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Aug. 6, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:21:56
THE FREEDOMAIN METAPHYSICS DEBATE!
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What's up? Hey man, how you doing?
I'm doing fine. So, now you're talking to me.
Would you explain your metaphysics for me, please?
I would be very happy to explain my metaphysics.
Let's just make sure we're both talking about the same thing.
If you could give me your definition, please.
Well, I ask first.
Sorry, I didn't mean your definition of metaphysics.
I meant your definition of what you mean by metaphysics, just to make sure that I'm going to answer the right question for you.
Well, okay, let's put it this way then.
All the philosophy you need to do in order to start on epistemology.
Well, no, I think you need to start with metaphysics, but again, just tell me what your definition of metaphysics is.
Hang on, hang on, hang on. I say metaphysics I define as that amount of philosophy you need to do in order to start on epistemology.
Okay. All right, so yeah, just give me your definition of metaphysics, and not what metaphysics, like your whole argument for metaphysics, but for me, metaphysics is the study of reality independent of human consciousness.
No, because metaphysics has to define what reality is.
What do you mean by one of the things you might need to do in metaphysics is define what reality is.
Oh, so for you, hang on, hang on.
Dude, dude, if I'm talking, we can't both talk over each other, okay?
We've got to try and play this back and forth.
So for you, or at least for the purpose of this conversation, metaphysics is the study of reality, but reality includes the human mind.
So for me, no, no, I'm still talking.
No, no, hang on, hang on. Listen, dude, dude, no, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Wait, wait, wait, hang on.
No, I'm not going to stop talking.
I'm not going to stop talking.
Until you stop talking over me.
Okay, if you want to have this conversation, you have to at least have the self-control to not talk over me when I'm in the middle of making a point.
Can we agree on that? Yeah, but you are framing it incorrectly.
No, no, no. I have to have that agreement from you if you want to have the conversation with me.
You can't use an excuse like something I'm framing, whatever that means.
If I'm in the middle of making a point...
You can't talk over me. I won't talk over you as best I can unless I genuinely don't understand something.
But if you're in the middle of making a point, I won't talk over you.
No, no, no. See, now you're doing it again.
I'm still not finished my point.
So we can't have the conversation.
No, no.
I need the agreement from you that that's how it's going to go.
Okay, fine. This is your show.
No, no, don't be passive-aggressive with me.
No, no, no, don't be passive-aggressive with me.
It's not, it's my show. That's civilized human behavior.
It's civilized behavior for you not to talk over me when I'm talking.
It's not just, oh, it's my show, right?
I mean, it's civilized decent behavior to let somebody else, you're still doing it.
It's civilized behavior to let somebody else finish making their point before you bully them and talk over them, right?
I'm not bullying anybody. Okay, I have to stop myself now and say, please carry on.
No, I still need an agreement from you that you're going to do it, and not because it's my show or something, but because you can't have a debate with somebody if you're talking over them, right?
That's what I'm trying to say.
So carry on. I don't understand.
I'm in agreement with you.
I'm saying, fine, we have that agreement.
I'm not going to interrupt you, and you're not going to interrupt me then.
Fantastic. Okay. All right.
So for me...
I'm sorry? I don't think that just happened.
Okay, so you need to not interrupt me right after you say you're not going to interrupt me.
Okay, so for me, and I think this is a pretty good way of doing it, and I have a whole playlist.
You can find it at fdrpodcast.com where I talk about an introduction to philosophy.
It's a 17-part series where I go all the way from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to politics and so on.
So for me, metaphysics is a study of reality and That does not include human consciousness, because once we start to include human consciousness and its relationship to reality, we're in the realm of epistemology.
So metaphysics is the study of what is, and then when the products of human consciousness are compared to reality, in other words, if you say that's a tree while pointing at a tree, then you're making a knowledge claim, and therefore we're in the realm of So first we study the nature of what is, and then we study the relationship between consciousness and what is, in particular truth claim statements, which is epistemology, and from there we go to ethics.
Does that somewhat accord with your way of thinking, or do you want to redefine it, or define it differently?
Well, it doesn't accord.
I don't like the use of the term study.
Study is something you do when you have epistemology.
You can't study something without having an idea of knowledge.
And you need to do some metaphysics in order to settle what is knowledge.
That's what I said. In order to frame the area of the philosophy of epistemology, one way to say it is that that's the philosophy you need to do before you can actually settle on knowledge.
You can't study anything without having an idea of knowledge.
So maybe you're just using Different words.
I would say it's a kind of philosophy, it's not a study.
You could study, you know, flowers or tractors or birds or whatever, stamps and so on, but that entails an understanding of what knowledge is, right?
Because you are studying that which you call reality.
When you are claiming study, then you're studying something that is a part of reality, but reality has to be defined and Well,
of course, I completely understand that.
So when I say that metaphysics is a study of Reality independent of human consciousness, I am a human consciousness making that distinction.
So without a doubt, I have to exercise some faculty of knowledge in order to make that claim.
But I think we can both agree that there is, or at least I hope we can, that there's an objective reality that exists independent of human consciousness.
In other words, it's all of the aspects of natural reality that would continue to exist were human consciousness to disappear tomorrow, if that makes sense.
Yeah, we could agree about it, but it's not good.
We could agree, but I would not like it to be very good philosophy.
Because if it's independent of your consciousness, how the hell do you have access to it?
How do you have access to natural reality independent of our consciousness?
Yeah, if it's independent of your...
Of your mind, or your consciousness is a part of your mind, or however you want to put it, right?
So if it's independent of your mind, you can't experience it.
If it's outside my house, I can't say it's inside my house, right?
Well, but you do understand that we are using the medium of objective reality in order to have this conversation.
You have to accept that I objectively exist.
You have to accept that there are sound waves.
You have to accept that there's a methodology for transmitting those sound waves, in this case TCPIP or internet connections and so on.
So you have to accept, in order to have this conversation, Things that exist outside of your consciousness and exist independent of your consciousness.
In other words, I don't think that you think that you're arguing with yourself, that I'm an independent mind that's on the other side of the computer screen that is having a conversation with you.
All the access I have to you as whatever I call it is an experience.
I have an experience of sounds and colors and so on, the equation of the experience.
That's what I have access to.
I interpret it as Stefan Molyneux or a podcast or whatever, but it's still a set of qualia.
And the qualia is in my mind, but my interpretation of it is also in my mind, but I'm just saying it's outside my mind because that's the interpretation I am doing.
Okay, so, but do you accept that there are Sequalia, which exists as information or data.
There's things that exist within your mind that do not exist outside your mind.
And there are things that exist outside of your mind that do not exist in your mind.
And the way that we test for that is universality, is consistency, is conformity to predictable and stable laws of physics and so on.
So every night we go to sleep and we have dreams where we're flying elephants, where we can dance in fire and not get burned and so on.
and that's a subjective experience and we know that that's a subjective experience because it's completely contradictory and it's impossible for us to achieve that because we can't dance with fire, we can't be elephants that fly because that does not conform with external laws of biology and physics and also because it happens consistently when we're asleep and doesn't happen ever when we're awake and so because we lie down in bed and then we have these fantastical visions while we're sleeping and of course if you're married Your wife can confirm that you did not turn into a flying elephant and the bed was not in flames and you were dancing on it.
Or if you live alone, you can video yourself all night and you have the subjective experience of these wondrous things in nightly dreams, but they aren't actually happening in the objective world that other people are perceiving.
