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dream_weaver

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    dream_weaver reacted to AlexL in Russian invasion of Ukraine/Belief of Mainstream Media Narrative   
    You alleged that the Ukraine government “is run by a neo-Nazi gang”. I’ve asked you to prove it. I even suggested you a specific method: by naming the top government officials who are Nazis. Or you could list the specifically neo-Nazi policies of this government.
    You did neither of these. Neither have you done it in any other proper, i.e. rational, way. Evasions, misrepresentations and ad hominems are NOT arguments.
    Therefore: do you intend to prove that allegation? And make only claims you can prove?
    Otherwise it will mean that you intend to continue to contaminate this forum with putinist propaganda.
  2. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to EC in Russian invasion of Ukraine/Belief of Mainstream Media Narrative   
    I think the person in this thread complaining about O'ists getting too much info on this subject from the MSM has been getting too much of his own info (nonsensical conservative propaganda) from Tucker (who I like in many ways even though he's a lunatic about this subject which is objectively evil Russian aggression, war crimes, and atrocities that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich). This is WW3's (let's call it by what it actually is) of the shit the actual Nazis did during WW2.
  3. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to AlexL in Russian invasion of Ukraine/Belief of Mainstream Media Narrative   
    You wrote:
    > [the] Ukraine government [is] run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion)
    > [the] Ukrainian government is […] mainly RUN by a minority of Nazis known as the "Azov Regiment" or "Azov Battalion"
    1. You provided no proof of this claim, you only evaded the request of providing proof by mentioning the government’s corruption, human trafficking, and money laundering. All these do NOT prove your claim.
    2. By "Azov Regiment" or "Azov Battalion" you seem to mean some kind of a political party, heavily represented in and dominating the Ukrainian government.
    Whatever the case may be: specifically, what members of the Ukrainian government do belong to this “Azov Regiment" or "Azov Battalion" ?
    And please don’t recommend me watching/reading someone else’s work to look myself for proof of YOUR claims! This trick doesn’t work with me.
    Be also aware that I am knowledgeable enough on the subject of Ukraine (and Russia and so on), so be careful about what you do claim on these subjects: I will ask for proof.
  4. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Russian invasion of Ukraine/Belief of Mainstream Media Narrative   
    The Invasion of Iraq by the US military under GW Bush was an agression and deserves condemnation, notwithstanding American-govrnment claims in the runup that Saddaam was producing bioweapons (seeing what one expects to see? psychological projection?). Same with Russian invasion of Ukraine under Putin. I rely on regular sources of information ("mainstream media") for report of the circumstance that no facilities for such weapons production were ever found and that Americans qualified to discern them were on the ground looking for them and for a very long time. I'll stay with regular sources that have the "narrative" that men really landed on the moon, that the 9/11 attacks occurred and were not instigated by US government agents, but the Bin Laden gang, over internet mining for sayings bolstering my political wishes and indicating my secret, unsung smarts. Iraq had not attacked the US. The latter was the aggressor. Ukraine had not attacked Russia. The latter was the aggessor.
  5. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Reblogged:Zubrin on Safety of Nuclear Power   
    Zurbin's Defense of Nuclear Safety
  6. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to KyaryPamyu in Great Description of Objectivist Metaphysics   
    EF, as a student of aesthetics, my research regularly leads me to thinkers like Schelling and Whitehead, which see nature as a living organism or super-subject, contra the so-called mechanistic or lifeless view.

    Since I'm using the base of Objectivism to ground my thinking about subjects such as art, beauty and personal freedom, I always find myself thinking about how those who hold the view of nature-as-living would react to arguments about the primacy of existence, the derivation of concepts from percepts, and so on.

    I can't pinpoint your overall worldview yet, but so far there seem to be some themes. You do seem to believe there is a world out there, albeit you claim that the sensations which reach you are integrated by an act of thinking, which was the fashionable view in Kantianism, but not much in line with the current science. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that the manifold of mental contents must be seen as belonging to one single subject (my consciousness), that this necessitates distinguishing between what is subjective and what is objective in experience, and that this in turn depends on representing what is objective (from out there) according to rules which belong to the objects and not to your will: causality etc.

