John J McVey

Objectivism Roundup 225

2011-11-03T20:32:00.000+10:30

Welcome to the November 3, 2011 edition of objectivist round up, number 225.

Jim Woods presents The Prometheus Inquiry Concept posted at Words by Woods, saying, "Drafts an elevator pitch related to a private solution to the ubiquitous problems in private education."

Jared Rhoads presents An alternative format for an early Presidential debate posted at The Center for Objective Health Policy, 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."

Ari Armstrong presents Yes, A National Sales Tax is Constitutional posted at Free Colorado, saying, "A national sales tax is constitutional (but otherwise a very bad idea)."

Paul McKeever presents Atlas Shrugged Part 1: Review posted at Paul McKeever.

Ryan presents Some Facebook Shenanigans posted at Ryan's Rantings, saying, "Just a quick rundown of a small debate I participated in on facebook. It involved wealth redistributing, caring, and Halloween."

John Drake presents Confirmation bias posted at Try Reason!, saying, "What is confirmation bias and how can you avoid it? I tackle this problem in my latest post."

Alexander Marriott presents AM's Wit and Wisdom: Calling the Media—When is Ron Paul Going to Have to Answer? posted at Alexander Marriott's Wit and Wisdom, 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."

Rational Jenn presents On Knitting, CrossFitting, and How I'm Growing as a Person Here posted at Rational Jenn, 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."

Gene Palmisano presents Unintended Consequences posted at The Metaphysical Lunch, saying, "Join me for the misnomer of the day."

Edward Cline presents Book Review: The Closing of the Muslim Mind posted at The Rule of Reason, 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.""

Diana Hsieh presents Video: Respect for the Transgendered posted at NoodleFood, 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."

Thank you all again! That concludes this edition. Next week's edition is at The Playful Spirit. Submit your blog article to the next edition of the objectivist round up, to be hosted over at The Playful Spirit, using our
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Objectivism Roundup 221

2011-10-06T17:36:00.000+10:30

Welcome to the October 6, 2011 edition of Objectivist Round-Up, number 221.

Kate Yoak presents Preschool due dilligence: naps posted at Parenting is..., 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."

Carl Svanberg presents Elizabeth Warren's Assault on Justice posted at The Cold Voice of Reason, saying, "Enjoy!"

John Drake presents GTD Habits posted at Try Reason!, saying, "Its the habits, not the technology that make GTD effective. Here are the habits I'm working to improve."

Rational Jenn presents The One About The Standardized Test posted at Rational Jenn, 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."

Ari Armstrong presents Pajamas Reply to Elizabeth Warren posted at Free Colorado, 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."

John McVey presents OTI post #7 - Primacy of Existence posted at John J McVey, saying, "This finishes metaphysics, at least for the time being."

Paul Hsieh presents Don't Blame Capitalism for High Health Insurance Costs posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "I'm honored that The Undercurrent published my latest OpEd as part of their Capitalism Awareness Week project!"

Santiago and Kelly Valenzuela presents Once Again, Immigrants Improperly Blamed posted at Mother of Exiles, 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?"

David C Lewis, RFA presents Can Your Financial Adviser Pick The Best Investment For You? | Twin Tier Financial posted at A Revolution In Financial Planning, saying, "I discuss the feasibility of selling investment recommendations."

Rational Jenn presents Parenting Thought of the Moment posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "A well-behaved kid isn't necessarily an obedient kid. (But there's more--go read the post!)"

David Baucom presents Gary Johnson on Republican Capitulation and His Presidential Bid posted at The Objective Standard Blog, 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"

Diana Hsieh presents NoodleCast #99: Live Rationally Selfish Webcast posted at NoodleFood, 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!"

Jason Stotts presents It’s About Time posted at Erosophia, saying, "Some states are now moving for legislation that removes the felony charge against teen sexting."

Gideon Reich presents Why I support Gary Johnson for President posted at Armchair Intellectual, saying, "My reasoning for supporting Gary Johnson for President."

That concludes this edition. Thank you all for submitting articles. To have articles showcased next week, submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist Round-Up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. Our host next week is Rational Jenn.

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JJM

OTI post #7 - Primacy of Existence

2011-10-05T21:34:00.000+10:30

Wrapping up metaphysics is the integration into a key point: the primacy of existence.

Context
The context is everything so far, but specifically it is the dicussion of Existence, Consciousness, Identity, and Causality. 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.

Meaning
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.

Reduction of the concepts
In the three-word statement “existence is primary”, two have already been reduced and reconstructed, though a quick recapitulation is instructive.

Existence
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.

Is
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.

Primary
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 dictionary.com are:

Adjective:
1. first or highest in rank or importance; chief; principal
2. first in order in any series, sequence, etc.
3. first in time; earliest; primitive
7. original; not derived or subordinate; fundamental; basic

Noun:
14. something that is first in order, rank, or importance

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.

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.

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 given first choice of something or perhaps himself being 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.

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 why mining and agriculture/aquaculture are called primary industry, why 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.

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 are so. To get to primacy in the world we have to consider time and causality, 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.

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) they exist and they are of certain natures - 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.

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.

Reduction of the principle
Reduction to facts
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.

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 that this is so.

Reduction to competing alternatives
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.

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.

Reduction to existence
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).

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.

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.

Reduction through anthropomorphism
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.

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 infer 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 conclusion 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).

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).

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.

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 causality, identity, and existence. 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.

Reduction through abstractions
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.

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 to know, 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.

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.

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).

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.”

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.

Reconstruction of “primary”
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.

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 first letter is d, the second o, the third g, and in “cat” the first 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

And with that we must move to consideration of what that proper primary of primaries is.

Induction of the principle
Primacy of existence in the initial implicit awareness
The instant that the new mind first turns on there is experienced a constant flow of evidence of how that there are things that exist. Everything else that is ever experienced and ever done always comes back to this: there is something. 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.

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 explicit 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.”

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.

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.

Primacy of existence in self-discovery
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.

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 years. 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.

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 perceive!” (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.

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.

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...

Express recognition of the primacy of existence
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.

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.

It takes genius to identify and state the positive that what is is 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.

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 exists, consciousness is and can only be conscious of existence, 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.

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.

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 activity 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.

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.

Integration
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.”

Some implications
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 is so, 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.

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.

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 existing, 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.

What now?
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.

JJM

Plan for OTI work and economic analysis

2011-07-17T16:12:00.001+09:30

I'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.

Also, there is one more topic in metaphysics I have to cover before I move on, so I edited OTI post 006 to remove the relevant side-comment in the opening words.

Here is the overview leading to economics:

- Axioms, corollaries, and further related issues
- Consciousness as a physical faculty
- Concept-formation
- Propositions
- Objectivity and laws of thought
- Induction
- Deduction
- Mathematics
- The faculty of reason psychologically considered
- Reasoning method
- Scientific method in general
- Life, action, and value
- Man, his values and his actions
- Society and civilisation
- Scientific method in the social sciences
- Politics and government
- The context of economics
- The method of economic science

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:

- Primacy of existence
- Consciousness as possessing identity
- Validity of the senses
- Volition
- Primacy of the perceptual level
- Man's power of abstraction
- Abstraction as mathematical in nature
- First-level concepts
- Higher-level concepts
- Definitions
- The metaphysically given versus the man-made
- Rejecting materialism and idealism
- The four causes

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.

JJM

OR209

2011-07-15T13:46:00.000+09:30

Roundup time is here again! Check out number 209 at Reepicheep's Coracle.

JJM

More mobile phone stuff

2011-07-15T13:36:00.001+09:30

I've downloaded Blogger for Android. Now I can blog from where-ever I get an Optus signal.

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...

JJM

OTI post #6 - Law of Causality

2011-07-08T11:11:00.001+09:30

Continuing to look at metaphysics, he are my observations and inductive reconstruction of the Law of Causality.

Context
The context for this is recognition of the three axioms for their content - existence exists, consciousness is conscious, and all existents are of definite natures - and the fact that they are axioms. 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.

Basic meaning
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.

Further, looking at affairs from the perspective of events 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 orderly and lawful.

Reduction of ‘entity’
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.

Reduction of ‘act’ and ‘action’
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 to change in identity. In the same vein: action is the progression of changes in identity. This also implies a reference to time, but I wont be getting into the controversial debate on that concept here.

The identity in question is that of the entire observed state of affairs 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. Why it has, we don’t know yet - but that it has, we do.

The concept 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 these that are directly observed and first-level abstractions made for.

Perceptual roots
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 of entities, and will never observe action other than by means of their 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.

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.

Reduction of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’
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.

When we mean by cause and effect is that there are definite patterns and orders of the progression of total sets of identities. Cause-and-effect means that one particular set of identities will 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 did 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.)

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 bouncing, 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, causes the balls to rebound; and similarly, the rebounding is the effect 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 can tie that with how we can bend metal bars, seeing how most of them want to return almost to their original shape but some them completely 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.

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.

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 causation. 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 causes B, to be justified in inferring that something external to us causes effects likewise external to us, this has to be experienced physically. We must first observe ourselves making things happen and hence generating that nub of a notion through a rudimentary observation of our capabilities. It is we who cause 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.

Discovery of actions and cause-and-effect relationships
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.

Self-control and personal limitation
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.

What gets the ball rolling for our discovery of the principle of cause and effect, rather than just associations of juxtapositions, is not just that we can exercise control but also that there are limits 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 ranges 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 make them grow through practice.

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 make 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.

Problem of anthropomorphism
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...

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).

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.

Cause-and-effect relations
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 new and exciting and even occasionally scary. 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.

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 make 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.

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 animals. Now, without being saddled by others’ anthropomorphism, and with our parents saying things such as “It’s just 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 non-intentional 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 reactive to external prodding. For instance, it is clear that a cat is an active investigator and intentional causer whereas a wadded up ball of paper is not. 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 TV remotes, telephones, and light-switches, all despite the absence of any knowledge of what makes these things tick.

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 learn 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.

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.

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 do 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!

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 want to upset mum, which we now know an easy way to do.

Reconstruction of ‘action’ and ‘cause and effect’
First-level concepts
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 mean. Then we start uttering these words non-stop and begin annoying the crap out of these “mum” and “dad” thingamajigs.

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 being washed and cleaned while our parents speak the words. Then we learn about particular ways of doing things, such as driving to grandma’s house rather than walking, where we learn that cars are things used to drive in. Then as we become adept at doing things ourselves we get told 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.

Then we start learning adjectives. 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 react. Some of the earliest are partly active: heavy versus lightweight, 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 hurts more 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 inertia of objects. Other attributes of entities require more direct action to discover. During more baking, for instance, we learn that eggs are fragile or breakable; we learn how toys made of plastic are also fragile whereas toys made of metal are tough, because some can survive a boy in his sandpit whereas others cannot. When we get older this includes further nuances, such as delicate (eg thin versus thick glassware).

Similarly, with adverbs we learn that the actions themselves have definite natures, such as how movement can be quick or slow, how someone may act clumsily or skilfully, 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 easily breaks on impacts is what leads us to ascribe fragility them, and so on.

Sentences
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 that.) 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.

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 link one clause with another to describe a chain of events. We can use it properly when we figure out that is used to explain in words how one set of affairs A caused another set of affairs B - that is, we can say “B happened because 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.

Reconstructing ‘act’ and related concepts
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 act. 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!”

It is later that we start to get more formal about the words action and reaction. 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 action of the gas flame on the water in the pot is what makes it heat up, and it is the action 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 works, whether overtly acted upon or is the overt actor in any instance. Thus we know that paper boats don’t act like stones when dropped onto water, salt doesn’t act 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.

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.

Reconstructing ‘cause’, ‘effect’, and ‘cause-and-effect’
By this time a child already has explicit understanding of making 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 cause 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.

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 makes eggs cook, and so on. This is the stage, I think, when a child is about ready to understand the actual word ‘cause’ itself.

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 caused the paper ball to fall off, gravity caused the ball to fall down; and also: heat causes things to cook, soap causes things to clean better than ordinary water, oil or water on the ground cause people or cars to slide around and have accidents, and so on.

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 particular events or as an explanation of why things act certain ways in general. 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.

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 that 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.

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.

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.

Reconstruction of the Law of Causality
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 Law 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.

The reconstruction
The full reconstruction of the Law, qua Law, 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:

- there is existence,

- there is identity,

- identities can change, ie that there are actions,

- all actions are actions of actors,

- all actions are of specific natures,

- the specific natures of actions are entirely correlated with the natures of the actors causing them,

- there are actions and reactions, leading to identifying that there are causes and effects,

- all effects are caused by entities, and all effects are effects upon entities,

- an entity’s full identity includes the cause-and-effect relations it can exhibit, under various circumstances as set by the influence of other entities to which this likewise applies,

- the correlation of effects with causes is the same correlation of actions with actors, and

- all effects are caused only by the full identities of the entities involved in the action.

That final observation is the Law of Causality. In order to get to it, one has to integrate the fact of actions being actions of entities and being the consequence of the natures of those entities with the fact that existence exists and all existents are of certain natures. 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!”

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.

Back-questioning
With the knowledge of the Law 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.

JJM

OTI posting and conceptual hierarchies

2011-06-27T21:19:00.000+09:30

I 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 any 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.

JJM

Some updates

2011-06-17T17:13:00.000+09:30

No, I haven't given up blogging, I've just been busy.

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.

That being said, I do think there is room for some creation by government of standards for government use. 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 United States Military Standards.

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.

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 practical 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.

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 Word Doc, PDF for A4 paper, and PDF for US Letter paper - are available in the File Cabinet. 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.

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.

JJM

A simple connection

2011-04-28T22:01:00.003+09:30

Of 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".

Update: second *palm-forehead-smack*... the Comprachicos. Simple Plan don't know the half of it.

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.

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 may or may not 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.

JJM

Objectivism Round-up 198

2011-04-28T15:45:00.001+09:30

Welcome to the 28th April 2011 edition of the Objectivism Round-up, number 198!

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" :

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.

All those in armed service who have lived up to that, thank you. 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):

Roderick Fitts presents Induction and Reduction of “Values as Objective” posted at Inductive Quest, 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."

Roderick Fitts presents Induction of "The Arbitrary as Neither True Nor False" posted at Inductive Quest, 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.""

Jared Rhoads presents Twead #11: Reforming America's Healthcare System posted at The Lucidicus Project, saying, "This book is a nice collection of nine brief chapters by nine different health policy experts. Here are some notes and quotes."

Opus Dei presents Anti-social indeed! posted at Ayn and Self..., 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)!"

Burgess Laughlin presents "Koran Reading Group" begins May 10 posted at The Main Event, 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."

Ron Pisaturo presents Read Atlas Shrugged posted at Ron Pisaturo's Blog, saying, "Here is my way of describing the novel, while withholding spoilers, to those who have not yet read it.

[I neglected to submit this post last week. I hope it's okay to submit it now.]"

John Drake presents How to do Abstract Integrative Reading posted at Try Reason!, 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."

John McVey presents Lest We Forget posted at John J McVey, 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."

Edward Cline presents Off With Their Heads: Islamic “Lawfare” posted at The Rule of Reason, 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."

Rational Jenn presents Silent Auction Fundraiser for ATLOS posted at Rational Jenn, 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!"

Rachel Miner presents Reposting: The Idiom Dictionary posted at The Playful Spirit, 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."

Gene Palmisano presents Misnomer of the Week posted at The Metaphysical Lunch, 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!"

Scott Connery presents Obama Launches Gas Price Investigation. We do the Legwork for him posted at Rational Public Radio, 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."

Diana Hsieh presents NoodleCast #72: Live Rationally Selfish Webcast posted at NoodleFood, 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!"

Jason Stotts presents Compersion? posted at Erosophia, saying, "Here I analyze the idea of "compersion," finding one's partner's pleasure pleasant, and whether it is a legitimate phenomenon."

Shrikant Rangnekar presents Atlas Shrugged Movie Polls (Over 350+ answers and counting?) posted at Shrikant Rangnekar, saying, "See (over 3500+ answers) in 9 polls on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and participate in them all."

Roberto Sarrionandia presents Pomp and Cowardice posted at Roberto Sarrionandia, saying, "Altruism and moral cowardice dominate British foreign policy"

Benjamin Skipper presents Why Does Evasion Cause Pain? posted at Musing Aloud, 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?"

Benjamin Skipper presents Loneliness and the Necessity of Friendship posted at Musing Aloud, 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."

C. August presents The Specific and the General posted at Titanic Deck Chairs, saying, "A brief discussion of two blog posts, the connection between them, and the state of American society."

Ari Armstrong presents No One Lives Forever posted at Free Colorado, saying, "Medical science might eventually enable to live a very long time, but not forever."

Jim Woods presents Federal Drinking Age is Irrational posted at Words by Woods, saying, "This law fosters disrespect for law and undermines honest communication."

