William Parker

Come enjoy food and conversation with other Objectivists and interested parties at my house in Columbus, Ohio. Please bring a dish to share that feeds 5-10 people. Beverages and other edibles are also welcome. Message me for address/directions. Date: Saturday, May 15, 2010 Time: 5:00pm until exhaustion

doctorx079 has decided that he wants an Objectivist meetup in Dayton, too. So, come on out all you southwest Ohio Objectivists (and interested friends from afar)! We'll get to know one another better, converse about current events and make plans for the future. RSVP on meetup.com or Facebook. Time: Saturday, April 10, 10:00am-1:00pm Location: Dayton Mall Panera Bread 2500 Miamisburg Centerville Rd Dayton, OH 45459

I forgot to put the date and time: Sunday, December 13 starting at noon.

Come celebrate the holidays with other Objectivists at my house in Columbus with food, beverage and good conversation. Non-Objectivist friends and family are welcome, too. Please bring an edible or drinkable item to share. RSVP for my address. I'm open to suggestions for activities. Concepts in a hat, anyone?

I, too, will be passing my first Christmas as an Objectivist. In years past, I had been somewhat disdainful of gift-giving because I thought it distracted from the holiday's supposedly-proper religious focus (though I was not above receiving gifts -- how hypocritical was that!). Also, I didn't recognize the value of relationships as much, and that, combined with my financial situation, made me a poor gift-giver. Leonard Peikoff's Christmas Should Be More Commercial helped me understand the proper secular nature of the holiday.

I've decided to start an Objectivist club at Ohio State University, even though I'll probably be graduating this year. I have some more local support so I can do more beyond the community meetups (which have continued in spite of my choice not to keep posting them on this forum; please check out Facebook, Meetup.com or e-mail me), and a potential person to pass off the different responsibilities to, once I leave for my illustrious career. We had a table at the student involvement fair last Monday where 70 people signed up for our mailing list, and we passed out all of the ARI booklets we had, plus many flyers and Undercurrents. So, brimming with that success, the first meeting of the Ohio State University Objectivist Club will be tonight (Monday, September 28) at 5:00pm at University Hall 043 (a basement room next to the tunnel to Dulles Hall). We hope to meet weekly and have different activities to help OSU students learn about and apply Objectivism. If you know anyone at OSU who might be interested (or should be interested), please let them know. Our Facebook group page (current main point of contact) is: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=133576269686 You may also give them my e-mail which is parker.453 followed by osu dot edu.

Pearlist, Could you be more specific about how you would apply Occam's razor to Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics? An interpretation must agree with the well-proven equations of motion for the wave function and avoid or explain the problem of wave-function collapse while retaining things like objectivity and primacy of existence. I recently began revisiting my understanding of quantum mechanics (in my less philosophical days, I tacitly accepted the David Mermin's summary of the Copenhagen interpretation: "shut up and calculate"). Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Z. Albert does a fair job of explaining the problem of wave function evolution and collapse, why the subjectivst formulations don't adequately address the problem and how the many worlds interpretation and the Bohm interpretation differ. He also tries to show how the Bohm interpretation allows free will while still deterministically describing particle motion. That particular argument didn't sink in well for me. Travis Norsen's papers that I've read so far argue 1) that an interpretation of quantum mechanics is necessary and 2) that Bell's work (and subsequent experiment) does not disprove a hidden-variables interpretation (such as Bohm's) but only proves that the hidden variable must be nonlocal (i.e., contain faster-than-light causality, and hence violate special relativity). I haven't made it past his 2006 work yet (finishing up a Ph.D. takes time enough), but this is what I've gathered thus far.

Date : Sunday, June 14, 2009 Time : 1:30pm - 3:30pm Place: Upper Arlington Main Library Meeting Room A 2800 Tremont Road Upper Arlington, Ohio 43221 What does sex mean to human beings? Why is it good? How do love and sex relate? When is it moral to have sex with someone? Is sexual orientation volitional or deterministic? Are masculinity and femininity objective? Philosopher Jason Stotts will speak on this topic for one-hour followed by an hour of discussion. Jason invites you to e-mail him questions in advance at [email protected]. Please put "Ohio Objectivist Society" in the subject line to avoid spam filters. Please read or review: The Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on sex: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sex.html Ayn Rand's Playboy interview (linked from Jason's blog): http://erosophia.blogspot.com/2009/05/play...d-ayn-rand.html If you have access to these books, also see: A. Rand, For The New Intellectual, "The Meaning of Sex" (taken from A. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part II., Ch.4). A. Rand, The Voice of Reason, "Of Living Death". A. Rand, The Voice of Reason, "An Answer to Readers (About a Woman President)". L. Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, "Sex as Metaphysical," Ch. 9, p. 343-348.

