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Aug. 21, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:23:15
STOP GIVING YOURSELF EXCUSES!
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Hey everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. Good morning to everybody over here in the grandiose continent of North America and hello everyone to the welfare-addicted vassal states of American imperialism known as Europe.
Welcome! Hope you guys are doing well.
Hope you're bracing for a chilly...
Winter, but hey, I'm not doing politics anymore, so that's just a little flyby.
So if you have questions, issues, comments, criticisms, and listen, I really do want to thank the fellow who called in a couple weeks ago for the metaphysics debate.
It's got my brain cooking, and in fact, yesterday I wrote...
An essay on metaphysics that blew my own mind.
It's a pretty wild place to be in my head, as you can imagine.
There's a lot of horses, most of them running in the same direction, some of them going in different directions.
And it's a really fantastic essay.
And I hope that you will check it out.
I'll probably publish it later today.
Maybe read it as a show but it's really something to explain exactly why this Cartesian demon puts your brain in a tank, manipulates all of your senses.
To produce a simulacrum of reality matrix style, why that exists, what it's for.
And it's a pretty wild thesis.
I think it's a valid hypothesis.
And you can, of course, let me know what your thoughts are.
But I've been debating this stuff for 40 years off and on.
And I think I finally cracked the nut of why it exists at all.
And it's really a pretty wild thing.
It's a pretty wild argument. So I hope that you will check it out.
And it kind of came from an idea or an issue.
Which is that it bothers me immensely.
It bothers me in a very foundational lizard brain, gut twisted kind of way.
That philosophy just hasn't solved this problem.
This problem has been going on for thousands of years.
What is real, man? Could all just be an illusion, man.
Our solar system could just be an atom in the couch of some divine being.
You just don't know, man.
How do you know what's true? Like the fact that we haven't solved this problem really bothers me.
And one of the main reasons it bothers me is that my daughter solved this problem when she was three or four months old.
Is it too much to ask?
Apparently it is. But is it too much to ask that philosophy, the big brain, giant brain philosophers could solve a problem that a toddler a couple of months old can solve?
Is that too much to ask?
Apparently it is. Is it too much to ask that giant-brained, well-tenured, paid by society millions and millions and millions of dollars a year to protect and guard the frontiers and borders between truth and delusion?
Is it too much to ask that philosophers could solve a problem that is solved by...
Apes. That is solved by squirrels.
That is solved by lizards.
That is solved by amphibians.
That is solved by... All the way down to single-celled organisms.
Like, single-celled organisms know the difference between food and debris.
So that they know what, quote, truth is.
Not in an abstract sense, of course, but in an experiential sense.
Any animal that has failed to solve the problem...
Of reality hasn't survived.
So we're only here because we've solved the problem of what is real.
Anyone who doesn't solve the problem of what is real is not long for this world.
Obviously, I mean, if they really commit to it, right?
If they genuinely believe that nothing is real, they walk off cliffs, they don't eat, they wouldn't get out of bed.
Why would you do anything, right? So...
We are the very best at solving this problem of what is real and what is not.
That's why we became the apex predator of the planet.
We're the very best. Every single creature for 4 billion plus years that has survived and flourished has been able to solve this problem of what is real and what is not.
And in fact, what is not real is merely training for what is real.
Sounds like Israel. But training for what is real.
A dog, the dreams of hunting a rabbit, is training for actually hunting a rabbit.
That's why that training exists, so that he can practice hunting without expending too many calories.
It's a form of efficiency, right?
Your dreams are a way of educating you without you having to expend a lot of calories.
You certainly don't expend as many calories sleeping and dreaming as you would in your waking life, and particularly for predators, dreaming about hunting prey.
Hunting prey is hugely calorie consumptive.
So we are the very best at figuring out what is real and what is not.
We even have an abstract discipline called metaphysics to describe our giant-brained capacities in this area.
So, and I remember when, I can't even remember exactly how old my daughter was, so she got object constancy.
She knew the difference between sleeping and waking.
And soon after she got some words, she talked about dreams when she was very young and knew that they weren't real.
So, I don't know, is it too much to ask that a discipline 5,000 years old could solve a problem that a three-month-old baby can solve?
Is that too much to ask? I mean, we should have that curiosity.
And it should be humiliating, shouldn't it?
I mean, if you had spent 20 years as a weightlifter and then it turned out that a baby that was six months old could lift more than you could, wouldn't that be kind of humiliating?
Like, what the hell have I been doing with my time?
What have I been up to?
If you trained for a decade as a boxer, this is your career, your profession.
But then you went up against a six-month-old baby and the six-month-old baby knocked you out and laid you flat on the canvas?
Wouldn't that be like, wouldn't everyone look at you and say, dude, this is like, that would be a joke, right?
You know, like when your kid hits you and you're play fighting and your kid hits you and you're like, oh, oh, good hit.
Like that would be like a joke, right?
Except this is serious. That a three-month-old baby can outperform a 5,000-year-old mental discipline inhabited by giant brain people.
That's humiliating. Now, maybe I'm a little bit more sensitive to this stuff just because I would be humiliated.
If, I mean, so I remember I used to play soccer.
I used to play footy. I used to play soccer in my teens with a group of friends we'd meet every Sunday and sometimes maybe during the week if we had opportunity.
It was one of these really tragic things where I first really began to learn about the excitements of government regulations and the legal system because we used to come and play on an unused field by my high school.
Which was very close to my house.
So we'd meet there and we'd play.
And we did this for years. And then what happened was suddenly you needed a license.
You needed permission. You needed paperwork.
So we couldn't play there anymore.
Now, why? I don't know. Maybe somebody...
Injured themselves and sued.
I don't know what, right? But suddenly we couldn't play.
And then we started on this gypsy nomad thing where, oh, well, there's this park not too far where you can get some kind of permission.
But the problem was when we went to a separate park to get permission to play, and you could sign up for this ahead of time, the separate park, you could get reserved permission to play, but they couldn't guarantee you that nobody else would be in that spot.
I mean, this is all before computerization and so on, right?
So it's just paperwork, right?
So you could say, oh yeah, now I want this particular field for two o'clock.
And they'd say, okay, you've got a book, but we can't guarantee that nobody else has booked it too.
Which was all sort of pointless.
And so we went a couple of times and sometimes we'd be able to play and sometimes we wouldn't.
And it's just annoying, right?
So the whole game dissolved.
So we just couldn't find a place to play.
That wasn't, you know, being uselessly hunted at by...
No-name bureaucrats with no accountability.
And, you know, people wonder why childhood obesity is on the rise.
It's like, well, maybe the kids have no place to play!
Maybe their parents pay for taxes for public spaces, and then you just can't really access them in any reliable fashion.
It's really quite tragic.
But anyway, so we used to play, and we played not in any structured way, right?
You just show up, and you pick your teams, and you play, and we'd play for an hour or two, and all of that, and then we'd go to...
The one guy who had a pool had a very popular house that, you know, because we'd just love to go from...
Especially in the summer, it could get pretty hot in Canada.
In the summer, and we would play, and then we would go to the guy's house who had a pool, and his mom was like this complete...
Popsicle-enabled angel who would just make sure everyone was super comfortable.
She was this British woman who was just lovely.
Would you like another Popsicle, dearie?
Just wonderful.
Like the best aspect of British hospitality and so on.
Anyway, so we played these games and we just pack around.
We just pass them and all of that.
And I was a pretty good goalie, though I was never particularly good at soccer.
I mean, other people I know just had a real natural...
Gift for it and all of that.
But anyway, so we didn't do any drills.
We just kicked the ball around and stuff, right?
And another team that had been doing more disciplined work and actually training and so on, we were like, oh, we've been playing for years.
We'll take them on. And they just kicked our butts.
