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Dec. 22, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:06
25 Validating the Senses

Arguments for and against the validity of the senses

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Well, good evening everybody!
How you doing?
It's Stefan Molyneux.
It is 6pm on Thursday the 22nd, I believe it is, of December, and I'm heading home.
And let me tell you, I have spared you from a rather dismal and distracted podcast.
I did this morning.
I'm going to exercise my creative judgment and... EXIT!
I mean, or put it on a CD which I'll never find again.
So, you know, consider yourself spared a rambling discourse where, you know, I was too tangential.
Too tangential.
Even for me.
Which is, I know, it's shocking.
But it's true.
So, what I was talking about this morning, that I'd like to talk about again, which I will absolutely stay rigidly unfocused, it'll be like a laser burning through the fog of non-truth, and burning a hole through the wall of illusion, and straight through like an arrow.
that I wanted to talk about the senses.
And, you know, one of the things that is very true in the history of philosophy and in sort of the current world is that if you want to bully people by sort of applying this hyperinflation of morality to concepts, so, to concepts.
So, you know, the group is better than the individual and God is better than all of us and the country is better than you and, you know, your race or your class or, you know, whatever nonsense you want to come up with.
All of these concepts have to be hyperinflated and made into these sort of all overarching moral monstrosities in order to erase the moral will of the individual.
And, you know, this is all relatively doable from a sort of, you know, bludgeon the child with these abstract conceptual overlords until, you know, the scar tissue that remains is unable to perceive any kind of truth.
But the one problem that you're going to face when you start to put this sort of stuff into practice, if you want to become, you know, the sort of master illusionists of conceptual moral absolutes, Then, you're going to face sort of a bit of a problem.
And, you know, all throughout history, this problem has been recognized by, you know, sort of instinctually or not, by those who want to rule through concepts.
And the problem is that none of these concepts actually show up in the senses, which is fairly significant when you think about it.
So, you know, somebody says, Like for instance, I'll sort of give you a sequential example of how this would show up logically.
So somebody says to me, Steph, you have to give up your marriage for the sake of the group.
Because the group's happiness is all and the group wants you to do this or something like that.
And I say, well, if I give up my marriage, I'll be miserably unhappy and I'm part of the group and surely my, you know, my unhappiness that I will feel On giving up my marriage is far greater than any happiness that the group will feel on me giving up my marriage.
Therefore, the net happiness of the group will be less, and so it can't be correct, right?
And they say, no, no, no, trust me, it's, you know, the group needs you to do it, and so on.
So then, okay, I say, well, who's the group?
Well, the group is, you know, these seven people over here.
I mean, I know it's never this clear, but let's sort of walk through it logically.
So they say, OK, the group is these seven people over here.
So then I say, oh, OK.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I'll go over to this group and I'll say, listen, apparently you guys want me to give up my marriage for whatever reason.
Let me just, you know, ask you and talk to you about it.
So then I go over to each of the seven people and I say, so you want me to give up my marriage.
Is that correct?
And they say, well, you know, I'm not really that comfortable with it.
And, you know, I don't really know who's supposed to be speaking on my behalf or whatever.
And so it sort of very quickly transpires that there is no such thing in reality as this group, right?
There's just me and a bunch of people.
And, you know, to create a moral rule for a group requires the creation, or at least the identification, of a sort of third entity.
Right?
So there's me, there's other people, You know, logically, since we're all human beings, we should all have the same moral rules.
But then there's this third entity, so me, others, and then this third entity called the group.
I mean, the me and others is sort of a false dichotomy because every human being has the same morals, so let's just say it's people and the group.
The group has to have a superior moral standing to individuals, and the group cannot be able to speak for itself, right?
I mean, you always need a Führer or an Overlord or a, you know, an Il Duce to speak for the group, or you need a Priest to speak for God, you know.
So there's this group, or this concept, or this abstract, ah, the President speaks for the nation.
Which, you know, can't speak for itself, so some doofus has to interpret what the supposed concept wants, and then, you know, speak for it, and, you know, so and so.
So, obviously, you know, it's completely clear that it's just a methodology for getting you to obey one person, because, you know, but not to feel, directly feel the shame or the humiliation of surrendering your will to another by saying, you know, so George Bush or someone will say, oh, you're not surrendering your will to me, but to the nation, you know, or the Fuhrer says to the fatherland, or, you know, Stalin says to the you know the historical class imperative or whatever
So, of course, these concepts have these heavily clogged and overcharged moral natures, which are supposed to obey, are supposed to be greater than everyone, and so on.
But the problem is that none of these concepts show up in the senses and are not accessible to reason.
So, minor problems.
So, of course, anti-rationality and anti-sensuality are very common among people who bully with conceptual absolutes.
So, you know, you can directly see the degree of conceptual bullying that is occurring by looking at the degree of hatred there is for rationality and for the senses.
So, you know, in the Middle Ages you had Luther saying, you know, you've got to tear reason out of your brain and you've got to stomp it on the ground and put it in a blender and hit frappe and all this kind of stuff.
And, you know, you also have this, you know, the senses are the realm of the devil.
of Beelzebub and you can't trust them and your senses will always lead you astray in sexual desire.
So the body, the senses and rationality are the three great enemies of those who deal with or attempt to bully through conceptual moralizing.
So I wanted to sort of talk a little bit about the status of The validity of the senses and how to respond to arguments against the validity of the senses.
This, I don't think, is quite as hot a topic as it used to be.
I mean, when I was in my teens and, you know, you'd have those sort of late-night parties where you'd sort of talk about the world and, you know, wouldn't it be wild if we were an atom inside a larger whatever-whatever, right?
All that sort of nonsense that people do instead of actually learning how to think.
Myself included at the time.
And, of course, one of the questions or one of the issues that came up was, you know, you can't trust your senses.
So, let's talk about that a little bit.
I don't think that's quite as hot a topic at the moment, at least maybe just because I'm not young and, you know, sitting in a beanbag anymore.
But, you know, I think it's still worth talking about because when you speak to religious people or you speak to people who are heavily patriotic and so on, they will always bring up this, you know, if they have any kind of philosophical bent, they will always bring up that you can't trust your senses.
So, let's have a look at some of the arguments they bring to bear on the topic.
So, one, of course, that you may hear is something like, well, you know... Now, I'll try not to do a hippie voice for all of these, but, you know, it's worth it, just because it seems to be sort of vaguely appropriate.
Well, you know, dude, you can't really trust your senses, man.
Because, you know, what you say is brown, I might say is light brown, or even some other color, man.
And also, you gotta remember, some people are like colorblind, right?
And so, you can't say for sure that what you see is what I see and, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
So, you know, that's fine.
You know, it's a reasonable place to start a conversation.
And, you know, there's absolutely no doubt that you and I will always see slightly different shades of color, right?
I mean, for a variety of reasons, some internal and some external.
The internal reason being their eyes are slightly different shapes that, you know, If I stand in front of a painting and give a color, and then you stand in front of the painting one minute later, the light has changed, or, you know, even if it's a controlled environment, we're still looking at it in slightly different angles.
So yeah, absolutely, no doubt, no problem, no question.
It is entirely true that no human being will see the exact same color as another human being, which is fine.
I mean, the degree of commonality should give us some, you know, that we're both... I'm gonna say brown, and you're not gonna say plaid, right?
Or you might say, I don't see colors, right?
But those, you know, colors still exist.
It's just you don't see them.
So, you know, everybody understands that, and that's why we have a technical term for color, namely, wavelength.
So, You know, you and I will always see different colors, but assuming that we're not blind, if we look at an oscilloscope, we will see the same sort of printout or the same view of the same wavelength, right?
