BUILDING BLOCKS

Rand defines a CONCEPT as 'a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition'... she further defines a PERCEPT as 'a group of sensations AUTOMATICALLY retained and integrated by the brain of living organism'... according to her theory of concepts, humans get the most direct form of information about reality thru our senses in the form of percepts, that at a conscious level only percepts, not sensations, can be retained by the mind... it is because concepts are automatically retained that the concept of objectivity comes in... 'objectivity' arises because concepts are formed by a specific process, and consequently bear a specific kind of relationship to reality...

while all knowledge is acquired thru the use of the reasoning faculty, however, this does not irrelevate intuitiveness - there are many levels of awareness which are receptive to sensory imput, and indeed it is the subconscious which has the task of assimulating while the conscious is occupied with more immediate and perhaps important matters... still, it is the conscious reasoning, by way of introspection, that takes the subconscious input and give validity to it where it is warrented, by identifying and integrating the facts therein... the error of Platonism is the inability or unwillingnessof its adherents to FULLY grasp the difference between a person's inner state, and the outerworld - between the perceiver and the perceived...

the primacy of existance, however, is THE fundamental axiom: existance exists... and all attempts to refute it necessarily involve using it... as such, it is not an act of faith, but the recognition of the irreducible fact of reality - that it IS... moreover, it is the recognition that to be is to be SOMETHING, to have a nature, to have IDENTITY... and, in addition, there is a third aspect involved, a very crucial one which corrects the Platonic problem of the perceiver and the perceived - that the act of grasping that 'existance exists' implies two corallory axioms, [1]'that something exists, which is perceived' and [2]'that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists... if nothing exists, there can be no consciousness - a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms... a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms - before it could identify itself as conscious, it had to be conscious of something... if that which is claimed to perceive does not exist, what is possessed is not consciousness' [Ayn Rand, from ATLAS SHRUGGED]