• Inability to cope with Life
    No one can cope alone. — unenlightened
    And yet... we are born alone, and we die alone. So I say that one can only cope alone. Others may be of help in teaching one how to stand on their own feet, but no more than that can be done.
  • On anxiety.
    You wouldn't say that an unhealthy person has a different type of body temperature from the healthy person. It is the same type, the same quality, but the quantity differs. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Okay, I can grant that. What does that change though?

    So if thinking is the therapy, then the goal of the therapy is not to put an end to the thinking itself, but to practise it in a more healthy way. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Sure.

    Thought must be initiated. Activity is good for initiating thought, because we need to think about what we're doing. Like a hobby for example. Remember, I didn't criticise your way of dealing with anxiety, you criticised mine. I only replied to your insistence that activity was not a good way of dealing with anxiety. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Why can't thought be initiated by directing our attention towards a problem we want to think about?

    See, you have adopted it as a practise. It is therefore an activity. Agustino would not classify meditation as an activity, desiring instead to create a separation between the meditative activity and the monkey mind activity. One being a good "type" of activity, the other a bad type. — Metaphysician Undercover
    According to your usage of the term, pretty much ANYTHING one does is an "activity" - the term becomes meaningless since even not doing anything is an activity.
  • On anxiety.
    Yes, it's sort of a dialectical therapy with one's self. Just that you have to train your inner therapist to identify which feelings are a result of what thoughts and vice versa. It's hard at the start; but, pays dividends with time and practice.

    I would say that CBT is primarily empowering. A patient feels like they can address an issue once they draw out the tables of initial thought, then analyze the cognitive distortion, and then engage in the cogntive distortion through a sort of REBT method. I think REBT and CBT are twins in some sense.     — Posty McPostface
    Yes. It is a process of learning to think through your problems in a manner that is actually productive, as opposed to ruminative. It's also very similar to Stoicism. Only MU likes to introduce sophistry by inventing new categories ("activity, not thinking") that are actually irrelevant to describing what is at hand.
  • On anxiety.
    ↪Posty McPostface
    You read Feeling Good no? Quite a decent book.

    My only question that remains, is why aren't we handing out these books for free to people who need them the most based on the efficacy of treatment on said disorders. — Posty McPostface
    Then who would be paying to go to the therapist, or even better have the state pay for them to go to the therapist?
  • On anxiety.
    We all think, thinking is not an illness. What is "behind the thinking that causes it" is the person's interests. We all have interests, and we all think. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Sure, please make an effort to read what I write charitably, trying to understand what I am actually telling you. My statements are made in a certain context, I do not understand why you take them to be blanket statements about thinking in general.

    No I don't assume anxiety is like having the flu. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Again, you're reading uncharitably. Obviously I was referring to the unhealthy type of anxiety. Do I really need to specify that, can't you make an effort to understand based on the context what I'm telling you?

    You just can't seem to grasp the concept that normal, highly functioning human beings have anxiety. You want to insist that having anxiety is not normal, that it's an illness. — Metaphysician Undercover
    This is false. Of course everyone has anxiety, I can cite you multiple statements from me in this very thread saying that anxiety itself cannot be eliminated and is a normal part of life.

    I think it is clearly false to say that there are no biological causes of anxiety. The human body is a very complicated biochemical system. Adrenaline for instance is known to be associated with anxiety, as a cause. And, there are many other chemicals which are known to influence anxiety. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Right, and guess what, the relevant part of the biology can be changed since the brain has neuroplasticity.

    CBT is not curing anxiety with thought, it is activity. It is a therapy of coordination between thought and behaviour. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Yes, it is the activity of thinking in a certain way :-} - not through thought, right...

    If CBT is your evidence of curing pathological anxiety with thought alone, then you haven't got a case. As I said in the last post, I haven't seen these "problems" with my position, which you keep alluding to, yet. I think you're imagining things. — Metaphysician Undercover
    What else is the activity that you mentioned above if not thought?

    Wow, thinking is an illness which contributes to the persistence of itself. Now I've heard everything. — Metaphysician Undercover
    In the context of unhealthy anxiety, sure! What's wrong with something being self-perpetuating? Have you ever heard of positive feedback loops?
  • On anxiety.
    I think that such a person has an illness which makes him feel like there is a conspiracy against him. The rumination itself is not the problem, it is what he is prone to be ruminating on, that is the problem. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Why is the illness different than just the thinking there is a conspiracy against him? I would say the illness is the thinking itself. That has certainly been my experience with anxiety - there is nothing behind the thinking that causes it as it were.

    Preventing him from thinking (ruminating) may address the symptom, but it doesn't address the problem. — Metaphysician Undercover
    These conditions are self-perpetuating habits of thought if you prevent the thinking, you prevent and many times improve the problem. For example, meditation allowed me to become detached from the anxious thoughts. They didn't disappear at first, but I went around no longer caring that I had them. Over time they slowly decreased in intensity, and then disappeared (for the most part, I still get a pathological kind of anxiety if I am super stressed).

    Right, the man is ill. The man cannot cure his own illness "through thought alone". Would you expect to cure a flu by thinking about it? — Metaphysician Undercover
    There is a very very big problem with what you're saying here. You assume anxiety is like having the flu, and that's NOT the same thing, not even close. The flu is caused by something that is clearly biological - namely a virus, which we can find and identify in people who have the flu. There are no such things in the case of anxiety.

    The brain has what is known as neuroplasticity, and it can alter its own structure, it can alter what substances and in what quantity it secretes, etc. The thoughts you have and the habits you have influence this greatly. That is why CBT - which is basically curing your anxiety by thought - is one of the most successful methods.

    So I don't see why you find "curing pathological anxiety through thought alone" so hard to get your mind around. It seems to me that you just don't have solutions to the problems I raised earlier.

    I don't see the "problematic" you refer to. The healthy person has a healthy attitude toward what to think about, and what not to think about. The attitude does not come from the thinking itself, it comes from elsewhere. So the thinking itself is not the problem. — Metaphysician Undercover
    The thinking itself is the illness, and quite possibly contributes to the persistence of the illness.
  • Implications of Intelligent Design
    So if I haven't had the experience of going to France, as say, you have, then the reality of your experience would be meaningless to me? That makes no sense to me. If that was the case, then why explain to people what it's like. Your friend explains their experience of going to France, but you say to him, it's meaningless to me, so don't bother. That seems a bit strange to me. Now some experiences are more difficult to explain than others, but I don't see how they're meaningless. — Sam26
    False analogy. I have seen buildings, I have seen France on TV, etc. Easy for me to imagine.

    The analogy of the man born blind that I gave is more fitting.
  • Implications of Intelligent Design
    We can know that an experience is real if there is enough evidence to support it. I don't need to have the experience myself. — Sam26
    Sure, but the reality of that would be meaningless to the person lacking the experience. What does sight mean to someone who has never seen in their life? Sure, they hear from this and that that there is this thing called sight - so what? It means nothing to them.
  • Implications of Intelligent Design
    ↪Sam26
    One can compare this to trying to convey the taste of pineapple to someone who has never tasted it. Whatever you say, the argument will in the end be meaningless to that person.
  • Implications of Intelligent Design
    If the universe has been around for over 14 billion years, why wouldn't it be more than likely that some civilization now has the ability to create realities for us to experience; and that we are also part of that creation process. Moreover, it may be that they even have the ability to move from universe to universe. We couldn't even conceive of how advanced such a civilization could be. To say that there is nothing beyond the physical is just too dogmatic for me. It's similar to religious belief.

    For me, consciousness is much more than what goes on in the brain, which is what I attempted to explain in my thread on NDEs.     — Sam26
    I am a theist and I do have faith in a Heaven where all tears will be wiped away. However, I freely admit that I do not know what this would look like beyond the bare description - in other words, existence beyond this material world remains unimaginable to me.

    I read your NDEs thread. The issue with that argument is that it has little purchasing power with those who did not have such experiences. Literarily, we don't have the sensations those people had, the raw data, to be able to make those judgements. The NDEs show that this is a possibility, perhaps even a likely possibility, but it remains meaningless to us because we cannot begin to imagine it - we lack the necessary sense data.

