Boydstun

Harrison, I'd think that whether harm brought to the liar or harm brought to the victim of the lie is greater would vary in different cases. Then too, how awful telling a lie to innocent people feels to the liar varies greatly among such liars. However badly it makes the liar feel, what is the source of the feeling bad? Isn't it firstly because the liar knows and feels it is wrong to treat a good person or a presumptively good person in such a way? You mentioned the liar filling his or her own head with nonsense trivia which they know to be false. That is correct, and one aged and sound egoistic strategic reason for not lying to presumptively good people in a generally good social setting has always been that you have to keep track of what lies you've told to keep up the social appearance of a consistent set of what all you have reported. Whereas, making it a general policy to simply tell the truth to the presumedly innocent means you don't have that burden, but can simply center on what you have thought true and by good habit would have reported truly. My claim has been that that is not the most basic reason that one does not lie to the innocent. I've had egoist friends who have spooled out that sort of reason, but that is only because they want to keep their official reason for not lying in harmony with pure ethical egoism. I don't believe it is in fact their first reason for not lying to people, but a rationalization for their practice of not lying to people. The basic reason they don't lie to people is because their human nature at the deepest level stands in a relation to other humans in a way such that to lie is to try to buck that nature. The human is far and away the most social species among the great apes. In evolutionary history as well as in individual child development, the capacity for joint intentions on joint goals is what fundamentally is the distinction between the human species and contemporary great apes and between humans and the apes our species had been before the divergence into the human. Our contemporaries, the chimps and bonobos, lack those social capacities; their behaviors first seeming to show such abilities with their kind have by now been shown to be not the human capacity at all (joint intentions to joint goals), but purely Machiavellian and still locked in only individual purposes. It was with the growing human capacity for authentically joint intentions to truly joint goals, that the human line was able to develop linguistic communication, routine truth-telling in it, rationality (thence its offsprings), and objectivity. And as it happens this trajectory is repeated in individual child development. I'll try to write much more about this in a few months more. This new understanding has come from empirical observation and experiments and reflections on them, as reported in the books by Michael Tomasello, especially in the last decade. Philosophers' ethical theories are necessarily based on what they take to be human nature at most basic level. There are certain sciences that can help get right what is that nature pertinent to ethics. I know there are Objectivist-types who do not think science can inform philosophy; that it can only be the other way around. And I've known a few successful philosophers not Objectivist who also talk as if that were their own outlook as well, even into recent times. But overwhelmingly today, thank goodness, the successful philosophers have come around to engaging in philosophy informed by pertinent results of modern science, which is to say, come around to being fully serious.

Rand’s rational selfishness is reality-seeking and reality-engaging, not reality-avoiding, as is megalomania, nor the reality-avoiding and other-avoiding, the subjectivism, the self-centeredness, of narcissism. Rational selfishness does not presume that others are inferior or stand on lack of empathy for others. Does a narcissist seek to find others she can admire? A person of authentic self-esteem does, according to Objectivist writings. More specifically, does a narcissist seek to be a productive creator and find others with that trait for which she can admire them? A person of authentic self-esteem does. See N. Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem, p. 146.

Dipert & Seddon on Kant v. Kelley/Rand (cont.) ~Dipert on Kelley’s Kant~A (To be followed by Dipert~B, then installment on Seddon on Kelley's Kant.) 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 objective 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 fair 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, just as we directly perceived, is due in part to our own motion. 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 not something constructed and projected from our own heads. We have ways of teasing out particular elements in our perceptions that depend upon our own location, state of motion, or perceptual system. Such would be the enlargement we have of the moon near the horizon in our perception of it. We take a photograph of the witnessed scene, and it shows no such enlargement. Similarly, with the Mach-band illusion we experience when we carefully cut out a particular chit of gray from a number of those color strips you can get at the paint store. Placing the chits of the same grey we have cut out side-touching-side snugly on a table before us, it will appear that the grey darkens near the abutting edges. And we know perfectly well that each of those chits was uniform in its grayness all over its surface. Unlike the moon illusion, science has identified how the Mach-band effect comes about: through the pattern of circuitry (lateral inhibition) of the receptor neurons of the retina. But when it comes to idealism, there has to be a general argument given for it, as Kant provided, aiming to show that all percepts or fundamental facets of all percepts are in some systematic way contributed by the conscious subject. 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; and Perception: First Form of the Mind (2022) by Tyler Burge. (It would be ridiculous to call Burge's book a milestone work; it is a light-year marker.) 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.

