| | Well, actually, your dog baiting comment did bother me. What you were doing is exactly what the drug dealers I have known do with their pit bulls in order to make them vicious. I suppose I should have separated that out from my Jenna W. reference which was just a joke - an intentional non sequitur - plain and simple.
I suppose that there are two underlying points that I feel should be made.
First, I find that you (singular) have a tendency to make posts about mind where you differentiate the human mind from the animal mind on what I see as perhaps an oversimplified view of animal intelligence. By intelligence, I simply mean learned responses that have a similar biological substrate to human pre-conceptual learning - not necessarily conceptual ability or especially concepts abstracted from concepts. In your earlier thread on human happiness I said that a horse can indeed be happy, (as a long term state like healthy) and you challenged me on this. I didn't answer at the time, but one can indeed see the difference between a happy dog or a happy horse and an unhappy one. A happy horse will buck and prance in excitement and joy, will play in a way that a mistreated or bored or broken one will not. This state will not necessarily be one of mere stimulus and response but one of long term affect. The evidence is, as you said, empirical. I would suggest you read the works of Monty Roberts, specifically Shy Boy and The Man who Listens to Horses.
Second, and much more important, I think Objectivists (pl) have a tendency to get carried away with what one can deduce from Rand at the expense of certain sciences, (including archeaology, linguistics, all the comparative sciences and braches of the humanities outside economics and history proper) especially biology, in this case giving animals their due for the intelligence they do have. This does not mean that one can't do philosophy without being an expert ethologist, but I do think that doing philosophy of mind requires that one be able to place the human mind within the overall context of the animal mind. (Indeed, in order to have a proper concept of mind, we cannot differentiate the human mind from the minds of angels or of God or use the so-called Turing test - animal minds are all we have.)
One of the greatest tragedies I see in the science that I read is that many authors such as Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Antonio Damasio and others will make excellent criticisms of Freudian, dualist, behaviorist, and Cartesian fallacies about mind, will make or have insights that Rand herself had or made or would have appreciated - but in general Objectivists are not biologists and scientists are philosophically illiterate. The two groups never meet. What scientists (like most laymen) know of Rand is politics and what the "prestigious" and well-funded ARIans know of science is agenda-driven at worst and dubious at best. I find it interesting that Nathaniel Branden, after the break, chose to describe his system as biocentric and I find it tragic that the most innovative, rigorous and neurologically literate and science-friendly Objectivist writer on the mind since Rand - David Kelley - is ostracized by dim mandarins more interested in turf than in innovation and integration. (I don't mean to belittle the efforts contributors to JARS and Objectivity, but in so far as they are heard, they are shut out by the Forces of Intolerance and Irrevocable Repudiation.) I see well-intentioned reputable philosophers like John Searle groping in the dark. I see respected philosophers like Daniel Dennett and respected biologists like Richard Dawkins talking nonsense in certain cases but being viewed as the cutting edge of thought while they make the same mistakes that men have been making since Democritus and the Skeptics.
All this is a lot to say without actually presenting a positive program. I would hope that Objectivists could move toward an evolutionary and developmental view of man in the same way that Rand in ItOE drew a developmental theory of human concept formation. This does require revisiting the notion of the meaning of the concept man as being the definition of the concept. I have argued elsewhere that Man is a much more complex and diverse phenomenon than just rational animality. I have argued that such human phenotypes as the autist, the deaf, the homosexual, and others should be studied not as deviations from the essence, but as fully valid ways of being human. I have left the door open to the idea that there might be other types of being human. Temple Grandin argues eloquently for this in her Unwritten Rules of Human Relationships. Grandin would call you and me, Ed, neurotypicals - and she has a lot to say. Oliver Sacks makes the same call for a broad understanding of mind but from a much broader perspective in his Anthropologist on Mars. Julian Jaynes has essentially argued that until about 1500 BC, without a cultural theory of mind, men were effectively schizophrenic children.
You have just been, at some times, the brunt of my frustration Ed. In so far as I continue to work as a corporate representative, and don't write and do my own scholarly work, I am not really any real part of the solution. And it is, as Rand was all too happy to concede, much earlier than we think.
Ted Keer
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