Wow

Out of curiosity I counted recently, and, if I count only the unique individual books that I wrote, I am the author of 35 books. I wrote 35 books. And I'm only 40 years old. That's almost a book a year FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE. How did I do it? I'm not entirely sure. I never get writer's block, and I am capable of writing 50 to 100 pages in a month, sometimes 50 to 100 pages in a week. So that helped.

Just an FYI to my readers, I don't plan to write another book. There's nothing I'm working on as a work in progress right now. And I think that 35 is enough.

Vegetarianism, Round Two

Hello,

I don't blog much anymore, but I have blogged about this topic in the past, so I feel that I owe it to my readers to keep them updated. I had gone back to eating meat, and have been for some time, but, recently, I had an experience where the McRib was in its "farewell tour" at McDonald's, and I bought a McRib, and, while eating the McRib, I started thinking about whether the pig I was eating had been tortured or abused while in captivity prior to slaughter, and that ruined the whole experience of eating meat for me, and I couldn't even finish the sandwich, I had to throw half of it out, and I have not eaten meat since. And the only reason to eat meat is that you enjoy eating meat, and it isn't fun for my anymore, so I expect not to eat meat again.

The good news is that now I can be a good Jew, since now I can avoid pork and bacon and not mix meat and milk. I've been eating a lot of salad and rice and beans.

I do hate that so many philosophy professors today who specialize in ethics have made veganism their "thing," their focus, because that is so easy, that is such a simple topic to tackle, you don't deserve a university chair if that is the extent of your reach as an ethicist. But so many of them are today, and I don't like it, even though I agree with their basic premises about it. Obviously, it's logical to be a vegetarian, the only problem is that for most people eating meat is so much fun.

On Free Will and Self-Esteem: The Philosopher’s Lament

 

On Free Will and Self-Esteem: The Philosopher’s Lament

People with low self-esteem generally feel like “I’m not good enough.” And philosophy would ask: Why? What does that mean? Good enough according to whose judgment? Judged by what standards? For what reason? For what purpose? And according to what foundational premises? And, I think, (and I speak from personal experience), the premise is a faulty understanding, a misunderstanding, of the nature of free will. But the truth about free will is, in a way, very, very sad, so people don’t want to face the truth. But this short essay states that truth. And this truth, in a way, holds a great deal of wisdom.

It is not, ultimately, within my control whether my philosophy has any effect upon the world, or how long it lasts. The readers control that. I do not have any control over that. You should write for fun, not for effect. If the readers reject you, that does not mean you “failed.” It isn’t necessarily true that always “doing more” would make it more likely that you “succeed.”

I had been operating under a false premise: that I was responsible. The world is the sum of other people. I am not responsible for other people. Not in any way. And I have no control over them or what they do. In any way.

And when you move to a new apartment, you won’t control whether you like it or not. You can’t know that before you move in and live there. And you could get stuck in a place you don’t like. You don’t control that. And that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. So you should not feel guilt. You accept, let go, move on, and fight your next battle.

I was writing for the wrong reason. I was writing for effect, not to have fun.

Same with gaming: Don’t play to win. Play to have fun.

Although I did have fun writing books. To paraphrase a saying, “You can’t change people, but it sure is fun to try!”

That is the premise of “yes and yes”: You don’t control whether someone wants to have sex with you or wants to date you. All you can do is put yourself out there, show up, ask, and then see what their answer is. And it’s only a match if you are a yes for them and they are a yes for you. But if they are a no for you, that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, because you don’t control their answer. You being a yes for them is necessary but not sufficient. They have free will, so you are zero percent responsible for their answer, and they are 100% responsible for their answer. Whether the other person says yes or no after you ask them to date you or have sex with you is, from their point of view, completely determined and controlled, and, from your point of view, completely random and chaotic. You have no control, there is nothing you can do to gain control, so you are good enough, no matter what, and there is nothing you could have done better where you did wrong and were not good enough. In this context, it is impossible to not be good enough, therefore you are good enough.

For examples:

Your writing is good enough. You don’t need to write more.

You’re thin enough. You don’t need to lose weight to get a boyfriend or hook up with someone hot.

I no longer take responsibility for the moral failure of being single and not having a boyfriend despite being lonely and lovelorn and for the moral failure of not having had lots and lots of hot gay sex despite being openly LGBTQ and horny all the time.

I no longer take responsibility for the moral failure of not having gotten a PhD in philosophy from an Ivy League university and for not becoming a philosophy professor (and for sparing myself the agony of being constantly surrounded by idiots).

I no longer take responsibility for the fact that my parents abused and/or neglected me my entire life and I let them stay in my life and continue to torture me long into adulthood instead of kicking them out for far too long, and I forgave too much. I no longer take responsibility for the moral failure I inherited by being the son of fucked up insane evil parents. I no longer take moral responsibility for the fact that my parents neglected me by not getting me any diagnosis or treatment for my Autism or Social Anxiety Disorder as a child when I had no friends or in high school when I did not date, thereby traumatizing me and torturing me by making me feel like it was my fault and I had no fucking clue what was going on or why I couldn’t socialize and I blamed it all on myself. I no longer blame myself. There is nothing better that I could have done. I did not need to do better. I was, and am, good enough.

I no longer feel guilt for my life. I did the best I could given what a fucked up nightmare shitshow this world is. What I did was good enough. Life is not an easy game to play. I didn’t need to be better. I’m good enough.

You’re good enough. For what? For anything. Why? There is no justification. No justification is necessary. But, if you take the opposite position, that you’re not good enough yet, then you would always have to do more, and feel guilty for not having done enough, and focus on every negative as an area of improvement, and ignore every positive because those aren’t the areas where you need to do more, where you’re not good enough.

You might make a big mistake, and feel like now you’re not good enough to succeed anymore, and feel guilt. But, if what you are doing is within the scope of your free will, then you control whether you succeed, because you have free will, so, yes, you are still good enough to succeed. And, if what you are doing, or the result of your actions, is outside the scope of your free will, then you do not control it, and “good enough” has no meaning in this context. The one wrong thing you can do is to feel guilty, cry, feel self-pity, and give up, and blame yourself (or blame other people, or blame fate, or blame at all). If you keep fighting the fight that you have the ability to fight, or accept that which is outside your control and be at peace with what happens, those are the wise things to do.

The premise that you doing better could influence or control other people, make them like you, make them love you, make them recognize your achievement, make them give you a reward, is flawed, is false. Because they have free will. But, absent that, you are good enough for them, and guilt could rarely, if ever, be justified. Did you do good enough? Was what you did good enough – to please others? That question has no meaning. You are good enough.

You cannot influence other people or control other people, but, if you want someone else to give you something, you can ask for it, you can ask them to give it to you, and there is no reason why they would ever give it to you if you don’t ask them for it. And there are better and worse ways, more or less effective ways, of asking someone to give you something that you want from them. And no reasonable person should expect to get anything from others if you don’t ask for it in an effective way; however, with the caveat that, in whatever way you ask for it, no matter how “effective,” you still do not control them as to whether they actually give it to you.

Radical free will. Let go. Atlas, shrug. Go Galt. You are responsible for yourself, you are not responsible for other people, you do not control them, and it is not your job to take care of them, or to have an effect upon them. You can’t help them. You have no effect on them. Each person is responsible for themselves. Each individual is 100% responsible for themselves, physically, spiritually, morally, economically, socially, sexually, and romantically. Because they have free will. Either you have free will, or you don’t. If you have free will – and, yes, you do – that is what it means to have free will. That is the doctrine of radical free will.

Because you have free will, you are personally responsible for yourself, so it is your job to provide for yourself and to take care of yourself. It is your job to make the money to pay the costs of you living your ideal life, to the extent that you have the ability to get a job and work. It is your job to make friends, find love, and have hobbies, to the extent that you desire to do so. It is your job to create meaning in your life, to build a narrative of what is going on in your life and find joy and meaning in the story of your life, to the extent that you need or want to do so. It is your job to love yourself – rational selfishness and egoism and self-esteem, the core tenets of ethical Objectivism, mean nothing more than this.

And when I say “it is your job,” I mean, it is your responsibility, you are responsible, your free will controls this. But did you do this job well enough? Should you have done better? Were you good enough – to yourself? You have free will, so this was under your absolute control. But this means that you did what you did, you willed what you willed, you willed that which was your will, and you would have done nothing else, given the scenario of choices which you faced. Will is not precisely the same thing as choice: you choose your choices, but you will your will, and your will is your intention, your meaning, your truth, that which you absolutely will and would bend reality itself to your will in order to achieve, you mean and intend it so completely and so absolutely that you intend to cause it to exist, so, if you willed something, there is no reason to believe that you would have willed something else, something different, given that specific opportunity a second time. That was your free will. That was who you are. You are the person who did that. You did what you chose to do. What you willed is what you meant to do, it is what you intended to do – literally, by definition. Was it the right thing to do? That is between you – and yourself.

You live the life you will. Your life is what it is because you willed it to be. That was your will. To say that you don’t like your life, that you feel guilty about how you took care of yourself, that it wasn’t good enough – guilt does not make sense in this context. From your point of view, that was your will, that is what you declared your will to be. Starting right now, today, throw out the guilt from the past, do what you want, and do what you know you should be doing, and will the life you want. Forget the past. Then, there is no guilt, you are doing what you want, and you are doing your job. The past and future do not exist, only the present time exists, from the point of view of someone alive today, at the present time. You only have free will over yourself at the present time; you cannot change the past, or the future, but you can change today.