The wavelength will have a certain frequency or wavelength measurement and so on.
And so, you know, of course we're going to see different colors, and that's why we have this thing called wavelength, which is objective.
So that's sort of one example.
Another example that people will come up with when they're criticizing the senses is they will say something like, well, if you look at a stick in water it seems to be bent, you know, but it's just not.
Or, you know, if you're standing in a desert and you're looking out Into the dunes, dude.
You're gonna see this lake, but it's not really a lake, man.
And, you know, so they're gonna say the senses can be fooled.
You know, senses can make mistakes.
You know, this is supposed to be some sort of foundation for the existence of some sort of higher being or, you know, some sort of collective imperative.
But, I mean, that's all nonsense.
I mean, First of all, you know, of course each individual sense can be sort of, quote, fooled, and I'll talk about that a little more later, but, you know, there's a reason that we have more than one sense, right?
Because one sense alone is not enough, either for, you know, attacking or defending in terms of hunter-gatherer.
So, if I see a stick that appears to be bent in water, well, lo and behold, I can just run my finger down The length of the stick and see, well, it's not bent.
It just sort of feels bent.
Or, you know, I can pull the stick out and have a look at it.
And now without the intervening water bending the light rays, then I actually have a clear view of a straight stick.
So, you know, each individual sense, you know, we can sort of make mistakes based on the information of it, but we have more than one sense, which is why you validate, why we have, we can validate with the other senses.
You know, similarly, If you and I are standing in a desert.
And we're looking out across the dunes and I turn to you and I say, look, there's a lake.
I'm thirsty.
Let's go swim.
You know, and we sort of scramble over the dunes and we get to where I said the lake was.
And you know, it turns out that the lake is sort of vaporized and gone off into the distance and so on.
Then, you know, you have every right to see me is to say to me, uh, Steph, I don't really think that was a lake.
I think that was a mirage.
And you know, if you want, you can explain to me about how, Light waves bounce between differently heated layers of atmosphere and all that kind of stuff and you know We've sort of established because we've tried to touch the lake or swim in it or drink it that it's not Real because we just happen to see something.
We thought it was a lake and it wasn't however, if We go and find that it's an actual lake and we jump in it and splash around and, you know, drink it and so on.
And then you can't really, well, then you can't really turn to me and say, you know, Steph, I think this is a mirage because what we saw with our eyes has now been confirmed through the other senses.
And another thing, of course, that we can do is we can rely on other people's senses, right?
So if I see something completely bizarre in the sky, like a, you know, a pine cone the size of the Eiffel Tower, you know, the first thing I'll do is, you know, I'll say to my wife, uh, sweetie, I don't mean to shock you, but do you see that?
And, you know, if she doesn't, then I am obviously going through some sort of hallucinatory episode and need to get my eyes checked.
So, you know, social confirmation of even if we can't check with our other senses, like I can't fly up and check out the pine cone in the sky, we can at least ask other people to validate what we're seeing.
So, you know, there's no real issue with this kind of stuff.
Simply because, you know, you can validate what you're seeing, the conclusions that you're coming to with the other senses.
Now that phrase, the conclusions that you're coming to is pretty important.
You know, the senses are mere passive transmitters of information.
And they don't actually contain conclusions.
There's nothing in your eyeball which sort of whispers into your brain and says, The stick is bent, right?
I mean, that doesn't happen.
What happens is your eyes accurately transmit the position and direction of the light rays that you're looking at.
So, if there's a refractory element that's going on based on the surface tension of water or the surface area of water, then, you know, that's actually what is occurring.
The light is being bent by the water, so the stick does look bent.
So, your eyes aren't telling you that the stick is bent.
The eyes are telling you this is the layout of the light rays that are passing through.
And, you know, in that they are entirely correct.
Water does bend light.
So, the eyes are functioning perfectly well.
There's no problem.
There's nothing wrong with the senses at all.
