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There are so many misunderstandings of what IFS actually says in your post. The only thing I agree with in it is that it is definitely an article of faith to claim that everyone has access to a Self that is compassionate. I'm not convinced psychopaths and some others do. And I've asked about that and not gotten satisfactory answers to it. But this is a minority of people. However, ignore for a moment any claims about the particular qualities of the Self. Just consider the Self the capacity you have to observe all of the other aspects of yourself from a detached mindset. It's the same thing people do when they meditate and simply become aware of whatever is floating through their mind. That simple awareness - the watcher or observer - is the Self. I don't think it's even remotely controversial to claim that most of us have that observer aspect. Do you not experience that? As for Dissociative Identity Disorder vs. IFS parts, the difference between these is addressed in Schwartz's book. DID Is a far more extreme situation where the parts alternate in completely taking over the person and aren't even aware of each other. When one part takes over, the person has no memory in many cases of anything that happened while another part was in charge. The irony of what you said, however, is that DID is a pretty well-established phenomenon, which only serves to support the notion that there are in fact parts experienced which can become extreme in some cases. As I've mentioned in the thread a couple times, IFS does not say there actually ARE these subselves in any real way. It simply says we experience things this way in our minds and that it seems to be helpful to people to talk and think about them as if they were subselves. Do you not experience inner conflicts? Could you not relate to the idea that part of you wants one thing, but part wants another? If not, you'd be the first person I've ever talked to who couldn't. If so, then that's all IFS is really talking about. Nothing more, nothing less. IFS was born when a therapist noticed that clients talked about themselves in terms of these subselves or parts and simply went along with the idea and it helped them. It helped because people experience their minds that way, for whatever reason. Think of it as a software issue, not a direct hardware issue. For whatever reason, people seem to relate to that kind of linguistic and visual approach to things. Finally, I can't even imagine an IFS practitioner of any credibility who would claim that the fact that we have parts means we aren't responsible for our behavior. The entire point of IFS is to increase our responsibility by having us own all of the various sides as parts of ourselves, not to claim they aren't ourselves. Someone who doesn't know IFS might say "I wasn't myself that night when I did that." Someone who does know IFS will say "That was a part of me that did that that night, but it's not the only part of me." Which one is more responsible?

I have a page on Jungian Psychology here. An example would be the section on Anima and Animus. A man may have a part in his psyche that represents the feminine side of his personality and vice-versa. It doesn't mean that it is based on any particular real person. It is a part that is symbolic of an aspect of life. There are other types of "characters" Jung said are commonly found in the psyche too. For instance, he often talked about the "wise old man" archetype. You don't have to have met an actual wise old man in real life to have a psychological aspect that corresponds to it because it is a concept deeply rooted in our common humanity. Or imagine a child who grew up without a mother. He might still develop a mother character in his psyche. Where does it come from? According to Jung, humans are wired based on our evolutionary history to have the "pegs" already in place for certain types of characters even if we haven't met them personally. This ties into his idea of a collective unconscious. So your inner sibling could simply be a representation or symbol of a type of relationship that humans inherently understand.

That's a very interesting point. Although not everyone conceives of God as condemning. Some conceive of a very loving, caring God. We could speculate on what inner parts are behind that, as well.

This is a very cool idea. I am like a broken record on this forum promoting this book. But I think you should really read it and have it inform your work. It is remarkably relevant to what you're doing and even talks about games (like the Prisoner's Dilemma) and the math behind what is necessary for cooperation to win out over competition. The Evolution of Cooperation "Widely praised and much-discussed, this classic book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists-whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals-when there is no central authority to police their actions." It might really spur your thinking about the kinds of incentives that should be built into the game.

MCS, It is just another example of emergent properties. Humans can talk. Cells don't talk. If you require evidence of talking cells to believe that people talk, you won't find them. But we do talk. Similarly, we experience subselves. That doesn't mean if you go to the lower levels, like the brain, you'll find anything analogous to subselves biologically. Emergent levels of systems are more than the sum of their parts. And again, IFS isn't claiming, at least as far as I know, that this is anything more than how we experience things. They aren't claiming there are little people actually running our brains. Just that, for whatever reason, our minds are experienced that way. It may be completely an illusion, but regardless, it seems to be something helpful that we can harness for our benefit.

Not sure this is quite as you described it there, but relevant: Coopetition

My understanding of IFS parts includes that they can be like Jungian archetypal characters at times. So they can be symbolic rather than literal in that way. They can take on a personality that really represents a certain aspect of character or side of life, etc.

Thanks. Glad it helped with your question! I'm looking forward to watching the video Stephen shared, as well.

