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Feb. 13, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:00:57

Stefan Molyneux vs Jay Dyer: The Purpose of Philosophy

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	All right.
	I believe we are live, but we will find out, I guess, in just a moment.
	I never get this quite right.
	So I hope you guys are doing very well.
	We just made so for the chat to kick in and for everything to go hunky-dory.
	Here we go. Here we go.
	Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
	Welcome to our chat with Jay Dyer.
	I'm still waiting for the Jay.
	To show up, and I just pinged him on his message system, and I'm just trying to sort of figure out what is going on, why he is not particularly around, but I'm sure we will sort it out, and he will be by in just a sec.
	I guess I get to vamp until then.
	Let's just see. I'm sure it will give me a ping when he's ready to join.
	So, I hope you guys are having a wonderful, wonderful evening.
	I'm really looking forward to this.
	And, you know, it's interesting, too, because I do see this issue around, you know, we're going to wreck each other, we're going to destroy each other, we're going to attack each other and all this kind of stuff.
	And... I get it.
	I get it. There is this kind of antagonistic stuff that can go on.
	But I'm just waiting for him.
	We'll see how it plays out.
	You know, the way I generally go with these things, as you know, is to, well, treat people the very best I can.
	And after that, I treat them as they treat me.
	So we shall see.
	And Jay Dissel going to win this debizzle.
	Yeah, let's do a little bit of chatting until Jay decides to grace us with his presence.
	I think he's a skeptic about time as a concept, so maybe that's why he's showing up late to our debate, which he agreed to and all of that.
	Hey, man, I'd love to go. I just can't debate unless he's here.
	Steph, he's here. Who is Jay Dyer?
	Jay Dyer is a philosopher, a theologian, so to speak, and somebody we have some significant...
	I guess we have some overlap.
	We have some disagreements.
	I'm here. Can you hear me?
	Ah, you are. Hello. How's it going?
	Great. How are you? Very well.
	Very well. Let me just check and make sure everything's...
	Super duper over here on the YouTube side of things.
	Can you guys see him?
	Fantastic. All right. Well, I guess without any further ado, let's dig right into it.
	Jay, thank you so much for taking the time tonight.
	Looking forward to this. And maybe for my audience, there are some people who don't know you, although I don't know how, I don't know why.
	But tell people if you could a little bit about yourself and we will get into it from there.
	Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.
	I'm glad to be here. It's an honor.
	I do a lot of analysis of movies.
	I do a lot of analysis of geopolitics.
	I lecture on the global elite and the most important books that they've written in the last century.
	That's kind of the main thing I do at the present.
	But I also do debates.
	So you can find all that kind of content at my site, my channel.
	I do a lot of videos that relate to movies and some comedy.
	Some people would say it's cringe comedy, but I think it's funny.
	You know, as a dad with a dead funny bone, I'm sure it's great.
	So with regards to your debates, these are some of the people I've seen you, I won't say tangle with, but interact with in a productive Socratic dialogue.
	Matt Dillahunty from The Atheist Experience, the clank master himself, Sticks Hex and Hammer 666.
	You've had chats with Nick Fuentes, Adam Kokesh, if I remember rightly.
	Is there anyone? I'm sure that people are missing, but if you wanted to mention other people you've had.
	There was a good debate with the A few more academics that I think were more formal and ordered.
	Dr. Malpass was a good debate.
	Dr. Feingold, those were good debates.
	All right. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention before we get into it?
	No, not at all. I would say if I mischaracterized you when I did that critique four years ago, then I do not have any problem being corrected.
	So forgive me if I mistook your academic status or anything like that.
	I don't ever intend to intentionally have mistakes about people's CV or bio.
	Good. Okay, well, yeah, let's clear the air on that stuff.
	I was a bit surprised.
	I mean, I made a mistake.
	I do jump the gun a little bit.
	It happens, well, like a teenager for his first time.
	So I did listen to something you put out in April of 2016.
	I didn't notice the date.
	I always imagine that everything that's posted is just somehow new.
	And there were a couple of things you said, you know, that you didn't think I'd spent much time in actual philosophy or had none.
	And I do, of course, have a master's degree in the history of philosophy.
	You characterized my ideas as Darwinism, don't spank, and libertarian entrepreneurship.
	You know, I guess those are aspects of it.
	You said, I'm good at demagoguery motivating a large crowd of people, and I count on people being ignorant of history, that I put forward stupid arguments, and that my philosophy is the reason for the death of Western culture, that I'm kind of ridiculous, and that I run a cult of reason that could end up, or probably will end up, like Robespierre cutting people's heads off.
	And there was some stuff, you know, hey, you could say that's kind of harsh.
	Certainly some of it is incorrect.
	And also, I think we're going to get into this with regards to determinism.
	You did characterize me as a determinist.
	And boy, boy, there's one thing that I have staunchly opposed since I first emerged into the public square like Matthew Broderick in a medieval movie.
	And that is I really, really love and find determinism abhorrent.
	And morally nihilistic and so on.
	So yeah, a couple of corrections with regards to that, which I think is worth mentioning.
	And I guess...
	If you wanted to...
	I mean, we can critique each other, but I think it's better to critique ideas because we are vehicles for the great machinery of philosophy.
	At least that's the idea.
	That's the goal. So I think probably we should start with your critiques of what you call...
	Empiricism, materialism, and so on.
	And if you wanted to make the case against that, then we could start from there, if that works for you.
	Yeah, I would say that it actually does relate to, if I recall the critique that I was making about determinism.
	I know that your position affirms liberty.
	It affirms the freedom of man's volition and choices.
	I understand that. But a lot of times what I do in my critique is I try to go to kind of the assumptions that underlie people's stated philosophy, the presuppositions of the philosophy, and try to work them out to their logical conclusion.
	I know that you do that, too, because you do that in your book, which I do have here in front of me.
	So, There would be common ground in that.
	I think you do have good points when you discuss self-defeating arguments.
	And that's really what I was trying to do with the critique of determinism.
	Not that you actually affirm the position of determinism, but that materialism, I believe, does result in determinism.
	Sorry to interrupt, because that's a really, really good point to make.
	I think you really do have to follow through the logic, and you've probably done that elsewhere.
	But I do sympathize with that perspective, that if you believe atoms don't have free will, and if you reject the soul, if you reject supersensual reality, Kant's Well, the forms of the new or mineral realm or the realm of God or heaven and so on, if we are merely machines, deterministic machines or machines of meat, then the natural consequence of that could be argued that you would then reject free will.
	So when you identified me as a materialist, so to speak, then you could say, well, the consequences of that ideas generally tend to be free will.
	And I can understand that, but again, it's still important to run through the other person's arguments.
	But let's go with...
	What your critiques are of the materialistic philosophy and how destructive you find it to be.
	The general approach I take to philosophy is to look at the three main branches epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and then to notice that there are a limited number of places and options that you can choose in any of those three branches based on your starting point.
	So I would say that the main problem in empiricism or basic enlightenment empiricist philosophy from Hume or Barclay or Locke or any of those characters would be that they kind of lock themselves into a box In terms of where they can go in their conclusions or in their reasoning process.
	And so I think you see the same patterns of traps that it doesn't matter which of those guys you choose or any of the later enlightenment tradition philosophers.
	They're all kind of stuck in what will result ultimately in solipsism.
	So I know that the conclusions are not where we want to go in terms of sense data and Facts-based evidence approaches towards solipsism, but I believe that the course of Western philosophy, especially in the domain of epistemology, has actually ended up there.
	And that's because of the assumptions of materialism.
	It's sort of setting from the outset what you will allow and not allow as different types of proofs for things.
	So if you have a materialist assumption that that's what exists, then you're only going to allow material types of Data.
	You're only going to allow for things that fit that paradigm.
	So I actually think that materialism, as well as the Enlightenment, and it's what I would call a classical foundationalist approach to epistemology, are dead ends.
	So the critique is really just that simple.
	So help me understand, because one of the things that you have talked about, which I kind of get, kind of don't, could just be my lack of sort of following it.
	But this idea that The empirical approach to life is that all knowledge comes through the senses.
	Do I have that roughly correct of where your perspective is?
	Right. I think that most of the people in that tradition and the way that that philosophy is argued up until the 20th century would say that.
	Well, if I'm hungry, is that knowledge coming through my senses?
	Sure. Which sense?
	Taste? I mean...
	No, no, no. The hunger is a feeling that is not in the tongue, right?
	Okay. Are you asking if all information in our minds is dependent on sense data or comes from sense data?
	Well, I was trying to sort of understand.
	You said all knowledge comes through sense data.
	Now, if I know that I'm hungry, or I know that I'm sleepy, or I know that I'm cold, that is knowledge, right?
	I mean, I have knowledge of something, but it's not coming through.
	And I'm not trying to sort of catch you or anything.
	I'm trying to find the limits of where knowledge and sense data overlap.
	Right, but most empiricists would not consider that knowledge.
	They would have a specific category for what they would consider knowledge.
	And emotions, things like that, would not be considered knowledge.
	So that's kind of a tautology in a way, though, then, if you say, well, all knowledge comes through sense data, and the only way I'm going to define knowledge as something that comes through sense data, that doesn't add anything to the equation, right?
	But it certainly is knowledge to know that you're hungry.
	I mean, that is a fact, that is a piece of information that you have that's not coming through sense data.
	Okay, but there's a difference between the content of knowledge that's in your mind and the sensation.
	And I think most empiricists would admit that there's a distinction between that.
	Because what happens in that debate is there's actually a really lengthy, heavy debate about whether the givenness of our experience, the data that's presented to any sense, whether it's taste or touch or eyes or whatever, whether that you can leap from...
	Sense data to mental content that's meaningful and not just meaningful mental content, but that you can also relate the mental content amongst itself.
	So this is a classic problem in epistemology.
	Most of the modern philosophy of mind, people will be debating this issue.
	So I don't think I'm raising anything controversial.
	It's just a persistent problem.
	in empiricism, much like the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds.
	These are sort of perennial problems for empiricism.
	No, it's not.
	Now, come on.
	It's not a problem at all.
	It's only a problem if you say all knowledge comes through sense data, and then you just disqualify any knowledge that doesn't come through sense data as not knowledge.
	I don't believe.
	No, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So, for instance, if I had a dream last night about an elephant, well, that was a direct experience that I had, of course, But or if I have a dream about some beast or some environment that I've never been in before or some beast that's never existed or is not based upon something I've experienced in my life, when I wake up and I say, well, I had this dream, I write right down in my little dream journal with my with my little unicorn pen or whatever.
	So I would write down my dream.
	And it would be knowledge that I had of the dream's contents and my experience within the dream, but the dream did not come through sense data, right?
	Because my eyes were closed and I was in the dark and there was no sound and I was not moving in my sleep.
	So does that mean that the knowledge of having had a dream, which doesn't come through sense data, is not knowledge?
	Okay, so I think maybe the problem here is what we mean by knowledge in terms of a sufficient and necessary condition for why we know or believe something.
	So we can always have, quote, knowledge from many different sources.
	We could have a dream. We could have an imaginative experience.
	We could have an hallucination. I don't think in the domain of epistemology, in terms of philosophy, nobody would necessarily count that as knowledge in the strictest sense because it's not justified.
	You can't really justify those kinds of claims in a coherent, consistent way.
	You can say that you had that, but justifying is different from where you receive or the source from which you get information.
	So you're getting information, but that's not the same thing as justifying the claims or how you know those claims to be true.
	Oh, sorry. So in this sense, knowledge is sense perception of objective entities or their characteristics or properties in the real world, so to speak, right?
	I mean, I'm not an empiricist, but I'm saying I think that the empiricist tradition would definitely affirm that true knowledge is belief that can be rigorously scientifically justified or demonstrated.
	So then what you're saying is if you define knowledge as coming through sense data...
	Then you can say that all knowledge comes through sense data, but you then, I'm not saying it's you, but then these empiricists would have to admit that there is knowledge that doesn't come through sense data that is valid, right?
	They do, and this is one of the problems.
	I mean, you know, this is kind of, Descartes poses this problem with, you know, an evil deceiver deity.
	Other philosophers later who are foundationals try to also solve this problem.
	So how do we get past...
	Beliefs that we know are properly basic and beliefs that are non-basic.
	So the classical foundationalist tradition typically wants to have that given.
	They want that common ground.
