Kallikanzarid

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  • Birthday 10/13/1989

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  1. Could you provide some examples and elaborate? TIA. I haven't read Kant's works yet, so I'm going by Wikipedia and what others have told me. Like Rand, Kant didn't like the skepticism of Hume, and he tried to address it in Critique of Pure Reason. "It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof." More interesting are Kant's views on substance: "Kant drops the empirical psychology [of Hume] and makes it a matter of a priori psychology, that only by employing certain categories could we have experience as of a physical world. It is only by understanding the world as possessing enduring spatio-temporal objects, which enter into causal relations with each other (that is, it is only by applying the categories of substance and causation) that we can have intelligible experience. Substances—that is, a framework of stable, enduring objects—are essential, but the source of this necessity lies not how the world is in itself, but in the framework which we are obliged to impose." (SEP, as quoted in the second link). Rand's crude attempts at introducing "identity" into her axioms seem like an attempt to do a similar thing: claim that substance is not altogether inaccessible to human mind or senses. Now, so far I side with Hume. I just can't make sense of substance, it seems like something fictional and not necessary for reasoning about our observations and making predictions. But I find it amusing that Rand, despite chastising Kant left and right, agrees with him on fundamentals. I imagine, there *are* a lot of differences between them, but they shouldn't be overplayed.
  2. studiodekadent, but you're the one who started about free will. I went on to try and dismantle your arguments, so for that purpose I adopted the stance of determinism. While all fundamental physical laws are deterministic, and thus suggest that reality is deterministic, I don't think we're justified in assuming that physical laws are the laws that govern "reality in itself". As far as observations are concerned (and thus, for all practical purposes), yes, determinism in between measurements is highly likely. But extending this to a metaphysical claim is beyond human grasp, if it's at all meaningful. This is especially true considering how sensitive unstable systems are to initial conditions. We can always say that non-determinism is hiding in the (-n)th order of magnitude and it will still influence the behavior of these systems in a significant way. But since our expectations of future observations are not affected by choosing determinism or non-determinism, the point is ultimately moot.
  3. > What the hell am I going to do with you? Since it's an Ayn Rand forum, rape is a natural choice
  4. studiodekadent, > By the same token, that quote renders determinism a pseudo-proposition as well! Yes! whYNOT, Rand's characterization of skepticism as philosophy is dead wrong. For example, Hume is considered one of the most prominent skeptics, yet he is also an empiricist, his theory of knowledge is far from what you claim it to be. > The assault on man's conceptual faculty has been accelerating since Kant, widening the breach between man's mind and reality. Again, dead wrong. In fact, some aspects of Kant's epistemological/metaphysical views are remarkably similar to Rand's.
  5. whYNOT, I don't see how what you've said is relevant to what you've quoted, or this discussion in general. And I assure you, your characterization of skepticism is dead wrong.
  6. Michael, > You are considering the mind's system (i.e., "formal theories") as separate from reality--separate from observing reality, existing in some kind of imaginary realm of formal rules and only there is where everything has to work, be proven, validated, etc. They exist as languages. The reason why we need formal languages is because informal ones often lead us to make mistakes. > To Rand, the mind exists within reality. I did not claim otherwise. > Tautology as a form of folly ("it tells us nothing about reality") does not really apply when looking from her perspective. I agree that tautologies are useful (I do love math). > Existing while imagining nonexistence is a form of folly to her. I'd like to discuss this in detail. I don't think we have basis to assert existence as something more than just a tool of reasoning about our perception. Rand's argument "Being aware is being aware of something" seems like an abuse of grammar to me, because she takes a common pattern of English language (something as a placeholder for an object) and then implies that if there is a placeholder, clearly there must be an object. Yet if you apply Ayer's weak verification criterion, you'll see that Rand's assertion doesn't have literal significance. > Having identity and questioning the law of identity is folly to her. This "identity" being the vaguest thing ever, I don't think there is much meaning in this claim. Law of identity is a simple mathematical convention which reflects our desire to use symbols consistently. Rand's "identity"... I don't know what the hell it is! Since the meaning of the word "identity" is so radically different in two parts of the sentence, I doubt that it's meaningful. It looks like a hand-waving trick that I complained about earlier.
  7. tmj, you are incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_(mathematics)
  8. > Yes, "hand-waving" - or finger-pointing, as MSK remarks. The rest you've seen in the discussion above, roughly that you had to have existence, identity and consciousness to make the query you made. Trying to refute them is to try to refute yourself. It's a bold statement, considering how vague this "identity" is. > while the Law of Identity subsumes all concrete, analytic, a priori truths. Law of identity, as it is commonly formulated (A = A for any symbol A) is not nearly enough to develop non-trivial formal theories. And since analytic truths are tautologies which reflect the way we're using language, it's hard to see how metaphysics is related to them at all.
  9. Brant, could you please express yourself clearer? I find it hard to understand what you're writing. > Free will can be defined into and out of existence, but as such does represent something. I don't understand this sentence. > Failure to acknowledge that and leave that label on that automatically raises the question of what a determinist is all about in the search of a "truth" with no apparent utility except implicit if not explicit denigration of those "choice" making abilities. This is a completely unfounded assertion. > This all spills over into morality and ethics--the heart of Objectivism--a place you don't seem inclined to go to any more than I'm inclined to go to epistemology, but it's all related, so there you go and here I come. Didn't Rand say she's primarily an advocate not of egoism, but of reason? > Go ahead, talk about determinism and ethics and find out why determinism is incompatible with ethics and philosophy generally--i.e., you'll find it harder to make an argument when you so expose your flanks to broadsides and boarders. The first part requires elaboration, the second part I didn't understand. > Deterministic "choices" won't crowd me out for those aren't the only choices and a lot of choices were "determined" by previous choices that weren't. In fact you can chicken and egg a lot of it back to babyhood. Then we hit biological determinism, the physical development of the brain and the role of a thinking consciousness in de-determination of sundry influences that might be de-determinable. I will be a criminal. No, I won't be a criminal. I will think. No, "Don't bother me, don't bother me don't bother me!" Etc. Ayn Rand didn't write a book called Human Action but she wrote about the subject incessantly. Why? Was she deluded? This and what comes after that is completely unintelligible to me.
  10. studiodekadent, since you've showed up, I'd like to continue our discussion of free will vs. determinism, even though it's off topic here. I think I've found exactly the kind of argument that captures my problem with Randian free will. From Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic: "We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition [lacking any literal significance]." Since there is no prediction to be made from either determinism or free will hypotheses, it's only fair to consider them pseudo-propositions in this sense.
  11. whYNOT, so Rand holds "identity" to be something self-evident and not requiring explanation? I beg to differ! It looks more like a vague hand-waving tool than a legitimate concept.
  12. Xray, if you posit that there is a reality independent of our senses, then it makes sense to ask questions about it separately from the questions about what we observe. Metaphysics is usually about trying to answer these questions. If there is no way to answer these questions, it's fair to ask whether metaphysics is meaningful at all.
  13. Brant, determinism doesn't mean disrespect for choices. In no practical sense does it matter if your choice could in theory be precomputed ten years ago, it's still something *you* decided to do. And I don't think that fear and disgust should stop us from a pursuit of truth.
  14. Michael, thanks! I think I'll stick around to just discuss things, without insisting on getting answers to my questions. I asked those in OO.net where I'm more likely to get hardcore Objectivist answers. Roger, thank you for typing in a lengthy reply. I mostly agree with you! However, I think that the concept of conditional causality needs further elucidation, right now I don't understand what you mean by it, exactly.