Boydstun

Yes, I don't think they are necessary in the longer run. I suspect that the freedom for innovation for profit in the market economy helped the US and NATO stay ahead of the Soviet Union, an enormously clamped down society, in advancing technologies, including for war. Also, quite possibly the Aswan Dam could have eventually been achieved by private consortiums for profits. I guess that dam is another monument to collective action by coercive taxes in the USA and in Brittain. Apart from military usefulness, I think the US advances into space (or under the ocean) should be by private commercial venture for profit. That is the natural way to go and stay grounded to the bundle of needs of human populations.

Yes, it was one of mankind's crowning achievements to date. And guess what: It was accomplished by the US government, the contractors, and the taxpayers. It greatest benefit was as a monument to scientific and technical level of the USA in the twentieth century. And a monument of American productivity and wealth. Cost in 2020 dollars. I gather it was not profitable (which was not its point), although there were spinoff technical benefits in service to people on earth. From ancient Mesopotamia to the present, government activities have fostered technological advances. Twin sister of Apollo is Artemis, which program will bring humans and robots to the moon and aims to start a colony there. These moon-landing programs are indeed monuments to the American government and the American civilization. However, I should support such US programs only insofar as they can be justified purely by their advancement, if any, of national defense.

Welcome to Objectivism Online, HRSD. What specifically were your reactions to The Fountainhead? Were there characters in FH you identified with in their psychology? I've known some readers of FH who found elements of Peter Keating in themselves, which they regarded as undesirable upon reading FH. They just changed their habitual ways, replaced with more or less Howard Roark. They did it themselves. Is there a fiction writer whose style you enjoy more than Rand's? I urge you to read Atlas Shrugged before anything else, for the adventure and the characters. You may find yourself in some mind in there, something in them and in you to esteem. You don't need to already know the philosophy set forth in Atlas to enjoy the book. Quite the contrary order is exciting for reading that book. Give the author a chance to offer the philosophy to you in that fictional creation. Since you have an inclination for the theoretical side, I urge you to then read all of OPAR. Because I read Rand's fiction when I was around 18, which is fairly early in life, it is no longer clear to me altogether what was already second nature to me before reading them and what was to become second nature to me later due to reading them. I'm only just like me. Not just like every bit of Rand's mind or Howard Roark's. But when it comes to many basic ideas and elements of character and personality, another novelist said it: "I don't know what souls are made of, but yours and mine are the same."

Background materials online: Perceptual Experience and Perceptual Justification Evidence and Justification The Contents of Perception Action-Based Theories of Perception The Computational Theory of Mind