What is outside your control: Accept, and let go – or try to control it, which is a losing cause. Such as, for example, by political control, or legal control, which fails, because each individual has absolute free will. Another approach is my theory of faith. People want to get God to control the things which they cannot control, for their benefit, so they seek to pay God with prayers and worship and service and faith, in return for God controlling the things which are outside their control. Totally illogical: God would not, in theory, need or want your prayers, your faith, your worship, your service. God is the one who literally already has everything, so there is nothing you can give to God in return for God controlling things outside of your control. You cannot buy God’s favor. This attempt is an end run around loss of control, it is trying to control that which is outside of your control by means of religion. You don’t control God, you don’t control other people, you don’t control the world, you don’t control what happens, you don’t control everything that is, according to logic, outside your control. You can let go and accept, or tear your hair out and gnash your teeth and cut your skin to blood fighting to get control.

It isn’t that each person is an end in themselves. “End” implies a justification, a reason to use a means. There is no justification. There is no need for a justification. Human beings simply are. We live. We exist. There is no need to justify behavior, there is only the need to deny the need for any justification, deny all negativity, and live a positive, affirmative life. Don’t justify, deny the need for justification. You have free will and the absolute right to do what you will. You might have done right, or wrong, factually, for a particular purpose, which might be your chosen goal, but you do not, in the end, either need, or have, any justification whatsoever. You stand naked, alone, before God, stripped of the clothing of justification, of pretext, of excuse, of “why.” You need no excuses and there are no excuses. There is no blame, and there is no need to blame.

The great mistake in human psychology is to blame your life on other people, or blame your life on yourself, or blame your life on your parents, or blame your life on bad luck, or blame your life on your mental health disorders, or blame your life on your addictions, or blame your life on the socioeconomic class you were born into, or blame your life on what other people did to you. And then you would need to do better to compensate for it. But there is no need to blame. There is no blame. There is nothing blameworthy to blame for. The crime that rendered you not good enough was never committed, and the proof is that you are good enough. You are good. You are good enough.

It's like the hero says in the movie “Serenity,” based on the TV show “Firefly”: “You can’t change people. They are what they are.” It’s because they have free will. They can change themselves, but you can’t change them. You can change yourself, but you can’t change other people. This is the philosopher’s lament, because the philosopher understands free will, and so he knows how little he truly has any power to affect other people. And that is wisdom.

The famous motto of recovery from Alcoholics Anonymous also comes to mind: “God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Except that I would rewrite it: Reason and logic, grant me the courage to change the things that are within the scope of my free will, the serenity to accept the things that are outside the scope of my free will, and the wisdom to know the difference and to understand free will.

Randianism

Consider this list of philosophies:

Rationalism,

Empiricism,

Analytic philosophy,

Existentialism,

Phenomenology,

German Idealism,

Socialism,

Anarcho-Socialism,

State-Communism,

Libertarianism,

Moral Realism,

Solipsism.

Next, consider this list of philosophies:

Platonism,

Kantianism,

Hegelianism,

The philosophy of Nietzsche,

The philosophy of Sartre,

Aristotelianism,

The philosophy of Wittgenstein,

Marxism,

The philosophy of John Locke.

Each of these things are what ordinary people would call a "philosophy." But these are not one thing, these are two types of things, the first set of which, from the first list, is what I call a systematic philosophy, and the second set of which, from the second list set forth above, I would call an individual's philosophy. A systematic philosophy is a philosophical system comprised of a set of philosophical views, while an individual's philosophy is the philosophy of one individual philosopher. Note, however, that each systematic philosophy is formed by importing a set of ideas and views from a set of individual's philosophies, or else one individual's philosophy could form its own entire one systematic philosophy. For example, the philosophy of John Locke contributed views to Empiricism, and Marxism contributed views to socialism. Multiple individual's philosophies can contribute to the same systematic philosophy. For example, the philosophy of Nietzsche and the philosophy of Sartre both contributed to Existentialism. One systematic philosophy can also have multiple systematic philosophies which are variations or sub-parts of it as a whole. For example, Anarcho-Socialism and State-Communism are both coherent systematic philosophies in their own right, but each is also a sub-part of the broader systematic philosophy of Socialism.

Now, the question is: What is Objectivism? Is it a systemic philosophy? Or is it an individual's philosophy?

Within the Objectivist movement, there is a great debate and conflict between the open-system and closed-system Objectivists. Closed-system people believe that Objectivism is limited to the philosophy created by Ayn Rand, and it ended with her death. Open-system people believe that Objectivism can be added to and expanded by other people and is not only limited to Ayn Rand's ideas.

I have come to believe that the conflict arises from linguistic imprecision, that the closed-system people understand Objectivism to be an individual's philosophy, merely another name for Randianism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, while the open-system people believe that Objectivism is a systematic philosophy, a set of philosophical views united around the theme of a common worldview in philosophy, and therefore obviously it could be added to by anyone, although at its time of original creation, 100% of the ideas in systematic Objectivism came from having been imported from the individual's philosophy of Ayn Rand, Randianism.

The two sides in the debate do not understand each other and cannot understand what the other side is saying, because they are using two different definitions of the same word, "philosophy," so it is impossible for the two sides to communicate, and neither side understands what the other side means. If Objectivism is an individual's philosophy, then it is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and obviously the closed-system side is correct. If Objectivism is a systematic philosophy, then it is defined by a set of philosophical views, and anyone who holds those views while adding ideas could add to it, and then obviously the open-system side is correct. The two sides mean different things and so can't see eye to eye to resolve their dispute.

I propose to solve this confusion by creating a new word, "Randianism," to describe Ayn Rand's individual's philosophy, which is defined as the philosophy of Ayn Rand, while keeping "Objectivism" as the name for the systematic philosophy, the philosophical system defined by that certain set of views about objectivity, reality, reason, rational selfishness in ethics, free-market capitalism and the moral defense of capitalism in economics, individual rights in politics, etc. At its inception, Objectivism was formed 100% from Randianism, but the two are analytically distinct, based on the understanding which I have provided.

Some critics might say that, as I have defined it, only an individual's philosophy is a "real" philosophy, and what I call a systematic philosophy is merely a historical category, or a worldview, or a philosophical view, or set of views. But that is not, in fact, how ordinary people use the term "philosophy." Each of those systematic philosophies is, in fact, a philosophy.

What is Reasoning?

Reasoning works by means of thinking along a line of reasoning. A line of reasoning is a line where each point in the line is a reason-computation that takes the conclusions from the previous point as that point’s premises, reasons what must be true if all those premises are true, forms conclusions, and then hands off those conclusions to the next point in the line to be the premises for the next point. Lines of reasoning prove things, but lines of reasoning must have their premises checked, especially if the conclusion turns out to be false or to resolve to a contradiction.

To check a line of reasoning, you start at the conclusion and work your way back up to the start, confirming that each premise which was reasoned from was correct, and a key task is to look for hidden premises, things which were assumed for the analysis without awareness or without conscious thought and deliberation choosing to accept those premises before they were adopted. Assumptions, or what you take for granted but which turns out to be not true, for examples.

To check a premise, you can assert its truth and see if it collapses to or reduces to an absurdity if it was true, and if it does then it is false; you can test it against empirical experience and evidence and observation, to see if it is false; or you can ask “why? Why would this be true?” and, if the reason behind it is incorrect or does not make sense, try again without it.

Reasoning from only true premises, if the reasoning is valid and sound and rational, produces conclusions which must be true, because the truth of the premises will cause the truth of the conclusion, because the conclusion is that which must be true if all the premises are true according to logic, but if there is at least one or more false premises, the conclusion will be false, and, if there is a premise or premises whose actual truth or falsehood you do not know, then the line of reasoning is in the condition of being able to be true or false, and you won’t know which it is.

Reason from 100% true premises is pure reason. Reasoning from false or dubious premises is corrupted reason. Pure reason produces knowledge of the truth. Note that a premise, as I see it, can be anything that is reasoned from: a perception or observation, a concrete thing, an abstraction or essence of being, a fact, a principle, a belief, an opinion, knowledge, etc. If your reasoning resolves to a contradiction or a conclusion you know must be false, take Ayn Rand’s advice: Check your premises!

The Moral Defense of Capitalism

Thesis: A moral defense of capitalism.

Premises:

1. Each thing is a thing. A thing is something, a thing is itself, and a thing is what it is. A thing is a thing in itself, a thing as such. Each thing has a nature, as what it is. The nature of a thing is the set of principles which explain how and why it is what it is and how and why it behaves as it does. Every thing has a nature, although the specific nature of a thing is subject to the specific domain to which it belongs, for example, science, math, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, etc. This understanding of the general nature of things is metaphysics. A thing’s nature can be studied and analyzed and known by reason and logic. The human mind observes things, and infers general principles from those things, and then applies those principles to other things, and, because knowledge is general and abstract and not limited to specifics, it covers cases outside of the immediate awareness or perception of the one who knows. This is epistemology.

2. Objective ethics is ethics that is based on objective facts about what things are and about what exists. If a belief is objectively true, then acting in accordance with and pursuant to that belief is the objectively right way to act. This is ethics.