And that was one of the things where I'm like, doing something is not the same as getting good at it.
Like Carlos Santana, like why is he such a great guitarist?
Because he'd practice eight hours a day, right?
Just practice, practice, practice.
Stevie Ray Vaughan would just sit down there and just learn and teach and play and learn and teach and play and learn and teach and play.
And, you know, the story is that when Eric Clapton first heard Jimi Hendrix, he basically locked himself in a room and practiced for another year because he just wanted to get better.
So there's a difference between just doing something and getting better at it.
And... That discipline to do the drills, to learn the theory, to read the books, to, you know, whatever.
Now I guess it would be to study the videos and so on.
It makes a big difference. This team had gotten, they were the same age, they started around the same time, but they'd actually had a coach and discipline and they just won, just completely won.
And it wasn't even close. Now, that wasn't humiliating for me in particular because, well, first of all, I was, you know, like, oh, we've been playing the same amount of time.
I'm sure it'll be a good game. And it's like, well, it really wasn't.
They just walked circles around us.
It wasn't humiliating because it was like, oh, okay, that's the difference.
The difference is they've really, they had a coach, they've been training and all that, right?
And it feels to me a lot like philosophy is like that soccer team from 40 years ago.
Man, that's a long time.
It's a long ass time.
Like my little run-around soccer group from 40 years ago.
Philosophy is just doing stuff.
Is it getting better? Is it solving problems?
Science is. Science is solving problems.
Science is advancing. Engineering is solving problems.
Engineering is advancing. Until recently, medicine was solving problems and medicine was advancing.
Now it is, just maybe not in the right direction.
But philosophy?
The same damn questions now!
That they were 5,000 years ago.
What is real? Still unanswered.
It's the one question you have to answer, and it's still unanswered, and there's still confusion about it.
Oh dear, what has been going on?
It's like that line Andy McDowell has in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is a both sweet and highly degenerate film, but anyway...
She talks and talks and talks about all the men she slept with, right?
And this is played as comedy, although that would, of course, be a sign of a huge red flag in real life that the woman has the bonding ability of 12-year-old duct tape that's been repeatedly attached to carpets, but she goes through all of these people that she slept with, and then she turns to the Hugh Grant character and says, and you?
And he says, it makes me wonder what the hell I've been doing with my time.
That's always the line that struck me.
I never wanted that in my life.
You know, I used to look back and say, gee, it makes me wonder what the hell I've been doing with my time.
Philosophy. You ever look in the mirror and say, it makes me 5,000 years.
I still haven't solved the most basic problem to the point where we just have easy answers.
Easy answers that philosophy has.
And honestly, the metaphysics stuff, not that complicated.
In 4,000 words, I did disproof and causality.
Now, it's a big claim, I suppose, but if you really do blank slate stuff, there really aren't that many problems.
Most of the problems that appear unsolvable are unsolvable because you're not wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch.
You're not wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch.
There's an old story about Stephen King and the novel The Stand, which is this giant novel I think about some sort of infection, and the novel was getting way too big, way too complicated, way too many characters, so then there was just this big die-off in the middle of the book.
Most of the characters died because he said it just got too big, it got too unwieldy, so in a sense the book only continued because he blank slated the whole thing.
Mostly, mostly.
And I remember when I was coding, sometimes the code would just get so convoluted and messy, and you'd be like, okay, now I know that it works.
I'm going to start again. And what I would do when I was coding was I would make something work, and then I would get it right.
So I would make sure it worked, and then I would make it efficient.
I would make it faster. I would make it leaner.
I would make it share more variables if possible.
I wouldn't do any go-tos because go-tos are spaghetti codes, a wonder, but you just clean it up.
You start with a blank slate.
I mean, I had this whole experience of genuinely starting with a blank slate by writing my first work of science fiction.
It's called The Future at freedomain.locals.com.
A great, great book.
I actually had somebody...
You know, as a philosopher, I want to make you think.
As an artist, I want to make you feel.
Well, I mean, there's overlap. As an artist, I also want to make you think.
As a philosopher, I also want to make you feel.
But when people talk about...
I listened to the ending again recently, and it is...
A wild, I'm not going to give you any spoilers here, but it is a wild, wild ending.
And a fellow wrote to me and said that he was listening in his car and, you know, maybe don't be driving and listening to the end of this book, but he was listening in his car to the book and he got so emotional that he had to pull over and stop driving.
That's a good thing.
So I really got to blank slate it because in everything that I wrote before, I had to have empirical research.
Like it took me over a year to write my novel, Almost, at almostnovel.com.
That one's free. It took me a year to write that, and that was a year of full-time work because there was just so much research involved in every aspect of European politics, in combat, in piloting, in like you name it.
I just had to research it like crazy to make it valid.
In my novel, Just Poor, justpoornovel.com, that one's also free, I had to do a huge amount of research into the development of agriculture in the 18th century, because it takes place late in the 18th century in the agricultural revolution, because there are so many novels about the industrial revolution, particularly coming out of Dickens, but there weren't novels about the agricultural revolution, which is more important.
I mean, absolutely...
You needed 10 to 20 times increases in food production to even have an urban proletariat that was the basis of the labor force for the Industrial Revolution.
I always like writing about the stuff that comes before what everyone else writes about.
Everyone writes about crime.
I want to talk about what comes before that, which is child abuse.
My first novel, Revolutions, was set in Russia.
In the late 19th century, because I wanted to discuss and talk about all of the personalities and ideas and debates and passions that were flowing around a generation before, or half a generation before the 1917 Communist Revolution.
I want to talk about this. What's driving it?
What's in the background? And that's because, as a philosopher, I'm about prevention, not cure.
I'm about prevention, not cure.
And this is, you know, partly a difference between men and women is the prevention, not cure.
So when I was a kid, if two boys got into a fight, right?
And one boy punched, like, Bob punched Doug, right?
Bob punched Doug. I mean, you'd have sympathy for Doug, but then if you found out that Doug had deeply insulted Bob's mom...
I mean, Bob's still wrong to hit Doug, but Doug was kind of stupid to deeply insult Bob's mom.
It's like, oh, it's free speech. It's like, yes, yes, it is free speech, for sure.
And we're not going to punish the guy who insults, but this is kind of dumb.
Just don't do that stuff.
In terms of violence, right?
I'm not talking like ridiculous censorship and so on, but it's just violence.
So, I mean, as boys, and if you ask the men honestly around you, they'll tell you the same thing.
As boys, we always grew up with great caution because of the omnipresent Concern about physical violence from other boys.
Like we didn't live in the bubble of never-hit-a-girl protection that at least was around when I was a kid.
So this capacity for violence, like a friend of mine insulted a guy, and the guy's like, well, they're going to fight now.
Now, the guy who said we're going to fight is wrong.
Free speech allows for insults.
I get all of that. But maybe don't do that stuff.
I mean, gratuitous, like just gratuitously insulting someone.
I mean, obviously, I've had some blowback and some violent blowback for what I've talked about, but it's kind of essential, and I'm actually working to prevent violence.
It's a little different.
So, you know, boys, we just grew up with this caution.
We just grew up with this caution, which is...
You have to act as if the world has some dangerous element to it.
I don't mean like every time you walk around, you've got to keep your head on a swivel, assuming you're not in New York.
I don't mean every time you walk around, you've got to keep your head on a swivel because you're about to get stabbed or punched.
I'm just saying that you work your life as a male to recognize that by the time you're in a violent situation, you've messed up somewhere.
For the most part, again, it could happen randomly out of nowhere and massive sympathies for all of that.
And so we're just used to prevention.
With regards to violence, prevention is the better part of cure.
And, you know, there's a story, of course, of even people who are experts in martial arts, that they try to get out of a fight, walk away from a fight as much as possible.
