"Hierarchy" by Leonard Peikoff

Officially. Good morning. Our topic this morning, the broadest topic, is thought as integration. We want to get some idea what integration is. It's very easy to state in broad general terms, which I will begin with, but then primarily we're going to be giving examples to try to stretch your concept of integration, to see how many things are subsumed under it. And above all, we. We're going to focus on one specific type of integration, which is hierarchical reduction, Tracing a topic or concept back through the intermediate chains to the perceptual data from which it begins, which is a form of integration. Last time we were concerned with false integrations that you'd already made that you had to blast. Now we're looking at positively what is integration and what should you be trying to do now? In the broad sense, I forgot my exact definition in my book, which was too big to bring in the suitcase, but most of you probably have it here. Integration was the process of uniting parts or elements or components into an inseparable whole. That was approximately the words that I used. And the key idea there was putting the parts together into an inseparable whole. I called it inseparable, even though with great work you can separate, you can tear an integration apart, as we saw last time. But I call it inseparable because I wanted distinguish it from just going up in an airplane looking at 500 tables as one perspective and then coming down again. Now you saw a whole bunch as one blur, but that was not integration, because the moment you stop looking at it in your mind, they assumed just the category of separate tables. Whereas when you take percepts of tables and integrate them into the concept table, every time you say or think table, each table that you know about, and potentially any table you come across, is inseparably connected and automatically fed to you, potentially at least by that integration. So integration is not simply juxtaposition. It does not mean bringing two things side by side momentarily. It means actually making a new whole out of a variety of parts. Now, let's just review, to begin with, some of the more obvious ways in which integration is essential to human cognition. What is the earliest stage of integration that we have to perform before we can get started? Now, taking my book and the introduction to objectivist epistemology for granted here, what is the first form of integration which is performed by our brain automatically and enables us to get to the perceptual? I have to watch that perceptual level. Sensations. Yes, the integration of sensations into percepts, which is covered in the writings that are available to you and thereby the ability to perceive entities and not merely floating sensations. And there you put together, you actually unite the touch, the visual appearance from various perspectives, the sound, the texture, etc. Into table, desk, person, etc. And that is one thing inseparably united, so that you cannot now perceive the person as simply a floating collection of sensations, the way you did as a child. And what is the next obvious level of integration when starting with percepts? What do you do with percepts? You integrate all the percepts of tables or all the percepts of people into. Into the concept of man or table, whatever it happens to be. And here again, the essence of the cognitive process is to take, in this case, an unlimited number of instances, past, present and future, have one mental unit stand for them. You put them all together into the concept, and that becomes, as I indicated earlier, an inseparable totality which is occupied in your mind by one unit. And this proceeds obviously on level after level. We take early concepts, table, chair, bookcase, bed, etc. And then we do wat with them to get from furniture, we integrate them. We take those four which were themselves countless units, each of those units being an entity which was itself countless units of sensation, and we put the whole business together into the term furniture, and we keep on integrating integrations. Now, why do we have to do this? Why can't we just let the chips come in as they may, one after the other after the other, the sensations, the perceptual data, and so on, and give up this process of integration? What, in one or two words, is the answer? The crow epistemology, the need for unit economy, the need to compress the content of our consciousness into the smallest number of units possible and thereby be able to hold and deal with the largest amount of data possible, and ultimately the universe as a whole. Now, it is not simply in regard to these obvious things that integration applies. I think all of this that I've said so far is obvious to you. I hope it's obvious to you. Integration is everywhere you look, on every level and form of cognition. Now take, for example, out of science. In what way would Newton's law, Newton's laws be integrations? Let's take the law every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force directly proportional to the square of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance, or something like that. In what way is that an integration? Now, there's no use telling me, because it applies to every particle. Obviously, if it's A statement about every particle. It is. So in that sense, it's an integration. But that is not the kind of integration that Newton had to perform to reach it. He didn't look at a particle and see that it relates to another with this force and then another particle and another particle and generalize. What did he have to do to reach that type of conclusion? I don't want a whole song and dance, but just an indication of previous conclusions and theories. It's previous conclusions and theories and also of gross observations that he was able to add in Galileo's theories and Tycho Bray and Kepler. They all had more primitive theories and he put them together along with things like the behavior of the tides and other observations. And of course, the famous one was when he had all of that and he was just about ready to get what it all added up to, down came the apple. And that was the final integration. He could now see gravity in that form connected with everything else. And he got the idea of the universal law. Now, this is the kind of thing that would be impossible without integration and impossible therefore to most people and most scientists today because they simply make statistical charts of the rate at which apples fall. And one group specializes in apples and another specializes in tides, and they have no connection between the two. And another does the history of Kepler. So it's all completely disintegrated. But the real science consists of this ability to look everywhere at the work of your predecessors, at their conclusions and observations from all different fields and put it together. You know what the Greek phrase for what we call integration was? Do you know there's a famous Greek phrase the Plato and Aristotle and Socrates were always seeking. They said the world is many things and they were always seeking the. The one in the many. And that's what we're still after in forming concepts. We want to make one out of many. And the same is true, informing scientific laws. I have to say, as a personal observation, the thing I was most enchanted by when I met Ms. Rand for the first time was not the content of any theory so much, although that certainly blew me away. But the integration she was able to make. Well, I would hear her talk about economics and then throw in a side remark on how the same thing applies to sex. I'd be compelled, completely flabbergasted. You know, sex and economics were just two different divisions of a university or of a life. How could. And yet she could say the same metaphysical theory that leads to socialism leads to Platonic love and so on. And I would. I got it. And I was absolutely enchanted that anybody could make connections like that. And of course her great fame as a philosopher will lie in her ability to connect everything to everything, so that ultimately, if you say existence exists, she can see capitalism and, and private roads connected to that. Now that's what I call integration, and that's what a real philosophy should be. Now let us take the processes of deduction and induction just as further examples. Those are our two formal reasoning processes and illustrate in what way they are examples of integration. Take the classic Socrates syllogism. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is more. In what way is that process of deduction? In what way is that an example or a type of integration? Integration means putting together, putting together into a unity. What things am I putting together there? I have a general principle. All men are mortal. Does that say anything about Socrates? Well, not explicitly. It just says if something is a man, then it's mortal. And I add to that what one observation. Well, Socrates is a man. Now if I put those two together, unite them, what conclusion then is inevitable? Socrates is mortal. So in a case like that, you're uniting a particular observation with a general principle. That form of integration is called deduction. Now it's not too important now whether you grab a grasp that it's deduction or not, but what you have to grasp is that what you're doing is putting things together. If you simply stared at Socrates as a man and you just looked at that, you wouldn't be integrating it, but you wouldn't be thinking about it. But if you see it as an example, as an effect, as a cause, as an instance of some broad principle, as instance of the concept man, as soon as you reach out to connect it to something else, you are engaged in thought, and that means you are engaged in integrating. Now we do not have a proper theory of induction, which would give you in a few simple sentences, the analog of how integration applies there. So I just want to take a two minute aside here to indicate that while I do not have a theory of induction, I have one very profound conviction on the subject induction. And you may as well not ask write any questions about this, because I'm going to tell you everything I know as far as induction is concerned. Induction in my judgment, is not in any sense a matter of quantity. There's a type of induction called induction by simple enumeration, which means induction simply by enumerating or counting instances. This chinaman is a laundryman, this one is, this one is, this one is. And after 50 or 100. Well, that's enough. Therefore all Chinamen are. Now I regard quantity as such as insignificant. It entirely depends on what happens to that quantity, which can be a good suggestive beginning. If you see something happening, what happens when you integrate it with everything else you know that's relevant? Now, for instance, you could have cases where the quantity is 1000 examples, is annihilated as far as an inductive generalization by something else you know, or is made tremendously weaker by something else you know, or is made tremendously stronger by something else you know. And it's the bringing in something else you know which which translates enumeration into a valid induction, at least within that context, or into just a hasty generalizing. Now, for instance, if you take this observation about laundryman, what do you know? What one thing do you know which would stop you completely from coming to the conclusion? Everyone Chinese is a laundryman that isn't a laundererman. Well, you know, one that isn't. But say something more abstract that would even explain that volition. Human beings have choice. Once you know that human beings have choice, that finishes any generalization that involves their choice based on no matter what the quantity is, including that all people are no good. Even if you've encountered only millions and millions of those who are no wood, so long as you know they have volition, you integrate that and it stops. It's like a red flag saying you cannot integrate that. There's a little trickier example. You watch swans in lake after lake after lake and they're all white. You got thousands, tens of thousands of examples. Are you safe in saying now all swans are white? Now swans don't have free will. But there is something else you know, which if you integrate