July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:23
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| Hi, my name is Stefan Molyneux. | |
| I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, which you can find at www.freedomainradio.com. | |
| And I'd like to talk to you today, with your kind permission, about a gripping, gripping topic called concept formation. | |
| Yes, I know. | |
| I know. | |
| If you imagine that if you know more about concept formation, A, what a fascinating person you're going to be to sit next to at a dinner party, how much fun you're going to have in bars chatting people up about this particular topic, And also how much more scintillatingly beautiful and better your life is going to be. | |
| Actually, the last part is true, but I'm not going to expect you to believe that just on my say-so. | |
| Now, concept formation is a very, very interesting topic and a very core topic within the world of philosophy. | |
| The reason for that is that concepts don't exist in the world, and if you've seen the introductory PowerPoint around A free-to-main radio, you'll sort of have some sense of this, so I'll go over it again very briefly. | |
| So, I'm going to hold up here two CDs. | |
| Two CDs. | |
| Now, these two CDs are... Hey, actually, I wonder if you can see yourself in them. | |
| No, not really. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, these two CDs exist in the world as physical entities, physical instances, right? | |
| They're composed of atoms, they contain matter and energy, and they are Distinct things, you can tap them together and they exist within the real world. | |
| And they would make excellent earrings, but we can get into that in the other show about jewelry. | |
| Now, these two things that exist in the real world are composed of atoms and energy and so on, and they are discrete physical instances, which is great. | |
| I mean, we know we want a CD, you go and pick one up and you put it in your player and do whatever. | |
| But they don't exist. | |
| The concept CD does not exist in the world. | |
| Individual CDs exist, but a CD collection. | |
| If you have, you know, you're some music geek like me with way too many CDs, more CDs than common sense, then you have a CD collection sitting in your wall, or maybe it's been transferred to your computer. | |
| The CDs exist individually. | |
| The CD collection does not exist. | |
| And the way to find that out is if you imagine eBay or something like that, some online place where you are going to be doing some online shopping, if somebody says to you, I will sell you my CD collection for a hundred bucks and there are two thousand CDs in my CD collection, I'm going to sell you the whole collection for a hundred bucks, you're like, wow, that's fantastic! | |
| I'll take it! | |
| But if then you read in the fine print and you say, you read, I'm going to sell you my CD collection, but I'm not going to ship you any actual CDs. | |
| I'm just going to sell you the idea of my CD collection. | |
| I think you might feel that the value of what you were buying might just be dipping down a little bit. | |
| So this is a very important thing to understand when it comes to concept formation. | |
| Individual things exist in the real world. | |
| We use conceptual aggregates to group like objects together, like two round, shiny things that aren't just my forehead. | |
| Then we group these things intellectually together. | |
| The concepts themselves, though, do not exist in the real world. | |
| So, as I said in my introduction, you can climb a tree, you can't climb a forest. | |
| You can have a CD collection, but if you take away all the CDs in that collection, then the collection no longer exists. | |
| So if you can think of concepts as wrappers, like conceptual wrappers, they exist in your mind, they don't exist in the real world, they exist in your mind, and they're tools that we use, mental tools that we use to aggregate like objects together. | |
| But the collective, the concept has no existence in the real world. | |
| This may sound a little abstruse and maybe I'm laboring the point a little bit too much, but it has some pretty significant consequences in your life when you really sort of absorb and understand this basic idea about concepts. | |
| It's very powerful in terms of understanding that concepts, to have validity, can only have validity to the degree with which they actually describe the things that they're talking about right so we got these two cds and if i say i have these two cds and then as part of the whole cd collection i'm gonna put this notepad in as well Right? | |
| And I'm going to call this things which you can play in your computer. | |
| In your computer CD drive or something like that. | |
| So I got two CDs and I got a notebook. | |
| A notepad. | |
| And I'm going to say that all of this is underneath the conceptual aggregation of things which you can play in your computer CD player. | |
| Or things which are shiny. | |
| Or things which are round, right? | |
| Well, of course, shiny things that are round that I can play in my computer's CD player would include these two things, would not really include this guy, right? | |
| So, if we have a concept called shiny, round, and can play in the CD player, then we've got to throw this guy right out, and we can keep these guys, and if we just say round and shiny, we can keep this guy as well. | |
| So, this is a very important thing to understand. | |
| Concepts are only valid to the degree with which they accurately describe physical instances in the real world. | |
| And any time that you try to have a concept which has properties which do not accurately describe the things which it's supposed to contain, You have an invalid concept, just like if I hold up these things and I say, round shiny can play in the CD player, and I'm going to include a plate as well. | |
| It's round, and it's shiny, but you can't really play it in the CD player. | |
| I mean, maybe not more than once. | |
| It's very important to understand, or you could sort of say, just to go back to labour the point even more, Round Shiny and has data, right? | |
| This counts too, but this contains data, the notepad contains data. | |
| I guess you could say the plate also contains data, right? | |
| You've got some printing on it, but you can't play these things in a CD player. | |
| So, when you have a concept in the world, or you have a concept in your mind that's supposed to describe things, it has to accurately describe the properties that it's trying to encapsulate, and if it no longer describes the properties of the things it's supposed to aggregate together within your mind, then it's an invalid concept. | |
| Okay, so enough about that. | |
| I think we all understand that we know what to put in our CD player at work or at home. | |
| But let's talk about how this might apply to something like politics. | |
| So, in politics, you have people. | |
| People are individuals. | |
| Individuals exist in the real world. | |
| They have matter, they have life, they have flesh, they have energy. | |
| any trademarks. | |
| So in politics you have people, right? | |
| And people are, around in China you can put them in TV players, people are individuals, right? | |
| Individuals exist in the real world and they have matter, they have life, they have flesh, they have energy, they exist within the real world and so we have a group of individuals that exist within the real world. | |
