Boydstun
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Posts posted by Boydstun
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A new particle at about 125 Gev has been found at LHC. Need to confirm it is the Higgs boson.*
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John Allison is a Board member of the Ayn Rand Institute. He made presentations at OCON 2011. In one of those, he mentioned some projects in academia that he and Charles Koch have co-sponsored in the past. He surely seems a great asset for Cato from his business expertise, his long-time staunch commitment to advancing the scholarly defense of freedom, and his understanding of the importance of Rand’s philosophy in that defense.
An explanation of the settlement for Koch v. Cato is here.
(Nikolai, a little point of sensibilities: John Allison or anyone else who takes Rand's philosophy and its scholars so seriously as he would not appreciate being referred to as "Mr. Objectivism himself.")
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Hi Oscar,
It was a long time ago. We never met. We corresponded on issues in relativity (especially GR) and metaphysics between 10/23/88 and 3/28/89. You were a physics major. You lived in Torrance. I lived in Chicago. You had written to me by referral from Ron Kagan. He knew of me because I had written him a letter responding to an essay he had in Objectively Speaking titled “The Foundations of Metascience.”
I still have all your letters and copies of mine. They were all hand written! They are fun reads. In your last letter, you had received a scholar award for graduate school in physics at UCLA. I hope you were able to take some advantage of that, and anyway, I am delighted to see you still have a lively interest in these topics.
Stephen
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Oscar Munoz, warm hello across the years. —Stephen
You may be also interested in this thread and in this post,
the latter concerning Penrose’s proposed Conformal Cyclic Cosmology: a, b.
(PS – I see now that you and Alfred have already been discussing Penrose's CCC here.)
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Alfred, thank you.
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On QM interpretation, this one.
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The Euclid satellite is to launch in 2019 and gather cosmic data bearing on dark matter and dark energy.
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- Popular Post
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My first lover and I were together for 22 years, to his death 22 years ago today. This then is a remembrance I would like to share today. It is my eulogy for Jerry at the memorial service for him in Chicago three weeks after his death, all those summers ago. The ceremony consisted of alternations of speaking and music, and the music that followed my speaking was the Rachmoninoff Prelude Op. 23, No. 2 in B flat.
Jerry D. Crawford (11 October 1948 – 17 June 1990)
Jerry carried two striking memories from his early childhood. His earliest memory was a beautiful dragonfly. He gazed upon its iridescent wings in the sunlight. It held him in complete wonder.
In the second memory, Jerry was wearing a cape. It was a towel, tied about his neck. Again and again that day, he climbed up the steps of the porch and leaped off to make his cape billow while trying to catch a glimpse of it.
Jerry’s childhood name was Peanuts.
Jerry was a happy child, and he was a serious child. He took himself seriously. Once, as a child, he was playing a musical instrument—a trumpet, I believe—for an informal group of adults. After he finished, one of them remarked with delight “He’s going to be another Lawrence Welk.” Jerry said “No, I’m going to be the one and only Jerry Crawford.”
Jerry’s brother Joel has shown me something personal and important that Jerry wrote sometime probably in his early teens. I shall read parts of it for you. I have reservations about reading this because the mature Jerry might be embarrassed. Still, “the child is the father of the man.” I think anyway that when someone dies we may regard the different periods of his life more equally than we would were he presently alive.
I met Jerry Crawford in the fall of 1966. We were freshmen at the University of Oklahoma. We became friends. Jerry became a close friend of Michael Clement. The three of us were in the same introductory philosophy course in the second semester. Michael lives in Chicago. He remained Jerry’s close friend always.
In the fall of ’67, Jerry and I had a number of philosophical discussions, and a great many cigarettes, into the wee hours of the morning. I had discovered the writings of Ayn Rand, and for me they were the breath of life. Sometime in the following spring, Jerry began reading Rand’s masterwork Atlas Shrugged. I remember the scene exactly. I had dropped out of school temporarily and was that evening behind a desk in an office where I monitored security alarms through the night. Jerry had stopped in after classes. As he was leaving, he smiled and said “I like the character, Dagny Taggart.” That was the first time ever I saw his face. I could not know then what had been set in motion, but, as Victor Hugo would have it: “Love is always love at first sight—the rest is only the rest.”
In June of 1968, we became lovers. We were both 19 years old. It lasted a lifetime.
I remember that Jerry was taking German that summer. He was taking also a seminar titled “Classical Greek Tragic Motifs in Modern French Literature.” He had already taken several French courses. I was taking a calculus course and a physics lab. We bought Rubinstein’s recordings of the Chopin Nocturnes. I remember lying on the living room floor of our rented apartment in the evening. The little chandelier and Chopin sparkled away as I waited for Jerry to return from classes.
When Jerry had entered the University, he had majored in Mathematics. He had taken every math course possible in high school. His high school teacher had been excellent. [i should mention that Jerry finished high school with a 4.0 average, straight A’s.] He decided after a while in college, though, to change his major to Interior Design. This was a brave decision. Men who were interior designers were presumed stereotypically to be homosexual. I do not think the word gay—or, for that matter the idea that homosexual was a perfectly normal and healthy way for some people to be—had yet reached Oklahoma. Rand said that one should live by one’s own first-hand rational values. That Jerry did.