And we know that difference because we can get the feedback from others and we can also achieve impossible contradictory things in our dreams, which means that they're occurring within our minds, not in the objective world, if that makes sense.
I understand where I'm coming from, but it doesn't make sense.
Because, to say it bluntly, you are working from a paradox.
You don't identify a built-in paradox in your thinking.
I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.
Your microphone is not particularly good.
I didn't identify what am I thinking?
There's a paradox built into your thinking that you're not identifying.
And that is, when you're saying there's an objective outside world, you are saying it, at least, as if that is a given to you.
But how do you have access to that if you need an experience of it, right?
This is what you call radical skepticism or something like that, right?
But there's nothing that is given to you.
You need to have an experience of it, right?
And that's what you have access to.
Then you identify it.
It's like pulling the territory out of the map and saying, now you have to put it back into the map.
But you never have anything but the map.
You don't have the actual territory.
Oh, yeah. So this is just Cartesian radical skepticism.
We're in a matrix. Everything could be manipulated.
I get all of that. And this is undergraduate philosophy 101.
Okay, so... The difference is that in some of the sense data that I get, there is consistency that is independent of my will.
Right? So if I'm writing a story, I can say, like if you think of the movie Star Wars, right?
So in the story, George Lucas I think was the writer, then Luke Skywalker can gesture at an object and have that object come to his hand, right?
So that can be imagined and that can be recreated using various kinds of fairly cheesy special effects and all of that.
So in a story, you can have things that can't occur in the natural world occur, in the objective world, right?
Now, You are unable to ever overcome gravity.
You are unable to gesture and have something fly across through telekinesis.
You are unable to directly read the minds of other people.
So these are absolutely consistent and universal experiences within humanity.
So we have to first differentiate between things which we can make up, things which we can control within our own mind, If you are thinking about something obsessively, you can, like if you have OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, you can get therapy and you can control those thoughts.
And so there's things that you can control within yourself.
You can control your mood.
You can think of things that are exciting.
You can even accelerate your heart rate.
You can meditate and you can decelerate your heart rate.
So there's things that you can control within yourself.
Directly or indirectly, you can even control the movement of your hands.
I'm gesturing even though I'm just doing audio because it helps me to think and communicate.
So there's things that you can control within yourself and that's one category.
And then there are other things that you can't control within yourself, right?
You can't control whether you digest or not.
Usually you eat food. It's an automatic.
You can't control whether you produce gas or not except by not eating.
And you can't control the contents of your nightly dreams, right?
So these are things that happen within yourself that you can't Now, there's this whole other area of, I think you called it SQL-A or sense data, which you can't control.
In a story, I can say, it was stormy and then suddenly it was a clear blue sky.
That would be a sort of fantastical story.
Or in a story like Benjamin Button, you can say, this man aged backwards.
And you can make up these stories.
I have wild physics in my science fiction book, The Future, which I just released recently.
So you can have these impossible things happen, but in the real world, in the world where you can't affect what happens based upon will or imagination or preference, I cannot will the weather to change, I cannot will things to move into my mind, and no one has ever been able to show that that can ever occur.
And that's, we have to at least differentiate, even if we say everything's kind of a matrix or a simulation, There's a huge difference, even in the simulation, between what we can control in our own minds and using our own bodies and what we have no direct control over out there in the world.
I can't walk out in the sunshine and not receive solar radiation.
Now, I could make up a story where somebody was immune to solar radiation that would be an act of imagination that would not reflect things in the real world.
I cannot change The phase of the moon by looking at it and concentrating.
So there's no possibility of changing the vast majority of the SQL-A that I experience in the world.
So the things that I can control or can affect directly or indirectly and the things that I cannot affect or control directly, these are two very important categories that exist no matter what you think of the simulation.
Okay. If you could...
Keep your answers a little short so I don't have to remember everything that you say.
Just a hint.
If you say a lot of stuff, I can remember everything.
Listen, I'll lead you through it.
Have you ever been able to defy gravity?
Can you float and fly? No, no.
I would like to wind back a little, right?
I'm referring to that paradox that's built in your thinking, or the way you presented your thinking, at least in the arguments you made first.
That if I say that my foot is outside my mind, how can it be outside my mind?
Because it needs to be inside my mind in order to experience it, right?
So what I'm referring to is an experience of something.
But if I say it's outside my mind, that which I experience can't be that thing that it is outside.
It's merely a representation of it, right?
It can't be the thing itself, as Immanuel Kant would say.
It's just impossible.
That's the paradox.
Hang on, but you just saying the word paradox doesn't make it a paradox.
Just saying the word paradox is not an argument.
Okay, fine.
If you say it's outside your mind, you can't experience it, right?
But since I'm experiencing that, I am referring to something.
That is in my mind, right?
In order for me to experience it.
So the paradox is, it can't both be outside and inside my mind.
How do I address that seeming paradox, or whatever word you want to put on it?
Yeah, okay, so that's what I have been addressing.
No, no, no, you haven't.
Sorry, you haven't. Oh no, I have been addressing it, whether you agree with it or not.
I have absolutely been addressing it.
So there are things that I can control within my own mind, the focus of my thoughts, maybe some pain management or whatever it is, right?
I don't think about my foot, I stub my toe, I'm suddenly thinking about my foot quite a bit, right?
And then I can say, oh, I've got to stop thinking about my foot because it's not going to make the pain any better.
So there are things within my mind that I can have control and influence over, right?
And so early, when we had our disagreement at the beginning of the conversation about talking over each other, we were asking, or we were both asking or making the commitment to not talk over each other, which is great, because we have control over that.
There are things that I don't have any control over.
I cannot open my eyes and not see.
I cannot have significant sound waves hit my ears and not hear.
So there are things, there's two categories, right?
There are things that I can have some influence or control over, and there are things that I have no influence or control over.
I cannot satisfy my hunger without eating food.
I cannot satisfy my thirst without drinking.
Now, if I'm hungry and I can't get food for a while, I can say, well, I shouldn't really concentrate on my hunger.
I should try and think of something else so it's not as uncomfortable.
But I cannot survive without food coming in from the external world.
And if I fall asleep and I dream that I've eaten food, I don't wake up with a full belly.
So there are things that are within my mind, and there are things which, of course, yes, I understand this conversation is occurring within my mind, and the room that I'm in that I'm looking at is within my mind.
But there's still categories of all the sense data that comes in.
Some I can influence, some I cannot.
And these two things are the delineation in...
Epistemology between the subjective and the objective.
The objective is that which you cannot directly influence with your mind and exists and impresses itself on your mind in a clear, predictable, utterly rules-based way, in a way that dreams don't.
Yeah, but when you start in metaphysics, you can't take anything for granted.
You can't say there is this and there is that.
There's an outside and there's an inside, right?
And another point I might...
No, that's not what I said, though.
That's not even close to what I said.
No, that's not... If you're going to strawman me, then we can't have the conversation.
You are interrupting me now.
No, no, but no, if you strawman me, I won't live for that.
I can't accept that. I'm not strawmanning you.
You are absolutely strawmanning me.
Perhaps you could repeat my argument to make sure that you understand.
I'm not saying you agree with it, but if you could repeat the argument, then I'd have some sense that you were listening.
Because you talk about an outside and an inside.
No, I said everything occurs inside the mind.
So perhaps you would like to try that again.
Okay, but that's not what I heard.
You said there's an objective reality that I am experiencing by opening my eyes, as you said, something like that, right?
