1. The Ayn Rand Fan Club interviewed David Harriman. As long-time readers may recall, Harriman “edited” The Journals of Ayn Rand to such an extent that her journals (as printed) reflect Randian-Objectivism circa 1960 more than what Rand wrote at the time of her entries. Unfortunately, that topic didn’t come up during the interview. (Harriman said a while ago that it was Peikoff who directed the editing.) Speaking of editing, Harriman confirms that Rand’s editing of Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels was rather substantial. Rand would return entire chapters to Peikoff, telling him in effect that he had to start over again.
Harriman discusses contemporary physics and cosmology. Granted, I’m no expert on these things, but his approach seems a bit one-sided. He attacks the Big Bang Theory as a “creation myth,” duly noting that it was developed by a Catholic priest who was also a physicist. It’s been a while since I looked into the topic, but my recollection was that the BBT is supported by multiple lines of evidence. One might think that the “objective” approach to the question would be, in effect, “if it has theistic implications, then so be it.” Even Harriman concedes that most cosmologists support the BBT and I doubt most would describe themselves as religious, much less creationists.
Harriman also discusses his book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics which he collaborated on with Peikoff (although Harriman is listed as sole author). Strangely, he says that the Ayn Rand Institute attacked the book (which he says was otherwise well received). In fact, two physicists associated with the ARI (John McCaskey and Travis Norsen) criticized the book. Upon learning of this, the ARI (at Peikoff’s urging) booted McCaskey out (I think Norsen might still be associated with it).
2. A new collection of essays on the relationship between Rand and Aristotle was just published, Two Philosophers: Ayn Rand and Aristotle. It’s edited by Greg Salmieri and James Lennox and is part of the ARI-dominated Ayn Rand Society’s publications.
3. The ARI has gone full TDS with the recent actions by ICE in Minneapolis. Ben Bayer compared ICE to the Gestapo. Yaron Brook called Renee Good’s death a “murder” before the facts were in. But these remarks are moderate considering that Harry Binswanger just wrote that ICE is “Trump’s Gestapo and SS.”* And Trump may be preparing a coup:
The actions of an entity follow from its nature. The tragic death of Renee Good is a logical consequence of letting loose on the country a horde of unaccountable masked gunmen, loyal to their bosses’ boss: Donald Trump. More deaths are sure to come. I worry that ICE is the nucleus of an elite presidential guard.
Putting aside how ICE carries out its functions, this raises a couple of questions for me: (1) why is the ARI obsessed with immigration when Ayn Rand wrote nothing (or next to nothing) on the topic; and (2) why does the ARI (which likes to claim it is above conventional left/right classification) insist on using the language of the left. The ARI has had something of a drift toward the cultural left in recent years (for example Brook says race and gender are social constructs) so the ARI may have concluded that to the extent that it costs donations, the damage has already been done.
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* For those whose history is rusty, Heinrich Himmler headed the SS and was Hitler’s second in command in carrying out the Final Solution.
--Neil Parille
7 comments:
I don't see how anyone can conclude that the BBT has theistic implications; at least not if you're dealing with only that theory, and not various bits of speculations or wild assumptions not actually part of the theory. The theory doesn't speak to anything before the Big Bang, or any creator, because it only goes back to that moment itself, and has no data about anything before, including what, if anything, caused it to happen.
As for the Renee Good incident, I think more than one thing can be true: it seems clear to me that Trump intends ICE to be a tool of intimidation and harassment in addition to whatever actual enforcement of laws takes place; if nothing else, the deployment locations hint strongly at that. And it also seems clear to me that Renee Good got caught up in the romantic notion of "resisting injustice" to the point of placing herself in a dangerous situation where she might be injured or killed, in a mindset where she thought just running through officers with her car was a heroic feat, like an action movie. No hands are clean in this affair. (In fact, assuming that the video I saw where her wife urged her to "drive, baby, drive!" wasn't faked, I think Good's wife holds a certain amount of blame, herself.)
Harriman said this essay is excellent to explain his understanding of the history of science.
https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/p/enlightenment-science
-NP
>Good's wife holds a certain amount of blame, herself.