Thank you everyone who replied. I have a few followup comments and questions: While I completely appreciate the epistemological aspect of objectivity, Ayn Rand in the essay I quoted says there is a metaphysical aspect, namely "the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness". Are the reality of states of consciousness independent of my introspection of them? I think so because those states of consciousness exist whether or not I introspect. So, their existence independent of my introspecting them underlies the metaphysical objectivity of concepts formed from them. Since most of you respondents emphasized the epistemological nature of objectivity and Jennifer explicitly stated that the concept of metaphysical objectivity is "meaningless", do you think that "the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness" is not useful? What caused me to use the word "entangled" was imagining a scenario where I am in a given state of consciousness, say experiencing an emotion, and, while still feeling that emotion, I introspect, note this emotion's similarity in kind but difference in degree with past emotions of the same type and form a new concept of emotion. The "entanglement" would seem to be simultaneously experiencing the emotion while forming the concept of it. I have no memory of ever having such an experience, and, thinking about it now, I see no reason that there would be "entanglement" in the sense that the concurrent experience of emotion and concept formation would affect the concept formation. Do you agree?

I'm trying to sort out in my head the relationship between existential concepts and concepts of consciousness. Their differentiae are: existential concepts are formed from sensation while concepts of consciousness are formed from introspection. Does it make sense to say that when I note my state of consciousness at a given point in time that is a introspective percept? Is it valid to use the concept percept with introspection? Next, I try to apply objectivity to concepts of consciousness. From "Who is the Final Authority in Ethics?": I see the epistemological objectivity -- I acquire knowledge of a part of reality (states of my consciousness) by reason and apply logic (non-contradictory identification) to those states to form concepts of consciousness. However, while I recognize that the reality of my states of consciousness exists independent of any perceiver's consciousness, they seem entangled with my own consciousness because they are an inseparable part of it. Is there a contradiction in viewing introspection as an objectification of my states of consciousness? I would appreciate any clarification anyone has to offer.

Greetings, forum readers. We will hold our third, nearly-fortnightly meetup in Columbus on May 31st. We will have a discussion of the topic of certainty and its contextual nature. Questions to address are: Does reason lead to certainty? What establishes certainty? How does knowledge advance from possible to probable to certain? What distinguishes the possible from the arbitrary? We will discuss Ayn Rand's answers to these questions. Please read chapter 5 of Objectivism : the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff beforehand (though do come even you don't). Also, see the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on certainty: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/certainty.html In summary: Sunday, May 31, 2009 1:30pm - 3:30pm Columbus Metropolitan Library - 3rd Floor board room 96 S Grant St Columbus, OH 43215

Welcome, Rational Jenn. I greatly enjoy your blog. Please keep it going.

Parking in the library parking garage is free for the first hour and $0.50-$1.00/hour each successive hour (pricing is scaled to discourage long-term parking). Validate and pay your ticket in the building before returning to the garage. Free on-street parking is available on Washington Ave. a half a block east of the library. The conference room is directly across from the east-most parking garage elevator (do not enter the book part of the library). Matt Yucha, president of OOS, will be there and has a suggested agenda, though we are free to cast it aside. As DavidOdden brought up, I think it will be important to establish common interests so that meeting up can be a value to those participating. I look forward to meeting all of you who come.

I've messaged some of you who list yourselves as in Columbus today about meeting up. Under encouragement of the Ohio Objectivist Society (OOS) leadership, I've reserved a room at the Columbus Metropolitan Library - Main Library for the afternoon of Sunday, April 26. We can adjust future dates according to different interested participants' schedules. In true Buckeye fashion, I reserved starting on the half-hour from 1:30pm to 4:30pm. A message about this will also go out through the OOS mailing list. I think the first meeting should be to get to know one another and decide what should we do. OOS suggested a review of the important points in Galt's speech or Francisco's speech as a starting point for conversation. Please comment! In summary: Sunday, April 26, 2009 1:30pm - 4:30pm Columbus Metropolitan Library - Main Library Conference Room 1 96 S Grant St Columbus, OH 43215

I like that much better. The "I" is clearly an "I" without Islamic undertones . What is the purpose of Objectivism having a symbol? Isn't dissemination of Objectivist ideas a necessary prerequisite so that non-Objectivists understand what the symbol represents, or do you think that a symbol would provoke people to understand what ideas it represents? I can't say that the peace symbol or the anarchy symbol have prompted me to further investigate the ideas underpinning them.

