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Aug. 30, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

17:51

1741 Freedomain Radio E-Mails of the Week - August 31, 2010

Why get married, beliefs versus evidence, and free will versus determinism...

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well. This is the emails of the week.
	We're going to start with people asking me where, Steph, can I catch the big chatty forehead live experience?
	Where will Steph be speaking live?
	So I can see him with the glare of magnesium pots and the biting of the head off the bats.
	Well, I will be speaking in Toronto at the Libertarian Party Convention.
	September the 8th, 2010, then I will be at the Students for Liberty Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
	That's October the 9th, where I'll be doing a speech on how to sell freedom.
	I will be then, I'm a featured speaker at Libertopia 2010 in Hollywood, California, with some other, well, some heavy hitters, Nathaniel Brand or Malta Block, I think, will be there, October the 14th to 15th in California.
	Then I will be doing the Arizona Freedom Summit in Phoenix, December 3rd to 5th.
	So if you can make any of those dates, if you want more information, you can just go to freedomainradio.com.
	It's all on the homepage. So let's start with the emails.
	First, Steph, you legend.
	Saw your procrastination video via rdsnation.com.
	Melted my reality.
	Made the air ripple around me.
	It was like being licked by a thousand blue-eyed French virgins wrapped in crepes.
	And drizzled in honey. Supremo respect.
	I'm in South Africa.
	I saw you reply to a comment on YouTube that you spent some time here, interested as to why you left.
	Just wanted to say thank you for changing my life.
	Keep well and in touch, mate.
	Well, first of all, anybody who can come up with metaphors about a thousand blue-eyed French virgins licking you has my ultimate respect as far as his seduction abilities go.
	And if you can get said virgins to be wrapped in crepe and drizzled in honey, please try and sell that to suicide bombers because it's a much, much better plan than Allah has.
	I spent some time in South Africa.
	My father lived there for many years, so I spent some time there twice.
	I was just there for some time to visit my father, and that was the deal.
	And oh, he says, P.S. You look way more badass with the beard.
	That's nice, because that indicates to some degree that I look at all badass without it.
	So thank you. Appreciate that.
	I just, you know, great language.
	So somebody else wrote, aside from your books, which I intend to peruse, are there any other books on anarchism that you would recommend?
	Well, the two authors that I found quite helpful, I sort of came to anarchism through objectivism and then discovered more anarchist authors later.
	Lysander Spooner, which you can find at Mark Stevens' show, M-A-R-C. He's done an audiobook reading.
	The Constitution of No Authority is a great one.
	Anything by Murray Rothbard is fantastic.
	You can get that at mises.org.
	There are a lot of historical Russian writers, a Bakunin and so on, who are more into anarchism and some of Noam Chomsky's stuff.
	He comes out of an anarchist tradition, so there's lots of stuff that you can read around that.
	I hope that you will. Somebody else wrote, I want to know your views on marriage.
	I'm very confused and don't understand the reason for getting married, if you already have a wonderful relationship.
	I am in love with a woman that really means the world to me, and I honestly feel like I would die for her if I had to.
	I think it's more important to live for people than die for them, but anyway.
	Why should I get married, and how can I get married and not have to do it under the government rules and Christian rules?
	Any help you give will be greatly appreciated.
	P.S. I believe in God, but not the God I was taught about.
	I believe in the God of creation.
	And I believe in, if you want to find God, and I believe if you want to find God, then you should go wherever love is.
	Well, if you're going to use the word God as a synonym for love, just use the word love.
	Anyway. Why marriage?
	Well, this is why I got married, and I did not get married in a church, of course, right?
	But this is why I got married.
	Very shortly after I met my absolutely charming, delightful, beautiful, magical, virtuous and wonderful wife.
	We met, we were married within 10 months of meeting after I had dated around quite a bit when I was younger because when you meet the right person and it just works beautifully, we've been married I'm seven and a half years now, and we have a daughter who's 20 months.
	We are just happier and happier every day.
	I absolutely love being married.
	And I was a guy who I never wanted to get married.
