Objectivism Online run by hypocritical babies?


blackhorse

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I don't think it's quite so much what having "volitional consciousness" means, but its implications.

Man's consciousness can adapt to changing circumstance at will - as long as there are in reality, alternatives. He may focus on what's most pressing, or not - he may make a moral choice, or not. He may put his ducks in a row, and select what to focus on from anywhere within his hierarchy of values.

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In all seriousness, I love that word asserevating.

Do you love it so much you'll learn to spell it one of these tries? :laugh:

Ellen

Ellen:

With a mean streak like this, I am surprised you didn't become a lawyer....

And no, I am not going to try to spell it again. Some people are simply doers of the ass-word rather than mere spellers of ass-word.

Between the taunts of you and Daunce my self-esteem is highly fragile just now, and my volitional consciousness in this area is in the off position.*

*Which raises the question, if indeed the button is off, who turns it back on?

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Yes, but "a being who can switch his focus anytime he wants" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.;0

I think the idea of "focus" came into the presentation, as a result of conversations with Nathaniel Branden, between the time when Rand wrote Galt's Speech and the time when she wrote "The Objectivist Ethics." She just speaks of "the choice to think" in the former.

Branden and Rand seem to have had different images, his being an analogy to a flashlight the beam of which can be varied in intensity and degree of "focus" - i.e, a visual analogy - and hers to a "switch" which can be turned on and off, like a toggle switch. The images aren't actually consistent, though Rand tries to knit them together in "The Objectivist Ethics."

I'll repeat an earlier post (#55) in which I quoted the passage:

Here's more from Rand on the subhuman status of those who aren't exercising reason:

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man - in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being - an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

Ellen

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With a mean streak like this, I am surprised you didn't become a lawyer....

Immitating Rand (imitatione Randi) on the issue of what she'd do if she were President.

I hope you don't hate me so much as to wish I were a lawyer. :laugh:

[...] and my volitional consciousness in this area is in the off position.*

*Which raises the question, if indeed the button is off, who turns it back on?

J raised that question earlier. Still pending is Branden's attempt to answer it. (I don't remember off-hand which article that was in and haven't had time yet to go a-searching.)

Ellen

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In all seriousness, I love that word asserevating.

Do you love it so much you'll learn to spell it one of these tries? :laugh:

Ellen

Ellen:

With a mean streak like this, I am surprised you didn't become a lawyer....

And no, I am not going to try to spell it again. Some people are simply doers of the ass-word rather than mere spellers of ass-word.

Between the taunts of you and Daunce my self-esteem is highly fragile just now, and my volitional consciousness in this area is in the off position.*

Heh, heh. Time to strike!

--Striker

"I have done nothing" (J. Galt)

try this one, sucker: amanuensis

then: antidisestablishmentarianism

wrapping the whole thing up with your defenestration (spelling not necessary or possible)

"The road is cleared. We are going back to the world." (trace the sign of the dollar here)

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I think the idea of "focus" came into the presentation, as a result of conversations with Nathaniel Branden, between the time when Rand wrote Galt's Speech and the time when she wrote "The Objectivist Ethics." She just speaks of "the choice to think" in the former.

Rand does use "unfocusing" in Galt's Speech in the following passage:

[bold emphasis added]

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call your "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character.

Thinking is man's only virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict "It is." Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say "It is," you are refusing to say "I am." By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: "Who am I to know?" - he is declaring: "Who am I to live?"

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Ellen

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The sentences from Galt's Speech occur in reverse order and are separated by two pages in the original hardcover of For the New Intellectual. I quoted in this order to draw attention to an elaborating which occurred between 1955, when Galt's Speech was finished, and February 9, 1961, when Rand delivered the paper "The Objectivist Ethics."

From Galt's Speech:

[T]he alternative [man's] nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.

[For] a human being, the question "to be or not to be" is the question "to think or not to think."

From "The Objectivist Ethics":

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man - in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being - an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

Ellen

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Ellen,

Here is some food for thought. Neuroscience and psychology are starting to explain a lot about conscious thought and what lies underneath.

But if it is true that to be conscious or not is the choice between life and death, for the life of me, I cannot explain the many blackouts that happened to me during my days of alcoholism. There were nights when I blacked out and drove over 30 kilometers on city and mountain roads without getting into an accident. Around Brazilian drivers at that! :smile: The next day I had absolutely no memory of it.

This used to freak me out. (So, at the time, like any good alcoholic I would drink on it. :smile: )

There is a lot more of this kind of stuff in modern developments in neuroscience and psychology. For example, in some experiments I read about, it was proved through brain activity that many decisions are made before a person becomes aware of them--and this is by milliseconds.

I'm not saying this as a gotcha for Rand. I just think the trinity Sensation, Percept and Concept is not only oversimplified, it is way too incomplete to be anything more than a description of some mental events. And even then, Rand makes some claims I no longer believe is true. For instance, she claims isolated sensations are not stored in memory. What's her proof? She said so. That's it.