with that, will cast tremendous doubt on that. Even though you never encounter a non white swan. Now what is that? That you know, one person, loudly, please, Gen X. Well, Gen X is too fancy for me. I want something that you would know on a primitive level, on a simple observational level. Yes, dogs are black and white. We can't hear you. Different animals like dogs are black and white. Yes, you say different animals like dogs are black or white. Put it more broadly. Color is one of the least constant attributes within a species. Wherever you look, you find a lot of things that are the same, but the color is very variable. In human beings, for instance, is a perfect example where we have the identical species capacities and so on, but it can be white, black, red, et cetera. Once you know that, you would have to have a lot of positive Information to say, I know that all swans are white. You'd have to know something about the whiteness of swans that differentiates it from the whiteness of other species, and show that that is inherent in the structure of a swan, you see, There'd be a whole new integration you'd have to make. On the other hand, if we take all men are mortal, are we taking that simply as true because every man we've seen so far is mortal? No, we integrate that to a tremendous lot of other observations, and it's that integration that conveys the power and certainty on all men are mortal. What else, for instance, do you integrate the observation that all men are mortal to? I have to be one person because I can't make. Raise a hand, please. Yes, all living organisms are mortal. So therefore, instead of this being some peculiarity of man, it's part of a much, much, much broader field, all of which integrates to it. Now, you see, if you had immortal radishes, then you saw mortal man, you'd have to say, well, I'm not so sure now. Some living things are mortal and some aren't. Maybe man could get the radish thing grafted onto him, you see, but the way it stands right now, we have a complete, unbroken integration. What else do you integrate all men are mortal with besides the living kingdom, the age. Aging is an excellent thing. Ayn Rand said to me once that all men are mortal would not be a valid generalization if it weren't for the aging process, because she said it would then be unintelligible if we simply went around Hale and Hardy, everything was great. We looked like we were 16, and then one day like that, we turned to sawdust and fell on the floor. That would be completely unintelligible. And therefore, no matter how often it happened, you'd say, we don't understand why there's nothing we can integrate this to. But when you see that on every single level there's a certain time span, and then you start to get wrinkles and, you know, age spots and grow hair out of your ears and all the other things that happens at a certain point, you put it all together and you realize there's only one possible terminus, and that is the complete collapse of this thing and that you integrate also with machines wearing out. So everywhere you look, you have evidence to support this primitive generalization, and that's why you convert it to all men are mortal. Now, I understand that this dissertation on induction opens up millions of questions as to what kinds of integrations and how many Integrations, et cetera, that is, for a course in the philosophy of. Of science, which I'm not equipped to give. But right now my concern is simply to show you that integration in one form or another, is of the very essence of human cognition from the perceptual level onto the most complex advanced science and philosophy. And the moral, therefore, is that you have to do it correctly. Now, the early integrations are automatic, from sensation to perception, or even the early concepts. But at a certain point, the formation and use of concepts, as you know, is not automatic. And you may integrate incorrectly, such as we saw last time, where you have a bad context which is integrated in your mind into a whole and keeps asserting itself. Or you may not integrate at all. You may be just passive, and the integration will not occur on the perceptual level at will. If you're passive, your senses and brain will unite to give you the awareness of entities. But on the conceptual level, past the earliest stages, they don't. So if you don't connect to things, they just remain floating, disconnected. And you're going to see the harm that comes of that. Well, in fact, you should have seen the harm that already. If you read my book, do you remember the Chamberlain example, which I worked out very carefully and don't want to take the time to repeat here, but the idea of it was he took a statement, isolated. This will satisfy giving him Czechoslovakia, will satisfy Hitler's passion for land, which will satisfy it for now, which was true. And he didn't bother to connect that to anything else that he knew in past history and political philosophy and ethics in anything. And of course the result was he miscalculated totally. And the result of this piece at Anti praise was war. Now, he was the arch example in my book of the opposite of integration. And the name for the opposite of integration is dropping or pushing aside everything to which you should be relating this. Now, what do we call that, starting with a C, this fallacy? Context dropping is the opposite of integration. That's as one deliberate form of not integrating, treating something as isolated, when in fact it isn't. And in a proper knowledge, nothing should be isolated. Even the axioms which don't have any proof have to be connected to their applications or their floating abstractions in your mind. So what you have to develop and what makes this lecture a little bit unsatisfactory to me, because it's not theory so much as it is examples, to try to give you the hang of watching for integration, nobody that I know has worked out a theory on how to integrate all the time. All you can do is what I'm. At least all that can be done so far to my knowledge, is you give a general characterization and then knock people with different examples of it or of its violation and see if they can pick up where the failure of integration is. And after a while, hopefully you get attuned to listen from the point of view to your own thinking and that of others. From the point of view of integration, is it or is it not? Now, here's an argument I heard in a letter. The letter writer didn't believe this argument, but he had had it confronted, stated to him, and he quoted it to me forcefully. And he said he tried in the rest of the letter to answer, what is wrong with this? And I think that this would be very helpful if you listen to this not from the point of view of arguing the content so much, but from the point of view of this letter commits only one sin, but it's such a sin, I mean this argument, that it wipes everything out. It's complete context dropping. That's all it is. And I'd like you to hear this from the point of view of what context is being dropped, in other words, what ideas easily available to this writer, who knows, objectivism, should have smashed this so that it never even came up. But he just rode one idea in isolation. Now listen to this. The argument is, to quote, okay, Kant's philosophy was deadly, but why blame Kant? Nobody forced whole cultures to listen to him. Nobody was forced to accept his philosophy in part or in whole. I can't stand this idea of morally condemning Kant simply because he put together this philosophy which nobody else was obliged to adhere to. If men have volition and the capacity for free will, why should Kant be blamed if they didn't exercise their free wills and treat his doctrine as the mess it is? Why blame him for other men's mistakes? Unquote. Now, does anybody feel a sense of plausibility when you hear, I know I've intimidated you out of saying that. Would anybody have felt a sense of plausibility? I mean, the argument is coherent within its own terms. If you accept it without. If you just live in that little world, people have free will. Wakan's free will doesn't interfere with your free will. So what the hell that follows on its own terms. But that is an arch, perfect example of dropping the context, non integration. Now, what is he not integrating it to? Give me one thing at the very back, I was trying to say that he's judging everybody else as having made a mistake. But not Khan? Well, no, he's prepared to say that they all make foolish mistakes, but they're just as bad. His idea is Kant had to use his free will incorrectly to come up with this. So he gets condemned. But they had to use their free will incorrectly to accept his. So that's just. It's equal misuses of free will. Yes, at the back, in the center. Okay, explain that a bit. You say the role of philosophy in history. Explain that a bit so we know why it implies what it does. The fact that fundamental ideas influence a culture. The fact that fundamental ideas influence a culture. But then the question will be, why should they? If you have free will, why should somebody else's fundamental ideas? And there's a very obvious point that, you know, if you took a course in economics, but it applies just as well with philosophy. Are we all professional philosophers? Could we survive if everybody was a professional philosopher? No, I'm serious. I mean, you'd have to have food and cars and lexuses and all the crucial things that make life possible. So what is it that we have to count on in order to survive? The division of labor. Right. And the division of labor necessarily means that specialists in each field have to give us their best. And if the specialist in a given field, the one that sets the terms for that field is corrupt, all the rest of the innocent victims are going to perish, regardless of the fact that they have free will. Because they can't do everything. They have to count upon trade with someone who provides something. And this is not only true of philosophy, it's true in medicine and agriculture too. If they got the idea in medicine to dose you with some powerful poison, you couldn't say, well, his mistake. You shouldn't have accepted it. You have free will. How can you become a doctor, a lawyer, you know, an Indian chief, a philosopher, and everything at one time? So this person is entirely ignoring the division of labor. He's entirely ignoring the fact of what is free will. Put it another way, he's treating free will as an isolated dogma. Like God said from above, you got free will, you're your own master. Well, what does that mean? Could I inject a person with poison and say to him, well, you have free will. You're your own master. So good luck, take charge. Free will as a delimited faculty, a faculty which has a specific identity. It's not equivalent to omnipotence. All it tells you is that within the limits of your knowledge and your ability and your time and your interests, you can focus or not on certain things. It does not say every question is up to you to start from scratch. And if you make a mistake anywhere, no matter what the corruption of the people in that field, you're just as much to blame as them. That is fantastic. Now, if anybody kept in mind that what free will is in connection with the law of identity and the division of labor, he couldn't possibly utter. I mean, you'd have to call it garbage of this kind. It wouldn't come out of his pen and it would just disintegrate. But it's a very good example, I think, of an argument that has an internal plausibility which stops people because their only way of analyzing it is to say, can I find some error in his premise? No, it's true. People have free will. Can I find some false deduction? No, it's true. If people have free will, then they're responsible. And then you're completely trapped. Without standing back and saying, every argument has to be judged against the background of the total knowledge we have. What do I know from any other field that would be relevant to this? And here, if you went into economics and brought in the division of labor or went back to metaphysics and brought in the law of identity, you'd be much farther ahead. Do you get what I said? This is an example of integration. And the only way you will learn integration, as far as I can see, since there's not a detailed theory of how to do it, is to