No Gods, No Masters

Comparison of hell vis a vis Objectivism? Context: critique of Objectivism as seen in Bioshock series.

@stengah - agreed. Edit: to an extent. But to follow logically - If someone claims that their statement is true, but it contains a fallacy - then it's not a true statement. Again, it's an approximation. It's truish. So what we're all doing is accepting these generally held "frameworks" so that we can communicate with each other(and hopefully not kill each other). So science's framework is cool with me, but I'm not taking its ride unless I get to bring my friend along. If science doesn't like it, he can bite me.
@fang ---- also agreed, and interesting follow-up statement.
@Rezzy --- Interesting. Going to have to disagree though. By withholding some forms of comfort, "we" teach "you". If any action particular is equally likely to result in comfort, then all actions are of similar value.

The argument being that if the source of the comfort is imaginary then so is the stick. In embracing the comfort you are also embracing the stick that is used to beat those that do not conform. "A hell of his own making."

Re: Objectivism in Bioshock. I've honestly never made it further than an hour or so into that game and get sleepy whenever I read about it. Am I missing anything?

@Rezzy - Oh. Neat. I can't go too far that way though. If my example is - being treated (in a way that by most people 's standards would agree) cruelly, and I know my situation is inescapable, and I get comfort by believing that there is an afterlife(which I don't believe per se - is it possible to be a Christian Reincarnationist?), I'm not sure I could take that as far to the end as making myself enjoy the cruelty. I have to believe that some hells are made for us.

If all start points are mutable, that's the sort of craziness that ensues.

I got there in probably a convoluted way, but what I was really trying to say is that our axioms are not all that we believe they are cracked up to be. That goes for both sides. Argue as we may the opposite.

Never played Bioshock. I keep meaning to... but never get around to it.

oddity wrote:

@stengah - agreed. Edit: to an extent. But to follow logically - If someone claims that their statement is true, but it contains a fallacy - then it's not a true statement. Again, it's an approximation. It's truish. So what we're all doing is accepting these generally held "frameworks" so that we can communicate with each other(and hopefully not kill each other). So science's framework is cool with me, but I'm not taking its ride unless I get to bring my friend along. If science doesn't like it, he can bite me.

That's fine so long as your friend doesn't try to claim they own science's car, or demand science find the nearest Chick-fil-a.

Rezzy wrote:

Re: Objectivism in Bioshock. I've honestly never made it further than an hour or so into that game and get sleepy whenever I read about it. Am I missing anything?

More pseudo intellectualism with a game as a jumping off point, if you ask me. I enjoyed the game. But so much writing I read on it seemed to read like "let me justify the 60 grand my parents paid for me to get a worthless degree." 10 dollar words, from a 2 bit mouth.

It has as much to say about objectivism as Fallout has to say about our nuclear policy.

KingGorilla wrote:
Rezzy wrote:

Re: Objectivism in Bioshock. I've honestly never made it further than an hour or so into that game and get sleepy whenever I read about it. Am I missing anything?

More pseudo intellectualism with a game as a jumping off point, if you ask me. I enjoyed the game. But so much writing I read on it seemed to read like "let me justify the 60 grand my parents paid for me to get a worthless degree." 10 dollar words, from a 2 bit mouth.

It has as much to say about objectivism as Fallout has to say about our nuclear policy.

The book paints a pretty good picture of what a truly "free" market and those that lead that market can fall into when there is no regulations or rules governing their business behaviors, and how people can react to the scenarios that can put them in.

oddity wrote:

"all I know is what my senses tell me" is also not accurate.

There are people that interpret pain as pleasure. There are people who see some colors that are generally accepted by others as yet other colors. There was a point at which "science" believed that rats and maggots and flies and such spontanteously generated from refuse. It is now generally accepted that this is not the case. And radiation? Hoo boy.

You've misinterpreted my point here. Nothing you cite disagrees with the idea that our senses mediate our perception of the world around us, which is what the statement I used referred to. We cannot perceive what our senses do not detect. Note that the use of machines as proxies extends our senses, but we still use our senses to interpret what those machines show us.

There are points all over science where the scientists of today look back and chuckle at how backward their progenitors were. How very quaint.

What is similar between all of them is that we hadn't yet come across a method to observe the system we were attempting to quantify.

Let's pretend for a minute that something approximating the god of the old testament existed and the bible came from him. How would he have communicated that information to the writer? Visons? Something akin to a giant flatscreen? Try to imagine yourself as that ancient man... attempting to reconcile all this information into a readable form, knowing only what those at the time did. Imagine reconciling the scale of all this happening. World created in 7 days? Sure. If you imagine it as a time lapse photograhy over however long it actually took, but possibly it took 7 days to watch. Or 7 god days. Who knows.

