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Oct. 26, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:25
HOW TO NOT GO INSANE! UPB Call In
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Yo, everybody, Steph.
25th of October, 2021.
Yep, that's right. I zeroed in on the year with a cormorant on a minnow level of accuracy.
The debate yesterday was really enjoyable, and I appreciate that.
It's really interesting to see everybody's very emotional reactions to a fairly punchy debate, which is fine.
We're trying to get to the truth. It's not pretty.
You think mixed martial arts is rough, man?
What's really rough is philosophy.
That's much more punchy.
So the question around...
I mean, really, it's epistemological to some degree metaphysical.
The question is...
You can't use the senses to validate the senses because that's circular, right?
And so where does...
Where does the factual information or the processing to get to the truth come from?
Now, if you say, well, listen, if we use pure logic, we don't have to involve the senses.
We can just say everything has to be rational, and then we can attempt to validate the senses using the process of reasoning, but that solves a problem, kind of creates a problem, too.
So it solves a problem in that you're not using the senses to validate the The senses, which is considered to be circular, and I can see that would be, but you create a problem which is, okay, where does logic come from?
How do we even know that it's valid?
Why would it have any relationship to the truth?
It's a big question, really the biggest question when it comes to these kinds of things.
Question again, I say again, my friends, I say again.
How do we know that reason, that logic, Is valid, is necessary, is important, proves anything, is required for the pursuit of truth.
How do we know? Aha, well, the pure reason people, right, which is the, in a sense, it's the, I don't know, the Plato, Hegelian, Kantian, pure reason stuff, right, which is that reason is abstracted from the sense data, reason is superior to the sense data, and reason tells you what is true, and If you know what is true, then even if the sense data contradicts you, you go with pure reason.
You go with pure reason.
So, that's not...
I was going to say that's not how I see it.
Like, you guys are really, really interested in how I see things.
But I would argue, and argue very strenuously, that that's simply not a valid approach.
So what is reason? Why does it matter?
How do we know it's got any validity at all?
Why should we conform to it?
It's pretty big and important questions, and I have gone through this stuff many years ago in Introduction to Philosophy, but given that I'm positive, I'm absolutely certain that not everyone has managed to win their way through that glorious masterpiece of long ago.
We will talk about reason.
Where it comes from, why it's valid, and its relationship to the senses.
Then I'll tell you why I was fighting so ferociously yesterday and why I take it personally, which doesn't mean I'm right or wrong.
I'm just telling you it's intense for me and I'll tell you why.
How do we know that reason is valid?
Reason, defined by Ayn Rand and the art of non-contradictory identification.
You find internal inconsistencies, and outoftheargument.com, outoftheargument.com if you want more on this, but you look for internal consistencies, and if there are internal contradictions, then the proposition cannot be true.
Any part contradicts the whole, the whole contradicts any part, any part contradicts any other part, you know you're dealing with an invalid proposition.
So the question is, of course, well, why?
Why? Why? Why on earth?
Would that be a standard?
Why would you say, well, look, if you contradict yourself, that's wrong.
You said this here, now you're saying this here, right?
So when the listener yesterday said, well, you can doubt your senses.
You should doubt your senses. The senses can fool you.
And then in the argument, as it went forward, he said later, well, I never said that.
Now, that's a contradiction. Now, why is that wrong or why is that bad?
I was talking to Isaac, who was on the chat, I think today, and he was teaming up with some other guy to talk about philosophy, and the guy who Isaac was agreeing with was saying, well, you can't trust your senses.
And then I wrote back and I said, I'm sorry, I can't process what you're saying.
I can't trust what you're saying.
I don't have any clue about your argument because I can't trust my senses.
Which is, I mean, it's not an elegant trap.
It's just a basic fact.
I really, really...
Listen, until things are pointed out, I'm all patience, light, and grace.
Until things are pointed out, right?
I'm like, yay, let's, you know, maybe you've just never thought of these things.
Maybe you've never noticed this rank contradiction.
So, you know, I mean, gentleness, sweetness, and light.
However, however, when people have been shown something very important, And dismiss, avoid, fog, gaslight, minimize, change their story.
I'm sorry, it just brings out the beast in me, or I let the beast in me out, because that's philosophical douchebaggery 101.
So if you say, well, you can't trust the census, and you remember early in the debate yesterday, I said, okay, what percentage of your argument can I not comprehend because I can't trust my census?
Pretty important question, right?
If somebody's writing and says, well, you can't trust your eyesight, they say, okay, well, what percentage of your writing have I completely misunderstood because I can't trust my eyesight?
And they say, oh, no, no, you can trust your eyesight for this.
It's like, okay, well, then, right?
It's an argument I made many years ago, which is if you send an email to someone saying emails never get delivered to the right person, that's a contradiction, right?
Now, is it a contradiction to say emails never get delivered to the right person?
No, it's not. It doesn't mean that it's true.
It just doesn't mean that it's internally inconsistent or contradictory.
If you say emails always do and always do not get delivered to the right person, then that's a contradiction because you're saying they do and you're saying also that they do not under the same parameters.
All people, all the time.
But if you say emails never get delivered to the right person, It's not self-contradictory.
However, as an empiricist, we must compare the argument to the action.
And actions speak louder than words.
I'm sure you've heard that in the past, just as I have.
Actions speak louder than words.
So if somebody emails you Or let's say they email me, because I know my name, I don't know yours.
They email me and they say, Steph, emails never get delivered to the right person, and I wanted you to know that.
I would say...
Now, I wouldn't examine their argument, right?
I wouldn't examine their argument.
In particular, I wouldn't say, gosh, I wonder if it's true if emails get delivered to the right person or not.
I wonder if I could find some way to prove that.
I wonder if I could test that myself.
I don't know that, right? I wouldn't.
I'd say, your actions...
Contradict your argument.
Because if you're emailing me saying emails never get delivered to the right person, your action of emailing me has contradicted your argument.
And so I compare not the argument to its own internal consistency, which would be a pure reason, unconnected to empiricism, unconnected to actual events in the world.
That's mind of God stuff.
Platonic abstraction stuff, where reason is an abstract set of standards completely divorced from sense data, from the mere material world, and empirically verifiable actions therein.
No, no, I don't do that.
And I'll tell you why in a few minutes.
What I do, if somebody says, you can't trust your senses, then I would say, then why are you using my senses to transmit that argument?
Right, so I wrote back to one of the guys yesterday on the forum who said, you can't trust your senses, and I said, I can't trust that I've read your argument correctly because I can't trust my senses.
Please find another way to communicate your argument.
And, of course, you've got the usual fogging and dodging and all that nonsense because people just squirm.
They don't want to look at the basic fact that by using the senses to transmit an argument, they have to trust in the validity of the senses.
Now, of course...
You could say, if this were possible, that a psychic connection would be the best way to transmit the argument, right?
Okay, let's say that that's the case.
So, if we were to say that a psychic connection, mind reading was the best way, mind projection is the best way, you say, okay, well, that's superior, and the senses are inferior, okay?
But when people...
Use your senses to transmit an argument, in this case typing, relying upon my eyes.
And you say, well, no, no, you said I can't trust my senses.
So use something that doesn't involve my senses to transmit the argument.
They get frustrated and angry because they know, they know that there is no better way to transmit the argument.
And in fact, there is no other possible way to transmit the argument.
Not one of them Those selfish bastards.
Not one of them opened up a psychic line to my lizard brain and downloaded the argument that way.
Not one of them, who massively criticizes the senses, deigned to use something other than the senses to transmit the argument.
