Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Boydstun

Patron
  • Posts

    2533
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    228

Posts posted by Boydstun

  1. 4 hours ago, necrovore said:

    . . .

    Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.

    I'd think that expansion of our knowledge allowing us to expand our exploitations of the physical determinisms would expand our freedom of will. At least in the sense that we obtain a wider range of options over which to exercise our will.

    So I'm not inclined to accept the idea that free will arises out of limited knowledge.

    I already have the freedom of will to decide what work I'll do first when I go outside to work in a few minutes, and if I had all the knowledge of brain and muscle and things I'll be working on out there, my free will would not vanish. I think, rather, that my free will has an explanation in terms of all those unknown processes within myself; contingencies in physical processes are the house of free will. I do not think my free will is based on my ignorance of those internal mechanisms.

  2. 13 hours ago, Solvreven said:

    Sapolsky's claim is that there is no Agent (my understanding) - we are mere reactions (or behaviours if you will).

    . . . 

    If that is a claim of his, then he is off in the old silliness that said there are no chairs because they are just an assembly of molecules or there are no tornadoes because they are just a conjunction of this piece of fluid flow and that one and that one . . . . and there are no seizures or high jumps . . . This would buy him absence of agent responsibility, but the idea that there is no agency of organisms flies in the face of ordinary experience and science, and he would need a better argument to show that determinism implies no causal responsibility (thence there be no liabilities in torts [which is not the same as criminality and its penalties]).

    4 hours ago, necrovore said:

    Even setting aside the fact that one's own free-will is self-evident, I think the whole concept of "determinism" is flawed. It proposes that "if you know the entire state of a thing, you can predict exactly what it will do next."

    . . .

    Determinism, at least as stated in the modern age (Hobbes, Spinoza and on to our own time) is not about predictions and knowledge. It is about operations of things regardless of how far we understand them or can predict them. It says that all things always have complete states in reality, and, given that that is the case for them, they can do only one thing in their complete state at any time. So I could have only the height I have ended up with, commit only the corrected typos that occurred in typing this, etc. Sometimes the debate has proceeded under the assumption that the complete states at all times are presently known by God. So Leibniz, for example, in defending our manifest free will against determinist conjectures trying to model how the world works so as to show that that manifest free will is an illusion, argues that foreknowledge by God of future results does not show that none of our future results will have been arrived at with free originations from us. 

  3. That one was caused to do an intentional act that brought harm to some innocent person does not seem adequate for inferring that one was not responsible for the intentional act. The caused agent caused the act, all the same. Torts may still proceed, and with coercive penalties, all the same.

    Sapolsky seems to be claiming he knows that all of the preceding is false. That is, for instance, he seems to claim that determinism of an agent to do an intentional act implies that all liabilities should be removed against the agent of such an act. If Sapolsky is determined to regard as logical inference what others are determined to regard as invalid inference, as mere routine pattern of thought transplanted from other contexts, how can there be an objective fact of the matter? And if there is not objective fact on this issue or any other issue as to correct inference, why bother trying to think together with your fellows? (This objection is in the line of Epicurus and Rand/N. Branden.)

  4. 56 minutes ago, Solvreven said:

    Thank you Stephen.
    I do agree, but when exercise I listen to podcasts or audiobooks that's easier to follow.
    Also if you didn't see:
     https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-203-robert-sapolsky-on-life-without-free-will/

    Yes, I did see that, and it begins to be something for getting a grip on his view. I have ordered his book, and it should arrive tomorrow.

    In the transcript you linked, Sapolsky remarked: 

    Quote

     

    Okay, so you’re sitting there. Where do you decide to value to think? How do you wind up being able to think rationally instead of how do you be able to reach a decision that could involve something where you then control yourself?

    You decide the rational thing to do is punch this guy instead of run for my life. Any other, what made you decide that like, okay, in this moment, yeah, Gandhi was cool, but this son of a bitch is just gonna come back at me the next time if I don’t do anything. Why do you decide that that was the most important thing? Why were you brought up that way? You were in a culture where they said, if the guy comes and steals your camel and you do nothing, next he’s gonna come and steal all your camoos and your wife and your daughter, as opposed to being brought up in a culture where it says turn the other cheek.

