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April 16, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:58
1041 Plato Voodoo - A Listener Convo

A debate with a listener about Platonism and voodoo.

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Oh, hi, Steph.
Can you hear me properly?
Yes, I can hear you just fine, thank you.
How are you doing? I'm great, how are you?
Oh, I'm excellent. So, is it all set?
Oh yeah, no, we're recording away.
Maybe we can splice the video together later, but you had some questions or criticisms of some approaches that I'd taken.
Yes, there were other, you know, some issues regarding a few comments that you made in your video presentations.
As such, I know you didn't mention any critics towards the points you made regarding Plato's philosophical approach in Iwakens is concerning...
First of all, I just want to make sure...
Can you hear me properly or should I...? The volume...
Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, sorry.
Yeah, so, you know, that story that we get our knowledge from the ether and it's a philosophical approach that many philosophers don't disagree with it.
And when you present it on your video, you didn't really put it down as nonsense or just organized opinions, you know, and Stuff like that.
You know, you just went along with it without any extra, you know...
You see my point?
I'm not sure what you mean by went along with it, because I oppose that view.
Do you mean that I went along as if the view were false without disproving it?
Yeah, I mean, it sounds something similar to religion, right?
I mean, why wouldn't you turn it down as you turn religion?
But you didn't. You just said, oh, actually it's pre-accepted.
A philosophy in a philosophical community, so why not give it a go as well?
I mean, you don't turn it down.
You would make a point about religion and you would right away say, this is nonsense.
But I haven't really heard you...
How do you call it?
It doesn't have a null What is that philosophical terminology?
Hypothesis. Hypothesis doesn't have, but you also don't make any contrary arguments.
You know, why is that nonsense that we gain our knowledge from the womb or before we were born and we kind of get a glimpse of it.
And when we are born, we try to remember as soon as we see that through our five senses, right?
I mean, it's mostly to do with the realm of concept formation.
How is it that we recognize a table as a table?
Well, the Lockean or Aristotelian view is that we build that definition up through exposure to tables, learning what they're used for, hearing the word described, and we then derive the concept from each instance that we experience in our life.
Whereas the Platonists would instead say that we have been floating around a perfect table before we're born, and that is how we recognize a table as a table, that it's not empirically derived from our sense evidence, but that we remember it as a perfect table before we're but that we remember it as a perfect table before we're Yeah.
I see.
Okay, let's move on, if you don't mind, towards another issue that I came along.
Hang on. I don't think we've dealt with that issue.
I mean, I've just described the two viewpoints, but your question is, how do we know the iconic one is false?
No, I mean, I personally don't have any views further on regarding this issue.
It's just that I was expecting you to kind of Yeah, I've talked about it a little bit in a podcast.
Aristotle has a fantastic refutation, which we don't have to get into here, but the basic thing is that This whole perspective relies on a religious approach to truth, which Plato is obviously quite keen on, and he's got a real mystical side to him.
But the idea that before we are born, our consciousness is superior and inhabiting a world of perfect forms is such a ludicrous idea.
I mean, if you're not religious, if you're a materialist or if you're scientific, it is such a useless and ornate over-complication of concept formation.
It requires that we ascribe superior perceptivity to a fetus.
It requires that we invent an alternate universe, which obviously multiplicity is not good.
Occam's razor is that the simplest explanation is almost always the best, all other things being equal.
We have to invent an alternate universe.
We have to invent an additional kind of sensory apparatus because obviously a fetus in the womb cannot perceive this alternate universe using any of its five senses because it's in a womb, right?
So it's in a dark cave, a dark wet cave, a black wet cave, and therefore can't perceive anything.
So in order for Plato's thesis to be valid, These are just some of the logical problems.
You have to invent an alternate universe.
You have to ascribe superior cognitive capacity to a fetus.
And does this occur when the cell first divides?
Does it occur when the fetus is looking like a fish?
Does it occur when the fetus is covered with a fine coat of hair?
And when does this all fade?
So you have to invent superior cognitive capacities for a fetus.
