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July 3, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:45
Ideas vs the World!
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Good morning.
I hope you're doing well.
I got a great question, a deep philosophical question at the live stream the other day.
The relationship between Thoughts in the mind and things in reality.
It's a great great question and I'm going to unpack it for you.
It's a little bit of metaphysics a little bit of epistemology but don't worry about the words they're not particularly important but these are very important things to understand about the nature of truth which is kind of what we're after.
So the way that thoughts and things in the world work is the best analogy is you think of a blueprint For a building, like an architectural blueprint for a building, what the building is going to look like, where the pipes are going to go, the spacage, the floors, the HVAC and electrical and all that.
So you've got to design for a building.
You know, if you've ever shopped for a house, then if you're going particularly to new construction, they have all of these models on the wall.
You know, here's how this looks, here's how that looks, and the square footage, and they have the two floors and all of that.
You know, it would be pretty funny and obviously fraudulent in a way if someone were to say to you, you know, here's the blueprint for the house.
The house is $400,000.
You hand over the $400,000 and they give you the blueprint.
And you'd say, well, I can't live in the blueprint.
I need a place to live.
A blueprint's not going to give me much shelter from the rain and the snow.
So that would be kind of fraudulent.
Where if they said, look, the blueprint's right there on the wall.
It says $400,000 and you spent the $400,000, you got the blueprint.
People would say, no, no, no, I thought I was buying what the blueprint represented, not the blueprint itself.
I wouldn't pay $400,000 for the blueprint of a house, which you could just photocopy.
I want the actual house.
So, does the blueprint exist in the world?
Yes.
Does the blueprint represent something in the world?
Yes.
Is the blueprint an exact match of the thing in the world?
It is not, right?
So you could get some atomic measure and so on and you could say well they said the house is 2,500 square feet but When I measure it in every conceivable detail, it's 2,500 and 6 inches, right?
Or it's 2,499 and 6 inches.
It's not going to be exactly say, oh, it's 2,500 square feet, but it's never exactly 2,500 square feet.
If you look at the dimensions of the rooms, they're close.
Obviously, they have to be close enough that you're not just buying something unrelated to the blueprint, but they're not exact, right?
So, the thing in the world is not exact, right?
And the blueprint is more exact, right?
Because the blueprint will say 2,500 square feet and all of the measurements, right?
They have the drawings and it's like, oh, this is 8 by 12 room, right?
So, in a sense, that's perfect.
The way that it's built, though, is imperfect relative to the blueprint and the blueprint itself is imperfect relative to The mind of the designer, right?
So in the mind of the designer he says an 8x12 room.
Just the concepts, right?
So an 8x12 room is perfect in the mind.
It's exactly 8x12 because it doesn't have to be translated into coarse atomic imperfect reality.
So there's two degradations.
There's the perfect 8x12 room in your mind.
Then there's the blueprint that you draw and the blueprint is imperfect because you've got to print it out.
Even on the screen the pixels are a little blurry.
So the blueprint is no longer perfect, right?
And then when you build the house it's imperfect relative to the blueprint.
Right?
Because the blueprint is going to be closer to the perfect 8x12 concept that you have.
The blueprint is going to be closer to that and the house is going to be more distant from the blueprint which is more distant from the perfection in your mind.
So we can look at this as a sort of quality degradation and there are people who say well but the perfect 8x12 room and the perfect house in your mind That's the truth, that's what really matters and I would say no, it's the other way around.
So the house is the perfect thing because that's the thing that has use, that's the thing that will keep you sheltered, that's the thing that keep you warm in the winter, cool in the summer and so on, right?
So the house is the perfect thing because it has practical utility for survival and shelter.
That's where you can raise your kids, it's where your belongings are protected, which means it's worth working to gather resources and so on.
So the house is the perfect thing.
Because if you think that the perfection is in the purity of the concept, then what goes on in the mind is infinitely better than the actual house in the world, right?
However, if you think, which I think is accurate, if you think that the house is the perfect thing because it has practical utility and it is the purpose, right, the manifestation of purpose has to be superior to the steps that lead up to it.
It has to be, otherwise you wouldn't have any steps that lead up to it.
Sorry, that was a badly phrased.
