tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19132360633672822752024-03-15T03:36:08.062+10:30John J McVeyJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.comBlogger148125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-60162822761391710602012-12-28T20:23:00.002+10:302012-12-28T20:23:37.292+10:30OTI post #10Contiuing my interposed introduction of <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com.au/search/label/OTI%20work">my OTI work</a>, which began with <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/oti-post-8.html">a new section 1.2</a> and <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/oti-post-9.html">the first part of section 1.3</a>, here is the the second major subsection within 1.3 of the Introduction.<br />
This part is a bit more... choppy... in that it does not follow OPAR's nice linear structure but goes left-right-left-right stepping fashion, spiralling back here and there as required. This is all to the good - I see for myself why this is required, and besides this is what Dr Peikoff prescribed in lecture 2 in his discussion of the contrast between an OTI hierarchy and and OPAR hierarchy (about half-way through, just before and continued after the technical difficulties he had to recover from in the middle of the lecture).<br />
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Remember also that this much is a once-over to get an overview that can be used to guide a more in-depth examination and induction. It is not intended to provide all the real chewing that is required. Again, this is for the OTI-vs-OPAR hierarchy.<br />
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<b>The three statements further considered</b><br /><i>The statements as validated by reference to perception</i><br />How does one know that the three statements established so far are true? As noted, all I have done is put into adult words what is implicit in the sensory-perceptual data gathered up by a baby from the moment it is born. This implicit recognition is then automatised within a few months to the point of being a visceral form of knowledge that one never ever remembers generating yet which is counted on by all actions thereafter (that fact is why people can and often contradict the three so badly later in life while being oblivious to the fact of contradicting themselves in the process). So I can raise and answer these important questions:<br /><br />How can one know existence exists? One perceives it.<br /><br />How can one know that consciousness exists? One can observe it in the act of becoming aware of existence.<br /><br />How can one know that A is A? In perceiving the existents A B and C, one perceives A as distinct from B and C, and likewise for B and C in their turn.<br /><br />In all cases there is no evidence but that of sensory perception. To understand what the three statements say is by that fact already to possess all the evidence needed to see that they are true. <i>They are their own evidence</i>, that is, <i>they are self-evident</i>. All statements of what is directly given in perception is to state the self-evident, in that you look and behold there is the evidence, with nothing else possible to back that up except that is ultimately drawn from more perception. As Dr Peikoff put it, the three statements are expressions of elementary perceptual-level facts in universal form.<br /><br />But given the controversy about illusions and dreams and hallucinations ad nauseam, how can one know that perception is valid?<br /><br /><i>A first look at the validity of perception</i><br />There are a few things I can state at this stage. First, note that I am not talking about incorrect <i>judgements</i> that can be made <i>about </i>the objects of perception at any time. What is at issue for the moment is only <i>that</i> one has sensory-data: what one may make of its particular contents is a separate issue to be considered later. That includes dealing with dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and so on, though I do make brief mention here below.<br /><br />The second is that the three concepts at the heart of the statements are implicit in the possession of sensory data as such, independent of details therein. There is nothing to perceive but something that exists, with the question of <i>what </i>is being perceived being part of that aforementioned separate issue. <i>No sensory data can, or ever will, do anything contrary to underscoring the fact that something exists and to provision of evidence of the identity of that which exists.</i> Existence exists, things are what they are, one perceives these facts to be so, and so by implication perception <i>has </i>to be valid if by valid means giving evidence of reality.<br /><br />The third is the fact that <i>one perceives existence by means of perception</i> is how one identifies that there is any such thing as <i>consciousness </i>at all. Observe from the development of children that awareness of the faculty of consciousness as such does not arise fully developed, but is instead formed by integrating all the particular acts of consciousness into a full recognition of a faculty of awareness, beginning by direct perception of existence. If that which one perceives does not exist then one does not perceive. That is,<i> if perception is invalid then one is not and cannot be conscious</i>, which cannot be the case because existence exists and one can <i>know</i> that it exists.<br /><br />Observe further that the question of philosophy-level problems with perception does not arise until many years into life, and when the first indications of problems of any kind are discovered they are not automatically cause for philosophic concern. For instance, observe that when illusion is first discovered by children it is <i>something to have fun with</i>, not something that generates intellectual trauma either for those kids or their non-philosophic elders. Observe that kids who are hearing-impaired or colour-blind or have to wear some pretty freaky glasses etc are still capable of learning the same things as the rest of us, and are expected to do so without non-philosophic folk thinking for a second that these different kids are permitted to give different answers to test questions on account of their perceptual difficulties. All of these issues are secondary and relate in some manner either to mechanics of sensory-perception or errors in judgement about sensory-perception and about allied phenomena. Observe the fact that we can recognise all these for what they are depends on the fact that <i>one is capable of perceiving reality</i>, <i>able to identify these issues,</i> and increasingly be in a position to do something about these mere technical difficulties so as to make life easier.<br /><br />It is <i>philosophically-inclined adults</i> (and the occasional youth led astray, usually maliciously) who have <i>intellectual </i>difficulties regarding perception, which again locates the bulk of the problem in judgement rather than sensory-perception. This is why I noted earlier on that the issue can be slashed down to one of these adults misusing their philosophic knowledge to make mountains out of molehills and relying on the insecurities of credulous audiences, with the question of whether the problems are even merely molehills <i>in philosophy</i> being still up for debate.<br /><br />The validity of perception begins with it being part of the axiom of consciousness: one cannot be conscious unless one can in some form perceive something that exists, for a consciousness that cannot be conscious of what exists is not conscious at all. To accept the existence of consciousness is to accept the validity of the means by which one is conscious. To deny the validity of perception in principle - ie separate from technical issues of mechanics and problems of inferring correct judgements from observational data - is to deny that existence exists, that consciousness can in fact be conscious, and that things are of definite natures. To accept the three axioms as true is therefore to require that one also accept that perception be valid, and vice-versa.<br /><br />There is much more to be said about perception that this, but that much indicates that perception is fundamentally valid and is necessary before any further investigation into the matter can be made. I further observe that the phenomena of illusions, errors, and other difficulty had relating to perception lie somewhere else in the cognitive chain, not at the level of sensory-perception. That is, the difficulty must lie in quantities of sensory data available or our judgement of that sensory data, rather than the data themselves. That gives me enough to dismiss with contempt those who - despite having the above pointed out to them - would still insist on making mountains, and so I move on in spite of them.<br /><br /><i>The statements as axioms</i><br />I can note a key consequence about the statements’ bases and origins. What I can say about them so far is this: <i>all</i> thoughts and actions presuppose those three statements. But this makes it impossible to prove the statements - all one can do is validate them by reference to perception, as above. There is a name for this phenomenon: <i>axiom</i>. The three concepts are <i>axiomatic concepts</i>, and the three statements that have them as their cores are <i>axioms</i>.<br /><br />The axioms cannot be proven, but, as Dr Peikoff noted, they all have a “built-in defence mechanism” against those who complain about that lack of proof: <i>the same presupposition that militates against proof also militates against denial</i>. So, sure, assertion is self-confirming, but <i>denial is self-contradictory.</i> Go ahead yourself, try to deny any one of them or the validity of perception without relying on what you’re denying in making that denial - <i>it can't be done without self-contradiction</i>. You cannot deny that existence exists or any other axiomatic principle without thereby declaring yourself to be a vegetable.<br /><br />The fact that the three axioms are inescapable as well as being validated by perception indicates that the validity of perception is itself is itself thoroughly axiomatic in nature, and is also presupposed by any and all utterances. All together, the three axioms are confirmed not simply by perception but also by the fact that both assertion and denial of the three concepts - including the perception underlying them - are reinforcement of those concepts and the perception by means of which on directly obtains the evidence for them. Reiterating and expanding a previous comment, to accept the axioms as true is to accept the validity of perception, and vice-versa. They go together as a unit.<br /><br />What I can also do now is expand the list of questions and answers I gave before:<br /><br />Why is sensory-perception valid? Consciousness is conscious of existence, beginning by perception: <i>denial is affirmation</i>.<br /><br />Why are the three axioms inescapable? They are implicit in all that one thinks and does: denial is <i>affirmation</i>.<br /><br />So this backs up both the axioms and the means of validating the axioms (ie sensory-perception and the basics of inference from them). In the future I must and do look at this at length, but once again, what I have so far enables me to take more steps forward.<br /><i><br />A first look at Primacy</i><br />Is there a proper order for stating the three axioms? The greater detail I will leave for later, but I can give it a first consideration.<br /><br />There has long been an argument between those who advocate what is called the <i>Primacy of Existence</i> and what is called the <i>Primacy of Consciousness</i>. The Primacy of Existence states that existence sets the terms for all else and that consciousness exists within it as a means to <i>becoming aware of</i> that existence, while the Primacy of Consciousness states that Consciousness sets the term and is a means of <i>creating</i> all that exists. The proper order of the three statements itself reflects which of these two is correct, and so reflects how one views - and thence interacts with - the whole of reality.<br /><br />What I leave out for now is discussion of the position of identity. The question at hand is: which of existence and consciousness is subordinate to which? The simple fact is that all the available perceptual evidence points to the Primacy of Existence, as does the intellectual identification that follows on from that evidence.<br /><br />Of the physical evidence, the existence of something other than one's own consciousness is evident from the very first wakeful moment, but the existence of one's consciousness cannot be identified until one has first seen it in action, which it can only do by first having multiple examples of being conscious of something that exists and then identifying oneself as conscious in each case. Contemplate oneself further physically, about one's means of awareness. Their existence - ie that one has the sense organs and so on - is only identifiable through their use upon existents other than oneself. Look at other people and see the same in them, and look in the mirror to see that there are no grounds for according oneself a special place as the conscious centre of the universe - for that matter, compare oneself and other men together en masse against other creatures, such as cats and dogs and birds etc, and see that nor are there any grounds for according mankind as a whole a special place as the conscious centre of the universe. Contemplate back in time, too, to recognise one's own childhood and development from it, to remember that exploration of oneself in that fashion for the very first time - to marvel at one's own hands and eyes etc and then discover how do to freaky things with them (gently poke your eye on the side right next to its skull cavity!) - took place on the backdrop of taking existence for granted and then recognising oneself by means of recognising all the ways in which one can interact with reality.<br /><br />And what of consciousness as such? Can <i>any </i>consciousness be accorded that kind of special place? <i>No</i>. Remember how one identifies the fact that there is any such thing as consciousness at all: by observing it in the act of perceiving something that exists. While the idea that existence can exist without consciousness being aware of it is easy to comprehend and requires no contradictions, the idea of a consciousness existing with nothing to be conscious of is absurd. Consciousness can only be conscious if it is conscious <i>of</i> something. Nor can consciousness be conscious of only itself (eg as Aristotle claimed for his Unmoved Mover), for then it would be a blank staring at a blank, returning as its report not a recognition of self but only more blankness - that is, <i>a consciousness turned on in itself with no other content whatever would not and could not be conscious at all</i>. A consciousness starting only at itself with zero content from outside itself would be akin to a video camera pointed at a monitor that displays strictly only what the camera is pointed at, all in a room that is in pitch-black darkness and at absolute zero Kelvin. Only upon influence from outside can there be any content to relieve the unrelenting blankness on the monitor. So it is with consciousness observing itself.<br /><br />If the Law of Identity is an aspect of how existence exists, the fact that A is <i>A</i> rather than B is a fact that consciousness must accept as a given, irrespective of however much a consciousness would want A to be B instead. Facts are facts. It is the place of consciousness only to identify those facts, not create those facts (the ability to engage in creativity is not a creation of existence out of nothing, but an act of rearrangement of the pre-existing elements of existence to generate new forms, all of which presupposes the primacy of existence and the fact that consciousness exists within a body that is wholly a part of a much wider existence).<br /><br />Existence exists, and within it, consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. The task of consciousness is to look <i>at </i>existence, identify things <i>about </i>existence and then on that basis determine what to do <i>in </i>existence. Existence has primacy over consciousness, and consciousness has to accept that fact if it is to be successful in its role.<br /><br /><i>The mortal blow to the other two candidates</i><br />There are upshots of the Primacy of Existence for the other two candidates for starting points. Observe that both of those other two - the act of articulating innate ideas that are felt to be so, and the act of beginning from arbitrarily-chosen foundational propositions and deducing from them - are different forms of taking the content of consciousness as primaries. That is, the other two candidates are variants of a Primacy of Consciousness view. Remember that those other two candidates also presupposed the three axioms, which will include the relationships that exist between those statements. The other candidates may not contradict the fact that existence exists and that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists, but the inexorable result from examining the three axioms is identification of the Primacy of Existence.<br /><br />This initial discussion of that Primacy deals a mortal blow to both those other two candidates, but be aware that the rejection of those candidacies still has a measure of threadbareness about it: though one can rule out the other two candidates as <i>starting points</i> for philosophy, <i>the phenomena behind them are yet to be explained</i>. I said I wanted an account that reconciled the three, and at this stage I cannot give that account other than to say that it may only be found by inference from observation.<br /><br />Moreover, critical questions about the inference-from-observation approach are yet to be answered, and more knowledgeable persons will recognise that I have not done anything to separate what I think from raw empiricism. As noted a number of times now, questions remain about the various mechanics of the proper use of the inference-from-observation approach. Yes, the blow to the other two non-empirical candidates is now irrecoverably mortal, but they are yet actually to die, and in the process they may yet deliver blows to the candidacy of inference from observation that could embolden the sceptics who developed from die-hard empiricism. Nevertheless, the truth of what has been established about that approach so far, and now its sole-survivorship from the battle of the candidates, together indicate that the work I am yet to do <i>can </i>be done.<br /><br /><i>Identity further considered</i><br />Miss Rand noted that there was a strong connection between existence and identity. They are inseparable, intimately bound up with each other. Identity a restatement of existence, viewed from a different perspective. To <i>be </i>something (pointing out existence) is to be <i>something </i>(pointing out identity). There can be no existence without identity, and vice-versa. In Miss Rand's own words, then, <i>existence is identity</i>.<br /><br />Given the above regarding the primacy of existence, what does this new linking say about consciousness? To say that existence is identity is to say that <i>A is</i> and that <i>it is A</i> - but how does one come to know what A actually is <i>in detail</i>? That is what consciousness has to find out - it has to discover the identities of all the A's it comes across. That is, in Miss Rand's words, <i>consciousness is identification</i>. The first thing it has to identify is that there is an A, and then proceed to identify more about the identity of A.<br /><br /><i>Non-Contradiction further considered</i><br />With the above in place, at this point I need to - and now can - give answer to a question that was asked at the outset of this presentation. Where does the Law of Non-Contradiction come from?<br /><br />Previously, positing the existence of contradictions was only brushed off as silly, noting that positing them reduced the positor to the status of a vegetable whose utterances have the same intellectual content as the rustle of cabbage leaves. That does not deter some of the more adamant proponents of a Primacy of Consciousness viewpoint, particularly but not exclusively of the revelatory mystic persuasion. Some try on the argument that perception is illusory and does not give us true reality, such as one finds with Heraclitus, Plato, and Augustine, while others dispense with the façade and dish out contradictions with gusto, such as one finds with Tertullian, Marx, and Kierkegaard.<br /><br />A more considered rejection of contradictions can now be made. Why can’t there be contradictions? <i>Because of the Law of Identity</i>, a development from the fact that <i>existence exists</i>. What is, <i>is</i>, and that which is is what it is. That is, <i>A is</i>, and A <i>is A</i>. The Law of Identity - A is A - is intended to indicate <i>what is</i>. If it is, it IS. The Law of Non-Contradiction is a restatement of that law with intent to indicate <i>what is not</i>. If it is not, then it IS NOT. All I am doing is shifting focus from affirming the positive to repudiating the negative. Whereas the Law of Identity says <i>A is A</i>, the Law of Non-Contradiction states that <i>A is not non-A</i>.<br /><br />The Law of Non-Contradiction is a guide for action by consciousness. Its foundation is in existence. There are many ways in which one may accidentally arrive at a contradiction without wanting to, and so the guide must be as complex as the ways of going wrong require that guide to be. The guide, therefore, must be consonant with the needs of the consciousness requiring a guide, and must also be tied back to existence because the point of consciousness is to gain content that corresponds to existence in some fashion. Just remember these two points - <i>a complex guide fit for consciousness</i>, and <i>a guide tied to laws of existence</i> - as I will come back to this much later when I examine logic.<br /><br /><i>The order of the axioms further considered</i><br />Objectivism points out that there is a difference between chronological development and the order of philosophic exposition. But this doesn’t mean there is a dichotomy between the two. Rather, it means only that one has to recognise the distinction between them and know how to reconcile them when they depart. An actual contradiction between the two is not permissible. What reality allows is only that the chronology in some areas is at least partly optional, and so one may choose which part of that chronology to focus on first by means of which physically-optional element is more appropriate to focus on before which. When there reality admits of an option in presentation of its contents, there is no contradiction either way any more than there is contradiction in studying say engineering before economics or economics before engineering.<br /><br />I noted earlier that existence had primacy over consciousness, and hence that the axiom of existence must and did come first. Existence is both chronologically and logically the start, there is no departure here. What is unresolved is the proper order of presenting the axioms of consciousness and identity. So, while the chronological identification of existence as first and the philosophic exposition of existence as prior to consciousness are the same, the question of sameness versus departure for consciousness and identity has not been settled.<br /><br />The answer is that chronological and philosophic order of consciousness and identity are indeed different. Chronologically the acceptance of identity - ie acceptance of that existents are of definite natures - will come before acceptance of consciousness, but I put the axiom of consciousness second, ahead of identity. Why?<br /><br />Observe that the evidence one needs for both consciousness and identity are available at the same time and arising from the same act. Consciousness begins with the first exposure to the facts and details of existence, which is done by means of observing the similarities and differences that constitute the directly perceivable elements of the identity of existents. That means that reality itself makes it permissible to point out consciousness before identity <i>if</i> one finds good reason to do so. The question then is, what reason do I in fact have for the way I choose (or more specifically, the way that Objectivism indicates is proper but which way I agree with from my own conclusions on the matter)?<br /><br />Recall that the nature of identity is that of an aspect of existence: existence is identity, to <i>be</i> something is to be <i>something</i>. So, in stating identity one is restating existence from a different but equally valid perspective: without identity, one could not recognise existence. Consciousness, by contrast, is not something one discovers solely by delving into the intricacies of existence. It is something that stands alone from such discoveries, needing only existence as something to be conscious of, with all else that one could be conscious of being but an aspect of that act. Therefore, though all three statements are primaries, consciousness is even more primary than identity and so must take second place ahead of identity in a philosophic exposition.<br /><br />A lesser reason is to get recognition of consciousness in as early as permissible as means to warding off those who persist in denying the fact of consciousness altogether. To put consciousness after identity would allow for placement of recognition of consciousness even further down order of philosophic development, arising from following a chronology wherein consciousness is not mentioned until a great number of subsidiary details of identity learned in infancy are given express statement first. That is a step on the road leading to the derogation and ultimately denial of consciousness, in the same manner as how some engineers contemplating politics misuse their knowledge to envisage a means by which liberty-oriented economics and economic systems can be supplanted by technocracy. Naturally, most people won’t follow that road, just as most engineers don't advocate technocracy, but why take the first step down it at all if one is not required to? This is therefore merely a pedagogic and polemic reason, yet still valid.<br /><br />It is best, then, to state existence first, consciousness second, and then identity third. The main reason is recognition of the Law of Identity being the first facet that consciousness discovers about existence after discovering existence per se.<br />
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<br />John McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-86001681728168579742012-12-23T16:22:00.000+10:302012-12-23T16:22:13.482+10:30OTI post #9Continuing my interposed beginnings, here is another installment. It is not all of what I have numbered as 1.3, because that section is large and admits of being broken up into separate subsections (as in fact it is).<br />
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This extract only grounds the practice of starting in philosophy as babies, by looking at the world, even though we are now many years into life. After that I then begin looking at the three axioms in a bit more detail, give a quick indication of the validity of perception in defending their self-evidency, and so on.<br />
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By the way, the two lecture series on The History of Western Philosophy have turned out to be far more useful than I had imagined they would be. I owe quite a lot of my growing understanding to learning from them, especially the part one on the the founders from Thales to Hume. In particular, they ram home how <i>vital</i> the question of Universals is and why getting Objectivist Epistemology into the universities is a necessity if there is to be a future for civilisation. The discussions of Objectivism given at the ends were also valuable, and have heavily influenced what I have written (in some places, I figured out things for myself, then listened to the lectures, and discovered to my delight that I was not in danger of contradicting Objectivism). Together, they also give a far greater context to how and why Dr Peikoff wrote what he did and how he did in OPAR. I strongly recommend you buy the MP3s: <a href="https://estore.aynrand.org/p/95/founders-of-western-philosophy-thales-to-hume-mp3-download">link to part one</a>, <a href="https://estore.aynrand.org/p/96/modern-philosophy-kant-to-the-present-mp3-download">link to part two</a>.<br />
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<b>1.3 Once-over A: Metaphysics</b><br />
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I now have three concepts and statements built on them that, although I obtained the idea of where to look from Objectivism, I have satisfied myself as being good candidates for starting points. This candidacy initially arose by asking over and over what any idea or concept presupposed for its validity, and finding that (or rather, agreeing with Objectivism that) the three statements - and more specifically, their key concepts of existence, consciousness, identity - were presupposed by everything and which did not themselves presuppose other ideas or concepts for their own truth and validity. That principle, too, is part of Objectivism: that is an instance of what is called "Rand's Razor".<br /><br />That work, however, was predicated on dealing with the bewildering enormity and complexity of content already present in the consciousness of an adult. What I did was only a series of acts that were the first taking of control over a moving vehicle that was in danger of skidding irretrievably into the ditch or being driven blindly into districts unknown but for reputations of unwholesomeness. Instead, I have shown how to bring the vehicle to a standstill with its motor still running. The driver lives, and is in a position to start over. What hasn't been done is show how to drive the vehicle properly, which has to begin with the fundamentals. What are those fundamentals?<br /><br /><b>Proper beginnings</b><br />Now that it is possible to be intellectually much calmer and more confident, I can see that the three statements are indeed the most consistent with the inference-from-observation approach. I can see that the three statements, particularly the three critical concepts in them, are implicit in what is evident to an infant. Within seconds of his first moment of wakefulness he can and does form an implicit concept that can be summed up in a single word that he will learn in a few years' time: "IS!" Within a few weeks or months after birth, after making many more observations of the strange and exciting world he finds himself in, he then can and does go on to form two more implicit concepts that can be summed up in two more single words: "AM!" and "THAT!" And while the infant will not learn these words for a few years yet, what they denote has been available to his observation from the get-go or quickly thereafter, and on that basis will become incorporated implicitly in all else he does and thinks thereafter.<br /><br />What this means therefore is that the proper place to start philosophy is with those facts implied by all possible observations, starting right from the very first moments of wakefulness even in newborn infancy. As an adult, I am not starting with concepts as such but instead am only using my adult knowledge of how to speak to state in conceptual form that which is evident to newborns on up. Instead of a top-down approach that came from philosophising in-media-res, I know where to start with a bottom-up approach. The proper start of philosophy is to articulate that which is evident from the start of wakeful life.<br /><br />What is existence? It is <i>all that</i> (waving my arms about). What is consciousness? It is the faculty of becoming aware of <i>all that</i> and bits thereof. And what is identity? It is that to <i>be </i>something is to be <i>something</i>. All else that one may come to know is in some way an <i>instance </i>of one or more of these (in fact, it is from integrating these instances that one comes to recognise explicitly the concepts used by the three statements). All else is exemplar of that there is something of which I am aware. No feeling, judgement or other content of conscious may contradict these three or any of its rightful instances.<br /><br />What is, is, it is what it is, and I know both of these facts. How does one come to know about what is? The correctness of what I have discovered so far suggests following Objectivism further as pointers to finding more answers. But I am not simply going to present it in linear fashion as found in OPAR and other Objectivist works. Rather, I will follow the path of what necessitates what (because metaphysics and epistemology are simultaneous) and also going back to add to what I have said previously by means of what new material I can support (which Objectivism calls the spiral-theory of knowledge). Only when I have that done may and will I do a linear exposition of my induction of Objectivism for myself following the structure in OPAR.<br /><br /><i>A first attack on the other two candidates</i><br />The inference-from-observation approach to starting points makes the most sense to me, both intellectually and from the fact that I must and do take the truth of those three statements for granted in all that I think and do. Further, it is also the most consistent with what all other men not obviously insane must and do take for granted in all the minutiae of daily life. Certainly, there are still technical issues with sensory-perception to be dealt with, but attacks on perception even at this early stage seem to be the making of mountains out of molehills - and the status of being mere molehills is itself still questionable at that.<br /><br />And, yes, there are also questions relating to connecting perceptions with universals and the making of propositions therewith. However, no amount of conclusion-drawing by the advocates of the other candidates can shake what has been established so far (which these advocates must also take for granted in their thoughts and actions), which then implies that connection of perceptions with universals <i>can</i> be made and leaving only the question of <i>how </i>such connection is made. Objectivism claims to have this covered, and my look at these claims finds them worth investigating, which I will cover later.<br /><br />In comparison to the inference-from-observation approach, the other two candidates are far more problematic. This is not only that they have to accept the three concepts and statements established so far if they do not want to be contradictory but also that they are untenable of themselves.<br /><br />Take the notion of revelation, the idea of propositions popping into our heads and <i>feeling </i>with high conviction that they are true. However, observe that there are a great many people - myself included - who have never had revelations, and, of those who do say they’ve had them and claim authority over those of us who have not, what these people have to say is totally at odds with what many others also have to say subsequent to other alleged revelations of their own. That makes revelation as such extremely suspect, though the phenomenon itself is still to be explained. At this point all I want to do is point out that people can be very arbitrary, and note that history shows that this arbitrariness may be combined with people’s need for meaning and moral guidance to result in the countless numbers of cults, belief-systems, and other mystic movements that have sprung up since man first used his mind.<br /><br />Western philosophy was born 2600 years ago when one intelligent thinker - Thales of Miletus - noticed this for himself over the course of his international travels around the Mediterranean and Middle-East. This realisation, along with his observation of a host of perfectly natural phenomena as contrasted against various mystic claims (such as rejection of mystic claims of cosmology in favour of the kinds of entirely natural processes he saw in river-beds and estuaries etc), prompted him to dispense with the entire mystic approach to answering the question of how the world worked. Certainly, Thales gave wrong particular answers to that question (he claimed that everything was water) and made other errors besides, but his reasons for abandoning mysticism did have solid basis and his inference-from-observation approach was on the right track.<br /><br />I see no reason why an arbitrary statement that is touted as a philosophic starting point should be accorded a special thou-shalt-not-question status that is not accorded to an equally arbitrary assertion on a more mundane topic. I see no just cause against recognising the arbitrary for what it is and dismissing it as such, independent of ascribed importance. It is one thing to argue that one must go with what one has in the heat of crises and only reconsider what one has later at leisure, but quite another to prohibit questioning when the later becomes the now and the leisure time becomes available. Should the appeal be made, an appeal to fear of consequences arising from a lack of a moral grounding is just not good enough, for that is then to state that the arbitrary assertion is in fact a deliberate lie, and an allegedly-noble lie is still a damn lie. When the lie is found out, that discovery will add vehemence and righteous anger to the wantonness that the lie was intended to hold back.<br /><br />But not all faiths make that kind of appeal, and some do try to give thoughtful responses to challenges against them. Today, the title of <i>religion </i>is accorded to those faiths that have gone on to develop a measure of intellectual sophistication on top of the claimed revelations at their base. To that extent, actual religions - particularly those that have grown in the light of Western philosophy - deserve a degree of respect commensurate with that philosophic sophistication; certainly one must find fault with, but one may not sneer at, an intelligently-informed faith.<br /><br />Now take the notion of exclusively deduction from foundational propositions. To a minor extent, the question of where these foundational propositions come from is dealt with above. That is, one can see that their advocates choose their various foundational propositions arbitrarily. However, these propositions are frequently actually <i>true</i>, such as Leibniz beginning by stating that the complex is composed of the simple, so this method cannot be dismissed only by pointing out the arbitrariness in choosing them.<br /><br />The problem with their approach is that they - the propositions and advocates thereof alike - presuppose the ability to speak as itself an implied independent starting point in its own right. The words of which all propositions are formed are <i>taught</i>, and the content of the propositions formed with them is not discoverable until quite some time into life. That leaves open the question of the validity of speaking. Admittedly, I am yet to deal with that issue myself, but remember that all I am doing here is putting into words that which can be affirmed to ourselves <i>without </i>words, that I am only articulating as an adult that which is implicit in the observations of an infant not yet six months old - the practice of deducing from propositions that are true but nevertheless chosen arbitrarily doesn’t have a patch on that. So I know enough to rule out this class of candidates insofar as they are touted as philosophical <i>starting points</i>.<br /><br />However, while the blow thus given to the other two candidates is <i>serious </i>it is still <i>not fatal</i>, for I am yet to address a very important question: from whence came the content of consciousness that either is not or not remembered as being based on perception and inference? There are many ways of raising this question to attack inference from observation, and many ways of answering it to give basis to the other candidacies - the question of universals is a major part of this, but it is not the only part. So there is much more that needs to be discussed, though now I can say that the practice of inference from perceptual observation is ahead by a country mile and that I have enough to move onward with.<br />
<br />John McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-76711418502644018212012-12-15T20:08:00.001+10:302012-12-23T15:20:43.288+10:30OTI post #8Given the long time since I've done any <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com.au/search/label/OTI%20work">OTI work</a>, from me always finding unsatisfactory how I began it and my procedures for working, I reviewed what I wrote so far.I didn't like how it simply dove in and started with a context that was taken rather arbitrarily, and had no connection as to why the axioms of Objectivism were indeed the proper places to start. For instance, how I addressed that back then, <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/oti-post-5-validation-and-importance.html">in post 5</a>, has always struck me as seriously wrong somehow. There was something wrong right from the get-go.<br />
<br />
I figured out what it was: a grossly inadquate context and non-use of the spiral theory of knowledge. My old introduction in post 1 had three parts: reasons, two elements of context, and an outline of methodology. I retain the reasons, but I am breaking up the rest, beginning with interposing a sequence on the search for foundations that leads to a basic discussion of the axioms. Then I will give Objectivism up to epistemology a once-over and use that to ground the proper context and methodology for the real chewing to come later.<br />
<br />
So far I've done that first interposition, and have started work on the once-over. Here, then, is the first installment of that new work.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>---<br />
<br />
(1.1 is still my reasons, unchanged)<br />
<br />
<b>1.2 The search for foundations</b><br />
I find myself <i>in a world</i> and <i>having a need to act in it</i>. This gives rise to three questions: What kind of world am I in? What should I do? And how do I find the answers to questions?<br />
<br />