And particularly now, when fighting has become politicized, it's an even worse idea.
And so, as boys, we grew up with this...
Yeah, there's a little bit of chest-thumping, ape-like social dominance that goes around, and there are always those boys who are kind of trigger-happy with their fists.
And you just learn...
I mean, sometimes you'll take on the fight, and sometimes you won't, but you just have to be aware of that.
It's not a huge factor in life, but it definitely is a factor, for sure.
And... I mean, I do remember...
When I got injured in boarding school, nothing hugely major or whatever, but I got injured in boarding school and the nurse, who was a bit of a nurse ratchet type and...
The only thing she did that was enjoyable, this was the level of entertainment we had in boarding school.
We all slept in these little iron metal World War I-era beds in a dormitory, like 20 or 30 kids to a giant room.
Our big entertainment in boarding school, other than the occasional movie night where one night they incomprehensibly played, The Charlton Heston film about the zombie attacks and all of that, just absolutely terrifying, awful stuff for like six-year-olds away from home for the first time,
just monstrous. But the only entertainment we had on our average day was that this nurse, she would hold the light switch half on and half off until the lights flickered and we would squeal and clap our hands like a bunch of trained seals because it was very exciting and cool.
But I remember when I got injured in boarding school, The nurse said, you know, we weren't allowed to climb trees, right?
And the nurse said, well, what were you doing?
And I hummed and hoared and eventually said, yeah, I was climbing a tree and I fell.
And she said, well, that was stupid.
There's a reason we have these rules.
Now, she did take care of my injuries and patched me up and all of that.
But it was like, well, that was stupid.
There's a reason we have those rules, right?
Yeah. So, and, you know, again, I know that this is a universal phenomenon among men, that if you're doing something dumb and you get injured, people will take care of you and they will patch you up and they will also tell you, well, that was dumb.
And they will also tell other boys that was dumb.
You kind of parade it around like a POW to warn other people, right?
Well, that was kind of dumb. But it's different for girls.
It's different for girls, right?
And this is just one of the foundational things that just happens in society, that if girls do things that are unwise, foolish, that put them in situations of risk and danger, we just never say, well, that was dumb.
Well, we had sympathy, but the boys get, that was dumb.
The girls don't.
It's just a foundational difference in the universe that we live in.
I just wanted to mention that and just say that I really do appreciate the guy who called in.
It was a good debate, a good tussle.
Sometimes greatness, and I think I wrote a really great essay here, but sometimes greatness is...
Provoked. And that provocation was very helpful and very useful, and I really do appreciate it.
All right, so let me just take a break here.
And get your comments.
If you have questions, criticisms, issues, anything you would like to talk about, this show is yours.
Just raise your hand and I will be happy to unmute you and we can jawbone till the cows come home.
That's something my mom used to say when we'd been up for a long time.
She would say, I always liked it.
She would say, in the morning, just sleep till the cows come home.
I thought that was very nice. I don't know where the saying comes from.
What was it? I heard the worst joke the other day.
All right. If you don't have any questions or comments, I will simply give you bad jokes.
What is the situation when you have an angry sheep and an angry cow?
Well, you have two creatures in a bad mood.
I could just keep going.
Honestly, it's pretty much an infinite carousel of bad jokes.
It's not a threat, but it is a threat.
So, yeah, if you have any questions or comments, I am happy to...
Ah, okay, so I don't know this particular instance, but there's a question.
My thoughts on assisted suicide.
My thoughts on assisted suicide.
Well... Assisted suicide is pretty common, particularly here in Canada.
So, let's talk about assisted suicide morally in a free society, right?
Because we'll talk about the perverse incentives separately.
But in a free society, if somebody wishes, or I wouldn't say wishes, that's probably the wrong word.
If somebody says, I'm going to end my own life, Then, I mean, you can't force people to stay alive.
Staying alive is a choice.
And it's a very complicated and difficult area because, of course, assisted suicide, anybody can just jump off a cliff, right?
I mean, that's obviously a pretty unpleasant way to go and so on, and I don't really recommend it in any way, shape or form.
And so assisted suicide with regards to medicine?
Yes. I mean, I could certainly see that people would be in a situation of a painful terminal illness where they're just going to be suffering and suffering and suffering and there's no possibility of cure or hope or progress or even minimizing their pain.
Okay, well, in that kind of circumstance, I can certainly understand why somebody would say, yeah, I'm going to leave the ball a little early because the music is just wretched and ain't going to get any better.
And I could certainly see how healthcare providers could be involved in helping somebody shuffle off this mortal coil in a way that was relatively pain-free and safe, so to speak, in that it wouldn't leave them with some horrible ailment or problem.
So, I mean, I think there would need to be a whole set of, and there would be in a free society a whole set of safeguards in place for something like that.
I mean, you'd want to make sure that they weren't being pressured to, you know, let's say that they have a lot of money, or in the future Bitcoin, and people are pressuring them to off themselves so that they can get their hands on the Inheritance and so on, you'd want to make sure that there aren't those kinds of pressures.
You'd also want to make sure that they wouldn't necessarily do it simply for reasons of financial expedience.
Because life would be, I mean, in a free society, life would be infinitely more treasured than it is now.
And so, let's say, you know, for most people, on average, half of your healthcare costs over the course of your entire life Are consumed in the last six months of your existence, obviously, right?
I mean, it really clusters at the end there.
So I think you wouldn't want to say somebody's just going to kill themselves so that the medical bills are cheaper and so on.
I mean, and I think there'd be a lot of charities to help out that situation, make sure that didn't occur, and people would have the right kind of insurance and all that.
And of course, healthcare would be much cheaper many years ago.
And you should look this up, Rod Long.
Which sounds like a porn name, but he's a professor of a very good grasp on anarchic history.
Rod Long wrote an essay about how cheap healthcare used to be.
Yeah, people used to be able to get quality healthcare for an entire year for two days' wages.
You know, back before regulations and pressure groups and interest groups and all that got involved.
So... In a free society, yeah.
I mean, there would be times where you'd say, you know, being a sound mind and sound body and the medical experts agree that there's just suffering and there's no cure and there's no, you know, can't even really blunt the pain that much.
Then, yes, I could certainly understand that.
There have been movies I've worked out before they've ended.
So that, I think, would be, you can't force somebody to stay alive.
And of course, if somebody's in a hospital bed and they can't find any way to end their life, but they really desperately want to because it's just endless pain, they've had a good life, surrounded by loved ones, and they just don't want to continue to suffer for no purpose.
Yes, I can certainly see that.
And would they need medical assistance?
I imagine they would. So in a free society, there would be a rigorous process to make sure that it wasn't being abused or people weren't being pressured or threatened or fearfully put into a position of where they felt that was a good idea.
So, yes, it is not a violation of the non-aggression principle to die, if that's by your choice, if it's freely chosen, and medical people agree and so on.
So that's the future.
Now, the problem, of course, is that Governments are paying a lot for the healthcare of elderly people, and so I do have some concerns about conflict of interest that assisted suicide could be potentially influenced – well, It would be for sure influenced by the costs of keeping people alive that are born by the state.
So when the state's in charge of making that stuff work and the state is also paying all the bills, there is, I think, a conflict of interest about that kind of stuff.
So I hope that helps.
Thoughts on the Dugan assassination attempt?
Well, I mean, it's a natural escalation to these kinds of things.
And it's also desperately tragic.
It's also desperately tragic.
What was the absolute need to put NATO in Ukraine?
What was the absolute need to put NATO in Ukraine?
Amen.
Especially when the Russian government had been promised forever that that wasn't going to happen.
So yeah, it's going to be quite an escalation there, and it's really tragic.
Let's see here.
