He made up his own meaning for the noun ‘affect’.
Okay, any number of folks have been exploring it now for decades. And how much further have they moved on in encompassing that precise existential understanding of freedom?
How instead are the narratives not largely still the embodiment of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
And yet even though both sides are still grappling with all of the issues embedded in being “free” here, you seem to be rather adamant that Communism is a really, really bad thing.
Sure. If I suggest that it ought to be explored, then you respond that it’s been talked about a lot without progress.
If I suggest that dasein, free will, determinism, or nihilism have been talked about enough in this forum, then you respond with “what else is there to do but talk about it”.
Yeah. I got that from these interactions.
Is it a really, really good thing? How would you decide?
I’ve assigned some level of value to the various factors that can be used to evaluate a society. I measured and weighed and I came to a conclusion.
How about you?
How hard is it to understand someone arguing that his or her own moral and political values – re God, ideology, deontology or nature – reflect that which all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to embrace?
You call yourself an objectivist. How then is that either applicable or not applicable to you given a particular context in which human behaviors come into conflict over value judgments?
I’m suggesting that if psychologically he roots his own “I” in the belief/feeling that others are obligated to share his own values, then “I” would construe him to be an authoritarian.
I couldn’t agree more. The authoritarian personality runs the gamut from fascism to Communism, from the capitalist to the socialist, from the conservative to the liberal.
The reason others are punished is because they refuse to become “one of us”. Or because their gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation etc., disqualifies them.
Even the nihilists and the sociopaths are able to convince themselves that their own frame of mind reflects the most rational assessment of the human condition.
There are always going to be gradations in our reactions to these things. Human motivation and intention, being embedded in a complex intertwining of genes and means, are derived from enormously convoluted existential trajectories encompassing any number of vast and varied personal experiences, relationships and access to ideas.
So there will always be things that we can in fact note to be true – postmodern beatnik banned me for life from the Philosophy Forum – and things that are subsumed instead in subjective fabrications – he was justified in doing so.
Tell that to the victims of Hitler’s or Stalin’s policies. Or to those who practice capitalism like a religion and bring about policies that sustain all manner of human pain and suffering for those not in power.
What do you expect to happen when you call him an objectivist? Are you going to shame him into changing? What?
For example, when people are called racist these days, it’s often to silence and discredit them. That’s the real intent.
What’s your intent?
The irony being that I’m the one who is opposed to those policies while you go around saying “well, we can’t really decide if it’s good or bad”. “Maybe they had to do those things”.
It’s hard to visualize the society that you would create but I really see no reason to believe that it would not be full of abuses. Moderation and compromise … Are you going to be moderate and compromise with those who will produce misery and suffering?
Rule of law … the Nazis used the law to persecute and kill the Jews, as well as many others.
Moderation, compromise and rule of law seem to feel good but where do they lead in practice?
Please. On any number of threads I have noted where my own philosophical proclivities lie. And I have pointed out that those who do not share my own preoccupation with the philosophical parameters of “how ought one to live?” would be advised to move on to others.
So, if that includes you, by all means, move on to others.
I was being facetious but this is an issue in which you seem rather settled. It’s a bad thing. And somehow this perspective is intertwined in the manner in which you construe the meaning of ethics philosophically and God theologically.
I’m just still unable to grasp how that “works” for you “for all practical purposes” out in the world of actual existential interactions with others.
I can think this but that’s not the same as demonstrating it conclusively. I think that any number of things certainly seem to be objectively true for all of us in the either/or world. The laws of nature, mathematics, empirical facts, the logical rules of language.
But then we bump into Hume’s distinction between correlation and cause and effect, between what we think we know about human reality and all that would need to be known about existence itself. And then the part about sim worlds, dream worlds, solipsism, the matrix.
What you seem intent on is arguing that in the is/ought world there are objectively true value judgments. Yours for example. But all I can do is to note that while this may in fact actually be true objectively you have yet to convince me of it.
If you say that and Serendipper says that all things are subjective, then a discussion could reveal that subjective and objective are reasonable categories or that there ought to be only one category.
