New Buddha

The below quote is from Rand. From the standpoint of epistemology, Rand's above quote is correct enough to counter claims of Epiphenomenalism. From wiki: Epiphenomenalism is a mind–body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance. Fear seems to make the heart beat faster; though, according to epiphenomenalism, the state of the nervous system causes the heart to beat faster.[1] Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism. Many modern day determinists (which includes many prominent cognitive scientists/philosophers) hold a variant of epiphenomenalism even if they would reject the term or deny dualism. Emotions are important in cognition. But the actual role emotions play in cognition is much more complex than a "yes" or "no" answer that you are looking for. In part because humans (and other complex animals such as wolves, lions, etc.) undergo dramatic neurological and physiological changes as they grow into adulthood - including learning by observation. An animal like a turtle or a fly, much less so. A young, pre-conceptual infant or child will not have emotions when looking at, say, his countries flag or a work of art. And adult will. But this does not mean that infants do not experience emotions.

I believe that Eioul is only objecting to the use of the word "genes" in the above. Genes themselves are not the repository of innate sensorimotor/sensory/perceptual/cognitive mechanisms that infants are born with. Genes guide the development of the substrate of mechanisms that support behavior but are not the behavior themselves.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores this idea too. From wiki: He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis.[5][6] He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events.[7] He proposes antifragility in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility[8] as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.[9]

Another long quote from the same book. Coming back to the issue of sensory FAPs [Fixed Action Patterns], there is a concept that has been lurking in the halls of neuroscience about as long as that discipline has been around. It is the concept of “labeled lines,” and it may further help us theoretically remove the ghost in the machine once and for all. The concept of labeled lines states that sensory pathways of all sense modalities encode the specific properties of the world they convey by very specific firing patterns, and that each line or pathway only carries information of that specific modality. In literal terms, these specific patterns are the specific sense modality messages from the outside world. It makes intuitive sense that the perception of high frequency sound requires receptors that convert sound waves into neural energy. These are the hair cells of the auditory apparatus, which respond to high frequency sound with a correspondingly high rate of firing. Similarly, hair cells respond with a low rate of firing when presented with low-frequency sound. Pacinian corpuscles, receptors of the skin that respond to mechanical compression, fire their labeled line message of low frequency pulsing in response to light compression of the skin, and correspondingly higher frequencies of firing for increased mechanical compression. And so it is that the initial message carried by a given sensory pathway faithfully “labels” its outer world counterpart. This frequency coding property, and the fact that each sensory pathway only carries information about its specific sense modality, has led to the concept of labeled lines. But let us follow one of these labeled lines a little farther, right into the central nervous system. The high frequency firing of the auditory apparatus in response to sound of high frequency does not remain as such. As we follow this labeled line, the high frequency activity is translated into low frequency activity by the time it reaches its end point (auditory cortical neurons). This tells us something very important: it is not the code or message coming from the outside world that is being transmitted, but rather it is the neuronal element that responds to the message from the outside that is itself the message! It is the sensation born of an internally activated sensory FAP—one may justifiably say that the labeled line carries de facto the frequency because it fired!

The way the long quote above works can be seen as this. Suppose you are an audio engineer tasked with recording an acoustical guitar performance. You might use two microphones - one for left and right channels - and each microphone records the entire spectrum of the sound frequency. However, each ear in humans has 16,000 "microphones" each of which is only responsive to a very small frequency of the entire audible band. This creates enormous redundancy and yet consumes very little power. In the human ear (and the entire nervous system for that matter) the "hardware" is performing what "software" does in computers. There is no computation or energy expenditure over and beyond the intrinsic neuronal activity that is constantly taking place anyway. The ears are only being modulated by external stimuli.

