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May 12, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:02
2692 8 Unsolvable Philosophical Questions - Solved!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, tackles 8 great philosophical questions considered unanswerable.

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Hi everybody, Stefan Marlenou from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
So, we are going to take a quick tour through an essay entitled 8!
Because 7 is way too little and 9 is just crazy!
8 Great Philosophical Questions That We'll Never Solve.
Philosophy goes where hard science can't or won't.
Philosophers have a license to speculate about everything from metaphysics to morality, and this means they can shed light on some of the basic questions of existence.
The bad news?
These are questions that may always lay just beyond the limits of our comprehension.
Well, you always have to be suspicious of people who begin to tell you what something is without telling you what its purpose is.
So imagine if you find some alien artifact on Mars or something and you wanted to know what it was, the first thing that would be most helpful would be to know what it was used for, rather than what it was you wouldn't really be able to tell unless you knew what it was used for.
So the first question is, what is philosophy for?
Now, once you know what philosophy is for, then you can sort of say what it is.
What is the scientific method for?
Well, for determining objective reproducible patterns of mathematics and predictability within matter and energy.
What is biology for?
What is geography for?
Well, then you kind of know what they are, because the for includes a methodology.
What is medicine for?
Medicine is for the maintenance and promotion method.
And cure of diseases, maintenance and promotion of good health and cure of diseases.
So once you know what a discipline is for, then you can figure out Whether particular questions fit into that paradigm, right?
So, do you like red is not a scientific question.
What is the speed of light?
It's a scientific question.
You know, what is the acceleration of an object towards Earth's gravity?
That is a question.
Is jazz cool is not a scientific question.
So, you see, not every question is philosophical.
So, then the question becomes...
What is philosophy for?
What is the purpose of philosophy?
Well, some people say it's the pursuit of truth.
You know, scientists are also in the pursuit of truth, but we don't call them philosophers.
And nutritionists are in the pursuit of truth for best food and so on.
Doctors are in the pursuit of the best cure.
So, in pursuit of truth is not enough to call something philosophy.
Answering questions about reality?
How many grains of sand are there in all of the beaches in all of the world?
I guess you could get an answer to that question.
It would probably be changing all the time.
Is that really philosophy?
You'd need an objective methodology.
You'd need very tiny tweezers and a lot of elves.
But is that really philosophy?
I would say no.
The one thing that philosophy has, I would argue, that other disciplines do not have is the pursuit of virtue.
The pursuit of moral excellence.
The pursuit of goodness.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
If you are rational, you can be virtuous.
If you are virtuous, that gives you the greatest chance of sustained happiness.
So, the purpose of philosophy is the distillation and advocacy for Moral excellence, moral principles.
And so this is, I think, very important.
Almost all the other questions that you could imagine would fall into the realm of science.
So their purpose is the promotion of moral excellence in the same way that medicine's purpose is the promotion of health.
So, once you know what philosophy is for, and again, I'm happy to hear arguments of the counter, but I think this is a pretty good case to say that the one thing that philosophy has, that science and literature and other disciplines don't have, mathematics and so on, is the moral quality.
I think that's the most important aspect of it.
So, I want you to just imagine a scenario at the moment.
So, You're involved in some horrible accident and your arm gets, you know, shattered and it's a nasty twist break and it's, you know, agonizing and you stagger into the emergency room and you scream in agony to the doctor and my arm is shattered.
I, you know, I need morphine.
I need a splint.
I need, you know, whatever to make it better and, you know, all that.
And the doctor comes up to you and says, interesting.
Interesting.
But more important than that, more important than giving you morphine and binding up your arm, is why is your arm there at all?
Why does your arm exist at all?
Why is your arm not the opposite of an arm?
Does your arm contain within it A perfect arm in another dimension that represents your arm.
These questions would be maddening to you and irrelevant to the field of medicine.
The field of medicine is guy's in pain, his arm has been broken, we deal with the pain, we bind up the arm, we go for rehab, we attempt to restore him to his position of wholeness, of health.
Why is the arm there at all is not the province of medicine.
Why is the arm not the opposite of an arm, is not the province of medicine.
Does the arm contain a perfect platonic form of armness that will continue after the arm is gone, after the person has died?
These would not be questions relevant to the field of medicine.
