dream_weaver

Thanks Nicky. I've jumped the gun here and will have to take this into future consideration.

I looked at that blog post. It's either a transparent attempt at rationalization, or someone posing as an expert when they're not. The Koran isn't made up of books, chapters and verses, like the Bible, it is made up of chapters and verses alone. There is no need to specify both the name and number of a chapter.
All the blog post author needed to do is a quick google search to figure out that plenty of Muslims cite the Koran by chapter number and verse alone. Same goes for everyone who takes some Christian blogger at their word that they're an expert on Arab culture. Even if there is some kind of pedantic rule that says how the Koran should be cited, it's pretty obvious that most people don't follow it. That's usually the case with those types of rules, in every language and culture.

P.S. Can these obviously Muslim vandals please stop with the silly apostrophes? If you're too lazy to learn Arabic (the way your religion requires you to) and write the Arabic word properly, like so: القرآن, then just write English. There are no apostrophes in the middle of words in English. It's either Quran or Koran.

Up until this point 12 people (lots?) have indicated a selection from the choices offered. I selected "Slightly significant".
 
This is based on interactions primarily observed in grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, and work. Network television was eliminated as a source of information for and by me back in December of 1995. My alarm clock is tuned to a local AM news station but mostly for weather reports. This leaves word of mouth and internet as my primary sources of what is happening in the world.
 
The word of mouth stories convey to me that the network media has a vested interest in "racism" playing a more significant role than it probably does. While following the Ferguson events as they unfolded, few showed little desire to discern what they had observed from what they had heard (social metaphysics?).

If urban warfare is coming home, it is because the lines are already blurred.
 
In a case like Ferguson, the reaction is fueled, not by careful consideration of the facts that culminated in the incident, but from folks who see Michael Brown's body lying in the street and draw conclusions based on unquestioned rationalizations of why the world is unfair, how justice is never served, others are just out to get us - a sort of dog eat dog mentality.
 
The response is shackled by miscarriages of justice, where an officer is punished for doing his job by a culture that does not fully understand what his job entails. The two officers in Detroit imprisoned for doing their job, because the perpetrator dies, not from an injury sustained in an attempt to take the officer's gun, but a heart failure brought on by years of substance abuse.
 
Israel's handling of Hamas, notifying when and where a strike is going to occur to allow people to leave the vicinity, have repeated found munitions stored in schools. This is a case where their enemies are purposely using children as shields to protect themselves from otherwise legitimate retaliation. Israel puts the safety and security of their citizens at risk bending over backwards to ensure that "no child is left behind" in a target zone.
 
Upholding and protecting individual rights is the purpose with which a legitimate government is charged, not the ensurance that an innocent is never injured or killed in the maintenance of that charter.
 
In Germany, where the "innocents" allowed to leave, knowing that a war was taking place, that it might not be safe to remain? If not, are the allies to be held responsible for their deaths, or the government that forbade their seeking higher grounds?
 
If a crowd of people gather and stick around while Molotov cocktails are lit and hurled at police - by sticking around (during and after), are they sanctioning the action of the perpetrators of such an activity? Is such a sanction an act of innocence?
 
It seems to me that what is being asked here is when should someone who blatantly violates individual rights be granted immunity simply because they discovered that using an innocent individual(s) as a shield(s) will shield protect them from the otherwise just consequences of their action?
 
Edited: Added, removed.

If urban warfare is coming home, it is because the lines are already blurred.
 
In a case like Ferguson, the reaction is fueled, not by careful consideration of the facts that culminated in the incident, but from folks who see Michael Brown's body lying in the street and draw conclusions based on unquestioned rationalizations of why the world is unfair, how justice is never served, others are just out to get us - a sort of dog eat dog mentality.
 
The response is shackled by miscarriages of justice, where an officer is punished for doing his job by a culture that does not fully understand what his job entails. The two officers in Detroit imprisoned for doing their job, because the perpetrator dies, not from an injury sustained in an attempt to take the officer's gun, but a heart failure brought on by years of substance abuse.
 
