God or No God or Something Else?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

God or No God or Something Else?

The following 8 posts got peeled off from a discussion I was having with Stephen Boydstun in a thread in his corner called Some of my Philosophy Writings. 

The discussion went way beyond his own writings and into a specific topic about God and religion.

It's a good discussion, too.

 

Enjoy.

Michael

 

==============================

 

Stephen,

I actually understood what you wrote.

 

I have a comment about this idea, though.

On 12/4/2022 at 7:55 PM, Guyau said:

Rand writes: “‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind” (AS 1036). She means in context not only things as perceived by your mind so far, but as perceivable by your mind at any stage, and she means not only your mind, but any sound human mind.

 

My problem is how do we know what is in "any sound human mind"? 

There is only one way to know it, from observing sound humans in their speech and actions.

There is no way to get into their brains and observe.

Fortunately, modern brain science is coming up with ways to record, contrast and compare the brain working, but essentially we depend on others to tell us what they observe and see if it aligns with what we observe.

And, that being the case, I personally am loathe to exclude certain things from existence and call it fact.

I don't call this unknown God in this context. It's the phrase I learned in 12 step meetings: "Higher Power, however you conceive of it."

 

The logic in my mind goes like this. If I restrict all knowledge as being rooted in things I can observe, what happens if something exists that humans can't observe? Or observe yet? How can we validly make judgments and absolute statements about the nature of that? 

We can't. We can talk around it, but we can't with certainty.

 

Evolution takes a long, long time. Some people believe the human being is the pinnacle of evolution for detecting all the elements in the universe.

Well, I agree that humans detect a hell of a lot of them, and humans build instruments to extend their capacity to observe more. But just like swarms form--seemingly out of nowhere--in a species of birds, they are detecting something in reality that humans do not. They are communicating in a way that humans do not.

Is it possible for humans to eventually evolve some sort of sensory capacity to detect what the birds know? Or instruments to bring their perception of reality within human perception? Maybe.

But I think it is just as plausible that humans will evolve further organs to detect parts of reality not available right now.

I think the similar experiences reported by people in different places, times, and without the ability to know what others observed about, say, near death experience--for one example--means something. The traditional dismissal of this is that parts of the brain are not acting as they normally do when a person is near death, it's a bug in the circuits so to speak that deludes the person.

But it it? Or do they detect something that exists that is only available to their perception when near death? For the life of me, I cannot speak with certainty about things I don't know and cannot know. I can say with certainty I don't or can't perceive something with the equipment I have, but I cannot say it doesn't exist if I don't or can't perceive it.

So when I see all of that similarity between reports of NDE, I believe I have to keep an open mind to several possibilities to explain it until I can know for sure it is not this or not that for reasons that take that thing (death) into account according to its own nature, and not just according to how "any sound human mind" perceives it.

 

So I ask myself, what would a developing organ look like in evolution? When wings evolved, was it like an on-off switch where one moment a species had no wings and the next moment all the individuals had wings? Or is it more likely that a transition period happened where partial wings were present in some individuals (with all sorts of gradations) whereas they were not present in others, and that the partial wings worked imperfectly, when they worked at all, by today's standard?

If I were an animal evolving back then and I could talk, how sensible would it sound to say that animals can't fly. Period. Why? Because flying doesn't exist. Or even say flying for all birds exists as if that were a fact? 

 

The following is anecdotal, but this is where my own standards on these matters start.

When I finally decided to give up drugs, I looked at a source of my anxiety back then and concluded this certainty issue was at root. At least for a huge chunk. So I thought it through and I concluded that the universe was way larger and way smaller than I could observe, and that there was a hell of a lot of time--before and after my life span--I had no access to for observing. So I concluded that I can be certain of some things, and I will likely never know for certain other things, not just because I don't know them, but because I--possibly--can't know them with the equipment I have. I am an individual in a species that is evolving.

After I concluded that, peace of mind came. I mean, I still had to go through hell to get out of addiction  , but I no longer blamed myself for lacking certainty when I didn't know something about existence. My default condition for perception and knowledge is limited--at least for the present--to the normal limitations of any sound human being.

 

Is there something more? Some people say no. Period.

Some people say yes. Period.

I say, "Damned if I know. I hope so."

And that's good enough for me because it has to be. I don't see how it can be any different with what I have and am.

 

Michael

[Guyau]

Michael, thank you for the reflections. 

I certainly agree that there is much unknown all around us. That is the understanding of all scientific research, why they do it. There is darkness and potential invention all around us.

Our artificial instruments are the fantastic extension of our natural sensory instruments to which they connect, connect together with the exploring mind in natural science, which is our investigation of things existential, indeed concrete existents.

In mathematics, there are things proven to be universally true, that is, universally within a defined realm. So in the context of a Euclidean plane, we can prove that the sum of the three angles of a triangle—any and all triangles—equals two right angles. The proofs show us both that the theorem is true and that it is necessarily, universally true. Within the Euclidean plane, not, say, on the surface of a sphere.

That is not the way we prove existential things. Rather, for concrete existents, we start with some knowing of it by perception and build on that. In the case of Rand's metaphysics or mine, for example of some interest here, we do not start as in mathematics with a proof for a single sample case which is inherently general to all cases. Rather in these metaphysics, we start with patterns we've discerned in observed cases and then see if we can find a proof that shows the principle is necessarily true, that it is true for all cases within the pertinent context. For metaphysics that context is widest context, widest reality, widest world. For the subject of metaphysics, at least general metaphysics, there is no analogue of change of context from the Euclidean plane to the surface of a sphere.

Rand had her principle for metaphysics that existence is identity; if no identity, then no existence. She could look around and point to cases in which particular things have certain natures and not other natures. She can agreeably say that that is the reason the principle of non-contradiction has been accepted by people engaged in cooperative communication and thinking from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. (Leibniz and Kant and others between them also saw this connection of identity to PNC, but without always with such a full-bodied sense of identity as Rand's. Hers included not only this versus that, but what versus what not.) That layer of proof of complete generality of a principle of existence is not the way we proceed with our greater and greater discovery in science, though there too, we begin with observation of patterns in some cases and with our senses, our natural instruments. That's OK. We have all three lights: mathematics and its methods, science and its methods, metaphysics and its methods.

I mention the distinctive sort of knowledge aimed at in the metaphysics of Rand and I and many others because if you can get such a proof of necessary truth for a principle, we can know it will never be within the bounds of existence for the principle to not hold. Rand mostly simply claimed  her principle that existence is identity is such a principle. That is, she claimed that if one were to deny the principle, one would end in a self-contradiction. I constructed proofs for her years ago here at Objectivist Living for identity in her categories of ENTITY and ACTION, but left it incomplete by never addressing the category ATTRIBUTE (which has a long dispute as to whether the thesis for this category [viz., red all over, green all over], from Locke to Putman, concerning whether it is merely a tautology [which would lose necessary connection to existence]). Perhaps I could have found a proof she needed for the attribute-component of identity. But I lost interest, because in 2014, my own ground-shifts in metaphysics were drawing my attention. The end result for me, about six years later, included new categories replacing Rand's as constitution of identity. And for my categories beyond ENTITY—the categories PASSAGE, SITUATION, and CHARACTER—I was able to provide proofs of their complete generality by showing that any counterexample as counterexample must rely on them. That was in my fundamental paper "Existence, We" (2021).

