As to "going Galt", the earlier point of seeing the valley being a resort, a place to withdraw from "getting one's hands dirty", I find this forum to be a place to one can go and interface with like-minded individuals, develop a deeper and broader understanding of reason, logic, morality, identification of fallacies and contradictions, etc. Unlike the valley, it also brings in people who don't hold Objectivism with the same esteem, giving rise to different advocates of Objectivism adressing and dealing with them conversationally in an arena that explicitly Objectivist in nature. I find this a good thing. It doesn't mean we all agree, or that the ideas put forth are explicitly objective even if we do agree.
John Galt is credited for stating: "When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
This is a place where we can look for and find those who make reality king and insist on granting it access to the throneroom of understanding via discourse, and help one another out in that process.
As to "going Galt", the earlier point of seeing the valley being a resort, a place to withdraw from "getting one's hands dirty", I find this forum to be a place to one can go and interface with like-minded individuals, develop a deeper and broader understanding of reason, logic, morality, identification of fallacies and contradictions, etc. Unlike the valley, it also brings in people who don't hold Objectivism with the same esteem, giving rise to different advocates of Objectivism adressing and dealing with them conversationally in an arena that explicitly Objectivist in nature. I find this a good thing. It doesn't mean we all agree, or that the ideas put forth are explicitly objective even if we do agree.
John Galt is credited for stating: "When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
This is a place where we can look for and find those who make reality king and insist on granting it access to the throneroom of understanding via discourse, and help one another out in that process.
As to "going Galt", the earlier point of seeing the valley being a resort, a place to withdraw from "getting one's hands dirty", I find this forum to be a place to one can go and interface with like-minded individuals, develop a deeper and broader understanding of reason, logic, morality, identification of fallacies and contradictions, etc. Unlike the valley, it also brings in people who don't hold Objectivism with the same esteem, giving rise to different advocates of Objectivism adressing and dealing with them conversationally in an arena that explicitly Objectivist in nature. I find this a good thing. It doesn't mean we all agree, or that the ideas put forth are explicitly objective even if we do agree.
John Galt is credited for stating: "When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
This is a place where we can look for and find those who make reality king and insist on granting it access to the throneroom of understanding via discourse, and help one another out in that process.
It's not about smugness. It's not about moral superiority. Morality is what it is. You can either accept and embrace it, or try to evade it. Morailty per se does not have a nature, it is man that has the nature of being a moral being.
Establishing context, in other words? If so, I would put game theory in there, because its level of specificity may be too much for philosophical inquiry. The topic is specialized enough that while it pertains to social dynamics, you'd be seeking just consistency with Objectivism, rather than principles to devise from Objectivism. I'd leave that out entirely. Instead, adding history would be more appropriate, namely, the American Revolution and/or the Communists of Russia, and other examples of revolt throughout history. Most of the time, concretes are the means to abstract, how to find any principles to be developed. Unfortunately, I don't know much about that history. By principles, I mean a way to figure out what a proper course of action is, not a rule.
I noticed some underlying premises that you have, I'll try to address them in a day or so. I think you may overestimate importance placed on persuasion per se. That's not exactly something discussed much in any Objectivist literature I've seen, except one article Rand wrote about "What Can One Do?" with regard to spreading some Objectivist ideas. Even then, it was written as some ideas (as I recall, I read it a while ago), not as a philosophical statement on the level of what she wrote in "Virtue of Selfishness". Also, spreading ideas is different than resistance anyway, since spreading ideas is about people who can be persuaded. Not all people are willing to be persuaded.
A theory of resistence.
So, if I innoculate myself against bad ideas with good ones, this only allows me to resist bad ideas. As you stated earlier, you do not find the Objectivism persuasive at this point. So even though I've developed a resistence to socialist ideas, that does not prevent them from being implemented by the legal monopoly of the use of force which should only be used where an individual's rights have been violated.
What is the difference here? Why can I read up on Objectivism, look at reality and see that it is consistant, while you can view the same words, look at the same existence and not be persuaded the same?