Now, this sounds binary, and I get that, and I'll give you another example.
So they say, listen, we're not saying you can't trust your senses at all.
We're just saying you can't trust your senses completely.
Now, I don't know what that means exactly.
Nobody trusts their eyes completely.
Nobody trusts their touch completely.
Nobody trusts their sense of taste completely.
We have five senses so that they can cross-reference each other.
If we only ever needed one perfect sense, we would have that.
Sonar plus psychic or something like that.
So when they say you can't trust your senses, what they mean is that the combined validation and verification of all five of your senses is not enough to establish truth.
I actually showed my daughter after we did the debate yesterday.
I took out a glass, put a pencil in, in the water.
And I showed her, look, that's bent, right?
And I said, oh my gosh, we broke the pencil.
She kind of rolled her eyes, right? We did not break the pencil.
Well, no, I said not we didn't break the pencil, the water.
That vicious water absolutely, totally and completely broke her pencil.
She's like, Dad, just put her finger, ran it down the pencil.
Look, it's not broken. She lifted it out.
Look, it's not broken. You fixed it!
And she said, oh my God, that's ridiculous.
And I said, welcome to my last two hours.
So, what does it mean to say your senses are invalid?
Well, you can take one sense and say, ah, your eyes saw that the pencil was bent in the water.
It's like, that doesn't...
Like, that's a point on a graph.
So, if you take one point on a graph and you say, well, I don't know if it's going up, if the trend is up, down, or neutral.
Okay, because you've only got one point.
You've only got one point. Now, if you have a hundred points, You get a sense of the trend, if there is one.
And so, say, isolating just one sense, you might be hearing things.
You might be seeing things.
It's like, well, yeah, duh, that's why we have more than one sense.
The old argument is, we're standing in the desert, we see a mirage, we walk up, and there's no lake.
There is but sand!
Okay, well, so our eyes transmitted accurately, the Light waves bouncing between differently heated layers of air gave us the mirage, but then we went up, we couldn't swim in it, we couldn't drink it, we couldn't taste it, and therefore we misinterpreted,
we jumped to a conclusion based upon the evidence of our eyes, and we know that we jumped to an incorrect conclusion based on the evidence of our eyes because our other senses did not validate what we concluded from the eye data.
There's a lake. Now, of course, if we walk up in the desert and we think there's a lake and we walk up and we swim and we drink and we spout and we splash and we feel it and we smell it and we taste it, we touch it, and then you would just say, hmm, I don't know if there's a lake here.
That would be the actions of an insane person.
I don't like any belief when taken to its logical conclusion would make you fucking insane.
Okay? Like I just, I really, really recoil.
And feel very passionate. Like I've been around people who've gone mad.
It's really, really not fun.
It's monstrous. It's a curse.
And anything which leads people down towards the path of madness, I will fight tooth and nail.
Can you imagine? Going with someone to the beach.
You're splashing around.
You're surfing. You're swimming. You're fishing.
And then the person turns to you and says, we're not at the beach.
You say, what the hell are you talking about?
Really? We drove here.
Hot sand on the feet.
Seawater through the fingers.
Fish nibbling at our toes.
We're surfing. Sunny.
I got a sunburn. You're saying, we're not at the beach?
You're like, yeah. I mean, it's true that all of my senses do confirm that we're at the beach, but we're just, we're not at the beach.
I think, I think we're in a cave.
I mean, wouldn't you feel a chill shadow of, oh my god.
If this person was really serious about that, you'd say, oh my god.
This person is going crazy.
Because they're not trusting the evidence of their senses.
This person is dangerously close to madness.
And it is easy, of course, and I consider it a gross misuse of intellectual ability to dismantle people's sense of reality.
Let me say that again, because I really feel this strongly.
I consider it a gross and actually sadistic misuse of your intellectual ability to attack and undermine people's sense of truth and reality.
You know, with great power comes great responsibility.
You're like the asshole superheroes.
The asshole superheroes.
Because you have great facility with language, these anti-sense people, you have great facility with language, you understand a little bit about quantum physics, and sowing doubt is pretty easy given your intellectual abilities, but you're not using your powers for good.
You're using them for destruction, for the destruction of people's certainty, identity, self-esteem, happiness, capacity for love, and I'll get into all of that in a sec, but you really are harming people.
Now, it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle, But you are really harming people.
And you're using your enormous intellectual powers not to illuminate, clarify, and give people certainty, truth, virtue, and goodness, but instead to paralyze them like some injected venom from a...
Like, it's an infection thing.
Like, I don't know if you know how Komodo dragons hunt.
They used to think the Komodo dragons had this venom.
But they don't. They just have rotting bacteria in their teeth.
So what they do... Is they bite, let's say a water buffalo or something, right?
They bite a water buffalo and then they just wait around for two weeks for the water buffalo to get sick and die from the infection of the bite.
It's not an out-and-out kill.
It's not like a lion chewing a baby zebra's head off.
It's a bite and then a deterioration.
And you do great harm.
I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding.
Like, if you're a sadist, then you'll probably take some secret satisfaction in this.
If you have any empathy and compassion, then you need to take your powers of eloquence.
You need to take your powers of persuasion.
And you need to take your focus on doubt, which is fine.
There's nothing wrong with focusing on doubt.
But you need to gain certainty before you go around infecting everybody with radical skepticism, which is undoing and undermining the entire fucking world.
You are cursing them. It's a curse, right?
So my guess is you're probably like the nerdy kids who had a lot of verbal ability, maybe no sports ability, maybe you were homely or tall or geeky or skinny or Dungeons and Dragons focused or whatever it was, the Les Nesmans of the world.
And maybe you're taking vengeance like Socrates did.
Maybe you got bullied.
Maybe the way that you get back at being bullied is to undermine people's sense of truth and reality.
You've got to really look inward and make sure that the bullies haven't turned you into a bully, that you're there to give people certainty, truth, virtue.
Right? Because while you're sowing the seeds of doubt in everyone with no way out, other darker souls are convincing everyone that all their enemies are 100% racist and should be punched.
The other side...
I'm not sitting there going, well, you can't really trust the evidence of your senses, so you don't really know if anything's true.
They're like, he's a Nazi, get him!
Who wins? Who wins that?
I mean, just, you can play that out of your head, Art of War style, right?
Who wins that? People sowing radical skepticism and paralysis and a venom and infection into the souls of people striving for truth and virtue.
Or the people who fill Dunning-Kruger style Low-rent souls with high-rent viciousness.
You're paralyzing the good and thus emboldening the weak.
You're actually acting for pretty dark forces in the world when all you do is sow this kind of radical skepticism into people's minds.
And you know this. You know this.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
I'm just kind of dredging it up Titanic style.
So, where does reason come from?
Why does it matter If a proposition contradicts itself or an argument contradicts itself, why does it matter?
Because reality doesn't contradict itself.
Truth is the relationship between a concept and either reality or the principles of reality.
Truth is the relationship or the accurate identification either of reality or the principles of reality.
Principles of reality include things like gravity, electromagnetic forces, strong or weak atomic forces, heats, The principles of science.
Principles of physics could be the principles of evolution.
So truth is when the concept in your mind accurately identifies either the facts or the principles of reality.
The facts of reality are, ooh, it's hot out.
It's sunny. It's raining today.
Those are the facts of reality. They're not principles.
They're identifications of events in the moment.
The principles, of course...
Are different, right? It's not, wow, I got a sunburn.
It's like, oh, the sun produces this kind of radiation which lands on Irish skin, turns it to smoking vampire doom.
So, logic is derived from the evidence of the senses.