Jerry’s decision to pursue interior design was brave in another way too, although he would not have thought of it this way. Jerry could not draw. How could he even think about becoming a designer? Well, he would just have to learn to draw. This was Jerry’s attitude towards anything he wanted to do. He never said “I would like to do such-and-such, but I have no talent for it.” He did not put much stock in talent. He just went to work.
Jerry learned technical drawing and water coloring for rendering his designs. He later taught himself life drawing. His design studies included period interiors and furniture refinishing. He took several courses in art history. When Jerry worked on a project, such as a watercolor rendering for a design class or refinishing a piece of furniture just for us, he worked pretty much straight through until it was completed. He resented sleep; it was a waste of time.
Jerry and I graduated together in the spring of ’71. His degree was Interior Design; mine was Physics. We both became unemployed. We had projects, of course, but for several months, no paying job. We did eventually find work—at a late-night restaurant in Oklahoma City. Jerry washed dishes. I bussed tables. There was one night we always remembered. We were driving home, to Norman, after work, on a road through horse-raising country. It had been another grueling day. We ached. There were only Jerry and I, speeding through the sleeping moonlit country. On the car radio, Roberta Flack was singing. It was an eternal moment.
We found better work later that summer. I worked on grounds maintenance for a hotel-office complex. Jerry worked at a custom drapery shop. He learned some useful things there.
On Labor Day weekend of ’72, I put our savings of $84 dollars into my pocket and got on the train for Chicago. I had a one-way ticket, which had cost $32. I do not think we ever spoke of it, but I heard Jerry blast the car horn that night as he roared away from the station. In plain French, ne m’oublie pas. A few days later, I called him from Chicago and told him I had found work with enough pay—$2.50 an hour. He quit his job and packed.
Jerry tried to break into interior design here for several months, but with no success. During those months, we had $5 extra for spending each week. On a night in November, we sat on the stage of Orchestra Hall at a benefit piano recital. It was all Chopin. The pianist was Artur Rubinstein.
On the day before our first Thanksgiving in Chicago, Jerry went to the grocery store. I know that those of you who knew Jerry in later years find it hard to believe, but it is true. Jerry actually went into a grocery store. On his walk through the several blocks back to the apartment, he saw more snow fall than he had seen in his entire 24 years.
That apartment was a dump. We did not intend to be there long, so we did not decorate it. Jerry had a guitar. He began to acquire a voice. He could experiment during the day, while the neighbors were gone to work . . . .
In the spring, Jerry took a job in the photostat department of Leo Burnett Advertising. We moved into an apartment on the 22nd floor of a newly completed high-rise at Clark and Armitage. It was unfurnished. As a temporary measure, we bought some lawn furniture. Jerry rented a piano.
[i should mention that Jer was half Choctaw.]
Jerry had taken piano lessons from fifth grade through high school. He always said his mother had wanted him to learn piano so he could accompany her singing in church. Once he played for a Cheyenne funeral. Now the Choctaw is one thing, and the Cheyenne is another. Jerry was seated at the piano with his back to the congregation. As soon as he struck the first notes, a great wailing cry went up behind him. It scared the daylights out of him. Jerry moved on to classical music. He took a semester of piano in college. He studied in Chicago under Roger Goodman.
Our high-rise apartment became beautiful. Jerry became attracted to the law. Jerry’s design skills were to serve only Jerry and me and our guests.
Through law school, Jerry (and I) made new friends. Some were close and continued to the present. I want to mention only Linda Dougherty—what a friend.
After graduation Jerry studied for the bar exam. It was about this time, I believe, that he made some very pretty, but schizophrenic, drawings and many wonderful French pastries. In the review course for the exam, Jerry became friends with David Montague. It was largely through David’s influence that Jerry and I began to appreciate opera.
Law was right for Jerry. He wanted intellectual, but practical, employment. He wanted work that mattered. The Office for Civil Rights had the right work for Jerry.
We moved from the high-rise to the present apartment [1887 graystone] on Barry in the spring of ’81. At last Jerry was freed of the 8-foot ceiling.
In the 1980’s, Jerry continued to develop his singing. He took vocal lessons from Kip Snyder. Kip had been the vocal coach for Windy City Gay Chorus. He is director of Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus. These choruses sing about many different things, but, because it is them singing, every song implicitly proclaims the emancipation of gay people. On Valentine’s Day of 1982, The Windy City Gay Chorus sang in Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. The program ended. Jerry was in my arms. It was an eternal moment.
At home, during the ’80’s, Jerry sang classical, art songs, but he also sang popular songs. There is a certain kind of love song Jerry would not sing no matter how excellent the song might be. It was the kind of song which says, “my man is no good, but I love him anyway.” Jerry knew that his lover was not a jerk.
In the fall of ’83, Jerry and I were interviewed for an hour or two by a woman working on an advanced degree in something like social psychology. What a high! We talked all that time about our life together, about our relationship. When the interviewer asked Jerry why he loved Stephen, Jerry replied: “Because his is so good.” “You mean . . . ?” “Yes, I mean moral.”
There are, of course, virtues worth having and worth responding to in addition to moral virtues. At Jerry’s bedside in the hospital, when I looked up from my study or writing, I would often find him simply looking at me. He would continue to look with those wondrous brown eyes. Then he would say, “You are so good-looking.”
