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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).

The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts (1992) by Harry Binswanger ~Part 1~ In this work, Harry Binswanger rejects the idea that the ends-attaining actions of living things are the result of a kind of sui generis cause appearing in nature in living things and not derivative from the causes in play in inanimate nature. That is, he sets aside the vitalist view of living action; there is no vital force inexplicable in terms of complexes of inanimate forces. Actions in which there are ends-behaviors are indeed peculiar to living things. But at this stage of science, we profitably seek to explain these behaviors by physical and chemical processes in certain structures. The patterns of behaviors in living things—from unicellular organisms to plants and animals—that appear to be aimed at goals or ends such as survival or reproduction are, in Binswanger’s argument, to be conceived as emergent from inanimate processes. His general position, which I think correct, is aptly called emergentist teleologist. Binswanger affirms the reality of goal-directedness in living nature, even where no directing consciousness is in play. It is cognitively important, in Binswanger’s view, that vegetative teleological patterns of action be understood as causal, even though teleology in living nature (e.g. plant tropisms) is explicable in terms of inanimate forces of nature. “Explanation on the level of parts does not necessarily eliminate the need for explanation on the level of wholes, and vice versa” (23). Our understanding of some things under the form ‘A because B’ is without the ‘because’ being causal (Lange 2017). Let A be the fact that the three angles of any triangle in the Euclidean plane sum to two right angles (2R), and let B be all the circumstances invoked directly or indirectly in Euclid’s proof of the 2R theorem. No causal powers are essential to that ‘because’ and understanding. Binswanger is not making out vegetative ends-directedness, or vegetative teleology, to be a non-causal ‘because’, but a causal one. I’ll show how he does that in Part 3 of this study. (Earlier remarks on Binswanger’s book include Mozes 1995, Enright 2023, and here.) “Now the principles which cause motion in a natural way are two, of which one is not natural, as it has no principle of motion in itself. Of this kind is whatever causes movement, not being itself moved, such as that which is completely unchangeable, the primary reality, and the essence of a thing, i.e. the form; for this is the end or that for the sake of which. Hence since nature is for the sake of something, we must know this cause also. We must explain the ‘why’ in all the senses of the term, namely, that from this will necessarily result (‘from this’ either without qualification or for the most part); that this must be so if that is to be so (as the conclusion presupposes the premisses); that this was the essence of the thing; and because it is better thus (not without qualification, but with reference to the substance in each case).” (Aristotle, Ph. 198a36–198b9) (I’ll compare this translation to that of Joe Sachs when I receive the latter.) Form is the cause-for-the-sake-of-which in unmoved movers. One such mover would be essences of things. Against this Aristotelian view, Rand and Binswanger and I have it that there are no such movers outside situations in which there is mortal life. If essences have causal powers, it can be only by their connection with living mind. Aristotle’s conception of what power is had by essences directly is flatly wrong. On the Rand view, which I think correct, essential characteristic(s) of a thing explain other distinctive characteristics of a thing, and that explanation is sometimes causal. As we get to know the microstructure of a material it may deserve being taken as the essential characteristic of the material (and stand in the definition of the material for many contexts) in that that characteristic distinguishes the material from any other, but further, the microstructure, when well enough known, can provide a causal explanation of features of the material on its macroscopic scale. Such a profound dependence of essential characteristic on state of knowledge is not within Aristotle’s conception of an essence; anything added to an essence changes it to a different essence, and the essence of each thing is singular (Metaph. 1044a1, 1031b5). For him essences are substances without matter (Metaph. 1032b14). They are causes, and they are forms (Metaph. 983a27, 1032b2–14). We moderns by and large not only reject his notion of essence, but Aristotle’s distinctive notion of form as well and operation of final causality in an arena larger than the arena of concrete life (including human artifacts in the arena of concrete life). Aristotle’s essences and forms aside, his conception is correct that there are final causes at work in unintelligent life forms, final causes that are independent of any directing mind whatever (Bolton 2015). Binswanger aims to show this is so as modern biological knowledge is brought to the issue. For Aristotle, such final causes are not simply fallout from efficient causes, so I’ll be looking for how Binswanger’s analysis lands on this specific character of vegetative and sensitive final causes. Aristotle famously used ends and causes-for-the-sake-of-which (traditionally called final cause, but now often called teleological cause) in explanations for not only the survival and reproductive activities of plants and animals, but for the actions of simpler things, for the actions of elemental substances. Earthen things naturally move downward to the center of the cosmos, which center coincides with the center of the earth (Cael. 296b10–24). That is their deepest nature. The center is their natural place, and they fall so as to reach that place (Cael. 277a213–16; 295b16–96a22; 311a23–24). The natural motion of water is also downward (Cael. 269a17). This is a very thin sort of final causality in comparison to what Aristotle sees at work in complex things such as plants or animals which are composed of these elemental substances, and in Aristotle’s view, the final causes in living things are not due to this thin final causality in the elements composing living things (Gotthelf 2012, 65). Then too, the natural end of the falling rain is not success of the human project of growing grains (Ph. 198b18–20). It quickly occurs to us moderns that final causality is not employed in our Newtonian mechanics: accelerations require a causal explanation, and those causes are efficient, not teleological. We make use of the circumstance that in classical mechanics, nature acts such that certain patterns in dynamical variables come about (e.g. Hamilton’s Principle), but no final causality drawing nature to those patterns is required or invoked. So it goes, also, for thermal physics and for quantum theory and relativity. The falling of a body near the surface of the earth is not on account of tending to its natural place. Its intrinsic nature is to follow time-like geodesics in spacetime, which in this situation happens to be a certain curved spacetime. The falling body is not doing so and doing so in the way it does for the sake of staying on that geodesic. Aristotle was wrong in taking any sort of final causation to be at work in this physical situation. Let me digress just a bit to observe that in our physics of nature today there are also no formal causes. For my handsaw in the shop, there is a teleological cause of its existence (the human aim of cutting wood) and there is a formal cause of it (the design plan for it, with its having teeth, having a handle, and limits of the size of the saw). As Aristotle observed, correctly, my saw has a material cause also: to the purpose of cutting wood, the teeth of the blade shall be harder than wood; the saw of Aristotle’s tradesman and my saw have iron as their material cause (Ph. 200a7–14). For us moderns, when it comes to nature, rather than a human artifact, a plan of the natural object might be discerned, yet the plan, which is to say, Aristotelian form in his form-matter composite, is not something we take as an end-directing power of nature. In Aristotle’s final causality, which was identified with form in Aristotle’s matter-form amalgam, final causality had a priority in explanation over efficient and material causality. The latter were for implementing the ends in all material things. An artificial object such as a statue, a chair, a bed, or a saw have a form given them by their human makers. Such objects as such have no nature, in the view of Aristotle, only the natures of their natural materials. We moderns do not think that way, at least not after a certain childhood stage. We are as happy to go on about the nature of a tractor as of a working mule. Aristotle argues an account of “what sensible substance is, and in what sense it exists; either as matter, or as form and actuality, or thirdly as the combination of the two” (Metaph. 1043a27–28, H. Tredennick, translator). Explanation of substance (which is most fundamental thing among beings), for Aristotle, requires both matter and form in his sense. Like most all moderns, Rand and Peikoff reject Aristotle’s fundamental form/matter composition of all beings (Rand 1990 Appendix, 286; Further, “Aristotle’s Theory of Form” in Bostock 2006; Chapter 3 of Koslicki 2018; Frerejohn 2013; and Lennox 2015.) Koslicki 2018 defends Aristotle’s fundamental matter/form combination as right in our modern science and therewith opposes reductive physical efficient causation in biology. Binswanger returns mind-free teleological causes to biology without retreat to Aristotle’s hylomorphism (matter/form). Aristotle’s cluster of views on final causality (and formal causality) had flourished in the Scholastic era of the Latin West and earlier with Avicenna, Arab assimilator of Aristotle. I should note, however, that these theologically minded fellows actually failed to leave Aristotle’s notion of natural teleology in operation and replaced it with a regression to Plato, wherewith superintending intelligence directs the course of all things with ends in view; Aristotle’s notion of mind-free teleology was booted. Be all that as it may: today, the appearances of teleological behaviors in plants and low-level sensory behaviors of animals have been accounted for by the efficient-causal factors in biological evolution, originating with Darwin, and efficient-causal factors in molecular biology (Sarkar 2005). In Part 2, I’ll look at Aristotle’s teleological causality in vegetative and sensitive life and in the heavens. I’ll convey the rejection of such natural causality in Descartes and Spinoza, as well as its resurrection by Leibniz. Part 3 will present Binswanger’s post-Darwin analysis of teleological causality in vegetative and sensitive life and set Binswanger’s scheme into the prior history of philosophy covered in the first two Parts of this study. This study is worthwhile in itself, but I undertook it for background for addressing computation and representation in cognitive science today in connection with David Kelley’s way with direct perceptual realism in The Evidence of the Senses in the course of completing my study “David Kelley’s Kant” here at Objectivism Online. In the present study, I’ll particularly want to assess the implications of Binswanger’s scheme for Ayn Rand’s theory of value. (To be continued.) References Aristotle 2016 [c. 348–322 B.C.E.]. Aristotle Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. Indianapolis: Hackett. ——. Physics. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, translators. In Barnes 1984. ——. On the Heavens. J.L. Stocks, translator. In Barnes 1984. Barnes, J. editor, 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bolton, R. 2015. Aristotle’s Natural Teleology in Physics II. In Leunissen 2015. Bostock, D. 2006. Space, Time, Matter, and Form – Essays on Aristotle’s Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Enright, M. 2023. Life is not a Machine or a Ghost: The Naturalistic Origin of Life’s Organization and Goal-Directedness, Consciousness, Free Will, and Meaning. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 23, Nos. 1–2, (2023), 218–79. Frerejohn, M.T. 2013. Formal Causes: Definition, Explanation, and Primacy in Socratic and Aristotelian Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.å Gotthelf, A. 2012. Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses – A Realist Theory of Perception. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Lange, M. 2017. Because without Cause – Non-Causal Explanations in Science and Mathematics. New York: Oxford University Press. Lennox, J.G. 2015. Form as Cause and the Formal Cause. In Leunissen 2015. Leunissen, M. editor, 2015. Aristotle’s Physics – A Critical Guide. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mozes, E. 1995. The Reality of Mind. Objectivity 2(1):93–107. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded second edition. H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, editors. New York: Meridian. Sarkar, S. 2005. Molecular Models of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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.

