The Death of A Soldier; Everyone's Anarchist; The Art of Human Life

Earlier today I established that I'm a dick. So it comes as no surprise that the summary of my response to this self-eulogy is 'bullshit!'

Many people are sad about it, and so am I. I'm sad because what this man entrusted to us in the event of his death shows so elegantly how deluded and screwed up he was, and despite his protestations to the contrary, it ruined his life. The reaction, totally unfeigned, only shows me, yet again, how widespread such delusions are.

As I'm coming to find I have to say a lot, I don't care what dead people think. However, rebutting this corpse's final post isn't about what it thought; it's about what you think. Or, if not you, then inevitably someone you know. These are pandemic.

And they are Sad. They are every synonym of sad all rolled up into a huge ball of grief and loss. But not because he died. Because his beliefs live on.

And I'll show you why.


First, a seemingly tiny part of his message.

"It's not easy asking anyone to do something for you in the event of your death, and it is a testament to her quality that she didn't hesitate to accept the charge."

It's not? I'm going to have to ask my friends about that, because to me it seems like a very simple request. That's not the point though.

The point is his philosophy says to him that he's allowed to leave something undone not just until the last minute but actually after he's gone.

Why the hell didn't he talk like this before he's dead? This is some of the clearest, deeply thought, deeply felt, and most sincere writing I've read in years. It's been said by many before, why the blasted hell does everyone wait until it's too late to decide to be themselves?

So, what do I do about this issue? There's a post on this site, about consciousness. Why is it there? Because I was thinking one day, and I realized that I wanted it out there. I think it's important. What would happen in the unlikely event that I'm hit by an exploding chicken tomorrow? Without this blog, that idea would evaporate with my life. If I want it out there, if I want it recorded somewhere outside my head, I have to do it now. So I did.

"Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer."

No, you're dead. You're not missing anything, because the structure that enabled you to feel the feeling 'miss' is now merrily feeding microorganisms. If indeed your consciousness survived somehow, blogging probably doesn't even make sense to you. You've become a completely different being. (Possibly the type of being known as 'nonexistent,' as you acknowledge later.)

"Bottom line: if I got the chance to meet you through blogging, I enjoyed it. I'm only sorry I couldn't meet more of you."

Sure buddy. You'd have just loved my blog if you'd found it. If your new body is capable of perceiving my blog, I bet you're just loving the crap out of this piece. What a load.

"I died doing a job I loved."

His job was killing people. He loved killing people.

Let me emphasize that.

He loved killing people.

"When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was."

Murder: a job description we all aspire to!

"Those who know me through my writings on the Internet over the past five-plus years probably have wondered at times about my chosen profession. While I am not a Libertarian, I certainly hold strongly individualistic beliefs. Yet I have spent my life in a profession that is not generally known for rugged individualism. Worse, I volunteered to return to active duty knowing that the choice would almost certainly lead me to Iraq."

Important, so I've quoted it here in case you, dear reader, don't want to read the whole thing. He continues in this vein for a bit until the following.

"As passionate as I am about personal freedom, I don't buy the claims of anarchists that humanity would be just fine without any government at all. There are too many people in the world who believe that they know best how people should live their lives, and many of them are more than willing to use force to impose those beliefs on others."

So, he wants to be an anarchist, but assiduously avoids the idea that there might, just might, be a non-government solution to these people "who believe that they know best how people should live their lives, and many of them are more than willing to use force to impose those beliefs on others." On the contrary, that is one of the most succinct descriptions of government itself I've ever seen.

Why would he argue against this specifically? There are lots of unpopular theories of government. Considering his audience, it's like arguing that he had hair - not exactly going to raise debate. Instead it's like a couple of jocks poking fun at the fat guy - it's a game of "Team up on the outsider."

Or is it? Why team up on this outsider specifically, except that he's afraid that's it's true? That he's afraid people will actually believe it?

"A world without government simply wouldn't last very long; as soon as it was established, strongmen would immediately spring up to establish their fiefdoms."

So it's overwhelming likely, according to this dead soldier, that government is exactly one of these strongmen, these gussied-up thugs, who "believe that they know best...and are will to use force."

Everyone wants to be an anarchist. Everyone wants to be left alone, to make their own decisions about their life, to do what they want, say what they want, work where they want, or indeed not work at all if they want.

If I had a business, and I was selling something that guaranteed that you'd have full control of your own life from here on out, that the people you talked to were all chosen by you, that what you ate was chosen by you, that you made all your own decisions in finance and business and pleasure and in love, what would people say?

"Sounds too good. What's the catch?"

"The catch is that you don't have to pay taxes." Ironically, that is indeed the catch - people want anarchism, but they don't like what it would mean in their lives - today, right now - if they admitted it.

And that's Sad. Steve Pavlina talks about fear holding us back. I sometimes might say that we don't like the logical consequences of accepting that the government needs to be gone. Molyneux would talk about how you were mistreated as a child. I don't actually believe its anything like as simple as any of this. I think it's a huge, messy, seemingly self-contradictory snarl of problems and counter-problems and hidden problems. It's real, like life.

But it's true that nearly everyone avoids simply going after what they want. Our world would be so much better if we did. Sure, some people are going to just admit that they want power, or crime, or other unsavory things. They are going to lie, cheat, and steal to get it. But that's no different than what's happening now - it's only that if everyone just went for what they want, the rest of us would end up honestly pursuing our goals, directly and without compromise. We would, for the most part, just admit our true desires and do everything possible to achieve them.

Without doing so, how would you ever know? Sure, you might fail. We might decide that we all want anarchism, but when we just go for it, it doesn't work. We fail. But you know what? At least then, and only then, we know for sure we can't have it. Then, and only then, we know it's time to pursue something else, something we didn't necessarily want as much. And we have no regrets.

Going for what you want and only what you want at the very least leads to half of inner peace - you aren't fighting yourself, nor are in conflict about what you're doing. You're just trying your darnedest to do it, and damn everyone who tries to stop you.

Either we're good people, or we're not. If we are, we have nothing to fear by pursuing our true desires. If we're not, then who the hell are we fooling? Bad people don't worry about being selfish. Bad people don't worry about looking themselves in the mirror. Only good people do these things. Only a good person could be persuaded to give up their goals for the sake of morals

Don't you understand? Only the good people are harmed by thinking they're bad people. Bad people don't worry about it.

That's why is Sad.

And here's another thing. What if I'm wrong, and not everyone truly wants anarchism? The fact is, we don't have to hang around those people. They don't much like us either, and it would be better for both sides if we just decided to live apart.

