Objectivism

[altonhare]

In this way, is not the premise of objectivism untenable?

If what you're trying to say were true, not only would Oism be "untenable" but so would every thought, action, and reality itself be! There would not be a single thought or idea one could consider a candidate for Truth. Indeed, there would be no Truth, no reality whatsoever!

If our observation of it entails interacting with it, should not our perception be critiqued based upon our perspective?

Here is your essential error. You're trying to impose the human conceptualization of "perspective" on Nature. In Nature, there is no such thing as "knowing less" as a result of varying location. Each object or entity interacts with every other object or entity in a way exactly in accord with their identities, regardless of distance or location. An object doesn't suddenly behave different from its identity because it attains a different "perspective" on another object!

Do not the conclusions, based on our perception, based on our perspective, thereby tautologically reflect our premises?

There is a difference between a premise and an axiom. A premise is an assumption that can be logically disagreed with or refuted. A premise is essentially a scientific hypothesis. The rope is a premise, the particle is a premise, etc. You can logically argue that there is no continuous interconnection between everything. You can logically argue that everything is a disconnected particle instead. At the end of the scientific presentation/method the differences will become apparent when you try to explain observation with the particle instead of the rope or chain.

An axiom cannot be logically refuted. For instance:

"Truth can be stated with certainty"

cannot be logically refuted. The refute:

"Truth cannot be stated with certainty"

refutes itself. It is a statement of certainty that claims there are no statements of certainty.

"Something is what it is"

cannot be logically refuted. The alternative argument:

"Something is not what it is"

voids itself, it states that something (such as itself) is not what it is, so the statement itself is not stating that something "is not what it is" because it is not itself.

[webolife]

I agree essentially with both Plasmatic and Alton's rebuttal of what they think I was saying.
I think I'm saying something different however... maybe my word choice is fouling me up...
I'm trying to ask questions to establish the belief base of both Plasmatic and Altonhare with as little hinderance from "jargon" as possible. I'm not confusing conception and perception. I'm trying to say that:
1. There is truth.
2. It is knowable.
3. I can't know all of the truth due to limitations of my perception.
4. I try to understand what I perceive by determining patterns, making connections, etc.
5. I evaluate reasonableness of my understanding based on evidence.
6. My presuppositions guide the way and kind of connections I make, and the conclusions I draw.
7. I rely on the perceptions/perspective of others to help me fill in gaps in my own understanding.
8. Understanding my own presuppositions and those of others helps me to evaluate the reasonableness
of their and my conclusions.
9. The more I dialogue with folks of unlike assumptions to mine, the more confident I am of coming to conclusions more representative of the truth.
10. Anyone who claims to have a totally "objective" viewpoint is undervaluing their own limitations, which hinders my belief in the reliability of their conclusions.

[Plasmatic]

Hey Web,

10. Anyone who claims to have a totally "objective" viewpoint is undervaluing their own limitations, which hinders my belief in the reliability of their conclusions.

This is nice and all but Im not sure what it has to do with Objectivism? Oism doent make the claim [as ive pointed out to GC] that one can be "totally objective" as in infallible, nor does it claim one person can know "ALL" truth. In fact the very nature of conception as a volitional activity declares it as fallible and contingent upon a particular method. Oism simply claims that no matter what amount of truth their is, it is what it is, and it is knowable i.e. one CAN properly identify the content of the particular existents in his field ofd perception[independent of others!]. That doesnt mean one can be omniscient [as in "all" knowing]

[altonhare]

Hey Web, I think we're converging a bit here. I understand what you're saying.

2. It is knowable.
3. I can't know all of the truth due to limitations of my perception.

What I think you're referring to with 3 is the ability for you or I to be consciously aware of every particular aspect of the Truth. I don't claim that. However, every constituent of my body/brain interacts with every other constituent in the universe. So although I may not be able to write down, state, or visualize every minute aspect of the Truth, everything that composes me certainly interacts with everything that exists in a way that is exactly the Truth.

10. Anyone who claims to have a totally "objective" viewpoint is undervaluing their own limitations, which hinders my belief in the reliability of their conclusions.

