| | William,
Okay... Here's a major point of contention that I have with Rand's conception of the universe, as concerns quantum mechanics and the existence of randomness. On page 17 of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff writes:
Even if it were true that owing to a lack of information we could never exactly predict a subatomic event -- and this is highly debatable -- it would not show that, in reality, the event was causeless.
First of all, this conveys an inability to have truly grasped the fundamental essence of quantum physics, and beyond that, goes so far as to naively -- or even arrogantly -- generalize human-scale causality to the quantum scale.
What Peikoff is basically saying is that he intuitively knows what is really going on, at the quantum level, and that it's just a matter of time before physicists confirm his beliefs. This, despite no evidence which supports anything but apparent actual randomness of subatomic happenings at any given point in time.
As spokesman for Objectivism, Peikoff took a firm stance which was unwarranted in terms of objectivity, and thus doing, violated the principle of objectivity. Therefore, because quantum physics is the foundation for the universe itself, I see no other recourse but to conclude that Objectivism is flawed on an important level, superior as it is to other philosophies.
For this reason, and because Objectivism aspires to grasp and promote true objectivity, Objectivism at the time of that publication is incomplete, and I consider it to be an important length of a yet-incompleted journey. That's why I think it should be called "Proto-Objectivism".
|
|
