Please read this article from next month’s Harper’s: The Neoliberal Arts: How college sold its soul to the market. It was in seeing the militant self-reduction of college students, eagerly planning, at the age of eighteen, their retirements some half-century later, with no regard to what went in the middle, that I grew convinced of the need for work like my book, written against one of the leading sponsors of the nihilism of our age.
Two high (i.e., low) points from the article. First:
A Princeton student literally made this argument to me: If the market is incentivizing me to go to Wall Street, he said, then who am I to argue?
Let’s think about this (hopefully apocryphal) Princeton student. First, we can set aside the specific edict of the market to find the logical form of his point; for any action A, he says:
“If the market is incentivizing me to A, then who am I to argue?”
Now let’s replace ‘the market’ with prior iterations:
“If God tells me to A, then who am I to argue?”
“If Dear Leader tells me to A, then who am I to argue?”
“If the King tells me to A, then who am I to argue?”
“If the people need me to A, then who am I to argue?”
“If my race needs me to A, then who am I to argue?”
The thing is that none of those supernatural edict-senders are genuine, spontaneous collectives. God says whatever the priests want Him to say; the Dear Leader and the King are individual people; “the people” always says what the politicians and bureaucrats want it to say; “my race” says whatever the nastiest politicians want it to say. Only with the market have we found something to obey that is an actual collective that speaks for itself with its “incentives”. This Princeton student is the perfect realization of collectivism: he loves Big Brother.
Second:
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, [Wisconsin Governor Scott] Walker [R] “proposed striking language about public service and improving the human condition, and deleting the phrase: ‘Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.’ ” The university’s mission would henceforth be to “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
If someone were to write a novel about a university suffering a Bolshevik purge, that is what one would write.
Craig J. Bolton said:
I somehow don’t see the connection with Ayn Rand or “Objectivism.”
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bregister said:
I guess that it’s not obvious. Ayn Rand is an extreme expression of the modern impulse to reduce all human action, including and most especially reasoning, to the role of instrument for a collective purpose, denying that anything has value independent of its long-term or social consequences. That impulse is incompatible with the pursuit of truth, by an individual, for its own sake.
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10x10 said:
What on earth does today’s higher education have to do with “capitalism” the way it is defined by Rand or envisioned by pro-liberty advocates?
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bregister said:
Universities are increasingly interested in the same kinds of measurable, collective things that are valued in the marketplace, and decreasingly interested in the discovery and promulgation of genuine knowledge. They are now governed by capitalist values: efficiency, customer satisfaction, and so forth — things that are unrelated to or incompatible with the pursuit of truth and understanding.
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10x10 said:
That’s a superficial answer. If you’ve read Rand or Mises or Reisman (or so many others lol) then you understand that today’s universities do not operate in a context of *liberty*. And as I said in my first comment, the system in place is not *laissez faire* which is what Rand meant by capitalism; ie the SYSTEM of principled liberty. Today’s universities are subsidized, semi-socialist, corporatist, interventionist (jesus chose any term you wish) monstrosities pushing cultural Marxism down everyones throats; ie they’re Leftist indoctrination centers. They are light years away from “capitalism”. And they sure as hell are not governed by “efficiency, customer satisfaction and so forth”. Do you know how any half way competent libertarian could pick apart that assertion? A free market in education would be nothing like today’s university system.
Jesus dude, you spent how many years studying Rand and liberty? And then you went to the ivory tower and you became a “mild mannered liberal”? I am influenced by Rand too and yet I too find flaws with her, especially her blank slate view of human nature which does need to be changed. But from what I have read so far from you, I am not impressed and don’t see you as competent to criticize her. Your comment above on the universities is enough to disqualify you from legitimacy. I knew better as an 18 year college freshman that the university system was the product of the mixed economy and was attempting to indoctrinate me with Leftism. (But hey the parties were great.)
Plus, you became a liberal? Studied all that Rand to become a liberal? I literally can not fathom where you are coming from psychologically.
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bregister said:
I think that you might be missing the point; have you read the linked article, or beyond the title of my post? I am not saying that the contemporary university operates in anything remotely resembling a free market. It obviously isn’t. I’m saying that it now values only things that are valued in the market. The contemporary university is now a bundle of administrators carving out profitable fiefs for themselves, without regard to the actual mission of the academy — like a corporation with all of its infighting and bureaucracy. And of course pop leftism sells, especially to easily agitated undergrads.
