libertarianbob01

LOL. I didn't realize I lived in an inferior, socialist country - what a joke. People do not live "in" countries. They live on geological land formations and go about the business of their lives within the context of a legal jurisdiction exerted by cretins who operate the Machiavellian machinery of a State. If that State is of the form of a national empire, then it is called a country. If the State is of the form of a federal republic, then it is proper to refer to it as a federation or a confederation if the member States have equivalent legal power to that of the federation government. The later case applies to the United States of America, however, the cretins at the helm have for a long time worked hard to advance the fiction that the USA is configured in the former manner. None of this is to say that I do not like you or respect your opinions. I wish you and yours long life and prosperity.

At blog post http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/042383.html Mr Shaffer strongly criticized Ms Rand. Any who feel like arguing with Shaffer may email him at zenanarchy@earthlink.net Best Wishes

Bill is not aware of consciousness, nor is any other man. Consciousness is awareness of existence that results from brain processing. Without existence or a brain process there can be no awareness and no consciousness. If Bill were to be surgically altered to disable all his brain neurological sensory cortices, he would have no sensory perception. Yet he would still be aware of his own thoughts because Bill is the processing of the brain that lives in his skull. The autonomic nervous system provides feedback to the various cortices and lobes in Bill's brain. Bill, however, would die when his brain dies. Without a physical brain to process, no consciousness can occur. As the end result of a casual process of awareness, consciousness cannot sense the material physical medium wherein it occurs, nor the casual operation of the brain leading to consciousness. Man can sense external reality via perceptual sensations and can recognize his own thoughts but not the processes by which he is aware of reality or by which those thought occur. Man qua man is an organic biological being and not a "supernatural" entity disassociated from reality as he would have to be in order to sense his own awareness of existence. Schrodinger was a brilliant physicist, but quite delusional when it came to the notion of a cosmic consciousness. All animals with a central nervous system that are capable of awareness of existence are conscious. The degree of intelligence, sentience, and sapience a particular organism is capable of varies due to and with the evolutionary history of their species. I wish all who read these words to live long and prosper save those who are my enemies.

Greetings: Ayn Rand wrote that "...If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. ..." in Galt's famous speech. Recently I had a message exchange with a Christian. I made the following argument, and he responded with the italicized comment. 1. To believe that a theistic creator deity exists and is responsible for reality, the believer must imagine their deity was in some timeless fashion akin to "before" existence alone in a timeless, non-spatial, void without anything. That is alone as a consciousness, conscious of nothing or only itself without time, space, energy, location, dimensions, fields, concepts, knowledge, symbols, perceptions, physical natural law, logic or matter. Believers imagine that their deity was a primordial, immaterial, non-spatial, consciousness that wished existence to instantiate. 2. Consciousness is an irreducible primary. 3. Consciousness at the most common denominative rung on the ladder of complexity consists of awareness of existence. 4. Consciousness of consciousness necessarily requires primary consciousness to first obtain as awareness of existence. 5. Prior to existence there could not have been anything to be aware of. 6. Without anything to be aware of, there could not have been any awareness. 7. Without awareness there could not have been any consciousness. 8. From 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 there could not have been a primordial consciousness prior to existence. 9. Creator gods are defined as primordial consciousness. 10. From 8 and 9 Creator gods cannot exist. Following are the Christians comments. my point is 1) I can have the capacity to be aware of things without actually being aware of anything. We need to make a distinction here: A) Consciousness is having the capacity to be aware of things and B) Consciousness is being aware of things. You sound like you accept B. I accept A. And my second point is 2) Even if B were true, God could be aware of himself. One can be introspectively aware of themselves, their feelings, their thoughts, their character, etc. There is no contradiction there. And my third point 3) Even if B were true, God the Father could be aware of God the Son. ...snip... In responding to this person, I pointed out that all the standard definitions of consciousness easily found online either directly assert or presuppose consciousness is awareness. I wrote a very lame reply in addition to the dictionary reference. "To be conscious is to be aware of external reality. Meta-consciousness necessarily must rest upon a foundation of awareness of reality. If there is no reality, there can be no consciousness. The fallacy you are making is know as asserting the primacy of consciousness." I then referred the person to Anton Thorn's Metaphysical Primacy of Existence essay My point in all of this is to ask how an objectivist may most correctly respond to those who assert consciousness can be something other than awareness of existence? Such assertions are the foundation of primacy of consciousness thinking. I suspect others have written on this subject many times. Is there a thread on the board where this specific issue is discussed? An if you notice an error with the argument based on Rand's consciousness stuff from Galt's speech against creator gods, shout out. I need to get this thing fixed. Thank you for your help.

Since TEW cannot account for the A Aspect data, TEW does not have greater explanatory power than the standard QM model. Thus reality is amendable to change by the action of consciousness at the quantum scale as shown by double slit experiments. There are further problems with TEW as noted at http://www.bip.wur.nl/UK/education/Quantum...ves/default.htm "Maybe the most important problem of this interpretation is the fact that it is not entirely clear how the elementary wave should contain multiple properties of different elementary particles. Also the fact remains that even though the probability of for example the emission of a particle depends on the intensity of the elementary wave, it is still a probability. As long as it is only possible to make predictions in the form of probabilities there is no chance of a deterministic theory, which many people regard as a flaw. TEW as problems with explaining the "double-delayed choice experiment as well. In this experiment the spin of the correlated photons is measured by using polarisors. The orientation of the polarisors is determined after the photons have been emitted. It turns out that the predictions of TEW for this experiment are not consistent with standard theory and experimental results. Little is working on an improved version of TEW." Additionally, Tom Radcliffe's essay points out yet more problems with TEW. http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/es...cliffe/tew.html **************************************************************** Consequently, the Objectivist is not warranted, let alone justified, in using the Primacy of Existence Principle to refute the existence of gods or the supernatural. But as a strong atheist, I'm confident that The Argument From Non-Cognitivism found at http://www.strongatheism.net/library/atheo...noncognitivism/ is sufficient to refute the existence of any gods defined in a self-contradictory manner. Its comforting to know that all the traditional arguments for gods fail and are refuted as is shown in fine books such as "Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith, and "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification" By Dr. Michael Martin, and others ( http://astore.amazon.com/skepticsannotate/...UTF8&node=8 ). But the fact of wave-particle duality means there is no ideal observer continuously monitoring the states of all quantum objects. The distinction between particle or wave depends not on the presence of any actual observer, but rather on the possibility of observational facts being integrated as knowledge. Since we can distinguish duality, there is no possibility of a cosmic consciousness ontologically capable of being aware of position and velocity of all instantiated quantum objects. It is impossible that omniscient god(s) have instantiated status as things that exist. Despite the indeterminacy of nature at the quantum scale, Objectivism remains a fine philosophy to use as a guide for living. Its commitment to reality qua reality, to proper and correct reasoning, to a healthy balance between empiricism and rationality, its good and useful epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and a logically derived rational morality makes Objectivism an obvious choice for living a better life.

