Starbuckle

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.

The chances are one in one, because I would make sure the tiles are face-up.

BC wrote: "The first persistent replicator (i.e. a compound or molecular structure that could copy itself) arose by chance. All subsequent copies are the result of physical processes operating according to physical laws." What do you mean by "by chance"? I would say that a knowledgeable, uninvolved observer could not have known which incident would prove successful in starting off the evolutionary process. But the first incident of persistent replication certainly occurred according to physical laws. It's not as if physical laws were suspended so that it could happen. After the incident, certain kinds of processes were possible that were not possible before it; that's all. The term "chance" is used equivocally by the creationists. On the one hand it seems to mean "without divine intervention and management." Then again it seems to mean "without systemic causation." Then again it seems to mean "having to do with statistical probabilities/prediction." When creationists say, "You don't think such and such could happen BY CHANCE, do you?," it is important to know what they mean by "chance." If I can't predict what biological solution might arise to the problem of a specific environmental challenge, that doesn't mean a specific solution can't naturally arise or that the chances are unfathomably low; not even if there's only a 1-in-zillion chance of any particular solution arising from the perspective of my ignorance of how all the relevant factors will interact over time to result in a solution (if one does arise). If I knew more, my ability to predict would improve. But can one estimate the chances of anything very complex occuring unless there is some kind of repeating event or series of events? When we deal with a fair coin, that's one thing; we can flip it endlessly. But we can't again and again unspool and re-spool any stretch of evolutionary history to determine what are the "chances" that evolutionary history will proceed in this direction or that direction.

All the stuff about the zillion to one odds of anything happening in the chemical or bio-chemical world "by Chance" is so much stuff and nonsense. The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%. If you throw a few relevant elements in a test-tube setup and mix water and heat, you start getting building blocks of life. That was established in the 1950s. Google the Stanley Miller experiment. What are the probability-table chances that a hydrogen atom will latch onto another hydrogen atom to form H2, or latch onto another hydrogen and oxygen to form H2O? Perhaps some number can be arrived at if you abstract away from any given circumstances and postulate, say, ten different sets of chemical circumstances in which you might find hydrogen. In five of these proposed chemical situations, let's say, the H2 can and would form; in the other five, the H2 cannot and would not form. The "chances," then, under the terms of the proposal, with the hydrogen stipulated to have the same chance of being piped into any one of the ten scenarios, are five in ten that H2 will form; or one in two. But this is a meaningless perspective when one is dealing with a specific context in which hydrogen atoms are near each other under typical conditions of temperature and pressure and no other atoms are around. When hydrogen is your only kind of atom interacting, you get hydrogen gas. You get H2. You get it because of the nature of the bonds that can form between the atoms. H2 is very stable. H wants to get together with other H. It's not a matter of somebody in a meta-universe watching the hydrogen and flipping a coin to determine whether today the hydrogen is going to behave like hydrogen or not. Hydrogen always behaves like hydrogen. It is extremely hydrogenesque. What does "Chance alone" have to do with it? Nor is the interaction between organisms, species and environment a matter of "Chance alone." Some organisms are going to be better at producing kids that survive than others. The survival-enhancing traits of the more prolific members of the species are the traits that will be most generally passed on. New traits that make it easier to survive in a particular environment are the traits that are most likely to become widespread throughout the species. The effects of natural selection are manifest in the fossil record, in the relationships between species living now, and in the realtime investigations of evolutionary change such as those of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who documented the changes in bill size of Darwin's finches in response to periods of drier or wetter weather. The causal interactions that affect the evolutionary history of a species can obviously be much more complex than briefly indicated above, but it's not about "Chance." It's about causality. Cause and effect in the primeval soup also operated; and once a set of any molecules could self-replicate, the evolutionary ball had begun rolling, however slowly. The Miller experiments established that the transition from chemical affinities and processes to biochemical affinities and processes is not that drastic, let alone unthinkable, and regardless of exactly what the geo-chemical processes and environmental circumstances were 3.5 billion years ago.

Duplicate.

GHS wrote: "While a very young and very devout Christian, I would occasionally awake during the middle of the night and see Jesus standing next to my bed. Complete with halo and a white robe, he looked exactly like a standard painting I had seen countless times. I remember wondering when Jesus posed for the portrait and who painted it." Did these visions at the time contribute to a feeling of absolute conviction that your religious faith was justified, even though in retrospect you can think of other reasons for your experience?

I, too, have had an Experience. This is an Experience I had just a few minutes ago, playing the Zone.com checkers game that comes with Windows XP. The Zone.com software anonymously connects you with other players over the Internet. I always rank myself as an "expert" checkers player, but sometimes Zone.com pits me against much weaker players anyway. (It's okay. Although they are not as challenging, the weaker opponents offer the compensating virtue of being easier to destroy.) Anyway, in the game that I played just now, I was able very early on to force my opponent to jump me in such a way that I could then triple-jump him and get a king without risk of immediately losing that king. But before my opponent jumped the man I was forcing him to jump (and, therefore, before I could then execute the triple jump I had set up), he sent me a message requesting a draw. I rejected the proposal, since I wanted to experience the sadistic joy of annihilating him, and didn't feel inclined to pretend that I wasn't about to do so. Well, the instant after I rebuffed him, I got another message from the Zone.com software: "Your opponent has left the game." Now, I don't know if it's ESP or what, but I am certain that my opponent did not at that moment lose his connection to the Internet as a result of the power going out or the like. I am certain that a cat did not jump on his keyboard, causing him to exit the game software prematurely and involuntarily. I am certain that no home invader suddenly shot up his modem. No, the only thing that happened to my poor stunned foe was that he had decided that he wasn't going to display even the minimal sportsmanship required to formally resign, and that, to avoid suffering the triple jump and ensuing methodical decimation, he must exit the game in a huff. My only clues are the fact that he was about to get slaughtered and the timing of his unceremonious departure. I will never be able to determine to the satisfaction of a court of law whether my conclusion is correct. Yet I know that it is; and the power of a thousand suns could not dissuade me.