dsaum

The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is not my recommendation but Jack Wheeler's. Note, it's in 11 volumes.

--Brant

BTW: I have the full set, and would like to pass them on to another reader. You pay shipping. A fun read!

USPS book rate?

--Brant

Sure. I am guessing something like 30lb, but I will weigh them together in a box. Message me if you want to do the deal.

The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is not my recommendation but Jack Wheeler's. Note, it's in 11 volumes.

--Brant

BTW: I have the full set, and would like to pass them on to another reader. You pay shipping. A fun read!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/objecting-to-the-season-of-giving/2014/12/19/f2ecb6a4-7fdc-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html

Harriman comments on state of objectivist movement:

http://www.atlassociety.org/as/objectivist-movement-today

Written by Robert W. Service. Sung by Hank Snow.

http://youtu.be/wvvOdisIIHw

The last time I heard this poem was when my buddy and I read it aloud while standing on the "marge of Lake LeBarge" during a 2002 Yukon canoe trip from Whitehorse to Dawson City to prospect for gold! The 30 miles of Lake LeBarge is more dangerous than the 400 miles of Yukon river because it can get choppy quickly and swamp your canoe in its icy waters.

Israel's real purpose in Gaza operation? To kill Arabs

Since the first Lebanon war over 30 years ago, Israel's main strategy has been killing Arabs. The current atrocious war in Gaza is no different.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.604653

The way to make ________ "vanish" from the Objectivist "scene" is to stop talking and writing about him. The only Objectivist commonality with science is, passively, the basic axiomatic positions. If any--even Objectivists--try to add to that it's neither science nor Objectivism, which is already pretty much ruined for public consumption and become properly only a private matter.

--Brant

Harriman's starting point is that philosophy is prior to physics and so physics depends on it. Physicist who think they are rejecting philosophy as worthless are setting themselves up for accepting some unexamined philosophy. Harriman says that if you read the history of physics, you can generally see exactly why philosophy they assume, and that has a big impact on how they interpret or develop their theories. His lectures spend a lot of time with "horror file" quotes from various physicists.

I think Harriman has a point, but he does not seem to have studied Bacon, the first philosopher of science who established the baseline philosophy for science. That baseline allowed scientists to ignore a lot of bad philosophy, so they are not as helpless as Harriman seems to believe.

In general I give Harriman an A for asking some interesting questions, and an F for his polemical answers.

Also, I want to mention Dan Edge. He blasted Harriman like you do, but part of that, also, is because he believes in the man-made global warming stuff. He asked people (see here on Facebook) to go to his blog (see here). That's where he extols the science behind global warming and said he spent 40 hours studying it, which is partly why he no longer considers himself to be an Objectivist.

I looked at Dan Edge's blog and find some problems.

For instance, he begins by saying that Harriman rejects quantum theory. That is incorrect. Harriman says many times in his lectures that quantum theory equations are correct and that fact is well established by experiments, but many of the interpretations of those equations, e.g. Copenhagen Interpretation, are incorrect. Edge's broken link proving his thesis seems to be a quote from a blurb for one of Harriman's lectures, and this blub is probably not even a direct Harriman quote. All of this leads me to believe that Edge probably never listened to any of Harriman's lectures.

I think the root problem with Harriman's physics is that it is polemical and not objective.

Please excuse, this is not an objectivist topic. I didn't know where else to post.

I've listened to Branden and Peikoff speak about definitions (Efficient thinking and Intro to logic course). Unfortunately neither quoted their sources. I'm looking for Aristotle's work on the rules for making valid definitions (such as: definitions must express fundamentality, no circularity, rule of negatives, equivalence, etc).

Unfortunately I cannot find it. Can anybody here help me out and point me to the sources?

Thanks a lot.

Philosopher Richard Robinson has several pages of interesting discussion about this topic in his book "Definition"

starting at page 140:

http://www.amazon.com/Definition-Richard-Robinson/dp/0198241607

You may be able to read this for free at

http://www.questia.com/library/1503699/definition

"There are are certain traditional "rules of definition", four or five or six in number, originally

collected from scattered remarks in Aristotle's Topics, and repeated with minor variations in

textbook after textbook or logic, down at least to the nineteen-thirties."