Hi, Steph. Can someone who works for the government be a moral person, especially once they've heard the arguments about taxation and so on?
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Look, we all participate in society and society is dominated by governments and so on.
So, you know, I think there's a couple of things that I would say about that.
First of all, it's that working for the government probably isn't going to make you particularly happy in the long run.
And I say this as somebody...
I've spent some time working with the government when I was very young.
And there are going to be...
It is not a very productive or positive environment.
It's a lot of politics, a lot of laziness, a lot of inattention, and a lot of the fights are vicious because the stakes are so small.
I don't think it's a good place to work in that sense, and it's very easy to get lulled in by pay and job security and benefits and pensions and so on.
I think it's very hard to get anything productive done in that kind of environment.
So it may not be a good place to work just emotionally and all of that.
And the other thing too, of course, if the government is providing a service that otherwise would be provided in the free market, I think that's fine.
Again, not ideal, but it's certainly fine.
Like, I mean, if you're a doctor who works for socialized medicine, well, there'd be doctors in the free market.
So you're not doing something that wouldn't exist in the free market.
I mean, so... And here's the thing, too.
Like, if you want to be a doctor and your healthcare system is socialized, then say, well, I can't be a doctor because of the government, is then to let the government take away the joy that you'd have in being a doctor for something that you didn't cause and don't approve of.
I think that's a bit of a...
All right.
Somebody said, the suffering of evil was an epic speech.
Thank you. But how do we get over our desire to see the evil people know they are suffering?
In your speech, you said that they most likely don't know it.
Look, I mean, vengeance is a complicated topic.
Vengeance is a complicated topic.
If you were a cruel person, And you wanted somebody to really suffer.
And that person had a toothache, then if you were, again, a truly mean person, then what you would do is you would mix in painkillers in their morning coffee and give it to them so that they wouldn't experience the toothache, right?
I mean, your teeth hurt because it's a signal that something's very wrong, usually with your, you know, cracked or some gum disease or something like that, right?
Some infection. And the longer that infection goes on, the worse it is for your health, right?
So you would want to numb someone to pain if you were really cruel.
So you want to see people suffer, and if they're evildoers, right?
You want to see them suffer, and if they suffer, though, they'll change, right?
So if you do care about someone and you believe there's an angel inside the devil, then yes, confront them and so on.
If they're beyond hope, then not only is it sort of pointless and will invite blowback, but They actually will end up suffering more if they don't get feedback.
If they don't feel that they're suffering in the same way that, you know, if you're a leper, I only know this from Thomas Covenant, right?
If you're a leper, you have to do a VSE, visual search of extremities, because your nerves are shot, so you can't feel a pain.
So you have to do a visual search of extremities to make sure nothing cut you, bruised you, stung you, infected you, or anything like that, because you don't get that kind of feedback.
So let's see here.
Dear Steph, great metaphysics debate.
Oh, metaphysics debate. That's a typo.
The physics of math. What is conceptual consistency and in what sense is it derived from sense data?
Okay, so as an exercise, you can read that sentence a hundred times.
Do the words ever change?
Do they suddenly flow into ancient Aramaic or do they become wingdings or hieroglyphics or braille or I guess not braille on a screen but I'm sure there are braille screens.
There was a keyboard once that had raised edges on a tablet.
So you can read that sentence over and over again and it will not change.
So the atoms and the engineering that formed those sentences on the screen remained the same.
In fact, you could take a screenshot of this, you could print it out, you could engrave it, and you could come back in a thousand years or ten thousand years, and the sentence would be the same.
I mean, you may not be able to read it if language has changed too much, but the sentence would be the same.
So just that particular, like I'll go back here and say, he says, oh, did I scroll up?
Dear Steph, great metaphysics debate.
Oh, and it still says metaphysics debate, right?
What is conceptual consistency?
And in what sense is it derived from sense data?
Sense data is perfect.
Sense data is perfect.
I mean, if it's not perfect, we know that something is wrong with our organs, right?
So if you can't hear...
Then it's not like the senses and philosophy and reality have suddenly changed.
It's that your ears have stopped functioning or are under-functioning in some Pete Townsend maximum R&B, way too many decibels in the 70s kind of way.
I think both Pete Townsend and singer Roger Daltrey have to wear hearing aids because they just blew their ears out.
And the same thing happened with Huey Lewis.
He blew out one of his ears in the 80s and then his other ear got fried.
And it's really tough for somebody so musically talented.
So the senses are perfect and the degree to which they're imperfect Is the degree to which we know they're not working correctly, right?
So as I age, I need glasses, right?
I didn't need glasses till I was in my 40s.
But as I age, I need glasses and I need a new prescription every couple of years.
Not a big deal. It's just, you know, always beats the alternative, right?
Which is to be dead. But I don't go to the optometrist and say, the world is getting blurry.
You need to fix the world, right?
I say, oh, things are getting blurry.
I need glasses. You don't say that the reality is getting blurry.
You say, my eyes are getting blurry.
And just as they age, I think that the muscles don't contract as much or harden or I don't know what it is, but something like that.
So the senses are perfect.
Now, people say, ah, yes, but the senses can fool you.
And it's like, no, they can't. They're merely passive organs of transmission.
If somebody sends you a threatening letter, you don't blame the mailman.
The mailman's just delivering the letter.
So the senses are perfect, and the senses don't fool you.
All they do is transmit information.
Your mind will come to conclusions about the evidence of the senses, but you can't blame the senses for that.
I mean, you can. You'd just be wrong.
So if you're in a desert and you see what seems like a body of water in the distance, And you say, oh, that's a lake.
Well, your eyes aren't telling you that that's a lake.
The eyes are simply transmitting the visual information.
Your conclusion that that's a lake is in your mind.
It's not the fault of the eyes. What do the eyes do?
They correctly process light entering the cornea, right?
And transmit it to the brain.
And it is certainly true that you see something shimmering and reflective in the distance.
Now, the fact that that's light bouncing between differently heated layers of air, that's science and all that, but...
Your eyes are not, you know, a mirage is not your eyes deceiving you.
The eyes are perfectly transmitting exactly what they're supposed to do, which is light entering your retina, cornea, whatever, light entering your eyes.
Perfectly valid. Perfectly accurate.
If you tell someone to misspell a word and they obey you, is it their fault that the word is misspelled?
Let's say you, I don't know, you're threatening them or something to misspell a word, right?
Well, no.
It's your fault. You caused it.
If you have tinnitus in your ears, tinnitus, is there a mosquito trapped in your ear?
No. Usually that's, I don't know, some sort of sign of hearing loss and your brain's overcompensating or something like that.
But you don't sit there and say, there's a mosquito trapped in my ear or there's an invisible mosquito constantly buzzing around my left ear or my right ear or both ears if you have it in both ears.
You don't say that. You say, oh, I have tinnitus.
That's an issue within the hearing and all that, right?
So the senses are perfect.
Perfect.
Now, the senses aren't infinite.
We can't see infrared, but so what?
That doesn't mean anything.
I mean, the fact that I can't reach something on the top shelf doesn't mean I can't reach something on the middle shelf.
I don't have any height at all. The fact that the senses aren't infinite, again, you know, a way that it's a very silly trick.
I'm not saying anybody in this call is doing that, but it's a very silly trick to say, I'm going to have an impossible standard of truth and therefore say everything is false because it doesn't meet that standard.
Like the metaphysics thing, which is you can't know anything unless you know absolutely everything about an object inside and out, every atom, every electron, every proton, every neutron, every quark and subatomic, whatever, whatever, right?
Well, that's an impossible standard of knowledge, and it's just silly.
It's like saying human beings are two-dimensional unless they're 40 feet tall.
Well, human beings could never be more than 10 or 12 feet tall because then every time they'd walk, they'd break their femur.
