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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:52
There is no such thing as absolute truth!
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Let's talk about truth, baby.
Let's talk about you and me.
Let's talk about some really, really, really bad philosophy.
So, this is an article.
There are no absolutes.
There is no absolute truth.
this is going to be a smidgen of a little bit of a tiny whisper of a twilight speckle of technical, but I think it's really, really important because this is a claim that has come up a lot, that is made a lot, and it's not true.
Now, when people say that there is no such thing as an absolute, everything is relative, there are no absolutes.
I mean, the first response, of course, is that if you say there are no absolutes, you've made an absolute statement to There are no absolutes!
This person even puts it in caps.
There are no absolutes.
Well, that's an absolute statement.
Now, that should make you pause, I think, if you are interested in sophisticated, reasonable thought.
Then that would make you pause and say, Let's head north so I can prove to you that there's no such thing as north.
But let's go a little bit into the arguments and see what we can do with them.
I haven't read this yet, but it was recommended to me.
An absolute is a claim of truth that is true for every possible circumstance.
It certainly is a possible circumstance that language did not exist, or that logic or the word truth did not exist, or that mind did not exist at some point in time.
Prior to humans existing, it is a possible circumstance that no truths existed at all, let alone an absolute truth.
An absolute truth must be true for all of eternity as per every possible circumstance.
But nothing can be true before it is proven, or when no language or minds existed.
Truth requires a system of proof preceding its conclusion of truth.
There cannot possibly be absolute truth because there is no system of proof that could deduce from all the possible circumstances arising from eternity in order to prove any claim of absolute truth.
Okay, let's see if we can unravel this.
So he's saying that truth is a human construct, it's human logic, human word, and it's in the human mind, and since human beings did not exist at some point in the past, which I agree with, then there can't be any such thing as absolute truth, which would have to have existed at all times.
I don't think that's true.
So, two and two make four, is not an invention.
Logic is not an invention.
Logic is a derivation from that which is.
Logic isn't just something invented, and it's certainly not arbitrary.
Anything more than mathematics is arbitrary.
So, if the wind blows four rocks together, then there were four rocks long before there were human beings.
The human beings came along, correctly identified that there were four rocks.
And so that it's derived from the nature of reality.
Logic is not a human construct.
It's not arbitrary or subjective.
Logic is fundamentally derived from atoms, right?
I mean, logic and atoms are sort of the same thing, in that if matter did not have consistent properties, if water wasn't kind of the same all over the world, then there would be no such thing as logic.
If atoms and matter and the physical laws did not have consistent properties, if law of gravity changed all the time, if carbon atoms could switch into hydrogen atoms or whatever, back and forth, sorry, hydrogen, yeah, then there would be no life, there would be no consciousness then there would be no life, there would be no consciousness and so So it's the stability of matter, energy, and physical laws that allows for life to exist.
And that stability is why we're here.
And therefore, when we create or identify mathematical or physical rules that act...
accurately describe what happens in reality, we're not arbitrarily making stuff up.
So, I mean, just to say, to give a sort of brief example, if you throw a rock off a cliff, and I'm standing near the bottom of the cliff, and the rock falls halfway down through the cliff, and then I look up and say, hey, there's a rock falling!
The rock doesn't start falling when I use the word.
I'm correctly identifying that the rock is falling, and the rock Wasn't not falling before I identified it.
It's been falling the whole time long.
I just identified it.
The rock falling is an example of physical laws and human beings appear.
Halfway through the life of the universe, however long it may be, and we correctly say E equals MC squared, whatever, right?
I mean, gases expand when heated or whatever.
And those rules existed long before us, and we've correctly identified them.
So, truth, if you say that truth is simply a human construct, then of course.
It's like saying language is eternal.
Well, of course, human beings are recent additions to the cosmic firmament, and So language is not eternal.
But truth is not a word alone.
It is not something that is just made up.
Like, say, apples are eternal.
Well, apples weren't around three billion years ago.
That was the Commodore 64.
So, that which is true for every possible circumstance.
I don't know.
An absolute is a claim of truth that it's true for every possible circumstance.
I don't know that that's the case.