I bought the book yesterday on Amazon. I won't receive it until March 3 at the earliest.

That is close to two weeks. Why so long?

The delay may be due to a game that Amazon is playing with folks who self-publish but do not use the Amazon self-publishing arm Createspace.

It seems to be out of stock on Amazon today?

http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/0985640618

Wonder why there are no reviews on Amazon?

Wonder why there is no kindle version?

Wonder why it is not available for sale on Harry's email list site?

http://www.hblist.com/

I guess his marketing strategy is to make it hard to get.

PS: It seems to be available directly from Harry for $39.99 with FS.

http://www.how-we-know.com/

http://www.tofpublications.com/

But his web pages are rather hard to find with search engines due to lack of SEO.

Obviously God's punishment of Denver for dumping Tim Tebow!

A mathematician who worked with the physicist Richard Feynman proposed two primary categories of geniuses:

Snopes on Fukushima

http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp

http://www.johnmccaskey.com/joomla/index.php/blog/64-attacking-rand

I started mining bitcoins a couple of years ago with some used video cards that I picked up on craigslist. Unfortunately I did not work at it very diligently so I am not a bitcoin millionaire, yet.

The ASIC processors have recently taken over bitcoin mining and made my video cards obsolete, so I have switched my video cards over to litecoin mining, and I am generating about 1 litecoin per day.

This cool graphic of the real time bitcoin traffic shows the rise of Chinese transactions:

http://fiatleak.com/

The PBS science show Nova recently had a show about the medical benefits of fasting "Eat, Fast & Live Longer"at, Fast and Live Longer with Michael Mosley

I saw it and was impressed. Unfortunately it was only available for a month of free streaming.

http://www.pbs.org/program/michael-mosley/

http://video.pbs.org/video/2363162206/

The author and star of the show now has a book out covering fasting and related topics.

about the shows and the author

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/apr/11/guts-michael-mosley/

book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476734941/

The fasting show covered every other day fasting (eat anything you want on non-fast days), multi-day fasting, and one day a week fasting. I have done the one day a week water fasting and the show pretty much agreed with everything I knew from research and personal experience about the subject. I have not looked at the book, but I assume it covers most of what is in the shows. In the show, the author actually tries and comments on most of the fasting techniques one-by-one on camera.

Bitcoins jumped another $10 to $155 overnight.

Interesting serious article in Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/07/four-reasons-bitcoin-is-worth-studying/

A few of interesting links about bitcoins

Misean analysis is interesting but conclusion does not follow

http://mises.org/daily/6399/The-Moneyness-of-Bitcoins

Funny take on difficulty of buying and using bitcoins

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/04/my-bitcoin-mis-adventure.html

google trends for "bitcoins" show interesting global hot spots

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today%203-m&cmpt=date

Www.bitcoincard.org

I have recently been considering moving to NH and came across this. Talk about screwing the frn.

Events seem to have overtaken pyramining. Those of us who plodded along with bitcoin mining for years using Radeon video cards

despite the poor payback due to sub $10 coin value and energy/hardware costs, are now find ourselves sitting on a nice

profit due to the latest bitcoin price runup. As I write this the auction value of each bitcoin is around $143. See

https://mtgox.com/

The bitcoin mining algorithm makes mining more difficult as time goes on, moreover some clever folks have started building

ASIC processor machine that mines so fast that it will put us video card miners out of business in a few months. Right now my 3 video cards

running 24/7 take about a month to produce one bitcoin, as opposed to days a year ago.

For us miners, the big question may be when to cash out. The net value of the 11 million bitcoins already mined is about $1.5B

and if we assume that bitcoins must have a total value comparable to the dollar (~$10 trillion) in order to replace the dollar

as the world's currency, then each bitcoin's value has to increase by at least 1000x from todays seemingly high value. In my dreams!