be plunged into a lot of examples of that kind until you get the hang of it. Do you find that of value as illustrative of integration? Because I don't want to bore you with too many examples, but on the other hand, there's no other way to bore you, or rather to. There's no other way to get this point across. I want to give you one more. I was given this by an honest student of objectivism. And this is exactly the same way the analytic synthetic dichotomy got started, by the way. But it doesn't happen to be that. But for those of you who know that this is exactly how it got started. He says, when I add up three and three to get six, I can't be mistaken. But I can be mistaken even if I am objective in adding up manually a column of 75 numbers. And I could be mistaken even if I recheck the total several times. Isn't it correct then to say that 3 and 3 equals 6 is certain, but the manual addition of 75 numbers is not now there again, his argument is clear cut. It's got its own initial plausibility until you stop and think about what? Until you bring in some things from outside of this that you know, maybe you should start asking, why is it that three and three equals six? You can't go wrong. And you can on the other. And was there a time when you could go wrong on three and three equals six and is there a time when you can't go wrong on 75 numbers? In other words, look outside. He's taking for granted everybody knows that three and three is six. How do we know that babies didn't know that? Well, I don't know, but we know that. And everybody knows you can make a mistake on 75. Well. Well, what's the solution? There is no solution. You can't be certain. Now this is to ignore a tremendous amount of knowledge. Now you tell me, why is it so obvious that 3 and 3 are 6? It's more than just the law of identity. Because the 75 numbers is the law of identity too. Yeah. Just focusing in on one single addition. Not only that, it's not just focusing on one addition, it's a very elementary addition. Because if I gave you two numbers to add and each of them was 10 digits, it wouldn't work the same way. Right. 3 and 3 and 6 is a primitive addition. Right. It's one of the most elementary things in math. You couldn't get any further until you had learned. And what's the key word? Automatized. Automatized made an automatic part of your functioning. That kind of addition. Consequently, to you, to look at and say three, six. If you had any hesitation, you wouldn't be raising philosophic questions. All that shows is that at a certain stage knowledge becomes automatized. And we haven't yet done anything to automatize the sum of the 75 numbers. You see, on the other hand, the child at the beginning in kindergarten, if you say, how much is three and three? He'll say, three, four, six, seven, seven. No, that's wrong. And he tries again until he counts on his fingers correctly. And within a year or so, oh, three and three, he knows. And then 20 years later he says, that's self evident and the other isn't. But you're entirely forgetting that everything had to go through a process. Now, by what process? To look at the other side of this, could you make 75 numbers as obvious without calculators, without computers, as 3 and 3 equals 6 repetition? First of all, what is the problem of 75 it's all those units, right? And consequently it's too much for you to hold. 5 and 6 is 11 and 7 is 18 and 4 is 22, and so on and on and on and on. So what you'd have to do is reduce the units. And how would you do that? Well, a lot of ways. Maybe add the first two, check it a few times, and then that's automatic. And then the next two, etc. Then you cut it in half, and then again and again and again until you get it down to a manageable number of units, which you then. And finally what? Automatize. After you went through that exercise, why you would, I don't know, because, you know, you could do it on a calculator. But just to illustrate the philosophic point, you could finally get it to the stage where when someone rattled off those 75 numbers, after that much effort, you would know it so well, you'd say, oh, it's obviously 3907. So this alleged distinction is a complete non distinction. But it seems like a distinction because he's ignoring how each side got to be where it is and what he knows about human knowledge and its steps that would explain one versus the other. And here again, it's simply bringing in what you already know and not taking things as obvious without bringing in the broader context. All right, that's what I'm going to say about integration in general. And now I want to turn to hierarchy as one essential form of integration. Now, on the conceptual level, once we formed our basic vocabulary and start to think, as I pointed out in my chapter on objectivity, there are two essential processes to being logical. Now I call one integration to other knowledge and one hierarchy. But in the broadest sense, hierarchy is really a type of integration. Integration is the broader term because it means establishing connections among anything, whether sensations to perceptions, perceptions to concepts, ideas and ethics, to ideas and metaphysics, generalizations to their instances, whatever. That's integration. Hierarchy is a specific and very crucial type of integration. It's when the integration takes place through a graded series, moving down to perceptual reality. In other words, hierarchy occurs when you have a level of knowledge that rests on a proceeding, which rests on a proceeding. And for you to integrate it back to perceptual data, you have to go through the intermediary steps, you have to engage in a process of reduction. So although I say in the book that there's reduction and integration, from the perspective we're looking at it here, I would say integration. I think in the book I make clear the two senses which I use it. But here I'm using integration as the broader term to subsume all cognitive connecting processes as against simply staring at them in a void, all interrelating of contents of any kind. Whereas reduction is one crucial form of integration, and that is integrating an idea step by step to its perceptual roots. And as I say in that chapter four, you have to integrate an idea to its perceptual roots. And when you do that, that's called proof reduction. But logically speaking, you have established it as true. And then you must integrate your conclusion to any other conclusions you hold in relevant fields. That's you can think of as the horizontal integration, if you want. The vertical is down into the soil of the perceptual data. You see this tree blossoming, you go all the way down the trunk until you get into the roots in the perceptual data. And then the horizontal, as you look at the trees that come up in economics and in physics and in everything else, and you see whether you have harmony across the breadth of knowledge. One you go back to sense data that's proof through reduction. The other you connect it to. All your other conclusions are the ones that are relevant in all other fields and that we can call integration or horizontal integration. Now, the first question people ask about this is why isn't proof enough? Why isn't it enough step by step to trace your conclusion back down to perceptual data? Why do you also have to integrate it to other conclusions in order to call it knowledge? In other words, why isn't reduction to sensory data sufficient to establish cognition? And I'm answering this question here because it's another way of showing you the essential role of integration in this case that we're calling horizontal integration to knowledge. Well, one thing is if you didn't use this horizontal integration, you would have no way to check on the correctness of your deduction, of your reasoning, of your reduction. The history of thought is littered of cases of geniuses who give what they think are airtight arguments for conclusions which within their premises seem unanswerable and yet clash madly with everything we know in other fields. But they stayed in their own field. Parmenides and Heraclitus are a perfect example. Parmenides gave a seemingly unanswerable example that change was impossible. And so he said therefore. And he traced it right back down to his perception of same indifference. And Heraclitus gave the opposite proof down to the same data that change was inescapable. And that there was nothing steady. And of course, both of them were refuted by simply looking around and checking what you do when you go to the Greek equivalent of a grocery store or the agora or whatever that happens to be. So you can't take a deduction out of context. I mean, you could be correct. But if you want the final check that will make your deduction, your reduction, to use the broader term, completely valid, you have to make sure that what you've come to tallies with everything else. And you will frequently, in the process of cognition, think you've got a good argument because you know we're not infallible about our good arguments. You'll think you've checked it step by step. And then you will say, but look, it clashes with so and so in economics, or clashes with so and so in metaphysics, and say, I must have made a mistake. And then you will find either you have to reinterpret the point in economics or metaphysics, or you look back and you say, I made a jump here that I didn't realize. Now, this horizontal integration is therefore essential to even being fully sure of your proofs in a given field. And secondly, this horizontal integration, even if your proof was unanswerable, controls your use and interpretation of the idea you have proved. This horizontal integration controls your use and interpretation of the idea you have proved. In other words, if you prove something in a vacuum and you don't connect it to all your other conclusions in relevant fields, even if your proof is unanswerable, you will not know what to do with that idea, how to use it, how to apply it, or how to interpret it. Now I'll give you a very simple example from ethics. In actual fact, all of ethics is necessary to interpret any one of its ideas correctly. Even if you took a given virtue and you gave a step by step proof and reduced it back to primaries, you wouldn't have any idea how to live by it or what to make of it if you didn't bring in all the other virtues and all the other things you know from ethics and see it, see that one virtue that you proved as part of a total whole. Now let's take the example, because I've worked with this with many classes and seminars of the virtue of honesty. Now let's suppose we condense for the detailed validation. You can read my chapter on that or section on honesty. But to make it in a phrase, it condenses down to this. We live in reality, so we have to correspond to it, not invent some unreal dimension that we try to cope with. Instead, that's what it came down to. If you take all that complex, we live in reality, so we can't invent another one. We have to adhere to this one. And honesty was the refusal to fake to create another dimension. Now suppose we have no integration of that with the rest of ethics. You listen to me and say, okay, I'm definitely committed, but all you know is you live in reality, so you're going to conform to it and you're not going to invent another one. Now, somebody comes up with a steam engine or an airplane, is he dishonest? Well, it's supposed to correspond to reality, not invent another one. This wasn't here. Now, how would you possibly answer that? How would you know except to say, well, there's some important things I know that are relevant here. This guy isn't creating another dimension. He's following the laws of reality. He's corresponding to them simply to change the combination. So he's doing something that's not an attack on what with an M. Metaphysical reality. This is within the sphere of the man made and deliberately correspond with reality. And that's why his machines work. So you need what distinction? The metaphysical versus the man made. Human actions which are in accord with the metaphysical and human actions that don't. And that has to be part of the context conditioning your idea of honesty. Otherwise, in a vacuum and by itself, you don't know what to make of it. Or listen to this one. Reality requires that I take in food. I don't have any, so I have to