http://www.runslinux.net/~jeff/tew_refutation2.txt (Part I written April 2000, Part II Oct 2000) Well, the time has finally come. I have completed the second more general disproof of TEW. In this one all parameters are left open for how the particles will "jump" onto different elementary waves when the polarizers are switched. This amounts to 16 separate variables, and the only constraints used are basic laws of probability and agreement with the photon counts at each detector as predicted by standard Quantum theory. As I show, even though there are only 6 constraining equations the system as a whole has *no* solution regardless of what parameters are used. It is the framework that is flawed, the experiment simply cannot be explained using reverse waves which travel from the detector to the source. I am including the "part 1" again along with the new "part 2" because all the equations of part 2 depend on the framework established in part 1, and I refer back to specific tables. Also, I found several serious numerical errors in my original part 1 refutation which I have corrected here so I would like this to go on record as replacing the original one. (The numerical errors were a result of miscopying my scrawlings which at the time were a loose collection of notes and tables in an attempt to simplify what I had discovered as much as possible before posting it). So if you are just going to skim this and you already have the gist of the first part of the argument you can skip down below to where it says "Part 2" to read what is new. But it will still refer back to a lot which is in part 1. An original copy of this document can be found at: http://www.spoonless.net/tew_refutation.html (This is a broken and bad link, but this is a Network Solutions whois search for spoonless.net.) http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/resu...n=spoonless.net A Refutation of The Theory of Elementary Waves ------------------------------------------- TEW was formulated by Dr. Lewis Little to be a local deterministic alternative to Quantum Mechanics, where particles follow paths and have a definite position and momentum all the time, regardless of whether they are being measured. This is similar to David Bohm's theory, except that Bohm's is non-local. Accordingly, Bohm predicts exactly the same experimental results as standard Quantum Theory, whereas TEW disagrees with Quantum Mechanics about some predictions. The circumstances where TEW disagrees with standard QM are the circumstances which have been in the spotlight for debate ever since non-locality arose as an issue in Physics (dating all the way back to the EPR paper published in 1935). Standard Quantum theory predicts non-local interactions in all EPR experiments--but it is only in cases where the decision of which angle to measure the particles at both ends of the experiment is delayed until it is too late for a signal to travel between them that it is necessary to invoke a non-local theory to duplicate the predictions of QM theory. It is these situations--called double delayed choice experiments--where TEW and QM disagree about the outcome of the experiment. When it was first realized that these experiments proved or disproved the non-locality of nature itself, an effort was sought to perform one of these experiments, forever proving whether the non-local Quantum theory which had been around for years was correct about its predictions. The effort to perform the experiment culminated in what is now known as the A. Aspect experiment, performed in 1981. This experiment was and is globably accepted as having conclusively shown, that any theory which involves particles having complimentary properties like position and momentum at the same time *must* be inherently non-local. Dr. Lewis Little claims, however, that he has found a loophole in the Aspect experiment, something which all scientist who performed it and have ever read about or studied it overlooked. In order to continue reading this document, it is highly advisable to first read the following text written by Little on the mechanism by which he believes TEW can escape the accepted non-local consequences of the Aspect experiment: <a href=http://www.yankee.us.com/TEW/InnsbruckNote.html>"Notes on the Aspect and Innsbruck experiments"</a> Before beginning my refutation, I will quickly review both the experiment itself and Dr. Little's explanation of how TEW gets around it. The Aspect experiment involves a generation of a pair of photons with a special relation to each other (to be described further on). The photons are sent out in oppositte directions. On each side, the photon is measured with a polarizer oriented at a chosen angle. Now, at each side half of the photons will pass through the polarizer and half will be blocked. But even though each photon has a 50 percent chance of passing through its own polarizer regardless of what the angles of the polarizers are, the two photons are related to each other. In fact, for a particular pair of photons, if the polarizers are set at exactly the same angle and the photon on one side passes through, the one on the other side will always be blocked. (Their anti-correlation is 100%). This is not true, however, if the polarizers are set to different angles. If they are measured at different angles, then the probability that they both pass through is given by the sine squared function: P(same) = sin^2(alpha) and the probability that one passes through and the other is blocked is given by cosine squared: P(different) = cos^2(alpha) (Notice these probabilities add up to 1) ...where alpha is the angle between the two polarizers. To find the correlation between the two results, you simply subtract these two numbers: E(photon A passes, photon B passes) = sin^2(alpha) - cos^2(alpha) which simplifies mathematically to: E() = -cos(2*alpha). Notice that if the polarizers are at the same angle, alpha is 0 and the correlation is -1, (-100%), which as I mentioned is an anti-correlation of 100% (the percentage of time they disagree). Now, the above mathematics is what QM theory predicts for the measurements of how many times on average the photons passing through will agree and disagree, regardless of how far apart the two polarizers are placed *and* regardless of how late the angle measured at each end is chosen. According to TEW, these equations work as long as one polarizer's angle is fixed (either doesn't change or ends up at the same angle it started while the photons are "in flight"). But if both polarizer angles are changed after the photons are generated but before they reach their destinations, then TEW predicts different results. The experiment was performed and a mechanism was used to switch the angles of the polarizers randomly at a time interval corresponding to less than the time it takes the photon to travel from its source to the polarizer. The results observed in the experiment were exactly consistant with the equations I have listed above; however, Dr. Little's complaint is that only certain angles were used and that for these particular angles it is possible to add certain assumptions onto TEW to make the results come out the same as what was observed (and what QM predicts for those angles). He admits that this is not possible to do for any angle in general, but I shall show here that even with the angles used, the added assumption needed to make TEW consistant with the results is contradictory to TEW itself! I'm sure that there are much more elegant and simple ways of showing this mathematically, but instead I am going to present the following argument in terms of extremely basic numbers, angles, measurements, and grade school algebra. The reason for this is to make it clear to anyone patient enough to read it carefully (I do stress carefully) what the argument is saying and how it is connected with reality, rather than presenting a mess of equations and subscripts only familiar to those who have dealt with this for years. Also, it is much easier to do slight of hand with correlation equations, and probability distribution integrals than it is with just measured values. I will refer to the two polarizers used in the Aspect experiment as the left and right polarizer (even though this distinction is arbitrary as it depends on which side of the experiment you're standing on). The left polarizer is switched randomly between 0 and 45 degrees. The right polarizer is switched randomly between 22.5 and 67.5 degrees. I am going to walk through the experiment for various cases, from within the framework of TEW. According to TEW, two reverse photon waves at each end travel to the source, one polarized parallel to the polarizer and one polarized perpendicular to the polarizer. Each photon emitted from the source follows one of the two reverse photon waves on its side back to the polarizer and either passes on through it to the detector or is blocked, depending on which wave it was following. If the polarizer angle of one end is changed in mid photon flight, the photon particle will jump onto one of the two new reverse waves. In other words, whether the right photon particle passes through the right polarizer is determined only by the initial orientation of the left polarizer (at the time of the photon emission) and the final orientation of the right polarizer (at the time the photons reach their polarizers). Conversely, whether the left photon passes is determined only by the final orientation of the left photon and the initial orientation of the right photon. The reason the final orientation of the right polarizer can not affect the left photon's behavior is TEW's locality assumption: the information of what the final orientation of the right polarizer is does not have time to travel over to the left photon before it reaches its destination (as mentioned, the switching rate of the polarizer orientations is fast enough to ensure this). The reason the initial orientation of the left polarizer does not affect the same (left) photon is that if it did it would disagree with not just the results of this experiment, but single-delayed choice experiments as well. Anyway, QM and TEW agree on this second assumpion, but disagree on the first assumption (in QM, whether each photon passes is dependant instantaneously on the final orientations of both polarizers). That said, we move on to the observed statistics. I will use square brackets [] to denote polarizer orientations, and parenthesis () to denote the polarizations of the two photons in the experiment. If the polarizers are not changed during photon flight, the statistics are the same for QM, TEW, and what is measured all the time in normal experiments: Polarizer orientations: Percentage of photon pairs passed/blocked: [left, right] (left, right) % ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (passed,passed) 7.3% [ 0, 22.5] (passed,blocked) 42.6% (blocked,passed) 42.6% (blocked,blocked) 7.