Your conclusion that the stick is bent is what is in error, not the sensual evidence itself.
So if I look and my eyes see this what appears to be a lake in a desert, my eyes are accurately providing me with sensual data regarding light waves.
You know, my conclusion that it's a lake or a mirage or whatever, that's my conclusion based on sensual information.
In other words, in any conflict between the senses and the mind, assuming some level of corroboration from other senses or other people, it is the mind itself that is incorrect.
You know, and I think we've all had this situation, right, where we're driving in a car and we sort of check our blind spot and we think we see a car, so we, you know, but we want to switch lanes or something, so we turn and we look in more, you know, we take longer, longer time to look at it and there's nothing there.
So, you know, we're revalidating our senses.
So, obviously, we saw a shadow or, you know, there was some dust in our eye or, you know, we saw You know, something leaning up in their back seat or, you know, whatever.
I mean, who knows?
But the issue is that, you know, we sort of recheck again and we don't think, my God, what happened to the car that was just there?
It just vaporized.
Maybe it'll come back.
Maybe I can't change lanes.
You know, we don't start to say any of that stuff.
So, you know, the senses do not provide us with erroneous information.
However, we can draw erroneous conclusions.
from the evidence of the census.
And that is a particularly important aspect of, you know, philosophizing or understanding the nature of truth and reality.
So, you know, why have things changed sort of somewhat in the realm of the census between sort of the Middle Ages and now?
All respect for the census.
Well, you know, the big change in my view, I mean, science obviously, but let's look at one that's a little bit more subtle, which is capitalism.
So, in the Middle Ages, there was no such thing as capitalism.
I mean, it was absolutely unheard of.
Usury, or the lending of money for interest, was considered to be a great evil, right?
So it's like if you were a Christian, you simply could not lend for profit.
And, of course, there were two reasons for this: one theological and one practical.
The theological one was it was banned in the Bible and you should not profit off other people's needs and you know, blah, blah, blah.
The practical one was, you know, the church very much liked being able to borrow money or take money without having to pay interest, you know, for its wars and the kings liked So, you know, there was no lending for interest, so there was no real capacity to invest capital into, you know, any sort of levels of efficiency or improvement.
The second was that, you know, in the Middle Ages, everybody's economic life was just strangled.
I mean, it was just under sword and whip constantly.
I mean, to give you a small but telling example, If you and I are bakers in sort of a medieval village, and we have sort of little carts across from each other, I mean this is true throughout a lot of Europe, if I sneeze when somebody is walking by, say person X walks by and I sneeze when he goes past my stall, I can be thrown in jail.
And why?
Well, of course, if I sneeze, then the person X has to say, bless you, because he's a Christian.
And then, you know, I say thank you, and we're chatting away, and I sell him my bread.
So it's a form of manipulative advertising to sneeze, and it was absolutely illegal, right?
You know, these guilds where you had, like, it took seven years to learn how to, like, make a candle.
You know, because you had to apprentice for so long and, oh man, it was just a brain-dead economic environment where, you know, you just got killed for everything that had any sort of level of productivity.
And so, you know, in the Middle Ages you had no economic life and the census were despised and, you know, for a variety of reasons that all sort of changed.
Renaissance, the Enlightenment and so on.
And so, now, given that everybody likes the goods that capitalism produces, right?
I mean, honest people like them because, you know, we get to trade our goods on the free market, relatively free at least, and, you know, that's nice, and I like gizmos and doodads and so on.
But, you know, the parasites really like them because there's more to steal, right?
I mean, if you're the government, you really want to be, you know, the parliamentary ruler of a modern capitalist economy and not the absolute ruler of some squalid medieval crap hole.
So, you know, capitalism is now considered to be sort of A grudgingly and sort of vaguely incomprehensibly good idea from just a mere practical standpoint, you know.
So, yes, everybody recognizes now that the free market produces goods, but it has to be sort of tightly controlled and managed and organized and, you know, you really can't let people be really free.
