Definition of Power


Dglgmut

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Oh, I see.

So, me coming on this thread to note that you and Peter don't ask any clarifying questions and respond too fast, from what I see without first really grasping what D says, is an example of "you gratuitously bash people out of nowhere" that you accused me of?

Did I gratuitously bash D or you and Peter with my debate criticism?

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33 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

People, we need to redefine run. I mean, moving by placing one foot in front of the other quickly isn't "run" when we talk about running a company. Or how about plantlife? What do running shoes have to do with the way ivy runs up a tree or wall?

This isn't what I've done... I've taken a specific usage of the word, and tried to untangle it from another similar usage that often gets conflated. You demonstrated the need for this by using the term "force" in your definition of political power. To "force" something to happen is to make it happen. If it doesn't happen, you didn't force it. So if there is any possibility of it not happening, force is not the right word--not when you're being precise. And precision is very important when you're talking about building blocks for complex concepts.

 

So if you put a gun to someone's head and tell them to take all their money out of an ATM, you aren't forcing them. You're influencing them. If they don't do it, you can kill them, but that's not social power, that's physical power. You can force them to die, you can't force them to act.

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14 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

This isn't what I've done...

D,

OK...

14 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

I've taken a specific usage of the word, and tried to untangle it from another similar usage that often gets conflated.

In other words, what I described is exactly what you have done.

🙂

You cannot graft the context of one meaning on another, then say the meaning is no longer valid because it doesn't work where it was not supposed to work. A meaning includes both the narrow part and the context. In Randian terms, you cannot graft the differentia on a different genus, then say the differentia is invalid because it doesn't work there. A definition in Randian terms needs both differentia and genus. Remove either one and you have destroyed the definition.

You can use the same word for different meanings and, if you do not stay clear on the concept of what you are talking about, in other words, if you switch meanings for the same word without identifying you are switching them, this is is where the camel gets its nose under the tent.

(Oddly enough, Rand herself does this at times. For example, she will define art as one thing, then point to an art work or art style she despises and claim that is not art.)

If you define reason as rational self-interest, but look at a black widow spider and notice that she eats her mate after sex, then say it's reasonable they would do that because that's their nature, but it's not rational since the mate dies, therefore it's false to say reasonable always includes rational--you have made a conclusion that is based on switching meaning for the same word, then tried to make this universal when it isn't.

Do you see the conceptual shift in that? Spiders are not rational because they are not conceptual beings. So nothing they do can be rational in human (conceptual) terms.

Yet, everything reasonable that humans do has to include an element of rational--man being a rational animal and all. (And from here we can talk about volition, the different parts of the brain that process information, and so on.) 

When you talk about power and guns, and power and persuasion, you are talking about two different things. Once you throw in human nature and mention the part of human nature that is applicable to each context, the concept for each starts becoming clear. If you ignore human nature, you get a mirage or mush.

One does not invalidate the other. They both exist and both are valid as different things. They have common ground, but not a common root. (Meaning common essence, or common differentia, etc.).

For power and the law in free societies, there is an "out there" and an "in here" when dealing with human beings (human nature). The law is mostly concerned with "out there" (physical force), not "in here" (mental things like persuasion). That's how freedom works. Authoritarian societies try to legislate "in here" stuff (like wrong-think). That is, if social organization is your end point in looking into this stuff. 

If you want to deal with power as self-esteem or electricity or a breakfast cereal, we can go there, too. But that has nothing to do with social organization. Those three examples are at the extreme and I know you didn't say them, but they are great for illustrating the concept of what I am talking about. I would have to go through your posts and list where you do this with closer situations, but I don't have the time to do that. Not if I need to convince you that the concept I am talking about exists and you constantly ignore it, then say it doesn't apply when shown it so clearly, you can't ignore it any longer.

All I have time to do right now is describe it and show it. Now the ball is in your court. You see if it fits your line of reasoning (or if part of it does or whatever). Since your initial automatic reaction is, "This isn't what I've done...", well... OK...

I've just given what I'm talking about a good clear shot. Repeating it over and over will get me nowhere, so I won't repeat it over and over in different words. But this habit of yours--this constant conceptual switcheroonie on the same word--is the problem I've had discussing other things with you.

On the good side, you are getting better on this same point. So something is clicking, even if only by osmosis. 🙂 

Michael

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1 hour ago, Dglgmut said:

So if you put a gun to someone's head and tell them to take all their money out of an ATM, you aren't forcing them. You're influencing them.

