Dan Haggerty

I see (OK hear) music as a recreation of reality, and a very unique one at that. The artist recreates emotional reactions in the listener, after which it back feeds to the values/attributes unique to that individual that inspires the emotional response in him.

For example, a novelist writes a heroic story and when you read it you experience heroism and triumph at the end of that story. A musician recreates heroism and triumph in audible form and when you hear it you experience that emotion but then fill in the story/values that invoked that heroism and triumph in you. This makes music a very personal art form since it allows you to experience your reaction first then fill in the cause that is unique to you.

The cause argument is a cyclical argument set to an infinity loop since you never get to a root cause of anything. What caused the universe? God(s)… What caused God? Uh-Oh… either a higher power than God did (you’ve marginalized your subject) or you think God is the end of the line so you have defeated your method of argument.

Your best bet is to go with the second since God could also be identified as an atheist. He doesn’t believe in a higher power either.

Actually, I was trying to get you to focus. You are on the edge of answering your own question if you stop and think about it.

..

Explore what I did there, then contrast with how you did it, and ask yourself the difference.

Focus, dear Watson. Focus.

Note to self - I'm more cynical when I drink.

Dan:

A cynic is a humanist with experience.

Adam

Not according to Wilde. I bet Dan knew the value of that bottle, but was regretting the price of it when it was empty. However, you can at least get 10 cents on an empty.

Nah… When I drink it is casually and for quality while enjoying some good music, not to pound it out like cheap whiskey! I have plenty left.

I’m saving the rest for election night…

Great example.

Ah yes, the rush to avoid our state "Emergency Managers" as Detroit continues to implode on itself. Sadly they needed Bing as a responsible known face due to the corruption and incompetence of previous Mayors. Their only saving grace is that Flint has passed them in unemployment and crime. You know it's bad when I have former ambulance drivers from Flint, who drive over a hundred miles to be there, in my class to become a truck driver because it pays better and is safer. Evidently the gang bangers have devolved to the point they will shoot at the one person on the street that will save their ass.

Perhaps we can get Ohio to take Detroit from us. We gave them Toledo back in the day and that worked out well for Wolverine State so maybe we can give them the Thumb and call it a day.

Robert, thanks for the reply

If I may, and I’m at home enjoying some chilled Grey Goose so take this as open musing, but it sounds like the quoted passages are far more indicative of Peikoff monument building.

Without saying so Peikoff just outlined how we are supposed to consider his work as the next step of Rand’s work in epistemology, in one hand acknowledging her work as the blueprint while making her irrelevant to our evaluation of his “new integrations to metaphysics and epistemology”. He rides her framework while imploring us to ignore their presence while evaluating the whole. Then again that could backfire on him too.

How does one circumvent the locked doors of Objectivism as a closed system while managing to allow one’s work to become part of Rand’s? To be considered a great philosopher next to Rand? I think I need another drink.

Note to self - I'm more cynical when I drink.

Dan,

If you feel a need to catch up on the philosophical side of Objectivism, my recommendation is to start with The Vision of Ayn Rand, then read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, then maybe Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

No need for The DIM Hypothesis. Or for The Logical Leap. If you have an appetite for more technical epistemology, try The Evidence of the Senses.

Robert Campbell

I have The Vision of Ayn Rand. I had the opportunity to get it personalized from NB when I met him briefly at Freedom Fest (three years ago now I think?) and (more importantly) had the chance to thank him for his work on self-esteem. I cherish that book a lot.

I was looking for something more technical and challenging, and it sounds like The Evidence of the Senses fits the bill so I'll dig into that next.

Thank you very much.

Michigan is obviously biased in this poll since most of the 7-11s outside of Detroit have gone out of business.

One of many reasons we are trying to sell it back to the Indians.

So, a question that comes to mind is:

Could there be a God within the universe, within existence?

I'm growing a beard, then I'll getcha!

--Brant

I need to learn the power of the beard. I've been doing something wrong all these years!

