The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out

[caroljane]

Jerry, yes I have read all of the works you mention, also We the Living and Anthem. But it was a long time ago and I confess I have not re=read them.

[Jerry Biggers]

I can only refer here to myself: I have found, in most cases, that her essays (particularly in VOS and CUI) when I have re-read them, to be more cogent and better argued than I had remembered. What her admirers, and especially her detractors, have said in print are her positions, are often distorted, and sometimes beyond recognition.

[Robert Campbell]

It has been quite a while since I read "The Missing Link" (now included in her posthumous book, Philosophy: Who Needs It),

so I will re-read it. I don't recall her saying that that there are (literally) "subhumans" (i.e., those not versed on ITOE?) wandering around in a pre-conceptual daze). Or, words to that effect.

Jerry,

The clear implication of what she wrote in that essay is that there are beings who look like you and me, but are not fully human, because they have never risen above the perceptual mentality.

There's no need to use the word "subhuman" when the implication is so clear.

Robert Campbell

PS. The essay is thoroughly bizarre, because it is an evolutionary speculation by a philosopher who refused throughout her career to endorse any conception of evolution.

[caroljane]

I can only refer here to myself: I have found, in most cases, that her essays (particularly in VOS and CUI) when I have re-read them, to be more cogent and better argued than I had remembered. What her admirers, and especially her detractors, have said in print are her positions, are often distorted, and sometimes beyond recognition.

I don't think her arguments could be better or more cogent than I remember them. I accepted them completely at the time of reading. It was her basic premises which I came later to question and find I could not accept.

[Robert Campbell]

ND,

I certainly won't end up taking the view that "Mysterious Stranger," one of Diana Hsieh's former ARIan allies, took of Chris Sciabarra's work in 2004.

Those who believe that Peikoff is in error, or that his project in The DIM Hypothesis is misguided, are obliged to refute the claims to which they object.

"Mysterious Stranger" was of course following a standard Peikovian line, according to which an arbitrary assertion can't be refuted, needn't be refuted, and mustn't be refuted.

Even those who are able to make sense of the simultaneous imperatives—can't, needn't, and mustn't—might be expected to identify which assertions ought to be considered arbitrary.

"Mysterious Stranger" didn't identify a single arbitrary assertion in Chris Sciabarra's writings. I guess he didn't want anyone to think he might be trying to refute something.

Robert Campbell

[Ellen Stuttle]

The clear implication of what she wrote in that essay is that there are beings who look like you and me, but are not fully human, because they have never risen above the perceptual mentality.

She was saying that those beings have never risen above the perceptual mentality by choice, not that they're biologically incapable of rising above it:

[...] he must become a human being by choice. What if he does not choose to?

Here, again, picked up from post #24 on the thread "Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design." is the full passage from the article, plus an earlier passage referring to what she called "a perceptual mentality." I don't know why I didn't capitalize "Missing" in the title.

THE Missing LINK

Part II, May 21, 1973

Vol II, no. 17,

The Ayn Rand Letter

pg. 3

The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (mass demonstrations), not action - in chanting, not arguing - in demanding, not achieving - in feeling, not thinking - in denouncing "outsiders," not in pursuing values - in focusing only on the "now," the "today" without a "tomorrow" - in seeking to return to "nature," to "the earth," to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don't see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve the problem. [Comma error is in the original.]

pg. 5-6, the concluding paragraphs

I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man's consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. But the development of a man's consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice. What if he does not choose to? Then he becomes a transitional phenomenon - a desperate creature that struggles frantically against his own nature, longing for the effortless "safety" of an animal's consciousness, which he cannot recapture, and rebelling against a human consciousness, which he is afraid to achieve.

For years, scientists have been looking for a "missing Link" between man and animals. Perhaps that Missing link is the anti-conceptual mentality.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Recall, she wrote in Galt's Speech that "to be human is an act of choice."

Correction. The wording I used is paraphrase, not an exact quote.

Here are exact quotes from Galt's Speech. There's also something along these lines further on in the speech, but I couldn't find that later passage quickly. My hardcover is hiding at the moment and I copied from a softcover which lacks the multiple marginal markings which let me fairly quickly find key statements on the nature of "man" in the hardcover.

For the New Intellectual

pp. 122-24, Signet December 1963 softcover edition

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. [....]

