masonman

"actual meaning of the words are subjective" I absolutely agree. Language is only useful when different people's subjective interpretation of different words are all generally in agreement. I always dislike English classes that acted as if English was an unchanging, static language that had solid rules like math. Language doesn't. Languages are always changing, how we use different words is always changing. Language is just sounds with meaning, the sounds can change, the meaning can change. However languages are super useful because I can say "bicycle" and we both understand what I'm talking about. However you may think of a red bicycle sitting on grass when I say "bicycle," and I may think of a black bicycle floating in a white void when you say "bicycle." Language is not at all objective. If I said "ejaculation" 200 years ago, you would have had a completely different mental association with it than you had when I wrote it now.

Thats how government programs work: they make things worse, but point the TV cameras at all this stuff. Look, you can't see what people didn't buy, you can't see people made poorer by this thing because it's not always direct. Yeah, they aren't paying premiums, but that money still has to come from somewhere, and it comes through deficit financing and taxation. How would you measure the people fired or not hired because paying for their healthcare would be too expensive? Employers don't have to submit that kind of data. Nobody knows. We just know its happening. How is "$19 billion in benefits" a positive? Was that money thrown down upon earth by God? No, that money was simply "moved," quite threateningly.

Thanks for your reply. I have been thinking along similar lines from time to time. I mean, after my mom moved our family far away from the people I grew up with I kind of stopped talking to people and hiding here for two years. I stopped thinking about my future, I just went with the first college she picked for me, and then after I left I am now just going with the first suggestion for work she has given me. I don't think I have ever really made my own big decisions in a very very long time. I have one or two extreme ideas for getting out on my own (well, one), and your post is definitely making me think about it again. Again thanks for the reply.

