Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - How NOT to be Bitchy! Twitter/X Space

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Oct. 21, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:20:23

How NOT to be Bitchy! Twitter/X Space

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	You know what it is, basically.
	You know how it rolls.
	Every single moment of my life interacting with a touchscreen goes through the basic problem, goes through the basic problem, which is that you touch something, you're not quite sure if it took, so you touch it again.
	And then what happens?
	Well, you're not quite sure if it took.
	Oh, but it took.
	So it unchecks.
	And that's that delay.
	Anyway, so we're going to talk about science and consistency and inconsistency.
	And I'm going to be annoyingly authoritarian.
	I'm aware of that ahead of time.
	I'm going to talk about things that are going to rustle your jimmies.
	And of course, as always, I'm very happy and thrilled to take feedback and corrections.
	But science is about skepticism.
	There's an old saying from great physicist Dr. Richard Feynman that all science is founded on skepticism of the authority of experts.
	And I'm going to give you a way of looking at science from a pure philosophical standpoint.
	Now, am I a scientist?
	No, but who cares?
	But who cares?
	You could speak about things that you don't do.
	Otherwise, none of us could speak about anything other than our own core expertise.
	Have I pursued the scientific method?
	Well, in a way, I have.
	And I'll sort of tell you what that means.
	Again, I'm certainly happy if people disagree, and I'm even happier if people correct me.
	But in business, in the business world, which I was in for many, many years as an entrepreneur and a chief technical officer and executive, you come up with a hypothesis.
	If I build a product, people will buy it.
	And you do your research, try and figure these things out.
	And it's going to take me this amount of time to build the product.
	And it's going to cost this amount of money.
	And then we're going to sell this amount.
	It's going to cost us this amount to market.
	You know, all that kind of stuff.
	And then if you get approval, sometimes I needed approval, sometimes I just do it myself.
	But if you needed approval, then you would come up with a conjecture, a hypothesis, you would come up with an action plan, and then you would test your hypothesis against the market.
	If I said, you know, 10,000 people were going to build this, buy this widget for a dollar apiece, then, you know, you get $10,000 of gross, right?
	And so you come up with a hypothesis, you build the product, and then you test your hypothesis against the empiricism of the market.
	And hopefully you get things right.
	If you get things wrong, then hopefully you learned your lessons and redo it.
	And of course, other people will check your premises.
	And they would, you know, when I would go before the board and I would say, I need X amount of dollars, a million dollars, two million dollars, whatever, I'd go and say, I needed this money, and here's how I'm going to benefit the company.
	I'm going to hand back more money than I take.
	Then they ask all the tough questions.
	And so it sort of follows a process.
	And it's not an accident that the free market and science kind of evolved around the same time because they follow similar methodologies.
	You come up with conjectures, hypotheses, you try and found them in reality.
	You don't just say, I think certain amount, and I think 10,000 people are going to buy this product.
	You have to have some evidence for that, some proof.
	Because not only did I do technology and management and sales, but I also was a director of marketing at one point for quite some time.
	And so market research and having foundational beliefs as to why you think a certain number of people are going to buy the product is kind of essential.
	And you even have a hypothesis.
	You say, well, I'm going to buy online advertising.
	And if I buy online advertising, it's going to have a conversion rate.
	The conversion rate is how many people see the product versus how many people buy the product.
	It's going to have a conversion rate of this.
	And so you say, well, if I show it to 10,000 people at a conversion rate of 2%, then that's 200 people who are going to buy the product.
	The 10,000 impressions cost us X. We make Y from the product sale.
	And so you understand that there's all these hypotheses that you put forward.
	And this is true for every feature.
	You know, I remember having a ferocious debate with the board at one point where I said, listen, it's as important to take away product features as it is to add product features.
	This is how I used to rapidly consume the Harvard Business Review when I was in my teens and 20s.
	I just found it sort of interesting.
	And firing your customers is like a big thing because 90% of your costs come from 10% of your customers in terms of like support and overhead.
	And firing unproductive customers is really, really important, which is why I'm constantly working at ways to get my numbers down on X, because keeping people who clog up the conversation out of the conversation is important.
	And so I, with the permission of the users, I put tracking features in the software so I could see what features were being used and what features weren't being used.
	And I said, because, you know, every feature we're not used, it's code that we need to maintain.
	It's everything we need to test with every new version.
	And we need to document it and we need to train the coders on it.
	And it needs to be upgraded with the new versions.
	And so that's a huge overhead.
	And if people aren't using the features, then those features should not be in the software.
	And then they'd always say, well, this one guy loves the features.
	I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
	But we have to look for the good of all the customers, right?
	You can't run a business on either end of the bell curve.
	You need to look at the bulk of the customers.
	So getting rid of features is important.
	And I see, you know, simplicity is better and things that are overcomplicated.
	And then they said, well, but it's a sales demo.
	We show all these features.
	And I'm like, well, yeah, I get that.
	But it's not the job of the technologist to sell the product.
	It's the job of the technologist to build the product in conjunction with marketing and sales, but it's the job of the salespeople to sell the product.
	And so if we're aiming for simplicity, which means we can sell the product for less, then it's up to the job of the, it's the job of the salespeople to sell our strengths against our competitors' weaknesses, not for our product to have no weaknesses whatsoever, right?
	Every product has strengths and weaknesses.
	It's the job of the salespeople to sell and not just, well, tech has provided a list of positives, therefore you should buy the product.
	So anyway, I don't want to get into a whole thing about business, but I have gone through the sort of hypothesis, proposal, conjecture, documentation, testing, and the constant feedback and reality processing that the market gives you as a whole is pretty essential for business.
	And it's pretty essential for science.
	So I don't want to go over the whole history of science, although I did study some of this in graduate school.
	I don't want to go into the whole history of science, although it is really fascinating.
	Maybe we'll do this another time.
	But science is based on the proposition that in any conflict between an idea and reality, reality always wins.
	And just to get a deep breath, inhale those spores of thought into your mental lungs, right?
	Doesn't mean accept or believe it, but just sort of understand what a radical notion this was in human history.
	If there is a conflict between an idea and reality, the idea is wrong.
	And, you know, every group says we're the greatest.
	And it's like, oh, maybe, but based on what, right?
	And my God exists of the 10,000 gods, my God exists.
	It's like, okay, that's an idea, but we have to test it against actual reality.
	So this is sort of the, there was science to some degree, of course, a threat to human history.
	Aristotle was famously fascinated by biology and dissection and so on.
	But it really was the Baconian revolution, which was Sir Francis Bacon in the 16th century, where people began to really say the ideas in the mind that are not supported by the facts in reality are false.
	And this is a war between Platonism and Aristotelianism, between idealism and empiricism.
	Idealism says that there's a whole realm of forms out there that have no particular rational proof, but are more important than reason.
	This is the world of Platonic forms.
	Kant talks about this with new Omenal reality, the higher reality, the higher reality, transcendental, other dimensions, better things, and so on, right?
	So the idea that individual facts, empirical reality is not just more important, but infinitely more important than abstract concepts is wild.
	This is the battle between the collective and the individual, right?
	You must sacrifice yourself for the sake of the nation, right?
	You must do all of this stuff for the collective good, the good of the many outweighs the good of the individual.
	The collective good is all that matters and so on, right?
	This stuff is all very powerful.
	The sacrifice of the individual to the collective is anti-scientific because it says that the concept is more important than the instance.
	The concept of the crowd is more important than the instance of the person.
	The concept of the nation is more important than the instance of the physical individual.
	So it is a huge deal.
