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June 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:08:55

267 Call In Show 4 June 2006, 4pm EST: Looks, Values and Free Will

Looks, Values and Free Will

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	So, thanks very much everyone for joining.
	It's 4 o'clock on Sunday, June the 4th, 2006.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	And we have on board a number of people who listen to the board.
	Ooh, see that clever duplicate use of the word board there?
	That's the kind of quality broadcasting you get from this group.
	Well, I thought I would just not...
	I don't really have a topic for today because I've noticed that when I come up with topics, there's a spectacular, if not deafening, silence from people.
	So I'm just going to open it right up to people as a whole to ask whatever it is that they want.
	But what I will say is that I was watching a Dr.
	Phil and they were talking about looks.
	You know, the Dr. Phil son is, I guess, a fairly handsome guy.
	So he was put... in makeup and he you know he was given like pimple scars and he had sort of a creepy pervert long hairdo and he was given a sort of fat suit and so he was put onto this kind of look and then he went into malls and started asking for directions and he applied for work and he was talking to women in stores and of course nobody was giving him any eye contact he went to shop for a bathing suit and he wasn't given any eye contact and so on And,
	of course, everyone was completely shocked about all of this and surprised.
	And then what happened was he went back to his sort of regular look.
	And he then went out and did exactly the same things and of course got the completely opposite response from people.
	Everyone was friendly and chatty and sort of happy to be in his presence and so on.
	And I thought that was interesting and you do hear a lot of this sort of stuff.
	It's so much taken for granted that everyone and their dog should always be absolutely opposed to judging people by their looks.
	But, of course, the whole show was about don't be shallow and judge people by their looks and so on.
	And, you know, I guess the one thing that you never really hear mentioned, although it seems fairly obvious to me, is that Dr.
	Phil's wife, Robin, is a very pretty girl.
	And then the son, who is supposed to be helping everybody figure out that looks aren't important and you should look below the surface and so on, He invites his girlfriend up on the stage and of course she's this stunning tanned California blue-eyed blonde with high cheekbones and a slim waist.
	To me it's quite amazing and I'm trying to think of somebody who has really, like in the media, somebody who's actually said that looks aren't important and then you look at their wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever Or friends even, and do they actually have that kind of situation showing up for real in their life?
	Or is it something that people just sort of say?
	So I was just sort of wondering if anyone has any opinion about that.
	It's not really a topic, it's just something I was kind of curious, whether that is something that people occur.
	And it's always a tough thing to talk about because nobody wants to say, yes, this happens to me because I'm unattractive.
	And, you know, for those who've read The God of Atheists, there's a pretty...
	There's an autobiographical bit in it for me, wherein I sort of did the ugly duckling to, I guess not exactly Prince, but certainly better looking duckling when I was about 14 or so.
	I had a sort of a great makeover from, actually this was my brother at the time, he was away in England for a couple of years, came back.
	And got me out of my polyester and, I believe, brill cream at the time and got me into cool clothes and a great haircut and stuff like that.
	So I really did have that kind of transformation and noticed that there really was an enormous difference before and afterwards.
	But I was just wondering if people have sort of had that experience of what they think of that or is it something that just people say that's never going to change or what's people's opinions about it?
	Hell out. I notice a big difference if I'm wearing glasses or not.
	If I wear lenses, I get a lot more eyes from girls.
	Now, could it be that you can just see them?
	Lenses, man. So, did you wear glasses when you were a kid?
	Like, did you have a big difference when you started wearing glasses, or did you always wear glasses?
	I wore them from pretty early age, about six or seven, no, seven or eight, around seven.
	So you've noticed a big difference when you don't wear the glasses, you get a lot more...
	I was around 10, sorry.
	Right, right. So, pre-puberty, I guess, which is the key.
	But when you got contacts or just decided to walk around blind as a bat, did you notice a really strict, was it an immediate thing, like the moment you sort of went out without glasses that there was a strong change in how people reacted to you?
	Well, when you're walking around in town, you just tend to look around a bit, you know.
	And it's clear that it was pretty apparent to me that when I didn't have my glasses on, that girls would look back more.
	I mean it wasn't a huge sample all the time, but it was pretty noticeable and I was aware of it.
	So yeah. Now, did you then end up, because I certainly know that from my own experience, having gone through one of these makeovers, that I did end up being more confident because I felt I looked better.
	And of course, when I say confident, what I mean is my false self managed to swell up to the point where I could actually sort of go out and do things with women, sort of ask women out and so on.
	Did you find that your own sort of romantic or sexual confidence also increased with the past?
	Like, did it become a sort of self-feeding mechanism?
	Because it's one of the things that annoys me about looks, which is that, you know, people are confident and they think, ooh, it's because I'm just naturally so confident.
	When the fact of the matter is that they've had a self-reinforcing kind of confidence that comes out of being physically attractive, which they then, of course, like everyone else on the planet, end up ascribing to their own personal own glories and characteristics.
	Did you find that you sort of had an upward spiral of self-reinforcing improvement in your level of confidence through that process?
	Well, I view it as a tool that you know that you've got a way of being more noticeable.
	But I stopped wearing lenses at one point because they weren't very comfortable for me.
	But I know that if I'll ever move to eye surgery or whatever, that it will make me better looking at least towards other people.
	But as far as confidence goes, I think you're totally right that people who are very attractive and so on, That it's a natural result of it.
	That they get more confidence out of it.
	And it's a result of that.
	It's not something that you are born with innately or something.
	It's purely the circumstances that shape your personality, I think.
	I think that's right.
	And one of the things that...
	They had both Dr. Phil's son, whose name escapes me.
	Do you remember? Jay. Jay?
	No, that's the initial. But what was his name?
	Jay. Jay what?
	We could go on for about 20 minutes, but we won't.
	Because I can only speak so much through the choking.
	they had these people go out there and then they reversed themselves.
	And these people said that over the course of the day, when they tried to approach people, tried to get jobs, at one point this J guy, when he was pimped out in these horrible rags and bad makeup, sent a drink to his own girlfriend and she sort of sent it back.
	And the manager sort of tried to discourage him from sending at the restaurant, tried to discourage him from sending the drink because I guess he didn't want to freak her out, didn't know who he was.
	And then when he came back said, oh, it turns out she's married and this and that.
	And so there was sort of a lot of falsehoods going on.
	And the thing I think that bothers me about all of this is that a couple of days ago on Dr.
	Phil, they had this woman on who had written a book about how to overcome an illness.
	I think she had multiple sclerosis.
	And he was sort of almost fawning over her or whatever, right?
	And it's like, wow, it's just so great that you've had all of this ability to give so much back and blah, blah, blah.
	And the woman was stunning.
	And then every time Dr. Phil has someone on his show who's like a personal trainer or a doctor or a successful executive or something, they're always really good looking.
	And I don't know if it's just because...
	And of course, the question is around Dr.
	Phil. Well, of course, the difference is he's like six foot six, right?
	So he's got the height thing, which makes up for a lot for...
	At least according to my friend's theory, makes up for quite a bit.
	But I think what bothers me the most is that people say, I have all this confidence and I'm going to transfer it to you by giving you tapes or books or lecture series or whatever.
	I've got all this confidence which I'm going to transfer to you.
	As if they've sort of earned it, and it's sort of like, for me, it's like a kid who inherits a two million dollar rich fund writing a book on how to become rich and then trying to sell it to people.
	Because, I mean, that kid didn't, he just happened to inherit this, he's like a trustafarian, as they call it, just happened to inherit all this money in the same way that people inherit good looks.
	And then the personal attributes that they get out of those good looks, they then try and sell to other people, as if the cause, like, while trying to obscure the cause and effect, And I think somehow I kind of get that feeling as sort of mean.
	You know, it's kind of a mean thing to do, to say, you just need to believe in yourself and you need to do this and you need to have faith in yourself and you need to have a plan and you need to, you know, as if we're all just sort of retarded, those of us who aren't in the sort of top tier of beauty.
	Without any personal recognition of the personal involuntary inherited factors that contributed to that great degree of confidence.
	And so whenever I see these sort of motivational speakers and so on, like Anthony Robbins, like Mr.
	Teeth, He's got these sort of banana hands and he's like six foot eight.
	And, you know, I just sort of think, well, yeah, I guess if you've got that kind of Ken doll look and the sort of hair and the lantern jaw and the six foot eight frame, and yeah, I guess you can be a personal motivator and so on.
	But I would be really impressed if like Danny DeVito, some Danny DeVito lookalike, and I don't mean to pick on Danny DeVito.
	It could be anyone, right? But Someone who looks that way, becoming a motivational speaker, that to me would be really, really impressive.
	Because at the moment it just seems kind of like a show, like religion.
	It doesn't really seem like anything real, and I think a lot of people get kind of sucked into that stuff thinking it's transferable.
	Over to you, board. Player left.
	So what you're trying to say to us is that you're actually a gigolo, right?
	Kidding, all kidding aside, Adia, I agree with what you had to say.
	Steph is giving me a very strange look.
	All kidding aside, if you've not read the manifesto.
	I would agree with what you had to say, and I think what I noticed when I was watching the Dr.
	Phil episode today was that Dr.
	Phil Sanjay, he was made out to look very eerie.
	He was unkempt, he was disheveled, greasy hair, bad skin, unshaven.
	I mean, he wasn't just a guy who had bad facial features.
	He was someone who didn't look after himself in any degree, and I think the relationship between one's looks and self-esteem Or one's self-confidence and one's looks can evolve for sure.
	There are some people who are overweight or who do have, I mean, they're born with crooked noses or wide-set eyes or whatever it is.
	But they look after themselves and that's where their self-confidence comes through.
	Or enormous and strangely erotic foreheads.
	Big chatty forehead? Big chatty forehead, absolutely.
	But go on, sorry. That's all I wanted to say.
	No, I mean, I think that's a good point, that there is a difference between sort of grooming and looks.
	But I think it's not quite as simple as that.
	And I'm sort of just going back into my own personal experience here, that the grooming that I didn't have...
	Before my great makeover, I didn't have because I'd received no instruction from my mom about how to groom and hair, you know, she cut my hair once with pinking shears, which gave me that, it looked like a little awning, you know, like it was an Italian deli or something.
	So, it is something that, if you don't get the instruction, Then you don't understand the impact that it has as easily or nearly as easily.
	I was a smart kid, but I just never really got it.
	It wasn't this fear that really meant anything to me, this whole grooming thing.
	Now, once I got the makeover, I got the grooming thing, and it all began to become self-reinforcing.
	And I don't know what that initial thing is that gets people to understand it, but it's not just a matter of everyone's equal, but some people choose to groom and some people choose not to groom.
	It is a long series of, I think, either abusive or withdrawal of instructions or mentoring that ends up with somebody...
	Like, if I'm at work, and occasionally this will happen, I'll be in a meeting at work, and I'll be sitting next to someone, and they just smell.
	You know, not lilacs, but like dead lilacs from World War II or something.
	And what is it that leads someone to be sort of in their 30s and 40s and not shower regularly?
	Well, obviously, it's not not being married would be one.
	Because I remember I could get fairly funky before.
	Just kidding. But, yeah, I think it's a lot to do with the mentoring that you get, which leads you into grooming or not grooming.
	And you can do a lot with grooming, and it certainly is the case that people who don't have any grooming usually have some kinds of issues going on.
