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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.

As I said, I think the refutation of Kant is just a sideshow. Speaking for myself, I feel like I did my further-looking before discovering Objectivism. Kant, I suppose, had his chance. Objectivism isn't rooted in Rand, it's rooted in reality, or at least it's supposed to be. I suppose it is possible to claim that Objectivism is wrong about reality. Some Objectivists are wrong about reality from time to time. This occasional wrongness is actually normal, coming as it does out of human fallibility. I think the correct answers will come out in time. But that is not the same thing as claiming that reality is inaccessible (or that certain parts of it are inaccessible).

Omg. Not even remotely true. Where are you getting this from and why are you also participating in smearing myself? What exact facts do you need as proof? I can list literally tens of thousands of facts about everything including crimes that have occurred against myself over the last two years since this started. This exact and extremely strange (and in many cases staged, whether from you two or not) reaction is exactly what has allowed this to occur and is ongoing. I have zero mental issues in any manner, am aware a perfectly consistent Objectivist of several decades, a man with an IQ of 180, and an INTP that is naturally able to make correct abstract connections between concretes. Why all these strange implications and smearing against myself? Do you really want me to type out tens of thousands of incidents, harassment, and crimes that have occurred in a public space before you actually believe the truth? I will do that if necessary as I'm trying to do everything left within my power after two years of non-stop destruction from this group in order to save my life, protect fellow Americans from this group and have it brought to justice before whatever their evil end is occurs.

All I have is my own history, which is only one data point. I was raised with Christianity, but ended up rejecting it. I went through seven or eight (philosophically) tumultuous years before discovering Objectivism, and I discovered Objectivism by accident. I never went through a phase where I thought the two were compatible. The lack of such a phase could have been in part because the flavor of Christianity I grew up with was fundamentalist; it guarded itself jealously against other flavors of Christianity; it rejected the other flavors as "people making up watered-down versions of Christianity in order to allow themselves to commit their favorite sins." So I could not entertain the idea of compromise. I had to be "in" or "out." I could not unsee the problems I saw, so I was out. I did try to hang on to the idea that God might exist, even if not the Christian conception of God -- until Objectivism showed me otherwise.

So it is about science. But is it ever really just about the science? What kind of discovery was it? In what industry? How lucrative is it? Would BiG Money make a lot of money from the science? I assume, if you had not really solved it they would not have been interested in you at all. Their noticing you means they would have had to have seen that you did (past tense) actually solve it, not just claimed to have solved it. I assume then that the science was published, otherwise how would they know that you had solved it, so the "solution" is now (and has been since they discovered your solving it), out there. That said, after discovering that you have let the genie out of the bottle why do they care about you anymore, shouldn't they be chasing the genie? Or implementing it for their own gain or power? If you have more information they don't want published, why do they let you post here? Perhaps they secretly just want your information. Why not just upload and post all your work for everyone to see, access, apply, it does not seem that anyone is stopping you from doing that. If it is important people will discover it and find it useful. I suspect, if you really want it, once you have posted whatever they want, they will leave you alone, they cannot risk being discovered, and will go back into the shadows.