So I was listening to the most recent Sunday show on youtube and the topic of social anxiety came up, a very very very important issue in my life. But once again (several other of Stef shows on the subject feel the same) I felt the conversation didn't really apply to me. Right now I just feel I need to write down my thoughts, sort of a stream of consciousness, because I am literally pacing around my room thinking this stuff because these ideas need to be out of my head so badly. Not to mention I am running short on time and am desperate. I would journal this, but I journal when I don't want an audience. I would call in during the next show, but I am also unsure of having Stef (and the youtube listeners) being my audience, and I hate my voice, and I wouldn't know what to say, writing is simply much easier for me.My parents were huge achievers. They started low and worked hard and got to the top. I cannot figure out the source of my social anxiety. But its bad. And it is making my life worse by the day. I left college as a result of depression (http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/33822-what-the-hell-am-i-doing-ramble-ramble-ramble/) that was very much aided by hopelessness surrounding social anxiety (for example I went to a job fair and after a conversation with one representative (full of stuttering and awkwardness, and when he asked "do you have any questions about the company" I just stood there for a few moments and then said "no") I felt the usual intense fear and terror and I had to rush back to my dorm and sit down and try to calm down for about an hour. I didn't go back.). The age of the article I linked to above kind of tells you how little progress I am making in my own life. I am 21 and have barely changed in my mental state from when I was 18.I've been sitting in the basement for more than a month procrastinating on a business idea my mom came up with for me (I sure as hell can't seem to figure anything out for myself, and by that I mean I don't want to because I feel very scared) to fix people's computers around town, and she's just about to kick me out I'm doing so little. I can't blame her for that. My fear of social interaction just gives me this hopelessness, I see everybody else out succeeding and I am stuck because I can't talk to people, I don't know how and even if I did, I'd be too scared to do so. I (awkardly) talked business with somebody a few weeks ago and again I had to cool down afterwards except that time I kept thinking about all the stupid things I did in the conversation, and about ways to hang myself, but the suicidal ideation is such a regular thing for me I just see it as a routine to not be taken very seriously, a "silent cry for attention" if you will. (I'll talk about it online but in real life I have decided I will either do it or not, I will not "fail." I've already got enough failure on my plate.)I don't know. Some people, and some topics, I can talk easily, somewhat relaxed. Though even with my own parents I have extreme trouble with eye contact. Even with myself in the mirror I have trouble with eye contact. I just start to feel terrified. I think part of it is self-esteem, I hate how I look, so I am imagining how they see me. I don't know. I mean, I am obsessed with fitness, always lifting weights and running and weighing myself daily and watching my diet for years I've been doing this but I always drop back to being weak and fatter every time I have heavier depressive "episodes." I imagine this obsession relates to the self-esteem thing.Peoples eyes, the moment I see them and recognize they are looking at my face, they terrify me. Absolute terror. I don't know how else to describe it.I remember after the Zeitgeist Response video where Stef talked about the RBE folks' need for resources without dealing with realities of the adult world, and I really felt chills there because I realized I TOTALLY want that, but I also recognize economic realities, and that just makes me feel worse. And then I feel even more shame than that because I have WAY more opportunities than 90 percent of the people in this world, from the country I am in to the personal economic stability I was born into. I can't even comfort myself with ideas of socialism. And I think the reason I want that so badly is because I am so scared, and I am so scared because of the people. And the eyes.More recently I have thought maybe its caused by narcissism. Maybe the reason I can't look at myself in the mirror is because I am looking at myself like a 3rd party would, and I don't like what I see, because I want to be this character, this "imaginary self" that is better than the real me. The star in a movie where everybody else is a supporting character, and I'm just scared of realizing how untrue that is.Or maybe its just school, I remember being terrified when we had to recite poetry in front of the class. I remember being yelled at or hushed whenever I spoke in class. Though after about 3rd grade I had become the "good student" who never spoke unless he knew he was absolutely permitted to, and even then not always. All us quiet ones ended up being a group of friends. But they all got over it. They're all open and loud and partying and happy and excited for life.All this creates this enormous envy in me. All the people I know and knew as a child are just so much better than me, they adapt and they learn and they speak and they smile and they actually have real feeling behind the smile when they talk to people and I just wish I could be like that but no matter how much I consciously try to realize how irrational this all is it still happens anyways, I still feel terrified, and I sweat, and shake, and hate myself.God I want to work. I don't think I have ever really provided any real value to anybody. Every time I was ever paid it always felt like a donation. I want to be of value to somebody, to provide something worth paying for. I hate feeling this worthless. I hate being dependent. Being a leech. But then the talking thing becomes a requirement and I shrink down again. Its why I left college. I realized all the education in the world doesn't matter if you can't handle a job interview. And in my high school during a practice interview I could barely handle it. It wasn't even for an actual job and I couldn't answer the questions and my voice was shaking and I didn't make eye contact and that was actually her main criticism: "don't be so nervous." Helpful, thanks.I know I know: I need a therapist. But all the reviews in my area seem to show that all of them are the "15 minutes of talking, 2 minutes of prescription writing" sort of therapists. Not to mention that level of courage I just don't have, trying to arrange such a thing.Sometimes I think there is just some random chemical imbalance, and all these problems would go away with one pill that I just haven't tried before. I really, really hope thats true, but I am highly doubtful. I can tell you one thing with confidence, if there was nobody that would be hurt by my sudden non-existence, I would do it right now. That is shame, not guilt, and once I figured out the difference I realized how narcissistic these thoughts are.On a note that may or may not be related, I don't actually know for sure, I sometimes have fantasies of getting in fights and losing bad, getting beaten to a pulp, vomiting, rolling in my own blood. Begging for the fight to keep going. Wanting it. Like I want to be destroyed or something. I enjoy those fantasies a lot, and I'm still working out why I like them so much. All this psychologising has got me making connections regardless of whether real connections exist. I don't know. Its probably something something narcissism.Sometimes I think maybe this entire post I just wrote is to create a character I want you to see me as, but its so subtle I don't even fully comprehend that I am trying to convince you I am a certain character. "Look at me, look at how broken I am! Look at how much help you should give me! Me! Me! Me!" I hate that I feel anger and fear at the idea that my suffering is - in a way - fake, even if its true. Layers and layers and layers.I am not even going to ask a question at the end here, because there is no singular question I can put, this whole fucking post is a giant question I think. Not sure if an answer exists. Doesn't feel like it most of the time. Then maybe I am just scared of the answers. No, I am certain I am scared of the answers.There is a distinct possibility this post could be connected to my real identity, which also scares me. But whatever, got to give up on your image at some point (Brain: "You're supposed to be strong dammit! People will look down at you if they knew this! It will be pity and mockery all around!")I still haven't fundamentally figured out how to say hi to people, really.

