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Objectivism and emotion and I have a history here going back almost to the beginning. At times I have been boring and pedantic. On the brighter side, thinking and reading about emotion and research into emotion has given me just enough confidence to be brief. I think everyone in this thread has made important points, interesting observations, and could probably get a C+ on a snap essay/comment that summed up "the other guy's" argument. What I got to was a question. And then a few more. First, Is empathy a capacity or an emotion? Is empathy felt in the body as an emotion is felt (is empathy an internal 'echo' of previously felt emotions re-imagined)? Can one empathize with an angry, grieving, mistrustful person? Can we ''pick up" and imitate a nearby emotion? Is there an "empathy of crowds"? How would emotional 'contagion' operate with and without empathy? If empathy is a human universal -- an aptitude or mental facility that comes with a standard issue brain -- can we measure its variable 'strength'? If empathy is a human universal, given a healthy brain, which will be the exceptions that prove the (general) rule? Can a sociopath be empathetic? Although it can be observed that a sociopath lacks remorse, is callous, has zero compassion and an absence of "conscience" and has difficulty distinguishing fear ... can he still 'get' empathy? Can he utilize empathy (or concurrent 'emotional echoes' in mind's eye)? Some of you here may keep up with the neuroscience as it pertains to sociopathy/empathy being mutually-exclusive. Where I think I agree most with everyone is that a human capacity for empathy(emotion) can be exploited, can be manipulated, can be commanded, and can be over-ruled. It can be fed on particular diets (of all the media we presently emit). It gets full play in great works of fiction. On that same tack -- empathy can be stimulated for good and for ill. As a parent teaches a child about the general non-aggression pact in human societies, stimulating a capacity for empathy is one tool. When we advise about the No Biting rule, and later on basic justice, on family fairness, we can effectively use a capacity for empathy to deepen the lesson. Later still, as we help teens grapple with moral issues we instruct on more explicit evils, on abuses and crimes, even on terrible fates, the wounds, hatreds, joys, fears and triumphs 'out there.' Evoking another's feelings in one's own mind is also a kind of day-to-day practical psychology ... One more line to truss up my points -- evoking empathy, eliciting empathetic reasoning, inculcating a mental skill at 'putting oneself in the other person's place,' imagining another person's joy or apprehension or shame or pain ... this helps carry forward the values of our selves (as philosophy for living), of our families, our cultural communities, "tribes," ethno-religious sects, states. It all adds to a lesson plan. Strong feelings help nail down the salient details. It might also be useful to re-beat this drum: empathy for the downtrodden, empathy for the forgotten, empathy for the left-behind, can be used to stake tribal boundaries -- using tales of great evil and suffering at the hands of putative enemies. It's a really interesting topic that I have thought about over the years. I wish we had a larger quorum, because this is one of those subjects that everyone probably has a take on. "What is empathy. What is it for? How does it manifest?" As always on an emotion-related thread, a plug for the excellent work of author and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. I've used an example from his work to illustrate how decision-making and reason itself is deformed or gravely impaired by specific lesions to the brain that remove emotion. What a remarkable attribute of human beings, that we can imagine ourselves in the feeling body of another human.

To the second sentence: but, of course! That doesn't follow from the first part, though. Advisedly, sometimes an emotion may well precede and accompany the decision for an action, when one 'emotionally anticipates' a desired end. Such as in buying a gift for a friend, you will anticipate his pleasure at receiving and using it and take advance pleasure from that. I think we are on different planes flying the same route here, Tony. I am going to go on at hideous length to explain my route and how I see us converging on the same destination. Once I post this, I am going to do hatchet/edit job, because it is already six times longer than I intended, and I hate the thought of losing a fan to TLDR. There is only so much vivid prose can do. My first sentence is supported by the striking case of 'Elliot.' His ability to make 'the simplest' decisions was gravely impaired by the destruction of his capacity for emotion. His decision-making, his process of judgment were permanently damaged. I used the example of a 'perfect pathology' to illustrate for Joseph the ubiquity of what he called 'cadence,' to illustrate what happens to a human being when his emotions are 'removed' entirely. From the most subconscious, ephemeral emotional calculations, to acutely value-laden deliberations of choice, 'Elliot' could no longer reason efficiently enough to survive on his own. So, the first sentence was supported by that which proceeded it, which you left out. Joseph had asked us "If emotions can cloud judgment, how does one know his judgment is objective?" and I wanted to establish the grounds of my opinion before attempting to answer: Without emotions like fear, anger, disgust, anticipation, sadness, happiness ... you would hardly be able to 'judge' anything. One may have an emotional disorder -- a mania or depression -- that results in irrational decisions, irrational actions, self-damaging judgments of impinging reality or irrational assessments of danger/risk. One can also be a victim of rare neurological states in which emotions are absent (see Antonio Damasio's study of just such a person, 'Elliot,' in Descarte's Error, and in a story from the Sydney Morning Herald, Feeling our way to decision). Tony, your advisory kind of built on on this knowledge of emotion, as you spoke of an emotion that can precede and accompany a decision, how a human 'emotionally anticipates' a desired end, how a human can anticipate his pleasure. I don't think we have substantive differences on how emotions can be born and managed, or on how automaticity can be invoked, curbed, reprocessed, primed, repressed, overridden, what have you. I don't think we disagree on the complexity of the reason/emotion nexus. And I think we agree down the line that we need more detail from Joseph before we can best answer his questions. I can interpret your notes on 'advance pleasure' that rational cognition is in some instances dependent on emotion for efficiency. Perhaps you might be thinking I evade a diktat or supervening authority ... maybe a phrase plucked from Rand: 'emotion are not tools of cognition.' I think we would agree that the example of Elliot teaches us that emotions can be key to decision-making, and that without them we can have cognitive problems. I've made the same very narrow range of points with various dressings and toppings in the past, so I will try to be fresh: if we see emotion as an 'evaluation' as do Rand and Damasio and most emotion theorists and researchers, we can see that rational evaluation as a class subsumes emotional evaluation, as a kind of neural substrate to choice and preference and differentiation of options and so on. The emotional index of a choice matrix is thus but one aspect we can consult -- neither the most important nor without importance at all. I believe that evaluation of even prosaic choice can be emotive in humans -- decisions without emotional valence are like picking fruit. One can completely rationally pick fruit to the highest standard -- but underneath the calculation is a value sought, rooted in the positive/negative value-scheme of a mind. (none of his means to imply that value schemes cannot be immoral, psychotic, deranged, irrational, dogmatic, destructive, incoherent, partial, psychopathic, anti-social, anti-individual. Nor do I mean to imply that one must always take an emotional depth sounding. Our machine is constantly monitoring, we don't need to examine our feelings until they cause distress. We don't need to goad feelings to the surface before a decision can be taken. We can usually rely upon the machine to alert us to dangerous situations requiring heightened attention. If the machine