basimpson22

This doesnt seem very objective. This seems like a blind defense of ones concept of objectivism. "by what method have you observed this thing you call "social intuition"." Isn't social intuition a tad bit self explanatory. Well, depends on how one defines intuition I suppose. Off the cuff I would define it as subconscious reasoning or the ability to reason without applying conscious thought or deduction. In that case, yes, it's self explanatory. You say "objectivism is merely a tool. Its value is that it allows one to explain what they know to exist. In doing so it reveals the level of development of their intelligence." Well, I disagree with that statement. An extreme example would be an autistic child. Many of them are extremely gifted intellectually yet they may not possess the ability to explain their thought process to others. I would also encourage you to read BLINK. It talks about intuition and going with your gut feeling. There are a many number of people who can make decisions or observations that are inexplicable. In the book is an example of a tennis coach who knows as a player strikes a ball if it will be a fault I think over 90% of the time. It could've been a higher percentage but i think you see my point. You ask what permits him to make that claim. Well, what permits you to ask him that question? What are your credentials? Are you a certified objectivist? Did Ayn Rand annoint you herself? One more thing. I agree with the statement that "Objectivism is merely a tool". Yes, it is merely a tool, not a way of life.

Very interesting topic. To Robert/Baal: what do you mean that by this statement? "all we have of other people is their external manifestation." Our minds are very accessible, especially through facial expressions, body language, etc. You could say that our bodies manifest what our mind is thinking. So when you say that all we have of other people is their external manifestation I am able to see where you are coming from. I encourage you to look up videos on the study of facial expressions, or you could read BLINK. This book goes into detail about being able to immediately know one's emotions through examining which combination of facial muscles are activated. Although the research was done in a 'deductive' manner (an objective process), i believe i would also be correct in saying that people have a natural intuition when it comes to reading people's facial expressions. So you say "all" we have of other people is their external manifestations well i would say peoples' external manifestations present us with a very generous amount of insight.

I love posts like this. Nothing could be more revelatory or clarifying. With some people you wonder whether they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Posts like these put such concerns to rest permanently. Lol! This post was intended to stir the pot up a bit and hopefully raise a few peoples' blood pressure. I knew people would be aghast by it. Anyways, Below I am posting a somewhat lengthy video. This video goes into length about the plane's flight path. Its very interesting. I hope people will take the time to watch. Its about the length of the average movie. There are so many good points brought forward in this video. They even address the Purdue study. And the farther you get into the video the more interesting it gets. Pls Pls watch. Starting between 25-30 mins are two eyewitness accounts by officers of the law. This is very convincing in my opinion.

Hard to believe that mental programming by the state dates back prior to your adolescence. You may as well believe that the U.S. Government is ordained by God. There's no arguing with people like you.

And no, I don't possess the truth. The truth can be revealed through use of the scientific method that you, as a self-proclaimed Objectivist, pretend to uphold.

what did you try? To impose your opinion of how the pentagon attack happened with a single, and blatantly biased video? Yes, I suppose you tried.

where is the fuselage, the wings, the tail? Did the plane completely burn up? Why were surveillance videos confiscated?

I would suggest that you see William's post number 69. Post #35 and 47 are also generally relevant and then you can retract you statement. Yeah I'm sure 9/11 myths debunked will present empirical evidence to the contrary. I will not retract my statement. Proving that the towers fell under their own weight or that the pentagon was hit by a plane is like proving the fallacies of the Bible. Many people attempt it and bring forth seemingly logical evidence but the truth remains the same.

I don't even know how i ended up in this forum but thank goodness I did. That was extremely inspiring. Everyday on this website, I find inspirational as well as challenging topics. Today's inspiration was this idea coming to my conscious, and that is that the idealists, or for my specific case, the christian is taught to see death as an answer to all of life's problems and the atheist or objective sees the contradiction in this view and seeks to take full advantage of this life. I've come across this idea also in several different forums and it has culminated here. Thank you, Paul, for sharing this.

To clear up the Pentagon attack, it was hit by a missile. Not sure why this forum is 5 pages long. The Pentagon was hit by a missile. That should be the end of the story.