Motherese Do not feel like you need to talk motherese. The regular continuous caretakers can give that a whirl. Just be yourself. My husband has one grandchild, whom I have known since he was born. He is now 21. Let your eyes do their natural things with his. You won't need to think about it. He is learning the world and people on his own motivation. Babies around the world develop fine under very different ways, by culture, they are cared for by adults. Relax. babies

You might enjoy reading Tom Rockmore's Fichte, Kant, the Cognitive Subject, and Epistemic Constructivism

Frank, on solipsism, some of my remarks in the immediately preceding post may help (my addition to Rand). Concerning idealism, the burden should be on the idealist to show that the world is not as it is perceived to be, namely, as existing and in the ways it does exist and as independently of our discernment of it. That independence element is part of what is in our perceptions. We have ways of teasing out particular elements in our perceptions that depend upon our own location, state of motion, or perceptual system. Such would be the enlargement we have of the moon near the horizon in our perception of it. We take a photograph of the witnessed scene, and it shows no such enlargement. Similarly, with the Mach-band illusion we experience when we carefully cut out a particular chit of gray from a number of those color strips you can get at the paint store. Placing the chits of the same grey we have cut out side-touching-side snugly on a table before us, it will appear that the grey darkens near the abutting edges. And we know perfectly well that each of those chits was uniform in its grayness all over its surface. Unlike the moon illusion, science has identified how the Mach-band effect comes about: through the pattern of circuitry (lateral inhibition) of the receptor neurons of the retina. But when it comes to idealism, there has to be a general argument given for it, aiming to show that all percepts or fundamental facets of all percepts are in some systematic way contributed by the conscious subject. Then the work of the realist can begin, which is to show what error there is in that general argument. (I think Moore did this with Berkeley, and I presume an Objectivist refutation of the arguments Berkeley gave would differ somewhat from Moore's.)

The context of the Rand quote is humans able to read AS or the Bible or anyway speak and listen and learn in language as a normal adult human. Another thing Rand had said about consciousness was that for those animals that possess it, it is their means of survival. But we should for her view on all that assimilate her further idea that only higher animals discern entities. That would suggest that only higher animals possess consciousness that is identification. It can be that for humans, consciousness in its identification power is the power that is a crucial enabler of the vast accomplishments of humans, including language, drawing, and music. For humans, at least humans, it can be that consciousness, at least paramount consciousness, is identification. That much I express for Rand's view. My own has something else coordinate with and equally fundamental for human consciousness and that is our awareness of other human minds in our company. And one does not have to learn of the latter from zero while learning about the world in early childhood.* Rather, it is more akin to one's ability to already recognize one's mother's distinctive voice the day one reached birth. It is internally reasonable to constrain Rand's statement about animal's consciousness and their survival in this way: For animals possessing consciousness as identification, it is the means of their survival. Humans, of course, are among the higher animals. That constrained thesis certainly has seemed born out in biological neuroscience. So far as I know, there is no consciousness at all in any animal that has a nervous system with a central integration and control center but is not so complex as to have a cerebral cortex in its brain organization. Even such lower animals, innervated and muscular, such as a snail, do have behavioral response hierarchies issuing from the nervous control center adapted to raise the liklihood of individual survival and reproduction, without consciousness. For them it could be said that their nervous system is the master controller for survival of the individual animal and its kind. On up the animal kingdom, the controlling brain comes to have parts and organization that are long-term controllers and these are the substrate of consciousness as identification (and as high power of consciousness for social coordination, such as the sharing of joint intentions, which the [other] great apes come nowhere near).