I think it does qualify as empirical evidence that this is how we humans experience our minds. It's not empirical evidence that explains why that is or that there is any directly analogous biological underpinning to it. It doesn't show that there are various personality centers in the brain or anything like that. But IFS, as far as I know, makes no such claim. It only claims that our experience is of multiplicity. Hopefully further neuroscience research will help understand why and how this experience of multiplicity emerges.

But the very place I think you quoted, Merriam-Webster's definition of religion, has a third definition you left out: : the belief in a god or in a group of gods : an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods : an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group

Yeah like I talk about in the blog post it's a massive misunderstanding of IFS as a whole that it's only about the internal family when it's really supposed to be about the internal family, external family, community, society - every level. It's such a shame it was named for what is really just the most novel part of it, but actually only a small part. And IFS is great because it lends itself to working alone, but working alone isn't always optimal until someone is able to find their Self consistently. "I think using a mixture of IFS alongside professional support to be the most productive..." See to me IFS isn't something you can use or not use any more than anatomy is something a doctor can use or not use. To me the internal family system is simply the internal anatomy of the psyche. No therapist can fail to use it. Every therapist is always relating to the internal family whether they realize it or not. In fact, in every interaction we have with anyone we are interacting with it just as we interact with their skeleton when we shake their hand. Also there is no dichotomy between IFS and professional support. It's just a matter of doing IFS alone vs. doing IFS with a professional. I think because of the novelty of the internal part of IFS and the fact it was named for that novel part, it has led to so much unnecessary confusion about it.

IFS is a form of talk therapy. It's just a particular way of talking to the person in that you communicate with and have them communicate with their various parts rather than talking to them as if they're one unity. I think IFS is so fundamental to the way people experience things that even if you just talk to people in another way, at some point, they will express something parts-related. The difference with a person who knows IFS is they'll pick up on that and use it rather than just let it pass as a figure of speech.

Someone once emailed me and asked about this very question. I answered as best I could in this blog post: Why the Internal Family Systems Model is Valuable Despite the Need for and Difficulties it Poses for Research

Personality theory only goes so far for me, as well. I've gone way beyond that into deeper psychology and also spent a ton of time focusing on psychological defense mechanisms, personality disorders, psychopathy and much else to make sense of things. All the various levels interact and are part of the picture.

GWHO, You might want to look into personality type schemas, as well. There are a few different ones I find very helpful. But in any of them, some people are more analytical, some more emotionally-driven, some more focused on individuality, some more concerned with their status or conformity to the group and so on. We can get pretty frustrated when we expect everyone to act like our personality type when many of them are of very different personality types. Also, how you react to issues that come up in childhood has a lot to do with what your personality type is. A child of one type might be incredibly hurt by a certain environment at home while another brushes similar things off their back.

Frankly I don't even know what Peter means by "eliminating the market" if he uses that phrase, which I'm not sure he quite does. To me "the market" is something that exists inherently. You can change the way the market works, you can change the rules of the market. You can even to some extent put a stop to flow within the market. But how can "the market" in the larger sense - not a market for a particular product or service, but the market in the larger sense - be made non-existent? I don't even relate to that phrasing of things. You also can't eliminate evolutionary incentives. It is a nonsensical thought. The question, as I stated before, is "How can we develop a situation in which what we want is most incentivized?" If what we want most is public health, how do we develop a situation that maximizes incentives for health? If what we want most is non-aggression, how do we develop a situation that maximizes incentives for non-aggression? I'm not claiming to have the answers. I could venture my best educated guesses. But my interest is more in framing the questions in a useful way so this discussion can be fruitful. I think the way the whole thing was framed in Stefan and Peter's talk was highly non-constructive. Do Stefan and Peter simply have two different highest values as to what we want most? Peter most wants security for more people and Stefan most wants adherence to non-aggression? If so, they may as well make that difference conscious. Or do they value the same highest things, but differ on strategy to develop a system that maximally incentivizes it? I would just like to see their disagreements organized around a couple clear, well-articulated core differences that can then be honed in on. I say it's highly oversimplified to say "Individuals can make choices and any given individual, no matter the systems in which they are embedded, can choose to go against the incentives on principle" and then extrapolate that to say "Therefore we just need to multiply how many individuals choose that way and soon everything changes." Sometimes that happens. But many times it doesn't. That's what it means when we say emergent systems are more than the sum of their parts and NOT reducible to them, even though that seems hard to grasp. How can a system be more than the sum of its parts and irreducible to them? And yet it's the case. It's kind of a paradox. It seems like that logic of multiplying individual choice leading to large-scale change would always be true. Yet we see time and again that it isn't true in many situations. Many times, even though individuals are making choices, we can predict the large-scale outcomes without even considering those individuals. There is nothing inherently sacred about the individual level when it comes to predicting behavior. In some situations, looking at the individual level is most useful. In others, it doesn't seem very useful at all and our best predictions come from looking at large-scale crowd activity. Why is it not family change or community change? For example, studies have shown that people are far more likely to do some things, including healthy beneficial things, if they think neighbors are doing it too or are noticing if they are or are not doing it. I've also seen studies on something as individual as weight loss that it's much more effective if done as a group with others who are also doing it. You could say "The group is made up of the individuals so they should be able to make the same choice individually that they make as part of a group." but that doesn't seem to be the case. If you just focus on the individual in cases like that, you lose the social incentives that drive change more on a group or community level. So again this sort of fetish for the individual level doesn't make sense to me. Some things are better incentivized on a family level or group level or neighborhood level. Some are best incentivized on a global scale. Psychologists know this well. Every day they have to decide if a particular situation is best dealt with in individual therapy or family system therapy. Some things are actually incredibly difficult to help someone with as an individual, but much more treatable with family therapy since the person has a very hard time changing if the family system is incentivizing opposite behavior. And note that treating the family together as a system does things that couldn't be done even if every member of the family was in individual treatment separately. We need to bring more of the system into the process. Other times, it's the exact opposite and bringing the family in would sabotage things and it has to be done in a more private individual setting. I don't think this is any less true with activism. Certain issues require intervention at different levels of systems.