Can philosophy make you happy (or at the very least, not a buzzkill)? Leonard Peikoff says: If you hold the wrong ideas on any fundamental philosophic issue, that will undercut or destroy the benevolent universe premise . . . . For example, any departure in metaphysics from the view that this world in which we live is reality, the full, final, absolute reality—any such departure will necessarily undercut a man’s confidence in his ability to deal with the world, and thus will inject the malevolent-universe element. The same applies in epistemology: if you conclude in any form that reason is not valid, then man has no tool of achieving values; so defeat and tragedy are unavoidable. (Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture) In this thread, I expressed some skepticism about this: On this topic, a comparison between Schopenhauer and Mainländer could be interesting, for two reasons: Schopenhauer was an idealist, but Mainländer was a metaphysical realist (although he uses "idealism" to designate philosophizing within the limits of human experience). Schopenhauer died of natural causes. Mainländer committed suicide. It's worth mentioning that Mainländer's older brother and older sister have also committed suicide. As for Schopenhauer, he believed that his father committed suicide (although there was no conclusive evidence for this). Instead of psychologizing, let us restrict ourselves to epistemology, because one's (implicit or explicit) epistemology is the methodology through which a philosopher's abstract conclusions in Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics and Aesthetics are reached. What follows is a summary of Mainländer's epistemology; how close or far is Mainländer, epistemologically, from what Leonard Peikoff considers to be a locus for the Malevolent Universe Premise? ___ Philosophy of Redemption, Analytics (Wherever possible, I have modernized the language and examples). 1. Before venturing into solving the big mystery of the World, we must first investigate our mind. Specifically, we want to know whether: a) the world in question is produced by the mind b). the world is mind-independent and perceived as-is c). the world is mind-independent, but its appearance depends on the perceiver's cognitive faculty (e.g. the difference between normal and color-blind people) 2. All knowledge is rooted in: a). the senses b). introspection 3. The senses can be divided into: a) the sensory organ itself (e.g. the skin on your toe) b). the conductive apparatus (transmits information from the toe to the brain) 4. The brain converts stimuli into two types of presentations: 1. Percepts (full objects) - the domain of sight, and partly of touch 2. Sensations (which only last for the duration of the stimulus) - the domain of sound, smell, taste, also partly of touch. 5. Just as the stomach's function is to digest the nourishment it receives, the mind's function is to determine what caused the stimulation of the sense-organ(s). Causality is presupposed by this mechanism. We can expand causality into general causality, i.e. apply it to all objects. 6. The mind represents each actant's sphere of efficacy on the sense-organs via extension in three dimensions. That is: precisely where the actant ceases to have an effect on the sense organs, the perceived object's spatial extension is capped (e.g. a quartz granule extends very little, is small for us; a palace extends generously, is large for us). 7. The so-called secondary qualities (sound, color, taste, texture etc.) are collectively called matter, and their function is to make the qualities of mind-independent objects perceptible to us. 8. The production of percepts requires all of the aforementioned forms together, which, to recapitulate, are: a function for identifying the cause of a stimuli (causality), a function of delimiting the stimulus's sphere of efficacy (point-space), and a function of representing the qualities of stimuli (matter). 9. We never see the whole world, just parts of it. For example, when I see a tree, I must move my eyes up and down to see the whole object. So, how come I understand that each disjointed, partial snapshot is in fact a fragment of one single object, the Tree? Through reason. 10. Reason moves gradually, from point to point (its standpoint is the present moment, because it can't process everything instantly), and works with the help of three other innate faculties: Memory -> keeps track of succeeding partial snapshots Judgement -> decides what belongs together Imagination -> is how we keep the completed tree in mind, even if we're looking peace-meal at it. However, the function of the mind in general is to give us a sense of self, i.e. to see those discrete faculties (memory, judgement etc.) as mere aspects of one single self. 11. An adult knows that the moon is very far away, but an infant might think that the moon is within arm's reach. The reason why adults think that they receive ready-made impressions (i.e. devoid of post-processing) is because they forget their infancy [and because processing happens very fast]. 12. The faculty of Judgement compares percepts. What is similar is classified under concepts. No matter how abstract a concept is, it's still reducible to its "maternal soil" (sense-perception). Concepts are the material from which judgements and premises are drawn according to the well-known laws of logic. 13. Time is a measurement of motion. 14. The mind's integration of sensations is a type of motion, hence it too can be measured via time. 15. Although our brains cannot produce material and spatial representation of gasses, scents or sounds, we nevertheless assign the conjunction of substance to them. 16. An analysis of the sense of taste. 17. During states like dreaming, the mind is capable of constructing representations from memorized material. 18. There are three types of causes: a) Mechanical (pressure and impulse). Inorganic beings are restricted to this. b) Stimuli. Starts to apply within the plant kingdom. c) Motivation. Applies to animals only (e.g. the desire to experience pleasure or to avoid pain) c. 1) Final, imaginary causes (i.e. setting goals and resolutions). Exclusive to humans. In addition, we can mention occasional causes. For example, the sun might be the direct cause of my hand getting warmed up, but the clouds occasioned this event by ceasing to obstruct the sun. 19. General causality implies a fourth type of cause: all individual things mutually affect each other. We can call this community, or interaction. 20. Mathematical space is an artificial construction on the basis of a perceptual form (space). Its infinite divisibility is only possible in the mind [recall Zeno's paradoxes]. 21. All optical and sensory illusions can be corrected by reason. 22. A summary of the preceding investigations. 23. Causal chains are difficult to identify, because they tie together events, not things. By contrast, a developmental chain studies how one single thing develops. For instance: a seed becomes a plant; in this example, the plant is related genetically, not causally, to the seed. The seed is also a thing of the past, and the plant exists right now, in the present. 24. We can therefore trace something like water to its "parents", hydrogen and oxygen. But hydrogen & oxygen do not coexist with water; on the contrary, they have modified their essences completely, have raised themselves to a new form, water. Consequently, water is not a mere amalgamation of something else. In light of this, science wants to discover the entire history of how something is formed across time. This quest leads scientists to posit a beginning of the Universe, [a "before" protons and neutrons have formed and stuck together to form atomic nuclei, then incorporated electrons into themselves to form complete atoms]. But it would be a mistake to think that this postulated Singularity still exists today. Just as hydrogen and oxygen truly become water, this singularity has truly become the Plurality (our world). 25. No scientist can cognize the Singularity, because reason's function is to connect the elements of a Plurality. 26. The introduction of multiplicity into the world [through the formation of protons, neutrons electrons etc.], was the first development of the world, not an arising out of nothingness. 27. No one has ever observed something like sulfur completely go out of existence (forever). But we can ask: what can be said a priori about matter? The answer is: nothing. Many of the things we currently "know" will probably get overturned in the future, on the basis of new empirical data. The philosophical distinction between substance (matter) and accident (solid state of matter, liquid state of matter etc.) is to be scrutinized here. Since the accidents (water, people, stars) are just modes of one substance (matter), it's clear that only those "modes" can ever arise and cease, not the underlying substratum itself. Matter neither arises nor perishes, because matter is the very precondition for arising and perishing. However, an imperishable Universe cannot be established a priori. True, all present-day empirical experiments point without fail to a conservation of Nature's substratum (in a closed system). However, a true, empirical proof of this requires observation over a very, very, very large period of time, so large that humans can't even fathom. (In the chapter on Physics, he mentions geology, paleontology and even politics (!) as a way of observing this leakage indirectly.) Substance, as a form of perception, has a definite function: to cognize the dynamic interconnection between real individuals. In the mind-independent world, this mutual interaction is something quite abstract; it's not a glue that binds individuals together, nor is it an invisible slime that engulfs all individuals into one single jelly. However, our mind can, and does represent this abstract interconnection in a form, namely the idea of a substratum. Independently of the mind, there is no substratum, only discrete individuals. 28. The world is a finite collection of finite forces. 29. Real space is not infinitely expansive or divisible. 30. We can break things down into other things (e.g. break water down into hydrogen and oxygen). However, this kind of division cannot go on infinitely, because infinity is a mental construct. To get around the absurdity of infinite division, some thinkers are satisfied to posit a "smallest particle" that can't be divided anymore, i.e. is immune to destruction. But this is a rationalistic fiction. 31. Time is finite as well. 32. A recapitulation of the aforementioned errors. 33. So far, we have discovered that independently of the mind, there are moving forces (upon sense organs) with a definite and finite sphere of efficacy. We can now proceed to our remaining source of knowledge: introspection. That which we've discovered by means of the senses, we can also apply to human beings: a human is a moving force with a definite and finite sphere of efficacy. However, since a human force is self-conscious, additional information about force is available to him in his first-person experience, nakedly exposed and in plain sight. After abstracting away the forms of the outer-sense (color, taste, space etc.), we are left with the additional information we were seeking: Our efficacy extends only to the utmost tips of our body, only to a definite and finite sphere. We are individuals, and this separateness from other individuals (which science and metaphysics ignores on the basis of the substance-accident relation) is revealed clear as day. We are always in ceaseless motion. Even if our body stands still, we are nevertheless internally restless, and this is not volitional, but rather how our being is like. This inner drive, if stripped of all human elements, can help us understand other humans, other animals, unconscious organisms and yes, even inorganic nature and the puzzling phenomena of life arising from it. We may call the drive "the individual Will". What is its nature? Is it an entity, a substance, a process, something else? The answer is that there's no reason to box the Will into existing philosophical ontology. We already know what a will is. That will be sufficient for our future investigations in physics, aesthetics, ethics, politics, metaphysics.

It is extremely unlikely that free choices have anything to do with quantum indeterminism. The time scales are way off. I argued the quantum irrelevance in VS. So far as we know, at least in the inanimate world, QM by its own mechanism gives rise to all the determinism, such as trajectory of a baseball, that obtains in the classical regime. This has been studied and has expanded from the inception of QM to this day. The idea of indeterminacy in some events is ancient; it does not wait on the appearance of QM. It should not be confused with contingency. Aristotle is right in saying that today whether the Russians will be militarily victorious over Ukraine is indeterminate not only in the sense that it cannot be predicted, but in the sense that there is not now any such determinateness of such a matter in reality. Peirce agreed, and I agree. Leibniz and Rand could agree, but only because collections of free wills go into the outcome. Physical indeterminism in neural-network interactions with each other (supposing indeterminism occurs at that classical level of physics in this setting) cannot be identical with a neural-network-interaction basis of free will because free will is purposive, directed activity and mere indeterminism does not possess that. This was recognized about potential physical bases from ancient times, long before our modern knowledge of brain and its roles in animal life. The contemporary Aristotelian Roderick Long wrote his 488-page Ph.D. dissertation on some of that story: Free Choice and Indeterminism in Aristotle and Later Antiquity. One needs to clear one's head of these confusions: Agency always requires free will (to the contrary, a cat has agency without free will), and contingency requires living agents, indeed ones with intellegence and free will, or it requires chance (to the contrary, it requires only independent causal streams intersecting each other).