The evidence of the senses consistently show the consistent properties of matter, properties and principles of matter.
Property of matter is something like mass.
Principle of matter is gravity.
You've never gone to the gym, lifted a 5-pound weight, and found it heavier than a 50-pound weight.
Never. Never.
It's never happened to you once.
And if it has happened to you, it's because you've lost your mind.
And then you're not really part of this conversation.
You're probably heavily medicated in a straitjacket somewhere.
So you're not in this area, not in this part of the world, not in this convo for sure.
The properties and principles of matter are consistent, universal, and objective.
You know, when I was a kid, I remember looking at a globe and like everyone, you look at the globe and you look at Australia and you're like, oh my God, how do these people hang on?
They just fall, right?
Now, of course, when I went to Australia in 2018 for a rather exciting and beset-upon speaking tour, I did not expect to see everybody jammed up against their ceilings hanging on for dear life.
Because I understood that Australia is not upside down and there's no gravity well below the Earth that pulls everything down.
Everything goes towards the center of the Earth.
That's universal, right?
Even the toilet flush, the coridonis effect or something, the toilet flush reversing is just a myth.
It doesn't actually happen.
It's not real. It's universal.
My daughter unpacked for the first time in probably half a decade a bunch of rubber balls she got when she was younger.
Guess what? Still bounced.
Right? Still bounced.
I love these things that we played some bouncy ball games, right?
She found an old little electric piano she had when she was younger.
Turned it on, wanted to play, it didn't work.
Did we say, oh my gosh, electricity has failed to work.
Electricity has stopped! Oh, it needs batteries.
Get batteries, it works. If we got the batteries and it didn't work, we wouldn't say electricity has failed to work.
We would say it must be broken.
Because universality. Listen, the stability of reality is something that we should really deeply sink our brains into.
It's a godsend.
It keeps us sane, it keeps us healthy, and it keeps us in love and keeps us happy, which I'll get to again in a minute or two.
Everything I'm walking around right now and everything I'm looking at, I've seen before, is in exactly the same place that I last saw, and if it isn't, it's because somebody else moved it.
I have... A box of stuff from my teenage years.
Pulled it out. Actually just posted a photo of me on a tux in 1985.
It's all exactly as I left it.
I mean, you know, photo faded a little.
Hair withdrew a little.
Losing battle versus time.
But it's all the same.
The writing on the back of the picture is exactly the same as it was on September 11, 1985, when the picture was taken.
Stability of reality is a beautiful thing.
It's what gives our brain support and sanity and reason.
And the stability of reality only comes in through the evidence of the senses.
He said, raising his voice, as if that was an argument.
But that's important.
It's really important. I had a dream that I was teaming up with Mick Jagger for a promotional concert in the football field next to my old high school, junior high.
Didn't happen in real life.
Don't know Mick Jagger.
You admire someone who takes that voice and makes a career out of singing, though.
Good for him. The only reason we have reason and its principles.
100% guaranteed.
That's why when you step off a low wall, you don't fall upwards.
You don't fall sideways. You don't float amid air.
You always and forever do exactly the same thing.
Exactly. The Romans, building roads 2,000 years ago, knew the properties of the materials they were working with and had excellent craftsmanship when it came to roads.
Roads from the Romans 2,000 years ago outlasted roads from the government.
by a factor of about a hundred or two hundred.
Their understanding of the properties of matter and the quality of workmanship and the principles of matter gave us roads that last to this day two thousand years or more.
The three laws of logic Aristotle wrote down twenty four hundred years ago still valid still true because we share the same universe with the same objective matter the same objective principles of matter Universal, factual, inescapable. The only people who escape facts are the insane and do not court people to insanity by undermining their trust in their senses.
So, reason is only a standard because of the consistency of matter and its principles that come to our minds through the senses.
And we know that 100%.
Because when we gain information through the fake senses, it's messed up.
It's contradictory.
It's inconsistent. It's insane.
The fake senses, of course, are when we sleep.
The fake senses are when we sleep.
That is sense data In the brain being stimulated with no input from our actual senses.
And it's usually delightfully insane.
I really enjoy dreams for the most part.
I mean, I have a few bad dreams like everyone else, but I really like dreaming.
It's a glorious vacation and an amazing path to self-knowledge.
Happens every night. It's incredible.
If you had a drug that could give you those kinds of experiences, and you get one every night, every night.
How do we know we're dreaming versus being awake?
Because dreams are inconsistent and waking is consistent.
In a dream, I can get out of bed, I'm floating in an ocean, I can walk on glowing footsteps to a volcano that is spouting candy floss.
Things that couldn't possibly happen in the real world.
You are trying to unplug the senses and plug in Dreams.
The sense data that we get from objective material reality is always and forever completely and totally and utterly consistent.
And that's why I talk about sense data rather than quantum physics.
Quantum physics, all the effects of quantum physics cancel each other out long before you get to sense data.
Reason It's valid because of the absolute consistency of the evidence of our senses.
Because when there is a contradiction between the evidence of our senses and reality, reality is true, our senses are false.
Now what do I mean by that? Let's say that you have taken a drug that basically allows you to bypass The objective empirical data from your senses and plug into your dream magician, your dreamscape.
And so you are awake, you are walking around, you are listening to music and there are jellyfish of light pulsing through the stars above to the beat of the music.
Are the jellyfish there?
No. Is it possible for jellyfish to fly through the sky?
To the pulse of your music when you've got headphones on?
Absolutely not, for so many different reasons.
You are having a hallucination.
If you cannot escape that hallucination, you are insane.
You are insane.
When we believe that dreams are reality, we have gone mad.
We have gone mad, and you are leading people to that cliff edge of madness.
Many will... Not false, some will.
That's on you. That's on you.
You're like a drug dealer, man.
Convincing people to take drugs.
Well, it's their choice, finally.
The problem is that you have skills the average person doesn't have.
You have language skills, you have reasoning skills, you have convincing skills, you have persuasion skills that the average person doesn't have.
You're like a jiu-jitsu guy going into a Fat family Bob Evans buffet and kicking ass.
It's not a fair fight.
It's not a fair fight at all.
And this is their resentment and their vengefulness that comes out of this kind of behavior.
But you're mad at the world.
You're mad at people. Maybe you don't feel they give you your due.
Maybe you feel that you were bullied.
Maybe you feel that the world has the wrong values.
Yeah, it does, for sure. But spreading madness is not the way, man.
That really will come back to bite you bad.
Bad, I'm telling you.
It will come back to bite you bad.
So the last thing I wanted to mention...
Yeah, sorry, let me just back up for a sec.
Because when people say, well, it's pure reason, you can't use the senses to validate the senses.
No, we use the senses to create reason.
Reason does to the principles what the senses do to the material.
Everything we touch, everything we see, everything we smell, everything we taste, everything we hear, has perfect consistency.
And I'm not kidding about that.
It has perfect consistency.
So when I was a kid, like everyone, I would lose my keys.
Now, my mom had this belief that somehow, somehow, if someone found your key, even though it didn't have her apartment number or address on it, they would just somehow know.
That it was your key, and they would come into the apartment and steal and assault.
Oh, those Russian tank commanders, what an effect they had on my childhood.
Thank you, communism. So I would lose my key, and I would be afraid to get a new key.
I couldn't get a new key.
So what I'd have to do is I'd have to try and find my mother's key, sneak it out of her wallet, find two bucks, which might as well have been $2,000 back in the day, And take it across, get the key cut, bring it back, hope it worked, all that kind of stuff, right?