Okay, so you haven't been following the argument.
Would you like me to repeat it?
You said when you open your eyes, you can't control whether or not you experience this or that as if it's an outside No, I never said no. Come on.
As if is a clear example.
Hang on. When you say you said this as if something, that's a clear straw man, because I didn't say that.
Okay, so you can't say, well, I'm going to use the word as if and then say that you said that.
As if it's a clear, like, oh, well, you said this as if it was an elephant that was saying it.
It's like, no, but so what was my argument?
Because I said everything occurs within the mind.
I accept that. What was my argument?
No. I want to get back to the core of the start of metaphysics.
No, no, you're not even hearing my argument because you are mischaracterizing my argument completely.
So there's no point having the debate if you're not even listening.
No, I was the one starting the question, and I would like to hang on to that question I presented, right?
That it's the starting point of metaphysics.
If you're going to discuss metaphysics, I would like to stay where that starts to wind back to that point where I think it's important to make sure that you understand my argument.
But I haven't mischaracterized your argument.
You've mischaracterized mine. No, but I'm trying to interpret what you're trying to say.
The thinking behind it...
No, don't interpret it.
Hang on. Don't interpret it.
Just repeat it back. I mean, listen, I can give you a strong argument for communism, and I'm not a communist, right?
So just repeat the argument back to me, because if we're not...
To be honest, I don't know exactly what argument you are referring to then.
Well, the argument is not that there's things that I can directly experience outside the mind.
I've never said that. I fully accepted that everything occurs within the mind.
The mind cannot peel itself out of the skull and go wandering around directly touching things in the universe.
I fully accept that everything is occurring within the mind.
That does not make me a radical subjectivist or a skeptic or anything like that.
I'm not a Cartesian skeptic.
I'm not a Humean skeptic or anything like that.
So, given that you and I both agree that everything is occurring within the mind, how do I differentiate What I'm arguing for is external to the mind and what is internal to the mind.
Yeah, but then if you're saying everything from the ground is within your mind, then we agree.
We're on the same page from the starting point.
But then there's nothing in that Then you can't say about that experience, which you only, from the starting ground, have inside your mind, that you need to start to point out what part of it is something that is outside the mind, or a representation, or something outside.
Why would you need to get to that philosophy?
It's like it's...
What is it about it that makes you convinced that you need to differentiate what part of it is inside and what part of it is something that is a representation of an outside?
Oh, because I don't want to be insane.
Hang on.
You asked me a question.
Sorry, you asked me a question. I thought, was that a rhetorical question?
Or if you want to keep going, that's fine.
I thought you were asking me a question.
That's a metaphysical part of the metaphysics.
The thinking, the philosophy you need to do.
When I say you need to do, I'm not talking about you specifically, but in all generality, about metaphysics.
Right. So why would I want to differentiate between purely subjective states or more objective states?
In other words, why would I want to differentiate between those aspects of the mind I can have direct control over and those aspects of the mind I can have no direct control over?
Well, A, because I want to survive and B, because I don't want to be insane.
So somebody who believes that the waking reality exists Is exactly the same as a dream at night.
That person is called psychotic or significant hallucinations or schizophrenic or whatever.
So mental illness is a very tortuous and horrible state and it's unsurvivable.
So the only reason that you and I are here to have this debate, which is a fun debate and I'm enjoying it and thank you for calling in.
So the only reason that we're alive to do this is because our ancestors, all the way back billions of years, were able to successfully differentiate between internal states and objective states.
So the internal state is, well, I'm hungry, I had a nap, and I dreamt I was eating food, right?
So then they wake up and they're still hungry, and they don't think, well, I'm fine, I don't need to eat because I just dreamed about it, because then they would die.
Because they wouldn't have enough food.
So the way that they do, so animals in general have to differentiate, all animals that have dreams, which is mammals I think and above, have to differentiate between the subjective states and the objective states because survival requires a successful negotiation with the objective state.
So you may say that you're a radical subjectivist or whatever it is, but it's not true.
Not in how you live, not in the practical manner of how you live.
So, for instance, for many decades, you have got enough sleep, you have got enough food, you have got enough water, you have gone to the dentist, you have sought medical care.
Where necessary, you have not walked off cliffs.
You have fully accepted, in order to survive, the difference between internal and external problems.
I think that's true.
If that's your perspective, hang on, I'm almost done.
Well, then there would be no explanation as to how you possibly have survived.
And the only way you survived is to have a very clear distinction between these two things.
And to understand why you have that clear distinction and why all our ancestors had that clear distinction is a very interesting question.
But just throwing up your hands and say, I'm just a brain in a tank and it's all a simulation.
Well, that's not how you actually live.
So I don't really take it very seriously.
I didn't say that. I say that the kind of metaphysical starter I'm pointing out now, or started by pointing out, is what you would refer to as radical skepticism.
I don't call myself a radical skepticist.
I don't call myself anything.
I'm not into isms at all.
I'm into good philosophy.
And wherever the thinking leads me, that's where I'm going in philosophy, right?
So if If I may get back to the point I was trying to start because it's like you're jumping way ahead very fast and taking kinds of thinking for granted without clarifying it.
If you need to take it step by step by step by step, you're talking about objective and subjective without clarifying what they are.
I have, no, I have, I have, no, no, that's a complete mischaracterization.
I have absolutely and repeatedly defined, now maybe you're not into listening, maybe it's too much sense data for you, maybe you're overwhelmed, but I have repeatedly and clearly differentiated between the subjective and the objective.
Again, if you weren't listening, that's not my fault.
Because you weren't listening, I will repeat it.
The subjective is the inconsistent and contradictory information that exists within my mind, such as dreams, or things which I can directly control, such as my thoughts or sensations within my body to some degree.
The objective is areas where my mind cannot influence directly any of the sense data.
I can't snap my fingers and have it change from day to night.
I can't age backwards.
I can't, you know. So, I very clearly said these two things.
And so, again, if you're not listening or you're not making notes or you can't process that quickly, I can't help that.
But if you keep saying, I haven't defined these things when I have, I have to correct you.
You know, but you're.
It's like if you are starting from a start, if you're having a starting point that's saying I have some experiences and I say that they're in my mind or that that's with the starting point.
Then the next leap is, okay, as I hear you saying, right, that I have to differentiate between object and subject.
Well, I mean, the objective and subjective is the terms that I use as a shorthand for things which I can control in my mind and things which I cannot.
Before you break in, you agreed, or you asked me to agree to, you're not breaking the stream of consciousness, right?
So, it's just, it's like, it feels that when you present it, that's my interpretation or my Feeling when you say that it's a beaten path.
I need to go there and I need to go there.
I need to stay that and that and that and that.
But in my opinion, when you do the metaphysics, if you start with one point, you should use that point in order to argue why you're doing the next thing.
So what is it about your experience That could make you say, now I have to differentiate between objective and subjective.
What is it about the experiences?
Sorry, if you're asking me that question, the answer is that there's a very clear differentiation between the things that I can directly control within my own mind and the things which I cannot.
Directed control within my own mind.
That's a very clear, and it's, you know, I'm 55 and a half years old, so I guess 55.5 years old.
And throughout my entire experience of living and through the entire experience of everyone else who's alive, we have to have a very clear distinguishing, a very clear distinction.
Between the subjective and the objective, and by subjective I mean things that I can control, things which can be contradictory within my own mind versus the things that I cannot control and which are perfectly consistent outside my mind, and that's how I differentiate between the two.