correspond to reality. So I have to take yours. I mean, I got to have food. That's stated by reality. And honesty says I can't make up another world and pretend that I can live without it. So I'll take yours. Now that is a perfectly valid reasoning, except we took our proof without any broader context and started applying it. Now, what would you say to a person who said that? Yes, you would say no, obviously. But why? Why would you say no? Yes. Initiation of physical force against somebody else is against the nature of a person. All right, so you bring in the principle of the initiation of force. But then he'd say, well, but if I don't initiate force, I'm going to starve. Then you'd have to say to him, no, because you also forgot productiveness. Productiveness. That's the way man gets his sustenance. Therefore built into the idea of corresponding to reality, which honesty dictates that you have to work for your Living and for your own sustenance. But if you're going to say no, I'm just giving proof of honesty. I'm not. Productiveness is the next semester, which is basically the way people think about it. You cannot even, even if your proof is unanswerable, you cannot even take in or retain honesty. Here is where that terrific statement of Hegel's, probably the only one he ever said that's good, which I love, and never cease quoting. The true is the whole wh. And this is particularly true of all cognition and of specific fields like ethics. It is not enough, even if your reductions or proofs are immaculate, to stop with that. You need this horizontal integration, the connection to other principles, other fields and other realms, to check on the validity of your reduction and to enable you to interpret your new idea correctly. You interpret it via the guidance of the other points. And by the same token, those other points become even clearer to you when you bring the new one to bear. It's that spiral theory. You come back to the earlier ones and they make the later one even clearer. The later one makes the earlier one even clearer, and you go round and round. Now, for instance, once you grasp this much about honesty, maybe you could make a connection to solve a problem that was bothering you. Suppose you had made this much connection to correspond to reality. You see, correspond to reality is not that simple a phrase. Why does it mean correspond to reality within certain parameters? Now you say. I was always bothered in art by this question. In art, people tell fantasies, which I like, but that certainly is outside of reality. And at the same time, modern art gives us all these smears and dots and so on, which is outside of reality. So somehow they both seem to be the same thing. And yet I like fantasies very often, and I hate modern art. Now, how would you untangle, in some sense, both a fantasy and the stuff of modern art is unreal? But what is a distinction that you could give. Get that you could bring now from our earlier discussion of honesty, that would help to untangle this particular confusion. This would be an integration. Now from honesty across to aesthetics. Can you think of it? What's the difference in the way these two are, quote, unreal? Yes. Can't hear you. Well, the purpose affects the content. They do have different purposes. But I want to go right in the nature of the content itself. Yes, fantasy uses reality to create the story. Fantasy is really like an invention. In the story world, you're going into another world. But the whole thing is, it's a world which is symbolic and taken for metaphysical reality. So there is no conflict between you, your story and reality. It's just that it's put in symbolic terms. There's no war against metaphysical reality, you see, in saying, let's pretend another planet and people with three arms and still find something out about the essence of life that applies to people with two arms on this planet. But if you're going to obliterate reality altogether and just put smears and dots and so on, that is a war on metaphysical reality. So that is on the same side as lying or cheating, you see, that's the attack on reality as against the fantasy and art. Now, I'm not hammering this point home because it's not really all that important, the example of art. But what I do want you to see is the necessity of doing hierarchy, hierarchical reduction, supplementing that by horizontal integration in order to have clear knowledge, and doing that consistently if what you want to have is clarity throughout your knowledge. Now, from here on, I want to do some exercises just in hierarchy. I've placed it in its role now so that you're not going to do it out of context and you're seeing it as subsidiary to a broader integration. But now let's focus for a bit on hierarchy itself. Hierarchy, as you know, and here again, lecturing on this, because it's in my book very clearly, is the structure of knowledge, the fact that certain things have to be learned first in order to learn others. Hierarchy does not apply where there are options. If you could go left or go right, you could learn orange first or peach first. Then you can't say the concept of orange is higher or lower than the concept of peach. It's just a matter of which choice you make. But if you had to say orange before box of fruit, then you'd say that's on a lower level because you have to learn fruit before you can learn the ways manufacturers combine and sell them. Now, all knowledge is hierarchical, starting, as you know, with the perceptual level. And then all that we were saying is we integrate and integrate and integrate, getting higher and higher. Well, reduction is taking this step by step back down. And what you have to be able to do, practically speaking, is hear an array of ideas and automatically try and think which of these is on a lower or higher order than which other one. Now, you can't always do it because there may be options, or they may be so diverse that you can't even think how to relate the two hierarchical. But usually you can. And the thing to do is when you hear arguments, try to Find one thing your mind should always do is, are there two or three ideas in this argument on crudely different levels of hierarchy? Because if there are, that will throw the whole argument down the drain. Now, many people argue that way. They act as though the table in front of them has, on the same one level, every idea in the universe. And they can take one premise from here and one premise from here and put the two together plausibly and come to a conclusion. And the point that I want to stress now is that you cannot do that. You cannot combine arguments from grossly different premises from grossly different levels without making sure that you're clear that that's what you're doing to reach a conclusion. And if you identify it, in most of those cases, the argument collapses of its own weight. But to do this, you have to develop a sense at least of hierarchy. So I have a perfectly arbitrary exercise for you to do right now. Now, this is. I'm going to do it with you, because I never even worked out the answer I'm going to give you. Let me see, A, B, C, d, e, f, 6. This is completely arbitrary. I don't think there's a real life case that anyone ever went through in this particular series. But just as an experience or experiment, I put down six ideas or statements and I'm going to give them to you one at a time and after. First of all, obviously you'll have to put down first because that's the first one you got. When I give you the second one, you have to decide would it go before or after the first one? And when I give you the third one, does it go before, in the middle or after? And keep going until you see what you've got for your order of all six. Now, as I say, this is crudely simplified. I want you to get the idea, not haggle over the details. Because the problem is, however much I tried to make it airtight, as soon as I made it really airtight, it was self evident. So I have to leave a certain vagueness in in order to have the exercise do any value. But I'll give you just this hint in advance. I am including implicit knowledge as real knowledge. So if one of these comes before the others, even implicitly, if it really comes, then it has precedence. I'm not talking only about explicit knowledge. Now that is a pretty big hint. All right, here we go. I'm going to start with A is a better put that in the middle because you don't know how many are on each side of it. All Right. My next one is two, plus two is four. Now I want to know whether you think that's something you would learn before or after. A is A. No, no, no, don't tell me. Just you decide. Is that something before? Because there are certain philosophers, for instance, like John Stuart Mill would have said, well, first you learn a 1 and 1 is 2 and 2 and 2 is 4 and 4 and 4 is 8. And after you have hundreds of examples, you finally generalize and see that A is a. So for him the hierarchy would be reversed. So if you're putting it second, you're already making a certain commitment as to how human consciousness develops. All right, now here's another one. The earth is round. Now you can think of history if you want. It may or not be helpful to know that the Egyptians were very good in mathematics and that Columbus, before Columbus, they thought the earth was flat. That might be helpful to you. Alright, now let's say the virtue of pride. You know, you can make whatever sentence you want out of that, pride as a virtue or whatever. Now you got some question as to where you would put that in your list? I hope. That tree is green. I'm just trying to figure out myself. And the last one, what Ayn Rand calls the virtue of selfishness or the principle of egoism. Now I'm making the assumption on these moral ones, that everybody learns these in some implicit way in order to function, even if they don't know them explicitly, don't accept them explicitly. The philosophic ones we're taking as implicit in order to be able to function at all. Now, who would volunteer? And the whole purpose here is, is just to try to get an idea of an order in which things would be learned. Who has an idea here of what would come first? The tree is green. No, I would not say that tree is green. Not in the sense that I'm using it. Not if you're talking about implicit as well as explicit knowledge. Because the very first things, according to Objectivism, are what the first primaries, the three axioms are existence, consciousness, identity. True, we have them only in implicit form at the beginning. So I certainly grant you that explicitly people don't have it. But counting the implicit, you can never get before an axiom, because you would never be able to even get to the identity of something, the idea of something, before you knew that there is something that is what it is. So I would definitely put A as a first. I hope I didn't throw you off by delivering that to you first, but that's what I would put first in its implicit form. Because I'd say without that, he can't function at all. The whole issue of hierarchy is without this, he can't function at all. Now, who wants to volunteer what seems to me an obvious candidate for second in this list? The lady. Yes. That tree. Yes, I thought I would put second. That tree is green. Why? I can't hear you. That's a direct perceptual grasp. Once he's got the axioms and he's reached the level of entities, in order to validate this, he has some primitive concepts. He just has to turn and look and he sees that the tree is green. And he could even have that in a subverbal way by just pointing at that thing and thinking of an image of green, you see? So this simple thing requires only that his consciousness is able to function. So once the axioms are there, he can go directly to the perceptual observations, and then there's a whole host of them that he can get. Now the question is, where do we go from here? Who's got an idea? What comes third? Now I have an idea. Whether I can defend it entirely, I'm not sure, but I have a definite idea. You got an idea here? Yes. Earth is round. No, I wouldn't put the Earth is round here. Why would you put the Earth is round here? That's not two plus two equals four. But then I figured a kid, you could show him a little globe and say, we live on this, but I know that it's really upstream. No, no, but you are mixing