cynicist

I don't agree with this at all. First, why should you be concerned about the child's safety unless you know they're with an untrustworthy person? That's like allowing your child to play with a scorpion as long as you can monitor the behavior of the creature lol. You shouldn't have to monitor anything. Secondly, we all know that you can't be yourself around your parents if they were harmful. We regress around our past abusers. You can't protect yourself around them so obviously you can't protect your child. !!!!! I think you are wise to consider the consequences of his behavior. If this were a theoretical discussion between you and your therapist I'd possibly attempt to show him the errors in his thinking, but in this case that would be the equivalent of saying that he knowingly and repeatedly put his child in danger. There is the concern that his actions might taint future advice, but I think more importantly I wouldn't be able to continue a session without thinking about what kind of harm is being done to that child and I would view the therapist as an enabler of it. Best case scenario, it is completely distracting from my own therapy.

I'm not sure how people can avoid valuing happiness. It sounds like they are describing something like cocaine addiction, where the pursuit of pleasure can alienate you from others. That's more of an issue with how happiness is pursued rather than whether they value it or not. Is there another way of defining happiness that I'm not aware of? What does it mean in the eastern context? This sentence immediately triggers my zen alarm, sadly without access to the paper it's hard to know what they mean for certain. I agree with you on self-esteem and praise, but how does a focus on happiness lead to being "overly egotistical"? I can understand that in the context of a guy trying to become happy through bragging about the new car he just bought, and in that case your idea holds up, but I don't see how it applies to happiness in a general sense. If I want to cook a meal for someone who is having trouble affording them because it makes me happy, how does that fit into what you are describing? I think your idea has some validity but is too narrow to apply to happiness as a whole. There are many ways to achieve it that don't involve vanity and there is also a difference between short-term happiness and sustainable, long-term happiness and I don't think your idea is accounting for those two things. (unless I'm mistaken)

I'm glad to hear you changed your mind on that, but why respond? I do it sometimes as a knee-jerk reaction but I'm trying to refrain from it because the responses are so predictable (and it just ends up pushing my buttons). Even on these forums it's really difficult to communicate about many of these advanced topics, I just don't think it's possible to influence someone unless they are already open to new ideas or you can get them to question their existing ones in person through an argument or an in depth presentation on it like Stefan does. Like you said at the end, "Most of the people who see this won't even stop to think about it... ".

Edit: Nevermind

The links I posted say the opposite.

I agree that most modern 'man caves' are more about boyish escapism, but I think xelent means a quiet place to reflect from time to time. I think that being alone to ponder my thoughts will always be desirable, no matter how much my relationships improve.

Even Libet himself doesn't say that his experiments contradict the idea of free will. There are also studies that say his results do not indicate that voluntary actions are initiated unconsciously. Science does not yet have an answer to this question.

Why does it have to be the genesis of a causal chain? This is a thing that determinists often seem to think that I just cannot understand, and which I guess leads them to claim that free will is some mystical property. Causality is not linear for human beings like it is for inanimate objects, it's reciprocal. We don't just react to things, we can have an impact on the environment as well. For us, causality is not limited to the present, it also exists as a factor in the past (memories/experience) and in the future (anticipation/planning). To me, free will is something that emerges from the combination of these causal factors and the resulting feedback in our minds. Our awareness of time and our intelligence allows us to anticipate causality and respond to it in a way that is unique relative to every other organism on the planet, much less inanimate matter. When you take causality as linear like it is in physics and apply it to human beings then of course decision-making becomes an illusion. If you say that we interact with causality in the same way that rocks do, then obviously we would be just as limited. One thing I don't understand is how free will is invalid and yet intelligence/reason is spared under hard determinism. How can you reason without making decisions? If decision-making is just an illusion (simply an effect of prior causes) then what is intelligence? I think at the very least this should give hard determinists pause.