gives us fear and loathing, or anger, or despair, or anguished second-guessing to otherwise simple decisions, if one is 'torn' and doesn't understand why, then, sure, pay attention ... in proportion to the decision.) But, of course, I might be missing the proper objection in your remarks, Tony, or perceiving agreement where it hasn't taken hold. Perhaps you are trying to tell me that I am invoking a 'power' of raw unexamined emotion to properly determine human action (decision). Perhaps you think that pointing to the ubiquity of emotion means I would campaign for making the emotional content of decision-making the only significant aspect of decision-making. Maybe I am simply not invoking caveats that seem necessary. Are there decision-making processes in which emotion is and should be least-ranked during evaluation? I would say yes, indeed, of course. If asked to defend the notion that unexamined emotions can wreck and hobble 'proper' rational conclusions, I would again say yes, indeed. We need only look at the richest fruit of human reason,at products of sustained application of human reason sans emotion. There are multiple rich examples from literature and life, science and history -- all showing us the variable ways in which human beings let their emotions over-rule reason -- up to and beyond the point of their personal destruction. One can find a plethora of sites and instances of decision-making further illustrating the danger of emotional motives and influences. We find benches and libraries full of the result of 'unemotional' decision-making and deciding, judging. I'd say that we would agree that in many cases our very existences depend on dispassionate judgment: in our finances, in justice, in science, in most sober fields of inquiry. -- all this extended rant to place my remarks in context and to more fully explain what I meant by the sentence "Without emotion, one can find it hard to make the simplest decision." Anyway, back to context within the bounds of the OT's concerns -- something unreasonable, conceptually distressing, confusing, conflicting or puzzling. How can he know when he (the Judge) is clouded by emotion? Well, again I'd say we can't approach answers without salient detail. Is the judgment (choice/decision/conclusion/assessment) in danger because of an inappropriate excess of emotion, or because of a by-intensity-suspect emotion? Is the emotion unwanted or welcome? Does the emotion contradict the reasoned judgment? Is a particular kind of judgment suspect when accompanied by strong emotion? (and as before, which actual emotions are at issue is key) I guess I am most interested in the personal problem, although the epistemology is absorbing. Here our planes intersect, Tony! Even the 'simplest decision' is values based. This is my point re 'Elliot.' His 'value'-assessment was impaired by his brain wound. He was unplugged from a part of the machine we normal-issue humans have still doing its business in our bodies. Even the 'simplest decision' is values based. Your formulation effectively supports a rational/emotive coupling. Values at the base, values according to our assessments from on down the cognitive chain, values undergirding one's sense of life, values underlying our emotional gestalt, mood, attitude per our particularities. Even the 'simplest decision' is values based. Values acquired through rational means or not. And from the Randian scheme of valuation, we can follow those valuations all the way back to pre-conceptual: good for me, bad for me, pain or pleasure, advance/retreat, flee/fight, live/die. You do not comment on a particular impaired judgment of Joseph's because like me you can't; we'd need to do a lot of spade-work to learn which values a particular decision were based on, and work up from there. We await clarification from Joseph. This is difficult to parse. I'd like to see this expanded, since I may misunderstand its import. I'd kick it back to Joseph and say -- how does this apply to your instance of possibly-clouded judgment? And then probe for the comparative he mentioned. The variables are similar: (strong emotion) + (confident) judgment / (strong emotion) + (doubtful) judgment. Are you perhaps unduly prioritizing emotion in assessing the 'clouding'? ... perhaps there is a persisting rational reason for ambivalence, once the strong signal is set aside or subsides. Again, what was the strong emotion? I can imagine a strongly 'negative' emotion much more easily. A judgment accompanied by feelings of contempt, disgust, anger, dismay, repulsion, whatever mixture, cranked up to ten or beyond. And then, again, what role might that felt emotion have played to confound or make suspect an otherwise confident mental act? -- the act of judgment, the conclusion, the decision? I always have been attuned to depressive reasoning, as depression has stalked my family for generations (no doubt a Norwegian adaptation). A fatalistic, detached, what's the use blunting of emotions, an inability to take once-appreciated pleasures, a disconnect from life's interactions. Others will be more attentive to different aspects of destructive or inappropriate 'moods' or 'states' in decision-making. Mike has his eye out for anger, maybe. Maybe most of us have our eyes out for hate/rage or obsessively negative emoters in our midst, online, in life, on the world's stages. Maybe some look for signals of other out-of-control or distorted emotional obstacles to rational cognition, on many different scales. So, Tony's apparent aversion to a general 'prioritizing emotions' in all choice is wise. Why prioritize, in general, what is only an aspect of cognition, an agent of evaluation? We can put a 'what do you feel and why do you feel it' question on a top-forty list of rational evaluative questions, and rank it higher or lower on an 'Uh-oh' scale -- depending on its appropriateness to the inquiry. In a court, What did you feel? is either wildly irrelevant and immaterial, or designed to elicit motivation. I was in a quiet cold controlled ragefear of jealousy, Your Honour. I felt nothing, Your Honour. In any case, I am not making an argument for prioritizing much more than figuring out the problem. I am curious where our questioner is feeling conflict and doubt over his own judgment. We can help him to a better rational place, I hope, or at least find a way to understand his conflict in the context of our own emotional/judging experience. Later, the advanced-level philosophical bone-picking can commence. In this case we must pay attention to -- 'prioritize' -- Joseph's emotions, because that is what he is what he brought forward. Not knowing the details of the puzzle/conflict, there's not much more I helpfully say to guide our friend, despite my own general and specific understanding of emotion and decision-making. So, I'll put the spotlight back on the OT and say, there's my general and particular thoughts, here's some interesting facts, here's the scope of the possible problem in my mind, hope to hear more detail. I don't know if this is an effective answer to the perplexed-by-William. One more try: Joseph said, I'll take that almost-last part, "how does one know that his judgment isn't simply motivated by pleasure/pain?" In great matters and small, pleasure/pain evaluations -- or more neutrally, positive/negative evaluations -- can be motivators. The stronger the 'intensity' of an emotion, the stronger the potential motivation. The least 'charge' accompanying a decision, the least likely to have been biased. The most charged evaluations are then probably a 'best sum' indicator from your mind that this is a high-stakes decision. So, Joseph, set aside that 'simply' qualifier and look back to how a comparison caused you to doubt a decision. Strong emotions in one instance did not delay decision. In the other, strong emotions were let to subside. Seems to me eminently rational to defer conclusions, but why not delay in both cases? Why didn't you cool off in the first instance too? How one might answer the "how do we know" query, how to determine whether "judgment isn't simply motivated by pleasure/pain?" -- by understanding that any judgment process may contain pre-existing/triggered positive/negative emotional evaluations (to the situation). Identifying the actual evaluations reveals the concepts in play, and readies them for analytic review. So, what difference did it make int he first instance -- the strong emotion? What difference did the emotion make in the second instance? Was each situation charged with differing emotions?