Israel's handling of Hamas, notifying when and where a strike is going to occur to allow people to leave the vicinity, have repeated found munitions stored in schools. This is a case where their enemies are purposely using children as shields to protect themselves from otherwise legitimate retaliation. Israel puts the safety and security of their citizens at risk bending over backwards to ensure that "no child is left behind" in a target zone.
 
Upholding and protecting individual rights is the purpose with which a legitimate government is charged, not the ensurance that an innocent is never injured or killed in the maintenance of that charter.
 
In Germany, where the "innocents" allowed to leave, knowing that a war was taking place, that it might not be safe to remain? If not, are the allies to be held responsible for their deaths, or the government that forbade their seeking higher grounds?
 
If a crowd of people gather and stick around while Molotov cocktails are lit and hurled at police - by sticking around (during and after), are they sanctioning the action of the perpetrators of such an activity? Is such a sanction an act of innocence?
 
It seems to me that what is being asked here is when should someone who blatantly violates individual rights be granted immunity simply because they discovered that using an innocent individual(s) as a shield(s) will shield protect them from the otherwise just consequences of their action?
 
Edited: Added, removed.

Dr. Lockitch's presentation Creationism in Camouflage: The "Intelligent Design" Deception presents a case where theology is "evolving" in it's struggle to survive in a hostile environment toward outright mysticism.
 
Spinoza lived in a time when openly advocating an impersonal metaphysical grasp of causality was treated hostilely. By cloaking "the fixed and unchanging order of nature" as "God's direction", Spinoza creates a camouflage for an Aristotelian view of causality to survive in a hostile environment where more reasoned approaches were springing forth.
 
It is interesting to me to note that his elucidations came forth during a time where Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton all made their marks.

On the grounds of my last post, I am locking this topic.

Both "Nothing is Everything" and "Non-existence is Existence" boil down to "Non-A is A".
 
From the middle of page 60 in ITOE, Ayn Rand captures this brilliantly in her concise identification as follows:
Observe the fact that in the writings of every school of mysticism and irrationalism, amidst all the ponderously unintelligible verbiage of obfuscations, rationalizations and equivocations (which include protestations of fidelity to reason, and claims to some "higher" form of rationality), one finds, sooner or later, a clear, simple, explicit denial of the validity (of the metaphysical or ontological status) of axiomatic concepts, most frequently of "identity."  (For example, see the works of Kant and Hegel.) You do not have to guess, infer or interpret: they tell you. But what you do have to know is the full meaning, implications and consequences of such denials—which, in the history of philosophy, seem to be better understood by the enemies of reason than by its defenders.

On the grounds of my last post, I am locking this topic.

Why don't you ask God to help you understand? Did he stop talking to you or something?

Rand and Peikoff both present why existence, identity and consciousness are axiomatic and that the axioms are reaffirmed in any attempt to deny them. (Aristotle's reaffirmation through denial.)
 
Am I supposed to pretend that you are appealing with reason here? I've already pointed out that "I've grown weary of discussing the "what" with you when the "how" is adhered to in such an ad hoc manner."
 
What you are presenting is a thinly disguised version of the  "reification of the zero." (see ITOE, toward the end of Chapter 6).

It occurs to me here that it isn't that existence and universe are incomplete concepts, rather you have an incomplete grasp of how to form them. What you need is an epistemological housecleaning. When you tell me that "You decide. I cannot decide for you, so my job simply amounts to persuasion.", draws the parallel that you need to do your own mental housekeeping, nobody can do it for you as a pseudo live-in maid.

Based on pictures of Michael Brown taken from social media (pictures showing him holding a gun, stacks of money, and flashing gang signs), he was either a gang member or at least an aspiring gang member. 
 
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/08/breaking-michael-brown-was-a-local-gangster-seen-flashing-gang-signs/
 
Even if that's the case, seeing him die is still a horror for his family I suppose, but you really can't say it's "out of the blue". 

I didn't provide any definitions. Those are propositions, or premises as you accurately identify in the previous quote following this one.
 
I do find a certain sense of irony in the postscript. 

There are few here, that I am aware of, that are considered "professional" philosophers. I'm a draftsman by trade and profession. Even within the craft of draftsman, I specialize in applying measurement theory (consider it a form of measurement inclusion, rather than of measurement omission.)
 