    Where’d that come from? For this very simple reason that you’re identifying, so you did a cost-benefit analysis and you brought a lot of experience to the table and some nice careful thinking and rationale and you formed the intent to punch the guy instead of the intent to run away. Where did that intent come from?

     

    Here he seems to be making the long-enduring move of thinking that if one has a reason for doing something and there are reasons behind having that reason and so forth on back, then necessarily you didn't have freedom over whether to do the deed. That is a controversial thesis, and he needs a proof of its correctness.

  5. I find reading compositions more exact and facilitating of serious thought than videos. I've not got Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Life of Science without Free Will (2023). I may get it to add to the following of mine:

    Free Will – Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong, editors (2022)

    Naturally Free Action by Oisín Deery (2021)

    Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell (2023)

    A Metaphysics for Freedom(* & on to next page) by Helen Steward (2012)

    Laws, Mind, and Free Will by Steven Horst (2011)

    Deep Control by John Fischer (2013)

    Causes, Laws, and Free Will – Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin (2013)

    Why Free Will Is Real by Christian List (2019)

     

    ~Also, to the free will side~

    "Volitional Synapses"

    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 3

    "Ascent to Volitional Consciousness"

    Abstract

    Article

     

  6. 3 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

    Why is the term emergent property used here? The reason I ask is why not use "cause and effect"? Of course cause and effect would create a contradiction in the sense that consciousness is determined by this "emergence". Implying that consciousness has a cause, a determinant.

    I could go on and on, as in that usage, couldemergence be a justification for the big bang theory? That the universe emerged due to xyz? Not caused by, but emerged.

    It seems to me that emergence is a substitute for cause and effect when wanting to avoid certain contradictions.

    Once one talks about consciousness evolving from evolution, there's no way to avoid determinism.

    I used "emergent" because I was reponding to Monart who had used "emergent." It seems sensible enough to sometimes use that rather than "caused," as when saying that the fluid state of matter emerged from a collection of certain molecules in a certain situation of temperature and pressure. Saying that "air is caused by the molecules composing it" is weird. And "air and its lack of resistance to shearing stress is caused by the molecules composing air and their collisions with each other" is also a weird way of talking. Shearing stresses are not something applicable to a molecule so far as I know. It is something that emerges at a macro level such as in our bones (hopefully with good resistance to shearing stresses) or in a breath of air. 

    Additionally, causal relations in the story of how I came about are immediate and dynamical in my individual ontogeny in which evolution has provided the engineering-type structures in which such organized developmental processes can proceed. (Not only the background evolutionarily yielded structure is required, of course, but also  a continuing sameness [within tolerances] of the environment in which the type of organism can survive.) So for thinking about causation and emergences of processes in the individual organism, it seems most important to be focused on individual development, not preceding evolution, while keeping evolution as important background of the present dynamics arena in which this is causing that and/or this is emerging from that.

    For the determinism worth having in a debate over free will vs. determinism, the determinism has to be a pre-determinism. To which the question "how far back is such and such in the present predetermined?" is sensible, and answers get more ridiculous the farther back the predeterminism is asserted, due to the circumstance that in the real physical, natural world there are a myriad of independent causal streams intersecting each other, continually resetting "initial" conditions and boundary conditions. All of that applies as well to emergences as it does to causation so far as I can see. Also, in stating Rand's mildly circular definition of the Law of Causality (that is, What is the Law of Causality, in applying identity to action?) using the phrase "caused and determined" in her definition (in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made"), one should, I suggest, not take the "determined" to mean necessarily determinism, but a broader concept determinate. More like: "caused and delivered as determinate." That way both the results of the mind-independent course of nature and the results of free will engineering things can be brought under a Law of Causality.

