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May 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:36
219 Radical Skepticism

If you can read this, you're already skeptical...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is 1 o'clock on May 2nd.
It's a Tuesday. I'm heading downtown for a meeting.
I just closed a deal late last week, so I'm having the Project Kickoff meeting today.
So, depending on traffic, we might have a long podcast, or we might have a not-so-long podcast.
So, of course, if it's a long podcast, I can speak slower.
And if it's a short podcast, I'm going to have to speed up massively because I must get the same amount of content into every single podcast.
So, it's either a matter of lots of filler.
I mean, the kind of filler that makes American Idol look like America's Funniest Home Videos.
Oh, wait. That has filler, too.
Something with less filler.
Or it's going to be highly compressed and highly concise.
So we will start with relatively concise and compressed and move on to filler depending on how the traffic goes.
Just trying to give you a little bit of a road map of where we're heading today, how, why, and under what steam power.
A question has come up on the boards that I've been meaning to get to for a while, and in my list of podcast topics, it has recently moved up, because a fine poster on the podcast was talking about a conversation with his girlfriend, who is a radical skeptic.
Also known as with all possible caveats and apologies, which I will actually not do anymore.
I'm going to try. I'm going to try and see because I know that my constant refrains of, in my humble opinion, according to me, and blah, blah, blah, are turning off some people because it's like, yeah, yeah, okay, I'm on podcast 220.
I can sort of assume that you've got some idea of what you're talking about so you don't need to keep putting in caveats.
And I think that is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and I think that I keep thinking that I'm talking to new people, and by this time, unless somebody's really randomly cherry-picking, I think we can safely assume that people are relatively on board with the whole Freedom Aid Radio scientific method, and so I will attempt to quell the Weasley caveats as best as possible, but I might not have any more luck with them than I do with any of my other verbal tics.
We shall see. So...
I think that this is a sign of a mental illness.
It's a mental problem.
Now, I know that it isn't in DSM-IV because it's not really categorizable from a biological or psychological standpoint, though I think it should be.
But the issue is, of course, around philosophy.
And people can function relatively well within society while still being radical skeptics.
But radical skepticism, for those who don't know the term, is...
The belief that everything is interpretation.
This is a quote that was posted on the board that this gentleman's girlfriend furnished from Nietzsche.
He said, nothing exists except interpretation.
There is nothing that is real.
Everything is subjective.
Everything is relativistic.
Even the faith that one needs to believe in leprechauns is identical in epistemological sense or in the sort of gathering of knowledge sense.
It is identical. To the belief that one has in one's senses.
So believing your five senses requires faith, and we act as if the five senses are real, and it's basically the approach of the Cartesian demon, which I write about in The God of Atheists.
And the idea behind the Cartesian demon, I mentioned it before, I'll be brief about it, just as a reminder.
But... The Cartesian demon is the idea that, which was brought up by René Descartes in his discourses on First Meditations, I think it was, where he says, look, it could well be the case that nothing I perceive is real and that everything is the manipulation of some devil.
I'm actually a brain in a tank.
I don't think he used that phrase, but I think that's sort of what he was getting at.
I'm sort of like a brain in the tank.
And what I need to do is to...
I have to look at everything that is coming in through my senses and everything that is in my mind and in my imagination, everything that I think I'm perceiving, even this paper that I'm writing on and so on, as being manufactured by some devil, some demon.
And we would sort of call this the Matrix right now.
But everything is being manufactured by some devil, and therefore I can't be sure of anything.
And the only thing that I can be sure of is that I am being tricked.
There is an I that is being fooled.
So even if nothing exists in reality, but everything is manufactured for me by a devil, by some sort of crazy manipulative evil entity, then...
I can't trust anything that's coming in through my senses and the only thing that I know for sure is that I am being fooled.
That something exists which is being fooled and that something is me.
And this is the root of this sort of famous phrase, I think therefore I am.
Or as Monty Python had it, I drink therefore I am.
This kind of radical skepticism is always deployed by people in search of a deity, right?
I mean, he sort of builds this up back to try and prove the existence of a deity, and it's a proof that, like all proofs of the existence of a deity, fails.
It completely fails, right? But you have to find some way of blending together or co-joining The belief in the senses and the belief in rationality, the belief in scientific methodologies or approaches to truth,
you have to find a way of conflating that or bringing that together, merging that into one big idiotic frappe with the faith that is required for things like God or the family or the race or the state or all these things that we believe in that don't have any sensual evidence or logical reality.
Now, that to me is what is meant by radical skepticism.
Maybe there's another definition I don't know about, but that's the one, as I understand it, that proved to me that everything that exists is not the creation of some sort of devil that is manipulating every single one of your senses and giving you the impression of reality without reality existing.
Well... There's a lot of things that can be said against this argument.
Fundamentally, of course, it's not provable or disprovable.
It's not an argument at all.
It is an assault, in my view.
And this kind of argumentation makes me very, very angry.
So I'll try not to get too angry during this, because it's not like you're inflicting it on me.
But this kind of argument is a direct assault upon someone's capacity to reason and to trust themselves.
And I consider it an enormously horrible thing to do to somebody.
That's why I said in my response to this person, be very careful around this person.
Be very, very careful.
This is a dangerous human being to be around because they're directly assaulting your capacity to think and to reason and to trust yourself.
And also what they're doing is frustrating your rationality.
So when somebody comes along and says to me, Steph, everything's this Cartesian demon and prove to me that it's not, well, all you need to do is say, okay, well, under what criteria would you say that this is a demon?
And are you, in fact, telling me, like telling me, this is the interesting thing, right?
Are you telling me that I am a figment of the demon's imagination in your mind?
See, this is something that's quite interesting.
And there's lots of arguments against it, but we'll start with this one, this sort of fundamental paradox at the heart of this argument.
So, if you come up to me and you say, Steph, you're a figment of my imagination, and you have to understand that.
I mean, do you see that already you're sort of stupid?
I mean, it's an idiotic thing to say.
If you come to me and say, Steph, you don't exist, and you need to change your mind about whether you exist or don't exist...
Then you've already broken the premise, right?
You have already disproven your own assumption.
So René Descartes, by the very act of writing down that he felt that reality was an illusion and only he existed and nobody else existed, and then publishing this and handing it out and saying, people, read this, it's very important, well, he's already...
Accepting the premise that other people exist and that they should change their minds about whether they exist.
You see, it's all just such nonsense.
I can't believe that people actually still talk about this kind of stuff with any kind of credibility.
And yeah, I know Nietzsche talked about it all.
I mean, sure, but Nietzsche was an aphorist.
Nietzsche was, by his own admission, not a logician.
Nietzsche spoke about impressions and he was a psychologist.
He would not classify himself as a syllogistic or rationalistic philosopher working from first principles.
And he is a very stimulating guy to read and he's very creative and he's very thought-provoking and all that's good stuff.
But he is not a philosopher in the way that he works from first principles and builds his arguments logically.
And, by the way, he kind of went mad and spent the last ten years drooling in a wheelchair.
Now, this could be through syphilis.
We're not sure. There's no way to prove it.
But definitely not a guy who had a very happy life, for sure.
I mean, just sort of read a biography of the man.
He was not a very happy camper.
Tortured love affair. Never went anywhere.
Never consummated. Never got anything he wanted.
Was unable to sustain his professorship of philology.
There's a mouthful. And so, Nietzsche, absolutely, you know, I mean, he's an interesting guy to quote, and he's very thought-provoking, but for heaven's sake, don't base any philosophy on what Nietzsche says.
If he opens up new avenues of thought for you, fantastic.
But you definitely want to circle back just a little and validate what the hell he's saying, because he himself was relatively mad.
So... And he recognized and wrestled with this.
His demon was Socrates, right?
He was wrestling with Socrates with the classical Greek syllogistic, logical, metaphysical, first principles-based approach to truth.
He wrestled with that his whole life because his natural bent was to sort of spin these webs of words that go on sort of six-hour walks through the mountains.
And think and think and think and then spew it all down in a mad rush when he got back to his cottage.
And that's not really a very syllogistic or logical or scientific approach to life.
And he was German.
And his mustache might give you some sense of his mental stability.
There's lots of things you can say about Nietzsche.
We can talk about him another time.
But not a very good philosopher to take on first principles.
