Boydstun

These Hours of Resonant Existence

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time. By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

Kyary, I had stated: "I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death." You replied in part: "Experiences like this have thought me that whenever a philosopher seems to not see something blatantly obvious, he in fact does, and with gusto. If the above was a reference to Mainländer [it is], he'd say that inspecting the parts of the locomotive without knowing what a locomotive does will always yield only partial knowledge. The function of the Universe is to destroy all useful energy. The thirst for life is the most effective means toward this goal." The universe does not have a function. Functions arise only with the advent of life. He is simply wrong and fudging, like so many philosophers before him, in trying to slip teleology into inanimate matter before the molecular machinery of life is on hand.* These are the facts with which our modern science works. We don't get to just speculate a reorder of things and count it as reality and yield something productive. The thirst for life by the researchers who prolonged my life did not attain some greatest effectiveness to my demise. And the end of life is not a goal of the universe. The universe has no goals. "I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death." A great many people fall into thinking that after they die they are somehow still around, in some minimal way at least, passing through time. They will not be any such thing. They will not exist. That is neither rocket science nor obvious; it is a wide consilience of inductions to something as absolutely established as the existence of the hydrogen atom.

Kyary, The context in Galt’s Speech in which Rand says “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms“ (1957, 1012) is one in which she is setting out a notion of alternatives as something presented only to living things. The fundamentality goes to location of that alternative among all the alternatives an organism might come into. (For much living process, these alternatives are not presented as choices before the organism; choice is not essential to alternatives in the conception she is trying to get into the reader’s head in this stretch.) The sentence immediately following the one you have quoted in isolation shows that Rand is contrasting inanimate matter to animate matter and that an essential to their difference is that animate matter has to pursue a specific course of action among alternatives having differential import for it’s continuation as animate matter. The emergence of the various forms of inanimate matter such as a tornado and the conditions that make such an inanimate formation possible are irrelevant in the context surrounding the sentence you quoted. To take the sentence from its context and give it a different context is to change the topic (in which, in the new context, the sentence would state an absurdity). That is cheap and is indeed beyond an absence of charitable reading. It is any-straw-for-derision-will-do. There are serious flaws in the philosophy, I’m sure, as any philosophy, waiting for serious, patient mining. Rand once remarked: “It is not fools I seek to address.” And indeed she did find not-fools who comprehended, for example, the conception of alternative she was articulating in this stretch of Galt’s Speech and who need for their suite of errors in Rand’s philosophy things genuinely in the philosophy. The point you bannered as you bannered it is not. The sentence you quoted is part of Rand’s argument to the momentous conclusion that value (and function and need and problem and so forth) arises only in the situation and process that is life. One way to topple this account of value would be to pose an alternative account and argue for the latter’s superiority in truth. One notable attempt along that line is the one of Robert Nozick in his Philosophical Explanations (1981). He points to the occasions of “organic unity” (which he as defined) in the world ranging from nature to art. He argues that the objective dimension of value is organic unity. I do not find this plausible. More plausible is that life is the basic and fullest occasion of organic unity and that all other occasions of organic unity are derivative of organic unity in life or are merely analogical. I don’t think the schemes of Empedocles, Schopenhauer, Mainländer, or Nietzsche (in his late imputation of will to power to even the inanimate world) have such plausibility (in our own era) as Nozick’s proposal. And his is wrong, Rand’s right, in my assessment. You talked of atoms wanting to become stabler, and you put want in scare quotes. That is a promising sign. A harmonic oscillator, classical or quantum, will tend to spend most of its time in its lowest energy state. That is cool, but there is nothing teleological about it and no need to understand it as teleological (and no need to take such a purported end-seeking as explanation for the teleological character of living things). Ditto, as I mentioned before, for the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of mechanics with their extremum principles. I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death. The Objectivist idea of a human-benevolent universe is not a naturalized mimicry of the idea of a benevolent God. It is not a postulate. It is only the proposition, with evidence, that humans with their power of reason fit superbly in the struggle for life and for wide, flexible grasp of reality, which has enabled ever more serviceability of nature for humans. It is the suitability to living and knowing of the character John Galt as described by Rand in the opening to Part III of her 1957 novel, which has affinity with Aristotle’s opening to Metaphysics. At times Rand displayed in her novels and declared in her nonfiction a sense of optimism (though pessimism about the future culture of Russia, taking its past as prologue). Rand’s optimism was not so far as Leibniz or the poet Alexander Pope. Rand’s optimism has some basis in the power and community of human reason, but I don’t see that optimism as strictly implied by the benevolent-universe idea. And in rejecting that optimism, one need not embrace the profound pessimism argued by Schopenhauer or Mainländer.