	They want that starting point to be able to say, well, some of these things like, I don't know, Aristotelian categories or basic principles of logic, these are givens, right?
	These are self-evident since data in some sense or some way can be self-evident.
	There's just a direct correlation.
	This is sometimes referred to as a correspondence theory of truth, that the idea corresponds directly to the object.
	But actually, I would agree with you that the objection that you gave would actually disprove a correspondence theory, or it would disprove some of the basics.
	It's called the myth of the given is the name of this problem.
	It would actually disprove that.
	Well, and of course, there are some subjective experiences that we arrive at objectively, and some subjective experiences we arrive at subjectively.
	So, for instance, and I hate to use this analogy during a time of potential worldwide pandemic, but if I feel cold, that might be because I'm standing outside a Nunavut I station in my skivvies, or it could be because I have some disease or some illness that is giving me body chills, even though it's warm outside.
	So you can have a subjective experience that is coming, in a sense, from objective conditions outside your body, or you can have a subjective experience that is not triggered by outside conditions.
	And both of those, of course, are very vivid experiences.
	One you may know It's because you're outside in minus 40 in your underpants.
	Or like I remember when I worked up north, I had to shower sometimes because you just got so disgusting after working, you know, physical labor for a week or two in the middle of the bush.
	And it would be like minus 25, minus 30.
	And I'd be out there, you know, showering with a can and the water would actually freeze on my body.
	Okay, that was objectively cold.
	And then there've been other times where I've got sort of body chills because maybe I'm nervous or maybe I'm unwell and so on.
	And so even these things where it's true that I'm cold, and of course the doctor would say, do you feel cold or do you have chills?
	And I would say yes. So the doctor now has knowledge, but my knowledge is not coming through my sense data.
	Now, in the first case, you could say it is because the sense of touch or breath into my lungs is cold, but when I just have body chills from a fever, Then that is not coming in from the outside.
	It's very essential information for my doctor to have.
	And so it's important knowledge, but it is not coming in through my sense data.
	It's coming in through, like, none of my five organs are giving me that information.
	Well, I think that in some of the philosophers in that tradition, like Hume, you could have the notion of relating ideas.
	I think Locke would agree with this too, where he wouldn't necessarily say that all knowledge is only external to man, but that anything that is in the mental content of man is something that had to have an origin in the external.
	So there's no innate ideas, right, in Locke or Hume or these people.
	So it's all Impressed upon us from the external.
	I'm just pointing out that eventually there's a problem that Locke and Barclay and Hume didn't ask in their day, which is later asked, which is the question of, it's just an assumption on the one hand to assume that there's a causal relation between the external world and printing data, meaningful content and data into our mind.
	And on top of that, another assumption that there are some of these External sense data impressions that we get.
	Some of these principles that are properly basic and others that are not properly basic.
	And the problem is that there's no empirical criteria to judge between those two.
	You have to start appealing to things outside of empirical sense data or empiricism, namely to a criteria that are not That are not physical, not material.
	Things like criteria, categories, things like this.
	So this is where I move into the realm of transcendental categories.
	I actually agree with a lot of the skeptical critiques of Hume, but I think that the response to Hume that's appropriate is to move into the direction of transcendental arguments.
	And I definitely want to get to those, but I wanted to mention something else which you had brought up.
	And listen, I'm not quoting you to catch you.
	It's just, for me, a great way to sort of get into the ways that we think.
	So you said in your critique of me, you said empiricism is a dogmatic philosophy which says that all we know about the world is obtained through sense data.
	And essentially man is a blank slate.
	And that blank slate is just programmed through all of the externally received impressions and phenomena throughout our life.
	You don't have a soul.
	You don't have any sort of inherent qualities and abilities that make you who you are, which is completely retarded in relationship to the whole study of genetics and DNA and heritage and all that.
	So obviously, you know, a completely blank slate.
	Stefan is going to hawk to you the anthropology from 400 years ago.
	Now, I have done a lot of work on the biological genetic basis of personality and in particular epigenetics.
	Like I've got a whole series called The Bomb and the Brain, which is about how childhood trauma really rewires us emotionally and physically and even down to our DNA.
	So the one thing I think that I wanted to clarify with regards to all of this is.
	I don't know the empiricists who say that we are Soft wax and, you know, the king's seal of, this sounds like I'm about to punch the screen, I'm not, the king's seal, it goes into us, into our soft wax and we're just, you know, we're just passive and it just molds us and we're just tossed around like a leaf in the wind of our environment and so on.
	But of course, I mean, you know, and I know, and I just wanted to make sort of clear to the audience that we are born with skills and abilities.
	And like, you might have a great singing voice, but have no capacity to determine one note from other.
	Like you have the opposite, whatever the opposite of perfect pitch is, you have that.
	And so you can't be a singer, right?
	Because you just, you don't have that particular, maybe you can train yourself a little bit, it's probably going to be pretty rough, no matter what.
	You may have, you know, really, really long fingers and really, really great physical dexterity, in which case maybe becoming a guitarist is easier for you, or it could be any number of things.
	You could look at, I think of like Robert Louis Stevenson, a great writer of adventure stories who spent most of his childhood in bed with various forms of illnesses and And that's one of the reasons why he had this great creative, imaginative life.
	And if he hadn't been ill, would he be such a great writer and such a great fantasist and so on?
	Well, probably not. So we do have particular attributes and characteristics and skills.
	Because to say, as maybe the empiricists do, that knowledge just comes in.
	It imprints. The world just types on us like Truman Capote on a typewriter.
	And the typewriter is not participating in the process.
	But... You're in a dance with your senses, right?
	Because maybe you smell something that's really like, you know, we all know there's different tastes in food.
	You smell something that's really wonderful and, you know, you want to eat it.
	And of course, if you have kids, your kids say, oh, that's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard or whatever, right?
	And that's all kind of subjective.
	You may have a particular, like I'm thinking of the original Richard Burton, not the drunk with Liz Taylor, but the original Explorer spoke like 21 different languages.
	And I know a lot of computer languages, but I'm pretty bad at learning human languages.
	He had a facility.
	For language that drove his capacities as an explorer.
	So we're kind of in a dance.
	And I just wanted to clarify that when you talked about empiricism, like we're a blank slate and we just get programmed by all of the externally received impressions, that's not my position.
	That's not a rational position given the predilections of genetics that shape our desires.
	We're kind of in a dance.
	Like, what knowledge do you pursue?
	I don't pursue the knowledge of how to speak Mandarin because...
	I don't have any particular need for it, and I'm not particularly good at learning foreign languages, but I will, you know, I will listen to your debates and read your articles and so on because of this debate, right?
	So because I choose the debate, then it chooses what I focus on.
	I'm sorry for this long sort of speechy speech, but I don't know where the empirical tradition that you've read about sits with this dance of ability and preference with regards to the knowledge that we pursue through the medium of our senses.
	Well, I think you're looking at it from a broader perspective of tying in genetic research and advancements that occurred in terms of biology, which I would agree with you on that.
	I don't have any problem with the 60-40 models of people who talk about the influence of our environment as opposed to our biology, DNA. I don't have any problem with any of that.
	What I was specifying was in the domain of epistemology that we have to be very precise and very clear about necessary conditions of things, justifying claims, grounding claims, what are sufficient conditions for claims, and so forth.
	And so that's a specific domain of debate and logic.
	And that's different from the realm of biology.
	And I know you know that, but I mean, so that's really what I was critiquing.
	It's not so much that you're wrong about your claims in terms of genetics, but there's There's perhaps two different conflicting things going on here that if we have the empiricist tradition, we're going to have to answer some of the dilemmas that have continued in that tradition for many centuries, which are still being debated today.
	And ironically, I just presented a paper last weekend on that very question of this sort of dance that you're talking about, where we do have an active role in interpreting the world as well as receiving the sense data.
	So there's a symbiotic kind of Relationship that goes on there and recent philosophers actually written on this Alvin Noe wrote a pretty good book called action and perception recently about eight years ago that dealt with that topic so no disagreement on that specific issue.
	Okay, good, good. All right.
	Now, the delineation, because the big question that you have, as far as I understand it, is what is reason?
	And I do understand that for you, as a Christian, that reason is a tool given to you by God and so on.
	As a non-Christian, my perspective would be that reason is something that we derive from the objective properties and behavior Of matter and energy.
	In other words, we have concepts because there are atoms that have particular characteristics of the same.
	We have the concept of water because H2O behaves the same pretty much all over the world, I guess, depending on the temperature, whether it's ice or water or steam or whatever.
	And so... We can derive universal laws of the consistent identification of information of objects and their properties and so on, because those objects do behave in predictable and universal manners.
	And so to me, the world is like the statue and reason is the shadow cast by the statue on our mind.
	So to speak. And that if the world did not behave in objective and universal ways, then, well, obviously we wouldn't be here because there wouldn't be any stability to develop human life, but we wouldn't be able to develop the concepts of rationality.
	Now, rationality is sort of the first...
	Test for any particular theory.
	Certainly in the material world, that would be the case.
	If you have a theory in physics that says that the gas, when heated, has to both expand and contract simultaneously, nobody would bother testing that because they'd say, well, look, you've got a contradiction in your hypothesis right there, like your conjecture is wrong off the bat because that's not going to happen.
	If you have a hypothesis that says water is going to freeze at both zero degrees Celsius and 300 degrees Celsius.
	Well, that's, you know, contrast.
	So we have to have consistency in our thoughts when we're trying to describe something in the real world.
	If we have consistency and universality in our thoughts, then we can begin the process of starting to test it empirically.
	So... If you have a physics theory which says a ball is going to bounce according to this gravitational constant, in Italy it's going to be one, and in Somalia it's going to be another, well, people would say, no, you're breaking universality, you're breaking reproducibility and so on, right? There's not local specific conditions for universal principles.
	So my sort of argument regarding logic is that it's something that we abstract and conceptualize from the consistent behavior of matter and energy, and it is required as the first step to validating a potential theory about the operations of things in the material world.
	My critique there would be that when you say reason is derived from matter, from the external world, we abstract from that universal principles and that rationality is the first test of science.
	I see two things that don't work there.
	First of all, The way I would define reason in terms of a faculty or the properties of what we're reasoning about, which are actually abstract conceptual truths or logical laws themselves or concepts, whatever, mathematics, numbers, I would say that the character of those things is invariant, conceptual, immaterial, in some sense non-spatial.
	And if that's the case, then they don't...
	Sorry, I'm not trying to break your flow of thought.
	I just can't follow it. And again, I'm perfectly happy that that's my limitation.
	But I don't know what that means.
	Sorry, if you could just break it down for me.
	It's the old explainer to me like I'm five years old kind of thing.
	You're abstracting a pattern of law from principles of induction, right?
	And you're extrapolating that that's a universal principle.
	Right. And I'm asking a meta-level question of what is the status of these universal principles because they can't be equated to matter because laws, by the nature of what they are, are not identical to the particular instances of matter.
	So what you mean is that the relationship between mass called gravity is not the same as the mass itself?
	The truth value of the claim or the proposition or any word or any concept is not identical to the particular instantiation of that.
	Can you give me an example?
	The number seven, like you can't equate the number seven to a specific instance of seven objects.
	Why not? Because the number seven is not the same as the instantiation of seven objects.
	You can never get a universal category as an actually ontologically existing thing from sense data and empirical observations.
	How does a bunch of particulars give you a universal?
	Sorry, I'm trying to sort of follow this.
	So if I put out seven coconuts, are you saying you don't know that that's seven coconuts?
	Or are you saying that they're not seven identical coconuts?
	No, I'm saying that seven itself, this is a higher level order of question.
	It's a meta level question of the status of numbers or the ontological status of logical laws or properties or abstract concepts.
	That doesn't clear anything up for me.
	Sorry, let me ask the question again.
	So if I put out seven coconuts in front of you and I say, hey, Jay, it's a buck a coconut, would you say, I have no idea how much to pay for seven coconuts?
	I mean, the number seven would apply to the seven dollars and the seven coconuts.
	We would clearly understand that, right?
	But asking what the number seven is and what ontological status the number seven has is a different question.
	I don't understand what that different question is, so please feel free to illuminate it.
	So this is a problem that goes back to Aristotle and Plato.
	They asked this question, what do we mean when we talk about concepts?
	What do we mean when we talk about essences, natures of objects?
	What are essences? What are categories?
	What are universals, right?