Shrikant Rangnekar presents Atlas Shrugged Movie Report: Aglialoro Shrugged? posted at Shrikant Rangnekar.

Thank you all for your efforts this week. Next week, your hosts are Santiago and Kelly at Mother of Exiles. Submit your blog article to the next edition of objectivist round up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Seen on the internet

2011-04-26T13:08:00.000+09:30

Michael Moore hates guns because he is fearful of being mistaken for a rampaging, brain-damaged, feral hog and shot for public safety reasons.

- commenter deguello, here.

(Hat-tip: Dr Paul Hsieh on facebook).

JJM

Lest We Forget

2011-04-25T20:54:00.000+09:30

Today, 25th April, it is ANZAC Day.

The day was initially instituted to remember those who died in the Gallipoli campaign, 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.

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.

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,

thank you.

JJM

OR197

2011-04-24T16:42:00.000+09:30

Kelly has the latest Objectivism Roundup up at Reepicheep's Coracle!

JJM

Thorium reactors?

2011-04-23T20:37:00.000+09:30

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 found it:

wind turbines are nothing but prayer wheels for suburbanite Buddhists.

Down in the comments I saw one from Billy Beck, who gave a youtube link. I looked at it. Whoah! It is highly edited to be extremely 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.

Btw, piece of trivia: that is an Australian 20c coin shown top left at the 15 min mark.

Speaking of money, there is a disclosure I should make: I own shares in Arafura Resources, whose interests includes thorium from rare earths processing.

JJM

Rockwell Turbo Encabulator

2011-04-20T21:31:00.000+09:30

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.

JJM

OTI post #5 - validation and importance

2011-04-20T21:01:00.000+09:30

Okay, so I comprehend what each means, but what of their validation? And why all the song and dance anyway?

The three statements as self-evident
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 anything 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 be something is to be something is also perfectly clear in the perceptual evidence?

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 is 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 self-evident.

The broadest meaning of the self-evident

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 perceptual level, 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 beginning 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.

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 history. 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.

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, is 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.

The self-evident contra the obvious

One fact about the self-evident must be observed at this point: a given truth being self-evident is not synonymous with it being obvious. 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 does 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.

Consider the history behind the three statements. If we begin from just the survivors of the Toba Catastrophe, 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 al-Andalus, 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 genius 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.

Yet be the requisite acts of genius to originate matters as they may, validation is a simple matter for me - and for any other adult with a functioning mind - because the statements are nevertheless still self-evident. 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 isolate the meanings down to the concrete-level self-evidencies that a child begins with. Now that I’ve isolated the meanings for you, you go do it too.

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 we need to do is go straight to perceptual data - and that is what is meant by the self-evident.

The statements as foundations of knowledge

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.

The statements as the widest integrations possible to man

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 “this 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 tomato exists”, “this particular piece of fruit exists,” “this particular plant matter exists,” “this particular animate matter exists,” and “this particular entity / existent 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 know that this particular object exists” etc all the way to “I know that this existent exists,” from which at some point I finally explicitly noted that I can know. 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 they are things that exist and also recognise that something existing is always something existing.

What applies to me applies to anyone else who shares my kind of consciousness - ie this applies to all men. For all men, the perception of a tomato is the evidence of the existence of that tomato, evidence of each man being conscious of that tomato he perceives, and evidence of that tomato being that particular entity with such and such characteristics. All observation points to this procedure and its results being applicable to anything and not just tomatoes, that whenever you identify anything you have evidence for the existence of something, evidence for your ability to be conscious of the existence and the nature of something (and also by particular means, which will be explored later), and evidence of that something being something, no matter what that something is.

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, all further observations and classification of things consists of reorganising known intermediates and recognising more intermediates.

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 classificatory layer was interposed between “plants and animals” and “living things.” Plants and animals are now recognised as types of “eukaryota”, which higher-level grouping shares equal billing with “archaea” and “bacteria” 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 amoebozoas and fungi - that too is a matter of controversy.

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.

The statements as implicit in all observations

The second interesting fact is that every single observation I ever made and I ever will make has always been and will always be evidence of the three statements by being instances. More critically, there had always been at least some degree of acceptance 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.

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 existed, that I knew this thing existed, and that this thing was a definite something. 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 Woollies supermarket).

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, it is an inherent part of development of human consciousness. 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 something, held by someone, and of a specific nature.

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 all observations by man, and in turn so is the truth of the three statements built from them.

The three statements as foundations

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 that they are so, but what can I see for myself that would justify highlighting that they are so?

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 can offer a few original leads here and there 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.

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 Incy Wincy Spider!” 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 wrong” with finality. 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).

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 was fit to judge things and people because I could see and know the truth for myself. 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 my own judgement of that which exists as based on observed facts - for any and all investigations of reality.

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 this 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!”

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 any 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.

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 not 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.

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 all 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 not self-evident but held to be true must be linkable back to that which is 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 details of what exists, of in what manner 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.

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 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. 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 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. 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.

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:

- the continuity of successive acts of human consciousness

- the ability to make express recognition of the primacy of existence, and

- the underscoring of primary facts as a contrast to non-existence, fantasy and error etc.

To them she added a fourth: epistemological guidance.

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.

That then leaves the primacy of existence and the nature of epistemological guidance. Both of these I will leave to the future.

The three statements as axioms

From the facts above it becomes clear that the facts expressed by the three statements are always implied throughout all of my - and man’s - 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.

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 prove 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 prove that existence exists, except by relying on the existence of evidence, which presupposes existence as such. I cannot prove that I am conscious except by relying on me being a conscious being capable of advanced cognitive activity. And I cannot prove identity except by relying the fact that facts are facts.

However, the same also applies to any attempt to reject 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.

There is a word for statements of this nature: they are called axioms. That word originates in ancient Greek roughly meaning “worthy of authority”. How fitting! The three statements are 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.

JJM

OTI post #4 - The Law of Identity

2011-04-04T18:04:00.000+09:30

In previous OTI work I had covered the basic context, existence, and consciousness. Now it is time to pay attention to the Law of Identity.

Basic meaning
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.

Reducing identity and nature
The fundamental concept is that of “identity”. I think there are two paths of reduction, here.

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.

The identity of any given thing - that is, the nature of anything - is whatever makes that thing that particular thing. 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 notion of it, which understanding is evidenced by the child comprehending what is meant by “about” in the question “tell me something about X”.

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.

The other part of reduction is noting that the notion of attributes cannot be applicable to anything other than entities. 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 of entities that one can gain the abstract awareness of this or that attribute. Thus before one can comprehend identity explicitly one must first comprehend entity 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.

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.

Perceptual roots
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 entities 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.

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.

Reducing “A thing is itself”
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.

A
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.

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.

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.

Thing
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.

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.

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.”

Is
The reduction of “is” was done as part of comprehending the meaning of “existence exists.”

Itself
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.”

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.

Reconstructing the concepts
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.

A and itself
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.

Thing
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.

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 insult to deliberately refer to a person as a thing or a something, 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!”

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).

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.

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.

Nature
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.

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!”

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 did change to become more human, with express attention drawn to that fact.

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 all 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.

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. All 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 we 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.

Identity
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.

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.

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.

Reconstructing “A thing is itself” and “A is A”
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.

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.

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 changing in the precise details of identity (mostly of shape, density and opacity) is just that and only that, and does not mean the absence of an identity at any given time.

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 the sum is the item of contemplation and to be connected to the entity as an item of contemplation.

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 is 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.

Existence and identity
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, all 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.

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 a thing is to be a something - to be a thing is to be a thing of some kind. Taking it back to the law of identity, the connection between existence and identity can therefore be expressed by noting that to be something is to be something.

Moreover, observe that attributes do not exist except as attributes of entities. There is no greenness floating about independently of things that are green. 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, each and every attribute exists and can only exist by means of being attributes of something that exists. 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.

It is for these reasons, notes Dr Peikoff, that Rand created the formulation “existence is identity.” The former - existence - is the fact of integration of attributes, while the latter - identity - is the fact of integration of attributes. 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.

You could look at the above and say “that is going around in circles!” My response to that is: “precisely.”

JJM

OTI post #3 - Consciousness is conscious

2011-03-20T14:09:00.001+10:30

I'd previously started with material on context and method, and figured out how to arrive at existence exists from observation. Now to move on to consciousness. Again, this is probably longer than it needs to be, but it's done.

1.3 Consciousness is conscious

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.

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.

Basic meaning
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.

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.

Reduction of the concepts
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.

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:

Concepts of the entity: consciousness (ultimate), mind, inside your/my head, heart, soul, memory, faculty, mind’s eye, mind’s ear, imagination

Concepts of quality of state: conscious (ultimate), conscious (medical), unconscious, awake, asleep, alert, aware, observant, oblivious, dozy

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

Concepts of attributes: smart, dumb, quick, slow, forgetful

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

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

Concepts of content: knowledge, thoughts, perceptions, conceptions, comprehensions, understandings, judgements, feelings and individual concepts thereof, values, goals, aims, purposes, standards

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).

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 able to act at all. The root of the discovery of consciousness lies in his very first deliberate actions of any 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 some retaking of control over a few of them, later).

Reconstructing the two concepts
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.

Separation of consciousness and existence through differentiation
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.

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 being 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.

The beginnings of self-awareness
The start of the discovery of consciousness is that the child must first be capable of deliberation 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.

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 there. 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.

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 new 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.

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 mind 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!)

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.”

The first identification of “I”
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 reference to her. 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 concepts. Those processes are discussed way later.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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”.

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.

The first concepts of actions and content of consciousness
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.”

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 mental 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 didn’t know things and that afterwards he did 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 knowing versus not knowing. He can eventually say to himself: “I can know stuff” and “There is stuff I don’t know.”

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 think stuff” contrasted with “Sometimes I can’t think of stuff”, to say “I can feel stuff” contrasted with “Sometimes I don’t feel anything” and so on.

I think a crucial part of recognition of consciousness lies also in recognition of degrees of awareness and degrees 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.

With that, he can identify the fact that 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.

The development of express valuation
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.

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.

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!”

An important element in this express identification of preferences and desires is him being offered express choices. 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 consciously 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, not as a prelude to being given them but as an academic exercise. 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 maker of value-judgements, which is a critical aspect of human consciousness and which he must identify if he is to understand “consciousness” fully.

Awareness of truth versus untruth
Another parallel line of development is his recognition of the contrast between the true and the untrue. 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.

Recognition of the distinction between that which is said and that which is actual is a significant milestone. It is a point at which the notion of doubt 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.

Moreover, this recognition is also the first exposure to particulars leading to formation of the concept of morality, via his own actual experiences of truth versus lies and of justice versus malice. He begins to realise that sometimes he is misled by others, not that they are only mistaken, and that he likewise has a capacity to mislead 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.

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 products and contents of consciousness as distinct from products and contents of existence. His discovery of this is a major step towards full identification of consciousness itself.

Contrasts in awareness
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 awareness 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 know things, but with a focus on him explicitly recognising the physical acts themselves and expanding his concept of knowing accordingly.

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 wanting 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.

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.

Powers of imagination and will
Another datum is during learning to read. More specifically, this is about learning to read quietly. 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.

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.

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.

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 will. 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.

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.

Arriving at the two concepts
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.

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 consciousness and that he is able to be conscious both of the world at large and the content of his own mind.

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 ability to learn stuff, know stuff, remember stuff, imagine 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.

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 fully awake and alert, actually able to be aware of stuff, to learn stuff, to talk about stuff he remembers or can’t remember, to make decisions and choices 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.

And with that I am satisfied with identifying what the words “consciousness” and “conscious” mean.

Reconstructing “consciousness is conscious”
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.

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.

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!

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.

JJM

God as government

2011-03-19T18:16:00.000+10:30

This is fascinating - and telling... The cynical idea that religion and socialism are the only two alternatives.

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.

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.

JJM

OR192

2011-03-19T15:46:00.001+10:30

Rational Jenn has the Objectivist Roundup #192 up and running at her place! Looks as though there are also some new blogs to add to the list of places to visit, too.

JJM

OTI post #2 - Existence exists

2011-03-14T00:10:00.001+10:30

In post #1 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.

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.

1.1 Introduction
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.

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 everywhere.

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.

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.

Why begin here?
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.

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.

1.2 Existence exists
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.

Basic meaning
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 there.” 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.

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?

Reduction of the concepts
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.

The concept of “exist” as preceding both variants of the concept of “existence”
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 there (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.

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 not, 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 be something is to be something, is always there, which issue will be addressed later.

Recognising existence through recognising identity: using “is”
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.

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: there is the what-is. 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:

The apple is red.
The book is on the table.
The pillow is under the sheet.
The sun is in the sky.

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).

The sun is shining brightly.
The sky is darkening quickly.
The moon is rising slowly.
The dog is barking loudly.

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.

Nouns, ie words denoting concepts of things: apple, book, table, pillow, sheet, sun, moon, sky

Adjectives, ie words denoting concepts of characteristics of things: red, sweet (and all the other sensory concepts), heavy, light, big, small, sharp

Verbs, ie words denoting concepts of actions: shining, darkening, rising, barking

Adverbs, ie words denoting concepts of characteristics of actions: brightly, quickly, slowly, loudly

Prepositions, ie words denoting concepts of relationships between things: in, on, under, between, next to, beside, inside, outside

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 entities. 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.

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.

Reconstructing “exists”
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.

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.

Later, in conjunction with learning about time, was and were and will be can be learned:

“The cat was on the mat, but now he is on the grass.”
“The dog is happy, but if we take his food he will be upset.”

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:

“That boy is being naughty.”
“The car is being washed.”

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 should, and if I become a parent I will), 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:

“Mum, Rex was running after the ball and knocked over the flower box and now there is dirt everywhere!”

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).

The need for mental separation of existence and identity
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 something being, whereas to “to exist” points to something being. Thus the word “is” is mostly not 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 not 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:

“The cake isn’t ready yet.” “Yes it is!”

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 shut down 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.

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 something, somewhere, somehow, and at some time, 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.

Separation of existence and identity through differentiation
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.

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).

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.

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.)

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.

Witnessing creation and destruction
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.

The beginnings would be teaching the concept of making, 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 consuming or destroying or any other form of unmaking. 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 exist.

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.

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 clearly did not exist before clearly 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.

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.

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 accelerate the child’s express identification, not enable 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.

Observation of one’s own recognitions
A second is observation of one’s own processes of recognising presence. These can be gradual or semi-gradual, or thoroughly abrupt, and also either pleasant or unpleasant too.

An example of a gradual or semi-gradual recognition is gathering together enough instances to form the concept of discovery, 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 dawns on you that you have in fact been bitten, ie it slowly dawns on you that the bite is there, that it exists.

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 something, 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).

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 cessation 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.

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 here, 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.

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.

Recognition of both artistic and deceitful fantasies
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.

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.

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.

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 do not actually exist or are not actually so 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.

Express identification of “to exist”
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 is.

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 exist. 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.

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.

Reconstructing “existence”
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.

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.

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.

Development of conceptual hierarchy
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.

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 existents 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.

Existence as a place
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 something in particular to being things that are and hence the concept of are-ness, the focus here is on the path from recognising things being somewhere in particular to being things that are here 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.

The fullest conception of “existence”
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 everything that is (including was and will be) and also everywhere that things can be. With that I am satisfied with having identified the full meaning of the concept of “existence.”

Reconstructing “existence exists”
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.

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.

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 is 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.

In time, if he is philosophical enough, he can recognise that all that all that (swinging his arms around again) is here, 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 all that is here.

With that, I am satisfied with this full identification of what “existence exists” means.

JJM

OTI post #1

2011-03-13T23:07:00.000+10:30

This is the inaugural post of my work on redoing my understanding of Objectivism, through induction, following on from my conclusions and resulution in January. The quantity of writing is probably overkill, at least early on, so be warned if you continue on. When I am satisfied with philosophy, at least in epistemology and ethics, sufficient to ground value theory, I will then tackle economics and economic method again.

The 'prerequisites' of this are: Understanding Objectivism, Objectivism Through Induction, The Logical Leap, OPAR, ITOE, and The Art of Thinking. Knowledge of logic wouldn't go astray either, but I will be investigating that directly for myself in time, too.

To start with, this is what I wrote as my own introduction.

Reasons for doing this
I am here thinking about philosophy, from the beginnings on up.

But why bother, given that this is obviously going to be an enormous effort? The answer is that there are questions to which I want good and detailed answers, especially value theory and ethics for investigation of economics, finance and business. This also requires an understanding of politics, and it also provides a basis for making headway in economic analysis and prediction. In addition, a good investigation of economics requires a good investigation of thinking and reasoning, especially induction. All these either are or depend on epistemology, metaphysics, and a solid understanding of the metaphysical nature of man.