Thanks for posting this. I was already familiar with Gabor Mate but wow, in that one video he single-handedly changed the way I look at medicine. I always thought that the two (mind/body) were closely related but I didn't realize how much of what modern medicine attempts to treat has psychological roots. Here's a good quote that sums up his thoughts in the video:

No idea, he would need to explain what 'corporate tyranny' means. It makes sense to me with the state but I don't understand what that would look like without it. What is tyrannical about trade? Stefan has changed my thinking a lot on this, though I can't cite sources since he's mentioned it a few times in unrelated podcasts. I used to look at large international corporations as unstoppable behemoths with the resources to take down any competitor, but now I think that's only true in niche areas that require lots of expertise like microprocessors (Intel) or where they have legal protection. In most areas it seems to me that it's difficult to maintain control since as you grow larger the odds are that you will become less efficient since your organization is becoming more complex, which makes you more prone to error and slower to adapt. (ex. hiring the wrong people or having your decisions approved by X) On the flip side you can absorb more losses (Microsoft). Given the above, bigger interests without hard to acquire expertise or legal protection are at a disadvantage because they constantly have smaller competitors trying to eat them. Most of these competitors will fail, but it only takes one success for you to be forced to adapt or risk losing the market to them. That adaptation is what keeps them in check imo. Since people like money and there is always a chance to make some by being better than your competition, I'm not worried about that disappearing. So I'd dispute the idea that we need the average person to be one of those competitors, without legal barriers I don't think there would any shortage of them. I think Stefan has a number of podcasts around collusion that would be helpful but I'm hesitant to recommend anything without relistening to it first, I'll try to respond later if I find anything relevant.

What industry do you work in now?

I don't think men are less shallow, just more honest about it. Women have this image of purity in society that they need to protect so they lie.

I know what it feels like to be isolated, though I have never inflicted harm on myself. You know the scars will not change their indifference. Why remain in proximity to them? Is it apathy towards the rest of society?

I have a question for you, why make this thread? Why do other people's thoughts on this matter to you?

I hate it because it's always shaming. You can't tell someone "man up" or "be a man about it" without saying that they're deficient, and at the same time obscuring the reason. Seems cowardly to me, to prey on someone's vulnerabilities like that. Whenever someone uses it I dismiss them as a pretentious douche (think "Bro" or "thug") and move on.

Translation: I have no arguments against what you are saying, so I'm going to imply that you are irrational and dogmatic in your thinking. I appreciate that you let me know early, saves us both time.

We don't need Ancapistan to exist in order to know that people prefer to be taxed less. People are leaving California to go to Texas for this very reason. We also just know logically that people don't want to be taxed more because it requires violence to do so. People don't support higher taxes on themselves, they want higher taxes on others in order to pay for benefits that they do support. Why do you think only small farmers would live in Ancapistan? Businesses already move to more favorable tax climates, and zero taxes seems to be pretty damn favorable to me. So compare a massive chain store that gets a tax break, to one that pays zero taxes. If a business is receiving a subsidy from the state, that means that money is being taken from another area, one that will be far more competitive in Ancapistan as a result. I certainly don't assume everyone would give up on statism, or that it's not beneficial to many. My point is that the economic engine (business) that powers a statist society would not be able to compete with one in a free society that doesn't deal with taxes or regulations, and that it only gets worse over time as people who do not benefit as much from the state move to get the benefits of a free society. I think the transition will be similar to what is occurring with Bitcoin right now. At first there will be lots of problems as people try to figure out how to get things done, but over time things will stabilize and the inherent efficiency of the system will cause it to surpass the alternatives.

