dream_weaver

I saw a reference to the material as "Rearden Plastic" elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.   
 

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. 
 

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.

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. 

~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.

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.
 

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.
 

A quick search for "truck driver" brought back 4 references.
The first was the diner she went into after telling the driver to stop in a not so good section of town.
"The stories they tell you when you're young—about the human spirit. There isn't any human spirit. Man is just a low-grade animal, without intellect, without soul, without virtues or moral values. An animal with only two capacities: to eat and to reproduce."
His gaunt face, with staring eyes and shrunken features that had been delicate, still retained a trace of distinction. He looked like the hulk of an evangelist or a professor of esthetics who had spent years in contemplation in obscure museums.
She wondered what had destroyed him, what error on the way could bring a man to this.
"You go through life looking for beauty, for greatness, for some sublime achievement," he said. "And what do you find? A lot of trick machinery for making upholstered cars or inner-spring mattresses."
"What's wrong with inner-spring mattresses?" said a man who looked like a truck driver. "Don't mind him, lady. He likes to hear himself talk. He don't mean no harm."
The second was a reference to Midas Mulligan by Lee Hunsacker to Dagny Taggert.
She sat up straight. "Midas Mulligan?"
"Yea—the banker who looked like a truck driver and acted it, too!"
The third was the individual in the valley.
The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, "What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?"
"No, ma'am," he answered. "I was a truck driver." He added, "But that's not what I wanted to remain."
Interesting to note that the man in the diner, Midas Mulligan and the man Dagny observed were stated to have "looked like a truck driver." Aside from Lee Hunsacker's voicing the evaluation, the other two evaluations were privy to the reader. The man in the valley only stated he was a truck driver after he was asked if he was a professor of comparative philology.
 
 

I would have described those ten years Rearden spent as an investment. In the pursuit of one value or set of values, necessarily cannot be also pursuing a different value or set thereof. Rearden's evaluation of the end goal was such that it likely existed, if he only discovered the right processes to bring it about. 
 

"The burden is on those who claim fraud..."
The burden is on anyone making a claim. Not just those claiming fraud took place. The burden is also on the officials running the election to convince me that they are honest actors who ran an honest election. And they have failed that basic criteria in several ways, namely by littering the streets and mailboxes with "mail-in" ballots and not checking IDs at voting centers. It doesn't matter if people can't prove fraud when the people running the election can't prove legitimacy.

This brings up a related question: how does the novel's historical setting affect first-time readers today? It was a bit of a period piece in 1957 (execs no longer took cross-country business trips by train; network radio was no longer the primary news and entertainment medium) and a bit more when I first read it. For most newcomers today it's a book of their great-grandparents' era. Does this make it harder or easier (or neither) to get into?

It's not complete. In her late years, Rand was planning a theory of induction:
Any kind of essay, book etc. is complete if it fully covers what the author intended to cover. It's his decision how in-depth that treatment is.
A system is a collection of interconnected principles. It is not a theory, but it can contain any number of theories, completed or not. The system is the main work, and is distinct from any presentation it might receive in full books, short essays, spoken lectures and many more.
With Objectivism, Rand was concerned with the essentials regarding five fundamental needs: the status of reality (mind-independent); proper cognition; survival; protection of individual rights; condensing our widest principles. 
Systems that cover this many branches are not commonplace in history. The system craze reached its peak in the 19th century.
Everything in the universe is interconnected (and thus all knowledge). We can expand any subject we want until we exhaust it completely. This is obvious to anyone. Protestations for 'openness' are simply calls for such expansion.
If you fiddle with the core ideas behind a worldview, you reach a different worldview (even if it's a close sibling of the original). According to my judgement, Kelley's corrections are not congruent with, and misinterpret, parts of Rand's system.
When Fichte become involved in a scandal, Kant had to publicly repudiate his philosophy because Fichte kept suggesting that his own system was simply the Kantian system, with a few rough edges softened.
(It wasn't).

"The 'floater' misses reality; the concrete-bound person misses understanding." -- Leonard Peikoff
***
A few years ago, I read Leonard Peikoff's magnum opus, The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out, and highly recommend it. As the author's web site indicates, the book discusses three different mindsets, and how they relate data to abstractions. The site explains in part:A minor practical benefit I have noticed lately is that, having read the book, I can sometimes spot such methods at work at unexpected times and be able to anticipate what another person will likely do (or fail to do).

