The sheer volume of information (far beyond the sliver you are imploring others to investigate) that exists is more than sufficient to overwhelm the crow. Teleology plays a significant role in what one allocates such a precious resource upon.
I'm also aware of the worldwide impact Christianity and Islam have had.
dream_weaver got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in The Statue of Liberty Shrugged? June 11, 2021
Here's a thread I posted different sources I found on the QAnon whilst it ran its course (been pretty quiet now, 'cept for those still nursing a few disparate memories.)
The Bobulinski angle on Binden
Incidentally, @Eiuol, I thought your initial response in this thread contained a reference to QAnon in it, but I see it was edited later.
You were courteous enough to reintroduce the innuendo to no avail thus far, as to elicit an emotive response on @Devil's Advocate's part.
After this story I ran across this reference to Ron Watkins, QAnon as a regular headline in mainstream media coverage seemed to have dissipated.
Nope. Just waiting to confirm or deny your status as a closet Q-drop addict.
dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in The Statue of Liberty Shrugged? June 9, 2021
In July 1986, I was with my first life-partner Jerry (d. 1990) sitting in the bleachers that had been set up in Manhattan along the Hudson. We were watching the Tall Ships sailing by. In the evening, the President would throw a switch, sending a laser beam across the river to activate the illumination of Liberty, which was reopening after a long refurbishment. The night sky would be filling with glorious fireworks on and on as if an umbrella over Manhattan.
That afternoon was sunny, as the ships sailed by. There were smiles and friendliness all around. Behind us a woman wore a classy T-shirt with a stylized line drawing of the Statue of Liberty, with only the word Forever. A day or two before, the US Supreme Court had handed down their decision affirming the constitutionality of States criminalizing same-sex sex acts. Oklahoma, for example. That was one of the reasons we had moved from our native Oklahoma to Illinois (where Jerry became an attorney), where we were legal. That sunny day with the ships was so sad to me.
The photo below is from 2002 (photo by native New Yorker, my husband Walter). In another year, the Supreme Court would reverse, and thereby make same-sex love-making legal throughout the land. I always remember that I learned of the 2003 decision while I was at Logan in Boston, learned from a newspaper headline. And I always remember my first thought was of Jerry and me that day with the Tall Ships.
Tomorrow belonged to me, these todays, each a "smiling day to be free to kiss in the sunlight and say to the sky 'behold and believe what you see, behold how my lover loves me.'"
dream_weaver got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in The Statue of Liberty Shrugged? June 7, 2021
The blindfold was a 16th century addition to the Greek's Themis. The Roman's Libertas is metaphorically her sister in spirit.
dream_weaver got a reaction from Devil's Advocate in The Statue of Liberty Shrugged? June 6, 2021
That she shouldn't have blindfolded her sister?
dream_weaver reacted to merjet in Do animals have volition II? June 6, 2021
Instinct And Learning
dream_weaver got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in Space Tug May 31, 2021
Space Debris Has Hit And Damaged The International Space Station
As the size increases, the quantity probably decreases in general, until getting to tracked size of 23,000 softball sized or larger.
Roughly 2.22 x 1010 sq. kilometers of area, excluding a "thickness", at just under geosynchronous orbit (radius of 42,000 km.)
dream_weaver got a reaction from StrictlyLogical in Do animals have volition II? May 31, 2021
This could bring new meaning to kangaroo court.
dream_weaver got a reaction from Boydstun in Aristotle's Wheel "Paradox" May 30, 2021
Here is a diagram inverting the illustration to begin with the points on the "wheel" pointing downward. The "spoke" is provided at 10° intervals, which were then used to create the cyan and magenta splines emulating the path of the points as the "wheel" rolled horizontally.
dream_weaver reacted to StrictlyLogical in Aristotle's Wheel "Paradox" May 29, 2021
"Fictional problem", in the sense that a "paradox" must involve some disconnect with reality. Reality has no problems, the problems are thus fictional.
No hypothetical shape, event, situation, process, system, etc. which is obvious and behaves exactly as "expected" or "intuited" was ever called a "paradox". Neither was anything which was judged too new or too complex to understand. Differential geometry is not a paradox to a musician, it's just something he/she does not have training in and does not understand, but he has no reason to suspect "paradox". A paradox requires an experience that something is amiss... but there are no contradictions in reality (no matter how many opposing forces, collisions or disagreements) there is only existence and existence is identity.
So the "problem" is fictional, in the same way an illusion introduces a fiction... reality is what it is, but something about what we see, and should understand, is off kilter, and we know it. At least for those who experience the particular paradox... the feeling of paradox requires a certain thinking process to get a person in the wrong place to sense that disconnect, and in truth, different people are often led in different directions...
I think in a sense the more something appears or seems opposite of what one assumes it obviously should appear or seem like, the more paradoxical it is. Since reality is NOT at fault, our sense and assumptions of what things obviously should appear or seem like, IS.
Fictional problem? Even Zeno's paradoxes were not fictional in the context of what was known at the time.
Maybe my attempts of understanding how involute curves of two meshing gears interact with one another contributed to my rather quick dismissal of the dilemma from the OP. Or the cut of a thread expressed in terms of 1000's of degrees, where 360° is one full revolution of the workpiece on a lathe as the cutter moves in a linear progression relative to the speed of the rotation for analyzing the production of a helix of a thread.
dream_weaver got a reaction from StrictlyLogical in Aristotle's Wheel "Paradox" May 28, 2021
The difference is in the attempt to apply a linear dimension to both circumferences and equate them with the distance traveled. Only the outer diameter rotates where the relationship between the angular progression and the circumferential engagement are 1:1. The inner diameter goes along at 1:1 with regard to the angular progression.