3. Capitalism is the economic system where a person owns the results of their actions and of their choices as private property, and each person has the freedom to act as they choose, and to make their own decisions and to then act out those decisions, within the realm of economics and in the sense of economic action, which is generally concerned with material objects in the physical world. This is economics.

Deduction:

4. A human is a type of thing.

5. Humans have a human nature. Humans are humans.

6. Because humans are humans, humans have free will.

7. Because humans have free will, humans are personally responsible for themselves.

8. Because humans are personally responsible for themselves, each person should do the work to make the money to support themselves and live their lives.

9. Because each human should do the work to make the money to support themselves to live their lives, that is a component of the successful life, and is therefore a component of the good life, of the ethical life.

10. Because making money to support one’s life is a component of an ethical life, it follows that rational self-interest, as a desire to make enough money to live an ethical or moral life, is itself ethical and moral.

11. Money is made by doing work, thinking and reasoning and intelligence about how best to get work done, and making decisions for which one takes personal responsibility against the indecisiveness or outright stupidity that might prevent work from getting done. As such, the human mind, and the human ego, are the means of making money.

12. Capitalism is the economic system that best enables a person to make the money to support themselves to live their lives, by giving them the freedom to work, and the freedom to think, and the freedom to reap the rewards of their hard work and of their intellectual thought.

13. This is true because in capitalism the individual owns private property. Private property results from a person’s actions to do work and think thoughts, to create and trade and buy and sell economic value, which manifests itself as privately owned money or private property. Property results from actions, and actions result from choices, so private property is the means by which a person can reap the rewards or obtain the failures of their choices, their actions, and their free will.

14. Capitalism is also the only economic system that gives a person the freedom to make decisions as an individual, which decisions control that individual’s own life and actions, by granting individual freedom of choice and of action in the economic realm instead of government’s or society’s control over the individual.

15. Thus, in capitalism, a person can use their free will to make choices, have the freedom to act out those choices, and then take ownership of those choices as private property. Private property and economic profits or losses are the material physical manifestations of personal accountability and self-responsibility for one’s own actions. Capitalism represents the morality of getting what you deserve and of earning what you own. Therefore, if it is fair and just to get what you deserve, or to own what you earned, then capitalism is moral.

16. Capitalism enables an ethics where making good choices gets good results, for an individual, and be rewarded by economic profit, or making bad choices causes bad results, for which that individual, alone, will be held accountable by financial loss.

17. Therefore, capitalism aligns with the most ethical human mode of life.

18. Therefore, capitalism has moral integrity to the conditions of life under which it is possible for a person to live a life which has moral integrity to their human nature, to what they are. Capitalism operates in accordance with and pursuant to human nature, and to the nature of the ethical life.

19. Therefore, capitalism has moral integrity.

20. Therefore, capitalism is moral and ethical.

Conclusion:

21. Capitalism is the best economic system for humans because of human nature, and is therefore ethical for humans, and this was proved by reason and logic, which is based on the nature of objective reality. Indeed, capitalism, democracy, and freedom, as a political and economic system, can be seen as a reflection of the metaphysical fact that humans have free will and are therefore self-responsible for their actions and choices. A system that enables humans to be humans, and which provides for humans to live life as humans, is good, for humans, not merely in a practical sense, but good as ethics and morality and virtue. Capitalism, democracy, and freedom, is a politics and economics which reflects the ethics of human free will and is pursuant to and in accordance with human nature, and therefore accords with the principle that a thing is itself, and, therefore, that humans are humans, because it is only for humans, as humans, that the question exists of what economic system should we choose. This is good and ethical and virtuous, because, as moral agents with free will, we deserve to own the rewards, or reap the punishments, of our choices and actions, and that is justice and fairness, and capitalism is virtuous for being fair and just.

22. Capitalism is morally defensible and ethically justified.

Counterarguments:

23. This argument has been attacked in several areas: that individuals are not, in fact, personally individually responsible for everything that happens to them. But, to say this, reduces to the claim that the individual does not truly have free will. Objectivism says that each person has free will.

24. It has also been attacked by saying that groups, not individuals, make money, and that economic production is a social activity, not an individual activity, or is done by muscle and sweat and labor and brute force, not by refined thinking and intelligence and reason.

25. Brute force, without reason, could only accomplish what a caveman or a primitive civilization could accomplish; it could build pyramids by an army of slaves, but it could never land a rocket on the moon, or find ways to treat diseases. Science and technology come from reason and logic, and the role that these play in business, is an example of the extent to which reason and logic magnify the effort of brute strength, for purposes of making money. Analytically, a human has no other tools that his body, hands, and brain, with which to do work, and work gets done, so these must have been the tools which got the work done.

26. To say that economic production is social, not individual, proves nothing, because when action is done by a group, it is done by a group of individuals acting as a group, so, even if the group achieved something, each individual would have earned a share in proportion to what they contributed to the group effort. A person has free will, a person makes choices, so, to the extent that an economic actor is a moral actor or an ethical actor, that ethical and moral agent is the individual.

27. There is the argument that objective ethics does not exist, and ethics is inherently irrational and subjective, or that objective reality does not exist, and objective truth does not exist. This position collapses into an absurdity, because, if that were true, then anything goes, and no one could ever know which economic system was better or worse, or what was right or wrong, so ethics would not exist and economics would not exist, and the question of the need for a moral defense of capitalism would not exist.

Faith, Skepticism, Knowledge, Rationality

Definitions:

Faith: The absence of doubts and questions, or the condition in which doubts and questions are not allowed.

Skepticism: The condition in which doubts and questions and critical thinking are allowed, or the process by which a position is subjected to questions or doubts, but this is also the name of the belief that knowledge is impossible, as such.

Knowledge: a position or belief which is held with the belief that it cannot be wrong or that its truth is the one and only possibility.

Faith-based knowledge: knowledge that is held without doubt, without question, without testing, without evidence.

Rational knowledge: knowledge that is held, and which is asserted or claimed to be known, but which is, or can be, doubted, questioned, tested, while still maintaining its status as knowledge, or knowledge which exists in a condition where doubts and questions and critical thinking are allowed.

The tradition position holds that you must choose between faith-based knowledge or rational skepticism, but you cannot have rational knowledge. Now the question is: Is rational knowledge possible? If so, how, and under what conditions?

Consider this: Claim, or assert, that you know that X is true. Logic, or science, or math, or history, or whatever, shows that, if X is true, then experience Y will be observed. You can test or question or doubt X by looking for Y in your observations or experience.

Now, you test for Y or not Y, and run an experiment to see if Y is true, or you question or doubt Y and Y withstands the critical scrutiny and proves true, once, and you see that Y is true. Does that mean that you rationally know X?

Consider this: You test X and/or Y an infinite number of times, and X and/or Y is proven true, against doubt and question and test and experiment and experience, an infinite number of times.

Would this, then, be rational knowledge? You know that X is true because X and/or Y withstood doubt and question and critical inquiry and critical thinking, but, for N number of times which X and/or Y did so, X and/or Y might fail a test at the N+1 experiment or test or doubt or question. So you can never rationally know philosophical truth.

Yes. But the problem is: how can you possibly test X and/or Y an infinite number of times?

Consider this: If X is such that if X is true then Y will be observed, and if X is a metaphysical or philosophical principle that is universal and infinite in scope, then (and here is the important part): if X is true, then Y will prove true an infinite number of times, if doubted and questioned an infinite number of times. Y will prove true an infinite number of times, because X is true.

And, if X is true, then the application of logic and reason to thinking about X, will produce knowledge of X.

So it isn't that you rationally know X because X was proven true by an infinite number of doubts and questions being withstood with X's truth intact. Instead, you rationally know X because X is true, and X would prove true in an infinite number of questions and doubts, if such were to exist, because X is true.

But how does one gain rational knowledge that X is true, other than by the satisfaction of an infinite series of doubts of X and/or Y? By means of logic.

What matters for rational knowledge is not whether you know it, what matters is whether or not it is really true. If it is true, then you will come to know it, provided that you use reason and logic.

Contrast this position with the faith-skepticism dichotomy: the claim that knowledge must be based on faith, because reason always allows doubts, and knowledge is that which is known to always be true, so rational knowledge could only come by means of a process of an infinite series of doubts being satisfied, because, if you assert or claim that your knowledge is rational, either you or someone else is always, at any or every point in the future, entitled to question or doubt or test that position which you claim to know, and no position can satisfy every doubt and every question because there could be an infinite series of such leading into the future, so only faith, as the absence of all doubts and questions, or as a condition where you are not allowed to doubt or to question, could make knowledge possible, so you must choose either faith and knowledge, or reason and skepticism, but you can't choose reason and knowledge, you are not allowed to choose to believe that rational knowledge is possible in a practical way in reality for humans.

Objectivism rejects the faith-skepticism dichotomy. The belief that rational knowledge is possible is a core element of the philosophy of Objectivism.

The truth has nothing to fear from skepticism. Indeed, rationality is skeptical knowledge, in a sense. If someone suppresses or avoids being questioned, and seeks to censor doubts, that is the surest sign that they are hiding something, that they fear rational inquiry or critical thinking, that they want you to believe their assertions when what they say is false, and they know it is false, or they themselves don’t know but they fear it is false, in their hearts, so they attack the skeptic who questions and doubts to insulate their own doubts from irritating their guilty conscience, because your doubts become a symbol of their own doubts in their subconscious minds, and they hide from themselves. As Ayn Rand said, “to name the unnamed,” to openly state the doubt or the question or the need for a test, to openly ask why and to call the belief into question, is the surest antidote to this type of fear. When someone has no answers, they seek to avoid the questions, but if they have answers, then they do not fear, or need not fear, skepticism.

