RobinReborn

26 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

The Barbary pirates.

--Brant

That was more than two hundred years ago.  Morocco was also the first country to recognize the US.

6 hours ago, jts said:

What you gotta rethink is your Constitution. Sharia law is above your Constitution. Your Constitution was made by man, sharia law was made by Allah. You gotta submit to sharia law. To hell with the Constitution. Any bad talk about Muhammad or Islam is bigotry and racist and hate speech.

99% of all the violence we see in the news in Europe is done by non-Muslims. Did you ever hear of a Muslim terrorist? Me neither. Islam is a peaceful religion and anyone who says otherwise deserves death.

 

We are not Europe and I am insulted that you would compare the USA to Europe.  Europe has a long history of fighting with Islam (The Crusades, conflicts with the Ottoman Empire), the USA does not.

15 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Is it now a matter of national defense?

I think the answer is, yes.

--Brant

Please elaborate.  I don't doubt that some portion of immigrants will be violent, but most of them will be productive, nonviolent citizens.  Some of them will even serve in the US military (remember the Khan family?).  It's not clear to me that immigrants are more likely to be terrorists than the existing citizenry.  Consider people like Timothy McVeigh or Dylann Storm Roof.

The world's longest lasting dictator is dead.  His brother still runs Cuba but this is clearly a step in the direction of freedom for Cuba...

And also might lead to the closure of Guantanamo Bay.

In practice, entirely computer based education does not work for children.  It may work for adults or teenagers, but they need serious discipline and willpower.

16 hours ago, william.scherk said:

So? So what?

Imagine it this way:  what happens to a person's decision-making abilities if these often-unreliable 'tools' are entirely absent?  I mention Antonio Damasio's insights -- perhaps too many times (current count 22), but his work with "Elliot" and other cases of brain disease or injury pointed to the necessary part of emotions in making even the most ordinary decisions.

Since decision-making is a cognitive process, to know that 'missing emotion' cripples a person, this is the strongest suggestion that Emotions are human Tools in Cognition, tools that once lost cannot be replaced by reason.

 

I'm vaguely familiar with Damasio's work, but I'm not sure how much it applies in this case.  The Amygdala is the part of the brain which plays a role in decision making and emotions.  Damaged/malformed Amygdalas can lead to criminality.

To use an analogy, a person with strong muscles and a weak heart probably can't become a great athlete, but they still have strong muscles and can potentially be a good athlete in limited respects.  An intelligent person with a damaged Amygdala might make bad decisions, but they are still intelligent, if they have the right guidance they can contribute to society.

I think the important question is what is the connection between emotions and the values we choose in life.

This is a great discussion.

I've had trouble finding a concrete boundary between emotions and thoughts.  I do introspect and ask myself why I feel certain emotions, and sometimes I try to change my emotional reactions to thing.  Emotions are useful in that they occur over shorter time intervals than thoughts.  Hypothetically you could rationally think through any problem and come up with the best response.  In practice, the amount of time you have to solve a problem is always limited, and an emotional response can be as good or better than rational thought over a short period.  (You can read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell or Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for more information about this, I know it may seem jarring to some but there's scientific evidence that emotional gut reactions are better than rational intellectual analysis for some decisions.)

I suppose you could modify the quote to be "Emotions are not reliable tools of cognition" you can certainly use them, but they may not work for their intended purpose.

2 hours ago, jts said:

Imagine a tiger is approaching you and you are out in the open, unprotected, and you are in mortal danger. You experience fear. Is this fear a tool of cognition? No. The fear does not tell you that it is a tiger and that a tiger is a dangerous animal and you are unprotected. The fear is a response to this knowledge.

 

Good example, but let's give it some context.  There are no tigers near where I live, I would not randomly visit an area where there were tigers without preparing myself for them.  I would learn to look for signs of tigers (they mark their territory with urine and scratching trees), and I would feel fear when I saw those signs...

Also, from a biological perspective, fear usually creates a fight or flight response (stimulating adrenaline).  This is a cognitive tool, it reduces your potential actions into just two possible actions.