If that is a claim of his, then he is off in the old silliness that said there are no chairs because they are just an assembly of molecules or there are no tornadoes because they are just a conjunction of this piece of fluid flow and that one and that one . . . . and there are no seizures or high jumps . . . This would buy him absence of agent responsibility, but the idea that there is no agency of organisms flies in the face of ordinary experience and science, and he would need a better argument to show that determinism implies no causal responsibility (thence there be no liabilities in torts [which is not the same as criminality and its penalties]). Determinism, at least as stated in the modern age (Hobbes, Spinoza and on to our own time) is not about predictions and knowledge. It is about operations of things regardless of how far we understand them or can predict them. It says that all things always have complete states in reality, and, given that that is the case for them, they can do only one thing in their complete state at any time. So I could have only the height I have ended up with, commit only the corrected typos that occurred in typing this, etc. Sometimes the debate has proceeded under the assumption that the complete states at all times are presently known by God. So Leibniz, for example, in defending our manifest free will against determinist conjectures trying to model how the world works so as to show that that manifest free will is an illusion, argues that foreknowledge by God of future results does not show that none of our future results will have been arrived at with free originations from us.

I used "emergent" because I was reponding to Monart who had used "emergent." It seems sensible enough to sometimes use that rather than "caused," as when saying that the fluid state of matter emerged from a collection of certain molecules in a certain situation of temperature and pressure. Saying that "air is caused by the molecules composing it" is weird. And "air and its lack of resistance to shearing stress is caused by the molecules composing air and their collisions with each other" is also a weird way of talking. Shearing stresses are not something applicable to a molecule so far as I know. It is something that emerges at a macro level such as in our bones (hopefully with good resistance to shearing stresses) or in a breath of air. Additionally, causal relations in the story of how I came about are immediate and dynamical in my individual ontogeny in which evolution has provided the engineering-type structures in which such organized developmental processes can proceed. (Not only the background evolutionarily yielded structure is required, of course, but also a continuing sameness [within tolerances] of the environment in which the type of organism can survive.) So for thinking about causation and emergences of processes in the individual organism, it seems most important to be focused on individual development, not preceding evolution, while keeping evolution as important background of the present dynamics arena in which this is causing that and/or this is emerging from that. For the determinism worth having in a debate over free will vs. determinism, the determinism has to be a pre-determinism. To which the question "how far back is such and such in the present predetermined?" is sensible, and answers get more ridiculous the farther back the predeterminism is asserted, due to the circumstance that in the real physical, natural world there are a myriad of independent causal streams intersecting each other, continually resetting "initial" conditions and boundary conditions. All of that applies as well to emergences as it does to causation so far as I can see. Also, in stating Rand's mildly circular definition of the Law of Causality (that is, What is the Law of Causality, in applying identity to action?) using the phrase "caused and determined" in her definition (in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made"), one should, I suggest, not take the "determined" to mean necessarily determinism, but a broader concept determinate. More like: "caused and delivered as determinate." That way both the results of the mind-independent course of nature and the results of free will engineering things can be brought under a Law of Causality.

(OK. A sour-cream coffee cake, very fine.) A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later she gets conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. Does that account solve The Problem of Induction ? How far was it a well-defined problem? Was solution of that problem what Rand had in mind in calling for a validation of induction in FNI? I imagine it was, as she would know of Hume’s making shallow of induction and causation and the hero worship Hume received by Philosophy of Science instructors (approximately Logical Empiricists) in the 1960’s (such as my instructor). Does Harriman’s book contain a solution to that problem? I rather imagine it does; I’d have to look at it freshly and closely as well as at the problem. But with the link to SEP on that problem, you might do yourself well in a close look at Harriman with that problem in view. I rather imagine Harriman had a good hold on that because of his portrayal of our modern sure inference to the existence and character of atoms. I told that story also in my “Induction on Identity.” We ended up in somewhat different years on when that thesis could no longer be at all doubted, rationally speaking. Harriman was a bit more liberal on that than I. Can’t recall just now if Harriman gave William Whewell credit for the process of the “concilliance of inductions” that played out in that case after Whewell’s time. Kant had an answer to Hume’s critique of causality. It would be good to know with exactly whose picture of causality Hume had been arguing against and was that prior picture also wrong from the vista of an Objectivist non-Humean system. Kant pulled the premise-rug out from under Hume by exposing that Hume et al. were empty-handed on what was human experience for which Hume could find no necessary connection from episode to episode. Kant’s own hand on what was human experience such that there were necessary connections between its episodes was fantastical. Classic modern philosophers Locke to Kant on this are getting a good replacement today with all the philosophers of perception, direct realist and representational realist who master and incorporate the pertinent science, neurological and psychological. I’ll be taking care of Kant in the sequel of this paper, with a modern realist replacement, my own, which was aided by Rand’s system. You asked about yet-to-come extension of Rand’s measurement structure for concepts. I did take a first step on that 20 years ago in my paper Universals and Measurement. I don’t know how far I might get back to developing that further in connection with science within my projects in view for however farther I live. (I have no indications on specific future failures of health, but I’m 75, so reasonably, the final grade I give myself in advance is “incomplete.”) Within chapter 7 of Harriman’s book, he discusses “Physics as Inherently Mathematical”. He has nothing original to say; and no mention of the many contemporaries of ours imminently qualified who have contributed to further understanding on that circumstance first really solidly seen in Newton (gravity, not optics), and rocketed by Maxwell; and he seemed to not actually know what it was from Galileo that was actually crucial for Newton’s advance; and he seemed ignorant of the middle man Descartes between Galileo and Newton concerning the law of inertia and, additionally, how it was that rotational motion came to be seen as a form of acceleration in the first place*; and he did nothing by way of showing a way (if there is one) that Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts is usefully related to uses of mathematics in modern physics. There are other aspects in Rand’s epistemological ideas that are shown to be at work in the practice of physics, but these aspects are not unique to Rand. If one is a beginner, this book can introduce some history and techniques of physics. Additional literature on those is vast, and some leads to it are in the endnotes of The Logical Leap. I don’t recall if Harriman discussed abduction teamed with induction in science methods, but that is part of the full picture.

Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’ How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area. But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B. Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation). That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013). From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329). William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science. From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls. Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism). Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1] The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014. Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2] In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own. (To be continued.) Notes [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes. [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. References Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library. Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet. ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press. ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Motivation is a key to human action, to its initiation, sustenance, and completion. Based on one’s values, motivation comes in many forms, such as financial, legal, ethical, promissory, logical, intellectual, and esthetic. At its core, motivation is emotive, i.e., e-motion: that which “-moves out”, that which is the motive power of action. An example of esthetic motivation is the following. Motive Power The motive power of life is the engine of directed motion, the generator and creator of life’s ambition, driving actions forward in life’s continuous sustenance and realization. In music, as in life, there’s a motive power that pulls music outward, a keynote that carries the flow of melody in harmony on a constant beat toward resolution and arrival. In literature, as in music and in life, there is a motive power that draws out the words and names the concepts that inform and inspire thought onward to envision real ideals. The source of motive power, in literature, music, and life, is: integration – it’s choosing to clarify and unify words, tones, and actions with integrity and purpose, all aiming for the climax, crescendo, and ecstasy that await. As three models of motive power, behold: In real life is the person and character of genius and benefactor Ayn Rand (see 100 voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand and The Letters of Ayn Rand, In music and literature, are the following two complementary works: one a motion-picture in sounds, the other, a motion-picture in words; the music “Collision” may be heard as a short prelude to the scene from Atlas Shrugged. All models are worth repeated visits for reflection and re-motivation. ===== “Collision”, by John Mills-Cockell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiIe3PjiYp4 And his other similar earlier works from 1970s, such as “Melina’s Torch”. “Tillicum”, “Aurora Spinray”, “December Angel”, "Appaloosa and Pegasus" – all can be heard on Youtube. Also, especially noteworthy is his 2004 Concerto of Deliverance, commissioned as a tribute to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. http://www.starshipaurora.com/concertoofdeliverance.html ===== Dagny riding the John Galt Line (especially p. 245-246, Atlas Shrugged😞 She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine's heart. For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long, rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips. She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in 'the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled "High Voltage." Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines? -- she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?" -- like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel. They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power -- of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time. They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going -- not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again -- not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages -- the power of a living mind -- the power of thought and choice and purpose. She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt . . . . =======

