Mindy Newton

Mindy. I'm sorry I wrote this! I got carried away. It was cowardly sexism on my part in that, as has been pointed out to me off list, I don't let myself go like this with the male posters. I probably owe you more than this apology. --Brant Not a problem. But the significance of this issue couldn't be greater! It is parallel with Kant's starting place, as I mentioned before. For the efficacy of the mind, it is absolutely crucial. = Mindy It's about twenty minutes later than my last post, and I find myself thinking that I've worn out my welcome here.

I thought I saw a facility here for creating a private group. If so, how does one set it up? Thanks! =Mindy

Mindy. I'm sorry I wrote this! I got carried away. It was cowardly sexism on my part in that, as has been pointed out to me off list, I don't let myself go like this with the male posters. I probably owe you more than this apology. --Brant Not a problem. But the significance of this issue couldn't be greater! It is parallel with Kant's starting place, as I mentioned before. For the efficacy of the mind, it is absolutely crucial. = Mindy

Mindy, I don't know what value you hold for dogmatic statements, but that is what I was objecting to. I object to statement in lieu of fact regardless of who claims it. In the case of Rand, she makes a few, calls them "premises" and builds from there. (Not all her premises are dogmatic, but a few are.) If you don't think Rand did that, bring it on. I am interested to see where she backed up her more dogmatic statements, like the one I cited about sensations not being stored in memory (and that is merely one out of others). I have read her extensively and I have found practically no discussion of this particular subject by Rand other then dogmatic claims presented as if they were facts, then reasoning developed over top of them. I personally see no attack in this. But I go from the premise of correct identification in first place, then everything else. I check premises of the concepts I use. I do not defend Rand in first place, then try to make it all fit. I build my normative abstractions from cognitive ones, not the reverse. Frankly, if you want top talk about defending Rand, I believe I have done more to do that with protesting against the boneheaded methodology by Valliant in dealing with her intimate affairs than most people who claim to defend her. At least a lie about her will not be presented to the world as fact without serious investigation and objection. Rand deserves to be presented truthfully to the public and not in a distorted manner, principally when her own writing is presented. Please define ability and define content. I realize that growth is not the issue in your position (which comes from Rand whole from what I have read so far). But growth of ability is totally ignored as an epistemological issue in that position. There are a few speculations by Rand in ITOE about how an infant first integrates concepts, but she treats the issue not as organic growth, instead as merely the mind needing to learn and catch up, so to speak. In other words, from her treatment, if an infant has had the proper experience, it's mind would be able to handle complex concepts with no problem. The only real problem (in that view) is experience and getting the new equipment (the mind) properly primed. Rand does not treat the infant's lack of conceptual ability at that stage as the mind not being biologically ready to act yet. There is precious little discussion of biological maturity of ability in her writing and outright denial at times when she discusses talent. She also dealt with growth a bit in The Comprachicos, but she dealt more with indoctrination and education than maturing biological mental ability. That is a premise I have checked in Objectivism and found wanting. But my conclusion is not that Objectivism is flat-out wrong. I see a problem of scope. The part that is right is right. (Experience does provide content for the mind, for example.) It does not tell the whole story, though. Some content develops innately just as surely as a tree branch grows from a seed. (Left-handed and right-handed are other examples. This can be overridden by training, but if left unchecked, it will develop on its own without specific learning to be that way.) On examining this issue in another light, I see no reason to believe that the mind is not organic. I believe that it is organic. This means that, like all organic things, it gets born, it grows and gets bigger and more complex and develops new parts as it matures, then it withers after peaking and finally dies over time (if no disease or accident cuts its existence short). Trying to imagine that the mind does not go through these phases (i.e., that it is not organic) in my present view is nothing short of claiming that there is a soul similar to the one presented in most religions that ties the mind to the body. I can't go there without some kind of evidence. My observations and readings contradict this. (How to work with this and strengthen the mind in old age is another issue—a related one, but beside the point on the premise level. Either the mind is life and emerges from life and is intimately connected with it, or it is a thing set apart from the rest of existence that obeys a different set of natural laws. Hmmm... that almost sounds like Kant's starting point... ) Inductively, I cannot claim that the mind is life, but contradicts some fundamental parts of life without experiments and testing to confirm such a speculation. I have seen none so far. Michael Define "ability" and "content?" I use the standard dictionary definitions, and I believe we both have been doing so for some time, no? Itchiness is a content, green and red are also, the sights, sounds, feels, etc. that experience consists in, and then the memories, general ideas, plans, thoughts, etc. are contents. Having two eyes is not content. Biological growth is not content. Biological changes such as reproduction and aging are not content. Yes, the mind goes through phases of growth. To do so is not having innate content. = Mindy

