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Oct. 24, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:29:31

HOW TO GO INSANE! UPB CALL IN AND QUANTUM PHYSICS DEBATE

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	So, hi. Yes, it's Steph.
	We're going to do all things UPP. It's going to all be sorted today.
	It's all sorted. It's all over.
	It's all done with. And there will be never any doubts you can march forward as secular ethics crusaders and take on the hordes of subjectivists and relativists and moral realists and Sam Harasoids of the world because we are going to sort it all out today.
	The brush fire will clear forth a new forest of lush virtue.
	Okay, so this dude, and I thought he was going to be here, but again, he had other things to do.
	I'm sure there's a good reason for it.
	I've had a history of, not just now, but in the past 16 years, even before that, people come on real strong.
	Your theory is crap!
	And then you're like, oh, can we...
	Can we debate it? Oh, no, I'm busy.
	Oh, I'm so sorry.
	I got stuff to do, man. Oh, love to.
	Love to. But, you know, it's not really possible.
	And again, I don't want to put him necessarily in that category, but I mean, what is more important than figuring out right from wrong?
	Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	And for people who have higher priorities than figuring out right from wrong, on a Sunday...
	I have questions. I mean, the chance to have a debate and clarify your thinking with a prominent philosopher, boy, that's not something that comes along every day.
	It's not something that's super common.
	And yet, people just don't seem to be that keen on it when it comes to the facts.
	Okay. So, there's a couple of quotes from the guy.
	And I, you know, no disrespect to him.
	This is just an object lesson.
	So he says, my problems with UPB are at a more fundamental level.
	I would bring up basic epistemological problems and metaphysical problems.
	I think it would be good for the people just getting into philosophy.
	Okay. Sorry, it's so obvious when you've been around the block a couple of times.
	In fact, when you built the block in this particular case.
	I guess you ask your question, right?
	I posted a picture the other day of myself when I was a wee bit chunkier, about 30 pounds heavier.
	And about the time my daughter was born, I lost a bunch of weight and 30 pounds or so.
	And I've kept it off and I actually weigh less now than I did when I was 18.
	So not bad for 55 and all that, right?
	But what I had to do, of course, was I had to change everything.
	Like if you want to lose weight and keep it off, as you know, like 97% of people, even if they lose weight, they don't keep it off.
	And a good percentage of those just regain more, right?
	So what do you have to do to lose weight?
	Well, you have to change everything.
	Like, you have to change everything.
	I mean, you have to exercise more, you have to eat less, you have to make sure you get good sleep, because if you can't get good sleep, you can't generally lose weight.
	And you have to not return...
	You know, gosh, when I... 25 years ago, you know, I'd have, like, an orange and a candy bar after dinner.
	Like, I would eat a Mr.
	Big Bar. Like, I don't do that anymore.
	I can't even remember the last time I ate a full candy, but I'll still have a nibble of chocolate here and there.
	My daughter likes making chocolate treats, and I'll have a nibble here and there, but you just have to change everything.
	And so there's a reason. I'm not, you know, I know you guys aren't fascinated with my diet advice or anything like that, but you have to change everything and you can't go back.
	It's not a temporary thing, right?
	Chips, cookies, chocolate, candy, whatever it is, you know, the four C's of the apocalypse, you just got to not have that stuff around.
	And you can never really have that stuff around.
	You go out for dinner. You can't have dessert.
	You take sugar in your coffee, you can't do that anymore.
	Right? So, you just have to change your life and not change back.
	Now, the reason I'm saying all of this is that those are actual actions that are specific and you can do, right?
	Now, how much weight do you think I lose by describing a diet?
	Oh, you've got to cut out your this, you've got to add more of that, here's what you...
	I mean, it doesn't do anything other than the one calorie it consumes you to say it, right?
	If you simply describe your diet, you're not losing weight at all.
	Now, if you actually change your actions, if you do something specific and actionable, okay, then you can lose your weight.
	But simply describing your diet.
	And so, when I was in the business world...
	Descriptions were bullshit.
	Always, always, always, always.
	Descriptions were bullshit.
	Right? So somebody would say, well, you know, we've got to have, this has got to be better specified, and we can't be overpaying for that, and we've got to make sure we drive profits on this.
	I mean, that's all bullshit.
	Like, give me something specific and actionable, or go away.
	Give me something specific and actionable.
	Or go away. Now, there are people in this world, and there's a lot of people in this world, and I think this guy might be one of them.
	I call it an appeal to insecurity.
	It's an appeal to insecurity.
	So what People do as they say, oh, UPP has so many problems, I can't even list them all.
	I mean, you've got your metaphysical problems, you've got your epistemological problems, you've got your consistency problems, you've got your self-contradictory problems, you've got so many problems.
	I mean, clearly, Steph is not a trained philosopher.
	He doesn't have a PhD from Harvard.
	He's an amateur, and it's completely obvious to anybody in the field.
	He's not taken seriously by anyone.
	If UPP is so great, why hasn't it spread?
	And there are all these problems, and the book is so...
	These are all descriptions.
	They mean nothing!
	In fact, it's worse than nothing and it's less than nothing.
	It's an appeal to insecurity.
	They pile on unspecified negative bullshit until they hope you just give up your position.
	Oh, your position is so self-contradictory.
	Oh, you've not even understood the basics of Augustinian approach to ethics.
	Oh, this is just a warmed-over rehash of Kant's categorical imperative, but you're too uneducated to even know these things.
	Do you have a specific fucking criticism?
	Do you? Do you have a specific criticism referencing something in the actual text?
	Anything? Have you found a contradiction in the argument?
	Tell me on the page where the doll touched you.
	You've got to look out for this descriptive stuff, right?
	Basic epistemological problems and metaphysical problems.
	What are they?
	What are they?
	The description stuff.
	People just describe how you're wrong without actually telling you how you're wrong.
	They're attempting to program you with negative opinions about something so that you will give up the position.
	And you understand?
	It's a great compliment.
	It's a fantastic compliment.
	When people only describe how you're wrong without telling you what you're wrong about, it's a massive compliment.
	So, for instance, my issue with Kant's categorical imperative, which is act as if the principle of your action became a general law for everyone.
	Why do I have a problem with it?
	Because it's not objective and universal.
	The strongest man in the village would love for an arm wrestling contest to determine who gets the prettiest bride.
	He's willing to make that a universal standard.
	Yes, everybody should participate in an arm wrestling contest.
	I'm willing to have that as a universal standard so that I get the prettiest bride.
	And then you might say to him, ah, yes, but when you're 70, you won't be as strong anymore.
	And a younger person, I don't care.
	I've already had my bride for 50 years.
	What do I care about 70, right?
	I'm willing to make that a universal standard.
	Now, that's not UPB compliant.
	But that's just so I can type that out in about a minute.
	I can voice dictate it in about 30 seconds.
	So there's an argument against Kant's categorical imperative.
	So I can go through Plato.
	I could just go with everything saying, you know, I could go through Ayn Rand.
	He is saying, like Ayn Rand, reason is man's tools for survival, therefore, everything which...
	Life is the highest value.
	Reason serves life. Therefore, anything which interferes with the capacity to reason and act on it is against life.
	That's not true. That's not true.
	There are people who act against reason all the time who are enormously successful in their lives.
	Now, you could say, but maybe they don't have existential levels of happiness.
	But he said human life, not human happiness.
	Reason serves life, therefore that which interferes with reason diminishes life.
	Life is the highest value, blah, blah, blah.
	That's all nonsense. I love Ayn Rand, don't get me wrong, but that's all nonsense.
	Now, sorry, nonsense is a description word, but I gave you the argument already.
	Think of Genghis Khan, a guy who raped and slaughtered his way across Asia Minor.
	Now, one in every 17 people is his descendant.
	He obviously liked doing it because he kept doing it.
	He was incredibly successful.
	His lineage was incredibly successful.
	His genetics were about as successful as any human beings in history.
	So this idea that somehow anti-rationality is negative to the flourishing of human life, it's just empirically false.
	So when people say, oh, there are so many, oh, the basic, basic epistemological problems, says Isaac, they're just basic.
	It's like, well, stop telling me about how I'm wrong and tell me how I'm actually wrong.
	Stop giving me the categories of errors that I have made.
	How about you give me these specific errors?
	Because this is my question, right?
	So if I have an issue with Kant's categorical imperative or if I have an issue with Hume's dictum skepticism that you can't get an ought from an is, oh, you just did.
	You can't! You cannot get an ought from an is.
	Oh, you just did. Which is you say you cannot.
	Therefore, we've got one. We can have more, right?
	So it's easier...
	To type out the actual problems than it is to just keep describing them.
	Did you see what I mean? This is how you know it's total bullshit.
	Now, I don't mean to say that he knows that it is or whatever, but from a philosophical standpoint, if people give you a couple of paragraphs on how you're wrong without mentioning a specific instance, they're full of shit.
	They're totally, completely full of shit.
	Where are the specific issues?
	Right? I used to, and this is way back in the day when I first did my first, well, my second essay that I ever published was Proving Libertarian Morality, which was the backbone of UPB. And people would just keep telling me that I was wrong, that it was naive, that it was ridiculous, that it didn't take into account this or that, there were basic problems.
	And I said, look, the syllogisms are right there.
	The syllogisms are right there on the page.
	Tell me where the error is.
	But if I keep telling you that you are wrong, without telling you how you're wrong, maybe you'll be chicken enough to give up your position.
	I'll just keep layering negative words on your position until you give it up.
	Like a cuck. Well, no.
	I take it as an enormous compliment.
	So what does he say here? He says, I don't see how a belief in objective universal moral laws proves UPB! I understand that UPB is part of moral realism.
	There are many moral realist positions.
	Just accepting that axiom doesn't mean UPB is true.
	Okay, first of all, Isaac, I'm sorry you're not here.
	Maybe we can talk another time. But your failure to understand my argument Does not invalidate my argument.
	I really don't know how to put it any more clearly than that.
	It's an argument from stupidity.
	It's an argument from stupidity.
	Why? Well, because...
	Do you know how many arguments there are in the world that I fail to understand?
	Or that you fail to understand.
	I mean, it's a lot, right?
	I'm sorry to go from whisper scream, from a whisper to a scream, right?
	It's a lot of arguments. Show me an argument in Japanese.
	I don't read Japanese or speak Japanese, other than what Styx taught me.
	Not Hex and Hammer, but the band, Dennis DeYoung.
	I don't understand it. Does that mean it's wrong?
	Hey, you know what else I don't understand?
	Complex mathematical equations.
	I don't understand these complex mathematical equations, therefore they're wrong.
	Ooh, ooh, I know!
	Write me an argument that shows how quantum physics is valid, but do it in Latin.
	Well, I don't understand the Latin argument for quantum physics.
	Therefore, there's something wrong with that argument.
	It hasn't satisfied me to the point where I understand it.
	So when you say, well, I don't see how this shows that, that is not a specific rebuttal.
	That is not a specific and disciplined refutation of a particular point.
	Well, I don't understand.
	Okay. Maybe you should study it some more.
	Maybe you should try to understand it.
	And maybe you shouldn't shovel your pig-ignorant lack of understanding at my feet and expect me to fix it for you.
	It's very easy to say, well, I just don't see how this follows.
	Okay? I get it.
	So what does that mean?
	Well, there's something wrong with it, man, because I don't understand it.
	There's something wrong with it.
	It's like, no, that doesn't follow.
	And the fact that you would think that that's an argument shows how profoundly ignorant you are in what an actual debate is or an analysis is.
	And maybe you've just never gone through the discipline.
	I mean, when I was taking my year-long course in graduate school on the Protestant Reformation, We had to take Martin Luther's arguments and break them out bit by bit, sequence by sequence, understand them, argue for them.
	I actually played Martin Luther in a play once.
	I had to really understand his arguments, inhabit them, breathe them, know them.
	I couldn't just say, I don't understand his arguments, therefore he's wrong.
	How ridiculous would that be?
	Listen, I mean, it's a funny thing, right?
	I don't understand how computers work.
	I don't. And no one does.
	You may understand a specific bit about a computer.
	Get it? But nobody knows how a pencil is made.
	That famous, was it Lawrence Reed?
	That eye pencil, right? Nobody knows how a pencil is made.
	Nobody. One pencil.
	Nobody has a clue how a pencil is made.
	You might know how to make the lead or the graphite.
	You might know how to make the wood. You might know how to make the paint.
	You might know how to make the metal or the eraser.
	But nobody knows everything there is to know about how a pencil is made.
	Not one person. And nobody knows how a computer works.
	Or how computers, particularly when you put them all together on the internet and the hardware, the keyboard, the Electrical impulses, the processing, the sending, the receiving, the validation, the IP contract, the servers.
	Nobody knows how all of that works.
	Not one person. Like, nobody knows how the tax laws work.
	Not one person knows how computers work.
	So he says, look, just because I don't know how computers work doesn't mean that they don't work well enough for me to type this argument on a server.
	So he's saying, look, I don't understand something.
	It doesn't mean it doesn't work.
	I don't understand how all this computer technology works together so that I type here and you read there.
	But that doesn't mean it doesn't...
	Just because I don't understand it doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
	Just because I don't understand it doesn't mean that it's wrong.
	And what kind of vanity...
	I'm sorry, like, I mean...
	It's really funny.
	It's really funny to me.
	Because it's solipsistic and it's almost narcissistic to me.
	Like, what kind of unbelievable vanity...
	Would you have to have to say, well, I don't understand something, therefore it's wrong.
	I don't understand something, therefore it's false.
	I am the definition of all that is true and valid, and if it's incomprehensible to me, it's completely false in reality.
	It's unbelievable to me.