	That are scary to people or alarming to people, especially in the case of the Dr.
	Phil thing. They did go a bit too far and sort of pimping him out like a pedophile.
	But I think what happened was because he was very confident and at the same time was so physically off-putting, people got kind of freaked, right?
	Because they're looking at this guy who's really confident and yet looks really...
	Freaky. And that's not a good combination to come across.
	Like an enterprising and energetic crazy guy is not the person you want to sort of start chatting with.
	So I just thought it was interesting.
	But I think your point, Eddie, is well taken that grooming can do an enormous amount.
	And I think people judge a lot more by grooming than they do by a lot of other things.
	And it says a lot about the person who doesn't groom him or herself.
	I mean, it really says something about their level of self-esteem and self-confidence.
	It's their level of marriage, I think.
	The level of marriageability.
	Now, we've had comments here, which I think would be interesting.
	When I said, all kidding aside, somebody wrote, all kidding aside equals Stefan aside.
	So I guess if we edit out the bad humor, we end up with a lot of dead air and some intelligent comments from other people.
	And also, real men don't wash is true to some degree.
	Real men also don't pass on their genes, which is why there are so few of them left.
	Because they don't wash, they're tough to bet.
	So... So, now, if anyone else has any other comments on that topic, no problem.
	I open it up completely wide to anything that anybody wants to talk about.
	I have an issue with one of your recent podcasts about broken logic with physics.
	And I was wondering do you mean that in a literal sense?
	Or do you mean use physics as a kind of an example, an analogy and not an instrument specifically?
	Because it doesn't make much sense to try to prove logic and I'm not really sure why you wanted to do that.
	So what do you have to say?
	Could I just ask you before, I hate to answer a question, but the question, could you just tell me, do you know a lot about physics?
	No, but I don't know what relationship that it has.
	No, there's no problem, I just wanted to establish...
	I'm not a bilatant, yeah.
	I'm not an expert, no.
	Okay, good, because I just wanted to know the degree of latitude I could give myself with making stuff up, so it's always very important for me to figure out the degree of knowledge within the other people first.
	So physics, obviously, there's a great magician at the core of the Earth who tells us that logic exists.
	Christine is now leaving the room.
	Did you get some wine coming out your nose?
	Is that what happened? Sorry about that.
	My purpose in the podcast was to say that the three laws of logic are self-evident due to the behavior of matter.
	So for instance... You know, the law which says a thing is itself and nothing else in the instant is something that we know about as being valid, not because we make it up in our head, but because we get the ideas of logic from the stability of matter as comes through our senses.
	So what I'm saying is that the highest abstractions of logic, the three laws of Aristotle and everything that gets built off of that, Occurred within our minds because of the stability of matter.
	And so for people to say, well, can you prove logic?
	Or there are different types of logic and so on, I think is not valid.
	Because I think that logic is what we derive from the stability of material objects.
	The fact that I can't be both...
	Here and in New Orleans at the same time, and the fact that I can't be both myself and a stereo system at the same time and so on, that the laws of logic are deducted from the stability of matter, and therefore physics, which describes the stability of matter, also supports the laws of logic which are derived from that stability of matter.
	Does that help at all?
	I don't think we really need to look at matter at all.
	We have to accept it as true because if we even try to prove logic, how would you go about it?
	Would you abandon, for instance, identity?
	Would you abandon the excluded middle in order to do that?
	That itself is a loaded question because I'm asking you to be logical about proving logic, so that's my problem with it.
	I certainly understand that you can't disprove or prove logic without implicitly accepting the premises of logic, so we're exactly on the same page about that.
	But what I would say if somebody said to me, prove logic, or I don't believe in logic, I would ask them, if they felt that the three laws of logic were invalid, then I would say to them that one way that they could enter that question Or enter that topic would be to look at the behavior of physical reality,
	of material reality, and if they could find sensual evidence of matter that contradicted the three laws of logic, then they would have a stronger basis for saying there's another kind of logic or whatever.
	And of course, I don't know, I really don't have any expertise or any ability to speak at any deep level about You know, the quantum physics and super-string theory and all that kind of stuff because I have a very, very rough understanding of that, like, you know, 12 science articles and a couple of documentaries.
	But that's why I sort of say to essential matter, right, because that's what we're sort of working with from the standpoint of when logic was developed and what we can work with as individuals.
	It becomes an article of religious faith to say there's all these 15 dimensions and super-strings and so on because there's no proof for it yet as far as I understand.
	So I'm not saying that I would ever get into a debate with somebody and try and disprove logic to them, because you're absolutely right.
	It's totally impossible. But I would say that logic is not something that we invent in our head, right?
	Because logic, you could make up systems of thought or a system of language and so on that all had internal consistency, but which were not necessarily something which connected to the real world as well, right?
	Because you have to sort of get things out there in the scientific method into the real world to communicate with others.
	And so I would say that logic is consistent, and you can't disprove it, but that it's not subjective and made up within our own heads, but it's actually tied to and derived from the behavior of material reality.
	Does that help? I'd say it's real but not real in the empirical sense because empirical statements always have a degree of uncertainty attached to them and logic is the very means by which we can achieve knowledge, if we can. It's the superstructure of reality, we could say that.
	If something defies logic, that something does not have a meaning, you know?
	And I don't think we should limit ourselves to the empirical reality.
	We should, for instance, in that presumed dialogue you had in the podcast, We have the man who tried to present mysticism at the same level as logic itself,
	because logic is based on a few axions, and that logic would be relative in that sense, but it was actually impossible to achieve any kind of meaning without logic, so we should not limit ourselves to it.
	I agree with you there completely.
	I think, though, that there's two things around empiricism.
	The first is, in the scientific method, right?
	So the first is, what are you measuring, right?
	And so that's sort of the empirical data that you get when you sort of record the wavelengths or the vibrations in some sort of geological sense or whatever.
	So then there's the content of what it is that you're recording, and that stuff is, to a large degree, you're right.
	I mean, it's conditional.
	So, assuming that gravity is true, such and such is going to happen, but it's all conditional.
	But I think logic is not that.
	I think that would be, in the world of logic, that is an argument.
	Like, that would be an argument like 2 plus 2 is 4.
	But logic is something that relates in science to the scientific method, right?
	So in the scientific method, you do experiments, and in logic, experiments are the equivalent of arguments.
	But logic is the equivalent of the scientific method.
	Now, there's no scientist that I could ever imagine is that...
	Who would ever say the scientific method itself...
	Is conditional. They would say that the conclusions reached by the scientific method are conditional, but the scientific method itself is not conditional.
	So, I would sort of say the same thing is true of logic, that some of the conclusions we would reach around logic may be conditional, but that logic itself is a methodology for determining truth and falsehood is not conditional.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah. You place your access on...
	That may not be specifically wrong, but it's somewhat natural.
	The statements, they can extract it from the general meaning of the text.
	Like, you have to prove a lot of it, and that's absurd.
	It is absurd. I fully understand that.
	But the question is, how do you answer somebody who says that you simply have faith in logic the same way that I have faith in God?
	And I'm not saying... I mean, if you've got somebody who's a hardcore mystic, there's just no way.
	But if you can say that it's not a matter of having faith in logic, and it's not a matter of logic being self-evident, but that logic is derived from the evidence of the senses or the behavior of matter or the stability of matter...
	Then you at least, I think, can get a step forward so that it's not at least a sort of stalemate that they appear, it's like, ah, I guess we're equal here and you didn't even know it.
	It's just a way of moving the debate one step forward.
	I'm not going to say it's going to change everybody's mind.
	But I do think that, you know, the old question, which is probably one of the first questions that we all think about, or that, you know, when you're sitting around 15 and trying to be deep, right, you sort of say that, well, how do you know whether...
	This isn't just a dream, and we're going to wake up, and how do you know the difference between dreams and waking?
	And this is something that mystics, of course, talk about sometimes as well.
	And the answer to that, of course, is consistency, right?
	I mean, it's that when we are dreaming, we have elephants turn into butterflies, and then a river of water turns into a river of fire, and I spend a couple hours without scratching myself.
	I mean, there's lots of things that never happen in the real world That occur in dreams.
	But of course in the real world, we know the difference between the two because of that kind of consistency.
	And so we don't worry about the logic of dreams other than in a sort of vague metaphorical way.
	But we do have logic in the real world and the difference is that the behavior of matter and events and people in dreams is completely inconsistent.
	Well, not completely. It's largely inconsistent.
	Whereas the behavior of matter and people in the world is very consistent.
	It's completely consistent. And so we have a way of differentiating between these two.
	And that's how we know that mysticism is sort of a dream and a fantasy.
	And it doesn't have the same sort of truth value that logic does.
	Or at least that's one of the ways. Now, the question...
	Sorry, he just typed it in.
	Logic is true prior to experience, therefore not empirical.
	And I think that's interesting, but I wonder the degree to which we would have logic if we did not have the evidence of the senses and or if the behavior of matter were not stable or as unstable as were us in dreams.
	I don't think that we would really come up with the idea.
	I mean, there's no real way to tell, right?
	But if you could, you know, completely cast aside any kind of ethics and you could take a baby and induce a lifelong coma where all they did was dream and find some way to enter that dream and talk to them, I'm not sure that they would come up with something like logic or the scientific method because they would be in a world where matter and identity had no stability.
	And so I just don't know that they would come up with logic in that kind of situation.
	I, um...
	What's going on? Anyway, truth is the result of an evaluation process, which is based on observation.
	So if you say that logic is true prior to experience, that means it's a different kind of knowledge, but there are no two kinds of knowledge.
	There's only one kind of knowledge, which is empirical knowledge of the material world.
	As always, I agree completely with Francois.
	I'm saying it's knowledge, but it's not empirical.
	It's not liable to question in the same manner that scientific experiments are.
	Could you make the...
	We can't know ideas in their pure form, yes, and we do know, we do acquire knowledge for the physical world, of course, there's nothing else, but knowledge is not necessarily bound to a kind of experience.
	Sure it is. We can derive The laws of logic, and we can know that they are true, but we can also know that they are true without our need to know them, to discover them, you know?
	No, there isn't any knowledge that is not derived from experience.
	You can't give me an example.
	The laws of logic are justified by our experience, because we observe the nature of things through our every observation.
	The laws of logic are implicit in any act of cognition, as you know.
	And you can't give me an example.
	For example, if you say the circle.
	Well, you've got a circle, and there's no circle, right?
	There's no such thing as a circle.
	I mean, everything in nature, you can't observe a perfect circle, right?
	But the circles are extrapolated concepts from the facts of reality.
	I mean, we observe things that are like circles.
	Things that are more or less like circles.
	I mean, we extrapolate perfect forms from looking at things around us.
	I think...
	Sorry, go ahead. If by what you're saying you mean that logic is always there and it doesn't need us to figure it out, well, technically that's true of everything.
	I mean, but the thing is, truth is an active process.
	You can't just say that logic is true Without observation, because that's simply not true.
	Well, and I think, sorry to...
	Can I just jump in for a sec?
	Because I think that the reason why this is a very important debate, if not the most important debate, is that the arguments that are brought against logic is that if logic is derived from the senses, then it's conditional and it's empirical, then things might change tomorrow, so people feel like it can't be absolute and so on.
	But the other problem is that if logic is not derived from the senses, then where is it derived from?