Those are all serious-thinking good points in this discussion. I'd like to add that when Rand introduced her axiom that consciousness is identification, one function it filled was to say which meaning of consciousness she meant. She took that one to be the most fundamental and took all others, such as in dreams or hallucinations, as dependent on consciousness in her fundamental sense of it: identification. Although it came up as a side point, in her Objectivist epistemology treatise, she indicated that she thought even a honeybee has some consciousness. I imagine that wherever there is an animal with a nervous system and some encephalization, she'd be thinking that that animal had some amount of consciousness. (A sponge is an animal, but without a nervous system.) She was in step with Aristotle in thinking that only some higher animals have powers of memory and of perception to perceive existence in terms of entities. Her definition of consciousness as identification contains 'entity' and is introduced in the duo: Existence is identity, consciousness is identification. That is perfectly fitting with the idea that fundamental consciousness is consciousness of existence. She had some trouble understanding earliest infant development in terms of this metaphysics, including the casting of consciousness in it. As here: To say to someone that consciousness is consciousness of existence, I have noticed, is not something that could be grasped by someone who did not have such an experience in their repertoire already. Like talking to a person blind from birth about the colors on the clouds in this morning’s sunrise. In connection with setting meditation in the context of the Randian setting of consciousness of existence as the primary and focal sense of consciousness, we might add the challenge of setting the awareness of such things as coldness, breathing, and other bodily conditions, which one had inarticulately from day of birth and retains to now. I should mention that recognitions of thinking existence could not happen without such priors as breathing giving sense of self-existence. The cognitive self of I think emerging in the second year (said as “I know,” meaning “I know how to do it”) joins preexisting awareness of bodily and situational self, affective and interpersonal self, and agency self. There is, moreover, no ontological priority of thinking-being over breathing-being in a human being, notwithstanding the greater activeness, facility, and deliciousness of thinking-being. Sidebar on intellectual history I have accumulated for “A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something”, the following: Theaetetus 160b, in Plato; Categories 7b29–30, De Anima 427a20–22, Metaphysics 1010b30–1011a2, 1072b20–22, 1074b35–36, in Aristotle; Ennead V.1.6.46–50, in Plotinus; Abelard ca. 1119 (commentary on Aristotle’s Categories), quoted in Jacobi 2004, 139; Summa Theologica I Q14 A2, Obj. 3 and Reply Obj. 3, in Aquinas; Wolff 1752, quoted in Kitcher 2011, 58; Herbart 1824, quoted in Heidelberger 2004, 32–33; Ortega y Gassett [1928] 1964, 198–99; Sartre [1937] 1957, 40; [1943] 1953, 21–22; 1948; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 395–96; Edelman 1989, 159. Rand’s talk here of “a contradiction in terms” is effective for directing attention to the meaning of consciousness. In the old technical vocabulary, the contradiction she exposes is not contradictio in terminis, but contradictio in adjecto. More specifically, it is the self-contradiction Rand housed under the rubric “stolen concept fallacy.” See Rand 1957, 1039–40; Branden 1963; Salmieri 2016, 298–99. Jacobi, Klaus. 2004. Abelard’s philosophy of language. In Brower and Guilfoy 2004, 126–57. Brower, Jeffrey E. and Kevin Guilfoy, eds. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitcher, Patricia. 2011. Kant’s Thinker. New York: Oxford University Press. Heidelberger, Michael. 2004. Nature from Within – Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Edelman, Gerald M. 1989. The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.

Hobbes had it that wit is ‘quick discernment of similitude in things otherwise much unlike, or of disimilitude in things that otherwise appear the same.” Locke followed up with this: “Wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy. Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another.” Rand, Peikoff, and Gotthelf express views on judgments concerning concptual-level similarities in an exchange with Nicholas Bykovetz (Prof. C) in the transcripts of her epistemology seminar (ITOE Appendix, 220–22). I want to spend some time digging into texts, KyaryPamyu, to reply to your picture in the preceding post. I had written you a quick complete reply shortly after your post, but I had composed it right here directly, and after a couple of maneuvers, I lost what I had composed. But then I realized it was just as well, because it would be more useful to be exact and dig into texts, rather than relying on memory and inexact expression of positions. So it will be a while yet before I reply, but that is underway in happy harmony with composing the next installment (Dipert v. Kelley) in the paper begun above, which will include (3rd installment) the treatment by Prof. Seddon on similarities of Kant and Rand.