The 1980’s were the richest years for Jerry and me. Jerry bought a grand piano. . . .
Jerry has left notes of a few of his days that I would like to share with you. He had tried to keep a diary in 1986. He never really got it going, but here is what I have:
A few days after Jerry died, I went to Neiman’s to get a new suit. Linda was with me. We were standing at Michigan and Chicago, waiting for the light to change. The sun was shining. I carried my old suit coat in front of me, over my arm. Then it came. Round and down and round. It lighted on my coat before me. Dragonfly.
I want to make two remarks about AIDS. First: Jerry was completely innocent; he was simply blind-sided. When HIV was being communicated to and by people like Jerry, nobody even knew there was such a thing. During the earliest reports of the disease, there would have been no reason for Jerry to think it had any direct relevance to him. Other socially communicated diseases were here before AIDS; Jerry never had any of them, not even the minor ones.
When people speak of infants with AIDS, they often say something like, “surely these are the most innocent AIDS victims.” This is false. It bespeaks a negative attitude towards human sexuality and pleasure. We are not made less innocent by sexual pleasure and the enjoyment of life, notwithstanding centuries of neurotic dogma to the contrary. Jerry was innocent. He never betrayed himself, me, nor any life on this magnanimous earth.
My second remark on AIDS is brief and is addressed to my gay brothers. So many have died. More will follow. As a people though, we are going to survive. And we will be free.
On the morning I spread Jerry’s ashes, there was a very light rain. It sealed the words I spoke in this envelope.
Jerry knew that music.
Jerry knew that life.
“A moment or an eternity, . . . life, undefeated, existed and could exist.”
- softwareNerd, Superman123, mdegges and 1 other
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Frank Wilczek (author of Lightness of Being)
“One could say that the electron was conceived in 1892 and delivered in 1897.”
“Although the Higgs particle is sometimes credited with giving matter mass, its contribution to the mass of ordinary matter is actually quite small. Lorentz’s beautiful idea, in modern form accounts for most of it.”
Of related interest: Representing Electrons
A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities
Theodore Arabatzis (Chicago 2006)
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Despicable Amendment – Amen
Thanks, Diana.
Depending on the courts interpretation of the language of the amendment, it could:
. . . prevent the state from giving committed couples rights to allow them to order their relationships, including threatening their ability to determine the disposition of their deceased partner’s remains; make medical decisions if their partner is incapacitated; . . . invalidate trusts, wills, and end-of-life directives by one partner in favor of the other.
Those are the sorts of possible effects that could impact my partner and me. We have that sort of legal situation here in Virginia also. The good news is that so far the legal profession is not so bigoted as the general public.
One good thing for same-sex couples throughout the country is that a couple of years ago, the President issued a directive that hospitals receiving Medicare business are required to have a written policy of nondiscrimination against same-sex couples concerning visitation rights. Unfortunately, even that can be overturned by a future President pandering to the bigots.
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Concerning Core
Two of Rand’s ideas I find true, original, and important are these:
The first is Rand's idea that concepts of any particulars can be fashioned according to a principle of suspended particular measurement values along certain magnitude dimensions shared by particulars falling under those concepts. This conjecture is important as a distinct position in the theory of universals. It has implications for metaphysics and for philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I continue to develop the measurements-omitted theory of universals* and to put it to work in problems current in the philosophy of mathematics and science.
The second is Rand's idea that value occurs only on account of the existence of life. Where there is value, there is life; and where there is life, there are values.* The first thinker who really got some grip on this idea was a philosopher of whom Rand likely knew little. Shoshana Milgram has informed me he was being taught at Rand’s university, but Rand did not take that course. His name is Marie-Jean Guyau. His theory of ethics was individualistic, against Utilitarianism, and purely secular. His book presenting this theory is A Sketch of Morality without Obligation or Sanction (1885). His concept of what biological life fundamentally is was somewhat different than Rand’s, and that is one reason for the differences between his ethics and Rand’s.
I think Rand was mistaken in these ways:
Metaphysics – Rand’s is overly deterministic. (a, b)
In my 1991, [i wrote] “Identical existents, in given circumstances, will always produce results not wholly identical to results produced by different existents in those same circumstances.” In contrast Leonard Peikoff had maintained earlier that year that Rand’s law of identity entails the following: “In any given set of circumstances, there is only one action possible to an entity, the action expressive of its identity” (1991, 14). Dr. Peikoff’s formula can be read as not in contradiction with mine if his phrase only one action possible is taken to mean only one kind and range of action possible. But that is not the plain reading of his text. In his 1976 lectures The Philosophy of Objectivism (Lecture 2), also, he had maintained that Rand’s law of identity applied to action entailed that only a single action was physically possible to a thing in a given circumstance. Rand gave notice that those lectures were an accurate representation of her views, so I expect she shared the erroneous view expressed by Peikoff concerning uniquely determined outcome. (That there is a unique outcome in all cases is not in dispute; the issue is whether in all cases only that unique outcome was physically possible; see my 1997 reply to Rafael Eilon, 159–62.)So I expect Rand meant “uniquely determined” in her 1973 formula for the law of physical causality: “All the countless forms, motions, combinations, and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved” (MvMM, 25). In any case, the error is easily corrected without major revision to her metaphysics or to its counters to Hume’s account of causation. [12/25/10]
Epistemology – Rand’s is overly to the side of the subject.
