Objectivism, Philosophy of the Individual.
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
- Ayn Rand
This being said, Objectivism cannot be corporate. It cannot be legislated. It can not be placed on another. It is an intimate personal philosophy that one can introduce to someone else and nothing more. True?
This is not to say that a group of individual cannot work cooperatively as individuals toward the same goal (the happiness of the individual). As a male, is not marriage a selfish act to perminently bind to you someone who makes you happy and can continue your name? As a woman, is not marriage a selfish act to perminently bind to you someone who makes you happy and will protect you and your offspring?
I contend that everything we do, rational or otherwise, is entirely self driven and that nothing we do is for anyone else.
Religion? Validates self while offering OTHERS the ability (via guilt) to dictate your actions and conduct
Faith? Covers self in the event a God does exist
Charity? Makes self feel good about self OR quiets everyone around you clammoring about selflessness
Opinions?
- Ayn Rand
This being said, Objectivism cannot be corporate. It cannot be legislated. It can not be placed on another. It is an intimate personal philosophy that one can introduce to someone else and nothing more. True?
This is not to say that a group of individual cannot work cooperatively as individuals toward the same goal (the happiness of the individual). As a male, is not marriage a selfish act to perminently bind to you someone who makes you happy and can continue your name? As a woman, is not marriage a selfish act to perminently bind to you someone who makes you happy and will protect you and your offspring?
I contend that everything we do, rational or otherwise, is entirely self driven and that nothing we do is for anyone else.
Religion? Validates self while offering OTHERS the ability (via guilt) to dictate your actions and conduct
Faith? Covers self in the event a God does exist
Charity? Makes self feel good about self OR quiets everyone around you clammoring about selflessness
Opinions?
There are limits, based strictly in reality, on what constitutes reason. If you use reason to understand religion, you will come to a set of conclusions that differ from those you would have found if you used religion to understand reason.
Religion, historically, has often been a precursor for philosophy, and philosophical quest occasionally a precursor to the discovery of reason.
If your understanding of reason is based on faith, then it is to faith you will repair when your reasoning contradicts reality. There are two sides to faith, but only one to reason. I can use my faith (on the one side) to justify my enforcement of faith (the other side) upon you. Not so with reason. As you said, "Objectivism cannot be corporate. It cannot be legislated."
The use of reason is not open to a multi-cultural approach, where I have "male, American logic" and someone else uses "female, Eastern-Mystical" logic. I'm certain that some feminist mystics must have hated Rand for her "betrayal" of their "feminine" logic.
Be careful not to ascribe to Objectivism or to Rand those beliefs of yours that you feel to be the same as hers.
Rand always cautioned people not to accept Objectivism on faith. I observed her application of that principle more than once. I saw her turn on someone who believed that his feeling of agreement with Objectivism gave him permission to violate her rights. "I'LL SUE YOU!" she said. He about fell over.
We now come to the question of belief in God. God is extremely difficult to prove, and requires faith. Proofs for God's existence can generally be shown to be logically false, but of course that does not prove His non-existence. The philosopher Blaise Pascal believed, using the logic of his famous "Pascal's Wager." In essence, he claimed it cost him nothing to believe in a god that might not exist, but that belief would gain him a benefit if there was a God.
Well, not so fast, M. Pascal! If your God does exist, and has the powers normally ascribed, He will KNOW that you are faking your faith, and you'll be on the Express Staircase to the Lower Regions as you cease your last breath.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thus far, God has not seen fit to cause me to suspend reason. I'm not holding my breath.
I would offer my own postulate - that of the Baddest Ass on the Block. If you do not believe that you will have a final accounting (to whatever you believe would conduct such - I believe that there is a supreme being that does such), then what prevents one from using all the force they can muster to make all others bend to their will (be the BAontheB)? Objectivism says that it is a rational understanding that only by honoring another's sovereignty can I expect mine to be honored - but I say that history shows this to be illogical and unsupported by centuries of opposite examples. Thus, regardless of whether one believes or not, it is in the interest of society to support such a proposition.
The price is small, the downside is great so do it. But do what?
1. Believe in God? or 2. Claim to do so?
The Wager has no meaning without choice. For a believer there is no choice. If making yourself believe is not possible (this could be debated, but the price is small) then the choice for a non-believer is either to deny or to fake it.
The argument is, if you do not believe but claim to, then you do not have a 'valid ticket' as God will know and send you down anyway. This assumes that God has perfect knowledge of your thoughts, or assumes that God cares about your thoughts. One can conjecture a God that is not all knowing, or does not care what you think but just wants worship. A God of power. A vitalist. Such a proposition avoids the absurdities from beneficence.
That is exactly what vast numbers of theists do, they accept Pacal's Wager by putting on an act of belief. It is the lowest cost action for them. The motivation is the reward now of being considered a 'good' person, and it is accepted by religious leaders who want the numbers.
You assert that faith can be used to justify enforcement of faith upon you, but not reason?