To me, your first paragraph is similar to saying that we can only deal with humans at the cellular or even atomic level. It's just not true. Some situations require us to act at the cellular level in a bottom up approach. Others work quite well via a top-down approach, like when we use the larger-scale digestive system to get medication into the body which then trickles down to the individual cells. I'm not sure why people here have this idea that systems made up of sub-systems, each involving many levels of emergent properties, can only be addressed bottom-up and not top-down or both. It is oversimplified to declare bottom-up approaches are always the only useful response. Real strategizing requires us to really consider which situations call for intervention at which level. Ironically, that concept - that we have to be wise about which level is best to intervene at in each case and that that varies in different cases, sometimes top-down, sometimes bottom-up, sometimes a mix, sometimes intervening at a middle level - is one of Richard Schwartz's big ideas in Internal Family Systems which so many people on FDR like. You may be right that people give away more than they need to. That's different than saying nobody can be dominated without consent at all. As for forming societies that can resist domination, failing to do so is only a sign of consent if they don't have a legitimate reason not to do it, such as that it appears to them objectively doomed to failure.

I would agree not to prematurely label someone. I think you should give the benefit of the doubt enough to give it a shot and see if you can connect while maintaining healthy boundaries. But when connection fails miserably and someone shows complete disdain for it, combined with the traits associated with a psychopath, I think it is naive and foolish not to eventually accept that they are a psychopath. It makes as much sense to me as refusing to accept that a shark is a shark and trying to pet it. You can still have empathy for a psychopath. But you shouldn't expect them to have empathy for you or you will be sorely disappointed. If you disagree, disagree. That's my view based on years of study and lots of evidence. You are free to disagree if you wish. If you think psychopaths don't exist, then I think you're wrong, but I have said more than enough to speak my piece on the subject.

So you agree an individual can be dominated even if they don't consent to it. You just mean if an entire society refuses to consent to it then it becomes impossible? That makes more sense. I agree that Peter should stop claiming the market is the cause of things that actually emerge from evolutionary game theory in general, not modern economic market game theory. I don't know why he says the first instead of the second. It's frustrating because that error ends up constantly distracting from what is a very worthwhile strategic discussion. When a system incentivizes things like obedience, lack of critical questioning and so on, parents do have an incentive to treat their children in ways that create these traits "for their own good." I don't even know if parents are conscious of this, but I think they are often driven, in a dominating system, to turn their children into good "dominees" because that is safer for them. In a system that punishes individuality and speaking out, when a parent sees a child questioning authority or challenging things, on a visceral level they may connect this behavior with a very dangerous path for the child and want to curb it. This is the kind of thing I mean about incentives driving behavior and needing to be taken into account. You can preach the immorality of subduing your children all day but if the family is in a system that puts people in danger if they become too "uppity" parents may continue to subdue them and feel they're doing the right thing - even if they couldn't explain to you consciously why it's the right thing. It goes back to deontology vs. consequentialism - principle vs. "pragmatism." Stefan preaches deontology focused on an ethic based on the non-aggression principle. Peter looks at consequences in the real world and wants to strategize how to fix them on the ground. It isn't a clash of two ethical theories or two methodologies. It's an ethical theory on one side and a methodology on the other. And I think viewing it like that would lead to a more fruitful dialogue. Would providing every human the necessities of life end child abuse? No I don't think so. I think it would end some proportion of it. But I also think it would mitigate some of the ill effects if, when a child is abused, they grew up in a world that had that level of security. Even if you couldn't stop every bad event, I think recovery would be a lot easier in such a situation.

