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April 3, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:46
A Philosophical Introduction to Concept Formation
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So let's do a little hardcore philosophy.
This is an expansion upon, oh I guess it's only been 14 years or so, from my very first video on YouTube, Understanding Concepts, which I did in a long ago office during my entrepreneurial career as a software executive.
And the question which
really plagues philosophy and when something plagues philosophy it plagues society as a whole is this question of how ideas get into our minds it's a really miraculous and remarkable thing and as a parent you notice this considerably of course when you have kids or in my case a kid and what you do is you notice just how effortlessly children are able to
Figure out what a chair is, and what a table is, and what a male is, what a female is, what a road is, the clouds, all of this, right?
It's truly amazing how little instruction children need in concepts.
And the same is also true in language, how little instruction children need.
in language.
I don't, and I was aware of this at the time when my daughter was very young.
I remember her first two-syllable word, elbow.
But I remember being struck by how little I needed to teach her the words for things.
She just, I don't know, it's weird.
It's like she picked them up from the ether or something like that.
It's a truly remarkable phenomenon.
And since this usually occurs prior to our conscious knowledge, it is really quite something to see it happen, because we don't usually remember this process ourselves, but we see this process cooking along in In others, in kids.
And so, I mean, when I worked in a daycare, the kids were older and usually had their language down to some degree, but yeah, seeing it happen in your own kids is a really amazing thing.
Now, my daughter, you know, she'll chew through a novel in a day and a half, and she does occasionally ask what words mean, but you pick up so much from context, and words get this interesting visceral flavor as well, which is really neat.
And you can see this.
You can see this, how words get infused with this evil, with this nastiness, or this virtue, right?
And you hear, diversity has got these halos and rainbows and all that, and white nationalism has all sorts of evil and Nazi and so on.
Not just the concepts, but the infusion of the concepts with moral absolutes is also really, really quite fascinating.
Now, this question of how we're so good at figuring out concepts is really interesting, and philosophers have struggled to explain this.
And they've struggled to explain it because how we get ideas in our head is so foundational to how society should be run that we've almost never had a clear field or a clear path to have a conversation about this.
It's sort of like saying, well, you know, the location of the Sun relative to the Earth and the solar system and the universe is just a matter of astronomy.
It's like, now it's really not, right?
I mean, it's a matter of theology.
And All of that is very important for people to sort of understand.
So it's hard.
Now with the internet, with podcasting and so on, we can finally have this conversation.
It's not without its dangers, of course, but it is interesting to see what happens when you can finally have a frank discussion of these matters in the open.
So, there's two ways in which something can be understood conceptually.
The first is through its properties, and the second is through its utility.
So when a child learns what a tree is, well, you know, it's this vertical tough stalk with Arms coming out of it and leaves coming out of the arms and so to speak, right?
The limbs.
And you learn it first because children don't climb trees when they're learning what trees are usually.
So you first learn about it as it has properties like water.
A squishy, clear substance that you can drink but cannot breathe.
And can be warm or cold or room temperature and so on.
So these are properties and They are, in general, the natural world, the unchanged world.
Grass, trees, frogs, leaves, clouds, and so on.
These are unshaped by humans and therefore they have properties that remain relatively consistent.
That remain relatively consistent.
A very tall plant is in general a tree unless it has enormous flowers in which case enormous leaves enormous flowers in which case it's probably some kind of mutant chernobyl plant or something like that so so kids can kinda get that and they're pretty good at understanding that a very tall plant with small leaves and a rough exterior is a tree even if it's an evergreen or deciduous you know elm tree and so on
So, the color of the bark, the shape of the leaves, the height of the tree, the general shape of the tree, whether it has leaves or not in the winter, these are all byproduct, not the essential definition, as Aristotle would say.
So kids are pretty good at doing that, even though kids rarely see something like a tree being used.
You know, they rarely will see, ah, well, you know, you cut down this tree and then you get You get wood out of the tree and then you make the wood into a fence or like they don't really see it in that sense because little kids shouldn't be around woodworking of that magnitude and power and frankly danger.
So clouds, you don't see anyone lassoing clouds and harnessing them down to give people hydrotherapy up the nose or something like that so you see the clouds but of course clouds have a pretty consistent set of characteristics, right?
Even though clouds have a wide variety of shapes, and of course sometimes they're in the midst of a blue sky, and sometimes they completely obscure the blue sky, and sometimes they're high and thin, and sometimes they're contrails, and contrails, of course, are the vapor trails left by airplanes, and very different from all other kinds, and usually kids will ask, what is that?
So clouds are not used, but clouds have common enough properties that can be easily identified.
And clouds are silent, except in thunderstorms, and clouds sometimes produce rain and sometimes don't, but there's never rain without clouds, and so on, right?
So kids are pretty good at conceptualizing Things which have not been shaped by humans for human use, right?