The Seven Rules of Dating in Emotional Capitalism

The two metaphors of emotional capitalism:

1. Forgiveness as moral bankruptcy: that to forgive someone is to forgive the moral debts that they owe to you, and to forgive yourself works the same way.

2. Trust and love before it has been earned or before you know that someone deserves it, in other words, faith, as a loan of emotional capital: that, to begin a relationship, you give someone a loan, without knowing whether they deserve it, without knowing whether they will ever pay it back, but in the hope that you will be rewarded for it long-term, and this loan is made of emotions, love, trust, hope, friendship, spending time with the other person, talking to them, etc.

Definitions:

Emotional capital: love, trust, respect, politeness, being nice and friendly and cheerful and loving

A loan: to give something to someone not knowing if or when you will ever be paid back for it, in the hopes that the loan might mature into something worth having, which is then repayment with interest.

Forgiveness: that, if you do something wrong, you owe a debt for having failed, to self or others, to whomever you wronged. Forgiveness is moral bankruptcy, to write off the debt, to wipe the debt off the books.

Rule 1: Give him a loan.

Rule 2: Ask him to give you a loan.

Rule 3: Forgive him.

Rule 4: Ask him to forgive you.

Rule 5: Forgive yourself.

Rule 6: Give yourself a loan (as self-confidence that you can do this).

Rule 7: Give the relationship itself a loan.

These rules make a lot more sense if you have read any of these essays of mine: “On Forgiveness,” “On Moral Psychology and Moral Philosophy,” “To Be Loved, Love,” or “The Math and Logic of Psychology.”

On Love and Romance

Romance as Sex plus Love (an Emotional Connection): 

Platonic Love as an Emotional Connection without Sex, 

Hookups and Friends with Benefits and Being with people who are not your partner while in an open relationship as Sex without Love. 

Level of lust and being horny as intensity of sexual desire, level of loneliness and desire for a partner and best friend and to fall in love as romantic desire, desire for romance as a function of sexual desire times romantic desire. 

If you have one, or the other, or none, but not both, then you do not have romance, instead you have either sex without love, or love without sex, or neither sex nor love. Something can be either disgusting or nice. Sex is disgusting, love is nice, romance is nice. It’s like body, soul, and soul in body. Body is disgusting, soul is nice, soul in body is nice. 

And in love, there is a great belief, a misconception, dating back to Plato himself, that you can either choose someone who makes you horny and for whom you feel sexual desire and are physically attracted to, or choose someone because you love them and have feelings for them or they make you laugh or they’re fun to hang out with, but, in fact, you can choose both. The first is sex, the second is love, the third is romance. Romance includes both sex and love, and this is how I have defined it, as a thing that has those two properties, romance equals sex plus love. You can choose sex, or you can choose love, or you can choose romance, but the odds don’t change any which way, because it is all just random chance if you meet someone who matches the criteria that you’re looking for. In modern times, people tend to look either for sex, or for love, but not both, and they assume that it is impossible to have both, to have true romance, but this is because they assume and accept the premise of Platonic love, that sex and love are opposed and in conflict, that dichotomy, of soul against body, whereas Objectivism says that soul and body should live in harmony, so sex and love can go together, as romance. 

Should you seek romance? You should seek either romance, sex, or love, based upon your own personal preferences and what you want and what would be best for you. If you find that perfect person for whom you feel both lust and love, and you like them and they like you, that’s perfect, but if, for example, you feel love for one person and lust for another, and you feel like you are being pulled in two different directions, that doesn’t prove that soul and body are in conflict, instead it merely proves that being human sometimes requires you to make tough choices, and to make a decision about whom you prefer, whom you would rather be with, to decide what you want in life. 

Then, on top of that, there is more to a relationship than merely being in love, or feeling lust and sexual desire, you have to “make the relationship work,” so to speak, and be compatible, and be able to see each other when you want, and enjoy spending time together, and have shared interests so that you have hobbies or events that you can do together to bond, or enjoy the same restaurants or clubs or bars to go on dates, and be compatible in emotions and psychology, and be the same or accepting or not caring about each other’s religious or philosophical or political beliefs, etc. 

But this is why, since so much has to go right, you probably never find a perfect person, you just find someone you love, and/or think is sexy, and you try to make it work, and forgive as much as you can, and then, if you can’t forgive any more, you walk away, and leave one imperfect person for the next imperfect person. If you’re looking for a soul mate, or the perfect match, on the theory that there is one special person for whom you would be perfect, the logistics of dating and marriage and romance indicate that this theory is not going to be true, you have to find a real person, with some flaws, and love them, you will not find a special snowflake who is the love of your life: the love of your life isn’t a quality that someone has, rather it is something that you create when you have a great relationship and fall in love with someone, but the other person is human, not an angel. 

However, there are things that people want, and people want what they want, so you can, and should, define a baseline level of what you’re looking for, and then reject everyone who doesn’t have what you want, and only look for people who have what you want. And I don’t believe that, when it comes to sex and love and romance, I don’t believe that what you want is something you decide, instead it is based on who you are and what you are, so, in a sense, yes, you are born that way, and you can’t change it, not because it couldn’t be different, but because you would not be the person whom you are if it was different, so it can’t be different because you are you, a thing is itself, “A is A.” 

Such things include, for example, being gay or straight or bi or pan, being into cis or trans or NBs or all, being a top or a bottom or verse, being sub or dom or both, what sort of things you are sexually attracted to like beauty or handsomeness or muscles or tattoos and piercings etc., or qualities of personality, like being nerdy and geeky or being smart or being normal or having a sense of humor or being sarcastic or being simple and sincere or being humble or being audacious and courageous or being religious or being philosophical or being on the Left or on the Right. 

In LGBTQ theory, right now, and recently, there is a big movement for defining sexuality as different from romance, so that a person could be asexual, or aromantic, but these are two different things, and a person could be, for example, bisexual but gay romantic, and want to have sex with men and women but only want to date men, or a person could be straight romantic but gay sexual, and want to date the opposite gender as them but only have sex with the same gender as they are. And those are merely a few examples of the general principle of the attempt to sever sex from love. But, the theory of romance as a combination of sex and love, contradicts this, that, if you are considering sex, and love, separately, you could define your sexual attractions differently than you love interests, but, if what you seek is romance, that will be what you are sexually attracted to plus what you are attracted to for love, and that will be one thing, which is a combination of the sets of both properties, because I have defined romance as sex plus love. 

Historically, it was assumed that romance was the description of a long-term sexual relationship, and that, if you were having sex with someone on a regular basis, the moral and ethical behavior was to love them and be romantic with them. It is only modern times which has sought to separate love from sex, such as with the Friends With Benefits (FWB) relationship type, of a long-term friendship that includes sex, or the Poly, Polyamorous, Open Relationship type, where you are in a long-term open romantic relationship with one person or one set of people (the Polycule) but you then also have sex with other random lovers outside of your primary partner or primary relationships, in order to increase sexual liberation and set people free to have sex without love, or, in reverse, to set people, if they want to, to be free to engage in what they call romantic love but without sexual desire and without lust, as Platonic love. The FWB and Poly, I believe, evolved as a way to have a relationship but also be sexually satisfied, because, in modern times, it was understood that a horny person might want more than one lover in order to stay fully sexually satisfied, which they could never get with romance from one person, but they also wanted the ethical and moral aspect of romance with one person, so Poly (and, to a lesser extent, FWB) evolved as modern evolutions of how to balance the desire for sex with the desire for love. 

But I assert my hypothesis, that, if you find true romance, if you find love with someone to whom you are deeply and intensely sexually attracted and who makes you horny, you could (for a period of time, at least) be sexually satisfied entirely by the one person you are dating, and so these are the set of conditions under which monogamous romance is possible. If you wanted romance, but you don’t care about sex, if you just want to marry your best friend and be married to your best friend and partner in life for 40 years and until such time as both of you are too old to have a libido or care about sex, for example, that, to me, is Platonic love, that is not romance. I have to admit that I think of Platonic love as friendship, not romance, although it an open question what the definition of friendship is, or what it means to be a best friend, and whether being a friend is a lesser included element of dating, such that romance includes friendship, or whether friendship exists in contrast to romance where friendship is love without sex and romance is love with sex. 

What is the difference between friendship without sex and Platonic love without sex? I do not necessarily see any difference, myself. But someone else might say: The friendship is just a friend, but the Platonic love includes romance without sex. But here, “romance” probably refers to a set of acts, like buying someone flowers or chocolates on Valentine’s Day, which, in practical reality, are designed to seduce someone into sex or marriage or into a romance that includes both sex and love. Or someone else might say: the friendship is based on hanging out and having fun and doing things together, but the romance includes a deeper emotional connection, or, perhaps, a willingness to make sacrifices for the other person, in return for them making sacrifices for you in the future, or the hope that they will do so. 

What is love? How do you define love? The meanings and definitions change throughout history, so you should make up your own mind about what to believe, and there are different things you can believe, but if you define sex as a physical connection and you define love as an emotional connection, then I define romance as sex plus love.

