San Diego Objectivist Study Group

“Is a miniature bonsai tree a work of art?” This is one of the questions to be posed at a meeting discussing Chapter 4 of The Romantic Manifesto, “Art and Cognition.” If you have read this chapter, what is your answer?

Mine is that it is an ornamental decoration for the interior of a house. As such, it is not art. Sure, it is a selective re-creation, one that takes a living tree as a medium and slowly transforms it into a man-made object; however, there is not a conceptual relationship to any of the cognitive faculties: it still appears as a tree to the eye and to the touch. In the same way that a beautiful garden is not a work of art, this indoor miniature garden is not art; it’s a tree in a pot.

An observer asked recently:

I want to bounce an idea off of you: I got into a debate recently with someone who claimed that nothing is impossible unless you’re talking about man-made systems with man-made rules.

I mentioned “It is impossible to find a number X such that X is simultaneously less than 2 and greater than 3.”

He said “Mathematical numbers are man-made concepts and as such do not apply to my claim that ‘nothing is impossible.”

“Is it possible for a person to jump so high that he accelerates to Mach 50,000 and crashes into the moon? Is it possible for a human to be alive while swiming inside the sun’s 10,000 degree hydrogen plasma for three hours?”

He said “There may be alien technology that will enable a person to do that.”

I’m not sure how to prove to him that some things are impossible. Of course that is just a premise of mine… or more of an axiom I guess: The idea that some things are impossible.

The terms “possibility,” “probability,” and “certainty” (as well their complements) are concepts dealing with the quantitative and qualitative levels of evidence for the truth of a conclusion. Where there is no evidence, the assertion is plainly arbitrary; it would be as if the person saying it just jumbled a group of sounds together. Only when there is some evidence to its plausibility is there then the possibility of a conclusion’s truth. The probability that something is true depends on the logical strength of the argument for it—which further depends on a lot more relevant evidence. And when the level of evidence is overwhelmingly abundant for it, as well as negating all other alternatives, then the conclusion is contextually certain—certain to the extent of the available human knowledge. And as for the complement at issue, when you have certainty of the truth of a conclusion, then both its contradictory and contrary positions are impossible. For example, when you are certain 2+2=4 , then 2+2=5 is impossible. When you know for certain that something is A, then it’s impossible for it to be nonA.

Your opponent in the debate was wrong both in the scope of the man-made and in the rules by which they’re made. Actually, had he understood the concept “concept” at all, he would have realized that all concepts are man-made, not just mathematical concepts. A concept is a mental integration of two or more units that are volitionally isolated from others on the basis of their common characteristics. In cases of higher-level concepts, the units of integration are other lower-level concepts. Only in cases of first-level concepts are the units actually the perceptually given, those perceptual data of existents that are sent automatically by man’s senses. That is, although percepts are metaphysically given to man by physiological processes, all concepts are totally man-made by volitional processes. Your opponent’s very claim depends on man-made concepts for every word he uttered; on the face of it, it suffers from the fallacy of self-exclusion.

Secondly, the “rules” for making concepts are not man-made but metaphysically causal, because the common characteristics are to be found in the very nature of the units isolated. And they are what they are, independent of any one’s feelings about them. In the same way, man’s mind is what it is; if he chooses to identify an abstraction of reality by means of the given, he has to form it causally in accordance both to the nature of the things out there and to the nature of his reasoning faculty. Therefore, if it is to be a valid concept, there just isn’t any leeway for any arbitrary human rule in the concept-formation process, even if it is a totally volitional cognitive process. In forming knowledge of reality of what’s possible or impossible, man must be on his best behavior—nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Finally and procedurally, you do not need to disprove a claim. If someone wishes to assert a claim, he has to provide the evidence for his conclusion. If he fails to provide a proof—a series of logical relations linking the conclusion to the evidence—then you have no obligation to accept it. Anyone can make a claim; indeed, everyone can claim he has a right to his opinions. But that’s just it. An opinion by definition is someone else’s judgment whose reported proposition and truth you yourself have neither judged on nor endorsed, from the evidence. A rational man, if he is courteous, might ask, where is the evidence?

The Cato Institute has the video: Five Key Reasons to Reject Class-Warfare Tax Policy.  One of its point is that politicians deign to tax people’s sins for the latter’s own good. The idea is that the more something bad is taxed, the less it is abused. Thus, taxing the rich is equivalent to taxing productive work as a sin. Whether wealth-creating work classifies as a sin is not the key issue. The key issue is: Should the government have the power to tax sins?

Atlas Shrugged is mentioned as a warning in the final minute.

During this past weekend’s Lunar New Year celebration (year of the tiger) Asians traditionally and typically wish for practical ideals such as health, wealth, and wisdom. These ideals, however, are based not just on the tradition or custom of a particular culture but on the facts of human reality.

Showing again that there is no contradiction in reality, scientists have discovered that the phenomenon of biological ageing is causally related to the phenomenon of cancer in body tissues. The scientific news, translated for the average public, is reported is here.

The discovery basically is that living cells in the body send internal signals to stop replication by mitosis whenever their DNA becomes too cumulatively and irrecoverably damaged. Stopping cell replication is the body’s defense against unstoppable cancerous growth by DNA-damaged cells that no longer serve pro-life functions for the body. And these internal signals deprive the body with new, invigorated cells to sustain its life; thus, the body eventually ages.

The adaptive cellular process to prevent cancer, in man, a species of organism evolved to change and eliminate environmental threats, is now itself a threat to the individual man’s life. One implication for man is that if scientists can discover the means to correct DNA errors in cells, then internal signals will not trigger. Another implication is that if scientists can discover both how to control the switching on and off of these signals and also how to solve the problem of cancer, then longevity will be extended.

