A Deep Blue of Philosophy?

Just posted this to a reddit r/Objectivism thread:

I often find that when I come to some point of Objectivism (or anything else) that I critique, I employ the methods of Objectivist thinking and I can't think of any way around those methods, which emphasize the concepts of integration, context, and hierarchy. How does one attack those concepts without self-contradiction? Anyway, if I come upon something in Rand's writings that I think falls short, I critique it on the grounds that it isn't a correct application of her own prescribed methods. This is why I'm more comfortable calling myself a perfectivist than an Objectivist; it commits me to no doctrine or practice other than the relentless accumulation and integration of knowledge, like with Aristotle. There are chess grandmasters, and then there's Kasparov, and Aristotle is philosophy's Kasparov. (Which raises a question: could a philosophical "Deep Blue" be developed? Damn...has that question been asked before?)

Just to clear up a thing or two right away: Deep Blue isn't a conscious entity.  As it is there are discussions within philosophy of mind circles whether and how we can determine that a machine with the behavioral characteristics of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey is conscious.  HAL does display many if not all requisite characteristics of intelligence.  Deep Blue is far from a HAL, but much like HAL, is quite expert at performing the task of playing chess, but that is a rather limited task.

What led me quite quickly to think of HAL is what HAL is short for: Heuristic ALgorithmic.  I'm not an expert on what a heuristic algorithm involves, but I gather Deep Blue relies on such a princple.  (The term "heuristics" appears once in the Deep Blue wikipedia article, so I'm probably onto something.)

Something else to clear up: Where "the highest responsibility of human philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge" (Rand, ITOE), a Deep Blue machine wouldn't technically qualify as a philosophical machine because knowledge requires a consciousness.  (I'm pretty sure of that necessary connection but I'll think it through some more.)  What a Deep Blue machine, in the task of integration, would be integrating content without being aware of that content.  (I'm speaking here of the Deep Blue machine as it is now, not an extra-advanced one like HAL.)

But here's the interesting part: Say that scientists could program a machine of Deep Blue's computing power to crawl the web (Google, wikipedia, etc.), integrate its contents, and generate output for humans to work with.  Would that (not) be pretty awesome?  Would the task involve much greater complexity than that involved in playing a chess game while seeing 18 moves ahead?  Could such an algorithm be developed to hone in on what is essential content, and to hone in on connections between items of content, such as what terms in a wikipedia article are hyperlinked?  As has already been discovered, wikipedia has a hierarchical organization demonstrated through a certain pattern of hyperlinking practices, with approximately 95% of wikipedia entries leading to the Philosophy entry.  (This would come as a surprise to a lot of folks, but not the least bit of a surprise to Miss Rand, who, aside from penning endlessly-carictured novels, actually wrote things on the nature and role of philosophy in the human endeavor, and topics connected with that.  If this kind of stuff had already been spelled out in philosophy textbooks, I might have noticed.  Seeing as so few people acknowledge the fundamental role of philosophy in human life, I doubt this message, even if contained in textbooks, got through to the readers as it fucking well should have.)  Wikipedia is quite the example of a system of content, enabled by the development of the internet, that, qua mapping of territory, condenses or essentializes a vast array of territorial concretes.  (I think the term "encyclopedic knowledge" involves the same phenomenon, i.e., systematic essentialization, not necessarily an expertise or familiarity with the mind-boggling number of concretes that an essentialized system necessarily contains.  Encyclopedic knowledge isn't so concrete-bound.)

Hell, what might result if such a machine were set to the task of integrating the contents merely of a high-quality dictionary?

I'll leave the rest to the imagination.

Legalize it, cont'd

From the "Integrate, dammit!" department:

Judge Posner calls for an end to the obvious insanity.

In the philosopher's queue: Nozick's unusual journey from leftist to libertarian; abortion and human rights (and the Ninth Amendment?)

Stupidity: not just a Republican thing

Wow.

The GOP and Crazy - latest episode

Unfuckingbelievable.

A philosopher's intellectual calm and patience can be stretched only so far before insults and/or damnation become the only appropriate response.

This isn't about the morality of abortion, but about a simple, anti-science, anti-reason, anti-fact rewriting of reality.  "Fetal life" in Arizona now begins at a point when fetal life does not - in reality - begin.

(To pile crazy on top of crazy, this new law is titled "The Women's Health and Safety Act.")

I don't know what's more crazy, this, or the notion that Sarah Palin was remotely qualified to be president.

Only ignorance and/or bad faith can explain these phenomena.  One can only hope that these intellectual mutants will be correctly acknowledged as such in the light of history - assuming the mutants don't already destroy us all before we get there.  That's right: fucking mutants.

EDIT: On a more constructive note, perhaps in the coming days I will lay out some thoughts on the abortion matter.  In the meantime, let us note one thing about the goddamned "pro-life" right-wingers in America, who have mutated even well beyond what they were in 1976 when Miss Rand had already called them goddamned so-and-sos: Their fierce defense of "the sanctity of life" in the form of the unborn cannot even come close to be taken as a cognitively unbiased (if not downright hypocritical) position on the sanctity of life - not when they show such stark indifference toward children in poverty (now standing at 22% in America - and rising), toward death-row inmates (who pose no threat to society when locked up, and who may or may not have been wrongfully convicted, or who may be mentally retarded), or toward the many children killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which these fucking mutants have decided to turn a blind eye while chanting about how the USA is "the greatest country on earth" because of its nationalism and militarism and anti-intellectualism, i.e., because of mutants like themselves.  I have no doubt that a dedicated individual could come up with instance after instance of the mutants' double-standards on "the sanctity of life."  (Just human life, I suppose, too.  Many of these same mutants don't think twice about scarfing down enormous amounts of factory-farmed meat and diminishing their own health in the process.  And what about the sanctity of the lives of members of future generations who may very well have to suffer the consequences of these mutants' epistemologically-fucked environmental negligence?)  That being said, there are legitimate moral concerns and arguments about abortion that need to be addressed to those of good faith, cognitive balance, and epistemic-intellectual sanity.  It is just too bad that it is not these folks who dominate American political discourse today.  (Speaking of which, how the fuck does presidential hopeful Mitt Romney get away with releasing only two years - tops - of tax returns?  What, am I the crazy one here?)

EDIT #2: Aaaaand yet more insanity from the past couple days.  I wonder how the pro-freedom, small-government Tea Partiers might react to this GOP-platform proposal for gratuitous federal meddling into people's private choices, choices made using their own hard-earned money no less?  Are the feds supposed to be conducting this frivolous meddling before addressing real problems this country faces?  Who are these fucking idiots?  (Note, further, that the Romney campaign has vowed to crack down on the porn menace, in addition to the vow to fight tooth and nail the same-sex marriage menace.  All while not releasing more than two years of tax returns because "it's none of our business."  Words fail at this point.)

Notes on teleology

Off-the-cuff here, but need to get the thoughts down on (digital) paper.

It's hard to imagine how one would become The Ultimate Philosopher without having devoted serious amounts of time and thought over the years to the subject of teleology.  The most famous exponent of a teleological interpretation of (at least some) natural phenomena is Aristotle.  The so-called conventional wisdom is that Aristotle's teleology was abandoned by philosophers after the middle ages and the rise of the scientific age.  It turns out that the subject of teleological concepts in biology is of interest to some philosophical sub-specialists today.

Now, to get to what just now had me to thinking (yet again) on the subject of teleology.