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.

["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 ) ----------

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 . . . . =======

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).

(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 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)

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.

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.

Objectivist Concept of Truth (2013) Rand wrote in 1966: “Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions—and the truth or falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics.” (ITOE 48) Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. (Leonard Peikoff made some use of that book and an earlier one by Blanshard The Nature of Thought in his dissertation completed in 1964.) It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year in The Objectivist Newsletter. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the analytic-synthetic distinction), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join. In Rand’s view, Branden said, in his Basic Principles of Objectivism lectures (c. 1968): “All knowledge is contextual, which means: has to be integrated, has to form a logical, consistent, non-contradictory whole. / ‘All thinking’, states Galt, 'is a process of identification and integration’. All logic, then, is a process of context-keeping. No conclusion of a formal logical argument can be considered true out-of-context. Only a full context can determine its truth or falsehood.” (Branden 2009, 75) Peikoff wrote “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171). Peikoff maintained that unless his proposition is true, the fact that we don’t know everything can be turned into the skeptical result that we don’t know anything. If we have no means of possessing any limited knowledge not susceptible to being shown false in the future, no means of knowledge sufficient for truth, then the skeptic can say “for all we know, all of our limited knowledge is false.” “Logical processing” in Rand’s philosophy, as is well known, includes a lot and is essential to truth and objectivity. To know the number of oval-head #4 five-eighths-inch brass screws I have remaining in their box, I need to count them. That process and result will require not only correspondence, but the right connections among the parts of the process of counting. Moreover, the process of counting is not only necessary; counting, with all my counting crosschecks, is sufficient for truth about the number of screws. Truth at a conceptual level of cognition is necessarily an integration, and if it were entirely free of any misidentifications in all its network, it would necessarily be true. That is, in this limit of cognitive performance, the cognitive conditions are sufficient for truth. That is Rand's picture. I say Peikoff's establish should stand between verify or confirm, on the one hand, and constitute, on the other; therewith he was not saying something beyond Rand’s picture of ’57 and ’66–’67. I take issue with Rand’s philosophy on the issue neatly captured in Peikoff’s statement. To start, the “an idea” and the “the idea” will usually have evolved with the advance of knowledge. That all animals are mortal was a truth with the Greeks as with us, but what we mean by animal and mortal have been considerably revised and improved over what it meant to them. The reference class of what is meant by animal has broadened and understanding of what is living process and its cessation has expanded tremendously. But Peikoff’s statement can likely be elaborated so as to take all that into account without substantive retreat. I attended Lecture 6 in Peikoff’s 1992 series The Art of Thinking. Peikoff remarked there, allowing for inaccuracy in my notes, that he does not see the preface “in the present context of knowledge” as sensible for: (i) perceptions or memory, (ii) automated conceptual identifications (table in contrast with hostility or pneumonia), and (iii) axioms (philosophical [very delimited; widest framework] and mathematical [very delimited subjects]). Saying “in the present context” in the cases where it is sensible is not proof against error. One can have been fully rational to have held views based on errors one later sees. However, error is not inevitable for the methodologically conscious adult. That is what I have in my notes. Suppose one’s knowledge were based on perceptual observation and correct reasoning upon them, including correct use of mathematics in application to them. Then it would seem fair to say that “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171). Perfect conceptual identifications, even though not all the identity of their referents are known, if perfect in all presently known connections with observations and with all other perfect conceptual identifications, are sufficient to establish the conceptual identification’s truth. Leaving aside the three categories of knowledge set aside in Lecture 6, there remains much in our knowledge that is also virtually perfect knowledge, because it has been so thoroughly tested for contradiction in its many connections, and because these durable propositions have been given ever more exact delimitation with the advance of science. “All animals are mortal” or “I must breathe to live” are examples. Even for a given context of knowledge, our integration and checking for contradictions is an incomplete work in progress. Meanwhile, we are adding new information, more context for knowledge, and beginning its integration and checking for contradiction. For all conceptual identifications in a condition of significantly incomplete integration and checking, correct logical processing is insufficient to establish truth (cf. Peikoff in Berliner 2012, 303–4). At first blush, this is no problem for the Rand-Peikoff view, for that just means that the knowledge is not to be rightly taken as certain knowledge. Rand’s picture in Peikoff’s bold statement is significantly incorrect in my view because as one’s (scientific) knowledge grows one’s knowledge of what was one’s previous context of knowledge also grows. One continues to learn what were the ways in which one's previous generalizations were over-generalizations (and in what ways they were inexplicit, indefinite, or vague). There was no reason to suppose that the Galilean rule for addition of velocities was only a close approximation to the low-velocity portion of a different rule for addition of velocities more generally, no reason until the electrodynamical results in the nineteenth century. There was no reason to post a specific caveat before then, along the lines of "for all velocities we've experienced so far." It remains that in present truth there is past truth and so forth to the future. We cannot know entirely which elements of scientific truth today will stand in a hundred more years of advance nor how those elements will have been transformed and connected with new concepts. Our repeatable experiments will still be repeatable (notwithstanding the unfounded imaginings of the Hume set), whatever new understanding we bring to them. Peikoff is correct when he writes “No matter what the study of optics discovers, it will never affect the distinction between red and green. The same applies to all observed facts, including the fact of life” (1991, 192). Peikoff’s sufficiency clause—its application to all cases for which the proviso of delimited truth-context pertains—is not necessary to foil skeptical maneuver. That rational thinkers sometimes have very reasonably taken something for true that is later shown to be false does not justify skepticism. Every such showing of falsehood is a showing of truth and a showing that skepticism concerning the type of knowledge at hand is false. Neither does the skeptic, nor the relativist, have justification for skipping to the contradictions of earlier science with later science, skipping, that is, the context of non-contradiction as a norm, the everywhere-context of things as they are and our ability to know them. Rand read John Hosper’s book An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis in 1960–61. Rand’s firm anchor of truth in correspondence and the primacy of existence comes through in her marginalia on truth, on propositions, on definitions and tautology, and on logical possibility (Mayhew 1995, 68–70, 75–80). Rand objected to shuffling the question “What is truth?” into “What are true propositions?”. She jotted: “Truth cannot be a matter of propositions, because it is a matter of context” (Mayhew 1995, 68). Like Aristotle’s, Rand’s is a substantial theory of truth. It pertains to the real, the cognitive agent, and the right relation between them. It declines linguistic stances as well as deconstructionist and relativistic stances towards truth. Aristotle’s writings “present truth in the context of a multifaceted account of knowledge that includes epistemological and psychological dimensions and in which truth directly pertains to issues of meaning, reference, intentionality, justification, and evidence . . .” (Pritzl 2010, 17). Rand can agree with Aristotle that being is the single constant context of truth. She can agree with Aristotle in holding truth to be not only saying of what is that it is, but saying of what is what it is (Metaphysics IX.10). However, she should deny Aristotle’s views that intellectual truth is an irreducible type of being and that “cognition is an identity of knower and known” (Pritzl 2010, 17). Rand’s has an integration element in her correspondence theory of truth (Peikoff 2012, 12–15). Integration is essential for truth in Rand’s theory. Fact is interconnected and multilayered in Rand's picture. Fact caught in mind will be truth, and truths will not be isolated in their facts nor in their relations to other truths. In Rand’s metaphysics, every existent stands in relationships to the rest of the universe. Every existent affects and is affected (ITOE 39). Rand does not go so far as the coherence theorist who would hold that relations to other things is what constitutes what something is. Concerning the historical roots of the integration element in Rand’s theory of truth, I think the main root is not the coherence views of absolute idealists, nor of Spinoza before them, but the views of Aristotle. “Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. . . . The truth or falsehood of [man’s] propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics.” (ITOE 48) Rand’s conception of the connectivity of facts for truth and her requirement of definitions designating essential characteristics for concepts in assertions are among the integration elements in Rand’s theory. Her theory is revised Aristotle. Aristotle wrote that "a definition is a phrase signifying a thing's essence" (Topics 101b37). Fundamentally, "the essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself. For being you is not being musical; for you are not musical in virtue of yourself. What, then, you are in virtue of yourself is your essence" (Metaph. 1029b14-16). For Aristotle the essential predicates of a thing say what it is, what it is to be it. To say that man is musical does not say what man is. It says something truly of man, but it does not say what is man. Thus far, Rand concurs. "A definition must identify the nature of the units [subsumed under the concept being defined], i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are" (ITOE 42). Moreover, the essential characteristic of a kind under a concept is "the fundamental characteristic without which the others would not be possible. . . . Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others" (ITOE 45). Aristotle held that all natural bodies are a composite of matter and form. He took form, rather than matter, to be what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. Essence is a form (Gill 2010, 120; Peikoff 1985; Witt 1989, 116–19; Bolton 2010, 40–46). Rand rejected this component of Aristotle’s metaphysics (ITOE Appendix, 286). "Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power. . . . Aristotle regarded 'essence' as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological" (ITOE 52). For Aristotle what makes gold gold or an animal cell an animal cell is a metaphysical essence, a metaphysical form. Metaphysical essential forms in Aristotle’s account are traditionally seen as universals; Charlotte Witt argues they are particulars (1989, chap. 5). In our modern view, the essence of the chemical element gold, that in virtue of which it is gold, is: having such-and-such numbers of protons and neutrons bound in a nucleus and the electrons about it. That is what makes its further distinctive properties possible. The essence of a living animal cell is that it offsets the potentially catastrophic drive of water inward through its wall by pumping sodium ions out through its wall. That is what makes possible its further distinctive properties (distinctive, say, from a living plant cell). These essences are physical. The essence of a human being—rational animality—is physical and mental. These are all essences in Rand's sense. They are physical or mental, but not metaphysical in the form-sense of Aristotle's essences. For Rand "an essential characteristic is factual, in the sense that it does exist, does determine other characteristics, and does distinguish a group of existents from all others; it is epistemological in the sense that the classification of 'essential characteristic' is a device of man's method of cognition" (ITOE 52). Proper essential characteristics in Rand’s theory of definitions required for truth use factual characteristics about a thing to state what it is. Aristotle, in contrast, did not take the essence of a thing to be one of its characteristics among others. He did not take it to be a characteristic of a thing. The form that is the essence of a thing, the form that makes it what it is, is prior in every way to the individual thing it makes possible (Witt 1989, 123–26). In Rand’s metaphysics, entity, not substance, is the primary existent. Though characteristics and relationships presuppose entities, an entity is nothing but its characteristics and relationships, for entities, like all existents, are nothing but identity. Rand’s realism of definition and essence reaches rock bottom of reality, while dropping some Aristotelian doctrines of substance, essence, and form. Rand contended that one must never form any convictions “apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge” (1961, 26). That integrated sum is one’s entire cognitive context, “the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge” (ITOE 43). We have noted Rand’s statement “No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum total of his knowledge” (AS 1016). To the extent that his mind deals with valid concepts, “the content of his concepts is determined and dictated by the cognitive content of his mind, i.e., by his grasp of the facts of reality” (ITOE 43). It is not the integration that makes the content true, though the integration is necessary to truth, necessary to the grasp of fact. Peikoff writes “If one drops context, one drops the means of distinguishing between truth and fantasy” (OPAR 124). That is partly due to the nature of facts. The context of knowledge is the context of grasped fact, which is a context of fact. Facts have contexts, independently of our grasp of them (cf. OPAR 123). The contextual character of truth in an Objectivist account should be hands-on-world, rather as Rand’s essential characteristics of concepts are hand-on-world. Recall that in Rand’s theory of definition, the fundamental characteristic serving as the essential characteristic of a concept is both metaphysical and epistemological; it tells relations of dependency in the world and relations of explanation in the mind. The relations of context in the world will naturally include more than relations of dependency, and relations of context in the mind will include more than relations of explanation. My contention that the essential characteristic(s) of a concept, in Rand’s epistemology, is not only epistemological, but metaphysical, is consistent with Rand’s text saying that an essential characteristic is factual and does determine other characteristics, its being fundamental being a metaphysical fact. However, on the face of it, my contention contradicts Rand’s statement “Aristotle regarded ‘essence’ as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological” (ITOE 52). In Rand’s view, “the metaphysical referent of man’s concepts is not a special, separate metaphysical essence, but the total of the facts of reality he has observed, and this total determines which characteristics of a given group of existents he designates as essential” (ITOE 52). She goes on immediately to say in what sense an essential characteristic is factual and in what sense it is epistemological. Rand is excluding from her concept of an essential characteristic the overblown sort of metaphysics Aristotle gives to essence, and she is introducing epistemological factors that bear on correct identification of an essential characteristic. She is not excluding metaphysics as a crucial, determining factor in the identification of essential characteristic(s). I concur with Rand. Essence as in her conception of an essential characteristic is not metaphysical in the full sense of the metaphysical that Aristotle gives to essence. However, in a less ponderous sense of the metaphysical, Randian essential characteristics are both metaphysical and epistemological. Rand requires a metaphysical basis for the designation of essential characteristics for our concepts of things. Furthermore, an essential characteristic should be not only a fact distinguishing a group of existents from all others within the present context of human knowledge; the essential characteristic of items under a concept should be additionally a fundamental one, the fundamental one on which the greatest number of the items’ other species-differentiating characteristics depend. This is metaphysical structure. Rand should agree with Aristotle that capability for learning grammar would be an improper distinction among animals for capturing the essence of that which is man (Top. 102a18–30; ITOE 49). This is due to facts of dependency. This is metaphysical structure. It would not do in Rand’s epistemology to follow Descartes in his idea that the primitive essence of matter is extension. That is a good distinguishing and logically necessary characteristic of matter (provided we take extension to stand for all aspects of spatiality). But it ignores the ontological primacy of entities among existents. And space is an existent. Concrete relationships are existents. A proper definition of matter must set it correctly in its relation of non-containment to consciousness (ITOE Appendix 247–50), and it must situate matter in relation to entities. Matter can be rightly defined in that second aspect partly by finding a fundamental distinctive commonality—say mass-energy—for all materials, but the standing of materials in relation to entities must also be captured in a proper definition of matter. There is much metaphysical structure in Randian definition according to essentials. Consider too a definition of solidity. I like to define it as a state of matter in which there is resistance to shearing stresses, or more exactly, in which there is an elastic zone of resistance to shearing stresses. This definition states physical relationships. It reflects metaphysical structure and physical structure within that metaphysical frame (assuming a proper concept matter). It reflects also context of cognition (and of potential vital action). That is to say, it reflects also the present state of knowledge of matter, an epistemological circumstance. Rand allows that with further understanding of matter I may have to expand my definition of solidity. Expanding “does not mean negating, abrogating or contradicting; it means demonstrating that some other characteristics are more distinctive” of solidity (ITOE 47). The qualification of a characteristic to be taken for essential continues to rest on the identities given to our consciousness so far—including relations of difference, similarity, and dependency—identities basing the economical scope of cognition and effective action we attain by rightly recognizing them. I have spoken of relations of context in the world and relations of context in the mind. The membership relation is one relation among contents of mind that is not that relation among the mind-independent, concrete objects corresponding to those contents. That is entailed when philosophers say with Aristotle that what-such depends on this-such, but not vice-versa, or when one says with Rand that only concretes exist in reality. The binding of membership relations to concrete factual relations, though necessarily not by complete identity with the latter relations, is surely a major impetus for integration in abstract knowledge and integration of abstract knowledge with experience. Rand’s cast of concept-class membership relations as analyzable in terms of suspension of particular values in mathematically scaled relations—relations that can express concrete magnitude relations in the world—is a grand structure for integration beyond non-contradiction. It makes the meaning of correspondence in “truth as correspondence with facts” more specific, and it accords with the success of science in improving correspondence by use of mathematics. References Aristotle c. 348–322 B.C. The Complete Works of Aristotle. J. Barnes, editor. 1983. Princeton. Berliner, M., editor, 2012. Understanding Objectivism, Leonard Peikoff’s Lectures. NAL. Blanshard, B. 1962. Reason and Analysis. Open Court. Bolton, R. 2010. Biology and Metaphysics in Aristotle. In Lennox and Bolton 2010. Branden, N. 2009. The Vision of Ayn Rand. Cobden. Gill, M. L. 2010. Unity of Definition in Metaphysics H.6 and Z.12. In Lennox and Bolton 2010. Hospers, J. 1953. An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. Prentice-Hall. Lennox, J. G., and R. Bolton, editors, 2010. Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle. Cambridge. Mayhew, R. 1995. Ayn Rand’s Marginalia. ARI. Peikoff, L. 1985. Aristotle’s “Intuitive Induction.” The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99. ——. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Dutton. ——. 1992. The Art of Thinking. Lecture. ——. 2012. The DIM Hypothesis. NAL. Pritzl, K. 2010. Aristotle’s Door. In Truth – Studies of a Robust Presence. Catholic University of America. Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House. ——. 1961. The Objectivist Ethics. In The Virtue of Selfishness. 1964. Signet. ——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. 1990. Meridian. Witt, C. 1989. Substance and Essence in Aristotle. Cornell.

