Matus1976

Bob you are not thinking correctly. People live much riskier lives now because they are sure they are going to die anyway within 60 or 70 years. With that natural limitation removed, people would probably engage in much less risky behavior. This is generally true when comparing nations which have longer life spans to nations with shorter life spans, those in the former are less likely to engage in risky behavior. You might argue that the potential for living longer would make life less valuable, but that doesnt mean your argument would be any good. Who cares? Are you a utilitarian all the sudden? A conservative crying about the breakdown of traditional families? It would probably drastically reduce birth rates and make family bonds stronger, as one would come to know many multiple generations of their own family. If you can wait a hundred years to have children you would probably be less likely to have them within the typical 30 year span. This same trend is shown in every developed post industrialized nations, birth rates drop precipitously. Think about it for 10 seconds Bob, lest you are doing sloppy thinking. Are you suggesting that if a negative political or economic consequence was found because of a potential to indefinate life spans, you would *outlaw* such treatment? I wasnt aware you valued arbitrary conceptions of 'natural' life spans over the lives of individuals. If I have the potential to live an indefinate life span, I couldnt care less about the economic consequences to a socialist nation. As a living being I am more important that a collection of ideas among other living beings. "Sloppy thinking." Indeed. Who cares? This is completely irrelevant. We are talking about whether death makes life more valuable, now you are trying to change the topic to one of the social consequences of indefinate life spans. Are you conceding than the point that you can not possibly subjectively compare life with non-life in order to derive more value to the former? If you go pyschotic after living for a millenia, feel free to kill yourself. If you have a healthy body and mind indefinately, why retire? It probably would affect many things we call 'human' who cares? It also might very well make us all much more human.

Sorry I meant to post this in the "Ethics" room, can it be moved?

But all of these only create value because you can compare the state of having them with the state of not having them, something not possible with LIFE. You can not compare being alive with being dead, you no longer exist and so can not compare anything. That is not the same thing. It would be like saying "Oh, hey Victor, everything is great here with Angie, so YANK sorry, shes gone now, but hey, now you truly know her value!" Life is not 'free to leave' you at anytime, as if it has it's own mind, value, and goals. So it's not the same thing. Life is intrinsically precious, it would be precious even if i lived a thousand or million years. It is bad to never have something good. It is better to have something good and lose it, but it is better still to have something good (in this case Life) and to keep it. Even so, you could always just kill yourself if you really thought your life had no more value. In this case it's you who needs the reflection, you are parroting just common pyschological colloqialisms born of a pathetic attempt to obfuscate death. I was, of course, paraphrasing the many silly objections people make when utlimately defending death. Funny, I would define human as a rational living entity which productively seeks to acquire values. Not 'something that can die' In fact having the potential of an indefinate age-less life span would make life far more precious, since if you died in some silly accident you would be losing a lot more of a life than that bound by 'natural' life spans.

Victor Wrote in the “Worthless Individual” Thread: Victor I think that is a sad and ridiculous sentiment. Death does not give life value, it does not make a life have meaning, it is the end of life, the end of existence, the end of the potential of values. Do you seriously embody the notion that all things, to be truly valued, must be taken away from you? Must you be enslaved to value freedom? Must you be tortured to value non-torture? Must Angie be taken from you so you can value truly value Angie? This, of course, is a common sentiment, and many people will say yes to some of these things. First of all, intelligent rational people can emulate these scenerios to enough of a degree to know they prefer them not to occur, I do not literally need to be imprisoned to value freedom. But second, and most importantly, all of these require a continuation of a subjective experience where the situation is compared before and after the thing we value is lost. You get to say “oh, this is what life is like with this” and compare that to “this is what life is like without it” You can NEVER, however, subjectively experience non-existence, you can not say “ah, this is what death is like” (as if it is some quiet dark room you sit in forever) and compare that to existence. You do not exist any longer to make that comparison. You can not “be” better of dead, because you are not any longer, and so can certainly not “be” anything. Similar, death can not make you appreciate life more. Death can not bring value to life, it is the cessation of life, the destruction of all values. No rational being who loves life should ever find value in death. I think you need to sit down and think about this mentality a little more, this attitude, I believe, comes from the fact that for the last 90,000 years humans had nothing to psychological deal with the cessation of their own existence, so they created every manner of non-sense to obfuscate the true horror of death. They invented religions and re-incarnation. Buddhists sought to absolve humans of all values so they would not care to exist or not exist. Today, even secular-atheists still harbor this psychological obfuscation, and it is manifested in sentiments like yours, that seek to derive so value from death. It gives life meaning, it is the end of a story, it makes way for later generations, its unnatural to want to live for ever, immortality would be boring, bla bla bla. It’s all ridiculous, and the perpetuation of this psychological attitude, which fundamentally WANTS to die, is the primary reason why so little gets done in defeating, in general, aging and death.