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice--and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man--by choice; he has to hold his life as a value--by choice; he has to learn to sustain it--by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues--by choice.

[....]

Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the source and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate, and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

[....]

No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man--by the work and the judgment of your mind.

No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else--and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

[....]

No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are are not there any longer. [....]

Ellen

[9thdoctor]

I certainly won't end up taking the view that "Mysterious Stranger," one of Diana Hsieh's former ARIan allies, took of Chris Sciabarra's work in 2004.

Those who believe that Peikoff is in error, or that his project in The DIM Hypothesis is misguided, are obliged to refute the claims to which they object.

Yeah well I just thought you’d get a kick out of seeing it again.

OO regular Grames recently put forward the view that the moniker “Comrade Sonia” “is used to avoid refuting the reasons Diana Hsieh gives to count certain people as false friends of Objectivism.”

http://forum.objecti...=50#entry298088

I said no, that’s not how the name came about, and that I’d explain it to him on OL, not OO where such a post is liable to be deleted. But finding documentation for an event that goes so far back isn’t always easy, and my interest level in the subject is too low. To do it right, I find that I’ll have to define what it means to call someone a “Comrade Sonia” (provide quotes from We the Living?), then retell the tale with links to documentation…it’s just too much of a project. My “gotcha” is that the phrase “false friends of Objectivism”, at least as I recall, originated well after “Comrade Sonia”, but that’s probably not going to convince any Hsiehkistanis of anything.

So, I was looking into some of that sordid history last night, while half following the Presidential debate (I can only half follow such things without becoming overwhelmed by nausea) and came across that gem. It came from here:

http://www.objectivi...=140#entry53863

[Robert Campbell]

ND,

Yep, there's the history of "Comrade Sonia," as it might be applied to Dr. Hsieh.

Dr. Hsieh began ratting on about "false friends of Objectivism" in 2004, during her noisy public conversion to ARIanism.

Now, it's 2012, Leonard Peikoff's next book has been published—and there's still no critique of The Russian Radical out of Dr. Hsieh.

Since she's fallen out of favor with Dr. Peikoff and no post at ARI will ever be open to her, I seriously doubt there will ever be such a thing.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

She was saying that those beings have never risen above the perceptual mentality by choice, not that they're biologically incapable of rising above it:

Yes, if she accepted the premise that a hominid with the perceptual mentality has literally never once strung together enough choices to think to enable him or her to correctly understand one concept more abstract than table or dog. OK, maybe it should be one concept more abstract (in Rand's terms) than furniture or animal.

I doubt that Rand herself actually believed that such voluntarily perceptual mentalities were to be all that widely encountered among our conspecifics.

I read the 1973 article as a recrudescence of those old journal entries.

Robert Campbell

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I have a suspicion that Ayn Rand would have been influenced--kicking and screaming at first, maybe, but still influenced--by the recent advances in neuroscience had she lived to see them (and understand them).

There is a phase in many pioneer-like thinkers who build their own systems that can be called the "throwing good money after bad" phase. This is where they have built and invested so much in a foundational idea, they keep piling new things on it. Until the foundation is proven wrong so clearly they can't keep it up. So the phase changes. At that point, they see the idea doesn't work like they thought and they change--usually making a big deal about how rational or open-minded they are at the same time.

I believe Rand would have changed some of her views on how the subconscious mind, and even volition, works over time.

Anyway, let's take her "throwing good money after bad" level at face value. There's something that doesn't work for me and never has--her primary condition of exercising rationality. You have to choose to think rationally when you are in a state where you can't choose anything rationally, otherwise, you can't think rationally.

WTF?

It doesn't make any sense. Enter Peikoff's premoral choice to live (which is a fundamentally moral choice) as a logical development of that premise. Talk about a pretzel...

So I, for one, have thrown this all-or-nothing idea of fundamental choice--to think or not to think--into the scrapheap of scope. (Anyway, it's a riff off Shakespeare's "to be or not to be" meme for good marketing, but that's another kettle of fish for another discussion.)

It's true. You can choose to focus and exercise your rational capacity with conscious intent and control, and by doing so, you can take it further--much further--than you can when it is on automatic pilot. But if you don't, rationality will still kick in. Degraded, but it's still there. That's "the given" to use Rand's jargon and you have no choice about it other than to neutralize it with drugs or suicide.