This much is not unique to me. No philosophising-proper can be done in the state of early childhood. By the time someone comes to ponder philosophical questions with any seriousness, this someone has spent years observing the world, learning how to speak and how to think, sometimes making his own discoveries, sometimes by hearing what others say and him making considered judgement that brings him to agreement with those others, and sometimes accepting what is taught to him without question. By the time he philosophises, he has come to possess an enormous amount of what he takes to be knowledge about what is real and how to act. This is a position common to us all. We each of us have the capacity to perceive and are constantly doing so, we each of us (reading this at least) have the capacity to use words and concepts, we each have the capacity to make judgements and consider others' judgements, we each have a whole pile of bits of knowledge with varying degrees of internal integration of various subject-matters, we each have the capacity to feel this way and that, and we each of us in fact do feel to varying degrees about a number of things.<br />
<br />
It also appears that some of it has seemingly been validated directly, other parts make sense (with varying degrees of confidence for this) on the basis of that which we have validated, and at least some sense of order appears to be possible. But this content of mind is still haphazard, disjointed, and sometimes greatly at odds either within itself or in contrast to what is observed. How are we to untangle all this? Where does one even start??<br />
<br />
What makes things more problematic is that the three kinds of content of awareness can contradict each other and also contradict variants of themselves. For instance, a perception of something (say, that an object is a real material thing) can contradict a judgement (that perception of objects is an illusion) and both of those can further contradict with a feeling (say that a Holy Text prescribes that objects are expressions of a Divine Intelligence). And, one perception can appear to contradict another perception (eg the infamous hands in water example), one judgement can contradict another (Heraclitus' claim that nothing existed but Change itself versus Parmenides' claim that no change ever took place and all that existed was One itself), and one feeling can contradict another (countless competing religions and competing sects within religions). So we have three candidates for starting points, but they seemingly contradict themselves as well as each other: mystic revelation, inference from observation, and deduction from basic statements that need no proof.<br />
<br />
This - and yet further problems besides, such as the “problem of universals” - is the philosophic state of the world in which we neophytes find ourselves. What the blazes do we do now??<br />
<i><br />My first step</i><br />
I have very little to offer in philosophy that is original. All I can say is there is posited an integrated approach to understanding things. This approach begins with perception, cements it with formal recognition of what has been implicit in perception from the get-go, shows how abstractions are formed from the material of perception, gives strong leads for how to proceed to making propositions, goes on to show how to form ever more complex judgements all the way to the heights of erudition, and normative rules about how to do all this properly. It then purports to give a reconciliatory account of the nature of perception, judgements, and feelings.<br />
<br />
It is this approach - which was begun by Aristotle, with its latest development being Objectivism and additional work by various Objectivists - that most makes sense on the face of it, and so justifies me giving it more consideration. This approach is what I want to validate for myself. If successfully validated then it is what I want to integrate into my mode of thinking and acting. If it is not validated then I will look elsewhere - the need to <i>act</i> makes saying "to hell with it" indefensible and unviable.<br />
<br />
The question then immediately arises: what do I mean by making sense? What do I take to be validation of the approach of objectivity? I’ll go into what ‘valid’ means in depth later, but something as to what validity means is required <i>now</i>, before a single step further can be taken. The only thing that “making sense” can mean is reconciliation between perception, judgement, and feeling, in turn providing an account of all of three by beginning with that about which there can be no meaningful denial, and then using that account to answer the first two questions. More formally, “valid” can only mean the non-contradictory identification of what reality is, and on that basis go on to determine my place in it and what I should do in it.<br />
<br />
But why non-contradiction? There are many in history who have revelled in contradiction, so on what grounds can I reject it at the outset? Here I find it easiest to reiterate what Aristotle said in his own defence of the matter: if contradictions can exist, no sense can be made of anything, no meaning can be ascribed to argument (even to the positing of the existence of contradictions), no reality exists, and no meaningful action can be undertaken so as to remain in it. Just to say “there are such things contradictions in reality” already requires non-contradiction in order for that statement to be agreed with, because it implies that to contradict that statement is to commit an error, which then obliterates that statement. For that reason, Aristotle said that whosoever posits contradictions is no better than a vegetable, for a positor of contradictions has nothing to say insofar as he maintains his advocacy of contradictions. The positing of contradictions is also indefensible and unviable. What the non-existence of contradictions suggests about the clash of the three is that at least two are wrong, either in how they are obtained or in how we interpret them. In turn, reconciliation consists of explaining the apparent clash.<br />
<br />
That much about contradiction is only polemics, however valid it may be. But where do we get this Law of Non-Contradiction from? This is a separate question to its being true and a law. I must come back to it at some point.<br />
<br />
<i>My starting points</i><br />
A hint of a criterion of validity is not an actual starting point; it has no content. All it does is delimit what may be acceptable content. What content-proper should we actually start with?<br />
<br />
Much of what we have as adults is derivative of earlier development as children, but these disparate bodies of knowledge are not well tied with each other, and so that still leaves open the question of foundations. What are these foundations and how do we validate them? That being the case, where should I start, and why? Unadulterated scepticism is out of the question, so that leaves either the three candidates already identified or me figuring out a fourth, though what such a fourth might consist of I have neither a shred of evidence for nor the faintest clue.<br />
<br />
But from looking at the three I have already I notice a particular commonality among them (specifically, I got it from Objectivism and recognise for myself that it is common), such that at this stage I need not bother pursuing the notion of a fourth. I further notice that one of these three is the most consistent with what that commonality implies, and I notice further again that the account suggested by the combination of that commonality with the procedures of that one is consistent both with the history of discovery of philosophic concepts and the apparent development of men. That commonality is the fact that there is <i>something </i>to have perception of, there is <i>something </i>to make judgements regarding, and there is <i>something </i>to have feelings about. What the something may be in each case is irrelevant, what’s common is that there is a something as such. Something <i>exists</i>. I am not stating anything about <i>what</i>, <i>where</i>, <i>how</i>, <i>how much of</i>, or <i>why</i>, I state only <i>that</i>.<br />
<br />
(Banal, you say? So what, I ask. The universe is not obliged to satisfy anyone’s need for high drama. Parmenides in this regard is correct: what is, is. If you don't like it, that's your problem. The cookie won't crumble any differently just because some twit doesn’t feel that the way it does crumble is sublime enough for his tastes. Besides - and this is entirely secondary to the truth identified above - the fact that it is an observable and non-contradictory firm standing-point, already thereby indicating a basis for reconciliation of much of what caused a great many deaths throughout human history, suggests that this identification is actually very important indeed. Consider it this way: that one has an unshakeable start consisting of real informational content about reality (howsoever vague that content may be, the key being <i>that </i>it identifies a truth about reality) suggests that this identification vastly more momentous than say an unassuming little man by the mildly ridiculous name of Frodo Baggins placing what appears to be a simple ring of gold of one ounce’s weight upon a table before a council of war, which council is gathered to deal with one of the greatest evils ever to beset the world, and which council’s recognition of the fact that the ring <i>is</i> changes the whole course of that war. So much for banality.)<br />
<br />
This recognition of the existence of something also most consistent with the inference-from-observation approach, through recognition of my own development and subsequent observation of the development of other children (I have none of my own, but I am familiar with those of family and friends). From very early on, a long time before the capacity to speak arises, children are observers and investigators of a world. Every blessed thing they do shows an implicit acceptance of that <i>something exists</i>. They're forever investigating it, often to the consternation of parents anxious to keep their inquisitive children from harm such as from sticking knives in power-points or prodding ants' nests. I can remember that much myself, and to this day regularly act accordingly. I can remember all the way from my youth to but a one second ago wordlessly looking at what lay about me and then interacting with it. I move my mouse around and type on the keyboard without paying direct attention to the fact of either’s existence, which acts imply me taking their existence for granted now. There’s something that <i>is</i>. I need not even use words in my personal agreement, as all I need to is observe that there is anything at all to observe, independently of the what, and affirm silently that whatever and wherever <i>that lot</i> (waving my hands about) actually is, <i>is</i> - determining what and where that lot is is for another time. And that much is evident and possible to an infant even in the very first moment of wakefulness, never mind before the ability to speak begins.<br />
<br />
That is also the beginning of Objectivism. And that is enough for me to say about Objectivism that I find it worthwhile to keep going. The progression continues: implicit in the recognition that <i>something exists</i>, however implicit the recognition itself is, is the further recognition that <i>I know</i> something exists. I can perceive for myself that something exists, just as above, and I have a whole history of perceiving existents in a great variety of manners. And at this very moment I can recognise my own acts of remembering, imagining, feeling, thinking, and so on. From all these I recognise the same commonality, that <i>I</i> too exist and that I am <i>conscious</i>.<br />
<br />
Score two for Objectivism, and we can go for a third. Every single thing I ever come across, or that anyone has ever come across, has always been something in particular. And further, within all acts of consciousness, the content has always likewise been something in particular. The same applies to the experiences of everyone I have ever met. It turns out there is a reason for all this, and that it is in fact impossible for anything to be other than something in particular, for to <i>be</i> something is of necessity to be <i>something</i>. Everything that exists is of a certain nature - all that <i>exists </i>is of a particular <i>identity</i>. Objectivism speaks of a Law of Identity - there's that third.<br />
<br />
So now we have three statements to start with. What is, is. I am. What is, including me, is what it is. Objectivism states these three less colloquially. Existence exists. Consciousness is conscious. A is A. Well and good, yes, but now what?<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
I then start, in 1.3, my once-over of Objectivism, starting with a validation of the axioms and the first indication of the validity of perception. That is as much as I have written on that score, with next being causality (straight forward enough), then volition, then conceptualisation, proposition-making, and logic. That much, in a simple form and validated as I go, also spiraling back as required, should be enough to end the once-over. After that, what I have currently as 1.3 and 1.4 need to be rewritten and renumbered in manners I am yet to determine are appropriate. With that in place <i>then</i> I can actually chew in detail, starting from the axioms.<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-74125131832641625252011-11-03T20:32:00.000+10:302011-11-03T20:32:32.920+10:30Objectivism Roundup 225<!--
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<p>Welcome to the November 3, 2011 edition of objectivist round up, number 225.<br />
</p><br />
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<p><b>Jim Woods</b> presents <a
href="http://jimwoods.thinkertothinker.com/2011/10/27/the-prometheus-inquiry-concept/"
>The Prometheus Inquiry Concept</a
> posted at <a
href="http://jimwoods.thinkertothinker.com"
>Words by Woods</a
>, saying, "Drafts an elevator pitch related to a private solution to the ubiquitous problems in private education."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Jared Rhoads</b> presents <a
href="http://ohpcenter.org/editorials.php?nav=20111027a"
>An alternative format for an early Presidential debate</a
> posted at <a
href="http://ohpcenter.org"
>The Center for Objective Health Policy</a
>, saying, "How about instead of another large debate with all of the candidates on stage at once, we have the candidates draw straws and group them into a series of smaller debates."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Ari Armstrong</b> presents <a
href="http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/2011/10/yes-national-sales-tax-is.html"
>Yes, A National Sales Tax is Constitutional</a
> posted at <a
href="http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/"
>Free Colorado</a
>, saying, "A national sales tax is constitutional (but otherwise a very bad idea)."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Paul McKeever</b> presents <a
href="http://blog.paulmckeever.ca/2011/10/27/atlas-shrugged-part-1-review/"
>Atlas Shrugged Part 1: Review</a
> posted at <a
href="http://blog.paulmckeever.ca"
>Paul McKeever</a
>.<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Ryan</b> presents <a
href="http://www.ryansrantings.com/?p=1076"
>Some Facebook Shenanigans</a
> posted at <a
href="http://www.ryansrantings.com"
>Ryan's Rantings</a
>, saying, "Just a quick rundown of a small debate I participated in on facebook. It involved wealth redistributing, caring, and Halloween."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>John Drake</b> presents <a
href="http://trhome.blogspot.com/2011/10/confirmation-bias.html"
>Confirmation bias</a
> posted at <a
href="http://trhome.blogspot.com/"
>Try Reason!</a
>, saying, "What is confirmation bias and how can you avoid it? I tackle this problem in my latest post."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Alexander Marriott</b> presents <a
href="http://alexandermarriott.blogspot.com/2011/10/calling-mediawhen-is-ron-paul-going-to.html"
>AM's Wit and Wisdom: Calling the Media—When is Ron Paul Going to Have to Answer?</a
> posted at <a
href="http://alexandermarriott.blogspot.com/"
>Alexander Marriott's Wit and Wisdom</a
>, saying, "Can we count on a man who thinks theocratic, jihadist, holocaust denying Iran is no different than Cuba to defend American interests and allies? What if he did write his own newsletters, knows his advisors are anti-Semitic, nods and winks at his many Neo-Nazi supporters and knowingly endorses conspiracy-ridden screeds that pin all manner of crimes on a family of Jewish aristocrats and financiers? These are questions that need answering. But someone needs to ask him first."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Rational Jenn</b> presents <a
href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-knitting-crossfitting-and-how-im.html"
>On Knitting, CrossFitting, and How I'm Growing as a Person Here</a
> posted at <a
href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/"
>Rational Jenn</a
>, saying, "In the last year, I've discovered two new passions that I enjoy very much. Though at first knitting and CrossFit might seem to be completely opposite types of activities, it's the things they have in common that really appeal to me."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Gene Palmisano</b> presents <a
href="http://raveler.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/unintended-consequences/"
>Unintended Consequences</a
> posted at <a
href="http://raveler.wordpress.com"
>The Metaphysical Lunch</a
>, saying, "Join me for the misnomer of the day."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Edward Cline</b> presents <a
href="http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-review-closing-of-muslim-mind.html"
>Book Review: The Closing of the Muslim Mind</a
> posted at <a
href="http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/"
>The Rule of Reason</a
>, saying, "Even if one has read the Koran, or sampled its most outrageous verses, injunctions, and imperatives, or discussed Islam with other concerned individuals, nothing could better guarantee a fundamental and essential grasp of the utter irrationality of Islam than Robert R. Reilly’s "The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamic Crisis.""<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Diana Hsieh</b> presents <a
href="http://blog.dianahsieh.com/2011/11/video-respect-for-transgendered.html"
>Video: Respect for the Transgendered</a
> posted at <a
href="http://blog.dianahsieh.com/"
>NoodleFood</a
>, saying, "In Sunday's webcast, I answered a question on which restrooms the transgendered in transition should use and discussed my general view of the respect due to the transgendered."<br />
</p><br />
<br />
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</p><div style="clear: right"></div></div>John McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-11225871824013527732011-10-06T17:36:00.000+10:302011-10-06T17:36:24.043+10:30Objectivism Roundup 221<!--
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Welcome to the October 6, 2011 edition of Objectivist Round-Up, number 221.<br />
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<b>Kate Yoak</b> presents <a href="http://www.parentingis.com/2011/09/preschool-due-dilligence-naps.html"
>Preschool due dilligence: naps</a> posted at <a href="http://www.parentingis.com/">Parenting is...</a>, saying, "After first despairing when I learned about the forced naps while visiting LePort school, I learned that this issue is not cut and dry. Today my daughter attends a school where that is not an issue."<br />
<p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<br />
<b>Carl Svanberg</b> presents <a href="http://thecoldvoiceofreason.blogspot.com/2011/10/elizabeth-warrens-assault-on-justice.html"
>Elizabeth Warren's Assault on Justice</a
> posted at <a href="http://thecoldvoiceofreason.blogspot.com/">The Cold Voice of Reason</a>, saying, "Enjoy!"<br />
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<b>John Drake</b> presents <a href="http://trhome.blogspot.com/2011/10/gtd-habits.html"
>GTD Habits</a> posted at <a href="http://trhome.blogspot.com/">Try Reason!</a>, saying, "Its the habits, not the technology that make GTD effective. Here are the habits I'm working to improve."<br />
<p><br />
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<b>Rational Jenn</b> presents <a href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/2011/10/one-about-standardized-test.html">The One About The Standardized Test</a> posted at <a href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/">Rational Jenn</a>, saying, "The decision about whether or not to comply with our state's standardized testing requirements for homeschoolers became a very interesting lesson in Civics, Government, and Ethics."<br />
<p><br />
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<br />
<b>Ari Armstrong</b> presents <a href="http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/2011/09/pajamas-reply-to-elizabeth-warren.html">Pajamas Reply to Elizabeth Warren</a> posted at <a href="http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/">Free Colorado</a>, saying, "Elizabeth Warren invokes a 'social contract' to justify higher taxes on 'the rich.' Does her case hold water? I argue no in a piece for Pajamas Media."<br />
<p><br />
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<b>John McVey</b> presents <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/10/oti-post-7-primacy-of-existence.html">OTI post #7 - Primacy of Existence</a> posted at <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/">John J McVey</a>, saying, "This finishes metaphysics, at least for the time being."<br />
<p><br />
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<b>Paul Hsieh</b> presents <a href="http://blog.westandfirm.org/2011/10/hsieh-tu-oped-dont-blame-capitalism-for.html">Don't Blame Capitalism for High Health Insurance Costs</a> posted at <a href="http://blog.westandfirm.org/">We Stand FIRM</a>, saying, "I'm honored that The Undercurrent published my latest OpEd as part of their Capitalism Awareness Week project!"<br />
<p><br />
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<b>Santiago and Kelly Valenzuela</b> presents <a href="http://www.motherofexiles.org/2011/10/once-again-immigrants-improperly-blamed.html">Once Again, Immigrants Improperly Blamed</a> posted at <a href="http://www.motherofexiles.org/">Mother of Exiles</a>, saying, "Immigrants are being blamed for border crimes, but who is really to blame and are US border cities really as unsafe as conservatives claim?"<br />
<p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
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<b>David C Lewis, RFA</b> presents <a href="http://www.twintierfinancial.com/?p=1537">Can Your Financial Adviser Pick The Best Investment For You? | Twin Tier Financial</a> posted at <a href="http://www.twintierfinancial.com">A Revolution In Financial Planning</a>, saying, "I discuss the feasibility of selling investment recommendations."<br />
<p><br />
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<b>Rational Jenn</b> presents <a href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/2011/10/parenting-thought-of-moment.html">Parenting Thought of the Moment</a> posted at <a href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/">Rational Jenn</a
>, saying, "A well-behaved kid isn't necessarily an obedient kid. (But there's more--go read the post!)"<br />
<p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
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<b>David Baucom</b> presents <a href="http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2011/09/gary-johnson-on-republican-capitulation-and-his-presidential-bid/">Gary Johnson on Republican Capitulation and His Presidential Bid</a> posted at <a href="http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog">The Objective Standard Blog</a>, saying, "Gary Johnson on Republican Capitulation and His Presidential Bid - (Not from my blog but my contribution to the TOS blog) A single Q&A I had with Johnson prior to, and not included in, my TOS interview with him"<br />
<p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<br />
<b>Diana Hsieh</b> presents <a href="http://blog.dianahsieh.com/2011/10/noodlecast-99-live-rationally-selfish.html">NoodleCast #99: Live Rationally Selfish Webcast</a> posted at <a href="http://blog.dianahsieh.com/">NoodleFood</a>, saying, "In Sunday's Rationally Selfish Webcast, I answered questions on fear of death, using the Do Not Call Registry, genetic influences on thinking, the morality of selling your body, and more. Listen to the podcast now, and join us for another episode on Sunday morning!"<br />
<p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
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<b>Jason Stotts</b> presents <a href="http://jasonstotts.com/2011/10/its-about-time-2/">It’s About Time</a> posted at <a href="http://jasonstotts.com">Erosophia</a>, saying, "Some states are now moving for legislation that removes the felony charge against teen sexting."<br />
<p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<br />
<b>Gideon Reich</b> presents <a href="http://armchairintellectual.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-i-support-gary-johnson-for.html">Why I support Gary Johnson for President</a> posted at <a href="http://armchairintellectual.blogspot.com/">Armchair Intellectual</a>, saying, "My reasoning for supporting Gary Johnson for President."<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-82972542267469707022011-10-05T21:34:00.000+10:302011-10-05T21:34:25.684+10:30OTI post #7 - Primacy of ExistenceWrapping up metaphysics is the integration into a key point: the primacy of existence.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>Context</b><br />
The context is everything so far, but specifically it is the dicussion of <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-2-existence-exists.html">Existence</a>, <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-3-consciousness-is-conscious.html">Consciousness</a>, <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/04/oti-post-4-law-of-identity.html">Identity</a>, and <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/07/oti-post-6-law-of-causality.html">Causality</a>. We will find that this discussion does not add anything new to these, but helps us to keep them and their proper interconnections in mind.<br />
<br />
<b>Meaning</b><br />
The phrase “the primacy of existence” is just a means of treating as a single abstract entity a particular relation for the purpose of exposition and its contrast against alternative entities. The root statement is “existence is primary”, and this is what will be tackled.<br />
<br />
<b>Reduction of the concepts</b><br />
In the three-word statement “existence is primary”, two have already been reduced and reconstructed, though a quick recapitulation is instructive.<br />
<br />
<i>Existence</i><br />
Existence is the grand totality of that all that is, was, and will be, the “all that” which may be said in reference to what is indicated when swinging one’s arms about demonstratively. What we can now also add is that includes the fact that all existents are of certain natures, and that these natures include all the causal laws applicable to those natures. By reference to existence we are bringing to mind the facts that there is this total of that which is and that every single thing that is exists in a certain way and acts according to that way in which exists.<br />
<br />
<i>Is</i><br />
The context of this word is not reference to being qua being, but its more grammatical sense of indicating some element of being, of indicating the word that follows is to be held as part of the identity of the subject. That is, it is being used to indicate that primacy is to be recognised as being an element of what it means to exist. I don’t think I need to examine this further.<br />
<br />
<i>Primary</i><br />
This is the key and new word. The root is the Latin for “first”, which is reflected in all its use in English. For our purposes, the relevant definitions from <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/primary">dictionary.com</a> are:<br />
<br />
Adjective:<br />
1. first or highest in rank or importance; chief; principal<br />
2. first in order in any series, sequence, etc.<br />
3. first in time; earliest; primitive<br />
7. original; not derived or subordinate; fundamental; basic<br />
<br />
Noun:<br />
14. something that is first in order, rank, or importance<br />
<br />
Some relevant English synonyms are: elementary, underlying, essential, principal, foundational, cardinal, pivotal, and so on. The meaning intended by the statement is clear enough: that which is the first, independent, and upon which all else is dependent or derivative. These are the lesser concepts from which the intended meaning is obtained.<br />
<br />
We can divide the reduction of primary into two related paths: the epistemological and the metaphysical. The epistemological path comes from noting that primary is a reference to a position in an ordered series of priorities. It is referring to the fact that something is properly the first thing to be considered and counted upon, which has no meaning except in contrast to that which comes later and counts upon that referred to as primary. More specifically, to say that something is primary is to give emphasis to that fact of firstness, so that one may think about that fact as against considering something else as holding that position and the present thing having a lower priority. So, we must learn primary at the same time as secondary and tertiary, though with the later ranks being of increasingly lesser importance (pop-quiz to be answered WITHOUT looking it up or making an educated guess of a construction: what is the comparable word for fifthness?). Instances of this are discussions of why something is the primary objective in some complex plan involving multiple goals, of what primary industry is, of a contrast between primary and secondary windings on a transformer, and so on. Some judgements of primacy are heavily dependent on express standards of value (eg determining the primacy of objectives), which is an out-of-hierarchy consideration, so I won’t examine those other than to note the connection.<br />
<br />
Before we get to primary and secondary etc, we must learn the less abstract terms of first and second, etc, since the -aries give emphasis to the relevant positions in a more abstract sense. (A child of say seven years, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, can legitimately utter the word “primary” in a few delimited contexts, and know it is a real word, though without knowing what it actually means beyond a vague sense. This is discussed later.) Now, I do not believe that it is strictly necessary to learn the cardinal numbers before one learns first and second etc, although for practical reasons it is likely that the cardinal numbers are learned before the ordinal ranks, and how - in English - from “fourth” onward the hints at connection are too blatant not to be missed. To learn the ordinal sequence it only needs a physical demonstration, be that in ordering the letters or blocks of different sizes, or the child himself be first to finish something (eg race or a task), or in being lined up so that a whole group can do something in an orderly fashion (eg teaching kids how to line up and then the first in line is first in the class room etc), or be himself is <i>given</i> first choice of something or perhaps himself <i>being</i> the first choice (both as in team-picking, these being the picker and the pickee respectively), and so on, all without that child necessarily connecting this with the numbers or even knowing how to add two and two. So I hold that, in English, instances of the first three ordinal ranks are perceptual level for primary etc (first second and third are not obviously linguistically connected to one two and three in the way that fourth and fifth are more obviously connected to four and five), that the cardinal numbers have their own perceptual level referents on their own terms separately from consideration of ordinal systems, and that the connection of cardinal with ordinal is a later feat of integration.<br />
<br />
The metaphysical side comes from how we learn to apply this system of thinking to real-world applications. We have to see that there are reasons for why we must do or consider something first and something else second. For instance, we have to identify reasons <i>why</i> mining and agriculture/aquaculture are called primary industry, <i>why</i> which winding on a transformer is the primary, and so on. Each of these has its own metaphysical answers which necessitate the epistemological judgement. For instance, primary industry is the beginning of all material processing, with secondary industry not being possible without it because it processes the output of primary industry, and that the primary windings on a regular three-phase transformer are those that take in the power from the high-tension transmission lines and step it down to lesser voltages (and higher currents) output on its secondary windings, and so on.<br />
<br />
Yet it would be mistake to think that there are facts more important to reality itself than others. As far as reality itself is concerned, all facts that are true at a given point in time are true simultaneously. They just <i>are so</i>. To get to primacy in the world we have to consider <i>time</i> and <i>causality</i>, both of which we have already seen before. Things happen in sequences: there are things that happen first, and things that happen later because of the first - the later events are dependent on the earlier ones. The consequences that come first can be referred to as the primary consequences, those that follow because of the primaries as secondaries, and those that follow from the secondaries as tertiaries, and so on. For example, military pilots bombing something are frequently concerned with looking for secondary explosions to follow the primary explosions caused by the bombs they drop, because the secondaries indicate that the primaries have hit an intended target that is expected to blow up as in the case of a supply of fuel or ammunition. In the Dune novels it is said that while the majority can see primary consequences, and the more intelligent can see secondary consequences, only Mentats are adept at the accurate identification of tertiary and quaternary consequences of the actions being contemplated by their masters.<br />
<br />
There is also a form of causality that does not expressly refer to time. This relates to the division of causality into its four kinds, which I will cover properly some other time. Of the four kinds, the efficient and final are concerned with time directly whereas the formal and material are less so. Of these latter two, material is more primary, for the formal has no meaning except as the form taken by that material, and also that the formal is still related to time and concerns the interplay of efficient and material causes in definite patterns. Thus metaphysically, the material cause of something is a primary in its own right, which leads to an investigation of what the ultimate components of existence are. But that is less of a metaphysics issue than it is a plain physics one. For metaphysics it only matters that there are fundamental constituents, that whatever form they take (be that substantial or topological or whatever) <i>they</i> <i>exist</i> and <i>they are of certain natures</i> - the concepts existence and identity we have also already seen. The rest we can leave to physics, though noting with a smile that among the special sciences physics is the primary upon which the others, such as chemistry and astronomy, are properly dependent - which is itself a fact that had to be discovered.<br />
<br />
I think the metaphysical reduction of primary as an isolated word can be left at that. After the above, it just a matter of recognising the various actual facts of time and causality to achieve the proper metaphysical application of judgements of ordinal ranking as identified in the epistemological reduction.<br />
<br />
<b>Reduction of the principle</b><br />
<i>Reduction to facts</i><br />
In philosophy, at the height of abstraction and universality, primaries are the first and foundational statements to be made in a system, that is, the axioms. But this is an epistemological use of the word. Metaphysically, the primaries are the actual facts described by those axioms. It is because these facts are held to be metaphysical primaries that the axioms describing them are the epistemological primaries. The point in asserting the primacy of something is to invoke the metaphysical facts so as to guide epistemological activity.<br />
<br />
Before one can concern oneself with primaries, one must be first concerned with facts as such. So the first reduction of the principle as an integrated whole is to the facts of reality. There are zillions of them: chlorophyll is green, the sun is a star, consciousness is conscious, crocodiles are big lizards, sulphuric acid is highly corrosive, all things that exist are of certain natures, black swans have white flight-feathers, the mean pressure of the air at MSL on Earth is 101.3kPa, and so on. All of these we obtain in one way or another from observation and induction, and each in its own way reduces to direct perception. The how will be examined in future under epistemology, as it only matters for the moment <i>that</i> this is so.<br />
<br />
<i>Reduction to competing alternatives</i><br />
Of all the facts that are so, a philosophy does make a distinction between them on the basis of their epistemological position in the system of that philosophy (whether that system be express or implied in the works of the relevant philosophers, and independent of their protestations on the matter). There are facts that are held to be the base of the system and facts that are of lesser importance. But not all philosophies profess the same primaries.<br />
<br />
Going back to philosophy and the idea of primaries, there is a distinction between sets of facts held to be primaries in general on the one hand and reference on the other hand to the single fact that is held to be the primary of primaries. To the extent that a given creed even concerns itself with both issues, all creeds as far as I can tell have one of two alternatives as the explicit or implicit primary of primaries: existence or identity. Recall that the point of the express statement of the primacy of existence is to deny the primacy of consciousness, so both existence and consciousness must be examined.<br />
<br />
<i>Reduction to existence</i><br />
The meaning of the primacy of existence is that existence comes first. The statement is saying that existence is the most fundamental fact to which all others are related, that it is existence that sets the term for all else, and that all else is a subset of or in some other way derived from existence and hence subject to all the principles of identity and causality etc as pertaining to existence in general. The statement is thus saying that we must recognise that fact and incorporate it into all of our thought processes, beginning with recognising that thoughts are only valid to the extent that they are attempts to think about existence in some way. It is an explicit underscoring of a fact that had long been implicit in all actions undertaken since the day of birth (and perhaps before even that, too).<br />
<br />
But although existence is held to be a primary, as an express abstraction it is far from being directly cognised. The primacy of it has to be a conclusion, which must come from observation of how various facts of existence are so independently of consciousness. All facts are expressions of identity and causality, where the latter reduces back to identity anyway, so the reduction of the primacy of existence comes by way of reduction to identity in the concrete. From there can one reduce back to existence, as already described under both existence and identity in previous posts.<br />
<br />
The summary of that conceptual reduction, which we will need later is: existence qua being (“exists”, “there” versus “not there” etc), existence qua being something in particular (“is a something”), concepts for broad classes of things, concepts for successively narrower classes until one reaches first-level concepts for entities, express recognition of entities, perception of entities, and so back to the awareness of existence, identity and consciousness on the implicit level that an infant is capable of.<br />
<br />
<i>Reduction through anthropomorphism</i><br />
Again, the express statement is also made as a contrast to the idea that consciousness is primary, the claim that it is a consciousness of some kind that that comes first and is somehow the creator of all else. The statement is made so as to recognise formally the subordinate nature of consciousness to existence. There are two aspects of this to consider.<br />
<br />
The first aspect is direct perceptions of the world about us and our place within it. When we look at the world we see a whole pile of actions, many of which are taken to be examples of consciousness in action. In most cases, however, consciousnesses are only imputed to exist, rather than perceived directly. The only direct perception we can have of a power of consciousness is that of our own: one can directly observe as regards the power of consciousness is one’s own capacity to move one’s own body. We may then <i>infer</i> the same capacity on the part of other beings such as family and friends, people down the street and at school, one’s own pets and other people’s pets, and all manner of creatures in the rest of the world, as a <i>conclusion</i> from direct perception of actions, such as creatures appearing to observe other things, our ability to communicate with them (not just people, but also to entice pets for TLC or to make noises and motions we know will scare away pests, etc).<br />
<br />