I do not specialize in automobile repair. I hire specialist to work on my automobile. If I required legal counsel, I would hire an attorney. A unique aspect about philosophy is that I cannot hire a professional philosopher to do my philosophical thinking for me. I have to adopt my own abstract principles (a tough science to master) in order to apply them to the particular concrete situations that I encounter.
 
It is by philosophic principles I evaluate a potential mechanic, attorney, dentist, etc., as being qualified to defer the requirement of learning how to do a particular task for myself to a specialist.
 
Philosophy, on the other hand, does not work this way. Each individual has to learn to evaluate what Is true or false for themselves. Epistemology is the science which deals with such a task, and no epistemologist can perform this task for you. To let someone else decide what is true or false for you is to default on the responsibility of determining such an important issue for yourself.  Essentially, it would amount to taking somebody else's word for granted, or on faith.

There are few here, that I am aware of, that are considered "professional" philosophers. I'm a draftsman by trade and profession. Even within the craft of draftsman, I specialize in applying measurement theory (consider it a form of measurement inclusion, rather than of measurement omission.)
 
I do not specialize in automobile repair. I hire specialist to work on my automobile. If I required legal counsel, I would hire an attorney. A unique aspect about philosophy is that I cannot hire a professional philosopher to do my philosophical thinking for me. I have to adopt my own abstract principles (a tough science to master) in order to apply them to the particular concrete situations that I encounter.
 
It is by philosophic principles I evaluate a potential mechanic, attorney, dentist, etc., as being qualified to defer the requirement of learning how to do a particular task for myself to a specialist.
 
Philosophy, on the other hand, does not work this way. Each individual has to learn to evaluate what Is true or false for themselves. Epistemology is the science which deals with such a task, and no epistemologist can perform this task for you. To let someone else decide what is true or false for you is to default on the responsibility of determining such an important issue for yourself.  Essentially, it would amount to taking somebody else's word for granted, or on faith.

There are few here, that I am aware of, that are considered "professional" philosophers. I'm a draftsman by trade and profession. Even within the craft of draftsman, I specialize in applying measurement theory (consider it a form of measurement inclusion, rather than of measurement omission.)
 
I do not specialize in automobile repair. I hire specialist to work on my automobile. If I required legal counsel, I would hire an attorney. A unique aspect about philosophy is that I cannot hire a professional philosopher to do my philosophical thinking for me. I have to adopt my own abstract principles (a tough science to master) in order to apply them to the particular concrete situations that I encounter.
 
It is by philosophic principles I evaluate a potential mechanic, attorney, dentist, etc., as being qualified to defer the requirement of learning how to do a particular task for myself to a specialist.
 
Philosophy, on the other hand, does not work this way. Each individual has to learn to evaluate what Is true or false for themselves. Epistemology is the science which deals with such a task, and no epistemologist can perform this task for you. To let someone else decide what is true or false for you is to default on the responsibility of determining such an important issue for yourself.  Essentially, it would amount to taking somebody else's word for granted, or on faith.

You ask: "Is it one existent?" Why didn't you phrase it "Are they one existent? Are they two existents?
You address existence as "an it" while playing the "inability to distinguish singular from plural" card. Just as "it" can be used in a singular or plural sense, so there are other terms that do as well. "Existence" just happens to be one of them.
 
The fact that we exchange posts contradicts your claim that you are being ignored.
 
The issue is one of communication.
The desire to be understood burdens the one trying to communicate the responsibility of discovering how best to communicate their idea.
The desire to understand places the responsibility on the listener to seek clarity on the points they do not grasp.
 
With that in mind, note that you are on a forum that geared toward a specific philosophy. Are you really surprised that what you are presenting, and the manner in which it is presented, are not being embraced with open arms?

I just wanted to make an observation on a Friday leading into, hopefully a great weekend..
 
 
We have all heard the statement "The truth will set you free".  This is somewhat of an insipid bromide, and it pertains mostly to the relief of the cessation of evasion, self-denial, or dishonesty.  Relief from the guilt and the stress/worry of being caught or from being in a state of dis-integration.  The relief from the self inflicted problems of vices is not like setting one's self free, it's more like taking one's hand out of the burning fire he never should have idiotically placed his hand into.
 