What I deduce about the Western Gods is exactly the kind of thing that confuses me - For example the fact the identity of these Gods assumes such details as they have an existence that is everywhere at once (yet non-present and unaccounted so they are also nowhere at all). Their consciousness extends into all things and all people since it is everywhere yet unidentified and not interacted with so they are seemingly nowhere at all by any account. In fact, they don't have an identity since mathematically the concept of infinite is not a real number; it’s just a mathematical construct for equations.

By deduction I come to a dead end since there are no attributes of an entity to review and no entity to examine for attributes to identity. As I see it, the Western God(s) contradict the Law of Identity since there is literally nothing to deduce from.

Thus, I need information to actually hang a discussion on. Perhaps when I return from this weekend I’ll look up those links more, or any input is welcome.

Dan,

As I understand it, Omnipresence is to be understood (at least According to Aquinas) in an analogical sense.

But how he [God] is in other things created by him may be considered from human affairs. A king, for example, is said to be in the whole kingdom by his power, although he is not everywhere present. Again, a thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subject to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be present to anyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in every part of the house. Lastly, a thing is said to be substantially or essentially in that place in which its substance is. [Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy]

In The Last Superstition, Feser says that we might usefully distinguish five gradations in one's conception of God:

1. God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.

2. God doesn't have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours. He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space. Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations. He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to "go away" from it, but he neverthe less may decide to intervene it its operations from time to time.

3. God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to "go away"; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is "personal" insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally "a person" in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

4. God as somewho who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.

5. God as Aquinas knows Him now, i.e. as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.

Further gradations between some of these are no doubt possible, but this will suffice for our purposes. Obviously, each grade represents an advance in sophistication over the previous one. Grade 1 represents a child's conception of God, and perhaps that of some uneducated adults. Grade 2 represents the conception of some educated religious believers, of popular apologetics, and of arguments like Paley's "Design argument". Grade 3 is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers. Grades 4 and 5 are attainable only if granted supernaturally by God.

There's an excellent blog post by Feser which you might find useful, I still think it's better to read the book, in which he devotes a lot of pages to laying the groundwork, as it were, to a proper understanding of Aquinas' "Five Ways". There's also a link to a utube lecture which covers the same ground.

To understand the arguments of classical natural theology -- arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways, for example -- you need to understand the difference between empirical science on the one hand and metaphysics and the philosophy of nature on the other. And you need to understand how the attitudes that classical philosophers (Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, Thomists and other Scholastics) take toward these three fields of study differs from the attitudes common among modern philosophers (whether early modern philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Co., or the average contemporary academic philosopher, who has -- often unreflectively -- inherited his basic philosophical assumptions from the early moderns). For the arguments in question are grounded in the philosophy of nature (and in some cases in metaphysics) and not in natural science; and they are grounded in a classical rather than modern philosophical understanding of the three fields and their relationship to one another.

That is interesting and I might add it has more artistic merit, but the practical side of me is simply more bewildered.

If “omniscient” does not mean all present but simple ownership in existence, then God(s) are actually just more advanced beings that have property in existence much like we do our homes. This would render them not a God but a later day version of us much like primitive man might view us today with our technology. Interesting idea but unfortunately it makes the concept of divinity moot since such a being is not a creator as the theory of the divine goes but a participant in reality.

As for the 5 choices, I get the degrees in understanding and it is a good testimony to the evolution in thinking, but the irony is the child’s image of the old man with the white beard is the only one that has an Identity. The more advanced versions systematically remove the measurements to render God a concept of no discernible Identity since He literally has no measurements. By the time we get to level 5 we are told we can never Identify him in this existence.

No Identity? Identify something outside of Existence? That violates metaphysical facts of nature all over the place.

I think I need another drink.

You sir are a good man. I’m having another on doctor’s orders.

Dan Haggerty names an interest group here at OL: those who are not spelunking, who have a phobia of Objectivish caves, who await the return of those who have gone deep and carried strong flashlights.

I agree although for me it’s not really a phobia so much as a critical period of reevaluation.

