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I don't know whom "proponents" refers to. But I'll try to explain how the claim can be coherent. Suppose at time t1 you ponder mutually exclusive alternatives A1, A2, A3 pertaining to what you will do at time t2 (t2 > t1). At t1 A1, A2, A3 are all physically possible (not actual). At t2, however, only one of them is physically possible (actual). If a proponent's claim is merely the first, then it is coherent. It's imaginary, but pondering any future state or event involves imagination. You could imagine throwing an egg against the wall and the egg breaking, but I wouldn't call your imagining this an illusion. You could imagine rolling a die and getting a 6, but I wouldn't call your imagining this an illusion, even though the outcome is unpredictable. Again I don't know whom you refer to, but maybe they mean "final cause" per Aristotle. Does that have no explanatory power?

At any time 't' what you call only one state might be a set of contenders (alternatives). For example, a few milliseconds before deciding on a turkey sandwich, three or four items on the menu are in strong contention. So are the contending items other than the turkey sandwich irrelevant? Whatever you consciously think in choosing the turkey sandwich is also reflected in the fysiology of your brain, so where is the problem? You indirectly answered my first question -- my decision is not an illusion. What about my second question? The problem is you say that I make a decision, then act upon it, yet you've said "free will" is an illusion. Doesn't compute in my book.

Agreed. Where would he best fit in the schools described in the Wikipedia article? I don't believe it would be Formalism, at least not that of David Hilbert's later view that most of math is meaningless. Constructivism probably. I believe mathematics that was developed for applications initially outweighs what wasn't. Btw, Aristotle said optics, harmonics, and astronomy were branches of mathematics. (from a modern perspective)

Dragonfly, you didn't reply to this. At least Ellen and I are interested in your answer. This isn't very clear to me. Regardless, how do you know this conclusion? You seem to say any other physiological states are irrelevant. So if at a restaurant I pick a turkey sandwich from the menu, the other items on the menu or what I may have eaten recently or what I expect to eat a little later are completely irrelevant to my decision? Or is my decision an illusion (all I really do is order)? Are my imagining eating any items on the menu other than a turkey sandwich mere illusions, but my imagining eating a turkey sandwich is not an illusion? The following from Hayek's The Sensory Order are not just for Dragonfly, but are relevant to the topic. 4.18 The essential characteristic of the order of sensory qualities is that, within that order, each stimulus or group of stimuli does not possess a unique significance represented by the particular response, but that they are given different significance if they occur in combination with, or are evaluated in the light of, an infinite variety of other stimuli which may originate from the external world or from the organism itself. 4.56 ... But even more important than the question why the organism will behave differently in different environments is the question why it will at different times behave differently in the same environment. 5.58 The representation or model of the environment will thus constantly tend to run ahead of the actual situation. This representation of the possible results following from the existing position will, of course, be constantly checked and corrected by the newly arriving signals which record the actual development in the environment. The newly arriving impulses, on the other hand, in turn will always be evaluated against the background of the expectations set up by the previously existing pattern of impulses. 5.59 The representations of the external environment which will guide behavior will thus be not only representations of the actually external environment; but also representations of the changes to be expected in that environment. We must therefore conceive of the model as constantly trying out possible developments and determining action in the light of the consequences which from the representations of such actions would appear to follow from it.

I don't deal in floating abstractions. Do you agree with David Hilbert's view of mathematics called Formalism? See particularly the first paragraph in the Formalism section here.

http://cogprints.org/385/0/Mathem.html This is rather long -- 35 pages when I copied it to a Word document. I found it very interesting. Topics include the nature of proof, logic, philosophy of math, history of math, pure and applied math compared. Enjoy!

I did some browsing at http://cogprints.org/ and found one titled The evolutionary origins of volition here. Some of you may be interested in reading it.

general semanticist, That's the most interesting excerpt from Korzybski you've posted. It isn't unique to him. See here. Also, several philosophers have written about humans and time. Edit: The "time-binding" paragraph seems much like Popper's "third world." Maybe Barnes will comment on that.

I know so little about GS, but why are animals irrelevant to epistemology theory? Human cognition has a lot in common with that of animals. Many animals have perceptual systems much like ours. Human brain chemistry is fundamentally the same as found in other vertebrates. There are neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters.

"Man is an animal" is a shorter way of saying "man is a kind of animal". It places humans in a more abstract category, one containing more than humans. For one who has often posted here about levels of abstraction, I hope you can understand that. If human aren't animals in this way, then what are they? Plants? Minerals? Artifacts? Humans are animals in such categorization because they have so much in common with other kinds of animals -- living, they breathe, eat, are motile, reproduce, have brains and sensory organs, etc. Obviously humans differ from other species in the category, but not by enough to exclude them from the category.