A problem is that inference of consciousness to things easily runs amuck. We saw that before in the discussion of causality: the problem of anthropomorphism. Note that it is not just a problem for primitive man, as our increasing familiarity and intimacy with robots is showing. This problem arises because of the eagerness with which consciousness is imputed to things. Primitive man saw that his consciousness had causative power over his body, and in child-like manner imputed consciousness to other entities that he observed causative powers. This alone lead to premises laid so deep in the culture it took several centuries of professional effort to overcome it sufficiently to give us our existence-oriented industrial civilisation (and, of course, the need for work here is not yet over).<br />
<br />
Yet even so, never has there ever been any direct perception of any clearly conscious being affecting reality in any slightest way through a sheer exercise of will. Zero, zip, nichts, nada, nothing. History shows that there never has been any evidence, and causality and identity shows that there never will be. All professed belief in it has always been some mixture of charlatanry, gullibility, hallucination, and outright insanity.<br />
<br />
In all cases, further, every blessed observation from which we have ever concluded anything, rightly or wrongly, about the nature of consciousness clearly points to <i>causality</i>, <i>identity</i>, and <i>existence</i>. Both when inference is correct and in error, what direct perception of consciousness does show, and has always shown, is the definite nature of consciousness as something to which causality and identity apply, that consciousness too is part of existence rather than the other way around. With that, both of the facts directly perceived in relation to consciousness and of the prior-seen reductions of causality, identity and existence to yet more facts, we are at the perceptual level.<br />
<br />
<i>Reduction through abstractions</i><br />
The question of an alleged primacy of consciousness does not lie exclusively through conclusions of an anthropomorphic nature from direct perceptions. There is also the realm of abstractions to cover, that of realising that one possesses ideas, emotions and concepts without knowing how one acquired them.<br />
<br />
For the most part we take abstractions for granted, and it takes an overt mental act to bring them into question. At first glance we seem just <i>to know</i>, because of their immediate availability as the need requires without needing to build them from anything every time we need them. It is this, in one way or another, that availability has given rise not only to a primacy-of-consciousness viewpoint and sophisticated mystic creeds, but also of a clash between a consciousness that tries to assert primacy and an existence that is recalcitrant to some degree.<br />
<br />
The combination of this in the primitive man, plus ignorance of the origin of abstractions in the earliest of sophisticated man, inevitably leads to the first instances of a primacy of consciousness viewpoint among those who begin thinking systematically. The anthropomorphism of primitive man gave us witchdoctors, soothsayers, bizarre rites, and the like, but the addition of sophisticated thinking turns this into more organised priestcraft, prayers and other magical incantations, ceremonies with all the seriousness that sophisticated intellectuals can muster, sacred writings and complex codes, and so on. These are the elements of the more formal primacy-of-consciousness viewpoint we associate with that phrase, and it is from these that we get actual religions rather than mere shamanism and witch-doctoring.<br />
<br />
Yet as with the pull-back from blunt anthropomorphism into recognition of a difference between intentional and non-intentional causation, and how this knowledge of causality was a major factor in the development of our modern society, this self-same society gives each of us plenty of material from which to begin questioning the origin of our ideas and concepts in a manner that does not devolve back to fear-driven nonsense (be that fear of the unknown world or fear of elders’ punishing us for insisting on asking the wrong questions). We are nowadays educated for long enough in a complex enough manner to recognise that we did indeed learn all these ideas, both complex and simple. Even when we think we ‘just know’ something and take it for granted, we can often see when we first learned something and then worked with it so much that it became automatised. It needs no detailed analysis to see any of this, we just need to recall our own time - at least a decade - spent in formal school and then remembering being taught things outside of school by parents, going back to before any schooling began. When we look at the same with others, we clearly see that even the simplest words and ideas have to be taught. If kids are taught different things then it is these different things that become automatised and taken for granted. This is why there is a diversity of languages and cultures around the world, including how there are ideas easily expressed in one language that are less easily expressed in another (eg panache, schadenfreude, and siesta have no single-word equivalents in English that capture their proper meanings).<br />
<br />
This applies to whole ideas and hence the feeling of “just knowing” that such and such is true. Religious belief has to be adopted, and usually requires it being constantly nurtured. People of even the same racial stock, indeed of the same family, raised from children to believe different religions will in time “just know” that their respective religions are true - unless they are the more heroic and questioning kind and their tormentors teachers don’t threaten dire physical consequences for expressing doubts. Not for nothing did the Jesuits come up with the adage “give me a child for the first seven years and you may do what you like with him afterwards.”<br />
<br />
All up, then, in a manner yet to be explored more fully, clearly the existence of abstractions of all kinds has to come back to education and observation, which ties back to the identity of consciousness as a definite thing (chiefly, here, that it includes the capacity for automatisation and then forgetting the process, to the extent one even recognised it taking place in the first place) on the first count and directly to perception of entities and others’ teachings on both counts. Again, we are back to the perceptual level, which includes the relevant connections to causality, identity, and existence, so as to obtain these abstractions.<br />
<br />
<b>Reconstruction of “primary”</b><br />
The beginnings of the path specifically to reconstructing “primary” begins when a child is being taught numeracy. Now, as I said, as it happens the cardinal numbers are taught first and the ordinal numbers are taught second but I don’t think the former are strictly necessary for the latter. That being said, I don’t think it a particularly important point, so I won’t explore that further.<br />
<br />
The first level, then, is direct observation of one, two, three etc, and of first, second, third etc. Cardinal numbers are easy to show: the sequences “I, II, III”, “A, AA, AAA”, “X, XX, XXX” etc all have in common that they are examples of what 1 2 and 3 mean. Ordinal numbers require a little more effort, such as going out of one’s way to show that in the word “dog” the <i>first</i> letter is d, the <i>second</i> o, the <i>third</i> g, and in “cat” the <i>first</i> is c, and so on. What is a little easier and less artificial than that is actual use in real life as applicable to kids, through a bit of judicious use of time and sequences in time, as shown already in the reduction of the word, eg races (side note: perhaps the assault on winners-and-losers and ranks in races etc has, as one of its lesser destructive consequences, the effect of undermining conceptual growth in knowing what the ordinal ranks mean? It won’t be much of a contribution, but nevertheless it is there and the younger the kids that this assault is directed at the greater the harm caused to their minds through the deliberate withholding of education.)<br />
<br />
After that, knowing what primary means outside of philosophy is not much more than hearing it and connecting it with the concept of “first”. In Australia and New Zealand at least, the first time a child will hear this word is in reference to the school he goes to after he turns five: here, we go to Primary School from grades 1 to 7, with the first three usually being in a Junior Primary School facility that is semi-separate from the rest of Primary School. I know that this is not the terminology used in the US (American kids go to Grade School), and I don’t know about other countries. For us, then, Primary School is the first real school we go to, whether or not some of us go to kindy or pre-school beforehand.<br />
<br />
However, although first exposure to the word is likely to be at age three or four it will be just an empty sound at first, and then treated only as part of a multi-word abstraction representing a class of nouns. This means the proper understanding, of connecting it with “first” through proper differentiation and integration, is apt only to be understood by all kids (in general) in western countries much later, more or less at the same time, irrespective of whether they go to Primary School or Elementary School or whatever.<br />
<br />
Then we get to the more adult uses. This is where we see phrases such as primary ignition, primary windings, and then connect them together to finally understand why primary schools are called such. All of these are directly related to the meaning of “first”, which, being etymologically related to “prime”, connects us to how “prime beef” is of a quality generally held to be the first choice of the discerning consumer, and so on. So in the general sense of the word, we may define primary as: that which is the first or main bearer of work in some physical system, and so is the first thing (and often most important or central thing) to bring to mind when examining that system. This must be used in recognition of how the system in question may be part of a larger structure, meaning that it is not as though the primaries of some small subsystem necessarily have to be thought of at the very start of consideration of an entire structure.<br />
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It is with the latter half of that definition that the philosophical use arises. The actual system being considered is the whole of some field of study, and in metaphysics the whole of all there is to be studied (ie all reality). Thus in philosophy a primary is a principle that must be among the earliest considered in some branch or topic of investigation. The primary of primaries is that which is the very first in that topic, with the most primary of all being that principle which is the very first that must be established and on whose basis all others depend for their validity. Here it is most clear why both “basic” and “fundamental” were listed as part of the thesaurus elements in the definitions provided by dictionary.com, which we can now see is perfectly justified.<br />
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And with that we must move to consideration of what that proper primary of primaries is.<br />
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<b>Induction of the principle</b><br />
<i>Primacy of existence in the initial implicit awareness</i><br />
The instant that the new mind first turns on there is experienced a constant flow of evidence of how that there are things that <i>exist</i>. Everything else that is ever experienced and ever done always comes back to this: <i>there is something</i>. The fact that existence is primary is implicit right from the beginning, and is treated as such not just in all action at this stage of a child’s development but for the rest of life.<br />
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Let us start from early on, here, working inductively. At the concrete level, the awareness of the existence of a wide variety of individual existents is <i>explicit</i> from the moment that perception of entities begins - indeed, it is this that leads to explicit awareness of the fact of existence as such, which we saw before when looking at that concept. The young child is inquisitive, looking, poking, prodding, licking, smelling, moving around, or otherwise inspecting - frequently causing glorious mischief in the process. The world and everything in it is new to children, all of it a discovery, and most of it exciting and interesting (at least at first). This world (other than art and mess) was not created by them, exists independently of them, and in most cases existed before they did as we can plainly see for ourselves. On the latter score, we know the same applies to us, given the similar testimony of our elders of whose words there is no good reason whatsoever to doubt the principle behind since we observe our own growth and own eldership over those younger than us. I can safely leave the rest to the discussions of existence and identity already made, all of which scream “primacy of existence.”<br />
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At this concrete level the principle is not restricted to humans only, either. The same perceptual-level discovery is observable on the part of many other animals, too. The world is as much a new and exciting place to a puppy or kitten as it is to a toddler. Puppies discovering that they can run out rolls of toilet paper, and kittens misjudging their capacities to jump distances, are both classics here, and both are equally evidence how existence is primary over their perceptual-level minds just as it is for toddlers’ minds. It is that fact, and all the concrete examples of it, that bring a smile to our faces, even if we sometimes have to clean up the mess that the young leave behind them - and that, too, is itself evidence of the primacy of existence over our own minds as adults observing the proceedings and their aftermath.<br />
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As we grow older, development consists of being more sophisticated in the same basic principle and process. There are things in the world that we then discover, investigate, and learn about. The nature of what we learn also grows ever more intricate, and begins being integrable with what we’ve previously discovered. We learn implicitly about the Law of Causality early on, and we learn about ever more complex forms of the law as we progress. Within that law also is the primacy of existence, this being so because it is an application of the Law of Identity and hence is traceable back to existence. Things are what they are, do what they do, and that’s a fact. With that, as a proportion of outcomes of our actions the frequency of innocent mishaps falls and of deliberate mischief increases, both as a result of incorporating causality into thoughts about the world - ie again accepting a primacy-of-existence view, albeit on a level that is still not an explicit formulation.<br />
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<i>Primacy of existence in self-discovery</i><br />
Awareness of the existence of consciousness is also implicit in our action from very early on, but this implicit awareness does not arise except on the background of the prior established implicit awareness of existence. This is a long process over the course of years that proceeds in inductive fashion over many areas, all parts of which imply a primacy of existence.<br />
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To begin with, observe that for the first few weeks and months of life all the motions of the limbs are chaotic, happening outside of the conscious control of that infant. The initial control takes months to learn, and taking full control is an achievement that takes <i>years</i>. This, too, is directly the result of existence being primary in fact: our limbs are parts of existence, parts which one later discovers one can control by an act of will, yet which one can only move in certain ways even if one wanted to do more than they are capable of.<br />
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Concurrent with that is the discovery of one’s five primary senses. We experience all five before we discover that they are part of us specifically, that we have material organs specific to each sense, and that we later learn we can act to influence what they sense by means of controlling what happens to or with those material organs. The fact is that perception of existence precedes identification of the act of perception itself, because the thought “I can <i>perceive</i>!” (be this worded or not) is conceptual level and first requires the perceptual level concretes - ie the individual acts of perception - to be observed before they can be integrated into awareness of the process. Indeed, in between those concretes and that conceptual conclusion it is necessary for there to be at least two lesser but still conceptual-level integrations involving the acts of sensing themselves, such as “I can see” and “I can hear”. And all five sense organs are in the same boat as our discovery of the rest of our body: they are definite things with definite capabilities that have certain ranges no more and no less. The very notion of control over them already presupposes an implicit primacy of existence view, through implicit recognition that each of the means of them is part of existence and hence subject to identity and causality, even though they are our consciousness’s points of contact with existence.<br />
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Then, as we get older, as we explore more, observe ourselves more, and later still are taught more, we discover that we have what we later call the mind’s eyes and the mind’s voice. With the mind’s eye we can imagine things to see, and with the mind’s voice we can imagine things to hear – sometimes this is within our control, other times not, but we do eventually recognise that we have the phenomena and that what we see and hear in such a fashion is in our heads rather than in the world itself. Although a rare few begin exhibiting disorders, the bulk of us recognise a personal capacity for what it is and start using it as such. It is with express discoveries like these that we begin to identify our minds explicitly, through recognising our possession and manipulation of mental content. In time, we gain concepts, the ability to speak, the ability to read, the ability to think, and express awareness of the fact that we have these powers.<br />
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From there we expand our powers of body and mind more deliberately. We at last expressly recognise in words our power to move body parts and practice skills, and also that we can choose to go on practicing or giving up in the face of failures. We at last recognise that that there are things we know and things we don’t know yet can and should learn, and that we can choose to think or not (eg by watching TV instead). Either way, we begin recognising that what happens to us is in part up to us and in part set by the nature of the world around us, and that if we want various things and outcomes then we have to accept certain facts for what they are and act certain ways with respect to those facts. In sum, we start to recognise our own existences within a world impervious to acts of consciousness other than via one’s body ever more thoroughly. But unfortunately, for the most part this is grasped concrete by concrete and the integrations tend more to be pushed into automatised behaviour and sense of life than conscious conviction about the nature of what is so. As a result, particularly because of lingering (growing) supernaturalism in the culture, for a long time there still remains for many the temptation to evade the imperviousness of reality...<br />
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<i>Express recognition of the primacy of existence</i><br />
At some point, prior to the previous paragraph, we begin to gain notions of a distinction between that which is and that which we would like to be or would like not to be. Slowly at the start, we begin recognising that our wanting what is not does not change that which is. Yet I find that this is no binary recognition, and instead that there is a gradual movement towards recognition of this as a universal – that is, it is a principle that has to be painstakingly induced. For instance, a very young child begins to understand that shutting his eyes wont make a mess he made cease to exist just because he doesn’t see it or wants to pretend it is not there, that when we get sick we just have to take the icky medicine for it (“Brondicon”... *shudder*), and so on, but that an understanding of that nature wont stop him from believing that God will convert a toy model motorbike from one type to a preferred one if he wishes hard enough and leaves it overnight at the foot of his bed. Been there, done that, don’t want to go back again. As strange as it might sound, that was a turning point for me – circa age 8 I think – and I am glad I never spoke to anyone about it because then I would have gotten some spiel about God not doing frivolous miracles, where instead (as best as I can remember it) I just absorbed the disappointment wordlessly and added it to my non-miraculous sense-of-life. Steps like that were how I moved along to the full recognition of the primacy of existence.<br />
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And this brings us to the key point: this movement towards recognition is a process that many people never complete, including among so-called atheists. It is this topic of completion versus non-completion that is the point about stressing the primacy of existence. From what I can see, those can finish it themselves mostly do it on a sense-of-life level, where most of their express commentary is rather concrete-bound and frequently cynical, with these people limiting their appreciation of the philosophical profundity of the matter to being merely dismissive of negatives such as supernaturalism. As valid as such dismissals may be, they are not enough to prevent one from falling afoul of primacy-of-consciousness viewpoints – a sad testament to this is the continued implicit belief (in a few different variants) among many atheists that feelings are some kind of magical connection to an infallible standard of truth and value. The final step on the gradual process is not dismissal but affirmation, and then going on to use this affirmation to identify equally expressly all that follows.<br />
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It takes genius to identify and state the positive that what is <i>is</i> and acts accordingly, and to tease out the implications of these facts. This is the legacy of Parmenides, Aristotle, and others, both in Europe and the Middle-East. As I’ve noted before, it is from working from their teachings that the modern, secular world springs. As great and powerful as this was, one last identification remained to be made: the actual statement of the primacy of existence in such a fashion that integrates everything.<br />
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The means of doing so is to recognise all the axioms for what they are, inducing each from observations and then integrating them into a consistent whole by integrating observations and identifying their relevant interconnections. We recognise that existence <i>exists</i>, consciousness is and can only be conscious <i>of existence</i>, that identity and causality are universals from which nothing – including consciousness – is exempt. There is no evidence whatsoever of a consciousness capable of manipulating existence except by means of the physical body of which each instance of consciousness is an element. Moreover, all the evidence available rules out consciousness having pure will-power – even the most plausible of fantasies, such as the disembodied energy fields one finds in science-fiction, still rely upon existence existing independently of consciousness and these consciousnesses still being subject to that fact by being of definite limited natures.<br />
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Working from the above, we can further analyse the connection of existence and consciousness. It is quite easy to understand the possibility of existence without consciousness. Indeed, all observation (with or without the aid of science) shows that this was once actually so. We know that the world was around before each of us was born, is still around when people die, and will continue to be around after we’re gone, both individually and as a species – a denial of that is and can only be wishful thinking, not reasoning. Science – such as biology, astrophysics, and palaeontology – started from this basis and then went on to underscore it with observations and integrations that span more volumes than a single individual can read in the whole of his lifetime.<br />
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Now, what about the reverse, a consciousness without existence? Simple reflection shows this to be an absurdity. In the first place, the idea of there having ever been a consciousness where nothing at all exists is not worth taking seriously, so I wont. In the second, the idea of their being a consciousness where nothing else exists, which consciousness could thus only have been aware of itself, is also absurd, for it is suggesting that at one point there was a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of. Consciousness is an <i>activity</i> as much as it is a faculty. A consciousness cannot become aware of itself until it notices itself in action observing something other than itself: a lone consciousness as the only existent would be a blank staring at a blank, undertaking no actual conscious activity, and hence effectively unconscious and in no position whatever to do anything about it. Even if we ignore the brazen defiance of the laws of identity and causality involved in willing things into existence, this consciousness could not do so even if had the power because it has no content of consciousness to work with and can never obtain any. A consciousness observing itself is akin to a video camera focussed exclusively on a monitor showing only what that self-same camera is picking up. It will be a blank staring at a blank, and only the effects of outside forces - ie elements of existence existing independent of consciousness – could this blank feedback loop obtain content and so cease being blank. The idea of a consciousness independent of existence is not just contradictory to all evidence (which is fatal in itself, and is the main means of trashing primacy-of-consciousness) but is also utterly self-contradictory.<br />
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So, every blessed piece of evidence and non-contradictory thought all leads to the same one conclusion: since existence exists, consciousness is conscious of something that exists in some fashion (even mental content), that existence must be implicitly identified before consciousness can be implicitly identified, A is A and A does what A does both irrespective of conscious wanting otherwise, and that ideas contrary to these are in defiance of evidence and reason, it can only the case that existence is primary and consciousness can only be used properly by working with that fact either implicitly or explicitly in mind.<br />
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<b>Integration</b><br />
In sum, the induction of how existence is primary consists of little more than formally recognising the processes of forming the initial concepts with extra consideration for the order of doing so, formally recognising the relation of consciousness to existence, connecting this with other aspects of reality that are also readily observed, and integrating it all into a single sum describing undeniable facts. If one has done all these things right, the final conclusion should be no revelation but greeted with a simple “of course.”<br />
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<i>Some implications</i><br />
So, what we’re doing here is not, as Dr Peikoff rightly notes, is not identifying a new axiom. Rather, we are underscoring that each <i>is so</i>, that the first is and has to be identified first chronologically (albeit in implicit form), and that all else that one identifies after that is only valid if consistent with that first. The other axioms are parts of a system where existence takes the lead and sets the terms. In explicit form, the axioms could be identified in any order chronologically, but this is only possible because of having already identified in implicit form the fact that something exists and then using that to identify implications. A critical role for identifying the primacy of existence, therefore, is in properly grounding all knowledge.<br />
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This grounding is about both method and content: existence exists, and one must act accordingly within one’s mind as well as with one’s body. Thus in method, the primacy of existence means that to gain knowledge of existence one must look at existence, of seeking to determine what the identity of something is by gaining awareness of its attributes and how they relate to each other. For instance, to know how an electric motors work you have to examine them for yourself, discovering the connections between magnetism, electricity, metallurgy, chemistry, insulation, energy transfer, mathematics, and validating as best you can the work of others from whom you may more quickly learn. The primacy of existence also rules out any such thing as revelation or just knowing, rules out the use of feelings as infallible indicators of the true and the good, and rules out trying to determine how the world works by looking at how consciousness works.<br />
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And in content, it means that all that one thinks one has identified has to be an integrated whole that is never at variance with any of the axioms. For instance, it rules out the fabled perpetual motion machines, rules out any and all forms of supernaturalism, rules out life after death, and many other forms of denying or contradicting any of the axioms. Further, if we go back again to the epistemological discovery of the concept of existence, we can recall how it is the widest integration possible. It is that which covers everything that is, was, and will be. It is the one key universal. It is that which is everywhere, from which there is no escape, not even in death. All else that is valid is predicated on it. Thus it has to be the first thing to identify: before it is valid to wonder about the nature of something one must first have evidence of that something <i>existing</i>, or else one is indulging in fantasy. It does not matter how tenuous that evidence is, so long as there is that evidence of at least something existing so as to make it valid to ponder what and how. That is primacy of existence at work.<br />
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<i>What now?</i><br />
What is, is. To know what is, go find it, examine it and think about it. That is the essential lesson of the primacy of existence. How? That’s epistemology, which I’ll start on next time.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-88979350930860018342011-07-17T16:12:00.001+09:302011-07-17T16:14:47.562+09:30Plan for OTI work and economic analysisI've been working on my plan for how this OTI work is to proceed. Recall that it is aimed not just at understanding Objectivism but of thoroughly digesting objectivity itself and applying this to economic science.<br />
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Also, there is one more topic in metaphysics I have to cover before I move on, so I edited <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/07/oti-post-6-law-of-causality.html">OTI post 006</a> to remove the relevant side-comment in the opening words.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
Here is the overview leading to economics:<br />
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- Axioms, corollaries, and further related issues<br />
- Consciousness as a physical faculty<br />
- Concept-formation<br />
- Propositions<br />
- Objectivity and laws of thought<br />
- Induction<br />
- Deduction<br />
- Mathematics<br />
- The faculty of reason psychologically considered<br />
- Reasoning method<br />
- Scientific method in general<br />
- Life, action, and value<br />
- Man, his values and his actions<br />
- Society and civilisation<br />
- Scientific method in the social sciences<br />
- Politics and government<br />
- The context of economics<br />
- The method of economic science<br />
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Within each of these there will be a number of different posts, though each individual post wont necessarily be in the precise order as above. For the immediate future I will just be following the same outline as presented in OPAR, unless I find reason to depart from that (which may be either a change in order or addition of more topics or leaving of secondary topics aside for future discussion). This is subject to change, but here is the plan for the next several posts:<br />
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- Primacy of existence<br />
- Consciousness as possessing identity<br />
- Validity of the senses<br />
- Volition<br />
- Primacy of the perceptual level<br />
- Man's power of abstraction<br />
- Abstraction as mathematical in nature<br />
- First-level concepts<br />
- Higher-level concepts<br />
- Definitions<br />
- The metaphysically given versus the man-made<br />
- Rejecting materialism and idealism<br />
- The four causes<br />
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I don't know if I really need to explore the validity of qualia for economics, nor the categories of being, though I may end up doing those topics too at some point anyway. The problem is that they are both Akston-level topics rather than Rearden-level, but they may yet be necessary even for Rearden-level investigation. I hope I don't have to wade into the Direct vs Indirect Realism debate, for instance, except perhaps in passing. We shall see.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-90460252194220394812011-07-15T13:46:00.000+09:302011-07-15T13:46:33.805+09:30OR209Roundup time is here again! Check out <a href="http://reepicheepscoracle.blogspot.com/2011/07/objectivist-round-up-july-14-2011.html">number 209</a> at <a href="http://reepicheepscoracle.blogspot.com/">Reepicheep's Coracle</a>.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-38376336156608184872011-07-15T13:36:00.001+09:302011-07-15T13:39:05.788+09:30More mobile phone stuff<div><p>I've downloaded Blogger for Android. Now I can blog from where-ever I get an Optus signal.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, I had thought the remoteness of my workplace was why I was getting poor signal. It turns out that it is the building itself at fault - signal strength jumped up bigtime as sooned as I opened the metal back door of my lab. Mmmmm, Faraday cages...</p>
<p>JJM</p>
</div>John McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-90064298654620586072011-07-08T11:11:00.001+09:302011-07-17T15:57:51.622+09:30OTI post #6 - Law of CausalityContinuing to look at metaphysics, he are my observations and inductive reconstruction of the Law of Causality.<br />
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<b>Context</b><br />
The context for this is recognition of the three axioms for their content - <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-2-existence-exists.html">existence exists</a>, <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-3-consciousness-is-conscious.html">consciousness is conscious</a>, and <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/04/oti-post-4-law-of-identity.html">all existents are of definite natures</a> - and the fact that <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/04/oti-post-5-validation-and-importance.html">they are axioms</a>. This is implicit in the cognitive activity of a baby within moments of his first conscious state, and needs to be explicitly stated for students of philosophy.<br />
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<b>Basic meaning</b><br />
The Law of Causality is that all entities act according to their natures. Since that includes their reactions to influences of other things, we can also note that a given set of events plays out according to the natures of all the entities that were involved in or otherwise gave rise to those events.<br />
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Further, looking at affairs from the perspective of <i>events</i> as the primary object of investigation and asking why they happened, another way of stating the law is that all effects have causes. That is, as was discussed in Dr Peikoff’s first OTI lecture, the world is <i>orderly</i> and <i>lawful</i>.<br />
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<b>Reduction of ‘entity’</b><br />
I shouldn’t need to state anything other than that entities are particular things that exist. This includes rattles, hanging-toys, cot bars, pillows, blankets, mums, dads, cats, dogs, suns, snails, flowers, and so on. Further exploration was done during examination of the axioms above.<br />
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<b>Reduction of ‘act’ and ‘action’</b><br />
The dictionaries I looked at only provide various synonyms of the word act, such as do, perform, and so on. Of my own formulation, a beginning for an objective definition is: to act (including react) is <i>to change in identity</i>. In the same vein: action is <i>the progression of changes in identity</i>. This also implies a reference to <i>time</i>, but I wont be getting into the controversial debate on <i>that</i> concept here.<br />
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The identity in question is that of the <i>entire observed state of affairs</i> rather than just individual entities in isolation, which thereby includes the generation and destruction of entities. At one point in time the state of affairs within a particular context was X and at later point in time the state of affairs relating to the same context was Y, where Y is different to X and action is that process of X giving way to Y. Thus ‘to act’ and ‘action’ may take the form of a change in composition of an entity, or in the layout of an entity, or of the disposition of that entity in relation to another entity, or whatever. An apple was red, now it is brown. The flower was closed, now it is open. The sun was in that part of the sky, now it is in this part of the sky. In all three cases, action has taken place. <i>Why</i> it has, we don’t know yet - but <i>that</i> it has, we do.<br />
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The <i>concept</i> of action is not first-level, just as the three axiomatic concepts were not. Rather, it is drawn from the lower-level concepts for types of actions. Thus we reduce action to swinging, rattling, falling, scratching, stinking, screaming, barking, yelling, and so on for all the kinds of actions whose concepts can be understood by children of single-digit ages. In turn, it is all the concrete instances of each of <i>these</i> that are directly observed and first-level abstractions made for.<br />
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<i>Perceptual roots</i><br />
Take note that it is always entities that are acting, ie it is always entities that are changing in some form either of themselves or in relation to other entities. There is much more to be said than that, but observe that, first, it is entities and their identities that we observe, and second, that it is changes in their identity that we also observe. One will never ever observe action that is not action <i>of entities</i>, and will never observe action other than by means of <i>their</i> changes. I could go back even further, showing how that definition covers observation even prior to the ability to perceive individual entities, but that’s belabouring things.<br />
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And with that we have reached the directly observational roots of action. In school once we actually let an apple go rotten so we could examine it, I’ve seen for myself how flowers open and close (I’ve even teased some Venus Fly-Traps!); and finally, everyone - other than those who are strangers to the Big Blue Room, such as geeks and emos - has seen for themselves the sun rising and setting over the course of a day.<br />
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<b>Reduction of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’</b><br />
So far, all we have is reference to observations of mere juxtapositions of actions with entities. We have observed the fact that there are temporal sequences, and indeed have begun to associate particular sequences and types of sequences with entities and types of entities under various conditions, and so on. BUT, we don’t know why those juxtapositions hold, and we can observe that sometimes they in fact do not hold: some seeds we planted did not sprout, the puppy did not come running when we clanked his dinner bowl, the glue we used to fix a toy didn’t hold properly, and so on. We need more than this.<br />
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When we mean by cause and effect is that there are <i>definite patterns and orders</i> of the progression of total sets of identities. Cause-and-effect means that one particular set of identities <i>will</i> come to hold after an equally particular previous set every time that this previous set comes to pass; and, conversely, a particular set of identities <i>did</i> hold prior to another particular set every time that the later set held. It is in this overall system that we can distinguish the two words: cause is the set of identities at a prior point in time conditioning the sets to follow, while effect is the set of identities at a later point in time, conditioned by the sets that preceded. Hence when we invoke the law of cause and effect what we are doing is looking at the sets of identities at one point in time and then either inferring from those observations conclusions about what sets of identities will exist later or what sets of identities did exist previously. (Note that this also includes the generation and destruction of entities.)<br />
