"Question & Answer Session 2" by Leonard Peikoff

Good morning. This is the last session of conceptual conferences for me in this year and we have an unbroken two hours of questions with no theme from me. Now, even though I asked for no written questions, two or three came in in a form that was hard to say no to, one lengthy one in particular dealing with statistics, which I'm going to defer until I've had more coffee and feel more motivated to answer. So let's leave that topic out for now. I also have an interesting clipping about something tangentially related to the course to read part of to you, but I think let's just plunge in now, taking the course as a whole and asking questions that you feel will either clarify, connect, apply, whatever. Linda, I was hoping you would tell.

Us about your experience teaching philosophy to.

Kira's first grade class. Oh, well, that's a planted question, but I didn't think you were going to ask that until quarter after 12. Well, I would say, have you, most of you heard of this or not? I was. Oh, the question was I'm supposed to repeat the question. So what I tell about my experiences lecturing on philosophy to my daughter Kira's class, which I did at the request of her teacher and with Kira's approval because I didn't want to embarrass her by showing up as her father unless she wanted to. And I asked the teacher how much time. These are six and seven year olds, grade one and two. It's a Montessori type class, but within a public school, so it's kind of an experiment out in California. And I asked how much time would I have? And she said, well, their attention span is about eight minutes. So I prepared what I thought was an eight minute talk covering just two points. What is philosophy? And I really only could get in what is metaphysics? And then what is the basic difference between Plato and Aristotle? And I thought I could get that into six or seven year olds in eight minutes. Well, it turned out I had a lot longer than eight minutes because those kids sat transfixed for 40 minutes, which was really amazing. They sat still. They were all clustered at my feet. They didn't sit in chairs like that. They were all right. You looked straight down. And they had no inhibitions about asking questions. And I find a very good way, if I say so myself, of explaining to them what philosophy was by making it strictly quantitative, which is not perfectly exact, but nevertheless something they could understand in their context. I said, you, I first explained philo sophia means love of wisdom, like philois crema would mean love of Ice cream and so on. And. Then the question is, what is Sophia? What is wisdom? And I just told him, wisdom is big knowledge. So if you know how many chairs there are in this room, that's little knowledge. But if you know all about, you know, the city where you're in Irvine, and all about California, you're getting bigger and bigger. Now, what do you think is the biggest thing you see, that would. That would make it real wisdom if you knew. And I kept putting everything they said on the board. We got past the Earth and the stars and the solar system and the galaxies and everything is the biggest thing. They said, yeah, they could see that that's what philosophy studies, everything you see. And that went over very easily. And they thought that was really intriguing that they'd never studied everything before. So then I just put Plato and Aristotle to them in terms of how do you. What should be your understanding of everything? And Plato thinks it had to come from something still earlier, and that's where religion comes from. And Aristotle said, it's silly to say it comes from something earlier because where did the earlier thing come from? And so on. So he said, we just have to start with, this is it, and that's Aristotle. So he's not religious. And they took this absolutely straight. I mean, I guess you could say this was propaganda, but I tried not to reveal where I stood. And I said to them, I'm not going to tell you whose side I take, but I definitely agree with one of those, not the other. And Kirk calls out from the side, aristot. Anyway, I had a very, very favorable impression of these children. I enjoyed that class more than any college class I have ever taught. They were perfectly straight, sincere. There was no hostility, there was no act. They took it really seriously and straight. And the kind of charming naivete that the straightforwardness is best illustrated by the fact at one point they asked me, I had brought a copy of my book in to show them, you know, what a book looks like from an author with my picture on it and everything. And they asked, is it hard to get a book published? And I said, well, it depends. I said, one of my books, I sent 12 publishers, and it was rejected and sent back each time. And finally the 13th accepted it. So the teacher rushed in and said, I just have to interrupt here, class. What does that tell you about Dr. Peacock? That he submitted his manuscript 12 times and it was rejected. Rejected. And he still did it again. And this little boy, they looked a little baffled. This little boy put up his hand. She said, yes, he Said he doesn't think. I just about fell off the chair. That is without a doubt the best comment I ever. So in any event, he finally changed his mind after intensive discussion. And then the teacher sent the kids out to interview the grade six students who are the oldest ones in their school, and to find out who knew more about Plato and Aristotle. They the grade one students or the grade six. And they came rushing back and said, we know more about Aristotle than the grade six kids who never even heard of him. And they were so proud of this achievement. And the next day, they actually. Teacher had them write a letter to me, each one saying what they got out of the lecture. And then they bound the letters into a volume, which is really one of the most touching things, because the feeling was so sincere. And yet they didn't have the language. They didn't know the word philosopher. So they said, you're the nicest philosophy man I ever met. You know, it was altogether a highly favorable experience. Does that answer your question? All right, now something a little more directly. Yes.

What were Ayn Rand's five editing steps? You said you did eight.

Oh, I don't think she. What were Ayn Rand's five editing steps, she did not have five steps as though she went through for content first and structure second and anything like that. She was much more professional than that. Everything on each step. That is, if she read it over, she would still grasp. What if there's an essential problem? She would stop editing. But if she felt that the essentials were in place, Dagny was saying the right thing with the right feeling at the right time, then she would be looking for lesser things at that time. Could she have made a basis for that? Prepared it better? Does it go on too long? Would it be completely intelligible if you read it objectively, without knowing what's coming next? Is there a beat needed after it to make it stand out, or do you want it to go fast? You see what I mean? And then she did the whole thing in iambic pentameter, basically, you know, so she had to keep adjusting the rhythm and the flow of it. And she would write it, I would say once, with two editings to get it exact in content and structure. And then it would be typed, and then she would start making smaller changes the fourth and the fifth time. And of course, the last time she read it, it's in conjunction with the whole, because as I myself found, any one chapter, you can get to the state where you're completely satisfied. And it's not until you read it part of the total book rapidly that a formulation in chapter two suddenly strikes you as possibly conflicting with something in chapter 10, but you'd long ago forgotten two. So you have to pull the two out and look at them side by side. And either you see you really did contradict yourself enough to make up your mind, or you have to reword one or both so that the question doesn't come up anymore, you see, you change the aspect. So there is a. There is one reading that's necessary absolutely non stop from beginning to end where you don't even dare make the correction. Just put a check on the page that something occurred to you and you keep going fast because the idea is to try to keep the total in your mind, you see. And then the galleys is your last chance to do that. The galleys bring out more corrections because the galleys is cold print and it's not your computer or your typewriter anymore. And consequently you. There's an alienation, a feeling that the world is just about to take it away. So now you've got to look at it one more time, even more brutally, because you're not going to be there to make any further corrections, you know. And then if you get to page proofs and you do it one more time, then you're. At least in the old days it used to be resorted to have to resort to killing widows. You know, the last little bit of a line that went over onto the next line of three or four letters was called a widow. And in the old days, I don't think this is true with computers anymore. But in the old days, if you wanted to change a word in the body of a paragraph and it was too long for that line, you had to catch up by the end of the paragraph. So you had to kill the widow so you'd have the room to put the extra words in. And I sat with Ms. Rand many, many times where we knew exactly what she wanted to say in an article and it was two letters too long. And then there was a question of how to get two letters out. And sometimes it would take two hours to just figure out how to kill two letters. That's what you call widow editing. I think technology has surpassed that now. I don't think computers do that anymore. But that was a really valuable skill. There were people who could edit widows. I guess they must have died out now. So that's the best I can say. She had a whole set of criteria of how she would edit, but she didn't do one all the way through or the other all the way through. She was focused at first on the essence, that is, the content and the structure. And then as soon as that was okay, it would be emotional overtones or, you know, rhythm, grammar, all the lesser things, repetition. And she got to the point where she could do everything in one glance through. Okay, that's a good question, because that's a writing question. Unfortunately, I didn't have a good answer for you. Yes, I wonder if you could say.

Something about teaching creativity, like aesthetic creativity, the way you.

