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May 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:51
257 Physics and the Three Laws of Logic

Do we need to have 'faith' in logic?

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well. My God, it's beautiful and hot up here in Canada now.
Woo-wee!
That's what Dr. Phil said once.
So hot out there, you just look out your front yard and watch a dog burst into flames.
So, hope you're doing well.
Welcome to our new female poster.
Actually, let me rephrase that.
That sounds like a pin-up I'm putting on the wall.
But we've had a lurker, ladies and gentlemen, a woman who's been on the boards.
She started listening way back at the beginning of all of this in November of last year.
And she's been lurking on the boards, lo these many moons.
And now she has decided to make her voice heard.
And I think that's great.
I know it's tough for women.
With all of us loudmouth chatterbox head guys out there typing and posting and snarling back and forth.
We try to keep it civil and pleasant.
Occasionally our emotions run away with us.
But we're very, very pleased to get women's perspective.
I am all the more pleased because she is a mother, and that is a beautiful thing, of course, when done right.
And also, I aim to meet the young, and also aim to meet as many women through these conversations as possible, and mothers in particular, because they're the ones who are, you know, the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world, in my opinion.
And so, if I can meet and talk to, or at least chat with women through these conversations who are raising children, so much the better.
I think that's where the foundation of the future is to be found.
And I'm not going to break into that Whitney Houston song about the children and the future, but don't think it hasn't crossed my mind.
So, this morning, we are going to talk about something a little bit technical.
And I also forewarn you that not only is it a little bit technical, but also it is something that I think might just be my idea.
I'm not positive, I've just never read it anywhere, so it certainly is my idea, but I'm certainly not going to guarantee you that it's only my idea.
Other people may have arrived at this conclusion.
In a different form or at a different time and I'm just not aware of it.
I'm not too sure of it because it seems to me like a fairly decent idea and in my oh so extensive readings I'm sure I would have come across it.
So the question of logic is a very interesting one and the opponents of rational thought Usually make arguments something like the following.
They say, well, yes, logic is valid, but logic is conditional.
And it's this way that they rescue faith and God and countries and all this sort of silliness that's out there from rational critical analysis.
So what they say is they say logic is valid, but you can't prove logic.
So, because everything that is logical rests on faith, i.e.
a belief in logic that cannot be proven, and you can't prove logic, because in order to prove logic, you have to use logic, and you can't presuppose the existence of what it is you're trying to prove, right?
So, if I'm trying to prove to you that an orange exists, I don't say, okay, so the first thing we have to accept is this orange exists, and then I will prove to you that this orange exists.
Well, that's not valid, right?
I mean, that's begging the question.
So you can't say that logic exists in this viewpoint.
You can't say that logic exists.
You just have to accept that the laws of logic are valid, and you have to accept those on faith.
Now, once you do accept those on faith, then everything else follows.
Now, the problem with that, of course, and the reason that people make this argument, is they like to say, look, You, oh Mr.
Logician, you take logic on faith and then you reason from there.
And everything makes sense if you accept that logic is valid on faith.
I accept that God exists on faith and reason everything from there.
And everything is perfectly valid once you accept that premise on faith.
And this is true for all these other things as well, the family and the state and all this other nonsense.
So, what they do is they attempt to say that logic and faith are equivalent because they both require a leap of faith to begin with.
Logic and belief in God.
Belief in logic and belief in God both require a leap of faith to begin with, and after that it all makes sense.
So they're attempting to bring their belief in God to the same metaphysical or epistemological level of accuracy that logic and science have.
And they've done a very good job.
This has been something that has kept faith alive to a large degree for a couple thousand years.
Certainly since Aristotle, who first worked out these three laws of logic.
Now, obviously, for those of us on the rational side of things, it seems weird.
Like, it seems like a weird argument, but how do you counter the argument that logic requires a leap of faith to begin with?
That the validity, existence of and validity of logic requires a leap of faith?
Well, I think that the answer there is...
Obviously, to understand a little more of the three laws of logic, and we'll go over them briefly in a few minutes.
But the goal is to tie the three laws of logic...
Into physics. And if physics through the sense, like sensual evidence, if sensual evidence seems to be too much of a reach, if somebody says, well, I don't accept the evidence of the senses, even though they've listened to your argument, then you can go one step further and you can tie the three laws of logic into one's existence as a conscious being,
as a human being. Because if it is the case that the existence of a conscious human being necessitates or proves, or I would say proves, substantiates the laws of logic, then you no more need a leap of faith to believe in logic than you need a leap of faith to believe that you exist.