Quote

Emotions are not tools of cognition

Quote

But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values.

Quote

There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards.

By my definitions of the words cognition and tools, the last two quotes are claiming that emotions are tools are cognition (there is no definition of either cognition or tools on the Ayn Rand Lexicon).

Unfortunately I find it difficult to have this conversation without a concise definition of what an Emotion is.

Rand herself wrote several which appear to be in conflict with each other:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html

Barbara Branden's book.

Also an interview with Donahue where Rand claimed "he was more of an atheist than myself... if that were possible".

Ayn Rand's beliefs on immigration were fairly clear though she did not write about it extensively.  She was in favor of it.

However things have changed significantly (welfare state, terrorism, different demographics) since she was alive so some may claim that an anti-immigration policy is compatible with Objectivism.

What do you think?

I have the ability to make now last for longer or shorter, but a second and a half sounds like a reasonable average.

Has anybody read this book?

I tried reading it when I was 15 but didn't bother finishing it.  It made me not want to be a businessperson.  Of course I've changed since I was 15 so perhaps I should reread the book now.

I usually avoid these sorts of conversations as they often devolve into people describing the idiosyncracies of their own consciousness and speculative theories about physics.

But I think the concept 'attention span' is useful to consider.  You can focus your brain to pay lots of attention to a little bit of detail over a short period of time, or to pay a little attention to a lot of detail over a long period of time (or other permutations of those concepts).

Frank is a bit of a mystery to me, I wander how much of a connection there is between him and Francisco d'Anconia.

I also question whether he influenced Rand's earlier writings (she mentioned that she'd heard Frank's ideas and rejected them as ridiculous, but her whole Hickman based story was pretty ridiculous too).

FWIW Frank was an atheist before he met Ayn Rand.  Given the attitudes of that era I would say that fact alone put him well above average in both intelligence and courage.

I've expressed some negative thoughts about Trump in the past, but now that he's president-elect I've had some thoughts about how he might be a good president.  I certainly don't claim to be able to predict how good a President will be (I thought both GWB and Obama would be better than they were).  However I've focused on Trump's positive characteristics and can imagine them materializing into something resembling decent leadership.  I admit that the media narrative of 'Hillary is going to win' had biased my perspective earlier.

39 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

China is not dying and it is run by Authoritarian Autocrats. 

Do you think the one child policy had no effect?  Dying is probably too strong of a word but their population would have grown much more if their government were different.

So a country run by Authoritarian Autocrats has it's population decline?  Somehow I'm not surprised.

I'll try to bring the thread back to the original question.

Because of who Ayn Rand was, Howard Roark would have still won at the end of the book.  He probably would have a harder time doing it.  In the Fountainhead people were always asking Roark for buildings in various European styles and they might not ask him to do that if he was black.  But race isn't a major part of Ayn Rand's novel, so it probably wouldn't effect the story too much.  Maybe one potential customer refuses Roark based on race and he figures out a way to get around discrimination and then speaks out against it in one of his monologues.  

When you're sleeping your neurons are firing much slower than when you're awake.  I think sleep is more of a reset for your nervous system then a way of generating energy.

Ask themselves how salient their desire is.

Did you read the article?  This expulsion of slave descendants happened in 2011.

I agree that this isn't relevant to Elizabeth Warren.

It's interesting because it shows that oppressed groups can be oppressors.  This isn't necessarily news but it goes against the narrative that I'm frequently exposed to.

20 hours ago, Robert Campbell said:

 

I know Melissa Harris-Perry said, while Warren was running for the Senate, that only "indigenous people" are allowed to ask whether she is really Cherokee—anyone else who does it is a racist and a monster of privilege—the implication being that the Cherokee Nation is no longer indigenous, and has turned into a racist monster of privilege.

 

Unfortunately there is some truth to that:
 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oklahoma-cherokee-idUSTRE77N08F20110824

Summary:  Not only did the Cherokee's own slaves but they expelled descendants of slaves from their tribe.