Ethics – Rand’s is overly egoistic (a, b).
There is . . . a thread of subjectivity in Rand’s conception of value and love and normative selfishness that is puckering up the fabric. In my judgment, that thread is unnecessary and should be removed. Speaking metaphorically, the solemnity of looking at the sky does not come only from the uplift of one’s head (HR V 598). In extreme desire for another person, the other does not recede in importance compared to the desire (GW IX 539). A rational desire to help someone in need is animated not only by “your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and struggle” (AS 1060, emphasis added). Rather, it is enough for rational egoism that, by design, no actions be contrary self-benefit (of a self worth benefitting). The requirement that all actions should intend primarily self-benefit should be dropped. In this way, one can love persons simply for the particular ends-in-themselves that they are. [7/9/10]Since you are interested in political philosophy, I will mention also that although there is some room for interpretation of Rand on the point, she may have made the error of assuming that individuals come to the state with their property rights in land (in the economic sense) already perfected, like their rights in their person. Murray Rothbard explicitly made that error. The corrective is here: a, b.
Dormin111, what do you find true, important, and distinctive to Rand in her writings? What of significance do you find incorrect?
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Looking to the text, I see that Rand did not err by saying as Thomas, whom I quoted in #332, that Aquinas reintroduced Aristotle. She wrote: “Aristotle’s works were lost to the scholars of Europe for centuries. The prelude to the Renaissance was the return to Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas.” There is error in the latter sentence in saying that the return was only by Aquinas. Not only were there other minds bringing Aristotle’s ideas in his rediscovered work to ascendance in Western intellectual culture; without the Aquinas conduit, that ascendance would still have occurred via those other minds at that time. Think especially of the more scientific thinkers, with Posterior Analytics in hand, and think of the broad impact of On the Soul on philosopher-theologians other than Aquinas.
In Rand’s first sentence, there is error in neglecting the logical works that had been already in the hands of earlier thinkers such as Abelard. That only concrete particulars exist outside the mind was already a live position, thanks in large part to Abelard’s interpretation and promotion of what is in those works of Aristotle. From those works, syllogistic logic was already the dominant mode of reasoning, and as Thomas has indicated in #335, to the purpose of much sterile rationalization (contrast with Rand: a, b, c). What was of interest to Rand in Aristotle’s logic was the (at once logical and metaphysical) principle of noncontradiction. That and Aristotle’s defense of it was not at hand full weight until Metaphysics was translated into Latin in the century before Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.
For the prelude to the Renaissance, we should add to the Aristotle of Aquinas and to the translations into Latin of Posterior Analytics, Physics, Meteorology, On the Heavens, Generation and Corruption, Metaphysics, On the Soul, Sense and Sensibility and translation into Latin of the commentaries of Averroes on Aristotle. We should add, also in the century before Bacon, Aquinas, et al., the translations into Latin of Euclid (Elements, Optics, Catoptrics), Ptolemy (Almagest, Planisphere, Optics), Avicenna (The Healing, Canon of Medicine), and Alhacen (De aspectibus).
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Ninth,
Aristotle's ideas on logic were already dominant in the Latin West. In the rediscovered parts of Aristotle (the works I listed), there was a largely non-mystical, this-world comprehensive view to compete with the Christian view. Aquinas' synthesis co-opted that competitor for Christianity, perhaps extending the dominance of that mysticism considerably. Even as late as the 17th Century, when the modern mechanistic physics had become a new threat to Christianity, we find Leibniz bringing Aristotle's concepts such as substantial form to the rescue of Christian Mysteries. Aquinas' synthesis continues to give a patina of rationality to Christian faith in some quarters to this day. Yes, I concur that Aquinas was the one who more than any other thinker made Aristotle in those rediscovered parts of his philosophy, when curtailed, acceptable in Christianity. Whether that notable weight of Aquinas favoring Aristotle was greater than the combined weight of all the others in the West favoring Aristotle, I do not know.
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. . .
. . . Aquinas, who re-introduced Aristotle . . .
That is incorrect. In the century before Aquinas, there had been translations into Latin of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Physics, Meteorology, On the Heavens, Generation and Corruption, Metaphysics, On the Soul, Sense and Sensibility and the commentaries of Averroes on Aristotle. The logical works, by contrast, had not been lost to the West. Abelard, for example, had benefitted from them; he lionized Aristotle simply from those. Champions of Aristotle in Aquinas own time included Roger Bacon and Albert the Great, mentor of Aquinas.
Rand was in error on this point when she wrote “For the New Intellectual.” No excuse for us.
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Worthwhile criticisms of Northrup Buechner’s Objective Economics (a, b) are put forward by Richard Salsman (a, b) in a hostile review in The Objective Standard, Spring 2012. Last summer at OCON 2011, Prof. Buechner was present, and his book was being sold (like hotcakes) independently of the ARI Bookstore, though in the same room.* Mr. Salsman will be an instructor at OCON 2012.*
“The Law of Supply and Demand” – Northrup Buechner (2012)
~~ I ~ II ~ III ~ IV ~ V ~ VI ~ VII ~~
Grames:
The first thing I did was check to see if I had committed an injustice against Dr Buechner. What I said was correct but I did leave out some of the context. What I did put in was his recognition that the other view of the subjective, that which depends on the context of the subject, is a valid one, where he says he wants to stress the 'philosophical' meaning rather than the layman's meaning.
