July 12, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:12
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So, do ideas, which are only in the human mind as far as we know, do ideas exist or did they exist prior to the development of human consciousness, which was able to conceive of these ideas and have concepts? | |
| Did the concepts exist prior to our ability to conceive them? | |
| I don't think that like insofar as like the concept of a forest would exist, but like the rudimentary parts of that concept would exist. | |
| Right. | |
| I think that's bang on. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| Sorry. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I interrupted you. | |
| Please go ahead. | |
| Oh, I was just finishing up saying like the forest, you could boil it down to like the concept of a thing and then the concept of an amalgamation of things. | |
| And I think ultimately this idea, like if you tried to beat it like a dead horse, would just turn into an argument about the development of language. | |
| But I do think that all ideas already exist and kind of a weird... | |
| Hang on. | |
| So no, no, no, we got the things and we've got the concepts. | |
| The concepts require the human brain. | |
| So the sun existed prior to it being called the sun. | |
| We agree with that, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And that's why I said it would kind of boil down to a semantic argument about language. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| People, I'm not saying this to you. | |
| People say semantics as if it's not important. | |
| So there were eight planets before human beings knew that there were eight planets. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, we are, the Earth is 93 million miles away from the sun or eight light minutes away from the sun. | |
| And this was true for billions of years before human beings came along and measured the distance and gave it a name. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Right. | |
| When I was saying semantics, I was saying like you could make the argument that that would not be true because we hadn't created the concepts of language to call them planets and suns. | |
| Well, there were eight planets before human beings named the eight planets. | |
| And of course, I know Pluto was nine, then it got downgraded and all of that. | |
| So there were eight planets before human beings said there are eight planets. | |
| However, if a human being says there are two planets or 50 planets, that human being is wrong. | |
| So the statement that we make about things in the world have to correspond to the things in that world or we're wrong, right? | |
| If I say the Earth is banana-shaped, it's not banana-shaped, I'm wrong. | |
| Now, the fact that the Earth is a sphere is valid. | |
| Obviously, it's not a mathematical sphere. | |
| There's indentations and so on, but the highest, I think the Mariana Trench to the height of Mount Everest, you wouldn't even feel on an egg. | |
| You wouldn't even feel that difference, right? | |
| So it's fear. | |
| So the facts, the reality existed before we labeled them, but the labels have to match what is. | |
| So I don't think that the concepts existed in the universe before human consciousness. | |
| But again, people think, well, because it's in my mind, it's subjective. | |
| Now, some things in your mind are subjective. | |
| I had a dream about an elephant last night. | |
| That's subjective. | |
| But I'm not making the claim that I actually was in the presence of an elephant last night. | |
| So some things in the mind are subjective, but not everything. | |
| The moment that we try to hook in or tie the concepts in our mind to things in the world, well, that's science, right? | |
| And that's relatively new. | |
| And it's really only 500 years old, give or take. | |
| I mean, there was ancient science, but the Baconian method is pretty new. | |
| And so you can have a hypothesis or a conjecture about how matter and energy is going to behave. | |
| Then you have to go and test it. | |
| It has to be reproducible, which is how we knew the fusion in the jar thing wasn't real because nobody else could reproduce it. | |
| And the science didn't even science that well anyway. | |
| So yeah, I think the concepts, the ideas did not exist prior to human consciousness, but that doesn't mean that they're only in human consciousness without reference to things outside of human consciousness. | |
| The only thing I would argue with there is that I'm trying to make a definitional segregation between concepts and ideas, saying ideas are kind of like this higher, like you said, Platonic form. | |
| And like a concept is itself an idea that you would bring in from another idea that would be a thinker. | |
| So would you say that ideas are first principles and concepts are derived, or do I have that completely wrong? | |
| I mean, I could very well, because I've just thought of your thinking here. | |
| Yeah, I would say ideas are first principles, and then you would derive thinkers from that, and then you would derive concepts from thinkers. | |
| Okay, so first principles, if I understand what you're saying correctly, is the consistency of reason that is required or demanded or imprinted upon us by the evidence of the senses. | |
| So the laws of logic come from the consistent behavior of matter and energy. | |
| So you can't be in two places at the same time. | |
| And so that's a principle of causality and logic. | |
| Something is an elephant or it is not an elephant. | |
| It is not both an elephant and something else at the same time, which is one of the basic laws of logic and so on, right? | |
| So the evidence of the senses gives us the requirement because matter and energy behave in perfectly consistent ways. | |
| Therefore, any ideas or arguments that we use to describe matter and energy must also behave in consistent and non-contradictory ways. | |
| And that's where we get logic. | |
| It comes into us through the evidence of the senses and how much the evidence of the senses shows us the consistent behavior of matter and energy, which means all thoughts that we have that describe things outside of ourselves must have consistency and uniformity, which is why science doesn't say, oh, yeah, this scientific experiment works fine in Philadelphia at 2 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, but nowhere else, right? | |
| Because it's talking about the universal properties of matter and energy, which are not confined to Philadelphia on a Thursday afternoon at 2 o'clock, if that makes sense. | |
| Yeah, it does make sense. | |
| And like probably one of the most influential things to me about been like thinking about this hypothesis for a while and hear me out because it's kind of super autistic and tangential. | |
| But it's the number pie and it's the philosophical thought experiment of the monkeys in a typewriter in a room with typewriters eventually generating Shakespeare. | |
| Because if you understand that mathematical philosophical experiment, it's not actually like primates. | |
| A monkey is a random character generator. | |
| The amount of time they would take to actually generate that would be way longer than the age of the universe. |
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