My Evolving Position on Abortion

Although abortion has been much in the news lately, I have decided to stop making arguments about it, and to not argue further about whether a fetus is a human life, or whether abortion is murder, or whether a woman has the right to have an abortion, because I have reached the conclusion that both the pro-abortion and anti-abortion movements are motivated 100% by psychological and emotional factors, and 0% by reason and logic, such that reason and logic and argument have absolute zero ability to change anyone's minds on this issue. The anti-abortion people feel the emotional biological impulse, hard-wired by evolution into our animal brains, which is called "the maternal instinct" or "the paternal instinct," to protect the young from threats and dangers, and they feel this towards the fetuses in other women's wombs. Logic and reason would not change such people's minds, because their minds were never decided by logic or reason to begin with.

Then, among men, there is the psychology of men's insecurity in masculinity and challenges to their manhood and feelings of not being manly enough, and of men's hatred and resentment of sex and hatred of women for being the objects of men's lust, for men who blame their lust on women, for which men compensate by attacking women and seeking to rule women and subjugate women to assert the superiority of the masculine over the feminine, which includes ruling over women's bodies and trampling women's rights. Forcing women to bear unwanted pregnancies against their will is a convenient and easy way for men to assert their control over women's bodies. And such men are so stupid that they do not understand that, when a man feels lust for a woman, that lust is an attribute of the man who feels it, not of the woman for whom it is felt, so the man is to blame for the man's own lust, and, if it is a sin, it is the man who sins, not the woman, and it is the man for whom punishment would be deserved. Of course, I have written elsewhere, when analyzed by logic and reason, sex is not a sin, but most (stupid) men have the feeling and the emotion and the sense that it is dirty and wrong and disgusting, so they feel that it is, and they blame women for it, instead of blaming themselves. The men want to make the women feel bad about having had sex, to blame women for the men's sin of having sex with the women, by forcing them to have their babies instead of letting them escape from feeling bad about it by having an abortion so that it would be as though the sex never happened, and the woman would then not feel bad (ashamed, guilty) about it and the unwanted consequence of being stuck with a child to raise that it caused, which the man wants to hang around the woman's neck as a symbol of her sinfulness and wickedness for sex. Nothing symbolizes sex (when sex is between a cis man and a cis woman) better than pregnancy itself, in psychological symbolism and imagery and meaning.

Then, on the other side, the pro-abortion people, either emotionally identify with women, or feel something emotionally right and just and virtuous about freedom for women, or else they are people who emotionally connect with trashy and dirty behavior, and they want women to engage in as much dirty trashy sex as possible, and get pregnant, without consequences, so they see being pro-abortion as a way to promote dirt and trash in the face of the cleanliness which they feel, at an emotional level, is their enemy. They emotionally connect their own moral failures, to the unwanted pregnancies of other women, and believe that neither one should be held accountable or face consequences, so, for them, being pro-abortion is about removing responsibility from people's lives. And some pro-abortion activists know, or feel, that, if this was a man's issue, men would certainly be allowed to have abortions, but men want women to be limited to or defined by their role as mother and wife, so it is an issue of equality, and ties into the social justice and equality narrative that has become the meaning of these people's lives, so they would feel that their own lives are meaningless and worthless if they don't support the pro-abortion position. So it isn't about abortion, it is about their own self-esteem as social justice warriors.

It is pointless to make any arguments using reason or logic or proof or deduction here, despite the fact that I have the ability to make such arguments, because there is no one there to listen, everyone's mind is made up on the basis of emotions and psychology, no one is going to just listen to a rational debate and choose a position based on neutral, unbiased, emotionless reason and logic in this area. There is the Libertarian argument that a woman owns her body, because she makes her body, she keeps her body alive by her own effort of living her life, and so she has the right to an abortion under private property rights, because she owns her own womb and can do with it as she will, but no one will care about that argument, because it is a logical argument. There is the Libertarian argument, called "Evictionism," that a woman having an abortion is not murder, even if a fetus is a human life with full human rights, because it is no different than a landlord evicting a tenant, when that tenant is certain to become homeless and die on the street, or a hospital removing life support from a patient in a coma, who is then certain to die, and the landlord or the hospital would have the absolute right to do this, because the landlord owns the apartment and the hospital owns the equipment, even if they had invited the tenant, or the patient, in to begin with, even if the landlord had initially invited the tenant to rent the apartment, or even if the hospital had initially voluntarily offered free life support to the patient, so the fact that a woman chose to have sex, and even if she intentionally chose to become pregnant, would not be grounds to justify denying her the right to an abortion, because it is her body and she has the right to evict the fetus from it and let the fetus live or die on its own without her help or interference. This was always the logic of the position that abortion should only be legal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, but not after, that, prior to that point, terminating the fetus in the womb is the moral equivalent of evicting the fetus out of the womb, but afterwards, it is not the moral equivalent, because the fetus could survive outside the womb and is therefore not life-dependent upon the woman.

But no one will care about such arguments, despite their strong logic. Abortion has to do with pregnancy, which has to do with sex, which has to do with gender, which has to do with men and women, and sex and gender and being a man or being a woman are areas that the human brain gets so emotional and psychological about, that no room for reason and logic exists. And people have debates, and make arguments, but those are merely for people looking for a pretext and justification for positions they have already chosen to believe in.

Bertrand Russell's Paradox, and Set Theory

In my book "Everything is Something," I set about to accomplish many things, one of which was to refute Bertrand Russell's Paradox. After finishing the book, and publishing it, I realize that I could have phrased my account of his paradox differently, and more accurately. In the book, I describe his paradox as "a set that is not a member of itself." In retrospect, it would have been more accurate for me to have described it as "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves." His logic actually makes far more sense in the second description, than in the first, which I had said. However, in "Everything is Something," I prove, and demonstrate using logic, that every set is a member of itself. A set is the set of all of its members, therefore the set is equal to the set of all of its members, therefore the set is equal to all of its members, and all of its members are within the set, therefore the set is within the set, therefore the set is a member of itself, and this is true of all sets, because it is true of a set as such, of the essential set, because of the essence of a set, and is deduced without reference to any specifics that might differentiate this set from any possible set, which is the methodology of essential logic. The fact that every set is a member of itself refutes both formulations of Bertrand Russell's Paradox, so my error was only in my statement of his paradox, there was no error in my statement of my proof of my refutation of his paradox. The only set which is not a member of itself is the set with no members, which is the null set, the empty set, but, because it has no members, the null set does not exist, it is equal to zero, because it contains zero members, it contains nothing. It can be thought about and conceptualized, but it does not, and can never, exist, in the sense of being a real thing, in reality.

More broadly, regarding set theory, which I discuss at length in "Everything is Something," I later realized this, also: Bertrand Russell (and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein) sought to derive math from set theory, and to prove math using set theory. But math is set theory, math and set theory are identical, so their effort, their quest, their work, was doomed to failure from the very beginning. For example, what is the difference between "a set of ten things," as such, and "the number ten," as such? What is the difference between "a set of one thing," "a thing," and "the number one"? In my opinion, there is no difference. So, the attempt to derive math from set theory, and to prove math using set theory, reduces to the attempt to derive math from math, and to prove math using math, which adds nothing substantive to math itself, as an academic discipline. Philosophy can say how we gain knowledge of math, and what role math plays in the world, and what math is useful for, but math is math, and philosophy does not, fundamentally, add anything to the statement "math is math," for one does math by doing math, not by analyzing math by means of philosophy, although philosophy can add to the understanding of math, to our wisdom with respect to math, so to speak, for example by saying whether numbers exist in the physical world or exist in a separate spiritual or intellectual world or do not really exist at all, which is within the province of philosophy.

And I argue that numbers do physically exist, and there is no need to refer to or rely upon another dimension or an intellectual or spiritual world where numbers exist, and it is also obviously not true to say that numbers do not exist or they are merely our way of speaking about things but they themselves are not real, because we can see that numbers are real, if we look out the window and see a flock of ten robins then we can see with our own eyes, and know beyond doubt, that the number ten is real, because a thing is a set of properties, and an essence is one property or set of properties isolated out of a thing or things and then analyzed using logic, and a number is the essence of a group of things as being a certain particular number or amount or quantity of things, so, if groups physically exist, if, for example, there is a group of ten squirrels living in my back yard, and they are real, then the number ten physically exists, because the group of ten squirrels is a thing that has a property of being the number ten, and a property of being a group of squirrels, and a property of being in my back yard, and the property of being alive today, and so on, for example, and "the number ten" simply uses essential logic to isolate the property of being ten, from a real physical group of ten things, or from many such groups, which is abstraction and induction, and then uses the number ten in math to prove things in math, which is deduction and logic. For another example, if there are three boxes on my shelf, those boxes are the number three, plus many other properties such as being boxes and being on my shelf, and the number three physically exists as those three boxes, because that real thing has the property of being three. And there is no difference between that number ten, as a group of ten things, and that number three, as a group of three things, on the one hand, and the numbers ten and three of abstract theoretical mathematics, in intellectual math, on the other hand.

Our knowledge of math does come from the physical world, and this is why math, and math used in science, can describe the physical world, and is useful for technology in physical reality. As I have also written elsewhere, I believe that math works in science, and math describes the physical world, because I do not believe that there is any real difference between the theoretical abstract space and time of math, on the one hand, and our actual real physical space-time, on the other hand, the only difference is that the first space-time is thought about in some mathematician's mind, and the second space-time is one which exists objectively, outside of our minds, and which we experience as the physical world, but the actual math is exactly the same for both. So, when mathematicians think of an intellectual or spiritual world where math is real, it is actually our own physical reality that they are thinking about. Science, and the scientific world, is essentially the manifestation of the abstract mathematics of space-time into the concrete experiences that you have as a person observing and experiencing the little slice of space-time in reality that your point of view is privileged to experience. Science is really just how all the math fits together to form reality, and to form our experience of reality.