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As with action, the concepts of cause and effect are not first-level abstractions. We do not associate causes with effects without observing particular causes and particular effects, given the particular natures of particular entities, and at and over particular points and ranges in time. In <i>bouncing</i>, for example, we can associate the flexibility of a rubber ball and its apparent determination to reassert a round shape in defiance of being pressed with its rebounding when dropped or thrown against a hard surface. This nature of rubber balls in general, coupled with the particular speeds that individual balls have and the solidity that surfaces have, <i>causes</i> the balls to rebound; and similarly, the rebounding is the <i>effect</i> of rubber balls striking sufficiently hard surfaces with at least some speed. We get used to this so readily with rubber etc that we have no difficulty in surmising the same cause and effect relationships on the part of the metal balls in Newton’s Cradles even though the departures from round are too tiny to see with the naked eye. We can do that because we <i>can</i> tie that with how we can <i>bend</i> metal bars, seeing how most of them want to return <i>almost</i> to their original shape but some them <i>completely</i> to their original shape so long as they aren’t bent beyond a certain point (a fact - called the yield point - that engineers et al have to work with). We contrast rubber and metal balls is say to a ball of dough or mud, which has no such determination to stay round, its flexibility is ‘one way only’, and which on impact with something just spreads out laterally or even breaks apart.<br />
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We can extend those observations for all actions we can poke a stick at - including, I might add, the action of poking things with sticks and observing certain ranges of these things occasionally being none too pleased about it. Amongst other possible reactions to being poked with a stick (and each associable with different types of things), some things exhibit very little response if any, some go crunch and make us say “uh oh”, some go REEAAAAAOWWW and tear the hell out of the sofas they’ve been sleeping on, and others make noises that in turn makes mummy’s face go red and make her rush to clap her hands over our ears. After discovering and associating these causes with effects, sometimes we enact those causes again because we want to repeat the effects. Then we get new effects to ponder, such as smacks to our backsides.<br />
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To a great degree we have come back to most of the perceptually observable roots of cause and effect. However, those examples of external cause-and-effect associations are by themselves just more juxtapositions of actions with entities. We’ve still not yet properly perceived evidence of <i>causation</i>. We infer causes for effects because we already have a nub of a notion of it. Where does that come from? To understand that A <i>causes</i> B, to be justified in inferring that something external to us <i>causes</i> effects likewise external to us, this has to be experienced physically. We must first observe ourselves <i>making</i> things happen and hence generating that nub of a notion through a rudimentary observation of our <i>capabilities</i>. It is we who <i>cause</i> provocations by poking things with sticks, we who cause our arms to move, we who cause our legs to walk us to where we want to go, we who cause our hands to flex, and prior to any of that, we who cause our heads and eyes to turn and look at what we are curious about, we who cause our eyelids to move at all. With that we now are finally at the core perceptual level of causation.<br />
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<b>Discovery of actions and cause-and-effect relationships</b><br />
What we start with is that we can observe action. We see, feel, taste, hear, and smell what is all just an incomprehensible blur at first, but from which we begin to identify patterns and start to become familiar with our surroundings. First, we begin to identify the fact that there are entities, and then that entities have attributes. These lines of investigation lead us eventually to existence and identity.<br />
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<i>Self-control and personal limitation</i><br />
Integral to that is discovery and development of some degree of control over the blur. We can shut out light by closing our eyelids, and we can stop the hurt on our hands and feet (which we as adults know comes about from them hitting the sides of our cots etc) by taking control of our arms and legs. We then become increasingly adept at motor control, becoming ever more able to move our eyes and our heads, to sit upright, to reach for things, and begin crawling, in manners as we choose to enact (including, to continue the previous development, learning to muffle the noises we hear by putting our hands over or fingers in our ears). Thus we start becoming active investigators of the strange world we find ourselves in rather than passive observers of it.<br />
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What gets the ball rolling for our discovery of the <i>principle</i> of cause and effect, rather than just associations of juxtapositions, is not just that we can exercise control but also that there are <i>limits</i> on what we can do. We may want X to happen, but that may be beyond our capabilities. When we experiment with ourselves to see what we can do we find that we have only <i>ranges</i> of capabilities. We may want to reach for something but our arms are only so long, and we cannot squeeze through the bars of our cots or playpens. We may want to move some piece of heavy furniture to get a ball that rolled behind it, but we find that though we can move some kinds we can’t move others, even though we’ve seen the grown-ups do that all the time. From countless examples like these we get the first implicit notions of how we can make things happen how our powers are limited by our natures. Later, we find that our powers not only grow, but we can <i>make</i> them grow through practice.<br />
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From recognition of ourselves causing we can project the same on the part of other entities. We see that our parents make things happen just as we do, and can do even more than we can. They can reach things we cannot, they can move furniture we cannot, and so on. We see other creatures also making things happen. From our own ability to dig holes or tear up paper or pick up balls, and seeing that a puppy can dig holes or tear paper or pick up balls too, we easily recognise that a puppy can <i>make</i> these things happen. And so on for cats and birds and ants and fish and etc. We recognise how those entities also cause things to happen, and can also see that they are limited. We find it amusing, for instance, to see cats try to jump for things and fail miserably, implicitly recognising the principle that there are limits to powers and mocking those who haven’t figured that out yet.<br />
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<i>Problem of anthropomorphism</i><br />
Before too long, however, we are inferring consciousnesses going about making things happen all over the place - and that’s a problem. Whenever mum brings out her cyclonic vacuum cleaner she may threaten to sic the Purple People Eater on us if we’ve been naughty - today we’re big enough boys and girls to be fairly sure she’s joking, but, given that “Roomba” thing that our friend’s parents have and also those robot movies our parents were watching that we’ve sneaked a peek at when we were supposed to be in bed, you never know...<br />
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At the dawn of man, this anthropomorphism lead to animism, then more formal religion. Then there were the Greeks. The discovery that there was a distinction between intentional and non-intentional causation was momentous. This began initially by the same man who, in the same act, separated philosophy from religion: Thales of Miletus. By Aristotle’s time, a bit over two centuries later, what was being commonly spoken of amongst the leading thinkers in Greece in his day lead him to state as a seemingly uncontroversial conclusion that the source of the movement of natural objects was their own essential natures (Book V, Chapter 4).<br />
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I’m not here to examine that progression, just to note that a problem existed for tens of thousand of years and that someone finally solved it and paved the way for our much more secular world. What the fact that this progression took place does, then, is allow us - as children now able to communicate with our parents - to investigate cause-and-effect relations without being tightly saddled with thousands of years’ worth of anthropomorphic nonsense at every turn.<br />
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<i>Cause-and-effect relations</i><br />
Over the same time frame as developing awareness of both self and other entities, we also observe that included in the attributes of things is that they act in certain ways. Initially all is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc">new and exciting</a> and even <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oxmRT2YWw">occasionally scary</a>. We do not know why these patterns hold, we know only that they do. Still, the headline is that we are actively using differentiation and integration to form pre-conceptual notions of types of entities and types of their actions.<br />
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After recognising our own and other’s causative powers, along with linking the ranges of those powers to the respective capabilities of ourselves and others as entities, we now have a first and extremely crude notion of what ‘to cause’ means: to <i>make</i> something happen in a way that is limited by capabilities. Similarly, we understand what ‘to be affected’ means: to act in a way consistent with what sort of thing something is and in what particular way it was prompted to move. This parallels development in learning what action and reaction mean, where for these purposes ‘action’ means pro-active behaviour - we are a way away from learning about the more general concept action that subsumes both.<br />
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We see directly an intentional causation on our own part, and we also easily infer the same again on the part of a wide range of other entities - that is, at least, of all the entities we later conceptualise together as <i>animals</i>. Now, without being saddled by others’ anthropomorphism, and with our parents saying things such as “It’s <i>just</i> a rock / some water / a cloud” etc, we have no significant occasion to develop our own proto-animism and run with it. Instead, after a while it becomes clear that there is also a <i>non-intentional</i> causation, too. We see that many objects are not themselves investigating the world like we do, that they are of themselves generally inactive though are <i>reactive</i> to external prodding. For instance, it is clear that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dobcfo-eBRY">a cat is an active investigator and intentional causer whereas a wadded up ball of paper is not</a>. That paper only moves when we and other intentional beings supply it with power to move, but when we do we can identify it as reacting in certain ways by making sounds as we tear it or scrunch it or by being bouncy or roly-poly when it hits the floor, and so on. The ease with which these two sets of causations can become quickly taken for granted then allows us to have fun playing with the said cat and ball of paper. This treatment of objects that we do not suspect of being intentional causers soon becomes taken for granted for a wide variety of objects, such as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5n7JroG5P4">TV remotes</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJY5BRCNAs4">telephones</a>, and light-switches, all despite the absence of any knowledge of what makes these things tick.<br />
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From here, working on this implicit notion of their being two broad classes of causative behaviour, growth is a process of building up a stock of more implicit notions of particular cause and effect relations. We learn to associate what we can and cannot do with things, and learn to look out for tell-tale indicators of what might happen if we treat something a given way. For example, we have to <i>learn</i> that touching hot things hurts us, and after being warned by our parents plus learning things the hard way (hopefully not traumatically) become careful when we see things we have reason to suspect are hot, such as oven doors or pots or steamy water. As for me, one memory I have is about how light globes are very hot and will melt one’s plastic blocks if placed on top of said globes. I also discovered that parents don’t like that, for some reason.<br />
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Speaking of blocks - we also implicitly learn that things fall. I recall some experiment a few decades ago where they got one of the early models of a manufacturing robot with an AI that was sophisticated for its day and asked it to stack children’s blocks. This robot tried to proceed by grabbing blocks at random and placing them in mid-air in the location they were supposed to go. The blocks then of course fell to the ground, but the robot AI still could not learn to change its approach. Contrast this to a child doing the same. Long before he is even given any blocks to stack he learns through observation and experimentation that things fall when not supported, so when he finally comes to stack blocks he knows very well that he has to start from the bottom and build up from there.<br />
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We also learn that various objects have characteristics that are not obvious to the hand or eye and instead are discovered by an active interaction. These require a little more active investigation, with the accumulation of the results adding to the implicit idea of action and reaction being correlated with that which acts and reacts. A personal example, as my parents tell me but of which I have no memory at all (honestly!), is that apparently I discovered that crystal goblets make a pleasing tinkling sound when smashed. One incident that I <i>do</i> remember is that I experimented with a self-inking rubber stamp... while hidden behind the lounge-room curtains and decorating the wall: *kaCLICK!*kaCLICK!*kaCLICK!*. And puddles! Kids love puddles! Parents don’t like muddy shoes, but, yeah, PUDDLES!<br />
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When both our motor and intellectual skills grow better, we also become able to investigate more complex relations, involving multiple steps. For instance, we learn that there are different steps in baking that have to be done in particular orders, and also that changing the ingredients will give different results - sometimes this is deliberate, so as to make different kinds of breads or biscuits, for instance, or accidental, as in forgetting to put the yeast in and finding that the bread wont rise like it should. And, before we kick the puddle habit for good, we learn to take our shoes off prior to re-entering the house - unless we <i>want</i> to upset mum, which we now know an easy way to do.<br />
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<b>Reconstruction of ‘action’ and ‘cause and effect’</b><br />
<i>First-level concepts</i><br />
The use of words in all this follows along. Indeed, one of the earliest cause-and-effect relationships we learn of is that crying makes one or both of those big huggy food-bringing nappy-changing thingamajigs come to us and give us some attention. Then they try to get us to make strange noises with our mouths by rewarding us with that attention in a good way, whereas, once they start wanting us to make these noises, just crying instead makes them upset when they finally turn up. Soon enough we get the picture and use the special noises to get their attention. Then they teach us more of these sounds, and also what they <i>mean</i>. Then we start uttering these words non-stop and begin annoying the crap out of these “mum” and “dad” thingamajigs.<br />
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After learning some words of pronouns and ordinary nouns, we learn the verbs for particular actions we see and are involved in. For instance, we learn what washing and cleaning etc mean, starting with <i>being</i> washed and cleaned while our parents speak the words. Then we learn about particular ways of doing things, such as <i>driving</i> to grandma’s house rather than <i>walking</i>, where we learn that cars are things used to drive in. Then as we become adept at doing things ourselves we get <i>told</i> to go wash and clean both ourselves and also other things such as dogs, dishes (a favourite of parents everywhere!), cars, and floors, as well as get ordered to do a whole bunch of other things like “pick up your toys!” “put your dirty clothes in the hamper!” “take the bowl back to the kitchen when you’re done!” and so on.<br />
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Then we start learning <i>adjectives</i>. The first are those that describe attributes we can see right away, such as colours, but now we are also beginning to learn adjectives for attributes that can only be discovered by interacting with objects. and seeing how they <i>react</i>. Some of the earliest are partly active: <i>heavy</i> versus <i>lightweight</i>, for instance. We can tie in with how hard they hit the ground when they fall either on the floor or on parts of our bodies: a hammer dropped from waist-height onto our feet <i>hurts more</i> than a plastic blocked dropped from the same. This is related to how that the heavier things are the more effort it takes both to speed them up and slow them down, which later we come to know by the <i>inertia</i> of objects. Other attributes of entities require more direct action to discover. During more baking, for instance, we learn that eggs are <i>fragile</i> or <i>breakable</i>; we learn how toys made of plastic are also fragile whereas toys made of metal are <i>tough</i>, because some can survive a boy in his sandpit whereas others cannot. When we get older this includes further nuances, such as <i>delicate</i> (eg thin versus thick glassware).<br />
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Similarly, with <i>adverbs</i> we learn that the actions themselves have definite natures, such as how movement can be <i>quick</i> or <i>slow</i>, how someone may act <i>clumsily</i> or <i>skilfully</i>, and so on. Note that the ascription of adverbs to actions can only take place to the actions of entities. For that reason the adverbs applicable to actions can lead to related adjectives applicable to entities undertaking those actions. Thus that an egg <i>easily</i> breaks on impacts is what leads us to ascribe fragility them, and so on.<br />
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<i>Sentences</i><br />
After a while we begin being able to describe whole cause-and-effect relations using full sentences. As part of that we learn what the word “why” means. Working from our implicit knowledge of cause and effect, we learn that the word is asking us to describe those relations in words and whole sentences rather than just pointing. Thus, as one mother told me of, a 4yo can understand just by having the words spoken to him how his failure to secure the latch on the rabbit hutch properly allowed the rabbit to get outside and then die of cold overnight (it point of fact, as she told me, the dog did the deed, but she said she wasn’t about to tell him <i>that</i>.) Likewise we find ourselves having to explain to disbelieving parents why the glass cup in the bathroom got smashed, and how it was because we had slippery hands when brushing our teeth just like they told us to. Then we face a barrage of further questions that we are expected to answer.<br />
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We also learn about related words such as ‘because,’ and ‘happened’ and so on. The word ‘because’ is critical: we can begin to use it when we can to use words to <i>link</i> one clause with another to describe <i>a chain of events</i>. We can use it properly when we figure out that is used to explain in words how one set of affairs A <i>caused</i> another set of affairs B - that is, we can say “B happened <i>because</i> A happened first”. For instance, “the airconditioner is hissing out gas because I put a dart through a pipe” and “I put the dartboard on the nail under the airconditioner because there was nowhere else to hang it up” and “Dad grounded me for a month because I broke the airconditioner”. (I was 8.) This word is but a step away from the formal concept of ‘cause’ itself.<br />
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<i>Reconstructing ‘act’ and related concepts</i><br />
Concurrently with the above progress towards describing things in sentences, as a result of a history of both us and others being naughty and being told off for ‘acting up’, asked ‘why did you act like that’ and told ‘stop acting like a baby” etc, we get our earliest introductions to the express concept of ‘to act.’ Thus similar to how our first understanding of causing is of us making things happen, our first understanding of the actual concept of acting is in how we <i>act</i>. An actor and an intentional causer initially mean more or less the thing. The matching word to act, and which coincides with the non-intentional causer is ‘react.’ Our first introduction to the word ‘act’ is in descriptions of this kind pro-active behaviour by ourselves and by others we observe and see being talked about, such as how dad remarks to us in a mock-conspiratorial tone “Mummy’s acting silly, isn’t she!”<br />
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It is later that we start to get more formal about the words <i>action</i> and <i>reaction</i>. We separate action from intentional causation, and instead begin to recognise it as being activity by an entity that happens prior to activity of that or another entity at a later point in time. We learn that the <i>action</i> of the gas flame on the water in the pot is what makes it heat up, and it is the <i>action</i> of the hot water that makes the eggs cook. Then, finally, when we’re older, we can start using the word action in the general sense to encompass reaction too, of treating how something ‘acts’ as similar to how something <i>works</i>, whether overtly acted upon or is the overt actor in any instance. Thus we know that paper boats don’t <i>act</i> like stones when dropped onto water, salt doesn’t <i>act</i> like sugar when it is heated up, and so on. From there, we can go back and forth between the general and the overt meanings with ease, as the context in each case requires.<br />
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And similarly, in conjunction with learning about words such as inertia, note also that by this time we are in school, and have likely been introduced to the express idea of action and reaction as an integrated unit. Most likely all this will happen with reference to the same thing: Newton and his laws. A more scientific examination of action I leave for another time.<br />
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<i>Reconstructing ‘cause’, ‘effect’, and ‘cause-and-effect’</i><br />
By this time a child already has explicit understanding of <i>making</i> things happen. It is a fairly easy task to abstract from “making a ball of paper fall off the table”, “making a cake”, “making your bed”, “making a mess”, etc, to understand what the word make means: to <i>cause</i> something or a state of affairs to be brought into being. One of the earliest examples of the latter that I recall is my brother, about age 3, stepping in front of a car which then came to a screeching halt with barely any room to spare. He turned around and, with a beaming smile on his face, said to our father “I made a car stop!” That wasn’t the only thing he made happen, of course, but that’s another story.<br />
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It is later, as a part of the process of separating action from intention, the child understands that non-intentional objects can ‘make things happen,’ where ‘make’ starts to take on a more abstract meaning of “to cause a given state of affairs to come to hold”. Grammatically, this is the ability to understand verbs in their infinitive form. Thus hot water <i>makes</i> eggs cook, and so on. This is the stage, I think, when a child is about ready to understand the actual word ‘cause’ itself.<br />
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I don’t think it really matters in what context a child first hears the word. For instance, he could hear talk about causes from parents or teachers or the radio or the TV etc, or he could be asked about why he “caused” someone or something to happen, or even perhaps (given the type of parents or school he goes to) the first he hears it is when the actual concept is trying to be taught to him. In any event, with a little abstracting on his part, he figures out what causing means, drawing easily upon his knowledge of what ‘making’ means in the broader sense, along with his knowledge of what ‘because’ means. For example he can now state that the cat <i>caused</i> the paper ball to fall off, gravity <i>caused</i> the ball to fall down; and also: heat <i>causes</i> things to cook, soap <i>causes</i> things to clean better than ordinary water, oil or water on the ground <i>cause</i> people or cars to slide around and have accidents, and so on.<br />
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Soon he can come to understand the noun form, too. That is, he is now capable of looking at “a cause” as an abstract mental entity referring to either a single entity or a whole state of affairs relating to entities, which cause is an explanation of either <i>particular</i> events or as an explanation of why things act certain ways <i>in general</i>. It is even possible that a reference like this could be where he first hears of the word, such as similar situations of overhearing others or from TV or radio, this time with reference being to “the cause” in relation to accidents or motives for action.<br />
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Similarly, as for ‘effect’, sometimes the first exposure to the word itself will be direct reference, such as asking what the effect of something or hearing about how effective or ineffective something is, and sometimes this will be the result of learning that it is synonymous with “result” and hearing <i>that</i> word first from situations such as worrying about test results, exam results, and so on. Another source of hearing the word is in reference to “special effects” of TV programs and movies, but that is a derivative application. In any event I don’t think it worthwhile to go into more detail because it is the counterpart to causing. Thus eggs being hard-boiled (or other food being cooked) is the result of being heated in some way, falling is the result of being dropped from a height or not flying properly any more, a slip is the result of there stepping on something wet or oily on the floor or trying to hold some objet in wet or soapy hands, and so on.<br />
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The last step at this still-child-level progression would be to integrate this with recognition that every form of doing something is causing something to happen. Every doing-verb can be recognised as essentially describing a means of causing some state of affairs to change into another, to which there correspond shifts in the tenses of those verbs. Thus cooking is identifiable as the process of causing things to be cooked, walking and driving are processes of causing people to have walked or be driven from A to B, washing is causing things to get cleaned, and so on. The only verbs that don’t are those that ascribe attributes or otherwise timelessly describe states of being.<br />
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Eventually, after this child builds up several years’ experience, a child has a large accumulated base of knowledge of particular cause-and-effect relationships, he takes the implicit notion of cause-and-effect for granted now (both acting accordingly and understanding what others do or say while equally taking that notion for granted), and he know what the words “cause” and “effect” mean. He has also likely to have even heard the phrase “cause and effect” itself, but if he hasn’t he soon will - most likely in school or some other more formal setting given the more formal nature of that phrase. And when he does hear it, by this time he is able to take to it like a duck to water. He knows this, either implicitly or explicitly, and with the words can have the latter easily: the principle of cause-and-effect is that everything that happens comes about because it is the effect of particular causes, and that these causes are the actions and natures of the entities involved.<br />
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<b>Reconstruction of the Law of Causality</b><br />
A child - or any non-scientist adult, for that matter - can live the rest of life with a perfectly good working knowledge of cause and effect, and can even talk about it with quite a degree of sophistication as his needs require, but he does not yet have a <i>Law</i> of Causality. All he has is, implicitly, a notion of cause-and-effect that is totally taken for granted in all action, and, explicitly (especially in response to the spaced-out or Jim-Jonesish natures of many modern “philosophers” young and old), an a-philosophically dismissive attitude towards doubt and which attitude is usually expressed in the form of attacks on the common sense of anyone who even thinks about asking deeper questions. That’s fine for day work, but for science that will not do.<br />
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<i>The reconstruction</i><br />
The full reconstruction of the Law, qua <i>Law</i>, follows easily on from the preceding reconstructions and to which is added intellectual integration of cause-and-effect and action with the axioms themselves: it is the first explicit discovery and then the intellectual acceptance of the axioms that are the hard parts, particularly among the mystics. Anyway, with the above in place, which will arise mostly just from growing up in the modern world, all the honest thinker need to is reflect on that process and expressly join the dots. That is, one simply formally recognises this progression: to get to the Law of Causality, observe that:<br />
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- there is <i>existence</i>,<br />
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- there is <i>identity</i>,<br />
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- identities can <i>change</i>, ie that there are <i>actions</i>,<br />
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- all actions are actions <i>of actors</i>,<br />
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- all actions are of specific <i>natures</i>,<br />
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- the specific natures of actions are entirely <i>correlated</i> with the natures of the actors causing them,<br />
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- there are <i>actions</i> and <i>reactions</i>, leading to identifying that there are <i>causes</i> and <i>effects</i>, <br />
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- all effects are caused <i>by</i> entities, and all effects are effects <i>upon</i> entities,<br />
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- an entity’s full identity <i>includes</i> the cause-and-effect relations it can exhibit, under various circumstances as set by the influence of other entities to which this likewise applies,<br />
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- the correlation of effects with causes is <i>the same correlation</i> of actions with actors, and<br />
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- all effects are caused <i>only</i> by the full identities of the entities involved in the action.<br />
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That final observation <i>is</i> the Law of Causality. In order to get to it, one has to <i>integrate</i> the fact of actions being <i>actions of entities</i> and being the consequence of <i>the natures of those entities</i> with the fact that <i>existence exists</i> and <i>all existents are of certain natures</i>. In short, as Miss Rand put it, now we can say plainly that Causality is Identity as applied to actions. This turns the working-knowledge of the ordinary man into a proper and defensible philosophical position. Then the young man can go on a ‘causality walk’ to just look around and think about what he sees, and be able to come back later that day to exclaim “there’s causality everywhere!”<br />
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But getting there was by far a lot more work than simply saying that “causality is identity as applied to actions” suggests. There is no escaping the need for actual perception and all the forms of differentiation and integration required in the processes of concept-formation and induction, with or without the intent to get to the final philosophical exposition.<br />
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<i>Back-questioning</i><br />
With the knowledge of the <i>Law</i> of Causality and the understanding of it as a proper philosophical position firmly in hand we can now deal with the kinds of questions asked by the spaced-out types et al. In regards to causality, their questions come down to: why do certain effects follow? Our simple answer to that, is that this is because that’s the way the entities involved are. As A is A, so A does what A does. The question then becomes: why?? To that there is only one answer: existence exists, it had to exist somehow, this is the way it is, and that’s that - like it or lump it.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-22707548936768669332011-06-27T21:19:00.000+09:302011-06-27T21:19:57.198+09:30OTI posting and conceptual hierarchiesI had intended that my next OTI post be on the Law of Non-Contradiction. I wont be doing that next, now. A discussion now would be out of hierarchial sequence because it is mostly about propositions and I haven't even gotten to abstractions of <i>any</i> kind yet. So, I am returning to my original intention - discussing the Law of Causality - even though my original motivation for discussing contradiction - this being the need to make use of the concept - still irks me. I'll have to deal with that fact in due time as well, then.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-33183478858355669542011-06-17T17:13:00.000+09:302011-06-17T17:13:55.411+09:30Some updatesNo, I haven't given up blogging, I've just been busy.<br />
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I had been unbusy enough to start doing blog-related work again by last week, but a comment by Dr Binswanger on HBL regarding the Weights and Measures clause got me to looking at and editing my Constitution again. He said that the government has no business dictating weights and measures where instead that private organisations should be doing that kind of work and market forces converging on the convenient standards. To a great extent he has a point: no standard should be dictated.<br />
<br />
That being said, I do think there is room for some creation by government of standards <i>for government use</i>. What I had in mind - actually before Dr Binswanger even raised the topic but which I had not incorporated in a new edit yet - was that there was a legitimate role for the military to set standards for its own needs of precision. In the US, for instance, I see no reason why a specification of weights and standards cannot be a part of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standard">United States Military Standards</a>.<br />
<br />
Of course, as that wikipedia entry itself indicates, a proliferation of standards causes problems in its own right. And, there is no reason why these military standards cannot themselves just be drawn from pre-existing commercial and academic standards. But all this is just administrative issues that do not negate the principle: there are legitimate grounds for government interest in formulating at least some standards for its own needs. Then, with a decent set of those in place I further see no reason why private individuals and organisations can choose simply to refer to these military standards, so long as the right to use standards at odds with those of government devising is not abridged. For that reason I have kept a weights and measures clause in my own Constitution - but I did make sure to enumerate that right expressly and to shift responsibility for formulation from Justice to Defence.<br />
<br />
The same principle is also applicable to accounting standards, given the legitimate need for law specifying standards for the recording and reporting of government accounts. And, sure enough, accounting standards are a hot-topic, too. Still, there is a provision for that in my own Constitution, which I have had there for a while and have left in for the same reason as above. As a <i>practical</i> point, however, it is probably better that the law in question just adopt commercial standards with only some adjustments - but that I leave to the accountants and the actual context in which a future LFC government finds itself.<br />
<br />
While I was at it I took the opportunity to cut the whole thing back. At 17,500 words it is still just over twice as long as the US Constitution, but I did cut out about 3,000 words of material that is best left to statute created under the Reasonable Person standard. The files of the latest version - in <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/mcvjj01/home/JJMconst13-1.doc">Word Doc</a>, <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/mcvjj01/home/JJMconst13-1.pdf">PDF for A4 paper</a>, and <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/mcvjj01/home/JJMconst13-1USLetter.pdf">PDF for US Letter paper</a> - are available in the <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/mcvjj01/">File Cabinet</a>. I am also told that the numbering system for the Word Doc doesn't work properly in Open Office or some other freeware (the same reason why I gave up on Google Docs, btw), so if the sections aren't numbered continously from 1 to 129 then take the PDF of your choice.<br />
<br />
I increased the main version number from 12 to 13 because the deletion of a number of sections caused all the later ones after the first deletion to be renumbered, plus of course because of the substantial amount I cut out. Feel free to comment, and I will bear good commentary in mind for a future edit, but I wont be touching it for a while: now it's back to working on OTI posts.<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-60235993360579727482011-04-28T22:01:00.003+09:302011-04-28T22:19:54.074+09:30A simple connectionOf course *palm-forehead-smack*! I just realised - leftists look at the world of business and think it is a larger version of their tiresomely cliche` view of the schoolyard as seen in movies: brainless jocks at the top of the pecking order hoarding all the resources for their own interests, always bashing down the weaker but smarter kids, teachers/politicians dealing with insufficient funding unless they work in relation to the jocks' interests, etc etc etc. Heck, there's even at least one whiny song I know of explicitly about it - Simple Plan's "High School never ends".<br />
<br />
Update: second *palm-forehead-smack*... the Comprachicos. Simple Plan don't know the half of it.<br />
<br />
These movies and song etc are of course of the creations of other leftists, working from previous incarnations of the same mentality that set their premisses, and they so experience an echo-chamber that acts as psychological and psychepistemological reinforcement. That's the same lunatic mentality seen when they prattled on about how that the fake military letter about Bush at the heart of Rathergate was something that "bespeaks a truth" or whatever that commentary was even after the fakeness was demonstrated.<br />
<br />
Question: is there any connection of the above to the hateful reaction to the Atlas Shrugged movie (which I haven't seen) that is more than just about the sociopolitical content? Specifically, I am wondering if they instinctively realise that the Altas Shrugged movie - however poor it <i>may</i> or <i>may not</i> be as a stand-alone piece of art - could hinder that echo-chamber mechanism at the unspoken psychoepistemological level. I am not in any position to find out, at present. This question must therefore one more thing for others, more immersed in concretes than I, to follow up on if they judge fit.<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-13776966719936778552011-04-28T15:45:00.001+09:302011-04-28T21:19:15.889+09:30Objectivism Round-up 198<!--
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Welcome to the 28th April 2011 edition of the Objectivism Round-up, number 198! <br />
<br />
It was ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand on Monday, and so I had occasion to review Miss Rand's words to the cadets at West Point in March 1974, reprinted as the title essay in "Philosophy: who needs it" :<br />
<blockquote>The army of a free country has a great responsibility: the right to use force, but not as an instrument of compulsion and brute conquest - as the armies of other countries have done in their histories - only as an instrument of a free nation's self-defense, which means: the defense of man's individual rights. The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right. The highest integrity and sense of honor are required for such a task.<br />
</blockquote><br />
