necrovore
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Posts posted by necrovore
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If you want to hear Ayn Rand herself talking about the subject of innocents in war, try this: https://newideal.aynrand.org/ayn-rand-on-the-death-of-innocents-in-war/
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58 minutes ago, whYNOT said:
It can't be stressed enough: the "Jewish" identity is both a race and a religion.
It should also be emphasized that the political Left wrongly conflates the two; i.e., they hold that your race determines your ideas (including religion), or perhaps that your race ought to determine your ideas, which is to say, if you don't share the ideas of your race then you're a traitor to your race, or, to put it another way, "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't Black."
This is the kind of thinking that makes things like genocide -- killing people solely because of their race -- seem necessary. If ideas are determined by race, then the only way to kill an idea is to wipe out the race that it belongs to. This can also be played the other way, and used to say that, since committing genocide is immoral, the only thing you can do if people are ideologically motivated to kill you, is to accept it, since their ideology is a product of their race and rejecting it would supposedly require committing genocide, and morally (according to this theory) it's better to be a victim of genocide than a perpetrator.
If you want to live, that choice requires proper self-defense, not acquiescence to one's own murder. So it's important to keep race and ideas separate. It's not race but ideas (including religious ideas) that cause people to want to kill each other. So sometimes the ideas need to be changed or eliminated, and if people can't be talked out of those ideas, they will act on them, and then force may be necessary in self-defense -- but a race as such is never a threat to anybody.
People whose ideas motivate them to kill large numbers of others tend to form or find governments that either look the other way, or actively assist them in killing. A government that does either is committing an act of war. It is proper for another government to recognize it as such, in self-defense and the defense of its people.
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13 hours ago, tadmjones said:
Israel would not stand for an Islamic fundamentalist state in Gaza, so what could be a possible solution ?
A separation of religion and state, and a requirement that any laws that exist have to be justified based on objective reality and reason and nothing else.
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On 9/16/2022 at 6:03 PM, necrovore said:
I was addressing the idea that "there is no possible reason the FBI would have raided Mar-a-Lago, especially knowing it would have rallied Trump's supporters, unless they knew they were going to find something incriminating Trump," because there are other reasons they could have raided.
Looks like I found one: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dc-establishment-deeply-concerned-trump-may-have-copies-his-declassified-binder
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1 hour ago, Boydstun said:
What is it in the New Testament that applauds selfishness in material matters?
This point of view doesn't come out of the New Testament; it comes out of the Enlightenment.
My understanding is that the first Puritan colonists almost died when they tried to take religion seriously, and only found success when they discovered productive work, an idea which developed into the "Protestant work ethic."
John Locke and some other Enlightenment philosophers thought that reasoning, based on reality, would ultimately lead to God -- to their conception of God. They argued that, if God made reality, to study reality was to study God. So they thought that if things could be derived from reason and reality, that was the same as if they came from God, and they thought of individual rights that way (as coming from God because they come from reality and the conditions necessary for human survival). They had a lot of confidence in the idea that they could have both reason and religion, but it turned out to be wrong, making a choice necessary.
There are still a great many Christians, especially in America, who discard logical consistency out of a desire to have it both ways. There are others who have decided that reason is error-prone, that reality is imperfect, and that both are corrupted by the Devil, so they side with religion (and the Bible) against reality. (Besides, if you can find out about God directly from reality, then "mistakes" in the Bible become evident, and the Bible itself becomes unnecessary, along with Christianity, and many Christians find that unacceptable. They'd rather say it's reality which is "mistaken.")
Sometimes I think there are two distinct interpretations of Christianity. One says that "Jesus sacrificed himself so you don't have to," that it was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the other says, "Jesus sacrificed himself as an example, so you should sacrifice yourself, too." I suspect John Locke (and the whole American system, which is largely based on his thought) would have aligned more with the former than the latter, but the debate seems to rage on to this day. (Or maybe it doesn't; it looks like the "example" side has been mostly winning.)
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Knowledge is hierarchical: you have to crawl before you can walk, algebra comes before calculus, and you can't invent the transistor until after you have discovered electricity.
The hierarchical nature of knowledge would also affect philosophy. Sometimes philosophers have to learn from their predecessors, including from the mistakes of their predecessors.
Because the human lifespan is limited and the amount of thinking a human can do is limited, there is a limit to how far one human can go intellectually. It's easier to reach any point if, due to the work of previous intellectuals, you get to start out halfway there. (You still have to verify their work, but that is much easier than having to invent it from scratch.)
Environment and society also make a difference; someone who comes up with a new idea will fare better in a free society than in a dictatorship, for example.
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Ayn Rand herself wrote about the subject of innocents in war; she had, after all, seen World War II. What do you think about the bombings of Dresden, or Hiroshima? Those affected a lot of civilians.
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15 minutes ago, AlexL said:
Is this language acceptable in this forum?
I will agree that ad hominem statements don't add any value and tend toward making the forum less useful for everybody.