In other words, choosing to think rationally is a matter of degree, not kind. The laws of logic don't change, but you will still use them up to a certain extent in your cognition, whether you want to or not.

It is inconceivable to me for a child to refuse to learn language (and integrate concepts) by conscious choice. Or to learn them at first by conscious choice, for that matter. Intellectual curiosity is prewired in the very young, not chosen. Our capacity to consciously engage our rational faculty by choice develops and gets greater as we grow. That choice is simply not there in the early years.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I read the 1973 article as a recrudescence of those old journal entries.

Robert,

Recrudescence?

Good Lord, I had to look that one up.

Here, let me help the reader along:

re·cru·desce(rkr-ds)

intr.v. re·cru·desced, re·cru·desc·ing, re·cru·desc·es

To break out anew or come into renewed activity, as after a period of quiescence.

[Latin recrdscere, to grow raw again : re-, re- + crdscere, to get worse (from crdus, raw; see kreu- in Indo-European roots).]

recru·descence n.

recru·descent adj.

Now all we have to do is look up that quiescence thingie...

Michael

[Robert Campbell]

It is inconceivable to me for a child to refuse to learn language (and integrate concepts) by conscious choice. Or to learn them at first by conscious choice, for that matter. Intellectual curiosity is prewired in the very young, not chosen. Our capacity to consciously engage our rational faculty by choice develops and gets greater as we grow. That choice is simply not there in the early years.

Michael,

This is part of the reason I don't subscribe to Rand's notion of a "perceptual mentality," even though that notion appears to leave some room for early language learning before cognitive development is definitively arrested.

Rand struggled with the question, "When does free will emerge in human development?" At times, she attributed free will to babies. But if this were so, then some toddlers of normal intelligence with normal hearing would fail to learn any language because they had refused to do the thinking required to learn it. And no one has come up with evidence of toddlers actively choosing not to think and consequently not learning any language.

Robert Campbell

[Brant Gaede]

It's the chicken and the egg--all the way down.

We easily see a big hunk or conglomeration of a problem obviating observation of just where the choice is/was--for just maybe it was a bunch of smaller choices where free will resides.

A baby doesn't say I'm gonna learn English. He's gonna learn a word, then another, then another--pieces of words by pieces of words.

The dynamic of a human brain is constantly doing something and free will to me seems to be directing the fire hose of consciousness on the burning fire of a problem.

--Brant

[anthony]

It's the chicken and the egg--all the way down.

We easily see a big hunk or conglomeration of a problem obviating observation of just where the choice is/was--for just maybe it was a bunch of smaller choices where free will resides.

A baby doesn't say I'm gonna learn English. He's gonna learn a word, then another, then another--pieces of words by pieces of words.

The dynamic of a human brain is constantly doing something and free will to me seems to be directing the fire hose of consciousness on the burning fire of a problem.

--Brant

You have something true there.

It is in the little chunks of things, and it is in the continuous whittling away at them. Often

we treat life as one big chunk of separate existence, fixed in time. We correctly apply the empirical method,

but that's only partial rationality: Our life is not a laboratory experiment.

Each of us is at some point of his arc of consciouness that never holds still. So much

behind us, and so much ahead, but we generate the motion, and direct and redirect our attention

with each second. Always adding onto where we've been - what we 'know' - because who else can do it?

(Brant sometimes reminds me of something by Salman Rushdie who wrote something like

"the only way to see the whole picture, is to step outside the frame".

Kind of objectivist.

He is good at seeing the whole picture.)

[Robert Campbell]

Phew... finally reached p. 347.

Long footnotes are uncommon in The DIM Hypothesis. A few of these indicate that Leonard Peikoff knows he has an exposure, and prefers not to bring the problem up in his main text.

Note 3 on p. 349, on the subject of differentiation, was one of these.

Here's another.

Peikoff claims that "mode" is revealed through "cultural products," of which he selects four for the book: educational practices, literary works, politics—and physics.

It might occur to a reader that Einstein's theories, quantum mechanics, and superstring theory are known, even vaguely, only by very small minorities in Western culture today, prompting questions, not especially welcome to Peikoff, about the likely contribution of 20th and 21st century physical theory to shaping the larger culture.

Particularly when, by Peikoff's lights, the more applied areas of natural science—he mentions metereology and oceanography—do not admit of any classification as D, I, or M (p. 350, n. 22).