I read Atlas Shrugged around 1990 and spent 15 of those years learning more and more through reading and some lecture tapes just fine, but never really knew what a mess the so-called leadership made of Objectivism. At Freedom Fest around 6-7 years ago I bumped into the Branden’s books then got the 411 from the guy working the book booth. That was a moment. Another is the last year when I finally made the jump online to really get a shock at the state of things.

The bottom line is the fact I have a lot of books waiting to be read and I have little desire to add to them right now if the book proves to be nothing more than an ironic demonstration of M1 in action.

Robert, thanks for the reply

If I may, and I’m at home enjoying some chilled Grey Goose so take this as open musing, but it sounds like the quoted passages are far more indicative of Peikoff monument building.

Without saying so Peikoff just outlined how we are supposed to consider his work as the next step of Rand’s work in epistemology, in one hand acknowledging her work as the blueprint while making her irrelevant to our evaluation of his “new integrations to metaphysics and epistemology”. He rides her framework while imploring us to ignore their presence while evaluating the whole. Then again that could backfire on him too.

How does one circumvent the locked doors of Objectivism as a closed system while managing to allow one’s work to become part of Rand’s? To be considered a great philosopher next to Rand? I think I need another drink.

What this seems to be coming down to real fast for those of us no spelunking this book as an issue of academic integrity is if it is still worth the time to read. Since the sources identified and the conclusions drawn look poor for me it is going to lie in the actually base concept of the DIM method at all.

So if I could ask a a question for those of you reading this is: Is the concept of Integration, Mis-Integration, and Disintegration sound as an idea into itself and how well is it actually developed by Peikoff. OK, that is two questions. 1) Is the DIM concept valid or at least interesting as a theory, and 2) How well does LP actually succeed at doing this?

Davy,

I'd like to offer a proper rebuttal but I'm lacking enough information to do so. For example, which God(s) are you suggesting are real?

Sadly the gentlemen you quoted left that detail out, and with over 3000+ God(s) created by various cultures in earth's history it would help greatly if you could narrow down with one(s) we are discussing here. You did briefly touch upon Aristotle who left it ambiguous (An unidentified Prime Mover) or Aquinas who justified the Christian God(s) but I get the implication that you are following their methodology, not necessarily their conclusion.

Further, if you are disputing O'ist metaphysics is it in the fact you think it mis-categorizes something? It is inadequate in what it covers? You have an issue with the Law of Identity?

Hi Dan,

The Prime Mover argument entails monotheism. I won't go into details, but having got to that point, you can go on to deduce other things about what such a being would have to be like, and it turns out that it would have to be like the God of traditional Western religious belief.

Regarding O'ist Metaphysics, it's not so much that I'm disputing anything, more that I find it a bit vague. I've no problem with the law of identitiy per se, it's the relation of it to cause and effect which I find fuzzy. Sorry, I know that's vague, I'm re-reading parts of OPAR and ITOE and I'll get back to you with something more concrete, hopefully.

That's OK; by narrowing the field of Gods down to Western traditions we have narrowed the field greatly to several Gods. Although Islam isn't exactly Western so I'm not sure if you are including it but I think that is a moot point for this.

What I deduce about the Western Gods is exactly the kind of thing that confuses me - For example the fact the identity of these Gods assumes such details as they have an existence that is everywhere at once (yet non-present and unaccounted so they are also nowhere at all). Their consciousness extends into all things and all people since it is everywhere yet unidentified and not interacted with so they are seemingly nowhere at all by any account. In fact, they don't have an identity since mathematically the concept of infinite is not a real number; it’s just a mathematical construct for equations.

By deduction I come to a dead end since there are no attributes of an entity to review and no entity to examine for attributes to identity. As I see it, the Western God(s) contradict the Law of Identity since there is literally nothing to deduce from.

Thus, I need information to actually hang a discussion on. Perhaps when I return from this weekend I’ll look up those links more, or any input is welcome.

Davy,

I'd like to offer a proper rebuttal but I'm lacking enough information to do so. For example, which God(s) are you suggesting are real?