The use of the term "teleology" in Objectivist/Randian circles is not altogether clear(ly consistent).  I'll first take the original statement on the matter from the Lexicon, which appeared in a footnote:

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

First off, I'd like to indicate what Rand got right: "Goal-directed" should not be taken to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature.  Then the confusion begins: "goal" here is to be understood in terms of the automatic functions of living organisms such that they achieve a "result."  Rand doesn't provide any further explanation of this point, but it's a big one, because it is central to understanding her meta-ethics.  It all has to do with living organisms facing a fundamental life/death alternative and that this alternative makes sense out of speaking of goals; where there are no alternatives, there are no goals.  This last part sounds correct.  However, we also have an apparent conflation of the meanings of "goal" and of "value," a value being that which one acts to gain and/or keep.  Accepting this definition of "value" for the moment (I am not clear on what would compel us to do so, and never really have been), we get concretizations from Rand about, chiefly, the activities of plants and of animals.  In her terms, valuation in plants would involve (for instance) movements to maximize exposure to sunlight, the sunlight being valuable to their photosynthesis activities; or, for another example, valuation would involve the activities of cellular metabolism.  With animals you have obvious examples such as feeding (and the other three F's, the last of which throws a wrench into everything, as I'll address in a moment).  Where the primary "goal" (or value) of the plant, is directed toward gathering energy and nutrients, the alternative is malfunction, disease, death.

So, how do we respond to all this?  Well, in addition to the two statements above which I've indicated make good sense, it also makes sense to say that the activities of (say) a plant are such that they are organizationally and functionally ordered toward the production of a result.  What I don't see that implying is that they are goal-directed.  This gets us to an accounting of "goals," which in my view are related to the term "value" (which has to do with valuing something, which doesn't mean "value" is defined as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep;" rather, value is used here in the sense of actual or potential utility in satisfying a desire, or something close to this idea).  Much as I have tried (and gone back and forth) over the years on understanding "goal" as applied to insentient nature, I think the term "goal" is applicable only to sentient activity.  Likewise, I think "value" has meaning only in application to sentient activity.  What's more, I think the fundamental meta-ethical term "goodness" is applicable only to sentient activity - which is to say, that I do not accept Rand's conception of goodness as applied to living organisms generally.  (N.B.: I do not think that this is fatal to the central thrust of Rand's argument in "The Objectivist Ethics."  I think much the same ethical conclusions could be derived from restricting the concept of "goodness" to the well-being of sentient entities [which for all we know must be biological entities, though that's a philosophy-of-mind issue].)

Here's where we are so far:

"Goal" is applicable only to sentient activity.  (I'll explain this shortly.)

"Value" is applicable only to sentient activity.  (Ditto)

"Result" is applicable to living entities in terms of how their biological organization functionally "directs" their activities.

Something's being a result in the above sense does not make it a goal.

Rand uses "goal-directed" so as not to imply a teleological principle operating in an insentient nature (or "tpoiain," for short).  What is not determined from this statement is how she does apply the concept of teleology.  Apparently "goal-directed"-not-implying-a-tpoiain would indicate that she doesn't think there is any such thing as a tpoiain, but that's not made explicit.

Since this is off-the-cuff, I'll mention Harry Binswanger's work on teleology at this point.  His Columbia doctoral thesis, later turned into a book published by ARI, is titled "The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts."  On the face of it, such a title does imply the endorsement of the idea of a tpoiain, as it applies not only to humans and other animals, but to plants, to fungi, to amoeba, to bacteria, any biological organism you can name.  At the same time, we would be reasonable to assume that Rand, with whom Binswanger was closely associated, was familiar with this thesis and its contents and agreed that it is consistent with her meta-ethics.  (Peikoff references Binswanger's thesis/book in OPAR, as well.)  And so we're back to the confusions.  We're back to asking whether a bacterium plausibly "pursues goals," "has values," or "faces a life/death alternative," and whether the concept "good" or "bad/evil" apply to the outcomes/results of its activities.  So, to continue . . .

"Goal" is only applicable to a sentient being.  (I may be stipulating word-usage here, but it's hard to see how Rand/Objectivists aren't doing the same.)  Here's how I think that's plausible: It does not make sense to speak of having a goal unless there is an awareness of an alternative.  Now, "awareness of an alternative" might be thought to involve considerable foresight, planning, and so forth.  Here, I'll mention something that Rand herself brings up: the pleasure/pain mechanism.  Even in that very basic form - as it obtains even at the level of mentally primitive animals - there is some basic awareness of the alternative involved here.  The goal, then, for such non-cognitively-advanced beings is to pursue that which provides an automatic guide to . . . well, to what?  For Rand, the automatic pleasure-pain mechanism directs an animal to that which "sustains, furthers, and promotes its life."  For contemporary biology, however, the automatic guide directs animals toward something called "inclusive fitness" - and hence why the last of the four F's is so highly related to pleasure.  Rand is at odds with contemporary biology; I don't know any other way to put it.  This means that Rand is almost surely mistaken as to what the basic functions (or "natural ends") of living organisms are.  She cannot derive her (plausible) ethical conclusions from her (implausible) biological claims.  (Her "man's life qua man" modification on "life as the standard of value" - rather than, well, psychological well-being as the standard of value - can be converted quite simply to: "the activities based on principles required for the proper functioning of a rational being," which translates both conceptually and causally to: eudaimonia.)

So, what's the point, then, of bringing up the pleasure/pain mechanism?  It's to make a less ambitious but more plausible claim than Rand does: that the pleasure/pain mechanism provides automatic guidance to animals as to what promotes their good, i.e., their psychological well-being.  I think it's necessary to add in here: "Other things being equal."  However, it's basically only cognitively-advanced beings such as humans that are able to grasp the "other things being equal" part and to take that into deliberative account.

So "goal," at the very minimum, involves an awareness-in-mind of an alternative.  It also makes sense to say that an animal pursues goals in the sense that the animal has desires, drives, etc. that can be satisfied or frustrated.

I think "value" basically operates in the same fashion.  The concept  "value" is based on the phenomenon of having desires, drives, etc. that can be satisfied or frustrated.  This needn't involve conflating the meanings of "goal" and of "value," even though they are obviously very closely related.

So, now we have:

"Result" is present where there are functional life-processes.

Biological "function" is defined in terms of inclusive fitness.

"Goal" and "value" are defined in terms of what is pursued by a sentient being.  (Binswanger's term "value-significance" applies at this level.)

"Teleology" pertains to goal-directedness, which operates only in sentient parts of nature.

The specifically human form of goal-directedness is defined in terms of purpose or end, or something indicating the rational and deliberative element in human goal-pursuit or valuation.

"Standard of value" pertains to successful goal-directed action, success being defined in terms of what is good for the valuer.

"Good" is that which promotes psychological well-being.

"Well-being" may very well apply to the health and successful life activities of non-sentient organisms, but that doesn't imply "goodness," "value," "goal."

Psychological well-being in humans translates (at least closely) to eudaimonia.  Or more precisely: psychological well-being exists on a (teleologically?) measurable continuum, represented by some variant or other of the Maslow hierarchy of needs (beginning with the vegetative, then animal, then human-specific needs with their own ordering), with maximal well-being or self-actualization being concurrent with eudaimonia.

Or something along these lines.  (If I've left some strands hanging in the above, I'll leave that as an exercise for myself and the reader.)

Whew.  Glad to get all that cleared up.  What next? :-)

UPDATE: A dialecticizing of all the items here just came under consideration.  It'd be time-consuming as fuck, but the payoff might well be worth it.  Or maybe not.  Better things to do?

An Aristotelian Utopia?

