Opinions of Ayn Rand's Philosophy

[sprinkles]

The validity or soundness or consistency of the game is derived from logic, not our relation to the game. Our necessary relation to the game makes us subject to it, and explains why questions like "where is the value out in the world" unintelligible questions. You won't see morality among the atoms. You have to recognize an agent.

What happens to the game if I lobotomize everyone except myself?

 

[dogman6126]

What happens to the game if I lobotomize everyone except myself?

This I don't know a good answer for. I'm still working on this question, well the direction it's going in. If there are no people, does morality cease to exist? That kind of creation and destruction would be hard to swallow in my opinion. I'm still digesting, heheheee

Sorry, I'm really tired. I'm actually going to bed after this comment. I mean it this time, haha.

Because our actions are constituting the game, does that mean if there are no agents that the game doesn't exist? Well, I THINK yes, BUT I don't think this is a problem. I can't remember now who was talking about it, and I don't fully understand the idea so I can't explain it very well right now, but the idea is that we only need a conceptual possibility of an agent. Something like a counterfactual will establish moral truth, just not metaphysical existence. It's a very weird result, i'm not sure what it means yet. So it's like imagine a universe exactly like ours, but there are no agents. Now, were it such that agents existed, would morality exist? Yes. So, in such a case, what is the moral truth? We can answer that question with this framework. We don't need a "the morality" or a "the moral value" to establish moral truth, and that is the important feature we need (arguable, and between you and me, I would complain here ). Perhaps this is just all we need? I don't know. Excuse the back and forth here, lol.

...I just lost my train of thought....I was playing with my lamp. I'm going to bed, lol. If I didn't answer the question, I'll get back to it later. Sorry man. Goodnight!

 

[sprinkles]

This I don't know a good answer for. I'm still working on this question, well the direction it's going in. If there are no people, does morality cease to exist? That kind of creation and destruction would be hard to swallow in my opinion. I'm still digesting, heheheee

Sorry, I'm really tired. I'm actually going to bed after this comment. I mean it this time, haha.

Because our actions are constituting the game, does that mean if there are no agents that the game doesn't exist? Well, I THINK yes, BUT I don't think this is a problem. I can't remember now who was talking about it, and I don't fully understand the idea so I can't explain it very well right now, but the idea is that we only need a conceptual possibility of an agent. Something like a counterfactual will establish moral truth, just not metaphysical existence. It's a very weird result, i'm not sure what it means yet. So it's like imagine a universe exactly like ours, but there are no agents. Now, were it such that agents existed, would morality exist? Yes. So, in such a case, what is the moral truth? We can answer that question with this framework. We don't need a "the morality" or a "the moral value" to establish moral truth, and that is the important feature we need (arguable, and between you and me, I would complain here ). Perhaps this is just all we need? I don't know. Excuse the back and forth here, lol.

...I just lost my train of thought....I was playing with my lamp. I'm going to bed, lol. If I didn't answer the question, I'll get back to it later. Sorry man. Goodnight!

Ah see though, the people aren't actually dead. Even with modern medicine they probably still have some agency.

Or to put it another way - what if everyone had Down's syndrome? Or what if everyone were psychopaths?

 

[hush]

Ah see though, the people aren't actually dead. Even with modern medicine they probably still have some agency.

Or to put it another way - what if everyone had Down's syndrome? Or what if everyone were psychopaths?

One could drown oneself in what-ifs.

 

[JJJA]

One could drown oneself in what-ifs.

The art of pointless endeavours.

 

[sprinkles]

One could drown oneself in what-ifs.

It's too bad they can't literally drown me.

 

[Skarekrow]

May I recommend a few satyrical books here, because they could very much be tied to the the discussion at bay.
Shall we be moral for reasons of God watching us, or shall we be moral for selfish reasons, or shall we be moral because it’s inherently the right thing to do somehow?
I think Rand would actually approve of these novels, though in a non-satyrical fashion most likely.
Anyhow...
Here they are if anyone is interested in a good chuckle while still using your brain.
(Or if you ever wanted to know if a Nun would have sex in God’s navel)

"Anthony Van Horne, the disgraced captain of an oil tanker that spilled its cargo, is approached by the angel Raphael at the Cloisters in New York to command his former ship on an important mission. It seems God has died, and his two-mile-long corpse has fallen into the ocean at 0 latitude, 0 longitude. The Vatican would like the captain to tow God to a remote Arctic cave for a quiet burial. Naturally, things don't work out this simply, and the complications form the events of this splendid comic epic. As more and more folks with varying perspectives become aware of the covert mission, more hell, if you will, breaks loose. The author, an sf crossover, puts the weighty subject and its possible ramifications to clever use on many levels. He packs the story with sailing matters, cultural criticism, theology, physics, and more but still manages to keep the encounter bubbly and inviting."