Well, could I say something about teaching creativity the way I have in this course in thinking? I don't think I could. In fact, I have gravedoes that anybody can teach creativity as such. Because creativity is the process of producing something new, unprecedented. Nothing came before it. Some mind took a leap or made a connection and made an integration that nobody else saw. Now, if you could give a recipe in advance for doing that, you either have to see it or you'd have some kind of incredible rationalistic construct about what must be done in order to get from one to the other. Now, all I can from the old to the new, all I can say is you have to think, you know, appropriately. And the essence of creativity is integration is connecting something to something new that hasn't been connected before. So the terrific amount of human progress consists of new connections between things previously known. And somebody once said poetry is really the essence of poetry is two words kissing that never came together before. So that's another form of integration that gives you a poetic ring, you see. But as far as creativity is concerned, I don't believe you can't teach it as such. You can teach a person to think, and if you're a psychiatrist, you can give him motivation, but he's got to use it to take that next jump. Otherwise you would be prescribing the unprescribable. You see, Now, I'm very much opposed in grade school in the attempts to teach kids creativity because I think that you cannot be creative till you have something to be creative about. You have to know reality, you have to know math, you have to know spelling, you have to know facts before you can start to project combinations that don't exist into the world of the imagination. I think it's very dangerous to try to train the imagination in going beyond reality before you've grasped reality. And that's one of the worst things about progressive education, is that they teach the kids fantasy right off the bat so that they'll be, quote, independent. And of course, the Result of that is that they become tremendous dependents on the rest of the class and on the teachers, because they have no access to reality on their own and they know they can't live by their fantasies. They're completely lost. I would prohibit organized creativity until the kids are at least in their teens. If they want to do it at home to write a story or whichever, okay. But I would first want to make sure they know what they're doing, they're in touch with reality, and they read widely, so they get an idea of what kind of things people do and then let creativity develop spontaneously. But nothing is worse than classes and creativity, both the people who teach them and the ones who think it can be taught to them. That's my viewpoint, yes. Talking about creativity, what do you think about lessons of Debono? What about Debono? You didn't the border. Did you say creativity? Debono. A man named Debono. I've never heard of him. I'm sorry, I thought you meant Latin of the good. But I don't know him. I'm sorry. If you want to summarize his viewpoint. Yes.

This question is about Lecture one, the volitional disintegration of an irrational context by.

Suppressing or at least mistaken. Yeah. Okay. And my question is, if you haven't.

Heard the question before, by what process do you determine that that question comes from the irrational context? And how does that differ from identifying.

From identifying. It's undermined that premises? Well, if you are given a question that you never heard before, it may be difficult to know from what context it comes. Questions don't come wearing on their face, the context to which they belong. So I would never say, if you're given an unusual question and you don't know where it comes from, suppress it. I mean, that would certainly be invalid. You have to remember to apply the content of lecture one. You have to have worked for some time trying to master a correct context. You have to know that you've had a battle across time with this other context. And you have to know what kind of doubts this other context is generating. So if a question comes to you apropos of my lecture, you should right away be able to know if it fulfills those conditions. This is coming from the old context. You see, if somebody would say to you, suppose it's a new question, but it would be worded in such a way that it would tie in right away. He would say to me, bananas are mortal. Is that analytic or synthetic? Now, I never heard that question asked about Bananas before. But as soon as he says analytic or synthetic, I know he's trying to reinstitute that context. On the other hand, if he said, do you like Frankie Lane as a singer? I wouldn't immediately say, well, it must be to do with analytic, synthetic or what you try to do in a case like that is find out what is the context. Are you planning dance music? Is this a PR tour for San Diego for old singers, ex Brooklyn lakes? You know, what is your. What is what are you after? And you can get the context for a question very simply by asking, why do you ask? That's what people colloquially say, where are you coming from? And they mean by that, what's your context? So if you just ask it to them there in that way, they'll tell you the context. If you don't know, but you yourself have to recognize a question as necessarily flowing from an old and rejected context before you can simply say, I won't ask that. I'm not saying each time. Next, because logically speaking, if I'm just staring into space. Yes.

I'd like some clarification on the points of justice.

Justice was that in this courts. Well, it's okay, let's. Let's hear the question.

I know that the emphasis is on rewarding the good versus punishing the bad and I know, and I also am.

Comfortable with the fact that you're also uncomfortable.

No, I am comfortable.

I see. Okay.

With the fact of not wanting to deal with an unethical party or person.

Right.

There are times I want to get information or get some benefit from a partially unethical person. And I wonder if there's any guidelines you can give as to how do I not. How do I get the information? I have to deal with the person to get the information. I don't want to deal with them and yet I still want the information.

Can you be more specific of the kind of information you want? You want to know from a professor, the requirements of a grade, you want to know from immigration, the requirements for travel, you want to know from your school, your daughter's teacher, the requirements for her being promoted. What do you want to know?

This is a case of scientific information. Environmentalism.

And who do you want to get it from?

Any particular person?

Yeah. Mr. X. He's done some private experiments. Is that the idea? It's not published.

No, he's not. He's just a reporter of experiments and.

He happens to have the data on certain experiments. And you want that data for what?

My own education?

Well, you don't intend to make any.

Use of it, form opinions, understand the.

Well and why. Why is it that he won't give you that data just because you ask him?

Oh no, that's not the problem. He, he's selling the data. But I don't, I am uncomfortable with trying to buy it.

Why?

Because I have reason to believe that he's been unethical in other areas. And so that's my conflict.

Well, I don't know what the reason to believe is. The principle here is this. You can sit down. I get the idea. First of all, the fact that somebody is selling material pertaining to a corrupt viewpoint has no bearing on whether it was just or not to pay him for the information. I may very well want a report on what Marxism was like in Russia. And the communists who are over there may have the best report there is, full of inside documentation. If I'm going to use that to expose them, I certainly have no problem whatever with buying that, particularly now that they're no longer a threat. I don't put ecologists yet in the category of traders. T R A I T O R S. I mean, I think they're monstrous, but they haven't yet sold out to a foreign power. And consequently, if you know that some of them has data that he is legitimately entitled to sell, I don't know why he wouldn't just give it away to any newspaper. But if, and you're that eager to get it, I don't know why you would, because it's going to be all nonsense anyway. But assuming all that, the fact that he has been unethical in other instances is irrelevant. On one trade with one person, you are not responsible for the person's past history. If you were, that would mean that when you went into A and P to buy a loaf of bread, you would have to conduct extensive interviews with the checkout lady and the manager and Huntington Hartford and you know, the whole business to find out are you sanctioning immorality along the way? The principle here is innocent till proven guilty and it's no business investigating unless you have ground. Now if you went into the A and P and you see the checker standing there with a blood stained knife, you know, and Khrushchev in the back is distributing the loaves, then you'd have to say I better check into this. And the same is true here. What do you know about this person? Is his unethicalness simply that he writes and works for the environmental cause people, which probably would be the case. If so you have to Say to yourself, if I have some use for this information, I'm not going to get it except from somebody who's in that wing. So they would have the same problem as far as they want to expose Objectivism. And they can only get it by speaking to Objectivists. Now the thing I think would be corrupt would be if you have to misrepresent in order to get something from them and then break your promise. It's not that dealing with them on that level is bad. This is what happened to me. For instance, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sent a reporter down to California to interview me for a program called I Think Ideas. And he said that on the 10th anniversary of Ms. Rand's death, which was a few months ago, they wanted to run a one hour special that would just consist of me and Professor Ridpath presenting her ideas because they thought it was time that she get, you know, a fair hearing. After 10 years and making an egregious error of logical deduction, I decided that if he's Canadian, the chances are more likely that he would be honest. I didn't even require it in writing, which was a terrible racist comment on my part. In any event, he conducted a mediocre interview and then broadcast a two hour show of which, so I understand, I never heard it, I got about three minutes and he dug up out of the woodwork something like 12 or 15 of her enemies and gave them a limited time to denounce her. Now that is truly, you know, a breach of contract, oral and implicit. That is an out and out corrupt lie. And I wrote him that in 40 years of dealing with the American media, which are so maligned in Canada, I have never encountered as heinous and vicious an action as the Canadians performed. And I see now that there is no vestige of morality left in the country. And I said a few quieter things than that, but you see, that would be wrong. But if you just want information from someone and you're not thereby sanctioning everything he believes, so you can't, you can't go that way. Did you want to add something, Harry? Yes.

I wanted to know what your opinion was. If the person wants to buy it from. Is a public enemy of Objectivism is attacked by random friend.

Well, if that's. You didn't give me that context. If somebody is a public enemy, let's put it broader than Objectivism, if somebody is a public avowed enemy of something that you consider a major value, it can be a philosophy you belong to, it can be even a club you belong to that's an avocation, A wife, a child, you know, a presidential candidate that you've pinned your hopes and future to something that you consider a major value, then I would never support anybody who is publicly trying to attack or destroy it. It's not unique to objectivism or Iran. The question I would want to ask is I want this information from this person to promote my values. If in the process I have to give him more than I'm going to get, that is the little extra data I'm going to get for political purposes is going to be outweighed by the money and endorsement and sanction I give him, that I'm losing in the procedure, and I wouldn't do it. Now, I will tell you, though, you have to do that calculation honestly, and I have done things that might astound you on the basis of that kind of calculation and sometimes have been very wrong. But I'll give you just an example which I had a discussion with Ms. Rand and she, in effect, gave me permission. I was crazy about a certain composer, Emmerich Kalman, and still am. I think he's the best of the European operetta composers by far, and he was her favorite also. One of his operators was the one that Kyra in We the Living was crying when she was listening to. And it happens to be the case with operators from that period that the farther east you go, the better their performance. Americans are absolutely abysmal. British are medium lousy, Austrian and German are okay, Hungarian is much better, and the Russian is superlative the performance, because they just froze everything in 1920 and said, no changes from here. So they're still doing it over there the way they did in 1920. And there were operas of his that I had already in German and French and English, and they were all, you know, nothing much. And I was dead set on getting the Russian version. This is at the height of the Cold War. And I asked Mr. Ben, will you make any case to justify sending the money over, in effect, to abet butchery? And she said, I can make one case. And I was ready to take any case at that point. She said, you are devoting all your time and energy to fighting the Communists, directly or indirectly. If you could honestly say that the inspiration that you would get from hearing this music would be so great that you would do even more than you would otherwise, then you're still winning in the trade. Whereas if you feel you're perishing in a void of junk and there's nothing even to listen to to excite you to keep you going, do it. She said. And get me a copy too. She said. So I actually have his most famous opera in Russian now. I think that's enough for that type of question. You're getting us way off into morality and justice and dealing with people. Let's go back to thought, Christina. When you integrate a more specific principle, more general, for example, force causes destruction.