While the most prominent economist on today's public scene spends his scarce time going apeshit over the Paul Ryan-Ayn Rand connection, complete with laughable commentary on Rand/Galt/Atlas, my thoughts turn more toward the long-term and to subjects of the greatest and furthest-reaching scope.  That's what I do, see.  That's all I do.  And I absolutely will not stop, ever, until I am dead.

So, without further ado, I direct your attention to a blog commentary (Part 1) (Part 2) on Prof. Marcia Homiak's essay, "An Aristotelian Life" (a chapter in the collection Philosophers Without Gods [Louise M. Antony, ed., OUP, 2007]).  The collection as a whole is okay, but the one essay that stuck in my mind was this one.  The basic idea of her essay is that a society built along essentially Aristotelian lines would fulfill all the needs that many human beings think requires belief in a god or gods to fulfill. It wouldn't be an atheistic or secular society by necessity or default - for all we know, a rigorously-philosophically-informed theism may be a prominent feature in such a society - but the point would be that belief in god(s) would not be necessary for the society to function in a, well, pretty fucking awesome manner.

I wish to go a step or so beyond the envisioned social order outlined by Prof. Homiak and consider certain questions.  These include: (1) How realistic is it that such a society might be actualized?  (2) Were such a society to be actualized, wouldn't the benefits of a philosophically-enriched citizenry have a snowball effect, leading to ever-better social discourse and, in turn, to ever-better solutions to major challenges facing humanity?  (3) Would this not hasten the onset of the technological singularity?  (4) Is such a social order, properly speaking, utopian?  Breaking that question down further: Is the society envisioned by Homiak already utopian, or would we need the aforementioned snowballing effect to reach utopia?  (5) What exactly is the difference between perfection (in this context, a utopian society) and excellence (an awesome society), anyway?

Well, I think the chief question here is (1).  I think once such a society were realized, the snowball effect and the rest follow quite logically - that is, unless humanity is already doomed.  Is humanity doomed?  I don't know.  But what's a pretty fucking awesome way to hedge our bets on that?  Or go out with a bang if the end really is near?  Could it get any better - could we do any better - than an Aristotelian society (be it to stave off extinction, or just because that's the best way to go regardless)?  If we could do better, that's what the Man himself would recommend we do, of course!  (You can't refute perfectivism. :-)  So, now: what about (1).  Is such a society a realistic goal?  Let me turn the tables here: Is it not a realistic goal, and if not, why?

The strategy here isn't difficult to figure out.  (It's tactics used to carry out the strategy that need some big-time investigation, I think.  How are memes optimally propagated in this day and age?)  The strategy is to get as many people turned on to this Aristotelian idea as soon as possible.  This has a number of things going for it.  For one thing, Aristotle is canonized.  Ayn Rand, on the other hand, deservedly or not, is not canonized.  Even though I think Aristotle and Rand would converge on support for the Aristotelian program, using Rand's ideas as the vehicle for such a social change would be something of a non-starter.  I think that comes after the Aristotelianization (great word!), which would enable the folks to actually understand what the hell Rand has been getting at all this time.  Or, perhaps, the Aristotelianized citizenry would tear Objectivism apart (if not ignore/scoff at it), as the current genius-packed academy-consensus would believe.  (I'd be happy to take bets on that.  But one philosopher against a million; what chance do I stand?)  But that's really quite beside the point.  The point is to have a citizenry that is maximally intellectually tutored and let the chips fall where they may.  (Again, I'm happy to take bets on how well Rand pans out in such a scenario.  But hell, we'd all be winners in that scenario.  I'd just want to be a bigger winner. ;-)

So, a maximally intellectually-tutored citizenry.  How can that be achieved?  Well, I said the strategy would be fairly simple and straightforward: Get as many people as possible understanding Aristotelianism as soon as possible.  Especially rationality as the highest virtue, and the progressive activity that is eudaimonia (involving self-actualization) the good life.  A citizenry devoted to learning and growing and deriving enjoyment from doing so.  Higher aesthetic standards in the public sphere.  Stupidity in politics scorned rather than celebrated.  A people "conditioned" to think eudaimonically and therefore looking down on lying, cheating, and stealing as purported means of getting ahead in life. Growing bonds of trust.  Capitalism with businesspeople actually of the character of Randian heroes, rather than the sociopathic unprincipled cutthroat philistinic cronyist assholes that dominate the business scene too much today. Violence scorned rather than celebrated.  And on and on and on.  Like I said, fucking awesome.

So how does that ball get rolling?  Is it realistic for the ball just to get rolling?  Well, is it not realistic, and if not, why?  How does a people concerned with their survival and well-being reject Aristotle?

Say that it's achievable in principle.  Better yet, say that it's at least plausible.  (If not, why not?)  In that case, it comes down to a matter of time: just how long would it take before Prof. Homiak's (admittedly ambitious) vision is achieved?  And why not sooner rather than later?

A couple other twists to the narrative above:

(1) Jesus of Nazareth can still play a key role in all this.  Think of this combination as the possible citizen-ideal: Having the head of Aristotle and the heart of Jesus.  (Do keep in mind what Aristotle had to say about intellectual activity as expressing what is "divine" in man, and ask yourself how Jesus could possibly object to the maximal use of one's cognitive faculty.)

(2) Cannabis legalization would speed all of the above way up, for the reasons Carl Sagan explained.

More to come, of course . . .

Sunday Worship, 8/12/2012

A mere 4:20 in length...

Rand and the 'national narrative'

Once we take a comprehensive look at the state of America today compared to its state 60 years ago (while Atlas Shrugged was being composed), how much can we say - as many left-wing analysts contend - Rand has had a major influence over American culture?  Well, first, let's observe that Rand's vision of good human beings is symbolized by Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart.  The charge against her, though, is that her philosophy appeals primarily to Wall Street "banksters," if we're going to name people who are highly unfluential on the country's state of affairs.  Meanwhile, if you were to compare the lifestyles of the Wall Street "banksters" with those of real-life Objectivists (the ones who knew Rand, or listened to the Peikoff lecture courses, or attend the conferences, or have an "insider" level of familiarity with Objectivist teachings), you'd probably not find a whole lot of overlap.  Look at Peikoff himself.  He lives too much like an Aristotelian to behave like a shallow dickhead investment banker.

Say that a bunch of super-rich assholes decide they dig Rand because they like the "survival of the fittest idea" and think Rand is a great source for that idea (clue: Rand doesn't endorse that idea), and so they behave like assholes and screw the masses of Americans over.  I don't see how Rand is to be blamed for their intellectual faults.  Quite true; she estimated the intelligence of her typical reader to be that of a quality-college-educated history major with a considerable degree of interest in large-scale, long-range issues that philosophy is there to study.  She didn't expect her readers to be philosophy-autodidacts like herself, but she did expect a great deal of intellectual attentiveness; otherwise, what's the point of writing for the public?  So, given the sad state of education and much of mass culture in America today, the widespread anti-intellectualism or intellectual laziness, the widespread hypocrisy, the screaming injustices so many just come to accept as part of normal life, etc., Rand may very well have assumed too much of her (future) readers.

More to the point: These left-wing criticisms of Rand's purported intellectual influence are rife with bias.  Blaming Rand for the behavior of super-rich assholes is comparable in silliness to blaming Marx for the behavior of the Stalin regime, something that the very same left-wing critics wouldn't put up with for a minute.  It's that fucking stupid.

The idea is to have a country of people who behave like Aristotelians - intellectual curiosity (i.e., rationality in the Randian sense, which Rand-haters are clueless about) being the chief and fundamental virtue in human living, along with an emotional life characterized by benevolence.  (Hint: Rand was an uber-advocate of benevolence.  You can see it in her characterization of Roark.  "In the name of the best within us..." (Atlas)  So lefties, stop being so stupid and superficial about Rand, huh?  Get a clue or two.)