I plug this in here, though answering Tony from the other thread on Diana and the Wall of Hypocrisy. I do not fully understand this. Set aside the term 'sub-conscious' and what does this mean -- every emotion came via one's consciousness? If this means that one does not emote when one sleeps, I would disagree**. If it means more or less that an impression of some kind (signal 'incoming' to an emotional centre in the brain) had to have been made on a conscious organism before it could feel emotion, I could partially agree, since I can easily sketch out a situation for the six senses, each one illustrated by a conscious organism having an emotion triggered by something external, or something that impinged upon the brain's awareness. But to say that one was conscious of something, an event or action that impinged and engendered emotion -- does this necessarily imply 'consciousness' in the fully extended gerund in play? It does not imply a fully human consciousness if one can say that a dog or other animal can be triggered into fear. Any manner of mammals exhibit fear, anger ... and can recognize it in a conspecific. So, I can agree with the statement that every emotion came via one's consciousness without accepting a human-only example. I set aside "one's sub-conscious" because I do not know what Tony means exactly. Unconscious brain activity obviously undergirds the conscious stream of thought and perception, but I do not reify this underground to a separate actor. I do not believe in The Unconscious as a personality, so to speak, in any way separable from the brain and personality of the individual. More to the point, if I agree that emotions are felt consciously, and rooted in consciousness, what can I make with that statement? What does it imply as knock-on effects in the world and in the mind? Emotion is one of those 'things' that I do not think Rand worked on sufficiently, did not explore and write enough about. I am unsatisfied with the stock Objectivish notions about emotion.† I agree with the broad strokes of Rand that agree with the findings of cognitive neuroscience, and part with her where her statements are contradicted in fact. Further elaborations of her verbalisms tend to confuse me, as I do not grasp the referents sometimes. For example, think of what conceptual depth is in these three words: cognition, tool, emotion. What do I need to know about cognition, about tools, about emotions, before I can confidently assemble the three into always/ever statements of broad (if not universal) applicability? This is so encouraging. I think of someone without emotion, or with particular emotional deficits. I cited Damasio before, Tony, hoping my readers in this thread had read him or of him. What makes his work interesting is he put the question of the OT at the front of his work as a neurologist. He sought out (like Sacks) the folks with deficits -- in consciousness and in emotion. Here the evidence from Damasio is unequivocal, and contradicts Rand's dicta. Without emotion, how can one make decisions? Without that evaluator automatically operating, giving physical reactions to the data, how can one make fully informed choices? In several striking cases, Damasio has featured the severe cognitive effects of having emotions 'removed.' Tony, can you imagine how crippled cognition might be without the input of emotion, in terms of analysis and judgement? Can you imagine a morality without emotion? I really think there is no more emotional animal than humankind. Hands down. The sketchiness of Objectivish thought on emotion is disappointing sometimes. What we know about emotion from Objectivism, in other words, is not enough to understand emotion in its fullest, and to more fully understand how deeply implicated emotion is in so much of what we call 'cognition.' The more we understand from the sciences about the peculiarities of our faculties, the more we can rationally deal with them. Knock out the ability to feel emotion, and the human becomes incapable of decision-making. A part of the machinery of the human that is absolutely necessary for rational cognition, emotion. ________________ ** of course, one is conscious to a greater or lesser degree during one's dreams and nightmares. The impingement on consciousness that engenders emotion in the dream world is almost always from the stream of consciousness, it could be argued. † Love love love where Boydstun and Marsha Familiaro Enwright get to on emotion. Dissenting with Rand on this issue is not apostasy. What I like is that Rand understood emotion as an evaluative faculty, and stressed that humans can engineer and supervise their own emotions, if not their moods. She also deftly sketched the actors, the organism/evaluator, and the executive, the Ego, and the impingements. Her sketch of an emotion under the executive management of the self is revealing of what she aspired to as a rational human being. I can only stand with this kind of aspiration. It is what I wish for myself and all human beings.

The topic of emotion in Randland has always interested me. My very first point of contact with Objectivish things online was the place of emotion in cognition. It is interesting to find myself in rough agreement with Michael all these years later. In the midst of a very intriguing conversation with my favourite South African Randian, this by MSK: It's not really fair to truncquote this bit, but readers can plunge back into the front porch thread to gain the flow of discussion, and the hinge-point of disagreement. But besides that, I think I can add a clarifying point in response to this (highlights added): This describes a similar-but-not-identical syndrome that I became aware of by reading the work of Antonio Damasio (whom I have mentioned a few too many times ...). Damasio worked with a neurological patient given the code-name "Elliot." I mentioned 'Damasio,' 'emotion,' and 'Elliot' in one post five years ago: The gist was this: "Here is a teaser from a popular article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Feeling our way to decision" -- which I excerpted in the 2012 post ... Back to Michael's post today ... I'd like to find the famous example ... perhaps Michael can introspect hard and come up with the details. -- this is roughly what I began to think when I learned of the case of "Elliot." I won't belabour the point here, since my "too many times" link above shows the same kind of discussion points I would make this time. Without emotion, one's thinking is crippled. An additional knowledge point would be what "emotional intelligence" is missing in psychopaths (and here I plug the brilliant synthesis of research given in Ken Kiehl's book, The Psychopath Whisperer). Here is a brief extract from the 2010 Scientific American Mind article "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath." -- imagine waking up to a world in which none of these bodily feelings were present in mind, but were mostly inaccessible ... and try to figure out which emotional circuits are blunted to the point of disappearance in the "rational" mind of a psychopath.

