Dragonfly

My crackpot theories are only tangentially relevant. Besides, you don't want to know, you want to believe. Who am I to take that away from you? It would be like telling a little child the truth about Santa Claus.

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

If the speed of light is invariant and time is a measurement of motion then time is invariant relative to the speed of light which represents motion?

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

No doubt.

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

At some point in human history it would be good if philosophers of your caliber would become interested in such matters. Particularly given the rather stunning halt to progress in theoretical physics after the Copenhagen interpretation came on the scene. Not that such is your duty here.

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?

And no, the measuring equipment is not suspect. This stuff has been checked out repeatedly over and over and over at great expense (billed to you of course). The answer is staring the physicists in the face but they don't care to look. Their contempt for philosophy is their Achilles heel.

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

I once had an argument with a physicist who claimed that physics had disproven the Law of Non-Contradiction. When I pointed out that this claim destroys the very concept of "proof" and renders all of science meaningless -- since any given claim, including his claim about the Law of Non-Contradiction, could be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect, so to say that p is true would be meaningless -- he was unmoved. He simply did not want to be bothered with rudimentary issues like this.

You will also find Christian physicists who claim that QM proves the existence of God and that probability theory proves intelligent design. (The latter claim is especially popular today; indeed, it was credible enough to convert the former atheist Antony Flew to deism.) A much older claim is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics proves the existence of an eternal being. Of course, you can point out that these are minority opinions, but so what? Even if the majority of physicists agreed with such arguments, I would still reject them.

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.

And I reject them for the same reason that I reject a number of other metaphysical conclusions that are supposedly based on physics. When the physicist, no matter how competent, ventures from his house and enters the house of of philosophy, he leaves his credentials at the door.

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.

Not since the Middle Ages have philosophers claimed that we can understand the world from an armchair. Philosophers such as Bacon, Locke, and Voltaire were the shock troops of the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, a number of philosophers, such as Descartes and Leibniz, made substantial contributions to mathematics.

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.

And if you read Rand's comments on science in ITOE, you will see that she steered clear of presuming that philosophers should dictate to scientists. Like other empiricists, she had a very modest metaphysics, because she well knew that much of what has traditionally been called "metaphysics" is properly the domain of science.

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.

This experiment is not an illusion, but a hard fact.

On top of being a poorly written sentence

Possibly, English is not my native language.

, it's a bald-faced lie. The experimental results require sophisticated interpretation in order to yield the FTL conclusion. And this interpretation is wrong.

And it's clear that you cannot read.

No, as interpreted by physicists using corrupt philosophy as their guide. There is no such thing as causeless action

How do you know?

there is no such thing as action without means, thus this "experiment" is merely an illusion of some kind that physicists haven't yet figured out.

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.

But these are physicists! How dare you impose on them the same standards of intelligibility that we require of everyone else! Who are we, who have not been initiated into the mysteries of the supersensible subatomic world, to question what they say? Only a silly, ignorant Objectivist would ever dare engage in such blasphemy.

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?

It seems Shayne has a point. Why do you call QM a theory? If a biologist described an elephant, a zebra, a lion and a wild dog--where's the theory? These animals can do various things, predictable things out of the descriptive material, but all without falsifiable biological theories. From such examinations a biologist may come up with theories about life and living and those would naturally address the questions of why? Why indeed? As such then, QM is physics exactly the same relatively easy way as the primitive descriptive biology assuming it's been aptly described here. Data is not the end-all be-all. It's just uneaten food on your plate.

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.

You are correct in principle, but it is not true that QM doesn't contain substantial integrations. The problem is that those integrations contradict one another. E.g., the wave/particle duality, or Bell's Inequality vs. relativity.

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.

I think the contradictions in QM are well known.

There are no contradictions in QM.

Why would "such a system" as "society" be expected to be "characterized by a cyclic behavior"? Is it a system like a physics system where there might be some reason to expect "negative feedback processes"?

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).

Your argument is not a reductio ad absurdum argument. Instead it unjustifiably poses an absurdity as the only possible alternative to what you're arguing against. You take as your criterion for certainty an indefensible idea (which moreover is a stolen concept in Randian language)

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.

-- the idea of knowing everything all at once with no means or method of knowledge -- and then claim that because knowledge requires a means and method, certain knowledge isn't possible. You might as well set up immortality as your standard for whether life is possible and then say that since humans aren't immortal, they can't live.