We circle back and take another run at that one, right?
So, if your goal is to get to Las Vegas, is the road to Las Vegas superior or inferior to the goal?
Well, since your goal is to get to Las Vegas, the highway that takes you to Las Vegas and the car and the gas and the driving, like all of that, that is inferior to the goal because it is a means to an end and the means to an end is generally inferior to the end, right?
So if you're really thirsty the goal is to drink water, right?
Going to walk to the kitchen, getting the cup, turning on the tap, filling the tap, drinking the water, those are inferior.
Now they're necessary to actually get the water into your system but getting the water into your system is the goal and the goal is superior or more important or of a higher status than the purpose.
So the purpose, because the purpose is conditioned by the goal.
So if you're thirsty, you've got to get up and get your water and drink your water.
And all of that serves the goal of satisfying your thirst.
So when we have a goal, the goal is The end product and all that leads up to it is inferior to the goal.
And I'll give you an example of that, right?
So, let's say you're thirsty and you get up and you want to get some water from the kitchen.
So you go to the kitchen, you get the cup or the glass and you turn on the sink, right?
So you say, okay, well, that's how I get my water.
But every now and then, you know, freaky stuff's happened to your plumbing, you get that, you know, the cough and you get that sputter of brown water and you're like, oh, well, that's, that's not good.
So the purpose of satisfying, the goal of satisfying your thirst Has been served you think by going to the kitchen and turning on the tap but the tap is not working.
It just coughs up yellow water.
So you still need to satisfy your thirst.
So you abandon going to the kitchen and turning on the tap and maybe you go to the bathroom and turn on the tap or maybe you go to the fridge get a bottle of water or maybe there's a little water dispenser on your fridge but you find something.
And if nothing in your house works, if your entire plumbing system is shot, then maybe you go to the neighbor's and ask for a glass of water, maybe you go to the store and get a bottle of water, but you gotta... So the goal is to get water into your system and the steps will change relative to that goal.
So the steps are conditioned by the goal, but the goal is not conditioned by the steps.
Again, I know this sounds a bit freaky, but be patient with me because there's a big payoff at the end.
But it's all philosophy.
It's good payoff the whole way along.
So if you see, you want to get the water into your body because you're thirsty, and the steps that you take are conditioned by that goal.
If the steps you're taking don't meet that goal, you turn on the tap in the kitchen, brown water, champagne, brown water, and so you change your tap, right?
Can't get it from the bathroom, go to the fridge.
Can't get it from the fridge, go to the garage.
Maybe you got some water, bottles of water in the garage.
Oh, there's nothing in the garage, then you go to the store.
You just keep changing your steps until you achieve your goal.
So all of the steps are conditioned by the goal.
So the goal is the highest priority.
So the purpose of satisfying your thirst is not served by going to the kitchen with a cup of water and turning on the tap.
Even if you fill it, Let's say the kitchen tap is working properly.
You fill it, but then your finger slips and you drop and you break the glass and you can't drink the water from the broken glass puddle.
So you have to keep changing your steps until you satisfy the goal.
So the goal is the highest purpose, the goal is the ultimate purpose, the goal is what it's all for.
It's the final purpose in a sense, right?
So if we understand that the goal is superior to the steps, because all the steps must change if they don't achieve the goal, whereas the goal doesn't change if you change the steps, right?
So, you know, if you're thirsty, it's a really hot day, and you decide to go out and lick grass, well, you've changed your steps, but you haven't satisfied your goal, right?
So the goal is the final purpose, it is the intended end, And everything that you do has to serve that goal.
Now, of course we say that that which is served is superior to that which serves.
You think of the sort of master-slave relationship where the king and his courtiers and so on, the courtiers serve the king and the slave serves the master and therefore in that sense the slave is superior.
The end goal is superior and more important and more foundational to the steps.
case legally though of course not morally if slavery is allowed.
So the end goal is superior and more important and more foundational to the steps.
So to return to our house, if that is the case that the end goal is superior to the
steps that precede it, then the house is superior to the blueprint and the blueprint is superior
to the concept, to the idea.
So you have an idea of a house, you make a blueprint, and then you build the house.