In the present post, I want to draw attention to and to dispute a recent attack on Rand’s idea that consciousness stands as a philosophical axiom. The criticism of this idea comes from Prof. Fred Seddon (Philosophy) in his recent review of a book titled EXPLORING “ATLAS SHRUGGED”: AYN RAND’S MAGNUM OPUS (2021). That book is a collection of essays by Prof. Edward Younkins (Business). Seddon’s review is in the December 2022 issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES, to which my page citations refer in the following. Seddon’s springboard to this issue is a statement by Younkins that an axiom “cannot be reduced to other facts or broken down into component parts.” Seddon responds: “Yet consciousness depends on other facts, like the brain or body. Consciousness is an attribute, not a thing, and attributes depend on the entity of which they are attributes.”(p. 237) Furthermore, secondly, “unlike existence and identity, consciousness did not always exist. For billions of years there was no consciousness.” Thirdly, “there is no proof by denial for consciousness. It makes perfectly good sense to say there was no consciousness, whereas it makes no sense to say there was a time when there was no existence or identity.” Concerning Seddon’s third criticism, I say: proof by contradiction in denial of an axiom is indeed a traditional necessary condition that Rand accepted for having the status of a philosophical axiom, as she indicated in Galt’s speech and in ITOE. The fact that consciousness has not always existed does not change the circumstance that to affirm existence or any facts of existence implicitly affirms the fact of consciousness at work in mustering the assertion. To say that consciousness is identification of existence is to define the fundamental nature of consciousness from which all other episodes that are ordinarily spoken of as consciousness are causal and conceptual derivatives (such as dreams or hallucinations). Consciousness as identification of existence is an axiom for an epistemology, specifically a stand on the relation of mind to world informing and constraining all right additional epistemology. “Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its 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. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that IT exists and that you KNOW it.” (AS, pp. 1015–16) In my own modulation of Rand’s metaphysics, as set out in my fundamental paper “Existence, We”, the axiomatic concept consciousness is continued as fundamentally consciousness of existence, but the fundamental division of existing things into existence and consciousness (the existent that is consciousness) is kicked upstairs a bit by the division: existence and of-existence, where the latter includes any living existent, including the living existent that is consciousness. Nevertheless, what Rand said about the way in which consciousness is an axiom still holds. The circumstance that consciousness and life did not always exist, Seddon’s third rub, is irrelevant to the point of having a set of axioms needing to be put to work, according to Rand, for the human level of consciousness. My reply to Seddon’s third criticism also replies to his second criticism. To Seddon’s first criticism, I say: To say, as Seddon does, that consciousness is an attribute, not a thing, and therefore consciousness is fundamentally dependent (on things, on entities), is to hold Rand’s division of identity into categories (entity, action, attribute, relation) to an exclusivity standard, which was held for Aristotle’s categories, that she did not accept. In Galt’s Speech, Rand refers to the solar system as a thing, as an entity. Yet it can be allowed also, considering further aspects of the solar system, to be a thing composed of component things and their motions. Rand did not take up the picture in which if something belongs to one metaphysical category, it can in no wise ever belong to another category. Indeed any action (one of Rand’s categories) when considered in its systematic situation can also be an entity. The system that is the instrumentation and master control system of an animal can also be a combine of entities as well as a combine of activities. Where that system amounts to consciousness of existents as entities, we rightly say all of these: Mind is a system, which is to say, an entity; mind is an activity, which is to say an action; mind is an attribute of certain animals, which is to say that mind is an attribute. It is invalid to think, as Seddon reasons, that because consciousness is an attribute of certain things, it is, tout court, dependent on other things and therefore cannot qualify as an axiom. To say, in Rand’s meaning, as Younkins reported, that the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness “cannot be reduced to other facts or broken down into component parts” is not to say that consciousness cannot become explained by facts of life and brain operations, but that one will not come such explanation or explanations of anything else without consciousness of existence and apprehension that one is conscious of existence, and those things are first-apprehensions in the order of knowledge. If one does not already have those in hand, one can be told nothing of anything nor understand anything.