Part 1 Part 2 I expect to complete this study later this year. The result I expect at this point is that evolutionary biology with vegetative teleological causation exhibited as Harry Binswanger does, in physical terms and with that teleological causal cycle framing[1] the efficient causes within the organism, yields for the first time in the history of philosophy, a sound physical basis for Aristotle's final causation in the case of the vegetative actions of living things. This accomplishment renders lost-in-the-woods the persistent criticisms of modern molecular, evolutionary biology as being an eliminative reductionism of quintessential living activity to physical (biochemical) reactions. Those criticisms need to loosen their concept of the physical. Concerning the ramifications for Rand's theory of value, which will come at the end of this paper, I'll have to wait until I've completed the study herein of the full complement of causal mechanisms of life. ([1] "Scaffold" – PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE [2023], 90[5]:1224–33.) This study is of importance to Rand's biocentric theory of value, although I had originally undertaken this work for the sake of getting a good grip on brain computational explanation addressed in Milkowski's EXPLAINING THE COMPUTATIONAL MIND, which had become important to completing my up-to-date assessment of David Kelley's realist theory of perception in THE EVIDENCE OF THE SENSES (1986).* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTERLUDE “The seeker comes to the great guru in his mountain fastness and pleads ‘What is Life?’ The sage answers, ‘Life is a fountain’. The supplicant, not surprisingly, is annoyed: ‘I have traveled halfway around the world, spent a fortune, risked my life, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?’ ‘All right, my son’, says the guru, ‘for you, Life is not a fountain’.” –The Way of the Cell by F.M. Harold (2001)

@tadmjones Here is an intellectual high-altitude perspective on possibility of superluminal signals, in flat spacetime, without getting into conflict with special relativity in its confines to E-M fields, etc. Although, the paper points to no known physical fields whose differential equations imply causal cones that do not coincide with light speed: Faster than Light? by Robert Geroch (at 13 minutes in this lecture, he speaks of a theorem which, if I understand correctly, rules out the possibility of negative mass in GR which I gather is the situation under which Alcubierre drive would be possible.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive I know how to make this work in an efficient manner but that worth trillions of dollars at the very least so won't explain it here. As for the acceleration problem there essentially is none because the ship bends spacetime such that the destination is much closer and surfs at normal sunlight speeds in the curvature. Also the fact that ER=EPR means wormhole creation is also possible but again won't go into details here but have already given many on this forum in many separate posts in many threads keeping most of it purposely in layman's terms and how it the Final Theory of Physics integrates without contradictions of any type with Objectivism/reality. For what it's worth since 2020 (and never before that) I have personally seen this type of craft on several occasions. Three times before I started working with Skinwalker Ranch as a volunteer which created the interest (never believed aliens were visiting Earth before that even though I was sure they existed somewhere) combined with my knowledge of the Final Theory of Physics I created in 2000 and the knowledge of how a warpdrive would work following from it. And then about 10 UAP during the summer of 2022 on their livestream which lead to several over the house I was renting at the time. Let's just say there was interest from far more than just our government. The Ranch itself was studying me. Then all this stuff started right after with drones flying all around the house that summer (this was about 8 houses down from the home I grew up in and was renting from lifetime family friends) and a fighter jet flew right down my street at less than 10000 feet. Just to give you a taste of the start of the destruction of my life. For what it's worth, what started me on the path to the final theory was down the street at the house I grew up in when I was 12 I had one of those flat green Lego pieces that is supposed to be like grass sitting on my dresser. I had just woken up and was about to get ready for school. I touched the flat green Lego and it shocked me like a static shock and right where I touched it glowed blue. It started shaking (I'm thinking is this an earthquake in Michigan or something?), then things got stranger as it shook and slowly slid to the edge of my dresser till it was about to fall. That's when things really got strange because it didn't fall down but up in a slow spiral like a leaf to the ceiling and then slowly spiralled down spinning in the opposite manner until it landed in my GI Joe garbage can. I was in shock and fear and backed up and bumped into my bed and fell backwards across it and yelled for my Dad who finally came and, of course, didn't believe the true story. But the point is that this lead me down a lifelong path to explain what happened which lead finally to discovering the physics behind it.

