Dragonfly

What indeterministic model of physics is false?

This definition by Rand of causality is an empty tautology and therefore for all practical purposes meaningless. You can't derive anything about the real world from it.

Welcome Jenna, and thanks for your kind works. Sometimes - sometimes? make that nearly always - I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness on those forums, as people just don't seem to understand what I try to say. I don't expect them to agree, but their comments are so beside the point (and they congratulate each other for every misunderstanding: well said! well said! no doubt generating lots of Atlas thingies for each other) that I sometimes think: why am I doing this? I could as well talk to the walls! Therefore I'm glad to know that there was at least someone who did appreciate my contributions. :-({|= Oh, eh, BTW, it's a "he"...

Well, that's really the problem with Rand's formulation: probably no one takes it literally as that would obviously be nonsense, so everyone is trying to give his or her own interpretation of her words. (And what does that remind us of?) Exactly, I coudn't have said it better! The Objectivist view of human consciousness is hopelessly simplistic: people either think (Objectivists) or don't think (the others), either focus (the Objectivists) or don't focus (the others) etc. Of course one can't avoid simplification in describing such complex systems as human consciousness, but the binary system promoted by the Objectivists is a ridiculous caricature. No, that is a technical term as you'll have discovered yourself in the meantime. A term like "fuzzy logic" is just like a term "imaginary number", you shouldn't attach much importance to the term itself, it's just a label, like the color of a quark is a label which has nothing to do with real colors.

Thank you for all these kind compliments. This is no doubt another example of the civilized, sensible Objectivist approach that prefers to attack people instead of ideas. I think you should feel at home at Solo-Passion.

Speak for yourself, you mystical armchair psychologizer.

That neurosurgeon is quite right: every day we make thousands of unconscious decisions. "Unconscious" doesn't mean here "lacking awareness and the capacity of sensory perception", but "occurring in the absence of conscious awareness". In other words: we're not unconscious, but many decisions we make are not the the result of conscious deliberation. If we would do have to deliberate consciously every decision we make, nothing would get done, we just don't have the time for it!

Fascinating story and quite revealing! I hope you have many more of those stories, I can't get enough of them. I think my reaction would have been the same as yours.

Ellen: I think we are on this list all amateurs in this domain, so we can at most speculate a bit and I won't pretend to know the answers, but I think that John has a good point: I was also thinking in that direction. I may in certain situations be evolutionary advantageous to care for the young even if they are from different parents. Or the prewired program that causes parents to protect their offspring (which certainly has an evolutionary advantage) is not sophisticated enough to distinguis their own offspring from that of others and may even have effects across species: we tend for example to be far more protective of animals with relatively big eyes (like seals), which gives them a baby-like expression, than of others like rats or cockroaches.

Ellen: Oh my, that seems to be a Mortal Sin here... If you want to explore the source of those moral sentiments, you won't find them in philosophy. I think you'd better study evolutionary psychology. Oh, I'm missing Mike Psychmajor badly now, he would at least come up with some substantial contributions. AFAIK such a law does exist in the Netherlands. I don't know about babies in the woods, but you can't for example with impunity leave someone lying on the roadside bleeding to death if you're the only one at that moment who can save that person. Such things are certainly not once-in-twenty-years-of blue-moons circumstances (that's my problem with the baby example, it's highly unlikely and it has extra complications due to the problem of parental obligations etc.) And that many a murder is not detected is no argument to make no laws against murder.

Michael: If you want to say it in Latin it should be "et tu, Brute?". BTW, I can't remember having stabbed anyone lately... Ok, wake me up when you've arrived there.

On the contrary, I think it is especially the legal issue that is the central point here, the moral issue is standard fare, already treated in The Ethics of Emergencies. AFAIR the lynch mob on RoR had no problem in declaring someone who didn't act in such an emergency a moral monster, but they became stark raving mad at the suggestion that he didn't have the right to do nothing, shouting that anyone who proposed such a thing must be a socialist, a fascist, a pathetic piece of shit, a cockroach (hi fellow-insect!), a looter and whatever other compliments a dedicated Objectivist can think of. The discrepancy between the moral viewpoint and the legal viewpoint is the crux of the controversy, and if you want to solve this problem, you shouldn't evade that point, even if it means that you'll have to give up the infallibility of Objectivist dogma (that's of course the only solution, but probably I'm the only one so far to see that...).