That would be making progress in the discussion. Instead, when I present a claim and ask why it ought to be considered ‘subjective’, you back off and we continue to be in the same rut.
I’m trying to move things along.
WEll, I’m glad to see that I did understand his position, despite my not remembering his idiosyncatic language use. Such things are not a problem as long as the definitions are on the table.
I think there are few objectivists who when it comes down to it believe that there is something that has no effects that is real. It’s also not a useful category for them or for most people.
Hypothetical objectivist: I believe there is X. X has no effects.
Person 2: How did you come to believe it exists?
[whatever the answer, it means X had an effect on them, at the very least]
Yeah. I don’t know where that idea about objectivists comes from.
Well, he had his affectance ontology, so he had to stay consistent even if grammar had to be modified.
An acid affects a solution and the effects are dilution. So affect is potential to cause effect and that’s how James meant it because if a thing has no potential to cause effects, then it can’t be said to exist. He basically said that existent things can only be relationships because existence itself is a relationship.
Observation is the affectance James was on about.
It’s a misconception in QM that consciousness is required to collapse the wave function since the only thing required is observation (interaction).
With the exception of gravity, our whole universe appears to be nothing but charge: the light our eyes perceive are just charge oscillation, the heat that we feel are results of charge oscillations, the smells are charge-dependent chemical reactions, sound is pressure waves resulting from charge-dependent van der waals forces, and ditto for touch. So the connectivity between everything that exists mainly relies on the existence charge separation to happen.
So the affectance that things have (the potential to cause effects) are in terms of charge and gravity at the fundamental level… and that appears to be the extent of it. So what is observation if it’s not described by those two forces?
Like electricity seeking a path to ground, the light from the sun departs and arrives at our eyes, which causes charges to jiggle, which causes our brains, via chemical jostling, to become aware of the jiggling and interpret such as color or heat. The observation is the mechanical bit and the conscious realization of the perception of color isn’t required to make it all go.
There is no such thing as unbiased reasoning. Everyone is biased.
There is no such thing as objective evaluation. All you can do is collect more opinions. And “fact” is consensus of opinion.
What do you say Iambig, is Serendipper an objectivist?
Think like him or you are wrong!!! That meets your definition of objectivist.
But he keeps saying that everything is subjective and opinion. 
Why do you tell me this?
You must think that it’s true for me as well as for you.
If it’s true for me, then it must be true for everyone. (Why would I be an exception?). And therefore it must be objective truth.
If it’s not true for me then there is no reason to write it.
The diagrams a few posts back are a dead giveway. They are objectivist and they are based on objectivist conclusions many layers down. But not objectivist in iambs sense, since he always distinguished between is and ought.
The object/subject juxtaposition deals with observation and not application. Even in subjectivity, the object is assumed to be applicable to all who have mechanism to perceive it. For example sound is perceptible to everyone with functioning ears; it’s not like there are those with ears who cannot hear because the speaker was targeting only certain subjects, but the speaker delivers to all who have capability. So it’s not a matter of who it applies to, but who has means to discern. The reality of the object is subject to the subject.
The quantity of people that a claim applies is not the test for objectivity. I said a few posts back that even if everyone on earth agrees on a fact, that it is still subjective. It’s not objective, but popular subjectivity.
“Murder is wrong” is an objective claim not because it applies to everyone, but because there is no path to see it: no deductive argument supporting it and we cannot see it lying around to verify it empirically. It’s just pulled from someone’s ass, asserted to be true, and what anyone thinks about it is irrelevant. It’s not subject to anything, but just is (by authority).
“The earth is a spheroid” is a subjective claim because it’s subject to the definition of spheroid and subject to the judgment that the earth fits the definition. It’s not asserted to be true regardless what anyone thinks about it.
I’m not asserting my position to be true regardless what anyone thinks about it, but supplying deductive reasoning as a lens so that everyone capable of logic can see it.
“Murder is wrong” is just sitting there in the middle of nothingness, having no affect on anything, having no path to interact with it, to see it. It doesn’t exist. And if you assert it to exist, then you’re making an observerless observation.