Now for a lot of people, this is sort of the platonic idea, they say well the concept is pure and perfect and therefore is superior to the blueprint.
The blueprint is more accurate to the concept than the house itself and therefore in priority of importance and perfection you go idea, blueprint, house.
Idea is highest, blueprint is next highest in terms of accuracy and purity to the concept.
Idea is the most pure and perfect, the platonic realm of forms, right?
Or the new or minimal realm of Kant, or Nirvana, or whatever, right?
The idea.
So, or the social good, right?
The idea of the society.
It's collectivism, right?
The concepts are superior.
So the concept of the house, or let's just say the 8 by 12 room, that's perfect and pure and excellent and fabulous.
The highest level of accuracy and perfection.
And then the blueprint is less accurate, and the house is even less accurate.
So it's a degradation from the purity of the idea.
Ba-ba-bum-bum goes down, right?
And people have this, you know, to take it in a sort of more visceral manner, people have this with regards to long-distance relationships or affairs, right?
So, you know, you have a long-distance relationship, you yearn and you burn for each other, and then you make a big trip and you have a lot of sex and you do all of these wonderful things, you go for dinner, you go for walks, you go for hikes, you fall into each other's arms, you talk about all the wonder of each other and so on.
All beautiful stuff, nothing wrong with it.
But then people say, well, that's the ideal in a relationship.
And then, you know, There are times when the relationship, you get married, you live together, you have children, and there are times when the relationship is, you know, a little ugly, a little messy, a little, right, you know, somebody's bleeding, somebody's sick and throwing up, somebody has a dental pain, some, like, there's just, there's sort of, and people say, well, there's this ideal, the platonic perfect love, and then it's all just a degradation.
Like, people really mess up their lives with this perfection stuff, right?
They really, really mess up their lives because they get these standards.
That can't be maintained.
Like, everybody has the best day of their life, and then if you look at that as the norm and everything else is bad.
But now, of course, the purpose of romantic love, the purpose of pair bonding, is the production and raising of children.
So if you sit there and say, well, you know, when we were dating, we would just, we'd go away for the weekend, have sex all weekend, go and have wonderful meals and blah, blah, blah.
That's the ideal.
And then the kid who's up all night with colic and so on, that's, that's just, that's a bad fall from grace degradation.
Or this is true for women.
I think like why, why do women sometimes get so dissatisfied in relationships?
Well, A, because I'm taken, but B, because, you know, they have this wedding day that's perfect and that's the ideal and then everything after that is like, you know, my husband's farting and scratching and yet he looked so great in his tux and you have this ideal and this perfection and then everything else is a degradation from that.
And of course, the purpose of marriage is not the wedding day.
The purpose of marriage is reliable pair bonding for the secure and provided for raising of children, right?
That's the purpose of marriage and lust and sex and romance and love and attachment and pair bonding.
It's all for the having and raising of children.
And so the having and raising of children is the perfection of marriage and everything else is a means to the end, right?
The means to the end so you get married so that you can have the pair bonding and the legal connection to get married and so on, right?
The having and raising of children is the perfection of marriage.
Everything else is a step up to it.
And so, you know, when the kid has colic, yeah, I know it can be, you know, you're crying a lot and all that.
But that's perfect.
That is the perfection because that's the raising and having.
Having and raising of children and all the other stuff.
Like, even sexual activity before you have children is designed to release the oxytocin
and the dopamine and the pair bonding chemicals and so on so that you will be reliable and
secure to raise the children.
So the concept is inferior to the blueprint.
The blueprint is inferior to the manifestation.
The idea is inferior to the blueprint and the blueprint is inferior to the house.
The house is the perfection.
It is the ideal.
It is as good as things can get.
It is exactly right.
The idea, the blueprint, are all necessary.
You've got to have the idea, then you've got to have a plan, and then you've got to execute it and build a house.
So the idea is necessary but inferior.
Right?
Necessary but inferior.
So, in order to be happy, you have to eat.
Right?
Because if you're starving to death, you won't be happy.
Right?
So in order to be happy, you have to eat.
So eating is a means to the end of being happy.
Right?
But of course, not everybody who eats is happy.
A guy getting his last meal in jail is probably not super happy, although he is in fact eating.