Just let them kind of be free enough to, you know, generate goods that we can steal.
So, you know, it's like a farmer, right?
I mean, a farmer will give his cows a little bit of room and, you know, enough food so that they'll keep, you know, he won't sort of starve them completely because then he doesn't have anything to exploit or to take from them.
And it's the same thing with our political masters, right?
They'll give us some property rights and some freedom so that we'll beaver around producing lots of goods that they can then steal and pillage.
And, you know, in the way that capitalism is given a sort of grudging and vaguely uncomprehending respect, the senses in the modern world are also given the same sort of grudging respect.
You know, because science obviously, as I mentioned before, is a very important factor.
You know, science uses the evidence of the senses and logic to determine truth from falsehood, right?
Accurate representations of reality.
And in science, of course, the theory Always fails in the face of the practice, right?
So in science, if I come up with some beautiful theory about how something works, and unfortunately it just doesn't work that way, then my theory is obviously a pretty mental construct that's completely false and can be thrown out.
And the same thing is true in capitalism, right?
If I think that I have the best way, the best product on the market, and I have the best way to sell it, and I have the whatever, I'm the smartest guy around, those are all just theories.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is you don't know what the facts are until you find out whether people are actually willing to exchange money for what it is that you want to give them or to sell them.
So, in both capitalism and in science, the theory, the idea, the goal, the business plan, the physics theory or whatever, all of those are nice, but the only thing that matters is what actually happens, what happens in reality, what is specific and measurable.
So, in science, the theory is matter behaves in such and such a manner, and if it does, your theory is supported, and if it doesn't, your theory is false.
You know, and a business plan says such-and-such will happen, we'll make such-and-such money, and if you do, your business plan is accurate, and if you don't, your business plan is inaccurate, and you're going to lose money, and, you know, there's all these objective measures in business and in science.
So the relationship between, sort of, capitalism and the scientific method and the respect for the senses, and, you know, as a sort of a minor aside, a respect for logic, Are all very well tied together.
You know, they're all part of a big conceptual package.
And, you know, that conceptual package is something along the lines of, you know, concepts are imperfectly derived from instances, right?
So, theories are imperfectly derived from facts.
In other words, in any conflict between theory and facts, facts rule.
And so in any conflict between interpretation and sensual evidence, like I think it's a mirage but it's, you know, I think it's a lake but it's a mirage, then the sensual evidence wins, right?
And so in any conflict between, you know, sort of how I think things should work in the market and how they actually work, my theory is incorrect.
Now this, this whole sort of big conceptual package which says that all concepts are imperfectly derived from instances or facts or sensual observation or whatever, means that concepts are completely subjugated to and derived from physical, sensual, material reality.
And if they're not, If there's no evidence for them in sort of physical, sensual, material reality, then those concepts, those theories, you know, are invalid, are false, are non-existent.
You know, so if I say that my theory is that every car pulls the car behind it by an invisible silver thread, it's amazing the metaphors that I come up with when I'm commuting, isn't it?
If that's my theory, and there's absolutely no evidence for it, and cars change speed relative to each other, and there's no car at the front that's pulling, obviously there's no logic for it, no evidence for it, then the theory is just plain false.
If you want to, however, be the kind of jerk that I talked about at the beginning, who wants to bully people with these conceptual absolutes, you are going to run smack dab into a number of problems when you deal with things like capitalism, when you deal with things like sensual evidence, when you deal with things like the scientific method.
You are just going to run smack dab into problems.
These are your sworn enemies, you know, from a conceptual standpoint.
Neither you and them cannot stand together in the same reality.
So, the degree to which you want to exploit and pillage and steal and plunder and harm the youth and teach things that are false and so on, the degree to which you want to do that, you have to oppose capitalism, you have to oppose the senses, you have to oppose the scientific method, abstract rationality, and so on.
