y_feldblum

"Causally unrelated" takes a "to". An ordered list of numbers may be causally unrelated to a whim, whether or no it is causally related to reality and hence displays specific pattern when observed in relation to such. Hence, since one person's definition of "x" is "y", and since every "y" requires a "z", that specific definition of "x" too requires a "z" - and Matt's definition of "random" takes a "to". However, I would never use "random" as a relation, because it already has an objective non-relative definition and belongs in the realm of a thing's identity.

Perhaps potentiality is a combination of identity and causality - things are what they are and behave according to their nature - A is A & A acts like A - a combination of the present principle and the future one. The potentiality of an acorn to become an oak tree is, it is an acorn and it is an acorn's nature to become an oak tree. The potential of a human child is not to become a toaster or a cow because such is the child's nature to become an adult human.

Except, the right to life is the philosophic underpinning of the right to property ... ?

Ash, you've got to be the one doing the shouting to see how your own understanding's changed. Mine tripled in the course of the brick wall thing. Brick wall or devil's advocate, practice is practice. Also, one could perhaps characterize this thing as a dual right then, ie each corollary implies the other and depends on the other to lend it meaning, and is meaningless without the existence and presence of the other.

I think there it is unreasonable to reject the notion that an animal can recognize similar things across contexts - eg, dogs know what dogs are and what balls are, as in your example. Animals clearly have no faculty for reason - that is the faculty which makes us human. But an abstraction of percepts into an archetype - the highest orders of animals certainly have precursor minds, ie things from which human minds capable of reason most recently evolved from. Otherwise, what other plausible explanations are there? And can you point me to some, free, on the Internet?

Ash, I've always conceived of property right and life right as being virtually the same, for two reasons. 1. I consider one's property to be an extension of one's self, one's life. 2. I consider one's life to be one's primary posession. Show (not tell) how I am wrong, if that is the case. And, it is not necessarily pointless at all to engage in debate with irrational people: the point depends on the objective (in this case I mean goal, hoped-for end-result). To convince them of the rational, perhaps the chance of success is infinitesimal. But to sharpen one's own mind, the chance of success is 100%. Of course, I say that because it applies very well to me, as I'm somewhat (or very) new to philosophy.

"Tiger" is a concept. Deer recognize it.

y_feldblum, you said that a Capitalist business is ‘regulated’ Which was obviously a mistake on my part. A capitalist business is one unaffected by economic regulations - anything other than protection from force and ban on force.

You said that a claim was "ability to arbitrary use and disposal". And of course since claim only comes in two flavors, exclusive and none at all, then we might as well call claim the "exclusive ability to use and disposal". That's ownership. It's like trying to convince me that ghosts exist by assuming that spectres exist and going from there. It's the same damn thing. I don't know what you want me to say. You are wrong, and your conception of what I said is completely backwards. Please, reread every time I said, "I think I'll explain exactly what this concept I made up called exclusive claim is without once referring to the concept ownership ... and then because ownership is such a nice small-mouthful word and exclusive claim is such an unwieldy two-word construction, I think I'll say write in my dictionary: ownership - n. exclusive claim!" It's like me telling you all about specters, defining exactly what they are and proving that they exist, and then saying ghost is another word for specter! Let's say that I build an abacus and write some instructions and then just leave it tethered to the ground someplace. You'd say that no one has a claim on it, and thus that the abacus is useless. Understandably wrong. If I leave a thing I have exclusive claim to in the ground somewhere - Ie, first come first take - it always has exclusive claim and is always owned. However, if the police do not care whether people steal your tv sets and nobody is allowed to carry handguns to protect their houses, then suddenly tv sets are entirely worthless.

'There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden,' Francisco said, 'except one: the refusal to think.' Thought is always moral (or at least not immoral). Non-thought is immoral. What a person thinks about is to some extent an indicator of his values, as CF said. However, they reflect the morality of his values but have no intrinsic morality. (Thought versus non-thought is a moral choice, an action, a value, which is why this distinction is one of morality.) A person thinking all day about child molestation we would generally describe as sick. Why? Because, apparently, it's on the 'good' side of his value system - not because he's thinking about things. If one enjoys thinking of such things, generally he is already immoral because of his value system. The thought itself is not subject to moral judgment, but the value system influencing it is. One cannot take a moral measurement of an indicator, but only of a thing which here is being indicated.

