Dragonfly

How predictable. Do you really think that anyone will fall for that lame excuse?

From the invariance of the speed of light follows the relativity of time. See for example Einstein's famous article from 1905.

Well, go ahead then. Wouldn't you like to enlighten us?

Stunning halt? That period has been one of the most successful developments in physics. Nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid state physics, chemistry, they all started to flourish thanks to QM and the Copenhagen interpretation. The computer on which you're working wouldn't exist without the work of those QM theorists, neither would lasers, CD's, DVD's, microelectronics, MRI, NMR, electron microscopes. QM gave the solution to the riddle of superconductivity and superfluidity. Ehm, by the way... what has philosophy produced during that same period?

So if it's so obvious, you no doubt can explain to us what really happens and why we get those counterintuitive experimental results.

The point is that the minority who has such nonsensical ideas is a very small minority. In every discipline you can find such confused individuals with foolish ideas if you look long enough, but that's chasing straw men, those people are not in any way representative for the whole field, that would be Peikovian cherry-picking. It does even happen that some of such people once were competent or even brilliant scientists, who later in life started to lose their touch if they weren't becoming demented. No, fundamental physical research does have implications for what is commonly considered to be the domain of philosophy. So it's for example physics that has shown that there is no such thing as an absolute time that is the same for anyone (no doubt in the course of the centuries philosophers have deliberated about the meaning of time, but they would never have been able to derive that result) and that reality is quite different from the naive view of philosophers without a scientific background. No one will dispute that philosophy and physical sciences were once one single discipline. But once the scientific revolution was underway, the gap between the people who studied nature with the scientific method and empirical research, and the philosophers who remained deliberating in their armchairs, became wider and wider. Rand herself may have been rather cautious in that regard, but there is little doubt that she sanctioned Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, in which he made several nonsensical attacks on specific mathematical and physical theories. Peikoff's and Harriman's scientific bloopers in Peikoff's DIM lectures I've already documented in an earlier post.

On top of being a poorly written sentence Possibly, English is not my native language. And it's clear that you cannot read.

How do you know? This experiment is not an illusion, but a hard fact. Now of course Objectivists are not interested in facts but in the mystical illusion that they've created for themselves. If reality doesn't conform to their ideas, well, so much the worse for reality. The results of the experiment are not in contradiction to special relativity, they may seem strange to us, but they are in accordance with the theory.

It's true that Objectivists are particularly prone to such stupidity. An intelligent person would understand that physics not a question of "initiating into the mysteries", but of (gasp!) studying the subject first and that means learning it the hard way, including the math. The "knowledge" gathered by reading some popularizing texts is useless, as modern physics cannot be dumbed down to the layman level without losing a real understanding of the subject. But tell that to a particularly arrogant branch of philosophers, who think they can understand the world from their armchair without doing some serious study that is indispensable for a real understanding and who insist that a simple popular text can give, nay should give such an understanding. I suspect that they're frustrated with envy of physical sciences as they're left out and not taken seriously, as they're too lazy or not intelligent enough to study first what they want to criticize. Compare this attitude with the condescension they display against a person who dares to criticize Rand's ideas without having studied those extensively. Double standard, anyone?

Where did you get that nonsense? Surely from an ignorant Objectivist? QM is the most successful theory ever. It is eminently falsifiable - but it has never been falsified, all the empirical evidence confirms the theory with an unprecedented accuracy. The idea that Newtonian mechanics would "explain" things, but QM not, is complete bullshit. What is Newtons law of gravity else than a formula that describes the regularities found in measuring the attractive force between two massive bodies? And what is the notion of a "force", mysteriously working at a distance, else than a description of regularities found in the changes of movement of such bodies? What is more explanatory in Newton's "force" or in his equations of motion than in the wave function of QM or in the Schrödinger equation? Newton's theory is a mathematical model that makes it possible to make predictions that can be verified. So is QM, only in an age in which more accurate measurements are possible the empirical evidence confirms with extremely high accuracy the predictions by QM and relativity theory and falsifies those by Newton.