    So to say that consciousness is beyond what goes on in the brain, fine, I agree. But what does that mean, practically? Where was consciousness before birth? Where will it be after death? What is the relationship between consciousness and memory? Etc. We have an extremely blurry image.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    You mean in Holland you get work as a lawyer regardless of your ability? — charleton
    The answer is yes. You just write on a piece of cardboard "Lawyer", stick it on your door, invite people in, and start charging them! I once spoke to a Macedonian lawyer and he told me the right motto in business is "work less, charge more!" >:O
  • On anxiety.
    I don't claim to be a doctor on this matter. — Metaphysician Undercover
    No one here does.

    You, not I, seem to think that there is a clear distinction between anxiety of the healthy type, and anxiety of the ill type, so perhaps you should offer your expert opinion. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Interesting.

    I would say though, that if one consistently ruminated on some problem, and failed to ever resolve that problem, the person's failure to recognize one's own inability to solve the problem, might be a problem itself. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Well, let's take a condition where rumination is one of the primary symptoms. What would you say about the case of a man who, for example, thinks that there is some government conspiracy against him and continuously ruminates on that? It's something called paranoid delusions, thinking that someone is out there to harm or hurt you, and often people ruminate on such issues to no avail, since these problems cannot be solved.

    It seems to be a problem with thought itself, with the very nature of possibility. If you really want to, you can interpret any event so that it fits with the story. The man smiling on the street was really giving you a secret sign. The taxi in front of your house was really a government agent spying on you. The popup you got while navigating a website was designed to be there and give you a virus so the government can have access to your computer. Etc. These are all thoughts that can occur in the mind of a person who suffers from this condition.

    So since according to you, there is no difference between the healthy type and the ill type of rumination (or anxiety, they are somewhat associated), how would such a man go about extricating himself from such habits of thought? It is the nature of possibility, that no matter how much evidence to the contrary you get for something, you could always interpret it as actually confirming evidence! The less pathological cases of this, we refer to them as "being in denial".

    So it seems that it is the nature of thought itself that such a person does not have means, through thought alone, of extricating himself from that condition.

    The more you ruminate, the better you get at it. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Personally, I would say it depends on why you're ruminating, what's your goal? If you are like the person with paranoid delusions, then ruminating on the subject of your delusions is definitely a bad idea - the issue cannot be solved.

    If you are driven toward attempting to resolve problems which cannot be resolved, and you cannot recognize your own inability to solve that problem, that is an issue. It is a case of trying to do the impossible, setting yourself up for failure. And the more time you spend trying to do it, the bigger the disappointment when the reality hits you. — Metaphysician Undercover
    I agree with you somewhat, however, the point is that you can never be 100% certain that the so-called problem cannot be resolved. And you never know if what you're trying to do is really impossible - maybe you've missed something, etc. So the mentally ill person will generally find refuge in this - not being able to be certain. Not to mention that if a problem is very very big - let's say that their survival depends on it - even if it is just a teeny tiny bit short of impossible to succeed in it, it is still worth trying to solve it! So as you can see, for these two reasons, the approach you suggest is problematic when it comes to pathological types of anxiety and rumination. Now you claim that there is no clear distinction between the healthy type, and the unhealthy type - so does this mean that the unhealthy type can switch over to the healthy type, and how would this happen?

    For me personally, in dealing with anxiety, I found meditation and Stoicism helpful - not ruminating more on it, since there was no end to the rumination, nor could an end be rationally determined.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Shapiro is better read in philosophy than Peterson — Thorongil
    Impossible. Peterson has a good understanding of everything after Nietzsche, and there are some important philosophical traditions there - existentialism, phenomenology, pragmatism, postmodernism.

    especially political philosophy. — Thorongil
    That's likely here.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Yes, Agustino, I mentioned Peterson (he was brought up before I mentioned him, however), and now I am ending the conversation lest we further digress off subject. — Maw
    Congratulations.

    I see you haven't lost your knack for putting words in my mouth. — Maw
    Oh really? Then why is it that you told me:
    And Ben Shapiro received his JD at Harvard Law, so I'm not sure what your point is exactly. — Maw
    You told me that for no reason? :s You brought up the fact that Ben Shapiro has a JD at Harvard when I told you that Peterson was a Professor there. And previously you compared Peterson with both Shapiro and Ayn Rand. Seems like you're not aware of what you're saying.