This equates that truth is a product of the consciousness deciding it, or a primacy of consciousness premise. When I believed that Jesus Christ was my personal savior, it was true to me because I was not cognizant of the criteria required to ascertain something as true or false. It was an error that was derived from ignorance, perceived as correct to myself and other who shared the same framework of reference. Reality and the relationship of consciousness as a process of identification to reality was not the standard of truth, thus the product (knowledge) was not measured in such a way to be able to determine if it was actually in within tolerance or not. Without an objective standard of truth, truth becomes whatever meets the standard by which the product is gaged and measured according to.
There is no Objectivist ontology. Metaphysics as a whole is a short subject in Objectivism, so it hardly seems worthwhile to single out this specialty with its own name.
From Wikipedia: Ontology (from onto-, from the Greek ὤν, ὄντος "being; that which is", present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimi "be", and -λογίa, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
Objectivism rejects as rationalistic the premise that philosophy can specify what kind of entities can exist. What exists must be discovered. The only guidance and limitation to our thoughts on what can exist is the law of non-contradiction: "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time".(link) As guidance for what kinds of propositions to accept and which to reject, the law of non-contradiction is explicitly epistemological. Yet the counterpart statement of the law of identity that "a thing is itself" is about things in themselves and is metaphysical. One could also call it ontological but what that would add is a mystery to me.
The large aspect of classical ontology that there are basic categories of being, that they should be grouped together, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences is re-allocated to epistemology in Objectivism because Rand takes the essence of a thing to be contextual and epistemological rather than metaphysical. So there just isn't much left for ontology to do. There is mereology, the study of parts and wholes. As well as wholes and parts Rand will admit as tools for reasoning the terms entity and attribute, with the defining quality of attribute being that it cannot exist "even for a split second" independently apart from an entity. Existent is a catch-all term for everything, even relationships such as distance and force.
A creator can create a garden, harvest the food, and create many wonderful meals from it. An inventor can put together a combination that has not been previously assembled from those ingredients before, perhaps add a process not previously conceived of and thus provide a new, or previously unexperienced, culinary delight.
Producing widgets at work would be creative. Coming up with a patentable widget would be inventive.
In Altas Rand wrote: “An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge” (1016).
She continued, “to arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking.” She had already stated “a contradiction cannot exist,” which we may take to mean there are no contradictions in existence, that they do not obtain in reality. That fits with a correspondence view of truth,* but maybe with others as well (Schmitt 1995; Newman 2002; Armstrong 2004; Walker 1989; Thagard 2007).
In the next paragraph, Rand wrote: “Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.” This sounds something like correspondence, but more. By her insistence on integration, wholly rational integration, she seems be fashioning herself a determined variation on the correspondence theory of truth.
A recognition is an identification, and it looks highly likely that Rand took truth to be an identification as of ’57. She fills in that point expressly when she addresses truth again in ’66–’67. The following is her statement, which Merlin Jetton examined in Part 3 of his “Theories of Truth” (1993, 96–99).
Jetton points out that concepts and universals have a couple of correspondence characters in Rand’s view of them.
Moreover, in Rand’s view,
Jetton argues that Rand’s epistemological views and her metaphysical views “purport some version of the correspondence theory of truth.” He notes that both David Kelley (1986, 28) and Leonard Peikoff (1991, 165) classified Rand’s conception of truth as “in essence” the traditional correspondence conception. Fred Seddon notes that Rand understood her concept of truth as recogniton of reality to be a correspondence theory of truth (Seddon 2006, 42–43; Rand 1974, 14).
Jetton goes on to argue, however, that Rand’s emphasis on non-contradictory integration, as well as her metaphysics, gives her conception some of the character of the coherence theory of truth.* He quotes a passage from Peikoff (OPAR 123, which is straight Atlas and ITOE) and remarks “the similarity to coherentists like Bradley and Blanshard is clear” (98).
Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the A-S distinction*), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join.