There is a reason to defend a value if one sees it attacked. Growth isn't the issue, Michael. Nature isn't the issue. The structures and growth dictated by DNA are not innate content. The ability to learn a language is not innate content. If we do not stay focused on the original point, all our discussion so far will be wasted. = Mindy

Mindy, Isn't the very act of integration, which is an innate capability, such an imposition on sensory data? So what is your criteria to say that one is innate and another is not, when evidence of both is repeatedly observed and measured? I see you making declarations, but that is not a good criterion, at least a simple declaration does not meet my own standard of knowledge. Rand did this a lot, i.e., "man's needs are..." or "sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory..." etc., and this habit is one of the weakest parts of her arguments. She basically says something is so because she says it is so. (Often she was right, but that is not what I am discussing, which is her method of discourse.) These kinds of declarations are premises I used to accept—on faith, in fact, since I used to believe there was something I was missing that would be explained later in the literature. But it isn't. Now I check any and all premises when I perceive a clunker. It's my mind for me, now, not anyone else's. Nowadays I need more than simple statements to become convinced by anything. Michael Innate capabilities are not innate ideas. Integration of sensory data does not falsify it. As to the latter, it might help to note that some integration is a logical necessity. Everything impinging on a nerve within the briefest time you want to specify is integrated into one signal. I would like to defend Rand against that allegation separately. As to being convinced, it was you who asserted a characterization, and thus who bears the onus of supporting it. I am arguing that you have not met that burden. = Mindy

I don't understand the hostility toward Rand here, Brant. The woman was a truly great thinker. She was a magnificent writer. She had the scope of vision to structure (not invent) a complete philosophy, her analyses of cultural and political affairs were continuing proof of the activity and accuracy of her take on things. You must believe that she had a superior grasp of all that is involved in these intellectual achievements. You surely realize that only excruciatingly precise intellectual standards could achieve these things. Don't you consider that what you term being a control freak might actually be manifestations of that ruthless mind? To say, (paraphrased) Remarkably, she let herself be creative in spite of being a control freak, is startlingly uncalled-for. Do you remember the Thanksgiving scene at Reardon's, with his wife, brother, and mother sitting down to dinner? Rand describes the beautiful table settings, and the decorations. Then she has the brother comment on the table, saying that all the china, silver, and crystal were just bought, while Lillian's decorations were "creative, or 'took real thought?'" Here she's obviously thinking of "creative" as the anything-goes nonsense that is popular today. Perhaps that's why she doesn't praise her characters' creativity more. But, if you didn't think of that scene at all, perhaps you don't realize how she dealt with the subject. For example, when Dagny is alone at the cabin in the woods, and starts moving boulders around, re-designing the yard, etc., Rand is showing how a mind such as hers acts productively whether there is pressing need or not. Dagny's efforts in that situation were creative, whether Rand used the term or not. I'm assuming nobody here uses "creative" only in relation to artistic practices, maybe that's not a warranted assumption? = Mindy

We are born blabbermouths. Ba'al Chatzaf Blabber for yourself, Baal. :baby: Mindy

