We Erred Rand

Correct. Materialists always insist that matter need not have a cause of its own existence: matter has simply always existed. Yet when you broach the same argument in relation to a Prime Mover or First Cause such as God, they object. Their usual argument is that, if one is willing to grant both that "God has always existed" and "matter has always existed" are the same sort of argument, the former is, at best, superfluous, because all we need to do (in principle) is discover all of the laws governing the ways in which this eternally-existing matter can combine with itself and we'll understand (and eventually control) everything in the universe. If that's the case (they aver), why push the analysis back another step and bring in a concept like God? The reason is that there are things about matter that cannot, even in principle, be explained by reference only to matter. That's why, at the very least, reference to the non-material must be made. Of course, to go from something like "the non-material realm" to something like "an intentional, personal, conscious God" is a big step. Many scientists and philosophers who have at least been able to get past the dead-end of material reductionism and conceded the necessity — philosophical and scientific — of "the non-material" in order to explain much of the universe, do not take the next step into actual theism. A few of them have (Michael Collins of the Human Genome Project, for example, as well as Dean Kenyon, who had co-authored one of the major books on biochemical determinism). Some are perfectly content to remain in the "realm of the non-material": Thomas Nagel (see his new book, "Mind & Cosmos"), Antony Flew, Fred Hoyle, to name just a few.

But so is every non-living thing. There's no evidence that the difference between "living" and "non-living" is some sort of as-yet-undiscovered law, or propensity, for dead matter to generate into living matter under the right conditions. In any case, Pasteur debunked that long ago in his "swan-neck" tube demonstration, and formulated his Law of Biogenesis: living things only come from other living things. We could just as truthfully say that every piece of written music is made of ink-spots on parchment. That's certainly true. What makes one set of ink-spots music, and another set merely a bunch of random ink-spots on parchment is the order, or sequence, of the former set. And it's quite obvious that this order is not the result of some hidden chemical process or as-yet-undiscovered physical law residing in ink or parchment itself. If you want to understand how words get formed in a game of Scrabble, you don't study the chemistry of ink and the physical properties of wood chips. You study English orthography . . . which takes the entire problem out of the realm of deterministic physics and chemistry and into the realm of linguistic convention.

Fido roasts his dogfood over a campfire and therefore asserts (based on nothing but his immediate narrow experience) "fire is warm; fire is red; therefore, red is warm." Fido was later adopted by Billy, a city boy with no experience of campfires. Billy likes to eat strawberry popsicles. For him, "strawberry popsicles are cool; strawberry popsicles are red; therefore, red is a cool color." Moreover, Billy makes himself a glass of hot cocoa by first heating some milk in a pot on a gas stove. When he lights the stove, the little flames of the burner are blue. "Stove flames are warm; stove flames are blue; therefore, blue is a warm color." Since there are as many contexts as there are individual Billys and fidos, to say that each is "objective but contextual" is to dilute the meaning of the word "objective" to the point of drowning it completely. Much better simply to say that the associations between a color and objects, or color and processes, is subjective. This makes sense because color itself is subjective, existing only as a percept in the mind of the perceiver. Not quite. There are rare green stars (beta Librae), and stars are considered to be approximately ideal blackbody radiators. There are even magenta stars: Brown dwarves of the T-class. You're a sick puppy, fido. You claim that many ordinary folks making many ordinary associations make statements about color that are "more objective" than a few statements made by a few researchers engaged in highly-controlled contexts in a laboratory. Then you haul in the CIE color-perception chart, which was put together by a small group of researchers originally in 1931, based on an even narrower, more tightly controlled context than Lord Kelvin's. What's especially funny about this is that the CIE chart was originally constructed by means of color-matching experiments using 10 observers (all of them sighted, of course! And all of them who claimed they had "normal" color vision, though I don't believe the original researchers actually tested them for that), who were tasked with matching colors on one side of a screen with reference colors provided by the narrow group of researchers on the other side of the screen. The field-of-view of the observers was restricted to 2-degrees (in the belief that this angle-of-view was where the retinal cones had the most sensitivity within the fovea). The color-matching experiments had to be redone at least twice, first with a 4-degree field-of-view, and then a 10-degree field-of-view. There's still no universal agreement which field-of-view is "objectively" the best representation of human color perception. Sounds like an even more artificially-constructed arbitrary environment than the one used by Lord Kelvin, which you claimed was arbitrary. And in Kelvin's case, there was no matching of colors; there was only a correlation between a color (whose perception obviously is subjective) and a temperature reading (which is objective). That's why a blind person could recreate a color requested of him by simply gaining knowledge of his Kelvin thermometer on a blackbody radiator; while the CIE color-matching chart would be meaningless to him for the simple reason that he needs to see it in order to get any useful information from it. The CIE chart is essentially a database of human subjective responses to color (via matching tasks) that is taken to be the "normal" response of "most" human beings everywhere. Useful? Of course. More objective than Kelvin's controlled situation? Of course not. Color-matching between two colors must be inherently subjective, as it requires perception of color. Color-correlation between one color and one temperature reading is inherently objective . . . it could even be done by a blind person, and requires only the ability to get information from a thermometer. Your master needs to take you to a vet, fido. You're clearly suffering from the philosophical equivalent of parvo-virus.

