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I agree with Steve regarding Israel and Hamas.
The passage Hripsime cites indicates that Chamberlain failed to consider the full context (at least) TWICE: (1) He failed to consider the full context when deciding against rearmament, and (2) he failed to consider the full context when dealing with the consequences of his first failure.
Both of these were unethical, and handing over Czechoslovakia was FAR WORSE, morally speaking, than would have been morally condemning Hitler and his intentions, EVEN IF Chamberlain lacked the military might at that moment to back up that condemnation.
IF Chamberlain did in fact evade the full context in the second instance to save his reputation, it backfired: We’re STILL talking about how terribly he acted.
Hey Hripsime, are you familiar with the Ayn Rand Lexicon? You can type in a subject and find passages where Rand discussed almost any topic related to philosophy: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/love.html
Hey Hripsime, are you familiar with the Ayn Rand Lexicon? You can type in a subject and find passages where Rand discussed almost any topic related to philosophy: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/love.html
I don’t really have anything to add here, but I love this. True success seems to be an “emergent property” of deep interest. It reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on Flow: When we’re interested in something, we’re motivated to work on it at the very bounds of our ability, and we continue increasing our ability over time.
Does perception require focusing your attention to become fully aware of entities? I believe it requires focusing your eyes, which does require some effort, and perhaps not a great deal less than the effort required to focus your mind. The difference between your experience and your wife’s experience seems to be that she is focusing her gaze on the objects and thus perceiving them, and further, she is conceptualizing what she perceives, thinking about it. You, as you say, are looking in the same direction, but you are not focusing your gaze on the same things and, having not seen the thing, you don’t think about it. Try an experiment: Glance out your window at an object, perhaps a tree or even just part of a tree, but do not conceptualize at all. Do not register conceptually any details about it. Simply glance at it, look away, and in your mind’s eye, visualize what you have just seen. I’ll bet that, at least for most objects, you can do this without trouble.
Is freewill morally relevant? Yes, freewill is what makes morality possible. I think what you’re really asking is: If we are actually determined, would that make any difference to our justice system? And the answer has to be that it couldn’t possibly make a difference, that essentially nothing matters because it’s all pre-determined, so why discuss it? Harris is sophisticated enough to say that our mental contents, not just our actions, are determined, but this doesn’t change the situation. He will perhaps argue that he was determined to make the arguments that he has made, and that others are determined to respond to them in whatever way they do. But absent from the entire picture is any choice, and without choice there is no morality. The better tactic in arguing with such skeptics on free will is, I think, to point out that they are freezing the concept of causation at the level of mechanistic cause and effect. LP describes this on pages 64–66 (but he does not actually label it an instance of freezing the abstraction).
I think I agree, Steve. And as you note, Peikoff’s account seems to switch between a continuum to a binary choice. If Peikoff were here to respond, I think he’d say that the binary choice to focus comes first, and then you can “bear down” and decided to go to 100%. But I’m not sure, and the text seems to slip between these two accounts without much clarity.
As to the facts of the matter, I think its introspectively obvious that when we wake up in the morning, we fairly quickly focus our minds, and then we have the ability to regulate our level of focus up or down.
Yash, the reason we can’t start at the level of sensations is that, from sensations, we could not grasp entities, identity, or causality. There would be no way to go from “splotch of blue,” “cool pressure,” “blaring noise,” and so on to “a police car just zoomed past.” Sensations simply do not register. In regard to computers, sensations would be totally useless to a computer, because sensations are not integrated or retained. What engineers have to figure out, and are already doing from what I understand, is to register, let’s say, pixels and patterns of pixels, as certain things, thereby enabling the assignment of identity. This is the rough computer equivalent of perception, not of sensation.