The only innate thing that counts, for this issue, is innate content. Can you explain "The wave (a 2 or 3 event)?" Our perceptual mechanism is a specific, limited capability. Perception integrates, yes. Experience is perceptual, yes. None of that means we have innate forms which we impose on sensory data. That is the issue. Perception is highly sensitive to symmetry. Symmetry is very common in nature. That doesn't mean we have an innate structure which we impose on sensory data. At the lowest level, we extract from sensory energy forms, patterns, or templates. We store these and use them in perceiving more things, as they are relevant. Before long, we are using patterns for nearly all our perceptions. When we can't get a stimulus to fit any pattern, we are taken aback, we look again, we say, "I can't make that out..." As we go, we extract new patterns, but mostly we use our liberal store of already-acquired ones. All of your top-down processes are simply our using stored patterns. If nothing else, parsimony forbids assuming some patterns are innate. =Mindy

Kids are born with IQ, or IQ-correlates, and I don't see why his geometrical insight as to the concave egg half and the projection of the rod doesn't count as creative. I'm happy with Simon's definition of creativity, that something new and valuable is a creation. If that isn't satisfactory, how would you define it? =Mindy

This is only an anecdote, but it is apropros: A 2+ year old boy is sitting in a tiny wading pool at a pre-school. He has a few toys in the pool, including plastic, graduated-size rings and the wooden rod they get stacked on, and a couple of plastic Easter eggs that come apart across the middle. A bored college student is "minding" this child and a few others. The kid picks up a half of an egg, and pulls the rod over to himself. Slowly, he puts the egg half over the top of the rod. He seems unsure whether to let go of it, when the "teacher" looks over at him. "Billy," she says, in a bored voice, "that doesn't go there." Whether or not we can measure the potential kids begin with, you can be sure there is a huge loss due to their "nurture." = Mindy

Mindy, So you believe that patterns exist innately where they don't exist by instrument measurement? Or that it is merely an arbitrary coincidence that everybody does 2 and 3? If neither, where do the universal patterns of 2 and 3 come from in your conception? I'm confused. Michael I emphatically do not believe that patterns exist innately. We possess familiar patterns of beats, 2/4 or 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8 mostly. As you know, the 2/4 and 4/4 are equivalent for a simple rhythm, as are the 3/4 and the 6/8. So the dominance of 2 or 3-beat perception is not surprising. It encompasses most of musical rhythm. Rhymes and songs are the source of those patterns. Having such patterns already in our minds when we go into the experimental lab, we hear a metronome's beat as fitting one or another of them--2 or 3 beat units. There are several factors I can think of right away that are relevant to this sort of stimulus, that is, a monotonous one. There is the fact that nerves adapt under steady-state stimulation. There is the Gestalt need to establish a figure and ground. There is neurological integration, which has its own time-frame, and such neurological tendencies as the flicker-fusion threshhold. If you speed up or slow down the metronome by a large measure, you get different perceptual responses from subjects, also. I do not claim that anyone has sorted out these factors. But they don't need to be sorted out for present purposes. I will grant, for the sake of this argument, that this is a case of top-down perception. However, the patterns used are not innate, but rather abstracted from earlier experience. = Mindy

I always miss irony. That is one of the effects of being an Aspie. Galloping literal-mindedness and all that. As to your main assertion, can you produce empirical evidence to support it? If you can, please do. Ba'al Chatzaf I would put it differently, Ted: most people are born creative, and it is stunted by... =Mindy

You don't need to look up the metronome research. As an aside, I actually did a psy. experiment with metronomes, and had to read the major metronome-related research at that time. We don't disagree about the facts. We disagree about their interpretation. = Mindy

I heard him talk about it at some lecture, maybe even a Q & A session. I'll see if I can come up with a reference. = Mindy

