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Feb. 8, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:26
EDGE CASE LORDS OF DOOM!
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Hey everybody. So you know in nature there are these predators and what they do is they inject you with a kind of paralytic venom so that you can't move in some sort of nightmare dreamscape and then they feast on your innards and you can't get away and There are other kinds of scavengers called jackals, so I call these people eccles.
This is edge case lords, edge case lords, eccles.
Now what eccles do is they come up with some edge case, which then is designed to invalidate The entire philosophy that you are proposing, and it's sort of like, you know, there's some colors halfway between blue and gray, and it's kind of tough, and you ask a bunch of people like that blue dress thing that was going on the internet some time ago.
You ask some people, and some of them will say it's more gray, and some of them will say it's more blue, and therefore they say, aha, there's no such thing as color!
Because there's grey, there's no such thing as black and white.
Now, of course, we only know that there is a grey because there is a black and white, and it's an admixture of the two.
So these edge case lords will show up everywhere you try and establish some rule.
So, you know, in a free society, just as we have now, there has to be some distinction between a child and an adult.
And I don't know if you had this sort of thought and feeling when you were a kid.
I know I did. Where it's like, oh, so if I want to vote, I have to be 18 to be considered an adult.
If I want to drive, I have to be 16.
If I want to drink, I have to be 19.
But when it comes to paying an adult price on a roller coaster, I only have to be $13.
Anyway, I've let it go, but you know, it took many years of therapy and a fair amount of medication, and I believe some moderate head trauma.
So, the edge case lords say, you say 18, okay, an adult is 18, and what they do is they say, okay, I'm an echel, I'm an edge case lord, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, so what you're saying is, and this is often a species of the world, actually people, well, actually.
So, they're saying, okay, so when someone is...
17 years, 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes, and then they get one extra minute, suddenly they go from being a child to being an adult.
What's the big difference? It's like, it's a minute's difference.
I get it. I get it.
It's not a massive difference, but you got to draw a line somewhere.
Right? You have to draw a line somewhere.
And it's not like in the one minute that someone goes from being 17 to 18 that there's a massive change, but you've got to make some kind of a difference.
And the same thing you could say with buying a car, right?
Let's say you're buying a car for $20,000, right?
Then you say, I want one penny off.
Well, what's the car dealership going?
They're going to say, great, yeah, we'll give you a penny off.
Okay, sure, here you go, right?
And you say, oh, well, I want another penny off and I want another.
And then at some point you say, I don't know, I want 50,000 pennies off or 500,000 pennies off or something.
And at some point they're going to say, no, that's too much.
And then you can go back and you can say, okay, so if it's one penny more, you'll take it.
But this one penny, this is what Eccles do all the time.
They come up with some edge case and then they assume that that invalidates.
The entire perspective.
Now, this, of course, is not what people do in the real world.
In the real world, we kind of recognize these exceptions, which is why people don't haggle over cars in one penny increments.
They tend to do it in 100 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever it's going to be.
And if some judge in a free society, someone comes up and says...
I was a child, Your Honor, when I did this.
And they say, well, how old were you?
And they say, well, basically, I was one minute shy of my 18th birthday.
What is the judge going to do?
The judge is going to say, okay, we're going to try you as an adult because it's as near as dammit, right?
And there's certain kinds of people, I'm not sure, maybe it's some obsessive-compulsive thing, and what they do is they say, wherever there is a gray area, therein resideth.
My Billie Eilish video anxiety, right?
I mean, wherever there's something that is not crystal clear, black and white, able to be drawn with perfect engineering mathematical precision, therein is an anxiety I simply cannot abide.
And they use, like those are the edge cases that they use to widen the cracks and disassemble the entire edifice of any rational.
Belief system, and it's like saying, well, there's no such thing you see as biological classifications because platypus, man!
Okay, so the platypus is, what is it?
It's a mammal because it's got hair, it's warm-blooded, and so on, but it also gives birth to eggs rather than live young and saying, well, then there's no such thing as a difference between a reptile and a mammal.
Because platypus, right?
And these are the exceptions that prove the rule, right?
So the vast majority of mammals give birth to live young.
The platypus is a mammal that is an exception that proves the rule.
That's how we know that mammal means live young as a whole because, right?