"God isn't dead after all. He's just in a coma. The angel who announced the Creator's demise in Morrow's World Fantasy Award-winning Towing Jehovah (1994) was simply wrong. God's body is no longer controlled by the Catholic Church, either. Strapped for funds, the Vatican has sold the Corpus Dei to the Baptists, who (shades of Stanley Elkin's The Living End, 1979) have turned the body into the central attraction at a religious theme park. Then a Pennsylvania justice of the peace named Martin Candle gets prostate cancer and loses his beloved wife in a freak automobile accident. Outraged, Job-like Martin decides to put God on trial before the World Court in The Hague. As in Towing Jehovah, Morrow combines black comedy with theological speculation in an often painful examination of God's possible responsibility for human suffering. There are some powerful and surreal scenes here, as when Martin, gathering information for the prosecution, enters God's brain and finds himself on a packet steamer captained by Saint Augustine, their destination the Garden of Eden. Along the way, they run into various biblical characters, many of whom applaud Martin's actions. Much of the narrative is heavy going, consisting of detailed discussions of "theodicy," the "attempt to reconcile the fact of evil with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator." Equally hard to deal with, though for emotional reasons, are the extended descriptions of human suffering, ranging from the gas chambers of Auschwitz to Martin's cancer. Ultimately, this is a dark and powerful sequel, but one lacking subtlety as well as the surprise and adventurousness of the original."

​

"Homo sapiens is an amazing animal.... Get God and Aristotle off its back, and miracles start becoming the norm," theorizes a hapless human in James Morrow's The Eternal Footman. Capping off the hilarious trilogy that began with Towing Jehovah and Blameless in Abaddon, Footman tells the story of what happens after God is undeniably dead. If His giant, deteriorating corpse in the first two novels wasn't enough, now His holy skull stares down from orbit like a melancholy moon, offering daily proof to the Western world that there's nobody left to pray to.

Cirrus clouds rimmed God's skull. He appeared to be wearing a white toupee. At least there weren't any ads today. Why the Vatican permitted the multinationals to aim their lasers at His brow was a mystery she couldn't fathom. Contemplating the Cranium Dei was depressing enough. You shouldn't have to read COKE IS IT in the bargain.​

Depressing? That's not the half of it, as Judeo-Christians, sure at last that nothing but blackness awaits beyond death, become "Nietzsche-positive" and are stalked by the leering embodiments of personal apocalypse. Nora Burkhart's son Kevin is the first of millions to succumb to the awful symptoms of abulia, the fatal result of death-awareness. Western civilization crumbles while Nora struggles to take her comatose son to a legendary clinic in Mexico, where a strange, powerful man is rumored to have a cure. Meanwhile, a spiritual sculptor finds inspiration in a new pantheon after his masterpiece is mangled by the Vatican--but the new gods may require the ultimate sacrifice.
This is James Morrow, after all, and despair is always accompanied by enlightenment in his satirical morality tales. Taking cues from Dante, the legend of Gilgamesh, and an imagined debate between Erasmus and Martin Luther, Morrow finds redemption for humanity in the simplest acts of decency. Giant stone brains, God's evil intestines, and the still-guilty captain of the oil-spilling tanker Valparaiso make memorable appearances in The Eternal Footman, a worthy finish to Morrow's trilogy, and a fair but passionate defense of "the West's greatest gift to the world, the miraculous faculty of rational doubt."

 

[dogman6126]

Ah see though, the people aren't actually dead. Even with modern medicine they probably still have some agency.

Or to put it another way - what if everyone had Down's syndrome? Or what if everyone were psychopaths?

Sorry, I usually don't stay up as late as I did last night. I was trying to condition myself for tonight because I'll be staying up late to go do some astrophotography with my brand new camera

So, the point I was trying to get at last night was that the game only requires theoretical agents to allow moral truths to exist. We don't need an actualized moral value for moral questions to make sense, only a theoretical one. So, whether there are no agents, or half agents (as you seem to be suggesting) doesn't matter. We just need theoretical agents, and we have that. This kind of answer is borrowed from Firth and her ideal observer theory of morality. In her model, we don't need an actual ideal observer to establish or decide moral truth. We just need a theoretical ideal observer. The same is true, as I understand it, for agents in Korsgaard's model.

 

[dogman6126]

Or if you ever wanted to know if a Nun would have sex in God’s navel

.....That's all I got outta this post.

I kinda want to keep this quote...

Lol jk jk .

 

[sprinkles]

Sorry, I usually don't stay up as late as I did last night. I was trying to condition myself for tonight because I'll be staying up late to go do some astrophotography with my brand new camera

So, the point I was trying to get at last night was that the game only requires theoretical agents to allow moral truths to exist. We don't need an actualized moral value for moral questions to make sense, only a theoretical one. So, whether there are no agents, or half agents (as you seem to be suggesting) doesn't matter. We just need theoretical agents, and we have that. This kind of answer is borrowed from Firth and her ideal observer theory of morality. In her model, we don't need an actual ideal observer to establish or decide moral truth. We just need a theoretical ideal observer. The same is true, as I understand it, for agents in Korsgaard's model.

But there's nobody able to theorize in this case.

Or maybe what they theorize is entirely relative to their ability to understand wrongs, e.g. with the psychopaths.

 

[dogman6126]

But there's nobody able to theorize in this case.

