Dragonfly

Why is everyone calling him Reardon? It is Rearden!

When I see that list with points, I wonder what all the fuss is about. Aren't these just general elements of what every good writer does? Is there anything particularly Randian about that list? Do you really need a "scholarly" study to come to the trivial conclusion that Rand did such things? I think such things are standard fare in every How To Write A Book course. The pretentiousness of making such a hubbub about this!

No, but how do you know that she only deleted fictional persons?

Father Amadeus? Stacy Rearden?

As in: "If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is."?

I really don't understand what the problem is. Point #5 is "omit references to actual historical people and places while still making the desired point". Why couldn't Rand have made such changes when writing AS? In fact she does still mention historical people and places, like Aristotle and Patrick Henry, not to mention America, California, New York, Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, the Statue of Liberty etc. So I think it's very well possible that she originally included more actual historical people and/or places, for example the Empire State Building, the Grand Central Station or Immanuel Kant, and later decided to omit those or change their names (for example Taggart Terminal obviously is the Grand Central Station in disguise).

On the contrary, it is a sacrifice exactly according to that definition. It is the real-life version of a sacrifice in chess.

I never said anything about painting birds. Imitation from the Oxford Dictionary • noun 1 the action of imitating. 2 a copy. And the same dictionary also gives an example: Does "copying" here mean "making an exact clone"? Of course not. The same dictionary gives for "copy": "a thing made to be similar or identical to another", so a copy doesn't have to be an exact copy, it can also be something similar.

Imitating doesn't necessarily mean making an exact copy. One can imitate someone's voice, manners, way of speaking, so that other people recognize who is being imitated, while they still can hear and see that it is not the real thing.

I don't think that anyone made the claim that no sacrifice is possible.

But that doesn't work. If one of the variables cannot be measured you cannot say that the other one is more important, the only conclusion is that you cannot compare those two variables numerically. Think instead of giving a dollar to the homeless, of giving money to your adult child, of whom you know that he can use it to save his life. I think it's not very useful to say then that you get "nothing" in return because feelings are not measurable. The term sacrifice is not meaningless, only rather vague. For altruism the situation is different: with the definition based on intent, it doesn't exist, but you can use the biological definition, which is based on comparing survival probabilities. Then it does exist and is also part of human nature.

In Granados' piece the imitation is rather stylized, the piano is of course not the most suitable instrument to imitate birdsong, but for example in Beethoven's Pastoral symphony the imitations of bird sounds are realistic and unmistakable, anyone will recognize the call of the cuckoo.

First, as I already mentioned in my previous post, Galileo didn't give his freedom to the church, he gave the disavowal of his theory. Second, a trade doesn't necessarily involve money, barter is also a form of trade. A barber can give a window cleaner a haircut in exchange for the cleaning of his windows. Neither of these services is a transferable thing like $10 or a CD.

I didn't say that they did that in all their compositions... Did you never hear the nightingale, quail and cuckoo in Beethovens Pastoral Symphony (Szene am Bach)? The nightingale in Granados' "Quejas, o la maja y el ruiseñor"? The wood trush in Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques? The goldfinch in Vivaldi's flute concerto from 1729? The cuckoo in Delius "On hearing the first cuckoo in spring"?

The case of Galileo vs. the church is complex, and I'm not quite sure to what phase you're referring. At first Galileo sacrificed the defense of his theory to avoid punishment by the church, i.e. his physical liberty was a greater value to him. The church gained the silencing of Galileo which was valuable to them as it threatened the authority of the church. Later Galileo tried to put his theory forward in a more indirect way, by presenting it as a hypothetical situation. Possibly he thought he could get away with that, that he was safe from persecution, so it wouldn't have been a sacrifice on his part. Nevertheless the church had a different opinion, the diluted version of Galileo's ideas was still dangerous to the church and in a process Galileo had to sacrifice again the defense of his theory by denying it under oath, gaining the relatively mild punishment of a house arrest (instead of a more severe punishment). The church gained again Galileo's silence. That is what was important for them to get. Galileo had to pay for his physical well-being by denying his theory. So the parallel with buying the CD is: CD ~ Galileo's physical well-being; 10$ ~ Galileo's disavowal of his theory. Galileo pays his $10 and buys the CD and the church gets its $10.