	It must be some plane or realm of reality.
	I'm not saying you're saying this, Adi, but the argument generally is that if logic is not derived from the senses, then it must be derived from some other plane, and maybe that's where God lives.
	It's the Platonic ideal realm or the new aminal realm of Kant and so on.
	But I think that we can deal with both if we sort of look at...
	How the scientific method works is what it does is it derives principles based on observation, even if that observation is just, I've been walking around the world and see how matter behaves.
	We extract principles from empirical evidence and then we extrapolate, right?
	It's the extraction of principles and then the extrapolation of those principles to non-sensual.
	So we've never seen the far side of Pluto, but we have some pretty solid idea that it's not going to be composed of something not called matter, which is completely contradictory.
	So we do take the laws from the evidence of our senses, but then we extract and extrapolate those to be more universal phenomena.
	Does that sort of help?
	Because I think you're both looking at it from the opposite side, so Adi's looking at it from the realm of sort of universal principles, And Francois is looking at more from the realm of the principles must be figured out based on sensual evidence to begin with.
	Well, then if that's the case, then we have to use the proper words.
	We can say that logic is axiomatic.
	Logic is axiomatic and empirical.
	Maybe Odyssey's contradiction, but there's no contradiction at all.
	I mean, we need, in a foundational system, we need to have axioms, but if all knowledge is empirical, fundamentally empirical in nature, there's no contradiction between the two, as long as we remember that axiomatic concepts are true for every act of cognition and that therefore we cannot prove them, we can only justify them.
	Okay, Francois, what do you understand by empiricism?
	Maybe we're just haggling over a misunderstood definition.
	Empiricism is the opposite of rationalism, and then rationalism says that we can obtain, it's kind of like Aristotle figuring out how many teeth the horse has without looking at an actual horse's mouth.
	You know, it's just, oh, I think you know A horse should have X number of teeth, and you didn't look in the fucking horse's mouth, you know?
	It's just from thin air, okay?
	And empiricism means you actually look at the damn thing, and you look inside the damn horse's mouth, and you figure out how many teeth it has.
	And maybe you should look at many horses, because some horses might lose their teeth or whatever.
	But that's the thing.
	It's based on observation.
	All truth is based on observation.
	Because truth is an active process of judgment.
	It's not a fact.
	We're not talking about fact.
	We're talking about truth, which is a human concept.
	There's also a difference here.
	For instance, in order to deduce the laws of gravity, we'd have to make some experiments.
	Some very certain types of experiments involving rocks, if you understand what I mean.
	But if we're going to understand the rules of logic, we don't need any specific kind of instance of experiment.
	We just need maybe a pen and a paper or something.
	We need something more specific to assert something in an empirical sense than in order to understand logic.
	You don't need a specific apparatus to show logic because logic is axiomatic.
	It means that exactly all you need is a pen and paper because you don't need any instruments.
	Logic is axiomatic.
	The only instrument you need is consciousness, the ability to think.
	And perceive.
	And any method, including empiricism, must have logic as an axiom, because logic is axiomatic.
	So empiricism does not preclude logic.
	We don't talk about logic because it's already there.
	because you can't not talk about it.
	Saying the wall is white, and you say, but you didn't explain to me what a wall is, so I'm going to say you're wrong.
	No, of course I expect that you know what a wall is.
	It's a given in this level of talking that we're discussing.
	Greg, you're lighting up, but we're not hearing anything.
	Alright.
	Oh, sorry about that.
	Hear me now? So if in my personal experience I can never experience a perfect circle, I can only experience phenomenal circles that are always imperfect, then where did the perfect circle in my head come from?
	Well, I would say that it is...
	It came from our ability...
	Well, sorry, I'm sure we're going to say the same thing, that it...
	We see circles in life and what we do is we derive then, we abstract a circle in our mind which we can define mathematically and so on.
	We extract a circle in our mind from the imperfect circles that we see.
	So we have the ability to synthesize, conceptualize and abstract A circle or a number or a category which don't exist in reality because we have this great ability to pull out the essence of a thing and turn it into a concept.
	And this process is not concept formation.
	And I hope we won't have to explain it kind of long, but yeah, it's concept formation basically.
	We observe instances...
	We observe entities, we look at how they change, how they're formed, their shape, and we omit certain measurements.
	And we define them according to their attributes.
	So we get a definition, for example, table.
	The concept table is derived from instances.
	Which we observe and we see, you know, there are some big ones and there are some small ones and there are round ones and square ones.
	But omitting all those measurements, we see that they have things in common.
	And so we have this concept table that comes from, and then of course our parents teach us the actual word.
	So that's how we get the concept.
	And you can abstract more or less.
	As Stefan says, if you abstract At a very, very high level, you get the concept of one, two, three, four, five, six.
	And if you abstract at a lower level, you get something like a concept-like table.
	So that's the basic idea of concept formation.
	It's basically abstraction of observations of singular instances that we observe around us.
	So then logic is conditional upon a rational mind, which is a biological product.
	Yes, certainly logic does not exist in reality in the way that a table exists in reality, but of course a table wouldn't exist without a logical mind, so come up with a better metaphor than that for sure.
	But yeah, logic doesn't exist in the world any more than the scientific method exists in the world, but the principles that logic, I mean my argument, which is how we sort of started this, my argument in the podcast is to say that the principles of logic exist Describe how reality actually behaves in the same way that an accurate scientific theory accurately describes, or a true scientific theory accurately describes the properties of matter, not just in history, but in terms of predictive and in the future.
	And so we knew that the theory of relativity was valid because they sent some boat out into the Indian Ocean to measure whether light rays would bend in a gravity well during an eclipse.
	And they did, and this had never been observed before, was predicted by Einstein's theory, and so that was a valid theory because it accurately described the properties of matter.
	So matter has specific properties and behaviors that occur and exist within reality, like, you know, a strong attraction, weak attraction, gravity, light, and so on.
	All of these properties exist at an atomic level, right?
	So for me, concepts are sort of based on the commonality of atoms, and I've talked about that before, I won't go into that again.
	But because matter behaves in predictable and specific matters based on its very nature, those habits of matter can be predicted, and that's how we know a good scientific method is being used.
	And because matter is stable and predictable, the laws of logic can be derived from and then be used to predict Certain behaviors and create theories which are accurate or not accurate and those theories can apply to human society as well.
	Capitalism works and communism and socialism don't work and there's ways of because you know everybody owns their own body should be able to own their own property and therefore social systems which don't allow people to own property are going to fail because they're contradicting the basic laws of human existence and so There are social theories, economic theories, and political theories, and scientific theories, and of course the degree of accuracy in the biological realm, like in the human realm of society and economics and politics.
	I would argue, as I have before, the level of accuracy is only that which is required in the biological realm, which is not perfect accuracy like physics, but, you know, 99% accuracy, which is what works in the field of biology.
	So then it's also reasonable to assume that if reality were radically different than it is, that our biology would be radically different and thus our thinking would be radically different and we may have come up with something different than logic.
	Yeah, I would certainly mean my argument is that we root logic, that the proof for logic is in the behavior of material reality, because you don't get a bird that flies straight through a tree, right?
	You don't get a bird that exists on the branch of a tree and flying in the sky at the same time, and you don't have a bird that is both a bird and an elephant at the same time.
	We know that through sensual reality and that is the validation for the laws of logic.
	We would have no concept of the laws of logic if reality did not behave in any kind of predictable manner.
	If matter had no properties, if there were no such thing as atoms and everything was just in flux, then, yeah, I don't think we would have any concept of logic.
	That is an interesting point.
	I have to agree. Now, somebody, I think, Francois, you said that I said values are subjective.
	But absolutely, I think that's an essential debate, and I think it's something we should talk about because it's tough to do it on the board, so go for it.
	I'm not sure that I did say that values are subjective, so just make sure I understand where you're coming from.
	Oh, you want me to start?
	Doesn't matter to me who starts.
	I'll take them all on. Well...
	The values are subjective.
	First of all, I don't like the word subjective.
	I've stopped using this concept, objective-subjective.
	Let's replace it with the word whimsical.
	No, I prefer to use the term based on facts or not based on facts.
	And from that, if you redefine it like that, Then you'll find that there's no such thing as a subjective value, right?
	Because any value that we have, even if it's simply because of our brain or a simple feeling, is based on something factual to accept.
	I mean, even our taste in ice cream is based on a fact, right?
	It's based on our brain, based on our case, our factual things.
	I'm not sure exactly why you say that values are subjective, so I'm not sure.
	Do you want me to explain why values are based on facts?
	Didn't you say that you can't get an odd from an if?
	Yeah, I think that's where the confusion is occurring.
	I'll literally spend 90 seconds on going over the argument that ought is a conditional statement depending on the goals of the individual.
	So if one man wants to go and kill himself, then he ought to throw himself off a bridge in order to achieve that end.
	If another man wants to shorten his hair, he ought to go get a haircut.
	But there is no ought that exists in nature in the same way that our flesh and our electrical energy in our brains and our physical energy in our brains.
	There's no should that exists in reality.
	Everything is conditional upon the goals of the organism.
	And so I don't mean by that that values are subjective at all.
	What I mean by that is that people have personal preferences about how they want to live, what they want to do, and there's so many examples where somebody says, well, life is the highest value and that's what human beings pursue, or human beings ought to pursue the value of life.
	Well, that's great, but the problem is the vast majority of human beings don't pursue the value of life.
	Certainly throughout history, you know, if there's a war, people are always like, hey, where do I sign up?
	You know, people sacrifice themselves all the time in pointless, stupid ways because of propaganda and all that.
	We can get into that another time.
	But there is no ought that exists that is axiomatic and automatic in human life.
	It's all dependent upon the goals that you want.
	I don't mean by that that that is subjective.
	What I mean by that is that if you want to define a theory of ethics, and to me theories of ethics are the only thing that really matters.
	I don't care about people's individual ideas about ethics.
	They're crazy things like, I think I should mate with a tree in order to be a good human being.
	What I care about is people who come up with systematic moral theories.
	So my argument is to say there is no ought, there is no have to in the world, right?
	And we know this because of free will, right?
	There's no innate, you know, a rock, if you drop a rock off a cliff, it has to fall.
	There's no possibility of any other thing occurring.
	But a human being can do whatever he or she wants.
	But if you're going to come up with a theory of ethics that you claim that human beings should do such and such, then it should be based on the properties of human being, and therefore it should be universal to all people at all times.
	And if it's not that, Then it's not a theory of ethics, it's just a silly opinion.
	Well, I want to clarify something here.
	You don't believe in contra-causal free will, do you?
	You'll have to define the term for me again.
	The free will terms escape me sometimes.
	There's causal free will and there's contra-causal free will.
	Just because your example of the rock is very bad, because it makes us think that you believe in contra-causal free will.
	Well, that does sound bad.
	Do you indeed? No, I don't know what that means.
	Do you believe that free will is somehow outside of the causal systems around us that is a different kind of thing, like some kind of Soul or some kind of thing of that nature.
	Well, the only thing that I can do in this is to say that I don't know what causes free will.
	I don't know the degree to which there is such a thing as free will.
	I can only speak from my own personal experience that there is a limited amount of option that I'm given in my life, so I can choose to do this podcast or not do this podcast, but I can't choose whether I'm going to be a human being or a duck.