The bigger question these lefty critics or any other intellectuals ought to be concerned with is: What are the causes of our society not being a society of people who behave like Aristotelians, where a mind like Chomsky's is an exception rather than the rule?  Because that, after all, is the root of our ills today.  How can the publication of Atlas Shrugged come remotely close to playing a causal role in these ills?  It defies all common sense.  So what have these lefties been doing up there in that ivory tower, then, besides snubbing the business ethos? :-)

More to come, of course . . .

Next up: Dialectizin' with Aristotle?

Legalize It

UPDATE below

A Compelling Argument - one among many

A recommended link - I think you might be amazed by what transpires there in the possibly near future.  Hard to predict these kinds of things, though.

UPDATE: Some additional links: (1) Sagan (2) semantic priming

Possible motto: "If you're old enough (18) to serve and die for your country, you should be able to grow weed or buy it in a store."  That simple.

Vote for candidates who endorse legalization or against candidates who oppose it.  Get organized to sway the election if need be.  Exploit the potential of mass internet social media not under corporate content-control, to win with the power of ideas over million-dollar campaign contributions.  (I'm working on this latter part as we speak.  Plus this is just the beginning of popular reforms we desperately need to see in this country and worldwide.  Chief on the agenda are philosophical education, ecosystem preservation, mass cognitive creativity, and love.  "In the name of the best within us...")

Stay tuned for more . . .

Sight and Sound 2012 poll results released

It's an event for cinephiles somewhat akin (or perhaps not) to the World Cup for soccer/football fans.  In the British Film Institute magazine's survey of hundreds of critics and filmmakers conducted every ten years, Vertigo has unseated Citizen Kane from the long-held top spot.  These poll-results could very well lead to a new round of obsessive (pun intended) number-crunching by the very dedicated, as they did for me the last time around.  Or, one could just let others do all the number-crunching and save one the trouble.

Question(s) for the day

How many accomplished novelists do you know of, who later went on to pen fairly technical works on epistemology, the most difficult subject in philosophy?

Such a phenomenon seems highly unusual.  What qualities of mind would have to be involved to pull that sort of thing off?  Could such qualities go unappreciated by many people over a long period of time for one reason or another?

A question

Invariably it seems that reports of near-death experiences involve a tunnel with a bright light at the end, perhaps an angel or deceased family member coming to take them toward the light.

I have yet to hear of a near-death experience in which the subject was being led to the gates of hell.

Does this mean that, if these near-death experiences reflect the true reality of things - that there is an afterlife and it's bright and peaceful, etc. - then we don't have to worry or wonder about whether we'll go to hell?  Or, alternatively, does it mean that all those who had these near-death experiences were pure in spirit - that one needs to be pure in spirit in order to have these experiences?

Where did the conservative intellectuals go?

Today I've been researching this question.  The list of "conservative intellectuals, activists, and writers" at the wikipedia page (1st google result) is disappointing to say the least (and neither Rand, Hayek, nor Friedman - the most prominent intellectual figures listed there - were, or considered themselves, conservative; Rand was especially vehement about this whereas today's "conservatives" haven't taken the hint).  Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are well into their retirement-age years.  How about anyone living today under, say, 65 years old who could qualify as a great conservative intellectual?  The field is catastrophically barren here.

Three years ago, Newt Gingrich (one reason the wikipedia list is so disappointing) lauded a 14-year-old Jonathan Krohn as the intellectual future of the Republican Party.  Not only has that not panned out (the intellectually precocious Krohn went on to read some philosophy and to realize how intellectually vacuous his earlier views were), but there's obviously something gone awry about a political party in which a 14-year-old is so highly touted by the adults (or is it "adults"?) in the room.

The second Google result quotes at length from a blog posting by jurist Richard Posner which paints quite the grim picture.  The original, in full - without paragraph break-ups - is here.

There was a time when modern American-style conservatism (or should I say, the package-deal under that label of some good and some not-so-good ideas) had appeal to me - at a couple years older than Jonathan Krohn was as a GOP celebrity.  This was somewhere around twenty years prior to that, a number of years before the GOP had definitively jumped the shark (the younger Bush's presidency).  It was also before I encountered a book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which spelled the end of American-style conservatism as an intellectually viable force in my mind.  Note how Barry Goldwater went on to repudiate the recent incarnation of the GOP.

If you look at the GOP today, it is a party that remains politically viable due in great part to two factors: (1) The super-wealthy support them: call this the financial support network; (2) The grassroots base - call this the electoral support network - is comprised to an astonishing extent (as abundant polling data show) of very ignorant people, geographically tilted toward the South and demographically tilted toward the old.  These two forces meet at the leading media outlet for GOP memes: Fox News.  Much financial and intellectual (or is it anti-intellectual?) capital has been spent largely via this propagation source to oppose such things as climate science, same-sex marriage and healthcare reform, to call into question Obama's "American credentials," and to promote fiscal and foreign policies that have little empirical data in their favor.  I would not be surprised if a poll of registered Republicans, when asked whether Al Jazeera is a political party, media organization or terrorist organization, ended up in a three-way split.  It's that fucking bad.

Very recently, this graph showing the relationship between favorite websites and political affiliation has been making the rounds.  I don't know how statistically reliable it is - it appears to be based on the Trendsetter app's user "likes" - but assuming it's reasonably accurate (and it looks quite accurate for reddit.com's placement), the most telling data point would be the location of the wikipedia logo.  This wouldn't even demonstrate how great Obama and the Dems are, instead of just how bad today's GOP and its candidates are in comparison.  (Keep in mind that book smarts and business smarts aren't the same; also keep in mind that plenty of business people support the Dems.)  If you look at the community of political philosophers, I'd expect the support for present-day American-style conservatism (not to be confused with, say, Hayekianism) to be close to (if not completely) nonexistent.

I will continue researching these Google results and encourage others to do likewise.

(EDIT: Note to self: try to keep the distinction between conservatism (and conservative intellectuals) and the GOP/Fox abundantly clear.)

(EDIT #2: The third Google result, a Wa-Post editorial, mentions Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning as a serious work.  Heck, it even scores 3.9 stars out of 5 at goodreads, way higher than similarly-titled Ann Coulter works score there.  A text search of the book brought up zero results for "Rawls" and one irrelevant result for "Chomsky," however.  So I'm skeptical about what "left" Goldberg is talking about.  Is this like writing a book on the crankery of libertarians by highlighting Ron Paul but not Robert Nozick?)

An exercise for the reader

Dialectic, ain't it fun?

Two statements from previous blog entries with an apparent logical tension between them:

(1) "Anyway, in a well-educated educated citizenry, this $46 trillion would not go almost entirely ignored while nearly everyone can tell you Ryan Seacrest is (but few could tell you who Immanuel Kant is, much less who Rawls, Nozick, or Chomsky are)." (May 7 2012)

(2) "In the tomes of Immanuel Kant, what do we have besides an elaborately worked-out system of interrelated ideas represented by words, words, words, without a clear tie to our concrete and everyday concerns? (Put the question the following way: what benefit would the layperson have in reading, or trying to read, the Critique of Pure Reason?)" (May 18 2012)

Exercise: reconcile these statements.

When it's Politics vs. Principles

There's political philosophy - where high-minded idealists discuss and debate the relative merits of Rawls, Nozick, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rand, Chomsky, Hayek, Marx, Mill, et al - and then there's politics, a practice that "in the real world" (read: as the practice is done today, not involving philosophers but - put politely - another subset of human beings) has next to zero connection to what's just, right, good, or honest.

