The title of this post is a deliberately inflammatory reference to my previous post 1984 belongs to all of us. That post offended a few of my readers, in one case specifically because it flew in the face of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Because of that, I was compelled to read Atlas Shrugged. At the end of this post I will justify that assertion about 1984, and extend it to include Atlas Shrugged. But first let’s give it a proper review…
I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Rand possessed enormous talent to create enough interest in her characters to keep me going for over 500,000 words. That’s equivalent to 3 full-length epic novels!
This book challenged me to rethink my attitude and approach to life. I had grown slothful and disinterested in my work. This book encouraged to put my heart and soul into it. Of course, that is contingent on having work where one’s heart and soul belong. For the last 3.5 years, my heart and soul have gone into my writing rather than my science. I had a choice whether to pour my spare energy into creating a tool to help decode the brain, or a book that says something about the condition of our world and its future. I chose the book, but the tool could have been equally valuable.
Rand’s book also challenged my world view. It is the main vehicle by which she presents the philosophy of “Objectivism”. Conveniently, someone provided a concise summary of the philosophy in the appendices, since the novel itself is anything but concise. (A good portion of those 500K words are dedicated to rambling rants about the philosophy.) Here is a condensed version:
- Metaphysics — There is an objective reality that exists independent of the human mind.
- Epistemology — Human perception and reason are sufficient to know that reality.
- Anthropology — The essence of a human being is mind. The use of our mind is necessary for survival in the real world, but we have a choice whether to think or not.
- Ethics — Everyone must live for their own sake, not sacrificing themselves for others, and not sacrificing others for themselves.
How does this stack up against my philosophy?
- Metaphysics — 100% agree. The Universe existed before I was born and will continue exist after I die. It follows rules which my thoughts cannot modify. Furthermore, my mind is implemented by a physical machine (my brain) which is part of the Universe. Thought and consciousness are the effects of information processing inside that machine, a physical process which converts energy and does work on matter.
- Epistemology — 50% agree. I am a cognitive scientist, not a philosopher. I try to understand how the mind operates so that I can build machines in its likeness. With our limited knowledge, I can write programs that recognize 3D objects or control robots. Fifty years ago the field of Artificial Intelligence naively tried to do it Ayn Rand’s way. It proved to be a dead end. Now we know that probabilistic reasoning (partial truth) actually works better than simple all-or-nothing syllogisms. Human (and machine) perception is limited to a very small fraction of the Universe, and is subject to well-known errors, such as optical illusions. I am convinced that our brains, and thus our minds, always work on partial and unreliable perception, doing imprecise reasoning about partial beliefs. The modern skeptic says that belief should be proportional to evidence.Even though the rest of the Universe is an objective reality, the only universe I experience is the one constructed in my own mind (limited Constructivism). When I die, that universe will end.
- Anthropology — 80% agree. Our experience of “fee will” is the product of ongoing processing our brains do in the real world. We never stop reasoning (unless our brain is physically sick), but we may use reason to work around painful truths. The job of our brains is to bring our state in the world into alignment with certain hard-wired goals. We do this by some combination of actions to change the world and adapting our thought processes.
- Ethics — 50% agree. My highest value is the conscious experience of the Universe. Thus I strongly value the individual. Any time someone is asked to die for the collective, something is terribly wrong with the system. OTOH, Rand’s vision of a society of purely self-interested agents with no higher-level regulation results in exactly that. The classic counterexample is the Tragedy of the Commons. Dawkins does a much better job than Rand of analyzing selfishness and altruism in his book The Selfish Gene, using the mathematics of game theory. System Dynamics is an even more powerful mathematical analysis of the world, which leads to even more dismal results.
Now, back to the topic of why 1984 belongs to all of us. Copyright and patent protection are forms of government regulation (that horrible thing hated by Rand), introduced by British royalty and echoed in the US constitution. The basic notion is to control the use of an idea for a limited period of time so that the originator can profit from it. It was never intended to create exclusive ownership of an idea for all time. Instead, all ideas are supposed to eventually pass into the public domain, enriching everyone. (There is a passage in Galt’s radio speech where he says that products of the mind enrich everyone, so even Rand would see this.) Yet there are powerful corporate entities in the US that wish to continue extending copyright protection until it becomes perpetual. In Rand’s terminology, I would call such people “looters”.
IMHO, it makes no sense to extend copyright or patent protections beyond the lifespan of the creator. After that, it is no longer possible for the creator to directly benefit from the product of their mind. You could argue that extending it for some fixed period after the creator’s death gives it value in the creator’s estate. But why, in a Randian world, would one want to give value to people who did not create value themselves? Maybe to pay for bringing their children to adulthood, but nothing more. That argues for no more than 20 years beyond death of author.
The reality, of course, is that the big proponents of perpetual copyright are not the individual creators, but corporations that provide no additional value. They want to hoard the value of the work, long after the true creative genius has passed from this world.
So back to the original comment about 1984. Orwell is dead, yet some entity still has the right to charge me for access to his story and the truth it contains. Ayn Rand is dead, and her book is in the same situation.
There is another view of intellectual property, a collectivist view that would be abhorrent to Rand. Yet it has proved highly successful at producing wealth for many people, both private and corporate. I’m speaking, of course, of free/open-source software (FOSS). A classic paper on this is Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Example’s of its success are Wikipedia and the Android OS (built on top of Linux, which is a huge success in its own right).
There are vastly more moochers of FOSS than producers, yet the contributors gain so much wealth from the process that it is still of value for them to share their intellectual products freely. With modern technology, the cost of sharing a such a product is trivial. It is not like an industrial product where each copy represents substantial investment.