Boydstun

In asking the "what would Ayn Rand..." question, I am presuming that she and you were both seeking the truth and each would change one's mind according to facts and logic when presented with them. So if she could grasp your reasoning as valid, she would revise her ideas, or if she could refute your reasoning, you would revise.
Those Objectivist philosophers:  If it weren't merely the result of coincidental independent work and they didn't credit you, it's a serious injustice that engenders unpleasant resentment.
Life is tenacious, especially human life. Before thermodynamics could eventually wipe out humanity, the unending power of reason will find a solution, including maybe discovering laws that supersede (but not contradict) thermodynamics.

Monart, let me respond to these last two secondary posts of yours together in this note.
On the Rand question, I don't have an answer either way, at least not thinking of it as what a definite deceased person would think. Our loved ones in life are continually surprising us and delighting us with some amount of unpredictability in their thought and expressions. Our experience of that part of them is part of our loss when they die. I'll allow as at least a slight possibility that Rand would agree with me as you posed. However, if she did, and if she wanted to say that her philosophy had not changed in any of its essentials by this change, that might take quite some tall argumentation.
On your second post, there has been some deliberate public not-mention of Boydstun perhaps, but I think that can be for all the reasons you mentioned at the same time. Also, for the reason of not advertising alternatives or extensions (notably, as mere extension, my 2004 "Universals and Measurement") that were not worked through and published with the imprimatur of their own organization. Three professional Objectivist philosophers have very possibly picked up original ideas of mine (published in the 1990's, also the 2004) and incorporated them in their written presentations without giving any credit: Gotthelf – my idea of independent causal chains in connection with physics and free will; Binswanger – introducing into his expositions the Moh's hardness scale for exemplification of ordinal measurement in the physical realm (re Rand's theory of concepts) and gravitropisms in some plant roots for best contrast of gravity pulling a stone into rolling down a hill (re teleology of vegetative life); and Rheins – mention that the law of identity does not strictly imply uniqueness of outcomes from same initial conditions in physics (which, he neglects to mention, Rand and Peikoff had always supposed it did). All of these presentations tried to pass off these tidbits and outlooks as part of Rand's thought, which they most certainly were not, and which in the ordinal measurement topic, she flatly contradicted.
But as you suggest, on to our own frontier. The flowering of online forums and of FB has allowed us to get our thought before more eyes and minds for these several years and perhaps will be here for future minds beyond our lifetimes. Minds communicating with minds is the core. All record of it is erased by thermodynamics eventually, just as all record that humans ever existed. What mattered was only while life was.
 

Monart, let me respond to these last two secondary posts of yours together in this note.
On the Rand question, I don't have an answer either way, at least not thinking of it as what a definite deceased person would think. Our loved ones in life are continually surprising us and delighting us with some amount of unpredictability in their thought and expressions. Our experience of that part of them is part of our loss when they die. I'll allow as at least a slight possibility that Rand would agree with me as you posed. However, if she did, and if she wanted to say that her philosophy had not changed in any of its essentials by this change, that might take quite some tall argumentation.
On your second post, there has been some deliberate public not-mention of Boydstun perhaps, but I think that can be for all the reasons you mentioned at the same time. Also, for the reason of not advertising alternatives or extensions (notably, as mere extension, my 2004 "Universals and Measurement") that were not worked through and published with the imprimatur of their own organization. Three professional Objectivist philosophers have very possibly picked up original ideas of mine (published in the 1990's, also the 2004) and incorporated them in their written presentations without giving any credit: Gotthelf – my idea of independent causal chains in connection with physics and free will; Binswanger – introducing into his expositions the Moh's hardness scale for exemplification of ordinal measurement in the physical realm (re Rand's theory of concepts) and gravitropisms in some plant roots for best contrast of gravity pulling a stone into rolling down a hill (re teleology of vegetative life); and Rheins – mention that the law of identity does not strictly imply uniqueness of outcomes from same initial conditions in physics (which, he neglects to mention, Rand and Peikoff had always supposed it did). All of these presentations tried to pass off these tidbits and outlooks as part of Rand's thought, which they most certainly were not, and which in the ordinal measurement topic, she flatly contradicted.
But as you suggest, on to our own frontier. The flowering of online forums and of FB has allowed us to get our thought before more eyes and minds for these several years and perhaps will be here for future minds beyond our lifetimes. Minds communicating with minds is the core. All record of it is erased by thermodynamics eventually, just as all record that humans ever existed. What mattered was only while life was.
 