Just one very recent case in point: a young idealistic Ron Paul supporter in Massachusetts receives a lesson in political practice from his state's GOP. Long story short, the corrupt assholes running the state party decided to change the rules mid-game to effectively exclude Ron Paul supporters from attending the national GOP convention later this year, after they had won the delegate positions fair and square.

This is a microcosm of politics today in its essence. You can see it everywhere. It's reflected in all the insider and pundit manners of speaking. It's reflected by the number of outright idiots who participate in the process, including elected representatives (another recent case in point). Political practice (at least in these United States) is, in short, broken.

This problem goes all the way back to when a democratic government sentenced Socrates to death by hemlock; his pupil in turn wrote a political treatise in dialogue form, envisioning a philosophically-enriched utopia. Many folks are resigned to politics being the way it has been practiced for so long, viewing philosophical proposals as impractical and unrealistic. That attitude strikes me as leading to a vicious cycle in which politics never improves. I don't accept this as inevitable, and there is one significant piece of historical data that backs me up on this: a real-life "philosopher-king", one who was not merely a lover of wisdom the way the U.S.'s third president would qualify as such (though this is another historical precedent of the sort I'm speaking of), but one who also made a notable contribution to the history of philosophical thought. So I don't consider politics to be a hopeless cause as such, but fixing broken political practice requires activity that goes well beyond participating in the prevailing travesty of civic activity.

One doesn't have to agree with the specifics of Plato's vision to agree with one central truth therein: a polity eminently worthy of one's participation requires a citizenry well-educated in what might be broadly termed the philosophical arts. That would not only result in an enriched polity, but enriched lives on the whole. And here's the practical question, posed in the name of the best within us: How do we get there from here?

To be continued . . .

How Corrupt is the Establishment?

And here I mean, how corrupt is the Establishment (the currently-prevailing corporate-media-political complex), intellectually? If you were to look at the circus that passes for "political news" these days, how would you evaluate it by intellectual standards? If the very cultural backdrop of political news coverage these days is devoid of serious intellectual influence, then just how futile is it to expect serious positive political reforms? I'll offer as Exhibit A: The complete absence, in all major media outlets in the United States, of one of the most thought-provoking intellectual figures of our age. It's pathetic, and damning. We as a people cannot expect much of anything better in our mainstream institutions if things don't change big-time - intellectually. At least the internet by its nature will give non-Establishment figures a greater audience-share than before. So there's at least some hope there.

Cultural Death Watch

This week a number of high-budget, special-effects-intensive, probably-yet-another-Hollywood-remake shit sandwiches will be released. Or a great number of such have been released recently. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a large enough metropolitan area, however, you will not be seeing a movie named Moonrise Kingdom, just like you never saw a movie named The Tree of Life in theaters last year (since it was a direct-to-DVD release, even though it has Brad Pitt in the leading role FFS).

If you've paid a reasonable amount of attention to the American film scene in, oh, the past decade or so - in other words, if you are culturally literate enough to name more than a few movies made by, say, David Lynch - you'd recognize the name Wes Anderson, he of Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Along with such names as Lynch, Scorsese, Coen, Malick, and Paul Thomas Anderson, he is one of the most important cinema auteurs in the English-speaking world today. His latest effort, however, is not slated to be seen by more than some fraction of Americans. This new movie has received pretty much zilch by way of domestic publicity; being too busy on a number of matters to pay close attention to the movie releases around this time of year, I only happened to hear about it on a classical music / NPR radio station that devoted a segment to the music used in this and other Wes Anderson films. A song by Nico was used in The Royal Tenenbaums, for example. Who besides the minimally culturally literate have so much as heard of Nico? And who the fuck listens to these kinds of stations, anyway? Certainly not the ones shelling out good money for yet another predictable/formulaic Will Smith vehicle, or yet another Spiderman remake, or yet another rendition of 28 Days Later under a new title.

A people cannot survive on shit sandwiches.

On a completely unrelated matter, how's that 2012 presidential circus freakshow campaign working out for you so far?

Marriage and Equality

(I've not yet proof-read/edited the entry below, so be prepared for any grammatical errors. Tags will be added later, when I have the time/inclination to whittle tags down to the essentials.)

This is something of a follow-up to my last entry on the subject, in light of President Obama's (phony) evolution to support for what the cultural left now frames in terms of "marriage equality" (and the cultural right frames in terms of "redefining marriage"). In my last entry, I observed that the cultural Right, which has essentially staked its intellectual reputation on this issue, is out of arguments. The last, pathetic resort of these right-wingers is demagoguery about the "definition of marriage," which may well play in vast swaths of the Bible Belt which would - if they had their way - go back to criminalizing "sodomy." But the anti-"marriage equality"/"redefining marriage" side is losing - badly - in the courts, where reasoned arguments matter and irrelevant BS is disregarded. When Ted Olson, the lawyer representing the couples marginalized by California's Proposition 8, put the (conservative!) case for equal-protection in Newsweek more than two years ago, the debate - rationally speaking - was pretty much ended. On the rational merits, the opponents have been left to flail about helplessly.

So where does it go from here? I have in mind what the majority opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court might look like. Now, I admit that I am coming at this as an amateur at jurisprudence and substantive law. I am a layperson on these matters who can at least name some key Supreme Court cases. A (if not the) key precedent on the same-sex (")marriage(") issue is Lawrence v. Texas of 2003, and a key feature of our nation's Constitution coming to bear on the issue is a judicially-acceptable interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Now, the majority opinion I have in mind (again, I note I am an amateur layperson so my formulation may be inexact in legal terms) would go something like this: The Court will want to come to the "best compromise" on the issue, hedging so as not to piss off either side too much, and to do so without running too obviously into accusations of "cultural engineering" or "legislating from the bench" or "judicial activism" or other such euphemisms that either side of the political spectrum tends to engage in when it disapproves of a Supreme Court ruling, depending on the issue. In this case, the Court will not want to be seen as "redefining marriage," but at the same time needs to affirm what common decency affirms on the issue: a substantive equal protection of rights under the laws of the states. Noted same-sex (")marriage(") advocate Andrew Sullivan would object to a "separate-but-equal" solution, though we do have judicial precedent for such a thing (which, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), didn't last all that long). [EDIT: I have since been corrected that this case was one overturning a previous decision upholding the "separate but equal" solution.] The "separate-but-equal" solution in this case is the requirement, on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, that same-sex couples have all the same rights and protections under the law as man-woman couples, but that these equal substantive rights do not require that same-sex couples be able to get married under state law. The commonsensical "middle ground" solution that has occurred on a state-by-state basis is civil unions (though apparently, on a state-by-state basis, there still are substantive differences between marriages and civil unions, which render them unacceptable even under the "separate but equal" solution). If the Supreme Court were to go for the "best compromise," it would simply be this: states must have equal rights whether in the form of marriages or civil unions, and that form is left up to the individual states.

One particularly appealing feature of such a compromise is that the last, pathetic resort of the equality-opponents loses even its demagogic force, except perhaps in the very culturally backward states. This compromise does not "redefine marriage" at the federal level, leaving the definition of marriage up to the states. So on what basis, in the political atmosphere of 2010s America, would the equality-opponents have to object? They get to keep their semantic preferences, but they don't get to continue marginalizing same-sex couples under the guise of "protecting the definition of marriage."