I've now read the whole article by Pierson and Trout and agree with a lot of it. Indeed, there are some points in common with my article here. Their primary hypothesis is: The ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. I think this has too much emphasis. It's ultimate in the sense volitional movement often comes after other functions of consciousness. I can understand their stress given that the hypothesis is rarely argued for. On the other hand, it will meet resistance from readers who put far more emphasis on the function awareness (or another). They even say volitional action is the raison d’être of consciousness. This undercuts non-volitional action being a part of the raison d’être of consciousness. From an evolutionary perspective the latter was likely first. Maybe a more palatable way to say it is that consciousness is the interface between awareness and action, with volitional action being a very important part, which to date has been insufficiently recognized. Pierson and Trout say, "there is no apparent reason why natural selection would make a dog seem to be deliberating when it is merely executing a program." The appearance of deliberating might mask real deliberating -- the animal is choosing between or among alternatives -- and waiting while a "multi-threaded program" does not show a discernible direction emerging from competing threads. The direction becomes clear only when one thread becomes dominant.

On another thread, Metaphysics - Plato and Kant, Ellen Stuttle mentioned a name, Lee Pierson. I don't know if it's the same person, but here is an interesting article: What is Consciousness For? Edit: There has been much discussion of it here. Many of the posts are by Lee Pierson.

Your opinion of philosophy is as superficial as your knowledge of philosophy. Here are only a few examples. - Aristotle explained logic. - In their times Galileo and Newton were called "natural philosophers". - Cognitive science still deals in concepts used centuries ago by philosophers. - Analytic geometry was invented by Descartes, calculus by Newton and Leibniz. - Principles of civil government were formed by John Locke.

But why I replied to the above post is because I was struck by this wording: "whether to attain or to preserve". Reminiscent of "Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep"? Had she read the wording you quote in a translation of Aristotle? What translation did you take the quote from? Good comparison. The translator was W. D. Ross.

You omitted an alternative. If he comes to slay you, kill him first, tear his head off and shit down his neck (The Wit, the Warmth and the Wisdom of Ba'al Chatzaf).

I haven't read Nichomachean Ethics in a long time, but this seems quite a stretch. Much of the book is about virtues and eudaimonia, which apply more to an individual person than a polity. Then there is part of Chap. 2, italics mine: "For even if the end is the same for a single man and for the state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or city-states."

Here is the first meaning of "moral" from here and my Webster's New World Dictionary: moral -- relating to, dealing with, or capable of making the distinction between right and wrong in conduct Note there is no qualifier "toward other people" or similar one. Rand clearly used it in that sense. Such use is not uncommon. See here for the goal-seeking framework and the juridical framework. If somebody chooses to use "moral" in only the "judicial framework" (or social context), it's understandable and common. But it doesn't make the other usage wrong. Carry on.

This is written in subject-predicate form. So it must be primitive and false. Please translate to a physics formula! Five decimal places will suffice.

Peter F. Drucker

I vaguely recall (so I might be wrong) Rand giving credit to Plato for his championing of the intellect and presenting philosophy as an alternative to religions. He was worthy in that regard and he didn't have an Aristotle to precede him. Regarding her view of Kant, OPAR probably reflects much of what Rand thought about him. In my opinion one thing Kant did that really irked Rand was his draining morality of self-interest. Also, a part of Rand's assessment of him may have been that Kant was preceded by Aristotle and the Enlightenment, so he is far less excusable.

I'm replying to post #107. My exposure to Korzybski is limited to what General Semanticist has posted on OL. My initial reactions have been similar to MSK and Ellen. I like Hayek's perspective in The Sensory Order much better. In the excerpt in #107 Korzybski seems to posit two different worlds and a dichotomy between percepts and the external world. Note the loaded words: "entirely non-existent" and "delusional." But it all flips upon entering the physics lab. In contrast Hayek writes about a physical order and a sensory order between which there isn't a one-one or complete correspondence. He uses "order", not "world". He doesn't claim 'no correspondence.' Our feelings of cold and warm are linked to external conditions. Green and red are linked to light wave frequency. Sweetness is linked to the amount of sugars present. And when we say that light exists outside the limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes register, we rely on our eyes to read the instruments. We can't escape our means of perception and achieve what David Kelley calls a "diaphanous view" of reality. We can only live with what we have and make the best of it. Here is another relevant quote from The Sensory Order: 1.12 Historically the concept of the 'real' has been formed in contradistinction to mere 'illusions' based on sense deceptions or other experiences of purely mental origin. There is, however, no fundamental difference between such corrections of one sense experience by others, as we employ, e.g., to discover an optical illusion, and the procedure employed by the physical sciences when they ascertain that two objects which may to all our senses appear to be alike do not behave in the same way in relation to others. To accept this latter test as the criterion for 'reality' would force us to regard the various constructs of physics as more 'real' than the things we can touch and see, or even to reserve the term 'reality' to something which by definition we can never fully know. [snip]

