objectivistbrit

You're doing what's typical for people trained in modern philosophy when debating online, i.e. complaining that I didn't write a full philosophical treatise in one comment.

E.g., I didn't go into details of my view on Locke because they weren't central to my point. After I became an Objectivist, I did some research on Enlightenment thinkers precisely because people dismiss Objectivists for being ignorant of past philosophy, and what I found tallied with what I'd heard from well-informed Objectivists. Locke is an empiricist and holds that certain knowledge is generally impossible outside of areas like geometry. This skepticism subtly undermines any philosophy built on top of it; Rand's epistemology, in contrast, shows how certain knowledge can be possible (within a particular context), which gives her the framework to build an entire system of integrated principles, basing politics and aesthetics on ethics, and ethics on metaphysics and epistemology.

Likewise, I didn't list what I think is novel in Rand's philosophy as I assumed honest readers could research it for themselves. Here's some: her solution to the is-ought problem, her solution to the problem of universals, her theory of the nature of romantic art, and, obviously, a complete moral code justified via rational self-interest. Locke and other writers did talk about the evils of force (and I often enjoy telling people that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was originally Locke's "life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness"). However, it was Rand who first coined the phrase "initiation of force", and Rand who first argued that reason and force were essentially the only two means of dealing with men, making non-initiation of force the fundamental social principle.

(For said honest readers, the books which persuaded me were The Romantic Manifesto and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, though Virtue of Selfishness is probably the easiest starting point. Once I studied Nozick's famous criticism of Rand, I concluded that he was someone very smart making a deliberate attempt to misunderstand her argument, and I was pretty much soured permanently on 20th century analytic philosophy, "libertarian" or otherwise).

"In a bizarrely unfair real society arguing that you have the right to maximally leverage whatever value you your dad and your grandpa managed to drag away and coral seems greedy and disingenuous."

You're arguing against aristocracy, not capitalism. In 19th century America (the most free society in history) there was a phrase "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." In the absence of state-protected income, inherited wealth never lasts long.

Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith and John Locke were hugely important historically in making the case for liberty. However, they were still products of their time and retain the influences of Christian ethics and Humean skepticism. Adam Smith, for instance, argued that competition was good because it maximised social well-being - which leads directly to the modern viewpoint that free markets are OK but that the government should step in to prevent monopolies and ensure businesses only make a "fair" profit (as defined by the government). This is what I mean by the pragmatic defence of property.

The most influential enlightenment philosopher was Kant, who was ostensibly pro-liberty but whose work paved the way for Hegel and Marx.

I might sound like a fanatic but if you actually read Rand it becomes clear how revolutionary her philosophy actually was. She's a system-builder, something unknown in modern philosophy (since Kant). Modern-day libertarianism is mostly a creation of Rothbard's, a one-time student of Rand's who later put all his energy into discrediting her while plagiarising her philosophy. (Just one example: the initiation of force as the basic social evil is an original concept of Rand's).

Interesting to meet an effective altruist here. I was somewhat involved in EA for a while and even interned at an EA org, but after reading up a bunch of different philosophies the one which I found most consistent with reality was -- perhaps surprisingly -- Objectivism.

The inferential gap between EA and Objectivism is obviously huge, so it's not worth giving a full argument here. For the intellectually curious, though, I'll simply say that the two schools of thought fromthemorning cites both assume that the purpose of morality is to maximise the greater good (rather than, say, teaching individuals principles to maximise their own long-term personal happiness).

On the off chance that someone on the fringes of the EA movement reads this, someone who shares the concerns I once had - the ultimate issue with EA is that it's hyper-empiricist: EAs love evidence but are highly distrustful of theoretical arguments. This is an understandable position, but ultimately a mistake, because you end up unable to synthesise the vast amounts of data you gather. All truths are simplifications - what you need are rules to form correct simplifications.

Objectivism isn't taken seriously in mainstream intellectual circles but it should be, because it shows how to avoid the pitfalls of both empiricism and rationalism. (See Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for details).