On the other hand, if “murder is wrong” because it’s bad for society (or whatever) then it’s subject to the definition of “bad” and subject to the judgment that murder fits the definition.
Objectivity and subjectivity are not dealing with the quantities of people that things apply to, but are concerned about how things are discerned (observed). They are statements about observation (interaction) and not application.
Words get muddled in their meaning through time. Another example is agnosticism, which is a statement about knowledge whereas atheism is a statement about belief, but the original meaning of agnosticism has been muddled. It’s similar with objectivity. It’s convenient to use the word in an alternate sense, but then confusion arises when two meanings are conflated.
An objectivist is essentially someone who posits things to exist without deductive or empirical evidence (ie god, morality, gender stereotypes like: men should work and women cook n clean, etc). If the objectivist tries to back his claims with rationale, then he’s no longer an objectivist since he’s subjugated his position to rational interpretation.
This is an objectivist:
You’re only confused because you’re trying to see it. Stop trying to see it and just believe it exists. That’s objectivity.
Why am I telling you this? Because I like solving puzzles and I’m expecting you to hand me another puzzle by either finding something wrong with my reasoning or by accepting my reasoning and then offering me a new puzzle as a consequence of the accepted reasoning.
You’re free to make up whatever definition for ‘objectivity’ that you want.
But then you have the problem that “positing things to exist without evidence” is not considered ‘objective’ or ‘objectivity’ by anyone except you.
You’re not even talking about the same issues as other people.
Again, my own understanding of objectivism here is an existential contraption. It revolves around human interactions in the is/ought world.
If Serendipper believes that his own moral and political values reflect the optimal or the only rational manner in which to resolve conflicting goods [as the Turds of the world do], then, yes, “I” construe him to be an objectivist.
Here however we would need to take his arguments “down to earth”. Situate them in a context most here will be familiar with.
I don’t have an exact definition. I grapple with its meaning existentially. And right and wrong here [re conflicting goods] are rooted in particular subjective points of view — the embodiment of dasein.
Unless of course I’m wrong. And I don’t say that facetiously.
And then intertwined in political economy where what counts is not what you think is the right thing to do, but which set of behaviors are able to be enforced.
There are many things about his argument I don’t fully grasp. But only to the extent that he illustrates his text “out in the world” are they ever likely to become clearer. To me, for example.
First and foremost, the diagrams above and this entire exchange seem to be inherently subsumed in that fundamental gap between whatever they and we think is true objectively about all of this and all that would need to be known about existence itself in order to know what is true objectively.
The irony being that we don’t even know 1] whether it is all further subsumed in a wholly determined universe or 2] whether, if not, the human brain is even capable of knowing this.
Indeed, the brains of aliens on other planets may be considerably more advanced than our own. What’s their take on it?
In fact, imagine if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs [allowing for the speedier evolution of mammals] had plunged into earth tens of thousands of years previously. We may well be that much more evolved than we are now.
In the interim there appear to be things that are true for all of us. Those things and those relationships that encompass the either/or world. Taking into account Hume’s distinction between correlation and cause and effect. And taking into account all of those “metaphysical” contraptions like sim worlds, dreams, solipsism and matrixes.
And then the part where one by one we topple over into oblivion.
Whatever that means.
And how could you possibly know that? An “observerless observation”? See what an objectivist you are?
And even if you were correct, calling me a pioneer isn’t such an insult. If everyone agreed with me, then perhaps I’d worry lol
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect” Mark Twain
Their take would be subject to their understanding.
As an aside, the dinosaurs were already dead when the asteroid hit. My opinion is they slowly died as conditions changed (O2 density and heat) which no longer favored them.
What’s true for all of us is coincidentally true for all of us; not that things that are true for all of us has more meaning or importance than things that are only true for some of us. The fact that something is true for all of us means nothing.
The speaker gives sound to anyone who can hear it. The speaker does not decide to give sound to only some people while not others. If people can hear the sound, then they hear the sound. All things are issued to all, but not all can perceive. So whether something is true for all of us is just pure coincidence and means nothing. Popular subjectivity doesn’t make it less subjective.