Mindy, I want to unpack this a bit. Innate does not mean arbitrary, but I am not sure from your statement if you agree with this or are using the two terms as synonymous or interconnected. I realize that innate is a dirty word in Objectivism when the word "mind" is near, but the very way the mind integrates concepts is innate. The emotional reactions of infants are innate. Feeling hunger and thirst when the body needs fuel is innate. There's oodles of innate stuff in the mind. See if an infant can refuse to learn a language. The development of language is innate with his growth, just like getting bigger is. The second thing I want to unpack is "the patterns or templates," which I interpret you to mean "ALL patterns or templates." Here is the scope thing again. From my observations, SOME patterns are innate in the mind, just like the sensation-percept-concept chain is, but not ALL. I see nothing wrong in accepting the fact that the mind has an identifiable nature, which is innate by the fact of being identifiable. And I see nothing wrong with identifying a predisposition to function in a certain manner. That's one of the places where math comes from (although not exclusively, since reality is involved also). If there can be optical illusions based on incorrectly processed patterns (indicating that there is something innate around), I see no reason to conclude that there cannot be a cognitive illusion. Once again, there is the metronome thing. Patters of two and three are clearly perceived, but they do not exist in the physical metronome beats and there is no distorting lens like there is with an optical illusion. How do you explain that if you reject innate mental patterns? And the third thing to unpack is that if a person so desires, a pattern or template can be arbitrary. He can make one up at whim and repeat it until he learns it. That's one of the reasons I imagine there are so many languages in the world, but all of them express the same concepts (at least on a primary level). Someone chose a template for whatever reason and others followed, but elsewhere others chose other templates for whatever reason. Michael That helps, Michael. First, "innate" and "arbitrary." I meant either/or. The key point is that it is not objective. Next, "innate" aspects of the mind. The dirt on the concept "innate" comes when it refers to ideas. Sure, the mind has a nature, and set abilities, and certain sensitivities, innate responses like a baby's sucking, holding the breath when submerged, etc. But these are not ideas. They don't count. Development of language isn't an innate idea, and physical growth isn't an innate idea. The issue is contents of the mind, perceptions, etc. Next: Illusions: illusions are not incorrectly processed anything. They are unusual perceptual abstractions. A spoked wheel that seems to be turning backwards is incorrectly identified as "turning backwards" because the exact rate of displacement of the spokes forward coincides with the displacement they would have if turning backwards, at a slower rate. Notice that these illusions always involve jumps in rate of apparent movement of the spokes. Illusions do not prove errors in sense-perception, though they represent errors in identification of what we are seeing, etc. I believe that's also the Objectivist line. It is important to keep in mind that perceptions are abstractions, and the same thing can be abstracted in multiple ways. All are valid, and they do not imply any contradiction. We must learn from coordinated experience what the bare look of a thing means insofar as making an identification of it. The reports of people who recover eyesight as adults are instructive here. A given percept may mean a curb of 4 inches at six feet distance, or a curb of 6 inches at ten feet distance, etc. (Just watched a program on this.) Despite his seeing what there is to see, and even knowing what the possibilities are, the newly-seeing person can't identify what is before him. You and I don't even notice that those two things look alike. Next: All sorts of patterns exist in the metronome's beat. We can assimilate it to the Mission Impossible theme (5 beats to a measure,) or anything else. We can do this because we already possess different rhythmic patterns. Abstraction does not require an exact match--just think of animals in clouds. Patterns/templates/forms (all the same for these purposes) are everywhere, and we work with them constantly. Finally: Lots of things in the world can be arbitrary. That isn't the point. What I'm claiming doesn't rule out imagination or wildly creative constructions. The issue here, and it is crucial to the efficacy of man's mind, is the objectivity of sense-perception. = Mindy

Thanks for keeping this argument current, Ted. Yes. Mindy's argument is substantial. I took time to analyze it into a progression of essential statements. And I then explained why it failed to convince me. But here's my version of her argument: So far, Mindy has not objected my paraphrasing of her argument. So I'll assume it is valid for now. The reason her argument fails to convince me is that I object to premise 3. I don't agree that all types of interest require morality. There is a non-moralistic type of interest that I call "desire." And yes, desire can create a serious preference for truth over falsehood - a SERIOUS one at that. Well, they can demand it all they want. Expecting it is another story. LOL But I get what you mean here. Anyway, the quoted statement would hold if morality was the exclusive domain of interests in truth. But I contest this very point. And so far, nobody has explicitly addressed it. -Luke- Not to neglect my duty: I think your no. 2 premise is a tautology--"interest implies interest?" I think your no. 3 premise is backwards. Interest doesn't "require" or depend on a person's having a moral code, rather having even an interest in something implies recognition of the "moral option," by which I mean awareness of an alternative along with a preference for one of the possible outcomes. Another way to put that is that interest is moral. (Note: interest, in a human implies certain things that are not entailed in the case of lower animals.) Mischief managed! = Mindy