    What I don't understand is you bringing up the fact that Peterson used to teach at Harvard. — Maw
    To show you that Peterson is not comparable with Ayn Rand or Shapiro, and Peterson is actually an intellectual in today's age.

    Does that make him smarter than Shapiro? Does it make him better than him, because he had an occupation at an elite institution whereas Shapiro "merely" graduated there? — Maw
    No.

    Don't. I always seem to forget how unbearable it can be to converse with you. — Maw
    It must be difficult for you to always lose our debates :P
  • Does God make sense?
    Saying a being existed "before time" is saying that there is a time external to time, which is incoherent. — Maw
    No it's not. When people talk of "before time", they are talking of "before (scientific) time". Scientific time is the time physicists deal with - they say this time started with the Big Bang, because it was impossible to physically measure time before that. However, this isn't to say that there couldn't be a (non-physically measurable) time before this.

    What's north of the north pole is technically space, the final frontier. — Buxtebuddha
    How so? North is a direction that is relative to the North pole.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    This thread is about the gender pay gap, not Peterson, so, I don't care to digress into that conversation here — Maw
    Right, I'm glad you finally remembered the subject of this thread after you brought up Peterson, and after you thought that having a JD from Harvard is the same as being a Professor there. However, it's time for me to go to sleep, not open threads atm.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    And Ben Shapiro received his JD at Harvard Law, so I'm not sure what your point is exactly. — Maw
    That's not the same as being a Professor there. So my point was stated very well, thank you.

    I guarantee there are many professors at Harvard who vehemently disagree with Peterson. — Maw
    Maybe, so what?

    Peterson is more learned than even a lot of those people. He is similar to Osho, though at a lesser level. Osho was also extremely well-educated, there are very few human beings on the planet who could have claimed similar levels of education. Just in terms of breadth - I mean, there probably was no important philosopher or religious thinker or artist that Osho failed to comment on - he even commented on some of the most obscure ones! Such breadth is rare, and this is before the internet! Peterson doesn't have even 30% of Osho's breadth. Not saying that I agree with Osho (I disagree on most things), but he was extremely well-educated, there's no denying that. He could easily run circles around all your Harvard professors probably. Many professors in this age have a lot of depth, but very little breadth.

    So Peterson is extremely insightful in this sea of over-specialised people, who only know one small thing well.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Certainly, Augustino, you are not equating a seemingly arbitrary journalist with a "left-wing intellectual". Just as most left-wing philosophers, or philosophers in general, rarely reference or confront Ayn Rand's Objectivism, so too, I imagine, they can safely ignore Peterson's unoriginal, uninteresting, self-help "philosophy". He resembles many modern intellectual conservatives (e.g. Ben Shapiro), who pimp out sound-bite friendly, cherry-picked statistics, or makes vapid claims sound meaningful by stating it with assertiveness and conviction, making it easily digestible to young, frustrated men, who are more interested in feeling right then being right. — Maw
    Riiiight, a Harvard Professor compared with Shapiro. And Ayn Rand. Nice. >:O

    If you don't see there's a huge difference of culture and learning between these cases, you need better glasses.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Jordan Peterson's competitive advantage is that he's primarily concerned with truth. He doesn't have to do mental gymnastics in service of ideology like his opponents. That's not to say he doesn't have an ideology or that he always succeeds in speaking the truth. The honesty is refreshing though, admirable guy. — Roke
    I think his main advantage is that he's a guy who is slightly more cultured and knowledgeable in a sea of idiots, which is what modern culture pretty much is.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Jordan Peterson — Maw
    Jordan Peterson certainly has dominated his opponents so far. There are very few people on the left who could stand up to him at the moment I think. For example:



    The problem with the left is precisely that for quite a long time the left has had what were essentially pseudo-intellectuals. Peterson is, in a way, also not really an intellectual (because as I said many other times, he has very little knowledge of philosophy up to Nietzsche). But he certainly has greater knowledge than today's "intellectuals", postmodernists, etc. And this is something that shows.

    Many people call themselves intellectuals because they have a lot of statistics in their heads, or they've read the latest books in some domain, etc. etc. But that's not what it takes to be an intellectual.