So does governor Tim Walz, who told metro police force in his state to stand down, and not to help DHS officers in rounding up illegals. Additionally, Walz has made a number of public statements encouraging locals to resist DHS. Minnesota deputy governor, Peggy Flanagan, is listed on the chain of contacts in the "Signal" chat app, which tracks ICE and DHS agents, so the state government appears to be one of the forces supporting the violent protests. I've read recently that an American billionaire living in the PRC and friendly with the CCP, Neville Roy Singham, has been funding the protests directly. Finally, much of this might be due to the fact that millions of dollars in Medicaid/Daycare fraud have recently been uncovered, and violent protests might simply be a distraction tactic.
Re BBT: The reason it has theistic implications (which all supporters of the theory acknowledge) is that the theory accepts the counterintuitice idea that "something can appear from nothing." That's the essence of any kind of creationist belief. For an excellent (and amusing) critique of BBT, see the essay "Was There a Big Bang?" by philosopher/mathematician raconteur David Berlinski first published by Commentary Magazine in 1998:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/david-berlinski/was-there-a-big-bang/
Re Harriman, even the title of his book, "The Logical Leap," is contradictory, since logic (by definition) never "leaps," but moves deliberately from premise to conclusion. Newton's insight that a falling apple and an orbiting moon were the same kind of phenomenon was not a "logical" leap, but an imaginative one. As Karl Popper wrote, it was really just a phenomenally lucky, educated guess, which Newton was later able to demonstrate mathematically as being logically necessary. The logical demonstration, however, came later, *after* the imaginative leap.
Sundry Objectivists, including Harriman, appear not to accept—let alone grasp—the meaning of the experiments proving the violation of Bell's inequality, which shows that regarding the property of spin of entangled particles, there really is such a thing (discomfiting though it is) as "spooky action at a distance." I.e., the "up spin" of one particle instaneously causes the "down spin" of the other particle. The universe at the quantum scale really is "non-local."
"So does governor Tim Walz"
This is a bit of a reach. Let's not forget that this operation is happening in Walz' state as a deliberate bit of antagonism on Trump's part - the fact that Walz refused to cooperate with said antagonism does not, I think, accrue any responsibility on his part for the Good incident, though if he encouraged resistance that probably doesn't help cool things down. To believe Walz bears responsibility would necessitate having to also concede that Trump's tough-guy rhetoric absolutely would encourage his supporters among ICE agents to act more aggressive and reckless.
"Finally, much of this might be due to the fact that millions of dollars in Medicaid/Daycare fraud have recently been uncovered, and violent protests might simply be a distraction tactic."
Or ICE deployments might be a distraction for Trump's international adventuring, or the Greenland thing might be a distraction from ICE deployments. If we're supposing things are staged for some reason, the man who was in show business surely knows a thing or two about that.
"He attacks the Big Bang Theory as a “creation myth,” duly noting that it was developed by a Catholic priest who was also a physicist. "
That is of course a bullshit argument. Using the same argument we can dismiss clssical (=Newtonian) mechanics, as Newton was also an ardent theologian and alchemist. Moreover, the BBT is the theory that the universe as we know it, has grown from an infinitesimally small beginning to its current size, and is still growing (and probably at an increasing rate). The theory starts in fact with a singularity, but at an extremely small scale the known laws of physics break down. What happens at t=0, of what happens before that point? Is there a "before" at all? 2These questions are a matter of speculation: Is there nothing before that moment, or has some kind of universe existed for an infinitely long time?
Why should one a priori dismiss the first option, just because some people want to couple it to a fairy tale about an old man with a beard, who cobbled it all l together? The BBT is the theory that explains how the universe that we know evolved in time, continually expanding. That theory is now well established and accepted in astrophysics, as for example the predictions it made about the distribution of the cosmic background radiation have been confirmed by observations. In fact the existence of such an CBR was one of the first predictions that later turned out to be correct What happens at or before the singularity is only a matter of speculation, but NOT part of the BBT, as we don't have (yet?) any data about that subject.
A similar confusion we see in discussions about the theory of (biological) evolution. Abiogenesis is NOT part of the evolution theory, which is established beyond any doubt by the fossil record and DNA analysis. In contrast, AFAIK abiogenesis is still a collection of different speculative theories. That is understandable, as there is llittle direct evidence to base a theory on.