I don't have any clue of what Stef thinks on the matter, but I can't figure out why automation is ever seen as a bad thing. I am quite confident in my argument that capitalism is always (not as a rule, but as a trend) moving in the direction of achieving technological singularity, and eventually a completely capital-run economy (essentially, press a button, get what you want). The RBE is kind of an attempt to achieve that, but without factoring in subjective value and economic calculation. People seem to have this idea that unemployment is ALWAYS bad. 100 percent unemployment in a society without automated capital goods would just lead to death and starvation. But if every single person on Earth had their job replaced by a machine, that would simply mean we'd live in an economy where it would kind of feel like "post-scarcity" even though it wouldn't be, though it would be a life of abundance.

In response to some of the stuff about meditation, from what I have seen, there are people within this community who see learning from your past history as essentially the cure-all for current psychological issues, and a good portion of people who are into Buddhism and meditation seem to think meditation is the cure-all. I hate the "in-between" argument (the answer to most debates is not the bloody middle ground), however I think both of these things help in different ways. I think ignoring your past is a great way to keep making the same bad decisions, and meditation is about learning to calm your brain down and to learn how it is fundamentally impossible to get a "one-up" on life. In my personal opinion meditation aids in gaining self knowledge because it forces you to watch your own brain as an "observer," and instead of being overcrowded with nonsense you get a little bit better at reasoning things out in your head. You can think a bit more clearly. I've never seen promoters of mindfulness meditation say that the point is to "clear your mind" (most will tell you that to consciously do such a thing is logically impossible), but just to watch what your mind does, and label what it does. In and of itself you learn a lot about yourself. I found it quite amazing to see how rapidly my brain flies from subject to subject. I don't try to shut anything out, that usually backfires anyways.

However, who defines usury? The problem with usury is it is a purely arbitrary distinction, that once certain terms are at some arbitary level, suddenly a voluntary exchange becomes immoral. So, how do you define usury?I agree totally though that people should really think of living within their means instead of feeling like they NEED to live in a house in the suburbs, even when they will have to take out a 30 year mortgage to do so.

Which prime numbers are in sexual relationships?See I can ask baseless, random questions too!

I highly recommend this article from We the Individuals:http://wetheindividuals.org/2013/08/26/feudalism-disguised-as-egalitarianism-a-critique-of-georgism/ What about food? Healthcare? If somebody is dying of a disease, if others do not provide medical treatment are they denying his right to exist? If somebody doesn't provide the person with food is he denying that persons right to exist?Land and oxygen and water ALONE are not enough to live, either. Why set the bar at that exact point? How can people have the right and not have the right at the same time? If you take the land somebody else owned "rightfully," you are denying property rights while also using property rights, and just making an arbitrary distiction about how much a man has a "right" to land, air, and water. Who decides how much water, air, and land is enough for each man? What sorts of ways? How do you distrubute access natural resources "fairly" without some entity that forces what it considers to be "fair" onto other people?

That may or may not be true, depending on your goals.

Oh man this is great. I must say right from the get go I have trouble taking anybody seriously when they use numbers in the place of words.

Russel Brand was never one of those people who's social commentary I took too seriously. I'm not sure how influential he is in that regard, considering he's mostly a hilarious and irresponsible drug abusing sex addict.