It was really, really tough. So what I would do is I would leave in the morning, I'd leave the door unlocked, I'd come home at lunch, and I'd hope the door was still unlocked.
That was a constant problem in my childhood, because once I lost a key, which, you know, happens, you're biking and falls out of your pocket or whatever, right?
Once I lost a key, it could be months.
And then what I'd have to do is I'd come home at lunch, but my mother, of course, would have remembered to lock the door.
I'd be locked out. No food, no money.
And then I'd have to wait for my mom to come home at night and then come in and get some food.
I'd be starving, of course, and really thirsty at this point.
I clearly remember being seven years old, needing to get into my apartment, not having a key.
And having to get the super to put a ladder up to get me up to the third floor where we lived.
I climbed up at the age of seven to the third floor on a ladder simply because I couldn't tell my mom I didn't have a key.
Because then she would get incredibly angry, violent, blah, blah, blah, right?
It's just the stupid little tyrannies that so many of us were subject to.
So I used to imagine or fantasize that I didn't lose my key.
That what happened was space aliens...
Space aliens were hovering over me and randomly beaming things up to try and figure out how they worked and to get their properties and their usage.
And I'm sure you've had this happen where you're looking for something, you know, that old joke.
Oh, I was looking for something. Oh, isn't it always in the last place you look?
It's like, well, yeah, technically.
Almost by definition, right?
So... You're looking for something, and then it shows up in the weirdest place.
Normally when you find something you're looking for, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I kind of remember that.
But every now and then, You just find it, whatever it is, in the weirdest conceivable place.
And of course, when I was a kid, I would say, oh, so they be...
And this wasn't a serious thought.
Obviously, I'm just sort of giving you a silly sort of daydream that I had as a kid, which is I would sit there and say, well, I see the space aliens have beamed up my key.
They examined it, and then they just beamed it back to the wrong place.
Just beamed it back to the wrong place.
It's not my fault. I didn't misplace it.
It wasn't moved. Space aliens.
Now, of course, again, just to be clear, I never actually thought that.
It was just kind of an idle thought that I played with, and not seriously, of course, right?
So, space aliens could have been...
Look, technically, space aliens could have been beaming up my keys.
Actually, I don't really know if beaming up is even technically possible.
Maybe wormhole style or whatever it is, but...
Like, space aliens with invisibility cloaks could have been getting into my apartment somehow and moving my keys.
Not very likely. Obviously, I would consider that infinitesimally small.
The likelihood of that infinitesimally small.
As close to zero as if you're in a room and somebody else chokes out and they run out of oxygen and you say, oh, well, it must have been because the Brownian motion of the oxygen all went to the ceiling at the same time.
Could that happen once every 50 universes?
I guess, but, you know...
It's not really a valid thing.
So the reason I want to sort of end on this part, and I'll take a couple of cues if you have them, is love.
If you don't believe in the evidence of your senses...
Oh, and there was one other thing. I was going to sort about scaling, not binary.
Okay, this is real brief, right?
So earlier I was saying, if you send me an email saying emails never get delivered to the right person.
And I say, well, you're sending me an email.
And you say, okay, sorry, sorry.
Emails sometimes don't get delivered to the right person, right?
Now, and then I would email back and say, okay, so we're about to have an email exchange, and we're going to go back and forth, say, 50 emails, back and forth on this argument, right?
What percentage of those emails will not get delivered?
Because it's really annoying if you're trying to have a complex argument and one of your emails doesn't get delivered, right?
It's really annoying, right?
It's difficult. It derails the whole thing.
And I would say, like, I'm not going to get involved in an argument if even one out of our 50 emails doesn't get delivered.
Because we can't conclude.
The argument. So, oh, no, no, all 50 are going to get delivered.
Okay, so 50 out of 50, we're batting 1,000, right?
100% of the email is 50 out of 50.
Okay, so let's say that it goes to 100 emails back and forth.
What percentage of those? Right?
Because I don't want to get into a debate with somebody who doesn't believe emails get regularly sent to the right person.
Right? So you can scale it as well.
Now, if they say, oh, it's only one in a million emails that don't get delivered to the right person.
Right? Or one in a billion or whatever it is, right?
And, you know, is this true?
Yeah, I guess service could go down or routing.
I don't know. I'm not an expert at email SMTP transfers or anything like that.
But I assume that emails sometimes don't get delivered.
But, you know, you can request a read receipt to make sure it does get delivered and all that kind of stuff, right?
So if they then say...
That, you know, 99.9999999% of emails get delivered to the right person, then I would say, so as a working hypothesis, we have to assume that all of our emails are going to get delivered.
Right? I say yes. Well, okay, so if you're working hypothesis and the way that you live your life is all the emails get delivered, then what are you giving me the argument that emails don't get, like, it's either such a tiny, tiny, tiny issue that it's not worth talking about, or it's an important enough issue that it's going to interfere with the conversation.
And of course, that's different.
Emails are different, of course, than a face-to-face conversation, which is how philosophy developed, usually.
And it's very different from typing back and forth on a forum, which is more immediate and so on, right?
And I've never seen one of these people who say, well, you can't trust this, you can't trust your senses, you can't trust...
If I misquote them, you know what they always say?
That's not what I wrote. And I've done this.
I've deliberately misquoted people sometimes in debates, and they get really mad.
They say, but I didn't say that.
That's not what I said. And then what they do is they post a screenshot saying, well, look, clearly that's not what I said.
When I say, how do you know? Your senses could be fooling you.
Maybe you did say that, but your senses are fooling you.
No! See, whenever it comes to accusing someone Then they will use the perfection of their senses as a defense.
Look, right here, this is not what I said.
You quoted me. You said I said this.
I said the exact opposite.
How do you know? I can see it right here.
Oh, now you can trust your senses.
But then when I make a statement, well, you know, you can't trust your senses.
You know, it's a cheat.
It's a complete cheat. It's like trying to play chess with someone who says, I can move my pawns as a queen any time I want.
Okay, well, it's not chess.
I don't want to play, right? Don't want to play.
So the last thing I wanted to mention is love, love, love.
Why is this so important?
So love is when there's somebody outside your brain who has a consciousness independent of yours, and the only way that you can process their existence is through the evidence of your senses.
Through the evidence of your senses.
I love my wife.
I only experience her through the evidence of my senses.
I see her, I hear her, etc., etc.
Keeping it clean. Now, if I doubt the evidence of my senses, then I doubt my connection to my wife, because the only connection I have with my wife is through the evidence of my senses.
The only connection I have with my daughter is through the evidence of my senses.
If you were in a brain in a tank with no access to any senses at all, you would have no perception of other people.
Now, if you believe that your senses can lie to you, then you can never trust what anyone says.
You can never really even believe that anyone's there.
And we've all...
I think there was an old Scrubs episode with Brendan Fraser or something like that.
There was an old Scrubs episode where A guy was talking to his brother and at the end of the episode it turned out that his brother was dead or, you know, that sixth sense thing where the psychologist turns out to be dead.
You think someone's there, but they're not.
Can you fall in love with the woman of your dreams?
In other words, the woman who's actually in your dreams and not in your real life.
Imaginary lovers.
There's an old song from the 70s, I think.
Imagination's unreal. Imaginary lovers never let you down or something like that.
I assume it was a pornography reference or whatever, right?
But imaginary lovers. But you can't love someone you can't believe in.
You can't love someone you can't trust what they say.
You can't love someone you can't tell if you're touching them or not.
And you can't love someone unless you accept fully that they're objectively independent from you.
I love you.
Well, you've got to have the I and you've got to have the you.
Two separate entities.