All those in armed service who have lived up to that, <i>thank you</i>. What you helped make possible was a world in which we could write and publish as we have done - but, as some of these entries show, what was won is steadily being lost. The philosophic fight is still being waged. And with that, on to the Roundup (and thanks to C August for pointing out the lack of submitters' additional commentary):<br />
<br />
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<p><b>Roderick Fitts</b> presents <a
href="http://inductivequest.blogspot.com/2011/04/induction-and-reduction-of-values-as.html"
>Induction and Reduction of “Values as Objective”</a
> posted at <a
href="http://inductivequest.blogspot.com/"
>Inductive Quest</a
>, saying, "A reduction and induction of (most) of the steps Rand used to reach her theory that values are not intrinsic or subjective, but objective."<br />
</p><br />
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<p><b>Roderick Fitts</b> presents <a
href="http://inductivequest.blogspot.com/2011/04/induction-of-arbitrary-as-neither-true.html"
>Induction of "The Arbitrary as Neither True Nor False"</a
> posted at <a
href="http://inductivequest.blogspot.com/"
>Inductive Quest</a
>, saying, "My essay on inducing the principle that the arbitrary is not true or false, but noise that can't be processed cognitively. I also discuss how one should treat the arbitrary, and what to do with cases of "arbitrary claims with possible evidence.""<br />
</p><br />
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<p><b>Jared Rhoads</b> presents <a
href="http://lucidicus.org/editorials.php?nav=20110421a"
>Twead #11: Reforming America's Healthcare System</a
> posted at <a
href="http://lucidicus.org"
>The Lucidicus Project</a
>, saying, "This book is a nice collection of nine brief chapters by nine different health policy experts. Here are some notes and quotes."<br />
</p><br />
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<p><b>Opus Dei</b> presents <a
href="http://aynandself.blogspot.com/2011/04/anti-social-indeed.html"
>Anti-social indeed!</a
> posted at <a
href="http://aynandself.blogspot.com/"
>Ayn and Self...</a
>, saying, "Batman is the perfect allegorical character of the 'anti-social' - the banned phantom of the Dark. And I always had him in mind whenever I turned the pages of 'The Fountainhead'. Howard Roark, the man who made possible the Enright House, the Stoggard Temple, the Cortland Homes, the Gail Wynand Building, the man who was one among the greats who contributed the most to society - that man was 'anti-social' indeed (pun intended)!"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Burgess Laughlin</b> presents <a
href="http://reasonversusmysticism.blogspot.com/2011/04/koran-reading-group-begins-may-10.html"
>"Koran Reading Group" begins May 10</a
> posted at <a
href="http://reasonversusmysticism.blogspot.com/"
>The Main Event</a
>, saying, "The upcoming Koran Reading Group is a rare opportunity for serious students of history and dedicated pro-reason activists to study one of the most influential mystical texts of our time."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Ron Pisaturo</b> presents <a
href="http://ronpisaturo.com/blog/2011/04/15/read-atlas-shrugged/"
>Read Atlas Shrugged</a
> posted at <a
href="http://ronpisaturo.com/blog"
>Ron Pisaturo's Blog</a
>, saying, "Here is my way of describing the novel, while withholding spoilers, to those who have not yet read it.<br />
<br />
[I neglected to submit this post last week. I hope it's okay to submit it now.]"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>John Drake</b> presents <a
href="http://trhome.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-to-do-abstract-integrative-reading.html"
>How to do Abstract Integrative Reading</a
> posted at <a
href="http://trhome.blogspot.com/"
>Try Reason!</a
>, saying, "In this post, I summarize a chapter from Ed Locke's Study Methods & Motivation. I also develop a technique for application in my reading and in my teaching."<br />
</p><br />
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<p><b>John McVey</b> presents <a
href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/04/lest-we-forget.html"
>Lest We Forget</a
> posted at <a
href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/"
>John J McVey</a
>, saying, "To the men and women in all branches of legitimate armed service, uniformed and not, who have taken an oath such that I may sleep soundly at night: thank you."<br />
</p><br />
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<p><b>Edward Cline</b> presents <a
href="http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2011/04/off-with-their-heads-islamic-lawfare.html"
>Off With Their Heads: Islamic “Lawfare”</a
> posted at <a
href="http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/"
>The Rule of Reason</a
>, saying, "Lewis Carroll, for all his imagination, could not have imagined that he would make some relevant points in Alice in Wonderland about speaking up against those who would silence criticisms."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Rational Jenn</b> presents <a
href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/2011/04/silent-auction-fundraiser-for-atlos.html"
>Silent Auction Fundraiser for ATLOS</a
> posted at <a
href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/"
>Rational Jenn</a
>, saying, "Help us spread the word about our silent auction! Online bidding has already started and it ends Saturday, April 30. Support a good cause (the Atlanta Objectivist Society) and win some awesome stuff at the same time!"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Rachel Miner</b> presents <a
href="http://theplayfulspiritrachel.blogspot.com/2011/04/reposting-idiom-dictionary.html"
>Reposting: The Idiom Dictionary</a
> posted at <a
href="http://theplayfulspiritrachel.blogspot.com/"
>The Playful Spirit</a
>, saying, "For those who didn't see my original post, this is a fun book that I've been building every week for years. I share the idea and some updates from the past year of entries."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Gene Palmisano</b> presents <a
href="http://raveler.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/misnomer-of-the-week/"
>Misnomer of the Week</a
> posted at <a
href="http://raveler.wordpress.com"
>The Metaphysical Lunch</a
>, saying, "By all means; read the misnomer of the week and click on the podcast (confessions of a neophyte objectivist, Part One) These contents are evolving rapidly, so stay tuned!"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Scott Connery</b> presents <a
href="http://www.rationalpublicradio.com/obama-launches-gas-price-investigation-we-do-the-legwork-for-him.html"
>Obama Launches Gas Price Investigation. We do the Legwork for him</a
> posted at <a
href="http://www.rationalpublicradio.com"
>Rational Public Radio</a
>, saying, "President Obama has launched a disingenuous investigation into gas prices in the hope that he can blame "speculators" and "big business". I do the homework to figure out who is really to blame."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Diana Hsieh</b> presents <a
href="http://blog.dianahsieh.com/2011/04/noodlecast-72-live-rationally-selfish.html"
>NoodleCast #72: Live Rationally Selfish Webcast</a
> posted at <a
href="http://blog.dianahsieh.com/"
>NoodleFood</a
>, saying, "In Sunday's Rationally Selfish Webcast, I answered questions on the basis of manners, brutal honesty, right to legal counsel, government medical insurance, promoting objectivism, and the morality of sadism and masochism. Go listen... and join us on Sunday morning for another episode!"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Jason Stotts</b> presents <a
href="http://jasonstotts.com/2011/04/compersion/"
>Compersion?</a
> posted at <a
href="http://jasonstotts.com"
>Erosophia</a
>, saying, "Here I analyze the idea of "compersion," finding one's partner's pleasure pleasant, and whether it is a legitimate phenomenon."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Shrikant Rangnekar</b> presents <a
href="http://shrikantrangnekar.com/2011/04/18/atlas-shrugged-movie-polls/"
>Atlas Shrugged Movie Polls (Over 350+ answers and counting?)</a
> posted at <a
href="http://shrikantrangnekar.com"
>Shrikant Rangnekar</a
>, saying, "See (over 3500+ answers) in 9 polls on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and participate in them all."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Roberto Sarrionandia</b> presents <a
href="http://sarrionandia.com/blog/?p=153"
>Pomp and Cowardice</a
> posted at <a
href="http://sarrionandia.com/blog"
>Roberto Sarrionandia</a
>, saying, "Altruism and moral cowardice dominate British foreign policy"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Benjamin Skipper</b> presents <a
href="http://benpercent-musingaloud.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-does-evasion-cause-pain.html"
>Why Does Evasion Cause Pain?</a
> posted at <a
href="http://benpercent-musingaloud.blogspot.com/"
>Musing Aloud</a
>, saying, "For anyone who seen someone get an evasion exposed, it can be plainly witnessed the discomfort that it causes. Why is there such discomfort?"<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Benjamin Skipper</b> presents <a
href="http://benpercent-musingaloud.blogspot.com/2011/04/loneliness-and-necessity-of-friendship.html"
>Loneliness and the Necessity of Friendship</a
> posted at <a
href="http://benpercent-musingaloud.blogspot.com/"
>Musing Aloud</a
>, saying, "I've always understood how great friendship is, but it wasn't until recently that I realized that my rejection of its necessity was due to false philosophical conceptions, namely that being physically alone is "bad" and that it can be cured with haphazard relationships."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>C. August</b> presents <a
href="http://www.titanicdeckchairs.com/2011/04/specific-and-general.html"
>The Specific and the General</a
> posted at <a
href="http://www.titanicdeckchairs.com/"
>Titanic Deck Chairs</a
>, saying, "A brief discussion of two blog posts, the connection between them, and the state of American society."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Ari Armstrong</b> presents <a
href="http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/2011/04/no-one-lives-forever.html"
>No One Lives Forever</a
> posted at <a
href="http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/"
>Free Colorado</a
>, saying, "Medical science might eventually enable to live a very long time, but not forever."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Jim Woods</b> presents <a
href="http://jimwoods.thinkertothinker.com/2011/04/24/federal-drinking-age-is-irrational/"
>Federal Drinking Age is Irrational</a
> posted at <a
href="http://jimwoods.thinkertothinker.com"
>Words by Woods</a
>, saying, "This law fosters disrespect for law and undermines honest communication."<br />
</p><br />
<!-- Carnival Submission --><br />
<p><b>Shrikant Rangnekar</b> presents <a
href="http://shrikantrangnekar.com/2011/04/27/atlas-shrugged-movie-report-aglialoro-shrugged/"
>Atlas Shrugged Movie Report: Aglialoro Shrugged?</a
> posted at <a
href="http://shrikantrangnekar.com"
>Shrikant Rangnekar</a
>.<br />
</p><br />
Thank you all for your efforts this week. Next week, your hosts are Santiago and Kelly at <a href="http://www.motherofexiles.org/">Mother of Exiles</a>. Submit your blog article to the next edition of <b>objectivist round up</b> using our <a target="_blank" title="Submit an entry to “objectivist round up”" href="http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_2069.html">carnival submission form</a>. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our <a target="_blank" title="Blog Carnival index for “objectivist round up”" href="http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_2069.html"> blog carnival index page</a>.</p><!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --><br />
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<p>Technorati tags: <br />
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</p><div style="clear: right"></div></div>John McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-54285430090751832832011-04-26T13:08:00.000+09:302011-04-26T13:08:11.003+09:30Seen on the internet<blockquote>Michael Moore hates guns because he is fearful of being mistaken for a rampaging, brain-damaged, feral hog and shot for public safety reasons.</blockquote>- commenter deguello, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/04/25/michael-moore-americans-own-guns-because-theyre-fearful-racists/">here</a>.<br />
<br />
(Hat-tip: Dr Paul Hsieh on facebook).<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-43235237795246962592011-04-25T20:54:00.000+09:302011-04-25T20:54:49.868+09:30Lest We ForgetToday, 25th April, it is <a href="http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac/anzac-tradition/">ANZAC Day</a>.<br />
<br />
The day was initially instituted to remember those who died in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign">Gallipoli campaign</a>, which was a horrendous affair marked also by great heroism on both sides. It has since grown to remember all the theatres in which Australian and New Zealander solders have fallen, to reflect on the cost of war and what it takes to defend our freedoms.<br />
<br />
The word "sacrifice" is mentioned a lot. It is times like these one really feels the loss of not having a good solid and active verb for being willing to bear immense costs in order to secure and promote something of even greater value. When the servicemen and women mention this word the honest listener knows what they mean, and approve of that meaning and its spirit. And on the day, that's what is important - the battle for epistemology can be put aside until tomorrow.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, this day is not over. I have not personally lost anyone in war, and I will not be a mere recreational griever cheapening the pain of those who have. But I do say this: for those who fell so that I may remain free, I am forever grateful, and to the men and women in still living and armed service, who have taken an oath such that I may sleep safely tonight,<br />
<br />
<i>thank you</i>.<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-62425786396774958332011-04-24T16:42:00.000+09:302011-04-24T16:42:16.114+09:30OR197Kelly has the latest <a href="http://reepicheepscoracle.blogspot.com/2011/04/objectivist-round-up-april-21-2011.html">Objectivism Roundup</a> up at <a href="http://reepicheepscoracle.blogspot.com">Reepicheep's Coracle</a>!<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-70997908372826467322011-04-23T20:37:00.000+09:302011-04-23T20:37:16.766+09:30Thorium reactors?I saw a cool comment about wind turbines recently, wanted to post it with proper attributions, forgot where I saw it, so I googled it and <a href="http://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/2011/03/not-to-be-tasteless-or-anything.html">found it</a>:<br />
<blockquote>wind turbines are nothing but prayer wheels for suburbanite Buddhists.</blockquote>Down in the comments I saw one from <a href="http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php">Billy Beck</a>, who gave a youtube link. I looked at it. Whoah! It is highly edited to be <i>extremely</i> fast-paced, and most of it will just fly right past you like a fighter jet on full afterburners if you're not already pretty much up to speed on chemistry and basic nuclear physics. But it is worth looking at if you are, or are willing to stop frequently and keep on going back to re-listen.<br />
<br />
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/WWUeBSoEnRk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
Btw, piece of trivia: that is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_20_cent_coin">an Australian 20c coin</a> shown top left at the 15 min mark.<br />
<br />
Speaking of money, there is a disclosure I should make: I own shares in <a href="http://www.arafuraresources.com.au/">Arafura Resources</a>, whose interests includes thorium from rare earths processing.<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-19186142244367308062011-04-20T21:31:00.000+09:302011-04-20T21:31:54.534+09:30Rockwell Turbo Encabulator<object style="height: 390px; width: 640px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2fjcJp_Nwvk?version=3"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2fjcJp_Nwvk?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></object><br />
<br />
I'll have to let my boss know about this. We've been having trouble with our own drives, particularly the wingle sprockets on our Type-42 Astatinic Dibromovitors. We use Rockwell Systems communications throughout, so they should be plug-n-play, so to speak. However, hypersaline environments are a challenge for most steels, so we'll probably have to get the hygrocontact parts custom made for us if being in 316SS is not available as a standard option. Could be pricy - 316 is a bitch to machine.<br />
<br />
JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-57134969100413908392011-04-20T21:01:00.000+09:302011-04-20T21:01:40.109+09:30OTI post #5 - validation and importanceOkay, so I comprehend what each <i>means</i>, but what of their <i>validation</i>? And why all the song and dance anyway?<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>The three statements as self-evident</b><br />
The question of validating the three propositions is the question of what is the evidence for them. The simple fact is that once the meaning is understood, the evidence required is entirely perceptual: all I need do to satisfy myself is look and see by myself for myself. What need is there for me to engage in complex argument and rigorous thought to accept that existence exists, when all I need do is look for myself and see that a whole bunch of things exist, that I can unite every single one of them all together by that fact under the term ‘existent’, and refer to their totality as ‘existence’? What need have I for complex argument to accept the fact that I am conscious when all I need to is observe myself in the act of observing and contemplating <i>anything</i> in existence and let alone recognise myself having arrived at such a grand abstraction as “existence”? What need have I for complex argument to accept that things are of certain natures when everything I have ever come into contact with, and everything I have ever had reason to infer was present, was always something specific possessing definite characteristics and which made its existence known by definite means by way of those characteristics? Moreover on the nature of things, what need have I for complex argument to tie that fact with existence when the simple observation that to <i>be</i> something is to be <i>something</i> is also perfectly clear in the perceptual evidence?<br />
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In all three cases, including the additional material in tying them together, is all right there before my eyes. All I had to do was look at the world to come to understand the meaning of each concept in each statement and then look back at the world again to recognise the truth of each statement involving those concepts by the statements being descriptions of my observations of the world. Note then that to comprehend the meaning of the three statements <i>is</i> to possess the evidence for them, because that evidence - the observations that lead to them - is required in order to grasp them. This means that the three statements - that existence exists, that consciousness is conscious, and that a thing is itself - are their own evidence for their truth. In short, they are <i>self-evident</i>.<br />
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<i>The broadest meaning of the self-evident</i><br />
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The three statements are not the only things that are self-evident. To be self-evident means precisely that: something is its own evidence. What this means in practice is that the fact in question is <i>perceptual level</i>, that one need only look and see (or use any of the other senses) to discover that the truth is graspable directly from the perceptual evidence. In fact, it was by <i>beginning</i> with individual concrete-level observations that even an infant not yet mobile can grasp and then successively integrating these observations the conceptual scope that the statements were arrived at in the first place. It is these individual concretes that are the root of the self-evident, wherein the statements have no truth other than as grand descriptions of all these concretes integrated together.<br />
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I’ll use Dr Peikoff’s example of a tomato - which I do partly because it is convenient, partly because it so happens that my boss recently gave me some home-grown tomatoes for helping her father with a transportation task, and partly because tomatoes and I have a <i>history</i>. The evidence for the existence of an object that I’ve come to know is an instance of a class of objects known as “tomatoes” is the fact that one happened to be right there in front of me, before my eyes and then in my hand etc. It too was its own evidence - it was there, giving me evidence of itself by means of this red object being placed by me on a cutting board, by means of having a certain texture and messiness when sliced, by it having a smell that was slight yet distinctive to members of that class, by it having a lightly acidic taste that is also distinctive to that class, and so on.<br />
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Unfortunately, you’re going to have to take my word on all that particular example now because I’ve since eaten the evidence. I was going to show you it again with some cheese, but I ate that too. Ditto two slices of buttered white bread, some iodised salt, and some cracked pepper. Sorry. But in any event you can see self-evidency for yourself on anything else anyway. That is, what applies to tomatoes applies to anything else that is directly perceivable, my tea, my computer, my home, and ditto your computer, your home, etc etc. The self-evident in its most general meaning, accordingly, <i>is</i> that which is directly perceivable because the evidence for it is itself. This applies to the three statements as well as concrete instances because of the simple method by which one validates them: look and see, ie identify their truth directly from perception.<br />
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<i>The self-evident contra the obvious</i><br />
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One fact about the self-evident must be observed at this point: a given truth being <i>self-evident</i> is <i>not</i> synonymous with it being <i>obvious</i>. It is not always the case that self-evident truths are such that anyone can look at the perceptual data and rattle off the express statement of the facts so observed as though this were a piece of cake. This <i>does</i> hold in the case of the concrete-level self-evidencies - eg that there is a keyboard beneath my fingers and a cup of tea sitting to my right - but it doesn’t hold for the three statements, which should have been clear in the lengths I had to go to in order to isolate the meanings of the concepts in the statements - and that was with the benefit of prior knowledge of the concepts and the statements involving them.<br />
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Consider the history behind the three statements. If we begin from just the survivors of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory">Toba Catastrophe</a>, the human race as we would genetically identify with it as of today had been existence for at least seventy thousand years (and, properly, greatly longer than even that) before the concepts were first explicitly used and contemplated by philosophers. Indeed, a scientific approach to philosophy in general did not exist until the work of Thales of Miletus in the 7th century BC, where prior to that what existed for professional inquiry and thought was religion. Then one can count around three hundred years from Thales to Aristotle, and also just over a thousand years between Thales and Augustine (ie if Dr Peikoff is right about Augustine being the first to draw express attention to the existence of consciousness operating actively as a definite faculty). From there, to go from just the concepts to the full statements was, at minimum, another fifteen hundred years. Even accounting for the Dark Age period there were many high-calibre thinkers in that period - not just in Europe (don’t forget <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus">al-Andalus</a>, btw) but also to the south and to the east - who had awareness of the works of those past thinkers yet did not formulate what Ayn Rand did. Alongside the context of knowledge of previous work it took acts of <i>genius</i> to formulate the concepts, the precursors to the statements, and finally Rand’s statements themselves. The idea that the three statements are obvious is ludicrous.<br />
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Yet be the requisite acts of genius to <i>originate</i> matters as they may, <i>validation</i> is a simple matter for me - and for any other adult with a functioning mind - because the statements are nevertheless still <i>self-evident</i>. All that I or anyone else need to do to verify them is look at reality directly, remember the meanings of the concepts involved - which themselves were built from integrations originating in perceptions - and complete the conceptualisation process by integrating the perceptual data with the individual concepts to validate the facts described by the three statements. And that is precisely what I did, with the point of the considerable discussion being what is necessary to identify how to <i>isolate</i> the meanings down to the concrete-level self-evidencies that a child begins with. Now that I’ve isolated the meanings for you, <i>you</i> go do it too.<br />
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Origination by one person is a separate issue from validation by another. Each of us is in the latter position, where, in that position, all <i>we</i> need to do is go straight to perceptual data - and <i>that</i> is what is meant by the self-evident.<br />
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<b>The statements as foundations of knowledge</b><br />
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Looking at the above, at the commonality in self-evidency between the concretes and the statements, two interesting facts become apparent. Then, from these facts, certain conclusions must be drawn.<br />
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<i>The statements as the widest integrations possible to man</i><br />
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The first interesting fact is that the three statements are clearly the widest integrations of observations of concretes that is possible to me. The process starts with me having an object in me hand and observing that “<i>this</i> exists” and, in the manner already described when analysing existence, moves upwards from there. I integrate my observation of this object with other objects I observe, and so, step by step, I can successively recast my observation of the self-evident as “this particular <i>tomato</i> exists”, “this particular <i>piece of fruit</i> exists,” “this particular <i>plant matter</i> exists,” “this particular <i>animate matter </i>exists,” and “this particular <i>entity / existent</i> exists.” The latter is where it stops, as there is nothing else to integrate all that exists with into identification of an even wider class of things. The same process is evident in me observing that “I <i>know</i> that this particular object exists” etc all the way to “I <i>know</i> that this existent exists,” from which at some point I finally explicitly noted that <i>I can know</i>. Likewise it is evident that things are always something in particular, no matter how broad my understanding of what type of thing something in particular is and how broad its connections with other things is, where the broadest connection is that <i>they are things that exist</i> and also recognise that something <i>existing</i> is always <i>something</i> existing.<br />
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What applies to me applies to anyone else who shares my kind of consciousness - ie this applies to all men. For <i>all</i> men, the perception of a tomato is the evidence of the <i>existence</i> of that tomato, evidence of each man being <i>conscious</i> of that tomato he perceives, and evidence of that tomato being <i>that particular entity with such and such characteristics</i>. All observation points to this procedure and its results being applicable to anything and not just tomatoes, that whenever you identify <i>anything</i> you have evidence for the <i>existence</i> of something, evidence for your ability to be <i>conscious</i> of the existence and the nature of something (and also by particular means, which will be explored later), and evidence of that something being <i>something</i>, no matter what that something is.<br />
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Now, neither I nor anyone else had to perform every single possible intermediate step of integrating entities into wider and wider classifications between child-level concepts like tomato and the top-level concept of existent, but at some point each man can draw the ultimate conclusions and arrive at concepts that cannot be seen as instances of anything wider. Different men will draw that conclusion at different points in the development of their own knowledge - and some never do at all - but it isn’t necessary to have knowledge of every single intermediate in order to realise that this final step is there for the taking. And then, after that, <i>all further observations and classification of things consists of reorganising known intermediates and recognising more intermediates</i>.<br />
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For instance, it was once believed that living organisms were divided into plants and animals but it has since been discovered that there are living organisms that are neither. For one thing, after a lot of investigation and with much still-ongoing controversy, a new <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_classification">classificatory</a> layer was interposed between “plants and animals” and “living things.” Plants and animals are now recognised as types of “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote">eukaryota</a>”, which higher-level grouping shares equal billing with “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea">archaea</a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria">bacteria</a>” as the three “domains” of living organisms. For another thing, there are also now known to be other kingdoms that share equal billing with plants and animals within the eukaryota domain, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoebozoa">amoebozoas</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungi">fungi</a> - that too is a matter of controversy.<br />
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Similar discoveries and reclassifications, naturally attendant with controversies to match, have been made and will continue to be made in all avenues of investigation. But whatever discoveries there are in future, and however the attendant controversies may be resolved in future, they will only ever be reclassifications of an within a particular structure that sits alongside other structures as part of a larger structure all beneath the concept of “existent”. We do not need to make any more discoveries or resolve any controversies in order to recognise that “existent” is that top-most concept of things. Again, the same process applies to the concepts of consciousness and identity for all men just as it did for me.<br />
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<i>The statements as implicit in all observations</i><br />
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The second interesting fact is that every single observation I ever made and I ever will make has always been and will always be <i>evidence</i> of the three statements by being instances. More critically, there had always been at least some degree of <i>acceptance</i> of that evidence as evidence in every single observation. Certainly, only now as an experienced person capable of identifying abstractions have I formed the explicit concepts in the statements, but nevertheless it becomes clear that I had always been operating on the basis of the three statements being true by way of relying on concrete examples whenever I acted.<br />
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For instance, I recall as a five-year-old cautiously starting to eat a bit of this sloppy, red, lumpy-ring-shaped thing I’d never seen before, instantly disliking it and spitting it out (my tastes have changed since then). I had absolutely none of the knowledge of tomatoes then as I do now, yet even in that first experience it was implicit that this thing <i>existed</i>, that I <i>knew</i> this thing existed, and that this thing was a definite <i>something</i>. Ditto the experiences of my brother, who as a regular two-year-old reacted to this strange and horrible thing by throwing the remains of his own against a wall, and also my mother when making our lunches that day over thirty years ago, and again by me at lunch time today, on the part of my boss’s farmer father and my boss herself last week, and everyone else in any way involved with tomatoes (eg the kids stocking shelves at the local <a href="http://woolworths.com.au/wps/wcm/connect/webSite/Woolworths/">Woollies supermarket</a>).<br />
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That was just for tomatoes, but more observation shows that the same applies for any entity that I or anyone else has observed. In fact, <i>it is an inherent part of development of human consciousness</i>. The perception of entities is automatised very early in life. One can see this in how infants soon begin reaching for objects to examine them more closely or to use them in some way, and how after that their existence is taken for granted. He gets hungry, so reaches for his bottle when offered to him. He gets fascinated by the pretty coloured objects dangling above him, begins swatting them and sees them spin around as his little fingers make contact with these objects. When he wants to see better what is going on beyond the confines of his crib he figures out then takes for granted how he can use the uprights and cross-beam of a crib-wall for support when he pulls himself to his feet. When he is free to move around on his hands and knees he crawls towards things that interest him. And so on - in all of which existence, consciousness, and identity are implicit. Indeed, the three facts are implicit in having any sensory data whatever: it is data about <i>something</i>, held by <i>someone</i>, and of a specific <i>nature</i>.<br />
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So, from my experience with tomatoes, countless similar observations of my and others’ interactions with other entities besides tomatoes, seeing how it is inherent in the life of man right from infancy, and seeing how it is implicit in the mere possession of sensory data of any kind, this principle is clearly generalisable to all observations by all men. The three concepts at the heart of the three statements are implicit in <i>all</i> observations by man, and in turn so is the truth of the three statements built from them.<br />
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<i>The three statements as foundations</i><br />
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Okay, identifying the top-most concepts in conceptual hierarchies is very nice, but all the above seems like a lot of effort to get what otherwise appears to be a rather underwhelming result. What other good do they serve? Rand went to a lot of trouble for them, and was adamant about their importance. I see <i>that</i> they are so, but what can I see for myself that would justify highlighting that <i>they are so</i>?<br />
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Here again I must accept I am very much only a philosophy-for-Rearden type. There is of course no shame in this, and perhaps I nevertheless <i>can</i> offer a few original leads <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/02/simultaneous-concretisation.html">here</a> and <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2010/09/response-to-anarchism-questions.html">there</a> for the philosophy-for-Akston types to pursue more rigorously, but this does mean I must rely on others for origination. I’ll get to this later, as first here are two things I figured out for myself before I looked it up in ItOE.<br />
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The first, and of personal historical importance to me, is that it is an express recognition that facts are facts and one can KNOW things. One of my earliest memories, around age 4 I think, was of me in pre-school one day making paintings in class. At the end of it the teacher was remarking on the various paintings we made. My offering that day was merely an enormous black blob... which the teacher gushed over and said “look, John’s painted <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incy_wincy_spider">Incy Wincy Spider</a>!” Nuh-uh, Miss. It had nothing whatever to do with Incy Wincy Spider, and in fact was not an attempt to paint anything in particular at all. There was some mildly dark mood I was in at the time, and I recall painting that mess over the top of something else (I don’t think it was even mine to paint over, to tell the truth) with no aim in mind. More importantly, when she made those comments I recall thinking “You are <i>wrong</i>” with <i>finality</i>. I didn’t say anything, partly because not disabusing her kept her off my back, but mostly because I had no desire to express the mood I was in at the time. Her praise meant nothing to me (I recall actually holding her in contempt for that), nor did praise from any other child (I don’t think any other kid actually said anything anyway, not that I took much notice) - I was content to think privately (I still am - the folks I met at OCON08 remarked on how quiet I am IRL).<br />
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The more I think back on this incident the more I think that it was more formative than I had previously recognised. It is the earliest point in my life that I can recall in which I realised that there was a definite distinction between that which is and that which people say is. Now as an adult I can see it was my first explicit introduction to the facts that what exists, exists, that what exists is of a certain nature irrespective of opinion, and that there are such things as knowing the truth about what exists and being mistaken. And, in relation to the question of the importance of the three statements, it was the first point in time in which I stood alone with my own judgement, quietly adamant that <i>I was fit to judge things and people because I could see and know the truth for myself</i>. The discovery of the three statements is in part built from experiences like these, but a key purpose of making them explicit is in justifying taking the kind of attitude I expressed as a pre-schooler - that I can and must make <i>my own judgement</i> of <i>that which exists</i> as based on observed <i>facts</i> - for any and all investigations of reality.<br />
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Nine years later the essence of that incident was repeated, with equal finality but with vastly greater scope and importance. No prizes for guessing the nature of <i>this</i> incident. By this time I was one of the oldest children in Sunday School with the local Salvation Army, and had in fact been picked out for inclusion in a decidedly adult prayer meeting totally apart from any regular services (I never found out why). Well then, if these people are going to treat me increasingly like an adult and expect me to start acting like one, I had better do just that. So I did, and began reading the Bible all on my own, without prompting and without a study group. I don’t recall the time-frame, but eventually I ran across Paul’s infamous exhortation for women to stay silent etc. I did not ask anyone else for clarification or whatnot, I didn’t need to! The majority of the instructors in Sunday School were women - which included the Captain’s wife and another woman who was a major organiser of events and the like - all of whom I respected and gave me no reason to think that them being women had any significance for the questions of true and false and of right and wrong. So, when I read Paul’s letter to Timothy, thought to myself with unshakable conviction “this guy’s an arsehole!”<br />
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Me being me, the inevitable happened: I took a step back intellectually, and recognised that if I could see that this guy, who is a major figure in Christianity, can be not just mistaken but most definitely a prick, why should I take <i>any</i> part of this Bible seriously? I don’t recall what other concretes came to mind - I suspect the bulk of it was a sense-of-life reaction because none of the Bible could really connect with me - but I think that the presence of other kids who didn’t go to Sunday School at all and of Indian/Pakistani kids with completely alien beliefs had a part in it by serving as stark contrasts. In any event, I think it was not even two weeks after making that discovery and judgement that I avowed myself as an atheist.<br />