	Where's the humility?
	Where's the humility?
	Oh, it's just amazing.
	You know, I mean, you hear this kind of stuff with...
	If you've been an objectivist or you've been around the Rand world, I mean, you hear this, oh, and Rand was a completely incompetent philosopher, and the characters were really...
	The dialogue is so stilted.
	It's like, okay, those are all statements of subjective experience and artistic judgment, which is pretty subjective.
	Um... Where in her arguments did she go astray?
	You know, she compressed everything she did into 60-odd pages at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Galt's famous speech.
	Tell me where her reasoning went astray.
	Well, she just didn't really understand how money worked.
	Okay. That's just a description.
	It's an appeal to ignorance.
	And it's an appeal to slavery, really.
	So when somebody said, well, she just didn't really understand how money works.
	Okay. What they're saying is that they know how money works so well that they can tell everyone who deviates from it and they've done a detailed analysis, right?
	And say, okay, where is it that she has made her mistake?
	Oh, I mean, it's all over.
	Every time she writes about money, she just gets it fundamentally wrong.
	I have no idea why. And it's like, these are all just descriptions.
	And when you see this stuff, you see it's happening all the time in the world.
	I'm really arming you guys To sniff out and reject the sophists.
	Right? Steph's a cult leader.
	Okay. What's your definition of a cult and how does he match it?
	I don't know, but I heard that.
	So you're just a dangerous gossip repeater.
	You know, like a blindfolded monkey with a machine gun.
	So, UPB... It's tricky.
	It's not tricky because it's fundamentally so complicated.
	It's tricky because we get lied to about ethics for so long.
	Understanding UPB is like trying to do math with somebody shouting random numbers into your ear.
	It's tough. Not because the math you're doing is tough, because there's so many countervailing currents and distractions, right?
	So Isaac says, I don't see how a belief in objective universal moral laws proves UPB. So I don't see is not an argument.
	Right? So, if you don't see something, look harder.
	I can't... I don't see where my keys are, therefore my keys don't exist.
	I mean, this is at the intellectual level of the three-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek who covers her own eyes and says, I can't see you.
	Oh, you can't see me, right?
	Because she can't see you. Right?
	So, I don't see how a belief in objective...
	Sorry, screensaver just kicked in there.
	I don't see how a belief in objective universal moral laws proves UPB. I mean, there's so much wrong with that sentence.
	A belief? UPB is not about believing something.
	It's not like a cheesy Disney, just believe.
	Believe and magic will happen.
	Put on makeup and you'll get money.
	Actually, that's kind of true. A belief in objective universal moral laws...
	If they're objective and universal in laws, you don't just believe in them.
	It's literally like me criticizing Newton.
	I don't see how a belief in gravity proves Newton's laws.
	It's like you don't believe in gravity.
	You accept. I don't know if it's this incredibly girlified culture that we live in, but, you know, spoiler, there's a huge difference between Epistemologically, in terms of knowledge, there's a huge difference between belief and acceptance.
	Do I believe that human beings are mortal?
	Actually, do I believe that? No.
	I accept that.
	You don't believe in facts.
	You accept facts.
	Do I just believe that two and two make four?
	Or that the Earth is a sphere? Do I just believe that?
	Do I believe...
	I believe that the Moon exists.
	I believe that there is such a thing as gravity.
	No. Belief is when there is doubt.
	Believe in yourself.
	Look, I had to believe in myself before I manifested my potential.
	Did I have empirical evidence that I could build the world's biggest philosophy show?
	I did not. Did I think I had a lot to say?
	Was an original thinker and had massive value to offer?
	I did believe that. Could I prove it?
	I could not. Did I believe I could write great novels?
	I had to believe that I could write great novels in order to start writing novels.
	I do believe that I have written great novels.
	AlmostNovel.com is totally free.
	You'll know when you hear.
	So I don't just believe that I could write great novels.
	I don't just believe that I could create the world's biggest philosophy show.
	No! The belief was in the potential.
	Does Tom Hanks believe he can get an Oscar?
	No! He accepts that he did get a bunch of them.
	However creepy he may be.
	He's a good actor. Does Bill Gates believe he can become very wealthy?
	No. He accepts that he is very wealthy.
	It's a fact. It's a fact.
	So, this is how chaotic...
	And see, this is a basic epistemological...
	He says, well, I would bring up basic epistemological problems with UPP. But then he says, objective universal moral laws, objective and universal and law, forget the morality part, objective universal laws.
	You don't just believe in those, you accept them.
	Now, if you say, well, it's just a belief, then you can't say objective universal and laws.
	These are two contradictory statements.
	And UPB is about objective universal moral laws.
	Universally preferable behavior is the proof for objective universal moral laws.
	So he's saying, I don't believe, I don't see how a belief in UPB proves UPB. But this is all just chaotic.
	It doesn't make any sense. He says, I understand that UPB is a part of moral realism.
	Okay. What's the definition of moral realism?
	How do you know that UPB is a part of moral realism?
	How do you know that the claims made in UPB are subsumed under the category of moral realism?
	It doesn't define anything.
	It doesn't say anything. He's just pulling words out of his ass.
	There are many moral realist positions.
	just accepting that axiom doesn't mean that UPB is true.
	So I understand that UPB is a part of moral realism.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	How do you know? I've never made that claim.
	I wouldn't even know how to evaluate that claim, but somehow he's made that claim, so he's just shuffling words around in his head and trying to look smart and trying to look informed and trying to look like he's just so much above things and really looking down at these little arguments.
	But there's no actual argument here, right?
	I don't understand something.
	I do understand something that's completely false, that UPB is a part of moral realism.
	So then he goes on, he said, when I said this, I was requesting clarification on his argument.
	I understand that this isn't an argument.
	My argument is that UPB can't be justified from the presuppositions you start with.
	See, that's not an argument.
	So this guy, basic epistemological problems, how you know truth from falsehood, and metaphysical problems.
	I don't even know the nature of reality, apparently.
	He says, my argument is that UPB can't be justified from the presuppositions you start with.
	That's just a claim.
	That's what you would have to prove.
	But he thinks that saying it proves it.
	I have a million dollars.
	Oh, let me go check my bank account.
	Saying it doesn't prove it.
	I don't know. I mean, how can you make it clearer than that?
	You can't be justified from the presuppositions you start with.
	And he thinks that he's proven something.
	He's just made wet mammal noises with his breathing hole.
	And I only say this not because he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, but because he's throwing these words around like he knows what he's talking about, and that's both dangerous and offensive.
	It's dangerous to people's clarity of thought, and it's offensive to me as an actual philosopher that you think this shit can fly at all.
	He said, as an empiricist, you can't justify empiricism without being circular.
	Okay. That's not an argument.
	I use the word circular, therefore I've proved that your argument is circular.
	In the same way that I use the word tautology, and therefore I've proven that your argument is a tautology.
	I've called you wrong, therefore you're wrong.
	Why? Magic.
	I have spells in my throat.
	I am reality.
	If I don't understand something, it's incomprehensible.
	If I say something's wrong, it's wrong because my words are physics and physics is just an opinion.
	So he says, as an empiricist, you can't justify empiricism without being circular.
	Okay. Glad you said some words.
	Would you like to make an argument?
	No. What he does is he goes on to say, you need to have a solid grounding in epistemology and metaphysics.
	Again, wet noises from his mammal hole.
	You need to have a solid grounding in epistemology and metaphysics.
	Okay. Is that an argument?
	No. But it is important to have a solid grounding.
	Wouldn't you agree that it's important to have a solid grounding in epistemology and metaphysics?
	Sure. It's not an argument.
	Doctor, how should I become healthy?
	You need to have a solid grounding in good health practices.
	Yeah, okay. You want to tell me what they are?
	No. And then he says, you need properly basic beliefs.
	Which is not quite English, or at least not quite good English.
	You need proper...
	Doctor, how should I become healthy?
	You need a solid grounding in proper health practices.
	You also need properly basic beliefs.
	That will be $150.
	It's like, you've said nothing.
	Nothing! So he says, you need properly basic beliefs.
	If you can't justify these things, your position is arbitrary.
	Hello, projection!
	What has he justified? He's just said a bunch of shit.
	I don't see this.
	UPP is part of moral realism, which I'm not going to define nor prove.
	UPP can't be justified from the presuppositions you start with.
	It's just a statement. No proof.
	No evidence. No quotes.
	As an empiricist, you can't justify empiricism without being circular.
	That's just an empty claim.
	All based within language.
	No actual Facts?
	You need to have a solid grounding in epistemology and metaphysics.
	He's not said anything about the nature of reality, how you determine truth, how UPB has deviated from the truth, what truth is.
	He said nothing. You need to have a solid grounding in these things which I'm not going to define or detail at all.
	You need properly basic beliefs.
	Sure, okay, yeah. That's going to be my new philosophy mantra.
	You need properly basic beliefs.
	Steph, what is truth? Well, truth is when you have properly basic beliefs.
	What's virtue? Properly basic beliefs.
	It's not UPB, it's PBB. I'm giving up on UPB going with PBB. You need properly basic beliefs because that clears everything up.
	It's like the sun rising on fog just blows all the fog away.
	You need PBB, properly basic beliefs, and you're good.
	And if you can't justify these things, your position is arbitrary.
	What does he justify? Of course he's good.
	It's not even arbitrary, it's just incomprehensible.
	So, that's not much language that he was putting out, right?
	But the amount of nonsense that's in it...
	And listen, you guys, you've got to help me out here, brothers and sisters.
	You've got to help me out here. Please, I'm begging you.
	Ask people to define some shit, you know?
	It's a philosophy show.
	Definitions are everything. Everything.
	Anybody can push syllables around like they're shoveling shit, and most people do.
	It's arbitrary. It's logical.
	It's self-referenced circular.
	Okay, this is just a bunch of buzzwords.
	You know, when Elon Musk was, I think, pushing Dogecoin and bagging on Bitcoin, he was like, well, Bitcoin just needs to be faster and faster.
	More decentralized and more efficient.
	It's just a bunch of words.
	Can I manage an engineering team just by yelling, build better, at them every day?
	Just build better, make things cheaper and more efficient and stronger and more long-lasting.
	I'm a genius of a manager.
	I'm just really helping these guys.
	You know, when I was a manager of like 30 programmers and testers and all that, did I just yell at them every morning?
	So it's really important that your code compile, do what is in the specifications, is maintainable and efficient.
	I sit down with meetings with the board and say, well, I think our plan should be To sell more, lower our costs, and increase our profits.
	It's just a bunch of words, dude.
	My plan is to lose weight.
	How? Unspecified.
	I'm going to have properly basic beliefs about diet and exercise.
	What are they going to be? Can't tell you.
	Won't tell you. But it's important to having solid grounding in nutrition.
	You guys got to help me out here.
	Come on. Call bullshit when you see it.
	That's my entire business plan.
	Call bullshit when you see it.
	The problems with UBB are at a more fundamental level.
	Okay. Any elevator down to that level?
	Can we turn on a flashlight, look around?
	No! But it's important not to be arbitrary.
	Okay, he's just making a bunch of claims here.
	And look, I'm sure he's a nice guy.
	I'm not trying to sort of bag on this guy in particular.
	But, you know, we've got to help each other out out of love.
	This kind of exquisitely retarded bullshit artistry needs to be called out because you've got to wake him up from this void of platonic excrement language that he's currently spouting around thinking he's doing something in the world.
	Right? You know, if you have a kid...
	Who's trying to help you, and they keep spilling things and breaking things, and I'm helping!
	At some point, okay, it's fine when they're three, but at some point you have to say, no, you're not.
	Sorry, you're not helping. You're not helping.
	You're breaking things, you're spilling things.
	It's taking a lot longer to do it, and it's fine.
	You're still a little kid, but let's not imagine that you're helping.
	Call the bullshit when you see it.
	Ask for specifics. What is the quote in the book that supports your position?
	Right? This is when I was doing the debate with the communists to say, you're an ethno-nationalist.
	It's like, okay, when have I ever said I'm an ethno-nationalist?
	Well, you said something about immigration.
	That doesn't follow. Yes, I said things about immigration.
	It doesn't follow. It doesn't follow at all.
	In fact, I have said that all the ethnicities are here.
	All the races are here. We've got to find a way to get along.
	The best way to do that is through discussions of IQ. Which is why the communists don't want you to talk about it.
	Why do you want to talk about IQ? Well, for the exact reason that you as communists desperately don't want me to talk about IQ. Because, you know, it's a far superior explanation for disparities in economic outcomes than this fantasy younger sibling resentment model of exploitation.
	So help people.
	Like, why would you let people continue with this gobbledygook baffle gab crap And not help them.
	This is going to sound strong, and again, I'm not talking about this guy in particular, because I've been dealing with this stuff for 40 years, right?
	So forgive me for being mildly short-tempered, but where is your love?
	It's a fundamental question.
	Not just a black-eyed peas one, but a philosophy.
	Where is your love?
	Look, if someone comes into your home like Harry the Hedgewound from SNL, right?
	If someone comes into your home and they're bleeding, Do you just say, oh, okay, yeah, let's get some lunch.
	Do you ignore it? No.
	If someone is bleeding, don't you say, whoa, dude, have a seat.
	Let's bind that up. I'm going to call the doctor.
	We're going to get you to a hospital.
	We're going to figure out why are you bleeding?
	This is a wounded mind.
	It's been wounded by nonsense.
	It's been wounded by sophistry.
	It's been wounded by contradiction.
	It's been wounded by manipulation.
	And you're not helping him?
	You know, if somebody gets leprosy, they can lose nerve endings, right?
	Stephen R. Donaldson taught me about this in the Covenant series, right?