	So there are certain capacities that I have for choice within my life and it does tend to be a really complicated situation because the more that I exercise my free will and choose things that are beneficial to me and choose to learn about myself or learn about philosophy rather than just sort of sit around and watch TV and so on, then the more I end up with choice.
	It's like a muscle that develops its conflict and I have no idea.
	What the cause of it is, I don't think anybody does.
	So, for me, there's a big X factor at the root of free will, but based on my own experience as a human being, I do have the capacity for certain areas of choice, and that it tends to be sort of self-perpetuating and self-escalating, and that the more that I do choose and the better choices that I make relative to the truth of my human nature, my own particular personality...
	The more choices I end up being able to make.
	So, I don't know what...
	I don't believe that it exists outside of reality, because nothing does, but I don't know what causes a human being's ability to make choices in that way.
	No, I'm not asking you what causes it.
	I'm asking if it's part of the causal systems that exist around us, or if it's separated from them.
	Well, when you say part of the causal systems...
	Because you seem to be saying...
	Because a rock falls where it falls.
	So, I mean, that's just cause and effect.
	I mean, do you deny that cause and effect applies to the human brain?
	Well, no. Of course, the human brain is part of material, tangible reality, but the human brain does seem to be rather unique in the universe in that there is this capacity to make choices, which obviously rocks and amoebas don't really have to the same degree.
	Okay, but that doesn't really answer my question.
	Go ahead, Neil. What does making a choice actually mean?
	Well, for me, what it means is that the one thing that I do have the choice in life, and I certainly believe this to be the case, that I can choose to focus on information or I can choose to not focus.
	The basic choice is to think or not to think.
	So if I'm addicted to cigarettes and I want to quit, then I can either go and find out all of the horrible things that might happen to me if I keep smoking and I can choose to go and investigate that and talk to my doctor or whatever.
	Or if I really like to smoking but I want to quit but I don't really want to or whatever, then I'm going to ignore that information.
	I'm going to reject that information.
	And where is this choice dependent on?
	Well, for me, it's dependent upon free will.
	I face that fork in the road and I make a choice about whether it is that I'm going to think about a particular topic that I should think about or would be beneficial for me to think about, or whether I'm just going to suppress that knowledge or suppress that feeling.
	Like if I'm in a relationship that's bad, right?
	I can either just sort of stagger along and pretend that everything's fine, or I can sit down and really think about it.
	And I don't know. I have no idea.
	It could be completely causal.
	Like it could be completely part of the system of reality.
	I only think I have free will.
	But the problem is, of course, that I do believe that I have free will.
	And I'm not saying that you are arguing against it, but people who do argue against free will are trying to change my mind.
	When, of course, if you don't believe in free will, you wouldn't do that, right?
	The noble lie.
	If you want to change someone's mind, then you are using causality.
	Otherwise, there is no otherwise.
	When I ask you the question, why would you choose to deal with a certain situation, like stopping smoking or not?
	Where that was based on, because it's based on your prior experience.
	It's based on the facts of your own brain, over which you have no control.
	It is what it is. And it's very complex, of course, and it feels like we're making somewhat conscious choices, but in the end, even though we cannot differentiate between it, it's defined.
	Not in a measurable way, but in a theoretical way.
	Okay, so as far as I understand it, then you're saying that what I would call free will is actually causal and isn't free will.
	Now, I think, though, and you could be perfectly right, of course, but I think the challenge is then that if you're going to say to me something that is counter to all of my experience and understanding, and all of the experience and understanding of just about everyone I know, you could be totally right.
	Like, everyone used to think the world was flat, now we know that it's round.
	But if you're going to create a proposition which says there is no free will, then I think you're going to have a challenge of proving that, right?
	I mean, you have to find something that proves that thesis because it is very sort of counterintuitive, which doesn't mean that it's wrong.
	It just means I think that the onus of proof is on you.
	No, you have to define what free will actually means.
	Our entire understanding of reality is based on logic and causality.
	So, you guys...
	Oh, sorry.
	Okay, guys, if we keep going like this, we're going to go in circles.
	I don't agree with that at all, Francois.
	I don't agree with that at all.
	I really do want to hear what Neil says.
	Yeah, but this is always what happens.
	Someone says, I ask for your own, and the other says, yeah, but everything is causal.
	The problem is that both positions are correct, and that's why a compatibilist position is the only position that makes any sense, because you guys are just going to go and pass it around, and you're both right.
	Let me give another example.
	Suppose we have got a machine that can output three actions like some kind of train railway station.
	Then we would say on a conceptual level that it can make a choice.
	But making a choice actually means that it's a process based upon the input and the status.
	And when you're talking about the human mind, it's extremely complicated, but it's exactly the same thing.
	So for you, then, the free will that I'm talking about where I say that I have a choice, you're saying it appears a choice because I don't understand, and maybe nobody understands, the complexity of the variables that go into the sort of quote decision that I make.
	Is that fairly accurate? Yeah.
	Now, the thing that I would say about that, though, is that you understand that what you're saying is a theoretical position.
	It's not a position that can be proven at the moment.
	Is that fair to say? I think it will be pretty hard to disprove it.
	And I still think that it's the default position.
	Because you're always talking about, for instance, how people are affected by their youth and their true self, their false self, their experiences...
	Which is all causality.
	These things go into your mind and they define you.
	And then, all of a sudden, you're talking about, well, there is this plane of existence that creates outputs which are completely uncausable.
	And that's very strange to me.
	No, I fully understand that, but I mean, strange doesn't mean wrong, right?
	I mean, you could say, and I take this example from a book on economics, but I think it's a fairly good one, where this economist was saying that, you know, if you have a rule like things fall down, and I know I overuse gravity, but bear with me for this example.
	So things fall down, right?
	You take a pen, you let go of it, it drops down.
	So you have this rule which says things fall down.
	But then you come across a helium balloon which is floating upwards.
	Well, You could then say, well, we have an exception to this, and we'll just say that it's a rule, but there's an exception, and so on.
	But what you could also do is you could study the helium balloon, figure out the properties, the lighter-than-air stuff, and all that kind of stuff.
	And by studying the exception, as an exception, you would then say that you'd end up learning a lot more about physics and about the air and lighter-than-air and helium as well, that kind of stuff as well.
	From my standpoint, everything in physics is determined.
	Because of physics, there's no choice.
	There's no consciousness in matter.
	But I certainly experience everything that goes on with me as a choice.
	And of course, the podcasts are all about changing people's minds, right?
	They're all about trying to make convincing arguments in an entertaining manner that's going to get people to think.
	And I try not to tell people what to think too much, but rather how to think.
	But... Because I think then they'll come to similar conclusions.
	But I have to put a lot of energy into appealing to something that is going to be of benefit to them and so on.
	And so from my standpoint, I act on the basis of free will limited.
	I mean, it's not perfect and it's an ecosystem.
	It's complicated and it's fluxy.
	I have no idea what causes it, but it sure feels like free will to me.
	And I can't prove to you that it is free will.
	But, sort of back to my point to say that if you are going to propose something that's counterintuitive, then I, you know, because God is counterintuitive as well, right?
	For me, at least, God is totally counterintuitive.
	And somebody could say, well, there is a God, I can't prove it to you, but it's counter to all of your sensual experience.
	Then I would say, well, I think then you have to prove that, right?
	I mean, because if you're going to propose to me something that's counter to my own sensual and personal experience, then I think that, as we talked about in the Burden of Proof podcast, I think that the onus is on you.
	And if you're going to propose to me that what I experience as free will is not actually free will, then I'm going to have to either take it on faith, which I obviously wouldn't be prepared to do, Or I would then have to put the onus on you to prove it.
	Now, obviously I'm not asking you to prove it now because it can't be done.
	But I think the only alternative then is for me to deny the experience of my entire life and, you know, what Christina does for a living, what I do with these podcasts, whole systems of ethics and punishment and so on.
	Sorry, go ahead. Okay.
	Well, the argument you're using is basically the same thing I'm trying to use against you.
	Because you're saying we've got these people that we want to change their minds.
	And you're saying it takes a lot of energy.
	But what you're trying to do is you're focusing on something that already exists in their mind.
	So, you try to talk about a logical standpoint or their empirical experiences.
	So, once again, you're constantly using causality.
	You use a podcast that goes through the air, into their ears, in their minds.
	So everything you're talking about sounds to me like causality.
	And yeah, I don't see where you get the unnatural feeling from.
	Because we're constantly talking about...
	I don't understand how you at the same time can feel that people are so affected by their environment and by their childhood and in their relationships, which means that you totally, totally support and say that things are causal.
	And then you counter it by saying that you feel differently.
	You've got a free will experience.
	I fully understand that.
	I don't understand it.
	No, I fully...
	Sorry, Greg, did you have something you wanted to add there?
	Well, I wonder if we're getting confused here because it sounds to me like we're confusing indeterminacy for free will.
	And if the mind is completely indeterminate, There's no argument you could possibly hope to make to change anybody's mind in any direction because it's completely indeterminate.
	But free will is in a sense, it sounds to me at least, a form of causality and not some form of indeterminacy.
	Well, I think that's an interesting point.
	My position, of course, and I do, and Christina, I'm sure, would say the same thing, that in the absence of knowledge, free will declines.
	I mean, I'm not asking anyone to agree with that.
	I'm just saying that that would be something that could be a reasonable thing to say from that standpoint.
	That in the absence of knowledge, so the reason that I try and share people's understanding of their own histories and try and say, what happened to you as a kid, your relationship with authority, your relationship with corruption, your relationship with being bullied, your relationship with a lack of identity and a lack of negotiation, all of that stuff.
	If you're not aware of it, then your choices go way down.
	So, knowledge breeds choice.
	And we know this. The more that we learn, the more choices that we have.
	And so, this is why I say I don't know what's at the root of free will.
	But I do believe, rationally or not, based on experience that I've had and some sort of theories, I do believe that...
	If you give people knowledge, then it's like a doctor comes up.
	If you're a doctor and you hear of a new way of doing a procedure that's going to be better for your patients, then you have the choice to do that now, and because you care about your patients, you probably will.
	But the problem I have with the causality argument is that if it is causal, then it should be predictable.
	And, unfortunately, human behavior is completely unpredictable.
	And so that, to me, is a blow against the causal argument.
	And it's not to say that it's not false, because it's like the weather is not predictable five years out either, because there's too many variables.
	But the degree of predictability seems to be relatively low, even when you know someone quite well.
	It's not always possible to figure out what they're going to do next.
	And, of course, in the stock market, it's completely unpredictable and so on.
	If somebody can predict to me what it is that I'm going to do tomorrow, then of course the causal argument gets a lot stronger for me.
	And I'm not saying that's impossible.
	It could be the case.
	But it would also seem to me the case that if somebody were to tell me what I was going to do tomorrow, and I know I'm taking it to an extreme example, Then if I were to...
	If somebody were to tell me what I was going to do tomorrow, then I might change what I was going to do tomorrow.
	So it all just seems kind of...
	There's too much unpredictability at the core to come down on one side or the other, I think, as far as proving or disproving free will.
	But it certainly feels real to me.
	Does that make any sense?
	Question? If it's...
	Can I go in?
	Just one second. Sorry.
	Can I go? Stefan, why are you podcasting if you're not presuming causality in the human mind?