"Advaita . . . it's pure metaphysics." But any philosophical metaphysics has epistemological, ethical, and political implications, even if not explicated. If Advaita is "much like poetry", and less like philosophical metaphysics, then, yes, Advaita could be interpreted to suit a given ethics.
Yes, "existence" as an axiomatic concept "collects", subsumes, contains, refers to all things that exist, at the same time that it underscores and reiterates the fundamental fact that if they exist, they exist. This repetition is a reminder and a cognitive guardian against the absurdity of denying that existence exists, i.e., that existence does not exist. One of Rand's innovation is her axiomatic conceptualization of reality as:  "Existence exists. Existence is identity. Consciousness is identification." Without explicit grasp of these axioms is why "they've been fighting for millennia over what exists".

When you say "it" are you referring to materialism? If so, yes, materialism today about living things would be the discreteness of cells. But that is not a conjecture or implication of any modern philosophical position; it is just the result of nineteeth century biology that all living matter is made of cells. It is a further speculation, such as I would make, that all consciousness and experience and memories are results in living matter engaged with the world and the organism's own internal regulations. That would be a modern materialism of consciousness and pals. That the matter is cellular is only from science.
In the portion of what I said that you quoted, I was thinking only of general ontology and Rand's point about it in that first paragraph at the top of page 39 in ITOE, with which I mainly agree. I don't see that as implying an ontologic discreteness, rather, an absence of any absolute disconnection of any existent from any other existents at all (except the existent that is the entirety of existence, of course). And I don't see that position in general ontology as implying any sort of materialism.
 

I don't think that Rand should go along with "We live" at the same level as "Existence exists." That is for two reasons. One is that she would be more comfortable offhand just putting first acknowledgement of life (at an elementary apprehension of it) with the acknowledgement of consciousness, which is in that second moment, the stepping back from the statement and assertion "Existence exists" and reporting her corollary axiom as she did. To consciousness in that second axiom, I doubt she should have any problem with a parenthetical ("there is no grasp of consciousness without attendant grasp that one is living") And similarly forward from statement of her axioms getting out the primacy of existence to consciousness, on to the following statement, Rand should be comfortable acceding that wherever consciousness puts in an appearance, so does life: "Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness— are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at it its end."
My difference with Rand on these starting points, as you know, is that leaves out some of what is among the firsts in the first ground from that first ray of light to the final lights out: being alive and with other.
The second reason Rand would not go along with "We Live" being yoked at the ground level with "Existence exists" nor go along with the more expansive second moment of mine replacing hers of 1957 is that it ends up kicking down the ladder to ethical egoism. This was not evident to me until a couple of days ago, when I wrote chapter X of the monograph; I had not known that a ladder alternate to the egoism one can be stood well suited to and intimate with my version of first philosophy I had completed and published in 2021 (and again shown, less technically, in the online FB monograph). But anyone will be able to see how that goes in the next post I make in this thread.
By the way, professional philosophers have noted before the amazing absence of other in Descartes ground floor he arrives at in Meditations. I notice, however, that God is left there with him in his final elements withstanding his (faux) radical skeptical doubt exercise for getting the first floor and what is in it (also, he ends up with enough elements to construct an Ontological proof of God's existence). And I, perhaps I alone, have noticed the amazing absence of aliveness of his ego at the ground floor. Of course he was set on having life understood as machines joined with spirits, and he had just gone through an exercise trying scoot machines off the table along with a lot of other physical-world stuff. From my perspective (this point being taken from Rand) the perfection Descartes would put into the concept God is a stolen concept once he has scooted life off the table on account of its machine component.
No, I never saw Rand give any lectures or Q&A's. I got to see her on television a couple of times on the Johnny Carson Show, and on a tape recording (in 1977), I got to hear her participating in the Q&A's of the Peikoff lecture series "The Philosophy of Objectivism." Of course there is plenty of video of her speaking online now. I did not hear any lectures of Nathaniel Branden during his time teamed with Rand. However, I did get to see him give a couple of lectures with Q&A around the turn into the present century. More importantly, in a way, was hearing him speak in the early 1970's to a group of maybe 25 people in a room at O'Hare airport between his flights. He was then a master of group control, or maybe something like hypnosis; you could have heard a pin drop. He was talking about psychology, which had figured prominently in Rand's writings too at least into the '70's. Too prominently. I was refreshed to see the decline of that with the rise of Peikoff and Gotthelf as Rand's important protege's.
I have not communicated with any philosophers associated with ARI on the philosophy I have developed; one is a Facebook 'friend' and can get any feedback he has for me to me easily; I don't expect any. As you see from "likes" and encouraging words on the FB post of it, there are other professional philosophers to whom what I have made brings at least a smile. I have one personal friend who is a professional philosopher (and some personal acquaintance with professors from whom I took courses last century and this). He first got a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, then a second Ph.D., which was the philosophy one. He is wrapping up a career of teaching philosophy in California this year, and he and wife will be moving to Michigan in retirement, last I heard. Anyway, he said something amusing once during our interval of me sending him early drafts of parts of my original philosophy and he sending feedback. He quipped something like "No-man-is-an-island individualism."

