get. They're sneaking in the idea that religion is based on knowledge. It's not; it's based on faith. If you want knowledge, you have to accept a means of gaining knowledge. Faith doesn't qualify.

Ok, fair enough. I wasn't aware that it had that sort of emphasis, and it didn't show up in the dictionary I referenced. I don't think we're in any important disagreement, so I'll leave it at that. It's more an issue of context than anything.

A quick request -- if you don't want to be referred to by your screenname, could you toss a quick signature at the ends of your posts? I've lost track of who's who. Anyway, RationalEgoist: your revised position is still hugely problematic. By denying causal efficacy between the mental and the physical, your position now amounts to epiphenomenalism -- the idea that consciousness is real, that it results from physical objects, and that it's totally irrelevant to everything. If the physical alone is a sufficient cause for your actions, then volition is a totally bizarre idea (you can choose, but you have to choose in accordance with what is physically determined, and *everything* is physically determined -- i.e., you can't choose.) Either that, or you just flat-out reject volition. But volition is self-evident. Part of its self-evidence is that it is causally efficacious. You can't look at yourself choosing to focus, for example, and say "Well, yeah, I chose to focus, but I didn't cause myself to focus. That was the chemicals in my brain." Leibniz, I think, had an idea really similar to this: he thought that there was the mental and the physical, and one could make choices mentally, but it was just by the will of God that the physical corresponded to the mental. On a reread, I might be getting the wrong idea from what you wrote. You might also mean, simply, that the mental is the physical understood from a different perspective. Lots of philosophers think that: the mind is the brain, seen from inside. But again, the same problem. It makes the mental distinct only insofar as it is a faculty of experience, and it can't even explain *that*. It *certainly* can't deal with volition. Anyway, give it some more thought. If I can tell you what I think your basic problem is, I think it's this. The mental and the physical are both *primaries*, in a certain epistemic sense. The history of materialism and idealism could be put this way: the materialists took the physical for granted, but not the mental, and tried to explain the mind in terms of the physical. (More often, they tried to deduce it.) The mind became a total puzzle to them, and the most consistent of them ended up as behaviorists, denying the mental altogether. The idealists did the opposite: they took the mind for granted (in the form of experience, sense-data, or whatever) and tried to deduce the physical from it. Again, it can't be done; the most consistent of them, like Berkeley, ended up denying the physical -- the rest either said it's not knowable, or ended up confused in even weirder ways. The only way to avoid these traps is to realize that you can't take one as primary over the other. (I mean this in a different sense than the primacy of existence, of course. Different issue.) Both the mental and the physical are givens. We perceive THINGS; WE PERCEIVE things. If you understand that both of those are unquestionable starting points, you can move on to question the specific nature of their workings and interactions, without falling into the trap that has thrown most of the history of philosophy into a top-to-bottom mind-body dichotomy.

That's a good way to put it. You can't refer to your referring, because then what are you referring to? If you think through it, it ends up being an infinite regress. You're referring to your referring to your referring to your referring... and so on, with no connection to anything in reality. One of my professors wore a shirt to class like that. The front said: "The sentence on the back of this shirt is true." The back said: "The sentence on the front of this shirt is false." The shirt was from the American Philosophical Association's yearly conference. (And no, the reference to the shirt doesn't save it. :-) )

p.s., the law of bivalence is wrong too. It assumes that the arbitrary can be subsumed by either truth or falsehood, but it can't.

Harry Binswanger talks about this in one of his lectures. I don't remember which one. Basically, the problem with the sentence is that it's purely self-referential. It doesn't refer to a fact of reality, it just kind of pretends it's doing so by taking over the grammatical structure of a referring sentence. Since it's purely self-referential, the issue of truth or falsehood can't arise. (So, actually, this is kind of a fourth category, aside from truth, falsehood, and arbitrariness. But nobody except philosopers would worry about it, so it's not too important, except insofar as it's useful to understand so they don't confuse you.)