I am about to go into work so I haven't had time to go through all the posts in the forum. But has anyone looked at AE911truth.org? An architect, Richard Gage, argues the viability of the towers being brought down by controlled demolition. Also, I hope you're all well informed about World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7). Its the third building that fell that day. It fell later in the day around 5pm. There was little news coverage on WTC 7.

Awesome. Accounting's a good one. I got a huge grin when I read "Its disappointing that accounting barely even touches linear algebra." I'm known here at the U for wanting more rigorous math in our engineering courses (in a second-year engineering class we were still being taught basic frickin' algebra and systems of linear equations... seriously!). Applying math to solve (or not even solve, just gain information about) problems enriches everything. You have to strictly define abstract quantities and their relationships... it makes you think! How the hell can you avoid math in accounting or engineering?! Let me know if you figure out some neat mathematical method of solving an accounting problem, or if you'd like to discuss an idea of such a method. And if I were you I'd do some reading about numerical analysis (unless you already have). It'll blow your mind when you figure out the stuff you can solve with some fairly simple methods. I'm in Chemical Engineering. Although my interests/hobbies are computational fluid dynamics and chemical reaction simulation, so I'm kind of a half-chemical-half-mechanical guy. Yeah, that argument has a lot of implications. Here's my suggestion for dealing with it (I do this a lot): create a word/notepad document for ranting. Type up your rant, and don't leave anything in your head (it's the build-up that kills the mind). Then go do some accounting/linear algebra or something you enjoy (fluid dynamics and basketball are my favorites here ). If you want to continue associating with the minister, or at least talking philosophy with him (I have plenty of good friends that are mormons, we just stick away from philosophy and get along great), then I would ask him if he is happy. And then ask him to define happiness. Definitions will kill so many arguments of people like this. These guys can be effective in argument only if the fundamentals of the argument are loosely defined or just plain undefined. And in my experience, christians/mormons are notorious for not defining happiness (and love), despite using them extensively. Mike Well, at Tennessee Tech, linear algebra was remedial for the engineering program. Calculus I is a Freshmasn first semester class. We were required to take Numerical Analysis (which included an introduction to MATLAB) sophomore year. We learned about using iterations to solve complex problems. Most of it I can't remember though. Thanks for the idea of the ranting notepad. I'll definitely use that. I do love me some basketball for sure. But I'm not sure about doing numerical analysis in my freetime. I should probably get back into calculus. I really did enjoy calculus. I do plan on associating with the minister. I just have to prepare myself better. I am often at a loss for words. I've been presented with some excellent arguments by you and others in this forum. I'll condense the good stuff in a word document and print it off.

I'm shocked. I had no idea that so many people on this site had personal encounters with Ayn Rand. This is exciting.