Chambered J – I’ve blazed up the fire in the fireplace. Come sit by me, Izzy. Yes, here. Speak again the science of the living chambers. I’ll play my part. I – Typically, each macromolecule, such as a protein or a nucleic acid, inside a living cell tends to carry many excess negative charges. These charges get balanced by positive ions, especially potassium, dissolved in the water within the cell. But the presence of these ions means that water tends to be drawn into the cell by osmosis. This osmosis is not on account of electrical charge on the potassium ions, but merely because potassium is not water and nature abhors concentration gradients among species of chemicals. J – What keeps the cell from swelling and finally bursting as more and more water is taken in? I – The walls of plant cells are made pretty strong. The pressure inside the cells can therefore be higher than outside, and this higher pressure inside opposes the osmotic flow of water into the plant’s cells. Notice the passivity of this solution for the problem. That is one stable solution to the problem that began with the fact that the molecules of life have excess negative charge. It is a rather simple-minded solution, however, and this is why to this day plants do so poorly on IQ tests (J. Enright, personal communication). The membrane forming the boundary of an animal cell is hardly a wall. It is usually not called a wall, but a membrane. The membrane is so thin it cannot withstand any pressure difference across it. Such a cell must live a bit more dynamically with its surround. It will be surrounded by water molecules just teeming to get inside and dilute the concentrations of dissolved chemical species (especially ions of potassium, but also sodium and chlorine). J – What to do? I – First, take stock: the cell membrane is permeable to water, to potassium, to sodium, . . . and not permeable to chlorine. The membrane is more permeable to the potassium than to the sodium. J – Hummm. I – Try this: pump sodium ions out. As it happens, doing that will simultaneously pump more potassium ions in from the outside. Then the pump—if it reaches a steady state before burning up—will be able to maintain a higher concentration of sodium ions outside than inside. Then the sodium ions outside will be diffusing across the membrane, trying to sneak back in, and the potassium ions on the inside will be diffusing across the membrane, trying to get out to the suburbs. Voila! Since the membrane allows potassium to get out more freely than it allows sodium to get in, the net effect of the pump will be to increase the concentration of particles that are not water on the outside, thereby making the water molecules content to just stay out there. J – Don’t start the pump! Check all angles, engineer Izzy! I – Consider the electrical situation. Both the potassium ions and the sodium ions carry an excess positive charge. Since the pump will be decreasing the overall concentration of these on the inside of the cell, the excess negative charge on the inside (macromolecules and chlorine) will not be entirely cancelled out by the dissolved positive ions inside. Then the cell membrane will have an electrical potential difference across it. The cell can live with that provided the pump speed is restricted to a certain range implicated by the membrane’s electrical conductance with respect to sodium ions relative to its electrical conductance with respect to potassium ions. J – Glory be. Start the pump. I – The momentous spin-off in evolutionary history was that this membrane potential, in some animal cells, could be briefly changed by adjustments in the membrane conductances with respect to sodium ions and with respect to potassium ions. Thus the animal-cell solution to the problem that the molecules of life (the macros inside the cell) carry excess electrical charge made possible the essential signaling mechanism (brief change in membrane potential) for muscle cells and for nerve cells (neurons). And that is how it came about that some animals today can talk and write and study, say, science and philosophy. (1994, 121–23) J – Amen. I – Want to pump, Joey? J – Let us now Hobbes-farewell our companions. I – But whatever shall be the method you will like, I would very fain commend philosophy to you, that is to say, the study of wisdom, for want of which we have all suffered much damage lately. For even they, that study wealth, do it out of love of wisdom; for their treasures serve them but for a looking-glass, wherein to behold and contemplate their own wisdom. Nor do they, that love to be employed in public business, aim at anything but place wherein to show their wisdom. Neither do voluptuous men neglect philosophy, but only because they know not how great a pleasure it is to the mind of man to be ravished in the vigorous and perpetual embraces of the most beauteous world. Lastly, though for nothing else, yet because the mind of man is no less impatient of empty time than nature is of empty place, to the end you be not forced for want of what to do, to be troublesome to men that have business, or take hurt by falling into idle company, but have somewhat of your own wherewith to fill up your time, I recommend unto you to study philosophy. Farewell.

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.