Foremost amongst this is the need to have the right epistemology. Ethics, Rand said, is effectively a corollary of epistemology. It is this latter field that determines the quality of any knowledge gained. Without the proper epistemology, one is largely doomed to make at least some serious errors. This I cannot afford, and so these are my goals. In addition, however, I also have general curiosity, and as noted above philosophy affects all aspects of life so I want to examine all of it to at least some degree of detail.

Context A: to use words
Every single word used in here has been created by someone else. I’ve either been actually taught them or have read them and then looked up what they meant. Though the history of some is better known than the history of others, the ultimate origins of most words is unknown - but, of course, they have not existed forever, so someone somewhere had to create the roots from nothing at some point in history. No doubt, too, a great many people contributed over a very long period of time. Still, in any event, reality comes first in our experience, and the words to describe it are created by us or are taught to us on the basis of that experience of reality, however correct or mistaken the method might have been. Whoever came up with some words did so to label and describe a piece of reality they saw before there were words for that piece.

Words should also not be taken for granted. There are many cases when the meaning that some word had turned out to be wrong, there are cases when someone knew a word but didn't have a clue about its actual meaning (inconceivable!), and there are cases when words have multiple meanings. That suggests that meanings etc are somehow just the creation of fallible beings. It isn’t saying that all meaning is unavoidably subjective, but it does say that we must be on our guard.

Certainly, many meanings are valid, but it is foolish to consider all meanings as valid without question. The guide is reality itself, wherein the obvious is the basis for validating the not-so-obvious, and so the use of words is to help identify the connection. The point about using words is to express thoughts, and the point of thoughts is to guide actions. Proper use of words thus makes for successful action. Though it is not set in concrete, this suggests back-the-way that successful action that was guided in fine detail as a result of worded thoughts means that the use of words was right. This would be most patently right in the simple things, such as noting colours and temperatures and so on. This I think any normal adult understands directly, and it is so obvious at these beginning levels that it requires a conscious effort to turn away from it - that is, anyone who challenges the validity of using words while using words to make that challenge is dishonest: a truly honest believer in that would shun language altogether and reduce himself to pointing and grunting.

This means that, at the outset, only non-philosophical and non-controversial words should be employed, and that the more advanced words should be validated before moving on with them. Thus the opening context must be ordinary language and knowledge held by a reasonably intelligent eighteen-year-old, now capable of independent existence and independent judgement, arising from having been taught the words necessary for that practical effect. Yet while even these should not be left permanently unquestioned, working from this shouldn’t be controversial among the honest - and I don’t care for the opinion of those who think it is questionable and that the words in the properly-held vocabulary of such an 18yo are incapable of referring to reality.

(* Of course, the ability of the modern young adult to be in such a state is predicated on elders past and present having painstakingly obtained and implemented knowledge over time to form the culture of the civilisation this young adult finds himself in. Rand noted that she could not have come up with her philosophy has the Industrial Revolution not taken place. This makes sense, because it follows the inductive nature of the progress of knowledge, made the power of reason clear as opposed to it being a toy for the idly inquisitive or a tool for religious sophistry, and in practical terms made our livings secure enough to permit substantial effort into highly abstract thought. But that’s another topic.)

Context B: to practice focussed awareness
The context includes the rudiments of method: we now know enough to state that human consciousness is a faculty of discriminated awareness. It is capable of mentally isolating and focussing on entities (including expanses of materials etc) and aspects thereof. We’ve long been capable of forming concepts well before the formal identification of the method, at least for simpler concepts, and have been able to advance, albeit haphazardly, because of that ability. This is akin to Moliere’s discovery that he had been formulating prose all his life without realising it. We don’t need to know what prose is in under to speak and write in it. Thus is it also for the basic processes of consciousness - it is an active process consisting of two essentials: differentiation and integration.

Those processes work automatically at the perceptual level, but not at the conceptual. There is something crucial, though, in their application to the conceptual level. Grasping that application for the very first time, and developing it from there, was a long trial and error effort. But once grasped by one man who teaches his discoveries to another, the validity of the principles at the basic levels at least is much easier to see on the part of that second man. Likewise, after yet more trial and effort, even a child soon figures out the merits of what we now know by the names of the method of difference and method of agreement, along with their derivatives such as method of residues and the method of concomitant variations. Our ancestors practiced these, without fully recognising that fact, though could not proceed very far until these specific methods were finally explicitly identified and refined.

One of the tasks of philosophy, in epistemology, is to make that identification and refinement of what had already been used, to turn the haphazard trial and error into systematic examination and prescription of methodology, and in time integrates those fragments into a consistent whole. That is one of the things I will look at - though, that being said, their validity and use at the basic levels, such as admit of ordinary language and methodologies of an ordinary 18yo, are taken for granted at the outset. Again, he who would reject this throws himself back to a pre-historic mentality, and by such a confession is automatically unfit to utter a peep against me or anyone else who agrees with me.

Context C: general methodology
I gleaned this from OTI, The Logical Leap, The Art of Thinking, and Rod Fitts’ blog, along with thoughts of my own. This is subject to change, as I continue to progress. At the moment it is how I am proceeding.

Concepts
State the concept

Identify the other concepts most closely related to it, to help guide reduction and then for the sake of contrast as necessary for later differentiation and integration

Give a flooding range of concretes of the concept being examined such that the concept is differentiable from allied concepts; at least six to eight examples

Reduce the key concepts to either perceptual data or concepts already prior reduced to perceptual data. There are two elements to this reduction process. One is by using definitions as a guide. On this score, start by stating the most appropriate definition of the main concepts, and list other allied ones. Then state the most relevant definitions of the concepts traced back each level in the reduction. All these statements of definitions is only for use as a guide in further reduction, and also later reconstruction and then cross-integration, and NOT as a means linguistic triangulation. For the definitions, use a reputable dictionary, eg OED. The other is recognising that there are other facets of things than just the definitive characteristics. Look at the concretes themselves, both of the original concept and the allied concepts, and try to find other important characteristics and facets of the concepts being examined. This includes looking at fields other than those in which the concept came up, so that you may later integrate your concept to knowledge in those other fields.

Begin reconstructing the concepts out of the results of the reductions, using the concretes as guides, and justifying their definitions or formulating your own as you proceed

Integrate the concept with other known knowledge across a variety of fields, showing the interconnections, parallels, ancestry in concepts and principles, and so on

Principles
State the principle

Identify the other principles most closely related to this principle, to help guide reduction and then for the sake of contrast as necessary for later differentiation and integration

State the context in which the principle or issue comes up, (eg locate the philosophic point in the hierarchy of knowledge)

Give a flooding range of concretes of the principle being examined such that the principle is differentiable from principles that together are part of a wider principle; at least six to eight examples

Identify definitions of the key concepts and reduce them as above, for use as a guide in reduction, reconstruction, and later cross-integration of principles

Reduce the principle to either perceptual observation or causal principles already prior reduced to perceptual observations

Reconstruct the series of inductions from observations leading to lesser principles

Reconstruct the meanings of those key concepts, following the process for concepts as above

Reconstruct the induction of the principle being examined

In all reconstructions above, use more concretes of a range sufficient to engage in differentiation and integration, including methods of difference and agreement as required. Note also that the two processes - re-formation of the critical concepts and the re-induction of the subsidiary principles - are apt to be integrated with each other and must proceed in lock-step fashion.

Integrate the principle with other known knowledge across a variety of fields, showing the interconnections, parallels, ancestry in concepts and principles, and so on

JJM

OR191

2011-03-13T20:26:00.000+10:30

Amy Mossoff has Roundup #191 up at The Little Things.

JJM

OR190

2011-03-05T14:49:00.001+10:30

Round-up #190 is afloat in Reepicheep's Coracle!

JJM

OR189

2011-02-26T11:12:00.000+10:30

Again, I have missed a few roundups. The latest, #189, is safely holed up in the foxhole with the atheist in it :)

JJM

A question and a dare

2011-02-24T17:27:00.001+10:30

A question for various segments of alleged atheists (they know who they are):

If you consider yourself truly to be atheist, why do speak and act as though emotions were some magical connection to an infallible source of truth and goodness that reason is impudent if it dares question?

Don't say I am not looking at you: all those who posit subjectivism - of either the individual or social variety - are as guilty as sin in this regard.

Emotions are essential for human life, without which life is neither worth living nor even capable of being lived. But emotions are not tools of cognition - they are not means by which one can determine "this is true" and "this is good". So, certainly, they have pride of place in human life - but cognition is not that place.

Here's the dare:

Find out how emotions arise. Then go find a standard of value without committing that sin in any shape or manner. And, once you've done that, question every value judgement you've ever made.

JJM

Category theory

2011-02-20T13:34:00.000+10:30

Four years of engineering mathematics and we were never introduced to this. Whether or not it was used in formulating electrical engineering methodologies such as symmetrical components, however, is another matter. We never got into that kind of underlying theory, we just learned how to use various techniques to solve real-world problems.

JJM

Quick note on sim.eq's and econ method

2011-02-20T13:17:00.002+10:30

I realised this morning that, unless I expressly say otherwise, someone is going to think I am setting up a lead-in to Walrasian equations for solving economic problems. So let me now expressly say that I intend no such thing, and that I would view an attempt of that nature as inane (and that's being charitable).

The application of the analogy of simultaneous equations to economics lies in the issues of concepts and principles. That is, complex phenomena can only be understood by first understanding the individual elements and lesser principles, which is conceptually akin to using the solutions found to simpler equations as means to solving the more complex equations. This is as far as it goes, albeit good enough to begin hammering stakes into the hearts of both empiricism and rationalism.

By the way, I reject the complaint about a lack of experimental ability in the humanities, leading to an alleged justification of pure rationalism in these fields, just the same way as we can reject the same approach is rejectable in astrophysics. It is not as though since we can't experiment by making up new planets and putting them in a variety of orbits that we can't be sure of the laws of planetary motion, or that this justifies some sort of attempt at arriving them through pure mathematical deduction divorced almost entirely from direct observation, is it? I do not have any respect for the Austrians' special-pleading for pure rationalism in economic theory. I am quite sure that Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, and a host of other figures who, through observation and inference from those observations, began to piece together the picture of how the solar system worked, would have some stern words to say to Austrians if they (the astronomers) heard the Austrians go on and on about the lack of experimental ability.

JJM

Inductive Quest

2011-02-19T21:24:00.000+10:30

Thank you, Roderick, I'll be making use of this.

JJM

New Constitution, v12.3

2011-02-19T19:35:00.001+10:30

I did an edit of my Constitution as a break from philosophising (yes, really). Version 12.3 is now available in the cabinet for your reading pleasure.

JJM

Simultaneous concretisation

2011-02-19T15:49:00.009+10:30

During this revision of induction I had the intention of starting from scratch, given how fundamental the topic is and that I recognise my past methodology was highly questionable. I now attribute that, in part at least, to taking to Mill too enthusiastically. I now recall that it was from his "A System of Logic" that I got the idea, rightly criticised by Dr Peikoff, of treating induction as indicative and that a conclusion was settled when one could tie it back to something broader from which the initial induction could now be deduced. His methods, as elements, are fine, but that later wrap up method is way off. For that reason I have determined that I really ought start from scratch, paying very close attention to method.

Still, my post on the analogy to solving simultaneous equations did prompt me to try to find my old writings from back when I was first trying to digest Objectivism, not just the material on that ABC stuff but everything I wrote just to see how badly I did go wrong (I knew I did, so I didn't go looking for it before). Almost all of it is gone, though, both on my computer and physically. All I have seem to have left from back then (the general late 90's period) are three of those diagrams (the date-stamp says it is actually circa 1998, not 1996 as I had thought), some other trivial writings, my notes from Understanding Objectivism, and notes from other courses such as Objective Communication. To be honest, I am not all that fussed about this precisely because I now recognise that my own thoughts were deeply flawed, and because today the only things I would find valid is precisely what does still exist: those UO and OC notes. I do recall dumping some stuff for that very reason, but perhaps I was more thorough about doing so than I actually recall being. I do know there was a hard-drive crash involved, as well. *shrug*

The reason why I dropped the analogy entirely was that it was an oversimplified notion of relationship. I realised that what I had in mind overlooked the richness of actual relationships in the real world, that the relationships between A and B&C can be very complex and may have very little at all to do with the relationships between B and C.

Now, all that being said, I reiterate my reversal of my previous outright dumping of the analogy. Why, I will show later. Still, I do see that I was indeed wrong to run with it as quickly I initially did. I was trying to eliminate the influence of consciousness altogether, which was in truth mostly motivated by a sense of defensiveness - but this I did not expressly realise until this week.

The problem with taking the analogy too far is lies in that original motivation, which is a fool's errand. There is no escaping the fingerprint of consciousness upon knowledge. The problem lies chiefly in not recognising the distinction between content and format, that consciousness is chiefly a supplier of the latter (both perceptually and conceptually), but also that at the conceptual level consciousness influences the quantity and depth of content provided as per each given consciousness's own purposes in gaining knowledge. That fact about influence upon concent itself redounds back on formatting at the conceptual level, because the topic of format is itself material of content, which then leads to the issue of method determining content and hence to an apparent chicken-and-egg paradox that only Objectivism can fully resolve. For more on that, see OTI, in the section where Dr Peikoff discusses the inductive basis for the principle that one needs a method of knowledge, why reference to the fallibility of volitional consciousness is nowhere near enough to support that principle, and who supplied what first pointers to the proper resolution of that paradox.

So, yes, I partially resurrect the analogy. Now, some concretisation for the reader of this idea of a conceptual equivalent of solving simultaneous equations is well in order - and, yes, I do know I ought to know much better than to bring this a bit late to the party.

It was in the process of working out concretes for something else that I realised I was looking at a concrete of my old analogy! (So, yes, I do have lots of concretes for myself, with the issue being not stating any at the time of writing about the principle, rather than not having them.) The truth is that one can objectively identify a significant relationship between B and C by abstracting from the relationships AB and AC. The validity of the analogy is tied up with recognising having been as rationalist in the rejection as I had been in the initial adoption. This is observable in those concrete examples of the method at work in the conceptual arena. I'll give you two, from the far opposite ends of the conceptual spectrum (it was the second of the two that prompted the resurrection.) A third that I will briefly mention here is how in a physics class I once took the solution to one complex equation was achieved by subtracting from it an equation from a related subject matter and working on the resulting simpler equation from there to identify what the relationship between elements of some real-world system are (I don't recall what - something QMish in optics and lasers maybe, but then again perhaps not).

The first is really one that Miss Rand herself gave: the relationship between a perceptual-level standard of physical measurement and the use of that standard to achieve conceptual comprehension of that which cannot be perceptually comprehended. The entire second half of chapter one of ITOE is about that issue, with her own concrete example being distance:

The purpose of measurement is to expand the range of man's consciousness, of his knowledge, beyond the perceptual level: beyond the direct power of his senses and the immediate concretes of any given moment. Man can perceive the length of one foot directly; he cannot perceive ten miles. By establishing the relationship of feet to miles, he can grasp and know any distance on earth; by establishing the relationship of miles to light-years, he can know the distance of galaxies.

That a given distance is ten miles is a physical fact. This not just that it is physically yay far from A to B, but that the numerical relationship of that distance is a certain number of multiples of the distance from A to C. Great - but has one thus excluded the influence of consciousness upon the identification of that fact? Absolutely not, because of the question of why on earth was the distance between A and C chosen to identify the multiples of it in the distance between A and B. The answer to that question is as Miss Rand identified, that of the point of using the distance AC as the reference is the particular needs of the consciousness using it. That distance is one directly comprehensible at the perceptual level by that consciousness, eg that point A is the heel of a typical foot and point C is the toe of the same, and so the influence of consciousness upon the conceptual expression of fact of AB's distance by means of presenting it a multiple of AC's distance (eg 52,800 feet) is now unmistakeable (and unavoidable):

It is here that Protagoras' old dictum may be given a new meaning, the opposite of the one he intended: "Man is the measure of all things." Man *is* the measure, epistemologically - not *metaphysically*. In regard to human knowledge, man has to be the measure, since he has to bring all things into the realm of the humanly knowable.

This, then, can be viewed as a very basic example of the analogy at work, as well as being a concrete of how all knowledge is relational. There exists two separate relationships, where, by a mathematical process, the nature of a third can be obtained. Feet to lightyears is of course somewhat elementary, but the principle is indefinitely extendable (eg that physics class, and the inventions that similar high-level instances have lead to such as in aerodynamics and electronics).

The other example, the one that got me to resurrect the analogy, originated in me figuring out how to reduce the express conceptual-level abstractions of existence and identity to the perceptual level. It is all very well to say that they are self-evident (which of course they), but that's an issue of validation, which presumes already knowing what they mean. The issue is best identified by the question of how one would teach what the words mean.

