(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.