Two separate consciousnesses housed in the skull and flesh prison with windows of the human body.
I love you.
Love is the relationship between the I and the thou.
I and the you. And the other person is only accessible to you through the evidence of the senses.
If you can't trust your senses, you can never trust another human being.
And the degree to which you can't trust your senses is the degree to which you can never trust another human being.
Because your experience of that other human being only comes through the evidence of your senses.
Can't trust your senses, can't trust people.
Can't trust people, can't trust yourself, can't trust yourself, can't trust people, can't love.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
And virtue is consistency in the pursuit of good.
But if you can't trust your senses, you can't trust that people are consistent.
Because your senses can fool you.
They could be magicians only pretending to be good.
And if you feel that you can't trust your senses, then the only thing that you have to trust instead is your internal thought processes.
This is the pure reason idea, right?
That the truth is somehow in our heads rather than through our senses in crystallized and universalized principles called logic, evidence, reason.
So, if you believe that someone has done something to upset you and your inner state takes primacy over your outer reality, Then your emotions will dissolve your actual bond to the other person because the bond with the other person comes in through the evidence of your senses.
And if your internal state triumphs over external stimuli, if, quote, pure reason triumphs over the mere empirical evidence of your senses, then you can make up whatever the hell you want and the other person can never disprove it.
So I'll give you this perfect example, which if you've dated, I guarantee you, you've had this experience.
And this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
Some woman accuses you of saying something mean.
You point out that your words weren't mean.
Do you know what she says?
It's not what you said.
It's how you said it.
It's not what you said.
It's how.
You said it. So that is not trusting the evidence of your senses.
That is the primacy of the internal state over the external facts.
That is the triumph of subjectivity over objectivity.
And that's someone clinging to the primacy of consciousness and destroying the objectivity of the world, of facts, of truth.
It's not what you said.
It's how you said it.
Which means the facts of what you said are immaterial.
My feelings about what you said are primary.
And when you go down the road of putting the primacy of internal states over the objectivity of your senses, you become narcissistic.
Narcissism is a philosophical problem.
It is not just a mental problem.
It is a philosophical problem because the narcissist...
The internal state of the narcissist is more important than the external facts.
In fact, in any contradiction or conflict between the internal state and the external facts, the internal state wins over.
The evidence of the senses cannot be used to overturn the internal state.
The internal state is primary, and that is a consciousness that Paranoia.
The primacy of the internal state washes away the objectivity of other people's actual and direct actions.
And the other state is paranoia.
I have direct experience of that through my mother.
Paranoia.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So my mother felt that insurance companies were trying to scare her into dropping various legal things and they were after her and all of that.
And so the two things that I remember, and I mentioned these on the show years ago, the two things I remember that served her thesis.
Number one, there was some rude graffiti sprayed on a wall with inside of her balcony.
Now she...
Was absolutely certain that this was a message from the insurance company to scare her off.
Another example was a car backfired on the road.
I wasn't there for this, but she said there was a loud bang from the road, which we assume would be a car backfiring or something like that, and she felt that it was them taking a shot at her with a gun.
I mean, she committed to this stuff, man.
She slept with this giant bread knife under her pillow and hated going to bed because she just felt she was so unprotected or whatever, right?
So paranoia is when internal fears crowd out and overtake the external stimuli.
It is about as sane as me genuinely believing that space aliens have moved my keys.
When the internal stimuli is unconditioned by the objectivity of the senses, narcissism and untamed, inner, cancerous and florid extrapolations to unreality tend to be the norm.
And you can't love people like that because you're not even really there for them.
If they have an internal state that contradicts your actual existence, They will take their internal state as primary and they will exclude the evidence of the senses that you represent.
When people say you can't trust your senses, what they're actually saying is you can't trust other people because they only come to you through the evidence of the senses.
They're saying your internal state should be primary over other people's objective reality.
You ever have been in a situation you find yourself just looking at someone Absent-mindedly, you're in a bar or whatever, and you're just not really staring at someone, but your eyes got to go somewhere, and you end up just looking at someone.
And that person's like, what are you looking at?
They take it as a threat.
Now, are you intending that as a threat?
No. Are you trying to threaten them?
Absolutely not. But that's what they experience.
So, when people say to you...
You can't trust the evidence of your senses.
What they're really saying is, you can't trust anybody else.
What they're really saying is, you can't trust me.
What they're really saying is, they're lying.
And you can't trust them.
Because they're relying upon the evidence of your senses to disconnect you from the evidence of your senses.
Which is like sending you an email saying, you can't ever trust Emails never get sent to the right person.
It's a con. It's foolish.
It's silly. And once you see it, it's completely obvious, and that's why people get mad at me, because I'm taking away their power over people, their power to invade and alter people's consciousness and set people against themselves.
They're trying to turn science back into superstition, philosophy into narcissism, love into anxiety and paranoia, And they're attempting to, Dambuster style, shoot the bomb of sophistry at the base of the personality.
When I misinterpret something with people in my life, if someone says or does something, I misinterpret it, and they say, that was not my intention.
I can accept that, unless there's strong reason otherwise, right?
Unless there's strong reasons otherwise.
Which is why I start every debate very positively, right?
This has always been my philosophy, right?
This is the most productive way that you can deal with the world, is treat people the best you can the first time you meet them, and after that, treat them as they treat you.
So when I engage in debate with people, I assume that we're both in hot pursuit of truth, and we're willing to sacrifice ego, vanity, preference, pride, whatever it is, in order to get to the truth.
And then if people start dodging and avoiding the truth, then, you know, sorry, it's game on.
Because they kind of lied to me.
And so if people come into a debate, it is with the assumption that they will respect and pursue the truth.
And that's my assumption as well.
I mean, if people prove me wrong, I'm happy and I will...
Reform my perspectives and opinions because the truth is, right?
So it's a con.
If people come into a debate with rational arguments, then the implicit arrangement, the implicit bargain, you know, like you don't have to sign a contract to sit down in a restaurant saying you're going to pay for the meal because it's kind of assumed that when you sit down and order the meal, you're going to pay at the end, right?
You don't have to sign a document when you go into a convenience store saying I'm not going to shoplift.
It's kind of assumed that you're in there to not shoplift.
It's an implicit contract. The implicit contract of debate is, if I'm proven wrong, I will adjust my position.
But then when people are proven wrong, and they don't adjust their position, that's a break in the contract.
They're ripping me off.
And I'm not patient with that.
I'm not happy about that.
It's a rip-off. It's...
I mean, the only reason I do it in general with most people is because it's a public forum and you could learn things from the debate.
Privately, I just get up and walk out.
Like the moment somebody, like I prove them wrong, and the moment somebody just starts fogging and gets all the vanity bullshit going and redefines and lies about what they say, it's like, no, done.
No. You just broke the contract, man.
You just lied. You lied.
Most foundationally. There was an implicit promise Because if somebody says to me coming into a debate, oh there's no way I'm going to change my mind, it doesn't matter what you say.
If you prove to me, if you prove me completely wrong, I'm just going to lie about what I said.
Would you bother? No, of course you wouldn't.
Of course you wouldn't bother getting involved in that kind of debate.
The implicit premise, the foundational reason, the reason why the debate exists is because reason and evidence should win the day.
And that's why when I disproved the guy yesterday about a couple of things, and he's like, well, my argument is just more nuanced than that.
It's like, okay, we're done, right?
It's not interesting anymore.
It's a lie. So, yeah, I fight ferociously, and you heard that when the guy was like, well, you can't trust your senses.
Like, nope, couldn't disagree with you more because it's an incredibly destructive perspective.
