Lians

Where you don't have empirical knowledge, you put in the possibility of existence. That's perfectly fine, but there are limitations to this approach. I outlined them in the core part of my previous post. The part that you ignored. I don't need to verify that the inhabitants of Omicron Persei 8 have developed consciousness without matter. I don't even admit the possibility of such a thing because the idea goes against the laws of our universe.

Steven Summerstone posted a great video on this topic. I could have saved myself some typing! Here it is:

I'm with Extraordinary_rendition on this one. I started with sports when I was 6 and stopped around the time I discovered FDR (19). I started exercising again about a year ago. During those 13 years I did 4 years of aikido followed by competitive 100m sprinting, basketball, football and volleyball. I used to have fantasies about getting back in my previous shape until I realized it would take me about 4 hours of working out/playing sports a day. That's 28 hours a week that I'm not spending on things that bring far more happiness to my life. The idea of the Aristotelian mean applies quite well to this line of reasoning. I settled for a 3-times-a-week routine consisting of strength exercises and a lot of stretching. It keeps me healthy and in shape given how much time I spend in front of the computer. The trouble with people like Zyzz and Chestbrah is that they try to fill the hole created by dysfunction with things that only provide temporary relief. The hole only grows larger that way. I grew up around people like that. I competed against people like that. This kind of behaviour isn't sustainable in the long run. My sprinting coach tore a ligament during a competition and spent the rest of her life looking back on her sprinting days as if they were the best thing that ever happened to her. After that injury, she stopped living in the present. I found that heartbreaking. Take the good bits - physical health, confidence, hard work, dedication, persistence, self-evaluation - and apply them to the creation of sustainable, long-term value in your life. That's my advice. Take it for what it's worth.

There's only anecdotal evidence for the IFS approach. I don't see why that would be a problem. I read quite a bit about IFS last year, but never fully committed to trying it out. I recently decided to give it another shot. I filtered out the inconsistencies (i.e. being open and curious yet going in with the goal of healing/reconciliation) and the ideas that clashed with empirical evidence (i.e. everyone has a true self). Giving some sort of form to your thoughts (thus identifying different parts) and negotiating with them is my particular approach. Nothing formal and it involves quite a bit of imagination. I've tried it a few times and I've had positive results, but I'll have to wait and see how things develop in the long run. Just focus on the process, not the conclusions. You can't negotiate when you have a goal that's already set in stone. Look for Stef's podcasts on negotiation.

You can fill the large void of human knowledge with just about anything you can imagine. I don't know why you would want to do that, but hey, it's your life. There are only two exceptions. You can't put self-contradictory beings (all-powerful and all-knowing) and/or entities that violate our scientific knowledge of the universe (consciousness without matter) in the unknown. To accept the existence of such beings is to reject the reality that you're living in.

I'd like to offer another approach in addition to what has already been said. You can turn the question around and ask her: "Would you donate to an organization that does these things?" She obviously cares enough about this topic to bring it up, but she's certainly not the only one. Let's suppose a free market society doesn't solve the problem through prevention. There would be former victims, their families, support groups and people that simply care enough to fund an organization that deals with these kinds of issues. The whole point of a free market isn't to have pre-canned solutions. It's the free flow of resources towards what people find valuable. If sex trafficking is a problem, there could be hundreds of approaches you can take (RFID implants, DRO prevention training and so on and so forth). The role of the market would be to maximize the efficiency of the solution through a price mechanism. If someone can solve the problem using less resources than the competitors, s/he can offer a lower price for the service and attract more people. All it takes to get the ball rolling is a group of individuals willing to pay for this kind of service. Your girlfriend seems to be one of them, so this answer might appeal to her.

We can finally leave the dreaded roads discussions behind our backs!

Thank you. I haven't deFOO'd yet. I'll do that when I'm in therapy since it's going to bring up a lot of emotional turmoil. I've reduced my contacts with her to once every 2-3 months or so. I realized I wasn't happy when she was around me about 3 years ago. We had that conversation 2 years ago. When I look back, she often joked about me becoming successful and taking care of her. There was more to it than the joke though. I always felt uneasy when she mentioned it. I remember Stef saying that in an abusive family, men become aggressive and women codependent. There's no way I'm going to let my sister move in with me though. That would be such a dramatic decrease in my happiness. The only certain thing I know about your situation is that you have a good reason for keeping her around. The alternative would be much worse. You probably have some kind of disaster scenario in your mind that would unfold if you kick her out of your place. This might be the reason why I felt your father (the one in your mind) could be present in the picture. I couldn't put it into words in my first reply. A conversation with your therapist should clear this up. Let us know how it goes!

I'll have to correct the title for you. If government efficiently solved problems, why would people need a government? It would have solved all the problems! "We're going out of business, folks! Nothing left to solve!"