Physics qualifies as concrete in regard to its social influence. A theory in physics, qua theory, is of cultural importance insofar as it impacts the concrete mental process of a society (and not merely of intellectuals). Specific scientific discoveries sometimes do this, and may even instigate a new mode or threaten an old. For instance, predicting Halley's comet or creating the atom bomb has helped move a society (to I in one case, or some version of non-I in the other). It is not the abstract physical theory that has influence here, not F = ma or E = mc², but the acclaimed public concretes; these are what promote in a society a certain view of the universe and of thought. (p. 362 n. 251)

In case you're wondering about Peikoff's vagueness ("some version of non-I") regarding the cultural impact of nuclear warheads, it may have come about because, in his scheme:

Newtonian physics is I

Positivistic views of physical science, à la Ernst Mach, are D₁

Einstein's theories are M₁

Quantum mechanics is D₂

Superstring theory is M₂

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

Speaking of superstring theory getting an M₂, Leonard Peikoff claims in another footnote that totalitarian political systems (such as Communism, Fascism, Khomeinism, or the coming enviro-Christian theocracy) are largely indifferent to science and make no demand for specifically M₂ varieties of science.

See p. 354, n. 88.

Robert Campbell

[Brant Gaede]

LP seems to want to broker thinking. I wonder if he knows he's knocking on 1984's door? Weakly.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

1984?

He's been doing that for years--mostly through his cronies--by publishing sanitized and altered versions of Rand's work.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Brant,

1984?

He's been doing that for years--mostly through his cronies--by publishing sanitized and altered versions of Rand's work.

Michael

Oh, The Wizzard of Oz, too.

Phew... finally reached p. 347.

Long footnotes are uncommon in The DIM Hypothesis. A few of these indicate that Leonard Peikoff knows he has an exposure, and prefers not to bring the problem up in his main text.

Note 3 on p. 349, on the subject of differentiation, was one of these.

Here's another.

Peikoff claims that "mode" is revealed through "cultural products," of which he selects four for the book: educational practices, literary works, politics—and physics.

It might occur to a reader that Einstein's theories, quantum mechanics, and superstring theory are known, even vaguely, only by very small minorities in Western culture today, prompting questions, not especially welcome to Peikoff, about the likely contribution of 20th and 21st century physical theory to shaping the larger culture.

Particularly when, by Peikoff's lights, the more applied areas of natural science—he mentions metereology and oceanography—do not admit of any classification as D, I, or M (p. 350, n. 22).

Physics qualifies as concrete in regard to its social influence. A theory in physics, qua theory, is of cultural importance insofar as it impacts the concrete mental process of a society (and not merely of intellectuals). Specific scientific discoveries sometimes do this, and may even instigate a new mode or threaten an old. For instance, predicting Halley's comet or creating the atom bomb has helped move a society (to I in one case, or some version of non-I in the other). It is not the abstract physical theory that has influence here, not F = ma or E = mc², but the acclaimed public concretes; these are what promote in a society a certain view of the universe and of thought. (p. 362 n. 251)

In case you're wondering about Peikoff's vagueness ("some version of non-I") regarding the cultural impact of nuclear warheads, it may have come about because, in his scheme:

Newtonian physics is I

Positivistic views of physical science, à la Ernst Mach, are D₁

Einstein's theories are M₁

Quantum mechanics is D₂

Superstring theory is M₂

Robert Campbell

Are you being driven to drink?

--Brant

concerned

I'm your spotter, do another rep

[Brant Gaede]

I'm beginning to get a more positive view of DIM in the reading of it.

--Brant

[anthony]

Robert,

Have you caught any hint in 'DIM' that Peikoff is aware he's moving outside

the 'closed' system of Objectivism? Is he, in fact? It appears that way to me.

(Maybe opening the door a crack.)

[Brant Gaede]

I have to give props to a man who would devote most of his seventies to writing this book.

--Brant

[PDS]

I'm beginning to get a more positive view of DIM in the reading of it.

--Brant

Are you willing to expand on the basis for this, Oh Pithy One?

Seriously, I would value any comments you have on this.

[Brant Gaede]

I'm beginning to get a more positive view of DIM in the reading of it.

--Brant

Are you willing to expand on the basis for this, Oh Pithy One?

Seriously, I would value any comments you have on this.

I'm not yet into the meat of the book, but the beginning is a fresh perspective on critical thinking.

--Brant