As a result of all the government BS surrounding steroids, the real data of their side effects on humans are far from well understood. "he was merely seeking the respect of people that put physical looks first" This is most people. To some extent it is everybody, everybody interprets quite a lot from somebody's appearance. "A shame because he will never have the look he so valued" What do you mean? As far as I know those sorts of injuries aren't permanently debilitating, Layne Norton got a pec tear a while ago and hes back in the gym 100 percent now. "Can lifting weights for aesthetics and attention be unhealthy?" Unhealthy in what way? I mean, he clearly had a passion for something, he inspired thousands of people to start exercising in some way or another. I don't think he was a pinnacle of health, but I dunno, he had a purpose. At what point to you go for what makes you happy instead of doing what others tell you is healthy? I think turning himself into a beautiful male brought him joy. I know I'd feel pretty awesome if I looked like that.

I thought it was primarily because they want to keep acquiring US dollars and buying treasury bonds so they can maintain a trade surplus, even though if they let the market return to a more natural state they would have more domestic consumption, surpluses, high standard of living, etc. I feel that talk such as this means things are going to change at some point: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90883/8182231.html

I'm still confused as to why there is an implicit assumption here that what she is doing is bad and/or is coming from a bad place? I'm not saying it is or isn't, but it seems like quite an assumption.

Well, they could have called it "consciousness and experience" but then fewer people would click the video. A TON of videos on scientific topics, not to mention quite a few TED talks, have names that don't coincide perfectly accurately with the things discussed in the video. Its a form of marketing I suppose you could say.

He might be taking further than I do, I mean as a phenomenon it is a universal experiencer, but I don't see any implication that it means consciousnesses are physically connected. "because one or more entities have a property, consciousness, therefore, all entities have the same consciousness?" I mean, all physical entities have a property, gravity, and I would argue they undergo the same phenomenon, gravity, however the magnitudes and directions vary greatly of course. "I am considering each consciousness as a specific phenomenon" In what way is this a better approach than the idea of souls? We know human brains are not extremely unique from one another, they share very similar characteristics, and they exhibit very similar measurable activity. So the idea that consciousness is a universal phenomenon that occurs wherever a brain-like structure is assembled is not exactly a wild jump. Ok, show me the "you" that is doing the experiencing. Your body isn't doing the experiencing. Your brain is the circuit that provides the environment necessary for conscious experience, so that isn't you. So who does the experiencing?