You have to invent an alternate universe You have to populate this alternate universe with some sort of ethereal perfect forms and then you have to give a direct capacity for the fetus to perceive in some way that has never been explained this alternate universe or other universe of perfect forms.
And that is, to me, you can't smoke enough drugs to make that a workable thesis when you already have a perfectly workable thesis insofar as concept formation occurs within the mind after repeated exposure to similarly shaped objects.
So we don't need to, like in the Aristotelian Urlachian view, we don't need to invent alternate universes.
We don't need to ascribe superior abilities to a fetus.
We don't need to invent the world of forms.
We don't need to invent some mystical way that the fetus perceives these world of forms and so on.
So I agree with you that perhaps I should have gone into more detail.
And I hope I've gone into a little bit more detail here.
There's a more rigorous logical argument that Aristotle applies to this.
Which is a little too complicated to go into here, but...
Absolutely. I mean, you know, Steph, you went through all of what I was looking forward to hear from you, and thank you for that.
Because you didn't clarify it, you didn't dismiss it in your videos, or whatever it was, or one situation or several situations where you put forward this problem.
But now you dismiss it very, very clearly, so it's great to hear that because you actually said, I don't want to repeat myself, but just to make it more bold statement, some philosophers actually push this idea into their community and you are a philosopher, so it sounds to me pretty awkward.
Oh, it is. But now you've definitely clarified it.
There's a whole German idealist, Hegel, there's a whole German idealist and to some degree French rationalist approach to this, wherein, and of course Marxists are very much like the big movement of history, so this idea that there's this alternate universe of perfect forms Is how people have attempted to very explicitly rescue Christianity, rescue religion, and also rescue ethics from what they consider to be a morally empty or materialistic or Darwinian universe, but it doesn't work.
That's right. So now, considering we can put aside out of the three situations, right?
We can put the first two aside.
We already clarified with it.
So now...
Now you're moving towards a scientific view of the world, right?
A scientific view and an axiomatic-based view of the world.
Is that correct? I agree with you about the science of materialism.
I'm not sure that I know what you mean by an axiomatic view of the world.
I'm not saying you're wrong or anything.
I'm just not sure I understand what that means.
Yes. The way the scientific community is pushing forward a certain theory or some other type of approach towards understanding the world we live in and putting into perspectives all the issues related to life in general,
its origins and all the main issues that you are putting forward in your videos usually, pretty much.
So, in this third approach, it's based on a materialistic scientific view.
Well, I'm sorry, just to clarify one thing, and this could be construed as complete vanity, not on my part, but on the part of philosophy, but I'll say it nonetheless.
It is my strong belief that it is not philosophy that is based on science, but science that is based upon philosophy, because you need to have A relationship between mind and matter, between thought and reality, you have to have metaphysics and epistemology worked out before the scientific method becomes valid.
Because, of course, there are some philosophies, I wouldn't call them philosophies, but some superstitions That would say that dreams and intuition and all that kind of stuff are valid roots of knowledge.
And philosophy rejects that and as a result the scientific method can be claimed to be valid.
But I wouldn't say that philosophy comes out of the scientific method.
This is just a cause and effect thing.
I'd like to work in the biggest field I can think of and if science were bigger I'd go there.
So that's just a minor correction if that's okay?
Absolutely. You're obviously part of the philosophical community, so you know exactly how you view these issues.
Yes, I'm glad you corrected me here.
I don't know.
You always mention the Occam Razor and the axiomatic type of You know, approaches towards scientific views.
So that means you deny any purpose of belief, for example, shamanic belief, you know, and Sorry, I missed a word there.
I got semantics. Shamanic, shamanic.
The shamans, you know? The shamans, yes.
All those cultures, all those ancient cultures and views upon the mind-body connection and such.
Think about the placebo effect, right?
Well, the placebo effect is scientifically valid, right?
I mean, the placebo effect is very powerful.
And so, as a rationalist, I would definitely accept that...
I would accept two things which may be related to what you're saying.
The first is that there is, of course, a mind-body connection, which can be proven through the placebo effect.
And the second is that people do find some value in something like prayer or certain kinds of superstitious rituals...
Of course, it would be great if we could find a scientific or rationalistic explanation as to the value that people get out of that, which is something that I'm sort of working on a podcast to do with that.