The faculty of reason is truly the root means of survival; and the more knowledge we have of reality, especially the reality of life, the longer lives we will have.

So the custom of wishing others health, wealth, and wisdom does have a basis in reality. Having wealth enables us to engage in scientific explorations; scientific discoveries facilitate wise decisions and actions; and prudent lifestyle choices and actions extend our health and lives.

Is it meaningful to say that our concepts are in our minds–my concepts in mine, yours in yours, etc.–and that my concept of whatever I’m talking about has nothing to do with any of your concepts? And given whichever being the case, what happens to the subjective-intrinsic thesis, that a concept is not in a mind, but neither is it in reality?

In discussing concepts, we have to be cognizant of two important terms: “product” and “content.”

When you observe concrete existents, and if you choose actively to focus on their similarities and differences, then you act to understand more about them; that is to say, you choose to abstract from your perception. The volitional cognitive action by your mind, when successful, enables you to become aware of reality in a more abstract and universal perspective. You become aware of a category of existents which may be various in variety (abstract) and numerous in quantity (universal).

The awareness from this cognitive action is very temporary and tenuous. It ceases when the action is disrupted, as when your mind is occupied with other actions. But unlike the experience of perception whose percept is also transient and in the moment, you have the ability to retain this awareness.

At this volitional, conscious level, the what that you are aware of is the content. The action that enables you to be aware of it, is abstraction. And the one-time action to retain the awareness of the content beyond the present moment over time, is concept-formation.

The product of cognition is the way/method/means/instrument of retaining the resulting object of conceptual-level cognition; i.e., the receipt or resulting byproduct of [1] detaching the content of a cognitive action (e.g., the category or the type of existents) [i.e., the objective content] as a content of a cognitive action occurring at a specific moment, and [2] retaining it as a cognitive content over time [ITOE 256-258].

So, is a concept a product or a content? In one context, it is a product of your action. In another, it is the content that you are aware of.

From an internal perspective, the one-time action of concept-formation, if valid, yields once and for all a product, a concept. This is a private achievement by the conscious mind doing the action. Before having the product, you would have had to perform the elaborate process of abstraction every time you want to identify some category of existents. Thereafter, you merely have to call up to consciousness the product, a mental unit [ITOE 256-257], and, voilà, you become aware of the abstract and universal category of existents. This is the context in which the concept is a product: a new instrument of consciousness that is exclusively yours to enable your willful, conceptual awareness of reality.

From another perspective, reality exists independently of you and me the knowers–this is the thesis of epistemological realism, or, simply, the primacy of existence. My or your awareness of reality does not change reality one bit. So in the same way that you and I may see perceptually the same glass vase on the table, we may each be aware of one and the same concept as a cognitive structure defined by its content of reality.

To put it in another way, while our actions of awareness may be individual, separate, private, and unique, we can become aware of the same abstract and universal category of existents; that is to say, we can come to share the same concept. You may form this concept of cars, for instance, and index it internally (and instrumentally) as “car” while I index it as “voiture”; but the concept as the content of which we are both aware, is the very same. We are, as it were, on the same page, on the same wavelength, etc.

Therefore, whenever we want to talk carefully about a concept, we have to make a further distinction. Are we talking about the concept as a product of the one-time concept-formation action? Or are we talking about the concept as some content of awareness that all men can come to discover individually? In the first sense, a concept is indeed in the head; but in the second sense, a concept is out there.

How out there is it? A concept is out there objectively–just not really, really out there. After all, only concrete things exists ontologically. The abstract and universal categories of things only appear to us through conscious, volitional, cognitive actions, and remain eternally for us only through further cognitive (and linguistic) actions.

Concepts are neither subjective nor intrinsic; they are objective. Objectivity in this sense means [1] the categories are based on similarities and differences that do exist independently of us, in the concrete things themselves; and [2] we act to abtract these similarities and differences in accordance to the nature of our conscious faculties.

In many recent polls that try to read the changing attitudes of American voters, particularly those concerning the rising Tea Party movement, I notice the use of the term “independents” in poll results. It would be very interesting to find out who these “independents” are.

Conventionally, it is taken for granted in opinion polls that the term “independents” refers to voters who are unaffiliated with either major political parties. This is a legitimate catch-all category. In the sense of party affiliation, “independents” generically contrasts against the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

The term “independents,” though convenient and legitimate in meaning it may be, is still uninformative in describing who these voters are, what they value, and why they favor the Tea Party movement. It does not help explain why both political parties vie for their membership, or why the Republican Party wants especially to co-opt the Tea Party movement itself.

Going beyond merely designating party affiliation, I suggest using a different term in future polls and dialogs to find out more about who these voters are culturally. I suggest “individualists” as a term designating cultural affiliation to contrast against all forms of “collectivists” of both the cultural right and the cultural left.

Individualism, the ethical and cultural worldview that a man lives by his own mind and for his own sake, is a legitimate but little-discussed position. The opposite of individualism is collectivism, that man ought to live for something higher than himself. Notice that the former stresses an independence of mind while the latter stresses a ceding of rational independence. Most informatively, notice too that the latter covers the entire cultural spectrum of right and left:

On the cultural right, conservatism holds that God’s authority or religious tradition is the ultimate grounding of moral values, by virtue of which man ought to live his life; and communitarians, on the far right, hold in addition that the community is obliged to socialize men’s morality. On the cultural left, liberalism holds that the state/government is the ultimate arbiter of values (of whichever values, depending on whichever interest groups are in power); and progressives, on the far left, hold in addition that the state must be active in changing society culturally toward the ideal value of equality.

What proportion of the independent voters is individualistic morally and culturally? What proportion of those who favor the Tea Party movement is actually conservative? These questions are much more interesting to discover, don’t you think?