Roger, have you read much of Antonio Damasio? Or how about David Gelernter? I hadn't heard of this guy. I was curious if he and Damasio had some overlap in their concepts of consciousness, and they do to some degree. Both are chary of a categorical functionalism that disregards the body, embodiment, emotion, proto-consciousness. I will read a bit more of Gelernter to see if his spectrum of consciousness intersects meaningfully with Damasio's theory, but so far it does only in opposition to the strict materialists in current squabbles in the philosophy of consciousness. Gelernter has a hate-list, though, and it is extensive, and it seems to intersect modern Objectivish concerns at several points -- in culture war, rotten higher education, individualism. When I get the book you recommend I will be interested to see who he cites as scientific support for his opinions. It looks like he weaves Jungian psychology in with literature and philosophy in a fun way, so there you go. His book America Lite looks like a total rouser. I think he would very much appeal to Bob Kolker. He seems to have a few good civilizational tips for Christianity that comport with Bob's moral anchoring in Judaism. I was hoping to draw Roger out on the subject of consciousness, and the fragment of oomph from fmr Dr Mrs Dr. The Damasio concept of levels of consciousness (my crib term) might be close to that cited as Roger's, and thus fruitful indeed. Anyhow, the Wikipedia article on his theory is brief and to the point so the comparison can be made ... Here is some material from a fairly long Gelernter article a couple of years back. It is concerned with consciousness and much else, and shows a rousing style and harsh rhetoric. That is sometimes attractive around here, whether the arguments are sound or valid or not. Two excerpts from The Closing of the Scientific Mind: Reflections on the zombie-scientist problem, Jan 1, 2014. It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable response to a mass attack by killer hyenas were to run away. Nagel was assailed; almost everyone else ran. The Kurzweil Cult. The voice most strongly associated with what I’ve termed roboticism is that of Ray Kurzweil, a leading technologist and inventor. The Kurzweil Cult teaches that, given the strong and ever-increasing pace of technological progress and change, a fateful crossover point is approaching. He calls this point the “singularity.” After the year 2045 (mark your calendars!), machine intelligence will dominate human intelligence to the extent that men will no longer understand machines any more than potato chips understand mathematical topology. Men will already have begun an orgy of machinification—implanting chips in their bodies and brains, and fine-tuning their own and their children’s genetic material. Kurzweil believes in “transhumanism,” the merging of men and machines. He believes human immortality is just around the corner. He works for Google. Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in and longs for the death of mankind. Because if things work out as he predicts, there will still be life on Earth, but no human life. To predict that a man who lives forever and is built mainly of semiconductors is still a man is like predicting that a man with stainless steel skin, a small nuclear reactor for a stomach, and an IQ of 10,000 would still be a man. In fact we have no idea what he would be. Each change in him might be defended as an improvement, but man as we know him is the top growth on a tall tree in a large forest: His kinship with his parents and ancestors and mankind at large, the experience of seeing his own reflection in human history and his fellow man—those things are the crucial part of who he is. If you make him grossly different, he is lost, with no reflection anywhere he looks. If you make lots of people grossly different, they are all lost together—cut adrift from their forebears, from human history and human experience. Of course we do know that whatever these creatures are, untransformed men will be unable to keep up with them. Their superhuman intelligence and strength will extinguish mankind as we know it, or reduce men to slaves or dogs. To wish for such a development is to play dice with the universe. ...] That science should face crises in the early 21st century is inevitable. Power corrupts, and science today is the Catholic Church around the start of the 16th century: used to having its own way and dealing with heretics by excommunication, not argument. Science is caught up, also, in the same educational breakdown that has brought so many other proud fields low. Science needs reasoned argument and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But our leading universities have dedicated themselves to stamping them out—at least in all political areas. We routinely provide superb technical educations in science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same students have been taught since kindergarten that you are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-made global warming, or the line that men and women are interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea that all cultures and nations are equally good (except for Western nations and cultures, which are worse), how will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists? They’ve been reared on the idea that questioning official doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in polite society. (And if you are president of Harvard, it can get you fired.) Beset by all this mold and fungus and corruption, science has continued to produce deep and brilliant work. Most scientists are skeptical about their own fields and hold their colleagues to rigorous standards. Recent years have seen remarkable advances in experimental and applied physics, planetary exploration and astronomy, genetics, physiology, synthetic materials, computing, and all sorts of other areas. But we do have problems, and the struggle of subjective humanism against roboticism is one of the most important. The moral claims urged on man by Judeo-Christian principles and his other religious and philosophical traditions have nothing to do with Earth’s being the center of the solar system or having been created in six days, or with the real or imagined absence of rational life elsewhere in the universe. The best and deepest moral laws we know tell us to revere human life and, above all, to be human: to treat all creatures, our fellow humans and the world at large, humanely. To behave like a human being (Yiddish: mensch) is to realize our best selves. No other creature has a best self. This is the real danger of anti-subjectivism, in an age where the collapse of religious education among Western elites has already made a whole generation morally wobbly. When scientists casually toss our human-centered worldview in the trash with the used coffee cups, they are re-smashing the sacred tablets, not in blind rage as Moses did, but in casual, ignorant indifference to the fate of mankind. A world that is intimidated by science and bored sick with cynical, empty “postmodernism” desperately needs a new subjectivist, humanist, individualistworldview. We need science and scholarship and art and spiritual life to be fully human. The last three are withering, and almost no one understands the first. The Kurzweil Cult is attractive enough to require opposition in a positive sense; alternative futures must be clear. The cults that oppose Kurzweilism are called Judaism and Christianity. But they must and will evolve to meet new dangers in new worlds. The central text of Judeo-Christian religions in the tech-threatened, Googleplectic West of the 21st century might well be Deuteronomy 30:19: “I summon today as your witnesses the heavens and the earth: I have laid life and death before you, the blessing and the curse; choose life and live!—you are your children.” That Dang Kurzweil Kult! Wait till Ed Hudgins reads this. Okay, to wind you down from the excitement engendered by Gelernter, Damasio having a live think at a TED thing. Their webpage contains a transcript of the Youtube version of the think. He is no Gelernter, but in his remarks captures the wonder and mystery of our senses of self, the individual human consciousness. -- see more from Gelernter at Big Think, including a great potted bio.

