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Oct. 23, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:10
Philosophical Defense 101!
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Time Text
Come on, come on.
It's a Sunday. Hope you guys are doing well.
Have a little bit of time.
Thought I'd give you some of my mind.
And just wanted to make sure...
Yeah, I think this is the right microphone.
Let's just double check. Do the speakers.
Yes, come on. You can do it.
Do the microphone. Yes, you can do it.
All right. Well, hi everybody.
Hope you're doing well, Steph. It is the 23rd of October on a Sunday.
Philosophical Defense 101.
When people come at you with this sort of brain-dissolving, brain-attacking mantras of, oh, there's nothing that's true, there's nothing that's real, there's nothing that's moral...
What do you do? What do you do, my friends?
Well, really, there is, in fact, only one thing you can do, and that's apply to the defense of the dark arts known as Philosophical Self-Defense 101.
Now, it is my contention, and I've made this case for many, many, many years, it is my contention that about 95% of philosophical issues can be solved how?
How can they be solved? Looking at the empiricism of what you're doing.
Look at the empiricism of what you're doing, and most, if not all, of your philosophical issues will be solved.
Now, if you remember the great old book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's a whole lot of money in not solving problems.
There's a lot of money in arguing.
There's a lot of money in debating.
I mean, if you think of the multiplicity...
Of religious denominations around the world, should God himself come down from his clouds and tell everyone the actual final answers?
Well, the various theologians, the various people who follow religious beliefs would largely be out of a job, because if you get it from the source, well, there's not much room for interpretation now, is there?
So yes, my friends, there is in fact a huge amount of money in not solving problems, which is why problems tend not to get solved.
I mean, in philosophy, it's kind of like you have government agencies, right?
And those government agencies are not designed to solve problems.
The welfare state has no interest.
Like the bureaucrats in the welfare state have no interest in actually solving the problems of poverty, right?
And people who do this back and forth about philosophical issues, it's largely for emotional reasons, for reasons of trying to figure out...
How they can keep going with a paycheck and how they can avoid any controversy, right?
Philosophy in general is about muddying the waters rather than clarifying the position.
If the position is clarified then a lot of sophists are out of work so they don't want to clarify those positions and that falls to us hardy souls out here on the hinterlands of the intranet.
It falls to us. So this has been something that I've been doing from day one and I will continue to do Until probably about 45 seconds after my last breath.
My last breath, of course, being entirely focused on producing philosophy in the brain trust that I have been granted with my mind that I hopefully use to serve to the benefit of humanity as a whole.
That's really the goal and that's the idea.
Now, it's not just definitions and it's not just the number 42, but we will get deep into What is going on with philosophical self-defense?
Alright, let's get started.
So, when it comes to answering philosophical questions, the first place you need to start is not with definitions, it's not with rationality, it's not with facts, data, it's not with arguments, it's not with any of that stuff.
That's not where you need to start when it comes to philosophy.
Where you need to start is with introspection.
The answers lie within.
I'm not talking pure rationalism where every truth is found within the mind.
I'm not talking about that. I am an empiricist.
But the first empiricism that you need to work with in philosophy is not the empiricism of facts.
It's not the empiricism even of your senses.
It's the wonderful empiricism embedded within Your own actions.
Can you feel the tastiness of it all?
Can you feel the delight of it all?
The empiricism of your own actions.
That's what you need to really work with.
What are you doing?
You need to slow everything down.
Slow everything down.
You need to ask yourself, what am I doing?
And what are the premises embedded...
In what it is that I'm doing.
If you can solve or unpack the premises involved in what you are doing, then you are, I'm telling you, without a smidge of hyperbole, you are vastly on your way to solving about 95% of philosophical problems.
Philosophy is clouded because people leap over the empiricism of their own actions into crazy, unholy realms of abstractions and data and arguments and syllogisms and everything that you could conceive of that is debatable.
So there's lots of stuff that is debatable in the world.
But the empiricism of your own actions is not debatable.
And if you want certainty, look at what you are doing and take it from there.
Okay, so let's get practical in what it is that I'm talking about.
When it comes to the empiricism of what you're doing, let's say that you're an adult.
Well, to be an adult, you have to have processed objective reality in a functional and positive manner.
In an accurate manner.
You have to have breathed.
You have to have been able to differentiate between what happens in your dreams and what happens in reality.
You have to have been able to do that.
You cannot gain sustenance from foods that you merely imagine.
You cannot gain nutrition or calories from foods that you eat, quote, eat in your dreams.
You cannot breathe in dreams, right?
And you can sort of imagine that if you're asleep and you're dreaming of flying up in the stratosphere, or perhaps a place where the air is less rare, imagine that you are dreaming of an air-rich environment and somebody plugs up your nose and your mouth.
What happens? Do you get to keep breathing?
No, you don't. What happens is you stop breathing.
And your brain says, whoa, although we are not dreaming of our nose and our mouth being covered up, we're not dreaming of that.
However, that's what's happening is, in fact, in reality, outside of our dreams, our nose and our mouth are being covered up.
So what happens? Well, we wake up, right?
Because although we are breathing in our dreams, we are not breathing in reality.
And so we wake up.
We wake up with a start, we wake up frightened, angry, upset, because we just can't breathe, no matter what we're dreaming.
If you dream, if you have an erotic dream about making love to a beautiful woman, you may wake up, you may even have had what they used to call, I don't know if they still call it, a nocturnal emission.