There are no contradictions. Wave/particle duality is an observed phenomenon. Ever heard of an electron microscope? About Bell's inequality: experiments have definitely shown that these are violated, as predicted by QM, ruling out local realistic theories with hidden variables. However, this is not in contradiction to the special theory of relativity.

There are no contradictions in QM.

Because there is enough evidence for such negative feedback. History is full of examples in which a generation reacts to the life style of a previous generation. I've seen it during my own lifetime. After the ravages of the great depression and the second world war we had here a period of return to a safe, conservative society solidly rebuilding. Then came in the sixties the reaction to what was perceived by a new generation as a dull, stagnant and oppressive atmosphere, characterized by conformity with the existing institutions, a generation demanding freedom, revolution, breaking barriers, etc. A lot of cobwebs were blown away and stuffy institutions turned over. Nevertheless, over the years the disadvantages of the new thinking, the new Zeitgeist, became more and more obvious, some aspects that in "small amounts" were beneficial became in "large amounts" deleterial and the next generation was again swinging back to a more conservative view. Of course this is just a very simplified picture, there are far too many variables and non-linearities to give an exact description with fixed periods, but throughout history we can see this kind of alternation between revolt and conformity which is reflected in the art, music and literature of the time. Therefore, if we see such a change in a certain period of history, it's much more logical to attribute it to a general, collective change by a natural reaction of millions of individuals to the situation that they perceive than to the influence of the writings of one particular individual, which, even if these become some kind of reference, in fact reflect the change rather than causing it. Possibly there were also no less eloquent writings with the opposite view, but they are forgotten as it wasn't their time (or they might later be considered to be prophetic).

Oh no, not again that nonsense about stolen concepts... I do not take that absurdity as a criterion for certainty, I show that the assumption of certainty leads to that absurdity and that therefore the assumption is wrong, that is exactly what a reductio ad absurdum means. Your analogy is false. A correct analogy would be that if I could show that life implies immortality, I then could argue that humans cannot live. In contrast with my example however, life does not imply immortality, so in this case the argument doesn't hold. Moreover, the idea of a "final" tally at the "end of times" (what is the date?) is no less absurd than the notion of omniscience.

That doesn't sound as a compliment, as Hegel wrote a lot of nonsense... But that Zeitgeist is no more a reified force than Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which is so popular in libertarian and Randian circles. It's just a convenient shortcut description of the fluctuations in the complex system that society is, with its myriad connections and influences. That such a system is characterized by a cyclic behavior is to be expected, due to the unavoidable negative feedback processes in such a system.

Well, from the same wikipedia article from which you quote: So there is no evidence that some particular philosophical theories directly influenced Haydn for his stylistic change. I think you've to think in more general terms, it was the "Zeitgeist", a change in thinking that cannot be attributed to one or a few particular thinkers but to a general evolution of society that does have a cyclic nature: periods of renovation, revolution, breaking with the past (Sturm und Drang, the roaring twenties, the revolution of the sixties) alternating with periods of consolidation, reaction, conservatism.

The point of the argument is that from the hypothesis of the existence of a counterexample does follow that this impossible standard would be true, and therefore the counterexample cannot be true - that's the crux of a reductio ad absurdum argument. The certainty with which you know that this nonsensical standard cannot be true is the certainty with which you know that the counterexample is impossible, in other words, the more nonsensical that standard, the stronger the argument.

That's also my opinion. Throughout history artists have been pushing out boundaries, looking for new effects, often shocking to their more conservative contemporaries, especially when they became more independent and could follow their own impulses. The daring innovation of one generation becomes the commonplace style for the next generation and so on. Like scientific and technological innovation, and possibly influenced by it, this process accelerated in the 20th century, with the inevitable result that at last "everything" is tried, if only to generate shock value. This is a completely natural process, and it's complete bullshit to attribute it to Kant's influence. If Kant had never lived the result would have been the same, just as "corrupt" modern physics would have been the same without Kant. That some artists may look for justification of their ideas in some existing philosophies doesn't imply that their ideas are the result of those philosophies.