| And you put all of these things together you get something called a crowd or a country or sometimes it's called the collective. | |
| Now what What you want to describe from a biological sense, by zoological classifications, are abstractions of the properties of individual species, so that you can understand when a zebra is a zebra and not a horse and so on. | |
| So when we start to put a collective concept called the government, which describes discrete individual groups of people. | |
| All well and good, I'm sure we understand that correctly. | |
| Now, we're back to our CDs here. | |
| The government is this group of people and the general population is this group of people. | |
| Now, you can't have a group of people called the government and a group of people called individuals where you have vastly different and opposing properties between these two groups. | |
| I mean, you can have it, But it's incorrect. | |
| It's like saying round and shiny and contains data and including a notebook or a coffee cup or something like that. | |
| So here on the government side of things we have human beings who claim the following abilities. | |
| I have the right to impose taxes on this group. | |
| I have the right to declare war and draft this group into the war. | |
| I have the right to pass laws which this group has to obey. | |
| And yet human beings into categories The only way that we can accurately describe groups of human beings is if we include relevant descriptions for all the human beings in that group. | |
| The moment that we have a group which has properties which are different or opposite than the human beings which it describes, then we have an invalid concept, an invalid collective concept. | |
| So, for instance, let's look at it this way. | |
| Let's say that you have something called a government, right? | |
| A government is an abstract description of a group of individuals, right? | |
| Civil servants, bureaucrats, politicians, certain unions, and so on. | |
| So you have a collective concept called the government, which describes discrete individual groups of people. | |
| All well and good, I'm sure we understand that correctly. | |
| Now, we're back to our CDs here. | |
| The government is this group of people and the general population is this group of people. | |
| Now, you can't have a group of people called the government and a group of people called individuals where you have vastly different and opposing properties between these two groups. | |
| I mean, you can have it, But it's incorrect. | |
| It's like saying round and shiny and contains data and including a notebook or a coffee cup or something like that. | |
| So here, on the government side of things, we have human beings who claim the following abilities. | |
| I have the right to impose taxes on this group. | |
| I have the right to declare war and draft this group into the war. | |
| I have the right to pass laws which this group has to obey. | |
| And yet, right, these groups are interchangeable. | |
| They're both composed of people. | |
| It's not like the people in the government are an entirely different species than the people who are not in the government, because of course you can move back and forth between the government and the private sector, as so often happens in Washington and so on. | |
| And so, the one thing that is very important to understand, and why this idea of concept formation is so important, is that when you have the government on this side composed of people, the problem is that this aggregate, this concept called the government, has completely opposite properties. | |
| The people within it have completely opposite properties and rights than everybody else in society. | |
| That's kind of a logical problem. | |
| This is one of the reasons why when you come to Free Domain Radio, you listen to the podcast or join on the board, We have some pretty significant questions around the ethical nature of the state, because we see nothing but people, individual instances within the world, and yet we see that there are certain groups within society that claim completely opposing rights to every other group. | |
| And it's not like there are different species. | |
| You can claim that a human being has rights that an amoeba doesn't have, Because human beings have sort of rational consciousness and language and the ability to learn and determine the difference between long-term and short-term consequences and so on, which an amoeba doesn't really have so much. | |
| And so we have no problem when you have completely different species, saying that there are different characteristics around those species, but If you're going to say, for instance, that one human being has the right to use force against another human being, i.e. | |
| to draft them for war, to take money from them at the point of a gun, for whatever purpose, let's say it's a perfectly benevolent, conscious purpose, the intention is to help the poor or heal the sick or I don't know, send drugs to Africa for the AIDS crisis or whatever. | |
| Whatever the intention is, it doesn't matter. | |
| The question is, why does one human being wrapped in a concept called the government have the right to initiate force against another human being when that other human being does not have that reciprocal right? | |
| Surely, surely it should be somewhat reciprocal, right? | |
| Otherwise it's kind of called hypocrisy, right? | |
| If I have a moral standard that says you have to obey me because I'm taller, but then someone else who comes along who's taller than me and I don't obey them, then it's kind of like a hypocritical standard, right? | |
| I'm claiming a universal thing called obey the tallest person around, and yet I don't follow that same rule myself. | |
| So the fact that it's not reciprocal is kind of important. | |
| Now there are lots of questions and oppositions, and I'm sure they're floating through your mind, which are sort of along the lines of Well, but we vote these people in and it's a democracy and this and that and the other. | |
| I understand all of that. | |
| I mean, we're not saying that we're going to deal with all of that in one video cast. | |
| But once you start to get into questions around concept formation and questions around what properties can concepts have? | |
| Ideas like government and family and church and state and country and race and religion and all these sorts of things. | |
| What kind of properties can these concepts have that completely oppose certain members that they claim to represent? | |
| So that's a very very fascinating question. | |
| At least it is for me. | |
| I hope that it is for you. | |
| I hope that I've sort of tried to communicate in my shiny kind of way why this is such an important topic and I hope that you'll continue to listen in as we start to delve into this topic in more detail. | |
| I think it's absolutely essential that we do try and figure this stuff out because I think we're all fairly aware that society needs a certain amount of reorganization | |
| in terms of ethics and concepts and so I hope that you'll join us on this chat as we move forward into how best to deal with the ramifications of understanding how philosophical and moral questions can be resolved through a deeper understanding of concept formation and the resulting ethics that that's going to have in society can be very exciting sometimes a little startling but always very very cool so I'll see you online either at www.freedomainradio.com or you can email me my contact information is on the website as well |
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