Boydstun

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.

KyaryPamyu Among people I’ve known who have read Rand’s novels and were critical of them, it was because on about every page, she brings on some ideological or philosophical point. And either they find that a defect in literature as literature or they are grabbed by the ideas, and if they don’t like them, they start ridiculing the characters and story as replacement for arguing out the ideas. For many years, people I met who responded positively to Rand’s novels and ideas were one or two standard deviations above average intelligence. Since the handy internet has come about, I’ve gotten to see the lower levels who respond positively and who are a little sad in their limited ability to stick with reasoning and to make or adopt a consistent and well-understood philosophy of life for themselves. I do not “get” talk about how to market the philosophy. What is the purpose? Trying to make the world a better place? I don’t think that is actually a sensible goal in life. Just making your own life and the lives of others as individuals better seems the sensible thing to me. But then one’s focus is on individuals one gets to know and interact with as individual persons, not their falling into statistical groups for what looks like political hopes, which is sensibly a second-thought concern in a well-lived life. I like the local focus of Henry Rearden. Make products. Find traders for it. His focus is on that work, for satisfaction and for making a lot of money. He attends also to persons who are not commercial traders such as the young government man Tony, whom Rearden inspires, and to the philosophical guy Francisco, who gives Rearden much psychological liberation, and of course, he attends to the with-benefits of that trader whose suit he gets into thinking about putting his hand under.

3/19/23 – Live link

One reason I think Rand in The Fountainhead wanted to emphasize the need for "I" in "I love you" is that at least in popular culture, it was ignored and should not be. In the arena of brotherly love, people will tell you they love you, even when they know nothing about you and don't have any interest in finding out anything about you or what you regard as important about you. I used to run into young evangelicals like that. Moreover, all they cared about you was that you were a sinner and needed to be saved. They often have erased in their conception of you that you are a definite self or that that is of any significance. In other words, they neither knew you nor respected you or your mind on matters of concern to them. It's a sort of desecration of the word and concept love. On the theological idea of agape, it is as you note, that that sort of love is routinely associated with the further idea of the Christ, come to be known as the Son of God, having to suffer and die, to somehow pay for moral failings of people undeserving of the sacrifice. (And perhaps, similarly, with Prometheus bringing fire because he loved man.) But I don't think that's the only way the idea is used within that tradition. God as creator is, I think, without addition, a creator from boundless overflowing love. On the human scale, in the secular arena, such a concept, without association of perverse sacrifice comes up in relation with human creators, as here. I'd say that Rand's neglect of the "you," such as I think true to romantic love, as in my second paragraph above, was an error, specifically, a not fully evicting yet the egocentric from the kingdom of self-esteem. A psychiatrist friend of Ayn Rand's has what seems to me a balanced, realistic view of love in friendship and in romance, at about 33:00–44:00 here.

Monart, I take issue with some of the points in your stimulating reflection “Romantic Love vs Selfless Love.” In response to Rand’s “To say ‘I love you’, one must first know how to say ’I’” one should add “Also, one must first know how to say ‘you’”. That is, one must first be a definite self, and know what that is, and one must first also be able see another and care about seeing that other and want to boost the other and tune to the other and want to share seeing the world together and making a life together. I don’t recall any writer advocating selfless love when it comes to romantic love. If they say such love requires self-sacrifice to the other, I’ve not seen them ever mean anything but what I added in the preceding paragraph. And that is hardly self-sacrificial, neither in autonomy nor in selfish inclination (considering, for the latter, the selfish mutual enjoyment that is won). The place that selflessness and self-sacrifice and genuine altruism come up is in connection with brotherly love, including love for all human kind (leaving aside the great evil ones – NOKD). Those mistaken or misconceived virtues are not regularly a feature of the conception of agape as they are in conception of brotherly love. I love human kind, the individual mind, working alone or with others, and its creativity, in my lifetime and before I entered the scene. I love those things insofar as they may come after me. That seems a sort of agape love, and it does not require selflessness or self-sacrifice to have that, rather, it suggests, particularly in taking care for the "after me," a strong and overflowing self. On Kant I just want to mention (briefly, because I need to get back outside and work on a flagstone sidewalk I’m building) that love as an inclination could not be a source of any moral aspect of an activity (in his view). The inclinations-self gets trumped by the autonomy-of-will-self (one’s own will) as to any moral valence one might impute to an activity. To love your neighbor as yourself fails as a moral rule for Kant. He does seem to approve of a sort of intellectual love, which motivates behavior according with moral law which resides in one’s reason. He treats that reason and autonomy as ends in themselves, requiring no further ends to justify them. He never gets the realization that only life is an end in itself. And he looks for the wrong kind of necessity in moral norms, not realizing that life is the source of all value, meaning, or significance. Je suis Belle – Rodin

For me, a few examples: A B C D

Thanks! Wonderful skill!

What a fine-spirit environment Objectivism Online has been for me (13 years) in communicating, in sharing life and the world!

Tad, (source – Black's Law Dictionary) Incitement of resistance to lawful authority can rise to the level of sedition under American law, and it does not have to be insurrection to be sedition. Seditious Conspiracy Convictions Insurrection is a second sort of sedition. An insurgent is one who opposes the execution of law by force of arms, or who rises in revolt against the constituted authorities. Insurrection consists of any combined resistance in the lawful authority of the state, with intent to the denial thereof, when the same is manifested, or intended to be manifested, by acts of violence. "Rebel" is often taken as an insurgent who engages in extralegal resistance to the government in a cause unjust and untimely. So we would say that Confederates in the American Civil War were rebels, whereas the French Underground Resistance (e.g. Sartre) against the German occupation would be only insurrectionists. I'd say an insurrection that succeeds in halting a government becomes de jure if they are in position, capable of enforcement, to make the replacement laws, including one making their violent inception lawful.

I'm nearly finished with Dipert~B, and I'll be posting it in "Books to Mind" soon. To the list in the first note of ~B shown above, I should now add also: Christopher Hill's Perceptual Experieince (2022). Ned Block's The Border between Seeing and Thinking (2023).

Where did I say that anyone was engaged in insurrection in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol?