Kevin Beal

"Nothing" by definition doesn't exist. Thats sort of what makes it nothing.

Technically, "valid" describes a line of logic. A concept cannot be valid or invalid. RTR goes into it, which seems odd to me that a book on relationships should be so full of epistemology. The number zero is as compared to positive or negative numbers. Nothing is as compared to something. A hole is as compared to the material around that "empty" space. Nothing is defined as a lack of something and something is defined as not nothing. Is there anything invalid about those statements? I don't think so. It's the proposition "god exists" that is invalid, and not the concept "god". It's invalid because of the obvious contradictions I'm sure you already know all about in proposing something that is (essentially) defined as non-existence exists. The static of the other universes applies to agnostics because they propose that god may be hiding in some other realm where the meaning of existence is different. I'm just saying that if you are going to use the word "something" (as in "there is always something in that ostensibly empty space") it necessarily implies that it's being compared to something that is not something (which by definition is "nothing"). And if you are saying that "nothing" is an erroneous concept then so is the statement that "something" is replacing it or filling it up. I mean, I'm not crazy, right? Something does imply "not nothing", right?

Don't be intimidated by the length of the video. The part mentioned by the OP is at the very beginning. It's,... disappointing. Is it just me or did the whole room become suddenly very awkward after the question was asked? Didn't the laughter sound a little like nervous laughter?

The only escape I can imagine from the fullness of space is absolute zero since there would (theoretically) be no wave to be moving around for particles to pop in and out of. But this is apparently impossible to achieve because: It may interest people to know that the coldest known place in the universe is on earth. So, I think (also being a layman) that you're right. But, I think, I take issue with the idea that this makes the concept of "nothing" an invalid concept. Because the fact that we can look at these quantum ghost particles as taking up that space implies a background that it's being compared in contrast to. How do you contrast the concept "something" except with "nothing"? Probably (and apparently), there is something else that takes up that space, but I think as a concept it's valid. It reminds me of how the atomic theory of matter looks at the phenomenon of the solidity of matter. The solidity I experience as I knock on the surface of my desk can be described at the level of atoms where what is actually making contact is the electrical resistance of atoms together in a lattice structure against other similarly structured atoms. I don't think that makes solidity an illusion though, rather it's just another level of description that offers a more complete picture. If that makes sense. Maybe I'm nitpicking Haha

There might not be the same kind of tracking for bitcoin as there is for paypal donations, so in order to maintain your subscription status, you may need to work something out that might not be set up currently.

What happened the day before the dream? Do you have any big life events coming up? What associations have you made so far? (These are some standard questions to ask about dreams). I'm just going to look at it as if it were my dream, and so please disregard associations that you wouldn't make. I would take this as (at least in part) a good sign, since you get out of the bus and get out of the way of the oncoming train. I would look at it as a prognostic sort of dream. Buses and trains are big and clunky and don't navigate in ways that make it easy to stop or turn around. Which seems like a clear metaphor for a life in which you feel a lack of control, and a potentially dangerous lack of control at that. And the driver of the bus is obviously not connecting with the fact that there is danger, which indicates an unconscious avoidance of something. You get some distance away from the bus and the similarly unconscious passengers, after it's moved away from a dangerous amount of traffic. So once you've gotten the opportunity to distance yourself from this, you take it. I would assume that this is the present part and that you can easily see what that may refer to, since this is the part where you've become active (which I'm equating to conscious). Especially considering you are now on a hilltop with a better view of things. I wonder what the hearing protection is... Could you be conscious of how bad something is, but are trying not to feel the emotions you have around it? I don't know... Do you feel relief that you avoided being a victim to the crash, or are you more horrified? Does this emotional response fit a potential big life event in some way? It can be helpful to focus on the elements of dreams that wouldn't make sense if they happened in real life. Like: - Nobody is concerned with how dangerous the traffic is - the train track is built in a completely impractical way - there's a tractor on a train track - the man in the tractor (is still alive?) but just lies there motionless - you have hearing protection for some reason Also, do emotional responses feel familiar with other things in your life you might have the same response to. If it fits the dream symbol's metaphor, then I'd say you've got yourself a valid analysis.

