I will not die it's the world that will end


RobinReborn

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Believe it or not you've changed my mind on some things. Not sure if it's worth telling you exactly what they are.

.

I would be interested.

A...

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Greg...the solipsism comment was partly in jest.

As for being able to convince people, I don't claim any magical ability to do so but I have had some successes (more failures though). There's no use in trying to undermine the foundations of someone's philosophy, but if you grow to understand them and their values well enough, you should be able to change their mind about issues they don't have strong opinions on.

Believe it or not you've changed my mind on some things. Not sure if it's worth telling you exactly what they are.

On minor ancillary theoretical intellectual concepts, it is possible for people to be influenced by the words of others... but never their basic chosen view. Changing that is under the sole purview of the objective reality of life. for only it possess the real power of the consequences of actions.

Greg

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Greg...the solipsism comment was partly in jest.

As for being able to convince people, I don't claim any magical ability to do so but I have had some successes (more failures though). There's no use in trying to undermine the foundations of someone's philosophy, but if you grow to understand them and their values well enough, you should be able to change their mind about issues they don't have strong opinions on.

Believe it or not you've changed my mind on some things. Not sure if it's worth telling you exactly what they are.

On minor ancillary theoretical intellectual concepts, it is possible for people to be influenced by the words of others... but never their basic chosen view. Changing that is under the sole purview of the objective reality of life. for only it possess the real power of the consequences of actions.

Greg

You are ignoring the tremendous gulf between "minor" and "basic." You are also ignoring how wrongness and ignorance can back up in a person and be released by new knowledge as in an epiphany. That new knowledge can be objectively minor in itself but cause tremendous change. A very good book can represent years of work by one person but it's all yours for the reading. Atlas Shrugged took 13 years to write, the literary-philosophical culmination of the author's life. I read it over five summer days in 1963 in my sister's home in the softcover. Goodbye my being a conservative. I went over decades from being a conservative to Objectivist to libertarian-Objectivist. I stopped at left-libertarian-anarchy, but not before I realized our government is run by baboons controlled by corporations and thralldom to the flag of which I retain a little too much. That shift came when I realized El Presidente was going to invade Iraq in 2003 and there was no stopping the born-again jerk American tribalist and his American tribe. That took my Vietnam real-life army combat experience and a pile of observations out of the news feeds and a pile up of psychological-philosphical knowledge including the general tribal-social orientation that can feed on war and dish out war in turn and call it "glory," all out of a basic biological social need and duty the intensity of which varies individual to individual. It's social hanging. Even the most radical, anarchical libertarian likes to hang with his fellows--and do and fight with them, even if the fighting is not literal. "Hang together or hang separately" knows individualism isn't enough for survival. Many of such even hang out at OL.

Have a tribe, need a tribe, control a tribe or the tribe will control you--so use your brains or or suffer the consequences of lack of critical thinking or lack of enough integrity to honor what you thus know by what you say and do and respecting whom, what and whom's what. Everyone is a tribalist with many tribes under his or her belt of differing but interlocking values varying in place and intensity and value--the value of valuing--through a lifetime of growing and change, experiences and thinking and just plain being. Each tribe is a story, has a story and is identified both by story and the evoking of a bonding emotion in spite of flat out plain individualism. Thinking is individualism but it's only good for long-term survival through social existence and finding and making your home. The basic tribal unit is the family commonly understood as man, woman and their children then with lessening intensity as an extended family less necessary today for many with the rise of industrial society and not living on a farm. This last has gone too far, thanks to the welfare-providing (war-providing), leveling, fulminating gargantuan bubble of a state which is going to blow. Stand back. Stand aside. Don't go inside.

--Brant

rant--pant, pant!

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I started when I was an adult.

--Brant

You're not the only one, Brant.

Pot is a 14 billion dollar industry in California, larger than any other agricultural crop, and California's Central Valley grows half the food consumed in the US. Add to that the tons of pot smuggled in from Mexico by the drug cartels and distributed by the gangs.

Greg

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You are ignoring the tremendous gulf between "minor" and "basic."

"Basic" is that upon which everything else rests,

and it's the only one that really matters.

All the rest is merely "fluff". :wink:

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Greg:

I was under the impression that you are aware of the medicinal as well as psychotropic aspects of a broad spectrum of plants/herbs/weeds.

I never thought of even asking you if you voted in any of the propositions of California.

However, if you did, would you vote for the legalization of that plant, or, are you agnostic on voting?

A...

