Is freedom to breed a right?

[anthony]

15 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Right. Presupposes that one has a mind.

Absolutely. No "mind", no conceptual knowledge, no individuality, no autonomy, no values and virtues - let alone an independent mind. The four New Atheists that William and I were discussing, following previous philosophers, contrived to eliminate or undermine consciousness and self, leaving only "wet matter" , a brain which-feels-emotions. From there to a morality of altruism is the next logical step. You haven't got a specific identity, "a self", self-abnegation is a done deal, automatic.

[william.scherk]

42 minutes ago, anthony said:

No "mind", no conceptual knowledge, no individuality, no autonomy, no values and virtues - let alone an independent mind. 

The fellow is doing a job, modeling clothes. Unless you have the power to read this his mind, remarks about his psycho-epistemology and moral faculties are at best speculation.   Does your soul-reading ability apply to all photographs of all young men? 

Edited June 23, 2018 by william.scherk
Phrenological psychoepistemologist as Moralist

[caroljane]

9 minutes ago, william.scherk said:

The fellow is doing a job, modeling clothes. Unless you have the power to read this his mind, remarks about his psycho-epistemology and moral faculties are at best speculation.   Does your soul-reading ability apply to all photographs of all young men? 

Your caption "Hey Ma, I got the job, but they won't feed me and I have to wear ladies' clothes", said it all.for all time. Still laughing especially after I looked at the poor boy's photo. There is more meat on poor martyred Thomas's bone after he was scavenged!

#Justice for Thomas# Stop the Avian Order Now!#tomorrow at the latest

[anthony]

Outdone by your zeal, William.

Look up top of picture: "Right. Presupposes that one has a mind." (Wolf) I replied to that.

[william.scherk]

3 hours ago, anthony said:

The four New Atheists that William and I were discussing, following previous philosophers, contrived to eliminate or undermine consciousness and self, leaving only "wet matter" , a brain which-feels-emotions.

We didn't get to far with the Four Horseman. I believe this 'contrivance' of your is mostly an unfinished synthesis. The claims made had some weak points, I thought -- especially in the warrants, so I don't support these conclusions. Paraphrasing "the other guy" can be useful and gist-accurate, but it can also distort, simplify or misrepresent. I think you have got the identification just right yet.

Me, I'd try not to offer an over-reductionist variable regarding the gentlemen.  I would try not to issue a sweeping judgement without having stacked up the warrants for each point of identification.

In other words, summary judgments are tricky. We are best testing our own assumptions, discovering least warrants, forestalling the inevitable discovery by others.

To reduce my sauce to a one-liner:  Reducing New Atheists to something like "all they got is 'wet matter'" is crude and almost certainly contradicted by the New Atheists' own arguments.

Quote

From there to a morality of altruism is the next logical step. You haven't got a specific identity, "a self", self-abnegation is a done deal, automatic.

You presumably take no narrative leap into the imaginary about the young man on a fashion show runway in some distant awful land.  How can we presume that Any Man has no identity, no self?  That seems like overreach. If the copying of illustration supposedly supporting Wolf's dire Dx was meaningless, of course ...

Are all you New Objectivists so skeptical of personal autonomy and individualism? 

2 hours ago, anthony said:

Outdone by your zeal, William.

Look up top of picture: "Right. Presupposes that one has a mind." (Wolf) I replied to that.

I consider that every waking human has an I and a conscious mind of sorts. The more functioning a mind, up to a baseline, we could call a norm or a median. You cannot function without a mind.  I don't subscribe to the vaguely Randish thinking about 'missing link' or blocs of pre-conceptual minds lurking, residing among us. My zeal for contest means I bore those taking broad conclusions. 

Wolf made a sly visual point using the appeal to disgust, I thought. The illustration you quoted was the visual warrant for his claim. Or so I believed.

Now I thought a Galliano runway show would be the last place to look for evidence of the fall of Western Civilization or the 4 Horsemen of Loss of Mind. The whole British-French bizarre get-up industry has had ripple effects since it first commercialized in the late 70s in Britain. Galliano's only note of freshness in this post-ruin PR coup is the extreme skinniness of his runway models. 

A secondary point is that fashion is both ephemera and culture. At the British Museum they had the history of clothes told by mannequins wearing the outfits through the eras, not quite anthropology, not quite lifestyle, definitely eye-opening for me. Ordinary person clothing usually rots away, save as captured in painting or sculpture or since the modern visual-digital age, so we capture only a tiny portion of the vast effluvium of our cast-offs, the more well-crafted and bijou and rich.

