A is A

Go girl. Oh, god.

Saying "I love you" involves two people, not just one.

While Kant didn't explicitly state that, anyone who claims that the world as it is in itself is unknowable except through faith and that the perceivable world is just appearance due to the operation of our means of perception (not any individual's means but to human's means as a species) clearly has dropped any attempt at objectivity and falls rapidly into subjectivity, as his philosophical children made explicit.

Most of the time, there is not a single thought accompanying an emotion. Emotions are automatic responses. There typically is a value context associated with emotions. That context is often not readily available to one's conscious awareness, depending upon the complexity of the values involved. When conflicting values or contradictory values are involved, it may take months to years to identify the values involved. The most important part of introspection is the grasp that thinking about one's emotions and values is necessary to figure out the relationships.

My math Phd candidate son said "The paper was put out 2 years ago. It was pretty much immediately shown to be an empty argument."

In the sentence you provided, Rand is stating that the source of the emotion is not identified or named. It is often like anxiety or depression, where the source of the emotion cannot be identified. It cannot be named because the method of thinking about emotions has been corrupted by their teachers asserting that thinking is not something required. A "causeless fear and an undefined guilt" clearly mean that one is experiencing fear and guilt, but the source, the values and thinking to identify the values, has not been identified.

How about some citations? How about some examples? Recognizing emotions is not self evident. They are about as far from being self-evident as anything is. Emotions are automatic responses associated with values that affect you. Which values they are have to be learned and identified by thinking and experience. The experience of an emotion simply tells you that something makes you feel something. And even that has to be learned and conceptually grasped.

I think you're on to something, but I wouldn't put it in those words. One does not consciously face the "choice to live" in one's daily life and one does not arrive it from perceptual experience. It's different than the choice to become a doctor or a machinist, or eat an apple or a pear. I think it is an abstract, conceptual identification that is needed to be grasped to justify an ethical system that formulates the volitional nature of the values and virtues that are specific to Objectivism. The choice is real, since making such a decision must be made to act to achieve volitional values. Knowledge needs to be justified because of volition and the possibility of error. The correspondence principle is how knowledge gets justified. I don't understand your last paragraph. If something is "in" consciousness, then there has to be some relation to an existent outside of it, even if it's indirect. In my opinion, the existent would the the self-awareness that one is alive.

What does "necessary to exist" mean? If you mean necessary to continue to remain alive, that is true but needs clarifications. Outside of that, a living entity will continue to exist, even when it dies. So I don't think you're referring to that. But I don't think that wording is clear and could be quite ambiguous. To exist is to be something. A living entity exists in a different way than let's say a rock. To remain in existence as a living entity, values must be acquired. There are no options about that. "Ought" means taking the actions necessary for the entity to remain alive, in existence. I don't understand why you'd want to apply it to options for enhancing existence. Do you mean like "I enjoy ice cream" is something I ought to pursue? I am also not sure if the term "necessary" applies in this context. Necessary implies a consequence of some event due to the nature of the entity taking some action. While it may apply to the biological aspects of living organisms (I'd have to think more about that), it doesn't apply to the volitional aspects of human values. The concept "ought" applies to both and it contains value implications where 'necessary' does not imply a value system. "Ought" serves as a bridge from facts to values. I'm not sure how necessity applies to the action that is generated by the entity itself rather than to inanimate objects that respond to external forces only. For example, if I jump out of an airplane, I will fall of necessity. If I don't eat breakfast tomorrow, I will not die of necessity. I may get hungry of necessity, but there is no necessity that I eat Cheerios rather than eggs to fulfill the hunger.

No one ever implied that "just by saying" something that anything is graspable. Conceptual thought is required. By identifying that values are associated with the facts required for man's life as a rational being, she solves the is-ought problem. Values are facts: facts viewed from the perspective of a living being, facts that require action to act and or keep them, facts that support man's rational life. If you study how Rand identifies the Objectivist virtues, they begin with x "is the recognition of the fact that ...". Thus, she concludes This last point is what I have been saying all along. Glad we can agree on that point.

Considering that altruism, self-sacrifice and religious duty have been the moral codes that have guided mankind for thousands of years, I'm wondering what alternative to Rand's ideas you were affirming as pro-life of rational man. People have only partially chosen to live rationally, and it was not consistently or explicitly identified or implemented. I reject Hume's version of the is-ought problem. Rand's identification solves it. But I'm not going to get into that debate since you are unable or unwilling to acknowledge or discuss Rand's formulation of how to approach ethics. You can continue on your Socratic method, but I think I've had enough of it.

This is clearly false. Man is a volitional being and the choice to think or not is logically prior to ethics. Rand's ethics is not about staying alive as a human entity, moving through life on a perceptual level, nor is it about simply finding food and putting it in your mouth to stay alive. To live as a conceptual being requires choice. To live as a moral being requires choice. Such choices cannot be within the moral code that acknowledges these facts. They are pre-ethical. Knowledge of how to live and how to think as a rational being is not automatic and must be chosen. There is no basis for alleging that such choices are within an ethical system for you are then trapped with no basis for living by one or another ethical system, except possibly duty which was the reasoning given by other systems prior to Rand.

