Pepin

Scientifically, dreaming is quite complex and not really understood. There are large methodological issues that make it very difficult to study. At the moment, there are two primary theories as to what dreams are, and I linked a video below that gives a better overview of the science of dreaming than I can. Personally with my own experience with dreams, once I start to record them and try to figure them out I will start to figure them out as I am dreaming, and then the dream starts throwing me for tons of loops. If I ever become lucid in a dream, the most common route is for me to dream that I am waking up, which a lot of the time works in making me forget I am dreaming. For a good example of this, I recommend reading this dream of mine. I don't know, I really get the impression that some part of my mind knows what is best for me. There have been plenty of times where I've been dead tired and ought to have slept, but where I decided to lay down with my eyes open. What ends up happening is that my eyes will have closed, but I will be seeing an imagine of the ceiling, and my brain is trying to trick me into sleeping. And when I'm in a dream and am about to wake up, the dream really hard to keep me sleeping. An issue I experience is that the most I figure out my dreams, the most they become indecipherable, like abstract art that can't be described. I do have a lot of dreams about mundane things, like being at work, but those aren't really interesting to remember or to record, and you tend to lose memory of a dream within 10 minutes of waking up. I think the best way to answer most of these questions is to start a dream journal and to find out for yourself. As someone who was initially far more critical of this idea than you are, once I began analyzing my dreams it began difficult to not change my mind. There are theories, but these aren't really scientific in the sense of being supported by empirical studies. Symbolism is subjective and has little ability to be described objectively. Imagine an overly rational alien is studying humans and they watch a ton of earth movies with heavy symbolism. Although the symbolism may be very direct and considered obvious and have objective meaning to humans, the alien would have no real methodology for testing if something was a symbol, and it likely will go over the alien's head. To a large degree, this is the problem with verifying the problem in and out of dreams. There is technology that is coming that is making it possible to see what people are dreaming. It will become far easier to test certain ideas, but it really doesn't overcome the methodological issues of test for symbols and metaphors. Another large issue is that symbols in dreams are likely to be quite personal to the person. With all of that said, a great book I'd recommend is Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

I think the theory of UPB is what will have the largest impact and will be what Stefan is remembered most for.

A question I like to 1. Being aware of where psychological stems from and being angry at any abuse suffered to avoid recreating it or repressing it. Being aware of the people you are associating with and being able to rationally judge the relationships that will allow for the maximum level of happiness. Adjudicating responsibility for harm done to you. I wouldn't use the term blame, just as we wouldn't say that a victim of physical assault blames the assaulter. It is of course semantics, but I think a stronger word ought to be used because the effects of a negative childhood shape the structure of your brain, much of what can't be changed without years and years of intensive therapy. 2. In the same way that finding out that your best friend beats his wife catapults you out of that relationship. Except worse, because you were the one being beat, you are a child, and you can't leave as your survival depends on thee people

If only I could dance. I have a bunch of music here. Unfortunately a lot of songs, some of them being better are not on there due to upload capacities. I think this is probably my best song, though the mixing is pretty poor. Didn't have enough time to do real guitar for a lot of parts.

Why talk about nukes when there are far more dangerous and less costly weapons of mass destruction? Certainly, anyone who wouldn't mind demolishing a city with a nuke also wouldn't mind launching a chemical bomb that will keep all of the infrastructure and technology intact. Keep in mind that in the future, technology will be far advanced. I think the main question is, what does this question have to do with governments? Let's say that there is no real good answer about the solution to this in a free society, how would it follow that government is preferred to anarchism?

This would be far more interesting if she was attractive.

Just sharing my personal factors which i hope will help others in identifying their own. I think some of my personal reasons may be similar to others, but I think there is a lot of diversity based off the very wide range of "how did you get here" stories. I like how you described the instant conversion, I think it captures it pretty well.

I feel like I am missing something after reading that post. Are you claiming that an anarchic society would not take care of those problems? If so, why?