	I was never particularly interested in having children.
	I like kids. I worked in a daycare.
	I worked as a teacher's assistant for a gifted kids program when I was younger.
	I really, really like children.
	I have a great deal of fun with kids.
	But I was never particularly interested in getting married or having kids.
	But when you meet the right person, it's important to be flexible.
	But the reason that I got married was, for me, it was a public declaration that this is the woman I intended to spend the rest of my life with and to raise a family with.
	That was the plan.
	That was what was going to go down.
	And the reason that we did that very publicly with those public proclamations was so that friends and family, if for whatever reason we ran into trouble, they would guide me back to my original commitment.
	So it's a public declaration of your intention to stay together and raise a family.
	And you do that so that people around you will guide you back to that place if you run into problems.
	You know, if you run into problems with a girl you've been dating for two months, a lot of people will say, well, you know, give it a shot, but it's no big deal if it doesn't work out.
	But if you've made that public declaration of love and eternal intent, people will guide you back.
	So I think marriage is a very important ceremony to state your intentions to your community.
	Hi, Steph. Somebody else writes, if I would introduce a friend to your videos, which one should I pick to begin with?
	Are there some which serve as a good introduction?
	Well, that's a tough question.
	You can sort of scroll through my most popular videos on YouTube.
	You can sort by most viewed.
	You can have a look at a couple of those.
	It really depends on the person's interest.
	So if you're talking to a sort of rigorous, logical thinker, then I would suggest The Introduction to Philosophy, which is a series you can get on my podcast page on my website, and you can also get it on YouTube.
	I'll put the links to these below on this video.
	The Introduction to Philosophy is an 18-part series, pretty rigorous, pretty good, I would say.
	You might want to introduce somebody, not necessarily to a video, but...
	Everyday Anarchy or Untruth, The Tyranny of Illusion are two free audiobooks that you can download and give them to this person's on CDs or in MP3 format or whatever.
	And if there's someone who wants something more short and stimulating, then The Story of Your Enslavement, Money Is You, any number of the sort of economics videos I think are worth checking out.
	If it's somebody who's more into relationships, I have a book on the philosophy of relationships called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, which you might want to check out.
	And I would always recommend, if this is a person who is very into self-knowledge or trying to understand the degree to which the unconscious affects society, the Bomb and the Brain series, which is also available on YouTube, is a good place to start.
	Or just give them the feed and see what they like.
	So, let's try and keep this relatively short.
	Alright, so somebody says, what's wrong with belief?
	You also ripped belief, but how can we have logic without a bit of belief first?
	We must first believe something is true.
	I believe that you are a real person.
	This statement requires no thought, so just assume you are real.
	However, it is possible that your image was crafted by a computer, much like Hollywood does, and a bit of logic would show that your image is not the image of a real person.
	In order for me to get to the point of, quote, believing that your image was crafted, I had to start out with the idea that your image was real.
	This allowed me to think further and come to a conclusion that invalidated my original assumption.
	I could not come to that conclusion without a starting point such as the one that believed your image was real.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	I appreciate this Cartesian demon problem of the world being manufactured.
	I don't have much sympathy for it, because to me, the moment that you communicate with someone, you're accepting that they're real.
	So it's just a self-detonating statement to say you may not be real.
	You wouldn't communicate to someone that is not real.
	If I put an inflatable clown in your bed, you might be startled, but you wouldn't become friends with it.
	At least I'd hope you wouldn't. The belief, well, the question, where does logic come from, I touched on in the last show.
	I'll just touch on it again briefly here.
	Logic is, you know, as Ayn Rand said, and I think quite right, the art of non-contradictory identification.
	And the reason that non-contradiction is essential to logic is because you are trying to say true statements about reality when you're talking about logic.
	And logic, sorry, reality is non-contradictory.
	So, A belief, you can have beliefs that are subjective, that are mere personal preferences.
	I believe that, or I claim that I like vanilla ice cream.
	It's not, you know, a truth statement about objective reality outside my own head.
	It's just, you know, I believe that I had a dream about an elephant last night.
	Completely unprovable, and there's no way to figure it out, but it's my belief.
	But it doesn't say anything about external reality.
	The moment that you try to pin something in your head to external reality, though, the moment that you're trying to say something true about objective, concrete, external, material, empirical, rational reality, then your beliefs, your statements, they have to go through the grinder of philosophical consistency, they have to go through the grinder of philosophical consistency, scientific accuracy, They just have to go through that meat grinder that consumes, destroys, mashes up, and spits out about 99.9% of the bullshit that human beings believe.
	But if you want to say something true about reality...
	Then you have to put it through the grinder of science and evidence and reason.
	There's just no shortcut.
	There is no other way to claim anything true or valid or real about the world.
	So when people say, I believe in God, are they saying, I have a belief in something called a God that's just within my own head?
	Or are they saying, I have derived my belief in God from the objective fact that God exists?
	Well, if it's the former, then you shouldn't use the word God.
	You should use the word inner voices or phantasm or alter or ego state or something like that.
	If you're trying to say something about the latter, my belief in God is derived from something that actually exists in the world, well, then you're wrong because God does not exist in the world.
	So belief is a tricky word.
	Reason and evidence and facts is the way to go.
	Somebody else wrote, Hi, I've just listened to this podcast, School Sucks, and it really is an important listen.
	I absolutely agree with you.
	School Sucks is one of my favorite podcasts.
	It is really highly recommended.
	The host, Brett Monat, is very funny and very smart and very consistent, and it is highly recommended.
	I've had him on my show a couple of times.
	I've been on his show a couple of times.
	Highly, highly recommend it.
	And please, please, please go and check out School Sucks.
	It's really good. Here's time for the kind of production values that I really can't get into too much at the moment.
	Let's see... Oh yes, somebody has questions about free will.
	Convincing arguments for free will.
	Somebody says, I have a hard time accepting that free will makes sense logically or philosophically, and a harder time trying to square it with what I understand about science and the way the world works.
	You seem like a pretty rational guy.
	I think what he means is rational and pretty.
	So I would be interested in hearing your argument, confidently free of appeals to religious nonsense.
	Anyway, I was wondering if you could give me the Reader's Digest version of your case of free will and or send me one of your videos on the topic.
	Well, free will is...
	It's just one of these things that is required to debate, is required to interact with other human beings.
	If you are a determinist, then you accept that human beings are television sets, that we have voices and movement, but we are fundamentally machines.
	A television set, we understand, does not have free will.
	It is a machine that is reproducing the electrical states and energetic states, that is a series of dominoes, just prior, prior, prior, input and output.
	We may not be able to, we don't know what commercial is coming next on a TV, but we don't imagine that the TV is choosing it.
	So when you are a determinist, you accept that human beings are television sets.
	You also accept that you're a television set.
	And so the first thing that you would do when you understand that human beings are television sets is you would stop trying to debate.
	I mean, if I think the television set is alive and I yell at it and tell it to put on the shows that I want and to stop regaling me with all this status nonsense, and then somebody says and explains to me very slowly and patiently that My television set is not alive, has no consciousness, no choice, no moral responsibility, no free will. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to stop debating with my television set, because that would be a ridiculous thing to do once I understand that it is all causal and it has no free will.
	So the moment that somebody says to me, Steph, you should stop believing in free will and you should stop believing in determinism, I know that they're not treating me as a television set.
	They're not treating me as a predetermined They're treating me as a human being who has choice, and they are saying I should prefer a state called truth to a state called error.
	There is a better state, a preferred state, and I have the alternative.
	So that is free will.
	Free will in my formulation, and I have a series of this on YouTube and in my podcast stream.
	Free will is the ability to compare the contents of our minds to an ideal standard.
	We have the ability to compare our thoughts and our actions to higher standards, to the scientific method, to mathematical reasoning, to philosophical rigor.
	We have the choice to do that or to reject that.
	That's really all that free will comes down to.
	The moment that someone comes to me and Steph says, Steph, that you should prefer a better state than...
	I know that they're not a determinist.
	They may call themselves a determinist, but they're really not.
	And they have no idea what determinism means if they continue to debate with me and call themselves a determinist.
	It's a ridiculous and embarrassing position to see once you really understand it.
	Like, if I see a bunch of rocks falling down or rolling down a hill, I don't yell at them, go left, go right, go left, go right!
	Because I know that where they're going to land is simply the result of physics.
	And I may not be able to predict where they're going to land, but I don't imagine that me yelling at them to go left or go right is going to make a damn bit of difference.
	That's exactly the same as how a determinist sees a human being.
	Determinist sees a human being. As a rock rolling down a hill.
	So for a determinist to say, you should choose determinism over free will, free will is a ridiculous position, you should abandon it, you should choose it better, is to say that there's preferred and non-preferred state.
	That human beings have a choice that we should do things that conform more to truth and evidence like determinism, we should believe those things.
	But that is to accept that human beings have choice, that there is such a thing as a preferred state and a non-preferred state, truth versus error.
	All of which completely violates the basic tenets of determinism.
	So determinism is just a self-contradictory nonsense problem.
	It is not a problem to be solved.
	It is a disease to be cured.
	So science will tell us in time about consciousness, but in the meantime we have to deal with rational consistency and determinists are just irrational in their approach.
	The only determinist I would ever respect is the one I never hear from because he doesn't argue with the television set called me.
	So, let's go here.
	Somebody else wrote, I'm going to university in a few days, and I've started reading the economics textbook.
	The textbook flat out has statements like, the reason we need the government, blah, blah, blah.
	And I can't help but always try and apply some libertarian principles whenever I hear something about morality or the government.
	Unfortunately, I think that being subscribed to your YouTube channel and podcast is going to interfere with my education.
	Well, that's not quite true. It's going to interfere with your miseducation.
	Just like I'm giving up video games and other hobbies to focus on school, I will have to abstain from listening to you so I can be properly indoctrinated.
	Look at it this way. If I can be successful in my education and career, I might actually end up with some extra money to donate to a good cause like Free Domain Radio.
	I have enjoyed your work greatly, and I will see you in four years when I am hopefully an accountant.
	Best of luck, Steph. See you soon.
	Dude, I can completely understand.
	I can completely understand.
	Who wants to spend the next four years of their life repeatedly pushing their head up against the cheese grater of status indoctrination?
	I did that, and I don't particularly regret doing it, but I certainly could have had a slightly easier time in university had I not been, you know, a capitalist and an empiricist and into reason and evidence.
	So... It's challenging.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	You can't get the marks unless you repeat the dogma.
	I get it. It makes sense.
	I appreciate that you could end up with some money to donate.
	This is a donation-based system.
	I do need people's goodies and bakshish in order to pay the server bills and for my time.
	So I hope you have a great time in school.
	Don't sweat it. Reason and truth will all be here for you when you get back.
	So I can completely understand that.
	Okay, so people have questions about rights that I don't believe that rights exist.
	I accept that rights do not exist.
	Rights do not exist like a kidney and a gallstone exist, but rights do not exist.
	Human beings have properties, like we have mass, and we have properties that we can speak, we occupy space, we have an effect upon gravity, or gravity has an effect upon us.
	But we don't have rights.
	They're not written on our spine or anything like that.
	But for my case for rights, so for my case for what most people assume are rights, you can do a search on my website for rights.
	There's tons of podcasts on it.
	Or you can check out my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics from my approach to morality.
	Okay, well, I think that's it.
	I'll try and keep this relatively short.
	Thank you so much, everybody, for writing.
	Thank you so much, everybody, for donating.
	And just a quick shout-out to everybody coming to the barbecue this weekend.
	I absolutely can't wait for it. It should be an enormous, enormous amount of fun.
	A friend of mine who is going to be hosting karaoke on Saturday night, which should be just too much fun for words.
	So I look forward to everyone dropping by.
	And if you're watching this and you get a chance to come and watch me speak, I hope that we get a chance to sit down and have a chat.
	So thank you so much for watching as always.

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