So, that's pretty good, but there's not a huge variety of those things in a kid's life.
I mean, there's some trees around, there's some grass, there's some ground, there's some water, maybe if there's a stream or pond nearby, there's all these kinds of things, but kids are not widely exposed to a huge variety of natural things.
Particularly, you know, if they're born in the winter in colder climates, they're indoors a lot.
But even when they get outdoors, and I'm sort of talking about more northerly climates where there's not such a mass of animals and a wide variety of plants and so on.
So they'll go to a petting zoo and they'll see animals, but those animals have been domesticated for human use.
They're usually not in the presence of wild animals outside of, like, frogs and other harmless creatures, but it's not a huge amount of variety that they're exposed to.
And, you know, they get stuff in picture books, and picture books really help so they know when they go to the zoo what a tiger is if they've read Winnie the Pooh or whatever.
So, the things which are natural in the world, there's not enough, there's not a huge amount of variety, and the properties of the things that they see are constant enough that it's pretty easy to figure out that the puffy thing in the sky that doesn't fall down and seems quite large is a cloud.
And the giant plant with the rough exterior and the small leaves is a tree.
And they'll know a couple animals, right?
Cats, maybe some rabbits, hamsters, whatever might be in the household.
And human beings, of course.
So they do get Concepts pretty easily, because the natural world is stable, and it's why we can classify everything, right?
It's like, well, we know the difference between a frog and a toad, right?
We know the difference between a goat and a sheep, because they have objective stable properties that are evolved and constant, and the trees, same thing.
So it's not too difficult to extract universal properties out of specific objects, because they have so much in common.
You know, trees don't walk.
So they have so much in common, that it's pretty easy.
Now, the more challenging... It's more challenging and easier in the same way.
It's more challenging because there's more variety, but it's easier because the objects are constructed, which is the objects that have utility, that have been created For and by men.
Right?
Mankind.
So, think of a pillow, right?
A pillow... I mean, you can use natural things as a pillow.
I remember we used to try and use heather as a pillow back in the day.
Not my cousin, but the plant that grows near Bracken, if I remember rightly.
So, You can use things as a pillow, but they're not constructed as pillows.
You could use a mossy rock as a pillow, a log maybe, but they're not constructed as pillows.
They're just things you can use as pillows.
So, a pillow is, you know, a soft object wrapped in cloth designed to cushion your back, usually, or your head or your butt against a harder surface, right?
So these things, they're not just occurring naturally.
But they are designed for use and therefore there's a greater variety of them with a wider variety of properties but because they are designed for a particular purpose they're easier to conceptualize.
So there's more of them with a wide variety of properties all the way from like a tiny throw pillow all the way to the back of a giant couch or the bottom of a couch where you sit or the butt area of the couch I would imagine that... I guess you could say, like, all the way from a giant fruit bowl down to the smallest bowl that you could imagine, which you might use for a couple of ounces of sugar or something like that.
Well, they're all bowls, although they will shift in size by, you know, a factor of 5 or 10, right?
Same thing is true of throw pillows versus the pillows on a couch.
There's a size factor between 5 and 10.
But you don't see that out in the world, right?
You don't generally see A tree that's ten times the size of the trees next to it, right?
The scope and size is not the same in the natural world as it is for the designed world, right?
So you can have a tiny little chair.
I remember putting together a little chair and art table with my daughter many years ago.
And you can have a tiny chair that, you know, barely comes up to your shins, including the back.
And then you can have a giant lazy boy, right?
Chair, not father, although the two are often quite closely related.
And out in cottage country you can sometimes see these giant Muskoka chairs, sort of put there for decoration.
It's still recognizable as a chair, even though it's like a hundred times larger.
And so the size doesn't usually change.
What are the size of cats?
Well, you know, I mean outside of kittens, right?
You can see the babies and adults, right?
But cats are generally similar sizes, you know, within 10 to 20 to 30 percent you've got the same size.
Dogs, of course, a lot more variety for sure, but generally kids aren't exposed to that wide variety of dogs, unless maybe you go to a dog park or something like that.
With human-made things, you can have toys as well, right?
You don't usually have Toy clouds, right?
I mean, but you will have, in your dollhouse, you will have a tiny chair, and you will have a tiny table, and, you know, tiny little dressers, and all this kind of stuff, right?
Tiny curtains on the tiny windows, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes full of ticky-tacky, and these are all recognizable, although they differ in size, in general, a lot more than things in the natural world.
Ah, it just popped into my mind, though, that clouds, of course, will differ enormously in size.
You can have tiny little scraps of clouds, and then you can have the entire sky covered with clouds.
But clouds themselves, of course, are not discrete.
Right?
A cloud is a gathering of water vapor, but you could walk right through it, and you could jam it into another cloud if you, you know, if the winds happen to go that way.
So it's not a discrete entity.
That's more of a, you know, a diaphanous kind of conceptual entity.