It simply is.
It's an axiom, but it's not an axiom that we have to take on faith.
It's back to Descartes' argument that even if everything around me is being manipulated by the demon, I exist because I exist to be manipulated.
I think, therefore I am.
Now, if somebody says, you can't prove that I exist, then this person is absolutely insane or completely and totally and utterly corrupt.
And so there's no point to discussing.
Because if somebody is telling you that they don't think that they exist, but they want to tell you this...
They want to convince you that they don't exist.
That's just such a ridiculous thing to say, that no reasonable thinker is ever going to make that proposition, because if they don't notice that something's wrong with that, then they are really just out to destroy your capacity to reason, and I would spend no more time around them than I would a bear-hugging leper.
So, I mean, I don't mean a leper who...
Oh, that metaphor almost worked nicely, didn't it?
Not a leper who hugs bears, but somebody who hugs me in a bear hug.
Oh boy. You know, there's nothing better than a metaphor you have to explain.
It's like a joke that if you go over it twice, people will go, oh, I get it.
So, let's see if we can't spend a little bit of time doing that.
But before all of that, and I do apologize for those who've taken this in school, I'll keep it very brief.
We, my brothers and sisters, will go over the laws of logic in a very, very brief manner.
And Ayn Rand has restated these.
I can't remember her names, but basically it comes out of Aristotle and it is one of the crowning achievements of human thought.
And it's well worth understanding them.
Now, I'm going to have to be slightly technical here.
I'll try and translate it into something that's a bit more practical.
Not because I think you can't handle it.
It's just that I remember when I was learning these, I was like, until somebody translated them for me.
So hopefully that will be of help to you as well.
So the first is the law of identity, which states basically if any statement is true, then it is true.
Or every proposition implies itself.
A implies A, or as Ayn Rand restated it, A is A. So if something is true, then it's true.
Now, the way that I work with that is if I establish with you the proposition that taxation is violence, Then that proposition is true.
If you follow the steps of logic and you don't get to choose, right?
We don't get to choose these things, right?
No more than we get to choose what the law of gravity is.
We can understand them or not or we can accept it or not, but we can't choose it, right?
So when you're proving something to someone...
It's not you trying to dominate them.
It's just you running them through the steps and you should always be open to correction.
And if the proposition is proven, then it's not up to you whether you accept it or not.
I always love it when people get mad at me for market anarchy ideas or get mad at me for saying, yes, everyone has the right to own nukes.
Like it's my opinion.
I mean... I mean, I've got a pretty strong logical case for it, and nobody takes issue with the logical case.
They just get mad at me and say, oh yeah?
Well, what about Hamas suicide bombers?
Are they allowed to own nukes?
Of course, this is all problems derived from the existence of the state, and therefore can't be used to prove the value of the state.
So anyway, A implies A, or A is A, means that if I prove to you that taxation is violence and theft and immoral, Then, as we move on to some other debate, we can't then say, oh, you can't then say, but taxation is good, right?
We've already established that.
So if a statement is true, then it's true.
It's just true. You then can't say something later where you ignore that and pretend that it's false.
So, there's a law of excluded middle states, I think, I can't remember what Ayn Rand called it, a law of non-contradiction or something like that, which states that everything must either be or not be, or everything is A or not A. And the way that I sort of work with this or understand this is that if I put forward a proposition, like a logical and verifiable proposition, then it's either true or it's not true.
And I am myself, and I'm also not everything else at the same time, right?
So if you have a cat, it is your cat, but it's not also a poplar tree and a piece of furniture at the same time.
Sorry, that's the law of the excluded middle.
The law of non-contradiction, or the law of contradiction as it's sometimes called, says that no statement can be both true and false at the same time.
Or A and not A. It's a contradiction and always false.
And that means that a statement, 2 plus 2 is 4, cannot be both true and false at the same time.
So we've got the law of identity, A is A, the law of excluded middle states, everything is A or not A, and something can't be both A and not A. So these are all pretty related.
But this is all the foundations of Aristotelian logic, or just logic, Euclidean geometry, physics, the scientific method, capitalism, all of the great things that have come out of human society have come out of a respect for these laws.
The mystics say, or the statists say, we have to take on faith.
And I would take issue with that.
I don't think that we have to take these laws on faith.
And I don't think that we have to say, well, they're self-evident, but I have to take that evidence on faith.
Axioms are always perceived to rest on something wobbly.
And the way that I think we can work this out is to simply say that logic...