We have worn some odd-seeming garments, we British-style humans.  Elaborate and often weird and not-at-first easily-explicated. I am thinking about that time in human history when the majestic families of Europe went crazy for wigs, rouge, powder and rippling curtain-robes of embroidered silk, when the satin-screaming glory of the Big-Poof-Haired King far outshone the ladies of the day.

The Galliano outfits are meant to capture the camera and a bit of hoopla for his 'new' push against the boundaries of blah blah blah, boundaries first breached in 1922, when Objecivism was born and women dropped an entire three layers of clothing, raised their skirts to practical level and bobbed their hair and said fuck it. 

In the museums of the future, we may save Galliano outfits, just because he was so bizarre and precocious in his early ephemeral glory. The male corsets today are stage-y ephemera. The actual corset-wearing subculture say pfffft.  I loathe Galliano, by the way. He is anti-Joo in a particularly stupid fashion, drunkly.

Anyway, a part of my zeal, Tony, is for good times.  I have a good time with ideas and using language to manipulate, sort, validate and question the ideas.  I like to think I am a guy with a knife and knife sharpener at the cutting board, like any guy at a barbecue. Everybody puts something up for carving.  Everybody gets some time with the knife.

Any critique is meant to sharpen your tools, so that argument can be revised and stand upon deeper justifications. I take the correction when observations and judgments are shown to be premature, over-general, or not supported by the evidence.

This kind of thing is the way I view the essential "sport" at OL.  Sometimes strong opinions and conclusions, sometimes strong disagreement, sometimes fruitful and productive discussion, views altered, suppositions overturned, premises checked by hard logic-hockey players.

And then there's Maude.

 

 

Edited June 23, 2018 by william.scherk
Picking a fight with John Galliano via Youtube. Joo-hater.

[caroljane]

4 hours ago, william.scherk said:

The fellow is doing a job, modeling clothes. Unless you have the power to read this his mind, remarks about his psycho-epistemology and moral faculties are at best speculation.   Does your soul-reading ability apply to all photographs of all young men? 

Or young women! Is that how you characterize the female model, such as the former Melania Knauss when she was a working girl jts? For shame!

[Peter]

Young Pharoah? King Tut Tut?

[william.scherk]

-- starting from the top, the harshly-gilded raked hair. Awful reminder of the colour of a quarter million Bulgarian Orange "blonde" kits sold every year in Sofia. Hangy bits look unkempt if not greasy-crusty.  Pass. Hair and facial expression alone make you look like a hungover school-lunch lady.

Amy eye-makeup.  Puh-lease. Amy could pull it off. You look like you used indelible Magic Marker instead and want people to pretend you could take it off if you wanted to. Another bad borrowing by JG.

Forehead tattoo, even faked as here:  very Brixton Prison. In other words, unless you are in the emptying skips or picking turnips field, this may stand in the way of promotion. Use your thick fringe to cover it on Parole Interviews. Cover it all with a hat. Put a jacket on, it's cold outside. Maybe eat a sandwich.

Neck tattoos. Also handy for the wing of Her Majesty's Prison complex where the sociopathic cannibal killers are kept.  

Giant Owl tatoo, even if fake.  Well, someone will like it. And that someone lives in a bedsit near Broadmoor Prison, pen-pal to the psycho ward. And you won't like him, he's on remand.

"Broken heart" transparent wifebeater shirt. Hmmm. Didn't this get used in the fourth-grade Passion of Christ as performed by Cher?  Not too bad as it goes, but sheltered workers aren't really good at jewellery. Just saying. If Bob Mackie was strung out on meth and had to do all the sewing by mouth and then died halfway through.

This is none of your fault, young son of London-based Polish "count" with a swimming pool under the mansion in Mayfair.  We'll see you on the next runway booked, and hope they are not dragging up the bottom of half-thought idea lake like this mess by the Joo-hating greasy-haired knob Galliano.

[jts]

On 9/23/2014 at 10:40 PM, jts said:

I don't know if this proves anything. Maybe it's just interesting.

 

 

Here is a video of him shovelling horse manure. with an IQ of 200.

 

[anthony]

20 hours ago, william.scherk said:

We didn't get to far with the Four Horseman. I believe this 'contrivance' of your is mostly an unfinished synthesis. The claims made had some weak points, I thought -- especially in the warrants, so I don't support these conclusions. Paraphrasing "the other guy" can be useful and gist-accurate, but it can also distort, simplify or misrepresent. I think you have got the identification just right yet.