There may be some quibble with the terminology, but it appears that a paradox is contrived by trying to combine unlike terms.
dream_weaver reacted to 2046 in Do animals have volition II? May 17, 2021
I think that's basically the whole thread. People often subconsciously think a thing having an identity is just mechanical causality. So they think you have things acting according to their identities, but you also have free will, so how to make that work. But they're making something that is all bottom-up causality, like an artifact in the Aristotelian sense.
So they hear this Objectivist line about a new type of causality. Well there must be a new type of casualty, meaning a new mechanism. So they spend 6 pages looking around for a new mechanism, or seeing how they can change the wording just right. They don't ever get to just agent-cause vs event-cause.
This example was reminiscent of this quip by Albert Einstein, without the hearing of the ticking, or the hope of ever understanding exactly how it works:
In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way to open the case.
dream_weaver got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in Derek Chauvin Trial May 10, 2021
I, too, am disappointed in the guilty verdict. Providing the epistemic justification requires being able identify and guide others through judicial landscape presented.
Thanks for providing the summation. It was nice having it in one place, unfolding as you presented it.
dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Do animals have volition II? May 9, 2021
Ascent to Volitional Consciousness - John Enright (1990)
dream_weaver reacted to Easy Truth in Why do some people fail to see Objective Morality? April 30, 2021
The public relations issue with Ayn Rand will ultimately be handled when they meet us, when they meet a person that has ideas the enhance their lives, that protect them against some of the nonsense they are trapped in. They change their view.
When you unshackle people from ideas that won't let them thrive, they are willing to dump their negative view. They are grateful. But it has to come from a partner or friend, not an adversary.
dream_weaver got a reaction from Easy Truth in Why do some people fail to see Objective Morality? April 25, 2021
"Good" is not perceptually given, it has to be conceptually grasped. The question might be used as in invitation to explore what objective means as posited in that context.
dream_weaver reacted to MisterSwig in Derek Chauvin Trial April 24, 2021
This trial was televised. I watched every second of it. I have a better claim than the jury. One, the jury had to remember testimony, they weren't given transcripts, whereas I could watch the testimony repeatedly on YouTube and also pause it to facilitate copious note taking. And two, statistically I'm probably more intelligent than most of those jurors, though I don't put much weight in statistics, so mostly my objective advantage comes from point one.
dream_weaver got a reaction from MisterSwig in Derek Chauvin Trial April 21, 2021
dream_weaver reacted to Boydstun in Atlas Shrugged April 10, 2021
No. Or anyway those would be secondary parallel patterns.
I am not referring to any analogical relation to 'Primacy of Existence to Consciousness.' Simply to Rand's thesis in Atlas: "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept 'Value' possible" (1013). This is introduced before Rand's layout in the Speech of her axiomatics of Existence/Consciousness and Identity/Identification, and it is fully understandable in its context without having yet been introduced to her most fundamental metaphysical scheme.
Her use of "concept" in the sentence quoted in the preceding paragraph here, I should add, as one can see from its context in the Speech, is not meant to direct one's consideration to those concepts as concepts, but to the referents of the concepts Life and Value in existential, concrete reality. The profound exclusive residence of value in life, fundamentally physical life, is reflected in the profound dependence of the concept Value on the concept Life.
Just before the opening of the Speech, where Rand will lead with characterization of living existence and the necessity of human mind for human living existence, she has the action scene in which Hank Rearden carries in his arms the dying government man, the young man Tony. There is enacted the absoluteness of life and death and the need for right thinking for life.
For the New Intellectual
Three years after Atlas Shrugged was published, Rand penned the essay "For the New Intellectual." It is interesting to compare and contrast the analysis of philosophical and psychological archetypes in Galt's Speech—Mystics of Muscle/Mystics of Spirit—with the types Attilas/Witchdoctors in FNI. In the present note I'll not take that on, and I'll not take on their relation to the broad philosophical types Peikoff frames in his book DIM. Certainly, in FNI and in Atlas, Rand was affirming, against many philosophies, the equal reality and virtuous unity of mind and body.
There is much that is interesting and much that is suspect in Rand's FNI story of the history of philosophy and in her account of how philosophic ideas move the world. That's something else I can't address just now.
I want to suggest in this note only that in FNI, Rand articulates one profound way in which her philosophy is a corrective to philosophies boosting Attila/Witchdoctor tendencies and in which her philosophy is a profound intellectual defense of humans as rational workers, producers, and traders. There is a cohort of that way, a second profound way of Rand contra Plato and Aristotle and contra much other philosophical thought to our own time, a second line in thorough defense of rational worker, producer, and trader. I want to notice that second way.
Rand's first way is the Primacy of Existence.* By that phrase, she meant (i) the universe exists independently of any consciousness and (ii) things have natures independently of consciousness. Along with that idea is her Existence is Identity. This restriction contracts the Existence she would have as primary, contracts from traditional Being, where the latter comes in two forms qualified and unqualified. There is no such thing as the unqualified existent in Rand's view of widest reality. So an older philosophy committed to primacy of being over mind (say, over over human mind anyway) could be very far from Rand's picture of the primacy of existence over (any and all) consciousness.
The second way, of which, in my view, Rand does not make enough hay in her critique of the course of philosophy from the Greeks to today is her: Primacy of Physical Life over Value. (Bertrand Russell noted somewhere I cannot recall that philosophies can be divided between those giving primacy to value over existence—Plato and Kant for sure—and philosophies to the contrary, such as his own.) Rand realized explicitly that her positive proposal for the basis of value and her scheme of morality drafted upon that basis was ready for adoption by anyone coming to realize the primacy of existence with respect consciousness, including valuation-consciousness, human or divine. But when looking at classical philosophies in contrast to hers, I think there is rich work not yet done: explicitly laying out their contrast with her primacy of physical life over value.