Free Peikoff course - DIM Hypothesis

[Robert Jones]

I like Dim Sum.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't know where else to put this, so I am putting it here for now.

Peikoff's main thesis is that the right-wing theocracy is America's gravest current threat. I just found an interesting site where some of the evidence can be examined:

Theocracy Watch

There is way too much to read there, but it does look like it would repay an afternoon skimming it over.

Michael

[emb021]

I haven't listen to LP's 15 hours of lecturing (the mere thought makes my skin crawl)...but, at first glance the whole idea appears to be little more than a giant truism simplistically applied as somekind of broad theory of everything (in terms of the epistemology of mind).

Grand Unified Theory of Everything?

On a different point, I've found it interesting some of the comments regarding the lack of (or low numbers of) published works from the "Official Objectivist" camp. Its something I've noticed of late. Sorry, I just don't feel that recorded lectures are a replacement for published works, whether they are essays, monographs or the like (I'll buy a book or monograph long before I buy a tape or CD of a lecture). How much has LP really published? 2 books (one based on a lecture series), and what, a handful or so essays (plus written versions of some lectures).

How many original works have ARI published vs, say, TOC?

On yet a different note, I've sometimes wondered if anyone has done a compare/contrast of NB and LP works on Objectivism? Which is a better work or better expression of Objectivism: NB's Basic Principles of Objectivism or LP's Objectivism, TPOAR? (and in my more twisted imagination, I sometimes wish there could be an 'Objectivist Throwdown'. NB vs LP point/counterpoint lecture on Objectivism. Never happen, tho.)

[above edited a little, with minor additions]

Edited April 13, 2007 by Michael Brown

[Robert Jones]

I don't know where else to put this, so I am putting it here for now.

Peikoff's main thesis is that the right-wing theocracy is America's gravest current threat. I just found an interesting site where some of the evidence can be examined:

Theocracy Watch

There is way too much to read there, but it does look like it would repay an afternoon skimming it over.

Michael

You've got to admit one thing about Lenny Peikoff: He KNOWS a theocracy when he sees one! I think we should pay his words some more heed. Perhaps he noticed the "ominous parallels" between certain Republican evangelicals and his own reign as Pope Leonard I of the Objectivist Church. Maybe Peikoff envisions the GOP conducting sham show trials, character assassinations, excommunications and issuing inscrutable encyclicals.

Or, maybe he thought he had a monopoly on the whole theocracy gig, and doesn't want the likes of Dobson, Robertson and Bush II muscling in on his racket.

Who knows????

Edited April 12, 2007 by Robert Jones

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Robert,

Here are a few more to chew on:

Jihad Watch

Communism Watch

Jew Watch

Halliburton Watch

Food and Water Watch

Eco Watch

Quack Watch

Just for Peikoff, there is:

Ari Watch

And for the rest in the Objectivist subculture, there is:

RandZapper

There.

Now you don't have to feel so singled out.

Michael

[Robert Jones]

Robert,

Here are a few more to chew on:

Jihad Watch

Communism Watch

Jew Watch

Halliburton Watch

Food and Water Watch

Eco Watch

Quack Watch

Just for Peikoff, there is:

Ari Watch

And for the rest in the Objectivist subculture, there is:

RandZapper

There.

Now you don't have to feel so singled out.

Michael

Singled out?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Robert,

I hope that did not come across as too aggressive. I was playfully poking you in the ribs (as you are a person who believes in God). Not mockery. Just horsing around. Kinds like a multicultural joke that didn't quite come off.

Michael

[Robert Jones]

Robert,

I hope that did not come across as too aggressive. I was playfully poking you in the ribs (as you are a person who believes in God). Not mockery. Just horsing around. Kinds like a multicultural joke that didn't quite come off.

Michael

Oh, I get you now. I wasn't trying to be abrasive either, I just didn't know where you were coming from is all. Here's the thing: I agree with Objectivism about 90% and with my own faith about 50%, yet, because our society places an inordinate emphasis on one's religious beliefs as predetermining the rest of one's cerebral content, when it gets down to brass tacks, I'm a Christian, not an Objectivist.

It's sort of like what Groucho Marx once said, though: "I would never belong to any club that would have me as a member." That is, I'm an individual first and an individualist second. One cannot be an individualist if he isn't true to the individual who is himself. Hence, my heterodoxical worldview.

Or, as the old Jewish lament goes:

"I can't talk to the people I pray with, and I can't pray with the people I talk to."

Edited April 13, 2007 by Robert Jones

[Robert Campbell]

Michael,

A thought or two about Peikoff's views on integration.