So, I'll give you an example.
I pay you $500 for an iPad and I ship you the $500 and you don't ship me the iPad.
And I say, you didn't ship me the iPad.
And that is a true statement because you didn't ship it to me.
Is that true under all possible circumstances?
Well, no, it's not true if you ship me the iPad.
It's not true if I'm telling it to the wrong person, if I send it the wrong email address or whatever and say you didn't ship it to me.
So is it absolutely true that somebody didn't ship me the iPad?
Yeah, it's true.
Somebody didn't ship me the iPad.
Is it true that I'm currently sitting on an off-white couch that was originally more white when I bought it?
Yeah, it's true.
Is it true under all conceivable circumstances?
No.
So I think that this sort of eternal perfect omniscient truth is sort of a hangover from religiosity.
You know, that you have a standard of truth that requires omniscience.
And that to me is not fair.
It's not fair.
If I say, arbitrarily, that the standard of human life, that the standard of a long-lived human being is to have lived to a thousand years, Methuselah style, and then I say, well, this guy died at 90, so he died young.
I mean, I've created a standard that really doesn't make any sense, right?
If I say, you know, that a Maserati is slow because it doesn't go as fast as a space shuttle, I'm judging the Maserati by a non-Maserati standard, right?
I'm judging human longevity by a non-human longevity standard.
I'm creating an extended standard and then saying everything falls short.
You know, human beings should be 80 feet tall and so everybody is stunted and short and a midget.
Well, I've just created an artificially high standard and then say, well, everything falls short.
And so when you say that And truth requires, true for every possible circumstances, that true requires that it had been identified and existed in some non-conceptual or non-consciousness form long before human beings came along.
You're just setting up a human being should be fifty foot tall stand and saying everything falls short.
So I don't think it's a valid approach.
It's a tempting approach.
And just so everybody knows.
I mean, I'm not talking about this person, individual, but the, you know, grand sweep of philosophical history.
is that human beings recoiled from absolutism in two great waves.
In the first wave, it was in the wars in Christendom in Western Europe, basically starting with Luther and going on to the 17th and sometimes even the 18th centuries when the Anabaptists waged war with the Zwingalians, waged war with the Calvinists and certain sects of Protestantism, other sects of Protestantism, that they all waged war.
significant portions of the European population died in religious warfare.
This is where the idea of the separation of church and state came from, because the unity of church and state was much more sustainable in a horrible kind of dark ageist way when there was only one Christendom, right?
When Christendom was Catholicism.
When religion broke into factions, they all went to war against each other, and the way that they primarily tried to go to war against each other was to take control of the state.
And recognizing that the state was a sword that everyone was trying to grab in the room to inflict their religion on everyone else, everyone said, well, let's just separate religion and the state.
Uh, And that was a concession to relativism, or at least a correct identification of the reality that religion is relative, because it's faith-based, it's not based upon science or reason or evidence.
And so it's a dream that you attempt to inflict on others.
And since you can't really do that except through force or indoctrination, they had to separate church and state.
So that was sort of one example.
And the second one is in a way more interesting, I think, that the second wave of fear and hostility towards absolutism came out of the 20th century and particularly out of the two world wars.
And because philosophy has been pretty dormant for a long, long time in the West, hundreds of years, and I would actually argue most fundamentally since its invention, since its inception, since its discovery, probably is a better way of putting it, philosophy has lain pretty dormant.
And I'm certainly doing what I can as hard and as deeply and as powerfully as I can to resuscitate this long-dead sleeping beauty called philosophy.
And in the 20th century, you know, virulent absolutism, irrational absolutism in the form of fascism and Nazism and communism, all of which are flavors of collectivist anti-property, anti-individual totalitarianism, Uh, Fascism and communism and Nazism.
Nazism, of course, being Short form for National Socialism.
And of course you can't call it National Socialism because there are too many socialists in the world still who somehow think that being a Marxist is somehow better than being a Nazi.
When of course Marxism killed far more people than Nazism ever did.