Me, I'd try not to offer an over-reductionist variable regarding the gentlemen.  I would try not to issue a sweeping judgement without having stacked up the warrants for each point of identification.

In other words, summary judgments are tricky. We are best testing our own assumptions, discovering least warrants, forestalling the inevitable discovery by others.

To reduce my sauce to a one-liner:  Reducing New Atheists to something like "all they got is 'wet matter'" is crude and almost certainly contradicted by the New Atheists' own arguments.

You presumably take no narrative leap into the imaginary about the young man on a fashion show runway in some distant awful land.  How can we presume that Any Man has no identity, no self?  That seems like overreach. If the copying of illustration supposedly supporting Wolf's dire Dx was meaningless, of course ...

Are all you New Objectivists so skeptical of personal autonomy and individualism? 

I consider that every waking human has an I and a conscious mind of sorts. The more functioning a mind, up to a baseline, we could call a norm or a median. You cannot function without a mind.  I don't subscribe to the vaguely Randish thinking about 'missing link' or blocs of pre-conceptual minds lurking, residing among us. My zeal for contest means I bore those taking broad conclusions. 

Wolf made a sly visual point using the appeal to disgust, I thought. The illustration you quoted was the visual warrant for his claim. Or so I believed.

Now I thought a Galliano runway show would be the last place to look for evidence of the fall of Western Civilization or the 4 Horsemen of Loss of Mind. The whole British-French bizarre get-up industry has had ripple effects since it first commercialized in the late 70s in Britain. Galliano's only note of freshness in this post-ruin PR coup is the extreme skinniness of his runway models. 

A secondary point is that fashion is both ephemera and culture. At the British Museum they had the history of clothes told by mannequins wearing the outfits through the eras, not quite anthropology, not quite lifestyle, definitely eye-opening for me. Ordinary person clothing usually rots away, save as captured in painting or sculpture or since the modern visual-digital age, so we capture only a tiny portion of the vast effluvium of our cast-offs, the more well-crafted and bijou and rich.

We have worn some odd-seeming garments, we British-style humans.  Elaborate and often weird and not-at-first easily-explicated. I am thinking about that time in human history when the majestic families of Europe went crazy for wigs, rouge, powder and rippling curtain-robes of embroidered silk, when the satin-screaming glory of the Big-Poof-Haired King far outshone the ladies of the day.

The Galliano outfits are meant to capture the camera and a bit of hoopla for his 'new' push against the boundaries of blah blah blah, boundaries first breached in 1922, when Objecivism was born and women dropped an entire three layers of clothing, raised their skirts to practical level and bobbed their hair and said fuck it. 

In the museums of the future, we may save Galliano outfits, just because he was so bizarre and precocious in his early ephemeral glory. The male corsets today are stage-y ephemera. The actual corset-wearing subculture say pfffft.  I loathe Galliano, by the way. He is anti-Joo in a particularly stupid fashion, drunkly.

Anyway, a part of my zeal, Tony, is for good times.  I have a good time with ideas and using language to manipulate, sort, validate and question the ideas.  I like to think I am a guy with a knife and knife sharpener at the cutting board, like any guy at a barbecue. Everybody puts something up for carving.  Everybody gets some time with the knife.

Any critique is meant to sharpen your tools, so that argument can be revised and stand upon deeper justifications. I take the correction when observations and judgments are shown to be premature, over-general, or not supported by the evidence.

This kind of thing is the way I view the essential "sport" at OL.  Sometimes strong opinions and conclusions, sometimes strong disagreement, sometimes fruitful and productive discussion, views altered, suppositions overturned, premises checked by hard logic-hockey players.

And then there's Maude.

 

 

William,  To repeat, I have found plenty enough validation for myself to establish a strong connection from one metaphysical view of the mind, reductive materialism - demonstrated by most secularists and atheists - then to philosophical skepticism, leading logically to reduced individual value, and so ultimately to altruism as ethics and Leftism in politics. Simplified of course, with great variations from one person and thinker to the next. BUT this is a hugely broad theory and I am not going intricately into each New Atheist to analyse the differences, contributions and reductions from each. They and many secularists I've heard have commonality at one level. A "conceptual common denominator" - CCD - in O'ist epistemology. You don't have to taste all the oceans to know the sea is salty, someone said.  I feel that you are over-concerned by 'data' and what this guy said or that guy said. This can derail a debate of ideas by narrowing down excessively. Like dog with his bone, you are the 'worrier'.