If you just paste the url, and don't make it a link, it'll work. Like so: http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1596_you_are_not_conflicted_convo.mp3 http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1596_you_are_not_conflicted_convo.mp3 Thank you, and it is very frustrating. Super frustrating I have considered it but didn't have any idea how I could confirm it. But if it's not just me with that conclusion, then I think that you are right about it belonging in part to them. If only because it doesn't always happen (speaking empirically). And simply imagining a situation where a gal doesn't want me to be myself but still wants to flirt or whatever, that has a very different feeling quality than imagining meeting a gal who just wants me to be myself, yay! And thanks for linking the podcast. I relistened to the Shyness one after I posted (which has a similar theme), and it's easy for me to forget this perspective. I'm inclined to think that if I have a conflict, it's my own that I'm responsible for, while equivocating between both meanings of the word "responsible". That I'm in a position where I need to do something about it (e.x. leave) and that I've somehow caused it to be a problem. I'm left wondering how much of the anxiety I've felt is in response to a projection or to the present situation. To an internalized female figure or as an accurate reading of the other person. I think that if I were in the moment and had the sense to ask myself that question, I could figure it out by how connected I am in general apart from the anxious situation. By default, I just assume it's my own projections, when I think about it afterward (even if nothing seems to fit that way). I had a dream the other night after thinking about this topic about being drugged by a woman and waking up in a strange room. I go to lock the door to keep her out, but then realize she's in the room hiding (where, I don't know), watching me and I'm terrified. Which is kinda weird since I'm a large man and can protect myself. I have the strange feeling that she's a big part of my life...

Another perspective, I think, is in looking at anxiety as inner conflict rather than as being synonymous with nervousness or fear. Anxiety is paralyzing and it fits the "freeze" aspect of the fight or flight response. If it were as simple as not wanting to or not knowing how to make small talk, it's doubtful that would cause anxiety. There has to be a conflict there. In my case trying to talk to eligible women my age has been known to cause me to have no idea what words mean, where to put my hands, how eye contact works or whether or not I'm standing up straight or leaning to one side like a human tower of pisa. It happens because I really want to look cool and be desirable, and because I often feel very uncertain of how to even start to do that. The idea that I should just be myself never seems to come to me until afterward! Aargh! So frustrating.

Also, Shyness - A Vindication http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreedomainRadioVolume5/~5/t6dBuGbuqOk/FDR_1647_shyness_a_vindication.mp3 To add to what Cheryl said, a great quote that has stuck with me from this podcast is: "No she's not shy, you're off putting!" (talking about people calling Isabella "shy") I've been considering the form my own social anxiety has taken and I'm reminded of how uncertain social situations feel to me and in the moment I don't even know how to make simple small talk, and the impulse is to castigate myself for not knowing how to handle that social situation. That, to me, sounds like I've had lots of past experience with situations that seem on the face of them normal or trivial, but injected with some form of craziness. Like passive aggression or gaslighting or people who are completely unpredictable. Or maybe even a hurtful rejection from a romantic interest that caught me off guard. The uncertainty is the unpredictable people in my past, and the self castigation is continuing the humiliation that I received. It's one theory anyway.

