Kevin Beal

Heya Noesis! Long time no see, huh? Welcome back to the boards As I see it, the actual physical link between me and my property is an ontologically subjective matter. Claims we make about how and what is my property is an epistemic matter. And for sure, there is an element of "arbitrariness" (for want of a better word) in property as there is in money and other institutional facts. To take an example, money is money because we all believe that it is money. A dollar bill may be constituted with the same fibers and inks as another, they could be physically identical, and yet one is not considered money because it was printed by me in my underground lair of anarchic mischief (thus "counterfeit"). With property, there are things which are more or less "arbitrary" in that my own body is mine (I don't think I need to argue for this one). And let's say I build a mailbox out of my own boogers, that's a little less my body, but still I think very few people would argue that it's not mine. And then from there, it's harder to tell, which is why we have disputes that get resolved legally in some way. I think a free society would also have these kinds of disputes settled in ways that feel somewhat arbitrary. Like how many years does something need to be homesteaded in order for it to be considered my property, or whether or not the "finders keepers" clause works in this or that scenario. But in any event, those things which could rationally be called "property" are tied at least in some way to my own self ownership, the effects of my intentions & actions, and my responsibility therein. In other words, I produced and manufactured my booger mailbox, me, and I'm responsible for it. You can't have it! The basis for these things is a collective intentionality. If nobody recognized property rights, they wouldn't really exist beyond what is logically necessary: self ownership. It's objectively true to say that money has value and that I function as a front-end developer at an insurance company. By accepting that I am a front-end developer, you bestow upon me certain institutional powers in the form of obligations, responsibilities, expectations, etc. And you also acknowledge property rights, since I produce something I'm responsible for, and which I trade for a salary. If I didn't own it, my pay would be unearned. By just being me, producing outside of my role as a developer, economic exchanges like the one described above happen all the time in subtle ways that don't require dollar amounts, but are just me being responsible and exchanging the fruits of that with other people. The proof of property rights is in accepting this sense in which I'm using "property" in order to argue against it. How exactly it breaks down is up for us to decide collectively in our contracts with each other. There is an inherent element of ontological subjectivity, but that doesn't make it false, unreal or invalid. Hope that clears it up a bit

I almost worked for a company that found antiques and re-sold them on Etsy. They could do it because the gal who ran it knew a ton about antiques and knew what she could charge, and what kind of markup. She needed a source of antiques, which she found with people who were moving and getting rid of a lot of their stuff. She learned a lot about it and figured out the science of it all, who the big names were, how to tell knock-offs and other relevant skills. And Etsy makes it easy to have an online store, so in combining these three elements, she was able to make a growing business out of it. What is something you know a lot about? How can you learn more about it? What kind of source or connection would you need to make in order to gain access to what you're knowledgeable of? How can you market it to people? In accepting bitcoin, you can get paid anonymously (tax-free) for almost any service you can do online, and being that you are part of a larger community of liberty and bitcoin minded people, it could help you to market yourself. What can you see yourself spending a ton of your time, emotional and financial investments in? Because whatever it is, you are likely going to have to spend a whole lot of time developing the skills and connections in order to achieve your ends. If you can do what you love, you never have to work another day in your life, right?

whoops! re-post And the basis of your claim is something that is factually incorrect and a very common misperception that free market types have to address often. If you started learning economics, and knew what free market theorists talk about, then you wouldn't bring technological unemployment up as any kind of criticism of the free market. I think, rather, it is you who has missed the point. Which is why I offered you some recommended reading. If you want to call free market types uninformed, then you need to not be uninformed yourself.

Everyone can have a job right now if we get rid of all farm equipment. There will only be about 1/10th the population there is now because the rest will starve off, but at least we won't have technological unemployment, right? Because, that's what's important The extent to which automation and increased economic efficiency due to technological innovation has already created a lack of a need for jobs is like crazy huge. If we told people a hundred years ago what would be invented now, they couldn't even conceive of anyone working still. Once you start making technological automation and the decreased need for mental overhead and man hours out to be a bad thing, you know you've got something wrong with one or more of your premises. This idea that automation means that people will lose jobs overall is pretty easy to debunk. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a good resource for learning the basics of economics and goes into this particular scare tactic in some depth. Please put it on your reading list

" Let it go! Let it go! Can't hold it back anymore! Let it go! Let it go-o-o! No more violence anymore I don't care, what their going to say Let the state come down violence never solved anything anyway.. ...or something like that

Welcome! I'm not too familiar with Objectivism. Was it a pretty big jump between the two?

You decided that I had no idea what I was talking about before you even knew what my definition of "abuse" was... Your guilty conscience is not my problem.

By that I mean that hitting kids is immoral. A rose is a rose is a rose. What people think or say about it doesn't change that fact.

