Kevin Beal

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Hi Nigel! I think it's an important issue you are bringing up and I appreciate you working toward moral clarity around these issues. This is just my opinion. I'm not an expert on any of these issues. The morality I think that I'm going to have to disagree with Lens, as it is not people that are immoral, but moral propositions, which are inherent in action. So we can take the proposition "if someone upsets us, it's justified to push them down stairs". I'm sure you don't agree with that now, and probably wouldn't have said yes to that even at the time, but that's the part to evaluate, I think. What these incidents represent in moral terms is the initiation of force. If you accept the NAP as a principle, you logically must condemn stair pushing. So, considering that, I don't see any way around the fact that something immoral was done. I can't think of why scaring your grandfather would be immoral. . . The difference I would say though that there is a moral difference between you pushing your brother, and your grandfather pushing you. In that you (probably) didn't have the option to not see your grandfather, he won't be condemned the way you were, and he has far less excuse around maturity and way more opportunities to address that violent impulse in himself. All of that pointing to the fact that he had more choice generally, and it seems fair to me to say that the people with the most choice are the most culpable. A caution What I would caution is making excuses for other people. If you were to say to yourself that what your grandfather did wasn't too bad, then what is inevitable (and the dark side of UPB) is that you will make those same excuses for yourself. The result being that you will hold yourself less responsible and you will justify more aesthetically negative (vices) or even immoral behavior in yourself. Restitution I don't know what you should do in this case, but generally restitution for acts of violence involves the effect on the person (i.e. bodily and psychological damage). If you were able to have some kind of measure for how much that is worth, then that'd constitute restitution. If it's a money amount, it's should be high enough to overcome the resentment, but not so high that they'd prefer to be pushed again (or something like that, I'm no expert). Further consideration What the hell were your parents thinking leaving you with a man who would push you down stairs? A man willing to do that doesn't suddenly out of nowhere just start pushing people down stairs. There would have to be some kind of history there. And why is your grandfather immune to criticism? Why is he shielded from condemnation while you are not? Why did nobody ask where you got the idea to push your brother?

Lol. I love the tags! I wonder how many economists were contacted during the "research" for this article. I wonder why everyone isn't guaranteed work already, why everybody doesn't own everything now. Maybe there is a reason for that. Haha

Personally, I would say "ghosts don't exist". I wouldn't even ask him to present the case. I think having a debate about it gives it way too much credit. I would feel silly debating the existence of ghosts. Somebody to believe in ghosts could not get there thru a rational evaluation of the facts. And I would suspect a much more personal emotional explanation. I don't know how I could get thru to someone like that, but I wouldn't waste mine or Bob's time debating it. I would feel inclined to just say straight up that it's boloney and that the person ought look at a psychological explanation for this belief, but they'd have to trust me a lot for me to do that. Maybe if I were to demonstrate extraordinary self knowledge, or something like that. I don't know. (Mostly thinking out loud).

The onus is on bob to show that ghosts are real. You can try to disprove ghosts now that you have a definition, but in most cases there is not enough there to even disprove. That's why it's on him so that you know exactly what you are disproving.

But that's not actually to know everything about the truth, right? Knowing everything and trusting your senses to respond with accurate sense data are not the same thing. I think it's an important thing to stop and address because, if it's true that reality is plain to see for what it actually is, and it's true that these erroneous conclusions you point out that people have made using their senses are really only confirmation of this self evident truth, then it's not a logical problem that needs to be addressed, right? Does that make sense?

A moral rule, in order to be UPB, has to be universal. That is to say that it has to apply at any point in history and in any location. Like Cheryl mentioned, something is only (im)moral to the degree to which there is actual choice. It would make no sense to hold someone morally responsible for something they had no choice in (they were born into a situation or they were forced by the threat of violence etc.) The reason that moral rules needs to satisfy the standard of universality is because that's the only logical way that they could be actually binding on people in any legitimate way. If I made a rule that applied only to you and not to me, then obviously, I'm just trying to exploit you in some way. If it applies to only some people some of the time, then it's not really a moral rule, but some kind of aesthetic preference (that's how you'd make that distinction). Have you read UPB, batman1337?