Or maybe what they theorize is entirely relative to their ability to understand wrongs, e.g. with the psychopaths.

No, we don't need a person to theorize. Theoretical is a step away from actual. We don't need an actual theorizer, we just need the thing to be theoretical. That means if we, in imaging that word, can conceive of the thing as possibly in that world using counterfactuals, then we have what we need. The status of any agents or non-agents in that other world doesn't matter for the question "is there moral truth".

 

[sprinkles]

No, we don't need a person to theorize. Theoretical is a step away from actual. We don't need an actual theorizer, we just need the thing to be theoretical. That means if we, in imaging that word, can conceive of the thing as possibly in that world using counterfactuals, then we have what we need. The status of any agents or non-agents in that other world doesn't matter for the question "is there moral truth".

I'm talking about the usefulness of this to the people who are supposedly in the game. What good is this if nobody understands it?

 

[Skarekrow]

.....That's all I got outta this post.

I kinda want to keep this quote...

Lol jk jk .

By all means..please keep it.

The answer is - why not?

 

[dogman6126]

I'm talking about the usefulness of this to the people who are supposedly in the game. What good is this if nobody understands it?

This is a different question though! How do we know the moral truth then? Well, we know it because we know ourselves. So far, I have only described what constructs the value and the truth, but not how the truth is known. There is more to the theory I must describe to answer this. The idea is that value is derived from the measure of an action against success at self-actualization. It's like this. A house, to be a house, has certain necessary capacities. A house must protect one from the elements (debatable as a specific instance, but grant this for discussion purposes. We only need to grant that there are necessary features of things that qualify thing x as being a house). How well a house protects one from the elements determines how good of a house some object is (a necessary but not sufficient condition, but again, this is for discussion purposes). Humans are like this to. We have an identity, and how well our actions exemplify our identity is the measure of how good of people we are, and how good of a dogman6126 I am or how good of a sprinkles you are. See the idea? It's like a norm of proper functioning. There are certain features necessary to your or my identity that, to be a good me or you, we necessarily act on. Now, Korsgaard doesn't try to describe all the necessary features, but she does describe one feature. That of being a human being. We are both necessarily humans! Now, here we will make some assumptions to get the ball rolling. Humans are creatures capable of rationality. In fact, being rational is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. For this reason, rationality seems to be a necessary feature of the human identity. So, to be a good human, we must be rational. If our actions are irrational, then we are not good humans. the moral value derives from rationality in this way. So, the moral truth will be whatever thing is the rational action in accordance with what Korsgaard calls our practical identity. This is the identity that we normally live by (this is also the part I have a problem with, but I won't get into that here). I am a college student, male, INFJ, etc. The right way for me to act is in accordance with these principles. Now, to account for change, it might be such that the combination of these identities necessitates change to these identities. Interesting claim, but at least plausible. For example, conflicting self identities will act in a kind of natural selection to change the identity of the individual.

So, we have accounted for change, moral action (by rational action), moral truth, moral value, and she does have an account of action and reason that I won't go into right now as they are similar to our intuitions. Well, maybe not reason, but its close enough, lol. But how do we know it? well, because we are it, and we in fact instantiate it. Here it gets a bit circular. Our actions are in fact self constituting. We constitute our self in action, then that self is used in moral truth judgments, moral truth judgments value kinds of actions to be taken, and then the self again chooses an action. It boarders on circularity, but it isn't quite. it is a self modifying system is what it is.

To bring this back to Rand, see the advantages of Korsgaard's system? It is whole steps above Rand's ethical system. Rand can't even answer the simple question what is value! she just assumes it I think (feel free for anyone to correct me if I'm wrong here).

 

[brightmoon]

I have zero interest in Ayn Rand or her flawed philosophy. President Obama summed it up pretty well:

Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party

 

[BrokenDaniel]

She's not taken that seriously as a philosopher in academia as far as i know. Watching her on youtube, i can see that. Her system of thought can be applied to a very specific mentality, in a very specific period, in a very specific place . It is cultural criticism/reaction at best. I have a hard time seeing how what she says about the ego can be applied to other cultures. Alas, her philosophy seems almost like a reaction to something that may be happening in that period. Maybe people from the USA can really connect with that given that's a cultural thing. But outside we don't buy that americana that much. It's just their bussiness, their mythology, not the real deal, imo. It's easy to feed your ego and look at buildings and what a man accomplish and give yourself pats in the back when you have the resources to sustain that illusion.
Also i see a lot of Nietzsche here and there. The shittiest kind of interpretation of his work though

 

[Arg]

I make so much money I'm astounding.

 

[invisible]

LOL! Sorry, it's very unsophisticated of me to share this, isn't it? The punctuation isn't even correct. But I just laugh every time I look at it. Awesome.

 

[Pin]

Frankly, Ayn Rand said a lot, too much if you ask me. There are times when one should prioritize oneself and times when one should prioritize others.

She took Aristotle's Law of Identity and used it to snort a metric ton of cocaine.

 

[Wyote]

She took Aristotle's Law of Identity and used it to snort a metric ton of cocaine.

Lmfao