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.

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!

~Part 2~ I’ll divide Part 2 into two sections. This first section examines further Aristotle’s conception of teleology in natural phenomena, also his method for natural science. By early 5th c. BCE, Parmenides had figured out that the moon gets its light from the sun, that the earth and moon are spherical, and the morning star is identical to the evening star. Anaxagoras, from those insights, went on, by mid-5th c. BCE, to reason the moon was closer to earth than the sun and to correctly explain eclipses. Meteorites, such as the large one crashing in Greece about 466 BCE, added weight to the thinking of Anaxagoras that the moon was stone. These conclusions were argued by observable phenomena. They were famous and persuasive in Athens and across the ages to us. Empedocles (mid-5th c. BCE) adopted them. Greek astronomy was advancing, and gods were losing their jobs (Graham 2013, 228–41). Sophism resisted such winnings of the natural philosophers, and the piety police were on the ready. Plato (late 5th to mid-4th c. BCE) formulated a compromise by subordinating natural philosophy to “questions of how things are arranged for the best,” therewith bounding natural philosophy with humanistic and idealist frames.[1] Aristotle (384–322 BCE) looks at regular, dependable natural phenomena and poses some observed character of such phenomena as (i) the answer to what makes the observed thing the kind of thing it is and as (ii) a fundamental and irreducible natural power of that kind of thing, upon which science of the kind should be founded. Regular, dependable motion characters are the natural characters for that sort of moving thing, in his conception of them, and contrary motions of such things are forced. Aristotle anoints those natural distinguishing characters purported to be fundamental with a sort of perfection. Aristotle joins thinkers before him in trying, by reasoning, to determine what are the elementary material substances from which, by combination, all others are made. Before Aristotle in this endeavor, notably, had been Empedocles, with earth, water, fire, and air as the elements (Metaph. 985a31–33). Today the school children can tell us that those elementary kinds of which everything is made are the particle/waves known as quarks, leptons, and the force-carrier particle/waves. Those are what a line of ancient Greek thinkers had been after: simplest kinds of matter composing all matter and which themselves are not composed of other kinds of matter which are still more elementary (Metaph. 1014a26–27). Our school children can tell us—at a more useful level than particle physics—that the elementary material kinds are the chemical elements. One of the Greeks’ favorite materials to take for elementary was water, and the children now can laugh and reveal that water is H2O, not a single element. As I mentioned in Part 1, Aristotle takes it that the elements water and earth move downward towards the center of the cosmos. Of themselves they move thusly along a straight line. Two other elements, air and fire, naturally move upward, and in their simplicity, they move along a straight line. All motion “is either straight or circular or a combination of these two which are the only simple movements” (Cael. 268b17–18). A simple body, an element, moves of its own nature in a uniquely simple way: straight line or circle (269a1–2). I should say that simple elements moving in their uniquely simple way receives no explanation by saying it so moves on account of its nature. Such saying is no explanation, although, it may serve to give notice that one is at a most basic level of fact, where explanations should stop. There must be, Aristotle argues, simple bodies moving naturally of themselves in circular paths. Unlike straight lines, circles are complete. “The complete is naturally prior to the incomplete” (269a19). “It is clear that there is in nature some bodily substance other than the formations we know [earth, wind, air, fire], prior to them all and more divine than they” (Cael. 269a29–31). “The superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of ours” (269b15–16). The four earthly elements are observable or roughly so; mainly it is their elemental standing that needs argumentation.[2] Aristotle’s celestial element, whose natural motion is circular, is an element whose existence must be argued for by Aristotle. The outermost sphere (shell) of the heavens, the one carrying what we would call the fixed stars plainly moves them in a circular way over the earth, though the conveying sphere itself is invisible.[3] What has been called ether is the element making up that invisible rotating sphere (Cael. 270b20–24).[4] Aristotle reasons, with flailing contrariety-based dynamics, that the circular motion of that sphere is eternal. Moreover: “Everything that has a function exists for its function. The activity of God is immortality, i.e., eternal life. Therefore the movement of God must be eternal. But such is the heaven, viz., a divine body, and for that reason to it is given the circular body whose inherent nature it is to move always in a circle” (Cael. 286a8–11). Aristotle conceives of the sphere of the fixed stars well as those stars as being weightless. No effort of the sphere or upon the sphere is required for it to stay aloft. Though living, it requires no efforts nor a striving soul to keep it moving, unlike living things on earth (284a11–33). In Metaphysics Aristotle maintains the living nature of the primary sphere and its stars, but has that assembly not itself divine. Rather, in Metaphysics, he has a divine unmoved mover towards which elements are drawn by their natural motions, as towards goodness. That would seem to confer some (other) kind of teleology on all the natural motions. “Everything that has a function exists for its function” is in need of an argument (I think it is an overgeneralization). That sentence implies that if something does not exist for some function, it does not have that function. To deny, then, for example, that the eye comes to exist for the sake of vision would be to deny that the eye serves the function of vision. The patent falsehood of the consequence is then taken for proof of the antecedent “exists for some function”. This argument, based on the false premise that “everything that has a function exists for its function,” is a showing on the cheap of Aristotle’s non-conscious-life teleology. That a component of a living thing truly serves a function does not entail immediately that the component exists for that function.[5] I should stress in the preceding passage from Aristotle that the immortal god is taken as a living thing, for mortality is pertinent only to living things.[6] I say, contrary the conception of an immortal life: You cannot have it both ways. If a thing lives, then it is mortal; if a thing exists forever, then it is not a living thing. Aristotle reasoned that the fixed stars, which are embedded in the farthest celestial sphere, have a spherical shape. A mass of such shape has no features for action, such as limbs or wings. We should nonetheless “conceive them as enjoying life and action” (Cael. 292a20–21).[7] They perpetually attain their good without having to themselves take action. They are carried in the way that is their good by that outermost heavenly sphere, whereas lowly life here on the earth requires effort to accomplish its good and completeness.[8] That is all backwards, of course. I say in tune with Rand that struggle is essential to the thing that is life, that value enters the cosmos right here, and the stars in their effortless cycles are not the tops of existence, but are badged with any worth only by needs and desires in earthly, animal life, namely, by the human being. Our school children will want to point out also that the stars do not make a diurnal circuit around the earth (at some faster-than-light speed); rather, the earth is spinning (cf. Cael. 296a24–297a8). The superiority of circle to straight line by the former’s completeness, as we have seen, suits divinity of the outermost celestial sphere and its motion, in Aristotle’s view. “Human affairs go in a circle, as do the other things that have a natural movement [as distinct from chance movements or from interventions against natural movement] and coming to be and passing away” (Phys. 223b24–26). Humans and other life are not among the basic elements of the earthly domain, but they have natural movements all the same, whose teleology, perfection, and completeness are signified by their circular quality. As for the earthly basic elements, some teleological causality might be awarded raindrops by their nature of heading toward the center of the cosmos. A tad more teleological causality in their falling might be awarded by noting their fall is part of a larger whole: the repetitive cycle of evaporation and condensation. Aristotle displayed some coarse knowledge of that cycle (e.g. Mete. 346b16–31), bearing a sort of completeness.