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If I had neighbors who were firing rockets into a foreign country, that's an act of war, and I would expect to run the risk of being killed by the foreign country's retaliation, even though I didn't do anything, and even if I ran an orphanage full of children or something.
I would also expect my own government to protect me (and the children) by either stopping the neighbors and possibly extraditing them, or incarcerating them locally, which might be an option -- or formally attacking the foreign country to prevent them from retaliating. (This latter is unlikely. A government would probably prefer to start a war itself rather than let my neighbors drag it into one.)
It doesn't make any sense to claim that the other country is "monstrous" in some way for defending itself but that one's own country is not "monstrous" for provoking it by attacking them (or refusing to stop attacks upon them) in the first place.
The initiation of force is wrong, but retaliation is not.
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1 hour ago, DavidOdden said:
programs and light bulbs don't have the capacity for self-generated action.
Maybe I don't know what you mean by "self-generated action" here. There are a lot of phenomena which cannot start themselves but, once started, can go on by themselves. Fire is an example, and fire isn't even alive.
If you mean "free will," if you mean that a consciousness can choose its next action, then that's more complicated. My own free will is self-evident to me. Other people's free will isn't self-evident per se but it follows logically both from the fact that people speak, write, and act as if they have free will, and also from the fact that I am human and I have it, and other people are human too, so they must have it, too.
The argument from "all humans have it" doesn't apply to a machine. However, the argument that an entity could speak, write, and act like it has free will, while not having it, does not make sense, because the argument from humanity depends on the argument from words and actions. If nobody's words or actions were consistent with the idea that they had free will, then I'd be justified in concluding that I was the only one who had it. But clearly, people's words and actions do support the idea that they have free will.
Further, the only way to tell whether free will exists is by inferring it from words and actions.
Some people say that AIs don't actually have free will and are faking it. Sometimes this can be seen to be true (e.g., if an AI gets stuck in an infinite loop or something). And it's easy to write a simple program that displays "I have free will" on the screen, but that doesn't mean the program has free will.
Determining whether something has free will requires seeing its words and actions over time, and in a variety of circumstances. It's even more telling if you can ask questions and see how it answers. (That's kind of the idea behind the Turing Test, but the test can be gamed because of its limited scope.)
Suppose somebody said that some rocks obey the laws of physics, but other rocks only look like they are obeying the laws of physics, and are actually faking it. There is no basis for such a conclusion: it's arbitrary. The same thing would apply when saying that AIs don't have free will but are faking it.
If you have evidence that a particular AI is faking it, that's fine; bring it forth. But you can't say they're faking it in general, especially without evidence. If you could, then you could also say it about certain kinds of people, which historically has led to atrocities and wars.
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5 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:
What primarily stops an AI from developing consciousness in any sense is the same thing that stops a light from turning itself on.
A baby can't give birth to itself, either...
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Thats fair. However, does that mean that consciousness then could be purely physical? If so what does that mean for volition?
Volition is also an axiom -- a corollary axiom, rather than a fundamental one, because the idea of "volition" depends on consciousness. It is self-evident, and you also have to use and assert it in any attempt to deny it. You have no choice.
Everything that exists, including consciousness, acts according to its nature. How consciousness gets its nature is an open question -- but, philosophically speaking, it doesn't matter.
If you learn that a wall is made out of protons and neutrons and electrons, that doesn't make the wall go away. It's still there. You just know more about it. The same sort of thing applies to consciousness. If we learn what consciousness is made of, it is still there, and everything we already know about it is still true.
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2 hours ago, stansfield123 said:
"God's rules" are the result of men observing reality and reaching conclusions about it. Not in a perfectly organized, 100% logical manner, but the source is exactly the same (reality ... what other source could there be?), and the methodology used is roughly the same.
If it wasn't, the outcomes wouldn't be the same either. Judging an idea based on the outcomes it produces is the ultimate test of it, after all.
"Judeo-Christianity" doesn't root itself in reality, it roots itself in divine revelation. It's essentially believing that abstractions come from God, that God handed the correct abstractions to Adam and Eve, and that those ideas have been passed down through the generations ever since.
Maybe long ago there were a bunch of elite high priests who thought that if they passed off their rational conclusions as divine revelations, and encouraged the little people to obey them blindly without asking pesky questions, then everything would work better. (There are people in Washington DC who think that way today.) However, things do not work better that way: society fares better if everybody knows how to think, just like it fares better if everybody knows how to read. The high priests often end up not being any better than anybody else, and sometimes they are worse (because criminals are attracted to positions of power).
Divine revelation can succeed through plain Darwinian evolution: if your civilization's divinely revealed ideas just happen to be correct, your civilization will last longer, and be able to spread more, than if they are wrong. However, if you root your ideas in divine revelation, the correctness of those ideas cannot be checked and is just a matter of chance, and bad or mixed ideas can be "enforced" just as easily as good ones. Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's right; the bad ideas may survive as parasites on the good ones, and very old civilizations can still have bad old ideas which cause unnecessary problems, but religious societies will refuse to change bad ideas, even if reality shows them as such, unless a divine revelation comes along that they will accept.
