When I said that Naomi is mired in rationalism -- reason divorced from perceptual concretes -- symbol divorced from referent -- her response to my post is a perfect example.  Words and symbols have meaning only according to what they refer to.

The referent for 2 is | |.  The referent for 4 is | | | |.   So | | + | | = | | | |.  | | + | | ≠ | | | | |.

Since you love math so much, Naomi, let me recommend a book entitled Mathematics is About the World, by Robert E. Knapp.  The title says it all.

Another example of Naomi's failure to appreciate the relationship between abstractions and reality is a response I made to her in Post 93 of the Banter thread, "Ask an Objectivist Fascist and Collectivist Anything":

I wrote, Really?  So it makes no difference to you whether you're happy or unhappy?  Would you say the same thing about pleasure and pain -- that it makes no difference to you whether you experience one or the other?

Naomi replied: I did not say that it makes no difference what I experience. Just that I cannot conclude that happiness is a value just because I experience it. It's a huge leap.

To which I replied: Happiness is not a value just because you experience it.  You experience pain and suffering, but those are not experienced as values; they're  experienced as disvalues, whereas pleasure, enjoyment and happiness are experienced as values.  Do you see the difference?  Happiness is a value, because it is experienced as such.  You seem insensitive to what is directly experienced, directly perceivable.  You're locked into a world of abstractions, ideas and concepts, but these need to be reduced to their base in perceptual reality.  Otherwise, they become floating abstractions not anchored to anything in the real world.  What is unique about Objectivism is that it ties every abstraction to its basis in concrete reality.  In the same way, it ties the concept of "value" for human beings to its foundation in human experience.

Naomi's rationalism -- her romance with floating abstractions -- covers every aspect of her thinking -- every aspect of her thought processes -- from ethics to mathematics.  Hers is a prime example of how bad philosophy can sabotage one's entire intellect.

(Edited by William Dwyer on 4/10, 8:47am)

Darth Clude asserted:

It's not garbage. It's abstract algebra.

Translation:

The world could very well have been such that whenever you put two pairs of sticks together, a new stick appears and you get five sticks...

A is A, EXCEPT in the mind of Naomie.  She's either a troll just saying anything to stir up those who take ideas seriously, or she actually believes that in some magical universe sticks appear out of nowhere and that universe is just as sensible as our universe, the one we grasp, the one based upon which we build our principles, the one that provides that facts we see.  Or she is both a troll AND someone who chose to intellectually disconnect from existence in an important way.

People who argue for a principle that couldn't exist in this universe, or against a principle that does exist in this universe, and do so by positiing some other universe forget the simple fact that it is only that which actually exists that we can draw valid principles from.  The minute some imagined universe is spoken of, only imagined principles could result, and they can't compete with the real world and its principles or apply here.  Until they can provide evidence of the existence of that other world somewhere, it is just nonsense.

What if we decide that Naomie was just a magical talking stick from another universe, and then she disappears, and anything that appears here as a post under her name is just a set of black smudges on a white background and no one will react to them as if they were messages.  Like some story from the Twilight Zone, imagine that Naomie worked so hard on her belief that anything was possible.... just imagining another world where nothing from this world applied.  Then one day, she was no longer able to effect this world, it began to leave her, or she leave it.  Now its like she is becoming a ghost, talking and writing, but with each day fewer people see or hear her.  She ended up moving to some other world.

The truth that is in that little parable is that rational people will have a harder and harder time taking seriously, someone who doesn't take reason seriously.  Someone who argues that a world might exist with magically appearing sticks won't have their arguments taken very seriously in our world.  They will disappear to us.  They can troll harder and harder, but that too will make them fade from our awareness.  It is an interesting irony that that attention-seeking behavior brings about invisibility.  (And I imagine that a growing sense of invisibility is what would prompt troll-behavior, like a weinie-wagger, saying, "Look at me!" because they don't feel as real as they should.)

I wrote,

When I said that Naomi is mired in rationalism -- reason divorced from perceptual concretes -- symbol divorced from referent -- her response to my post is a perfect example.  Words and symbols have meaning only according to what they refer to.

The referent for 2 is | |.  The referent for 4 is | | | |.   So | | + | | = | | | |.  | | + | | ≠ | | | | |.

Naomi replied, No, William, just because 2 + 2 = 4 (| | + | | = | | | |) it does not follow that it can't also equal 5 (| | | | |).

The world could very well have been such that whenever you put two pairs of sticks together, a new stick appears and you get five sticks . . . 

You can't just assert this, as if it were self-evident.  You have to show how, given what we know about the nature of sticks, adding two pairs together could under any conceivable circumstance yield a total of five sticks rather than four.  Even to claim that something is possible, you have to offer at least some evidence for the claim; otherwise, there is simply no reason to accept it.

Just to be clear, the straight lines in my example do not stand for sticks, but for units.  I define a unit as a specific kind of existent, e.g., a stick, a person, a planet.  It is true that if you mix 2 quarts of water with 2 quarts of ethyl alcohol, you'll wind up with less than 4 quarts of liquid, but that's because the units of addition are not the same.  You're adding two different kinds of existents -- water and ethyl alcohol -- and getting a third, more general kind -- liquid.  Unfortunately for your example, this doesn't hold true for sticks.  If you add 2 sticks plus 2 sticks, you'll get 4 sticks -- nothing more, nothing less.

Our everyday experiences with counting and ordinary piles of sticks cause us to deduce the ordinary laws of arithmetic, and those laws give us lots of good reasons to believe that a number such as H does not exist, but that doesn't mean that such a number cannot possibly exist.

The laws of arithmetic don't just give us good reasons to believe that H doesn't exist; they give us sufficient reason to believe that it doesn't exist, because H contradicts these laws.

Does that sound ridiculous? Consider that for a long time, people thought that correct law addition of velocities was v_1 + v_2 = v_total, to which the orindary laws of arithmetic applied, which in turn implied that there was no largest velocity. But then special relativity came around, and we learned that the above law doesn't work, and that there is in fact a largest velocity.

In the case of light, it wasn't that adding more velocity failed to increase the total velocity but that, at its upper limit, adding more velocity wasn't possible, a fact which has no bearing on the laws of arithmetic.

You guys seem to have this bizarre belief that if something is true that it could not have possibly been otherwise, but this is nonsense. It's as if you guys think that truth is a property of the world, but it isn't. You cannot point to a rock and say "that rock is true", or "this other rock is false". Reality and the things in it are neither true nor false, they just are. Truth is a property of statements. And a statement such as "It rained yesterday" are capable of being either true or false. The fact that it rained yesterday itslef is neither true nor false, it's just a fact. It simply is.

Of course, truth pertains to statements or propositions, rather than to events or states of affairs.  I don't think anyone here would disagree with that.  If they would, then they're not Objectivists.  What we're saying (or at least what I'm saying) is that there is no alternative to the laws of nature.  The statement, "No human being can fly unaided by flapping his arms" is a truism; it refers to a fact of human nature.  One can recognize the truth of that statement without having to consider the truth of a contrary statement.  Speaking more precisely, if an event does not depend on human (or volitional) action, the event could not have been otherwise, because the actions of the physical world are not optional; they're governed by causal necessity  Everything has a nature, and everything acts according to its nature.  A man cannot fly by flapping his arms; a fish cannot survive out of water, and a bird cannot do algebra.  You, on the other hand, seem to think that anything is possible -- that there are no limits on what can take place in the physical world.