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (passed,passed) 42.6% [ 0, 67.5] * (passed,blocked) 7.3% (blocked,passed) 7.3% (blocked,blocked) 42.6% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- (passed,passed) 7.3% [45, 22.5] (passed,blocked) 42.6% (blocked,passed) 42.6% (blocked,blocked) 7.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- (passed,passed) 7.3% [45, 67.5] (passed,blocked) 42.6% (blocked,passed) 42.6% (blocked,blocked) 7.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.1 This table can easily be calculated from the cos^2(alpha) formula mentioned previously. Notice that the statistics for the first, third, and fourth cases are the same, This is because the statistics depend on alpha, the *difference* between the left and right polarizer angles. The second case, marked with a [*], is the only case where alpha is 67.5 rather than 22.5 so the statistics are different. Side note: all the numbers in the table are rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent. I will continue to do this throughout the rest of the refutation, but keep in mind that the real values are irrational and could be calculated to much higher precision. According to TEW, which reverse-waves the photons follow are chosen at the time of emission, and in the case where the polarizer angles are not changed they stay on the same path throughout the experiment. The chosen wave's polarization is either parallel or perpendicular to the polarizer on its side. With this in mind, here is the last table redisplayed in terms on TEW and which reverse waves the particle is initially following when the experiment begins: Initial polarizer Percentage of photon pairs initially orientations: following waves of these polarizations: (left, right) (left, right) % ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ( 0, 22.5 ) 7.3% [ 0, 22.5] ( 0, 112.5) 42.6% (90, 22.5 ) 42.6% (90, 112.5) 7.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ( 0, 67.5 ) 42.6% [ 0, 67.5] ( 0, 157.5) 7.3% (90, 67.5 ) 7.3% (90, 157.5) 42.6% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ( 45, 22.5 ) 7.3% [45, 22.5] ( 45, 112.5) 42.6% (135, 22.5 ) 42.6% (135, 112.5) 7.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ( 45, 67.5 ) 7.3% [45, 67.5] ( 45, 157.5) 42.6% (135, 67.5 ) 42.6% (135, 157.5) 7.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.2 The above table summarizes the statistics for which wave polarizations the left and right photons will follow based on the initial angles of the polarizers. If the polarizer angles are changed afterwards, the photons will jump to follow new polarizations in response. The polarizer on each end can be switched back and forth between their 2 possible angles any number of times during the experiment but the only angles which matter are what they start out at (initial angles) when the photons are emitted at the source, and what they end up at (final angles) when the photons reach the polarizers. This possible because of the determinism of TEW, and helps with agreement with experiment. Of all the possible combinations of initial and final left and right polarizer orientations (16) we will only need to look at 3 of them. I will introduce the notation [a,b] -> [c,d] to mean that the left polarizer has initial polarization angle a, and the right polarizer initial angle b, and their polarizations are changed in mid photon-flight to end up in final polarizations c and d respectively. The 3 cases I will analyze here are as follows: case 1: [0,67.5] -> [45,67.5] [left polarizer is changed] case 2: [0,67.5] -> [ 0,22.5] [right polarizer is changed] case 3: [0,67.5] -> [45,22.5] [both polarizers changed] All three have the same initial polarizer orientations, but then one or both of the polarizers end up switched by the time the photons reach their desinations. The fourth case involving an initial [0,67.5] polarization is [0,67.5]->[0,67.5] which has already been covered and isn't difficult to explain in terms of TEW as the photons simply end up in the same polarizations they started in. Of course there are also 12 other cases corresponding to different initial polarizer orientations which are similar to these 4 through various symmetries. These cases are not of interest to the present discussion. For case 1, the left photon will begin in a polarization of either 0 or 90 degrees and jump to a polarization of either 45 or 135 degrees. The statistics for the final polarizations of the photons must match the measured percentages of how many are blocked versus passed through the polarizers. These statistics are the same ones shown above in the [45,67.5] section of Table 1.2. We end up with a relationship between the initial right polarization (which remains the same) and the final left polarization (where the left photon ends up when it jumps). Initial photon Probability left photon will jump onto: polarizations: 45 degrees 135 degrees (left,right) % % ------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ (?,67.5 ) 14.6% 85.3% (?,157.5) 85.3% 14.6% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.3 The ? indicates that so far the angle the left photon jumps to does not need to depend on what it started out at. It may depend on this, or it may not. For example for the first line, the chances of the left photon jumping to 45 degrees may be different for initial polarizations of (0,67.5) and for (90,67.5) which both have different weights to begin with; but the average number of left photons ending up at a 45 degree polarization must come out to 14.6% for those two cases combined. A similar situation exists for case 2, where the right polarizer is changed causing the right photon to jump to another polarization. The corresponding statistics for its jump this time depend on the initial polarization of the left photon: Initial photon Probability right photon will jump onto: polarizations: 22.5 degrees 112.5 degrees (left,right) % % ------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ ( 0, ? ) 14.6% 85.3% (90, ? ) 85.3% 14.6% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.4 Now, in order to represent the statistics for case 3 where both photons jump we need a slightly bigger table. Now there are 4 possible outcomes of the jumps and 4 possible initial photon pair polarizations. The statistics listed in the [ 0, 67.5 ] and [ 45, 22.5 ] sections of Table 1.2 are listed on the left column and right heading of the following table. If one takes the assumption Dr. Little has made in the "Notes on the Aspect/Innsbruck experiments", then transitions corresponding to photons jumping in oppositte directions are forbidden. These transitions are marked here with 0's. (Note: later, I will show that even if one does not take this assumption, there is still no way to make the theory self-consistant but for now we will assume the original assumption made by Dr. Little). The rest of the statistics for the jumps can be anything as long as the rows and columns sum to 100 percent... Initial polarization state: Probability of final polarization state: 7.3% 42.6% 42.6% 7.3% % (left,right) (45,22.5) (135,22.5) (45,112.5) (135,112.5) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 42.6% ( 0, 67.5 ) 0 100-x x 0 7.3% ( 0, 157.5) 100-y 0 0 y 7.3% (90, 67.5 ) y 0 0 100-y 42.6% (90, 157.5) 0 x 100-x 0 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.5 With the 0's placed in this way, the probabilities along the top and along the side match up regardless of what is chosen for x and y. So case 3 is in agreement with experiment. But now let's look back at what happens in the first two cases. Consider what happens to the left photon as the experiment progresses. It is influenced by any change in the left polarizer but cannot know whether the right polarizer is changed (because this is outside of its lightcone during its journey). Therefore, what it does must be the same whether the right polarizer is changed or not. This means that the x and y values from the above table also apply to the table for case 1. But now its jump depends on more so Table 1.3 must be expanded and the values from Table 1.5 filled in: Initial photon Probability left photon will jump onto: polarizations: 45 degrees 135 degrees % (left,right) % % ------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ 42.6% (0 ,67.5 ) x | 100-x 7.3% (90,67.5 ) y | 100-y ------------------------------------------------------ 7.3% ( 0,157.5) 100-y | y 42.6% (90,157.5) 100-x | x ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.6 The four quadrants in the above graph correspond to the 4 probabilities listed in Table 1.3 (14.6%,85.3%,14.6%, and 85.3% going clockwise from the upper-left quadrant). The initial polarizations have different weights, but when averaged together it has to come out to the value from Table 1.3. We end up with the following new constraints on x and y: .853x + .146y = 14.6 (from upper left quadrant) .853(100-x) + .146(100-y) = 85.3 (from upper right quadrant) .853x + .146y = 14.6 (from lower right quadrant) .853(100-x) + .146(100-y) = 85.3 (from lower left quadrant) The coefficients shown here come from the 7.3%'s and the 14.6%'s in the lefthand column of Table 1.6, doubled because it is only out of the 2 possible initial polarizations in that particular quadrant rather than all 4 possible initial polarizations; and expressed as a decimal rather than a percent so that the multiplication is clearer. The first and third equations are the same equation, as are the second and forth. Furthermore, the second/forth equation also reduces to the first/third: .853(100-x) + .146(100-y) = 85.3 85.3 - .85.3x + 14.6 - .146y = 85.3 -.853x - .146y = -14.6 .853x + .146y = 14.6 So all four equations simply say .853x + .146y = 14.6 which still doesn't pick out values for x and y, but does restrict them a bit. Now let's look at what happens when the right photon jumps. It has no way of knowing whether the left polarizer is changed so its statistics must be the same for case 2 and case 3. Expanding Table 1.4 with the same x's and y's gives us: Initial photon Probability right photon will jump onto: polarizations: 22.5 degrees 112.5 degrees % (left,right) % % ------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ 42.6% (0 ,67.5 ) 100-x | x 7.3% (0 ,157.5) 100-y | y ------------------------------------------------------ 7.3% (90, 67.5) y | 100-y 42.6% (90,157.5) x | 100-x ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1.7 And the corresponding constraints on x and y from Table 1.4 are: .853(100-x) + .146(100-y) = 14.6 .853x + .146y = 85.3 .853(100-x) + .146(100-y) = 14.6 .853x + .146y = 85.3 which reduces to the single