	I am presuming causality in the human mind, but I'm not presuming exclusive causality, and I think that's the compatibilistic position that Francois was talking about.
	No, it's not.
	But it is another form of compatibilism, yes.
	It's not the one that I hold.
	The one you're talking about is more of the objectivist kind, wherein people say that the mind is completely causal, but the will originates some of its own causal relations.
	So your compatibilism would be more in the Yeah, so I certainly, you know, if I sort of look at myself akin to a medical researcher, so that if I, I mean, I assume that doctors want to deal with their patients in a better way,
	and so I come up with some miracle cure for X, Y, and Z illness, then I'm going to tell as many people as I can, which is sort of the argument for morality approach, but I can't predict who is going to like it.
	And who is going to not like it?
	And if I can't predict who is going to like it and who's not going to like it, sort of the podcast, then it's hard for me to say that the human mind is completely causal.
	And that, again, could be because there are just too many variables and so on.
	but I do believe that if people want to be happy now some people will take the steps necessary to be happy sort of as I talk about in podcast 183 sort of getting rid of the corrupt people in your life and maybe even getting rid of your family if you can't rescue their any pleasure in your relationships with them and so on some people will be willing to take that on and say yes I will go through this very excruciating process of getting rid of corrupt people in my life in order to be happy and take these ideas seriously
	And other people won't.
	Now, if nobody has any idea that there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or I guess you could say peace of mind at the end of the war, then nobody's going to go into it, right?
	No more than you sort of throw yourself against a brick wall over and over for no particular benefit.
	So nobody goes to chemo unless it's going to save their life, right?
	So I think that in communicating about the benefits of going through difficult things like getting rid of corrupt people in your life, then people will have a more informed ability to make a decision about what's good for them.
	You may not want to do this if you're 12 days away from dying and you need people to, you know, wipe your butt in bed, but...
	I think that by giving people more information, I'm giving them more of a chance to make a better decision, but I still can't predict how many people are going to want to do that, and how many other people...
	I don't know how many people dropped off after Podcast 183, but I bet you it was quite a few.
	Okay, what you're describing to me here sounds to me that this concept of free will is a metaphor of looking at this.
	Looking at the complexity that exists between people and human minds.
	Can you tell me more about what you mean?
	And also, if we've got ten people and they all act differently, then it feels that these people have a soul, that these people have free will, they can make choices independently of their environment, etc. But that's not really what's going on.
	In a sense then, free will is sort of just like a placeholder for the missing perfect formula that would predict the human mind.
	No, it's not.
	Well, we're asking Nielsa. Another thing is that it feels a bit like Stefan, that when you said, yes, I do assume causality in the human mind, but at the same time there's other stuff that can somehow have effect or non-effect.
	That feels to me like that you're talking to a Christian and you're saying, well, This is lightning that strikes, et cetera.
	Is this a miracle or not?
	And they're saying, well, we've got all this empiricism and natural law, et cetera, but God can have some other effect.
	That's the kind of explanation how it feels to me.
	No, I fully understand. So I'm saying that there's something...
	All matter is perfectly causal, as we know, but I'm saying that there's an X factor out there which smacks of a kind of non-physical, non-material, possibly supernatural explanation to it, like how people say...
	Well, where did matter come from?
	Well, God created it, which isn't an explanation because, of course, saying that some unknowable being for some ineffable purpose created matter in some incomprehensible way is not an explanation.
	And I certainly am not putting forward an explanation as to what free will is, but I am saying that free will is to some degree dependent on knowledge.
	So if I'm standing in London and I want to go to Torquay, I have to have a knowledge of how to get there.
	I'm not sort of free to go to Torquay if I'm blindfolded, spun around, and have no idea that I'm in London.
	Like, I'm not free to go to Torquay then because there's just no way I'm going to get there.
	I mean, I guess I could randomly, but it's really going to be tiny odds.
	Whereas if somebody says, here's how to get to Torquay, But unfortunately, it's hailing, and it's lightning, and you may make it and you may not, right?
	Then somebody may want to go to Torquay, they may not.
	They at least have the choice now whether they want to go to Torquay or not, because at least they know where it is.
	So in the podcast, I'm kind of putting out saying, here's a direction towards happiness, and if you want to go there, it's going to be tough, but at least you know how to get there.
	And so they have the choice now to take this road or not take this road, but at least they know or at least have some idea of the destination, which I think adds to their capacity for choice, whereas if they don't have any clue how to get there, then they're really just thrashing around.
	They don't have the choice, in a sense, to go to Torquay.
	Does that make any sense?
	Well, the first part of what you said really shows that you understand my position and my ideas, so that's good.
	Well that's good, the first part.
	That's a plus.
	That's good. That's a step.
	Excuse me guys for a second.
	Are we gonna, because we're talking about values, but I think we got sidetracked.
	Do you guys want to keep talking about this?
	Because I think this is kind of an expensive topic.
	We might want to keep that for another show.
	I'm happy to keep talking about it, but if other people want to talk about other stuff, that's fine as well.
	This is definitely the board's show, so whatever you guys want to chat about is fine with me.
	Okay. Alright.
	I suppose...
	It's just that, like I was saying before, you and Niels are kind of going in circles because you're both talking about basically the same thing and talking about it in different ways.
	Niels is using deterministic language.
	And you're using a certain kind of compatibilist language.
	And it's kind of...
	I don't know what other people think, but I think this is kind of going in circles.
	Well, I think now that we've actually gotten to a point where we're...
	I'm sorry?
	You have yet to define what you mean by free will, which is very important, because if you look at the same example about miracles, they are also not defined.
	So, um...
	There's nothing for me to prove if you don't say what different way you've got of looking at this, outside of causality, which we both accept.
	Well, I mean, as I said, I think I did define the free will, though, is the capacity to focus on information or not focus on information.
	The changing capacity throughout life to balance long-term and short-term objectives, to figure out the right path, to try and figure out what is going to be best for you based on your available knowledge.
	Nobody can say in advance, for instance, to what degree people are going to say, you know, heroin is great.
	I don't care about the future.
	I care about getting high now and feeling, you know, whatever, right?
	And so when people are young, they'll generally go to school or go to university.
	There's not a lot of people who, when they're 94, apply for entry-level positions, although that's a sensible thing to do when you're 18 or whatever.
	So the balancing, the complex balancing of short-term goals, long-term goals, happiness, pain, pleasure.
	Sometimes I go to the gym when I have a headache.
	Sometimes I don't. It depends on...
	How I feel and what I choose to do with my time.
	So this very complex system of determining long-term, short-term goals, balancing the needs of others with your children, with your parents, with your spouse, with your job, all of the juggling act that goes into trying to optimize our way through this sometimes occluded and convoluted valley of shadows that is sort of self-interest within life.
	I would say that one's personal nature, the values which you choose or reject, because when you're young, right, you can choose or reject certain values that are going to have a pretty strong effect on how happy you are and the choices you make over life, and then you can choose to reject those values, so like I was a socialist when I was in my early to mid-teens, and then I became an objectivist, and then I became more of a libertarian, and now I'm an anarchist, just based on sort of accumulated pursuit of knowledge and what I can sort of figure out as logical.
	So free will to me is that faculty which evaluates and balances and helps us to choose what sort of short-term, long-term gains we want to balance, what terms of self-interest versus the interest of others we want to balance, with the goal of maximizing our happiness and those choices dependent upon the degree of knowledge that we have and its accuracy.
	I know that's not exactly something that would fit in a dictionary, but as I said, it's a complicated topic.
	Okay, that's very, very interesting because I just realized that the way that you're defining free will actually defines it out of existence.
	Because you're saying if you have a train station, which is a very simple choice-making mechanism, And we go up in complexity, that at the moment that we cannot predict any more accurately what the output is going to be,
	then that's how you define free will, which is of course, yeah, very interesting, because it's just like defining God out of existence, because you cannot disprove it, because it's defined as disprovable.
	Well, no, you can certainly disprove free will anytime you want, which is just to predict people's behavior.
	Yeah, but if I ask you what's the difference between a computer or a train station or a human mind, it's that you're saying, well, you can't predict it.
	Thank you.
	That's your definition.
	So if I say, well, if I can show you something that can be predicted, then you just move the complexity up a step.
	Like the weather. It's extremely complex.
	It is complex, and I think that at the root, we're probably agreeing, and we're probably agreeing, I think, a lot more than we're disagreeing, which is, it really doesn't matter whether we have free will or not.
	What matters is, could we ever comprehend the complexity or not?
	Like, if we can never comprehend the complexity, I mean, you and I in our lives, maybe in a thousand years, they'll have got it nailed or whatever, but...
	If we can't figure out, and this is a bit of an argument from effect, but that's okay, because we're in a sort of state of lack of biological and physical knowledge.
	If we don't know the degree of complexity which goes into making up our choices, in other words, if we had all the variables, it would be perfectly predictable, like the weather.
	If we knew everything, we could predict the weather for, I don't know, assuming no human free will, we could predict the weather after 100 years.
	If we can't figure out all the variables, then we sort of have to act as if there's free will, right?
	I mean, whether there is or isn't.
	Since we can't conceivably understand all of the variables that go into making up our choices, I think that we're going to act the same whether we have free will or don't have free will.
	So then the answer to my question is yes.
	What was the question? What question?
	That all free will really is is just an intellectual placeholder for some missing algorithm that we haven't solved yet that could accurately predict all human minds.
	No, I wouldn't say that it's that though, Greg, because we don't know whether or not it is free will or not.
	Like, there's no way to prove it either way.
	So, it may be a placeholder in the same way that God was for the creation of the universe.
	Free will may be a metaphorical placeholder for knowledge we will gain as a species at some point.
	But it also may be a metaphorical placeholder for knowledge that will regain that free will exists in some completely freaky quark-dimensional, you know, super-string, God knows Gordian knot view of the world.
	So we don't know which side of the coin is going to land, you know, sort of free will up or free will down.
	But because we don't know the variables, it is pretty much identical whether you believe in free will or believe in determinism.
	It doesn't allow you to have any better predictive ability to believe in determinism, and it also isn't going to change the way that you try to live.
	It's still going to live as if you have free will, make choices to optimize your situation, and so on.
	So this topic is sort of the metaphysical equivalent of string theory.
	It could be. I find it fascinating to discuss, and I find it a very interesting topic.
	I hope it hasn't put everyone else to sleep.
	I do find it interesting, and of course Neil, as usual, has excellent, excellent points.
	But I think that our knowledge is too...
	Certainly Neil's point, that everything in the universe is causal, I absolutely accept.
	But I think our knowledge is too undeveloped to be able to figure out where it's going to end up.
	The likelihood is that if we did know all the variables, then we may be able to predict an enormous amount of human behavior, but to what degree it is going to be that way, we don't know yet.
	Christina's head is still spinning.
	But saying that you cannot predict or basically understand something, Doesn't mean that you have to invoke an invisible object or process.
	That's basically the principal problem I have here.
	Because we're always arguing from causality and logic.
	And suddenly there's this thing that we call pre-will that we don't know or can define.
	And we can't say, Because we recognize that there are a lot of choice-making processes out there.
	Even if you look at the simple evolutionary forms of life, it's all totally predictable.
	And then we get to this other, more complex, and suddenly there's this object which you You say that there's suddenly an extra bit, which you call x-factor.