But the short answer for me would be that I believe that we are full of amazing intuition.
We can see this in terms of dream analysis.
Malcolm Gladwell has a book out called Blink, which is very interesting, which is the power, as he calls it, of thinking without thinking.
In so far as people can determine, based on listening to half a second of a professor's muffled voice, whether he's a good professor or not, and it's very close to the results that are handed in in terms of professor evaluation by students at the end of a course.
So we have an amazing ability to process.
We have incredible instincts and we have intuitions.
I'm a big fan of psychology and Jungian stuff in particular, certain aspects of it.
So we do have amazing intuition.
So when people sit and pray to God and they get an answer, it's obviously not an external divine being that they're praying to, but they are asking a question in a sense of themselves and receiving an answer.
And it has certainly been my experience that that is a valid approach to at least bringing some kind of creativity or wisdom into our lives.
So the call and answer aspect of psychology that we, when people sit down and pray and ask God, For an answer, they will often say that they do get some kind of answer.
And it's obviously not an answer like, what is the square root of 12 billion?
But it is an answer like, where should I go with my life?
What should I do with my life? Give me an answer as to whether I love this person or not.
And they do feel that they receive some answer that has value for them.
And my belief in that is that that is true, it's just not a divinity that is external to their consciousness, but more the depths of their instincts and their own unconscious that they're asking to get these responses from.
Okay, great.
I mean, in this manner, if I can make an association between the placebo effect and the effects of prayers, and putting aside As well, the mathematics.
Think about how complicated the mathematical formulas there are.
I mean, how would you expect a primitive culture and later on, obviously, towards a civilized society nowadays or even in the future, looking at people and not only the prophets or,
you know, the laymen, but even the experts looking at some issues With the complexity of mathematics that it has such a laborious way of approaching some such ideas of views upon the world that have an explanation through mathematics, but they are so complicated.
Wouldn't it be much easier to kind of put Put towards this approach, for example, a simple prayer can do more than all the mathematical formulas in the world, right? To get you to have some kind of emotion, you know, that it's kind of taking you towards the goal of understanding.
I mean, this has been done over the eons, right?
Yes, but sorry, I would say that that's the right tool for the right job, right?
You don't use a saw to hammer in a nail, and you don't use a hammer to cut a piece of wood in two.
And I would say that when it comes to self-knowledge...
Just to remind you, also the placebo effect, I then put it together with this mathematical approach and this emotional, religious type of approach.
And another thing, I dismiss also the religious type of theological religion approach.
Theology, you know?
I put that aside.
It doesn't fit my way of looking towards these issues.
But the emotional aspects of the traditional Cultural and religious way of looking towards understanding the world of our purpose and such, I'm still skeptical about it, you know?
Right. And in terms of the relationship to me between something like intuition or an authentic emotional experience, you would not necessarily find mathematics a tool.
You can't say, what is the square root of love?
What is the cube root of anger?
So authentic emotional experiences...
Oh yeah, you can.
You can. I mean, why not?
You can have, for example...
There are scientific papers where they define even love now.
Even, you know, some hormones, you know, some state of mind, some, you know, here is some adrenaline, here is some, yeah?
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I'm talking mathematics, not hormones.
Of course, there are hormonal aspects to love.
No, but the hormones can be put in a chemical formula and then you add them in some...
Some other further descriptions, mathematical or chemical or some other similar scientific approaches.
I'm not talking about mathematical just as strictly speaking mathematical formulas, but a scientific approach such as mathematics or chemistry, you can explain how all these feelings They can't be put, after all, into a scientifical equation, if you wish to call it this way, right?
And don't forget the placebo effect.
Don't forget the placebo effect.
Why is it that it works so well?
I mean, it must be something that people believe.
It must have some influence on them.
Even if it's fake, even if it's false, just the belief itself seems to be You know, working wonderfully, you know?
Well, within certain realms, right?
I mean, the placebo effect does not help some illnesses, right?
I mean, and certainly prayer has proven to be completely ineffective in a sort of blind controlled study, a double blind controlled study prayer.