[9] I notice that in claiming these motions are in some sense teleological is to import something not manifest in the phenomena themselves. That is a requirement for causal explanation: For A to be the cause of B, one requirement is that A be something not exactly B. Alan Gotthelf, we should notice, takes on the challenge of refuting the traditional interpretation of Aristotle as holding that final causality is at work in inanimate earthly things such as the falling rain (2012, Part I). Joe Sachs writes: “Aristotle’s ‘teleology’ does not impose the human idea of purpose onto non-human nature, but recognizes that all natural beings are whole and act so as to preserve that wholeness and fulfill its potencies. Final causality governs the action of formal causes, and thus characterizes the whole realm of nature.” (2011, 58) Aristotle’s idea that non-living natural things act so as to preserve their unity or self-continuation, I say, is out of bounds, the bounds of the living and artifacts of the intelligent living. Additionally, Aristotle’s picture in which, in all domains, potencies have a striving for actuality is a foul. In Aristotle’s understanding, falling raindrops are in their intrinsic motion to their own natural end. Under evaporation and condensation, they are part of a cycle, a completeness composed of two elements: water and air. The elements also make up the complex cyclic formations that are life. Living things have their own overall ends, which are not the “ends” of the earthly elements composing an organism. The overall ends of living things are to live and reproduce. The living parts of a living thing have functions supporting those overarching ends. We can concur with Aristotle in those propositions and in this one as well: without the ends of continued life and reproduction, functional parts of the organism would not exist (GA 742a28–36). Where I should part company with Aristotle is in going on to infer that the overarching ends cause the enabling parts to exist; not every because is a causal because. A pure potential, such as a potential organism, does not bring forth enablers to its actuality. The evolution-absent and biochemistry-absent context of Aristotle’s knowledge requires his over-rating the power of pure potentials to support his notion of vegetative teleological causes.[10] We might stress in defense of Aristotle that the parents giving rise to an offspring-organism are actual, not purely potential, and that indeed there will be no offspring without actual parents. That is confusion of Aristotle’s position, a blurring over of his way of having final causes of the particular individual organism enable the bringing about of its own functioning parts. “The soul is the first actualization of a natural body which possesses life potentially” (de An. 412a28). That is a thesis from Aristotle’s report of the “common account” of the soul. He does not dispute that account; he bolsters it. Soul is the essence of bodies that possess “a principle of movement and standing still within itself,” which is to say, the essence of living bodies is soul (412b17). “The soul is the cause and principle [archē, starting-point, source] of the living body. But cause and principle are spoken of in many ways, and the soul is, accordingly, a cause in the three senses that have been distinguished [efficient, final, formal]: it is the cause as the source of the movement, as that for the sake of which, and as the substance of animate bodies. It is clear then that the soul is a cause in the sense of substance. For substance is the cause of the existence of all things, and for the living things to exist is to live, and the soul is their cause and principle.” (de An. 415b8–14) In no body whatever is its matter its essence (Metaph. 1029a27). Then in no living body is its matter its essence. Matter is what form and essence come to be in. The essence of the compound of matter and form, an enformed matter, is form, not matter. The substance of a thing is its form [11]. The substance of a living thing is its form, that is, its soul. “The soul . . . is the form in its role as final cause” (Lennox 2021a, 230). I do not see that postulation of soul in anything living and taking it thrice over as cause of distinctively living actions—thrice over cause of each: nutrition-pursuit, perception, and reproduction—is explanatory at all unless soul has some meaning independent of being that form of a living thing which is its final cause. To define soul as formal causal explanation or any explanation at all of the distinctive dynamic characteristics of the living is merely to conceive those characteristics of the phenomenon that is life in a wider metaphysical framework of formal causation. Without a preexisting meaning of soul—say, a clipped edition of human psyche in animals and an additionally clipped edition in plants[12]—and an argument for identification of that with form in living things, the posit of soul explains vegetative teleology no more than form of the living, which is to say, not at all. Aristotle should be commended for recognizing a phenomena: all living things naturally engage in pursuit of ends, even though they do not possess intelligence under which the pursuit of ends is directed. His attempt at explanation of the phenomenon is a failure, and he shows no inkling of the scientific progress, in any area of science, that could be made beyond his era. Life explained in terms, specific terms, of the organization of earth, air, fire, and water, where the material organizing structure is also explained by those earthly elements, would be a right form of “A is explained by B,” where B is not simply a posit or a mere restatement of the phenomena to be explained. Explanation for living action along that line could not have any success until humans conceived and accomplished such things as modern chemistry and biochemistry.[13] We cannot fault Aristotle for not having those things in hand, but we can and should fault him for his wrong metaphysical views (e.g. hylomorphism, dynamism of being and potency per se, and inalterability of the species) and their poisonous intermingling with science of nature. He should be blamed at the same time for his wrong model of how natural science should proceed. James Lennox points out that for Aristotle, the form of a living thing is “that complete action or way of life for the sake of which the living body is organized as it is” (2021a, 234). It is no reinstatement of Aristotle’s conception of formal causality in living things to call nucleotide sequence and its role in producing proteins a formal cause.[14] Whether the perspective of Binswanger 1990 amounts to a modern cashing of Aristotelian formal, ends-directed causal explanation of living action or amounts to a replacement for such explanation remains to be seen. Work of James Lennox has persuaded me that it is incorrect to interpret Aristotle as holding that essences, stated in definitions of natural things, always, as essences, act directly as causes. Rather, capture of essence in a definition gives an inquirer the spot for investigating causes that can yield causal essences, for definitions that can be used in syllogistic causal demonstrations, the makes of science (Lennox 2021b, 1–64). Definitions remained important in modern science. The definition of force in Newton’s second law of mechanics, as it is learned by the physics student today, is crucial. Force is therein general cause of acceleration, stated in mathematical relations between magnitudes of the two. Into the slot of that general force, must be placed a specific mathematically expressed force, say, Hooke’s law for suspended weights pulling within the elastic zone of a spring. Particular solutions satisfying the specific force-acceleration equation will then be the specific and particular time course of locations of the accelerating body in its situation of being subject to the specific constraining force against free fall in the earth’s gravity. But before all that, human beings had to get to Newton’s first law, attained thanks to Newton and (before his specific conception of force, less exactly by Galileo, improved by Descartes), which law enshrines the circumstance that not all sorts of motion of a body across space need a cause of their continuing motion, and exactly which kind does not. Aristotle did not know that. Additionally, contrary Aristotle’s general method of scientific inquiry: embedding definitions and causal relations in a premise in a demonstrative syllogism accomplishes nothing in the domain of what we call classical mechanics. What matters to those inquiries and understanding of nature are only the relations—come to mind by induction and by abduction—among physical parameters and the passing of empirical tests of implications, mathematically expressed, from such relations. The probative value of formality in mechanics is not from wielding syllogisms and refining essences in the definitions of things, but from mathematical proofs among relations of mathematical elements standing for natural, physical characteristics.