The Epistemology of Intimidation by Hatred

[anthony]

5 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

If I do not know why I feel such and such when I felt it, then the hell with it.  Why do I feel it?  What difference does it make? I feel what I feel when I feel it.  Wandering about musty attics and damp basements is not the best use of my time. 

Well, that's so for many. Don't go to (or clean up) the musty attics and damp basements which may stink up the house.

[Peter]

25 minutes ago, anthony said:

Well, that's so for many. Don't go to (or clean up) the musty attics and damp basements which may stink up the house.

I wonder if Ba'al ever goes over events in his life and wishes he had done things differently. And then when he mulls over an event a bit he learns how to improve his thinking and actions in the present and the future. And what goes on in his mind when he learns something new? "Data storage added. Personal story from acquaintance stored at archive level 435." 

Peter 

[anthony]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Tony,

Read her more.

She dealt with introspection for cognition a lot more than your impression.

A hell of a lot more. Lot's of ITOE, for example, was arrived at through introspection and she describes it in the book as she goes along.

Michael

This takes us into how a total philosophy is created. And another topic. My "impression" is not so limited, I'm simply applying this specific topic to what Rand -directly- writes about introspection -  emotions - not what one can take as implicit of her method. The direction of this debate was turning away from important emotions, to a general discussion on thought .

For the bulk of it, I can only surmize meta-philosophy necessitates vast induction and deduction - perception, integration and conceptualizing and, of course - introspection, even 'intuitionism'. Within a comprehensive metaphysical vision. All the tools and methods we need to understand it went into making it.

[BaalChatzaf]

2 hours ago, Peter said:

I wonder if Ba'al ever goes over events in his life and wishes he had done things differently. And then when he mulls over an event a bit he learns how to improve his thinking and actions in the present and the future. And what goes on in his mind when he learns something new? "Data storage added. Personal story from acquaintance stored at archive level 435." 

Peter 

Only to the extent of learning not to repeat errors. 

[Brant Gaede]

3 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Introspection is a multi-step process which requires  recalling and rethinking prior  experiences.  Introspection is a drill down activity.  One has t work at dredging up the reasons why one did such and such or thought so and so.  Introspection requires mental labor.  Ouch!!  does not.  Since there are no independent corroborations of what one introspected,  it is an inferior method of cognition. 

No such thing as an "inferior method of cognition." It's just another tool. We don't say a wrench is inferior to a hammer. We say they are different for different uses, but one may make the use of the other possible.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

No such thing as an "inferior method of cognition." It's just another tool. We don't say a wrench is inferior to a hammer. We say they are different for different uses, but one may make the use of the other possible.

--Brant

A tool whose reliability is highly questionable. How do you know what you introspect is correct?  You cannot corroborate by an independent witness.  You are the only witness.  

Also introspection is dependent on memory  which is known to be unreliable. 

[Brant Gaede]

2 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

A tool whose reliability is highly questionable. How do you know what you introspect is correct?  You cannot corroborate by an independent witness.  You are the only witness.  

Also introspection is dependent on memory  which is known to be unreliable. 

Sorry. I didn't know you knew introspection. Do you introspect?

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

20 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Sorry. I didn't know you knew introspection. Do you introspect?

--Brant

I have read enough about it. 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

8 hours ago, anthony said:

I'm simply applying this specific topic to what Rand -directly- writes about introspection -  emotions - not what one can take as implicit of her method.

Tony,

I still disagree. It's not just in the word. If I'm writing about bananas, but I don't use the word "banana," instead talk about the yellow longish fruit that is easy to peel and monkeys like a lot, that doesn't mean I've stopped talking about bananas.

I forgot where Rand talked about the following, but I read her describe how she used to trace her concepts down to the root sensory experience then noticed the conceptual chain. That is introspecting. Or look at the story she told of how she came up with measurement omission for concepts. Or the event of Roark blowing up the housing project. And so on. I can supply you with quotes, lots of 'em, but I have to actually open the books and remember where I saw the passages instead of doing a Google duel with the word "introspection."  