~Dipert on Kelley’s Kant~Bα In the next two installments (Bα, Bβ), I shall argue that the Objectivist view of illusions and David Kelley’s diagnosis of a fundamental error in philosophy of perception, are incorrect. I shall assess Kelley’s resistance to representational and computational accounts of perception. I’ll assess further Dipert’s criticisms of Kelley on philosophy of perception and Kelley on Kant. I’ll compare the concept of a percept with Kant’s concept of a sensory intuition. Physically Processed, yet Direct David Kelley observes: “As a form of awareness, perception may naturally be approached from various different perspectives. From the outside it is a physical response to the environment, and one may examine the way sense organs are stimulated by physical energy, and the way this stimulation is transmitted and transformed by the nervous system as it ascends the sensory pathways to the brain. Or one may view it from the inside, as we experience it, describing the features of objects we discriminate, the structures and relationships of which we are directly aware.” (1986, 8 ) That distinction is important to keep in mind when thinking about the alternatives Realism v. any Representationalism that is not realist in perception. If I understand him correctly, Kelley’s “external” sort examination includes investigations in cognitive psychology, including neuropsychology. Responses of the subject, including varieties of awareness, are essential components of such research (e.g. Anne Treisman). If neuronal activities are the required support of all episodes of consciousness and if the stream of neuronal processing from sensory receptors in a perceptual process resulting in some unitary activity-formation in cortical regions of the brain which are then experienced as an immediate, direct awareness of something in the environment; why are not the need for sequences of neuronal processing itself enough to show that perception, realist or not, is indirect, not direct? Indeed, even where neuronal receptors do not need a follow-on sequence of processing for activating a conscious, perceptual episode, isn’t the difference of the awareness from its pattern of neuron firings and inhibitions enough to show that conscious perceptions are indirect? No. That conclusion would be a failure to keep track of when one is describing the perceptual process from the external view with the internal acts of perceiving the world, including perceiving that part of the world that is brain processing supporting any conscious awareness. Percepts Nathaniel Branden: “Percepts constitute the actual starting-point of human knowledge, in the sense that percepts are man’s first fully aware cognitive contact with the world” (c.1968, 38). The concept and term percept was evidently introduced in the era of Charles Sanders Peirce in the nineteenth century. It was taken up by Rand when she wrote ITOE. In Rand’s view, as with Peirce, the conscious uptake from the senses for the makings of reason is sensory information already automatically integrated into percepts. (See further, Kelley 1986, 31, 44–51, 141–74.) “A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. . . . Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident” (1966–67, 5). Animals capable of percepts, perceive entities, in Rand’s categoreal sense of that term. Percepts and their objects are susceptible to retention in memory (Rand 1961, 18–19; Aristotle APo 99b35–40; Metaph. 980a28–30). Peirce had stressed that sense impressions are not first in our knowledge. We are not shut out from the external world, With Rand, and in contrast to Dretske 1978, the term and concept percept is like perception in having as its first and most basic sense: successful consciousness of realities. Percept indicates a relationship to reality, a consciousness in Rand’s fundamental sense, not a detached internal state. She does not use percept as in contrast to perception in the way that fright is in contrast to the occasion of being frightened by some existent such as a bear, with fright being occasioned also by non-existents such as ghosts. Dipert not only criticized Kelley for not meeting Kant’s arguments of the Aesthetic head-on (Dipert 1987, 60–61; see previous installment). He objected to Kelley’s emphasis on the metaphysical passivity of consciousness per se, Kelley’s contention that consciousness is not metaphysically creative (1987, 58–59, 69–70). Rand and Kelley have it, according to Dipert, that “of the bidirectional interaction between an individual human being and the ‘external’ world, knowledge and perception is the hopelessly passive direction. In fact it is Kelley’s main aim to demonstrate just how passive and non-creative perception and knowledge are” (58). Kelley had written: “When I open my eyes and see a chair, I do not choose the content of my awareness–I do not choose to see a chair with four legs and crimson upholstery instead of a Mack truck with sixteen wheels and steel-gray sides. It is given and can therefore serve as the basis for the judgment that this is a chair.” (1986, 202) Kelley countered Kant’s synthetic view of awareness in which perceptual and conceptual organizing activities of faculties of the subject give the presentations of the senses their intentionality towards an objective world (1986, 25, 204–5; further, Jankowiak 2012). (That innovation of Kant’s set the stage for the coherence theory of truth bannered by later idealists.) Kelley counterposed to Kant’s synthetic view of awareness, a “spectator view” (a view named and opposed by John Dewey), though of a sort allowing for physical processing yielding direct perceptual awareness without thereby scuttling its possible objectivity and cognitive bona fidi. Dipert took this passive picture of perception as a failure to take into account that insofar as perception is cognitive or a major support of reasoning and knowledge, it is action-directed and essentially so (1987, 69–70). Kelley and other elaborators of Rand’s philosophy follow her in the idea that percepts are both metaphysically passive and cognitive. I think the Objectivists are correct in maintaining both of those positions, and although they have not given enough weight to the action-directing of perception, it is perfectly harmonious to acknowledge the affordances for action given in perception (not mentioned by Dipert or Kelley), as in J. J. Gibson and researchers in the ecological school of psychology, and the metaphysical passivity, the givenness, the sense of one not having made it up, in the nature of perception. One may also acknowledge that neuronal systems in lowest innervated animals are instrumentation and control systems (control of actions), having