It looks somewhat discreet, but it's constantly changing, and then it blends into others, and then it goes, and then it's covered by other clouds, and the next day it's all different.
So as far as the things that are tangible and constant, they don't grow, obviously, in any visible way usually, and they also don't shift in size.
They don't have a variety of sizes in the way that man-made things are.
So you can go all the way from a doll's chair, which can be the size of your little finger, all the way up to a Muskoka chair that is probably a thousand or two thousand times larger and still recognizable as a chair.
Whereas, you know, if a cat gets big enough, it's no longer perceivable as a cat.
And so, it's usually not... When my daughter went to zoos, and she would see something like a lynx, she didn't say a kitty, right?
She'd say that's some kind of cat, or that's a very big cat, or that's, you know... So she recognized that there was something different, even though a lynx is, what, two to three times the size of a house cat, and so on, right?
It's how kids know the difference between, like, a dog and a horse, right?
I mean, you can get a big dog, but you won't get a dog as big as a horse.
So, although there's usually greater variety in man-made objects, from dolls' chairs all the way up to giant, like, lazy boys and so on, because these things are created for utility, Right?
And the doll's furniture is also created for utility.
It's just that the utility is for the doll, not for the human.
Or you could say, in a larger context, the utility of doll's furniture is to facilitate the play of a child with the doll by proportioning the furniture to the size of the doll.
So it is fashioned with a purpose.
And so it still falls into the category.
So a chair, obviously, is designed to allow A more comfortable repose, right?
So standing gets tiring after a while and can make your joints ache, particularly when you get older.
Worst chairs are comfortable for longer, although not so great for the posture.
So all of these things are important to understand.
So when it comes to identifying man-made objects, or objects made for the purposes, right?
So what is a table?
Well, a table is designed to hold things at a comfortable level for somebody who's sitting, in general, right?
I mean, there are standing tables.
I get that there are exceptions, but we call them standing tables for a reason, right?
So a table Is designed to keep things at a comfortable level for someone that is seated now.
Or it could be, in the Japanese style, for somebody who's sitting on the ground.
Because if you're small and very flexible, that's a lot more comfortable.
I've never been able to sit cross-legged because I'm just not flexible enough.
And that's always been... I have to basically do one long sit-up.
When I'm sitting cross-legged, which happened a lot in theater school, I have to do one long sit-up, or I have to sit up against the wall, and my thighs are tense just holding my torso forward, because my natural tendency is to flop back, like a book being blown open.
So kids can look at the stable properties and relative lack-of-size differential of things in the natural world, And whereas there's greater variety and greater size differential, their concepts are bound by the design elements of what it is that they're looking at.
Right, so they know what a TV is, display moving images and sound for the purposes of entertainment.
That is, or I guess instruction if you're looking at this.
Well, hopefully a bit of entertainment too, but not necessarily on this more technical kind of stuff.
So, if we understand that things in the world have stable properties, and given that one of the properties is size, it's relatively stable too.
Like, I'm driving at the moment, I'm looking by the side of the road, there's a whole bunch of trees planted, and they're all within 15 to 20 percent of the size of each other.
I'm not.
Telephone poles, obviously.
Very close, one to two percent, but trees are just... When you have a copse of trees, usually it's a bunch of similar trees because they're all dropping seeds on the same spot and crowding out the other trees and so on.
So there's similarity.
So kids understand a phone, right?
Even though phones We'll have different shapes and sizes, right?
I mean, that may be still the old rotary dial.
I guess not those anymore, right?
Pretty darn push-button phones.
But there are cell phones, some with touchscreens, most with touchscreens, I guess.
Some have the flip.
Some have physical buttons.
There are handheld phones that have physical buttons that are usually attached to some sort of wireless base and all that.
So, all of these things are for the purposes of remote communication, right?
So, you pick it up, you hold it to your ear, or you have a headset, and you talk, and you listen, and that's the majority of what the phone aspect of the phone is for.
Like, I get there are video players and all that you do, but the phone aspect of the phone is for talking, and because it has that purpose, so the child doesn't have to look at something and say, what is that?
You go into a forest, you see a new tree, your brain is like, well, what is that, right?
Because it's not being used for any particular purpose.
But when you see someone sitting on something that has a back and four legs and, you know, a butt placed... Well, that's a chair, right?
Because it's being used as a chair.
When you see food being placed on a piece of wood with four legs that's about waist height, I guess a little below waist height, then that's a table, right?
Everyone come to the table for dinner.
Would you mind setting the table?
Would you mind clearing the table?
So, you get the additional clue when you're looking at man-made objects, which is how they're being used.
You know, the people outside of trying to be funny don't often pick up a shoe and start trying to dial people and talk to them and so on, right?
But when someone's holding up something to their ear and having a conversation, that's a phone, right?
Or there's something being used as a phone.