Certainly they are motivated by efficiency and customer satisfaction. Efficiency, for instance, is the main reason that tenure is being slowly abolished, in favor of a pool of semi-employed adjunct instructors. Customer satisfaction is why the students’ course instructor surveys now dominate the hiring and retention of those adjuncts, and why there is so much morale-building nonsense thrown at students. (Again: feel-good collectivist and emotivist goo is profitable and it pleases enough students of the student council president variety, or their parents, that universities throw a lot of it at them.)
As for the personal remarks, we haven’t met (so far as I know), so I’m not sure what you’re trying to talk about. My book is about why a radical for capitalism became a “mild-mannered liberal”, not how I did. The personal context in which I confronted arguments against Objectivism and libertarianism and found that I could not defeat them and that no one else had done so either isn’t relevant. The arguments themselves are what matter. It’s philosophy, not autobiography. By like token, it is not necessary that anyone fathom my psychology.
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Neil Parille said:
Second:
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, [Wisconsin Governor Scott] Walker [R] “proposed striking language about public service and improving the human condition, and deleting the phrase: ‘Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.’ ” The university’s mission would henceforth be to “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
If someone were to write a novel about a university suffering a Bolshevik purge, that is what one would write.
*******************************
But Walker isn’t talking about the state as is in government, but the people of the state.
We are talking Wisconsin here, a hotbed of progressive thought and in particular its State-run university system. Yeah, instead of teaching students that, for example, race is socially constructed, gender is socially constructed, blacks are poor because of white privilege, I think they should be taught how to milk cows and make cheese.
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bregister said:
Bolsheviks also wouldn’t be talking about the state as in government, but the people of the state.
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leonid said:
The articlle represents a variant of mind-body dichotomy. Yes, Man is essentially a rational being, reason and creativity is his only tools of survival. But without proper rational philosophy to guide one’s actions man cannot create anything. Free market needs producers,that is-individualists, free thinkers who live and act rationally towards their own self-interest and well being. Only these people could benefit society as a whole and only a rational philosophy and morality of self-interest could teach them. Exactly this philosophy modern liberal educational system failed to provide.
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bregister said:
Reason and creativity are worthwhile in themselves. To say that they are only tools of survival is to degrade them. The contemporary academy treats them as means to ends — as tools of survival. But they can’t exist as anything but what they are; degrading them to mere tools exterminates them entirely.
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leonid said:
You mean that reason and creativity are intrinsic values , that it-values without beneficiaries. But this is a blatant contradiction. All values are means to ends and presuppose an existence of valuer.
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bregister said:
An ultimate end is not a means to an end; it is a value. To say that every value is a means is to say that life has no value. And I didn’t say anything about intrinsic values. Reasoning and creativity are among the ultimate ends of an individual life. They aren’t of value if there isn’t anyone to value them (though if there were no one to value them, then there would be any reasoning or creativity), but they are of value despite not having any further purpose.
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leonid said:
No, there’s no such a thing as intrinsic values. It’s a blatant contradiction. All values are means to ends and presuppose an existence of valuer.
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Leonid said:
The ultimate end or standard of value is man”s life itself.. Reason and creativity are only valuable if they promote and benefit individual life..Therefore they are means to that end..What would be a value of creativity which is used for development of the weapons of mass destruction?
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bregister said:
A life without reason and creativity would not be worth living; were I immortal, I would still engage in reasoning and have a go at creativity. When does one get to this “man’s life” — after all of the means to it? In that case, “man’s life” is death. Something about living has to be worthwhile in itself, and that is (among other things) the exercise of reason. We aren’t just animals pursuing animal goals that happen to have a great information-processing system shoved into the fronts of our skulls.
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Leonid said:
Well, this is true. However. There is no mind-body dichotomy and man’s life means a lot more than just physical survival.. Reason and creativity are means to the human mode of existence. Without them life is not worth living as you rightly observed..
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bregister said:
What is the human mode of existence that excludes reason and creativity? If they’re only means to it, then they aren’t it. What exactly was this mind-body dichotomy ever supposed to be? Rand seems to have been a substance dualist; she’s described as one by Peikoff and Binswanger, and they both, and Kelley as well, treat being non-physical as a criterion of the mental. What could the mind-body dichotomy be if it isn’t substance dualism?