The relevance is that if ownership is claim and claim is ownership, then no, sir, you cannot use the concept of claim to validate the concept of ownership. I probably shouldn't say this, but exhasperated sigh. Here we go again: I defined ownership as exclusive claim, and I defined claim in terms of other things. Therefore, the definition for ownership which I provided is perfectly solid assuming the definition for claim I provided is solid as well. If you still don't agree with that, please tell me why. You asked what would happen if someone took the product of my mind and reason away, and suggested that such a thing would negate the value of my mind and reason. << It seems to me that the utility of a product I create wouldn't change if I didn't have a claim on it. >> Fair enough. However, it would change if nobody or everybody had a claim on it. What I meant by "others" there was people in general. This means that even if our mind and reason could be shown to be producing only valueless things in a propertyless environment But it physically cannot be shown to be producing. GC, good post. Only, I take issue with what you think about exclusivity: one can have exclusive rights to 25% of a company, or exclusive rights to the minerals or water in a certain area.

TR's definition of property is not inconsistent with mine. I'm not sure if the definition depends upon a derivative makes sense: definition of A depends on definition of B; definition of B depends on definition of A. Definition of A then ultimately depends on itself; same with definition of B. So, please clean that up.

<< Mind/reason only operate when a concept called private property is present >> Wrong. Dead, flat-out wrong. I've told you several times why it's wrong I don't believe you have. Who has exclusive claim on an organization? Those who own it, however that is defined in law. And more importantly, why do you keep ducking the god(s) question? I didn't mean to; the answer is a mystic derives some benefit from his own imagination, from social interaction, and from fun activities. This is the first time you've used this term. What do you mean by "the value of information"? Equally sorry. It's just that I'm in debate with another person on the exact same topic that you mentioned and and I've used that term many times there (every time ignored, which explains the uncharming demeanor), but who is who sort of slipped my mind. You're not telling me whether you'd feel ripped off if an expensive DVD player broke right after the warranty lapsed. No, because I know what the warranty means and what I'm paying for. Obviously, if it broke too soon and customer service sucked, I would switch to another company. Things generally last well past their "lifetime", because companies try to be "nice" and keep you as a customer, but they don't "have to". And you said before that non-exclusive claim is the same as no-claim, correct? Yes. There is no effective difference, other than the words used in the dictionary (me) definition. That if a claim isn't exclusive, it might as well not be there at all? Bingo. If that's the case, in what important way is exclusive claim not the exact same thing as ownership? Relevancy? And, in no important way or in any way whatsoever. Well, no, then. A social fiction is a subset of "that which is not reality". You're right - I didn't care too much to give a careful definition for mysticism. In fact, right now I can't come up with a nice concise formal definition for mysticism, but maybe later.

I don't know if RC "hates" you, but I sure am enjoying moderating my first post. You should feel lucky that I got to it first, because RC has warned you that the next time you attempt to mix physics and philosophy may be your last post here. --GreedyCap

What exclusive claim have I got on an organization that I value? You have got none. What exclusive claim have you got on a car which you haven't bought yet which you value? That is why I introduced the concept of trading here. However, by the fact that exclusive claim at all exists on an organization, it is possible to value it or derive benefit from it. You will notice that I repeated myself because you asked the same question twice, and you will further notice that I am starting to sound scarily like RC, only without his mod powers. Tell me whether the fact that I will pay more for an advertised product than I will for an unadvertised product of similar quality means that the advertised product is of greater value than its otherwise equivalent counterpart. I will answer by saying a) no and you again evaded the value of information. Contracts? I told you that there was a one-year warranty, and that a year had passed. Answer the question. Will you feel ripped off? Does a one-year warranty tell you that things are expected to start going wrong sometimes after one year because no product is perfect? Yes. It doesn't tell you that the product is supposed to remain perfect forever; it tells you that the manufacturer expects things to stay perfect for up to a year, and after that it can't guarantee anything becase the laws of nature decided to start being what they are. Actually, I was going to tell you that I dated my wife longer than you dated yours, and tell you that we've been married longer. Then I was going to offer to trade. I mean, obviously my wife is of greater value than yours is, because I invested more time in pursuing her. Assuming both our wives were willing, would you jump at the deal? Now, read up on what a "sunk cost" is (in short, something you've already paid that you cannot get back but which does not count in value). But, the marginal value of one more unit of your wife is huge to you but comparatively tiny to me; therefore, we will not be able to agree on a price at which to trade. But, to understand this concept fully, which you will not because I haven't explained it near enough as of yet, you will have to research marginal value on your own. A claim is ability to arbitrary use and disposal. Excellent. I will go back and read some of your older stuff with this in mind. Just for my personal edification: ownership is simply exclusive claim, correct? About my personal definitions? On both counts. What's the Oist definition of mysticism? That which is not reality.