But in neither case does it reference the logic that informs the immoral actions themselves. A proposition is either true or it is not. It is either true that hitting children is immoral, or it is not. Barring very particular propositions about the agreements we make (a dollar bill is valuable because other people believe it is), it matters not at all what people think about it. In this case "hitting children is immoral" doesn't require any agreement to be true, otherwise we are beholden to cultural relativism, which as is demonstrated in UPB cannot establish objective morality. I think you know what I mean. That is, I think it's quite obvious and I'm not sure if you are being obtuse or if I really am creating a distinction without a difference as you suggest. I do not mean that Stef is physically unable to avoid paying taxes. I mean that the consequences are such that it he might as well be unable (morally speaking), being that he'd be royally screwed for not doing it. The question is of responsibility, and not of physical capacity, right? And it seems that we should be able to take for granted that a person held at gun point is not morally responsible for the actions that the gun holder demands. But you are under no such compulsion. You may be inconvenienced in the short term, but no one has a gun to your head telling you to see these people. And to compare the two as if they were equivalent is, ... inaccurate, ... to say the least. I'm not telling you to do anything. You asked the question and I provided a case and some corrections. You felt it important to ask, so I think it's fair to say that you feel a need to do something differently even if it's the way you negotiate with yourself around the issue. Personally, I don't suspect that you can be happy with abusers. I don't think there is any discrepancy between virtue and happiness as you suggest. At least in the long term. It's really unpleasant to confront people. It can be dreadful, anxiety-provoking insecure kind of stuff. I totally sympathize with a fear of confronting people who are doing immoral things. If you don't want to, then don't. But just don't tell yourself falsehoods about it is all.

You are only obligated to act morally, which includes the explicit and implicit contracts that you make. I believe you made two errors in your post. The first is that you implied that it's not immoral to do a thing if the person is misguided. The second is that you said that Stef had a choice in paying his taxes or not. I believe both of these things are mistaken. People have to be misguided, even if it's willful ignorance in order to do evil things. The bad guys in the movies that we love are those bad guys which turn an evil act into a tragically distorted "virtue". Nobody, I think, tells themselves that they are glad to do something that is unreservedly evil. And it's not what people think that makes something good or bad, it's the logic itself that we look at. It's immoral for people to abuse children for very specific reasons, right? And do any of them include what people think about it? No... And Stef has no choice in paying his taxes. He will get royally screwed if he doesn't pay his taxes. At some point the threats will escalate to murder. So, no. That's not a fair comparison. You have a choice in whether you associate with bad people or not. And I don't know what the best choice is. To go or stay... Have you talked to them about what they are doing and why it's not something they should be doing? If so, then good for you! You've done something most people will not. If not, then I'm not sure that your argument makes any sense. You aren't helping the children in that case. If they continue to hit or otherwise abuse / neglect their children despite your protestations, then to continue would only drain you emotionally and it wouldn't be toward your goal of helping the children. It seems to me is that the only option is to say something, make it an issue in your relationship with them that needs resolution. Be honest with yourself and them and be gentle but assertive that it's a problem. Then it's in their hands. You've given them the opportunity to learn and grow and stop the abuse, and they can either take it, or they won't. That would sort of make sense to me, anyway. Speaking generally. I hope that helps.

I'll be working

Is there any regular time that these occur? I'd be interested to join a call sometime, if it's open to new people. Sounds fun

I'm not sure I understand. I am fully aware how willfully ignorant most people are about certain subjects. It sort of comes with being an anarchist, don't you think? I find a lot of resistance to the things I would like to help people to see. I'm also resistant myself sometimes. If I had written more than the repartee, what it would be nice for the OP to understand is how often we project, and given the threads started by him, it seemed pretty clear that there was some projection going on. And if he's projecting, that is, he's guilty of what he condemns, then it doesn't really matter if he's right. If the people who see a problem cannot escape it, then it seems to me a change of approach is required. And the first thing, before any progress can be made, I believe, is to recognize your own capacity for doing whatever it is. I guess, I was hoping my comment would communicate all that.

So, as I said I was going to, I managed to get a full playlist together of the many dream podcasts here. I designed the page to accept tags in the url so that you could link directly to a playlist of a particular tag, in this case "dreams". It currently accepts these urls: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/tag/dreamshttp://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/search/lovehttp://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/volume/6http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/359/holy-batdream

Welcome alincita! I'm glad things are getting better for you, and good for you for taking such proactive steps How'd you come across the show? What was it about the show that got you interested?