That leaves something open in metaphysics, however, that can with much work be closed in mathematics. And that is whether a given set of categories is complete. Is the set the entire constitution of identity? In mathematics proof of that sort is called a category proof, and it was a big accomplishment in our lifetime that they found a proof that their characterization of what they call simple Lie groups was a complete characterization; they had gotten a category proof for that area. This lack for a set of ontological categories means one should keep alert for possible additional necessarily true elements within identity. However, it does not mean that there is any existent that can possibly be contrary the theses we have proven for existents so far: Existence is passage (and consciousness is a passage marking passage), Existence is situation (and consciousness is a situation that sites), Existence is character (and consciousness is a character that characterizes). (The scope of the duration category may be only for concrete existents [although that would include not only actual concretes, but potential ones], as I recall; it's too late in the day to be looking it up just now.)

I probably have mentioned before the reporter asking Röntgen what did he think when he found that his sealed-up, protected photographic plates in the lab where he had been investigating beta-rays (electrons) had been exposed already when he unwrapped them. He replied "I did not think. I investigated." That is surely the right step(s), of the right sort, in response to that sort of bumping into the darkness around us. He found X-rays, which have brought new light in more ways than one. In mathematics that sort of bumping into the surrounding darkness arises in creative construction of surprising mathematical particulars, such as when Weierstrass produced a function that was everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable; that leads to some conceptual sharpening and regrouping in mathematics. The problems thrown up to modern philosophy are often from unexpected results of science. If one is going to philosophize about objectivity and its relation to truth-telling, in the general perspective that is philosophy, then one had better have assimilated what has been found from anthropology on the evolution of human thinking and the psychological research on development of human thinking from infancy. Surprises come up in physics, where philosophy needs to learn the physics and make the philosophic thought more precise than before the scientific discovery. An example would be the development of chaos theory in physics, from the 1970's to now (mostly, but a bit earlier also from Poincaré on stability of the Moon's orbit) and its result that a process can be entirely deterministic yet not have its future course computable a non-trivial time into the future even if every bit that there is in the universe could be utilized in the computation. That is, there is a cleavage between determinism and predictability that was not foreseen (for the right reasons) by philosophy. There can come also new challenges to philosophy, including metaphysics, coming internally from philosophy itself. Examples would be answering Hume in his various skepticisms or countering the vast philosophy with which Kant replaced German metaphysics prior to him.

Those internal wake-up frictions in philosophy, however, are less securely real challenges to respond to and assimilate philosophically than those coming to philosophy from science (or from mathematics/logic, such as the limitative theorems of Gödel).

But against this background situation of darkness and what we know, let me finally respond to your remarks on mortality. I had one seeming-near-death experience, several years ago. I say seeming, because although the situation was precarious, I was not in the moment about to die, only about to lose consciousness. I had been internally bleeding and was in number ten pain. I was being wheeled on a gurney down the hallway of a hospital. I began to think, along with experience of the pain, that I was dying. I simply coldly thought: "So that's where I got to" (meaning in my writing work). But then is when an involuntary thing occurred. I sensed that all the world had slipped away into darkness, it was no longer in my thought, and within that blackness there was only this disk of bright white light and only two things were in it: Walter and me. A bit like a cameo picture. 

All that seems readily assimilable to me within science and philosophy. I have no doubt that death is exactly as it blatantly and rudely appears to be, namely, the end of life and its instrumentation and control systems, the end of its consciousness, end of the existence of that person and consciousness. Many of my loved ones have come to that full stop by now. I shall end also, full stop. Existence, time, situation, and character will continue. But there is no something I shall be when I die, no place in space or time. I wrote a poem about this a little over a year ago, and it is here.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

It's late and I will write more. You gave a few statements that intrigued me.

For now I just want to register a quick note.

Rand's "ostensive definition."

For existence, she swung her arm all around and said, "I mean this."

That's kinda my perspective when we get to the axiomatic concepts in metaphysics.

More coming...

Michael 

[Guyau]

Agreed.

Then she goes on to place a necessary test for something to be an axiom, which is of course in the context of language and thought in language: Show that a thing witnessed, or a noted aspect of what is witnessed, is true necessarily, meaning it has to be recognized as always true, upon pain of contradiction (including self-contradiction or contradiction with what is witnessed). Passing of that test is only a necessary requirement. Additional criteria enter into which among various passers of that test should be selected for axioms. A good historical example is the concept 'possibility'. When people are talking and thinking together about philosophical things, overwhelmingly, they take non-contradiction of things asserted or deductively following from assertions taken together as a basic principle of thought and discourse. A shared common presumption. But going beyond acceptance of PNC, there is the case of the metaphysics of Baumgarten, whose text was used by Kant for his lectures on metaphysics through the years. It wasn't that you had to hold forth as true everything in the textbook for the course. You got to select a text from a set sanctioned for teaching by the state in Berlin, but you could point out things in the text you thought were errors. In Baumgarten's account of and setting out of metaphysics, he begins with a definition of nothing, which is anything that is contradictory. He then defines something as anything that is not nothing. And consistently with those moves, he will define metaphysics as the philosophy of our most fundamental means of cognition. Rand and I and Kant and some other philosophers of his era will all object to that ordering between the basic concepts of nothing and something. Rand should say existents and their natures properly have conceptual priority over possibility and over nothing; I shall say that existents and their natures have conceptual priority over nothing and over actualities and potentials, and potentials have conceptual priority over possibilities (including one's possibility of sweeping one's arm in a situation of joint communicative intent.) This is the further condition Objectivists have placed on axioms (axiomatic concepts or propositions) for metaphysics: the factor of being conceptually most fundamental (or the more fundamental among all contenders). 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I read something about Axiomatic Concepts Nathaniel Branden wrote ages ago that made so much sense to me, it stayed with me.

He said you know a concept is axiomatic when you have to use it conceptually to try to disprove it.

If you want to disprove existence, you have to exist to do that.

If you want to disprove the law of identity, you first have to have an identity to be specific enough to prove or disprove anything.

If you want to disprove consciousness, you have to be conscious.

 

This is where God comes in. If you want to disprove God exists, conceptually you don't have to be God or be part of God or be created by God. That doesn't mean you will ever disprove His existence, but it does mean His existence is not an axiomatic concept.

That's my paraphrase, but I always thought that was cool.

 

 

btw - To be clear, I lean toward the existence of a Higher Power or even Higher Powers. I get observational glimpses at time. But that's all I get. I don't know enough about them or about existence as a whole to say anything for certain from a perspective that would embody them. And I don't know what consciousness would be like if I were like them in range and extent. I can only think from the human and human-sized perspective. Human-sized in this context is not limited to space.

To add to a former thought, there are certain worms, bugs, sea creatures and cave creatures that do not have eyes and cannot sense light. That does not mean light does not exist. They just can't detect it when it is present. And there are some creatures that have bumps or primitive sensors and can only get the equivalent of glimpses of light, but not enough to be useful to their existence. That's the same kind of state I believe many humans are in with regards to... well... and that's where I have to wait to be sure. 