It is trying to make you mad, insane.
It is trying to make you doubt your own existence.
It's trying to make you doubt the existence of others.
It's shielding you off from love, power, objectivity, free will.
And it's trying to promote the vanity of narcissism over the philosophy of empiricism.
It will seal you off in a tomb of your own dream, which will all too quickly become a nightmare.
And I've seen this stuff happen over the last 40 years.
Over and over again, without a single exception, when people stop believing in the evidence of their senses, when they stop accepting the truth and validity of their senses, without any alternative standards.
The only alternative to the evidence of the senses is the narcissism of your own fantasies.
That's all you've got. That's all you've got.
It's the evidence of your senses or the narcissism of your delusions.
Facts or nightmares.
That's the only thing.
Love, connection, companionship, support, or narcissism, paranoia, and manipulation.
Think of the guy who really believes his girlfriend's cheating on him.
Maybe he doesn't feel that attractive or whatever.
He really feels his girlfriend's cheating on him.
What does he do? Well, everything that she does, everything that she says confirms that, despite the fact that she's not cheating on him.
He becomes paranoid. Why? Because, you see, his internal state is taking primacy over the evidence of his senses.
His internal state is taking primacy over the evidence of his senses.
The evidence of his senses are that his girlfriend is not cheating.
But his inner narcissism, his vanity, his paranoia has overtaken the evidence of his senses and it destroys the relationship.
And brings his worst fears of abandonment and neglect to life.
It's brutal, man.
Don't let it happen to you.
Plant yourself firmly in the evidence of the senses.
Accept. The senses are valid.
Perfectly accurate. I've never once in my life, I mean, I've never smoked marijuana, I've never taken any drugs, I have never, my friends, not once in my life, had any kind of visual or auditory hallucination.
Or touch things which weren't there.
Not once.
Not once.
And if you're honest and you're not mad and your senses are functioning, neither have you.
And that perfect consistency, that absolutely perfect consistency, It's the root of all of our knowledge.
It's the root of all of our certainty.
It's the root of all reason.
Reason can only be as absolute as we accept the senses to be because reason is derived from the absolutism of matter and its properties and its processes that we get only through the evidence of the senses.
So I hope that helps.
Max, you had...
uh a uh a comment you wanted to make uh you're going to need to unmute them and please please god have a good microphone yeah i have a headset good so there was um back in november of 2019 i was part of a incubator and at one point one of the people that i knew there was telling me that you know that stefan molyneux guy he's a white supremacist i said Well,
what makes you say that? And the guy said, well, you know, I've read about it.
I said, you mean you've read his stuff where he is spouting white supremacy?
And he said, no, you can't read that.
I said, what do you mean? You can't investigate the primary source for these claims of white supremacy.
He said, no, you can't fund it.
I said, what are you talking about? The guy doesn't have any advertising.
And apparently, like, I pointed out that actually later in the conversation, no, you can donate.
But he didn't know that.
And so then I was like, well, look, what happens if I do, you know, watch Stefan?
What's going to happen? He's like, well, no, you can't do that.
I said, are you saying I can't think for myself?
That I can't make decisions for myself?
He said, yeah. I said, well, then You're deciding that that is in itself a decision for yourself.
Well, so yeah.
I mean, reputation.
People who don't believe in the evidence of their senses are very susceptible to lies and slander, right?
White supremacy is the argument or the idea or the belief or the advocacy of the idea that the white race should rule violently over all other races.
What a monstrous concept, and you would need the state to do that, and a particularly evil state to do that as well.
So, yeah, I mean, so what happens is you're saying, go to the primary source.
Go and find... This is why, you know, when I was talking with the communists, they said, oh, you're an ethno-nationalist.
It's like... I'm an anarchist.
What are you talking about? When have I ever said that?
Oh, but you said this about IQ, and it's like...
The people who say you can't trust the evidence of the senses, they just want to make up whatever the hell they want and have you believe them rather than...
What's the old saying? Who do you trust?
Me or your lion eyes? We're going to get certainty about something, and the people who want to displace your senses want to put their own usually lies in the place of your senses.
It's incredibly dangerous. But sorry, go ahead.
And later on, like I was asking, why do you believe this stuff?
You know, why is it that you trust the secondary or tertiary sources or like a headline or whatever?
And this was in reference to the New York Times article where, you know, people were radicalizing, the far right was radicalizing people and everything like that.
And I said, well, why don't, did you actually look up these people and, you know, hear them speaking?
Obviously not in person.
He's like, no, I just trust it.
And I say, you trust the New York Times to do your thinking for you.
He said, yeah. I said, okay.
It's pretty honest. Yeah, but later on in the conversation, I kind of figured out what's going on.
I asked them, you know, don't you know there are actually a lot of more real problems Rather than these kind of fake problems as far as this person's a boogeyman and whatever else.
And this person was actually black.
And I said, well, don't you know there are these actually problems that are more prevalent in the black community than other kinds of ethnicities?
He said, yeah, I know that, you know, I didn't have a...
Well, he said that in the black community there are not a lot of fathers present.
And I could see him kind of tearing up.
I said, yeah, that's kind of a problem.
And later on, I could see his fist was...
He was making a fist because he didn't really like that I was kind of pointing out these contradictions in his thinking.
And I thought, well, this isn't really worth getting punched over.
Yeah, and of course, I mean...
The number one issue for black males, young black males in particular, is father absence.
I mean, it's what hits them the hardest.
It's what moves them the most.
It's what the greatest sorrow and anger is with them.
And yeah, it's really tragic.
It's really tragic. I mean, I grew up with father absence, and I have more in common with most blacks than with most whites who grew up with a dad, right?
I mean, it's just the way things are.
And yeah, of course, it's divide and conquer stuff, but Yeah, that's their thing, man.
That's their thing. Just replace the evidence of your senses with me.
There's no such thing as a neutral dismantling of the senses.
Always, always something gets put in its place.
All right, I'm going to just mute you because you've got something going on in the background.
But, Colm, you've got to unmute if you wanted to talk.
Got time for another question or two.
No? All right. Hello, Monsieur Isaac.
You've got to unmute. Hello.
Hello. Hi there.
So, the other Isaac, they mentioned properly basic beliefs.
Yes. I just wanted to touch on that.
Wait, hang on, sorry.
So that's not you, right?
No, no. So your name is Isaac, but you're not the Isaac I was talking about yesterday, right?
No, no, no.
Thankfully not. Okay, so hang on.
I mean, how would you know what he meant by properly basic beliefs?
So this is something from the work of a philosopher called Alvin Plantinga.
So basically, a properly basic belief is that the beliefs that I would...
I'm sorry, I'm going to ask you for a question.
Sorry, just because we've got everyone listening here and life is, we're all mortal.
You've got this style of speaking that takes a long time to, you're going to have to just try and fill in the gaps.
I know it's not your job or anything, but if you could just crank it up a little, I'd appreciate it.
Yeah, yeah, sure. So, beliefs that are properly basic, they don't depend upon justification of our beliefs, but on something outside the realm of belief.
So, you take, for example, the external world.
Like, belief in the external world would be a properly basic belief.
On this view, because there's no way of being able to prove that, say, the world wasn't created five minutes ago and, you know, you've had all these memories just put into you and experiences put into you, or that you were, say, a brain in a vat, you know, the control of an evil scientist or something like that.
And then you have...
Non-basic beliefs and those depend upon properly basic beliefs.
Would those be axioms?
I mean, I'm not sure why there's a new phrase for something for which there already seems to be a word.
So, yeah, they are self-evident or axioms.