But these sort of virulent, old world, old style, absolutist philosophies, so to speak, or worldviews of these three great totalitarian movements
made people in the West recoil against absolutism because they viewed absolutism as that which invades Poland and that which you know gangs together with old world Austro-Hungarian empires and attacks France and so on and so when humanity had these incredibly virulent absolutes striking at its very jugular everybody said we don't have philosophy so we can't disprove them all but what we will do is we will create
A vast and deep hostility towards absolutism as a whole, which was again the second wave of the anti-absolutist reactions after the breakup of Christendom.
And you see this all the time.
I mean, this is a very strong, quote, defense against irrational absolutism, is to say anyone who's really dedicated to his or her beliefs is an extremist, is a fanatic, is an ideologue, is placing ideas above people, does not play well with others and should only be given the edible glue and the You see this all the time.
Anytime you bring any kind of absolutism into any discussion, people recoil.
Like you've just set an inflammable lamb on fire and tossed it into a vat of gin-soaked pigs.
Sometimes the metaphors not only get away from me, but make me kind of hungry.
Anyway, so people recoil against absolutism and the relativism of the modern world is a sad and pitiful and frankly only temporary defense against radical irrational absolutism, right?
Because there's irrational absolutism, right?
Like racism, sexism, There's radical absolutism that is irrational and really should be combated not with saying there's no such thing as truth.
Like if people say my truth is that two and two make five, the correct defense to that is to disprove them and prove that two and two make four.
If somebody comes at you yelling that two and two make five, it is a sad and pitiful defense to say, well, there's no such thing as truth.
Because the only people that you'll scare away from the discussion of ideas, if you take that approach, are the rational people and the people who have sensitivity and sensibility.
And those are the people you actually want in the debate.
Anyway, so he goes on.
Assume for argument's sake that humans have always existed in the past.
Then somebody could claim that absolute truth does exist, and it was passed down to us.
Wrong!
Remember that absolute truth must also exist unchanged into the future.
It is impossible to prove anything into the future, never mind unchanged.
Therefore, absolute truth is indeed an impossibility.
Well, again, if I say I'm 45 now, is that true when I'm 46?
Well, yeah, of course it is.
And so I'm not sure what it means to say that absolute truth must also exist unchanged into the future.
I mean, the sort of Aristotelian laws of identity, the three laws of logic, A is A, Iraq is Iraq.
It's going to be true in the future, isn't it?
And the challenge, of course, of this kind of argument is that this person is also saying absolute truth must also exist unchanged into the future.
So he's putting a standard of truth into the future and saying the truth falls short of it in the future.
Almost all philosophical arguments can be examined merely by looking at the premises, the axioms, the arguments of the person making the argument.
That is the foundation of useful philosophy.
And there's very little that falls outside these bounds, right?
Absolute truth must also exist unchanged into the future.
Well, I don't believe that's not true.
But even if we do accept that that's true, This person is making a truth claim that exists absolutely in the future, which is to say that all truth claims must exist absolutely into the future.
Well, how do we know that?
Maybe truth will be completely different tomorrow, or completely different the day after.
You can't say anything comprehensible about truth the moment you give up empiricism and reason.
He goes on to say, any claim of absolute Any claim of absolute truth is self-refuting because there is nothing in the cosmos which can be proven to have always been eternally true and will be eternally true.
Truth is dependent on cognition.
Someone cannot be absolutely certain that a truth claim has always been true and will always be true throughout eternity.
I mean, this may be nitpicky, but I think it's worth pointing out.
Truth is not dependent on cognition.
Cognition is not solely a human activity.
There are other animals, whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, whatever, that have cognition, and I don't know how far it goes.
I'm not a biologist.
I don't know how far down it goes.
But we don't know the degree to which dolphins can philosophize, but we don't have any proof that they do as yet.
So truth is not dependent upon cognition.
You could say it's dependent upon human cognition.
Again, that's kind of nitpicky, but if you're going to make all of these statements about truth, you've got to be precise.
And truth is not dependent on cognition.
This is kind of a tricky thing to work with.
But truth is not dependent on cognition.
Because it is not up to me whether 2 and 2 make 4.
Right?
I can say two and two make five.
I can truly believe it in that sort of Winston Smith kind of way through whatever trauma I've experienced, but that doesn't make it true.
