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I have a question about homosexuality that I think may be pre-emotion in the chain. One barometer I personally use to determine the appropriateness of an idea is whether it holds in the extreme cases of its application. Homosexuality is one that has me going back and forth because at the state of the conversation where it is I don't see any problems with it. My question is, if there were a colony of humans on a desert island and they were all homosexuals would/could they survive? My response would be no, because of the reproduction aspect of it. Of course, I'm assuming here that the people in the colony would refuse to have sex with the opposite sex, and I'm ignoring the parenthood of the individuals. When I look at this way it seems to me that its more like a genetic mutation, (a sustainable one because its occurrence isn't common enough to eventually eradicate the species), than a preference. In that sense, if homosexuality has genetic roots, how is it any different than albinism? In that sense, is it proper to decide on the morality of homosexuality when the individual doesn't have a choice? I've read that homosexuality can be rooted in either nature, nurture or both. Am I right to understand that the conversation pertains only to the cases of nurture-spurred homosexuality? How does it work when its a combination or nurture and nature?

I couldn't see the video yet, but based on the outline... How much of these results are due to bad premises we've left unchecked? I think that the concept integration when we're youngest and most susceptible to learning others' bad premises leaves us with those bad premises (or equally invalid versions of those premises). Those unchecked premises are going to have consequences that may be an explanation of those 'irrational' decisions that are presented in the outline. Let me ask in these other ways, -if we presented these same experiments in a country where instead of things being commonly priced at $X.99 (X starting at zero) they were priced solely in whole numbers, 1 coin, 2 coins, 3 coins etc, would the SSN experiment have a different result? -Would the ten commandments experiment have the same results with an Amazonian tribe who has never had any kind of access to the ten commandments? I don't want it to seem like I'm attacking the guy. I'm convinced he achieved those results what I am questioning is the significance of his results, or more specifically the categorization of predictable irrationality to his results. I agree with you Michael, this topic definitely goes in epistemology and it definitely sells the integration of concepts in the objectivist epistemology. I also think it's very clever of him to use the terms predictable and irrational together in order to imply a certain amount of "could you believe that irrationality is predictable" as if the two were exclusive.

I'm curious about what people on the forum think of Puerto Rico's current situation in the United States. Here are some facts about their situation. 1. Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico, cannot vote in the presidential elections. They can vote when they live in the United States. 2. Puerto Rico has a representative in the United State legislature but he can only vote in committees. 3. Puerto Rico doesn't have a standing army, currently if a Puerto Rican wants to join a military, they must join the United States military. 4. Puerto Rico has its own constitution. 5. Most Federal Taxes do not apply to Puerto Rico. However Puerto Ricans in PR pay: social security and medicare, import/export taxes, federal comodity taxes and some others I'm not aware of. 6. US Federal laws apply to Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico is part of the 1st Federal Judicial Circuit 7. Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico after 1941 are considered US citizens and can run for president. 8. Local self-government can be unilaterally revoked by the U.S. Congress. 9. U.S. can withdraw the U.S. citizenship of PR residents of PR at any time. I can't think of anything else at the moment to add into this list. What I'd like to know is what you think about Puerto Rico's status within the United States. Statehood? or maintaining a commonwealth i.e. the status quo, or complete independence from the United States?

When will Atlas Shrug? http://townhall.com/Columnists/JohnAndrews...as_shrug?page=2 MAN DISCOVERS AYN RAND, GETS AN FJM http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=1337

Sure, I just didn't want to get myself in trouble on the boards but here it is. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/11/20tucker.html

EDIT: It's actually kind of vulgar and tasteless. I removed the link, but if you want to see it anyway, message me and I'll get it to you. RE-EDIT: Here's the link I realized that putting it in a reply wouldn't leave it in the top pane on the next pages. Here's the link. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/11/20tucker.html

Georgia's response to the stem cell research was that they would outlaw the use and creation of human embryos in research. http://www.macon.com/149/story/644192.html You have to wonder whether it would be a wise business decision to invest millions of dollars in stem cell research, machines, scientists, employees, etc when the government can shut you down the day after you make the investment. I think that may be stopping some drug makers from trying to put effort into it.