Sounds like a SWAT team at midnight, but a nocturnal emission.
You may have ejaculated in your sleep, and you may have Imagine that you have had sex with a beautiful woman, but you're never going to get a baby out of your dreams.
So everyone who is alive has navigated objective reality with great success.
Does it mean perfect success?
Well, I don't know about that. But let's say that somebody you're debating with is 30 years old.
Okay, they spent 30 years breathing in reality.
They've spent 30 years eating food in reality.
They've spent 30 years gaining shelter in reality.
They've spent 30 years drinking liquids in reality.
Not in fantasy, not in dreams, not in imagination, not in the matrix, not in the Cartesian demon scenario, but in actual, factual, empirical, universal, objective, material reality.
You cannot reject the empiricism of the everyday and remain alive.
Everybody who is alive Has successfully navigated the difference between dreams and reality.
Successfully navigated the difference between dreams and reality.
Now, they may not have figured out all of the philosophical reasons for the difference between dreams and reality, but even dogs know the difference between dreams and reality.
A dog may dream that he's eating food, but when he wakes up, he goes to eat.
I mean, a dog's body even knows the difference between dreaming and waking because a dog's legs will merely twitch if he's running in his dreams, but if he's running in reality, they move like a blur.
They move like the hummingbird chin-wagging vibrations of a soffit's mouth.
Even dogs can do it.
If dogs can do it, if dogs can perform and understand, at least at some instinctual level, the difference between dreams and reality, between the subjective and the objective, if dogs can do it, It seems to me possible.
It seems to me quite possible that human beings can do it.
You know those horses that can count to ten and do some basic addition and subtraction?
Okay, well if somebody claims to be an expert mathematician, can we accept that they can do better than a horse?
Can we accept that they can do more than whinny and thump and pour their hoof into the ground to try and show everyone their mathematical brilliance?
I am an expert in mathematics!
Okay, can you do addition and subtraction in 1 to 10 by thumping your knuckles on a table?
Uh, no. No, I can't do that.
Well, you know a horse can do it, right?
So, if you are not a better mathematician than a horse, I have some doubts that you are in fact an expert mathematician.
I actually think you're mostly full of nonsense and lies and sophistry and just ridiculousness.
So you look at the empiricism of what you're doing, okay?
So, what you say is, what's the difference between subjective and objective?
Well, the first thing you have to understand is you know that.
You know it. Again, you might not be able to describe it syllogistically, but you know it already.
Otherwise, you could not have lived.
You could not have lived.
Like that statement that I read in Reader's Digest books when I was about, I don't know, six or seven years old, where some kid from a poor neighborhood and a poor family was saying he was hungry.
And his mother said, well, if you're hungry, eat a congry.
And the kid was kind of dissatisfied because there's no such thing as a congry.
So you can't eat it.
So you can't satisfy your hunger based on that.
So the first thing is that you know, you absolutely know, The difference between dreams and reality.
Now, you might say to yourself, my God, what have I done?
You might say to yourself, look, I know that I understand at some level the difference between dreams and reality, otherwise I couldn't have survived.
And you may have humility in the face of the fact that you can't define it, but that's okay.
That's okay. There's lots of things we understand that we cannot define.
A football player knows how to catch a ball based upon the angle, the spin, the wobble, relative motion.
You know, Tom Brady, what is he, a quarterback or something?
Now going through the, hey, welcome to hell, aspect of the potential divorce, I suppose.
But Tom Brady, does he understand physics?
Nope. Probably not.
I don't imagine he does.
Could he describe in a scientific level, at an equation level, could he describe what's going on with the ball that he wants to catch?
No, he couldn't. Can he catch it?
Yes. Is he going to say, even though he can't describe it mathematically, is he in fact going to say that there's no way to accurately describe the movement of the ball he's trying to catch?
That the ball can...
Stop, hover, spin in place, dive into the ground, rise up to the stratosphere, go into the lower orth orbit, and then come back in the blink of an eye.
No, he's not going to say any of that.
He's going to say, yeah, it's predictable, yeah, it's objective.
I can't describe it mathematically, but I understand it instinctually.
How do I know I understand it instinctually?
Because I can catch the ball!
I can catch the ball.
And he would also say, look, I need to go to training, right?
What is his wife mad at him because he's playing football again when you get, what, six months off a year with football?
A couple of away games and six weeks of training.
The horror. Now, he doesn't get to go to his coach and say, Coach, I don't need to come to training.
Do you know why? Because I've dreamed of playing football all winter.
The coach is going to say, well, you know, I guess that's fine, but I need to be able to verify, right?
Trust but verify, trust but verify.
I need to be able to verify what's going on.
I can't just take your word for it.
And the fact that you are dreaming about football doesn't mean that you're training in the real world, because the real world has objective standards, and dreaming is subjective.
So I'm afraid we will not be able to take your...
Dreaming about football over the course of the winter as enough.
Enough. So, to be alive, you must have successfully navigated the difference between subjective and objective.
Now, if someone comes along and says there's a difference between subjective and objective, for you to say there's no way to prove that, that's not true, it's invalid, is literally like Tom Brady.
Saying to a physicist that there are objective ways to describe the movement of the ball, he'd say, well, yeah, of course there is.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have a better or a worse football player.
Catching the ball, kicking the ball, dodging others.