A key point of objectivity is the ability to identify and admit when you're wrong. If you meet someone who claims to be objective but either A) Claims to never be wrong or B) Claims they are fallible but never, ever actually admits an error even when it's obvious then you are talking to a hypocrite. I have admitted to being wrong/mistaken/etc. a few times on these boards, although I make a reasonable effort to be consistent and unambiguous.

I'm currently seriously discussing Kevin's theory(ies) in "Why an ether/aether?". I am listening in earnest and taking my valuable time (I do work for a living and am getting married soon) to read carefully and ask reasonable pointed questions in order to arrive at a clear picture of what is in his head. I do this although Kevin has stated he has no formal education and his posts are difficult for me to read because of poor spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. Additionally I dislike reading his posts in general because they don't tend to tell me anything about what *he* is thinking. Rather like poetry, in which each person interprets it their own way, deciding for themselves what is actually being said. In science this kind of situation is undesirable, or scientists would forever be talking past each other, at cross purposes, and would never learn anything from each other. For the purposes of science, the particular qualities I mentioned don't have any bearing whatsoever except insofar as they may make it a bit more difficult to communicate. For the purposes of science, all I care about is if the theory/argument does not contradict itself. The source of the theory/idea, whether Kevin or Hawking or a 5 year old, doesn't matter. As far as I'm concerned the theory/idea stands on its own and only has to pass the criteria of non contradiction to be valid. Of course to apply this criteria the strategic words in the theory must actually be defined, otherwise there is nothing there to evaluate. Would anyone have it any other way?

The sole criterion for an objective stance/theory/etc. is Identity i.e. non-contradiction. Philosophically this is preferable because it does not lead to absurdity. Scientifically it is preferable because it is parsimonious.

[webolife]

Aye, we are converged.
Maybe we can work a bit on "materialism"?

[altonhare]

Define materialism so we can discuss it. Might wanna start a new thread.

[Grey Cloud]

"What advantage is there in what men call not dying? The body decomposes, and the mind goes with it. This is our real cause for sorrow. Can the world be so dull as not to see this? Or is it I alone who am dull, and others not so? . . . There is nothing which is not objective: there is nothing which is not subjective. But it is impossible to start from the objective. Only from subjective knowledge is it possible to proceed to objective knowledge. Hence it has been said, 'The objective emanates from the subjective; the subjective is consequent upon the objective. This is the Alternation Theory.' Nevertheless, when one is born, the other dies. When one is possible, the other is impossible. When one is affirmative, the other is negative. Which being the case, the true sage rejects all distinctions of this and that. He takes his refuge in God, and places himself in subjective relation with all things.
"And inasmuch as the subjective is also objective, and the objective also subjective, and as the contraries under each are indistinguishably blended, does it not become impossible for us to say whether subjective and objective really exist at all?

"When subjective and objective are both without their correlates, that is the very axis of Tao. And when that axis passes through the centre at which all Infinities converge, positive and negative alike blend into an infinite One. . . Therefore it is that, viewed from the standpoint of Tao, a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction. Nothing is subject either to construction or to destruction, for these conditions are brought together into One.
"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of all things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, subjectively; but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed. And viewing them thus they are able to comprehend them, nay, to master them; and he who can master them is near. 1 So it is that to place oneself in subjective relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,—this is Tao. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the individuality of things, not recognising the fact that all things are One,—this is called Three in the Morning."
"What is Three in the Morning?" asked Tzŭ Yu.
"A keeper of monkeys," replied Tzŭ Chi, "said with regard to their rations of chestnuts, that each monkey was to have three in the morning and four at night. But at this the monkeys were very angry, so the keeper said they might have four in the morning and three at night, with which arrangement they were all well pleased. The actual number of the chestnuts remained the same, but there was an adaptation to the likes and dislikes of those concerned. Such is the principle of putting oneself into subjective relation with externals.
"Wherefore the true sage, while regarding contraries as identical, adapts himself to the laws of Heaven. This is called following two courses at once.
"The knowledge of the men of old had a limit. It extended back to a period when matter did not exist. That was the extreme point to which their knowledge reached. The second period was that of matter, but of matter unconditioned. The third epoch saw matter conditioned, but contraries were still unknown. When these appeared, Tao began to decline. And with the decline of Tao, individual bias arose."
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/mcm/mcm06.htm

[Orlando]

Nice post GC, thanks for the link.