Here Jon,

An idea: using a gun is not force unless you fire it.

You seem to like this way of thinking...

(I don't.)

Maybe we can make this about Jon so you will get interested.

Michael

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39 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

In other words, what I described is exactly what you have done.

No, because people don't conflate one usage of the word "run" with another. They're pretty clearly defined.

 

The reason social power needs to be defined and differentiated from physical power is so that we don't explain power structures with incorrect concepts. The reason I want to look into the anatomy of power structures is because there are going to be changes coming, most likely... and I'd like to have some confidence in what I believe works and what doesn't. The imprecise use of the word would taint any theory.

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47 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

An idea: using a gun is not force unless you fire it.

You seem to like this way of thinking...

(I don't.)

And if they don't withdraw the money, did you force them to do it?

You can force someone to leave your house by physically removing them. You forced them because they didn't use volition.

This goes back to unwanted associations of terms, except the other side of the coin: you want to associate these two versions of force, one being literal, the other being a sort of approximation. It's like you forced them to take the money out.

I also see what you're trying to say about human nature, but I think it's because you were putting this all in the wrong context. I'm not trying to talk about laws, or society as it should be maintained... I'm trying to talk about how power structures develop, and perhaps how they fall.

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1 hour ago, Dglgmut said:

And if they don't withdraw the money, did you force them to do it?

D,

Armed robbery is not merely an act of persuasion unless a gun goes off or the thieves put their hands on the victim.

No amount of blah blah blah is going to eliminate or change the reality of what armed robbery is.

If you can't see that armed robbery entails force as part of the concept, you are not thinking conceptually.

Hell, you are not even thinking behaviorally in the strictest sense. People learn that guns kill and maim people just like Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate when the bell dings. Your way of thinking would lead to the conclusion that if there was no food involved in a specific instance of a bell dinging and a dog salivating, that means food wasn't involved at all.

But food was involved because the conditioned response, how the dogs learned to salivate with a bell ding, was done through repeated sessions with food.

Guns kill and maim people, especially in the hands of bad guys. That's force. You don't learn that by persuasion. You learn that by repeated observation and/or experience.

So a bad guy--a thief--using a gun on a person to commit armed robbery is using force. It's not persuasion in the same sense as propaganda or marketing.

Your habit of blanking out the context is one of the reasons why I keep saying you are all over the place conceptually. 

But keep plugging... You will get there. I'm not being glib. I mean it.

Michael

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9 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

If you can't see that armed robbery entails force as part of the concept, you are not thinking conceptually.

I'm thinking STRICTLY conceptually. If I threaten to punch you in the arm, is that force? You have established social power as an emergent property, which means you've precluded any discovery of the roots of power structures. You just know it when you see it. Great, but not analytical.

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Your way of thinking would lead to the conclusion that if there was no food involved in a specific instance of a bell dinging and a dog salivating, that means food wasn't involved at all.

The bell with no food is the unloaded gun. I've already brought it up. There's no food involved at all? Where's the food? In the dog's head? Again, we've been over this. The power is the power to put an idea in someone's head.

 

Do you agree that the media has power, or no? Do you believe that religious institutions do and have had power? Do you believe that Universities have power? What about a psychologist over his patient?

 

I'm isolating a key element of power structures as to further analyze their birth, development, and destruction.

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2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

I'm thinking STRICTLY conceptually.

D,

What you mean by concept is not what I mean. I don't know what you mean, but I know enough from your words, that you don't understand what concepts are as presented by Rand. I mostly adhere to her form, except I throw in modern psychology, neuroscience, and story-processing (for a real clunky term) within her frame.

Do you know about things like conceptual common denominator, crow epistemology, and so on?

I keep arguing by example, which is only good for initial clarification (it provides something familiar for the mind to hook unfamiliar abstractions to), and I have given so many that this is a repeat-fest. But Peikoff, of all people, gives such a great example of what you are doing (in "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand") that I have to quote it.

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Ayn Rand started thinking in terms of principles, she told me once, at the age of twelve. To her, it was a normal part of the process of growing up, and she never dropped the method thereafter. Nor, I believe, did she ever entirely comprehend the fact that the approach which was second nature to her was not practiced by other people. Much of the time, she was baffled by or indignant at the people she was doomed to talk to, people like the man we heard about in the early 1950s, who was calling for the nationalization of the steel industry. The man was told by an Objectivist why government seizure of the steel industry was immoral and impractical, and he was impressed by the argument. His comeback was: "Okay, I see that. But what about the coal industry?"