Some people eat, of course, and then regret it at an extreme.
They might be binge purging, like throwing up and so on.
There are people who eat something and then find out, oh no, it has peanuts in it, and I have a peanut allergy, now I've got to EpiPen and get to Emerge or something.
So they eat and they regret, right?
So eating is necessary but not sufficient for happiness.
So if your goal is happiness, yes you need to eat, but eating doesn't make you happy.
But eating eliminates hunger to the point where the doors to happiness are at least open and you can get through some usually productive work in the realm of manifesting or transmitting moral excellence.
That's the best way to be happy in the long run.
So people have this dreamers thing, right?
The idea is perfect and The planning is inferior and the manifestation, right?
So there's the idea, the planning, and the manifestation.
The idea is the idea of the house.
The planning is the blueprint for the house.
The manifestation is the actual house.
The actual house is the goal.
It is the superior.
It is the perfect.
It is the wonderful.
It is the what it's all for.
And everything that leads up to that is imperfect.
And it's imperfect because it does not achieve the goal of The house, right?
You can't live in the idea of a house.
You can't live in blueprints for a house.
What's that?
There's an old, uh, um, a friend's episode where, where Joey and Chandler go to London and Joey puts the map down and jumps into the map, right?
I'm in the map, right?
And, but he's obviously it's in the map.
He's stepping on a piece of paper.
not walking around in London itself.
So you can't live in the idea of a house, you can't live in the blueprints of a house,
you can only live in the actual house and therefore the idea is inferior because it
doesn't serve the purpose of a place to live.
The blueprint is inferior because it doesn't serve the purpose of where to live.
The house is the ideal, that which is manifested in the world is the ideal, the end goal of
the necessary steps and it's not even that necessary, I mean you could just slip together
a lean-to, you don't need blueprints, you can lean to in the woods.
You can go and live in a cave which does not need a concept and doesn't need a blueprint
and doesn't even need to be built, right?
So there's places you can live that would be natural, right?
I mean, or even if there's an abandoned house.
I mean, I guess if it's legal or whatever, you could, I mean, it's sort of free in a free society.
You could, if a house was abandoned, you could go and live in that house and you wouldn't need an idea of the perfect house.
You wouldn't need to plan it.
You wouldn't even need to build it.
You wouldn't need to transfer any resources for it.
You could just go, you know, some cabin in the woods or whatever.
You could just go live there, right?
So the shelter can be provided, I mean other people usually have to plan things, but you don't have to, right?
So the shelter can be provided without the concept or the planning, without the idea or the blueprint, but any sophisticated dwelling can't be created without some concept and planning.
It doesn't necessarily have to be ideas and blueprints and so on, but you have to have some idea what you're doing.
So the physical manifestation is the ideal and the concepts are inferior.
So people say, ah yes but the 8x12 room is perfect and the 8x12 room looks really, the angles are perfect on the computer but then when you build them they're slightly off perfect and it's like no no no no.
The purpose of the house is not to conform to the blueprint.
I mean obviously it has to have some relationship to it otherwise there'd be no point for the blueprint.
But the purpose of the house is to be lived in, not to conform to the blueprint.
We have the blueprint so we don't waste resources when we're building the house.
We don't build something, oh my gosh, this room is too small.
Oh, I don't have a load-bearing wall.
Oh, the structure is not secure.
I didn't dig deep enough.
Like you have planning so you don't waste resources.
So you can build more houses.
That's what the purpose is, right?
The purpose of conceptualizing and planning a house is so you can build more houses with fewer resources and less time.
Like you plan out software, you don't just sit down and start coding, right?
To some degree, anyway.
Once you understand that the concept is inferior to the manifestation because the concept doesn't serve the purpose of the manifestation.
You can't live in the idea of the house or the blueprint of the house.
You can only live in the actual house.
So that is the ideal.
The ideal is the house because that's what you can live in.
So when you think of a house, right?
You've gone through a planning phase for a house.
When you think of a house, you have visions and ideas in your head and that is a configuration of neurons in your mind, right?
The imagination, the creativity.
If you close your eyes, you sort of picture your ideal house, then that is the aligning of particular creative or imagination neurons in your brain, right?
