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Feb. 9, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:37
Why We Dream! Locals Questions Answered
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All right. Some questions for freedomain.locals.com.
Thank you, of course, for all of your interest support.
You can join the community at freedomain.locals.com.
You can, of course, support the show at freedomain.com.
All right. What is the useful context in the expression that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?
I actually think it's closer to that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The listener goes on to write, analysis shows it to have The wrong structure, applying either the formal meaning of the modal verb can, have ability, or the informal incorrect meaning, have permission.
We still get that anyone is able to and permitted to assert anything and dismiss any assertion without any reflection upon its possible truth at all.
My estimate is that the expression has no value because it adds nothing.
If you wish to dismiss an assertion, it is obvious that you cannot be denied either the ability or the permission to dismiss it.
Your dismissal of the assertion has no effect on the truth value of the assertion, And the truth value of the assertion has no effect on your ability or permission to dismiss the assertion.
Explain to me if I got something wrong here.
I think that the general expression is that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
So, a child says, I have an invisible friend, right?
And you say, oh, well, so I can't see him.
Can I touch him? No.
You can't touch him either.
Can I smell him?
No. Does he say anything?
No, right? So, you say, I have an invisible friend.
There's no possible way to detect it.
You don't need to have a standard of disproof for that which can never be proven.
So if you were to say, in another dimension, I am the king of Saudi Arabia, what efforts should we take to dismiss or disprove this assertion?
The onus is on the person making the claim to make the proof.
And if somebody makes a claim which cannot be proven, You can dismiss that without any counter-work or counter-weight.
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
So, and things which technically, I guess, could be true, right?
So, I mean, there are things that can't be true, there are things that can be proven, and there are things which could be true but cannot be proven.
Right, so that which is impossible can't be proved, can't exist, right?
So I don't need to scour the universe to find out if a square circle, right, a shape that has both a square and a circle at the same time, contradictory properties, I don't need to scour the universe to prove that there's no such thing as a square circle, right, that we understand.
Now, if I say a horse with a horn on its head exists somewhere in the universe, well, I'm sure that a quadruped with the characteristics of a horse that has a horn on its head, I mean, technically that's possible, right?
I mean, there are antelopes that have horns, I know, not on the front of their head.
There are rhinos that have horns on the front of their head.
So, it's not self-contradictory to say that somewhere in the universe that exists a horse exists With a horn on its head.
Now, it wouldn't be identical to an earthly horse, but close enough.
Yeah, in the hundred billion stars in each of the hundred billion galaxies, surrounded by half a dozen planets, I'm sure that somewhere there is a horse with a horn on its head.
Now, we can't say there is, but there could be.
But there could be. And, of course, this is a statement that could never be disproven.
Even if you had an infinity of time and energy, you couldn't disprove this statement that there exists in the universe a horse with a horn on its head.
For the simple reason, of course, That the width of the universe is greater than the requirement to evolve a horse with a horn on its head.
So even if you went to every single planet in every single solar system in every single galaxy and scoured it and scanned it and didn't find it, Well, by the time you were a third of the way across the universe, I don't know, like 4 billion...
I don't know how big...
I mean, I know how old it is, but let's say it's, I don't know, 15 billion light years across.
By the time you're a third of the way across, 4 or 5 billion years is more than enough for something to evolve.
So, by the time you're a third of the way across the universe, where you first started, maybe some barren planet has now developed life, right?
So, you simply cannot...
Possibly no. And even if you were to set up some sort of, I mean, let's get really absurd, right?
Even if you set up some sort of visual monitoring system to scan every planet, well, your monitoring systems couldn't deliver you information faster than the speed of light, so you couldn't get.
So you can never disprove something like that which is possible.
And then there are things which are possible and proven, right?
So there is such a thing as a horse.
Yes, there is such a thing as a horse.
You can go out of the city and see countless country fields full of horses.
You can go up and touch them. So yes, there is such a thing as a horse.
You could also say that there are things which could be proven but aren't provable in the moment.
So if I were to say there's a big lump of gold on the far side of the moon,
that statement could be verified, you know, as soon as people go back to the moon or whatever,
then you could look for it and so on. But of course, I cannot say that I know for certain that there is
a lump of gold on the far side of the moon. I can't say that I know for certain because I haven't been there,
I haven't seen it, I don't have any direct... Now, I could say there could be...
be.
that's certainly within that. I guess some meteor could have hit and deposited a lump of gold on the far side of the moon.
So it is certainly possible that there is a lump of gold on the far side of the moon.
It could be proven if you were to go and scour the far side of the moon for gold.