Of course, we also know that visions are quite common in humans; we don't need a supernatural explanation for those. In the times you're talking about (and indeed today), they were often associated with religions. Today, we know that some visions and religious experiences can be stimulated in the brain; they are connected in their site of origin.

I'm not really arguing that everything in the bible makes sense. Personally I feel it's silly to demand that anyone accept everything in there as wholly accurate. It was initially meant to convey a series of events that were unknowable, and at the the largely indescribable.

I believe in god. I also believe in some form of evolution as well. Either I believe that, or I would have to believe that I believe in a god that meant to create some of the stupidest, most awful people I have ever met, on purpose.

I feel like the best people are going to do for a long time is approximations. Reality at almost every level is subject to inter-observer variability. It takes too much time to do otherwise. When you say table, I see one thing in my mind and you see another. But I don't doubt that what you are seeing is a table. I just accept that there is a level of variance between your interpretation and mine.. and a molecular physicist's.

We could all however measure that table using the same tools and come up with the same figures. Here you seem to be confusing semantics with the idea of agreement on reality. Another way to put this is that we all see the color red somewhat differently depending on the sensitivity of our eyes, but that 550NM is red to everyone, since it's in the middle of the defined spectrum for red light. (A blind person would be lost talking about red, however, unless at some point they had not been blind.)

Not all of science's axioms are true. Not all of religions are true. Which religion? Which science? String theory? Chaos theory? Global warming? Relativity? What if our reality, is rocks speed of light? They seem like they don't move at all, because we move so fast, relatively. We can't measure what happens at light speed. Even colors, again, no longer adhere to "what our senses tell us".

The speed of light is not relative to an observer; rocks have the same speed of light that we do. And we can measure what happens at light speed, in fact, we detect objects at least speed all the time (photons).

The difference is that in science, axioms can be reliably tested against the real world, regardless of the practitioner's belief, as long as they use the rules and methods of scientific investigation. That's all mediated through our senses of course, but as above your interpretation of the world being just "what our senses tell us" is the wrong one. Instead, simply bear in mind that we can't know what our senses can't tell us.

The fact that there still things unknown about the world does not in any way mean that we don't understand large chunks of it.

The the thing I think is most important about "religion", is accountability. In the absence of an entity that watches and measures, all things are subjective. All events are, to an extent, unrelated. Everyone's suffering is over as cessation, so nihilism begins to look like a valid viewpoint. Noone will care about anything when everyone's dead, so why worry about it? So small scale cruelties, unwitnessed, should technically be ok, as long as they end in cessation.

I can't say I understand the bolded statement, sorry. I don't follow your point here, you're borrowing from many different ideas here and stacking them up without really connecting them.

It's an extreme. Sure. But like you said - change the startpoint - change the destination and all the points along that road. I agree. In the absence of a standard laid out by some cosmic superman, who then decides which reality should be the established standard? Without that established standard... really, just start anywhere you like.

Reality is what is perceived by everyone, not just by one person. That's how we tell the difference between what's going on inside our brains - thoughts, feelings, etc. - and what is actually going on outside our bodies. (And there are people who can't; we call them "delusional", but the fact that we can tell that is in itself indicative that there is an objective world outside of us.) We don't need a standard put in place by God, we just need bodies with similar sensory abilities, and a means to communicate.

Objectivity and subjectivity are important. It is comforting to me, that everyone believe in a being that watches and measures. In that reality - even my suffering has value. There are some who exist wholly in spaces that are too awful to countenance. Who know, they can only expect to suffer until they are dead. Their suffering is lessened by the knowledge that something watches and will catch them when it's over. Even if it wasn't real, why wouldn't it be better to believe that it is. If all it does it's takes that edge off some of the worst things I might have to go through?

I have no problem with that belief, I just don't see any evidence for it myself. I'm not comforted by thoughts of a superior being, one who notices me or not, just as I'm not bothered by thoughts of the non-existence of such a being. Even when I believed, it was clear that something in the experience was missing for me. And the overall point is that there's nothing in the universe that we've found that requires the existence of God, or Krishna, or Quetzelcoatl in order to exist.

Small aside, Robear. Theoretical science is just as rational as other rational disciplines. It takes some axioms from observed phenomena, but simply assumes others. As far as I understand it, Einstein's landmark idea was that the speed of light was constant. He didn't observe this, he simply assumed it. Einstein predicts significant time dilation with significant difference in speed as a fraction of lightspeed. We have not observed this. It's a conclusion based on an assumption, which is an unproven axiom.