	I don't get why you have a need for using something like that to explain something.
	Well, I disagree with you that it's got some sort of equivalent to a god.
	And I also disagree with you that we start working...
	What does it explain?
	Well, hang on, hang on.
	You don't have to explain something in order to experience it.
	So people experienced gravity long before we had...
	9.8 meters per second per second acceleration towards Earth or the inverse square law or anything, people experienced gravity before they understood it.
	And they had something called things fall down go boom before we had Newton or we had the people who theorized about gravity.
	And I don't agree with you that we start off logically, and this is all the way back to the beginning of the podcast session, we start off empirically.
	And the difference is, between free will and God, is that, rightly or wrongly, I've never experienced anything supernatural in my life.
	So for me, the idea of God just doesn't make any sense.
	It's neither logically valid nor empirically valid.
	However, both in my conversations with people and in my own experience of myself, I experience what I call free will every moment of every waking day.
	And so when I start working empirically, I agree with you from a physics standpoint, it doesn't make much sense.
	But when I look at my own life empirically, I experience something that I call free will, the ability to choose.
	I experience that every moment of every day.
	I don't experience God at all in any way, shape, or form.
	So when I start working empirically, that's where I get free will from.
	And I think that's what's different between free will and the idea of a deity.
	Like I said before, we're kind of going in circles because you need both free will and determinism to explain the facts of human behavior.
	I don't really see where Niels is going with this.
	Well, perhaps you could synthesize it for us.
	I already did.
	I think that Niels is just...
	You and Niels are just saying the same thing with different language.
	Niels is using deterministic language, and you're using a certain compatible language.
	Well, but if you could... You're just both repeating what you see as obvious from that language.
	Sure, but if you could synthesize it, that would be great.
	Synthesize what? You say that we're both saying the same thing...
	And isn't there sort of a...
	Sorry, go ahead, Greg.
	Yeah. Well, yeah, but if you want me to say it using my compatibilist language, it'll be something different again.
	We're going to argue about the same damn thing.
	But you're saying that...
	If I understand this, Francois, you're saying that we're both saying the same thing.
	I don't see that, but if you could at least explain to us without bringing, like, how we're saying the same thing, that would be helpful.
	Well, Niels is saying that...
	Niels is saying that there are factors in people's experience which makes them do things.
	And then you say, yeah, yeah, but I experience free will in my life.
	That's the exact same thing.
	Seems completely the opposite to me, but perhaps you can go a little further with that.
	Because he's saying everything is causal and I'm saying it's not.
	Yeah, but being a compatibilist to me is the exact same thing.
	I suppose that for you it probably doesn't seem right at all.
	Greg, did you have something? It sounds to me like maybe there's a sort of extremism going on on both ends that's kind of wrapped around and met in the middle in the sense that, I mean, on the one hand, You have one group saying, well, if the mind is completely determined, then there's no point in changing it.
	And then on the other hand, you've got the other group saying, well, the mind is completely indeterminate, so there's no point in changing it.
	Do you think that was a position that Neil Thrive was holding?
	No, it's not like that at all.
	If you want to change a person's mind, you need both.
	The other person needs to have the free will to change, and the person needs to be in causal control of his own mind, has to be able to be appealed to.
	If you don't have both elements, you're not going to change someone's mind.
	Well, and I guess to take the medical metaphor, if you're a doctor and you want to cure someone and give them a pill, they have to know that they're sick, they have to believe in you as a doctor, they have to be willing to take the risk of a pill, and they have to want to get healthy, and so on.
	There are lots of factors that go into somebody actually taking the pill and getting healthy, some of which are causal and some of which, to me, you'd sort of balance and choose.
	Well, what I'm saying is when I talk to someone, of course I'm a compatibilist, but anyone who talks to anyone is a compatibilist in some way.
	Because when you talk to another person, you assume that the person is able to understand and focus his attention on what you're saying and make a decision based on what you're saying.
	And on the other aspect, you also hope that this person is in control of his own mind, that there's a causal link Between the individual in the present and the individual in a minute or in an hour.
	Because if there's no causality in the mind, then there's no continuation of personhood.
	And so there would be no point in talking to anyone.
	Yeah, because you'd convince someone that 2 plus 2 is 4 now, but then tomorrow they'd say 2 plus 2 is 5 again.
	Exactly, because there will be no connection between the individual's memories and intellect in his mind.
	And we have to assume some degree of self-interest.
	Maybe we can talk...
	Sorry, go ahead, Nils.
	Yeah, that's also a fact of reality, what you mean.
	Maybe we can talk a bit about an actual experience.
	For instance, suppose...
	Suppose dinner time is coming, and I'm getting hungry.
	Now, I can make different choices, but the choice that I end up making is based on a lot of subconscious processes.
	For instance, the fact that I am hungry, that's a fact which comes from a causal subconscious process.
	And then I have to act, which is also causal.
	Sorry, Christine is just saying that's more biological than subconscious, but that's just a hair split.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well, that's basically the same thing, of course.
	The body and the mind are both very causal.
	And... In my experience, even though I spend my day feeling kind of free and experiencing entertainment and happiness, all the feelings, all this stuff that goes by very fluently,
	I know that every single thing I did in my day is based on other things, on how my subconscious created me to feel, On how subconsciously my choices were fed with certain kinds of information.
	Sorry, do you mind if I just add to that?
	I just have a minor question about the food thing, right?
	So, I'm hungry, I'm going to go eat, but somebody who's anorexic is going to go, and because they're hungry, specifically they're going to avoid eating, that they may only eat when they're not hungry or whatever, right?
	So, they're going to have completely the opposite goal than I will.
	I want to satisfy hunger, they want to exacerbate hunger.
	Now, you could say, of course, that the reason that This woman, let's say, it's mostly women, right?
	This woman is an anorexic is because she had a bad childhood and that's her causality.
	But the problem for me with that is the problem of infinite regression, right?
	What is the first cause of all this kind of stuff?
	So if we say, you know, Patty the anorexic is anorexic because she had a bad childhood.
	Well, why did she have a bad childhood?
	Well, because her parents had a bad childhood, and their parents had a bad childhood, and so on.
	And so I'm just not sure, if there's no sort of choices involved, how the argument of determinism explains anything, because then we should just get a sort of simple photocopy reproduction, right?
	I mean, I may be oversimplifying, but that's sort of a question I have.
	The original, the...
	The original, the start of all the causality changes is the initial conditions of the Big Bang.
	That would be the ultimate answer.
	Okay, so go ahead.
	Your question feels pretty weird to me, because what you're saying is true.
	If you have a bad childhood, then that affects you.
	And why did you have a bad childhood?
	Well, because your parents were Had also had a bad childhood.
	But it doesn't mean that it's like a symptomatic formula.
	It's very, very complex.
	And people can break out of it.
	And why? Because they are met.
	They have a different DNA. They have different experiences.
	They meet other people. They listen to podcasts.
	And also, the universe gets more complex as it goes.
	So I don't see any problems with that.
	But I try to pin it down on an actual experience, and then you come to me with the question about...
	which is really high conceptual level thinking, you know?
	The mind, it's very complex.
	And then you go all the way back to a basic causal effect at the start of the universe.
	I don't see the connection.
	I got it, I got it. Now, to take another sort of immediate example, and thanks, that was a great explanation.
	Do you believe that my, whether I end up believing in determinism or free will, is that for you, is it determined or not?
	Yes. So, in a sense, the end of this argument is foreordained at the beginning, right?
	So, let's just say, like if I said, well, that's it, I'm going to stop with this argument right now and continue to believe in free will, that that would be perfectly predetermined.
	Yes. But you're, once again, swaying away.
	Because where it came down to was that you said that you feel that you experience free will.
	So I try to get our opinions on that at the same level.
	For instance, if somebody has a bad eating habit, then that means that a certain piece in their mind is corrupted somehow.
	So it's all natural and comes from the difference between human minds.
	But I would say that corrupted might be the wrong phrase, because if it's perfectly inevitable that they have bad eating habits, it's not a deviation from any other ideal state, right?
	It's just what is. Yeah, corrupted is of course a conceptual statement.
	And so would evil and pride and love...
	Yeah, exactly.
	So, one of the problems that I came across this week is a very tough problem, that a Christian says, this is what I believe in God, and that makes me happy, and I believe in it axiomatically, and you cannot disprove it.
	And also, when they say, well...
	If you take the idea of God from me away, then I won't be happy.
	If people believe that they are happy in their own state, then you cannot convince them of anything else.
	So it's hard to tell them that this is better objectively because they don't experience it that way.
	Well, but I think that we could absolutely define it objectively and tell them that they were wrong.
	Because if they say, I feel good because I believe in God, that's a subjective statement, right?
	And I guess you could hook up something to their brain to say, do they get the endorphins when they go to pray or whatever?
	And so you could verify to some degree whether they feel good when they pray or whatever.
	But if they say God exists, then that's a philosophical proposition that's open to verification.
	So I think that those two issues are very separate.
	I agree with that, but...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	We were talking about how to look at the state of the human mind, how to judge it.
	And I, of course, agree with you about objectivity, etc.
	But that doesn't mean that they have a state of mind.
	That if someone is anorexic, that they will behave a certain way, and their anorexia is caused by some sort of way.
	And if somebody feels, suppose the experience of an anorexic person, it might feel that it's good and great to do certain things.
	Well, one aspect of anorexic people is that they don't feel that there's something wrong with them, but still we know that their experience is based on the stuff in their head.
	Well, they do feel that something's wrong with them and that they always weigh too much, for sure.
	I mean, they definitely have that kind of distorted image, so there is that aspect to it.
	But let me ask you something else, just at a sort of more practical level.
	Would you say that you...
	And this is a tough question, so forgive me in advance, but if you're reading a newspaper article about a pedophile, right, and you think of that pedophile attacking children and raping them and so on, Do you feel in your gut, and again, this is leading and I apologize for, but to me this is always an interesting thing about determinists, right?
	Because if you're a determinist, you should feel no moral outrage or no hostility or no negative emotions towards a pedophile because they're just acting out the laws of physics since the Big Bang, right?
	When you do, or if you had a daughter and she was attacked by a pedophile and so on, would you feel outrage or anger?
	Would you feel any kind of, that this was a deviation from an ideal situation that should not have happened?
	Or would you feel sort of a perfect acceptance and understanding of your moral evils or what I would call moral evils or crimes within the universe?
	Do your emotions follow along with your determinism?
	Well, you gave a perfect example of this this week in one of your podcasts, where you said, well, what good would it do if we get enraged in certain people in politics?
	Because their behavior is perfectly predictable.
	So, of course, if we don't know any better, we'll get emotional.
	But at a certain point, I understand that that is human nature.
	And that we understand that these people are a product of their childhood.
	And if you want to change people's minds, then we're going to have the most effect if they are not corrupted like that.
	So I don't see a problem with the question.
	Well, first of all, I wasn't saying that we shouldn't feel moral outrage.
	What I am saying is that we should direct our moral outrage to its proper objects, which is in the podcast.
	But my question is, if you have a daughter and she's attacked by a pedophile, would you feel outrage or would you feel that that was just perfectly inevitable and not really something that to be upset about it would be an immature reaction to accepting reality?
	Well, first of all, I understand that it's usually not very productive to get angry at things, at people like that, because it's not going to have any effect.