Kelley's Kant

Dipert & Seddon on Kant v. Kelley/Rand 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. As has been noted earlier on this forum, in Galt’s Speech, 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.

Tad, I was unable to understand their methods. I don't know what weight to give the circumstance that the organization has a variety of social aspirations. Strictly speaking, it would seem falling into the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy to give that any weight not zero. Be that as it may, I think what could have most bearing on any slanting in this particular data would be a desire that people get vaccinated for this contagious disease and for contagious diseases more generally. Or anyway, that leaders not try to sabotage this effort. As far as the merit of THAT social aspiration goes, I think it is fine. When I was a child in the 1950's, we got various vaccinations in school, including vaccination against polio. I don't recall my folks having any objection to it. As an adult, were I a parent of a schoolchild, I'd want them to have any vaccination our doctor thought good. Were there some sort of legal requirement (at what penalty?) to have schoolchildren vaccinated, I would not count it as a compulsion since I would want it to happen anyway. With respect to the Covid vaccines, I've not felt under any legal compulsion to get vaccinations, and I've not invested any time to learn whether there is any legal requirement for me to do so, because I simply wanted the vaccination, the sooner the better.

Here is another estimate from another group on lives saved and hospitalizations avoided by development and use of these vaccines.

Forward

Learn from Dr. Touchstone's paper, I should say, in the following way: Take her springboard from my old papers as opposite the conclusion I drew in those papers. Take it as Touchstone's conclusion drawn from material presented in those papers. Then learn from her of new research and thought that further elaborates the conclusion she had incorrectly drawn (i.e., take the conclusion for true while reading her paper, even though it can't really be inferred from my works), such newer works from these two, for notable example: http://www.aracneeditrice.it/ara.../index.php/autori.html... https://www.jennystanford.com/author/andrei-khrennikov/

The issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES recently issued (December 2022 – https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/…/ayn…/issue/22/2… ) includes a paper by Dr. Kathleen Touchstone titled “Error, Free Will, and Freedom.” It engages importantly with earlier writings of mine, and because the next issue of JARS will be its final issue, and it is already at the printer, I’m making a reply to Touchstone’s paper simply in online posts. Kathleen Touchstone’s main-stage representation of what I wrote in OBJECTIVITY in the 1990’s about internal indeterminism is incorrect. I rejected the idea that quantum indeterminism could play a role in these organic processes. The classical Boltzmann-regime and chaos processes in the classical regime are the only plausible candidates for micro indeterminism in neuronal process as far as I knew or know even now. I do NOT accede “the source of volition is errors.” I argued that error occurs, contra Descartes, in animal capabilities not requiring free will. But the circumstance that error arises without conceptual intelligence and free will does not entail that error Is the source of free will. Although, it suggests that cognitive error, conceptual or more primitive, is a necessary attendant of intelligence and free will. I do NOT accede “this error [thence free will] is due to indeterminism that is associated with quantum probability” or “credit error—specifically as it relates to quantum probability—with being the root of free will.” I did NOT conclude: “Of the three sorts of chance, quantum probability offers the only possible physical source for volition because of the presence of indeterminism.” Rather, classical processes can be the physical bases of neuronal indeterminism once one rejects the illicit projection of regular classical isolated, independent, determined process-streams onto wider physical reality. A softening of the picture of determinism in ordinary physical reality is required (V2N4, pp. 183–86; also "Reply to Eilon" in V2N5 Remarks): a keeping true to actual physical process before us everyday, which leaves a possibility for neuronal processing systems, so far as I know, that yields free will. Everything else in Touchstone’s representations of my old papers is accurate. I thank Dr. Touchstone for her deep dive into and recognition of the significance of those papers: Boydstun, S., Chaos, OBJECTIVITY V2N1:31–46. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#31 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 1. OBJECTIVITY V2N1:109–38. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#109 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 2. OBJECTIVITY V2N2:105–29. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number2.html#105 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 3. OBJECTIVITY V2N4:183–204. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number4.html#183