  7. 1 hour ago, monart said:

    Rand's chapter, "Concepts of Consciousness", in her ITOE may help with reducing the perplexity. Is the "self" an abstraction from all that which characterizes a human person, including the mind, senses, feelings, choices, actions, the whole mind-body organism -- and not an actual separate existent? Or is the "self" a real emergent property in the growth of a person's consciousness? . . .

    Rand's sets the self in her first presentation of her mature philosophy thusly: "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists" (emphases added). This talk of one possessing consciousness is just in the vernacular that the reader can readily get the meaning of sticking simply with common usage. Before this passage in the speech, Rand has been talking already of men living by the mind and of sacrifice and self-esteem. Additionally, this whole speech is set against the immediately preceding scene in which the young government man Tony dies in the arms of Rearden, and they have spoken of the absoluteness of that bullet wound and Rand has illustrated the absoluteness of life and death of a person, mind and body.

    Self can be an emergent property looking across animal phyla. Encephalization of a nervous system, such as in a snail, need not entail existence of a self, even though the organism has a (fixed) behavioral value hierarchy. Damasio has found neurological quarters and interconnections for different levels of the human self (The Feeling of What Happens). Much is known about the development of the human brain in ontogeny, and experts might tell us when self-consciousness is added to primary consciousness. However, none of those emergences are about emergence of consciousness or consciouness-related self from neurological process, and I don't know if emergence would be the right relationship between neurological processes we possess and those selves.

    To your first option, we could say that self used to include all those things would be very handwaving, but that it is true enough, and Rand assents, that human self is the whole mind-body organism. I don't think your following OR, taken as exclusive would be right. I leave open for now, at my stage of information, whether the relation of consciousness and consciousness-related self stand to their underlying neural process in a relation of emergence, and if they do so stand, I don't see that as in conflict with your first option. Rand's talk of consciousness is never a sort of reified abstraction, but part of some animal biology.

  8. I’d like to mention another point, this one made by Rand, concerning the choice to live as it relates to ethics. That is: having chosen to live, the life is necessarily within the constitution, powers, and limits of what is human life. Human being has a definite nature just as any being has a nature, a definite living nature just as any living being has a nature. Notably, in Rand’s view, and mine, the nature of humans is that either one is rational or, in irrationality, one is making way for fulfillment of the standing condition of life: eventual disintegration of life to stillness, to death. Additional nature of being human would be such things as needs to breathe and to eat and to learn and to have companionship of the mind.

    In Rand’s view (and I concur in this point), life is the sole domain of valuations, significance, and meaning. With value arising only where life arises, I slide Rand’s relationship between value and the general world into one of the five kinds for that relationship noted by Robert Nozick in his PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS (1981): we choose that there be value, but the nature of value is not up to us.

    About a year ago, the following mathematical feat was accomplished: a tile shape was found that tiles the infinite plane within the problem-rules that patterns of tile fittings do not repeat and there are no overlaps or gaps between the tiles. The tile shape that accomplishes this was initially called the Einstein tile because ein stein means one stone. That tile is now called Hat because its shape looks like the silhouette of a hat. In the 1970’s, Roger Penrose found a tiling of the plane using two shapes of tile. So the more recent mathematical accomplishment goes Penrose one better, we might say. I want now to get physical about these tilings, and this will bring us back round to the point about Rand’s metaphysics of value with which this post began.

    Theoretical physicists place theoretically an atom at each vertex of these tiles and see what sort of matter they get. They take the atom-vested tiled plane as a cross-section of a 3D material. A theoretical material.

    In the case of the Penrose tiling, the material turned out to be a quasicrystal. That solid material of the Penrose tiles was later found in nature. The matter that would result from the Hat tiling has been found to be a quasicrystal, but it shares properties of the crystal structure called graphene.

    As I recall, the pure-carbon crystal graphene was invented in the wake of the invention of fullerene (buckyballs), a sphere-like molecule purely carbon. Fullerene was first theoretically fashioned, then produced physically. Later it was found to also exist in nature.