I didn't interpret it as going that far in the video. I mean the electric field produced by your computer is not treated as its own phenomenon, its considered a basic physical law that appears anywhere when certain conditions are present. The video points out that humans tend to think of consciousness completely differently (and unscientifically) - that each person has a unique consciousness (soul, etc.), but as it is already known that simply is not the case, we have different arrangements of consciousnesses (just like we have different arrangements of electric fields - with different magnitudes and directions depending on different physical factors). Of course consciousness is an aggregate, but then again so is an electric field (I mean heck its magnitude is measured as a rate - Newtons per Coulomb). "What evidence do you have that your consciousness and my consciousness are not unique?" We know that in all probability under equal stimuli your brain will respond differently to my brain, but its the same phenomenon going on. Different electric field magnitudes and/or directions do not mean they need to be treated as completely different subjects in physics. "If 'we are all one consciousness', wouldn't that be apparent in the activity of consciousness, itself?" The video put forth that our experiences are all manifestations of a universal phenomenon called consciousness (I don't mean to Peter Joseph this conversation, but I don't know how else to put it). Just like all electric fields are all manifestations of a universal phenomenon called charge. I don't think it claimed that each human consciousness is literally physically connected. All these claims are completely falsifiable. For one, if humans can completely rebuild a brain from the ground up and "turn it on", but no matter what the synthetic brain physically cannot act like any human brain, then that means there is another ingredient to consciousness that nobody yet knows about. If a brain similarly constructed to other brains acts completely out of any pattern seen in other brains, once again there is something missing. "What additional knowledge or insight is gained by knowing that something is within the set of possible things in the universe?" Ok so whats the significance of this argument? Isn't the guy in the video just saying "nearly identical physical forms all act in the essentially same way"? Well... yes. So there is one phenomenon called human consciousness. I've heard it said plenty of times (in different words, of course), "your consciousness is nothing more than the side-effect of the configuration of your brain." Which as far as we know is quite possibly true. So, who am I? I can say "I'm Mason" but that is just a sound/word/image that has been associated to identify my individual form. That tells us nothing about whats behind your eyes. Who, or better said - what - is actually taking in the physical stimuli measured by my senses and experiencing it? I mean, when I look at things in a purely physical way, there is no "me," as much as there is an arrangement of cells occurring in nature. Humans just decided not to divide things down that far and find it much more practical to identify me by the aggregate. Its easy to call an arrangement of trees a "forest" but if we want to compare two forests we are required to acknowledge the individual parts (and we can choose how far down we want to go, tree types, cell types, atoms, protons, etc.). So how can consciousness be anything other than universal? I can say "I am experiencing the touch and sight of this computer and I am contemplating about the response to these posts" but "I" is something imagined up by consciousness to help keep everything in order, right? Evolution brought about brains that always work to bring order to differing stimulus. I think the best comparison I can think of is if my cat, Tally, is eating food, I can say "Tally is eating food" but Tally is a name I have assigned to one individual instance of "cat." "A cat" is eating food. Of course I can break that down further, but that would simply add unnecessary wording to the same thing. However this is still a bad comparison, because consciousness as a phenomenon is unique in that we are using the very thing we are trying to explain in order to explain it. My consciousness is just "a consciousness," my consciousness is just an instance of "consciousness." So, consciousness as a phenomenon comes before "I" do. Consciousness experiences what the senses interpret. Consciousness as a phenomenon identified and later named its own instance. We know a few other animals are capable of identifying their own instance as well (with the mirror test). So cats and other animals that fail the mirror test can be seen as "unintentional hippies" lol. They don't even have self-awareness, they are only capable of somewhat identifying other moving things and dealing with them accordingly. They are a consciousness without any sense of "me." They are just a floating experience machine like the rest of us, but they haven't gotten all mucked up in attempting to name and identify everything as if that brings you closer to reality. If you have a room of computers, all built slightly different, and you turn one on, did you "create" anything? No, you just started running current through a certain arrangement of equipment. If that equipment then automatically begins identifying its individual parts, and gives itself a name ("Computer 13"), what happens when you take a sledgehammer to the computer? "Computer 13" as a few bits of data (which is just using current to create relative values through voltage) separates out into "disorder" (subjectively, according to both human-built computers and human brains). I think part of what the video is saying is just that that is all death is, shutting off a universal phenomenon in one tiny part of the universe, but that doesn't not shut off the phenomenon as a whole, or as a scientific rule. "The second mainstream hypothesis holds that consciousness is a local phenomenon emerging from certain types of complex physical interaction, by some undiscovered mechanism" This idea presented in the video coincides perfectly with this hypothesis. My argument and the argument in the video is that you don't experience consciousness, consciousness just experiences. It just "is" as a result of your brain. What is "you" but a small bit of data generated by the consciousness? If you placed a brain in a life support system with NO sensory input, it would be a consciousness without the ability to identify anything. It cannot logically build the idea of "you" because it cannot connect with physical reality. I think that would be one of the most fascinating experiments possible to observe. I wonder what the brain would do. Would it just sit at a standstill, processing nothing, just storing a miniscule piece of energy? That's my hypothesis. Believe me, I am ready to spin on a dime on this line of argument, but I cannot see any gaping flaws in it at the moment (then again I've only been tossing it around in my head for like a few hours). If somebody DOES draw the conclusion of "we are all physically/consciously connected" from this video, I would say that is not supported by the evidence humans have so far. I could be totally spewing woo-woo though, it wouldn't be the first time.

You have no idea how hard I laughed at this. Muh roads.

FriendlyHacker (and anybody else who understands a good deal of the RBE concept), I have a few rather general questions. I've done a little bit of reading on the RBE, and I see a lot of cool looking ideas and designs for efficient and futuristc ways to exist, but how does the RBE as a whole balance human wants and environmental concerns? Like, at some point, humans that go beyond hunter gatherer style living tend to reproduce and consume resources. Since the RBE system is based around efficient use of resources, where is the line drawn? If somebody wants a bigger house, how big can he go? If somebody wants his own car instead of public transport, can he acquire that? Where is the line drawn between human want and ecological protection? It seems like an important thing to be clear about. The reply I usually hear is essentially "people wont need any of that because the system will be so efficient that such things will be redundant." Ok, but then THAT statement is drawing a line, saying essentially if you have a want, you are limited to exactly what meets the basic elements of that want, and nothing more. i.e. if you want communication you can acquire one highly efficient communication system of some sort. If you want one that is wired differently, or one in a certain color scheme, thats excess that isn't necessary to meet the basic requirements of what you want.