Nathaniel Branden's book is awful. I thought so when I originally read it, and I was more sympathetic to his style of thought at that time. He goes back and forth between admitting that he was a bastard and blaming Rand for it: the impression one gets from his book is that he believes in free will, except when Rand is involved, where she had a magical power to override it and rid him of responsibility for any immoral actions he committed. As much as I hated the movie, I wasn't convinced that Barbara Branden's book was particularly bad until I read James Vallient's (sp?) article, "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics." I would link to it, but it has apparently been taken offline. If you do a google search by title and click on one of the cached pages, there's an email address where you can apparently ask for a copy of it. (Or maybe buy one, I don't know.) I wish I had printed it. Some of Branden's stuff is interesting reading, mostly for the case studies. But as for theoretical work, I don't think he's done anything of significance since his break with Rand. Last note: without taking a position on what the real deal is with Rand's personal life -- an issue I don't care about all that much -- I will say that "Facets of Ayn Rand" is a charming and inspiring book, well worth picking up. I laughed out loud a bunch of times... anyone who thinks Rand was humorless (how could you, after Francisco???) should definitely read the part where Peikoff accidentally eats a box of fudge intended for her. Actually, I'll just write it here. It's that good. "There's an amusing story connected with fudge, and it's an example of her sense of humor. Leonard was fond of the fudge, too. One year, I sent him two pounds, each pound in a separate box -- one with her name, one with his. I expected him to deliver a box to her. Well, apparently, he didn't see the labels. And when he called to thank us, he thanked us for both the pounds. But by the time he called, most of the fudge had been eated by Leonard and some friends. So, I phoned her to report the mishap and to say that I would send her another box. She said something like "Do you mean to tell me that he ate both boxes?" She sounded surprised and somewhat indignant. I said, jokingly, "Ayn, it's not as if he had just challenged the validity of the Law of Identity!" There was a pause, and then she answered, "Well, it's not that bad. But it's close."

Can you show why this isn't just a stipulation? Dictionaries give a number of definitions for belief, but a common thread is that when you believe something, you hold it to be true. No mention is made of the methodology by which you reached it. Are you arguing that "belief", as is commonly used, is a package deal and needs to be replaced? Or do you think that what you're describing is what most people mean by belief? The first is an interesting idea that I'll give some more thought to, but I think the second would definitely be wrong. A thought on the notion of belief as package-deal: it may depend on the context you're using it in. Most analytic philosophers take belief to be the genus of knowledge: it's a broader category, denoting those things you hold to be true, where the subcategories include knowledge (things that are also true, etc.), opinion, false beliefs, arbitrary assertions, etc. This is wrong, and it's definitely a package-deal. Epistemologically, the fundamental issue is whether or not a logical process was used to draw a conclusion from sense perception. So in the context of epistemology, this hierarchy is totally improper. On the other hand, if you're talking about what a person *does*, the fundamental issue may well be what he holds to be true, regardless of how he got there. It's fundamental here because it explains more. (I think this is more true in the short-term than in the long-term, by the way.) If I want to know what a person will do on Sunday, I'll want to know whether or not he holds it to be true that going to church is a moral obligation. Within that context, the question of whether he arrived at that conclusion through an honest mistake or through bare irrationality is secondary. So in that context, belief isn't a package-deal.

The question is a bit more complicated than that. "The universe" is an abstraction; it's a sum concept, it's not one single entity. And, as Renee asked, what would it be expanding into? This claim usually means "space is expanding." This may just be an instance of the difference between hard science and popular science as mentioned in the Newton thread, but as stated, "space" is an invalid concept. Space is somewhat like time; where time has motion, a perceptually-given fact, as its basic referent, space has distance, which is also perceptually-given. To say that "space is expanding", per se, is like saying "time is slowing down." Neither of them mean anything. It's only particular distances that can become greater or lesser, just as it's only particular motions that can speed up or slow down. On the other hand, those red-shifts DO have to be accounted for. I'm not a scientist, so I'll pass on that question -- and it may well be that the hard science gives an account of this that's not obvious from its popular interpretations.

Sometimes somebody is so totally and obviously wrong that the best thing to do is to refer them to books, which they claim to have read, where it is said best. I don't recall seeing anybody here behaving dogmatically, as DonGalt claimed. (In fact, I've been impressed by that, because I see it all over the place. This site has been a nice exception.) DonGalt is a troll, plain and simple. He came in slinging insults and making sarcastic comments, but never giving facts to support his allegations. (I'm familiar with the issues he discussed, and he's just plain dead wrong on the majority of what he said.) He strikes me as a guy with a big chip on his shoulder. Why else would somebody spend so much time talking to people who he claims to think are intellectually dishonest? I'm glad he was banned. I'm just sorry it took so long.

Sounds reasonable, Michael, but how would you distinguish opinion from belief?

God, there are a ton of mistakes in there. Just on a quick read: 1. Whatever a fact is, it's not a species of "statement". This came from analytic philosophy, probably ultimately from some linguistic analyst. 2. Something does not have to be falsifiable in order to be non-arbitrary. Is the law of identity arbitrary? This came from Popper. 3. I'd tend to think an opinion is a position one takes, but can't prove. That doesn't make it arbitrary: it might just be that it's quite probable. 4. The idea that a fact describes an aspect of reality is contradicted by the idea that a fact may be false. If it's false, it doesn't describe reality. 5. The last paragraph is a false view of the arbitrary, at least in the first two sentences. If a statement is arbitrary in the mind of its utterer, it is neither true nor false.