["Project Starship" is a very young and serious man's description of a romantic and philosophic vision of the future – and of the present, too. It's dedicated to the heroic genius of Ayn Rand, upon whose work this conception of starship is largely based. It's an answer to my previous post here, "What Can One Do?" ] ---------- Project Starship 3rd Edition Monart Pon © Copyright 1976, 2001, 2023 Monart Pon The Starship (General) In the boundless universe of stars, in a small region called the Milky Way Galaxy, is one star called the Sun. Spinning around this Sun, on a planet called Earth, is an organism called Man. This man is tapping the energy of the Sun and transforming the material of Earth to build his starship, his starship to seek, hold, and give the beauty that brings him his happiness. The starship that man creates is an expression of his mastery over his own destiny, a mastery that breaks the circle of nature with a straight line, a line that reaches from this earth to touch the farthest stars. The structure of the starship is the product of man’s shining his cool, strong light of reason upon the wilderness of reality to tame it into the home that supports his life. Growing from this work of discovering and unifying truth, goodness, and beauty, the starship is a selective re-arrangement of various aspects of reality into those forms that further his well-being. Abstractly, starship is a complex concept, integrating the knowledge that leads to the success of human life. Concretely, the starship is an artificial planet, an earth re-created into a hierarchical unity of arts and machines, performing the functions of sustaining and enriching man’s spiritual/material health. Symbolically, the starship is a badge that signifies man’s ultimate purpose, his central activity, his highest achievement. The starship for beautifying man can inspire him on his quest for new arts, new machines, new adventure: on a voyage that blasts off from this port of Earth and shoots outwards to other ports of other worlds--outwards to the countless stars of the countless galaxies of the unbounded universe. The Project (Introduction) Project Starship is an adventure to the stars, a romance for the ideal of starship--a consecration to the ultimate purpose of creating a world comprised of all those things from which comes the experience called happiness. Project Starship grows from the acceptance and expression of one’s responsibility as a special kind of being, whose honor is one’s volition and whose glory is one’s starship. Project Starship begins with understanding these facts: a. Starship is the integrated structure of knowledge and processes, of arts and machines, of ideas, values, and inventions that, together, can nurture the continual growth of life and happiness. b. The necessity of starship is based on the volitional nature of human life, the rational process of one’s consciousness, and the unlimited capability of one’s actions. c. The starship’s vital core is one’s conceptual consciousness, one’s mind, one’s reason, the basic faculty that discovers and invents the ship’s knowledge and processes. d. The starship’s most basic and crucial knowledge is philosophy, the knowledge of fundamental principles, the knowledge that integrates and guides all other knowledge, the knowledge that yields an attitude of romanticism for the wisdom as summarized in this way: Man is a rational animal, whose existence in objective reality is sustained by the volitional operation of his conceptual consciousness called reason towards the cognition, evaluation, and invention of his starship to happiness. I. The Basis Man is a living, conscious, volitional being. Starship is an expression of this volitional nature. Man, like all living things, is alive conditionally upon his generation of a series of successful internal-external actions to fulfill the needs for his life’s existence. Like other conscious living things, man uses his faculty of consciousness, his power of being aware of reality, to understand the meaning of the information gathered by his senses. This consciousness is a power to determine the good, or life-enhancing, and evil, or life-destroying, aspects of reality. It is a power to guide the course of actions towards the production of the good, and a power to experience, through emotion, the resulting state of life called happiness. Unlike other conscious things, however, man has volition. He has direct control over the operation of his process of awareness, and, therefore, over his life. He can choose to be conscious and live, or to be unconscious and die. He can choose to be sharply or vaguely conscious: he can raise his level of awareness, sharpen its focus, enlarge its field, increase its cognitive efficacy, or he can blur, shrink, blank out and sabotage its processes. Volition begins with the choice to drive the mind to the highest achievement of successful life, or to leave it to stagnate to a rotting death. Born ignorant and naked, man is innately ignorant of what is good or harmful to life, and is inherently naked of the tools to achieve the good and fight the evil. He has no instincts, no fur, fangs, or claws. To acquire knowledge and tools, man has to discover them by means of his mind. To fulfill the needs for his life’s health, he has to earn them by directing his mind towards the understanding of reality, the detection of possible good, and the invention of those extensions and augmentations to himself that can achieve the good. To attain the successful state of life called happiness, man must accept and express his responsibility as a volitional being: he must deserve his honor as the driver of his own mind, the master of his own life, the maker of his own destiny. This honor and responsibility of volition grants man the freedom of a potentially unlimited capacity of awareness, a potential to know the simplest, or most complex, part of reality, a potential whose limit is essentially determined by man’s own choice and desire. At his command, man can enhance, elevate, focus, his level of awareness, from the automatic but limited, perceptual state of non-volitional beings, towards the virtually unlimited, conceptual field that only he can achieve. The conceptual mode of consciousness brings into his grasp a vivid understanding of the nature of himself and his world--an understanding that can transcend the immediate moment and place around him, to ultimately span an eternity of time and an infinity of space. Given this kind of volitional awareness, an awareness unlimited in possibility of clarity, depth and scope, then the kind of actions possible to man is also unlimited. The sophistication of a conceptual consciousness can guide the most complex series of actions, the kind that can significantly alter the environment to suit human life, and that can enrich man’s health and extend his life-span. Man’s possession of a conceptual, volitional consciousness distinguishes his life as, symbolically, a straight line, an endless line transcending the immediate bounds of this Earth, of this Sun, of this Galaxy, to ultimately touch all parts of the vast realm of stars. To complement this volitional life, to clothe his nakedness and replace his ignorance, to glorify his honor as a master, to seek his happiness--man creates the starship. Starship could be the highest expression and achievement of human rational being. It is a ship of knowledge and processes: an integrated mobile environment that provides man with nourishment for growth, shelter against decay, and locomotion to explore his boundless realm. It is a starship because its primary source of energy and inspiration emanates from the stars. It is a starship because it is the kind of structure that can house and fly, comfort and move, man’s life on an astro-adventure. It is a starship because it can inspire man to be starbound, to seek new knowledge, new powers, new beauty--to seek his happiness and glory by sailing the endless sea of stars. II. The Constitution Starship is an integrated structure of the knowledge and processes, the arts and machines, the truths, goods, and beauties that, together, can enhance the continual growth of man’s life. The starship’s vital core is man’s consciousness called reason. Reason is the creator, commander, coordinator, of the starship’s every part. Reason builds, organizes, integrates and maintains the ship’s entire structure by forming ideas, values, and inventions. It conducts the long and complex process that begins with raw materials and energies of the universe and ends with pro-man products. Reason is the basic generator of man’s happiness and the starship’s potent dynamo. Reason performs the three general stages of starship-building: cognition, evaluation and re-creation. Cognition is the process of identifying the facts of reality, of discovering the properties and relationships of entities, of determining what is available for transformation. Evaluation is the process of detecting values and goals, the process of judging the possible good. Re-creation is the process of re-shaping, re-arranging, converting the raw elements of reality into those forms that can further life. The knowledge thus acquired, the ideas, values, and inventions, is integrated into the structure of the starship, constituting part of what may be called the starship’s intellect and spirit. Reason’s supreme power of creativity is made possible by its conceptual manner of perceiving and understanding reality. The rational, conceptual process is one of perceiving, identifying, and integrating the data received by the senses, condensing the multitude of observations into simplified groups called concepts. A concept is a mental unit concretized by a word and individualized by a definition. It is a condensed unit of knowledge formed by the differentiation and integration of essential attributes and relationships among entities. A concept reduces a multitude of facts about reality into easily grasped essentials, thereby freeing the mind from routine in order to study the new. Each concept thus formed is further combined with others to form larger concepts, or is divided into smaller ones, continuing this process of differentiating and integration indefinitely, bringing in ever-more organized knowledge, forever expanding the scope of man’s awareness. The starship’s knowledge may be divided into science and technology. Science is the faculty of facts, the faculty that studies what is. Technology is the faculty of fancy, the faculty that, based on the sciences, studies what could be. Linking the two is ethics, the faculty of morals, the department of philosophy that studies what should be. Directing science and technology is philosophy, the faculty of axioms and fundamental principles--the faculty that studies the basic nature of, and relationship between, man, reality, and the starship. Philosophy is the starship’s most crucial knowledge, the knowledge that unifies all the complexities of science and technology, the knowledge that gives a comprehensive framework of principles guiding and inspiring the conduct of all other knowledge. Philosophy identifies the underlying nature of existence, of that which exists, of what is real, describing reality’s meta-laws, defining the principles of reason’s conceptual process, and prescribing the basic principles of life-seeking actions. Two axiomatic concepts of existence that philosophy studies are “identity” and “causality”. Identity is the concept that an existent, any existent, if it exists, then it exists with an identity--with a set of characteristics that distinguishes it from all other existents, making that existent a thing, not a nothing and not just anything, but a something. Identity thus distinguishes the real from the unreal, the natural from the supernatural. Causality is the concept that an action or process is generated by specific entities, generated in a specific manner, resulting in a specific effect, according to the identity of the entity generating the action. Every action, every effect, presupposes an entity that generated or caused that effect. All of reality’s processes, including man’s, are accountable by certain properties or principles governing those processes. Causality thus distinguishes the kind of actions that an entity can generate from those it cannot, those actions that are explainable from those that are miraculous. These axiomatic concepts are the basis, integrator and compass of all other concepts of the starship, guiding the ship’s science and technology to study the specific identities of entities and their actions. Applied to man’s actions, “identity” and “causality” yield the ethical derivatives of “honesty” and “justice”. Honesty is the principle of being natural, of being true to reality, of perceiving reality as it is. It is the principle that since reality is objective and since man is a rational being, then to be true to nature, to be human, is to be conscious and conceptual. This means to pay attention, to understand reality with the clearest and fullest focus of the mind, with the widest context of knowledge, according to the law of identity. Honesty thus distinguishes the kind of thinking that man must perform to understand the nature and meaning of his life. Justice is the principle of being fair, of being true to man, of treating men as they are. It is the principle of men acting to seek, grant, and accept only the earned and deserved from each other. It is the principle that since every effect presupposes its causal agent and since one’s desired effects are not achieved without cause, then every part of the starship must be earned, earned by exerting effort in a specific manner according to the law of causality. Justice thus distinguishes the kind of actions that man must perform to achieve the happiness of his life. Honesty and justice form the basis of ethics, the set of principles (independence, integrity, courage, etc.) that guide the actions of the starship’s creation, the set of values that helps to unite the major faculties of science and technology, linking the facts of raw nature with the fancies of man’s desire. Science is the faculty that scrutinizes the kinds of entities and processes that exist. Science systematically analyzes the properties of existents, determines their relationships, defines the methods of measurements, and categorizes the results into ideas. Technology is the faculty that imagines the possible beauty that could come from the ideas of science and invents the techniques of re-creation to concretize the imagined ideals--creating the forms of artistry that enhance man’s spiritual life, and the forms of machinery that enhance man’s physical life. Thus, the starship is generally a structure constituted by the knowledge of science and technology, and by the products of arts and machines, integrated by philosophy for the purpose of man’s happiness. III. The Crew The crew of a starship is a society of individuals. Each member of the starship’s crew is guided by the principles of honesty and justice. He is a specialist in some industry of the starship for a certain period of time, trading his particular service for that of other members. Some may be scientists trading with technologists or philosophers with artists. Whatever the relationship, each concentrates his energy on some specific profession, and combines his effort with others in trades that yield industries too difficult for one man. Some benefits of this co-operation are the diversity of services and products, an amplification in the power of an individual to seek his happiness, and a more efficient, faster creation of the starship. The benefits of such a social starship are protected by an agency devoted towards the defense of a man’s right to his own life. This political instrument functions as a police and court to secure the individual from possible interference and destruction caused by the physical force of other men. It governs the retaliatory use of force to defend against initiated force, and may be called upon to resolve peaceful disputes. Today’s government at times protects the freedom of men to pursue their happiness, and yet, other times, commits (for the sake of cowards and parasites) the very crimes against which it is commissioned to fight. This legalized violation of rights causes injury, hardships, and unnecessary obstacles, and must be opposed morally and politically, in order to free man’s achievement of his starship to happiness. The Project (Conclusion) . Project Starship is a life-long purpose, an industry of philosophy, science, and technology, a career of understanding man, reality, and the starship--a study and practice of creating the starship’s basis, constitution, and crew. The first symbolic step in the starship project, for those who choose it, is the naming of one’s starship (e.g., Starship Pegasus, Starship Phoenix, Starship Prometheus). The name serves to symbolize and unify the specific stages of one’s project and serves as the banner of one’s quest, the emblem of one’s home. In the name of one’s starship, an introductory study of philosophy is undertaken. The study of philosophy begins with gathering the knowledge with which to understand such subjects as: the nature of objective reality, the nature of man’s mind and emotion, the principles of moral action, the preconditions of a rightful society, and the nature of the romantic spirit. This knowledge will aid in the identification of what the starship is, why man needs it, and how he can build it. The place to initiate the study of philosophy is Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivist philosophy provides the principles for the starship project described in this article. Specifically, the starting point is Ayn Rand's essay, “Apollo 11", in which she wrote: "Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of reason. Yes, reason can solve human problems--but nothing else on earth or beyond it, can…. Let us hope that some men will learn it. But it will not be learned by most of today’s intellectuals, since the core and motor of all their incredible constructs is the attempt to establish human tyranny as an escape from what they call “the tyranny” of reason and reality….. If the lesson is learned in time, the flight of Apollo 11 will be the first achievement of a great new age; if not, it will be a glorious last--not forever, but for a long, long time to come." ("Apollo 11", The Objectivist, vol. 8, no.9, September, 1969; also in the anthology, Voice of Reason, 1989; also online ) ----------