The thing is, if conscious focus is not directly tied to human survival on an either-or basis, this removes the underpinning of Objectivist ethics. All is not lost, though. I believe conscious focus is needed for human progress in knowledge, and that leads to improving the species, but humans survived plenty long running on autopilot like other lower animals until the conceptually aware mind evolved.

This, in this form, can still be used as an underpinning for the good stuff in Objectivist ethics and be correct. It will not be the only underpinning, though, and it makes hash of a lot of the preachy parts from Rand and others in O-Land.

Michael

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The Objectivist Newsletter

Intellectual Ammunition Department

Vol. 3 No. 4

April 1964

With regard to the principle that man is a being of volitional consciousness, does not a man have to be thinking already in order to "choose" to think?

The primary choice to think - i.e., to focus one's mind, to set it to the purpose of integration - must be distinguished from any other category of choice. It must be distinguished from the decision to think about a particular subject, which depends on one's values, interests, knowledge and context; and it must be distinguished from the decision to perform a particular physical action, which again depends on one's values, interests, knowledge and context. These decisions involve causal antecedents, of a kind which the choice to focus does not. A man's choice to focus is a primary, a first cause in consciousness. (See my articles on volition and determinism in the January 1963 and the May 1962 issues of this Newsletter.)

The principle that man is a being of volitional consciousness has reference, specifically, to the human form of consciousness - i.e., to the conceptual level of awareness. The perceptual level, which man shares with animals, is automatic. To be aware of the physical concretes of his immediate sensory field, man merely has to be awake (assuming, of course, a normal brain state). But to engage in an active process of cognitive integration - to abstract, conceptualize, relate, infer - to reason - man must focus his mind, he must set it to the task of active integrating. This level of awareness must be achieved and maintained volitionally.

The act of focusing pertains to the operation of the faculty of consciousness, to its method of functioning - not to its content.

To understand the process of focusing, one must understand the concept of "level of awareness." This concept refers to the degree of active cognitive integration in which a mind is engaged. This will be reflected in (a) the clarity or vagueness of the mind's contents, (b) the degree to which the mind's activity involves abstractions or is concrete-bound, (c ) the degree to which the relevant wider context is present or absent in the process of thinking. Thus, there are degrees of awareness, degrees of consciousness; the alternative is not simply absolute unconsciousness or optimal consciousness.

The choice to focus (or to think) does not consist of moving from a state of literal unconsciousness to a state of consciousness. This clearly would be impossible. When one is asleep, one cannot suddenly choose to start thinking. To focus is to move from a lower level of consciousness to a higher level - to move from mental passivity to purposeful mental activity - to initiate a process of directed cognitive integration.

In a state of passive (or relatively passive) awareness, a man can apprehend the need to be in full mental focus. His choice is to evade that knowledge or to exert the effort of raising the level of his awareness.

As focusing involves expanding the range of one's awareness, so evasion consists of the reverse process: of shrinking the range of one's awareness. Evasion takes the form of refusing to raise the level of one's awareness, when one knows (clearly or dimly) that one should - or of lowering the level of one's awareness, when one knows that one shouldn't.

When a man acts and functions with his mind unfocused, we may, in certain contexts, refer to him as "unconscious." This is a means of indicating that such a man is existing on a level of awareness inadequate to the requirements of human survival - i.e., he is attempting to exist in a state inadequate to the cognition of reality which human survival requires - he is attempting, in effect, to exist on the passive, perceptual level that is appropriate to a lower animal. But this is a specialized use of the term "unconscious."

Speaking literally, of course, when a man is awake and his brain and nervous system are structurally normal, he is conscious - if only passively. This basic level of consciousness is given to him by nature, as it were. Volition pertains to the responsibility of raising this basic level to the active, conceptual level, which is biologically appropriate to man.

--Nathaniel Branden

Ellen

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The thing is, if conscious focus is not directly tied to human survival on an either-or basis, this removes the underpinning of Objectivist ethics. All is not lost, though. I believe conscious focus is needed for human progress in knowledge, and that leads to improving the species, but humans survived plenty long running on autopilot like other lower animals until the conceptually aware mind evolved.

This, in this form, can still be used as an underpinning for the good stuff in Objectivist ethics and be correct. It will not be the only underpinning, though, and it makes hash of a lot of the preachy parts from Rand and others in O-Land.

Michael

Michael,

I can go with that except for the "autopilot like other lower animals." I think that it's a lot more complicated with other animals, too, than is indicated by Rand and Branden, that volition didn't start with the appearance of humans, and that effortful cognition is only one type of volition, producing even less of an either-or basis. I think that humans could go back to surviving like the millennia of our hunter/gatherer ancestors, if worst came to worst and the advances which have been made were lost.