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  • 1 year later...
On 5/17/2015 at 5:01 AM, moralist said:

This is what helped me to understand. Your world is everything and everyone with whom you come into direct personal contact. Your world is everything over which you exercise direct control and consequently it is also that for which you bear direct personal responsibility

These real world interactions of what you do and the consequences they spin into motion form your view of your world.

Each person's world overlaps with the worlds of others.

When your consciousness of your world ends with your physical death... so ends your world.

 

Well put.

That's exactly how it is.

We are wholly subjective beings and perceive the objective world subjectively. Our subjective perceptions form our world. That's why there's more than one.

The more our many subjective perceptions of our world agree with that one objective reality of the world... the better our lives are.

 

But the death of somebody IS reality.

That's not actually you... but rather it's others' subjective perceptions of you.

Well... that's because we're subjective beings.

You forgot one small detail...

You ARE humanity.

So that means that you are also the future of humanity. So don't squander your life. Make it count. :)

Once you die...

All-Bets-Are-Off.gif

Greg :wink:

Hello, I signed up as a new member just to answer to this.

I am disturbed by relativism in the world for it creates havoc. It is not in our interest to coexist in chaotic social conditions therefore we must adhere to absolutism at least in terms of moral values. Ayn Rand helps a lot in that respect. 

Whatever good comes from our civilisation derives from Aristotelian philosophy and its derivatives (Ayn Rand's Objectivism) .

When people adheres to relativism, everything goes south. Altruism, for example, is a relativist's virtue (which it cannot be, for all virtues must come from the self and be applied to the self). Altruism (and self-sacrifice) cannot be applied to the same individual that practices it. In other words it is a unidirectional act. Unlike altruism virtues that are universal like love, respect and philanthropy, CAN BE APLIED to the self. As a matter of fact they should FIRSTLY applied to the self. Altruism can't, hence there's no meaning in including it to the list of universal virtues. A virtue cannot in itself foster the elimination of the virtuous individual. 

Moreover, If reality isn't objective then a person that falls from a skyscraper and hits the concrete below with his/her head first it's not certain that he/she dies. Unfortunately that is never the case. 

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Reality is objective. Valuing by individuals is subjective. However, man as a concept--the idea of man--needs objective values such as food and water, etc. but existing only as an idea cannot value.

If you have plently of water you'd value it as X, but if you had little and no prospect of getting more you might value it as XXXXXX. You might say since water is an objective value to man as a man it's an objective value to you, but that's all abstract. Greg focuses on physicality, on acting.

If you were looking for Objectivism's take on this subject, I am not representing it except coincidentally.

--Brant

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1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Reality is objective. Valuing by individuals is subjective. However, man as a concept--the idea of man--needs objective values such as food and water, etc. but existing only as an idea cannot value.

If you have plently of water you'd value it as X, but if you had little and no prospect of getting more you might value it as XXXXXX. You might say since water is an objective value to man as a man it's an objective value to you, but that's all abstract. Greg focuses on physicality, on acting.

If you were looking for Objectivism's take on this subject, I am not representing it except coincidentally.

--Brant

scarcity makes the heart grow fonder and the price grow larger.

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'Valuing by individuals is subjective".

Ow, Brant, you've eliminated the O'ist ethics in one swipe. If his life is of objective value to him, then by a conceptual chain all the way up - e.g. to the person he chose to marry, to his specific, chosen hobby, etc. etc. and to his need of water at any given time - must all be *objective* values - although *personal* to him. Perhaps you agree, romantic love is an objective value. Productivity, too, and so with leisure activity, and the rest of the general categories. Then how does the woman one chooses (and the career) out of many, instantly become a subjective value, when (and because) it's chosen? I think that's confusing the particular with its category.

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On 5/16/2015 at 0:43 AM, Selene said:

Do you have the contextual paragraphs around it?

A...

Regardless of who said it, it is pure nonsense.....

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9 hours ago, anthony said:

'Valuing by individuals is subjective".

Ow, Brant, you've eliminated the O'ist ethics in one swipe. If his life is of objective value to him, then by a conceptual chain all the way up - e.g. to the person he chose to marry, to his specific, chosen hobby, etc. etc. and to his need of water at any given time - must all be *objective* values - although *personal* to him. Perhaps you agree, romantic love is an objective value. Productivity, too, and so with leisure activity, and the rest of the general categories. Then how does the woman one chooses (and the career) out of many, instantly become a subjective value, when (and because) it's chosen? I think that's confusing the particular with its category.