Ms. Speicher also gives Peikoff's definition of integration: "an active human process of putting elements together to make a whole." She disagrees with this definition with some unnecessary hairsplitting about the phrase "active human process." (This discussion is here.) I agree with her that this phrase is not good, but not for her reasons (basically she objected to redundancy). I think the phrase is horrible because of the word "human." Other higher animals than human beings integrate sensations into percepts by definition just like they have consciousness. Nonhuman higher animals both integrate and differentiate. They identify things. Peikoff made a very poor choice in using the word "human" to define integration.

Obviously there is integration as well as differentiation going on in the mental processes of some other species. According to Rand's definition of a percept, any creature that can perceive anything is engaged in integration. (I think Rand's definition is wrong, because it presupposes the existence of sensations, but Peikoff accepts it. What's more, it wouldn't be hard to show that other kinds of integration are going on in perception, even if there are no sensations for it to integrate.)

I believe that Peikoff put both "active" and "human" in his definition so he could avoid comparative psychology. I suspect he takes "active" to mean volitional--perception could then be excluded because Rand and Peikoff consider perception to be an automatic process. He adds "human" in just in case his audience doesn't buy his reading of "active." (In OPAR, Peikoff denies the relevance of animals' emotions or even human babies' emotions to the claims that he is making about the dependence of emotions on value judgments--because, he insists, epistemology is concerned with human mental processes only to the extent that they are rational.)

Betsy Speicher has correctly pointed out that for Rand (and for Peikoff, until very recently) "consciousness is identification" and identification requires differentiating and integrating. However, while I find it perfectly OK to say that my dog identifies her water dish, or the living room couch, or a dog biscuit, Objectivist doctrines concerning perception attempt to separate perceiving something from making a perceptual judgment about it. If one accepts such a distinction, it can then be used (not wisely, but it can be used) to deny that other animals ever identify anything.

If Peikoff is now claiming that integration is what consciousness is about, rather than identification, that just means that his Hegelian inclinations ("The truth is the whole") have taken over his epistemology.

Robert Campbell

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Robert,

If one thinks philosophically and not scientifically, (meaning observing, then inducing/deducing from the observation alone without too much measuring going on), I find the terms sensation, percept and concept to be useful. To me they are like saying front part, middle part and back part. There is not real spot or line where the front part turns into the middle part, etc.

When you try to relate sensations, percepts and concepts to actual neural activity, all hell breaks loose. I have a book by Churchland on Neurophilosophy that is simply kicking my ass, especially when I try to think in these terms. Also, I am going back through ITOE, studying it and reading some critiques as I go along, and I am detecting some holes. (For instance, that was quite a sleight of hand Rand had in treating the defining characteristics of lower concepts as measurements so she could eliminate them in abstracting from abstractions.) But I want to finish my studying before critiquing.

I see a real problem by Objectivist philosophers in trying to impose general categories, which work at the distance of the big picture (philosophy), on physical science and psychology once the facts start showing where the categories are oversimplified. For example, there are animals now developing concepts and doing elementary mathematics. But the difference between these rare creatures and human beings is so striking that at a distance, and for the average person, it is more practical to say they have no conceptual faculty. This is even true in that context, since a chimpanzee doing math does not even fit in the world of the average person. So long as the possibility for greater precision is left open, I see no problem with this. The precision of the knowledge fits the need. I do see a problem with insisting on these general categories and this "average person" context (that animals have no conceptual faculty at all) in light of the evidence recorded under scientifically controlled conditions. (Cats and dogs do a good deal to test this, too, so this is not really the best example.)

As you probably can guess, I believe that the mental faculty is the same thing backwards and forwards, merely with differing degrees of complexity in differentiation and integration (and some other goodies thrown in).

When we get to the things I heard in the DIM Hypothesis lectures, where philosophy was put squarely above science in terms of identifying truth, all I can see is a person rationalizing the creation of arbitrary systems from principles, and those principles may apply or not. It doesn't really matter because reality continues to be what it is and stubbornly does not comply. This approach reminds me of the image of a bull in a China shop.

A great example was made by Rand herself in her strange theory of emotions being completely governed and programmed by conscious reason. She was trying to impose philosophy on biology, even after it was clear that it no longer fit.

Philosophy is the starting point, not the end point of knowledge. Peikoff and others constantly invert this. Hell, in the DIM lectures, Peikoff even claimed that all scientific truth is inductive, not deductive. I get the feeling that he was being cantankerous because scientists usually say that scientific truth is deductive and induction is only good for establishing probabilities. I find it weird that nobody ever claims that it is both, which is what I see.

Michael