If someone really wants to be ordered about, or simply can't live without ordering other people around, let them. Just don't let them do it around you.

But I don't believe anyone really wants to be told what to do. If you don't believe me, then let's try it; contact me and I'll tell you what to do. How long will it be before you start arguing with me? Ten seconds? Five?

No one wants to be told what to do. Sometimes, though, even you don't know what to do. This is the time for someone like a grandfather. They're similar to you genetically, and so too will be their style of living. You spend a lot of time with your family; they know you well. So too do they know, through their long experience, life itself. So you ask your grandfather, what do I do? And a wise grandfather doesn't tell you one thing about what they would do. They ask questions, they help you live your life as you, instead of trying to graft on bits of other people. Ideally, it seems as if they know you better than they know yourself. They help you remember who you are, instead of trying to make you into who they think you should be.

Just like you don't hang around people who think they know your life better than you, if you really don't like your boss that much, you can quit. And guess what else? If you hate your family, you don't have to hang around them. "But they're your family!" isn't an argument. "But you owe them!" for whatever reason, isn't an argument either, especially if they're insulting or abusive. If you hate or fear your family members, if going to a Christmas gathering with people you supposedly love fills you with not joy but terror, don't fucking go. Sure, they'll say mean things about you. But you hate them, what do you care? Just do what you want.

Just do what you want. Or don't ever, ever complain if you don't get what you want, because it's nobody's fault but your own.

There's an art to human life. It's not just go to work, pay off your family with calls and visits, spend time raising your kids, then snatch a few minutes for the things you really enjoy before going to bed and starting the whole thing over again. It's not just bits of physics grinding up against other physics. It's an art.

Music? Movies? Poetry? Painting? These are but tiny sub-arts to the great dance that is a human life. But interesting blips compared to the true swelling orchestral beauty of a well-lived life.

And it's your art. Not your mother's, not your god's, not your spouse's or your children's or the poor and needy's or your government's or any of the thousand other people that will try to lay claim to it.

Yours. Yours and yours alone.

It cannot be any other way. Your mind is your own and no one can take it from you unless you let them.

The people who claim that they can paint your life better than you? They can't. They don't know you, they can never know you well enough, and they're just trying to supplement their own failure to live up to themselves by taking your talent.

The best advice I've ever heard was, "Don't take advice."

It's an art. It's poetry and symmetry and contrast, light, colour, arpeggio, forte and pianissimo. It's the way the clutter of your house - or lack thereof - reflects your inner life. It's the people you choose, the foods you choose, how you divide your day. It's the way you try to integrate the things you can't control into the things you can. It's the details and the wholes they make up. It's whether you choose to do things exactly right, or if good enough is good enough.

It's the integrity of the thing, the way it all fits together. It's what people are talking about when they say self-expression. It's not what these things are, but how they fit together and what they mean. It all combines and expands and becomes more than even you meant it to.

It's an art. It's a dance through existence and it's always your move.

Ah, you may ask, but what is art? One of the points of art is to show things that otherwise can't be shown - to play with the senses.

You can paint a landscape. But why? You could also just visit the landscape, and see it in its full interactive glory. You paint the landscape to show things the landscape itself can't. To emphasize to the eye details that are never emphasized, to add colour where there is none or take it away from where it is.

This is why I loved Escher so much at first. He takes the paintbrush and plays with the rules of the eye, showing us things we never thought we could see. He explores our reality on our behalf and lets us learn new things about ourselves.

All art should do this. Fiction displays events that could never happen, so we can feel thing we'd never otherwise feel. Music are sounds beyond that we can find in nature, giving us moods previously impossible. Poetry is a game of the mind and language, evoking unheard-of connections. This is also why photography seems so silly to me as an art - it's just a natural scene, and yes there's a certain craft to portraying it accurately, but it's inevitably less than the actual thing itself. For the most part, it's better to just go yourself to wherever the photograph was taken. By contrast, photoshop reawakens the playful and exploratory, taking the natural scene and cranking the contrast or inserting illusions or combining two things we'd never otherwise see together, and ultimately making it mean something, about you.

In a human life it's all this and yet more. The harmony and disposition of your choices is the most subtle, yet intense, everyday, yet sublime art there is. Through nothing else can the real purpose of life be seen but by living it, by appreciating the greatest work you'll ever see: your own life. Though this art there are an infinity of things you never thought you could experience.

"What's the catch?"

"You have to do what you want."

I'm Such a Dick

For context.

So, I thought about what he'd said for a while. I tried to come up with the essential flaw in his argument. Just now, I sent a message approximated here:

Subject: Laws of Logic

Since you've apparently figured out how to reason about the absence of logic, I have a few questions for you.

A=A

A is either true or false. (Logic is binary)

A != !A (Noncontradiction.)

What would a universe where A!=A or A=!A look like?

What would trinary (or continuous!) logic look like?

I have no faith that he will even attempt to answer these questions. So, I'm a dick. Nevertheless, if you, dear reader, can answer them, I would greatly appreciate it. I strongly suspect that our brains will find it literally impossible to property conceive of such situations, but a counterexample would quickly disprove me.

Update: Yup. Got a link to ternary logic. You'll notice that the third value is 'unknown' which is impossible with respect to physics. I responded by outlining why I don't accept this, and mentioning that it was flippant at best, but probably an insult. Again, unfortunately, this simply proves that I'm a dick.

2nd Update: "...design purposes." Yup, definitely an insult. Does this actually mean anything? Can it mean anything?

Stefan Molyneux, His Crazy Libertarianism, Segue Into Philosophy and Action

Dude's not too heavy on the logic.

It's a shame, because he has some good ideas.


I've tried to change Stefan Molyneux's mind before. I wouldn't have, but first he claims to be a very 'healthy and honest' human being, went to therapy and everything, and second because he solicited it. If I think he's wrong, I'm supposed to let him know.

However, each time I've tried I get the impression that either I'm not making it through, that he just doesn't understand (in which case I'm just a better philosopher than he is) or that I'm getting the runaround - that his desire to be proven wrong is insincere at best.

So I decided to call him. Get him to call me and a bunch of other people, actually.