    Jordan Peterson is a learned man by today's standards, he taught at Harvard, and he is certainly an intellectual. Comparisons with Ayn Rand make YOU look like a fool.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    The statistics get misused grossly. Their utility is in identifying areas where there might be a problem. Then, the next step should be to investigate that area carefully and address actual instances of discrimination. Attempting to arrive at preset statistical goals just doesn't do justice to the complexity of free choice. We should be agnostic about what the optimal statistical landscape looks like. — Roke
    That's true. Also statistics can be used to deceive or they can be made up. Everyone who worked in research knows this. It's not difficult to twist statistics to get them to show what you want them to show. Much more important than that is understanding the underlying phenomenon.
  • Sports Car Enthusiasts
    Cars? I don't know anything about cars :s They say this is a shame for a man >:O
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Being short did not stop Napoleon from becoming Emperor, even though people have a bias for tall people. Neither was Cleopatra stopped from reaching the top of the pyramid because she was a woman, or Queen Seon Deok of Korea, or Mishil of Silla, etc. etc.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Whatever the percentage, surely it's due to systematized social constructions and not that men are inherently more criminal than women, right? — Roke
    >:O
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    As I said, if you're just going to cherry pick the bits that suit your world view and ignore the rest, I will leave you to it. — Pseudonym
    Thank you.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    "Evidence indicates that CEOs tend to be optimistic, overconfident, risk averse, and self-interested. Optimistic and overconfident CEOs overestimate future earnings growth and underestimate the earnings' risk, thereby perceiving a larger cost for issuing equity than debt." — Pseudonym
    Yeah of course, because the better the performance is on paper, the more they get paid. So if they can make the performance seem better, and if they can make the company seem like it is going in a great direction (even if it isn't), they stand to profit from it. It's not like they overestimate future earnings because they're idiots - no, they do it on purpose.

    "We find that CEOs are significantly more likely to purchase targets near their birth place, consistent with either informational advantages or familiarity bias." — Pseudonym
    That's not a bias, that's normal. I tend to work with what I know too, everyone does that. You have better performance that way.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    What world are you living in! Since when does anyone behave entirely rationally, have you ever even picked up a psychology textbook? — Pseudonym
    People who don't have skin in the game don't behave rationally, that's true. So middle-level managers who have no stake in the company, etc. don't (always) behave rationally.

    But the entrepreneurial types do behave rationally, and that's almost a given (it's simply what it takes to succeed).
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    I have not idea what conditions in the USSR were with respect to pay rates, though soviet women were far more commonly employed in professional and technical fields than in the United States, at least. — Bitter Crank
    I can confirm that this was definitely true - though I'm not sure how true it is nowadays.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Yes, in many regards it is probably a myth. For example, for web development jobs, in my experience 9/10 applicants are male. Chances are, of course, that you'll hire a male. It's not really my concern though, this is a competitive world. If you're a woman nobody will discriminate against you just because you're a woman (that would be irrational), but they might discriminate against you if you don't maximise their productivity. I would find it absurd if we had a woman who was, say, 50% more productive than her male colleagues not being paid more (unless of course she did not demand to be paid more, threaten to leave otherwise, etc.). One naturally tries to pay people as little as possible, it's their fault for accepting. In fact, I'd say that, for example, women are really wanted in jobs like web development where there aren't many women (they would even be privileged in such occupations), but you just don't find them. Women seem not to want to do those jobs. And this isn't just me being a nut job, contrary to what people like SLX think:
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/03/22/women-in-tech-female-developers-by-the-numbers/

    And even if it's not a myth, it's not something that we should actively seek to eliminate (I don't see why women should, on average, have equal pay with men - women don't do the same jobs, on average, as men, and even if they did, it's again a question of value added). By all means this equality shouldn't be centrally planned, if it arises naturally, no problem.

    Take as an example the fact that if a student wants to get some practice in a specific field before getting their degree, chances are, they will have to work a couple of months for free as no one will pay them for their work, and employers know they need to get experience. — Coldlight
    It's not that they won't pay them, it's simply that they have a lot of learning to do, and they're not willing to pay people to learn. Most students at that age go in a company and they don't even know what's what - you need someone to babysit them, they are expensive, they don't really know how things go, etc. etc. It's more of a hassle than anything else - that's why small businesses, for the most part, don't accept students.