	The idea that there are these categories of existence that have characteristics not only independent of, but opposed to the characteristics of the individuals, is a wild thing.
	And I'm aware, I know, I know, I know.
	It sounds all very abstract, but it's all very real.
	Because the concept of sacrifice is the concept of taking an individual and harming or destroying that individual for the sake of a collective.
	And so all power, really, prior to the modern age, was based on the supremacy of the concept over the individual.
	As I talked about, I did an introduction to philosophy series like 20 years ago.
	And the way that I phrased it, you know, kind of awkward, but pretty descriptive, I said that concepts are imperfectly derived from instances.
	And what that means is you look at things in the world, you look at a bunch of rocks, right?
	And then you have a concept called rocks.
	You're going to see a little bunch of rocks on the ground.
	And you have a concept called rocks.
	You see a bunch of trees and you have a concept called the forest.
	Now, when you look at a bunch of rocks and then you create a concept called rocks, empiricism says that you cannot have any characteristic of rocks in your concept of rocks, right?
	Your definition of rocks.
	Your definition of rocks cannot contain characteristics that contradict the nature of any individual rock.
	And again, I know this sounds kind of abstract and I'm not explaining it super well, but I'll take another run at it.
	I even know when I'm sort of missing the mark.
	So I'll try it again.
	So you have something called mammal, right?
	What does mammal mean?
	You know, let's hashtag exclude duckbill platypus.
	Mammal means warm-blooded.
	Mammal means gives birth to live young.
	Mammal means has hair.
	I mean, for me, armpits, for a lot of people, their head.
	So warm-blooded, give birth to life-young, has hair.
	There's probably a couple others, but those are the major ones.
	Now, you cannot have a concept of mammal that contradicts the properties of anything you put in that category.
	So you can't say, well, a mammal, you see, is warm-blooded, but I'm going to just throw this toad in.
	Right?
	A mammal is a creature that gives birth to life young, but I'm going to throw in the ostrich.
	You can't do that.
	And so what that means is that the concepts are derived from the things in the world.
	And if there is any contradiction between the concepts and the things in the world, the concept must be adjusted.
	Let me say that again.
	It's really, really important.
	Foundational.
	Concepts describe things in the world.
	Concepts are like the shadows cast by things in the world.
	Because concepts are derived from things in the world, concepts cannot contradict that which they describe.
	So to use an analogy, which is illustrative, although of course I am aware that analogies are not proof, but they're really illustrative and very helpful.
	And I really, I'd be screaming this at the top of the lungs if I thought it would help.
	I don't think it would help.
	But this is how important this stuff is.
	This is foundational to whether civilization survives or not.
	And I'll sort of tell you why.
	So let's say you have a statue of a guy on a horse with his sword above his head.
	Let's take some old-fashioned Victorian statue.
	You've got a guy, he won some battle.
	There's a statue of a guy on a horse with a horse, raising his sword above his head.
	Now, the shadow is cast from the statue.
	Now, can the shadow include elements or not include elements that are in the statue?
	So the guy's got a sword over his head.
	Let's say the sun is at 45 degrees, right?
	And let's say it's just, it's a flat concrete parking lot, road, whatever, right?
	Something flat.
	There's no ripples.
	We won't introduce any funky stuff, man.
	We'll just keep it simple.
	For my sake more than yours.
	So, guy on a horse, sword over his head.
	Brilliant sunny day, sun's at 45 degrees.
	So you see the shadow.
	It's a little elongated.
	It's a little distorted.
	But you see the shadow.
	Now, can the shadow include things that are not in the statue?
	So let's say the guy is not wearing a Viking helmet.
	The guy, the statue of the horse, the guy on the horse raising his sword, he does not have a Viking helmet on.
	He just got a pith helmet or something like that.
	There's no horns.
	There's no horns on his helmet.
	Could there be any horns in the shadow?
	Right?
	Well, no.
	In fact, it would be incomprehensible for the guy, the statue has no horns.
	The guy in the statue has no horns, but then you see these two little horn spikes in the shadow.
	That would make no sense, right?
	Can you imagine there's no hole in the statue?
	It's just a guy on a horse, sword over his head.
	Can you imagine a hole in the shadow if there's no hole in the statue?
	No.
	Now, if, let's do this, right?
	So if you were taking a video of the statue, and then you were panning over to the shadow.
	Now, you take a video of the statue.
	It's just a guy with a helmet on, no horns, right?
	And then, when you pan to the shadow, the guy has horns on his head.
	What would you think?
	In fact, what would you know for certain?
	What would you know for certain?
	Well, of course, what you would know for certain, for absolute certain.
	No doubt, no hesitation.
	You would assume that some Joker had climbed up on the statue and was using his hands or something to create horns from the time you took your video camera from the horse to the shadow, right?
	There's no horns on his head.
	When you're shooting the statue, you pan to the shadow.
	Now there are horns.
	You know, you know for a fact that something has changed on the statue to produce the horns in the shadow.
	That is how dependent concepts are on things in the real world.
	And it's a vanity thing.
	I'm telling you, it's an ego thing.
	Everybody wants the ideas in their mind to be true.
	Me, you, everybody.
	For obvious reasons of efficacy and vanity and also power and control and so on.
	If you can get people to believe that you are a living God, then they're probably going to give you a bunch of money, power, and obedience.
	Now, science comes along and asks the foundational question of epistemology.
	The foundational question of epistemology is not, is it true, but what is truth?
	What is truth?
	How do we know something is true?
	What does it mean to be true?
	What is the essence of something that is true versus that which is false?
	Now, religions and superstitions, and I'm sorry to diminish religions by putting them in the same category, even roughly, but there is some similarities.
	So religions say truth is revelation.
	Truth is what's written in this book.
	Truth is what I pray for.
	Truth is what I get a feel for.
	Truth is what my faith determines is true.
	And it cannot be resolved.
	It cannot be resolved.
	So let's say religion A says that cows are divine.
	Religion B says, no, no, no, it's goats that are divine.
	Well, given that there is no divinity that you can open up the goat or the cow and look at, it is a concept that exists in the mind, not in the nature or empirical essence of the goat or the cow.
	Sorry to do a bit of Hindu thing here, but it's what came to mind.
	I got to roll with it.
	I can't overcensor.
	I can't communicate anything.
	So, so which is divine?
	Is it the cow?
	Is it the goat?
	Or neither?
	Or both?
	It cannot be determined.
	It cannot be determined.
	Now, if a biologist comes along and says both goats and cows are mammals, you say, okay, well, it's definition of mammal.
	Okay, we got gifts birth to life young.
	Ew, gross.
	I didn't want to see that.
	But yes, I see the cow coming out of the vagina of the.
	I see the baby cow coming.
	I see the kids, right?
	The kid, it's called the kid, the baby goat.
	Yes, no eggs, gives birth to life young.
	Okay.
	Number two, okay, hair.
	Yeah, well, they've got the billy goat gruff and they've got cows got hair, right?
	Okay, number three, hot-blooded, check it and see, right?
	So number three, warm-blooded, which means that you can internally regulate your own temperature better than the cold-leathered creature or something like that.
	Gavin Newsom, for example.
	So we've got these criteria, which are empirically measurable and testable.
	So science is peace.
	Science is testing ideas or thoughts against empirical, factual, universal, tangible material reality.
	And the way that it works is you come up with a hypothesis or a conjecture.
	Here's how I think the world works.
	Now, it's not the why, it's the how, not the why.
	Why is there a property of matter called gravity?
	Why does mass attract mass?