For us Objectivists however this statement, used in a different context, reflects a reality few non-Objectivists, if any, would understand.
 
We all (almost all) were raised in and indoctrinated with religion, false dichotomies, evasion, disintegration, duty, rationalism, intrinsicism,.. these all create actual mental prisons.  Prisons in the sense that they restrict freedom of thought and action in ways which are not rational, valid, properly justified, nor in accordance with reality, and from which the prisoner, to the extent of his ignorance, is helpless to escape.  When one discovers the truth, the Axioms, what morality IS, what rights are, i.e. Objectivism, even though the structures around us remain, the religions, the statism, the public consensus in irrationality etc., one nevertheless has been literally, albeit only mentally and spiritually, set free by that discovery.  In this way the truth HAS set you free.
 
On a Friday perhaps it is a nice thing to remember in the face of all of the coercion and unjust initiation of force upon your lives... .at least you have found a way, the truth, to free yourself from the mental and spiritual prison you once occupied!
 
Have a great weekend!

Whoa! As intriguing as this first appeared, I now find myself asking: "if I have the choice to program a machine to 'defend' itself.", what if my idea of a program for 'self-defense' includes a parameter that is not ultimately morally defensible?
 
From a sci-fi aspect, adding programming that somehow presumes a "recursive" function to correlate with morality is one thing (i.e. free-will), but to build in a cart blanch function to defend against destruction  . . .
 
Did Isaac Asimov take these kinds of considerations to this level of depth?

We'll have to convince the Jewish Illuminati to relinquish their control of the Fed in exchange for us removing our tin foil hats.

The presentation was amazing. However, it totally changed the way I see the theory of concepts. Binswanger says that it should be: pre-perceptual stage first (not separate sensations), then perception, conception, and then sensation as conceptually defined. His view of awareness as the base of consciousness and as an organic, unified field (!) matched my view of awareness as I described it before, except now awareness is all (pre)perceptual. He totally removed any kind of judgements, such as how we perceive words and know their meanings, because knowing the meanings would not be perceptual but conceptual. Overall, his excellent presentation made me better understand the theory of concepts beyond ITOE. I heartily recommend it to everyone.

Perception is essentially the ongoing continuum of what you are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching.
 
For 99 cents, ARI offers Harry Binswanger's presentation called Perception. His self identified theme of the lecture is "Perception is perception." Part of the first paragraph of the description:
The perceptual level of awareness, which man shares with the higher animals, is the incontestable base of all knowledge. Objectivism provides an understanding of perception that differs radically from the representationalist and subjectivist views infecting all philosophy since Thomas Aquinas. In this lecture, Dr. Binswanger explains the actual nature of perception, contrasting it with three widely held misconceptions about perception--misconceptions that make the concept of "objectivity" impossible and cut man's consciousness off from reality.
 
Perception is not going to get you very far in conversation though. You see an object moving through the sky flapping it wings with a head on one end and a tail on the other - you learn to recognize the basic shape and motion of the wings and identify it as a "bird". "Bird" is the only first-level concept in description. You could point to instances of actual physical birds you see - and refer to them, one after another, as "bird".
 
A curious child is likely to see birds flying - watch them for a while, perhaps see one on the ground hopping about, and then see it take off in flight - or notice one on a limb of a tree either prior to taking off in flight, or flying to and landing upon a branch. The child hears the flapping of the wings, the chirping, warbling and cooing sounds made. All of these perceptions are wordlessly isolated by the child, and integrated together as belonging to the same (similar) enitity(ies). Wordlessly: "All the things I saw that entity do belong together somehow." Then, pointing to a bird one day, he asks "What's that?" to his mother. Upon learning the word "bird" the child can associate the all the perceptions associated with the actual physical birds he recalls having seen up to this point in time with his now completed concept designated as the word "bird".

There appears to be a slight vitriol here toward Capitalism, and more directly toward Objectivism.
 
Historically, the Luddites became known for attacking what they did not understand. When the labor-saving device made their debut on the scene, naturally these machines where built to perform the tasked being performed of the day, only more efficiently than what was being performed tediously and less efficiently.
 