Basically, the result was, "Go proselytize, and maybe I'll talk to you then." (Right at the end, 63:00) In short, I got the runaround, exactly as I predicted. (I did get a few questions answered, and indeed I'm grateful, but as soon as he felt the noose tightening, lo and behold he's done talking to me.) While I knew he would cut me off if I asked enough questions in a row, I had hoped that a person who's such a self-described master philosopher would at least know to give me a semi-real reason. Such as, "I'm tired of answering your questions." "You haven't donated, I have better uses for my time." "I don't feel like it anymore." You know, just something honest. Or even, "Well, I can't be honest with you."

Basically, some RTR* from the supposed inventor of RTR. *(Near the bottom of the list, FDR #3)

(He did say, "I'm going to end up with one video image per second if I keep going." But when I said that I had more questions, why didn't he repeat that?)

As he would no doubt ask, "What does this remind you of in your childhood." It reminds me of my mother, "Go play outside, and let me do the dishes." It reminds me of my teachers. "Just do the work." Way to act like a public school teacher, Stef.

Also, if this is such an important objection, if it's really so much more important for me to proselytize rather than understand the theory, why didn't you point it out four days ago when I posted my analysis of tax rates?

(Also, the dude doesn't get math. Which, considering he said, "mathematics isn't real," is not surprising at all.)

In other words, his line "I'm perfectly happy to hear about expansions of UPB," is bunk. If he were, if he had any kind of intellectual curiosity at all, he would actually carry out his threat to listen to me. No, if he releases the recording, skip to the last quarter or so (sometime after 50:00 in the video). When you find that line, see if you can hear the fear in his voice. I could.

In fact, his whole community has a problem with listening to me. I saw it in action by testing their forum instant-message app. I put some random deep thoughts into the stream and saw...exactly nothing come back. No agreement. No refutation. No gentle correction. No heads-up that it's not important to them (it was). This despite randomly pulling crap, like my signature, that I really don't care about, and praising it to the skies. (When you wound a soul, it bleeds fear.)

No, Ockham suggests that Molyneux is high on being the top man. He delights in being the leader of his little community...not a member.

No, every time I try to figure out if Molyneux really is "happy to hear about corrections" he changes the subject. Finally, this time, he actually told me to shut up and go away. He actually told me, point blank, to ask questions relevant to other people.

Since he never has nor ever will take any of my suggestions, I guess this makes sense. Bit of a waste of time for me to make them, really. But, I have to know if I'm right or not. I have to know what someone who's gone to therapy is like, what someone who has a therapist as a wife is like. I have to know if even someone who knows all the theory of how to treat people will actually do so.

I have to know how important mental knowledge is for moral and compassionate behavior, so that I know how to advise anyone who may ask me. So I know how important it is to spread correct principles vs spreading correct special-case solutions.

You would think, for someone who understands how badly children are treated, that if someone came to him confused and asking for things, he would respond by being compassionate.

Instead, for a dude who's supposed to be so fond of the Socratic Method, I really have trouble getting a question in edgewise, let alone a statement. If I have to stop and think about things, he just continues on. The basic strategy seems to be eyes-glaze-over-waiting-for-him-to-shut-up. I was going to ask him if there's a better solution, because he sometimes stops repeating himself and says something new, but if my eyes have glazed over I'm liable to miss it. I can't though; haven't "proselytized" yet. Even if I was able to get more than a few words in, the proofs I use are obviously beyond him. "Me no understand." Indeed. (Consciousness isn't physical, bub. I would like give you not only one but three old college tries at proving me wrong, but since that's not what you want to talk about, it's not in the cards.)

If I met a philosopher who was smarter than me, who could understand my works, I would be ecstatic. I would have nothing but questions for them. I would want them to understand so that I wouldn't have to do all the work. So that they could help me find the truth.

Instead, with him I have the opposite because of his (apparent) rampant contradictions, in his podcasts, articles, and books. Certainly, he has a lot of good ideas in there. However, I have to do all the legwork, to see if they're logically consistent, myself. His ability to think in straight lines is strangely schizophrenic. It goes on and off like a loose connection.

It's exactly how he sounds - his arguments, especially when he's not reading written-down arguments, are suggestive but never coherent- so that makes sense.

It's infuriating. Since he clearly isn't using logic to find his ideas - if he were then I wouldn't have to correct him all the time - I want to know how he's doing it. If most people who just guess get like 2 or 3, he gets like 40. (Mencius Moldbug gets like 90, but he isn't guessing.) Is he just cognitively unfit? (Lacks logical sense.) Is he cancerous like the anti-logicians, meaning anything related to his basic misunderstanding gets eaten by anti-logic? Does he have a novel method of find the truth? If he kept telling me to "Go proselytize," I would never find out. I wonder if this is by design.

(I'm hoping to get 100 or better, and indeed if my logical consistency is really as high as I think it is, I'm totally succeeding. I can explain all of MM and yet also point out his mistakes. Yes, this is a falsifiable theory - I'll even help you falsify it. Since I want to be that good, I need to constantly make sure I haven't confused my current destination with my actual goal.)

Moreover, Stef's philosophy, which even he isn't particularly good at, (as one would expect of new ideas) is supposed to make one happy. Indeed, Stef appears to me to be pretty happy. This is doubly infuriating. If I tried to get by with that many contradictions, I'd be crushed. If I let myself get that loose around the intellectual middle, waking up every day would be torture. Is it just me? Of course it is! Stef's quite happy! Stef's forum is quite happy! In fact, lots of people are pretty happy! But if I tried to slack off even a tenth that much, I'd be slaughtered instantly by my conscience.

In short, if I tried to use Stef's philosophy, I'd be wracked hourly with guilt, doubt, self-recriminations, and the nagging feeling that there is something better.

And indeed, that's why I want to score 100. I have to score 100. I have no real choice. Just be thankful that you are not me.


No, my offense is to have the gall, the gall, to think I might be an equal. That I may actually have something to contribute to the conversation beyond what Stef himself has thought of.

No, that simply cannot be allowed. And heaven forbid that you criticize him personally. No, Stef's gone through therapy. His wife's a therapist, even. He's perfect. Unless you suggest he is, then he's not. You're just abusive. You need to go to therapy, too. All that desperate pain you feel when you listen to a therapist? Just a fluke of nature. Never because they're causing you harm. Unless you ask him, then of course he's happy to listen to potential philosophy-relevant character flaws, but for now you should "Go proselytize."