It could be proven, but nobody can say that it is true at the moment because there is no evidence, direct evidence that has been accumulated.
So it's possible that It could be proven.
There's no proof yet.
And then it's possible.
It can never be proven.
So you can't say there's no place in the universe where a horse with a horn on its head exists.
You can never prove or disprove that.
And then there are things which are self-contradictory and require no disproof because their self-contradictory nature disproves themselves.
So if I say there is a magical horse somewhere in the universe whose nature it is to travel backwards through time, we would know that this is not true.
We wouldn't need to scour the universe because there is no entity, certainly no organic entity, that is capable of traveling backwards through time.
For the simple reason that evolution has to go forward through time from less complex to more complex.
So if you have a creature as complex as a horse, it would never be moving backwards through time.
Also, there's no creatures that move backwards through time.
I don't think there's anything other than maybe some bizarre subatomic quark stuff.
I don't think there's anything that travels backwards through time.
So we know that that's not true.
So that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Now, the problem, of course, with this formulation as a whole is that while it is technically and logically true that if somebody asserts something without evidence, it can be dismissed without evidence, that's not how the human brain works when it comes to evaluating truth and falsehood.
Sadly. And in a future world where children are better educated and so on, this hopefully will be different.
But right now, this is not how most human brains evaluate truth.
Most human brains evaluate not truth But threat.
And of course, our brains were largely developed to evaluate threat.
I mean, if you think of the pain receptors in your nervous system, that's designed to evaluate threat.
When you think of nervousness, that's designed to evaluate threat.
And of course, our fear response is far higher than our happiness response.
And so on. So, our brains are developed not to pursue truth, but to process threat.
And threat is a greater risk to us than lying, which is why people lie In order to maintain their status, they lie in order to maintain their attractiveness through makeup or hair transplants or wigs or whatever, right? So people lie all the time to maintain their status because lower status is a great and grave threat to us.
So what's more dangerous?
Telling a lie or telling the truth?
Well, of course, in most circumstances, if you have the king is coming to town and you say, that's just an ordinary man with some metal on his head.
Is that true? Yeah, of course it's true.
The king is an ordinary man with a piece of metal on his head and some gems, right?
That is true. Throughout most of human history, though, of course, telling that truth would get you imprisoned, punished, put in the stocks, killed, your reputation would be destroyed, your family would be ostracized, and genetically, this would be very, very dangerous.
So, in the choice between telling the truth and surviving...
People choose to survive.
And of course, as everybody knows, there's a whole bunch of Voldemort topics in the modern world that people choose not to talk about because it's too dangerous, right?
So it certainly is true, that which can be asserted, though that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, but that's just not the way that our brains operate.
So what happens in general is Is people say, or the brain works in the following manner, which is how social media and sort of the modern world works in a nutshell.
The brain works in the following manner when it comes to evaluating things, particularly morally.
The brain says, if you are hated, you must be bad.
If you are hated, you must be bad.
And that's why people pour such prodigious energy into hating others.
Because hating is translated by the brain into being bad.
Why would they hate you if you didn't do anything wrong?
Why would they say such bad things about you if you didn't do anything wrong?
Why would you be so attacked if you weren't being offensive or bad or something like that, right?
Now, of course, there's no epistemological truth in the statement, because you are hated, you must be wrong.
Because, everybody knows, we can think of countless people throughout history who were both hated and right, and in fact were hated because they were right.
I mean, Jesus, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and so on, right?
What's that joke I read this morning?
Sir Isaac Newton died a virgin.
It's like, well, that's what you get for inventing calculus.
And we can think of countless people who are persecuted and perceived to be in the right due to their persecution.
I mean, I did the whole truth about Nelson Mandela.
You can look at... Nobody says, well, Martin Luther King Jr.
was hated enough that someone shot him, therefore he was wrong, or Bobby Kennedy, or whatever, right?
Or JFK. So, everybody knows, as a matter of fact...
And this is known to everyone, that people are often persecuted because they're both right and good, but they like to do that when the person has already been killed, and everybody accepts that the person was persecuted because they are right and good.
Nobody defends Miletus in his accusations against Socrates.
The person's already dead. It's a long time ago.
And everyone already agrees with you.
So then you can come out in defense of someone long after the fact when it poses no risk to you whatsoever.
In fact, it would pose a risk for you to defend Miletus.
I mean, not much of a risk.
It would just be, you know, kind of intellectually provocative.
But it's, you know, 2,500 years ago.
Who cares in particular, right?
But in the moment when somebody is being attacked...
We perceive that as dangerous.
If you ally with someone who's being attacked, that is dangerous.