And so that's why it's so important when you are talking with people like this to recognize that, you know, they will be undermining to one degree or another the senses and especially the senses in relationship to abstracts, right?
So you say there's no such thing as God and then they say why and you say there's no such thing as sensual evidence.
Well, the first thing they have to do is say, well, the senses aren't aren't always accurate.
The senses aren't whatever.
And at the very least, they have to say the senses aren't complete, right?
They're not the whole story, right?
There's this whole other big bucket-y realm where, you know, all of these great concepts live, like God and the state and class and race and countries and all that kind of stuff.
And that's the real one and this, you know, this sad little material world we live in is imperfectly derived from that perfect world.
You know, all of the sort of Kantian and Platonic nonsense that, you know, anybody who's, you know, fallen asleep in a decent philosophy class has sort of, has seen before.
So, that's something you're always going to run into.
If you say, there is no God, and somebody says, why don't you say, why do you think there's no God, and you say there's no sensual evidence, I bet you, absolutely bet you, they're not going to say, you know what?
There isn't!
And now, they're not going to be able to say the senses aren't valid at all, because, I mean, that's just nonsense, right?
I mean, if somebody says to me the senses aren't valid, well, I've got to listen to them saying it, right?
If they put it on a whiteboard, I've got to read it.
You know, given that telecommunications or a sort of psychic phenomenon seems to be a relatively unproven phenomenon, There's no way for somebody to communicate to me anything about the senses without relying on the validity of the senses, right?
So, you can't scream in my ear that sound doesn't exist and you can't tell me, you know, and require my ears to interpret it correctly that, you know, the senses are false, right?
I would just... If somebody said that to me, I would just stare at them and wouldn't respond because I would sort of say, well, gee, I didn't know you were actually saying something because I wasn't sure if I could trust my senses.
I mean, it would be irritating enough that the person wouldn't argue with you for long, and, you know, they would realize that they're just spinning a load of nonsense.
So, you know, nobody can say that the senses aren't valid, because, you know, it's so easy to counter that silliness.
So they have to say the senses are valid to some degree, but they're not valid in sort of the fundamental moral or absolutist sense, that they're sort of like these sort of badly made, misfiring organs that are constantly leading us astray.
You know, I actually had this argument once with someone who was driving a car and I did sort of mention that if that were the case, perhaps we should switch driving because I feel real comfortable with somebody who really believed that their senses were continually faulty and was rocketing me along at 110 kilometers an hour.
So, You know, they can't say that the senses aren't valid, so they have to say the senses are sort of vaguely sort of in a shoddy manner valid for some lower or sort of pitiful material realm that doesn't really have any import and, you know, doesn't really matter in terms of the big picture and so on.
And that's how they rescue the absolute nature and the absolute moral value and sort of metaphysical existence of these, you know, big-ticket conceptual items with sort of perfect ethical absolutes enmeshed within them.
And, you know, of course, if they were to agree that the senses are valid, and logic is valid, and anything that's not validated by either the senses or logic, or hopefully both, is not true, does not exist, then, you know, for them, I mean, just so you understand what happens for these people emotionally, you know, they then see The complete collapse of their entire moral universe.
You know, if you can prove to somebody, I mean, or if somebody accepts the sort of fairly simple proof that, you know, nothing exists except what we can perceive through the senses and what we can rationally sort of argue for and validate through some sort of sensual and empirical information, And they have bound up their entire sense of life's meaning, and life's goodness, and everything I've taught my children.
You know, the whole reason I went to church, and the whole reason I joined the military, or the whole reason that I said such and such was a good thing, and the meaning of my life, and so on.
You know, if they believe you that there's no such thing as these higher moral concepts or higher abstract concepts that are morally absolute, their whole worldview, their whole sense of themselves as a moral individual, their whole This psycho-epistemological structure that they live in, that gives life meaning, that gives life purpose, that makes them able to look at themselves and say, I'm a good person, and I taught my children well, and I love my wife, and my community, and my family, and all of this stuff.