    You also mention the double-slit experiement, which allegedly shows that consciousness affects the world in some way, and in another thread on this forum you mention a disagreement with a purely 'undirected' emergence of life. This would be more in line with a consciousness-first view, such as the one in the OP.

    I am asking out of curiosity if you can describe your view in some essentials, especially: if the universe emerges out of a consciousness; or if a Nature-as-intelligence gives rise to all particles, chemistry, life and consciousness as it gropes (consciously or unconsciously) for some end goal, like self-consciousness.

    It could also be that, for you, nature is an objective absolute, but it simply can't be known through perception, and for instance, the double-slit experiment is merely true for how things apppear to your mind and not indicative of some fact about nature.

    In your opinion, does your view solve some inadequacies or 'evil' implications of materialism, biological evolution or Aristotelianism?

    If there are some books on your worldview (it could be that it's actually an original view of yours), they might be of interest to future readers of this thread. It is a monumentally important topic, since all forms of departing from the existence-as-absolute view depend on showing that some ideas are innate or created by the mind, independent of perception.
  7. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to KyaryPamyu in Great Description of Objectivist Metaphysics   
    It's not the whole story.
  8. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Great Description of Objectivist Metaphysics   
    @Boydstun, I wasn't thinking on the margins, when the thrust has been more of a general attack on perfection, as a more general concept. With refrigeration, you have a grasp of what can't be achieved. In circularity and straightness, acceptable levels of perfection can be stipulated and maintained/produced. Even with such a specification, it is known (abstracted) what the level of deviation is a referenced of.
     
  9. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from The Laws of Biology in Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism?   
    Why, @The Laws of Biology, do I get the impression you tend to view man as a helpless plaything of natural forces beyond his control?
    You posit some stark contrasting views, then leave them hanging as if they are unresolvable. You're well read, but you seem to be adrift on your sea of information. 
    Man is a moral agent. His mind need ascertain what is right and wrong, and not by a consensus based on the fact that not everyone uses language like the nominalist or the subjectivist. 
    You are oscillating,at times, between a benevolent and a malevolent universe premise. 
  10. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism?   
    If one holds that Objectivism is a philosophy for living on earth, the question of 'saving the world' or 'saving others' should only come up in the context of what value the 'world' or 'others' have to you as an individual.
    Living in a rational society provides benefits that could not be acquired living on an uncharted island or a struggle to be self-sufficient off the grid. Personally, I like growing a small vegetable garden, even though a portion of it often gets pilfered by the local wildlife. It reminds me of how convenient it is to have grocery stores that rely on professionals that grow much of the world's food much more efficiently than I can on a modest suburban lot.
    For what it's worth, @The Laws of Biology, The Psychology of Psychologizing is available at the ARI Campus. It reminded me of how Hank Rearden offered Lillian (among others) the benefit of the doubt at so many steps along the way. It ties in with part of Galt's Speech as well:
    "While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.
    Man, by the grace of nature, is a moral being. And with another H/T to Miss Rand, she saw it too when she expressed in her essay Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World:
    There is a tragic, twisted sort of compliment to mankind involved in this issue: in spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.
  11. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from The Laws of Biology in Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism?   
    I can provide some earlier thought Ayn held on the nature of psychology from her first journal.
    All instincts are reason, essentially, or reason is instincts made conscious. The "unreasonable" instincts are diseased ones. This—for the study of psychology. For the base of the reconciliation of reason and emotions.
    As to psychology—learn whether the base of all psychology is really logic, and psychology as a science is really pathology, the science of how these psychological processes depart from reason. This departure is the disease. What caused it? Isn't it faulty thinking, thinking not based on logic, [but on] faith, religion?
    All consciousness is reason. All reason is logic. Everything that comes between consciousness and logic is a disease. Religion—the greatest disease of mankind.
    [bracketed] were added in a later edit by someone other than Rand. She had also revamped her notion of religion from "the greatest disease of mankind" to "a primitive form of philosophy" along her way.
    As to Rand's position on the subconscious being carte blanch dismissed as mysticism, that does not gel with the fact of her recognition of the phenomenon, and such a hasty conclusion on your behalf might not be warranted on the matter at this time.
    Given her track record, and the track record of those who interpret her, I lean toward trying to understand and integrate based on what is available from her and by her.
    She went on to hold instinct as an automatic form of knowledge, but another passage that has caught my attention more than once over the years wraps up this May 16, 1934 entree:
    Some day I'll find out whether I'm an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy? Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence.
    Things that could make one go "hmm?"
  12. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to KyaryPamyu in Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism?   
    LB,
    Rand's point is that whatever out-of-context desire, drive or motive the subconscious spits out, it will always get overwriten during the process of raising one's awareness of the situation at hand, and noticing that the 'drive' will prevent you from getting something you want. It's in this sense that mystic impulses and subconscious drives are basically the same principle.
    Rand was a pretty good psychologist, going by the testimony of close associates that were helped by her. 'The Romantic Manifesto' is chock full of examples of how one's childhood events, way of thinking and other factors influence one's psychology. Except, she thought that one can identify the source of one's mental disposition through meticulous introspection.
  13. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to StrictlyLogical in Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism?   
    Identifying and discouraging insanity or insane ideas might be acceptable activity.
  14. Thanks
    dream_weaver reacted to Harrison Danneskjold in That Kelley Creature   
    Since the other links I posted do not appear to work:
     