	So this goes all the way into the Middle Ages of the debate between nominalists and the realists about the status of universals.
	Okay, Jay, please do me a favor, man. Just give it to me again, like I'm five years old.
	I mean, you love going down these rabbit holes.
	I don't care about the history of the argument.
	Just tell me what the argument is.
	Well, you do.
	Your degree is in the history of ideas, right?
	And so you. Yes, but we're not talking to an audience that has a degree in the history of ideas.
	We're talking to over 3,000 people at the moment who are just trying to sort of...
	So help me understand how the number seven is not related to seven coconuts without necessarily dragging in Pythagoras and Plato and the history of blah, blah, blah.
	How is seven not related to seven coconuts?
	It is related. I'm just saying that asking how we justify our belief in sevens or logic is a different order of question than whether there are instances of sevens and logic.
	It's two different orders of things.
	It's a meta level, like metaphysics, right?
	Yeah, but putting the word meta in front of something doesn't, you know, like if I say, oh, I didn't just win this debate, I meta-win this debate, that doesn't really add anything.
	Or if you don't meta-win this debate or whatever, right?
	So... Just help me understand what the meta question is, because numbers seem pretty clear to me.
	Maybe that's my base materialism and so on, but when you have seven coconuts, the number seven seems entirely appropriate.
	So you're giving a pragmatic account, which is fine.
	You can do that. And I'm just saying that a pragmatic account is not a sufficient answer or justification for claims.
	Okay, so what am I missing?
	Essentially, it seems to me, and I don't want to mischaracterize you, it seems that the approach you're taking is to essentially deny the possibility of metaphysics and metaphysical questions.
	I don't know what those questions are.
	Just help me understand what the questions are.
	I'm perfectly willing to be schooled on this.
	I will sit at your knee and gaze up adoringly.
	I'm not going to be sarcastic, but I really do want to know what are the metaphysical questions regarding that.
	Well, let me put it this way. So let's say we have a rank materialist guy.
	Not necessarily you, but just a guy who's a rank materialist.
	Maybe me. Okay. Maybe you.
	And he believes that he's dogmatic.
	The only thing that exists is matter.
	Okay? He may not be interested in doing metaphysics, but that is a metaphysical claim or belief, whether he wants to do it or not.
	Would you agree with that? Well, just with the minor tweak that nobody says that the only thing that exists is matter, because there's also the effects of matter, like gravity and radiation and so on.
	And so there's matter and its effects is what we count as existence.
	Well, but either way, I mean, it's still a statement about metaphysics, even if that person doesn't believe in the possibility of doing metaphysics and philosophy.
	Okay, so is the question, does the number seven exist in a platonic form prior to our instantiation of it in the material world?
	Is that? Yeah, I mean, if you want to say divine conceptualism or, yeah, I mean, I don't affirm Plato, but he was, yeah, in the same sense.
	So I do believe in a form of divine conceptualism, yes.
	Okay, so it's in concept formation that we are probably diverging.
	And since for me, concepts are imperfectly derived from instances in the world.
	In other words, when we have a contradiction between that which is in our mind and that which is in the world, we must relinquish what is in our mind in accordance with what is in the world.
	So to take a silly example, if I buy seven coconuts and you only give me six coconuts, then I will say, hey man, I'm missing a coconut.
	There's everybody's little gif for the day, right?
	And so from that standpoint, if you think there are seven coconuts, but there are only six coconuts, you're incorrect.
	Because the seven, the number seven in your mind, is supposed to define the number of coconuts actually in the world that you're transferring to me.
	So for me, and I would say philosophically speaking, this is the correct approach, that concepts are imperfectly derived.
	And that's a kind of goofy way of just saying in any conflict between...
	The real world and your concepts.
	It is the concepts that must change to reflect the real world in particular.
	So for me, concepts are imperfectly derived from instances in the world.
	And the question of metaphysics is...
	If concepts are imperfectly derived, then they only exist in the mind, and concepts that claim to describe things that don't exist in the world are invalid, whereas if I understand this correctly from your standpoint, there's a metaphysical reality that is beyond the senses, above the senses,
	unrelated to the senses, where concepts, something that I would call a concept, actually has I can't really say tangible existence because it's not impressing on sense day, but it has maybe a higher existence, a superior existence.
	Yes, right. Okay. Did I get that roughly correct?
	Yeah, I would agree with that.
	Okay. So then we have, I guess, the big challenge, which is how do you prove it or how do you make that claim?
	I would say that this is where transcendental arguments do come into play.
	Good. All right. Let's back our bus up to that unloading dock and school me on it.
	Are you going to play a beep beep?
	Something like that, yeah.
	So I would say there's two steps that we would take to answering this question.
	One is we would compare systems.
	We don't believe that there's like a properly basic foundationalist approach to how we look at knowledge, that there's no privileged position epistemically that anybody has.
	We're all kind of in the same boat, right?
	And so because there's all these problems like how does the content that's in our mind actually match up to the objects in the external world, right?
	Because the The mental content is not the same.
	Whatever you believe about the mental content, the idea is they're not identical to the objects in the world, right?
	And again, this becomes a long debate amongst the empiricists.
	So how do we...
	I'm really sorry to interrupt you because I know you're in a flow and you didn't interrupt me.
	And do you want me to hold off my questions or do you want me to ask along the way?
	I'm just going to make two...
	I'm going to make two moves.
	I'm going to do the critique and then I'm going to say...
	Okay, I'll zip it and I'm going to interrupt again.
	Sorry about that. Go ahead. So we would say that when you have a lot of these sort of classic problems in the empiricist approach, whatever you think of the content in the mind or the ideas or what they are, it's very difficult to see how you can make the move from just having an external world that imprints upon us or even that we interpret To assuming that the content in your mind is identical to or matches up to the objects in the external world.
	So Hume asked this question.
	It's still not been solved, and you can go all the way up into the famous paper by W.V.O. Quine.
	Quine wrote a famous paper, The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, where he shows that we cannot justify induction.
	So the project that you have at work in your book, the UPB book, which...
	I commend you for taking on that project.
	I think that the reason that you can't justify the argumentation, in my view, my critique would be, is because you have to answer some of the dilemmas that Hume posed.
	And I don't think the pragmatic approach that I think you're taking answers those questions.
	So how do we get out of this dilemma?
	Well, you, on page 31, do mention self-defeating arguments.
	And so what we're doing here is we're saying We can take that same type of argumentation about self-defeating arguments and apply that to some of the assumptions and problems in empiricism that relate to the history of philosophy, the big questions that have not been answered.
	And we can find insights and different ways to prove things that are not like the material world.
	So if there are objects that are immaterial, invariant, conceptual, that are not material or extended in space, if there are, then it stands to reason that they would be proven in a different way from material objects.
	And so the only possible way that that might be proved, we would say, Aristotle does this in book four, in his metaphysics, is to do a transcendental argument that they're proven by the impossibility of the contrary.
	In other words, Something is the necessary condition for something else.
	And if it's so necessary that it makes knowledge impossible, then it seems that that thing exists.
	So it's actually a very simple form of argument.
	People may reject this argument.
	They're free to do that. But whether it's a valid argument is a different question.
	I think it is valid. Okay, so I think I follow this.
	There's an old Bertrand Russell example of you can't prove that there isn't a teacup orbiting Mars or something like that, right?
	And, of course, that is within the realm of possibility.
	You know, there are things which are possible and known and therefore certain.
	There are things that are possible but unknown.
	In other words, they don't contain within themselves self-contradictions or contradictions to the properties of matter.
	And then there are things that are both unknown and impossible, right?
	So, sure, that could be a teacup orbiting Mars.
	I mean, I wouldn't put a lot of money on it, but it could be the case because it's not a self-contradictory thing.
	the laws of physics or reason or anything like that.
	On the other hand, if you were to say, if you were to say that there is a man orbiting Mars without a space suit who's breathing normally, you would say that is not possible because there's no, I mean, orbiting Mars above the atmosphere.
	And even if it was, you know, within the atmosphere, unless it's magic, Matt Damon, there's no survival there, right?
	So if you were to say there's a man at the bottom of the ocean or the body of a man at the bottom of the ocean, I'd say, sure, I watched that movie too.
	If you were to say that there's a man at the bottom of the ocean, you know, breathing comfortably without a scuba gear, then you would say, no, that's not, you know, Aquaman is CGI. And so when it comes to the existence of things, right?
	Well, you know, we know that there are trees out there.
	We can verify them with reason and with evidence, with the census, with all of that, with through history.
	And we know that trees exist and are real.
	There are contradictory things which we don't need to scan the universe for to know that they don't exist.
	So something, you know, a square circle doesn't exist anywhere in the universe, something that is supposed to sphere and the cube at the same time doesn't exist, and we don't need to check for all of those because it's functionally impossible.
	So are you saying that if we're looking at propositions about the non-existence of immaterial things, if those propositions are themselves self-contradictory, Then it at least opens the door to the existence of these non-material things.
	Is that right? It's a stronger claim.
	It's actually a much stronger argument that not only are they not self-contradictory, they are necessary for the possibility of experience at all.
	So that's actually a much stronger claim, I would argue.
	All right. Can you hit me double-barreled straight to the big chatty forehead, one or two of these babies?
	Sure. I mean, you could talk about the existence of an external world imprinting Information causally on the mind.
	Something that I don't think empiricism can justify.
	One of the things that we mentioned earlier, the causal relation between the external world and the mind.
	If you don't assume that, then the possibility of knowledge is actually negated.
	You would be led to solipsism, which is actually where the empiricist tradition ended up.
	It ended up in pure solipsism.
	Could you just rewind?
	And I feel like we fast-forwarded that through just a smidge.
	That seems very, very important to what I understand as philosophy.
	So if you could take me through that step by step.
	Maybe even throw a seal at you somewhere too in the mix, I'd be thrilled.
	Yeah, so this is one of Hume's critiques.
	And he basically says that induction, for example, we could use the causal relations in the world or we could use induction as two examples.
	You can't prove that the future will be like the past from particular instances of the present.
	You have to assume and read that into the future, right?
	And I think you do kind of reference that a couple points in your book.
	You talk about Hume and that we don't assume that when I step into the floorboard that it's going to turn into sand and this kind of stuff, right?
	But that's different from whether we can have an actual logical, rational justification for belief in the principle of induction.
	So that's one type of transcendental category that's necessary for knowledge or even presupposed in the scientific method itself.
	Another example would be that we have a an external world that we all share that that causally we interact with it that it imprints some data and information on our mind because we don't have a way to empirically verify that or that there's other minds right we have to assume it Which I'm not saying that we're wrong to assume it.
	It's just that how do we prove that or justify that just on the basis of starting our system of thought with sense impressions and empirical data.
	And the point is that you can't make that move.
	So we're making a much stronger claim.
	We're saying that Some things, some categories of things are so necessary that the only way that we can even have knowledge is to assume them.
	So they're proven by the impossibility of the contrary, such that if we were to deny those things, we would end up in a boxed in or we would end up in some kind of solipsistic circle or the external world being Maya illusion with no way to actually know or have consistent knowledge or a coherent theory of the external world or truth or logic or anything.
	So I could give a syllogism.
	Yeah, I've got one written out if you want.
	Oh, yeah, sorry. Go ahead. I thought you were referencing it.
	Yeah, I'm all there. Yeah, so I figured this might come up.
	So if you want a syllogism, you could say...
	So if you can see it.
	So the possibility...
	Yeah, the possibility of why...
	This is a five-point modal syllogism.
	The possibility of why...
	Given that there is the necessity of the possibility of Y, the possibility of therefore Y is dependent upon X, so the possibility of, excuse me, the necessity of the possibility of Y dependent upon the necessity of X, therefore the necessity of X. So if X is necessary for Y and Y does exist, then X is also necessary.
	It's a pretty Simple, not that many moves in the syllogism.
	You can also do it in a normal syllogism.
	No, I get it. So it's, if something's burning at room temperature, something must have set fire to it.
	Something must have started the fire, right?
	Yeah. I mean, if we're going to have, let's say we take Descartes.
	Descartes says, you know, I think therefore I am.
	Although I think that's an invalid move.
	If thinking exists or is occurring, then thinking in some sense also exists.
	However you define existence, maybe you think everything exists as just a dream or an idea or it's all just matter in motion.
	Thinking at least assumes some other properties or some other categories beyond just the proposition itself.