    These coincidences of the artificial and the natural is perfectly fitted with Rand’s metaphysics in Galt’s Speech (in ATLAS SHRUGGED) and in her later essay "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made” and in her buddy Leonard Peikoff’s essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” These Objectivist founders had emphasized that products of invention have determinate natures just as things occurring in the course of nature. That the former were inventions initiated by free human choices does not mean that the natures in the inventions are any less (or more) necessary than the necessities within the purely naturally given.

    The choice to live is choice for human life, and although we have continual and ongoing choices concerning that life, they are made within a human nature not up to us.

     

    quasicrystals – https://www.nobelprize.org/.../advanced...

    graphene – https://nanografi.com/.../60-uses-and-applications-of.../

     

  9. 4 hours ago, monart said:

    Could Mr. Brunton be trying to maintain his balance on his unstable platform by regarding "God", like some Christians sometimes do, as if it were like "Existence", the axiomatic concept of Objectivism, . . .

    I noticed how easy it is to replace God with Existence in the most basic ontology of Spinoza's (Jewish, not Christian) system here (linked excerpt is from my fundamental paper "Existence, We" [2021 {scroll down}]). Perhaps that is part of why he was so often accused of pantheism and atheism.

  10. Einstein Tiling Is Getting Material

    Physicists have made a theoretical examination of what sort of material results if one places an atom at each vertex of the tiles.* This had been done with the Penrose tiles (1970's – 2 shapes of tile) covering the plane. The physicists look at such a tiled plane they have conceived as vertex-embedded with atoms as a slice through a 3D material. In the case of the Penrose tiling, the material turned out to be a quasicrystal. That solid material of the Penrose tiles was later found in nature. The matter that would result from the Einstein tiling (also called the Hat tiling because the shape of that tile resembles silhouette of a hat) is a quasicrystal, but it shares properties of the crystal structure called graphene.

    If I recall correctly, the pure-carbon crystal graphene was invented in the wake of the invention of fullerene (buckyballs), a sphere-like molecule purely carbon. Fullerene was first theoretically fashioned, then produced physically. Later it was found to also exist in nature. This coincidence of the artificial and the natural is perfectly fitted with Rand’s metaphysics in Galt’s Speech and in her essay "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made” and in Peikoff’s “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” Objectivists had emphasized that products of invention have determinate natures just as things occurring in the course of nature. That the former were inventions initiated by free human choices does not mean that the nature of the inventions are any less (or more) necessary than the necessities within the purely naturally given.

  11. On 10/11/2021 at 12:33 PM, Boydstun said:

    Picture of Particle AND Wave (at the same time!)

    (Although likely we should be saying particle-like AND wave-like: a wavicle.)

    HT - Dan Edge

     

    10 hours ago, tadmjones said:

    This article offers a different frame of interpretation of what was ‘captured’. It seems a better view of the image is to see at as capturing the interactions between  light’s ’energy’ and target particles , the light isn’t ‘seen’ or imaged as exhibiting dual aspects as much as what is depicted in the image is the history of the reactions between particles and light as akin to an interference pattern.

    https://www.insidescience.org/blog/2015/03/13/no-you-cannot-catch-individual-photon-acting-simultaneously-pure-particle-and-wave

     

  12. 39 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

    Is the idea that sometimes a lepton can be in particle mode, sometimes in wave mode, and it can switch back and forth?  Or are the modes different ways of considering the same particle at the same time?

     

    Apparently different aspects of the same entity at the same time. And I think that is smooth with the original paper of DeBroglie and with the way we learn to put together a particle as a wave packet in QM class (although the latter would be for ordinary QM, and surely we need to be at quantum field theory to be at fullest understanding of elementary particles).

    What's the point?

  13. 22 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

    Is that to mean Rand and Augustine agree that embracing God is a negation of the self or the mind? both? or are they one and the same?

    I've long thought that mind and self were the same, but lately I'm perplexed with the notion that self contains the mind as an aspect. That the more fundamental self is consciousness as such. The underlying awareness of the functioning of the mind and its contents are objects to the self.

    Whether embracing God is negation of self would depend on one's conception of God. Spinoza certainly would embrace God, but his does not entail negation of his self nor suspension of reason.

