Boydstun

Apparently different aspects of the same entity at the same time. And I think that is smooth with the original paper of DeBroglie and with the way we learn to put together a particle as a wave packet in QM class (although the latter would be for ordinary QM, and surely we need to be at quantum field theory to be at fullest understanding of elementary particles). What's the point?

Whether embracing God is negation of self would depend on one's conception of God. Spinoza certainly would embrace God, but his does not entail negation of his self nor suspension of reason. I think of mind as the instrumentation and control system of some higher animal bodies, including the human case. There is just an ambiguity in "self". Sometimes it mean mind and body, and sometimes only one's mind. If a Christian sect arose that preached resurrection of one's body, but without any memory of one's previous existence, experiences, thoughts or other minded persons, I don't think they'd win many clients. The mind of a human is the precious self.

Love yourself! strongly suggests that self-interest cannot be entirely immoral in a consistent Christianity.

The mind-independent universe is mass-energy, not philosopher-armchair substance. Knowledge of mass-energy and evidence for its amount in the whole universe being conserved back to and including the Initial Singularity is a glorious fruitful quest of science alone. Whether there are extensionless points in spacetime is, in the armchairs of philosophers, as stuck in the mud as all the centuries they wasted over the question of whether matter was atomic or continuous. Science got the answers and subtleties of that and delivered a solid stage for bringing the world into our service. Elementary particle physics has it that leptons, in their particle mode, are extensionless particles, perfect points of mass. The old sayings of philosophers that extension is more fundamental than weight is sensibly (on account of modern science) left back in those moldy old armchairs. Additional Note

Augustine had it that to embrace God is to turn away from oneself. Rand had it that to suspend one’s critical rationality in any question, including the existence of God, is a sacrifice of one’s mind, which is one’s self, and I agree. I think the standpoint of the author Mr. Brunton is like one of those exercise platforms with a hemisphere as its underside. His standpoint is unstable and a frame of cognitive dissonance. At least he is an independent thinker. Thanks for the notice. That egoism of God on display in the Isaiah passage seems overly concerned with social image. More importantly: Is the kind of love traditionally attributed to God, traditionally called agape, is it, when shorn of a Christian sacrificial cast, is such purely outgoing love egoistic? As a matter of fact, it is (though not in the sense of being for benefit firstly to oneself). It was stolen from man and placed in God, just as in truth the making and control of fire was stolen from man and credited to the gods in the setup for the myth of Prometheus. Nonsacrificial agape is our fundamental love, the human-level experience and instantiation of outward striving, the joy in agency and dance, an essential of life itself in the human. Such agape in oneself is because one is a living self. I'm speaking of mortal life, which is to say, real life.

(OK. A sour-cream coffee cake, very fine.) A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later she gets conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. Does that account solve The Problem of Induction ? How far was it a well-defined problem? Was solution of that problem what Rand had in mind in calling for a validation of induction in FNI? I imagine it was, as she would know of Hume’s making shallow of induction and causation and the hero worship Hume received by Philosophy of Science instructors (approximately Logical Empiricists) in the 1960’s (such as my instructor). Does Harriman’s book contain a solution to that problem? I rather imagine it does; I’d have to look at it freshly and closely as well as at the problem. But with the link to SEP on that problem, you might do yourself well in a close look at Harriman with that problem in view. I rather imagine Harriman had a good hold on that because of his portrayal of our modern sure inference to the existence and character of atoms. I told that story also in my “Induction on Identity.” We ended up in somewhat different years on when that thesis could no longer be at all doubted, rationally speaking. Harriman was a bit more liberal on that than I. Can’t recall just now if Harriman gave William Whewell credit for the process of the “concilliance of inductions” that played out in that case after Whewell’s time. Kant had an answer to Hume’s critique of causality. It would be good to know with exactly whose picture of causality Hume had been arguing against and was that prior picture also wrong from the vista of an Objectivist non-Humean system. Kant pulled the premise-rug out from under Hume by exposing that Hume et al. were empty-handed on what was human experience for which Hume could find no necessary connection from episode to episode. Kant’s own hand on what was human experience such that there were necessary connections between its episodes was fantastical. Classic modern philosophers Locke to Kant on this are getting a good replacement today with all the philosophers of perception, direct realist and representational realist who master and incorporate the pertinent science, neurological and psychological. I’ll be taking care of Kant in the sequel of this paper, with a modern realist replacement, my own, which was aided by Rand’s system. You asked about yet-to-come extension of Rand’s measurement structure for concepts. I did take a first step on that 20 years ago in my paper Universals and Measurement. I don’t know how far I might get back to developing that further in connection with science within my projects in view for however farther I live. (I have no indications on specific future failures of health, but I’m 75, so reasonably, the final grade I give myself in advance is “incomplete.”) Within chapter 7 of Harriman’s book, he discusses “Physics as Inherently Mathematical”. He has nothing original to say; and no mention of the many contemporaries of ours imminently qualified who have contributed to further understanding on that circumstance first really solidly seen in Newton (gravity, not optics), and rocketed by Maxwell; and he seemed to not actually know what it was from Galileo that was actually crucial for Newton’s advance; and he seemed ignorant of the middle man Descartes between Galileo and Newton concerning the law of inertia and, additionally, how it was that rotational motion came to be seen as a form of acceleration in the first place*; and he did nothing by way of showing a way (if there is one) that Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts is usefully related to uses of mathematics in modern physics. There are other aspects in Rand’s epistemological ideas that are shown to be at work in the practice of physics, but these aspects are not unique to Rand. If one is a beginner, this book can introduce some history and techniques of physics. Additional literature on those is vast, and some leads to it are in the endnotes of The Logical Leap. I don’t recall if Harriman discussed abduction teamed with induction in science methods, but that is part of the full picture.

