Amaroq
-15
11
Amaroq has not written any posts yet.
Amaroq has not written any posts yet.
I think you're pretty close to the core of this one. You identified that having something to protect gives you strength. And having a worthy cause to work for, for the same reason.
But what is that reason? What is it that gives you strength? What is the underlying cause of us gaining strength from certain causes?
I'm not certain I understand the topic well enough myself, but I think I have something that you might find insightful here.
Moral Idealism. That's where your power comes from. Whether you're fighting to protect a loved one, or you're fighting to promote a worthy cause, you have the power to dedicate yourself with every fiber of your... (read more)
I feel I must reply to my own post to update a bit as what I believe has changed a little.
By the nature of humans, every individual human is potentially valuable to you unless they prove themselves otherwise. Humans are capable of reason, productivity, trade, etc.
Just don't go sacrificing the actual (yourself) to the potential (the usefulness of a stranger). If you can aid someone in an emergency without risking yourself, there is a selfish justification for doing so.
I just came from a debate with a friend of mine about emergence, so here's a simple example of what emergence is and isn't that I just told to him. (That he rejected anyway.)
Let's take, as an example, a car. Motion is an emergent property in cars. (I'm talking about motion on the level we live on that allows whole objects to move great distances.)
The pieces of the car, gathered into a pile, could not move. So motion was not a property in the parts making up the car. Motion emerges when the parts are built into the complex relationship that makes up the car.
That's an example of what emergence is. Here's... (read more)
I come hailing as a more learned Objectivist than I was before. This article actually caused me to go find an online Objectivist community for the purpose of observing them to see if your assertion was true. I've found that it is not. I have not met a single "whiny" Objectivist out of all of the Objectivists I now chat almost-daily with.
Objectivism holds a primacy of existence attitude towards reality, as opposed to a primacy of consciousness attitude. This means that reality comes before our wishes, and if we want our wishes to come true, we have to work for them. We have to affect reality to get what we want, not... (read more)
Ah, but you see, I was arguing at the technical level, not on the "it's good to call it this" level.
I believe that absolute certainty is required. Not in all, and probably not even in most things. But absolute certainty has to be possible, because without it, I must give technical possibility to self-contradicting statements like this one:
"God exists, he is omniscient, infallible, and he can make a boulder that he cannot lift."
Can you tell me that all the pieces of that statement are technically possible?
P.S. I don't think I commit the fallacy of gray. I accept that there are varying shades of gray. But I believe that there must be a... (read more)
I cannot accept that Probability must be applied to everything. Which of course indirectly states that there are no absolutes, since probability has no 0 or 1.
If you discard absolutes, you must be willing to accept mysticism and contradictions.
I can create a long list of false or contradictory statements, and anyone who lives by probabilities must obediently tell me that every one of them is possible.
"Does God exist?" "Probably not, but it's possible."
"Can he create a boulder that he cannot lift?" "Probably not, but it's possible."
"If God dropped that boulder on me, would I survive?" "Probably not, but it's possible."
"Can he lift that boulder that he created to be unliftable by him?"
You can't "evolve to extinction." Evolution does not "operate on" organisms. Evolution is created by organisms competing against individuals of their own species to survive and breed. Individuals with valuable traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. Then their offspring carry the trait. Everybody knows this.
In a sexual species, an individual organism doesn't evolve; it keeps whatever genes it's born with. An individual is a once-off collection of genes that will never reappear; how can you select on that?
You select on it because the variation in genes this individual winds up with makes it more likely to survive and reproduce. The organisms aren't competing to acquire better genes, they're competing... (read more)
Where do you think social systems get their power? People give it to them, then the population becomes ignorant and/or apathetic and allows it to run amok with no attempts to strip it of the power they gave it.
The idea isn't that you just expose the evil. You have to deny it power over you.
It's those looters who don't approve of excellence who are keeping you down. Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.
Any Objectivists who believe this have missed half of Ayn Rand's message and are doing Objectivism completely wrong.
Not only did they miss one of the main points of John Galt's three hour long speech in Atlas Shrugged, but people who level this accusation against Objectivism as a whole missed it as well.
The point I'm referring to is that it takes two things for the looters to keep the men of ability down.
The answer is so simple, I don't understand why you guys are so strained about it.
Teach people to base their beliefs on reality. Teach them to systematically check their beliefs to make sure they're connected to reality. Via induction and conceptual reduction. (If you want to prove that an abstract concept is connected to reality, you break it apart into its constituent concepts. Keep doing this until you've broken the abstract concept up into 1st-level concepts that represent percepts Once you get from the abstract concept to the perceptual level, your idea has been proven to be connected to reality.)
The problem underlying religion is that people think faith is an acceptable source of knowledge. Teach them that all knowledge must be derived from observation, and you can undercut religion.
"Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others." -John Galt