Actually it is you who have not provided proof or logical argument to your statements. They are merely declarations of your opinion and bias.

Science does not understand mind so there is no way to know that it evolved or when. You might say a brain or nervous system perhaps but that is not the same thing.

Nor do you account for the intelligence in all of nature. Nor have you learned that evolution as Darwin theorized not sufficient to explain irreducibly complex mechanism in nature. Those whose parts must all come together for there to be a mechanism and whose parts do not have purpose otherwise and would not come together by chance. Sorry but you are still spouting the blind religion of evolution by chance and survival only. That science is outdated. Step out of your church of the flat world and try to overcome the need to shout heresy.

My reaction to your thread is neither emotional nor "overreacting". I simply find your little rationality invested in your post. It doesn't appear that you have learned much about Objectivism in the last 40 years. If you had you would recognize the specious nature of your "arguments". I might as well be talking to my wall as engaging further.

He? You must be talking about Wilbur and his "Boomeritis". Yup, full of fairly bitter and vehement hostility - definitely not consistent with the principles of Spiral Dynamics. He's a strange cat.

But much like Tony Robbins is to the originators of the NLP model, but then he is the high-profile student (and valuable popularizer), not the intellectual originator of the Integral Model. (Although his 4-square overlay did enhance the practical applications of the theory. I use it a lot in the executive and Enterprise Coaching work I do) .

But the originators, Cowan and Beck, were very (both/and, all/and vs either or, which is the central principle of the model) about the green meme, as with all the memes.

What brilliant paradigm-shaking, human evolution-turbo-charging work!

Yep...don't agree with his accessment of the greenies, (they have revisit the previous memes or we could say, go down a peg or two)...but the rest all made sense. The clear path to continued ascension is not ignoring or discarding the previous memes, one must bring what's universally valuable to the next level or meme. In that sense, it's all inclusive and leads to a continued process of integration.

The other clear and valuable point is that it's not a pretty perfect process; one might find themselves at any of the levels at any given time...one moment in the bicameral brain and the next moment in his mind.

I did. I am truly surprised the series is not a "required" course for Objectivists, but to have it difficult to even find leaves me flabbergasted.

Sounds like you have read Spiral Dynamics as well. Awesome book

Mankind will always ask this question, whether or not the question is valid or not, whether there is an answer or not by those conscious and those stuck in bicameralism. Religion continues to ask and answer that question for and by bicameral thought. We are trying to form and reach a conscious understanding of the question and what is a logical response that would include a profound appreciation of the complexities of it all. That's all the original discussion was about and everyone today refuses to see that. One needs to understand the meme or paradigm of the times...Jaynes helps us do that...but the question will always be asked. We need to be humbled...otherwise we'll go off the rails...we are seeing that today and it's not the first time it's happened.

Thanks for your comments. I have been there in years past.

I can't speak for you, but after 40 years of committed and active involvement in Objectivism, when I find myself negatively emotionally overreacting to otherwise calm dialogue and exchange of ideas, it is a clear indicator for me to look within myself to the source of the emotion that is so out of proportion to the stimulus and out of sync with the good will in which the ideas are being offered.

Great opportunity to grow and strengthen my inner make-up and my ability to manage my emotions and their expression with skill, finesse and grace.

Food for thought...

Oh, yes, I am definitely hostile to anti-concepts such as you propose. Language should be used to clarify and elucidate, not obfuscate and confuse.

I spoke on this thread about ARI and currently running OCON-2016. At 1pm today Greg Salmieri, a brilliant, delightful newer philosopher will be speaking on "Being Objective about Objectivism". Here's the blurb:

Philosophy is a demanding discipline that requires intellectual rigor and scrupulous honesty, and Objectivism is an especially demanding philosophy. It takes years of disciplined thought to understand and evaluate its principles and to incorporate them into one’s life. And the work continues across a lifetime as one uses the philosophy to keep integrated an ever growing body of knowledge (checking one’s premises as necessary). Join Gregory Salmieri as he discusses how to be objective about Objectivism, including the need to be mindful of which philosophical principles you know to be true, how you know this, and what questions remain for you to answer. He pays special attention to common mistakes enthusiastic students make when approaching the philosophy, and he emphasizes the need for the members of an Objectivist group or movement to respect one another’s cognitive needs and context of knowledge.