	Of course, I would be upset, but the thing is that I understand what's likely causing this person to do such things, and I know what things can and can't have effect on So you would feel upset or anger, but you would not want to feel that because it would be a lack of rational acceptance of the deterministic facts of reality.
	Well, having emotions isn't a bad thing.
	It's natural. But they would always be incorrect, wouldn't they, if they were...
	I'm just trying to understand, because it seems like a bit of a Zen approach, right?
	If everything is determined, then any emotion that you feel, any passion that you feel, is inherently immature and incorrect, right?
	Because there's lack of acceptance of reality.
	It's like, if you lie out in the sun, and you don't put any sunscreen on, and then you get a sunburn, and you get really angry at having a sunburn, well, that's kind of immature, right?
	But that would be sort of the reaction to anything that occurred would be not to be happy or to be sad or to wish for or feel disappointed or to hope or not to hope.
	None of that would be...
	It just seems to me like I just can't quite understand what the purpose is of emotions then.
	If everything is deterministic then the emotions must always be incorrect.
	Would that be sort of true?
	The emotions help us lead to making better choices.
	We don't know if a pedophile like this is walking around in the neighborhood.
	We don't know. But that doesn't mean that if something happens that it's very useful in getting angry, but it doesn't mean it's bad.
	Sorry, you just said it could help us make better choices.
	I just wanted to understand that.
	Well, it's a natural byproduct of our being.
	If we have a business and all of a sudden it goes down, then we're not happy about it.
	It's... Yeah, sorry, I still don't see the problem.
	Maybe it's because you think it's looking at life too robotically, but I think that's the same thing as saying that evolution It isn't a romantic way of looking at life.
	It's a way of understanding life, and that's what makes it so beautiful, the kind of things it can create.
	It's not undermining it, in my opinion.
	I'm sorry, so you feel that emotional reactions to things like anger or fear or love or whatever are not compatible with what actually occurs in the world but can be pleasurable nonetheless?
	What do you mean? I completely accept emotions.
	That's one of the things that we can experience as human beings.
	That's basically what makes life so great.
	Okay, let me ask it another way, because I don't think I'm being at all clear.
	Sorry about that. If you have a child, are you going to child-proof that home?
	Yes. But surely if your child is going to have an accident or not, that's preordained, and therefore it doesn't matter whether you child-proof your home or not.
	Would that be fair to say? No, no, no.
	That's not a determinist position.
	Determinist doesn't say, I am all-knowing.
	Ah, you see, now here I think is where we are joining up again.
	So because we're not all-knowing, we have to act as if our choices influence what is going to occur and to our advantage.
	Like we have a kid, we don't want the kid to fall down the stairs, so we get one of those little gates to put at the top of the stairs because we don't know whether there's going to be an accident or not.
	So we have to act to minimize things which are negative towards ourselves To the best degree that we can, right?
	So if our kid is six years old and wants to ride a skateboard, maybe we'll let them, but we'll hold them.
	But then when they're 16, we don't hold them anymore, but there's still a risk they could fall.
	And that's sort of what I was coming back to saying, that because we don't know all the variables, we have to act as if we have a choice and that our choices have an effect.
	Yeah, of course. A different example would be that suppose you'd raise a child in the best way you could, And then, suppose he would get 20 years old, and he gets in a car accident, even though you were fully prepared, seat belts, etc.
	Then, if you're rational, then it would be stupid to look at the world and the universe and being angry.
	That's not useful.
	That's not rational.
	Because you understand that this other car had a small problem that was detected just a little too late and the brakes weren't working.
	It's all causal.
	So it's not like a drunk driver or something.
	It's not like a drunk driver, right?
	It's just that the car's brakes failed randomly or whatever.
	So, for sure, yeah. I mean, it's like getting angry at being old or getting angry at the fact that your car needs gas.
	I mean, that's just the facts of reality.
	But those things aren't specific to free will, right?
	Not free will, but what I'm referring to is free will.
	I mean, because I want you to, I don't want to beg the question, ask you to agree with it ahead of time, but to get angry at situations where free will is not a possibility, right?
	So a frozen guy, like I can't remember this, someone was sitting on a porch, and a plane flew overhead, and when it opened up its wheels to come in and land, a guy who'd crept up there to try and escape whatever, Cuba or something, who'd frozen to death up there, came out of the plane and landed, who'd frozen to death up there, came out of the plane and landed, I think, on someone's porch or their car or Well, you don't get angry at that because nobody's trying to hurt you, right?
	But if somebody sort of willfully decides to get drunk and mows down your kid, then yeah, I think it would be perfectly healthy to get angry because for me, at least, that guy didn't know all the variables, and so he wasn't acting to maximize his sort of minimize the pain to others or whatever situation.
	So I think that you could even get angry in a deterministic sense if, say, well, you didn't know all the variables, so why the hell did you do that?
	Yeah, I think I agree.
	It's... The deterministic way of looking at reality doesn't undermine any of these things, like emotions or results that come from life, like an accident or something like that.
	But it includes everything we know about it.
	Well, very interesting. I certainly appreciate that.
	I hope that it kept everyone else awake.
	I do find this fascinating, and I thank you for taking such time to dig into the topic with me, Niels.
	Of course, you make excellent points, and I certainly enjoy the conversation.
	Did somebody want to add something else or another topic which we can talk about for a few minutes?
	We've been going for almost two hours, so I'm getting peckish because I have to have a big meal about every two hours.
	Is there something else that anybody wanted to add or talk about?
	I would still like to talk about values because I've been getting some notices from other people that You are still saying these things.
	I wanted to address some little points about what you said before, if that's okay?
	Sure, go ahead. You said that values can't be judged, correct?
	I'm sorry, could you repeat that?
	Okay, fine. Did you say that values can't be judged?
	You did say that, correct?
	No, good heavens, values can be totally judged, in my view.
	Okay, now I'm confused because I wrote down here that you said that values can't be judged.
	Okay, now I'm confused.
	You're going to have to explain this.
	How can values be judged?
	Well, I mean, there are two kinds of values.
	There are subjective values and objective values, right?
	So subjective values are like, I like to bake beans.
	Please don't use the words subjective and objective, alright?
	I don't. We should seek to completely eradicate these words.
	Completely. Well, unfortunately, I can't answer your question and change my entire terminology at the same time.
	You're asking too much of me.
	I think we all know what the terms mean, right?
	I don't think I have to at all, Francois.
	No, we don't. That's the problem.
	No, we don't know what they mean, and that's part of the problem.
	Well, why don't we do this? We'll save values until next week, and why don't you make the case for getting rid of subjective and objective?
	No, I do want to know what you think about judging that.
	For example, if someone kills someone you love and you have this feeling that you want to take revenge on him, you want him to get the death penalty, you want him to die to be eradicated, do you think that's a sound value?
	How would you evaluate that value?
	Well, but that's not a value, that's an emotion.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, but suppose it becomes a value of yours.
	No, a value...
	At the moment you decide that you want to see this person killed.
	A value would be to say that everyone who kills someone should be able to be killed by other people.
	That would sort of be a value or a moral proposition.
	That's not a value, it's a principle.
	Okay, you know what?
	You have to define the terms, because if you have different definitions of the terms, then we're not going to get anywhere, right?
	Like, if I start saying stuff like subjective, objective, value, and you keep telling me that I'm using the wrong terms, you have to start by defining the terms then, and maybe we can get somewhere.
	You are. You are using wrong terms.
	I mean, we have to be precise here if we're going to, you know, have a fruitful...
	It's like the whole thing with you and Niels.
	It's all about precision.
	Yeah, but Francois, if you have your own decision...
	But you can't say that just because somebody else is using a different methodology than yours that it's imprecise.
	You haven't made that case yet, right?
	I mean, you're just telling me I'm being imprecise when I'm using terms that I think are fairly familiar to everyone, and I haven't had a whole lot of complaints over 280 podcasts about being imprecise.
	So if you want to define the terms, I'm willing to accept those definitions, but you can't just tell me that the terms I'm using are just imprecise.
	No, everyone thinks that they know what objective and subjective mean.
	But there are many different definitions and there are many different ideas that people have.
	I mean, it's such a term used in so many different ways and in so many different ideologies that I just...
	So what are the right ones?
	Well, I don't know what Stefan was going to say.
	I mean, it depends on the conceptual aspect of what he wants to talk about.
	The terms that I use are based on facts, factual, or non-factual, not based on facts.
	But what about subjective, though, in terms of like...
	Sorry, but if I say, I had a dream last night about an elephant, is that factual or not factual?
	Can it be proven or not proven?
	It's factual that you had the dream, yes.
	How do you know? I could be lying, right?
	Well, sure you could.
	But if you're lying, I mean, why would you lie to me about a dream?
	You don't have any motive to do so, and I would accept it.
	I mean, I would trust you.
	Well, I'm just saying that it's not as simple as true and false, right?
	There's stuff which is indeterminate.
	Well... I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
	If you mean that I have to trust you, yeah, sure.
	But I don't have any reason not to trust you on that.
	No, what I mean is that if I say I like baked beans, then you can at least say, okay, well, I'm going to put a camera in your, you know, I'm just talking about verification, right?
	Forget about trust. If I say, I like baked beans, well, how many did I buy?
	How many do I eat? And so on, right?
	That's verifiable. If I say, I have a fridge, that's even more verifiable, because you can just come in and look and have a fridge and see my ownership papers or whatever.
	But if I say, I had a dream about an elephant, there's no conceivable way that that can be verified or not.
	So there's just, there's subjective, objective, and then other or non-verifiable, right?
	Now, subjective stuff can be verified.
	I don't want to use these terms at all.
	Okay, well I'll tell you what.
	I don't want to use these terms at all.
	Okay, well I'll tell you what.
	What we're probably not going to be able to achieve after two hours is to redefine all of the terms that we're going to be using and also get to the issue of values.
	So why don't send me an email about the terms and the definitions and the way that you want to use them and then we can deploy that next week to talk about value.
	No, no. No, listen, I don't want to use them at all.
	I just want us to talk about facts.
	If something is based on fact or not.
	Now, you do agree with me that every single value...
	Yeah? Sorry, go ahead.
	In terms of what?
	You were saying every fact is...
	Well, you do agree that every...
	Yeah?
	Well, I was just saying that every single value is based on some species of fact.
	You do agree with that.
	I think so.
	I mean, I'm not sure exactly what terms you're using now, or like in what sense you're...
	You can give me an example of a value.
	What I'm saying, for example, just take a completely irrational value.
	I value...
	I don't know, for example...
	The example I gave you, the value of wanting to see this person killed...
	Well, it's still based on the fact.
	It's based on the fact of my emotions and my reaction to those emotions.
	The fact that I'm just prone to giving into them and integrating them into my way of thinking about the issues.
	So even though it's not a good value, it's still based on a fact.
	Well, I would say that if you...
	The question is more what species of fact.
	Yeah, I mean, your personal feelings are desires, right?
	So if somebody kills your wife and you want to go and kill that person, you have a desire, and that's something that you're experiencing, and it's a fact.
	You could hook up somebody to an MRI and track their brain activity if they were shown a picture of the killer or something, and you'd be able to measure that person's level of desire for vengeance.
	And I think that it would be perfectly valid to say that I have a desire for vengeance.
	Right. I would say that I'm not sure exactly how value would fit into that.
