adavies42

The interesting thing about Japan, which has both good and bad implications for Objectivism's prospects there, is that they're not just "good at rapidly adopting good ideas from Western Civilization": they're good at rapidly adopting ideas, period. I took a class on Japanese civilization in college which focused on reading primary sources, and it's very strange to read about how Japan was converted to Buddhism: they did it because the Chinese were doing it. It almost seems like a question of philosophical fashion--instead of "what are they wearing in Paris this year", it was "what are they believing in China". The cultural history of Japan can be summed up as follows: a millenium of copying China, a century of copying England, a few decades of copying Germany, and a half-century (and counting) copying America. The upside is that if the Japanese get the idea that Objectivism is the latest and greatest thing from America, they'll be "converting" in droves. The downside is that that conversion may not be particularly deep or lasting.

He thinks that's a meaningless question, which is obviously the biggest problem with his arguments. He compares the issue to General Relativity's definitions of time and motion as fundamentally relative. He is of course most likely wrong on that point, but I still think he has some interesting ideas about relating free will to predictability.

It's certainly theoretically possible, but rather beyond us at the moment. At least according to this page, the "focal length" of Sun is about 550 AU, which is more then ten times the orbital radius of Pluto. So until we can put an observatory out in the Oort cloud, we're not going be able to do much with this effect.

This reminds me of what Bush said in the last debate (IIRC): "Kennedy is the *conservative* senator from Massachusetts!"

Eric S. Raymond has just posted a new article to his blog, Armed and Dangerous, entitled Predictability, Computability, and Free Will. In it he has several interesting ideas on the nature and causes of free will that seem to me, on cursory examination, as if they might have at least some potential. As I understand it, he wants to define free will relatively, and in terms of observation: if an observer cannot predict a mind's future mental state, that mind has free will relative to that observer. I would be interested to read what those with more experience in philosophy think of his argument. Caveat: ESR is a libertarian/anarchocapitalist, and I'm not implying any endorsement of his politics here.

Heh. That was also my first Rand book, BTW. I was in 10th grade, and I'd heard of Rand vaguely, but didn't know that much about her. I picked ITOE off a shelf at the local university's library because I needed a non-fiction book to do a paper on for school, and I've never looked back since.

That's why they call it bleeding edge research. Check out how long the first dozen organ transplant recipients lived.

I've never used a Zire, but I have nothing but good things to say about Palm in general. My first PDA was a IIIx, and I'm still using my trusty IIIc, now over three years old. The difference between Zires and Tungstens, AFAICT, is in functionality, so wheich you get will depend on what you need out of it. BTW, a word of warning--having a Palm destroys your memory! I can barely remember what day it is w/o it!

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with either point by any means. In fact, I've cited the second as one of my prime reasons for prefering conservatives to liberals, when forced to choose between the two. (I.e., every time I vote. )

OK, I can see that, but you're quoting the "classic" Ben Hur of 1959, aren't you? It's not exactly a 21st century movie. Today's films, by and large, err on the side of nihilistic subjectivism, not religious intrinsicism. Whether that's an improvement or not is debatable.

Um, say what? I'm not sure what your point is.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply; what you've said makes a lot of sense to me. I suppose I was hoping for some single cause that could explain everything, but that doesn't really seem realistic.

Question: Where do cultural tendencies come from? Context: I have been wondering lately about the factors that influence cultural development. Obviously, philosophy is paramount among them, but the dominant philosophy of a culture is not created _ex nihilo_. Why do some cultures develop a tendency to embrace rationality, while others become mired in superstition? Without, one hopes, appearing racist, it seems possible to say, for instance, that the ancient Greeks had more of a tendency toward reason than away from it, while other cultures of similar antiquity--China, India, Arabia--descended into morasses of collectivist irrationality from which they have yet to recover, millennia later. This phenomenon can be seen in the "Athens-Jerusalem" dichotomy that describes some of the contradictions of "Western civilization". Possible Answers: One possible answer would be a "great man" theory, similar to that seen in some analyses of history, which gives sole credit to the most prominent philosophers of a culture for shaping it. This seems intuitively wrong: it fails to explain why, for instance, Aristotle rose to prominence in Greece and Confucius in China, rather than vice versa. Unfortunately, it also exhausts my list of interesting possibilities. All I have left is the typical factors that anthropologists cite as influences on culture: environmental issues like geography, climate, natural resources, etc; and these seem woefully inadequate. Challenge: Does anyone have any ideas on the subject? Are there any writings on anthropology by Objectivists that I should be looking into?

The form of Charlotte's argument reminds me of a rhetorical fallacy commonly found in religous circles: prooftexting. Prooftexting is the technique of choosing very small passages, such as single verses of the bible, and using them to defend an argument without considering their context. It can frequently degenerate into a contest over who can quote the most verses in support his position. (Which I'm glad to say I haven't seen here--it's been entirely one-sided.) Much theological writing consists almost entirely of prooftexting--it is the essence of Rabbinic Judaism, for instance. I have seen prooftexting from an Objectivist before, on an email discussion list, but at least he had something of an excuse: he wasn't entirely right in the head. (He had OCD or bi-polar or something like that, I don't remember the details.) Whether Charlotte is "innocently" rationalistic in her obsession with this single verse or "shrewdly" making a reductio argument for anarcho-capitalism, I'm not sure, but I just thought the resemblence of her argument to those found in the circles of the proudly irrational is interesting.