itsjames

What is pleasure actually? Are you talking about a purely physical pleasure? If so, this sounds like a floating abstraction. Give an example if you think not. PS: I assume you don't mean emotional pleasure, since your emotions follow from your evaluations. To say "X is good because it gives me emotional pleasure" begs the question of why you evaluated the thing as good in the first place.

Just in reply to your first post Gwen, it seems like you're assuming men are infallible. Even if all people were honest and conscientious about working to learn the truth of a given matter, that doesn't mean they will arrive at the truth. It takes an effort to think and to conform to reality precisely because failure is a real possibility.

Rights are natural in the sense that they can be derived from facts of reality: the requirements of long term human survival in a social setting. But they aren't natural in the sense that they exist independent of man, eg. growing off a tree. They are principles, they don't exist until they are formed and understood. But I think there's a slight difference in the usage of the word when someone says "my rights". That to me implies that they are living in a society which has granted them their natural rights. If they aren't living in such a society, then they don't "have rights".

For what? You should take their perspective into account when forming a moral evaluation of them, but when it comes to choosing your actions I think you should only be concerned with the world "as you see it".

If it wasn't for the "wall", I don't think I would have any complaints. The whole purpose of a "wall" is mass communication, which aside from emergencies and event invitations, I don't see a point to. Even if you're posting a message on someone else's wall that's supposed to be specifically for them, any of your friends or their friends can see it and tell you whether they "like" it or not or post a comment of their own. If people thought about what they posted and were interested in carrying on thought provoking conversations on their walls, then I could see the benefit in that, but that's not really how the medium is set up. The text boxes are small, there's like buttons all over the place, and there's so much other stuff going on on the site that people won't even read your posts if they're too long. Most of the posts I read are just people's immediate reactions to other posts. Sure it's nice to see what your friends think of a video or a link occasionally, but does any of this matter enough to be spending time doing it on a regular basis?

I don't think this quite answers it. What about having a vision of the world where everyone respected everyone else's rights? It's the particular vision they have that's the problem. Like trying to eliminate world hunger or having any kind of equality on a mass scale. At a psychological level, I think a lot of it is too much "putting yourself into other people's shoes".

Like what?

Friendships, and any kind of relationship for that matter, are not free. They require energy, sometimes money, and always time. When you call up a friend do see how he's doing, your spending your time and energy and in return you get pleasure in the form of a sense of companionship, or perhaps inspiration. And the fact that your friend is using his time and energy to talk to you makes it even better. It's nice to know our friends care about us. I think this is what friendships, meaningful friendships, are about. This is not what I feel when I go on Facebook. (Yes, I have an account. Still trying to figure out whether it's worth it.) On Facebook, each user is spending time and energy, not towards any one person, but towards an immense diffuse sum of "friends". You can go from profile to profile sending messages and looking at pictures of different people as quickly as you want so that none of those resources have to be wasted on any single person. You don't log on to facebook to talk to or keep tabs on a single person, but rather people in general. This seems a little fishy to me. At the very least, I think Facebook is watering down the concept of "friend".

Here are three other simple realities: Everyone eventually dies. Pain exists. Pleasure doesn't last. And here are three others: Life exists, and we are alive. We have the capacity for pleasure. Pain never lasts. These are all true statements, but they represent totally different views of reality. I think the question to ask is, "What are the essential truths?" What should we be focusing on? What is important and what isn't?

I'd highly recommend the Disney movie Bolt for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's about a dog who thinks he's a superhero until one day he finds out he's just an actor who plays a superdog on TV. It's a movie about learning to be yourself and being a hero regardless of what anyone says. Here's the IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397892/. You pretty much can't go wrong with CGI animated movies, but this one is my personal favorite.

Great quote, Amaroq. I agree too that most people wouldn't feel bad for the clam, since the seagull is merely acting for its survival. If only people had the same respect for human survival and all that entails....

You shouldn't choose your actions based on whether you already "want" to do them. Wanting something doesn't mean it is good for you. For example, you may want to eat breakfast at McDonald's every day and NOT WANT to make your own, healthier breakfast. Both life and happiness require a specific course of action, and neither is granted to you merely by satisfying your desires, whatever they may happen to be. A better formula is to learn the underlying reasons for your desires, and to only act once you're decided that they are good (rational) reasons.

I'm confused as to what the purpose of the hierarchy is supposed to be. Is he making an observation about how people do act or how people should act?

In one of the quotes in the beginning of the Fountainhead, Ayn Rand says that men are born as essentially moral beings, seeking a noble vision of man's potential and greatness. Most men become corrupt later in life (sometimes still very young) when they learn to evade. Eddie Willers was not an evader. He chose his values by his mind to the extent that was possible to him. So he was still morally pure. If he had OPAR and all of Ayn Rand's works to study from, he would not have been a Christian (not that he actually was supposed to be one in the book, I don't even remember that honestly). In short, since you've said that you've read OPAR, there's no excuse. You need to establish all of your values by means of thought. You're not living in the same pre-Ayn Rand days that Eddie Willers lived in. Ayn Rand was probably one of the greatest benefactors of humanity in that she provided us with an essentially fully integrated philosophy of life. Before reading OPAR, choosing certain values by means other than thought wouldn't necessarily mean you were evading, but if you've read OPAR honestly, you no longer have that excuse. It took a brilliant mind to create the philosophy of Objectivism, but once you've been exposed to it you have a very high moral responsibility to strive to understand it and to live up to it. What's more important, being annoying to "conventional people" or living your life to it's fullest on your own terms and by your own mind because you know you're right?