    On Moral Sanctions by Peter Schwartz
    A Question of Sanction by David Kelley
    Fact and Value by Leonard Peikoff
  15. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in That Kelley Creature   
    Two clips from an interview with David Kelly by Mark Scott from March 6, 1992.
    More David Kelley and Objectivism (03-06-92)
    The second clip may be of more relevance to this conversation with an endorsement by Mark Scott for David Kelley's book "Truth and Toleration."
     
  16. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Doug Morris in That Kelley Creature   
    Rand's contention with the libertarians at the time dealt with the superficial use of terms, i.e., freedom applied as a floating abstraction to justify a whim. If memory serves, it was this in conjunction with selective quoting of her writings in an attempt to ride on the coattails of the credibility she had established for herself that drew the bulk of her ire.
  17. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Objectivist Mechanical Engineers   
    I saw a reference to the material as "Rearden Plastic" elsewhere.
  18. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Objectivist Mechanical Engineers   
    Twice the strength of steel and one-sixth the density of steel: MIT
    I am grateful to philosopher Neera Badhwar for notice of this important development.
  19. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in In the Gathers of the World   
    Stream
    Only this racing stream
    insisting, existing
    its bed, course, and cargo,
    its downward and inward,
    its wide, wide tomorrow,
    its lastly vast salt sea
    and this bright smiling we.
  20. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in In the Gathers of the World   
    Is Love
    As thunderheads to thunder,
    as starling sky to wonder,
    as swaying trees hold under,
    as howling wind, up-ender,
    as surrender, as splendor,
    is love.   
     
  21. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to KyaryPamyu in [W]hat is the objective basis of politics?   
    In other words, natural science. The common classification of sciences is into three branches: formal (such as logic, mathematics), natural (chemistry, biology) and social (psychology, economics).
    I go with Rand in classifying a science as philosophical if it's realistically needed by everyone regardless of their occupation, interests and other considerations. In the essay The Objectivist Ethics she laments the lack of a scientific ethics and arrives at one by observation of facts, not experiments. 
     
