necrovore

I suppose I should skip to the end: the whole purpose of "proof" is to establish truths for the purpose of guiding people's decisions, which presupposes that people make them. So without free will there is no need of "proof."

What does it mean to "establish" a fact or truth? As opposed to the fact or truth simply existing. Why does it matter whether a fact or a truth is "established" or not?

If there's no free will, how do you define "proof"?

Even though things like X-rays are out of the reach of our senses we can infer their existence from evidence. So what's the noumenal domain needed for? Sounds to me like it's nothing but a cover for bullshit.

I didn't say her principles were correct because she identified them. I said she showed how to derive them from objective fact.

Individualism does not equate to being able to rewrite reality. Ayn Rand did not hand out a set of "commandments," and even wrote that such a thing was offensive. She did identify principles of morality. She claimed that they were derivable from objective fact. She showed how to derive them. This is similar to the way Newton identified principles of physics. Newton is not opposed to individualism merely because he came up with Newton's Laws and then claimed they were universal and not subject to individual choice. Newton, like Rand, showed how he came up with his principles. The description of how is more important than the principles themselves, but his work would have been incomplete if he had merely described the "how" and left the principles themselves to implication. So it is with Rand. The identification of Newton's Laws was a major breakthrough in Enlightenment thought because it showed, on a scale never before seen at that time, the power of the mind to grasp reality. Ayn Rand's morality does the same thing (although historically later). Her principles are not meant for the kind of "blind obedience" that religionists encourage from people. If some people take her principles that way, it's because those people have probably grown up with religion and they don't know any other way to handle such principles. People new to Objectivism sometimes enthusiastically graft it onto what they already "know" without realizing that they're still acting on unidentified anti-Objectivist principles. (Then others observe their behavior and think it's Objectivist behavior when it isn't.) Newton was obviously not meant for blind obedience, either, and it was not the final word on physics. Future discoveries made Einstein possible (and necessary). The same thing is probably also true with Rand. There are probably moral principles yet to be discovered, that apply in situations Rand didn't consider, but they would still have to be validated by reference to reality and the requirements of human life. (Besides, applying the principles correctly, to your own circumstances, can require considerable amounts of "thinking for yourself.")

Hold it right there... Ayn Rand is not responsible for misunderstandings or misrepresentations of her views, even popular misunderstandings. Unfortunately it is fairly common for some people to misunderstand her views, and then for some others to hold that those misunderstandings are actually her views, when they are not. It is better not to accuse people of holding certain ideas unless you know what you are talking about.

As I said, I think the refutation of Kant is just a sideshow. Speaking for myself, I feel like I did my further-looking before discovering Objectivism. Kant, I suppose, had his chance. Objectivism isn't rooted in Rand, it's rooted in reality, or at least it's supposed to be. I suppose it is possible to claim that Objectivism is wrong about reality. Some Objectivists are wrong about reality from time to time. This occasional wrongness is actually normal, coming as it does out of human fallibility. I think the correct answers will come out in time. But that is not the same thing as claiming that reality is inaccessible (or that certain parts of it are inaccessible).

Here's a good article from John Eastman, who represented Trump before the Supreme Court concerning the 2020 election, about some of the information he was given in the course of doing his job: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/most-secure-election-american-history-john-eastman Interesting read!

PWNI doesn't mention Kant by name. It does illustrate the practical consequences of certain philosophical ideas -- if and to the extent that you take them seriously and try to apply them in a given situation. Even Kantians can somehow manage to make it to the store and buy groceries, even though their minds allegedly are incapable of understanding the store and the groceries as they really are, and can only understand them as they appear to be. In a sense the astronaut is an exaggeration just to make the point. In another sense, though, the whole problem with certain philosophical ideas is that you can't take them to their logical conclusions without causing disaster to ensue... and if that's the case, there must be something wrong with those ideas. I don't think that's "vilification." That's just calling attention to a problem. (Of course I don't think the real intention of those bad philosophical ideas is for people to go all-in with them -- rather, it's to use them as an excuse or an escape hatch whenever they want to do something irrational.)