equation: .853x + .146y = 85.3 Unfortunately (for TEW), this contradicts the previous sum which has the same righthand side but a different constant on the lefthand side! 85.3 is not equal to 14.6. And there you have it folks. If you add the assumption to try to explain case 3, then it has contradictory consequences on cases 1 and 2. In fact, any 2 of the 3 cases can be made consistant by adding the appropriate assumptions to TEW. However, it is *impossible* for TEW to explain the results seen in all three cases without contradicting itself. The reason for this is simple. The Aspect experiment set out to disprove local theories. It succeeded. Dr. Little cannot get around the facts of the experiment, and TEW is no better at explaining reality than any local hidden variable theory. ========================================================================== Part II --------- The above was originally written by myself in April 2000, and submitted to the TEWLIP egroups list, dedicated to discussing the Theory of Elementary Waves. Since then, I've found several errors in it and have gone back and corrected them. Some were typographical errors, some were a misuse of language concerning the theory, and some were errors resulting from miscopying variable names between written tables. I apologize for these errors, which may have severely hindered the original reception of my point. The result of the proof, however, remains unchanged, and is now correct as written to the best of my knowledge. Dr. Little has acknowledged the error in his original assumption and retracted what is still on his current webpage, and has posted a preliminary alternative explanation which he believes may save TEW after all. Some of the numerical errors I found in my refutation I didn't realize until after this retraction. At that point I didn't bother to repost these corrections since all relevant parties agreed that there was at least some contradiction in Dr. Little's original assumption. So now here (above) is the corrected version of the proof, and now as promised I shall expand this to be a more general disproof of TEW regardless of what assumptions are used... Refer above to Table 1.5, which represents the 16 probabilities involved in the 3rd (double delayed) case discussed. Without any a priori assumption of what these probabilities are, this is a 4 by 4 matrix leaving us with 16 variables which I'll label as the following: Initial polarization state: Probability of final polarization state: 7.3% 42.6% 42.6% 7.3% % (left,right) (45,22.5) (135,22.5) (45,112.5) (135,112.5) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 42.6% ( 0, 67.5 ) x_11 x_12 x_13 x_14 7.3% ( 0, 157.5) x_21 x_22 x_23 x_24 7.3% (90, 67.5 ) x_31 x_32 x_33 x_34 42.6% (90, 157.5) x_41 x_42 x_43 x_44 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 2.1 And there are several sets of constraints on these variables. First, the rows must sum to 100%. Second, the probabilities much match the headings of the vertical columns (agreement of case 3 with experiment). And third, certain weighted sums of probabilities must agree with the block probabilities for cases 1 and 2 (from the basic probability law that the sum of the probability of several independent events occuring must equal the probability of at least one of the entire set of events occuring). I will show that even though all these constraints amount to less than 16 equations, they still contradict each other and thus have no solution. But before I do, let me note that Dr. Little's second attempt at explaining TEW (the alternative assumption posted after the retraction) corresponds to setting the following probabilities equal to 0: x_12,x_13,x_21,x_24,x_31, x_34,x_42,x_43. These are the probabilities corresponding to the photons jumping in the same direction (exactly the reverse assumption from the first one shown in Table 1.5). This does not agree with the probabilities in the vertical column headings which are the probabilities of observing a photon at one or both of the detectors predicted for case 3 by QM. (There has been some argument now as to whether these probabilities were actually measured but that will be dealt with later). Just as an example though, to show where these probabilities disagree, here are the equations which would need to be satisfied in order to agree with the QM prediction of what photon ends up where (for case 3, simply read off of Table 2.1 above): .426 x_11 + .426 x_41 = 7.3 .073 x_22 + .073 x_32 = 42.6 .073 x_23 + .073 x_33 = 42.6 .426 x_14 + .426 x_44 = 7.3 so combining the first and last equations, and combining the middle-two equations: .426 (x_11+x_41+x_14+x_44) = 14.6 .073 (x_22+x_32+x_23+x_33) = 85.3 But all the rows must sum to 100%. With the current situation where the x_?? values not shown have already been set to zero, we have: x_11 + x_14 = 100 x_22 + x_23 = 100 x_32 + x_33 = 100 x_41 + x_44 = 100 which means: .426 (200) = 14.6 .073 (200) = 85.3 neither of which is true. These equations all worked out fine for the original assumption but they do not for the new assumption. However, this was just an example to show how these equations are being used. For the general case, it will simplify things for me to define a few more variables: let a = x_11 + x_44 , let b = x_41 + x_14 let c = x_22 + x_33 , let d = x_23 + x_32 let y1 = x_12 + x_43 , let y2 = x_13 + x_42 let z1 = x_21 + x_34 , let z2 = x_31 + x_24 let y = y1 + y2 , let z = z1 + z2 In order to visualize this the following table may help: [ a y1 y2 b ] [ z1 c d z2 ] [ z2 d c z1 ] [ b y2 y1 a ] But don't be confused by each variable above being in two places. I'm *not* saying it is equal to the probability at both of those positions, I'm saying let it equal the *sum* of whatever those two individual probabilities is. So if we add the first and forth rows together, because each row adds to 100%, we have: a + b + y = 200 Similarly, if we add the second and third rows together, we have: c + d + z = 200 We will use these facts later. That's all we need for the first set of constraints. The second set of constraints is that the case 3 probabilities work out. The sum of the probabilities in each column of Table 2.1, where each probability is weighted by the multiplier in parenthesis to the left of its row, must add up to match the number listed at the top of the column. This amounts to 4 equations, but if the two middle columns are added together as well as the two outer columns we can express this as two constraints on our new set of variables: .426 (a+B) + .073 z = 14.6 ( outer columns ) [Eq 2.1] .073 (c+d) + .426 y = 85.3 ( middle columns ) [Eq 2.2] And finally, the last set of constraints is that the probabilities from tables 1.3 and 1.4 match the sum of the four weighted probabilities in their blocks. This corresponds to agreement with the experimental results for cases #1 and #2 (single delayed switch cases). If we sum the 2 blocks which are to add to 14.6 for each case, and sum the 2 blocks adding to 85.3 for each case as well, we obtain 4 equations: .426 a + .426 y2 + .073 z2 + .073 c = 14.6 (case #1) [Eq 2.3] .426 a + .426 y1 + .073 z1 + .073 c = 14.6 (case #2) [Eq 2.4] This is all the constraints we need for the purposes of showing a contradiction. If we combine Eq 2.3 and 2.4 by adding them we get: .853 a + .426 y + .073 z + .146 c = 29.3 And then, from the rows-sum-to-100% constraints we can replace y with an expression in terms of a and b, and z with an expression in terms of c and d: .853a + .426(200-a-B) + .073(200-c-d) + .146c = 29.3 which simplifies down to: .426(a-B) + .073(c-d) = 70.7 [Eq 2.5] Now, let's save this result for a second and go back to look at the case 3 constraints. Eq 2.1 can be expressed entirely in terms of a,b,c, and d if we use the sum-to-100% rule of c+d+z=200 in order to eliminate z: .426(a+B) + .073(200-c-d) = 14.6 which simplifies to: .426(a+B) - .073(c+d) = 0 [Eq 2.6] Now we are almost finished. It's not obvious yet but Eq 2.5 and 2.6 are not compatible with each other. To see this, we can subtract Eq 2.6 from Eq 2.5 to cancel out a and d: -.853b + .146c = 70.7 which when solved for c can be rewritten as: c = 483 + 5.83b However, since b must be non-negative, this would imply that c >= 483 but c is the sum of only two probabilities. It can be at most 200; 483 is far outside of the highest value c could be. In fact, if taken with the sum-to-100 equations, it also implies that d+z is negative! Therefore, the original assumption (TEW) was false. No matter which parameters TEW uses to describe the jumping between waves, it has no way of replicating the predictions for the appropriate number of photons to be detected at each detector when all cases are considered together. - The only other issue to be dealt with is what exactly has or hasn't been measured. TEW has been proven here to be incapable of predicting the same results as QM, even for the angles used in the Aspect and Innsbruck experiments; and even if it is modified by any change in its parameters not involving non-locality. It is now undeniable that the physical measureable results of the theories are different. But were these differences measured in any experiments to date? Stephen Spiecher has raised the point that not all of the numbers which disagree here were measured. It seems only the photons passing through the polarizers were detected and measured. The reflected photons were not registered at all. But both QM and TEW predict that exactly half the photons will pass through each polarizer. This has always been observed to be the case in any experiment involving unpolarized light regardless of what angles the polarizers are switched to or whether they are switched. In fact, the photon on one side must pass through its polarizer with 50% probability regardless of what happens on the other side. So if this probability were somehow different for the double delayed case, it would also have to be different for the single delayed case, and even the case where neither polarizers are switched. But there have certainly been plenty of experiments done in these latter cases and the 50% rule has always held true. Therefore it must be true for the double-delayed case. This means that for every photon which is detected as having passed through on one side there was (on average) one other photon which was reflected from the same side without being detected. Therefore, due to symmetry, a measurement of only the photons passing through is sufficient to obtain values for all of the statistics involved in this refutation. Because the Quantum statistics are implied by the results of the measurements in the Aspect experiment, and the Quantum statistics have been shown here to be unproducable under TEW, TEW cannot account in any way for the results of the experiment.