It is important to keep in mind a recurring theme in Logical Leap, namely, that science, including physics, should be concerned with describing physical reality in terms of causal relationships. While not denying the practical value of mathematical formalisms, Harriman argues that physicists should seek a deeper level of understanding. His discussion of Ptolemy is significant in this context. In accord with standard histories of astronomy (e.g., those by Kuhn and Toulmin), Harriman criticizes Ptolemaic astronomy for its construction of mathematical and geometrical fictions that were designed to "save the appearances" by generating accurate predictions, while exhibiting little or no concern for the underlying physical reality.

The Large Hadron Collider is a ten billion dollar exercise in "concern for the underlying physical reality". See where the physicists have put the money and you know where their mouth is. As to "saving the appearances" the appearances (i.e. the phenomena) is really all we have. All physical observation of the very large, the very far, the very small, the very fast and the very energetic is by way of phenomena indirectly observed. To get to the "underlying physical reality" we have to drill down to Planck Length and Planck Time. Fifteen Orders of Magnitude to go and counting. And if (not likely) we get there we have no assurance that we have gone far enough. All we will have even at that small a scale is the phenomena.

The only first hand knowledge we have is direct immediate perception within the capabilities of human senses. Everything else is indirect and inferential. And all of our inferential material is theory laden as well out our direct perceptioln. Example: measuring a bookshelf with a yardstick or a tape measure is predicated on sufficient rigidity or sufficient inextensibility of the measuring instruments. And to verify that we rely on a theory of the mechanics of the material out of which the measuring stick is made. But how to we verify such theories. With measuring sticks. When we pick up a ruler Here to bring it There to make a measurement we presume the motion of the carry does not distort the measuring stick. How do we verify that we are not distorting. With another measuring stick (perhaps of a different type, such as a laser beam) whose nature is predicated on verification using measuring sticks. In effect, we are limited by a coherence notion of factual truth, not a correspondence notion.

All we can do in the long run is to build up coherent patterns of explanation which are mostly inferential. But that is not bad. It is good enough to get us computers that work, planes that fly and GPS systems that can locate us within ten feet of where we are.

Ba'al Chatzaf

There is an interesting logic to Harriman's hypothesis of the corruption of physics. Unfortunately his analysis is primarily available in audio form today. I have listened to a number of his lectures and I have found him to be a clear lecturer with a good grasp of physics and the history of physics. Here my attempt at "Harriman Physics 101" based on some rough quotes transcribed from Harriman's "The Philosophic Corruption of Physics" (TPCOP) 1998 audio lectures.

1. Harriman does not consider the myriad successes of physics as a refutation 0f his corruption hypothesis. So do not even try to refute him by listing them. His main claim is that we would be much better off if Kant had not derailed physics and caused physicists gave up trying to discover the causal basis of phenomena like relativity and QM:

"Why should you care whether physics today is irrational? How does it affect you?

I think it affects you in two ways. First, you know that physics is the foundation of technology. The discovery of fundamental truths in theoretical physics can have an enormous practical value. Such discoveries fueled the industrial revolution, which has made our lives twice as long and immeasurably more enjoyable. Irrationalities in physics will, in the long run, bring such progress to a halt and thereby adversely affect your life. Now, don’t ask me: if subatomic physics were rational, what life-promoting technology would come from it? I don’t know. But I do know that, in the long run, as physics goes, so goes technology. So, there’s a major value at stake here."

And do not ask him for any experimental evidence that supports his "corrupt physics" hypothesis. He argues that philosophy trumps physics, and philosophy does not require experiments.

2. What should physicists be doing according to Harriman?

In one of Harriman's Q/A he was asked what he thought about the new discoveries about the accelerating expansion of the universe. He replied that you should look at the primary data which consists of light from distant stars. He thinks that we do not have a satisfactory theory of light due to our lack of a causal understanding of QM and relativity, so we need to go back and correct these fields before we can even speculate on the topics like the expansion of the universe. So you can see that Harriman's view of what we should be doing in physics is rather limited. The rethinking of the causal basis of physics seems to be the highest priority activity of a Harriman physics.