Or saying human beings don't exist because human beings aren't 40 feet tall.
I always think of the biology conference or the physics conference, right?
Okay, you go to a physics conference and you say, none of you exist because human beings aren't 40 feet tall.
Or, to be even more silly, none of us exist, including me, because human beings aren't infinitely tall.
I mean, that wouldn't even be a bad joke.
That would just be like, who let this mentally ill person in here and why are they on stage?
So having a standard of validity, like the senses need to see inside things as well, and you need to be able to see infrared and x-rays, and you need to be able to hear like a dolphin and a dog and whatever Barry White does with his bass.
That's just silly. I mean, you can stretch the spectrum to infinity and then say everything within that spectrum doesn't exist.
Well, that's just silly. And, of course, you know the other thing.
Of course, the person is, if they're arguing with you verbally, right, they're saying that the senses are invalid while using your hearing to transmit accurately their argument.
And here's the thing, too. If you were to say, I've done this before where somebody tells me that the senses are invalid or the senses can't be trusted— And then I'll argue with them and then 10 minutes later I'll say, oh no, but you already told me that the senses are perfectly valid.
And they'll get really angry, really upset, really frustrated.
And they'll say, I never said that. I said, yes, you did.
That's what I heard that.
It's like, I never said that. Oh, so now my senses have to be valid and accurate in the transmitting of your arguments.
Anyway, it's all very, very silly.
So consistency comes from the evidence of the senses, right?
Your senses are consistent, right?
There is a realm of consistency, our waking life when we're using our senses.
There is a realm of consistency, and then there is a realm of inconsistency.
There's a realm of Aristotelian non-contradiction, and A is A. An object can only be itself or something else.
An object can't be both itself and something else, right?
Three laws of logic. All of those are derived from the evidence of the senses.
My daughter and I watched a funny video the other day where a man went up with a banana that was open and offered a bite to his girlfriend, and then she bit into it, and it turned out to be a rubber banana, and he pulled it, and then it snapped into her gently.
It was kind of funny, right?
And so she thought that the banana was the banana, but it wasn't.
It was a rubber banana, right? And I remember once, many years ago, in an open house, there was...
Plastic fruit, and I was just curious how heavy it was, and somebody had tried to take a giant bite out of the plastic fruit.
You could see the teeth marks.
You could probably identify the person if you had to.
And so he thought it was fruit, but it wasn't fruit.
So our senses are perfectly consistent.
I've never had my senses be wrong.
Never. Never. And I think if people are honest, I mean, I've misinterpreted things for sure, but I've never had my senses be wrong.
And we understand that evolutionarily speaking, I mean, the people who believe that God designed us, well, they would say that God wouldn't design something that would fool us.
And the people into evolution, right?
Let's say you're a sheer atheist, and you accept evolution, well...
All you have to ask yourself is what we certainly need, things in reality to survive, food, shelter, water, blah, blah, blah, avoid predators, pursue prey, and we need to find somebody to mate with us, raise our kids.
So we need things in reality in order to survive, and you would simply ask yourself, in the evolutionary pressures upon the sense organs, would those whose sense organs worked accurately And whose brain accepted that sense organ data accurately, would that be selected for survival?
Well, of course it would be. If your eyes constantly got things wrong, you wouldn't survive, right?
So I'm sure you know this, but your eye inverts light, right?
So things that are closer Look bigger and things that are further away look smaller.
Well, that's not natural, right?
Light beams spread. So you'd think that the things further away would look larger and less detailed, but your eye inverts these things so that the things that are closer look bigger and the things that are further away look smaller.
And why is that? Because that's how we survive.
Because the things that are closer are things that we need to pay more attention to, that we're working with, that were crops that we're growing or animals that we're skinning.
Like we need to see those things closer.
And the things that are further away are less important.
They're not unimportant. But they're less important.
So, of course, we're going to see things as smaller that are further away and see things as bigger that are closer up.
That's evolutionarily selected.
Now, the accuracy of the senses, which religious people would accept because God wouldn't design something to fool you, and atheists or Darwinists would accept because, of course, Senses that didn't work would be selected out of the gene pool very quickly, like very quickly. Which begs the question, how has metaphysics confusion survived?
Well, I answered that in the essay, so I won't get into that here.
But yeah, the senses are perfect.
The senses don't lie. The senses just give you information.
And at least for me, I've never...
I've never heard things that aren't there.
I've never seen things that aren't there.
I've never once had my senses make any kind of foundational mistake.
It's one of the reasons I've never done any drugs.
The idea of screwing around with my senses would be, I mean, it's horrifying.
It's a horrifying conception to me.
The idea that, you know, an LSD or whatever, you see things that aren't there and so on.
It's like, oh my god. Why would you want to make yourself voluntarily insane?
People who are going through florid psychosis, having total breaks with reality, hearing demons telling them to drown their children, all this kind of monstrous stuff, right?
That's at the very extremity of mental illness, mental dysfunction, and often produces great immoralities.
Why you would voluntarily want to put yourself in a state of florid psychosis?
Never understood that. Why would you want to dissolve the boundaries between reality and fantasy?
Why would you want to have waking dreams?
It's a nightmare. And what it produces in people is this radical subjectivism, and it's just a victory of the abusers over the integrity of the mind.
So, We do have the ability to reject the evidence of our senses, of course.
And I think we're unique in our power, our capacity to do that, to reject the evidence of our senses.
And that's good. It's good that we can reject the evidence of our senses.
That's how we get science.
That's how we know things about the universe that our senses contradict.
The world is round, it looks flat, and all that kind of stuff, right?
So yes, we can reject the evidence of our senses.
That's a great strength in science.
It's a great weakness in philosophy.
So the senses are perfectly consistent.
When I was a kid, if I couldn't find something.
And if you've grown up in a household where it's messy, you know, that's usually on the parent, right?
If you've grown up in a messy household, you know that maybe you save a little bit of time by not tidying up, but then you lose much more time by just looking for things all the time.
But when I was a kid, if I would lose something, I would have this...
I mean, it was just an idle fantasy, but I have this fantasy that...
Well, space aliens are beaming it up to examine it and understand it like anthropologists.
And then they beam it back down.
But, you know, it's slightly inaccurate, so sometimes it doesn't end up in the same place.
It just moves a little. So, yeah, we have the ability to reject the evidence of our senses, which is great in science, terrible in philosophy.
But that doesn't mean the senses are invalid.
So the sense, if we look at the horizon, it looks perfectly flat, right?
And you have to go pretty high up to see the curve.
Not like hovering over a Kardashian.
But your eyes are simply showing you blue, line, sky.
I mean, even sky is just a conclusion.
It's a conceptual label we get.
So if you say the world is flat because it looks flat, Well, your eyes are simply transmitting information to you.
Every conclusion then is on you.
So given that the senses are perfect and perfectly consistent, and if they weren't, this conversation wouldn't be possible.
Given that the senses are perfectly consistent, where do we get the laws of logic from?
We get the laws of logic from the consistent properties and behaviors of atoms and energy.
Gravity is a constant.
Electromagnetism is a constant.
Radiation is a constant.
Fission and fusion are constants.
Why we get sunlight? One of the two.
Fusion? Fission?
I can't remember. Fission in the sun for the correct answer.
So we only have science.
We only exist.
We are only alive. Because of the absolute consistency of the behavior of matter and energy.
And I've got to tell you, like, I know everybody wants to wiggle out of these things and find, oh, there was this gold leaf experiment where blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no. And, oh, the quantum mechanics and the quark level is like, no, no, no.
Philosophy deals with sense data.
Philosophy is about morality, and morality does not exist or is measurable at the subatomic level.
Come on. Yeah. Well, this guy strangled another guy, so we're going to put the three atoms in his hand in jail.