This is why I'm an Objectivist - it's the only philosophy which gives a moral argument for property rights. (Most libertarian and free-market thinkers argue on pragmatic grounds, which means they are willing to compromise in the manner you describe).

Virtue of Selfishness puts the case succinctly:

"The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values."

"The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job”—there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals."

> If a situation forced you to choose between compassion and property rights (Maybe you're asked to steal a life saving medicine for someone else in dire need), which do you choose?

The Objectivist answer is that sickness (like hunger) is not a sudden emergency but a predictable element of human life. Because of this, people invest in researching and manufacturing medicines, or studying to become doctors. They own the products of their labour, and are entitled to trade them (or donate them) as they see fit.

Many people would say they agree with this, but that there are some situations where rights should be compromised. The thing to understand is that rights are principles. In Objectivism, principles essentially encapsulate long-term pragmatism: principles are concepts you should always follow if you want good long-term results. (Rights, for example, encapsulate the principles to follow in the social realm). There will always be bad effects to violating principles, even if there appears to be a short-term gain.

If you say that one group of people (e.g., drug companies) should have their rights violated based on the needs of another group of people (e.g., sick and poor people), you establish the principle that anyone's rights can be violated for the needs of anyone else. You end up with different pressure groups and lobbyists pushing for government handouts and favourable legislation (i.e., the current situation). Linking back to the field of medicine, one practical outcome of the push to prevent "greedy drug companies hoarding medicine" has been that medical innovation has increasingly focused on things like viagra and plastic surgery, since if they develop life-saving innovations their intellectual property rights may well be violated.

"Are you saying you do ascribe to this position, that your only motivation to work is to get more money (and by extension luxuries) than everyone else has?"

No. I never said anything like that, and you are arguing dishonestly.

(For the sake of other readers: the goal of work is to achieve eudaimonia, productive happiness. The false dichotomy between "material greed" and "spiritual self-sacrifice" causes massive and unnecessary misery. See the books in my profile for details).

"Do you have specific objections to that plan?"

The change you said you wanted to see in the world was everyone earning the same wage. Here's a specific objection: let's say I'm a plumber living in your utopia, and some of my neighbours complain that InstPlumbing is often slow fixing their pipes. Though it's a fair bit of work, I'm willing to do it myself in exchange for a few of their hoarded dollars (or cigarettes, or whatever), which I later barter for extra bread rations for my kids. Whoops, now I'm earning more than other plumbers and we have inequality again.

Should I be banned from performing this greedy, selfish activity? And how are you going to stop people from engaging in such voluntary trades without totalitarian surveillance?

"You'd need a central bureacracy [which is the problem]"

It's more than a problem - you couldn't implement such a system without a totalitarian state.

"It's a source of sadness for me"

It's a source of sadness for me that you haven't thought through the details of your plan to "make everyone's world better".

I would go further. My clients' money is their money. As it's their money, they can do what they want with it. If they choose to give it to me, it's now my money.

Similarly, if you have a job, the money your employer gives you is now your money. If you have a business, the money your customers give you is now your money.

It's true that someone making £60k a year probably works harder, with more responsibility, and has invested more up-front in their own skills than someone making £20k a year. However this shouldn't be used as the justification for their higher salary; the justification has to be that freedom and property rights are inviolate principles.

If you cede those principles -- e.g., by conceding that hedge fund traders and CEOs cannot possibly be "worth" their high salaries, and so they should not be permitted their salaries, and so they and their employers do not have a right to their own money -- you effectively give free reign to the government to interfere with any economic transaction in the name of "fairness" or "justice".

If wealth and power are being concentrated anywhere, it's in the hands of the state:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/usgs_chartSp03t....

How's life as a tech guy in Singapore? I'm thinking of relocating there.

(I've lived in Hong Kong and China, so I'm not an Asia noob, but Singapore seemed better as a long-term place to settle).

I didn't read the whole thing ('tis long) but I think I got the gist from skimming it.