up two questions. You could show him a globe, but that would presuppose that you had already reached the adult knowledge that the Earth is round. And then you made a globe to show him. But in terms of his learning, if it wasn't, you know, the hierarchy can be tremendously masked and hidden and confused if you bring in at an early stage to a child what it took adults centuries to learn. So you're importing higher knowledge there on the. See, that tree is green? He just looks at and he sees. You don't have to say, here's a model of a tree, even though it looks like it's white to you, we found out in the higher dimension that it's really green. He just looks at the. But the Earth is round. He would look and say, where is it round? Maybe a kid brought up in a spaceship looking down could. But talking from the context of Earth, the Earth is round. Would come much later. It's a complicated scientific discovery, so I Certainly wouldn't put that next. Two plus two is four. Two plus two is four. Why do you put that next? Well, that depends really on how you interpret two plus two equals four. If it's on the perceptual level. If it's just you're going to give him two glasses and two glasses and he sees that those are four, if he's reached the ability to count and he can count 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2-3, 4, which is an early stage, then this would be perceptual. I was taking this in the sense of an abstraction, that he reached the point that two and two equals four. Not just that one peach and one peach and one peach and one peach is four peaches. You see, where they can count, but where they can abstract the numbers away from the content of what they're counting. And to my knowledge, they have to have something before they can reach that abstract. A level. They have to have certain. They have to. In other words, for a consciousness to function, it has to have its axioms, it has to have its perceptual data, and it needs something else in implicit form before it can go on and acquire higher information. That's my view anyway. But that's still a simpler abstraction than the earth is round. Oh, it's definitely earlier than the earth is round. The earth is round I put at the end. So the question is, what comes next? I tried to give you a clue there by saying, first you get your axioms, then you get your perceptual data. But you need some way, somehow, implicitly, to absorb something in order that you be able to initiate the effort and the work of going on and trying to learn all this later information. Yes. No, there's only one left. Egoism. That is the essence of your motivation. Now, at that stage of knowledge, it's implicit and it takes the form of they want pleasure, they want to pursue what satisfies them and avoid what hurts or bores them. But they have to acquire some kind of motivation. And that is tantamount to the importance of pursuing your values and making your life happy, even though, of course, they don't know that any more than they can say A is a. So I would say egoism in that implicit form is inherent. As before, the child can make any further steps in the acquisition of knowledge. Now, I think here you have a choice. It's granted that the earth is round. As last, I think here you could go either to pride or 2 and 2 equals 4. The reason, however, why you couldn't start with pride as your first virtue. Why is that as your first ethical motivator, you couldn't take a child who says, okay, I have my axioms, I have my perceptual data, and now think you're terrific. Now go ahead. Because even in any implicit terms, what would the question have to be? Terrific? What does it mean? Why? How do you become terrific? By what standard? What made me terrific? You have to say, well, because you're so conscientious and honest and you pursue your own goals. And after your, you have to have a content ethics of some primitive kind. And then on top of that, you can have self esteem or pride for living up to that content. And that's why Aristotle and Ayn Rand both treat pride as the last virtue, because it presupposes all the earlier ones. You couldn't form it as a primary or an early one the way you could with egoism and so on. So I just deliberately put that in there to say that if you're developing your ethics even implicitly, you have to follow some path of development. And I would put pride later, but now whether the child gets pride or two and two equals four after egoism, I would say is absolutely a matter of his environment, whether he's raised by a psychologist or a mathematician or, you know, whatever happens to him. I think he'd be ready for both at this point. And then I would say the earth is round comes much later, much later, because you have to go into complex scientific theories. It's not a perceptual issue at the beginning at all. And you have to know complex mathematics to even figure out what all those motions of the sky is and so on in order to build the rocket ships that would take you one day far enough away so you could see it perceptually. Now, I realize there's a lot of arbitrary assumptions there, but I hope that gives you at least some little clue that there are gaps in. There's a structure. And if you want to play a party game and get into tremendous fights, just have each person pick one true sentence and put them all in any field he wants and put them all in a hat and then argue over what order they logically belong in. Now, I wouldn't argue too long, but just enough so you get the idea. I think we'll take our five minute break here. All right, I want to continue now with exercises of different kinds on hierarchy, recognizing it and recognizing people who drop or pervert it. And let's start with giving you an argument that I got of which the essential Answer is this is an anti hierarchical argument. It takes two ideas on radically different levels of the hierarchy and puts them side by side. This is about as easy an example as I can think of of that. This person said, in essence, a man on a desert island cannot get nearly as much knowledge as he could get in society. So it's not true that reason is man's means of knowledge. Actually, reason is sometimes, but people are sometimes too. Did you get that? You didn't get that? Oh, you have to get that or you can't refute it. A person by himself can't get nearly as much knowledge as he can, as if he lives in society. So how can you say, just as a flat statement, reason is man's means of knowledge. Sometimes you get things by figuring out by reason, sometimes you get it by people telling you. So we should really say man has two means of knowledge, reason and people. That's the kind of argument that would pass in any doctoral dissertation today. In fact, it would be the foundation of any philosophy today. Now, what is wrong with that? I don't want, you could say a hundred things, but I want the essence of what is wrong. That is that it violates the principle of the hierarchical structure of knowledge. It has two basic ideas in it, one of which is at the foundation of all thought and one of which is way later. What are the two? Yes, you still had to have reason before you came. Learn from. Well, explain that. You have to have reason in order to learn from other people. As you're speaking, you have to use your own reason in order to learn from them. And how did they learn what they learned? You know that issue. They learn from other people, other people and other people. How are the first people learn it? And I asked the equivalent of that to a professor. He said there were no first people. Obviously everybody who learns anything that's considered valid knowledge had to learn it through reason. And when you learn it from others, that's not an alternative to reason. That's another form of using your reason to be speeded up by them. So what are the two principles that are being invoked in this argument? Number one, man's means of knowledge is reason. Number two, the most productive use of reason is division of labor. Now, the most productive form of cognition is division of labor. Now, which of those is fundamental and which is computer? Completely derivative. And later, first you have to know that reason is your means of knowledge. And then for a long, long time everybody would have such primitive knowledge. They would learn on their own and they'd get the Little bits that they could. And finally it get to the stage where there were different subject matters and different specialties and the idea of a division of labor and learning from experts would come up. But that is already historically and logically miles up the chain from the basic issue that reason is your means of knowledge. And you see how this person gets. This is what I call taking them on the table. Here is reason and here is the division of labor. And he just weaves an argument with the two of them as though it's exactly the same thing. You can easily bring them together and it is absurd. It's like taking two and two equals four and saying, now I relate that to this differential equation and I come out with peach jelly or whatever, because there's no connection. He's mixing levels completely. Now I'll give you one more, which you may think is even more obvious, but this also is a completely real one. It's not exactly the same way, but the problem is a failure of hierarchy, failure of grasping hierarchy. This person wanted to understand clearly the relationship between religion and socialist. He was against both and he felt there's a connection. And his method of doing it was make a column on a piece of paper, one side headed religion and one socialist. And then he read extensively among religious people. And every time he got a quote, an idea that was repeated frequently, he put it down under religion and rate frequently from socialists. And every time he got repeated idea, he put it down under socialism. And he had a whole bunch of similar ideas. The way he put it to me, he said, I found that both are against selfishness, both are against profit, both think money is low. And he had this whole list. And then he said, but where do you go from here? They're not exactly the same thing, but they have so much that's the same. So would you say that socialism is a religion or would you say religion is a form of socialism? He was completely lost. Now, what is the error here of trying to relate two positions by putting them both on the table together? No hierarchy whatever. And then just saying this has attribute ABC and this has attribute abc. You know, it's like you put babies and professors on the table. This one breathes and so on, this one breathes and so on. Therefore, babies are miniature professors or what? You know? Yes. Well, you tell me. I want. You're using the word essential, which you could use here, but I'm not going to do that word until two more days. I want to use the word hierarchy here. If you asked what is socialism and what is Religion, Would they occupy the same place in the hierarchy of knowledge, in the hierarchy of ideas? Would they be on the same level? Which field would religion come under? Philosophy? Well, they both come under philosophy, broadly speaking. Which field does religion come under primarily? Religion can encompass a whole way of life and socialism by implication can too. But that doesn't mean that these two terms occur on the same level of thought. They do not. One is much more fundamental than the other. And which is the fundamental here? A wrong fundamental, but still religion. Religion stands primarily for what branch of philosophy? What branch of philosophy is the essence that makes something religion. And it's a really epistemology, it's the dependence on faith. And then through that of course, faith in God and the supernatural. Now that's a religion. It then depends how you develop it. What's going to happen on your ethics and politics? And there's of course a great perfect logic to the fact that if that's how you start, you're going to preach self sacrifice, you're going to end up preaching some form of statism, although not necessarily socialism. Now where on the other hand is socialism? What, what branch is that? Is that the essence of that an epistemology or in metaphysics or what? That's a politics, that's a political, socio political viewpoint. So it's way down the stream. It is a political economic