So there are all these edge cases.
And whenever you propose a standard, a rule, then what's going to happen is the eccles are going to start, you know, they sniff.
Oh, what's that I smell?
No, what it is, what I smell, is certainty.
And I must use my echol wizardry to water my sliminess in between the cracks of the edge cases, widen it out, and disassemble the entire edifice of certainty.
Certainty is a predator to these people, which is why they tend to go after my theory of ethics, or I think a rational theory of ethics called universally preferable behavior.
They'll try and find some sort of edge case And then they will use that to attempt to bring down the entire system because they're Eccles.
It's kind of their compulsion. They hate certainty.
It's a predator of some kind.
And I like certainty. I think certainty is a very good thing.
I'm quite certain that I'm recording audio and video here.
Otherwise, I'd just be a crazy person talking to myself in a room corner.
So I like certainty.
I think it's a good thing. But the Eccles, they hate certainty and they must bring it down as a predator that somehow undoes their very being.
I think it's because they've done wrong in their life, just my personal feeling.
I think they've done some really bad things in their life, and when a clear system of ethics comes along, it makes them feel very bad, because UPB, universally preferable behavior, is simply the conscience, our conscience, crystallized and abstracted in philosophical form.
And so everybody who's done wrong has a conscience that lies deep within their body, and UPB is a big sonar wake-up call to that slumbering conscience, and I think that they then attack it because they're actually trying to attack their own conscience to try and not have to end up in a situation where they have to make amends to the people that they've wronged.
By the way, if you've done wrong to people, do us all a solid.
Do humanity a solid.
Call them up. Better yet, go over it.
Apologize. Make amends.
You'll feel better. They'll feel better.
The world will get better, and you won't have to be an echo anymore that has to attach itself like a vampire on a baby whenever you come across certainty.
So, one such example is hunger.
Hey, look, we went from vampires to hunger.
See? And sometimes it works out that way nicely.
So, hunger. So, people will say, is hunger A true phenomenon, right?
So what is truth? Well, truth are ideas in the mind that conform to reason and evidence, right?
And reason first and then evidence if it passes the test of rationality because the universe is rational.
Or to put it another way, the universe is objective and consistent and reason is the methodology that accurately describes the behavior of reality.
So then people say, is hunger?
If I say I'm hungry, Is that a true statement?
Can you evaluate the truth statement called, I am hungry?
Well, so there are some truth statements that can't be validated.
Like if I tell you, I had a dream about a clown last night.
Sorry, I thought I saw a clown.
If I say, I had a dream about a clown last night, can you verify that in any way whatsoever?
Well, no, of course you can't. There's no way you can Go back inception style into my brain and figure out if I actually saw a cloud in my dreams or anything.
You can't check that. You can't verify it.
And I don't know why, maybe it's just they're surrounded by maybe the Eccles, the edge case lords.
The Eccles are surrounded by such terrible people, or maybe they themselves are such terrible people, that they just can't trust anyone about anything at any time under any circumstances.
I'm going to need proof.
Hey honey, I think I'm lost.
Oh yeah? I'm going to need proof.
It's like, look, if you're Just in general, if you're in a situation in life where somebody says, I had a dream about a clown last night, and you say, I'm sorry, I don't have any proof of that, you know, you're probably surrounded by the wrong people, because it's a matter of personal trust, isn't it? If I say I had a dream about a clown, and you're like...
I can't believe you because I don't have any objective proof.
It's like, we don't really have a very good relationship.
You don't trust anyone or I'm not trustworthy or something like that, right?
So in the realm of personal trust, these things kind of happen.
With regards to hunger, is it an objective state?
It's hard to say. Because it's like that old chestnut, like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Well, it depends how you define sound.
If sound is something that people hear, then no, it doesn't make a sound.
If sound is vibrations in the air, then yes, it does make a sound, right?
It just depends on the definition.
It's not a particularly complicated one.
And the fact that it's still around is kind of the result of philosophers doing a circle jerk of useless abstractions rather than actually helping society in the real world, wherein you get a lot of blowback, as I know.
So, hunger, okay, so there are certain hormones, I think, that are released in the body when you get hungry, and so we can measure Whether you have those hormones in your system, right?