You can pick, much like the Bible, you can pick a lot of stuff out of Nietzsche.
and find just about anything you want because he was a highly intelligent and chaotic thinker with these occasional brilliant flashes of insight and Very interesting analyses of psychology, but not a syllogistic philosopher as he himself would be the first to admit.
So when it comes to epistemological questions, don't go with the Fredstra.
That's not the home that you're going to find that's going to be built on stone rather than wild and witty German fog.
So that would be my suggestion.
Let me know if you think otherwise, of course.
But this argument, these are also self-defeating.
All of these arguments around radical skepticism are also self-defeating.
And that's just something that's so important to understand.
And that's something that's important to understand that this is why I say that it's a form of mental illness.
I don't say it's a form of mental illness because somebody disagrees with me.
God knows I'd like to get that classifiable in a manual of mental illnesses, but obviously that's going to take a little bit more time than we have today.
The reason that I say that it is a form of mental illness is that whenever you have somebody who is acting in a completely hypocritical manner, completely earnestly, and completely destructively, then you have an indication of historical trauma of near biblical proportions.
And so that's something that you really need to understand.
If you want to understand why people are radical skeptics, look at their childhoods, which are going to be bitter and alienated and broken and destroyed and withdrawn, and everything that goes to serve up a tasty plate of black and empty nihilism to the personality will have been served during their childhood.
And we can talk at some other time about how nihilism grows out of these kinds of childhoods, but I'm sure you can pretty much trace most of the path yourself by this point.
So we can talk about it another time, but this kind of radical skepticism is the result of somebody who grew up...
Completely manipulated and destroyed by false arguments for morality, hypocrisy, false beliefs, manipulation, control, withdrawal, and possibly physical, emotional, or sexual brutality.
And they grew up entirely tossed about in the nets of their parents' prejudices, and so they could never conform to reality.
They could only conform to other people's beliefs.
That was the only way that they could survive.
And so, of course, their fundamental epistemology is based on opinions rather than facts.
And the moment that they admit to themselves that facts and reality exist and is available through the senses and reason, and that people's opinions do not exist, they go through an unbelievable caving in of the false self and of the incredible destruction of what they perceive as their very being and personality.
So, approach this with caution and with courage, because it is quite a black pit to explore this kind of radical skepticism.
So the first thing that I say to a radical skepticist who says to me, Steph, you don't exist.
You're just a figment of my imagination.
I would say, well, then why are you trying to change my mind?
If I am a part of the demon's methodology for confusing you, then obviously I don't have any existence independent of yourself or independent of this demon.
So why are you trying to convince me?
And of course, the person might come up with a whole bunch of nonsense, but they basically have to say then, whether it's the demon or whether it's something or someone or some evil god, something outside themselves exists.
And I am a manifestation.
If I, as an individual, am a manifestation of that, then there's no point trying to change my mind.
Because if the demon is trying to fool them, then anything that I say is going to be part of the demon trying to fool them and is therefore not going to be conclusive in any way.
So they have to accept that I exist independently of them and I can change my mind through rationality.
Or through an argument and then they've completely destroyed the idea of radical skepticism already.
They have to believe that I exist.
They have to believe that language exists.
They have to believe that their body exists because they have to communicate to me unless they've managed to break through the psychic barrier.
They have to communicate to me in some manner using their body, using their senses, using atomic reality through sound waves, through writing something down, through hand signals, through tracing the words on my forearm, whatever.
But basically, they have to accept that they exist, that I exist, that language exists, their body exists, material reality exists, the transmission of ideas exists, language, syntax, grammar exists, all of these things.
And they have to believe that these things exist in some manner that is not purely subjective.
For instance, if you believe that all language is purely subjective, then you would never use any kind of language, syntax, or grammar that would be recognizable.
You'd just sort of be going, or something like that, because it's all purely subjective.
So it doesn't matter what you say.
It doesn't matter what you choose.
It doesn't matter what you express, in what manner.
You can jumble sentences, words, sounds, syntax.
You can... Hold up color cards.
You can use that African clicking language you can do and mix it all together in one big melange and it won't really matter because everything's subjective anyway.
But if somebody is putting together the words in such a precise manner that they're saying everything that exists is relative or nothing exists independently of consciousness or whatever, then they are believing in a large and enormous number of things.
When somebody speaks a sentence to you of any kind, They are taking an enormous amount of things for granted.