It doesn't make it valid.
It doesn't make it accurate or factual.
I can say that the world is banana shaped and I can really believe that that's true.
Some crazy people believe that they're Jesus Christ or Napoleon or Jim Morrison or whatever.
But they're not, those people.
And so, truth is not dependent upon cognition.
Now, the fact that truth is a human concept that exists within the mind does not mean that truth is an arbitrary, subjective, whim-based, or restricted-in-time concept.
The inverse square law is something that didn't exist before we figured it out.
But what it describes does exist, right?
So the word color, right, so this red wall, the word red didn't exist until human beings came along and came up with the word red or, you know, whatever language you speak.
The word red did not exist, but that doesn't mean that this thing wasn't red, that it had a particular wavelength that bounced off.
Because if this thing was not red before the word red was invented, the word red would make no sense.
It wouldn't have been invented.
If there was no such thing as color in the world, if everybody was colorblind, or if there was just no such thing as a color in the universe, there'd be no such thing as red.
And so what exists existed before we came along and had specific and measurable and repeatable and consistent properties.
That's why we came up with the word red.
And so the word red exists within our mind, but it does accurately describe the wavelength bouncing off something.
Any claim of absolute truth falls directly within the realm of religious fundamentalist dogma, which asserts as faith that absolutes were given to mankind through God.
Now, of course, I think this is right.
I remember I hadn't read this.
I have not read this before.
I have not met this member of the audience before.
But I was talking about how this was a reaction to religious absolutism.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
But if you have as a standard that which is eternally, omnisciently true under all conceivable circumstances throughout all eternity, then what you have as a standard truth is God.
and And people say, well, there's no such thing as God, and therefore there's no such thing as truth.
But truth is a human concept, a human construct, not something that is involved with a deity.
Alright, so, Bibles and Scriptures have undergone changes.
That's all very true.
Humans are not absolute and have no system for preventing change to anything that is supposedly absolute.
Then how can any truth handed to them by God be proven to remain absolute into the future?
Impossible!
Okay, so, um...
The standard of truth, again, you know, we don't want to say human beings are 50 feet tall and then say everyone is short who's not that tall.
The standard of truth is this.
I think it's a reasonable one and you can tell me if you think there's a better one.
The standard of truth is those concepts which accurately describe realities outside of time or immediate circumstances.
And so, you know, the correct, the philosophical term for color is wavelength.
I mean, there's a scientific term for color is wavelength.
You may be colorblind and not see this as red, but if we both read off the same wavelength from a spectrograph hitting, I mean, we're going to get the same number.
Two and two make four.
That is a truth that is independent of time, independent of geography, and so on, right?
It's really hot here is true, but it's specific to that location, right?
If you're in the Arctic, that's not true.
But it still is really true when you are in the middle of the Mojave Desert or whatever.
So, to have a standard of truth, I think, is good.
Now, if we say that The physical laws, what if gases expand when heated?
Well, maybe, just before human beings came along, gases contracted when heated.
But then, the laws that we see operating, or the activities of the universe that we see operating, like the sun, would the sun burn if gases contracted when heated?
No, it wouldn't.
And so the fact that we can age the sun means that we have perfect evidence that gases have always expanded when heated.
I mean, obviously, people have tested this six different ways from Sunday.
It's why we have steam engines.
It could go on and on, right?
And you can see, of course, evidence from long ago, geological events that gases expand when heated and so on, right?
The proposition that a human being cannot live if his head is removed, it can't philosophize, mate.
He can't live.
It's true in all places and at all times.
I mean, for very well-known, permanent physiological reasons.
The jugular goes through your neck.
Your brain kind of needs to be connected to your body for any kind of long-term sustainability.
And so these are all true statements.
They sort of accurately identify all the reality that has been known, that is conceptualized.
It is, you know, like the Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian physics because Einsteinian physics more correctly predicted things like light bending around the eclipse of the moon and so on.
And there's no cracks in them yet, and they're true.
Now, scientists say, well, it's conditionally true until we come up with something better.
But that is to have a standard of truth that says, you know, reason and evidence are the standard of truth.