All questions relevant to the field of medicine would be to do with how To make the arm whole again and to return the person to a state of optimum health.
Everything else would be nonsense.
So, with that in mind, let's look at some of these questions.
So, the first one is, why is there something rather than nothing?
Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words.
Why does anything exist at all?
As one writer says, nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than totally different laws, and so on.
This has nothing to do with the promotion of moral excellence.
It has nothing to do with philosophy, I would argue.
It has nothing to do with anyone's thoughts who's old enough to pay their own rent, but it really doesn't have anything to do with philosophy.
Why is the speed of light 186,000 miles per second?
Why do objects fall towards the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second?
Why do gases expand when heated?
These are not questions that philosophy has anything to do with.
Why...
Why has the human body exists and has developed in the way that it does is a question for evolutionary biologists but not for doctors.
So there may be questions that would be interesting to physicists in this area, but because it has nothing to do with moral excellence, moral excellence is the promotion of universal moral goals, then it has nothing to do with philosophy.
It may be interesting for scientists to figure out why certain laws are the way they are and so on, although I don't think that that would be particularly interesting.
Engineers would work with the laws that you have.
Can't dial up and down gravity or anything like that.
So this has nothing to do with philosophy in the same way that...
Why is the arm not the opposite of an arm?
Why is there an arm?
Why do human beings exist?
Why is the world round?
Why are there no unicorns?
These have nothing to do with helping somebody with a broken arm.
The job of a philosopher, the goal and purpose of a philosopher, is to promote moral excellence among mankind.
In the same manner, the goal of a doctor is to promote healthy habits and to fix or repair diseased or broken bodies as best he or she can.
So let's look at the second question.
Is our universe real, real, real, real?
So this is the classic Cartesian question, René Descartes, which is the basic argument that we could be a brain in a tank and all of our sensory data are being manipulated by some demon who wishes to fool us.
This whole thing could be a matrix of educational possibilities.
We're just a brain in a tank or...
Whatever, right?
Again, this is nothing to do with philosophy because it doesn't matter that there's no way that the answer to that can ever be ascertained, right?
This is a classic moving the goalpost scenario because there's no possible way that this could be established or not.
Right?
And so, like, you can prove the matrix, you can unplug the matrix, you can go and see the world for what it is, and so on, right, in the movie.
But you can't, if your entire sensory apparatus is being perfectly controlled by some external malevolent or benevolent consciousness, there's absolutely no way to ever figure that out.
And, of course, it has no fundamental bearing on moral questions.
In the same way, if you shatter your arm and you go to the emergency room, the doctor says, the most important question is not how to relieve your pain or how to fix your arm.
The most important question is, is your arm even real?
Any doctor who did that would be insane.
You understand that there would be something fundamentally wrong with their brains.
They would be having some sort of psychotic break.
I've never seen a medical show where, you know, a guy comes in with some piece of piping through his chest and, you know, the head of the ER says, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, stop!
Stop, everybody, stop!
Don't touch that pipe, if that's in fact what it really is.
Don't touch...
Those medicines.
Don't inject him with any morphine.
The most important and essential and elemental question is, is this all a simulation?
Are we all just brains in a tank?
Is this all a simulation from some alien life form trying to teach us something esoteric about what it means to be human, even though we're not human, we're just brains in a tank, in a lab, in a classroom on Betelgeuse?
Right?
If somebody said that, people were like, you need to take a leave of absence.
You need to have your head examined.
You are insane.
If you think that's the highest priority, guy's got a piece of piping sticking out of his chest and you're worrying about whether the piping is real or what in the matrix or everything is simulated, You are mentally damaged.
And this is like philosophers like myself who are out there in the world promoting moral excellence look at these questions with a peculiar like creepy crawly spider up the spine kind of horror.
Because people who are devoting time and energy focusing on these issues when the world is dying for a lack of virtue.
Right?
When generations are being sold off into...
Debt slavery to foreign bankers when money is being created through force at the point of a gun, when wars are being fought for no reason whatsoever, when society is constantly eating itself with oligarchical power, people worrying about whether we're in the matrix or not.
It does seem absolutely identical.
I'm telling you, it looks absolutely identical to you submitting a script.
To some medical show saying, everybody has to stop when someone has a piece of pipe through their chest and ask whether the pipe exists or anything exists or anything is real.
I mean, somebody like that would be sued for malpractice.
Tragically, this doesn't happen for academic philosophers.
Do we have free will?
Well, I've got lots of arguments about that.
So I won't sort of go into that here.
I think it's an interesting philosophical question.
But I think that the answer is pretty clear.
Most of what you do in philosophy is you try to figure out what the person is doing and then accept the philosophical arguments that underpin that.
So if somebody types in the text window and says, well, you can't really trust your senses, well, they're relying on your senses, your eyes, to see those letters accurately.
And therefore, they're relying on you to trust your senses to communicate that you can't trust your senses.
Or somebody who writes to me and says, language is meaningless.
Well, they're using the meaningfulness of language to communicate that language is meaningless.
This is all very silly.
So you just simply look at what somebody is doing.
If somebody's trying to convince you, if somebody's trying to appeal to your rationality, somebody's trying to change your mind, then they do accept that you're responsible for the contents of your mind, that you have a choice and so on, right?
So the only person who is a consistent determinist is somebody who will never try and tell you that they're a determinist or that determinism is true.
Because if determinism is true, there's no such thing as true and false, right?
So this is one of these self-detonating arguments about determinism.
If a rock is bouncing down a hill, is there a good or a bad place for it to land objectively?
Is there a true or false place for it to land?
No.
So the actions of human consciousness, if determinism is true and everything is just physical laws operating, there's no such thing as true and false.
So the moment somebody tries to tell you that determinism is true, they're saying there's a true state, there's a false state, we should prefer the true state, we can change our minds to approach that true state, all of which are elements of free will arguments.
Number four, he says, does God exist?
Well, it always bothers me when people say God rather than Zeus or the tooth fairy or square circles or anything like that.
God is just one of these words that for most people has this emotional resonance, mostly to do with our memories of infancy and people who appeared as deities to us, our parents, when we were babies.
So it has this emotional resonance from people.
So when you say, does God exist, people accept that one way.
But if we were to say, does the tooth fairy exist?
Do leprechauns exist?
Do square circles exist?
Then we would not get that same emotional resonance.
And philosophy doesn't really care about emotional resonance.
In fact, if you're into philosophy, emotional resonance is something that you should be enormously suspicious about because it is a way of...
Shields down for the guards of truth so the photon torpedoes can shatter the hull of reality for you.
So does God exist?
Well, what is God?
God is a consciousness without matter.
God is both omnipotent and all-powerful, which cannot coexist.
If you're omnipotent, you can do anything that you want.
But if you are all-knowing, then you have to know what you're going to do in the future and what's going to happen in the future.
And you can't change that.
Without invalidating your knowledge.
So if you know everything that's going to happen in the future, you can't change it.
So you can't be all-knowing and all-powerful at the same time.
There's no such thing as consciousness without matter.
That's like saying gravity without a mass.
Gravity is an effective mass.
Attraction is an effective mass.
Light is excited atoms and photons.
Heat is excited atoms.
So the effects of matter...
It can't be separated from matter itself.
It's like me saying, I want to do a show, but I don't want to be anywhere near a camera and a microphone.
Well, a show is an effect of my proximity to the camera and to the microphone.
So, you cannot separate the effects of matter from matter itself.
So, saying that there's consciousness without matter is like saying there's gravity without mass.
Or there's light without a light source.
It simply doesn't occur.
It doesn't happen.
And for six million other reasons about the self-contradictory nature of a deity, you are actually defining God.
God is defined as that which does not exist.
Self-contradictory entities cannot exist.
There's two kinds of things which don't exist.
One is stuff that could exist we haven't found yet.
Could there be some nine-headed fish at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
Sure there could be.
Absolutely.
Could there be unicorns on another planet?
Could there be fire-breathing dragons orbiting some planet around Alpha Centauri?
Yes, there could be.
So you can say, no, we haven't found them yet.
They may appear, or they may seem improbable, but you cannot actually rule out their existence.
Prima faci.
But something like a square circle or two and two making five, these things do not exist.
The effects of matter without matter simply can never exist.
The effects of matter without matter can never exist.
Because by definition, they are the effects of matter.
Gravity is an effect of mass.
You cannot have gravity without mass.
Then it's something else.
It's not gravity.
It's something else.
So you cannot have consciousness without matter.
And therefore, if you say God is consciousness without matter, then you're saying something doesn't exist.
And you're saying, when some people say, does God exist?
They're saying, do self-contradictory things which have no effect on matter and energy exist?
Well, self-contradictory things cannot exist.
And the way that we know something exists is it has an effect on matter and energy.
That's how we know that it exists, right?
I mean, you know you're not walking through the door, but rather against the wall when it hits your nose, right?
It has an effect of matter and energy.
So when people say, does God exist?
God being defined as a self-contradictory entity which has no effect on matter and energy, well, these two things are synonyms for that which does not exist.
So the true question when people say, does God exist?
The true statement philosophically is, does that which does not exist exist?
To ask that is to answer it.
But you have to put all these emotional layers on top so people can ask those simple questions.
Is there life after death?
Well, we have a...
This would require an eternal aspect to consciousness.
And we already have an example of...
Our consciousness and matter not being together, which is not the question.
The question is not, is there life after death?
What's there life before death?
Do you remember the 17th century, the 18th century?
Well, of course not.
Your consciousness miraculously arose as an effect of your biological processes, right?
The electrical energy, the biochemical energy in your brain.
So we already have an example of whether we were alive before death, which is that we weren't, and therefore we have no reason to believe that we would be alive after death.
And people say, ah, but the near-death experiences.
See, near is the point.
Nobody has been brain-dead for 20 minutes and come back to life, right?
Because it's like when you turn a radio off, the voices don't go somewhere, right?
They don't vanish off and go and live on clouds somewhere.
The electrical energy which produced the voices has simply ceased to operate, and therefore it's become inert.
So, no, of course there's no life after death, just as there was no life before death.
Can you really experience anything objectively?
Well, yes, this is the whole point behind science and philosophy, I would assume, particularly science.
People say, well, I look at red and you look at red and we see slightly different colors and so on.
Of course, we're both looking at red and saying red, which is kind of a clue.
But the objective term for color is wavelength, where, you know, you convert it into a wave and you can measure it mathematically and so on.
But it's funny how, you know, can you really experience anything objectively?
The man's typing it using my sentences, using words, using language, and trying to communicate objective questions.
So the premise of the article is that we can trust our senses, language has meaning, and we can experience these questions objectively, which is why he's not typing randomly, right?
What is the best moral system?
Well, you know, sympathize with this.
This is really the most important question of philosophy.
I have a free book on my website at freedomainradio.com forward slash free called Universally Preferable Behavior of Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
And I won't go into the whole history and theory of it right now.
But I think that there is a way to define ethics objectively and universally.
And it does check off the four major aspects of any moral system that we assume has to be good.
It bans rape.
It bans theft, it bans assault, and it bans murder.
It just has the inconvenient effect of banning a lot of other things in society that we think are moral and which the Pope recently said we should have more of.
So I won't go into the whole argument here.
I really recommend checking out the book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
It's completely free.
Audiobook and PDF and HTML and so on.
But yes, I think I've made a very good case for universal ethics, but I understand that that is something...
But he says it can never be It can never be achieved.
And this is simply not true.
So his eighth question is, what are numbers?
And...
It's really the question of the relationship between concept and empiricism, right?
So trees exist.
Trees are sort of united biological entities.
But a forest, which is an aggregation concept, an aggregation that we call...
The trees exist, the forest is not, right?
A bunch of people in a square all exist as individual entities.
The concept crowd is something that's in our head.
The concepts are imperfectly derived from instances.
And so if I have a group of...
Five mammals and a lizard, and I say these are all lizards, then my concept is incorrect.
In the Platonic world, concepts trump instances.
In the Aristotelian or objectivist world, instances trump concepts.
And in the scientific world, instances trump concepts.
In other words, if you have a theory, even if it works abstractly in a logical manner, if your theory does not accord with what is empirically measurable in the world, your theory fails.
In other words, what happens in the world fails.
Is what conditions our concepts.
Our concepts do not condition what happens in the world.
And that, of course, I think is the basis of philosophy.
Numbers are concepts, right?
You have five coconuts in a row.
There are five coconuts.
Individually, they exist.
The number five is not floating above them in some subatomic format.
So numbers are concepts that we use for arranging objects and concepts.
Grouping objects and manipulating objects within our minds to produce great effects, right?
And getting a spaceship to Jupiter and beyond.
So numbers don't exist.
The concepts don't exist.
And in any contradiction between concepts and instances, the instances must win and the concepts must be adapted to fit the reality of the instances.
And again, I've got a whole introduction to philosophy here on YouTube and on my podcast feed that you can check out at youtube.com forward slash free domain radio.
So, you know, my case is that the one thing that philosophy has that is directly actionable and also is unique to philosophy is the definition and promotion of moral excellence, of virtue and courage.
And boy, oh boy, there's so much to do in the world when it comes to moral excellence.
Reading articles like this and this academic stuff that goes on, you know, the trolley scenarios and this and that and the other, is so elementally...
It's so frustrating.
I'll just give you one final analogy, if you will forgive me for going a little longer.
But the way I see it, it's not proof.
I'm just telling you the way that I see this kind of...
It's like a masturbation climax.
The way I see it is the world is infected by a plague.
And the plague is killing people left, right, and center.
And we have a cure.
And the cure is a tiny pill that's free to produce.
And we have a cure.
Now, of course, a lot of people think that we're poisoning them when we're in fact healing them.
That is the nature of being a philosopher.
You always get accused of corrupting the young.
You always get accused of hurting people and so on.
Because having illusions stripped away is like peeling off a layer of leprous skin to reveal the healthy skin underneath.
It's a very painful process.
But the reality is we have a cure.
It's reason and evidence and moral excellence.
We have a cure for the world's ills.
And that cure is most fundamentally promoting the benevolent, peaceful, and reasonable treatment of children.
No hitting, no yelling, no timeouts.
Negotiation at all times.
And that is the cure for the evils of the world.
It's very well validated scientifically.
It's very well validated morally.
Violations of the initiation of force with regards to children is literally...
The demon seed, as the song says, that raises a flower of fire.
And there are so many children being mistreated all over the world that you could bend your entire will and work 20 hours a day for the rest of your life and you would barely scratch the surface of the harm done to children in the world through indoctrination, through abuse,
through separation, through neglect, through abandonment, through rape, through beatings, through spankings, through all the things that children are subjected to, not even counting the educational claustrophobia that comes from jamming them in government schools and And the financial predation that occurs from using them as collateral to bribe voters in the here and now with their future productivity.
So, so much harm is being done to children in the modern world.
That is the cause of the ills in the modern world, at least most of them.
And so much can be done by any individual who decides to commit himself or herself to working for the sane, peaceful and rational protection of children's interests.
You will never be done.
You will never ever run out of So the people who think that this stuff that they're talking about has something to do with philosophy, And has something to do with actually achieving good in the world.
Literally, it's like, you know, we few are screaming in the middle of a universal plague that is causing ice-plosions and hair rot and arms to fall off and so on.
And we're saying, we have pills.
Get these pills to people.
Get these pills to people.
Now!
We've got to get these pills to people to save the world, to save the future.
I have a child myself.
I want her to grow up in a more peaceful world.
Than I did.
And that means people got to start treating their children a hell of a lot better than they are.
We have this pill.
We have this cure.
Get this to the people.
Save them.
Though the cure hurts, it saves not just individuals, but the world and the planet itself.
So we have the pill, we have the prescription, and we know how to give it to people.
But there are all of these people milling around saying, well, we're the real doctors, you see.
And who's to even know?
Whether this world is real?
Who's even to know whether the suffering is fake or real?
Who is to know whether anyone has a choice?
Who is to know why the world is the way the world is or why the world is not the opposite of the world?
And who is to know whether Zeus and tooth fairies do not exist?
And we're like, damn it!
Get out of the way!
We have pills to give to people to save the world!
Stop clogging the air with your gas bag nonsense!
That's what it's like.
Get out of the way.
I'd send you to the children's table, people, but that would be an insult to children.
So let go of all of this stuff.
Maybe when the world is a perfectly peaceful place, we can all stare at the navels, dig out our belly lint, and wonder why the world is not the opposite of the world.
But right now, we have a world to save, so get out of the way with these abstractions that are a form of self-indulgent paralysis, the major horror of which it is so easily spread to others.
The infection is distraction.
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