Boydstun

Garden Light J – Welcome to my after-garden, Izzy! I’ve gotten daffodil bulbs to add, but I’m savoring summer a few minutes more. Admiring the brown of my feet, before boots. I – How can I help? J – Use the digger to make fifty holes in this part, six inches deep and about eight inches apart. Do not tumble down the hill. I – What are you going to do? J – Attend to your every position. Then issue your next instruction. I – There are other wonders of the world. Why do your bare feet on a step-stone today feel cooler than your feet on the soil? After all, we know perfectly well the stone and soil are in thermal equilibrium. They have the same temperature. J – You are very educational. And when you speak of such things, I imagine all the more positions, bed and floor. I – Spring eternal? J – Whichever comes first: either as long as it takes or as long as it takes. By the way, I do know how the stone and soil heat-thing works. Awaken to me. I – Speak the science of the stone and soil paradox. J – We have skin receptors responsive to rate of heat flow into or out of the body when contacting materials with a different temperature than body temperature. Flow rate is slower into or from insulators such as air. And the dry soil is more insulating than the stone. So heat from my feet flows at a higher rate into stone than into the dry soil. Useful in philosophy? Stone floor? With rug? I – I raise an eyelid. Let’s do the bulbs, Joey. J – Tomorrow is another day.

Daybreak J – Grüß Gott, Izzy! I – Good Morning, Joey! J – Kaffee? I – Danke! The garden in this light is something else. J – You in that easy satin robe are something else. I – But that our reach exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for?* J – Annie said the sun comes up tomorrow. That was only a metaphor for the human lot, of course. But literally, how would she know the sun would come up again? I – An invariant run. But Melancholia, you know. J – And you? I – Spin of the earth is long as earth, but for arrival of external torque. Radiation out sun is long as its fusion. Shade of earth by a celestial body is not in prospect tomorrow. J – May I kiss you? I – So many days have not yet broken.* *R. Browning, Rig Veda

Inference to the existence of atoms is a case of induction in the genre of what William Whewell termed consilience. By 1900 atoms and molecules were evidenced by Dalton’s law of multiple proportions, Gay-Lussac’s law pertaining to the volume of gases, Avagadro’s law (which made possible the determination of molecular weights), and the kinetic theory of gases (which could approximately predict molar heat capacities). After 1908, when Jean Baptiste Perrin published his results on the sedimentation distribution of (visible) particles suspended in a still liquid and his measurement of Avogadro’s constant, the existence of atoms could not be reasonably doubted. These lines of induction, and many others, converged steel-strong in favor of the atomic hypothesis, by consilience. The evidence was and is several (many-kind) and joint. What did all those centuries of armchair from Democritus and Aristotle to Leibniz contribute to our knowledge of atoms and molecules? Exactly nothing. There is nothing of merit in an armchair “law of weakening force,” whatever similarities there might be with some scientifically established law. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Kyary, in what other emergent property of chemical elements, besides life, do you see entities striving to remain in existence and going out of existence by spoilage of that teleological organization in its existence? Not the earth, its minerals, or mountains. Not the atmosphere or its tornados. Not the rivers or oceans. Not a virus. The only places I’ve seen clearly such a thing is in living cells and multicellular organisms. Fairly plain Jane, not bold. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Writing “Galt’s claim” induces a distracting circuity of thought. Galt is nothing but a perfectly passive creature of Ayn Rand. Any “Galt’s claim” is better simply “Rand’s claim” in a philosophical discussion.

I still expect to accomplish that. Not yet. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Because of my own long years of work underground, often before sunrise, my favorite line of Anthem has long been: "We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it."