Is not an absolute?
The question is, is logic absolute?
Well, logic is not absolute any more than the conclusions of science are absolute, or even the scientific method is absolute.
So, for instance, a scientific method demands reproducibility.
So if I perform an experiment like fusion in a jar, and I give you the recipe, so to speak, then you have to be able to do it too.
And if you can't do it, then there's something wrong.
And the reason that reproducibility is important is that matter has the same properties everywhere.
The same basic laws of physics operate everywhere, and matter has the same properties everywhere.
And therefore, it really can't be the case that if I perform something in my basement and then you perform exactly the same steps in your basement at the same altitude, the same temperature, you know, controlled experiments, and you come up with the complete opposite result, then something's wrong with my theory, because my theory is universal.
So there is a requirement that the scientific method demands reproducibility.
And the reason for that is that it was twofold.
One is that theories of any value are supposed to be universal.
Like if I say, my cat really likes to watch that fish.
That's my theory. Well, it's more of an observation than a theory because it's not...
I mean, it's predictive, I guess, for that cat.
But there's no real statistics in it.
And even if there were, it would only be for my cat and who else would care and so on.
So theories which other people are going to want to invest time proving or disproving have to have some sort of universal predictive value.
And so meteorology, that voodoo science, claims to have some predictive value and people invest a lot of time and energy into it and so on.
And so it has to be reproducible so that other people know whether it is a predictive and universal theory.
And the other thing is that, of course, it is claiming to be a predictive and universal theory, and therefore one of the ways that you test universality is to try a bunch of things in a bunch of different locations.
So that, to me, seems to be a principle of the scientific method that is derived from an observation of how things actually are.
So I seem to have the same arms from day to day.
I have a couple of little moles and a little bit of hair on my forearms, and they seem to be my arms.
Like, they're not replaced with hooks.
I don't suddenly have bejeweled female arms.
I don't have tentacles from day to day, and they're also not often replaced with electrical cables.
So I seem to have the same arms from day to day.
At a more subtle level, I seem to have the same personal characteristics from day to day, as I'm sure that you're aware from the nature of the podcast.
I'm not particularly moody.
I mean, I'm pretty happy, positive outlook on life.
I enjoy my life immensely.
I have the same characteristics.
Like, I don't wake up one day and say, uh, what's philosophy?
Like, if I learn something, it seems to stick, and I don't sort of open up my mouth for these morning drive and afternoon drive podcasts and have nothing to say.
Can you imagine?
So, I think that it's important to sort of understand that my physical nature, my personal nature, has It follows these laws of logic.
So I am myself.
I don't wake up tomorrow and have, like I'm suddenly speaking German, and know how to do the hula dance.
My personal characteristics change to a small degree with some effort if I want to change something about my personality, but you don't wake up with a different personality the next day.
You don't wake up with enormously, wildly, hugely different personal characteristics every day.
So I'm not buying heavy brushes with the expectation that tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up with, I don't know, like a thick head of hair.
I don't sort of say, well, I don't know what length of pants to buy because tomorrow, like today I'm six foot tall, but tomorrow I might be seven foot tall or five foot tall.
This just doesn't occur. So I am myself from day to day with the natural deterioration that occurs with aging, which hasn't hit me at all yet, but I'm sure will come.
I mean, I try and take good care of myself and exercise a lot and so on, but at 39 years old, I do feel like I'm entering into the prime of my life, which is a great thing.
So I am myself.
My body is myself. My body doesn't change its nature from day to day.
There are times where, when I'm dreaming, that my body will change its nature.
Not very often, but occasionally.
Certainly my body, like physics will change, like I'm able to fly and all that kind of wonderful stuff.
And that occurs, but I know that it's a dream, and we've talked about this before, because everything contradicts itself.
So when I wake up, I'm the same person.
I'm in the same bed. Everything is exactly the same.
If I lose my keys, I don't think, oh my god, my keys have achieved sentience and walked away.
Because I've got two keys on the chain, maybe they could do a hoppy, jumpy thing.
I don't think that.
The law of identity is...
Something which we experience.
I don't have to take it on faith any more than I have to take it on faith that I exist.
I simply do exist, and I know that because I exist.
Because I'm experiencing my existence every single waking moment and a good chunk of my sleeping moments.
So, that's not something that I have to take on faith.
So, if somebody says, well, you have to take logic on faith, the first thing that I would say is, well, do you have to take your own existence on faith, or is it just something that is?
And so the second, the law of the excluded middle, the second law of logic, everything is either, must either be or not be.
Everything is A or non-A. So I am myself, I am human.
Stefan Basil Molyneux, for those who didn't know my middle name, yes, it's a spice, and also the name of the guy on Fawlty Towers.
I am myself, and I am not the car in front of me.
I am not my steering wheel.
As they say in Fight Club, you are not your bank account.
You are not your cockies.
You are not the contents of your wallet.
And that's all true, right? I mean, the reason that that statement seems kind of powerful is it's kind of true, and it's something we forget, right?
But I am not myself and a poplar tree and an electric cable and a piece of grass and a cloud simultaneously.
Those things are all themselves and not other things simultaneously.
So this is, again, something that I experience.
I don't wake up in the morning and find half a Frisbee jutting out from my breast.
I mean, I don't find that I somehow merge with the carpet when I walk.
You will see that kind of stuff in particularly horrifying films.
In the outtakes of a film I thought was quite good, especially the second half, Girl Interrupted.
In the outtakes, a girl sees her hand turn into a tentacle in the mirror, and that's terrifying to her, and of course it would be, right?
When the nature of reality changes.
And this is the problem that I had with Swept Away, I think it is, the Ghibli film that a friend sent me, that everything's properties kept changing and there was no constants and some animals walked on the ground and some floated in the air and parents, when you turned away and looked back, turned into pigs.
And nothing had any particular...
That's a world of mental illness, right?
It's a world of schizophrenia and psychotic delusions.
And it's a terrifying world because your basic reality processing is misfiring or firing in contradictory manners and the fault is always with the senses.
This is how we know that there's an illness.
The fault is always not with the senses but with the interpretation.
I mean, usually. I mean, occasionally you can get illnesses which will affect the senses but for the most part it is with the interpretation.
So, the fact that I know that I am myself and not a truck or a road sign or anything like that.
I wonder where I'm getting my metaphors from this morning.
My metaphor generator still seems to be asleep.
So, that's how I know that the second law of logic is true.
It's just based on everything that I experience in my life and have experienced and will experience.
Now, the law of contradiction, no statement can be true and false.
So, A and not A is a contradiction, and thus always false.
And so, if I say that my car, my proposition is my car is both a car and a horse simultaneously, and that's what the proof of my political theory rests on, if you can grant me that stretch of imagination, then we know that that's not the case.
Because when I go down to get in my car in the morning, I don't think, gee, I better bring down a food bag of meal just in case my car has turned into a horse.
And I don't think that my car has turned into a sentient carnivorous creature and thus need to check the door hinges for new teeth and all of these guys just start my car up.
And it doesn't change overnight, right?
The material properties of my car are fantastically stable from day to day to day.
And this same thing is true for me as well.
So I don't think that I am both at home and at work at the same time, right?
So if somebody says to me, like if I say to my boss, gee, I'd really like to work from home tomorrow because of X, Y, and Z, and then my boss says, no, no, no, I need you here for a meeting, I don't then say, oh no, I'll be both places.
And he says, no, no, no, not like a webcam, like I want you physically here for the meeting.
I don't then say to him, well, yes, no, I understood what you said.
It's just that I will be working from home and here at the same time.
Well, he's not going to go for that, right?
And he would probably be a little bit worried about my mental health if I said something like that.
And so if somebody says that you have to take this law of non-contradiction on faith, then I would say, great, if you can both sit in front of me and tap me on the shoulder from behind at the same time, then I will understand that it's a real leap of faith to believe in this.
But if you can't quite manage to pull that off...
Then I'm going to have to tell you that you believe in it as strongly as I do.
It's your experience. It's my experience.
It's not something we have to take on faith because it is the nature of the reality that we agree on every time.
Because for something to be taken on faith, there must be an alternative.
And if in no time in our life have we ever experienced the alternative, and if science, physics, and empirical, sensual reality, reproducibility, every experimentation all confirm the same thing, And if somebody experiences themselves as a discrete biological entity from day to day without worrying that they're going to turn into a lamppost the following day, if they're not taking out, I'm going to turn into a lamppost insurance, right?
Because see, we take insurance for, I don't know, cancer or things like that.
Life insurance. But we don't take insurance for, I'm going to burst into flames and turn into a mythical bird that flies around, be ground up into ashes, and then come back to life, and so I'm going to need some asbestos oven mitts to work my computer.
I'd really like to take out... I mean, people don't take insurance out for that, because that's not something that's going to happen.
And so, the laws of logic don't need to be taken on faith.