Ellen

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Evocative observations in this discussion. I was thinking about all this last night while stroking and talking to one of my dogs - recognised by all dog lovers, is how they listen hard for a comforting tone of voice, and listen for those familiar words - but most significantly that they learn new words, while staring in intense concentration mostly at your eyes, not just your mouth. Even a dog yearns to extend his 'knowledge' to its limits, it seems.

There was a book on dog training "No Bad Dogs". How basically true that is. An animal - a being of NON-volitional consciousness - can only act according to its nature, never contrary to it. (Except if he's had sustained ill-treatment, that is, wrongful interference by humans.) He cannot be 'bad' - i.e. act to his own detriment or destruction.

It is a serious thought that we volitional humans are, at any given moment just one choice (or non-choice) away from being 'bad'.

Fine, we have volitional consciousness - but what to do with it, what to 'focus' upon from a vast array of possibilities?

Which begs the question, what is Rand's "cognition"? I'd like others' ideas, but my simplified read on it is as a two-way street 1. the process of never-ending addition and integration of identity and causality (identity in action) to one's conceptual store 2. constant reference to back to those self-same (and never completed concepts and moral principles) to implement into actions. With back and forth between them to their reciprocal benefit.

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The sentences from Galt's Speech occur in reverse order and are separated by two pages in the original hardcover of For the New Intellectual. I quoted in this order to draw attention to an elaborating which occurred between 1955, when Galt's Speech was finished, and February 9, 1961, when Rand delivered the paper "The Objectivist Ethics."

From Galt's Speech:

[T]he alternative [man's] nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.

[For] a human being, the question "to be or not to be" is the question "to think or not to think."

From "The Objectivist Ethics":

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man - in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being - an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

Ellen

I like the Galt's speech formulation, as excerpted in post 184, better than the above. The OE formulation is tighter, but the GS formulation makes the hierarchy of progression crystal clear.

I wonder why she changed the formulation? Possibly because of the accusatory tone of GS--which is, indeed, a little jarring.

But, she did lose a little bit of explanatory power in the translation.

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The choice to think or not to think is actually how one thinks about what--the focus and the rigor, etc. The responsibility of consciousness contains the volition.

A lot of Objectivism came off a rhetorical if not polemical base. It was an heroic effort by Ayn Rand, but not John Galt. His heroism was what? There wasn't any to speak of until the bad guys got their hands on him, but they might as well have gotten their hands on a rock of granite. (In this context Barbara Branden's idea of combining the Galt and d'Anconia characters makes sense.)

--Brant

the climax of the Gaedes (I'm not bragging)

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I can go with that except for the "autopilot like other lower animals." I think that it's a lot more complicated with other animals, too, than is indicated by Rand and Branden, that volition didn't start with the appearance of humans, and that effortful cognition is only one type of volition, producing even less of an either-or basis. I think that humans could go back to surviving like the millennia of our hunter/gatherer ancestors, if worst came to worst and the advances which have been made were lost.

Ellen,

I agree with this. In fact, that's my position and I've stated and implied it in different words many times.

But here I didn't manage to convey it. To explain, when I said "autopilot like other lower animals," I was referring to the way Rand presented animal life. Not the way I think animal life is.

But note, I'm not saying I'm right and you should have caught my gist. Instead, I believe my writing was sloppy and incomplete for the idea I was discussing.

This is an example to me that clarity needs to be evident and not just implied.

Some day I'll get this writing stuff down...

Michael

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I like the Galt's speech formulation, as excerpted in post 184, better than the above. The OE formulation is tighter, but the GS formulation makes the hierarchy of progression crystal clear.

I've never found the progression in Galt's Speech clear, or even comprehensible, without twisting my thoughts into pretzels and filling in from later writings, including Branden's.

I wonder why she changed the formulation? Possibly because of the accusatory tone of GS--which is, indeed, a little jarring.

I think at least partly as a result of conversations with Branden, with his trying to provide something approaching a description of process. Between the two works, GS and "The Objectivist Ethics," Rand had changed the way she presented the contrast (as she saw it) between animal and human cognition, and had changed her definition of "reason" from "the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses" to "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses." I.e., she'd dropped "perceives" from the definition.

You might note that in the answer I quoted from Branden (post #187), he's changed the claim made as to what's volitional, without precisely saying he's done so. Instead of volitional consciousness, he describes volitional "levels" OF consciousness.

Also, without his precisely referring to Rand's ("Objectivist Ethics") statement that "in the sense of the word applicable to man [...] an unfocused mind is not conscious," he's indicated that this statement is to be interpreted metaphorically not literally.

The issues are awfully complicated, and I think that this thread isn't a good context for trying to present a detailed discussion. Plus, I haven't time just now in any case for much work at a computer. Fall chores to tend to, and getting the house ready for our "Thanksgiving Seminar." (That's what Larry and I call our traditional get-together with a couple long-time friends with whom we make merry and discuss and argue for several days.)

Maybe, after Thanksgiving, I'll start a new thread specifically on the topic of Rand's theory of volition.

Ellen

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