One could call this the "argument from helplessness" which arbitrarily posits some prime mover. Problem is, it solves nothing, but only pushes the "causal chain" one step further back. It looks like even six-year-olds can grasp this, for it was a six-year-old kid who once asked me: "If God made the world, then who made God?" That a god "always was", or was self-created or whatever else, is as inexplicable as the physcical singularity necessary for the Big Bang to have occurred. Now you can apply the principle of Occam's razor which says that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity (Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate). More later. Continued: Occam's razor means that if the introduction of an additional element is not necessary for solving an issue, the element can be discarded as irrelevant. When Napoleon asked Laplace which role God played in his scientific theory, Laplace answered: "I don't need a god for my hypothesis." But if a god were scientifically necessary to act as a "force" here, then why are many astrophysicists atheists? This allows the inference that there must be something wrong with your minister's theory. As you said, there is no scientific basis whatsoever to assume any afterlife. Whenever theists get on epistemological terrain, their unsubstantiated premises will drown in quicksand there fast. That's why it is always a good move to argue with theists from an epistemological standpoint, because the theists have nothing at all to counter there. That's why all attempts at "proving" the existence of a god had to fail. Again, you minister is completely wrong in assuming that "going Christian" is any safeguard. This is a situation where you can argumentatively remain in the theist's terrain and confront them with the contradictions between the faith systems themselves. You could reply to the minister: "I'm afraid you are not safe at all. For suppose it is not the Christian god who rules, but some other god, a god who may be irate at those who did believe in him, then your Christian faith may even contribute to your eternal damnation by this other god. Do you really want to run that high a risk?" Arguing like that is also another epistemological attack on faith, for of course no believer can be certain that what he believes is true, despite all the dogmatic faiths proclaiming the contrary. That's why doubt is often considered as sin in dogmatic religions. For the religious dogmatists are well aware of epistemological weakness of their systems, and they know that doubt can finally lead to the abandonment of the faith. In addition, you can argue that with such an erratic, unjust type as the Biblical god, even if you are Christian, you are not safe. George H. Smith has pointed this out in all radicaltiy in his "Smith's wager": The complete article will give you a lot of 'fodder' for your argumentation from an atheistic standpoint. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/george_smith/defending.html This unpredictable, partial, unjust, tyrannical god of the Bible was clearly modeled after the Oriental potentates the deprived desert nomads of those past times had been familiar with. In your place, I would print out the article, give the minister a copy and suggest that he goes through it with you in detail. Tell him you want to do that, and then wait for the reaction. I'll bet hell will freeze over before he agrees to that. Instead he will try to wriggle out, using some lame exuses. One can get a pretty good picture, yes. It was an intentional diversion. The reason being that he dit not want to enter a terrain where potential danger for his faith lurks. One has to be more precise here. Connecting the discussion of biological "design" with moral ideas is mixing up epistemology with ethics. As an Objectivist, you are indeed in weak position here. Since Objectivism shares the same premise of a unversal moral code, you can't attack the misiter's premise as fallacious without at the same time collapsing your own premise. All you can do is to try to convice him that Objectivism's moral code is the "true, objective" one, but this does not erase the evident problem all advocates of objective morality have: each proclaims their moral code to be objective, but the moral codes themselves quite obviously vary. So we have got a contradiction there. How to deal with it? Imo the idea of objective morality is a fallacy. Pantheism is incompatible with Objectivism because Objectivism rejects any form of faith in transcendence as irrational. Again, your minister makes a comletly unsubstantiated argument. Moral codes exist because we are group beings and cannot not survive without rules. How the rules look like is another story altogher. Moral codes are subject to evolvement and permanent change. But if your minister absolutely wants to argue from desgin, tell him that what one can observe is that the world sems to be "designed" as one big restaurant (as Woody Allen put it) where living beings can only exist by killing other life, and where e. g. so-called parasites are perfectly well equipped by nature for their job. The intelligence of a biological programme and the idea of a "benevolent" universe clearly do not match. In fact most of what one can observe in nature collapses any idea of a benevolent creator. It looks like rationality is not your minister's long suit. Notice how he again inserts moral ideas ("serve our creator") into a mere issue of an organism's successful adaptation to biological survival. Bleak prospects for any religious concepts of the end of the world where on a Final Judgement Day the dead will rise from their graves. For there won't exist any graves anymore from which any dead could rise. Wow! Thank you so much for your time. I've been busy this weekend and this is the first chance i've had to look at the forum. I like the part about they cruel and unjust God. I grew up in church and through middle school we went through the Old Testament. Even then I could see that God was unjust. I remember the story of the ark of the covenant where anyone who touched it would die immediately. And also, I believe if it was allowed to touch the ground it would be punishable by death as well. Well, they were carrying it on the back of a donkey and it started to fall so a guy tried to save it from touching the ground but he broke the first rule and POOF! he died. What the hell GOD?! SMITE ME OH MIGHTY SMITER! Even children can see these holes. As a child I asked, why would god create man and then allow him to suffer. The explanation to the unexplainable was always that we would find out in the afterlife, that all knowledge would be made of access to us then. "Children don't worry, if you're good, death will be the answer to all your problems." LOL! I just thought of something else. He is a racist GOD (I mean obviously he only fancied Jews). Oh Lord....religion is definitely the great enemy of logic. Again, thank you so much for your reply. You were very considerate in your reply and its been so refreshing reading this. You put everything into excellent perspective.