value-ordering, without possessing consciousness, and rightly receive as spectator some among our instrumentation and control systems in which consciousness is put in gear. Kant took the content (or “material”) of sensory intuition as given and given as from things independent of our occasions of awareness. He erred, I say, in concluding that elements of form in perceptual experience could not be received passively along with the material element in sensory intuition. Fact is, ten fingers with eight spaces are part of my two hands and are spatial situation given right along with any stress—active by exertion or passive by being worked on by the manicurist—and are reality received passively, all simply given and given as being given in perception. Similarly, some affordances for action can be simply part of what is immediately given in experience, supposing one has developed so far as to have had pertinent past experience of actions on, with, and from things. Illusions Let me elaborate a view of illusion and veridicality in percepts, at odds with the Objectivist analysis. Let me elaborate a different frame of perceptual direct realism, one still according with metaphysical passivity of and direct realism in perception. It incorporates affordances for actions at a fundamental level. Instruments we design for detections and measurements have a dedicated object (which I shall designate by all-caps TARGET). We can manipulate and adjust the instrument to capture just that object for presentation to our senses. We could design a camera with the purpose of imaging a straight stick partially in water such that the camera system compensates for difference in the indices of refraction of air and water. A sensor in the air and a sensor in the water feeding information ultimately to the camera would likely be required, and this information processed in an automatic way in the camera recorder. The camera would show a straight stick because we had made the instrument system an indicator of our information purpose, our TARGET: straightness in objects it detects. Design of the instrumentation systems that are our natural sensory systems are the result of natural processes of evolution and individual development employing living processes in an environment having whatever material resources are locally available at the time. Mere typical success in detecting or measuring the target (lower case) of the sensory system regularly associated with objects, motions, or media pertinent to life of the animal gives enough probability for preservation and reproduction of the animal. We are able to learn that the enlargement of the moon or the sun when near the horizon is, in some unknown way, a contribution of our visual system. If we take a photo of the moon in that position, the enlargement-effect is not registered and reported by the camera. With thought and empirical investigation, we can tease out elements in our perceptions that are contributions of our perceptual systems. By modern scientific investigation, the Mach-band effect—which is a visual illusion in the degree of darkness of the grayness of surfaces and which may have had the adaptive advantage of accentuating edges—has been explained by the pattern of neural connections (lateral inhibition) in the circuitry of the retina. I mentioned the TARGET of an instrument we design. There is another sort of target of an artificial instrument, which is also at work in our natural, perceptual instruments. Advantage in animal species evolution or in survival of the individual animal is not the TARGET of a natural perceptual instrument. Nature is not a designer, though it yields designs, and there are no TARGETS for natural perceptual systems. There is a target (lower-case) of an instrument which is in the detailed constitution and operation of the instrument. Our modern motion-detecting devices have as their target: alterations in level of light being received by their sensors, which has some fair correlation with objects moving in the field. Our purpose, our TARGET—detection of moving objects—is not the target we put into the design of the instrument. I maintain that this is the way to view natural sensory systems, from thermal contact systems to visual systems having a distal stimulus. Veridical perception, I say, is neuronal system indicating in consciousness things as they are. Illusions are neuronal system indicating in consciousness things in some ways as they are not. I say percepts are leaders to reality, due to our constitution. Percepts not only present. They indicate due to our constitution. Their character of automatically indicating in consciousness is what makes percepts components in empirical cognition. The proverbial straight stick partially in air and partially in water indicates a bent stick. Understanding how it comes to look bent does nothing to change the circumstance that the perceptual presentation is misleading (contra Branden c. 1968, 47–48; Kelley 1986, 88, 93; Peikoff 1991, 40). Kelley and other Objectivist philosophers ignore the leading I attribute to perceptual presentations prior to any perceptual judgement. That is a mistake. The quality in perceptual presentations that I have called leading, and the importance of that quality, should be recognized and put to work in a realist philosophy of perception. (Continued to ~Dipert on Kelley’s Kant~Bβ.) References Aristotle, c. 348–322 B.C.E. The Collected Works of Aristotle. 1984. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Branden, N. c.1968. The Basic Principles of Objectivism. In The Vision of Ayn Rand. 2009. Gilbert, AZ: Cobden Press. Buchler, J., editor. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover. Dipert, R. R. 1987. David Kelley’s The Evidence of the Senses. Reason Papers, 12:57–70. Dretske, F. 1978. The Role of the Percept in Visual Cognition. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 9:107–27. Houser, N., editor. 1998. The Essential Peirce. Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jankowiak, T. P. 2012. Sensation and Intentionality in Kant’s Theory of Empirical Cognition. Ph.D. dissertation. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses – A Realist Theory of Perception. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Peikoff, L. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton. Peirce, C. S. 1901. Pearson's Grammar of Science. In Houser 1998. Also in Buchler 1955. Rand, A. 1961. The Objectivist Ethics. In Rand 1964. ——. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness – A New Concept of Egoism. Signet. ——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. In Rand 1990. ——. 1990. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, editors. Meridian.