Of course it is a very fuzzy line, depending on individual circumstances and psychologies (how do you quantify "hurt")? So what? Many things just cannot be defined exactly. Where do you for example draw the line where someone becomes rich? Not at all. The value for the church is silencing Galileo, because his ideas are threatening the authority of the church. To Galileo his life and physical liberty were of more value than the freedom to advocate his theories, so he sacrificed the latter to gain the first. Indeed these are not relevant, they just belong to a subset of possible sacrifices. When someone holds a gun against your head and asks for your money or else, then most people prefer to sacrifice their money to gain the continuance of their life. That's also why most people pay taxes, even if they don't like it. Their freedom is to them a larger value than the money they lose.

The term "Objectivism" as a philosophical movement is at least a century older than Rand's version.

I second that. This isn't a dump site for unreadable, long and old threads from another forum.

Well, that's too bad for composers like Rameau, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Delius, Vaughn Williams, Messiaen and many others who wrote music that imitates bird sounds...

This is such a silly discussion, and it's all the result of Rands hopelessly inadequate definition of art: .What Rand meant by "re-creation of reality" is quite clear when we consider some art forms: a painting should represent a scene from reality: a landscape, a portrait, a still life etc. - according to Rand an abstract painting is not art. In sculpture she's even more restricting: And she means it: That may be fine for a novelist, but she discards all abstract painting and sculpture that does not represent a human figure. And with architecture and music Rand's definition really becomes useless. Instead of trying to find meanings in "recreating reality" such that architecture and music also become art according to Rand's definition, that definition should just be put in the waste basket, it is typically a definition by non-essentials and on top of that a definition that excludes many examples of what generally is considered to be art. Contrived interpretations that stretch the definition of "re-creation of reality" will only dilute the meaning of art so much that the products of almost any human activity can be called art (like for example scientific theories, technological products, any computer program). And all that only to save a definition that was bad to begin with.

Every sacrifice is a trade, but not every trade is a sacrifice. We talk about a sacrifice when that what you give up is of considerable value to you and what you hope to gain is not always immediately visible, for example while it's something to be gained later (like a sacrifice in chess, or some financial investment based on an insider tip) or is a psychological gain that is not obvious to an outsider. When you buy a CD for $10 it's not a sacrifice because losing $10 is not a great loss and the value of obtaining that CD to you is quite obvious. Well, except if you are very poor and you desperately need those ten dollars for other things, like food. In that case it is a sacrifice, as giving up those $10 will hurt you, even if you think that possessing that CD is still more important to you. Whether you really gain in a sacrifice is not relevant, it is the intention that counts. A sacrifice in chess may misfire because you overlooked some move your opponent might make, or the psychological satisfaction you expected may be disappointing, if only because you cannot always foresee all the consequences of your action (for example giving money to someone of whom you think that he needs it very badly, while it turns out that he's swindled you and that he's in fact quite rich).

You hit the nail on the head.

Daniel may seem to be beating a dead horse, but the truth is that the horse unfortunately is not dead, but rearing its ugly head again and again, as in Leonid's post #364.

That's because that method is much too coarse, it's a bit like trying to determine the programming details of the programs running in you computer by measuring temperatures inside the computer. We need a method that is much more detailed, so that we can map the firing of our neurons onto the thoughts we have. For the time being that is far beyond the knowledge and technical possibilities we have, but that's no reason to think that it cannot be done in principle. Perhaps the practical difficulties might never be overcome to get such detailed knowledge, but we'll probably get more and more confirming evidence that the model of thoughts being the abstract description of the physical events in the brain is the correct one, even if we can't obtain that information in every detail. It's the simplest hypothesis and it is in agreement with our current scientific knowledge.

Glenn Beck, isn't that the idiot who recently called Wilders a fascist?