Mark, for starters, identify your values and prioritize them accordingly. If your highest value is to make a great living doing what you love, even if nobody else cares for your product, than you must deal with the repercussions of that. If your highest value is to ensure your own health and well being, then trying your whole life to make a good living doing what you love, instead of what works, is not a good idea. My advice, take up a practical career and pursue your passions on your side. You may not be happy bagging groceries (hey, I’d love it if someone paid me to debate on forums all day, MSK, any offers?) but the reality of the world is that you must work to sustain your life, to acquire the material necessities for existence. Sit down and prioritize your goals and values, and work to each according to it’s priority. Stop obsessing over colloquialisms from books, there is not always something great from every setback, when my main water supply line to my house started leaking, it setback all my goals, there was nothing good to be found in it. But the real world is made of physical objects, roofs, valves, washing machines, cars, etc, that are not perfect and that fail. That they fail does not mean a sinister malevolent force is out to make your life difficult, it means that physical objects wear and fail. Deal with it. Also, you may very well have worked very hard at these things, but working hard at an impractical career does not guarantees success, you may spend your whole life as a mime, but don’t be surprised if you don’t make a living at it. You may want to enjoy the ‘good life’ in your ‘golden years’ but buying metaphorical lottery tickets instead of working rationally toward long term financially security is not the way to do it. Alternatively, working on your house might have kept in you a physical condition not so deteriorated that you might have had a heart attack five years ago. Even so, keep some aspirin nearbye, taking 5 or 6 at the first signs of a heart attack can mitigate something like 60% of heart attacks (don’t know the official number, look it up, it may save your life) Stop whining about things breaking and the work you have to do. I own two houses both built before 1940 which routinely have some random problem. Last week I was up till 3 am every night trying to re-plumb my upstairs apartment before the new tenants moved in, this after the last tenants busted 3 doors and two windows and did 1,200 worth of damage. At the same time, the water main supplying my house started to leak, the city said they must fix it, and I must pay for it. Having just gotten that fixed this weekend, costing many thousands of dollars I do not have, I walked into a flooded basement where my washing machine valve failed and got ‘stuck’ open. I subsidize my parents house because they cant afford one of their own, but I am glad they brought me into the world and one of my goals is to get them small nice place they can live in without worry. Almost all the work I do in my house I do on my own, this while I work full time, run an online business with small time manufacturing runs, and do freelance 3D animation, AND have been designing and building a motorcycle for the past 5 years which I hope to manufacture and sell. I have very little time left over for friends or relationships. If you’re wife is calling you worthless, then leave her. If you cant physically separate, than you ought to at least emotionally separate. You don’t even seem to like yourself, why would you expect someone else to like you? To have credibility in your product you must provide rational evidence of it, I can’t go on your word. If you are a good filmographer, than you have to start making some movies. If you cant afford a camera, do some story boards with elaborate descriptions of your directing and editing. If you cant draw, learn to, through directed practice. I spent 3 years making a huge, ridiculously detailed 3D model of a Star Destroyer which essentially functions as my “resume” now, once I posted it I was offered a job in California working on the Starship troopers animated series. I could not go to anyone and say “yeah, I can do this great model” and expect them to believe me on my word. That’s absurd. Either you go through a conventional education system, or you teach yourself, sans the credentials of the former, you need to prove your ability through real products in the latter. Stop whining that no one will give you a chance, that no one will believe in you. They have no evidence to base that belief in. I want to, eventually, be a motorcycle designer. There are probably only 3 or 4 people in the world who get paid explicitly for visually designing motorcycles, so I could spend half my life pursuing this ‘lottery’ ticket, or I could design and build my own. The worst mistake an inventor, artist, creative person can make is to put the onus of their success on everyone but themselves. To put everything they have worked for and dreamed for in one basket and bring it to some big wig who couldn’t possibly understand or appreciate the value of something you have spent decades developing, only for him to spend ½ second thinking about it and disregarding your idea, is to set yourself up for failure. You must take it upon yourself to promulgate your creations. You need to settle down and pick a pragmatic rational ‘gig’ that you can work at while you pursue your other goals. Through your massive materialistic acquisitions, you obviously value a lot of things more than what you probably ought to value to be conducive to a psychological healthy life. Get rid of that stuff and crap you don’t need, get only what you need for your goals and pursue those. You seem to have excuses for everything. You are trying to convince us, or yourself, that you have no talents ( you weren’t born with them, not that I believe such a thing is relevant see the “What is talent” thread http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ic=1909&hl= ) and you are mentally slow (unlikely considering the introspection and verbal quality of your writing) and you are physically too tired to work. What should we do, come up with something that requires no mental effort and no physical effort yet allows you to be a wealthy? Hmm, the only thing I can think of is to be a crappy modern artists. San Francisco guarantees 400/month to everyone including homeless people. Move to SF and become a crappy modern artist. “Traditional employment however, exists to pocket as much money as possible, while paying the employees as little as possible.” And you seek to do as little work as possible, while trying to get paid as much as possible. Your income is a balance between those two things. Why are they more offensive and parasitic than you are for trying to do the exact same thing? You sound like a socialist / communist here. The conditions you moan about are the same ones 99.99% of all humans have had to deal with throughout all of human history. You think you got problems? This kid has problems – On a side note, at least you can be very proud of the fact that you have not contributed to the promulgation of a corrupt expanding socialist nation.