Are Conservatives (Undocumented) Aliens? Link to article by Jacob G. Hornberger Save a link to this article and return to it at www.savethis.comSave a link to this article and return to it at www.savethis.com Email a link to this articleEmail a link to this article Printer-friendly version of this articlePrinter-friendly version of this article View a list of the most popular articles on our siteView a list of the most popular articles on our site DIGG THIS Conservatives are strange and fascinating creatures. Their minds operate in a strange, Bizarro-like universe in which delusion and deception seem to be considered normal. Consider, for example, the most recent Republican presidential debate. Let’s leave Ron Paul out of the picture for the time being. The rest of the candidates were standing there and periodically proclaiming how committed they are to such principles as “free enterprise,” “fiscal responsibility,” and “limited government.” I watched this with fascinating bemusement. I kept asking myself whether these people really believed that. Is it really possible for them to be so out of touch with reality as to not recognize how bizarre their proclamations really were? What was also strange was that many of the people in the Iowa audience didn’t seem to notice anything bizarre about those proclamations. It’s almost as if there were political zombies on stage dutifully repeating old, dated conservative mantras while an audience of conservative zombies were sitting there dutifully nodding their heads in agreement. Reality check: Americans are living under the biggest, most powerful government in history. It is the biggest-spending government in history. Its currency is crashing because of its out-of-control spending. Its military power extends over the entire globe. It is an empire that polices the world, sometimes with brutal and deadly force. It kidnaps, tortures, sexually abuses, incarcerates, and murders people with impunity and without even the semblance of due process or trial by jury. It engages in coups, assassinations, invasions, and occupations of countries that have recalcitrant regimes. Its jails are overrun with people who have committed no act of violence against others. It ignores constitutional restraints on its powers. Its ever-increasing welfare-state programs keep the citizenry drugged, calm, and dependent on the state. The reality is that all the Republican presidential candidates (except Ron Paul) are part and parcel of all this. During their entire political careers, they have supported the socialist, interventionist, and imperial direction the United States has taken. They still do. Yet they stand there in front of an Iowa audience and look into the faces of the people and into the television camera and with straight faces repeat the old mantras that conservatives were mouthing in the 1950s: “I’m committed to free enterprise, private property, limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the Constitution.” And then they dutifully bash those “big-government, big-spending liberals.” And the people in the audience, zombie-like, just sit there, nod their heads, and applaud. It’s almost like watching a real-life variation of The Stepford Wives. Now, it’s true that liberals are in favor of big government and big spending, but what’s different about them is that they don’t make any bones about it. That’s what they stand for and that’s why they support every socialist and regulatory program that comes down the pike. But at least their recognition of this gives them a grip on reality. What’s fascinating about conservatives is that they claim to stand against those things and yet continue to support them and then act as if they don’t. Then along comes someone like Ron Paul, who has the temerity to propose abolishing federal departments and agencies, substituting voluntary charity for coerced welfare-state programs, restoring sound money, ending regulatory and interventionist programs, and dismantling the U.S. military empire. In other words, he proposes restoring “free enterprise, private property, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionally limited government” to our nation. The result? Conservatives treat him as if he were from Mars! “What in the world is Ron doing?” they exclaim. “Is he crazy? Doesn’t he know that in Bizarro-land, conservatives are only supposed to mouth the old mantras, not actually carry them out?” Let me give you another recent example of this strange, surreal world of conservatism, this one involving famous conservative Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly became upset with White House reporter Helen Thomas for an exchange she had with President Bush’s spokesperson Dana Perino over the occupation of Iraq. During the exchange, Thomas took Perino to task for the U.S. military’s continual killing of the Iraqi people. This led O’Reilly to call Thomas a “pinhead.” What was O’Reilly’s reason for hurling such a nasty insult against Thomas? In explaining his decision, he got all wrapped up in his own personal distinctions between Iraqi terrorists and insurgents, on the one hand, and civilians, on the other. Apparently, his point was that U.S. forces have been targeting only Iraqi terrorists and insurgents and that any killing of Iraqi civilians has been accidental. But if you go back and closely examine the exchange between Thomas and Perino, it is clear that Thomas didn’t draw any such distinctions. She just referred to the killing of Iraqis in general. O’Reilly and other conservatives simply block out of their minds a discomforting reality: No Iraqi ever participated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Every single Iraqi, including the hundreds of thousands who are now dead or maimed at the hands of U.S. forces, was innocent of the 9/11 attacks. Why is that important? Because while the U.S. government had the right to go after those who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, it had no right, legal or moral, to wreak vengeance against people who were innocent of the 9/11 attacks, including all of the Iraqi people who are now dead or maimed at the hands of U.S. forces. Equally important, the Iraqi people have every right in the world to rid their country of a foreign occupier, especially an occupier who is in their country by virtue of a fake and false rationale – nonexistent WMDs – that was used to justify the invasion on which the occupation is based. The strange part of all this is that conservatives such as Bush, Perino, and O’Reilly behave as if U.S. officials are engaged in some act of morality by continuing to kill Iraqis as part of a brutal occupation that was based on that fake and false rationale for invading the country. And despite the fact that they know that the WMD rationale was fake and false, conservatives have deluded themselves into believing that the invaders are justified in killing Iraqis who are simply doing what they have a right to do – drive a foreign occupier out of their country. At the risk of stating another obvious fact: If American troops do not wish to suffer any more attacks from Iraqi terrorists or insurgents who are trying to rid their country of foreign troops, there is a simple solution: Get out and go home. Haven’t U.S. troops, loyally and obediently following orders, wreaked enough death and destruction on a country whose people did not participate in the 9/11 attacks and which U.S. forces invaded on the basis of a fake and false rationale? The casual indifference that conservatives have displayed toward the killing of Iraqis is just one more example of the Bizarro-land in which these people mentally operate. After all, how often do conservatives remind us of how religious they are and how much they value human life, especially the life of the unborn? But where is all that religion and so-called concern for life when it comes to the lives of the Iraqi people? We don’t even know how many Iraqis U.S. forces have killed and maimed because conservatives don’t deem them sufficiently important to count! Why don’t the conservative preachers who ask us to pray for the troops in Iraq every Sunday in church ever offer a single prayer for the victims of this aggression? Isn’t the life of an Iraqi as valuable as the life of an unborn child, at least in the eyes of God? One of the strangest aspects of Bizarro-land is how conservatives conflate the federal government and America. In their minds, the government and the country are one and the same. Thus, when O’Reilly heard Thomas’s criticism of the federal government’s occupation of Iraq, that was all the proof he needed that Thomas hates America. Never mind that the federal government and the private sector are composed of two different groups of people, a fact recognized by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the private sector from the federal government. That’s a reality that is best left ignored in the conservative mind. As a loyal conservative, Perino herself lives in this strange, alternate universe. In her exchange with Thomas, she said that Americans elected President Bush as their commander in chief? What? And here I thought that Bush was commander in chief only for those in the military. Wow! Does this mean that everyone in Bizarro-land is supposed to behave like loyal little soldiers, marching in lockstep with their leader, not daring to question his decisions, and saluting, brown-nosing, and spit-shining their shoes? Weird! I predict that a century from now, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists are going to have a field day studying conservatives. They might even discover that conservatives were proof-positive that Earth had, in fact, been visited by extra-terrestrial life. December 21, 2007 Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/...71212202008.htm Different Areas Of The Brain Respond To Belief, Disbelief And Uncertainty ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2007) — The human mind is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. The capacity of our minds to believe or disbelieve linguistic propositions is a powerful force for controlling both behavior and emotion, but the basis of this process in the brain is not yet understood. Sam Harris, a UCLA graduate student in the lab of Mark Cohen, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a