Before I continue, I will note: It has been some time since I read the book, and I do seem to recall a caution against labeling individuals with the short-hand labels. Indeed, judging people is difficult in the best of circumstances, and I don't think pigeonholing people with such labels is just or helpful to oneself.

At best, the kinds of things I am noticing might be data relevant to judging another person or for forming a preliminary rule of thumb for dealing with someone else. (Or, as we see from the second vignette, one can learn that common sense may not apply to some people.)

That said, I'll relate some observations about a couple of people I have had dealings with enough times to have noticed patterns. (On editing, I notice that I have discussed the "rock" first and the "floater" second.)

The first person I know to have been educated almost entirely in the U.S. public school system. Over time, I have noticed that this person seems to be able to follow my arguments over a wide conceptual range of subjects, from mundane problems to philosophical matters. In fact, I will often get intelligent and actionable feedback from this person about what I am talking about at the time.

At the same time, I have noticed a curious failure of anything to sink in. Let's set aside more abstract matters: Changing one's opinion requires deep understanding and motivation to begin with, and I am not necessarily the best person in the world to help someone do this. Besides: That is less impressive than what I will discuss here.

I have many times now had practical arguments fail to sink in. I will explain a course of action or a procedure as well as highlights of the rationale behind them. Not long later, the same topic -- which I thought was settled -- comes up, and it's as if I have said nothing. As far as I can tell, this person is not obtuse or neurologically impaired or being a jerk. I think it just doesn't stick.

When I consider a course of action -- whether to decide upon it or to understand why someone else wants me to do it -- I find that the better I see a connection between that thing and whatever I am supposed to be doing, the better able I am to formulate or follow that course -- or to remember it. Associations don't just help one understand, they help one remember.

Again, I can't completely rule out some deficiency in my communication style (generally or as pertains to this individual), but knowing that "progressive" education stunts the conceptual faculty, I can't help but wonder if this is why I am having this difficulty with this person. Whatever the case may be, I know not to expect later understanding or compliance from this person, no matter what the apparent level of understanding or agreement may be in the moment.

Image by Jezael Melgoza, via Unsplash, license.My second example comes from someone I know to be religious and hell-bent, so to speak, on proselytizing to people who are not fellow members of a sect that shall remain nameless. I have had several ... interesting ... conversations with this person, who has admitted with no prodding to wanting such things as a theocracy.

This person also knows that I consider myself an Objectivist. I don't go around broadcasting this, but I don't hide it, either. On meeting this person and realizing there would be further dealings, perhaps for a long time, I had hoped this information (which flowed naturally enough from a conversation early in this acquaintance) would cause this person to annoy me less with religious talk and seek more ... fertile ... targets than myself.

(Word to the wise: Don't assume -- as I incorrectly did here -- that someone whose basic cognitive framework is different than your own will react to new information in the same general way you would.)

What have I found instead? I will occasionally notice conversations taking a strange turn. Out of the blue, for example, came an observation about a traffic layout at a business establishment that, while it wasn't exactly optimal, wasn't particularly atrocious, either. Apropos of nothing, this person started pontificating about how the traffic layout needed improvement. In this person's view, this was because people in large numbers don't self-regulate to behave rationally, and later, because people need guidance. The convsersation got interrupted before I could see where it was going, but I later realized where it was coming from.

Driving home later, I chuckled when realized that this was an attempt to start a conversation about religion with me -- by speaking to me in "my language" as it were -- via the cardboard caricatures of my professed philosophy as a starting point. Lots of people confuse capitalism with "spontaneous order," for example, or don't seem to realize that it might be perfectly rational for people at leisure to mill about in a mall "inefficiently."

See my mistake now? This person's religious imperative is to add to the flock. All new information is interpreted through this lens. Facts such as I am an Objectivist. I am an atheist. don't mean Don't waste your time. to a person like this: They mean, Find a better hook for future conversion efforts.