	So they can't tell if they're wounded.
	They have to do a VSE, visual search of extremities, right?
	They can't tell that they have a cut or a wound or a blister or a sunburn.
	They can't feel. So they've got to be constantly checking their feet.
	When you go into the woods, you've got to come back and there's ticks.
	So help him.
	Help him to understand that he's not thinking.
	He's just short-circuiting.
	Not this guy in particular.
	It's people as a whole. When they make a bunch of nonsense claims, you've got to help them out.
	Out of love. If you were hiking in the woods and you came across someone...
	Who was trapped under a heavy log, wouldn't you stop and lift it?
	Of course you would. Of course you would.
	When you see somebody fundamentally confused and unable to think clearly, unable to define anything, unable to make a coherent statement, help them.
	I mean, obviously helping them is helping you.
	We all benefit when the world thinks more clearly.
	Helping them is helping you.
	Don't let people persist in error.
	It's bad for them. It hurts them.
	They hurt others.
	When he tries this kind of foggy, nonsense, tentacle brain, sophist attack, there's, like, this is the log he's trapped under.
	It's bullshit. And there's a part of him, it may not be a very obvious part of him, but I guarantee you it's there, there's a part of him My friends, that is begging for you to lift the lager bullshit off his legs.
	Help me think.
	Help me be clear.
	Help me understand that I don't understand.
	Help me stop using words that I don't understand.
	Help me stop intimidating people with an appeal to insecurity.
	Help me stop being a bully that frightens people.
	With my use of words I don't have a clue about.
	Help me out of the fog.
	Help me into the world. Help me into reality.
	Help me into truth. Help me stop being addicted to this garbage I push.
	Now, of course, you call people out.
	Well, look, so because he's doing an appeal to insecurity, he's fundamentally insecure.
	So when people attack you, they're telling you their greatest fear.
	This is Troll 101, right?
	I'm not calling this guy Troll, but this is just in general.
	It's Troll 101, right? When people attack you, they're telling you their worst fear, right?
	So, you know, if you're a torturer, to use an extreme example, if you're a torturer and you're a guy, you're going to punch a guy in the nuts.
	Why? Because you know as a guy that's what hurts you the most.
	And so when you punch a guy in the nuts as a torturer, you're saying that your worst fear is to be punched in the nuts.
	So whatever people try to inflict upon you in your life or online, whatever people try to inflict upon you, they reveal as their own worst fear.
	So when he attempts to appeal to your insecurity by saying, well, your behavior is just fundamentally wrong and it...
	What was the phrase again?
	It lacks PBB, properly basic beliefs.
	It's like, okay, it's just a bunch of nonsense.
	You need solid grounding in these things.
	Okay, what's your solid grounding?
	Can you define anything? What is reality?
	What is truth? It took me 17 hours of my introduction to philosophy, give or take, to make that case.
	I've got a book, Essential Philosophy.
	I make the case against assimilation for free will.
	There's a very compact version of UPB in there, which is really good.
	So when people, like, when he says...
	Well, UPP is just wrong and there are basic epistemological problems.
	What he's doing is he's trying to appeal to your insecurity.
	He's trying to humiliate you into giving up your position.
	Well surely you wouldn't still advocate for such a completely discredited nonsense such as UPB. Surely you can see the clear and basic bad think problems in UPB. Surely you couldn't possibly hold this position.
	When no credible philosopher has ever examined it and found it to be even remotely valid, surely you wouldn't reveal your massive ignorance of basic epistemology and metaphysics.
	Right? So he's attempting to appeal to your insecurity.
	So what he's revealing is that his greatest fear is humiliation.
	Right? His greatest fear is humiliation.
	I'm trying to help him over that fear.
	Right? Because I guess what you could say, like what I'm saying could be counted as humiliating, but I'm being blunt and I do it out of love.
	I do it out of love. This guy's a smart guy, man.
	We could turn this tide.
	We could get him over to the light.
	We could get him to stop all of this manipulative, old womanly, dowager's hump bullshit.
	We could get him to do some real good in his life, right?
	He's a smart guy, great use of language, and he's manipulative, which is fine.
	There's nothing wrong with that if it's used in the right purpose, right?
	In a sense, like you can get your...
	You know, I was told to brush my teeth when I was a kid because I was told that fairies danced on sugar bits and would crack my enamel.
	All right. That's just the noble lie stuff, which I'm not sort of advocating for, but the fact that he is manipulative is not the end of the world.
	Just, you know, try and use it for good or at least use it against bad people.
	So, the problem is, though, when you push back and you correctly identify this verbiage as just total...
	Empty-headed bullshit, he's going to feel very humiliated because that's his worst fear, right?
	But if he can handle his worst fear, if you can handle your worst fear, you become a superpower.
	The superpower is, what's your worst fear, right?
	What's your worst fear? What's your worst fear?
	And if you can face that down, you gain the superpower.
	You know, when I was a kid, bad reputation was the worst thing, right?
	Did I have to face that down over the last 50 years?
	Sure did! Now I can't be harmed by it when people don't have anything to use against me.
	So when you push back, so here's the problem, and this is why you guys don't push back on this, right?
	You're certainly skilled and smart enough to, right?
	But the reason you don't is you sense deep down that if you start asking him to define his terms, right?
	And I did this, and I said, your failure to understand something is not disproof of it, right?
	So, if he says, you know, there are basic epistemological problems, you say, oh, could you please list the basic epistemological problems with reference to the text?
	Right? That's a polite and reasonable...
	If somebody makes a claim, it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to substantiate that claim.
	In fact, it's not only perfectly reasonable, it's kind of essential.
	Right? UPB... And metaphysics.
	UPB is not a metaphysics-facing argument.
	It's an internal consistency argument.
	I'll get to that in a sec, right? So, if somebody says 2 and 2 make 5, is that a metaphysical statement?
	No, it's an internal consistency argument.
	That 2 and 2 make 4, and 5 is not equal to 4, you don't need to know anything about Whether they're oranges or apples or newspapers or whatever it is that's being counted.
	It's not an empirical argument.
	Two and two make five is not a metaphysical argument.
	It's not even an epistemological problem.
	It's because it's self-contradictory, it's false.
	Anything which is self-contradictory, which claims to describe something objective, since the objective universe is consistent, right?
	This is one of Aristotle's three laws of logic and an objective It can only be itself or something else.
	That's why alibis work, because you can't be in two places at the same time.
	So when he says, well, it's epistemological problems and metaphysical problems, it's like, well, no, that might be relevant to my Introduction to Philosophy series or the work that I've done in Essential Philosophy, the free book you can get at essentialphilosophy.com.
	But he's just saying these big-sounding philosophical words and that they're basic.
	Well, ask him for what do you mean by epistemology and if they're basic problems, how is UPB deficient with reference to the book?
	And the reason you need to say with reference to the book is not because the book is some kind of Bible, but because you need to make sure that somebody actually understands UPB before they criticize it.
	Because, I mean, the He says it's, you know, they're epistemological and metaphysical problems.
	No, not really.
	It doesn't really focus on epistemology.
	It certainly doesn't focus on metaphysics.
	Right? When do I ever say that UPB is validated by real-world examples?
	I say that there's evidence for it, but not that it's validated by.
	So, you say, I mean, it's not a pushback.
	It's just, you need to find out if he's If he's full of shit, and listen, most people are full of crap.
	Most people are completely full of crap.
	It's not their fault. It's not innate to human nature.
	But you understand, we're all raised to be ignorant and to feign knowledge.
	We're all raised to be ignorant and to feign knowledge, which are really the two sides of the same coin.
	So your default position, my default position when I go into any debate with anybody is they don't have a clue.
	They don't have a clue.
	And this is not just true of people who are my ideological opponents.
	Even most of my allies don't have a clue.
	Don't have a clue. Does Jordan Peterson understand that taxation is theft?
	The state of society is the only morally just society?
	No, he wouldn't understand that.
	Do libertarians understand that spanking is the most prevalent and actionable violation of the non-aggression principle around?
	Most of them don't. So, yeah, most people are full of crap.
	And once they know that they're full of crap, they can begin to gain wisdom.
	This is not even my argument.
	This is Socrates 101.
	Most people are feigning knowledge.
	Most people are bullshitting.
	Most people are pretending. Most people are sophists.
	Now, this guy, in all of the stuff of his that I read, and I'm sorry to use him as an object example.
	Again, I'm sure he's a nice guy, smart guy, but, you know, needs to wake up to this stuff, right?
	There was not one specific objection to UPB. It was just a bunch of verbiage designed to make him sound smart, UPB sound stupid, so that you would abandon the position.
	The appeal to insecurity.
	Well, you need properly basic beliefs.
	Do you not have properly basic beliefs?
	Yeah, I do. Well, properly basic beliefs tells you that UPB is invalid.
	Okay. PPB. Greater than UPB. I think that was the original of the Jackson 5 song.
	Help him. Help him to understand.
	Look, everybody's got to go through that moment where they realize they're full of shit.
	And not that nature is not natural to them, it's just the way we're raised.
	I mean, I had been a philosopher for...
	I had been really interested in philosophy and read a huge amount about philosophy and came up with some somewhat original ideas about philosophy.
	I mean, some of the stuff in the Rationalist Manifesto.
	You can get it at freedomainnft.com, by the way.
	Pretty original. And then, 16 years ago, I was 39.
	So I did philosophy from 15.
	I did it for almost a quarter century.
	I did philosophy for almost a quarter century.
	And do you know what I said to myself?
	I don't know what virtue is.
	I don't know. I mean, I followed this person, I followed that person, I accepted these arguments, I accepted those arguments, but I could always find holes in them.
	So I studied something for 25 years, both privately, in my social life, and in academia at the graduate school level, undergraduate and graduate school level.
	And after 25 years, I said to myself, ooh, I don't actually know what virtue is.
	I don't know why violence is wrong.
	I don't know why theft is wrong.
	It hurts people.
	It's not an argument. I mean, it certainly doesn't hurt the person who's stealing.
	So... I've gone through that passage and it's like the deconstruction of your entire personality because when you're forged in the fires of bullshit, washing away the bullshit feels like you're washing away your entire personhood.
	Like, what is it that is me that isn't a lie, that isn't bullshit, that isn't crap?
	It's a big question.
	You ever use a high-pressure hose to clean crap off something and then that something also falls apart?
	It's so weakened that the high-pressure hose just causes it to buckle and collapse.
	You ever try and clean something off your car and scratch the paint?
	Of course, right? I'm trying to remove that which is extraneous.
	And, you know, you keep looking inward, you keep looking inward, and you're like, okay, what is there in me that isn't a lie?
	That isn't a pretense. What is there in me that is true?
	Because we base our personalities, our beliefs, on what we perceive to be true.
	We're lied about what truth is.
	We're lied about what virtue is.
	We're lied to about these things.
	And so we say, okay, I'm going to take the high-pressure hose of philosophy.
	I'm going to remove all the crap.
	I've got this painting. It's covered in mud.
	I'm going to... Clean off the mud.
	You clean off the mud, and the paint starts to run.
	You start wiping that up. You wind up with no painting.
	You keep wiping.
	The canvas dissolves, then the frame, then the wall, then the house, and you're like, I shouldn't have started this!
	I'm being undone.
	Unraveled. Like you pick that little thread up off the Carpet, you yank it up.
	Half the carpet comes up.
	Oops! Shouldn't have started this process.
	But it's necessary. It's why we have a modern world.
	You understand? It's why we have all this technology.
	It's why we have still vibrant but somewhat diminished liberties that we possess.
	It's why we can have this conversation.
	People said to themselves, maybe we don't really know how to communicate technologically.
	Maybe the Pony Express isn't the way to go.
	Oh, look, we've got the telegraph.
	Oh, look, we've got the telephone.
	Oh, look, we've got the radio. Oh, look, we've got the internet.
	Help people out.
	Ask them for definitions with reference to the original.
	And I know why you don't do that.
	And you know why you don't do that.
	Maybe you're not conscious, but you know deep down.
	You know that if someone comes along like this, throwing their bullshit weight around, trying to discredit something without providing any details, you start asking them for details, and what happens?
	They escalate.
	They escalate. Because you're pushing them when you say, oh, okay, so it's got basic, what you said, basic metaphysical problems.
	Okay. Can you define metaphysics and give me an example from the book?
	Of these basic metaphysical problems, right?
	As if there's anything about metaphysics that's basic.
	It's like, well, basic quantum physics problems.
	I don't think there's much that's basic about quantum physics or whatever, right?
	Basic vector calculus problems.
	So you ask them, right?
	You say, can you give a brother a definition and an example?
	Because if you tell someone that they're wrong in a public forum and you don't provide any examples, you're kind of a shitbird, frankly.
	It's not good.
	It's not honest.
	It has zero, in fact, negative integrity.
	It's a shitty thing to do.
	To come onto a forum and say, Anyone, in this case the founder of the forum, say his life's work is totally wrong for basic and obvious reasons, and then refuse to provide any of those reasons or give quotes from the founder's work.
	That is a shitty, shitty thing to do.
	It throws doubt into the community, which is fine.
	Nothing wrong with throwing doubt into the community.
	That's why I do these debates.
	I have these conversations. Wonderful.
	But it's an appeal to the most brutalized and frightened aspects of the people on the forum.
	Because that level of bullshit has inherent with it an intimidation factor, which is, hey man, this is how committed I am to bullshitting you and humiliating you.
	This is how certain I am that you will not ask me for any specific definitions or examples Of where Steph is so wrong.
	Because I know you guys have gone through trauma and you know that me spouting bullshit in a philosophy forum, that's a shot across your bowels, the next shot won't be across your bowels, I'll start going for you individually and personally.