In other words, conceptually Rand talked a LOT about introspection that did not pertain to emotions. And, if you want to even look at the emotion thing, one of her uses of introspection was to identify the causes of emotions. Do you think those causes are only--or even mostly--about emotions? They are not. They might produce emotions, but they are a lot broader.

When Rand wrote,

8 hours ago, anthony said:

In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are "What do I feel?" and "Why do I feel it?"

I think she oversimplified her other statements about introspection to be able to fit the sentence to a nice parallel formula. Look at the entire paragraph:

Quote

The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: “What do I know?” and “How do I know it?” In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”

She did a what/how, then a what/why construction. She was being cute.  This is style, not exhaustive conceptual substance.

And even as style, it is not totally accurate. Look at the other quote you quoted:

Quote

Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc.

She could just as easily said about the other psychological actions she mentioned: In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I think?” and “Why do I think it?” OR In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I reminisce?” and “Why do I reminisce it?”

Here's another thing. You cannot write a novel and get into the head of another character without introspecting and often describe the character doing it. Dagny. Rearden. James Taggart. (Oddly enough, she did not show John Galt doing this.)

I'm not saying Rand did not talk a lot about emotions and introspecting. I'm just saying that was not her main focus to the extent you claim.

Michael

[anthony]

Galt’s Speech,
For the New Intellectual, 124

Consciousness is the faculty of awareness—the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

Awareness is not a passive state, but an active process. On the lower levels of awareness, a complex neurological process is required to enable man to experience a sensation and to integrate sensations into percepts; that process is automatic and non-volitional: man is aware of its results, but not of the process itself. On the higher, conceptual level, the process is psychological, conscious and volitional. In either case, awareness is achieved and maintained by continuous action.

Directly or indirectly, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived from one’s awareness of the external world. Some object, i.e., some content, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms.

“Concepts of Consciousness,”
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 37

Michael, The excerpt is I think useful, here. What should be highlighted is "action" and "content". And, "directly or indirectly".

"Awareness is achieved and maintained by continuous *action*". And: "Some object, i.e., some *content*, is involved in every state of awareness".

(There is ongoing cross-over between the two. Induction--deduction: Action creates content, while content instigates further action - as I view this).

AR says that ~both~ actions, extrospective and introspective, are cognition; while she isolates for introspective (inward) cognition - "one's own psychological actions...such as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc."

The solid foundation, we know, is -- Identification.

Taken from there, I think we have: a). Direct awareness, action applied to the external world. What? How? ("do I know"). Perception, differentiation, integration, evaluation and concept formation;

and b). Indirect awareness, of the content prior and present in one's mind perceived also from the external world (by actions of thoughts, emotions, and memories). I believe it's clear, that here Rand's ultimate end is an integration of "psychological" actions, e.g., emotions. What? Why? ("do I feel").

 

 

 

 

[anthony]

16 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

 

Here's another thing. You cannot write a novel and get into the head of another character without introspecting and often describe the character doing it. Dagny. Rearden. James Taggart. (Oddly enough, she did not show John Galt doing this.)

I'm not saying Rand did not talk a lot about emotions and introspecting. I'm just saying that was not her main focus to the extent you claim.

Michael

 

Yes, novel writing and art as a whole, are highly introspective ... imagery drawn from one's consciousness - but still and always, of referents in reality. "Derived from one's awareness of the external world".

The novelist re-arranges components of life to suit himself, in his own image (of what is existence, or what it could be). He is literally playing God. My simple explanation of creativity, imagination.  

Not "her main focus"- well, no, of course. There are plenty bigger fish to fry. But she is also mighty insistent on one knowing and reviewing one's internal state, and does a great service to rationality by removing all the mystique and mystical nonsense from emotions. Why not, when they too, are existents with causality and can be objectively known. Rand's value->emotion connection is profound.

Nathaniel Branden went further. I recall one chapter, about guilt, in HtS (and he also pointed out emotional repression within Objectivism he'd observed at NBI).