Who's claiming to know the truth about everything?

But you can't say that without reference to the actual objects as they actually exist, otherwise, to say that it's not really an accurate representation, or that what we are experiencing is something else becomes entirely meaningless. Those electrical signals are not any different than the moon. To say that one is experienced and the other not makes no logical sense. The very fact that we have a term for dream and illusion is evidence of an objective distinction. The reason we can say that something is an illusion or a dream necessarily implies an objective reference to objective reality, otherwise the distinction would be meaningless. Also, you seem to be implying that because animals have a greater capacity for certain sensual experiences (larger ranges, lower thresholds, etc) you are appealing to an objective standard about what is real about the world. You already accept what I'm telling you. This is implied in what you are saying. That's why I say it's so simple: because everyone already acts as if it's entirely true (and the degree to which they don't they are uniformly recognized as having a serious mental problem). There are three basic positions on the philosophy of mind: Nothing is real except our experience Some combination of the external world and our internal subjective experience the external world is entirely real and concepts do not exist <----HINT: it's this one Stef goes into these in the Knowledge series. I would suggest you go there since he does a better job than I can. Have you watched any of them yet? How we know that everyone already accepts the above conclusion: Mental health is measured (in large part) by how well people can process and navigate the real world. Everyone expects consistent behavior of the physical laws (i.e. that gravity won't suddenly reverse) A successful scientific theory is reproducible, falsifiable and universally consistent etc etc etc The only reason people quibble on these things (as far as I can tell as a layman) is because it serves some political or religious agenda: Plato's philosopher kings could access the world of forms and so they should decide what people should do, how society should run God exists because reality isn't "purely materialistic" and those who see past this "shallow materialism" can talk to god and "instruct" others etc etc etc The only way that people can be controlled is if you undermine their capacity to understand the world objectively for themselves. Or as is sometimes mentioned "freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. From that all else follows". By undermining people's efficacy here, they will rely on the perceived authority: the priest or the politician.

Google security team are apparently pretty pissed off about what the NSA is doing. Some data is forced at gunpoint while other data is gathered through illegal means. Story here.

I'd probably sound pretty silly saying it, especially since I am no expert on this (or really any other) issue, but isn't it just the simplest thing in the world? I really think it's as simple as it sounds. Me, this computer I'm typing on, the sun, the moon etc. What we experience with our bodies (our senses) and the extension of our bodies (tools, telescopes, microscopes, thermo goggles etc). Despite that, I'll provide some sort of more sophisticated definition. Reality is a category that encompasses all existing objects. It's distinguished from what is true in that something can be true, but not real (like a math equation). It's distinguished from concepts since we can hold a concept of a unicorn, but it doesn't mean unicorns exist, rather what exists is a person's brain that generates the ontologically subjective experience of that concept. The general philosophical metaphysics around existence is called "ontology", defined as: The introduction to philosophy series is here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC1647D7F937DDE7A This one is especially relevant (but you may want to watch the knowledge sub-series first):

How about self actualization? Go big or go home, right? I always used to make goals that I never really had too much control over, like: "I'm going to find a great gal and fall in love" or something like that. The law of attraction has not made it happen for me yet though. Damn you universe! I did make a resolution one year though to get a job that I'd actually enjoy (being unemployed at the time). I ended up seeing a potential opportunity and I decided to work my ass off to become qualified enough for the position learning two programming languages in the process. It was partly luck, but I was able to pull it off, and I still feel good about that 2 years later. That being said, most resolutions that had some control over (not necessarily on new years) have never come about. I'd either lose motivation pretty quickly, or I'd get pretty far realizing that I don't want to do it anymore finally considering some obvious things. For example, I thought maybe I'd become a police officer *shudder*. I never really felt bad about it, but that might not be a great thing. If there's something I truly want and I can't do it or it won't come about for whatever reason, then disappointment feels like an appropriate response. Perhaps, it was because I never used to have very high expectations for myself...