What I'm missing in all these discussions is the fact that there is a big difference between the emergency situations that are described, and the socialist idea of an institutional altruism. The special character of the described emergency situations is that the person who can in that situation save the life of another human being, is at that moment the only one who can do so, the life of the other one literally depends on the action or non-action of that single person. That is a heavy responsibility for that person, which he didn't ask for. But not everything we're confronted with in life is asked for, whether we like it or not. In such a situation, where an action, without any risk for your own life, is the only way to save the life of another person, I see absolutely no problem in making failing to do anything helpful punishable by law. This is an either-or situation, a life-or-death situation, and has nothing to do with the fate of the poor children in some third-world country, the straw children of all those orthodox Objectivists. If the Objectivist formulas say that that person shouldn't be held responsible by law, my answer is: throw those formulas in the dustbin of oblivion and forget the whole Objectivist circus, or go home and think up some rationalization to amend those principles. Perhaps even I could do it if I'd like to, but in fact I've more interesting activities waiting for me.

Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt (1567-1641) was a masterful portrait painter. Here is his portrait of Frederick V:

The next master is Nicolaes Maes (or Maas), 1634-1693, who studied with Rembrandt. His most famous work is this "old woman praying": A larger and more detailed reproduction can be found at: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/images/aria/sk/z/sk-c-535.z You can almost hear the silence, only broken by the soft scratching noises of the cat, especially when you see it in reality (it's fairly large: 134 cm x 113 cm). Despite the religious note, I find the quiet dignity of this painting much more inspiring than all those bright "heroic" and "exalted" paintings, the admiration of which seems to be de rigueur in Objectivist circles. Here is another painting by Maes, Old Woman Dozing: and "Girl at a Window":

Michael: If you want to get the attention of the general public, yes. But I think that on a forum like this we shouldn't wait until some famous Objectivist says something before we think that it's worth to be discussed...

There is the clair-obscur technique of the highlighted objects, and the subtle effects of reflections, like that of the orange(?) at the right in the goblet and the reflection of light on the silver platter (of which we hardly see anything, except the border, indicated by a few white dots and dashes), lighting the bottom of the cup; the light falling through the transparant section of the lemon, making it glow. I find all these lighting effects fascinating.

Well, sometimes I feel like I'm just casting pearls...

Well, I said more or less the same thing here already on 7 January: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...dpost&p=702 but no one seemed interested at the time.

I'm an admirer of the Dutch masters, especially those of the 17th century. Of course everyone knows Rembrandt, Vermeer, Steen and Hals, but there are many other great painters from that period, and I want to present here a some examples of their work (and perhaps also that from other periods). It's difficult to find good reproductions on the Internet, and even the best ones can give only a faint reflection of what you experience when you see them in reality. So here's the first one, Willem Kalf (1619 - 1693), famous for his still lifes with precious goblets and glasses and juicy lemons, painted in deep, rich tones. Here is his still life with Nautilus Goblet: Other examples can be found at: http://www.artunframed.com/kalf.htm and: http://token.rijksmuseum.nl/wwwopac.exe?DA...t1&%250=8859%22 (the latter is a bit too bluish and perhaps also a bit too dark, I think, but it's many years ago that I saw the painting)

At the moment I can't upload anything there, the site is "currently undergoing maintenance". Well, I'll try again later.

That's the problem with those yahoo urls (that is really a bug IMO). I updated the url, but I don't know how long it will remain valid. Perhaps there are also sites like those for photos where you can upload wav files.

Recently I made a short sound registration of a discussion between some Objectivists (you may have to close the window afterwards with control F4): http://f6.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/UK4IRGFJow2RH...-discussion.wav

Michael: Of course I didn't mean to imply that ideas in general can't be proved, only that those particular ideas I referred to can't be proved, and I can prove that by pointing out fatal flaws in the argument that is used for those ideas, that's all I have to do; the ball is now in the court of the proponents of that argument.

Roger: Rand's definition apparently is: All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. But this definition is so vague that it's worthless. You might interpret it as implying determinism ("caused and determined"), but that would imply that the human brain is also a deterministic system, which Rand no doubt would deny. So the conclusion can only be that her definition is an empty tautology which doesn't tell us anything about the real world: a thing acts according to its nature - and how do we know what the nature of a thing is? By observing the actions of that thing, so a thing acts according to the way it acts, a perfect example of a circular definition. Why should all "oughts" flow from it? The only thing you can say is that these "oughts" shouldn't be incompatible with life as a value, but that doesn't imply that they follow from that principle. In fact there are many "oughts" possible which Rand no doubt would have rejected forcefully that are also compatible with the notion of life as a value. The whole notion of "life" as an "ultimate value" from which all other values are derived is incoherent, but many people swallow such arguments unthinkingly, while they at a superficial glance may sound plausible and while the conclusions she draws are so attractive. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to say that your ideas can be proved? Alas, they can't!