"The hope will depend
on a world without end
whatever the hopeless may say"
--Neil Peart--Rush

Peace
Or

[Grey Cloud]

Nice post GC, thanks for the link.

"The hope will depend
on a world without end
whatever the hopeless may say"
--Neil Peart--Rush

Peace
Or

Glad you liked it but the credit goes to StefanR.
BTW go easy on that Rush, that's how Junglelord started.

[StevenO]

Time is what separates objects and subjects. Taking this separation away, the world becomes truly eternal as in Tao.

[Plasmatic]

"What advantage is there in what men call not dying? The body decomposes, and the mind goes with it. This is our real cause for sorrow. Can the world be so dull as not to see this? Or is it I alone who am dull, and others not so? . . . There is nothing which is not objective: there is nothing which is not subjective. But it is impossible to start from the objective. Only from subjective knowledge is it possible to proceed to objective knowledge. Hence it has been said, 'The objective emanates from the subjective; the subjective is consequent upon the objective. This is the Alternation Theory.' Nevertheless, when one is born, the other dies. When one is possible, the other is impossible. When one is affirmative, the other is negative. Which being the case, the true sage rejects all distinctions of this and that. He takes his refuge in God, and places himself in subjective relation with all things.
"And inasmuch as the subjective is also objective, and the objective also subjective, and as the contraries under each are indistinguishably blended, does it not become impossible for us to say whether subjective and objective really exist at all?

"When subjective and objective are both without their correlates, that is the very axis of Tao. And when that axis passes through the centre at which all Infinities converge, positive and negative alike blend into an infinite One. . . Therefore it is that, viewed from the standpoint of Tao, a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction. Nothing is subject either to construction or to destruction, for these conditions are brought together into One.
"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of all things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, subjectively; but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed. And viewing them thus they are able to comprehend them, nay, to master them; and he who can master them is near. 1 So it is that to place oneself in subjective relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,—this is Tao. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the individuality of things, not recognising the fact that all things are One,—this is called Three in the Morning."

Translation A is non A. Absolute jibberish. Even the monkeys that are taught to sign get that they wont get a banana by signing for something that equals "not banana".

Since concepts, in the field of cognition, perform a function similar to that of numbers in the field of mathematics, the function of a proposition is similar to that of an equation: it applies conceptual abstractions to a specific problem.
A proposition, however, can perform this function only if the concepts of which it is composed have precisely defined meanings. If, in the field of mathematics, numbers had no fixed, firm values, if they were mere approximations determined by the mood of their users—so that "5," for instance, could mean five in some calculations, but six-and-a-half or four-and-three-quarters in others, according to the users' "convenience"—there would be no such thing as the science of mathematics.
Yet this is the manner in which most people use concepts, and are taught to do so.
Above the first-level abstractions of perceptual concretes, most people hold concepts as loose approximations, without firm definitions, clear meanings or specific referents; and the greater a concept's distance from the perceptual level, the vaguer its content. Starting from the mental habit of learning words without grasping their meanings, people find <ioe2_76> it impossible to grasp higher abstractions, and their conceptual development consists of condensing fog into fog into thicker fog—until the hierarchical structure of concepts breaks down in their minds, losing all ties to reality; and, as they lose the capacity to understand, their education becomes a process of memorizing and imitating. This process is encouraged and, at times, demanded by many modern teachers who purvey snatches of random, out-of-context information in undefined, unintelligible, contradictory terms.
The result is a mentality that treats the first-level abstractions, the concepts of physical existents, as if they were percepts, and is unable to rise much further, unable to integrate new knowledge or to identify its own experience—a mentality that has not discovered the process of conceptualization in conscious terms, has not learned to adopt it as an active, continuous, self-initiated policy, and is left arrested on a concrete-bound level, dealing only with the given, with the concerns of the immediate moment, day or year, anxiously sensing an abyss of the unknowable on all sides.
To such mentalities, higher concepts are indeterminate splinters flickering in the abyss, which they seize and use at random, with a nameless sense of guilt, with the chronic terror of a dreadful avenger that appears in the form of the question: "What do you mean?"
Words, as such people use them, denote unidentified feelings, unadmitted motives, subconscious urges, chance associations, memorized sounds, ritualistic formulas, second-hand cues—all of it hung, like barnacles, on some swimming suggestion of some existential referent. Consequently (since one cannot form concepts of consciousness without reference to their existential content), the field of introspection, to such people, is an untouched jungle in which no conceptual paths have yet been cut. They are unable to distinguish thought from emotion, cognition from evaluation, observation from imagination, unable to discriminate between existence and consciousness, between object and subject, unable to identify the meaning of any inner state—and they spend their lives as cowed prisoners inside their own skulls, <ioe2_77> afraid to look out at reality, paralyzed by the mystery of their own consciousness.
These are the mentalities that modern philosophy now asks us to accept as the criterion of the meaning of concepts.