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Today of course the Christians have spin-doctors for that - I am quite certain my reaction was not unique. I don’t care. What I do care about is the fact that whatever remnants of a faith-orientation such as I had were shattered forever then, and, more importantly, that I experienced that <i>not</i> as a nihilistic cynic but as one who could recognise for himself by himself from perceptual evidence that such and such was just so and that another such and such was not so despite nearly two thousand years of people saying the opposite. I was right and a Church Father was wrong. Once again what underlay taking such a position with conviction is expressible by the three statements, which are true even when others say something at odd with them, and of which my thoughts were instances of acceptance and reliance upon in order to reconnect with reality after having been lead astray by mystics. And once again, an invaluable use of the three statements is to go back to moments such as these and say “I was right to do so” with intellectual armament as back-up rather than only the vagaries of sense-of-life and happenstance, and, with concretisation and integration like that in hand, to continue making use of this armament when facing all manner of questions and controversies thereafter.<br />
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Continuing on with that vein, and integrating it with my knowledge of science and engineering (rather than concretising this in detail and make your eyes glaze over I’ll cheat and say go get Dr Peikoff’s IPP lectures and Mr Harriman’s “The Logical Leap”), and also with all the work I’ve put into the above, I can also sum it all up with recognition that there is no breach between the simplest concrete-level perceptions on the one hand and the widest possible abstractions on the other, with the connection of the two being successive abstraction and integration. By showing the steps of conceptual development required to formulate the statements and then stating explicitly that the principle of validation by self-evidency and observation applies at both ends of the cognitive spectrum, the explicit discovery and acceptance of the axioms brings home the fact that the basis of <i>all</i> knowledge - both at and everything in between those two ends - is to reduce observation and inference back to the material of sensory observation. That is, everything that is <i>not</i> self-evident but held to be true must be linkable back to that which <i>is</i> self-evident. No matter how abstract a given line of inquiry becomes, we have a life-line to keep thoughts tied to reality. All knowledge besides the three statements themselves, then, is now identifiable as consisting of discovering the <i>details</i> of <i>what</i> exists, of <i>in what manner</i> it exists, what the connections between all manner of these individual elements and facets of existence are, and how man should go about discovering this.<br />
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In regards to life-lines, as I can see there are two related critical points about the three statements. First, the facts that they are obtained by integrating the observations of every particular life-line identified and that they connect the two extremes of direct perception on the one hand and the widest possible integration on the other means <i>we can safely extend the abstractness of any particular line of inquiry to be as long as we need it to become and still remain true to reality so long as we maintain the connections to the self-evident</i>. Second, the fact that the three statements are universal and cover all of reality and all of man’s cognitive activity in relation to reality <i>they are common to and integrators of all lines of inquiry with each other, reminding us that all knowledge is interrelated because it all comes down to knowledge of the same one existence</i>. Different lines of inquiry, then, are just different subsidiary aspects of what is really just one grand line of inquiry. No discovery in one subsidiary line may contradict a discovery in another: if such a contradiction is found, at least one of the two discoveries is in fact mistaken. A great value of the three statements, therefore is to remind us of the existence of these life-lines and to provide a base that shows us how to keep hold of them in any instance.<br />
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Anyway, what did Miss Rand have to say? Her answers are to be found in the second edition of ITOE, not just in Chapter 6 but also block 10 of the workshop transcripts. In pp260-1 she concurs with Professor E that roles for “axiomatic” concepts include:<br />
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- the continuity of successive acts of human consciousness<br />
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- the ability to make express recognition of the primacy of existence, and<br />
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- the underscoring of primary facts as a contrast to non-existence, fantasy and error etc.<br />
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To them she added a fourth: epistemological guidance.<br />
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She goes on to note that it is the third of these three that is most important. Yes, I can see that - it’s what makes the first two possible. My first thought was to say “interestingly,” but given the content of pp262-3 I suspect Miss Rand would have said “naturally”, in response to how that this was the first application I focussed on, both as a child at the times and now while wracking my brain for observational data by which to identify what the fuss is. But in any event it means I have already concretised the most important reason for caring about the three statements. And, also, in identifying the sum of those incidents etc, I implicitly covered what is meant by the continuity of consciousness: whatever you do, wherever you go, however you think, the facts of existence, consciousness and identity are there, timeless, and one’s grasp of them helps one keep one’s experience and knowledge across time as an integrated whole. They serve as reminders that all knowledge is knowledge of the same one reality, and so no thought in one field may contradict a thought in another, and that if a contradiction is found then at least one of these thoughts is in error.<br />
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That then leaves the primacy of existence and the nature of epistemological guidance. Both of these I will leave to the future.<br />
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<i>The three statements as axioms</i><br />
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From the facts above it becomes clear that the facts expressed by the three statements are <i>always</i> implied throughout all of my - <i>and man’s</i> - cognitive activity. They were implied from the very first possession of sensory data and hence first instance of discriminated awareness, implied in every step of cognitive development to their recognition as being the widest abstractions possible to man, and implied in every act of expanding one’s knowledge of everything between those two cognitive poles. They are also implied when I and others are mistaken, and even implied when others are given to flights of fantasy just as when I once was. There is no cognitive act that man performs in which they are not implied.<br />
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There is a problem arising from the fact that the statements are implicit in all cognitive activity: since they are so implied it is not possible to <i>prove</i> the three statements. Any act of proof, since any such an act is a cognitive activity, already relies upon those statements being true in order for the constituent thoughts in those acts to have meaning. I cannot <i>prove</i> that existence exists, except by relying on the existence of evidence, which presupposes existence as such. I cannot <i>prove</i> that I am conscious except by relying on me being a conscious being capable of advanced cognitive activity. And I cannot <i>prove</i> identity except by relying the fact that facts are facts.<br />
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However, the same also applies to any attempt to <i>reject</i> the three statements, again because the act of rejection implicitly relies on the three being true. I cannot deny existence except by accepting that there is something to reject and evidence to dismiss. I cannot deny consciousness except by means of a cognitive process, which act relies upon consciousness. And I cannot deny identity except by means of accepting there being a definite contrast between that which is so and that which is not. This is also why the three are implied by flights of fantasy, which flights when contrasted against explicit statements are shown to be contradictory and are in turn brought to a halt. I’ve not had much experience with those who’ve been thoroughgoing deniers of the three statements, so again I must cheat and refer you to Dr Peikoff’s OPAR for his example, which there is no point in me repeating here.<br />
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There is a word for statements of this nature: they are called <i>axioms</i>. That word originates in ancient Greek roughly meaning “worthy of authority”. How fitting! The three statements <i>are</i> rightly worthy of authority, for as noted they are the foundational bedrock and binding force for all investigation and all knowledge. Thus, existence exists, consciousness is conscious, and a thing itself, are indeed the great axioms undergirding all knowledge. And any man who understands what they mean and the proper method of validating is justified in establishing them as authoritative for himself, by himself, and on their sure footing climb the greatest heights he is fully capable of.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-41373768157620594972011-04-04T18:04:00.000+09:302011-04-04T18:04:55.184+09:30OTI post #4 - The Law of IdentityIn previous <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/search/label/OTI%20work">OTI work</a> I had covered <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-1.html">the basic context</a>, <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-2-existence-exists.html">existence</a>, and <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-3-consciousness-is-conscious.html">consciousness</a>. Now it is time to pay attention to the Law of Identity.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>Basic meaning</b><br />
There are a few different ways of expressing this fact. One is as stated, that a thing is itself. Another is “what is, is what it is”, and another again is “A is A”. In any event, they are all forms of what is known as the Law of Identity. Its basic meaning is that everything that exists is of a certain nature, that each existent is the integration of all its attributes.<br />
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<b>Reducing identity and nature</b><br />
The fundamental concept is that of “identity”. I think there are two paths of reduction, here.<br />
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The first path of reduction comes from noting that, in the context of a variant of the Law of Identity, the other related concepts are basically synonyms of identity, and differ merely in degrees of focus or linguistic register or both. These other concepts include: thing, something, itself, and nature.<br />
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The <i>identity</i> of any given thing - that is, the <i>nature</i> of anything - is whatever makes that thing <i>that particular thing</i>. The referents for these two concepts, then, are the concepts of attribute classes. As a prelude to the express knowledge of the concept of identity, a child therefore needs to know a notable range of concepts of attributes sufficient to describe an entity in some detail. This amount should also be sufficient for a child to comprehend the concept of “attribute” - though the concept of “attribute” itself isn’t necessary, where what is important is the understanding of the <i>notion</i> of it, which understanding is evidenced by the child comprehending what is meant by “about” in the question “tell me something <i>about</i> X”.<br />
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These attributes are in turn either are reducible to or already are perceptual-level observables by the five senses: weight, texture, flexibility/inflexibility, brittleness, smell, taste, sound, colouration, and so on. These are the only root means by which we may come to know of the nature of anything, with all other means being indirect connections to these observables. This is particularly obvious in the case of a child, who has no other means of knowing a thing but by those directly perceivable facets of that thing.<br />
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The other part of reduction is noting that the notion of <i>attributes cannot be applicable to anything other than entities</i>. Have you ever seen an attribute floating about looking for an entity to descend upon? Obviously not. Quite the opposite - one cannot comprehend any particular attribute, nor the notion (never mind the concept) of attribute except by abstracting from the possession of attributes by entities. It is only by observing attributes as attributes <i>of entities</i> that one can gain the abstract awareness of this or that attribute. Thus before one can comprehend <i>identity</i> explicitly one must first comprehend <i>entity</i> in at least some implicit form or better. This also ties in with the above reduction because those lesser synonyms are also considerably synonymous with entity too, differing only in terms of focus.<br />
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Before I leave, I can note that there is also a use of the word “identity” to refer to the fact that two things are equal to and interchangeable with each other. From what I can gather, this is the word in the form of an abstract noun referring to a relationship between two items of consideration rather than the character of one item of consideration, and that this is mostly to do with definitions and how the same one thing has different labels for different contexts, and also in mathematics. For instance, the square root of -1 is represented by i, so the formula “SQRT(-1)=i” is said to be “an identity.” As far as I can see, this is a derivative of the Law of Identity, though not interchangeable with it (note Dr Peikoff being vociferously unimpressed by those who state the Law as “A=A,” which I was once guilty of on an online avatar.) Similarly, and also in mathematics, the square matrix with ones running top-left to bottom right with zeroes everywhere else is said to be the identity matrix, because it is the matrix equivalent of unity and so when another matrix is multiplied by it the result is that same other matrix. Again, these are advanced derivatives, are well beyond the ken of pre-teens, and so should not be allowed to get in the way of a basic understanding of what “identity” means at the most fundamental level.<br />
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<i>Perceptual roots</i><br />
As foundation to all of the above, and also the further reductions below, we are back to the capacity to identify entities as such as a mechanical-perceptual skill. Again, after this skill is acquired the existence of actual <i>entities</i> is subsequently taken for granted by consciousness until later explicitly identified. Making that identification requires cognitive effort, part of which involves successfully learning the above concepts and all that goes into them.<br />
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An additional part of that skill, acquired a little later in life, is the ability to make selective focus on the attributes themselves rather than their integrated sum. In the early stages of learning concepts, this is another thing that is implicit and which it is an achievement to do explicitly again by conscious effort and focus.<br />
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<b>Reducing “A thing is itself”</b><br />
Most often, one would never reduce every single word in a proposition describing a whole concept or principle one is trying to reduce. Here I will make an exception, partly because I went ahead and did it anyway before even considering the propriety of it until after the fact, but also because I thought that it might be instructive and I had already resolved to leave no stone unturned at this foundational level.<br />
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<i>A</i><br />
The word “a” is a grammatical tool for use in conjunction with concepts of entities. It is the indefinite article, indicating that there is a single instance of the concept to which it refers (ie the article) and where any of those members are interchangeable with the instance being referred to (ie the indefinitude). In short, until further notice the instance so referred to is not of special interest, other than that it is one being singled out for momentary attention. For example in “Joe ate an apple” he ate one apple out of a broad selection from which he could choose, and that we, the audience for that statement, are for now at least not given reason to pay that apple further mind.<br />
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The chief contrast is the definite article “the,” which indicates that closer attention should be paid or that the entity so referred to is in some notable way differentiable from other instances of that same concept. For instance in “The apple that Joe ate was tasty,” it refers to the particular apple he ate as an item of interest separate from other apples, many of which may not be as tasty as the particular one eaten by Joe, such as say the apple eaten by Sally in “but the apple that Sally ate was bland.” Note again that the “the” in this second half of a compound sentence indicates a closer attention to a particular instance is to be paid, in this case that her particular apple was of poorer quality than most other apples.<br />
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The other contrast is, again, the use of the word “some” in an article-like fashion. In this case, as partly already indicated, the word “some” in this context is not separate from “thing” but concatenated with it to create a single word. Again, I won’t go into this here - all that matters is the fact of contrast so as to understand what the concept “a” means.<br />
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<i>Thing</i><br />
The concepts “thing” and “something” are less high-minded terms for “entity.” In part, the difference between the two is chiefly of a grammatical nature, but there is also a difference in emphasis. Thing refers to the general fact of being an entity, whereas something has added reference to the fact that the thing does have some identity that is unknown or unspecified.<br />
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There is also a grammatical difference between the two, in that “something” does not need an article if it is the subject of a sentence, whereas “thing” does. To that extent, the single word “something” is a concatenation of the article-like “some” and regular “thing”. I don’t think I need to explore this further at this stage.<br />
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The concept of “thing” is not a first-level abstraction. It is a reference to entities in their capacity as entities of some kind where the specific word attachable to any given entity or class of entities is either unknown or at least just unspecified. Thus prior to knowing of the concepts “thing” and “something” it is necessary to identify at least some names of particular entities (such as family members, family pets, friends, and other people, and later also places with names such as streets and cities etc), and the words for concepts (ie of whole classes of entities) - and then it is necessary to have occasion to speak or write a word of some kind to refer to a given entity despite the lack of desire to name it or perhaps in the lack of knowledge of that name. Indeed, the invocation of the word “thing” is frequently in a context of some kind of exasperation, such as “what the blazes is THAT thing!?” and “this thing’s STUCK!”, though this is hardly the whole of the context for using “thing.”<br />
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<i>Is</i><br />
The reduction of “is” was done as part of comprehending the meaning of “existence exists.”<br />
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<i>Itself</i><br />
The word “itself” is, according to the dictionary, the reflexive form of the word “it,” where “it” is a pronoun that refers to an entity that has just been specified or is just about to be specified (except in the “prop ‘it’ ” usage, such as in “It is raining,” which usage is only a grammatical construction and so isn’t further examined here). What is additional about the word “itself” is that it is also used to refer specifically to the nature of the thing that is the “it” so reflected upon. It is of course, then, in this context that the word is used, the context being a statement of the Law of Identity. The key concept is thus “nature,” where the statement “A thing is itself” is a simpler way of saying “A thing is of a certain nature.”<br />
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Much of this, then, has already been discussed. The nature of anything is what makes that thing that particular thing. This cannot be anything other than the complete set of the attributes of that thing. The referents for the concept of nature, then, are the concepts of attribute classes. These attributes are in turn either are reducible to or already are perceptual-level observables by the five senses: weight, texture, flexibility/inflexibility, brittleness, smell, taste, sound, colouration, and so on.<br />
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<b>Reconstructing the concepts</b><br />
The reconstruction is mostly just the reverse order exposition of the reduction. The mechanical-perceptual skills of being able to perceive entities and selectivity-skills of being able to focus on individual characteristics of entities are taken as the base and are not explained here.<br />
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<i>A and itself</i><br />
The learning of what “a” and “itself” mean mostly comes from grasping grammatical nuances. I’ll just note here that the meanings of the two have already been covered - indefinite article and reflexive pronoun, respectively - and since there is not much point in restating what has already been stated I’ll leave the rest to grammatical treatises to deal with.<br />
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<i>Thing</i><br />
The concepts of “thing” and “something” are predicated on a child knowing (implicitly at least) that there are indeed entities, and also only once development of the ability to speak is already well underway. This requires the implicit knowledge and expectation that there are such things as names of individual entities and words for concepts. The words “thing” and “something” are learned ostensively in most cases after a host of such names and words is under the belt, by learning the words and then learning that they mean recognising an entity as an entity but either not being able to identify that entity either by proper name or by reference to known concepts of entities or by not bothering to make that identification. The former is achieved when a child is able to ask questions such as “What’s that thing?”, make pronouncements such as “I want something to eat” and make assertions such as “There’s something in my wardrobe!” and the latter is achieved when a child is able to say “I don’t like that thing” when he knows very well what the “thing” is.<br />
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Further, the two words also generally refer to non-human entities when that fact of non-humanness is known. Note on that score that it is an <i>insult</i> to deliberately refer to a person as a <i>thing</i> or a <i>something</i>, though quite alright to say “something hit the wall” if one could not identify what it was where the something was in fact a someone (or part of their body such as a fist or foot). Similarly, referring to something as a thing when one knows very well what particular type of thing is often also an expression of annoyance or disapproval, such as “this thing is stuck!” and “that thing stinks!” Of course, taking the easy option of a simple word rather than a more complex name or concept also plays a part, usually when the identity of the thing in question is also known to the audience of the statement: contrast “this thing’s stuck!” with “this ute latch is stuck!”<br />
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Aside from the contrast of entities of known versus unknown identities (be that in terms of individual names or classifications), technically speaking another contrast to “thing” and “something” is “stuff.” “Stuff” often refers to material that comes in a continuous form, or is at least referrable to as such, rather than as discrete entities as the primary consideration. For a child this is mostly in the form of gasses (eg mist, spray, steam, smoke), liquids (water, juices, milk), thick oils (butter, peanut butter), slurries (porridge, pureed fruit, mud), gels & emulsions (jam, cream), and powders (salt, pepper, sand).<br />
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Yet even so, definite amounts of stuff (eg containers-full or internally cohesive globs) are also entities, and likewise may be constructed of readily observable entities (eg grains of salt, individual beans from a beans-and-sauce mix or individual oats from porridge). Not surprisingly, the concepts of thing and something can be regularly applied to stuff because the key characteristics we are interested in and which are the context for the concepts - the fact that they are all existents of unknown or unspecified nature - is there in equal measure in both “thing” and “stuff.” Accordingly, the philosophical implications are the same, with the distinction being non-sharp and mostly of a non-philosophical nature that I needn’t look at further.<br />
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Similarly, “stuff” does sometimes get used to refer to a collection of things, be that collection closed or open-ended. An example of a closed-ended use is to refer to “Go put your stuff back in your bag” and an open-ended example is “All the best stuff comes from there,” where in both examples “things” is interchangeable with “stuff.” I don’t think there is anything important to be gained in pursuing these nuances as this kind of usage strikes me as just grammar and linguistics, along with how it frequently reflects sloppy thinking.<br />
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<i>Nature</i><br />
One meaning of “nature” is the reference to the natural world. This is obviously not what is meant here, though there is an evolutionary origin for the two meanings. I won’t go into that right now, if ever.<br />
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If not expressly taught it first, a child could be introduced to the word by over hearing a fragment of a conversation such as “or something of that nature”. Another source is movies and television, such as the last line from the introduction to the Japanese TV series ‘Monkey’: “The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!”<br />
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The word itself can be taught by showing that different entities have different attributes, and that the nature of something is the complete set of those attributes. In regards to Monkey, for example, that line was a reference to the fact that, in the Chinese story “Journey to the West”, Buddha tried to tame Monkey’s wild character by trapping him under a mountain but this experience failed to change him. The contrast required for “nature” is therefore the different actual natures of individual things and classes of things. A contrast for Monkey is the natures of Pigsy, Sandy, and Tripitaka, for example. In the TV series at least, Pigsy’s nature <i>did</i> change to become more human, with express attention drawn to that fact.<br />
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An important point is not to confuse “nature” with any particular class of attribute that one is showing as a contrast. Different classes need to be pointed out, such as that different things have different hardness, different weights, different colours, different smells, and so on. Then one can say that the nature of something is the whole integrated sum of <i>all</i> the features about any given entity or material. The nature of an apple is the fact that it is sweet, the fact that the skin is red or green or yellow, the fact that it has a core, and so on, as contrasted to both how an orange is orange, has a different kind of sweetness, that it doesn’t have a core, etc, and also to how a given brick may be pale yellow, is rectilinear and oblong, is heavy, is hard and brittle, is man-made, and so on.<br />
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There are additional nuances of nature, but these relate to essences and as such are epistemological in nature rather than metaphysical, so I won’t deal with them here. As far as each entity is concerned, it is the whole of what it is. <i>All</i> attributes of an existent are equally important in making that entity what it is. Change any one of those features and the identity of that existent changes. It is only we, from the epistemological perspective, who assign different weights and imports to different attributes and changes therein. For example, scratch a rock slightly and the kind of thing it is changes, but as far as <i>we</i> are concerned the rock is still the same plain old rock - unless there were a particular reason for our own needs that the presence or absence of man-made scratches is a game-changer in terms of how we deal with that rock, such as the scratch being contamination of archaeological or palaeontological evidence for some theory or rendering the rock unfit for decorative use.<br />
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<i>Identity</i><br />
The concept of identity is predicated on knowledge of the concept of nature. The concept of “identity” in this context is another way of viewing the concept of the nature of a thing but in a more on-a-pedestal kind of contemplation of the integrated sum. In some circumstances the words are interchangeable: “The nature of the cause was X” and “The identity of the cause was X” mean the same thing. But in other circumstances they are not, such as how in “I want something of that nature” is common whereas “I want something of that identity” strikes the ear as off. The difference is, again, subtleties in grammatical use, though with foundation in slight differences in attitude and formal treatment.<br />
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That being the case, I take the reconstruction of “nature” as already doing the legwork for the reconstruction of “identity,” and note that the latter is a more high-brow concept whose word for it gives a closer indication of relationships to entities: entities are identities.<br />
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The first introduction that a child is liable to have to the word “identity” is in being asked to discover the identity of something or someone, such as “the identity of the thief.” In this case, the child is starting with knowledge of a few of the characteristics of some entity and is being required to identify other characteristics and in time able to isolate a specific entity or class of entities by name. While this is a derivative of and dependent on the full philosophic meaning of identity, this usage is not quite what is meant in philosophy - but for a child to get to that this just requires knowledge of and integration with the concept of nature and the formal philosophic treatment of each. I don’t think I need to go deeper into that, here.<br />
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<b>Reconstructing “A thing is itself” and “A is A”</b><br />
Again, the statements do not come about merely by slapping words together in a convenient fashion. Rather, they come from a simple realisation of a fundamental fact from the entire history of what has been observed about all entities and materials, and then formulating means of expressing that fact by use of concepts.<br />
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The fact identifiable from observations is that every single entity or material ever observed to exist or imputed to exist is always of a certain nature. There is no entity or material that is ever identified except by means of particular attributes that let its existence be known by some definite means. Every single individual entity or actual quantity of material is of a definite nature, that each exists and has an entire set of attributes that go into making what each entity or amount of material is.<br />
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Even the non-descript and the nebulous are of definite natures. Something being “non-descript” just means it is commonplace and not worth remarking on, not that it has no features capable of being described. A description could be made if there were call for it - but there was no call, hence no description made. Similarly, to be nebulous is necessarily to be of a certain nature, to wit, thin and wispy, consisting of microparticles of varying inter-particle distances yet all moving in some fashion as part of a loose structure acting to some degree as though part of a larger body, such as a cloud moving in the sky or a fog rolling in from the sea or some smoke rising from a fire. To be constantly <i>changing</i> in the precise details of identity (mostly of shape, density and opacity) is just that and only that, and does not mean the <i>absence</i> of an identity at any given time.<br />
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The statement “a thing is itself” is a summation of the above facts in the form of a universal principle. It consists of the connection of the fact that each thing (including set amounts of material) is an existent and that it is a definite “itself,” ie that each thing is itself. A thing is the whole of its attributes, where reference to “itself” indicates that <i>the sum</i> is the item of contemplation and to be connected to <i>the entity</i> as an item of contemplation.<br />
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The second statement, “A is A,” is a more formal way of expressing the Law of Identity. The first “A” stands for the name of some entity or class of entities and the second “A” stands for the integrated sum of the attributes of that entity. The two are linked by “is” because a thing <i>is</i> the integrated sum of its attributes. It can also be the other way around! Either way, it is a blunt underscoring of the fact that things are what they are and that is that, irrespective of any wish or desire that they be something else.<br />
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<b>Existence and identity</b><br />
In the reduction, note that the statement form of the Law, “a thing is itself,” was as simpler way of saying “a thing is of a certain nature.” Note that the linking verb there is “is,” not “has.” This is important, because this mode of expression is used to indicate that a thing is nothing other than itself, that it is invalid to talk of a thing with no nature at all. An existent is the integration of all its attributes, <i>all</i> of which are elements of existence. It is nonsensical to separate an entity from its nature, as though there were some vaporous capacity for something to be and where attributes descend upon it to give it corporeal form - a thing without attributes is no thing at all.<br />
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Recall from before that there was a distinction in focus between “thing” and “something,” that the former was entity-oriented while the latter was identity-oriented. Again, we can see that the two are variants of the same fact: to be <i>a thing</i> is to be <i>a something</i> - to be a thing is to be a thing of <i>some</i> kind. Taking it back to the law of identity, the connection between existence and identity can therefore be expressed by noting that to <i>be</i> something is to be <i>something</i>.<br />
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Moreover, observe that attributes do not exist except as attributes <i>of entities</i>. There is no <i>greenness</i> floating about independently of <i>things that are green</i>. This is flipside of the fact that a thing is the integration of all its attributes. The whole of an entity’s attributes constitute its existence - existence is not a single attribute on equal footing with the other attributes. Rather, <i>each and every attribute exists and can only exist by means of being attributes of something that exists</i>. Just as it is absurd to posit a thing without any attributes at all, it is equally absurd to posit some grand integration of attributes that lacks only the “attribute” of existence.<br />
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It is for these reasons, notes Dr Peikoff, that Rand created the formulation “existence <i>is</i> identity.” The former - existence - is the fact of <i>integration</i> of attributes, while the latter - identity - is the fact of integration of <i>attributes</i>. The two are therefore not inseparable but two are different ways of looking at the same one phenomenon, differing only on what element is the datum of consideration.<br />
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You could look at the above and say “that is going around in circles!” My response to that is: “precisely.”<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-64112861569627978352011-03-20T14:09:00.001+10:302011-03-20T14:13:02.120+10:30OTI post #3 - Consciousness is consciousI'd previously started with <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-1.html">material on context and method</a>, and figured out <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-2-existence-exists.html">how to arrive at existence exists from observation</a>. Now to move on to consciousness. Again, this is probably longer than it needs to be, but it's done.<br />
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<b>1.3 Consciousness is conscious</b><br />
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The next thing that Rand said followed was the identification that “consciousness is conscious”. Dr Peikoff notes in Understanding Objectivism that it is not strictly necessary that this be second, because identity could be second and that the axiom of consciousness could come third instead. However, it comes second because identification of identity is a specific item of knowledge that consciousness identifies as part of identifying that existence exists.<br />
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The further point in going for consciousness second is that metaphysics and epistemology are , at least in the early stages of the latter, hierarchically simultaneous. This makes sense. The admixture of metaphysics and epistemology was already visible in the discussion of sources of contrast for being qua being, and, going broader than that, the context of this work includes recognising that consciousness works by being based on processes of differentiation and integration, along with specifics such as difference and agreement. This is reason enough to pick consciousness second, whatever other additional reasons there may be.<br />
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<b>Basic meaning</b><br />
The statement “consciousness is conscious” means that there is a particular faculty and it is characterised by it being one of awareness. Other than underlining my recognition of myself, it does not state how many consciousnesses there are or the particular means by which awareness is achieved. All it states is the fact that it exists and it is capable of awareness. I have the capacity to know that something exists. This fact of knowing is a fact of me being conscious of something, and the part of me doing this knowing (for there is more to me than just this capacity to know things) is my consciousness.<br />
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Again, though, both concepts are highly abstract. But, unlike for “exist” and “existence”, after much thinking I don’t think it is necessary to comprehend (or even have heard) the word “conscious” in order to understand “consciousness.” Each can be held independently, where the other is held as a derivative from it. What is etymologically true is beside the point - it only matters that there is this faculty and that there is a name for it. Etymology, at least in general, is not a significant concern to me.<br />
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<b>Reduction of the concepts</b><br />
I had originally thought about reducing each concept individually, and had settled on starting with “conscious” because of the suspicion that the pattern that had to be followed for “existence” and “exists” might also have to be followed here. Now, though, I see that the suspicion was misplaced and that there’s more to this than just reducing those two concepts. In terms of philosophic analysis and exposition, consciousness is a far more complex phenomenon than existence, where the complexities of existence are instead what the special sciences deal with.<br />
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For “consciousness is conscious” there is actually a number of different paths of reduction to follow before the meaning of these words can be fully comprehended. I will of course rest on the material for existence in order to deal with “is,” and needn’t reiterate that. That leaves the phenomena of consciousness and being conscious themselves, then the process of justifying connection with “is.” Here is a substantial (yet not comprehensive) list:<br />
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Concepts of the entity: consciousness (ultimate), mind, inside your/my head, heart, soul, memory, faculty, mind’s eye, mind’s ear, imagination<br />
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Concepts of quality of state: conscious (ultimate), conscious (medical), unconscious, awake, asleep, alert, aware, observant, oblivious, dozy<br />
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Concepts of reference: I, me, you, he, she, we, us, they, them, all the possessive-case variants of these, and all the reflexive variants of these<br />