~Dipert on Kelley’s Kant~A Prof. Dipert’s paper is not only a criticism of Kelley’s Kant in ES, it is an examination of the theory of perception that is the aim of Kelley’s book.[1] I want to examine both (a) the direct criticisms that Dipert makes on Kelley’s representation and analysis of Kant and (b) the issues Dipert takes up in Kelley’s theory of perception, their fate in subsequent scientifically informed philosophy of perception and how Kant’s philosophy and Kelley’s philosophy fare in light of those developments. Kelley had written that Kant’s doctrines that space and time are forms of the perceptual faculty, subjective things imposed on the manifold of sensations, are applications of Kant’s doctrine that because consciousness has a specific constitution and has specific functional operations, consciousness cannot passively mirror the world outside. I observe that that is not among the arguments Kant gives for the ideality of space and time in the outset of KrV in his Transcendental Aesthetic. Kelley does not deal with those arguments, which is understandable since his book is about philosophy of perception. I should mention, however, that for Objectivism, Leonard Peikoff had argued against a doctrine of Kant’s which Kant had set out within his the prelude to the Transcendental Aesthetic. That is the division of judgments into either synthetic ones or analytic ones. Rand and Peikoff had also argued a point with which Objectivists could sensibly approach Kant’s arguments on space and his proposed source of necessity in geometry. That point is that there is no such thing as strictly a priori knowledge, and those arguments against a priori knowledge would go not only to alleged examples of analytic a priori knowledge (viz., logic), but to the synthetic a priori sort of knowledge devised by Kant specifically to characterize geometrical knowledge, and subsequently to characterize an allegedly “pure” part of physics and any right metaphysics.[2] In order to supersede Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, together with his ideality of space, an Objectivist philosophy of mathematical knowledge must be adduced. No such adequate theory has been forthcoming, and Kelley, like Rand, omitted direct counters to Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic, though he had the tools for setting aside Kant’s own epistemology of geometry. Dipert stresses this neglect in Kelley’s engagement with Kant’s arguments (1987, 60–61, 68–69). It should not be thought, I say, contrary Kelley’s contention, that Kant’s doctrines that space and time are forms of the perceptual faculty, subjective things imposed on the manifold of sensations, are applications of Kant’s doctrine that because consciousness has a specific constitution and specific functional operations, consciousness cannot passively mirror the world outside. Firstly, that is not doctrine correctly ascribed to Kant at all. Kant’s reason for thinking we cannot access things as they are in themselves and the things that are noumena was because he denied we a have a power of pure intellectual intuitions, on which his predecessors had rested our ability to access such things. Unlike the divine understanding, “our kind of intuition is dependent on the object, and hence is possible only by the object affecting the subject’s capacity to present.”[3] Our power of intuition is only sensory intuition. Secondly, Kant has given in the Transcendental Aesthetic his reasons for concluding that space and time are forms of the perceptual faculty, subjective things imposed on the manifold of sensations. Those reasons, as I said, do not include consciousness having a specific constitution and specific functional operations. Dipert disdained Kelley’s and Rand’s fundamental metaphysical constraint of the primacy of existence, taken for manifest in everyday direct perception of the world (Dipert 1987, 61). Just because we do not experience the perceptual scene as being of our own creation is, according to Dipert, no showing that it is not. This attitude strikes me as rationally inverted. Driving along the roadway we can see the objects nearer the road are whizzing by faster than the ones farther away, and we can readily account for this by considering the entire spatial configuration and our movement in it. That is, we can intellectually discern that the perceptual phenomenon is due in part to our own motion, just as we directly perceived it to be. We can perceive also directly that we are sitting stationary in the seat of the vehicle and not creating that apprehension either. We need not get silly and start with the differential whizzing-speed phenomena and try to demonstrate that configurations in space are independent of the participation of our persons in them nor independent of our conscious registrations of spatial configurations. Nor prove that our apprehension of being stationarily seated in the vehicle is something constructed and projected from our own heads. Kant sensibly did not dispute that we experience space as given to us, not created by us and put about us by our minds. The challenge he took upon himself was to argue this impression is not durable under careful examination. The challenge he leaves for us (which he thought impossible to accomplish) is to find a way in which the character of what we do in geometry and the character of the results could be accounted for by some method empirical (e.g. Locke/Feder) or rational (e.g. Aristotle/Wolff), rather than by his own subject-heavy account. Dipert rightly noted that that is a challenge Kant leaves for realists and that Objectivists have not risen to this challenge.[5] I have mentioned two tools an Objectivist should bring to an analysis and critique of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic: non-existence of a priori knowledge and Peikoff’s way of toppling the mutually exclusive division of knowledge between the analytic and the synthetic, in “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” coupled with Peikoff’s remarks therein on necessity in knowledge. Bring along also Kelley’s account of perception, perceptual form, and his account of how percepts are made from sensations. These Kelley accounts are possible replacements and improvements for Kant’s notion of and use of sensory intuition. (To be continued.) Notes [1] Dipert, R. R. 1987. David Kelley’s Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception. Reason Papers 12:57–70. Since the time of Kelley’s book, philosophy of perception has been a very active area. A distinguished book defending realism is A. D. Smith’s The Problem of Perception (2002). Other eminent works in philosophy of perception since ES: The Contents of Visual Experience (2010) by Susanna Siegel; Does Perception Have Content? (2014) edited by Berit Brogaard; The Unity of Perception (2018) by Susanna Schellenberg; Perception: First Form of the Mind (2022) by Tyler Burge; Perceptual Experience (2022) by Christopher Hill; The Border between Seeing and Thinking (2023) by Ned Block. Also pertinent to Kelley and to Dipert on Kelley: Hallucination – Philosophy and Psychology (2013) edited by Macpherson and Platchias; Dreaming (2015) by Jennifer Windt; Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001) by Michael Huemer; The Case for Qualia (2008) edited by Edmond Wright; The Innocent Eye (2014) by Nico Orlandi; and Explaining the Computational Mind (2013) by Marcin Milkowski. [2] For a thorough refutation of Kant’s (or anyone’s) casting mathematical knowledge as a priori, see Kitcher 1995. [3] Kant, KrV, B71. Further, B139, B153. Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality – Kant’s Idealism & His Realism (2017), pp. 154, 157–58, 167, argues that the singularity and immediacy that Kant takes as essential to sensory intuition guarantees existence of their objects. [4] That innovation of Kant’s had set the stage for the coherence theory of truth bannered by later idealists. [5] From the empiricist side, Philip Kitcher’s The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (1995) delivers a sophisticated pragmatist replacement for Kant’s account of space and geometry.