There would be no such thing as a better or a worse football player if reality was not objective.
Somebody who can better track the objective path of the football, somebody who can better predict the movements and momentums of players who want to tackle him, all these kinds of things.
Basketball, right? Getting the ball in the hoop, nothing but net.
There has to be an objective reality, otherwise these things couldn't be achieved.
There'd be no better or worse.
I mean, if you can imagine a football player who could bend the ball with his mind, bend the path of the ball with his mind.
Well, he would be the best, I would assume, right?
There is a game that I describe in my novel, The Future, which is a form of racket sports, where you can alter the course of the ball with your mind, and it's designed for older people to stay sharp mentally.
That's kind of what it's for, right?
That's available to everyone, right?
That's not just available to one person.
So Tom Brady's not going to sit there and say, well, there's absolutely no way you can describe the path of the ball mathematically.
There's no way that there's any stability or universality or objective rules by which the ball moves because he's utterly relying upon those objective standards in order to be able to throw and catch the ball with any accuracy.
What are they paying him for?
Why do they pay Tom Brady millions or tens of millions of dollars?
He's got, what is the net worth in the hundreds of millions, I assume, with Gisele Bundchen.
What are they paying him for?
They're paying him for being able to accurately throw and catch the ball and dodge people.
I mean, I know that there's more to football than that, but I didn't make the team, so I'm going to reduce it to insignificance.
No, I mean, it's a complex game of throwing and catching and dodging.
And I know that he's got to know all the plays and they've got to figure out their strategies and they do review recordings of the other teams.
I get all of that. I get all of that.
I'm not trying to eliminate that.
But in the end, it comes down to accurate throwing, catching and dodging.
Well, getting the ball to the end zone, right?
That's what it's all about.
That's what he's being paid for.
And if there was no objective reality, then he would not be paid any more than anyone else, right?
So Tom Brady is not going to sit there and say, oh yeah, no, there's no way that these balls move objectively.
There's no way that momentum and wobble and air friction and any of that, there's no way that any of that could be described in any objective manner, because he knows instinctively that it is Objective.
And he's paid for his ability to work with objective reality better in the purpose of football than any other player around, for the most part.
And you sort of think of any of these games, particularly involves throwing, hitting, you know, basketball, golf, cricket, tennis, racquetball, squash, pickleball, you name it.
Right?
It's all about working with objective reality and accepting the properties of objective reality.
You know, when I play pickleball, I am sometimes complimented, as is the case when I play tennis, for the spin I'm able to put on the ball.
Nobody sits there and says, oh, you just bent it with your mind, or, you know, you didn't spin it, but it went in an arc anyway.
And you have to work in particular with pickleball.
You have to work with wind, right?
You have to work with wind.
It's a real challenge, especially when you do a lob.
You really have to compensate for the wind more than just about any other.
You don't have to compensate for wind with squash because you're indoors usually.
Well, I think always you're indoors.
But tennis, a little bit you have to compensate for wind, but pick a ball a lot because the ball is much lighter and has holes in it.
The wind can really catch it and whip it around.
So the ball...
And this is maybe one of the reasons why empiricists and people into rational philosophy have a history of playing sports.
You know, I've talked before about how people into rational philosophy usually have a history of doing manual labor of some kind.
And I think it's also probably the case that people into empirical philosophy have a history of playing sports at a relatively high level.
And again, I'm no expert sportsman, but I'm pretty good at a wide variety of sports.
I'm good amateur, I suppose, or very good amateur at a wide variety of sports, and so I accept this empirical reality of universal physical properties and energies.
You can't do sports if you don't accept that.
And, of course, everybody, I don't know if this is probably the case now, back in the day, if you were playing with someone, In a video game, sometimes what you would hear is, Hey man, the joystick's busted.
Something's wrong with the joystick.
This used to happen from time to time.
I remember having borrowed a joystick for an Atari 800.
Or maybe it was the Atari 2600.
I borrowed someone's joystick and it ended up getting broken.
I can't remember if I broke it or someone else.
I owed that guy 20 bucks.
Sorry, dude. I had to dodge you.
I had to pay rent. Not proud of it, but it wasn't my fault that society was the way it was, my family was the way it was, and that I was broke.
I pay my debts wherever I can, but when it comes to food or joysticks, if you ever hear this, sorry about that, but it was kind of an emergency.
So these are the things that you have to accept when you're dealing with reality.
Reality is objective.
Physical properties and energies are objective.
And if you look empirically in your own heart and in your own mind, you will understand that.
So the challenge then becomes not somehow proving that reality is objective.
You being alive proves that.
Your being alive proves that.
That reality is objective.
So what do you need then?
Well, if you're into philosophy, you have to have a way of proving the difference between objective and subjective, right?
I mean, if Tom Brady, I'm not saying it will be his next career move, but if Tom Brady decides that he wants to be a physicist, what he will be doing is he will be formally describing, using mathematics or the discipline of physics, He will be formally describing that which he has instinctually understood since early childhood.
That's what he'll be doing. He'll simply be using mathematics to formally describe that which he has fully accepted.
Not just, of course, in sports, but in...
Everyone who's alive understands.
The parents of everyone who's alive understands this reality as well.
That you need an egg, you need sperm, you get pregnant, you give birth, you have to breastfeed, you have to keep the child safe, you have to...
Give food, shelter, water, and all of that.