You subjectively value objective values. All valuing qua valuing is subjective. An objective value to you--your loved one--is not necessarily an objective value to the other fellow. In all cases of values and valuing it's all in people's heads. Romantic love is not an objective value to a priest. It's a de-humanizing cop out to say the priest is not a man qua man. Man qua man is really man qua Randian man. I guess an Objectivist has to have Objectivist values but that's no basis for objective values. Everybody has objective values constantly fluctuating in intensity and importance to the individual human organism thus he subjectively values.

--Brant

pant, pant

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On 5/16/2015 at 1:38 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Bob,

Rand was referring to her perspective of existence, not the metaphysical fact of it. She said specifically she would not be there to observe the world, so FROM THAT PERSPECTIVE (which is implied, not stated explicitly), the world would also end.

She chose to live her life within that frame rather than believing she was a poor suffering critter who was a victim of the universe.

Michael

So, Bob, why is it nonsense?

--Brant

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On 5/16/2015 at 4:38 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Bob,

Rand was referring to her perspective of existence, not the metaphysical fact of it. She said specifically she would not be there to observe the world, so FROM THAT PERSPECTIVE (which is implied, not stated explicitly), the world would also end.

She chose to live her life within that frame rather than believing she was a poor suffering critter who was a victim of the universe.

Michael

Sure.  Bury your head in the sand and the predators won't see you,  right?

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33 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

So, Bob, why is it nonsense?

--Brant

Because the world exists independent of any of us.  We come, we go and the cosmos  goes on. 

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1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Because the world exists independent of any of us.  We come, we go and the cosmos  goes on. 

Why is it nonsense apropos Michael's evaluation of your position? You know--what I quoted? I quoted it for a reason and appended my question to the quote.

--Brant

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I always thought Rand meant that she will no longer perceive.  So "I will not die" because she holds her own life as her ultimate value, not death in any way; and "it's the world that will end" is the consciousness axiom and also her attribute of her own consciousness, that to be aware means to be aware of something, so to not perceive, isn't to be aware of anything at all, so the world, ends.

edit:  Ah, I'm seeing Rand said some of this already in the Tom Snyder interview.  Well.. anyway..  guess I'll read the entire thread now  :):blush:

edit2:  And jeez, MSK right above with what Ba'al quoted...  and I haven't even started drinking yet  :blush:beer-smiley.gif~c200

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When you die you can't know you died since after death there is no memory of going into the black....

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  • 1 year later...

I just came across this thread - I don't know who the philosopher was, but the brilliant classicist and poet AE Housman wrote this which was obviously based on him (or her!!)

"Good people, do you love your lives,/And have you ears for sense?

I have a knife like other knives, that cost me thirteen pence.

I need but stick it in my heart, and down will come the sky,

And earth's foundations will depart. And all you folk will die."

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  • 2 years later...
On 5/16/2015 at 4:17 PM, ThatGuy said:

"She had often quote the saying: 'It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end.' Her world was coming to an end." -Barbara Branden. THE PASSION OF AYN RAND, pg. 403

James Day interview:

James Day: "How do you, as an Objectivist, feel about death?"
Ayn Rand: "It doesn't concern me in the least, because I won't be here to know it. The worst thing about death, and what I regard as the most horrible human tragedy, is to lose someone you love. That is terribly hard. But your own death? If you're finished, you're finished. My purpose is not to worry about death but to live life now, here on earth."

From a Peikoff podcast:
Episode 53 (06:54)
"'Ayn Rand once said that her view on death was something she had heard from a poet whose name she could not remember.' (The poet, by the way, is Badger Clark, and the poem was called "The Westener.") 'And the line she quoted was, "The world will end the day I die."
 

 

On 5/16/2015 at 4:21 PM, ThatGuy said:

As to the source of the quote, this was suggested, at the Forum for Ayn Rand Fans:

http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?showtopic=13350

The closest passage I've found in the Greek philosophers is this one, from Epicurus's letter to Menoecius:


"Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience ..."
[quoted in Jason L. Saunders, ed., Greek and Roman Philosophy after Aristotle, p. 50]

This thought was repeated by several followers of Epicurus, e.g. Lucretius in Book 3 of On the Nature of Things:

"From all this it follows that death is nothing to us and no concern of ours, since our tenure of the mind is mortal."
[ibid., p. 36]

and

"Epicurus stated his view as: ''Where death is not, I am; where death is, I am not.' This is essentially Rand's view."

 

Taking a third-person perspective on oneself, one can be in advance conscious of one’s death, one’s full stop. In the first-person perspective, full ending of any object of consciousness whatsoever is collapse of both together, conscious process and object. I like better the third-person perspective, which is the only perspective with real interest for one's endpoint. Value is here on this earth beyond one's own life. Look to here and to the tomorrows of here all through one’s own last look at all.*

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