And if reason and evidence cause a theory to fail, then that theory needs to be improved or tossed aside, I guess.
So that is the scientific method, philosophical reasoning and so on.
These are the standards of truth that we have.
And they have been shown to exist throughout history, across the universe.
They can see the constant speed of light throughout all of the universe and they can see the operations of gravity in predictable ways all throughout the universe.
Okay, so you can talk about quantum physics in that.
Quantum physics has nothing to do with philosophy.
Quantum physics has no more to do with philosophy than it has to do with biology, or geology, or any of the other physical sciences outside of pure theoretical physics.
And if people are curious, I can give more information about that.
But basically, by the time you get to the perceptual realm, which is really where philosophy works, then there are no quantum effects whatsoever.
So, some people will look at the above statement when this guy says there are no absolutes and say, hey, your statement that there are no absolutes is an absolute statement.
Geniuses who make such bald assertions are known as either religious relativists or religious absolutists.
They subscribe to the extremist faith-based dogmas of either relative truth or absolute truth.
Both of these extremist ideologies were formed by religious pseudo-philosophers at a time when the concept of truth was not abstracted in a consistent manner to apply to all that is perceived and conceived by human reality, namely empirical truths and tautologies.
The man can write a sentence.
They didn't know that truth needs to be proven, and they started applying it erroneously to all objects and concepts, i.e.
Jesus is true, heart is true, water is true, books are true, evil is not true, love is true, homosexuality is not true, the Bible is.
Typical nonsense.
It only propositional statements... I'm sorry, I don't understand the sentence he's writing.
It only propositional statements about objects and concepts can be resolved as either truth or belief.
Let's analyze such a feeble propositional statement.
I'm always concerned a little bit when somebody who's trying to talk about truth starts throwing out all these ad homs.
It strikes me as emotional defensiveness, which truly interferes with any kind of objectivity.
So, since English grammar is bound by syntax and context, we can analyze the above two statements, there are no absolutes, from a syntactical perspective we can analyze the above two statements, there are no absolutes, from a syntactical I I must say that I'm having trouble following this, I'm not going to try and do this on the fly.
He says, the propositional statement, your statement that there are no absolutes is an absolute statement.
It's syntactically absolute but not absolute in any real cognitive sense.
I'll link the article.
It is a fact that truth is not an object and therefore does not exist without a mind and hence is impossible to be eternal.
But again, why would truths need to be eternal?
I'm speaking right now is the truth.
When I stop speaking or in between when I take a breath, which I've been known to do every 300 podcasts, then I don't know why truth has to be eternal.
Again, that's having the 50 foot tall human being and say everything falls short because they're not 50 foot tall.
Truth is bound within the domain of concepts and hence impossible to be eternal.
It is a fact that anything claimed as eternal cannot be proven to be the case because eternity does not exist in order to be used in the construction of any logically deductive proof.
It is a fact that no claim of truth for anything absolute can be proven to be true by any stretch of the imagination.
So, yeah, I mean, we can sort of sum up here.
So the argument is that for something to be true, it must be true before human beings existed, which of course can't be seen to be the case.
Something can't be true before human beings existed.
And therefore truth is not eternal, and truth must be eternal in order for that to be perfect.
And truth has to exist both in the past and in the future, in eternity, which it can't be shown to be true.
But I don't see how that's true.
I don't see how that's valid.
I don't see why that's a requirement for absolute truth.
Absolute truth, if you say, well, absolute truth has to be true at all times and in all places and in all circumstances, before human beings existed, after human beings existed, in every conceivable place in time, before the universe, after the universe, then you're setting up an impossible standard of truth.
And you could do that and say that you've disproven truth, but you haven't.
You've just set up an impossible standard.
It's a straw man argument, fundamentally.
So, you know, what counts for being true?
Well, of course, there are empirical truths and there are logical truths.
Right?
If a rock is falling and I say a rock is falling, I'm right.
It's true.
It's factual.
If I say that bridge is standing up and it's currently standing up, hey, guess what?
You know, I've made a true statement.
Is that statement going to be true in 300 years if the bridge falls down?
No.
But it's true in the moment.