More to the point, they also don't mean, This person, who is reasonable and easy to get along with sure doesn't seem evil: Maybe I should check my premises. I'm not sure what (if anything) they mean (or can mean) in that respect. Probably nothing, since this person's beliefs are "grounded" in the arbitrary pronouncements of the Bible, rather than being built up from reality via induction and logic.

But people have free will -- which belief systems and methods of processing information can help or hinder. It is not impossible that interacting with me might at some point down the road help either or both of these people start a journey towards becoming more rational. That isn't my primary focus in dealing with either of these people, but it is a consequence that can flow simply from being open about and living by a rational philosophy.

-- CAVLink to Original

Literacy and Print in Early Modern Germany and England

Philosophical Detection
The Ayn Rand Letter
Vol. III, No. 10  February 11, 1974
Philosophical Detection--Part II
I will list these essentials for your future reference. But do not attempt the shortcut of accepting them on faith (or as semi-grasped approximations and floating abstractions). That would be a fundamental contradiction and it would not work.1
The essentials are: in metaphysics, the Law of Identity—in epistemology, the supremacy of reason—in ethics, rational egoism—in politics, individual rights (i.e., capitalism)—in esthetics, metaphysical values.2
1. This paragraph essentially rhymes what Mr. Boydston articulated at the beginning of his generous reply. ([T]he idea that Objectivists need a Creed is an insult to them.)
2. I would suggest that the difference between the two listings comes from an extemporaneous delivery on behalf of the citation from the Ayn Rand Column and the edited for print version initially provided in The Ayn Rand Letter and later reprinted under the title of Philosophy: Who Needs It?

To The Laws of Biology and Monart,
While I admire your attempt to reduce the concepts of Ayn Rand and Objectivism to as few words as possible, whether poetry, psalm, or song, I have to agree with the others, that is, Objectivism requires much mental gestation. Monart, you mentioned in your other post that you didn't exactly grasp Ayn Rand from the very beginning of your reading of Anthem. You understood more as you studied more. The crisis of our time may be reduced to the fact that people are not as introspective as you or I. Our society endures a deluge of information, evidenced by the continual assault from mass media, be it mainstream or social media. The message of most of the media is not helpful to mental health in a free society. For a society addicted to cell phones, it may be challenging enough to encourage people (especially young people) to set aside enough time to think of philosophic questions. Though some individuals may start their journey into Objecitivist enlightenment through your online posts, I believe the overwhelming majority will find their path as you did: friends sharing conversation, leading to the recommendation of a book or an author. Nonetheless, I wish for your success, as America and Western Civilization desperately need to be informed of Objectivism in a positive light.

I contended that the case for retaliatory force was set in the 1950's and that it should have been done then. Acting on this premise 70 years later seems more a case of the sin's of the fathers being used as rationalization by the children of the transgressed.
The fact that lands are held by unproductive hands is not a case for commandeering lands either, regardless of what natural resources such lands may possess.
 

Consciousness is required to perform the conscious act of proving/proof. Consciousness is required to perform the act of consciousness identified as belief.

A scientific explanation presupposes consciousness, @OfficerBacon .
 

I'd like to welcome to Objectivism Online the poster Laws of Biology, who writes in his/her About Me the following:
 

Consider the first six paragraphs of Chapter 3 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: Abstraction from Abstractions.
Therein lies an example of an objective method of reasoning. (Keep in context all of the chapters of the book leading up to it.) The crux, in my humble opinion is in the third sentence of that sixth paragraph wherein she wrote:
Some (a very small minority) proceed straight on, by the same method as before, i.e., by treating words as concepts, by requiring a clear, first-hand understanding (within the context of their knowledge) of the exact meaning of every word they learn, never allowing a break in the chain linking their concepts to the facts of reality.
(This was written with regard to the O.P.)

While art does impact those who experience it, Leonard Peikoff explained how a picture (or a picture show) is not an argument. (ARI Campus: Ford Hall Forum presentation, and some further commentary by James Valliant.)
Global Warming has been discussed in many threads on this forum here. Please feel free to explore some of these before launching another thread.
As of January 23, 2022, there are:
(53 pages of "Global Warming" mentions.)
(2 pages of " Global Warming" in title only.)