His basis is that all values, like all knowledge, is the result of processing of facts by the mind. There are no intrinsic values because _man's mind_ has to be involved in processing the facts, and that there are no subjective values because man's mind has to be involved in processing _the facts_. All knowledge, and all values, are the joint product of both reality and consciousness. The question is how that product is formed. A man therefore has two basic choices: take control by reason in the forefront of your mind or allow your psychology to take over in defiance of reason. The result is the division of values (as considered by a conceptual-level consciousness) into the objective and the irrational. (And, at a subsidiary level, he notes that optional values are those in which man has a choice as to the particular form that values may take within the category of objective value).
His concept of the subjective is the idea of the content of mind being an exclusive primary. To be a true subjective value, a value placed on something has to be completely divorced from the nature of that something. He gives the analogy of the value-meter: one walks down the aisle of a supermarket, then suddenly the needle on the meter shoots up because one passes say a box of cornflakes, and purely as a result of that one grabs the box and puts it in one's trolley. There is no consideration whatever of why cornflakes might be valuable, there is only the value-meter. His argument against subjective values is that in reality one's mind is always going to consider the nature of the cornflakes (or whatever) themselves and a standard of value when evaluating them. The values do not spring causelessly to mind, "there are no baseless, causeless, arbitrary convulsions of consciousness." The abdication in favour of emotion is as close to subjectivism as one can get, such that the values might as well spring causelessly to mind because this method does not allow a man to understand the causes. Nevertheless, it is still not subjectivism because it always remains an identification of facts and their judgement against a standard of value. By saying that no emotion is causeless he is noting that there are always reasons as to why a man will experience a particular emotion, and that any given emotion is the result of subconscious processing of the facts. That is straight out of Objectivism, and he even quotes Galt's speech on the matter.
As to the rest of your charges, that's between you and Dr Buechner, and I am not fit to speak on his behalf. What does concern me is me, what I think and what I have written. You're right to note that AR holds the subjective as the arbitrary and the emotional (this is just from a quick check of the Lexicon), but I still tend to think there's a confusion between subjective meaning subject-as-creator (all consciousness as self-consciousness) and subjective meaning requiring knowledge of the subject's context in order to comprehend. I also have disputes with other things you've said, but I am still thinking about this topic and I will get back to you once I have more time.
JJM
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Demanding tests for theories of dark energy and the origin of the acceleration of cosmic expansion are being set by precise cosmic distance and size measurements relying on baryon acoustic oscillation signals.
Probing Dark Energy with Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations
Seo and Eisenstein (2003)
Bassett and Hlozek (2009)
Anderson et al. (2012)
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Hi Thomas,
Which translation of KrV do you have? I strongly urge getting one of the two fairly recent translations—the one by Pluhar or the one by Guyer—if you don’t have one of them already. I like Pluhar’s a lot. I had studied out of Kemp Smith about twenty-five years, but the switch to Pluhar was so worth it. So much help all along the way.
Concerning #230 and #234: I wanted to mention that the realm of appearance, or the phenomenal realm, is not a realm of systematic illusion in Kant’s conception of it. And contrary to the excerpt from the Britannica article, the phenomenal realm is in no way unreal, not a bit less real than the noumenal realm. Kant loves the phenomenal realm; he loves its objectivity and intelligibility; he loves is objects and its spatial, temporal, and causal structure. In KrV think of the “Second Analogy of Experience” section, think of his “Refutation of Idealism” section in the B edition. Yes, Kant was horribly mistaken in thinking that the fundamental structures and unities in the “phenomenal realm” come from the constitution of the human mind. But in attributing way too much to the side of the subject, he was not thinking of it as subjective in the negative sense of non-objective. In fact, he has so much determination in the phenomenal realm (in physics specifically) that he ends up with another tragic mistake: he thinks there is no place left in the phenomenal realm for free will.
Peikoff told a good joke I recall. After he had made his presentation of Kant’s philosophy in his history of philosophy lectures, one question he got was why didn’t Kant just dispense with the noumenal realm altogether. Peikoff quip: “Because Kant had big plans for the noumenal realm.” He then went on to explain Kant’s thinking on why he needed to retain the shadowy noumenal realm in his Kant’s total scheme of accounting for the phenomenal, experienced realm.
I would caution against noumenal baseballs. That goes too Plato for Kant. I’d keep the noumenal behind the baseball in hand vague, indeterminate, and nameless.
Now you probably know about Kant’s big plans for the noumenal realm (in KrV and beyond). One thing in that haven from the phenomenal realm was free will. This was Kant’s way of protecting free will against a mistaken total-determinism in the picture of physics. He had a couple of other valuables to stow in that haven as well.
Stephen
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Of related interest:
Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method:
Turning Data into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology
William L. Harper (2012 Oxford)
“Newton's method endorses the radical theoretical transformation from his theory to Einstein's. Harper argues that it is strikingly realized in the development and application of testing frameworks for relativistic theories of gravity, and very much at work in cosmology today.”
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Loose connection looks to be source of the anomalous experimental result.