system which rests implicitly on a certain ethics, which in turn rests on a certain kind of metaphysics and epistemology. So what then is the relation between the two? They're not completely disconnected from each other. It's not as if they're just two radically different things, but they're certainly not on a parallel with four attributes in common. What, how would you word the relationship between religion and socialism? To state the relationship without confusing the levels. Socialism rests on earlier premises of religion. Socialism implicitly accepts some of the epistemology or methods. Well, I wouldn't put it that way because you're saying socialism has to rest on an intrinsicist foundation and it doesn't have to. There are other types of foundation. The most you can say is socialism being a political view rests on a certain kind of anti reason, anti reality foundation of which religion is a good example, although it's not necessarily religious. And by the same token, religion leads necessarily to a certain kind of ethics and politics which will be dictatorial in some form, though not necessarily socialistic. So it's like a concrete within metaphysics and epistemology and a concrete within ethics and, and politics. Each presupposes something like the other to have a full system. But you can't list them side by side and get any connection between them because they're on completely different hierarchical levels. Now, this, I think, should be as clear as you can get to an example you can retain. When you hear an argument in the first half, I was stressing, you have to be able to pull out the ideas that you know from. From any other field that are relevant to it. That's the horizontal integration. And now I'm saying you have to hear, within the argument, are there ideas on different levels that are being conflated, pushed together, as though they're on the same level, which you are implicitly accepting, because if you do that, you're not thinking hierarchically, and that means it's hopeless. You could get any conclusion out of any premises if you do it that way. Now, I want to try a few positive exercises and we'll conclude for today in terms of lecture. I want to take a couple of ideas, abstract ideas, not simple ones like the theory of relativity, and I want to see how you would reduce these ideas back to. To the perceptual level. Now, I'm saying ideas, principles, not just individual concepts. You remember what I did in my book with Friend, we reduced that single concept. I want to take propositions that you're thoroughly familiar with and ask, how would you reduce this back? So this is a positive, not a negative exercise. Nobody made a mistake. We're just now trying to see if we can actually reduce some complex ideas back to perceptual data. Now, I don't care whether you start with the perceptual data and lead me forward, or start with the idea and go backwards. As long as one way or the other, we've got a chain of essentials, and we're not trying to get a million different nuances, just the key chunks. All right, the first idea that I would like you to reduce, I'll give you two ideas. The first idea I want you to to reduce is the role of philosophy in human life. In other words, the vital importance of philosophy in human life. Now, I want you to tell me, from what observations and through what stages did you have to go to come up with that conclusion? Or starting from that conclusion, how would you dig your way backward to direct observations? Now, the source of this idea is not for the new intellectual, because Ayn Rand had to get it from reality. So this has to be something that you directly perceive in reality, leads you to certain conclusions, then you make more discoveries based on that, and then more and at A certain point, you're way up in the stratosphere. You put it all together and say, philosophy is crucial in guiding human life. But what is the tie between what we actually see and hear? Now, that's pretty much murder to ask somebody out of the blue. Does anybody have an idea of where you would even begin to start groping? I see a green aqua hand at the back. You'll have to yell. No, Diana, you'll have to yell. I can't hear you. The use of the human mind in sustaining your life. That is an idea I agree with you. Is much earlier than the role of philosophy. Show me the connection between the two. What's the connection between the two? Loud. Because I've got a fan and a big space here, so you have to scream it. Well, all right. So you say you need philosophy to guide the mind. You need the mind to guide your life. All right, let's pick on any of those. None of that is self evident, right? By perception. All right, let's go to. We need the mind to direct our action. Where would you get that from? That's a lower level idea. Because on that we build the philosophy as a way of developing the mind to guide us properly. So where do you get the idea that the mind is necessary to guide your action? I mean, I can look around, I can't see that. Well, I know you know, because you already asked, in fact. Oh, okay. Who is somebody different who hasn't asked any questions yet that anybody want to. This is your chance for immortality. Yes. Yeah. The nature of human life. Well, tell me something you observe about the nature of human life. That's perceptual. We have to take this all the way back down to perceptual data. What do you observe about human life? You need food to live. What? First of all, even before finding out that you need food to live, what do you find out? That you're hungry, that you need food. And a very young child will be able to do what? Reach out for the food and swallow it. Right. And feel better. He doesn't even know about food food yet. But what is it that we can observe him doing? We observe him choosing certain goals, right. In a way in which the chair or a rock or a lightning storm does not. Now, he can't conceptualize all this at this point, but we can observe, and he can observe what we call goal directed or purposeful action. And before we had that, we couldn't get anywhere with this question. And you get that at the very, very early from direct perception, because if it came down to how do you explain what it means to pursue a goal? I'd say, follow me. There would be no use just giving you synonyms and, and purpose and etc. And so on. There's aim, there's a million synonyms. But how did you get that basic idea? Ultimately it's perceptual. You have to watch people function. You see, this man is moaning about how tired he is, and then he drags himself over, he looks around the room, he sees this bed, he walks over there and falls down. He's pursuing a goal as against this other man who just stands there twiddling his thumbs. You see, he's pursuing food, he wants money, he wants a raise, whatever it is. And you see this happening among animals, especially far as you can see. And you see that it doesn't happen among vases and water fountains, etc. At that point you have the perceptual data of the pursuit of goals. And if you're introspective even that you can choose certain goals over others, that it's up to you what you can choose. And you could tell your volition, as you know, by direct introspection, which is a form of direct perception. And what else do you find on the observational level besides that you pursue goals? Something else that's early and easily available to everybody at the back? No, not other people, that's too narrow. Something more directly involved in goal directed behavior. Can you engage in a goal directed behavior? For instance, suppose I told you I'd like you right now to blow up this room in the next two minutes. That's your goal. Could you do it? No. Why not? You have no idea how to do it. Now, if you were a super engineer with a bomb, you could connect it and blow it up. But you can't achieve an end if you have no clue as to the means. And the means is what? Knowledge. And knowledge that you get how? By observing causal sequences and ultimately expanding them. If you, if you hunger in your stomach, the baby already knows that if it swallows a banana or milk or whatever, the hunger goes away. So he has an idea of means. And first of all he just grasps certain ways, give you certain results, and you get a flood of those observations. Finally you can generalize from just that much you know. This is already at an older stage. Well, thought leads to action. Now that's an inductive generalization from countless observed data. You get the idea of your voluntary choice of an end and of certain knowledge needed to get it. And all of that as being your conclusions, your ideas as a result of what you. The things you observe in the world, the actions people take and the means that they have to discover. So we get to thought leads to action, or what Diana called the role of the mind. But now that by itself is not going to take us to philosophy, because all we've said so far is we have certain ends, we have a lot of means. We got hundreds of ends and hundreds of means. Now where do you get to philosophy? What concept do you have to form now on this basis to elevate to the next level of the hierarchy? You couldn't form this concept early. You'd have to have hundreds and hundreds of individual thoughts before you would be able to stumble on this concept. And this concept was not even discovered until the 5th century BC in Greece. Reason. No, I'm not thinking of reason. I'm thinking of a distinction among certain kinds of thoughts. No, something even more basic than that. I mean, all of that would be necessary for the full validation. But just for the essential link. There's one crucial thing you have to do to get from thought to philosophy. Philosophy is a certain kind of thought. So what you have to do is divide thoughts themselves up into two kinds. One kind underlies the other kind. What is the one kind called with an F? Fundamental. You have to reach. After you get the idea that thought controls action, you have to reach the idea of a fundamental thought. In other words, one that underlies or shapes a whole range of actions as opposed to just particular or concrete thought. Now, for instance, your hunger is a. That you want, food is a thought, but that gives you only one type of action. But suppose you reach the stage of grasping egoism versus altruism. Then right away your conclusion on that, you can see, is going to shape how you satisfy your need for hunger and for sleep and your how you treat your friends, etc. And so on. It sweeps across the whole of action and it's going to condition all of your individual goals. So you get the idea of a fundamental, all encompassing thought. And of course you have to do that on many instances before you can abstract that. What's in common is that they're fundamental. But after you do that for a while, you begin by having the idea of a lot of fundamental thoughts. And we went through a century or so, that was the pre Socratic period. And then it takes the genius of all time to take the last step, which is to take the key fundamental thoughts. And say what? They belong together they make up one gigantic thought which is philosophy. That's what Plato did. He took the last step in that hierarchy. And so of course it be obvious that philosophy shapes human action. But the chain is philosophy shapes human action because philosophy is the sum of fundamental thoughts, which we get by getting to fundamental thoughts, which are thoughts in contrast to concrete motives, and the means of attaining them, which underlie that and which we ultimately get directly from observation. So you have a whole chain there, ending with this stratospheric idea of philosophy is the ruler of human action. Now that is in pattern what I would like to you to be able to do on any idea you believe. Now, it's true we could have brought in the concept of values and reason and all the rest, but I was trying to strip it to the barest reduction without even saying what kind of philosophy, whether it's good or bad, rational or irrational, but just philosophy as such. So even if a person doesn't recognize reason, you see, now you could do it through the concept values. You have to choose among your motives, among your choices, by deciding one is more valuable than the other. And then you have fundamental concepts of value. And that's philosophy. But I