Is Objectivism Falsifiable or Merely Explanatory?

[Guyau]

Mikkel and Ellen,

The clause “or the survival of their species” is indeed part of my own view of the fundamental nature of life, which part Rand left out of the fundamental conception of life she selected for base of her ethical egoism. The part she selected is correct; it is just seriously incomplete.

Like Rand I do not care about biota below the level of the living cell in considering biological bases for morality. Living systems, single-cell or multicellular (and possibly organic organizations formed even above these), are the plausible arenas for value in the world so far as I am concerned. Not all such cellular, living systems take the form of individual organisms, and Rand ignores this. That is not a significant omission, because the case of life we are after for ethical theory will in the end be the human animal, which comes as individual organism.

The animal kingdom is replete with living systems that come in the form of individual organisms. All of them, including humans, exist only because of organism reproduction and the nature and niches of their species. In the case of humans today, reproduction is more and more under intelligent control. And the many scientific and technological advances that have made individual life better have often made the future of the species more secure. Nature remains a giant, as when a tsunami wipes out 300,000 people, but the humans have advanced enough to have spread their kind to several billion.

There is considerable harmony between the interests of individuals and their species. However, I think it is a very significant omission to leave reproduction out of the basic definition of life pertinent to human nature basing ethics. It is not that every individual needs to work on producing future generations. Our species can afford specialties and different balances in individual life. It is that there are no human individuals who were not nurtured and brought into being a communicating and thinking individual by a family or larger community. Our intellectual and emotional natures are importantly tied to the social and reproductive nature of the animal kind that is the human species.

I have not come to the end of my formulation of ethical theory correctly informed by biological nature. The finished system, should I reach it, will be somewhat different than Rand’s.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Related: A, B, C

[Mikkel]

Hi Stephen and Ellen

Let me explain something, I am not an Objectivist. I have been informed by Objectivism and I accept this:

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/free_will.html#order_1

In other words I accept rational self-interest, but I don't accept that for any or all contexts, the only ultimate value I can hold is my own life. Why??? Because if I have choice, but can't choose any other ultimate value that my own life, then I have no choice at all.

Mikkel

[Guyau]

Mikkel,

Rand holds that it is right to always hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value. She holds that whether to do so is open to one’s choice. It does not happen fully automatically in the case of human beings. In fact humans can bring themselves around to not valuing, indeed to disvaluing, all human life.

Her conception of holding others as valuable allows the possibility of simultaneously valuing them and retaining oneself as one’s ultimate value. She even carries this so far as to portray her fictional personifications of ideal man (both in Fountainhead and in Atlas) as ready to lay down their life to save a loved one. Her conception of what is a human life and what is in the proper interest of such life allows that. Her conception does not allow as right choosing to live for the sake of another, whether loved one or stranger. She argues that an attempt to do so cannot be fully implemented, but it can be partially implemented, can be chosen, and should not be chosen.

I'm glad you think self-interest is good. It is good, genuinely good, by-itself good. It is not wrong and not without moral significance. It is morally good. That is something I first learned from Ayn Rand.

[anthony]

Hi Stephen and Ellen Let me explain something, I am not an Objectivist. I have been informed by Objectivism and I accept this:

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/free_will.html#order_1

In other words I accept rational self-interest, but I don't accept that for any or all contexts, the only ultimate value I can hold is my own life. Why??? Because if I have choice, but can't choose any other ultimate value that my own life, then I have no choice at all. Mikkel

Its a hierarchy, isn't it? Without 'Life', your life would not exist; without your life, your values would

not exist; without your values, that particular person could not be loved, respected - valued - by you.

Each, a prerequisite for the next. 'Life', and your life, are metaphysically "given", all the rest is choice.

Welcome to OL, Mikkel!

[Mikkel]

Thanks for the welcome, whYNOT.

To the both of you, whYNOT and Stephen, will answer you both by starting here:

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/free_will.html#order_1

When somebody says/writes something, you always allow them room for the usage of poetic style, rhetoric and everyday usage of words, but you also always strip away that and see if you can make sense of what they say in context of their individual worldview; i.e. their philosophical system.