I'm vaguely familiar with Damasio's work, but I'm not sure how much it applies in this case. I recommend Damasio's "Descartes' Error" from your library. It describes the "case" of the patient called "Elliot" ... the subtitle of the book is "Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, and the chapter is A Modern Phineas Gage. I can briefly describe the case and why I find it applicable or interesting to the question of Emotions as Tools of cognition. In a nutshell, Elliot had damage to a part of his pre-frontal cortex. From that point forward, he lost his ability to make decisions. (the case is more complex than that, of course, but that is the gist.) So the point or issue I am inserting is that we have an example of a person, a real person, who had 'lost' his emotions. And that the effect of the loss was profoundly damaging to decision-making. And that decision-making is a cognition. Elliot did not have amygdala damage. Damage to or disease of the amygdala leads to various interesting and awful syndromes, but that isn't applicable to Elliot. (bringing forward research on the amygdala and decision-making would add another immensely interesting angle on Rand's precepts) In this case, I prefer not to use analogies, or rather 'argument by analogy.' I want folks to think through what happened to Elliot and what it might mean to the hard and fast edict that "Emotions are not (reliable) tools of cognition." A person with an undamaged amygdala can still make 'bad' decisions. A human mind does not map to the analogous situations. That is an important question. I am asking questions from a slightly different angle. What is the connection between emotions and decision-making? What if the chosen values can no longer be 'assigned' a bodily sensation (emotion positive or negative)? Here's a little bit of Damasio which compresses his work with Elliot. Feeling Our Emotions | According to noted neurologist Antonio R. Damasio, joy or sorrow can emerge only after the brain registers physical changes in the body If you donate five bucks to OL, I will lend you a listen to an audio reading of the chapter. If you give ten bucks I will lend you the chapter text backstage. It is my own copy, and to Trump with the DMCA ...

Which emotions??? Do anger and hatred promote cognition or do they cripple cognition. A little fear increases watchfulness. Panic destroys reason and judgement. I have been boring at length on this since I came to the forum in 2006. My thesis is borrowed almost entirely, with biggest debt to Antonio Damasio. I have only convinced one person to read an item or two from Damasio's booklist. I am saying I have been banging a drum for some time. I don't recall you engaging with any of my other boring banging, so I am kind of self-bored at the prospect of freshening up that bonging boring droning. Perhaps I could just sketch the scope of what I mean by 'tool of cognition' ...? I will call cognition not just thinking, but reasoning, reasoning in the sense of normal everyday evaluations, decision-making, analyses and self-reports. For cognition, for a person making his way in the world, a lack of emotion otherwise standard issue from birth, the lack is a handicap. For a poetic version of the bonging and droning see my most recent post in this thread.. Imagine, if you will, a person with lesions in his or her brain, lesions where the emotional circuits are, rendering that person an almost perfect Spock and in no way effecting memory or intelligence (such persons are rare but perfect illustrations). The problem results in faulty or entirely absent mechanics of valuation -- a lack of 'charge' on all emotional vectors. Without the ability to feel emotion, there is no physico-mental neuronal 'calculus' of benefit, no beads on the mental-emotional abacus, no 'skin' in the game, no chips at stake. If you take the time to read a story at a link I have posted three times before I would be happy to continue a conversation, Bob. Your experience of life and development on the Autism Spectrum, your unique cognitive challenges, these can serve to add empirical heft for my thesis once you understand it. While I go dig up my own cache of bongo, consider a mirror or consider the face of a 'neuro-typical' person under your gaze, whether in your early life, at school, in love, in conflict, in doubt. Can you now grasp the 'tells' on that face via everyday emoting, emoting that appears on the face? I think you have written before on how your 'emotion detection' equipment needed a lot of programming. You might end up thinking, if something needed 'programming,' then surely that something is a tool essential to the human cognitive toolkit. (I will edit this down and/or out, and perhaps shift it to another thread with more of a focus on emotion where the issues have been trodden already, Bob. There is not a lot of learning going on here in this thread. But. It would be fascinating to read about your viscerals as pertains to art -- if it plays any part in your life.) Suggested search term : william.scherk[user] damasio AND emotion AND cognition

So? So what? Imagine it this way: what happens to a person's decision-making abilities if these often-unreliable 'tools' are entirely absent? I mention Antonio Damasio's insights -- perhaps too many times (current count 22), but his work with "Elliot" and other cases of brain disease or injury pointed to the necessary part of emotions in making even the most ordinary decisions. Since decision-making is a cognitive process, to know that 'missing emotion' cripples a person, this is the strongest suggestion that Emotions are human Tools in Cognition, tools that once lost cannot be replaced by reason. Rather than rewrite the same material here, I include some earlier quotes ... to serve as Food for Thought: I add emphasis here and there. A B This is stated many times, and I still do not fully understand it. I have asked before if anyone can imagine making a rational decision without emotion, and I noted Damasio's work on emotional deficits (in the consciousness thread). Blackhorse, have you read anything of Damasio's work with 'Elliot'? (first in book form in Descarte's Error) C

What's the context? The facial meaning is that there are pretensions in the formal teachings of Objectivism, among which that Reason is humankind's most potent tool/attribute -- and relatedly, that a reasoned inquirer needs to subordinate emotion, understand emotion, identify the root of particular emotional states. Since decision-making is quite often dependent on functioning emotional circuits, the identification requires steps out of Objectivist diktat into allied fields of investigation. The fictional character Spock was/is perfectly poised to understand the uses and misuses of emotion. He could not be swayed by pure emotionalist argument, nor struggle to avoid his own half-human emotions overrunning logic and reason. Except of course when he was in rut. As with Ayn Rand's "Stomach Feeling" ... I sometimes see contortions. Objectivist rage and all that. Emotionalist language and emotional arguments. The character is evidently not stripped clean of emotions, being bi-racial. A fully emotionless man is Damasio's famous patient, Elliot, which absence wrecked his life. The pretension to cold, logical, wholly rational cognition is then a nice target zone for me. I don't think Objectivists tend to master their emotions any greater than average, yet the pretense is attractive. If emotion is relatively easy to whip up, manipulate, recruit in service of inhumane, irrational and destructive ends, then a calm and collected culture of reason is where I want to live, at least in my mind.