Is an example of cause and effect. When you integrate it to the more general, what process are you following?

I mean, is it.

I don't think it's induction. I mean, is it deduction? Is it horizontal integration?

It's actually in that case deduction. When you take. She's saying, when you integrate a narrow principle to a broader one, what process are you using? And she says the narrow principle is the one we took. Force causes destruction. And the broader principle is the law of cause and effect, of which that says is an instance. First of all, cause and effect is not arrived at by generalization from force causes deduction. Cause and effect is a corollary of identity. You hold that implicitly as soon as you grasp that certain things act in certain ways. And you may never get to the conscious formulation of it. So it's not as though you start in politics and economics and whatever and whatever, get a whole bunch of lower scale and then induce you have that as soon as you. Because of its philosophic fundamentality, as soon as you're able to articulate at all, if you reach that degree of philosophicality. So when you see. It's exactly the same principle as when you see a man. How you apply the issue of man. You say man is such and such. He is this, he is a man. Causality is such and such. The principle of force is an example. Therefore it's a principle of causality. That's all. It's just the application in that instance. And any application of a broader to a narrower is deduction. Yes.

When a writer does not use familiar words such as individual rights, freedom, etc. How does one proceed to decipher what it really means? Given that you can't go to predispose.

Well, does Kant use the words individual rights? I don't remember him using individual rights. He probably uses rights more. Alright, but I can't claim that I read it within the last lifetime, so I don't, you know, the last generations. I can't remember. It was so long ago. But it doesn't sound like him. But let's take your question more broadly. If a writer uses a phrase like free enterprise or individual Rights or absolute certainty or whatever, which the rest of his writing makes impossible. That is, by everything else he has said he should be against this thing. How do you interpret him? Well, there's only two possibilities. He's lying or he's in contradiction. He's lying in the sense that he's using those phrases for the boobs to make them think he's for freedom or certainty or whichever, while actually undercutting them. So it's just like a come on. Or he's confused. He's sincerely confused. He doesn't see that he can't have both. In which case, it's up to you to show that. If you say, for instance, on the one hand, the senses are valid, you can't say you're certain. If you say nothing exists but the whole, you can't say. Then there's individuals who have rights, you see, that's all it would be. But in any given case, it's very hard to judge. You'd have to read the works of the person, and you'd have to see what motif predominates. And what is the purpose of this reference. Is it unthinking? Is he smuggling? What is he doing? Yes. Tim, you had a group of objectives.

Over when you wrote the report of paragraphs. Some professors have talked over there.

Yeah. How did you integrate that into your.

Writing process in terms of.

I mean, was it just for their pleasure? Did you learn from it?

Was it important for the process?

Oh, well, I had a class which we called the class of 91. I'm going to tell you the question. This was the question. I had a class which met at my home in California once a month. For how long? About two, three years, basically starting when I thought I had finished the book. So that must have been about 87 or 88 and lasting until I actually had finished the epilogue, which was sometime in 90, I think. And they came once a month. There was about 12, 15 people. They weren't all professors. There were some PhD candidates and there were doctors of medicine, and there was a real estate. A realtor, and there were some professors, and there was a district attorney or, you know, sort of a mix. Not a district attorney, but, yeah, he worked for the district attorney. And there was a. There was a mix. I was curious to see who would get what and what would be clear and what wouldn't be. And they were eager to see the book. So it was a trade of that kind. They would get a chapter a month in advance, and then they would read it and get to mark it all up. And then we would just go over one sentence at a time. Now, I enjoyed it because it was the first public survey of the book as a whole. I had given lots of it in one shot, lectures here and there. But this is the first time. We started at the very beginning, worked all the way to the very end. And, you know, we got to have a certain camaraderie after coming. Month after month, I got regular suggestions for improving the formulations. And Peter, what would you say? What ratio of suggestions was I amenable to, as opposed to those I rejected? I took about 1 in 50 of these suggestions. The others, I thought, that's their unique context, you know. And I even took a vote a couple of times. How many think this sentence makes it clearer or unclear. And they split right down the middle. So I realize, you know, that you can't do that. But there was, in fact, Peter was responsible for one small change. Peter laporte, because he was absolutely baffled by the beginning of one sequence he couldn't imagine. This was in chapter one, why I went there next. And at first I took, you know, sort of a standard huffy attitude. But then anytime I hear of criticism, it percolates, you know, And I usually see it the next day. And I suddenly saw from the point of view of why he didn't see and what needed to be done. And I just rewrote the opening sentence, and then it flowed completely smoothly. Now, things like that, if somebody that's intelligent and conscientious absolutely doesn't get something and a one change of a minuscule kind that I myself think is better, you know, turns it from chaos to clarity. I don't mind that kind of editing that I was open to right to the very end. But then there was other people who shall be nameless who were very helpful, but who wrote in long suggestions for changes when I was past the point where I could psychologically withstand any further changes. So it was either a matter of go on living and publish it or stop everything. So I'm just kidding. But, you know, there's a point to which you just can't go on anymore. And I reached it on that book. I really reached the point where I could not make another change physically. I just couldn't. I couldn't keep the context. I didn't have the motivation. I would rather have gone and see a horror movie than improve the book. Does that answer your question? Yeah, what I was going to say. We cannot weigh ahead and trade what we got. You could. We came out way ahead. Oh, you. They should. Well, I don't know. It was fun. Yeah.

As a follow up, any of these.

Questions that you did not use to make changes indicate areas of further work that might come out? Oh yes. Very often the questions were extension or application to other fields, other areas. And I, you know, I was very cautious on cutting things out because my overriding goal was to get Objectivism within one volume and not, you know, one of these multi small print volumes. Because that was my assignment as I saw it in history, is to reduce this in scale so that every point is like a miniature and the total reproduces the exact structures within Objectivism. And if you start to bloat one, then the whole thing is gone. So I had to take a tremendous amount that I wrote out. Now you say would it go into a later book? I doubt it at this time because is just boxes and boxes of scraps with the idea. You know, you mark on it someday or maybe later or something like that. And then when you look at it a year or two later, it doesn't seem that consequential. Yes.

Would you be willing to share some.

Of these notes with a PhD candidate who could write a thesis on some of these things? You find me a PhD Department of Philosophy in this country that would allow such a topic and I guarantee to provide the notes and I mean give the guy his PhD at the very back.

Diana, this question stems from your first lecture on volition.

Yes.

It's in radial context. The idea deoghmetized an emotional response by remembering holding each. Your volition? Yeah, you know, to cling to the non truth in the face of doubts. I generalized that and I think a lot of people did it because it seemed applicable to more than just intellectual material. It seemed applicable to your whole life really and dealing with deduction. But there's one case in which it seems rather confusing and this is a.

Little bit off the subject.

So I feel willing to talk about.

It if I can. Go ahead. Because once you're going into psychology, you're leaving my field. But I'll do what I can. Yeah.

What about the case where your emotional response is relevant to determining your truth? How do I think about your response to evil?

Right.

Maybe a romantic partner or a friend, something like that. Your emotional response is to that.

Well, you better let me say something right about that because this could be a disastrous misinterpretation. If I understand you, if I don't, forgive me, but I want to at least squelch this interpretation. You're saying I said if intellectual Questions keep haunting you, even though you know clearly that they come from a context that's false and you can prove the valid context. At a certain point, you have to just say to hell with these questions and that they will then atrophy in time. It does not follow from that that if you have an emotion that's very strong or personal built into your psychology and you take therapy or objectivism, you discover that the emotion that you would like to have is the exact opposite of that. It does not follow that you can get rid of that emotion the same way you get rid of the bad intellectual context by just saying no to it. Remember, ideas are within your mind's power. Particularly when you have the proof that a certain idea is true and you compare it to the other. You have the power to say, no, I know this is wrong. Emotions are the result of automatized evaluations that take a long, long time to trace and don't express themselves in anything so simple as the universe always had to exist. You know, they're not isolated intellectual confusions. They very often, particularly you're talking about romantic love can go back to your earliest experiences and you can have a strong desire for a kind of man that intellectually you don't like. And yet you find your mind tells you, this is a terrific guy. In a situation like that, if you try to apply the advice that I gave and just say no to that emotion, all you're going to do is repress, won't disintegrate on its own. It's not a set of ideas that you're countering with another idea. It's a strong emotion which you're saying, I don't like. And that per se, will not work. The only way that will work is if you first translate it out of the emotional into the intellectual sphere, say after a certain amount of therapy. You see that I'm just schematizing simply. You see that the emotion for this type of man that you want to get rid of actually comes from the fact that when you were young, you felt uncertain and insecure and you thought that a man with thick eyebrows would take care of you. Okay, so what this. I mean, I'm just giving you this. What this experience actually is, is amounts to an emotional reaffirmation of that idea. If you actually get to see that, and it's never that simple, then when it comes up, you have to tell yourself the conflict is normal eyebrows versus thick ones, and do I need them in order to survive? You don't focus on the emotion. You Focus on that which led to it. You can't do anything about an emotion as such. You focus on that which led to it. Insofar as you see clearly that it's wrong by juxtaposition with an intellectual context that you see is right. Once you get it on that level and you still say, well, those eyebrows mean so much that you can suppress because you know now. But the passion for the man is not going to go away until all the roots of it are gone and until you supplant it with something else. Am I answering you or not?