	Bullshit is always, always, always a threat.
	Always a threat.
	Because when somebody bullshits, You know that their greatest fear is exposure and humiliation.
	Also their greatest need, by the way.
	And so if you start to patiently ask for examples, that's the story of Socrates, right?
	He just patiently asks, oh, you know what truth is.
	You know what wisdom is.
	You know what justice is.
	you know what virtue is can a brother get an argument well justice is piety is what the gods disagree with each other all the time don't they Thank you.
	Oh, and is piety good simply because the gods do it, or do the gods do it because it's good?
	Can I get a definition and some examples, please?
	And they fucking killed him.
	Jesus says, maybe, just maybe, God intended morality to be universal to human beings rather than to our specific group.
	God made man, God made virtue, therefore maybe virtue should be universal to man rather than specific to our group.
	They fucking killed him too.
	So we all understand that when people come in with bullshit, there's a threat right there.
	There's a gun in the gas.
	There's a fist in the fog.
	You start asking for definitions and specifics.
	They're gonna escalate.
	Philosophy is the most deeply willed and ferociously fought combat sport in the history of our species.
	It really is the entirety of the history of our species.
	Right? And you don't have to fight.
	You don't have to fight.
	It's totally fine.
	There's no positive moral obligation in the world.
	But, if you choose not to fight, it really, really, really, really needs to be a choice.
	It really, really, really, really needs to be a choice.
	So you can look and you can say, oh, okay, this guy's coming on all heavy with the bullshit.
	In the bullshit is a balustrade.
	sorry I may have done one too many alliterative things there right right in the bullshit is a fist is a fist If I start calling him on his bullshit, he's going to escalate and become really aggressive.
	And then you can say, I choose not to engage.
	And it's a shame that he wasn't here because I would have asked him these questions.
	Okay, what's your definition of metaphysics?
	What's your definition of epistemology?
	How do you know what is real?
	How do you know what is true?
	And can you give me specific examples from UPB? And then he'd be like, well, UPB says...
	No, no, no. Specific examples.
	I assume you've read the book. And if you've come on my public forum to tell me I'm full of shit and an idiot...
	Which is what he's saying when he says there are basic problems with the UPB. Then he's saying, I'm full of shit and or I'm an idiot.
	Which I don't mind. I don't mind.
	I mean, you've got to prove it, right?
	Otherwise, you're just kind of an asshole, right?
	Say, no, no. I've got a copy of the book right here.
	Tell me on which page. Because clearly, it's a fairly complicated work.
	Clearly, if you're going to come on and tell me that I'm completely wrong, it must be blindingly obvious.
	So tell me where...
	I've got the book right here. Give me a page.
	You must have underlined stuff.
	You must have actually read some shit, right?
	Well, but I just blah, blah, blah.
	No, no, no. And you all know how that would go.
	Because he's already revealed in his attack...
	And his appeal to insecurity, he's already revealed that humiliation is the worst thing for him.
	So he will dodge, he will fog, he will gaslight, he will escalate, he will manipulate.
	And then, if, in this public forum, he were to end up being revealed to somebody who didn't know what he was talking about, it happens.
	It happens.
	It happens. Then what would happen is he would feel humiliated, which comes back to early childhood stuff, right?
	He would feel humiliated.
	And then what would he need to do?
	I think we all know, right?
	We all know what he would need to do.
	What he would need to do is he would need to then level back up.
	So then he would go to some other place or maybe come back on the forum and he would be really aggressive because he would need to restore his fragile ego to its former state of gaseous self-importance.
	Then he would escalate, he would end up getting banned, and then he would go to everyone else and say, oh, the supposed philosophical community, you raise a couple of rational objections, they just ban you because they can't handle criticism, right?
	Or, and that might go on for a while, but there would be a true self within him.
	There would be a true self within him somewhere, which, you know, we can only hope that people get access to, which would say, ah, you know, you kind of did publicly trash the guy on his own forum, and then when he asked you for specific examples, you couldn't provide any.
	You know, I'll give you an example, and then we'll get to the convo part.
	So when I was in my late 20s, I was in a business meeting, and We had written software, or I had written software that allowed for people to enter information about environmental assessments, environmental audits, right? So if you're going to buy a piece of land, you need to make sure that there wasn't some battery factory on there 40 years ago or some underground storage tank that a gas station used to have and it was abandoned because that's going to be a huge amount of liability down the road.
	So you need to do an environmental audit.
	You need to do groundwater testing and you need to do Soil testing and you need to do research on the history of the property to make sure that there was nothing, you know, some Indian burial ground or some orphanage burial ground or something, right?
	You need to make sure that what you're buying is not going to present you predictable problems down the road.
	So, one of the selling features for my software was, and they're called Phase 1 ESAs, Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessments.
	And so, one of the companies that we were working with I offered a 40% reduction on the price of an ESA if my software was used.
	And I put together a program that calculated savings, and when companies are going through a big acquisition process, it could save them millions of dollars for relatively cheap.
	It was a very good business profit, a very good value proposition.
	Because these things cost thousands of dollars.
	If you're doing a bunch of them, you get 40% off.
	It can save you a whole bunch of money, right?
	Plus, then, when you sell the property, you can give all the data over to the next owner and save them from having to do the same ESA. Anyway, it was a really good business case.
	And I had said it a whole bunch of times.
	Anyway, so I was in a meeting with, let's just say, company A offered...
	40% off for site assessments.
	And I had said this a million times because I did a lot of these presentations.
	Now, I was in the business meeting with Company B, not Company A, that had made this 40% reduction.
	And I was so used to saying this that I said, with Company B in the room, who was a competitor of Company A, I said, oh, Company A will give you a 40% reduction, which wasn't offered by Company B. I think Company B was only offering a 20% reduction.
	So basically, I torpedoed their chances of getting the deal to do these side assessments because they weren't offering as big a reduction as the other company.
	And I was just a little bit on autopilot.
	I was probably kind of tired, and you know how it goes.
	And, you know, it was a mistake.
	It was a mistake. And so afterwards...
	And I knew it was a mistake the moment I said it, right?
	Because then the guy was like, oh...
	Oh, 40% reduction?
	Are you going to match that? I thought you only said 20%.
	And afterwards, the guy was really mad at me, the guy who was the head of company B, because I had oversold his competitors.
	Oh, no, oversold. I had pointed out the advantages of his competitors when he had invested in my software.
	Anyway, it doesn't hugely matter, but I, of course, scrambled within my own brain to justify what I had done.
	Well, it's better for the company if they get 40% off, not just 20%.
	It's like, but no, that's not right. You don't go to a meeting and sell someone's competitor.
	You don't do that. That's just not right.
	It's just not right. Because if you don't think that this company is offering a good deal, then don't go to the meeting with them.
	Go to the meeting with the company offering 40% off.
	The guy, he was a little overaggressive.
	I guess his business wasn't doing that well, which is why he could only offer 20% off.
	But he kind of eviscerated me, and I didn't even have a car at the time, so the guy had to drive me back to the office, and he was railing at me, right?
	And I wouldn't apologize.
	I felt too humiliated.
	I was kind of mad at myself.
	And this was a morning meeting.
	He complained to the board.
	The board called me in.
	And you know what happens.
	You hold this position that's not valid.
	Because of ego and vanity and, you know, I was basically a kid in the business, like my first year or second year in the business world, so I was just a kid.
	And then what happens is you just take a deep breath and you go, ah, I'm wrong.
	I'm wrong. I mean, at a tiny level, when I did the review of the movie Joker, I was taking some notes when this important thing showed up and I, right, I maintained that I was right about the movie.
	Everyone told me that I was wrong about the movie.
	And I went to go back and see it, and I was wrong about the movie, about some important thing.
	I remember what it was, but just in case you haven't seen it.
	So you just take a deep breath, and you say, nope, I was wrong.
	And so I called the guy, and I said, you know what?
	That was a bad move on my part.
	It was disrespectful to the relationship that we have.
	I really apologize.
	I will make sure it never happens again, and you are right to be mad.
	You just, you realign yourself back to reality.
	Because, you know, there's ego, there's vanity, there's insecurity, there's fears of humiliation, there's desire to level up and to be right all the time.
	We all have that. It's fine.
	It's a state of humanity, right?
	Whether it's ideal or essential, who knows?
	It was also propagandized.
	But yeah, there have been times in my life like I was just plain wrong.
	I mean, that's why I apologize to Christians profusely and continue to do so.
	The Christians are the best people around these days.
	And probably for the last 2,000 years, frankly.
	So, there is always hopefully that part that says, you know what, I shouldn't be pushing this language around.
	I shouldn't be trying to humiliate and put down The guy who runs the server without any evidence.
	Look, if somebody finds something wrong with UPB, I'll be the first person to kiss your feet.
	Literally. I will be the first guy to kiss your feet.
	If UPB can be improved, I will thank you.
	The world will thank you.
	The future will thank you. Magnificent.
	Fantastic. So, that having been said, I'll just do a tiny bit, and we talked about this the other day, but most of you weren't here, you selfish people.
	But, UPB is just two things.
	It's just two things. Which is...
	Anybody who argues for universal...
	Anybody who argues for the truth accepts universal standards.
	Universal standards cannot be self-contradictory.
	That's all it is.
	Anybody who argues for the truth accepts universal standards, number one.
	Number two, universal standards cannot self-contradict.
	And the axiom would be, from the scientific standpoint, science is a great proxy for UPB because it's a subset of UPB. Anybody who proposes a scientific hypothesis accepts the scientific method.
	Number two, a scientific hypothesis cannot be self-contradictory.
	You could say this in the realm of math.
	Anybody who proposes a mathematical theorem accepts the mathematical method, and mathematical theorems cannot be self-contradictory.
	If your mathematical theorem requires that two be both two and four at the same time, You don't need any empirical disproof.
	It's proven by self-contradiction.
	If your scientific theory requires that matter attract and repel simultaneously, you failed.
	If it requires that gases both expand and contract when heated, you failed.
	So, anybody who argues for the truth, which includes correcting someone else, accepts universal standards.
	Because the truth is in conformity with the universal standard.
	If I say I like blue, I'm not telling you you're wrong if you don't like blue.
	I'm telling you my subject.
	There's not a universal standard of liking blue.
	It's a subjective preference, perspective, opinion.
	But the moment I correct you, I'm correcting you not with reference to my own preferences.
	I'm correcting you with reference to a universal standard.
	right?
	The moment somebody tells you you're wrong, the moment someone tells you you're incorrect, the moment someone tells you that your proposal is invalid, your facts are wrong, your evidence doesn't add up, you're contradicting yourself the moment somebody argues you're contradicting yourself the moment somebody argues and corrects you or makes a case.
	They have accepted universally preferable behavior.
	Thank you.
	Because he says, if you can't justify these things, your position is arbitrary.
	Now, he didn't say, if you can't justify these things, I will view your position as arbitrary, but that's just my opinion.
	If you can't justify these things, your position could be perceived as arbitrary, but that would just be a subjective opinion.
	He's saying, no, your position is arbitrary.
	And arbitrary is not true.
	Arbitrary cannot be true.
	Because truth is consistency and repeatability.
	Arbitrary is the opposite of those things.
	So let's say you're trying to figure out where to stand in a field.
	You close your eyes, you throw a ball, and you just go and stand wherever that ball is.
	is.
	That's arbitrary to a large degree.
	Basic epistemological problems and metaphysical problems.
	Thank you.
	Now, a problem is not an error, but an epistemological problem is when you say a self-contradictory entity is consistent.
	I mean, that's almost a tautology, but if you say a self-contradictory entity is consistent, a self-contradictory statement is consistent.
	So if you say 5 equals 4, or 2 and 3 make 4, Two and three make four.
	Okay, so you're saying that these two things are equal, but five does not equal four.
	So that's false.
	If you're saying that someone can be both in Auckland and Anchorage at the same time, that's contradictory, because an entity can't be in two places at the same time.
	It's false. So the moment that you point out inconsistencies internal, like things can be inconsistent to themselves, right?
	Inconsistent to themselves.
	Or they can be inconsistent relative to reality, to objective material reality, right?
	And so if you make a statement that's self-contradictory, you don't need any more examination.
	That statement is false.
	If you make a statement about reality that is self-contradictory, reality is not self-contradictory.
	And therefore you're saying something which is self-contradictory is equivalent to something which cannot be self-contradictory.
	Or self-contradiction is equal to the opposite of self-contradiction, which is consistency.
	Matter behaves in a consistent, predictable, and universal manner.
	And I'm talking about quantum.
	I'm talking about the realm of philosophy, which is the realm of sense data.
	I mean, you put a pen...
	You put a pencil into a glass of water.
	At the top of the glass of water, it appears that the pencil is bent, right?
	It shifts over because of the refraction of light.
	Now, you look at that and you say, wow, that's a bent pencil, right?
	And then you run your finger down and you find out that it's not bent.
	It's a trick of the light, right? Now, if you were to say the pencil is both bent and straight at the same time, that would be a self-contradiction because it is impossible for the pencil to be both bent and straight at the same time because that's not how matter behaves.
	So if something is internally self-contradictory, it cannot accurately describe reality because reality is not self-contradictory.
	If it's self-contradictory, it's false.
	If, like, I can say in my dream, elephants can swim and fly.
	I had a dream where elephants can swim and fly.
	Okay, that's not self-contradictory because we're not talking about an objective realm.
	We're talking about dreams, which are arbitrary and subjective by definition, right?
	It's how we know their dreams are not reality.
	One of the reasons. But if I'm saying elephants can swim and fly at the same time, or elephants can swim and fly, that's incorrect.