    Things like job performance, getting promoted at work aren't as simply things people depict them to be. — ssu
    A lot of it is politics it seems to me. Which is why I dislike working in that kind of environment.
  • On anxiety.
    That certainly is exactly what I mean; ever had those dreams where you need to move or get out of somewhere, but you physically just cannot go and try all you can, your body will not move? — TimeLine
    Hmm when that happens to me, I just give in to it and accept it. It takes some time though to move from state of panic to state of acceptance. Then usually I wake up.
  • What will Mueller discover?
  • On anxiety.
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    Okay, so then how would you differentiate between the kind of rumination expressed in the article, and the kind of rumination you're talking about? Should a different word be used for each? And what is the difference between each?

    And in addition to that, I obviously agree that if we define rumination as:

    My OED defines ruminate as "meditate, ponder" — Metaphysician Undercover
    Then it is not at all a negative thing.

    How would you describe the case of a person (it happened to me when I suffered of anxiety/OCD) who spends 2 hours trying to remember if he has closed the door to the house when he left, and questioning every detail of his memory, while he has other work to do at the same time, and therefore doesn't get on with that work?

    Are you so sure we are not robots, and that it is a delusion? Or am I pathological in even asking? — unenlightened
    Yes, seems quite unlikely.
  • Three Categories and Seven Systems of Metaphysics
    Is it a matter of practice and habit? We can test that with twin studies, feral child studies, isolated cultures, anthropology etc.. The answer's definitely not there yet, but it's a verifiable statement. — Pseudonym
    Yes, but you have to be careful here. It is possible to offer verification within a given system, but that verification is bound to be circular. For example, the standard for determining whether it's a matter of habit or practice is to look at twin studies, feral children studies, isolated cultures, etc. and see what happens in cases where people don't get the practice or habit required for learning. How have we arrived at this standard? It is through habit and practice, which has shown us that to verify this, we must resort to looking at such particular cases as we have established.

    And this circularity isn't a problem - it is part of the system. We cannot have a non-circular and complete description of the world, since the world must be, by the very we way conceive of it, a complete, closed whole. So when we're trying to verify A, we can resort to B. When we're trying to verify B, we may resort to A. And this is not a fallacy - but what could we appeal to if our system describes the entirety of reality, but other relations within reality?

    What we are, in-truth, doing is that we're establishing relationships between things in the world - how things hang together. That reversibility of direction we encounter with verification - that you can verify A by B, and B by A is just a reflection of the underlying two-way relationship between A and B. You can start with A and end with B, or start with B and end with A, because the two are interconnected.

    By this point, we're already way beyond positivism.

    Do metaphysical statements describe underlying realities? If they do we'd expect them to be remarkably similar. If we had a theory that they did, one way to verify that theory would be to see if they were indeed similar across cultures. — Pseudonym
    We would expect the underlying conceptual structure to be similar, not necessarily the words used.

    We have gone directly from requiring a verifiable definition of utility to making verifiable statements about why its meaning should be so universal. At no point so far have we had to rely on a non verifiable statements of fact to derive our meaningful propositions. — Pseudonym
    Things are locally verifiable, with reference to other things. Much like Wittgenstein's hinge propositions. You may be able to derive one first principle with reference to other first principles. But the enterprise is circular, because you can equally travel in the other direction.

    "all people seem to act as if they believe in the confluence of logic and truth" is a verifiable statement. From that we can theorise in a pragmatic sense, that there is a confluence of logic and truth. We cannot know this of course, but it is a verifiable theory. — Pseudonym
    We can know it in a deeper sense than the merely pragmatic, but we need to tie it in to the theoretical (ie, why a confluence of logic and truth would lead to people believing in the confluence of logic and truth).
  • What will Mueller discover?
    Ending an investigation into you because you claim to be innocent is obstruction of justice. — Michael
    He did not end the investigation, he expressed his desire to do it, but ultimately did not act on it. We'll see, but I highly doubt anything will happen to Trump for this, because it's just normal practice in my view.
  • What will Mueller discover?
    Why did Trump try to fire Mueller? — Michael
    He has said that innumerable times. Because he sees no need for such an investigation since there was no collusion.