But as a taste - read a little about Dan Dennett and observe how he undermines or destroys consciousness and its efficacy -by 'explaining' it. From meatiness to roboticism to magic. (Speaking of magic, most non-objective atheists have not lost their mystical roots, transferring to neo-mysticism, intrinsicism -- e.g. deification of the State, the People, and so on).

Anyhow, Dennett, a "philosopher of consciousness", can you believe? "Smoke and mirrors":

 

Brain

There's No Such Thing as Consciousness, According to Philosopher Daniel Dennett

April 14, 2017

Written by Reuben Westmaas [an excerpt]

14,151

Cogito ergo sum means "I think, therefore I am." That quote—coined by French philosopher René Descartes—is the cornerstone of modern philosophy. What it means is that although you could be wrong about nearly everything, from the answers to simple math problems to the very belief that you're awake and not dreaming, the one thing that you can be certain of is that you're experiencing the things that you're experiencing. But according to modern-day philosopherDaniel Dennett, even that is suspect.

Daniel Dennett speaking with Claudia Laitano at the Brazilian Fronteiras do Pensamento conference

Fronteiras do Pensamento / flickr

"Real" Magic Versus Real Magic

There's a quote by religion professor Lee Siegel that Dennett use to illustrate his point: "Real magic is the magic that's not real. While the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic." There's nobody out there sawing people in half and putting them back together again, only illusionists using various tricks to make it appear that that's the case. According to Dennett, the same is true of consciousness. The only difference is that our brains are triple-billed as the saw-wielding magician, the lovely assistant trapped in the box, and the mystified audience. What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it's all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons.

If that's a bit heady, then get ready for Dennett's next metaphor: If our brain is a smartphone, then consciousness is the screen. In other words, consciousness is not how our brain works, it's only how we interface with it. A screen doesn't really have much to do with how the phone works, and in fact, the phone could do nearly everything it does without it. It just wouldn't be useable by humans. According to Dennett, our brains are like smartphones in another way as well: they are basically robots, or thinking machines, and like any robot, they need a medium through which to communicate with their users. But it goes even further than that: if our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which are in turn made up of even smaller robots. So even if we lose the concept of consciousness along the way, we're still pretty incredible "machines."

[...]

[william.scherk]

5 hours ago, anthony said:

 Anyhow, Dennett, a "philosopher of consciousness", can you believe? "Smoke and mirrors":[...]

There's No Such Thing as Consciousness, According to Philosopher Daniel Dennett

https://curiosity.com/topics/theres-no-such-thing-as-consciousness-according-to-philosopher-daniel-dennett-curiosity/

Edited June 24, 2018 by william.scherk
Link URL

[Jonathan]

11 hours ago, jts said:

Here is a video of him shovelling horse manure. with an IQ of 200.

 

jts, why do you have such a boner over Chris Langan?

[jts]

1 hour ago, Jonathan said:

jts, why do you have such a boner over Chris Langan?

Chris Langan is a puzzle. According to Jordan Peterson, IQ is the best predictor of a bunch of things.

 

[Jonathan]

23 minutes ago, jts said:

Chris Langan is a puzzle. According to Jordan Peterson, IQ is the best predictor of a bunch of things.

 

 

The predictions didn't work out for Langan. Get over your crush.

[Peter]

I don't like videos making fun of people even when the ones being made fun of, realize it. I think the "cut off point' is when the people doing the camera work act like they are just regular reporters and friendly. That may be why I despise Stephen Colbert. 

[william.scherk]

8 hours ago, anthony said:

To repeat, I have found plenty enough validation for myself to establish a strong connection from one metaphysical view of the mind, reductive materialism - demonstrated by most secularists and atheists - then to philosophical skepticism, leading logically to reduced individual value, and so ultimately to altruism as ethics and Leftism in politics. Simplified of course, with great variations from one person and thinker to the next.

 

 

This is great. This allows a list, and helps organize thoughts about who is responsible for 90% of awful things in the world.  First stop, Reductive Materialism.  Bad news for everybody. 

Ultimately, destructive Leftism in politics sits upon the cultural horror of altruism, which rests upon rampant devaluation of the individual volitional mind, which devaluation is inevitable under a regime of philosophical skepticism, which most secularists and atheists espouse and our culture imposes, all because of a simple hideous mistake made by most secularists and atheists, Reductive Materialism.