Given that we don't know how much we don't know about the universe, it's impossible to say with accuracy whether we understand a small or a large part of our world.

LarryC wrote:

Small aside, Robear. Theoretical science is just as rational as other rational disciplines. It takes some axioms from observed phenomena, but simply assumes others. As far as I understand it, Einstein's landmark idea was that the speed of light was constant. He didn't observe this, he simply assumed it. Einstein predicts significant time dilation with significant difference in speed as a fraction of lightspeed. We have not observed this. It's a conclusion based on an assumption, which is an unproven axiom.

How significant of a time dilation are you talking about? Experimental evidence has supported the theory up to 98% of light. I suppose we don't have evidence that time stops at 100%. I do understand your point that some theoretical science is, for the moment, only theory and untested. But I'm sure those physicists would love to know if they're right by designing and conducting experiments if we had the means and money to do so.

All theoretical science is theoretical. Once predicted hypotheses are tested and proven or found inconsistent, it becomes experimental science. That's just a matter of definition. That doesn't change what theoretical science is - a rational, not an empirical exercise.

It's notable that the most well-known theoretical physicist, Einstein himself, balked at quantum mechanics long after it was acceptable to most scientists. That's not a very unusual thing for rationalists to do, whether they're religious or scientific.

Demosthenes wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:
Rezzy wrote:

Re: Objectivism in Bioshock. I've honestly never made it further than an hour or so into that game and get sleepy whenever I read about it. Am I missing anything?

More pseudo intellectualism with a game as a jumping off point, if you ask me. I enjoyed the game. But so much writing I read on it seemed to read like "let me justify the 60 grand my parents paid for me to get a worthless degree." 10 dollar words, from a 2 bit mouth.

It has as much to say about objectivism as Fallout has to say about our nuclear policy.

The book paints a pretty good picture of what a truly "free" market and those that lead that market can fall into when there is no regulations or rules governing their business behaviors, and how people can react to the scenarios that can put them in.

There was a Bioshock book?

The factual problem is that an unrestrained market is not a free market. The trend to cartels, monopolies, and stopping competition is too great. This cannot be stemmed without government intervention.

I do remember interviews with Ken. He said the main criticism people who believe in Rand had of the game, was that his Utopia could never fail in the real world.

And when MythBusters did a Plane on a Conveyor Belt, they got it wrong because the plane took off said their critics.

Demosthenes wrote:
Rezzy wrote:

Re: Objectivism in Bioshock. I've honestly never made it further than an hour or so into that game and get sleepy whenever I read about it. Am I missing anything?

The book paints a pretty good picture of what a truly "free" market and those that lead that market can fall into when there is no regulations or rules governing their business behaviors, and how people can react to the scenarios that can put them in.

Yeah, I liked the way it dealt with that issue of how people react. It's about the idea that we already tried an industrial world without a social welfare system run by the government, and it didn't lead to Rapture, it led to Fascism. FDR once said:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

The Rapture Civil War comes about because of Fontaine's Home for the Poor; Frank says:

"Made Ryan good and mad when I started playing the charity angle. Fontaine's Home for the Poor. 'Fore I knew it, I was calling myself Atlas and leading an army. Ryan and his precious Rapture. You don't have to build a city to make people worship you ... just make the chumps believe they're worth a nickel."

edit: I'd also say it did a really good job making the point about how the issue of children is one that individualistic ideologies often stumble over. Again: Fontaine had the Little Sister's Orphanage and there's that quote from Dr. Suchong about how they just 'take' and don't 'make'. Really, the rights of children generally go unaddressed whatever the ideology and Bioshock put them right front and center.

LarryC wrote:

As far as I understand it, Einstein's landmark idea was that the speed of light was constant. He didn't observe this, he simply assumed it. Einstein predicts significant time dilation with significant difference in speed as a fraction of lightspeed. We have not observed this. It's a conclusion based on an assumption, which is an unproven axiom.

While we haven't observed extreme time dilation at near-light speeds, we HAVE observed time dilation. Relativistic effects cause orbiting satellites to "lose" several microseconds every day. This has to be taken into account when writing GPS software otherwise the whole system just wouldn't work, as GPS uses timing measurements between disparate satellites to determine positioning on earth.

ruhk wrote:
LarryC wrote:

As far as I understand it, Einstein's landmark idea was that the speed of light was constant. He didn't observe this, he simply assumed it. Einstein predicts significant time dilation with significant difference in speed as a fraction of lightspeed. We have not observed this. It's a conclusion based on an assumption, which is an unproven axiom.