In the context of "What is consciousness for," your question is sharp. Although the danger in defining terms is that we can carve away all the wonderful connotations of a word and leave it like a boned fish on an empty plate . . . and while your question has a profound trap (how the hell can I know what is in the we-formation, the we-mind, besides consulting lexicons?), it is fun and can seed a hundred further discussions/tirades/obtuse idiomatic rants. I am pig-ignorant of the recently burgeoning field of consciousness studies, but cling to the speculative work of Antonio Damasio as you do to your pathfinder Korzybski, of whom I am also pig-ignorant. If you recommend to me an accessible Korzybski take on consciousness (of something), I will try to find you an accessible take from Damasio. ** But, at the risk of getting everything utterly wrong-ass, Damasio believes that consciousness in human terms is that which a normal, neurologically-sound person is aware of: the body foremost, the sensory 'images' pressing in from outside and the 'images' that flash through thought, and subsequent evolved capacities, emotions, feelings, self and conception of self in the temporal flux. His great book "The Feeling of What Happens" has a subtitle that captures for me the near-ineffable gestalt of his speculations: "Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (see this review if you are unfamiliar). If you can conceive of what it means to be "unconscious," and if you can read some of the case studies of Damasio (or Oliver Sacks, for good measure), you can sculpt your own conception of the common connotations of the word . . . In terms of "what consciousness is for," accepting that this is a metaphor like "What the Fox gene is for," I find it helps to think as Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins suggest -- as an attribute of an evolved species, consciousness is not strictly for anything, as telos, as end, as purpose. Yet by applying a reverse engineering perspective, one can ask "what does it do?" and "what does its absence imply for its purpose?" and "are there levels of consciousness?" In my muddled understanding then, consciousness is a built-on extension of the senses that most living things have, an 'awareness-Plus,' a sophisticated homeostatic function of the organism. Consciousness of the type an amoeba does not possess is the function of the organism that says "I, me, mine, today, tomorrow, forever." And to stretch an analogy to its snapping point, consciousness is the Knowing of the Knower. Fascinating angles on consciousness come from consideration of coma, persistent vegetative states, locked-in syndrome, various agnosias and effects of brain lesions from the neurological literature. _______ ** in the meantime, a quick summary of Damasio's levels of consciousness here.

I think your questions are interesting, but vague. What is the personal judgment -- what kind of judgment on what kind of issue or question, what in particular is being judged, what kind of decision are you trying to make? By the same token, what are the 'strong emotions' you feel when grappling with decision, while trying to judge? Without context, there is no opportunity to find out if you are ruminating. Without emotions like fear, anger, disgust, anticipation, sadness, happiness ... you would hardly be able to 'judge' anything. One may have an emotional disorder -- a mania or depression -- that results in irrational decisions, irrational actions, self-damaging judgments of impinging reality or irrational assessments of danger/risk. One can also be a victim of rare neurological states in which emotions are absent (see Antonio Damasio's study of just such a person, 'Elliot,' in Descarte's Error, and in a story from the Sydney Morning Herald, Feeling our way to decision). Without emotion, one can find it hard to make the simplest decision. Without emotion, human life would have no variations in felt 'flavour.' It will be most useful for discussion to elucidate particulars of the situations you remark upon. I can imagine, for example, a situation in which you are 'judging' a contest of some kind, a yes/no, accept/reject, set-aside/retain-for-examination series of assessments. If you were overwhelmed by feelings of rage or sadness in the midst of the judgment process, Brant's suggestion to wait until passions subside is elementary. What would trigger such feelings? What background situation might intrude? What mood state has darkened your senses? I can imagine any amount of situations you might be in -- where emotional intensity seems out of balance to the matter at hand. Snap judgments informed only by strong negative emotion may indeed need extensive review -- if the judgment is important to you or those close to you.

Do emotion names capture that sense of identity? Does your epigram capture the passage of time, intensity, shifts and blurs in your own emotional life Of what use is this generalization and home-truth to the project of appreciating(criticizing) art? Do you have a project, in so many words? If someone's emotions are curiously blunted and limited, Tony, as in Damasio's case studies, do you think they could still appreciate art? Would removing Kamhi and Torres emotional life render their judgements on art more or less useful? Would cutting out all the insults and moralistic 'you people' crap from this thread serve your argument better? I don't expect answers to these questions, but set them as a hook for my own thoughts. I would love to see someone in this thread go off and gather some art, select some items for discussion, and 're-set.' Roger's introduction reads to me like a laissez-passer to an Invitational, an event, an intellectual event. The personal invective adds no value to me. But here is my last emotional outburst, a sketch of OL emotions, pictured -- and labeled (In Polish). Have I missed any of the Big Objectivish Emotions expressed so far? The Kantian Sublime: Why Care? Published in ‘Why Theory,’ Cal Arts Exhibition Catalogue, 2009 The Kantian sublime exists as topic, ghost, or foil in many current critical texts about art. Immanuel Kant lays the foundation for a mode of thought that yields two centuries of critique. As Terry Eagleton notes, it is within Kant’s vision that “Marx’s immanent critique will find a foothold.”i Despite the simplification of Kant in some contemporary writing, the actual text is nuanced and at times contradictory; Kant exists at the threshold of rationalism and romanticism. A close read of the text dispels the notion of a pure formalism; even within the Kantian realm, the concepts of beauty and the sublime originate with sensory experience but ultimately assert the triumph of the human capacity to reason. Revisiting Kant’s text seems particularly relevant to our cultural moment as critics such as Edward Said and Eagleton reassess the material outcomes of countervailing anti-essentialist theories. Perhaps the most controversial and fantastical aspect of Kant’s text – the assertion of beauty and the sublime as universal experiences deserves the most thoughtful enquiry. [...] Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) shifts the emphasis of the sublime from the object to the subject. For Kant, the sublime though instigated by objects in the world is not an external object itself, say a mountaintop. The sublime is a mental process, a particular subjective experience that presents the limits of human knowledge to the subject. By emphasizing the subject and the limits of human cognition, the Kantian sublime ultimately rests not in Nature itself, but in the human capacity to reason about Nature. [...] Despite humanism’s misuse of politics and public policy in the form of ethnocentrism and empire, Said asks us to remember the humanist ideal “based on the human being’s capacity to make knowledge, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively, dully.”xxvi Can we similarly see Kant’s universality not as the masquerade of authoritarianism but as an assertion of what makes human beings common? Kant’s ideas are nuanced; they carry the tools of their own dismantling. There is an awe of reason in this formalist world, a limit to subjectivity in this humanist vision and the paradox of a universality that is also subjective.