I'm trying to figure out how to make a pun with Plato's cave, but that particular light is not coming into my awareness.

 

 

I'm starting to muse...

For a creature without eyes, light cannot be an axiomatic concept (should it ever become conceptual) even though light exists. The creature does not have to prove light doesn't exist. It doesn't sense light at all. So it doesn't have to use light to disprove it.

I can extend that and say, even for humans, who are conceptual, the existence of light for that creature is not axiomatic. The existence of light is axiomatic for us humans, but that is so irrelevant to the creature, the existence of light has no meaning or value. And when I (human) look at that creature, I can't find anything but rationalizations to make the existence of light have meaning or value for it. I see what it cannot.

I see what it cannot. That proposition, to me, is axiomatic. Light has to exist for me to make that observation and I have to know what sight is to make it. But that has to do with me, human. It has nothing to do with the creature itself, or its nature, on its own terms of existence.

Michael

[Guyau]

On 12/6/2022 at 1:31 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

. . .

If you want to disprove the law of identity, you first have to have an identity to be specific enough to prove or disprove anything.

. . . That doesn't mean you will ever disprove His existence, but it does mean His existence is not an axiomatic concept.

. . .

To disprove the existence of God, one would have to have some specification of what is meant by the term (a proper name, really) God. In the tradition of "the negative way," championed especially by Pseudo-Dionysus and by Maimonides, the only thinking humans might do concerning what God is is by negation of anything known of existence. God is not activity nor stillness and so forth. To continue then to give the thing personification by giving it a proper name, is inconsistent, but let's pass over that. On Rand's view, and mine, a thing without identity is a thing that does not exist. To offer a counterexample to the universal proposition that any existent has some identity, one will land in contradiction. The norm of non-contradiction is, as noticed by Leibniz, Kant, and Rand, based on the fact of identity, and really, as Rand took it, on the requirement of identity for existence. Ending in a contradiction might be comfortable for a denier of Rand's principle of identity. Such an comfort, however, rests on a consistency against a presumed background that contradictions do not exist in reality and should be avoided. But let us leave aside that line of problems and stay with the usual presumed common ground of adherence to principles of elementary logic, including the rule of non-contradiction. "Negative way to God" is proven not a way to any existent if it is proven that any existent must have identity. 

Suppose an entity, other than existence as a whole, is offered as an entity that is not of any kind excluding it being other kinds. Then the supposed entity could be one with any other entities that are of exclusive kinds (just as a leaf that is a drain-clogger could be one with a leaf that is dead, maple, and wet). For it is not an entity of any kind excluding it being other kinds. But to say that an entity is not of any exclusive kind and that it is one and the same with another entity that is of some exclusive kind(s) is a contradiction. (Not-A is A.) Indeed if some entity were not of any exclusive kind, then it could be one with the person who supposes such an entity (the person who proposes such a counterexample). Then to suppose an entity that is not of any exclusive kind is to suppose that one’s own person could be an entity not of some exclusive kinds. But that supposition contradicts the presupposition that one is of the exclusive kind Person, a person who makes the (errant) supposition. (Cf. Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1007b19–1008a28.)

That is a method for proving that no counterexample to the thesis “Every entity is of some exclusive kind(s)" is possible if contradiction marks falsehood and impossibility. Let me now try to use this method to prove that no counterexample can be found to the thesis “Every existent has some definite character” (because character, along with passage and situation, are the categories additional to entity in my metaphysics, and when those three are bundled together and with any category that has escaped my attention, they constitute exhaustively the identity of any existent. The existence of the existent is the same as the existence of its four together, which is to say, the same as the existence of its identity ).

The counterexample would have to have no definite character. Then it would be one with any existent having definite character. It would have to be one with the person proposing the counterexample as well as one with a stone. Then a person would be one with a stone, which as Quasimodo observed, they are not.

You mentioned that God cannot be taken for an axiom. Spinoza tried something akin to that. Everywhere that Rand and I and perhaps you also would put the word and concept existence, Spinoza put God (and where he puts essence, we put identity, and where he puts substance, we put entity). So:

"By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence. . . . If something is absolutely infinite, whatever expresses essence and involves no negation pertains to its essence."

"Since it pertains to the nature of substance to exist, . . . its definition must involve necessary existence, and consequently its existence must be inferred from its definition alone."

"God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists." (He then proves that thesis by what has gone before. Cf. Tibor Machan's paper titled "Evidence of Necessary Existence" in Objectivity. A Spinoza man told me later that Tibor's paper had grown out of discussions with him.)

"Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God."

This guy Spinoza was seriously thinking and is worth study. There is much in the preceding text, including what is in the ellipses, for an Objectivist or me to challenge. But at least he was unfolding a specific thing. Such a layout does not try to close the door on cooperative communication and preclude counterargument showing his argument entailing the (necessary) existent God is amiss.

One line of objection would be that philosophical axioms or leading ideas should start with claims about the world we experience around us. Then those truths may be tested for their susceptibility to being barred from complete generalization because a counterexample has been adduced.

Literally, I'm in a world without God or a higher power, insofar as those have been made articulate notions. I am content in this harmonious place and with my vulnerabilities and eventual absolute deceasing in this all there is. And also, in the here, in this only, for those recurrent notions God and higher power there are available for me correspondents in the here some things, including in us, our strength and goodness and love of life.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

I read this carefully, and there is an instance you did not cover: the unknown (metaphysics) and how the brain processes the unknown (epistemology).

I adhere to Rand's law of identity and all of that (meaning axiomatic concepts and going on for there). But I also am aware that her formulation about axiomatic concepts is epistemology, not metaphysics. And Randian epistemology is based solely on input to the senses being processed by an organic computer-like faculty, a brain. I can supply quotes, but I'm sure you are more than familiar with them.

(As an aside, I am not on board with her computer analogy because I do not find it accurate. However, it does apply to some of the mind, but that discussion is beyond the scope here. I'm just mentioning it to make note of it.)

We can posit that this mental system is superior to metaphysics and it, this system (this epistemological system), determines the extent and nature of reality (metaphysics), but that would be primacy of consciousness at root. Not primacy of existence.

Or we can accept that this system is the human form of processing information about reality that evolved as the human species survived and evolved though individual members surviving and reproducing and dying (the conditions set by reality for any species to survive and evolve, which, in this sense, means adapting to reality and gradually encompassing more and more of the parts of reality unknown to the individual members of the species before).

When one posits that reason is able to delimit reality, I not only judge this to be wrong, I see a contradiction using Randian principles of logic themselves. The epistemological axiom of metaphysics for Rand starts with primacy of existence, not primacy of consciousness. That's how I understand her work. And to invert that right at the start is a fatal logical flaw.

 

Then there is the matter of subjective experience. We only know that other people see red because they tell us. Then, using lots of people essentially pointing at the same thing, we can measure wave forms and so on as people who see also red keep saying, "Yes, that is what I mean." But the experience of seeing red belongs to each individual subjectively and only subjectively. I'm not a proponent of one mind melding with another, nor of a collective consciousness. Those are the only two ways I can imagine right now where you would be able to experience my experience, i.e., see red in the exact same instant and manner that I do, that is, become me, so to speak. 

I like shapeshifters and body snatchers for stories, but I don't think they are good models for epistemology, specifically to base reason on.

