Kevin Beal

Yea, awesome show indeed! Mike was also on this sunday show back in March 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBVHTt9uv2E

I actually made a very similar transition. A few other people on the boards went the NWO route too. I never really thought about it before, but why do you think that is?

Welcome to the boards Brandon! How'd you get seduced into anarchism? How'd you stumble upon the show and community?

These two scenarios are obviously different. This is like equating "I decided to keep living on still after the day I discovered what suicide was" as a choice in the same sense that someone chose to pull out a gun and shoot someone in some gang war. That's not very honest. And it's really annoying. (Can someone help me find the video where stef is talking in a nasally voice imitating the nit picker in an ethics class talking about flagpole scenarios?) And whatever gray areas there are, they can be figured out in whatever future DRO systems we have set up. The fact that there is some ambiguity at the far edges of the theory is of little consequence that I can see. Nothing against you personally, I don't know you, it's just that your argument is as silly as saying that nobody is responsible for any crimes if they choose to get out of bed in the morning, or at least, you are portraying it as if that's the logical consequence of the theory. It's ridiculous. Imagine if I were to try to take down UPB by addressing the coma test this way: Like the man in the coma, everyone is at least partially unconscious in some aspects or part of the time, so any moral argument should apply to the man in the coma as well. Therefore jumping up and down 24/7 can be UPB, and thus UPB is absurdly false.

People are not so completely retarded that they can't control the volume and venom in their voices.

Wikipedia says: It's completely irrational to say that someone is wrong about something they haven't in some way defined, because wrong about what? But if they have defined it, at least enough to debate, then they have actually defined it. Either way, you've got some 'splainin' to do oooooooo, gotcha! Also, another podcast about this topic of self ownership and property rights: 67 – Property Rights http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/property_rights.mp3

A person's personal preference (like in the sense that I prefer chocolate to vanilla) has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of moral arguments within the framework UPB. If there truly is an argument at the heart of UPB that relies on a personal preference as the basis for something being moral or immoral, then that part needs to be addressed and re-written or the point conceded. Not to mention that it completely defeats the purpose of the theory: to establish what is true about morality regardless of people's individual preferences. If I say it's UPB to play minesweeper for two hours a day, but I don't want you to because you're better at it than I am (haha, yea right, there's no one better than me at minesweeper), then for me to put forward the moral argument for everyone except you, it's the proposition that has the universality fail regardless of whether or not I did or didn't personally prefer you not to play minesweeper. The context here only provides a reason as to why I'd put forward this moral position, it doesn't actually bear on it's validity. It's not the "unwantedness" that is the source of the problem. It's the moral argument that's being evaluated. Whether or not Bob wants to live and not be shot makes no difference whatsoever regarding the universality. It's the fact that "murder is UPB" doesn't apply to Doug in Bob's formulation that it's not universal, and thus not UPB.

Last time you asked me, I said that the unwantedness has nothing to do with any standards, but rather is a description of what murder is, and how the universality fail is not concerning the unwantedness, but rather the fact that Bob cannot say murder is UPB and say what's his face should not murder him back. What specifically was lacking in this clarification?

You cannot forget a truth that big. That's why Cypher in the Matrix has to have all his memories replaced before being reconnected with the matrix. That's why I like the intro to On Truth so much: Luckily we don't have to worry about being dragged off into a cage (or worse) for speaking truth to power, like Socrates and Galileo were. And as hard it is now (and it is hard), it will be even easier for future generations. The future will look with admiration upon the people who take these necessary risks today. I think there is a good argument to be made that the degree to which people want us to sit down, shut up and don't ask questions, is the degree to which it is necessary that we don't shut up and do ask questions. Who else is going to do it if not us?

I don't know what you should do, as I've never been in love. I just wanted to say that I feel a little heart broken reading this. In a way it's even worse than if it were an unhealthy relationship that should end before it makes things worse. Because at least you have a reason reinforcing why it shouldn't be. It almost feels like you lost someone you loved. I'm really sorry man.