And that proves there are an infinite number of meanings one can arbitrarily assign to any term — so long as one makes that assignment explicit to others when communicating with them. The linguistic sign "Limes" = [any term one arbitrarily designates], so long as one makes explicitly clear to others the right side of the equal sign. "Correct context", as you used that phrase, simply means that one assigns a meaning to a term (i.e., the right side of the equal sign) that the majority of other language users assigns to it. There is no inherently correct or incorrect context for a linguistic sign.

Yes. One must be true and the other must be false.

How is this relevant to whether or not people understand the meaning of terms?

The DNA argument is not "worthless" because it supports the eyewitness's testimony. DNA only shows that he had been in physical contact with the bike at some point time (perhaps the owner let him ride one day; perhaps he secretly took it for a spin and returned it). It doesn't support the eyewitness's claim that he saw D steal the bike. Yes. Both could be false. D asserts: "I did not steal the bike!" Witness asserts a denial of that: "You did steal the bike!" Those two assertions are formally contradictory. I don't see how both could be false. Either D stole the bike or he didn't steal the bike. One or the other must be true. Whichever one is true, the other must be false.

I'm not distorting your argument. I'm quoting you. I don't see any mention of Romanticism here: It's obvious your equating "middle America" — the America you've never visited — with some idea you have of them (whether derived from Rousseau or not) as "rural" and "poor." It's complete fantasy. I'm confident you are. What you don't seem to be aware of is that those developed cities are precisely what many Yanks regard as "middle America." For some reason, you abstract them out of your screenplay of "middle America". Not sure what this means. You've studied economics but don't work professionally as one? (It's not that important for the discussion. Just curious.) You're mistaken. Point of historical fact: conservative social values (as I briefly described them in my last post, especially regarding the placing of a high value on the future) have, in fact, led to free-market economics. Read "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" (by Marxian historian R.H. Tawney), "American Civil Religion" by Robert Bellah, and a review of "Democracy in America" by Tocqueville wouldn't hurt. Innovation and entrepreneurship are both oriented toward a greatly improved future state of affairs. Perfectly consonant with the conservative values I mentioned previously. Except that Rand had an atomized view of individualism and individual creativity unrelated to social structures like "family" (which is always presented negatively, at least in Atlas Shrugged); etc. Edison was one of the most creative individuals the U.S, or any nation, ever produced. He was nurtured by his mother and completely home-schooled. This was also, in general, true of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hill, etc. They didn't emerge out of a vacuum, armed with courses in philosophy taught by Hugh Akston at Patrick Henry University. Certain values were cultivated in them. Rand, of course, never shows that in AS. The children in that novel are the major characters — Dagney, Francisco, Eddie Willers — and in Rand's universe, they were the same as children as they are as adults. Just smaller. No growth. No mistakes. No loving admonitions from parents. That's fine. When Petr Beckmann complained to Peikoff that he found the lack of discussion about children and family in AS to be a major lacuna in the novel (given that it's obviously meant to illustrate an entire philosophy), Peikoff apparently told Beckmann, "You want the novel to contain everything??" (As if children and family are some minor footnote to the business of living life. For Rand, of course, they were.) LOL! Right, but not by native San Franciscan flower-children or swingers from Haight-Ashbury! The physical, geographical location is irrelevant. It's the kind of people who comprise innovation-revolutions that's important. And following Mises in this analysis, while "the creative class" — entrepreneurs — are undoubtedly the spearheads of the revolution, the "battery" that provides energy for their innovations is capital; i.e., unconsumed wealth, earned and SAVED by the "capitalist class" . . . all those boring, family-oriented, church-going dentists, school teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, etc., in the flyover states . . . you know them well: you called them "the rural poor." They're the ones who LIKE what the creative-class does, and who make it possible for them to continue doing it. Ex-hippie. He chose not to remain one. You choose only to see the significance of his having been a hippie, but not the significance of his having given it up. I see the latter as more important — both for himself and for everyone else. You've been listening to too many Joan Baez records. The '60s were all about "conforming to non-conformism." If I remember correctly, Rand even wrote an essay about it. Necessary but not sufficient. The cultural yearning for freedom didn't come from people reading Adam Smith, smacking their foreheads, and proclaiming, "He's right! I never saw it before, but he's convinced me!" It came from changes in values first; then they read Adam Smith, smacked their foreheads, and proclaimed, "I'm so happy a smart guy like professor Smith can articulate what I already suspect and feel to be true." So will atheistic, rationalistic, libertine ones. The Soviet Union didn't produce much of anything; neither did Communist China, Cuba, or North Korea. Neither did Haight-Ashbury. Come to think of it, neither has Holland recently. That rather leaves the Christian/Protestant value system peculiar to a group of Anglo-Saxon countries as having had the value system that became the "golden mean" between those two extremes. C'mon. Japan's growth and China's growth are simply examples that cultures emerging out of authoritarianism in which the State is God, or the Emperor is God, must rely on foreign ideas, foreign capital, and foreign investment to jump-start their economies. It obviously won't happen with micro-loans, and there's no reason they ought to engage in completely native capital-deepening when there's a whole big world that has already done so, and which they can "leverage" to their own advantage. And by the way, much of US wealth comes from Foreign Direct Investment, as well: recent numbers were about 2 trillion dollars. There's nothing wrong with foreigners investing in production-goods (stocks, bonds, real estate, R&D), as opposed to simply buying ready-made consumer goods. China, no doubt, wishes MORE people would invest in her capital-accounts side of the foreign-trade ledger. That the world doesn't do so (yet) proves that most investors are more impressed by the returns promised by high-productivity (e.g., the U.S.) than they are by the returns made possible by low-wages (e.g., China). No. I'm saying popular support of classical liberalism won't occur without a change of values, first. And by the way, those "rural poor" in middle-America, for the most part, have already been steeped in those values for generations, which is why they mostly support free-market policies. That's precisely what the leftist establishments on both coasts despise about them. As just one example: what many liberals (in today's sense of the term) hate about Sarah Palin is the fact that she chose not to abort her last child who was born with Down's Syndrome. Anyway, you seem to have in mind that idea that capitalism needs to be packaged in a certain way, rhetorically, and then people will buy it. Not so. Reagan didn't package it in any exotic way. He explicitly told people "Government IS the problem." He articulated what they already believed. The "rural poor" today in middle-America don't need or want any special rhetorical branding of capitalism to vote for a free-market candidate. The problem is whether or not the U.S. has enough "rural poor" to be a voting majority. You might try navigating to PJmedia ("Pajamas Media") and looking for videos of Bill Whittle. I haven't followed him lately, but he started to do something quite interesting after the last election: he started a "virtual Presidency" (with himself as the virtual POTUS), in which he "shadows" Obama, i.e., after Obama gave his inauguration speech, Whittle webcast his own "inauguration" speech, demonstrating what an actual conservative/libertarian POTUS would sound like. He did the same thing after the State of the Union Address. In his view — which I agree with — capitalism doesn't need any special branding to be sold to people. The main problem is that — outside of professional economists like Thomas Sowell, Russ Roberts, etc. — most politicians and businessmen can't articulate why people should want capitalism. Mitt Romney certainly couldn't (perhaps because he's not really for it himself).