Still, this conclusion is not ironclad. There's lots of ways to falsify it, and indeed I would be ecstatic if I could do so. (Notably, I could also have misunderstood, and a misunderstanding of this magnitude is, shall we say, 'serious,' and very much the problem of the thinker so misunderstood. If so, fix it!) So, on the off chance some random FDR person actually reads this, I want to ask Stef the following:

"Okay, I agree with you. Yes, the principles are more important than the instances. (We're going to ignore the fact that I don't see how UPB is anything but an argument from effect.) I am trying to learn how to proselytize. If I can't convince you to listen to a little expansion of your theory, how am I supposed to convince people, completely illogical people, to throw away values they've held their entire life?"

I was unable to ask this question. Since I have to "Go proselytize" for a while, I am in fact not allowed to ask this, right now, at all.

I have this blog. I'm trying to bring people to it. (Not with this post.) I already am trying to proselytize. In fact, I have to hold myself back! I have found that I'm terrible at spreading my beliefs, yet every time someone says something I disagree with, even if they're named Stef, I feel ethically compelled to at least try to correct them. (Though admittedly, as Stef presumed I went overboard on the holding-back phase of development.)

No, you cannot tell me to "Go proselytize" as a way to prevent me from doing so. I am proselytizing, Stef. To you.

This is how Stef always treats me. Yes, always. He honestly couldn't care less about the ideas of others unless they directly support his own. This is flabbergasting for someone who claims to be a philosopher, who wants to help people.

Yeah that 'heroin' you were talking about? It's not helping people. It's superiority. It's the high of authority, and I don't want any part of it. I want to ask people what they want help with, and then do so in a logically consistent manner. I want them to decide what they need help with, because if I'm logically consistent, I can't help but lead them to the truth. If I listen to them carefully, I can't help but know what they're really asking for help with - the real, personal problems that truly trouble them.


No, I don't understand how anyone could be anything less than pleased with someone who asks all sorts of questions about their theories and in fact comes to agreement with you most of the time. I totally agree with UPB. I simply don't understand it completely. Why is he intentionally blocking my understanding?

Here's something else I want to ask Stef:

"If I don't properly understand UPB, how am I supposed to proselytize properly? Why are you asking me to get behind something I cannot yet logically get behind?"

Again, I don't mind if Stef was just bored of talking, if he was starting to feel put upon, if he just wanted his podcast not to be a million years long, (it would help if he could stop repeating crap I already know) if he just said, "Come back for the Sunday call-in show," if he truly suspected I was just being difficult, or any of a dozen other reasons...provided he tells me that's the reason. If honesty is the first virtue, why can't I get any out of Stef?

Why, Stef, does it feel like it's all about you? Why is your board a total echo-chamber? Why are you so fond of your own voice? Why have I almost never seen your beliefs evolve? Why do you apparently resent my questions and misunderstandings so much, since I've demonstrated that you can resolve them? Why is it your ideas I must spread? Why can't I make them into my ideas? Why do you never attribute your ideas to others?

It's very mysterious.


Unless, of course, Stef is exactly what he appears to be; a messianic wannabe. He probably just finally did what I've been complaining about since elementary school. Since he wants to be a messiah, he actually figured out what it would take, (some useful, but anti-social truths, along with some cultesque follower-manipulation)* and then put them into action. Since it worked, he now spends his time expanding and defending his turf.

*(You don't get a following that size with just actual truth. If you did, based on my successful prediction rate, I wouldn't be able to go anywhere without tripping over followers. Am I right? Well, is this post going to generate only universal disparagement on his board? Yes, a recursive test of my predictive ability. Also, is the sky blue?)

Why is it that everyone on your forum was abused? And not just like, a little. Sure, no one is parented well. I knew that already. There's also Alice Miller who predates Stef by a solid margin. Did he steal her ideas, intentionally or not? He's stolen mine before. I don't mind, but it sets a bad precedent - taking my ideas without acknowledging, at least to me, that you've done so. (Latest offense; used a concept of mine in his hideous Free Will youtube videos. Dude couldn't understand determinism if we tied him down, taped his eyelids open, and paraded all of history's most polite, logical, and eloquent determinists in front of him until he collapsed from exhaustion. We've practically done so already.)

Again, "why is it that there's no one on your board who A: agrees with you yet B: wasn't abused? Are you telling me that there's like a one in six billion chance of being raised well, meaning that we have no one from class B to compare to? I've seen less abused people on your board before, so that's patently false. I even met one in person. These people don't stick around on your board."

This also makes sense. I used to be a messianic wannabe. (My mother actually thought I was Jesus Christ reborn. Not all the time, I was sometimes demoted because she was crazy, but some of the time.) I know exactly what it feels like. I know exactly what it looks like. I know exactly what kind of people are susceptible to it, because I used to be horrified by how they listened to me. Honestly I have to say that damn that guy knows how to pull it off. Of course maybe this is just projection. But, much as he likes to say, "If I run a cult, it seems to be the worst cult in the history of cults," if I'm a messianic wannabe, I'm doing a shit poor job of it.

Also, Stef agrees with me. "It feels like messianic craziness and I don't want it!" (Feed 3, Podcast 628, The Die is Cast.) Also, "Trust your feelings." Well, Stef, trust your feelings. You're a messianic crazy. Also, you've met god. Yours is a big blue eye-thing that hates freedom and music. I suggest you get a new one. I guess I can see why you don't want to trust your feelings completely. That plus the therapy thing. If you listened to your feelings as completely as you advise, you would never have been able to go.


No, my stated goal is to make more people with my skills. Ideally, I would make people with superior skills so that I wouldn't have to work so hard. I want to be able to justify being intellectually lazy to myself. (Also one of the reasons I will happily present evidence and let you draw your own conclusion. I know that it helps antidote any remaining messianic urges. Also, once you know the evidence I'm using, you can see if my logic is faulty. Directly, and on your own. While I'm massively right, I do make mistakes, I just wish more people could spot them.)

But I can't. While I won't, as Stef did, say there is no one else, I'm sure having a devil of a time finding them. Seriously, if you know where one is, please please point them out to me.


The sad, sad, tragic thing is that Stef is better than the vast majority. He at least puts his ideas down in a somewhat logical way. I can understand what he's trying to say, and he doesn't start equivocating as soon as I prove him wrong. Which is part of why it's important; if I can't get him to agree with me, why the fuck am I trying to get average Joe to agree with me?

Sadly these very virtues are why he has to give me the runaround. Deprived of obfuscation, deliberate mind-fucking, changing the subject, and declarations of 'irrelevant,' (remember, he does score 40 or so) he has to use other tools. He can't engage me in conversation for too long. He can't ever let himself understand my ideas, just as he can't let himself understand determinism. He sure as shit can't ever expand my ideas.