study co-author, and Sameer Sheth of Massachusetts General Hospital, report that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals clear differences in the areas of the brain involved in belief, disbelief and uncertainty. Their results suggest that the differences among these cognitive states may one day be distinguished reliably, in real time, by techniques of neuroimaging. This finding has implications for the detection of deception, for the control of the placebo effect during drug design and for the study of any higher cognitive phenomenon in which the differences among belief, disbelief and uncertainty might be relevant. Fourteen adult volunteers were scanned in an MRI device at UCLA's Brain Imaging Center. While inside the scanner, subjects were presented with written statements covering a broad range of topics, including mathematics, geography, factual knowledge, word definitions, religion, ethics and biographical facts about themselves. Subjects were asked to rate these statements as true, false or undecidable. The authors then compared the brain images recorded when their subjects believed, disbelieved or could not judge the truth-value of these written propositions. The scientists predicted that the difference between belief and disbelief would be largely mediated by activity in the frontal lobes -- the part of the brain most enlarged and differentiated in humans. Indeed, when belief and disbelief were compared, the investigators saw differences principally in a region known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), near the front of the brain, along its midline. "The involvement of the VMPFC in belief processing suggests an anatomical link between the purely cognitive aspects of belief and human emotion and reward," the authors said. "The fact that ethical belief showed a similar pattern of activation to mathematical belief suggests that the physiological difference between belief and disbelief may be independent of content or emotional associations." The areas especially engaged in disbelief included the limbic system's cingulate areas and the anterior insula, a brain region known to report visceral sensations such as pain and disgust and to be involved largely in negative appraisals of sensations like taste and smell. "Our results appear to make sense of the emotional tone of disbelief, placing it on a continuum with other modes of stimulus appraisal and rejection," the authors said. "False propositions might actually disgust us." When the subjects experienced uncertainty, yet another pattern emerged. A different portion of the cingulate cortex, located closer to the front of the brain, showed a much stronger signal. This so-called "anterior cingulate" cortex frequently shows up in studies of conflict monitoring, error detection and cognitive interference. When compared to both belief and disbelief, the state of uncertainty also showed a decreased signal in the caudate, a region of the basal ganglia, which plays a role in motor action. Noting that uncertainty differs from both belief and disbelief by not allowing us to settle upon "a specific, actionable interpretation of the world," the authors suggest that the basal ganglia may play a role in mediating the cognitive and behavioral differences between decision and indecision. Taken together, these data offer insight into the way in which our brains work to form beliefs about the world. "What I find most interesting about our results is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottleneck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust," Harris said. "While evaluating mathematical, ethical or factual statements requires very different kinds of processing, accepting or rejecting these statements seems to rely upon a more primitive process that may be content-neutral. I think that it has long been assumed that believing that two plus two equals four and believing that George Bush is President of the United States have almost nothing in common as cognitive operations. But what they clearly have in common is that both representations of the world satisfy some process of truth-testing that we continually perform. I think this is yet another result, in a long line of results, that calls the popular opposition between reason and emotion into question." Article: "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty," Sam Harris, Sameer Sheth, Mark S. Cohen, Annals of Neurology, December 2007. Research in Cohen's lab is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. ***************************************** This is hugely significant to Objectivism as Ayn Rand's philosophy assigns seminal importance to reason as the foundation of ethics. The Ayn Rand Institute at aynrand.org reports the following on ethics: "Ethics "Reason is man's only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: man's survival qua man—i.e., that which is required by man's nature for his survival as a rational being (not his momentary physical survival as a mindless brute). Rationality is man's basic virtue, and his three fundamental values are: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life." Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruism—the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society." http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pag...vism_essentials But if belief/disbelief/undecidable assessments of propositions requiring use of reason and experiential emotions process through the same brain structures as indicated in Cohen and Harris, then Objectivists are unwarranted in following Rand on ethics for reasoning would be subject to the same perceptual vagarities as emotions due to brain functional variances of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex and caudate. How can an ethical system be based on the presumed correct operation of brain regions? What of the brain damaged patient? Would she be unethical due to her inability to form beliefs in response to reasoning? Do other species of apes also have ventromedial prefrontal cortexs and do these brain structures function in an analogous manner for the apes? If so, then Chimp, Gorilla, Gibbon, and Orangutan reasoning would be an equally valid source of ethical perception. If the objectivist cannot answer these and other questions, then this is fatal to Objectivist ethics and thus any stance based on Objectivist ethics is called into question. Wikipedia's thought article defines reasoning thus: "The intellect can mix, match, merge, sift, and sort concepts, perceptions, and experience. This process is called reasoning." But since reasoning as a brain function utilizes the same structures the brain uses "to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust," Rand's presumptive premise of the special nature of reasoning, the contrast of "man qua man" with a "mindless brute" is negated, and Objectivist ethics fall by the wayside.

An Open Letter to Republicans by Andrew Ter-Grigoryan http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/ter-grigoryan1.html This is a letter to all of my fellow Republicans, written on behalf of the presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul. If you have been following the Presidential campaign this year, the chances are good that you have encountered a candidate whose name is Ron Paul. Though underreported by the mainstream media (shakes fist at air angrily), the Congressional 10th-term Texas Republican candidate's run for the White House has amassed untold millions and has a legion of grassroots support across America. My fellow Republicans, if you are reading this and have decided to reject Ron Paul's candidacy, please allow me to explain why I so strongly believe that Ron Paul is the man that I believe will rescue our party and restore our Constitutional republic if we elect him into the White House. Dr. Paul is truly a rarity in today's political environment. A strict adherent of the Constitution, Ron Paul his had the same consistent positions throughout his ten total terms in Congress, and has never compromised his values to a corrupt incentive or special interest. If you would like to read about Ron Paul's presidential platform, go to RonPaul2008.com (which just so happens to be the most visited website of any politician currently running for President, Republican or Democrat). Here is an overview of Ron Paul's positions on some of the major issues of this year's race for the White House: Abortion: Ron Paul, who delivered over 4,000 infants from the womb over the course of his medical career, has one of the strongest pro-life records in Congressional history. Unlike Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney (before he flip-flopped), Dr. Paul opposes the Roe vs. Wade ruling and views a developing unborn life as a sovereign being, and has always voted that way in Congress. When our party led Congress, we may have had the opportunity to overturn Roe vs. Wade, but it appears that to many, the votes that could potentially be gained from the issue being open was a stronger incentive than actually overturning the decision. Abortion is one of the key GOP issues, and Ron Paul can truly represent our party on it. Border Security: Like international faux-"free trade" deals such as NAFTA and CAFTA, some of our Republican politicians in Washington were misled into voting for amnesty for illegal immigrants not because of loyalty to conservatism but because of pressure from the president. Ron Paul opposes any plan for amnesty or an open borders policy. Much of his solution incorporates federalism and private ownership. Ron Paul is completely, unabashedly anti-amnesty. In fact, he supports what even Tom Tancredo would not – ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegals. Ron Paul's policies as President would ensure an end to this country's illegal immigrant problem. Economics: Some have said that the GOP can no longer be considered the party of fiscal conservatism and market libertarianism. After begrudging support of new taxes, out-of-control spending, pork-barrel spending, unbalanced budgets, and many socialist programs, our politicians, even, unhappily, Republicans, often appear disingenuous when they talk of halting increases in taxation and spending. The braver ones may talk of lowering taxes as well. But of