IDC

I have "State of Fear" sitting beside my bed, waiting to be read. First must complete 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I was disapointed to read that the main character is a bumbling idiot, but maybe it will be ok.

There are no proper arguments there to refute, it's just some unpleasant personal attacks. I would just try to ignore it. Cheers Ian

I don't think Dr. Peikoff meant a mathematical interpretation of "total" there. You have to take the whole context, he just meant that the universe is everything that exists. Also I don't think anyone here disagrees that the universe is the collection of existents and nothing more. A is A, therefore existence is the many, not the one. But since existence actually is the many and the varied, you can't attribute a particular attribute to all that exists without scientifically cataloguing it all first (as the quote from AR stated). All you can say about the universe as a whole is the basic stuff, such as it exists and it is what is it. Maybe if we ever did catalog all the existents (somehow) we would find there is another similarity, but that is certainly not currently feasible, and may even be philosophically impossible, I'm not sure.

I think The Durande is treating mass as different to other attributes. Just because there are yellow things in the universe, he would not say the universe as whole is yellow, but he thinks it is OK with mass because mass is something you add up. The mass of a set of N objects is the sum of the masses of the individual objects. So you can attribute mass to the universe as a whole by observing only one object (his laptop) that has mass. But Alex is saying it is not valid to consider the universe as a set of N objects in the first place, because you are stealing the concept of "number."

When I saw Mr. Incredible in his cubicle, it did make me think of Roark. But I was really surprised to go on the Internet and hear people calling it Randian. It just goes to show how superficial most people's grasp of Objectivism really is. As to the movie, I was bored to death. It saddens me deeply that this wretched shell of a thing is so well regarded. I'm going to go and mope...

If you want to see Natalie Portman (from Closer) in a good movie, try _Where the Heart Is_ (2000). It is the story of a poor pregnant teenager and her struggle to make it, and it quite heartwarming. Some of the pleasant surprises (from an Objectivist point of view) in the movie: the notebook, the baby's name, the portrayal of WalMart.

I second that recommendation. I read those two earlier this year and they were great!

I really liked Vanilla Sky. It's one of those movies that makes you step back and take a look a your life from a wider perspective than the usual daily grind. I agree with argive99 that the skyscraper scene was touching. "Look at us. I'm frozen and you're dead, and I love you." "It's a problem."

OK thanks for that, I didn't realize NY had a Conservative Party quite apart from the Repubs. But I still think it is a pretty similar situation: Bush is a conservative (even though on the Repub ticket) and his opponent has the same kind of policies she listed for Moynahan (nationalized health insurance, centralized economic management). And she said she would vote for the liberal "anytime." The US was supposed to be a country with intellectual freedom and small government, we all know this. The small government thing is a lost cause ever since the passing of the income tax. All that is left is the intellectual freedom. I know you will ask for the evidence that Bush is a threat to the intellectual freedom, and I can only point to his professed Christianity and what Christians traditionally have done to intellectuals.

I haven't seen the new one but I've seen the original. So they replaced the communists with corporations as the villian? I guess Ayn Rand was right about communist infiltration of Hollywood - maybe the influence still lingers.

