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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

09:31

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Let's do today's daily argument about concept formation.
	This incredible ability that you have to identify new stuff based on old stuff.
	Look at a tree you've never seen before, identify the tree, identify its age if you're like an expert arborist, its type and so on.
	It's really an amazing feature of the brain and it's Mostly unconscious.
	We look, we see, we identify.
	This happens instantaneously.
	And it happens really at the level of the subconscious, right?
	I mean, the subconscious has been shown in some instances to have a processing power 8,000 times faster than the conscious mind, which is amazing.
	There are tons of experiments where people who don't have any abstract mathematical or advanced mathematical abilities When given a social problem about the fairness of distribution, understand the correct way to do things in a moment just based upon the subconscious.
	This capacity we have to identify new entities, new items, and to categorize them automatically, incredibly rapidly, and so on.
	Like, you don't look up in the sky and you see an airplane, maybe it's a kind you haven't seen before, like a biplane.
	You don't say, what is that?
	I mean, you understand it's a plane with two wings.
	It's an incredible feature.
	Now, I'm going to make the case that there are three reasons why we can do this.
	And this is pretty wild, I think, when you get it.
	And two of them apply to non-organic entities and one applies to organic entities.
	So the first is if we look at inorganic entities, just think of like a rock on the road.
	If you're old enough, you look, you see, oh, there's a rock, right?
	Don't hit that rock, you say, if you're bicycling and someone is behind you and you see one on the path.
	So the reason that we can identify that is because of atoms.
	and physical laws, atoms and physical laws.
	So if you saw a rock floating in the air, and I had a friend when I was younger, when I first started to get into sort of rational empirical philosophy, I had a friend who was scathingly, corrosively relativistic and subjectivistic and really just became an out-and-out nihilistic.
	And he said, you know, he said, Oh, you're so much into this objectivism and you're so much into this objectivity and you're so much into this rationality.
	He says, I can't wait until the day when you let go of a ball and it just floats in the air.
	And he really wanted me to live in an insane universe rather than admit that he might be wrong about being nihilistic.
	Well, there's a friendship that's deep in the rearview for obvious reasons.
	I try not to get the socially transmitted disease called nihilism.
	It's really, really a one-way brain rot.
	But if you saw a rock floating in the air, you wouldn't know what it was, right?
	You'd say, well, is this some kind of drone?
	Is there some magnetic thing that's going on?
	Is it hung from a thread?
	Is it some kind of practical joke?
	You'd say, well, this can't be a rock.
	Right?
	Life doesn't work that way.
	And so because the rock is composed of atoms with particular properties, and because the rock is subject to universal and objective physical laws, we know what something is.
	I mean, if the properties and behaviors of matter and energy changed from day to day, we would not be able to develop any stable concepts.
	In the same way, like if you can imagine doing a presentation at a scientific conference called, The Physics of Dreams.
	Oh wait, that's sort of like a leftist budget.
	But anyway, it wouldn't make any sense because they'd say, well, there are no physics in dreams.
	That's kind of one of the ways you know that they're dreams rather than waking reality, because you can fly, you can breathe underwater, you can do somersaults in the air forever, and so on.
	This stuff goes on and on.
	And so because matter and energy behave in stable ways, because atoms have properties that are replicated and consistent across the universe, we can develop concepts.
	Concepts are the greatest abstractions identifying the behavior fundamentally of atoms and The way that physical laws operate on those atoms.
	So you would never expect to see just a rock floating in the air as you were walking along.
	I mean, if you did, you'd either be dreaming or crazy or the subject of some elaborate practical joke or something like that.
	And of course, this is what magicians do.
	You know, those annoying guys who are like, fools you, fools you, fools you, fools you, and you just want to punch them in the head.
	An AP, I know.
	But it's okay.
	Exceptions for clowns and magicians.
	But anyway.
	So magicians are constantly doing this, you know, it's floating in the air.
	I've got a hoop going around it.
	So, um, that's okay.
	I have my prejudices as well, of course.
	So because atoms behave in stable ways, and because the laws of physics are universal and predictable and consistent, we can develop concepts.
	Now this is all for inorganic things, like just matter.
	But there's something different about organics.
	And I'm just looking at a tree at the moment, and of course a tree pops into my mind.
	And now yours.
	See how the way this translates?
	Sexually, you know, socially transmitted deontological concepts.
	So when you think of a tree, one of the reasons you identify it as a tree is that you can see its purpose.
	So if, I mean, you know, a tree needs light, right?
	So if you came across some stalagmite or stalactite, sorry, I can never, which, which one goes up, that looked just like a tree in a cave, you'd know it wasn't a tree because there's no, no light.
	There's no sunlight for the tree to perform its photosynthesis on.
	And so trees and bushes and plants and worms, they have a purpose.
	Now trees don't move in any generally physical way other than, you know, through the wind.
	This, but dead trees will do that too, but trees have a purpose.
	And when you go into a forest, of course, you see that, you know, the trees are striving for the sunlight and so on.
	Where a tree has fallen and a gap has opened up in the canopy, you can see the new trees sprouting up and thirsting for the sunlight.
	So trees have a purpose, and it is that purpose that helps us identify things as well.
	And so a worm has a purpose, and a human being has a purpose, and a chipmunk has a purpose.
	And generally it's, you know, eat and get laid.
	That's generally a frat boy.
	So this Reality that we have inorganic matter that has consistent atomic and physical law behavior.
	We have animate matter, which also has consistent atomic and physical law behavior, but also has its own purpose as well.
	Jellyfish and we can look at bacteria under a microscope.
	They have their purpose and so on.
	Mitosis, meiosis, you can see all of this stuff going on.
	So entities which have a purpose also, fall into a category of easily identifiable.
	And I know that there's some fuzzy boundaries around the definition of what is alive and what is not alive, but in general, we're pretty clear of it.
	You know, three days after someone's dead, in general, maybe with one historical exception, such as is claimed, we can generally say, not dead-ish, but dead.
	And so, because we have atomic properties, universal physical laws, and purpose-driven
	Organic life we have these concepts in our mind now what's also fascinating as well is If you look there's a video on YouTube where it's got like someone made a sculpture underwater of people standing in a circle now theoretically, of course you could have coral could grow in the shape of people standing in a circle the odds against it would be staggeringly like once in 20 universes kind of lifetime of the universe but When we swim underwater, we see something like that.
	We know that that's been created by a human being for a particular purpose, in this case, an artistic purpose.
	So when we look at something that has been made by a human being, if we look at a table, the table is made with a purpose, right?
	To give you something even to put your stuff on when you're sitting down.
	And you look at a shelf, you know, it's for the purpose of, you know, displaying books that you never read while hiding the ones that you actually do read.
	Maybe that's just me.
	But a picture frame, they're all purposeful.
	And so human beings have a purpose, but the things that human beings create also have a purpose.
	And because they have a purpose, they can be easily conceptually identified.
	Now, there are some things like you could make a statue of a table, right?
	You could make a statue of a chair for whatever reason, call it art or whatever, but that would just be copying the purpose of the chair.
	So when we look at a chair, we know it's a chair because the purpose is to allow us to sit rather than stand or squat or lie down.
	That is something that's really important to understand when it comes to concepts we can divine in a sense or through experience build the idea of what is the purpose of an object and because we know that human beings act with purpose and create with purpose we can divine in a sense the purpose of the thing that is The scissor is created for cutting paper and so on because that's something that needs to be done and that's what human beings have made a scissor for.
	So that helps us develop our concepts that much more clearly.
	I hope this makes sense.
	Please let me know in the comments below.
	Please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Muchly appreciated.
	Love you all.

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