Will further knowledge of the brain reveal consciousness and free will and morality to be superstitions? Will greater medical and scientific advancement reveal determinism to be true and the existence of free will and morality to be completely irrational?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| Question from a listener, which is the argument or the possibility that as we discover more about the brain... | |
| And consciousness that moral philosophy will turn out to be a superstition from a bygone age of bygone-ness. | |
| And it's a great question. | |
| It's a great question. | |
| I certainly wouldn't want to be a materialist and an empiricist and then create some ghost in the machine, machine, machine that... | |
| Would miraculously rescue my irrational medieval prejudice for moral philosophy. | |
| That, I think, would be, well, not good. | |
| Not good. | |
| Bad philosopher. | |
| Naughty philosopher. | |
| Philosopher gets spanking. | |
| So... | |
| An analogy that pops into my mind is, would we say that the more we learn about the body, the less relevant nutrition is? | |
| Or would we say that the more we learn about the body, the more relevant nutrition is? | |
| I think for sure we would say the latter. | |
| The more we learn about the physical properties of matter, the less relevant physics is. | |
| Or the more we learn about tensile strength and load-bearing capacities and so on, the less relevant engineering is. | |
| I think that would be a hard case to make. | |
| That knowledge invalidates a discipline. | |
| Now, of course, I fully admit that I have no conclusive proof for free will. | |
| Of course not. | |
| But I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. | |
| Determinism is one of these, sort of like some religious arguments, like the God of the gaps, like wherever there's a gap in human knowledge, that's where God lives, that's where God exists. | |
| God is now at the edge of the universe because we can explain eclipses by methodologies other than demon eating the sun. | |
| And wherever there is uncertainty in the realm of human knowledge, that's where people project all of their irrationalities onto. | |
| And that is a very bad practice, a very bad habit. | |
| It's an almost universal habit. | |
| Because if you can hook your crazy into reality somewhere, then you're not crazy. | |
| You are keeping an open mind. | |
| You are at the forefront of human knowledge. | |
| Irrationality then becomes a virtue. | |
| And that is very, very tempting, of course, for a large number of people. | |
| And whatever you redefine as a virtue, you will not change. | |
| You will pursue. | |
| You will avidly defend. | |
| It will become a bedrock of your personality structure because we all tend towards the good. | |
| So, the question of will enough knowledge of the brain...cause us to eliminate moral responsibility, moral philosophy, free will, choice, virtue, in the same way that a further knowledge of the body has not proven very fruitful to the theory of the soul. | |
| Is the soul an immaterial entity that is supposed to be the seat of life and the basis of the personality? | |
| Well, of course, as we have learned more and more about the body... | |
| We have learned less and less about the soul, or we have eliminated more and more the possibility of there being such a thing. | |
| As a soul, as scientific measurement instruments have improved, we can't weigh the soul, we can't see the soul leaving the body on infrared or x-ray or any other spectrum that's ever been figured out. | |
| And so we have... | |
| A magical immaterial construct called the soul to explain life and to promise immortality. | |
| You can't promise immortality to people who regularly seen dead bodies rotting in the street unless you can inject life and its essence into something immaterial which can't rot and leave the body and so on. | |
| Is morality such a ghost to explain good and bad behavior? | |
| Do we turn to a ghost, a soul, called morality and figure it out from there? | |
| Well, of course, if it's a ghost and if it's irrational, then you can't figure it out from there. | |
| It becomes where you end inquiry. | |
| Now, of course, I think the people should continue to peer into the brain. | |
| I really think they should. | |
| And I think that we should also continue to look at certain levels of Economic trends to do with IQ, intelligence quotient. | |
| We should try and figure out the degree to which what's called G is a certain measure of intelligence, to what degree intelligence is innate, is genetic. | |
| Or if we say that, of course, there are various estimates about the proportion of intelligence that is genetic versus environmental. | |
| But once somebody has become an adult, well, I mean, IQ seems to be quite fixed from a pretty early age, which seems to be somewhat invulnerable to environment. | |