The questioner wanted to know whether to vote for a liberal or a conservative Republican. They thought that even though the conservative was the worst philosophically, that they at least wanted free market policies, and that their philosophy wouldn't have much practical effect "in the real world." Here are some quotes from Miss Rand's reply: (Buckley = conservative, Moynahan = liberal) "Anyone who denies the right to abortion can not be a defender of rights, period." (i.e. can not be the government) "The Conservatives have decided to be Trojan horses [to the Republican Party], the way the Communists were against the Democratic Party..." "The Conservatives will then take over the Republican Party and we'll just have liberals and conservatives. Which will mean: liberals and fascists, because that is all that the religious conservative group is - they are pure fascists. They might leave you some freedom to work - for a while. It is intellectual freedom that they want to cut, actually many of them advocate censorship. For example their drive against the movies. Now that is the choice between Mr. Buckley and Mr. Moynahan." "Therefore an 'ally' who comes close to you but starts from opposite premises, is much more dangerous to you than a mild enemy." (because when they screw up, Capitalism takes the blame) "I would vote for a liberal over Buckley anytime." "Buckley is the trojan horse, out to destroy any hope that this country ever had of a return to freedom and actual capitalism, actual free enterprise." "I'm not going to vote not particularly for Moynahan, but against Buckley - we've got to get him out of there." "In the real world where you have to look at things long range, which means philosophically, you have to get that conservative out of Washington - he got in by a fluke, get him out by every legitimate means you can." "Please, in the name of philosophy in the real world, and not philosophy in the hereafter, vote Buckley out. That is my suggestion, my advice, philosophically." She seems to be really, really against Christian Conservatives in Government...

Anyone who has access to the Philosophy of Objectivism tapes by Leonard Peikoff should listen to the question period of Lecture 5 in relation to this question. In it Ayn Rand talks about the dangers of religious conservatives and it is very interesting.

There seems to be quite a lot of support for Bush here, but which is worse? Someone who does bad things within a system (such as Kerry and Nationalized health) or someone who trys to destroy the system (such as Bush and separation of church and state)?

Yes, I have skipped movies because of the political views of the actors. I probably should be able to ignore it, but I can't. I wanted to buy the Mission to Mars DVD but have resisted for over a year because Tim Robbins is in it.

Even if you establish that a particular behavior will follow from a given attribute don't you still have to show that all members of the concept will have that attribute? To do that you would need to show that your subconscious will not dredge up the word "table" unless the object in front of you has that attribute. So you need to introspect to find out what it is doing - you need to know what attributes are triggering the word "table" are what are being omitted and therefore not.

I always get INTJ on those tests too. What does it mean? Why are so many Objectivists INTJ?

Well...immaterial is not the same as non-existent. So even immaterial things are something (A is A) with a certain range of actions. I don't think there is any inherient reason why material and immaterial objects can't interact. So maybe what we focus on as a consciousness, through some mechanism causes physical neural connections etc to be formed in our brain creating our personality/memories, but I don't know what the mechanism is, just that we can't rule out the existence of such a mechanism philosophically.

Bowzer, If claiming context is all that is needed to validate induction, then what has Leonard Peikoff been working on all this time? "On the basis of all available evidence" I have to conclude that there is more going on here... Regards Ian

When we form a concept we omit measurements of commensurable characteristics. We don't do so consciously (we don't consciously think "well...erm... I'll omit this, no wait - this!") we just look at enough objects and our mind forms a concept subconsciously, all we have to do on the conscious level is pay attention to or focus on enough similar objects. Consciously we also give the abstraction a name. So doesn't the validity of an induction depend on what exactly our mind did subconsciously? It omitted certain measurements - is there any concievable value for those measurements which could make the induction false? For example, I concentrate on a lot of similar objects causing my subconconscious to create a new file folder which I label "table." The first five tables I encounter I throw in the river and they all float, so I induce that "all tables float." Then later I see a metal table. I recognize it as a "table" even though it is made of metal. I throw it in the river and it sinks. How could I have known before that point, that my induction was wrong? If I consciously identified what measurements my subconscious had omitted, I would have realized that it had isolated the bizarre spider like shape of tables and that it wouldn't care what the thing was made of. If I also knew, from work in another field, that shape combined with material effects whether a thing floats I could have known in advance that "all tables float" was a false induction. Wait a sec... am I being rationalistic here? The only difference being speaking in terms of the subconscious formula instead of the conscious defintion, but still saying the equivalent of "if its not in the definition then it can change?" Because even though the subconscious formula allows for a metal table (it contains a "variable" in the material slot) - that is not proof that there is any such table. So I still could not know in advance that the induction was false.