As I've pointed out multiple times, Rosenberg included a chapter on the protective use of force precisely because he admits fully that there are situations in which you are unable to connect with someone enough to prevent their aggression. I think there should indeed be an NVC disclaimer that says "Warning - May not prove successful with some people. Do your best to connect, but if it does not work in a reasonable amount of time or fast enough to prevent damage to someone, seek out other methods." If you disagree, that means you think NVC is the answer to all situations and no other methods are ever needed which is indeed a dangerous way of thinking in my view. That takes NVC to the level of dogma and fundamentalism in a way even Rosenberg himself doesn't do. If NVC requires every person on the planet to have empathy then NVC is in big trouble. Luckily it doesn't require that to be useful in many situations. Many many people have said they feel the same way, that you are being robotic and not really connecting with them emotionally due to the repetition of what they say without actual connection. And in a case where your goal is connection itself that means they are, by definition, correct. I'm not interested in getting on video or any of that. I responded more, at this point, for the benefit of others who might find use in my writing about the limits of NVC and might want to hear my response to your challenge to it.

Very interesting. I guess in pure mathematical terms, you're talking about issues of infinity. So you may be right. And I guess if you're asking this question about belief to a mathematician who knows about "almost never" then his answer of 0% may mean impossible or possible so you'd have to dig further. For 99.9999% of the population, if they say 0% they mean they believe it's impossible. And since all we're talking about is understanding their level of belief as they understand it, that's good enough. The reason we don't ask people's belief of the probability of a 20 leaf clover is that, for whatever reason, a 20 leaf clover hasn't become a symbol people around the world do believe in and base huge life decisions on. If it did, that question would become very relevant. "How likely will there actually be some dude transcending space and time?" is a legitimate and related question. And, much to your chagrin, those who believe there is any kind of serious probability of a God will likely say there is thus some probability that some dude has already transcended space and time.

Happens every day. One of the more common examples on this board would be taxes. You are told you have the choice - pay your taxes or go to jail. You can say that isn't being dominated because it's your choice. But the issue is not whether you're choosing but what your options are. Someone has narrowed your choices to those two and removed other choices. If you choose not to pay them you may be put in jail without ever consenting to any of it. So how is that not being dominated without consenting to it, which you claim cannot happen? The point here is that power is exercised not only in removing choice but in determining the options available to choose from.

Possible vs. probable is dealt with too. 0% means someone believes something is impossible. Any other value means they believe it is possible. So that single number provides your answer to their belief about possibility (which is just a subset of probability) too. Remember, we're not asking here what the ACTUAL probability is. We're just asking people what they believe is the probability. Terms like atheist, agnostic, non-theist, etc. all have to do with someone's belief about the probability, no matter how accurate or inaccurate it may be. The "almost never" thing is very interesting. I didn't know there is a term "almost never" in mathematics. You are saying that "almost never" means that the probability is both 0 and not 0 at the same time? Or am I misunderstanding? I certainly think there is value in digging deeper to find out why someone believes the probability is what they believe it is. But when you try to reduce it down to a one or two-word label, that's when I see people just ending up in distraction.