Searching online and my own memory banks, the only definition provided for "law of causation" is that states of objects change into other states. I don't find this particularly helpful in understanding what the actual nature of time itself is. And I don't think it should satisfy you either. Demand more! Two types of "causation" A level of description could be that kinetic energy in combination with oxygen and some form of fuel comprises the emergent property called "fire", or a an accumulation of H2O molecules results in the property "wetness". The state of these objects is considered to be caused by those smaller objects that compose it. This doesn't require time at all. In fact, if time stood still, the facts would remain the same. It doesn't describe a change, but rather a state of an object via a reduction. There is another description of causation as a concept that could be easily equivocated which is those features of an object that cause changes in the state of objects. Me having the feature of my leg with it's capacity for kicking being actualized against a ball, causes that ball to change from a stationary state to a moving state. The fear of the irreducible I wanted to make this distinction in order to highlight a logical issue that seems to arise concerning areas of philosophy which are not a priori and are not as established as the atomic theory of matter or the evolutionary theory of biology. People tend to assume that any causal account of a phenomena must be reducible or else it throws all of science on it's head. I think that this is a huge mistake and one that really irks me. Think of all the physicists who dislike the "soft" sciences like psychology or the praxeological account of economics. Keynes tried to turn economics into a strictly empirical kind of physics and it didn't turn out well. The socialists of the early 20th century tried to come up with an objective value scale of goods and that was a huge fail. The behaviorists tried to account for psychology completely in terms of observable behavior and that is laughably false. And yet there are causal descriptions in all of these things, even if the reduction isn't to a molecular state. The illogic of trying to completely operate entirely on outward observable behavior and disregard the subjective experience inspired one of my favorite jokes: Q: What does one behaviorist say to another after sex?A: That was great for you. How was it for me? The "magic" of consciousness Consciousness is relatively mysterious in that we don't have a great account of it's mechanics, and when looking at subjective conscious experiences like pains, desires or even the experiences of color and sound, the immediate knee-jerk reaction of most academic philosophers (and as a result laymen) is to jump to a level of description which is reduced. Instead of defining the color red by the features we subjectively experience, they define red as a light wave's length of oscillation at 600 nanometers (or whatever it is). This is bullshit though. Imagine someone who is color blind and has always been. They researched everything there possibly is to know about color. The understand how the spiralling light waves hit the cones in our eyes. They get how the eyes transmit this information to the brain. They watch that information get integrated into the unified field of subjective experience of the world around us. And yet they will never know what the experience of seeing red is like. That color experience is entirely irreducible. The madness of materialism In trying to find a solution to this supposed dilemma, many philosophers (such as Daniel Dennett) conclude that consciousness must be an illusion. If it can't be reduced, it is unscientific and does not exist, is the rationale. And many people consider this the "scientific" approach to this "problem". But this is exactly equivalent to scientists opening a guy up to try and understand how digestion works, and when it's not immediately apparent to them how digestion works, they declare that digestion is an illusion! But that is insanely unscientific. In science, observations are made and accepted as self evident all the time. No one ever was asked to justify the existence of digestion, or vision, or that hair grows. But somehow people are told that they must justify the reality of consciousness. And that anybody who denies that consciousness is simply a flesh-based computer program must be a mystic. Do not accept reductionism as a necessary qualification for science. Why is this important? I think this important because for as long as there has been science (natural philosophy) people have branded their sophistry science! And this is very often not true. They say that if you deny their theory then you deny science! It's just like those extreme feminists who say that if you criticize one woman, you criticize all women! And you are a sexist pig heathen blasphemer, and a complete moron to boot! Don't take shit from people who call you unscientific and don't provide any argument. Ask them "unscientific as compared to what?" Be wary of those who talk about causation as something separate from the features of objects like there is this aether of causation sprinkling it's dust on all the objects within our realm. Causation is just change. It's not physics or mathematics. If it were, there would be no need for any other fields of science. Everything could just have this ostensibly superior description in terms of atomic interactions and everything will be hunky dory. Giving a vague account of causation (or equivocating between both senses of the term) as the basis of a theory can lead to very irrational beliefs *cough* determinism *cough* So when the narrator talks about causation as if it's this amazing thing, it shot up some red flags for me. I'm just saying that you may want to procede with caution.

No, he's not the only philosopher to define it that way. John Searle is another. Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden too. Other philosophers imply this definition when they say that consciousness is itself an illusion (i.e. the subjective experience of making decisions). Stef's arguments actually share some aspects with Rand's, who also borrowed from other philosophers. The history of the free will / determinist debate is actually a very rich and interesting one with very strong arguments on both sides. Anyone who pretends that the debate is obviously won on this side or that would benefit from a little reading. May I suggest John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind?