The books by John D. Norton on induction look excellent: The Material Theory of Induction (2021) and The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference* (forthcoming, 2024) look to be illuminating. They would not be expressly hooked to Rand's metaphysics or theory of concepts. Upon studying these Norton books, concord and discord with Rand's theoretical philosophy is something most any participant here could do for themselves. A case for basing induction on Rand's Law of Identity is made in my Induction on Identity in the early 1990's (one way to access the text of the paper is to click on bolded text in the Abstract linked here). (I received a complimentary personal note on that paper from Jude Dougherty who was at that time head of the phi department at the Catholic University of America and was editor of the professional journal The Review of Metaphysics.) For deductive logic, the principle of noncontradiction looms large. It is a powerful tool. (Hilbert used only PNC in making the mathematical proof that was his Ph.D. thesis, for example.) Leibniz, Kant, and others of their eras recognized, as did Rand 1957, that PNC is a normative principle of cognition based on the Law of Identity. In some deductive inferences, we rely directly on identity: "All animals are mortal, you and I are animals, therefore we are mortal." One sense in which one might try to validate induction would be to try to prove that if PNC is securely based on Identity, then so is induction based on identity. I think that the history of trying to link induction very closely to deduction has been widely deemed unsuccessful, and perhaps that route suggested in the previous sentence would fall prey to those criticisms. Another sense in which one might try to "validate" induction would be to try to elicit it's correctness for cognition as a corollary from Rand's general metaphysics (taken for true), in the way that OPAR elicits "corollaries" (not deductive theorems) from the most elementary theses and concepts of Rand's general metaphysics. I approve, notwithstanding the usual charge of circularity one receives for any attempts to discursively defend inference principles, deductive or inductive. Another way to validate induction might be to point to vegetative "induction" in the activities of organic neural networks in bringing about sensory perception. Having validated the deliverances of the senses, one then might argue for goodness of consciously engaging in induction for tracking reality (but, again a circularity (benign?) because the first validation had to enlist some induction). Rand suggested in ITOE that induction was intimate with abstraction in her (or other, really) account of concepts. This would be abstractive induction, which I mentioned even in the Abstract of my "Induction on Identity" linked above. That genre of induction was the topic of Peikoff's paper "Aristotle's 'Intuitive Induction'" (1985 The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99), which was a bit taken from his Ph.D. dissertation. ‘Intuitive Induction’ and ‘Abstractive Induction’ are two traditional names for the same genre of induction. Harriman’s book is nice in his illustrations from the history of physics on the methods we often call induction. That is the standard and very helpful way in contemporary philosophy of science. Scroll down in the pdf link for Norton to his Table of Contents, Part II. I was thrilled in Harriman’s book when I came to text I recognized as taken from old Harvard case studies by Duane Roller, the volume on electric charge, which I had read in my History of Science course in undergraduate around 1970. Roller had joined our faculty at University of Oklahoma. (I’m sorry, but I need to break off just now. I’ll try later tonight to come back and finish what else I wanted to reply for you, Monart. For the present, my husband is calling me away, hoping that I’ll get our dessert made for this evening’s meal.)

Key themes of content and methods of mathematics in the 20th Century– An overview, in 2002. —by Michael Atiyah.

Correct, Monart. This got to be a longer road than I had in mind at the beginning, but that is giving it full due weight. And I'm going to get to each promised component.

Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’ How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area. But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B. Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation). That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013). From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329). William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science. From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls. Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism). Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1] The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014. Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2] In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own. (To be continued.) Notes [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes. [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. References Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library. Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet. ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press. ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

I spent more than an hour composing a post for y'all, summarizing episode 8 "Moscow Will Not Be Silent", which covers from the Russian baton passing from Yeltsin to Putin up to Putin's attack on Ukraine. I think posters and readers here would really appreciate the detail and integration attained in this Netflix documentary. But I goofed, apparently by not clicking "Submit Reply" and just logged out. I don't have time to recompose that long post, to which I appended remark on poking fun at dictator elections, and since the Biden-Trump contest was mentioned, elaborated on what I thought about that off-topic issue as it relates to preservation of our constitutional democratic republic. I've got a minute to at least repeat the last sentence of that long, long post now gone to wherever they go when you fail to actually post them: After Obama was elected, in '08 or '12, some commenter at Rebirth of Reason said there would be no more US elections. Wrong.