I had a pretty good connection come to me the other day. It is pretty simple and perhaps it has already been stated, but I think it explains a lot and it feels new to me. There is the idea that seems to be empirically verified that the best way to break the cycle of violence and to stop being a victim is to get angry. Those in the libertarian movement tend to have quite a lot of anger in regard to emotional arguments and are rather impervious to them. Many would prefer that emotion stay out of arguments all together. I would hypothesize that many people are libertarians because something in their childhood made them angry about emotional manipulation. Now to go off on in another direction, I think there were a few large factors that allowed me to accept anarchism. I was one of those people who accepted it almost instantly, though I spent a month or two looking at opposing arguments. I really didn't have any clue what a government was prior to this, I mean I could give answers, but they didn't make any sense internally to me. The biggest factor I believe is having a rather isolated childhood with neglectful parents. I've never felt any strong emotions to my parents or to anyone in my family. A number of years ago, far before coming to FDR, I came to a question about "do you love your parents" and I thought about it for a second and thought "no". I really didn't care to ever see them again. The idea of "missing" them never made sense. Provided that the "the state is a projection of the family" theory is true, I don't think I had any real family to project upon the state. The next two factors are an overly rational mind with a pretty innate understanding of logic and an avoidance and almost complete repression of emotion. It was actually a conscious decision I made when I was in 6th grade where I came to the conclusion that emotions were causing me too much difficulty. At the time, I was overly sensitive and cried quite easy and this caused a lot of issues. It was something I really couldn't help either which I found annoying, if someone started making fun of my speech impediment, I would try all these mental games to stop the tears, but it'd happen anyway. After finding repression, for years and years of my life, I really didn't feel much at all. The way I'd describe it to close friends at the time is that I had emotions, but most of them were felt in very close ranges. Another factor is that I was rather shy and had a speech impediment, so I tended to observe social interactions more than I participated, especially in groups. As on observer, I noticed so many irrational and weird psychological things go on with people that didn't make sense. For some reason, my third grade music teacher started talking about Socrates one day in class and started explaining the concept of self-knowledge and why it was needed, and this really made sense to me because of my observations. That combined with being somewhat of a loner has given me so much knowledge of myself. FDR really kind of shook my up because there was this whole part of me, namely my emotions, that I really didn't have direct access to. One last odd thing about something is that I really didn't like how people acted like different people depending on who they were with. I wanted to be consistent in my personality because I equated this with being honest, so in the fourth grade I started that project. There were a lot of weird and irrational thoughts that went into that idea, one being that I had a fear of explaining myself my actions if they contracted an "alter-ego" or whatever it'd be called. I also stopped visualizing and day dreaming around this time because I couldn't figure out where the image was coming from, which confused to no end. Anyway, I am pretty this had a decent effect, not sure how. I could probably go on and on with things that I think helped contributed to my road to reason, but I think summary is essentially that I got lucky as it could of ended up pretty bad. In the 4th and 5th grade I had been getting this sense of superiority to everyone, like only I could do things and only I understood things, that I was special and unique. I realized this was completely irrational and had to keep telling myself that this wasn't true. From talking to a psychologist about this, they told me that when this happens to people in their childhood and they go with it, it ends up very bad, and that it is amazing that I dodged that bullet.

Exercise is quite good for you, and body-building is as well. To me, it is kind of like if you are going to exercise, you ought to choose according to the results you want, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to shape your body. There is a lot of psychology that goes with appearance, and looking good is something to be preferred and has measurable positive impacts on social interactions. I'd argue that it is an Aristotelian mean though. There are all these starvation diets that people will go through to get their abs to show, which I think is unhealthy. I also have a difficult time understanding and justifying the professional side of it, much in the way I can't understand the point of professional baseball. There are also other cases of people becoming obsessed with it which can be bad depending on the reasons. What I mean by this is that a personal trainer has a reason to become obsessed with it and this would be positive, while an ordinary Jane who can't stop thinking about it might be avoiding something in their life. This argument is no different than the general argument against obsession.

It's kind of like asking "if a business that gets all its money through force opens up to not robbing people..." to which the response is that there'd be a large and costly transition period that could not be survived providing that competition isn't banned. The entire structure is not designed to maximize resources, to please consumers, or to deal with people in voluntary ways, setting up for a pretty impossible transition. It's like saying "we can take the bottom 5% of the work force that are the least productive the least driven and the least efficient in society, and make a business so successful that we'll be able to compete with any experienced firm". It is literally putting a child in the ring against Mike Tyson. My argument is essentially that if it did happen, we'd have anarchy soon after competition arrived.