~Additional comments on Kathleen Touchstone’s “Error, Free Will, and Freedom”~ The first full paragraph in Gibson, p. 147, which Touchstone relies on, is dubious history of quantum mechanics, at least in the impression it gives, and its ascription to Schrödinger of the idea that a photon’s position does not exist until it is observed is very unlikely to be a correct ascription; that sounds more like Bohr and von Neumann. Touchstone got right as preludes to QM the wave character of light and the Planck/Einstein new reasons for a particle character of light. But the building order of QM, in the 1920’s, went like this: DeBroglie’s wave, Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, Born’s statistical interpretation of the wave (as recounted in my V2N2, pp. 121–25). (Warren Gibson, “Modern Physics versus Objectivism,” THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES, 2013, V13N2, pp. 140–59.) I think it is important to hold forth, as Touchstone did in this paper, the idea that rights violations occur not only because of willful evil, but from innocent errors, including errors in identifying what rights there are. But I think it true also that rights are abridged by willful evil. As I understand her, Rand would agree that willful evil is a reality (contra Socrates), and she had it that that was possible through the power of evasion and irrationality. I don’t think the Randian Benevolent Universe Principle (BUP) should be taken as Touchstone did, as an ideal situation in which all people act morally by their own lights. It is, rather, the standing condition that the human as rationally acting animal is in a physical world suited to the human. (Which really is due to the evolution of our wing of primates evolving into rational animals, which was due to the adaptive advantage of joint intentionality, which would chagrin Rand were she still around to see this work: A Natural History of Human Thinking by Michael Tomasello, 2014.) Unfortunately, Rand left out of the fundamental stance of BUP that one is in company of other rational animals with whom to cooperate. Touchstone represented Rand as holding: “Since man’s life is his ultimate value, rights are necessary.” Left there, that’s a big leap. Touchstone follows up with Rand’s connection of instrumental rationality with moral virtue and the need of rights for operation of that rationality. But besides Rand’s life-as-ultimate-value-and-necessity-of-rights, there is also in Rand the argument: Life is an end in itself. Individual human life is an end in itself. Rationality includes recognition that the lives of others are ends in themselves and should be treated as such. That too is a line of Rand’s reasoning to rightness of respecting rights of others. Because of this second way of basing rights under Rand’s ethical theory, I decline the tout court conclusion that Rand’s case entails that “rights are based (secondarily) on errors . . . . . .”

The issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES recently issued (December 2022 – https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/…/ayn…/issue/22/2… ) includes a paper by Dr. Kathleen Touchstone titled “Error, Free Will, and Freedom.” It engages importantly with earlier writings of mine, and because the next issue of JARS will be its final issue, and it is already at the printer, I’m making a reply to Touchstone’s paper simply in online posts. Kathleen Touchstone’s main-stage representation of what I wrote in OBJECTIVITY in the 1990’s about internal indeterminism is incorrect. I rejected the idea that quantum indeterminism could play a role in these organic processes. The classical Boltzmann-regime and chaos processes in the classical regime are the only plausible candidates for micro indeterminism in neuronal process as far as I knew or know even now. I do NOT accede “the source of volition is errors.” I argued that error occurs, contra Descartes, in animal capabilities not requiring free will. But the circumstance that error arises without conceptual intelligence and free will does not entail that error Is the source of free will. Although, it suggests that cognitive error, conceptual or more primitive, is a necessary attendant of intelligence and free will. I do NOT accede “this error [thence free will] is due to indeterminism that is associated with quantum probability” or “credit error—specifically as it relates to quantum probability—with being the root of free will.” I did NOT conclude: “Of the three sorts of chance, quantum probability offers the only possible physical source for volition because of the presence of indeterminism.” Rather, classical processes can be the physical bases of neuronal indeterminism once one rejects the illicit projection of regular classical isolated, independent, determined process-streams onto wider physical reality. A softening of the picture of determinism in ordinary physical reality is required (V2N4, pp. 183–86; also "Reply to Eilon" in V2N5 Remarks): a keeping true to actual physical process before us everyday, which leaves a possibility for neuronal processing systems, so far as I know, that yields free will. Everything else in Touchstone’s representations of my old papers is accurate. I thank Dr. Touchstone for her deep dive into and recognition of the significance of those papers: Boydstun, S., Chaos, OBJECTIVITY V2N1:31–46. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#31 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 1. OBJECTIVITY V2N1:109–38. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#109 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 2. OBJECTIVITY V2N2:105–29. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number2.html#105 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 3. OBJECTIVITY V2N4:183–204. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number4.html#183