The effectiveness of prayer for particular ailments has proven, you know, completely ineffective.
Well, you know what, I have to interrupt you here, Steph, because I heard this point of view so many times over the debates on the internet, and actually these studies, they were done in a particular manner.
They have some specificity that was limiting the real effectiveness of such a I mean, what I'm trying to say is that I don't see these tests as viable 100%, because the way they were approaching this testing was not accurate, in my opinion.
Well, I certainly would be happy to hear about the limitation.
These are all peer-reviewed studies that have gone through some very rigorous scientific approaches.
It certainly is not a valid thing to say they're not valid, right?
I mean, if you have some proof about how each one of these tests was falsified or used false premises or made mistakes in some foundational way...
Then you should publish that, right?
I mean, because that is some very, very powerful stuff.
If you can discredit the studies that were done, which claim to prove the non-efficacy of prayer, you should have...
I mean, that's an incredible thing to do.
You should either point me towards...
And you can put that link if you have one in the chat window.
Well, I'm just trying to add an extra point here.
For example, during those tests...
There were selected 50 people that are supposed to pray, 50 people are supposed not to pray.
But in this context, you cannot create that emotional state that would impact, you know, the prayers.
Sorry, no, I'm not talking about those ones.
The ones that I'm talking about are where people in a church are told to pray for one group and not another group.
Right. No, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Well, no, but if you are genuinely praying for someone, then the effect of that prayer should show up on that individual.
If prayer is claimed to be efficacious, then in order to remove the placebo effect, it has to be a third party who's praying for you.
Oh, okay, okay. I know what you mean.
I know what you mean. That's not what I'm talking about.
Exactly. This is the type of research that's been done.
To prove or disprove the validity of the prayer, but exactly.
So I disagree with such type of testing because just taking some group of, you know, churchgoers to put them to honestly and generally pray, it's not the same as, let's say,
having a Buddhist monk or, you know, that is doing it He's doing it for years and years, and he has a kind of pattern to do it properly.
Sorry, but how do you think it's not the same?
Well, I wouldn't say it doesn't have some sort of similarity, but in what I'm concerned, it's not really It doesn't convince me, let's put it this way. But sorry, it's not up to you to be convinced or not.
The question is, is the methodology and the data valid?
It's not whether you like it or not, obviously, any more than whether I like it or not.
Perhaps it has some chances to be valid, but you cannot base your further decisions regarding Such issues are based on this research only.
To my view, it can be easily dismissed.
Well, sorry, I don't know about what issues you're talking about.
The statement made by...
The invalidity of prayer towards...
The statement that is made by religious people is that prayer affects the outcome of illness, right?
Yes, pretty much.
And some other similar issues, yes.
Right, so then in a wide variety of studies using a wide variety of methodologies, all of which has been peer-reviewed and run through a rigorous examination of the methodology and the validity of the data, the correlation between prayer and illness that has been claimed by religious people has been completely unsubstantiated.
I mean, that's just a fact. We can draw whatever conclusions we want from that, perhaps, but the statement of claim that is put forward by the religious people is falsified.
I mean, you can't just say it, but it's not a valid thing to say, I don't accept those findings.
Those are the facts, right?
Right, but you see, you're right.
But also, let's say telepathy, right?
This particular scientific, pseudo-scientific view upon some way of communication between Brain waves, you know, it's not been denied 100% yet.
So, you know... Sorry, can you tell me what you mean by...
I mean, it certainly has never been...
Nobody who claims telepathy for the last century that I know of has ever tested above a purely random sample.
So it remains a completely unsubstantiated thesis today.
Yes, it remains.
It doesn't dismiss it for good, so to speak, you know.
As well as a placebo effect and...
I don't know...
Sorry, can you tell me what you... I'm sorry, I just want to make sure I understand what you mean.
You say it doesn't dismiss it for good.
So, for the last hundred years, there's zero evidence whatsoever of any kind of non...
Oh, we don't know that.
...between minds.
Maybe it's simply, you know, not put forward towards the public.
You know, who knows?
I don't have access to the truth of the research that's been done, you know?
So I can't really give any more arguments.