  22. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in That Kelley Creature   
    Some selected elements form Galt's Speech. [M]an's reason is his moral faculty. A rational process is a moral process. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality[.] The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed.   Interestingly enough cult is utilized in Galt's Speech as well.    The more I've examined the speech the more it appears to be an advocation of morality in distinction to what drove her to ask "why" of existence and let nothing stand in the way of what is surely perplexing to many who have yet to put their proverbial finger on it, the "inverted morality" that has gelled over the millennia while advances in other areas of thought provided the magnificence that has risen.    The term cult is better applied to where efforts to understand are not being applied, than to delineating what are the essentials that warrant applying the effort(s) required for understanding.
  23. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Group Theory and Physics   
    Tolerance, or precision of 0.01%, or in terms of the 800 lb gorilla (ha!) to 1.5 oz. Is that 800 lb ±1.5 oz, or 800 lb ±0.75 oz for a total range of 1.5 oz? 
    And while investigating the more easily relatable example of precision, a quick check of 800 lbs equates to 12,800 ounces of which 0.01% is 1.28 ounces. 
  24. Like
    dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Rand and I contra Kant   
    ~J~
    In 1975 Rand composed an essay she titled “From the Horse’s Mouth.” She had been reading a book by Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) titled Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrines, published in 1898 and translated from German to English in 1902.
    The horse Rand was referring to was Immanuel Kant. She took Paulsen to be “a devoted Kantian” giving a fair reflection of Kant in this book, a modest commentator in comparison to the stature of the originator of the system that is transcendental idealism, but a philosopher parlaying Kant’s ideas in an exceptionally honest way. She took Paulsen’s Kantian views at late nineteenth century to illustrate what she took to be the fundamental cause—philosophic influence of Kant—of twentieth-century progress being, in her estimation, second-rate in comparison to what had been accomplished in the nineteenth century. Indeed, she took the Kant influence to be the reason one could no longer go to the theater and expect to find a great new play such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), rather, productions such as Hair or Grease.
    In the Preface of the second edition (1899) of Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine, Paulsen lamented that belief in ideas, such belief in ideas as Kant and Lessing had exhibited and imparted to the nineteenth century at its beginning, had “gradually given way to belief in the external  forces and material goods that now dominate our life. Nevertheless, as in families the grandson may resemble the grandfather, so it may perhaps happen in history; perhaps the twentieth century will be more like the eighteenth than the nineteenth.” Not that Paulsen hoped for a revival of the intuitionistic formalism in ethical theory (Kant) of the eighteenth century.
    Alongside being a philosopher (metaphysics, knowledge, ethics) and historian of philosophy, Paulsen was a famous conservative educator and commentator on current affairs in Germany. He saw at the turn into the new century a “general breakdown of traditional patterns of authority and respect” (Aschheim 1992, 37). That was why, according to Paulsen, the youth were so attracted to Nietzsche.
    Rand was correct in her essay when she described Paulsen as an admirer of Kant, but she erred in taking Paulsen to be a Kantian. Neither was he a post-Kantian, which anyway is too revisionary of Kant to pass off as genuinely Kantian. No, the correct classification of Paulsen would be post-idealist, meaning following on the entire load of German Idealism. Paulsen had been a grad student under Trendelenburg, a major late German-Idealist.
    A few months after Paulsen’s death, Frank Thilly, composed a review essay titled “Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence” (1907). Thilly had been the graduate student of Kuno Fischer and Friedrich Paulsen. Thilly had translated Paulsen’s most important philosophical work A System of Ethics (1889) into English in 1899. 
    That is, Thilly translated the first three of the four books constituting that work. Those three books come to over 700 pages. Paulsen’s critique of Kant’s duty-consumed and a-prioristic-intuitionalistic ethics runs to 13 pages; it is not different than the critique Rand and others would make across the decades since then. The ethical views that Paulsen himself espouses are not Kantian.
    In her essay, Rand did not seem aware that in Paulsen’s view it is the effects of an act that make it right or wrong, contra Kant. Then too, Paulsen rejected hedonism. It is life, not pleasure that is the ultimate good. The proper end of the will is action, not feeling. The highest good of human life is its objective content, including perfection of psychical powers and including pleasure (Thilly 1909, 146). “The highest good for man, that upon which his will is finally directed, is a complete human life; that is, a life that leads to the full development and exercise of all capacities and endowments, particularly the highest, the mental and moral capacities of the rational personality” (quoted in Thilly 1909, 146–47).
    The highest good “consists in the perfect development and exercise of life” (Paulsen 1889, 251).  “In the moral sphere, every excellence or virtue [positive ones, not absences of wrong] is an organ of the whole, and at the same time forms a part of life; it is therefore, like the whole, an end in itself” (Paulsen 1889, 276). This is like Rand in seeing the individual whole life as an end in itself, but differs from Rand in giving virtue (the positive ones) not only a means-value, but an end-in-itself-value on account of being not only in a relation of service to the living whole, but in a relation of part in the constitution of the living whole. Similarly, Paulsen takes the individual life as part of the sphere of civilization and nonetheless as an end in itself.