I validate this logical train of reasoning, but asking myself if it makes sense both backwards and forwards. It kinda does.  I validate for myself by teasing out and selecting connections between dots.  The dots here are clearly correct and don't need much more work, so I draw necessary and sufficient reason as a causal relation.

How do I do this with only "wetware" and some ineffable qualia?

There is no "qualia." It's not even interesting to talk about qualia.  It isn't interesting to talk about what other people think are puzzles. There is no puzzle!  I have a mind. It is rational. I am man. I sleep. I am man. I use concepts. I am man. This is self-validating and kinda fun.

It is not interesting that I am atheist and secularist in outlook, and a thorough-going humanist in values.  I have self-abnegated, since I take a stance of skepticism towards a class of claims, so since I squish everything together into a ridiculous material splodge, I carry out the mistaken work of Most Secularists and Atheists because of the power of a chapter heading.  Rubrics!  Type Two Errors!

Leftism, it goes without saying, is the bent and deluded side of human politics that needs to be carefully managed, reduced, and if possible in the long run, extirpated. I validate that with Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot.   There really is no middle ground in 'mixed economies.' Mix up your premises and you will end up like me, skeptical, atheist, humanist, "left" of the CPC as led by Andrew Scheer, a magical qualia robbed of Self, unable to grapple with concepts ... 

I should blame Kant somewhere around here, but.  The magic has gone. 

I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Tony under the banner of It's Pretty Simple, A Lot of Folks Have Bad Philosophies, And So Do You.

 

[william.scherk]

16 hours ago, jts said:

Here is a video of him shovelling horse manure. with an IQ of 200.

Manure needs shoveling out in horse and cattle country. Fact. 

Here is a more recent video. His theory of the God thing is pretty much done, we'll have to wait for evidence of its take-up over time.

 

[jts]

2 hours ago, william.scherk said:

Manure needs shoveling out in horse and cattle country. Fact. 

No sense of humor?

 

[anthony]

On 6/24/2018 at 8:14 PM, william.scherk said:

 

 

This is great. This allows a list, and helps organize thoughts about who is responsible for 90% of awful things in the world.  First stop, Reductive Materialism.  Bad news for everybody. 

Ultimately, destructive Leftism in politics sits upon the cultural horror of altruism, which rests upon rampant devaluation of the individual volitional mind, which devaluation is inevitable under a regime of philosophical skepticism, which most secularists and atheists espouse and our culture imposes, all because of a simple hideous mistake made by most secularists and atheists, Reductive Materialism.

I validate this logical train of reasoning, but asking myself if it makes sense both backwards and forwards. It kinda does.  I validate for myself by teasing out and selecting connections between dots.  The dots here are clearly correct and don't need much more work, so I draw necessary and sufficient reason as a causal relation.

How do I do this with only "wetware" and some ineffable qualia?

There is no "qualia." It's not even interesting to talk about qualia.  It isn't interesting to talk about what other people think are puzzles. There is no puzzle!  I have a mind. It is rational. I am man. I sleep. I am man. I use concepts. I am man. This is self-validating and kinda fun.

It is not interesting that I am atheist and secularist in outlook, and a thorough-going humanist in values.  I have self-abnegated, since I take a stance of skepticism towards a class of claims, so since I squish everything together into a ridiculous material splodge, I carry out the mistaken work of Most Secularists and Atheists because of the power of a chapter heading.  Rubrics!  Type Two Errors!

Leftism, it goes without saying, is the bent and deluded side of human politics that needs to be carefully managed, reduced, and if possible in the long run, extirpated. I validate that with Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot.   There really is no middle ground in 'mixed economies.' Mix up your premises and you will end up like me, skeptical, atheist, humanist, "left" of the CPC as led by Andrew Scheer, a magical qualia robbed of Self, unable to grapple with concepts ... 

I should blame Kant somewhere around here, but.  The magic has gone. 

I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Tony under the banner of It's Pretty Simple, A Lot of Folks Have Bad Philosophies, And So Do You.

 

William, This is some good thinking, though I wish you'd put this in print form to be better grasped. I don't see why you have to depersonalize your analysis with a robot voice. I like the "backwards and forwards" treatment (that I also tested out). The meaning of that final, enigmatic "...and so do you"- ?