And so you can say to somebody, if they say, well, you have to take the laws of logic on faith, but no, I don't have to take the laws of logic on faith any more than I have to take on faith that I exist, because my existence follows all of the discrete laws of logic.
I am myself.
If I have a proposition that says I am myself, then I also can't have an axiom which then says I am both myself and a turnip at the same time.
I also can't have a proposition which says I am going to be both in Seattle and Nunavut at the same time.
Because that's the law of non-contradiction states that I'm either here or I'm here.
I can't be in both places simultaneously.
Now I know I'm going to get some physics geeks who are going to write in to me and say, well, yes, but you see, down at the atomic level and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, listen, you know, when people have come up with a...
Comprehensible theory. I remember being pretty excited reading about it in my mid-teens.
I've got to tell you now, like 25 years later, it just seems like a whole bunch of state-funded noodling.
And I would sure love for people to be able to prove this stuff in a logical, consistent manner, to have people stop arguing about this grand field theory that explains everything.
I mean, all of that stuff is just state-sponsored noodling.
It's all like this climate change.
I mean, there's a whole swathes of the scientific community completely addicted to state money, and it would seem to me that since no capitalists are funding this, that it's all just a load of nonsense.
You know, I could be wrong.
This is perfectly conditional. I'm certainly no one to make that final decision.
But it just seems to me that people coming up with weird and strange ideas of physics just have been around for a long time and have yet to come up with anything consistent and provable.
And I know it could take some time and this and that, but it will have to be logical and consistent when it's done, right?
So they will have to find some way of explaining it and predicting it when it's done.
So, from that standpoint, I don't worry so much about that.
Well, the electron is here and here simultaneously, and the sea turtles, thousands of miles apart, both get born at the same time, and there's communication and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, that just seems to me kind of silly, but that's fine.
I mean, I'm certainly willing to keep an open mind.
It's just that that's pretty high standard of proof to say to me that two things are in the...
Like, something is in two places simultaneously.
That seems to be more a problem of...
Of recording the information then.
Because, of course, it doesn't explain, if matter at the base level, at the atomic level, is random, how it's so incredibly stable at the sensual or the meta level.
And that's the level that we're working at.
If matter is so unstable, why is it that I have the same personality from day to day?
That electrical energy, biochemical energy, doesn't change.
Ha! And if you've ever tried to change someone's mind through using logic, I think it's fair to say that personality structures are fairly rigid, and it's not easy to change people's minds, which would not speak that well to the randomness of matter.
But also, what we're talking about here is logic as derived from sensual reality, because this is all that people can deal with, right?
It's all that people can work with is sensual reality.
So, when it comes to me figuring out what makes sense in the world, what's logical, what's not, I can work with empirical sensual reality and the laws of logic.
If there's something which requires 15 particle accelerators and a $12 trillion grant from the NSA, then it's sort of hard for me to say, well, I'm going to give up all of my sensual evidence and all of my capacity to reason Because some physicist over there in some state-sponsored physics land has come up with something that he claims defies every single one of my senses,
every single scrap of my life's experience, every single sense I have of my own identity, and every experiential thing that has ever occurred to me.
If somebody comes and says, well, that's all false because I got an electron to show up in two places at the same time, then I'm going to say, well, that's great for you.
I think that's wonderful, but it's going to be a little bit more work for you to say to me that my entire life experience is null and void because you've got something to occur in a particle accelerator half a mile under the ground.
Sorry, that doesn't really cut it for me.
That's very much akin to people saying, well, I had a religious vision, and therefore you need to believe in God.
I'd be like, well, check your lithium, check your sodium levels first, and then we'll talk, right?
But I just don't have any faith in it, right?
Nobody is going to be able to say to me that all of my sense data, all of my life experience, all of the logic that I've worked out, that none of that is valid.
And because something has occurred that I can't re-verify, right?
Like if somebody says to me, well, you see, if you put the baking soda here and you put the magnesium over there, then suddenly you're able to be in two places simultaneously.
I'd be like, holy crap, I'll give that a shot.
Absolutely. But when it comes to this kind of physics, it's all completely unreproducible.
And that really is taking people's word on faith that it happened, that it's real, that it's reproducible, that it's verifiable, and of course that it completely overrides.
And I can't reproduce it.
I mean, that is exactly the same as receiving religious visions, right?
I saw God. I talked to God.
So you need to get rid of everything that you've ever believed because I had...
I just... I know that this is going into grounds that is going to make me sort of sound like closed-minded and anti-physics or whatever.