How do you determine what's a pseudoscience? The common reason given for why psychology (and psychoanalysis in particular) shouldn't be considered science is because the subject matter is subjective. My dreams for example are a subjective experience of mine that AFAIK can't be recorded and reviewed by a psychologist. Technically speaking psychoanalysis isn't a field of science. It's collection of theories on how to diagnose and treat mental functions and behaviors deemed unhealthy according to a standard of mental health. The standard of mental health differs between different schools of psychoanalysis and between individual psychoanalysts, but there are some generally accepted tenets that nearly every psychoanalyst accepts: besides the inherited constitution of personality, a person's development is determined by events in early childhood; human attitude, mannerism, experience, and thought is largely influenced by irrational drives; irrational drives are unconscious; attempts to bring these drives into awareness meet psychological resistance in the form of defense mechanisms; conflicts between conscious and unconscious, or repressed, material can materialise in the form of mental or emotional disturbances, for example: neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety, depression etc.; the liberation from the effects of the unconscious material is achieved through bringing this material into the conscious mind (via e.g. skilled guidance, i.e. therapeutic intervention). The fact that something is subjective doesn't mean that you can't have a science studying it. Economics is another example. There is no objective value scale of goods, and yet economics has a whole hell of a lot to say about the exchange of these goods. In the same sense, psychology has a lot to say about our minds, our subjective experience of consciousness, dreams, behavior patterns etc. If psychoanalysis were not based in science, it would have no predictive quality. You couldn't observe someone repeating an unhealthy pattern of behavior, look at the characteristics of that behavior and limit the possible origins and treatments accordingly. But psychologists do, and are successful doing so. Here's a couple interviews discussing the science behind talk therapy and how success is measured: 1524 – 'Mapping the Effects of Talk Therapy on the Brain' - Dr Gabriel Dichter - The Freedomain Radio Interview http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1524_mapping_therapy_dr_dichter_interview.mp3 1517 – The Benefits of Therapy - An Interview with Chris Boyce, University of Warwick http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1517_interview_chris_boyce_32_x_happiness.mp3 The effects of divorce and religion on the human mind are pretty big. Just do a little googling and you'd be surprised what you'll find.

"Apply" means that if a moral argument is true for one person, it's true for all people. If I were to be a snarky teacher with a "disobedient" student, I might say something like "this assignment is due tomorrow. Anyone who doesn't finish it will not be going to recess. This means you TDB!" That's what "apply" means. Stef makes the distinction between "preferable" and "prefered". The first describes the proposition "if you want to have valid conclusions, it's preferable that you reject propositions that lead to contradiction". The second is about what kind of icecream I want. The first is objective evaluation of a proposition and the second is subjective experience of propositions.

The way that I understand the distinction between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind is whether or not the brain activity reaches a certain threshold of activity. If you think of the activity of the brain as a 3D map where X and Y are the area of the brain processing the stimulus and the Z axis is the amount of activity going on in that region, you can imagine mountains spiking up in the landscape. An alarm clock spikes the region of your brain that responds to sound. This is how you can be both conscious and unconscious of things. Breathing is an obvious example. Also how we can be only partly conscious of something, like that word I'm trying to think of that has "ger" in it, I think. Only the tippy top of the mountain is tall enough to break those clouds. How consciousness works is still largely a mystery (and hotly debated). Baroness Susan Greenfield is a neuroscientist who has a lot of very interesting stuff to say about consciousness. This video was very informative for me. The idea that the unconscious mind has like 3000x the processing power as the conscious mind is true because almost none of the activity in our brains reaches the threshold for it to be conscious (the mountain isn't tall enough). In this way, for something to be unconscious it simply needs to produce less activity in the brain or to be dwarfed by something much more active. I believe that the amygdala and hippocampus can produce chemicals that very easily overwhelm the frontal cortices and so in that way, if something were to be suppressed with the aid of fight or flight responses, that could explained repression, psychological splitting and things like that. I'm also a no-nothing when it comes to neuroscience. If an actual neuroscientist were to read this, they would probably take issue with it.