	There's no why.
	There is only the is and the how.
	How does, right?
	How in terms of how does it manifest?
	There is no why an object falls to the earth at 9.8 seconds per second, right?
	Accelerates towards earth at 9.8 seconds per second.
	There's no why to that.
	It just is.
	Why is there an inverse square law?
	Why do gases expand when heated?
	Nobody knows.
	Because there's no null hypothesis to compare that to.
	We now have another universe.
	You know, imagine there's a big dial at the center of the universe with gravity and there's another universe with anti-gravity.
	Of course, there wouldn't be any life there because you need to be attached to the ground in order to live.
	And certainly you need an atmosphere and anti-gravity would have atmosphere be expelled into space.
	Everything would be barren, blah, blah, blah.
	Anyway, so you come up with an idea.
	How does this work?
	And you write down your thoughts.
	You write down your math, your arguments, and then you go test it.
	You go test it.
	You say, my prediction is a famous experiment, Galileo's time, leading tower of Pisa.
	I can't remember exactly what it was, like an orange and a bowling ball or something like that.
	Now, everybody thought that the bowling ball would fall faster because the bowling ball is heavier.
	And they dropped the bowling ball.
	And nobody had thought to test this because it just seems self-evident, like the world is flat, seems self-evident.
	Nobody thought to test this.
	So what did they do?
	Well, they climbed all the way up the leaning tower of Pisa, and they dropped a bowling ball and they dropped an orange, and they both fell at the same rate.
	Counterintuitive.
	Because all objects accelerate to Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
	Now, of course, a javelin is going to fall to the Earth faster than a feather because of wind resistance and so on.
	Air resistance.
	But that's the rule.
	Mass attracts mass at a constant rate.
	Matter and energy are interchangeable.
	You can only convert matter to energy or energy back to matter again.
	E equals mc squared.
	Energy equals mass m c speed of light.
	Mass times the speed of light squared.
	It's the foundation of nuclear power.
	So you come up with an idea.
	Here's how I think it works.
	I mean, they had the structure of the atom long before they had a picture of an atom.
	Here's how I think it works.
	And then you go test it.
	And then you go test it.
	And if you test it and it seems to be valid, you will certainly try and come up with some reason as to why it's valid.
	And then I'm talking about real science, like in the past, not this government-mandated conformist, money-hungry bullshit.
	But real science in the past, a lot of gentlemen scholars, 18th, 19th centuries, and a lot of peasants too.
	I write about this in my novel, Just Poor.
	A lot of peasants got really interested in science.
	They did chemical experiments.
	Of course, a lot of the peasants being farmers, they did experiments in animal husbandry, selective breeding, all this kind of stuff.
	And so what you would do is you would publish your findings, publish your data, publish your, here's what I thought would happen.
	Here's what did happen.
	Here's what I think.
	Here's what I think, why I think it happened, right?
	Here's what I thought would happen.
	Here's what did happen.
	And if the two match, right?
	If I, well, pretty much had this hypothesis that if I held a ball at arm's length and let go, the ball would fall down.
	Okay, so we could test that.
	My ball falls down, the ball falls down, and then you come up with a general rule, not just about the specific instance, but about all matter and energy based on the principle and fact and reality that matter and behavior, the matter and energy behave in universal consistent manners.
	Consistent doesn't mean predictable, right?
	I mean, my daughter and I, she's outgrown it a bit now, but we spent a year or two with these little foam airplanes, right?
	And they're really cool, right?
	So you've got these little foam airplanes, maybe a foot and a half or two feet wide, a foot long, and you can adjust the airlines and so on, and you throw them in the air.
	And we would have, you know, what's the coolest flight?
	What's the easiest landing?
	What is the most loops?
	You know, all of this stuff that we would like, who can keep it in the air the longest and all this kind of stuff.
	And who can catch, you throw the plane, can you catch it again?
	Now, I couldn't predict where the plane was going to land, but that didn't mean it was random.
	I couldn't predict it because there's too many variables.
	I mean, if you throw, I love Frisbee, right?
	Throw and catch Frisbees.
	You can pretty much predict, you know, if you throw it ahead of you, it's not going to materialize behind you.
	It's not going to burst into flames or turn into an eagle or a javelin or frisbee, you throw it, right?
	So you don't know exactly where it's going to land, but that's part of the final challenge is you've got to catch it and all of that.
	Throw a ball, a dog could run and jump and catch the ball.
	It doesn't understand the equations.
	It doesn't understand the physics, but it can certainly predict behavior because dogs are trained, they evolve to be hunters.
	And hunters means predicting behavior without knowing it.
	The job of the hunter is to predict where the animal it's hunting is going to be and eat it.
	And the job of the prey is to not have the predator know where it's going to be.
	It's dodging, darting, weaving, bobbing, all of that sort of stuff.
	So, what do you do?
	You say, I think this is going to happen.
	I tested it.
	And this is what happened.
	And here's why I think it happened.
	Nobody cares about one ball dropping in particular.
	But the purpose of science is to gain prescription from description.
	The purpose of science is not the past.
	I mean, the purpose of nothing is the past because the past cannot be changed.
	The purpose of pain, right?
	You stub your toe because you're walking carelessly.
	The purpose of pain is not the past because you can't change the past.
	The purpose of pain is to have you be more careful in the future, right?
	You get a bad sunburn, you're like, oh man, I've got to slip slaps up, right?
	T-shirt, sunscreen, hats, that kind of stuff, right?
	And the purpose of science is not the past or the instance, but the general and the future.
	So once people figured out that the Earth, while looking flat, is actually a sphere, well, it became a whole lot easier to navigate the planet, right?
	You actually opened up.
	I mean, it was two things really that opened up international exploration and travel.
	The first, of course, was the general understanding and knowledge of the Earth as a sphere, which had been around for a long time, but in terms of practical application.
	And the second, in general, was the mathematical development of insurance.
	It was too risky to send ships all over the place unless you had insurance.
	But in order to have insurance, you had to have statistics, probability, calculus, all the stuff that came out of Pascal and others.
	He had these kind of creepy pinsees and thoughts, but he also worked a lot in mathematics and mathematics.
	And the free market was the foundation of the insurance industry, and the insurance industry allowed for international trade and a lot of other things.
	So the purpose of science is to provide general principles through which to better control the behavior of matter and energy in the future.
	So we look at something primitive.
	If you rub two sticks together in the right way, you can get a fire.
	If you cook your food in fire, it will be more likely to kill and drive out the parasites and bacteria and all that sort of stuff.
	And so you are more likely to live, not die from some horrible intestinal worm or something like that.
	Something that in India, you have to wind off your skin with a stick, some horrible, horrifying stuff.
	So same thing with boiling water.
	You boil water over a fire and let it cool and you have clean water, right?
	There's only two ways to get clean water, really, right?
	I mean, you can have modern filter systems, but in general, it was wait for the rain.
	The rain is clean for the most part, or boil your water.
	So, you know, people figured out: you rub the sticks, you get the fire.
	Or it's the old Anthony Hopkins movie, I can get fire from ice, right?
	He uses the ice as a prism to focus sunlight to start a fire.
	And the purpose of that is: okay, so if we rub sticks, we get the smoke.
	If we get the smoke, we get the fire.
	If we get the fire, we can cook our food, we can boil our water, we can do all kinds of things to keep us healthy.
	So that's a good thing.
	And of course, you know, sort of back in the day, it's one of these things that's plausible, but turns out to be completely wrong.
	There was this sort of theory of elements, this theory of elements, that why does fire go up?