Your critique is essentially saying that since we do not have an absolutely perfect description of reality, and we are not omniscient (we cant view everything everywhere all the time) that there is no such thing as truth. As Johnny points out, is that a true statement? It is most reasonable to assume science asymptotically approaches a completely 'true' and accurate description of an objective reality. It may never reach it completely, and even if it did, we wouldnt know it, because that in itself would require omniscience, yet our devices work better and better, and our predictions continually increase in accuracy. Relativity did not disprove Newtonian mechanics, it created a more accurate understanding and description where newtonian mechanics is was innacurate, similiarly any theory which unifies Relativity and quantim mechanics will not invalidate either, but create an even more accurate description where those things fail (the extremely massive yet extremely tiny) What is 'truth' a perfect description of objective reality? How would you know its perfect and complete? The only way we can determine how accurate our descriptions and understandings of reality are is to compare than against the ultimate arbiter of truth; objective reality. Where they coincide with reality, they are true to the extent which they coincide, where they deviate they are innacurate to the extent that they deviate.

As far as silly disingeneous stereotypes go, I particularly liked this one from 'The Mating Habits of the Earth Bound Human' "Men like movies where many people take a very short time to die (cue explosions and gun fire) women like movies where one person takes a long time to die (cue sad music)"

There are much more interesting things to do. My sentinments as well, people who get obsessed about sports seem to be seaking a cause to champion, hey, get a real cause. Sports can be nice when you see the potential physical capacity of people and the abilities that elaborate and complex training and practice can bring out, but to get obsessed about one team or another is pretty lame and just residual tribalism. There are always much more productive ways to be spending your time than passively watching something.

Free University Lectures, Physics, Science, Math and others, continually updated. http://lecturefox.com/ I particularly enjoyed the UC Berkeley 'descriptive introduction to physics' http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details...esid=1906978397 Also check the itunes podcasts and education sections, many courses are posted there. I also recommend The Teaching Center's courses http://www.teach12.com These are expensive, but often you can find them at your local libraries.

