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July 12, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:52
Do Concepts Exist?
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Okay, so then, of course, we have the challenge, which is what do you mean by the word exist?
And let me sort of preface that by saying: you know, there are things that exist that are tangible, right?
So I have a little, a little ball here with lip balm because it's dry in the studio, right?
So this exists in a tangible way.
It conforms to all of the evidence of the senses.
It's consistent.
It's behavior and its properties.
Even the color is the same.
If I came down and it was a different color, I'd be like, ah, my wife fixed it.
She moved it.
She changed it.
So sensory.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Sorry, almost done.
So things exist in a tangible way.
There are things that are ideas within the mind.
Do they physically exist?
Kind of, because it's a pattern of neurons, right?
So when I think of a memory that I had from 20 years ago, I bring it back in my mind's eye.
There's a visualization.
Clearly, that memory and that visualization is stored somewhere in my mind.
If I know that two and two make four, which I do, that knowledge is stored somewhere in my neurons, but it doesn't exist in the same way that an external physical thing is.
So if I'm looking at a whole bunch of trees, they stretch to the horizon.
I say, wow, that's a big forest.
Now, the forest as a concept doesn't exist out there in the world.
Each individual tree atomically does exist.
But the forest is a concept I'm using to describe an aggregation of trees.
Now, this, I know to the people who are listening, maybe this sounds like, you know, a bit circle jerky and ookie-cookie and sort of pointless, but it's very real.
Because if you think that concepts exist, then collectivism is valid and the individual must submit to the mob because the mob can have moral properties not available to each individual.
Whereas if you say the concept is imperfectly derived from the instance, in other words, a forest has to be an aggregation of trees.
It has to be.
It can't be, you can't say a forest is an aggregation of water atoms or penguins or umbrellas, right?
So it has to be an aggregation of trees in order to be called a forest.
You can't just throw other things in there.
And if the concept only exists because of the things in the real world, then the concept cannot have properties that are not the same as the individual.
So if a forest is a collection of trees, an aggregation of trees, the concept forest can't have properties that contradict the essence of the trees.
And what that means is human rights.
It's my human right to have health care, some people say.
So human rights.
So what they're saying is that there are rights in the group called humans that specifically oppose the rights of an individual.
So an individual doctor must be forced to provide health care because other people have a right to healthcare in the aggregate.
Whereas if you say no individual can initiate the use of force against another, then saying I have a right to healthcare is like saying I have a right to steal, I have a right to murder, I have a right to rape.
You don't.
You don't have those rights.
And so when we have concepts that contradict the nature of any individual member of that concept, what we're saying is that there are rights out there that people can claim that contradict your rights and my rights.
Like the right for people to be free of offense as a group, right?
Means that we can't tell the truth because other people will just claim to be offended and shut us down.
So we can't have free speech.
So when you say it exists, concepts don't exist in the way things do, but that doesn't mean that they're subjective because concepts are supposed to accurately describe things in the world, right?
If I have two coconuts and two coconuts, I have four coconuts.
Now, the number two, the number two, the number four don't exist in the real world.
The coconuts do, but the numbers don't.
However, they're not subjective because it has to describe two things and two things that combine to make four things.
The combination, the numbers, they don't exist in the real world, but they're not subjective.
The accuracy of them is open to being tested by being compared in the real world.
So sorry, that was a fairly lengthy and complicated speech, but go ahead.
Yeah, that's completely fine.
The way I'm saying that ideas exist is that they exist in the way that math exists, where it's not subjective, but it's not physically tangible.
Perfect.
Yeah, that might be a good idea.
I should probably define what I mean by idea because there's this weird relationship I'm trying to figure out in my hypothesis, because I'm saying that ideas would exist irrespective of the thinker.
And I think that's because like a thinker itself is an idea.
And like when you reference like concepts, which things like the forest to an amalgamation of trees, like a concept itself would be an idea insofar as I'm trying to define it.
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