There is no choice of any meaningful action or cause and effect in the question, just sacrifice your life for everyone else. There isn't even a hint of how that would allegedly accomplish anything by any means in reality. It has no connection with reality at all.

I would probably look for a way to sort them out, saving those who had an objective morality, which would mean that very few would be saved.

"'I don't have to tell you,' he said, 'that if I do it, it won't be an act of self-sacrifice. I do not care to live on their terms, I do not care to obey them and I do not care to see you enduring a drawn out murder. There will be no values for me to seek after that—and I do not care to exist without values.'"

Galt's oath does cover acts risking death.

Whether or not something is a sacrifice is not determined by whether or not it is voluntary. Values are not arbitrary. Dagny was a rational value. "Deciding" to kill yourself for the sake of the collective because it is the collective is not. Neither are floating abstraction "questions" with no causal connections posing sacrifice as a virtue. Voluntary altruism is altruism.

And he said, "I don't need to tell you that if I do it, it won't be a sacrifice." (memory quote; he may have said, "I don't have to tell you...").

If all the other people on planet earth were to die, it would mean no more Gilbert&Sullivan performances, and all the Coca-Cola would be gone. So I think maybe I would choose to die then, but if I did, I would consider it not a sacrifice, but a submission to a hard trade.

I'll go with Allosaurs' answer!

Ayn Rand was an atheist as a consequence of her philosophy, not an agnostic.

There is no principle that anything that exists is inherently unknowable. Mathematical undecidability theorems you cited are based on paradoxes from self reference within formal symbolic systems, not unknowability.

Ayn Rand did not use or misuse Occam's razor. It has no fundamental role in theory formation. Theories are cognitive explanations of reality, not floating abstractions manipulated to 'correspond' to facts, from which we arbitrarily choose the simplest. Two different theories that have predicted the same result are still contradictory. At least one of them is wrong, which does not depend on a preference for relative simplicity.

A form of "simplicity" that is required is what Ayn Rand called "Rand's razor", an epistemological principle for the proper formation of concepts in accordance with what she informally called the "crow epistemology", which is the fact that there is only so much that we can simultaneously retain in our mind at the same time.

Concepts are a system of cognitive classification. As Ayn Rand put it, a "crucial aspect of the cognitive role of concepts" is that "concepts represent condensations of knowledge, which make further study and the division of cognitive labor possible." That is done through a hierarchy of abstractions from abstractions.

"The range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited. The essence, therefore, of man's incomparable cognitive power is the ability to reduce a vast amount of information to a minimal number of units—which is the task performed by his conceptual faculty. And the principle of unit-economy is one of that faculty's essential guiding principles."

The form of such "simplicity" required for cognition is that principle of cognitive "unit economy". Ayn Rand expressed it as what she called "Rand's razor": "Concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity—the corollary of which is: nor are they to be integrated in disregard of necessity". That is objective necessity, not preference, and is not Occam's razor, let alone based on Popper's negative notion of falsifiability.

For the full explanation see Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

On the topic of theism, it implies atheism (a-theism): not believing in the supernatural. It does not allow for agnosticism, a perpetual state of accepting not knowing what to think. It is not necessary or possible to disprove arbitrary assertions in order to not believe them or their possibility (assertion of possibility also requires proof that something is possible). And when the arbitrary assertions are self contradictory or contradict what we already know, as theism usually is, one can further deny their possibility, not just not believe it.

So are you N. Peace.

Understand hip replacement. My BFF whose blood sugar hit 500 and caused her to hit the deck fractured her femur in three places. 14 days in hospital 48 days in rehab. Then 6 weeks before we got the pins out and faces hip replacement. I had hip replacement but I was only in the hospital two days and walking that nite. Had PT at home and am back on my John Deere bouncing across my yard! My Ortho is a real classy lady!

Absolutely correct! Also, there are some on the "whole planet", whom I really would not lift a finger to save, esp. capitalism-hating politicians. You can't do all the work for the people, they need to act as well, if they want an outcome.

Back in 1988 when I first played Nethack, it was advertised as a fun way to learn how to navigate Unix.

Ahhh, Nethack. Last week I learned it had a new version release. I may have to install it again. :)

What kind of life would you live where choices are divorced from causality and reality has no role in formulating questions like this?