If there is a least favorite topic in O'ist circles, it is emotionality, I've noticed. It's as if, because they aren't "tools of cognition", one's emotions should be shunned. I can't get it. How does anyone not enjoy and appreciate the signals his emotional element sends  - and, not want to understand himself (or others, especially others' emotionalist behavior we are surrounded by)? This is all to do with man's consciousness, finally, and its nature.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

49 minutes ago, anthony said:

Yes, novel writing and art as a whole, are highly introspective ... imagery drawn from one's consciousness - but still and always, of referents in reality. "Derived from one's awareness of the external world".

Tony,

I'm insisting on this because you are making an error here. Just because referents from reality are inside your mind, that doesn't mean you can't introspect about them.

Example: If I think about a chair, I am not introspecting. If I think about my thinking about the same chair, I am introspecting. Just because a referent from reality is involved, that doesn't mean introspection is banished.

51 minutes ago, anthony said:

If there is a least favorite topic in O'ist circles, it is emotionality, I've noticed. It's as if, because they aren't "tools of cognition", one's emotions should be shunned.

I think it's even worse. This is one idea where Rand's statement is limited to things like syllogisms, but not for the rest of cognition (not even concept formation using her method). Emotions are tools of cognition. Great ones. They are just not the ONLY tools and, by themselves, they are useless for higher conceptual cognition. But without them, higher cognition means nothing.

Here's a very simple example. Lobotomies used to be popular in America. Once the emotional centers were cut off by a gross pick that looked like a bent screwdriver being shoved into the upper part of the subject's eyes and scraped back and forth in their brain, some people (after recovery) were able to function perfectly in a rational sense. They just could not use the information.

If they had to make a choice off a menu, for instance, they would take hours and starve until someone made the choice for them. This has been documented countless times. They even knew they didn't like some of the food on the menu, but could not make up their minds not to order it.

In a famous example that was talked about a lot, although I am not sure of the details (it's been a long time since I read about it), they sat a man on a railroad track. He was fully aware a train was coming at him, that he would splat all over the place if it hit him, and he would die. But he wouldn't get off the track because he didn't find it important. He was taken off the track if I remember correctly. But don't quote me on any of this since I am going on a vague memory. If I'm not mistaken, this was even a part of a major story in Time Magazine.

So what use is cognition if you can't use the information? Can anyone really call that complete cognition? I don't. 

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

18 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I have read enough about it. 

So you don't.

--Brant

actually you do, but as described previously by you it's crude and cumbersome but you figured out how to modify your behavior for social reasons

[BaalChatzaf]

42 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

So you don't.

--Brant

actually you do, but as described previously by you it's crude and cumbersome but you figured out how to modify your behavior for social reasons

my ability to introspect is feeble compared to that or Normal People.  I use  my memory and inferential inclinations to solve problems,  more than for figuring out why I did such and such. 

[anthony]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Tony,

I'm insisting on this because you are making an error here. Just because referents from reality are inside your mind, that doesn't mean you can't introspect about them.

Example: If I think about a chair, I am not introspecting. If I think about my thinking about the same chair, I am introspecting. Just because a referent from reality is involved, that doesn't mean introspection is banished.

 

Michael

 

Michael,

Where's the disagreement?  I don't follow. The act of a writer's mind 'imaging' an object or person or episode into literature, I said WAS introspection. "Indirectly" - from reality, ultimately - and "processed" by the author's mind and personal values.

And your purpose and aim as an author, is for your reader to reverse the process, from your words, back into the same imagery you 'saw' as closely as possible, all-dependent on your skill with language and his. He too, then will introspect and provide his own mind's imagery, to the word-concepts.

Writers are not actually thinking about thinking, they are inwardly "seeing", I believe. What we call "previsualization", in photography.

 

[anthony]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

 

I think it's even worse. This is one idea where Rand's statement is limited to things like syllogisms, but not for the rest of cognition (not even concept formation using her method). Emotions are tools of cognition. Great ones. They are just not the ONLY tools and, by themselves, they are useless for higher conceptual cognition. But without them, higher cognition means nothing.