	Because the fire element is its very top, and fire wants to rejoin its elements.
	You set fire to something, it leaps up because it's trying to rejoin its element, right?
	The earth element, why does a stone fall?
	Because it wants to rejoin the earth element, which is below you and the air and right?
	Water, all of that.
	Why does water go downhill?
	Because it wants to rejoin the water element, right?
	The atoms have yearning, preference, needs, desires.
	The Disney's I Want song, I need song, right?
	That every atom is a yearning housewife that wishes to rejoin a collective.
	And it was wrong, like the medieval science of humors, right?
	That there were these four different humors and you had to balance them out and so on.
	So, I mean, up until, what, 250 years ago, they didn't even know that the blood circulated through the body.
	They thought it just sat there like a bag of milk.
	Just sit there.
	So, science is when you say the ideas in my mind can be, not only can be, but must be falsified by things in reality.
	In the past, it was enough to sit in your ivory tower, to sit in your studio, to sit in your study, and to just ponder and think and reason and mathematics and the idea of actually going out and testing things in the real world.
	I mean, it wasn't unknown, but it wasn't the foundation of science.
	And of course, one of the reasons why science became more valuable was because post-Black Death, right?
	I mean, the Black Death wiped out sometimes a quarter, a third, in some places, even a half of the local population, often concentrating among the poor who had less access to clean water and other forms of sanitation were often crowded in together, weren't in these sort of isolated castles where you could raise your drawbridge and stay safe from the plague.
	And so because the laborers were diminished enormously by the plague, the wages went up 50, 75, 80%, 100% in some places.
	And as labor became more expensive, the interest in labor-saving devices became more valuable.
	Why did the ancient world not have the Industrial Revolution?
	I mean, they knew about science.
	They knew about empiricism.
	They knew about testing.
	They even had the steam engine.
	It was used for some sort of trippery toy stuff, right?
	But why didn't they develop labor-saving devices?
	Because they lived on slavery.
	And when you buy a slave, you don't want a labor-saving device because it reduces the value of your slave in general, I mean, as a whole.
	And so Black Death causes far fewer people around, which drives up the price of labor, which increases the interest in labor-saving devices, increase and increases in agricultural productivity.
	And this was started pretty early on.
	And it's not like these things aren't all secrets.
	So I don't want to give this sort of Marxist.
	It's incredibly complicated stuff.
	And these things, they overlap and there's no sort of, it's not dominoes, right?
	Because there's free will in the world.
	But as the price of labor rose, people wanted to get more efficient use of their farmland.
	So they rationalized the farmland was all getting divided up into tiny, hard-to-plow, weird shapes.
	So the lords found ways to increase the efficiency of the farmland.
	Increasing the efficiency of the farmland meant you needed fewer farmers.
	So as the price of labor goes up, you want to use yet less labor, which means you want more automation.
	You want better use of crops.
	You want winter crops like turnips.
	You want all kinds of cool stuff.
	And so you end up needing far fewer laborers.
	We can see this.
	It's the same process with AI.
	AI might replace truckers.
	There's a million people plus who make their living as truckers in the United States.
	And yet, at some point, at some point, it's going to be safer, cheaper, more effective, and more efficient for trucks to be driven by computers.
	And what happens then?
	Well, of course, in the past, once you raise the price of labor to the point where the serfs got more liberation and independence, you got more efficient at your farming.
	Then you kick people off the land and then you have a, where do they go?
	They go to the city.
	They can't go to another farm because nobody needs their labor.
	So they go to the city and that's the base of the proletariat, the base of the industrial revolution.
	So science in part was driven by the need for more efficiency because of the rising price of labor as a result of the Black Death, which came, as you know, we know this from COVID, right?
	Things come in waves, right?
	The Black Death wasn't one thing.
	It was a whole series, a whole wave, right?
	Mutate and come and so on.
	Thanks, China.
	It's the gift that keeps on giving.
	Of course, there was no germ theory until the late 19th century, which is how we know the smallpox blanket thing is slushy nonsense.
	So the question then becomes, for me, it's a very interesting question.
	And it's a wild thing to me.
	And I mentioned this on a show the other day.
	Like the free market and science have been without question, without hesitation for anybody who looks at the facts, anybody who looks at the facts honestly.
	I stake my absolute entire reputation on this.
	Everything, everything.
	I'd bet a kidney if it was legal.
	But science and the free market, which as I said at the beginning of the talk, are closely related.
	Science and the free market have provided by far the greatest benefit to humanity over the last 200 years.
	Like it's not even close.
	Again, you can sort of look at world GDP, economic productivity.
	It's a complete flat line until like 200 years ago, and then it literally goes up to the moon.
	So science and the free market.
	Anybody who denies the value of science in the free market is absolutely illiterate in history.
	And of course, the funny thing is that people who will literally type to me on X or other social media platforms or email me saying, you know, you can't trust science.
	Science isn't accurate.
	Science doesn't discover the truth.
	It's like, bro, like 90% of 90% of philosophical problems are solved by just slowing your roll and looking at what you're doing.
	What are you doing?
	What are you doing?
	Like if somebody were to say to me, hey man, language has no meaning.
	Language is meaningless.
	It's like, you know, you're using language to communicate that, right?
	You're relying on the, you're relying on the fact that language has meaning to try and convey to me the fact that language has no meaning.
	That's contradictory.
	All you need to do, like the is-ought dichotomy.
	So you can't get an ought from an is.
	It's like, is a debate an ought or an is?
	A debate is an ought.
	It's not an is.
	It's not like a rock.
	A debate is an ought.
	So once you're debating, you've accepted that there's an ought.
	So we don't need to debate whether there's an ought from an is.
	There's no debate there because a debate is an ought by definition.
	You ought to not shoot the other person.
	You ought to bring reason and evidence.
	You ought to have as your goal the truth.
	You ought to bow to reason and evidence.
	All of the oughts, right, that engage in the debate.
	So once somebody's debating, there's no point debating is there an ought from an is because we already have the ought in the form of the debate.
	We have an ought in the form of language.
	You ought to use words that represent your position, right?
	If I say two and two make five and someone says, no, they don't, and I say, yes, they do.
	You say, no, they say two and two make four.
	And they said, but that's what I said.
	I said two and two make four.
	I said, no, sometimes I interchange the word four and five, but they mean the same thing.
	Like that would be a debate you couldn't have.
	So you ought to use words that accurately reflect your position.
	So when people, you know, post on X, well, you can't trust science.
	Science doesn't give you the truth.
	It's like, you are using science, right?
	Nobody's going to tell me that social media, computers, TCPIP, CPUs, nobody's going to tell me they aren't the product of science.
	Oh, but they're engineering.
	It's like, yes, but engineering follows science, right?
	Engineers take the abstract principles and manifest them into practical products.
	But there's nothing that works in engineering that doesn't conform to science.
	Well, quantum mechanics is, yeah, yeah, things get from the evidence of the senses, things get freaky at the subatomic level.
	But certainly engineers don't work at the subatomic level in that way.
	And in the realm of morality, quantum physics is irrelevant because quantum phenomena cancel out long before you get to sense data.
	And, you know, try this.
	You know, don't try this, right?
	But try committing, I don't know, try committing a crime and then saying, but in another universe, it's entirely conceivable I didn't commit this crime.
	I mean, your ass is going to jail anyway.
	There's a certain level of practicality that we just need to have.
	And there's, I don't know, so much of sort of modern thought is just absolutely raping the common sense of mankind into, you know, quivering, blood-soaked, haunch subjugation.