I always learn something from these conversations. It just so happens that I am used to addressing first generation Objectivists who were, on the whole, completely obsessed with Rand's philosophy. I'm aware that this attitude may have toned down with the new generation. But my primary experience with Objectivism is with the first generation, and they were quite shrill, I can assure you. And they still are, those that are still around anyway.
For example,
"But Kant said..." <BLOCKED>
If you are a first-generation Objectivist with a more open mind, then I salute you.

My monograph These Hours of Resonant Existence sets out the philosophy I have created, in ten brief chapters, in a way hopefully accessible to some of the generally educated public: no traditional technical terminology from philosophy, and, unlike my usual substantive papers, no citations or references, supporting or contrasting. I have not yet composed two of the chapters: VIII. Science and Mathematics and IX. Logic. These will be more technical due to their topics. I have excellent education for them, and, should I live a few years more (which I expect), I’ll get those done, although their lengths may be longer than the other chapters. 
I had minored in Philosophy in my first college degree, which was from University of Oklahoma (Physics major) in 1971. I continued to learn more philosophy across the decades, but it was not until January of 2014, that it occurred to me that I likely had a pretty full original philosophy in my head, and that I should try to get what was there on paper and work on it. I had not earlier set out to create a new philosophy. I had simply loved philosophy and never stopped learning it and mulling it over.
One Saturday in the 1980’s, I got home from work at my commercial job, and, no sooner had I come in the door, I announced to Jerry:* “I figured out what I’ve been doing all these years.” “What?” “I’ve been making a mind.” Now I know also I was making a philosophy.
In the history of Western philosophy (which I know a bit about), the two philosophies most worth comparing and contrasting with mine are Rand’s and Kant’s. In my next post in this thread, hopefully tomorrow, I’ll try to do a run-through of significant likenesses and conflicts between my philosophy of Resonant Existence, as shown in the monograph so far, and Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

I have now posted* at Facebook the first seven chapters and the tenth one (whose title has been changed to Mortal Life and Care).

Existence may be both Resonant and Radiant, thanks to Mother's Love. . .
. . . Which reminds of this:
 
At Sunrise (Against the Wall)

By Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni


 
They pushed him straight against the wall;

The firing squad dropped in a row;

And why he stood on tiptoes,

Those men shall never know.


 
He wore a smile across his face

As he stood primly there,

The guns straight aiming at his heart,

The sun upon his hair;


 
For he remembered, in a flash,

Those days beyond recall,

When his proud mother took his height

Against the bedroom wall.



 

Ooops! Resonant, not Radiant. Maybe praise from MP was close in my head.
Or maybe it was some sort of Freudian slip (when you say one thing, but mean your mother).