For the above quote the keep part is ""free will"" and how it relates to "is your mind’s freedom to think or not". I interpret it all the way back/down to existence exists as I as a word/concept is a placeholder word for caused and determined natural processes in my brain. My brain is me and I as a word am not a case of ontological dualism/idealism. Volition is not a free ride, I am not free to do anything, rather I must if I want to live think in order to avoid dying and thus live up to "Nature, to be command, must be obeyed". So existence exists; reality is objective and awareness as awareness is epiphenomenal; reality is for us humans nature as life as a natural, caused and determined process; different life forms; among those humans as a specific life form with a tabula rasa brain; we don’t have an automated, free ride life like other life forms; in biological jargon we survive in a cognitive niche.

So “your only freedom” is the choice between life and death and not the freedom of an irrational second hander/looter as there are no free rides. In other words I accept(obey nature) in that I accept I don’t have a free ride and I am not outside objective reality; i.e. I have been “given” the dual option of think Or die.

More later if real life permits.

With regards

Mikkel

[anthony]

Thanks for the welcome, whYNOT.

To the both of you, whYNOT and Stephen, will answer you both by starting here:

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

http://aynrandlexico...ll.html#order_1

When somebody says/writes something, you always allow them room for the usage of poetic style, rhetoric and everyday usage of words, but you also always strip away that and see if you can make sense of what they say in context of their individual worldview; i.e. their philosophical system.

Mikkel

Mikkel,

Whew! Is that all?

Am I glad Stephen is around. I'd not do this justice, if I attempted a response.

I agree (only sticking to your first part) that Rand would often write poetically, but I would advise against relegating it to simple rhetoric.

With "soul", I think she meant it literally - just not in the mystical sense.

"Man is a being of self-made soul" - etc.

Which I connect to Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

I think that what he and she induced - almost intuited - is completely synonomous with discoveries being made lately in neuroscience - "neural pathway mapping", or somesuch. Very simply, that each of us not only uses one 'route' in our brain habitually - BUT - we also have the capability to consciously re-direct a thought along another route.

I'll stop at that since I do not have this info at hand, presently, and I haven't a great

memory. But it is exciting.

You see the significance though, if it's true: A validation of volition.

Also, self-made consciousness and character (a soul) is not so poetic, after all.

The cherry on top - let's not forget that the philosophers got there first, inductively!

[caroljane]

Mikkel, do you work in airport security by any chance?

[Selene]

Mikkel:

A belated welcome to OL.

Your profile states that you were a "professional soldier." Whom did you serve for? Or, were you a "Soldier of Fortune?"

Adam

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mikkel,

Let me chime in and welcome you to OL.

Dane?

Michael

[Mikkel]

Hi daunce

No, I work at a high school for adults, 7th to 12th grade. On the side I teach applied ethics for people studying to work within the nursing/child-caring/schoolteacher/social-worker fields; i.e. how with proper ethics to care in the broad sense for those, who can't care fully for themselves.

Hi Adam. 5 years of service, basic infantry, specialized as a medic and then a NBC-"calculator" (to track the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and calculate the expected loses, military only of course). Never saw active duty.

Hi Michael. Yes, Dane.

Hi whYNOT.

As I see it, for "we also have the capability to consciously re-direct a thought along another route" we don't re-direct; we are parts of our brains, which can influence in a limited sense other parts. In short it is the difference between I control my brain versus I am my brain or rather my brain is me.

More later, whYNOT.

Mikkel

[Mikkel]

Primarily to Stephen and whYNOT, but in effect to all.

http://www.atlassociety.org/sites/default/files/BigDiagram.pdf

Life and Happiness: (2.1) 1) For any living organism, its life is its ultimate value.

That is neither fully true nor fully false, it is a half-truth.

Life in general requires time, space, energy/matter and happens as replication through organism. The latter is a two factor explanation where you can't reduce neither away and where you need both to understand life. Examples; worker and soldier ants are as single organisms expandable; female octopuses who care for their offspring to the effect that they die themselves; salmon in short.

Now the "rule" goes like this; evolution doesn't "care" about the single organism, it "cares" about the single organism as a part of the specie AND replication.

But now it gets even weirder, remember caused and determined versus/and learning. Automated learning in "higher" life forms is a form of replication (non-genes), which are pasted between members of a species (primarily, as there are cross species examples) and which facilitates the single organism and groups of organisms as a part of the specie(s) AND replication.

So with this in mind, we can explain how irrationals survive and replicate; they rely on automated learning from others and as long as what they learn work within evolution it works.

Examples:

- The Bible: Go forth and multiply. (It doesn't matter that they do so in honor of God, because it fits replication).