Notice the similarity of Rand’s view, as stated by Nathaniel Branden in the Basic Principles of Objectivism lectures (c. 1968), to that of coherence theorists. In Rand’s view, he says:
Peikoff writes “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the ideas’ truth” (OPAR 171). Of that statement, Jetton writes:
Peikoff maintained that unless his proposition is true, the fact that we don’t know everything can be turned into the skeptical result that we don’t know anything. If we have no means of possessing any limited knowledge not susceptible to being shown false in the future, no means of knowledge sufficient for truth, then the skeptic can say “for all we know, all of our limited knowledge is false.”
“Logical processing” in Rand’s philosophy, as is well known, includes a lot and is essential to truth and objectivity. To know that the number of oval-head #4 five-eighths-inch brass screws I have remaining in the box, I need to count them. That process and result will require not only correspondence, but the right connections among the parts of the process of counting. Moreover, the process of counting is not only necessary; counting, with all my counting crosschecks, is sufficient for truth about the number of screws.
Truth at a conceptual level of cognition is necessarily an integration, and if it were entirely free of any misidentifications in all its network, it would necessarily be true. That is, in this limit of cognitive performance, the cognitive conditions are sufficient for truth. That is Rand's picture. I say Peikoff's establish should stand between verify or confirm, on the one hand, and constitute, on the other; therewith he was not saying something beyond Rand’s picture of ’57 and ’66–’67.
I take issue with Rand’s philosophy on the issue neatly captured in Peikoff’s statement. The “an idea” and the “the idea” will usually have evolved with the advance of knowledge. That all animals are mortal was a truth with the Greeks as with us, but what we mean by animal and mortal have been considerably revised and improved over what it meant to them. In his contribution* to Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue, Irfan Khawaja also takes issue with Peikoff’s bold assertion that objectivity as epistemic justification is sufficient for truth. Khawaja gives a quick insightful objection, which I think is incorrect (2011, 64).
I attended Lecture 6 in Peikoff’s 1992 series The Art of Thinking.* Peikoff remarked there, allowing for inaccuracy in my notes, that he does not see the preface “in the present context of knowledge” as sensible for: (i) perceptions or memory, (ii) automated conceptual identifications (table in contrast with hostility or pneumonia), and (iii) axioms (philosophical [very delimited; widest framework] and mathematical [very delimited subjects]). Saying “in the present context” in the cases where it is sensible is not proof against error. One can have been fully rational to have held views based on errors one later sees. However, error is not inevitable for the methodologically conscious adult. That is what I have in my notes.
Suppose one’s knowledge were based on perceptual observation and correct reasoning upon them, including correct use of mathematics in application to them. Then it would seem fair to say that “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171). Perfect conceptual identifications, even though not all the identity of their referents are known, if perfect in all presently known connections with observations and with all other perfect conceptual identifications, are sufficient to establish the conceptual identification’s truth. (A good study might be to contrast and compare the Objectivist view with the very local sufficiency condition of Descartes: When we have clearly and distinctly understood a proposition, we can infallibly assign a truth value to it. Then too, an interesting comparison on this point could be made between Objectivism and Stoicism [see Potts 1996, 12–13, 37–39]* and Peikoff 2012, 48.)
Leaving aside the three categories of knowledge set aside in Lecture 6, there remains much in our knowledge that is also virtually perfect knowledge, because it has been so thoroughly tested for contradiction in its many connections, and because these durable propositions have been given ever more exact delimitation with the advance of science. “All animals are mortal” or “I must breathe to live” are examples.
Even for a given context of knowledge, our integration and checking for contradictions is an incomplete work in progress. Meanwhile, we are adding new information, more context for knowledge, and beginning its integration and checking for contradiction. For all conceptual identifications in a condition of significantly incomplete integration and checking, correct logical processing (so far with go-ahead) is insufficient to establish truth (cf. Peikoff in Berliner 2012, 303–4). At first blush, this is no problem for the Rand-Peikoff view, for that just means that the knowledge is not to be rightly taken as certain knowledge.
It has seemed to me for some decades, however, that the history of science as we come to Galileo and Descartes showed that sometimes one’s experience leads one to an extremely well justified proposition in which it would have been very hard to realize that one was overstepping the evidence and that the proposition should not have been taken as certain knowledge, only as likely knowledge. Such would be the old, mistaken propositions that every moving body requires a mover* and that heavier bodies fall faster. This is a danger zone (this-worldly and rational) for the precept “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth.”