Hi William! Sorry about the catholic school Welcome to the boards! Which of the FDR videos or podcasts lured you in?

Among the groups I knew, the "debate" was kinda like Peter Joseph's word salad, full of adjectives and assertions, but no apparent rigor. So, when someone would say that forgiveness is a marker of an enlightened, non-ego person (regardless of whether or not restitution was made), I would explain how I distinguish forgiveness as something involuntary done with at least some sort of honest standards. What I would get in return was either that it's my ego's attachment to meaningless things or that it's a hateful act toward the person that I do not will my forgiveness. The conversation became murky at that point because they hadn't addressed what I was actually saying, but rather simply elaborating on what they already accepted. I would reword my criticism or I would bring a new one up, and very quickly the conversation was shut down with some veiled insult or a retreat entirely into subjectivity (with the suggestion that I was being intolerant). So they'd say "when you come to see what I've seen, you will know the truth I bring". Or they'd say "this is what my heart tells me, and I have always been able to trust my heart". Or they'd say "your truth may be different from my truth, but this is still my truth". That's most of the people I debated with. But if you got somebody especially good at manipulating language, it was slightly different. What they'd say was either very vague or used terms in ways that didn't make sense (at least to me) and then I'd have to ask for an elaboration. Then they'd elaborate in a way that made it even more confusing and the cycle would continue. At some point I had to stop them and bring up my arguments again as explicitly as possible, which would be addressed with something that was again incomprehensible. It would be full of adjectives and references that weren't necessary to make their point bringing me to some tangent they wouldn't even support later as it would be "beside the point". These are usually the guru types who people (I will assert) mistook incomprehensibility for true wisdom. It's the same kinds of things that postmodernists pull in my experience. I don't know if that helps or not... I think that this podcast does a good job of describing what I've experienced: 673 – Subjectivism http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_673_Subjectivism.mp3

That they don't actually try to understand the environmental factors. Being that the parents bring him to the doctor rather than look at themselves, it would seem fair to me to conclude that there is a serious lack of empathy for the kid (primarily) on the part of the parents. It also pathologizes "negative" behavior, making the child out to have a fundamentally screwed up emotional apparatus, which if that's not the case is setting the child up for some seriously tragic problems with their own capacity for operating in the world as an emotional being, permanently! (unless they process it later in life) Mental health is equated to conformity in cases like these, devoid of any real principles. Tragically, this is sure to continue that cycle.

