Three Obvious Fallacies of Objectvists here:

[And now you'll probably say that I'm deliberately making it "personal" in order to avoid discussion of the issues, right?]

My apologies, Nick. The statement of yours that I quoted was not the one that I was responding to. In writing my post I inadvertently omitted it, while inadvertently including a different statement of yours, which asserted that not all entities cause actions. Sorry for the confusion. In any case, it now appears that both you and Sam agree that whereas all actions are caused by entities, not all entities cause actions.

But I'm not so sure I agree. Everything that exists acts in a particular manner, a manner that is caused by its nature -- by the kind of thing it is. So a rock acts in a certain way, even if its action consists simply in staying put unless acted on by an external force. "Action," in the broad sense of the term, applies to whatever behavior a thing exhibits, whether in a state rest or in a state of motion. So, in that sense, all entities cause actions, because every entity acts in one way or another and does so in a manner consistent with its nature.

William, the literature of Objectivism states that entities cause things, at least that humans cause things, but this does not explain free-will. Objectivism also advocates unbroken cause and effect, the corollary of the law of identity, and this works if something causes entities to cause things. However, for free-will to exist, an entity must cause things without being caused to cause things. It must be a first cause, and this breaks the chain of cause and effect.

I tried to explain, in post 13, about the difference between entities with fixed natures, the objects, and human natures, the subjects. And, I tried to show how acting in accordance with a particular nature loses meaning when an entity can choose to act in more than one way, which Objectivists claim that humans can do. It is necessary for them to have this ability if they are to have free-will. However, this means that A is A must act a little differently when applied to humans.

Bis bald,

Nick

Let me make clear, Michael, I am not arguing against Heisenberg, but I do claim Objectivists do. It is not in Galt’s speech, specifically, but it is in The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff. On page 202, Peikoff continues to complain about the movement away from certainty of Aristotelian logic. He blames the influence of Plato, Kant, Hegel, and almost everybody for the march toward Nazism. He talks about “…the younger physicists—typified by Werner Heisenberg, whose Uncertainty Principle was announced in 1927—were suggesting to the avant-garde that the traditional Newtonian-Einsteinian view of a universe fully accessible to man’s mind is outdated, inasmuch as the subatomic realm is ruled not by cause and effect, but ultimately by chance (a viewpoint once confined to the age of pre-physics).”

So, if you want to support Heisenberg against this charge, you can join me here on this lonely dissent forum and argue against the Objectivists here.

Also, remember, I said, “… randomness doesn’t prove free-will any more than determinism does. For free-will, an entity has to determine an action without being determined to do so. Such an entity must be a first cause.  This cannot logically happen with hard determinism, and it cannot happen with randomness, since randomness has no determining will. Things just happen.” You didn’t respond to that or my counter proposal of the existential model.

bis bald,

Nick