I'm sort of including Skype in this, but yeah, if you give me a little bit of blurry Boundaries on all the new stuff that would be helpful or useful.
So this additional standard or property, I suppose, of utility is what helps us understand the purpose of something.
And you can go a long way to fooling people by pretending that there's another purpose, right?
The stated purpose of the mainstream media news is to inform, right?
But it's not.
It's to indoctrinate, right?
So you have a stated purpose, right?
The stated purpose of university as it has inherited its nomenclature is to teach people how to think.
Whereas the actual purpose of university is to teach people what to think, or rather, not to think, since once you teach someone what to think, they're not being taught to think, they're being threatened with punishment and showered with rewards if they follow, or if they mouth off a particular platitude or conclusion.
So you can, of course, do quite a bit of camouflage, right?
You can say that the purpose of the welfare state is to help the poor.
Another purpose of the welfare state is to create a perpetual underclass dependent upon the state who can reliably be harvested for votes and support.
And, you know, the purpose of Marxism is to create an egalitarian society.
It's like, nope, the purpose of Marxism is to destroy the capacity of high IQ people to gather more resources and therefore have higher sexual market value.
It's all about the squishy bits, my friends.
It's all about the squishy bits, as you would expect from an evolutionary based model of the universe.
And cosmology, cosmology based upon biblical theology, is it designed to give you the truth about the universe?
No, it's not, right?
It's designed to support existing theology.
And yet, of course, it will proclaim that it is the truth.
The truth is what is being pursued.
So, once we understand that it's pretty easy to conceptualize things in the world That are unaltered because they have stable sizes, stable properties and where there's less stable or a wider variety of sizes and properties because there is utility involved.
It's pretty easy to conceptualize based upon the utility, right?
You sit your dolls around a table, you put little teacups on, and it's a doll's table.
Is that our table?
Is that a person's table?
No, that's a doll's table, right?
That's the idea.
So stability and utility.
Ooh, I'm starting me a rap.
Stability, utility.
And once we sort of understand that, then there are, it's a lot easier to understand how fluent and good we are at conceptualization.
Now, animals, of course, have instinctual conceptualization.
If you give a lizard a leaf that it likes to eat, or a turtle, it doesn't sit there and say, well, I don't know what that is.
It's some green thing, but it's not the same shape and size exactly of the last one of these I ate.
A lion doesn't look at a springbok and say, well, I don't know what that is, because it's got slightly different markings.
Or a zebra, slightly different markings than the last juicy four-legged burger I took down and munched on.
They know, right?
They know.
So they're able to conceptualize.
But it's not... I mean, it's sensual conceptualization, which is my sense data is giving me enough of a pattern that I know what this thing is, but I cannot conceptualize the pattern beyond mere sense recognition, right?
So I can look at this four-legged running thing that has a brown coat and horns and a little head or whatever it is and a white belly and a Bushy tail.
It's like, okay, that's some kind of antelope.
And I like to eat antelope so I can go and do that.
Right.
But of course, the animal cannot conceive of a biological category and differentiate according to that.
So there's pattern recognition regarding sense data.
And it's like similar enough, right?
There's things in facial recognition for computers, right?
So facial recognition is looking for particular patterns in I guess a video or a photo and it's attempting to match those patterns to data that it has, right?
But the computer has no particular conceptual understanding of what is a human face.
It's just comparing data.
It's comparing visual data to stored data and that's it.
It does not coming up.
It's not thinking for itself Skynet style and attempting to come up with a definition of human beings that includes them being viruses that must be wiped from the face of the earth, right?
That's not what it's just.
It's just data matching.
It's matching visual stimuli to uh... instinct and past visual stimuli and so it's looking for similarity in characteristics but it is not abstracting those to conceptual definitions it's just this is look similar uh... and uh... same thing with the uh... same thing with the uh... the gazelle uh... that the last time that the
The grass moved in this kind of way, the tall grass, you know, bad things happen to my friend, Buddy Bouncing Bob, so I better start running.
I better not run too much, though, I get too tired if it's a fake, right?
So, it's the same thing, you know, butterflies that migrate, right?
They don't have a concept of countries, so to speak.
But they do have an instinctual urge to go, you know, to fly in some particular direction, although they would not be able to conceive of something like longitude and latitude.
So, human beings have the ability to create universal abstractions out of particular sense data.
Not just in terms of this is similar, but this is the definition of those similarities, right?
So that is That's a key differentiator, and you really do require language for that, right?
Because language is creating a conceptual definition of particular instances, which children do, right?
That is a tree.
Well, the word tree is a conceptual tag for an aggregation of similar enough characteristics that they're in the same category, right?
A tree.
And, you know, again, we have amateur and professional, right?
So, I mean, amateur might say, well, that's a mongrel, but a professional dog breeder would probably know every ingredient into making up that dog.
So there's different levels of degree, but nobody sits there and says that a St.