I tried reading some of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but I honestly couldn't even get through the introduction (or whatever the opening chapter by Kant was). I was straining my mind just trying to grasp the definitions for all the non-objective concepts he was using. Do you skip around when you read him, or do you read it straight through?

I don't know about the chimps, but to Ayn Rand rights were a "means of subordinating society to moral law". So I think to say one has a "right to life" is really just a positive way of saying "You shouldn't initiate force against other men." If you're not convinced that the initiation of physical force is evil, it's covered in OPAR and Ayn Rand's essay on Ethics.

How's this: A thought is a concept as grasped by a human mind. An emotion is an automatic response which proceeds from the evaluation of an existent.

Do you at least agree that there is a necessary distinction to make between a concept like "life" and the concepts of "existence", "consciousness", and "identity"? The difference between these latter concepts and a concept like "life" is that the latter concepts are implicitly grasped much earlier on because they require an integration of fewer units. From the first thing we perceive (be it our mother, the ceiling of the hospital, or whatever) the concepts of existence, identity, and consciousness are implicit in our minds, even if it takes years for us to state them explicitly in words. The concept "life" on the other hand requires much more. There would be no need for the concept "life" if there were no other organisms on the planet aside from yourself. (There would still be a need for existence, identity, and consciousness though.) "Life" is an integration of lots and lots of perceived units: ourselves, our parents, cats, dogs, birds, fish, bacteria, etc. Such a complex concept can't be grasped, even implicitly, until much later in life. Regardless of what you choose to call axiomatic, the fact remains that there is a necessary distinction between the concepts of "existence", "consciousness", and "identity" and concepts like "life".

I wasn't using "reduction" in the sense of reductionism, I was using it as Ayn Rand did. Reduction, as she defined it, is a method of verifying a concept's grounding in reality by reducing it to the percepts on which it's ultimately based. And axioms, as Ayn Rand defined them, are concepts which cannot be consistently refuted, because any attempt to refute them implicitly assumes that the axioms are true. This isn't the status of the concept "life".

I've been watching this anime series called Heroic Age lately, and I've completely fallen in love with the soundtrack. Here's a link to the main theme. The composer is Naoki Sato.

Reduction is the method of explaining a concept in terms of simpler (closer to the perceptual level) concepts step by step until it's brought back down to the percepts on which it's based. The fact that life has a definition means that it can be reduced to the perceptual level. Life is a process of self-generated self-preserving action. All the concepts used in this definition can be reduced to percepts. To say that this reduction "eliminates the emergent properties which constitute life" is to make the mistake of thinking the definition may be substituted for the concept. But that's not the purpose of definitions. All definitions have to do is distinguish the concept from all others. From what I can see, your argument could be used to claim lots of other concepts as being irreducible as well. Man, for instance, is defined to be "a rational animal." But we just feel like there's something missing from this definition, like something has been eliminated, like it doesn't totally sum up mannness....But it's not supposed to. It doesn't have to completely explain all the properties of man (which would be impossible) it just has to distinguish men from the other animals. And the fact that each of us is an instance of the concept "life" doesn't make it axiomatic either. We can only identify ourselves as being "alive" after making observations about other living organisms. On the other hand, our implicit grasp of the concept of consciousness is inherent in any observation we make. So I think that is the difference.

Why not? Life is not an axiom. It's a concept which can be reduced to perceptual data, ie. explained in terms of simpler "non-life" components. Ayn Rand had a famous quote saying something like, "Existence can't be explained in terms of non-existence" and "Consciousness can't be explained in terms of unconsciousness." But that's because these are axioms. I don't see how you can say the same thing for something like "life."

I was reading one of the quotes at the top of the forum main page a few minutes ago, when something occurred to me. Is it proper to quote individuals with whom you disagree with on fundamentals, when the specific quote you're using supports your position on an issue? The purpose of a quote is usually to offer a short and eloquent statement of a belief on a particular issue which was said by a well known person. The way I see it, there are two deeper reasons one might quote another person. The first is because the quote is eloquent and you want to acknowledge the person whom you're quoting to give them credit. The second is because you want the name of the person you're quoting to serve as a stamp of approval on the belief, like saying "I must be right, because this great guy thought the same thing." This latter reason is obviously irrational, no matter whether you agree with the person you're quoting on fundamentals or not. But the first is trickier. Personally, I wouldn't want to go around quoting Hitler on anything he said even if I happened to agree with that particular thing. And even with someone less evil, if I disagreed with him on how he came to believe what he said, ie. if I disagreed with him on fundamentals, I wouldn't want to quote him. I'd rather come up with my own way of stating the same thing, because I wouldn't want to give him credit for just happening upon the correct belief when all his underlying beliefs were wrong. The thing is, I really like reading the quotes at the top of the forum page. I like to read what the positions of all these famous people were just because it's interesting. But that isn't the typical setting under which you hear or see people being quoted. Normally I think people have an agenda. Is there something I'm missing here? I'm really curious what you guys think about this.

For me, the big challenge has been going back and rethinking the definitions of a lot the abstract concepts with which we deal regularly and checking to make sure those definitions are grounded in reality. I'm constantly identifying, differentiating, and integrating everything I observe, which can be quite taxing. But it is very rewarding. It's the best feeling in the world to understand everything around you and feel that you are truly in control of your existence.