Yeah, that's kind of where I was coming from. Assuming that you've done that kind of work and you know the root of your emotional. You don't agree with conscious reality, your conscious view of reality then. But you still have these old emotions. And since emotions are key to relationships, it seems like that's one case where you really couldn't just deautomatize.

Well, you couldn't deautomatize an emotion by simply saying no, even if you thoroughly understand the roots. But the problem is in this idea of thoroughly understanding the roots and the state of psychology today. Psychotherapists can give you some knowledge of the roots of your emotions. They can certainly make it. Make them partly understandable, make it to some extent easier. I do not believe the science has reached the point where even within the realm of neurosis, they can give an explanation all the way down that would explain how you ended up with a certain kind of desire. I just don't think that scientific knowledge exists. And therefore, in most people, if they have very strong emotions formed very young, will have a lifelong struggle to. If they don't repress, you see, you could get rid of an emotion by turning yourself into a vegetable. But if you don't repress, it'll be many, many, many, many years. It's absolutely not like I'll just stop asking how long the universe existed because everything and all your experiences feed into it. Whereas the type of context I was talking about is usually instilled in you by some teacher or older kid or professor who's corrupt. And it just enters and you can kick it out, you see. But the type of context you're talking about could be so fundamental to your whole development that you would need a therapist and a degree of knowledge that just doesn't exist today. I think a whole theory of the nature of human personality and of what issues are formed in what order, and of what issues have to be deformed or unformed in what order would be essential. And I also incline to think I'm not speaking here as Ayn Rand's alter ego, but just as myself. I incline to think that there's a bigger role for medication in a lot of persistent emotional problems than I used to think. And that doesn't counter the fact that emotions come from premises. But you are one integrated total. And there's all kinds of evidence that medications in certain cases, enable a person to be much more receptive to the right ideas. So in other words, I'm trying to say, to put it briefly, psychotherapy is a very complicated and difficult field. We're in its infancy now. And you could not make this simple application? Well, just the way you say no to one of these out of context intellectual things, I'll say no to an emotion. You can't do it. You can say, I won't act on it. But to get to the point where you have transformed your personality is a heroic feat in today's world, with psychology and psychiatry being in the state they're in. I don't know if I've answered you or not, but at least I don't want to be too depressing and I don't want to be too hopeful. Yes.

In all your discussions with academic philosophers over here, what are the reasons they give for not accepting.

In all my discussions with academic philosophers over the years, what are the reasons they give for not accepting objectivism as an academic philosophy? Well, it would be better if they would say, you know, I have three reasons why I don't accept it. They don't accept anything written in fiction. They don't accept anything written in nonfiction that refers to anything written in fiction. This is the guild psychology, you know, they don't accept anything clearly written. No, no, but I mean a specific thing. They. The only type of thing they respect in quotes is convolutions within convolutions. You know, like one line of text across the top and all the rest a running footnote, and each footnote filled with foreign citations and so on. You know, all of the paraphernalia of the unintelligible scholarship, you see what I'm saying? So objectivism comes to them in a form and by a method. The very fact, I think what disqualifies objectivism more than any other thing is the issue of thinking in essentials. See, that's what they are most passionately against. I don't think they could care less. If you were for egoism, if you were for capitalism, if you were for atheism, if you were for reason, and called it that there's no censorship by content, but what it is is they regard thinking in essentials as inherently corrupt. They call it superficial, simplistic, etc. And they want every point that anyone could dream of needing to be chewed to become the subject of a chapter. That's the level on which they function. And consequently they're tremendously convoluted because you can never abstract what they're saying because they don't want to say it's. I, at a younger day, took an article out of my doctoral dissertation which was already screwed up, you know, to fulfill their requirements. But I took one little article out of it just because I kept. Everybody said, you never get anywhere if you don't have publications. So I took out one article and I sent it to a philosophic journal in Berkeley, and they kept it for several months and they sent it back. Projected with it was about 20 pages with the reader's comment. You know, they give it to outside readers. And this had a lengthy evaluation. I don't remember the wording, but the idea was, this is a brilliant idea, but he has to make a book out of it. See, the 20 pages to them is just like a table of contents because every line is the beginning of a war. You know, if you ever read G.E. moore, he'd say, let us begin by saying that there is a hand in front of me. Now, in front does not have to mean directly in front. It can be in front and to the side. Now, how far to the side? That's a question we'll have to postpone for the present. But let us assume that it is between 43 degrees on this side and 42 degrees on this side. Now, is the front or the back to me, I don't think that'll make any difference. But in order not to bias the outcome, I'll have one hand to the front and one hand to the back. Now, if a person had nine fingers, he would of course, have different hands. So I will restrict my conclusions only to these hands. Of course, I don't know that they are hands yet, but they seem to be hands. So let's put down at this point that they will do as hands until real hands come along. Now, this goes on page after page after page after page. And the last conclusion, you know, you know, I don't know, 40, 60, 80 pages later is they really looked like hands. And this is called A Defense of Common Sense was the title of his essay. So that's the mentality. You see what I mean? That if you even open your mouth. You know, Ayn Rand's sentence from the Fountainhead, the sound perception of an ant doesn't include thunder. I always thought that was a brilliant line. They could not hear what she has to say, because if she came in and said, existence exists, the first thing they would say is, what do you mean by X? X instance. Is that different from sub cistence, pre sistence? Couldn't we have had a word ob systems? Are you prepared to let the cyst go and just make it existence? And then how would that differ from essence? I mean, if you do that, you're a philosopher, and if you don't do that, you're not a philosopher. That's it. And since I won't do that, that's it. Does that come from Kant? I think that comes from depravity. Now, Kant laid the deepest groundwork for that by making unanswerable all important questions. This is what people do once there's nothing left to do. So Kant, I give him enough credit to say, would not have taken part in philosophy today. He would have been disgusted by it, you know, because he was still on the level of can we grasp necessity? And where does the order of the world come from? And so what's the basic values by which we should live? His legacy led to the gradual shrinking. Where to now they're just, you know, shysters and kibbitzers is putting it too mildly because they have nothing to do. The only legitimate forums they ever conduct is what should philosophy do now that there's nothing left to ask, you know, that they talk about periodically. But you're seeing the end. You see the death of the subject that can't go anywhere else. And it's just breaking up right now. But that's why what you basically need is some historical line, say that's over. Like, you know, the Renaissance, the medieval part is over now. This part is over now we're starting again. And somebody was saying the other day, if only we could find Atlas Shrugged in the Egyptian desert, written by Aristotle, you know, and bring it back, then it would be great. But don't tell me if you plant it, it has to be written in ancient Greek too. Yeah, okay, Glenn, on a very different.

Topic, is the concept fundamental more metaphysical than the concept essential and yet contextual? Is it valid to say that something is fundamental in one context?

Fundamental is definitely a metaphysical concept, as we have used it here because we mean that in reality, which is the cause of or leads to the derivatives. Now you can use fundamental as for instance, in math, where there's no causal connection, where it's just a logical or epistemological relationship. But if I say, for instance, rationality is fundamental and having a thumb is not, I'm definitely talking a causal relationship. And the causal relationship is metaphysical. It's still contextual because all knowledge is contextual, all inductive knowledge, and therefore that doesn't alter the fact. But it is true that of those terms fundamental is the easiest to have a purely metaphysical meaning. Essential is now essential. You know, words are defenseless. You can use essential in a metaphysical sense as meaning simply necessary. For it is essential to eat in order to live that states a causal or necessary condition. So I can't. You can't take any one word and say this one is epistemological, this is metaphysical. All you can do is create a context and say, this is the way I want to use this within this discussion.

So essentially for us, essential is epistemological.

Yes, essential is epistemological. Fundamental can be either, but is often characteristically metaphysical insofar as it invokes a causal relationship. John, I just wondered if I could.

Connect up with that. I've had students ask me, when you.

Are defining the man, you look for.

The essence of man, that you're looking.