 

How this pertains to God, is almost a secondary issue. People who think like I do accept that God is not present as an individual in the sensory input processing system in the brain. But only to the extent of the fives sense (or more if you call gravity detection and so on as happening through specific dedicated sense organs). Should another sense organ develop in humans to detect the unknown, that is, parts of reality not perceived by humans yet, this input would have to go into the same system as input from the other senses in order to make concepts and other mental operations in Objectivist epistemology.

I, and those like me, also accept that the subjective experience of many different individuals is how awareness develops in a species so that such awareness can be present in individual members not yet born. This growing awareness of the unknown, or better said, this growing knowing of what was previously unknown, physically alters enough DNA of individual members that they begin to reproduce offspring with this awareness. It's a long process, but I don't see how it can be otherwise at my current state of knowledge.

So I find it impossible to delimit the nature of God (or whatever term one wants to use for an unknown higher power) in sensory terms, but I also find it impossible to be rationally consistent and posit that God does not exist as a metaphysical absolute. And when people say there is no evidence, I look around and see all kinds of people relating subjective experience of experiencing God, and a huge number, actually the majority from what I can tell, of these reports are similar.

That is evidence. That may not be proof, but that is evidence. Eye-witness reports are evidence. From what I can tell, we can do three things with this evidence:

1. Ignore it. (Blank out.)
2. Make up some speculation or other about how these people are being fooled by their brains or by others (which goes the range from neuron and neurochemical misbehavior all the way to saying the majority of mankind is stupid and deluded and then mentally process this allegation in the same manner an axiom is accepted by far too many people--that is, they say to themselves, "I perceive and think, therefore they are."
3. Accept that these people, or a large number of them, are honestly relating real experiences to the best of their ability, then study it and see where it leads.

I choose to do the last. 

 

And there is one last item: creation. If we accept that humans do not create reality, that human creation is rearranging parts of reality into new wholes, which is Rand's view (once again, I can supply quotes, but I am sure you are familiar with them), we have a huge unknown left over. What created us? Are we just parts of reality that were rearranged, or is there something else about this process that we don't know?

I think anyone who answers that last question with 100% certainty is pronouncing--as fact--something he or she cannot possibly know. They are saying their knowledge is superior to reality, that certain possibilities they have no equipment observe are excluded from reality. Essentially they are saying parts of reality that others detect and relate do not exist because they think so and say so. If they cannot detect it, it does not exist. Full stop. Then they often put a cherry on top with an absurd example such as "The Flying Spaghetti Monster could exist according to your logic."  I disagree with this in more ways than one, including when I use Randian logic.

What they leave out is the vast quantity of evidence of all those people telling about their experiences throughout all of human history. I don't know of anyone saying they had an experience with a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but mankind, since the beginning, has stories of the same experience with God (or a higher power of some sort). I, me Michael, just can't blank that out just because I long for certainty (which is an urge in all healthy human brains).

 

On a personal note, I came to this view when I got out of addiction. Back then, I did a mental start-over. All the way back to the beginning. One of the ways to start over (which I later saw meant the same thing as Rand's call to check premises) is to begin by taking inventory of what is around you. "What do I know?" and "How do I know it?" Those questions should be familiar.  

When I dug in, I came to the conclusion that I understood the universe according to human size and human limitations, but also human faculties and powers. And using human as a standard, I saw that the universe was a big-ass place, but also a small-ass place, much bigger and smaller than humans can detect with present day senses and equipment. So I had to accept that there are parts of the universe I will likely die not knowing. And I accepted that. This led me to focus on what I could know. Emotionally, it led me to a serenity I did not have before.

So, regarding questions of God, I became more and more uncomfortable with the "hard atheism" line that I held up to then. That line appears to me as just another form of faith. When I don't know something, even when I can't know something, I'm happy to say I don't or can't know it. 

The only thing I have added is that I am also happy to observe dots to connect and speculate about things that are unknown to me, but there are signs I can observe. This always starts as story, that is, people relating their experiences, or me putting into story form something I experienced.

Before I was dismissive of stories that did not align with my view of what reality is (formed by sensory input and processed by a wet computer, basically formed by reading Rand). Now I accept that a story may not mentally represent a fact in the same manner a concept does, but that does not mean it does not represent any reality at all. When enough reports from others are similar, I accept there might be something there. It becomes time to look deeper or go into a holding pattern and do or think about something else. For me, I no longer state as fact that it does not exist.

Michael

[Guyau]

Michael,

Concerning religious experiences, I don’t need to learn of them and what they are like through report of others, because I had them myself, and I have some memory of them. I’ve talked in adulthood to others (in our culture) who had them and we could understand that ours were the same. They were of two sorts in my case. The ones in childhood were intense episodic ecstasy in which I made no connection to another personage such as God, though I imagine older children and adults might. I doubt I ever spoke of them to anyone. They were just natural and marvelous to me. Yes, those probably were brain breakouts of some sort, as I was a child who additionally had chronic Grand Mal seizures. Everyone knew about those, of course. But the important thing for our discussion here was my final and decidedly religious experience.

That was in first year of college. For some reason, I no longer remember very specifically where I was, but that I was at college, definitely alone, probably just in the dorm room. Actually, a bit more is coming back to me now. I was reading my Bible, which would have been usual for most any day. I came to a line that said “feed my lambs” and suddenly I knew in my head and heart, it was addressing me personally. I had received “the call.” Established ministers know this experience, and they know it may or may not pan out. I was at the secular school University of Oklahoma, but my pastor there knew what all to do to get things rolling. I was taking German already, but additionally, I would need Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (which last you could get individually from an elderly Rabbi in the community). I switched my major from my beloved physics to a very well-suited major they called Letters, which had a triple emphasis in history, literature, and philosophy. All that would be the excellent preparation for entering the seminary, which would be in Missouri.

This was no brain-difference sort of thing. It happens all the time with people who’ve never had any brain problems.

I’ve thought, looking back at how my life unfolded the next fifty-seven years, that I probably would have been pretty good at that vocation. A few months after “the call” and still in freshman year, I became an atheist. (Sorry if I’ve related some of this before.) Those minutes I remember very clearly. I didn’t know anything of Rand yet or any other philosopher, except some Thomism from my first philosophy class. I was alone on our floor at the dorm. I was entering my room from the hallway, and I had begun in thought a sort of dare to think what it would be like if God did not exist, what if it were all just floating here of itself, without support of God. I saw it all fit. There was no God. That was quite a pain, of course, because I had just realized that the greatest love in my life had never existed. But it was also a feeling of cleansing and vast benevolence toward all humanity (perhaps because now I realized no cosmic one was was watching over them.) I began to tell some of my close college friends as I encountered them. We all knew what was each other’s religion. All but one of them was utterly shocked that this was coming from me, whose religious views and devoutness they had known very well. I was the sole student among the hundreds in the cafeteria who bowed his head and silently said grace before each meal. The one student who was not what I would call shocked was the one guy we all knew was not religious, but an agnostic. A broad smile went across his face, and he reached over and shook my hand.

I returned to being a physics major (and a philosophy minor). The emotional effect on my family of me no longer believing in God was horrible. Years later, I could visit more distant relatives, eat at their table and go to their church with them, and in a little while they would figure out I was no longer religious, and in all cases, their response was the same: do not be with us further.