- The Spaghetti Monster: If someone eats, drinks and multiply, because the Spaghetti Monster orders it. (Ditto)

The general "rule" is this - evolution doesn't "care" if automated learning is false as long as it meets the core requirements of evolution.

So here is the welfare grandmother - irrational as hell, but still a product of nature, nurture and culture. She got a lot of children with a lot of different men, her daughters continue as their mother and her sons seek out women like her. They are living as looters, second handers and what not. In biological terms they are behavioral parasites, but as longs as their biological sub-niche is there, they replicate despite harming themselves and others.

All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality. (My bold)

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/logic.html#order_1

More later if real life permits.

Mikkel

[Selene]

Hi Adam. 5 years of service, basic infantry, specialized as a medic and then a NBC-"calculator" (to track the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and calculate the expected loses, military only of course). Never saw active duty.

Mikkel:

Thanks. This was for the Danish army? Part of NATO?

Adam

[Mikkel]

Adam:

Yes, Danish army under NATO during the Cold War.

Mikkel

[Selene]

Adam:

Yes, Danish army under NATO during the Cold War.

Mikkel

Mikkel:

Thank you for your service.

Adam

[Mikkel]

Adam:

Thanks.

Related to Ayn Rand's Ideal Man who is willing to die for those, he love and respect, I don't love you as I love my dear ones, but in the abstract I love and respect you as a part of the group I have chosen to belong to; i.e the western world with its imperfect democracies/republics for which they could get better, yet also worse. So for those who would attack that and make it worse, I would sit in my foxhole and accept that it could cost me my life because I also love and respect you as a part of the group I belong to.

Yes, it is absurd on some level, but as a social animal, i.e. individuals who live in groups, I accept that and will stand by my group, because I have chosen it so.

Mikkel

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mikkel,

I don't find it absurd at all. In find it noble at root.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

Hi whYNOT.

As I see it, for "we also have the capability to consciously re-direct a thought along another route" we don't re-direct; we are parts of our brains, which can influence in a limited sense other parts. In short it is the difference between I control my brain versus I am my brain or rather my brain is me.

More later, whYNOT.

Mikkel

And why could it not be that you can control yourself?

Learning to control yourself in a new way is always difficult... learning how to ride a bike, for example, but it's no different than, say, learning how to act on camera, learning how to speak a new language or learning how to sell.

When we learn how to control ourselves in new ways we learn in breakthroughs, opposed to a steady progression.

[Mikkel]

Mikkel,

I don't find it absurd at all. In find it noble at root.

Michael

Thanks Michael.

The absurd comes from this Scandinavian cultural trait: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

Mikkel

[Mikkel]

Hi whYNOT.

As I see it, for "we also have the capability to consciously re-direct a thought along another route" we don't re-direct; we are parts of our brains, which can influence in a limited sense other parts. In short it is the difference between I control my brain versus I am my brain or rather my brain is me.

More later, whYNOT.

Mikkel

And why could it not be that you can control yourself?

Learning to control yourself in a new way is always difficult... learning how to ride a bike, for example, but it's no different than, say, learning how to act on camera, learning how to speak a new language or learning how to sell.

When we learn how to control ourselves in new ways we learn in breakthroughs, opposed to a steady progression.

To the bold part (my bold) it revolves around how you explain you as mind/consciousness in relationship to this:

The basic metaphysical issue that lies at the root of any system of philosophy [is] the primacy of existence or the primacy of consciousness.

The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).

The source of this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, i.e., between the perceiver and the perceived (thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal). This crucial distinction is not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/primacy_of_existence_vs_primacy_of_consciousness.html#order_1

There are other parts in Ayn Rand's writings but this captures the crucial part. In practice it means this; take any person with a functioning brain and how this person understands and acts in reality happens as a part of reality in that person's brain. I.e. the brain is and controls consciousness and not the other way around. In practice it means how different parts of the brain interact with other parts of the brain. So I can control myself with volition means I as parts in my brain use different parts of my brain as opposed to someone who doesn't use volition and/or my brain work differently.

In short volition is not "free will", volition is a certain way some brains function as opposed to other brains.

Mikkel

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mikkel,

To be clear, Ayn Rand always used volition and free will as synonyms.

That's the way I have always understood her.

Now there are wonderful writers for the general public like Daniel Kahneman and David Rock and many others explaining advances in neuroscience and empirical psychology and how to use them, but back when she wrote, this stuff was mostly speculation.

There was Skinner and the behaviorists, I guess, but they practically made a secular religion out of the scientific method and got weird.