"Teleology is merely a regulative principle for the assessment of the course of the world. . . (Metaphysics)" This sounds like an allusion to Kant's regulative principles (cohort of an as-if take on teleology in vegetative life) as distinct from constitutive principles. If so, Mainländer is projecting life as conceived by Kant onto the world in general (going beyond Kant), continuing the line on this from Leibniz. The as-if purposive view of life by Kant in the Critique of Judgment is mistaken. Organisms with no consciousness actually act teleologically; that aspect of their causation is from evolutionary inheritance of structure within which efficient causes are constrained. (Biology folk like Goethe paid lip service to Kant, but then went on in biology as usual: all biological entities as actually teleological, as in Aristotle.) The animal become the intelligent conscious animal that is us is able to engineer devices and artificial life deliberately, design-engineer things with structure, control systems, and functions. The world at large does not need regulative principles of any sort. Its laws do not regulate. They just are the patterns in place. That goes for principles of Lagrange and Hamilton as well as Newton and likewise Pauli's Exclusion Principle. The law of identity also does not regulate in nature; it is only the grand pattern in place and principle we keep in back of mind for success in inventions and solutions. A molecule is not in striving-processes in its continued existence. Neither is the universe, the totality of all existents. A living cell is in striving-process which continues its existence; it has teleological causation enacting chase of such things as survival and reproduction. Inanimate matter does not go out of existence, unless one is talking in a context in which "matter" is standing as in contrast to fields. But taking matter as in contrast to living matter, that is, taking inanimate matter as in contrast to animate matter, matter means mass-energy. (I don't mean to say that Rand was fluent in mass-energy, only that we should be fluent and identify older talk of matter by philosophers as mass-energy.) Matter as mass-energy does not go out of existence or even become reduced in the big picture. Then too, I should not regard any of my lost tools as having gone plum out of existence; it is not plausible, for example, that they've encountered that much antimatter. Upon collision an electron and a positron become two gamma rays. Among physical things not going out of existence in the annihilation of the electron and positron, is, notably, their total mass-energy. Furthermore, the electron and positron and the gamma rays do not have teleological processes maintaining them in existence. It is only with advent of teleologically organized matter that alternatives enter nature. That much is Rand. I concur. I say, in addition: We say that when we've got the accelerator on, a given electron is either going to encounter a positron or not. That saying is true to nature, but it, unlike identity, is not something in nature independently of a striving mind. Either-Or, I have written in "Existence, We", is based in identities in nature, but is only in nature where living systems are in nature facing nature. That is, the Law of Excluded Middle for thought rises as high-animal mind rises by organic evolutionary layers on vegetative neuronal control systems of animals. The electron will either encounter a positron or it will not, but the electron does not face an alternative of continued existence or not. We see the possibilities, but the electron, unlike a living cell, does not face them. We and all living things face the alternative of continued existence or not, and from that fundamental alternative, all alternative is born.

Fortunately, we do not have laws against hate speech in the USA.

Most any listener or reader of your personal troubles in recent times concludes you suffer from paranoia and delusion, whether by natural developments or induced. I doubt this is the first time you have received this conclusion in impressions of you. That conclusion is why so much silence here on your personal calls for help against an external threat and why you apparently get silence from your calls to protective agencies against violence and possibly why you don't like what your family says on your situation. I did not say you were a liar; I said I doubted you were lying (rather than simply being mistaken). I gave you heartfelt and objective feedback on your calls for attention to your personal situation as you have reported it. Still hoping you are not dead in another two weeks, as you announced you are expecting. I'll not address you further in response to your pleas on your personal situation.