In the contexts of ancient or medieval knowledge, one could have checked the idea that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones by doing Galileo’s thought experiment. Their integrations and checking for contradictions of the idea was not complete, not perfect, even within their own contexts of knowledge. Granted these cases are unusual, nevertheless, this danger zone is there. The earlier men could have made the reasoning check made by Galileo: In imagination drop two identical bricks, of identical weight, from the same height. You know they must reach the ground at the same time. Now consider the two bricks joined, making a combined brick weighing twice as much as the two individuals. Drop that joined brick from the same height as before. The time of fall cannot be different than when the halves were individuals falling side by side. Therefore, bodies of different weights fall at the same rate. (And observations in contradiction with that result must have specific causes of their nonconformity, which need to be found.) The earlier men’s checking was incomplete without this creative check, and one would have had no inkling of that until the wise guy came along.
Rand’s picture in Peikoff’s bold statement is significantly incorrect in my view because as one’s (scientific) knowledge grows one’s knowledge of what was one’s previous context of knowledge also grows (cf.). One continues to learn what were the ways in which one's previous generalizations were over-generalizations (and in what ways they were inexplicit, indefinite, or vague). There was no reason to suppose that the Galilean rule for addition of velocities was only a close approximation to the low-velocity portion of a different rule for addition of velocities more generally, no reason until the electrodynamical results in the nineteenth century. There was no reason to post a specific caveat before then, along the lines of "for all velocities we've experienced so far." It remains that in present truth there is past truth and so forth to the future. We cannot know entirely which elements of scientific truth today will stand in a hundred more years of advance nor how those elements will have been transformed and connected with new concepts. Our repeatable experiments will still be repeatable (notwithstanding the unfounded imaginings of the Hume set), whatever new understanding we bring to them.
Peikoff is correct when he writes “No matter what the study of optics discovers, it will never affect the distinction between red and green. The same applies to all observed facts, including the fact of life” (OPAR 192).
Rand read John Hosper’s book An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis in 1960–61. Rand’s firm anchor of truth in correspondence and the primacy of existence comes through in her marginalia on truth, on propositions, on definitions and tautology, and on logical possibility (Mayhew 1995, 68–70, 75–80). Rand objected to shuffling the question “What is truth?” into “What are true propositions?”. She jotted: “Truth cannot be a matter of propositions, because it is a matter of context” (Mayhew 1995, 68).
Like Aristotle’s, Rand’s is a substantial theory of truth. It pertains to the real, the cognitive agent, and the right relation between them. It declines linguistic stances as well as deconstructionist and relativistic stances towards truth. Aristotle’s writings “present truth in the context of a multifaceted account of knowledge that includes epistemological and psychological dimensions and in which truth directly pertains to issues of meaning, reference, intentionality, justification, and evidence . . .” (Pritzl 2010, 17). Rand can agree with Aristotle that being is the single constant context of truth. She can agree with Aristotle in holding truth to be not only saying of what is that it is, but saying of what is what it is (Metaph. IX.10). However, she should deny Aristotle’s views that intellectual truth is an irreducible type of being and that “cognition is an identity of knower and known” (Pritzl 2010, 17).
I shall refer to the “coherence” strain in Rand’s theory of truth as the integration element in her correspondence theory of truth (cf. TT 2 114–17; Peikoff 2012, 12–15). Integration is essential for truth in Rand’s theory. Fact is interconnected and multilayered in Rand's picture. Fact caught in mind will be truth, and truths will not be isolated in their facts nor in their relations to other truths.
In Rand’s metaphysics, every existent stands in relationships to the rest of the universe. Every existent affects and is affected (ITOE 39). Rand does not go so far as the coherence theorist who would hold that relations to other things is what constitutes what something is (TT 2, 114).
Concerning the historical roots of the integration element in Rand’s theory of truth, I think the main root is not the coherence views of absolute idealists, nor of Spinoza before them, but the views of Aristotle.