[15] To be continued: The next section of Part 2 will trace the fate of Aristotle’s final and formal causes and his picture of teleology in natural vegetative life in pre-Darwinian lights: Suarez, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Part 3 will take all this home in tracing and evaluating Binswanger’s post-Darwinian theory in The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. Notes [1] Cf. Kant’s move here. [2] In Aristotle’s understanding, the element fire is a warm and dry thing, a fine particle, very fast in rising, and flame is more like the element fire than burning coals are like the element fire. [3] Like Aristotle, Eudoxus before him had taken the heavens to be a series of nested spheres (shells) conveying by their motions the motions of stars, planets, the sun and the moon. Many of the Presocratics had taken the heavenly bodies to be simply freely moving without such carriages. [4] See further, de Groot 2014, 290n474. [5] See for examples, Garson 2013. [6] I’m pretty sure the translator’s capitalization of god is inappropriate under our present style conventions, since, when capitalized the term god is a proper noun, the name of the Judeo-Christian deity, to which Aristotle could not be referring. [7] Lennox 2021b remarks that Aristotle mentioned a number of times in De Caelo that the heavenly spheres are ensouled (176). I have not been able to find any statement of that in the only translation of that book of Aristotle’s I possess. I had hoped to find such a thing, a literal statement, for the text might then give some notion of soul independent of the notion in its connections with living things on earth. I’m getting the impression that ensoulment of the heavenly spheres by Aristotle is an inference readers have made from his verdict that they are alive, and it is only what he says about soul in life down here that can give us his account of what soul is. [8] Aristotle knew that stones fall from the sky, such as the storied, huge one at Aegos Potami in about 466 BCE, eighteen years before his birth.* [9] See further, Johnson 2005, 150–58. [10] Cf. Gotthelf 2012, 367–69. [11] See Cohen and Reeve 2020, §§5–11. [12] Bremer 1983, 125–31. [13] Water serves “as the solvent for essentially all cellular chemical reactions. It also serves as a thermal buffer and, to a lesser extent, as a pH buffer” (Fox 1988, 80). Entropy changes in water have an explanatory role to play in molecules recognizing each other and aggregating into complexes and even into membranes. Such character of water and the cellular unit of life were of course unknown to Aristotle. Molecular morphogenesis and molecular control mechanisms beget the life of the cell. “Once the subunits are synthesized, their thermal motions bring them together, whereupon they spontaneously link by means of multiple specific weak bonds. The structures they form and the unexpected properties of those structures are examples of emergent properties, which are observed to attend all transitions in a structural hierarchy. A key emergent property is the capacity for control, or regulation” (ibid. 83–84). On mechanism in contemporary biological explanations more generally, see Bechtel 2011. [14] Contra Terzis and Arp 2011, xxiv, xxvi; Moreno and Ruiz-Mirazo 2011, 162–64, 172n9. Formal causation is able to bear some non-zero explanatory load in our contemporary informational accounting of organisms (Moratalla and Cerezo 2011, 192–93). This formal cause, however, does not coincide with Aristotle’s formal cause for living action, namely, the organism’s way of life (for the sake of which the living body is organized). A sweeping role of formal causality in contemporary biology is attempted in Austin 2021. This relies on features of a dynamical-systems representation of the ontogeny of (whole) organisms. But to maintain that structure in likelihoods of the various states in a state space of organismal development is a formal cause is to say such structure in an abstract space is a cause. We might as well say that the ellipse of the dynamical states of a pendulum in its abstract phase space is the cause of the time course of that pendulum’s positions in concrete physical space, which is absurd. And even were such a formal cause as Austin envisions operative in ontogenesis, the form is not Aristotle’s formal cause for a living thing’s alterations: the organism’s way of life (in maturity). Furthermore, state space structure of states in ontogenesis (like the phase space of a pendulum) is not even an explanation of phenomena, only a redescription. [15] That is not to say that physical phenomena are explained by only mathematics. Mathematics of electromagnetism could help establish that light waves are electromagnetic waves, and mathematics of gravity could help establish that a previously unknown planet exists and perturbs the orbit of some known planet. But identity of light and electromagnetic waves and the existence of Neptune beyond Uranus are physical facts merely uncovered, importantly, by employment of mathematics. Consider further, Kuorikoski 2021. On continuing pursuit of causal relations in contemporary physics, see Frisch 2014. On usefulness of mathematics in measuring causal specificity, see Griffiths et al. 2015. More comprehensively, on uses of mathematics in modern science, see Pincock 2012. References Aristotle [c. 348–322 B.C.E.] Physics. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, translators. In Barnes 1984. ——. On the Heavens. J.L. Stocks, translator. In Barnes 1984. ——. Meteorology. E.W. Webster, translator. In Barnes 1984. ——. On the Soul. F.D. Miller Jr., translator. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. Generation of Animals. A. Platt, translator. In Barnes 1984. ——. Aristotle Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. 2016. Indianapolis: Hackett. Austin, C.J. 2021. Formal Causation and Biology. In Jansen and Sandstad 2021. Barnes, J. editor, 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bechtel, W. 2011. Mechanism and Biological Explanation. Philosophy of Science 78(4):533–57. Binswanger, H. 1990 [1976]. The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. Marina del Rey: Ayn Rand Institute Press. Bremer, J. 1983. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, M.S. and C.D.C. Reeve 2020. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. De Groot, J. 2014. Aristotle’s Empiricism – Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing. Fox, R.E. 1988. Energy and the Evolution of Life. New York: Freeman. Frisch, M. 2014. Causal Reasoning in Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garson, J. 2013. The Functional Sense of Mechanism. Philosophy of Science 80(3):317–33. Gotthelf, A. 2012. Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Graham, D.W. 2013. Science before Socrates– Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy. New York: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, P.E., A. Pocheville, B. Calcott, K. Stoltz, H. Kim, and R. Knight 2015. Measuring Causal Specificity. Philosophy of Science 82(4):529–55. Jansen, L. and P. Sandstad, editors, 2021. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Formal Causation. New York: Routledge. Johnson, M.R. 2005. Aristotle on Teleology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kuorikoski, J. 2021. There Are No Mathematical Explanations. Philosophy of Science 88(2):189–212. Lennox, J.G. 2021a. Form as Cause and the Formal Cause. In Jansen and Sandstad 2021. ——. 2021b. Aristotle on Inquiry – Erotetic Frameworks and Domain-Specific Norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. López-Moratalla, N. and M. Cerezo 2011. The Self-Construction of a Living Organism. In Terzis and Arp 2011. Moreno, A. and K. Ruiz-Mirazo 2011. The Informational Nature of Biological Causality. In Terzis and Arp 2011. Pincock, C. 2012. Mathematics and Scientific Representation. New York: Oxford University Press. Sachs, J. 1995. Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Terzis, G. and R. Arp, editors, 2011. Information and Living Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