I'm sorry, just help me understand.
How is it that you know whether something is true or false?
Because it sounds a little bit like, if there's science I don't like, I'm going to...
Because maybe it's secret, right?
Maybe it's secret for, you know, it's used in military purposes or, you know, who knows?
Remote viewing and some other ways of, you know, causing harm even, you know?
And maybe it's just not...
You mean like voodoo?
Well, voodoo or military purposes, you know?
You never know. Sorry, what you're saying is that all of these tests that have been going on in the scientific community might be discredited because there's military purpose to the telepathy?
Well, that's one point of view.
What's the evidence of that? I don't have the evidence.
I'm assuming...
Or presuming. So you're rejecting evidence on the basis...
So there's evidence that psychic phenomenon is completely invalid.
Well, I didn't read the scientific papers.
Hang on. But they're available on the Internet, right?
So the Internet has made this false...
I doubt it. I don't think they are available.
You don't think that scientific studies about telepathy are available on the Internet?
No, I don't. Have you looked?
Well, I looked and I didn't find anything concrete, you know.
They are military secrets or some other forms.
They are not revealed to the public eventually.
I don't know.
Maybe they are not.
But I don't have the evidence either way.
I'm trying to get you to recognize something here.
And this is just my perspective, right?
Whether you want to accept it or not, it's up to you, of course.
What you're doing is you're saying, okay, on the one hand, there's a huge amount of scientific literature and evidence that completely discredits the idea of psychic phenomena.
So that evidence I'm going to reject, and I'm going to reject it because I have a possible thesis about military something something for which there's absolutely no evidence, right?
So you're rejecting the presence of evidence on the basis of a thesis for which there is no evidence, right?
That's not scientific at all.
It's not rational, right? Well, I'm not saying there's no evidence.
I just don't have access to it.
It doesn't mean that if it can be made public, it's going to be made public on the internet or otherwise, you know, wherever you go to, wherever you get your information from.
But anyway, I don't know.
I can't dismiss it yet.
I don't read an article that's saying 100% it should be dismissed as junk science, pseudoscience and all those, including wood, if you wish.
Even wood, you can't dismiss it because it may have some impact on some level.
Is there any thesis that you would be willing to dismiss?
Is there any null hypothesis for your approach to validating or invalidating a theorem?
Null hypothesis, yeah.
What thesis would you be comfortable in rejecting?
Well, it's a kind of laborious way of putting it.
So I will try to go through some shortcuts, if I may.
For example, lots of people, they want to just, you know, get high, right?
They just want to get high.
You want to be this feeling of happiness, getting high or, you know, through natural or some people are doing it through prayers, some people are doing it through meditation or just taking medication, natural or artificial medication, right?
So all these effects that These stimulants, whether it's artificial or not, or based on a belief, methodology, or some other way, you know, obviously, they have impact on our current lives, you know, so we cannot just dismiss them yet.
I mean, to give you a contra-example for why voodoo When Voodoo wouldn't work.
I'm not really prepared for that.
It's probably a laborious issue, but I don't know if you see my points at Penn trying to make.
I'm sorry, no, but I'll tell you what I'll do.
We'll stop talking just now.
What I'll do is I'll listen to this again.
And if I have any questions, I can give you a shout.
But I can't quite follow what it is that you're making now.
But what I'll do is I'll have a listen to this again.
And as you know, I record these.
at least we can put this up and other people can comment on it.
But let me stop just because I want to make sure that if there's something in what you're saying that I haven't missed it sort of as it blew past me.
So if that's okay, we'll take a pause now and let me listen to this and perhaps we can pick it up again if I find that there's something that I've missed in what you're saying.
Sounds good to me. You're saying that we should continue afterwards or some other time?
Well, let me have a listen to what it is that you've said.
And if I've missed something in terms of the argument, I just can't follow what you're saying now.
But if I hear it, I have questions, then I can give you a shout.
I'm not sort of saying a specific date to continue, but if there are some questions that I have, then I can give you a shout and we can pick it up again.
Quite, quite. Okay, well, thanks very much.
I appreciate it. It was very interesting. Okay, thank you, Steph.
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