Rand’s conception of the connectivity of facts for truth and her requirement of definitions designating essential characteristics for concepts in assertions are among the integration elements in Rand’s theory. Her theory is revised Aristotle.
Aristotle wrote that "a definition is a phrase signifying a thing's essence" (Top. 101b37). Fundamentally, "the essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself. For being you is not being musical; for you are not musical in virtue of yourself. What, then, you are in virtue of yourself is your essence" (Metaph. 1029b14-16). For Aristotle the essential predicates of a thing say what it is, what it is to be it. To say that man is musical does not say what man is. It says something truly of man, but it does not say what is man.
Thus far, Rand concurs. "A definition must identify the nature of the units [subsumed under the concept being defined], i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are" (ITOE 42). Moreover, the essential characteristic of a kind under a concept is "the fundamental characteristic without which the others would not be possible. . . . Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others" (ITOE 45).
Aristotle held that all natural bodies are a composite of matter and form. He took form, rather than matter, to be what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. Essence is a form.
Rand rejected this component of Aristotle’s metaphysics (ITOE Appendix, 286). "Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power. . . . Aristotle regarded 'essence' as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological" (ITOE 52). For Aristotle what makes gold gold or an animal cell an animal cell is a metaphysical essence, a metaphysical form. Metaphysical essential forms in Aristotle’s account are traditionally seen as universals; Charlotte Witt argues they are particulars (1989, chap. 5).
In our modern view, the essence of the chemical element gold, that in virtue of which it is gold, is: having such-and-such numbers of protons and neutrons bound in a nucleus and the electrons about it. That is what makes its further distinctive properties possible. The essence of a living animal cell is that it offsets the potentially catastrophic drive of water inward through its wall by pumping sodium ions out through its wall. That is what makes possible its further distinctive properties (distinctive, say, from a living plant cell). These essences are physical. The essence of a human being—rational animality—is physical and mental. These are all essences in Rand's sense. They are physical or mental, but not metaphysical in the form-sense of Aristotle's essences.
For Rand "an essential characteristic is factual, in the sense that it does exist, does determine other characteristics, and does distinguish a group of existents from all others; it is epistemological in the sense that the classification of 'essential characteristic' is a device of man's method of cognition" (ITOE 52). Proper essential characteristics in Rand’s theory of definitions required for truth use factual characteristics about a thing to state what it is. Aristotle, in contrast, did not take the essence of a thing to be one of its characteristics among others. He did not take it to be a characteristic of a thing. The form that is the essence of a thing, the form that makes it what it is, is prior in every way to the individual thing it makes possible (Witt 1989, 123–26).
In Rand’s metaphysics, entity, not substance, is the primary existent. Though characteristics and relationships presuppose entities, an entity is nothing but its characteristics and relationships, for entities, like all existents, are nothing but identity. Rand’s realism of definition and essence reaches rock bottom of reality, while dropping some Aristotelian doctrines of substance, essence, and form.
Rand contended that one must never form any convictions “apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge” (1961, 26). That integrated sum is one’s entire cognitive context, “the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge” (ITOE 43).
We have noted Rand’s statement “No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum total of his knowledge” (AS 1016). To the extent that his mind deals with valid concepts, “the content of his concepts is determined and dictated by the cognitive content of his mind, i.e., by his grasp of the facts of reality” (ITOE 43).
It is not the integration that makes the content true, though the integration is necessary to truth, necessary to the grasp of fact. Peikoff writes “If one drops context, one drops the means of distinguishing between truth and fantasy” (OPAR 124). That is partly due to the nature of facts. The context of knowledge is the context of grasped fact, which is a context of fact. Facts have contexts, independently of our grasp of them (cf. OPAR 123).
The contextual character of truth in an Objectivist account should be hands-on-world, rather as Rand’s essential characteristics of concepts are hand-on-world. Recall that in Rand’s theory of definition, the fundamental characteristic serving as the essential characteristic of a concept is both metaphysical and epistemological; it tells relations of dependency in the world and relations of explanation in the mind. The relations of context in the world will naturally include more than relations of dependency, and relations of context in the mind will include more than relations of explanation.