Sadly the gentlemen you quoted left that detail out, and with over 3000+ God(s) created by various cultures in earth's history it would help greatly if you could narrow down with one(s) we are discussing here. You did briefly touch upon Aristotle who left it ambiguous (An unidentified Prime Mover) or Aquinas who justified the Christian God(s) but I get the implication that you are following their methodology, not necessarily their conclusion.

Further, if you are disputing O'ist metaphysics is it in the fact you think it mis-categorizes something? It is inadequate in what it covers? You have an issue with the Law of Identity?

The Hindus have 6 billion gods. When they have named them all the world will end.

See -The Nine Billion Names of God- by Arthur C. Clarke.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I thought they were akin to spirits of those who really, really behaved themselves?

Ah well, now this just confuses things even more. We have 6,000,003,001+ Gods to consider, more Gods then people!

Davy,

I'd like to offer a proper rebuttal but I'm lacking enough information to do so. For example, which God(s) are you suggesting are real?

Sadly the gentlemen you quoted left that detail out, and with over 3000+ God(s) created by various cultures in earth's history it would help greatly if you could narrow down with one(s) we are discussing here. You did briefly touch upon Aristotle who left it ambiguous (An unidentified Prime Mover) or Aquinas who justified the Christian God(s) but I get the implication that you are following their methodology, not necessarily their conclusion.

Further, if you are disputing O'ist metaphysics is it in the fact you think it mis-categorizes something? It is inadequate in what it covers? You have an issue with the Law of Identity?

Not that it was strictly a sitcom but I always had a soft spot for the show M.A.S.H. The character humor when it got rolling was great.

I love Rush and everything from their Progressive era is top notch. The 80's is pretty good too outside of Signals (which is great), Grace Under Pressure (excellent), and certainly Moving Pictures which I'd easily put on a list of Top 25 albums of all time.

The fact this band is not in the so called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (along with Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, and Kiss) is why that institution fails at life.

I did some dictionary checking for posterity and this is what I found:

par·a·site

1 : a person who exploits the hospitality of the rich and earns welcome by flattery

2 : an organism living in, with, or on another organism in parasitism

3 : something that resembles a biological parasite in dependence on something else for existence or support without making a useful or adequate return

Outside of being a perfect fit for the current occupants of the White House (gratuitous slam for Selene), only number two comes close until you look up the definition of parasitism. It also fails since it usually involves one creature gaining a benefit while harming its host.

Either way, this is still moot. Let’s be honest, if you walk up a pregnant lady, call her a host and ask how the little parasite is doing, you’re going to need the help of a good proctologist to clean your teeth. Explore that reaction and you’ll find out why the relationship between unborn baby and mother is more complex.

I can't help but love your blunt passion for this.

Obama needs to be fired and the door does need to hit him in the ass on the way out.

Are we really having a conversation about babies as if they were a leech and mothers as if they were a host creature? I mean, really?

Dan,

It looks like it.

This is Objectivism for Martians, not a philosophy for living on earth.

(This is what happens when a person deduces reality from principles and memorizes catechism lessons--then wants to preach--rather than induces principles from reality first-hand. I know because I used to do that stuff all the time. That's why I'm not all over the kid. Give him some time. Reality will teach him some hard lessons if he does not think through things correctly, but he has a good mind and I'm convinced he will learn.)

Michael

Your right of course, I was just shocked.

This reminds me of something I have been thinking about. As I've been reading and exploring the online world of O'ism I've noticed a bad trend where people like to think in theory without ever considering the practical side of their argument. I'm starting to wonder if this is the problem with O'ism, not the philosophy but how it has been represented. I seem to recall LP once said Rand got on him for forgetting the practical in the same way she would get on Greenspan for doing the opposite. It would explain a lot.

Just a theory I’ve been kicking around.

Are we really having a conversation about babies as if they were a leech and mothers as if they were a host creature? I mean, really?

I can't wait to see that Mother's Day card!