And we also know human beings need, what, 1,500 to 2,500 calories, or for me, 4,000 if you're writing a book.
You need a certain amount of calories to get through the day and maintain weight and all of that.
It depends if you exercise or whatever it is, right?
So we know that if somebody hasn't eaten for 24 hours, their body needs food.
Now, is hunger defined as your body needing food?
Well, yeah, if you haven't eaten in 24 hours, your body needs food, and therefore you're hungry.
Now, that's the objective thing.
You could also say if somebody's hungry, like let's say they just overeat like crazy, they stretched out their stomach, and then every hour they don't get a thousand calories, they feel hungry.
Now, their body doesn't need food, but they feel hungry because they've developed bad eating habits.
Have you ever had that thing where you, you know, it's the old chestnut about Chinese food, you know, you're hungry a couple of hours later.
Are you objectively hungry?
No, you've had enough calories, but you're experiencing the subjective experience of hunger, right?
Now, maybe we can measure, if you're doing some experiment, right?
You could measure the hunger hormones in people's body, and if they were present, you'd say, okay, they're experiencing hunger most likely because of these hormones, right?
But let's say they've eaten recently, they are not producing these hunger hormones, and they say, I feel hungry.
Okay, well, Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.
You know, when I was a kid, if I didn't want to go to school, I would have terrible stomach pains, you know, kind of unverifiable and so on, right?
So was it real?
Nah, not really. Just, you know, every sane kid needs a break from that propaganda meal from time to time.
Not that you should do it ever.
It's wrong. But anyway, so if somebody says, I feel hungry and they just ate and they have no hunger hormones, Do they feel hungry?
Maybe. Maybe they're lying.
Maybe they're just saying that they're hungry so they can get more food because they're greedy.
I don't know. It just depends how you define hunger.
If hunger is the purely subjective experience, independent of the amount of food or the presence of the hunger hormones, boy, that sounds like a really bad trilogy, doesn't it?
The hunger hormones. So...
If hunger is a subjective experience, then it's not in the realm of philosophy.
Purely subjective experiences are not in the realm of philosophy.
They're in the realm of personal honesty, personal trust, conversation.
Understand? They're not in the realm of philosophy.
Philosophy is that which can be objectively measured.
So what's in the realm of philosophy?
Well, the fact that your body needs food.
That's in the realm of biology really, but it's a philosophically true statement to say your body needs food.
That the experience of hunger is produced by particular hormones within the body.
I don't know if they're hormones or why I think they're hormones, right?
But if we say that the presence or absence of these hormones is the definition of hunger, then again we can measure these things.
They move from the realm of subjective opinion into empirical fact.
When it's empirically verifiable, when it's objectively verifiable, then it's in the realm of philosophy.
If it's not objectively verifiable, then it's in the realm of personal trust.
And relationships. Do you trust the person to tell you the truth if they say they had a dream about a clown last night?
Well, that's up to you.
Do they tell the truth in general?
Does it make sense as a whole?
Do you trust them to tell the truth as a whole?
And personal trust is not in the realm of philosophy.
Now, I think you can say that if someone has been honest with you as a whole for 20 years, Absent any brain injury or, I don't know, conversion to Satanism out of nowhere, they're not going to just wake up and start pathologically lying to you because character tends to be pretty consistent throughout life.
I remember going to a high school reunion completely by accident.
I was just down picking a friend of mine up who happened to live near the high school.
There was a reunion. We just decided to drop in.
And it was just amazing to me how everybody was exactly the same as they were in high school.
I could see people down the hallway, and the way that they walked was exactly the same, whether they were sloped shoulder, whether they stood up straight.
I mean, the athletic people were still generally athletic, and we were all a little worse for wear through time.
It's a pretty brutal tire track that time leaves on your face, but it's all pretty much the same.
And, you know, people were saying to me, yeah, you're pretty much the same.
Character tends to remain fairly constant.
I mean, you can improve, you can change as a whole, but your character as a whole tends to remain fairly constant throughout life.
So, in the realm of personal trust, you can say if somebody's been lying to you, then they've earned your lack of trust.
If somebody's been telling the truth to you, then they've earned your trust.
But subjective statements are not in the realm of philosophy.
And people will do this to you all the time.