That's really more than fair -- and it shows that the concept of property and the respect thereof are wonderful social conventions No; it shows that property is a moral principle, one which a rational individual would practice irrespective of the currently popular social fiction that other people practice. "I find theft disgusting" - on principle, not in practice. Apparently, the "also ..." mutual respect clause is what you thought he meant as the main point. What I want is to see someone show me that property and ownership are something other than invented ideas that keep the wheels greased. Okay, again, without reference to social fictions. You have mind/reason, and that feature of you distinguishes you from species with only conceptual consciousness and is also mankind's mode of survival and existence. Mind/reason only operate when a concept called private property is present; therefore mankind only exists as mankind when it observes the principle of private property. On the other hand, it is perfectly well entitled to exist without such a concept - but then it would exist ony with conceptual consciousness just like all the other animals, without mind/reason functioning at all. Private property is, then, a necessary condition of the existence of man qua man, ie, the only method of sustaining the mind. Since it actually sustains the mind, it is not a social fiction and is rather an actual thing.

You said that, "value exists because people value; people only value because they have exclusive claim (ie, exclusive ability to arbitrary use and disposal). Value is wholly dependent on the existence of exclusive claim." In answering my question (I noticed that you avoided the deity thing), you admitted that people can value an organization because of a derived benefit rather than from exclusive claim. Unless you want to clarify or restate, I'll count that as a retraction of your previous statement and we can move on. I will indeed clarify and restate: in people valuing an organization, there is exclusive claim, and people derive benefit from the existence of exclusive claim through trade. You said, "Let us define the worth of an item as the marginal value of that item, or the amount of money you would pay to have one more unit of it." I find it fairly obvious that the amount of money I would pay for something is wholly contingent on my appraisal -- my perception. In fact, if worth were not a measure of percieved falue, then we would have to concede some very silly things. For instance: consider advertising. Ad campaigns are designed to increase the visibility of a product, and thereby increase demand. If a company didn't advertise, they'd have to drop their prices to create that same demand. And since a product's worth is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, we can conclude that a McDonald's sandwich would be worth substantially less than it is today if that guy with the 'fro weren't "lovin' it". Consider shoddy workmanship. Say you bought an expensive DVD player that broke the day after the one-year warranty expired. Would you feel a little ripped off? Heresy! Socialist brainwashing! The crappy DVD player was quite obviously worth every penny, because that's how much you paid for it. That's why I have not used "worth" in any of my logic - only, when you brought the term up, attempted to give it an actual economic form of a definition which I don't think you liked very much. So, we are going to forget the term "worth" and focus on objective value. Ad campaigns are designed to increase the visibility of a product, and thereby increase demand. If a company didn't advertise, they'd have to drop their prices to create that same demand. This is why I advised you to learn the fundamentals of economics, because that statement was patently untrue, though at this point there is no way you would know it. Precisely because of that, I mention what things there are for you to look up on the internet: supply and demand curves. "A shift in demand curve is different from a shift in quantity demanded." Consider shoddy workmanship. That's why there are contracts over which you can take action if one party breaks his word to, say, a guaranteed piece of equipment. There are no non-economic forms of value? Interesting. If someone acts to gain and keep a thing, then it has value. If something has value, that value can be measured by the trading price. Tell me: are you married? No, I am not married, and I understood the implicit question. Ask any economist (by this I mean any one I've read) this question, and he will tell you that yes, marriage has a trading price which can even be tested to prove its reality. I think I missed this. Where did you define claims? All over the place. For example, here. A claim is ability to arbitrary use and disposal. A valid concept is one which refers to something in the world. By contrast, a social fiction is an invented concept which is invalid but believed to be valid. Your definition of social fiction is ... the Objectivist definition of mysticism?

Good, that AR has influenced you to think different. What I am warning you of is a serious reservation to her philosophy you still have, a contradiction that means you have to check your premises. This bulletin board is a place for anyone who is interested in Objectivism, wants to debate, and has a strong stomache. This place is not an outreach forum - that is a different thing with very little debate and a lot of "official" literature. You certainly have a place here; nobody (to my knowledge) has decided to kick you out. This place is for anyone who wants an interactive education like they had a century ago, when nobody was afraid to contradict and correct an error. I said, Microsoft was the perfect example of what Capitalism is. I meant, nothing Microsoft does is in contradiction with the philosophy. Take it or leave it, but the Objectivist loves Micro$oft and is especially pleased when people spell it with a dollar sign. Lastly, I have no idea what you meant by a question of balance.