    I think of mind as the instrumentation and control system of some higher animal bodies, including the human case. There is just an ambiguity in "self". Sometimes it mean mind and body, and sometimes only one's mind. If a Christian sect arose that preached resurrection of one's body, but without any memory of one's previous existence, experiences, thoughts or other minded persons, I don't think they'd win many clients. The mind of a human is the precious self.

  14. The mind-independent universe is mass-energy, not philosopher-armchair substance. Knowledge of mass-energy and evidence for its amount in the whole universe being conserved back to and including the Initial Singularity is a glorious fruitful quest of science alone.

    Whether there are extensionless points in spacetime is, in the armchairs of philosophers, as stuck in the mud as all the centuries they wasted over the question of whether matter was atomic or continuous. Science got the answers and subtleties of that and delivered a solid stage for bringing the world into our service.

    Elementary particle physics has it that leptons, in their particle mode, are extensionless particles, perfect points of mass. The old sayings of philosophers that extension is more fundamental than weight is sensibly (on account of modern science) left back in those moldy old armchairs.

     

    Additional Note
     

    Quote

     

    Nietzsche had read, in 1876 and 1883, a renovation of Schopenhauer’s system that made it less metaphysical. That was Philipp Mainländer’s Philosophy of Redemption (1876),5 in which the author claimed that throughout nature “instead of one metaphysical will, there are many individual (and immanent) wills that continually struggle with one another” (Brobjer 2008, 69). That is an opening for an individualistic theoretical employment of will in nature, in nature more widely than in intellectual animals such as man.

    5.  In this title, I have translated Erlösung as Redemption because that is how the term is rendered by translators of Schopenhauer. However, it would also be reasonable to translate Erlösung as Deliverance. Schopenhauer and Mainländer were atheists and thought that death is the end of the individual. They thought of death as deliverance from the suffering pervasive in life.

    Brobjer, T. 2008. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context. U of Ill Press.

     

     

  15. Augustine had it that to embrace God is to turn away from oneself. Rand had it that to suspend one’s critical rationality in any question, including the existence of God, is a sacrifice of one’s mind, which is one’s self, and I agree.

    I think the standpoint of the author Mr. Brunton is like one of those exercise platforms with a hemisphere as its underside. His standpoint is unstable and a frame of cognitive dissonance. At least he is an independent thinker. Thanks for the notice.

    That egoism of God on display in the Isaiah passage seems overly concerned with social image. More importantly: Is the kind of love traditionally attributed to God, traditionally called agape, is it, when shorn of a Christian sacrificial cast, is such purely outgoing love egoistic? As a matter of fact, it is (though not in the sense of being for benefit firstly to oneself). It was stolen from man and placed in God, just as in truth the making and control of fire was stolen from man and credited to the gods in the setup for the myth of Prometheus. Nonsacrificial agape is our fundamental love, the human-level experience and instantiation of outward striving, the joy in agency and dance, an essential of life itself in the human. Such agape in oneself is because one is a living self. I'm speaking of mortal life, which is to say, real life.

  16. (OK. A sour-cream coffee cake, very fine.)

    A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later she gets conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. Does that account solve The Problem of Induction ? How far was it a well-defined problem? Was solution of that problem what Rand had in mind in calling for a validation of induction in FNI? I imagine it was, as she would know of Hume’s making shallow of induction and causation and the hero worship Hume received by Philosophy of Science instructors (approximately Logical Empiricists) in the 1960’s (such as my instructor). Does Harriman’s book contain a solution to that problem? I rather imagine it does; I’d have to look at it freshly and closely as well as at the problem. But with the link to SEP on that problem, you might do yourself well in a close look at Harriman with that problem in view.

    I rather imagine Harriman had a good hold on that because of his portrayal of our modern sure inference to the existence and character of atoms. I told that story also in my “Induction on Identity.” We ended up in somewhat different years on when that thesis could no longer be at all doubted, rationally speaking. Harriman was a bit more liberal on that than I. Can’t recall just now if Harriman gave William Whewell credit for the process of the “concilliance of inductions” that played out in that case after Whewell’s time.