Bernard's is exactly the same as a Chihuahua, or even approximately the same in terms of in the species of dogs.
So once we understand that, then we are a long way towards resolving the biggest issue in concept formation, which is Well, I guess there's two, right?
Number one is how absolute are these concepts, and number two is if there is a contradiction between concepts and instance, which gives way?
Now, of course there are two levels of... I guess, yeah, there are two levels of absolutism.
One is, of course, physics, and the other is biology.
Now, in physics, They're absolute, right?
Gravity is absolute.
But in biology, you can have a sheep born with two heads.
You can have mutations.
There's going to be some fluidity, so to speak, right?
There's going to be the duck-billed platypus, right?
Which, although it is warm-blooded and has fur, it gives birth to eggs rather than live young.
If I remember the nitpickers from one of my previous videos.
Thanks guys!
Actually, that's very, very helpful.
If I remember that correctly.
And so there are going to be times where these sort of fuzzy, fuzzy issues, right?
How do you classify this?
How do you classify that?
Is this a... whatever, right?
I mean, there's just going to... because, you know, it's not like nature is designing things for human abstractions, right?
Human abstractions are imperfectly derived from physical instances, right?
I mean, you can have a small horse But if the horse is small enough and it's not a regression to the mean situation, right, so a tall horse can give birth to a shorter horse, and a short horse can give birth to a taller horse, and you don't make every inch height of category a different species of horse, but if you have a dwarf pony or a Shetland pony or whatever that is consistently giving birth
To ponies within a relatively short variation of its own height, then you have a different species, right?
You have a different species.
A St.
Bernard might give birth to a smaller St.
Bernard, but not to a Chihuahua.
So, there's going to be some natural variation, but where that natural variation falls outside a particular range, along with other different characteristics, then you have a new species.
But there's going to be some Fuzzy boundaries, for sure.
There's going to be some fuzzy boundaries, and that's because you have conceptual absolutes trying to layer over biological variation, which has a huge amount of consistency.
Don't get me wrong, it's a huge amount of consistency.
You know, two black parents from Somalia are not going to give birth to a Nordic blue-eyed blonde-haired Swede, for as long as that analogy holds.
So there is natural variation in the biological world and because of that there's going to be some fuzzy boundaries.
Now people of course use these fuzzy boundaries to try and discredit concepts as a whole.
Which is wrong.
Which is wrong.
Because the only reason we know there are fuzzy boundaries is because there are absolutes.
There are absolutes.
Nobody thinks that a bird is a lizard.
Right?
I mean, no biologist, right?
So, yeah, there's a couple of things that are tough to classify, and we only know that they're tough to classify because they're tough to classify relative to all of the things that are dead easy to categorize.
And that's important.
So it's like this.
You could say that the boundaries of your property are a little fuzzy.
Right?
You understand that, right?
That, let's say you have a square acre, and it's somewhere in the woods, right?
And let's say there's a tree that's half on your property and half on someone else's property.
Is it your tree or not?
Well, you know, it's a little fuzzy, right?
And if you want to go right down to the micro level, where is the exact end of your property and someone else's property begins.
And if you build a fence and it's a couple of, you know, a couple of millimeters or centimeters or inches or whatever, one way or the other, right?
So yeah, right down.
At the edge of your property, there are fuzzy boundaries.
If you want, you can definitely focus on that.
But, they're only fuzzy relative to what is not fuzzy, which is a couple inches back, it's definitely your property.
A tree that's entirely growing on your property, including the roots, is your tree.
Your house, that is right in the middle of your acre, is your house on your property, right?
And if you go two feet into someone else's property or you go 50 feet into someone else's property and start building a shed, well, that's clearly their property, right?
So, you can focus on these little fuzzy boundaries and think that that somehow invalidates the concepts of ownership or biology or whatever, but it's not true.
It's not true.
They actually reinforce those, right?
So there's my property, there's a little bit of fuzzy edginess, which actually doesn't matter in the real world.
Like, 999 times out of a thousand, or 9,999 times, you get it, right?
Like, almost every single time, it doesn't matter.
Like, if your neighbor builds a fence, and you say, oh my goodness, it's one inch on my property.
I mean, it may rankle you if you're anal and can't stand having maps folded up in front of you the wrong way.
But it doesn't really matter in any practical sense.
What are you going to do with that edge, right?
If it's six feet over or whatever, then, you know, you've got a problem because you can do something with that six feet.
But there's no practical consequences of the fuzzy boundaries property disputes.
Most times.
Again, you know, there are exceptions.
Your neighbor grows a tree and it hangs over and shades where you want to have sunlight or something like that.
Yeah, there are times where these fuzzy boundary issues are important, but they're extraordinarily rare.
And for the most part, if you slice and dice enough, Actually, the fuzzy boundaries is not even that fuzzy on your side, because you have a right to sky access, which is why someone can't build a giant bridge over your property, right?