I am majoring in accounting. Before accounting I had three years of engineering. Its disappointing that accounting barely even touches linear algebra. What about you? You bring up a good point. Do I deal with this fool?.... Well, the guy in the coffee shop was an easy no but I am friends with the minister. I actually care about the arrogant prick. I see a man who is trapped by his religion. I doubt there is any turning back for him though. His entire adult life has been spent on his religion. He is obviously not happy. He is employed by a church of christ. Job security for him is in keeping his mouth shut and the occasional "I agree". I do wonder how Rand would look on Ministers and the way they make a living. To me these people are to be greatly pitied. Something else he said to me which was outrageous was "yeah, i've been in your position before but I have 13 years of studying and knowledge behind my decision to be a christian." Oh, so many implications in that statement. The biggest one probably being that he is a fool I should stay away from.

I'm not sure how you feel about using youtube as a reference but there are several interesting videos on octopus there

Maybe you are talking about the Octopus that opened the screwed on lid of a jar? Manipulation, but not really tool use. Our luck they only live two years and die when they reproduce. I actually don't remember the jar. But it was something to that effect. I think it was an octopus using various objects as cover or armor.

I get that one a lot. It's a screwy statement in that it allows him to switch his underlying argument. Following the statement, he'll defend two ideas interchangeably: (1) There is a moral code which is known intrinsically by all human beings. and (2) There is a correct moral code for all human beings (the idea of salvation being open to everybody). Obviously these are two very different ideas. Before you can argue against his initial statement, you need to ask him to clarify. And then you can deal with the clarified version that he gives you. Statement (1) has no merit (ask him to provide reasoning for it, rather than immediately trying to attack it). Statement (2) is correct, but it's not the christian moral code. It's that Objectivist one! Mike P.S. Where do you go to school? Thanks Mike. I go to Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN. We're considered apart of the Bible belt. And there's good reason for that. I was discussing the origin of the universe with a girl in a coffee shop and toward the end of the conversation this older gentleman chimed in, arguing her creationist theory. Quite frustrating. What is it he said.... he said that since it can be observed that so many cultures have a creation story that there must be some merit to the idea of there being a God. Something to that affect. I just didn't say anything to him.

I enjoy that "there has to be", btw. The simple version of an argument to the minister might be that there were a trillion, trillion possible outcomes from the BB onwards, but the one we know about was the one we got here and now; some entities we've named rational animals questioning themselves, inventing a deity, etc. Literally, the best of all possible worlds. (But we better watch out for those clever calimari.) Tony They truly are clever. I saw a documentary on them once and it showed how they were one of few of the animals in the animal kingdom to use tools. I do believe they are highly intelligent. Lol, clever calimari

Thanks. I just loved to see that you guys had a uniformity in your responses. You took care of the question real fast. Yeah, objectivists can have their leisure just like anyone else. And as you said, the mind is a very important thing to exercise. I just love that you guys didn't have anything confusing to say. It was direct and also relieving. Objectively, most people aren't going to be as productive as Dagny or Henry. These are fictional heroines and their abilities are a tad bit exaggerated. Its just not logical to hold oneself to that standard. Anyways, thanks again.

I'm really loving these responses. Thanks everyone

that's a good point in of itself but the minister was just using that as an example of the many complex systems we find in nature. What you said is logically sound and he wouldn't disagree with that nor do I. Eagles see at much greater distances than us human but what I'm interested in is a logical argument that will challenge his beliefs. I know there is one out there. There has to be

How much time did the likes of a Henry Rearden or Dagny Taggart spend thinking on the metaphysical? I believe they were written as people who experienced life rather people who spent the majority of their time observing it. These two were constantly working and working toward a goal, whether it was to perfect a superior formula of steel, save Taggart Railroad, complete the John Galt Line. They were always working on something. Should the real-life objectivist be more like Dagny and Henry, always working, always acting instead of spending hours each day reflecting and contemplating. Shouldn't the objectivist see this as idle behavior and shouldn't the objectivist strive to do what is productive. And if this were true shouldn't this forum be abolished, lol

Ahhhhhh.... a refreshing beverage of effervescent logic.

God is not my premise. When I mentioned God I was referring to the Christians concept of God as all-knowing, all-seeing, all-present, all-powerful and eternal. Doesn't that fit the definition of a pantheist type God anyways? What this topic was intended for was to argue the ministers positions and no one seems to be able to give any advise pertaining to that. Why would you even suggest becoming pantheist? Doesn't that go against objectivism since pantheism is a speculative concept.