If you can't get your resources from objective reality, you can't survive.
So you yourself have also had no problem differentiating between the subjective and the objective because we need resources from the objective universe in order to survive and continue our semi-subjective state of mind.
So the reason why I have that experience is there are things which I can control in my mind and things which I cannot control no matter how much willpower.
I mean I remember when I was a kid in the 70s there was all this woo-woo mysticism going around and there was all this, oh, you can control objects with your mind and actually got into the newspaper for the spoon bending and stuff like that.
And I experimented I think like most curious kids do.
Oh, I wonder if I can – I'm going to concentrate on trying to lift this cup with my mind.
And I tried it and my friends tried it and it was all over the place.
It's a sort of cultural thing and it never worked.
It never happened. Whereas, of course, in dreams, if you're into lucid dreaming, you can, to some degree, control the contents and purposes of your dreams, and there are times when I'm having a nightmare when I can force myself to wake up, but if something scary is happening in my real life,
I can never force myself to So the difference between these two, which is perfectly consistent and perfectly universal as far as anybody has been able to verify with me, for me it's very important to distinguish between these two states of mind because they definitely exist within my mind and within the minds of just about everyone I know.
Yes, but I agree so far that that's also the steps I would take in my philosophy.
The difference is that That which I call the outside is also still an experience inside.
I only have access to the experience inside my mind.
I'm classifying a part of it.
This is the part I can control, which I classify as that which is outside.
What I have access is not the actual outside.
It's still an experience inside.
Because I need to open those eyes in order for it to get in, right?
Or, you know, how would I put it without stretching my philosophy?
That's the reason why I think a guy like Immanuel Kant says, The actual world, that which it tries to tell you about, so to say, you don't have access to because you need the experience inside.
And when it has become an experience, it is no longer the thing outside.
If I'm experiencing an elephant, the elephant is not, you know, decomposing itself, transmitting itself through some kind of photons, traveling through my eyes, and then decomposing itself into an elephant and saying, this is the actual same thing that is out there.
So it can't both be the thing out there and the thing in there, if I'm classifying my experience that way.
So what I'm saying is, what I call the outside is still inside, but because it's that which you call the objective universe, because you can't change it, you can't You can't decide whether or not to have the actual impression of an elephant.
If you have an impression of an elephant, you have an impression of an elephant.
If you don't have that impression, you can't force that impression on you.
You can maybe, you know, have that shadowy experience of the concept that you use in order to identify the elephant, but that's a concept you're dragging out of your mind somewhere, right?
I would say that the mind actually uses in order to identify some Pattern in your experience.
So, not to get too deep, but it can't both be the thing outside and the thing inside.
And if you had the access to the real thing outside, why the hell would you need the inside if the inside can be erroneous, right?
So that's the paradox that is built in that sort of, I would call, materialist thinking.
And another thing that the materialist paradox runs into is what is known as the heart problem of consciousness, which is how that scientific description of the world in numbers and so on, how does that become sort of the color of roses?
There's nothing in numbers or physics or Newton or Your Avogadro's number or anything, logarithm or, you know, the particles and subatomic, whatever, nothing necessitates the experience of red, right? And that's the paradox that you arrive at or the problem you arrive at in a materialist thinking.
The other way around, you eliminate that problem.
I'm sorry, how do you eliminate the problem?
Because if you stay from the inside and say, okay, I can only, because we agreed that's the starting point, right?
But you can't get beyond the inside.
You can't step out of yourself and say, there's an elephant out there, and I'm stepping back in and saying, I'm having the same elephant inside.
How could that be possible at all?
And when you say that you're working from the outside, then how the hell does that become the inside?
But the inside is the qualia, right?
So that's the hard problem of consciousness.
Okay, so I understand.
Sorry to interrupt. Sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead. Sorry if you were just finishing up.
I thought you were repeating, but go ahead.
So the hard problem is that you can't get to your qualia or your experiences.
From the outside.
And then the point, then the argument is, or the philosophy should be, well, how do I have access to that outside then?
Well, I would say you haven't.
You haven't. If you say your experience is some outside, then it's just a classification of your experiences, and that's fine.
I work from that, when I drive my car, I am working from my experience being a representation of that outside.
But in order for me to have the experience, that experience must be inside my brain, right?
Or inside my mind. So the difference is that the actual outside, you do not have access to.
No matter how you fiddle around with your experiences, you can actually never get to the real thing, as Immanuel Kant would say.
Something like that, right? Yeah, yeah.
So the paradox is, if you say there's an outside, how do you experience that actual outside if it's outside your mind?
Because an experience of that outside needs to be inside, and when it's inside, it's no longer the outside.
Okay, so you're done with that part?
Done?
What do you mean done?
No, no, I don't want to interrupt you, but I felt you were just sort of repeating at that point.
Okay, so let's just do a bit of back and forth here, and if you could keep your answer short, I'd appreciate it.
Excuse me for breaking in, but it's sort of difficult.
English is not my first language.
You know, I'm trying my best to illuminate both myself and you on my thinking, right?
No, I get it. I get it. Now, see, I fully accept that my experience of you is entirely within my brain.
Right? We can't see each other, but my experience of you coming through my ears is entirely within my brain.
So I accept that.
To have a standard of knowledge that requires human beings be a god is not a valid standard of knowledge for me.
In other words, saying that the only way things could be true is if you could directly, not through any medium of the senses, directly experience every atom in the universe.
Or if you're looking at an apple, oh, I can only see the outside and one side and so on.
And saying, well, you can't really know the apple unless you know every atom within the apple.
Well, that's having an impossible standard.
Of knowledge that doesn't exist to any living or sentient creatures.
So I don't accept that as a standard of knowledge, to say that the only way that we could know anything is for our brain to leap out of our skull and merge with the object and directly, I don't even know what that would mean, directly experience it.
Because the only way that we can experience things is through the outside world, is through sense So I don't accept the Kantian requirement that we know the things of themselves or in themselves.
I fully accept that the highest standard of knowledge that we can possibly attain is conceptual consistency through the evidence of the senses.
To me, there's nothing greater or higher or a standard that shrinks that down to nothing because it is inconceivable that we are not gods And we can only experience the outside through the evidence of the senses and our brain still sits within our skull and I fully accept all of that.
So I reject the Kantian requirement that we know things...
Of themselves or in themselves that we can get out through our brain and somehow merge with our souls in the universe directly because that would be requiring.
It would be saying, well, we can't know anything unless we're omniscient.
We can't live unless we're immortal, right?
I mean, I completely reject those standards because they're made up standards.
They don't exist anywhere in the realm of philosophy except as a repudiation of sense data.
So, let me ask you this.
Do you accept at least that there's a difference between things you can control in your own mind and things that you can't control through the evidence of the senses?
In other words, you can maybe change your clothing, but you can't change the weather.
Change the weather?
Well, if I... If I blow some crap out in the sky from an airplane or something like that, I might be able to change the weather.
No, no, just standing on the lawn, or I guess standing at your house, hopefully, you can change your clothes, but you can't just change the weather, right?
You can choose to change your, but you can't change the weather.
Or if you want to say this, you can't change the phases of the moon by your wind or your willpower.
I understand where you're going.
Yeah, I largely agree with what you're saying.
I understand the point you're trying to make.
Wait, you largely agree? Are you saying that you somewhat can change the phases of the moon?
Weather is an interpretation.