I mean, it's not... They're responsible.
They made the moral choice. Come on.
Everybody... I'm telling you, though, there's such a beautiful life and a beautiful world on the other side of just taking a deep breath.
Just accept this shit.
Just accept it.
Just accept it.
Your senses are valid. If they're not, I would suggest you seek medical help.
If you can't hear...
Go to an ear doctor. If you can't see, go to an optometrist.
If you can't taste anything, blame Wuhan.
Or British cooking. So Yeah, your senses work.
Just accept it. Your senses are valid, and matter behaves in perfectly consistent manners.
I mean, if it didn't, there's no way we could shoot a spaceship past Pluto, right?
Just couldn't do it. Again, we couldn't even have this conversation.
You think of all of the immense amounts of complexity involved in having this conversation, from the diaphragm in my microphone to The transmission of the data from me to you to you receiving it through the speakers or whatever sound you're hearing, headphones. I guess headphones are just small speakers.
Everything that is involved in this communication requires that matter and energy behave in perfectly predictable manners.
And scientists cannot find exceptions to this.
They cannot find exceptions to this.
And again, there's fuzzy boundaries, but fuzzy boundaries don't mean anything when it comes to certainty.
Right? You know, there's black, there's white.
We get that, right? And then there's, you know, some gray in the middle where it's kind of ambiguous.
That doesn't mean that black and white don't exist.
Or are invalid, right?
The fuzzy boundaries...
So going to the surfing at the edge of knowledge stuff and saying there's uncertainty there, therefore there's nothing that's certain, is ridiculous.
Right? If you grow up in a town, and around the town are woods, and then you go and explore the woods, does that mean you have no knowledge of the town because you're in woods you don't know yet?
No, of course not.
I mean, I've thought, and I wrote about this in my book, you ever have this funny thought, like you're on a train or something, or a bus, or I guess a car or two, anywhere, you're just someplace new.
And if you're in a train and you're looking out the window and someone's backyard is there, well, that backyard just, you know, flashes past you in an instant.
It's there and it's gone. However, for the person who grows up in that backyard, they know every single square inch of that backyard.
You know, if you grew up in a house, the backyard you grew up in, you know every inch of it.
You know where the ants' nests are.
You know where the trees are going to fall.
You know where the whole of the fence is.
So somebody in a train flashing past is just there and gone.
But for somebody who grew up and spent 18 years in that house, most of it playing in the backyard, they know every inch of that.
So you have virtually no knowledge of the backyard, just an impression flashing past, but they have intimate, deep, and powerful knowledge about that backyard, which they will mostly retain for the rest of their life.
I mean, I remember when I was in university, I shared a room with a fellow because I was broke.
And I remember one day shortly after we got in there, someone knocked on the door.
And it was a guy, he was probably in his 30s, seemed kind of old to me now.
It seemed kind of young to me now. It's again part of the relativity of things.
But He had this curly black hair and a big nose and he came in and he was like, oh guys, listen, I don't want to interrupt.
This was my room. This was my room when I was in college.
I spent two years here.
This was my room. And he looked and he said, oh my gosh, yeah, that window that sticks and That little depression in the wall and that bottom plug.
I don't know if it got fixed. It didn't work when I was there.
You know, just all these things, right?
Now, we just moved in. We didn't really know much about the room.
And he was, like, moved and emotional.
Oh, this room. I had such great times here.
My youth. He's got all of this knowledge of the room, which we just moved into.
So, the fact that science is new to some things doesn't mean that what science does know It's invalid.
Of course, there's always going to be fuzzy boundaries.
I mean, this whole point of life is to learn new things.
The fact that I have new arguments every show, and I really do have new arguments every show, I really try not to repeat myself.
I was even conscious earlier of not using my sun and moon of the same size analogy, right?
It's convenient, but again, it's repetition.
You know, midwits like repetition.
I think smart people like novelty.
So... The fact that I come up with new arguments doesn't mean my existing arguments are invalid.
The fact that science has uncertainty at the edges of its knowledge doesn't mean that the certainty it has doesn't exist.
The fact that you're exploring the woods near your home for the first time doesn't mean that your knowledge of your home or your neighborhood is invalid.
Because then that's to say that curiosity leads to ignorance.
Like if science wants to learn new things, which is the only reason we have this conversation, the only reason we have the modern world, if science wants to learn new things, somehow that invalidates science.
We'll talk about a mind frack, right?
That's horrible. It's horrible.
Well, you're learning a new language, so nothing you say in your old language is comprehensible to me.
So curiosity then leads to ignorance.
No, but curiosity only exists because of...
The desire for certainty.
We aren't curious about things we can't possibly know.
So we are curious.
Curiosity is a drive or a desire or an emotion that aims to satisfy us with certainty.
And then when we're certain of that, we move on to something new, right?
That's the next thing. That's the next thing.
It's how we progress as infants.
It's how we progress as a society.
So saying that your desire for new knowledge means that no knowledge is valid is to say that your curiosity, which is driven by the desire for certainty, is completely invalid and we should be sitting in our own filth like a bunch of orangutans and never progress on anything.
It's a way of turning curiosity and the desire for knowledge into a curse against the existence of knowledge at all.
But because there's fuzzy boundaries at the edge of knowledge, we can't know anything for certain.
Go be a scientist.
Go study something. Go learn something.
Go create something. Go do something.
Just sitting there like a spotty-ass troll sniping away at everybody trying to achieve anything using the very technology that the people who reject your entire uncertainty principle, using all the technology developed by people you're criticizing in order to make your criticisms.
I mean, I guess I have sympathy for the bad childhood, but, you know, you're responsible as an adult.
You're responsible. You're responsible.
So, where does conceptual certainty come from?
It comes from the perfection of the senses, and it comes from the absolute no escape.
No escape. Don't give yourself an out.
Don't give yourself a maybe.
Don't give yourself any quantum physics gold leaf experiment crap.
To pretend this ain't the fact.
This ain't the truth. This ain't reality.
It is. It is.
And if you want to disagree with me, then you're accepting that everything that I'm saying, you can comprehend, that it's transmitted over the medium of audio, unless it gets transcribed one day and becomes visual.
You're accepting that your senses work perfectly to transmit my argument and therefore you disagree because you comprehend the argument and you disagree.
Don't give yourself any out at all.
Don't give yourself any out at all.
Your senses are perfect and reality is perfectly consistent.
If you make a mistake on the interpretation of your senses, that's on you, not on your senses.
Reality is perfectly consistent.
Don't give yourself an out. Don't give yourself an escape hatch.
Don't give yourself a, well, but, maybe not 100%, Schrodinger's cat, man!
Don't. Don't do it.
That way, madness lies.
And it's not how you live.
This is the thing, man. Philosophy cannot contradict how you live.
I mean, it usually does, but it cannot be valid and contradict how you live.
That would be like saying science has a theory of gravity that says when you put your coffee cup on the table, it's going to float, not sit on the table.
Look at me using immediate metaphors.
So science can produce some freaky stuff.
Yeah, speed of light is constant all over the place and, you know, Australia is hanging by a thread on the bottom of the world.
Science can produce some freaky stuff, but nothing science does contradicts your immediate experience because your immediate experience and the consistency of matter that you experience at the sense data level is the only reason we have science to begin with.
It's the only reason we survive is we're able to correctly identify and manipulate the properties of matter and energy.
That's why we don't eat rocks if we're sane.
Don't give yourself an out.
No vents, no asterisks, no footnotes, no nothing.
100%. Senses are valid.
Reality is perfectly consistent.
Perfectly consistent. There is no place in the universe that science has ever examined where the laws of matter and energy do not apply or are reversed.
It is consistent throughout the entire universe.