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Leonid said:
No mode of human existence could possibly exclude reason and creativity. That’s I claim that they are not ends in themselves but means to maintain man”s. Existence qua man. The attempt to view reason as an ultimate value and therefore to separate it from life is mind-body dichotomy to which Rand objected.. Of course Rand was substantial dualist,, she separated mind from matterand rightly so..there is no mind to be found in autopsy.
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Leonid said:
Mind is not a material substance. It doesn’t occupy space. You cannot weight your consciousness. And yet it can’t be separated from the body. Rand described mind as human faculty. Mind -body dichotomy is a mystical notion that mind could be divorced from life. The notion of mind as a ultimate goal implies that.
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bregister said:
Obviously thinking is an activity of a living thing (so far; I’m sure we’ll have some non-living thinkers shortly). I can’t guess what it would be to “divorce mind from life”. Substance dualism is the claim that the mind is an object without physical qualities and the body is an object without mental qualities.
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Leonid said:
Body and mind inseparable.. Ayn Rand wrote “mind without body is a ghost. Body without mind is a corpse.. Both are symbols of death. “so she can’t be substantial dualist in the full sense of the term.. However we can separate them for didactic purpose. I
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bregister said:
That separation will consist of Rand saying whatever she pleases for her rhetorical purposes at a given moment. She can be, and is described by Peikoff, Binswanger, and Kelley as being, a substance dualist. She is also an anti-dualist.
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bregister said:
In saying that reason is a means to something, you say that it is not that something. If reason is a means to life, then it is not life. So you have to specify what “life” is independent of reason so that we could explain how reason works as a means to this other end. In so doing, you’ve redescribed human life as nothing but an animal life where the animal is physically weak and so has to rely on reason.
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Leonid said:
Yes. In the very basic sense reason is a survival tool to sustain man’s existence. Man simply has no other tools to do so.. Although human needs are much bigger than just survival, it’s a precondition. Dead people have no desires, goals or aspirations
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Leonid said:
To live you have to eat. To eat you have to produce.. To produce you need your mind. Therefore mind is a tool of survival and a means to the ultimate end which is life itself
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bregister said:
If X is a means to Y, then X is a cause, or partial cause, of Y. For X to be a cause of Y, Y must be describable without reference to X; otherwise, to say that X caused Y would just be to say that X caused what X caused, which contains no information at all. Thus if reason is a means to man’s life, then man’s life must be describable without reference to reason; else, to say that reason is a means to man’s life is just to say that reason is a means to whatever reason is a means to. If man’s life can be described without reference to reason, then reason is nothing other than a tool by which a certain kind of ape collects its ape-chow. You’re welcome to believe that; David Hume, for instance, did, and Rand does so sometimes (though she rejects those claims at other times, or sometimes in the next sentence).
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Leonid said:
Yes, of course, life of man as an organism could be described without reference to reason.. Reason is a tool which sustains human life but so water, air and food.. Life is an ultimate value and a source of all other values including reason..
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Leonid said:
Man doesn’t live in order to think but thinks in order to live
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bregister said:
“Man” does quite the reverse. Some men who think that they are just clever animals might do that.
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Leonid said:
To think one has to be alive in the first place. Man is a living organism, it’s a fact. There is no divine soul,, just a living process which requires rational thinking.. Life is a prerequisite of mind and any human activity.. Dead people cannot think,, create or pursuit happiness.
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Leonid said:
Even your joy of creativity and of using your mind is an emotion which derived from reaffirmation of your capacity to live in this world.
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bregister said:
I don’t enjoy creativity because it keeps up the metabolism.
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bregister said:
The fact that living is a prerequisite of thinking (which it probably isn’t anyway, as AI will probably reveal) doesn’t imply that living is the goal of thinking. I have to have a bus pass to ride the bus; that doesn’t imply that I ride the bus to get passes. I can’t see a movie without a movie ticket, but that doesn’t imply that I see the movie to get the ticket.
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Leonid said:
And I never said that goal of living is thinking. Goal of living is living. Life is an end in itself. Thinking is a process which facilitates human life.. If living is a bus than thinking is a fuel.. Now tell me what AI needs thinking for.?