Here's a very simple example. Lobotomies used to be popular in America. Once the emotional centers were cut off by a gross pick that looked like a bent screwdriver being shoved into the upper part of the subject's eyes and scraped back and forth in their brain, some people (after recovery) were able to function perfectly in a rational sense. They just could not use the information.

If they had to make a choice off a menu, for instance, they would take hours and starve until someone made the choice for them. This has been documented countless times. They even knew they didn't like some of the food on the menu, but could not make up their minds not to order it.

 

Michael

 

By tools of *cognition*, surely Rand must mean: perception, integration, differentiation, evaluation, and concept creation. In other words, the entire gamut of reason. But if at one of the stages, an emotion (fear, hatred, etc. - or say, racial prejudice) is allowed by the thinker to cast any influence on his cognition, without doubt his outcomes - in evaluation and of conceptual knowledge - will be badly flawed. That has to be inarguable. Next step he will then act, emotionally and destructively, based on his 'emotional judgment' (evaluation) and false conclusions.

"Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are "tabula rasa". It is man's cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the *content* of both. Man's emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program--and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

But since the work of man's mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions.

...Emotions are produced by man's premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly [...]" VoS

(Profound, AR's value--emotion connection....): "The programming consists of the values his mind chooses".

I quoted this excerpt, in light of the 'lobotomy of emotional centers' argument.

I think Rand would strongly cite those experiments!

Because what was surgically severed from his brain resulting in the paralysis of the patient's decision-making ability, is in fact his "emotional mechanism" -- without which the "programming" of his values CAN'T take place. No evaluation, no ability to choose values - psychotic indecision. If one can't feel pain and pleasure, all emotions are gone and "value" becomes null and void.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

The act of a writer's mind 'imaging' an object or person or episode into literature, I said WAS introspection.

Tony,

That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about those passages in fiction where Rand goes into the characters musing over things and what and how they thought. I'll repeat it again. She did that with Dagny and Hank, and even Jim Taggart (and Peter Keating), etc. etc. etc.

Remember Wynand sitting with a gun observing whether he felt boredom or not so he could decide to blow his brains out or not? (Granted, this example is emotion, but I'm pulling this post out of where the sun doesn't shine instead of looking things up and that came to mind.  )

How many times does Rand have a villain evader stare long and hard at a button or something like that to avoid thinking? This is a case of blocking introspection. I could go on and on, but my point is she portrayed the act of introspecting over and over in some of her fictional characters. Sometimes they observed their own emotions. Sometimes they observed their own thought processes. Sometimes they observed their own questions. And so on,

Notice she did not do that with John Galt--we never get to see him introspect, we only see him from outside his head--and only a little with Howard Roark.

If you want a story that is practically nothing but a portrayal of introspection that covers the gamut of mental actions, see "The Simplest Thing in the Word" in The Romantic Manifesto.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

But if at one of the stages, an emotion (fear, hatred, etc. - or say, racial prejudice) is allowed by the thinker to cast any influence on his cognition, without doubt his outcomes - in evaluation and of conceptual knowledge - will be badly flawed. That has to be inarguable.

Tony,

Unfortunately for those who try to hold on to Rand's universality in her theory of concepts, that is arguable. Just as Rand's claim is arguable that sensations are not retained in memory or that, mentally, man is born as a blank slate.

(As an aside, on this last point, we come with an innate fear of things that look like snakes and spiders and this is well documented in the earliest of infants. Where did they learn that? They didn't. Like all good mammals, they inherited knowledge of certain things by evolution. They can override that knowledge later, but they can't not not have it at birth.)

But back to point, not only are many sensations retained in memory, they--and percepts for that matter (which is a term I don't like as it is a vast oversimplification)--have to have an emotion attached to them in order to be registered in long term memory. No emotion, no memory. Seriously. That's the basic rule and it's true for the overwhelming majority of long-term memory (semantic, episodic and process, autobiographical, etc.).

So how do you make concepts without memory?

Notice something else. Rand had very little to say about human memory. To Rand's credit, she claimed her theory of concepts was to be considered a theory and nothing more.