I should add also that Tycho Brahe's, failing to observe any steller parallax after his decades of observations, believed in fact that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Aristotle's errors and even more so the refusal of Aristotle's intellectual heirs to see his errors held back physics science for over a thousand years. Aristotle's basic error was his failure to check his conclusions experimentally or by observation. I don't think this Aristotle bashing is fair, it's certainly not Aristotle's fault that most people in the west in the middle ages after him simply chose to abdicate their own ability to reason and learn and instead hand over the responsibility to thinking to Aristotle, Aristotle certainly never argued that his knowledge was absolute and that everyone for the rest of history must follow everything he said. It's clear that reading Aristotle work and life that he was a brilliant man who undertook serious and sincere efforts to understand the world. Isaac Newton, in realizing how contradictory laws of force and acceleration were to Aristotelian dogma (the dogma of the people who worshipped Aristotle without critical thought and forced those opinions on everyone else) wrote in his notebook, paraphrasing Aristotle's break from Plato, that "Aristotle is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth" taking a very obvious lesson from Aristotle himself, that truth is to be valued above any claims of authority. Most of Aristotelian science was common sense of the time, as was much of his philosophy for anyone who values life and reality above mysticism. To the casual observer, heavier objects did fall faster, since all the obvious examples available made it seem reasonable to think that. Additionally Aristotle was one of the first great adherents to observation, it was his mindless bandwagon through the ages that abandoned observations with reality. For instance he was the first Hellenistic philosopher to present observational evidence suggesting that the Earth was a sphere. Where his predecessors, Plato and Pythagoras considered the Earth must be a sphere because the sphere is a perfect shape, Aristotle said look at the shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse, it is always rounded something that would be very difficult for a disc shaped object to continually do. He also pointed out that a water droplet will pull itself into a spherical shape, that it was the naturally tendency of 'stuff' to pull together, and the shape would be a sphere (an amazingly prescient observation!!) Aristotle also noted that travelers going south see southern constellations rise higher above the horizon. Aristotle's assement of motion was also a common sense and intuitive one to anyone of that day, that the natural state of objects was to be at rest, and forces must be applied to move them, when the force is removed, the objects degrades back to being at rest, eventually. We know of friction and inertia, but in the absense of these different conceptions it does seem all objects are naturally at rest. Newton wrestling with this very idea appealed to Aristotle love of truth in order to finally overcome Aristotle's claim on motion. Aristotle argued that the Earth did not move and things rotated around it because the Earth was so damn big, and anyone who tried to move large objects learned pretty quickly that they did not move. It was reasonable enough within the context of that day to presume the earth was stationary and everything else appeared around it, and it wasnt until the advent of telescopes that could detect stellar parallax from the relative change in the position of the earth that the final nail was hammered into the coffin of a geocentric earth. As a side note, Copernicus was in fact an Aristotelian and was trying to remove the conservation of angular momentum that Ptolemly had introduced in order to restore the uniform circular motion of the Aristotelian heavens, in doing so he destroyed both frameworks. Tycho Brahe’s observations took *decades*, Kepler's analysis of Brahe's data took nearly 5 years, and were certainly not obvious to anyone who would spent a casual afternoon or two investigating the question that the Earth moves around the Sun. If it is that easy to prove the Earth rotates around the Sun with casual observation I would be interested in seeing how you would accomplish it. To most people at that time it was reasonable to think the Earth stationary and everything rotating around it. As you correctly note, Aristotle was the son of a physician and seems to have loved examining organisms of many kinds. To suggest he despised, as is common now, empirical edification, is entirely wrong. It is pretty clear that where it was possible or reasonable he appealed to empirical examinations, where it was impractical, or seeming to rational people at the time, not worth the effort to disprove he appealed to logical arguments. It's easy in hindsight to look at what Aristotle did and didn’t do and insist that we would have been much wiser, but to look at the context of the world which Aristotle lived reveals how truly monumental his contributions were. To skip over his incredible contributions in nearly every human endeavor and chide him for making a mistake or two is ridiculous, and to hold him accountable for the brain dead 'Aristotlean-droids' is even worse intellectual dishonesty. Nobody should be held responsible for what people did 'in their name' a thousand years later.