Let KrV stand for Kritik der reinen Vernunft = Critique of Pure Reason. In citations A designates the first edition (1781), and B designates the second edition (1787). ~Kelley and Rand on Kant In his excellent book The Evidence of the Senses (ES), David Kelley included some remarks on Immanuel Kant’s mature theoretical philosophy by way of contrast with the realist theory of perception which Kelley had developed within the metaphysical and epistemological framework of Ayn Rand. Dr. Kelley’s book assimilates pertinent modern cognitive science up to the year of its publication 1988. It engages contemporary philosophers and classic modern ones Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. "The theories of perception of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, of A. J. Ayer and Wilfred Sellars, derive as much from general assumptions about the nature of cognition as from any facts about perception in particular. . . . / The fundamental question in this respect is whether consciousness is metaphysically active or passive by nature. Is consciousness creative, constituting its own objects, so that the world known depends on ourselves as knowers; or is it a faculty of response to objects, one whose function is to identify things as they are independently of it? In Ayn Rand’s terms, it is a question of the primacy of consciousness versus the primacy of existence: do the contents of consciousness depend on the subject for their existence or identity, or do the contents of consciousness depend on external objects?" (ES 8 ) I’ll take it that by “contents of consciousness” it would be a poor analogy to think of the contents of my coffee mug. Surely that would be lame. The woods outside my window that I can see are out there, not inside my consciousness ticking along and located here with me at the computer; whereas, the coffee in my mug is simply in that mug. “Contents of consciousness” would be more sensibly analogized with an electronic, compact-disc recording of a song, where said song is analogue of the object of an object-tracking episode of consciousness. The song is gotten into the recording from outside the recorder and put again outside when the CD recording is played. Actions vis-a-vis the song are required to get a recording of it. Actions of ours and the CD player are required for the song to reappear. Kelley erred badly in the following representation of Kant: “Kant begins by distinguishing appearance from reality. We are directly aware, he says, only of appearances—or phenomena, as he calls them. These exist only as the representational content of experience and are thus to be contrasted with noumena, or things as they are in themselves, things as they are apart from our experience.” (ES 21) Appearance, experience, phenomena, and noumena are technical terms in Kant’s idealism, which can be variously called Critical, Formal, or Transcendental Idealism. Kant’s use of appearance in his mature philosophy (KrV and beyond) is not in contrast to reality, but to things as they are in themselves. Appearances, in Kant’s sense, are presented to us as they are in us. They are nothing unreal. They are real, though not what Kant would call objectively real in themselves or what we should call real as existents external to consciousness. Combined with consciousness of them, appearances are perceptions. There is an active power in us that synthesizes an order for appearances and makes them coherent and apprehensible for us, that is, makes them empirical experience (A120, A124). By Kant’s lights, we have also an enduring ‘I’ of pure apperception that is correlate of all presentations to us insofar as we become conscious of them. This attendant pure apperception makes apprehended appearances intellectual (A124). These contain concepts, and this pure apperception “makes possible the formal unity of experience and with it all objective validity (truth) of empirical cognition” (A125). This pure apperception bringing sensible presentations under one consciousness “precedes all cognition of the object, as the intellectual form of that cognition, and itself amounts to a formal a priori cognition of all objects as such insofar as they are thought (the categories)” (A129). Phenomena in Kant’s sense, are appearances insofar as these are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories (A249). Phenomena are nothing unreal. Contrary the implication of Kelley’s brief sketch above, things as they are in themselves are not necessarily identically noumena, though it should be stressed that, in Kant’s system, neither is knowable by us. Things in themselves and noumena can be thought, but not known. Noumena was a technical term of philosophy not original with Kant. Noumenal objects in metaphysics had been such things as God, monads, and the immortal human soul. Their access had been by intellect, and a crucial part of that process of access had been taken to be a human power of intellectual intuition. Kant denied we have that power. We have sensible intuitions alone. These are the immediately grasped singular presentations of the senses, and all our knowledge of the world is ultimately from these. Things in themselves in Kant’s meaning are the things that appearances are the appearances of. But according to Kant, we should not be looking to appearances and the phenomenal to the end of learning what are things in themselves. That is not the prize we should seek in our sound inquiries. Rand and we should agree with that last point of Kant’s, but for a radically different reason. Things in themselves did not mean for Kant and his predecessors only things as they are independently of our discernment of them. It meant more generally things as they are devoid of any relations to other things. Rand booted the general notion of things in themselves and replaced it with simply things as they are. In her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, she articulated some additional metaphysics, and among these additions was the thesis that no existent is without relation to other things. A thing purported to stand in no such relations would be nothing (ITOE 39). The correct and easy inference we ought draw is that things in themselves are not things as they are. We know some of the things as they are, we aim to discover more of them, and any contention that there are any things as they are unknowable to us bears the burden of proof. That is a heavy burden, considering that there are no things as they are which do not stand in some external relations. Things “are not such that nothing that pertains to one kind is related to another, but there is some relation” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a16–17). I should say: Things in themselves are not things as they are independently of our discernments of them nor things as they are when we discern them. There are no things in themselves. Then too: Kant affirmed there are things in themselves, and this puts him in an untenable position of supposing that things in themselves are as in no relations to things not themselves, yet saying things in themselves stand in an undergirding-relation to appearances. Kelley makes an understandable error concerning Kant, which is partly due to the Kemp Smith translation of KrV. Of things as they are