| And the degree to which a person is not responsible for the development of his or her intelligence and the degree to which said intelligence results in economic disparities is the degree to which you could make a decent case For those with an IQ of, say, 85 for giving money to them. | |
| I mean, if my... | |
| Let's say I make a million dollars a year. | |
| Yeah, I don't. | |
| But let's say I make a million dollars a year as a result of my phenomenal IQ, then is there not a case to be made that those who have an IQ of 85 who are getting by on $15,000 a year, that I should recognize that that I should recognize that I've been lucky and they have not and I can give them I think there's a case to be made for that. | |
| On the other hand, I don't think a government should ever be interested in the responsibility to do anything like that, of course, right? | |
| So that would be something we would make a case for that. | |
| Now, if we are going to associate intelligence with morality, then we have somewhat of a further challenge. | |
| Now, there does seem to be, and I've read this a couple of places, but I've not followed it up or verified it in any significant way, so take it with a grain of salt. | |
| But there does seem to be a kind of sweet spot for an increased likelihood of criminality, which floats around IQ 85 or so on. | |
| Lower than that, you can't do much planning. | |
| And higher than that, you tend to figure out the consequences of your actions. | |
| And so... | |
| Now, please understand, the vast majority of people with an IQ of 85 are not criminal. | |
| So it's just a minor increase in potential or possibility. | |
| And to me... | |
| I've always aimed that UPB could be understood by somebody IQ 85 and above. | |
| It needs to be something that is simple enough that you can explain to a 3 or 4 year old. | |
| And something which, you know, when you say to a three or four year old, how would you like it if someone did that to you? | |
| And the kid might say, I like it. | |
| And then what do you do, right? | |
| I'd like it. | |
| You know, if it's the biggest kid in the class, yeah, yeah, a kid could try and grab the crayon from me. | |
| They won't. | |
| They won't succeed. | |
| I like it. | |
| Let's have that as a rule that the biggest kid takes the crayons because I'm the biggest kid. | |
| And then you have a sort of problem. | |
| You say, well, you're lying. | |
| You wouldn't really like it. | |
| Or you have to then snatch the crayon from the kid. | |
| And then the kid can say, well, wait a minute. | |
| You're an adult. | |
| You're supposed to know better. | |
| Stuff that you can get into with kids. | |
| But UPP, of course, is designed. | |
| And I have explained it to kids who are very, very young. | |
| And it works out fine. | |
| Still have trouble explaining it to adults, but I'm working on that. | |
| I'm working on a summary of UPB that hopefully will make it more digestible. | |
| So, the fact that there is no moral explanation, or no explanation of morality, sorry, it's a better way of putting it. | |
| There's no explanation of morality at the moment that Can reasonably be explained to people of lesser intelligence. | |
| I mean, good lord, good luck taking them through Kantian ethics, or Aristotelian ethics, or Platonic ethics, or... | |
| I mean, you could probably have a little bit more luck with Randian ethics, but it's really important to try and get moral knowledge that's, you know, rational and understandable to people of lower intelligence. | |
| And what's happened, of course, is that people of lower intelligence, we generally have a threat of consequences, hell or jail or whatever, and... | |
| That doesn't seem to work too well, at least for certain segments of the population. | |
| It doesn't really seem to work too well at all. | |
| As I've talked about before, years ago, in a three-part series on free will, you can find on YouTube or at fdrpodcasts.com, a lack of knowledge is a lack of free will. | |
| A lack of knowledge is a lack of free will. | |
| I mean, let me give you an example. | |
| I have very little geographical sense. | |
| On roads. | |
| I'm good in the woods because I spend a lot of time in the woods working as a gold panoram prospector in my late teens. | |
| But I am not good on roads. | |
| I'm just not. | |
| Now, because there's this wonderful miracle called the GPS, because there's a GPS... I can now punch in where I want to go, and the GPS will tell me how to get there. | |
| Now, that has opened up my capacity to go places recreationally. | |
| Like, oh, there was some park. | |
| Oh, I'll just store the location on the GPS and go back later. | |
| Like, I now have the choice to go to the park in a sort of practical way. | |
| Of course, I've always theoretically had the choice to go I could go, you know, pull out the... | |
| They used to be called Purdy's, these maps. | |
| I guess that's another business that went by the wayside. | |
| But I could go and pull out these maps and write everything down and so on. | |
| But I'd be less likely to. | |
| You know, one of the great things about GPS is you can actually have conversations while you're driving to places you don't know how to get to. | |
| Just glance at the GPS, keep your conversation going. | |
| But in the past, it was rough. | |
| I mean, it was really rough. | |
| You couldn't concentrate on a conversation and concentrate on looking for the road signs and figuring out where you were and watching your odometer and so on. | |
| All of that was not so good. | |
| So, because there's the GPS... I have more freedom to travel to places I wouldn't otherwise go to. | |
| And again, at a theoretical level, I could have looked up, but it wouldn't really have happened. | |
| So now it's like, oh, let's go to that cool walk we found, stored on the GPS, you know, off we go. | |
| And all of that is really helpful. | |
| And it gives people freedom of choice. | |
| I sort of often thought that GPS has reduced gas consumption because people spend less time driving around lost. | |
| But at the same time, it maybe has increased gas consumption because people will take trips that they may not have to more distant places because the GPS makes it so much easier to get there. | |
| So... | |
| All of these factors are important when thinking about determinism versus morality. | |
| If people don't have a comprehensible, understandable, and comprehensive series of thoughts about ethics, then their free will with regards to virtue is significantly diminished. | |
| Similarly, all ethical systems based upon empathy are like diet books for slender people because all ethical systems based upon empathy Fail to rein in those people who lack empathy. | |
| In other words, those most likely to be cruel or exploitive or destructive or thieves or rapists or assaulters or murderers, all of those people who lack empathy require empathy to follow empathy-based moral systems. | |
| So, you know, how would you like it if someone did it to you fails the test of... | |
| Empathy. | |
| Because, sorry, it requires empathy, which means that those it's most targeted to are the ones it's least likely to convince in any substantial manner. | |
| How would you like it if someone did it to you requires mirror neurons that people are able to and have the habit of putting themselves in other people's shoes, and it doesn't work. | |
| You know, the The standard movie plot or narrative, right, the Revenge MacGuffin, is that the thief steals something and then another thief steals it from him and he goes after that thief in full moral outrage to go and get it back. | |
| Well, that, of course... | |
| Fundamentally means zero empathy, right? | |
| I'm going to steal from someone. | |
| I don't care. | |
| It doesn't even cross my mind how they're going to like it. | |
| Wait, someone stole from me. | |
| I'm outraged. | |
| Well, of course, so is the person you stole from. | |
| And that's one of the reasons why ethical systems don't work that well. | |
| And that's why you have to have all these threats. | |
| Because it doesn't really work. | |
| Now, those who lack empathy for others also lack empathy for their future selves. | |
| Empathy occurs across the population and forward through time. | |
| This is one of the reasons why I've done videos about the baby boomers. | |
| The baby boomers lack empathy forward through time. | |
| And all those who are not talking about reducing the national debt lack empathy through time. | |
| They're like, well, it's more convenient for us For this political system to exist, and for this redistribution to exist, for this military-industrial complex to exist, that's more convenient, and changing it puts us into conflict, which is uncomfortable, and so we're just going to send the bill to the next generation. | |
| That's cold. | |
| That is cold. | |
| That is a severe and significant lack of empathy. | |
| And where did this lack of empathy come from? | |
| Look, I'm not saying the prior generations and The situations where empathy dripped. | |
| But I mean, sort of look back at the founding of the American Republic, and they thought about, you know, how can we create a system that will sustain itself for a great number of years? | |
| And I mean, you could argue it's about 80 years before the federal government, governments as a whole, broke the bonds of the Constitution and went... | |
| On their drunken rampage through property and other rights. | |
| But 80 years, not bad. | |
| I mean, the welfare state has been chugging along for a half century and is already dragging the entire economy down. | |
| And didn't even last as long as the... | |
| So, they did do... | |
| Some more work in the past. | |
| And I think that in the post-war period, one of the fallouts of the First and Second World War is that war is incredibly destructive to empathy. | |
| Obviously. | |
| I mean, I don't think I need to make any arguments for that. | |
| How would you like it if he shot you? | |
| I've got to shoot him first. | |
| I have empathy for that. | |
| Tim or me. | |
| Win-lose is the opposite of empathy. | |
| Negotiation, win-win, that's where empathy is rewarded and flourishes. | |
| Empathy is like a plant. | |
| You water it or you piss on it. | |
| It grows or it dies. | |
| And so empathy-based moral systems, you know, I guess they make morally sensitive people feel guilty, but those morally sensitive people or empathetic people were not likely to go and do any kind of crimes anyway. | |
| But those who lack empathy, A, don't recognize emotionally the impact of their actions and predations on others, and B, Even consequences and punishment seem to do little good because consequences and punishment require that you have empathy for your future self. | |
| I don't want to go to prison. | |
| I don't want to go to hell. | |
| And so I'm going to modify my behavior so that I won't do these things. | |
| Where am I going to be in five years? | |
| What kind of life do I want to have? | |
| Well, I've got to change my circumstances now. | |
| I've got to stop doing drugs. | |
| I've got to stop drinking. | |
| I've got to maybe get a little exercise in. | |
| I've got to do all this kind of stuff. | |
| I've got to maybe even change my companions, my social circle. | |
| If my social circle is unwilling to change and is dragging me down, I've got to change. | |
| That's empathy for your future self. | |
| I have to not marry dangerous people in a thorny legal quagmire. | |
| So, this is why ethical systems at the moment, I don't think, are giving people enough of a choice. | |
| And we need ethical systems, like you target your anti-smoking campaigns not to the non-smokers, but to the smokers. | |
| Right now, we have anti-smoking campaigns that are only visible to non-smokers. | |
| You know exactly what we're looking for. | |
| So, we want to target moral systems, moral theories, moral arguments to those who are less intelligent and who lack empathy. | |
| You know, there's Lex Luthor, genius criminal and so on. | |
| There's a few, but they're not particularly... | |
| The world does not overflow with them, let's put it that way. | |
| So, do people of little empathy and lower intelligence have an ethical system that makes sense to them? | |
| Well, no. | |
| I mean, you put them in a system of predation like government schools... | |
| For, you know, 12 years and whatever it is, thousands of hours. | |
| You put them in that system and is any empathy being shown for the children in that system? | |
| Do they want to be there? | |
| Do they have a say in how it goes? | |
| Do they have a say in what they learn and how they learn it and who they're sitting next to and how long they go for and how much homework they get? | |
| There's no empathy for the kids in that system. | |
| No empathy. | |
| And that's really tragic. | |
| And so, you know, for a lot of kids, their exposure to their... | |
| For a lot of kids, school is their exposure to larger society. | |
| Society outside the home and its values. | |
| And society outside the home and its values, frankly, doesn't give a rat's ass about kids. | |
| There's no surveys, there's no feedback, there's no sensitivity or response to what they want. | |
| You know, the animators... | |
| Who make My Little Pony or Caillou or Peg and Cat or whatever. | |
| They're very sensitive to that which works for kids. | |
| They do lots of tests about what kids respond to, what they like, and they screen children's movies in front of kids to find out what they respond to and what they like and so on. | |
| And none of that goes on in government schools. | |
| You go, you sit, you shut up, you do what they tell you to do. | |
| You have no say in anything. | |
| And this is, I mean, government schools are foundationally sociopathic in that the children are there so that the adults profit and prosper, that they have jobs, that they have control, that they have power, have money, political influence. | |
| I mean, the children are hostages, solely used for the aggrandizement and profit of the adults, and no thought whatsoever given to what the kids like or what the kids want. | |
| I mean, it's just that that would be, I mean, incomprehensible. | |
| I mean, the idea that there would be some educational movement that would start with asking the kids how they like to learn and what excites them and what interests them and how school could be structured to better serve their needs. | |
| It's all top-down stuff, like Common Core and so on. | |
| It's no... | |