The attempt to order language before concepts, or vice versa, is a logically flawed enterprise, because neither exists without the other. Both are essential properties of the faculty of reason. A concept, in Rand’s analysis, is not simply a mystical assemblage of generalized entities that somehow cohere, a concept is an open-ended definition with a label. There are no definitions without language (inspect all of Rand’s examples of concepts), and the labels are the representational filing device for concepts, i.e. morphemes, expressed either with physical gestures, written symbols, or in its normal state, sound. Claims about feral children are vastly overstated and over-romanticized. First, no children are taught language at all, they learn language on their own from peo-ple speaking in their environment. Second, that process begins before birth. Fetuses do not learn words, but they learn, from exposure, many facts about the language of their environment. Remember that the womb is not a soundproof chamber. Third, there are virtually no decent scientific studies of feral children, and no evidence about the cognitive state of actually-feral children (children who exist without human contact: you can see why it is logically impossible to test for the existence of concepts in a feral child, were you to find one. The one somewhat-studied such child was Genie, for whom there is no publically available scientific evidence regarding her initial cognitive abilities although we weakly knew in principle how to assess their existence. There is no evidence at all that she had concepts when rescued (after substantial psychological treatment, she gained a limited ability in language given substantial intervention efforts, which apparently failed for the most part). There is a misunderstanding of concepts as involving some sort of universal “inner language” where actual language learning involves discovering the relation between universal inner language and actual individual languages. Under the universal inner language theory, of course, all humans are born with something like a language already built in, and early Chomskian linguistics did take that stance, and therefore by definition all children must have built-in concepts in some kind of Cartesian “universal machine language” for humans. We know better now (I am not sure whether Chomsky himself knows better). Under that theory, one must claim that feral children have concepts and can form propositions, they just can’t express it in ordinary ways. In fact, feral children are so severely damaged, cognitively, that they really provide evidence for nothing about the nature of language. Concepts and language are developed in parallel, by iterated reasoning. A child observes that mom, dad and the dog are different existents which have different properties. The child associates the sounds of “mommy”, “daddy” and “doggie” with the referents (or whatever names are assigned to those people / beasts). They learn to differentiate, after more exposure to the world, learning that “daddy” and “grampa” are different names and different people. So far, these are names, not concepts. The leap to concepts comes when they learn of types, and can distinguish “doggie” from “kitty”. Feral children are not really a "gold standard" in linguistics, they are a sound-bite gimmick that Cartesian linguists used to invoke as supposed factual support, but for what? In fact, it just suggests (does not show) that there is an age past which a first language cannot be acquired by normal means, that age being around the age of majority. But children do acquire language well before that, except in extreme cases usually involving severe child abuse or mental / physical disability.

Thankfully, Kant didn't say that people have built-in concepts. If they were built-in, they wouldn't be a priori concepts and would lack the necessary force of lawfulness or that of a natural order of things. And gathering concepts does not lend them the a priori necessity they require for lawfulness. Causality wouldn't be a law of nature. Principles and laws can't be derived by observation, no matter how many observations of causal events have been made. How did Rand discover that causality is a law of nature?