The following I am culling out of a larger piece of writing I'm still working on for my own sake - ie it is me going back to the start again and being thorough in grasping Objectivism through inductions of my own pursuit.

Begin with existence: how would you teach that? I would argue that trying to go straight to something along the lines of stuff being here and there, and there's this great big totality of all of what's here and there, is just going to lead you around in circles, because "here" and "there" already have definite meanings and trying to retask them is apt to confuse the living daylights out of a child who does not already have at least some knowing grasp on the issue of being qua being. Do remember that an explicit grasp is miles apart from the implicit grasp that everyone has - the former could not be achieved without the latter.

I came to the conclusion that explicit grasp the concept of to exist precedes explicit grasp of the concept existence. That is, one must first comprehend that X exists before one can grasp there is a grand totality of X and Y and Z. And, before one can do that, since we must start at the perceptual level, that means beginning by making the simplest observations about what X is, as part and parcel of learning all the individual first-level concepts of things and attributes of things etc. Here one has all those simple sentences that a normal three-year-old (and often younger) can grasp without difficulty: The apple is red. The sun is shining. The moon is rising. The dog is barking. And so on.

Therein lies the issue at hand: existence is intimately bound up with identity, and one cannot grasp the former except by abstrating from instances of the latter. The questions then arise: How does one mentally separate existence and identity? How would you point that out to a child?? Get this wrong and you have what I suspect is the reason why some Objectivists make the mistake of thinking that "Existence exists" can be deduced from "A is A".

The answer is to be found in the fact that, at the same time as the child is learning about things and their attributes, the child must also be learning about concepts relating to time. This, too is bound up with identity, since it revolves around issues of that which is, that which was, and that which will be, where in each case definite particulars are attached: the apple was in the bowl, is being eaten, and the core will be thrown in the bin ("or you're in big trouble, lad!") So, here we have more instances of multiple referents to the abstract concepts that a parent is trying to teach: more equations, as it were.

What is the answer itself? That in the process of teaching about temporal relations there will come a time that is directly about the issue of coming to be, being, and ceasing to be. The concept of to exist, of being qua being, can thus be pointed to at the perceptual level and thrown into express sharp relief by contrast to before something came to be and after it stopped being. The Gaussian Elimination, in effect, would be through showing a child this development of being across a variety of different things, and then drawing attention to the fact of things being. In concrete, this can be achieved by scratch-baking all sorts of things (stories from my boss about her baking things with her daughter fill me with delight), playing with construction toys like Lego (a favourite of my own youth), making snowmen ("CALVIN!!!!!") and sand castles - anything and everything where the child is hands-on involved in actually bringing into being something that did not before exist. On top of that you can add in reference to seeds germinating, flowers developing. Then back the way, refer also to the eating of foods, the breaking up of Lego spaceships to make other things, snowmen melting, sandcastles being washed away, and then also observe other events from afar like whole buildings being burned (I saw a large tenement fire when I was a kid in Glasgow), and so on.

The range of possible concretes - ie equations in this analogy - from which to obtain the contrast required to differentiate out and subsequently integrate the concepts of "to exist" and eventually "existence" is endless. The parallel with solving simultaneous equations is apt because all the issues are in reality bound up with each other simultaneously, a word expressly used by Dr Peikoff. The direct perceptions are the original equations to be worked from, first-level other lowerish-level abstractions (eg the concepts of attributes of things and actions, and also spatial and temporal concepts, quantities, and so on) are the smaller subsidiary equations, and from there one works towards the grand solutions. Finally achieving the express identification of what "to exist" means is akin to one's discovery of those first solution to one of the actual variables themselves in the Gussian Elimination process.

With the concept of "to exist" in place it then becomes possible to identify the concept of "existent," and from there to identify the concept of "existence" (in conjunction with following a similar path of particulars to higher abstractions in regards to the issue of location, to get to "everywhere" and hence to identify "existence" in terms of place). One can then take this solution and use it to isolate where-ever existence is bound up in more complex "equations" and find other solutions, ie to then be able to draw express attention to the concept of identity qua identity, as opposed to particular modes of identity, and similarly with consciousness. For instance, regarding the concept of identity, one is now able to teach to (and in a manner appropriate for) a child the idea that to be something is always to be something, such as how everything one sees has a colour of somesort, that all material stuff has some sort of weight to it, and so on to show that everything is always something in particular, even clouds and winds and piles of dirt and so on.

That should be more than enough to validate my assertion the analogy is not auomatically to be dismissed as rationalist.

JJM

Simultaneous equations and induction

2011-02-17T19:21:00.004+10:30

(Update for direct-hitters to this post: concretisation is here.)

A long time ago (circa 1996) I thought up an analogy in reasoning to the mathematical methodology of simultaneous equations. I eventually dropped it, however, because I thought it was too rationalistic (plus because I was being ridiculed for it - though somewhat deservedly at the time, too, I must add). I now realise that I was definitely on to something important back then and that I was wrong to drop it entirely.

What I had in mind back then was quite simple: if one knew the relationship between A and B, and one knew the relationship between A and C, where for instance A was oneself (ie one's consciousness), then one could identify the relationship between B and C as it stood independently of A (ie, contra Kant, conceptually able to identify things in themselves). Working on that principle, one can then tackle more and more complex relationships, succesively busting down complex equations into lesser ones and from there to the identification of individual variables. I had neat diagrams to go with it, too, such as:

The reason why I think that there is something valid in this for all thought in general (I've never rejected the fact that it was a definitely valid method of approaching the quantitative aspects of reality) is because of its connection to Mill's methods (particularly difference and agreement) and their connection in turn to the general cognitive processes of differentiation and integation. It is quite valid to view systematic methodologies for solving them, such as Gaussian Elimination, as being advanced implementations of Mill's methods to the mathematical realm. That is, what is GE but a complex method for the progressive discovery of residues? Taking it back to reality itself, what is the method of concomitant variations but the means of identifying the equations themselves? There's even analytical software available for that purpose - that is what all those statistical packages amount to, with the R-squared variables and the like indicating how much confidence one can place in the equations so generated from a mass of raw input data.

The other reason why I am reversing my past dropping is that Miss Rand noted that to invalidate concept formation one first had to invalidate algebra. The solving of simultaneous equations is an element of the subject of algebra! It is one of the methods that is directly applicable to reality itself. The fact that there really is a strong mathematical element to consciousness, along with that express identification, clearly suggests to me that the method of solving simultaneous equations ought be investigated by the epistemologist. But I am neither a professional mathematician nor a professional philosopher, so I will leave this for those professional epistemologists to develop.

That being said, I know what I know, I do know that I am on to something valid and that it is not to be dismissed as inherently rationalistic. "Everything in reality is simultaneous" notes Dr Peikoff in many places, and that hierarchy in epistemology existed because we had to approach reality in that fashion: knowledge is built on previous knowledge. I strongly suspect that this is also a tie-in with the spiral theory of knowledge, in particular applications, in that the more one knows the more one can go back and refine more detail out of equations that one had already partly solved in the past. Thus I will use it when and how I think appropriate, being careful of course not to get over-enthusiastic and rationalist about it.

Dr Peikoff also notes that science was nothing more than the conceptual unravelling of perceptual data. Miss Rand noted that cognition was a mathematical process. I would suggest, then, in combining the two along with recognition of Mill's methods and their derivatives (particularly in mathematics), is that science in large part consists of identifying the figurative or literal equations in reality or fragments thereof and also of contrasting various equations against each other to isolate ever smaller valid sub-equations and ultimately to identify the root irreducible variables.

JJM

CR on unused credit limit

2011-02-12T08:41:00.002+10:30

Following on from the previous post on these kinds of technicalities, this is my educated guess as to why there was a CR marker next to the unused portion of my credit-card limit. I'll have to look up a resource on accounting practice within retail banks, or be told by an actual bank's accountant, to find out whether I am right or wrong. That being said, I am sure enough in this guess not to be motivated to make a significant effort to find out formally. If I get the opportunity to do so that is not out of my way, sure, but not otherwise.

The appellation of CR is not accidental, nor a mere automatic repetition of such a tag in the software or whatnot. It is put there, knowingly and deliberately, for valid accounting reasons. The reason: contingent liability. The unused part of my credit limit is the amount of debt that I am authorised to cause the bank to go into. If I use that amount, I would cause the bank to then owe the merchants I've just traded with the amounts of the transactions in question. For example, if I buy $50 of petrol from Woolworths-Caltex with my credit card then I will then cause the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to owe Woolworths-Caltex that $50. That amount will then be deducted from my remaining unused credit and added into what I owe the bank.

Precisely because credit-card holders are capable of putting the card issuers in hock to others like this, it is prudent that the issuers keep a definite track of the amounts of contingent liability they are thus exposed to and in turn manage their financial and administrative practices accordingly - ie it is an example of using management accounting for its intended purpose. Thus, as liability, the unused credit amount (legal meaning of credit) is a credit-side entry (accounting meaning of credit) and so warrants the CR tag as per standard accounting practice.

Now, back to boning up on induction.

JJM

Concretising the possible flaws

2011-01-17T21:28:00.003+10:30

For reference regarding what flaws in I've done so far in scattered episodes over the last three weeks, this is the work in progress. Be warned: it is messy, and skeletonish in places. As ever with me, mine out of it what you can if you're interested, but don't expect too much value.

Preliminary identification of the law
Most western people these days have heard of this “Law of Unintended Consequences.” That’s a bit of a misnomer, where the proper specification is the Law of Unanticipated Consequences – but more on that later. Simply put, the law is that whenever individuals act (qua human action) with intent to arrive at certain consequences there are always alternative or additional consequences that were not anticipated by the actor. These consequences could be either good or bad for the actor or others: unanticipated does not automatically mean undesirable. They could also be in terms of simple happening versus non-happening or in terms of marked differences in degree.

The Concise Encyclopaedia of Economics notes that the concept has a long history, though it only became popularised in the 20th century following the efforts of Robert Merton. Merton focussed chiefly on social outcomes of action, but the law is broader than that and applies to all consequences of volitional action. For that reason I hold it to be important to ethics theory, which means will redound upon economics for more than just collectivists’ preoccupation with sociopolitical organisation.

Here I can note some of that wrong-headedness. Prior to Christmas and the New Year, I’d already known about the distinction between material consequences and value consequences, but what finally dawned on me more recently was the distinction between what was unintended and what was unanticipated. I am hardly the only one to have failed to note that subtlety, as shown by how the law is popularly known as unintended consequences rather than Merton’s original specification of unanticipated, evidence by common experience and also how the Wikipedia entry jams Merton’s original word in brackets as though the difference were a mere affectation. In truth, there are such things as consequences that were anticipated but were nevertheless unintended. This is where they are known concomitants of consequences that were both anticipated and intended to result from the action. The knowledge of undesirable side-effects of medicines leading to prescriptions of supplementary medications to deal with those side-effects is a major example. It doesn’t have to be negative in terms of value, either, and may also be positive. An example is the prior-identified brightening of a room in some newly-moved-in-to house that also results from repainting it in lighter colours and whose motivation for doing so was to reassign it to a girl rather than another boy as per its previous occupant. The law does not apply to these cases because the consequences were anticipated even though unintended.

But, these distinctions aside, the simple validation of there being at least something to this law is easy enough, and is precisely what Merton did. He brought various observations made by many others throughout history (eg Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) together, noticed their similarity, and came up with his generalisation. The Wikipedia entry lists additional examples, too. To that I’ll add the machinations against Flavius Aetius, whose murder by Emperor Valentinian III left Rome vulnerable to sacking by the Vandals, as well as being one of the motives for Valentinian’s own assassination (one does wonder to what extent Valentinian had perhaps thought of these prospective events, though).

As well as those high-profile instances, everyone will have had experiences of minor instances in their own lives. Just last weekend I was cutting up the wood beams and planks that my father and I pulled down earlier in the week from an old pergola in my parents’ back yard. I got him to hold one end of a beam or plank secure while the other sat across the top of a broad-lidded and sturdy bin, which was wide enough such that the half sitting on it should not fall off from being unbalanced after I cut the wood with a power-saw. Indeed, no wood got unbalanced of its own accord, just as I anticipated. What I really did not expect was a gust of wind catching one of the now-lighter half-planks strongly enough to push it off and fall on my head as I was putting the power saw safely back on the ground. Fortunately it was flat-on rather than edge on, but that still hurt! Another local example I can add is how the construction of a stone jetty along some coast in South Australia had the unanticipated effect of curtailing the flow of water along that beach frontage, causing the sand to build up on one side and reducing the rate of replenishment of beach sand on the other. It wasn’t fully appreciated that the sand was moving laterally along the whole beachfront, rather than deposited merely by tidal action.

The phenomenon is also to be found in the dramatic arts, instantly recognisable as such because the phenomenon is so commonplace in the real world. The murder of Flavius Aetius was part of the content of the dramatisation of that period in Roman history in the miniseries Atilla, for instance. In movies, the old version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth showed Professor Lindenbrook gently chipping out a small crystal from a cave wall, which had the unanticipated consequence of weakening that wall. The fragile wall had been holding back a body of water or an underground river, so, shortly after the single crystal was removed, the crack left behind sprung a leak which grew and grew until the whole wall collapsed and the explorers were caught in a flood.

Because of familiarity with instances like these, both major and minor, and both personally and in coming to know of others’ accounts, people will almost instantly recognise there being something to this law. But that is not the only reason people accept it so readily, because the commonest sense-of-life I find attached with it is that relating to results both undesired and unanticipated. Some people will take to the law readily because it fits with a Malevolent Universe Premise, which could be implicit or explicit in any given individual’s case. I would argue that Merton’s just complaint about how the issue had often hitherto been treated as being one of express or insinuated theological import stems from that in some fashion. This MUP is still echoed today by the Wikipedia article in its reference to it being a caution against hubris and the culture putting the law on par with Murphy’s Law, and also by my own observation of it being invoked as part of conservative attacks on leftists’ policies and programs where the attacks are usually combined with calls for humility or somesuch (which basis for calls is essentially a continuation of the theological insinuation).

Still, irrespective of the attributions and motives people have for identifying it, direct observation of countless instances that range from the mundane happenings of daily life through to the most broad-ranging events in politics or some other grand arena means that we have enough to state that there is indeed a broad-ranging tendency for things to happen that the actor did not expect to happen. It is a phenomenon that deserves sober attention, which fact is what motivated Merton to write his paper.

Understanding the causes
One of Merton’s aims, besides bringing the issue to attention, was to examine the causes for the phenomenon. He holds that there are four main causes: ignorance, error, immediacy of interest, and adherence to basic values. The Wikipedia entry adds a fifth: the relevance paradox. To my mind, though, I think that only the first two are the actual direct causes and that the other three are causes for those causes. There are a number of causes of both ignorance and error, and those other three should be analysed as part of the analysis of those causes.

The cause in ignorance is that, for whatever reason, the actor did not possess prior to all the information or techniques of interpretation of that information that were relevant to desired outcomes. This could be for entirely innocent reasons, such as simple ignorance, or an inadequate education, or the forecast marginal cost of gaining information being greater than the forecast marginal revenue, or an immediate need to act even in awareness of not possessing all the information, and so on. Ignorance could also arise out of not-so-innocent reasons, varying in their degree of evil, ranging from impatience, slapdashery and other laziness to outright evasion and pretence.

The cause in error is that, for whatever reason, the actor did not employ proper methods to gain or interpret information or techniques of interpretation (note a suggestion of recursion regarding methods to learn methods, which is actually a reference to the need to understand the spiral nature of induction and to be able to reduce knowledge to perceptual data). Innocent reasons for error include interruptions of trains of thought, other distractions, and the general fallibility of men. Not so innocent reasons are the same as for ignorance, varying in their particulars.

Immediacy of interests: concern for consequences in the immediate future comes at the expense of concern for consequences further down the track. Distinct from begin in a rush. Also distinct from knowing those further consequences while not caring because of having no reason to care, ie distinct from the apres-nous attitude. IoI applies when people would personally regret their actions at a later date. Is a cause of both ignorance and error: ignorance through failing to pursue required information or technique because of the future being relatively unreal, and error through underweighting their importance.

Basic values: certain actions are taken because of felt need to act in consistency with moral norms. Again, causative of both ignorance and error. Currently predominantly sinful, because of evasion of questioning those norms and hence both ignorance and error. Need not be sinful and will, among fully rational people, actually be part of what is normal, and perhaps the greater part of causes for the Law playing out. In the face of incomplete knowledge of detail (an inevitability, varying only in hierarchical degree) one must act according to principle. This but the root of the need for rational moral principles! Like it or not, this then leads to Merton’s “basic values”. No business treating this as a wholly separate issue, therefore - possible cross-ref of Merton’s sociology perspective to Schumpeter’s annoying superciliousness towards the very concept of morality in HEA?