	Well, and all of these are strangely, not in your formulation, but in philosophy in general, they're all sort of strangely divorced from how people act in the real world.
	And I know that's not necessarily a powerful argument.
	Let me sort of refine it a little further and say that somebody cannot...
	Logically, interact with me on the claim that I do not exist.
	Because the very fact that they're interacting with me means that they believe that I exist.
	Like, I didn't have this debate with the mirror because I understand that the mirror is just a massively handsome dude, right?
	Like, it's not someone who's out there on the other side of the pane of glass Kiefer Southern style.
	I know that...
	I know all these weird references from, like, movies I watched years ago.
	So... If you're interacting with me, you can't say I don't exist.
	I mean, you can say it, but it is disproven by the methodology of interacting with me.
	I agree. You can't say language has no meaning.
	Exactly. Because if you can, right, if language can convey meaning, then you can use language to say language has no meaning, but it's a self-detonating statement.
	It's like mailing a letter to someone saying, hey, man, letters never get delivered to the right people.
	Absolutely. And so when you look at not the sort of freeze frame of human interaction or the mind's interaction with reality, but you look at the process of debating and interacting, when people say, you know, there's no such thing as an objective universe, well, they're using the properties of an objective universe, sound or sight or whatever, to transmit that information.
	And that, to me, is the way out of that particular riddle, that rather exhausting, debilitating, procrastination riddle of, hey man, maybe it's all really a dream, is that if somebody genuinely believed that, that it was all a dream, well, first of all, they'd just starve to death or they wouldn't, you know, take care of themselves, and they certainly wouldn't be out there debating.
	With anyone, because any more than I would debate with a mirror or try to debate with a television set or something like that.
	So to me, if somebody's not in the conversation of attempting to reason people into a better perception or more accurate perception of reality and truth and reason and so on, if somebody's engaged in that conversation, There's so many implicit assumptions, and I think this ties into what you're saying, so many implicit assumptions that you can toss aside, you know, the solipsism, the radical skepticism, the subjectivism, the relativism, all that kind of stuff, right?
	You can toss aside even determinism, because when somebody's trying to change your mind, they are predicated on the belief that your mind can be changed, and they're predicated on the belief that our senses are valid, at least to some degree, that there's an objective world, that both people exist.
	Right. And so, to me, the simple act of interacting in a philosophical debate clears up about 90% of these metaphysical tortures, so to speak.
	And I sort of end up, I can't remember who it was, was it Heidegger or someone who said, metaphysics is not a problem to be solved, but a disease to be cured.
	And it really struck me, and I've spent quite a bit of time trying to work on that.
	And I know, of course, I'm, you know, far from original in some of these arguments, but...
	That's my solution is, hey, I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
	Not you in particular, but when I'm debating this stuff.
	No, I totally agree there. I think that's where we would find the common ground is that the move that you're making is the exact same move that I'm making.
	It's a different type of the argument I was making, but the form of that argument is the same.
	So you can actually take those arguments like you were talking about, you know, people saying that language has no meaning as they use language to convey meaning.
	That argument actually has a specific form that you could translate into other arguments.
	And so all we do is we say that that's the strongest possible type of argumentation that you could make for These types of things.
	And so combined with what I was talking about earlier about the status of these things, you know, are they just material objects?
	Are they just patterns of material objects or recurring patterns that we see?
	Or can we ask?
	And I think that we can. I wouldn't be arbitrary to say, well, no, we can't ask that question.
	We just can't ask that question. I'm not saying you're doing that, but I tend to see people who are in the sort of atheistic mindset.
	They will just sort of Like a lightsaber cut off, like any possible question that you can ask beyond this.
	Or you can ask these questions, but don't go into metaphysics.
	And one reason for that is that it's not exactly clear at times when issues are metaphysics or epistemology or even ethics, because in our view, they kind of intertwine.
	It's difficult to divorce arbitrarily a question of what exists and what's real from a question of knowledge.
	Because if you say, well, Such and such exists, and that's all that exists.
	The universe is nothing but, you know, popcorn.
	We live in a popcorn universe. Well, you're also presuming to know about popcorn as well, right?
	So there's a knowledge claim at the same time as there's a metaphysical claim.
	And also, there might be even perhaps an ethical claim assumed in that as well, that we ought to affirm the existence of the popcorn multiverse world that we live in.
	Well, I mean, we could certainly go down the rabbit hole of begging on your average atheist, which I would find a great and lengthy meal, not overcooked these days.
	Many of them want to blow the mind of an atheist when they're rambling on about the non-existence of God.
	Tell them that the state doesn't exist and see what happens to their particular religion, because they tend to be pretty hard on the left and pretty into collectivism.
	But that's perhaps a topic for another time.
	So if we are simpatico with regards to looking at the form of the argument before involving ourselves in the content of the argument, because so much truth, so much acceptance of axioms can be extracted from simply looking at the form of an argument.
	Then where do we part ways?
	Is it on irrational numbers?
	Is it on fractals?
	I mean, where is it that you and I then go in different directions when it comes to metaphysical claims about nonsense data existence?
	I would say that many of these things that we've mentioned, the categories themselves, the abstract concepts, the logical laws, the numbers, The questions that are raised, the problems that come up in empiricism direct us to another type of reality, a higher level of reality in which these things exist.
	For example, I'm not saying this is just an example of somebody who raises this question, right?
	Roger Penrose, the mathematician, the guy who's behind like the Penrose tiling and all that.
	He started noticing that there was patterns and numbers that seemed to go beyond just the material world.
	And so he thinks that mathematics actually points to, as you mentioned, fractals seem to point to a higher mindscape, a mental scape that can't be just located in or identified with brain states or gray matter.
	There's something that is invariant, immaterial, and constant, and thus abstract and non-spatial about these things, while mysteriously they also seem to in some way relate to and interact with the spatial realm, the material realm.
	So it's...
	A problem in the move of materialism and the enlightenment, I believe, to say and identify and sort of smush the only things that exist into the here and the now.
	When we do that, we kind of trap ourselves into these, again, logical, self-contradictory places that the empiricist tradition goes into.
	Okay, so what I got out of that is that there are patterns that lead to God, and there are contradictions that I don't understand.
	Sorry, feel free to break that out a smidge more for me.
	I don't follow that at all. If we don't have a form of divine conceptualism, then we are stuck in the material world.
	And if we're stuck in the material world, we don't have a way to answer a lot of those philosophical problems that I think the Christian, the Orthodox worldview does answer and does solve.
	And in fact, even to the point of metaphysics, we have a really grandiose kind of approach to all of these questions in many of our philosophers and theologians.
	Yeah, that doesn't eliminate anything for me.
	Because if you reject the higher realm hypothesis, then a lot of these philosophical questions go away as irrelevant.
	It's like, you know, what is the biology of Klingons?
	It's like, well, okay, that might be a fun mental exercise, but, you know, Klingons don't exist, so it doesn't really matter what the biology of Klingons.
	If Klingons did exist, their biology would really matter.
	So if you don't Go for the higher realm hypothesis, then you are sitting pretty when it comes to significant amounts of philosophical questions.
	And certainly when it comes to metaphysics and epistemology, you're doing pretty well.
	And, you know, it's not just Occam's razor.
	It's just I think it is the correct and proper relationship to say to to to not fall prey.
	And I'm not saying you're doing this, but to not fall prey to reification, which is an annoying technical word that simply means that you are taking an abstract belief, a conjecture, a hypothetical construct.
	And then you treat that as if it's some concrete thing in the real world.
	It's known as the, you know, the map is not the territory.
	There's this old silly joke from the Friends TV show, probably before your time, showing my age, where Joey tries to get into the map of London.
	He stands on the map of London as if he's in London.
	And of course, that's funny because it's silly.
	So if there are patterns in mathematics, that's cool.
	But those patterns in mathematics can't then be extrapolated into any kind of Tangible or I guess you could say even intangible or higher reality without some additional proof, if that makes sense.
	Right. And the proof for those could only be a transcendental type of argument.
	And if the transcendental argument for those types of objects holds, then they're actually more certain and more necessary than even the physical world.
	Sorry, why would you need a transcendental argument?
	Wouldn't it just be an argument? Right.
	Because if we're arguing for things that are non-physical, the only way that we could argue for things like categories is in that way, by the nature of what they are.
	But I mean, everyone accepts that concepts are not physical.
	Everyone accepts, at least every reasonable person accepts that the abstractions of numbers don't exist in the real world.
	The scientific method doesn't exist in the real world.
	Laws of physics don't exist in the real world.
	They describe things that exist in the real world.
	They're not arbitrary.
	They're not subjective.
	The fact that the number seven isn't floating around coconuts like little moons on Jupiter doesn't mean that the number seven then becomes subjective or arbitrary.
	So as far as I'm concerned, we all accept that there are concepts that represent things in the real world that don't exist in the real world.
	But you're saying there's something different with the transcendental arguments.
	Right, so what you're saying would be like Locke's version of like a representational realism that the objects in the external world Are just represented in the mind as concepts.
	But again, the problem is that you're not ever knowing, first of all, that the concepts and the content of your mind actually match up to the data in the external world.
	And the fact that people do affirm these things is also not the same thing as giving account for, giving a justification for those beliefs.
	Those are two different things. Wait, how do I not know that the concepts in my mind match up to the world?
	Because on empiricist starting points, you can't justify that claim.
	Why not? Because you're going to appeal to other sense data to justify the claim that would be circular.
	Why? Because that's an invalid move to be circular.
	No, no, no. Sorry.
	So if I say there's a ball, like I pick up a tennis ball, right?
	I could feel the tennis ball on my fingers.
	I can shake it. Maybe it's got that little sand rattle on the inside that tennis balls have.
	I can lick it and get that weird clay tarmac taste that you get off tennis balls.
	I could sniff it and it smells like summer and shoulder sprains.
	And, you know, I could see it, of course.
	So every one of my senses fully validates the tennis ball in my hand.
	So how can I not be certain?
	It only validates on the assumption that there's a causal relationship between the information and content of the external world is transferred into the representational ideas in your mind.
	And that's what I'm saying is that how do we justify that belief, that move, that causal move?
	It's a question that Hume asked, right?
	Because there's no contradiction.
	Between any of my senses, there's no contradiction of the entity.
	Hang on. Let me make the case, then you can tell me if it's wrong.
	First of all, there's no contradiction between my five senses.
	And therefore, the consistency requirement is met.
	Secondly, the object itself is not self-contradictory, right?
	I'm not looking at a cube and a sphere at the same time.
	So if you sort of compare, you know, like let's say you and I get full-on room with a view naked in the woods and we go swimming in a pond, right?
	Okay, well, we're swimming, we're splashing around, we're picking leeches off our legs and, you know, whatever, blowing water in the air.
	Okay, that's a pond. It's real.
	It doesn't contradict. It's all of our sense evidence is confirming it.
	And let's say you and I, then the next day, for some godforsaken reason, we're stuck in the desert, and I say, hey, Jay, man, there's a lovely lake just right over there, three sand dunes away.
	Let's go for a swim. And you're like, no, man, I think that's a mirage.
	It's just the light is bouncing between differently heated layers of atmosphere, and it's a myth, and it's a mirage, whatever, right?
	Now let's say that we go three dunes over, we dive in and it's just sand and there's no water and so on.
	Okay, then we know that it was a mirage rather than a real thing.
	And so if it's not self-contradictory and if it accords with all of the evidence of our senses and our experience, how is that not true?
	I would say that the argument is circular because you're restating the question.
	The question is, how do we know that the external world's data is transferring accurate information to the concepts in our mind?
	So the problem for Locke is basically the same problem or the problem that Hume raises, which is, It's fine to say these things, but the question is, how do we make that move logically if we believe in empiricism?
	There's no empirical way to verify that empirical sense data transfers accurate information to our mind.
	And that's the point. So you can't just appeal to more sense data and say, well, we know that it's true.
	We know that it's correct. That would just be circular.
	Wait, so you're saying that to validate sense data, you would need sense data, right?
	That's what I understood the flow of your argumentation to be.
	No, I'm perfectly happy with, you know, it accords with my sense data, all of it.
	And it also accords with the law of non-contradiction and so on.
	It's not a square circle or whatever.
	And of course, you know, this is an old argument I had with my friends when I was like 15.
	It's like, you know, everybody sees the color brown a little differently.
	And, you know, it's true. I mean, of course it's true, right?