Ayn Rand once gave some really good advice that went something like this: "The most important thing you can do to help the poor is to avoid becoming poor yourself." I add: The most important thing you can do to stop destructive evil in the world is to not be destructive of yourself, such as by telling lies, using non-prescribed psychoactive narcotics (even if legal), possibly causing damage to your mind such as paranoia and delusions of Galt-level accomplishments made by yourself, mysteriously unheralded, in physics and engineering. From all you have described to us on your personal front and pleaded for us to accept, it looks most likely that if you "will be completely out of all resources", it will be at root due to your own compromised mind and behavior, whether you yourself caused that damage or it happened by the course of nature. If you die "within the next two weeks" it will not be because of evil of someone else. I hope you will still be alive in two weeks and not so out of resources that you no longer can communicate in this medium if you wish. A sister of mine committed suicide a few years ago (a wife, mother, and grandmother), and from what I know of her physical miseries for which she could get no further help, it was a well-and-long-considered sensible suicide. I don't think she did it just so her loved ones would be pained. I do not know your health potentials, but that is surely the arena in which you need help and protection, assuming you are not just BS-ing the site in a show of fake feelings and mental states (which I doubt). I hope you are not in such a boxed-in and painful health situation as my sister evidently was. Be suspicious of any inclination you have towards suicide. Nature is going to end each life soon enough. A year ago, a nephew of mine died of alcoholism. It destroyed his organs. He was 52. It had started as a young man, when he had been in the Navy. He knew he was an addict, but refused to let the appropriate professionals try to help him. I hope you are not on a destructive course along those lines, with some sort of long addiction. If so, please get medical help, and realize you can not make the return to health by yourself. I experienced paranoia myself for a couple of days. I was in a safe place, a hospital I'd come to for what turned out to be symptoms from a bladder blockage. All my regular medicines I take each day to stay alive could not get released from my body and caused malfunctions in my brain. The neurological condition is known as Metabolic Encephalopathy. When I later saw my neurologist, he could predict all the various mental malfunctions that had ensued. I mention the paranoia part because I know first-hand that while you are in it, you do not know you are in it. You just keep putting every bit in every episode of life into a vast plot against yourself and things you treasure. But if there is for you periodic waning of it, get yourself some help, protecting yourself from yourself. Don't be ashamed of mental derailments. The appropriate model of human perfection is not a perfect crystal, but perfect health, which can be lost and possibly regained. Resilience and recoveries are virtues. I was in a mental hospital myself as a young man, due to my suicidal responses to my existential situation. I began to read The Fountainhead there, and my doctor encouraged me to finish it, which I did. And I lived another six decades (so far, so good) without such problems again, and I achieved difficult things in love and work and in personal projects that, though difficult, were more modest than and more suited to my abilities than stellar physics breakthroughs. (I loved physics and, with engineering education also, I have been able to put what I learned to good use in philosophical reflections.) And I have been happy. Here's hoping. –S

I happened across another one in my library important to include in that list: The Neural Basis of Free Will – Criterial Causation (MIT 2013) by Peter Ulric Tse.

Oops! Not to worry, as that essay is in The Psychology of Self-Esteem. (PSE was originally published in 1969. It contains a lot of his works he first produced in the The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist earlier in that decade.) Objectivist philosopher Ben Bayer has also addressed the need of free will for knowledge here.

Øyvind has wondered, as he posed to me in a personal message, whether determinism can even have an epistemology. He wonders "isn't that a contradiction within itself?" He is pleased to have our PM exchange posted here. My response: Branden's essay was in the May 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter. It is reprinted as §III of Chapter IV of The Psychology of Self-Esteem. In the January 1964 issue of ON, he had a piece "The Objectivist Concept of Free Will versus the Traditional Concepts." Øyvind has a determinist friend who would deny that there are any alternative actions confronting the human engineer or experimental physicist were we to know more in detail all the determinist going-ons in the situation. This is kind of what I should expect from a determinist. They, like so many others, do not get the idea that living things face alternatives and that such a thing as alternatives (say fight or flight) do not exist in the world except in the situation of a living thing confronted with the world. And if they do not see that, then there is no deliberate human free will set in a living animal (us) ranging over in mind any alternatives.

SL, There is a widespread good in people of wanting to know the truth. Aristotle thought that even ALL people desire to know (the truth). One widespread thing people want to know today, as thousands of years ago, is what becomes of one's inner self and that self of one's loved ones when we die. Is it really just the absolute end as it might appear from the successive states of the deceased body, or is there future life, perhaps one brighter or darker than the earthly life (and for some an opportunity to sell post-death prizes and penalties for power and money in earthly life)? Decline the fake insurance policy of Pascal's Wager. Prize the truth come what may. As for widespread desire for protection against dangers, the main danger is not from interpersonal conflicts, but from nature. Getting to the discoveries and developments that can rescue one or one's loved ones from this or that particular occasion of bodily catastrophic failure (mostly from disease or old-age cascades) is not helped by prayers and blaming death on human moral failings, but by rational investigations into nature. I mention this vast sort of danger due to Objectivist-types' widespread knee-jerk salience of dangers from interpersonal conflicts as first concern among dangers and politics as top aim. There are plenty of religious people with whom I form political alliances. More importantly, religious friends and family and I (I purely naturalist, atheist) love each other very much. Those are choices open based on common values, including the value of truth, even as one keeps straight what are one's differences on what is true and how to get it. Nietzsche became so popular in the culture of Germany in the 1890's and up to WWI that there were some theologians serving up bowls of unity between Nietzsche and Christian religion in Germany. When I was first in college ('66–'71), there was Christian Atheism of Altizer.* More recently and probably more durably, there is The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007).