The law school's Federalist Society invited Bob Barr to speak today at the law school. His topic was government growth versus individual liberty. Recently I've been reading about Barry Goldwater and his opposition to the civil rights act way back around (I believe) Kennedy's assassination. For those of you who don't know who he is, Bob Barr was the presidential candidate for the libertarian party. Barr said that whenever a power is given to the Federal government it is taken away from the individual. I don't see any problem with that statement, but I'd ask anyone that is going to comment to assume that for the sake of the discussion I would like to set here. The civil rights acts benefit minorities by imposing restrictions on race/gender/color/national origin discrimination. For example, the fair housing act was a part of the civil rights of 1968 and it eliminated discrimination the above discrimination with respect to housing, like renting, selling, or financing homes. There are many different 'civil rights acts of XXXX' and each one contains provisions with respect to discrimination. I asked Mr. Barr a question, and I assumed that the libertarian party's stance was against the civil rights acts. I wanted to know how he would reconcile a stance against the civil rights acts with the benefits that those acts have provided minorities in the United States. To my surprise, Mr. Barr said that he was not against the civil rights acts but he was in favor of them and found that they were an appropriate exercise of police power. Now, Mr. Barr was wrong in that they were passed based on the police power, they were in fact passed under the commerce power. I do not know how big of a difference that makes. My reasoning that the civil rights acts impose on individual liberty is that people cannot freely choose who to sell their homes too. I am not condoning discrimination, I am however pointing out that if an individual really wished to discriminate then he would not have the liberty to do so based on any of the characteristics mentioned above. A number of questions come from that, and that is where I wanted Barr to go with it. 1. The community re-investment act obligated banks to give loans to X, Y, or Z people based on their economic situations, in other words, banks were forced to give people who would not have otherwise been approved for loans. Banks were forced to give home loans to certain people who would not have otherwise been approved for a loan but for those acts. What similarity does the Fair-Housing act have with the community re-investment act? Is the community re-investment act a child of the fair housing act (in the philosophical, slippery slope sense) 2. Suppose people from Imaginaryland generally have religious practices that include sacrificing animals. A family from Imaginaryland wants to buy a house. Ignoring credit - related problems, is it a violation of a civil rights act to not rent them a home because they are from Imaginaryland? Does that violate your individual property interest in the home you were trying to rent if you are obligated to rent it to them? 3. Assuming it is a violation of individual liberty, what other remedy is there to avoid discrimination without an imposition on individual liberty? 4. If the goal of government is to secure individual rights then laws against murder and rape make sense because they protect the individual's right to his life. The criminal does not have a right or individual right to the victim's life. However, in the case of the civil right's acts the individual with the home does have a property interest in the receiver of his home, and the buyer/renter does not have a property interest in the home yet the law implies one. Is discrimination a moral judgment call? And if it is, is it the place of the government to say who can and cannot discriminate? 5. Barr mentioned that the Federal Government's commerce power was growing out of control. If the civil right's acts were properly passed under the commerce power then are they a proper use of the commerce power or is it an improper taking of an individual's property interests? (Note: I'm using the fair housing act as my primary example, I think some of the other CRA's may be harder to fit into this structure.)

Did anyone else watch Wall E and think that it made humanity look like we were the plague of the Earth? Or like humanity would be happier in a rejection of technology and moving back to some kind of stone age? On that, how about Happy Feet stopping the cartoon portion in the end and making it seem like this perfect fantasy land the cartoon penguin was living in became real and horrible when he made contact with people? Is it a general tendency now to make movies that portray humans so vilely? Or have I just started realizing what has always been behind children's movies and such?

I think pure mathematics is very important. How long does a pure mathematics problem stay 'pure' anyway? Some of the most complex algebra problems out there started out as pure math problems and are now being used in computer science. Pure mathematics models sometimes show parallels to applied mathematics models and tell you exactly what to expect. The line you're trying to draw is just not solid enough to be valid. Too many things move from the pure side to the applied side. Sure, you can say that mathematical models that have not been applied at this moment may be "possible known relations" and "pure". However that's equivalent to saying that calculus was pure mathematics at the time of the cavemen. I think the difference between pure mathematics and applied mathematics absolutely crucial. Do you consider pure mathematics knowledge? Knowledge of what? About the only thing one could say pure mathematics is knowledge of is possible relations that we can discern. So on one hand we have all known possible relations (mathematics) and all known empirical relations (everything else). Huge, important difference.