I am not going to say that it is, because it would require a very large scale full-text search of both Rand and Kant. Peikoff did say that Kant had "occasional fig leaves," which means we can't say that Kant was wrong about everything. (I suppose a complete lie would be more easily rejected than one that verifiably tells the truth some of the time.) We can say that Kant was wrong about fundamental ideas -- like the whole division into noumenal and phenomenal worlds. On fundamental ideas, Rand and Kant are completely different. If Kant were right about something, his fundamentals would tend to undermine it (sort of like if someone were saying that 2+2=4 because of extraterrestrials). Rhetorically, at least, I'm sure there were places where Rand would take the other side of one of Kant's formulations. But if she were to say that 2+2=4 she would probably (rightly) leave Kant out of it, even if he said the same thing at some point or other.

In the above quote, Ayn Rand lists a series of facts, but she does not do any deduction, she does not apply any abstract principle, so there cannot be any "fallacy." Also, you won't get anywhere by starting with Kant. A valid argument starts with reality -- not in the middle of anyone's philosophy (Kant's or Rand's). My understanding is that Kant's noumenal realm was just a space that he intended to be filled with faith and Christianity. He himself claims there is no way to reach it from reality, which is why he thinks faith is necessary, but that need for faith is probably why more secular-minded philosophers rejected it. However, it doesn't matter, because Rand's philosophy doesn't depend on Kant at all. Her arguments against Kant are a sideshow made necessary only by the popularity of Kant; her philosophy stands on its own even without those arguments (and without Kant).

Productivity itself is context-laden, and in fact it is you who are taking it out of context. Something that causes a loss is not productive, it is counter-productive. False. There is no such thing as excessive pride. Arrogance is false pride, it's a pretense, because it doesn't have the reality to back it up. False. Emotional repression is false rationality, it's a pretense that consists of evading one's emotions. False. A workaholic lifestyle is a pretense, not an excess, and it does not lead to productivity.

All I have is my own history, which is only one data point. I was raised with Christianity, but ended up rejecting it. I went through seven or eight (philosophically) tumultuous years before discovering Objectivism, and I discovered Objectivism by accident. I never went through a phase where I thought the two were compatible. The lack of such a phase could have been in part because the flavor of Christianity I grew up with was fundamentalist; it guarded itself jealously against other flavors of Christianity; it rejected the other flavors as "people making up watered-down versions of Christianity in order to allow themselves to commit their favorite sins." So I could not entertain the idea of compromise. I had to be "in" or "out." I could not unsee the problems I saw, so I was out. I did try to hang on to the idea that God might exist, even if not the Christian conception of God -- until Objectivism showed me otherwise.

Technically, when a person dies, their remains continue fine, too! I think Galt is contrasting inanimate matter to life itself, not to animate matter. Living matter can die, but it is the life which goes out of existence, not the matter; the matter remains but is dead. Matter (or more precisely mass-energy) can change its forms but it cannot cease to exist. Matter can become part of a living organism or can become no-longer-part of a living organism. But a life can come into existence, e.g., when a person or animal is born, and it can go out of existence, when the person or animal dies.

There is such a thing as "agreeing to disagree" but this requires both sides to give up the use of force. Giving up force means that persuasion has to be used instead, which gives the long-term advantage to reality and reason. Some people don't want reality and reason to win. Others just don't want to wait; they think they have the advantage when it comes to force, so they seek to use it.

I'm not really talking about ignorance per se, I'm talking about the unknowable. In order for your free will to "go away," you'd have to know the unknowable. That's an entirely different thing from learning new facts of which you were previously ignorant.

As far as I know, the claim that determinism is "useless even if true," is my own argument. (I don't see it in the Objectivist literature either.) A useless determinism does not convert free will into an "illusion." Saying that it does is the same sort of argument that says that, because tables and walls are really made of atoms which are mostly empty space, the solid tables and walls that we see are "illusions." They are not. The solidity of tables and walls is a fact that arises out of the nature of the entities involved -- the atoms, the forces between them, and the fact that our bodies are also made out of molecules. Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.