And if you have any social skills, interactions, playtime, you name it.
Every parent of everyone who's alive fully understood the difference between objective and subjective reality.
You know, if your kid is emaciated and, you know, the neighbors call because they think your kid's dying and maybe he is.
And then the government comes over or doctors come over or police come over and you say, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Come on.
I'm feeding that child.
Every night I dream about feeding my child.
Every night I dream about feeding my child.
Would they say, well, actually, that makes sense.
Yeah, because, I mean, we can't tell the difference between objective and subjective.
We can't tell the difference between dreams and reality.
So, yeah, okay, that's perfectly valid.
I guess Dream Kid is doing well, and maybe this is Dream Kid, and the Dream Kid is the real kid, and they won't.
I mean, of course they won't, right?
So if you're only alive because your parents accepted objective, universal reality, and you're only alive because you've accepted the same, to sit there and say there's no difference between subjective and objective is crazy.
It is a denial of your own existence.
It is a denial of your expert, perfect ability to navigate between the subjective and the objective.
That's what I mean when I say it really is, really is, a kind of madness.
Well, it is a form of sophistry, right?
Generally, it's a midwit position, right?
I know that that's an insult, but I'm perfectly happy to make it, because Lord knows these people have insulted me over the years, so treat people the best you can.
First time you meet them, after that, treat them as they treat you.
It's a midwit position, and it's a cruel and often sadistic position, because when you go to the average person, and I don't necessarily mean of average intelligence, but just you go to the average person, And you say, well, you can't tell the difference between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, reality, unreality, objective, subjective, and so on.
Instinctually, they know that you're wrong, but they lack the language to be able to disprove you.
They lack the skill, the training, the language, right?
And so they recoil from you, and they can't prove you wrong, but they will avoid you.
Why?
Because they themselves need to survive, and you're kind of like a brain virus, trying to dissolve the ability to tell objective from subjective, which is to cripple the being's ability to survive.
And so survival drives them away from you.
You feel superior because they can't disprove you.
You certainly will alienate them, and they will become indifferent and or hostile towards you.
And what you're doing, of course, is you're driving them away from philosophy, Because what they say is, well, philosophy is kind of insanity.
Philosophy, if I accept it, it will get me killed.
I have to ignore the tenets of philosophy.
There's no difference between objective and subjective that you can prove.
I have to ignore the tenets of philosophy in order to survive.
So philosophy is anti-life.
Philosophy will drive me crazy or get me killed.
You know, how many times have you crossed the street in your life?
life you don't believe there's any difference between objective and subjective yet you've managed to cross the street thousands and thousands and thousands of time without getting hit by a bus a car a lorry as they say in england a hue lorry a truck a windowless van right you've managed to survive all of that
So if you look at the empiricism of what you're doing, you say, yeah, I know the difference between objective and subjective, and my parents know it, and every single generation, back to the primordial soup a couple of billion years ago, every single generation of entities that have ended up with you completely and totally understood the difference between subjective and objective, because if any one of those creatures had not understood the difference between subjective and objective, the chain would have been broken and you would not exist.
Millions of generations of creatures going back to the single-cell primordial soup All completely and totally understood the difference in subjective and objective.
And why did they do all of that? Why did they struggle to survive and feed and screw and reproduce and raise offspring?
Why did they do that? Well, so you could deny the reality of their entire experience by faffing around with masturbatory, circle-joke, ooky-cookie nonsense philosophy.
It's a way for midwits to feel smarter, right?
You know, it's like me going to Tom Brady and saying, hey man...
Can you mathematically describe the path of a football?
No? Well, I guess I'm superior to you then, aren't I? Although that is a rational discipline.
Going to people and saying, what's the difference between subjective and objective?
Objective is what you're breathing. Objective is the medium you're using to convey this information to me.
Objective is where the food is.
Objective is where the shelter is.
Objective is where the bed is that you go to sleep at night.
You don't try and fall asleep in the bathtub with a full tub of water now, do you?
You don't attempt to breathe through your armpit, do you?
You don't attempt to hear with your fingertips.
And you don't attempt to have reproductive sex with your middle toe.
So, yeah, you already know it.
Now, if you push back, so somebody says there's no difference between subjective and objective, what you do is you say...
Well, obviously, there is.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be here.
I wouldn't be here. So, you've thought about these things.
I haven't, right? So, someone comes to me.
Let's say I'm just... I'm a normie, right?
I'm an average person. You've thought about...
Okay, so somebody comes to you and says, well, there's no such difference between objective and subjective.
Okay, well... Of course there is, otherwise we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't live, and you wouldn't be using an objective medium to communicate.
And, you know, you've obviously successfully navigated crossing the street and getting sleep and eating and drinking and getting shelter and maintaining a reasonable body temperature and exercising, right?
So you've done all of that in objective reality.
So you've thought about all these things for a long time.
It's not my specialty, right?
But you've thought about all these things for a long time.
What's your answer? Well, I don't know any difference between subjective and objective.
It's like, well, there is a difference between subjective and objective, and you accept that, so you've thought about something that you know already, you've thought about something for many years, and you've no answer.
Oopsie! Oopsie!
Right? There's no difference between subjective and objective.
Oh. Well, you've obviously survived, which means that you've survived in the objective world.
And you've thought about these things for many years.
What's your answer? I don't have one.
Well, then you're not very good at this, are you?