It's funny, but it took someone else (Eben Pagan) to point out to me how Nathaniel Branden's later work, specifically the sentence completion technique used in a daily 5% increase in awareness and intent manner, presents a great method for literally increasing the scope and activity of what you call volition.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

Mikkel, my question was rhetorical. We do control ourselves. It's just simpler to look at it like that opposed to us controlling our brains... but like I said, there is a learning process to self-control.

[anthony]

Primarily to Stephen and whYNOT, but in effect to all.

http://www.atlassoci.../BigDiagram.pdf

Life and Happiness: (2.1) 1) For any living organism, its life is its ultimate value.

That is neither fully true nor fully false, it is a half-truth.

Life in general requires time, space, energy/matter and happens as replication through organism. The latter is a two factor explanation where you can't reduce neither away and where you need both to understand life. Examples; worker and soldier ants are as single organisms expandable; female octopuses who care for their offspring to the effect that they die themselves; salmon in short.

Now the "rule" goes like this; evolution doesn't "care" about the single organism, it "cares" about the single organism as a part of the specie AND replication.

But now it gets even weirder, remember caused and determined versus/and learning. Automated learning in "higher" life forms is a form of replication (non-genes), which are pasted between members of a species (primarily, as there are cross species examples) and which facilitates the single organism and groups of organisms as a part of the specie(s) AND replication.

Mikkel

Mikkel,

Well, nature certainly doesn't "care" which specie makes it, or dies away.

Man and the sea slug have equal 'value'.

In biological terms we are less well equipped than all other life-forms that have

survived so far - simply because man possesses no instinct for survival, no hard-wired

command to further his life. Every step is a choice for him.

Also, nature doesn't "care" for the single entity of a specie - individual man, here.

Each of us is no more than a gene-carrier.

Which indicates what? That man's only strength, his rationality and consciousness,

has to be fully applied to his survival as species - which means each individual man should find

value in his life, and apply it to his own survival and thriving.

Unlike other organisms, we lack a collective will or collective consciousness.

You mentioned "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"- earlier.

The "commanded" is what counts (the purpose and the primary), I think; the "obeyed", the means.

Would you agree?

[william.scherk]

imply because man possesses no instinct for survival, no hard-wired command to further his life. Every step is a choice for him.

An aphoristic thought. I would add that though there are no 'instincts' for survival, no 'hard-wired' command as told to us by the Holy Books and the Seer, it is possible to argue that a baby without Suck or Cry, an infant without Scream (and big eyes that make him or her look like an adorable precious little lovable puppy), a mother without Oxytocin, a toddler without Learn Learn Ask Hound Why Why Why No No I Won't, a teen without shame or fear or clannish feelings, a young adult without speech or community ... without all these non-instinctive things that may or may not be chosen consciously, without emotion, without Big Cute Eyes and Sex Appeal and Rutting Desires and Nesting Hormones (as with the mountain vole), humans would be well and truly fucked.

As it is, we overran the world and killed that pesky passenger pigeon. I think we can be trusted to expand right to the cliff edge and well beyond, whatever the bycatch or losses to socialism.

And I say this as a guy who clings to rationality like Molly to the life-raft.

[anthony]

imply because man possesses no instinct for survival, no hard-wired command to further his life. Every step is a choice for him.

An aphoristic thought. I would add that though there are no 'instincts' for survival, no 'hard-wired' command as told to us by the Holy Books and the Seer, it is possible to argue that a baby without Suck or Cry, an infant without Scream (and big eyes that make him or her look like an adorable precious little lovable puppy), a mother without Oxytocin, a toddler without Learn Learn Ask Hound Why Why Why No No I Won't, a teen without shame or fear or clannish feelings, a young adult without speech or community ... without all these non-instinctive things that may or may not be chosen consciously, without emotion, without Big Cute Eyes and Sex Appeal and Rutting Desires and Nesting Hormones (as with the mountain vole), humans would be well and truly fucked.

As it is, we overran the world and killed that pesky passenger pigeon. I think we can be trusted to expand right to the cliff edge and well beyond, whatever the bycatch or losses to socialism.

And I say this as a guy who clings to rationality like Molly to the life-raft.

A male lion will often eat his young.

"Instinct"? I don't know. Human parents can be unspeakably cruel, too.

Man possesses the instinct to gang up on the weak and helpless, and often does.

Which instinct to uphold, which to discard? By what standards? some other involuntary instinct, like empathy?