So that's kind of, I think, where they were going with that.
So I just thought it'd be worthwhile just letting you know that's what they meant because they never actually defined the term or anything like that.
So that's really interesting to me, which is if I'm speaking to a group which is very unlikely to know anything about UPB, I wouldn't just reference UPB. And assume that I'd proven anything.
So if you're very familiar with ideas, and of course I think I'm pretty much the most familiar with UPB, then the basic empathy you would have to have is to say, well look, other people aren't as familiar with this idea, right?
And so if they're going to start...
I mean, I was saying that a lack of belief in the senses promotes narcissism, and a narcissist often assumes, well, I know something, therefore everybody else must.
Or it's a kind of a power play that people have where they will reference something fairly obscure, and then when you don't know it, they then, oh, I can't believe you don't know it, and you're inferior to them because you don't know this stuff or whatever, right?
So, again, that...
That really falls right in line with my hypothesis that disbelief in the senses promotes narcissism.
Right, right.
And I would say, for myself personally, I wouldn't say I'm an empiricist, but I do trust the senses.
I'd say I'm kind of like a joining of the two, you know, because I take a Christian perspective where you kind of have The mind, which, you know, kind of takes in the sense experience and processes it, and, you know, made it in the image of God.
Well, and as a Christian, of course, as a Christian, God made the senses, and he didn't make the senses to mess with you.
They're not like demons that are going to constantly lead you astray.
That's more for emotional temptation, right?
Right, yeah. So, I... Yeah, so I think there is like a priori structure in the mind which allows us to take in the senses.
So, you know, we have science, but we also have kind of a priori truth.
Well, and sorry, the purpose of the Christian mission, and please correct me or I'm astray.
I think I've got this one down from my friends who are Christians and my childhood as a Christian.
But as far as I understand it, I mean, the purpose, of course, is to do good, to avoid evil, and to...
Make amends for wrongs that you do and so on, right?
All of that stuff is the Christian journey.
Now, denial is a sin, right?
If you have committed a crime and you deny that you've committed a crime, let's say you've killed and you deny that you've killed, then you've broke two commandments, right?
One is thou shalt not kill and the other is thou shalt not bear false witness.
Denial of wrongdoing is Is really the gravest sin.
It's not so much that you have sinned, it's that you deny that you have sinned.
That is the real issue because most sins can be forgiven if acceptance and repentance is made.
Do I have that sort of roughly in the right ballpark?
Yeah, yeah. There's an interesting thing about good and evil though in the Christian worldview in the sense that You know, when you go back to the Garden of Eden and the fall of man, you know, Adam and Eve, they partake the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
So, you know, I think for a lot of people, like, good and evil are opposites.
But in the Christian worldview, good and evil, they're on the same tree, you know, and then you have the tree of life.
So I think that in the Christian worldview, there's this idea that, you know, it's the source that matters most.
So, you know, what's the source of your action?
Is it of your own will or is it independence on God?
So with Christ, you know, we have this image of Christ being fully dependent on the Father.
So It's not so much for Christians.
It's not so much whether your actions are good or evil.
It's whether they were done in dependence on God or independence from God.
Okay, so sorry. That's interesting theologically, but I want to make sure we sort of stay on the sense data stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my case would be...
So in the debate yesterday, the guy said, don't trust the evidence in the census.
This also happened on the server in text.
And then they said, no, we're not saying that, right?
Now, that, of course, is an appeal to insecurity.
And also what they're doing is they're asking that I not trust the evidence of my senses.
The evidence of my senses was that this is what they had said.
And I verified it in both circumstances.
And yes, I was correct.
This is what they said.
What they said was you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
And then when I said that there are conclusions to that, right, there are consequences to that in terms of our debate.
They then say, no, no, no, that's not what we meant.
Or the other guy who would make a case and then when the case would fall apart, he would use the word nuance as if I was just some idiot who didn't understand how deep and complicated his actual debate was or his argument was and so on.
You don't just get to say nuance when you're disproven.
That's a cheat. That's a lie.
And so, they were kind of demanding, in both circumstances, that this happens, you know, among a number of people, they were demanding that I not accept the evidence of my senses, right?
Now, I guess you could say that is kind of consistent, except they were also, they weren't saying, well, it obviously looks like I said that, but I didn't, right?
But you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
They were saying to me, you're incorrect about what you remember, right?
So, you can trust the evidence of your senses, But you're just incorrect.
This is sort of an important point, right?
Because if I said, no, you guys said that you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
And they said, well, this is a perfect example of the fact that you can't trust the evidence of your senses, right?
Because you thought we said that.
I don't remember saying that, but it certainly could be the case that it transferred that way across to you, right?
In other words, if you order something in a restaurant, the waiter gets it wrong.
Usually they'll say, oh, I'm sorry, I wrote that down wrong.
They don't generally say, you misspoke, right?
Because you know what you ordered, right?
And so if they're saying, no, Steph, you're wrong.
I never said that. Then they're saying, oh, you can totally trust the evidence of your senses.
You just got it wrong. Not, well, no.
And they wouldn't say, well, this is why we have a problem because you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
So every time we debate, things can go completely wrong because you can't trust the evidence of your senses.
They don't say that. They say, no, you're totally wrong.
What you perceived was accurate, but you've got it wrong.
You accurately perceived what was being said in terms of understanding language and the evidence of your hearing or whatever, but you're just totally wrong, which is very much a denial of the sort of premise that they're making.
So to sort of jump back to theology for a sec, if you kill someone and then you deny that you have killed someone, Then, you are denying the evidence of your senses, right?
And you may say, okay, it's true, I have a memory of strangling some guy.
I have a memory of burying him in the woods, or whatever it is, right?
But, you know, I can't trust the evidence of my senses.
Maybe that never happened. Maybe it was a dream, right?
So, not admitting to wrongdoing is all based on denying the evidence of your senses, or denying Somebody else.
The validity of somebody else is evidence of their senses.
And so that thou shalt not bear false witness is a commandment that can only exist if we accept the validity of the senses.
The moment we don't accept the validity or we deny the validity of the senses, the moment we do that, then it's no longer possible for us to gain redemption, to apologize, right? Because we can say, oh yeah, like a Maybe I remember cheating with that.
I guess I remember cheating with that woman, but maybe that was just a dream.
Maybe it didn't really happen.
Maybe it's just a fantasy. Maybe it's just made up.
Maybe it's all nonsense. And so when you're denying responsibility, if you don't believe in the evidence and the census, you just deny that you did things.
Or claim that it was a dream, or that somebody else must have fantasized about it, or that's not what actually happened.
So it gives you a perfect out.
You never have to take responsibility.
You never have to own up to anything.
You never have to make amends. You never have to make restitution.
And that is a very powerful excuse machine that I quite despise, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I know if I was to be a rationalist, I wouldn't go there and say...
You can't trust the senses.
I think my approach would be more like you can't really...
You can't have a justified ground for the senses in the sense that, as you touched on, you can only have a circular argument.
Yeah, you can't go to God and say, or St.
Peter, the pearly gates, you can't go there and say to God, hey man, You tell me to take moral responsibility and not do evil, but you give me senses that are completely unreliable, that I can't trust, and then every night you put me in this dream state where I fantasize a whole bunch of things that seem completely real to me.
How on earth am I supposed to know what's right, what's true, what's good, what actually happened, and then you want to hold me responsible for moral actions when I don't even know what the truth is?
I can't possibly know what the truth is?
God would simply say, no, no, no, hey man, I gave you five senses because they all work together, You know the difference between dreaming and waking.
Because if you only ever tried to eat in your dreams, you'd starve to death.