I remarked in 2009:

"Existential Possibilities Drained of Real Potentials" "Radical Doubt of Memory and Cognitive Imagination, Feigning Thought" 1–2–3–4

"Cogito Counters" & "Demonic Skepticism, Obscure Perception, Realist Concepts" 1–2–3–4

René Descartes: Dualism, Reflexes, and Living Machines

Kyary, In this quoted excerpt from Rand, which you likely would recall, she had no problem with and found it useful to look at attributes and actions separately from the entities to which they belong and to which she also applies identity in the stone/leaf example. She applies exclusionary identity to all of them, separately and together. Rand's entity is in quite a bit of difference with Aristotle's substance, though there is some overlap in their ontological placement.* Entity made a neat fit with identity, of course. Have you studied any of Whitehead's process philosophy? A comparison with Mainländer might be quite interesting. I would not put too much weight on order of learning categories of things as keys to ontological priorities and dependencies (I put weight on adult experience and science for that), but philosophers, including Rand, have tended to use order of learning as a bit of confirmation of priorities in ontologies (such as that attributes and actions have an asymmetric dependence on entities). An example would be child learning of common nouns for objects before verbs for actions. (I should mention that understanding A is itself [a mapping of self to self] comes rather late.) Concerning perception, we have a lot of gear for detecting motions and objects. Humans, and some other primates too, are able to categorize perceptually because they are able to percieve directly some of the invariant structural and transformational relations in the world. The visual system spontaneously extracts relational invariances in the optical flow across the retina. One result is our ability to see solid objects and their motions in three-dimensional space. An analogy between the visual system and a prism can be drawn. A prism is commonly characterized as a kind of fourier analyzer, a separator of harmonic components of light. Similarly, the visal system can be conceived as , among other things, an analyzer of projective geometry. Without any measurements, of lengths or angles, the visual system sorts out relations in figures that remain invariant under transformations of perspective. There are geometric signatures through which we can perceive as (human) walking any instance of that class of events. In vision we can also apprehend categorically skipping, jogging, or sprinting, We can perceive the various kicks of swimmers all as kicks. We can perceive the variations and underlying constancies of these categories directly, sensitively, and without linguistic articulation. (See "Capturing Concepts," [1990] pp. 14–16.) You mentioned Rand's claim that matter is indestructible and can only change its forms. There is truth in that taken as a statement of conservation of mass in chemistry or as conservation of mass-energy in physics. But that was not what she was working on in that statement. She was contrasting the continuing existence of inanimate matter with the discontinuing existence of life and the efforts required of life such that it continue (for a while) in existence. So, for example, when the character Tony dies in the arms of Rearden, all of Tony's chemicals are said to continue fine, but his life has gone out of existence. From what you have shown on Mainländer's general metaphysics, it looks to have the chronic mistake—from Aristotle to Schopenhauer to late Nietzsche—the mistake of projecting teleological actions from their true and only place, which is life (and its machines devised by humans), onto the whole of inanimate nature. Rand and I and modern science dispute the correctness of such a projection.