You have a right to sky access from your property.
So if your neighbor's tree overshadows your hammock, then you can ask him to cut it down, although most likely you'll just move your hammock, right?
So these things are pretty easy to resolve.
So the fuzzy boundaries don't matter.
There's no utility to the consequence of these fuzzy boundaries.
So, let's say that there's some beetle that is hard to classify, right?
So hard to handle, right?
Let's say there's some beetle and it's like, I don't know, it's got the wrong number of legs, I don't know, whatever it is, right?
I just know there's a lot of beetles, right?
So if some biologist has a real challenge classifying some particular beetle, what consequences does that have in the real world? . what consequences does that have in the real world? .
Well, assuming that it's not some, oh, if it's this kind of beetle it's a protected species and the government launches into action or like something like that, right?
It doesn't have any consequences in the real world because concepts do not alter that which they describe.
Concepts do not alter that which they describe.
You can call a tree a fridge, it doesn't shift one atom in the tree.
It doesn't alter that which exists.
And where utility is absent, fuzzy boundaries are irrelevant.
They're not unimportant, they're irrelevant.
Insofar as if some Beetle is tough to classify.
I mean, does it really matter to you that the duck-billed platypus gives birth to eggs rather than live young, even though it has hair and is warm-blooded and, I don't know, suckles its young or whatever?
Doesn't really matter.
How does it really matter?
How does it really matter?
And certainly the fact that it's tough to classify does not alter anything in reality.
Metaphysically, right?
You could say, well, the law and this and that, but in terms of the actual atoms and physical reality and so on, it doesn't matter, right?
If I mistaken the class of lizard as a mammal, I don't magically cause it to grow hair and become warm-blooded and give birth to live young and suckle.
It doesn't magically sprout nipples on its belly.
You understand, right?
All of this kind of stuff.
So the fuzzy boundaries, look at a country, right?
So let's, I mean, Australia, right?
Australia, giant continent, it's an island.
Look at Australia.
Okay, don't look directly at Australia because you'll get sunburn on your eyeballs, but, and some giant spider will sting you, right?
But if you look at Australia, say, ah, Australia, it's a continent and there's ocean around it.
It's like, okay, what's the square kilometers of Australia and whatever it is, right?
Yes, but you see, there are waves lapping on the shore.
Is Australia the size of when it's low tide or high tide?
Is Australia the size of when the waves are coming in or the waves are going out?
And you could really get down to each grain of sand.
Is it wet?
Is it dry?
Do you understand?
You could get to the fuzzy boundaries of Australia.
Do you then say, because there are fuzzy boundaries around Australia... Sorry, I forgot to pronounce that correctly.
Australia is correctly pronounced as... Ah!
Something bit me!
Oh wait, no, it was Antifa.
So, you can go neurotic about the fuzzy boundaries of Australia, but... So what?
Just because there are conceivably fuzzy boundaries on Australia, around Australia, does that mean that there's no difference between being a mile inside Australia or a mile out of the ocean?
Clearly, if you're a mile out of the ocean, you might be in Australia's territorial waters, but you're not in Australia.
You're not on the land continent called Australia.
Whereas, if you're a mile in Australia and you're standing there, You are in Australia.
You are standing in Australia, right?
We get all that, right?
We understand.
We understand, right?
So the fuzzy boundaries are interesting and they're not, you know, they're worth exploring and they're kind of fun stuff to while away a little bit of time on or if it's your job and, you know, that's what oils your gears mentally, you know, good for you.
I'm glad that there are people who fuss over these classifications.
I think they're interesting.
So, you know, the fuzzies are great, but we only know they're fuzzies relative to the absolutes, and they generally have no practical consequence when it comes to things in the real world, right?
No practical consequence at all.
So, all of that is, you know... Sorry, this is kind of like my bookmark while my brain... I'm waiting for my brain to cough up the next bit of the Of this chat.
Well, this is very important to understand.
All right.
So I'm sorry.
I won't cut him out because it's too much work and I don't think it really matters.
Hey, look, it's a fuzzy boundary between two topics.
It doesn't really matter.
It has no practical import.
Oh, look, now it's not a fuzzy topic between two topics because the fuzzy topicness is the topic itself.
The fuzz between... Anyway, you understand.
Now I'm just starting to talk about my belly lint intellectually.
So fuzzy boundaries are a direct affirmation of absolutes, and using fuzzy boundaries to disrupt absolutes is basically saying that everything is a fuzzy boundary, which is incorrect.
You have a fence between you and your neighbor's property, and that fence is two inches thick.
Well, where in the middle of that fence does your property end?
It doesn't matter.
You've got a fence.
Your side, their side.
Assuming it's accurate enough, it's fine, right?
Because in physics, there's really not... Well, you know, even in physics there is such a thing as accurate enough.
And absolutism versus accurate enough is tough for some people, right?