So I guess, compared to the rest of the population, I understand where he's coming from. Compared to the people that surround him, he does rule the roost.


So what have I learned from this? Many things, of which I'll list a few.

First, there may be an alternate way of finding truth. True, I have at least five already, but more is always welcome. (Logic, hunches, inspiration, 'feeling it out' - I've learned what contradictions and truth feel like, so basically I've taught my emotions to reason, and reading - what I like to call the theft of ideas. I've stolen quite a few of Molyneux's. All of these have to produce beliefs that do not contradict any of my existing beliefs. Notably, sometimes existing beliefs are displaced.) Especially one that can score 40 all on its own.

Second, that the task of convincing someone of the truth is probably much, much, more momentous than I thought it was.

Third, I found out that even if you know the truth, putting into action is almost totally unrelated. (I have since confirmed this on my own with reddit comments. I am susceptible as well, though at least now I know it's a problem, so I know I need to solve it.) Knowing the principles may be a completely fruitless approach to engendering honesty, compassion, and morality.

Fourth, that I really have to make sure that you, dear reader, can see when I change my mind, so that you know I'm not static like Molyneux is.

Fifth, I found that I was wrong about therapy. I thought it was worthwhile. However, their methods are simply too traumatic to lead to anything but more insanity.

Sixth, I have a quick acid test. Am I being like Molyneux? If so, I should probably stop, especially if I can't justify doing so from first principles.

Seventh, while I've learned that my friends aren't all that good at logical consistency either, what does it matter? They beat the crap out of everyone else on every other measure that does matter. While logical consistency is as necessary to me as air itself, apparently all my friends can get along fine without going overboard on it.

Eighth, I've learned how important it is to make sure people can just be honest with you, whatever that means for them.

Finally, I absolutely, totally, completely, and passionately hate Stefan Molyneux. From his first email to this last straw, he has been nothing but derisive to me. This article or a quotation thereof will the absolute, final chance Molyneux has.

Since I'm going on about showing evidence...my first email was a response to a Lew Rockwell article where he asked about if he's wrong. I gave a long a detailed explanation of my beliefs. They were, admittedly, somewhat false. His only response? "Ha ha. Go check out my site." It's wonderful that you find my attempts at reason funny. Good job dismissing the deep thought of a "clearly very intelligent person." Your words, not mine. (You went on to praise my specific techniques. Thanks! I stole them from some generally twisted bastard, that's why they're 'slippery.' Effective though, as you found out.)

(Today, May 12, you asked in chat 'why would anyone find me insulting' or something of that nature. The above is why.)

That hurt, Stef. That was the first, and apparently the last, time you were ever able to do so. And then I went to your site. Guess what I found? I found that you said if I was hurt by things you say, it's because I was abused. And that, if I told you how you were insulting, that would be simply more abuse. If I'd been stupid enough to do bring it up, you would have told me it was my own fault for being insulted.
What a mind-fuck. What fucking bullshit.

Stef, you've given me a lot of your time, which I appreciate knowing how much derision you have for me. You answer all of my forum posts, (though your first was also a laugh - at a joke at my expense) even when I'm being 'very catty,' which makes me believe you think I have hope, relative to your philosophy. But now, I've stolen all your good ideas. I've absorbed and tested the results of the philosophy, which I can clearly see on your forum.

All that is left is hate. Unlike you, I can deal with learning from people I hate. Truth is truth, regardless of the mouth that utters it. Nevertheless, it does not make sense to keep visiting people I hate who are of no use to me. I don't talk to my sister anymore either, now that I've got my own place, and have taken the relevant furniture that I inherited out of her house. I would even refrain from letting you know this post exists, but you haven't come up with anything new for at least a year. Further, if you continue to put out books for free, I can continue to skim them for accidental truths. I find reading full-length, clear but wrong thoughts is challenging and keeps me on my toes. The podcasts are just too inefficient.

So this is the last, absolute last chance at repentance. This is not just because I'm going to get banned for posting this. Instead, because you've given me no reason to believe that my first suspicions were anything but right. If you don't do it now, I'm not going to ask again.

I'm DeFooing you.

But fear not, if you ban me I will read the responses to this article. If your forum starts insulting me, I'm sorry - 'analyzing,' knowing that I cannot respond, much like they have done to others, it will reflect very badly on you.

Also, just like my first email, this post has some mistakes. There are things I will happily admit are abusive - if you can spot them. If you can refute them even slightly. They're a test of your intellectual ability. If I had sincerely made those mistakes - and it's not like I planned to include them, my subconscious handles that - you would be doing me a great service by pointing out my error. Unfortunately, I already know how it will turn out. It will turn out exactly like it turned out in my first email.

You may respond, "But if you want compassion and repentance, why are your words so harsh?" But, why a thinker of your caliber (remember, about 40) would expect me to treat you better than you've treated me is beyond my comprehension.

So help me god, if one philosopher can't talk to another in brutal honesty, then there's just no point to the entire endeavor. And so help me god but I believe everything put down in this post. (Yes that phrasing is just to annoy you - it shouldn't. What do you care what I think? I'm just some asshole on the intertubes, relative to you.)

Apparently, I am that mythical sociopath that can indefinitely hide their true beliefs, because I would hope to god that if you'd noticed before, you'd have gone "proselytizing" at me to try and change them.

For non-FDR people: Could you kindly see if anything in this post doesn't fit with another part of the post? I've read it over several times and I think it all works out, but it's mine so I can't ever be quite sure that I'm not just remaking the same mistake.

A Quick Definition of Property

(Now with a long definition as well.)

I'm having trouble stating it clearly, so instead I'm going to repeatedly state it, and ask you to sort it out internally.

You have property because when you do things, you expect it to work.

When you build a house to live in, you expect to be able to live in that house. If you couldn't reasonably expect that - if you didn't own the house - then you wouldn't have built it in the first place.

All agents with finite resources will have property. Anything that needs to expend energy to get some benefit in return will have property in exactly the same way humans have property. When energy is intentionally expended, it will only be expended if the expected benefit is equal or greater.

Property, the concept, is a result of the expectation of ownership. Property, the actual instances, are also a result of expectations of ownership. No agents will act without it. Agents that don't act will literally die.

As a result, all organisms capable of expectation will have property.

As a result, trying to bypass, eliminate, or alter a human's instinct for property, (A child says, "NO! It's MINE!") is to attempt to bypass, eliminate, or alter this immutable fact. It cannot, does not, and will never work.