You're welcome. That's a good "wonder". I will make some guesses about her reasons. 1. Hayek argued that the basic problem with socialism is that it based on the false idea of "constructive rationalism," the belief that some men can rationally order society top-down via government. In doing so he argued against reason. It was an abuse of reason, but I suspect Rand did not approve of deprecating reason in any manner. 2. Hayek is known to have supported government-run welfare programs. Of course, it most likely was not near to the extent they exist today or that statists desire. 3. He was an economist who use the term subjective value.

I recommend a book which has much about what has been discussed on this thread and Universals and Measurement. It is Friedrich Hayek's The Sensory Order. Amazon link. The following two paragraphs are excerpts. 1.42. There exists, therefore, no one-to-one correspondence between the kinds of things (or the physical properties) of the different physical stimuli and the dimensions in which they can vary, on the one hand, and the different kinds of sensory qualities which they produce and their various dimensions, on the other. The manner in which the different physical stimuli can vary and the different physical dimensions in which they are arranged have no exact counterpart in the manner in which the sensory qualities can be arranged. This is the central fact to which we have referred when we insisted that the two orders, the physical order of the stimuli and the phenomenal or mental order of the sensory qualities, are different. 1.48. .... Some events in the physical order, such as electrical currents which we can only infer, will have no corresponding events in the phenomenal order; and some events in the phenomenal order, such as images or illusions that are not produced by physical stimuli, will have no counterpart in the physical order. While there will thus be some degree of correspondence between the individual events which occur in the two orders, it will be but a very imperfect correspondence. While I could not find Hayek saying so with a brief search, it can likely be gleaned from this work that explanation of the physical order is far more quantitative than that of the sensory order, and that explanation of the sensory order is far more qualitative than quantitative. Btw, in the preface Hayek thanks his friend Karl Popper for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of the book.

I'm not familiar with PHP, but its OOP nature is addressed here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Data_types

How do you reconcile this with Rand's position that entities are the primary existents? I'm not expecting a reply, but offering you some food for thought. Aristotle held that the primary existents were "substances", arguably not exactly the same thing, but close. (He used "substance" in another sense as well, like the more common one now.) Take your pick -- Aristotle or Pythagoras. An article in JARS was about this topic (Adam Reed, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2003). Several years ago a revolution in computer programming occurred, and the new way came to be called object-oriented programming (OOP). As Reed notes, several textbooks on OOP make reference to Ayn Rand’s epistemology. He says OOP and Rand's epistemology have much in common, not that Rand had anything to do with OOP. Reed also gives a brief description of OOP, but here I will describe it with a different way, one that supports the commonality. Computer languages prior to the OOP revolution are usually described as procedural. However, I do not believe that provides a great contrast to OOP. The steps in OOP are less linear and less uniform (think user interfaces), but OOP is still procedural. In my view OOP is more about data structures and program organization. Prior to OOP the typical language offered two main data types – alphabetic and numeric. The latter came in two main types -- integer and floating point (non-integer). All types could be structured in vector or array form. OOP offers the programmer the opportunity to build their own data types, by combining the given, basic ones. These came to be called "objects". For example, as a programmer for a business, one might define an object SUPPLIER, which is a combination of several data types. One could be its name (alphabetic), another how much money the business owes it (numeric), an assigned unique ID (numeric), an array of products the supplier has (numeric and/or alphabetic). While one could manage without an OOP language to keep track of the different kinds of data for several suppliers, it would be much more difficult since different data types, and arrays of different sizes, must be maintained separately. An OOP language affords the opportunity to combine the given, basic data types into one big one. Another difference is that in the procedural era, there were often main programs and subroutines. A subroutine was called as needed by the main program, after which control returned to the main program. However, the subroutine could not be called by another main program. If the programmer wanted another main program to use the same subroutine, the latter had to be duplicated. A key feature of OOP is that subroutine-like programs are made to be stand-alone and can be called by multiple main programs. Both of these features are about organization. There is more to OOP than this, but this suffices to show the commonality. "Objects" are central to the organization of OOP. Entities are the primary existents for Rand and thus central. In OOP attributes and methods are tied to "objects". For Rand attributes and actions are tied to entities.