I don't know if it's some sort of toilet-trained, gunpoint, anal-retentive thing or something, but this accurate enough is, you know, I've said this before, just very, very briefly, right?
So if you're navigating, Newtonian physics is fine.
If you're navigating continent to continent, if you're trying to send a probe to Jupiter, well, you're going to need Einsteinian physics, right?
The difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics when you're sailing a boat from Lisbon to New York is, you know, what, a couple of millimeters?
But, you know, you miss as good as a mile, or I guess as good as 10,000 miles if you're trying to use Newtonian physics to send a probe to Jupiter.
So, there's good enough, right?
There's good enough.
And that's if you recognize that concepts, what are they there for?
What are concepts there for?
Are they there to perfectly, absolutely, under all situations and all circumstances, exactly describe reality?
No.
Absolutely not.
Not in any way, shape, or form.
Are they there for that?
And we know that because of evolution.
We know that because of evolution.
Evolution would not pour the massive amount of resources as it poured into developing the human brain.
It would not do that.
At all.
If there was not immediate survival utility in our development of concepts, it wouldn't do it.
It just wouldn't bother.
As I said before, you know, like It's a couple percent of our body mass but it's like a quarter to a third of our energy.
The human brain is very expensive and so the human brain, which is our processing of concepts and development of concepts organ, the concepts must serve human survivability in some manner.
It's worth having babies that can't walk for the first year in return for being able to build shelter to protect us from wolves.
Because we don't just, like, are selected to have just as many babies as humanly possible and then just let the wolves eat a bunch of them.
But we sort of pair bond, we invest in our own kids, you know, certainly the K-selected of the K-selected humans... Sorry, the K-selected of the humans are the most K-selected on the planet.
Sorry, if this doesn't mean anything, you've got to check out my presentation called Gene Wars, G-E-N-E Wars, available on the tube of Unis.
And so, The purpose of concepts is utility.
It is not absolute accuracy.
Which is why when I sort of talk about all the fuzzy boundaries, and it's like, I don't care.
Because when you're resolving your, you know, if you're figuring out where to build your fence with your neighbor, atomic certainty is not necessary.
And you'll never be able to achieve it anyway.
You know, every time a raindrop hits the fence, it moves it slightly.
Come on, right?
But what is the purpose of the fence?
The purpose of the fence is to give you certainty about where to invest your labor.
To make sure that when you build something, it's yours.
And of course, to reduce conflict with your neighbor.
The old good fences make good neighbors, right?
Reduce conflict with your neighbor.
That's the purpose of the fence.
So if the purpose of the fence is it gives you certainty on your property and reduces conflicts with your neighbors because you both agree where the fence is and right that's just how it works.
So the question is not what is the atomic certainty exact location and perpetuity absolutely of the fence.
It is does it give you certainty on your property and reduce conflicts with your neighbors?
And the answer to that is yes.
The answer to that is yes.
If you look at a wedding ring on the hand of someone, it's there designed to say she's off the market, he's off the market, so don't hit on her or him.
And if it achieves that goal, great.
You know, now again, sometimes it won't.
Sometimes it's a turn-on for people.
They're homewreckers.
They want to destroy things.
Sometimes guys put it on for whatever reason to pretend.
Like, who knows, right?
You can take off the wedding ring.
I understand all that.
But the reason that... It's a form of property marking, right?
I mean, the wedding ring is like a fence around the genitals and pair bonding of your partner, right?
Owned and operated by... Husband slash wife.
And yes, it's mutual, in case you're listening to this, and oh, it's women and property!
So, when you understand that these things are designed for utility, well, that's really important.
So, once we have understood the concept formation, we've understood the relative
nature of absolutism versus the fuzzy boundaries now of course we have really the only remaining big challenge is this which is how should we resolve conflicts between concepts and instances and the answer to that is since concepts are imperfectly derived from instances in other words the imperfection is in the concept not
In the instance.
The imperfection cannot reside in the instance.
Because the instance is objective, external to consciousness, empirical, factual, physical.
Whereas the concept is an imperfect shadow cast by the instance.
So I can say that the concept tree should also include a bird.
And that is an error.
I can't reasonably go looking around the world looking for a tree that flies or a bird that is made of wood that flies and is a bird that's alive.
It's incorrect.
So you always need to know how to resolve Disagreements.
Philosophy, fundamentally, is about how to resolve disagreements, right?
To know what is true and what is false, and to know how to resolve disagreements.
So it's not that reality disagrees with concepts, because reality has no consciousness of its own.
It's basically that human beings disagree with their conceptual definitions, right?
So some people say, oh there's such a thing as a social contract, and that means that you have to obey the government, and they take the Socratic argument that you've lived under the protection of the laws, and if the laws act unjustly against you, blahdy blahdy blah, you've got to just suck it up, deal with it, and drink your hemlock, right?