in themselves, apart from all the receptivity of our senses, we know nothing. “We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them” (A42 B59). The translation of Pluhar reads “All we know* is the way in which we perceive them. (*–More literally, ‘are acquainted with’: kennen.).” The translation of Guyer reads “We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them.” The Kemp Smith translation, now overrun by the later ones, had made Kant out to be more subject-sided than he was. To be sure, Kant flirts with the empirical idealism of Berkeley by that statement, under any of these translations, when we take the statement from its full context. Kelley quotes the text preceding the statement and italicizes the statement to emphasize it. Kelley takes the passage as supporting his view, coinciding with Rand’s, that for Kant it is because our faculties of awareness have a specific identity, we cannot know things as they are in themselves. Like Rand, having supposed that appearance is in contrast to things as they are, having slipped from things as they are in themselves to things as they are, Kelley concluded that the view of Kant implies we cannot know the real (leaving aside mathematics) because all our knowing is by specific means (ES 22). I say that in the context of Rand’s philosophy, as we have shown, one should never make the slip of taking things in themselves as things as they are. Rand, Branden, Kelley, and Peikoff all made that slip and wrongly concluded that Kant’s system entails our inability to know reality, systematically so. Kant’s statement highlighted by Kelley shifts focus from things as they are perceived by us to the mode or way of our perception. That the statement was exactly right for Kant to say, within his own treatment of perception, is belied by the text following the statement: “We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. We are concerned solely with this. Space and time are its pure forms, sensation in general its matter. We can cognize only the former a priori, i.e., prior to all perception, and they are therefore called pure intuition; the latter, however, is that in our cognition that is responsible for it being called a posteriori cognition, i.e., empirical intuition. The former adheres to our sensibility absolutely necessarily, whatever sort of sensations we may have; the latter can be very different. Even if we could bring this intuition of ours to the highest degree of distinctness we would not thereby come any closer to the constitution of objects in themselves. For in any case we would still completely cognize only our way of intuiting, i.e., our sensibility, and this always only under the conditions originally depending on the subject, space and time; what the objects may be in themselves would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance, which alone is given to us.” (KrV A42–43 B59–60 [Guyer]) Kant, then, was not claiming that the “matter” of percepts, which varies with what is perceived in our different episodes of perception, are from the side of the subject; only spatial and temporal form in such percepts originates from the constitution of the subject. Yet that is not the impression one gets if one attends only to “We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them” or “We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them.” Our perceptions have a matter to them, in Kant’s full view, and this does not come from the subject. Of course, it is bad enough that Kant tried to pose space and time as orders purely from the constitution of the perceiving subject, and Rand and Kelley were surely right to challenge that doctrine. Kelley understood that Kant had not taken objects in our perceptions to be sourced in the mind. But Kelley supposed this to hold only for the phenomenal mind. Kelley took Kant to be sourcing objects of perception in the mind as it is in itself, not the mind knowable to us (ES 24). Kelley took that to be the way in which Kant’s idealism differed from Berkeley’s. I don’t think that is such a really great difference considering that that would merely displace Berkeley’s mind of God with the unknowable human mind as it is in itself. Kant argued in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) that in his Critique he had not argued skepticism of the objects of experience; he had argued that and how we have some a priori cognition of the objects of experience. This Kant had done by arguing that space and time are not empirical presentations, but a priori forms necessary for any experience of objects. Space and time for Kant are ideal, but not because the material world is ideal. By the time of writing the Prolegomena, Kant called his type of idealism not simply transcendental. He called his idealism additionally formal, in contrast to Berkeley’s dogmatic or material idealism. Kelley wrongly represented Kant as holding that “the criterion of objectivity is universal agreement among subjects, or intersubjectivity” (ES 26). In Prolegomena Kant had observed “there would be no reason why other judgments necessarily would have to agree with mine, if there were not the unity of the object—an object to which they all refer, with which they all agree, and, for that reason, also must harmonize among themselves” (1783, 298; see also A820–23 B848–51; 1786, 144–46). In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant reiterates that “universality of assent does not prove the objective validity of a judgment (i.e. its validity as cognition) but only that, even if universal assent should happen to be correct, it could still not yield a proof of agreement with the object; on the contrary, only objective validity constitutes the ground of a necessary universal agreement” (1788, 13). Prof. Randall R. Dipert (1951–2019) criticized Dr. Kelley’s representations of Kant in ES in a Review Essay in Reason Papers (1987). In the sequel, I shall examine Dipert’s criticisms as well as the later criticisms of Kelley’s Kant by Prof. Fred Seddon, who bannered quite a bit of distinctive common ground between Kant and Rand, quite more than should win assent by her or Kelley or by me (or Hill 2005). (To be continued.) References Aristotle, c. 348–322 B.C.E. Metaphysics. Joe Sachs, translator. 1999. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press. Hill, K. 2005. Seddon on Rand. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 7(1):203–7. Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason. Werner Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ——. Paul Guyer, translator. 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1783. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. Gary Hatfield, translator. 2001. In Immanuel Kant – Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason. Mary Gregor, translator. In Immanuel Kant – Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses – A Realist Theory of Perception. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Thanks, Doug! Let me try it again: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798 The reason it was called the "einstein" was because ein stein means one stone. That single tile has now been shown to exist. We can sleep more sweetly now. The full paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10798.pdf