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A live-streamed debate on the topic Is Government the Problem or the Solution? is scheduled for next Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. at George Mason University, in Founders Hall, Room 134. The debaters will be Yaron Brook* and David Callahan.*
Later in the year, there will be debates between the Democratic and Republican candidates for President. Wednesday’s debate foreshadows, at a deeper level, what is sure to be an underlying issue in the Presidential contest.
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Thought’s Living Existence
This essay is a companion to “Your Love of Existence.”* We saw there that for Aristotle the true or false “is in the same province with what is good or bad” (DA 431b10–11). I want to add to what I said there about how this general state of affairs is reconceived by Ayn Rand.
Rand proclaims that the root of her moral code is “the axiom that existence exists. / 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” (Rand 1957, 1015).
What is the sense of exists in the phrase “that one exists possessing consciousness”? Immediately it is that one is an existent among other existents in general and that one is an existent conscious of other existents. On the following page of Atlas Shrugged, we are told that consciousness is identification. So exists in “that one exists possessing consciousness” means furthermore that one exists as an identifier of existents. This much goes to the side of us concerned with the true or false, or the cognitive.
There is a further sense of exists in the phrase “that one exists possessing consciousness.” That sense has been prepared by text preceding our quotation on 1015. In the preceding pages of Galt’s radio speech, Rand had outlined the place of the mind in human survival and in moral virtue. This outline had been dramatized in the final scene between Rearden and Tony just before the radio-speech scene (Rand 1957, 989–95). The sense of exists in the corollary axiom “one exists possessing consciousness” is living existence. One is implicitly conscious of oneself as a living identifying existent in one’s grasp of the statement existence exists (see also Rand 1969–71, 252). The normative side of us is joined to the cognitive at the deepest level of our conscious existence.
Grasping the statement existence exists is the grasp by a mind mature enough to be understanding Atlas Shrugged. Therein such a mind can learn that life, living existence, is the metaphysical foundation of normativity, of values.
Four years later, we find Rand adding: “In what manner does a human being discover the concept of ‘value’? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of ‘good or evil’ in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation” (1961a, 17). The fact of the pleasure and pain mechanisms of the human body is essential to valuation on Rand’s understanding of the human being. Pleasure and pain are mechanisms necessary for human survival, and the experience of them is epistemologically foundational for moral concepts. To this view of Rand’s, there is a precursor in Aristotle. “To feel pleasure or pain is to act with the sensitive means [in contrast to intellectual means] towards what is good or bad as such” (DA 431a10–11; also 431b2–9).
Rand continued to elaborate the tie between the cognitive and the evaluative.
While cognitive abstractions identify the facts of reality, normative abstractions evaluate the facts, thus prescribing a choice of values and a course of action. Cognitive abstractions deal with that which is; normative abstractions deal with that which ought to be (in the realms open to man’s choice). (Rand 1965a, 18)The process of a child’s development consists of acquiring knowledge, which requires the development of his capacity to grasp and deal with an ever-widening range of abstractions. This involves the growth of two interrelated but different chains of abstractions, two hierarchical structures of concepts, which should be integrated, but seldom are: the cognitive and the normative. The first deals with knowledge of the facts of reality—the second, with the evaluation of these facts. The first forms the epistemological foundation of science—the second, of morality and art. (Rand 1965b, 145)
There are many special or ‘cross-filed’ chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man’s mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed according to a special criterion.
Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good?” (Rand 1966, 36)
In Aristotle’s conception, “soul is in some sense the principle of animal life” (DA 402a7). Soul is “that by which primarily we live, perceive, and think” (414a13). Its relation to the body: “The soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be a body; it is not a body but something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of definite kind” (414a19–21).
Like Descartes and Spinoza and moderns generally, Rand held to the contrary that understanding natural life and its place in existence requires no appeal to soul or final causation, which the ancients had writ into life beyond the life that is thought-consciousness (a, b). However, Rand and we contemporary thinkers view the relation of thought-consciousness to the body as like the relation Aristotle had articulated in broad terms for the relation of soul (with ancient scope) to its animal body.
Rand’s concept of living thought-existence differs from Aristotle’s importantly in that Aristotle held it to be free of identity other than its capability of becoming identical with the thinkable identities, the universal forms and essences, of any and all existents (DA 429a10–430a26). Of course “it is not the stone which is present in the soul but its form” (431b29).
Though Aristotle conceived of thought as requiring imagination, and imagination bodily sense (DA 427b14–15), he held sensation to be yoked to the body, and in this, sensory perception is profoundly different from thought (429a29–b5). Then too, sensory perception “is of things in their particularity, whereas thought is of things in their universality” (417b17–27). He reasoned that if thought were itself tied to the body, its perfect identity with every possible intelligible object would be spoiled. The mind must lie ready to receive any characters, like a clean writing tablet lies ready to receive writing (430a1–2).
Grasping the characters the intellect has received, indeed becoming them, requires not only capability for their reception, but capability for an active internal lighting of them. This latter feature, which has come to be called agent intellect or active intellect, can exist separately from the rest of our cognitive system. It is in fact necessarily immortal and eternal. We cannot remember it as since always because with it alone a human being could have thought nothing. We cannot think anything without the passive, receptive, and mortal component of human mind (DA 430a10–26; see also Gerson 2004).