Right? If I've studied motion, mathematical motion for many years, and somebody says, is there any way to mathematically describe the movement and momentum of a ball through air?
And I say, no. No, there's no way to describe that.
It's like, oh, well, you've been studying mathematics for many years.
Clearly, there is a way to describe it because it's predictable.
Right? You may not know all the variables.
You wouldn't. All the dust moats and little currents and eddies of air.
But it's not random. If it was random, then they wouldn't play ballplayers.
They wouldn't pay ballplayers for being any better.
You wouldn't know that Jack Nicklaus is any better than some half-blind duffer puttering around in his backyard with a stick and a marble.
So if somebody comes and says, well, there's no way to math...
I've been studying mathematics and motion for many years, and there's no way to mathematically describe the movement of a ball.
Say, well, you're just not very good at it, are you?
You're not very good at it.
Oh, well, no, but you can't prove that there's any such difference as objective and subjective.
So I don't have to, because you're using an objective medium to communicate.
Somebody says to you they're using vocal cords, sound, airwaves, the eardrum, the inner ear, the outer ear, the middle ear, all of that, and your ability of your brain to process things.
They're using all of that. It's philosophical defense 101.
Somebody comes to you with a convoluted, messy, philosophical problem.
They say, well, you're the one who's been studying this for many years.
What's your answer? Well, I don't have one.
Then why would I listen to you?
Well, I've been studying medicine for 10 years now, and I have no idea of the difference between health and illness.
Okay, well, excuse me, you don't mind if I step over your brain-dead corpse and go to a doctor that actually understands the difference between health and illness.
Well, I've been a coach of basketball for 20 long years, but I have absolutely no idea what the purpose of basketball is.
Something to do with a net and a ball, but I don't know.
It's like, okay, well, if you've been studying something for 20 years and you don't have any clue what the answers are, even of the basics, then I'm going to ignore you because you are self-confessed incompetent or rather an anti-competent, right?
Philosophical Defense 101.
Somebody comes to you, oh, there's a trolley problem, there's a hanging from a flagpole problem.
It's like, okay, what's your answer?
Well, there isn't one. Okay, well, you've been studying something for 20 years and you don't have an answer.
Or you've been studying something for 10 years and you don't have an answer.
Okay, so I'm going to ignore you because you're not good at what you do.
Now, if something doesn't have an answer, then you stop studying it, right?
If something doesn't have an answer, I mean, unless it's quantum physics and you're being paid by the state, right?
If something doesn't have an answer, you stop studying it, right?
How many air atoms, or, I don't want to say, how many O2 atoms are in the room that I'm speaking in?
Well, you can't answer that, because they're seeping through the vents, they're seeping through the walls, I'm breathing, which is causing Brownian motion, or I guess Brownian motion is constant, they go in under the door, they're, right?
They're colliding into each other.
They're disintegrating. There's no answer to that.
So if somebody says, well, I've spent 20 years studying to find out exactly in a split-second instance how many oxygen atoms are in a room, you'd say, well, you can't answer that.
Or if somebody were to say, I'm studying to figure out exactly how every aspect of evolution worked across all species throughout all time across the entire world.
I said, well, you can't know that because...
I mean, there's a ridiculous scarcity of fossil records, right?
In all of North America, in terms of fossil records, all the people in North America, if you had as few fossils in the future as we have from the past, you'd have one thigh bone from all the people in North America.
You can't possibly do evolution with that little amount of information, which is why they've never found or shown intraspecies evolution, right?
Micro-evolution they've shown, macro-evolution they can't.
So, if you're studying something for which there simply isn't the information and you will never know, then what are you doing?
Well, you're studying something for 20 years which you can't possibly know, and it's fairly obvious that you can't possibly know it, in which case, if you spend 20 years studying something without an answer, you're also hopelessly incompetent at it.
You're not good at evolution if you say, well, I'm studying the evolution of all Organisms across all continents throughout all of history.
You'll never have that information.
You'll never be able to answer those questions.
So you're bad at what you do.
Very bad at what you do.
So why would you be taken seriously?
Why would you be taken seriously at all?
You're not even competent enough to know that the question can't be answered.
Right? So somebody comes to you and says, what's the difference between subjective and objective?
And you say, well, there is, because that's what we need to survive.
We need to differentiate the two in order to survive.
So what's your answer? Well, I don't know.
Well, can the question be answered?
No. Well, it can't be answered by you.
And anyone who says that human beings can't achieve what a horse can achieve.
Horses know the difference between subjective and objective.
I'm sure that horses have sexual dreams at night as well, but they still mount a mare, right, the...
The males still mount a mare, sometimes in front of the queen, in order to make their foals, right?
And the mares, after they give birth to the foal, they don't sit there and say, well, there's no way of knowing anything that's real or not real.
It could be a complete fantasy or phantasm.
So I'm going to completely ignore the foal and not give it any breast milk.
Oh, foal dies, right?
So if human beings can't know what much lower animals know, for sure, Well, then the hierarchy of knowledge is completely messed up.
It's like saying that horses can understand the Pythagorean theorem, but human beings have no way of understanding or answering those issues.
So if somebody comes to you with a really convoluted problem, some trolley problem, say, well, what's the answer?
Well, there isn't an answer.
Okay? So why are you studying things for which there's no answer?