Proof of Aperiodic MonoTile Has Been Accomplished

Tad, thanks for the compliment, but it took me forever to figure out what was the pun you refer to. I'm afraid that was accidental; it hadn't occurred to me. I had thought your laughter emoji was in reference to those trash-minded parents in Florida. It is too bad the school principal lost his job on account of them. But let's leave those fools aside now and abide with human exaltation and those who know it.*

The Academy in Florence has invited teachers and students in Florida to visit Michelangelo's David in the museum after the complaint from parents in Florida against sixth-grade art students being shown a picture of this David, jewel in the crown of the Renaissance.

Some of my favorite excerpts He speaks struggle, sometimes tenderness. He speaks me.

What do YOU mean by platonic idealism? Are you accusing some contemporary not your former self of precisely THAT which you mean? Between wrestling stones making my flagstone sidewalk and going back out to work myself into the ground splitting wood, I took a lot of precious time writing that comment for you this afternoon (after receiving the PM from you indicating you wanted further communication on this topic). And this laconic sentence is all you have to offer in return? And no specific sign of you having read or understood or appreciated or wondered-over anything specifically I worked up for you in that comment based on your earlier posts best I could understand them? Talk some clear specifics, OK? Or I'm finished with trying to communicate with you.

SL, So far as I understand you, I incline to agree with Nozick 1981 on the relation of value to the world (which may coincide with the outlook you expressed). He gave four or five possible relations between value and the world, and among them, he rated as best: We choose that there be value, but what the character of value there is is not up to us. I differ from him on what he took to be the basis of objective value, which was degree of organic unity. I'm with Rand on the basis: life. Indeed the value in organic unity, whether in art or in the making a business, is derivative from the character of life, including its character of organic unity. We choose that there be value in that we choose to make life our conscious operative goal. Concerning our relation cognitively to the world, I think it everywhere good (and a joy) to parse what is from the human mind and what lies in the world independently of our thinking about that thing in the world. I mentioned coordinate systems upstream. Our perceptual illusion of the largeness of the sun or moon near the horizon is also a phenomenon humans were able to soundly reason, even before experience of photographs, must be a contribution of our visual system, in whatever unknown way. In many of my writings published since way back, I have taken set membership to be only a tool of the mind, which can be applied productively to the world. In the world there are members of families, but no members of sets independently of the thinking mind. Then there are in the mind-independent world no members of sets as such along shared qualitative dimensions of things, which is to say that independently of mind, there are no concepts of the Randian form in the mind-independent world. Such sets along noted world-given dimensions are tied to magnitude structure in the world, but they are tools from us for keeping good track of things in the world. Then too, in my fundamental paper "Existence, We" I have parsed some of what in logic is in the world independently of our thinking logically about the world from what appears only by connection to our minds thinking about the world. There is sameness and difference and similarity and dissimilarity in the mind- and perception-independent world. There is identity in the mind-independent world, though not self-self identity in the mind-independent world. The guide of non-contradiction is of course a guide for us fact-seeking minds and keeping ourselves unified in our fact-seeking. Identity, on which the rule depends, is in the mind-independent world; non-contradiction is not. My most novel insight in this area was that the law of excluded middle is similarly not in the mind-independent world. That is, it is novel when joined with my original proposal that all disjunctions in cognition are descendants from the alternative set up by the phenomenon of life: life or death. Life is the bringer of alternatives into the world scene. Nothing in the preceding remarks depends on any of the differences between Rand's metaphysics and mine. All of it can be consistently assimilated into Objectivism. Thank you for the reflections, SL.

In his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), Leonard Peikoff adds an element of what to the that given in mere perception, without judgment on the perception. That element is similarities and differences given in mere perception: “The role of the senses is to give us the start of the cognitive process: the first evidence of existence, including the first evidence of similarities and differences among concretes. On this basis, we organize our perceptual material . . . . This whole development depends on the sense organs providing an awareness of similarities and differences rich enough to enable a perceiver to reach the conceptual level.” (Peikoff 1991, 42) This representation of Rand’s epistemology, amending Rand 1957, is also adopted in Salmieri 2016. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Peikoff, Leonard. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Meridian. Salmieri, Gregory. 2016. The Objectivist Epistemology. In A Companion to Ayn Rand, edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

References Branden, Nathaniel. c.1968. Basic Principles of Objectivism, in The Vision of Ayn Rand (2009). Gilbert, AZ: Cobden Press. Hauser, Nathan, ed. 1998. The Essential Peirce. Volume 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moore, Edward C. 1961. American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, & Dewey. New York: Columbia University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1901. Pearson’s Grammar of Science. In Hauser 1998. Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. ——. 1960. Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World. In Rand 1982. ——. 1961a. The Objectivist Ethics. In Rand 1964. ——. 1961b. For the New Intellectual. Title essay of For the New Intellectual. New York: Signet. ——. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library. ——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 2nd ed. H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, eds. 1990. New York: Meridian. ——. 1970. Kant versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet. Wilson, Aaron Bruce. 2016. Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality. New York: Lexington Books.

Oops, I got the terms mixed up. Geroch's term was "appropriate," not "adequate." It's his meaning of his term I have in mind: everything in the mathematics has physical meaning and all of the physics one wishes to talk about is describable in terms of the mathematics. Such is an appropriate mathematics for the physics. Some of our mathematics used in physics, I say, hopefully uncontroversially, is clearly a matter of chosen tool, not the mathematical character of the physical reality. Such would be using base 10 in arithmetic calculations and using various coordinate systems. As fruitful as it was to realize that curves can be described by algebraic equations written with reference to a coordinate system, when it comes to geometric facts of curves in the Euclidean plane, which we may take for planes of the physical geometry around us, the method of Euclid we learn in high school for bisecting a line segment is perfect location and physical; no coordinates lain over things by us and used to describe the curves and their intersections add something physical, which we get directly by synthetic geometry (Euclid's way being an example of synthetic geometry, as distinct from analytic geometry).

I sure did: more on the ways complex analysis is like and different from real analysis (including likeness and difference of R2 and C). I want to watch it again, and I hope to listen also to his part II and part III. The portion starting at about 9:00 was right on our mathematical issue, and I'd expect would be informative to you as it was to me; the part before that is good, but you probably already knew. Are you able to understand each word in that accent? Did you already know it all? (My favorite college mathematics professor was Indian (ordinary differential equations), and so was my favorite philosophy professor, who had done his advanced degree in Göttingen, then was professor in India, then migrated from the Ganges to the Red River in time to get me going on KrV. I love the accent and get every word, due to all that practice, I imagine.) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Have you been exposed to the quaternionic formulation of quantum mechanics (Adler 1995)? I do not yet understand the work of Renou et al. well enough to know whether their result also renders any quaternionic formualation of QM short of adequate. By "adequate" I mean as the meaning of Geroch in Mathematical Physics:

Rand on Discernment of That and What Nathaniel Branden: “Percepts constitute the actual starting-point of human knowledge, in the sense that percepts are man’s first fully aware cognitive contact with the world” (c.1968, 38). The term percept is from Peirce and his contemporaries (see Moore 1961, cited in Rand 1966–67, 2; further, Wilson 2016, 190–95, 204–5). Rand had written in the 1957 exposition of her philosophy: “The task of [man’s] senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.” She defined man’s reason as “the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses.” (Rand was still using that definition in her 1960.) She took human knowledge to run part-and-sum “from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end” (1016). “Sensations are . . . an automatic form of knowledge” (1961a, 18). A sensation is “a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments” (1966–67). Rand took knowledge broadly enough at times such that sensation, which informs perceivers only that something exists, not what exists, counts as some knowledge. Knowledge for humans would be, in full, “a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation” (1966–67, 45; further, 1970, 84–87). Rand had taken all consciousness fundamentally to be identification (1957, 1016). So all perception, even perception of a first ray of light in infancy, would be an identification. It is therefore not surprising that in her later articulation of Objectivism she would contract her definition of reason to simply: “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses” (1961a, 20) in place of “perceives, identifies and integrates . . . .” Rand had it that “sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically by the brain of a man or of an animal” (1961b, 14). Those perceptions in humans are volitionally integrated into conceptual comprehension by reason. Sensations are transitory identifications, not identifying what, only that. Unless a sensation is itself focused upon—say, in neuropsychology—it is not, in Rand’s meaning of the concept sensation, retained in memory, which I cash to mean specifically not retained in working memory or in episodic or semantic memory (i.e., retained only in iconic memory). Conceptualization, conjecture, and inference come under the name reason for Rand by falling under the volitional identification and integration of material from the senses. In Rand’s view, as with Reid and Peirce, the conscious uptake from the senses for the makings of reason is sensory information already automatically integrated into percepts. (See further, Kelley 1986, 31, 44–51, 141–74.) “A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. . . . Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident” (1966–67, 5). Animals capable of percepts, perceive entities, in Rand’s categoreal sense of that term. Percepts and their objects are susceptible to retention in memory. Peirce had stressed that sense impressions are not first in our knowledge. We are not shut out from the external world, Once Rand had taken on percept and its position in cognition from sensation to reason, I think she really needed to do a little refinement on her 1957 statement that it is only by reason that we discern what an existent is. Animals capable of percepts have some of what a perceived thing is and what actions a thing affords right there. So do we. It remains, of course, that with reason we grasp more, much more, of what a perceived thing is. Additionally, by now it is overwhelming in the neurobiological evidence that into neural activity streams feeding into a percept is a good deal of what a thing is.* None of that formation is volitional, and all of it remains as the given, for conceptualization and reasoning on it. That is, such rich percepts, giving some what in addition to that, can remain first cognitive, aware, contact with the world and sound foundation for knowledge. When we have a percept, it includes places, motions, and some temporal relations in a scene. Are these part of the what a thing is? Or are they only part of the that a thing is? In Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, she articulated some additional metaphysics, and among these additions was the thesis that no existent is without relation to other things. A thing purported to stand in no such relations would be nothing (ITOE 39). That is, there are no concrete existents that do not stand in some external relations. That tunes well with Aristotle: Things “are not such that nothing that pertains to one kind is related to another, but there is some relation” (Metaphysics, 1075a16–17). External relations are there, ready for conscious recognition in percepts and concepts and predications. I suggest that in Rand’s metaphysics and her concept of percepts, her system needs a minor repair by acknowledgement that wheres and whens are within percepts, delivered as aspects of concrete existents, delivered both as that and what of existents *E.g. "Feedforward, Horizontal, and Feedback Processing in the Visual Cortex" by Lamme, Supèr, and Spekreise in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 1998, 8:529–35. (I'll try to list the References in a later post.)

Real and Complex Analysis (especially over at 9:00 forward)

InfraBeat, Welcome to Objectivism Online! Thank you for the helpful informative post!

Interesting. Newton maintained that numbers as in 7 feet are really ratios, which would be a relation. I've not had time to chase it down, but do you recall an imaginary term that falls out of a classical E-M radiation equation which turns out to correspond to quantity of the radiation absorbed in a medium?

So mathematically, complex analysis is really equivalent to real analysis? A complex number consists of a real number plus an imaginary number, where the imaginary number has a real coefficient. But using the real number 3 as a coefficient in 3i does not turn 3i into a real number does it?

"For years, it was generally accepted that real quantum theory was experimentally indistinguishable from complex quantum theory. In other words, in quantum theory, complex numbers would only be convenient, but not necessary, to make sense of quantum experiments. Next we prove this conclusion wrong." (12/15/21). In the April 2023 issue of Scientific American, there is an article by the researchers getting the result that the use of complex numbers in standard quantum theory is not really just a convenience, but that some results of standard quantum theory cannot be also obtained in any alternative formulation using only real numbers. In other words, if I'm getting this right, characterization of quantum mechanics using complex numbers (or hypercomplex numbers?), is the only correct mathematical characterization of the physics. That is, purely real-number characterization—however complicated—of quantum mechanics is inadequate as a characterization of the physics.