I'm surprised this hasn't been blamed on global warming yet and that's not beeing splashed all over the headlines. It is an interesting and potentially worrisome thing.

Paul, it seems in your description you are talking about the same thing I am in this post. For my part, I suspect it is a consequence of an active process in a volitional being. I think if you consider how to program 'volition' into a computer you might get some insight into this. Here is a vague description of my still vague idea of a possible concentpual answer to this question; I think the root is a series of neural loops which fire all the time, and thus are continually processing and responding. A volitional "decision" then is one in which a series of options are recalled, and the actual decisions (which is weighed against values, etc) is picked up from a continual. There is no 'prime cause' because as an active process the cause need not be pinpointed to a singuarly nueral event, but instead the combination of effects from various loops which are weighing values, perceptions, projections, etc. Maybe that helps, maybe it doesnt really answer the question at all, this is still a topic which perplexes me. Regards, Matus

Thanks for your post Elizabeth, I am glad it is in a tone of sincere introspection as this is clearly a complex issue. I have seen this tragedy erupt on many other forums into a pro-gun control or anti-gun control thread almost instantly. But there are very compelling arguments that can be made both ways, as you said, if he had a sword he wouldnt have been able to kill as many people, but conversely, if more people had guns (on another forum I frequent someone posted an article about a bill was proposed in virginia last year to allow students with conceal carry licenses to take their guns on school grounds, it was defeated on grounds of 'safety in our schools), even if the security guards had them, it is possible they could have stopped this much sooner. Many years ago a cousin of mine's wife and child were killed by their child's best friend, he snuck into their house and took the fathers gun, and waited for the wife and child to come home. He shot each and also the family dog, he never said why he did it and was not a legal adult at the time to the transcripts of the case were never released. Gun's certainly enable us to kill people much easier, but in doing so they are also a great equializer of humanity. Even the first crossbows in Mideival europe tilted the balance of power back away from feudal lords because the crossbow was cheap, simple, and could pierce armor. People had a way to defend themselves against tyrants. Similiarly today, how might a 5' tall 100lb woman fight off a 7' 300 lb male attacker? A gun makes everyone's size irrelevant, anyone can stop anyone else. Has this ultimately been good for society? I think so. Pro-gun rights people will present a lot of evidence suggesting that fewer people are actually injured ultimately in a society with friendlier gun ownership laws, because criminals know they face a possible armed retribution, and stastics about gun related deaths never include numbers about how many lives were saved by someone defending themselves with a gun, even if merely showing it. It is likely that many of these cases are not reported. Gun control advocates say that more guns = more crime and more violence and more death. The issue deserves an in depth study and is so politicized that one must be weary of everything they read on it. But ultimately this is an appeal to utilitirianism, it is considering a social measure good or bad based on the total number of people hurt or not hurt. To me the question is simple, if you have a right to life, you must have a right to materially act in the world to perpetuate that life, thus property rights are a necessary component of any rational ethical system which holds life as its fundamental standard. Concurrently, if you have a right to life, you must have a right to defend yourself against people who wish to take that away from you. To me, that is the only issue, even if, ultimately, more people are hurt in a utilitarian sense (and that is questionable) no government has the right to take the ability of a person to defend themselves against attacks away from them.

I think it's very difficult for objectivists, or even people who love life, to wrap their head around what could possibly motiviate someone to kill another human being, let alone 30+ of them. We could come up with many guesses, maybe he had a painful life and wanted to hear others, maybe he just snapped, we'll never really know unless he wrote a clear note detailing his reasoning. If he wanted to kill himself why take 30 other people with him? I can't think anything but he is a scumbag and an embodiment of evil, I can't forgive him because he was lonely or molested or any of that crap, he killed 30 people, many with a 2 hour break in between. He was methodical and motivated. It sucks, what a tragic event.

