eschiedler

Lust is to sex what Gluttony is to eating. That you would conflate the two is quite telling. Basically, because it is mindless, and using another person to your own ends, therefore it is criminal type thinking. Far different is to think deeply about life and orient yourself toward what is true and just. Whatever advice you hear from anyone, anywhere, including this, it is up to you to completely be responsible whether you agree or not.

Love of sex is an unconscious act and since intercourse in humans is used as a means to an end to satisfy lusts it is immoral. Pursuit of more and more of it is evidence that you are avoiding thinking deeply and consciously. Of course, you can't help it. Therapists are not wise people, if they were, they would not be therapists. Primarily, they are there to monitor patients against self-harm until they return to homeostasis as defined by a statistical norm (that is, is the person ceases to be in a crisis and returns to "normal").

No doubt about it.

They merely need to demonstrate that it is determined entirely by causes. And it is easy to do so. All things are determined entirely by the causes that bring them into existence. Perhaps you imply that there needs to be a model that reverse-engineers all the causes. But that wouldn't have any difference on whether things have effects that are the entire cause of awareness or mind.

K and R has nothing to do with (edit) morality of humans. Humanity is classified as a high K species and that's all that is indicated by the theory.

The law of identity is not apriori, it points to the truth of logic and duality. I am not talking about things that are empirical, but of all differentiations, i.e. duality in consciousness. Just think about it. Probably the most thorough explanation ever made was by Otto Weininger in 1903 in the book "Sex and Character" in the chapters on Logic.

If you have a thought of a thing that appears in consciousness, it is a thing and you experience it. Kant's "thing-in-itself" is a category he developed that also cannot violate the Law of Identity. You are repeating your earlier error. You are using things to say there may not be things. You are using the Law of Identity right now, thereby "validating" it.

The Law of Identity points to the nature of things, that "a thing is itself and is identical with itself." You asked "How do you know that the Law of Identity is true?" You used things that have identities to question whether or not those things might not have identities. Rewritten, your question could be phrased as "By experiencing that a thing has identity, can I use the identity to question that you can identify things?" The experiential fact of consciousness creates duality, which is further described by logic and is the basis for creating the concept of a "Law of Identity" whose primary purpose is to discuss this elemental fact of the universe.

Science can never, ever demonstrate that it has found all of the causes of any given phenomena. However, the argument for determinism is philosophical and cannot be otherwise. Free will is an illusion and to argue otherwise is to violate the First Law of Logic, the Law of Identity.

You haven't defined the difference between a rational observation and an irrational observation. The idea of viruses in your head that are separate from your true self is something you have not demonstrated in the slightest. In your OP, you seemed sure of your reasoning and didn't demonstrate any sense of awareness that you might have a thinking error. To you, I recommend that you get married as soon as possible. It doesn't matter which woman, they are all the same I can assure you. Work yourself so hard that you only have rational observations and positive emotions. If some disturbing emotions arise, keep saying whatever you have to say to yourself until the emotions are happiness and passion. Then you will know that you are back on the right track, as these "involuntary responses" were positive and therefore must be proof of your rational observations. If you should get divorced, just marry another woman as soon as possible. The world is full of material resources at the moment you should have plenty after the divorce if you keep working hard to afford another wife.

"Emotions are simply involuntary responses to our rational observations." If you believe this, you will never be a philosopher.

I don't recommend trying to be an entrepreneur doing something you don't care about to make a large amount of capital, like $800K to live off of it about $30K a year... the requirements to focus your entire mind with a lot of energy to being successful will highly compromise your ability to be a philosopher. To put it poetically, it will cost you your soul. If by entrepreneur you mean that you will find a way to make a small amount of money working 10 hours a week, that is more feasible. You need to have time to become wise or else your mind will be absorbed with work, then exhausted when you are resting to prepare to return to work. Most wise philosophers either do not work at all, and receive a stipend depending on the country they live, or have a modest job they can work 10 to 20 hours a week. For example, one very wise philosopher I met online does a little bit of computer programming and gets a few donations in exchange for downloads for his wisdom collection- he probably works about 10 hours a week and lives frugally. Besides, making money itself is not a very wise endeavor as it requires submitting to the deluded values of the society in order to find the arbitrage for a large profit.