One slight problem for Harriman's thesis is that Kant lived after Newton, so the presence of non causal action-at-a-distance in Newton's gravitational theory can not be blamed on Kant. Harriman's answer is that Newton said that he did not have any evidence for the causal basis of gravity, and that besides, he wrote a letter in which he said he considered action-at-a-distance to be nonsense. But after Kant, Harriman does not cut anyone any slack, so I guess he would not be satisfied if today's physicists followed Newton and said that "we did not know" the causal basis of relativity and QM. And Harriman never contemplates that nature may be constructed so that we can not have expeimental access to a causal basis for gravity, relativity and QM. Harriman does not spend much time contemplating alternative that would not fit in his tidy hypothesis of corruption based on Kant.

3. Polemics vs Objectivity

Unfortunately, Harriman's lectures lack even the pretense of objectivity. He is more interested in polemics, moralism, and name calling than a balanced argument based on facts. He begins TPCOP by calling those who disagree with his approach "hacks"

"Now, it’s true that many physicists today just use the equations without thinking about the fundamentals. But, that’s the attitude of a hack, not a serious scientist."

and he makes absurd generalization about physicists and ridicules them:

"I want to start by telling you about the historical development of quantum theory, as this history is told by physicists today. The so-called history that physicists believe is so absurd, that I’ve decided to present it to you as a fairy tale, which it is. Fairy tales are sometimes read to children at night until they go to sleep. Well, this fairy tale serves the same purpose. It has put physicists to sleep for the past seventy years."

And he often asserts that most all physicists are in full agreement with the most controversial positions:

"Physicists today, as I said, take the exact opposite approach; they look at those three assumptions and they say: identity – out, causality – out, number three – self-evident truism. They interpret these experiments that show violations in Bell’s theorem as proving once and for all that “reality has been refuted”; long live the void of nihilism, where contradictions exist and physical entities don’t".

No wonder there have been few attempts to analyse Harriman's arguments in the 10 years since he delivered these lectures. Why bother to refute someone whose stock-in-trade is abuse and hyperbolic argument? This situation is unfortunate since Harriman has interesting arguments that deserve careful analysis.

4. Harriman's Conclusion

We’ve seen the devastating effects of Kantian philosophy on physics. In 19th Century Germany, we saw physics swing from the Kantian mysticism of the Romantics to the Kantian empiricism of the Positivists. Both schools were based on Kant’s subjectivism and on his fundamental premise that reason cannot know reality. By the end of the 19th Century, a consensus had been reached. Physicists renounced the goal of understanding the physical world, and humbly accepted the job of describing the appearances. The immediate result was Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity, in which he rejected any physical explanation for the constant speed of light, and focused solely on the mathematical relations of the appearances. The final result was quantum theory, which, in the spirit of Kantian nihilism, explicitly rejected causality.

"The question I want to raise is: what is required to get physics back on track? And, of course, the obvious answer is: Objectivism. In the distant future, if and when we reach the stage where college graduates have all read and understood Leonard Peikoff’s book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, the science of physics will be put back on a rational foundation. At that point, physicists will shake their heads in amazement when they look back at 20th Century physics, which will be considered the most bizarre episode in the history of science. They will understand why it happened, but they will still find it difficult to believe that an entire century could have taken Kant’s ideas so seriously."

I am worried that a generation of Objectivists have attended courses where Harriman's views on the corruption of physics have hardly been contested, and now he intends to unleash them on the unsuspecting world as his next book.

I am sympathetic to the idea of a general theory of objectivity that unites physics, philosophy and mathematics; and Harriman is one of the few Objectivists writing on this topic, so I think it is important to try to understand his writing and lectures, but I think his polemical style and lack of objectivity is a fatal flaw that will damage Objectivism.

I believe in the Q&A following his lecture on why Kant is the author of the modern destruction of physics he said that he didn't get a doctorate because he couldn't tolerate the epistemology taught in grad school.