Right? These people, these Eccles will, edge case lords, they will do this to you all the time.
And they will constantly switch between a purely subjective experience and an objective measurable experience.
Or, sorry, a purely subjective experience and an objective measurable fact.
Do we need calories to survive?
Yes, we do. Is there a hunger hormone?
Yes, there is. If somebody subjectively says that they're hungry, And they just ate and there's no hunger hormones in their system.
Can we objectively verify that they're hungry?
No, we can't. There are some people who go on hunger strikes who report that after a day or two of not eating, they don't feel hungry anymore.
Does that mean they're not hungry?
Depends how you define it.
If you define it as something they just feel, then they don't feel hungry.
You can say you trust them or not or whatever, right?
But... It's not in the realm of philosophy.
If they have massive washes of hunger hormones in their system, and we know they haven't eaten in a couple of days, that objectively their body needs food, and that's hunger.
Hunger is your body needs food, right?
Again, you can define it subjectively, you can define it objectively, and switching these definitions is a concentric of these predators called the Eccles, and it's really, really important.
You'll see this all the time.
You say, ah, so you're into truth and falsehood.
Tell me. Tell me this.
Is love a true thing?
Does love exist?
Is it a fact? Well, love is a subjective experience.
My definition of love, which I stand by very strongly, is that love is our involuntary response to virtue if we are ourselves virtuous.
So if you're a virtuous person, you try to do the right thing, you tell the truth, you try to act with some honor and integrity, nobody's perfect, but you know, you aim at it, right?
So if you are a virtuous person and you come across another virtuous person, you will tend to hold that person in high regard.
That may not be all the way to love because you have friends and you may have varying degrees of virtue and everybody's on the journey to the good and all that.
But you will have a positive response to someone who's virtuous if you yourself are virtuous.
If you are Immoral or evil and you come across a virtuous person you will feel I mean it's a complex thing that the evil people have with relationship to good people there's envy there's desire to achieve it there's hatred in the belief you can't the evil person can't achieve it there's a predatory desire to destroy the good because it reveals the evil in the same way that the shadow that the shadow is revealed by the statue in front of the Sun so it's complicated but it's not love right Now,
love, also there are bonding hormones that are released.
It happens with mothers and child.
It happens with sexual or romantic bonding.
There's a high. And so there's a lot of things that you can measure with regards to objective.
You know, does somebody get dopamine or serotonin release in the presence of someone?
You could sort of measure a positive...
When somebody's in the presence of someone else you can measure all of that and there's ways to track if they've been generally virtuous and so on.
So there's lots of ways that you can measure love or attachment in general.
But there's also if you just define it as a purely subjective experience then it comes down to personal trust.
I mean if somebody says I love the band, I don't know, In Excess.
Let's switch from Queen for once in my life.
So somebody says, oh, I love the band In Excess, right?
And then you, in the old days, you'd look at their record collection.
I guess later you'd look at CD collections.
Now you might look at their playlists or I don't know what is up these days, right?
And there's not a single song or album or anything like that.
You say, I love this band. It's like...
But you never listen to them and you don't have any of their records, so the empirical evidence would point against it.
And there's nothing ever in your play history, I don't know, whatever you could do to sort of track their musical tastes, right?
I love them, but I don't listen to them because I love them so much.
Again, it just comes down to personal trust.
You trust that person to tell the truth.
Also, is there a motive for them to lie or whatever it is, right?
You've got to watch out for these edge cases, right?
So, you ask for the definition.
Somebody says, is this valid?
Is this true? Does morality exist?
Is it true? Is it blah blah blah, right?
Well, no. Morality doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist like a tree exists, or like electricity exists, or gravity, which is a relationship between objects that have mass.
It doesn't exist. So what?
It doesn't mean that it's subjective.
Come on. The scientific method doesn't exist like there's a statue of it somewhere and, you know, you can measure it with tape, right?
The scientific method doesn't exist.
Mathematics as an abstract discipline doesn't exist in the real world.
There are three coconuts, but there's not the number three that's glued onto the number of coconuts.
So there's tons of things.
Logic doesn't exist.
Science doesn't exist. Mathematics doesn't exist.
Even price doesn't exist.
There's a relationship between two things of value that are being exchanged for mutual benefit.