I actually had never heard about the CIA connection. That's very interesting. I'm not entirely sure what to write here. But I was born into a mormon family and when I was ~3, my parents got really into A Course In Miracles (ACIM) and they left the church. This made things very uncomfortable socially for my family with all mormon neighbors and schoolmates, so we moved to Arizona to start a new life outside the church. My parents divorced not very long after that. My dad would quote ACIM often to his children, the way a pastor might to his children. My mom was more interested in David Icke, Deepak Chopra and eventually The Secret. To her credit, she rarely spoke about any of it to the youngest children. I would often listen to my dad speak for hours about this stuff, not really taking any of it in. I pitied him and wanted to make him feel visible and heard, be the parent he wasn't for me. I would enable him in order to escape my mother (who was less overtly spiritual, but similarly neglectful). My brother grew up very close to my dad and he ended up taking ACIM pretty seriously as a result. As an adult he went to the ACIM cult in Wisconsin and loved it. He is the one that exposed me to this non-dual world. He has a practice that he does of creating associations through language that is nearly incomprehensible, and he would practice it a lot with me, tie in things he'd learned from the large list of non-dual thinkers he was reading, and even meeting in person. It's a bit like Rudy's (in TGOA) imitation of post modernists, re-arranging the language. Without going into specifics (since my brother is not here to defend himself), I found this to be sad, upsetting, disorienting and frustrating to deal with. It made being vulnerable with him really difficult for me. I would very often have the experience of convincing him of something, and then the next day it was like he didn't get it at all. He had no problem at all contradicting himself (by his own admission). I have had a lot more contact with spiritual types than I have with religious people. That was just the people I was living and working with. Maybe it's just these people and my sample size isn't large enough to generalize, but there is a pretty big difference between the spiritual and the religious. The religious people would quickly bow out of any debate that I would bring and just say "faith" and be done with it. The spiritual people, I found, were a LOT more touchy, defensive and just mean below the thin veneer of humility and niceness. These people would constantly posture about how enlightened and conscious they were, and when they did that it irritated the hell out of me so I would call them out on it. Not a single one of them could sustain a single minute's debate, before retreating completely into subjectivism. People actually thought that I was a spiritualist myself based on how well I was familiar with the concepts, and (me being susceptible to flattery) a few people actually told me straight up that I was "enlightened" (I say in all my false pride ). The worst part was the subjectivism. That drove me crazy. At least the religious people I talked to didn't really try and pull that shit. The whole thing often became using this amorphous blob of mutually exclusive truthisms to contradict other people whenever they felt like it. Religious people do that too, I guess, but there wasn't like a single book that people could resolve these differences. It was just a distorted alpha male thing between terribly fragile people. It's painful to watch. I find myself favoring religious people overall. There is a kind of consistency and commitment that they have that I can actually appreciate a bit, even if it is completely false and destructive. Rightly or wrongly, I don't have this same appreciation for the vaguely spiritual. To me they always seemed to do everything they could to prevent knowledge rather than foster it. If I grew up in a different environment, I might prefer the vaguely spiritual to the religious, I don't know. But that's my general experience.

I consider myself a n00b in this area, so it could be that I'm totally wrong, but I'd prefer a demonstration of how I'm wrong rather than mere assertion. I just wanted to share a few terms that are thrown around sometimes in these types of debates: Epiphenomenalism - is a mind-body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance. Fear seems to make the heart beat faster; though, according to epiphenomenalism, the state of the nervous system causes the heart to beat faster. Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a version of monism. Computationalism - In philosophy, a computational theory of mind names a view that the human mind and/or human brain is an information processing system and that thinking is a form of computing. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1961, and developed by the MIT philosopher and cognitive scientist (and Putnam's PhD student) Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s (due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others), the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology; in the 2000s and 2010s the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy (Scheutz 2003, Edelman 2008). Dualism - is the position that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical, or that the mind and body are not identical. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism, in the mind–body problem Ontological subjectivity - Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective. Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness. Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it. Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Could you provide more details? What was the caller's question? Was it a male caller? Was it a call-in show or a listener convo? My guess that you may be talking about this call : http://youtu.be/ZA8EDHqHhmg?t=1h59m27s The topic is a guy calling in about an ex wife and his christian family. And how the people in our lives need to have our backs, and when they don't, it has some dark implications. It's a really great call. Another call that could be it is this one : http://youtu.be/aUFt-HrTfO4?t=1h46m56s It's a caller from panama who was forced to take care of his mother. Stef argues that if you forgive people who don't deserve it, you end up becoming more irresponsible yourself. That codependency implied seems to be kinda what your quotation is around.

Well that's no reason to steal their land, right?

