Leaderboard

Hi @Mole I guess that's you changing your mind about/discarding military internship... right? If so, good on you! Make it work! Barnsley

The question that any person faces in life is, what should I be doing with my time? I think this is a sufficient proof of free will because it asks man to be rational and to have objective ideals. If emotions are arbitrary, then there are no objective ideals because the purpose of life is happiness but happiness is just positive emotions. To say that it's a false dichotomy sounds like saying that rationality and irrationality is a false dichotomy. I can understand that emotions might be inaccurate some of the time, e.g., it's just a prank bro. I'm not saying that emotions are always accurate, but I am saying that they are always rational and that just means empirical. And given that our emotions such as guilt are so complex, this must be the case. That's because in order for us to even be able to feel guilt, we must have built a conceptual chain leading to guilt that includes other concepts such as justice, and that can only be done by a robust, empirical mind. But if we are able to do that, it doesn't make sense that we make a 'cognitive error' of thinking that we ought to be guilty for things we didn't do wrong. That cannot be the case, because if we feel guilt then we very well know what justice is, but if we know justice, then we know that what we have done isn't wrong. If emotions such as guilt don't really exist or are much more primitive than we make them to be, then I don't understand how a person can find meaning in such a complex world. I think it is most likely that we evolved to have complex emotions as we concurrently came to understand the world and society. I would definitely say that the true self consists of sub-personalities which can even contradict one another. However, a conceptual net can be caste around these sub-personalities that are more or less not merely self-defense mechanisms. The sub-personalities of the false self are simply reacting to the sub-personalities of the true self. To give a very concrete example, obviously there is a part of you that knows your dog didn't eat your homework. However, there is another part of you that doesn't want other people to know that you know that. Without the first part, the second part cannot exist. This is how we differentiate the true and false self. Perhaps this is where the idea of shoulder angels originated from. Psychoanalysis or rather psycho-dynamics has been shown to be as effective as CBT in the long-term. However, many psychologists argue that there is a common variable that explains this. And they say that this common variable is the empathy of the counsellor/therapist. Given these results, I think the debate is not nearly settled. Anyway, I'm not even sure whether it is fair to compare psycho-dynamics to other psychotherapies, just like it is unfair to compare weight loss and liposuction. Also, it should be noted that almost every FDR call-in show contains a great chunk of psycho-dynamics. It is very hard to argue that self-defense mechanisms don't exist or that there aren't unconscious drives or motives which we only discover later in life. Cognitivism might claim to be able to explain these things, but it goes nowhere near into detail as psycho-dynamics has.