	Elephants cannot fly. Too big a mass.
	No wings. You get all of that, right?
	So if it's self-contradictory and it claims to describe reality, it can't be true.
	If it is not self-contradictory but it does not accurately describe reality, then it's not true.
	If I say gases contract when heated and then we go and measure it and they actually expand, it's false.
	It's not internally self-contradictory to say gases contract when heated.
	That's not all. Mass attracts mass.
	It's not self-contradictory.
	But it does contradict what actually happens in reality.
	So we know it's false, right? So the moment someone says, your statement is false, they're saying there is an objective universal standard of truth which statements must conform to be considered true.
	If I say, I like blue, and you say, that's false, that would be meaningless, right?
	If I say, blue is equal to red on the color spectrum, that the wavelength of blue is equal to the wavelength of red, somebody would say, well, that's false.
	For two reasons. One, it's self-contradictory.
	The wavelength of blue cannot equal the wavelength of red because red and blue are defined by differences in wavelength to some degree, to a large degree, right?
	That's the objective view of color as wavelength.
	So I have a self-contradictory statement because I'm saying that wavelengths that are defined as different are actually the same.
	You can't have it both ways.
	They're either defined as different, like they have to be different for there to be red and blue, or they're the same.
	But they can't be both different and the same.
	That's a contradiction. So you don't need to measure that We just know it's false because it's a contradiction internally, right?
	Now, if I look at the wavelength for blue and I say that's the color red, then that would also...
	That's not self-contradictory.
	If I look at a wavelength and say that's the color red, that's not self-contradictory, but it does contradict the actual facts of reality, which is the wavelength for blue is not equal to the wavelength for red.
	And when I say that the wavelength for blue is red, I'm incorrect.
	So the moment somebody corrects you, No, that's not right.
	No, that's not true. They're saying there's an objective standard for truth.
	And your statement must conform to that objective standard in order to be called true.
	In other words, if I'm going to say that something is true, it must be true according to an objective universal standard.
	It's not personal. Don't shoot the messenger.
	It's just an objective standard.
	In other words, it is universally preferable behavior for truth claims to conform to truth requirements.
	It is universally preferable behavior for truth claims to conform to truth requirements.
	For me to say something is true, it must conform to the requirements for truth, which is an epistemological question.
	Now, this stuff is very basic, and I don't mean simple, I just mean that it's basic, and the reason I know it's basic is Is that my daughter understood this.
	I mean, this is the great value about being a parent, is you understand just how incredibly adroit kids are, babies are, toddlers are at philosophy.
	If you give her a piece of broccoli and say it's candy, she knows immediately that it's not.
	If you say to a child, you can have candy, oh, you can eat candy, but don't eat candy, they will look at you like, what?
	That doesn't make any sense. To a toddler.
	If you say to a toddler, go up and down the stairs at the same time, I guess when they get older they might walk up with their fingers and go down with their toes or whatever, but if you say, with your legs, walk up and down the stairs at the same time, they will look at you like, what are you talking about?
	It's not possible. If you say to a dog, come here, go away, they'll just run in circles.
	They'll be confused, right? They're not simple in our gut.
	but they're just hard to define sometimes in our head.
	So anybody who corrects you, anybody who claims that what you say is false, anybody who says you're incorrect has accepted anybody who says you're incorrect has accepted UPB.
	They've accepted UPB.
	So then the question is, okay, to correct someone is to accept UPB. So the only question is, does UPB have to be consistent or can it be self-contradictory?
	Well, it can't be self-contradictory because the whole point of telling someone that they're wrong is saying that their statement contradicts the truth standard, whether it's self-contradiction or fidelity to objective reality or accuracy with regards to objective reality.
	So if non-contradiction is the only way that you can correct someone or debate with someone, Then contradiction can't be UPB. It's a bit tough to communicate.
	I apologize for that. I'm doing my best, but I might take a couple of runs at it.
	It's tough to get across.
	For me, maybe it's easier for others.
	So, if debating or correcting someone is saying that if their claim contradicts Consistency or empiricism, which is a scientific method.
	Is it internally consistent?
	Yes. Okay, then it might represent reality.
	Does it represent reality?
	If yes, valid. If no, not valid.
	If self-contradictory, not valid, because self-contradictory statements cannot describe objective reality, which does not self-contradict.
	So, the question with UPB is, okay, I'm correcting someone, that must mean that consistency is UPB. Internal consistency for potential, consistency with reality for proof.
	So if UPB is defined by consistency, then all UPB statements must be consistent.
	They cannot self-contradict.
	Because if things are allowed to self-contradict, you can't correct someone for saying that 2 and 2 make 5.
	And since we do correct everyone all the time from toddlerhood onward about these things, We can't say.
	Inconsistency doesn't matter.
	Like, if I were to say, I like the color blue and the band Queen, nobody's going to sit there and say, well, that's inconsistent.
	Right? It would be meaningless, right?
	I'm making a statement about subjective preferences that are in different categories.
	If I say, I love the color blue, I hate the color blue, people will say, well, that's inconsistent.
	But consistency must be the key for UPB.
	Otherwise, you can't correct anyone.
	So if consistency is the key for UPB, then we say, can stealing be universally preferable behavior?
	And the answer is, well, no, of course not.
	Because stealing is the unwanted transfer of property.
	But if stealing is universally preferable behavior, then we must both want to steal from and be stolen from at the same time.
	But if we want to be stolen from, it's not stealing.
	Self-contradiction, boom, done.
	Done and dusted. Done.
	Can rape be universally preferable behavior?
	Well, no, of course not. Because rape is usually violently resisted sexual contact, intercourse usually.
	But if everybody wants to rape and be raped at the same time, then the category of rape ceases to exist.
	Because if you want to be raped, it's not rape.
	It may be some kinky weird role-playing, but it's not rape.
	And if the category vanishes through the universalization, then the category cannot be universalized.
	The category of pro-theft cannot be universalized, therefore it is invalid.
	Boom! Done! So I hope that wasn't too long.
	Yeah, it probably was. But it's important, I think.
	Just please, my friends, just try to push back on people who are spouting bullshit.
	Because the sooner they realize that they're spouting bullshit, the sooner they can get to actual facts, actual truth, actual reality.
	I think that's what we want people to get to, isn't it?
	So, yeah, sorry for that long thing.
	Actually, I'm not too hugely sorry, because that was very good.
	But I'm happy to hear if people have.
	Some people have had their hands raised for a while.
	And if you still want, I'll unmute you.
	And if you want to say something, then by all means, go ahead.
	Oh, one person has vanished.
	Kevin, you're still on, but you're muted.
	If you wanted to say anything, I'm happy to hear.
	Can't hear you, brother.
	Let me see what's going on. I can vaguely hear you, but is it so hard for people to get decent mics?
	I'm not sure what everyone's using.
	Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
	Hi, sorry about that. My headphones were dying right as you pressed the button.
	Can you hear me okay? Yeah.
	That guy is pretty close to BBP, which could be a basic bitch philosophy, but that's for him to figure out.
	Not illuminating, but funny.
	I know. So question is, I'm thinking about this, and this might relate to your speech that you just gave there, which is fantastic, by the way.
	How do we justify old traditions, adding a new philosophy to the mix that kind of stirs up those old traditions, but then how do you create new traditions off of that?
	I'm not sure that's a UPB question.
	In fact, I'm quite convinced it's not, so I'm going to, you know, that's a fine question.
	I'm going to see if anybody else has a UBB question.
	That's more of a conservatism question.
	So, yeah, no, that's fine, but I'm just going to try and keep it to UBB. We'll talk another time on that.
	Yeah, you bet, for sure. All right.
	Somebody else. Yes, hello.
	Yes. Can you hear me fine?
	Great. So first of all, thanks for your speech.
	It was quite good.
	I really loved it. I do have a quite specific question relating to UPB. So I've read UPB, I've read Essential Philosophy.
	In fact, I'm actually the guy who offered to translate Essential Philosophy in French.
	Oh, thank you. If you remember me, you might, yeah.
	So I've had a really good look at it and I love it.
	I really love it. There's always been just a tiny hole in my mental model of UPV in the way I understand it, which is that the way you prove that a certain behavior cannot be universalized, I have trouble sort of connecting it to the prescription of thou shalt not engage in this behavior.
	I think that specific question has been brought up before, but I don't remember a clear answer to it, of why you cannot engage in something that is not universalizable, sort of.
	Okay, no, that's a fine question.
	And it has been answered before, but it's in the bowels of history, and I'm sure I could do a better job of it now.
	So let me, I'll keep this one brief, because it's not too, too bad a one to sort of plow through.
	Okay. So let me ask you this.
	And we'll make this a conversation because I already had my monologue.
	So do you pay more in taxes than you lose to thieves?
	Well, yes.
	Okay. Are you controlled more by the state than by criminals?
	Of course. Right.
	So our primary danger is not from criminals.
	Because we can defend ourselves against criminals, and they're a relatively small minority of the population.
	And we can move away from them.
	Our primary danger, is it from individual criminals or false moral theories?
	Oh, it's clearly from false moral theories, but I don't see the state as anything more than just a really big, powerful criminal.
	No, no, no, I get that. I get that.
	But that certainly is not a perspective that is shared by the vast majority of the population, right?
	Of course, of course. Okay, so the vast majority of the population believes in a false moral theory called statism.
	Now, UPB, of course, is not a guard dog.
	UPB is not a personal security guard.
	UPB will not save you if somebody wishes to violate your personhood or your property.
	However, UPB will save you from the greatest predator, which is false and self-contradictory moral theories.
	So, by removing what is by far the greatest predator, against you and the greatest violator of your rights, by removing the justification for that, it's sort of like saying, look, we should end slavery.
	And you say, yes, but people might still be kidnapped.
	It's like, yes, they might.
	In fact, they certainly will.
	But not by the state.
	So, if you look at UPB, sure, there is no...
	UPB is not a god.
	It cannot reward or punish people with heaven or hell.
	But UPB dismantles the theories which justify the greatest predations and violations of human liberties and rights in the world.
	So UPB can't stop a bullet, but false moral theories cause the deaths of a quarter of a billion people in the 20th century through the power of the state.
	So you say, ah, well, UPB can't stop a bullet.
	It's like, yes, but it stops gulags.
	It stops intergenerational debt slavery.
	It stops taxation.
	At least the justification is there too.
	So it does not force people to do the right thing, but it exposes the greatest danger.
	The greatest danger is not a criminal.
	A criminal knows he's doing the wrong thing.
	The thief doesn't sit there and say, I earned this.
	He knows, right? But what it does do is it takes on and dismantles the greatest danger, which is not individual criminals, but people who believe that evil is virtue, and virtue is evil.
	The category confusion.
	So if a surgeon thinks that he's going to really do your health good by cutting off your head, And you think that he's a great surgeon and you pay him and you go under and then he cuts your head off.
	Well, you can't defend against that because he's fundamentally wrong about health, right?
	Cutting off your head will not enhance your health.
	So a guy who might stab you, you know, very few people ever get stabbed in this life, right?
	And certainly in a free society, it'd be far fewer because it would be peacefully parented kids.
	So it's the doctor...
	Who prescribes the wrong medication, thinking it's the right medication, that's the great danger.
	In fact, some of the greatest serial killers have actually been doctors who kill through their skill.
	So UPB won't compel people to do the right thing.
	It won't physically, obviously, stop rapists and murderers and so on, but it destroys the justifications for the industrialization and institution of theft.
	Yep. And man, if that's not enough for you, then you can't be satisfied, if that makes sense.
	Oh, it definitely is.
	But maybe to sort of continue with that, if you'll allow me one more question.
	I found sort of an issue with communicating, not necessarily communicating or convincing people of how false the false moral theories that govern our society are, but Once you've convinced someone,
	sometimes they just say, well, it's just how it is, or what are you going to do about it, or, well, we have all these beautiful roads and everything, why we want it to be any different, and then it's, well, how are you going to have roads in a free society, and it just goes into this loop.
	Well, so, look, not everyone can be a basketball player.
	Not everyone can be a singer.
	You know, you have a look at these guitarists, right?
	They usually have these incredibly long, skinny fingers, right?
	They just dance all over because they, you know, whereas I got these Short, chubby fingers and guitar was not really my thing.
	So, yeah, not everyone is cut out for making the world a better place.
	The vast majority of people weren't abolitionists.
	The vast majority of people did not agitate for a free market.
	The vast majority of people did not want the end of aristocracy.
	So what? You know, it's not their thing.
	Now, I mean, there are obvious answers to these kinds of things and someone says, well...
	Who's going to build the roads?
	It's like, yeah, who's going to pick the cotton after we end slavery?
	It doesn't matter, right? Exactly, yeah.
	Right? So, you know, we've got all these nice roads.
	It's like, well, yes, and slaves got free health care.
	So what? Did that mean they weren't slaves?
	Slaves got free housing. Does that mean they weren't slaves?
	Unjustly imprisoned prisoners get three meals a day.
	Does that mean they're not unjustly imprisoned prisoners?
	Right? So, and also this, like, shrug your hands, what can you do?
	Just say, well, I guess you're not going to do a fucking thing, then are you?
	And move on. You're just going to accept the evils of the world for the way they are, and, you know, you'll be forgotten by anyone, and anyone who does remember you will remember you as a coward who aided and abetted the worst elements of humanity in the subjugating of the best.
	That's going to be your legacy.
	That's going to be your legacy, man.
	I'm telling you, that is going to be your legacy.
	But you can choose that if you want, I guess.
	All right, well... Sometimes it's a bit of a void pill to see how many people make that choice, unfortunately.
	Right. Now, the other thing, too, is you can totally call them selfish douchebags.