	Everybody has some color. 10% of the male population is colorblind.
	I learned that when I was a computer coder and people couldn't see my lovely user interface round one.
	So yeah, everybody sees the color brown a little differently, but that's why we have something called wavelength, right?
	So you can, you know, get the wavelength of the color of the light bouncing off a particular colored surface and you can put it in the spectrum of brown and then everybody can look.
	And even if you can't see, you can read it with braille on your fingertips.
	So everyone can look. At the wavelength and see, yeah, that's in the color.
	That's in the spectrum brown, like the brownish, right?
	That's brown. And so that's two different ways of validating the same kind of thing.
	And even somebody who's colorblind can look at that and say, okay, I don't see brown, but I can see that that's in the spectrum of what is described of as brown.
	But that's relying on sense data.
	I'm sorry? That's relying on sense data.
	We're asking about the reliability of sense data, and that's why it's circular.
	Okay, because then you say, okay, well, I'm looking at the color brown, but then I need my eyes also to see...
	The wavelength, right?
	Like the number, whatever the wavelength is.
	Yeah, it's just appealing to another sense data impression.
	And then if I say to you, hey Jay, what number do you see on that wavelength machine and you say whatever number it is, you're saying that there's still doubt about that because it's your sense data now that I'm appealing to and it's just more sense data, right?
	Right. Okay. Now, the way that I would solve that, rightly or wrongly, would be something like this.
	You have to rely on the validity of my sense data in order to have a debate with me.
	And so we've both accepted it.
	Let's just move on. So that would be a transcendental argument?
	No, I don't think so. It is.
	No, no, no. It's a self-detonating argument.
	If you're going to say to me...
	I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I'm saying that the form of that is a transcendental argument.
	Because to deny the reliability of sense impressions would lead to the impossibility of knowledge.
	Well, I don't know about transcendental because then that says that that's in the realm of proving God or something like that.
	To me, it's a bad argument to say you can't trust sense data while relying on somebody's ears or eyes or whatever it is to transfer that argument.
	Well, there are transcendental arguments that are different from the transcendental argument for God.
	Why? Why do you need a different category?
	It's a transcendental argument.
	So you show the invalidity of people relying on sense data to argue against sense data through a transcendental argument.
	And so that's different, though, from a transcendental argument about God's existence.
	Two different orders of argument.
	They're related. Okay.
	All right. All right. So if I said to you, I'm going to pray for God to reveal to you that he doesn't exist, that would be a transcendental atheist argument or an argument that would be self-detonating, that would be transcendental, but would not be for the proof of God, right?
	Well, ultimately, I don't know if I would include that in the category of transcendental arguments just because it would conflict with our view of divine revelation, which is ultimately what we would ground our worldview in, which is not to deny philosophy or science or these things.
	But I don't think that that claim itself would relate to transcendental arguments per se.
	It would just relate to questions of God and his nature.
	So we would say God doesn't lie, so he's not going to reveal himself to you in that way.
	No, but if I were to say, I pray for God to reveal to you that he does not exist, then if God revealed something to you, that would be affirming his existence, not denying it, right?
	Uh, again, so you're asking a question about something that would be impossible in my worldview?
	No, it would be, so if I didn't believe that God existed, then there would be no, if I didn't believe God existed, then I would never say I'm going to pray to God to reveal to you.
	Mm-hmm. His non-existence, right?
	Because first of all, if I don't believe God exists, then I wouldn't pray to God.
	And secondly, so I'm assuming that God exists in order to pray for him.
	And that's sort of the first round of self-detonating statement.
	And the second is, if God revealed to you his non-existence, you know, came down in a cloud of angels to take a sort of cliched look at it, and performed miracles and said, therefore, I do not exist.
	It's like, well, you just kind of Just prove that you did, right?
	So I think that would be...
	I'm not sort of trying to make this an argument.
	I'm just sort of trying to understand if transcendent...
	Sorry, if transcendental is just another category of arguments and is not specifically related to the proving of non-corporeal entities, I can accept that.
	I've not heard that terminology before, but I've not been doing a lot of cover band material.
	I've been writing original for quite some time, so I may have lost track of the newest terminology, or maybe that's an old one I just didn't know.
	So you're saying that a transcendental argument is simply what I would call a self-detonating statement?
	Yes. Those are examples of transcendental arguments, yeah.
	Okay. So far, you and I are riding side by side on the great trail of philosophy heading towards the giant city on the Hill of Truth, right?
	You believe in lakes where we're going to go skinny dipping, which are non-existent, by the way.
	There's not a lake where you and I are going to go skinny dipping.
	But, no, no, see, that's one of these things that's possible, but just hasn't happened.
	And, you know, I could, Bill Cosby, you.
	All right. So, none of this.
	We're not at ethics yet.
	Nobody's talking about voluntary.
	All right. So, then let's get to the place where our trails part ways when you go towards transcendental arguments for the existence of non-corporeal or non-material things or the effects.
	Yeah, I don't think it's a bad move.
	I think it's a logical move.
	It's the only possible move for those types of things.
	And of course, we could say, well, why do we need those types of things?
	And again, I'm saying that a lot of the problems in philosophy, a lot of the evidences of mathematics, a lot of the evidences of logic, or the questions that I mentioned earlier that are called meta-level questions, when we ask, what is a number?
	Where does a number reside?
	Can we locate them somewhere?
	What are they? I don't think that those are nonsense questions or that we can't ask those questions.
	I think they're important questions.
	Again, you know, Plato asked those kinds of questions.
	And I think that there's a powerful argument that all of those kinds of things, if we were to like stack all those, what I call transcendental categories into a big ball, if we were to just start Throwing them into a ball, making a big super ball of them.
	We say, well, how do all these things cohere?
	All these transcendental categories, right?
	So we can talk about knowledge of the external world, but knowing that there's an external world is a precondition for the possibility of knowledge.
	Having a mental representation of the external world is a precondition for the possibility.
	That there's a transcendental subject, a self, that underlies all these perceptions of reality is another transcendental category.
	That the past existed as a transcendental category.
	That we perceive things from beginning, middle to end in a spatiotemporal array as a transcendental category.
	So we can start looking at and seeing all those things.
	And if we ask, well, it seems like some of these relate to one another, right?
	Some logic seems to relate to the mind.
	It seems to relate causally to the external world in some way.
	So what justifies all these things?
	How do we give an account for and justify those things?
	And I'm saying that the worldview of Orthodox Christianity presents a coherent picture.
	This is why we affirm coherentism in terms of justifying claims as opposed to foundationalism or properly basic beliefs.
	We wouldn't say that there's any properly basic beliefs.
	We don't, there's no way to know what the properly basic beliefs are without assuming properly basic beliefs.
	So I would say our worldview is a web of beliefs that we all have.
	We all have some network of beliefs about epistemology, about metaphysics, about ethics, whether we know it or not, whether we're Arrogant, rambling philosophers.
	I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about myself.
	Whether we are those kinds of people, we're just everyday dudes.
	Everybody has, you know, assumptions in those three realms.
	And the question for us is, how do we justify and give an account for those assumptions?
	And I think that Orthodox Christianity and the view that it has, not just of God, but also of the world and of its structure of reality, its metaphysic, and of its anthropology actually answers and solves a lot of those questions that philosophy can't seem to answer.
	And I think that's a powerful argument.
	Is it time for me to explicate a subjective experience?
	Yes, I think it is.
	That felt like a filibuster to me, my friend.
	It really did. Like, I don't know half of what you said.
	What was it? Fundamental basic belief?
	I don't know what those are.
	So let's just rewind if we can.
	No, sorry, go ahead. In your book, you talk about this kind of stuff.
	I'm not trying to be unfair to you.
	I mean, I thought we would agree on ideas of like properly basic beliefs.
	No, but I just don't know what that means.
	Like, is that an axiom?
	What is that? Yeah, yeah, like accents, sure.
	Okay, okay, got it. All right, so let's go back and get to where we diverge, because, okay, self-detonating arguments, I think, solve a lot of problems in philosophy.
	I think that the philosophy of numbers has some interest to it.
	I mean, I think it is interesting, and we can certainly get into that, and I know that there are some transcendental arguments that you deploy regarding number theory and fractals and so on as proof of the existence of God.
	I'm down with all of that.
	Let's talk about all of that.
	You know, one of the things that I just, by the by, just, you know, sorry, I asked you a question.
	I'll just do a little thing here, which...
	You know, I'm a dad and I, you know, it's funny.
	I think a lot to do with philosophy for me was because I worked in a daycare for years when I was a teenager, which sounds like funny, but it's interesting.
	And I always thought if...
	And I started working with kids who were like four or five years old.
	It was a real madhouse of a room.
	There were like 25 kids aged five to 11 and four to 11 sometimes.
	And it was quite a madhouse.
	But the one thing I remember very clearly about all of that...
	Was I thought if a four-year-old can figure it out, You know, it really can't be that complicated.
	And I always remember thinking about that when I got into philosophy in more depth, that if my eyes glazed over, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about like some of the, well, maybe mostly German philosophers, but when my eyes glazed over and the languages, when you had to turn the page three times to get the end of the German mashed together Welsh village pronunciation of an Aztec god name for something or other, it's like, you know, come on, but five-year-olds have, well, no, six months old.
	Six months old babies, they have object constancy, right?
	Like you roll the ball behind the couch and they know it's gone behind the couch.
	They know that even though they can't see it, it's still there and it's still real.
	You know, babies can perform spatial reasoning at three to six months.
	They can perform mathematical calculations at eight to 12 months.
	They can start doing moral reasoning at about 18 months.
	And I'm like, gosh, can we just get philosophy to the realm of a six-month-old baby?
	Is that at all possible?
	Because the more complicated it gets, the more elitist it gets, the more it excludes people from being able to...
	Participate in the realm of philosophy, and most fundamentally, it doesn't even achieve what babies can achieve.
	And I remember thinking about that at the time, and when I sort of went public with my approach to philosophy, or this approach to philosophy, I was also struck by the fact that Socrates never used the word epistemology.
	And I like the word, I think it's a useful word, and, you know, we're not, you know, Socrates also never had an MRI, I'll still take one if I need it.
	But This is sort of a way of saying that once we start getting into what is the philosophy of numbers, hey, interesting stuff, but the reality is that, you know, you say to a baby, do you want two pieces of candy or one?
	They will take two. Like, they can handle the number thing, and they use the number thing accurately, and I'm always a little bit concerned when theories diverge so much from what a six-month-old can do that they can't explain what a six-month-old can do, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I think you have a valid concern over mystifying language or neologisms.
	And like if you read Hegel, it's like a nightmare to try to understand exactly what he's talking about.
	So I definitely understand that concern, that criticism.
	But also at the same time, I think you would agree that there are really complex things in the world that do match up to things in the world.
	I mean, we do really abstract mathematical things to make computers, you know, to design.
	Babies can't get to Jupiter, but we can, right?
	Yeah, to do all kinds of things like that in engineering.
	So I wouldn't arbitrarily sort of knock out an argument just because of complexity.
	I think that would sort of assume that there's some primacy to simplicity or to Occam's razor.
	But how do we prove Occam's razor or know for certain that simple arguments are somehow...
	More certain or prior, that's an assumption that I would have to question.
	Maybe they are. Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but to support that point, a dog can catch a Frisbee, but it can't do the mathematics of gravity and friction and momentum and inertia and all that kind of stuff.
	So I get, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that we've all got to live like we're six months old, although there are times when that actually seems quite pleasant, just get some food.
	You're basically saying everyone has to be a tard.
	That's literally what you're saying, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right.
	Except for this wonderful audience, and your audience too.
	Okay, so let's go back to the metaphysics, the metaphysical arguments that lead you towards, I mean, I guess we don't need to pussyfoot around it, but lead you towards the proof of God.
	Could I make one last point about the point about simplicity in philosophy and its relevance?
	The only thing I would say to that is that I think there is a really practical aspect of the transcendental argument, which is really accessible to a lot of people.
	You will probably disagree with this because I think...
	Much of your book is against this sort of move, but I would say that ethics is a very simple way to point out the transcendental argument, to point out that we need objective morality.
	I agree with you there. We can't just have subjective accounts of good and evil, of what's right, what's wrong.
	And I think that the existence of God is a pretty powerful answer to the ethical dilemma.
	So I would say you can make an ethical argument that's transcendental as well.