	Like people just making up the most absurd nonsense.
	Using the products of science to deny the value of science is a form of mental illness.
	Now, I'm not saying, of course, everyone who does it is mentally ill.
	And it's fine if you do that or you have done that.
	We've all done things that look crazy in hindsight.
	And but once you know it, right, once it's pointed out to you, you can't use the products of science to say that science is not valid.
	You can't use the evidence of the senses to say you can't trust the evidence of the senses.
	So, you know, in your GPS, right?
	You want to get to, I don't know, Picatin, Woodbridge, right?
	You want to get to Woodbridge.
	And you say to your GPS, give me the best route.
	Whether the best route for you is whatever.
	Maybe you want the scenic route.
	You say, avoid highways.
	Maybe you want the cheapest route.
	Okay, avoid tuls.
	Well, whatever the best route is for you, right?
	It's the best route.
	Or let's say you're an ambulance.
	Well, ambulance, you don't want the scenic route.
	You don't care about tuls.
	You just need to get to the person to the hospital as quickly as possible.
	Let's just change the analogy to ambulance.
	This is how live the show is.
	Reforging analogies on the fly.
	The ambulance has to get the best route, right?
	You punch in your GPS and it gets you the best route.
	And let's assume the GPS is accurate.
	It is, right?
	Get the best route.
	Now, let's say you get there and you study because you want to check the GPS afterwards, and it was the best route, right?
	It was the best route.
	There was no better route.
	Everything else would have cost you more time, more money, and could have killed the person in the back of the ambulance.
	It's the best route.
	So does it make sense to say that ambulance trip, it was the best route, but it was inferior?
	Does it make any sense?
	That was the best route.
	It got us there the fastest.
	There was no other way to get us there faster, but it was not the best route.
	It was an inferior route.
	Well, compared to what?
	Well, teleportation, but there is no teleportation.
	You got to get the ambulance to the hospital over the roads.
	GPS gave you the best route.
	You checked it afterwards.
	Yes, it was the best route.
	Everything else was locked jammed.
	There were trains, ditches, flaming ice cream trucks, craters, asteroid falls, whatever, right?
	This was the best route.
	So if that is the best route, saying there's a better route doesn't make any sense.
	So when people post to me on X saying, hey, man, language is subjective.
	Your eyes can deceive you.
	Science is not proof.
	Science is not truth.
	It's like, but then why are you using my eyes and my capacity for language and science to tell me that there's something better than all of these things?
	If there is something better than language, the evidence of the senses and science, why aren't you using that instead?
	I mean, listen, man, I understand.
	If you want to go from Buffalo to Vegas, from cold trash to hot trash, you want to go from Buffalo to Vegas as fast as possible.
	I get it.
	If you're walking, that's pretty slow.
	If you're driving, that's faster.
	If you're flying, that's fastest, right?
	So if somebody says, man, I got to get to Vegas in a hurry.
	I think I'll walk.
	You say, well, you should fly.
	Okay.
	I get that.
	But why, if people believe there's a better method of human communication than language, the evidence of the senses, and science, why don't they use that instead?
	So there's an old Kantian argument that says, well, we can't know the things in themselves, right?
	You look at an apple, you only see one side of the apple.
	You can't see both sides at the same time.
	Unless you're that odd guy on Instagram whose eyes go both ways, but you can't, you can't.
	Can't remember his name now.
	My daughter will kill me because she's shown me this video about a hundred times.
	But Kant says, you can't see the whole apple.
	Or to put it another way, you can't see God's apple, right?
	You can't see every cell, every atom.
	You can't see the inside and the outside of the skin.
	You can't see the core and the outside and all the way around to the top and the bottom.
	And it's evolution and it's in end product and you can't see where the atoms go after it's eaten.
	So you can't see the whole apple.
	And, you know, taking out the God equation part, okay.
	Taking out the God equation part.
	Yeah, fair, fair.
	I can't see the whole apple.
	I can see the part I'm looking at.
	I know it's an apple.
	If you've got an apple, a banana, and you say pass the apple, nobody passes you the banana.
	So I get it.
	I get it.
	So we need principles because we're not omniscient.
	We cannot see every atom of the apple simultaneously.
	We can't see the apple stretched from past, present, and future.
	Okay, yeah, I fully accept that.
	Is that a limitation?
	Well, it's like saying flying is a limitation because of teleportation.
	And it's like, but teleportation doesn't exist.
	You cannot despawn and respawn somewhere else.
	So teleportation is not a thing.
	It's not real.
	So you cannot say that something is limited by comparing it to something that is impossible.
	I mean, you know that Star Trek only introduced teleportation.
	Bear me down, Scotty, because they didn't have the money for flying to the planet special effects.
	So they'd put the shimmer in because it was cheaper.
	It's not a real thing.
	Obviously, we know that, right?
	It's magic.
	It's magic.
	So, I mean, imagine, I mean, this is just common sense stuff.
	Like, rather than doing this, like, bizarre debate stuff on X, if you want to lift your values, then you can go to a travel agent and say, man, I need to get to Vegas quick.
	And they say, oh, yeah, well, the next flight is at two o'clock.
	I can get you in on that.
	And you're like, no, no, no, no.
	Come on, man.
	I need to get there perfectly quickly.
	The travel agent will look at you and say, what?
	Sorry, what now?
	What?
	What are you talking about?
	It's like, no, I need to get there instantaneously.
	Travel agent is going to give you that thousand-yard stare and possibly push a security button under her desk because you are showing signs of psychosis.
	No, I need to get to Vegas now.
	She's like, all I could do is put you on a flight at two o'clock.
	It's a non-stop flight.
	It's the fastest you can get to.
	You're there in three and a half hours.
	No, right?
	That would be insane.
	Like you would be insane to demand teleportation because teleportation is impossible.
	Atoms cannot go from here to Vegas with no traversing of the intervening space.
	That is not possible.
	So having a standard like the Kantian standard of, well, true knowledge is knowing the thing in itself and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, but that's not possible.
	It's impossible.
	It's like teleportation.
	It's not a limit of human perception, conception, and intelligence to say we can't see everything all at once.
	Now, of course, if you compare it to omniscience, yeah, well, yeah, well.
	But omniscience is not a thing that applies to human beings.
	It's like saying, well, you know, my grandmother, she died at 105 years old.
	She had a tragically short life.
	Horrible, horribly short life.
	It was so unfair, so unjust.
	We wept copious tears at the shortness of her life.
	And you say, wait, sorry, when did she die?
	Oh, she died at 105.
	Weeks, months?
	No, no, no, years.
	Say, how is that?
	I'm sorry, how is that a short life?
	Well, I'm comparing it to never dying at all.
	I'm comparing eternal physical life to my grandmother dying.
	I mean, she died infinitely short of an infinite lifespan.
	That person would be insane.
	Like, deeply disturbed, absolutely out of reality.
	Oh, but there's a standard.
	Imagine giving that speech at the funeral.
	Poor grandmother snatched from us so soon.
	She should have lived forever.
	Don't ask me why there are other caskets here.
	She should have lived forever.
	She should have lived physically.
	I mean, blow past Methuselah 900 plus years.
	She should have lived forever.
	She should have been immortal, but not bloodthirsty.
	She should have been immortal.
	She was snatched from us at the tender age of 105.
	It's just beyond tragic.
	I mean, people would get mad at you for mocking a woman who awfully obviously lived a very long life.
	So creating imaginary standards of omniscience and perfection and then saying, well, science falls short.
	Science is the absolute gold standard, best that we have.
	There is nothing better.