Oh yes. I second this idea! I love the article analyses.

I confirm that he is indeed portraying Stef's position correctly. He states this as his definition in this debate. The definition of free will is actually surprisingly simple. It doesn't account for a bottom up description, but it is what he is referring to when he uses the term. The reason that this definition runs counter to determinism is that (as Stef argues) determinism precludes preferred states. That puts the debate where it is more apt instead of arguing over mechanics. There is a phenomenological issue that needs to be addressed long before the mechanics can even be relevant.

Also, it's logically untenable to hold that there is such a thing as observing yourself observing like they are two separate things. There is no consciousness without content, because it means nothing if not conscious of something. You absolutely do engage in your thoughts when you "simply observe them" because you are not a zombie and you supply meaning to that observation. Mindfulness meditation rests on that false premise. To be consistent, you'd need to observe the observing, and then observe that observing into an infinite regression. It is exactly equivalent to any other thoughts and in the exact same sense in which they are thought to be different. Whenever I think about meditation, I'm reminded of the brief training I received and how I was told "okay, now clear your mind" and I start laughing out loud because I know that how I would do that is to think thoughts like "okay, I'm clearing my mind right now, don't let any of those sneaky thoughts slip past me", haha. I'm sure the irony is obvious. There are clear benefits to meditation, but in exactly what way those benefits are delivered, AFAIK is a mystery. It could be entirely physiological because we are resting and breathing well, usually in a good posture meant to increase circulation. Or it could be in the same way that journaling is healing because we have quiet time to reflect. What I would caution against is assuming that meditations are something different in nature than the things we do in everyday life. Breathing in deep in preparation for a test is a form a meditation, after all.

Anxiety: A Conversation http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1436_Anxiety_Convo.mp3 Social Anxiety http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreedomainRadioVolume5/~5/izbGNMujLGc/FDR_1702_Social_Anxiety.mp3 Social Anxiety Part Two http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreedomainRadioVolume5/~5/pDFWrwRmRDs/FDR_1730_social_anxiety_part_2.mp3 Social Anxiety A Couple Convo http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1152_Social_Anxiety_Couple_Convo.mp3 Social Anxiety - A Listener Convo http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreedomainRadioVolume5/~5/Fwf-3Dp7XdY/FDR_1950_social_anxiety_convo.mp3 Dr Greg Siegle Interview - Anxiety, Depression, Autism http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1533_dr_siegle_interview_depression_anxiety_autism.mp3

Okay, it sounds like this is where you and I disagree then. Your interpretation is correct, at least in the sense that I'm using it. But just cuz I like to nitpick, I would rephrase it to say that the propositions themselves are immoral or are vices, but I think it's true enough to say that a person who acts consistently on evil propositions, is themselves evil,... as a shorthand. (I'm not totally satisfied with that description though, so I may change it). There aren't immoral atoms that compose their bodies, rather it's still observer dependent, describing subjective things (in an objective way), like how I described above. But I will try to show how it does objectively mean that people ought behave ethically below, or at least what is meant by "binding". (I hope it's okay that the topic has changed and the thread title no longer describes where we've ended up). The part about UPB that is binding (as I understand it) is that a moral proposition is true, not because of my personal preferences, because I'm me, because you are you or because some other arbitrary reason. That someone ought act a certain way because the proposition is true. Dems just the facts! It's binding like how the laws of logic are binding: - If you say something that requires a contradiction to be true, then what you said is simply illogical - If you say something that is not logically consistent, or does not meet the standards of universality, then your moral proposition is simply false But if a moral proposition does in fact meet these standards, then it's not just true for me, but for you as well because that's how logic works. The sky is blue is true for you and me and everyone else, because it's just plain true. The way that I imagine people hear it is that punishments for violating ethical rules are to be imposed on every violator. If that's how you took it, then I can see how it might be confusing. Does that help clarify it?