	Okay, and let's talk crap about modernity.
	For a moment, because I don't think people understand just how much has been stripped out of their mind and their heart.
	And I think you would say soul, and I would use that in an allegorical way as well.
	you know, but you've got 80% of millennials who have no idea what the purpose of living is and don't have any sense of, of usually depth or meaning or power in their lives.
	And it's the fact value dichotomy, right?
	And, and you, I'm sure I've studied this even more than I have.
	So I wonder if you could just help people to understand that with the fall of religion, with the fall of Christianity, virtue and value has, has vanished.
	Like you can get, you know, it's like that old quote, a cynic is somebody who knows the price of everything and the value of Now we have the price of everything.
	We don't have any sense of value and meaning and virtue have vanished from our lives, rendering us largely defenseless to more robust cultures.
	I would agree. I think the problem with the moves that were made in the history of philosophy, particularly in the West, it's not just the West that has these kind of problems.
	I think Far Eastern philosophy also suffers from a lot of these dialectical problems.
	I'm a big opponent of dialectical philosophy.
	I know you're a big critic of Marxism.
	I also critique the dialectics of Marx pretty heavily, pretty severely.
	Can you just mention to people the dialectic definition as well?
	Well, so there's an assumption in a lot of philosophers that comes to a head, and people like Hegel and Marx, that the fundamental movement of the world, what's going on in reality in the world, is this constant sort of dialectics.
	There's always oppositions.
	There's competition in business.
	There's competition between males and females.
	There's competition between everything.
	Everything manifests this sort of tension.
	And so that's just the most fundamental truth about the world in those systems is dialectics.
	So ironically, whether you're a materialist like Marx or whether you're this strict idealist like Hegel, they both share the same idea that everything is just constant dialectics.
	And so what you have in a system like that is there's never any consistent truth.
	There's never any properties or qualities that are unchanging.
	There's only flux.
	And so I think Lenin, it's either Lenin or Mao has an essay about how the fundamental nature of our system is this struggle and flux.
	Everything is constant flux.
	But if everything is constant flux, you can easily critique that by saying, Is it also in flux that everything is in flux?
	I mean, is the proposition that everything is in flux?
	And if that's the case, it could be in flux and not true tomorrow, right?
	So it's absurd on its face.
	I think you would share that critique given the way you critique self-defeating arguments.
	Well, I mean, and you could also just play with your Marxist professors because it's always thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
	It's all they talk about. And then if you get a C in your class in Marxism, you go up to your professor and you say, hey, man, I want an A. Let's, you know, let's have a synthesis of B. And he'd be like, no, you got a C because you didn't whatever, whatever, right?
	If you wonder why people of that frame of mind are so oppositional and defiant and just the way that they act, it's because it's in their very system that they have to propel the dialectic.
	You have to critique the critique and then critique the critique of the critique.
	And it's just constant fight.
	That's their whole thing. And that's why it doesn't ever attain truth.
	It's actually consistently at war with the concept of truth, virtue, or any notions of constancy or invariance in philosophy or values that don't change.
	Well, and of course, also, if you believe that everything is this Nietzschean, Darwinian, soulless struggle for dominance and power, it creates a uniquely paranoid worldview where you constantly have to be inventing new enemies, which is why after you kill the kulaks, you turn on the counter revolutionaries and then you turn on your which is why after you kill the kulaks, you turn on the counter revolutionaries and then you turn on your sister and then
	Because your dog looked at you funny, it is a uniquely terrifying, paranoid and extremely violent worldview that to some degree comes out of the Germans, though not, of course, only.
	And this is the void that we've had when this will to power displaced the universal benevolence of Christian ethics in the West.
	We did get a lot of this 20th century horrors, which, you know, people sometimes blame on Nietzsche, although, of course, Nietzsche did predict and warn against it, but I don't know.
	He gave much of an alternative.
	Yeah, I would personally see Nietzsche as insightful, but also part of that same dialectic.
	I mean, you could really go in any direction.
	Do you want to go in the direction of like a Nietzsche and Übermensch, or do you want to take that Übermensch idea and just sort of squish it into the collective?
	It really doesn't matter.
	They're both... Sides of the dialectic, the one versus the many.
	The collective versus the radical democratic anarchist.
	They're both problematic and there's a lack of understanding of balance between the one and the many in those two systems.
	It reminds me of a professor that I had in undergrad.
	He was my main advisor.
	And he actually made your very point there because he had studied under one of the Frankfurt School guys, Habermas.
	His professor did his dissertation under Habermas, Frankfurt School.
	And I remember him saying something like, yeah, Stalin didn't fare too well because Stalin had to eventually, after he purged everyone, purge all of his underlings.
	So it's like the system itself is, like you said, gives rise to perpetual paranoia because there's nothing...
	Stable. There's no virtue.
	There's no truth in a conceptual, abstract sense.
	Well, and there is this weird belief.
	You know, one of the things that I enormously respect about Christian theology is the concept of original sin and the inability of human beings to handle power, and in particular, political power.
	And I know there's the Divine Right of Kings and, you know, all that.
	There's a complex sort of history around all of that.
	But there's this kind of bizarre belief that in the left, and of course, you could sort of, if you put fascism on the right, I know some people put it on the left.
	I mean, it was National Socialism and...
	Mussolini was just a reformed Marxist and all, but there is this weird belief that human beings have the capacity to handle power that is currently infecting and destroying the West at the moment.
	Let's just give government power over healthcare, because Lord knows the government will never deny healthcare to people who have bad think, and there'll never be a social credit system, and people will never be deplatformed from essential social services, because everyone can handle power.
	And then there's this weird fear of more voluntary power like corporations and this weird enslavement and belief in the infinite virtue of coercive institutions like the state.
	And anyway, I know that's a bit of a here or there thing.
	But when you were talking about the fact value dichotomy, which is basically you can't get an ought from an is.
	It's an old formulation from, well, all the way back to Hume.
	And so just because, you know, strangling a guy kills him, okay, well, in Christianity, in religion, it's pretty simple.
	You've got a divine commandment called thou shalt not kill, you know, bingo, bango, bongo, you're done when it comes to that moral question.
	But when you get rid of God, the question is, Why wouldn't you?
	And the 20th century has been a kind of powerful argument as to, okay, you kind of opened a can of worms there and a whole lot of people got killed.
	And that is a very sort of powerful question.
	And I understand, of course, that there is an answer that is provided by Christianity by other religions.
	And I think Christianity provides the best answer because it's the most universal formulation of ethics.
	It's not rabbiting group preference like other religions.
	Most other religions.
	And so just want to sort of people to understand that what we're kind of wrestling here is not it sounds abstract, like seven and coconuts and stuff like that.
	But what we're wrestling here is trying to rebuild the dam that evil broached in the 19th century.
	18th, 19th century.
	The dam that evil broached and is threatening to swamp us all.
	And it's this big, terrifying, black, bloody, bone-infested wave that is coming over the brooch.
	And we're trying to find ways to patch it up.
	And Jay is trying through transcendental arguments.
	For God, I'm trying through universally preferable behavior.
	We're trying to seal up this brooch, this breach that has got the West looking like New Orleans when the water came over.
	There's a book that would appeal to you probably by a guy who's more in your vein of thinking in terms of economics.
	He was very much a libertarian free market type of guy.
	But he had a really great analysis of the history of social order in terms of dialectics.
	And it's a book called The One and the Many where R.J. Rushton, he actually compares societies that sort of shifted over into an overemphasis on the collective.
	And then the societies that then shifted the paradigm, the dialectic over into an extreme of the many, of democracy, and how both of those options really were manifestations of an imbalance in the philosophical systems or the ideas that that people or that civilization held.
	I think you would find a lot of value in that because for us, what we would say is that that balance that's exemplified in the social order ultimately, I would say, resides in God.
	We need a deity that sort of grounds all these things, not just in theory and not just in mathematics or that kind of stuff, abstraction, but also in the social order.
	We need a binding principle.
	That allows for the balance of the one and the many.
	And in our view, the Trinity does that.
	It actually provides the ground for that.
	I know you would say that's an invalid move.
	But Rushdie makes a powerful case that there is this pattern in the history of civilizations of swinging in this pendulum dialectic back and forth between two extremes.
	Yeah, we'll get to the transcendental arguments for a second, but I might as well shoehorn this in for no rational reason.
	But I've really been thinking about how it's hard to think of morality independent of scarcity.
	And when societies gain material wealth, usually through free market, you tend to dissolve.
	Particularly when you have fiat currency, endless debt and money printing and all of that.
	When you have the sense of infinite resources, what the hell is the point of morality?
	Morality is for scarcity. And anyway, so that's...
	I think one of the problems that we're facing at the moment is we can't say no to anyone because the perception is that we have infinite resources.
	So why the only reason you say no to someone is because you hate their guts.
	Anyway, so let's get back to transcendental arguments, because if you can make the case for God, then you've just made the case for ethics and I can go burn my book, which would be great because, you know, It's a challenge to make that argument over and over.
	And so, if you could step me through, and again, I'm not saying we resolve it all here, but I just do want to understand how you take the self-detonating arguments and get to the divine.
	Well, if you took something like ethics as a starting point for argumentation, not as a starting point in terms of giving it some epistemic priority, but just as something as simple Typically, ethics seems to revolve around the question of the good, right?
	Good and evil. What are these notions?
	Do they exist? What are they in the world?
	How do we know them?
	The good seems to immediately suggest also something metaphysical.
	I mean, it can't just be subjective.
	I mean, you note that in your book.
	So how do we know the good?
	How do we come to the good? And I would argue that you can't.
	You can't come to the good or know the good outside of A framework, a web of beliefs wherein we can give a coherent meaning to not just the good, but for example, when you talk about freedom or free will, free domain radio, right?
	I would argue that we need some kind of anthropology too, right?
	I mean, we need a concept of man that's not just as a meat machine, as you said, but also a being with some notion of dignity.
	Well, in Orthodox Christianity, man has dignity because he's made in the image of God.
	As you mentioned earlier, there's categories of ethics as to norms about not killing people because they're made in the image of God.
	And so the good as a metaphysical category makes sense in the orthodox paradigm.
	I'm not saying it's true just because it makes sense, but if we consider for the sake of argument that paradigm, it makes sense how there is a good, why there is a good.
	It's part of man's purpose or telos in the world.
	And so when we compare that to the other paradigms, which are materialistic, atheistic, we tend to have not any way to give a coherent account for the good or what the good is, or if we can even know the good.
	Okay, but saying that human beings need ethics, God delivers ethics, therefore God exists, is not a very good, you know, providing this as a fundamental transcendental argument, but need doesn't, you know, doesn't create existence.
	The fact that I need something to eat doesn't create a crop, it doesn't create food, and the fact that we need ethics doesn't create God, or doesn't prove existence of God.
	So I could reframe that to say that all Systems or belief systems about the world.
	All worldviews have some notion of the good in some form.
	And so the question is, how do we justify the good?
	How do we give an account for the good?
	And I'm saying that our worldview does give an account for the good.
	Well, but the other account for the good would be a tragically Darwinian.
	I'm sorry to pull my, you know, J. Dyer cliche bag out, but, I mean, for me, but...
	For me, at least, the argument as to why there is, in general, a system of ethics is because a system of ethics tends to enslave the masses in service of the rulers who themselves are exempt from the same system of ethics.
	Thou shalt not steal, not the Christian sense, but the legalistic sense.
	Well, thou shalt not steal should, of course, destroy the concept of taxation as a valid moral operation.
	But taxation, you see, is a valid and wonderful thing, even though it's the transfer of property through threat of force and imprisonment.
	But you see threatening to kidnap and imprison someone who doesn't give you half their money, that's evil in the private sector, but it's a necessary virtue and positive thing for civilization in the public sector.
	And so you create ethics so that people don't steal from you and that they don't steal from each other so they're more productive so you can tax them more because you're exempt from thou shalt not steal.
	And so that to me would be the more cynical or Darwinian sense of why this is so common because it's so productive for the rulers.
	Right, but stating how something occurs or how it works would not be giving an account for it.
	So I would argue that just because, in other words, if you gave the sort of survival of the fittest Darwinian account of, let's say, social Darwinism, you know, I should just climb to the top by any means necessary and who cares if I squish everybody and I'm the God Emperor.
	I'm Paul Muad'Dib. Screw everybody else, right?