Did the Luddites embrace this new advance in the application of reason to the problem of production? Quite contraire. The proud new owners of these fine pieces of machinery enabling higher productivity than previously possible often found themselves the victims of vandals.
 
The mechanical weaving loom embodied the new knowledge of the time. It was attacked by those who desired things to remain the same. In this sense, the Luddites resisted change. The Luddites did not want to change. Their response was to try to destroy the physical symbol of this change, in their feeble effort to stop the change. Now while they were successful at destroying others private property, new machines were being produced and innovations implemented along the way to improve their efficiency. Unfortunately, sometimes the owners of these machines were attacked instead of, or in addition to.
 
What has any of this to do with Capitalism or Objectivism? The analogy is apt. Keep in mind, the mechanical loom was the embodiment of the new idea. The owners were savvy enough to recognize the benefit it would bring them. Before the idea could be embodied into a machine, or another mind recognize the potential it offered, it first had to be discovered. This is key.
 
Capitalism has never been given a full political test run, but still continues to operate to this day, The black-market, which runs when arbitrary decrees seek to throttle various aspects of it, arise under nearly every political regime, where a full embracement of Capitalism is verboten.
 
So what do the modern day 'Luddites' have to fear? It is simple. The moral underpinnings that will support Capitalism in the future, the same moral underpinnings that ground Objectivism as a philosophy proper to man. To paraphrase Ayn Rand speaking through John Galt, morality needs to be discovered. Well, Miss Rand has discovered the foundations for morality. The opponents of this morality may obfuscate, misrepresent, and even muddy the waters - but the waters will settle, the misrepresentations will be exposed, and the feeble evasions exposed as attempts being unclear and confusing at best. This does not wayside the fact that such a morality has been discovered. While Aristotle's Law's of Logic were relegated to relative obscurity for nearly a millennia, it is hard to fathom Miss Rand's discovery being relegated to the same fate.
 
A misapplication of "A is A" along the way is, quite simply, a misapplication of "A is A" along the way.

I'll respond to the OP, for the sake of the original poster:
 
First, the idea that something "pops into" and "out of existence" are stolen concepts.  Mass and energy as well as a myriad of various other quantities, charge, momentum, lepton number etc. are conserved and/or in some cases converted one to another (e.g. mass <---> energy) but strictly speaking no physicist has actually observed anything actually going "out of existence" or "coming into existence".  Particles can annihilate top create energy and excess energy of particle interactions can lead to particle antiparticle pair production  but this is not "something from nothing" nor "something into nothing"... it is a change in the forms of existents - the sum total of the universe does not change: the universe cannot become "the universe minus one" or the "universe plus one" so to speak. 
 
As for randomness, nothing philosophically speaking can strictly and logically rule it out nor strictly and logically rule it in.  Causality, for subatomic particles and for conscious beings, as a corollary of the law of identity, requires only that a thing act in accordance with its nature, i.e. it cannot act not in accordance with its nature.  So for some things, being identically as they were, and in the exact same context, "could have done otherwise than they did".  This is what some people mean by the property of "free will" which is exhibited by complex existents like human beings.  This also is claimed to be exhibited by things such as electrons or photons changing states on interaction: the claim being they could have changed to another state (spin up instead of down or polarization orientation etc.) according to some probability (which we use to describe them).  In this way the possible outcomes and the probabilities are determined by their nature/identity but the particular outcome is not determined by their identity (determinism of course holds the opposite view).
 
Einstein would deny this "it could have done something different" as evidenced by his statement "God does not play dice..." to subatomic particles, and materialists who deny free (adhering to determinism) will deny the same "it could have done something different" as exhibited by more complex conscious systems: humans.
 
As long as the range of possibilities and probabilities are dictated by the nature of the electron, photon, or human, i.e. as long as the actions are in accordance with identity, then some randomness within those constraints is possible within the Objectivist philosophical framework.
 
In fact, Objectivism's validation of "free will" as a fact of reality strictly and logically speaking presupposes that a material (non supernatural) entity (which happens to be complex system) can act (all actions are caused, none are uncaused) in such a way that it "could have done otherwise".  As such the universe is not deterministic.