	Right, because you can say to them, are you happy that you're not ruled by a predatory aristocracy?
	Whatever they like about the current system...
	Are you happy that you get to vote?
	Are you happy that you have property rights?
	Are you happy that you have some free speech?
	And you know that these things were really hard fought for.
	And you enjoy all the benefits of the people who fought hard for these things and fought with significant risk and sometimes torture and sometimes death.
	You inherited a world that doesn't wholly suck because people stood up for what was true and what was right.
	And you won't lift a fucking finger to save it.
	You're just a hanger-on.
	You're just somebody who's blowing the money earned by far better people.
	You owe it.
	If all the people ahead of you had had your attitude, we'd still be living in the fucking caves.
	Being regularly... Raped and beaten by whatever tribe happened to run through on horses.
	We wouldn't even have fire.
	Now don't be a parasite on the benevolent gifts of others.
	Don't just consume all that your ancestors gave you, your forefathers fought and died and bled to give you.
	They risked life and limb, torture and death, And you're like, well, I'm not sure how the roads would be built, so fuck them.
	You know, if they could see your indifference and your pathetic cowardice, you know, they only fought for a free world so you wouldn't be this way, or on the assumption that you wouldn't be this way, that you'd have some respect and venerance for the treasures they gave you.
	If they'd have known you'd have sold out everything they fought for because you can't imagine how human beings could build roads, They wouldn't have bothered to give you all these freedoms.
	They wouldn't have bothered to fight for all these liberties.
	And you wouldn't have them. And then you'd be like, oh my gosh, this world's a terrible place!
	Ah, you'd probably be indifferent to that too.
	You just hang around. You're just somebody sitting on the back of somebody who's a strong swimmer thinking that you're a champion.
	But no. If you enjoy the freedoms, you work to maintain or to expand them.
	That's just what you do. And if you don't, you're just a douchebag and don't deserve the sacrifices that your ancestors made for you.
	Thanks a lot, Stefan, for this beautiful argument.
	I hope it's going all bit shoot because I'll have to learn how to put it out in my own words because it's great.
	It's going to have to be among one of my favorites.
	So thanks a lot. I'm glad to hear.
	All right. I can do one more.
	That'll be all for me. Yeah, I can do one more question and I appreciate everyone dropping by this afternoon.
	What a great pleasure. If you want to unmute yourself, I'm happy to hear.
	Hello? Yep, go ahead.
	I can hear you, so just go for it.
	Yep, okay. Yeah, I actually took a lot of notes.
	So this is mostly going to be about your monologue.
	So my first note is about belief versus knowledge.
	So you mentioned that belief is based on having doubt, right?
	I would argue that...
	So if we...
	Let me give you a...
	Okay, so...
	Belief is a synonym for I think.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I mean, when we had ducks, right?
	Are the ducks in the backyard? I think so.
	I believe so. If you can see the ducks in the backyard, you don't say, I think so.
	You say, they are, right?
	So, yeah, belief is when there is some uncertainty, but there's a probability.
	Yeah, I kind of want to dive into it a little bit deeper.
	Based on what we know about the universe today, right?
	So if we go into the, if we look at the quantum level, right?
	I know, but we don't, no, no, no.
	I don't know. Did you hear that part of the speech?
	Moral philosophy, epistemology, doesn't do quantum.
	Well, yeah, let me, that, yeah, that's mathematics.
	No, quantum is not, no, quantum is physics.
	Yeah, I know. What you're referring to is mathematics.
	I just want to talk about knowledge versus belief as far as in the physical world first.
	I'm going to get through everything, but I'd just like to bring up the argument.
	So in fundamental physics, when you talk about fundamental particles, they act as both what they call particles and waves.
	And I think Scott Aronson has the best analogy of that.
	If you think of probability, the chance of something being heads or tails, there's a probability of it.
	In other words, you don't have knowledge of what will happen.
	However, you have knowledge over time, you can say, okay, generally, there'll be as many heads as many tails, even if that's not guaranteed.
	Further, but just to add to that, is that when we talk about quantum mechanics in particular, it gets more interesting in the sense that it's what they call a two-dimensional probability.
	So the idea is that you can have probabilities where regular probability is additive, Quantum probability is both additive and destructive, right?
	So that's where you get, for example, with electrons, where if you get certain information, you see the electrons as beams, and if you don't have the information, you see them as waves, right?
	So I think, since the whole world is built on quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics is probabilistic, Then really everything is probabilistic.
	Now when we say that we know something, like for example, there's a duck, right?
	And I agree with you, there is a duck, right?
	The reason why we know that is because if you count all the probability that it's not a duck, it would be vanishingly small.
	And this is kind of how science works now when they figure out You know, whether a theory is valid in particles, they usually do something like call five sigma, which means that it has to be like a one in a million chance that we're completely off.
	Right? So that's my first thing, is that I think as far as a lesson to take from that, is that I think there should always be some doubt in people's minds.
	No, absolutely not.
	I'm not going to accept that.
	Not even a tiny bit.
	Are you making an absolute statement that there should always be doubt in someone's mind?
	There is always a probability you can be wrong.
	You just said always. Hang on.
	You just said always. You recognize that that's philosophy 101.
	That's true. That's true.
	Okay, so you've just contradicted yourself with the statement that it's an absolute certainty that we can't know anything for absolute certainty.
	I mean, in the physical world.
	Well, you're communicating this argument using the properties of the physical world.
	Right? So I can disregard your argument because you're relying on the properties of the physical world to take away my certainty about the physical world, the properties of the physical world.
	Because you're using sound waves to communicate.
	We're using the technology, the physics, the quantum physics of computers to And so if you are going to say to me you can't trust your senses or you can't trust the properties of the physical world and you are relying on the properties of the physical world to transmit that argument, that's not true.
	I mean you just contradicted yourself entirely.
	In other words, hang on, what percentage of your argument am I not receiving because of quantum physics?
	I mean, you're hearing the argument, but I don't think… I like to respond to that, right?
	So, okay.
	So, here's the thing, right?
	Let me go through another approach.
	No, no, no, no.
	Okay. If we're going to debate, you have to answer my questions.
	Yeah, okay. Okay, so don't.
	I'm asking you a simple question.
	What percentage of your argument have I not received correctly because of quantum physics?
	How much of your argument should I... Because I think that I've received an argument that you've made.
	But you're telling me that I can't ever rely on anything physical.
	I can't ever rely on the properties of anything physical.
	And so I need to know what percentage is it?
	50% of your argument has been disrupted by quantum physics and you could have said the exact opposite.
	What percentage of your argument do I need to disregard because I can't trust the properties of physics?
	Approaching zero.
	Infinitesimal. So, I cannot trust your argument, though, because I can't trust anything physical, right?
	It's not an either-or.
	It's not a one or a zero we're talking about.
	We're talking about probability, right?
	You said that you can't...
	No, hang on, dude. I'm just...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on. I'm just going by what you said.
	What you said is we can't ever be certain about the physical, right?
	Yes, correct. Okay, so I'm asking you what percentage of your argument can I be uncertain about?
	Yeah, and I answered that an incontestable amount.
	Like we did have a conversation.
	Now, I don't know if we – Wait, so do I have to – hang on.
	Do I have to effectively treat your argument as if I got 100% of it correctly?
	I don't mean that we agree 100%, but in terms of the physics, the property of the physics that you're using to transmit your argument, are you saying it's the equivalent of 100%?
	Yeah, near certainty.
	Because we're talking in a very macro scale, right?
	Okay, so what is the difference between infinitesimally small doubt and no doubt?
	In a practical sense, there isn't.
	Okay, and do you remember earlier, hang on, do you remember earlier that I said philosophy only deals with sense-level data?
	Yeah, I like to get into the sense argument.
	Okay, so you're saying that at the level of philosophy, or at the level of sense data, we have 100% certainty because the doubts are infinitesimally small, and I do know for a fact that quantum phenomena all cancels itself out long before we get to the level of sense data.
	And so if your argument is that at the level of sense data we have certainty, But we can't have certainty in the physical properties of matter, but all sense data relies on the physical properties of matter, then it seems to me you have a contradiction on your hands.
	No, I don't. Certainty is an emergent property.
	Agreed. Right.
	So that's all I'm saying. No, no.
	On the base level of reality, it's not certain, right?
	However, the reality that we deal with is not at the base level, right?
	Okay, so why, hang on, dude, why are you bringing a physics argument to a philosophy discussion?
	That seems very strange to me.
	It'd be like if people were discussing quantum physics and I brought UPB into the argument, they'd say, well, that's very interesting, but we're talking physics here.
	So I'm not sure why you're bringing quantum physics to a discussion where it very clearly, and for reasonable arguments, delineated that...
	Philosophy works at the level of self-sense perception and up, and then you're trying to bring some epistemological doubt to an area where you just admitted there is no doubt.
	Well, let me – Why did I bring this up?
	I just brought it up that inherent in reality there is always doubt.
	But you're relying on sense data, which you say has no doubt, to communicate an argument about doubt which never exists in the realm of philosophy or human life because we operate at the level of sense data.
	I can bring you an example.
	You were talking about how we can trust sense data, right?
	However, I mean, we know that's not true because if you ever watch like a magic trick, Magicians work on the fact that our senses are not infallible.
	Okay, can you give me an example, please?
	I mean, any magic trick.
	You know, here's a ball, it disappeared.
	We know the ball didn't disappear, that's the fun!
	Well, I understand that.
	It's a magic trick. But the reason why the magic trick is fun is that it plays with our sense perception.
	The fact is, the reason it's fun is because our sense perception is not necessarily valid towards what reality is.
	We saw the ball disappear, right?
	Even if the magician shows you how the trick works, you've seen magicians where they do that.
	They show you how the trick works, and then they do the trick for you anyways, and you still get fooled because of their skill.
	No, but your senses aren't fooled.
	Your eyes are accurately...
	Hang on, hang on. No, dude, you can't interrupt me every time I open my mouth.
	It's really annoying. Okay, so your senses aren't being fooled at all.
	Your eyes are accurately transmitting that the ball is no longer in visual range.
	Would you agree with that? Yeah.
	I mean, there's no such thing as disappear for the eyes.
	Disappear is a concept.
	It's a conclusion of the mind.
	So the senses are providing you accurate data.
	Your mind may misinterpret it.
	But those are two different things.
	Like if we're standing in a desert and I say, oh look, there's a lake.
	You'd say, no, it's probably a mirage.
	Now, my eyes are indicating to me that there's a lake there.
	Now, my conclusion that there is a lake there is a function of consciousness.
	It's a function of the human mind.
	My senses are not telling me that there's a lake there.
	My senses are simply giving me the visual information.
	And so my eyes are not being fooled at all.
	Just as with the magician's trick, the eyes are not being fooled because the eyes don't conclude that the eyes don't have brains.
	Neither do ears.
	All they do is feed information in a passive way into the brain.
	Now, the brain can come to conclusions that may be valid or invalid, but the eyes aren't being fooled.
	The senses we can trust completely are conclusions, not so much.
	And that's where philosophy comes in.
	Okay. I'm not disagreeing with that, though.
	I would add that there are, I mean, that's one example of an illusion.
	Another example are certain visual illusions.
	Like, for example, there are illusions where, you know, you look at an object and it'll appear like a window going inside or a pencil going through a window.
	When that doesn't happen, right?
	And so we don't have direct access to our senses.
	We only have access to the model that our minds...
	And I can agree with you that...
	Hang on, hang on. Sorry, you're making a bunch of statements here.
	I don't mean to interrupt you, but I feel like you're trying to make a whole load of markers on the ground, and I don't want to just have them blow by like they aren't big markers.
	Okay. So the eyes never say, here's a pencil going through a window.
	Never. That never happens.
	Because the eyes don't have a brain.
	Yeah. The eyes give you the visual stimuli that is coming in.
	Now, you may, in your brain, because your brain assembles this into a coherent view of the world, your brain may say, wow, that really looks like a pencil going through a window.
	But it's not the eyes. It's not.
	Where's the error? Now, if you say that the errors are in the senses, that...
	I'm not kidding about this, man.
	This is why I'm fighting you so hard on this.
	That is an invitation to psychosis, to insanity.
	Because how do we know someone is insane?
	Because their senses have stopped working.
	And by that, I don't mean that they've lost, like they've become blind, deaf and dumb or anything like that.
	It means that they see things that aren't there.
	Mm-hmm. They see a demon standing in the room, that's called florid psychosis.
	Their visual acuity, their eyes have completely gone insane.
	When you're telling people not to trust their senses, it's an invitation to heavily medicated psychotic insanity.
	This is why I'm fighting you so hard on this, because I think it's a dangerous idea to put out there.
	It really is dangerous.
	Now, dangerous is not an argument, but if it's false and it's dangerous, you have a moral responsibility for what you're trying to do, which is to drive people a little insane.
	I'm not kidding about that, by the way.
	It's very serious stuff that you're playing with here, telling people not to trust their senses.
	Because that's what...
	Hang on, let me just finish up.
	If you're in an insane asylum, and you say, I am a god made of lava, And I can fly.
	And I can see there's a penguin sitting on your head.
	Yeah. What is the psychiatrist or the psychologist going to say to you?
	No. Even though you see a penguin sitting on my head, there's not actually a penguin sitting on my head.
	Your senses or the wiring or whatever is happening...
	Have completely failed you.
	You cannot function in society and you are insane.
	You are psychotic.
	And trying to talk people out of these delusions is really quite something.
	And so when you say to people you can't trust your senses, you're in the position of a psychiatrist diagnosing someone who's gone fucking insane.
	And that's dangerous stuff, man.
	It's.
	Well, I don't think.