Weather is an experience, right?
Weather is an interpretation.
It's an abstraction of your experiences.
So, and change something, that's about the future, right?
I can predict the future, but I wouldn't try to change the weather because it's, I mean, it's, how would I know it's changed?
It's the weather, right?
I mean, so I hope that...
Wait, are you saying, sorry, are you saying that you're open to the argument that you can will the weather to change?
No, but it depends on how you define it.
It's an interpretation. I would like to get away from those kinds of interpretations.
Okay, okay, hang on. Let's take it differently.
Hang on. Let's take it differently.
Okay, so if you're having trouble with the weather, let's do something else.
Can you snap your fingers?
Like, you can snap your fingers and you can turn a light off, right?
I can get up and I can go and turn a light off, right?
Can you snap your fingers and turn the sun off?
Well, I would have to say I don't know.
I don't think so. So you don't know whether you can turn the sun off or not?
You think it might be possible for you to snap your fingers and turn the sun off?
Because I can know about the future.
So you think it might be possible for you to snap your fingers and turn the sun off?
No, I didn't say that.
I said I don't know.
Well, no, if you don't know, then it might be possible, right?
No. No, that's bad philosophy.
But you can't rule it out, right?
No, I'm not saying it's possible.
I just can't say if it will happen.
Just that I don't know doesn't make it possible.
Well, no, but you're not ruling it out, right?
I know for an absolute fact that it's impossible for any human being to snap his fingers and turn off the sun, right?
Now, you're saying, I don't know whether that might or might not be possible.
I don't know whether somebody could or couldn't do it, which means you're not ruling it out, right?
No, no. If I snap my fingers now, right, then in nine point or something minutes, I would see if the sun goes out.
And then I would say, it didn't go out, so it didn't go out.
But then I could snap my fingers again, wait another nine and a half minute or whatever, eight and a half minutes, and see, does the sun go out?
No, it didn't go out. Okay, it didn't go out.
I can snap my fingers again and so on, right?
Oh, no, but you see, if you can snap your fingers and turn out the sun, then you can certainly snap your fingers and overcome the speed of light, because it means that there are no physical rules that exist outside your mind that govern objective reality.
So you can't say, oh, well, somebody can snap their fingers and turn out the sun, but it has to be at the speed of light.
It's like, no, no, no. If you can snap your fingers and turn out the sun, then there's no physical rules that apply to anything, because there'd be no physical causality by which that could...
Hang on, hang on, still talking. No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying I don't know.
Because I can't know.
If I'm deciding to snap my fingers, I haven't snapped them yet, right?
So if I'm thinking of snapping my fingers, snapping my fingers is in the future.
I can't know about the future because I don't have that qualia I need in order to have that knowledge.
If I'm saying, I think the moon exists, I'm sitting here in my dark room here, there's no moon, right?
But I have a fairly decent You know, idea that there might be a moon.
So if I need to know there is a moon, I need to go outside and look at the moon.
And then I say, now I know there's a moon.
No, you don't. How do you know there's a moon?
If you look at it? Trial experiences, memories.
No, no, you don't know, no.
You don't know that there's a moon.
It's all happening in your brain.
How could you know there's a moon?
Just because you're getting some sense data, that doesn't mean anything.
Yeah, but it's that which you're saying that is objective.
You classified it as objective of being outside, right?
Because you couldn't change it. Oh, I know there's a moon.
I know there's a moon, but you don't.
I know it when I experience it.
And is there any continuity in your experience?
We're not doing epistemology.
We were doing metaphysics, right?
Now you're talking about knowledge.
I said that very early on.
In my opinion, you need to be completely done with metaphysics before you even start approaching knowledge.
And now you're talking about knowledge and being true and talking about universe as something that is...
No, we're talking about what exists.
No, we're talking about what exists.
No, don't cheat. Don't cheat, man.
This is unfair. We've been talking about what exists.
Okay, you go ahead. You go ahead.
Finish your bloody thought, then I'll talk.
Okay. What is thought?
Yeah, finish your thought, then I'll talk.
You're mentioning the term knowledge, and you're talking about being true.
And in my opinion, you might have a different opinion.
If you refer to something being true, you have to have knowledge.
So you can't talk about true when you're doing metaphysics.
And you can't talk about knowledge within metaphysics, right?
Well, haven't you been... Hang on.
Haven't you just spent the last 45 minutes arguing that I'm incorrect?
I'm not arguing that you're incorrect.
I'm trying to point out that there might be a paradox built into your metaphysics.
You didn't say there might be a paradox.
You said there is a paradox.
A paradox is a contradiction and therefore a falsifier.
So do you believe that my argument about objective reality, do you believe that it is incorrect or false?
But true or false is not a part of metaphysics.
That's a part of epistemology.
How on earth are we supposed to have a conversation about that which exists without affirming that it exists?
Or at least having an argument that it exists?
In other words, how can we describe reality without involving the human mind at all, given that you and I are arguing through the medium that the sense is using the human mind?
Hang on. We are not arguing about reality.
That's not... Metaphysics, in my opinion, we are arguing how we get to understand what we mean by reality, right?
That's metaphysics.
What we understand what we mean by reality, in other words, making true statements about reality.
No, so we're arguing about valid statements about reality, right?
If I say there's an objective reality and you say that there isn't or I can't know, then I'm making a truth claim and you're rejecting it, right?
Okay, so we're talking about knowledge.
You just said yes. So why are you dragging me off into epistemology now?
We're already talking about knowledge.
I just said I'm making a truth claim and you're rejecting it and you said yes.
Okay, so we're talking about that.
I said you started to use the terms knowledge and truth.
No, no. Let's rewind.
Hang on. This whole debate has been I'm making truth claims about objective reality and you're saying that I'm incorrect because everything is subjective or everything exists within the mind and that I can't experience things in themselves.
I can't go out of my mind and directly experience things, right?
The elephant is out there through the evidence of the senses.
It comes into my mind. It's not directly within my mind and all of that.
So when I make truth claims about objective reality, you reject those truth claims as being false, and now you're suddenly saying that our entire argument has not been about metaphysics because truth claims are about epistemology.
So you're just moving the goalposts here, and it's kind of boring.
No, I'm not trying to move the goalposts.
I'm trying to make sense of what you're talking about.
You're not trying to. You're succeeding in moving the goalposts.
Because now that I'm starting to disprove some of your arguments or starting to ask you direct questions, you're now...
Gaslighting and fogging the whole debate by dragging us into epistemology as if we haven't been doing that the whole time.
Okay, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. Have you ever been able to satisfy your desire for food by thinking about food?
Have you ever been able to satisfy your hunger by thinking about food or sustain your body's requirement for energy by thinking about food?
Or do you actually have to get what you would consider a more objective food into your body?
But I know what you're trying to...
No, just answer the question.
It's not a trick or a game.
I'm just asking a question.
I'll answer it. No, I haven't ever been able to do that.
So just answer the question.
Yeah, but there's an inherent...
The axiom you're implicitly working from when you're making the statement that I'd rather deal with before we talk about this, right?
You can't answer a simple question like, do you need to eat to fill your belly?
Yeah, but then you could start to...
Yes or no? Do you need to eat?
Come on, this is not that complicated.
There's stuff that is complicated.
This one isn't. Do you need to eat to fill your belly?
I need to stop something in my face in order to fill my belly, yes?
Okay, so you cannot generate sustenance for your body through your mind alone because we can dream about eating but not wake up full.