You might find this interesting. It's from the book I of the Vortex by Rodolfo Llinas. The messiness is not a bug, it's a feature! The one [ ] is my add. But is there something in principle quite different from the types of embodiments that we have in modern day computers and in the nervous system itself? That is a very serious and important question to ask. One may consider, as did Alan Turing (Turing 1947; Millican and Clark 1996), whether it is in principle possible to make a universal machine out of a digital type of device if the appropriate algorithms are implemented. Can algorithmic computation ever be sufficiently extensive, fast, and concise enough to implement the totality of properties that a 14-watt entity such as our brain can implement with 1.5 kilograms of mass? And what do we make of the intelligence of an ant that as a robot demonstrates incredible computational agility with mere milligrams of neuronal mass, a brain with less mass than a single microchip? The fundamental issue is that brains are nothing like digital computers; they operate as analog devices and thus utilize physics directly in their measurements, as opposed to the abstracted measures of zeros and ones that are cleansed of the elements that generated them. Is the computation of digital physical computers truly comparable to that performed by analog devices? It has been stated that for a digital computer to be able to support the equivalent computational properties (capabilities) of the brain, the mass required might be many orders of magnitude larger and the power supply equally as large. There is another argument to consider in terms of the differences between brains and computers. Warren McCulloch wondered long ago how it was that reliability could arise from nonreliable systems (McCulloch 1965). The reader should know by now how unreliable nerve cells are as computational entities. First of all, they have intrinsic activity, and thus as conveyors and relayers of information may be extremely noisy. McCulloch’s answer was rather intriguing: he felt that reliability could be attained if neurons were organized in parallel so that the ultimate message was the sum of activity of the neurons acting simultaneously. He further explained that a system where the elements were unreliable to the point that their unreliabilities were sufficiently different from one another would in principle be far more reliable than a system made out of totally reliable parts. Here, a reliable system [computer] is one with unreliability in each element as low as possible but still present. This may sound almost paradoxical, but in what is considered a reliable system, the elements are reliable to about the same extent. And even if this reliability is 99.99 percent, the problem is that the elements are also all the same in their unreliability, meaning that what is unreliable is common to all the elements. It therefore becomes an issue of probabilities. In such reliable or redundant systems then, whatever tiny problem or unreliability they do have will add up. In nonreliable systems, however, the elements are not redundant and are therefore slightly different in their unreliability. Because they are all slightly different in their unreliability, there will never be the possibility of this unreliability adding up! These unreliable systems are therefore far more reliable than reliable systems. The upside of this is that in a system with elements of differing unreliabilities, what they have in common are the reliable aspects! This is fundamental. It means that for an instrument to be totally reliable it must ultimately be made up of unreliable—varied—parts!

A child cries because he's "hungry". But the concept of "hungry" is not yet fully developed as it will one day become. As an adult, you may feel hunger pains and realize that it's time to eat, or that you will have to wait awhile until you get home, or that you are on a diet, etc. All an infant really can be said to know is that it feels pain. it's also a valuable means of alerting that something is "wrong" to adults, care providers, etc. The child will slowly over time come to learn to associate feeding with pleasure or, in the least, the lack of pain. And some children can be born with the inability to feel pain. This can be deadly. It necessary to differentiate between emotions discussed in the domains of philosophy, psychology and neurology/physiology. I do tend to think that people interpret Rand's philosophical /epistemological view of emotions as equivalent to psychology/neurology/physiology - and this would be wrong. The role emotions play is far more complex than presented in the above extracts. I'd be happy to explore this if you want. It is an interesting topic.

And this is from Values Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of “value”? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of “good or evil” in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation. The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.

This is from Emotions in the Ayn Rand Lexicon Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss. But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments. Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses. But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

The smearing of feces was not part of the original contract. When you are hired, you are hired to perform a stipulated task (either in writing or an oral agreement). If that task changes (even if it's not something as weird as smearing feces) then BY LAW you can renegotiate the terms of your agreement. In this case, if you cannot reach an agreement to compensate you for the change in your duties, then the company would be required BY LAW to fulfill the original terms of the agreement and return you to earth at the original, agreed upon cost. Most companies have job titles with written descriptions of the duties you are expected to perform - along with a company handbook- specifically to avoid these types of legal ambiguities. They also have periodic performance reviews to document in writing (which they require the employee to sign) whether or not the employee is meeting what is required of him. If they do fire him, then they can show how he was not meeting his obligations. This protects the company from litigation for wrongful termination.

Your specific example was about changing the agreed upon price of a return trip ticket. Even if the company loses money on the return trip, they would still be obligated to do it at the agreed upon cost. They can't just change it. Everyone in business has, at one time or another, lost money by underestimating the cost it will take to do a project or deliver a good or service. If the error is on your part, then you have to eat the cost.