Saddam Hussein has bested Vladimir Putin in Dictator Elections VP came out of the election in Russia just ended with only 87%. SH in 2002 got 100% with all 11,445,638 registered voters turning out. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We have been learning a great deal from the Netflix documentary Turning Point – The Bomb and the Cold War, even in the parts we had lived through.

David's remark got me thinking that the way we found the house we wanted to buy was probably pretty good from the competition factor. We were buying in 2009 which was good for buyers, as housing transactions had fallen (also, since we were first-time buyers, we were able to get a federal tax advantage at that time). We had been renters in Chicago throughout adult life. By retirement time, we had saved enough money to by a house, provided we moved to a less expensive part of the country. Using sites like Zillow, we had spotted about 30 places in the mid-South we wanted to explore. We had no agent. We rented a car and drove down to look at those houses only from the outside. All but 7 could be eliminated by the surroundings of the house. I wrote down the agents with whom the 7 homes were listed at the property, and after we returned to Chicago, I called each of them and made an appointment to see the interior. They knew I was looking at a number of definite houses, and perhaps that was to our advantage. When I came to the house that was calling "home," it turned out that (in Virginia) that agent could be also our agent, so that is what we did, and it was very convenient for us. I'm pleased to hear his commission may well have been 6% from us—I never knew—and really that seems like a bargain for us.

Doug, I had imagined our agent would be getting about 10% (we came to own real estate only once, late in life), so I was surprised that people consider 6% or so high. I've seen some dramatic data given for the thesis that if one is a seller, one will get about 1.5 times for your home using an agent than doing a "for sale by owner." Whether one is a seller or buyer, I think most of us would not want to do it ourself if the other party had an agent.

War Powers War Authorization Clinton – Bosnia Nuclear Launch

I'm inclined to side with Gus in opposing such a law as is coming about in Utah, and my concern, as in the example Gus mentioned, is the ability of children to find things out about the world, going around the controls of their parents. It is good to be able to learn more truth. The internet offers that, even if it has also the ability to convey the social-gang emotional damaging that goes on among teenagers. Parents do indeed need to be on the lookout for what their children are encountering, whether their children are in pains over social relations with their peers, whether their children are using drugs, shoplifting, becoming depressed, or getting suicidal. But parents can be on the lookout for those things without the lazy turnkey of controlling, not just monitoring, but upfront blindering of children to wider truth of the world and wider truths being discovered of nature beyond what parents wish them to learn. Preparation of a child for independent life is enhanced, as far as I've observed, by wider and argued views of what the world and we consist of, not by deprivation of that information.

SIDEBAR In his 2016, Greg Salmieri notes that it is curious that Peikoff 1967 does not mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” Salmeiri points out some ways the Rand-Peikoff diagnoses of and remedies for the errors in analytic-versus-synthetic doctrines differ from Quine’s. Salmieri understands the later challenge of AvS from Kripke and Putnam to have more in common with the Objectivist challenge, though Putnam differs importantly from Rand on definitions and essences, which looms large in the Objectivist challenge (2016, 304n34, 311n87). Salmieri points to the book-review article, in JARS in 2005, by Roderick Long for thoughts on some relations between Randian theory of meaning and those of Kripke and Putnam. Long’s 2005 review of Greg Browne’s book Necessary Factual Truth was followed a year later by a substantial reply from Browne and rejoinder by Long (JARS V7N1). From May to September of 2007, Prof. Browne engaged in a very generous exchange (his own words coming to about 19,000) in a thread at Objectivist Living* defending the rejection by Peikoff of AvS and defending his own kindred rejection of AvS. Browne had in his arsenal the Kripke-Putnam developments that had been savaging AvS in the years since Peikoff 1967. Browne vigorously countered, in that thread, devotees of Logical Empiricism (and of Popper) who criticized (and poorly understood the revolution afoot, such as in) Peikoff 1967. Late in that thread, Robert Campbell entered it to ask Browne if he had any thoughts on why Peikoff had not addressed the famous Quine paper in his (Peikoff’s) dissertation, which Campbell had lately acquired. Browne had not seen the dissertation and had not much to conjecture on that peculiarity. (Remember, Peikoff 1964 is not written as a champion of Ayn Rand’s philosophic views, but, in an even-handed way, by an author acknowledging his background preference for some rehabilitated sort of logical ontologism and pointing near the end of the dissertation to some of that rehabilitation, such as fresh thinking on the nature of definitions and essence; distance between Quine’s views on logic and on AvS and Randian Peikoff views would not be the reason for no Quine in Peikoff 1964.) I should suggest that Quine, Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein raise such a briar patch of technicalities that it was better (and enough for deserving a Ph.D.) to stick with the more accessible and manageable Ayer, Nagel, Dewey, and Lewis to get the dissertation (already more than an armful in history assimilated) finally completed. I'll be digging through the Carnap-Quine briar patch in the next installment of the present study (along with Neo-Kantianism, Logical Empiricism, and of course Kant). *I stopped posting at that site a year ago, when the owner covertly deleted a post of mine partly critical of Donald Trump. ~References~ Browne, G. M. 2001. Necessary Factual Truth. Lanham: University Press of America. Gotthelf, A. and G. Salmieri, editors, 2016. A Companion to Ayn Rand. Wiley Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Long, R. T. 2005. Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? —Review of Brown 2001. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7(1):209–28. Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Salmieri, G. 2016. The Objectivist Epistemology. In Gotthelf and Salmieri 2016.