That's what your error looks like to people who think in concepts as opposed to words only. 

The following quote from "Abstraction from Abstractions is what you are doing, albeit, the quote states it in a more advanced form that you may not grok yet. Unfortunately, it includes the discussion of the concept "man," and that is a distraction, but I needed to include that part for the second paragraph to make sense. (My bold.)

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Just as the concept "man" does not consist merely of "rational faculty" (if it did, the two would be equivalent and interchangeable, which they are not), but includes all the characteristics of "man," with "rational faculty" serving as the distinguishing characteristic—so, in the case of wider concepts, the concept "animal" does not consist merely of "consciousness and locomotion," but subsumes all the characteristics of all the animal species, with "consciousness and locomotion" serving as the distinguishing characteristic. (We shall discuss this further when we discuss definitions.)

An error of that kind is possible only on the basis of assuming that man learns concepts by memorizing their definitions, i.e., on the basis of studying the epistemology of a parrot. But that is not what we are here studying. To grasp a concept is to grasp and, in part, to retrace the process by which it was formed. To retrace that process is to grasp at least some of the units which it subsumes (and thus to link one's understanding of the concept to the facts of reality).

(Oddly enough, although I criticize your conclusions, I see your constant attempts to provide new definitions and so on by examining countless examples as attempts to redo your basic thinking-through and trying to retrace the process by which your abstractions and ideas were formed. I both admire and encourage this attempt. It's a bitch...)

Back to point. By claiming force is not involved in an armed robbery is to treat a gun as a harmless object like, say, a banana. Thus in your example, a man could be pointing a banana at the people he is robbing and it is the same thing as pointing a gun. Getting their money is merely an act of persuasion, right?

Instilling fear in them has nothing to do with force, right?

In your way of thinking, that is right. But in reality, all of reality, including past, present, and future, force is fundamental in an armed robbery. An armed robbery is not merely a series of disconnected instances. It is a whole. Technically speaking (and this is outside of Objectivist jargon), the mental form of such a whole is a narrative model (sometimes called story or schema--a whole narrative model exists in the mind like a concept).

If you remove force from an armed robbery, you no longer have an armed robbery.

You might have something different, but you no longer have an armed robbery. And if you have no capacity to recognize an armed robbery when one happens to you, no capacity to recognize it as a process with a beginning, middle and end, and made up of several components, including force, good luck surviving one.

That's what you are not seeing.

If you limit the meaning of force to a single physical act in the present only--which is what you have described time and time again in describing the robbery, you are stepping outside of conceptual thinking and into the land where rivers don't exist because the water in one place at one time is not the same water in the next moment. In this thinking, the molecules of water change due to the flow, thus a river can never be a single river because the water that makes it up changes all the time.

A conceptual way of thinking knows a single river exists. A concrete-bound way of thinking finds the concept of a river flawed.

The past and the future do not exist in the concrete-bound form of thinking. It takes a single instant and deduces reality from that rather than induces identifications and the principles governing them first.

Another quote from "Abstraction from Abstractions" shows the mental processes involved in doing concepts.

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... the process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

You need both induction and deduction for making and using concepts correctly. You are only using deduction from memorized definitions.

Then you crow victory, but that's another issue. I don't mind that part so much. I'm not an enemy of spunk, zeal, and overextending one's confidence. 🙂 

Michael

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2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

I'm isolating a key element of power structures as to further analyze their birth, development, and destruction.

I keep trying to explain concepts because your analyses are based on premises bearing both flawed conceptual bases and flawed definitions. You have to isolate something (including a "key element") from a correctly processed whole in order to connect abstraction to reality. Otherwise, your isolation is what Rand calls a floating abstraction.

And using floating abstractions as your premises, any "birth, development, and destruction" of power structures you analyze will never correspond to reality--right from the start of the analyses. (Except by accident once in a while.)

Michael

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23 minutes ago, merjet said:

Definitions? Excellent starting point Ms. Rand.

This is off point but I found a local TV ad interesting. In the ad (for working at WBOC TV where you will sell ads) asks, “Do you have a passion for working with others?” In the midst of an epidemic they are talking about online and phone work I suppose. So your skillset must be convincing people to buy your ad, which is not yet a reality, creating a decent ad to sell a product, and then getting it on enough platforms to be a success, and little of this is in person.