So you need to go to something that is not just within your own mind according to all of the rules of objectivity and reproducibility and consistency and things that we can't do within our own mind.
We can daydream about eating, and that's within our own mind, and we know that partly because it doesn't satisfy our hunger.
So you have to go into the world that I call objective or which is not directly controllable by our minds.
You have to go there to get food, and you can't get it any other way.
Yes, but all I'm saying is that which you stuff into your face in order to fill your belly.
That experience is not that which you put into your belly because your experience is in your mind and what is in your belly is in your belly.
Your mind is not sitting down in your belly and saying there's an elephant down there, right?
So what you stuff in your belly...
Wait, your mind is...
Hang on. I'm sorry. I'm confused.
Your mind is not in your belly saying there's an elephant down there?
I have no idea what that means.
Sorry. If you're eating an elephant or a mammoth or whatever, right?
Which is possible to eat, you would agree, right?
Yeah, I assume you can eat part of an elephant.
Sure, yeah. If you start to eat that elephant and you're saying that your stomach is outside your mind, but you're having an experience of that which you're stuffed into your face, then that which you're stuffing into your face If you're saying that into your stomach, if you say the stomach is outside your mind, then whatever experience you have of that which you have in your stomach is something else than that which is actually in the stomach because you need to have the experience inside your mind.
That's the whole point of it.
Well, no, but hang on, hang on.
Is there any way for the body to generate its own calories or does it need to get those calories from an external source?
But what you call your body is also an experience in your mind.
Okay. Is there any way for the mind to survive if the body dies from starvation?
Oh, come on. My daughter at the age of five could answer these questions.
They're not that complicated. This is pretty simple stuff, isn't it?
But you don't experience mind, right?
Mind is an abstraction of all that is going on just from your experiences, right?
Are you saying that you don't experience thought or your own identity or your own existence?
That's different from mind.
Mind is a catch-all term for everything that goes on there, right?
I don't know what you're talking about.
It just seems like we're just moving definitions all over the place like a shuffleboard.
Okay, but that would be an interesting...
No, no, but I'm asking you a simple question.
Can the body survive without external food?
I would say no, but what you're referring to is still something that is in your mind when you're talking.
No, no, no, no, no.
External food.
That's the metaphysics.
Okay, so why don't you try not eating because it's all in your mind, right?
Why don't you try not eating and see how that goes?
I know for a fact you've never tried not eating for very long, so you continually go in order to have this conversation.
You continually go to the external world to get your food and no other place.
You don't dream about it. You don't draw a picture of food and eat it.
You don't imagine it.
You don't sing a song about food and think you're full.
You, every single day, probably a couple of times of the day, you go to the external world to get your food in order to survive and then you have the energy to say to me, I have no idea what the external world is.
It's the place you get your food from!
That's where you get your food from.
It's where you get your air from.
It's where you get the water from that allows you to live.
That's not that complicated.
It's that place you go so that you can tell me it doesn't exist.
What do you mean you go there?
What do you mean you go? You go there because you don't just daydream about food.
You get up and you go to the fridge and you get food and you put it in your eating hole.
So you're allowed to shout at people but not, you know, break in or what?
I was passionate. I wasn't shouting at you.
I'm just passionate about the idea.
But go ahead. Okay, I'm passionate too.
I'm trying to keep my temper down, right?
Okay, when you're saying go there, what do you mean go there?
Because it's just these terms that you use then sometimes, right?
No, it's not. It's the term you use.
Actually deploy when you go and get food.
See, I don't like philosophy that is detached from everyday life.
I don't like this, and I'm not calling you bullshit.
I don't like this bullshit. Hang on, let me finish.
Let me finish. No, no, shut up. I don't like this bullshit philosophy that creates all these abstract categories that is completely at odds with how everybody lives their everyday life.
Philosophy comes from the everyday.
If something can be done properly, By a squirrel, it's probably something that a human being can figure out in their brain, right?
And squirrels don't imagine that they have nuts for the winter.
They store them under the ground.
They put them in their cheeks. They hide them all over the place because they know that they're going to need objective nuts in the real world to survive through winter.
So when you say, I don't know the difference between subjective and objective, it's all in the mind, it's all in the brain, that's not true.
It's not true because I know that it's not true because you're actually alive and able to have this conversation with me, which means you are perfectly able.
To differentiate between the subjective and the objective.
Because if you only believed in the subjective, you'd imagine food, you'd just daydream about food, and you'd starve to death long ago, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
So you have to look inside yourself.
I'm almost done. You have to look inside yourself.
This is a matter of introspection.
And you have to say to yourself, okay, the only way that I'm alive is I know the difference between the internal and the external, because I go to the external to get my food, to get my drink, to get my shelter or whatever, and And so I need to figure out what I know about the external so that I consistently go there to get my food so that I can stay alive.
Now, if you can figure that out, which is a process that I've been working on, because I'm like, okay, if I didn't know the difference between subjective and objective, I'd be dead because I wouldn't know...
I would think that gravity was optional in the way that wearing underwear is optional.
I would daydream about food because it's way more efficient to do that than to actually go and cook something.
I would try drinking my own spit or my own urine because it's more convenient than going to get some water.
So, clearly, I understand the difference between the internal and the external because I don't have waking dreams.
I only have dreams when I'm asleep and I'm able to differentiate between the dreams And objective reality.
So I'm able to do all of this and my ancestors are able to do all of this.
All of the animals that exist are able to do this.
Therefore, philosophically, there must be a way to do it.
And the way that I do it is look for consistency and look for things that I can control directly or not, which is my argument from earlier.
Now, if you tell me that philosophically there's no way to know these things, I just call bullshit because you're alive, which means you've gone to the external world for your food, water and shelter for 40 plus years.
And therefore, if you haven't figured out how you're able to do it, that's not on me.
But you're misinterpreting what I'm saying.
You're framing it in a different way than what I'm trying to say.
You might have that interpretation.
Fine, I can't do anything about that, right?
All I'm saying is actually that Whenever you do anything, when you go to that objective world you're talking about, you're still referring to something that is in your mind, never mind what you're doing.
You're just saying, okay, I need to get this kind of experience in order to make sure that I'm surviving.
I'm doing the same thing, but it's still an experience of some colors and some taste and some sounds and whatever.
When I open my fridge and I pick out that strawberry cake or whatever, it's the red one, right?
And hopefully it's not green.
So, I'm still working from an experience inside.
I'm just particular about certain experience that I previously had the experience, they will further my existence, right?
They're still just inside experiences, let's say, right?
That's all I'm saying.
Okay, but there's a difference between...
Hang on. Is there a consistent difference for you between daydreaming about food and actually eating?
I mean, even if we say that's all an internal state, has daydreaming about food ever sustained you?
And is there a difference between daydreaming about food and actually eating?
Is there a difference between dreaming about eating, which we often do, and actually eating, in your experience?
Of course there is.
Beautiful. Beautiful.
Beautiful. Then we agree.
Then we agree. And eating or, you know, stuffing what you call food or what I would call food into my face is not the same as thinking about stuffing food in my face, right?
Beautiful. Of course not. Beautiful.
Beautiful. Fantastic.
Then we agree. We are dealing with epistemology now, right?
We're not dealing with metaphysics, in my opinion.
No, I'm just asking if there's a difference.
Okay. Sorry, I'm just going to mute here.
So listen, great conversation.
Great, great, enjoyable. Yeah, we agree.