This is stated many times, and I still do not fully understand it. I have asked before if anyone can imagine making a rational decision without emotion, and I noted Damasio's work on emotional deficits (in the consciousness thread). Blackhorse, have you read anything of Damasio's work with 'Elliot'? (first in book form in Descarte's Error) I mention this so that you can find and examine a situation that puts the "not tools of cognition' / 'not tools of rational decision making' to the test. Here is a teaser from a popular article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Feeling our way to decision

This is good, but I don't think Tony is familiar with what you are talking about -- in terms of what I might call (borrowing from Damasio) "core consciousness." This kind of "core consciousness" is the thing that makes us kin to animals (to my mind). The way I read your remarks make me think of the relatively famous (in consciousness studies) person known as HM ... Now, what was missing in HM was not procedural memory, nor did he lose the ability to subconsciously learn physical tasks -- but his day to day world of consciousness was without memory consolidation. As he said above, each day is alone by itself. Considering how important memory is to our human selves, how crippled we can be without a working memory, can we still imagine a pre-self-conscious human (a toddler before she 'knew who she was' -- during the years subject to childhood amnesia) who has one up on HM, with functioning hippocampus? If we can imagine this, can we say that this small human did not have 'consciousness' ... ? Can we say that HM did not have 'consciousness'? I think not. HM, without a hippocampus, was able to converse, walk, write, read, etcetera, and could identify himself. He was 'conscious' of himself and his surroundings. Another way to look at this tangle where emotion, memory, self-awareness and consciousness intersect and work together is by looking at animals that are closest to us (in terms of primate evolution). Here is a short (5 minute) video of Damian Aspinall and his reunion with young gorilla, Kwibi. I am hoping we can stop banging the pot for Rand and think about what this brief vignette can suggest to us about identity, self/other, memory, emotion and .... consciousness.

A cunning lead in to what is actually quite old, my first online clang! on Objectivish subjects, in which I compare Atlas Shrugged to Battlefield Earth [from freedomofmind, at yahoogroups, post number 23918, posted Wed Jun 8, 2005 -- I think I may have killed the thread. Note that Monica Pignotti is known as an apostate of two totalistic systems, The Callahan Technique and Scientology, and is a recent convert to a healthy, normal skepticism, though still touchy it seems on the subject of Rand] Snippet: Is Objectivism a cult? In my opinion, no, not really. Is it attractive to those who are vulnerable to the 'cult embrace'? Worth a thought, I would say. I close with a few selections from Branden, a couple of sharp quotes from a 1999 Lingua Franca essay, two abstracts on current science from 'official' Objectivism, and a tag from a radio interview with Objectivist educators Tara Smith and Betsy Speicher. Thanks to those who developed this thread -- and to Monica for opening the door to my comments! Freedom-of-mind is an excellent list that helps sharpen my mind. Re: new member posting re Rand Like Monica Pignotti I disagree with aspects of Michael Shermer's "The Unlikeliest Cult in History" (www.skeptic.com/02.2.shermer-unlikely-cult.html), yet I would advise those interested in the Rand/Cult donnybrook to read and consider his complete essay. I wager that Shermer has a devotee's ability to be utterly enthralled by succeeding enthusiasms: fundamentalist christianity, objectivist philosophy, skepticism -- I note the wisdom of his central observation that the most "rational" of enterprises, science, may also be the object of cult-ish veneration. Objectivism a cult? No, probably not, in my opinion. But maybe another way of looking at the Cult/Rand meme: could we find cult-ish tendencies within the present body of Objectivists? Maybe yes. Maybe Shermer simply found a ready-made fit for his devotional tendencies after he gave up god . . . Maybe the observation of total immersion in and acceptance of Randian tenets by its more extreme adherents means less that Objectivism is a cult, more that Objectivism may tend to attract people who themselves behave, at times, like cult followers -- followers who venerate an ideal being holding final truth, who shows the only true and correct way to live life. Those who do interpret Rand this way frighten and appall me. I hope that not too many of them live in my town, although I do understand the appeal: a total system of thought and value can be very attractive to those who welcome the enveloping embrace of something that explains *everything*. (of note also is the cultish take-up and elaboration of Objectivist jargon: Altruism. Evaders. Evil. Sanction. Check your premises. Etc.) With regard to Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in which she laid out concrete examples of her philosophy in action: Oi. Fantasy. Rant. Haranguing dialogue. Characters with the depth and realism of Skeletor, Lex Luthor, Bizarro Superman, She-Ra and Wonder Woman. So far I have only read the first 650,000 of its 800,000 pages. At the moment, as I struggle through the chapter "The Utopia of Greed," it reminds me most of L Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth," with Rand's monsters slightly more horrid and evil than Hubbard's nightmarish slavedrivers, the titanic struggle between good and evil only slightly more titanic . . . mind you, Hubbard's book is also slightly longer, at 1,000,000 pages of turgid, pulpy, entertaining hooey. WRT Tara Smith, you can buy her book and audio CDs at the Ayn Rand bookstore: http://www.aynrandbookstore2.com/store/products.asp?dept=45 (you can also listen to a radio interview with her here: http://www.prodos.com/archive032artscienceselfishness.html -- of note is the same stubborn neologism pointed out by Robert Bass in his The Misuse of Language: "Selfishness" and "Altruism," cited below -- why torture the word selfish, with its negative load of undue attention to self, when a more precise term like 'self-interest' exists?). . . but see also Smith's 'Why a Teleological Defense of Rights Needn't Yield Welfare Rights' in The Journal of Social Philosophy, and 'Rights, Friends, and Egoism' in The Journal of Philosophy. Considering that the utmost aim of the 'official' Ayn Rand Institute is to seed higher education with Rand . . . I might be forgiven for likening the success of Rand thought on campus to the success of Phillip Johnson's 'Wedge,' and the Discovery Institute: "Wow, scientists are taking Intelligent Design seriously!!! It's being discussed in books and journals and in lecture theatres . . . " Right. Is Smith an unprincipled huckster? No. Is she an independent scholar discovering the lost wisdom of Rand? Perhaps. But in the age of Madonna Studies and the opaque goo of Judith Butler. . . give me Patricia Churchland (Philosophy in the Age of Neuroscience) or Susan Haack (Defending Science - Within Reason) rather than Smith's party line. I tend to disagree with the practical implications of Monica's notes about science vis a vis Objectivism. For example -- Rand was not a fan of Darwin. She was not able to make natural selection jibe with her ironclad views