The bloody Reign of Terror following the French Revolution was done in the name of reason, not faith. Planned famines in the Soviet Union and Maoist China were done in the name of reason, not faith. Nazi atrocities against "sub-humans" were done in the name of reason, not faith.
You seem to think that if two individuals are both committed to reason, they must necessarily agree, since reason (according to you) "has only one side." And, of course, if they seriously disagree, it must be because one party or the other was employing something other than reason to arrive at a conclusion.
In his "Pensees", Pascal does not suggest that one should mouth Christian platitutudes while intellectually doubting the existence of God at the same time. He is not suggesting that one adopt the stance of a hypocrite.
As for claims and evidence that are extraordinary, many people find the claims of Richard Dawkins extraordinary, yet he has never provided extraordinary evidence.
Requirements for extraordinary evidence apply equally, whether the extraordinary claims are made by a mystic or a materialist.
I don't know what that is. Example?
synonym: "insincere"
antonym: "sincere"
So the opposite of "hypocritical" is "sincere", not "non-contradictory."
Religion does validate one's self and is selfish. If one is religious and is willing to accept the consequences, I think that it is possible to live (albeit with difficulty) such a life without contradiction IF one is doing so in gratitude for what amounts to a trade for something that is not tangible. One could go through life living a life of religious gratitude for what they thought was a deal too good to pass up. For objectivists, trades for things that are intangible are difficult to enter into.
Regarding charity, I don't have any problem asking Gulch citizens for charitable donations of used lab equipment under the following stipulations: a) you do it of your own free will, b) that you realize that my university is as close to what Gulch citizens would want in a university other than Hillsdale College, c) traders are preferred (equipment in exchange for materials, chemical, or bioanalytical services rendered), and most importantly, d) you can use the donation to avoid paying taxes to the looters.
If charity makes you feel good about yourself, I think that is perfectly reasonable. All my charitable donations (time, money, equipment) go to individuals or organizations with whom I agree philosophically and can have a personal stake in.
That said, I recently heard of a study on scientific reasoning that included a number of clergy as a "control group" from whom little valid reasoning could be expected. Lo and behold, the preachers came in as the top reasoners. Perhaps the intellectual activity in trying to work through religion is not wasted.
For the Christian, the theory of evolution, while based in reason, requires even MORE faith than believing in Jesus. If one argues in the big bang theory as explaining evolution, then what or who caused a big bang? Moreover, atheism does require an element of faith. One cannot prove the lack of existence of a creator any easier than the presence of a creator. Atheism is a simpler belief system than belief in a creator. On that point, I think all can agree. Whether there is a creator or not, we as humans are not going to be able to convincingly prove that while we are here on earth.
Indeed, the intellectual activiity in trying to work through religion or objectivism is not wasted. Several of the founders of America were deists for the most part because they went through a similar intellectual exercise. I am not going to argue that America's founders did not belong in the Gulch.
So a crystalline structure is not complex, but simple — simple, predictable, and completely specified. A biological organism (e.g., a cell) is completely different from the regular, ordered pattern of a crystal.
When it comes to the order of nanomaterials, there is order, but is of a much shorter range, and consequently predicting that structure is quite challenging. Self-assembly of nanomaterials has been one of my areas of research for the past 5 years.
All biological structures lack long-range crystalline order and have nanostructures similar to those I am studying. Frankly only a few hundred (perhaps 1000) people me in the world know how to create such biologically-relevant nanostructures. And even people like me know how to make only a few such structures (< 1% of all such possible structures). You will learn that the more you know, the more you still have to learn.
Nothing you've just posted — including the BS in which you compare yourself to imaginary romantic literary heroes — in any way contradicts or disproves what I posted earlier regarding crystals being repetitive and completely specified in their configurations. Ergo: their structures can be written in SIMPLE, ALGORITHMIC STEPS (e.g., "Do X, then do Y, then repeat the first two steps a millions times"). By definition, since the description of a regular crystal's structure can be compressed into algorithmic steps, it is NON-COMPLEX (or, "simple").
Look up "Kolmogorov Complexity" if you don't know what I'm talking about. You can also look up the work of Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin regarding algorithmic recursion and complexity.
Everything else you posted was irrelevant to the issue of biological organisms vs. crystalline "complexity." Regular crystals are completely specified and determined; biological structures (such as eukaryotic cells) are not: given a few amino acids along a polypeptide chain, there is no algorithm or repetitive unit cell or deterministic law by which you could predict what the next amino acid on the chain MUST be. And what is true of amino acids is obviously true of the nucleotides in DNA that code for them.
You make a beginner's mistake in logic: you assumed that the word "simple" (as used above) meant "easy to discover or grasp". It doesn't mean that at all. "Simple" has a precise, mathematical definition. Similarly, "complex" does not mean "difficult to discover or grasp." It, too, has a precise meaning.