This question you have is almost verbatim asked by the second mailbag asker in the video I linked. Did you watch it? If not, why not? If you did, how was that answer not satisfactory? (It start ~8min) This is my thousandth post! Woohoo!

If I say it's good for me to do something, but bad for you to do it, that moral proposition fails universality. Universality requires moral arguments to apply to all people. The unwanted aspect is simply a description of what murder is, not an additional standard. If both guys extended the right to kill them to the other guy, it's no longer murder, and instead some strange form of suicide. Suicide is not evil, but murder is. This is basically a reiteration of the coma test. It's why you can't have a violation of a "thou shalt" that would be evil. The only sustainable moral arguments (where violent enforcement is justified) are "thou shalt not"s. You cannot create a moral argument that logically justifies murder, rape, theft etc without a logic fail. So soldiers don't become moral, and taxation is just a euphemism for theft. The arguments you are referencing are used to explain why this is. By pointing out how their arguments actually suggest an acceptance of the theory in order for them to be made (Which is why I approached Waster's criticisms the way I did). Working through the logic of the book, how it confirms our intuitions about murder and rape etc, how it can evaluate moral propositions and how it's a consistent theory that even has predictive value (like any good theory should) is what convinced me (a previous skeptic). I'm almost certain it's in there. Maybe it's in RTR? It's somewhere, haha. If not, then we both had the same hallucination, haha.

To those rejecting self ownership as a concept, please refer to the second listener bag question in the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0JGAn7p81M

"Only if they want to be moral" is the conclusion you reach through the exact same logic. "Only if" implies a condition by which we see if something if preferred. Prefered in this sense is actually objective. There is an equivocation when you say that something is prefered based on a condition, and that something is subjectively prefered in the way that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. Those aren't the same thing, if you catch my drift. When you are arguing for subjective morality there is a prescriptive element implied in the act necessarily, a prefered state. You are saying that if you value truth, you ought believe that morality is subjective. All UPB is saying is that if you want to be moral, you need to satisfy a few standards, like universality and logical consistency. You are doing the same thing that UPB is saying you should, except with the important distinction that there is a logical inconsistency in what you are saying, a break in universality, where you are using a standard that you are rejecting (i.e. a performative contradiction). "You ought not believe that anyone ought behave a certain way" is essentially what you are saying, which even if it met whatever criteria you are using for "subjective" it's still irrational. The fact that people disagree about what is moral has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of the propositions. People disagree about what is logical, so then is logic subjective? Of course not.

Ought people to believe that morality is in fact not objective, and is actually subjective? Ought I show you what you're missing? If no, why? If yes to either, ought I do it because you have a preference that I do, or because of reasons that are true regardless of what you or I prefer? The implication being that if you answer yes and because you simply prefer it, there are logical problems I can go into, but I'll wait for your response first.

And my point was that's exactly what you're doing: claiming universal objectivity regarding the way people ought behave. I showed how you were doing it with reference to your own quotations. You can't just say "nuh uh", haha. If the rule "everyone should murder" applies at all, it should apply to everyone. Exactly. It's the exact same thing you are talking about. And it also fails the unchosen positive obligations test as well. You're right.

So, it could be that I'm not using the words the way Stef is, but I use morality to describe both what is moral and immoral, but also aesthetics, and what is neutral. And these distinctions involve universality and logical consistency, then to what is enforceable. There is nothing to universalize about me reading a book, when there is when someone is late to a meeting with me. The second case does not justify enforcement and so is not strictly immoral. Rather it violates aesthetic standards. Obviously it is a waste of my time, my most valuable resource. As a society, in a family, among friends rules are established all the time about how people ought behave that are mostly within the realm of aesthetics. We have explicit or implicit contracts with each other. Contracts are around aesthetics. It would not make a lot of sense to have a contract that forbade you from killing me. Instead there would be some standard that we come up with to handle the working relationship and in the case of the breaking of the contract. By working for me as a therapist in my practice, I will require you not to have sex with any patients. If this contract were to apply to you because you are a therapist working with clients, and then not apply Jeff because he's a therapist working with clients. There is a problem concerning universality and logical consistency here, and so that contract would be a pretty bad contract. Often we think of contracts as being good or bad using UPB like I demonstrated above. Murder is unwanted by definition. If the guy wanted it, that would be like some strange suicide. Imagine two guys in a room wanting to murder the other, but not wanting to die themselves. Murder is good for me, but not for you is the break in universality.

