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Objectivist's View on Religion

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Plasmatic, I appreciate the link. Reading through however, I've stumbled upon what I feel is a direct contradiction. I'm wondering if you putting this into more layman's terms will help me understand the argument the author is providing.

In one speech, we have the following:

There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards.

However, directly above it, we have this:

An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality...

I don't understand, if an emotion is a response to reality, how can it tell you nothing about reality? The mere fact that it is a response seems to indicate that emotions tell the mind something about the reality he inhabits.

The "fact of reality" that your emotions are "estimates" of are your evaluations which are based on your "standards". The only way to determine those standards and their validity,is a process of volitional introspection/reason. This "reality" is an epistemic one as opposed to "out there".

So the emotion only tells you that you have values. It cannot tell you what they are or if they are rational/justified. They are "caused" by your explicit and implicit value judgements.Simply put emotions are effects of your values.

Now consider this quote in relation to the above:

You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.

But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.

You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?

Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don't reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn't, you don't.

Philosophy Who Needs It

Ayn Rand

Are your emotional responses based on a values you chose by a "conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation"?

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dclynch, just remember that necessity doesn't imply existence. I may feel the necessity to be comforted by the thought that there are fairies in the garden- but it's not going to make said fairies appear. I actually once had a friend who for a time bought into the whole 'Otherkind' delusion and thought she was a fairy for real. I told her "Hon, you can believe whatever you want out of necessity, but it isn't going to happen just because you need it to be true. You're not going to shrink and fly off to Neverland, and that's one guarantee I am willing to bet all of my money on."

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dclynch, just remember that necessity doesn't imply existence. I may feel the necessity to be comforted by the thought that there are fairies in the garden- but it's not going to make said fairies appear.
Presumably you meant that feelings don't imply existence.
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