prefer to do it through fundamental, because that gives me a much broader sense of philosophy at the end. Otherwise I would just end up with a necessity of ethics, which of course could very well be the way people come to philosophy. They go up the chain through ethics, and then they see that ethics is connected to other branches and they finally make the extension to philosophy as a whole. But the way I using it, through the fundamental, through the concept of fundamentals, you go right from observation up. Now I'm going to give you one more because these things take time to digest. But this, if you could do this one, I think you're all set. Our thesis today in today's class is that knowledge is hierarchical. So what about if you take that principle knowledge is hierarchical and reduce it to the perceptual level. So that means you can, you can reduce even the principle of reducing. Now think about that for a minute. It's actually not that hard. That is, if you've read introduction, objectivist epistemology. If you haven't, it's hopeless. How would you reduce knowledge is hierarchical to the perceptual level? You can't even see knowledge. It certainly can't see hierarchy, or feel it, or touch it, or taste it, or smell it. But this didn't come from God. It had to have been formed by successive integrations from the perceptual level. So all we want to do is go back down to where we had to start. Now, who has an idea what would be at least one link somewhere in here? If you don't know, you just plunge in with some link. Like Diana gave us. The idea of thought being a link between philosophy and observation. What could be a link between hierarchical knowledge and perceptual data? Once you put it that way, it seems pretty. Is that Anne? Yes, I was going to say. Well, you say that some things are obvious perceptually and other things obviously you can't get perceptually, but that in itself is not going to get us very far to how do we get hierarchical things, the things that we don't perceive, out of the things we perceive. So it's true that some things you don't perceive, such as knowledge, is hierarchical, but we want a little more direct guidance as to how to get that from what we do perceive. Yes. Okay, now you really said the whole thing there, but let's break it down. He said man can abstract. Now if you didn't know that, this thing would be a total mystery to you. Knowledge as hierarchical. What do you mean by abstract? You actually mean form concepts, right? And that is the key link here. What is a concept? If you know that knowledge is a conceptual phenomenon for human beings, then whatever is true of concepts has to be true of knowledge. What is a concept? And it's a concept. How is it related to percepts? That's the question. Because if concepts have a certain relation to percepts and knowledge has a certain relation to concepts, then knowledge has a certain relation to percepts. What is the relation between concepts and percepts? Yeah, first level concepts are integrations and perceptions. That's right. There are certain kind concepts on the first level are an integration of percepts. I'm not taking you through the whole thing, but you see certain similarities. You see certain shapes that are similar as against ones that are different. And you focus on the similarity and you give it a term standing for an unlimited number like this, and that's called table and so on for chair. Now, what is the percept that that concept reduces to two things? The external percept, the individual tables you're seeing, and your introspective ability to look in at a certain point and realize that what you're doing is integrating these percepts in a certain way. So it takes extrospection and introspection to reach the idea of a concept. Everybody makes the concept table, but that's not enough for them to grasp. Hierarchy, they have to know what they're doing in making that concept. That means you have to basically be a philosopher, like Ayn Rand. But once she's done it, you see, I asked her was where she got her theory that concepts were an integration of percepts with the measurements omitted. She said, I just asked myself, what do I do when I form one? I mean, there was nobody else to ask. She just looked and she introspected and she caught herself functioning a certain way. And it's that combination perception and your mind operating on perception a certain way that leaves you with the net result of concept, an integration of something earlier, which obviously then had to be built on the earlier. It didn't just come out of the blue. So the concept itself was reducible back to what you observed. And then you see on the next level, you go to a higher level of concept and you do it by integrating. And therefore by reverse, you can break down furniture, the higher levels, back to their units and so on, all the way back to the initial persons. And then you see that that's true of the most exalted philosophic or scientific truths, like philosophy governs man's life, or the law of gravity, whatever it happens to be. They come back step by step by step, down to the activity of perception, and in this case, your mind building on, proceeding, building on, proceeding, etc. And so you stand back and you say, that's not a means to say knowledge is hierarchical. Every level is built on the proceeding, on the proceeding down to perceptual data. And the way I got that is to start with the perceptual data I'm given, watch my mind at work, and then observe that I build those layers one on top of the other. Then I stand back and observe that that same thing is true of all human knowledge. And then I just give, as my inductive generalization, all knowledge is hierarchical. That's it. Now, this will satisfy one type of person and not another. So I want to put one little PS on this. There are a lot of people who will say, well, yes, this shows you that knowledge is hierarchical, but it doesn't show you that it has to be hierarchical. Now, I don't know if anybody is tempted to ask that question. I certainly was when I was in my 20s, and when I discussed it with Ms. Rand, I said, well, this is an inductive proof, and I certainly see that all knowledge is hierarchical, and I can't think of any that isn't. But I said, but could you give me a Proof that by the very nature of awareness it must be hierarchical. She said well, what kind of proof? Well, I wasn't satisfied with saying this is the nature of concepts. So I wanted a proof that by the nature of awareness it has to be conceptual. She said well, it doesn't have to be. I said what do you mean? She said well, what about animals? I said well, I don't mean that kind of argument, but I mean an argument that it was hard to state. I wanted her really to come back to a as a and show me by deduction from a that conceptual consciousness had to exist and therefore hierarchy had to exist. And she said, well, what else do you think is possible? I said I haven't the faintest idea, but I don't know how to put prove that this has to be and that something else isn't possible. Well, you can imagine what she said to me, that that was pure rationalism, etc. She said there is not two tasks in knowledge. There is not one, showing that something is so and then two showing that it had to be so. If you show it correctly, all there is to do is show that it is so. And then she said to me one of the worst statements in the critique of the pure reasons. It's very easy to see that something must be so, but the difficulty is to show that it has to be so. And to get to the second, Kahn directed all this incredible innate category of apparatus that was supposed to guarantee what you learned from your observations. Now, so when you are, the broader moral for us is when you are reducing or inducing your concern to integrate the data, you are not concerned to deduce from axioms some principle that may not in fact have a deductive validation at all. It may be that all we can say and all we ever can say and all we need to say is this is the way reality is, this is the way the mind works. And if you can integrate everything into that, that's all that is required for any. I say this because reduction we're using as a form of proof. And to some people proof means the rationalistic mathematical deduction from axioms. And that is not what we mean as objectivists discussing. All right, that takes me to basically the end of what I wanted to say today. And the two messages are integration is everywhere, and the detection of hierarchy is one crucial form of it. And if you remember that much, I think you have a good lead. I grant you it's very generalized. I wish I had the intermediate level where I could go from the broad definitions to the intermediate how to's before I come right to examples. Unfortunately, I never did work that out, but at least I gave you the two extremes and we'll see where you can go from here. All right, we have time for questions now. Yellow. Yeah, can't hear you. The which yell. I'm sorry, I'll have to come forward. Or yell. You're saying something about types of hierarchies, but I can't hear beyond that. Dog and animal. Yeah, Give me this. The second one more like what arm to the body. You mean. Understanding what. Ethics depends on manifestation Epistemology. Yes, I understand. Well, you could not have read my book, or at least you didn't read it thoroughly, because I covered that in the book. Objectivism uses hierarchy entirely as an epistemological term, and the reduction should just have made that clear to you, because the reduction of all these things consists of what did we have to learn first in order to get to this and then in order to get to this? Organic connections or connections to among broad genera in reality. If you mean that in a metaphysical sense, it leaves wide open the epistemological question. Now take your example. Do you have to get dog before animal? Not necessarily. You could easily get cat, you know, fish, lion, etc. And animal never find out about dogs. Would you have to get even some specific animals before you get the abstraction animal? Not necessarily. There's option here. You have to get something to contrast animal to. So maybe you'd start with people or chair, and then animal would just be things that growl and move around, and then you'd find subtypes of those. So for this I refer you to the Appendix to Introduction Objectivist Epistemology, where Mizran discusses in detail what do you have to learn to learn the later. And when is it hierarchically dependent and when is it optional? And when could it take place in different forms? But the same is true of arm and body. The body, biologically, the arm depends on the body. And you can make the case that if you cut the arm off by itself, it'll just shrivel, whereas the body is the unit. But it has nothing to do with hierarchy as we're talking about it. A child could grasp arm on a purely perceptual level before it has the ability even to take in such a big thing as body or vice versa. It's conceivable to me, if it's a little body and he gets the body of a doll, he can get the whole thing and then come down to zero in on the Details. So the biological issues are completely irrelevant to the epistemological issues. I also made the point in the book. The hierarchy is very dependent on the type of senses you have. It's a thoroughly epistemological issue. If you were born with the capacity to perceive atoms, that would be your primary, your perceptual level. And the discovery that there were gigantic things like lecterns and coffee cups, which you couldn't see directly because they would be too big for your scale of vision, would be an inference based on your perception of the atom. So this would be a higher level conclusion. So what would be a higher level to one species would be lower to another. And that does not introduce subjectivism. It just means you have to start with what your means of knowledge provide as the basis and then build on that. And that is independent of the considerations that you raise. One of the troubles with the issue of hierarchy is that throughout the classic tradition, metaphysics and epistemology, cosmology are thoroughly intertwined and not separated. They have metaphysical hierarchies like Aristotle, you know, from prime matter on to prime mover. And he's got the whole universe arranged in a