Certainly not. It may simply mean that you value each differently (which I'm sure is true) or you value them on a different scale. Surely romantic involvement is different than familial relationships. I don't think you should compare your values to death, but you should compare it to the context of your happiness in your life. Loosing a value is one way to put something in context of how important it is to you.

Besides just asking questions, it would be nice if you demonstrated an understanding of what the Objectivist position of the argument was. It is quite apparent that your questions originate from your lack of understanding. Your assertion that morality and rationality interfere with each other is absurd.

The decision to live is best described as pre-ethical, or meta-ethical.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "naturalistic fallacy." Where did I state that my argument leads to choosing life? I don't understand what your second sentence is being applied to. I've stated above that there is a difference between "choosing life" and the "choice to live." One "chooses life" because one wants to achieve values. I'd suggest you read or reread Rand's presentation in The Objectivism Ethics and digest how she leads up to the presentation of her morality. I don't think I can be more precise than she. The choice to live is just another way of saying "I am a living organism." The identification of that fact leads to the issue of what one ought to do. Facts lead to values. Values are facts considered from the perspective of a living organism. You keep asking these questions without any reference to anything in Rand's theory or its justification, as if all you have to do is just spout questions for others to answer, which you don't consider, and then assert your skepticism as being self-evident. You need to think about Objectivism more seriously.

If you're going to make such an unfounded assertion, it would be nice if you could at least offer some argument to justify it to the readers, lest you be dismissed out of hand.

Your conclusion about what she is saying is subjectivism. Your argument assumes all of the errors already discussed and presented about why the choice to live is fundamental and objective. One chooses to live because one acknowledges the facts of reality, as presented by Rand in Galt's speech, that life and death are the only alternative; that one acknowledges one is a a living being who needs to make a choice to live as a man or woman of reason. It is not that "you have values to live for already" but the fact that any rational values you have depends upon the choice to live. This grounds ethics in facts: it makes it objective. You keep repeating that "it doesn't say anything about whether you should choose life" and you keep ignoring the argument that such a question assumes the choice already made.

There is no "numbered succession of premises and conclusions." Such an argument is Rationalism, and Objectivism rejects such a method. You must grasp the inductive nature of the argument, otherwise you won't get anywhere. You need to reject Rationalism in your thought.

Read The Objectivist Ethics, Man's Rights and The Nature of Government. It's a fairly straightforward argument: man's life depends upon the achievement of values, man's life depends upon his use of reason, reason identifies the values man needs for life, reason is volitional and does not function under force or threat of force, man needs to be free of force to achieve the values his life requires. Unless you are prepared to exempt yourself from the human species, that should be a sufficient explanation of why you should not use force.

What a person should do depends upon what is. "A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality." I'd suggest you study The Objectivist Ethics. The values and virtues defined by Objectivism are based upon the choice to live. One should continue to live to achieve the values one has chosen to further one's life and achieve one's happiness.

My dictionary defines "why" as "for what purpose or reason." Also, "for what cause." The question you seem to ask should be properly formulated as "what gives rise to choice?" My dictionary defines "what" as "used as an interrogative expressing inquiry about the identity, nature, or value of an object or matter." Again, this is answered by Rand in her analysis of value and life in Galt's speech prior to the quote about the two presuppositions of her morality. That is the reason she discusses such subjects prior to presenting her morality. She is justifying it by basing it on reality: the nature of reality, of life, and of man's life.

Not really. Plants and animals are biologically alive and pursue values but do not face the requirement to make the choice to live.

In Galt's speech, Rand specifically formulated her fundamental choice: In Objectivism, the choice to live means to accept that the nature of human life, qua rational being, requires specific values and virtues. It may be classified as a meta-ethical choice since pursuing rational values would make no sense without such a choice. Without such a choice, ethics would be duty-bound, a kind of Kantian imperative. The choice to live is the first choice of a volitional being to be ethical and pursue values required for a rational life. The question "why choose to live" is a question involving context dropping: "why" presupposes purpose, reason, self-esteem. On the same grounds, one cannot ask "why not choose not to live?" "Choosing life" does not carry such implications. It is open ended to any interpretation of values, to any ethics, to any living being, in virtually all situations (short of suicide). "Choosing life" simply means that one has acquired a set of values during one's existence and that one's values serve as motivation to keep going and achieving more values. Values, or thee lack of, serve to pursue similar values. In this case, motivation is a strong influence. If life is going great and one feels happy, one naturally chooses life rather than giving up. One these grounds, there may be a time when it would be proper to choose death: such as when various health or psychological problems arise in one's life. There are many ethical systems, such as fundamental religious or totalitarian doctrines, where death is what people value and choose to pursue. The choice to live does not enter into their ethical systems. Nor is the choice to live at the base of their ethics.

I think there is confusion in terminology here. "Choosing life" is not the same as "the choice to live" that John Galt mentions in Atlas Shrugged.