	You could say that it is a value to satisfy your desire.
	So I want to go kill this guy.
	I'm going to go kill this guy. And then I'm going to feel great that it's a value to satisfy that desire.
	But I think if you would then elevate that to a principle which said everybody should satisfy their desires, then obviously you and I, I'm sure, both agree that that's not a particularly valid principle.
	So that's sort of how I would categorize that if it helps.
	That's the hurt line. All I'm saying is the question is really what species of fact we're using to justify.
	Because if we just talk about the origin of something, yeah, everything has a causal, well, you might disagree with that, but more or less everything has a causal origin, an origin based on fact.
	But when we're talking about values being factual, we're talking more about their justification.
	So, are you saying that values, not all values can be justified by facts or you're saying that, I'm not sure what you're saying exactly in regards to that.
	Well, no, what I'm saying is that if you have an ought, like if you create a should for human beings, then the shoulds, right, whatever it is that you say, have to be logical and consistent for all human beings.
	That's really always been my basic principle.
	That's the argument for morality.
	So if you're going to say that everyone...
	Whose wife has been killed ought to go and kill the guy who killed his wife, then that's not a universal moral proposition because it can't apply to everyone, right?
	Lots of people whose wives haven't been killed or whatever.
	You can't find the killer or the killer kills himself and you can't do it.
	So that's not a valid moral proposition.
	So you need to have consistency across moral propositions in order for them to be valid, in the same way that if you come up with a scientific theory, it has to be consistent across everything it is that you're trying to describe.
	So a biologist is going to say, all zebras are like horses with stripes.
	Well, that's valid, right? But if you say, you know, all zebras are horses that can fly, well, then you're talking more about a pegasus, and you can't have both.
	So I'm just saying, whenever you come up with moral propositions, then you have to make sure that they're consistent across The species and that's where that's the test for sort of moral validity over the validity of a moral theory.
	Okay, so you do agree that values can be judged based on the facts.
	Yeah, I would say more...
	Well, you're the one who said I wasn't saying that.
	I'm kind of confused now because you were saying earlier that you can't judge you can't judge goals.
	I mean, you can only judge actions based on the goal that they're supposed to fulfill, but now you're saying that you can indeed judge goals.
	So you're kind of contradicting yourself.
	I don't think so. If I say that an object accelerates towards the Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second, what's the goal there?
	The goal is simply to communicate something that is true.
	And if I say all human beings should...
	Well, yeah, to understand and describe the properties of matter, right?
	So if I say that non-aggression is a valid moral principle, then it has to be something that is logically consistent for all people.
	You can judge propositions for For sure, right?
	You can judge propositions, but there are two things that are generally associated with goals within society or, I guess, propositions.
	One is the one that operates between human beings, right?
	So you shouldn't come up and, you know, jam a fork into my back or something like that.
	That seems like a, you know, non-aggression principle would take care of that.
	And so I'm not sure if there's a goal in that.
	It's just that that's a logically valid thing to say, this non-aggression principle or whatever you want to call it, because it's applicable to all human beings.
	However, when it comes to your own sort of personal life, there's stuff like, if I want to be a filmmaker, and that's my big sort of goal, then there are certain steps that I have to take, and I can judge the value of those steps relative to becoming a filmmaker.
	So one of them would not be become a guy who's great at dance.
	That's not going to help me become a filmmaker.
	If you have a goal in life, you can judge actions relative to that goal, and those actions gain or lose value relative to whether they get you closer to that goal.
	That's sort of more personal satisfaction, personal fulfillment, and that's sort of one aspect of it, but the other one would be relationships that are common to all human beings.
	Definitely. I'm going to have to go real soon now, but I just wanted to say, so you're saying that you can't, and I would like it if you could be really short on this, I know it's hard for you, Stefan, but you're saying that if I decide to be a mass murderer, for example, you would only evaluate my actions as good or bad depending on how well they fulfilled that goal?
	Well, you could, and there are certain ways that you could judge that from an amoral standpoint relative to that goal, but that would violate the superior principle, which is what is common to the species, the non-aggression principle, and so on.
	So you do agree with me that there are ways to judge overarching goals?
	Goals? Hard to say.
	For me, goals is not the right word to use when it comes to ethics.
	If I want to launch myself on an enterprise to become a mass murderer, you would still think that there's a moral problem with that kind of enterprise, right?
	For sure, for sure, but...
	Well, the goal is...
	Go ahead. Anyway, I have to go, guys.
	Okay, well, thanks, Francois.
	I just need to talk about this another time.
	Sorry, go ahead, Greg. Bye. Well, I... I was hoping to get a little clarification from it, but that's alright.
	In my mind, a goal is essentially a desire for a specific effect.
	Correct? Yeah, I would certainly say that would be...
	I mean, I'm not going to try and come up with a perfect definition, but I think that's definitely a workable one.
	Okay, then it doesn't make sense to judge the non-aggression principle from that standpoint, because you're basically making an argument from effect.
	Well, yeah, I mean, that's the issue that I have, right?
	And this conflation between what we want as individuals, like my goal might be all I want to do today is sit down and read a book.
	Well, that's not an ethical choice, but it's going to make me happy.
	And then there are other things like telling the truth, which, for the most part, it's not illegal.
	Like if you tell your kids that Santa Claus exists, they don't throw you in jail, right?
	Until we get to Libertopia, of course.
	But those would sort of be like telling a falsehood.
	Like you're a software sales guy and you say this software can do it, but it can only kind of do it.
	Well, you know, it may not be ethical, but it's not particularly evil.
	Whereas, you know, going and stabbing somebody in the back with a fork...
	Is evil.
	So there's lots of different ways of looking at human action.
	Ethics is a very, very small subset of human action because it's around specifically forbidding a very small subset of the possibilities of human actions in very limited ways.
	So don't stab people with forks.
	It's not exactly going to define how somebody should live.
	So it's a totally minor aspect of the whole range of human choice.
	It's a pretty essential one.
	And those aspects can be judged objectively.
	Now, the problem is that the danger is not some individual going and stabbing someone from a fork.
	The danger is that somebody comes up with a moral definition that makes everybody think that stabbing people with forks is a good idea.
	That's the real danger in life.
	Not some crazy guy who's having visions and stabbing people.
	That comes across like once every 10 years in one country.
	Who cares, right? That's like worrying about, I don't know, being struck by lightning while simultaneously getting a bee sting and dying that way.
	I mean, that's really nothing we need to worry about.
	But if somebody's come up with a definition of ethics that they can get people to believe that stabbing people with forks is really good, then we've unleashed a tide of hell on the planet, right?
	There's a statism and socialism and communism and fascism.
	It's getting people to believe that the evil is the good That is the real danger and that's why it's so important to focus on the argument for morality so that people don't think that they're doing a great thing by sticking someone with a fork.
	Hear, hear. Alright, well listen, we've gone two hours and ten minutes.
	Sorry, did you have another thing you wanted to add, Niels?
	I'm surprised that you didn't talk this week about the story from Kelsey in the forum about how she talked about how she was raising her child Which you said that you shed a small tear.
	I agree.
	It's really a hallmark in history.
	Because has this ever happened, raising a child rationally?
	I don't think so. Well, Christina's been trying to do it with me for about three years of marriage, and I'm sure she could tell you that it really is quite an uphill battle.
	Lots of reprogramming, I guess you could say.
	To say the least. To say the least, absolutely.
	It is a first. I will get to that.
	I'm sort of on vacation so I haven't been podcasting as much as I normally would but there's that and also I think the fantastic description that a woman gave on the board about relationship issues that another board member was going on.
	I think both of those are fantastic. And there's been some great comments on the board.
	So yes, those are pretty amazing things, and I think it's an enormous step forward.
	And of course, whatever we can do to reach out to the fairer sex, I think we should do, because they will be raising the next generation of people who will free us all from the state.
	Okay. Well, basically, the fact that we came across that she was raising her child this way is basically the thing that we want to reach, don't you think?
	And after 200-odd podcasts that this basically already is happening, it's really great.
	Absolutely. I can't tell you how thrilled that is for me.
	You know, they do say, and I think it's true, and Greg's now going to ask me who they are, and that's fine.
	Fine, I'll see if I can remember.
	But they do say that the best way to achieve happiness in some ways, in sort of limited ways, is that if you missed something, to create what you didn't have, right?
	So, I mean, as you know, I had bad parenting and so on, bad education.
	And so trying to create good parents out there and trying to create better education out there, which is specifically what I lacked, is a wonderful way, I think, to turn evil into good.
	And that's sort of something I'd recommend to everyone to take a shot at it.
	Well, I can tell you it's partly what inspired me to talk to my niece.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, and that's another thing I wanted to read as well because that was a fantastic conversation that you had with her and what was most remarkable about that too was A, great job and B, she got it like right away.
	This stuff really isn't that hard.
	It just takes somebody to point out an obvious contradiction and the false self is like totally easy to penetrate with logic.
	It's just that everybody tries manipulation and then gets swallowed up.
	Yeah, that's kind of what I noticed, too, is that it was like watching it just fall away right before my eyes.
	Okay, well, listen, thanks, everybody.
	I really appreciate the time that people spent on this.
	It is an abstract and esoteric topic, this concept of free will, but I really feel that the cold claws of Niels' deterministic philosophy closing around my soul and extinguishing it from any sort of new or meanal realm, which is going to be painful, but I think in the long run very healthy.
	Oh, there it goes. Off it goes.
	No, I really appreciate that.
	It is a very important topic to get involved in because it does have a lot to do with the absolutism of logic and also the role of ethics in life.
	So it is an essential topic.
	And I certainly appreciate everybody's patience in listening and Neil's patience with me as I struggle to sort of understand the deterministic position.
	Fantastic. Is there anything else that anybody wanted to add?
	Otherwise, I'll sign off for this week.
	Yeah, Stefan, we don't have any more time maybe for next week or maybe we have time in a podcast.
	I was wondering on your idea about morality being less precise, less precise of a theory than would be the theories of physics because it appeals to the individual and we can't predict the behavior of the individual the same way we can predict the behavioral matter.
	But I would say that such a theory cannot be less precise.
	It refers to something completely different.
	And I don't think there is actually a means to measure precision in this field.
	So if you maybe can enlighten us over maybe a few minutes or maybe in the next segment, something to think about.
	I think I'll need a little bit more time, and it'll also need a little bit more probing to understand what, to make sure that we're on the same page.
	So if you could make a note about that, I think it'd be a great topic for next Sunday.
	All right. Well, thanks so much, everybody.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	And thanks also. I'm glad that you guys enjoyed the dinner table chat that Christina and John and I had yesterday.
	And maybe someday we can all sit down together at a big, long table and have a dinner like that, too.
	So thanks so much for listening, everyone.
	And I guess check back for a podcast during the week.
	I'm not sure how many I'll get done, but I have a couple of great topics that I wanted to get done this week, so I will try and get those done.
	And have yourselves a fantastic week, and thanks so much for your time.
	Of course, always, always, both on the boards and in this, it is hugely, hugely important to me, of course, and hopefully helpful to you, for you guys to be spending the time to work on this kind of stuff, because the value that you're providing to people who come along who are newer is enormous, and every post that you guys put in adds to the value of what we're doing, and I really, really appreciate that.
	So thanks so much, everyone.

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