You can get it via Lifestream along with all the other general sessions - 9 in all. They are available live as well as on demand until the end of July.

Ayn Rand defined God as a word or concept to simply mean "the highest good". Humans' more complex minds with their abstract thought systems that go from a premise (I call it the singularity or origin point) to an open-ended continuum to infinity, and the ability to improvise invented explanations for the unknown, led to inserting a wild card into trying to understand existence itself.

Seeing our own creativity and intelligence in designing anything we use in our lives crossed over into positing a super brain in creating everything around us in the Cosmos. At the hypothetical infinity terminus it is thus conceptualized as infinite (omni-present), everlasting (immortal), all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient)--all the things we limited mortals aren't but aspire to be. And that allows us to say "God only knows" where we fall short, and ascribe to God anything we don't understand.

Once having personified the unknown into a character endowed with consciousness and will--an extension of our own living attributes--we also endowed it with the best and worst personality traits, like fatherly love but also anger, vindictiveness, jealousy and a demand for total obedience. We romanticized it as the creator of everything that demands our worship. And for thousands of years this notion clothed in powerlust has enslaved mankind's mind and heart (intellect and emotions) in endless conflict and misery and wars over whose God is the real one. From an abstract metaphor we have made it into a belief in an actual entity.

Our conceptual faculty, that works so brilliantly in every other area of living and building and producing and advancing and understanding and creating, on this one point hangs from a skyhook the idea of a mysterious, invisible creator that somehow exists outside of our known space and time and must have pre-existed the beginning of the Universe and of existence itself.

The energy that pervades the Cosmos, the reality that encompasses all that exists, the natural causes that our science has identified, are all ascribed to and encapsulated in that one notion, God. What a concept! And our own built-in striving for self-preservation and continuity thus posits a survival after death, an immortality in some other realm, an ascent to “heaven” and return to the creator.

But wait for it. So if God is the highest good, there must also be its antithesis, the greatest evil, personified by Satan or Lucifer or the devil, who likewise contends for the hearts and minds of these humans—two cosmic forces evenly matched and locked in an eternal contest.

These, then, are the symbols of what is relevant only to living things: values--that which supports life or endangers it. The knowledge of good and evil is possible only to a conceptual being, namely mankind’s highly evolved and still evolving brain. It has turned a fantasy tale into a belief that can operate only by disconnecting the critical faculty and substituting “faith”. Yet faith is the mind-killer, the voluntary abdication of rational thought.

It’s like the microbe that infests an ant’s brain and makes it climb to the top of a blade of grass in order to be eaten by a cow in whose stomach the microbe fulfills its own life replication cycle. It is fascinating to contemplate how the God virus (see the book of that title by Darrel W. Ray) and the God delusion (see the book of that tiitle by Richard Dawkins) have infected humanity, and not in our best interest. Faith shuts down inquiry and makes questioning itself a sin or, in extreme cases, heresy punishable by death.

Yet our evolving minds have found answers to many of the Universe’s previously unknown aspects, from the laws of physics to life’s dynamics, and will continue to gain understandings about both the outer Universe and the inner workings of our brains. If we find someday that we are actually carriers of some cosmic power, little relay stations of some universal intelligence, we will then at least know and understand it as fact, not just believe and fantasize in a fear-induced haze.

At some level of enlightenment we may yet reach the point where ideas (memes) will not manipulate us into mutually destructive behaviors; where individually and cooperatively we can reason our way to a life-enhancing modus vivendi and our evolution itself may reach the stars. Then we shall become like the gods we once imagined. Let us not impede that path with skyhook fables.

Cute. But actually, the question of God can stand entirely separately from the question of afterlife.

You said,"'Existence' is best just placed in Rand's 'Existence Exists' axiom as a general relation between matter and radiation."

I disagree - existence includes both matter and energy, as in all that exists.

As one contemporary of mine says. Faith is like an ice pick to the brain. How's that for direct and dramatic?

Objectivism is a philosophy that provides much more useful tools for thinking and is much more respectful of people's rights and responsibilities as a sovereign individual.

Actually, I'm using universe in the philosophical sense for the unit of all that exists. Cosmos is described as the study of the origin and evolution of the large and small structures of the universe and has more of an astronomical perspective.

For this conversion it doesn't really matter.