>>>Truly one of the dumbest posts I've read in a long time.... Well, thank you, Ghs! I've always thought the same thing about all of your posts. In fact, I'm amazed at how you manage to outdo yourself in dumbness from one post to the next. In your last one, I especially enjoyed the operatic hyperbole — the drama-queen overblown-ness — of your assertion that parents who request of their teenage son that he join them at a service in observance of an important religious holiday (the most important holiday for Christians) are violating his conscience! Brilliant high satire!

I reject your rejection of my denial. No two qualitative experiences -- sunsets, cloudy days, navel oranges reflecting sunlight that has first been reflected from a sandy beach, etc. — can ever be measurably alike. They can only be "similar" or "close enough for practical purposes". Um, a heated black body is a lighting source, not a lighting condition, which refers to the ambient light that might surround the source itself, as well as the researcher: e.g., overhead fluorescents in a laboratory; reflected skylight from outdoors; etc.. And they have no effect on how a black-body incandesces when heated to 3200K. Moreover, they are (as explained below) based on random, stochastic processes in nature; hence, they are inherently non-reproducible (because no two random, stochastic events are exactly alike). The point, fido, is that the only duplicable condition that objectively exists for color is to heat a black-body until it incandesces and to correlate the color with the temperature. The point is not that sunsets and reflections off of beach sand are difficult to duplicate. The point is they are impossible to duplicate in principle. How so? Impress us with a hypothetical. They're imprecise and approximate on account of their being subjective. "Subjective" and "imprecise" are not mutually exclusive. Then you don't accept reality. The sun is always in a different position moment to moment, even at the same time of day and exactly one year apart; its original position in the first sunset is non-reproducible because there is no universal stationary point by reference to which we could, even in principle, haul the sun back to its original position in order to duplicate the sunset we had a year ago. The rotation of the earth is not exactly the same. The position of the sand on the beach has shifted. The cloud pattern (and other weather events) during the sunset is a non-repeatable random event based on stochastic processes in molecules of water vapor. These are non-reproducible in principle. Alas, that's a physical impossibility. Black-body incandescence always emits a continuous spectrum. To emit a continuous spectrum means that all colors are achievable and reproducible at some specified temperature (in other words, there are no holes, or gaps, in the temperatures, and there are no holes or gaps in the various colors that are emitted at each of these changes in temperature). What an incandescing black-body does is to emit color, not hue, but color; i.e., something with all three dimensions of hue, value (brightness), and saturation (purity). "Hue" is not a synonym for "color" but a term referring to the generic family name of a group of similar colors, i.e., the hue called "red" doesn't exist, per se, as it means "the family of reds", which would include, "dark ruby red," "medium rose red," "light red," "dull red," "brick red", etc. "A red hue," just by itself, with no brightness and no saturation doesn't exist except as an abstraction, and therefore cannot be emitted from an incandescing black-body. Same with "warm beige." It corresponds to some point on the continuous spectrum from an incandescing black-body. If it can appear on a beach in Miami from the concatenation of factors (many of which are unknowable), it can be achieved on the black-body at some temperature.

Quite so. That's also true of many words; "altruism" and "selfishness", for example. Formal contradiction doesn't require that the client contradict himself. It only requires the statement that is incompatible with the client's assertion be framed in the form of a denial; it doesn't matter who makes the assertion. Example: Client: "I was at the opera when the murder occurred." Janitor: "You were NOT at the opera when the murder occurred." The janitor's statement is a formal denial of the client's statement; one is affirmative, the other negative. The DNA evidence simply shows that he touched the motorbike at some point, or rode it at some point, or perhaps he — or, who knows? maybe someone else — put D's clothing (which might have his DNA all over it) on the motorbike. The existence of D's DNA on the motorbike does not prove D stole it, and it does not not contradict D's alibi, nor is it even incompatible with it, as just explained. I don't understand your use of the worthless DNA argument. You've just stated that there was an eye-witness to the crime. That's more powerful evidence than the DNA, which simply shows that he was in physical contact with the bike at some point in the past. D asserts: "I did not steal the bike!" Witness asserts a denial of that: "You did steal the bike!" Those two assertions are formally contradictory.