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Concepts of attributes: smart, dumb, quick, slow, forgetful<br />
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Concepts of direct actions: focus, concentrate, drift, evade, fantasize, muse, speculate, contemplate, comprehend, ponder, judge, calculate, evaluate, choose, decide, express, and bodily actions, concepts of pleasing and hurting<br />
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Concepts of more passive actions: know, think, believe, hold, see (mentally), feel (emotionally), the five sensations and their individual concepts (bright, loud, stinky, sweet, sharp, etc), pleasures and pains as experiences<br />
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Concepts of content: knowledge, thoughts, perceptions, conceptions, comprehensions, understandings, judgements, feelings and individual concepts thereof, values, goals, aims, purposes, standards<br />
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The express recognition of actual consciousness itself begins with the first personal observation of oneself in the process of learning, of knowing that one had forgotten things, of trying one’s best to remember, and succeeding. This also presumes the first beginnings of knowing how to speak so as to be communicated with and hence able to tested on what one is expected to have learned, be those tests formal (ie actual tests of learning itself without knowledge of the use of that learning) or informal (impromptu tests when one is asked if one remembers something that had to be remembered for the purposes itself, such as dress technique or brushing teeth).<br />
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Yet that is still not the beginning, because the fund of experiences necessary to get to that stage starts being acquired well before the first attempts at speaking are made. The root of concepts of consciousness is activities relating to consciousness dealing with existence itself, where learning to speak is only one means of such dealings with existence. Long before a child is capable of speaking there is his basic discovery that he is <i>able to act at all</i>. The root of the discovery of consciousness lies in his very first <i>deliberate</i> actions of <i>any</i> kind, which at their most basic are movement of one’s limbs, fingers, head, eyes, and even just the eyelids. These are the ultimate raw data leading to the discovery of the existence of the “I”, consisting of one’s body and one’s mind. And that, the first deliberate action, even if as simple as experimenting with eyelid movement or flexing fingers, is the perceptual level for concepts of consciousness. Actions deeper than that are automated physiological actions and outside the province of conscious behaviour (though there can be <i>some</i> retaking of control over a few of them, later).<br />
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<b>Reconstructing the two concepts</b><br />
Again, unlike for the existence concepts, I don’t think there is a set progression of one concept to the other. I think it possible that a child could understand either word first and then the other, or could learn the full meaning of only one (and either one at that) and not recognise the full meaning of the other at all.<br />
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<i>Separation of consciousness and existence through differentiation</i><br />
Every single state of awareness has two classes of components: the object of consciousness and the subject of consciousness. Prior to the express discovery of consciousness, only bits of content in the world around him can be the object of his consciousness. The subject of consciousness - ie his consciousness itself - provides the format of that awareness and can only be learned of after a great variety of objects and formats of awareness are observed and which allow him to abstract the actions of his consciousness from what he is observing.<br />
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Again, concepts require differentiation and integration. In this case what is necessary primarily is separation of the object of awareness from the subject exercising the processes of awareness, and integrating multiple examples of this to identify the fact of there <i>being</i> a subject and processes of awareness. The contrast to consciousness is non-consciousness, though what this latter consists of is considerably varied. And before he can get to that, he has to build up a fund of pre-conceptual experiences that will serve as material for future integration. Note, then, that the following is not meant to be taken as a linear development on a single path, but describes a variety of lines of development that run in parallel. Some start later than others, but once they’ve become operative they are generally concurrent processes.<br />
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<i>The beginnings of self-awareness</i><br />
The start of the discovery of consciousness is that the child must first be capable of <i>deliberation</i> and then acting externally on the basis of that deliberation. This deliberation cannot be and does not have to be a linguistic determination. It is required only that the action he performs in his mind is the choice to exercise mental focus on something and then to will the actions of his body as a consequence. When he first starts doing this, just a few weeks or months into life, it is his beginnings of his active investigation of existence, with him at the epistemological centre of his investigation. He has also begun to practice goal-directed behaviour at the conscious level.<br />
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His initial development will be physically-oriented and perceptual level, with discoveries being incorporated into that which is taken for granted. For instance, he sees objects and tries to reach for them, taking completely for granted that they are <i>there</i>. Likewise, the existence of existents that are peripheral to his investigation, such as the horizontal bars of his crib that he uses for support when standing, are also totally taken for granted once he accepts that they are there. But this is all so implicit and primitive (by adult standards) that almost nobody can remember this far back in life - the explicit identification of such “therenesses” is a later achievement, as already described. The focus at the moment is the fact that he is picking, choosing, focussing, and actively trying to comprehend.<br />
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Still, at this stage of life - and in combination with the notoriously short attention-span of children - the experiences will be too chaotic and too incredibly <i>new</i> for any investigation to be systematic. Rather, when he starts doing one thing he will be flooded with sensory data from a bewildering array of sources. In the course of any action he undertakes he finds that there are consequences of those actions besides those directly related to what he was investigating by those actions, which consequences are often as interesting and worthy of investigation as what he was initially intent upon. For instance, he lifts his hand to reach for an object hanging from the mobile above his crib (which we know to be a piece of plastic in the shape of say a horse) and find that when his hand falls back down it hits the crib-bars or his blanket or mattress, which then suddenly gives him sensations he’s not noticed before. He may then focus his attention on that suddenness, and investigate it by varying the energy he puts into touching or hitting things, and begins to build up a picture of his sense of touch, which likewise gives him more unexpected experiences to take in. With countless examples like this, in part it increases his awareness of things in the world around him to investigate both in terms of existence and their nature, but what is also happening his the growing awareness of the fact of sensation and perception itself, which will continue to be a topic of investigation in its own right for a long time.<br />
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He also finds he is frustrated by his own physical limitations, such as how he cannot reach that hanging shape despite his efforts. With enough experiences of this nature he can integrate the fact that he is a being of a definite physical nature. Adding to this is that in time he discovers that his capacities can be improved, which awareness he can get from his own improvement and also from being examined by others and seeing his progress tracked (eg the classic height-and-age marks on walls etc). Another component of this is improvement in his ability to figure out techniques of dealing with his limitations and so overcome what frustrates him. For instance, there was a video doing the email rounds showing that a toddler figured out how to circumvent a child-barrier security gate by first tossing a big pillow on the other side and then hauling himself over the gate to fall onto that pillow, clearly acting in the knowledge that without the pillow he’d be hurt when he landed. Such a child is well on his way to self-awareness. (One can also easily imagine the parents filming this would have both felt pride and annoyance - pride that their son used his <i>mind</i> to find a solution to a problem, and annoyed because now they would have to be extra vigilant and update their security measures to keep their boy safe!)<br />
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These are the first of all the referents that are eventually integrated into his awareness of his own physical self as a whole and its capacity for development. And, in time, experiences are no longer all sui generis, for sooner or later he will come across the same experiences under the same conditions again and again. By means of rudimentary versions of the methods of difference and agreement, through differentiation and integration at the perceptual level, he can begin to extract sense from the chaos. His world stops being quite so bewildering (this is part of his taking ever more things for granted), and when he does have new experiences they are often integrable with what he has already experienced before. In conjunction with his increased physical strength, mobility, and ingenuity, he is on his way to having a basis on which to become much more adventurous and able to comprehend more. In time this will include the complete recognition of his “I.”<br />
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<i>The first identification of “I”</i><br />
After gaining better control of his body and after being exposed to other people speaking (particularly his parents and their active encouragement of this), he now begins to become interested in speaking himself. The first word he speaks is almost always “Mum” (or its equivalent in other cultures and languages), for the simple reason that she is a great value to him, where, after first following her cues to make the sound without knowing its importance, he realises that the sound she teaches him to make has the effect of getting her attention in his favour. Soon enough he begins to understand what that word means: it is a <i>reference</i> to <i>her.</i> And from there on, too, both for revelling in his own understanding and enjoying the encouragement of his parents, he begins to learn not just words that are references and names for particular people etc but words that symbolise <i>concepts</i>. Those processes are discussed way later.<br />
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During the time he is learning to speak, one set of concepts he is taught early on is the names for parts of his body. He learns he has fingers, hands, arms, toes, feet, legs, a stomach, a chest, a throat, a head, and so on. As previously described, he has already been perceptually investigating some of this, but here his awareness of self is now beginning to be conceptual level. In this case, he will have already been consciously examining himself and testing out his physical abilities, such as flexing his fingers, moving his arms, wiggling his toes, moving his legs, moving his head and eyes, all just to identify the fact that he can do these things and to identify the range of motions available to him. These will have been developed at the perceptual level and taken for granted very early on (note that nobody can remember much at all this far back), while now he is having explicit attention drawn to them again but this time on the conceptual level, which is more memorable and will make its contribution to self-identification.<br />
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What is also important in this self-rediscovery is that he learns he has things he can touch with, has a nose to smell with, ears to hear with, eyes to see with, and a tongue to taste with. These contribute not simply to self-awareness, but of awareness of his means of awareness, which can be integrated with physical self-awareness into a complete awareness of self by his means of awareness being vital elements in his whole system of means of interaction with reality.<br />
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After a while of teaching by his parents and his observation of and thought about others’ talk in general, he becomes able to form and understand the simplest sentences. To get onto the part of discovery of consciousness, though, these must begin to include his use of those that contain the words “I” and “me,” helped along with concepts for other personal experiences and rudimentary value judgements, for which the pre-conceptual data discussed above are vital referents.<br />
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Here the contrast required to identify the express concept “I” is straight-forward. He sees that others use the word “I” and use it to refer to themselves, to which the contrast is other people referring to those same people but with different words. For example his mum can say “I am wearing a hat!” while she points to herself then the hat, followed by his dad saying “Mum is wearing a hat!” while pointing to her and her hat. Then his dad can say “I am wearing glasses!” and he points to himself then his glasses, and then she says “Dad is wearing glasses!”, and points to him and then his glasses. Then his mother can get the child to point to himself and to say “I”, and then to get him to point to his sandals and to say “am wearing sandals!” The child can also see countless examples of using “I” in all manner of other contexts other than deliberately set-up teaching moments like that. The contrast is then against second and third party references: “you,” “they,” “he,” “she.”<br />
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His conceptual-level awareness of physical self is further aided by him learning the concepts for actions he undertakes. Again, he had already been doing many of these actions where the point is conceptualisation. Now he knows explicitly that he can reach, walk, get up, fall down, lie down, roll over, run, trip up, and so on. In line with that he learns equally conceptually that he can get hurt in various ways, such as bang into things, get scrapes or splinters or cuts, touch things that are too hot, and so on.<br />
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As the child develops in linguistic prowess this includes the words “am” and “me” in his sentences. Thus at some point the child is capable of using basic sentences describing his own actions or experiences: “I saw a pretty cloud,” “I’m hungry,” “He kicked me in the legs!” “It wasn’t me running in the hall!” Likewise, he can also start using the words for sensory-perceptions, with the focus now being express reference to his experiencing them: “I see some clouds” “I hear Rex barking outside” “I smell bacon cooking” “I feel something heavy in my bag” “I can taste lemon in the water”.<br />
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With that, he possesses the root concept of “I” and can successfully use it in sentences, though his understanding of “I” is still nowhere near complete because his use of “I” is as still perceptual-level and mostly physically oriented.<br />
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<i>The first concepts of actions and content of consciousness</i><br />
A little while after beginning to form sentences and then using the word “I”, he starts learning the first concepts of content of consciousness. These are words such as know, forgot, want, and like, which he can put in I-centred sentences: “I know my ABC’s!” “I don’t know where her doll is!” “I forgot my mittens, but I remembered my boots.” He is already clear on his physical “I”, so the word is no floating abstraction, but now he is gathering the referents for his mental “I.”<br />
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It is once he has these words down pat, through integration from a sufficient variety of instances as per all learning of concepts, he can focus on the concepts deliberately and connect them to himself. This enables him to identify his first express <i>mental</i> contrasts, through the process of learning or discovering things that he hadn’t prior known about. For example, in instance after instance he identifies that previously he <i>didn’t</i> know things and that afterwards he <i>did</i> know things. Also, fuel for this identification would be where other people ask him questions and he doesn’t know the answer. At some point after this gathering up of referents he begins to draw the express contrast of <i>knowing</i> versus <i>not knowing</i>. He can eventually say to himself: “I can <i>know</i> stuff” and “There is stuff I <i>don’t</i> know.”<br />
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This kind of contrast and its repeated instances can lead to integrations of the other founding concepts of consciousness. In these cases, he is eventually able to say “I can <i>think</i> stuff” contrasted with “Sometimes I can’t think of stuff”, to say “I can <i>feel</i> stuff” contrasted with “Sometimes I don’t feel anything” and so on.<br />
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I think a crucial part of recognition of consciousness lies also in recognition of <i>degrees</i> of awareness and <i>degrees</i> of ability to become knowledgeable about things. He then comes to learn of concepts such as smart or stupid, and so on. As part of that, as uncomfortable as it is, it is inevitable that he will eventually be involved to some degree in personal attacks where he is sometimes the offender, sometimes the victim, and sometimes just an observer of these attacks. Thus there are attacks for being dumb and also attacks for being smart, which, for better or worse in terms of the concretes of the moment that he automatises, do give him referents to a variety of concepts of consciousness.<br />
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With that, he can identify the fact <i>that</i> he has knowledge, thoughts, abilities, feelings, preferences, desires, and some degree of intelligence, and also that the same applies to others too, all of which identifications are more data for the formation of the concepts of consciousness and to be conscious.<br />
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<i>The development of express valuation</i><br />
He also develops his first deliberate likes and dislikes during this. This typically begins with foods, because of being regularly fed from day one and being exposed to an increasing variety as his capacity to eat advances. There had always been basic pleasurable or displeasurable tastes to what he smelled and ate, but now he is recognising the association of those tastes and smells with what causes them and acting upon the knowledge of those associations. Soon enough he is favouring some foods more than others, including rejecting foods outright deliberately because he now knows in advance of eating what has just been offered to him doesn’t taste good to him. In time his range of preferences also encompasses things like clothing, games, organised sports, music or other artistic classes, and so on.<br />
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In addition to this his capacity to understand emotions grows, too, which further enriches his capacity to identify and express value judgements. At some point he can learn the concepts for individual emotional states, such as angry or happy or sad, which can only be fully comprehended by his recognition of his own experience of them.<br />
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All this develops in line with his experiences and also his acquisition of the requisite words and concepts: like, dislike, hate, want, don’t want, and so on, plus the concepts for the concrete things for which he has these likes and dislikes. The result is his ability to express statements such as: “I don’t like tomatoes.” “Soccer is fun!” and “I don’t want to go to kindy, I want to stay home with you!”<br />
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An important element in this express identification of preferences and desires is him being offered express <i>choices</i>. For example, what kind of lollies or flavour of ice-cream does he want for being a good boy? Here he is not just having reactions after the fact but is being asked to make judgements <i>consciously</i> before the fact. In addition to his first formal introduction to the express fact of his capacity to choose, this also sets the stage for his verbal expression of likes and dislikes as such independent of actual pursuit or immediately prior experience of concretes. For instance, he can be asked to state what kind of foods he likes in some class at kindy or school, <i>not</i> as a prelude to being given them but as <i>an academic exercise</i>. With exposure to this exercise of judgement and choice, as well as being material for other inductions later, he is building up referents for him as a <i>maker of value-judgements</i>, which is a critical aspect of human consciousness and which he must identify if he is to understand “consciousness” fully.<br />
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<i>Awareness of truth versus untruth</i><br />
Another parallel line of development is his recognition of the contrast between the <i>true</i> and the <i>untrue</i>. He learns that a statement is true if it corresponds to what is actual, and that a statement is untrue if it contradicts it. The contrast here is not just that which enables him to learn those concepts, but also that the exposure to both teaches him of the distinction of reality itself versus statements allegedly about reality.<br />
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Recognition of the distinction between <i>that which is said</i> and <i>that which is actual</i> is a significant milestone. It is a point at which the notion of <i>doubt</i> can begin to be formed, because he will be exposed to people saying one thing and discovering that something else is in fact the case. But this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. It can be good if it is material that leads him to begin taking care in what he thinks, and it can be bad if he finds his confidence broken and he mentally retreats from the world. Though others can help or hinder, in the end how he responds to his discovery of doubt is up to him.<br />
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Moreover, this recognition is also the first exposure to particulars leading to formation of the concept of <i>morality</i>, via his own actual experiences of truth versus lies and of justice versus malice. He begins to realise that sometimes he is <i>misled</i> by others, not that they are only mistaken, and that he likewise has a capacity to <i>mislead</i> others. His sister may have told him a lie which he later finds out about. In turn, he may, despite his protestation to the contrary, know very well where his sister’s doll is, which he is not telling about because he may have hidden it or damaged it in revenge (or because he just wants to make her upset out of malice), and so on.<br />
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With experiences like these, and with sufficient exposure to concepts such as “mistake,” “truth,” and “lie,” he comes to realise that there is such a thing as <i>products and contents of consciousness</i> as distinct from <i>products and contents of existence</i>. His discovery of this is a major step towards full identification of consciousness itself.<br />
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<i>Contrasts in awareness</i><br />
One of the means by which he came to discover what to exist meant was in abstraction from instances of recognition of presence. Knowledge of the capacity for <i>awareness</i> can come from re-examining these instances and noticing the fact of the recognition itself rather than the presences so recognised. This of course must come after a number of such instances, and because of the emotions surrounding all these instances would require both a degree of emotional maturity and a degree of detachment exercised at the time of re-examination, which are possible only to older children and above. This will also integrate with his more generalised understanding of his capacity to <i>know</i> things, but with a focus on him explicitly recognising the physical acts themselves and expanding his concept of <i>knowing</i> accordingly.<br />
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The recognition of the difference between being awake and being asleep is another critical contrast. The first introduction to this contrast is in recognising himself being sleepy and nodding off, how fuzzy it gets before he falls asleep, and how can’t remember either falling asleep or waking up again and sometimes wondering how on earth he got where he is (ie that his parents moved him from the lounge or out of the car, etc). Another means of gathering instances is of him being woken up and <i>wanting</i> to go back to sleep despite others not letting him. Adding to the list of referents for this is observing the same in others, including non-humans such as pets or the animals shown on TV or seen in a zoo or in the wild or wherever else. Soon enough, he learns what the words “sleep” and “awake” mean, along with their respective variants. “Nooooo, no kindy, I’m sleeping!” he says, burying himself in his bed-sheets, not untypically in the morning after a night in which he threw a tantrum because he wanted to stay up.<br />
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More advanced still, but with much less likelihood, he could also become aware at this early age of the distinction between being conscious and being unconscious. Given the nature of this, all instances of these are apt to be emotionally charged, particularly if it is a loved one who has gone unconscious or has regained consciousness. Depending on his circumstances and events he becomes aware of, and how the grown-ups around him during these times treat his questions about what is going on and what the words they are using mean, experiences like these could also be his first exposure to the words “conscious” and “consciousness” themselves.<br />
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<i>Powers of imagination and will</i><br />
Another datum is during learning to read. More specifically, this is about learning to read <i>quietly</i>. This is a feat that was a long-time coming, where until it was learned people had to read out loud when reading even by themselves. Kids today still start out by such vocalised reading. It was, and today still is, an achievement to control the inside of one’s mind and read silently, using only one’s mind’s voice to sort-of convert the visual words to sounds. In time, this also leads to recognition of full over one’s mind’s voice, not just in reading.<br />
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Another datum again, of a similar nature, is recognition of and control over the mind’s eye. This is where one can imagine seeing something, be that something completely new or as an alteration to what is actually before one’s eyes.<br />
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Both of these are perceptual-level experiences, but recognition of them for what they are is a vital part of properly identifying consciousness. It is not just that there is a further recognition of the distinction between products of consciousness and reality, but that this is material for recognition of his power to control what goes on inside his head.<br />
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It isn’t just mental, either. Another line of development is in development of physical skills that the child knows have to be developed, through practice that incorporates exercise of <i>will</i>. This ranges all the way from dressing (eg practicing tying his shoelaces) to handwriting (an obsession with parents and teachers!) to sports and playing musical instruments and so on.<br />
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The express realisation of the possession of powers of control over mind and body, both in terms of that they are powerful and also that they are limited, effectively means he now has the actual notions of consciousness and of being conscious. What is left is acquisition of knowledge of the concepts-proper.<br />
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<i>Arriving at the two concepts</i><br />
All the above concepts are formed through differentiation and integration, just the same as any other concepts. The child knows that once upon a time he didn’t know his ABC’s and then he did, that once he didn’t know his 123’s and then he did, and so becomes capable of knowing what the word “know” means. The same process is followed for all the other concepts.<br />
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At this point the child has some unworded notion of him having a consciousness and being able to be conscious, and also that others have consciousness and are able to be conscious. All it takes is to hear the words. But, again, I don’t think there is a definite order of learning consciousness or conscious first. At some point enough data will have been obtained allowing the child to draw the conclusion that he has a mind, which in time he learns is called his <i>consciousness</i> and that he is able to be <i>conscious</i> both of the world at large and the content of his own mind.<br />
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For instance, without the child knowing either word, his father might introduce him to the original Star Trek movie, which has line that note that V-Ger was programmed to “learn all that is learnable” and that it “amassed so much knowledge that it achieved consciousness itself.” A child capable of handling watching that movie would know what the words “learn” and “knowledge” mean, but it could be that this movie is the first time he hears the word “consciousness.” The concept can then be explained to him by his father, who states simply that his own consciousness is his mind, in his <i>ability</i> to <i>learn</i> stuff, <i>know</i> stuff, <i>remember</i> stuff, <i>imagine</i> stuff, pick and choose what he likes and dislikes, what he does and how he does it, and so on. The father then points out that both he (the boy) and himself (the father) have consciousnesses, that Admiral Kirk and Captain Dekker and Mr Spock have consciousnesses, and that the scene here is that they are discovering that a machine has managed to get a consciousness too but doesn’t know what to do with it yet! (Cue the father’s prepping for the “V-Ger is a child” line.) Knowledge of the word “conscious” is not necessary for this learning of what “consciousness” is.<br />
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Similarly, a child might have parents in the medical field and so he may hear the word “conscious” repeatedly long before hearing the word “consciousness.” Tying in with his knowledge of awake and asleep, and also of out cold, he could then figure out what the medical meaning of to be conscious is. He can then ask what this word “conscious” means, whereupon with good guidance he can come to know what conscious in the general non-medical sense is. Again, the material for this integration is the above, with this time the focus being on the actions themselves: knowing, learning, remembering, forgetting, being aware or ignorant, and so on. The parents can explain “conscious” as that someone is <i>fully awake</i> and <i>alert</i>, actually <i>able</i> to be <i>aware</i> of stuff, to <i>learn</i> stuff, to talk about stuff he <i>remembers</i> or <i>can’t remember</i>, to make <i>decisions</i> and <i>choices</i> again, and so on. Knowledge of the word “consciousness” is not necessary for this learning of what to be “conscious” is. If he is unlucky he will have to figure out the non-medical meaning by himself through exposure to non-medical use of the term.<br />
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And with that I am satisfied with identifying what the words “consciousness” and “conscious” mean.<br />
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<b>Reconstructing “consciousness is conscious”</b><br />
As with existence, the meaning of the full statement is not merely obtained by slapping the words together, but must be obtained through integration of instances. In this case it would consist of him asserting the existence or operation of his consciousness in relation to particular items of content.<br />
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Basic statements that can lead to the full statement include forthright statements of “I saw what I saw,” “I heard what I heard,” “I know what I know,” and so on. Whether or not the child is actually correct in any concrete instance is beside the point, with the actual point being him recognising that he has a consciousness and the ability to use it. Similarly, a child can state the same in relation to another: “She saw what she saw” etc. The context of statements like these are when he is being challenged on some point, such as the identity of the culprit of some misdeed or whether a strange thing had happened that he is telling others about or whether there is something he heard that he thinks his parents should investigate, and so on.<br />
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The integrations of these statements then consists of the lock-step path of integrating the subsidiary concepts into their relevant grand concepts. From recognition of himself and his own consciousness, along with recognition of other people and their consciousnesses, and also recognition of other creatures and their consciousnesses too, he can identify that all animals have a consciousness of some kind and that they all can see, hear, know, and so on. “I have a consciousness” “You have a consciousness” “Mum and Julie have consciousnesses” “Rex and Fluffy have consciousnesses” “In the Star Trek movie, the machine called V-Ger has a consciousness”, and from there to the universal “There are lots and lots of consciousnesses!” Likewise, from recognition of these abilities in himself and others, he can recognise that he is conscious, his parents and his sister are conscious, his puppy and his sister’s cat are conscious, the make-believe “V-Ger” was conscious, and so on, and then become able say “Lots and lots of creatures are conscious!” This can actually be taken too far, as primitive peoples did, by attributing some degree of spirit or consciousness to the sun and everything under it!<br />
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At last, and again if he is philosophical enough, he can integrate the two paths and recognise that all consciousnesses are conscious, and finally universalise it into the formal statement that “consciousness is conscious.” With that, I am satisfied with this full identification of what “consciousness is conscious” means.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-45449001665754158472011-03-19T18:16:00.000+10:302011-03-19T18:16:35.706+10:30God as government<a href="http://www.statebrief.com/briefblog/2010/11/07/god-as-government/">This</a> is fascinating - and telling... The cynical idea that religion and socialism are the only two alternatives.<br />
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The fact is that one cannot establish a philosophic positive by demolishing a negative. Commentary like this shows that atheism alone is nowhere near enough to establish liberty - without reason and egoism being proudly promoted as essential parts of the secularisation of society the sense-of-life of religion - not to mention the false alternative of dogmatism versus skepticism - will continue to poison the ethical and political codes even even alleged athiests, and the consequences of the spectacle itself gives fuel back to the religious cause.<br />
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The real enemy of man has always been religion, not socialism, for the latter feeds on the former and cannot survive long without its lasting influence. Religion must be despatched from this world - but the method of despatching it can only be by putting the greatness of "Reality, Reason, and Rights" in its place.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-88544367456589742422011-03-19T15:46:00.001+10:302011-03-19T15:47:43.538+10:30OR192Rational Jenn has the <a href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/2011/03/objectivist-round-up-192.html">Objectivist Roundup #192</a> up and running at <a href="http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com">her place</a>! Looks as though there are also some new blogs to add to the list of places to visit, too.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1913236063367282275.post-963181165374050192011-03-14T00:10:00.001+10:302011-03-15T16:33:11.140+10:30OTI post #2 - Existence existsIn <a href="http://jjmcvey.blogspot.com/2011/03/oti-post-1.html">post #1</a> I began with a basic introduction and the context for the work. This is where I begin the actual work itself. I started my OTI work at "Chapter one" (of course!), but it is also within "Part One." Part one is all of metaphysics of relevance to me, with chapter one focussing specifically on the three axioms. I can't and wont commit to a set schedule of posting, though.<br />
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Chapter 1 has 5 sections so far (I've completed 4): intro, existence exists, consciousness is consciousness, a thing is itself, and these three as axioms. This post here contains the first two sections.<br />
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<b>1.1 Introduction</b><br />
Ayn Rand formulated three axioms: “Existence exists,” “Consciousness is Conscious,” and “A is A”. I will put a lot of work into examining these, far more so than I imagine I will put in for later content. I have a couple of reasons for this.<br />
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The first is that I agree, for reasons I will explain later, that they are the most basic foundations of knowledge, and the nature of one’s understanding of them colours one’s understanding of everything. Get them wrong and one is highly likely to go wrong <i>everywhere</i>.<br />
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The second is that I want to focus on the method by which I determine what they actually mean and validate them. I’ve already been over some of this material, and over the course of that examination I found and corrected errors in my method. An example of that is having initially let the mind-body dichotomy get established when discussing consciousness, committed by neglecting the discovery of control over one’s body as an essential element of discovery of self, of goal-directed behaviour, and hence pursuit of value.<br />
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These are more than enough reason to make an enormous effort in establishing the three axioms. I am writing all this down, including the polishing of the text, entirely for my own benefit. If you are reading this (I don’t mind if you are, and indeed will publish bits and pieces as I judge fit), be aware that it is exclusively a privilege I have granted you and that no part of this was written with your needs in mind.<br />
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Why begin here?</i><br />
But why begin with them? And why start with “existence” first? She noted in ItOE that the concept of existence was both at the base of knowledge and was the highest abstraction (not that this means it takes the highest intelligence to figure out, only that it is not subsumable into an even wider abstraction). The fullest answer must of course take considerable explanation, but the simplest answer is as both she and Dr Peikoff gave: it is implicit from the very first observation that someone makes in life (which can technically mean before even being born). Observation of this for myself indicates that it is indeed foundational, and so I’ll accept it for now for that reason and take up the issue again later after exploring the fact and the statement of the fact in some detail.<br />
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Of course, I do know in advance that it is to do with the axiomatic nature of the concept, but that’s for later because how does one know what an axiom is and what the importance of axioms is? Thus it is necessary to see the evidence of the foundational nature of the statement before moving on with it, and then necessary to come back and then address the issue of the nature of foundations in general. This is proper inductive method at work: analyse the concretes, then draw the abstraction from the concretes via differentiation and integration / method of difference & method of agreement.<br />
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<b>1.2 Existence exists</b><br />
Ayn Rand noted “existence exists.” There are two separate lines of question from this. The first is: is that statement true? The second is: how did she come to arrive at it? I’ll deal with the second some other time.<br />
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<b>Basic meaning</b><br />