Contrarily, systems of laws or other tools that advance, generalize, and expand the human instinct for property will always meet with success, to the exact extent that they are consistent.


Right, I've sorted it out now. I'm leaving the above so you can see how I think.

You control yourself. This is a fact of you being yourself; if you didn't control yourself you would be this weird inverse-possessed spirit-spectator thing, at the whim and mercy of cold unconscious physics.

Since you control yourself, you expect the results of your actions to also be under your control. This is ownership. If you expected that an action would result only in things you don't control, you wouldn't do it. If you expected that your attempted control would be thwarted, you wouldn't try.

Property is simply the act of respecting this fact. I expect to control my actions, therefore I can only reasonably expect that you control your actions, unless I have some ironclad proof that you aren't the same kind of being that I am.

We call this fact 'ownership.'

Property-rights debates only make sense in the context of things, and yet if the anti-property debater were to win, and apply their theory logically, then there would be no things over which to debate.

Equivalently, we can say that if you try to take ownership of someone else's property, you do great violence to logic. First, you would only steal in such a way if you thought it would work; stealing inherently requires property rights; second, if there weren't property rights, there would be nothing for you to steal.

Another way to look at it is to see that property is really just an extended self. You are yourself, plus your things. Especially once we realize that you own your thoughts as well, this completely makes sense.

Steve Pavina; How to Be a Man; an Analysis

I've written this post for two reasons, first that Steve Pavlina is good at provoking thought, if not spectacular at being right, and second because to truly understand a philosophy you need to understand the philosopher. You need to know my blind spots, for instance, be aware of my inexperiences, understand my idiosyncrasies in the use of language, and so on.

There's also a small chance that you can learn more about yourself by reading this, or learn more about how to introspect accurately.


The problem with this is that I appear to have MPD, except that the relevant personalities co-exist in time.

Specifically there me who's in mostly in control, and there's a second me.

This second personality appears to have only one goal in life; for it not to hurt. This seems like perfectly respectable goal to me, except this personality seems to be in charge of what hurts and what doesn't, which is clearly a corrupt situation. If it really wanted life not to hurt, while it doesn't appear that it has full control, it could at least tweak the settings so that it's much easier. For instance, it could not put me in double binds.

For example, the dishes. I walk into my kitchen, and there are dirty dishes everywhere. I don't like this, and so I decide that I'm going to do the dishes. I find that I really don't want to do the dishes. So I change my mind. Then I get punished for changing my mind, and reminded that I don't like my messy kitchen.

This is a minor example, but they're everywhere.

Instead, it appears that this personality exists mostly to punish me. It includes my conscience, though that's not its totality. My conscience is not perturbed when I torrent, lie, take advantage of people, manipulate people, am cruelly sarcastic, or display contempt. Instead, it gets upset when I drink. It gets upset when I try to jaywalk. Clearly this personality hates me. (Admittedly it also gets upset when I intentionally inflict pain, or go back on my word.)

Notably, my main personality has its own preferences. I think that my kitchen should be neat, irrespective of whether I enjoy a neat kitchen or not. Also notably, I don't always have this reaction to the thought of dish doing, just sometimes.

The reason this is relevant is that this second personality is an obstacle to my integrity. I cannot act with integrity and appease it at the same time. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't in charge of my emotions.

I run into dilemmas, again double binds though at least I control one branch of the bind, such as; "I completely disagree with what this person is doing. It's an indication of deep philosophical sickness and I cannot abide letting this person spew their poison at my fellow humans."
and
"This person's actions and choices are theirs, and they do not want to change. While I can explain how they are wrong, or counterproductive, this would put a lot of stress on this person, with only an epsilon chance of success, where epsilon is the chance that this person is unlike any other person I've ever talked to, plus the chance I say something magically more brilliant than I've ever said.
"Further, since the whole problem is the transmission of falsity rather than its existence, I have an audience. This audience is, more than likely, also going to be disturbed by my attempted defense on their behalf.
"In short, this course of action will lead to you hurting a lot of people, to no purpose. You don't like hurting people, and I'm not going to let you."

The only way I can, to quote, "express his true self" is to do both. I want and need to help/defend the vulnerable. I want and need to not hurt people. In practice, this is impossible. Indeed, what happens if I am actively attacked? If someone says something specifically to me that is contradictory, poisonous, diseased?

I don't particularly need to defend myself; my logic-fu is very strong. Their words are annoying but not ultimately effective. Nevertheless, I cannot abide such attacks. It strikes me as excessively craven, and to not punish it is anathema. Not for my own sake, but in the hope that they may learn something.

Understand that these two impulses come from very different sources. They share my brain but not neurons. I could, technically, decide to abide such attacks, that they are not anathema to me. This is under my power. (For instance if I were assured that epsilon was zero, I would just laugh at people when they attacked me, to let them know I find their attacks humorous instead of effective.) I cannot decide that I am justified in intentionally inflicting pain for no gain, just to "express my true self."

What I can do is suppress this whole personality. It controls my emotions, so my emotions go with it, but its under my power to do so. It gets sulky, as anyone would, but it allows me to go ahead with acting with integrity to my values.

But when I'm suppressing such a large part of myself, can I really be said to be expressing myself? Am I following my heart?

I actually don't know the answers to these questions. While I can predict the actions of this postulated second me, I do not understand it. I don't know what it is or why it's there.

While I suspect that this problem and most of its properties are unique to me, it does have one shared property; you do not control your emotions either. It is likely that when following your heart, you will discover that your values and emotions collide at some point.

When this happens, what do you do? Steve doesn't say, and I certainly don't know.

(I'm basically done my argument with Steve here. Now I'm simply mentioning stuff because it's related.)

One of my particular problems is that after I suppressed this personality, I found that I had to use two words to describe my feelings, and this is one of the reasons I think it's a separate consciousness, not simply some mechanism. I have emotions, but also instincts. I can't perceive my actual instincts of course, they just happen, but I have a number of feelings that feel like instinctual reactions or knowledge. I call them instincts because they are uncannily accurate. You could also call them intuition but they're entirely sensual in nature, not logical.

These feelings are not affected by whether I'm suppressing this second me or not. They inform me with the aforementioned uncanny accuracy on every possible situation, blithely indifferent to second me. Also important, it's not like I stop having emotions. I still get angry and sad and so on, it simply becomes impossible for me to tell the difference.

So, while most of my feelings are dependent on second me, not all of them are. Similarly, the problem of my values clashing with my emotions would not be a problem if my values didn't carry some emotional weight of their own, independent of second me.