And it is true for all time that it was true in the moment.
Right?
It is true for all time that it was true in the moment.
If I say today the Brooklyn Bridge is standing up in 5,000 years, the fact that I said today the Brooklyn Bridge is standing up will still be a true statement in 5,000 years, because I'm talking about today.
So these are the truths that are empirical.
If I say gases expand when heated, that is going to be true.
We know that it's been true for billions of years in the past.
And there's, you know, zero reason to believe unless you believe in a God who's going to come and suddenly reverse all of the laws of matter.
Of course, if the laws of matter reverse themselves, we're all going to die in about a tenth of a second.
So it really doesn't matter.
There'll be nothing to argue about then.
But if something has been a law that can be demonstrably observed to have been stable for tens of billions of years since the beginning of the universe, and it's the only reason why we're here to talk about philosophy, talking about the sudden, incomprehensible, insane reversal of that law as some sort of incomprehensible, insane reversal of that law as some sort of probability in the future, it just doesn't make any sense.
I mean, there's no higher standard of truth than gases expand when heated has been true for tens of billions of years.
There's no higher standard of truth than that.
I mean it's observable all across the universe.
It's observable micro, macro.
It's been observable in readings from the very edge of the universe.
What is that, 20 billion years ago?
That is as great an absolute as you're ever going to get in the human mind, in the universe.
There's no greater absolute than that.
You can say, well, but it could arbitrarily switch itself tomorrow.
But it hasn't arbitrarily switched itself for 20 billion years.
And if 20 billion years of consistent behavior isn't enough for somebody to say this is true, Then they're just setting up a willful opposition to any reasonable standard of truth or even an unreasonable standard of truth.
Say, well, 10 billion, okay, but it's got to be 11 billion.
It's been 20 billion.
Again, I'm sorry, I forgot the age of the universe wrong.
I think it's 20 billion.
If something has been perfectly stable and observable for 20 billion years without a single exception, then that is just truth.
I mean, to say that there's a higher standard of truth than that is just to come up with just an insane standard of truth and say that you've proven something.
And saying that someone died young by saying that they should live to a thousand years, I mean, you're just playing with yourself, so to speak.
You're not coming up with anything valuable.
So, I mean, there are those truths which are, you know, two and two make four.
That's, you know, I mean, that's almost a tautology, but it's not quite.
But I mean, it's just an identification of reality.
The sun is hot relative to Pluto.
I mean, that is a statement of reality.
That is a statement empirically measurable.
You could say, well, maybe things could reverse.
Well, if things reverse and the sun becomes cold and Pluto becomes hot, then we're all dead.
We'll run out of space heaters in two days.
It doesn't matter.
If those things happen, who cares, right?
But that is the standard of truth, saying that any physical law which has been directly observable or indirectly observable for billions of years, that those laws may suddenly reverse themselves or not be true at some point in the future is just to set up an arbitrary exception to something.
And it's to say, well, a human being can live with his head cut off.
Maybe that will be true without evolution at some point.
I mean, that's just to create crazy standards.
I mean, because you always have to ask yourself, and it's an interesting question to ask, you know, why would somebody want to create these crazy standards and then think that they've achieved something?
Why would somebody want to say human beings have to be 50 foot tall and, you know, or that rock only started falling when you invented the word falling?
I mean, why?
Well, of course, the argument that I would make is that, and it goes back to childhood, that this person, I can guarantee you, this person was raised by a tyrannical absolutist, and this is an emotional defense.
In the similar way that the modern rise of, you know, creepy, foggy, brain-draining, soul-sucking absolutism in the sort of mid-20th century arose out of a reaction to the bitterly evil and hostile absolutes of the totalitarian doctrines.
But I mean, you don't fight the certainty of evil by creating a fog bank, right?
I mean, it's like getting a water sprayer and attempting to spray upwards when a rock is falling down.
I mean, it's not going to do anything.
It may give you the feeling that you're doing something, but you fight irrational absolutes with rational absolutes.
You don't just fog everything up and think you've achieved anything other than opening the gates for further evil to pour in.
Anyway, I'll put a link to this below.
And thank you so much for listening as always.
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