I didn't say to redefine market. I said he should be referring to evolutionary game theory, rather than the market economy at all. You just made my point. Evolutionary pressures determine whether aggression or cooperation is more likely to pay off in certain situations. This, to me, is Peter's point. As you say "Evolution assumes that different strategies have the possibility of success in different environments." So Peter is asking "What kind of environment must we create in order to make it so cooperation pays off the most?" This very question is dealt with in a marvelous way in the book The Evolution of Cooperation. This is one of those discussions I would like to see had more clearly. You might be right, but the conversation was never had cleanly enough to really get Peter to provide his stance on this, at least in this discussion. I think Peter's point was that even if people DO see certain things as immoral and undesirable, if the game theory involved incentivizes it, they are forced into a choice between doing the thing anyway or suffering greatly for not doing it. There are some people with incredible integrity who will stick to their principles despite such incentives. But I don't think - and Peter seems to agree - that it is very wise to count on a massive swell of individual integrity to get people to stop doing things that all of the game theory incentives urge them to do. This is especially true when those incentives affect not only them, but their children. Also if the incentives go against it, then those people who stand up for principle may be noble, but will be selected against so their views become unsustainable anyway (a matter discussed wonderfully in The Evolution of Cooperation). Another way to frame the Stefan vs. Peter difference is that Stefan counts on individual integrity to trickle into large-scale change. Peter sees how large-scale structural incentives generally override individual integrity for all but the very very most principled people and that it is unwise to expect change without changing the structural incentives. I think that both sides have merit, but again they didn't really talk clearly about this. It's like they were talking about it in the subtext of a bunch of other distracted discussions. It is a contradiction on one hand to admit that certain systems incentivize a certain type of parenting and then label that type of parenting as "convenient and unwise based on immediate desires." There are plenty of systems that incentivize fulfilling those immediate desires so strongly that it becomes almost suicidal not to. There is a built-in bias for the short-term over the long-term because if you don't survive the short-term, you don't even get to the long-term. You can't blame parents, in general, for taking shortcuts in a system that is built around short-term incentives everywhere you turn. You can certainly applaud the nobility of those who sacrifice to do what is not incentivized on moral grounds. But counting on this as a strategy for change, without addressing the incentive system itself, is not necessarily optimal. What I see going on here in your answer too is the same conflict between "Individuals make choices" vs. "Structure creates behavior" which is a tenet of systems thinking. Both have merit. And when I see someone trying to focus on one and ignore the other I think it is misguided. There is a paradox here. Individuals do make choices. And yet, at the very same time, we can predict a number of things on large-scales because there are structures and incentive systems in place that make certain choices both likely and understandable. There are emergent properties in systems that are not predictable from the sum of the individual decisions that make them up, but are more predictable from larger scale structures. I think Stefan generally represents the first view and Peter represents the second. Stefan says "violence happens due to an individual choosing to do a violent act." Peter says "Violence often happens because of structural incentives that provide a context in which most people are barely even making a genuine choice because the options have been so limited and the stakes raised so high." I really hope people can get to the point where they see that these two views are both part of what is going on and we really need solutions that address both. it's not true that no one has power over anyone that is not given to them by the one willing to be controlled. The power often reveals itself through a clever means - reduction of options. A person who has power can leave someone with a choice, but only with a few options that they approve of. They can then say "See you are still in control since you're choosing." But it isn't a free choice among all the possible alternatives. It is a choice among only options pre-approved by the one in power. Funny enough, this is a trick parents use with their kids as part of peaceful parenting. Instead of ordering them to do things, parents will think of a few options that are all acceptable and let the child choose. The reason it is sometimes a useful strategy is that the child has the feeling of power due to making a choice, but the parent actually has the power still since they pre-approve all the choices. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad idea to use with a kid. But you see how it's a trick right? The parent really does still have the power. As I've said many times, I would really like to see Stefan and Peter talk again in the context of NAP as a moral philosophy vs. resource-based economy as an economic system and see if they each think these things can be compatible or not. I'd very much like to hear Peter's answers regarding your last paragraph. As for this "Believing that it is the system that is some other entity is much easier for those who are afraid of assigning responsibility where it is deserved...The system, including the state do not exist outside of the minds of those who believe in it." I think this is another example of how often "emergent properties" are given short shrift on this board. It is like saying that the climate is nothing but an aggregation of each tiny weather phenomenon. That's technically true. But the overall climate is larger than the sum of its parts and cannot be predicted from those parts. It's true that if you took away - one by one - each smaller weather phenomenon, then you would get rid of the climate. And yet that doesn't play out to mean that the climate is reducible. There are many examples like this in the world - systems that emerge from parts, but that are more than the sum of those parts and take on a life of their own. It isn't enough to point out that they are just made up of those parts because their being made up of those parts doesn't tell the whole story about the larger system. A human being is made up of a bunch of cells. If you took away every cell, there would be no person. Yet when you want to work with them, do you address them on a cellular level? No. Because the person as a whole has emergent properties and you deal with them - in most cases in your day to day life - as an emergent system, not as a bunch of cells. We need to look at things like the government, corporations, etc. the same way. These things cannot just be dismissed as "only existing in the minds of each individual that believes in them" as if this solves the problem because it doesn't address the emergent properties at all.

Yet another thread exhibiting perfectly why I try to just ask "What do you think is the probability of a God, defined as [fill in definition you want to ask about], existing?" The response is a number that expresses just what their belief is. It's 0% or 100% or 50% or whatever. After that, if you feel the need, you can make some verbal label for it (atheist, non-theist, agnostic, whatever). But I don't even see why. You see in this thread how the debates become sidetracked endlessly by the meanings of these words, rather than what really matters - how probably the person believes the existence of God is.