Search ideas

If you have alternate suggestions, I'm of course eager to hear them!

My suggestion is to just stick with Deutsch’s terms. He is already using “the nearest existing term[s]” to what he means. That implies that there’s already a change (in usage, not in words).

Changing the words on top of his change is going to be difficult without moving further away from what he means, even if you explain your changes. It’s just going to confuse people and make the concepts harder to discuss, not easier.

You set out to make the concepts easier to discuss but I think you’ve inadvertently caused the opposite effect.

I wonder if ‘drive’ is really a good word for unconscious ideas. In this context, my Dictionary app says:

an innate, biologically determined urge to attain a goal or satisfy a need: emotional and sexual drives.

and

determination and ambition to achieve something: her drive has sustained her through some shattering personal experiences.

But neither of those is unconscious. People are aware of their sexual and emotional drives and their ambitions.

In addition, there are other types of unconscious knowledge. As you say in your video, habitualization is a source of unconscious knowledge.

When I hear the word ‘drive’, I think of determination and ambition, which take lots of conscious effort. I don’t think of habitualized knowledge, which by definition takes no effort.

If I get her right, one could in principle hold a rational belief which is false —a belief in god, say— so long as this belief stems from a sincere effort to explain the world and so long as the believer is ready to jettison his belief if he were to think of some reason why it cannot be true.

A belief in god is a form of mysticism. Rand writes that rationality “means the rejection of any form of mysticism […].” So a belief in god is not just false, it’s irrational. It’s also implausible that someone could hold on to as blatantly false an idea as the existence of god without some refusal to look into the matter critically.

If non-existence is to mean anything at all, I think that’s it, yes.

I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.

Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.

Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.

Clearly, an embryo without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.

According to https://www.neurosciencefoundation.org/post/brain-development-in-fetus, “an embryo’s brain and nervous system begin to develop at around the 6-week mark.” And: “At as early as 8 weeks (about 2 months), you can see physical evidence of the brain working (the electric impulses) as ultrasounds show the embryo moving.”

This idea is for viable pregnancies only. Other considerations may apply for non-viable ones.

Anything that processes information is a computer.

The brain processes information.

Therefore, the brain is a computer.

That is not what freedom means.

Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.

Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.

If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is forced.

Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.

The anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.