Oh come on. If you are talking about choice in the context of free will there is no need to differentiate between the "choice" of a computer and a person. Btw that particular example is anthropomorphism, which is ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman things, not a difference of definitions. Also I wasn't implying that a coin would have to flip itself to have choice, I was merely stating that a coin has no way to perform an action, in response to your question, "How can I determine if an object's actions were determined by choice?". I don't think anyone should have to explain that coins require human intervention in order to be flipped, or even exist. Anyway I agree with you that not having agreed upon definitions can make conversations challenging, but equally true is that having to caveat or explain the most basic of details can make any discussion functionally impossible. I mean take for example the quote below. You made the choice to create this topic and respond to it, but are now claiming that you don't understand what he means by "making choices", as if somehow the two are distinctly different. This thread is also littered with logical errors such as the following: Physical reality can't "cause you to choose" to lift your arm. If reality caused it then it wasn't a choice and if you chose it then you can't say it was caused by reality, they are mutually exclusive. What you're saying is the equivalent of, "My mental illness caused me to choose to kill that guy" as opposed to "My mental illness caused me to kill that guy" or "I chose to kill that guy".

Hi! This is a pretty famous philosophical issue that goes all the way back to Rene Descartes. I'm sure you've heard of the Cartesian demon. Basically he became obsessed with the idea that everything we perceive is merely an illusion conjured up by a malevolent demon, including our own physical bodies and corresponding sensual experiences. So if that were the case, how would we know that anything at all truly exists? This is where the phrase, "I think therefore I am" comes from. The meaning is that thinking about one's existence proves that a self exists in order to do the thinking. It's a fact of reality that cannot be further reduced and requires no proof or explanation as it is self-evident, it's axiomatic because you would need to accept it in order to even argue against it. I hope that helps.

Are you trolling? Decision-making is a cognitive process which requires things like sensory input and I dunno... a BRAIN. There's also the problem of coins not being able to act, like flipping themselves without our intervention... I was going to take this thread seriously and add my thoughts about the definition of free will but if you are asking questions like this in a serious manner it would probably take me 100 pages to explain everything so out of practical consideration for my poor brain I think I will refrain from doing so.

Yeah, you failed to demonstrate how that is tautological, and it's not a fact that people are bad at making decisions. (If that were true the human race wouldn't exist) The idea that people don't make trades without perceiving a benefit is establishing a basic fact that you can build larger ideas on. So when someone comes along and presents economic theory X, based on human beings being completely irrational and not knowing their head from their ass, you can discard that theory because one of its basic premises is incorrect. How can it be falsified? Easy, nobody trades absolutely anything since what they have is always more valuable than what they would be trading it for. Try a little more humility and maybe ask some questions before you say people have no idea how reality works...

Ha are you kidding? You think people who live in a statist hellhole having their earnings taxed at ridiculous rates wouldn't be fleeing in droves to the tax free Ancapistan? Not to mention an anarchist society wouldn't limit people with patents or fees for things like licensing or have any limitations on trade. I don't see how a state could possibly compete when it comes to wealth or innovation. Maybe you could explain the idea a bit further, as I don't see how taxing citizens to shower a corporation with money is going to make a state more wealthy. (the point of a state is to transfer wealth from the many to the few, why would they steal from people just to try and out-compete a free society? And how would you imagine that to be more efficient than a free market?)

Lol now I'm imagining someone saying "be a snorlax" with a serious look on his face. I liked the video but the comments on it were pretty depressing. Also, it's great that it is acknowledging the problem but you just know they won't go anywhere near the real origin. It'll be blamed on the abstract 'society' rather than individuals and certainly not target parents or mothers of all people. Agreed. The way they present it is tautological, people attack each other because they're attacked by one another. Progress is so damn slow in society, feels like it will be a hundred years before this stuff is talked about in a major way.

You can't tie addresses to people since there is no registration. So you can operate with a "public" address that you share and then just create new ones to move money around. So you can use new addresses for each transaction or even multiple addresses to bounce it around and it's indistinguishable from what are regular transactions between individuals. It's not anonymous but Bitcoin is not designed to be and personally I don't think it's necessary or desirable. (The very same public ledger that prevents true anonymity is also what prevents double spending, which is essential to making it valuable as money)

Really slick website. I'd recommend putting it in your signature so people can find it more easily. I'll try to hit it up the next time I want to pick up some shirts. (the punk socrates one in particular is hilarious)