Saying the speed of light is constant in all reference frames is a little difficult to get the implications of. Essentially, no matter your velocity, you will always measure the speed of light to be the same. If I measure that you are moving at 80% of the speed of light and both you and I measure the light that you are emitting, we will both measure the speed of light. Classically, what we'd expect is that you'd measure a lesser number than I would, just like if you were to shoot a gun off the front of a moving train. In that scenario, to you the bullet would be traveling at lets say 1000mph. If I was outside the train and stationary and lets say the train is moving at 1000mph, I'd measure the bullet's velocity to be 2000mph. But if this was Einsteinian bullet, this doesn't happen, instead I'd measure the bullet to be at X MPH and you'd measure the bullet to be the same. A great thought experiment that Einstein came up with is to imagine that you are on a hover board with a light beam bouncing up and down between two plates. You are moving in a direction that is perpendicular to the two plates at 1/8 the speed of light. We know for a fact that you will measure the light to be moving at speed C (the speed of light). Now, if I am observing you from an outside perspective, we know for a fact that I won't measure the vertical up and down component of the light to be C because you are moving to the right. Instead I'd measure the diagonal motion to be C, which means if I were to measure the light beams vertical components, they would be moving slower. Not just that, but you would be moving slower as well. To get a good visual demonstration of this, I suggest watching this video at the 6:45 mark I'm certain that I'm just repeating what others have already said, but this is a difficult idea to wrap your head around and to really understand. It took me a few months to be comfortable and capable of explaining it.

A nice example I like to point out is when you start acting in a way that you don't like and are just kind of watching yourself. This happens in a lot of conflicts like with your partner where you might say to yourself "ok, don't escalate", and then the next phrase to come out of your mouth is the exact opposite. A back and forth occurs, and then eventually, you find yourself yelling at the person and you are just kind of watching thinking "ok, I need to stop yelling, apologize, and take control", and this really doesn't work. People with anger issues seem to talk about this sort of effect quite a lot.

GPS systems are based on relativity. If they didn't account for it, the inaccuracy would be large enough to make them nonfunctional. Magnetism is a result of special relativity and its accuracy has been verified to a stunning degree. I'm not liking the language in the last sentence, it is really frustrating for me to read. There are plenty of books, lectures, and videos that explain physics including special and general relativity. I'm not going to suggest that any sort of an explanation on a forum is going to help because these are subjects you have to study to understand, and with special relativity, you need a strong understanding on classical mechanics.

Emotion are highly developed senses that developed through the process of evolution. They are involuntary in that you can't choose to not to have an emotion, you are more along for the ride. There are many evolutionary advantages provided, particularly in social groups. Emotions are found to be in other animals and are most noticeable in mammals, likely because parental nurture and care taking is far more integral to survival. Answering the question about conflicting emotions is a little difficult considering the complexities of modern life compared to the original evolutionary process. I'm not certain that people 50,000 years ago were having such a flurry of emotions over what girl to mate with due to the limited supply of women and the drive to pass off the genes. But to answer the question, conflicted emotions give a message to the conscious mind that the best action may be to not act at the moment and instead to do some thinking to resolve the conflict. Emotions are for the most part great, but I hypothesize that it depends a lot on how you are raised and the self-work you do along with some genetic factors. The will of so many people is made up through emotional manipulation, which is quite obvious in the area of politics. This doesn't indicate that emotions are bad, just as manipulation through argument does not mean arguments are bad. I'd make the claim that it is best to be curious about the emotions you are feeling and to be aware of psychological effects such as projection and transference to ensure their accuracy. I'm hesitant to say "trust your emotions" as they are not always accurate, but in general you should. I really didn't really ever feel emotion for most of my life due to some pretty serious repression and dissociation, and I've been working quite hard to fix this. I find it pretty incredible how predictive and helpful they can be.

Welcome to the forum. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend watching the Introduction to Philosophy series as it lays the basis for FDR. I'm curious, how does one get a PHD is TVP? Are there classes and different levels of accreditation? Tests? Or am I misunderstanding a metaphor?

No, it just makes simultaneity at very small time frames or extremely fast velocities confusing to deal with, which is something only physicists deal with. To make another point, verifying an objective theory through empirical testing cannot invalidate that there is an objective testable reality. It would be like producing a mathematical proof that proves that math is invalid.