Donald Trump managed to eke out a win over Nikki Haley yesterday in New Hampshire. Haley is not dropping out of the GOP primary yet, but her battle is more uphill than I was hoping to learn from yesterday's vote. The outcome likely means that too many Republicans are part of Donald Trump's personality cult for that party to nominate a serious candidate for President and that not enough independents appreciated the need to have a better choice than Trump or Biden in November. That is awful. The war for freedom is hardly over, but this particular battle appears to be lost, and we will almost certainly have one of Joe Biden or Donald Trump and -- if either drops dead while in office -- one of their Vice Presidents continuing to damage our country for another four years. This is both a bigger deal and a lesser concern than Oh well, I'll leave President blank again in the next election. Two articles do an excellent job of explaining why. On the bigger deal side is the first, which I learned about from the excellent Yaron Brook's Twitter feed. It's by Briton Dan Hannon, and its title is, "This Isn't About Trump Anymore -- It's About Whether America Is the Country It Always Was." The whole thing is worth a read, and ends as follows:The country that was founded as an antidote to arbitrary power has fallen for a personality cult. The city on the hill is set, this time knowingly, to make a liar and petty crook its first citizen. The things that elevated and ennobled America -- optimism, political pluralism, the ability to disagree with civility, respect for the law, respect for the ballot box -- are scorned by those who claim to be patriots. God help them. God help the rest of us. [bold added]In the short term, things look bleak. This election cycle and no matter who wins, we could be moving from a discussion of breathing room, of how much time we have to turn the ship around -- to wondering if we can politically further the cause of liberty at all, any time soon, in America. On the not as big a deal side of the ledger we have Ayn Rand's 1972 essay, "What Can One Do?", which I first encountered in Philosophy: Who Needs It:To gain perspective, one must focus on the right things. (Image by topntp26, via Freepik, license.)Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them? Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? Are you immune from the fallout of the constant barrage aimed at the destruction of reason -- and can you provide others with antimissile missiles? A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability. This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles, Objectivist or otherwise: knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action. This does not require omniscience or omnipotence; it is the subconscious expectation of automatic omniscience in oneself and in others that defeats many would-be crusaders (and serves as an excuse for doing nothing). What is required is honesty -- intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one's knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute. When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. This does not mean that you must make philosophical speeches when unnecessary and inappropriate. You need philosophy to back you up and give you a consistent case when you deal with or discuss specific issues. [bold added]The essay was written with people concerned about the state of the world in mind, but it has a deeper meaning than is apparent, as is frequently the case with Rand's writings. The passage above is a reminder, frequently needed anyway, about the nature of current trends, particularly for people interested in improving the world around them: Politics is the end product of a long conceptual and causal chain. Philosophically, it arises from ethics, and the dominant form of politics (increasingly, collectivism today) derives from the dominant ethics in the culture, which is altruism. Until enough voices in the culture challenge altruism and its philosophical underpinnings (of mysticism and primacy-of-consciousness), our society will remain dominantly altruistic and political movements appealing to it -- be they leftist crusades to redistribute wealth or save "the planet" or right-wing crusades for nationalism or theocracy -- will always threaten to gain ground. Change the dominant philosophy and the politics will take care of itself. That's the easier part to see of a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. On a deeper level, one should ask, Why do I want to improve the world? My answer is because I live in it, and I would hope any fellow travelers are at least equally selfish in that regard. That is the only good reason to want to participate in an intellectual movement. One cannot improve anything without knowing how, and one cannot know how without knowing why, and having a solid grasp of facts. In the process of getting one's house in order and developing an active mind, one will consequently improve the quality of one's daily life by applying what one has learned. Rand shows that the battle to improve the culture is long-range, and -- barring a true cataclysm -- much bigger than any single election. But she also shows that it is a personal battle for self-betterment that is always within the grasp of anyone who seeks it. Speaking for myself: Short-term, while I might be unfortunate enough to be witness to the start of a dark time in American history, I'm glad I am doing so with open eyes, and am not deluded enough to see either of Donald Trump or Joe Biden as America's savior. I know that the constant media blare about Trump isn't worth too much of my time, and I can spend it on better things. Politics can help or hinder one's life, but it isn't the whole of one's life. Thank God for that, so to speak. -- CAVLink to Original

Today's topic is "Inferential Deduction". My version of the more widely known theory, "Reading-Response" When approaching a text, typically the reader will begin the interpretation process in a very deliberate and methodical manner. This is a process that seasoned readers have rigorously developed as a result of extensive reading. A good reader makes an effort to understand the context and sentence formations, even when the content is less than clear. Whether it's a poor writer who lacks sufficient context or maybe their grammatical formations are incredibly counter intuitive. Nonetheless, it requires syntactical precision for the mind to make rich connections and proper inferences. Clear and concise language usually ensures a more thorough accurate understanding of the content. So on to the concept of inferential deduction. Different people make different inferences from one another, when reading the same dynamic text. This is a result of people understanding words in slightly different ways. Some people apply certain connotations to the terms, or their definition of a word may slightly diverge from the actual explicit meaning or other's definitions of the same word. And every word ties to a barrage of emotions and thoughts that are unique to the individual. Essentially, the reader is constructing a narrative in their mind, that is slightly or radically different than what the author intended.. This occurs when people bring their own dynamic emotional states and view points, and bias to the reading process. These novel interpretations can add depth and unique insights to the wider discussion. But sometimes the ability to infer is accompanied by over-analyzing or drawing connections that are not in the text. As far as the other intended. Words and phrases, and even concepts can trigger different effects if the reader, which leads to interpretations that are unique all on their own. If words or phrases connect or correspond to personal experience's or strong emotional memories. You will have quite an interesting overall summary to write. The fact is. Text's are not solidified into one digestible plate of meat and potatoes. Nope. The readings are completely open to interpretation. The actual meaning's one draws of the text requires an active process where the reader construct's meaning through a very subjective lens. One grasps the general ideas of the text but the multifaceted inferences are a very real thing. The hook is, readers may be the real constructors of meaning, Not the author.

More facets of Deep Reading Hey Deep reading Mars, here. Today I will introduce a new topic "Integrating Information" Combining ideas and concepts to form general big picture understanding is essentially the heart of Integrating Information. It means what it says, Integrating Information entails pulling disparate pieces of text and material from the reading together, and combining these various elements into an interconnected whole, or holistic understanding. All the facets, ideas and concepts within the text are to be related and systematically organized into the broader context. Or summation of the whole. Comprehensively covering all the material requires deep focus and adept inferential abilities, while critical thinking takes precedence. Connecting all the data through extensive analysis simply means making connections among the different components within the text. Every idea somehow relates to other ideas within the reading. Making as many connections as possible ensures a sophisticated grasp that exceeds superficial comprehension. This means drawing connections between sentences or paragraphs, to make a unified understanding of a text in its entirety. This entails making inferences, analyzing how different elements connect with one another. And recognizing patterns and relationships within the text, to form an interconnected understanding. This will improve Critical thinking: Critical thinking is also a fundamental aspect of Integrating Information. And creating a coherent mental framework is ultimately the goal. Analyzing parts of the text and determining their significance in the broader context, while synthesizing all the information into something coherent, cultivates critical thinking. As readers become adept at Integrating Information, they slowly excel in the art of understanding complex ideas and they will achieve more in their reading en-devours. That's it!