| The idea of asking kids is incomprehensible. | |
| And so, this is also what's terrible, is that children absorb this lesson that is literally pounded into them. | |
| That they're trapped and forced to absorb. | |
| I've always sort of thought that scene in A Clockwork Orange where... | |
| Is it Malcolm McDowell, I think, is the actor? | |
| He's got his eyes propped open. | |
| He's staring at all this stuff. | |
| I mean, the reason why that scene is famous and why it's so chilling is because there's school. | |
| At school, we all remember. | |
| We can't forget. | |
| So... | |
| You take a bunch of kids, you put them in a situation, in a sociopathic institution like public school. | |
| And please understand, I'm not saying everyone who teaches or administers public school is a sociopath. | |
| I'm saying the system as a whole is sociopathic in that it exploits others without ever asking them what they want. | |
| And it uses children for profit. | |
| And again, there's a lot of teachers in there who wanted to write and so on. | |
| I'm just talking about the system as a whole. | |
| So there's sort of an example of how you take a bunch of kids and some of them are going to have already have empathy and some of them are never going to have empathy perhaps and some of them are in between with potential. | |
| They go either way. | |
| They can go either way and you put them in an institution that is the opposite of empathetic and that relies on Punishment with a smidgen of bribery. | |
| You know, the relationship of punishment to reward in school is similar to punishment and reward in fundamentalist tenets of religion, in that there's a lot more focus on hell than there is on heaven. | |
| And that's how it rolls. | |
| And so the kids who could go either way, they tend to do pretty badly in that situation because they're just exposed and bludgeoned with all of this horrible self-interest stuff. | |
| So ethical theories that do not rely on empathy, that rely on simple reasoning capacities like UPB, ethical theories can rescue those children from Or even those adults, | |
| I believe, who are on the fence, not completely without empathy and reason or completely already virtuous and empathetic and so on. | |
| It can rescue those people. | |
| And so that's the point. | |
| So then, of course, the point is that they become good. | |
| At least they act in a good manner. | |
| And once they've accepted the UPB, then they are unable to To hit their children with any moral justification and negotiation and so on, even though it may be very tough for them to do that, there is that moral understanding that shifts the behavior, that changes the behavior. | |
| Now, of course, the purpose of moral philosophy is in a sense to To make itself redundant. | |
| To put itself out of business. | |
| That is really the point of moral philosophy. | |
| That's what we do it for. | |
| So, for instance, the purpose of nutrition In a way, is to put itself out of business. | |
| In other words, if you can convince everyone to raise their children so that their children are used to healthy food and doing all this kind of lovely stuff with their eating, they're not going to be fat, they're not going to be diabetic, they're not going to be too skinny, they're not... | |
| The purpose of... | |
| Nutrition, to some degree, is to make nutrition a habit, to make good eating a habit, such that there's really not any need to buy books on nutrition. | |
| Now, that's a tenuous analogy, because we'll always have biological desires for fat and salt and sugar and all those kinds of things, which is not quite the same as our biological desires for evil. | |
| So, there is the aspect of moral philosophy which says that the purpose of moral philosophy is to teach people virtue. | |
| Through teaching people virtue, they act virtuously towards their children, and therefore their children will not need to learn about virtue formally any more than the children need to be formally taught their native language. | |
| Now, don't get me wrong, you still learn grammar and there's still English as a discipline in school, but you don't have ESL. We don't want VSL, right? | |
| Virtue as a second language. | |
| That's hard and that's tenuous and, you know, how many people without a necessity to go out and learn a foreign language? | |
| Well, very, very few. | |
| A few. | |
| A few. | |
| I know there's some FDR listeners grinding their way through Japanese. | |
| Still? | |
| Still? | |
| Tell me. | |
| I'm curious. | |
| But VSL, Virtue as a second language. | |
| And the reason I use virtue is because MSL just sounds like something you take when you're constipated. | |
| So VSL, it's hard work to learn virtue if it's not taught to you and modeled for you and embedded within you in the same way that learning Japanese is hard if you're not born Japanese, right? | |