about human nature, so she mostly ignored its implications for her philosophy. Same with psychology, physics, history, economics. For someone who styled herself reason incarnate, she was eqivocal about the fruits of empirical inquiry. Moreover, my recent reading of Randian disciples and subgroups indicates very little overlap with fresh scientific findings at all. Instead there is disengagement, disconnect, and heated harangues against 'environmentalists.' Check any website associated with 'official' Objectivism, and there is almost nothing about real scientific discourse, little to reflect the burgeoning literature of psychology. For example, altruism research -- on the too-numerous-to-mention Rand-influenced lists, there is no discussion whatsoever about what cognitive neuroscience suggests about altruism. Nothing of evolutionary psychology. Altruism is evil, so any attempt to find its roots in nature, human nature are flawed -- this seems to be the general reaction. In any case, to illustrate, consider what Rand herself proclaims about altruism. I am left wondering where on earth she dug up these definitions (from Robert Bass, cited below): On altruism (All quotes from the entry on "altruism" in The Ayn Rand Lexicon): "The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value." (Lexicon, p. 4) "The irreducible primary of altruism ... is self- sacrifice – ... which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good." (Lexicon, p. 5) "Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value – and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." (Lexicon, p. 5, emphasis on "any," "only" and "anything" added) "Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value." (Lexicon, p. 7) http://personal.bgsu.ed u/~roberth/misuse.html Oi. Consider also Randian thought's complete disdain and disengagment from 'emotion.' You simply don't find discussion of current research, let alone classics from Damasio, Plutchik, Ekman. Zip. Nada (for a full evocation of Rand's equivocation, read Nathanial Branden's notes on 'Hazards of Objectivism,' cited below). Search up 'Steven Pinker' 'Human Nature' & 'Ayn Rand' -- find things like this, from 'THE FORUM for Ayn Rand Fans,' topic 'Hardwired "trust?"' "Don't bother to examine a folly: ask only what it accomplishes. I have to wonder if these "scientists" understand on some level that altruism is irrational, yet seek to "I couldn't help it" their way past that bothersome fact by "proving" that it is "hardwired" into us. " - and - Havent you ever been tempted to ask these quacks if theres a gene for scientific fraud? http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/lofiversion...x.php/t916.html Oi again. Is Objectivism a cult? In my opinion, no, not really. Is it attractive to those who are vulnerable to the 'cult embrace'? Worth a thought, I would say. I close with a few selections from Branden, a couple of sharp quotes from a 1999 Lingua Franca essay, two abstracts on current science from 'official' Objectivism, and a tag from a radio interview with Objectivist educators Tara Smith and Betsy Speicher. Thanks to those who developed this thread -- and to Monica for opening the door to my comments! Freedom-of-mind is an excellent list that helps sharpen my mind. WSS ____ The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand "It's always important to remember that reason or rationality, on the one hand, and what people may regard as "the reasonable," on the other hand, don't mean the same thing. The consequence of failing to make this distinction, and this is markedly apparent in the case of Ayn Rand, is that if someone disagrees with your notion of "the reasonable," it can feel very appropriate to accuse him or her of being 'irrational' or 'against reason.'" "She used to say to me, 'I don't know anything about psychology, Nathaniel.' I wish I had taken her more seriously. She was right; she knew next to nothing about psychology. What neither of us understood, however, was how disastrous an omission that is in a philosopher in general and a moralist in particular. The most devastating single omission in her system and the one that causes most of the trouble for her followers is the absence of any real appreciation of human psychology and, more specifically, of developmental psychology, of how human beings evolve and become what they are and of how they can change." "I remember being astonished to hear her say one day, 'After all, the theory of evolution is only a hypothesis.' I asked her, 'You mean you seriously doubt that more complex life forms -- including humans -- evolved from less complex life forms?' She shrugged and responded, 'I'm really not prepared to say,' or words to that effect." http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writin...AndHazards.html Lingua franca -- September 1999 "Rand's feelings about academia did not mellow with age, as Mimi Reisel Gladstein of the University of Texas at El Paso learned while working on a critical study, The Ayn Rand Companion. Toward the end of Rand's life, Gladstein wrote to her, informing Rand of the project. Rand warned that, if the study appeared, she would sue. When Douglas J. Den Uyl of Bellarmine College and Douglas Rasmussen of St. John's University were putting together a collection titled The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, they faced similar discouragement from the author. (Both volumes finally appeared in 1984, unlitigated.)" http://web.archive.org/web/20020124040704 /http://www.linguafranca.com/9909/rand.html Lingua franca -- September 1999 "Objectivism itself was a piece of property, and her concepts were not available for unlicensed use. 'If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others,' she warned readers, 'do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship for the parts you agree with--and then indulge any flights of fancy you wish, on your own.' An unauthorized interpretation of an Objectivist concept was, ipso facto, a violation of her proprietary interest" http://web.archive.org/web/20020124040704/http://w ww.linguafranca.com/9909/rand.html The Ayn Rand Institute: Science "The Scientist Trap Monday, June 18, 2001 By: Robert Tracinski Honest scientists who think they are staying out of politics--are trapped into giving their stamp of approval to the global-warming hysteria." The Ayn Rand Institute: Science "The National Academy of Dubious Science Monday, June 11, 2001 By: Robert Tracinski The NAS panel told the president that the globe might be warming and that the results might be bad." http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pag...a_topic_science PRODOS.COM internet radio - THE ART AND SCIENCE OF SELFISHNESS Betsy Speicher: "Persuing my self-interest does NOT mean harming other people ... Altruism creates victims and oppressors!" Tara Smith: Putting others first (altruism) poisons relationships ... It makes every person out there a walking I.O.U. Topics covered include: Why is the concept of selfishness so misunderstood and misrepresented? Isn't everyone selfish? If only! Selfishness is not the same as gratifying your every desire. The morality of selfLESSness creates irreconilable conflicts within us. How the Ancient Greeks were accepting of self-interest. How ALTRUISM painted self-interest as harming others. Who gave selfishness a bad name and how they did it. Tricks used by advocates of selflessness - For instance: The benevolence trap." http://www.prodos.com/archive032artscienceselfishness.html