The idea of deliberately basing conclusions on reality has existed in the West in various forms ever since Aristotle. At some level people need it in order to survive, but sometimes it is counted on without ever being formulated as an idea at all. (I suppose in that case it is not deliberate...) When it is formulated, it is apparent that it is not really a religious idea, and in most periods of history it has been unpopular and derided, especially as a means of working out highly abstract ideas (which are the most important). The most common objection seems to be that people are too stupid to figure out reality on their own and therefore should give up the attempt and trust the high priests.
This is where Objectivism is radical: it takes the idea of deliberately basing conclusions on reality to its logical conclusion.
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It's easier to argue against the American right than the American left, for two reasons.
First, the right is inconsistent, whereas the left is consistently evil.
Second, the right generally allows freedom of speech (at least about matters of politics), whereas the left generally doesn't.
I'd rather have a party that allows me to point out their mistakes than one that does not.
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Welcome back!
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13 minutes ago, Grames said:
This link still works
At best, all it proves is the existence of one crackpot.
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4 hours ago, AlexL said:OK, then show :
- where is the ad hominem in the above quote, that is what @whYNOT's argument did I answer by an attack on his person?
- same for the alleged argument from intimidation.
When you imply that someone is a conspiracy theorist, that is a statement about the person rather than the argument they are making.
Saying that someone "must be irrational if they support X, Y, or Z" can be an argument from intimidation, like "Oh, you can't claim to be an Objectivist if you believe X, Y, or Z, because then you'd be irrational, and Objectivists have to be rational." It's an appeal to Objectivist peer pressure, especially trying to say that "this is supposed to be an Objectivist board so only Objectivist points of view should be able to be posted here," etc.
And both are a form of psychologizing -- attacking a statement by going into the mental state of the person making it, instead of attacking it by comparing it to reality.
If you want to show that some statement X is mistaken, then you have to show why without reference to the person making the statement.
If you want to show that a statement is arbitrary then you need to show that no evidence, of any kind, could establish its truth or falsehood -- that it is "detached from reality" in the specific sense that reality wouldn't make any difference to it.
(It's possible for something to be arbitrary "in practice" and to prove this by using other facts about the world to establish that it is arbitrary; it is valid, for example, to say that a statement is arbitrary because the current state of technology is such that nobody could know today whether it is true or false -- even if in principle it might become known someday. This is how you deal with the claim of the teapot orbiting Venus.)
Finally, it's not always possible to prove something definitively on any sort of forum. This is why civilization as such sometimes requires people to agree to disagree. It is also one of the reasons why freedom is important. There can be a difference between what you know and what you can prove to others.
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6 hours ago, AlexL said:
He sees the generally pro-Ukraine position of the mainstream Western media as being a result of the activity of a centrally-driven propaganda machine - a conspiracy, IOW. He sees no other possible explanation.
The tactics I am using with him is to challenge him to prove his claims with facts. He never does, thus confirming his irrationality, but this doesn't bother him, nor does it bother the moderator...
This is nothing but an ad hominem and an argument from intimidation.
The whole debate is about which facts to use, because if someone can cause facts to be discarded, or lies to be treated as facts, they can rig the argument to produce any result they want, even without changing the principles.
The "mainstream Western media" has learned that they can get perquisites by going along with the party line; the government, which makes news whenever it changes its policies, can reward obedient reporters by giving them scoops. This has been true for a long time; Rush Limbaugh's radio show cited example after example after example (of reporters uncritically repeating what they were told by leftist politicians). I see no evidence that this situation has changed, and much evidence that it has gotten worse. I also see no evidence that the situation is any different with the Ukraine issue than any other (such as gun control). That the media lies is not a "conspiracy theory." It is very real, and has been going on for decades.
I do not agree with @whYNOT about everything, but I very much disagree with the notion of censoring or canceling everything and everybody that "goes against the mainstream." Ayn Rand also went against the mainstream, and if she were to have written her novels in today's environment, no one would know about her.
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There's a difference between having doubt about a particular issue -- which can occur normally in the course of learning -- and having doubt as your philosophy.
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On 8/25/2023 at 12:51 PM, whYNOT said:
Is a new party called for? One with no baggage from the past?
Somebody (maybe it was Gus Van Horn, but I don't remember for sure) observed that because the U.S. has a "winner-take-all" political system, parties in the U.S. are more like the "coalitions" in other countries. Creating a third party (or running as an independent) tends to split the vote and therefore help the people you like least.
It would make more sense to create an organization just to promulgate ideas, which is what ARI was originally intended to be, but the main problem is that legal entities (including non-profits) can only exist with the blessing of the state, that the state increasingly makes its blessing conditional, and that the conditions increasingly are being set by Establishment leftists to the advantage of leftism and/or the Establishment.
(I think the ARI was intended to "infiltrate" the schools and universities, but now I sometimes wonder who has infiltrated whom...)
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6 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
Have you considered fleeing the country?
That's a really mean thing to say.
The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor?
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