I’ve not studied any psychology work on the religious experience of “getting the call,” and it’s just not anything terribly alien going on in my experience of it and assimilation of it in my later perspective of what is the world and the place of the living mind in it.

The circumstance that millions of people have religious experiences and call them that and millions of people are decided atheists does not carry any intellectual weight for me. They contradict each other. Just as religions across the past of humans contradict each other. (Absolutely fabulous: Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age by Robert Bellah.) Not all can be correct. That’s all. The reasoning of Thomas or Spinoza or I or . . . on our experience carries the only cognitive weight to me.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

7 hours ago, Guyau said:

The circumstance that millions of people have religious experiences and call them that and millions of people are decided atheists does not carry any intellectual weight for me. They contradict each other.

Stephen,

That was an interesting look into your past.

Thanks for telling it. I'm sorry I missed it the other times you told it.

(btw - I believe more people will read your stuff online if you use shorter paragraphs. They skip over long blocks of text on the screen. This is not a style thing. It's about eye movement and I can point you to the relevant eye movement studies if you like.)

As for me, all of the experiences I have had did not involve a specific religion. Ironically, I've had lots of contact over the years with formal religions, but I can't recall any of those contacts, or teachings, involve what I would call a religious experience. I admit they awoke curiosity in me, premises to check, so to speak, but they did not prompt any experiences per se.

 

Now a comment about your words I quoted. In purely epistemological terms, I find an error in the quote. Not in the value judgement part (the intellectual weight part). That's your business.  

It's in the logical part. Saying that religious experience is contradicted by people deciding to be atheists is comparing two things that do not have a logical either-or connection. Both exist. The religious experiences related are not chosen. They happened to the people who had them. The decision to become an atheist is consciously chosen. One is passive, the other active. The stories of religious experience are evidence of some sort of passive occurrences, of having something happen and observing it. The rejection of the existence of God, if you want to call that evidence, is evidence of a conscious choice a person made about a proposition.

One does not contradict the other because they are different things. Apples do not contradict oranges.

Maybe a logical connection exists if both of these are put forth as proof of the existence or inexistence of God, but that is not what I was talking about. And it makes no sense to me anyway. Even when I was religious in my youth, it never did. 

And I can go further. In your case, I do not find a contradiction in your religious experiences as opposed to your choice to be an atheist. Both happened.

The syllogism as I see it, when adding God to the mix, is the following.

Some people have religious experiences.
Other people are atheists.
Therefore God does not exist.

That makes no sense to me as a syllogism. I could have easily said the contrary, "Therefore God exists," and that would have been just as illogical.

The two propositions are not connected in terms of God existing or not. I grant that they are deeply connected in perception of God, though. And perception belongs to each individual at root. It is not collectively shared as a mental state. Perception is not reality. It is one part of the the mental processing of awareness. Perception is epistemology and reality is metaphysics. 

 

In my own world, I am extremely interested in what I call "moments of transcendence." I know they happen and I am not content to label them aberrations of the brain. In fact, I accept that brain aberrations can explain some of them, but I reject that this explains all of them, or even the majority of them. Especially not the eureka feeling, which is one type of moment of transcendence. And the eureka feeling happens in both a religious context and a nonreligious context. 

It exists. So I look at it and look into it no matter what the context. Delving into it is my starting point, not prejudging what it means or can or cannot be. Or, as I often say, for complex matters, I adhere to the cognitive before normative process.

Also, in my fiction writing, I have purposely chosen to add moments of transcendence as part of the things I present.

 

Apropos, Rand did that.

I don't recall her trying to justify or describe those transcendent experiences as the result of sensory input and processing, except when she discussed art. Not when she did art, but when she discussed it.  

When she did art, here is an example, her most famous moment of transcendence, or at least one of them.

"Howard Roark laughed."

Not only did she not present this as the result of a syllogism or as proof that somehow contradicts, say, people who are depressed or something, she made a point to exclude logic by presenting contradictions.

Just take a look at all of the logically nonsensical descriptions in what followed. Things like frozen explosion, not only that, a frozen explosion of granite bursting and flying, immovable water, flowing stone (that is not lava), a pause more dynamic than motion, rocks that begin and end in the sky, an island floating on nothing. And so on.

I understand these are metaphors, but why include contradiction as part of ALL of them? These contradictions are not the result of sensory input. Also, a metaphor does not need to include a contradiction. But there it is in the Grand Lady's work right at the start of her first famous novel.

(btw - I find this technique inspiring and beautiful, although I prefer it more subtle. It's definitely not the product of logic. It hints at the unknown as it tries to convey an emotion, mostly wonder and awe.  Also, on a purely artistic level, I think she did that because she started with the transcendent experience instead of leading up to it. She pointed to it, so to speak, by Roark's laugh, then tried to get people to feel it, too. After a few paragraphs, she did land at Roark's feet, but this is the philosophy part, not the transcendent experience part.)

I believe Rand was separating the transcendent experience from either-or comparisons by choosing this technique. The moment of transcendence exists because it exists, not because it is a result of some operation of reason or some brain aberration. Just like reason exists because it exists, not because it is the result of some philosophical or religious principle.

In Rand's preface to The Fountainhead, she muddled this a bit. But she said enough to glean wisdom. She specifically said her point was that people who are not religious can have transcendent experiences, too. Then, as is typical with her, she included a hatred (religion and mysticism) and concluded that religious people can only have these transcendent experiences if they degrade man. That part is not true. That is, this may be true for some, a minority, but not all. To use her form of rhetoric, I say, as proof of my claim, I present the founding and growth of the United States of America.  I could have just as easily said The Enlightenment. She also related the existence of the transcendent experience to man's need for a code of values, ethics. And here I flat out disagree, but that is another discussion. 

 

But even with Rand's rhetoric, trying to say a transcendent experience is proof God exists or does not exist, that this contradicts metaphysics or people's stories of things they experienced but can't explain, makes no sense to me. Once again, apples and oranges.

Another way of saying this is that pointing is the first step in sharing reason with others. And telling a story is one way of pointing. Pointing is not a syllogism. It signals to others one has observed something. That "something" can be internal or external, but by pointing, one is signaling one has perceived an existent. At least, ones believes one has. And those who point (without guile) believe it at a primary level, the level where one trusts one's faculty of perception or not.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Sometimes serendipity is a little too cute.

When it happens, I am learning to go with the flow.

The Law of Attraction people say to swim downstream, not upstream. I looked deeper into this idea (rather than dismiss it) and came to a different conclusion. I have to swim upstream on things I can control if I want to improve them, like my fiction writing skills. Practicing with intention is hard work. Pure upstream, but the constant improvement is well worth it. Downstream doesn't get you there.

However, with things that I cannot control, downstream is good, especially when the result comes with nice payoffs and does not infringe my moral values.

 

Why am I saying this? A few hours after writing the above post, I took a look in my Audible account (I have some backed up credits) and saw an ad for the following shoved in my face, specifically advertised as credit-worthy:

The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience: audiobook by Andrew Newberg, The Great Courses

The above link is to Amazon (referral) because the links at Audible get weird at times.