In metaphysics, “subjectivism” is the view that reality (the “object”) is dependent on human consciousness (the “subject”). In epistemology, as a result, subjectivists hold that a man need not concern himself with the facts of reality; instead, to arrive at knowledge or truth, he need merely turn his attention inward, consulting the appropriate contents of consciousness, the ones with the power to make reality conform to their dictates. According to the most widespread form of subjectivism, the elements which possess this power are feelings.

In essence, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts, and therefore men’s primary tool of cognition. If men feel it, declares the subjectivist, that makes it so.

The alternative to subjectivism is the advocacy of objectivity—an attitude which rests on the view that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that the role of the subject is not to create the object, but to perceive it; and that knowledge of reality can be acquired only by directing one’s attention outward to the facts.

Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: “It is, therefore I want it.” They say: “I want it, therefore it is.”

They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

[Grey Cloud]

The horses were given 3 lots of A in the morning and 4 lots of A in the afternoon. Apparently, the subjects didn't object. Horses can think oatside the box.

[Birkeland]

Time is what separates objects and subjects. Taking this separation away, the world becomes truly eternal as in Tao.

Time is a conceptualization of relative motion between concretes. As such, time does not exist in itself.

[Birkeland]

A good summary of the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary science and scientific methodology. This is at its roots a philosophical issue. As Ayn Rand wrote back in 1966:

• The disintegration of philosophy in the nineteenth century and its collapse in the twentieth have led to a similar, though much slower and less obvious, process in the course of modern science. Today’s frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscent of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn—that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism. In the humanities, however, the crash is past, the depression has set in, and the collapse of science is all but complete - Science

In addition, see Travis Norsen's critique of contemporary scientific methodology:

Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics - Part 1
Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics - Part 2
Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics - Part 3
Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics - Part 4

And the lecture The Crisis in Physics - and Its Cause by David Harriman.

For further study:

• These historic lectures present, for the first time, the solution to the problem of induction—and thereby complete, in every essential respect, the validation of reason. Peikoff begins by identifying the axioms of induction and the method of establishing their objectivity, including the role of measurement-omission. This enables him to make clear the parallels between concept-formation and generalization-formation, and leads him to discover the real distinction between induction and deduction. Peikoff goes on to discuss the methods used in science to prove non-axiomatic generalizations and advanced theories. He stresses, with many examples (from Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and others), the roles of experimentation and of mathematics. The course then considers the similarities between philosophy and physics. Peikoff shows that the differences affect only the form (but not the essence) of induction, and illustrates this fact by analyzing the inductive proof of typical Objectivist principles. The course concludes that (apart from mathematics) the same process of induction is essential to every rational field—and that, as a result, truth in any such field, including philosophy, possesses the same objectivity as that of physics, the archetype of science itself - Induction in Physics and Philosophy

[jjohnson]

Prof. Wolfe's beautifully written discourse bothers me because it is not how I view things. He quotes well-known people who resort to melodramatic obfuscations like "the attributes we give to physical objects are "mere articles of clothing...draped over the mathematical symbols; they [do] not belong to the world of reality." My unswerving belief is that the universe is real, and causal, and ofttimes fatal if you don't heed those facts. The statement preceding is true in the sense that we live in our heads. Of course; we have evolved to take in sensory data and organize it in a Darwinian evolution that favors survival enhancements like mental processing. We are pretty good thinkers. We should not attribute too much importance to that, however.