So it means nothing to say that something is better, but it's better to believe that there is no objective morality? Is it your subjective preference that no objective morality is possible? If one ought not believe that objective morality is true and real because of some objective basis, meeting some sort of standard of reason and evidence, but the idea that one ought not murder, that's another matter entirely! Morality is not a system. It's not a collection of rules. Even people who believe in theories of ethics which are barbaric and evil will tell you that they believe it because it meets some objective standard for how people ought behave, i.e. a standard beyond some system or collection of rules.

The distinction is not inflicting. Being late is inflicting wasted time on me. The thing that separates immorality from aesthetics is whether or not the use of force is justified in preventing the act. We can use force to prevent rape, theft, murder etc. The person doing the murder has violated the NAP. In other words they are saying "I'm acting violently toward this person, so I now I'm accepting that violence can be used against me". There's universality even in the negation. That should also cover the second question. It's been a while since I read UPB, but that's how I remember it applying in that situation.

You brought up a lot of stuff. Is there any one thing in particular that would really clarify things for you above everything else?

There are a lot of words that are somewhat synonymous with "happiness", so I think it's a good idea to make some distinctions. When I'm speaking about happiness, I mean it more around satisfaction and fulfillment. That fulfillment may be illusory (such as in the case of mania), but the experience is one that I am doing good things with my life. I would say that the familiar place in my comfort zone can include fulfillment and satisfaction, for sure, but it can also contain things that work against your own fulfillment and satisfaction. I don't know about you, but I found that when I just stuck to my routine, my habits, I would eventually get a strong sense that I'm not fulfilled. It's familiar and if things get too much, it's a good place to come back to, maybe, but I think that in order to be fulfilled there has to be a concerted effort to push the limits. In the case of becoming familiar and used to doing something that is ultimately good and fulfilling, that can start to become kind of boring and not challenging and maybe that's not a rut per se, but there is definitely an experience that something is lacking. Like when a guy who's achieved some success, he starts a business that is finally doing well and sustaining itself over long periods. He wants to start adding new products and take it to a new level, as he should. If we were to imagine a company that worked in exactly the same way over like 10 years, the same volume, same products, same everything, I might think that the people who run it might not be super fulfilled. I would probably ask them why they don't try and do more with the business. So, that's what I mean about being happy and pushing limits. Hopefully that makes some sense.

I've noticed a similar tendency in myself. I would get happy and then notice I was happy and then I'd suddenly get a little tense. I would anticipate some kind of crash as if in a mania. I would try and curb the happiness so that the crash wouldn't be as bad. Not that I was never in a mania, but this applied much more to my own genuine happiness than anything else. Because when I'm in a mania, I'm not connected enough to myself to experience that caution and hesitation. I know that when I would be happy at home or school or with my frenemies, I ran the risk of some passive aggressive attack, like how I must be stupid to be happy. Probably because people's own unhappiness became acutely available to them in contrast, and they saw me on some level as the source of that discomfort. A possible origin, but simply knowing that didn't do a whole lot toward addressing the issue in this case. What helped me was in therapy a tendency for my therapist to look positively on every time I was happy. That even if it were a mania, I can still let myself enjoy it. Knowing that offered me relief. I tried to have an attitude of "I'm happy? Great!" Because being happy is important. And I'm sorry that you don't have very much of it Are you in a rut right now? Are you trying new things and going outside your comfort zone? I know that I wasn't only sabotaging my happiness in that one way, but in several ways. I would never challenge myself, never give people the opportunity to connect with me. The safe familiar stuff is where there is the most inertia, and I think that my happiness is kind of like the muscles that grows in response to the resistance there. If that makes any sense. Maybe it's different for you.