Individual Identity is Chosen, Not Inherited

As Ayn Rand wrote, the question isn’t: Who will let me? The question is: Who will stop me? And how can anyone stop me? 

You Can Choose to Accept or Reject Any Racial, Cultural, Religious, or Social Identity that You are Born Into. 

I was born the son of a white Jewish mother and a brown Muslim father, so I was essentially given a choice, choose to be Jewish and white, or choose to be Muslim and a person of color. And I chose: neither. I chose to be an Objectivist and a Libertarian and LGBTQ, and to embrace those cultures, those works of literature, that music, instead of either of the two cultures I was born into. And perhaps it was easier for me, because, as someone who could have belonged to both, I fully belonged to neither, but I firmly believe that anyone can do this. People just blindly accept the culture they are born into, because their family is that and their community is that and everyone they know is that and they told that is what they are and they have no choice about it, and they accept, and obey, when, in reality, they had a choice, only they never knew that they had a choice, and they never figured that out on their own, so they never made a conscious choice, they just accepted what everyone had handed them to begin with. As Rush sang, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” 

And then the counterargument against me is, a white person can choose to embrace Black culture, but a Black person is not allowed to embrace white culture, because the white racists won’t let them, they will decline to recognize them as one of their own. But culture is more than just being hired for a job or being welcomed by your neighbors on one street. Other people do not control what books you read, what music you listen to, what religion or church or temple or services you attend, what plays you see, what TV shows and movies you watch, what type of clothes you wear, what type of social events you attend. Those things are freely chosen. But they define your culture, and your identity, often in ways that denote social, economic, religious and racial identity. 

All of those things are chosen. And the beliefs, and values, and culture, from those things, then, is chosen. And other people can’t control that. That sort of control would require total 100% government state censorship, and, yes, some nations have that, but we in the USA do not yet have that, we have freedom, and, because you have freedom, which you inherited from the Founders through the American Revolution, you have the freedom to choose. You can use that freedom, or decline that freedom, but the freedom still exists, regardless of what you do and whether you choose to believe that you are free or not. 

Throughout history, there were people from foreign nations, who came to America, because they felt they really belonged in America, and they were really Americans, not members of those foreign cultures, and, likewise, there have been people who did not want to be Americans, and who left. As for national culture, so, too, for ethnic culture, religious culture, social culture: you can stay, or leave, and anyone can, if they find a way to get out, or to get in. A person is born with a set of physical traits and attributes, like DNA, but most of the attributes that form the set of attributes which we call identity, are not inherited attributes, instead, they are the meanings that people assign to those attributes. 

For example, being brown-skinned is, in itself, meaningless, it only means something because of the meanings that have accumulated over centuries of history, which meaning everyone assigns to that inherited attribute, so people just assume that the meaning is inherited, but no, it isn't, and that physical attribute could have had any meaning that people had chosen to assign to it. What I inherited, being the son of a white parent and a brown parent, can have many meanings assigned to it: mongrel, Mulatto, mixed race, biracial, and a person could assign good or bad or neutral as a value to it. 

People do not choose their inherited attributes, but they do choose the meaning that they assign to those attributes, and they choose whether they accept, or reject and decline, the meaning that other people have assigned to their set of inherited attributes. It is well established that being a man or a woman is a meaning that is assigned to bodies, it is not, in itself, inherited or defined at birth, although the physical genitals that you are born owning are assigned at birth and are inherited. I argue that this is true, too, of racial identity, and cultural identity, and of any identity. And then some people will call you a traitor if you try to leave your culture because you choose a different one, but it is your privilege, as someone who has freedom, to be free to choose.

On Empirical Logic

Here is a point that I have tried to get at in my previous essays, but I don't think I phrased it in quite the right way, so I attempt to here: Data is counterintuitive. This is the reason why empirical logic is preferrable to spiritual intuition. Oftentimes, a surprisingly high number of times, in fact, you will make an assumption, and hold a belief, that you know is right, and you hold this belief for days, for months, for years, or maybe even for decades, but then, when you actually look at the research, and see the data, and see what the science says, you find out that you were wrong, and the data said something completely other than what you and your intuitions had assumed, even though your assumption seems like it was likely to be right, and what the data says is counterintuitive and unexpected, maybe even strange and odd and unlikely. And it can be embarrassing, to be honest, that you were convinced you were right, and then someone else, or maybe even your own research, points to the data, and proves you were wrong. But, if you believe that data comes from the external world, and that your intuition comes from your own internal mind, and if you believe that the external world is objective reality, then, if your data and your intuition conflict, trust the data, do not trust your intuition, and throw your assumptions out the window and embrace the data. And one should never hide from the shame or embarrassment of having made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, by clinging to them and refusing to abandon them in the face of the data; instead, be intellectually honest, admit you were wrong, and move forward on the basis of what the data shows. There's nothing wrong with making an assumption, but there is something wrong with refusing to abandon it in the face of data that contradicts it. However, I say this only with this one caveat, that raw data says nothing, it only says something to you after you use your logic and reason and your reasoning mind, independently, to analyze the data.

So, to sum, in a pithy motto: You are what the data says you are, and you should do what the data says you should do. (There is also a capitalist version of this motto: You are what the market says you are, and you should do what the market says you should do.) Also, as I have written before: True knowledge comes only from experience.

Also note that in recent politics there have been efforts to politicize science, and the purpose of this short essay was not to have anything to do with that. This short essay is not intended to be political at all, it deals only with epistemology, logic, and the philosophy of science, in a neutral and unbiased way, which is how all data-driven science should be.

An Open Letter to the Faculty of the Philosophy Departments of Ivy League Schools, Regarding the Teaching of Objectivism in College Classrooms

Russell Hasan has published the following open letter to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, UPenn, Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth philosophy departments:

Philosophy departments should achieve diversity and inclusion in philosophy, with more women and minorities in philosophy, so that the list of famous philosophers is not merely a list of old white men. Please let me put forward a suggestion for how to help: begin to teach the philosophy of Objectivism in the classroom. Assign “Atlas Shrugged” in your introductory philosophy classes, and offer seminars devoted to Objectivism. Ayn Rand was a woman, and an immigrant from Russia to the United States. I myself, Russell Hasan, am a contemporary Objectivist philosopher. I am openly LGBTQ and of mixed race.

What prevents you from doing this?

Mischaracterizations of Objectivism:

(1) Objectivism is an ideology, not a philosophy.

When you consider this statement, it does not make any sense, and is intended to insult Objectivism, not to convey truth. In academics, an ideology is something less that a political philosophy, which asserts that a certain economic system is superior. Objectivism does not fit the definition of an ideology; however, the definition of “ideology” itself is highly dubious, because every political ideology either is, or implies, a political philosophy. Socialism, for example, is an economic system and a political ideology and a political philosophy formed by the ideas of the various socialist political philosophers. Its ideological aspect does not prevent professors from taking it seriously.

Objectivism does not merely assert that capitalism is superior to socialism as an economic system, as an ideology would. Instead, Objectivism explains why capitalism is superior to socialism, using arguments that are distinctly philosophical, and grounded in logic, ethics, and political philosophy. Objectivism is a complete philosophy, which holds positions in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, political philosophy, economics, and aesthetics.

(2) Objectivism does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Who decides what is, or is not, a “real” philosophy? How is that decision made? On the basis of what criteria? Is Confucianism or Daoism or Stoicism a “real” philosophy? Is Existentialism a “real” philosophy? What does “real” mean in this context? Objectivism contains a serious set of ideas on subjects such as epistemology, ethics, logic, and political philosophy. You might not agree with those ideas, but your disagreement does not prove that those ideas are not legitimate or that they should be banished from intellectual debate.

(3) Objectivism is a form of elitism.

Objectivism does not believe that great human beings form an elite who should rule. Instead, it believes that every human being can, and should, achieve greatness, or seek and strive to do so.

(4) Objectivism is a form of Far-Right Conservatism.

Objectivism is an atheistic philosophy which asserts that reason is superior to faith. It does not collapse into or imply the Christian Far Right.

(5) Objectivism is a form of Neo-Modernism, not relevant in the Contemporary Era.

Objectivism believes in freedom, reason, logic, rationality, virtue, knowledge, science, industrial capitalism, and the existence of the external physical world. It holds these beliefs in a simple and sincere way. It does seem like it would have belonged more in the 1700s or 1800s, not in the Contemporary Era. But many details of Objectivism are unique and deserve study.

(6) Objectivism is not important to the history of philosophy.

Since its publication in 1957, “Atlas Shrugged” has had more influence in philosophy, as measured by number of readers, than, for example, Plato and Aristotle, or the German Idealists. My own books related to Objectivism have sold, or been downloaded for free, thousands of times. “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” have both sold millions of copies and been read millions of times, and had a huge influence on American culture and politics, which make them important to the history of contemporary philosophy.