Intellective cognition is an immaterial reception of forms. In becoming in an immaterial way the forms and essences of its objects, the intellect comes to exist actually. It then is a type of being and truth. When intellect is thinking a form that is not a composite of still other forms, it has become a truth in which no bit of falsehood is possible. This is Parmenides’ existence view of truth incorporated in a circumscribed way into Aristotle’s system,* where it portends Plotinus’ identity theory of truth* (see further, Pritzl 2010a, 22–39). Parmenides had maintained: “The same thing is for thinking and [is] that there is thought” (F8L34, quoted in Gallop 1984, 71).
Aristotle said “being and not-being in the strictest sense are truth and falsity” (Met. 1051b1–2). With regard to incomposites in particular, it is not possible to be in error. “They all exist actually, not potentially; for otherwise they would come to be and cease to be; but, as it is, being itself does not come to be (nor cease to be); for if it did it would have come out of something. About the things, then, which are essences and exist in actuality, it is not possible to be in error, but only to think them or not to think them” (1051b28–32; cf. DA 430b27–33; An.Post. 100a15–b8; see further Pritzl 2010a, 22–39; Salmieri 2008, 71–122, 158–83, 201–18).
In Rand’s view, existence of thinking consists in the identity of thinking; it consists in the specific forms in which thought is a living identifier of existents. Rand held that thought functions by identifying existents and identifying as same existents and their identities, rather than as same thought and those identities. She conceived of identification by thought as having its distinctive forms: thought is conceptual and is capable of attending all one’s modes of consciousness (Rand 1957, 1015; 1961b, 17). She understood thought and conscious self, like all consciousness, to be supported entirely by mortal organic activities. “You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness” (Rand 1957, 1029).
Rand rejected the idea that the intellectual essence of anything is received. Essential characteristics are found only by active thinking about differences, similarities, and causal dependencies (Rand 1966–67, 42, 45–48, 52; 1969–71, 230–31; Kelley 1984; 1988, 19–22, 39–40; Peikoff 1991, 97, 99–100; Gotthelf 2007).* All natures can be found out by mind with its definite nature (Rand 1966–67, 79–82).
As with distinctively human value, in Rand’s account, truth lies in a relation between subject and object. Rand’s most elementary sense of the concept objective is the sense of ordinary parlance. This is the sense she talked of when explaining why she had chosen Objectivism as the name of her philosophy. She credited Aristotle as the first to correctly define “the basic principle of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes, or the feelings of any perceiver)” (Rand 1961b, 22).
In 1965 Rand published two refinements of her concept of objectivity. Early in the year, she distinguished a metaphysical from an epistemological aspect of objectivity (Rand 1965c, 18). Later that year, Rand refined her concept of objectivity further. She introduced her distinction of the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. This was in application to her theory of the good and its relationship to other theories of the good (Rand 1965d, 21–26).
By the following year, it was clear that Rand envisioned a broadened role for the intrinsicist-subjectivist-objectivist way of locating her philosophic theories in relation to others. She applied the tripartition to the theory of concepts and universals. Rand’s conception of concepts and her conception of the good can be rightly characterized as (i) objective with Rand’s metaphysical-epistemological faces of the objective relation and, at the same time, as (ii) objective within Rand’s intrinsicist-subjectivist-objectivist tripartition. She remarked that “the dichotomy of ‘intrinsic or subjective’ has played havoc with this issue [of universals] as it has with every other issue involving the relationship of consciousness to existence” (Rand 1966–67, 53).
The thinker who innovated on Aristotle by defining truth as adequation of thing and intellect was probably Arabic. Thomas Aquinas adopted this as his preferred definition of truth. It stresses the mutual relation of thing and intellect in any occasion of truth (Aertsen 2010, 136–40; Milbank 2010, 279–84).
Rand writes “Truth is the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts” (Rand 1966–67, 48). Concepts are rightly understood as objective,
Identifications asserted in a proposition depend importantly on the identifications made by the concepts composing the proposition.*as neither revealed nor invented, but as produced by man’s consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality, as mental integrations of factual data computed by man—as the products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be performed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality. (Rand 1966–67, 54)Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. . . . He organizes concepts into propositions—and the truth or falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them.” (Rand 1966–67, 48; see also Peikoff 1991, 137–39)
“Truth is the recognition of reality” (Rand 1957, 1017). So it is, and so we are.
References
Aertsen, J. A. 2010. Truth in the Middle Ages: Its Essence and Power in Christian Thought. In Pritzl 2010b.
Aristotle c. 348–322 B.C. The Complete Works of Aristotle. J. Barnes, editor. 1984. Princeton.
Gallop, D. 1984. Parmenides of Elea – Fragments. Torronto.
Gerson, L. P. 2004. The Unity of Intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima. Phronesis 49: 348–73.
Gotthelf, A. 2007. Ayn Rand on Concepts – Another Approach to Abstraction, Essences, and Kinds.*
Kelley, D. 1984. A Theory of Abstraction. Cognition and Brain Theory 7:329–57.
——. 1988. The Art of Reasoning. Norton.
Milbank, J. 2010. The Thomistic Telescope. In Pritzl 2010b.
Peikoff, L. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Dutton.
Pritzl, K. 2010a. Aristotle’s Door. In Pritzle 2010b.
——., editor, 2010b. Truth – Studies of a Robust Presence. Catholic University of America.
Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House.