And how do we resolve these disagreements?
Well, I mean, the way that you resolve the disagreement regarding the social contract is you say, so all human beings have the capacity to create social contracts.
So if some human being creates a social contract that says, well, Steph, you have to obey the law, well, then surely I can easily decide that, then surely I can easily decide that, no, it's you who have to obey my laws.
So somebody can create something and say, oh, you have to obey the law that says pay $10,000 in taxes and say, well, no, I can create a social contract too because it's universal capacity and therefore I just create a contract that says you owe me $10,000 and it cancels it out.
But the moment you say, well no, only some people can create social contracts and other people can't.
For some people it's perfectly moral to create a social contract.
For other people it's perfectly evil to create a social contract.
Well, now you have a category problem, which is you're defining as both virtuous and evil one human being performing the same action as another human being, which is using force to transfer resources.
These things are not actually that difficult to solve once you have the correct Definitions, right?
I mean, like once you understand how to navigate, it's still tough to get from Lisbon to New York.
But once you have correct definitions and philosophy, it's very easy to solve these sort of conceptual issues, these disagreements, right?
Because the moment you're talking about virtue, you're talking about universally preferable behavior, and if you then require, if your philosophy then requires oppositional categories of human beings, right?
So you say, well, all mammals are warm-blooded, but we also have to divide mammals into warm-blooded and cold-blooded.
Like, that's just a very obvious That's a problem, right?
I mean, that's very clearly unfair.
Oh, well, all human beings have the right to create unilateral contracts.
Well, then this can't possibly be implemented, right?
Because a unilateral contract is something that one person wants and the other person doesn't want.
Otherwise, it's a mutual contract, right?
It's contractual rape, so to speak, or contractual theft.
And so it simply can't pass UPP.
I'm not saying that the implementation of the resolution of these disagreements is far from simple, but it is actually very simple.
So knowing how to navigate doesn't mean that it's easy to get from here to there.
Knowing the actual moral and philosophical resolution of these kinds of disputes doesn't mean that they're easy to implement.
Yeah, I guess it's a better way of putting it.
But it is actually pretty easy to solve in a scientific or philosophical or UPP or consistent manner.
So in any disagreement between the concept and the instance, well, you must adjust the concept to fit the instance.
And this is not really that surprising, is it?
I mean, it's not.
It's not complicated, and it's not anything that other mental disciplines don't already require.
Right?
I mean, in science, if there's a disagreement between your conjecture, your hypothesis, and what actually happens in reality, well, what do you have to do?
You have to, of course, adjust your hypothesis.
You have to adjust your theory.
If you say, if I let go of this ball, it should fall upwards, and the ball falls downwards, you don't sit there and say, well, that's a tough one to resolve.
I guess we have to redefine what the ball's doing to conform to my theory.
Well, you can't do that, right?
I mean, you can, but you're wrong.
The scientific method is empiricism trumps, rationality trumps.
Same thing with math.
If your mathematical theorem requires that the number 3 be treated the same as the number 4, well, You have a contradiction, right?
Law of identity contradiction.
Three is three and not four.
An object is itself and nothing else.
So, when you look at all these conceptual things, you know, society as a whole, the good of society, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that is the idea that the instance should be sacrificed to the concept, right?
That the individual should be sacrificed to the concept, the collective of society, or you name it, right?
But since concepts don't exist in the real world, and since you must always Decide in favor of the instance with regards to the concept.
If you say, well, the individual should be sacrificed to the collective, what you're saying is that some individuals have the right to harm others against their will.
But that violates UPB.
So it's easy, in a sense, to solve these issues conceptually.
Again, sort of bringing this into the real world is, well, it's a whole other beast, right?
But as far as solving these problems, it's really not complicated.
You cannot assign contradictory properties To members of the same concept.
Right?
You cannot, you cannot do it.
You can't say that a lizard is a lizard and the opposite of a lizard at the same time.
You can't say that human beings must not use violence and must use violence at the same time.
You cannot say that up is down and black is white and the number three is the same as a blue mohawk unicorn.
These are statements of insanity and because they're so widely accepted, well, that's one way we know the world is crazy.
So thanks everyone so much for listening.
Please don't forget to help out the show.
We are on YouTube in particular.
I don't know if we can see suppressed, but you're not really showing up.
We're not really showing up.
In the recommended videos, which is where a good deal of traffic came from.
So given that, you know, I'm gonna just have to rely on you.
And I hope that you care enough about philosophy and this show to like, share, subscribe, all that kind of stuff that goes on on YouTube that can be enormously helpful.
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So if you could help out, I would really, really, really appreciate it.
And so you can, of course, subscribe at YouTube.
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And so if you could help out, I would just enormously, enormously appreciate that.
Stefan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com, forward slash donate to help out the show financially, also necessary.
Have yourself a wonderful day.
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I love doing it.
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Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
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