For a metaphysically fundamental wrong, or you're looking for a fundamental characteristic. But it's not metaphysically fundamental in the sense that all of the other aspects of man are non significant or non essential or not part of his nature. You see, it's in that sense, if you take out rationality as the metaphysically fundamental, that's metaphysical in the sense that it really is true that that factor underlies and makes possible all of man's unique skills. But that doesn't mean that calling it essential is a metaphysical fact. The reason we pick it out and focus on it and call out the definition is because we need a way of getting a handle on and reducing to a unit all the things we know about man. So it's not that having 5, 10 fingers is less important or less part of man metaphysically, but it doesn't help us retaining what we know about man because we can't tie other things to it. Did you follow that? Now I think I'm going to tackle before our break this one on statistics, which I have here somewhere. I got a long heated question. I'm not going to read the whole length of it, but it amounts to. I'll read excerpts. Statistics is the science of probability, of dealing with aggregate data. True, it does not say anything about a specific individual, but it is based on actual real group data and is used to varying degrees by virtually every profession, business and science, and is crucial to their success. And then he gives the examples of medicine, psychology, manufacturing, physical. I'm not going to read all these examples. Maintenance of aircraft, I guess, insurance, marketing, economics. So we take for granted that in some of those at least, there are statistical that are used. And then what epistemological status does this quote information have? I take it that those are sarcastic quotation marks because I said it wasn't knowledge. It is not witchcraft, guesswork, mysticism or total ignorance. It works in enabling businesses and sciences to have some practical success. Otherwise they would fail. What do you call this? Aggregate knowledge? Partial knowledge, Data, Information? No, none of those. Now, I'm deliberately doing this before the break with the hope that you'll forget all about this topic when we come back. You can call statistics a science of probability. There's a lot more to statistics than just randomly counting and saying 8 out of 10 people get better from this medicine. I haven't a clue as to why. That's the type we were talking about about in our class. There is. I even took a course, believe it or not, on statistical the uses of statistics in sampling. And there was a type of qualified sampling which was much closer to legitimate induction than just random sampling. For instance, random sampling, you would just ask every fifth voter, who are you going to vote for? And just keep on going until you had reached 100 or 1,000, whatever, and then you say plus or minus x percent. But the other type that they had, which to me made a lot more sense, was they hypothesized in advance what were the factors that. Now I don't put myself forth as a statistical expert, but to me it made more sense. They hypothesized in advance what were the main factors that would determine a person's vote, like socioeconomic status, in other words, income, religion, part of the country in which he lived, age group, single or married, et cetera. And they know from observations that those factors are relevant. Not decisive, but they're relevant. And the more they know about a given individual, the more they come to demarcating him down to everything about him except his philosophy, which is going to dictate his vote. And since most people don't vote according to a philosophy, they don't have to do that. Now, you can get very exact predictions from this type of sampling. And I regard that as a primitive induction because it's not simply correlating data with no clue as to why you're hypothesizing in your very sampling method the factors that would account for the result. And if therefore you find that the people who live in Shaker Heights all vote for the Communist Party because they're all very wealthy, you have a causal connection there. Basically, it's understandable to you on the basis of your sampling what I was really. And then you would have the basis, if you were really scientifically interested, to investigate further and find out what are the role of all of these things? What is the role of philosophy? Is there any way to test for philosophy? And you'd remember that people have free will and therefore, although they can't act causelessly, they do have choice. And you wouldn't conduct a poll in April and decide that's going to be applicable in November. Well, that they already know. But you could on that basis construct already a theory of how people vote with a good deal of plausibility to it. So you would be in the field of knowledge and it would be very tricky to say when would you need enough knowledge to be certain, especially if the subject is volitional. Now, but that is not the type of thing I was talking about. That is like the beginning groping toward induction. I was talking about the truly unanalyzed random samples, like one out of every hundred, that's it, completely primitive. Now they have shown, and I know this from courses that I've taken, that practically speaking, in populations where you simply cannot find out what every individual thinks, if you ask every hundredth or every thousandth or every ten thousandth and you follow that ten thousandth guy to the ends of the earth, you know, because if you 9,999 and the 10,000th is away and you take the 10,000 first instead you wipe out the randomness of your sample. So you have to follow him around and become cumbersome and so on. But if you can do it and have a truly random sample, they can get results most of the time that are close enough to accurate to be able to act on. This is usually done when it would be impossibly expensive to interview every person or to ask everybody what they thought of a certain product and they need market research and feedback, etc. Now this kind of random sample I do not regard as immoral or even unnecessary. It's not an attack on anybody's self esteem if you're in the professions of providing it, but I do not regard it as knowledge. That doesn't mean it's mysticism knowledge. I agree with Aristotle, and I'm sure Ayn Rand does too. He says the two things there is to know about knowledge is that that something exists and why that it exists, and why some concrete all knowledge has to reduce down to that. Now, this random sample is oblivious to individuals. It doesn't know about individuals. It knows only about patterns among unknowns. That is not knowledge. It's a shortcut to predictions. And the best way I would, the best status I would give it is to say it's in the anteroom to induction. That is, you're gathering some data. One in a hundred people like President Kennedy, five of a hundred, think that he was too promiscuous. 94 of 100 never heard of him. Now there is some data there which could become knowledge about human beings, but it's not at that stage because you have no idea why that distribution, what does it show? Is the one that likes him psychotic or born in Massachusetts? Or, you know, what are all the possible explanations and how can you make sense of this data? When you start to try to explain it, to integrate it, to theorize what could connect it to the rest of what we know, then you can say, I'm entering the realm of knowledge. If all you're doing is chalking up correlations, that is not knowledge. It's not ignorance. It can have practical uses and does, but it is not knowledge. The best you can say is it is the first gropings toward data that some other person using a different methodology will turn into knowledge. Knowledge means certainty. Probability is not knowledge. Possibility is not knowledge. Of course you know that it's possible, but that's equivocation. If something is merely probable, it's a hypothesis, it's not knowledge. Now, to call something a hypothesis already requires a reason to hypothesize it and an idea how it would integrate to the rest of knowledge. So you can't just walk around and ask a couple questions at random and say 1 out of 10, and therefore now I know something. You don't know anything except you have this blind shortcut to prediction. But that is not knowledge. You don't know anything that exists, nor why it exists. Now, true knowledge would be if you started off with 8 out of 10, people are helped by this medicine. That's one of the gentleman's questions. And then you know what the question that a true scientist who wanted knowledge would ask when he heard that eight out of ten are helped by this medicine. What about the other two? What's with them? That is an essential you would have to ask them before you could say, you're entering the realm of knowledge now. And if you find that they have different genes, different chemistry, different physiology, I don't know, they took poison before the medicine, whatever, and you can get a true unexceptionless generalization and then you can integrate from those 10 to others and you can find something in the nature of the entity that would explain it, then you are in the field of knowledge. But you cannot take unexplained empirical observations, notice an inexplicable unintelligible pattern, and then say, now I know that field. I mean, it's not mysticism. It isn't mysticism, it isn't anything. It's playing at the periphery induction without taking the responsibility to turn it into knowledge. Now, I'm not saying that you have to do that. We need market research and doctors have to have these statistics when they can't get to the organs to investigate them. And it's perfectly okay to have a whole industry turning on statistics. I just happen to think that we'd be a lot farther ahead if half as much time and effort, 1/4 Warner, guided by the right epistemology, went into turning out causal relationships and integrated knowledge, as opposed to just new governmental finance random surveys which just pile up and up and up and up and contradict each other and can't be integrated. And who knows what's coming next. So if I have a prejudice against statistics, that's the reason, because people take as the end and the apogee the perfect example of knowledge, what is really child's play at the beginning that you have to do because you're just too ignorant to do anything else. Now, I hope that's sufficient. And I do not really dare you feel you must ask this question. Well, I'm really not eager to turn this into a course in statistics, so I'd rather follow your example from yesterday where you cut off questions because you didn't want to answer them. So I'm going to do the same thing today. Now I have actually a few more written questions got somehow up here, even though they weren't asked for. But I think I'll take. Since there's just a couple, I'll take them to start. Oh, well, this is about the movie. Let's leave questions about the movie and everything to the end, okay? All personal questions. What are you doing? And when is there going to be a movie and all that. This is a good written question. Is the refusal to recognize essential distinctions a form of evasion and thus A form of non integration. Now when I heard it that far, of course when you say refusal to recognize, that sounds like he's deliberately. But if you just change it to. Is the inability to recognize essential distinctions a form of evasion? No, per se. Not learning to recognize essentials is something that you require training to be able to do. And training is what people don't get. And in fact most people get training in the very opposite of that. So the sheer fact that somebody doesn't think in essentials doesn't prove anything about his evasion. Now if you have reason to believe he could know what was essential and he's refusing, then of course that's a different proposition. Now then, the example he gives is very intriguing. He says, take the advocates of the many factors view of historical causation. You know, I attacked them in the last chapter, the ominous parallels. The one who says there's many factors that cause Nazism and then there's the wheat germ theory and the toilet training theory, etc. And so on, and they refuse to distinguish between the essential cause philosophy from its consequences, such as psychology, great leaders, etc. Do I regard that as evasion? Absolutely, yes I do. Because they would not permit, as I said in the chapter, the same approach in any other field or in medicine if their child was sick. And the doctor said, well, there's six or eight factors. He's got spots on this arm, he's got spots on this arm, he's got a headache, he has no appetite, so it could be the left armitis, right armitis. There's a whole bunch of things that could be. As a parent, let alone professor, he would automatically say, this is absurd, he's got a disease. Obviously it expresses itself everywhere. But what is the one cause he'd still be human enough to look for? The one in the many. And a historian who devotes his entire life to understanding Adolf Hitler and cannot see a connection between psychology, philosophy, economics, you know, et cetera. I simply don't believe anybody can be that stupid. They are not stupid. They write intelligent, stupid books. But I mean they have the capacity, it has to be that they are afraid of coming out with one answer because that will be, quote, simplistic. And in today's world you have to be dense and unintelligible to get prestige. So I think it's what you could call second handedness. They're trying to be popular. Now, it's conceivable to me that some poor dolt went into history and conscientiously copied down Six different explanations. And he figured they're all good. And he just ended his book with all six. But mostly, in a decent society, that person wouldn't be published. He would be like a kindergarten teacher trying to review other people's books. He would never get published himself. The fact that they do today is a sign of the deterioration of the culture. But to me, on that issue, the truth is so clear that anybody that says there are six different explanations has to be dishonest. I'm prepared to go to that extreme statement. And you can tell it. When you start talking to these people and they get belligerent at the idea that there's only one cause, they're not even intrigued enough to say, you think you can put it all together. Oh, that's some kind of cult. You know, that's. You're crazy if you think there's a one cause for anything. All right, I'm going to go back to you for a while now. I still have a little clipping, but I'm going to save that for a low or high point. This is questions. Yes.

