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June 3, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:50
1675 Absolutism and Religion and Quantum Physics

Am I too aggressive with god? And what about quantum physics? Huh?

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. I just want to start off the podcast.
I wanted to start it off by going, Hi everybody!
Because that's the way Isabella says hello.
Hi mama! Hi dada!
Oh, she's so adorable.
Anyway, I hope you're doing very well.
And this is a ramblecast with a variety of content of things that have just been floating around.
The first and foremost thing...
Oh, redundancy. Oh, let's improve our language.
Let's not say things like first and foremost because they're redundant.
I'd like to talk about my militancy.
Why am I such a knuckle-dragging hot-ass when it comes to something like agnosticism?
Or you could say minarchism.
To me, agnosticism is just the religious equivalent of minarchism for politics.
Well, atheism was very popular in the 19th century.
It's one of the reasons why it was a century of peace.
And things were going well.
Things were doing well. Even Francis Bacon, who was an avowed theist, was writing a lot of tracts, even in the 17th century – no, 16th century he was – around anti-atheist positions.
So atheism in Europe was doing very, very well.
And, of course, it is doing very well in some areas, though irrationality remains supreme.
It's simply been displaced to statism, because that's the pendulum.
We go from God to state to God to state to God to state to God.
Because these must forever fill the power vacuum left by the authoritarianism of the family, as we have often spoken about.
And it has been my experience that if you give a man an out, he will, by golly, take it.
If you give a man an out, he will take it.
If you say to a man, I cannot disprove The existence of your God.
I cannot tell you for sure that your God does not exist.
Then he will take that and run with it.
Now, this is an argument from effect.
But that's okay. That's okay.
Argument from effect is okay.
When it comes to tactics, an argument from effect is okay.
I think strategy is the principles, but tactics and argument from effect is okay.
So not only is there no God, or no sense of any kind of God in the universe or in the world or anything like that, But it is very important to bring that standard to bear in an absolutist way.
Because if you give people an out, it's like, to take a not-too-great example or metaphor, it's like if you put an escape artist in a prison...
And leave with ten doors.
And to leave only one door unlocked, well, by golly, that's the one that he's going to use to escape.
You have to lock all ten doors to keep people in the, quote, prison of reason, rationality, and reality.
See? Told you it was a bad metaphor.
Oh, a swing and a miss.
But you can't let this slide.
I mean, you can't. Because...
People will do anything to hang on to that which shields them from their scar tissue.
And you're not helping people.
You are enabling their infantile avoidances.
And I don't mean infantile just as immature, but things which occur through infancy.
You're not helping people.
You don't say to a drunk, well, have a couple of drinks a day.
You don't want to drink to access, but I can't prove that there's anything wrong with you drinking alcohol, so I guess you can go.
That's not healthy. Understand, people are addicted to religion.
They are addicted to statism.
It is a form of self-management.
It is a form of anxiety management.
It is a way of avoiding confronting the lies they were told by those who had power over them when they were children.
You don't taper off drugs.
Sorry, let me rephrase that.
What do I know about getting people off drugs?
But maybe there is a way that you taper or you substitute methadone or whatever, but that's not the way that it works in the mind.
You can't give people the out.
It's like saying you can only have a couple of hits of heroin a day.
That is not taking a stand against the addiction, against the illness, so to speak.
And this doesn't mean that you have to break the truth about everything all at once, right?
I mean, in terms of tapering off, yeah, you can begin to chip away at people's illusions, but only ever with absolutes.
You can never chip away at people's illusions with relative statements.
You can never defeat religion with agnosticism, because agnosticism is the door in the cell that lets God out to roam the world and do his vicious, demonic, and beastly work forevermore.
And so it's really, really important to not let agnosticism slide, in the same way as it's really, really important to not let Minarchism slide.
Minarchism results in totalitarianism, as we've seen throughout history.
Agnosticism results in religiosity, or, at the very least, an increase in superstition.
Because agnosticism is just a smaller part of a larger narcissistic principle.
Agnosticism and minarchism and the virtue of the family as an axiom, they're just...
Not minor, but they are smaller slices of a much larger pie.
And the much larger pie is the narcissism of personal preference.
I don't want there to be no God.
And therefore, I'm going to wrap philosophy around that want, that need.
It is the primacy of need, the primacy of preference.
I don't want to face the anxiety of a godless universe and of having been lied to.
And as we've seen...
The arguments against God, and I just did one with a kind and very smart listener, they're pretty simple, which is not to say easy.
They're only hard because of the propaganda we've received.
But the arguments against God are pretty easy, because we all understand those arguments against Santa Claus.
I mean, they're the same set of principles.
Unicorns and ghosts, it's the same set of principles.
But it's the primacy of need, of preference, of want...
I can't easily conceive of a world without a government, of a world without gods, and therefore it must be impossible.
But that's placing the limitations of consciousness as a philosophical absolute and expecting reality to conform to limitations, to anxiety.
But reality, of course, does not conform to limitations or anxiety.
So, you know, you can call it militancy, you can call it absolutism.
I will absolutely take those labels and actually wear them with pride as the only medals a philosopher should be wearing on his battle-scarred chest.
But it is really, really important to not give people the out of escaping back into their illusions.
Because they will desperately want to do that and they will use any, any, any, any excuse...
To resurrect the ghost and hobgoblins of history and to disappear back into the ethereal fog, emptiness, vacuity, and propagandized murk, mess, and mental catastrophe of the propaganda they were fed.
Relativism will never beat absolutism.
This is textbook rant, right?
In any conflict between two positions, the most consistent position will always win.
And there has been a lot of propaganda that's been put forward about don't make absolute statements.
Scientists will say this all the time.
Don't make absolute statements.
This is conditional and so on.
And I agree with that, of course, about many, many, many things.
But not about principles, not about reality, not about reason.
So, I hope that makes some sense.
You simply can't give people the out.
Because to me, that's even worse than, like, approaching a religious person with agnosticism or approaching an agnostic with weaker agnosticism, to me, is worse than not approaching them at all.
Like, if you're going to approach someone with the truth, bring the whole damn thing.
I mean, in individual snippets, right?
The principles, the absolutism of that argument.
You don't have to bring everything, right?
But, of course, you can't. Otherwise, I just have one podcast.
That would be, I guess, relatively long.
But if you're going to bring truth and reason to someone, bring it.
Don't bring a diluted version, because then that will be their perception of truth and reason.
That will be their perception of philosophy.
It will be this wishy-washy, well, pseudo-maturity, let's not make absolute statements, and so on.
That is not respectful towards philosophy.
And you don't want people to then get the sense that reason and evidence is something that is, you know, a sort of kind and gentle, vaguely persuasive point of view rather than the actual real facts that they need to accept and understand if they wish to have any partaking of the truth.
Alright, so let's get on to part two.
There is a debate which flares up from time to time in Free Domain Radio, and I'll just touch on it here, although I've done a show or two on it before.
The quantum mechanics, or quantum physics, wherein subatomic particles do some seriously funky stuff, like appear to be in two places at one time, and so on.
And I'm just going to reiterate my comments on it.
And I've said that philosophy deals with sense impressions, deals with sensory data.
And what I mean by that is that the only reason that we know that quantum mechanics is freaky is because matter doesn't behave that way.
Unlike an electron, you don't get a ball in two places at the same time.
And so we've only derived the laws of logic from the consistent behavior of aggregated atoms, of sense matter.
And so quantum mechanics is only freaky relative to sense perception.
And so sense perception remains primary, because that's where we develop the principles of the scientific method from.
And so, in one sense, quantum mechanics is inside philosophy, in that quantum mechanics is a problem to be solved through the scientific method, which is reason and evidence, which is derived from the philosophical observation and extrapolation of principles of sense evidence.
And so, in that sense, philosophy encapsulates or subsumes quantum physics, as it does all physics, all science, and all forms of human knowledge.
On the other hand, it doesn't have anything to do with philosophy.
In terms of philosophy and action, the philosophy that you live with.
So, if you are a quantum physicist, then it has a good deal to do with how you...
Like, philosophy has a good deal to do with how you attempt to resolve these seeming paradoxes of the behavior of subatomic particles.
Yay! Go for it. I think it's wonderful.
I look forward to reading the next...
What was it? I think it was 25 years ago.
I was first reading about string theory.
Still not proven, but hey, I fully accept quantum mechanics as an incredibly accurate measure and a way of figuring things out at some ectopic level.
So if you're a quantum physicist, fantastic.
You need scientific method, you need philosophy.
For the rest of us, since all quantum behavior cancels out at the sensual level, it cancels out in any aggregation of atomic particles, at least that aggregation which is perceived by the senses, It has nothing to do whatsoever with how we live our daily lives, with the philosophy of life.
Not the philosophy of physics of subatomic particles as a scientific method, but the philosophy of life.
And I'll give you an example of what I mean.
Let's say I'm just going to use a state court metaphor.
Forgive me, it's just a little easier than saying in a DRO risk of the future.
So in court...
I am charged with having a stolen iPod in my possession.
In my house. It was lying on my bureau.
My neighbor said his iPod went missing.
The police searched my house and found it.
So I'm charged for stealing it.
And I say, no, no, no.
You see, Your Honor, quantum mechanics indicates that things can just shift of their own accord.
Would he say, oh, well, absolutely.
Okay, right. Makes sense.
Off you go. You don't even need to give it back.
It'll just shift back at some point.
We all understand that would not be a valid defense.
If I provide an alibi for a crime...
And then it turns out, like if I say, oh, I was home alone...
When this crime occurred, and then there's a videotape of me with a time code that's valid, and I'm committing the crime, and so on, do I then get to say, well, much like an electron, I can appear to be in two places at the same time?
Would the judge say, well, okay, then we'll wait for your second part to turn up, and we'll charge them with the crime?
No. He would say, no, you can't be in two places at the same time.
The video puts you here, and therefore, we are going to charge you.
So, when it comes to ethics, it's really, really, really important that we understand that if it wouldn't fly in a court of law, then it has nothing to do with ethics, right?