Before answering a question it is proper to evaluate the question. Asking about the origin of everything is a mistaken question because it implies that there is nothing left for a causal explanation. Therefore the question is a contradiction in terms and unanswerable.

It's a common fallacy promoted by religion - asking unanswerable questions and then attaching moral implications to having their dogmatic but arbitrary answer. The moral loading to nonsense traps people in unsolvable guilt. The trap is sprung.

The only defense is the philosophical insight from good epistemology (theory of knowledge) to recognising a fallacious and therefore meaningless question.

Just because we can construct a question, it doesn't make it valid.

I hope that helps.

It takes faith to believe in God, without faith one will continue to have an emptiness that never fulfills one's quest for peace. There is an answer.

Thanks for writing in the contemporary vernacular here. Now you are understandable to me and are on the road to come to terms with a completely rational integration of what you are seeking.
At first I thought you were somewhat like the rosicrucian I met in college searching for some nonexistent connections for consciousness with external world. I never could see the energy field that he was looking at between his held apart hands.
There is no way to integrate many of the spiritual terms that religion took as its own without redefining them with respect to objective reality and by doing that removing that subjective reality perversion of reality which tries to get one to believe that there is some kind of revelation from god or the universe. Also beware of getting into a trance state by suspending your critical faculty and running off into some kind of selective thinking. That is what I consider to be the basis of all faith related thinking.

I took a nap but instead of really sleeping I kept running the location of that house around in my mind. We did not have to walk very far down Sylvan Drive to reach the house in question.
So when I sat up from my very light snooze I was certain that house used to be in that green area.
It had to have been completely torn down with all the rubble removed and greenery has had plenty of time to cover up the bare spot.
I also remember that the second floor we were on was kinda different. Instead of a hall there was a wide open space with maybe three rooms lined along its east side. The guys and I sat in a circle in the open area facing outward so as a group we could see in every direction at once.
A guy named Irving and I had an eye on that door where we both saw the described movement at the same time.
As for learning the history of that house, which I'm pretty sure is long gone, old dino just doesn't feel enthused. Sorry. That sounds like a lot of bother with no perceivable reward.
May be retired but I have other interests I do not want to be distracted from.

Any reference to Einstein becoming a theist in later years?
His: "These details, (physical laws), are so specific and mathematically precise that if it were one digit, one decimal place off...existence wouldn't exist." is off the mark because it should be that the Universe might not exist. Not that existence would not exist. The physical laws pertain to the physical universe and may be different for any other universe depending on how matter and energy comes into being, i.e., as existing acting stuff with specific identities for action relative to each other.

The psychological impact on me is immensely helpful - much like the use of certain words or phrases in poetry or stretches of the imagination in Scifi/fantasy fiction. I may enjoy the experience of them, but give them cognitive or intellectual or decision-making weight.

Existence does not require a universe, that can come out of existence as with a big bang. Even that is a little off because a vacuum would have existence were it to have energy relationships which could fluctuate into a universe. Best to just say 'Existence Exists' and a vacuum had existence and then Banged. Better than that god made the universe because there is some evidence for a expansion of the vacuum into the Universe as the so called Big Bang and a lot of evidence that we all exist, though some are having trouble with that last.
When one of my brothers tries to discuss the Universe referring to everything leaving out the 'that exists' thing and I say that there is existence regardless of there being a universe, the shouting begins and the discussion ends. 'Nothing' cannot exist and would contradict the concept of 'existence'. So there is either existence or ....
'Nothing' is not something just as a non existing god is .... :nothing to describe there. Therefore I have to remain an atheist and get along with the always wonderful, amazing, and knowable existence that exists.

Not knowing anything about the house, the map was interesting but not helpful. There must be records of the house and who lived there someplace in Sarasota. You know, you might try your local DAR or SAR chapter. They might be able to give you a starting point.

CBJ makes some excellent points. It seems you are trying to force square pegs into hexagonal holes.

Repackaging existing concepts (like Existence) into poetically palatable words doesn't create clarity. In contrast to the existing words you've set aside, you've taken words with deep history of mysticism and tried to apply them to their philosophical opposites. Why? What clarity is achieved...even poetically?

The psychological impact is confusion...amid emotionally charged words.

Thanks for your thoughts - and your warning. I get it. Cheers.