all the current candidates, only Ron Paul will abolish the income tax and phase out the IRS. He has never voted for an increase in taxes, an unbalanced budget, programs that propose welfare or affirmative action, or to even raise his own pay! Following with his commitment to personal liberty and limited government, Paul's economic positions are largely based on his decades of studying the free-market philosophy of the Austrian School of economics of Mises and Hayek. Above all this, Ron Paul realizes how much of our economic woes go back to the dollar itself, which is why he contends for a return to the gold standard and the end of the Federal Reserve. Education: Whereas the party once opposed public-schooling measures and a Department of Education (as Paul still does), schooling freedom has continued to wane. Some of our politicians have allowed themselves to be watered down to the point of supporting No Child Left Behind. Ron Paul wants to make private and home schooling viable options once more by restoring educational freedom, while deconstructing the federal bureaucracy. School vouchers do not have the ability to accomplish these ends. Health: As a lifelong physician, Ron Paul obviously has a lot of firsthand experience with the health care situation. When his patients could not pay for medical services, he helped them regardless, without pay. He understands that some Americans are unable to pay for their health care, mostly because of present anti-free-market policies in this field, not a lack of big government social programs. As the dollar gets further inflated and income further taxed, how can the average American be expected to keep up? Remember that since the government has unfortunately conditioned our citizens to depend on programs like Medicare, Ron Paul will not actively work to phase them out as President, but he would work to give citizens the option to opt out of such programs. Family: Unlike the GOP "front-runner" Rudy Giuliani, Ron Paul lives by his own moral values. He is possibly the most socially traditional of all the candidates running for President. Dr. Paul is a family man who has been married to his wife Carol for fifty years, has five children, and many more grandchildren. Although he does not publicly focus on this aspect of his life, like much of the GOP base, he is a churchgoing Baptist. If he gets the nomination, no kind of attack ads from the Democratic opposition would be able to lay a glove on Ron Paul's personal life, because there is simply nothing to be attacked! In Congress, he never voted for abortion, for infringements on our religious freedoms, or for an economic policy that harms the middle-American family. Ever. He voted against a national ban on same-sex marriage on federalist grounds. Marriage – period – is a private and societal institution that should not be connected with the State or its nanny-state benefits. That's the way it used to be in this country. Foreign Policy: And here we reach the pivotal point. Fellow Republicans, if the current foreign policy's intrinsic failures have not been enough to convince you that it is errant, let me offer a recommendation: read your history! Far from a fringe renegade, Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy is simply the policy that our party once had. What do WWI, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and our presence in Kosovo have in common? They were all started by big-government Democrats and opposed by conservatives! The American people voted in our party to end self-destructive conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam Wars. How did the current administration's policy come to be the norm? It certainly was not the policy advocated by Russell Kirk, Robert Taft or President Ronald Reagan. President Bush's foreign policy is informed by members of an intellectual school called "neo-conservatism" encompassing those like Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Paul Wolfowitz, many of whom are former Marxists! Such a policy has already cost us trillions, reduced our national sovereignty, tarnished our image abroad, bred extremists, and entangled us in ever more perpetual and complicated conflicts and alliances, exactly what our nation's Founding Fathers warned against. Ron Paul, a former serviceman, supports our troops but not any errant, non-traditional foreign policy. He also supports the U.S. pulling out of NATO and the U.N., positions which used to be conservative boilerplate. A Ron Paul administration would be strong on defense; not offense. The mainstream media (boo! hiss!) tries to characterize him as out of step with Republican traditions; no, it is the other candidates who want the US to be the world’s policeman, who are incompatible with our basic philosophy. Guns: In Congress, Ron Paul has never voted for a piece of legislation that would have infringed upon the rights of gun owners (well, further than they've already been trampled on). Paul is a gun owner standing 100% opposed to gun control and votes against any legislation to that effect. Giuliani, Huckabee, and Romney all have terrible records on gun rights. We must be wary of the Democrats in Congress that would strip us of our rights to own a firearm to protect ourselves and our loved ones. How can we compromise ourselves in this critical time by supporting a candidate who can not fully represent our most basic historical beliefs? It is crucial that we lend our support to this man’s Presidential bid and his undiluted platform. What is the extent of Ron Paul’s competition? Rudy Giuliani? A fiscal moderate and social liberal without foreign policy experience. Mike Huckabee? An amnesty-loving big-government tax-and-spend "right-wing progressive" who will wreck federalism. Mitt Romney? Ditto, and a flip-flopper. John McCain? A thoroughly lukewarm big-government neoconservative. Fred Thompson? A zombie, with the Hollywood writers on strike. And all of them are in support of a failed foreign policy that compromises the values of our nation. Finally, there is another objection, not to Paul's political program but asserting that "he can't win." We must not deceive ourselves in this way. Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate that I believe can defeat Hillary Clinton almost on default if nominated, largely due to the contrast between his views and her vicious welfare statism and her hawkish foreign policy not even in tune with her own party. Only Ron Paul of all the Republican candidates can attract uncommitted and even Democratic voters. The Paul campaign has enormous grassroots support from Americans of all walks of life, and has raised unbelievable amounts of money. Paul has over 40,000 Meetup groups to Huckabee’s 3000+. On November 5th the campaign raised an amazing $4.3 million, an all-time GOP fundraising record. On Dec. 16th, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, he is expected to break even that amazing fundraising record. Don't trust the "official scientific" polls that claim to represent "likely" Republican voters for one second. Those polled therein had 80% support for Bush’s performance in Iowa and 55% in New Hampshire, meaning that the majority polled were hardcore Bushites. So, his actual Republican support, plus his massive independent support, is far greater than those polls would indicate. Ron Paul's supporters can also be expected to have a much higher voting turnout than supporters of other candidates. Ron Paul can win the Presidency, and if so, can certainly bring forth an era in this country that will far outshine the Reagan revolution. "In your heart, you know he's right." December 10, 2007 Andrew Ter-Grigoryan [send him mail] is a college student in Kentucky.

http://www.ronpaul2008.com/press-rel...-goldwater-jr/ Barry Goldwater Jr Endorses Ron Paul November 16, 2007 10:16 am EST ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA—Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul today gained a public endorsement from Barry M. Goldwater, Jr. “America is at a crossroads,” said Mr. Goldwater. “We have begun to stray from our traditions and must get back to what has made us the greatest nation on earth or we will lose much of the freedom we hold dear. Ron Paul stands above all of the other candidates in his commitment to liberty and to America.” “Leading America is difficult, and I know Ron Paul is the man for the job,” he added. Mr. Goldwater is the son of the late former Republican presidential candidate and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Barry Goldwater, Jr. served in the House of Representatives for six terms with Texas Congressman Paul, and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Goldwater Institute. After representing northern Los Angeles County in Washington, D.C. for 14 years, Mr. Goldwater retired from politics in 1983 to pursue a successful career in business and humanitarian ventures. “The Ron Paul campaign is exceptionally honored by Mr. Goldwater’s endorsement,” said Paul campaign manager Lew Moore. “Dr. Paul and Congressman Goldwater fought together in the Congress for the ideals of limited constitutional government that Mr. Goldwater’s father so tirelessly advocated. The Goldwaters have left an indelible mark on the Republican Party, and theirs is a legacy which Congressman Paul will certainly inherit as President.” The late Barry M. Goldwater, Sr. sparked the modern conservative movement and was the Republican Party presidential nominee in 1964.

I am going to rain on your parade. Even if R.P. were elected president (highly unlikely) the Constitution will not be restored. It just ain't going to happen. The American public loves their government programs way too much for that to happen. Ba'al Chatzaf Thanks for your insightful comment. However, I respectfully disagree while acknowledging the very real need for educating the Citizens of the United States of America in what actually constitutes a free federal republic. To that end I submit the following link to a speech Congressman Ron Paul gave on the floor of the House of Representatives on May 22, 2007. http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul388.html Best Regards and wishes for your continued success

Please donate $100 to the Ron Paul campaign tomorrow, November 5th, to help get Paul elected. Liberty is worth it.