Please elaborate. How is it like that? Demonstrate the point you are making by use of examples and / or logic.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/24/256863444/highway-in-iceland-may-be-sidetracked-by-elves

Concerning the idea that something helped me so I should recommend it to others This is actually not (alone) sufficient reason to prescribe something to other people. First of all, how do you know it helped you? Helped you as compared to what? I got into politics as a communist initially. By identifying that way and maintaining that identity I ended up learning a lot about political theory. Similarly, I considered myself a nihilist in the true sense of the word, bordering on solipsism. During that skeptical phase I was able to (reasonably) reject some pretty core things that are really terrible things like the idea that lying to people is helping them, and this sort of thing. I actually kind of appreciate nihilism in some respects, and some of Nietzsche's stuff, and skepticism in general. But I am not going to recommend nihilism to anyone (or communism for that matter). I would actually feel gross and ashamed to prescribe these things to people. Concerning a right or wrong way At the very least you have to accept that there is a right and wrong way of getting out of nihilism. The problems of nihilism come in many facets, but I'm sure we can all agree on the rejection of truth, the world and morality (and I'd include: the self). Non-dualism is addressing the dualism of the mind and body, or the subjective experience of consciousness and the material world. The "solution" non-dualists offer is that neither is real or true. And these non-dual gurus make money from lying to people about this non-answer. And this non-answer can get people in some real trouble (such as when it is used to justify and excuse destructive behavior). In medicine, there is sometimes a need to inflict an illness to treat a bigger illness. (I can't actually remember why, but it is possible.) In these (extraordinarily) rare cases there is a lot of work done to make sure that this not going to overwhelm the patient's immune system and make things worse, or that the new disease won't grab too great a hold. It may be that Tolle is a good way out of nihilism. That's possible, I guess. But at best it's counterintuitive, and at worst it's destructive. So either an explanation is necessary or the prescription should be abandoned. Concerning debate The way that people learn is not to hear conclusions, but to hear arguments, listen to people present a case. Or provide lots of context, failing that. "Read Tolle" doesn't help me to understand what I'm supposed to do with that. What is the methodology that Tolle provides for getting out of a nihilistic mindset? I did ask questions, brought up where I wanted clarification and asked if my analysis was correct.

Right. The computer can only simulate things. That is not to say that artificial intelligence cannot exist, it's just that as far as anybody can tell, it's the wetware in our brains that provides the necessary environment for the state of consciousness to arise. And this is too obvious, since we don't argue with a computer or talk about it having preferences (except in a comical homunculus sense: "my computer is acting up today"). If the computer were to tell alert some scary message like "I can see you. I'm going to get you!", we wouldn't get a restraining order against the computer, we'd think it was somebody communicating to us thru the computer. Additionally, if we were to say that a computer understands things because it reacts to and expresses things in a sophisticated manner, then that is to look at human understanding in the same sense as the computer being a blind input to a blind output. That is to make consciousness an illusion, something on top of and entirely subject to these blind processes, which poses a lot of problems. It makes debate nonsensical for the reasons Stef so brilliantly points out, but it also there are other logical problems: The computation theory of mind states (roughly) that the problems of consciousness, meaning and free will can be answered in terms of computation, reduced to simpler processes, rather than as a state of the brain. This is like saying that H2O molecules are generating liquidity rather than liquidity existing as a state the H2O molecules are in. John Searle is my favorite philosopher after Stef and he's got a lot to say about consciousness and the theory of mind that AFAIK has never been refuted. A relevant and interesting paper is here. Here are some quotations:

That doesn't even make sense. That's not an answer to the question. If you are going to make immature snarky comments, at least have them make at least some sense. Here's an example of what I mean: Q: How do you present a case? A: By swearing dramatically, avoiding every criticism and acting hypocritically. Also, I wasn't the one who downvoted your post in case you thought I did.

Great! Then demonstrate the principle here. Put up or shut up. That's not the point. The point is not that this screen here is an abstraction from ones and zeros. The point is that there is no point in the computation where meaning or understanding can be said to belong to the computer. It only interacts with what is directly expressed. It's a book falling and hitting the floor. The book doesn't understand and neither does the computer. Gathering information that is not directly expressed by the equation as per the definition of "meaning" I gave you. The person has all sorts of associations, subjective experience, an ideal measured against an objective standard etc. If the human gets the equation wrong, it's not a computation problem or a programming problem (At least not in the sense that we use these terms to describe computers).