@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.)

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.

Pretty much. In the real world you can gain that knowledge from things by observing the thing directly (in any way through a causal chain without intervening third parties). You can also gain knowledge from information which has been generated by third parties observing the thing and essentially telling you about it. This information is recorded in any symbolic form of communication or record keeping and it represents the referent to which it is directed. We also use the term information to identify the representations conveyed by nonliving causal intermediaries between the thing and our minds... e.g. eyes, provide the information we know... video recording provide information about what the camera was aimed at...the photons travelling from galaxies give us information about the galaxies. Both knowledge and information are about or refer to things, they have referents in reality. Knowledge is in your head, information is encoded in some, any medium, or causal intermediary. You can get knowledge about referents directly or from information. Both knowledge and information is valid when there is both a causal connection to the referent and when they identify the referent or whatever is relevant about it,without contradiction with that reality.

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.

In Rand's Galt's Speech (GS, 1957), she broaches the topic of sensory illusions, which she takes to be only illusions insofar as one has made an error in judgement-identifications about what is there. And this was because the sensory systems are purely physical, therefore purely deterministic, and being without free will, unlike conscious thinking, the senses have no power to "deceive" one. It's an old philosophic picture—held most famously by Kant: the inerrancy of the senses. Own up to it or not, that picture put forth in GS implies there are no perceptual illusions that one cannot expunge from experience by intellectual understanding of how they are caused. That picture of Rand (and others) is false, beginning to end. There is no such physical determinism even in the classical regular regime of physical law when one gets down to real physical processes taken in their intersecting independent causal streams as in nature. (I don't care how many thousands of times that phony picture of physical determinism in the classical regime has been repeated by way of introducing the "problem of free will", it is still baloney, as ever it was down from LaPlace.) As Peter noted above, Rand held to the modern view which, most reasonably, takes all occasions of consciousness to be features of living animal brain. She writes in GS that mind is not possible without physical life: "Your mind is your life" and "neither is possible without the other." Also, in an oral exchange a dozen years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: "It's a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That's what the concept means." (ITOE App., 252; cf. Binswanger 2014, 30–41; and the article by Robert Efron in The Objectivist which Peter mentioned earlier.) Any free will and any volitional, fallible consciousness are undergirded by living brain processes. Just as when we drift on habit, engage in evasion, or get things right. None of my retuning of Rand on classical physical process (including living sensory process), which I published in Objectivity in the 1990's and was likewise put forth later by Alan Gotthelf in his little book On Ayn Rand (only with my talk of independent causal 'streams' replaced with independent causal 'chains' and without remarking that he was departing from Rand) affects at all the fundamental principle permeating good epistemology that consciousness is identification (focally, of existence).