Relevance paradox: information or technique was not obtained because of a lack of awareness of the need to pursue that information or technique. The identification of the need for them would only arise after they had already been attained. This is an instance of ignorance as causative.

As a side note, following on from this analysis of causes, I don’t think that the focus on negative instances is purely a reflection of a malevolent universe premise. I suspect that the larger part of instances in actual fact will be negative. This comes not from ignorance and error, but how life as a material phenomenon is thermodynamically unstable (“life does not have the passive stability of inanimate matter”, as Dr Binswanger put it), and how also the material values that men pursue are either likewise thermodynamically unstable (or at best delicately metastable) and will become more so as our technical abilities improve. The result is that it is easier to go wrong accidentally than to go right accidentally: that is, there will in reality be more unanticipated consequences that will be undesirable than will be beneficial. But this is only a deduction and a mere suspicion not backed by a comprehensive survey.

Requisite knowledge of concepts and principles

Causality: generalise from instances, apparently rooted ultimately in one’s identification of self-efficacy as an infant. Makes sense - how else would one teach what the word ‘cause’ means? I saw a leaf swinging in air as though on the end of a string. I could not see such a string, but then I finally glimpsed a long thin strand of spider web, glittering in what sunlight filtered through the shade of the tree that the leaf presumably came from. “Stickiness!” The stickiness causes the leaf to be caught there, swinging around in the wind and unable to be blown away. Tautness of strands of line or whatever - feel for oneself by pulling on string or trying to break up a spider web. Causes what’s on the ends to be hung there (ref yoyo craze, heh!). Feel of weight of object on upturned palm. Ever heavier objects. Crush and pain! Then see things breaking because of weights being put on them, or hung from them (yay Hills Hoists! Yeehah! Crash bang whoops!). Heaviness caused the breakage because of force exerted - "push” and “pull” to a child.

Action (general)
Entity
Identity (axiomatic - ItOE ref)

human action (BTDT, don’t reiterate over much!)

anticipation and the unanticipated; forecasting and prediction
knowledge
logic, rational judgement
principle, concept, concrete

consciousness (also axiomatic)
consciousness as possessing identity
the crow and the raven, other quantitative limits
capacity for error
volition; focus vs evasion/pretence
the speed of thought (cool Dune ref!) versus need for action

The complexity of existence, including the intricacy of those complexities themselves. There’s so much going on that is relevant that it is impossible for anyone to know all of it. Much is not readily knowable at all, never mind in detail.

Four sets of observations are relevant here. The first is what it takes to identify the principle of the Conservation of Energy (we can safely ignore nuclear physics and also the very tiny bit of mass lost or gained in chemical reactions that E=MC^2 does technically apply to). It is, for the practical purposes of the economist, neither created nor destroyed. It only changes form.

The second is that there is not just a single switch from a cause to an immediate effect but there are entire chains of causes and effects: A affects B, which affects C, which affects D, and so on. The integration of this with the Conservation of energy (which includes its own set of observations again as well as intellectual feats of integration) is that the chains of cause-and-effect do not end just because a particular desired end has been achieved. The flow of causes and effects keeps on going and going and going, putting the Energizer Bunny to shame. Both the intended and unintended consequences could lie anywhere along that chain of cause and effect, could occur in either order, and both could even be comprised of consequences from multiple points. More often than not, though, the unintended consequences occur in the more remote links of the chain.

The third is that the chains are not singles. The one cause can have multiple effects on different things, leading to multiple daughter-chains, with some of those in turn having multiple granddaughter chains, and so on ad infinitum. As before, some of these chains may result in the particular consequence being aimed at, while others will have consequences that weren’t. Also, when one integrates this fan-out phenomenon with the conservation of energy (ditto commentary on observation and integration), the result is most of what the concept of entropy refers to. As the chains fan out, they also dissipate in their strength, until eventually the effects of the particular cause originated by an actor are so spread out as to be absorbed into and becoming part of the background noise, as it were.

The fourth is that not every progression of cause and effect down those chains is oh so linear. Even with entropy considered, the flow of energy is not always the continued spread, dissipation and dissolving into the background. In the real world there are also such things as there are amplification and leverage effects of varying kinds. There are also capacities for storage and release of energies, and associated with that there are activation energies and other thresholds for triggering events. Many effects are binary and quantised in nature: either they are triggered or they are not, and when triggered the effects have the same definite characteristics every time, such as electrons moving up and down orbit levels as they absorb or emit packets of energy of specific sizes. In the extreme, there is the phenomenon captured by the concept of “chaos theory,” that in some cases there systems so delicately balanced that very small influences can have incredibly enormous effects.

Validating all these I leave that to courses in physics to deal with. The courses in question should be high-school level, which means even those who want to be economists when they grow up should have been exposed to sufficient evidence for the above. That being said, the philosophically-minded industrial-strength nerd in me demands that I point out that I have felt with painful fingers my own instances of Count Rumsford’s observations in drilling metal, and that carbon-black from overheated cutting fluid suddenly welling up from holes being drilled is eerily reminiscent of biologically-oriented sci-fi horror flicks.

Example from literature (and film): in the Dune universe the identification of third and fourth order consequences is said to be achievable only by a Mentat (“It is by will alone I sent my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning.”) Beyond that, though, nobody has a chance - except the Kwisatz Haderach, of course.

goal
value
standard
moral principles as application of principle of forecasting and acting WRT principles ID’d from obs
prospective marginal cost of information versus prospective marginal benefit in value-pursuit

Re “always”?

observing that while there may always be unintended consequences this does not mean that we always care about those consequences. A critical element in the law’s import is that it relates to man’s values. There are times when it seems as though there aren’t any unintended consequences, but I argue that they are always there and that they are not brought to mind because they are both unidentified and not worth worrying about. That is, they’re there, but their significance is zilch.

Consider, for example, the consequences of inviting someone to your home on a hot or cold day, which would include not just the obvious things such as your time and sharing tea or coffee, but also an extra load on your air conditioner or heater. Certainly, some people do care and act accordingly (I’ve actually been a guest in another’s house in that circumstance, ref to common practice of people risking death by rationing the aircon or heater, and so on), but most would not care and never think about these consequences. Still, trivial does not mean non-existent, as those who do not find them so trivial will be sure to inform you of.

Cross integration of the law with other fields

The Law touches on the phenomenon of long-range order from short-range action, though this law focuses on specifically volitional action by man.

The law comports with economies as systems analysable to some extent in an engineering fashion; feedback loops and the like, leading to natural harmonics and the like

Implications of the Law

The law concretises the greatness of the need to identify principles of action in general as a basis for forecasting. As part of that there is a need for moral principles; cost-benefit analyses are not enough for bases of action; back-tie with the “basic values” causes

The need to look out for consequences more remote from the time of action, particularly in economics because of the existence of quantitative systems; Hazlitt’s One Lesson

Methodological flaw?

2011-01-17T19:19:00.000+10:30

Some explanations are in order. One of the things I have been doing over the last several weeks is listening to the "Induction in Physics and Philosophy" and the "Objectivism Through Induction" recorded lectures. I bought them at OCON08 but totally forgot about them until recently, and I still haven't finished OTI (I'm currently on lecture 5). They are proving to be extremely valuable... and also making me question the extent to which I have gone wrong in what I thought was proper inductive validation by oneself of another's findings.

Of present concern is how I had tackled economics, which I began questioning when I wondered if I had been wrong to some degree in the method. What I had been doing, at least to some extent, was effectively Aristotle's induction-as-suggestion method.

For this I had gathered a host of examples, both those themselves mentioned elsewhere (Merton's original paper and Wikipedia, mostly), examples I recall from others' specific instances, and those of my own observation and experience, and then treated them as the data for a preliminary induction. The next step I took was to examine the causes (and I have come to the conclusion that there are but two direct causes and that the other causes of the phenomena are in fact causes of those first two causes), and so tie the phenomenon to various facts (the complexity of existence, human capacities for focus and evasion/pretence, other facets of volitional consciousness, and so on). Finally, I then sought to reduce all the critical concepts back to direct perception. It is the second step there - the tieing in with other facts - that I am finding is problematic in what I have done.

I am glad I caught this at an early stage rather than waste a large amount of time only to find out the fact of such wastage at a later date. I'd hate to be in a similar position to a researcher that von Mises wrote about, who spent - and thus wasted - almost his entire academic life in systematically calculating the elasticities of every significant commodity that people regularly consumed. Yet, for what I have done so far, I am not sure that I have done exactly what Dr Peikoff said was wrong. I was not avowedly looking for broader principles to deduce the law from... but until I spend time going over my work from scratch a second time and working to fully comprehend the lessons of OTI it may well be that I had been unwittingly making that mistake anyway, so don't expect further publication from me in the immediate future.

By the way, over the last week of December I realised that I - and evidently a great number of others - had been making a subtle mistake. There is a definite distinction between that which was unintended and that which was unanticipated, and the law applies to the latter, not the former. This was both Merton's original description, and also cross-ties better with all the implications that are in fact inferred from the law by most and all those that should be so inferred. But more on that when I do finish writing.

JJM

CR and DR

2011-01-16T11:51:00.003+10:30

RealistTheorist quickly got the easy answer: CR is short for credit, DR is short for debit. One cookie.

The significance in this context comes from how that in the accounts presented the CR and DR are quoted from the perspective of my bank (Commonwealth Bank of Australia). Whenever one looks at one's bank statement what one is actually looking at is an extract from that bank's own accounting books, made available to the extent that one has the right to look at those books.

To the bank, the amounts listed as CR are liabilities. From their perspective these amounts are payable to me - CBA owes me those amounts (and hence they are also receivables in my own perspective). Here is the rub: in regards to my relationship with the CBA I have property in receivables from it, not in cash held by it. The amounts receivable by me and payable by CBA are the principals in a creditor-debtor relationship between us (likewise the sole DR is the amount I owe to the CBA on my credit card, and which amount to them is a receivables asset and not indicative of ownership in part of my physical cash holdings). This what the law, actual financial practice, and actual accounting practice have all now long been saying.

I don't know of any who made the following mistake, and I never made it, but it wouldn't hurt to give this warning against it: take care not to make the rationalist deduction "the amounts are listed as credit-side entries in accounting therefore they are items of credit in financial law". In fact it is the other way around, because the law takes priority and is what causes that financial-credit to be required to be listed on the credit-side in the books. Note that there are other reasons for listing credit-side entries in the books besides law-of-credit payables. Not every liability is an amount of financial credit, the equity holdings are also credit-side, and there even "contra assets" that are effectively credit-side even though their source is attachment to particular entries in the asset column (which is on the debit-side). The two contexts - accounting and finance - happen to use the same word, but what each context takes the word to mean is different to what the other takes it to mean and there is one point of overlap in referents.

The upshot of all this is that it further concretises the fact that in the real world today the bulk of the money supply is credit - in Australia as of Nov 2010, currency was $47b and demand deposits were $215b, giving an M1 of $262b. The credit in question is part of the money supply, additional to actual notes and coins, because I can easily reassign to others my property in claims upon the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. These monetised-credit mechanics are already here, fully in place and eminently capable of serving the needs of a sophisticated economy - and while something physical somewhere is necessary the use of credit as money does not strictly require physical cash (pay particular attention to paragraph 3 of this). The only thing that the financial sector need do if the courts begin taking heed of the epistemological complaints regarding the use of the word 'deposit' is simply to refrain from using that word. Until the rationalists on the topic of FRB understand that fact they are going to get absolutely nowhere in terms of theory and, in terms of practice in the event they actually succeed in influencing the courts, they will find themselves in the same position as the British Currency School when its members railed against FRB on notes in the mid 19th century: simultaneously listened to and promptly stepped around.

JJM

Update:
The numerical entry under the "available funds" column for my credit card line is the amount remaining unused from my credit limit. That's the amount I could further borrow but have not actually borrowed, so it isn't credit I've actually taken. Similarly, to get the CC relationship started I didn't have to make any initial deposits or whatnot in, so it isn't credit that I've granted the bank and the bank does not owe me anything either. In short, it is not as simple as saying "It's CR because it is available credit" in rationalist fashion as already warned against. So, here's another question for you - what does the implied credit-side classification of CR there signify? This time I don't know for definite, but I do have an educated guess that I am confident of.

Meanwhile on Netbank...

2011-01-04T20:46:00.007+10:30

This is an extract from a screenshot of my internet banking website, half an hour ago:

Pop quiz: what do the "CR" and "DR" mean? What is their significance?

JJM

An unwieldy but valuable book

2011-01-01T23:20:00.001+10:30

One of the books I got for myself a little while back is a paperback version of J A Schumpeter's 'History of Economic Analysis.' Contentwise it is straight-forward enough so far (I'm on page 93 after about 10 days of scattered reading episodes), though it does presume quite a large amount of knowledge and breadth of reading on the part of the reader. That is sobering, but at least this doesn't get in the way of comprehending the content.

The problem is physical - the pages are too small given that there are over 1200 of them! This makes it difficult to get comfortable while reading it, necessitating a firm grip that is both tiring after a while and creates the danger of damaging the pages or the cover. I'd hate to try reading this while on a plane or train (or automobile)! Its present physical format is best suited to books of tables and statistics that are delved into for minutes at a time (there are engineers' handbooks bigger than this), not for in-depth narrative. It should have been physically constructed with a smaller number of larger pages. The pages are a dash taller than A5, whereas ideally they should be one third taller and wider, giving a total of an extra 78% of text space per page and hence reducing the page count to somewhere around 750 to 800.

Another problem with this book is that the printing and binding got messed up. I estimate that there are about half a dozen or so leaves missing from the front of the book. Fortunately this is just Mark Perlman's introduction and the book itself (so far) is intact, so I wont bother with the trouble of sending it back halfway across the planet.

JJM

Still misunderstood Pt 2

2011-01-01T18:08:00.000+10:30

This continues and concludes my response to Doug, as per Max’s request.

The full demand-notes variant of FRB by legal means
So far we have large quantities of short-dated credit-notes being issued by professional financial houses with solid credit ratings. They trade at a small discount when in bulk, mostly just for interest with only a tiny part for credit-risk. For example, at a 4%pa rate a $100 note repayable in three months would trade at $99.02 and go up as the days passed. For smaller denominations, a lot of the time most people wouldn’t even bother with a discount. Trade both at discount and at par is precisely what happened in history.

Going to a full demand-note variant rather than credit-note would only take one more tweak, also something that should be legal, and already is in general credit law independently of its application specifically to money substitutes.

Each working day yay many notes would mature. However, the issuers of credit notes will find that some of the notes continue to trade even though they are mature, and so some of the cash they had made available is sitting idle. They will further find that this is not just a one-off but happens consistently and predictably, where, ceteris paribus, the better the issuer’s credit rating the larger the amount kept outstanding. Obvious implications then arise.

Should the issuers be legally obliged to have the whole of that money sitting idle in vaults and tills, waiting for redemption of mature notes that they know full well aren’t going to be redeemed, even though such a requirement may not be a term of contract? Should law not inherently bar them from reinvesting a portion? Indeed, should law declare void a term of contract that expressly allows the issuers to reinvest what amounts they honestly forecast aren’t going to be redeemed? No.

The situation is now that the economic difference between the credit-notes and the banknotes is only the law they come under, where both are now redeemable on demand. It is the content of the law that makes the difference: the credit notes are under credit contracts while the banknotes are under bailment contracts. The nature of bailment contracts is that the holders of the notes have direct property in the specie they are redeemable for (specifically, tantundem in genere), so it should be flat-out illegal (and would be under laissez-faire) for the note issuers to use that specie for anything. The nature of credit contracts is something else: the ownership of the specie remains in the hands of the issuers of the now-mature credit notes, and the creditors who hold the notes only have property in uncrystallised claims to being paid on demand. This makes all the difference in the world, because it is no longer illegal for the issuers to keep on using the specie - it is legally theirs to do with as they judge fit. There is a legal gulf between, on the one hand, something that ought be outright illegal and which is also imprudent, and, on the other hand, something that is imprudent but which must remain legal despite being imprudent. The law should and does recognise the existence of this gulf.

This is the key to the affair. Unless there is a specific clause setting out an express covenant regarding what happens on and after maturity, the credit contracts only require that the issuer pay on demand. Without such clauses it is not a breach of contract to fail to have the money on hand. The issuer may only be found at fault if there is an actual failure to pay on demand. The issuer may not, and indeed is not, found at fault for a mere potential that would arise under particular circumstances. The law can, does, and should recognise the crucial distinction between the actual and the potential - this is the same distinction crucial in the abortion debate, for instance.

So, yes, it is physically impossible to satisfy every holder of credit notes if not all the money is actually on hand to pay on demand, and yes, in economics it would be catastrophic were there enough demands made at once. The fact remains, however, that the financial houses would, under laissez-faire, be legally at liberty to keep available only a fraction of the amount of coin required to pay out on credit notes that have become mature and yet which are still trading.