While we haven't observed extreme time dilation at near-light speeds, we HAVE observed time dilation. Relativistic effects cause orbiting satellites to "lose" several microseconds every day. This has to be taken into account when writing GPS software otherwise the whole system just wouldn't work, as GPS uses timing measurements between disparate satellites to determine positioning on earth.

Oh hey. My policy of "never read LarryC" made me miss something important.

More significantly: That the speed of light is constant was not Einstein's landmark idea. It's a measurement that had been performed by scientists and had yet to be accounted for. Einstein came up with a mathematical model of how it could be true, along with additional predictions that would hold assuming that the mathematical model was correct. Among those additional predictions in the special theory of relativity was time dilation due to acceleration. When he extended the theory to include gravitation in the general theory of relativity, this included time dilation due to the curvature of space-time in a gravity well.

Both time dilation due to acceleration and time dilation due to gravity must be (and are) accounted for in GPS satellites. If these predictions from special and general relativity did not hold, then correcting for them would not be necessary and would in fact make GPS systems not work.

So, LarryC's statement was wrong in just about every way. Not only is the constant speed of light not an "unproven axiom" now, but it was not an unproven axiom at the time of Einstein--it had been observed experimentally. Not only has the predicted time dilation (due to both acceleration and to gravity) been observed experimentally, but a very large number of people make use of devices that depend upon it every day.

Edit: I take that back. There is one way that LarryC was probably correct (I will trust him to know his mind): This was his understanding. Unfortunately, his understanding was lacking. Hopefully it no longer is, although I could swear relativity has been brought up in one of these rathole semantic discussions before.

Hypatian wrote:

Edit: I take that back. There is one way that LarryC was probably correct (I will trust him to know his mind): This was his understanding. Unfortunately, his understanding was lacking. Hopefully it no longer is, although I could swear relativity has been brought up in one of these rathole semantic discussions before.

He never qualified what he meant by "significant" time dilation. If you're talking 99.9999% or so of the speed of light, then, no, it hasn't been verified experimentally. But 98% is pretty good so far. And there was experimental evidence for time dilation 14 years before Einstein died based on the half-life of moving muons, so it was verified in his lifetime.

The axiom is that the speed of light is constant regardless of the velocity of the observer. Until we can get an observer to significant fractions of light speed and hear back a report that the measurement was the same, it remains an axiom. If a human has ever been accelerated to more than 50% light speed, I'm willing to admit my ignorance of it.

ruhk:

We have since reported observations consistent with Relativity's predictions (light being affected by gravity as well as small time dilations, or relatively large decay prolongations). This does imply but doesn't prove that the assumptions were correct.

Hypatian:

Every time you read something I post, you misunderstand it in the worst interpretation possible. The only time you understood, you said it would be impossible for me to have meant that because it violated an assumption you were making about me: that I was evil.

I politely ask you to continue to ignore me and not read my posts.

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Anyway. Away from The LarryC Show, and back to the point of the thread:

CheezePavilion wrote:

My angle was that we have an ideology that is (1) unarguably atheist which (2) lots of people blame for problems in our world. In discussions of religion and atheism, there's a predictable script: someone brings up the Crusades/Inquisition/etc., then someone brings up Hitler/Mao/etc. as a counterpoint. Usually that discussion, at best, derails into whether one of the latter can really be called atheist in the same sense as the former are religious; at worst, it just shuts the whole thing down. Citing Objectivism might cut through all that.

I don't *think* I saw this mentioned, but the main problem I see with claiming Objectivism to be an atheist ideology is that atheism doesn't actually drive Objectivism, it's more a tangential side effect of the Objectivist idea of rational egotism. An omnipotent, supreme skydaddy doesn't fit with the idea of the supremacy of the Individual, so the Individual casts skydaddy aside to become herself god. Were the Objectivist ideals to stem from a dismissal of gods, then Objectivism WOULD be "unarguably atheist," but in this case the dismissal of gods seems to be an effect of the ideals, not a cause.

LarryC wrote:

The axiom is that the speed of light is constant regardless of the velocity of the observer. Until we can get an observer to significant fractions of light speed and hear back a report that the measurement was the same, it remains an axiom. If a human has ever been accelerated to more than 50% light speed, I'm willing to admit my ignorance of it.

