Aug. 8, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:48
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| NERDS! NERDS! NERDS! NERDS! | |
| What is a nerd? | |
| They've been laughed at, picked on, and put down. | |
| Philosophy is just about the most pitiful mental discipline the world has ever seen. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Other disciplines like medieval alchemy and phrenology and the demonic possession and theory of mental illness had the good grace to fall into disuse because they were just plain wrong. | |
| Other disciplines like Newtonian physics are still used because they are accurate enough for most situations. | |
| And other systems like science and medicine have gone through a process of continual and staggering improvements over the past few hundred years. | |
| Philosophy first came into being over 2,500 years ago. | |
| And since then it has staggered and shambled through history like an anemic vampire, unable to conquer and impervious to death. | |
| When you compare the stagnation of philosophy to the stupendous advances in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, business, computers, hell, even the success of religion, it is impossible to think of another discipline that has remained so stagnant, so unproductive, and yet will not die. | |
| The basic questions of philosophy What is truth? | |
| Reality? Knowledge? | |
| Virtue? Still remain unanswered after thousands of years. | |
| Every thinker, every school has a different answer, like every culture has a different god, a different flag, a different language. | |
| Sad, sad, sad. | |
| When I was contemplating abandoning my career in order to pursue philosophy full-time, I made a vow to myself that I was only going to make the leap and take the risk if I could genuinely advance the discipline in some significant ways. | |
| I was so sick and tired of watching philosophy getting its ass kicked all up and down the beach that I vowed either to bulk it up and teach it to fight Or walk away forever. | |
| This is what I came up with. | |
| This is what I've been working on for just over 25 years. | |
| Philosophy continually fails because it does not identify and reject the self-detonating statement, sometimes also boringly called a performative contradiction. | |
| A self-detonating statement occurs when the form of a proposition contradicts the content of the proposition. | |
| For example, if I yell into your ear that there is no such thing as sound, the fact that I am using sound to communicate that there is no such thing as sound is a self-detonating statement. | |
| The form of the proposition, sound exists, contradicts the content, sound does not exist. | |
| In the same way, if I say that I am an atheist and that I will pray to God to ask Him to reveal His non-existence to you, that is also a self-detonating statement, since an atheist does not believe in God. | |
| And if God reveals His non-existence to you, He is actually revealing that He exists. | |
| If I send you a letter arguing that letters never get delivered, That is also a self-detonating statement, since if the letter gets delivered, my argument is invalid, and if the letter never gets delivered, my argument is never heard. | |
| I must assume that letters get delivered in order to argue that they never get delivered. | |
| Also, if I tell you that you should choose to believe the true statement that choice and truth do not exist, that is also a self-detonating statement. | |
| I cannot rely on choice and truth to deny choice and truth. | |
| This is the mess known as determinism. | |
| Last example. | |
| The statement language is meaningless. | |
| This is also a self-detonating statement because the form of the statement directly contradicts its content. | |
| If language is indeed meaningless, then the argument will be impossible to understand. | |
| If the argument can be understood, then language cannot be meaningless. | |
| You can't logically rely on the fact that language has meaning to communicate that it has no meaning. | |
| Self-detonating statements are different from mere hypocrisy, such as an atheist who makes strong arguments against the existence of gods, who is then found kneeling in prayer. | |
| The fact that he prays has no direct relevance on his arguments against gods. | |
| A self-detonating statement does not require any knowledge external to the statement itself, unlike the praying atheist example. | |
| This is why I call it a self-detonating statement. | |
| The vast majority of intractable and frankly boring philosophical disagreements occur precisely because people ignore these self-detonating statements. | |
| In other words, when someone argues that language is meaningless, the debate then charges off in that direction rather than stopping to examine the consistency between the form and content of the initial statement. | |
| Boring. I have used this approach to solve problems in the realms of determinism versus free will, knowledge, ethics, politics, agnosticism, atheism and religion, and many other branches of philosophy. | |
| And now, for what I believe is the first time in its long and sorry history, philosophy has finally got some real game, baby. |
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