—SDF Tractors "ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food" OK. I would not need to discover it because my parents taught me how to do it, and in my childhood we did just that—enough fruit and vegetables (and honey) for the family for the entire year. How to grow it, to process it, and to preserve it. We got pork or beef by butchering it out on Grandparents' places, which were largely self-sufficient farms, where my parents grew up during the Great Depression. What America did you think you were addressing, writer? Folks like in Manhattan? Only office folk across the country too good to ever get their hands dirty and who don't know how the store food is produced? THAT was NOT the only American audience existing in 1957. Welcome to the rest of America and their abilities. There was not some sort of genius, like Galt or real ones, who invented tillage or the plow. The civilization in which those techniques first came about evidently did not know or have a clue that plowing would so enhance productivity. They invented it for other reasons of labor, as mentioned in the quote. My paleface ancestors came mostly to what is now MD and VA, including the part of VA where we live today, in the 1600's. At that time, it was all trees here, and to make a field, to till and plant, many trees had to be removed. They had iron axes and crosscut saws and knowhow from their parents. Bless all who brought about those tools and all who contributed to their invention and production. And in current practice, bless all the engineers and manufacturers and service workers who make my chainsaw possible. But not forget that we the readers of Atlas Shrugged are not all so devoid of hands-with-mind and love of it and so helpless as to deserve the demeaning rhetorical: "ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food." We do not depend from some speculated individual mind envisioning the important result and inventing the practice of plowing for higher yields, but on many minds accumulating success across the centuries to our own minds and ways of survival.

A Greek Sham The fire of the gods stolen by Prometheus was actually stolen by the story maker from man and given to the gods, omitting credit to man of having learned to start, control, and use fires without outside help.

I think the answer to your last question is Yes, but I'm unsure. I incline to think that cats don't have free will (cf.). Finding the neurological bases of free will in humans could lead to answering the question on cats definitively. Many have remarked that domestic cats don't have remorse, for what it's worth. Do All Mammals Have a Prefrontal Cortex?

Yes, it is a contradiction. I stated the falsehood "agency always requires free will," and then contradicted that thesis with the truth "a cat has agency without free will." Descartes or some of his followers might have seen an animal as just a more complex reaction system than a stone. I'd say there is an important qualitative difference between the two even though Descartes was right that the animal such as a cat has no free will. I don't know in the case of cats, but in the case of some monkeys, their behaviors are not only by habit and reflex, provided their prefrontal cortex is intact. Prefrontal cortex of the monkey can retain some things in mind for several seconds in absence of continuing stimulus. (That is not sensory iconic memory of animals—including us—which is only about a quarter of a second.) That memorial ability of the monkey is some amount of working memory and requires some ability of representation. Although the total abilities of the monkey are in striking contrast to a stone (or the monkey's body as a mass) reacting as in Newton's Third Law, Yes, the determinist maintains that the monkey's actions are all deterministic, predetermined. And the same for us humans with more extensive capacities for representations in the active making of our outputs, some of which some of us (e.g. you and I) say are freely chosen.

Yes, that is what we have all meant by determinism for a long time and still do. And they want to maintain they know there are no occasions of free will because no neural activity could possibly be the support for any such mental occasion. Their claim to that knowledge of possible neural-network interactions is mistaken. They have no such knowledge, and their thinking that they do so is due to a number of mistaken presumptions about the world.

It is extremely unlikely that free choices have anything to do with quantum indeterminism. The time scales are way off. I argued the quantum irrelevance in VS. So far as we know, at least in the inanimate world, QM by its own mechanism gives rise to all the determinism, such as trajectory of a baseball, that obtains in the classical regime. This has been studied and has expanded from the inception of QM to this day. The idea of indeterminacy in some events is ancient; it does not wait on the appearance of QM. It should not be confused with contingency. Aristotle is right in saying that today whether the Russians will be militarily victorious over Ukraine is indeterminate not only in the sense that it cannot be predicted, but in the sense that there is not now any such determinateness of such a matter in reality. Peirce agreed, and I agree. Leibniz and Rand could agree, but only because collections of free wills go into the outcome. Physical indeterminism in neural-network interactions with each other (supposing indeterminism occurs at that classical level of physics in this setting) cannot be identical with a neural-network-interaction basis of free will because free will is purposive, directed activity and mere indeterminism does not possess that. This was recognized about potential physical bases from ancient times, long before our modern knowledge of brain and its roles in animal life. The contemporary Aristotelian Roderick Long wrote his 488-page Ph.D. dissertation on some of that story: Free Choice and Indeterminism in Aristotle and Later Antiquity. One needs to clear one's head of these confusions: Agency always requires free will (to the contrary, a cat has agency without free will), and contingency requires living agents, indeed ones with intellegence and free will, or it requires chance (to the contrary, it requires only independent causal streams intersecting each other).