It's not the case at all. I have huge respect for physics.
My God! Scientific method capitalism are the crowning achievements of mankind.
But I just find that there's noodley stuff where you get all these physics texts that are out there which are used by people to deny sense experience and to sort of indicate that matter is weird and flexy and we can't be sure of anything.
That's not the point of physics.
I think that's either a misinterpretation of what's going on at advanced physics or...
It is people who are desperately clawing for government funds, coming up with freaky stuff to get attention.
That just seems to me the case.
So don't worry so much about the advanced physics argument.
Just ask people that if they can reproduce it in your living room, or they can give you any way to reproduce it, then you will be more than happy to look at it, but otherwise you're going to wait for the proof.
I mean, you're going to wait for the proof.
I think that would be a reasonable thing to say.
Because otherwise, you can accept anything that anyone in a white coat says, right?
You're back in Milgram's experiment where people are shocking each other to death because someone in a white coat is telling them to.
So, I don't take that.
Sense experience is pretty powerful.
The stability of reality is exactly what you would expect from an objective and empirical universe.
And so my basic argument is that the laws of physics, or the laws of logic, are entirely derived from the laws of physics and the laws of biology, I guess you could say, too, but more so the laws of physics.
A is A is your cat is your cat.
I mean, that makes sense, right?
And the law of the excluded middle is that your cat is either your cat or it's something else.
The law of non-contradiction is your cat can't be both its cat and something else at the same time.
It can be your cat, and then it can be a decomposing cat later, but it can't be a lively, frisky cat and a decomposing cat at the same time.
It's the basic laws.
And so the same thing is true of your own personal identity.
You are you. You are not both you and something else, and you are either you or you are something else.
You can't sort of be both. And so it just seems to me that the laws of logic are not things that need to be taken on faith.
Anymore than the fact that you exist.
So if somebody says, the fact that I exist I do not need to take on faith, then because the laws of logic are entirely derived from one's own personal existence, then it would seem to me that...
If they say, I don't need to have faith to believe that I exist, then they don't need to have faith in the laws of logic because it's self-evident.
So there's no one who can say to you, you have to take the laws of logic on faith.
I mean, that's just nonsense. And if they get confused by the whole you are you and not a cat argument, then you can just talk about how the physical world works and say that if they believe that you have to take the laws of logic on faith, then...
You can sort of say to them, okay, well, if you can be in two places simultaneously, like if you can be to my left and to my right simultaneously, then absolutely I'm going to realize that there's something quite wrong with the laws of logic as far as I understand them and I'm perfectly willing to re-examine them and figure out what's going on.
That makes sense to me. And so if they say, well, the law of identity doesn't work, it's like, well, if you can be both yourself and, you know, this glass of beer at the same time, let me know.
If you can sort of vanish, inhabit the glass of beer, speak to me from the lip, and then come back as yourself, then I think that would be pretty cool.
Oh, X-Men. And let's talk about that.
But if they can't do any of that, then it would seem to me that they have no right to say that the laws of logic have to be taken on faith.
And finally, the laws of logic being taken on faith, to me, is very, very silly, as a basic concept.
Because if you say, well, the laws of logic have to be taken on faith, just like God, well, sensual evidence proves every waking moment and most sleeping moments that the laws of logic are valid.
And yet, we have never seen or experienced or talked to God or have any proof of God whatsoever.
The existence of God, as I talked about in Podcast 13 way back then, the existence of God denies every evidence of the senses and every postulate of logic, whereas the laws of logic are perfectly derived from daily evidence, daily sensual evidence of the stability of material reality.
And so... When I said at the beginning that the laws of logic were conditional, it's entirely true.
They're conditional upon the facts of reality.
Because the laws of logic are really laws of physics.
That's all they are. They're laws of physics.
They're the basis of physics.
Laws of logic are the basis of scientific methodology, scientific method.
So they are conditional upon the behavior of matter, and if matter tomorrow starts behaving in some completely contradictory manner, then we're going to have to revisit the laws of logic because they won't apply to anything anymore.
Laws of logic will then apply universally about as much as the laws of the logic of your dreams applies to everyone else.
I can fly, therefore everyone can fly.
Therefore, flight is possible. I mean, it can fly in my dreams.
Of course, that wouldn't make any sense.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
We'll talk a little bit more about it this afternoon.
But don't worry about, I mean, people who say you've got to take the laws of logic on faith, just like God.
They're making no sense.
And so you can just come back to them with the rebuttals that are in here and let me know how your conversations go.
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