You close your eyes and you picture it.
The neurons are firing up like when you have a dream at night your eyes are closed but you see things so the visual spatial centers of your brain are being activated and you know the more you meditate on your ideal house the more your neurons will change to go in accordance with that ideal.
So you are getting your physical structures in your brain to match what is going to happen out there in the world eventually.
Right?
So you are building a house through your neural architecture in your mind.
again you close your eyes, you imagine your perfect house, then through that imagination
your mind is building something in your mind.
The neurons are firing a particular kind of way, your visual centers are firing in a particular
kind of way, your imagination is firing a particular kind of way.
So you are literally building the house using neural structures within your brain and then
you copy paste those neural structures in your brain to the blueprint and then you copy
paste the blueprint into somebody else's mind.
So the blueprint is a way of taking the neural structuring of the house in your brain and copy-pasting it into somebody else's brain.
Now, we don't have mind melds or anything like that, although this show is very close.
We don't have mind melds, so how do we copy the neural structures of our mind to somebody else?
Well, we have artist visualizations, we have blueprints, we have detailed schematics and so on.
And so, you know, the guys who built the game Doom, right, the Carmack guys, the id guys, the guys who built Doom were transferring their vision of, you know, hell and fighting and demons and so on.
They were copy-pasting through the medium software to other people.
It's a way of copy-pasting a dream or a concept, right?
So, you have structures in your mind that are physical, right?
The neural structures in your mind.
I mean, I felt that flash of inspiration.
It also happened with the DRO system, right?
There's a flash of inspiration which is the neurons connecting, right?
There's got to be a way to solve the problem of ethics.
I'm going to think about it, turn it from different angles, and we've all had this at one point or another, flash of inspiration.
That's when the neurons connect.
So now I have a structure in my brain called UPB and the book and the debates and the articles and the arguments and the speeches and so on.
That is a way for me to copy and paste the structure of UPB from my mind to your mind.
So it is a form of the transfer of neural structures from one person to another.
I mean it's not just UPB, education as a whole fashions in this way.
So if you learn another language your brain is copy pasting the language structures from someone else through the medium of Grammar and memorization and practice and pronunciation and so on, right?
So, you have an idea for a house.
That idea is a neural structure, a physical neural structure in your brain.
We don't have the technology, I don't think, to be able to analyze that, but we absolutely have those neural structures in our brain, right?
I mean, I close my eyes, I think of my perfect house.
It's pretty much the same as it was a few seconds ago when I did it, and I'm sure the same is you.
Maybe little details and so on, right?
So you have a physical house structure in your mind.
It's not just a airy-fairy kind, it's like it's physical neurons.
Physical neurons have connected to create the house in your mind.
But then the question is, okay, so how do you get the house in your mind out there in the world?
Well, you need to plan it and make sure that, you know, there may be some limitations.
If you have some house that's kind of an inverted pyramid on a swamp, you know, it's impossible to actually make in reality.
Then you're going to need to adjust that.
Or maybe build it on the moon where that might be possible or something like that.
I guess not a lot of swamps on the moon.
The moon is anarchic.
So...
So you have to find a way to copy the physical structure of the neural connections in your brain to other people.
And we do that through language, we do that through education, we do that through books, we do that through mime even, we do it through visual mediums, we do it through a song, and so on.
Like, I'm really, really sad, I'm going to write this heartbreak song, and I'm going to be Adele, and I'm going to copy-paste my heartache to other people, right?
That's how it's going to kind of work.
Ideology works the same way, it's copy and pasting particular false prejudices and so on.
So we have neural structures in our brain and that is the dress rehearsal for creating things in the world and transferring our neural structures from ourselves to others.
I have a neural structure around empiricism, rationality, objectivity, UPB, self-knowledge, respect for the unconscious, like all of these things that I have.
And of course the purpose is to copy-paste these to other people.
Right?
I mean, surgeons, We'll copy-paste other surgeons so that they know how to do a good surgery.
A guy who's your personal trainer will copy-paste his training regimen to try and get you to follow his ideal.
Nutritionists do the same kind of thing.
Your doctor, by giving you, you've got to quit smoking.
He's trying to transfer hostility or negativity towards smoking from his mind to yours and so on.