Please point out the sophistry that you see so that it can be exposed and the truth come out. It doesn't do people any good to know that something is sophistry, they should be able to tell how it is sophistry so that they can avoid it in the future. I confess that I was acting badly, that I was acting superior and being a jerk. But if I'm the (or one of the) sophists you mentioned, then I can honestly say that I was not at all trying to make it too abstract or complicated. I do believe it is more complicated than your characterization. But, I made an effort to define all of my terms and I rephrased the same points in several different ways so as to make them easier to digest. And I had people tell me that they understood what I was saying and got a clearer picture of the free will side of the argument. That seems, to me, incompatible with your claim that I (assuming you are referring to me) am making things too abstract and difficult to understand so as to keep people away from the truth of determinism. I probably was wrong about a thing or two, in which case you are free to point it out and show the readers you are addressing how I'm mistaken, or ignorant or engaging in sophistry and we can all learn from the experience. But consider this: you said that all free will proponents are resting their belief on an intuition and that there is no evidence for their claims. A sophism is a false argument intended to mislead. And what you said was misleading and false. If you would like me to concede something, perhaps you can lead by example and show me how it's done.

What is your intention with posting this? Are you hoping to change the minds of the people on the boards? If so, do you think this will work?

You gave a definition of random that I didn't quite understand, so it could be the case, the way you are defining it, that it is random. It's not compatible with the sense in which I use the word. Free will is self caused rather than causally random, is how I would phrase it.

Also, I'm not really sure what your respect has to do with anything. The guidelines weren't put in place to earn your respect, right? Not to be a dick or anything, but why should I care what you respect or not?

Close enough, I suppose. I'm not entirely sure what constitutes the self to be honest. It's one of those things that seems to be a somewhat controversial and complicated issue in philosophy, and I don't have any solutions to it, really, beyond what people imply is themselves when they act. If I'm anything, then I'm made of matter and energy, though. That seems uncontestable. I certainly don't mean to imply that consciousness is not a physical and biological phenomena. It's actually quite the opposite really, since I'm saying that it's real and not illusory. That first John Searle video I embedded goes a little into this if you recall.

Because that implies it's something else. I'm me. I'm not a little man inside of my head.

I think that the confusion is as you suggested, in the concept of causality. The determinist in my head tells me that all events are push / pull events locked in a dance with both the past and the future and that any gaps in this chain must be a sign of an error in our description, rather than any actual gaps in that chain. The metaphor I use in thinking about this problem of deterministic things in a universe which isn't entirely deterministic, is to think about event based programming. It isn't until an event like a mouse click occurs that some logic is run. That logic is 100% deterministic, but the event itself which triggered it is not necessarily. When we draw up a physics model, we're always doing it in a particular context of X results in Y in C, and it's necessary to have C be something that we can fully account for. We don't want outside factors messing up the reliability of Y. When we create this physics "simulation" so to speak, we are describing something that will really happen once we set it up to fit the model X to Y in C. If it accurately describes reality, then we know we haven't totally fucked up our model. To make this apply general to everything that exists, we have to assume a whole lot of things that I don't think should be taken for granted. I want to see the model and the experiment that proves the model. This requirement that all causal events be deterministic has at least one exception that we all kind of have to accept for now, which is quantum indeterminacy (and other quantum events). So gaps do exist, at least on the quantum level. I somehow doubt that consciousness is a quantum state of the brain. Rather I think that our conscious capacity for free will is a self generated cause in the way that I experience it. I don't know how that can be, but I don't know either why it can't be. It cannot follow logically simply from the reality that we live in a causal universe. At least, that's what I've been arguing this whole time. And sorry to be annoying, but I think that actually you do experience free will in the sense that I have defined it, and that's because you are reasoning through things and talking as if that reasoning means something, and is itself not an illusion (as it would have to be). The reasoning must be causal and your doing as an agent with free will in order for you to say that you've reasoned something through. Causal (as opposed to epiphenomenal) because you are saying that your reasoning resulted in your logical conclusions. And your own doing as a responsible agent with free will because you acknowledge ownership over your own arguments. If your consciousness were an illusion and not causal in any way, then you have no idea if your memory of the past ever happened, much less if you made a particular argument. That's why I say that you experience free will. On this point, as I have defined my terms, I'm confident enough to speak on your behalf. Your actions imply it.

I don't actually know for sure. Mostly I thought it was a witty thing to say. I just thought it was pretty strange to be with everything so far, all the anarchism, and strong atheism, and objective ethics, and focus on relationships, and push for therapy and all that, and the one thing that makes you lose respect is that defending abuse is a topic that can get a thread closed down. It just seemed like a weird set of priorities. Like, why would you care about that one enough to publicly condemn (too strong a word?) the boards like that?

Well, they'd probably call it a multiverse. I think the confusion is that universe is used in two different senses. The one you and I are using to encapsulate the entirety of existing entities, and also what is sometimes called "the observable universe", what resulted from the big bang. I avoid using it in the second sense precisely because of this ambiguity. I'm no cosmologist, but from what I understand, there is nothing stopping other large sections of space-time and matter in the same 3 dimensions we inhabit that are far far far outside of what we call the "observable universe" and what resulted from the big bang. It's funny that we could ever think of the universe as being small enough a place to go looking for systems larger than itself. But that's the power of the human brain, to be dissatisfied by things that are absolutely amazing