    Kant had an answer to Hume’s critique of causality. It would be good to know with exactly whose picture of causality Hume had been arguing against and was that prior picture also wrong from the vista of an Objectivist non-Humean system. Kant pulled the premise-rug out from under Hume by exposing that Hume et al. were empty-handed on what was human experience for which Hume could find no necessary connection from episode to episode. Kant’s own hand on what was human experience such that there were necessary connections between its episodes was fantastical. Classic modern philosophers Locke to Kant on this are getting a good replacement today with all the philosophers of perception, direct realist and representational realist who master and incorporate the pertinent science, neurological and psychological. I’ll be taking care of Kant in the sequel of this paper, with a modern realist replacement, my own, which was aided by Rand’s system.

    You asked about yet-to-come extension of Rand’s measurement structure for concepts. I did take a first step on that 20 years ago in my paper Universals and Measurement. I don’t know how far I might get back to developing that further in connection with science within my projects in view for however farther I live. (I have no indications on specific future failures of health, but I’m 75, so reasonably, the final grade I give myself in advance is “incomplete.”)

    Within chapter 7 of Harriman’s book, he discusses “Physics as Inherently Mathematical”. He has nothing original to say; and no mention of the many contemporaries of ours imminently qualified who have contributed to further understanding on that circumstance first really solidly seen in Newton (gravity, not optics), and rocketed by Maxwell; and he seemed to not actually know what it was from Galileo that was actually crucial for Newton’s advance; and he seemed ignorant of the middle man Descartes between Galileo and Newton concerning the law of inertia and, additionally, how it was that rotational motion came to be seen as a form of acceleration in the first place*; and he did nothing by way of showing a way (if there is one) that Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts is usefully related to uses of mathematics in modern physics. There are other aspects in Rand’s epistemological ideas that are shown to be at work in the practice of physics, but these aspects are not unique to Rand.

    If one is a beginner, this book can introduce some history and techniques of physics. Additional literature on those is vast, and some leads to it are in the endnotes of The Logical Leap.

    I don’t recall if Harriman discussed abduction teamed with induction in science methods, but that is part of the full picture.  

  17. 3 hours ago, monart said:

    How close does Harriman's book come to validating induction (for Physics)? How close does it come to validating induction in other fields like Psychology or Ethics? What would be a complete, successful validation of any method of induction?

    Do you know of "someone yet-to-come" who could extend Rand's "measurement structure"? Do you yourself have some ideas about how to go about it? Have you written any overview of your philosophy, how it complements or expands Objectivism, or generally the ways in which Objectivism as a philosophy (or as an intellectual movement) could be developed further?

    The books by John D. Norton on induction look excellent: The Material Theory of Induction (2021) and The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference* (forthcoming, 2024) look to be illuminating. They would not be expressly hooked to Rand's metaphysics or theory of concepts. Upon studying these Norton books, concord and discord with Rand's theoretical philosophy is something most any participant here could do for themselves. A case for basing induction on Rand's Law of Identity is made in my Induction on Identity in the early 1990's (one way to access the text of the paper is to click on bolded text in the Abstract linked here). (I received a complimentary personal note on that paper from Jude Dougherty who was at that time head of the phi department at the Catholic University of America and was editor of the professional journal The Review of Metaphysics.)

    For deductive logic, the principle of noncontradiction looms large. It is a powerful tool. (Hilbert used only PNC in making the mathematical proof that was his Ph.D. thesis, for example.) Leibniz, Kant, and others of their eras recognized, as did Rand 1957, that PNC is a normative principle of cognition based on the Law of Identity. In some deductive inferences, we rely directly on identity: "All animals are mortal, you and I are animals, therefore we are mortal."