So the subatomic stuff, it's great for microprocessors.
It's great for other kinds of incredibly precise measurements, and we fully accept it as far as that goes.
But it really doesn't have anything to do.
I mean, in the same way, if you're a sailor, you could use the theory of relativity to plot your way across the ocean.
It's just that it would, what, a tenth of a millimeter would be your, right?
So it's a thousand times the work compared to Newtonian physics while providing no appreciable or measurable difference in the outcome.
But at least there is a measurable difference in the outcome between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, even if we just look at a transatlantic voyage.
There's none whatsoever when it comes to the sense perception of quantum physics.
So, in the one sense, yeah, quantum physics is important with regards to philosophy because it's considered freaky because of the standards of matter that we have derived philosophy and philosophical principles from.
It requires a scientific method to process, and yay.
But when it comes to everybody who's not a quantum physicist who actually is trying to apply philosophy in the world that we live in, in the matter that we deal with, it has absolutely no impact, no relevance, no meaning whatsoever.
It might as well be the elf dancing on the far side of the moon.
That we'll never ever see.
It's an invisible elf dancing on the far side of the moon that will never be perceived or seen.
It has no relevance whatsoever.
That's not the best metaphor, but you understand what it means.
No relevance. So people want to dive into quantum physics because they want a place to put their feelings of freakiness, right?
So people who've been raised with crazy parents or crazy authority figures or priests or whatever, they have a big bag of crazy in them that's been deposited there like a cyst or an abscess from the crazy people around them.
And they need to I think?
And so quantum physics is just another one of the modern substitutes for religion where people say, well, reality is crazy, and therefore the people around me who were crazy weren't really crazy.
Well, no. You've got to deal with the crazy people around you.
Quantum physics is not crazy.
Quantum physics is...
Unexplained at the moment. But so what?
I mean, the number of things that are unexplained in the universe is very large.
But the only way we'll know they'll be explained is by applying philosophical principles.
So if you're raised by crazy people, I mean, Deepak Chopra does it and lots of other people do it.
Oh, there's a quantum flux.
There's, you know, the God hides.
God does not play dice.
God hides in the quantum flux.
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine.
It is stranger than we can imagine.
It's really not. It's really not stranger than we can imagine.
The universe is not strange.
There are things in the universe that are unexplained, but to call them strange is to project a historical experience of craziness into the merely unknown.
There's a difference between a darkroom and a darkroom with a ghost in it.
The explanations for things in the universe is a darkroom.
There is no weirdness, there is no creepiness, there is no freakiness, there is no ghost, there is no craziness, there is no instability.
There's just shit we don't know yet.
And we slowly turn the light on in each of these rooms, and we find, hey, no ghost, right?
We are now in our ten hundred thousandth millionth room.
We flipped on, and we've gone, hey, now we can see what's in here.
No ghost. And everyone's almost like, oh no, in the next room, there's a ghost!
No, there really, really isn't.
We'll flip the light on, we'll figure it out, and there won't be any craziness or any ghosts or any weirdness.
It's just stuff we don't know.
Don't be those primitive, superstitious South Sea Islanders who are like, oh my god, the moon is eating the sun, we must kill a virgin to bring it back.
It's just stuff you don't know.
It's just stuff we don't know. It's nothing to panic about.
It's an interesting thing, just to bring my last point, it's an interesting thing that goes on.
On YouTube it happens more than anything else, where People will post very frustrated and sometimes aggressive statements sort of to the effect of, well, yeah, fine.
What's your solution, Mr.
Molyneux, Mr. Stephbot?
What's your solution, man?
My solution is 10 pots water to 3 pots vinegar.
My solution is irrelevant.
I mean, as far as this goes, and this is to all the YouTube people or any of the YouTube people who may end up hearing this, it doesn't matter if I have a solution or not.
It doesn't matter if I have a solution or not.
If we're all hiking in the woods and we want to go north and I say, hey, the way we're heading, absolutely not north.
And then you turn around and say, well, which way is north then?
It's like, I'm not exactly sure.
And even if I was or wasn't sure, it doesn't matter.
I mean, I think I have a good direction. But it doesn't matter if I know or not.
It doesn't matter if I know or not.
The only thing that matters is I know that we're not going in the direction that we want.
And for them to say, well, which way should we go?
It's a de facto cry out for leadership, right?
And it's a very instructive cry out for leadership, right?
So somebody posted this recently on my Ron Paul video, still getting quite a few views.
And people posted, somebody posted this, so what's your solution then?
It's like... Okay, so if I shoot down Ron Paul, now you have to come to me for a solution to freedom in your life?
Come on! Come on!
Stop looking for goddamn leadership, people!
The leader is you.
The leader is you. The power is you.
You've got the power!
And that's a very sad thing, right?
It's like, oh, he's shut down.
The king is dead. Who will be the next king?
He's shut down Ron Paul. Who will be in the next...
Okay, where do you want us to go, right?
Your leader's taking you in the wrong direction because you shouldn't have any leaders.
Oh, my God. Well, which way should you...
Will you take us? It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not the way it's going to work in terms of a free society, so...
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