I wish to respond to Boydstum's review of my article "Check Your Presuppostions: A New Kind of Foundationalism in Objectivism" published in JARAS. ========== MY REPLY TO BOYDSTUN STEPHAN Boydstun (https://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?/topic/33990-the-presuppositionalist-argument-for-the-axioms-of-objectivism/) PRESUPPOSITION IS A KIND OF INFERENCE Presupposition is a kind of inference, according to my sources. For example, As one of the basic forms of reasoning, inference can in general be defined as a process of accepting a statement or proposition (called the conclusion) on the basis of the (possibly provisional) acceptance of one or more other statements or propositions (called the premises). Construed thus, it includes deduction, induction, and abduction. It also includes entailment, presupposition, and implicature. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110214260.397/html?lang=en) Deductive inference is entailment inference from a premise to a conclusion. For example, inference from an axiom to a theorem. Or, an immediate deduction of one axiom from another axioms, say of identity from existence or of causality from identity. Presuppositional inference is inference from a presupposer to its presupposition(s). For example, free will presupposes causality (i.e. man has free will presupposes that reality is causal since causal laws give man the means to achieve his chosen goals and since man would not have free will in an acausal world in which he would not know what could happen next. An example from Rand is that value presupposes life (i.e. man has values presupposes that man is living.) Also, according to Rand, consciousness presupposes existence (i.e. man is conscious presupposes existence exists). TWO KINDS OF FOUNDTIONALISM The definition of the two kinds of foundationalism is best done in terms of the kind of inference each uses to build the hierarchy of knowledge. Deductive foundationalism uses entailment inference from axioms that function as premises to derive the rest of knowledge, whereas presuppositional foundationalism uses presuppositional inference to derive the presuppositions on which the rest of knowledge logically depends. Deductive entailment makes derived knowledge necessary, whereas presuppositional inference makes derived knowledge possible. Deductive entailment is based on sufficient conditions that make the rest of knowledge necessary, whereas presuppositional inference is based on necessary conditions that make the rest of knowledge possible. Deductive inference is progressive because it works forward from premises to conclusion, while presuppositional inference is regressive because it works backward to presuppositions on which all knowledge logically depends. USE OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF INFERENCE The kind of foundations differ mainly in kind of inference used. Deductive foundationalism derives knowledge from axioms which I call deductive axioms because deductive inference from them entails the rest of knowledge. Presuppositional foundationalism derives the rest of knowledge from the presuppositions which I call presuppositional axioms because they are the foundations on which the rest of knowledge logically depends. EXAMPLES OF DEDUCTIVE INFERENCE AND DEDUCTIVE INFERENCE Deductive examples of inference are written in terms of deductive entailment: facts about human nature entail human values, metaphysical objectivism entails epistemological objectivism, and the grasp of existence entails consciousness. (NB: Rand did not say that existence entail consciousness. Also, Rand explicitly said that value cannot be deduced from life.) Your act of grasping that something exists implies a second inescapable fact: that you are conscious --i.e., that you are aware of what exists. Your possession of consciousness--the faculty of perceiving what exists--is a second self-evident and undeniable fact [i.e. axiom]. (Gotthelf 2000, On Ayn Rand,, 37-40) (NB: “implies” means “entails” so existence exists entails man is conscious) Presuppositional examples of inference are written in presuppositional terms such as “is a precondition of” and “presupposes”: consciousness presupposes existence and value presupposes life. Mixed examples reflect both kinds of foundationalism and are written in terms of both entailment and presupposition: METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY ARE PRESUPPOSED BY ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETIC BUT THEY ARE ALSO ENTAILED BY THEM Philosophy, according to Objectivism, consists of five branches. The two basic ones are metaphysics and epistemology... These two branches make possible a view [or theory] of the nature of man... Flowing from the above are the three evaluative branches of philosophy. (italics mine) (Peikoff 1993, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 3) (NB: “makes possible” means “is presupposed by” so metaphysics and epistemology are presupposed by the theory of man (aka metaphysics of man)) (NB: “flowing from” means “is entailed by” so metaphysics, epistemology, and the theory of man entail ethics, politics, and aesthetics) (NB: so the evaluative branches of philosophy are entailed bye the descriptive branches of philosophy) In other words, the foundational branches of metaphysics and epistemology entail the derivative branches of ethics, politics, and aesthetics; however, the derivative branches presuppose the foundational branches. RAND’S TRANSITION FROM DEDUCTIVE FOUNDATIONALISM TO PRESUPPOSITIONAL FOUNDATIONALISM I argue that Rand shifted from an early deductive foundationalism to a later presuppositional foundationalism signified by her explicit rejection of deductivism (a short name for deductive foundationalism). This shift from deductive foundationalism to presuppositional foundationalism is explained by Gotthelf. In the following passages, Allan Gotthelf (2000) explains that Rand’s philosophy developed from a deductive approach into one that rejected deductivism. She started a presentation of her ethics after the publishing of The Fountainhead, in which: The structure of the presentation is essentially deductive—from one axiom and several facts about man’s nature. The axiom is: “Man exists and must survive as man.” The fundamental facts about man’s nature are: that he is a living being, that his means of survival is reason, and that the exercise of reason is a matter of free choice. All this is said to rest on the existence of “an objective world” and the ability of reason to know it. (21) But the notion that ethics begins with an axiom comes to be rejected…[Rand’s] mature approach to the foundations of ethics [was to apply] the method of asking, in relation to a given concept, what facts of reality give rise to the need for that concept. (22) Rand’s three founding axioms are: “Existence exists,” “Man is conscious,” and “Existence is determinate.” Then comes “Existence is causal” and “Existence is objective” (called the Primacy of Existence). But Gotthelf notes, Rand did not build her philosophy deductively from axioms: “she certainly does not hold that all human knowledge is deduced, rationalist-style, from these axioms. In Aristotle’s language, she holds that these axioms are that by which we reason, not that from which we do…” (43n3, emphasis in original) Gotthelf explains that Rand’s philosophy shifted from a deductive approach to one that rejected deductivism in favor of a new, presuppositional approach in foundationalism may have occurred around 1947. (Gotthelf, Allan. 2000. On Ayn Rand. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing.) This transition in Ayn Rand's philosophy have not received the attention it deserves due to its importance to her thinking—an oversight that needs to be corrected. CONCLUDING COMMENT I argue that Objectivism needs to explain the difference between the two kinds of foundationalism, to acknowledge Rand’s change from one theory to another, and to decide which is the correct foundational theory. David Tyson