	It's funny because people get mad at AI for making mistakes.
	So humanity advances because we can reject the evidence of our senses.
	That's why we advance, right?
	We have imaginations.
	We can picture things that aren't there.
	I can picture a book that didn't exist and I could write the book, use my imagination.
	So we can create things that aren't there, which is great.
	But along with the capacity to have progress is the inevitability of making mistakes.
	It's the inevitability of making mistakes.
	The higher you turn creativity on AI, the more hallucinations you're going to get.
	But if you don't have any, then it's just Google.
	Except more honest because Satan is more honest than Google.
	But anyway, actually, no, probably Satan runs.
	That's a whole other, that's a theological debate for another time.
	Stay on target, stay on target.
	Destroy a tritter, intruder, bean tangent.
	I get berserk on my mind.
	Oh, no, they're drawing me away again.
	Let me refocus.
	Recenter.
	Ah, zomb, zomb, zomb.
	Let us get zen.
	It's the best we've got.
	Human beings are very creative.
	We make mistakes.
	People lie.
	They cheat.
	They have conflicts of interest.
	They are seduced by money, fame, power, glory, affirmations, popularity.
	You name it, right?
	So science is the best we have.
	We don't progress without imagination.
	Imagination means we get things wrong sometimes.
	And so what do we have?
	What's the best thing that we can get to for truth?
	Having a hypothesis, a conjecture, a theory, a theory.
	And a theory says, this is how I think things will go.
	I'm talking about the conjecture, like the very beginning, like the theory of gravity.
	People think it's still just, well, it's just a theory.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	It's just, it's confirmed, right?
	Gravity is a real thing.
	I mean, nobody who's sane doesn't believe that gravity is a real thing.
	Because otherwise, people would try to fly, you know?
	Like my friends and I, when I was a kid, we always had the vague theory we could just take a blanket and jump off the garage roof and float nicely down.
	I have actually a two-teeth mark on my left knee, a scar from when I was very young, trying to jump off a roof.
	I wasn't trying to fly.
	I just went up to get a tennis ball because we needed it to play.
	And I jumped off the roof.
	My knee buckles and my two front teeth went into my knee.
	And I still have the little perfect angle scars from over 50 years ago.
	So yeah, gravity is a real thing.
	Nobody thinks otherwise who's sane, right?
	And they don't live very long if they think that gravity is not real because they'll just run and jump and do all kinds of crazy stuff and die.
	Why would I take a plane when I could just fly myself?
	Right?
	What do I need a parachute for?
	So they just die.
	So that which we describe in empirical reality is rational, objective, and consistent.
	There is no way we could be having this conversation if reality wasn't rational, objective, and consistent.
	If atoms and energy did not behave in objective, rational, and principled ways.
	And again, quantum mechanics, it's all kind of a little fuzzy and boily down at the bottom.
	But by the time you, you know, I remember when I was a kid, do you ever try?
	Well, I mean, when I was a kid, I guess you could do it now with pixels.
	When I was a kid, I want a microscope at some fair, throwing balls of coconuts or something.
	And occasionally I used to get a picture from the newspaper and I'd zoom in.
	And of course, back in the day, rotoscope, I don't know what it was, but there was this process that it was like pixelation, right?
	Like the dot, dot, little dot, dot, dots that you can use to create pictures.
	And so I would take the newspaper and I'd put it into my microscope and I'd zoom in and I would just see a couple of dots, right?
	But when you zoom out, you get the picture, right?
	So none of those dots are the picture.
	But if there are no dots, there's no pictures.
	You put the dots in aggregate, you get a coherent and consistent picture.
	So if you zoom in enough on matter, things seem kind of freaky and weird.
	And there's the double slit experiment and all of that.
	And you can know the position, but not the path of the electron, things like that, because everything you do to measure it will change it.
	So I get, yeah, quantums, yeah, things are freaky, but the same way you zoom in on a picture, you just see a couple of dots.
	If you just looked at that couple of dots and says, what's that a picture of?
	You wouldn't have any clue.
	But you zoom out and you get a picture that's completely comprehensible.
	Oh, that's the guy.
	Hey, let's tie all the analogies together.
	Yeah, that's a picture of a guy on horseback with a pith helmet and a sword over his head.
	And look at that shadow, perfectly consistent with the statute, right?
	So science is the best we got.
	There's nothing better.
	There's nothing better.
	And we know that because it works.
	It works in a way that nothing else does.
	In the same way, the free market works in a way that nothing else does.
	Both of them conform to humility.
	And that's what's really tough.
	That's what's really tough about science and the free market is it directly targets vanity, narcissism, megalomania, delusions of grandeur, delulu, right?
	So the free market says nobody knows how resources should be allocated, right?
	Oh, we should spend money on this and we should increase government funding on that and we should cut back on this or we should tax it.
	Nobody knows.
	Nobody knows.
	And this is the veil of ignorance in free market discussions, particularly out of the Austrian school.
	It's very clear.
	Nobody knows how resources should be allocated or created or anything like that.
	Nobody knows, which is why central planning always fails, because central planning is a delusion of grandeur.
	It's a delusion of knowledge that you can't possibly possess.
	You can't possibly possess it.
	Nobody knows how much gold there is in the world.
	Nobody knows.
	Because, you know, there's gold that's been handed down and it's in someone's jewelry box in the basement or something like that.
	Nobody knows how much gold there is.
	Now, if gold would go up 10 times in price, a lot of people would bring out their jewelry and sell it.
	So things would be, things can be repurposed and so on.
	The market can figure out all of these things over time, but no individual knows.
	No individual knows what the price of rental units should be.
	No individual knows how many machine lathes there should be in the world.
	The only thing that can possibly ever sort these things out is voluntary trade based on the price system in the free market.
	I mean, everybody's heard these absolute toilet-brained windbags who are like, well, I think that we should spend money on this.
	And if we invest more in education, then that's going to work out beautifully.
	And if we do this, it's like, you don't have a clue.
	You're just making like weird totalitarian noises with your breathing hole.
	You don't know, nobody knows.
	Nobody can figure out underutilized resources that only come into utilization.
	I mean, we need wood.
	Okay, well, if you need wood, then if you bid up the price of wood, then people will bring wood, right?
	Maybe they got a bunch of wood in their backyard or their basement.
	It's just sitting there that left over from some project.
	Then they'll come in and sell it to you.
	Or maybe they'll take their ping pong table.
	Or maybe they haven't used their model train set in 20 years and they'll take the model trains off.
	And if the price is high enough, they'll sell the wood that underlies it.
	Four by six.
	I slept under one when I had a model train set in my early teens.
	Nobody knows.
	Only the free market will tease and there'll be incentives and so on.
	So nobody knows.
	There's no better knowledge than the free market.
	There's no better marker of how things should be allocated than price.
	No better marker.
	It does nothing better.
	And anybody who says they're better than the voluntary, free, uncoerced decisions of millions and millions of people is insane.
	Like, I'm not kidding about this.
	I mean, they may have a suit.
	They may have an office.
	They may do all of these wonderful things, but they're insane.
	I mean, can you imagine me saying, or anyone saying, well, people shouldn't date each other, and they certainly shouldn't decide who they marry, but they shouldn't even decide who they date.
	I will tell everyone in the world who to date.
	That would be insane, right?
	I would be mentally ill if I said that.
	That would be delusions of grandeur.
	That would be psychosis far worse than thinking you could fly, because at least thinking you can fly self-corrects that out of the gene pool.
	But powermongers go on and on with this massive vanity.
