Starbuckle

"He threatened to quit if I said once more that he has not had an original idea." Regardless of the politics surrounding his remonstration, to repeat this kind of assertion about Machan over and over, if that's what happened, is insulting and unwarranted. And what does it accomplish, anyway? Do you expect him to throw away his pen based on such a declaration? Machan has published hundreds of books of books and articles, some of which I have edited. Whatever his limitations as a thinker or writer, he does often produce original insights.

"Here’s the myth: Ayn Rand’s ideas inspire fanatical love or hate within the majority of people who read her." This myth is new to me. Can you offer a citation of some statement of it?

GHS wrote: "Following are some passages from The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, by Ernst Troeltsch...." I found no etext of this book. In addition to the used copies from Amazon starting at about $20, however, books.google.com enables reading of large portions of the book online.

"Didn't watch this. The title is crap. He can't know faith if he hasn't any or experienced it so he can't tell us about it. It has to be, therefore, deductive and implicitly anti-empirical." Repudiating hogwash is not "anti-empirical," and the author of the video does it with such zest, articulateness and brio that it would be self-deprivation not to watch the rant. Be empirical and see for yourself what a smashing success it is. Don't take it on faith that the evidence-eschewing nay-sayers are justified in their nay-saying and evidence-eschewing.

GHS wrote: "Here as elsewhere Nozick was too clever by half. To suggest that an omniscient and omnipotent deity could not figure out a way to reveal himself to the entire world in a convincing manner is absurd. God could, for example, announce in an omnipresent voice that he is going to cure all cancer on the spot, and then do it. And if that didn't do the trick, he could announce that he is going to make the missing limbs of every amputee in the world grow back instantaneously, and then do it. And if these demonstrations were not convincing enough, he could give every person in the world the ability to fly for one day, or he could resurrect one dead relative of every person while permitting us to choose the relative, or God could give every dog and cat the power of intelligent speech, while again announcing all these miracles in advance. Or, if all else failed, he could make Xray write a string of posts praising Ayn Rand. The possibilities are endless." Oh, Borg nanites could accomplish any of this. A god worthy of the name is an entity either capable of violating the nature of things, and hence impossible to exist to begin with, or just another part of that nature and hence not a god, just sort of something with a sort of super-nature, like Barbara Cartland or Vasiliy Alekseyev. Neil tries to fudge the problem in various ways, but he can't get around the fact that the supernatural as mystically enlisted by believers is not merely a kind of especially robust, frequently cloaked and/or hiccuping and prickly version of the natural, but rather an unintelligible contradiction of it. It's much more likely that either a stoked subconscious was speaking to Neil or an arch nemesis had planted a microphone in his skull while he was asleep than that the entity who communicated with him in the exact mode of any fiction writer brainstorming with himself was supernatural, i.e., non-existent. It is supremely unlikely for non-existent things to exist if only because they don't exist. Lack of existence is, in fact, one of the most glaring features of all non-existent things. Any close examination of flagrantly non-existent things will support this conclusion readily. BTW, I don't mean by my disagreement with the bad conclusions of Neil's memoir to imply that it is anything but a very engaging and interesting book. It is a compelling recounting, as well as testament to the friendship of Brad Linaweaver (the interviewer) and L. Neil Schulman.

J. Neil Schulman wrote: "That assumption, however, can be negated by an acceptance of physics that offers additional possibilities of cause and effect." I enunciate an even more sweeping powerful possibility-of-assumption-negating assumption: all assumptions can be negated by opposite assumptions. I call this Starbuckle's Law of How All Assumptions Can Be Negated by Opposite Assumptions. GHS provided a video demonstrating this based on work done by the Argument Clinic. There are no "additional possibilities of cause and effect." There are only the different natures of things, which act in different ways because of their different natures. Causality depends on identity. Any scientific inquiry might give us new insight into stuff whose nature we thought we already knew, or into stuff of which we were previously altogether ignorant. But if one throws out the law of identity, how can even begin any scientific inquiry? The whole point of investigation is to find out the nature of things, the whats and the whys. There is no other basis on which to proceed. The law of identity is certainly an assumption, but an objective and inescapable one. I haven't read Neil's whole testament yet, but it seems to me that his interpretation of his experiences are fundamentally informed by his blending of the merely speculative and even fictional with what can be objectively substantiated. The experience did not come first, followed by the re-thinking; the re-thinking preceded and seems to have produced the experience. (Either that, or God wants to confound the rationalists by being extremely coy. Why does he simply not reveal himself to all in a wholly unequivocal and undeniable way? Too easy and perhaps not very interesting and amusing. God is a kind of happy-go-lucky jester, perhaps.) The following is incomplete but I don't know how long it will take me to finish the book so I thought I would just post some of my reactions so far. The specific evidence for a God or the supernatural (if it is evidence) doesn't come until after J. Neil has graduated from atheism to agnosticism and begun playing out competing paradigms in his mind. Theory, argument or assertions, from C.S. Lewis and others, and cultural experience has been informing his evolving views before he gets to his "face-to-face" talk with God. We have C.S. Lewis versus Ayn Rand, maybe PhilipKDick Heinlein versus AynRand Heinlein, Judaism versus Catholicism. (Presumably the alleged paranormal experiences of his father are not regarded as firsthand evidence; we know in any case that psychics and other paranormalists can, like any adept magician, set up mind readings and moving objects, rely on a certain willingness to believe, and are suddenly shy when Randi walks into the room.) A lot of Schulman's musing is about how the reality of under-informed rationalists is but a veil, rather than a realm that we can straightforwardly explore albeit with necesssarily greater sophistication as we become more aware of subtleties and complications. Philip K. Dick is supposed to have said, "The nature of reality is to disguise its true nature." Perhaps God spends a lot of his time hiding under reality's surface froth, or at least hiding from skeptics who have yet to throw the mental switch that would illuminate all? Dick, of course, was another fictioneer persuaded by his own unverifiable speculations, also not conventionally Christian. In any case, it does seem that the distinction between myth and imagination on the one hand and observable reality on the other becomes blurred in Schulman's interpretation-crafting. Thus, if it is possible to speculate, without any evidence, about "multiple continua" or dimensions, on the basis of a mere mathematical construct positing oodles of dimensions, this becomes a substantiated possibility--a legitimate "hypothesis," although a hypothesis without any body of data that the hypothesis could be useful in explaining--rather than a mere unsubstantiated speculation useful for crafting SF and fantasy stories. The stories that inspire him and the ideas he develops support each other. Some stories make more sense than others or are more congruent with Schulman's values than others, and it seems that he regards the more-congruent ones as, if not literally true, then at least kind of true (they can be cherry-picked)--at any rate, are more revelatory of the true nature of the secret world unknown to rationalists or not credited by rationalists and others who have only reality to work with. A few excerpts from the book with my comments in brackets: "I remember a day in 1970 that I was expecting, all day, a telephone call to come in saying that my grandfather, my father’s father, was dead. That call came around two in the afternoon. I’d been expecting it. This was when we were in the process of moving from Massachusetts to New York." [What is this evidence of?] "...omething happened to me during the writing of The Rainbow Cadenza. I had some sort of event happen to me, probably in the last month of writing, that puts it somewhere in November to December of 1981, and I would say that my atheism was pretty well done at that point because I was seriously running at least a second or third paradigm, at that point. The materialistic view that Rand had given me was in suspension along with other views at that point so I would say I was agnostic by that point. Obviously, by the time I’m writing that statement 'I believe in God' – it’s dated March 24, 1992 – my agnosticism is pretty much over. "I also talk about having the experience with God, I don’t think we’ve gotten to it yet in the first part, where I had an experience in 1988 around my birthday in which, I had been praying daily The Lord’s Prayer by 1988 probably for about a year. [schulman had been praying The Lord's Prayer for about a year before his alleged encounter with God. Did he have evidence of a God before undertaking this exercise?] The 1988 experience I have told you about but I’m going to be putting on the record here and this is as good a place to do it.... "So, by the end of 1981 when I’m finishing the writing of Rainbow Cadenza [in which there is a discussion between a C.S.Lewisian and an Ayn-Randian] I’m going through this transition period. It then starts accelerating so that by 1987, I’ve decided to make the experiment. We can call that period from 1982 to 1986 — at least five years — we can call that my for-sure agnostic period. "In 1987 I decide to make a leap of faith — an experiment — and that is to pray.... "The very exploration of art in The Rainbow Cadenza started giving me new paradigms having to do with existence itself. I started seeing God, in the sense that Hill Bromley was talking about God, as being an artist. And this paradigm, that’s when it started running alongside in my head, these other paradigms, these purely mechanistic science paradigms. And, of course, there were the quantum paradigms, also, which I was getting from reading things like Illuminatus! and the The Schrodinger’s Cat books by Robert Anton Wilson. And of course Sam Konkin was a theoretical chemist and so I was given some, at least a Sunday supplement version of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. Not that I had any mathematical understanding of them, but at least that was one more of the paradigms that was starting to run in my head as I started thinking about quantum uncertainty as possibly having to do something with free will and freeing us from the mechanistic clockwork universe that seemed to be so much a part of the secularists...." [Me: Which secularists? Rand doesn't deny consciousness and values, nor does she regard these as "mechanistic." She doesn't therefore consider herself a "materialist" (or if she is, in what sense is she a materialist? In the sense that she denies _supernatural_ spirit or consciousness, that is, denies the spirit or consciousness for which there is no evidence or which makes itself manifest only very irregularly and coyly.)] "So this transition that I was going forward with, again a lot having to do with tension and release and realizing that Creation itself utilized these artistic principles, made me start at least running the paradigm of the created universe alongside the uncreated universe. Again, the contradiction in my mind was how could you have a created universe if existence exists? That existence exists was where Rand was starting out, how could you have a created universe if existence has always existed, how can something come out of nothing? That was one of the main problems that I was trying to resolve in my mind. If there has to be something which is uncreated, how could you have a created universe? Okay, so that was the unresolved problem in my mind. "BRAD LINAWEAVER: You did not like the idea of Creation ex nihilo. "J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right, and to this day I reject the concept of creation ex nihilo...." "J. NEIL SCHULMAN: [Heinlein was] Very prominent [in his mind], but at that particular moment I don’t know, okay? But again, it was this clinging to God, praying so tight that nobody dies, that no harm comes to everybody. You know this panicked clinging, which was what He was breaking. In essence He was telling me, 'Don’t pray so much!' because I’d been praying every day, constantly. Not just the Lord’s Prayer, but also the prayers for everybody to be okay – and not in the Christian sense of praying for their soul – but praying for them physically not to die, not to get hit by a truck. "So, God ended that at that moment. [The Godvoice had indicated that Neil's praying was annoying and ridiculous.] "Nonetheless, again, being the rationalist, I’m thinking maybe this is my science-fiction writer’s brain telling me that I’m having a heart attack. So at this point I woke up my roommate and I said, 'Call the paramedics, I think I’m having a heart attack.'... "There was always that two percent of doubt because _I_ might be crazy. I knew that the human body was capable of doing odd things, and the human brain was capable of doing odd things. I thought that maybe I was suffering from some toxic poisoning from coffee or something like that. Maybe this was some sort of hallucinated experience." [Me: Why isn't the rationalist interpretation the one that Neil sticks with? "I thought, at that point, I wonder if this is simply some sort of psychological event, some fantasy my body is having to tell me that I’m having a heart attack?" Isn't this a more likely explanation than that some kind of impish supernatural entity had invaded his brain? And how does he know it's "God" rather than some kind of other, perhaps lower-order supernatural trickster?] ###

Robert, I agree with those kinds of objections, or at least that there is often grounds for suspicion. But other interviewees in the book confirm common criticisms and observations about the problems in the circle around Rand. It's also true that there are a lot of missing "voices," those who are persona non grata to the orthodoxy, who would have had more insight and interesting anecdotes to offer about Rand than some of those included can provide. Schwartz and Peikoff are not in the book for other reasons, I suppose. I'm annoyed by the omissions and some of the apparent steering, and no one should base his understanding of Rand solely on her work and this resource. But a lot of the questioning effectively elicits much of value that is obviously the honest view of the interviewee. There is so much in the book that is new and interesting (to me, anyway) that I cannot agree with the claim that no one would be satisfied with it. It's a great book, fascinating.

George, you didn't just post that Monty Python video.

GHS: "There is a very effective response to this kind of skeptic: the Bitch Slap." Well, he was 19 at the time, so I cut him some slack. He once complained that I had interrupted him, and I said, "No, you only THINK I interrupted you." His answer: "Okay, that's going too far..."

On another OL thread, there's a clip of an even squirmier appearance by Ron Paul on "Meet the Press" trying to rationalize his contradictions in seeking boodle for constituents. The clip includes Paul's attempt at the polticians' patented Skeptical Interruptive Chortle that is deployed whenever the point that someone (in this case, Tim Russert) is making is unassailable.

J. Neil SCHULMAN wrote: "Then debate them with 'J. Neil Smith'; I'm not particularly qualified to. :-)" Yikes, sorry about that. You are no L. Neil.

GHS wrote: "We could not engage in any cognitive discipline, including history, without some conceptual and theoretical presuppositions, and it is very peculiar argument to say that the very presuppositions that make a knowledge-seeking discipline possible are also the very things that disqualify it from ever attaining objective knowledge." This is one of the claims of some philosophical subjectivists, however: that cognitive mediation is per se subjective/distortive. I met a thoroughgoing skeptic several months ago who claimed that he wasn't willing to believe, for example, that there had ever been such an institution as slavery in American history (not that he denied it; he was agnostic about it). What about all the documents and testimony, letters, journals, newspaper articles, ads offering rewards for runaway slaves, that strange allusion to "three fifths of all other persons" in the Constitution, etc.? He proposed that all such artifacts were the creation of a conspiracy (or simultaneous conspiracies). Whatever objection I raised could be countered by a further statement of doubt. I think he was partly sincere and partly playing devil's advocate. He never cited any evidence for such a saturating conspiracy, but didn't seem particularly bothered that he could not supply any evidence. For those who don't adopt a procedure of universal doubt on principle, there is some point at which one can refer to facts that are indisputable, and then go further and discuss interpretations, when scientific or historical evidence permits certainty and when it is too incomplete, etc.

"Amazon is craven and cowardly. Especially when knuckling under to a weasel such as Lieberman." You're assuming that there can be no valid reason, or that Amazon's management could not have been persuaded that there is a valid reason, for declining to host Wikileaks.

J. Neil Smith wrote: "Now, is there any reason to take multiple continua seriously? Sure, because the best science we have does.... "...11 dimensions of the 'brane.' " What is the definition of and scientific evidence for multiple continua?

J. Neil Schulman wrote: "All points of view reflect the assumptions, if not the biases, of the speaker or writer, making them to one extent or another subjective." Is the following an objective statement? "All points of view reflect the assumptions, if not the biases, of the speaker or writer, making them to one extent or another subjective." If "subjective" is defined as "produced by a mind," then all assumptions, conclusions, inferences and statements of whatever kind are "subjective." But in that case, what is the point of distinguishing between a concept of subjectivity and a concept of objectivity? Obviously, "objectivity" has to do with method. If abiding by facts and logic are central to one's approach, one is more objective than if one merely indulges feelings and impulses and regards facts as annoying irrelevancies. Any time in discussion we point to a fact and say, "But aren't you forgetting Fact X? Doesn't that contradict what you're claiming?" we are relying on the possibility and importance of being objective. It's true that anybody already has some theoretical understanding of the world when he comes to some new observation or issue, and that it's often useful and critical to know what a person's viewpoint is. But why would this mean that we can't be objective in either assessing either what's new to our cognitive territory or what's old (our current understanding)? JNS: "SEK3 (entirely Objectivist in his epistemology and an atheist for all of his life past childhood) always emphasized that there is no such thing as an objective point of view." Central to Objectivism is the claim that objectivity is possible. That's where the name comes from. If SK disagreed with that, he couldn't have been "entirely Objectivist" in his epistemology. It's not a side issue.

For the benefit of anyone considering "sex reassignment surgery" (SRS) and who happens to surf into this page, here are a couple links to articles about post-SRS regrets. "What if you 'succeed' in completing a TS transition, but did it for the wrong reasons?" http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Warning.html "When sex-change is a mistake: Some transsexuals suffer bitter regrets." http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/when-sexchange-is-a-mistake-some-transsexuals-suffer-bitter-regrets-sarah-lonsdale-reports-1512822.html

GHS: "You could hear an audible gasp from the chooser as his mouth fell open. The other three guys kept asking, 'Was that really your card? Really? He really got it right?' " For all you know, the card was wrong but the third guy decided to play along and stick it to the other two.

Great story. Thanks. Reminds me of one or two "Columbo" episodes in which magic/alleged psychic ability played a part, except Columbo never doubted that the trick was a trick.

"It is quite telling that Peikoff identifies a vagina not as another kind of organ, but as a lack of one." I'm not sure how you get this out of what he said. Perhaps a direct quote would be helpful. I gather he'd say the operation is a mutilation in either direction (man to "woman" or woman to "man") and even if fake opposite-sex genitals are then installed. I don't think he'd disagree with what the attempt of the surgery is about.

I don't agree with Peikoff's analogy with the concentration camp doctors, since coercive mutilation or any assault cannot be equated to voluntary self-mutilation or any voluntary submission to physical punishment (like boxing, wrestling or s&m). But it does seem that cutting off someone's genitals just because he asked you to do that to him is pretty creepy. What about Peikoff's example of the person who says "In my soul, I know that I am a fingerless being, not someone who has fingers," and wants to have his fingers amputated for that reason? Would a very strong feeling that one was born in the wrong body, a body with fingers, justify cutting off one's fingers? Could a surgeon feel good about undertaking that chore, so long as he had had a thoroughgoing discussion about it with the person wanting to be amputated?

Ninth said: "Oh come on, talk about ambiguity!" "Ambiguity" is one of the words that begin with the letter "a."

Cute when he talks the audience their applause is "very kind" but all they have to do is not their heads.

George, so you are a magician? Do you perform?

AA, is getting at the truth the most important thing to you in this discussion?

Go to Amazon for a collection of his writings put together by Joan Kennedy Taylor called "Liberty Against Power," various reviews and essays on topics ranging from politics to music. Ron Neff I believe has a site with some of Roy's essays on anarchism. Possibly Mises.org has pdfs of the magazine he edited for several years, Libertarian Review. If not, a search for Roy Childs at Mises.org may lead you to many of his articles that appeared in libertarian publications and journals available at the site, for example, his critique of Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (which was probably also reprinted in Joan's anthology). Googling "Roy Childs" or "Roy A. Childs, Jr." will take you to sites that have reprinted this and that of his. Much of his good stuff is book catalog copy, the exuberant and lengthy reviews he wrote for Laissez Faire Books until his death in 1992. Unfortunately, many of those are not readily accessible now but a few have been reprinted. There's a Roy Childs Corner at this web site with some of his writing.