I have a question related to writing, the presentation of objectivism in particular.

Yeah.

There are some people who think that, oh, you know, we could jazz up the lectures by having more visuals and that it'll make it. The purpose of it would be that it would be easier for people to understand and digest. Can you comment on that in relation to your lecture on thinking versus writing?

Oh, I agree, absolutely. If there was unlimited money and strength, it would be incomparably better to have all the courses and lectures and everything on video cassette and not on audio tape, which is an outmoded technology anyway. There's something barbaric about a group of people sitting around the equivalent of a radio and staring into space while this voice drones on and on. We even tried it, but the costs are simply just ludicrous. If you get one camera, it's just as good as having none, because basically, for no reason known to me, they film from beneath the nostrils, straight up. So you need at least three cameras, you know, to keep it alive. And then you need a crew director of the thing. And then, of course, you need the cutting, etc. And so just to make the master even. Suppose I was willing to do all the retakes that are required. And the students get very uncomfortable. We tried that. And they can't look fresh. The 19th take, you know, so they get glazed over. But even if you went through, it's like making a movie. Even if you went through all of it and got the master. The reproduction costs are so tremendous, and then the shipping cost, and then on the other side, the person's got to have the video equipment. It doesn't have the shelf length that the little audio cassettes do. It's primarily a monetary issue. If we had the kind of money that Dianetics has, you know, put everything on, you know, that fabulous, you know, professional quality tape, and certainly I would do it. It's absurd to do it the way we're doing it. But the only thing I can say is the communists did it the same way and look how far they got. In other words, Ayn Rand used to say, this is 40 years ago, that if something has a lot of money spent on it, terrific graphic designs, three color process, etc. You can be sure that conservatives financed it and it's meaningless. Whereas if something is scrawled from the upper left to the lower right and every single space is used in tiny print, you know, it's the communists, because they had something to say. And we are here on that. You know, we try to cram everything into the cheapest technology. We just don't have the money. General Motors will not subsidize this, you see. And that's the problem.

I'm afraid I left something out of the question. A friend of mine said, well, no, you don't really want to have all kinds of diagrams, for instance, showing hierarchy, because then some people will just take it very rationalistically and simplistically.

No, you don't need a blackboard, you need a face. The blackboard wouldn't cost any more money anyway, but you need a face taken from different angles and panning out to the audience when it's relevant. Whereas when they take me at Fort hall, they wait till I pick up the cup, then they zero right in and they watch. So I can never watch those things. Never. Other questions we're mixing up here, but theoretically, if you have questions on the art of thinking, that takes primacy. Yes.

You spoke about the theory of induction and indicated that there was more work to be done in that area developing that area. Do you have any hints or suggestions of what the next step might be?

Well, I've already told you all the hints and suggestions that I have about the next steps in induction. I don't want to repeat it. And the first step would be to become thoroughly familiar with the history of science, I mean, the history of real science, starting, like from the Renaissance, and make notes as you go as to everything. You don't understand how they got From A to B, or you do understand that's the closest you'll ever get to a science of creative thinking is to study the history of science and then integrate it with mathematics and come back to me. At that point, I'll suggest another step. Yes.

Is meaningless the same as the arbitrary?

No, meaningless is not the same as the arbitrary. Meaningless as a term was brought into vogue by logical positivism, and they were attempting to show that there were certain things that you could not think because those things were informed in abstractions. And all we have, according to their philosophy is sense data. So anything that wasn't a description of sense data was meaningless. But that is a completely nonsensical. It's not meaningless, but it's nonsensical. It's absurd to make meaningless a philosophic category. The reason that they did it was because everything philosophers thought was meaningless on their view. So when I say that something is arbitrary, if it were meaningless in the literal sense, it would be. I wouldn't have. It's not true, false, arbitrary. It's not even language. It's just, you know. Now when I say it's comparable to noise, meaning that if you are to adjudge it, it has no relationship to reality. But normally people use words to utter the arbitrary. And from your perspective, you can see that they intended to have a relation to reality, even though it doesn't. It's not like. And in that sense, you call it the. You can describe it as the arbitrary. If it becomes outright speaking in tongues, you know, or gibberish, then you don't even call it the arbitrary. It's just not even. It's not language. Yeah.

Then before determining if what someone has said is arbitrary, you first have to know what they mean.

Absolutely. Before determining what. Whether it's arbitrary, you have to know what the words mean when you say what they mean. That's a different question because, you know, they could mean a thousand things that they haven't said, but you have to be able to say, man has an immortal soul. That's arbitrary. Why? I have to have some idea that he means to say there's a part of us that we can't see that lives in our body and it goes on after death. So we're still going to know what's going on even after we leave the body. I understand that he means all that. And because there's no evidence one way or the other, it's not meaningless, it's arbitrary. You could say it's cognitively meaningless. In other words, it contributes Nothing to cognition. In the same way, it's gastronomically meaningless. It wouldn't help make a good meal. But it's not just plain meaningless. If it was, I wouldn't just even talk about it. I have enough trouble with things that mean something. Yes, it can't be reduced to fact. Well, an arbitrary statement certainly can't be reduced to fact by the proponent of it qua arbitrary. Someone else, as I've given examples in my book, could take the same words and integrate them and reduce them, and then it would be true or false, depending upon what the reduction was.

Yes, we're making judgments about people. You mentioned understanding their motivations. By that, do we mean philosophic motivations?

When did I say that?

Four or five days ago. The question was asked concerning understanding people's motivations before coming to a judgment about a person.

Oh, yeah, well, that's certainly true. You'd have to know their basic motivations to understand the essence of a person. And now what was the question?

The nature of what we mean by basic motivation from a philosophic or psychological.

Give me an example of what you would call philosophic versus psychologic. In terms of basic motivation, do you mean neurotic and healthy or you mean something else?

Oh, something else.

Oh, well, like what?

Why would a person. Why would a person, someone who at one point. Point was an objective, that starts writing things which don't quite seem right to you anymore.

Yeah.

And you're asking yourself, why are they. You know, you're trying to judge this. Why are they doing this?

Do you do that from.

Are they doing it for payment, fortune, or are they doing it from a particular. Are you looking at it from their motivation in terms of explaining why they would write a certain way, or from a perspective of why do they say that? What are the essence of the argument here?

Do you talk to this person?

Gosh, no.