	In the same way, science is the rigorous process of measuring truth claims against reality or truth claims about reality to actual reality.
	That's all.
	You say this is true about reality.
	Okay, fantastic.
	Let's measure that.
	Let's find out.
	Let's think about that, shall we?
	You say this is true about reality.
	Okay, that's not, I like blue.
	That's not, I had a dream about an elephant last night.
	That is a truth claim about reality.
	And people love to waffle burger on in their truth claims about reality.
	I remember once being in an investor meeting many moons ago, and they were thinking of investing in a couple of companies, and I was brought in as a wee bit of an advisor.
	And the first company said, yeah, we're looking to do 4 mil in sales next year.
	And we said, ah, you know, I don't, you know, the investors said, I'm not sure that's going to work for us because, you know, we like for companies to make at least five mil to start, right?
	So then they turn to the next guy and says, well, what is your company going to do next year?
	He says, oh, five mil.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Now, everybody knew he was lying because they just said we only invest in companies that make five mil or more.
	He's like, oh, yeah, five mil.
	Oh, easy to be more than that.
	Easily, that's the base.
	That's the best.
	That's the worst case scenario is five mil.
	Now, I don't think it was.
	And then what I said to the investors is, don't tell them your floor for investing if you want people to be honest about their projections, right?
	So everybody wants to believe stuff because they just want to be right.
	And science comes along and says, oh, sorry, you say that's true about reality.
	Great.
	Let's test it.
	That's all it is.
	And we have these tests all over the place.
	Oh, you say you're a doctor.
	I'm going to need to see your medical license.
	Right?
	Oh, you think you're a good programmer?
	Okay.
	Solve these programming problems.
	Oh, you think you know your 12 times table and you know how to spell 100 words?
	Let's test you on it.
	That's all.
	It's just a test.
	Oh, you claim this to be true?
	Fantastic.
	Let's find out.
	Now, liars and vainglorious D-bags don't want to be tested.
	Of course not.
	And everybody who fails to submit to rigorous testing is a fraud.
	This is why I've talked earlier about government quote science.
	Government science is a mystery religion of corruption and power.
	It's all it is.
	All it is.
	And anybody who's been in academia, and I did spend some years in academia, knows that it's just a conformity experiment.
	98% of scientists who are funded affirm that which gets them the funding.
	Yeah, no kidding.
	No kidding.
	You know, I find that advertising companies paid by Coca-Cola have a lot of positive things to say about Coca-Cola.
	It's weird.
	They never do an ad with you drop the penny and it gets cleaned, right?
	They never talk about the link between soda and tooth decay and diabetes and obesity.
	No.
	They say, oh, look at all of these thin, pretty people drinking sugar water.
	It's a miracle how much conformity there is.
	You know, I often find when the current is very strong, the fish who are trying to go upstream will swim in the same.
	They're all in a line.
	It's like this a conspiracy.
	Like, oh, they just woke up that morning and said, hey, we're just going to swim in this line.
	So, hey, well, science can only give you an approximation of the truth.
	Nope.
	No.
	Compared to what?
	Compared to the Kantian standard of omniscience?
	Well, that's a bullshit standard.
	That's a nonsense.
	That's a ridiculous standard.
	That's a ridiculous standard.
	It's a non-standard.
	It's the destruction of a standard.
	We don't have perfect knowledge of things in themselves and we never will because we are, I won't even say limited because there's no other way to get it.
	I I can't mind meld with an apple.
	I can't believe the things I have to say to robut nonsense.
	I can't mind meld with an apple and figure out its essential atomic structure for all time.
	I can't do it.
	It doesn't happen.
	I have to rely on the evidence of the senses.
	And that's the most truth that is possible is reason and evidence.
	That is the most truth that is possible.
	There's nothing better.
	Why reason?
	Because reason comes from the consistent behavior of matter and energy transmitted through the senses.
	Science works because matter and energy behave in predictable ways.
	How do we know that matter and energy behave in predictable ways?
	Because we wouldn't be alive if they didn't.
	If matter behaved randomly, then it would never assemble itself into anything that resembled a consciousness.
	Matter is so stable that personality traits remain relatively stable throughout people's lives.
	I accidentally went to a high school reunion some years ago, and everyone's like, bro, you're like exactly the same.
	Yeah, because I remember I was at this high school reunion, and I saw there was this girl that I liked who was very shy, and I saw her down the hallway.
	She had exactly the same posture and attitude that she had in high school.
	I'm not saying people can't change.
	I've certainly changed.
	I used to have a real temper.
	And so you can change, you can mature, but personality traits remain remarkably stable, as does IQ, over the course of people's lives.
	That's how, I mean, even in the neurons, even in the accidental intersection of genes and experience that characterize the personality, there's remarkable levels of stability, even in something that you would expect would be not stable, like the personality and the intelligence of someone over the course of the lifetime.
	Right.
	So science is the best.
	There is no truth standard higher than science.
	It's like saying, you know, when people say, this good is underpriced.
	Nope.
	There is no price other than what people agree to.
	There's no magical price.
	Should be higher, should be lower, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	You get what you negotiate.
	Your price is what you settle for.
	If you're willing to work for 50 bucks an hour, you get 50 bucks an hour if someone's willing to pay you.
	If you're willing to work for 25 or 7, that's what you get.
	Say, well, I'm worth more than that.
	It's like, then you need to, but there's no abstract value other than what people negotiate.
	What's the value of a bottle of water?
	Well, if you're dying of thirst in a desert, it's everything you own.
	If you've just already had three bottles of water and you'd really need to pee, you're not going to pay for another bottle of water.
	It's worthless to you.
	You don't want it.
	There's no value or price embedded in things.
	Only the free market determines the value of something, and the value manifests in the immediate moment of exchange and then vanishes again.
	Because you can buy something for a dollar, go down the street, maybe in front of a concert, buy a bottle of water for a dollar, you can sell it for $2.
	So what was the bottle of water worth?
	Well, it was $1 when you bought it from the convenience store, and it's $2 when you sell it to the thirsty guy coming out of the rave.
	There's no embedded value.
	The value manifests in a flash in the moment of exchange and then disappears again.
	Everybody's had buyers' remorse, right?
	I bought this thing.
	I wanted it.
	I valued it.
	And now I don't want it.
	I'm going to return it.
	I bought a headset not too long ago.
	And the headset, it was like 40 bucks or whatever, right?
	And the headset, I wanted a mute button, right?
	So I put on the headset, I look up the instructions, and I push the mute button, and it says, muted.
	And then there's a beep every 30 seconds when I'm muted.
	And then when I push the mute button again, it says, unmuted.
	It's like, I don't want that.
	I think that's an, and I actually emailed the manufacturer and said, can I turn that off?
	They're like, nope.
	I'm like, okay, well, no, it doesn't have value for me.
	I thought it had value for me.
	Pretty comfortable.
	Not bad sound quality.
	Decent microphone.
	Mute on.
	No, I don't want that.
	And I certainly don't want the, when I'm trying to listen to someone, I don't want to beep in my ears every 30 seconds.
	Beep, beep, right?
	That's annoying.
	So it went from having value to not having, and it went from having value to being a negative because they had to package it up and return it and so on, right?
	And so there's no value, mysterious abstract value.
	This band is underrated.
	It's criminally underrated.
	I know people pick jokes about that.
	And where's the truth?
	Where's the truth?
	A conjecture in science has to be logically consistent, right?
	You can't have as your conjecture, I'm going to test whether this is true and there's a contradiction right at the beginning.