I don't, however, think that it's really a matter of semantics in the more bigoted regions of our country. If it were, then those regions would have already allowed, at the minimum, civil unions for same-sex couples, but they don't. That leaves bad faith, malice, ignorance, stupidity, obfuscation of the relevant issues, misrepresentation of the real agenda, or other such ugly things as the explanation for this. (And President Obama should still be held to account for his past political pandering to such ugliness; I don't buy his "evolving on the issue" bullshit for a second, and Andrew Sullivan is out in la-la land if he thinks Obama is praiseworthy for (what is in fact) shifting with the political winds. He's a f'ing politician with no identifiable core save for strategic-tactical Alinskyism/Machiavellianism. This Sullivan admiringly characterizes as his "meep-meep" quality. Stick with Greenwald if you want bullshit- and la-la-land-free analysis of this president's actions. (Sullivan protests, but he's way too easy on the president regardless - definitely so if he doesn't call him out for being a core-less political calculator.))

Understanding Objectivism: Preliminary Thoughts

(I've not yet proof-read/edited the entry below, so be prepared for any grammatical errors. Tags will be added later, when I have the time/inclination to whittle tags down to the essentials.)

I've finished chapter 1 of the book version of Leonard Peikoff's lecture course. It has been many years since I heard the lectures in audio, but the first lecture does accord pretty well with my somewhat vague recollection of the audio lectures. (Arguably there are benefits as well as drawbacks to "absorbing" these lectures via the audio format; in any event, Peikoff, Michael Berliner and others evidently saw the benefits of putting these lectures in book form in addition to the audio.)

First off, I want to point out that these lectures are for "serious students of Objectivism." It is expected that one has familiarized oneself decently with the written Objectivist "canon," including Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), or "OPAR," the "book adaptation" of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course endorsed by Rand and given in her presence. The Objectivism being discussed in the Understanding Objectivism (hereafter shortened to "UO") is far, far removed from the superficial, caricature-ish version you see being discussed in the mass media. It is also fairly removed from the Objectivism one is exposed to in the written canon, with the main exception of chapters 4 and 5 of OPAR. The primary focus of UO is on "chewing" Objectivist ideas in an active fashion - of making the Objectivist way of thinking part of one's internalized, first-hand mental practice, as distinct from the more "passive" approach involved in reading the literature. The purpose is to get the "serious student of Objectivism" to move on to becoming an "advanced" student of Objectivism, i.e., someone who could, independently of the canonical texts, arrive at the Objectivist ideas themselves the way Rand herself did. (As Peikoff points out in the first lecture, Rand did not learn Objectivism from reading Atlas Shrugged or from attending courses by Peikoff. It all had to come first-hand.) In any case, UO presupposes a considerable degree of familiarity with Objectivist ideas, so it is targeted not to newbies but those who've spent some time reading and thinking about the ideas. That is one chief barrier to just any ol' outsider profitably plunging right in and "getting" what it's all about. Absorption of ideas takes time - often on the order of years. This presents a further difficulty: those who don't take Objectivism all that seriously to begin with aren't going to be willing to invest that amount of time "chewing" Objectivist ideas and finding out just what there is of so much value to its practitioners. (Common sense would tell you that long-time Scientologists telling you that if only you would invest so much time (and money!) learning about their ideas will you come to see its profound value, is not going to be all that plausible on its face if you don't buy into it at the outset.)

So, that being said, what does UO offer listeners and/or readers? Above, I've alluded to the notion of actively "chewing" ideas and to the closely related notion of the Objectivist way of thinking. "Chewing" refers to the process of working over ideas extensively in one's mind before one is really ready to digest them. The audio version of UO is rougly 27 hours of doing just that. Fundamentally, the course deals with the proper method of thinking through or chewing ideas, as distinct from the content, which in the case of Objectivism is laid out in the canonical texts primarily by Rand and the Brandens pre-1968, and in Peikoff's 1976 course. The method consists in what I'll call a rigorous and systematic approach to "premise-checking," that is, of tying one's ideas to the concrete facts of reality as well as to the systematic whole of ideas that is the Objectivist system. Viewed as a method of thinking, Objectivism, therefore, serves as its own best protector: it demands that one be able, first-hand-, to validate one's ideas by the highest standards of fact and logic. Whether this makes the content of the "official Objectivist canon" just as impervious is a different question. Aside from some basics - namely, the axioms of existence, identity and consciousness, the fundamental reliability of sensory information and some minimal notion of volition as a presupposition of rational discourse - there is very little if anything that is obvious or indisputable. For instance, plenty of other thinkers besides Rand would look out on the same sensible reality that she does and arrive at different conclusions about ethics and politics than she did, and these matters are (or at least so Rand and Peikoff would argue) hierarchically dependent upon metaphysical and epistemological fundamentals. Which brings me to some important methodological observations for philosophers as such to take careful note of.

Central concepts within Objectivist methodology are: integration, context, and hierarchy. These concepts are so central to Objectivism, in fact, that you basically cannot separate method from content at this point. (Perhaps by now you are beginning to see how woefully inadequate the superficial mass-media treatments of Objectivism are; an article or book covering Objectivist ideas that make essentially no reference to these central concepts, or display not a clue about them, are probably not worth your time except as a cultural exercise.) These concepts are treated at considerable length in chapter 4 of OPAR. And, I would argue, these concepts are so closely related to one another that you can't separate them from one another. To properly integrate one's ideas is to respect both context and the hierarchy of ideas, and vice versa.

Now, I assume the reader is at least minimally familiar with these concepts as discussed in the above links, if not the more indepth discussion in OPAR. So here's an important question that should arise at some point in a thoughtful person's mind: just who or what serious thinkers would disagree with the importance of properly integrating one's ideas, of maintaining (i.e., not dropping) context, of respecting the hierarchy of ideas? Aren't these of fundamental importance to the practice of philosophy as such? What makes Objectivism special in this regard? Why has this blogger in particular been on record for touting the historical importance of Rand as a thinker, particularly in regard to the need to properly integrate one's ideas? I think the answer is this: since these concepts are so fundamental to the practice of philosophy, what major figures in the history of philosophy have identified their fundamental importance? Remember, this is a matter of methodology, of the very practice of doing philosophy itself, of meta-philosophy perhaps. An historically-informed treatment of Rand's ideas points to deep methodological similarities in the so-called dialectical tradition, dialectics being understood as "the art of context-keeping." So it isn't like Rand is the first thinker to come along and realize that all ideas (all phenomena?) are embedded in a context and cannot be adequately understood apart from that context. Indeed, I'd say any great thinker in history paid scrupulous attention, at least implicitly, to the context of statements and attempt to reconcile conflicting ideas by properly taking into account the widest possible context. Whether this has been explicitly formulated and acknowledged as a matter of philosophical method by others besides Rand, I do not know. What is significant here is that Rand, a widely read and "popular" philosopher, made these identifications - apparently independently of other historically significant thinkers - for the benefit of the layperson. Wouldn't it be nice if other "popular" thinkers and philosophers out there would make the same explicit identifications and thereby perhaps stem the tide of cultural decay?