Hey Nigel, I can completely sympathise with the difficulty of your situation. What a terrible position to be in. The first thought that popped up in my head while reading your first post was: Aren't you enabling her unsustainable behaviour? The longer you support her, the tougher it will be for her to find a sustainable job later on. Judging from your replies, you seem to have considered this possibility. This part felt somehow important to me. Is it possible that having your sister leave your place will cause you to re-experience the feelings you felt when you father left you? I'm just guessing here, since I don't know if you've dealt with these feelings with your therapist. When I first considered cutting off my family from my life, I was on the fence about my sister. Just to give you some context, she's one year younger than me (21), so she can take care of herself. I could see all the damage my parents had done to her mental and physical health. It took a while, but I finally decided to talk to her. I brought up how our parents treated us as kids and she called me selfish and ungrateful. She refused to talk about this any further. That was all the clarity I needed. I knew I couldn't help her and staying around would have caused her even more pain. I guess what I'm suggesting is to be honest with her about your feelings. She seems to ignore you every time you bring up these topics. What feelings do her reactions invoke in you? Tell her about them. Here's a podcast that might be helpful: http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_837_DeFOO_and_the_Christian_Channel.mp3

Hey marius, I found this video to be really helpful. It's made by a member of this community. Personally, I use RedNotebook to keep my journal. It's cross-platform, supports markdown text formatting and has a tagging functionality. The search function could be a little better, but overall, it's a solid piece of software. When I start writing in my journal, I'm describing whatever's on my mind. I imagine that I'm telling a story to someone else. Someone I trust. As I'm writing, I keep observing my emotional state and add remarks about how I feel at the moment. I don't "talk" about things in a chronological order. It's useful to see how your thoughts flow from one topic to another. If I'm dealing with a serious problem, I first journal about it. Afterwards, I read what I've written, grab a pen, a piece of paper and I start writing and drawing. Typically, I'd write down the main ideas on the piece of paper as sentences. Then I start drawing arrows connecting them in what I think is a logical way. For example, this thought was generated by this particular feeling, while these ideas are logically connected. It's easier for me to see where there are missing links and I start thinking about what could possibly be there. If I come up with anything useful, I go back to the journal entry and write about it. So far, I've found this approach to be really helpful. I'm not particularly experienced with journalling (have been doing it for a little over a month now), so take my advice with a grain of salt.

If emotions are so fallible, why have they evolved to be such an important driver behind our decision making? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions_in_decision-making http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/decisions-are-emotional-not-logical-the-neuroscience-behind-decision-making http://hss.caltech.edu/~steve/bechara.pdf The logic behind this shouldn't be too difficult to understand. There's no objective criteria that can be applied to the vast majority of decisions we have to make in our lives. So, how do you reason in the face of subjectivity? You don't. Modern day economics should be a good example of what happens when you try that. To answer OP's question, I think the price mechanism is a good analogy that can be used to understand emotions. The complexity that goes in the process of determining the price of a simple pencil is absolutely staggering. Price is a feedback mechanism generated by the whole of human economic activity. If you're mathematically inclined, you can think of it as a 7-billion-dimensional, tightly-coupled system. Good luck computing that when you don't even have the equations. It's quite easy to go to your local store and find out the price of a pen. You don't have to perform an impossible amount of computations. This observation was at the core of Mises' criticism of central planning. I look at emotions through a similar lens. We all know that the computational capacity of a single brain is enormous. It's hard to even compile a list of everything the brain does (this list will also be incomplete given our current knowledge). How does such a complex structure operate as a unit? I think emotions are the "currency" our brain uses. They determine the best course of action we can take as a product of the brain's collective work. Where reasoning is possible, the brain has facilities to handle that. You can make general observations about the brain's functions, but you can't say much about particular details. Science has made great progress in penetrating the peripheral functionality of the brain, but much is still unknown about its inner workings. I suspect that this is why it's been so hard to understand how the human mind works. Neuroscientists are looking for a centrally planned state, while dealing with free market anarchy. All of this is, of course, pure conjecture. Ultimately, nobody knows what emotions are or how they work. However, some conjectures better account for the existing evidence than others. Equating emotions to caching states operating on fuzzy logic or anything resembling computer programs is counter productive. Ignoring emergent properties in sufficiently complex systems can be catastrophic. Be mindful of that.

If the topic excites you, I think you should keep pursuing it. Make sure you maintain some rigour though. You won't get a lot of vicious criticism from this forum. We're gentle folk around here.