And so this sort of copy-paste is happening all the time, which is why I say personalities, ideas, arguments, perspectives can be very infectious.
Because through the medium of language, but not just language, but largely it's through language, through the medium of language we are copy-pasting our ideas, arguments, personalities, and perspectives to each other all the time.
All the time it's happening.
You're trying to infect others, so to speak.
Other people are trying to infect you.
I don't mean necessarily it's not bad, right?
A yawn can be infectious.
Laughter can be infectious, which is why they used to add laugh tracks to comedies.
Laughter can be infectious.
An infectious smile, you know, it can be a positive thing.
Obviously peaceful parenting is a structure within the mind that I'm trying to copy-paste to override the fairly awful parenting procedures and processes that people have in their minds.
But Although you may say, and I've said this before, but it's a very vivid memory I had when I was a little kid.
I was maybe three or four years old and I had the idea that I wanted to paint.
A little boy with rosy cheeks and a scarf flying behind him on a nice wooden sled with a curly front going down a snowy hillside with fir trees in the background and little bits of snow flying out.
And you know, what do they give you?
They give you that crappy half-cardboard paper, they give you these giant watery pots of Cause I paint and then they give you these big brushes that you could use to sweep a factory floor.
And then I just remember the idea, which is, I still very vividly hold it in my mind, you know, more than half a century later, I have this vivid idea in my mind.
And then what I actually created on the paper, obviously lack of skill, but also lack of any decent medium was, was vastly different.
And I just remember looking at that and saying, that's nothing like What's in my mind and people who lack skill and and all of that they say well what's in my mind is vastly superior to what's in reality therefore reality is at fault.
They don't say I need to increase my skill to the point where what I have in my mind is able to be recreated in reality and it's the recreation is perfect.
My description of UPB My arguments for UPB are perfect.
Does that mean they can't ever conceivably be improved?
No, no, that doesn't mean that.
But it does mean that, you know, millions of people have been exposed to UPB and understand now the rational proof of secular ethics.
That may be difficult to defend at times, I get all of that, because when you hit that really caustic nihilistic skepticism, everyone can feel the foundations of their brain beginning to dissolve.
Because something like nihilism is a way of detonating or deconstructing neural structures, right?
This sort of cynicism, nihilism, ideology, and so on.
It's a way of using aggression and intimidation to undo the physical structures of accurate thought in your mind.
Look at Jesus, he made arguments for morality and reality.
Socrates, of course, made these arguments for Socratic questions and so on.
Socrates invented internal debate in many ways and a lot of people without an inner voice viewed it as a kind of possession.
But those of us with slightly more sophisticated views of our own inner processes welcome the inner debate because that's how we get to the truth.
So ideas, yeah, they're physical.
Ideas in the mind are absolutely physical.
They exist in reality because ideas in the mind are particular structures of neurons that connect, right?
I mean, philosophy is growing neurons, neural connections.
It's growing neural connections.
It's copy-pasting rational structures of neuron connections from one person to another.
I mean, think of mathematics.
Two plus two is four.
Everybody understands that the world over, and that is a copy-paste of a mathematical concept.
And so, if you say two and two make four, And you say, well, two bananas are never exactly the same, therefore two bananas in the concept of the mind is superior to the inferior of each banana is a little different and so on, but the purpose of numbers is to quantify
interactions, right? So if you're buying two bananas for two dollars, then you need the
concept of two dollars, you need the concept of two bananas, and that's how you facilitate
the transaction. And the purpose of facilitating the transaction is to satisfy both people,
right? So the bananas don't have to be perfect for that to occur, and therefore the numbers
are inferior to the manifestations, because the purpose of, say, two bananas for two dollars
is to transfer the dollars to the guy who wants the dollars more than bananas, and transfer
the bananas to the guy who wants the bananas more than the dollars. So both end up happy.
It's a facilitation of happiness or positivity for the purpose of productivity, right?
So the guy with the two bananas is going to give it maybe to the farmer who's going to use that to be able to produce more bananas, buys, I don't know, more fertilizer or a scarecrow or something like that or a coat, an old coat for a scarecrow to scare off the birds.