The final tweak is to issue credit-notes with no maturity at all to begin with. The benefit for issuers and holders alike is that now there are far fewer tranches to deal with and discounts are now just appraisals of risk. Each issuer only has one or a few contract types, with notes differing only in the unitised amounts of their principals. So, now we have large numbers of pieces of paper evidencing rights under credit law to immediate payment of unitised quantities of coin on demand, which credit was granted solely on the back of the confidence in the issuer to pay coin on demand (ie ‘created out of thin air’), which notes evidencing the credit circulate alongside actual coin, and which notes do not have a matching quantity of coin actually available to pay on demand were every single demand made at once.

This is identical in every meaningful way to fractional reserve banking for notes, both in its mechanics (eg redeemable upon presentment, trading at a discount that varies predominantly with appraisals of risk) and in its economic effects (eg credit expansion in their creation, ephemeralisation of part of the money supply, potential for boom-bust cycles). The only difference is that the word 'deposit' is nowhere to be found, there is no hint whatsoever of the notes being warehouse receipts or equivalent thereof, and that the applicable commercial law is that of credit. In light of all those similarities, and despite that difference (and which difference was rendered meaningless by Foley v Hill), what purpose is served in not identifying this as fractional reserve banking?

Integration with other bank practices
Not only is there no benefit in that refusal, recognising this credit-variant as FRB allows much easier integration of it with other issues in prudential bank management. For instance, I hold that FRB is itself an instance of an even broader questionable practice, which a previous commenter rightly asked me about. The practice of FRB - in the wider sense I use - is a concrete instance of maturity transformation (also of duration mismatch, but that’s too arcane to discuss). This is where the maturities of the assets one invests in is different than the maturities of the liabilities and equities used to fund those investments.

Mismatch is pursued because of the tendency of longer maturities to have higher rates of return than shorter maturities. In the majority of cases, the practice is of having assets of greater maturity than liabilities and equities, giving rise to net interest margins and hence increased profits for the equity-holders. This, however, is dangerous because the obligation to pay can arise much faster than the right to take payment. The result is failures to pay and hence legal proceedings for default. (The opposite, having longer liabilities than assets, is inefficient because it cuts into net margins for no good reason).

So, given the zero-maturity of the notes and accounts that are payable on demand, for the most part there’d be some sort of skewed distribution curve heavily concentrated in the low-maturity range but allowing for small amount of investment in higher-maturity assets. This curve would be calculated and constantly monitored by specialists advising the bank’s overall credit policies for regions of varying sizes and economic conditions etc.

With that in mind, it should also be clear both that FRB even in the wider sense I mean is not sui-generis but is part of a whole system of financial practices and that, despite courting danger for the banks, shouldn’t automatically be illegal. Where FRB differs from other instances of maturity transformation, though, lies in its more direct connection to the money supply, which leads to the danger being an issue for more than just the bank practicing it.

A side observation, one perhaps too technical to bother discussing besides mentioning the fact of integration, is further connection of the practice of using bills and other “money market” instruments as media of exchange and how they are part of M3. Their use in this fashion is also an instance of maturity transformation, with the same dangers being attendant for the same reasons. But I will leave exploration of this issue to others who may be interested in this sort of arcanery.

An accounts-variant of FRB
The above was the notes-method credit-variant of FRB. With the requisite legal principle even for mature credit now in place, it is not hard to come up with an accounts-method credit-variant. Indeed, this can be discussed very quickly.

Instead of the issuer issuing unitised notes to holders, the issuers make book-entries in their accounts that list specific amounts. The holders can then either demand payment (eg at ATM’s or inside actual branches) or demand reassignment (eg cheques, EFTPOS, internet banking). In the past, customers could get information on their accounts either by asking in person or by consulting passbooks or chequebooks etc, while today these options have been added to by ATM queries, telephone queries, internet monitoring, and probably other methods too.

To facilitate trade and promote custom, the issuers can also be members of clearinghouses to deal with transactions among holders who are customers of different issuers. (One of the things that central banks have done is monopolise that clearinghouse role for their respective political jurisdictions.)

After that, complexities relate only to the range of services that financial institutions might provide. The only things limiting the financial engineer are imagination and marketability.

Epistemology regarding ‘deposit’
Without a doubt there has definitely been epistemological corruption regarding the word deposit. If one considers the wider, non-economic meaning of the word, it means something that is just sitting there, such as a deposit of ore in the ground. The word was brought into banking on the application of this to having specie or bullion 'just sitting there' in the vault.

Thanks to various injustices now long-since normalised, 'deposit' in banking has come legally to mean having amounts outstanding owed and payable on demand, irrespective of where the physical owings happen to be or what is being done with them. This was recognised piecemeal in case law, then formalised by Foley v Hill, 1 Ph. 399; 2 H. L. C. 28; 9 ER 1002, at least for Commonwealth countries anyway (emphasis mine):

Money, when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be the money of the principal (see Parker v. Marchant, 1 Phillips 360); it is then the money of the banker, who is bound to return an equivalent by paying a similar sum to that deposited with him when he is asked for it. The money paid into the banker's, is money known by the principal to be placed there for the purpose of being under the control of the banker; it is then the banker's money; he is known to deal with it as his own; he makes what profit of it he can, which profit he retains to himself, paying back only the principal, according to the custom of bankers in some places, or the. principal and a small rate of interest, according to the custom of bankers in other places. The money placed in the custody of a banker is, to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases; he is guilty of no breach, of trust in employing it; he is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in a hazardous speculation; he is not bound to keep it or deal with it as the property of his principal, but he is of course answerable on the amount, because he has contracted, having received that money, to repay to the principal, when demanded, a sum equivalent to that paid into his hands.

Make no mistake, I decry that epistemological degeneration. But I think that heavy reliance upon undoing this corruption as a means to trying to refute FRB in principle is cut off from reality. There is no doubt that part of eventual reform must include restoring the original meaning of deposit, but now that the practice of FRB has been normalised and has defenders not just among free-marketeers but even knowledgeable Objectivists it will take a damn sight more than linguistic reformation to deal with the practice. Without that extra work, these other Objectivists can and have condemned the deductions from the etymology of ‘deposit’ as rationalist.

The need for extra work can be seen from the fact that the linguistic complaints can be satisfied by mere equally linguistic change. All that the financial institutions need do to maintain FRB while doing justice to epistemology and legal clarity is to abandon any and all reference to deposit and related concepts in their brochures, advertisements, and contracts. This is not a tall order, because a panoply of nouns and verbs with 'credit' as their root already exists and is in use in banking. For instance, instead of depositing into an account the bank will refer to customers crediting their accounts, or instead of withdrawals it is debiting, and so on. Likewise, instead of the bank making reference to “accessing your money” it could refer instead to the physical acts themselves along with catch-all words like “or” and “so on.” In this project, the financial engineer would use the services of the lawyer and the linguistic engineer.

With that in place, the word "deposit" could then easily be returned to its original meaning by the courts without causing economic disruption, with all new contracts using the word treated accordingly (as instances should have been so treated all those centuries ago). The problem is the only thing that has changed is making public recognition of the fact that under FRB there is the use of credit alongside specie as a medium of exchange, interchangeable by means of common money-substitutes. There has still NOT been given any reason as to why credit should not be used in this manner. And so, other free-marketeers and those other Objectivists will continue to defend the principle in general until they understand the actual economics.

Conceptual structure
The argument I’m having with the legal-based opponents of FRB is not that their arguments are false - on that score they are substantially correct and I don’t have much quarrel with their arguments - but regards how broad the concept of FRB is. Their argument on this issue is that FRB applies only where deposit contracts are being technically violated by banks lending from the funds deposited. My argument is that they are right to identify the violation for what it is but are wrong to restrict FRB solely to the outcome of that violation. I am trying to point out that what the violation achieves in economic substance is the forcible (and hence immoral) transition of banker-customer relations away from bailment towards credit and the monetisation of that credit, which fact is being masked (extremely thinly) by continued use of depositary nomenclature, and yet that this particular outcome can also come about perfectly legitimately by simply entering into contracts of credit from the beginning. The conflict, therefore, is about conceptual structure.

Here is the conceptual structure I have in mind:

At the top-most level is fractional reserve banking in general. Its defining feature is the use of credit owed by banks to customers (whether or not identified as “depositors”) as media of exchange. This is fractional because there are more rights to payment on demand outstanding than there is cash on hand to pay those demands. Within this concept, differentiable by legality, there are two main variants (and other, lesser, demi-variants I wont discuss here). These are deposit-variant and credit-variant.

The deposits-variant is where customers are told (or are lead to believe) that they are making deposits when they hand cash (or cheques or whatever) over to a teller etc. The etymology of the word ‘deposit’ once legally implied that the amounts so deposited were stored in vaults, in the same way that ore still in the ground is a deposit of that ore. They are also being lead to believe - or at least not being expressly disabused of the inference - that the money is there being safely held for them (*). This variant is fractional because that is not actually the case - only a fraction of the amount deposited is actually there as a physical deposit.

(* At least, that is the claim I have heard from some quarters. From personal experience both anecdotally and as a former professional taker of surveys that included bank satisfaction surveys - I once worked for Roy Morgan Research and AC Nielsen - I know that real people from a variety of walks of life are nowhere near that naive. They know what happens to money in banks and credit unions and building societies. Heck, part of the charters of these latter two types of institutions includes member education.)

The credit-variant is where customers are told that they are told (or have sufficient notice) that they are creditors to the bank and that when they hand over cash etc they are making loans to the bank. The customers can demand full or partial settlement immediately, whether by drawing on them in specie or through reassignment. This variant is also fractional because only a fraction of the amount that is legally payable on demand is actually available for payment.

The legal-opponents rightly condemn the deposit-variant, but exclude the credit-variant from the broader FRB concept entirely. I don’t do that.

These legal variants can then be further distinguished by the concretes of mechanical methods. There is the notes-variant of FRB, which is where the issuer has more paper notes outstanding than cash on hand to pay them, and there is the accounts-variant, which is where the issuer has more amounts listed under liabilities than there is cash listed under assets.

Metaphysical claims
A frequent element in treatments against FRB is the claim that two (or more) people are trying to lay claim to the same thing at once, that a given unit of specie is being used several times simultaneously. This argument against FRB requires that the law recognise multiple ownerships of the same thing - not in the form of shares of ownership, but that each is trying to claim 100% ownership at the same time as others are doing likewise.

The problem with this is that it is confusing the issue of who exactly owns what. The law no longer recognises ownership of specie on the part of depositors - again, that is one of the things the finance industry took from Foley v Hill. By the violation of the deposit contracts, which then became normalised, the customer’s relation to the bank was forcibly switched into one of being a creditor. What the customers own is right to payment, not to a share in the present stock of what that payment must be in.

The trade in ownership of rights to payment separate from trade in the goods actually payable with is no different to trade in any other intangible, such as in factoring, or in the rights to buy or sell stocks at given prices (calls and puts respectively) separate from the trade in stocks themselves (giving rise to the distinction between covered and naked). These rights are separate assets from the physical underlyings, are recordable in accounts books as such (cue arguments about expensing executive stock options...), can be used as collateral, and are subject to tax laws.

Further, this trade in rights is but an instance of the broader trade in all intangibles in general, such as the purchase and sale of copyrights or other intellectual properties. So, so long as the debtor pays on demand and is not insolvent (ie total assets are greater than total liabilities), this trade should be and is recognised as perfectly normal by the courts. There is no metaphysical difficulty at all, so long as one properly identifies that the legalisation of the original violation of deposit contracts included the forcible switch of property relations from owners’ reclamation rights to creditors’ repayment rights, and that one remembers that intangible does not mean unreal. Again, if the issue of the meaning of deposit were resolved as reason and justice demand that would still leave this principle of trade in credit intangibles untouched, and would just see the marketing and legal arms of financial institutions try to push customers in that direction.

Inflation and dilution
One last issue I’ll discuss is whether or not the consequence of monetary expansion is always inflationary. This is the particular topic that got a few people emailing me after I published something on HBL. My answer is yes and no, but that properly speaking the answer is no and that Dr Binswanger is correct as far as he goes (but he is wrong to hold that there is nothing wrong with FRB).

The answer is yes, if by inflation it is meant an increase in either the total money supply or in general prices. The problem is that I don’t hold to either of those identifications of “inflation”, so the proper answer is no.

Inflation occurs under fiat currency, and is best kept strictly to that context. It is the act of increasing the quantity of notes or numbers in accounts denominated in a numeraire whose sole value lies in its ability to satisfy tax and legal tender laws. Without taxes and legal tender laws, fiat currency would have no value whatsoever - modern polymer notes wouldn’t even do as toilet-paper or kindling. Thus the expansion of fiat currency is an injection of worthless air, which is consistent with the etymological origin of the term.

However, when the money supply is being increased through the monetisation of credit, ie where banks are borrowing money from current-customers in the form of credit notes or credit accounts (NOT credit cards, which is a different issue entirely) and where this credit is instantly reassignable by direct transference of substitutes from one person to another, I would not call this inflationary. Instead, dilutionary would be the better term (I don’t claim origination of the term - I co-opted it from Hazlitt’s dilution-of-wine idea he used to analogise inflation with). Dilution implies a thinning with something that is much more substantial, which something can and does have value in its proper context. Unlike fiat currency, the credit issued by the expanding bank does have real value independently of its use as a medium of exchange. The problem - and why it is a dilution - is that it does not actually add anything to the overall economy and merely redistributes value from everyone else in the economy to the issuer (and others to a declining degree in the spending cascade that follows).

One could then discuss the interrelationships of inflation and dilution, but I wont go into that. Besides, right at this point in time I don’t have a matching concept for the opposite of dilution in the way that deflation is the opposite of inflation in the fiat context. “Concentration” strikes me as unwieldy in this context. Feel free to suggest something.

JJM

FRB still misunderstood!

2010-12-22T17:38:00.001+10:30

Commenter MadMax asked me if I could respond to a post by Doug Reich about Fractional Reserve Banking. The topicality of that topic is a bit more 'perishable' than econ method, so I decided the latter can wait and I spent what time I had this past week on making that response. Besides, it also ties in with some on-going email (and now tardy) discussions I've been having with a few people and they all have the same issue that is at fault with Doug's post. I hope that this will help clear up a few things in that regard.

Also, note that I am not here actually to defend FRB. Other than when there is a bona-fide physical dearth of specie, such as in remote and rarely-visited locations or where bad law hampers the circulation of specie, there is no economic benefit to the practice and so should be heavily frowned upon. There is no excuse for it in a free economy that has decent communication with the rest of the world.

This is not all of my response, and I’ll post the rest later (update, here it is). It is not the best time of year to be doing this sort of thing!

For those who missed it, previous posts by me are here, here, here and here.

The essence of Fractional Reserve Banking
The issue at hand lies in what exactly is FRB in principle. Over and over I see people having the same misunderstanding of this point, by means of them committing a particular conceptual fallacy, implicitly expressing faulty reasoning that includes that fallacy as a premise, and then on the basis of those fallacies subsequently drawing from the empirical data a particular hasty generalisation.

The essence of FRB is the monetisation of credit. This is what it IS in economic substance, independently of how concrete forms of this monetisation historically came about. In all its variants, FRB is where a debt owed by a debtor to a creditor can be used by that creditor as a medium of exchange independently of the original principal. What makes it fractional reserve banking is that this new form of money is not wholly backed by tangible specie but by the general assets of the issuers of the credit, of which only a fraction is actual specie. The rest of the assets backing the money is other goods, both tangible and intangible.

The different types of FRB differ on the mechanics by which credit is monetised. They also differ in the morality of those mechanics. Some implementations of FRB are immoral, such as the historical origin of particular implementations that gave the principle practical legs in the first place, but not all. In order to say that the whole of FRB is inherently something that ought be illegal one must say it should be illegal to use credit as money. The problem is that there are no grounds for such a law. By all means, one can and should criminalise particular practices that result in FRB, but that is as far as one can go in terms of what the law can say. As soon as you accept that it should be legally permissible to use credit as a medium of exchange you have accepted that at least some form of FRB can be legal. Once that is accepted then generating an instance of FRB that is consistent with both epistemology and morality is but a matter of technical know-how.

In regards to those historical origins the legal-based opponents of FRB are committing the fallacy of the Frozen Abstraction. What the legal-based opponents are doing is rightly noting various immoralities, observing that they lead to FRB, but then concluding that the immorality is necessarily attendant with all instances of FRB. That is fallacious.

They then mention the deleterious economic consequences of FRB, which they are right to note are indeed inherent in FRB as such (and why I am not a fan of FRB despite accepting that in principle it should be legal). But here they are committing another fallacy. They are implicitly reasoning that since the immoral is the impractical, instances of systematic impracticality can only arise from systematic immorality. They then integrate this fallacious reasoning with the actual instances of systematic immorality they've discussed and so further bolster their claim regarding the whole of FRB as such.