You're right. An EM wave is a particular configuration of electromagnetic fields. However, this definition isn't particularly helpful for someone who mixes EM and mechanical waves. LifeIsBrief, scientific knowledge is knowledge that is validated by experiments. The word science is merely a description for the existing body of scientific knowledge. For a theory to be considered scientific, it has to explain existing phenomena and make falsifiable predictions about reality. The second part is what's important. You verify these predictions through experiments. If the experiments confirm the predictions, you've got yourself a scientific theory. Your theory lacks these qualities. For you to challenge both general and special relativity, it would require that you show how the existing experimental data is wrong or point to a prediction of relativity that is different from reality. That's all. You're not doing either of those things. That's why your posts attracted trolls. I suggest you look into the experimental data supporting both general and special relativity.

I think you're not clear about the difference between mechanical and electromagnetic waves. They're not analogous and behave quite differently. Light is an electromagnetic field, while a blast wave (sound, wind etc.) is a mechanical wave. Electromagnetic waves are absorbed and re-emitted by particles. The EM waves exist in an electromagnetic field which is very different from vacuum. Mechanical waves are the result of oscillating particles/matter. Have you considered posting your theory in a physics forum? I think you'll get better feedback there. EDIT: Have you looked at this page?

Let's look at this from another angle. Dogs are little animals. According to Walter Block's logic, we should beat our dogs to discipline them. Do you think he'd agree with this statement? Why, no! That's animal abuse! People on the internet would go after him with pitchforks. Ah, the perils of doublethink... People like Walter Block criticize the general public for being irrational. What was that old saying? People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Ah, the endless ping pong game of sophists. The moment you pin them on something, they run to the other side. This forum has seen its fair share of their breed. To continue the mud wrestling analogy from the chat yesterday: Why would you wrestle with a lubed up opponent?

Another thing is that DROs don't even have to initiate force. If someone steals something from you, your DRO can contact local business and other DROs with a request to ostracise this person until s/he provides restitution and takes steps towards preventing future crimes. DROs would probably have some kind of prevention campaigns as well, because prevention is cheaper than cure.

Your post reminded me of something. I used to debate statists on some forums and I started noticing a pattern. Some would go through each of my arguments and ask me to present evidence. I would then exhaust myself compiling posts with evidence they could have found in 30 seconds. I started to feel bad about presenting any arguments because I had to go through this laborious process again and again. I caught on to what's going on and started telling these people that if they can't fact-check my arguments in the age of Google, they're either lazy, incompetent or don't care about the truth. Most of them stopped replying to my posts.

Well, you see, children are not people. The moment you become big enough to pose a physical threat to your parents, you're magically promoted to a full-fledged human.

fstream is a RAII class. It flushes its buffers when instances of the class are destroyed. Adding fuckyou.close() might also give the impression of unsafe memory handling because the code between open() and close() might throw an exception. If you know fstream is a RAII class, that won't be a problem. However, if you're using non-library classes, you have to explicitly check to see if they follow the idiom. In general, I don't manually deallocate resources used by RAII classes.

Oh, yeah? If there's no God, who invented the grill that allows you to make grilled cheese? It's grills all the way down!

Welcome aboard, Vincent! I think the specific details will be of great use, but I'll ask questions instead: Are you able to focus on particular tasks (no matter how small) for long periods of time? Were your parents supportive of your interests, indifferent or actively discouraged them while you were growing up? Do your parents have successful careers or do they face issues similar to yours?

Dark Chest of Wonders Nightwish http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsV5sUuCn4M Lyrics: Once there was a child's dream One night the clock struck twelve The window open wide Once there was a child's heart The age I learned to fly And took a step outside Once I knew all the tales It's time to turn back time Follow the pale moonlight Once I wished for this night Faith brought me here It's time to cut the rope and fly Fly to a dream Far across the sea All the burdens gone Open the chest once more Dark chest of wonders Seen through the eyes Of the one with pure heart Once so long ago Meaning: I first heard this song when I was around 15 and it really stuck with me. I now know that the "dark chest of wonders" is where I had to keep my true self in order to protect it. The first verse established the idea that something has been lost or stolen (Once there was). Heart and dreams are often symbols that represent our deepest desires. Perhaps we were the ones that locked them away in the dark chest in order to protect them. It would certainly explain the line, "Open the chest once more," in the third verse. "Once I knew all the tales," refers to the mythology other people use to tie us down while we're growing up. Returning to the past (time to turn back time) to see it with our own eyes means getting rid of the mythology (time to cut the rope and fly). To me, the third verse symbolizes an exploration of the unconscious (fly to a dream; far across the sea) once the childhood abuse is in the past (all the burdens gone). An examination of one's history. Once you're in a safe place in your life, you can return to your true self -- the one you hid away "so long ago." All of these ideas are wrapped up in very powerful imagery. The ghostly and supernatural picture that the first two verses paint serves as a wonderful stage for the development of the song. The environment indicates that all this exploration is done in our minds.

You're right, but I figured it's not necessary at this point. Now that I think about it, const correctness might be a good habit to develop early on. As for endl, I tried to keep the original behaviour of his program.