In this forum we chide others on confusing cause and effect, such as, recently, lightning and sandstorms on Mars. Prof. Wolfe adopts the philosophy that (human) observations and mental consideration or modeling of the universe change it and make it the way it is, in some mysterious participatory interaction. The logical conclusion of this is that experiments turn out the way they do because we observe, and therefore influence, their results. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, "For every experiment there is a solution that is neat, plausible, and wrong."

Okay, if you are an ornithologist studying the actions of a flock of birds feeding on the ground, and you rise up above your blind to snap a picture and they are startled and all fly off, you have obviously affected the outcome. Take the case of the double slit experiment. You set up and turn on the photon emitter and the slits and the phosphor screen. You turn on the computer to count the hits and record their locations. For good measure you put the video recorder on the tripod to make a visual record of the screen while the photon hit pattern is generated. Then you leave it all running and go out and get drunk. Late the next morning you return, popping aspirins, and review the results. They look just about the same as the last time you pulled an all-nighter sitting in the lab and watching the screen yourself as the interference pattern builds. You tell me how observing or not observing an experiment influences its outcome. If that were the case, the universe would behave according to each and every observation and interpretation of an experiment designed to uncover how it works. (I still haven't the slightest idea of what makes that experiment create a diffraction pattern, and I bet we still don't grasp that correctly.)

Since everyone's perception is a little different and this could be happening over and over in the universe wherever a sentient organism evolves far enough to process sensory input, the universe would be uncontrollably chaotic. Our observations do not change how the universe works or the outcome of experiments, I conclude. We are the blind men patting and feeling and smelling the elephant. Our internal representation within our brains of how we perceive the way the universe works may change, and we may communicate this among ourselves and analyze what others' ideas may bring to bear on such understanding, but the universe is durable and operates consistently and is causal. We are simply small collections of complex molecules and atoms behaving consistently, in accordance with the organization we call "laws" of how things work in the universe. We are not influential observers apart from the universe; we are OF the universe.

The universe simply proceeds with great diffidence. It makes no difference what methods or equipment we use, or what mental constructs we engender in our search to understand how it works. When we draw wrong conclusions, and proceed upon them, they may have good or bad consequences upon us or upon something else, but not on the way the universe itself as a whole works.

When a human looks up at the night sky and the brain does the sensory process and "sees the stars", that doesn't mean that people's looking up makes this a universe that contains stars. The stars are real; they ride there in the dark for long periods of time, silently radiating. They move; they change; they come and go, irrespective of observation. If a trilobite, back in the Cambrian, looked up with its beautiful hexagonal fluorite-lensed, waterproof eyes at the underside of a dark Cambrian sea, and its brain "saw" tiny dots of light on the underside of the water, did the trilobite's failure to interpret the dots as "stars many trilobite lengths away" mean that the stars did not exist in the universe? That would not be a logical conclusion by a human, in my book.

If an inexperienced human researcher watches lightning during a thunderstorm and observes that so far it seems bright, beautiful and safe enough ("nothing dangerous has happened to me; it made an interesting, pretty and changeable pattern and vanished; it made my eyes blink"), and then gets hit by a bolt of lightning, his conception of what lightning is suddenly becomes an ex-misconception, and he becomes meat on a stick. The universe is real and causal, despite our mental constructs of what it might be. We may be only partially right, and there may be things existing, large or small, in the universe of which we are totally ignorant, but what is in our heads doesn't make them exist or not exist. To think that is so is hubris.

As Edward Fitzgerald translated one of the quatrains in Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Aargument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door where in I went.