One main point is that the US government was meant to be a purely voluntary contract between men:

"The Constitution not only binds nobody now, but it never did bind anybody. It never bound anybody, because it was never agreed to by anybody in such a manner as to make it, on general principles of law and reason, binding upon him.

It is a general principle of law and reason, that a written instrument binds no one until he has signed it. This principle is so inflexible a one, that even though a man is unable to write his name, he must still “make his mark,” before he is bound by a written contract."

The second main point is that government debt is the factor which has shifted the government from "servant of the people" to the more typical "ruler of the people":

"On this principle, and from this motive, and not from any love of liberty, or justice, the money was lent in enormous amounts, and at enormous rates of interest. And it was only by means of these loans that the objects of the war were accomplished.

And now these lenders of blood-money demand their pay; and the government, so called, becomes their tool, their servile, slavish, villainous tool, to extort it from the labor of the enslaved people both of the North and the South. It is to be extorted by every form of direct, and indirect, and unequal taxation. Not only the nominal debt and interest—enormous as the latter was—are to be paid in full; but these holders of the debt are to be paid still further—and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid—by such tariffs on imports as will enable our home manufacturers to realize enormous prices for their commodities; also by such monopolies in banking as will enable them to keep control of, and thus enslave and plunder, the industry and trade of the great body of the Northern people themselves. In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood money demand, and insist upon, and are determined to secure, in return for the money lent for the war."

I'm in favour of a minarchist state, and, not being American, I find the US from its founding to roughly WWI something close to my ideal of a government which acts more as a mutual protection agency, rather than as an entity with an eternal claim on its citizens labour. Some of the Greek city-states also came close to this ideal.

I don't have time to give a detailed opinion on the argument in this article, but there's merit to the idea of every citizen having to formally recognise their constitution. E.g., at age 21, to become an official citizen you voluntarily sign a contract agreeing to uphold the constitution. (Obviously this wouldn't work in any current society, I'm talking a capitalist utopia with voluntary ~5% tax rates to pay for the police and army).

In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them? “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals. Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life.

An organism’s life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival. No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, including the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature—if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating—the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism’s life.

An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible.

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal- directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.” To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contradiction in terms. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.”"

-- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

There's a community of people online who like squashing logical fallacies. Thing is, articles like this represent a more subtle and high-level form of disinformation than the simply fallacies such people are trained to spot.

One aspect of this disinformation is treating "Silicon Valley" throughout as one big blob, an organisation or organised movement, rather than a group of diverse individuals and companies, each with independent opinions and objectives.

"YC is funding research on basic income - but Uber mines your data so how can these Silicon Valley elites be trusted?!!11"

Why do this? Because he wants to paint Silicon Valley as a power bloc. Remember that this is the writing of a public intellectual, and a well-connected member of the liberal establishment, in a major liberal newspaper, basically declaring that tech is a) too wealthy and powerful and needs to be cut down to size and b) their advocacy of basic income (libertarian socialism) is unsatisfactory, and only full-blown socialism will be deemed sufficient.

"Basic income, therefore, is often seen as the Trojan horse that would allow tech companies to position themselves as progressive, even caring – the good cop to Wall Street’s bad cop – while eliminating the hurdles that stand in the way of further expansion."

In other words, "don't trust techies who claim to be good capitalists, there are no good capitalists".

Note that when an industry expands (which Morozov implies is bad) they sell more useful products and services to more people. When the welfare state expands and "flourishes" (which Morozov says is good), it forces more people to pay more money to other people.

---

Near the end there's some illuminating new economic theory, which makes his thought process clearer:

"First, it is a way to compensate workers for the work they do while not technically working [...] Think of Uber drivers who are generating useful data, which helps Uber in making resource allocation decisions."

The data generated by one driver is of little value - probably no more than cents per trip.

"Second, because much of our labour today is collective – do you know by how much your individual search improves Google’s search index? Or how much a line of code you contribute to a free software project enhances the overall product? – it is often impossible to determine the share of individual contribution in the final product."