This segues into another basic focus of the UO course: the role of philosophy in human existence, or the role of philosophy in daily living. From the very beginning of the first lecture, Peikoff addresses the matter of how one lives by a philosophy, particularly in a society from which one's philosophy is largely alien (as current society is with respect to Objectivism). He naturally moves on to the issue of how philosophy as such, not just Objectivist philosophy, can play a role in human life. Another chief idea in Objectivism is that philosophy - whether directly or indirectly, whether by adoption or by rejection or neglect - is the fundamental moving force in human life. (Rejecting or neglecting philosophy in one's life generates existential impoverishment in a number of ways.) The problem here is: how does one connect abstract ideas to the practice of concrete daily living? And here Peikoff sets up his number one target of destruction: rationalism. Now, it must be noted that "rationalism" has become a buzzword among longtime Objectivists and on online Objectivist forums, even though in the written canon it is hardly at all touched upon. This generates a problem in terms of how one properly defines, in fundamental terms, what the problem of rationalism is as Peikoff (and, presumably, Rand) understood it. How would one identify an idea, thought process, or person as "rationalistic"? Further, just how pervasive is the phenomenon of rationalism so identified? As to the latter question, Peikoff says that the problem is pervasive in a very large segment of individuals, including among students of Objectivism, and that it is a problem that can undercut and paralyze their thought processes, and in fact destroy their commitment to integration, context, and hierarchy, quite unbeknownst to them. Being that it is a serious and pervasive problem, and largely unidentified, we're in deep doo-doo if we don't unroot it and fix it. Peikoff emphasizes that this problem is so ingrained in so many people's thought processes that it presents a, if not the, chief obstacle to living - and living well - by a philosophy. Since thought and action are integrated phenomena in human beings, the problem of applying philosophical principles to daily living is primarily an intellectual problem.

So what is rationalism? It has some important similarities to rationalism in early modern philosophy (associated with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz), but the sense in which it is used by Peikoff is more all-embracing than the term applied there, I think. It concerns one's habitual method of dealing with ideas, or one's "psycho-epistemology," and key to understanding Rand and Peikoff's criticism of most of the philosophical tradition is understanding their criticism from a methodological standpoint: they would insist that rationalism as method of thought is quite literally pervasive among intellectuals, i.e., among those who deal with the most abstract ideas. And, so, at last, what does this rationalism consist in? I would formulate the problem as follows: rationalism consists, in effect, of treating the map (our abstract system of ideas) in the same manner as one would treat the territory (concrete reality). Take a common lay-criticism of the practice of philosophy: that philosophers have their "head in the clouds," that all they do is play around with ideas in their heads, with little practical importance or application. Just what do philosophers do, anyway? How do they make their ideas relevant to practical daily living? What if, in effect, whether they realize it or not, their map is their territory, and so what makes sense in their territory has little if any connection to the real territory? After all, if we all have the same real territory to work with, why do philosophers, via their conceptual system-building, still disagree with one another (in some deep fashion that doesn't similar afflict the community of scientists)? Further, if rationalism is a fundamental methodological phenomenon, then might not David Hume be just as much a rationalist in this sense as Descartes? Does Hume start with some "floating" premises (premises not properly anchored in concrete reality, as much as he would insist on some doctrine of empiricism) and deduce from those premises conclusions that fly in the face of practical, real-world concerns? In the tomes of Immanuel Kant, what do we have besides an elaborately worked-out system of interrelated ideas represented by words, words, words, without a clear tie to our concrete and everyday concerns? (Put the question the following way: what benefit would the layperson have in reading, or trying to read, the Critique of Pure Reason?) Or, to take an example from more "practical" (ethical and/or political) philosophy, what territory does Rawls's A Theory of Justice map out?

But remember something I noted above: Peikoff says that the problem of rationalism, or of deducing to or from "floating ideas" not properly grounded in concrete reality, is a pervasive problem among many students of Objectivism as well as among the historical philosophers he and Rand love to heap their invective upon. Peikoff mentions having struggled with rationalism himself for over a decade. It is an affliction present in many intellectual types as such, due to hazards inherent in dealing with abstract ideas. They would identify the phenomenon in so simple a circumstance as a student of Objectivism reciting some tenet or argument in Objectivism and then failing to establish the truth of the claim first-hand apart from relating words to other words that they gleaned from a book.

I am quite sure that the problem of rationalism needs to be fleshed out much, much more than the summary treatment I've provided here, for the problem to become more apparent. The whole point of philosophy, the counter-objection would go, is to ensure that one's ideas are true, i.e., properly grounded in reality, and there's no clear reason to believe that Rand and Peikoff have done better at this than others, their identifications and protestations concerning methodology notwithstanding. My very strong impression is that, over the course of a few decades (namely the '50s through the '70s), Rand and Peikoff encountered countless instances among the students and thinkers, Objectivist and non-Objectivist alike, instances of what they came to identify as the problem of rationalism. UO is the only course/book that I know of where the problem is fleshed out indepth, but I'll need a refresher from reading the rest of it to really pinpoint what they have in mind.

I would like to make an observation concerning methodology and the idea of Objectivism-as-its-own-protector. The way that Peikoff structured OPAR, for both epistemology and ethics, is to define the basic concepts - "concept" (chapter 3) and "value" (chapter 7), respectively - and devote a chapter to explaining these concepts before proceeding to matters of what I might call "application," particularly in the chapters on "objectivity" and "virtue," respectively. In each of the chapters of the latter sort, we are presented with general advice (along with some concrete examples) of how to conduct ourselves epistemically and ethically, respectively. In the later epistemology chapters (4 and 5) we are given "commonsense" advice concerning such things as arbitrary claims, or when a claim is assigned such values as "possible," "probable," "likely," and "certain," or when a claim is considered to have been properly proved as true. In the chapter on virtue (chapter 8) we are given an extensive discussion that is expanded to book-length in Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics. At least in the case of the ethics chapters, you have a division into meta-ethics or the discussion of the meaning of ethical terms (chapter 7 on "the good") on the one hand, and normative ethics or discussion of the content of ethical obligation (chapter 8 on virtue) on the other. Perhaps a similar sort of division needs to be made in the area of epistemology; perhaps what many professional specialists in epistemology are focused on are matters correctly classified as "meta-epistemological," while how to conduct oneself epistemically is a matter of "normative epistemology." I raise this possible division as food for thought. If the division is a valid one, then I think chapters 4 and 5 of OPAR are concerned with normative epistemology. This raises a further possibility: if Randian normative ethics can be plausibly described as a version of ethical perfect(ionism/ivism), then her doctrine concerning epistemic method might be considered a version of epistemic perfect(ionism/ivism). For some time I have viewed Objectivist methodology (mentioned above as a rigorous and systematic approach to premise-checking) in this light, and doing so has inspired me to approach philosophical subject-matter in general (and not just Objectivism) accordingly, as best as I can. Any such philosophizing can trump Objectivist content. Hence the term I've adopted: Perfectivism. :-)

Items for the Day

1. Why so aloof?

So, what have I been up to lately to occupy my time? In short: consulting various online information bases, e.g., wikipedia, reddit, rateyourmusic, acclaimedmusic, Scaruffi, Amazon, Oxford philosophy podcasts, Arts & Letters Daily, Greenwald, Sullivan, etc., really studying up on the world of Western classical music (next: rock, jazz and popular music), following lots of links, and vigorously applying the motto just below this blog's headline. (C'mon, whatever else you think of Rand, she's really right-on with this one.) How many of your "leading philosophers" out there today can lay claim to be doing all that? :-) (Next up: publishing the results of all this research ASARP.)

2. Mahler = the first supermusic?

That's the question that arose in my mind recently, since I absorbed his music more deeply and observed how it really seems to take music to the next level. That only prompted further curiosity about the rest of the world of classical music I had yet to "get," including especially Bach, Wagner, Bruckner, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich, or music I had been downgrading for not being robustly Romantic enough, e.g., Mozart. This also leads me further to question what I may have missed about the world of rock, jazz, and popular music. At the present time I have yet to find music that exceeds Mahler's in power and beauty, and there hardly seems any music since that matches it. From my experience the closest that comes to it in rock music, I believe, is work like Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer (emerging over time, as younger generations age, as the most acclaimed album of the rock era). I don't think it meets or exceeds Mahler, however, and my hope is that one day the younger music fans out there will see this, too (along with having a general education in philosophy / critical thinking).