	So you could give a Darwinian account, but the question is, would that be coherent and would it be self-defeating?
	I'm arguing that it would be self-defeating because that's not actually giving an account for the good itself.
	You can say that whatever I want is the good.
	Whatever my personal tastes are, are the good.
	Oh, no, no. Sorry, sorry. Sorry to interrupt.
	No, that's not my argument.
	I'm not making it a subjective argument.
	I'm saying that The existence of objective morality has to be explained in conjunction with the fact that the rulers are always exempted, or in fact, the opposite values apply to the rulers.
	Like if you and I print money out of nothing, we're counterfeiters and we go to jail.
	But if the central bank does it, well, they're just a sensible economic policy, right?
	So if you have to explain the prevalence of ethics, right, one way to do it is to say, well, ethics are so prevalent that they must come from some central fountainhead.
	That fountainhead would be God, and that's...
	It's a support for the existence.
	It may not be proof, but it's support for the existence of God.
	But you, of course, then have to explain why, if ethics are supposed to be universal, why the rulers always have these magical hot pocket reverse osmosis exceptions for themselves for these moral rules, in which case you would say that the pseudo universality of ethics is created to subjugate the masses to the whims of the rulers, which is why they always exempt themselves and create a whole different language set For themselves.
	Like if you use force to get what you want, that's bad.
	But if the government does it, it's just collecting taxes and enforcing law and order and so on.
	So I'm not saying that this means ethics are subjective, but it explains why there is the claim of universality with ethics with always these magical exceptions for those at the top.
	I see what you're saying. Yeah, so I think, uh, so Nietzsche gives an account like this where he says in a sort of conspiratorial, I'm not saying it's false because it's conspiratorial because this does occur.
	There are rulers who will exempt themselves.
	Uh, I paid an exorbitant amount of taxes last year.
	So I had to learn this, uh, First hand.
	So yes, absolutely. Yes, that is Nietzsche's account.
	That is a valid critique of the historical process of how ethics are oftentimes enforced on cultures and society.
	But I think again, that's also a different question from Whether there are ethics that are universal in themselves and the question of what the good is in itself.
	So I'm just, again, I'm trying to stress that like I'm asking a question that's on a different order than the normative kind of historical, not saying that the historical analysis is invalid or that we shouldn't look at the history of tyrannical rulers and misusing ethics, but it's still a different question from whether there are any universally binding ethical norms and how do we justify them.
	It's a kind of funny thing, too, just at a personal level.
	It was really surprising to me because I still have massive, naive elements, which I think are kind of necessary for survival in the modern world.
	But when I was younger and I was told, well, you've got to respect people's property and you've got to tell the truth and you've got to be good and all of that.
	When I first started toying with the idea of extending Respect for property to agents of the state.
	It was like you enter into the upside-down world of complete opposite moral horror.
	It's like, well, I meant to respect property, but only you, not us.
	I went from the best guy in the world to the worst guy in the world.
	Of course, I was raised...
	With the ethic that came a lot out of feminism, which I have some real respect for, the ethic of, you know, if someone's abusive, you don't have to stay with them.
	In fact, you probably should leave them, right?
	And this was, of course, told to women in general to, you know, as part of the whole leftist thing to break up the family, which is not to say that all marriages are great and some marriages, you know, people are better off apart.
	But then when I'm like, okay, so dum-dee-dum, here I am wandering around like a little ping-pong ball in a vacuum tube.
	And I'm like, oh, well, you know, being in abusive relationships is really bad.
	Then, you know, I got people calling into my show saying, oh, my parents, I'm an adult.
	My parents are really, really abusive. And I'm like, you know, you don't have to be in abusive relationships because I thought it would be like, well, sure.
	But that's a whole different kind of situation, right?
	That went against... The powers that be for a variety of reasons.
	So this is like hard-won, bitter, battle-scarred knowledge that comes out of, oh, these rules are universal?
	Okay, let me apply them universally.
	Boom! You know, it's like, no, no, no, no, that's not what they're for.
	They're not for universality.
	They're for pretend universality anyway.
	So I just wanted to sort of mention that, that it took me a little while to figure out like, okay, what the hell's going on?
	I was told these things were universal.
	Now I apply them universally and I'm like a really bad guy.
	It's like, what the hell is going on?
	Okay, so now I think we can understand that if we can solve the problem, the existence of God, we get a lot of good things out of it.
	We get a lot of complexity when it comes to metaphysics, but nonetheless, if God exists, then the complexity is perfectly valid.
	I mean, that's totally fine.
	But there is a way, using these transcendental arguments that I've heard you explicate, and listen, You can put them forward.
	We don't have to chew them all through because I was hoping we'll get sort of major points of difference across.
	We don't have to resolve them across at all.
	And then we'll get some Q&A and AMAs from the lovely chats.
	And, you know, it's great.
	You know, this is a weeknight. We've got 3,000 people plus watching this.
	Oh, wow. It's really, it's good.
	You know, I love people's love of philosophy.
	This is what we want to do is engage people in this stuff.
	It really, really matters.
	So why don't you, we don't have to go into the back and forth at the moment.
	We could save that for another time.
	But let's, if you don't mind, you know, put forward the argument.
	You know, I'll chew it over in my mind after the show and we can perhaps talk about it again.
	I'd like to. But lay for me down the breadcrumbs that take these self-detonating transcendental arguments to the existence of God, please.
	Right. I would say that when we look at the world, there are categories that are needed to interpret the world.
	These categories are preconditions.
	They aren't just mental abstract things.
	They also apply to an actually existing external world.
	Things like that the world possesses telos, that there's telos and purpose in the world, not just in our minds.
	There's the principle of causation, there are causal relations that are real, there are ethical norms and values that are not reducible to matter, that there are abstract conceptual entities that are invariant and unchanging like laws of logic,
	that there are Entities or things like the self or a soul that you could whether you want to call it the mind or whether you want to call it the soul that those things are Seemingly preconditions for and we could list many more but just take those as a brief list off the top of my head there And when we consider those things and we ask and think about them and how they relate to one another We start to see see that they aren't independent.
	They sort of interrelate like a web And they're part of the fabric or web of beliefs that we all have in some way to interpret the world.
	Now, one could pick out and deny any one of those things if they wanted to, but to do so would move them into one of those self-defeating arguments that you talk about in your book, I would say.
	So therefore, if we ask the question of how we ground all of these categories And give them a coherent meaning, I would argue that the Orthodox conception of God is a perfect solution and explanation for that.
	Now, the fact that that's a perfect explanation and solution, you could argue, well that doesn't prove it, because maybe it just has explanatory power.
	But I would say that it doesn't just offer explanatory power for Like how we can use logic, it offers explanatory power for things like induction, for ethics, for the past, for objects having identity over time, for meaning in the world, for civilizations, for a binding force within culture.
	I mean, it's very broad in its scope and has so much to offer that there's also a very pragmatic And a useful aspect to this as well.
	So it's not just the realm of theory.
	It's also very pragmatic and useful.
	I think that's actually part of the argument is its pragmatism.
	It's not just a pragmatic argument, but I'm saying that it has elements of a lot of philosophical schools that I think have pieces of the truth, right?
	So somebody said, well, why don't we just be pragmatic?
	Why don't we just have common sense realism?
	You know, there's all these problems and debates about how we know about the external world and philosophy.
	Let's look, let's just assume that there is an external world, right?
	So you see a lot of philosophers making the pragmatic move.
	It's typical in American philosophy.
	That's like the one school that American philosophy has produced is pragmatism.
	And I'm saying, ironically, even though this sounds maybe too abstract, it actually has a very practical value.
	All right. All right. Well, I appreciate that.
	I had to do just a smidge of cleanup from on the chat, which has been a bit of a troll.
	So let's a bit of a troll fest, which is fine.
	I mean, hey, you know, bumps up the numbers and I got no problem with that.
	So if you want to ask questions of myself or of Jay or of both of us, We would be happy.
	Try to keep them vaguely sensible.
	Time is not a figment of your nutsack, Sarah.
	I just wanted to mention that on so many levels.
	I don't really know how to follow that.
	Holy shit, finally. Yes, finally.
	And let's see here.
	Should women be banned from the internet?
	No. There would be no internet if there weren't originally women, particularly naked women, on the internet.
	All right. Can you see the chat, Jay?
	No, I don't have it pulled up.
	I'll throw it to you in the Twitter...
	DM, hang on. You know, just in case we get a sensible question or two, it might not be the end of the world to throw it back.
	Yeah, I'll pull it up here. All right.
	So Jay is claiming, so here, why don't you ask her this?
	So Jay is claiming that if God exists, then many philosophical questions are settled and solved.
	Sounds like Jay is arguing for the rationality of the belief in the existence of God, not necessarily about proving the existence of God.
	Right, so I actually have a paper on this, if somebody wants a longer explanation, where I actually argue that one of the transcendental categories that's needed for this argument is also the necessity of a commonly experienced external world.
	Which I don't think can be proven merely by sense data.
	I mean, you can say that, but it's not, I don't think, a very strong proof.
	Just to claim it, you need to have a justification for it.
	So the commonly existing external world is also part of the transcendental categories.
	If somebody wants to, they can go read the essay on Strawson that I did.
	This one would be helpful for you, Jay.
	Somebody just said, could you guys repeat everything I just got here?
	So if we could just start over, that would be, you know, because Wyatt is the guy who we need to please.
	Somebody has said, what is Jay's view of presuppositional apologetics?
	Well, what I'm doing is a form of presuppositional apologetics, so I affirm it.
	Way to go, Jay, and screw anime weebs.
	I don't know what that means, but I assume that...
	That is a valid argument.
	It's the claim that even metaphysical arguments need axioms.
	I'm sorry, say it again? It's the claim that even metaphysical arguments need axioms.
	I think you could make that move.
	I don't think I made that claim, but you could make that move, I think, yeah.
	Yeah, I would say so.
	I mean, the challenge with axioms is, so an axiom is something that's kind of at the base of your argument and necessary for your argument to even exist in some situations, right?
	So we're always tempted to engage with the content of a debate and don't do that.
	I mean, at least don't do that for a while.
	We talked about this a little bit earlier, but I'll sum it up here.
	And Jay, if you, of course, disagree, I want to help yourself.
	But don't look at the content.
	Look at the form of the argument.
	Look at everything that is implied in the argument actually existing, in the argument being communicated, in someone choosing to communicate an argument to you, typing it out, speaking it, emailing it, whatever it is.
	There's so much that is accepted as true and valid and in the rear view of what you need to debate about simply in the act of engaging in a debate, which is why Jay and I are not sitting here arguing whether each other exists because we're having conversations so that is accepted.
	And once you get there, then you can dispense with a huge amount of philosophical agony that circles the drain and goes nowhere.
	And I'm not saying, like, never look at these questions.
	They're fun. But when it comes to actually getting somewhere in the debate, look at the form of what a debate is.
	And only after you've accepted everything that's necessary for that form do you engage in the content.
	And if the content contradicts the form, dump the content and focus on establishing the principles embedded in the form of the argument.
	I would agree with that. All right.
	Can you do more debates with Jay?
	Yes, obviously we will be debating which pond to be bathing in at midnight.
	So let's see here.
	Did Jay finally say, if you don't believe in God, then your worldview is incoherent because you don't have an answer to hard solipsism?
	Yes, if a person has empiricist presuppositions, I would argue that, yeah.
	Right, okay. So, there was a question up here about, oh yeah, you said the contradiction to perhaps between Orthodox Christianity and the kind of Christianity that you were talking about, or was there something, do you get this question about your relationship to, I mean, I know you were raised as a Baptist, although you don't accept those arguments as much anymore.
	What is your relationship to traditional I mean, you could say Catholic or traditional Protestant theology.
	I know it's a big question, but if you could touch on it.
	Well, I mean, we certainly think that Protestants and Roman Catholics have aspects of their theology which are true, but we would say that we think that Orthodoxy has the fullness of that.
	It is the consistent continuation of the first millennium of Christianity.
	So kind of bound up within Orthodox theology is the notion that the Church has to have the same form and function and Um, exemplification that it had for the first millennium of Christianity.
	And so that becomes then a debate between, well, is it Roman Catholic?
	Or is it Protestant? Well, Protestant, of course, develops, you know, at the time of the Reformation.
	So is it Roman Catholic or is it Protestant, excuse me, or Orthodox?