I would be very very interested to see a flowchart or other similar graphic to layout (in general steps) how the software works. Are you guys planning on developing something of the sort to give folks like me a better idea of the concept?

So considering how many people are talking about how difficult Peter Joseph's points were to clearly understand, I've decided to make a complete transcript of the debate, I'm halfway done now but I also need to study, I'll try to finish and post it by Saturday. Figure it might be helpful to have a searchable text of the debate.

Walk down any street in Japan and you can see why they have such low crime. They just don't have a violent culture. They have suicide issues resulting from the ritualistic elements of their culture, but the closeness of families and very non-violent culture I think has made the country very low-crime relative to other countries.

I'm an EE student (3rd year now), I made a thread a long time ago about my issues (here: http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/33822-what-the-hell-am-i-doing-ramble-ramble-ramble/)A lot of your story reminds me a LOT about myself. However now I am thinking along a bit different lines than I was back then."I have no friends, not even a single person to talk to about life"I have one friend (who dropped out) here, but I never talk to him about these things for the most part. I remember I never felt lonely until I came to college, even though I was just as isolated at home. Do you feel like you are missing something significant (in terms of helping yourself) by not having friends in college? (I'm still working on my own answer for that question. I think there really is something to value in solitude)"I am 100% dependent on my parents"Me too, I feel super guilty every day about it. I don't buy new clothes or really anything (I buy maybe four or five non food items a year). Last year this guilt made me feel extreme pressure when studying, like I felt like the money price of every math problem I was doing was weighing me down until I just became a static mess that didn't do anything because I was so sick of how it felt."I try to talk to my parents about my worries, but they are always in denial that I am in trouble"In your past have they shown more empathy with different problems you were having?"about 60% of students that start off in S.T.E.M. majors either change majors or drop out of school"I started reading LOTS of articles like this a long time ago, also posts from engineers talking about how they are giving up, or they worked for 20 years and just got laid off, etc. it pretty much sparked my depression, with other problems acting as the "fuel." Then I came to understand that what matters is what I do, not how other people are faring. Backup plans are a very good idea, though."I will also consider myself a failure"Will you? Or will you consider yourself a failure to other people? As in, will you only feel like a failure because everybody else sort of makes you feel that way? I have always had a problem in that I see my value as a person defined by certain people, and I realized that is why I felt like shit every time I did homework or was working on an exam, and why I did so badly. I was utterly TERRIFIED of messing up and looking like a failure to them. (It definitely clicked with me watching Stefs video on procastination and reading this http://www.raptitude.com/2011/05/procrastination-is-not-laziness/"I wanted to change it when I got to college, get good grades, become successful in clubs, have a bunch of close friends, and I was so determined to do so"One of the first things I came to learn in college is that, suprisingly, the people in college are the people who graduated from high school. There is just a higher IQ/financial cut-off point. I also found it is not too hard to just go to one of the hundreds of gatherings they have all the time. Though pretty soon I got bored of it and stopped going."Am I doing something wrong?"This is one of those "compared to what?" kind of questions. Just like success and failure, you define for yourself what wrong and right is."Should I be worried?"What do you want out of life? Because if you are attached to a concept in your mind that you want to live up to, and you truly believe you wont be able to live up to it, then why are you worried about it? At some point you choose to give up the controls in order to seek different ones."I’m just stressed out and am having trouble figuring out what’s going on internally"From what I've observed, there seems to be three big things that help you through the maze of your own mind: daily journaling, therapy, and mindfulness meditation. I wont claim to be an expert in this area, this is just what I have heard, I half-heartedly do two of them.