Existence

[Backstep]

Ahhh
The old "if you don't eat you don't shit, and if you don't shit you die" ploy..............

The ploy would come from the non-existent person saying, "who ever smelt it dealt it"

One can say and argue they do not exist, what is undeniable is their bodily waste products.

 

[Gatefan1976]

The ploy would come from the non-existent person saying, "who ever smelt it dealt it"

One can say and argue they do not exist, what is undeniable is their bodily waste products.

Your Full of shit dude

 

[Backstep]

Your Full of shit dude

Then i must exist

 

[Gatefan1976]

Then i must exist

Argument via excrement

 

[Backstep]

Argument via excrement

No shit, we circled back to my original statement " i poo there for i exist", unless someone else wants to try and crack this kernel or flick peanuts at it.

 

[Gatefan1976]

No shit, we circled back to my original statement " i poo there for i exist", unless someone else wants to try and crack this kernel or flick peanuts at it.

Wash your mouth out sir!!​

 

[Jim of WVa]

read OM1's posts

Perhaps yes, but you need to elucidate on your point.
Is Sarah Palin the equivalent of a "brainless porn star"?, and by default Ayn Rand is just as brainless?

I am more than capable of Extrapolation of a point, I won't gaurentee I will arrive at the same point as you have however, or even recognize the pont you are making.i

OM1 had the theory that having an empty head made one more beautiful as demonstrated by the examples of Sarah Palin and Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, the pr0n star, Lisa Ann, was the counterexample. She was more empty headed than Sarah Palin but slightly less attractive.

 

[Overmind One]

OM1 had the theory that having an empty head made one more beautiful as demonstrated by the examples of Sarah Palin and Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, the pr0n star, Lisa Ann, was the counterexample. She was more empty headed than Sarah Palin but slightly less attractive.

I will admit, Sarah Palin is quite attractive. I bet she has more than a few Victoria Secret baby dolls and camisoles in her closet. Id viewed as just a normal woman outside of politics, she is quite a dish. I cannot think of any female politicians with looks that come even close. The porn star to me looks gross. Fake boobs, injected lips, and the hairstyle does not fit that face.

So...is she any good in the porn movie? Name names (movie) please.

 

[shavedape]

Argument via excrement

That sounded almost Latin so I ran it thru a couple English to Latin translation programs and the best I could come up with (Google) was this:

Ratio per excrementa

Be sure to use it when you publish your thesis on scatology and existence.

 

[Gatefan1976]

That sounded almost Latin so I ran it thru a couple English to Latin translation programs and the best I could come up with (Google) was this:

Ratio per excrementa

Be sure to use it when you publish your thesis on scatology and existence.

Dedication Page:

To Shavedape
A True master of talking shit
and without whom this book would not be possible
WURD!!​

 

[shavedape]

Dedication Page:

To Shavedape
A True master of talking shit
and without whom this book would not be possible
WURD!!​

I can't take all the credit, after all, you're something of an intellectual laxative.

 

[Jim of WVa]

I will admit, Sarah Palin is quite attractive. I bet she has more than a few Victoria Secret baby dolls and camisoles in her closet. Id viewed as just a normal woman outside of politics, she is quite a dish. I cannot think of any female politicians with looks that come even close. The porn star to me looks gross. Fake boobs, injected lips, and the hairstyle does not fit that face.

So...is she any good in the porn movie? Name names (movie) please.

Her list of movies are here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0030217/

From what I have seen of her movies where she parodied Sarah Palin, I can tell that she was not hired for her acting skills.

 

[Gatefan1976]

I can't take all the credit, after all, you're something of an intellectual laxative.

So, what you're saying is I could make a fortune in the US then?

 

[mzzz]

You have taken this thread off track. I was using Rand's epistemology to make my point about existence. One can quibble about things further down the line in her philosophy but the issue here is do you or do you not agree with her tenet of the Primacy of Existence (that we must first exist in order to then know that we exist)?

The argument I was having with Mzzz pertained to his belief that we can somehow exist without existing, i.e. have consciousness without existence, which is a contradiction in terms and isn't possible. (I'm sure he will be along to claim that I just misrepresented his stance.)

You did, I never argued my stance in this thread, argued against her stance, mainly her lack of a well defined existence, but from your description, you seem to include perceptual reality as part of existence which is unjustified.

Usually Ayn Rand appeals a lot to the die hard libertarian set. This isn't surprising given her "objectivism" philosophy. Here's a brief definition off of The Ayn Rand Institute:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Just gonna argue against the first two a little bit, she hasn't proven the objective nature of reality, that (I will assume she means perceived reality) the perceived reality actually exists in the first place, our perceptions could be wrong and not actually map out the actual reality. And secondly, it'll be hard to argue about the objective nature of it, if our only means of perceiving reality is through our unjustified perceptions.

The second point is also somewhat wrong, assuming her previous things, because that's not the only source of knowledge, we also have certain 'genetic knowledge' such as how to use our perceptions in the first place and certain genetic processes that are built in that have no use of 'reason' to them.

New topic...

Does we have free will?
I'm not well read on the subject but from a brief intro long time ago, there were three major viewpoints on that, libertarianism who says yes, hard determinism who say no, and compatibilism which is a slight mixture of the two.

Is there a difference between an act and an omission?
Have to give an example to explain this one, isolate all things so that we are left with two choices and we pick one, lets call them A and B. An act would be choosing A or B. An omission would be not choosing A, resulting in B, or vice versa. Is there a difference? One example where this kind of thing pops up is during euthanasia, letting the person die or killing the person.

 

[shavedape]

You did, I never argued my stance in this thread, argued against her stance, mainly her lack of a well defined existence,

What the hell does this even mean??? "well defined"??? You quibble with Rand's definition of existence because she wasn't needlessly verbose???

but from your description, you seem to include perceptual reality as part of existence which is unjustified.