| Born Japanese, you grow up learning Japanese, don't really think about it. | |
| Somebody else from Iceland wants to go and learn Japanese. | |
| It's a challenge, to say the least. | |
| So, the purpose of moral instruction is to teach people to be good and to teach people to respect the non-aggression principle. | |
| Through that process, children are raised in a peaceful manner. | |
| And when children are raised in a peaceful manner, then all kinds of wonderful things happen, right? | |
| Because when children are raised in a peaceful manner, then they end up having empathy and having a respect for the non-aggression principle. | |
| In other words, that the non-aggression principle... | |
| It's not emotionally traumatizing for them, right? | |
| Because there's no conflict between our natural allegiance to parents and our allegiance to virtue, right? | |
| So when parents act in a manner that is opposed to virtue, then we will naturally bond with our parents and virtue becomes traumatizing. | |
| Virtue becomes our enemy. | |
| Virtue becomes... | |
| Something we avoid as a great pain because it interferes with our bonding with our parents. | |
| Virtue becomes the enemy of parental bonding. | |
| So, that's important to understand as well. | |
| We really only need one generation of people to believe UPB, to accept the non-aggression principle, and then we're good to go, right? | |
| We're set. | |
| And the reason that we're set, of course, is because children raised with the non-aggression principle will have no issue with the non-aggression principle. | |
| Let's say reviewed in light of this, but they'll still be fine with it as a principle. | |
| If you had crazy parents or a crazy teacher, I suppose, who goaded you into saying two and two make four, but every single time you said that two and two make four, they beat you within an inch of your life, then when some math teacher comes along and says two and two makes four, you're going to start shaking, you're going to start sweating, you're going to be really tense and messed up about it, right? | |
| I mean, that's just how trauma works. | |
| And that's the same thing with the non-aggression principle. | |
| If you're Parents and teachers keep telling you not to use force to get what you want, but then hit you when you don't do what they want, then you have, well, you've got some trauma, and it's really difficult to process UPB. Whereas, of course, if your parents and teachers and everyone has acted consistently with that principle of non-aggression, | |
| then when somebody says the non-aggression principle is good, then you're like, tell me something I don't already know in a very deep and conscious and subconscious manner. | |
| So, this is really the point, the point of virtue, is focusing on parents. | |
| Oh, why do you focus on parents so much from the Fed? | |
| Because the Fed is a product of bad parenting. | |
| Sorry, it just is. | |
| I'll make that case elsewhere. | |
| I know, it just is. | |
| Not the most philosophical argument I'm going to make today, but I've made it so many times in places elsewhere that I don't think I need to make it here again. | |
| Oh, look at me, respecting your time and everything. | |
| What a nice host. | |
| And... | |
| So once we can convince parents, those in authority over kids, to be virtuous, to respect the non-aggression principle, with regards to their parenting, right? | |
| I mean, you may still have to send your kids to government schools, and you may have other restrictions on your capacity to act with perfect virtue, as we all do. | |
| As we all do. | |
| But the whole point of UPB is that nobody really needs to think about UPB. | |
| The point of the map company is to invent the GPS. | |
| So when it comes down to will sufficient knowledge of the brain render morality irrelevant, I would say, well, I think morality is what renders morality irrelevant. | |
| That's the The purpose of knowledge is to eliminate the knowledge of knowledge. | |
| I know it sounds weird, but it's true. | |
| You think about it. | |
| So, remember the first time that you played like a first-person shooter? | |
| I mean, for me, I was a dungeon master on the old Atari 520ST, a first-person shooter. | |
| I guess, like most people, it was Wolfenstein, Spear of Destiny, and so on, right? | |
| And then, I can't remember the first one that came along that used a mouse Maybe it was Quake. | |
| I can't remember. | |
| But anyway, at some point, you could use a mouse, and then you could use a mouse to look around and so on, right? | |
| So remember the first time that you started using a mouse in a first-person shooter, it was tough, right? | |
| You went too far. | |
| You had to adjust the mouse sensitivity or whatever. | |
| I always have to invert the mouse because I'm different. | |