——. 1961a. The Objectivist Ethics. In The Virtue of Selfishness. 1964. Signet.
——. 1961b. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. Signet.
——. 1965a. The Psycho-Epistemology of Art. In Rand 1975.
——. 1965b. Art and Moral Treason. In Rand 1975.
——. 1965c. Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics? In The Voice of Reason. L. Peikoff, editor. 1990. Meridian.
——. 1965d. What is Capitalism? In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. 1967. Signet.
——. 1966. Art and Sense of Life. In Rand 1975.
——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, editors. Meridian.
——. 1969–71. Transcript of Ayn Rand’s Epistemology Seminar. In Rand 1967–71.
——. 1975 [1971]. The Romantic Manifesto. 2nd ed. Signet.
Salmieri, G. 2008. Aristotle and the Problem of Concepts.*
- dream_weaver and Wotan
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Wayne,
Nicky’s point in #7 is important. It is the Christian Left in America that has always made for Left Socialism in America. It is because of Jesus, as they see him, that we got the Health Care Reform Act. Christian work for governmental social welfare programs was afoot in America when Karl Marx was only a gleam in his father’s eye.
Throughout my voting years (I’m 63), I almost always voted Democratic because I always voted Pro-Choice. The issue of individual freedom at stake in that controversy is the issue of involuntary servitude, the same issue as in military conscription. So I voted for Bill Clinton because he was Pro-Choice, hoping he would be thwarted on his plan for socialized medicine (and he was). Likewise for Barack Obama (whose attempt was nearly defeated in the Congress and may yet be defeated in the Supreme Court this summer).
My voting decisions have been for Pro-Choice candidates, and like all the Objectivist or quasi-Objectivist people I have personally known, my decisions have not been made in order to fall in line with the voting decisions of Objectivist leading lights, such as Ninth insinuates in #8.
Stephen
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Some considerations to add to the train of good responses for the good lead question of this thread:
All consciousness is organic. Perhaps we organics will introduce artificial non-living forms of consciousness, even conceptual consciousness, into the world eventually. I doubt it, but even if we did, it would remain that natural consciousness arose as a living activity useful for survival of certain animals, individually and as a species. Without the natural, organic, conceptual form of consciousness, no artificial forms, whether living or non-living, shall have come into existence.
As a lower bound on perceptual requirements of an animal possessing what Rand called percepts, I would say that three-dimensionality, shapes, relative sizes, and degrees of solidity given in percepts, would be required for its species-success within its feasible range of behaviors in its environment. It seems implausible that the further range of adaptability to environments that is brought about by extensive manipulation of environments—through conceptual thought and communication—would be possible if evolution to this highest level of animal life had to develop straight out of lower animals possessing no percepts, no consciousness of entities, only sensations. So I would say that three-dimensionality, shape, relative sizes, and degrees of solidity given in percepts also form a lower bound of what must be perceptually given for conceptual animals.
Turning from phylogeny to ontogeny should yield tighter, fuller specification of what must be perceptually given for the emergence of symbolic representation in general and linguistic, conceptual representation in particular.
Shape, Action, Symbolic Play, and Words
Linda Smith and Alfredo Pereira
Susan Carey
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Background:
Rand thought that higher animals, such horse or wolf, are guided by percepts. The actions of such animals “are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it” (OE 19).
We should note, however, that “an animal has no critical faculty. . . . To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality—or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels” (FNI 17).
“A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. . . . Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident” (ITOE 5).
“The first concepts man forms are concepts of entities—since entities are the only primary existents” (ITOE 15).
“The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow” (ITOE 6).
On Rand’s concept entity and its role in cognition, see ITOE 264–76 (seminar) and Peikoff’s OPAR, 12–14, 74–75. From Gotthelf’s On Ayn Rand: “In the concept’s primary sense an entity is a solid object with a perceivable shape, which acts or resists action as a whole. The beginnings of cognition, at the perceptual level, involve the grasp that the ‘somethings’ out there are distinguishable things, entities, and the concept is basic to all subsequent cognition” (40).
The Tree of Life
in Movies, Shows, and Theatre
Posted
This film affects people in very different ways. It is called The Tree of Life. I saw it the other evening rather accidentally. The great wind storm had come through our area last Friday night, knocking down trees, including one of our big oaks and some smaller trees, which knocked out power. Walter and I were able to find a hotel about 40 miles south of home, where we stayed until the power was restored four days later. All is well, as the big tree did not fall on our house, and we have plenty more trees. We were lucky to be able to be in an air-conditioned place during those days, to have a swimming pool, and to have chanced into this film on HBO at the hotel.
It is a modern and ancient integrated view of human existence exquisitely crafted. I heard in it some faint echoes of Plotinus and of Leibniz, and certainly it shines some biblical vistas and values. It is not agreeable in its messages, at least not altogether, with my philosophy or that of other people here. It is very agreeable in message, I would wager, with millions of viewers who regard themselves as spiritual (and likely liberal). I would urge anyone here to see this film for the experience of it—much of it wonderful for you I hope—and for seeing also to what in its very center, in human nature, Ayn Rand was and is offering a new vision. Imagine such talent and technology brought round to inspiring audiences by vision of man with step that travels unlimited roads, man as the glory of all the forces that led to his existence, his sacred existence, here where is human value, here home in the cosmos where is human life and death and love.
Formation