Mindy, Actually the correspondence between mental operations and reality for primary integration is mostly as it should be. Only a small part is innately imposed, as I mentioned with the metronome experiment. I believe this is due to the nature of the integrating mechanism itself. That's the way it works. The mind comes already predisposed to hone in on specific sensory input and integrate it into small groups of units and forms (in terms the mind can use), and to ignore the vast amount of sensory input. I'm not just stating an opinion, either. There is a lot of empirical evidence to back this up. I am in agreement with the fundaments of Objectivism, but not when there is common and repeatable evidence on record that proves the contrary. This is why I believe part of the problem of Objectivism is scope, not accuracy. Just because something is 100% true in "X context" does not mean it is true in 100% of ALL contexts. Something like what we are discussing is true and verifiable for the most part (and it is), but I too often see an either-or mentality inappropriately applied to where it does not belong. Thus "X is true except in cases Y and Z" is not on the table for this kind of thinking, even when the exceptions are observed and measured and repeated at will. It becomes "if part of X is false, then all of X is false." With the rider, "And the idea that part of X can be false is a Kantian fallacy." Then the logical pretzels start in order to justify a claim that the eye contradicts. In metaphorical terms, black and white exist, but so does gray. And even more, so does an entire spectrum of colors. There is no such thing as an exclusively black and white universe, just as there is no such thing as a universe without black and white in it. The either-or mentality claims gray and colors do not exist in the universe and the fuzzy mind claims that nothing is black or white. I claim both of these poles are wrong in scope, but right in the part they get right. Thus black and white exist (as claimed by the either-or person), and so do gray and colors (as claimed by fuzzy minded non-absolutist). Oodles of recorded evidence overwhelmingly support the fact that the mind has an organizing nature of its own. This is even called the law of identity in Objectivist jargon. If you like, I will try to dig some of the recorded experiments up. It has been years since I have messed with this, but I am sure our friend Google will be useful in finding something. Anyway, I am an artist. I use my imagination and "selectively recreate" reality all the time, thus my mind actually imposes itself on reality. (I call this top down causality.) I literally make forms that never existed before. I integrate something in my mind, and solely in my mind, then I make it happen in reality. I am the cause of such things. The buck stops with my volition. And these forms come from a place inside me that is not caused by what has existed before that moment, other than my volition taking my memories, my mental organizing faculty and my surroundings as raw materials to be used to create something new in a form caused by my volition itself. It is true that a sculptor can't make paper or water out of a slab of marble, thus marble has its own nature that cannot be violated. But the breathtaking sculpture he carves does not exist merely because he integrated the form of the marble slab. He imposed the sculpture's form on the marble and that form came to exist solely in his mind before he started to carve the stone. If the sculptor does not integrate and imagine the form in his mind first, it will never come into being in reality. Michael I believe, Michael, that I know of the top-down findings you refer to. Perceptual set, etc. I am not disagreeing with these sorts of perceptual findings. I don't disagree with top-down cognitive processes. However, I do disagree that the patterns or templates we use when we get to top-down processing are innate or arbitrary. That means that top-down cognitive processing has to be a secondary perceptual process. Underlying the ability to process stimuli that way is another level of perception. This basic level of perception derives structure, patterns, templates, etc., directly from sensory data. The primary process is bottom-up, and the secondary ones work both ways. Philosophically, it is crucial to make this distinction. = Mindy