So, "perceptual reality" is unjustified? Hmm, interesting... And how do you discern reality, that is, if you acknowledge reality at all?

P.S. -- You are a classic example of one who uses the "stolen concept fallacy" as a method of argument (See also Aristotle's "reaffirmation through denial"). You use the very concepts you deny in a fraudulent attempt to "prove" your argument to be correct. You attempt to negate reason by means of reason. You question the validity of existence while ignoring the fact that you have to exist first before positing such a query. You deny axioms, namely the Primacy of Existence, and completely ignore the fact that if it wasn't for this irreducible primary you wouldn't be here stinking up the place with your freshman level regurgitation of Cartesian nonsense. You, sadly, are trying to prove "I think, therefore I am" while ignoring the epistemological fact that there has to be an "I" first (existence) before there can be any "thinking" (consciousness) that takes place. (The proper term reads: "I am, therefore I think".)

 

[Jim of WVa]

(The proper term reads: "I am, therefore I think".)

Rocks exist, but do not think. I know that I exist because I can doubt my own existence. To doubt implies the existence of a doubter.

 

[Jim of WVa]

The Jets and the Sharks smoked weed and read Camus.

When I say "historical evidence" about Ayn Rand I am referring to what she herself wrote and said. For example the Stanford encyclopedia records:

Conspicuous by their absence from Rand's list of virtues are the “virtues of benevolence”, such as kindness, charity, generosity, and forgiveness. Rand states that charity is not a major virtue or moral duty (1964b); likewise, presumably, kindness, generosity, and forgiveness. Whether, and how much, one should help others depends on their place in one's rationally defined hierarchy of values, and on the particular circumstances (whether they are worthy of help, what the likely consequences are of helping them, and so on). The greater their value vis-à-vis one's rational self-interest, the greater the help that one should be willing to give,ceteris paribus. What is never morally appropriate is making sacrifices, that is, surrendering something of value to oneself for the sake of something of less or no value to oneself. Thus, it can never be moral to knowingly risk one's life for a stranger (unless, of course, one's life is no longer worth living) or to court unhappiness for the happiness of another, whether stranger or friend.

This derives both from her book "Atlas Shrugged" (Galt's speech) and also "The Objectivist Ethics" and "The Virtue of Selfishness".

Joelist,

If that was all that Ayn Rand said and did, then all that we could accuse her of doing was violating the Golden Rule has expressed in scripture, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Unfortunately, Rand's professional and personal actions largely consisted of psychologically manipulating the members of her cult so as to extract sexual and other favors from her followers. Rand's life basically consisted of her violating the weaker form of the Golden Rule as expressed by the eastern philosophers, "Do not do unto others what you would not have others do unto you."

A large amount of Rand's vitriol was consumed in her attacks on the philosopher Kant. Kant, unlike Rand, recognized that other people were Ends as well as Means. Rand viewed, both philosophically and personally, other people as ways to get what she wanted. Rand treated her followers as chumps who would kiss her ass on command; similarly, Brad Wright thought that television viewers would watch any piece of shit tossed in front of them because it had his name on it. Both Wright and Rand viewed their consumers as automatons designed to feed their material needs.

Jim

 

[Graybrew1]

You did, I never argued my stance in this thread, argued against her stance, mainly her lack of a well defined existence, but from your description, you seem to include perceptual reality as part of existence which is unjustified.



Just gonna argue against the first two a little bit, she hasn't proven the objective nature of reality, that (I will assume she means perceived reality) the perceived reality actually exists in the first place, our perceptions could be wrong and not actually map out the actual reality. And secondly, it'll be hard to argue about the objective nature of it, if our only means of perceiving reality is through our unjustified perceptions.

The second point is also somewhat wrong, assuming her previous things, because that's not the only source of knowledge, we also have certain 'genetic knowledge' such as how to use our perceptions in the first place and certain genetic processes that are built in that have no use of 'reason' to them.

New topic...

Does we have free will?
I'm not well read on the subject but from a brief intro long time ago, there were three major viewpoints on that, libertarianism who says yes, hard determinism who say no, and compatibilism which is a slight mixture of the two.

Is there a difference between an act and an omission?
Have to give an example to explain this one, isolate all things so that we are left with two choices and we pick one, lets call them A and B. An act would be choosing A or B. An omission would be not choosing A, resulting in B, or vice versa. Is there a difference? One example where this kind of thing pops up is during euthanasia, letting the person die or killing the person.

That depends on more than just an intellectual argument. It is the basis of many christian belief's that God gave us "free will" and hence the continuing battle between good, God, and bad, the devil. I believe we each have it in ourselves to be incredibly good or bad. Some of us just have stronger will power than others. Some can handle their alcohol and some cannot. Some can watch their weight and some cannot. Some can gamble and some cannot. Is there much difference between that and losing it and going completely "BAD" and if so how thin is that line that divides us?

 

[Bluce Ree]

That depends on more than just an intellectual argument. It is the basis of many christians that God gave us "free will" [...]

Isn't that a contradiction? And, if one subscribes to the "God's plan" doctrine, doesn't that and "destiny" basically negate the whole notion of "free will" and render the whole concept to nothing more than an illusion?

If it's all an illusion, then, do we truly exist?

 

[Graybrew1]

No, that is what I was taught. God wants us to decide for ourselves and not just do his bidding. We alone make the choice to steal or not steal, to kill or not kill. This determines the people that we become. He also stated that after the great flood, he would never destroy mankind again, he would allow us to do it to ourselves. This is why so many christians believed the nuclear age was the beginning of the end.