Morality and ethics are used synonymously in UPB. I'm not too familiar with the history of philosophy on ethics, but I believe they are treated synonymously by most philosophers. As far as moral nihilism goes, it's not taken that way by most nihilists that I've talked to. You, my friend, are a rare breed. Moral nihilists (in my experience) say that objectivity in the realm of ethics is impossible. They take from the fact that ethics doesn't exist in nature inside of entities, that therefore moral propositions are all erroneous. Most especially they take issue with the part of ethics that makes it binding on people. They compare the binding of rational ethics to be exactly equivalent to an imposition of will. The reason that Stef takes issue with nihilism, from what I remember, is primarily with nihilism in the regarding reality and truth claims, and only as a consequence moral nihilism. I'm sure you're aware that there is essentially 3 types of nihilism: nihilism regarding morality, regarding reality and regarding truth itself. In the theory of mental health that Stef argues for, he looks at how people hold contradictions in the mind to be true simultaneously (among other things). A nihilist concerning truth and reality must necessarily be contradicting themselves, often in very aggressive ways, which is consistent with unconscious behavior, acting out past traumas and the like. A moral nihilist of the variety I described above also fits this category. Also, I think your description of "personal morality" is something like aesthetics in ethical theories, which describes things like showing up late to a meeting, cheating on a test and that sort of thing. Would you say that you identify with the description of moral nihilism that I gave?

Well, then that makes me a nihilist as well, then. There are certain ontological propositions that are observer dependent, that would not be the case if no humans existed to think them, such as the value of money, or the fact that a field goal is worth 6 points. John Searle calls this ontological subjectivity. It's still true and describes real things, but it is not in the actual inks and fibers of a dollar bill that makes it worth a candy bar. In the same way that dreams are real, but subjective. It may be the case that we are in complete agreement

What about that thread that went on for literally 3 years that (prolly) holds the record for the longest thread with Noesis representing the nihilist side? http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/26465-debate-about-upb-moral-nihilism/ No one is suppressing dissent regarding UPB. A quick google search reveals this in seconds. Also, don't just say there are double standards, point them out. Also, UPB wasn't developed until some time after the boards were up. Why don't you just ask someone who's been on the boards a while what the deal is instead of jumping to these conclusions?

Haha! The feeling is mutual

I'm not sure I understand your use of the words "inauthentic" and "manipulators". The guy in the comic was direct and wasn't being dishonest, necessarily. In fact he was attacked when he was most honest. Nice guys tend not to exploit a vulnerable woman into offering up sex to him. That would be a sleezy jerk guy, who is not likely to spend a whole lot of his time doing things for her. I don't think I have ever seen a case of a friend-zoned guy where the gal didn't play into it in some way. It may actually be the case the sexual manipulator is her. At the very least, it seems to me to be too little information, being friend-zoned, to determine who is manipulating who. If it gets to the point where there is a blow up like depicted in the comic, I seriously doubt that ignorance is sufficient enough an explanation. How would you feel about someone who is desperate to do things for you and does not say what is in it for them? For me, it makes me very suspicious and I limit my time with them. Unless it's a lady, in which case I get that she prolly likes me, and I can understand a little desperation. I mean, come on, it's me we're talking about. I can't help it if I'm hot! I hope the irony is clear

The division of labor necessarily implies cooperation by definition.

He's very often on Skype. You don't even have to call into the show. You could just say "Hey man, I think you are being inconsistent here and here. Maybe I've misunderstood you, but I think it's an important thing to address, if only to clear up any confusion" or something like that. Also, please do not post about determinism. It is the only topic that is against the forum guidelines. If you'd like, we can chat about it you and I, but debate in general is not great in the message board format, especially a topic like free will / determinism. There is an emotional investment on both sides that is usually never addressed and so it tends to be like two TV's talking past each other, leading inevitably to much frustration. Searching the boards for "determinism" shows many threads that demonstrate this.

I'm just curious. Why didn't you ask Stef to clarify his statements? Why assume that the least favorable interpretation is the correct one, not address Stef personally and instead accuse him publicly of arrogance and wanton irrationality?

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