Nonsense. Having to attend a seminar to learn how to use a new accounting software and having to smear feces on your body to keep a job are in no way similar. And even having to attend management seminars to learn how to develop interpersonal skills in the work place is in no way similar to your example of smearing feces. The courts would certainly see the differences in the above and so would any rational person. If you can't, well then I guess this post won't really go anywhere. Smearing feces was your example, not mine.

The above examples are entirely different from smearing feces on your body.

I've helped draw up and review many contracts over the years (Owner Architect, Owner Contractor, Developer Tenant) and no contract can be all-encompassing. There can always be areas when even rational, well-intentioned men can disagree.

The way I would address the issue of "dignity" in your example is that the company is asking you to do something that has nothing to do with the job for which you were hired.

No contract can cover all contingencies, and many are complex enough that they can be open to interpretation even among honest, rational men. Underlying written or spoken contracts and agreements (in the US at least) are very broad principles regarding fairness and just compensation for goods and services rendered. Courts are formed by people to settle disagreements when and where they arise. Your hypothetical can keep shifting to reach the conclusion you want.

Nope, you are wrong.

I wasn't sure how to address your post. So I started with a "law" approach - in the sense that a corporation that has its base in the US would not be exempt from US law. There is an issue that exists today in the Gulf States regarding migrant labor and what would be illegal in the US is not in some Gulf States. Also, a firm I once worked for did a HUGE design project for a company in the UAE. We were jerked around by having to make multiple changes in the design that, in the US, would have entitled us to compensation for "scope creep" beyond the original contract. But we were told in no uncertain terms that there was no way we could win any kind of lawsuit -- so we cut our losses and ended up not getting paid for a lot of work done. That was an expensive lesson in the importance of law. For you to have Rights, in any meaningful sense, you must be able to enforce them. Rand says of Value (and Rights are Values) that, “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep." That may mean nothing more than "acting" by voting in elections. But you have to be able to enforce your rights, or they mean nothing (as the poor migrants in the UAE know). You have a "right" not to get mugged, but I'm not going to be walking down any dark alley's in a bad part of town late at night anytime soon. Or doing business in the UAE.....

To illustrate the limits of hypotheticals. And, the importance of Law in human relationships.

If you click on a EULA agreement, for some emoji software, and buried in the agreement is something that stipulates that you give them your house, then no court would ever uphold that.

You are just wrong on this Sk. Period. Maybe in your hypothetical world, but not in the US.

I posted my reply before I read this. No, the company cannot unilaterally change a contract - even if it were buried in fine-print on page 162.

If you signed a contract, with a stipulated return trip price, then it would be a breach of contract if they were to change the price arbitrarily. I think that's fairly obvious. Wrt to the smearing feces, this fall under having nothing to do with the job for which you were contracted to perform. That they are asking you to perform activities that you don't want to do and have nothing to do with the job which you were hired to perform - AND - they control your means of leaving, then that would be considered "force". Not physical force - such as punching someone - but force none the less. And an important point to be made is that you don't have to have a "signed" contract that stipulates what you will and won't do in a job. There are numerous laws on the books that have to do with industry standards, implied warranties, etc. and they are implied in any job that you take. I've worked for 4 architectural firms and 1 general contracting company and I've never signed a contract. That's doesn't mean that there were no laws governing my relationship with my employer. Even contracts that don't have some form of fair and mutual compensation can be void by the courts. It's understood by law that both parties, for a binding agreement to exist, should each receive just compensation as defined by current standards.

You raise several questions. If you are a US citizen and are being asked to smear feces on yourself and if the price of the return trip ticket is arbitrarily raised in order to keep you "captive" then both of those instances would be violations of current US laws - irrespective if it's happening in Ohio or on a ship in a remote asteroid belt.

The question is not necessarily so hypothetical. I think it's probable that in the next 100 to 150 years (or sooner) there may be colonies on the Moon, Mars or in the asteroid belt. One way to address your post is, "In which country on Earth would the corporation be incorporated?" This would establish the framework for the body of laws that govern the corporation. If it's a US corporation, then US law would apply. If it were a Gulf State or Chinese business, then their laws would apply.