Part 1 Part 2 I expect to complete this study later this year. The result I expect at this point is that evolutionary biology with vegetative teleological causation exhibited as Harry Binswanger does, in physical terms and with that teleological causal cycle framing[1] the efficient causes within the organism, yields for the first time in the history of philosophy, a sound physical basis for Aristotle's final causation in the case of the vegetative actions of living things. This accomplishment renders lost-in-the-woods the persistent criticisms of modern molecular, evolutionary biology as being an eliminative reductionism of quintessential living activity to physical (biochemical) reactions. Those criticisms need to loosen their concept of the physical. Concerning the ramifications for Rand's theory of value, which will come at the end of this paper, I'll have to wait until I've completed the study herein of the full complement of causal mechanisms of life. ([1] "Scaffold" – PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE [2023], 90[5]:1224–33.) This study is of importance to Rand's biocentric theory of value, although I had originally undertaken this work for the sake of getting a good grip on brain computational explanation addressed in Milkowski's EXPLAINING THE COMPUTATIONAL MIND, which had become important to completing my up-to-date assessment of David Kelley's realist theory of perception in THE EVIDENCE OF THE SENSES (1986).* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTERLUDE “The seeker comes to the great guru in his mountain fastness and pleads ‘What is Life?’ The sage answers, ‘Life is a fountain’. The supplicant, not surprisingly, is annoyed: ‘I have traveled halfway around the world, spent a fortune, risked my life, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?’ ‘All right, my son’, says the guru, ‘for you, Life is not a fountain’.” –The Way of the Cell by F.M. Harold (2001)

Earliest Sub-Canopy Tree – Another Summary – Original Paper

Correction to preceding post: as I understand so far, angiosperms are NOT the types of tree whose fossils are showing the oldest forests. Perhaps pertinent focus should be on Tree Fern, which were earlier than fruit trees (angiosperm) talked of in the Garden of Eden story.

Tad, the picture I'm getting is that when something petrified comes to mind at the word "fossil", it is only by typicality. Like when one thinks of a mouse or rat at the word "rodent". "Fossil" seems to really mean merely the product of minerals replacing living tissue. My Encyclopedia Britannica says that fossilization is process by which the remains or traces of plants or animals are preserved in the earth's crust. I notice that fossils are always sources of information on earlier life forms or sources of energy to people with appropriate background knowledge. However, that does not seem to be part of the definition (by use). On emergence of angiosperms: A, B

@tadmjones Here is an intellectual high-altitude perspective on possibility of superluminal signals, in flat spacetime, without getting into conflict with special relativity in its confines to E-M fields, etc. Although, the paper points to no known physical fields whose differential equations imply causal cones that do not coincide with light speed: Faster than Light? by Robert Geroch (at 13 minutes in this lecture, he speaks of a theorem which, if I understand correctly, rules out the possibility of negative mass in GR which I gather is the situation under which Alcubierre drive would be possible.)

The Brits Are Claiming 390 Million Years Ago, Topping the US 385 Million Years Ago.

Likewise. The great difference in standard of living between rich and middle/poor from the times of Carnegie to our times of Bezos is much publicized. But the rise in standard of living, in market economies, of middle/poor over that interval is where the attention should be, I'd say. I did not like that in Elysium yet another recent futuristic dystopian background for the story was being predicated on overpopulation of the earth. In the first place, it is false that there is not land in the economic sense to support a population 100 times today's were rights-respecting minds left free to investigate and trade. And secondly, it is most galling that stories continue to use overpopulation of earth as fulcrum to the story, when the worried human population growth projections of several decades ago have not occurred. Since 1970 the world population doubled. But with the growth rate now, it is not projected to double again until 200 years from now have passed.