Since I have the online account version of the Great Courses (called Wondrium--I locked it in at a discount a while back, great investment), I put this video course into my watchlist and saw the first lecture.

The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience by Andrew Newberg

That link goes to The Great Courses site since the Wondrium link gets weird, too.

 

This course does not explore whether God exists.

It studies what happens in the brain of people who undergo or practice different religious experiences.

That is where I am at. Not hard atheism. Not true believer faith.

In fact, one of the reviewers said two types of people will not like the course, atheists and believers, because they want a course like this to prove the existence of God or disprove it. And it does neither.

The first lesson is completely aligned with what I have been saying for a long time, except I have been saying it in terms of philosophy and speculation, and Dr. Newberg goes the same route in terms of science.

I don't control metaphysics. It comes as it is. But I can study and think about what I perceive.

 

Was the ad serendipity metaphysics singling out lil' 'ole me, or was it just plain vanilla coincidence? Or maybe retargeting from Internet surveillance?

Who knows? I have a suspicion it was coincidence, but I have no proof.

I also know that serendipity metaphysics makes for a better story.

And retargeting just pisses me off, so I try not to think about it.

In essence, who cares?

In the wise words of Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?" 

 

Why waste time seeking certainty on things I cannot know because I am not omniscient and eternal?

I'm going downstream, regardless.

I'm going with the flow.

I'm going to watch the damn course.

Michael

 

EDIT: Stephen, if this drifts too far off from the purpose of your thread, we can move the discussion elsewhere.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

For the sake of technical clarity, the posts above this one came from the thread mentioned in the opening post. (IPB calls a thread a "topic.")

There was a bit of a technical hassle getting this thread (or "topic") set up right, but I wrote in a support ticket and it's all good now.

From this point on, all posts will be new to this thread. Er... this topic... meaning what you think of as thread... That is...

You know...

Michael

[Strictlylogical]

I have been of a mind recently leaning towards the idea that Objectivists which are human and humanity inclined (as I believe Rand was), rather than mechanism and mechanics inclined, have more in common with the typical Conservative who is usually religious, rather than the typical atheist.  Most strikingly a sense that individual humans are sacred and are ends in themselves, is paramount for us whereas a typical atheist, or mechanism focused Objectivist, is more driven by disproving existence of God or showing everything is rational... to them getting thoughts correct is more important than living life right.  Objectivism for living is a moral sense of humanity and living life as a human being at the pinnacle of what actually matters.  Reason is our tool and servant for reaching it, we are not tools of reason for reason's sake. 

Rationality is not the aim of life, LIFE is the aim of rationality.

 

For so long, those people all over the map considered God versus No God, to somehow be paramount... but for me something deeper in humanity, a sense of sacredness and joy in living versus a sense of destructiveness or hopelessness... is far more operative and important.  

 

I am starting to see the camps not as Religious and Atheist, but instead divided into groups of those who advocate for flourishing individual humanity with a sense of sacredness and those who view people as meaningless meat machines that can be utilized as necessary in a blind and senseless universe. 

The lines for me are now, Good and Evil as I see it... and in many ways these do not neatly fit prior considerations of religiosity - atheism, or conservativism - progressivism.

 

Sometimes I despair that Objectivism now has slid towards the wrong side, or at least in its cowardice is somehow now complicit.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

42 minutes ago, Strictlylogical said:

Rationality is not the aim of life, LIFE is the aim of rationality.

S,

I predict you are going to do fine in life.

 

Michael

[Guyau]

SL,

Somewhere Bertrand Russell remarked that in the history of philosophy, some hold to the primacy of Value and others hold to the primacy of Being (or perhaps it was Fact or Truth he took for that wing). Plato and Kant would be the Value camp; Aristotle and Russell in the Being camp.

Surely in the structure of Rand’s philosophy, Existence is the logical and metaphysical primary, though Life and Value can be the motive for thinking on philosophical matters, the beginning and end, so to speak, as far as motivation goes. In Rand’s Galt’s Speech, she says she is addressing persons with the courage of a flower or bird reaching for the sun. In other words, the setting is for people who want to live, and when she sets “the choice to live” following recognition of “Existence exists” as fact and most basic fact, she can reasonably think readers hearing her, really hearing, are people who, in spirit and in act, want to live.

Although Rand begins her GS talking about the source of all value in the character of living action, she agreed with Branden and with Peikoff in their following of a logical order for presentation in which general metaphysics and nature of knowledge come first, then introduction of the arena of existence that is living existence and it’s import of any such thing as value and mind and such things as problems, solutions, and inventions.

In the Renaissance and in Early Modern philosophy, ancient varieties of epistemological skepticism were put to the defense of suspending critical thinking and attacking claims of human knowing, all by way of defending the way to truth by faith, especially the revealed truth of Christian salvation. Beginning with a transforming mystical experience in 1654, Blaise Pascal spent the remaining eight years of his life working on defense of belief in an infinitely incomprehensible being. His defense is intended to be rational in a practical sense, not an epistemic sense. (American Pragmatists would naturally object to that distinction just now made.) Pascal puts it famously:

Quote

God exists or not. If one believes God exists and He does exist, one’s gain will be infinite. If one believes God exists and He does NOT exist, one gains nothing and loses nothing. If one disbelieves God exists and He does exist, one’s loss is infinite. If one disbelieves God exists and He does not exist, one gains but it is only a finite gain.

This argument today would be objectionable because of so much run into the conception of God that is really only gotten from religious doctrine, Catholic in the case of Pascal. But there is another objection I have, and I think Russell and Rand could join me. That is that we want to know the truth. We aim to find it even if it is painful in what we might find. This unconditional truth-seeking is for some of us a moral ideal. In the nature of human intelligence and its emergence, I’d look for the emergence of this ideal as coordinate with the circumstance that such a policy and practice make us the amazingly free-ranging thinkers we are, not so stuck in a dedicated sequence as a reflex or a fixed action pattern.

If I’ve got the rational truth that contradictions do not obtain in reality, then any wagering on the matter is wrong headed. And unworthy of the human mind. Same with the rational truth that God (of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) does not exist.

In this purely natural world, for the human rational down to the fingertips, there is the sacred. That is exemplified in Rand's literature, and of this sacred, she could again say "why have we left it all to the fools?"

One pertinent poem from me and a share from AE on his mind and life:

~All Along~

Become some reason, then all along,

beneath each chant, arch, trance, and tear,

was known

stop-still of life, the end, no more,

no something, no place, no passage.

–SB

 

“It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely-personal," from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it. The mental grasp of this extrapersonal world, within the frame of the given possibilities, swam as highest aim half consciously and half unconsciously before my mind’s eye. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights that they had achieved, were the friends that could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

–AE

 

 

 

[Strictlylogical]

philosophy and thought have their place... but neither they, nor rationality, nor even the mind are holy enough to sacrifice all else, of what it is and means to be a human, to them.

we are so much more than what we think... and in the end at best knowledge and philosophy help guide each person as a whole, prevent us from making mistakes... but all the richness and meaning of life is to be found way beyond such hypothesizing, tinkering, and syllogizing.