The good news about her theory of concepts is that it has applicability in some areas and her notions of conceptual common denominator and measurement omission are extremely useful. She flounders, though, on the lower processes of the mind, the part she would call the automatic processes, and in the interaction of these lower automatic processes with conceptual awareness, which she called psycho-epistemology (sometimes with and sometimes without hat tip to Barbara, who coined the term).

When Rand dismissed the is-ought problem in "The Objectivist Ethics," she was closer to the truth than even she suspected and outside the bounds of her claim that emotions are not tools of cognition. To the human mind, there is no is without an ought, at least not in human memory.  

Even the lobotomized folks had emotions attached to their memories when they were formed, although they were unable later to trigger the neural pathways during retrieval because they had been surgically damaged. And even then, new long-term memories in these poor souls were able to be formed with the emotion of curiosity attached.

If you want a rather irritating book, but a very good one, on emotions, I recommend How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain  by Lisa Feldman Barrett. I read this thing and it was EXTREMELY illuminating. The irritating part is that Barrett kept making the same mistake as Rand, that is, she presumed that if she observed ONE correct thing about emotions, that applied to ALL things about emotions. In Rand's case, Rand claimed she could detect the cause of all her emotions through introspection, which is impossible. (Rand made some other presumptions that don't reflect the reality of the brain, too.) In Barrett's case, she kept claiming, over and over like a mantra or broken record, that her discoveries (which actually are dynamite) prove that man has no free will. When I read the book, I kept thinking, jeez, she sounds just like a Randian villain.  But her information was too valuable to dismiss like that. I can dismiss her philosophical musings and still keep her science. Anyway, I think she repeated the mantra so much because, underneath, she knew it was bullshit.  

However, to be fair to her, there are many cases when you feel like you are making a decision, but your subconscious mind has already made it and you are already acting on it on the neurochemical and hormonal level, not to mention muscular motions--and this has already transpired at the time you think you are making the decision. In these cases, your conscious mind only thinks it is making a choice, but it is lagging behind what your lower brain already did. It's like an optical illusion, except it's a cognitive one.

This is a fascinating topic and there is a lot of wonderful stuff out there now to look at.

You can limit your understanding of these things to what Rand wrote and, although some of it will be wrong, at least it is organized and you have a somewhat functional framework to think about things. But I cannot recommend strongly enough building out from that framework and seeing what else is out there. The technological advances in understanding this stuff is taking off like a rocket blasting through the roof. And the good news it there is plenty in layman's language and it is backed up by repeatable science.

Michael

[anthony]

Michael, It is not as though my understanding is limited to what Rand wrote. Quite the opposite - I'm not a kid and at this stage of my life I have the luxury of putting everything of Rand's through the torture tests, kind of 'reverse engineering', trying out the methodology on everything I've experienced. That's a lot of inductive experience I gathered. I don't write here about anything I haven't personally seen or done and thought about (much of it from my mistakes), and you know what? This philosophy never ceases to amaze me in its comprehensiveness. Only in the last 7-8 years, to my regret, did I begin concentrating on the fundaments: metaphysics, epistemology. With the concept method especially, (which I'd already practised naturally but haphazardly) I can safely claim to have doubled my understanding of ~everything~ in this short time.

Emotions are just a portion of the whole, but here too I've introspected and observed much, especially on my earlier years' quite crazy feelings, and the ups and downs - and can state as a matter of fact, that Rand was right. Emotions are not tools of cognition, and should not be so considered. If one allows emotions to dominate, one will find troubles. But if you rigidly restrict them, other problems arise. And it is not a compromise that's needed, it is the understanding that the alternatives are false: not to wallow in them, nor to clamp them down. Our emotions are too valuable for that. Reason - plus emotionality - is how we are. It does ~feel~often as if emotion is our dominant feature - after all, they have a strong psychological power, feeling them and seeing them in others  - and that is exactly because they are intimately related to(and made by, programmed by) the values we and others choose--for good or bad.  In short I found that the more one sees, the more one thinks and the more one knows - and the more one cares and feels. Do you think Rand, with her conceptual depth, was unaware of this fact? If she said she could identify her feelings I will take her word for it. While not with all my emotions all the time, with more practice and confidence, I can see and have found the causes of many, often.  