I'm afraid the crescents on the ends of the bar in the O make me think of Islam. What was your thought in styling the intersection of the bar and the O that way?

Ironic that you fly out of Columbus, I dropped my wife and daughters off at the Dayton airport Tuesday for a flight, and we have flown out of Dayton a few times in the past. It has been stressful radically changing philosophy, though more for my wife than for me. I feel more at peace with myself having rid myself of the conscious dichotomy between faith and reason, even though I had always lived reasonably within the nonreligious part of my life. My wife too is reasonable except in relation to things covered by the arbitrary assertions of her religion. The second essay in the Virtue of Selfishness addresses the tension caused by accepting faith, and I experienced the tension even more acutely being consciously aware of it. After I reread that essay last year, I felt a strong emotion that helped me realize emotions and sudden thoughts are not mystical revelations. How could God be telling me that an essay explaining away God's revelations is true? As to what things in my life have changed, I think the biggest thing is that I have become more honest and open with my wife. In the past, I would not reveal my doubts or skepticism on something. I believed keeping the peace was more important than letting her know my true thoughts. It's not that I seek out ways to criticize or belittle her now, just that I don't hide my opinion and try to keep her up-to-date on my thinking. Another thing that has changed is that my intensity of enjoying life has increased now that I don't have faith in my spirit's eternal existence. Facing the finite nature of my existence has helped me to focus more on seeking happiness both now and over the whole course of my life. I think I was lazier with regards to the importance of promoting my happiness when I believed in God. Finally, it will be a big change treating Sunday as my own day and not one I should sacrifice to God, participating only in faith- and family-promoting activities that do not make others work. I hope to devote some of that time to improving my life by better understanding and promoting Objectivism.

Thanks everyone for the messages of encouragement. In response to SherryTX: My wife remains a devout Latter-day Saint, and we agree to disagree. On my invitation, she started reading Atlas Shrugged back around the 50th anniversary, but she couldn't get past the depiction of Hank Rearden's family. Harmonious family is a central part of LDS dogma, and I don't think she was able to deal with a depiction of a family composed of such clearly parasitical relationships. We talked about reading OPAR a few months back, but I haven't pressed at all since she is emotionally distraught enough at my rejection of her faith. In response to Tenzing Shaw: I am in theoretical condensed-matter physics. I investigate the electronic structure of solids through computational models.

Hello, everyone! I am excited to join this forum and participate in the discussion here. I have lurked around here for years and only recently left my former religion to embrace Objectivism without reservation or contradiction. I come from a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) background and tried for years that I could reconcile the truths of reality with the God-claims of the church. I found that I could not. I encountered Objectivism through a high-school classmate, later college roommate, who lent me his copy of Atlas Shrugged. It was a riveting read that I started at the airport on my way to a summer research internship in Germany. I could scarcely sleep and couldn't put it down until I finished two days later. Upon my return to the USA, I read C:TUI, VOS and FTNI over the ensuing months. I had never encountered such cogent ideas before. It amazed me how Ayn Rand just put everything together in so few words, and it was a stark contrast with the half-arbitrary, half-rationalistic teachings of my then church. After marrying my wife and moving to Ohio for graduate school, I read IOE and OPAR. It was OPAR that strongly confronted my God-belief and forced me to begin evaluating clearly why I believed in God. After coming to a realization my God-belief was based on a primacy-of-consciousness view of epistemology (I thought I knew because I had had powerful feelings and epiphanies[in the secular sense]), I began seeking an epiphany in the divine or supernatural sense. Somewhere along this process I noticed that I had had powerful feelings and epiphanies while reading the writings of Ayn Rand, indicating that these were not mystical revelations but natural products of my consciousness responding to values and integrating ideas. Probably not surprising to the readers of this forum, I experienced nothing that gave me evidence for God. Hence, I left my religion and look forward to enjoying life with the backdrop of Objectivism integrating my knowledge. I thank collectively (since my memory fails on the individual level) the active participants of this forum. Your rational and often passionate discussions gave me concrete evidence for the potential in man when I often felt surrounded in a sea of skepticism (at my work in physics) and emotionalism (at my former church). I can't think of any specific understanding I gleaned from this forum, but its mere existence and nature were sufficient to buoy me up in facing the truth. I look forward to participating and hopefully even meeting some of you in person.