Their reasoning is fallacious because there are other reasons for systematic impracticality besides immorality. The critical ones in this regard are systematic ignorance and systematic error, neither of which are inherently the result of immorality on the part of the ignorant or erroneous. For instance, you should see some of my grad school notes, written by some of the top members of the financial profession in Australia yet which have howlers such as “interest is the price of money.” Imagine the consequence of these howlers being taught to thousands of financial services students every year. Thus the systematic impracticality must be dealt with on economic grounds, because dealing with the particular immoralities of the referents of the frozen abstraction still leaves open moral means of generating a fractional financial system. It is time, then, to show how that impracticality arises by otherwise moral means.

Constructing a notes-variant of FRB by perfectly legal means
The actual fact is that FRB can proceed with its full vigour, without injustice, by the simple method of making the contracts of a credit nature from the beginning with everyone knowing exactly what is going on. (I’ll deal with the epistemological and metaphysical claims later). This is an example of that technical know-how - and note that it is the bread and butter of the financial engineer to think up things like this and put them into actual practice.

The context is that the economy is laissez-faire, and that the money supply initially consists exclusively of specie. That is, there are physical coins circulating around, be they made of gold or silver or copper or whatever. This core constituent does not change. There are also banknotes circulating in the place of coin, where the contracts for those particular notes specifies 100% reserves. People in the economy are well-use to using these notes as substitutes for money. For all practical purposes, these banknotes can be treated as one treats coin.

Joe lends Pete some coin, say $98. Pete gives Joe a verbal promise to pay $100 back at some specified later date, say three months hence. Joe accepts the verbal promise because he knows Pete well. Pete spends the $98 on something productive either by purchasing and using capital goods himself or on-lending it to someone else who will purchase and use capital goods (you can also daisy-chain that as much as you like, too). The profits of this investment will afford him a profit even after paying a little more back than he borrowed.

One day, about a month later, Joe comes across Sally selling something that he wants. He finds that he does not have enough coin on hand... but he gets the idea of calling Pete and asking him if it is okay that he (Pete) owe the $100 to Sally instead. Both Pete and Sally agree to this. At no point is Pete required to go to Sally’s shop and provide $100 in coin, it is just a direct reassignment of debt. Sally accepts this because she wants Joe’s business, and she (like Joe) thinks Pete is a good credit risk anyway so she has a good chance of earning some interest. She accepts the debt for the value of say $98.67 (eg Joe had to pitch in an additional $1.33 in cash to buy something with a $100 price-tag).

Do you follow that much? If you accept that it consistent with standard commercial law as should be recognised under laissez-faire then you’ve just accepted the economic basis for a legally legitimate system of fractional reserve banking. You’ve done that because the root of FRB is the reassignment of debt as a means of settling other debts (in this case, Joe settling his debt to Sally when he takes that $100 item). The monetisation of credit is where the practice of debt reassignment becomes widespread enough for it to be taken for granted and incorporated into people’s regular economic calculations: that is, they include the use of high-quality debt as a medium of exchange when examining the economy, when examining and calculating price structures, and when taking account of their own and others’ money stocks.

To get from debt reassignment to credit monetisation (and hence an instance of FRB) that all we need is a series of tweaks, each tweak being equally legitimate. Follow this evolution, and see if you can point out where, if anywhere, an act that should be illegal has been committed.

Instead of a verbal promise, Pete gives Joe a paper note evidencing the fact of credit by it saying “I, Pete, owe Joe $100, payable on or after X date.” By means of this paper, instead of Joe calling Pete to reassign the debt Joe just crosses his name out, signs this crossing-out, and puts Sally’s name there instead. This makes it easier to reassign the debt because it no longer requires Pete be available to answer his phone. It also makes the debt more marketable because the written evidence of who is owed what is clearer and more legally presentable. This has just described the economic substance of creating a Bill of Exchange. It is no accident that Bills of Exchange are included in expanded definitions of money and are known in the finance industry as an example of “money-market instruments.” It is also no accident that discussion of them in general, and also of the economic merits of their use as backing for notes issuance in particular, is included in arguments about FRB.

Instead of a creditor being named on the note, it says “I, Pete, will pay the bearer $100 on or after X date.” This allows the debt underlying the credit-note to be reassigned much more easily still because it becomes “without recourse” and eliminates any lingering contingent liabilities on the part of holders who on-trade it. Bearer instruments and “without-recourse” clauses should be legal, and mostly still are. For instance, there are such things as bearer bills, bearer bonds, and also cheques payable to “bearer”. Similarly, many mortgages and other debts have without-recourse clauses in their contracts. This should continue to be legal under laissez-faire.

Pete recognises the fact that his credit-note could be traded around, just as banknotes already are, so as an enticement to prospective creditors he breaks the single $100 debt into a series (called a ‘tranche’ in the jargon) of identical $1 credit-notes. There are now 100 of these credit-notes circulating around in the economy, used alongside coin as media of exchange and independently of the original $100 in coin that Pete borrowed and spent. There’s no disputing this tweak either. If one has the right to borrow as such then one is at liberty to break up that borrowing into as many little units of whatever size as one finds practical. Indeed, that is precisely what is done today, with the unit sizes being tailored to the market being targeted. Certainly, they do trade at a discount, of course, but so did fractional notes in actual history (ditto Bills of Exchange) and that didn’t stop them from being widely used as money (as money substitutes, to be precise), so one cannot claim lack of significance in trade to skirt the issue at hand.

Pete recognises that his excellent reputation means that he can have quite a turnover of tranches going. So, he borrows $5,500 or so in the form of about 55 tranches of 100 $1 notes, each having three-month maturities such that one tranche matures each working day of the year. Each time he repays one tranche he issues another to replace it so that his total debt outstanding remains around $5,500. Now there are 5,500 $1 three-month credit-notes constantly circulating, with 55 different maturity dates. This is just more of the same as above, differing only in quantity. Again, the significance-of-trade argument is irrelevant.

Tom, Dick, and Harry et al each independently see what Pete is doing and profiting from, so they repeat it themselves. They too borrow money and evidence the debts with multiple tranches of $1 credit-notes. Now there is say a hundred thousand dollars worth of paper physically circulating around the economy, all independently of the original principals. Again, this is just an increase in quantity.

The financial houses see what is going on and so themselves begin systematically emulating Pete, Tom, Dick and Harry, issuing tranches of fungible $1 credit-notes by the truck-load. They are credit contracts, rather than the bailment contracts that the banknotes are issued under, and so do not legally require the whole of the outstanding amount of debt be backed exclusively by coin in their vaults. The amount of these notes circulating in the economy now runs into the millions. One cannot legally disallow this enormous increase in quantity given the previous developments!

The credit-notes are exactly that – notes evidencing credit claims upon their issuers, and whose issuers back those claims by the totality of their assets and not just the small amount of cash actually on hand. By the ready transferability of the credit notes, and hence of legal title to the credit itself, that actual credit has been monetised and so the notes themselves have become money-substitutes. This is an instance of notes-based FRB even though the notes are not repayable on demand until on or after the maturity date, because the nominal amount outstanding is not backed by an equal quantity of specie held by the issuers.

Just these straight-forward and completely moral tweaks on an equally moral original situation are enough to create a variant of fractional reserve banking. One could even envisage the lending of the notes themselves (which, again, must be legal), in time generating credit from credit in standard multiplier style - but it should be clear by now that this would be belabouring the point. I also can, and will, develop this into a demand-notes variant, but I wont just now because it would raise another issue that is the subject of misunderstanding and dealing with that just now would get in the way of that main point.

The need for economic argument
FRB can be done in a completely above-board fashion simply through sophisticated developments of the practice of reassigning debts, all of which are and must remain legal. At least some form of FRB in principle must be legal under laissez-faire because at no point in the evolution from simple debt reassignment to the mass monetisation of credit is anyone defrauded or stolen from, nor was there any epistemological corruption or attempted metaphysical voodoo. At no point may anyone forcibly intervene and say “You shall not do that.” Thus one cannot ban FRB without ultimately requiring a ban on debt reassignment for the ban on FRB to be effective - but such a ban is impermissible because it would be a violation of rights.

The fact that the immoral is the impractical has the exact opposite consequence for this topic than the legal-based opponents intend: an effective ban on FRB would be enormously destructive. A ban on debt reassignment would redound not just on FRB but effectively destroy much of the short-term debt market - it would make Bills of Exchange illegal, for instance. The ban would also end up obliterating most of the liquidity of shares in corporations, because the sale of stocks requires that the debts owed by corporations, insofar as corporate debt is actually owed by the shareholders, is also transferred from a selling shareholder to a buying shareholder (ie not as Joe selling debt to Sally, but Pete clearing his debt through Eddie assuming it as part of him buying out Pete’s investments). The result of a ban, once consistently enforced, would be a wiping out of huge amounts of wealth, and, as it would constitute an enormous exit-barrier, would heavily discourage further capital formation.

There are a number of other comparatively minor consequences too (eg to ban factoring), but to top this all off, a ban on debt reassignment would ultimately require that the government ban barter or any form of payment in kind whatever, dictate what shall and shall not be money, regulate its value, and institute legal tender laws. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: a ban on FRB-in-principle damn-well IS an intervention, and once that process is begun it will lead to controls breeding controls.

Trying to curtail FRB by means of legal proscriptions is totally the wrong way to go about it. You can and should ban wilful breach of contract, but that’s not enough to prevent FRB. So long as debt reassignment is legally allowed, as it must be, then at least some form of FRB can legally arise, with all the deleterious economic consequences that follow. More to the point, so long as debt reassignment is legally allowed at least some form of FRB will arise, as will those economic consequences, unless the hard work of making proper economic arguments is undertaken. The only normative prescriptions that can be made regarding FRB relate to what people should do in their capacity as customers of financial institutions and as participants in markets, not in their capacity as citizens and lawmakers.

A pause
Here is where I will stop for the time being. I’ve proven my chief point: it is wrong to say that all FRB should be always illegal, and the reference to particular injustices as though they exhausted the whole of what FRB refers to is to commit the fallacy of Frozen Abstraction. The heart of fractional reserve banking is the monetisation of credit, irrespective of the legal status of how credit comes to be monetised in any given instance. It is the economics that must be dealt with, not those particular injustices, if FRB is to be eliminated in entirety.

When I come back I will continue tweaking so as to arrive at a full demand-notes variant and then convert it into a full demand-accounts variant, again by steps that are and must remain legal. I will then deal with the epistemological and metaphysical claims.

JJM

Busy until Christmas

2010-12-16T18:59:00.003+10:30

Hi there, people

It has become and will continue to be a very busy December for me. I'll be working every day right until Christmas eve. I have notes prepared for my next example of using induction and deduction in how an economist should proceed - validation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. At this rate it wont be done until after Christmas.

Btw, this is Chienna:

As to the whys and wherefores, there are of course things I am not allowed to say but I can say that Cognis has officially been acquired by BASF as of 9 Dec. On Monday this week we each got a lanyard, a magnetic lapel pin, an informational fold-out, and a booklet of stickynotes, plus also a celebratory morning tea. I have no idea how hectic work will get once the integration process hits full swing, but there should be a lull between Christmas and Jan or Feb. I must say it has been good working for Cognis, and I can also say that I am glad I was there for all of its independent existence after Henkel carved itself up. Now it is on to a new future!

JJM

Roundups

2010-11-27T08:24:00.000+10:30

I've missed a few Objectivism Roundups, I see.

Objectivism Roundup #171 was hosted by Kelly at Reepicheep'c Coracle,

Objectivism Roundup #172 was hosted by Lynne at 3-Ring Binder,

Objectivism Roundup #173 was hosted by Rachel the Lady Baker at The Playful Spirit,

Objectivism Roundup #174 was hosted by John Cox at Sacred Ego,

Objectivism Roundup #175 was hosted by The Secular Fox himself down in his Secular Foxhole,

And Objectivism Roundup #176 was hosted by our most gracious uber-Hostess, Jenn at Rational Jenn!

JJM

Econ method 2

2010-11-21T20:29:00.006+10:30

Edit 1: poor cut'n'paste management fixed
Edit 2A: For the record, just in case anyone's thinking it, I do NOT think I have added to Objectivism. My thoughts are my own, for my own sake.
Edit 2B: The content in question now also has an addendum.

This entire series on econ method from here on is a very truncated version of my own thoughts regarding induction and validation of various principles important to economics. It is the due concretisation of my post about proper economic method and my rejection of the exclusive use of deduction in determination of economic laws.

This post is not about showing a worked out theory of induction. Rather, it is simply a demonstration of the sort of work in conceptualisation and induction that the economist ought properly be performing to generate and validate economic laws. I leave the full discovery of the theory of induction and its full application to the social sciences and economics for intellectuals more immersed in such issues than I.

Nor will I show the validation of the axioms and causality, as that has already been done. If someone has an issue with just that much then he has bigger problems to deal with than economics. That being said, I will make direct use of one particular corollary of the laws of identity and causality, but more on that later.

Rather than wait until I’ve done the whole lot, which looks as though it is going to run into umpteen pages, here’s the early work that precedes economics proper and focuses on foundational concepts and principles. I'll finish it when I can, though no promises when.

Action and human action
The Miseseans follow Mises’ Kantian methodology and start with their idea of what “human action” is. They treat it as an axiom, in the manner of one of Kant’s twelve categories, and try to deduce from there. This procedure is completely wrong-headed: there is no such thing as innate knowledge, and all concepts are learned. Their idea of human action is, at best, a floating abstraction.

How do we get to a proper conception of what is human action, then? Start with children, of course, and how they learn to speak.

First, action in general. The broadest conception of action is obtained simply by working from observation of instances – via synonyms less formal than action, to be precise. It is from toddlerhood on, during the time we are taught our parents’ tongue, that we start to learn words like “happen,” “do,” “because,” and so on. We have to learn these concepts by our own cognitive action, even if occasion for this is repeatedly provided by the grownups offering instances and us figuring things out. If we’re lucky the grownups do this with proper concept-formation methods in mind and implicitly teach us these methods, while if we’re not we glean what we can by differentiating and integrating (without knowing we’re doing it) from the words they speak at us and the context in which they are spoken. “What happened to the ice-cube? It melted!” “What’s the rock doing? It’s rolling down the hill!” “What are the fish doing? It’s swimming in the water!” “What happened here? What are you doing with that paint!? GET BACK HERE!”

Following from that, as we get older and start going to school, then we learn the more formal words, which includes “action” and related ones like “cause,” “event,” and so on. The method of this learning will follow the same patterns already shown above, just done a little more intensively and academically as well as through continuation of regular home life. We could then have our first worded definition of what action means:

Action is stuff that happens or stuff that things do.

At this point, as adults armed with philosophy we could do better, expressly invoking identity and causality, thus coming up with something like:

Action is the process of change in the identity of entities, following the law of causality applicable to the identity of the acting entities at each successive moment.

Either way, the contrast is against things that just sit there. There’s nothing happening and they’re not doing anything. Getting back specifically to children’s conceptual development, it is not just in science class, either, that we are exposed to the word. In drama classes, particularly when kids are rehearsing for something to be put on stage for our parents to see, the teacher frequently acts like an actual director complete with the basic jargon employed, where he gets us all to set up our props, move into position, and then makes us wait for him to yell out “Action!” before we start doing our lines and moving around.

Once we get past the age of about ten we get a bit more technical about investigating action in school. We learn about the action of acids and alkalis, of weights and pendulums, of stars and planets, of varieties of plants and animals, and so on. For our purposes in economics, the most critical differentiation of types of action is that of inanimate matter versus living organisms. We can see there is an enormous difference between what non-living things do and what living things do, and how all living things share the same basic pattern that isn’t shared by non-living things. So long as we don’t start pulling anthropomorphic explanations for action by inanimate objects out of our backsides in the manner of primitives taught to do so by their equally primitive parents, we need no antecedent knowledge or theories to make such a distinction, just a sufficiently substantial array of observations.

Putting these observations together, as Ayn Rand did in The Objectivist Ethics, we find that while there are many differences between all sorts of entities, and many differences between types of inanimate objects and also between types of living organisms, the essential feature that is common to organisms and which is absent in inanimate entities is that the former exhibit goal-directed action and the latter do not. On that basis we can define organism:

An organism is an entity that exhibits goal-directed behaviour.

Moreover, we observe that the goal in all cases – except man – is self-preservation (reproduction is an adjunct to that). We also observe that the content of action is begun by the organism. From observations like this, integrating it with the meaning of organism, we (as Ayn Rand did) define life:

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action.