Below I linked two articles I found. I remember hearing a decent amount about this somewhere, particularly in relation to the Dredsen bombing. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22007730 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615171408.htm http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20080716/effects-of-premature-birth-linger http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a555465/your-premature-babys-future

If you haven't see it, I'd recommend watching The Bomb in the Brain series. I have a lot of theories as to why libertarians are different, the main having to do with liberty oriented people having a strong disassociation from the emotions which leads to a reliance of the rationalistic part of the mind in times of confrontation. It isn't that the reasoning part of the brain wouldn't be shut down if a strong enough threat was present, many libertarians show this when arguing against anarchists, but rather that this part of the brain is more likely to be hyperactive. When confronted with opposing viewpoints, a libertarian or anarchist is far more likely to understand the opposing argument and do research on topics if they don't understand something, and this is more of a compulsion than a curious itch. This sort of behavior is a self-defense mechanism and can be found in others, but I'd say is the most prevalent in libertarians. A major downfall to this mental framework is the overuse of reasoning and the ability to fall onto it as a coping strategy when confronted with anything difficult. When applied to irrational matters, this may result in a circular feedback loop where the person is always in search of evidence of their theory that they already believe to be incontrovertible. Conspiracy theorists tend to go overboard with reason, logic, and evidence to quell the anxiety. It has been noted by many psychologists and logicians that conspiracy theorists tend to have a very strong grasp of reason and evidence, but that it tends to be the case that they will often miss or ignore large gaps in their argument, and they will not change their views when confronted. I'd put forward that this is because they are managing anxiety and fear through this rationalization, and the emotional response that does it for most people doesn't work for them. I hope this was clear. I could write a twenty page essay on this topic as it is something I've done a lot of thinking and research about, mostly in relation to myself. I think I just got lucky with my coping strategy which with enough time developed into a high ability to reason and use logic.

These are words that I highly doubt that they act on in their own life. You can test this by punching them in the face and stealing their wallet. If they let you do that and don't use any sort of violence including third parties such as the police to get back their wallet and be compensated for the damage done to their nose, then they actually believe what they say. If not, well then they don't actually believe or understand what they are saying which makes a debate pointless. Of course I don't suggest doing this, but bring up the scenario to them and make their claim personal. Is this how they live their lives?

I'm not really following this. If you sign up for a DRO program and someone rapes you, the DRO and anybody else is ethically justified in using force to stop the rape. Are those that stop the rape immoral for enforcing property rights?

The parts within you don't have to be consistent with your reality. As a blatant example, many people have parts that take the form of a fictional creature or an animal. Many parts will associate themselves with other parts either in negative or positive ways, and I'd say that this is just an example of that.

From my reading of it, the person is making an argument for themselves, not you. For instance: This isn't meant for you because it if was, they'd not only give an explanation of justice and morality, but they'd also demonstrate why your own conception of the concepts are wrong. It is like if someone is a Marxist and is big on the labor theory of value, and you were trying to convince them of capitalism, you'd spend most of your time disproving the labor theory of value as opposed to putting a few words next to it and saying "capitalism is the best" and then proceeding to list all of the positive benefits. Lets assume that this person is right. Well, it is very difficult for someone to really understand when there is little to no argument and a bunch of words that you have no association to. It is as if a 9 year old asked a physicists a question, and they responded with "the angular momentum of the pendulum moves in a path that is always orthogonal to the vertex so that the inelastic collision with a ball at point P will result in a total transfer of the momentum into kinetic energy and the ball will travel in the tangential direction at the point of impact". It may be true, but nobody would consider that an answer because to the 9 year old, it is just a bunch of words. Similarly, if this person is right, I have no idea what they are saying and it is not my fault. Clearly this is directed at you, but I'd claim this exchange has nothing to do with you.

Trust yourself. Be yourself. Don't even try to ask questions, it'll happen naturally, like in any conversation.

Them - We need to push third world countries to ban child labor, Me - Won't that result in them starving or having to go to more illicit and dangerous jobs? Them - No, children need to be in school, not in sweatshops. Me - They are barely able to feed themselves. Putting the words "we'll give them food" together doesn't solve anything, and it is quite clear the foreign programs that have already been in place to solve these problems have had detrimental effects. As studies by credible groups of UNICEF have shown, bans result in the starvation of the majority of children, and those that survive tend to end up in child prostitution and the drug trade. Them - I can't believe what I am hearing... What kind of monster supports child labor!