If you've ever heard of bike shedding, you might get a whiff of déjà vu from a piece by Alex Papadimoulis at The Daily WTF. To begin with, his example discussion arises from a cyclist's desire to keep his hands warm in the winter. Image by Axel Brunst, via Unsplash, license.That coincidence aside, if we take bike shedding to mean have a lengthy, unproductive discussion over a minor issue, then we see that Papadimoulis describes a kind of bike shed discussion. Usually, bike shedding occurs when people out of their depth focus on some minor issue they know something about (e.g., "it is easier for a committee to approve a nuclear power plant than a bicycle shed"). But here, we have knowledge domain experts beating a solved problem to death, apparently oblivious to said solution, which a quick reminder causes them to realize they do know of and understand. In the example, a bunch of engineers got going with an idea for heated handlebar grips for bicycles until someone who wasn't zeroed in on the discussion casually popped the whole thing like a balloon:The reason that this "hand warming system" does not exist is because most people have found a pair of gloves to be a perfectly suitable way for keeping one's hands warm.Most of us have seen or participated in discussions like this, and Papadimoulis proposes that the word gloves, with his full example in mind, might be a good, quick way to help oneself step back and gain perspective long enough to identify such discussions or, better yet, avoid them altogether. I think that's great advice, and I appreciate that a single, memorable word tied at once to a common object and a good example of failing to keep the big picture in mind can help one implement that advice. -- CAV P.S. The kind of discussion Papadimoulis describes is common and has been around enough to give rise to such unflattering stereotypes as the proverbial professor who lacks common sense. It is interesting to consider how much of this phenomenon comes down to fascination with interesting problems vs. a kind of dis-integrated thinking, in which a person is prone not to relate knowledge he has across domains. I have often seen intelligent people failing to make connections I deem near-obvious en route to mini-versions of the discussion at The Daily WTF. Unfortunately, in those cases, there isn't a well-developed thread one can puncture with a single word, or time to help make an immediate correction. Still, it can be helpful to know that this might be going on. I have found that time can help, at least in cases where ethusiasm for a given subject overwhelms thoughts about other concerns. Revisiting a topic after some time has passed often helps when that is possible.Link to Original

It is true that the roots of Objectivism can be traced back some three thousand years (not ten), but the soil that it is rooted in is found in Greece. Western philosophy has been influenced by numerous Asian streams, however Aristotle cannot be said to have been influenced by Christianity or Judaism. Centuries later, the Romans welded Plato and Jesus together to create a still-living hydra monster, but we cannot generalize these secondary developments as “Western philosophy” thereby tainting Objectivism with improper Christian underpinnings. It is also true that Objectivism has a normative trend – there are “rules”. Rules are not a recent invention, indeed they substantially predate the evolution of humans, or mammals. Obviously rules in the sense of explicit moral codes are the exclusive property of humans because only humans have language, the tool for encoding explicit moral codes, and we may presume that such rules have been around for over 100,000 years. Mostly they would have been in the form “Give me your stuff or I’ll kill you”, or “Touch my stuff and I’ll kill you”. The dominant putative authority for moral rules across the globe has been the supernatural, except that the ancient Greeks sought to devise moral rules deriving from nature (as did the Cārvāka of India, who vanished), and this is the essence of Aristotilean and Objectivist ethics. If Objectivism were a synthesis of 10 millenia of world philosophy, it would be incoherent as Christianity is, especially in its modern instantiations. It is very clear from the historical record that Rand eliminates millenia of prior “synthesis” to find the Aristolilean core, then developed and perfected it into Objectivism. Identifying that philosophical root is what makes Objectivism radical. I don’t deny that in the 60’s the leftist movement redefined the meaning of “radical”, but I also don’t care. The reason why we should not just look at outcomes is because inspection of outcomes is vastly inferior to an understanding of actual causation. We now have rampant outcome-based systems of pseudo-knowledge on our computers that threaten civilization because they are based in a neo-religious interest in superficial behavior (outcomes) rather than what causes behavior. Outcomes are just the raw data that we call on to understand causation. It is meaningful to ask what are the principles that define Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. We can even ask what distinguishes Calvinism from AME-ism. The fact that there is a difference between AME-ism and Syrian Orthodoxy does not invalidate the unity of Christianity as a body of religious principles. Even within a single church (literally, a building not an institution) individuals can disagree. Because man’s behavior of chosen and man is free to choose between alternatives, we face a real quandry in characterising any philosophy or other kind of volutional behavior by humans. The integrationist viewpoint looks for the underlying principles that guide men’s choices, the disintegrationist viewpoint emphasises the diversity of behaviors. In order to judge a culture, you have to first identify the culture, meaning that you have to know what its causal principles are, and what essential properties distinguish it from other cultures. It is not an essential property of Christianity that Shabbos is on Sunday, even though that is a property distinguishing SDA from other Christian sects. That is one sense in which Christianity “speaks with many voices”, and we can multiply Protestant disunity by noting many other non-essential differences such as abstinence from alcohol, abjuring homosexuality, belief in credobaptism, doctrines regarding sin, the essentiality of sacraments etc. The question should not be whether you can find differences between individuals, the question should be whether a particular concept is valid in the first place, and if so, what are its defining features. I am lightly skeptical about the validity of the concept “modern Judeo-Christian culture”, as opposed to “Jewish culture” and “Christian culture”. Rather than defining the unity in terms of religion, I would define that unity based on geography: western civilization. As it happens, Christianity spread along with other aspects of western civilization, and the Judeo-prefix is a recognition that western culture is not exclusively Christian in religion. I would prefer the label “Religious western culture”, which is distinct from “atheist western culture”, but still similar in being “western culture”. Then any reference to “modern Judeo-Christian culture” simply directs our attention to the religious aspects of western culture. By inspection of the texts and behavior, we can identity a certain “Judeo-Christian” unity, even thought here there are measurable differences that should be omitted. If there are professed (purported) Christians who act selfishly, you should not ask whether they believe in some part of the Bible that seems to teach selfishness, you should ask whether they simply reject the principles of their nominal religion without embracing that rejection. Crossing the line from agnosticism to atheism is extremely difficult, and I believe that many so-called Christians are only social Christians, who are unwilling to openly declare their atheism.

If anyone here is still misinformed enough to believe that Israel is anything but an almost indescribably evil, racist, genocidal lunatic state led by twisted, sick men who promulgate the most anti-man, anti-western ideologies imaginable, then watch this lecture by Israeli investigative journalist David Sheen wherein he describes the Israeli far-right "Messianic" movement and its connections to the Israeli government. He first talks about the beliefs of the religious far-right rabbis at Israel's top military academy. The religious far-right is fully in the mainstream of Israeli society. They constitute the second largest group in the Knesset. Remember that these people are TO THE LEFT of the messianic movement. The views of the religious far right are already so extreme that I cannot even begin to comprehend the sheer level of madness that is required to believe them. One of the rabbis wants to bring back slavery. Another describes his own ideology as explicitly anti-man and claims that Western values are the "true" holocaust. A third one describes Hitler as "the most moral person possible". This is the Israeli MAINSTREAM. THIS GARBAGE IS WHAT IDF OFFICERS ARE TAUGHT. But The Messianics are somehow even more extreme than this. How? How? It's so crazy it cannot be believed. Watch this video to fully understand what we are dealing with here and how this affects American politics: