dan2100

There's nothing in mainstream Big Bang theory to suggest there's a God -- and you still have to deal with all those philosophical arguments against God. Also, Big Bang theory is just a theory. It might prove to be false -- in which case, then what? Would you stop believing in God?

Since you brought up the Chambers review, has anyone on this site discussed Tom Bertonneau's "Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination"? It's online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0354/is_4_46/ai_n8680946/

I don't really see this as applying to humans. Again I think this is applying principles from lower life forms to higher. Well, "all else remaining the same" I believe it applies. Granted, it all else might not remain the same... I did acknowledge this in the paragraph you left out: "Of course, things might not remain the same -- as I'm guessing you believe humans might overload their environment and collapse -- in which case, more humans might lead to extinction as they exhaust their support system. This, however, doesn't appear to be the case now and doing too many radical things to curb what's seem as environmental damage might actually do much more harm to humans. (This doesn't mean I feel there's no problem and humans can start dumping all their waste in the streets or rivers. But a lot of the solutions or improvements here need not involve lower populations. I'd like to see, e.g., more humans living off world. Right now there are none or just a few temporarily. That and not the green movement. as well intended its members might be, would likely do much more for improving the chances of humans and other known life not dying out.)" Also, humans can use technology to, perhaps, conserve themselves as a species. At the radical extreme, it's possible that technology will make all this moot. But that's not the case now and it's a speculation at this point -- one that might not come true. (I can imagine storing the human genome for the long term and then reviving it after some catastrophe. This can be done, as well, with other life forms. I can also imagine some extreme form of nanotechnology -- assuming, of course, that life can simply be built at the molecular level -- where one could build any life form, including humans, on demand. In which case, human survival as a species would depend on merely storing and retrieving the information necessary to construct humans.) Would you share why you believe the idea -- I wouldn't call it a "principle" -- doesn't apply to humans?

Interesting information. My lady was completely non-resistive. We had a number of arguments as to dealing with an intruder. Hers was not to resist and mine was to kill the intruder as quickly as tactically possible in a given situation. Adam Your observations are exactly in line with the evolutionary explanation for men/women differences. The theory is that when small tribes or societies were attacked by other warriors (men), the women reacted by clutching and protecting their young, and by submitting to the new attackers in order to survive. Chris btw, this thread is slowly being hijacked by Xray. Bla - This sounds like the "just so" stories I mentioned here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8353&st=0&p=92717 And it does sound like a good story, but is it true?

Do you have the direct like to that SOLO post? And why does all of this not surprise me? Is it possible for Boeckmann to not see how ridiculous he looks?

I don't know Tore, but I'm a bit skeptical of people who give five star reviews to everything they review. (Then again, it could Tore only reviews the stuff he absolutely loves.)

I think that Rand's definition of altruism and biology's are sufficiently similar that we can meaningfully examine her ideas in a evolutionary light. I understand your point about evolutionaly psychology, but I wanted to point out one think that people lose sight of sometimes when discussing evolution. Evolution is not all about reproduction and survival of the individual. The individual is subordinate to his genes in very important ways. It's the gene perspective that is most meaniningful. Evolution is gene-centric. Therefore we would expect to see a general pattern of behaviour that would demonstrate a relationship between the strength of altruistic tendencies and kinship, this could include sacrificing one's life. Of course, this is indeed what happens, and is very well explained in his context. We don't need any separate "ethics of emergencies". Bob I believe their definitions are similar enough to make people want to compare them, but different enough to make for confusion if one just presumes they're either identical or close enough not to matter. After all, as you mention, it seems most evolutionary biologists believe the altruism has to be looked at from the perspective of the gene -- whereas Rand would only being looking at the level of the organism (and maybe groups of organisms) and then only of when the organism is the locus of choice and value. In my view, too, I would distinguish between evolution -- what happens -- and its mechanisms -- as I've asserted elsewhere. From the perspective of one mechanism -- natural selection -- putative altruist acts nedd to be explained. Other mechanisms -- e.g., neutral selection -- might not have that same problem. (Which mechanism is in play in any given instance, in my mind, depends on the details and this is partly why I wrote my "Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses." You know, that the chicken could have crossed the road merely to get to the feed on other side is a hypothesis, but maybe, if we look deeper, we find the chicken was being chased by the fox or that the road was sloping and the chicken couldn't do otherwise but fall over to the other side, etc.) Also, regarding the "ethics of emergencies," as I've written earlier, I don't buy it for other reasons. I don't think, too, Rand was using it to explain human behavior. (This might be the problem here. Rand was not so much describing in ethics. Yes, she tells us her ethics are based on reality, but she's obviously telling people what's the right thing to do -- which presumes they might do otherwise. Hence her defining, if my memory's correct, ethics as a code of conduct to guide action -- not as a description of what people do but a guide to what they should do.) I also don't think charity and generosity fall under "ethics of emergencies" for Rand. (I might be wrong, but I think "ethics of emergencies" tend to mean for her actual lifeboat situations and I think she was thinking about things like when is it okay for me to steal or even get my place on the lifeboat. I think real world emergency situations tend to be a lot more complicated that I wouldn't reduce most of them to the textbook lifeboat ones. (And, of course, the media tend to tell all the stories of people risking life and limb to help others, but what about the other 6 billion or so people who did absolutely nothing during the emergency? Of course, this leaves the realm of ethics as a normative science and enters that of describing how people actually behave.)) Finally, if you really want to test Objectivist ethics, we need to define it more clearly first and then make sure the comparison doesn't leave something out. Yes, mean, nasty people who never do anything for anyone else seem to not leave many descendants (is this true? I'm only guessing), but mean, nasty people who never do anything for anyone else are not necessarily practicing Objectist virtues.

Yes, though one must be careful with such models. Game theoretic models are often used, for example, in economics. They're good as long as one remembers they're idealized and baked in many assumptions that might not hold in real world cases. I believe Axelrod covers some of this, but I've only skimmed his work... I'm thinking of, for example, how people will argue against free markets using the traditional "prisoner's dilemma" reasoning, which assumes things like people only think about immediate gains, can't signal each other, and the game does iterate. (Of course, there are approaches that try to make up for this by allowing these factors to creep into the model.) Population genetics models have the same problem, of course, but these models all can be used to create null hypotheses to test a just so story against. Still, one must be careful that the mathematical model is capturing something real and is not merely a formalism that looks cute. This is not typically a problem, though, in biology as the case study approach is still alive and well there, in my experience, and they don't seem to have gone model-crazy like economists. (To be sure, too, cladistics is usually done not by someone listing out traits and then having at it. Instead, a lot of the work is coding up traits, developing algorithms, and letting the computer program have at it. A lot of these studies I've read about involve dozens of species, so one person trying to develop a phylogenetic tree would likely take years were it done without some computational power.)

Yes, you need a clear definition of what an altruistic act -- in this context -- would be. A problem here, though, is that Rand's view of altruism (and egoism) do differ in some respects from the biological view usually taken for altruism in two respects. One is that, for her, there's no genetic determinism for human action. (I'm not saying mainstream biology posits there is one. I think there's much debate in the field about this and, yes, some do argue that human action can be traced back to genetics or to some biologically deterministic mechanism.) The other is that Rand waffles, I think, on just what's supposed to be in one's self-interest -- is it survival ("life as the standard of value" tout court) or flourishing ("man qua man")? But even with her waffling, if we select either view of self-interest, I'm not sure what you mean by her "proclamations repeadetly fail[ing] the 'reality' test." Do you just mean her views of human nature are wrong? In what way? That people are basically altruist by genetic programming because natural selection selected for some altruism? Maybe we should step back and discuss just what all of us -- not just you and I -- believe are Rand's and the evolutionary biologist's views of human nature, altruism, and the like.

You are making an inference here that a smaller population implies less chance of survival. How do you come to that conclusion? All else remaining the same, there'd be, on the whole, more chances for species extinction with cladogenesis (meaning no new species arising from humans) the smaller the population. Think of it this way, fewer organisms for a given species usually means lower odds of that species surviving -- save under extreme circumstances. Of course, things might not remain the same -- as I'm guessing you believe humans might overload their environment and collapse -- in which case, more humans might lead to extinction as they exhaust their support system. This, however, doesn't appear to be the case now and doing too many radical things to curb what's seem as environmental damage might actually do much more harm to humans. (This doesn't mean I feel there's no problem and humans can start dumping all their waste in the streets or rivers. But a lot of the solutions or improvements here need not involve lower populations. I'd like to see, e.g., more humans living off world. Right now there are none or just a few temporarily. That and not the green movement. as well intended its members might be, would likely do much more for improving the chances of humans and other known life not dying out.)

So what would you call it if an organism was polluting it's environment and gradually making it more hostile and it knew it was doing it and still continued doing it? I'm not saying mankind is doing this but the possibility presents itself. It would be maladaptive in terms of survival -- if the long term trend were to make the species go under. But one must be careful here. After all, plants give off oxygen, an extremely toxic chemical. In some ways, it can viewed as a pollutant and certainly, for plants, when oxygen is in really high concentrations, the risk of fire is much, much higher. So, what's adaptive or maladaptive (or neutral) depends on context. With pollution, too, we're entering the realm of politics and it gets harder to spot a maladaption. After all, having electricity is very helpful to human survival. So it makes the environment far less hostile for humans. This must balanced against that almost any form of electric generation, distribution, and use is going to involve degraded part of the environment -- in terms of making it less hospitable for humans. Where's the balance here? It seems to me on the less hostile side at this time. That doesn't mean there's no room to improve electric generation, distribution, and use to be more efficient and less polluting, but I wouldn't be so quick to see this as a completely unmitigated bad thing that's going to destroy the species. If anything, all else remaning equal, getting rid of electric generation, distribution, and use would likely lead to much smaller population and a lowered chance of species (or descendant species as humans might eventual split into several species) survival.

I don't know enough about Wagner to say, but, yes, I was only making a suggestion and not saying any particular artists were doing this. And I mainly brough it up to answer the implication that all artist-estheticians might merely be, in so far as they are estheticians, merely apologists for their art work. I think other cases of a back-and-forth influence might be André Gide and Albert Camus. I think they both wrote novels and stories while writing explicitly about esthetics. However, I haven't studied them in enough detail to see if they changed both their theories and their art in light of each.

I don't think "Evolution sells itself." Just look at all the people who aren't buying over 150 years after Darwin first published his book. Also, evolution should be distinguished from evolutionary theory or evolutionary mechanisms. I do think that evolution is a fact -- or maybe more precisely an very abstract fact since it collects many observations under one concept; the fact being that life has undergone much change over time. Evolutionary theory is the attempt to explain that fact. Darwin's theory, in particular, attempts to explain it via "descent with modification" and natural selection. (Other theories propose other mechanisms or causes.) Regarding Darwin's books, I think he was attempting to test his hypotheses, so he wasn't stopping at just concocting a story and leaving it at that. In my view, just so stories can be great starting points for investigation, but the problem occurs when someone stops at a just so story and doesn't attempt to test it against the evidence -- particularly by constructing a "null hypothesis" and looking for conflicting evidence, and also seeking out independent lines of evidence. By the way, to do cladistics, one doesn't need to know genetics. For instance, in Phylogeny, Ecology, and behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology, Daniel Brooks and Deborah McLennan come up with a way of coding behavior to do cladistic analyses on it. One could imagine someone in Darwin's time doing the same -- without the benefit of post-Medelian genetics -- just by observing organisms. In fact, anything can be grist for the cladist's mill -- any trait. It's even been applied to fossils! A few month ago, I went to New York City and visited the American Museum of Natural History. They actually have cladistic diagrams there to categorize their dinosaurs. The only thing to compare in this case is, of course, fossilized remains -- not DNA and rarely anything directly like behavior. So what workers are doing is looking at, e.g., a skull and comparing to other skull and generating a cladogram from this to reveal evolutionary relationships -- things like dinosaur X is more closely related to dinosaur Y than to dinosaur Z because they both share the same type of teeth and jaws. (I'm dinosaur nutter. )

On "virginity," that might be my misrecollecting a passage.

Indeed, Dominique thoughts in the Fountainhead: Rape by a hoodlum and pleasure... kinky Rand! Dominique to Gail Wynand: Seems clear enough to me. Is it then so strange that people take her at her word and also call it a rape? Sometimes I wonder whether some Objectivists have themselves ever read the Fountainhead. Thanks for the exact quote. I'm in the middle of moving and didn't have my copy of The Fountainhead handy. (I also do not have a copy on my Kindle and didn't want to buy one.) Of course, someone might say that this is what Dominique states and that Rand didn't think that it was truly rape -- just that her character believed or said it was. On another note, I recall too that the opening scene of this novel finds Howard Roark naked in the middle of the woods. I wonder how many Objectivists who have read the novel remember that and see it as significant. I certainly did, though I don't believe I've fully processed that yet.

What would "UNnatural selection" entail that would make it different from natural selection? I disagree about intelligence being different with respect to it being the trait a species has to adapt to. By this I mean that any trait a species has might be in conflict with its ability to survive and flourish -- not just intelligence. For instance, it's probably likely that the first organisms that excreted oxygen were making their environment, in the long run, poisonous to themselves. The conventional story I've heard is these organisms evolved and for a long time the oxygen they gave off had a neglible effect, but as they flourish and as more oxygen built up in the oceans and eventually the atmosphere, they likely poisoned themselves and brought up a global cooling event which further made their environment inhospitable to them. This doesn't appear to be the sort of thing one needs more than natural selection and the usual neo-Darwinian "tool kit" to explain.

So, assuming we are not adapting well in this regard, what are we failing to adapt to? Our own intelligence? I think you're looking for too abstract an answer to this question. Why did the dinosaurs die out? Letting birds aside -- since they seem to be the dinosaurs that did survive and flourish (if my memory's correct, there are more bird species than mammal species -- despite mammals being around, as a clade, for much longer than birds) -- yes, it was a failure to adapt in a sense and so it seems today. But given their times, they appear well suited to a range of environments and there's a good reason why so many dinosaur fossils abound -- probably because they were so successful that they left enough corpses around to be fossilized. Are humans failing? I do not see this, but evolution and history are never truly over. Just as a person who is up until this moment successful in business can go bankrupt in the next, so might it come to pass with humans. (Also, while I agree intelligence is just another trait, it does appear the smarter species often do fairly well. If we look at animal evolution, there does seem to be a trend toward larger brain size or larger encephalization quotients (brain-to-body ratio) -- and toward more sophisticated behaviors. The dinosaurs, despite having relatively small encephalization quotients compared with, say, modern mammals, were pretty smart for their time. I'm only bringing this up because intelligence is often shortchanged in discussions of evolution -- as if it didn't confer a huge advantage in the struggle. I think intelligence explains why human populations exploded while other primates are, for the most part, hangers on.)

The vacuous definition of self-interest doesn't so much muddy the waters as make them appear clear when they're not. Also, the vacuous definition doesn't so much "reduce the importance of self interest to its most mundane levels" as it virtually eliminates the distinction between self-interest and non-self-interest to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to imagine an action that's not self-interested. This is similar to coming up with the distinction of "bachelor" -- to divide between married and unmarried men -- and then telling us all men, including married ones, are really bachelors. In other words, the term becomes meaningless as it no longer adds anything to the discussion. Regarding buying the hat, in my understanding of Rand's view, one already has to have an objective view of values and self-interest before coming to the scenario. Without it, there is nothing to be said, especially if one adopts the vacuous definition of self-interest. With it, one would then have to ask, is buying the hat more or less objectively valuable or in his self-interest to the person than helping his child? One would not start with what the person does -- because this is what's to be judged. And, yes, the hat would likely have some place in his hierarchy of values, though my guess is Rand would believe it should be lower than his child in that hierarchy. Let's say I'm right about her view of objective value, self-interest, and the relative values of the person's hat and child. Then, obviously, buying the hat over helping his child would, even if he does it and does it fully consciously (in context as some might argue that one would have to fake reality on some level -- thereby reducing consciousness? -- to pull this off), would be going against his self-interest. Don't you agree?

I think Xray's main thrust has been that there are no objective values, not that there is no knowable reality. I might add that while values may be considered objective in the sense that they exist, ie. food value, they are subjective in the sense that one is free to value whatever they wish, depending on their goal. Regardless of what Xray meant, what do you think values are in the first place and what would be necessary for any particular value to be objective? (This is more a foundations of ethics question than a metaphysics one, I think.)

"Univeralizing her particular tastes in gender roles" is right on target. Imo Rand was unable to identify her personal preferences as subjective, but instead elevated them to something others "ought to" (objectively) prefer as well. Hence her presenting Howard Roark as the ideal man (instead of "her" ideal man), and "as man should be", i. e. as a role model for others. As for "gays, bis and asexual types" (do the latter really exist?), imo accepting them was far removed from Rand's thinking. She found homosexuality "disgusting", but then this was at a time when practicing homosexuality was still considered as a criminal offense in several countries. While I said Rand was universalizing her personal tastes -- and still stand by that -- I would separate between what appears to be the implication that "the ideal man" is a priori an impossible thing. I don't know if you meant that. Yes, Roark (or Galt) is her ideal man and maybe too clogged with her personal tastes to be the ideal man, but this would invalidate the concept. (That said, I don't think there is one ideal man or woman, but probably not for the reasons you might think.) On asexuals, I just take them at their word (until it's proven otherwise, of course) -- though, no doubt, some of self-identified asexuals might be mistaken or lying. (Of course, the same might apply to straights and gays -- as in any straight or gay person is likely to not be, respectively, 100% straight or gay -- in the normal sense of being sexually attracted to people of, respectively, the opposite or same sex.) Regarding Rand's revulsion toward gays (as far as I know she was silent on other types of sexuality), I doubt it was based on legal status. I don't know where it came from, though my guess is it was partly zeitgeist -- though I'm not a reductivist in this area. (And, no doubt, despite the current legal status and current widespread tolerance of gays, bis, etc. in many nations, I bet even some people who pretend to not being repulsed still are and just hide it well. My guess is feelings of disgust and revulsion -- assuming Rand was sincere in her self-reporting -- run deeper than merely following the politically correct view of a particular time and have more to do with childhood experiences, especially with regard to sexuality.)

Rand did say that about the scene, but didn't Dominique, in the novel, say she lost her virginity by being raped by Roark -- or something along those lines?

Duh - ye think they'd present one which would invalidate their own art work??? But I don't assume all artist-estheticians are all necessarily self-serving. And this can go another way too: someone might start with a theory of what art should be and then try to create art that fits that theory. Maybe Harold Bloom is an example of this; he wrote a novel that supposedly -- I haven't read it yet -- attempt to put into practice his views on literature. My guess is most people who play both sides here probably walk down a "dialetical" path here: adjusting art to theory and theory to art. But this is just my guess. I hope the more intellectually honest and perceptive ones would correct their theory when it came up against art that didn't fit -- even if their own practice might track their particular theory. I've only read a handful of people doing both. (And I reckon we can look at all artists as implying some esthetic theory. Maybe this goes too far and it wasn't a point anyone here seems to have been arguing against.)

But "sacrifice" doesn't have to be extreme, like giving your life for someone else (the soldier who throws himself on a live grenade to save his companions). Even a small amount of money spent for someone else means that you cannot spend that amount for yourself. Rand herself gives such examples, for example that the choice of not buying a hat to save your child can be a sacrifice if you value the hat more than the health of your child (I'll ignore here the contradictions in her examples, which have been discussed earlier). There is a whole range from a small and negligible discomfort to a large discomfort and worse. Is there some kind of demarcation line where "benevolence" turns into "real altruism"? I think such a division would be arbitrary and quite personal and that it is more logical to call all behavior altruistic that improves the well-being of someone else while decreasing the well-being of the actor with at least some amount, small or large. But that would of course be denied if one insists that all altruism must be bad, therefore the true Scotsman is invoked. I believe this is where Rand can invoke her view of objective values and objective self-interest. That might not settle the issue, but, were it to work, it would reduce the number of cases that are fuzzy -- that fall under the true Scotsman argument. By this I mean there would be, per Rand, cases where you might not value say your child more than a new hat, but, on an objective value scale, you should value the child more so choosing the immediately easy path of buying the hat is the morally wrong thing to do.

Cooperation was clearly part of our past evolution and I agree will continue as we go forward. Altruism is different, altruism means performing an act that confers a survival advantage to another person or people at the cost of a survival disadvantage to the actor. Taking a risk to help someone falls into this category. and to respond to Dan... "I think the jury still out and this field changes so much, especially in terms of looking into human behavior, in recent years, that I'd be careful in drawing too many conclusions of what's wired in or where certain behaviors or beliefs come from." Sure, things will change, ideas will develop, but evaluating human behaviour against this backdrop has the distinct advantage of being rational, evidence-based, testable and scientific. Evolution itself could easily be thrown into the junk bin if a fossil record contradicts it - hasn't happened yet. Any scientific idea is immediately at risk/toast as soon any verifiable data doesn't fit. Find just one human skeleton inside the belly of a T-Rex of identical age and we're back to the drawing board. But I think it makes a whole lot of sense to hypothesize that the forces that created our bodies and minds (evolution) would create our behaviour too. Sure this could be wrong, but we can test it. How does evolution explain altruism? Mathematical/game theory models can explain how it could develop. Also, we have measured physiological responses to altruism behaviour in both humans and animals and neural reward pathways get activated almost universally (not across all species of course, but within). You (Dan) wrote " though this would need to be tested and not merely proclaimed, no?" Well yes indeed!! It's the Evolutionary Biologists that are hypothesizing and testing, while Rand did the 'merely' proclaiming. That's the definition of altruism inside biology -- though it's not too far from Rand's view of it. Regarding evolutionary theory, I was talking more specifically about evolutionary psychology. What I've seen in that field is much more heat than light. And the view that science self-corrects is not necessarily true. Incorrect theories sometimes have staying power. In fact, to me, from my studies, much evolutionary psychology just looks like warmed over sociobiology. Of course, the jury's still out.

GS, What are you envisaging - Utopia? Anyway, entering evolution and genetics into ethical debates is pointless, since they need huge time-frames to 'take.' In the meantime, Man is what he is, and can best move forward individually,and by volition. Co-operation is not the opposite of competition. The trader principle - trade of thoughts and, yes, emotions - is unsurpassed for its benefits to mankind, and the individual. It's the advocacy of altruism that does all the damage, politically, socially and psychologically. To hell with duty, or the expectation of it. Tony I agree about being cautious about "entering evolution and genetics into ethical debates" on ethics, morality, and politics. People tend to draw simple conclusions and take rather shakey positions -- and the science isn't settled. That said, though, evolution or genetic change don't take all that long to happen -- and there's no set rate. In fact, some recent studies seem to show genes taking and spreading in human populations on the order of maybe hundreds or thousands of years. Yes, this is still long by the standard of an individual life and I doubt someone is going to make many ethical choices based on when and where the blond hair gene or such evolved. In many cases, this stuff is simply not germane to discussions of ethics and the like. However, I think the others who were invoking it were not so much worried about what rate evolution moves, but rather at the results -- the particular results of importance being just what sorts of behavior are wired into humans. I think that can and should be discussed, but I would be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from this. (In fact, to me, history and biography should also be entered into the discussion. Both have as much to offer in terms of insight -- though they, too, must be used judiciously.)