Yes, I think it’s logically possible. I’m not a very good logical nit-picker.
However, based on the primacy of existence concept that you mentioned, then isn’t it possible that everything is possible? Then doesn’t logic simply turn into an attempt by the human mind to prove or disprove what he can’t see?
That’s what I’m getting from it.
I’m a hesitant Atheist, to be honest. My ‘reason’ tells me that there is no God, but a part of me wants to think there is. Life just seems easier with one. However, I cannot delude myself into thinking that a God exists when my experience and my conclusions point to non-existence. But primacy of existence, if I am grasping it correctly, suggests that God could be true, regardless of my reason. Is this correct?
Sort of. Some would use Rand’s Primacy to “prove” the existence of that which no one can see or experience, but its more honest application is as a safeguard to protect a theory or hypothesis from the skeptic, by stating that the Primacy allows that its logical possibility prevents it from being ruled out as obviously false (even if it is objectively false). One consequence of this is that everything that is empirically-inaccessible and logically possible is potentially true “behind our backs”—but this is not to say that every logical possibility can co-exist in the same ontological space: the existence and non-existence of God are both logically possible, but you can’t have a world in which both are true (a logical impossibility)
[b]Actually, I find problems in the notion that human existence, etc. is created by an unconscious mechanism that, being unconscious, does not even know that we exist, that it exists, or that it created life (or anything else) and supports the continuance of life (my argument against the supposition that Nature “knows” or “cares” that an organism needs a particular mutation in the face of a particular changing environment in order to survive).
The notion that God does not exist is even more difficult to seriously accept when one considers the proposition that the human brain supposedly creates consciousness, and that one’s entire future—from birth to death—is schematically represented in one’s neurons (before the fact!)—and that blind, unconscious mechanisms, by chance, have pre-wired every neural response to changes in the external world that have yet to happen!
Sure, observing foolishness, evil, perversion, etc. generates philosophies that strain at the bit to accept that a good God exists, but even here one can rely upon Rand’s Primacy and state that these evils are not the result of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons but unbidden, unexpected, and even unwanted collocations of psychic information in the mind of God. Regardless, we accept what we can accept, and Occam’s Razor manifests itself differently to each person. I hold no grudge against atheism: it’s an honest perception.
But you are correct: Rand’s Primacy of Existence (according to my interpretation), simply means that God—or any logically possible but empirically-inaccessible concept—could be true regardless of human reason, perception, and belief stating otherwise.
[b]The paragraph above is explained in detail in the thread: My Mechanized Fate!viewtopic.php?f=9&t=165662
But I can explain a little here:
It is widely believed that consciousness has a physical basis (Chalmers) in the form of the brain, composed of neurons, being the sole arbiter of conscious experience (psychophysicalism).
In psychophysicalism, no experience can exist independent of a representative process in the brain.
It is widely believed that there exists a non-subjective, mind-independent world that exists and would continue to exist even if all consciousness in the universe were to cease to exist. This world is believed to mimic the content of our visual experience (there is, surprisingly, no counterpart of non-visual consciousness in the external world: the question begs how non-visual consciousness is appropriately “tied” to the external world).
Consciousness is[/b] subjective experience[b]: thus if there was a time when the external world existed without brains, then there was a time when the external world was totally bereft of consciousness. This means that whatever the external world may be, it is not constituted of subjective experience, and one cannot use consciousness to access it.
It is widely believed that we perceive (if one possesses a normal brain) an ongoing real-time (subjective) simulation of the external world. Consciousness, it turns out, is ultimately a simulation of the world—it is not the world itself. (The belief that what we perceive is the world itself and not a ‘virtual’ simulation of the world is naive realism)
The brain, if it continually produces a real-time simulation of the external world, must keep up with changes in the external world by changing synaptic connection and frequency and number of action potential in affected neurons.
The brain must come up with the appropriate synaptic connections in neurons of the cortex in order to accurately mimic[/b] future states [b]of the external world. What you experience five minutes from now must be prepared by your neurons before you experience your future.
The brain can’t mess this up: it must accurately represent the external world and it only has one chance to get this right the first time (if not, you will experience something other than the current shape of the external world), and it must somehow “know” which neural schematic will represent your future five minutes from now and be prepared to yield the appropriate neural set-up in the veritable nick of time.
But neural circuits do not exist in a vacuum: they are connected holistically to almost 10,000 other neurons which could feel the effect of forces routed to the cortex from the body and the external environment. At any given moment in time, the activation of a neural circuit corresponding to some new and future aspect of the external world is pretty much selected by “lottery” (Unless one accepts that there is only one possible future outcome for every antecedent cause in the present. Given the neural choices in the vicinity of a selected circuit, this Laplacean determinism is suspect).
If the brain is the sole arbiter of conscious experience, and if—neurogenesis notwithstanding, you do not gain new neurons in those areas of the brain responsible for generating simulations keeping in step with the external world—it follows that your fate, everything that you experience now and 20 years from now—are schematically set-up BEFORE THE FACT in the brain (or at least the neurons, their pre- and post-synaptic knobs, and their neurotransmitters are in place and standing by: it isn’t like they pop into existence in their appropriate place in the cortex seconds before the external world forges the future they must accurately represent).
In the end, the very notion that blind atoms can form a machine (the brain) mechanically set up to simulate every contingent future—
(Five minutes from now, will I go to bed or will I dance and sing? Will a plane crash in my back yard? Will a friend show up wanting to go out? My neurons are prepared for all these contingencies before the fact!)
—in the external world is so fantastic that a belief that a God (or some other Intelligence) contrived this “future-prepared” machine more readily obeys Occam’s Razor than that which is commonly accepted about consciousness in the secular world.
Whew.
Anyway, I highly recommend the ILP articles: My Mechanized Fate! and: It’s Absurd! Why Should The Brain Give Rise To Consciousness? as essential reading on this subject.[/b]
Hmm. But then isn’t this only indicative of instinct in the brain? I remember reading something about evolutionary psychology, and it says that the human being is adaptive not because it has fewer instincts, but because it has more.
Sort of like the data in a videogame… all the possibilities are programmed in but the user has to unlock the event realizing the possibility… Huh, wait. Then it is deterministic.