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bregister said:
You say that because living is a prerequisite of thinking, that living must be the purpose of thinking. As a matter of logic, that inference is obviously invalid. Here’s how things would be if it were valid:
Living is a prerequisite for thinking.
If X is a prerequisite for Y, then X is the only possible purpose of Y.
Therefore, living is the only possible purpose of thinking.
However:
Having a bus ticket is a prerequisite for riding the bus.
If X is a prerequisite for Y, then X is the only possible purpose of Y.
Therefore, having a bus ticket is the only possible purpose of riding the bus.
I take it that the conclusion of that argument is obviously false. But the argument logically valid. Thus at least one of the premises must be false; it is a reductio of its premises. But the first premise is obviously true. Thus the second premise must be the false one. In that case, it is false in the previous argument as well. Thus the conclusion of that argument does not follow from those of its premises that are true.
I suppose that the AI would need to be able to think to accomplish whatever goals it had been programmed to accomplish. We’ve been programmed, too, to maximize the number of our offspring; from a biological point of view, that is the only thing that reason could possibly be for. So much the worse for letting biology dictate our values.
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Leonid said:
No, it’s logically false. It’s a fallacy of equivocation.. Ticket is not s prerequisite for the movement of the bus.. So the premises are wrong.. If you say instead that a driver is a prerequisite, then it then your syllogism would be true.. Your statement about AI also contradictive. Thinking is impossible without Self-awareness and free will..it cannot be programmed since it’s about making choices…including thinking itself.. If actions are programmed, no thinking is needed.
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Leonid said:
If you were saying that ticket is a prerequisite of your ride on the bus you would be perfectly right.. Without ticket you don’t ride. Without thinking you don’t live
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bregister said:
“Having a bus ticket is a prerequisite for riding the bus.”
I’m glad we’re agreed, then.
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Leonid said:
Ask yourself why conceptual consciousness developed at all? It’s obvious that such a faculty provides a huge evolutionary advantage, in other words promotes life
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bregister said:
It promotes reproduction, as everything with a biological explanation does. I assume that you don’t mean, by ‘life’, ‘the maximization of the number of future beings that will have certain chemicals chains that resemble chemical chains in *MY* body’.
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Leonid said:
Wrong. It stops the process of adaptation of the organism to the environment and allows adaptation of the environment to the organism it eliminates the need to live in ecological niche allows spreading of the people around the globe and space and eventually between stars. That what causes population explosion, but also gives means for population control.. The end result betterment of man’s life
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bregister said:
The process of evolution by natural selection didn’t select for our rational faculties because we might thereby come to live among the stars; it certainly did not select for our rational faculties because that “bettered” any organism’s life. It selected for our rational faculties because our ancestors’ rational faculties was sufficient for our ancestors to reproduce under circumstances in which their nearest kin could not. The biological function of anything that has a biological function is: the causal contribution of that object to the reproduction of the genetic sequences that code for the development of that object.
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Leonid said:
Yes but not for the movement of the bus.. It can move without you. But not without fuel..You equivocate them and this is a fallacy.. Life is also kind of movement, it’s basically process which living organism initiates in order to sustain its existence which is an ultimate end. Reason is a tool of man. To say that reason has value in itself means separation of values from life which is worse than contradiction in terms. It’s a stolen concept.
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bregister said:
Can we come at this with fewer slogans?
You accept the following claim:
Living is a prerequisite for reasoning.
From that claim, you infer the following claim:
Living is the purpose of reasoning.
Am I correct so far?
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Leonid said:
No, purpose of living is living. Reason facilitates the living process. In humans..
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bregister said:
I put what I thought your argument for this claim was. If that isn’t your argument, would you mind telling me what your argument is? Just repeating this claim, as though it were self-evidently true (when it is at best wildly counterintuitive and has at least the appearance of nihilistic anti-humanism taken to an extreme), is of no cognitive significance.
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Leonid said:
You reiterate my point.-the emergence of Reason results in evolutionary advantage. And that means betterment of life of every individual.
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bregister said:
Which individual has benefited from the evolution of reason? I haven’t, since I wouldn’t have existed without it. My ancestors didn’t, because it didn’t yet exist.
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