| And I think it's because I learned on that stuff on flight simulators. | |
| Anyway. | |
| And it was tough. | |
| You had to really focus on moving your hand and so on. | |
| Now, after you played for a while, you point and shoot, right? | |
| It becomes very instinctive. | |
| You don't think about how your mouse is moving, right? | |
| And you just, oh, there's someone over there. | |
| Look, shoot, move, run, jump, right? | |
| Do all the stuff that I used to do when my nervous system was younger. | |
| And, you know, walking. | |
| You know, you focus a lot on walking when you're learning about it, and now you just say, I want to go somewhere, and your magic hovercraft legs take you there. | |
| The purpose of knowledge, right? | |
| And when you're learning a foreign language, a lot of work at the beginning, and then eventually you think in that language, and you don't even think about the next word in the same way that when you're in native language, you don't. | |
| So the point of knowledge is to erase knowledge of the knowledge, to just become, you know, fully automatic. | |
| Automatic for the people. | |
| And the purpose of morality is not to have people say, well, I could join this group of guys who are planning a bank heist, but I just read this book on ethics and I guess I'll grip my teeth and not do it. | |
| But for you not even to be among people who would be planning a bank heist and then eventually for no people to be even planning bank heists. | |
| And hopefully, no banks. | |
| Bitcoin! | |
| So the purpose of morality is to erase the knowledge of moral theories, insofar as they're just automatic and you don't really have to think about them. | |
| And you may, if you're interested, right? | |
| There are people who study the kinesiology of walking. | |
| And there will be people who still work on ethical theories, and there may be new situations, you know, discovering life on other planets or other worlds. | |
| But I repeat myself. | |
| I mean, other planets, other solar systems. | |
| Doubt we're going to find any life that's going to require ethical consideration in this solar system. | |
| But... | |
| There will be people who are working on ethical theories and so on, but the vast majority of people will simply live and breathe ethics the same way that adults live and breathe walking and barely give it any consideration. | |
| When you learn to play piano, initially you're doing scales, you're really focused, and then, you know, I remember seeing Sting in concert many, many years ago. | |
| I think it was his Dream of the Blue Turtles tour. | |
| He had this jazz pianist, this black guy, unbelievably great, like playing one hand in front of him, one hand behind him, just jamming, and God, it was meaty, fantastic, amazing stuff. | |
| I mean, I love me some good piano boogie. | |
| I'll even put up with whatever the hell Freddie Mercury does in Living on My Own, but that's a topic for another time. | |
| But, um... | |
| That is the purpose of morality. | |
| Now, when you have really internalized a system of knowledge, that's when you have the greatest freedom. | |
| I mean, there are some pianists and guitarists and musicians that are like, oh, play this song, you know, and off they go. | |
| You know, off they just, they go and play it. | |
| And they can just improvise and they have the greatest freedom to do pretty much whatever they want because their knowledge has become, their knowledge and skills have become so automatic that there's really, they have the greatest freedom. | |
| And so to me, The moral discussions or the moral story of mankind is... | |
| There's not a lot of freedom because it's all consequence-based and those who need ethics the most need the most empathy and don't have enough empathy for consequence-based or punitive ethical theories to work on them because they don't have empathy for others or their future selves. | |
| And that's one problem. | |
| And then when UPB first comes along, people are like, oh man, that's really tough, that's really hard, that's kind of annoying. | |
| And I agree. | |
| I do. | |
| And then, as generations, it's why it's a generation, it's why a multi-generation change, as I've always said. | |
| As parents come along, then UPB is not emotionally threatening to people, they grow with empathy, so UPB fits in with their empathy and fits in with their, they don't have a fear or hatred of ethics as a result of being parented badly. | |
| All this kind of stuff happens. | |
| And then when people are, quote, automatically virtuous, then we have the greatest freedom possible. | |
| And I don't think that that is going to end up where ethics become irrelevant through science. | |
| Ethical theories will become irrelevant through the application of ethical theories. | |
| Hope I've blown your mind! | |
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