So the purpose is to facilitate positive interactions and therefore the fact that each banana is not identical does not mean that the concept of two bananas is superior because it's, quote, perfect.
No, because the purpose is to facilitate interactions between people, win-win interactions, in an economic sense.
There's other reasons for math, of course, but the purpose of math is to facilitate win-win interactions, and the degree to which it does that, and it does that very well, is the degree to which math is perfect.
So saying well two bananas is slightly different therefore two bananas in the mind is superior to
it's like no but that's not the purpose of two bananas is not for the two bananas to be identical
the purpose of the two bananas is to facilitate a trade win-win trade at least from an economic sense
so once we understand that it's the things in the world that are the purpose of concepts
then the things in the world that are only manifested by concepts having the idea of a
a good house therefore leads you to build a good house.
The purpose of concepts is manifestation in the world and therefore the concepts are inferior to the manifestation.
Now of course we can say well if you say oh my idea is a small house with three bedrooms and you end up with somebody building you a giant house with twelve bedrooms then you can say that manifestation is not Good, relative to the concept.
I get all of that, but that doesn't really happen, I mean, unless you agree to it and change your conception so your ideal house becomes twelve bedrooms or something like that.
People don't... You just pay people three bedroom houses and they build you twelve-bedroom houses.
That doesn't happen in the world, right?
So I think it's important to recognize in life as a whole, you say, okay, well, what is the purpose?
What is the purpose of my day?
What is the purpose of my life?
What is the purpose of my thought?
What is the purpose of my energy?
What is the purpose of eating?
What is the purpose of exercising?
And so on, right?
What's the purpose of all of this?
The dreamers.
Can you put your, it's a great song by Supertramp.
Can you put your hands in your head?
Oh no.
So you put your head in your hands, right?
You can't reach into your head.
And live inside the concept of the house that's in your mind, which is a physical structure.
The concept of the house is a physical structure in your mind.
It's neurons.
It's not a ghost.
It's not a fantasy.
It's not an abstraction.
It's not Plato's forms that don't manifest.
It's physical, right?
The ideas in your head are physical things, physical connections between neurons, right?
So when you're learning another language, you're firing up neurons to process that other language.
And if those neurons don't connect, you can't learn the other language, right?
So it's all about drawing lines between things, right?
drawing lines between things.
Since the purpose of concepts is manifestations of things in the real world, then the manifestations
of things in the real world is the ideal.
Bye.
And the blueprints and the concepts are inferior.
Right?
So if platonic perfection is your ideal then sure the concepts are perfect and then the drawing is less good and the house is less good but that's complete reversal of cause and effect and that's just a bunch of dreamers.
People who want to live in their head.
People who want to Get an ideal without putting in the work or and you know that the ideal thing is from people who are particularly brutalized when they're growing up.
So many years ago we had a free-domain barbecue.
Some people showed up early and I didn't mind that they showed up early but I was still doing some stuff around the house and doing some stuff in the garden and so on to sort of get ready for it and people were happy to step in and help and I still appreciate it you know 15 years later.
And I remember people who were helping were like, wow.
Some of the people who were helping were like, well, this is really strange.
Like I'm helping in the garden and I'm not getting yelled at because my dad would always say, you're doing it wrong.
And the weed whacker's at the wrong angle.
And you went to, you set the lawnmower too low.
There's yelling, right?
So when you get yelled at for physical manifestations, right?
Like, I want you to cut the grass.
Oh, you did it wrong.
I want you to wash the dishes.
Oh, you did it wrong.
Then people's concept to manifestation the ideal to the execution is blocked and so you end up having to try and find satisfaction within your own mind rather than in reality and because you've been traumatized Oh, yelled at, abused, maybe beaten for doing things wrong in the world, then the path of concept to manifestation is blocked because manifestation becomes too fearful and therefore you prefer the ideals in your head rather than manifestation.
in the world.
And there's lots of people, oh, I've got this great business idea, they never put it into practice.
Or like the guy who 21 years ago says he came up with the idea of a fifth dimension, not XYZ time, but a fifth dimension that's still accessible to the human mind and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he's never done anything with it.
So he'd rather live and I sympathize with that.