They are automatically accepting the existence of all the things that I mentioned before.
And so then to say that everything is subjective and that the only way I can communicate it is to believe an enormous amount of objective things is pure nonsense.
It is kind of like a joke.
It's kind of like a test of not even intelligence because it's really not that hard to figure out.
Oh, so I don't exist, but I should change my mind to believe that I don't exist.
Well, what kind of nonsense are you speaking here?
Do I exist or don't I? If I don't exist, then there's no point trying to change my mind.
And if I do exist, then trying to convince me that I don't exist is ridiculous.
And so it's not really an intelligence test.
It's just a test of, I guess, intellectual integrity.
Because you do exist.
My brothers and sisters and friends, you do exist.
Of course you do. I wouldn't be podcasting just to talk to myself.
I'm actually talking to my computer.
But even my computer exists.
So that's just something that is kind of like a joke when people say that.
That's sort of one thing. Now, of course, the other thing is when they say that you have to have faith in your senses in the same way that you have to have faith in religion.
And therefore, God exists as surely, or the right or the willpower to believe that God exists is as valid as you believing that your iPod or computer or CD player is producing these sounds.
Well, of course, that's all pure nonsense.
And that's also kind of silly, right?
If somebody is saying to you that you have to have faith in your senses in exactly the same way that somebody has to have faith in God, then, of course, my response would be to say, so, I don't know what you just said, because all I know is that I received some impulses from my ears But since I don't believe in God, and if I believe in what you're saying, then I should not believe my senses, then we can't have...
I mean, there's no point even me talking to you.
Because if you're right, and we can't trust our senses, then there's no point talking to me and having my ears transmit the sound.
I mean, that would be silly, right?
And even if my ears transmit the sound correctly, my interpretation of them is going to be false or incorrect or wildly different.
So the degree to which I understand through my senses your proposition that the senses are false is the degree to which I can completely discard your proposition that the senses are false.
Because if you're right, then I'm only going to get gobbled static or nothing or I'm going to translate it into some sort of kind of language in my mind.
And therefore, if you're accurately communicating to me that the senses are false, then the senses are not false.
They're kidding, right? I mean, this is not a serious argument in any way, shape, or form, but people seem to like it, and it seems to have a certain amount of effect on people, and it's not because it's that tough to figure out.
It's just because, you know, we're lied to so consistently that when somebody else starts to say that everything is a lie, there's an undertow of her personality that feels like, yeah, maybe that is right.
Maybe I am Keanu Reeves or whatever.
But... That kind of situation is just nonsensical in the extreme.
Somebody is not able to ever logically disprove the evidence of the senses because they have to use the senses, right?
It's like driving to your house to say that cars don't exist.
And the only way I can get there is to drive to your house, and therefore if I'm at your house, I've used a car, and therefore for me to argue that cars don't exist is kind of like...
I mean, it's kind of like April Fool's, but sort of not funny, I guess you could say.
I just don't understand that in any way, shape, or form.
It's not just the senses that exist.
It's not just the senses that exist.
I mean, in order for somebody to speak and for me to hear it, their body has to exist, which is obviously independent of their consciousness, because they can't will an arm to come and go out of existence and so on.
So they...
Their body exists, their throat exists, their muscular control over their throat exists through the effort of their mind because they're forming sentences in their mind and transmitting those to their larynx and so on.
So their body, their muscular control over their larynx through their mind and neurological system exists.
And also then the air exists because you can't have sound without air, of course, despite all of the roaring noises we see in science fiction movies.
It really is a silent movie when you're combating out in space.
But that stuff has to be assumed to exist.
And then, of course, your ears have to be assumed to exist independently Of somebody's mind.
Like if somebody really did believe that you were part of the matrix or part of the Cartesian demons world web of insubstantial fooling, foolery, I'll get there.
I really will. Then if somebody really did believe that you didn't exist outside of their mind, then they would simply think the thoughts at you, right?
But the fact that they're opening their mouth and speaking to you means all of those things exist.
Atomic reality must exist independently of consciousness, right?
Because the sound waves that they're putting out into the world...
It must be caused by vibrations of material objects, atoms or whatever, sound waves.
And then it's got to go into your mind, independent of your thinking, right?