Ultimately, the desire to understand is a need and a drive to control or feel in control... we see the very central planning types ... most eager to wrestle the world to their design are technocrats in spirit.  But the desire and need for control and orderliness, for anything other than one's own property, is a sign of psychosis.  Healthy people do not need to feel that they understand everything.  What people really want is the experience of being alive... fully and as a whole being... mind and body, intuitively, emotionally, rationally, socially. 

 

I believe Peikoff got it wrong in DIM.  The great threat now is not Religious Theocracy but a kind of Global Central Planning Utopianism... a resurrection through the advancements in technology of Subjectivist Atheist Mechanistic Totalitarianism.  A sort of arrogance and nihilism, arising from the view of people as machines and with our great new powers the possibility of managing a world according to someone's view of the good Utopia... all it will cost is everyone's freedom, everyone's humanity, everyone's life as individual humans.

 

The next big threat comes directly from overemphasis and arrogance on those connections called rationality... so beautiful and noncontradictory... and yet, as such, inhuman... that we should aim to sacrifice ourselves to this one aspect within, to this one tool, to remake ourselves in the image of rationality as such, as individuals and as a culture, such would be the destruction of humanity.

 

I have more in common with an irrationalist and a religionist than that Atheist Central Planner ... and I have no qualms identifying them metaphorically with the lowest of creatures on the lowest rungs of hell.

 

I think one antidote to the arrogance of the technocratic man-hating tyrant, is humility, and a sense of respect akin to worship for what is it to be human, for the XX% of our soul which is unconscious, for the millions and millions of years which has gone into the forms of our bodies and minds... for the many milenia which has gone into the software of our cultures and our stories.  We cannot remake any better what we have been given, we need to tend and grow it...  the freedom and room to flourish.

the arrogance of attempting to remake man or society in the image of some specific thing.. imposed upon it... even rationality...will only result in the end of humankind.

[Guyau]

SL,

Ordering of society is one thing. Ordering of one's self and life is another, and this latter is what it was I thought you were calling for putting the brakes on rationality. It's only the latter that I'm very interested in. After college, for fifteen years, I studied political philosophy and engaged in political activism, by campaigns, demonstrations, and letters, which activism in hindsight was a foreseeable waste of my precious lifetime. On the sociological side, there is a 1996 book you might want to consider ReEnchanted Science – Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler.

I love rationality in individual life. I love rationality in our legal system under the Constitution and prior common law. There is valuation of the autonomy of individuals there to significant extent–such as that the FBI cannot just come and take my computer to the lab without a warrant–and rationality in the rules of evidence. Again and again, people immigrate to this country and say "you guys have no idea how free you are." (I think that way too, when I heard people whining about their freedom concerning wearing a mask. When I was a young man, I was subject to the military draft. Now THAT is loss of freedom worth writing against.) But I digress into the easy, the seductive distraction of politics and culture de jour.

Rand's offering of life rational, life integrated, life mortal, life its own end, is lovely and is life for real.

any joy

 

[Strictlylogical]

16 minutes ago, Guyau said:

Ordering of one's self and life is another, and this latter is what it was I thought you were calling for putting the brakes on rationality.

Well, you could say I am calling for putting the brakes on "ordering one's life" for order's sake rather than bringing some order into one's life, for the sake of life.

[I recall a funny commercial once, where two onlookers who are insurance agents are spouting off probabilities of this or that occurring... while others go about the doing and living of life... the human calculators safe to calculate, muse, and ridicule....  a far cry form the "pitch and toss" of Kipling's "If"]

 

Also an adjective, such as "rational" applied to more than a syllogism, does not serve to characterize the entirely what it modifies... it is only one aspect of the thing which it adheres to... that special non-contradictory sauce... like a little garment tag "Made with Reason, polyester and cotton".  It's a great ingredient in the things in which we bring it to bear, as a tool not a design, as an instrument not the plan, as the means not the end.  

Law is to be just and human.  We arrive there in part by way of the important ingredient which is rationality.  I would caution not to overemphasize reason as such, with that comes the traps of rationalism... and down that slippery slope you arrive at statistical treatment of humans, public health, utilitarianism, sacrifice of the few (or the one) for the many. 

Rationality does not logically necessitate the choice to live and the sense of the sanctity of life, everyone's life that goes with that choice... in fact, if a technocrat in reality IS powerful enough, even the sanctity of life becomes dispensible to him...

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

S,

Rather than use terms like public health, utilitarianism and so on because they are so easy to misconstrue, or better, construe in different ways, I prefer to use Rand's get out of jail free card for love (and even compassion).

This is a direct quote from her:

Quote

Love is exception-making.

Ayn Rand said that twice in The Fountainhead. (Maybe more, but I know of 2 times.)

Love is the easy part to understand. Compassion is a bit more nuanced (presupposing in this case it is not an evaluation base on reason), but it works with Rand's quote. Also, you can insert love where the word compassion is below and it works in an identical manner.

If you feel compassion and do not act on it, you deny yourself.

If you feel compassion and demand others act on it, you deny them.

You are free to act on as much compassion as you feel. But the only way to guarantee that others act on your compassion is by force.

And that would make you an authoritarian, a bully.

Rand's get out of jail free card is to show that one's life is more important to oneself than reason is. But it does not exist as a weapon for enslaving others.

And to be clear, a rational man (or woman) holds both his own life and reason dear.

Michael

[Guyau]

 

Ever since first reading Rand, I’ve wanted again and again to say to her critics on the point of rationality: “but your ‘rational’ is too small” (paraphrasing a book title back in those days). Just as any modern should want to say to philosophers from Plato/Aristotle to Descartes/Hume: “but your ‘knowledge’ (expelling the merely likely from the club) is too small.”

Rebelling for real scientific knowledge against the impotent scientific knowledge by syllogistic demonstrative form down from Aristotle, the title That Nothing Is Known (1581) by Francisco Sanches loses its punch to modern minds with a better grip on what is empirical science and where it gets its traction as science than the grip tendered by Aristotle.

Love, exception-making, and rationality live harmoniously here. People too often slip into conventionality as working criterion of or stand-in for rationality.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Guyau said:

Love, exception-making, and rationality live harmoniously here.

Stephen,

And a very good place it is.

Michael

[Strictlylogical]

13 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

S,

Rather than use terms like public health, utilitarianism and so on because they are so easy to misconstrue, or better, construe in different ways, I prefer to use Rand's get out of jail free card for love (and even compassion).

This is a direct quote from her:

Ayn Rand said that twice in The Fountainhead. (Maybe more, but I know of 2 times.)

Love is the easy part to understand. Compassion is a bit more nuanced (presupposing in this case it is not an evaluation base on reason), but it works with Rand's quote. Also, you can insert love where the word compassion is below and it works in an identical manner.

If you feel compassion and do not act on it, you deny yourself.

If you feel compassion and demand others act on it, you deny them.

You are free to act on as much compassion as you feel. But the only way to guarantee that others act on your compassion is by force.

And that would make you an authoritarian, a bully.

Rand's get out of jail free card is to show that one's life is more important to oneself than reason is. But it does not exist as a weapon for enslaving others.

And to be clear, a rational man (or woman) holds both his own life and reason dear.

Michael

I like that.