It all comes crashing down.
You know, so it's very important to understand that so that you know what it is that you're biting off.
And so you don't just sort of get irritated with people when they come back at you with sort of petty ad hominem arguments.
Like, I mean, I've got these sort of emails lately and I sort of read them more maybe tomorrow, although not while I'm driving.
But, you know, these people who will just give you these petty arguments.
One guy wrote to me and said, oh, so I guess I'm just a child abuser because I believe in a higher power or whatever, right?
And, you know, that's not a logical argument, right?
I mean, it's just someone being petty and pouty.
But I certainly fully understand the sentiment and the reasons behind it.
I mean, it doesn't mean that I sort of forgive the intellectual hypocrisy that is contained within that statement, but I certainly understand that this person is...
You know, or somebody that you're arguing with.
I mean, you are pulling much more than the rug out from under their feet.
I mean, you are literally, they're hanging by a thread, and you are sawing through that thread, and they're gonna fall.
And not only they fall, but their whole family is gonna fall, their community.
I mean, I think it's very important to understand the amount of emotional investment that people have in, you know, moral falsehoods.
And, you know, how much resistance they're going to put up.
You know, they say that in the scientific community, A new theory comes out, or a young new theory comes out, that nobody has ever converted.
Nobody ever changes their minds.
What happens is the older generation, who believes sort of the previous theory, they just retire and die off, or whatever, and it's sort of no longer a factor.
And so, you know, you never really... Nobody ever changes their minds, right?
So it's sort of like the older generation with computers, right?
People who weren't hobbyists when they came out.
There's a lot of business people out there who, you know, just don't understand software, don't understand computers, and sort of never will.
So that is, you know, that's sort of very important to focus on.
And the last thing I wanted to mention about in the sort of few minutes till I get home is that, you know, there's lots of people who will also give you the argument from, you know, quantum physics or, you know, the argument from, you know, which sort of says, well, you know, physicists are now talking about 12 dimensions and matter skips between dimensions and, you know, it's just one big drug trip and so on, you know, and how can you You know, how can you say that the senses are valid when matter is so unstable and, you know, we can travel through time and whatever, right?
Well, you know, to me the important part of that is, you know, and this takes a fair amount of cojones, I guess you could say.
I don't have much problem saying it, but, you know, people, you know, are pretty skeptical of my opinions.
You know, I'm sort of a, I guess I enjoy science from an amateur standpoint, but, you know, I'm very confident in saying this, you know, history may prove me wrong, but I strongly doubt it, that, you know, all of these physicists who are working with these n-dimensional string theories, I mean, you know, they're just kind of like Well, remember, they're bureaucrats, right?
I mean, anybody who's seen the sort of 50-volume tax code knows that bureaucrats have a wonderful ability to overcomplicate things.
And, of course, you know, the people who come up with these superstring theories and, you know, n-dimensional matrices and stuff, they're, you know, they're bureaucrats.
You know, they're paid to come up with complicated stuff that requires a lot of money and can never be proven.
You know, they are civil servants.
You know, they're working on it.
They're not working in the private sector, I'll tell you that.
So, I wouldn't particularly worry at all about people who come up with that stuff and just say, well, you know, that stuff's all theoretical, it's not proven, you know, it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the validity of the senses.
And it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the validity of the senses in some sort of day-to-day sense, right?
I mean, I certainly, on driving along, don't worry if the truck ahead of me is composed entirely of super strings that I can drive through, or not.
And so I think that's a pretty important, you know, criteria.
I just summarily dismiss this kind of stuff.
And of course then people accuse me of being, you know, an uninformed, ignorant, you know, bigoted person who's throwing out all the genius science in the world just to maintain my theory.
But, you know, sort of what I say to that is that, you know, the superstring stuff, this may all be true.
