Kevin Beal

Hamburger earmuffs

This is not an example of reductionism. I quite dislike reductionism, personally. Reductionism is giving a full account of a system by looking solely at smaller subsystems. Like trying to give an account of chemistry by using only physics descriptions. Rather this is the demonstration of a principle being extended to larger scopes. If it applies here, it should apply generally, is the logic. This is because humans are pretty similar in most respects and they don't suddenly become the opposite of human when you put enough of them together. What is a group but a collection of individuals?

Morality describes the good and evil categories within UPB. These categories justify the use of force to enforce. The good "do not rape" is the moral good and the violation of the rule justifies the use of force to prevent rape. This category includes: rape, theft, murder, fraud, etc. Morality is distinct from aesthetics and morally neutral behavior in this way.

It's inevitable. The pull to debate this topic is too strong,... unless it's over skype. Then it's crickets. I just wish that people actually acquainted themselves with what the actual debate is about, and to treat it like the complex issue that it is. There are extremely intelligent people on both sides of this issue. People don't know that they don't know. And that's kinda frustrating.

Heya Nigel, I just wrote a post about some of the basics of how we know, and what is real over here. It doesn't have anything necessarily to do with your question, but I think it has some good general definitions and distinctions for philosophy in general.

If you don't find a local FDRer who's a therapist, there are some good articles on how to find a good therapist by some names you may be familiar with. Alice Miller: - On finding a good therapist http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?force=faq Daniel Mackler: - On the differences between friends and therapists http://wildtruth.net/three-differences-between-therapy-friendship/ - On the differences between parents and therapists http://wildtruth.net/three-differences-between-therapists-parents/ Stefan Molyneux: - On finding a good therapist

Determinism isn't an acceptance of cause and effect. If it were, no one would believe in free will except the most insane. But I'm going to just stop there since this topic is against the forum guidelines. Go ahead and message me if you really want and we can set up a skype convo or something. Having a debate about determinism thru text has repeatedly proved to be less than unproductive. It just leads to endless frustration. Go ahead and search "determinism"

His actions beg that question, so to make the argument is simply acknowledging what has already been begged.

That doesn't make it "superficial" simply on the basis: "not necessarily". It's significant that it requires this assumption. Not proof, but syllogistic proof doesn't exist for or against the proposition. Failing that, we have to acknowledge what we know to be true, and work from there.

Nothing to do with this particular subject, but actually, yes. If the negation is a performative contradiction, it can be proof of the proposition. More here.

This topic is against the forum guidelines http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/16582-i-am-closing-down-the-topic-of-determinism/

I think it could be a good idea to be totally unreservedly honest with your therapist about your concerns and resentments. Say something like "hey, I feel irritation and fear when you condone the excuses my parents made" and express that it makes you feel insecure in the therapeutic relationship. If you aren't sure whether or not it's a good therapeutic relationship, I think the best policy is total honesty and vulnerability. And see how they respond to having this authority over you as the therapist (or analyst) with your guts laid out. If they use it against you and exploit that in some way, then you can be sure that it's not a good therapeutic relationship and it's time to see a new therapist. It could be the case that your therapist may see why their position is not toward the growth of the relationship you guys have, and / or is not true on principle. And as you know "they did the best they could" is a bullshit excuse. You can always say "hey, I'm don't feel like my issues are being taken seriously here" or "I don't think I can trust you if you condone what my parents did" if you are going about it honestly (think RTR). In therapy we are bound to bump into issues that are only issues in relationship with other people. Like if you are on a date and it becomes known that your date has a belief in a god (or something like that). Being able to work through those difficulties in a way you can feel good about is one thing worth getting out of therapy. Assuming you can trust your therapist to be honest about it, you can work through issues like "how do I have a healthy relationship with someone who believes in gods?" There are obviously some deal breakers worth having. You don't want to have a relationship with someone who is a serial rapist, for example. And maybe your therapist's position should be a deal breaker, especially if it means you have to be the therapist in that relationship, or that it's just a constant re-infliction of the abuse/neglect, or it's condoning evil, or something like that. I don't know if there's enough information yet to determine that, so that's why I propose being vulnerable about it. Also, you only owe your therapist the money to pay for your visits. You owe your therapist nothing beyond that. If you choose that you simply don't feel like going there anymore, that's up to you. However, if you think that trust can be established enough to be able to work through the issues you want to bring to therapy, then I think you should do it, and for yourself, not anyone else. Hope that helps!