That's all that was meant. I'm not urging you to assign different meanings to terms in your personal life for the sake of doing so. You've just finished telling anyone reading your post that the term "lime" means "umbrella." We've all read it. Now when you say "It's going to rain, I'll need a lime," there is no breakdown in communication. We all understand what you're saying. Therefore, so long as you tell people how you intend to use terms in your communications with them, the arbitrariness is infinite, not "quite limited."

My only standard in judging politicians is by their track record: I only consider what they have done, or are doing. I usually disregard what they say because they'll say anything to get elected and stay elected. I ignore educational credentials or appeals to intellectuality in politicians. Neither mathematicians nor Grand Masters in chess would necessarily make a good President. William F. Buckley, Jr. (an intellectual conservative who graduated from Yale) once said: I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. I agree. Most soi-disant intellectuals from the Ivy League schools are functional ignoramuses. Obama is a soi-disant intellectual from two Ivy League schools, Columbia University and Harvard. Except for flattering portraits (much of it fabricated) about himself, has he written anything important and profound? No. When we was editor of the Harvard Law Review, did he contribute any articles? No. When he taught law at University of Chicago, did he publish scholarly articles on legal issues? No. Has he ever run a business? No. Is he knowledgeable about economics? No. Is he especially knowledgeable about the health insurance industry? No. The U.S. has always prospered far more under do-nothing hick Presidents than it has under Ivy-educated elites. In 1920, the stock market crashed, sending the economy into a depression. Lucky for the U.S., it had a do-nothing hick President in Warren Harding (a graduate of Ohio Central College). He ignored all of the trendy advice from the Federal Reserve to inflate; he ignored all of the advice from his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover (!!!) to raise taxes and increase federal spending, and instead, Harding severely cut both federal spending and federal taxes. Guess what? The economy turned around in a year. We need more Warren G. Hardings, and fewer Woodrow Wilsons and Franklin D. Roosevelts. (And we don't need any Barack Hussein Obamas.) You've been to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, but not, Houston, or Wichita, or Salt Lake City, or Tulsa, or Boulder, or Santa Fe, etc., etc., all of which are culturally "middle America" and geographically, the proverbial "fly-over states," because they're the states the elites have to fly over to get from New York to San Francisco or Los Angeles (all 3, hotbeds of hyper-leftism). In your view, all of these cities are stuffed into a neat conceptual pigeon-hole labeled "the rural poor." Very convenient. If it's the "rural poor," would you mind explaining to me why many of the so-called "elites" are moving out of cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and moving into cities like Houston and Dallas? Is it because they like rubbing elbows with "the rural poor"? No. It's the economy! Gee, I wonder if vibrant, dynamic economies like those in Texas and North Dakota (another "rural poor" valorized state in your view, yet the one with some of the consistently lowest unemployment, now slightly above 3%) tend to follow as a result of certain economic policies flowing from certain cultural attitudes? The fact is this: classical-liberal policies of voluntarism, free trade, low taxes, low gov't spending, etc., can be defended by means of reason and sound economic models; but historically, they have never flowed into practical application simply as a result of reason and sound economic models. They flowed from certain cultural attitudes, e.g.: hard work is good; thrift is good; saving is good; deferring immediate enjoyment in the present in favor of a more distant future is good; children are good because they represent the agents of this more distant future; traditional heterosexual marriage is good because it's main purpose has always been to produce children and provide a stable environment for them; fidelity is good because it provides a stable basis for marriage; disrupting influences — drugs, promiscuity, homosexuality, practices leading people away from this cycle of future-oriented activity, are condemned. Now, these cultural attitudes, if accepted by enough people, then resonate throughout other aspects of the culture: in books, movies, television, music, art, etc. True, the British Classical school of Ricardo, Mill, Senior, etc., made excellent arguments in favor of abolishing trade barriers in their day, but their theories were "reinforcement" of cultural attitudes regarding "middle-classness" (the so-called "bourgeois virtues") that were already in place, which is why the majority of people (and hence their democratically elected government) supported them so enthusiastically. Blood and Soil Nationalism of the Nazi variety is not the upshot of middle-class virtues and middle-class values. The middle-America that I know has no feeling for the notion that "the State is God", which is what Blood and Soil Nationalism of the 1930s European variety rested on. You're projecting a fiction movie about the U.S. that you wrote, directed, and produced. Good question. Here's the answer: Objectivists sense what I wrote above: that certain cultural values tend to lead to certain economic and political conditions (not the other way around). This is certainly true. Because of their reading of Rand, Mises, etc., they desire the economic and political effects (capitalism, liberty), but they either see no connection between those and the cultural values out of which they grow, or they simply profess disgust for the values, claiming they are ultimately "based on faith" and not "rationally derived". The latter happens to be correct: love of freedom (the value-precondition of establishing capitalism) can be rationally defended, but it requires a certain sense-of-life to implement. That sense-of-life is not learned in a classroom by means of textbooks and lectures. It is not rationally-self-consciously derived. Go to Amazon.com and obtain some of the writings by economist/historian Deirdre McClosky. You'll find them (and her) quite interesting. I think you feel confused because you feel the same way that many of those other Objectivists do, and you don't know why. If this is the case, then it's probably time to check your premises in a very serious way. Because elitist SF nannie-state hippies tend to lead to welfare states with high poverty, high unemployment, high crime, low innovation, low birth rates = low expectations for the future. "Right-wing equivalents" tend to lead to the opposite. So if you value the opposite, it's a good idea not to heap disdain on the people and the values that make it possible. That's part of the movie you're projecting in your head. Her actual track record as governor says otherwise. Not sure where you're getting your information from. Sympathetic treatment by whom? The mainstream media (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, The NY Times, The Washington Post) savage traditional American values (a/k/a "right-wing culture"), just as they have savaged (and continue to savage) Sarah Palin.