Dolphins apparently have unique healing and sonar abilities etc. Humans started without such things and invented them. Contrariwise, humans start with a mind which produces things like healing and sonar to the nth degree and cars and computers, and dolphins are still stuck with whatever healing and sonar they started with, whatever transportation they started with, and haven't the power to calculate pi to four decimal points if all of them gathered around in a big circle for a year on end. That thing that dolphins lack is reason. It is a thing unique to mankind. Concepts - many species have that, including humans. But no species other than Wise man has mind/reason, an order of consciousness above concepts.

1) People value their children and their relationships and the organizations they belong to Because these entities have exclusive claim to themselves, and individuals derive benefit from mutually voluntary interaction. 2) worth is a measure of percieved value Mass brainwashing. there are forms of value beyond economic value There is no such thing; value is always the trading price (though not always traded in currency). (Objectivist definition of moral value is not the same.) And in an Anthem society, there is no word I. A value (a thing which has value) is that which one acts to gain and keep, and depends entirely on a person's acting. Nonexclusive claim = no claim, by the definitions of it I've provided in my preceding posts, means an individual cannot act to gain and keep. 4) I did not define claims in terms of ownership. I defined claims and then equated ownership with a specific type. so that we don't drift further off topic. Recall that the point of the thread is to show me that ownership is something other than a human invention. Have you noticed?! It's not me taking things off topic. I've spent quite a number of posts showing what ownership is. Telling me about all the wonderful things that would be true if ownership existed is a start, but it's really not going to get you anywhere. No kidding, that's why I'm not doing it. Show me that a universe in which ownership didn't exist as anything other than a social fiction would necessarily be unlike ours in some obvious way. What do you mean exactly by social fiction? In a universe where the concept ownership was arbitrarily applied by some government, it can always be retracted. I equated ownership with exclusive claim, and exclusive claim (exclusive ability to arbitrary use and disposal) that is retractable, ie negatable, is not exclusive claim. Since exclusive claim doesn't exist, nothing is of value, and mind/reason is negated. Men are metaphysically and act physically no different from animals of the lowest orders. A universe without ownership would be a commune: and history has proved that such a thing cannot exist, especially in its purest form, so long as men have mind and reason.

I think I understood your posts pretty well, thank you: you don't like evil greedy capitalists who use means other than a resume and a factsheet in trading with others but you have no idea why. Yes, you do in fact need to pass an exam to speak your mind. No, we're not going to force you, but Objectivists are not the kind of fourth-grade teachers who let any opinion "out there" because otherwise the kids' self-esteem will drop. We are/were talking about economics. I was trying to at any rate, and you had no idea what I was saying. I asked if you knew what three terms meant (supply, demand, marginal) and you responded with something (profit margins) that was a. nonsense and b. irrelevant. I cannot be a textbook, and there is a lot to say on the subjects; but I also cannot use them in answering your questions if you aren't comfortable with them. Here, you cannot speak your mind unless you are comfortable with the basics, because nobody is here to build up your self-esteem, but to try it. My goal in replying is to persuade you why your conception of Capitalism is all wrong, and why it could lead you into collectivism very easily. (It being a value to me that there are more Capitalists and fewer collectivists, and it being a value to me that I refine my knowledge through debate.) Perhaps it would indeed have been better for your self-esteem had I used a different approach, perhaps more patient and understanding. But I didn't. That doesn't give you the excuse to call my knowledge of a subject you know nothing about inadequate. You had expected to converse with somebody who thinks on the same lines as you do; as I hope I have made clear, very few here think as you do. Check out ARI's (Ayn Rand Institute) defend Microsoft crusade to find out why. From my knowledge, I am under the impression that your lines of thinking are antithetical to Capitalism economically, and to Objectivism morally, and for the two reasons above I want to persuade you of such. Whether or not I consider you a "naive amateur" has had no effect on whether I attempted to fill you in. Only, I gave you a viewpoint completely opposite yours. Either way, I did fill you in, and in case you haven't understood from my posts, Microsoft is an example of the moral and Capitalistic way to do business. And yes, everybody thinks that being a Capitalist businessman is making profits by having the ability to persuade people to buy one's products. Whether they are in your opinion low- or high-quality, or whether the public is in your opinion ignorant or educated, is of no concern; the only caveat is, no initiation of force, no murder, theft, etc., by any party.