Yes, it does, actually. It doesn't have anything to do with ontologically objective truth claims, such as the features of objects ("I have an arm hair growing out the top of my head"). But absolutely the scientific method, philosophy etc have a ton to do with consensus. This in the same way that language has meaning. It doesn't actually have anything to do with this question of whether or not Darwin was right, but more of an aside. I go into much more detail here.

Yes. I understand what you are saying. You do not need to repeat yourself So, I know this is a confusing issue, so I'm going to try and make a few distinctions and definitions, because I think I see better now where the error is that I believe you are making. Which I should have done sooner instead of repeat how obviously true what I'm saying is, which I confess is a lame thing to do. As if believing it more strongly myself is going to somehow change the beliefs in your head. Lame! Haha Objective vs Subjective Whether or not something is objective actually depends on the subject of the proposition. If the proposition concerns a physical object ("my body has hair growing out of it"), that is ontologically objective. If the subject of the proposition is not a physical object but rather a truth claim to do with knowledge ("my name is Kevin and I am a programmer for a living" or "2 plus 2 is 4") that is epistemically objective. Subjectivity is something that tends to scare philosophers away, when it shouldn't. The value that my federal reserve note has compared to other goods is ontologically subjective. There is no encryption embedded that says what everyone will accept it in trade for. That is up to individuals and their subjective valuation. Despite this inherently subjective phenomena, we have the study of economics which takes an epistemically objective view of an ontologically subjective phenomena. The claims that economics comes to about the value of goods is entirely objective. The claims ethics makes are objective in this same way. Observer Relative vs Observer Independent Some things are true regardless of who is there to say or know it ("the earth is spherical"), while other things are true only because people think it ("Obama is the president"). And even more interesting, some things are true in the very act of saying it ("the meeting is adjourned!"). Those things that are just simply true regardless of anything any person might think are observer independent, while on the flip side if nobody were to think that Obama were the president, then he would not be the president, that being observer relative. Functions vs Features I have a heart in my chest. It is a feature of my body. Bob serves a function in his capacity as a street sweeper, that is to clean the sidewalk. If we regarded newspaper, bubble gum and styrofoam coffee cups as being things that are desirable and clean, his sweeping them away would not fit the function we described "clean the sidewalk". The same is true in base biology. Our heart pumps blood so that we can get oxygen to all our systems, but if we regarded staying alive and getting oxygen as being as bad as some cancer, it's function to pump blood would be dysfunctional. The fact that we can say that it's functional or dysfunctional and for that distinction to be meaningful is because functions are observer relative. The features themselves are observer independent. Collective Intentionality The fact that money has the value it does is based on the fact that people believe that it does. It's observer relative in that if no one believed money was valuable, they wouldn't trade with it and it would in fact not be valuable (at least not in the sense we think of it as being valuable). The meaning of words and sentences too is a collectively intentional phenomena since it's meaning is based on how other people are using the words. And yet it's an epistemically objective truth to talk about the word "ball" as describing spherical objects. Status as True The fact that I am a programmer, that this truck nearby is mine and that a guy named Tyler is my boss at my company are all status functions. They are true statements about the functions I perform by being me. My status as the owner of my body and my truck is observer relative. My stamp isn't etched into the aether surrounding these things. Rather this only has meaning because you and I are here to think about it. This doesn't make it arbitrary, though. What it means to own something is based on collective intentionality. I own my body because of what we collectively understand the concept of "property" to mean. I have been identified, and from there a certain set of features and functions too. I am Kevin, and I bought my truck from the previous owner. In this case thinking it does make it so, but it must be epistemically true about this ontologically subjective claim. That is to say that buying it equates to owning it, and we all agree that it does. Performative Contradictions With the foundation we have now, we can see how this supposed fallacy is not a fallacy at all, and does prove the status, the ownership as true. By confirming the status of ownership over your own body and of your actions and the results therein as you inevitably have to in order to argue against self ownership, you prove self ownership. This is because the collective intentionality is the basis itself. This is directly analogous to yelling at me saying "language has no meaning!!!" In order to be comprehensible at all, it has to be true that language has meaning. Likewise, in order for the claim "there is no self ownership" to be comprehensible at all, it must be true that we have self ownership. It's just a more complicated version of "there is no truth". That statement only being comprehensible because truth accurately describes things. The definition is not the proof, rather this demonstration is the proof. That's what is meant by proving self ownership. For more about these distinctions and definitions, and to listen to a great lecture, watch this video:

Speciation has been observed. Darwin's theory of natural selection is proven. There is no debate.