I agree with you.

and also @Guyau 

Quote

Ever since first reading Rand, I’ve wanted again and again to say to her critics on the point of rationality: “but your ‘rational’ is too small” (paraphrasing a book title back in those days). Just as any modern should want to say to philosophers from Plato/Aristotle to Descartes/Hume: “but your ‘knowledge’ (expelling the merely likely from the club) is too small.”

Rebelling for real scientific knowledge against the impotent scientific knowledge by syllogistic demonstrative form down from Aristotle, the title That Nothing Is Known (1581) by Francisco Sanches loses its punch to modern minds with a better grip on what is empirical science and where it gets its traction as science than the grip tendered by Aristotle.

Love, exception-making, and rationality live harmoniously here. People too often slip into conventionality as working criterion of or stand-in for rationality.

 

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not on the offensive against reason as such or even pointing at over rationalistic tendencies of anyone in particular here.  I make no claim that it cannot be harmonious, only that it can get out of balance.  I am touching on a psychological tendency which I believe can be dangerous when allowed to take over, which can happen to anyone who is a proponent of reason including some Objectivists.

I think Peikoff was most brilliant at a few points in Understanding Objectivism in particular the chapter/lecture on Rationalism and the other one Emotions and Moral Judgment.  These are absolutely some of the best treatments of Objectivism, Philosophy, and reason in their proper context of a full well balanced human being.  

I highly recommend those lectures.

 

I believe knowledge is useful for the human being and flourishing, that understanding knowledge and the study of knowledge Philosophy are important, and an individual should have a basic working framework to enable the living of life.  I believe that as Philosophy and not a special science of any kind (examples of which are physics, psychology, genetics, evolutionary psychology, mathematics, developmental psychology, biology … etc.) the fundamentals of Objectivism are true.

My warnings are not a rebellion from the root base or foundation of what I believe is correct, but a warning more about those shoots and leaves that perhaps go askew…. Further Application and extrapolation and implication or ascribing of levels of significance… all can become issues which become a hindrance to life as indeed they do and have in the context of other ideological bases.

 

To a hammer everything looks like a nail.  There is more to a building than nails… and some things a hammer’s blow does no good for.

 

I try to always remember that being human means pursuing a passion, and sometimes that passion IS life and flourishing for that person… and I do believe a proper philosophical foundation and the use of reason are absolutely crucial in living and achieving that life of passion… I want to warn that one should not obsess over the tools, the means, at the expense of that passion and a full life.  This is my main purpose over the past few posts… 

 

That said.

Sometimes I forget that for some people.

Philosophers and academics in particular…

That which is normally only a tool or a means in the pursuit of life and passion, happens to BE that person’s life and passion…

I would say to them only that they should keep in mind that what they see as life, is (and in most cases should be) only a tool and means for most other people

and then I would ask, in the spirit of love and compassion, that they accept my sincere apologies for incorrectly calling only a tool, that which to them is the source of life giving passion of highest significance to their life and flourishing.

I acknowledge that… and there is no contradiction in its being chosen as a deeply unique and personal path to bliss.

[tmj]

Something about the idea of a ‘culture de jour’ and how an identification of such will say something about a self identified position in relation to that milieu, yes ? Not sure what , just now, is it that is nibbling around my edges but it made me reflect on the movie The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I’m not sure yet why but my internal analogy machine linked mask acceptance and promotion to trying to stop the ultimate destruction of the bridge(late spoiler alert). I’m a little short on time right now , but I wanted to get a thought out there. Basically, the moral rationalism or rational moralism of the officer in charge of the construction was seemingly oblivious to the real world considerations of his efforts, blind to a more pragmatic assessment of his actions toward a goal , without consideration of what the goal accomplished.

I haven’t ironed it out yet , but I think I can connect the ‘whining’ about forced face diapering to planting and igniting the demolition charges.

[Strictlylogical]

41 minutes ago, tmj said:

Something about the idea of a ‘culture de jour’ and how an identification of such will say something about a self identified position in relation to that milieu, yes ? Not sure what , just now, is it that is nibbling around my edges but it made me reflect on the movie The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I’m not sure yet why but my internal analogy machine linked mask acceptance and promotion to trying to stop the ultimate destruction of the bridge(late spoiler alert). I’m a little short on time right now , but I wanted to get a thought out there. Basically, the moral rationalism or rational moralism of the officer in charge of the construction was seemingly oblivious to the real world considerations of his efforts, blind to a more pragmatic assessment of his actions toward a goal , without consideration of what the goal accomplished.

I haven’t ironed it out yet , but I think I can connect the ‘whining’ about forced face diapering to planting and igniting the demolition charges.

Please explain… when you have more time!

[tmj]

In the movie British soldiers in a prisoner of war camp are tasked with building a bridge to further the Japanese war effort. One of the main characters is a British officer who decides to organize the construction rooting out any efforts of sabotage and shoddy workmanship. Among his motivations is proving the superior quality of British engineering and workmanship while encouraging a better morale among the men by participating in the achievement of a productive goal despite their adversities , a well constructed bridge as a testament to the superior functions of the 'British' way.
At the same time allied commandos are planning a raid of the site to demolish the bridge and when the officer notices the plan he acts to stop the destruction and only at the vary last moment seemingly realizes his error in judgement , that his actions have lead to abetting the Japanese war effort and  falls on the plunger detonating the charges placed on the bridge.

The officer's motivation, rooted in his reverence for the accomplishments of 'his culture' and his desire to show an example of what such a culture can produce,  blinded him to the actual outcome of his actions, ie a working railroad bridge would be used by his enemies to inflict further harm.

The motivation to promote the use of masks as a means of controlling contagion was, at best, missguided. Though more likely the government officials making the policy were aware that in practical terms any masking/blocking measures below the level of positive pressure  suits would serve no actual medical benefit. The effect of such efforts would, intentionally or not, play out in the level of compliance with such strictures and concomitantly the compliance was the device needed to gain and keep control of a populace.

The cultural acceptance of argument from authority, 'scientism' and reliance on "experts' expertise" was the only justification for promoting the forced use of masks, acquiescence to compliance only eroded the use of rationality as it applied to the specific  situation. The guise of medical necessity was used as a means to reduce the level of protection of rights by virtue of a diminishment of the use of reason, the only true protector of rights.

Whining from the hoi polloi about masking should be recognized as a call to rationality, the arguments should be seen and considered as a sign that reason and objectivity were abandoned, that abandonment lead directly to the imposition and acquiescence of a myriad other strictures with  more deleterious effects.

Using the power of the state to ensure the safety of the citizens can easily 'go off the rails' if actions of the state are not sufficiently scrutinized to ensure objectivity is holding its proper place. Building a reliable bridge is evidence of objective productivity and a testament to human ingenuity, but the use of the bridge must be judged against the intentions of the users and not only the builders.

( the analogy seemed less weak and tortured at first blush , I apologize for any heightened expectations or allusions to the contrary)

 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, tmj said:

... argument from authority, 'scientism' and reliance on "experts' expertise" was the only justification...

T,

That sounds like a crapload of people I have discussed things with in O-Land.

 

Not everybody is like that, of course, but I have found that some of the worst collectivists are in O-Land.

What's worse, they do it by mind-reading. ("You said XXX. That means you are... [some mental collective or other].")

 

 

btw - Great job at working though an idea and illustrating it.

Michael