The problem is that while my instincts are very useful, they are not rich. I used to have a particular emotion for a wide variety of situations. Waking up felt different each day, while staying up had a small constellation, separate to going to bed on time. Sunsets would have a particular flavour, as would most rooms and any two geographical places that were out of eyeshot. All this is clearly part of me, and yet it disappears when I take the necessary steps to act with 'integrity.' I am, that is first me, is not comfortable thinking that I know enough to intentionally redesign myself like this, quite apart from the fact that, by comparison, the world is pretty monotonous without it. Precisely, I don't lack such a feeling now, but rather everywhere and every time feels the same.

The other problem is that this emotional rebellion is new. I certainly wasn't born with it. I somehow developed it through my experiences, most likely with public education primarily, though my mother certainly played a role.

Something I'll mention because I'm on the topic anyway...

I also have a third me which appears to be the governing consciousness of my physical body. It tells me what I should eat, when I should sleep, what to do when I'm hurt, and if I ask it to adjust some hormone levels, it will gladly oblige. It also has control of whether I feel physical pain or not, in addition to a wart on my right index finger on the left side of the nail level with the quick. It activates this wart when I decide my hands are ugly and makes it go away when I change my mind. (I found this out by accident and then tested it a second time.)

In other words, it talks to me and I can talk to it, if I want. I can ask it to do a large number of things that you'd have trouble believing. It's in charge of the placebo effect, for instance.

This is one of the reasons I think it is also conscious, and that everyone has one. The placebo effect works through your belief and concept system. If you are told you're getting the saline solution, you don't get a placebo effect even if every other factor that leads to it is kept alive. In other words the placebo effect understands the concept of placebo. It's not Pavlovian, but rather understands the world around it, at least to some degree.

I can see the attack here of saying, "but that just means it hijacks your consciousness," but which would only make sense if you were actually conscious of the placebo effect. It's similar to the fact that if you were to feel another person's emotions directly, they wouldn't fundamentally be someone else's emotions anymore, they would be your emotions.


To finish off, I'm going to look at a relevant example of the type of clash I've described. Steve is soliciting submissions for 'How to Be a Woman.' He also said in the article, "A man is the first to initiate a conversation, the first to ask for what’s needed, and the first to say “I love you.”" The relevant detail being that the man steps up and puts himself out there.

So, taking that advice, I should take a risk. I should say, "Well Steve, you're soliciting responses, but I have a response you may not like. I think it will be useful, that perhaps you'll think more deeply about what you say, and may on the off chance actually be able to answer my objection. However, it's not about womanhood at all. And here it is."

I think that piece of advice is, in a general way, good advice. However...

"Steve isn't going to read your article, link to it, or be changed by it. (If you don't believe me I'll gladly submit this article as a test of my theory.) If he reads much of it at all, he will most likely be stressed and discomfited by it, again with only an epsilon chance of having any kind of useful interaction result. You don't like hurting people and I'm not going to let you."

In this case, I'm annoyed that even if I did decide that I wanted to submit it, (the first point actually seems valid to me) I would hate doing so, and in general this stress on my part would only be increased by any answer he'd offer. Despite my values, that I really it's his responsibility to deal with random submissions like this, especially when he's actually soliciting them, and that every opportunity to improve the world, no matter how unlikely, should be taken, I would despise the act of doing so, unless and until he somehow assured me that I had not caused any harm. (Not going to happen.)

While my problems are more widespread that I suspect most people experience, it's almost inevitable that values and emotions will clash. This problem is almost never discussed; the distinction between values and affections never put into words. Nevertheless, especially when offering advice such as Steve Pavlina's, advice which in general is common, this essential and difficult problem is a necessary part of the full analysis. Avoiding is like teaching someone to drive but neglecting to tell them that cars break down.

I'm only 24. I'm not surprised that I cannot answer this question. However, for Steve to avoid it so completely is an act of negligence. Did it not occur to him? Is he truly so unaware? While I can't say for certain, people in his position are generally not unaware, for otherwise a simple heads-up would be sufficient to solve the problem. No, he is either willfully ignoring this problem, or his identity actively depends on its nonexistence.

For a layman to have such a dependence on ignorance or untruth is basically expected. For a professional thinker such as Steve, especially since he's going on about integrity, is unforgivable.

Consciousness is Not Physical: Some evidence

I suddenly realized that I had, all this time, direct proof that consciousness isn't physical.

I have only scattered memories before I was about three years old, as most people do.

However, one of them is extremely significant. I remember that my memories plunged in and out of blackness all the time when I was a toddler. I remember thinking this is normal, as indeed it is.

For instance, I bent down to pet a small dog who was eating, after his owner warned me that I shouldn't. He snapped at me and then...blackness. Like a film that's been cut off.

A bit later the film resumes. I'm crying in my mother's arms in the living room, explaining (or maybe just thinking? It's hard to tell) that it was my fault for petting the dog when I knew I shouldn't. (Incidentally also my first memory of being a philosopher.)

In other words I ran from that dog to my mother, and explained the situation, without being at any point in between, conscious.

At least, I think I explained it. She knew the situation. Perhaps she came and got me in the intervening hole, and asked the neighbour what happened. I don't know, I was unconscious (but not asleep!) at the time.

In other words, even the human organism can function quite well without consciousness...and yet it still exists.

It's for this reason, actually, that we don't remember our earliest years. We weren't conscious then, at least not properly, not reliably. We don't lay down memories of what's happening to us.

Nevertheless, we learn to walk and talk, to manipulate our parents, what and how to eat, the rules of the house, and myriad other monumental tasks. We lay down memories. Unconsciously.

It would seem at first blush that this only confirms the determinist's worst fears; it is indeed easy for complex neural nets to simulate consciousness, feelings, suffering, and free will.

It is also a fact that we are conscious. That it needs specific neural events to occur, which cost energy. Even though we can do anything physical without having a mind, we create one anyway.

What benefit can it possibly give us? The only remaining option is that it gives a nonphysical benefit. That it somehow reaches to a realm of interactions beyond energy and mathematics.

As indeed we would expect from the facts of qualia. Qualia are entirely different to anything we have found in the physical realm; their existence, properties, and interactions are all entirely unique.

It would be bizarre indeed to have found that they are mere products of physical processes.