I'm sorry, I think I should have been more specific. I haven't quite learned to quote messages far back from mine, but in one post general semanticist said something about pure mathematics. There is a distinction within the field of mathematics between applied mathematics and pure mathematics. I understood that his post about "pure mathematics" and drawing the distinction and explaining that distinction was splitting hairs. With respect to the ultimate question that you mentioned below I think that all knowledge derives from reality and could not be otherwise which is what I was trying to get at with the sudoku analogy. That even in the circumstances where you think you have found a happy accident you are in reality being bound by reality in subtle ways of which you may not be immediately aware of but that will be discovered and become apparent as experimentation continues. Forgive me for not being clear. Emmanuel, You are a little late to this discussion and it is far from splitting hairs. So I will try to give you some of what is behind the arguments. 1. There are those who state that logic and math have no relationship to reality, that they are only abstract constructions according to arbitrarily chosen rules. 2. These same people usually try to claim that philosophy is invalid and only science is valid, or philosophy is not important but science is, in some kind of weird competition (which only exists in their arguments, or those of orthodox Objectivists, who claim that philosophy is more important than science—all of which I find silly at root since mankind happily goes on its way producing knowledge in both fields). 3. In the Objectivist theory of concepts (as I understand it so far), math is connected to reality because "1" is a unit of something, and we first get that notion of something as infants from observing what exists. 4. In the Objectivist theory of concepts (as I understand it so far), logic is connected to reality because it is based on the law of identity, which also serves as one of the fundaments of concept formation and governs our selection of categories. Once again, we discover the law of identity as infants from direct observation. Thus when you say "pure mathematics," there is disagreement over what this means. The Objectivist view (once again, in my understanding) finds unit identification reality based, which is why it works with reality. The "useful tool" school claims that math works with reality "somehow," but never lets you know how or why. The same approach applies to logic. Both types of thinking admit that there are rules and syntax for math and logic that are abstract, but one kind of thinking severs the rules from reality and the other grounds them in reality, especially the law of identity. When we come to axioms, the science-is-better-than-philosophy school claims that there are no axioms in science. I mentioned math, but as you see, there is a fundamental difference between what math means according to these different views. (And I still have not seen how the body-of-knowledge—science—exists without math as an essential component of that knowledge. Trying to get rid of the math after acquiring the knowledge is what is called a "stolen concept fallacy" in Objectivism, wherein you develop a concept based on certain premises, then start using it as if those premises did not apply any longer.) Incidentally, there is even a more basic fundamental axiom on which science is based, which is "consciousness exists." The basic idea behind that is that science is a body of knowledge and you cannot have knowledge without conscious awareness. However I have read from the science-is-better-than-philosophy school that consciousness does not really exist, but instead is a "user illusion" and things of this nature. Those are the essentials of this discussion. It all boils down to whether you believe your knowledge derives from reality and could not be otherwise, or that what knowledge you do have that works is nothing more than a happy accident. Both views allow for correcting knowledge that is not accurate, but the knowledge-derives-from-reality side claims that knowledge is based on the initial context of our five senses and a brain. Since we are not omnipotent, we are unable to observe all things at all times, so by reason of this biological limitation, concepts are categories that are open-ended. Thus the category becomes solid knowledge based on observation, but what goes into the category can be modified by later observation. The other view claims that we can only know with certainty abstract thought that is disconnected from reality because it is based on arbitrary rules that we design, and they use these abstract rules to "falsify" propositions (or essentially opinions) about reality as their form of verifying what works and what doesn't. I express this as a discussion of the interface between consciousness and reality. Bob Kolker has used a term I like very much, "in here" and "out there." I firmly believe that "in here" reflects "out there" correctly because it is made of the same stuff as "out there" and follows the same laws of nature. This applies to "pure math" and "pure logic." The other view claims that "in here" is nothing more than a by-product of "out there," but somehow operates differently. And they present "pure math" and "pure logic" as an example. This is not just splitting hairs. The fundamental world-view and view of man's nature are different. Michael