Dragonfly
>Abiogenesis is NOT part of the evolution theory,
Wrong. Abiogenesis is not part of *classical Darwinism* but even Darwin himself mused that life could have arisen in some "warm little pond" (his words, I believe) governed by the same kind of natural selection process that he believed governed the morphing of an already existing species into another species. He was wrong—about the "warm little pond" bit, as well as incorrect about the appearance of supposedly "new" species via small, incremental, beneficial changes ("mutation") preserved by a process called "natural seleciton." Sounds scientific but it actually isn't. It's just "scientism."
>which is established beyond any doubt by the fossil record
Wrong. Only naive-materialists believe that because it makes them feel that "reason, science, and logical leaps are fully in control of narratives about origins. John Galt smiles." Professional paleontologists (even if biased toward neo-Darwinism philosophically and methodologically) admit that most of the fossil record shows (1) long periods of stasis where nothing changes despite evidence of drastically altered environments; and (2) sudden appearances of new phyla—new body plans—despite no changes in the environment. That's the *majority* of the fossil record. In the few cases in which there seem to be smooth, incremental transitions between a series of fossils ending in an existing form such as the whale series, the timing from most ancient to most recent violates assumptions of neo-Darwinism; i.e., the morphologies occur too quickly to be explained by slow increments, each happily beneficial mutation contributing (somehow) to a slight survival advantage as measured by "reproductive success." In sum: the few instances in which there is an intact series of fossils apparently indicating smooth changes in phenotypes occur too quickly to satisfy the Darwinian assumption of "slow/incremental/occurring over long periods of geological time." It doesn't work. Conversely, the rest of the fossil record that does occur over long periods of geological time shows either stasis or saltations (jumps) in which an unrelated body-plan (phylum) appears pretty much out of nowhere. None of the above facts about the fossil record support Darwinian accounts of speciation. The starkest example of that (which Darwin had heard about even in his day) is the Cambrian Explosion shown in the Burgess Shale in Canada. No changes over long periods of time, yet all of the major phyla we know about today appeared from nowhere—de novo—with no precursors. Darwin admitted that if such fossils existed, it would disprove his hypothesis. He had read about the discovery of the Canadian shale deposits but did not comment on it, probably assuming that the deposits were incomplete; i.e., the precursors and intermeidate forms would "likely" be discovered . . . some day. You must have FAITH. The Burgess Shale, along with a similar deposit in China, does not "disprove" Darwinism, but the problem is that it doesn't support it by violating some of its foundational assumptions.
As for "life from non-life," most philosophically materialist biochemists today admit that abiogenesis has failed to posit a plausible pathway. Even a staunch materialist like Sir Francis Crick averred that the causal gap between non-living chemisty and the simplest self-reproducing single-cell organism is far wider than the speciation gap between that single-cell organism and a multi-cellular organism such as a mammal: at least the latter gap can be hypothetically "explained" with enough hand-waving arguments even if there is no empirical evidence for them; the biochemical arguments not only have no empirical evidence but they violate many understood laws both of physics and chemistry. The entire field is a failure.
Congratulations on being about 50 years out of date with your knowledge of this subject as judged by your post. Keep up the good work.
>This is a bit of a reach.
No it isn't. It's a simple statement of fact.
>Let's not forget that this operation is happening in Walz' state as a deliberate bit of antagonism on Trump's part
The operation is ongoing in a number of states, not just in Minnesota. The difference is that the governors of those other states have not ordered their metro-PDs to stand down. That was the case in the Obama administration, during which millions of illegals were deported (far more than in Trump's first or second term). No one in the press complained at the time because they liked Obama (the 1st African-American President; Democrat; far leftist; he checked all of the intersectionality boxes for wokeness and DEI) and they dislike Trump . . . this, despite the fact that more people were killed during the rounding-up process (not to mention put in cages that Obama had built as detention spaces while awaiting deportation) than during the present operations under Trump.
>Or ICE deployments might be a distraction for Trump's international adventuring
Or those who don't grasp that federal law trumps state and local law as per the Constitution might simply be in denial.
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