Arguments from Non-Reality

[ctrl y]

Aren't Objectivists obliged to call the following two passages arguments from non-reality?

Try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.

~Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics"

Assuming that a species has organs capable of the requisite range of discrimination and the mind to interpret what it perceives, such differences in sensory evidence are merely different starting points leading to the same ultimate conclusions. Imagine - to use a deliberately bizarre example of Miss Rand's - a species of thinking atoms; they have some kind of sensory apparatus but, given their size, no eyes or tactile organs and therefore no color or touch perception. Such creatures, let us say, perceive other atoms directly, as we do people; they perceive in some form we cannot imagine. For them, the fact that matter is atomic is not a theory reach by inference, but a self-evidency. Such atomic perception, however, is no more valid than our own.

~ OPAR, 43

[Jake]

No.

I've never heard the phrase "argument from non-reality" used as a standard term to describe a certain logical fallacy, but if I understand your meaning:

- The first quote demonstrates that one's facing life or death is a necessity if one is to value. She doesn't say "There is an indestructible robot...", she says "If there were, then it could not value."

- The second quote seems like a response to some other idea, and I don't have OPAR with me to see what that idea was. Regardless, it is a demonstration using an imaginary, but not impossible, scenario. I think it shows that certain facts are self-evident, not because they are metaphysically more fundamental, but because they are at our level of perception.

[Grames]

Not arguments, illustrations or as Jake said demonstrations. The hypotheticals highlight the cause-effect relationships she was writing about for the purpose of clarity in communication and are by no means proofs of anything.