Sure, I mean, maybe it is true that there are superstrings in 12 dimensions and this and that and the other.
But none of that, the problem with all of that stuff, is none of it explains How matter is just so fundamentally stable.
You know, I mean, I've got a book in my basement where I drew a picture in it when I was like five years old and, you know, every now and then when I'm moving or whatever, I'll see it and I'll open it up and I'll look at that picture and it's exactly the same as it was, you know, 36 years ago, 35 years ago.
So, you know, matter is just sort of fundamentally stable, down to the point where I have pretty much the same personality that I had when I was five.
And so even this sort of Intellectual energy that I have, or sort of the electrical sort of neuropsychological energy that I have within my mind, is stable.
And even though I've sort of learned a lot and, you know, tried to grow as much as possible as a sort of thinker and as a person, my personality is the same.
So even at the level of sort of identity matter, I guess you could call it, there's an enormous amount of stability.
You know, my car is the same color every day, I drive the same route to work, you know, the weather is the same, you know, pretty much in sort of the season sense, year over year.
Matter is just enormously, enormously stable.
And so, you know, any scientist who comes up with sort of 12 dimensions and, you know, matter skips around here and there, does sort of face, and I think has a responsibility to overcome, the natural objection, which is that, okay, Well, how does matter that is sort of based on these, you know, flicking in and out of existence super strings, how does matter actually, you know, stay so constant?
You know, when anybody, even if they've got like, you know, six PhDs in advanced astrophysics, anybody who says to me, you know, reality is not what you seem, or not what it seems, you know, they have a pretty high fence to get over.
Because, you know, lots of people will tell you that who are just trying to scam you, scientists included, right?
I mean, Scientists get their cyclotrons and they get their multi-year grants for studying all this kind of stuff.
So I know they have a motive to keep it all complicated and messy and unsolvable and untestable.
Because they're working in the public sector and so they're paid for not solving problems but for coming up with complicated non-solutions.
So, you know, if somebody, in particular somebody who's paid by the state, if somebody comes along and tells me, you know, there are all these dimensions and the senses aren't valid or, you know, reality isn't what I think it is, you know, I don't care how smart they are and I don't care how many blackboards they can fill, they still have this problem of explaining to me just how all of that, all of those random fluxes translate into, you know, stable, predictable, absolute material objects.
And if they can't, then I'm just going to say to them, well, you know, it's nice that you've got this little theory.
You know, you all come back to me when you've got some sort of proof or some sort of explanation of how it all translates into perfect stability.
And of course, if they don't, then they're just knowing me and, you know, taking my tax money.
And if they do, then there's, you know, what's going to happen is, you know, our senses validate information that there's sort of super atomic realm.
I mean, it's not like I can sort of feel the atoms on my steering wheel or anything.
And so, if they do come up with some sort of explanation about how these twelve-dimensional superstring things translate into sensual, material, stable reality, then fine!
That's great!
That still has no effect on the evidence of the senses, even if there's something sort of weirder, or less logical, lower down.
It really doesn't matter, because our senses, and especially our moral decisions, and the truth of concepts, all is derived from the evidence of the senses.
And, you know, at some point, finally, they will have to prove whatever theory they're going to come up with through reference to, you know, empirical sensual observation that's reproducible across locations and that sort of stuff.
So, you know, don't be fooled, so don't be sort of snowed in by these sort of physics geeks who'll tell you because they read some article in Scientific American or Nature magazine that, you know, there's super strings and there's n dimensions and therefore, you know, that's where God might live.
I mean, that's just plain silly.
And, you know, don't let it intimidate you because that stuff's all just, so far, it's all sort of theoretical and unproven and I suspect largely nonsensical make work for government employees.
Well, I've made it home.
I hope this has been helpful.
You know, really do focus on this issue of the senses because it is very, very powerful.
You know, if you get people to believe that, to understand that the senses are valid and the senses accurately Thank you so much for listening.
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