3. Politics and the 2012 election

Unless either of the two major presidential candidates has the balls to address $46 trillion dollar fiscal elephant in the room that are the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, I may find it hard to get at all excited about this year's race. (We already know they won't touch things like long-term climate change and potential resource-depletion, issues a science-literate polity would be concerned about, with a ten-foot pole.) I've seen estimates go as high as $70 trillion.

[EDIT: Okay, so for those of you reading this in 3012, what does $46 trillion mean? Well, in 2012, the national debt is somewhere around $15 trillion, nearly the size of the U.S. economy (GDP). This figure is actually the "gross federal debt" figure which includes some $5 trillion or so which is owed by one part of government to another, namely, the money in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds." The $15 trillion figure is what gets cited a lot in the media. It is widely considered a staggering sum perhaps never to be paid back, though we have a number of commentators telling to take into account the load of debt relative to GDP and put this in historical context. Alright then: At the end of World War II, the USA had a national debt of around 125% of GDP. What that dollar figure was in 1946 I have an admittedly vague idea, but it is somewhere around $100 billion. $100 billion in today's dollars would be less than one percent of GDP. That was money all owed to "the public," being that Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare had yet to be formed. Further, the USA at the end of World War II was in such a position relative to the rest of the world that the 25-year postwar boom was pretty much inevitable, and since that time real median living standards have only crept up slowly and are now almost stagnating, with an increasingly uneducated and undercapitalized populace, particularly relative to world standards. On top of that, now consider this: the $46 trillion dollar figure is a present value figure, that is, the estimated obligations to come due to these "trust funds" in the future comes to around 3 times our present GDP. Present value means the time-discounted value of a sum divided into equal payments over a period of time. We actually have to discount by two factors: the time discount (the rate of interest) and the inflation discount. In the case of the United States government, the assumed time period involved approaches "the infinite horizon," and over that same period the present value of expected accumulated future GDP comes out to somewhere around $1 quadrillion dollars. In other words, as things are on there present course, we are basically on the hook for about 4.6% of our nation's entire productive future to cover coming Social Security and Medicare obligations. This is in comparison to the approximately 1.5% of our nation's entire productive future committed to paying off the national debt. In non-discounted terms, this comes out to the hundreds of trillions, or perhaps more, some decades down the line - an amount that seems staggering to us now the way that $100 billion doesn't seem like so much to us now, the way it did in 1946. Anyway, bottom line: if we're going to be crippled by debt nearly equaling our current GDP, then what about the looming obligations presently valued at around 3 times our current GDP? Think what might happen if 1946 USA were on the hook for obligations coming due totaling around $400 billion in then-present value with an annual GDP of $80 billion? And without the ignorant and decadent citizenry that is the norm today?]

Anyway, in a well-educated educated citizenry, this $46 trillion would not go almost entirely ignored while nearly everyone can tell you who Ryan Seacrest is (but few could tell you who Immanuel Kant is, much less who Rawls, Nozick, or Chomsky are). And were it to be addressed more than nominally, you'd have one side, driven along by the Occupy Wall Streeters, blaming capitalism (not enough taxes) and another side blaming government (too many promises in face of domestic and global economic reality). I can see where the capitalism-blamers are coming from, and still think they've got some head in sand about some economic fundamentals, stuff that the likes of Krugman, Mankiw, Cowan or Caplan wouldn't buy into. As for who is to blame, it really all comes down to how ignorant and decadent the American public have gotten over the years; the consequent vices comes out in both private and public sectors. As to whether the GOP has dodged its political bullet by nominating Romney (the only GOP candidate besides John Huntsman minimally qualified to mount a serious challenge to President Obama), that certainly remains to be seen. The crazy is strong in the party (the birfer stuff still won't go away, for one thing, and its approach to science is now certifiably pathological), and never forget 2008: a "reasonable" candidate was nominated, and we still got a flaky, fundamentalist ignoramus proposed - with an actual straight face, mind you - as ready to have control of the red button. Now that's crazy. In fact, seeing what the party base might still have up its sleeve in the train-wreck department may be the only motivation for watching the whole electoral charade.

4. Is it just me... or was the internet just a lot smarter back in the days of Usenet? Try as one might, I don't think one could find the true equivalent to alt.philosophy in today's internet. (Anyone who remembers those days and uses reddit much for discussion knows that reddit's format simply doesn't cut it compared the Usenet's newsgroups.) Which begs the question: What happened?!

To Be Reviewed...

The Leonard Peikoff lecture course, Understanding Objectivism, now in (much-less-expensive) book form. To the question, What do Ayn Rand and Objectivism have to offer to the world of philosophy?, this is perhaps the most invaluable resource out there. It needs to be critically examined as part of any serious scholarly treatment of (rather culturally influential) Randian/Objectivist ideas. Then we'll see in much clearer and more well-developed terms whether reading and studying Ayn Rand's work is really worth our precious philosophical time.

On a related note, perusing the Ayn Rand Lexicon, I see how her handling of Kant is not a good sign when it comes to assessing Rand's strength or maturity as a thinker. It is very amateurish, and not the least bit scholarly. Wouldn't a thinker such as Aristotle have done much better at interpreting a thinker like Kant? Why couldn't she be more like Aristotle, of whom she spoke so reverently (but probably understood just as amateurishly)? Or like Korsgaard, who has studied Kant indepeth and comes to much different conclusions about him?

On a further related note, why is the "scholarship" about Ayn Rand on so many left-progressive news-and-opinion sites so damn lousy? Who the F cares about a serial killer aspects of whom a very un-mature Rand spoke of in positive terms in her un-published journals - as it relates to her considered, mature, published thought? Or that she accepted social security and medicare benefits in light of her published (a) objections to such programs and (b) explanation for accepting government benefits? Selective out-of-context cherrypicking while ignoring or failing to seek out contrary evidence is not serious scholarship. These hit-pieces are by so-called journalists and not philosophy professors, yes, but does it really have to be that bad, that intellectually lazy, that anti-serious about ideas? (This means Rand is still on the hook for how she approached Kant.)

On a yet further related note, why would a "leading academic philosophy blog" give such crap any airtime whatsoever, even so much as airing the view that Ayn Rand's philosophy is inspired by a psychopath (with the implication that characters like Howard Roark are inspired by psychopaths)? (Sure enough, her reasoning about who should and who shouldn't accept government benefits is bizarre on the face of it and it's quite doubtful it could be supported by sound argument, but this was brought up on the "leading academic philosophy blog" in the first place because of her having accepted government support, and not because of her (published) reasoning behind it, of which the Leading Academic Philosophy Blogger, when calling her a "welfare queen," was nevertheless totally unaware. Hopefully these sorts of cheap, unfair hyper-partisan tactics aren't widespread in academic philosophy or the academy generally. We won't really know if Rand/Objectivism is worth studying until we apply fair, rigorous, disciplined, and scholarly standards (be they from inside or outside the academy) to her writings in the first place [see, e.g., here - a work which, by the way, is about Rand's eudaemonistic egoism - not about her comments on Immanuel Kant, or on a serial killer she never came anywhere near to writing about publicly, or about why only people who agree with her politics should accept government benefits - and which, by the way, comes out as very positive in favor of her ethical system; it looks like the ball is now in her critics' court should they choose to take up the task, unless they're content to leave it all up to Dr. Cullyer]. As to the Rand-admired-psychopaths stuff, it doesn't even merit comment, that's how ridiculous, malicious, context-flouting and manifestly unjust it is.)

On an even further related note, I'll also want to review Greg Swann's Man Alive!.