When you exclude Objectivism from the academic debate, you exclude one of the greatest woman philosophers of the contemporary era ever, Ayn Rand, and you also exclude me, Russell Hasan, a philosopher who is openly LGBTQ and of mixed race, and I also consider myself to be one of the best philosophers currently doing philosophy. Objectivism disagrees with most of the basic ideas taken for granted in academic philosophy, and we do things differently than you. I can understand that you don’t want to have to address a philosophy that calls your basic unquestioned beliefs into question and which asserts that most of what you believe is wrong. But that is not a rational grounds, in itself, to exclude us, if we make arguments that can be rationally understood and which make valid points, and if you have a sincere desire for a lively intellectual debate in academic philosophy.

I request that you add Objectivism to your academic curriculums immediately. Although I, Russell Hasan, am a nobody, and you are the great and powerful Ivy League, I write this letter, not in arrogance, but out of a humble desire to help you find new ways to meet your diversity and inclusion goals.

The Contradiction of Subjectivism: Russell Hasan's Paradox

Contemporary academic psychologists and neurobiologists, as well as contemporary academic philosophers, if they want to sound trendy and give the impression and appearance of being sophisticated, like to talk about how the human brain creates experience, and the various biases that manifest in this creation. 

But we, as Objectivists, must ask the real questions: The human brain creates experience... from what? From magic? From fairy dust? From thin air? If the human brain creates experience from a source in the external objective world, but what we ourselves experience is merely created by our brains, then how could we, as thinkers, ever gain knowledge of the external world, since we would have no direct access to it? But, if experience is not created from a source in the external world, then from what source is it created? Where does your brain exist, if not in the external world, and, if you have knowledge of your brain itself being in the external world, then from where did this knowledge come, if not from the external world? 

Their belief collapses into a contradiction, and in a hurry, too, if anybody actually bothers to examine it in a logical way. If experience is real, then something is real, so where could any real experience come from, if not from reality? It's like the reverse of Descartes' classic motto "I think, therefore I am": I experience the external physical world; therefore, the external physical world must be the thing that I am experiencing. 

For example, if I brush my teeth, then I feel my teeth, and I hold the toothbrush, and I feel the toothbrush brushing my teeth; each of these things exists physically outside of my physical brain, therefore it adds nothing beneficial to our philosophical analysis to say that my brain created my experience of my teeth and the toothbrush and brushing my teeth. Yes, I can only taste the tastes of the toothpaste that my tongue has the taste buds with which to sense and that my brain has the neurons with which to understand, but that only means that my point of view limits the scope of what I can experience, it does not mean that the things which I actually can experience are subjective. 

Another example of this: the human eye cannot see ultraviolet light, but that does not prove that the colors we can see, red, green, blue, etc., are subjective. The ocean is blue, and apples are red (or green, and their insides are yellow or white), and if the blue ocean exists, then the fact that it is blue is an objective fact, and this is what we see when we look at the ocean and see a blue ocean. The blueness of the ocean, and the experience of that color blueness, is the ocean itself, is the ocean as a thing in itself, and that perceived thing is what we experience when we see the blue ocean. 

The objectivity of existence does not say that you perceive everything, instead it only says that what you perceive exists objectively, so it is perfectly plausible, and compatible with this account, that what you have the actual ability to perceive is limited to your point of view. For example, if you are facing forward, then you can only see what is in front of you, however, if you see a rose garden in front of you, then that rose garden objectively exists, despite the fact that your point of view limits you to see only this rose garden, and not, for example, the brick wall behind you. 

Either reality is objective, or else it is subjective. There is no middle ground. As I have written elsewhere, some things, like our artistic preferences, or our sexual orientations and romantic desires, are entirely subjective. But they are subjective only in the sense of moral objectivism or moral subjectivism, not in the sense of epistemic subjectivism or epistemic objectivism: that one person cannot pass valid judgment upon another person's desires or tastes, and desires and tastes can be neither right nor wrong. To the extent that a preference or a desire does in fact exist in reality, it, too, exists objectively. However, experience itself, and the objects of our sensory experience, are objective. Existence exists objectively. 

Inevitably, because these idiots say that the human brain creates experience, which would require the contradiction that we have no direct access to the external world and yet we know that the human brain is creating our experiences from content in the external world, their answer is that we have direct access to knowledge of the external world, not from our experience, but by means of our intuition, or instinct, or faith, of phenomenological revelation. So, their neuropsychological false premises always cause them to collapse into philosophy, which then causes their philosophy to collapse into religion and mysticism, of the worst variety. With my theory of epistemology, no need for this sort of stupidity exists. The experience of driving a car, for example, is itself merely the act of that person driving a car, in objective reality, which one experiences, the experience of a thing is what the objective real thing looks like to that person, and so consciousness is merely the name for objective reality as experienced from the point of view of the person who is aware of it. 

Likewise, the perception of something, for example the taste of an apple, is the perceived thing itself, is really the thing in itself as experienced by a person, for example the taste of an apple is the apple itself as perceived by the tongue, and the experience of an apple is the apple, and the consciousness that experiences it is the person who tastes it. The perception of an apple is not a perception, it is an apple. And, in a sort of similar way, words in a language are merely symbols or signs or representations that show a thing to the mind’s eye, such that dog is not a word, dog is a four-legged canine animal, which can be shown to a listener or reader by speaking or writing the word “dog.” 

Essential logic says that a thing is a set of properties, and, if you can define the property or properties that are the essence of a thing as that type of thing, and then prove what other properties a thing will have because it has those essential properties, then those things, as the consequence of the essence, must necessarily and universally be true for all things of that type, so I prove truths that are necessarily and universal, but at the same time I hold that physical reality consists only of specific concrete real objects, because essences are properties of real physical things as analyzed by essential logic, and the surface properties of a thing as a set of properties can be known directly by means of sensory perception, so the essences are not themselves real abstract beings in some other spiritual or intellectual realm known by means of faith or revelation or intuition. Instead, knowledge of essences and consequences as necessary and universal truth in the physical world comes from logic and reason and perception and awareness. 

You can call my analysis above by the name of "the contradiction of subjectivism," or Russell Hasan's Paradox, that, if our experience of reality is subjective, then we cannot directly know objective reality by means of perception and sensory experience, but then we could not know what our supposedly subjective experiences are actually of, such that if we experience an external physical world, if we see the ocean, taste an apple, or know what brushing our teeth is like, this proves that the world that we experience exists objectively, because we have knowledge of it from our experience. 

If you hold true to the belief that your brain creates your experience, then you either collapse into a contradiction, that your brain is creating the experience of things outside of your brain, or abandon your subjectivism and embrace objectivism, or else you must concede that you actually know absolutely nothing, and you have no idea what the fuck you are really experiencing when you have an experience, or else you must fall back on the position that intuition or instinct or revelation is your source of knowledge for what you experience and what those things really are. 

Some philosophers seek to solve my paradox by means of what they call "inter-subjectivity," that your brain creates your experience, but, because everyone else's brains are also creating their experience, and we all experience the same world that we share which we are all in, our shared subjectivity is what creates objectivity. But this is like saying that a shared dream or a shared hallucination is real, just because multiple people experience the same dream or the same hallucination. And my paradox refutes this, too, in this way: how do you know that the other people in your shared world are real? You either know that other people exist, on the basis of your sensory perceptions of them, your experiences of them, and a set of valid logical inferences that you draw from that experience: you see someone, hear them talk, see them smile, engage them in a conversation, observe their behavior, so you infer that this other person is someone like you, is a real person. If not, then the other people in the subjective experience that you brain creates, would be just as subjective, and unreal, as everything else in your experience, so either you would have no direct knowledge that other people exist, and so you cannot derive your objectivity from their shared subjectivity, or your knowledge that other people are real would come from intuition or instinct or revelation--and what is both good and bad about intuition, is that no one knows how it works, and that is the whole point, so you would require blind trust and faith in intuition, and abandon reason and rationality, or you would still know nothing, and be limited to solipsism, that the world you experience is just in your own mind. Inter-subjectivity as a solution to my paradox merely collapses, again, into my paradox. 

The one and only solution to my paradox is strict philosophical epistemological Objectivism. If your brain creates your experience, then how could you ever have any direct access to the external world, ever, at all, so how could you ever know that an external world exists, other than by a process of transcending your subjective experience to a spiritually known objectivity by means of intuition, which is pure mysticism and faith and nonsense and religious bullshit, and requires completely abandoning reason and rationality and logic? And even that is not rational knowledge of objective reality, it is merely faith in intuition of objective reality. 

Three other attempts to solve or refute my paradox: First - The human brain creates experience, but you can tell the difference between the parts of your experience that are subjective and the parts which are objective. You can tell the difference: how? Why? On what basis? How could you even have a concept of objectivity to begin with, as a starting point for this analysis, if all of your experiences were created by your brain, and none of your experiences were the direct experience of objective existence? 

Second - the human senses are subjective, but, for example, camera video footage is objective, and scientific test instruments' measurements are objective, so you can use such things as a measure or basis of knowing objective reality. Yes, that's great, except that, from a person's own subjective point of view, if they watch video, that video is within their experience, therefore they would think their brain had created the experience of the video footage, or, if you read the results of scientific tests using scientific instruments, you read those results with your eyes, the test results are things you see, so the experience of reading the test results would be subjective, so the test results themselves, too, would be entirely subjective. 