Well, the reason you'd be studying things for which there's no answer is to screw up everybody else's thinking, mess other people up, And serve the powers that be by driving people away from the empirical rational certainty that comes from philosophy.
Or if people say, there's no such thing as preferred behavior.
Well, how did you live? How did you eat?
How did you drink?
You preferred to do that rather than die.
There's no such thing as preferred behavior.
Oh, so I should drop my argument that there is such a thing as preferred behavior?
In other words, you would prefer that I change my behavior to deny preferred behavior?
It's really, really bad.
It's really bad.
Really, really horse amateur stuff.
Horse amateur stuff.
You can't own things.
You can't have property. Oh, so you're producing an argument from the property called your body that says you can't produce anything and own anything from the property of your body.
Somebody says, well, you can't own the effects of your actions.
Oh, is that your argument?
Yes. Well, then you own the effects of your actions called making an argument, the argument being the effects of your actions which you own.
It's your argument. So when somebody uses their property and owns the effects of their actions and then says, you can't ever own the effects of your actions, it's, I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's embarrassing. And it's midwit stuff, right?
So, dumb people, you've seen that bell curve thing, right?
Like, dumb people are empirical and rational.
They may not be able to abstract it.
In fact, they usually can't. They can't describe to you the abstract principles by which they know the difference between objective and subjective, but they damn well do.
You know, when I was working up north and the boss came out and said, we've got to hike five miles through the snow to drill at a particular location.
And I said, no, we'll just dream about that.
We'll all dream about that tonight.
He would just stare at me like, what stupidity are you talking about?
He would worry if I had lost my mind.
I got bush fever.
I'd lost my mind. He would worry about that.
And he'd be right to worry about that.
People who are actually doing things in the world don't have time for all these convoluted, naughty abstractions that lead nowhere.
Right, so great minds clarify and simplify.
And great minds cannot reject the instinctual conclusions of all living creatures, which is that there's an objective difference between subjective and objective, right?
So, yeah, dumb people instinctively understand empiricism, truth, reality, subjectivity, and objectivity.
Intelligent people, brilliant people, can define these things in terms that accord with the instinct's Of every creature, right?
You know, this silly thing where they say, according to physicists, bees can't fly, yet bees manage to fly anyway.
Well, then physicists are wrong.
I mean, I'm sure it's not true, right?
But physicists are wrong, because whatever they're saying that says bees can't fly, well, if bees can't fly, then the physicists are wrong.
Because empiricism trumps theory.
That's the whole point of the scientific method.
So, it's the midwits, the people in the middle, the 110 to 120 IQ, They're the ones that can really mess things up.
They're the ones who truly muddy the water.
Because they don't sit there and look at dumb people or less intelligent people or instinctual people.
They don't look at less intelligent people and say, I've got to figure out how you know with certainty what you know.
I've got to figure that out. A physicist doesn't look at Tom Brady and say...
Oh man, I've got to prove that Tom Brady can't catch that ball.
I've got to prove that there's no way that Tom Brady can know where the ball is, where it's going.
There's no way that the people who block the attackers, who are trying to protect the quarterback, they're trying to protect the quarterback.
There's no way that they can figure out where the bodies are, where they're moving to, how to intercept them.
I have to prove that the sport of football is utterly impossible.
And I have to become a coach to the football players saying, there's no way that you can know where the ball is, where the ball's going, who the people are, what the momentum is, how to get the ball to the end zone, how to kick the ball through the field goal.
There's no way you can know any of that.
None of that is real. Right?
The players would be like, what are you talking about?
They would think that somebody had escaped from the asylum in order to lecture them that the sport of football was impossible.
Smart people, people with genuine compassion, who aren't just trying to confuse less intelligent people so they can feel so smart.
I'm so smart because I can ask impossible questions of less intelligent people.
I'm so smart because I can confuse the slightly below average.
Oh, aren't you just great.
Look at that. You can beat up a girl guy.
That must mean you're Mike Tyson.
You're just a heroic guy.
I can lift a feather.
I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh, it's embarrassing.
So they pick on the less intelligent and they confuse them.
And it's really tragic.
And when they come across the more intelligent people who can actually define these things and answer their questions, they just get enraged.
Good, because they've done a lot of harm in this world by severing theory from practice in the minds of the average or the below average.
It's really terrible. I mean, the harm they've done.
They've driven people away from philosophy, from abstract reasoning, from virtue, which requires abstract reasoning.
They've just done a huge amount of harm in this world.
I tell you, you know what intelligence is?
Intelligence is something you're handed in trust for the betterment of mankind.
I view this with myself.
The intelligence that I possess...
I view as something that was handed to me in trust, in escrow, for the betterment of mankind.
It's not mine. Why?
Because I didn't earn it. I was just born with it.
I mean, I've trained it and I think I've done good with it, but that's only because I view my intelligence as something that I happen to possess through accident.
And the only way that I can take any pride in the possession of my intelligence is...
By pursuing that which benefits human beings as a whole.
That which benefits society as a whole.
I'm accidentally smart and the only way it can be turned into a virtue is to turn that intelligence towards the betterment of virtue, wisdom and knowledge across the world.
And this is one of the reasons I have this little fitness watch and I just noticed like last week I did 10 hours of exercise.
Now, some of that's just walking, doing the shows.
Some of that is weights. Some of that is cardio.
Some of that is racket sports or whatever, right?
So it's not like I'm just lifting weights 10 hours a week.