	I think Okay, how do I... Have you ever dealt with somebody...
	Sorry, have you ever dealt with somebody...
	Who has been told or who believes that they cannot trust the evidence of their senses.
	I don't know if you saw the movie with Russell Crowe called A Beautiful Mind about a guy who had florid psychotic hallucinations.
	And whenever he'd meet someone new, he'd have to turn to the guy next to him and say, do you see that guy there?
	Do you see him? Yeah.
	So this is a guy who can't trust the evidence of his senses.
	That's true. And it almost completely destroyed him as a human being.
	So when you're inviting people to not trust the evidence of their senses, oof, I mean, maybe a lot of people just kind of go, oh, that's interesting, and it kind of sits in the back of their head or whatever.
	But you're like a drug dealer.
	I mean, I know that sounds strong, and I don't mean this like you're a bad guy.
	I don't think you've fought through the consequences of what you're putting out there in the world.
	It's like you're dealing with drugs, and a lot of people who take drugs, they don't become addicts.
	It doesn't destroy their lives, but to some people it will.
	And if somebody has an issue with trusting themselves, and you go in with this quantum physics shit about you can't trust your senses...
	Dude, I mean, can you live with the consequences if it actually does destabilize someone significantly?
	Because it seems pretty important to me.
	You mean telling someone how the world works as far as we know in science?
	What the fuck are you talking about?
	Dude, there's no science that says we can't trust the evidence of our senses.
	You gave me magic and illusions.
	That's not science. No, that's not science.
	The science there does not say you can't trust your senses.
	Science there says...
	No, science there says that you can come to the wrong conclusions about the information presented by your senses.
	Now, that means you have to trust your mind and be rigorous about how you evaluate the senses.
	But that's not saying you can't trust your senses. - I agree. However, the mental model of our minds, when we talk about a visual illusion, for example, is an explicit example of where our minds are telling us one thing, even though that can't be the case.
	Right. So you know that the only people who can't trust the evidence of their senses are psychotic.
	They shouldn't trust the evidence.
	They're like, listen, so I'm talking about the women who hear, literally hear, so they claim, they literally hear the voice of Satan telling them to kill their children.
	And you're kind of spreading this around like it's no thing.
	Oh, you just can't really trust the evidence of your senses.
	You're not giving me any science at all.
	You're giving me Penn and Teller and...
	That's not science.
	And here's the thing. Science relies completely on the evidence of the senses.
	Why? Because it's empirical.
	How do you know if a scientific experiment has worked?
	You look for the empirical data.
	You look for the facts. You look for the evidence of your senses.
	Hang on, let me finish. Hang on, let me finish.
	And then what do you do? You measure what's happened in the scientific experiment using your eyes usually, right?
	Even if it's a spectrograph or whatever, you're reading the spectrograph.
	So you use the evidence of your senses to validate science and then what do you do?
	You write up a scientific paper and you publish it and other people read it with their eyes or listen to it with their ears.
	Science is entirely founded upon trusting the evidence of your senses.
	Entirely founded upon, you say, well, science tells you you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
	All scientists rely on the absolute evidence of the senses in order to record, measure, and report upon their scientific findings.
	And evidence is quantifiable, right?
	The amount of evidence of something.
	Like, for example, where we have a standard saying, reasonable doubt.
	Right? In the macro, what I was referring to is that doubt is that the fact is that we...
	Hang on.
	We're talking science and you're bringing in standards of legal proof?
	What are you talking about? Well, I mean, well, you said an example of, you're saying evidence, right?
	So let me talk about evidence then, right?
	Evidence is based on, you weigh the evidence if you haven't argued it, right?
	Dude, come on. You cannot switch from science to law as if it ain't no thing.
	That's a bullshit move, man.
	And I'll tell you why.
	Hang on. Let me tell you why.
	Hang on. Let me tell you why.
	Because I can't just make an accusation without fulfilling it.
	So you said reasonable doubt.
	So reasonable doubt is only a standard in the absence of evidence from the census.
	In other words, if you have a direct eyewitness, if you have video footage, if you have smoking gun, in other words, if all of the evidence of the senses directly proves that a man is a murderer, then there's no standard of reasonable doubt.
	The reasonable doubt is when you have to make arguments and provide evidence that is not direct.
	In other words, when you don't have direct evidence provided to you by your senses, if you were in the room and you saw Bob kill Doug, you wouldn't say, well, I think that's proven to me beyond a reasonable doubt.
	You'd say, no, Bob killed Doug.
	I saw him.
	I saw him do it.
	Right?
	So when you switch – and this is why I say it's a bullshit move – when you switch from science to – which is – and I say direct evidence of the senses, and then you switch to a legal proof, but beyond reasonable doubt, the beyond reasonable doubt, you're now switching to something that is nothing to do with direct evidence of the census, but it's all inference and deduction.
	Yeah, but let's talk about, fine, let me switch to a scientific argument then, a scientific example, right?
	Right.
	The theory of evolution.
	It wasn't there 300 million years ago to know that there are dinosaurs.
	What we do is we have evidence, we have these bones and we have these pieces of evidence that we construct Or we have the theory that says that, okay, things will evolve over time, and we can empirically discover that by looking at viruses or whatever.
	So we're piling up evidence to the point where, okay, the evidence is overwhelming to the point of what we call certainty.
	But the evidence is not unlimited.
	That's why we still, in science, call things theories.
	Like the theory of gravity.
	Oh, I do love being lectured to on the philosophy of basic science.
	It's so arrogant.
	Alright, so you're exactly proving my point.
	The theory of evolution...
	No, it is absolutely arrogant that you would lecture me.
	I've been talking about scientific theories and how science works for 16 years straight as a public philosopher.
	So the idea that you're going to lecture me on basic science and...
	Anyway, it's just annoying.
	But maybe it's more for the audience.
	Okay. How come when I have a counter-argument that...
	I have a counter... No, no. Hang on.
	You just put forward an argument about evolution.
	Let me respond. Okay.
	That's exactly my point.
	The theory of evolution, does it exist in the world as an objective thing or does it exist in the mind as a conclusion?
	The theory of evolution would be a theory in the mind.
	Okay, perfect. So, do you doubt that fossils exist in the world?
	Do I doubt?
	No, I don't. Okay.
	Have you seen them? Have you handled them?
	Like, they conform to all the evidence of the census, and they're not self-contradictory?
	I've been to a museum.
	Okay, yeah. And they're being truthful.
	Okay. No, I mean, so we understand.
	We have bones. They calcify.
	They go into the ground. They can become hardened.
	We've seen this process happen.
	They're not self-contradictory.
	They conform to every piece of evidence of the census, and we can actually go.
	When I was a kid, I used to go On the beaches of Brighton sometimes, and I would look for fossils, right?
	You chip open a rock, you might find a trilobite or something like in there.
	So we know that fossils exist, and we can verify them ourselves if we want through the evidence of our senses.
	Do you agree with that? I agree.
	Okay. Can we say that the theory of evolution is proven 100%?
	No. It could all be a simulation.
	It could be a cunning thing put together, or as they say, in some of the more Bible Belt areas that God put the fossils in the ground and backdated them in order to test her faith.
	Like, whatever. You could come up with other theoretical...
	Or this whole world is a museum put together by space aliens to fool us.
	I mean, you could come up with...
	Now, I think, is it proven beyond a reasonable doubt?
	Yes. Yes, it is.
	But is it something where we can say with absolute God-like certainty, no.
	No. But that's my entire point.
	There's no problem with the evidence of the senses.
	We accept that there are fossils.
	We accept that there's ways of carbon dating them.
	We accept the visual cues of what the carbon dating machines say.
	There's no problem with the evidence of the senses.
	Now, a mental construct like evolution might be incorrect.
	That does not invalidate the evidence of the senses because the theory of evolution is a conclusion in the mind, not...
	A direct evidence of the senses thing, if that makes sense.
	So, doubt in evolution is not doubt in the evidence of the senses in any way, shape, or form.
	Okay. I mean, I acknowledge that.
	Have you ever... I'm just at a personal level, right?
	Because at these levels of conflicts, to me, obviously, we're both pretty ferocious, and I think that's fine.
	It's obviously a very important topic.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Dude, I'm just about to ask you a question, if you could just wait for a second.
	Okay. Have you ever had any direct experience with somebody who's losing their mind?
	Direct experience?
	You mean in a psychological break type of thing?
	Well, somebody who's losing their mind.
	I mean, I think that's a pretty colloquial phrase.
	I mean, have you ever had somebody who's gone kind of crazy, who's fallen into a rabbit hole, who's become progressively more anti-rational or anything like that?
	I mean, I've met people that have been like, let's say, persistent liars, and I'm not sure if they're totally in grip with reality if you lie too much.
	But not anyone who's actually been, I don't know, maybe institutionalized or has had heavy meds or anything like that, right?
	No. And as far as your own experience goes, have you ever had or been in a situation where you yourself could not trust the direct evidence of your senses?
	Have I ever been in a situation?
	Well, like I said, with visual illusions, yes.
	No, no, because we already established that visual illusions are not mistrusting the evidence of your senses.
	That would be mistrusting the conclusions of your mind.
	Yeah, correct.
	Have you ever had a situation where you've seen something that wasn't there or not seen something that was there, direct evidence of the senses stuff?
	Well, I don't think I've ever had a direct connection to my senses, only to what's in my mind.
	So, like, for example, with a visual illusion, even if I can know...
	For certain that the pencil's not going to the window, when you look at it, you're seeing the pencil go through the window.
	I mean, your visual, everything, anything that you have access to, I'm not talking about like the pixels, but rather when we look at a box, for example, let's say a square, right?
	We're looking at, I mean, we're looking at the...
	We have certain intuitions in our head that things can't go through other things.
	So we know that's the case.
	However, your visual senses actually are full to see it.
	Okay, but dude, let me ask you this.
	Let's go back to the illusions.
	Depends to going through the window. Do your eyes come with subtitles?
	In other words, do they also prevent you...
	Do they say... Here is a pencil going through a window in subtitles under the text, under the view that you're seeing.
	Basically, light hits the eyes, and they excite your nerve endings, and those signals get sent up, right?
	And then they get processed into what we see as reality.
	Okay, so the eyes are simply providing you raw data with no interpretation.
	Your eyes are not telling you there's a pencil going through the window.
	They're simply providing you, in a sense, pixels.
	There's no subtitles. They don't interpret anything.
	They don't give you any conclusions.
	It's just the raw data. Does that make sense?
	Nerves getting fired.
	Right. Based on certain wavelengths of light.
	Now, do you have...
	Direct access to that information.
	In other words, does it come from the eyes into your brain?
	Of course it does, right? Otherwise you would be blind.
	That it does, yes.
	Okay. So, I need to, you need to, to be accurate, you need to pry apart the conclusions from the data.
	Mm-hmm. Right?
	The conclusions, a pencil is going through a window, that is a conclusion.
	It is not in the senses.
	The census is simply providing you light images and color. - The thing is, is that my, here's the thing.
	I'm not disagreeing with you about the raw senses of, okay, there is visual light going in the eye.
	However, what we term as vision is actually part of the mind.
	It's my conscious experience.
	Can you experience vision without the eyes?
	I've never said that you can't experience vision with the eyes.
	Okay, so when you say vision occurs in the mind, that's a false statement.
	The raw data of the vision is supplied by the eyes.
	The interpretation of the mind can produce an error, but the eyes are not giving you an error.
	If the eyes are giving you an error, you're either insane or have an eye injury or an eye disease.
	Right, so as I'm now in my 50s, right?
	So as I age, my vision gets a little blurrier every year.
	I never needed any glasses until I was in my 40s.
	My vision gets a little blurrier.
	Now, does that mean that reality is getting fuzzy?
	Um, no.
	No. The eyes are deteriorating as they do as you age.
	Nothing, you know, nothing particular.
	My otometrist is like, oh, this is perfectly normal, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Plus I read a lot, right? So, okay.
	So my eyes are not deceiving me.
	The world is not getting blurrier, right?
	I am experiencing a deterioration, age-related deterioration of eyesight.
	So when you say that...
	Sorry, I don't know where I'm getting this echo from.
	Is that from you? I don't know if...
	Did you switch anything or...
	Because I'm getting an echo.
	I think I can't do anything at all.
	Okay. All right. We'll just try and fight a little bit.
	Okay. It's just the...
	So, if you say you can't trust your senses, then you're not saying, well, sometimes you will come to the wrong conclusions about your senses, right?
	Which is my position.
	Yeah, sometimes you will come to the wrong conclusions, but you can trust your senses.
	Because the definition of not being able to trust your senses is disease or insanity.
	Mm-hmm. So if you're saying to people you can't trust your senses, you're saying to everyone you're diseased and or insane.
	And I think that's dangerous.
	But the mind can go to different conclusions, right?
	Absolutely, for sure. And that's why philosophy has to be really disciplined about checking to make sure we come to the right conclusions about the evidence of the senses.
	In other words, I wouldn't go to an optometrist and get glasses if I thought the world was objectively becoming fuzzy.
	So because I know it's not the world that's getting fuzzy, but it's my eyes...
	I go to the optometrist and I get my glasses for reading, right?
	So making sure that people are focusing their efforts on that which is accurate is really important.
	When you go around saying to people you can't trust your senses, that is a diagnosis of disease and or insanity.
	And what I'm saying is philosophically the accurate approach is, yo, your senses are fine.
	Now you may misinterpret what happens in the realm of the senses, but you can trust your senses.
	And the people who genuinely believe we can't trust our senses would never talk to me.
	Do you know why? Why?