So don't give me this. I gave you every single thing that you needed to know truth from falsehood.
Your failure to pursue that, that's on you.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
Denial of the senses is a great sin.
And it facilitates sin in the sense that I would sort of understand it.
Alright, sorry, I'm going to just, I've got, I don't know, he keeps, is he just, is he trolling?
He keeps wanting to speak.
Thank you, very, great pleasure to chat.
I'm sorry that you weren't the other Isaac, but it was nice chatting.
Alright, Colm, have you lured me in one more time?
Hello. Hello. Hi.
Hello. I would just like to apologise.
I believe you, I joined him before I said I was ready to speak earlier this evening.
So I'd like to apologise for that, if nothing else.
Yeah, no worries. In other words, I've been following along this conversation you've been having for the last wee while, and I must say it's been very, very interesting.
From the point of view of someone who has studied Christian...
Well, no. Let me rephrase that.
Philosophy and theology from a Christian point of view, it has been very interesting.
A very... It's been a conversation in which I can both...
I have learned a lot and I feel as though I could give a lot as well, if that makes sense.
Does it? I don't know.
I don't know whether you could give a lot.
I mean...
I certainly think...
So for me... The evidence of the senses is really important from a moral standpoint.
It's not just like epistemology, like, oh, do you know if it's a mirage or not?
That's not how we function in the world.
If a bus is bearing down on someone, like they're in the middle of the road and a bus is coming at them, they don't just sit there and say, could be a bus, could be a fantasy, like you jump out of the way.
This is how we work at an operating level.
It's all just sophist nonsense because nobody actually lives this way.
Nobody actually lives this way.
Nobody sits there and says, well, I'm swimming underwater and it feels like I'm about to die, but that could all just be nonsense.
It could all just be made up. It could all be an illusion.
Like, no, people get up and they get their air.
Like, they don't live that way. And so why do people want to doubt the senses if they're never going to live that way?
Well, the reason they want to doubt the senses is so that they can get away with stuff.
It's so that they can lie to themselves.
They can lie to others. They can dismantle others' perception of reality.
They can be jerks or a-holes.
They can just be nasty specimens.
It gives them permission. It gives them a philosophical justification for the ultimate douchebaggery of disconnecting people from the truth.
Yes, very much so.
And the devil, sorry, the last thing I would say if we're going to talk theology, the devil is the guy who says only the internal state matters.
The devil is the guy who says there's no objectivity.
God says, no, we got objective moral rules.
I gave you the sense data to process reality.
I gave you physical laws that are absolute and objective.
You exist in a game of life for which there are strict rules, both moral and physical.
But the devil says, oh no, hey man, I can get you to break all those rules.
You can break all those rules.
It'll be fantastic. What does the Satanist say?
The Satanist says, do what thou wilt.
Do what thou wilt. Will.
Internal states. Desire.
Ambition. Lust.
The satisfaction of internal states is the only thing that matters and the only thing that can bring you any kind of happiness.
Subjecting yourself to external standards, to reality, to truth, to virtue, to the Ten Commandments, that's bad.
Objectivity, the evidence of your senses, that's all bad.
It's your internal states, and that's what the devil does.
The devil comes along and says, Oh, you're nothing if you're not king, Macbeth, so you've got to go kill the king.
Or, you're nothing if you don't have a new car, so if you've got to steal it, that's the way it is.
You're nothing if you're not dating five girls at the same time.
You're nothing. And it's your internal states, your lust, your ambition, all of these things that overwash and destroy any external standards, objectivity, truth, or virtue.
And this is why I fight this guy so hard.
I mean, it's really a devilish, if not downright satanic perspective.
I know that sounds like a lot, but I feel it very strongly, which is not an argument.
I'll tell you where I'm coming from emotionally.
I think I understand.
If you have any reason to believe I do not, then please interrupt and correct me.
May I make a reading statement?
Recommendation to you.
Look up Benedict XVI, Pope Benedict, the dictatorship of relativism.
He may well touch on a lot of what you have said just in the last couple of minutes, I believe so, anyway.
Yes, I mean, so I'm a Christian.
I'm a Catholic. Let me put that out there.
And yes, you know, I believe in the evidence of the senses.
I believe that presently, for example, I am sitting down.
There is a table in front of me.
There is a rug underneath said table.
And I can believe what this...
I find the notion of you can't trust your senses to be a very evil concept.
Do you understand what I'm going with?
You're making statements, so I'm not sure where you're going with yet, and I appreciate the statements, I think I share them, but I'm not sure where you're going with yet, so I'm sure it's going to be fine, but I can't tell you as yet whether I approve or disapprove.
I believe in that what I see, what I hear, what I feel, smell, and so on, is real.
It exists. I mean, admittedly, there is a limit to what I can see, To what I can hear and form.
But nonetheless, they are real.
They exist. And to deny that they exist, to deny that they are real, is to deny reality itself.
Do you follow me from that?
Yeah, and listen, we don't want to judge the senses by our inability to see infrared without assistance.
Which is like saying, well, because I don't have infinite money, I don't have $100.
Or because I'm not 100 feet tall, I'm not 6 feet tall.
Or because my physical body doesn't live forever, I don't have any life at all.
You can't extrapolate and make vanish things in reference to eternity or infinity or other skills.
So yes, it's true that we cannot see the infrared spectrum.
But that does not limit Once again,
I find you to be well ahead of me in making my points.
No, no problem at all.
Is there anything else you wanted to add? What can I say?
I am a Christian. I am a Catholic.
I believe in God.
I believe in Jesus and his church and so on.
And should you ever wish to discuss or talk about any of that with me, please do let me know.
Either in a public or private capacity.
And Please keep on doing what you are doing because I think you are doing good in the world.
Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.
That's very kind. And that is the plan.
All right. I appreciate that.
And let's see, Max, you had something that you wanted to say.
Let me just bring you up here.
You'll need to, of course, unmute yourself.
But, yeah, thanks for joining.
Max, what's on your mind? Yeah, I just wanted to finish up the story.
There were other people at the incubator who were also, you know, You know, what really irked them, in addition to me posting some of your arguments, was that I thought that global warming was the anthropogenic, catastrophic climate change was actually a huge hoax.
And that just really set their asses on fire.
And so it wasn't just, you know, like one black person.
There was All sorts of people there who were just super pissed.
Anyways, I got kicked out of that place.
Yeah, that's probably well because, I mean, the people, you know, whatever your argument with regards to global warming, it is important to be able to listen to the counterpoint.
And people who just outright dismiss, and of course, you know, they tend to be younger people because the older people, we've all heard the predictions that the world literally was going, that half the world was going to be underwater by the year 2000.
And so when people blow past these kinds of issues or these kinds of deadlines without any notice or notification, then...
And of course, a lot of the environmentalists openly say, we're going to lie and exaggerate in order to get our way, to raise public awareness.
So, you know, when people out and out are saying, yeah, we're going to lie and exaggerate, and then they keep blowing past all of these deadlines...
Without seemingly to notice anything.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's worth having a question or two.
I think it's a reasonable thing to have a question or two.
But those companies will not succeed.
You just don't have enough critical thinkers for critical mass in terms of productivity.
Those companies will not succeed, so probably a good thing to get at.
All right, well, listen, thanks, everyone.
I appreciate your time this afternoon.
A great pleasure to chat. I hope you found it helpful and useful.
I know I did, as I always do.
Love you guys. Thank you so much.
Don't forget, free novel. AlmostNovel.com and FreeDemand.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
Great pleasure to chat. Take care, everybody.
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