No, it's not subjective, but contextual. The colors that we see in cool areas in nature, such as in shadows, water, snow and ice, are blues, violets and aquas, where the colors that we see in sources of heat, like the sun and fire, are reds, oranges and yellows. It is no less objective for people to associate those colors with those entities and their comparative termperatures than it is for Lord Kelvin to randomly choose a substance to heat while observing its colors. In fact, it is more objective/rational to associate colors with the entities and temperatures that we see in our everyday context than it is to associate them with scientific experiments that hardly anyone will ever perform. J >>>No, it's not subjective, but contextual. The opposite of "subjective" is "objective", not "contextual." All statements regarding perceptions we make about the world — "this is blue", "this is smooth", "this is high-pitched"; etc. — are based on some context or other; it doesn't follow that they are therefore "not subjective" just because they require context to be perceived, thought, and uttered in the first place. >>>In fact, it is more objective/rational to associate colors with the entities and temperatures that we see in our everyday context than it is to associate them with scientific experiments that hardly anyone will ever perform. Interesting. I've noticed an odd strain of old-fashioned populism in contemporary Objectivism that wasn't there when Rand was alive. Here, Jonathan avers that because lots of non-specialists make similar kinds of associations between their subjective percepts and an objective event in non-controlled, everyday contexts, it follows that these "collective associations" or "socially aggregate associations" must have more objectivity than the associations made by one self-conscious individual like, e.g., Galileo or Pasteur, in a highly-controlled context: such as dropping two balls of different weight from the Tower of Pisa, and putting a piece of meat in the narrow bend of a swan-neck tube of glass. Yet the first shattered the Aristotelian notion (which everyone simply knew to be true) that objects of different weight fall to the earth at different rates; and the second destroyed forever the Aristotelian notion (which everyone simply knew to be true) that living things are generated spontaneously out of dead matter. So much for the "special" objectivity of collective percepts by aggregates of non-specialists in multitudes of everyday contexts. Objectivity and rationality are not established by any sort of process of enumeration or counting.

>>>>A definition of a successful civilization may be helpful first. Nothing exotic was meant. You can use Marotta's "Existing and Enduring" as two characteristics.