The membership relation is one relation among contents of mind that is not that relation among the mind-independent, concrete objects corresponding to those contents. That is entailed when philosophers say with Aristotle that what-such depends on this-such, but not vice-versa, or when one says with Rand that only concretes exist in reality.
The binding of membership relations to concrete factual relations, though necessarily not by complete identity with the latter relations, is surely a major impetus for integration in abstract knowledge and integration of abstract knowledge with experience. Rand’s cast of concept-class membership relations as analyzable in terms of suspension of particular values in mathematically scaled relations—relations that can express concrete magnitude relations in the world—is a grand structure for integration beyond non-contradiction. It makes the meaning of correspondence in “truth as correspondence with facts” more specific, and it accords with the success of science in improving correspondence by use of mathematics.
References
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In preparing this paper, I have benefited from discussions at Objectivist Living.
I hope to write another paper for this thread, which will be on the nature of truth in geometry.
Deciding to conform to the scientific method is a volitional act, and a relatively new kind of act in human history. Logic is part of the scientific method. Axiomatic concepts (ed: and axioms) are tested to be axiomatic by logic (must be accepted in the process of attempting to refute them). It cannot follow that volition is outside of the scientific method.
To put it into an analogy: Mind is to brain as grip is to hand.* That is, there is a noun performing a verb. Using mind as a noun can be grammatically correct, but it has the hazard of fallaciously reifying mind if one automatizes that classification of mind as thing.
*(That analogy first appeared on Binswanger's email list, though not originally by Binswanger.)
First let us unpack the idea of a type of consciousness that is not limited by a single perspective. What exists to which this concept could refer? What does not exist is a consciousness having all possible perspectives, omniscience. Setting aside the case of infinite perspectives, what exists that has even two perspectives?
Most people and many animals have a left and a right eye, each functioning separately to produce its own visual perspective. For that matter there is also a left and right ear, and left and right hand, and several square feet of skin.
But perhaps the level of the sense-perspective is not what we are after, which is "the subjective experience of consciousness". Consciousness is nothing without content, something to be conscious of. The primacy of existence is axiomatic. The remainder of consciousness after subtracting all content, what would be an intrinsic phenomenon of consciousness in itself, does not exist. Consciousness is a relationship not an entity. If we further distinguish consciousness from the sense-perspective level then all that remains that can be consciousness is the integration of several sense perspectives together. The integration of consciousness-as-integration is an integration across space (left and right hands, ears and eyes, the several square feet of skin), integration across sense modalities (hear the phone ring, turn to see it, reach out to grab it), and integration across time (through memory).
The idea then of a consciousness that is not limited by a single perspective is a consciousness of multiple integrations, integrations which remain apart and are not integrated with each other. There is a contradiction involved in settling upon a definition of consciousness as an awareness through integration and then to attempt to refer to what is not integrated as also consciousness. The only examples similar to this I can think of are a person with multiple personality disorder or demonic possession (same thing), but these are failures of consciousness not exceptions to a rule.
For the privacy issue, what would it mean to be a type of consciousness that is not inherently private? Continuing to rely upon the definition of consciousness as awareness through integration, non-privacy implies that what is being integrated is indefinite and not limited to one body linked together by the normal causal links (i.e. what is referred to is ESP or telepathy). Partial violations of the privacy of consciousness are possible by normal causal links that are gestures, speaking and writing too long messages on the internet. These kinds of breaches of privacy are limited to the conceptual level and are not a sharing of sensation or perception. So long as one consciousness is aware of another consciousness only through its own sensation and perception mechanisms there is no problem distinguishing one consciousness from another. For one consciousness to integrate with another consciousness and have direct access to its senses and percepts would mean there are no longer two distinct consciousnesses but one while they remain linked, one consciousness which remains private with respect to other consciousnesses. Privacy is the boundary between what is conscious and what exists to be conscious of, it is the border and finiteness required by the law of identity that everything exists in a particular and definite way.
