dontdrinkthatmilk

Hello everyone, I'd just like to introduce myself- my name is Daniel Higginbotham, and I've been a fan of Ayn Rand since I read Atlas Shrugged in 9th grade. I've won or placed in a number of Ayn Rand essay contests, including a first place win for Anthem and second place for Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand has probably been the largest and most beneficial influence on my life. Her writings have taught me how to think clearly and have given me the courage to continually pursue a good life. A bit more about me: I dropped out of high school to go to college - St. John's College, where the curriculum is the Western Canon - and I droppped out of college because my classmates were ridiculous, making the discussion-based classes useless. Now I own a steadily growing business creating web sites from the beautiful Hawaiian archipelago It's strange, I actually feel a bit embarrassed / self-conscious telling you all things about myself that I'm proud of. But that's why I'm here - so I can communicate freely without such silly reservations I look forward to great conversations with you all! Daniel

Just curious to see if there are any Ruby / Ruby on Rails programmers on this forum?

This is an excellent article on "how public education cripples our kids, and why": http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

So often in the debate on Illegal Immigration fence-supporters point out that illegals are taking millions of tax dollars in the form of various welfare programs. Yet no one suggests that a possible solution is to not have those welfare programs. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by this, but I am. Same with Campaign Finance Reform. The other day I heard a young man go on about how election campaigns need to be publically funded to eliminate corruption in politicians. He talked about how pharmaceuticals and energy companies are essentially writing legislation by buying politicians. Neither he nor his interviewer ever suggested that the real source of the corruption was the politicians' power to write such legislation in the first place. It's maddening, I tell you!

A few month's ago I read Steinbeck's Easy of Eden, what I consider one of the best books ever written. He introduces the character Cathy Ames as follows: I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tils or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins. And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physicl monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul? Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous. --- There's a lot here, from the questions of, "Is it possible to be born with a malformed soul?" and "what does the world look like to someone born without a conscience / born a monster?" to the imperative "You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous. Mainly, however, these paragraphs contradict Miss Rand's assertion that "man is a being of self-made soul" by implying that yes, people can be born with corrupted souls. The paragraphs could be dismissed as just fiction if it weren't for the ample scientific evidence that Steinbeck's assessment is correct. Wayward genes can create humans prone to violence. Trauma to adult brains can radically alter a being's personality, turning him into someone else entirely (see the story of Phineas Gage, http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/phineas-gage). So my question are, where does man the lump of computational matter end and man the being of self-made soul begin? And what are the ethical implications?

Please add Getting Things Done, by David Allen. Thank you!

I thought of this book because of the recent discussions mentioning M. Night Shayamalan's Unbreakable. Here's a description of the book from Amazon.com:

please add The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, thanks!

This helped put the movie into new perspective for me. I think I'll need to go see it again without my adult brain turned off and see how I like it.

Thanks for your replies everyone. I'm going to go grab some Rand books and re-familiarize myself before posting more on this thread or these ideas. Also, it's evident to me that I haven't been clear in framing the issues I've been trying to present. Hopefully soon I'll be back with clearer and more concise posts. In the meantime, does anyone have a lead on where I can find Rand's assertion that scientific conclusions will not contradict an objective philosophy? Thanks!

WARNING: SPOILERS Before saying more, I want to add that I'm a huge fan of M. Night Shayamalan. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and The Village were all fantastic in my opinion. And, I really don't want to ruin the movie for anyone, so I want to emphasize that this post contains spoilers. There are many elements of the movie that I would think Ayn Rand fans would find distasteful. Here are some of them: The movie depicts people as receiving their purpose from external sources. Giamatti, "the guild", "the symbolist", even the lady herself all have somehow pre-ordained purposes which they are to fulfill. The characters' purposes and roles are not at all determined by any traits which they have chosen to develop. Goals are achieved by accident or by a kind of mysticism. For example, the correct course of action to save Story is determined by a kid intuiting messages from cereal boxes. In the end, Story is saved from the beast trying to kill her first by happenstance, with her "protector" for no discernible reason appearing in the right place at the right time, and then by the introduction of a dues ex machina. Perhaps, however, I'm missing the point, and forgetting that this movie was originally a children's story?

I just wanted to clarify that the paragraph, "The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind -- the self or soul -- is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief", was written by Pinker, not me. Sorry for the sloppy quoting!

Thank you all for your warm welcome! I failed to mention that I decided to join because of the quality discussions I saw in my brief time lurking. Most of the other AR forums I've visited have been lacking in intellectuality and clarity, and this place looks to be just the opposite Stellavision, I went to the Santa Fe campus. Santa Fe's a very beautiful place!

I've done a couple searches to find discussions on this topic and can't find any. I'd be very interested to engage in a conversation on this issue! Thanks!

I have to say, I went to see Lady in the Water with high hopes and was pretty disappointed. The main flaw I noticed was that there was too much "telling" and not enough "showing". In some cases the "telling" - verbal descriptions of characters - contradicted the way the characters actually behaved, and not in an intentional way.

Yes, of course. But does it alter your thinking at all to consider that some people don't have the same inhibitory emotions to the thought or process of acting on anger in a harmful way? You're blessed with foresight, with a conscience, with an ability to anticipate and care about the suffering you will inflict on others and yourself and to feel preemptive shame and fear. Some people aren't. Allow me to put it another way: Abraham Lincoln could not condemn men who owned slaves, giving as his reason something like, "If I were born in the South I would probably own slaves too." Finally, about volition. Here's a nother quote that should offer some food for thought: "One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerbral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in tow, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one's advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without its knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command "WALK" to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person's left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up, he will say, in all sincerity, "To get a Coke" -- rather than, "I don't really know" or "The urge just came over me" or "You've been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don't know exactly what you asked me to do." Similarly, if the patient's left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, "Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed." The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind -- the self or soul -- is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. --- So, what are your thoughts? What are the implications? These are pretty open questions - when you ask "implications for whom", I don't have an answer. Rather than try to set specific topics for discussion, I'd rather just throw stuff out and see what people think without trying to guide the thought process at all. There's a lot here, and maybe this should be broken into different threads? In my mind, however, it's all related - perhaps I need to be better at explaining how

I just wanted to make a couple corrections - "tils" should be "tails" in the first paragraph, and Steinbeck isn't implying anything, he's flat-out saying it.