And, of course, the demand is that the person being attacked be denounced as immoral.
I just read this whole book about the Salem witch hunts, the Salem witch trials.
Everybody knows that the people who are accused of being witches...
We're not witches, and they were unjustly persecuted, tortured, burned at the stake, murdered, based on the hysterical pronouncements of early teen girls.
I mean, just way crazy stuff, right?
Me too on, I don't know, murderous steroids or something like that, right?
And most people, of course, have been the victim of some kind of whisper campaign, some kind of rumor spreading or something like that, right?
But in the moment...
Good translates into survival and bad translates into danger.
So if somebody is being attacked, it means that they have aroused the ire of powerful people because the ability to attack and be believed is one of the hallmarks of power.
If somebody says the king is bad, that person is in trouble.
If the king says somebody is bad, that person is in trouble.
So the ability to accuse, the ability to slander, is a hallmark of power.
So when people in power say, Bob is evil, I mean, that is asserted without evidence, or the evidence is sketchy, or there's tons of counter-evidence, or whatever.
But the purpose of those in power in saying Bob is evil is to separate him from everyone else because everyone else says, well, gee, if the people in power are saying Bob is evil, then if I defend Bob, I'm going to share Bob's fate.
So the question is not evaluated according to its truth value.
The question is evaluated...
According to its risk or its danger.
People don't evaluate the truth, they evaluate risk, because that's what our brains do.
And so when Bob is called evil by people with power, the purpose is to separate any support from Bob.
So, you know, the only people who say, I stand with Bob, are only doing that when Bob is not being attacked by anyone in particular power.
Now, the ability to accuse, to threaten, to separate from support, to ostracize, to isolate, is one of the hallmarks of power.
So, I don't think it's particularly useful when people say, well, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
So, people say, Bob is bad.
Bob is evil. People in power say, Bob is evil.
Very few people will say, well, you haven't provided any conclusive proof as to Bob's evil, and therefore I'm going to dismiss your claim.
That's not the way that society works, and that's not the way that evolution works.
Evolution is...
survival is everything.
And if lying...
Enhances my chance of survival, then a liar I will be, but I will be true to my genes, right?
True to the genes often means false in philosophy.
And I don't condemn this at all.
I mean, I'm thrilled to have the brain that I have.
I'm thrilled to have the life that I have.
I'm thrilled to have the health that I have.
And I wouldn't be here if my ancestors had decided that the truth was more important than survival.
I'm trying to mean to laugh, right?
But my ancestors made their necessary compromises.
My ancestor...
William Molyneux, who was best friends with John Locke, they were hunted all over the Irish countryside by the king for various things that they had said, and they hid, and they ducked, and I'm sure that they tempered their speech and all of that, which, you know, people have to do on a regular basis in the world.
I mean, the Internet's helped a little bit with that, but not in any permanent or perfect way.
So, survival is good.
And, of course, the bad people know that if they threaten people's survival, other people will fall in line and will say whatever the people in charge demand that they say, they will turn on whoever the people in charge demand that they turn on, and they will ostracize whoever the people in power demand that they ostracize.
And, of course, but that's kind of humiliating.
And so people will often join in the moral crusade and convince themselves that, oh yes, Bob is a bad guy and he should be ejected and I join.
Right. So you merge with the attacks of those in power so that you don't feel the humiliation.
It's a lot easier for most people psychologically to believe that they're on the side of good Rather than say, well, I'm forced to betray my friend by those in power.
I guess I now see where I stand in the pecking order, and that's really humiliating.
And also, that doesn't really help with your survival too much, because if you're too humiliated for too long, you might blow up and fight back and then suffer a pretty bad end.
So yeah, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
It's true. But it's not true that that's how people process information.
They process information based on threat.
They don't process information based on truth.
Alright. So question, what's the effect of losing a child on parents, particularly when other children are still around?
Grief is inevitable, but what if it affects the parent's ability to provide the needed care to the other children?
Well, it's, I mean, this is obviously one of the most brutal questions around.
I don't have any particular answers to this other than to say death is one of those stimulants that can really help remind you to live your life as richly and deeply and powerfully and honestly as possible.
All the troubles that you have in your life, compared to what you think and feel when you're dying, are unimportant.
Relatively unimportant. Not all of them, but most, right?
So, death is a way...
It's how you judo-move death, right?
Death can either drag you into the grave or propel you into the skies.
The great, beckoning, crooked, bony finger of death is, it's so sad that your life will be forever in shadow and forever half-destroyed.
Or, you can judo death and say, the fragility of life and the inevitability of death has convinced me to live as richly and deeply and powerfully and courageously as possible.