Here is my third post on this topic written shortly after reading Rand's essay "Causality Versus Duty" from "Philosophy Who Needs It" Today I went to my local library and checked out their copy of Ayn Rand's “Philosophy Who Needs It”. Her essay “Causality Versus Duty” addressed the issue in my question regarding Dr. Michael Martin's assumption that his readers would intuitively understand that rational minded beings have a “duty” to use empirical methods to gain knowledge. Rand correctly identified the error that Dr. Martin made in his assumption. It is the same error that has afflicted my own thinking for all of my life as the notion of duty as defined by the dictionaries Rand cites in her essay was pounded into my little mush filled cranial cavity from the beginning. Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “Causality Versus Duty” the following in contrast to Immanuel Kant's descriptions of duty as a component of his prescriptive morality. “If one were to accept it, the anti-concept “duty” destroys the concept of reality: an unaccountable, supernatural power takes precedence over facts and dictates one's actions regardless of context of consequences. Duty destroys reason: it supersedes one's knowledge and judgment, making the process of thinking and judging irrelevant to one's actions. Duty destroys values: it demands that one betray or sacrifice one's highest values for the sake of an inexplicable command and it transforms values into a threat to one's moral worth. Since the experience of pleasure or desire casts doubt on the moral purity of one's motives. Duty destroys love:who could want to beloved not from inclination but from duty? Duty destroys self-esteem: it leaves no self to be esteemed. If one accepts that nightmare in the name of morality, the infernal irony is that duty destroys morality. A deontological (duty-centered) theory of ethics confines moral principles to a list of prescribed duties and leaves the rest of man's life without any moral guidance, cutting morality off from any application to the actual problems and concerns of man's existence, Such matters as work, career, ambition, love, friendship, pleasure, happiness, values (insofar as they are not ;pursued as duties) are regarded by these theories a amoral, i.e., outside the province of morality. If so, then by what standard is a man to make his daily choices, or direct the course of his life?” After exposing the undesirability of “duty” per Kant and due to Kant's philosophical fixing of duty as an obligation to a supernatural being or to the designated agents of some supernatural being, Rand describes how causality instead serves rational ethics.: “Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is “You must if - “ and the if stands for man's choice: “if you want the achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. Your must think, if you you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think – if you want to know what to do – if you want to know what goal to choose- if you want to know how to achieve them. In order to make the choices required to achieve his goal, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality - specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, apples only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it. In a rational ethics, it is causality - not duty - that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one's actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his actions. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he could be cheating, but himself.” From the forgoing it is plain that Dr. Martin and I have erred in assuming that the word duty would suffice for the purpose of representing the evolutionary inclination to self-interest. A rational conscious being will use an empirical way of gaining certain (to some degree or other) knowledge (via methodological naturalism) if that being is self interested in continuing to live, to prosper, to adaptively fit to whatever constraints the environment may impose, to survive by passing on its genetic material to a new generation. So while my case for an obligation to one's own self via way of inclination to fulfill self-interest due to evolutionary self-organization was flawed by the error of not defining the terms obligation or duty as in no way having a meaning associated with any primacy of consciousness fallacy like a Platonic metaphysical other realm or a supernatural “spirit” being. To correct the error, the terms duty or obligation anywhere found in my first two posts should be replaced with the phrase “self-interested inclination”, and categorical imperative should be replaced with "causal goal seeking". Please accept my apologies for arguing from error. It is my goal to always be self-correcting when it comes to philosophical reasoning.

Greetings: In my (new and improved: now corrected for improper nomenclature) first post, the duty or more accurately the self-interested inclination was implicit upon the self and imposed by self. My question was about why any rational consciously aware thinking intelligent being would be responsible to themselves to adopt a empirical way of knowing things. Thanks to reading Ayn Rand's essay "Causality Versus Duty" in "Philosophy Who Needs It" I identified the problem as the error made by Dr. Martin and myself in assuming the Kantian morality and concept of duty that are part of the standard indoctrination performed on young children in America was presumed valid and sound. Therefore I dispense with the notion of "duty" or "obligation" as the denotative meanings of these words infer a connective relationship with a supernatural being in some incomprehensible Platonic other realm. (BTW: did you notice you used the now bad word "obligation" in your post.) In my second message I attempted to explain and elaborate what my meaning was and why any rational being if they want (or have a natural propensity) to prosper and be evolutionary adaptive has a self-interested inclination in the form or a responsibility to themselves to employ only empirical methods of gaining verified knowledge. Then in my response to Brant and to you I explained how I found the error and corrected it. In the third post I explained in further detail and cited Rand from her essay. Yet the brief boiler plate like replies of Brant and yourself indicate you have little understanding of how evolutionary phenomena affect intelligent, rational beings within the context of objectivism. Hominids and primates when after maturing to reproductive age have a very strong natural instinct to reproduce. This is an evolutionary adaptation to achieve evolutionary fitness. The drive to sexual activity controls the minds of many otherwise quite intelligent and reasonable young people. The emotional attachments people feel for their children and the children for the parents is likewise an evolutionary adaption that has served our species well despite the obvious disadvantages to the adults. These are obvious examples. All the features of the human and primate minds are evolutionary adaptations. We are the result of billions of years of natural evolution. This indisputable fact is the foundation of my assertion that a rational minded being has a strong self-interest in promoting their natural inclination to be evolutionarily adaptive. Fulfillment of that self-interest and with some luck the rational minded organism can experience personal prosperity and evolutionary fitness via survival. When sapience is conjoined with self-interested inclination purposeful action results yielding self-imposed responsibility, for the rational minded organism recognizes its strong inclination to want to prosper and survive. Such recognition instantiates meta-cognition that self imposes a goal to be obtained. This goal can be loosely labeled as a self-imposed responsibility. Rand wrote of this in her essay mentioned previously. Regarding your point about contracts and obligations. If the contracts are made under authority of a religious theocratic government, then they should not be enforced by objectivists, for the notion of obligation as a duty under the mysticism of theocracy is that of subservience to the imaginary deity of the leadership. No gods means no legitimate contracts under a religious government. Rand puts this well. "In a mystic theory of ethics, "duty" stand for the notion that man must obey the dictates of a supernatural authority. Even though the anti-concept has been secularized, and the authority of God's will has been ascribed to earthly entities, such as parents, country, State, mankind, etc:, their alleged supremacy still rests on nothing but a mystic edict." Thats all for now. Perhaps I'll think of something else later.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Yes I think I agree with you. After reading Ayn Rand's essay "Causality Versus Duty" this afternoon I came to understand the error of presumption of Kantian moral duty implicit in Dr. Martin's statement in "The Case Against Christianity". I now agree with Rand and have corrected my earlier posts by noting that the words duty or obligation should be replaced with the phrase self-interested inclination. The Kantian term "categorical imperative" was replaced with the phrase "causal goal seeking". As for irrational beings there would be a number of cases determined by the extent of brain or CNS development. Organisms without a brain or CNS would be completely unable to exhibit capacity of self-interested directed inclinations. These beings would depend upon biochemical reactions that have evolved as adaptations to their environment to carry out beneficial activities promoting the survival of their species. Organisms with a CNS and sensory organs would be able to process signals from the environment to guide their behavior to achieve adaptive survival. However, animals of this characteristic would not be able to engage in self-interest as they lack a sense of self. Organisms with brains that are capable of decision making would have and even better chance of adaptive fitness and survival. Such animals having the advantage of reasoning and a sense of self would be very much advantaged by employing their self-interested inclination to use only empirical methods of ascertaining existence because doing so would allow them to more efficiently procure the necessary nutrients, obtain mates, rear young and so forth. But would such animals be rational? Perhaps it would be better to exclude rational animals with brains from any discussion of applicability of self-interested inclinations resultant from goal seeking causality to irrational beings. Is rationality an attribute of a CNS or is is limited to brains? Or is rationality a purely hominid phenomena and if so is it due to mental memetic mind virus'? What is rationality anyway? But to directly address your point regarding the irrational person, any lack of self-interested inclinations to be reality based in the thinking of the irrational person will when conjoined with whatever bad luck may come will result in that person's genes being deselected. Whatever the reason for the affliction of irrationality in the mind of the deselected gene carrier we can be sure that the reason was completely naturalistic and that the irrationality was fully determined by natural causation. That's all I got for now. Perhaps I'll think of something else by morning. Best Regards