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.

There you sound outright Hegelian -- a "Zeitgeist" as a reified force resulting from "a general evolution of society that does have a cyclic nature."

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.

Would you say that Haydn's and others' "Sturm und Drang" period had nothing to do with philosophic and literary influences?

Well, from the same wikipedia article from which you quote:

...Haydn never mentions Sturm und Drang as a motivation for his new compositional style,[9] and there remains an overarching adherence to classical form and motivic unity. Though Haydn may not have been consciously affirming the anti-rational ideals of Sturm und Drang, one can certainly perceive the influence of contemporary trends in musical theatre on his instrumental works during this period.

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.

No, the non-omniscient argument pulls in a nonsensical standard, a standard which has no relationship to knowledge anyway, so it doesn't actually tell you anything about the possibility of certainty.

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.

I don't know about Beethoven's influences, but I think that creators are usually directly influenced much more by other creators than by philosophers. I think Objectivish-types tend to buy into the idea that philosophy drives everything. I don't know for sure about music, but my understanding of the history of aesthetics and the visual arts is that the opposite is usually true: Artists rebel and explore new effects and new ways of doing things, and then philosophers come along and analyze how and why the new methods affect us. It's the creators who primarily dictate the direction that art takes, and the philosophies of aesthetics which follow.

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.

I agree that "We believe that p but p may turn out to be false" is a better formulation. Sometimes "We have strong, including very strong, reason to believe that p but p may turn out to be false."

I don't like the formulation using "know," which Fred Seddon used and Daniel has adopted as expressing the point. I'd reserve "know" for cases in which we in fact do know, and there are many such cases -- but not ever about ultimate scientific laws. The idea that we could know that we have the correct ultimate scientific laws is contradictory, since we'd have to be here after everything is over to check the final results, and if we were here, everything wouldn't be over. DF argues contradictoriness on the basis of non-omniscience, but I don't think that that argument is as strong, since *of course* we aren't omniscient, omniscience being a nonsensical idea, an invalid concept to begin with.

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).

Your claim that incorrect statements about "already defined concepts" can't be definitions indicates that you don't realize that definitions of a concept -- that is, of the type of something the instances of which are the units of the concept -- aren't definitions of words but of the nature of the units and indeed can be incorrect identifications of characteristics of those units. E.g., if people define the animal meant in English by the word "whale" as a type of Pices (the biological classification) -- and some people did argue that that type of animal should be thus defined -- this is a factually incorrect classification. The animal is not a fish; it's a mammal. That isn't true "by definition" of the word "whale." It's true because of the nature of the animal being labeled by that word.

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?

But although I'm assuming you would agree that classifying the animal labeled by the English word "whale" as Pices instead of Mammalia is a wrong classification, since you insist that a definition cannot be wrong, you'd have to say (if you're to be consistent) that the misclassification was all along merely a non-standard use of a word. Similarly, if the force which tends to keep things from drifting apart has been defined as a force of attraction acting at a distance and it's shown not to be that kind of force, for you the former definition has retroactively become not a 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.

> Regarding the emergency slide, NYCAviation writes that it can cost up to $10,000 to replace one, not counting the cost of having the plane out of service.

Oh, bullshit!!!!

Couple hundred bucks, max. And you take planes out of service and replace them with another one all the time for fueling, maintenance, etc.

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.

Rand's "contextual certainly" comes down to being "scientific skepticism."

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.

Within the context of our knowledge and taking into account the historical sources of our knowledge of unicorns, it is wrong not to claim they are imaginary. Being made up as a myth is how it happened. In your way, we would have to say that Mickey Mouse should not be considered as not being a real mouse just because you want to leave the door open to the possibility. And you want to do that in the definition.

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.

But new knowledge is able to be added in Objectivist concept formation. The door stays open in the concept and you change the definition to suit the new knowledge. You don't impose a definition on reality, like what you are proposing.

I do no such thing.

But returning to your comment. It also applies to the concept, God. Right?

I don't mean the God who is an "abstract concept." I mean the old man in a flowing robe with a long beard. The concrete. Like the horse with a horn on its forehead. You want to make sure your definition does not exclude that God from possibly existing. Isn't that what you are saying?

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.