It can bring even more love to your other children when you've lost a child, because then you appreciate the children, right?
I mean, every parent has this story, right?
Every parent has this story.
So, you're in a social group, you're among friends, and you hear some story about a child's illness, like a serious illness, a dangerous illness, a maybe life-threatening or permanently disfiguring illness.
And what do you do?
I mean, that's awful, and you provide massive sympathy, of course.
And then, when you see your children next, you give them a big hug and a kiss, and you remind them just how much you treasure them.
Loss can absolutely be a fuel for increased love.
And the idea, of course, of thinking of the child speaking from beyond the grave, while obviously a little odd, can be quite helpful.
I mean, I've thought of this, right?
Statistically, I'm likely to die before my wife does.
Women outlive men.
Now, when I think of being a ghost floating around my wife's life when I'm dead and gone, right, as the Marlon Brando said towards the end of his life, it's like, it's so weird to imagine not being here.
So, would I want my wife, after I'm dead, to be miserable for the rest of her life?
I would want her to laugh.
I would want her to enjoy her life.
I would want her to remember with great affection the relationship that we had, but not to the point where she's like choking with sadness and grief.
I mean, I was in a play called The Bear by Chekhov.
It's a short play where a woman is overwhelmed and overcome with grief.
And that's the Hamlet thing, right?
Father also lost a father, says his uncle, and this excessive grief is...
So yes, you grieve, and then you use that grief to further fuel your appreciation of life.
I would want, I will want my wife...
I mean, obviously not to, I don't know, boogie-woogie at my funeral, but I would not want her to be miserable for the rest of her life because I had died.
That would be sad for me, and if I were a ghost, I would encourage her to continue to enjoy life, to not half join me in the grave, so to speak.
Steph, the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura says that the Bible is the only source of truth.
This seems self-refuting, as even the Bible doesn't say the Bible is the only source of truth.
Thoughts? Honestly, that's theology.
I'm a philosopher, so I don't have much to say about theology.
I certainly, I mean, I was raised a Protestant.
I never heard that the Bible was the only source of truth.
I think, I mean, people certainly said it was the source of moral truth, and it was the most, the Bible was the source of the most important truths.
But, well, calculus is valid and true.
Calculus isn't in the Bible.
And I'd never heard any priest when I was growing up in any of the churches that I attended.
And I attended a lot of churches for a long time, particularly in boarding school, I never heard any priest ever say that nuclear fusion or fission is invalid because it's not in the Bible, or that air conditioning doesn't exist because it's not described in the Bible.
So, I'm no theologian, of course, but in my experience and my studying, I think, of course, that they would say that the most essential moral truths and the most essential spiritual truths and the most essential metaphysical truths Are in the Bible.
But the Bible is the only source of truth?
I've never heard of that. I've never heard of that at all.
I mean, the fact that I've never heard of it doesn't mean that it's not believed by some people, but it certainly isn't any kind of mainstream Protestantism that I was ever exposed to, and I did quite a lot, and I've read quite a lot, and so on, right?
So, all right. All right, what's your favorite medieval weapon?
I see you as a Zwehander guy.
Well, I think that the broadsword is the only super straight weapon.
Love me the broadsword.
The longsword with its 1d8 is lame.
The broadsword with its 2d4 is excellent.
I like weapons...
That are sturdy and can take a lot of punishment.
That's why I liked the Hawker Hurricane in World War II. The Spitfire was kind of like a ballet dancer, and the hurricane was kind of like a tank.
So, that would be mine.
All right. Can you discuss dreams with those that happen during the night?
How can one discern which dreams are truly worth sitting down to analyze?
How should they be analyzed, and how much time should be dedicated to it?
Isn't it more crucial to journal, exercise, and meditate?
As a stay-at-home mother of three young children, hey, congratulations, there isn't much time left at the end of the day.
That time is typically allocated for household chores, exercising, meditating, or journaling.
Should dream analysis also be included in my prioritization?
I've always been a person who dreams a significant amount, starting from my childhood.
In my teenage years, I focused heavily on this aspect, believing...
These were prophetic dreams from God.
I was intensely religious.
However, I severed ties with my religious beliefs and became an atheist at twenty, completely ceasing to pay attention to my dreams, dismissing them as mere confusion with no significance.
Perhaps it's time to reconsider their importance.
Yeah, it's a great question. Now, as a woman, obviously massively appreciate and love women and femininity, but the idea that I would tell you how much time you should spend on your dream analysis, sorry, I can only give you some principles, I can't give you some practices, right?
So, beware false dichotomies.
Beware false dichotomies.