    Paulsen recasts certain aspects of the ethics of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer partly from variance with them on ordinary manifest human nature, but also by explaining those aspects in terms of the modern theory of evolution, which was not available for assimilation into those systems of metaphysics or ethics. The metaphysics on which Paulsen rests his ethical theory contains a teleological element, expansive in the way of Aristotle, not rightly confined to the realm of life, which was the confinement Rand gave to teleology in her golden insight. The take of Paulsen and many other intellectuals in the late nineteenth century was that the process of evolutions was teleological, rather than rightly understanding that novel generation and natural selection explained the appearance of teleology at work in biological nature—apart from intentionality in we higher animals.
    In his book on Kant, the book about which Rand wrote, Paulsen devotes pages 324–33 to criticism of Kant’s ethics. The portions of this book of about 400 pages that Rand made use of in her essay were pages 1–6. Rand’s marginalia in Paulsen’s book, the marginalia published in Mayhew 1995 (40–46), span the first 143 pages of Paulsen’s book. It is only after that point of the book that Paulsen digs into the Critique of Pure Reason; the Prolegomena; Kant on traditional issues in metaphysics; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; Kant’s moral philosophy; and Kant’s theory of the law, the state, and religion.
    Rand used only those first few pages of Paulsen’s Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine. She was struck by his opening picture in which religion, philosophy, and science all bear truths of reality, that “the history of philosophy shows that its task consists simply in mediating between science and religion,” and that Kant had created a peace pact between science and religion. She was rightly appalled that science and religion or reason and feeling should be regarded as each having rightful claims to truth. She took Paulsen to be claiming, at the end of the nineteenth century, that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. Well, as a matter of fact, that was what I was learning from my Thomist philosophy professor in my first course in philosophy in 1967. It is nothing foreign to America or Europe to this day, pretty sure.
    Paulsen was certainly wrong in saying that the task of philosophy is “simply” mediating between science and religion, in his day, Kant’s, or ours, if the translation “simply” is intended to imply that that is the only function served by philosophy.
    Rand paints a picture in this essay (and in FNI) in which men were getting over the ancient split between mind and body and between morality and the physical world until Kant “revived” and steadied the split. Rand overcame the latter split by her theory of value in general and moral value in particular. She overcame, or anyway attempted to overcome, the former split by her metaphysics.
    The Kantian division of reason and faith, she alleges, “allows man’s reason to conquer the material world, but eliminates reason from the choice of the goals for which material achievement are used. Man’s goals, actions, choices and values—according to Kant—are to be determined irrationally, i.e., by faith” (79). Well, no, that is not Kant, and differently, not Paulsen either.
    Rand thought that the Kantian picture painted by Paulsen at the outset of this book, if typical of intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, surely would doom the twentieth century (to 1975) to what she saw as its declining achievements and to the century’s totalitarian states and the Holocaust. The outset-picture of Paulsen was not untypical among philosophers of Idealist stripe, though we should keep in mind that German Idealism (and its posts) was not the only major philosophy on the scene and the season of German Idealism was coming to an end. The conflict of faith and reason tearing apart integrated life and the award to faith the province of values continues to this day, as it did in the age of Copernicus. It did not and does not require the thoughts of Kant on it for its continuation. The Baptist University across town does not require Kant for continuing their faith-based rejection of the scientific account of the formation of the earth or of the biological evolution of our kind or of the separability of body and soul or of the other-worldly source of morals and home of the righteous.
     
    References
    Aschheim, S. E. 1992. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990. California.
    Mayhew, R., editor, 1995. Ayn Rand’s Marginalia. Ayn Rand Institute Press.
    Paulsen, F. 1889. A System of Ethics. F. Thilly, translator. 1899. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
    ——. 1898. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine. J. E. Creighton and A. Lefevre, translators. 1902. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
    Rand, A. 1975. From the Horse’s Mouth. In Philosophy: Who Needs It. 1982. Signet.
    Thilly, F. 1909. Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence. The International Journal of Ethics V19N2:10–55.
  25. Like
    dream_weaver got a reaction from DonAthos in How exactly does objectivism disprove skepticism at all?   
    In the progression of knowledge, familiarity with what is right precedes the discovery of the concept of wrong. 
    One of the roots of the concept "simulation" is the "what" that is being simulated. Unless you are going to embark on an infinite regress, ultimately a simulation of reality would have its foundation based on existence.
    Knowledge of reality is a prerequisite to ascertaining what you are dealing with is a facsimile.
    The skeptic has weight of the onus of proof on his shoulders.
     
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