As Objectivists or at least admirers of Rand's work we hear that sort of thing often. But I always have to ask, are you a Dagny (or Galt as the case may be) as well? Remember it was only Galt that got Dagny in the end, I think a very fulfilling relationship could be built with a Cheryl Taggart (sans suicidal tendancies of course). A Dominique would be annoying. We should always hold ourselves to the same standards we hold our significant others, and vice versa.

It's not that they are attracted to shitty people, its that hot people can get away with being a shitty person better. My coworker is dating a crazy girl who freaks out all the time at him, get's upset for stupid things, etc, but she's a stripper and is hot so he can't bring himself to break up with her yet. They place all value on physical attractiveness, and none on personal quality. The simple fact that so many people put up with this kind of behavior is what perpetuates it.

I find a lot of value in "The Week Magazine" I recommend everyone check it out, its intelligent and engaging, cheap to subscribe to, also makes a very concerted effort to be non-partisan. http://www.theweekmagazine.com/ Each issue (it's sent out every other week) includes a briefing which is usually a very intelligent round up of a hot issue, features local and global news stories, edtiorials from foriegn newspapers as well, the "only in America" section is usually entertaining for libertarians / objectivists. Hot political issues includes round ups of the positions of liberal and conservative editorials from major news papers. They also pop in a section on the market, liesure and culture, and usually include a fascinating excerpt from book at the end. Pick one up next time you are in a book store.

Haha, funny that you say that. I am a big Chow Yun-Fat fan and went to see this with my friend, after a couple minutes I turned to him and angrily said "I thought you said Chow Yun Fat was in this??" He's points at the King on the Screen and says "Thats him right there!" Holy crap I didnt recognize him at all. A visually beautiful film, I highly recommend it for that. The choreagraphy and fights were excellent as well. The film reminded me of a Greek tragedy set in ancient China

Thanks Victor, good post. Just to re-iterate I would add that while one can certainly value something more than their own life (even if life is required to have values, we know things perpetuate beyond our own existence). If life was the only and highest standard of value, than any torture or discomfort could be elucidated in order to get someone to give up any other value, that person is much less principled and always acts at the expediency of the moment, not to protect the things he values most, but to save his own hide. Maybe, someone would say, his hide is what he values most, but to abandon all other principles, ideals, and values for the sake of the pragmatic saving of one's own hide is to eventually abdicate any 'self' at all, taken to it’s literal extreme it is voluntarily locking one’s self up in an underground padded room left barely conscious and fed intravenously. That’s why, I think, there is a clear distinction to be made between being alive and living.

Of course, at least currently, those groups post little to no real threat, how many people have eco-terrorist groups killed? 0 as far as I know (though I recal a report that someone died in a french mcdonalds fire that was started by an ecoterrorist group) How many people have been killed by abortion clinic bombings? 10? 20? Im not sure, but all of these groups combined and multiplied by 10x still don't come anywhere near the death toll of fundamentalist islam Recently it was in the news that a russian scientist was arrested for supplying weapons grade plutonium to undercover agents posing as muslim extremists. He first provided 10 grams, and once tested, was asked for a 100grams, he was arrested at that transaction. Georgia-CIA sting nets bomb-grade uranium http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16795915/ Obviously acquiring weapons grade uranium is within the realm of the possible for islamic extremists, and is there really much doubt that would try to get / make a nuclear bomb? These are not the methods of eco-terrorists or abortion protestors, these are the methods of mass murderers. In a world of finite resources we must focus on the greatest threat posted to us and make the best blow against that enemy when and where possible. To equate islamic terrorism with abortion clinic bombings is highly disingeneous.

Bob, you havent actually stated any position or arguments in this thread, you are seemingly just baiting the objectivists here into defending their conceptions of rational self interest, why dont you try defending altruism (and necessarily define it as well)

Amazing, thank you for that...

Even though I dislike Ann Coulter I have to acknowledge this is an excellent article

Thanks Kori, hmm, can you please forward this info to every woman you know, have ever known, and will ever know? That'd be great, thanks! ;)