So if you say, well, I have to do my household chores and I have to exercise, well, your meditation or journaling, well, journaling can involve your dreams.
You can have some great thoughts while you listen to household chores.
You can also think while you're exercising and so on.
So dream analysis.
So dreams are what, think of them as waves that wash over a A barrier, because the barrier of principles is too low.
I'll give you an example from my own life, and neither of these are proofs.
These are just sort of examples and a way to start the conversation.
Certainly analogies are not proof, my experiences are not proof, but I'll tell you how my thinking has evolved in this.
So, when I was enmeshed in a whole series of amoral or semi-corrupt Relationships in my 20s, I had very sort of vivid and powerful dreams.
And when I was no longer in those amoral or semi-corrupt relationships, those dreams ceased.
Now, the reason I was in these amoral and semi-corrupt relationships was because I was not applying my philosophical principles in any kind of fundamental, universal, or absolutist style fashion.
It was a momentum of history.
It's too much work to find new companions.
It was a lack of knowledge of what it is to be truly loved, which I didn't really experience until I met my wife.
So, you know, it's like being in prison.
Honestly, it's like being in prison. And being imprisoned, I was imprisoned by my lack of integrity.
And I didn't have much excuse because I had been studying at this point philosophy for like 10 years.
Now, I don't, I'm not mad at myself, I don't blame myself, but I do have to be accurate about myself and that I was not living with integrity.
Philosophy was talk, research, study, debates, arguments, perspectives, but it was not to be lived in empirical and actionable ways.
Now, I get all of this.
You know, you don't start off as a healthcare provider injecting things into people.
You start off practicing your injections into oranges or things like that, right?
So I was in a realm of theory, I was in a realm of practicing things rather than doing things, like practicing as in rehearsing rather than practicing as in I'm a practicing lawyer kind of thing, so to speak.
So I was all theory and little practice.
And again, that's fine.
You have to have the blueprints before you have the bridge.
But I was having vivid, very vivid and powerful dreams, which I've sort of talked about before.
I was having very vivid and very powerful dreams because I was not living my values.
I had not found fault with the values, but I was not living them.
I was essentially a Platonist in that the theory is more important than the practice.
Although I was an Aristotelian in my metaphysics and epistemology, in my practice I was detaching theory.
Sorry, in my actual life I was detaching theory from practice.
So dreams can be very strong indicators of where you're not living your values.
And certainly they were very important indicators of where I wasn't living my values.
And they're worth examining from that standpoint.
So, a lot of my dreams were basically, which means what?
Which means what? You believe in this, that, and the other, which means what?
What does it mean? What does it mean?
If you're overweight, you're incredibly frustrated at being overweight, you read all of these diet books and all other kinds of stuff, at some point your dreams are going to be like, can we actually lose some weight?
Like, I really hate being overweight.
I really want to lose weight.
I'm reading all of these books on health, nutrition, education, right?
And this goes on for years.
Your dreams are going to get pretty vivid because your unconscious is going to be like, can we just do it?
Can we do it? I mean, enough preparation.
Can we actually just do it? You know, if you buy a membership to a climbing gym and you buy all of this climbing gym equipment and you get the chalk and you keep driving to the gym and sitting in the parking lot, at some point you're just going to have some pretty vivid dreams about climbing.
Like, stop teasing me.
Can we actually do it? Stop circling.
Stop doing the drive-bys and actually do it.
So, and again, there's a certain amount of prep that's necessary, there's a certain amount of prep that's important, but if all you're doing is practicing your backhand and your overhand in tennis, at some point, you're going to have dreams about actually playing a game, if all you're doing is practicing and not actually playing.
So, I think the dreams are when the unconscious is striving to have you actually act out your values, but you're not doing so, which again, I understand and sympathize with, I think the dreams will say, yeah, it's time, you should absolutely do it.
So, how much time should you spend?
I mean, what I would do is look at places where my values weren't being enacted.
Look at places where my values aren't being enacted and see if I can close that gap a little bit, right?
Because what's going to happen is later on in life, all you're going to remember is not your fear of living with integrity, but your lack of integrity.
I mean, sort of when I look back at why I wasn't living with integrity, again, I have sympathy and I understand, but I don't really remember the fears of it.
All I really remember, which is all that really matters in a way, is that I wasn't living with integrity.
All right, let's do one more...
No, I think I will.
No, I'll wait for the next one. Do that later.
But I appreciate you guys listening in.
I hope that these are helpful comments and feedback.
And freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
And I look forward to your comments.
And thank you so much for these questions.
I look forward to more of them.
They are great brain food for me.
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