I mean, we know what makes galaxies form, right?
Some central gravitational mass.
Everything swirls around like a whirlpool.
And we can see, what, 100 billion galaxies all the way to the edge of everything that can be seen.
So from here to the edge of everything that can be seen, however, I don't know, crazy billions of light years away.
Galaxies exist, which means that gravity exists everywhere all the time with perfect consistency.
Gravity, right, mass attracts mass.
Gravity exists and is valid everywhere all the time no matter what.
100%. And your senses are valid in the transmission of it.
Well, I once thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye and then I turned around and it wasn't there.
That was a glitch in the matrix, man!
No, it wasn't. I mean, mostly I don't believe any of this stuff anyway.
If somebody is genuinely going, like, seeing things that aren't there, they're not having a conversation with you about philosophy.
They're running buck naked down 6th Avenue thinking their ass is on fire.
Because they're insane. Psychotic break from reality.
Don't give yourself an out.
Because the modern world only exists because people don't give themselves an out.
Because if you give yourself an out, you will stop looking for consistency because you just gave yourself an out.
You will stop being curious.
You will stop exploring. You will stop Trying to create and understand new things, new circumstances, new environments, new people, new careers, new jobs, new everything, new lands.
You will give up looking because you gave yourself an out.
Do not give yourself an out!
In the same way, like, because if you give yourself an out in physics, you will give yourself an out in morality, which is where it really, really matters.
Like, I have a rule.
I don't punish, hit, yell at, intimidate, or call my daughter names.
I don't do it. Now, I don't give myself an out.
It's not like, well, I don't know, unless I got some bad news, or unless the price of Bitcoin goes down, or I just don't, like, there's no out to that.
Right? I don't violate the non-aggression principle.
There's no out for that.
There's no asterisk to that.
I don't assault people.
Well, unless they insult me.
Whatever, right? No, I just don't assault people.
There's no star, no asterisk for that.
There's no out. It's UPB. 100%.
UPB. Now, where does the 100% in ethics come from?
It comes from the 100% in the physical universe.
The physical universe is 100% consistent.
Your senses are 100% consistent.
And if they're not, you need to get them checked out, in my opinion.
Because it means something is wrong with your senses.
And I know that in part because I got glasses and everything's clear now.
Right? My distance vision is gone a little bit.
And so, I have sunglasses that have a little bit of vision correction, and yeah, so things are a little clearer now in the distance.
That's nice. That's reaffirming.
That doesn't cause me to doubt my senses.
That reaffirms my senses.
The accuracy of my senses reaffirms them.
And the fact that Your eyes begin to fade just about the same time as you can't hunt effectively.
Like if I was a hunter, you know, I'm only 56 next month.
I'm not fast enough or I don't have the endurance to go and be an effective hunter.
So by the time your sons and your grandchildren start hunting for you, nature doesn't expend a huge amount of energy to preserve your eyesight.
Well, yeah, of course. That makes total sense, doesn't it?
Why would you want to spend energy and time preserving that which is not needed?
To take energy and calories and it would cost you something else in your body to preserve your eyesight.
Why would you not hunting anymore?
You're not doing fiddly work that way or strenuous work that way or work that requires significant endurance and good vision.
So I mean, your skin still covers your body.
That doesn't fall apart because then you'd be dead, right?
But you don't need your vision as much when you're no longer hunting, so it's expendable in order to preserve your heart muscle or your liver function or your spleen or whatever is going on, right?
Sacrifice some eyes to keep everything else going because the eyes are less necessary.
It's 100%. Don't give yourself an out.
I know it's tough. I know that, you know, like toddlers, every time we hear a rule, we just want to will an exception.
Well, we're trained for that, right?
Find a rule, accept an exception.
That's the nature of power, right?
You can't borrow on somebody else's name without their permission.
That's a rule, right? That's called fraud.
But governments can borrow on behalf of people who aren't even born yet, and that's called good governance.
So have a rule.
You can't take somebody else's credit without their permission.
That's a rule. And then there's an exception.
So the fact that you are trained to both accept a rule and accept an exception is you're just trained.
I mean, you're just programmed that way by power so that you'll accept the moral rules for yourself and give them the exception.
To those moral rules. You're programmed that way.
So your desire for there to be an out is your desire to defend power.
Unjust authoritarian power.
You're just programmed that way.
Don't fall for it.
Don't do it. Because the modern world only exists because of the 100% acceptance of the senses and the behavior of matter and energy.
And our brain is directly wired to To get 100% certainty.
And the uncertainty serves the rulers.
Don't give yourself an out.
I'm telling you. If you give yourself an out, you'll just be exploited.
If you give yourself an out, you'll just have trashy, manipulative people around you for the rest of your natural-born days.
You don't give yourself an out.
You raise your standards. Reality is 100%.
The senses are 100%.
Logic is 100%.
No! Out! No exceptions, no asterisks, no footnotes, no well but, no fuzzy logic, no Schroden just can't, no quarks, no bullshit.
100%. 100%.
Well, you don't give yourself an out with reality.
You don't give yourself an out with morality.
And then when people are trying to say, hey man, you can't know anything for true or everything's subjective or nothing is real or nothing is virtuous or everything is relative and all that, you'll be like, oh, okay, so you're just giving yourself an out.
And what that means is you have full permission to act like a shitty human being to me.
I'm telling you the practical, I mean, it's not just abstract metaphysics and epistemology.
This is absolute consequentialist facts in your social reality.
Business and political environment, everything, everywhere.
People give themselves an out in reality.
You don't think they're going to give themselves an out in morality?
Absolutely. In fact, the entire purpose of giving people, the reason why people give themselves an out, an escape hatch, a vent, an asterisk, the reason people give themselves an out in reality is so they can behave like shitty people and not blame themselves.
The entire purpose of, oh, I don't fully trust the senses and you can't ever know anything for real is, oh, I'm going to be a shitty person because I don't have 100% standards.
If I don't have 100% standards in reality, you expect me to have 100% standards in morality?
That would be insane. Morality is less vivid, less impactful than reality.
You know, I can listen. I can knock on a piece of wood.
I can't knock on UPB. I can't knock on the scientific method.
I can't knock on logic. So if somebody's saying...
I don't believe that's anything real for sure.
Oh, but I'm willing to be perfectly moral?
No, come on. It's a warning sign.
It's a shot across the bow. It's like that really bright-colored frog in Hawaii.
You just feel like picking up, but don't.
It's a warning. It's a communication to say...
I have full permission to be shitty.
Because there's no such thing as shitty because everything's subjective.
I have full permission to be corrupt, manipulative, evil, exploitive.
Because there's no such thing.
I mean, hey man, I don't even believe that you exist and you expect me to be perfectly moral.
I don't even believe that reality exists and yet you want me to be consistently moral.
I don't even believe that my sense data or the behavior of matter and energy is consistent.
And you want me to be morally consistent?
I just told you I don't believe in consistency in a rock!
And you want me to be morally consistent in my soul?
No! Subjectivism leads to relativism, leads to exploitation.
The people who are telling you they don't believe in reality are telling you they don't believe in virtue.
People who are telling you you can't trust your senses are telling you, you can't trust me!
Because I've just told you I don't even trust my senses.
I don't believe that anything is real or anything is true.
And they're like, well, I'm sure he'll be moral, though.
When push comes to shove, I'm sure they're like...
How can he believe that he could be immoral when he doesn't even believe a tree exists?
You understand? It's like a debate I had with a professor years ago.
Was it Thaddeus Russell?
If memory serves, he believed that it was theoretically possible for a woman to mate with a tree and have a baby.
Anybody tells you they don't believe that reality exists is telling you as clear as daylight.
If I don't have any standards for reality, you expect me to have any standards for myself?