Peikoff has lectured that creativity can't be taught. I myself think that that's wrong. I suggest you look at de Bono on the web, his strategies for thinking creatively include specific techniques to bring to light overlooked possibilities. These aid in, for example, designing new products. In a lecture, Nobel Laureate Paul Simon said that if something is new and valuable, it is creative. One's criteria for what is and isn't creative is a large part of the subject. Also, the fact that language itself is creative--that is, we are able to speak and comprehend sentences that we have never heard before, is one way to reference creativity that has a huge amount of theory--linguistics--behind it. The creativity of language is one of the basic tenets of linguistics. There is a terrific book on creativity by Hutchinson. I'll try to find my copy and then post the title and publisher. He goes into autobiographical anecdotes by highly creative people--mainly intellectuals. He pulls from that and other sources a pattern for how one should work to achieve creative insight. Since we're talking about creativity: I believe that strong likes and dislikes in art, music, literature, design, etc. are sufficient to lead a person to creative success in that area. It is mostly introspective. You gather samples of what you greatly like and greatly dislike. You look for similarities in each group. You go from one extreme to the other, and back and forth, studying your own reactions and feelings. This will sharpen your focus onto what quality(s) you value. You use your own feelings to focus in on the aspect that you feel strongly about. Once you've identified that--and it might not be in words, but you'll have it tied to some examples or a certain feeling, you begin creating by "making one of your own," and building on it, with your contrasts and feelings as guides. This is an intense process, and there's no saying how long it takes to filter out extraneous features. Like saying the same word over and over, until it sounds foreign, you can "burn through" and have to stop. You actually need to give your brain a rest. You mustn't let other criteria sneak in, they'll pollute your judgment. You have to keep going back to that familiar feeling of liking, and use it like a blind man's cane to literally feel your way through the options--lighter or darker, faster or slower, slim or round? At the risk of beating a dead horse (heaven forbid!) you do not think of what is better or more desirable, you notice what causes you to feel a certain way, and you use that in your creation. Of course, this process will only create something that satisfies the tastes of the person doing it, but that is enough for most of us. = Mindy

This will sound wild, but I think it can be defended: Morality is the enlightened man's guide to having everything one wants. The life/death premise is represented in this as "wants," enlightenment means living long-range--actually "guide" might imply that as well. The test then is whether I can show that any objective moral rule is in fact aimed at having what any enlightened man, or long-range-thinker does in fact want. I'm thinking this is a morality even Luke's amoralist might like. = Mindy

I don't see what is Kantian or rationalist about that. Perception is not a passive process. We cannot recognize an object in an image if we don't already have templates of possible objects in our mind. We are wired to detect patterns in the data from our senses and we project our templates even on more or less random patterns, so we for example perceive faces where none exist (a face on Mars, a grinning devil in the smoke clouds of the WTC, Jesus or Mary in food stuff, etc.). Our brain is continually looking for correlations between general form templates in memory and sensory data. Yes, we find patterns. We can find different patterns, too, just like seeing a cloud as one thing, or another. Each pattern we recognize in the cloud is valid. And each is objective. MSK was saying that we find some, and we impose others. That is the conclusion I disagree with. Perception is abstract, and abstractions are partial. Different abstractions don't contradict one another, there is not one that is objective and others that are "imposed." Secondly, Kant's whole program is built on our supposed inability to perceive fundamental formal characteristics such as space and time. Since we can't perceive them, since we are already "using" them in our earliest perceptions, they have to be organizations imposed by the mind. Bye-bye reality. Now, as to how we originally acquire these patterns, nothing has directly been said. My theory is that we derive them from sensory data through a process of extracting invariances that are objectively present in that data. Gibson's theory of perception talks about "picking up" invariances--he doesn't go into how we actually internalize them, but he worked at length to show that the constancies that our perceptions show over variations due to such as distance, rotation, etc., are present as invariances in the ambient sensory energies. Cherry (ask if you want a ref.) has shown how nerves can extract invariances. (I know I've posted about this before, but I can't recall if it was here. If I'm repeating myself, my apologies.) Anyway, this gives us a series of steps by which we can acquire and utilize patterns in the manner in which you described, Dragonfly. Current theories of perception tend to assume that the patterns are at least partially innate. That point of view, taken in its philosophical implications, takes us back Kant. (I'm not saying reject it because it takes us to Kant, I'm highlighting the connections between the idea of imposed form and a Kantian point of view.) = Mindy