    One sense in which one might try to validate induction would be to try to prove that if PNC is securely based on Identity, then so is induction based on identity. I think that the history of trying to link induction very closely to deduction has been widely deemed unsuccessful, and perhaps that route suggested in the previous sentence would fall prey to those criticisms. Another sense in which one might try to "validate" induction would be to try to elicit it's correctness for cognition as a corollary from Rand's general metaphysics (taken for true), in the way that OPAR elicits "corollaries" (not deductive theorems) from the most elementary theses and concepts of Rand's general metaphysics. I approve, notwithstanding the usual charge of circularity one receives for any attempts to discursively defend inference principles, deductive or inductive. Another way to validate induction might be to point to vegetative "induction" in the activities of organic neural networks in bringing about sensory perception. Having validated the deliverances of the senses, one then might argue for goodness of consciously engaging in induction for tracking reality (but, again a circularity (benign?) because the first validation had to enlist some induction).

    Rand suggested in ITOE that induction was intimate with abstraction in her (or other, really) account of concepts. This would be abstractive induction, which I mentioned even in the Abstract of my "Induction on Identity" linked above. That genre of induction was the topic of Peikoff's paper "Aristotle's 'Intuitive Induction'" (1985 The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99), which was a bit taken from his Ph.D. dissertation. ‘Intuitive Induction’ and ‘Abstractive Induction’ are two traditional names for the same genre of induction.

    Harriman’s book is nice in his illustrations from the history of physics on the methods we often call induction. That is the standard and very helpful way in contemporary philosophy of science. Scroll down in the pdf link for Norton to his Table of Contents, Part II. I was thrilled in Harriman’s book when I came to text I recognized as taken from old Harvard case studies by Duane Roller, the volume on electric charge, which I had read in my History of Science course in undergraduate around 1970. Roller had joined our faculty at University of Oklahoma.

    (I’m sorry, but I need to break off just now. I’ll try later tonight to come back and finish what else I wanted to reply for you, Monart. For the present, my husband is calling me away, hoping that I’ll get our dessert made for this evening’s meal.)

  18. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’

    How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area.

    But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B.

    Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had  “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation).

    That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013).

    From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329).

    William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science.

    From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. 

    I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls.

    Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism).

    Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1]

    The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014.

    Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2]

    In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own.

    (To be continued.)

    Notes

    [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes.

    [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. 

    References

    Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104.

    Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. 

    Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.

    Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library.

    Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY.

    Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

    Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990.

    Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet.

    ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982.

    ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet.

    ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian.  

    Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press.

    ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

  19. I spent more than an hour composing a post for y'all, summarizing episode 8 "Moscow Will Not Be Silent", which covers from the Russian baton passing from Yeltsin to Putin up to Putin's attack on Ukraine. I think posters and readers here would really appreciate the detail and integration attained in this Netflix documentary. But I goofed, apparently by not clicking "Submit Reply" and just logged out. I don't have time to recompose that long post, to which I appended remark on poking fun at dictator elections, and since the Biden-Trump contest was mentioned, elaborated on what I thought about that off-topic issue as it relates to preservation of our constitutional democratic republic. I've got a minute to at least repeat the last sentence of that long, long post now gone to wherever they go when you fail to actually post them:

    After Obama was elected, in '08 or '12, some commenter at Rebirth of Reason said there would be no more US elections. Wrong. 

  20. David's remark got me thinking that the way we found the house we wanted to buy was probably pretty good from the competition factor. We were buying in 2009 which was good for buyers, as housing transactions had fallen (also, since we were first-time buyers, we were able to get a federal tax advantage at that time). We had been renters in Chicago throughout adult life. By retirement time, we had saved enough money to by a house, provided we moved to a less expensive part of the country. Using sites like Zillow, we had spotted about 30 places in the mid-South we wanted to explore. We had no agent. We rented a car and drove down to look at those houses only from the outside. All but 7 could be eliminated by the surroundings of the house. I wrote down the agents with whom the 7 homes were listed at the property, and after we returned to Chicago, I called each of them and made an appointment to see the interior. They knew I was looking at a number of definite houses, and perhaps that was to our advantage. When I came to the house that was calling "home," it turned out that (in Virginia) that agent could be also our agent, so that is what we did, and it was very convenient for us. I'm pleased to hear his commission may well have been 6% from us—I never knew—and really that seems like a bargain for us.

×
×
  • Create New...