Briefly, technology and all the rest (and I stay pretty up with it all - everything interests me to some degree) is never a substitute for a strong philosophy. When somebody can discover anything that blows away Objectivism's axioms, epistemological methods and ethics and rights -- that's the day I will sit up and take notice. It's not gonna happen. Empirical knowledge will always play second violin to an individual's conceptual knowledge, whose hierarchies and scope are too deep. The brain/nervous system with regard to the consciousness, is a major instance in point. Human/animal biology is terrific to learn about, but it is still biology and no more. It cannot prove more about oneself - that really matters - than you already know.

(I have great doubt that new-born babies have instinctive or inherited knowledge, and I've mentioned before the many instances known of babies innocently playing with dangerous creatures. When we were in bush country up in N. Rhodesia, my parents found me in my cot one night densely covered with an army of african Soldier ants - I was peacefully asleep. Let's say I'm wrong though, and baby infants do have limited instincts and genetic information, it has little, or nothing to do with their eventual, fast growing cognition. Some 'discoveries' must be taken skeptically).

I believe it highly conceivable that for a month or so before birth the baby is already creating and programming its "automated" emotional system. The 'values' in his case - are the comfort and security he physically feels around him/her - a threat to those values (like emerging from the womb!) would certainly cause his emotional outburst. ;) On that minor point (emotional tabula rasa at birth) I would argue with Rand.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

Emotions are not tools of cognition, and should not be so considered. If one allows emotions to dominate, one will find troubles.

Tony,

How do you define tool? Command?

That's not how I define tool.

Just because one uses a tool as part of a whole, that doesn't mean the tool dominates the whole. 

Your leg is a tool for your body (and it provides mobility). Does it dominate your body? It's silly to even think like that. Strictly speaking, it's a part of your body that is used as a tool.

You wrote at the beginning of the paragraph:

1 hour ago, anthony said:

Emotions are just a portion of the whole...

Bingo.

They are tools within a larger process called cognition that, also, makes use of other tools.

Let me do this by analogy (although I don't like to argue this way normally). What is more important, the liver or the heart? The truth is, remove either and you are dead. Remove emotion from cognition and you remove memory from the brain. Without memory, there is no cognition.

As long as semantics are ruling the day, let's make it worse, shall we?  

Rand wrote in many places that reason is man's basic means of survival. I agree if survival means intellectual progress. But if survival means not dying and reproducing enough for the species to perpetuate, how could anyone agree with her statement? The only way is to claim that evolution does not exist.

If humans descended from apes or similar, what did these primates use to survive? Reason? Really? Apes using reason? As to humans, did humans suddenly lose all that apey goodness and survival means when the brain evolved? From what I can tell, cavemen survived long enough to be our ancestors, and I mean cavemen without fire, without the wheel, without language, and so on. They didn't use reason, but they survived. In fact, they survived on emotions (and instinct) as their ONLY cognition. The proof is we are here.  

The point is, it's not either-or. We ADDED reason on top of what we evolved mentally. We didn't replace our brain biology with reason.

But let me be clear on the other side. I am a huge proponent of reason and of dispassionately identifying things (you must have read something by me about cognitive before normative). I think we have to deny emotions at times when emotions threaten to cloud correct identification. But this emotion versus cognition dichotomy is simply not true. Emotion is part of cognition. It's a tool, just like logic is. Just like narrative is. Just like heuristics are (to use a Kahneman term).

In fact, I agree with you that if you let emotions dominate over reason, it generally ends in a bad place. Not always (especially in the amygdala shortcut to the cortex like when seeing snake-like shapes), but reason is usually best when consciously using volition. In other words, emotions cannot REPLACE logic (and other non-emotion components) in cognition. But it cannot be excluded from cognition and one still be referring to human beings.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

Empirical knowledge will always play second violin to an individual's conceptual knowledge...