Yes. Does your "yes" answer depend on the axiomatic status of volition? -Luke- What do you mean by depend? The idea that volition exists and is axiomatic (which I do believe) certainly wasn't explicit in my mind when I answered you. Well, more precisely my question is whether you think the denial of morality leads to a demonstrable logical contradiction, the way denying the axioms does. I just took a guess that an Objectivist who wanted to demonstrate such a logical contradiction would somehow use the axiomatic status of volition to support that demonstration. If my guess was wrong, please forgive me. But regardless, I am still interested in my more precise question: Do you think the denial of morality leads to a demonstrable logical contradiction? And if so, I don't expect you to demonstrate that contradiction. That may be more laborious that you want to undertake, and I could respect that. But if you happen to know of a demonstration that already exists somewhere, I'd appreciate a reference to it. I'm looking for a demonstration that expresses the contradiction most clearly. -Luke- That question wasn't addressed to me, but I have a proposal of such a demonstration. If one says there is no morality, they are saying there is no necessary or logical reason to act in one way rather than another. It is a fact that some behaviors are destructive to one's own existence. If those behaviors are as warranted as any others, self-destruction is acceptable. But self-destruction defeats the goal of deciding whether or not there is a morality. (Is that step sneaky?) So the very act of asserting that there is no morality shows an interest in truth, in philosophy, in understanding ourselves and the world. It is not indifferent. Only complete and consistent indifference is not contradicted by the "fact" that there is no morality. As soon as someone says it or thinks it, he has entered the fray, and thus staked his claim to preferences, to values. Does that work? = Mindy

I have no doubt that my brain is unusual and most likely deficient as well. A quick comment: If it is true of you two, Paul and GS, it sheds a new light on why you argue and describe as you do. = Mindy

Mindy, At another time in my life, I started investigating Gestalt psychology for understanding how the mind processes information on perceptual level. I remember reading a fascinating book called Gestalt Psychology by Wolfgang Köhler, which opened my mind to ideas like pattern recognition and boundaries in formulating concepts. But that was years ago. I intend to resume this line of study one day because I found many parallels between the Gestalt theory of integration with the Objectivist theory of concepts. But I remember the issue being two-sided, not one-sided. Not only does the mind organize things according to how they exist, it also has its own inner forms that it imposes on sensory data. Here is an example I remember from some studies in music. Notice that in most all popular music, the drum beat is in twos or threes. (Most classical music follows a two and three rhythmic organization, also, but it is more obvious in popular music because of the drums.) There is a mental reason for this. Experiments have been conducted on people listening to a metronome over a period of time. They always end up organizing the beats in groups of twos or threes even though the sensory data coming from the metronome is identical. The way the mind bounces back and forth in visual images such as the following are also an indication of an independent form-making mental imposition on sensory data. In other words, the mind recognizes forms, but also creates them. I believe this is true on a conceptual level, also. Michael Cognitive psychology was my field of study. I know the Gestalt theory and related perceptual phenomena. They are indisputably real. Whether or not they mean the mind imposes form is a philosophical question. That Gestalt phenomena mean the mind imposes order on simple percepts or sensory data is not certain. I don't believe it is the correct interpretation. This is a good topic to discuss, but I'm short on time at the moment. I'm posting now because your statement that the mind has "its own inner forms that it imposes on sensory data," is a Kantian premise, and conceding that simple statement actually yields to Rationalists everything they need to reject an Objective point of view. = Mindy

Dan, I will comment on this later. It is on my to-do list. I expect to find and provide food for thought. Michael I just read this whole thread--for the first time. People came to ask me why I was laughing so much. Guys are so cute when they talk about sex. Is this thread dead in the water, so to speak? = Mindy