>>>No. Contextual. Period. The context of viewing specific objects on a specific day under specific conditions is no more and no less individual-dependent than any other context. Except that each "viewing" is done by an individual subject. The percepts are part of each subject's experience, and experience is unique to that specific individual. >>>You've just described a specific, controlled environment, and if anyone else duplicates the environment, he will be able to match the color. But I deny the environment in the 2nd example can be duplicated, while the environment in the 1st example is irrelevant. The only thing that needs to be duplicated in the 1st example is temperature in degrees Kelvin and a "black body." Weather conditions and lighting conditions are irrelevant. >>>you also have to add it to one of the participants in the first. So, when we equally taint the black body experiment by giving the Alaskan macular degeneration and a touch of red-green color-blindness, he and the Floridian will not end up with the same color. I already specified that there's nothing about a thermometer that, per se, requires one to access its information visually. A completely blind person could, in principle, find a Kelvin thermometer that would beep or vibrate when the number "5500K" was reached. So long as both thermometers are calibrated, both 5500K readings will produce the same phenomena (even if the blind person cannot perceive the phenomenon of color). Conversely, a blind person in Alaska would never be able to comprehend a request to reproduce "a warm beige, somewhere between a great suntan and a Florida navel orange glowing on Miami beach at sundown, just when the sun kisses the ocean." because those are completely subjective criteria, unique to a specific sighted person's subjective perceptual experience, at a specific location, at a specific time, on a specific day, with specific weather conditions, etc. The Alaskan could never reproduce them even if he were sighted, and the Floridian could never reproduce them at some future date. He could photograph it, of course, and he could do his best to retain it in memory; but the original conditions are not reproducible.

(NOTE FROM MSK: This pearl of intellectual depth was culled from here.) >>>Nevertheless, several questions come to my mind in the manner in which you have chosen to interact with this forum: I am duly awed by your intellectual prowess and your overall wonderfulness (to borrow a phrase from Bill Cosby). Believe me: I'm shaking in my pajamas at the frightening prospect of having to answer your questions. >>>1) are you familiar with the forum's programs wherein you can link your reply to the paricular post, supra that you are "replying" to?; I actually find it more cumbersome than the simple ">>>". But I'll try to mend my ways. >>>2) are you generally supportative of Ayn's general analysis of philosophical issues?; and Generally. But so far, I haven't seen any of her analysis of philosophical issues on this site. I've seen material reductionism (which has nothing to do with her general analysis of philosophical issues); I've seen epistemological nominalism (which has nothing to do with her general analysis of philosophical issues); and I've seen hedonism (which has nothing with her general analysis of philosophical issues). You seem like a friendly chap, Selene (stupid, perhaps, but friendly). Can you help? I'm looking for a site called "Objectivist Living." The current site bearing the same name appears to have been hijacked by a group of . . . of . . . (what's that word again...?) ah, yes: fuckwits. >>>3) what is your purpose in joining this forum? Lofty intellectual entertainment. I'll let you know when I find it. >>>I have many more questions, however these will suffice for now. I admit to feeling great relief (coupled with physical and emotional exhaustion) at having come through your grilling. I hope to do even better the next time.

The word "limes" refers to what exactly then? You can assign any meaning you want to it. The logical relation among the premises and the conclusion won't change. Did you think it would?

He never specified his religion? He said he was an atheist! I guess you probably mean that he never specified his parents' religion. You're right. It was simply synecdoche on my part: I used one part, or sect, of the Christian religion (Catholicism) to represent the whole. Perfectly legitimate figure of speech. Look it up. Anyway, I'm reasonably sure, however, that Evan's parents are neither Jewish nor Muslim. I have lots of counter-examples, but first you have to cite concrete examples, and not just breezy generalities. >>>It is metaphysically impossible to apply Christian (altruist) ethics and survive. That's a breezy generality, not a concrete example. >>> No one has done it. Breezy generality. >>> In every case of a predominantly altruist society existing and enduring - monasteries whether Catholic or Buddhist, just for example - the source of the success was the compromise of individual virtues of intelligence and productivity expropriated by the community and also of "trade" with the outside world in the form of donations and gifts Breezy generality. Can you cite specifics, such as which monasteries? When? Where? Something specific?. >>> They also traded in the positive sense, producing goods such as beer and wine for sale. Yes, the Benedictines, Trappists, Cistercians, and others made wine, cheese, and other products. No one except possibly an Objectivist has ever claimed that production and trade are incompatible with altrusim and Christianity. >>> But even so, consider, for instance the old USSR whose gold mines were worked by political prisoners. The "success" of communism was based on the wide application of that principle. No it wasn't. There's nothing about communism in the old USSR that was altruistic. Without going into specifically economic arguments about communism, one might claim with a great deal of truth that the reason the old USSR failed was that it was thoroughly atheistic, with a ruling elite who believed in nothing but their own power. We might say this: there has never been a successful civilization in history that upheld atheism. And now you are welcome to cite counter-examples.