You know, we've I think all of us had this, you should do X. And then when you manifest it, even if you've never been abused for this, When you manifest your ideal, like for me when I was a kid and I wanted the beautiful picture of the boy with the scarf and the sled.
When I manifested it, it looked like crap and I knew that it looked like crap.
It was like a zillion miles away from what I wanted to do.
Now I have an uncle who was really good at copying paintings.
Like he was really really skilled.
He would copy other people's paintings.
Really skilled at that.
He didn't make his own paintings but he would really copy Other people.
So you look at people like Collinius Krieghoff, who was an expert at painting cracked ice, like he was a Canadian painter, skate cracked ice, very, very tough to paint.
Or, you know, the amazing Michelangelo webbed marble with the cloth over time.
It's just absolutely incredible stuff.
And the people who are best able to transfer their concepts into reality are the people we call the most skilled.
Sitting and dreaming about the concepts without taking the time to manifest them into something real.
is a mark of trauma or a mark of excessive self-criticism.
You say well I've got this perfect house and then when I blueprint it it's really frustrating because I can't get it right and then if I build it it's going to be a long way away from my perfect house and I can't stand it so I'd rather live in the realm of ideas and I'd rather live in the realm of concepts and I'd rather live in the realm of abstractions because manifesting into reality is too damn painful.
Because the gap between the dream and the manifestation, between the idea and the execution, the gap is so huge.
T.S.
Eliot writes about this in...
Between the ideal and the execution lies the shadow, the shadow of self-criticism, the shadow of self-hatred, the shadow of frustration that what is going on in your mind is not... I mean, we have this at karaoke, right?
You've done karaoke, right?
You have the song in your mind, you have a great singer, usually the song is sung, and then you sing, and it's just come across the way.
Right?
I was singing the other day, Sting does... Have you ever had the feeling that you The world's gonna left you behind.
Angel Eyes.
Sting does a version of it for the Leaving Las Vegas soundtrack.
Sings it very well.
I tried singing it and it's too high for me and it's just like oh that's not that's not pleasant.
I mean I can get the notes but they kind of get me back.
I can hit the notes but only with a club.
So you know what's going on in your mind versus what actually happens and that level of frustration is tough.
It is tough.
That should be the go to close that gap so that what you create in the world is Close to what you imagine in your mind.
And maybe sometimes even better.
So I'll tell you something.
One of the reasons I keep doing these shows, I mean obviously I think I have great things to add in the realm of philosophy, but one of the reasons I keep doing them is the shows often end up even better than I think.
Right?
So I had an idea about this show and it ended up, the copy-paste stuff came up sort of in the flow, right?
The sort of recreation of neural structures usually through language in other people's heads.
That's a great idea!
So one of the reasons I do it is that I have an idea for shows and this is true in call-ins I go in with an idea and then it usually ends up being even better than I think.
So one of the reasons I still keep doing these shows is I have ideas about how they're gonna go and they end up better.
So for me this is what's so addictive I think about having some expertise in a field is it ends up even better.
Then you think, and that's really heady.
So for me, one of the reasons why I accept that the manifestation is superior to the idea is I have ideas, like when I'm writing novels I have ideas for scenes and the general story flow, and then there's a spontaneity that occurs within the writing that just blows me away and seems vivid and real to me in a way that the idea wasn't. So when
it manifests on the page I see it so vividly. When I do a show like this, the language
flows so well, the ideas and arguments flow so well, we're doing highly complex
technical stuff in a way that I'm sure you're following. You may need to listen to it a
couple of times but you'll get the general idea. So for me, the house that I built with a
podcast is much better than the idea of the house or the podcast in my mind.
So what I actually manifest in the world is better than what I have in my mind ahead of time.
In other words, the building improves upon the fantasy.
And if you can do in reality better than you can fantasize, that's about as good as life gets.
So I hope that this makes sense to you.
Please let me know what you think.
You can leave feedback below, of course, or join the community at freedomain.locals.com.
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It's almost the end of the month.
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And you can share that with as many people as you want.
People who don't share your language or who don't speak English can use the AI in whatever language they want.
So I hope you'll check all of that out.
Thank you, my friends, so much for the greatest life in history.
We're doing amazing stuff.
I'll talk to you soon.
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