I probably couldn't survive that very well.
And so why do I do that?
Well, lifting weights is particularly associated with preventing dementia, right?
And I have been given this brain in trust for humanity, and I need to take good care of it.
I mean, if you are given $10 million as a lawyer and you're to hold it until somebody turns 18 or 21 or whatever, then you have to be very careful with that money.
It's not yours because you are taking care of it on behalf of someone else.
You are an executor.
You are somebody holding wealth and trust to be passed along to someone else.
I can't use intelligence.
This is not about me, I understand.
I assume everybody who's listening to this is smart.
And your intelligence, it's not yours.
It's not a virtue just because you happen to be born smart.
That's like saying, well, I'm better because I was born with blue eyes.
I didn't choose that.
It's just a genetic result of some blue-eyed guy in the past being all kinds of hot to trot.
I didn't earn that. So intelligence is something...
That you're largely born with.
I mean, and again, wisdom is more important than intelligence, which is why intelligence that is used to promulgate wisdom and the greatest and most virtuous use of intelligence is to promulgate wisdom.
Wisdom is when you can do the right thing without having to explain everything.
It turns philosophy into a kind of instinct, like the way that Tom Brady can catch a ball without knowing the physics.
He's got the wisdom of motion.
He doesn't have the science of motion.
He's got the wisdom of motion. And when you can translate abstract ideals into practical wisdom and people know the right thing to do even without being able to explain it in deep syllogisms, you've done the greatest good for mankind that can possibly be done in this or any other age.
You hold your intelligence and trust for the betterment of mankind.
Now, is this slavery?
No, you can do what you want with your intelligence.
I'm just telling you that the best way you'll be happy, the best way that you'll be Full of legitimate pride and self-respect is if you accept that your intelligence is a motor there to drive the advancement of mankind.
I mean, you can do whatever you want.
It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle to use your intelligence to confuse and baffle and alienate the less intelligent.
That's free speech.
It's an asshole move, but it's not an evil move.
But if you use your intelligence to lift people up, to give them practical moral instruction, as I'm trying to do here today, if you use your intelligence for that purpose, you're doing the best possible thing in the most humble and productive manner that you can do with the accidental gift called intelligence.
It's not about me.
It's not about vanity.
It's not about being smarter than.
It's not about being more right then.
It's not about baffling other people with sophistry.
It's not about feeling smart because you can make other people feel dumb.
Now, if you're the captain of a sports team, your goal is not to make yourself look like a better sports player by making your teammates play worse, right?
Your goal is to make the team win by making everybody play better.
And As an intelligent person, I'm sure that you understand that there's no security in confusing and baffling the average or below average.
It just alienates them from virtue.
It alienates them from morals.
It alienates them from practical wisdom.
It alienates them from the non-aggression principle and peaceful parenting and UPB. And then they become worse people, more predatory, more seductive, more exploitive.
That's the world you've got to live in.
You spend your midwits shattering the clear line between subjective and objective people, then they raise their children to be irrational.
Then you've got to live, and your kid's got to live, in a world full of irrational people!
I mean, if I can't appeal to your altruism, let me at least appeal to your self-interest.
That you want to teach reason and evidence to people.
Because if you don't, they will teach anti-irrationality to their children.
You break that Line, you shatter that border between the real and the unreal.
Then unreality and associated violence spreads across your landscape, your property, your home, your future.
So, be practical.
Codify what a horse knows to be true.
Codify and abstract and explain the difference between objective and subjective.
And you can look at my Introduction to Philosophy series, which I did 15 years ago.
It's a 17-part Introduction to Philosophy for more on that.
But the objective is where there is consistency in the behavior of matter and energy.
Objects don't change their properties.
You don't change locations without transition.
Balloons don't turn into heads.
You're not younger or older.
Dead people aren't floating around you having conversations with you.
Objective is where the properties of matter and energy are consistent.
You go to sleep in your bed and you wake up in the town of your youth with people long dead.
You know you're dreaming because you've traveled through time and you've traveled through place with no transition.
Because everything that is objective requires transition.
Now, of course, you can fall asleep on a plane, but you're falling asleep on a plane.
You're waking up on a plane.
Time has passed. You can see where you are on the map.
The properties of matter and energy are perfectly consistent in the waking world.
That's how you know you're awake. Dreams are your mind commanding reality.
Reality, if you're sane, is your mind being commanded by reality.
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
So we can easily define the difference between subjective and objective.
Subjective is when your mind can change the nature of reality when you're dreaming.
Reality is when your mind cannot change the properties of reality, the properties of objects.
You can manipulate atoms and the laws of physics all you want in your dreams, but in reality you can't.
You can't change gravity into anti-gravity, although you can do that in your dreams.
You can When I was younger, I used to have dreams of trying to escape predators, and every step I took, giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon.
Every step I took, I would just bounce really high, and then I wouldn't be able to run because I'd be floating in air.
Well, I can't do that in the real world, so this is how I know that I'm dreaming.
And of course, you go to sleep in your bed, you dream, you wake up in your bed.
You haven't traveled anywhere, neither in time nor place.
And of course, you can always check that.
You can just leave a little video recorder running on your bed all night.
See if you did go into the past or into space or to the top of a mountain.
No, you didn't, right? Where the properties of the evidence of the senses are objective and absolute and universal.