Well, that makes it a lot harder because if you talk to them, you can ask them. But suppose somebody does something that you consider a departure from what they actually know. You see, it's possible to write something that you disagree with, and yet the person be completely sincere and he just made a mistake. Fallibility is not a motivation, just a fact. So the first thing you have to judge, if you see a piece of writing such as you're talking about that departs significantly from what you think this person has the basis to know, is could this have been a mistake? How much did he know, and how glaring is this error? And if it's an error glaring enough that you could write 16 pages non stop of all the obvious things that an contradict that he professes to know. No, I'm not mentioning any names, of course, then you know it's not honest. At that point you've exhausted philosophy unless you go one step further and say, how could a person be so detached, you know, from the facts? And then the answer is always the same. If it's a professor, it's because he's a rationalist and he's basically detached from reality anyway. So that's your philosophic explanation. Now why does he want. He doesn't do that. Just in a void. If he makes a sudden break like that and it's beyond the possibility of being honest, even though he's rationalistic, he does it for something because he's been rationalistic all his life and he didn't jump until this point. So then what does he want? You just watch around. People will let you know what they want. Maybe she. Let's make it a fictional case. Maybe she wants. Maybe she wants to be the leader of a big new group and didn't feel that she had enough power in the old one. Maybe she feels strangled by the fact that every time she tries an innovation in the old one, somebody comes down on her and she wants freedom, you know, to extemporize as she wishes. Maybe she's met a couple of big businessmen who say, if you change a few things, you'll really be in the money. We'll start, you know, we'll finance you, you can be the ambassador to Sweden, et cetera and so on. Watch and see. They usually announce it. I've never found a case where watching the person's life didn't tell you what they were after. Because the things they want you can get. So you just wait till they get them.

Your answer is both.

Oh, yes, sure. A certain full explanation of the type of thing you're talking about would require what did they have to do to square it or get away with it intellectually? And what was the actual motivation that made them do the whole thing? Because there's lots of rationalists who remain loyal and true even though they're rationalists, you see. So it's not an either or. But I'm very leery of hypothesizing psychological explanations Ex cathedra. You see, if you ask me down on the floor where it's just you and me, I'd tell you what I think, but then I would. If I do it up here, it's like it's part of Objectivism. It gets on tape, they study it in Australia. You know, it's just not worth going through that whole route when that's not my purpose and nor my field of expertise. And when I'm struggling to have objectivism restricted to philosophy. I'm not casting any aspersions on psychology, but in the early years, because of people who shall not be mentioned, there was so much stress in the 50s on psychological interpretation of everybody that you didn't bother to ask in certain circles what they thought, but just did they have high self esteem or not? I mean, that is a bizarre distortion. Objectivism is a philosophy. People have psychologies, we don't deny that. But there is no such thing as an objectivist psychology, just as there isn't objectivist physics or objectivist, you know, bioastronomy. Sciences are sciences. They have to have their proper epistemology, a proper philosophic basis, and then they have to go according to the data.

I ask the psychology in the sense of the icing on the case and the fictional example we're giving here, once you come to the philosophic conclusion of the new line.

Absolutely, absolutely. The philosophy is, the psychology is the icing on the cake. Unless you are tremendously invested in this person, you're married to them, you're sleeping with them, and you know they do something that you think is really bad. You can see the intellectual explanation. But they were such a great person, you just can't believe you can't get it. Then you know you're close enough to them under those circumstances to ask. I mean, you're right next to, to each other, but then you're flying wild basically, because every therapist you ask is going to give you a different answer anyway. So you may as well get it from the horse's mouth. Now, do you want to hear? Oh, you have a question? Okay.

I believe that you've indicated that there.

Are certain situations where a person is.

Justified in being certain and yet the conclusion that he comes to turns out not to be true.

Right.

And I wondered, therefore, what in general is the relationship between evaluating a statement.

As true and evaluating it as certain? Well, evaluating it as certain is saying in the present context, the evidence is conclusive. Evaluating it as true unqualifiedly says this conforms to reality. It makes a relation between the statement and reality, not the statement and the evidence, although there has to be evidence for it to be true. Now you understand you are never in a position where you simultaneously say, I am certain this is true, even though it's an error. By the time you find out it's an error, you've withdrawn the claim that it's certain or even that it's true. Okay, so what is confusing me throughout is I'm mixing the context. Yes, yes, it's only God or you from the future can look back on you and say, I, I called it certain, but I see now it was wrong. Now, I wanted to give this clipping because this is, after all, connected to our course in some way. And I thought it was really interesting. I'm not going to read it all, but I got this as everything else in the New York times of Wednesday, May 27 this year. And it's the troubles that the post office is having getting machinery to recognize zip codes. You know, they want to automatize, not automatize, automate the sorting of letters. And it's really fascinating to see how the Objectivist theory of concept formation is exactly the thing that they have to try to get around. And it struck me as a kind of really clarifying little story. So I'll read you just a few excerpts. The headline is Teaching computers to recognize letters and numbers. And if you think that's easy, it's monstrous. And they give a perfect explanation right at the beginning. Humans are able to read an infinite number of handwriting styles, and that means truly infinite in the sense of endless, you know. Mr. And called it an infinite series. Humans are able to read an infinite number of handwriting styles even though handwriting is as individual as a fingerprint because of their ability to remember and recognize the power pattern of a letter or digit, even if the style of writing is unfamiliar. Now, what is it that we're able to do? We can see seven scrawled every which way with the French stroke through them and without. And so just take one look and you know right away what doesn't make any difference what color, what angle and how wiggly and all you look. Seven, right? Why? What do you do? You omit your measurements just like that. There's nothing to it. All the variations are obviously omit measurements. And you could teach a kid this, and as soon as he gets that, he can do it anywhere. But now the poor computer cannot omit measurements and still has to learn to recognize sevens. And that is a son of a bitch. And this is. Listen to this. But pattern recognition is not an easy task for computers because they can recognize only exact replicas of images they have seen before. Now you imagine what state you'd be. See, they're absolutely on the animal level. They can retain a concrete, but if One is written like this, and another has more of a wave that's in. One of those is seven, the other isn't, see? And the computer can. You have to try to give it every conceivable seven, anything that might come in as a seven, and tell them that's seven, too, you know. And then they got a clever way of doing it. They worked out, and I quote, a system of hundreds of thousands of tiny computer programs, crudely modeled on the human brain. And these tiny programs, which they call algorithms, work to extract features of known characters. So one of these thousands of interconnections. Will pull out a horizontal stroke, like maybe a little line like this. Not this big, but a line like this. And there's so many thousands that you pretty much cover the waterfront for this little line. And another one will pull out, let us say, a little curve, and another set of thousand will pull out a little curve, see? And once these algorithms are built in and you give it a letter, it instantaneously will run through all these thousands of programs to see whether this means vertical or horizontal and so on. In other words, it's like a gigantic translation of every concrete into one of the seven, one of the nine numbers. And they've got it built down now that they can do it. And it says, quote, after thousands of training examples forming such connections between the algorithms and the letters, a system can learn to extract the right features. For example, the experimental AT&T system has learned, now this is a real feat, has learned to ignore the extra horizontal stroke in a European style seven. It just wouldn't accept it because that's not a seven with a stroke through it. And they finally got enough blockage on that that it'll call it a seven, even though it has that stroke through it. And it's really very fascinating. You see how bad the writing can be. And they can still pretty much figure it out, but this is what they had to go through. And then they conclude. Feature extraction becomes more difficult when cursive script rather than printed words is to be read, because letters or numbers are more likely to run together in script. The system must also learn to partition a word or number sequence correctly. So they have to figure out, does the line stop here, is there a tail, or does this tail, does it stop there? And this tail is part of the next letter? And that's monstrous for computers to do because they have no idea of, you know, that you're trying to communicate. I thought that was fascinating to see. When people say that computers are, you know, artificial intelligence, a Thing that the. The youngest child in preschool can do, like that takes this immense complexity of memorizing concretes before the super sophisticated computer can do it. And I think that's an analogy. That's an example of the Objectivist theory of concept formation and a refutation of the fact that computers can think all in one shot. Do you find that as interesting as I did as an example? I think it's very helpful. Okay, I'm going to. You're still entirely free to ask philosophical questions, but I'm going to go on to anything, basically, now that you consider it in good taste to ask. And I'll start with one written question. I have heard it rumored that the Fountainhead movie is being remade. Is this true? If so, are you involved in this project? And in what capacity? I heard it rumored too, the estate of Ayn Rand does not own any rights to the remake of the fountainhead movie. Ms. Rand sold all the remakes when she sold the picture to Warner Bros. Originally, she did not at that time have the clunk, nor did television and all that have the realistic possibility. So the contracts at that time did not include the right to make remakes which the courts have interpreted as belonging to whoever bought the original movie from those days. So Warner Brothers sold it to Turner. And Turner, so I have heard, has sold it to somebody. I can't remember his name. I think it's a Mr. Hill. I'm pretty sure I have no involvement in the project of any kind. I don't know him. I don't know Turner. I have no say. The only thing I've been told is that Mr. Hill is eager to do a good job on the Fountainhead so that he can then go on to do Adler Shrutt. And I know no more than that. So you know every day something is announced in Hollywood and then a month later it's cancelled. So I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Everything is announced and nothing ever happens at the back.

I found your statements about your coping plans before. I'm interested.