The First Step

Naturally, I believe I have a coherent theory about truth. About what is truth, and about how to find more. I'm going to share it with you for several reasons. If I'm correct, this theory of truth, this epistemology, is superior to any other that I've found, if for no other reason than that it includes all their good parts. I assume that you want to know truth, not lies, yes? If nothing else, you can update yours the same way I update mine. Also, by sharing it, I have the benefits of peer review, which given standard conditions is enough to find every logical error in triplicate. Finally, if there's anyone else like me it'd be nice to talk to them, and if I can't find them on the internet, I'll be damned if I can find them at all.

Following Socrates either literally or by convergent evolution, every person seeking truth must start with accepting their own ignorance. Preferably just the ignorance they actually have, rather than going Decarte's route.

So! I've accepted ignorance. I've found zero. Where is one?

Already the metaphor breaks down. There isn't a one. There's only Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Godel's theorem is incredibly broad in valid application, right up there with causality and Newton's Third. In English, Godel realized that every theory has a finite volume, and at the edge are things that are unprovable within that theory. For every provable truth, somewhere along the chain of proof is an axiom, simply taken as true. In the case of ontology, it means you have to start somewhere.

In humans, this starting point is simply memories. Since babies aren't philosophers in a strict sense, anyone practicing philosophy already has some understanding of the world. At a deeper level brains are already preferably wired to understand things like gravity and 3D space and the concepts of past and future.

However, at some point a philosopher will have reduced every memory they own into principles they use to explain the world. I exaggerate and simplify for logical effect, but even having done this, the explanations will depend on axioms.

Now, often two people meet and discuss with the goal of coming to a common understanding, taking the democratic idea that if more people agree it's more likely to be true. However, it is nearly always impossible for two people to come to a common understanding, as their axioms will differ, and how are you going to convince someone that their axioms are wrong?

Luckily, our brains are all hominid brains. Most of the axioms are the same. Even still, this axiom changing crusade seems an ongoing obsession with anyone even slightly contaminated by intellectualism.

How do we form our axioms? Well, I certainly can't figure it out yet, and I've never run across anyone even beginning to examine this question. For the moment, I'm just going to enumerate mine.

1. Our perceptions are trustworthy.
2. Self-consistency is proof on its own merit.

That's basically it. Number one I've had as long as I remember, while number two I created later.

Still, number one needs some additional explanation. It means that when I see an object, that object is really there. It doesn't matter whether it's actual sight or hearing or emotional seeing, it doesn't matter if I can tell what it is - that's interpretation - but if I see something, it's really there.

Now, for the physical senses this is pretty obvious, and you can easily define disorders as simply the physical senses not obeying this simple rule.

Notably, there are far more than five senses, though there seems to be wide agreement on those five. To tell when you're hungry, do you taste or touch your hunger? How about the sense of where your limbs are, your proprioception? Your sense of balance? When you're sick, what hurts, exactly? Based on an article in New Scientist exploring the issue, a conservative estimate for total senses is about 50. Some of those are unconscious, like your blood pH, and perhaps shouldn't be counted, but the point is that five is way too few.

However, for emotional or mental senses, the objects under scrutiny do not apparently exist in our shared physical space. Put this way, it's not surprising at all, of course. It means that disorders of emotional and mental perception are nearly impossible to define, and may even mean that they don't exist at all. I don't normally find sunsets beautiful. Does that mean I have a 'disorder?' Are they objectively beautiful but I'm simply emotionally blind? Or, does it mean that what I see is true? Does it mean that, for me, sunsets are kind of boring?

I assume that when I have an emotion, while I may not know what it means, just as I may not know what an object is when I see it, but I assume it's trustworthy. I assume that I am in fact sensing something that is exists.
The only proof I can offer is that emotions are extremely consistent across similar situations. If I have a particular feeling when someone is bullshitting me, I'm going to have that feeling again and again every time someone is bullshitting me. I just have to figure out the association once.

Notably, the opposite contention of post-modernism is logically inconsistent. If you can't trust your senses at all, how can you trust your perception of the idea that you don't trust your senses? Same goes for brain-in-a-vat hypotheses and similar trash.

This is subjectivity. It's not invalid or somehow beneath (or above!) objectivity, but simply different.

However, there is at least one problem with my axiom. Logic. I want you to go find or construct a logical progression so you have it to play with. A true one, specifically. What you think is true, not necessarily what I think is true. B, therefore C, something like that.

Now, how do you know that C follows from B? Is it 'obvious?' Okay, now define obvious.

You don't know, do you? I certainly don't. Accept ignorance. We can name it though: this is our logical sense or senses.

But that's not the real problem. Even though you can't describe it, you know it when you see it. That's emotional consistency. The problem is that logical senses are very dependent on previous conclusions, through things like the confirmation bias. 'Obvious' is a shifting mire.

"Be rational! Use your reason! It's the golden age of enlightenment!" That's nice. What's rationality? What's reason? Is it your logical sense? Is it deduction? Induction? Bayesian averaging?

Luckily, there's a hack solution. Your logical sense is exactly like a muscle, and can be trained. The process is often called science, but the label is being eaten away by corruption.

Hypothesis, testing, conclusion. Use your logic, make a prediction, and find where you've gone wrong. If you look hard enough, you'll find something. Use that to find the flaw in your thinking. Repeat.

After an interminable time, you can eventually have some confidence in your logic alone. Most experts need about a decade of practice to truly master their craft. For me, there were ten years between the time I wanted to make people laugh and the time I did.

I say science is corrupt because most scientists do not go through this process. Even though science is supposed to be the great culmination of rational thought, most scientists can't think their way out of a paper bag. They seem to rely on the 'scientific method,' that fuzzy beast, to do their thinking for them. And of course emotions are but poisonous 'subjectivity,' which I will talk about later, because my ideas on that are a result of my axioms.

My axioms are not true axioms. They can, with a few clarifications, be confirmed or refuted. That's not the point of the essay. The point is that they are my axioms. They didn't come from some analysis of the evidence, I didn't logically disprove all the other possibilities. I simply jumped up one day with them in my hand, and started hacking away at the jungle of reality.

As such, if you disagree with them, and want to argue with me, realize that if your goal is to change my mind, you will axiomatically fail. We can still debate some more minor points, the subset of axiomatic towers that work have to overlap, especially in the fine details. However, the true bedrock of my thoughts really is adamantium against the weathering of argumentation, and the sediments above are like Ultima's Blackrock - only powerful magic will ever change them.

In return, I will attempt to respect your axioms. If I find a flaw in your reasoning, I will try to present it in a way that does not contradict your most basic beliefs. It's polite, and frankly a waste of time otherwise.