I just went to the trouble of looking it up and transcribing what he said, for accuracy's sake:

...in general, my area was theoretical particle physics. I got disillusioned in graduate school after going through the whole, uh, PhD qualifying process and so on, and uh, it was time for me write my dissertation, I’d completed all my course work, and I looked around at what theoretical particle physicists were doing, and they were just creating mathematical formulisms and any time you ask physical questions they, um, told you well that’s metaphysics we don’t talk about that. Um, so, ah, I ended up dropping out, and targeting nuclear bombs instead, for a while.

So I didn't recall it exactly right, though I was in the ballpark. The last part sounds like Bob K talking.

No shit!

I’m afraid that’s an oversimplified reading of the upcoming Theory of Alimentary Waves.

I seem to remember from the Q/A for Harriman's 1998 audio lectures "The Philosophic Corruption of Physics" that he said he was then in physics grad school in California (Claremont?) and he was trying to get the physics department there to allow him to use his historical analysis of how Kant corrupted physics as his PhD thesis. For some reason this did not work out as he expected. His dislike for modern physics is touched on in the last few pages of The "Logical Leap", but it will be the meat of his forthcoming "The Anti-Copernican Revolution". I bet this will earn him a high score on the Physics Crackpot Index: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

The text of the ARI 'guidance' teleconference announcement is now on field.

What makes this interesting is the Q and A. -- I wonder how forthright will be the questions put to the Kremlin representatives. The feebleness of the email itself portends an equally feeble teaching moment on November 8. But who knows, there is a fierce head of steam built up among ARI supporters, and maybe everyone on the line will get with reality and realize that Uncle Grandpa needs a talking to and his handlers and toadies need to give their fucking heads a shake.

From SOLO via Boaz the Boor:

Dear OAC Students,

We're looking forward to starting up the OAC year in a few weeks, and to seeing all of you in class soon. In the meantime, we want to invite you to a phone meeting we're planning to have with the entire OAC student body (this is the first such meeting, I believe.)

For those of you who spend time on Facebook, you've likely become aware of various discussions on the internet by some Objectivists regarding Dr. John McCaskey's recent resignation from ARI's Board of Directors. We understand that some of you have questions, and more importantly, that some of you are genuinely struggling with how one should respond based on the limited public information and subsequent "chatter". We therefore want to meet with all of you to discuss both why Dr. McCaskey's resignation is a private matter, and more urgently, to provide some guidance on how to objectively think and communicate about a matter that appears as difficult to understand as this one does. [!!!]

Because of our travel schedules, the meeting will be a few weeks away on Monday, November 8, 2010 at 2 p.m. PT. This meeting will take place via the OAC bridge line (dial in to 1-800-xxx-xxxx, enter Guest Access Code xxx#.) Yaron Brook, Onkar Ghate and I will speak with all of you then--and we're looking forward to it. Because there will likely be many people on the line, it may be hard for us to take questions live so I'm asking you to send any questions you might have to oac@aynrand.org by November 1, 2010. Your questions will help us frame the discussion so we encourage you to send those in.

(Please note, this phone call is for registered OAC students only. The phone access information is confidential and should not be shared or distributed.)

Have a good few weeks, and we'll "see" you all in class soon.

Best regards,

--[name omitted]

Oh to be a fly-on-the wall for today's conference call!

The Ayn Rand Bookstore sells CD lectures by McCaskey on Francis Bacon:

http://www.aynrandbookstore2.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CM62M

I fancied myself as somewhat of an expert on Bacon, but after

listening to these comprehensive lectures I found that McCaskey

taught me a lot more. Highly recommended!

Interests: gazing into the abyss, fighting monsters from the id

Dr. Morbius,

I figure they could use your help over at ARI around about now;

their "monsters from the id" are getting seriously out-of-hand...

("The Forbidden Planet" is one of my old favorites too.

Watch out for that "brain boost"! It's a doozy!)

Mike

I just got a blu-ray player and I have ordered the Netflix blu-ray version "Forbidden Planet".

Be still my heart!