I choose to stick to virtues and values which are identifiable, objective.

But ~ also ~ to explore all that's human. (So much for anyone introducing a claim of mutual exclusivity, to me.)

The second cannot be sustained without the former..

Just as true socialism could not survive, without the presence of capitalism, as history proves.

I'm a simple person William, and I know (am sure) that all men and women begin at the level of each,

and every individual - and grow outwards from there. To start from 'top-down' - to impose some

'system' for the collective 'good', from the skies above - is contra-human, in my book.

It's just God, by another name.

[william.scherk]

An (invading or triumphant rival who has killed a King of Lions) male lion will often kill [young offspring of his vanquished rival/s -- and sometimes all the suckling young]. It is observed that female lions cannot come into estrus until a new hormonal regime begins after they stop lactating. Makes evolutionary sense for the new King. Makes humans blush, all that death-to-spawn-of-rivals and fuck-their-widows -- except in the bible.

I use the same tools as you, Tony, and check my goggles and try to adjust for bias.

I look at fruits of rational inquiry from the behavioural sciences, and I string them together as a lure, Tony. The big eye hypothesis, the Oxytocin experiments, the surge of hormones not under conscious control. I only hinted at acquisition of language, and 'developmental feedback' milestones, of the deficits in these areas that challenge our concept of Will and Instinct, and render them creaky old reified artifacts at times.

Tony, there is a wonderland of rational inquiry that makes Objectivists go into coma (with obvious exceptions like James H-N), sciences of strict standards of rationality and well-considered programmes of inquiry. The fruits of inquiry may be sweet and they may be sour to our human tastes, but they bear attending to in my opinion. If it is human to choose to learn, to think, what if there is no conversation, no 'co-locutor' either as caregiver or fellow inmate/sibling? If you do not stimulate a child or infant towards language, will there be a deficit?

These are all questions that are being addressed, answers that are mostly or somewhat known. The answers tell a complex story of do-not-call-it 'instinct' and 'social stimulation.' And more.

These may be trifles, inconsequential, of questionable relevance or Obvious, but I find they are unlikely to be wholly untrue as explanations. Thus O-ish folks along with Catholics go along with a half-assed adherence to evolution (if not the final sparking wonder of the human birth of Reason/Soul/Immortality/Blah).

It is disturbing to my sense of free and robust inquiry that Objectivist claims are not simply treated as claims, checked. If iffy, set aside for further inquiry. A claim made about real world is indeed (at least in human imagination) falsifiable? This is where the Four Horsemen, the Gnu Atheists (and PZ Myers) crash against good manners and ignorance and conservatism. Claims are testable against reality. It is incumbent on justice to do such tests, and to repeat them.

Is the fact of complex human governance emerging along with civilization a great mystery to Objectivists? Is it all the spark of ineffable genius of Homo Neandertalis Galt, or is it a million stones and crap in the walls and fences and roads and practices of history, a growing thing part of us and our genus's genius?

Per Rand magic, humans invented rational (and not so rational) planning and governance (not Man. There is no Man. Not unless his Name is always Norm). I believe it is governance that is the genius that drove civilization and drives it still. To whom do you trust the safety of your cosmonauts or aerospace industry?

Regulation, preventive measures, division of labour, bureacratic oversight and audit, directives and orders on advisement. We do not see a reduction in the misery of workplace death and wandering widows and the utter waste of human potential until the humans bounded together to establish the 'private' Work(mans)er Compensation schemes. Who led these efforts? Was it foul progressive beasts of Kant, or was it humans? Was it Man?

So, goggles welded to my skull, my slavelike collectivism drilled into my head since birth in a public hospital, I am no innocent here. But I do say that governance and bureaucratic oversight and control, audits and 'best practice' and directives are here to stay as a spine of civilization, whatever its formats.

Do it Stalin, do it Hitler, do it Pol Pot, do it Summer of Love and LA riots, do it Utopia, do it High Valley Kennel and orphanage.

I do not think that how we devise means to govern ourselves is either fungus or a grace: it is our stumbling towards the future, it is behaviour, it is practice. It happens in private hands and public. It happens in my sleep at the electric plant.

So, I do not mean to clobber you as a lovely man with a big heart, Tony, just remind myself in wonder that there seems to be a lot of meat in the sandwich often passed over. It is not all gas and chalk and taint and psychobabble, cousin, goggles on, goggles off.

Edited May 13, 2012 by william.scherk