Even setting aside the fact that one's own free-will is self-evident, I think the whole concept of "determinism" is flawed. It proposes that "if you know the entire state of a thing, you can predict exactly what it will do next." Although nature follows laws, these laws are averages, and there are always sources of noise. The gas laws for example arise from the random motions of innumerable particles. They are an average. There's no way any conscious could "know" the positions and velocities of all those particles. The amount of information is too big, even without accounting for "quantum weirdness." Some systems such as analog computers are capable of "unpredictable" behavior such as "strange attractors," where the system amplifies variations that started out being too small to measure, and thereby becomes unpredictable. This is also known as the "butterfly effect," wherein a (hypothetical) butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could eventually cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It is possible to use the thermal noise of a resistor to generate unpredictable random numbers. As for humans, there's no way you could know the state of someone else's brain -- in your own brain. Is your brain twice as big and only half-full, to have room for the other person's brain-state? How long will it take you to memorize it? But even that wouldn't be enough because you'd need additional brain-power to think about the state of their brain, to make your prediction. That doesn't even cover their sensory input, which is also a factor in what they do next. Also, they would carry out the action you are trying to predict faster than you could predict it. We can form and use abstractions. Abstractions throw information away. We can use them only when the information thrown away (or not known in the first place) is demonstrably unimportant. If you want an exact prediction, you can't throw anything away, because of the butterfly effect. So when they say, "in principle, if you knew the state of someone's brain," or "in principle, if you knew the state of every particle in the resistor that is being used to generate the random numbers," that's like saying "in principle, if two were equal to three..." because nobody could know the state of someone's brain or the state of all the particles relevant to the resistor noise. The "principle" of determinism is therefore useless. It only exists because of religion and the religious conception of "punishment," which assumes a God and His followers who should punish people for making wrong choices. Saying that something wasn't your choice is a legitimate excuse. Saying that nothing was your choice is the ultimate generalization of that excuse. Determinism also seems to require a God who could "know" all this stuff, because no real consciousness could know all of it. I think it's right to reject the notion of "punishment," but determinism, being useless, is not the right way to reject it. I do accept free will, and I also accept the notion of self-defense, which requires keeping murderers in prison (as a form of retaliatory force) because they're not safe to let loose. Self-defense also requires exercise of judgment: if you want to prosper, you have to protect yourself and the people and things you care about from crooks and incompetents, which means having to determine who they are and how to deal with them (if at all). But this does not require "punishment."

The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct? The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith. The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality. These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith. If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings). Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians. -- There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct. Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too. Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons. But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?

The term "gaslight" comes from a play, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Light. The other one, may be defined here? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Run the Table I suspect the lack of blogs is because people had to shut down their blogs because of the crowd who believe in imposing "consequences" for speech. It can be dangerous to run a blog if one's views are unpopular with certain people (even more so if the blog can be tied to your real name). I used to have a blog (which I never linked to from this site) but deleted it for that reason.

There used to be a lot of bloggers aggregated here, but Gus seems to be the only one left.

I do seem to recall (from some older articles) that many jurisdictions had laws requiring that all real estate agents had to be Realtors, so much so that people began to forget that Realtor was trademarked and not a generic term like "lawyer." I do not know if such laws are even still on the books, but even if they were or are repealed, it is still likely that the National Association of Realtors would have a lasting advantage from their existence. If the market is open to competitors then prices should stabilize even if no competitors appear (the mere threat of competition is often enough to stabilize prices). This kind of arrangement is similar to laws requiring that cars be bought through a dealership, which Tesla has gotten in trouble with, or laws that grant city or county monopolies for cable television. Such things are of course products of the "mixed economy" and are violations of the separation of state and economics (a principle not recognized by law at present).

I do not advocate any of these things. I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do. Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.) I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them. I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement. Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it. Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large censorship moderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.) Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.

I should add something: this whole topic about what to allow on this forum is essentially philosophical and, more specifically, epistemological. If this is an Objectivist forum then it should practice the Objectivist epistemology. An essential feature of the Objectivist epistemology is the rejection of evasion. Objectivism requires the integration of all facts. It does not countenance the propping up of false abstractions through the suppression of counter-examples or counter-arguments. It rebuts false arguments, by identifying them as false (or in some cases arbitrary or irrelevant), but it does not evade or suppress them. Rebuttal should not be hard. OPAR shows that it's possible to use abstractions to group arguments and rebut them all in a single blow, e.g., by identifying an argument as "Primacy of Consciousness." Banning people from the forum because of their arguments is evasion of those arguments, pure and simple. (But it is proper to ban things which are not arguments, such as spam or harassment etc.) The people who run this forum are free to run it however they want, just like they are free to evade in their own minds if they want. But when they start burning heretics, they aren't acting like Objectivists anymore. (Further, such action incorrectly suggests that Objectivism is no different from any other philosophy or religion).