The essential point stands for any complicated enterprise - how much does one line of code contribute to a commercial project? As it's impossible to measure, there's only one way to settle the issue - worker and employer mutually agree on the value of worker's labour.

Evgeny's solution, remember, is to hand out more money to everyone. This would only be a fair system if the value of everyone's work was equal.

Note again the assumption that because many companies constantly mine data from everyone, and this data has some value, this means that everyone is creating value, all the time. The only value Uber and Google get from your data is the ability to better target services to you, so Evgeny's point is that companies should pay you for the ability to sell you stuff.

(I should point out that I think data mining is a shitty activity, and companies probably overvalue its benefit - on an unspoken "it's dubious so it must be useful" premise).

"First, that the welfare state, in a somewhat reformed form, must survive and flourish – it is a key social institution that, with its generous investments in health and education, gives us the freedom to be creative."

More freedom for those who get money, less freedom for those forced to pay for it.

This sounds a little like someone I used to know. Can you say more about how her personality came to light? Any little red flags your friend initially tried to ignore?

Or New Zealand's research into the feasibility of implementing UBI:

http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...

Key takeaways:

"An income of $300 per week is just over the average (mean) benefit income – therefore a plausible minimum income. However, paying a guaranteed income of $300 per week to every New Zealander aged 16 years and over, excluding superannuitants, comes at considerable fiscal cost. The fiscal cost of the GMI proposed in the first model (Model 1) is $44.5 billion (including the cost of all social transfers – in particular, New Zealand Superannuation payments, would cost $55.5 billion), requiring a flat personal tax rate of approximately 45.4%. Note that this tax rate and the others considered below are cost-neutral – not fiscally neutral – as personal taxes currently raise approximately $6 billion in excess of current social assistance costs."

"Although the Gini coefficient improves under all models, many beneficiaries (including the disabled, carers and sole parents) currently receive more than $300 per week and would be made financially worse off under a GMI scheme. Therefore the GMIs considered could distribute money away from those most in need of government assistance and toward those who have choices and opportunities but choose not to work."

Your theory is essentially Marxist (capital colluding to hold down the workers), and like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.

Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society, and not merely businesses which survive via trade.

Whether the mind is equivalent to the brain is an open question. If someone built an artificial mind, that would massively raise my belief in the possibility that the mind is purely physical. But I hold that this is vastly more difficult than assumed.

My point with the Lord of the Rings was precisely that you give the books to a person who hasn't read them, and give them a few weeks to work through them. A Chinese Room would take vastly longer to "process" the book and it's "understanding" (represented symbolically) would take up vastly more room than the book itself. Even to understand simple word problems (to do with arranging blocks, for example), the algorithm used by the Room would have to explicitly encode our implicit knowledge of spatial relationships, and be able to apply this knowledge to arbitrary problems. To understand literature at a human level, the algorithm would have to encode standard knowledge of human psychology, society, physics, etc.

In principle this could all be performed with a giant lookup table -- but such a table would be the size of several solar systems' worth of matter. So I don't hold that a Chinese Room is impossible in principle, but I do hold that building a practical AI would require great advances in the understanding of our own consciousness.

Most aren't, but some are. You give up something priceless if you adjust to fit in -- and though it's hard not to, you don't need to.

I wasn't commenting on the word choice. I was commenting on the focus on the financial drawbacks of startups, when the focus should be on how they stifle good work.

> So the takeaway is always send less words as you don't know on what device the recipient will read it.

The real takeaway is to learn to judge the character of the people you meet, and not to waste time with vapid morons who are intimidated by four paragraph messages. How are you going to have any kind of meaningful adult relationship with such a creature? Even assuming that you don't want a relationship, and merely want to navigate her arbitrary tests for long enough to score a quick sexual fling -- what's the point? You jumped through some hoops and scored a pointless hedonistic trophy. Whoop.