With respect to the issues of sciences not including/using/utilizing math the discussion really is just splitting hairs. There is a slight problem with the statement, it should read "Only pure mathematics uses axioms, science does not." Micheal, you keep bringing up this point and I wish I could make you see the difference. When a scientist uses any kind of mathematics he is attaching a physical meaning to the symbols whereas the mathematician is not. This is a huge difference. When we attach a physical meaning then we get to apply some measure of "truth" or "false" to the relation but in pure mathematics we are only concerned with consistency. So science utilizes mathematics (your use of 'include' is somewhat ambiguous) and sometimes it even precedes mathematics as the above example illustrates, but science is a fundamentally different activity. (I'm sorry I still don't know how to quote) Yes, this is true however when the scientist adopts what was a "pure math" model he expects/experiments with it until he is satisfied that the particular 'consistent' 'pure' math model he thought was appropriate properly resembles reality. Once the model that approximates or nails the phenomenon is discovered or developed it would be improper to say that mathematics was not included or utilized in the discovery and that mathematics was not fundamentally necessary to its discovery. To connect the above and the prior discussion I'd say that the moral standards, physics, and math we're discussing are all very analogous to a game of sudoku. You could guess that a 2 belongs in a spot and make plenty of 'discoveries' about where the rest of the numbers go after inserting the 2. But, until some more numbers are put in you will not be able to verify whether that 2 was supposed to go there. These moral standards are the same way, humanity has only just started discovering some of the most complex laws of the inanimate universe. There are still far too many open boxes in the sudoku board to determine whether some of these moral standards are properly defined in their respective boxes but that does not mean the sudoku board of the universe will not spring back at you when you try to put "people can be tossed in wood chippers feet first" in the 3 box on the 5th row.

Hello! I'm Emmanuel I've been reading these forums for a few months now. I felt like it was about time I actually posted on a topic. A little about me I did math in undergrad and I'm finishing up law now. I'm looking to finish philosophy and mathematics MA's in the near future. I've been reading Rand's work for a good time now, but it wasn't until recently that I've decided to get out there and look around for things online. I think the website is great and to be honest, I thought it was exciting to read things Barbara Branden was actually posting. I kept up with a few things and directed people to the site and such for conversation. It's great to be here and actually writing I hope to learn a lot. Emmanuel

I've never posted on this site and there is a lot to read. Forgive me if I am about to go on and on about something that is in another post, but after reading through this thread I have a few questions/ideas I want to toss out here. I do not see the difference between the wheel, philosophy, ethics, physics or any of the other subjects/objects/names that have been tossed out at each other in this discussion. Humans aren't any different than any other animal that makes his home on this earth. Birds have beaks and fly, other animals have spines or sharp teeth. Each of their evolutionary advantages provides them with the tools of survival their species requires. We have a huge complex brain that allows us to mimic and/or improve upon all of those characteristics. In what sense has our biologically, physically or otherwise scientifically-reality limited mind broken the bounds of the rational world such that it can create something that works and is real but would not be limited by those same laws? i.e. How does our brain create these "conventions'" that are not bound by the laws of physics if the brain is indeed bound by the laws of physics and the created convention is supposed to have an effect on our proper functioning/survival within reality? To ask for the proof of deriving ethics from physics I cannot offer anymore than that. As the logicians/mathematicians here know to prove that not A is false is to prove that A is true. The consequences of accepting that ethics is not tied to or otherwise derivable from the laws of reality seems to be equivalent to saying that there is some other world/place/space/realm out there where ethics exists and we have to figure it out subjectively down here. Then, wouldn't that bring the question back to a Plato v. Aristotle anyway? What would be the difference between calling out ethics a convention and something like say a bible? As for the idea of what works for you might not work for me, it is not dispositive of error production in reality. Clearly erroneous decisions and judgments are made everyday; their existence/occurrence is not proof that they must be correct. There very well may be a law somewhere that allows the murder of humans by dropping them feet first into wood chippers but that does not prove it's correct-ness. I'd call now Baal's earlier post on the limitation that 1) cannot cause extinction and 2) must not be impossible in reality and ask, how is this not sufficient to show that ethics, if it pretends to be functional, must necessarily be limited by reality? Michael asks how you can separate the particular sciences, and then ethics from philosophy. Wouldn't that same argument continue on back and therefore wouldn't we have to ask whether any of those bodies of knowledge, and the intent that we create and study them in order to get closer to the objective truths of reality, be anything but limited by the physical laws of reality? Emmanuel