You say you're going to pay $20,000 for a car.
The car exists. The money, well, it's fiat money, so it mostly somewhat exists by convention, like grammar, right?
But the $20,000 is an abstract way of describing the relationship between your money and the car.
The money exists. The car exists.
The $20,000 number doesn't exist.
It's just the way that you describe these relationships, right?
So, I mean, the vast majority of what we deal with in the world doesn't exist, but it's objective.
You know, I mean, time.
There's no reason why it would be divided into 24 hours and 60 minutes and 60 seconds.
Just a convention, right? Time.
I mean, yeah, it moves forward in a linear fashion, but the way we've sliced and diced it doesn't exist in the real world.
That doesn't mean that you don't have to show up at 9 o'clock when you have a 9 o'clock appointment.
Time is subjective, man!
So, I mean, the fact that something doesn't exist in the objective universe, if it's tied into the objective universe, like how did we know we needed to add a day every four years?
Because the Earth goes around the Sun 364 and a quarter, right?
So every four years, you've got to add a day to keep up with things, right?
And every now and then, I think they change the clocks a tiny bit or whatever it is, right?
So... If the mental structure you have created references something in the objective universe, then although the mental construct doesn't exist in the same way that the objective universe does, it doesn't mean it's subjective because it describes the objective universe, right? And people say, oh gosh, watch the difference between a tree and a shrub, and there's something halfway in between, and some people call it...
Doesn't matter. The edge case lord stuff is just nonsense.
Because what they're trying to do is get you to doubt an edge case.
And as they say in the law, edge cases make bad law, right?
So what they do is they're trying to get you to live in the uncertainty and then extend the uncertainty to everything.
Yeah, there are edge cases.
Some 18-year-olds are very immature.
Some 16-year-olds are very mature.
But you've got to have some objective definition of the difference between a child and an adult.
You just have to as a society.
And it's kind of labor-intensive to do some test of objectivity, which will probably be corrupted anyway by whatever special interest groups.
So what they'll do is they'll say, well, they'll define something as partly objective and partly subjective.
And then they'll say, focus on the subjective part.
Can you prove it objectively? And you'll say no.
And then they'll say, well, then there's no such thing as objectivity.
This happens over and over.
I've done this enough. And it's really boring, right?
Once you see this pattern, right?
So they'll say, does hunger exist?
Right? And you say, well, yeah, people feel hungry.
It's like, how do you prove that they feel hungry?
How do you prove that they're not lying?
You say, oh, no. I guess you could go with the hunger hormone or you could go with the objective fact, the body needs food.
It's like, no, what if it's purely subjective and you have to rely on their self-reporting?
Can you prove it? It's like, well, no.
Then it's not in the realm of philosophy anymore.
Right? It's like a sunset is, you know, when the sun appears to sink up the horizon because of the turning earth and that kind of...
That's the sunset, right? Yeah.
It's an objective thing.
Whether the sun is going down or coming up, it's kind of an objective thing, right?
So that's in the realm of science or reality, philosophy, truth, right?
I like sunrises.
I guess, you know, I actually, I personally like sunrises, but I don't really like getting up early, so there's not a whole lot of proof of me getting up and reflectively sipping coffee while the ball of nuclear weaponry, you know, vaunts up on the sky like a balanced beach ball.
No, it's not a lot of evidence that I do it, although I do like sunrises every now and now.
I have to do it for various reasons, and it's like, yeah, it's kind of nice watching the sun come up.
It's a new day. It's a new dawn, and that's nice.
Some people like rain.
Some people like sun. Rain and sun are objective phenomena.
Sunny is a rainy subjective. Whether you like it or not, it's subjective.
And although there may be some evidence for it, if it's defined as purely subjective, that's just the way that it is.
So watch out for these Eccles, man, these edge case laws.
They'll get in. Really loosey-goosey defines some stuff.
It ends up being purely subjective.
You can't prove it objectively, and then they say there's no such thing as objectivity.
Very, very dangerous people.
Very dangerous people. Anybody who comes between you and rational certainty is a dangerous predator who must be either reformed or avoided, I would say, with great intensity.
Thanks so much for listening and for watching.
I'll talk to you soon. Lots of love from up here.
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