In America you don't experience the real threat with which we have to live here. For example, in Amsterdam, the once so tolerant city, gays are now beaten up by muslims and jews are threatened by them so that they in public have to hide their skull caps, so that they won't give offense, antisemitism is rapidly increasing here, in some quarters the autochthonous population is harassed away by the muslims. That all thanks to the appeasement policy of the ex-major (ironically himself a jew). The result of years of endless talk about integration, building bridges, tolerance, etc. has been only that the city is going to the dogs (and it isn't the only one). It's therefore not surprising that the only politician who dares to oppose this policy of appeasement, Geert Wilders, vilified by almost all the other politicians and the mainstream media, has had a meteoric rise in popularity. He was the great winner of the elections for the House of Representatives (from 9 seats to 24 seats, his party becoming the 3rd largest in the country), and according to the polls his party would now even be the greatest party in the country. The other politicians still don't understand that the muslims are not interested in bridges and dialogue, they want to take over. Therefore the comparison with Chamberlain is apt, our patience is at an end.

Chamberlain tried to build a bridge. Churchill knew that the time for building bridges was over.

That in fact makes my argument very strong. The certainty with which we know that man isn't omniscient is the certainty with which we know that we never can be certain that p, as the existence of a counterexample would lead to a contradiction (reductio ad absurdum).

If you define a whale as an animal with certain characteristics belonging to the class of Pisces (note the spelling), then this isn't a wrong definition, but a definition that doesn't correspond to a known animal. What is wrong is identifying the thus defined animal with an earlier defined animal (those big animals in the sea with certain characteristics). The error is not in the definition, but in the supposed and described relation between differently defined concepts, in particular in thinking that your definition refers to some real entity or phenomenon. If I want I can define a bat as the animal that you call a whale. It would of course be quite inconvenient, as a commonly understood definition scheme is necessary for effective communication. On the other hand, what is Rand doing when she presents her own idiosyncratic definition of "selfishness", even claiming that it is the only correct definition? No, it remains a definition, only we now know that it doesn't correspond to a real phenomenon. For example the definitions of phlogiston and of polywater remain definitions, but we now know that they don't refer to real entities.

If I think of the costs of replacing spare parts of ordinary cars, it seems very unlikely to me that replacing an emergency slide of an airplane would only cost a few hundred bucks. Further I don't think that you could replace such a slide in the same time that you refuel the plane, moreover, you have to take the plane out of service now, you cannot wait until the next planned maintenance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the total costs would be even much higher than $10,000.

Research question interjection. I shouldn't have said "Rand's" in that statement, since I don't think "contextual certainty" (oops, I'd misspelled it as well) was ever used by Rand. I think that's Peikoff later. Now you mention it, the phrase does have a distinctively Peikovian ring to it. It's also significant that in the AR Lexicon the entry for "certainty" is dominated by a Peikoff quote with two minor quotes from Rand herself (one of which doesn't even mention certainty!), which strongly suggests that they couldn't find much in Rand's writings about that subject. Another word that sounds much more Peikoff than Rand is "arbitrary", so I looked that also up in the Lexicon and Bingo! It surely starts with a large Peikoff quote (614 words) in which the word "arbitrary" can be found 16 times, followed by a small Rand quote (101 words, with only once "arbitrary"). BTW, it's rather funny that they've put Peikoff's texts in the Ayn Rand Lexicon. As far as I know Peikoff wasn't Rand and the book was not called The Objectivist Lexicon. Apparently Peikoff knows what Rand should have said.

No, it is not wrong not to claim that they are imaginary, you only leave that question open. If a concept belongs to the set of only abstract concepts, it automatically belongs to the larger set of (only abstract concepts ∪ concepts of real entities). That doesn't mean that there must be real representations of that concept, the latter set may be the empty set. A concept defined by a narrow definition always belongs to a wider definition that encompasses the narrower definition. If the narrower definition is "correct", so is the wider definition. The narrower definition may be more useful as it gives more details, but a definition doesn't have to be exhaustive. I do no such thing. Not at all. It is not a question of one definition being correct and the other one being wrong, they're all correct, even if one may be more specific than the other one. "Less specific" is not the same as "incorrect", however.