The Consequences of Greed

Here's a question for those who harp on about the consequences of greed to the greedy: if a certain path leads to long-term negative repercussions for the person pursuing it, doesn't it stand to reason that a greedy person would avoid that path?

Determinism Versus Causality: Frozen Abstractions

The first three weeks of my first semester of my first year of the OAC have made conscious an idea of mine that had been brewing subconsciously for some time: that the vast majority of people today, including many Objectivists, engage in what is known as the fallacy of the frozen abstraction, especially in regard to quantum mechanics (from the online Ayn Rand Lexicon):

A fallacy which may be termed “the fallacy of the frozen abstraction” . . . consists of substituting some one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs—[e.g.,] substituting a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of “ethics.” Thus, a man may reject the theory of altruism and assert that he has accepted a rational code—but, failing to integrate his ideas, he continues unthinkingly to approach ethical questions in terms established by altruism.

In this case, a specific form of causality, determinism, is substituted for the wider abstraction of causality. Now, most people don't even recognize that there can be a difference between determinism, the idea that the (fully determined) state of a system at any given time necessitates completely both all future states and all past states, from causality, the idea that an entity can only act in accordance with its nature, so when a quantum physicist observes a decaying atom behaving in a non-deterministic way, he states that it behaves in an acausal (and therefore without identity) way. Objectivism, however, does recognize a distinction between causality: it rejects determinism, yet demands causality. For example, within Objectivism man has a non-deterministic-yet-causal free will: the nature of his consciousness is such that it can make non-determined choices. My goal here isn't to defend or attack that particular view, only to point out a contradiction that many Objectivists maintain: when presented with a claim that, for example, an atom decays non-deterministically, they reject it out of hand on the grounds that it violates causality and/or identity. Now, I haven't looked at the evidence for this claim well enough to say that it is true or false, but I can say that, within the framework of Objectivism, it cannot be dismissed on philosophical grounds. Yet, many Objectivists do.

When Miss Rand identified the freezing of "ethics" at the specific type of ethics, "altruism", her response was to explicitly identify altruisim as merely a type of ethics, and then to go on to explicitly identify an alternative. I will attempt to do the same for causality and determinism here.

To quote from Galt's speech a bit, "The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature." So a ball rolls because it is round, a computer processes because of the arrangement of its wires, and a brain leads to consciousness because... Well, we don't know, but because of the nature of brains. Conversely, a brain can't roll (well), a ball can't compute, and a computer doesn't lead to consciousness. Note that it need not be known which aspect of an entities nature leads to the nature of its actions, it merely need be that there is some aspect which leads to the action. Moreover, it may be that at some fundamental level the only answer possible to the question "which attribute" is "it is, therefore it does", i.e. "why does an electron have charge? An electron is, and therefore does have charge" (this is not to say that an electron is necessarily one of those fundamental cases, but it might be.)

What, then, is determinism? Determinism takes causality and specifies: it says that the relationship between the nature of entities acting and the actions they take is of the very specific form of "a certain set of fully-definable characteristics completely set the exact action taken at any point in the future, and is could only have arisen from a specific set of circumstances at any given point in the past." So the kinetic theory of gasses specifies a deterministic model for the action of gases in a container: the positions and momenta of every particle in the container at any given point will fully determine the future positions and momenta of those particles (assuming there is no influence from outside of the container).

So is there anything that can be described as causal but not deterministic? Certainly; free will is the prime example of such a phenomenon. It is certain that nature of a healthy human brain leads to the ability to make choices; all such brains are capable of making such choices and things that aren't such brains cannot make such choices, and anyway to deny causality would be to embrace a contradiction (Dr. Peikoff's Objectivism:The Philosophy of Ayn Rand can answer why better than I). But free will is just as certainly not deterministic: there is no set of characteristics (not even the values of the person in question) that will fully and eternally determine the outcome of choices made; a person can and does choose. Just as egoism is an alternative to altruism in ethics, free action is an alternative to determinism in causality.

One important difference between the ethics case and the causality case is that, while there is only one correct type of ethics for man, there is not necessarily only one correct type of causality for entities. Gases may behave deterministically alongside humans behaving freely with no contradiction. This leaves open an important question: are there any other types of causality? While an assertion of a new type of causality would require stringent proof, there is no way to philosophically dismiss all such claims out of hand.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November...