We agree. Now, there's a difference between what occurs within the mind and what's necessary out there in reality.
I appreciate the conversation.
It was a really good workout and thank you very much for the discussion.
And just to sort of reiterate the point, I'm not trying to sort of win the argument after the fact, but to reiterate the point, when I was a kid, I read, I used to, I got these books, Reader's Digest condensed books.
And in those books, they had, you know, short versions of stories.
I remember talking about this on the show many, many years ago.
And I remember this very vividly when I was maybe eight years old or so.
I read a story. I can't remember what it is.
And in it, a kid said, I'm hungry.
And his mother said, then eat a Cungry.
It was K-U-N-G-R-Y. So I said, I'm hungry.
And she said, eat a Cungry.
Now, Cungry doesn't exist and it's not a real thing.
And I just remember being struck by that.
It was a very interesting exchange.
I think it was a pretty depressing book overall.
And so he said, I'm hungry, so he wants real food, and she said, eat a made-up word.
Eat something that doesn't exist.
Now, the kid in the book was very little, and he said something like, I can't eat a concrete that doesn't exist.
I'm hungry. I want some real food.
So this little kid in this fictional story was able to differentiate between imagination and reality.
And if you were to say to a kid, let's say he's three, right?
And you were to say to the kid, I'm going to give you some candy.
And then you gave the kid a picture of some candy.
He would say, that's not real candy.
That's just a picture of a candy.
Right? If you were to say, I'm going to give you a chocolate...
And then you were to wrap a piece of wood in chocolate wrapper and you were to give him that piece of wood in chocolate wrapper and he would unwrap it, even though it had the wrapping of chocolate and maybe felt a little like chocolate before you opened it, he would open it and he would say, that's not real chocolate.
Children have dreams.
I remember asking my daughter when she was very young, did you have a dream last night?
And she told me what her dream was, and I remember dreams from when I was very little.
And we have this amazing ability to differentiate between dreams and reality.
I'm sure everyone who listens to this has had the experience of having a bad dream, a nightmare maybe, and you wake up and you say, oh, thank goodness that's not true.
And then we feel this relief, which we don't feel in the dream because we've woken up And we've transitioned from some terrible scenario where we've been chased by someone with an axe and we wake up and we're in our bed.
And we recognize that it was just a dream.
Now, for me, given that babies, toddlers, dogs, and so on, can tell the difference between dreams and reality, given that a little kid knows that he couldn't eat a kungri, Given that if you're cruel enough to give a kid a picture of a lollipop, when you say you're going to give them a lollipop, and the kid's going to say, oh, that's no good.
I don't want that. I want a lollipop.
I don't want a picture of a lollipop. He's able to tell the difference between the image and the thing.
And children are able to tell the difference between dreams and reality.
And dogs are able to tell the difference between dreams and reality.
Now, usually we can't tell the difference between dreams and reality while we're dreaming.
But the moment we wake up, we say, oh my gosh, that was a dream.
And, you know, if we have a dream that we owe someone $10,000 and we wake up, we don't phone everyone and say, wait, did I owe you $10,000?
We just say, oh, I dreamed. Now, it may be that we do owe someone $10,000.
We forgot about it for some reason.
The dream's there to remind us, but, you know, assuming that it was just a dream.
So we're really good at being able to differentiate ourselves Between our subjective experience and objective reality.
In fact, we know for sure that we could not have survived if our ancestors and ourselves had been unable to do that.
So this idea that everything exists within the mind and it's all this big blur and there's no difference between the internal and external, there's no difference between the objective and the subjective, that is a luxury of That we indulge in only because other people don't.
And I don't like to be parasitical that way.
I'm not calling this former debater a parasite or anything like that.
I'm just saying I don't like...
If the only way that I can indulge in everything's kind of subjective is because other people don't believe that, right?
So he's paying his electricity bill, right?
So that he can have a computer so that he can talk to me and have a really strenuous debate, which was great.
Now, the only reason that the electricity works is because people don't just kind of daydream that they've wired up an electrical grid.
They actually have to go out there and do the difficult, dirty and dangerous work of wiring up an electrical grid.
Right? The only reason that he has food that powers his mind to have this debate, or anyone for that matter, is because farmers have not just daydreamed about making food but have actually gone out into the hard, bitter, dangerous, difficult world And spread the manure and rotated their crops and planted the seeds and harvested and, you know, and cooked or transferred it to people who cook it into bread or whatever.
So all of these people have to deal with the real world to provide you the food and the shelter and the drink and so on for you to say there's no such thing as objective, whatever, right?
And I think that's...
Again, I'm not calling this guy because I don't really know him that well, but in general, I find that perspective extraordinarily dishonest.
Because if the only reason that you're able to make the argument that there's no difference between subjective and objective is because other people have fully differentiated between subjective and objective, then you are arguing using the very tools and survival that is given to you by people Who've acted in the complete opposite of your argument.
And that's why, you know, to me, also, if you're in a situation, and this is in general, right?
This is why it gets a little frustrating at times.
You know, I hope I wasn't too frustrated because I really enjoyed the debate.
But if you have trouble with simple questions like, can you live without eating?
You know, again, a three- or four-year-old could probably answer that question, right?
Now, to me, if a three- or four-year-old can answer a question correctly, then philosophy should figure out how they can do that.
It shouldn't just say, well, you know, that's like a three-year-old saying that the world is flat and they just don't know.
It's like, no, if both a three-year-old and a post-doctorate PhD in biology both answer it the same way, yeah, it's probably pretty close to true.
So if you're having trouble with a question like Can you eat the dream of food?
Do you need actual food in order to survive?
Like, if that causes you to hesitate, if that causes you to, well, it's complicated, it's like, no, no, no, no, that's not complicated.
And if you've lived your whole life, like he was talking about driving, right?
So I'll pick on him for this one, right?
So if you're driving and you say, Well, first of all, you're driving because you can't will yourself to your destination, right?
Like if you're daydreaming, I can daydream about a vacation that I had when I was 10, and then I can daydream about a vacation that I had when I was 40, and then I can daydream about vacationing on the moon.
Now, I don't need to drive to these places.
I don't need to fly to the moon.
In my mind, I can go to all of these places, and of course I've done this very vividly.
I mean, I'm one of the few philosophers who has worked very deeply and very seriously in the artistic realm, right?
So I've created entire fictional worlds.
With characters, with locations, with economies.
I've done this in Dungeons and Dragons.
I've done this in novel writing.
I've written 30 plays.
I've written hundreds of poems.
So I've worked really hard in waking dreams.
And I have to believe in the worlds that I'm creating to such a degree that they really come alive to the audience.
I have to really invest and create these worlds that really come alive to the audience.
But they're not real. They're fiction.
So I'm always concerned, I think, when somebody says, when I'm driving dot, dot, dot, and they say, well, there's no difference between the objective and the subjective or everything occurs within your mind and you can't tell them apart in any real way.
Okay, but then why are you driving somewhere?
Because I can visit imaginary worlds and I can visit memories.
I can visit different places that I've been in my mind.
I can think back upon the three big documentaries that I've done in Poland and in Hong Kong and in California.
You can find these at freedomain.com slash documentaries.
You should already watch them. I think they're very good.
So I can daydream about these things, and I don't need to drive anywhere.
The moment you say, I've got to drive somewhere, you're in a different state of mind.
Like, if I were to say to my wife, I want to look at photos of her wedding, therefore we need to go to the place we were married, she'd say, well, what are you talking about?