For that matter, what if Evan apologized and stated at some future date, "Gee, mom and dad, considering the fact that I'm living in your home, eating your food, attending school on your dime, driving dad's car, and misspending the allowance you both generously give me, I think I'll take you up on your kind invitation to join you for Easter in church"? Are you ruling out that possibility?

Following Menger, Mises claimed that money is a good like any other good and that it obeys the same economic laws to which all goods are subject. The reason people hold money today is that they expect it to have a certain purchasing power tomorrow; that expectation derived from yesterday's expectation of today's purchasing power; etc. The reason this is not an infinite regress into the distant past is that money must eventually resolve itself into its original desire to be held or exchanged directly as an actual commodity-good, as oppposed to being exchanged indirectly as a money-good. There's nothing "Kantian" about this. Mises is simply employing logic. You should try it sometime. For further reading, see: http://mises.org/daily/1333 "The Origin of Money and Its Value" Robert P. Murphy

"We Erred Rand": Do you think of logic as irrelevant to epistemology? Good God, no. But I do think of epistemology as irrelevant to logic. And the discussion thus far has been about logic, not epistemology.

And I'm fine if you want to meander aimlessly into topics that have little or nothing to do with formal logic.

>>>The point is that, generally speaking, in the context of our daily lives, we associate blue with coolness because more cool things that exist around us are in the bluish hue range of the spectrum than on the opposite side of the spectrum. That would be relevant if objectivity were a matter of summing up the individual subjective experiences (what you flatteringly call "context") of the majority of individuals. But that is neither science nor objectivity. That's merely a form of social metaphysics.

>>>No, it's not subjective, but contextual. Contextual to each individual under varying conditions and uncontrolled circumstances. That rather makes it "subjective." >>>The colors that we see in cool areas in nature, such as in shadows, water, snow and ice, are blues, violets and aquas, where the colors that we see in sources of heat, like the sun and fire, are reds, oranges and yellows. It is no less objective for people to associate those colors with those entities and their comparative termperatures than it is for Lord Kelvin to randomly choose a substance to heat while observing its colors. Lord Kelvin didn't randomly choose a substance; he chose a color — black. And he observed the temperatures at which black changed first to orange, then, red, then yellow, then white, then blue. The point of color-temperature is that it makes no difference what material is used (iron, lead, steel, tungsten, etc.) just so long as it can withstand being heated and that it is black. Color-temperature is an objective description of color because someone in Alaska can call a stranger in Florida and say "The color blue I have in mind is achieved by taking a piece of iron and heating it to 5500K" and the two strangers will both have exactly the same color blue. The blue corresponds to the temperature, and the temperature is something that appears on a thermometer that can be read optically or, if need be, converted to voice-data, or perhaps made to vibrate when it reaches the required number of degrees Kelvin. In other words, the color can be associated with repeatable objective events so that even a blind person would be able to reproduce the color simply by going through the steps necessary to produce it. Totally different is the situation in which the fellow in Alaska calls the guy in Florida and says "The color blue I have I mind was achieved by doing ice-fishing last December 15th at midday, while wearing polarized goggles, and with my view slightly obscured by the smoke from the chimney of a nearby cabin. I almost forgot to mention: I have some slight macular degeneration and a touch of red-green color-blindness, so please take that into account when reproducing the color "blue" that I have in mind." Sounds subjective to me. Try telling it to a blind a person and see how far he gets. Anyway, I hope this post didn't use any words that insulted you by the use of more syllables than you're accustomed to.