hierarchy. And that, of course, is the Platonism in him. That is a thorough mistake. We regard reality as being outside of hierarchy. Unless you're talking about real hierarchies like professors above students, you know, things of that sort. But generals above colonels. But leaving aside things like that, there is no metaphysical hierarchy. Okay, who is next? I would give a preference to people who haven't talked up to now. If you have anything you would like to say or ask. Okay, yes. Horizontal integration is the final section. Yes. When you prove something, you have to. Is it just valid? What's the difference between valid and completely valid? Well, obviously, if I said is the first thing, to make it completely valid is necessary. You quote me as saying horizontal integration is necessary to make your proof completely valid. And then you want to know what's the difference between completely valid and valid? And of course, you. You caught me in language there. I should never have said such a thing. But I was trying to get the idea. You cannot be completely certain that your proof is valid until you perform the relevant horizontal integrations. But obviously validity is like pregnancy. You have it or you don't. It doesn't come in degrees and isn't partially valid. I mean, if you've made a fallacy, your argument is just out. Maybe you can salvage parts of it as being valid. In parts is invalid, but it's an either or thing. So the adverb should not precede the word valid. But that's the whole advantage of speaking rather than writing. You say something five different ways in the hope that one way it'll come out. You cannot have the precision that you would in writing. And if I did, you couldn't take it in by oral means because I would be very terse. I would say exactly what I meant the first time and I would zip it off. It would go right through you. So the disadvantage of an oral presentation is there isn't the word by word precision, but the advantage is you could take it in orally. So we just have to live with this problem. Yes. Diana, is that you again? Yeah. Well, where do I bring rationalism into the discussion of integration and context dropping? Is that your question? Well, I didn't mention rationalism because I made a promise on the brochure. The topics covered intensively elsewhere would not be mentioned in this course. And since I gave a whole course understanding Objectivism on what's wrong with rationalism, I felt it would be cheating to bring it in when I had promised something new. But since you raise it, obviously rationalism and empiricism are two different forms of context dropping. In the most profound way, rationalism takes self evident axioms out of the blue without basis in sense perception and just starts, you know, they'll start with something that sounds good, like every hole can be divided and that can be divided. Therefore the ultimate particle must be infinitesimal. But if it's infinitesimal it can't be material because anything material has some extension. Therefore the infinite ultimate particles have to be minds. But one mind that's that small couldn't be enough. Now that's Leibniz, you see, it just went on and on and on like that. A whole world full of minds, big minds and small minds. And all of it starting from you can keep subdividing in a vacuum without any idea what he's subdividing. Where do you get the concept of subdividing? Nothing. You see, now that's typical of rationalism. It's complete thinking in isolation, grabbing some premises and just churning out what he thinks he can deduce from them. That is one of the worst methodological types of context dropping. Empiricism is basically the same thing. But what an empiricist does is rather than have a free floating theory is declare you can't have any theories. Integration is out of the question. He said, I can see that that tree is brown and this tree is green, and the sun rises, but who knows about tomorrow? So all we can do is steer our perceptual data. So rationalism tries to integrate everything by starting arbitrarily and integrating in defiance of observation. And empiricism says you can't integrate at all. You have to be like David Hume and just stare out helplessly. And the truth is, of course, you have to integrate just as much as the rationalists do. But it has to be on an empirical, perceptual basis to which you reduce all your integrations. See, that's where objectivism is in contrast to both. That's an excellent question, but I was trying to be a man of honor and not raising that. Anybody else? Do you get an idea of what I was going to say, what I'm talking about? Do you get an idea of the all pervasiveness of integration and specifically the importance of being able to distinguish the levels within an argument or a discourse, what's primary, what's secondary, and so on. Now we can't quantify those levels. I mean, I wish I could say this is on the fourth level and that's on the first. So you skip three. But you know, so much of it is contextual and so much of it there are options that there's no way that I know to quantify. But in gross terms, such as the examples we used, you certainly can make those essential distinctions and level. And that is really crucial to being able to think clearly and both in your own positive thinking. If you're creating an idea that you know what it depends on and that you then build on that and on that, and you can see the hierarchy of your own conclusions and polemically when you're fighting someone else, that you can be tuned into what they're doing when they reverse or ignore hierarchies. So these things have tremendous practical application as well as being just simply important. Theoretically. We still have about five minutes, so if. Yes, okay, in the last few minutes, if there's no if there's nothing right on this topic, you can feel free to browse. More generally, Yes. Do I have any thoughts on how to solve the problem of induction or where to proceed? I have thoughts, but I'm not going to do it. And I tell you that flatly because in my opinion, and I say opinion, the ultimate solution that is, would be the one able to explain what are the criteria that you could apply in practice that will distinguish valid scientific hypotheses from invalid ones that will tell you when you can justify certain kinds of generalizations and when you can't we can do that on a certain level today. But the ultimate thing will require, in my opinion, three tremendous routes. Put it this way, Number one, the person would have to know thoroughly the history of science, because there would be a tremendous temptation to get involved in rationalism here and say, since the generalization is so and so, and since the concept is so and so, therefore, and that will not work, you have to know the actual structure of scientific development from Aristotle to the present and from, you know, the Renaissance, through Newton, through Einstein, etc. And see what is it exactly they do, where, if at all, did they go wrong. Obviously in some places they've gone wrong because they're coming out with maniacal things now. But obviously that also will be for you a whole proving ground of what depended on what. When was something shaky that you didn't know but subsequently discovered. What does the process of generalizing really consist of? But you'd have to know that so. So intimately, as intimately as I know chairs and tables. So when I talk about forming the concept of furniture, I'm completely at home. But if I knew nothing except grapes and bananas and then you handed me a type definition of tables that start to lecture, I'd be completely lost. And that's the way anybody would be an induction if they don't know intimately the history of science. The other thing you would have to know is higher mathematics. Now, Ayn Rand was convinced that the final full grasp of the proper understanding of human epistemology lay in higher mathematics. She was actually studying it at the time of her death. She felt that her, as I said in my book, that although her theory of concepts was proven, it wasn't completed, that there were many, many more principles tying in the conceptual consciousness to the mathematical consciousness than she was able to identify in her lifetime. And she had leads from all over, from algebra, from differential equations. She was very concerned to learn that field thoroughly because she was at home with the amount she knew, and she felt that she would get tremendous insight into the solution to problems of knowledge from that. And the third field was neurology. She was also extremely interested in neurology, and she did not believe that you could ultimately explain the nature of human consciousness and its functioning without understanding something about the brain and its functioning. And she was particularly fascinated about. I'm so ignorant of it that I can't even remember, but there's some. I'm afraid to put this into language. Anybody who knows neurology will jump on me. But there's some mechanism in the neurological system which is either or and can't be a degree. It's either on or it's off. And it was like a neurological analog to the law of the excluded middle. And she thought that was really fascinating. She wanted to hear. She talked to neurologists professional about exactly how that works, is it modifiable, etc. And so on. And I do believe that if she had lived another 30 years, she would have become a specialist in math and neurology and put it together with what and science and put it together with what she knew of epistemology and that that would have been a massive new breakthrough. But she didn't live that long. And I won't even start because I'm very aware that it took me 4, 40 years to understand as much as she said. And to do this program that I've just outlined, you'd have to be at least 18, you know, to start. I mean, you couldn't be much older than that because by the time you learned everything necessary, you'd be getting very gray. So this is far beyond my powers just in terms of age alone, let alone interest. That's not what I have in mind to do with my life. But this is what I personally think would be necessary if you're to have a comprehensive final solution to these problems of induction and theory formation that is not simply rationalistic or out of context or partial. I don't know if that gives you hope in the sense of pointing a direction or dismay in the sense of equating the solution with omniscience, but that is the best I can do. I can take one short question in conclusion. Yes, Christina. Deduction is a form of applying a generalization to a particular and it can relate to you say, how does it relate to horizontal integration? In every way the premises have to be checked out against everything else you know, and the conclusion has to be checked out against everything you know. Thus, all men are mortal. Sockets is a man. Socrates is mortal. That premise, all men are mortal, can only be validated, as I stated in the, in the lecture, by integrating it with a tremendous number of observations in other fields, all living entities and the behavior of machinery and facts of aging, etc. Similarly, even suppose you do that and you say all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. I would say you have got to be able to integrate what you know about Socrates with that. Now you have to. You can't be credulous. It doesn't mean, you know, you accept any soothsayer statement that he's 900 years old, you know because people can make up lies all over the place but if you observe, if you happen to observe that Socrates just went on and on, you know, forever and ever and ever and from grandfather to grandson it was handed on that Socrates is mortal but he's still around you say, you know I can't I grant you that this conclusion follows deductively from the premise but I have to integrate the fact that Socrates never dies. You see that's what I would call a horizontal at that point it's not you're not deducing it but it's a fact. Now we don't in fact have any such data but you have to be amenable to it doesn't mean you have to say it's possible it means you have to continuously roll over the totality so that whenever you say anything the PS is this comports with the totality of my knowledge. And with that thought we will conclude for today. Thank you very much.