Both the multiple perspectives and privacy issues turn on the principle of identity. Multiple perspectives implies a contradiction with the identity of consciousness, and loss of privacy implies a loss of identity as a distinct consciousness and is a transformation into something else.
To add an interesting thought: I think that the enactive perception of Alva Noe and his influence in J.J Gibson offers an interesting response to the Hard Problem.
For Noe, perception is non-proposition sensorimotor knowledge. We become acquainted and learn how to perceive the world around us. An organism operates by acting in its environment. In this way, we don't answer the hard problem but render it irrelevant.
I haven't followed the thread, but the primary rational reason to have children (I assume this is true of rational folk in general, not just Objectivists) is to experience and participate in the growth of a human being. One can explode this notion into all sorts of concrete ways in which one is adding a value to one's life. However, being a parent is an very time-consuming and focus-consuming job that lasts for many years. So, being a parent necessarily means giving up a fair amount of time that one would spend on other values. This is not like choosing to go to a movie, which wastes half a day at most! In addition, it is an irreversible commitment. Therefore, considered in the abstract, it can be completely rational both to have children and not to have children.
Having kids in order to have someone to tutor in your philosophy is a pretty dubious idea, and one that is almost certain to lead to gross disappointment. Of course, one will tell one's child what one thinks is true, including about philosophy. My point is only that having kids because one wants to teach someone a philosophy is a pretty irrational idea. Even more irrational is to have a kid primarily so that they take that philosophy and preach it to others. I doubt too many people have kids for these reasons, even not the more religious folk.
Isolating the quote again from Ayn Rand, "It is the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral ideal." referring to the actual emotions that such concepts as "reverence", "sacred", "holy", etc., refer to and re-paraphrasing the question "Is there a positive reason or need, if you will, for reverence?" let me meander for a bit here to try and tie a sequence of thoughts together.
Miss. Rand points out that the question at the root of ethics is "Does man need a code of ethics?" and if so, "Why."
The answer given is "Yes." for without code of morality, man would die, setting the stage for man's life as the standard of value.
Emotions are a response, a reaction, a consequence, if you will. They can provide an analytical tool for evaluating ones thinking.
I'm probably dropping many steps here, but with man having a need for code of morality, and the emotional mechanism providing feedback to assist in the evaluation of what we are confronted with at any given moment in time - reverence would not be a need as such but an emotional reward to encountering some aspect of the moral ideal.
A moral code being necessary leads to the development of a moral code which is either based in reason or is not. Regardless - the aspects of the code that are put on the pedestal as ideal, and accepted as one's sense of life is going to trigger the emotional response when it is encountered in some way, shape or form.
If we consider the emotions as a tool of cognition, or give it primacy over reason, it could seem as though reverence is indeed necessary to the well-being of a human being.
If we put it in it's proper place, the aspect that is necessary to the well-being of a human being, that is a moral code built on reason, properly cultivated should provide the emotion of reverence under the proper circumstances.
Given how much concern is expressed by the few (news, parts of the scientific community, organizations such a greenpeace) that man is somehow destroying the environment, where is the genereal sweeping sense of reverence within that?
Even so, isn't reverence an emotional response evoked within an individual? As an emotional response (response being the key word here), it is an automated aspect of human beings brought about by processing the data of the senses filtered through ones sense of life. As such, I would not consider reverence as a primary. I do not have a particular sense of reverence toward existence as such. Reverence toward something which has not earned it, seems to cheapen the meaning it could ultimately hold in ones person.
What I find fascinating is that my liberal friends make fun of the NSA or the Patriot Act as “Security Theater” and yet blink at me when I point out their economic views are the same thing. They are simply sacrificing their rights for “Economic Theater” with the promise of economic security. The only difference between liberals and conservatives being the show they want to pay for with their rights.
dream_weaver reacted to JMeganSnow in Choosing to live
dream_weaver got a reaction from tadmjones in Free Markets are for Sissies
dream_weaver got a reaction from hernan in Free Markets are for Sissies
dream_weaver got a reaction from mdegges in Free Markets are for Sissies
dream_weaver got a reaction from Nicky in A Reason for Reverence?