But organisms do not just act in some vague manner. Each acts specifically in the way that its own nature allows it, not just at the level of the whole organism but of each part within it (indeed, all the way down to internal cellular operations, as we later find when we get scientifically sophisticated enough to learn). All living organisms abide by the laws of identity and causality, doing so in ways both common for each hierarchical level, distinct for each class of organism within each conceptual-hierarchical level, and further distinct for each organism in its own context, all as the whole natures of their separate identities provide for.

We can then integrate all this to gain a better understanding of what action specifically by living organisms is. We’ve already observed that all actions follow the law of cause and effect, and we will never find evidence the contrary. We’ve also already observed that living things are pro-active in this regard, yet still must themselves adhere to the laws of identity and causality at all times. With that in mind we can state the following:

Action by a living organism, specifically in its capacity as a living organism, is the pro-active interruption of one set of chains of cause-and-effect and the initiation of another set, intended to achieve the life-advancing goals of that organism.

Each living organism makes its interruptions and initiations according to its own nature and the context in which it finds itself. It is important to note that by ‘intention’ it is not meant that there is mindfulness at work but only that definite goals are prior set as the outcome, be that setting by thoughtless evolution or by human contemplation or anything in between. If the goal is achieved, the particular organism with the identity that most permits the action that leads to this goal is the one that most succeeds at living and procreating. Richard Dawkins also makes this point, specifically in his attacks on Intelligent Design rather than an abstract discussion of what action means, but I don’t recall which of his books it is in.

Once we have the concept of the living organism and its definition, properly obtained from observation, objective conceptualisation and induction, and make a variety of further observations and distinctions, we can get more formal about the concept of man and what his definition is. Cutting to the chase, following the concept-formation method Ayn Rand indicated, we validate Aristotle’s definition of man as the rational animal. We identify rationality as distinguishing characteristic because it is that characteristic that most distinguishes man from other creatures, that it is the explanation for an enormous variety of other characteristics of man both essential (capacity for abstractions, capacity for speech, capacity for complex technology) and inessential (capacity to want to wear peplums or powdered wigs or navel piercings) consequences of man being man.

It is that capacity to reason, that which differentiates us from all other organisms, that makes us specifically men. It is stemming from the exercise of reason to determine what to do and how to do it that some of man’s actions can be identified as specifically human action, as opposed to action in man’s capacity as a Great Ape (good manual dexterity in general), as a mammal (women give birth to babies rather than lay eggs), or as a heterotroph (man eats other organisms for energy and nutrients):

Human action is action by man arising specifically from the use of his mind to determine what to do.

Whether or not a man uses his mind properly in general, and whether or not he is correct or in error despite a commitment to a proper use of his mind, are critical issues for each man but not essential for the nature of human action as such. It is only important to note that specifically human action begins in some form of cognitive action before manifesting in physical action.

We could do much more, expanding on this such as by raising the issue of volition, but at this point it would be pointlessly getting bogged down in details. What is important is that it is from conceptual work of this nature, begun way back in toddlerhood and the words ‘happen’ and ‘do’, that we must and do obtain our understanding of what human action is. There is absolutely no need to take recourse to drivel about innate categories, contrary to what Mises and other Austrians have said. All that is necessary is a capacity to form concepts and the proper exercise of that capacity in the face of sufficient observations. The key is learning what that proper method of exercise is - and Rand has now gotten us started.

The fourth prerequisite of value
Between the end of the previous discussion and the beginning of this one would be various topics, including identifying the nature of value and giving its definition. I won’t go into that here, and instead take it for granted.

One induction that I think is of my own origination is how I arrived at the fourth prerequisite of value. The first three, already identified by Rand in The Objectivist Ethics, are: there must be an actor, there must be an end, and there must be a need to act in the face of opportunities and threats that are not foregone conclusions. The fourth prerequisite of value, which Miss Rand does mention but only as an instance in relation to man, is:

There must be a concrete operation of a mechanism of connection appropriate to the kind of creature that is evaluating, which operation brings together all the relevant facts and standards that give rise to actual values and hence to an imperative to act.

As best as I can remember it, this is what happened. While visiting my parents one day I was watching my father play with their Jack Russell terrier, Chienna, out the back under the pergola. I think it was lunch time and he had extra cheddar cheese cut just for her – Chienna just loves cheese. He would break off little bits from this extra slice and gently toss them at her to catch. One she missed and it rolled behind her. She looked for it in front of her for only a short time, then quickly gave up and looked at him in that puppy-dog expectant way. He wasn’t going to give her more until she got that wayward piece, and so he was saying “it’s right THERE, ya silly animal!” Of course, Chienna didn’t understand a word, so both she and the piece of cheese just sat there. My father soon figured that she wasn’t going to get the picture so he bent down, picked her up, flipped her about 180 degrees, and plonked her back on the ground, whereupon she then caught sight of the cheese and went for it.

That may seem like just an amusing but otherwise unimportant incident to you, but it was an eye-opener for me at the time. What was also an important part of its whole context was that I had been re-listening to Dr Buechner’s lecture series “Objective value versus modern economics”. As it happened, while I was watching this I was amusing myself by connecting what I was seeing to the prerequisites of value. There I was, being a good Objectivist, looking for concretes to go with abstractions. There was the valuer, a dog by the name of Chienna: check! There was the standard of value, that Chienna loves cheese and it is nutritious to boot: check! There was the need to act in the face of an alternative, that she had to catch bits of cheese in mid air or get them off the ground if she wanted to eat them: check! Then she missed a piece of cheese entirely. The three prerequisites were all there, completely visible before my eyes, yet she was not acting! What was missing? At the concrete level the answer was obvious: out of sight, out of mind.

From what I recall, it was me remembering in particular Dr Buechner’s emphasis on grasping that was the critical moment in my mind. When I remembered it I connected to what I was seeing right in front of me and this give me the first thoughts, which then occasioned me to look for other examples of it. On that score the first thing that came to mind was his discussion of plants turning their leaves to face the sun. I looked it up, and leaving aside the complexities of the details, I read how that leaf-turning action was effected by light-activated pumps shifting fluids around (its called heliotropism). Other examples that came to mind were how some plants specifically direct root growth towards the direction of scents of water, while others just use gravity as their chief cue to direct how they develop their root structures, generic thoughts of an instance of predator X hunting an instance of prey Y while an instance of prey Y detects an instance of predator X, and so on. With that set of thoughts in mind I then expressly realised that, far from being sui-generis to man, his grasping of values was actually an instance of a broader principle that deserved equal billing with the other three prerequisites of value:

Values cannot come to be unless there is an operation of a mechanism of connection between all the relevant facts and the mechanism that leads to action.

I also wondered about contrary data. One of the thoughts on that score was how only some plants are active water-seekers in their root-development strategies, with others merely going by programming and essentially ‘hoping for the best.’ In the end I dismissed that as a contrary because there was still the gravity cue and that there is more to the development of roots than just the pursuit of water and nutrients (eg how stability is a major concern for large plants). I also came to the conclusion that it was necessarily consistent with the operation of all consciousnesses, from those of jellyfish on up, since the whole point of a consciousness is to act as a sophisticated connection mechanism that constantly judges real-time data. Heck, even single-celled organisms are hunters or gatherers, actively seeking their preferred prey or sources of nutrients as their style of life requires. I stopped looking for more contrary data after that. If there is any modification to this principle to be made, I think the ‘worst’ it is likely to be is to restrict it to all consciousness on up, but I’ve already shown that it applies to lots of plants and their activities as well.

That was as much as I did to generate that induction in the first place. I did wonder if it in fact it wasn’t already included in the third prerequisite, that there must be the need and ability to act in the face of an alternative. It was the ability part that I wondered about, but I concluded that the answer was no for two reasons. The first is that the ability refers to the technical possibility of completing the action and achieving the goal, not awareness of the opportunity itself. The second, which I thought was the more important, was the separate consideration of the fact that man has to grasp his values before he can act. I concluded no in this case because the grasping and acting are two separate functions, even if connected. I cross-linked this distinction across different organisms and showed that the more complex the organism is the sharper the distinction is in fact, which fact itself requires that the operation of the mechanism must be something separate from consideration of occasion for that operation. You can find my discussion of the mechanism, beginning with how it operates in plants and other animals, and later of its final form for man, in my posts on the core theory of value, so I won’t repeat that here.

Also after the event, I was able to spiral it back to the idea of concepts as beginning in concrete percepts and building from there, plus cross-link both it on its own terms and the suggestions indicated by that spiralling back to more uses in value theory in general (eg more detail on the joining and also distinction between evaluation and action processes, all the way from plants’ mechanisms to man’s) and also to economics proper (eg the marginal revolution and the solution to the paradox of value). I’ll show some of this, but right now I won’t belabour the point, which is again that one must observe, conceptualise and induce, and that those who pluck “axioms” out of thin air (eg the whole of that Kantian category garbage) are guilty of fallacies.

You won’t deduce this from the definition of value or of life or action or action specifically by organisms. You certainly won’t derive this by deducing from any understanding of specifically human action, even if that understanding were properly conceptualised rather than plucked out of the dictionary to be treated as an “axiom,” because it is something that precedes the existence of human beings entirely. Yet, whether straight or restricted to conscious valuation, it is one that is very important for economics.

Addendum:
After writing this, while thinking at work, I also realised that my fourth prerequisite can and should be integrated with the issue of the non-existence of intrinsic and subjective values. The necessity of an operation of the mechanism of connection in all cases likewise means that there must be a connection of something pertaining to the valuer and something pertaining to something in the external world and which is being valued by that valuer. There are no such things as intrinsic values because the valuer has to DO something specific and understandable to create values-as-magnitudes and ascribe them to values-as-concretes. Likewise, there are no such things as subjective values because the valuer as to do SOMETHING specific and understandable.

The application of this to the issue of man's values in particular gets messy, but I think it still holds and I retain my rejection of subjective values as per the philosophical meaning of 'subjective' rather than the layman's reference to 'the personal.' I'll leave that for another time, though, as that entire section still needs more work.

Hierarchy and review of standards
A little while later I made another integration. Unfortunately, I remember much less about how I arrived at this than I do about the errant cheese incident. All I can do is reiterate the materials that went into it, not the process.

Another matter that Dr Buechner discusses is that in relation to the second prerequisite, there must be an end, there is a hierarchy of ends (which is not a reference to rankings of priorities). Perceptual-level concretes are first-level means to rudimentary ends, and then those ends are themselves means to higher ends, they again means to higher-still ends, and so on up to the ultimate ends.

For example, a man can think about enjoying a day at the beach some weekend and contemplate whether Saturday or Sunday would be the better day, or he can think about whether a day at the beach as such is how he wants to spend his weekend relaxing as opposed to going hiking, or whether relaxing as such is how he wants to spend this weekend as opposed to getting work-related chores out of the way, which could lead him to wondering about how much he values his career as such, and so on getting ever more abstract. There exists a conceptual-hierarchy of values for man. Man is capable of having broad and abstract goals, and of breaking them up into components that must separately be achieved in order for the broader ones to be achieved, which can be nested to as many layers as the situation demands. The higher-level values and goals cannot be achieved except by means of an integrated sequence of lower level values and goals, ultimately down to values and goals on the perceptual level.

That much isn’t news to Objectivists, nor is the need for concretisation both within economics (or value theory generally) and outside it. For the record, what I thought of besides the run-of-the-mill stuff like the above was both its connection with something that Mises said, the OSI model of communication systems, and the nature of labour plus integration of the foregoing with management theory in general.

The relevant material from Mises is in “Human action” under the heading “The Principle of Methodological Singularism” (pp44-6 in third revised edition):

Human life is an unceasing sequence of single actions. But the single action is by no means isolated. It is a link in a chain of actions which together form an action on a higher level aiming at a more distant end. Every action has two aspects. It is on the one hand a partial action in the framework of a further-stretching action, the performance of a fraction of the aims set by a more far-reaching action. It is on the other hand itself a whole with regard to the actions aimed at by the performance of its own parts.

It depends upon the scope of the project on which acting man is intent at the instant whether the more far-reaching action or a partial action directed to a more immediate end only is thrown into relief. … The road to the performance of great things must always lead through the performance of partial tasks. A cathedral is something other than a heap of stones joined together. But the only procedure for constructing a cathedral is to lay one stone upon another. For the architect the whole project is the main thing. For the mason it is the single wall, and for the bricklayer the single stones. What counts for praxeology is the fact that the only method to achieve greater tasks is to build from the foundations step by step, part by part.

A little while later I recalled both the OSI model of communications systems, which shows a system of seven layers of protocols and events of how something gets done in electronic systems, ranging from end-user human action at the top “application layer” (eg a businessman writing an email) to the physical structures at the bottom in the “physical layer” (eg copper wiring plus voltage and current specifications, optical cable plus light wavelength specifications, and so on). That there are disputes about the precise content of this particular model is beside the point, as what counts is the idea of hierarchical construction and integration.

I recall that I remembered this one specifically in relation to values, as out-of-left-field as it seems at first glance, because I had already used it regarding the nature of labour. That in turn happened because of another project I was doing, regarding the lessons to be had from “The E-Myth revisited” by Michael Gerber, who pointed out that one of the things the aspiring entrepreneur has to realise is that there is a critical distinction between entrepreneurial labour, managerial labour, and technical labour. By itself that’s fine for business theory, but for economics we must add a fourth layer on top, that of capitalistic labour for the setting of benchmarks by investors for entrepreneurs to meet or achieve while using investors’ money. The connection of the OSI model to labour is that a single action at a higher level must be accomplished by a host of integrated actions at the lower level, where at the finish up a single top-level act (eg the user clicking “send” on a completed email) is achieved by an entire (and enormous) seven-layer tree that ultimately reduces to umpteen bajillion electrical pulses, integrated together by means of the protocols executed and oversight functions performed by devices and programs at each layer. The parallel to achieving something in business and finance should be patently obvious.

The details of how or why I specifically brought the OSI model to mind again while thinking about the structure of means to ends I don’t recall. Still, I do vaguely recall something along the lines of remembering the fact of benchmarking and review of entrepreneurs by financiers, plus the “controlling” task of managers, leading me to adding my own additional thoughts regarding how man should act in light of the fact of the conceptual-hierarchy of values. These thoughts related to how man must take responsibility for the nature of the goals he pursues. At all levels of his conceptual hierarchy man must figure out not just what the appropriate means are but also whether the ends are worth pursuing. It was when I also remembered about avoiding micromanaging (I think I had been watching Oceans’ 13 at around about that time?) that I brought it all together and formulated the principle of the varying urgencies to review:

The urgency to review the merits of the end being contemplated tends to decrease as the abstraction-level of that end increases.

That’s quite a bizarre and tortuous path, I know, but that’s roughly what went through my mind, as best as I can remember it.

Action as exchange
Remember how I said I’d come back to a development of the axioms? This is it: one of the other corollaries of the law of identity is the fact that existence is finite. There is only so much of the totality of the core constituent stuff of existence, only so much material substance whether that substance be matter or energy or whatever else, because identity requires finitude: an infinite quantity is a quantity lacking identity, which is of course impossible. Material substance swirls and changes this way and that, but the grand sum never changes.

Looking at the world itself we can see instances of this - indeed, observation of such instances and recognising that they’ve always been implicit is part of how one arrives at explicit awareness the full meanings of identity and causality. Every single change is always and only ever a shift in the form taken by material substance, even when matter and energy convert back and forth. Even so, its truth comes from the fact that it is a corollary in the law of identity. We have to begin with observations so as to have occasion to think, but the proof it is a straight deduction rather than an induction.

The point of returning to this is that has a definite upshot for all action, in turn for human action as a consequence. By considering the nature of change and the constancy of the totality of material substance, we find we must modify the latter half of that statement. Action cannot bring new material substance into being nor can it send existing material substance out of being. The only thing that action can do is effect alterations of form taken by material substance. With that in mind we reform the meaning of action to the following:

Action is the motion by organisms that interrupts of one set of chains of cause-and-effect and initiates of another set to replace the first, intended to result in material substance taking on a more life-sustaining form than would otherwise have existed.

In short, action is an exchange. Von Mises does state this, but as yet another floating abstraction that his reader is expected to take for granted without knowing where it came from. Nevertheless, it is also a statement that happens to be right, and right enough to proceed to identify the pre-economic meanings of some key terms by combining the fact of alteration of form. The revenue of action is the value of the form that existed after the action, and the cost of action is the value of the form that preceded the action and which had to be destroyed in order to create the new form. A profit is made when the revenue exceeds the cost, and a loss is made when the cost exceeds the revenue.

However, it will not suffice to throw four terms around like that. A proper education on the matter, though one that would be presumed by economics, would be to teach what they are by proper concept-formation methods. Those I’ve already shown above, so I won’t repeat that procedure again. What economics would do is state that presumption, then formalise the definitions by integrating those concepts with both the nature of value and the nature of action.

JJM