	And I would say that Orthodoxy is the true continuation of that first millennium of Christianity.
	I think it's pretty easy to demonstrate that when you read the people from that first millennium.
	So it just kind of depends on the opponent.
	I mean, if it's a really nasty Protestant guy, I'll debate pretty hardcore.
	If it's a pretty... Testy Roman Catholic, I'll debate them with equal testiness.
	What is your favorite anime, Jay?
	None of me. None of me.
	All right. So no waifus on your bedroom ceiling.
	All right. Somebody asked me, does your basis for ethics have a telos?
	If not, how do you resolve the issue of elite classes having an inverse ethical code?
	So I assume by telos, you mean sort of like a larger overarching or end goal.
	I would say that the purpose of ethics is not consequential.
	In other words, you cannot judge an action by its consequences because that is to shoot an arrow over the house and hope you don't hit your brother.
	Right.
	Because you can't tell the consequences of particular actions.
	And I remember having a guy, he was actually a Muslim guy, called into my show and he said when he was a kid that he had an uncle who would just torture him with all of these, you know, would you do this immoral action?
	And it's like, ah, but if you do this moral action, this great good can result or would you do this good action?
	And if you did that good action, some great, terrible evil would result.
	And then you can't judge an action by its consequences.
	Consequentialism is, well, it cracks time.
	Right.
	You have to make decisions based on principles, not based upon consequences, which cannot be determined ahead of time.
	And so it's not a dice roll.
	Ethics is not a dice roll.
	It's not a buffet.
	It has to be universal principles.
	But if you have a hypothetical where half of the population gets a zombie virus and half of the population will and can never be cured, and we know this with omniscient certainty, can you grant me that?
	And then I can prove to you that you can't eat animals.
	Right. I'm joking. Yeah, I mean, if we have a virus called half the population turns into zombies, well, we'll have a debate about public school education another time, but that would be the closest thing.
	So, Steph, if you were going to believe in God, would you choose A, an absolutely simple God whose essence, existence, and activity were synonymous, or B, a God with really distinct actions and existence?
	Ah, yes. So this is the great question around God.
	And listen, I'm as hungry for God as anybody else.
	It's one of the reasons why I'm engaging with Jay, is that...
	Especially as a husband and as a father with friends that I love, the idea of eternity with people is a wonderfully delightful idea.
	The idea of not having to peddle up the nihilistic slash sociopathic indifference of general atheism to an objective universal moral code that actually binds them to do something other than tip fedoras and snark on the internet.
	It's very tempting.
	And of course it would be salmon-like returning to the spawning grounds of my youth as I was raised a Christian and He belted out many high-voiced hymns in the church choir and so on.
	So I do love the idea, and it is rather annoying that he is not coming down and tweaking me in the ear to say, hey, dude, I'm here.
	I'm here. It's working.
	It's working. Oh, this faith thing, it's a...
	It's a crab and a half. And it's funny, too, because my father was an atheist when he was younger and became, you know, full-on Protestant back to his youth, although he also went back to where he was born after living in South Africa for many years professionally.
	And I remember having a lot of eye-rolling regarding that.
	And now, of course, as time marches on and begin to sort of understand the impulse.
	So I would not want an abstract God.
	I would not want a deist God.
	I would not want...
	I want a full-on Old Testament...
	God who rolls up his sleeves and gets involved in things and listens and interacts and all that kind of stuff because to me, the more abstract and anemic the God is, the less...
	How powerful and passionate the relationship would be, if that makes any sense.
	And that's not much of a philosophical answer.
	I'm just talking about a particular personal evidence.
	I'm not saying that I just want a God who will smite down my enemies, although, of course, that is definitely tempting.
	But no, I would want, to me, the more anthropomorphic in many ways, the better, although with more virtue.
	Does Jay have a citation as to where Hegel claims or his philosophy implies that everything changes?
	Well, I don't know if it's fair to just ask you, Hegel wrote so much, you know, it's on page, but you can look into it, of course, right?
	Well, I was saying that the Marxist position is that everything is in flux.
	Hegel is an idealist, so Hegel wouldn't believe that the ultimate structure of reality itself necessarily changes because he's kind of a version of Platonism.
	It's a version of Platonic philosophy.
	I was saying that the dialectical process that Marx took from Hegel, he transferred into the material realm and just said that all reality is flux.
	I'm not saying that Hegel thought everything literally is flux.
	Right. And somebody else said quite powerfully, you lie, you are speaking to yourself, you are in a mental ward.
	But the point is that we're not doing this all in caps.
	So this may be a look in the mirror situation.
	I'm actually in the mental wards library.
	Yes. Right. They let me out.
	Question for Steph. Can a creation exist without a creator?
	And the answer to that, of course, is logically no.
	No, you cannot have a creation without a creator.
	That's almost a tautology, so to speak, but it's definitely the last domino before creation that occurs.
	What are your thoughts on Wittgenstein?
	This is at me, but Jay, do you have any particular impressions or anything you'd like to share?
	I mean, it's a big, somewhat ugly topic, but...
	He's a good guy to bring up, not because I agree with all of his philosophy, but because his analysis of the structures of language and how language games work is very amenable to my argument and transcendental arguments because it kind of shows that words don't function independent of the rest of The language structure or the lexicon.
	So just like if you're talking about the number one and then you move to the number two, you know, the number two kind of assumes the number one.
	And so likewise with all other numbers, they kind of relate in some necessary way to all the others.
	In the same way, when we speak and use language, words don't operate independent of the rest of the lexicon of words within our vocabulary.
	And, oh, this is a question that I also had for you, Jay.
	So the question is, or the comment is, Jay opposes communism and globalism.
	Check out his book analysis series...
	If you, you will become truly woke.
	So you used a phrase in the 2016 video about me, which was global capitalism.
	And I assume that means sort of international capitalism, transnational corporations and so on.
	Could you just give me your meaning behind global capitalism?
	I think it's been some years since I listened to that talk where I critiqued you but if I recall I was referring to what I think Quigley would eventually call monopoly capitalism.
	Now I know that you would agree probably in rejecting monopoly capitalism.
	Personally I don't see a huge distinction in the actual outworking of monopoly capitalism that moves into like big finance capitalism and then like big industry cartels.
	I mean I know this is nuanced, but I see them kind of just outworkings of the same type of system.
	So from my vantage point, the wealthiest people in the world are also involved in promoting a lot of socialism.
	So socialism itself I see as sort of a tool that more wealthy people use to sort of browbeat and destroy and beat down societies into what they would find more manageable and more ultimately technocratically useful.
	Well, and of course, the reality is that much though we have respect for property rights for thee, but not for me, we have capitalism for thee, but not for me.
	Right. In other words, the banks want their monopolies.
	They want their barriers to entry.
	They want their massive regulatory hurdles that anyone's going to have to get over.
	They want their bailouts.
	They want their central banking.
	They want that control of interest rates.
	So the elites love...
	Managed economies, socialist or outright communist economy systems for themselves, but they want you to be out there in the free market because it drives down your wages and also because it does produce the kind of innovation that benefits them.
	I mean, the free market produced a lot of wonderful technology that we're using here that the elites can use to listen in to everything that we're doing here.
	So it is...
	Somebody else said, I yell in Swahili when I choke my chicken.
	I just wanted to point out that that's a very, very vivid piece of imagery.
	That is a valid argument.
	That is a valid argument.
	All right. I don't know.
	Do you care how tall he is?
	I don't think so. Stefan, if you had to believe in one God, which would you choose?
	Well, I would choose the Christian God and Jesus is what I grew up with.
	And it's the philosophy that I respect the most.
	I'm 6'6 when I wear my stilettos, by the way.
	Right, 6'6", when he wears his stilettos, and that's just lying down.
	You don't even want to think about it standing up.
	Not even close, man.
	Oh, shit, the bots are gone.
	Yeah, I got rid of that.
	All right, I think let's just do one or two more.
	Fun though this is. They're scrolling by a little too fast for me.
	Yeah, I always get this RIP Joe Rogan, like Joe Rogan seems to die every time I do a...
	It's a Mandela effect, dude.
	I thought Joe Rogan... I thought he died last year.
	It's a Mandela effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay. So, Steph, somebody says, Steph, given your atheist metaphysics and ontology, why shouldn't someone affirm UPB in public while really being a narcissist sociopath?
	Well, that's a fine question.
	And so, just for those who don't know, UPB is a theory of ethics that, you know, bans rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	And it is predicated on the fact that, of course, some people are going to be immoral.
	And it's not It's individuals who are immoral who are your great danger in the world.
	A thief you can protect yourself from.
	You can have a gun, you can protect yourself when it comes to self-defense.
	And most people go through life without having to pull out a gun in anger.
	Most people go through life without being in any kind of death-dealing situation.
	Most people go through life without having their homes broken into.
	Especially now that there's better security systems and all that.
	So individual criminality, while certainly a danger in the world that can never be eliminated, is not really your primary danger or problem.
	I mean, it wasn't like individual murderers in the 20th century killed 250 million people.
	That was outside of war.
	That was governments. Governments themselves.
	So it is false moral theories that are the great danger.
	Theories which say... You have to respect property rights, but the leaders can Do whatever they want to your property.
	You can't engage in a contract on somebody else's behalf without their permission, but the government can borrow against the future earning properties of the unborn and so on.
	So the grave danger that we face, if you look at the grave danger that Europe faces with mass migration, this is based upon a particular moral theory and a particular economic theory that has people have the perception of infinite resources and you name it.
	The grave danger that we face is false, inconsistent, self-contradictory moral theories.
	And so UPB aims to take a sledgehammer to those false moral theories, and it doesn't give you a magical protection, but what it does do is it drives back the greatest predators on human existence, which are the justifications for oligarchical coercive power and predation that is truly, truly monstrous in the world.
	So... You can still be a narcissistic sociopath and publicly affirm UPB, but you can't generate a false moral theory that exploits the world and have it pass the test of universally preferable behavior.
	All right, let's do one more for Jay, and I appreciate your time tonight.
	Let's get something good here.
	Oh yeah, okay, so that's all right.
	Okay. Jay, what's the most important philosophical problem?
	Which argument has the best chance of solving that problem?
	That's a really vague, big question, I guess.
	What is the meaning of life?
	Or does God exist? I guess those could be the big ones.
	And I would say the arguments that I gave tonight were intended to approach answering that question.
	So I don't know how else to...
	I can't think of anything more important than, you know, what is the meaning of life?
	All right. So, Jay, for my audience, if you wanted to give your statistics on the web, mention your book and website, YouTube channel, and so on, for people who want to pursue more of what you have to say, that would be great.
	My website is jaysanalysis.com.
	It just deals with film analysis, philosophy, geopolitics, history, some literature analysis as well.
	My YouTube channel is just Jay Dyer.
	And I have a couple books on Hollywood and symbolism in film.
	It's called Esoteric Hollywood, Sex, Cults, and Symbols in Film, Parts 1 and 2.
	And I have a TV show that you can watch at Gaia TV, which is called Hollywood Decoded.
	It's a full production, one season of a TV show we did a couple years ago.
	That's me. That's my work.
	And I guess, like I said, the most relevant thing probably to your audience recently has been what I call my Globalism Books Talks.
	So that would be analyzing the global elite from the last hundred years and their works.
	We've done 40 plus of those now.
	So you can find that as a playlist on my YouTube channel.
	So that's 2.5 years per book.
	Okay. Well, thanks.
	And for those who are, Jay, of course, has more than my happy permission to re-up this to his channel, because, you know, we're both laboring.
	We should both profit from it in terms of spreading wisdom.
	And for me, if you're on Jay's channel, you can find me at freedomain.com.
	The YouTube channel is freedomainradio, youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
	I have a bunch of free books and my podcasts are free.
	And please note, of course, the distinct lack of advertisements, I guess, other than both of us talking about our projects, the distinct lack of advertisements in this lengthy chat.
	That is the result, of course, of people supporting Jay and the result of people supporting what it is that I do.
	I don't want to have ads.
	I don't want to be beholden to outside people.
	I want to be in the business of delivering truth to you, so to speak.
	And so if you'd like to help me out, I would really, really appreciate that at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Thanks again, Jay. A very enjoyable chat.
	Hopefully we can do it again and get more into what we skirted a little bit tonight, which was the transcendental arguments for God.
	I really appreciate your time tonight and have a great evening.
	All right. Thank you. Anytime. Bye.

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