Have you changed your mind in any regard? I am going to amend the recommendation in the second part of TIA that's reprinting the last half of my speech. At the time I spoke at Ford Hall, I did not take Perot as a serious factor. That was in earlier mid April. And I just took for granted that it would be Clinton versus Bush and that the crucial thing was to get Bush out. But if it is true that Perot remains in the race as a viable factor and it's going to be a three way split. I would never urge voting negative in a three way race because you don't know which way your vote is going to help. A vote against Bush for Perot might elect Clinton because of the geography and the political characteristics of that state, etc. You have to be a soothsayer to know when it's three ways and you're casting a protest vote, who's going to benefit from it. The only way I would ever counsel voting in a three way race is if you actually want one of the characters to win, one of the candidates to win. I do not. I'm not in that state with regard to any. I want to see Bush lose, but not so badly that I would positively vote for one of the other two, leaving open the chance that the third one would come in. I see some good things in Perot which are obvious. He's in some ways definitely better, but he's so wild and undefined and he flip flops so much that I wouldn't have any idea. It's possible in my mind that he would do something really good. It's possible in my mind that he would do something worse than anybody else would dream of doing. And it's possible he'd get away with it on a wave of popularity or that he'll turn out to be more left than Clinton. The very fact that he's freed from this political allegiance opens the door to him being anything. And it's compounded by the fact that he doesn't tell you what he stands for, seemingly on principle, or when he does tell you, it changes regularly. So I wouldn't vote for him. I have a sneaking hope just as a way of slapping down the other two parties that he gets elected. But I would be terrified at the same time and I would never actually vote for him because if he did get elected, I would feel it would be on my head for having voted for him. So it turns out if he fades, as some people think he will, then I would go back to my preceding analysis. Anything to get Bush out. And Clinton is already self evidently what he's going to be. He now has his, you know, his running mate and he's going to be just absolutely predictable and he won't be popular. So I wouldn't be unhappy having him and his ticket there as the butt of the newspapers and have four years of personal scandals and you know, et cetera. But if Perot is in it, I won't vote at all. That's my position. So I have to decide that at the last minute basis I just have to make a decision whether it's a national factor he's in or not. And I don't think it'd be too hard to decide because he's either going to fade rapidly or he's not. And if he's still around after the Republican convention, basically he's in. I mean, he's into the end of the race. Yes.

Could you comment on the recent attempt to get amendments?

I don't believe that there should be an amendment prohibiting flag burning. Flag burning is a symbol. It's disgusting and reprehensible that people do it. But I don't see any grounds on which the government can interfere on such an action insofar as it's their own property that they're burning. If they're burning a public flag, you get them for vandalism. I certainly would think every form of private boycott is justifiable. And I would go one step further because flag burning is a specific assault on the symbol of United States and loyalty to it. I would say in wartime or in the state of the world, such as it is now, which is potential wartime, the act of flag burning should validly result in you being an FBI file being made on you and you being followed and get a court ordered eavesdrop on your conversations because that is an objective step in the direction of treason. And therefore in times like this, I think we should be able to follow and find out what these people are and who they're promising what to. But I don't think we should forbid them from flying the fly. I'd be quite content just to have them tailed. And I certainly wouldn't want an amendment to the Constitution to that effect. Yes.

Is it altruism for a graduate student to try and convert a Marxist professor, even if they think they might succeed?

No. Is it altruism for a graduate student to try to convert a Marxist professor? That is not altruism. That is masochism. You couldn't convert a professor because he already has his advanced degree. He's got his network of colleagues, he's got his path, you know, through the various committees to tenure and so on. And if you converted him on anything other than some minor trivia, you would blow up his whole life. So, you know, I mean, he's got free will, although he doesn't believe it. But since he does, I suppose it's possible. But I think the myth of Sisyphus is much more realistic. Just keep putting the rock up to the top of the hill for the Rest of your life. You'll accomplish more than trying to convert a Marxist professor if you actually do it. I'd like to hear about it, but I'd like to hear about it the same way Weight Watchers, you know, they want to know, does it last for longer than three months or does the Marxism come on again? You know.

I'm seriously considering it in terms of the Marxist professor being a low value and your own success as.

A higher value, then that speaks for itself. If you don't like him and it interferes with your success, why do it? I can't think of a stonier more hopeless task than to try to convert, of all things, a Marxist professor, because the entire world has already abandoned Marxism on the basis of perceptual evidence. So the people who are still left preaching it are closed in a way that, you know, no one is that bad. So to pick that, I mean, it would be a much more productive use of your time to dirty the streets. Gary, can you say something about how.

Your book has been doing in the market and some of the future plans for the estate?

Well, how my book has been doing in the market, for some reason, I can't get them to tell me. It has had three printings, but they will only print a small number because they have no confidence that it will go on. So they printed. I think. I think the first was 4 or 5,000, and then they printed 2500. In any event, it's now up to 12,500 has been printed. And they, as far as I can tell, are gearing themselves up for a fourth printing. And somebody just told me they raised the price two or three dollars on the fourth printing. So that's hopeful. I mean, that they think it's selling. I did get to speak to. They had the aba, you know, the American Book association convention at Anaheim. And I got to speak to one of the sales reps for nal, which is the publisher, and she was really astounded that the book had sold 12,005 and that they were still printing it. And she looked at me, she said, this means people are asking for it. You know, I kind of didn't entirely understand her. I said, well, I assumed that. And she said, no. But what usually happens is the publisher has a certain amount and he just loads them on the various stores and then waits for the ripped covers to come back that they didn't sell. But she said, if they're printing it and printing it again and printing it again, it's actual orders from the public. That's coming in and you can't beat that. I certainly agree with that. So it's a very slow process. You know, if it sells 15, 17,000 the first year, then it'll go into paperback. And my guess is it would sell a few thousand each year thereafter, more or less forever, but it's not going to compete with Tom Clancy and Stephen King. So who asked that? Gary? I'm pleased in that the prediction that was originally made is that this book was so heavy in technicality terms that it could not sell 3,000, that that would be primarily the libraries. So already four times past that and going into another printing, you know, it's not 200,000 or 6 million, but it's a start. Now, plans of the estate was the other thing you asked. Well, I still hope to bring out everything one way or another that I have access to of Ms. Rand. That would include a biography, an authorized biography in some form, using a lot of material from her own recollections, certainly a journal, a book of her journals, book of her correspondence, a transcription of her lectures on fiction writing, a transcription of her lectures on nonfiction writing. NAL is very keen on getting a book called the Best of Ayn Rand. You know, one of those portable ones where you have mixed in fiction and non fiction and expose people to the gist because they think those are very big selling items and introduce people to the rest. And if there were time, I would certainly, I certainly agree with him completely about that. So there is, there's a lot of publishing projects left. Any one of those takes a year, basically full time to assemble and put, go through the press and advertising, the whole business. So there's 10 years worth of just mopping up what we have left in the warehouse, let alone any further independent studies and articles and so on. Does that answer you?

Can you say anything about possible biography or no?

Well, as definitely in the works of biography, which makes substantial use of Ayn Rand's own recollections of her life. And those recollections are culled from several sources, some on tape, some in her journals, some in her letters. And I think it's all right to say that someone in this audience is working very diligently along with someone on the podium to bring out something that would be approximately called My Life in My own words. And I think that will be out. I won't say when, but I think that's a foreseeable project. It's already been begun. Yes.

Are you still working on the fiction book that you mentioned at TJS last.

Year yes and no. But more, more no. Am I working on the fiction book? I have found that at the present time I don't have my life under enough control to do anything long term. I have eight days worth of, of short range insignificant activities for every seven days of life. So I just run from one thing to the other and I'm just able to take on the kind of projects that you can sandwich in like you know, an introduction to the 35th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged or the afterward to the 50th anniversary of the Fountainhead or Ford hall wants a lecture or conceptual conferences, wants some lectures. And there's always four things like that that have to be done yesterday. And I'm not committed enough to any long range project to say no. So I'm just sort of desultory going along in this way, reacting to stimuli and enjoying the fact that I don't have to do anything if I don't want to. Now at some point that is going to become illegitimate, but I don't feel that it has reached that stage yet. So I'm doing a lot of things also that I have nothing to do with objectivism, but things I always wanted to do like learning French and playing tennis and stuff like that, which takes a lot of time too, to say nothing of my daughter, whom I spend a lot of time with. So right now I'd have to have a tremendous motivation to start a long range project and have to upset my whole easygoing, jam packed schedule for some one goal that's 10 years in the future. I just haven't got it right now to do it. I don't have the wherewithal, but usually you allow yourself two to three years between books. So you have to wait for at least another year or two before I could answer that. I do have to say though, in conclusion, I wanted to tell you this, this is in the nature of a boast, but I had a conversation with my daughter. This has nothing to do with your question. But the other day and she wanted to know what it was to have a PhD. And I said, well, that's a doctor of philosophy. I try to explain to her it's not like so and so. Who is a doctor of medicine who fixes people? This is a doctor of philosophy. And she says I know what that is. And she wasn't kidding. And I said what's that? She said, he's somebody who, when philosophy gets sick, he fixes it. I thought, I thought that was really a great epigram and I wrote it down along with the date. And she said, don't put my name on it or tell me. Tell anybody I said it. So, anyway, on that note, I want to thank you all for having come. I enjoyed you very much as a class, and I hope you got out of it what you wanted. And I wish you all the best for the future.