Before I can work out whether it is true, first I have to find out what it means. What does “Existence exists” mean? Simply put, that “All that...” - indicated by swinging one’s arms around - “... is <i>there</i>.” The term ‘existence’ covers both the contents and the place. The term ‘exists’ covers the fact of being a constituent of those contents and being in that place. That is, in terms of expression, existence means “that which exists”, where the ‘that’ is a pointing word indicating the world around oneself and every single bit of its contents, the ‘which’ is a conceptual act of linking ‘exist’ with the ‘that,’ and ‘to exist’ mean reference to being qua being rather than some definite form or mode of being.<br />
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The two concepts, however, are highly abstract. The fact that existence exists is directly perceivable and implicit in all thought and action, but the two concepts explicitly expressing this fact are high-level: these concepts are not formed directly from perceptual-level observations. They are definitely not part one’s express knowledge until well into life. How do we arrive at them? How would a child be taught them explicitly?<br />
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<b>Reduction of the concepts</b><br />
I am trying to show how to mentally isolate the fact of being qua being, as abstracted from the identification of something being something in particular or of some specific aspect of being, and then showing that this being qua being is the meaning of “existence” and “exist”. We know enough to state that we must use differentiation and integration, and also the method of difference and the method of agreement, to achieve that isolation, so that is what I’ll do. Someone somewhere must have expressly identified existence for the first time by himself, but I’ll leave that issue alone for now.<br />
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<i>The concept of “exist” as preceding both variants of the concept of “existence”</i><br />
The two concepts in the statement are obviously related, but which, if either, has priority? I think the concept of the verb “exist” precedes the concept of the noun “existence”, because it is identification of the fact of existing, of recognition that things are <i>there</i> (not in the sense of specific location, but being there as opposed to not being anywhere), that allows the final integration of all the great variety of things and all the great variety of instances of being qua being into the grand abstraction of existence. It is the fact of existing that is the CCD for the straight-noun concept of existence, and must be identified first. Besides, a child will have occasion to use the verb “exist” far sooner than occasion to use the simple-noun “existence,” and everyone will use the concept of existing far more often than the straight-noun concept of existence, where most of the time when the word “existence” is used by people it will refer to the noun-form of the verb instead.<br />
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I hasten to add that this does not mean that existence is an attribute. The only reason why any of this works is precisely because it is <i>not</i>, that the existence of what is perceived has always been taken for granted. The point is to get at that root as an explicitly recognised abstraction, whose referents have always been there. The fact that existence is identity, that to <i>be</i> something is to be <i>something</i>, is always there, which issue will be addressed later.<br />
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<i>Recognising existence through recognising identity: using “is”</i><br />
The prelude to gaining express conception of being qua being originates in specific concrete identifications of instances of being - being is, after all, the ultimate abstraction and so must be worked towards by beginning at the perceptual level and first-level abstractions.<br />
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I remember from grammar studies I did way back (particularly from studying “Rex barks” by Phyllis Davenport) that “be” is the root for the related word “is.” I also remember that Dr Peikoff notes that an older way of saying “existence exists” is Parmenides’ way: <i>there is the what-is</i>. And, since we must reduce to the perceptual level and first-level abstractions, and that I remember that even very young children can use the word “is,” that means the start of growing towards express conceptualisation of being qua being is in children’s very first propositions using that word. That is, the start consists of learning proper use of the word ‘is.’ In particular, this would be learned use of “is” as a linking verb in conjunction with either nouns or adjectives as the linked objective-complements. This is where one uses sentences that identify some characteristic of an entity or its relationship with another entity, ie of expressing in concepts particular instances of being. These are the kind of simple sentences that a parent can regularly utter to a normal two or three year old child and expect to have comprehended, with the child using them back to that parent:<br />
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The apple is red.<br />
The book is on the table.<br />
The pillow is under the sheet.<br />
The sun is in the sky.<br />
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This is also supplemented by learning other verbs (concepts for actions) and adverbs (concepts for characteristics of actions) in a manner in which “is” is also applicable (ie verbal objective complement, rather than the verb being the heart of the predicate), which also would be part of learning the concept of causality (but more on that later).<br />
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The sun is shining brightly.<br />
The sky is darkening quickly.<br />
The moon is rising slowly.<br />
The dog is barking loudly.<br />
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But isness is still not a first-level concept - it is a less abstract way of saying existence, but still not a first-level abstraction. Taking those kinds of sentences back further still, ie before one can use the verbs of is and be, one must first have the concepts of entities that are or in relation to which some characteristic is, and likewise concepts of the characteristics of entities and concepts of position (ie prepositions in grammar). Before one can link, one must have the elements to be linked. This means the actual first-level concepts themselves.<br />
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Nouns, ie words denoting concepts of things: apple, book, table, pillow, sheet, sun, moon, sky<br />
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Adjectives, ie words denoting concepts of characteristics of things: red, sweet (and all the other sensory concepts), heavy, light, big, small, sharp<br />
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Verbs, ie words denoting concepts of actions: shining, darkening, rising, barking<br />
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Adverbs, ie words denoting concepts of characteristics of actions: brightly, quickly, slowly, loudly<br />
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Prepositions, ie words denoting concepts of relationships between things: in, on, under, between, next to, beside, inside, outside<br />
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With that we’ve gone back to direct perception, where parents begin teaching the words for first-level concepts to their infant and toddler children. At this point in the reduction we just see the ability to identify whole <i>entities</i>. Prior to that is the first few months of life spent integrating sense-data, which processes I must take for granted because, as I can see for myself, entities abound. It takes a tremendous amount of arbitrary what-iffing and maybeing to get around what is patently obvious: there are lots and lots of entities about the place.<br />
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When the ability to recognise discrete entities is achieved, the notion of entity quickly becomes implicit in all action and is taken entirely for granted thereafter, which makes possible all else that follows (including eventual integration of all actual entities into the concepts of entity, existent, and then existence.) It is from here - the ability to perceive entities and the ability to recognise similarities and differences among entities - that we can go back up, just as parents take children on those children’s first time up. There is a complication, however, in that “is” is rarely used to indicate being qua being, but I’ll get to that in due time. The point of the moment is that “is” is a word in its own right that is a child’s introduction to the fact of being, by means of sentences that specify particulars of being.<br />
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<b>Reconstructing “exists”</b><br />
We’re now down at the level of the first-level concepts. First, concepts of entities are learned, then concepts of characteristics and of actions.<br />
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Once the first individual concepts are in place (note that the acquisition of concepts never stops), the next step in learning to think and hence speak consists of properly integrating existents with what those existents are or what they’re doing. This means the ability to integrate individual words together to form propositions, with the critical type being propositions where the verb is one of the linking verbs regarding being: be, is, am, are, was, were, being, been.<br />
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Later, in conjunction with learning about time, was and were and will be can be learned:<br />
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“The cat was on the mat, but now he is on the grass.”<br />
“The dog is happy, but if we take his food he will be upset.”<br />
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Sentences using “being”, indicating an action that is presently on-going, can be a bit more complex, but still well within the range capable of a preschooler:<br />
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“That boy is being naughty.”<br />
“The car is being washed.”<br />
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Initially these will all be concrete level (as per “The apple is red” etc as above). Parents do this, too, and soon enough the children are able to speak in whole sentences, albeit simple ones at the start. In some cases the parents would be talking in simple sentences to infants right from the start (I am in no position to say forthrightly whether a parent should or shouldn’t do that, though I do recall reading that they <i>should</i>, and if I become a parent I <i>will</i>), but the initial focus is just on getting individual words right. First “apple” and “red” have priority and are given the most emphasis, and then, when the child is a toddler, sentences such as “this apple is red!” are given priority and emphasis. Here, the use of “is” shows the connection of what had previously been mentally separate. These sentences bring something to attention and then note something specific about that something. In time, as the fund of experiences and concepts grows, so too does the complexity of propositions and integrations grow:<br />
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“Mum, Rex was running after the ball and knocked over the flower box and now there is dirt everywhere!”<br />
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As this shows, there is also the temporal fact of the connection existing now, but, as with sentences of that complexity, temporal relations come a bit later (both in fact and in how I’ll develop this).<br />
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<i>The need for mental separation of existence and identity</i><br />
But isness is somewhat distinct from existing - although existence and identity are one (see later) they are each different aspects of the fact of being. “Is” points to <i>something</i> being, whereas to “to exist” points to something <i>being</i>. Thus the word “is” is mostly <i>not</i> first used to identify being qua being - going straight to “exists” is, because “is” predominantly implies the specifics attached by means of that word. That is, the use of the word “is” implies the identification of attributes, whereas existence (noun form of verb) is <i>not</i> an attribute. Using “is” without predicate-verbs or predicate-adjectives is a considerable abstraction, and in calm situations is only used in philosophical or religious contexts. For the most part, then, the predicates are actually implied and are just omitted in sentences responding to other sentences, which latter contain the particulars omitted in the responses because they’d be redundant (and also weird-sounding) if stated:<br />
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“The cake isn’t ready yet.” “Yes it is!”<br />
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Yet there are cases where sentences in the manner of “such and such is” are said to a child, and an observant child can begin to glean being qua being from them. However, the context in which these sentences are uttered actually works against this. This is because the point of a parent saying things like that is precisely to <i>shut down</i> a child’s mental processes on the issues at hand, not activate them - these situations are not calm! This is where the parent wants the child to accept that something is so or must be done without that parent explaining why (assuming the parent even can, such as when the point being imposed is of a dogmatic nature) and the child is questioning it to the point of intransigence. For instance, the parent could be trying to get the child to believe that something is the right thing to think or the right thing to do. The child, looking for an explanation, particularly when the thing being taught has no basis or is silly as far as he can see or the thing he’s expected to do is contrary to his values (eg a demand that he give away some of his favourite toys or clothes to strangers), becomes recalcitrant and demands to know why this is so. The exasperated parent trying to impose this belief then retorts “IT JUST IS!” or similar, and acts to extract submission and obedience from the child. It would take an intelligent and unusually heroic kind of child to go on thinking privately in the face of such tactics and to use forcefully-made pronouncements like these as data included in the whole set from being qua being can be isolated and comprehended. It can be done but it isn’t likely in the vast majority of cases, where, in most cases, the highly emotive nature of the circumstances means the child is more likely to be quite upset (especially when he is deprived of his values) and momentarily not capable of thinking in much depth at all.<br />
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So, getting well-versed in use of the word “is” only sets the groundwork for the meaning of “exists,” by means of learning a great variety of specific modes of being (it’s also groundwork for other related concepts, but I’ll get to them in due time, too). One cannot expressly identify in conceptual terms the fact of something being without abstracting from a wide variety of things being <i>something, somewhere, somehow, and at some time</i>, because those are the concrete facts directly perceivable and easily identified by means of differentiation and integration. Only with comprehension of a great variety of concepts of existents and attributes of existents, and some relations within and between existents, can one begin to expressly comprehend the meaning of being qua being by means of eventually finding the ultimate integration of expressly identifying being qua being. But this is still some time off yet, both because of its abstractness and that there are other points to cover.<br />
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<i>Separation of existence and identity through differentiation</i><br />
All concepts require some form of contrast to differentiate and isolate what it is to be focused upon from other things and features, which instances can then be integrated into an abstraction. One cannot form the concept of apple except by observing two or more apples, contrasting them against non-apples and seeing that they deserve to be mentally grouped. I don’t think “is” and “exists” are any different, though the precise mechanism is different because existence is not an attribute.<br />
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I think there are at least two classes of contrasts here: metaphysical and epistemological. The metaphysical contrast is being versus non-being. The epistemological contrast is recognition of being versus non-recognition of being. The express identification of being qua being lies in identifying both of these kinds of contras, that each throws the various distinctions into sharp relief and so makes possible the focus on the elements being contrasted against each other. This also leads into discussions of recognition of consciousness, but more on that later. (As a side note, observe also that this is wrapped up with Dr Peikoff’s statement that metaphysics and epistemology are simultaneous).<br />
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The instances of being are as far above, whereas the instances of non-being are more problematic. Being is an implicit fact that has been taken for granted from the moment of the first sensation in life, but non-being is a significant abstraction that cannot be grasped except by some form of contrast against being. But the explicit identification of existence itself requires some form of contrast against non-being. So, the problem, I think, is to achieve that express awareness of non-being, because at this stage it is too easy to get non-being as such confused with something being somewhere else. I think this is precisely because being qua being had already been implicit in every perception of both everything and also everything about everything: being is perceptually identifiable directly, whereas non-being is most definitely an abstraction that must be grasped conceptually.<br />
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Looking at this in practice, when people - and also some of the higher animals (eg dogs, monkeys etc) - expect something to be somewhere and don’t find it there the first thing they do is go looking for it. “Where did it go?” is the first question, be it either wordless in the case of animals and pre-verbal children or expressed in worded thoughts by those able to do so. In event of failure to find what is sought people will stop looking mostly because of thinking it lost rather than thinking it ceasing to exist, and animals will stop looking because other stimuli grab their attention and they eventually forget about what they were looking for (timing on forgetting, as far as I can see, depends on the prior-attained value-status and hence memorability of what they sought and couldn’t find.)<br />
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I can see three ways in which a child can come to identify non-being as such and hence be able to mentally isolate being qua being from instances of something being something in particular. These are observation of creation and destruction, observation of one’s own recognition of presence, and the recognition of make-believe and lies for what they are. These three can develop contemporaneously, each contributing its part to ultimate recognition of “to exist” by means of some sort of contrast.<br />
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<i>Witnessing creation and destruction</i><br />
The first is through the child’s identification of the creation and destruction of something. Here is where a child can recognise that something has come into existence when before it didn’t exist, and that something has gone out of existence when before it did exist. Do this enough times and over a variety of circumstances and what we have is instances of method of difference and method of agreement.<br />
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The beginnings would be teaching the concept of <i>making</i>, eg producing foods that involve very substantial processing resulting in foods that are vastly perceptually different from their ingredients (baking, for instance), playing with construction toys such as Lego, in making snowmen and sandcastles, and so on. At the same time, though beginning second, what would also be taught is the concepts of <i>consuming</i> or <i>destroying</i> or any other form of <i>unmaking</i>. This can be identified in eating something up (eg the cake that was baked), or using something up (the flour and eggs etc), or breaking up a construction (pulling a Lego building apart into its constituent blocks), of watching snowmen melt and sandcastles being washed away. This suggests that spending time with children actively making things is not just fun and instructive in the concrete sense but also capable of being tied in with cognitive development all the way to the highest abstraction possible, ie express knowledge of the fact that things <i>exist</i>.<br />
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Other occasions for teaching about creation and destruction, this time without active participation, would be in talking about events observed in daily life. This can be as simple as watching seeds germinate over the course of days and weeks, watching how a fire makes a piece of firewood or a whole building cease to exist, or looking at construction and demolition sites, and so on. These events would of course be expressed in sentences that a child can understand, but with the groundwork laid by proper use of “is” in place the elder can use the word “exist” and expect to have the child understand with enough exposure to instances of coming to be and ceasing to be.<br />
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A key here, I think, is that what is so made must be completely new and not identifiable in the elements that went into the construction, eg how flour and eggs and lego bricks do not already look like cakes or biscuits or spaceships right from the start, so that what <i>clearly</i> did not exist before <i>clearly</i> does exist now. With that, the child can identify the fact of something brought into being, then of something ceasing to be (eg eating the food or breaking the Lego spaceship apart to make something else with the bricks) and so can begin to identify the state of being qua being. The topic of the eternity of existence comes later, as the present point is simply on isolating and focussing on being.<br />
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Here, then, is where express identification of temporal relationships would be both taught for the knowledge of them as the initial focus of teaching them and, soon after that, also material for the isolation of being qua being. Again, as with and technically as part of implicitly knowing the fact of things existing, the child will already implicitly be aware of the passage of time, but also again the point is the first express learning of these facts and of specific concepts relating to them. Thus the child learns about time and various concepts relating to timing: the absolutes of second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, etc, and the relatives of yesterday, today, now, soon, later, before, after, last X, next X, etc. Again, the topic of the eternity of existence must wait, now because the child has to understand time before it is possible to understand timelessness.<br />
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In the pedagogical setting, all this - ie the teaching of temporal relations as well as building towards express identification of being qua being - would be taught in parallel, building up all these individual concepts by giving various examples of each in a somewhat jumbled fashion and then the child using difference and agreement (and also their derivatives, particularly the method of residues) to nut out a solution, not unlike a conceptual-linguistic equivalent solving of simultaneous equations. At this early stage, then, a parent either accelerates or hinders learning, but I don’t think parents are capable of halting a child figuring things out without making concerted efforts to be irrational and keep the child in experiential poverty. Of course, all parents try to shield children from issues that the children can’t handle properly, but here the parent is doing this irrationally and with definite intent to shut down or hinder intellectual development. All that good parenting in this regard does is <i>accelerate</i> the child’s express identification, not <i>enable</i> it, so long of course as the word “exists” exists in the language of the culture and is used properly in speech heard by the child.<br />
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<i>Observation of one’s own recognitions</i><br />
A second is observation of one’s own processes of recognising <i>presence</i>. These can be gradual or semi-gradual, or thoroughly abrupt, and also either pleasant or unpleasant too.<br />
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An example of a gradual or semi-gradual recognition is gathering together enough instances to form the concept of <i>discovery</i>, particular discoveries in locations where the child had been before and prior has not made concrete discoveries but later realising that what had been discovered was always there. For instance, a child can wander through a yard or meadow that he has been in before, then discover something fascinating such as pretty flowers, wild animals’ homes, and so on, and recognise that they have in fact always been there and just haven’t been fully noticed before. An example of an unpleasant gradual recognition is where one say has one of those insect bites that don’t sting straight away but build up in their pain or irritation, such as from mosquitoes. Starting out from the absent-minded scratching of what begins as a mild itch, it slowly <i>dawns</i> on you that you have in fact been bitten, ie it slowly dawns on you that the bite <i>is there</i>, that it <i>exists</i>.<br />
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Abrupt recognition arises from a sudden event that brings the existence of something to the child’s attention in a snap. Sometimes this can be very pleasant, such as when the child walks into his bedroom or into the back yard and finds a new present waiting for him. Other times it can be unpleasant, even extremely so, with physiological responses to match. For instance, something inside his wardrobe may slip suddenly and make a thump as it hits something else, making for fuel for the classic monster-in-the-closet fear. Another would be where a child may suddenly realise that there is someone outside the door or window of his bedroom, or wake up in the dark and discover someone (or <i>something</i>, such as the household cat) quietly observing him up close and personal-like. Another still, one very common, is when two people oblivious to each other’s presence almost run into each other as they turn the corner in a dark hall or through a doorway, giving each other a bit of a fright in the process. And what can be a very unpleasant example again is being deliberately sneaked up upon by someone, whose sudden revelation of presence is expressly intended to scare the victim (even if only as a joke).<br />
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The above can also happen in the reverse. Things can gradually or abruptly go away, and when this is noticed the absence then throws the prior presence into sharp relief. Scientists have even discovered the mechanisms in the brain by which the <i>cessation</i> of a sound that had been gotten use to triggers awareness both of the change and of the existence of a cause of that previous sound.<br />
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The above recognitions can become bases for first understandings of what “here” and “there” mean as distinct from reference to specific locations. For instance, you can point to a child that fact about the flowers or nests having always been there, and use that to identify this meaning of “there,” and go on to indicate what is meant by “see, there are such things as apples and clouds and books and cats and dogs and birds, that they are <i>here</i>, in the world.” By these means one can teach a child “there” as separate from the specific details of any given instance of there-ness. From that, one can eventually get to saying things such as “there’s stuff everywhere,” and in time that develop both “to exist” and “existence,” with much intermediate work on the way there as we will see.<br />
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Moreover, they are all instances of contrast by means of the child’s own observation of the contrast between his own recognition versus his own non-recognition of the existence of something. This is then part metaphysical and part epistemological. The latter element makes this issue wrapped up with his own recognition of his capacity to know, ie his discovery of his own consciousness, which will be discussed later.<br />
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<i>Recognition of both artistic and deceitful fantasies</i><br />
The third means by which a child can gain a contrast for existence is identification of various kinds of unreality for what they are, in that he knows personally of their contrast to what is actually real. These can be innocent or guilty.<br />
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Innocent unreality lies in the realm of the make-believe, particularly in art and play. A child can know that a cartoon character is not actually real but is just a character in a story, such as Mickey Mouse or Optimus Prime or Dora the Explorer, that the dolls and action figures played with in the dollhouse or sandpit are just toys and the scenarios are made up by that child for fun, and so on. Added to this is when the child actually gets involved in dress-up, make-believe games, and more organised school plays, and so on, wherein he knows he is playing a character and acting out a role.<br />
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Guilty unreality is in deceit and lying. Here the child knows that something is not actually so, but says that it is so to another so as to have that other think that it is so, or had previously believed that something is so because another he trusted said so but he then discovered that it was never so and the other knew it wasn’t when saying that it was.<br />
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This is really moving more towards the epistemological side, but it is still an issue of how one identifies explicitly the meaning of to exist. The point is that a child’s direct personal knowledge of there being things spoken of - by others and by himself - that <i>do not actually exist or are not actually so</i> is a source of distinctions that add in to the data-set upon which differentiation and integration lead to express knowledge of being qua being. The fact that this is also very strongly an epistemological (and also ethical) issue goes to show how recognition of existence is part of recognition of consciousness, of which more will be said later.<br />
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<i>Express identification of “to exist”</i><br />
It is once the ability to form sentences is reached, along with having a large amount (but not necessarily all) of the above means of isolating being via contrasts, that the fact of being can be expressly and readily have the child’s attention drawn to it by the parent, even if sometimes the word has already been slipped into conversation validly (doing this for most words is how learning to speak the local language in total is learned by children, not just “exists” and its equivalents in other languages). It is of course not a fully philosophical attention, but it is the first use of the actual word “exist.” It is now that we can say that such and such exists, once existed, or does not yet exist, and also, in regards to make-believe and lying, that such and such does not really exist. The child is perfectly capable of using the word “exist” properly and have arguments accordingly, such as “Unicorns do not exist! Do too! Do not!” and so on. Whether or not unicorns actually exist is not the issue here, the fact that the two children having this argument know what “to exist” means <i>is</i>.<br />
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From this point on the child can then successfully live the rest of childhood (or most of it, anyway) without further developing the formal philosophical implications of the fact that things <i>exist</i>. Philosophy-proper can wait until at least the mid to late teens, and in the interim the child has no need of express awareness of the concepts of “existent” and “existence” (other than as the adjectival-noun form of the verb “exist,” which a child isn’t likely to have occasion to use until the teens anyway). This does not mean he can’t or there is an implacable shouldn’t (though formal philosophy for the pre-teens is said to be inadvisable), only that it is not immediately necessary.<br />
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For us, though, now we can be formally philosophic and can mark a milestone. Although all the above is material that say a normal ten-year-old can easily handle, it is also all that we need to identify for ourselves to properly validate the meaning of the word “exist.” We - and the child - have always been implicitly aware of the fact of existing, but now we can expressly use the abstraction denoting it. We observed the various states of being (ie various forms of is-ness, observed the processes of coming to be and ceasing to be (ie various forms of was-ness and will-be-ness respectively), observed ourselves recognising the existence of particular things or persons, observed the distinction between that which is actual and that which is a fantasy (that which isn’t really but pretended to be for fun) or a lie (that which actually isn’t though told to another as though actually is), and, through differentiation and integration upon all these observations, drew the timeless abstraction of being qua being. That is, we have fully identified what the concept of “exists” means.<br />
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<b>Reconstructing “existence”</b><br />
It is only with proper knowledge of what “to exist” means that one can comprehend what existence is, both in the form of the adjectival noun form of the verb and in the form of the simple noun. This is much simpler to describe, because most of the hard yards in isolating being qua being have already been done.<br />
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Getting back to the child, then, while he is not yet dealing with formal philosophy he is still building towards the necessity of it, and in due time he will be unable to keep on growing in intellectual prowess without express awareness of philosophy and philosophic methods. Also, if as an adult he is not going to pursue some significantly academic career, particularly one that has a definite philosophic bent (eg economics, law, science), it is not strictly necessary at all to have the concepts of “existence” and “existent” as simple nouns in his common vocabulary. They are apt to be the kind of word he will know the meaning of when he hears or reads it but rarely personally uses.<br />
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Even so, he is nevertheless building towards the development of the philosophical implications of the fact that things exist, even if he has no need of taking the final step explicitly for himself. However, if he will pursue a life-course that includes sufficiently abstract thoughts, then he must eventually take that final step, which will also be required when that last step becomes possible to him.<br />
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<i>Development of conceptual hierarchy</i><br />
One cannot go straight from apples, books and pillows to the concept of existent directly. As part of the development towards achieving explicit identification of the adjectival-noun meaning of existence - which had always been implicit from the start and which had made growth towards explicit identification possible - the child is also building up a fund of concepts large enough both to admit of and require a definite hierarchical structure. It does not have to be an immense structure, but it does have to be sophisticated enough to allow awareness the idea of structure itself so that the idea of integration and connection can be made aware of.<br />
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Once the process of building up a hierarchy goes far enough, this leads toward the final identification of the top-level noun that is the concept subsuming the totality of all concrete entities and groups of entities and groups of groups etc. I think the development is: first, one identifies the concept of to exist, then one takes it back to apply to the instances of things existing from which the abstraction was drawn, and universalising this by expressly and conceptually recognising the entirety of all such instances of things existing as being <i>existents</i> for the first time in one’s life. After that, gaining new knowledge would include the insertion of new layers of abstraction between the perceptual level and what is now known to be the peak abstraction and concept of ‘existent.’ Thus one can at last comprehend that existents exist. The final step in this line of development is converting the plural “existents” into the singular-collective “existence” and there we are.<br />
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<i>Existence as a place</i><br />
But that integration of entities alone is not sufficient, because another path that helps lead to this is the development of a conceptual hierarchy not of entities but of locations of entities. Rather than the part from recognising things being <i>something</i> in particular to being things that <i>are</i> and hence the concept of are-ness, the focus here is on the path from recognising things being <i>somewhere</i> in particular to being things that are <i>here</i> and hence the concept of here-ness. That is, from all the concrete instances of “X is here”, where the all the heres in question are also placable into hierarchies (my room, my house, my street, my suburb, my city, my state, my country, my world, my solar system, etc), to identification of an ‘all of everywhere.’ In conjunction with the noun-development of existent, the concept of everywhere can then be identified.<br />
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<i>The fullest conception of “existence”</i><br />
The identification of existence as a place is not so great a task as identification of existence as a totality of things, but the fullest conception of “existence” is the integration of both identifications. Existence covers both <i>everything</i> that <i>is</i> (including was and will be) and also <i>everywhere</i> that things can <i>be</i>. With that I am satisfied with having identified the full meaning of the concept of “existence.”<br />
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<b>Reconstructing “existence exists”</b><br />
Recognition of the fact that existence exists does not consist of merely slapping the words together. The fact, just as with the constituent concepts themselves, has to be learned from observation and must be identified as an integration of those observations. The identification that existence exists is the culmination of a long process not just of learning those concepts, but of integrating them with their allied concepts as will be discussed later. Most particularly, this relates to the concept of identity.<br />
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For existence exists in particular, one part of its identification lies in the reliance upon certain things being just so as part of pursuit of some goal. For example, a child can implicitly take the nature of his Lego blocks to be just so in the process of building his latest creation with them. They exist, and he takes that for granted and counts on it. A part lies also in frustrations and pains. For example, a child may want a particular toy but not have it, try to wish really really hard that we he does have can transform into what he wants, and nothing happens. Another would be accidentally hitting furniture hard, and wishing it weren’t there wont make it disappear. They, too exist, and he eventually realises it is futile to rail against that fact and that if he is to do anything at all about it he has to accept it and deal with things as they are rather than how he wishes them to be.<br />
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From countless instances like this, a child begins to realise that what is, is, both in terms of what aids him in pursuit of his goals and hinders him in that pursuit. This is how existence is wrapped up with identity: the fact that things are what they are is an integral part of the fact that what is, is. The grand totality of identity <i>is</i> the grand totality of existence. It is via his recognitions of the fact that certain things are in fact so, that the natures of things are implacable, that he can eventually explicitly recognise for himself that what is, is.<br />
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In time, if he is philosophical enough, he can recognise that all that <i>all that</i> (swinging his arms around again) is <i>here</i>, whether he likes it or not. Once he learns the individual words, and then either figures it out for himself or learns from another, and if his focus at all times is upon reality and he uses words to identify reality as can be identified from perception as the root of all knowledge, he can then see the truth of the statement that existence exists, because all this does is formally express his identification that <i>all that</i> is <i>here</i>.<br />
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With that, I am satisfied with this full identification of what “existence exists” means.<br />
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JJMJohn McVeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09178461877060724170noreply@blogger.com0