	Because they would never trust that my ears would transmit their arguments correctly or that their ears would transmit my arguments correctly or that my eyes would be able to read their arguments correctly or that their eyes would be able to read my arguments correctly.
	The only people who talk to me A people who fully trust the evidence of their senses.
	And then when you come along and say, well, I don't trust, you can't trust the evidence of your senses, and you rely upon my senses to communicate that argument, I gotta call bullshit.
	Like, it's just, it's a self-contradictory statement.
	By the way, I never really said you can't trust.
	I just said that things are built on uncertainty.
	No, you said, no, dude, dude, I didn't make this up.
	Like, don't fuck with me here, okay?
	I didn't make this up.
	You said you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
	And if I'm incorrect, I'll check in the chat window there, but I remember that very distinctly because that's why I wanted to talk about this in such depth.
	Yeah, well, I meant...
	And also, I understand that you're defining senses as the raw visual or the raw sensory input, right?
	The way I always thought of senses as it's the model that the mind creates from that.
	No, but those aren't the senses.
	I mean, you've got to be accurate, right?
	Your senses are the five senses, right?
	That's not the brain.
	I mean, the sense organs are the eyes, not the brain.
	The brain can't see a damn thing.
	The brain interprets the input to create a model.
	Right, and that input can be incorrect.
	Okay, we're speaking to each other now, right?
	My audio senses are feeling pressure from the eye.
	Yeah, I understand how hearing works, trust me.
	Okay, so let me ask you this then.
	Okay, let me ask you this.
	So let's go back to your example of the pencil going through the window, right?
	Yeah. So your eyes tell you that the pencil is going through the window.
	When you look at it from a different angle, what do your eyes tell you?
	That that's an illusion.
	Okay, so your eyes have corrected your brain, right?
	Yeah, it only works...
	If I look at it in a different angle, yeah, the illusion would disappear.
	Yeah, or like earlier, I was talking about the pencil in the glass of water.
	The pencil looks crooked where it hits the water, but when you run your finger down the pencil, it's revealed as straight and uncrooked.
	Does that make sense? Yeah.
	Okay. So you understand...
	You are correcting the misinterpretation of the brain with the evidence of the senses and you're somehow blaming the senses.
	In other words, when you change your position On the pencil in the window, you recognize that it's an illusion.
	When you use your sense of touch to run your finger down the pencil, you realize that your eyes, which are giving you the correct light waves, that your conclusion about what your eyes were saying is incorrect.
	So how the hell do you get to say we can't trust the evidence of our senses when the only way you can correct a misinterpretation of the brain is through the evidence of the senses, the touch going down the pencil?
	Yeah. But let me ask you this.
	When you stop touching the pencil, right, does the pencil still look broken to you?
	Well, no. See, broken is a conclusion.
	The eye is transmitting the raw data, and the raw data shows the light waves, and the light waves are bent because of the water.
	I'm just using a pencil example.
	You put the pencil in the water, the pencil seems to be disjoined.
	The part out of the water seems to be disjoined from the point.
	Crooked. Okay. The part outside the water seems inside the water, right?
	Then you use another sense to say, nope, that's not the case, right?
	That the pencil is actually whole and it's straight.
	Or you could just take the pencil out.
	It's actually whole and it's straight.
	However, you put it back in, even though you know that, you put it back in, your senses are showing yet again.
	No! God, man!
	Okay, I'm going to just try this one more time because you really have some weird emotional resistance to this.
	I can say this now. I have made this fucking argument like five or ten times.
	Crooked is a conclusion of the mind.
	It is not in the eyes.
	The eyes are transmitting you the light waves perfectly accurately.
	There's no problem with the eyes.
	The eyes don't tell you.
	There's no subtitle when you look at the pencil saying crooked.
	It's crooked. The eyes aren't doing that.
	They're simply supplying...
	You're shooting the messenger here.
	The light waves are actually being bent by the water.
	Hang on. The light waves are being bent by the water and your eyes are accurately reporting where the light waves are and what the pencil looks like.
	You come to the conclusion and say, well, that's crooked.
	It's not in the eyes. You can totally and completely trust the eyes.
	Now, where the doubt lies is in your mind, in your conclusion, crooked.
	Crooked is not in the universe.
	Crooked is not in the eyes.
	Crooked is not in the pencil.
	Crooked is not in the light waves.
	Crooked is entirely upon your interpretation of the raw sense data, which you can 100% trust.
	Okay. Yeah.
	Fantastic. Fantastic.
	I don't think I'm disagreeing with that.
	I would just say that your senses are not just...
	Where I disagree with you is this.
	Let me say where I disagree with you.
	I agree with everything you've said, but this is how I would think about it.
	The senses are not just the visual or the physical tactile thing.
	It's also that mixed with The mind.
	Because we only have our brains are what's creating the mind, right?
	And so those signals are being processed and what we're experiencing is of the mind.
	And so that's why I would disagree with you, that we do experience that.
	So when we talk about senses in a colloquial term, I mean that in both the mind and body, so to speak.
	So you don't You don't distinguish between the subjective and the objective and this is why I'm fighting you so hard on this.
	You can't have quality relationships in your life if you can't distinguish between the subjective and the objective.
	I do, and I'm actually proposing an example of that, right?
	That what we experience is a subjective, right?
	Like you said...
	No, no, no. Okay, don't tell me what I'm saying.
	Okay, so you're saying that the senses are the raw data plus the mind.
	No. Yeah.
	No, no, they're not. Okay.
	Because the senses are the data, the mind is the conclusion.
	The senses are objective, the mind is subjective, or can be, or at least we strive when we're making truth statements to say things that are true and objective, right?
	So if you're saying, well, the senses are objective, we just went through this, right?
	And if there's an error in the mind about the evidence of the senses, the fault lies with the mind, not the senses.
	So the senses are objective, the mind is subjective, and if you're saying that the objective and the subjective are the same thing, that's an incorrect statement.
	And what I'm saying is that You're having trouble bending to that which is objective and true because you want to hang on to this subjective thing and I'm telling you that's a complete disaster, not just for this conversation and the reason I'm digging in so hard for this one.
	This is a statement as a whole.
	If you want to have quality relationships, if you want to be effective in the world, you've got to pry apart the subjective and the objective and you're trying to mix them all in together and that's a bad idea.
	I completely agree, but it's very important to realize that everything in your mind is subjective, right?
	It's only through evidence, right, by evidence and logic, right, that we're able to derive objectivity from the mind.
	Okay, so hang on, hang on.
	This is a contradictory statement.
	You said everything in the mind is subjective, but through reason and evidence, we can achieve objectivity.
	Yeah. Correct.
	Okay. Reason and evidence, do they exist in the mind?
	Reason and evidence exist...
	Well, okay.
	I think... No, no, dude.
	This is just going to be hard. You just made the statement.
	Okay? Okay. You said everything in the mind is subjective.
	And then you said, but we can achieve objectivity through reason and evidence.
	Yeah. So that objectivity, that exists in the mind.
	In other words, if we have correct and true statements about the world, then we have participated in the objectivity of universality and empiricism.
	That's what science is trying to do, right?
	As opposed to superstition.
	Yeah, correct. Okay, so it cannot be the case that if everything in the mind is subjective, then I'm just going to rewire this entire conversation so that you completely agree with me and that I will say, you've then agreed with all of my points and you've agreed that I'm right and blah, blah, blah, to which you would say, no, I haven't.
	In other words, you would say that my subjective perception of this debate is incorrect.
	In fact, you know that the fact that we're disagreeing means that we can't just make up whatever reality we want.
	Otherwise, you would just make up a reality where I agreed with you and I would make up a reality where you agreed with me and we wouldn't get anywhere, right?
	So there are things in the mind that can be objective.
	We have to work usually to get there and all of that, but there are things in the mind that are objective.
	Right.
	And logic is the art of non-contradictory identification and it's based on the fact that the senses don't contradict each other because if the senses contradict each other, you've gone insane.
	So we only have logic.
	We only have logic and science because of the objectivity of the senses.
	We only have the idea of consistency and universality because of the objectivity of the senses and the predictable and rational behavior of matter and energy.
	So when you say we can't trust the senses, you're saying...
	There's no such thing as logic.
	We can't trust logic.
	We can't trust empiricism.
	We can't trust science. We can't trust anything.
	That is a mentally ill statement.
	I'm not saying you're mentally ill. I'm just saying that statement is a statement of mental illness.
	I do think you're strongmanning me a little bit here.
	Because I'm not even really disagreeing with that.
	I'm really bringing up, and in the general term, I'm just talking about...
	In a more nuanced way, in a sense that, like, for example, when we talk about the senses and the mind, right, that the mind is part of that.
	Okay. I'm done here.
	I'm sorry. Sorry. I'm done.
	Just because when I make a clear argument and then you claim that it's lacking nuance, that's not an argument.
	That's just bullshit. No, there's just one of these appeals.
	Hang on. It's just one of these appeals to insecurity that, oh, Steph, your argument lacks nuance, and that's all.
	I'm sorry. That's not how I... Yeah, that's sorry.
	I just muted him. Yeah, that's not how I play.
	I'm making clear arguments. And look, I get, so this guy is like unable to admit error.
	He keeps redefining his statements in the past and he's holding on and I get it.
	It's like an ego-based, it's a vanity-based thing that he wants to not admit that he was wrong and all of my efforts to try and help him and you.
	Like, you really got to fight for this stuff, man.
	You got to fight to separate the subjective and the objective.
	Clearly, the subjective is important, and that's your thoughts, your feelings, your passions, and that's important.
	That's where you connect with people on an empathetic and emotional level.
	But if you don't have any objectivity, if you don't have anything that can condition the subjectivity of your mind, you just become a narcissist.
	I'm not calling this guy a narcissist, but the end result of that, you can't trust your senses and everything is subjective, is you can't ever be corrected.
	You can't ever have intimacy with people.
	You can't ever negotiate with people.
	You just can't because you are the measure of truth and reality and it's no good.
	I mean it's really bad. You have to have some way to discipline the wild narcissism of your own interior experience just as I have to find a way to do it with my own interior experience and the way that we do that.
	is with the discipline of philosophy and we had a good old run with this guy but for me when I hear the word nuance come out when I've made a very sort of clear argument and he's contradicted himself a whole bunch of times that's just somebody who's not willing to you know and maybe it'll come over time but he's just not willing to admit fault and I'm not going to dishonor the idea of a debate with somebody who just keeps redefining stuff and won't admit when he's wrong And then comes up with something like, well, no, it's just more nuanced.
	It's like, that's not even, you know, and it's kind of funny because I was talking about like trying to rescue people from error because you care about them.
	And this guy saying all this stuff.
	Yeah. It's like I came up with the theory and then the universe provided the actual example, which was actually very, very cool.
	So, all right. Thanks everyone so much.
	Have a super afternoon.
	I really appreciate everybody dropping by today.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	If you would like to help out and, uh, Thank you.
	I thank you very much to the caller, too.
	It was very instructive, and I like a good workout like that, so I appreciate that.
	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful afternoon, everyone.
	Lots of love. From here, I will talk to you.
	Hey, Steph, listen. I just finished processing the show, and I wanted to mention a little bit about, yeah, I'm pretty passionate, and I got a bit more punchy than I sometimes do, and I was sort of wondering why.
	So I thought about this, and this is not any kind of argument related to the debate, but in terms of, like, why...
	So number one, of course, is that I do really believe that chipping away at people's confidence in their own cognitive processes and the sense data and so on is really, really unhealthy.
	And I think I sort of have an idea.
	It's probably nonsense, but I have an idea in my head that when my mom started to go crazy, she was surrounded by friends who fueled that and fed it on.
	And I always, I guess I was wondering deep down in my brain that did the unconscious level.
	I was wondering, ooh, what if she hadn't had those friends?
	What if she'd had people who pushed back against her craziness?
	Would it have maybe changed it or helped it and so on?
	So the people who are part of the quantum mechanics, mystical dismantling of...
	Our confidence in our own cognitive abilities, I think I view that from that lens, which, you know, it's not right or wrong with regards to this guy, but in terms of the intensity of the emotions that I was experiencing and the passion that I cared about with the topic.
	And again, passion and debate, there's nothing wrong with it.
	So I think that was sort of one aspect.
	Now, another aspect I think is kind of important for me, and maybe for you too, is we are in a time of crisis.
	I mean, civilization is kind of slipping away and it's kind of dark ages is coming up.
	I think one of the things that troubles me about the, you can't trust the evidence of your senses people, is it kind of, I'm not saying about this guy, just in general, it kind of gives them an out from the necessary stand up and be counted, fight for the good, take risks, confront evildoers,
	try to rid mankind of dangerous and toxic errors and so on, because they've got an out, which is, well, but you can't really trust the evidence of your senses, and I think that not only does it excuse them from the I think they also spread that excusing to others, if that makes any sense.
	So I do consider it particularly toxic.
	And I do think it does contribute to mental illness.
	I'm not talking about this guy personally, but these ideas as a whole.
	So I think that's...
	I was a little bit caught by...
	I was caught up by my own passions.
	I was surprised a little bit by my own passions, and I just want to unpack and explain why I think that happened, and it doesn't really detract or add anything to the debate other than I think that the emotions are comprehensible, which again does nothing to fuel my arguments, but it was interesting to me how passionate I became about this, and I think that combo of, you know, that's why I asked, have you ever watched anyone go crazy?
	Now, if someone's going crazy, and you say to them, well, you can't trust the evidence of your senses, you're just hitting the gas, so they're Going crazy.
	And the excuse, you don't have to go to the battlefield if you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
	You kind of have an out. And it feels like you're being wise and scientific.
	I don't think that's true.
	All right. I hope you enjoyed the debate.

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