So if they were just a figment of the imagination to you, then you would not take anything they said seriously if they were being fooled by some Cartesian demon, right?
You'd never listen to them. You'd never take them seriously because nothing would actually be occurring other than The same thing as if you were having a dream, right?
And so... They have to assume the existence of so many things that occur independently of consciousness that to speak or write or anything like that and then say that my argument here proves that only things exist which are a part of consciousness and you're a figment of my imagination.
Well, it's all just kind of silly.
Like, I mean, if they upload an article, I don't know.
I guess I'm sort of belaboring the point.
And the only reason that I'm doing that is because it is something that is so obvious, and yet it is something that people fall prey to pretty constantly.
And the reason that you get frustrated is because you know in your gut that what they're saying is complete bullcrap, but...
It's very hard to assert that independently.
And the reason that it's very hard to assert that independently is because we ourselves understand the emotional baggage that is going on behind these kinds of statements.
This is all sort of, I think, pretty important to understand.
That it is very important to understand what is going on behind the mind or behind the emotional veneer or the philosophical or intellectual, pseudo-intellectual veneer of the radical skeptic or the radical relativist that there is a kind of evil in this, right? Nihilism is an evil virus of the mind that attempts to spread through destroying people's faith and their own ability to process and understand, function within, and reason about reality.
So, behind this assertion that everything is subjective and nothing exists outside of consciousness, the Cartesian demon, the matrix, whatever you want to call it...
Everything that is going on behind that intellectual defense is a completely hellish and brutalized emotional experience, as a very formative young mind really went through the shredder of somebody else's hatred, vile, moral evil, hellishness, brutality.
I mean, it is genocidal to a child's mind, towards a child's mind, To make them dependent upon your whims and your opinions as a parent.
When a child is faced with that in their parent, then the child will absolutely conform to the prejudices of the parent because you've got to live, right?
The point of life is not to be right, but to live.
I mean, when you're a child, right?
If you're right and you die, those right genes, the genes which cause children to fight against their parents' prejudices, never quite made it through to puberty and so pretty much died off.
So we have within us a strong conformist And healthily so, conformist element.
So when I was a kid, I conformed to my mom's craziness, and when I got older, I fought it, and then I buggered off.
And that to me was the perfectly healthy path.
If I had decided not to conform to my mom's craziness, well, she could have beaten me to death.
I mean, it's a very real possibility.
And you can get cold and withdrawn and agonizing.
It's terrifying as a child.
And so basically what happens with somebody who grows up to be a radical skeptic Is that they went through a childhood wherein they were not allowed to have any opinions independently of their parents' prejudices.
And those prejudices were pretty heinous, in my view.
And so that's something that is pretty important to understand.
The reason why it's tough to fight these people from an emotional standpoint It's because there is such a degree of emotional hellishness behind it, emotional agony, and that they themselves have now turned from people who were abused into people who are now abusers,
right? So they went through this phase, of course, where their own minds were completely destroyed and undermined by their parents, but rather than face up to the agony that their parents were destroying their lives and their minds and so on, They ended up deciding to justify that within their own minds, and now are kindly helping other people out of their era that they exist, or the era that they're at all competent or efficacious to deal with reality.
And so, by sort of, quote, helping people out in this manner, they feel that they're, you know, they're doing the right thing, they're trying to help people out, and so on.
And I think that's a very nice thing to be doing.
But, of course, it all is complete evil and complete hellishness to...
To speak in this kind of way to people is just, to me, stone evil of the worst kind.
And you definitely don't, I think, want to be involved with somebody like this unless they're willing to deal with the emotional hell that they experienced as a child.
If they're willing to deal with that, fantastic.
Then I think that you can easily and nicely get along with this kind of person.
It's going to be a pretty rocky ride to get there, in my humble opinion.
It's going to be a pretty rocky ride to get there.
But it is something that you can do, but the person has to be honest, and they have to say, okay, well, obviously what I'm saying is complete nonsense, and I don't know it.
I feel very compelled to tell people about this, and so maybe I have some emotional issues that I kind of need to deal with.
And that would be something, I think, that is a possibility for moving forward.
But for God's sake, don't have, don't, whatever you do, have children with this kind of person, because they will then repeat the same horror that they experience to their own children, which will make them miserable, and your whole life will then be pretty much rooted in corruption.
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