Ooops! Resonant, not Radiant. Maybe praise from MP was close in my head.
Or maybe it was some sort of Freudian slip (when you say one thing, but mean your mother).

I did consider briefly if your "existence exists, we live" is a "yoked pair", each equally at the same axiomatic base, but I took the sequence as indicating an abbreviated movement from the former to the latter, and sought to explicate the intermediate corollaries. I will think more on this.

G.K. Chesterton is mostly right.
'I stated  later that objectivism [sic] posits goals “that are not even desirable: commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one’s understanding and knowledge, and to never permitting oneself contradictions. If any individual were truly as devoted to these goals as the objectivists [sic] urge him to be, he would be compulsively rational­­ and therefore inhuman and irrational.' -Albert Ellis, Is Objectivism a Religion?

Where you say "Consciousness is conscious," I think you really need "Consciousness is conscious of existence". I know that the latter is included in what you mean in the shorter, but readers outside of Rand readers (might you be having their audience) would not.
But to your sequencing: When you state "Consciousness is alive" that looks to be a third-person sort of statement. That is fine, and we and biologists and neuroscientist take that standpoint usefully all the time. My view is that we have not only that outside look: consciousness is alive. We have also and firstly the inside experience of it. That elementary take on life is not, as I observed in the text, so extensive on what all is life, such as one can learn later (e.g. that life ends, requires maintenance, and in the human form, requires production). The elementary knowing of life in breathing and in elementary knowing of consciousness is what I place back earlier in the sequence. I lay it right with "Existence exists", but not in the form "Consciousness is alive." Rather: "Existence exists, we live". (Or, as we have discussed "I and other live.") That is what is most basic with us. I should mention also, as I wrote in the paper "Existence, We", this "we live" does not arise in that second-moment 'corollary axiom' movement. No. This "we live" is right there in the first phase containing "existence exists." The two are a yoked pair right there at the base.
So my way with this is would be in parallel with a recoiling from Descartes for whom the basic things (after God) are matter and mind, i.e., extension and thought. A recoiling to Augustine, where knowing one's aliveness is primitive and whose form of Descartes's later skeptical exercise is that even being under a deception, one knows that one lives. Though, in my basic knowing, the life of self known is companioned: another lives. 

Thank you, Monart, for that possibility that "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" could be restatements of Rand's corollary axiom from the axiom "Existence exists", her corollary axiom "that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Yes, "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" can be a restatement of her corollary axiom, but I'd say that in the restatement the status as corollary axiom is lost, and in this particular restatement, Rand is moving on to a further important and grand exposition of ontology and philosophy of mind. 
Rand's notion of such a thing as a "corollary axiom" was an innovation. The closest thing to it I've found is something we could notice when following Euclid in geometry. After reading his axioms, postulates, and definitions, one could step back and realize "I'm going to need means of drawing and a straightedge and a compass to make the labeled diagrams required to do these ensuing demonstrations." That is only an analogy with Rand's stepping back after the assertion "Existence exists."
In philosophy, there is a similarity with Descartes's movement of mind as susceptible to deception to existence of human mind. Aquinas had mentioned that move, but not in a context of Descartes-like description of or excuse for pretended super-duper state of doubt by a sane mind. Descartes's move is backwards in our order of knowing: One already has to know one exists to follow (pretend along with Descartes) the exercises of the MEDITATIONS. So that is not really much similarity in fundamental moves between Rand and Descartes. That Rand has axioms is like Spinoza, but the likeness does not amount to much. Spinoza does not have something like "corollary axiom". He is using axioms from which to deduce further propositions. That was not Rand's use of axioms and not her program. She was using 'Existence exists and is Identity' as a touchstone for right thought and right inquiry and as bar to metaphysics of being that had been crafted by the Arabs and Latins to have a niche in being for existence of God of the sort in which they had faith. Also a bar against radical epistemological skepticism. She was not using 'Existence exists and is identity', and 'consciousness is fundamentally consciousness of existence and is identification' as a basis for proving further propositions. I have not included in the present presentation the axiomatic aspect that my metaphysics can take on (which is detailed in my paper "Existence, We"). Like Rand, my program is at odds with Descartes and with Spinoza.
Although I don't go into the possibility in this monograph of axiomatic structure being lain on my metaphysics, my invocation of the character of  examples and counterexamples per se in arguing for the necessity of my categories resonates with Rand's efforts to prove that existence requires identity (efforts along the lines of Aristotle in defending the Principle of (Non)Contradiction).