Are you crazy? You're the crazy one here, not him.
He's been perfectly honest, perfectly clear.
Nothing is true, man. Nothing is real.
You can't know anything for certain. You can't know anything 100%.
The senses could lie to you. Reality changes.
It shifts. It's like... So you have no standards for your own behavior.
How do you have standards for your own behavior when you don't even have standards for oxygen existing?
It's a... I mean, it's the biggest red flag there is.
It's the biggest red flag.
I mean, UPB, you understand. Or, you know, if somebody's a Christian and they believe in universal morality and follow it and so on, that's same effect, different cause.
UPB is a filter to get dangerous exploiters out of your life.
Hopefully to bring them to the light and that they accept the senses, they accept reality, they accept logic, they accept empiricism.
They don't give themselves an out in the existence of air or gravity and therefore they're less likely to give themselves an out when it comes to logic or morality.
But expecting somebody to have higher standards in the abstract than they have in their own tangible sense data is mad.
Literally mad. You think the madness is in them and the madness is in you if you believe this stuff.
I say with love and affection.
I'm going to make this case as passionately as I can because I want you all to stay safe in these increasingly dangerous times.
Expecting someone to have higher moral standards than a standard of sense data empirical reality is crazy.
They'll have lower standards in morality than they have in reality.
Somebody can reject the existence of Of something they're holding in their hand, right?
They're holding an egg in their hand and they say there is no egg.
If somebody rejects the existence of something they're holding in their hand, do you think that they will ever accept that they've been wrong about anything?
That they need to reform, that they need to do better, that they need to raise their standards for morality?
God, no. If you can reject the egg, you can reject everything.
If you can reject the egg, You can reject everything, including being trustworthy, moral, reliable, honest.
Well, I don't believe that reality exists, but I do believe I have to be 100% honest.
Well, where would you get the 100% for honesty if you don't even have 100% for reality?
This is why, metaphysically and epistemologically, you don't give yourself an out.
Because the out that you give, you won't believe anyway, you won't act that way.
You know, if somebody's standing on the street and they're a subjectivist and a relativist and metaphysically mental and a bus comes towards them and honks at them, they'll jump out of the way.
They don't believe that stuff. The entire purpose of this metaphysical insanity is not to change anyone's mind about reality but to give them permission to be as shitty as they want.
The purpose is get out of jail free card for shitty behavior.
That's the whole purpose of all this metaphysical madness.
Nobody lives that way. Nobody could live that way.
It's impossible. You wouldn't survive.
Why would you breathe? You don't know that oxygen is real.
No, no, no. The whole purpose is just to be a terrible human being.
And this is why people get dug into this position.
Because once they've done enough bad stuff, you can't turn back.
Once you've smoked enough cigarettes, you can't run a marathon.
Once you've eaten enough Twinkies, you can't climb a mountain.
Now, maybe you could. Way to reform it, isn't that?
But there is a certain tipping point where there is no turning back.
Once you've smoked enough cigarettes and you get lung cancer, there ain't no, you know, quitting smoking is not going to erase your lung cancer or prevent you from getting it, right?
So there's a certain tipping point.
Now, once you reach those, so you've disbelieved in reality to the point where you've allowed yourself to do terrible things but said, hey, man, everything's relative.
Nothing is true. Nothing is real. Therefore, nothing can be moral.
Therefore, I can't be immoral. Therefore, I can do what I want.
It's a satanic belief. Do what you want.
Everything you do is right. Everything you do is moral.
No external standards, no requirements, no facts, no truth, no reason, no evidence, no objectivity.
Nothing that your mind cannot torture into a justification because there is no reality.
You mean the escape hatch from reality leads only to hell.
Please understand this.
The escape hatch from reality leads only to hell.
That's why I'm trying to save you.
With this speech, which sounds lengthy, sounds involved, but is a desperate plea to save your soul.
Don't give yourself an out.
You give yourself an out.
You give those around you outs and you just fall and fall and fall and don't even know that you're falling because your values are fixed to nothing.
If you're pushed out of a plane holding a tennis ball and you only look at the tennis ball, say, well, me and the tennis ball don't look like...
The tennis ball is not falling from me.
I'm not falling from the tennis ball.
Therefore, we're not falling. If you only look at something that is not fixed, you can do anything you want.
And the problem is, though, that you pay the consequences because your unconscious operates on universals.
I'm telling you this right now.
Your unconscious acts on universals.
This is why you can catch a ball before you know calculus, differential equations.
Before you can mathematically describe the ball, you can catch the ball because you know where it's going to be.
People who couldn't pass grade 7 math can play basketball.
They know how to throw. They know where the ball is going to go.
They understand gravity. They understand momentum.
They understand the weight of the ball. They understand inertia.
Even centrifugal forces, they hold the ball tighter when they spin around.
Unconscious acts on universals.
It has to, otherwise we couldn't have survived, because we need universals to survive.
So your unconscious acts on universals.
Your conscious mind can screw with all of this stuff and throw sand in the Vaseline, so to speak.
Gum up the works, put sugar in the gas tank.
Your conscious mind can do this.
The unconscious acts in universals, whether we like it or not, which is why the person, whatever their bullshit, top-of-the-brain, epistemological insanity, they will jump out of the way of a bus that's coming their way.
The unconscious acts in universals.
So we can pretend that we can do anything we want, and nothing is real, and nothing is true, and nothing is moral, but unconsciously, morality is operating whether we like it or not.
UPB is merely a description at the unconscious level.
Of the universalization of morality that happens because we are universalization machines.
We couldn't have science or this conversation if we were.
We couldn't have language if we weren't.
We are universalization machines.
If you give yourself an exception at the empirical level, you won't ever believe it.
You won't ever follow it. You are merely doing that in the mad hope that morality is subjective.
You can do whatever you want, but it ain't.
Morality operates at a level below the conscious mind because morality is universal and we are universal making machines.
That's what our brains do, is they conceptualize and universalize.
And so, you may ignore universal morality.
You may act against it.
But that doesn't mean universal morality will ignore you and not act against you.
That's what they call a conscience.
Now, In the Christian theology, the conscience is generally the sole divine part of you that recognizes and accepts the majesty and virtue and commandments of God.
In philosophy, the conscience is the fact that UPB operates in our minds, and the more we reject it in our conscious mind, the more it ends up operating in the unconscious mind.
UPB operates within us whether we like it or not.
UPB is not an invention.
It is a discovery.
The archaeologist uncovering the city didn't build the city out of nothing.
He's uncovering something that's already there.
UPB is a description of the universal ethics that operate in our conceptual hamster on a wheel brain.
Like you could ignore the fact that smoking might kill you.
That doesn't mean that smoking is no longer harmful to you.
Because smoking operates at the physical level.
And you can believe that universal morality doesn't apply to you, but your entire brain is a machinery of universality.
And you will use ethics to manipulate other people and then you think that somehow you'll be immune from any blowback or any consequences.
The conscience operates at a physical level that is below our capacity to deny.
UPB operates at a physical base of the brain level.
It is beyond our capacity to deny because everything we invent to control other people involves universal morality.
Don't give yourself an out.
Just take a deep breath and relax into the truth, away from the programming of those who would manipulate you by creating exceptions to reality and exceptions to morality that they use to enslave you.
No outs. Just get on your knees and praise and worship and thank the reality that gives you sanity and the reality that gives you morality that gives you virtue that gives you happiness and the great glory of virtue which is love.
Ah! Glad to get that out of my system.
So... Again, I don't think I'm going to do better than that speech, so I think I'll quit while the quitting is good.
Don't sell past the sale.
Have yourselves a wonderful weekend, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
I guess it's Sunday. The Church of Philosophy is in session.
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Thank you everyone so much for dropping by.
Lots of love from up here.
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