Yes, it's a meaningless invalid question with no connection to reality and causality, intended to invoke a false premise of guilt and duty to sacrifice.

Ayn Rand never invoked Occam's razor. If there is no evidence for something then rationally one does not believe it. That is not Occam's razor.

You are correct, my bad.

Thoroughly analyzed. +1

On a humorous note,
with regard to Schroedinger's cat, I found the cat frozen and dead in a refrigerator in a game called NetHack once. Once unthawed, my pet dog gained both an experience level and teleportitis upon consuming the cat. Fortunately I had a "magic" whistle that summoned the dog from anywhere on the dungeon level. ;)

The Maru test isn't a save one vs many, that is the Trolley Problem IIRC. The point of Starfleet's test was that there was no way to save anyone in the scenario. Hence the "I don't believe in a no-win scenario" from Kirk in STII:The Wrath of Khan.

I would tend to disagree with that as an acceptable use of the Razor, and thus disagree with the premise as well. While it may appear initially that to say something is unknowable is the same as saying god does not exist, we have no shortage of items where we can define things as unknowable.

For example we have the Halting Problem, Göedel's Incompleteness Theorum, and Tarski's Undefinability Theorum to go with it. These and more do demonstrate that certain things are, so far as we can reason, un-knowable. Of course, Schrödinger's feline companion may have something to say about it. Or not, we can't say.

Even if we were to reduce logic to numbers (Gödel numbering IIRC), Turing and Church showed that we still could not prove certain things as true or not. And this is in the realm of computers, math, and logic.

Perhaps the great irony for non-agnostics is that there is one and only one way to prove, or "know" there is a creator god. It must make itself present to you and provide you with the historical knowledge sufficient to be unequivocal proof. Conversely, there is no proving the negative.

At most, assume we are able to create the ability to see into the past - at any time on Earth in any location (great story for this: The Light of Other Days - Clarke and Baxter). Could we prove there is no god? No. All we could prove was whether events portrayed in religious texts actually happened.

I suspect, based on the context provided, that she was misusing Occam's Razor. The Razor is not a proof tool, it is a tool for extracting bits. Besides, assuming you have the god theorem and the "it just happened, m'kay" theorem and they predicted the same results, then Occam would say to select the God one because it has the fewest assumptions.

Naturally, I am not saying that is the correct answer, merely the simplest and thus the best match for Occam. Occam's Razor is not a top for logic. It is explicitly a tool for selecting between competing theories that predict the same outcomes - and not based on a provable logic just on a preference for simplicity.

Incidentally if she was misusing Occam's in the common guise of "the simplest answer is best", that would be incorrect as that comes from the law of parsimony.

Yet even that "law" is not a tool of logic, but one of convenience and the scientific method's preference for simplicity because we expect falsifiability. The more complex the explanation the more we have which needs to be falsifiable.

Saving them from what? Some existential crisis?Pfft! No.

As others have questioned: Some implausible scenario from the movie Armageddon, would I do what Bruce Willis' character did? Almost certainly.

Lastly, I'd comment what a silly topic this is for a survey. But it was fun to play.

I have made the agnostic argument in this forum on several occasions before. Saying something is unknowable in this life is an acceptable answer for me, but Ayn Rand uses an Occam's Razor argument to say that atheism is the logical position. I disagree with her premise.

I can conceive of a conscious existence after death that does not involve deities, so sure. You could even have a soul with no deities - especially if that "soul" is your consciousness.

An objectivist could be agnostic, thus not necessarily atheist. You can call Buddhism an atheist religion as there are no personal gods in it. Indeed, if there is one tenet shared by all groups of Buddhists, it is that there is no creator god. I mention all of that because the Buddhists do believe in a post-death existence of sorts, though it is not surrounding a "soul", and not quite "reincarnation" as is commonly used.

There are enlightened/ascended beings but they are not what we'd call deities. Even then among the Buddhists system they are generally regarded as symbolic anyway. I mention this because

With atheism there are two poles if you will: "god does not exist" and "I have no proof or evidence god exists, so I do not have a belief in god existing" (yes, semantically belief means no proof but this is the way the phrasing is used).

So I'd say it may be likely that an Objectivist is atheistic, it would not be certain. Even among atheist Objectivists, I'd expect them to be more of the nontheist side. But maybe that's just me.

hell no....