So your skill set is not getting along with people in person. This opens the door to people in wheel chairs or who have bladder, gas, or fecal problems, ugly people, and miserable, disagreeable people, who you would never work with in person. So, the virus could be a boon to the people who don’t have a passion for working with others face to face.  Huh? What? how long was I asleep?  

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44 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

You have to isolate something (including a "key element") from a correctly processed whole in order to connect abstraction to reality.

I've given you some "wholes," being the media, the universities and the church. Your definition of power does not fit with them, does it? Fear is not force, unless you think fear will 100% determine behavior. No, it influences behavior. The more fear, the more influence.

 

Where is the floating in this abstraction? I'm specifically looking for the connections to reality, and removing the false ones. Floating abstractions are typically based in generalization, I'm not doing that. I'm being more specific. I'm trying to be more consistent, that's the point of cross referencing... If your definition doesn't work in some cases, the definition is flawed. The point of refining a concept is not to simplify things, but to clear up space for other relevant concepts.

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34 minutes ago, merjet said:

"A hungry man is not free," can be true, though. Even in a social sense, if one man has a monopoly on food in a specific situation... MREs in a war. If we expect both these men to respect each other's rights, the hungry man is not free but to exchange whatever property or service to the other man or else he will die.

 

Accepting something as true does not mean you agree with the rhetorical use of such a fact. If we treat both economic power and political power both as social power, we can see that most forms of political power are far more influential than most forms of economic power. So the false equivalency is not one of quality but of quantity. Manipulation can vary extremely in degrees... The psychologist's power over the patient has nothing to do with physical force, but it's still significant.

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1 hour ago, merjet said:

I also have to add that the idea of "political power" does nothing to answer "who" has power? The police officer? Does he have political power? Or is it the politicians--you know, the ones not holding any guns?

 

This is just sloppy thinking. It's an attempt to draw a straight line back from a roughly correct conclusion to a starting point. Political power usually leads to bad things, economic power often leads to good things. I see why Rand would want to differentiate between the two.

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2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

I've given you some "wholes," being the media, the universities and the church.

D,

These are wholes, they are concepts, but not for what you are trying to do. Force is not built into the concept of media like it is into the concept of an armed robbery.

How about power in the universe? That's a whole, too.

By the way, do you remember what my definition of power was?

2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

Your definition of power does not fit with them, does it?

See? And this isn't the only place you are saying that.

So you present yourself as knowing enough to say what you think my definition of power isn't.

Do you remember what it is? Do you remember what I wrote? Because you are not saying so far.

If you don't, now is a good time to go back and look it up.

Michael

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1 hour ago, Dglgmut said:

I see why Rand would want to differentiate between the two.

D,

You see?

Care to share your pearl of wisdom?

Why do you think Rand would want to differentiate between political power and economic power? Because she was a sloppy thinker like you said in that post? Or is there something more?

As to sloppy thinking, I can't even elicit a response from you that indicates that you know what a concept is. And this transpires as you mush concepts together in places they don't belong.

btw - I keep objecting because your way of portraying situations where force is involved as persuasion only leads to government censorship. Illegal wrong-think with jail penalties and things like that. Today it's fashionable to say "words are violence." Then the contrary comes, that acts of violence are peaceful protests or public expression and not really violence.

Why does that happen? Once you have neutralized the concepts of force and power by eliminating context, anything goes. Then people start "persuading" all over the place with guns as their form of making a living.

I refuse to sanction that kind of power over my mind.

Michael

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2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

Where is the floating in this abstraction?

D,

I thought that was clear.

Severing past and future and repetition from forming the concept.

That's only one example, but it's a doozie.

Are you even reading what I write or are you just skimming to find something so you can kneejerk a rejection?

Michael

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2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

The psychologist's power over the patient has nothing to do with physical force, but it's still significant.

D,

This is more stuff not thought through correctly.

Psychologists these days prescribe drugs--powerful drugs that inhibit the uptake of serotonin in your brain, for example.

That's physical force.

In past times, they did lobotomies. More physical force. They still do shock treatments. Even more physical force. 

I could go on and on and on...

Michael

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21 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

These are wholes, they are concepts, but not for what you are trying to do. Force is not built into the concept of media like it is into the concept of an armed robbery.

I don't know what this means.

Quote

How about power in the universe? That's a whole, too.

Okay? Social power?

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