What something is worth to me has absolutely no bearing on what something is worth. Worth comes from utility. We need a definition for worth, because I have never seen an economic (or philosophic) one yet. Let us define the worth of an item as the marginal value of that item, or the amount of money you would pay to have one more unit of it. Then yes, worth comes from utility. Now let us discuss the definition of economic value: it is whatever the prospective buyer and seller agree upon. It is the intersection of the supply and demand curves. It is the point at which marginal cost equals marginal value, or where the minimum amount you would have to pay equals the maximum amount you would be willing to pay. As you can see, value comes partly from "worth", and partly not. If someone started burning twenty dollar bills on the street, you wouldn't just shrug it off. Despite the fact that it's not your money, you'd still feel like something of value was being destroyed. No, I would not shrug it off, because the person is causing a miniscule amount of deflation on a government-regulated currency. Other than that, I would shrug it off, because a person is entitled to do whatever he wills with his property by definition. I am assuming, for the moment, that the bills don't belong to no-one. When Toyota builds a car, it's worth $18,000. Someone drives it around for three years and sells it to me for $12,000. I drive it around for a while and sell it for $5000. Was the car worthless before I bought it? After? Absolutely not, despite the fact that I'm not getting any use out of it. There is exclusive claim on the car; it is not worthless. The owner can sell it for whatever the market price (objective value) is. Value does not depend on who is taking utility, but on the fact that utility can be taken at all. Similarly, if we assume that taxes are 100%, the product of my labor is worth whatever it's worth to the government (which depends on the use they put it to), not zero. I certainly wouldn't say that what I'd made was suddenly worthless. You create something and somebody else steals it: the object still has value because it still has exclusive claim. You create something and everybody and nobody steals it: the object has no value because it has non-exclusive claim and non claim. You're talking a lot about claiming, though, and that seems fishy to me. As I said to someone else above, it's incredibly easy (and incredibly worthless) to prove the existence of ownership when you assume that ownership exists; that seems to be what you're doing when you talk about claims. Value exists because people value; people only value because they have exclusive claim (ie, exclusive ability to arbitrary use and disposal). Value is wholly dependent on the existence of exclusive claim. If product has no value because there is no exclusive claim to it, then neither does what product is equal to, the sum of mind and reason. If exclusive claim does not exist, mind/reason has no value, and therefore is of no value. Mind/reason of no value is no different in functionality than no mind/reason to begin with. No mind/reason is how animals are different from people metaphysically speaking. People being on a higher order than animals requires objectively defined exclusive claim, ie the "right to property". I am not starting with the concept ownership and then proving it exists. First, I define what the concept ownership; and then I show why it is necessary in our conception of nature. On the other hand, you could have a different conception of nature in which ownership is unnecessary - in which case you would have to renounce mind/reason and reject the distinction between Homo sapiens (wise man) and the oak trees.

As far as I can tell, they're only logically connected if you use AR's crappy definition of property. I'll accept mind + reason = product if you like, but not mind + reason = property. Like I said before, you need to either address my objection to her definition (and the Catholicism counterexample) or take another tack. I did say above explicitly Man qua does not exist without such a thing as "property rights". In a person's mode of survival as man, mind is the beginning, reason is the middle, and property is the end; mind the input, reason the process, property the result. Note that as of here, property is simply the end result. Ie, when I use the pseudomath to express the relationship, and when I use the word property there, exclusive claim does not necessarily apply just because. It applies because nonexclusive claim is a contradiction, but that is another story. Either way, we can express the relationship as mind + reason = product = precursor property. All three - mind, reason, and property - are either exclusive claim or no-claim (rightful claimer makes no claim; sanction of the victim). That has no effect on the logic of the pseudomath relationship, but both arguments stand by themselves and together define exclusive-use property. More than that, it seems foolish to say that no property means no mind and reason. What is the value of your mind or your labor? What is the value of your mind or your labor when its product is taxed at 100% ? When one person has a claim to something, he is able to use the thing with no interference; when a thing has no-claim = non-exclusive claim, he is able to use it until somebody else comes along and takes it = he is unable to use it, as is everybody else. Non-exclusive claim, which is another way of saying no-claim, means that value disappears ... and reason and mind are negated.

You know, you can ask the mods to change the title of this thread to Micro$oft is Evil. Bill Gates of Microsoft made it big by being an excellent businessman. Perhaps the product wasn't superb (we'll leave that to individual analysis here, because I happen not to mind his products terribly much; I use IE and XP and .NET by choice) and perhaps none of his ideas were original. However, the business systems that Bill Gates built were phenomenal, every aspect about his business operations lent themselves to marketing his products efficiently, en mass, at little cost and high profits for all concerned including the buyers - and that is as big a deal as the finished good. That concept is not going away, and when you ignore it I call it evasion. You deplore something based on your emotions; that explains why everything is fuzzy and ill-defined for you. Let your mind and your reason see the light now. Research the basics of economics from any conservative/libertarian sites you come across and seek out Thomas Sowell's writings, because you cannot continue to debate things you formally know nothing about, and it's even worse when you have (mysticist) feelings involved.

While you're at it, make smokers clean up too.