In crystal structures, the subject that I was discussing, simple has a meaning that is equivalent to primitive (meaning that there is no repetition within the unit cell). And yes, I know the difference between simple and complex in the mathematical sense, too.
And frankly I could teach you quite a bit about protein folding and misfolding, for which deterministic algorithms ARE being developed, because I am one of the ones developing them. Indeed, protein misfolding is mathematically complex (as opposed to the journeyman's idea of complex). I figured out the steps in chicken egg lysozyme aggregation experimentally a couple of years ago (part of one slide I will be discussing in a webinar a week from Thursday at 11 AM Eastern time as advertised in
http://my.fit.edu/~jbrenner/Nanoadvisor_... on p. 4 on the bottom right. I am featured on pp. 2 and 3. I have a student right now starting a project on the computational modeling of chicken egg lysozyme aggregation. It is actually a pretty good model for what happens to Alzheimer's patients. Believe it or not, the mathematically complex process of protein misfolding is better done by gamers than by computers right now.
Unfortunately, as part of that talk, I must come clean. The last five years I have been non-mooching, but I got my last grant to fund that work just before reading AS. The work in the slide that I mentioned was post-AS for me.
I know plenty about Kolmogorov, too.
Both the specificity and the complexity exhibited here is similar to the kind observed in language — which is why linguistic terms such as "code", "information", "transcription", "translation", etc. are inevitably referred to in biochemistry.
None of the really interesting apsects of life — the coded-chemistry aspects — have anything to do with crystals, crystallography, or unit cells, which in any case, are all ultimately governed by thermodynamic considerations.
Codes are not subject to thermodynamics, which is the very reason there's such a thing as "life" in the first place.
So if you were previously wondering why some doubt evolution (at least, Darwin's notion of it), the reason is that codes are products neither of chance nor determinism.
Morse code is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics. The paper and ink WITH WHICH a particular instance of Morse Code might be instantiated are, of course, subject to those laws: the ink and paper must eventually deteriorate; but that doesn't mean Morse Code deteriorates. A pair of headphones and a code-keyer are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but the code itself — which is a mapping of one symbol-set (dots and dashes) to another symbol set (the English alphabet) is non-material; hence, not subject to physical laws.
Mapping, ideas, concepts, imaginings, daydreams, musings, theories, hypotheses, etc., are not subject to thermodynamics any more than they are subject to gravity or the laws of motion.
This is an intriguing statement as I continually get reamed for suggesting there may be something other than darwin's evolution. I'd really appreciate learning a bit more. I think I can message you even though your not a producer account. IIf you would reply to me via the address contained it would be greatly appreciated (for personal reference and a timely bit of info for my current project),
Hillsdale College? My daughter and I were just talking about Hillsdale the other day.
If the premiums are true belief, though, can you actually will yourself to pay them. Your mind either believes, doubts, or rejects claims. You can't make yourself believe something in exchange for a reward.
Also, I never understood the faith as an insurance policy thing. People believe what makes sense to them. I cannot make myself believe in something I don't in exchange for a reward. If someone offered me millions of dollars if I changed my beliefs, I'd be lying. For example, we don't know there's not a dim start closer than Alpha Centari that's never been identified. It could be true. We haven't measured the parallax on every dim start to determine its distance. But I cannot make myself believe something that I've seen no evidence for and think is probably not true, even if I wanted to.
So it makes no sense to believe in some religious narrative on the off chance that there is a god and she/he actually cares at all about my guesses about creation in the absence of evidence. Maybe he/she wants me to be a skeptic. Who knows. We're just making it up.
I have moderated a couple of debates on Christianity vs. atheism vs. agnosticism before. It can be a suprisingly tough debate.
and how does this relate to Objectivism in your view? That one would think they are Objectivist in general, but without the commitment to living the philosophy, somehow it's less?
I see both marriage (an institution) and Objectivism (a philosophical system) as separate in identity from the individual. An individual can a la carte parts of Objectivism, but they are not Objectivist. People can be married in name only (legally), but they are not in a marriage. If we look at commitment-then to a philosophical system, it is an individual one. To a marriage, it is aggreement-takes two. I guess I'm asking for further explanation from your comments above, AJ.
Reading the comments I think that the statement I most disagree with, is "hedging one's bets.." or something to that degree. I do not see it as rational-more superstitious. it's like buying a lottery ticket. The odds are NOT in their favor, but the price of a ticket is relatively small-so the bet does not break the bank and if somehow you hold the winning ticket the upside is tremendous. There is a cost to suspending one's disbelief, in that if you suspend disbelief and reason for God, why not for other issues and difficult moral dilemmas. Same is true about marriage, IMO, half a commitment is not being authentic to each other. Neither would it be for both parties to "hang on" in the hopes of re-kindling a deeper commitment.
And if the stories about God don't make sense to you but you go ahead and claim to believe anyway, you haven't really purchased a ticket. You've just selected some numbers, but you don't have a bona fide ticket.