It might be a good time to revisit what altruism is (stripped of its fallacious associations, kindness, chosen charity, personal values, etc.). A working model: the ideology that the importance of one's existence for one, has no more - indeed, should have less -  value than everyone else's existence. With respect to the general 'other', then, one is to be egalitarian or lesser (or both, according to random circumstances). 

The important 3-way altruism consideration - either a. One buys into this credo without question and reduces his life to be egalitarian/inferior. One therefore is self-sacrificial (I like Rand's "self-abnegation" as it better denotes the mind and self, as well as physicality and material goods) to arbitrary "others". Or b. One's life is involuntarily made to be of lesser importance, by powers beyond one's control, therefore is forced into sacrifice to others. Or, c. One sacrifices others' lives and minds to oneself, by force or deceit.

All boils down to the invidious false dichotomy:  sacrifice others, or sacrifice yourself - sell out others, or sell out yourself -- encapsulated by: any individual life is to be a submissive *moral duty* to other lives. Nobody asks - Why?

[Wolf DeVoon]

10 hours ago, anthony said:

All boils down to the invidious false dichotomy:  sacrifice others, or sacrifice yourself - sell out others, or sell out yourself -- encapsulated by: any individual life is to be a submissive *moral duty* to other lives. Nobody asks - Why?

Sorry to intrude, want to inject the notion of voluntarily chosen duty. Parent is a big one, a 20 year commitment, supersedes marriage and personal wellbeing. Cop, lawyer, Marine, tinker, tailor, spy -- most public service careers have a dimension of duty that's like a one way door involving classified or confidential knowledge.

[Brant Gaede]

On ‎6‎/‎24‎/‎2018 at 7:31 AM, william.scherk said:

https://curiosity.com/topics/theres-no-such-thing-as-consciousness-according-to-philosopher-daniel-dennett-curiosity/

Ho and hum. Fist he says there is no consciousness then he says there is.

--Brant

[anthony]

13 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Sorry to intrude, want to inject the notion of voluntarily chosen duty. Parent is a big one, a 20 year commitment, supersedes marriage and personal wellbeing. Cop, lawyer, Marine, tinker, tailor, spy -- most public service careers have a dimension of duty that's like a one way door involving classified or confidential knowledge.

"Inject" away!

"Voluntarily chosen..." indicates one thing - One objectively *wants* to do so, and perceives the objective value (primarily for oneself, while inclusive of the value for an 'other' and others who will benefit, too) and so one cares strongly for what one does and accomplishes. Adding "...duty", then, makes the statement self-contradictory.

"Man is a contractual being" (as contrasted with "a social animal", per Aristotle), and all your enterprises are "a contract" or commitment or resolve, which a rational person makes with himself, prior to with anyone or anything else. Very much including child rearing. How can a child be a "duty", which is an unwanted, coerced commitment, a self-sacrifice of one's higher values to a lesser one? Yeah, such parents exist, that alone is an argument for Pro-Choice. The thousand so-called 'dutiful' (misnomer)actions in +/-20 years of nurture and growth - and enjoyment of a new individual being, add up in total to a greater value, a huge gain, for most parents. 

[anthony]

Envy is what makes some want to sacrifice others-to-self. Guilt is what makes one sacrifice self-to-others. Misplaced emotions, arriving from the wrongful premise that everybody is and must be kept "the same".

[Wolf DeVoon]

9 hours ago, anthony said:

How can a child be a "duty"?

A dice roll. We try to narrow the odds by picking an Objectivist mate, or as Gordon Liddy said to me in explanation of his wife, "Good genes." But still, it's a dice roll, and kids have unusual characteristics, horizons of their own. Twenty years is a long time to be perfectly rational and perfectly wise every minute. Shit happens. I think I had 50 fights with school teachers and administrators, some public, some private. At least a dozen errors of judgment dealing with my daughter, several million mistakes dealing with my wife. The duty persists through thick and thin, loved or hated, admired or scoffed at. Parents use themselves up. New life is the purpose.

[anthony]

Wolf, The measure of value vs. self-sacrifice is this, I believe:

Was it worth it? Is it worth it?

If so, "it" is not a sacrificial duty, and would be a betrayal of one's values to consider it so. In this case, one (and one's child, inestimably) have gained more than one has lost.

"Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one’s lifespan, it is a part of one’s life that one invests in everything one values. The years, months, days or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it".

“Concepts of Consciousness,”
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 

Quite, thank god - and our initial value-choice - for a strong woman. Not as much "an Objectivist mate", per se, but with high character qualities, who can think.