No, that's not an axiom assumed by the theory, [em]that's the theory[/em]. The observed data preceding the theory was that the speed of light emitted by an object did not change based on that object's motion. That is, light coming from an unmoving source had speed Y, and light coming from a source moving at speed X also had speed Y. The theory accounts for these observations by suggesting that this would be true if the speed of light were independent of the relative motions of sources and observers, and that one consistent model for this involves the Lorentz transformation, and if that model is correct it has these additional surprising implications.

Your suggestion that the only way we can know for sure is if we accelerate someone up to 0.5c suggests that what you're really after here is the universality of the laws of nature. That is in fact an accepted axiom (although no evidence has been found to the contrary). But that being an axiom of science has nothing to do with the fact that Relativity was motivated by pre-existing observations (not unmotivated assumptions, as you suggest).

In short: Your suggestion that Relativity is based on the [em]baseless assumption[/em] that the speed of light is constant is incorrect. Feel free to continue to argue your thesis that science is based on unsupported axioms, but don't suggest that such axioms exist where they do not.

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ruhk wrote:

I don't *think* I saw this mentioned, but the main problem I see with claiming Objectivism to be an atheist ideology is that atheism doesn't actually drive Objectivism, it's more a tangential side effect of the Objectivist idea of rational egotism. An omnipotent, supreme skydaddy doesn't fit with the idea of the supremacy of the Individual, so the Individual casts skydaddy aside to become herself god. Were the Objectivist ideals to stem from a dismissal of gods, then Objectivism WOULD be "unarguably atheist," but in this case the dismissal of gods seems to be an effect of the ideals, not a cause.

No, I don't think you can say it's tangential or that it doesn't drive Objectivism--here's some sources. Something can be 'unarguably X' without X having to be so fundamental a root cause that like you're saying here, where just stemming from something else (and even then, I don't think the cause/effect relationship is so clear or one-way in the case of Objectivism) disqualifies it. Setting that high a bar for I think will just lead to some really funky results we might not like when discussing things other than Objectivism.

I think perhaps belief in a supreme being is compatible in the Objectivist view. I think it is consistent to submit to a more powerful overseer and believe that you have the capability to surpass him/her/it at an unrestricted pace. I think it is like the scenario of the established up-and-comer vs. the still-got-it veteran in sports.

Objectivists may be narrow in their perspective, but I don't believe they are foolish enough to disavow the world that grew before they existed. They probably feel it was made specifically for them so that they can inherit the reigns and streak out of sight.

I will admit I have only a basic understanding of Objectivism. I am curious about it but worry that should I read Rand's work, I won't be able to get through more than 15 pages before wanting to pry it out of my brain through my ear with a rusty crowbar.

Considering how the far right has co-opted Rand style Objectivism, at least professing Christianity does not seem to inhibit that. I am not sure many people would call Reagan "atheist."

Later in the same year Einstein derived the Lorentz transformation under the assumptions of the principle of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light in any inertial reference frame,[9] obtaining results that were algebraically equivalent to Larmor's (1897) and Lorentz's (1899, 1904), but with a different interpretation.

Thanks for the reference, Switchbreak.

fangblackbone wrote:

I think perhaps belief in a supreme being is compatible in the Objectivist view. I think it is consistent to submit to a more powerful overseer and believe that you have the capability to surpass him/her/it at an unrestricted pace. I think it is like the scenario of the established up-and-comer vs. the still-got-it veteran in sports.

In that scenario you describe, they're both still playing the same sport. If you can surpass a god, it's hard to say why it was a god and not just an alien intelligence.

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In that scenario you describe, they're both still playing the same sport. If you can surpass a god, it's hard to say why it was a god and not just an alien intelligence.

I don't necessarily see a distinction. The Greek and Roman gods were not infinite and all powerful. So perhaps they are more like Q. Yet I see a definition of an all powerful god as this type of infinite: We can compute more and more digits of pi, but there will always be another one to find.

In other words, we can approach god like behavior (cloning, gene therapy) but the creator has the ability to keep moving the goal posts. So in a sense, it is both that god created us in his image but his omnipotence comes from the ability to layer complexity and/or grow the universe.

To which the Objectivist might ignore god's ability to grow in all directions and usurp ownership of any direction they choose regardless of god having already been there.

That is the nature of theology and the evolution of societies. Even in the Old Testament you see the changes of god, over time. That the God of Israel is the ONLY God in the world, is not until Deuteronomy.

God changes based on new discovery, based on political need, based on foreign pressures. When was the last heresy for believing in a spherical earth?

A god that changes to suit the new world, I do not think is incompatible with most logical or rational philosophies. The problem comes in when god becomes a denier of reality and fact. Or more accurately, when the institution of religion becomes an imposition on society.