Tony,

This is an error even within strict Objectivism. Empirical knowledge is part of an individual's conceptual knowledge. If you can't trace a concept back to the senses, it's called a "floating abstraction," meaning there are no referents in reality for it.

The way you argue makes me think you need to check your premises on the hierarchical nature of knowledge, that is if you are talking about Objectivism. You constantly oppose a broad category against a component as if they were on the same hierarchical level. It's like saying Dodge Chargers are different than vehicles and they compete on some level. Or that a foot-race is more important than the beginning. Or, to butcher your quoted statement above: "The beginning will always play second violin to the foot-race." 

The beginning is part of the foot-race. A Dodge Charger falls under the category of vehicle. Empirical knowledge is part of conceptual knowledge.

Comparing them as equals destroys the conceptual hierarchy.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

I have great doubt that new-born babies have instinctive or inherited knowledge...

Tony,

Well, people once had grave doubts the earth wasn't flat. 

   

You have to look at the science...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

Empirical knowledge will always play second violin to an individual's conceptual knowledge, whose hierarchies and scope are too deep. The brain/nervous system with regard to the consciousness, is a major instance in point. Human/animal biology is terrific to learn about but it is still biology and no more. It can't prove more about oneself - that really matters - than you already know.

Tony,

I want to make a final point on your post. It seems like I'm picking on you, but I have great affection for you.  It's just this stuff is important.

Biology is not a form of proof. It is the standard of proof. If you exclude biology from philosophy, you divorce reality from philosophy and reality is the ultimate standard. But if you divorce biology (i.e., reality), to use one of Rand's favorite metaphors, it's deuces wild.

Once again, if you don't look at the science (and I have many good places in layman's language to look), why bother rejecting it in favor of philosophy and calling that knowledge? That's more like a religion...

Science cannot replace philosophy, and I agree that philosophical principles are more fundamental, but if science ends up consistently contradicting a philosophical principle, the principle has to be revised. For example, in ancient times, philosophy stated that thunder came from the gods and that was considered as reason, at least, all reason that developed was based on things like this. Without science, there would never have been a correction.

Whether we arrive at reality through observation leading to philosophy, or observation leading to science, it's reality that has to trump all, not some weird kind of intellectual contest between knowledge categories.

Michael

[anthony]

22 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Tony,

This is an error even within strict Objectivism. Empirical knowledge is part of an individual's conceptual knowledge. If you can't trace a concept back to the senses, it's called a "floating abstraction," meaning there are no referents in reality for it.

The way you argue makes me think you need to check your premises on the hierarchical nature of knowledge, that is if you are talking about Objectivism. You constantly oppose a broad category against a component as if they were on the same hierarchical level. It's like saying Dodge Chargers are different than vehicles and they compete on some level. Or that a foot-race is more important than the beginning. Or, to butcher your quoted statement above: "The beginning will always play second violin to the foot-race." 

The beginning is part of the foot-race. A Dodge Charger falls under the category of vehicle. Empirical knowledge is part of conceptual knowledge.

Comparing them as equals destroys the conceptual hierarchy.

Michael

Empirical knowledge is gained by experiment. So most of us, actually aren't scientists. I've argued this at length with Bob, on the larger scale of the false dichotomy beween philosophical Rationalism and Empiricism. If you want a quote, I'll find where Rand said that we come by knowledge in two ways, directly from the senses to perception - and by learned knowledge. The latter has to be followed back to perceptual roots and integrated (in my words). My point doesn't change. 

Of course "empirical knowledge is part of conceptual knowledge"! That was my implication with "second violin". 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

4 minutes ago, anthony said:

Empirical knowledge is gained by experiment.

Tony,

Wrong. It is gained by observation. Experiment is only one form of using observation.

Notice Rand's "ostensive definition" of existence. She circled her arm around and said, "I mean that."

When she did that, she presented a form of empirical knowledge. In fact, she presented the only way empirical knowledge can be formulated.

Once again, there is that hierarchical error...

 

Michael