Reply to Touchstone

D, I hadn't thought of the connection to Rearden before. There would be two parallels, one just between oneself and one's lover. Although my first learning my gay capacity for joy (with my best and esteemed friend) entailed no sense of guilt; there was simply truth and making our own way without map or positive models. (That was 1968, in Oklahoma). As parallel, Rearden with Dagny seemed to be learning some truths about himself and his values. (If, at the end of the novel, he and Francisco were to enter into a romantic relationship, that would be a slighter learning about himself than the earlier one, I'd say.) The second parallel I notice is with coming out and Dagny's radio interview. Coming out was gradual, as I suppose it is for most gays and lesbians, since there are a number of different social arenas in which it takes place. But in our case, it was slow overall, from the sheer terror of the social surroundings at the time. D and K, with just the two of us alone, I guess the validation was just what intense preciousness we found was possible and the conviction, in the light of Roark, that one should live by one's own first-hand rational values, notwithstanding that Rand/Branden had at the time been saying derogatory things about you. You had the truth of the human goodness of what you were doing in your own experience. There was a further sort of validation of the "you are not alone sort" later on for us. In Oklahoma we were illegal, and one reason we headed for Chicago was that there we were legal. In the big city, it turned out, there were gay bars, and it was there we first were in one. They were hotbeds of social organization and mobilization, in addition to company of other same-sex couples and same-sex searchers and dancers. We joined in demonstrations and in the Gay Pride Parade, which was new then. As the years went by, the size of the parade grew and our straight friends marched with us. Eventually, in this century, gays and lesbians were squarely accepted into the military, the old illegality of same-sex relations was over-ruled throughout the land (2003), we attained the legal power to marry (2015), and an American President said he word "gay" while he was in office (he also had made an executive order that hospitals receiving Medicare monies had to have a policy of allowing same-sex partners to visit the hospitalized partner, which was important in our case, where a lot of students indoctrinated by Liberty University go into nursing here, and there, as in any workplace, they try to do their great commission of holding back the humanistic revolution concerning treatment of gays and lesbians. (There is a picture of us in our 30's here. He died when we were both 41. Love is love.)

She would say: "You guys who voted for Reagan and the so-called Moral Majority, may you be damned!" "Boydstun, from Kant to Dewey, for cryin' out loud, get off my back!" "Here is what I have to say about presidential candidate Donald Trump. . . . No wait, I wrote the same stuff about candidate George Wallace in 1968." "Given what I said about the Russian soul, it's not surprising the mystics came back into fashion and power there." "That this is Putin's philosopher is hardly surprising." "What did I say needed to be done concerning the moral ideal of altruism and self-sacrifice and scarcity of understanding and esteem for the concept of individual rights? Today the consequences of failure in that philosophical revolution among the people are all around." "What did I say about the growing fashion of anti-man worship of nature? About holding up one's sores for nobility, about tribalism? I need not repeat. Read what I wrote." Real Revolution

Good evening, buddy. Got it.

Jon, I clicked on your link. This is the first I've seen writings by Q. They are mysterian, as in "the meek shall inherit the earth." Loose enough to lay your own meaning on them if you care to. Some of my poems are pretty mysterian, such as the following one (2012). None of my poems of any sort has ever been about public affairs, because that is not what is of greatest importance to me or anywhere near it. I touch something deeper, and some people really appreciate it, even just the feel of the more mysterian ones. Thankfully, these words will never be a reason for politics or social movements. Still One Only it, other it is. Given it is and taken. Other it is in token. Spoken it is, other is. Round itself sailing itself, taking, making its token, breath-sail flies and dies, broken. Rounding ruin, round sails itself. In, still one, out, rushing roar, kill after kill, still is still. Touch and word, still ever will. One, still one. For say, sail, oar.

Part of the star map of Hipparchus(+) has been found.