Last Wednesday was November the fifth, also known as Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night. In tribute, my girlfriend and I rewatched V for Vendetta, for her second time and my 42nd time. I must say, I absolutely love this movie and I could watch again and again without getting tired of it. But there are two flaws that jump out at me every single time I watch it, and I want to discuss them here (note: spoilers to follow)









First is the fact that while V certainly identifies an evil that exists in his Britain and works to destroy it, he doesn't have any good with which to replace it. Aside from a brief reference to vox populi in his opening alliterative speech, V says absolutely nothing about what should be, politically. In a sense he recognizes this himself, when he gives the choice to Evey about whether to blow up parliament, but even then it is not made explicit nor does he give a reason why we should care about Evey's choice more than his. Luckily, the movie doesn't explicitly offer nothing in response to what currently exists, it just doesn't explicitly offer anything, which allows room for you to substitute your own desired system, which is not ideal but isn't terrible.

The other part which bothers me on a visceral level every single time I watch it is when V leaves Evey at the train to go die and achieve justice against "his maker". While justice is in fact a virtue, it is only such because it is a fundamental part of having a full and happy life. If justice must come at the cost of one's life and there won't be a world worth living in if it isn't achieved, then V would have been justified in doing what he did. But at this point in the movie, V had already won. He had almost the entirety of Britain on his side and had Creedy and Sutler distracted so they couldn't give the firing order, and, more importantly, he had something to live for: Evey. There was absolutely no reason he had to die, since, as even he himself realized, he no longer existed only to exact justice; he was now in love.

Although these are somewhat major flaws, I must emphasize that all in all this is an amazing film, and if you haven't seen it this month (or worse, this lifetime), then I demand you drop everything you're doing right now and go rent it.

Post-election Madness

This is not a political blog. While I have definite views on many things politics, I don't find political discussion very interesting. So this post has nothing to do with political parties, candidates, ideas, or anything like that. It has a lot to do with the way politics is viewed, however.

When your favorite football team wins the superbowl, that's a pretty good time to run around, celebrating and shouting the name of your team at the top of your lungs, maybe pumping your chest a few times. When your favored political candidate wins the presidential election, that's an awful time to run around, shouting the name of your political candidate at the top of your lungs, and maybe pumping your chest a few times. Why? Because politics, unlike football, is about ideas. You can bet that there was no running around and screaming "Washington! Washington!" after the first presidential election was announced. Elections are not a game, and the consequences thereof are much more significant than a fancy ring and fancier endorsements. When you have the equivalent of a tail-gating party before an election (the huge party for Obama was said to be like a carnival atmosphere) and primal cheering afterwards, you know something is wrong with how the electorate views politics.

Should I Continue?

As anyone who follows this (hi, vacant room!), I haven't exactly been up-to-date in posting here. I'm going to give regular posts one last shot, but if it doesn't work I'll probably throw in the towel.

Love is a Wonderful Thing

That is all.

What I've Been Up To

I do honestly think that I am more busy this semester than I have ever been in my life. At Rochester, I'm taking seven classes, one sophomore-junior level math class, three sophomore-level general science classes (each of which has a lab), two introductory-level engineering classes (one of which has a lab), and an introductory-level specialized-science class. I'm also in the ballroom dance club, the swing dance club, the outdoors club, and, once snow starts, the recreational skiing club. I'm the webmaster for ballroom and (somewhat) for swing. I just got a script for a movie that I'm almost certainly going to be in, filming of which is every weekend starting in October. I'm learning piano from scratch with a combination of help from my girlfriend (oh yeah, I have a new relationship too) and online tutorials, and I'm practicing 4 and a half hours a week. I'm learning Arabic from the Rosetta Stone program which I'm doing for 3 hours a week. Come mid-to-late October, I'll be starting the freshman year of the OAC, as well as joining the cultural changes study group as part of Study Groups for Objectivists. Within the next month I'll have to start looking into finding research opportunities for spring semester or over the summer. Finally, I have this nifty little blog thing that I'm going to try to update regularly again.

With all of this going on, I've decided to put a strict limit on not adding any more responsibilities to my life for this semester. This puts a few things I wanted to do on the back-burner, including Physical Science by David Harriman, quite a few ARI lectures, part 1 of First History for Adults, learning about and possibly incorporating evolutionary fitness into my life, learning to cook, tutoring, and learning/trying my hand at investing.

I'm having the time of my life :^D