Third – there is the argument that how the human brain processes information is very important to our experiences, and this has been proven by science, in research study after research study. Yes, but that does not solve my paradox, because “how the human brain processes information” is the means by which an experience is obtained, it is not the content of the experience itself. How the brain works says how we get experiences; it does not say what an experience is. There is no reason to assume that the means of experience somehow constitute the contents of the experience itself, if the experience is of something in the external world that exists objectively, unless that position was reasoned and logically deduced from some basis in reality, and I do not accept that there is a proof of such a position anywhere in objective existence. 

Your brain, and how your brain processes information, as your cognitive point of view, might limit what you have the ability to experience, much as your eye’s point of view limits what you have the ability to see, but this does not prove that the actual experiences or perceived things themselves are subjective. The scope of what you can experience, which is defined by your means of experience, is not identical to an actual real experience, which is defined by the external world in objective reality. An actual real experience is identical to the actual real thing that it is the experience of, in other words, an experience is identical to the thing which is experienced. If you see something in the external world, then something in the external world is what you see. And the proof of this is that what you see is physically located outside your own skull and brain, in space and time, if you see a table over there, in the corner of a room, then you see a table in the external world. The external world is the world outside your mind, outside your brain, which exists objectively, and the meaning of “objectively” is that it exists independently of, and separately from, the means of perception, means of awareness, means of consciousness and means of experience, and of the acts of perception and awareness. 

If the means of experience does not bias the contents of experience (and there is no proof that it does), then we can directly experience the external world, and this is true even if we experience reality by means of our brains. I could go further and assert that reality, in other words existence, merely refers to space and time which exists objectively. If you analyze these arguments using strict, coherent, rational logic, they collapse into contradictions. Your knowledge of objectivity would itself have been within, and have come from, a purely subjective experience or a set of purely subjective experiences, unless you began by directly perceiving things that objectively exist in reality, as your experience. And the philosophy which says that this is true, is called Objectivism. 

For citations as to who inspired this analysis, I must cite, in general, to Ayn Rand, and also to Mortimer Adler, who himself cited to Thomas of Aquinas, who himself cited to Aristotle.

Some Fun Facts About Me, Author Russell Hasan

Favorite Color: Yellow

Favorite Food: Sushi

Favorite Movies: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and The Matrix

Favorite Novels: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Catch-22

Favorite Album: The Castlevania Symphony of the Night soundtrack

Favorite Composer: Tchaikovsky

Favorite Band: Radiohead

Favorite Video Game: Super Mario World

Favorite Computer Game: League of Legends

Favorite Beer: I don't drink!

Favorite way to smoke 420: I don't smoke!

Favorite Exercise: Weightlifting

Favorite Season: Summer

Favorite Drink: Coffee (black, with Splenda)

Philosophical Aphorisms - By Me (Russell Hasan)

(1) The Logical Positivists held that everything which cannot be verified by science has no meaning. My position is precisely the reverse: that everything which has a meaning can be verified by science.

(2) Nietzsche once said: "Every philosopher must be forgiven for his first followers." I have a similar motto: every writer must be forgiven for their first book.

(3) Nietzsche said, or meant, in gist, something similar to this: "We hold the greatness of geniuses a safe distance above ourselves for the purpose of considering ourselves unable to reach it." Similarly, people who choose to be stupid look up to smart people in order to relieve themselves from the burden of having to think.

(4) What is a Libertarian?

A Libertarian is someone who doesn't obey the rules.

But then how do they know what to do, if they don't follow rules?

You would have to think for yourself.

Precisely.

(5) The history of philosophy, summarized in one paragraph: Pre-Kant, there were the empiricists, who had sensations but not reason, and the rationalists, who had reason and the analysis of concepts, but not sensations. The empiricists were like Pavlov's dogs, merely animals reacting to sensations like a smell or a noise, or to a mental image, without thought; the rationalists were like blind men, having a mind that could think but lacking eyes that can see. Kant "combined" the two, by saying that reason and the analysis of concepts imposes truth onto sensations, and he called this scientific. And the popular narrative of the history of philosophy calls Kant a hero, for having done that. I might be viewed as having said the opposite: that reason acts upon sensations, but it is the sensations which impose truth upon reason, and it is the sensations which impose truth upon the analysis of concepts, and that this is what science is.

But that is a shallow, two-dimensional view of my work. My philosophy runs deeper. There is no sharp distinction between sensations, on the one hand, and reason and the analysis of concepts, on the other hand, the former is object, the latter, subject, you could not have a sentence without the form of "Subject verb object." The subject does something to the object, or else nothing would happen, but the subject is subject, and the object is object. What the subject actually does to the object is summed up by this pithy quote: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

(6) If someone from another country, a long distance away, in a land where they grow mangos but not apples, and he has never seen an apple before, if he asked you, "what does an apple look like?" How would you answer? The only true answer is that an apple looks like an apple. A thing is what it is. And a thing's appearance is what it looks like. If you have seen an apple, then an apple, itself, is something that you have seen. The apple's appearance, what the apple looks like, is equal to the visual properties of the apple itself, of the apple in itself, the thing as such, the thing in itself. So, if something looks like an apple, then it has an apple's appearance.

If something looks good, then you know that it is good-looking, because these are one and the same thing, and if something looks ugly, then you know it is ugly looking, because that is what it looks like, and good-looking and ugly are properties of visual aspects of things, and so those can be directly perceived. If you see something, then you know what it looks like, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you know what it is, in the sense that you don't necessarily know what is underneath its appearance, you don't know what structure is there, what physics of body and mass, what chemical composition, or what actions the thing can do, what its purpose is, and so on. Any one of those things could surprise you, if you assume, absent proof, that the thing is exactly what it looks like it is.

But to see a thing, and to then have knowledge of what it looks like, is incorrigible, and the only way to truly know what a thing looks like, is to see it. Sensations are simple, what Ayn Rand called "the irreducible primary," they do not break down as visual appearances into smaller components, although the visual things can be described using abstractions, like "blue" or "cloudy" to describe how the sky looks, etc.

But things themselves as such are not simple or irreducible, it is only the directly perceivable properties of things, which is what an appearance is, that are of this sort. And, of course, you could draw a picture of an apple, to try to show the foreigner what an apple looks like, but that is merely an abstraction, and sensations are always fully concrete, so it is not the same, seeing a drawing of an apple is not the same experience as seeing a real apple (although it is the same as seeing a drawing of an apple), because of what sensations are. This is why to experience something is to have an experience, which is a unique, simple, irreducible thing. There are some philosophers who say, "you cannot say what experience is." But you can. Experience is experience. That says everything that there is to be said. And, no, that isn't a tautology, because there are plenty of philosophers of logic who would disagree with me. You can say what it is, in a statement that is true, but that isn't the same as experiencing it.

However, experiences can be analyzed, using logic and reason, because they are things, like, for example, asking why an apple looks the way that it does, for what purpose, and how this shape helps the apple seeds become trees, and such. The experience of seeing a hammer, for example, is the perceivable and sensory aspect and attributes of the hammer itself: the hammer is the sensation, plus the substance, such as, in this example, the logic of why this shape and this material can hammer nails, and so on, which reason and logic can analyze. The hammer as a perceived thing is-plus the set of sensations; you see the sensations, but it is also true that you see the hammer, that you see the thing itself, because the thing itself is the sensations plus other properties. A thing is a set of properties, and an experience is a set of sensations which are properties of a set of perceived things. The things, as such, exist in objective reality, so the things that you perceive do in fact exist objectively, outside of your own subjective mind; experience is not in itself subjective, although your own mind and point of view and angle from which you see experience is.

Sensations can give us a path to knowledge of the depth behind the surface appearance. Such things can be real, or illusions, but reason and logic can tell the difference, much as a scientist might look to empirical data to see if his research is on the right track or has hit a dead end. In general, as I have written elsewhere, if the sensations were what a theory would expect, they serve to confirm it, to the extent that those sensations are a statistically significant sample set of the entire thing, but if the sensations were not what a theory would expect them to be, they refute the hypothesis.

A caveman in ancient times could see the stars at night, and he knew what stars look like just the same as we do, but we know that they are stars, which the ancient cavemen did not know, because we have science and reason built upon generations of research and scholarship, and he had only the knowledge that came from immediate experience of the sensations of stars. The difference between what he knew and what we know is the difference between empirical knowledge and rational knowledge.

(7) Some philosophers would say "a dollar bill on Mars isn't a dollar bill, it is just a piece of paper." But, no, it is still a dollar bill--because the dollar bill always was just the piece of paper. There are some who have said that a hammer isn't really a hammer objectively, it is only a hammer for human beings, because that identity, being a hammer, exists only relative to our human purpose. No. It is a hammer--that is a fact in objective reality--it is useful precisely because, in reality, it has a handle of wood, and a head of metal, with this hardness, in thus-and-such a shape, that makes it useful for hammering--the fact that humans can use it to hammer nails into wood is a fact in reality, which is true because of what the hammer is--because it is a hammer---it is not a merely a subjective wish or feeling. What humans find useful, is a fact in objective reality--whether we succeed or fail, whether we live or die, exists objectively. Also, if a human actually used a hammer to hammer nails, the fact that they did so would be objectively true, and would be fully objective.

(8) Mark Twain once said "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." He also said "Do the right thing. This will please some people and astonish the rest." I would combine the two: "Do the right thing. Everything else is already being done."

(9) If people are not allowed to be proud of their virtues, then they will be proud of their sins.

(10) What is Heaven for one man is Hell for another.