Lots of material about the debate or, more broadly, about the issues between them:
albert ellis nathaniel branden debate - Search (bing.com)
albert ellis nathaniel branden debate - Google Search

These Hours of Radiant Existence*
This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy.
The ten short chapters in this monograph are:
I.     Existence
II.    Other
III.   Divisions of Existence
IV.   Entities
V.    Passage
VI.  Situation
VII.  Character
VIII. Science and Mathematics
IX.   Logic
X.    Mortal Life and Value
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

Monart,
By we in this context, I mean only the combination self and other.
On day of birth one is already immersed in other humans around one. Indeed, before birth, one was already immersed in the human thing that is one's mother's voice. I reject the view, often put forward by classical empiricists, that one performs an inference to know there are other humans, things like oneself, with inner life. Although, at the beginning we have no language, so no articulation of any of that in mind (and we have only begun to develop powers of memory.) I'd have to look up when we get the idea of we. (We begin to use the personal pronouns "I, me" at age two.) But as adults or near-adults, we can examine our elementary episodes of consciousness and know there is a pronominal other in all of them, an element that is accessible if we turn to that feature in our consciousness, and by adulthood, we know the "we" in those episodes. This presence of other forming the we in all human consciousness perhaps contributes to many peoples' sense that God is with them. If so, that is just a mistake; the presence with themselves is other humans, taken in an open unspecified pronoun-type way. My viewpoint on this, I later learned, had been put forward by some existentialists last century. However, they were engaged in an archeology of subjectivity, whereas in my system, existence standing independently of apprehension and comprehension is the objective prize we are joined with by other.
I'd like to mention also, concerning the Objectivist metaphysics, that it was not "Existence is Identity" that Rand posed as a corollary of "Existence exists." It was something else, something one could infer if one were making the statement "Existence exists." The thesis "Existence is Identity" can be argued to be something fundamental about Existence, and it can be shown that under Rand's various categories, looking to deny "Existence is Identity" lands in contradiction, and is therefore false. The thesis "Consciousness is identification" is also not a corollary, but a definition of what is the most fundamental sort of consciousness, with any others, such as in dreams or perceptual illusions, being derivative with respect to the fundamental consciousness. Philosophers of mind today have called success consciousness that type of consciousness Rand took for fundamental.

Rand’s “corollary axiom” with “Existence exists,” you recall, runs this way: “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). The counterpart in my system: ‘Existence exists, we live’. The act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Rand erred in omitting express, elementary knowing of aliveness of self and others in elementary knowing of consciousness.
Rand did not omit altogether elementary knowing of aliveness in elementary knowing of consciousness in her mature philosophy, although that elementary nexus is not highlighted. Some sort of impossibility of mind without life is affirmed later in the speech when Rand writes of the alternative “your mind or your life” that “neither is possible to man without the other” (1957, 1022). Then too, when something she wrote in Galt’s speech “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible” (1013) is joined with something else in the speech “A rational process is a moral process” (1017), it could be inferred that, at least in higher, rational consciousness, its aliveness is implicit in its episodes and this fact is reflectively accessible within such consciousness. Also, in oral exchange years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: “It’s a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That’s what the concept means” (ITOE App. 252).

These Hours of Radiant Existence*
This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy.
The ten short chapters in this monograph are:
I.     Existence
II.    Other
III.   Divisions of Existence
IV.   Entities
V.    Passage
VI.  Situation
VII.  Character
VIII. Science and Mathematics
IX.   Logic
X.    Mortal Life and Value
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

This is brilliant, innovative, and inspiring. It stimulates wonder and reads like metaphysical poetry. I'm fully engaged and in resonance with it as I marvel at it.

These Hours of Resonant Existence

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

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

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