But in order for any kind of progress to be made in this discussion, an acknowledgement that we do have self ownership must be made. Because it's true, it's necessary to talk about people owning things in general and it's so monumentally obviously true

That's an awesome graphic for an awesome quote. Nice job! I have a few favorites: "If there were anything true about culture, they wouldn't call it culture!" FDR#71 http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/culture.mp3 "democracy is a suggestion box for slaves" (I believe a graphic already exists for this one, though) "I don't want the fucking candy!" from the truth about voting

No thanks! Hopefully you figure it out, June, but I'm not going to be the one to help you through it.

I find sans-serif fonts easier on my eyes, but I'll serif it up in here. My point about fatalism was simply that ideally philosophy should have a predictive quality. That the value in looking at the past is to improve the future. And if the reason that the past is taken as more true or important or valuable is because it's definitive then I take issue with that for the reasons I mentioned. Also, memory is faulty and history is told in whatever way the historian wants it to be perceived by others. A non-answer is an answer that explains nothing. You don't explain the origin of life on earth by saying "god did it" (for example). A good causal account of something has to explain something. Submitting that everything is lock step fatal offers nothing to explain things. It's not true for reasons I wont go into, but also, it's completely unhelpful. Certainly it's beneficial to look at the past in order to see through propaganda. That's why therapy is so much about the past. I don't think there's any getting around that. Perhaps I don't understand your question. Does that help at all?

I think that all boys are very aware of this mask, but they look around and no one is willing to take it off or support them if they do themselves (rightly or wrongly). That constant masking before going out into social situations, obviously resenting it, and feeling terribly alone in it is guaranteed to make boys hate society. The society that will not let them be vulnerable, which like the trailer mentioned, makes people go insane. Insane and alone. Personally, I always took the "be a man" thing or "don't be a pussy" from other boys as a kind of reminder to keep the mask on. Like a twisted kindness they were doing me. When it came from the girls though, that just about destroyed me. I don't trust the MissRepresentation gang to be honest about girls/women's involvement in this masking. So, I thought I might preemptively say a bit about it and see what kind of feedback I get. Other boys who bully can totally overwhelm, but the culture is such that the rules are pretty simple and if you try you can figure things out. The boys held a club over the other boys to sort of beat them into conforming. The girls however held knives that could impale you. And the pressure on boys with single mothers to become men is great since single mothers have so little free time to simply support these boys and cannot really support boys the way that fathers can. So, they feel like they are on their own and must grow up fast. Not only to take care of themselves, but also their mothers, because unfortunately many mothers (and especially single mothers) request this of young boys since there is no father around and things need to get done. This is god awful. I have never been so humiliated by men as I have by women. And I believe this masking, the false bravado, the premature manliness sets boys up for humiliation from girls who are not forced into the same mask. Because the girls get it where the insecurity is and whatever it is about girls that makes them great at knowing where to stick the knife in (or conversely connect) generally, it puts boys in a terrible situation. They are "worthless" for being humiliated by the girls and if they do anything to get back at the girls he's also worthless, and in any event, nobody wants to associate with a worthless loser. Or maybe I'm generalizing too much. Maybe my experience was my own or of the community I was in. You can let me know if I'm talking out of my ass or not.

Me choosing to lift my arm and then having the damn thing go up is a causal description that is the exact opposite of a predetermined causal description. Fatalism is not an appeal to causality, but to mysticism. Fatalism was conceived of by bronze age mystics as a non-explanation, on par with "god did it".

Well, UPB at a bare minimum. There's a lot to be gained passed that threshold, I think, in the reporting of the facts of your experience, and in the vulnerability of being more invested in the relationship than with the thoughts and feelings themselves. And the more a relationship can survive (and better yet flourish) in intense vulnerability, I think that's just about the best thing a person could hope for. It's a fantastic way of establishing trust, and gaining certainty about potential or real toxic relationships, enough to take the appropriate action. The self-RTR approach is vital for me in being able to curb overwhelm, quickly understanding what I know to be true, and working from there. And the book is full of awesome gems like this one: Maybe consider taking another look?

Yes, it is causal. But that's not the same thing as saying it's predetermined. I think it's perfectly fine to make generalizations or predict based on principles supported by (or derived from) probability. You may be wrong, but it's the principle that's important, right? Having had a neglectful or abusive childhood causes people to have dysfunctional adulthoods. We can even say what kinds of abuse will produce what kinds of dysfunctional behavior later in life.