    But my main issue with your claim here is that Trump didn't really try to do it because it wasn't actually done. — Michael
    No, it's not only because it wasn't actually done. It's because he didn't give the order, and hence McGahn did not resign.

    Relenting because you don't want someone to resign doesn't mean an attempt wasn't made. — Michael
    Again, a consultative discussion in which someone expresses that he will resign if you give a certain order does not indicate that he tried to obstruct justice.
  • What will Mueller discover?
    and legally, according to experts responding to recent news reports, there's a case for Trump obstructing justice. — Michael
    No, not according to all experts.
  • What will Mueller discover?
    It is the legal technicalities that matter, not your pragmatism. Whether or not it's "practically" treason or "practically" not obstruction is irrelevant. — Michael
    It is very relevant. Your good sense is often more important than the law, especially when interpreting the law for a non-lawyer, like I presume both of us are.

    It's called "insubordination". Look it up. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Thanks.
  • On anxiety.
    My OED defines ruminate as "meditate, ponder". And you insist that meditation is so good, and rumination is so bad. How do you spin "rumination" such that it is suddenly something bad? — Metaphysician Undercover
    Have you read the article I linked? What are your remarks about it?
  • Three Categories and Seven Systems of Metaphysics
    We may not be certain what "utility" exactly refers to, but we seem nonetheless to be able to use the word in normal conversation and still understand each other. How has this miraculous confluence occurred? — Pseudonym
    It has occurred because we share the same underlying metaphysical presuppositions with regards to these matters. How come we do? That's largely a matter of practice and habit, that we have learned and been taught, and also because the metaphysical statements describe actual structures of reality and of our experience. So there's the practical level (we learn by having to live in communities, that words are used as such and such), there's the theoretical level (that this reflects the actual structure of reality), and then there's the pragmatic level (namely that because this reflects underlying reality, remarkably similar metaphysical positions are taught across cultures and communities that are otherwise remarkably different).

    Are you suggesting that the meaning of the word "utility" is an open metaphysical question, whose answer cannot in any way be verified, but to which nonetheless, the entire human population that has ever lived has reached a remarkably similar answer? — Pseudonym
    Yes. Not all aspects of existence can be verified, and that doesn't mean they don't exist. All that it means is that they are first-principles, and almost by definition, first-principles cannot be deduced from something more general than themselves.
  • Three Categories and Seven Systems of Metaphysics
    but it highlights the utility of allowing cases of special pleading as premises. — Pseudonym
    Since you're returning to a question of utility, (2) ultimately reduces to (1).

    1. Michael Friedman's primarily utilitarian approach which essentially argues that as a performative statement it can be at least falsified, as can its opposite. Consider that no statements of metaphysics can be verified. In that case, all statements in performative truth become statements of oughts. One "ought" to act as if X were the case (where X is the metaphysical statement in question). Having done this transformation, however, metaphysical statements become verifiable by their utility. The statement then becomes "there is no utility in...". This can be falsified easily by demonstrating some utility to non-verifiable metaphysical statements other than this one. If this one is the only statement that has any verifiable utility, then it justifies its own exception, by its own rule.
    You may of course disagree with the assessment of utility, but that is not a metaphysical argument, but an empirical one. Utility can be demonstrated.     — Pseudonym
    It seems to me that at first you start out by telling me that metaphysical statements are not matters of fact, but rather much like "guides" for action and behaviour, similar to ethics. So then you're telling me that one ought to act according to whatever metaphysical (or non-factual) statements.

    Then you claim that metaphysical (or non-factual) statements are verifiable by their utility. This is problematic and quite possibly also involves a contradictory element because you cannot reduce this process of verification to just an empirical process. Any process of verification presupposes choosing a standard, or criterion of verification, and this cannot be done merely through an empirical process. I need to decide, for example, what shall count as utility, in the empirical world, and which I will use to compute the utility of statements. So whatsoever I do, I cannot avoid having non-verifiable metaphysical statements - they are absolutely presupposed.

    For example, I need to quantify what counts as "curing" a particular illness to decide if, empirically, it has been cured. I will look for whatever markers I specified, and if they are absent, I will declare it cured. But this specification cannot itself be empirical, nor can it be empirically justified.
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