This is my problem with advice like yours. You change your behaviour to avoid coming across as "needy" -- but you're still making your primary goal winning the approval of an irrational person. Be more selective, know your own value, understand what kind of person you value -- then just be straightforward and direct when you do meet that kind of person.

I've been browsing HN since 2009 and there's always been articles like this. Hell, if you read pg's old essays, he often took a strong pro-bootstrapping, anti-funding tone.

The problem with articles like this is they call startups a "cult" on the grounds that one can get a better financial deal elsewhere. What they ignore is that some people might be entirely rational in valuing the chance to build something groundbreaking, over pure financial concerns. The real criticism of startups would be that this is the big swindle -- that despite advertisements to the contrary, VC-funded startups do not offer the chance to build great products. The VC game inherently undermines attempts to build companies which think long-term, act on principle, and which build awesome products. Some companies manage it, but it takes exception leadership, vision and political savvy from the founders.

Absolutely. "Alex"'s mistake was not the content of his message, but in sending any message at all. What value could there be in a relationship with such a vapid creature?

  So DNA didn't store any information until a conscious human learned how to read it?

It didn't. DNA is simply a complex structure, which, placed within another complex structure (a cell, containing appropriate amino acids), creates further complex structures (proteins).

  Otherwise, how could consciousness have evolved in the first place?

I don't know. However, I disagree that information needs to be an independent physical property for consciousness to evolve.

The steelman [1] version of your view, I guess, would be that "information" is equivalent to "complexity". Certainly consciousness relies on complexity, but it's not equivalent. Hurricanes are very complex, but certainly not conscious. Some say that complex systems like waterfalls and hurricanes perform complex information processing, but I think this is wrong.

There's a fundamental difference between a human processing information (say, a bronze age man reading about metallurgy from a wax tablet and using the knowledge to craft a sword) and the actions of DNA, or hurricanes, or waterfalls.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

An actual Chinese Room would be unimaginably vast - whole planets, solar systems, devoted to the knowledge we hold implicitly.

To illustrate - imagine you give the room (in Chinese) the text of Lord of the Rings, and then ask it which member of the fellowship corresponds to the "Wise Old Man" archetype. Any reasonably smart human will give the answer, "Gandalf". But the room would need to (in Chinese) make systematic notes of the characters, their relationships, their actions, and then somehow integrate all this into a categorisation under the appropriate archetype.

I'm actually agnostic as to the question of whether such a room could be built -- as I'm agnostic towards the possibility of AI -- but assuming the room would not be inconceivably complex masks the complexity of the ordinary workings of human consciousness.

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  Essentially: consciousness does not exist. We only think it does because the thing we think with is wrong. But because we think with it, we can't tell the difference. So asking "who is experiencing the illusion" is begging the question.

As for your essential point, I hold that words like "think", "experience", "illusion" all rest on the more fundamental concept of "consciousness".

Indeed.

  That’s the content of consciousness, and it’s no longer a
  fundamental mystery. It’s information, and we know how to build 
  computers that process information.

The fundamental error here is trying to explain consciousness through the concept of information. The thing is, information can't be explained except by reference to consciousness. A physical entity X (e.g., a radio signal) might hold information for a conscious agent Y, but X doesn't intrinsically hold information in the absence of an agent.

I know there's a growing trend in modern physics to treat information as a real physical property, akin to matter or energy, but I hold that this is a category error, akin to treating "risk" as something you measure in the world, rather than a measurement of your own uncertainty about a situation. They're both examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy, projecting properties properly belonging to the mind out into the world.

Dualism gets a bad rap, but you can posit a non-religious form of dualism, whereby matter & consciousness are both natural elements of the universe, but possessing different properties. Perhaps future science will be able to explain their relationship in more detail.

Attempting to dismiss consciousness, on the other hand, by taking monist reductionism as axiomatic (everything is matter, consciousness isn't real), end up with the proponents attributing properties of consciousness to matter, and ultimately flopping back over into monist idealism (everything is consciousness) and precisely the mysticism they were trying to avoid.