Reply to @barn I had a bit of trouble with the quotes, so I hope you get the reply, but here goes: Yes, it is critical to have a clear definition of the concept "rationality" or "rational." This is so important, that it is not a semantic game at all, as I am sure you would agree that it goes to the very heart of philosophy. We might debate the meaning of rationality for hundreds of texts and could consider it a useful exercise. So the question becomes, where to start? There are two meanings of "rationality" that contrast each other highly in this example. The first is that to be rational is to be logical or to have logic appear in consciousness. The second is to choose between two possible states. These are not the same whatsoever. Let's say that I predict more pleasure from strawberry ice cream to chocolate ice cream. If I must choose ice cream and these are my only two choices, I might choose strawberry up to a certain cost premium, say up to $1 more for the strawberry. I can make these choices instinctively and other people would choose between those two ice cream flavors and a cost premium based on their instinctive preferences. I didn't choose in any way to make strawberry more pleasurable to me than chocolate. I don't have any control over how my body feels pleasure from the tastes. So it is not ultimately based in rationality although of course I appear to make a choice. The choice seems to appear to me and to others the choice seems to appear. As this choice is made entirely by a conceptual model of the physical, empirical realm, no choice was made in the second meaning of rationality that follows immediately below. The other main type of idea of "rationality" is abstract logical thinking, which arrives at truth that is independent of personal preferences of ice cream, feeling of loneliness, etc. - other such feelings. That is because the logical truth is independent of time and is true outside of empirical experience since it remains in abstract thought. No personal preferences are possible in logical thought. In fact, to extrapolate further, it is true, derived from the fact that we have consciousness, that thinking rationally is abstract logical thinking and can be nothing else. If we don't agree that these are two different types of "rationality", then we won't come to agreement on my explanation that wanting pleasure from the company of others, and being sad and disappointed in not getting it leading to depression, stems from irrationality. I suspect one reason that we may remain in disagreement is that you argue that the body is in the physical world and strongly influences people's minds. There is no question that the body is part of the causes of mental states. But that argues that the physical world is really objectively there and that we can find all the causes that act on the mind from our measurements of the body and the physical world's effects on the body, in other words, that a scientific model of the human body and it's effect on the mind can be found. But that ignores the more direct philosophical route that consciousness appears and gives a direct path to truth. It's what makes us human after all. And the physical world appears only in consciousness and nowhere else, by logical argument. The world IS logic and we can simply stay in the mind and find what is true. We do that by thinking philosophically. A philsopher, focusing on logical truths, would never become depressed. What might this mean in the example of loneliness and depression from such a state: Let's say that we want to cure depression from loneliness. We could statistically determine that most people will be "cured" and not commit suicide or continue in pain if we give them specific types of social engagements. We couldn't entirely control this process. We wouldn't be able to certainly arrive at a state of constant pleasure for the patient - pleasure derived from appropriate social engagements. That'll fall apart again when their social life changes and they might very well be back to depression since they are swinging between their physical preferences and focusing their mind to arrive at an abstract, logical truth, which would be timeless. Because of my reasoning, I consider it rude to offer someone only temporary relief, an ability to enjoy pleasures off and on that might slip away from them, when I can offer them permanent relief. Now it is an entirely other matter to argue why people can't think logically and rationally. It negates not one bit the moral necessity to offer them the guidance to think logically and rationally.

There is a difference from being alone and feeling lonely. Being solitary and alone does not by itself cause depression. The feeling of loneliness is irrational attachment to be in the company of others. That is why the other comments from other people on this thread are gaslighting, saying that it's your fault that you don't find a woman (the same gaslighting would be true if you were looking for male friends) - it's a cruel argument like kicking a dog that has already been kicked.

The vast majority of people I meet are very well aware that they will pay a lot of interest. They understand that and read the documents particularly in preliminary meetings and they do so in detail afterwords. They've educated themselves quite a bit before signing the loan, and I've met very poor people who are almost illiterate who learn a lot about mortgages. The problem is rarely in their understanding of interest, but mostly in that both wealthy and poor people are illogical at making strategic plans to improve their lives and carry those plans out. The mortgage is simply a tool that is quite useful if they can use it for a useful goal and rarely hinders them by itself. On the contrary stable mortgages have lifted more people out of poverty and into the middle-class and upper-class than any other debt instrument. You are in debt for the principal, disregarding other terms, which may be numerous and complicated. The interest is across time. So it is important to conceptualize the payments and loan across time and keep it quite clear what is separate, the principal and interest. You could say it was a 778K debt instrument but that would be logical ONLY if you immediately pointed out that it was discounted at 11% for 30 years - subject to tremendous discounts for pre-payment; thus immediately notifying people that they could pay it off RIGHT NOW for $400K. It is redundant and confusing to keep switching the time perspective, especially since the discount from future to the present is intuitively backward.