We don't need to go to the place we were married in order to look at photos of her wedding.
Now, if I were to say, I want to look at the location of the wedding, I want to look at the location of where we were married, then, of course, we would have to go there to the actual physical location, right?
So, If somebody says, I had to drive somewhere, then they're accepting that they can't get there in their mind, that they actually have to move their body through some objective medium.
They also have to say, and the car is built by people who didn't daydream about having a car or who fully and completely understood the difference between subjective and objective.
That's the only reason you have a car.
That works. It's the only reason you have gasoline.
It's the only reason that gasoline works is science and people studying these things and engineers and so on.
So if everything that you do to survive and flourish and do anything in this world requires a very clear distinction between the subjective and the objective, then you need to figure out how you're doing it and how everyone else does it and how everyone who grows your food and everyone who designs your car and everyone who delivers your electricity and your water, how they all do it.
Now, that's a very interesting philosophical question.
And one, of course, that I've been working on for decades.
Now, just to say, well, everything occurs within your mind and it's all subjective to one degree or another, whatever, right?
There's no difference between subjective and objective.
It's like, okay, then you need to stop paying for food.
Because it's much more efficient to daydream about eating than it is to actually go and eat.
Going to eat is expensive, it's time-consuming, blah, blah, blah, right?
So... If it's much more efficient to daydream about eating, why did we develop physical dangerous agriculture?
Everything that we have done to survive and flourish as a species is based upon a clear distinction between the subjective and the objective.
Science, engineering, medicine, mathematics, biology, geography.
There's different spaces in the world, different places in the world, different countries in the world that aren't one big blob.
Anthropology, you have to travel to go.
So we are very good from very early on.
Like object constancy, you can get at a couple of months.
Like the ball rolls behind the couch and the kid doesn't think it just disappears but knows that it's still behind the couch.
Object constancy comes pretty early.
Now, object constancy, If the ball rolls under the couch, when the baby's very young, the baby will just lose interest because the ball is out of sight, out of mind, right?
But relatively early, relatively quickly, the child, and this is at a couple of months, will reach under the couch to get the ball.
And they know the ball still exists even though it's no longer impressing itself on their senses.
And they're right! And they're correct!
The ball rolls under the couch, and dogs do this too.
The ball rolls under the couch, they will whine and scratch at the couch to try and get the ball, because they know that even though they can't see the ball, the ball is still there.
Dogs do it. Bees do it.
Even educated fleas do it.
Animals are really good at developing Concepts or abstractions, in a sense, beyond immediate sense data.
And the higher and more advanced the animal, the more it's able to extrapolate to actual scientific concepts in the case of humanity and so on.
So we're only alive.
We can only have this conversation.
And he and I only had this debate.
So he wasn't debating with himself.
He was debating with me, which meant that he accepted another consciousness that Outside of his own.
Now, I would say at the beginning he was really talking over me a lot.
And listen, I know that people say, well, Steph, you sometimes will talk over other people, but if they've completely mischaracterized my argument, I have to interrupt because we're not talking about the same thing at all.
Right? Like if I say to a friend of mine, let's go to Kingston, which is a town in Ontario...
And he thinks we're going to Kingston Town in Jamaica and he starts making plans for Kingston Town and he says, hey man, I've got us really cheap flights to Kingston Town or Kingston, Jamaica.
And I say, no, no, no, Kingston, Ontario.
I mean, am I interrupting him?
No, because we're not talking about the same thing, right?
So if somebody is misrepresenting my argument or hasn't been listening or is mischaracterizing what I'm saying, I have to interrupt because it's not actually a debate that's happening as yet, right?
Because you have to understand each other's position in order to have a debate.
So to me, that's a different matter.
But at the very beginning, I had to assert, and it's funny, it was kind of the way this mechanics worked out, at the very beginning, I had to assert my sovereign consciousness to say, look, you can't talk over me.
I have a preference that is different from yours.
His preference was to just talk over me, and my preference was to not be talked over, because that's kind of rude.
And also, if I ask somebody a simple question and they won't answer it, I will repeat the question because I'm just filibustering it that way.
It's just, I don't know, it's just terrible.
And it's not the mark of clear thinking and so on.
Not everything's that complicated in this life, right?
So, at the beginning, he accepted, although he didn't really like it, he accepted this, like, let's not talk over each other.
And he called on me on it once or twice, which is perfectly fair.
And so he accepted that I had rules that were different from what he was doing.
He accepted those rules and accepted me as an external consciousness.
Now, have you ever had a debate with yourself where you have to say to yourself, stop yelling over me?
No, no. I mean, you may have difficulties negotiating with yourself or debating with yourself, but being yelled over is not one of them, I assume, right?
Unless it's really vivid, I suppose.
So... He accepted that we had an objective medium of communication.
He accepted that words have meaning, that sound exists and is valid.
He accepted that I have a consciousness outside his own consciousness.
And then he said, everything is in my own brain.
Well, then why would he call up someone to have a debate?
Did you understand? That would be like me driving to a place I want to visit only in my imagination.
Why would you call up someone to have a debate if you didn't accept that they existed as a sovereign consciousness?
And that's part of when you slow down debates and you look at What's occurring in the debate?
This is one of the things that happens in UPB as well.
When you slow down the debate and you say, okay, what's happening in the debate?
What needs to be accepted in order for this debate to even exist?
Well... Two consciousnesses, some reasonable rules of debate, and so on, right?
And so, yeah. So, I mean, I thought we got to a very productive place, at least for me, where he's like, yeah, there's a difference between daydreaming about food and eating food.
Yes, perfect. That was sort of my position from the beginning.
So, I think it was very positive, very productive.
And yeah, I do.
I mean, the reason I fought so hard as well is...
I think it's dangerous.
I think it's a dangerous idea to give people all of this real subjectivity and subjectivism and everything's in your own brain and so on.
I think it isolates people and I think it's not healthy at all for the mind to believe that, to not have access to objective and empirical reality.
I think it's very, very, very, very bad.
Okay, so thanks everyone so much.
Have yourself a wonderful evening.
I appreciate that.
So let's see here.
I'm sorry, I'm just curious what people are saying about the debate.
Let's see here. Somebody says, Steph, it seems more like it was an argument on the foundation of the meaning of words or language than it was objective reality itself.
He had way too many logical inconsistencies and contradictions.
But my question is, isn't the claim that reality is subjective also an objective claim?
Well, yeah, of course. And that's why he was telling me that I was wrong, that my arguments contain paradox.
And then when I tried to prove things that I was right, he said, oh, that's epistemology, not metaphysics.
And it's like, no, that's not.
But see, here's the thing. Subjectivity is a way of not having to obey objective rules and so on.
I need to eat stuff.
I need to stuff my face to sustain my existence.
Yeah, that's true. So, alright.
Well, thanks everyone. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Please don't forget to check out my review of Pink Floyd's The War where I go into great history of Roger Waters and the album and the 20th century and the war and communism and fascism and do a little bit of wobbling.
But it's really, really good and you can get that at freedomain.com Sorry.
Well, you can go to freedomain.com slash donate and you can sign up for locals and get it there.
My free books AlmostNovel.com and JustPoorNovel.com and for my modern comedy FDRURL.com slash TGOA I hope you will check those out.
Have yourselves a wonderful evening.
Thank you everyone so much for some great topics this evening.
Thank you for the debate. I will talk to you soon.
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