That's reality. Where they're subjective and chaotic and Shift and transition, and there's no transition between things and no transition between the objects, that you can be in a cave and on a mountaintop at a blink of an eye, then you're dreaming.
Because objects, time, and properties have no consistency.
In some other words, the inconsistency is inconsistent with the consistency of your waking world.
So you know. You know.
You know. And of course...
If you dream of eating food, you go to bed hungry, you dream of eating food, you wake up and you're still hungry.
As you get older, you always have this fear that you're going to dream of peeing and peeing.
One day, if you're lucky to live long enough, you have to go to bed in a diaper, right?
So yeah, I really wanted to give you this philosophical 101 thing, like just major defense stuff.
People can match you with these unanswerable questions and say, well, what's your answer?
Oh, you don't have one? So why are you studying things for which there aren't any answers?
Somebody says, well, there's this trolley problem and there's no objective answer.
It's like, okay, so you've studied ethics for how long?
Oh, I've studied ethics for 15 years.
I've studied philosophy for 20 years.
Okay. What is the certainty that you have derived from philosophy?
What is an absolute fact that you derive from philosophy?
Well, I don't have one.
Okay, well, sorry, fuck off.
Like, literally, fuck off.
Get away from me with your brain squid, rational disassembling insanity injecting brain virus of chaos and madness.
You're trying to turn my waking reality, which I need to survive, into one of your fever dreams of psychosis.
You are attempting to draw me into madness.
You are attempting to eviscerate my capacity to process reality and thus thrive and survive as a living organism.
You are a dangerous fucking person and get away from me.
If somebody came along and tried to inject you with a drug that would give you vivid hallucinations, wouldn't you fight that person off tooth and nail?
Yeah. If somebody tried to inject you with a drug or feed you a hallucinogen that would permanently destroy your capacity to tell fantasy from reality, wouldn't you fight that person off tooth and nail because they'd be condemning you to death?
If somebody tries to do that philosophically, you back the fuck away.
Call them out. Great person here trying to make everyone insane.
Midwit trying to feel smarter by confusing other people.
Fed. So to speak, right?
Danger zone! Yeah, you've got to stay away from those people.
They are incredibly toxic.
It is a form of brain toxin.
It really is. It's a form of brain toxin trying to inject you.
With madness. They're trying to inject you with hostility to reality.
And they're writing you a prescription for a medicine they would never take themselves.
Never take themselves.
Because they're saying to you, well, you can't tell the difference between subjective and objective.
They themselves would never live like that because then they wouldn't live.
I mean, do you understand how much cheaper it is to eat food in your dreams?
Like if you want to save money, holy crap, grocery bills are insane these days.
I saw a receipt on the internet the other day.
Somebody went from $1.73 for a dozen eggs a year and a half ago, and now it's like $7.24 or something like that, right?
I got Stacey Abrams saying, well, you know, abortion is the solution to rising prices.
Yeah, thanks, Moloch.
But you understand how cheap it would be?
You know, you've got somebody in your life who's a relativist and they're complaining about the price of groceries.
Just say, dude, just eat in your dreams.
Listen, I guarantee you this, if you don't eat, I mean, of course eat, this is just a mind exercise, right?
But if you don't eat, you will dream about eating.
Guaranteed, you will dream about eating.
That's so much cheaper. Your wife says, oh, I'd really love to fly to Greece.
I'd love to go to Greece for a vacation.
You say, oh, that's really expensive.
We'll just watch my big fat Greek wedding and fall asleep.
And you will dream about Greek things.
That's so much. She spent thousands of dollars to take a vacation in Greece.
And by the way, we don't need to...
We don't need to heat our place anymore.
We can just put on a screensaver of a fireplace.
Or we can think of fire.
Or we can dream about being warm.
You know, people who are freezing to death, they dream of being warm before they die.
And I've just, you know, we'll save our money on groceries because we just dream about eating.
I mean, try that nonsense, right?
You get bad marks because you're handed in a paper late in university.
You just go to the professor and say, no, no, no.
Just have a dream that I handed it in on time and give me an A. Oh, and also have a dream that it was a great essay.
Just give me an A, man. You can't disprove that.
Some philosophy professor who tells you there's no such thing as objective reality yet gives you a mark on your paper that...
To be handed in on time.
Oh my God. Philosophy is an asylum.
We're all just trying to tunnel out to a clear, rational world.
Oh my God. All right.
Well, listen, I just wanted to drop in and get that stuff across to you today and say thank you, of course, for the distinct, deep, and wonderful honor of being able to talk like this to the world.
Lord knows philosophy's needed it for a couple of thousand years.
Oh, and I just produced or published my two-plus-hour exposition on an amazing, powerful, first peaceful parenting guy in history, yet exquisitely dangerous philosopher, the British empiricist John Locke.
You can get that at freedomain.locals.com.
You know the promo code, all caps, UPB2022. Just sign up for monthly and you get a free month.
You can cancel. It doesn't cost you a penny.
If you don't like it, you get my free book.
That way, or you get my book that way called The Future, which I think you'll really enjoy.
It's really my magnum opus and my biggest description of what I'm talking about here, philosophy as a whole, and peaceful parenting in a joyfully irreverent science fictional setting.
So it's called The Future, and of course there's tons of podcasts up there as well.
So I hope you guys have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Thank you so much for dropping by today.
Lots of love from up here. Take care, my friends.
I will talk to you soon.
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