	On the assumption that gases both expand and contract when heated, on the assumption that gravity both attracts and repels at the same time, right?
	Then nobody's going to read any further because it's like, bro, you got a contradiction here.
	Okay, the basis of my scientific theory is that gold is identical in atomic structure to silver, right?
	Nope, it's not.
	If the basis, oh, if we assume a carbon atom is the same as a hydrogen atom, it's like, well, it's not, right?
	So nobody's going to read any further because it's got a self-contradiction at the beginning, like a math.
	I'm going to found my mathematical hypothesis on two and two make five.
	Nope, it doesn't.
	So I'm not.
	So it has to be logically consistent because you're trying to describe the behavior of matter and energy, which is logically consistent.
	So if your hypothesis is self-contradictory, if your hypothesis is logically contradictory, blah, blah, blah, it's wrong.
	You don't have to test it.
	It's just wrong.
	My hypothesis is that there's such a thing as a square circle.
	It's like, nope, you don't have to go looking around for it.
	You don't have to read any further.
	This is just the rantings of a crazy person.
	Or the contradiction might be more subtle, but it's wrong.
	And I will take questions, and I appreciate everybody's patience.
	It's such a big topic.
	It's such a big topic.
	It's really, really important.
	So when people say, well, science only approximates the truth compared to what?
	Compared to what?
	Perfect knowledge doesn't exist.
	Perfect knowledge is a contradiction in terms.
	Omniscience is a contradiction in terms.
	It's saying infinite knowledge, but knowledge is acquired and must be validated.
	And saying infinite knowledge is also saying that you can have knowledge that passes the barrier of time.
	You know all things past, present, and future in every conceivable detail.
	That's not how the brain works.
	That's not how knowledge works.
	That's not how truth works.
	It's an anti-concept.
	It's like immortality.
	Well, you've just taken a human life, which is defined by living and dying, and you've taken away the properties of living and dying.
	You haven't added anything.
	You've just taken away properties.
	So you've got this thing called knowledge, which comes through the principles identified by the consistent behavior of matter and energy as transmitted through the senses, conceptualized, abstracted, made non-contradictory in a consistent hypothesis, tested, validated, blah, blah, blah.
	Once you go through that, that's knowledge, right?
	There's no such thing as instant, perfect, eternal knowledge.
	You can't grok every atom of an apple.
	It's a fantasy.
	It's like a kid saying, you know, wouldn't it be great if when I ate a candy bar, I just regrew?
	Well, yeah, it's a funny idea.
	But, ah, kid, that's a great idea.
	I'm going to start that business, regrowing candy bars.
	Probably involving some sort of mRNA technology.
	But you'd look at a kid and say, yeah, that would be cool, right?
	Like my daughter, when she was little, we would sit on the couch and daydream about the coolest restaurant to open.
	Wouldn't it be great if parrots brought the entrees?
	I actually used some of this in my novel, The Future.
	But you don't sit there and say, wow, that's a great idea, right?
	Because, you know, when we got older, I'm like, yeah, but the problem is parrots pooping, right?
	So, but that's why, you know, in the, oh, God, what's that?
	That's that restaurant where they have all of the apes and all of that in the undergrowth, right?
	But they're not real because apes would poop and stink and fart and all of that sort of stuff, right?
	So there is no perfect truth.
	There is no omniscience.
	There's no eternity, at least as far as human truth goes.
	You say human truth.
	Now, if you're going to compare the truth that has to be hard won and fought for to automatic, perfect, universal, eternal truth, then you are creating a fantasy and saying that that which is the greatest possible standard that human beings achieve is wrong compared to something that doesn't exist.
	It's like saying, I'm not going to date any woman because I want a woman who doesn't age.
	Okay.
	Well, that's sterility, right?
	Because you're creating a fantasy called an ageless woman and then saying, well, all women are deficient because women age and I want a woman who doesn't age.
	It's like, that's not a real standard.
	Like, what would you say to someone like that?
	I want a woman who's born voluptuous at the age of 20 and never ages.
	And I will date no woman who either was a child or will grow older.
	Or, I don't know, at the sort of slightly more believable extremes, I will only date women who look like Sailor Moon characters.
	It's like, well, you know, those are baby eyes and kind of a weird half-pedo drawing style and all of that, right?
	Like there are no women who look like the Sailor Moon characters.
	Thank God.
	They'd be freaky.
	So that would, and saying, look, I'm not going to compromise.
	I'm not going to compromise.
	I mean, don't tell me what I have to put up with.
	I am not going to compromise.
	Well, that's crazy, right?
	It's not compromise to accept reality.
	Reason and evidence is the highest standard of truth that we have.
	There's no higher standard and there's no other higher possible standard.
	And saying, well, I just find that deficient is crazy.
	I'm not dealing with objections.
	And I'm not saying you're crazy if you've ever said this or believed this.
	Like I believed in socialism when I was younger, but then I learned better, right?
	So I'm not saying, like, if you've never heard these arguments before, I'm not saying that, oh, you're crazy, you're mentally ill.
	I'm just saying that once you hear the arguments and once you look at what you're doing, people who send me text-based messages using science and relying on the evidence of my senses are saying this is the highest standard of communication.
	And saying this standard of communication falls short of ideal communication, it's like, well, then why not do ideal communication?
	This is why when people say to me, well, you know, there's lots of truth that's not available to the senses.
	It's like, well, then why are you sending me this argument using my senses?
	Why are you asking that I read using my faulty highsight, right?
	Why are you asking that I so when people communicate to me, they're communicating using the best methodology possible.
	Because if there was a better methodology, they would use that.
	Like, I've never been engaged in a debate with someone online or wherever, right?
	And what they do is they get mad at me for not responding.
	And I say, well, I didn't see any posts.
	And they say, no, no, no, no, because what I did, I did smoke signals.
	I also released some carrier pigeons with a rough, I heard you live in Canada, so I released some carrier pigeons with notes tied to them saying, go to Canada, right?
	Because that would be crazy.
	That would be.
	So when they reply to me, they're saying, this is the best medium for responding.
	Your senses, reading my message, science to transmit the senses, and the fact that language has meaning, that's the best we can do.
	Because if there was a better way to do it, that's why I say to people, well, you can't trust your senses.
	Like, why are you using my senses to tell me that?
	If there's something better than the senses, use that.
	If you want to get to Vegas faster, and flying is faster than driving, fly.
	If you are debating me on the internet, saying there's something better than science and the senses, you're lying.
	It's a con.
	And again, until you've kind of been brought up short with this kind of stuff, you know, we all make mistakes.
	We all say and think foolish things.
	And Lord knows we get trained by a bunch of propagandists into believing stuff that in the future will be classified as mentally ill.
	So I'm not calling you crazy, which is why I, you know, when people say this kind of stuff to me, I don't just say, well, you're insane.
	I say, okay, well, why don't you, if there's something better than reason and evidence, why don't you send me the message using that?
	Why don't you psychically contact me?
	Why don't you use teleportation and we can have a live debate in my living room?
	Why don't you mind melt with me and we can share the fusion of our neurons winding together like smoke from two fireplaces and then everybody will get a deep and eternal sense of truth from our combined mental telekinesis.
	It's like, nope, I don't do any of that.
	I want to type using science and rely on the meaning of language and the evidence of your senses to tell you that there's something way better than science.
	Science is only an approximation of truth.
	Nope.
	No.
	Because it's creating an illusory standard of omniscience and then comparing science as deficient.
	Nope.
	Nope, nope, nope.
	And what you're doing is you're saying, I don't want to submit my ideas and arguments and beliefs to reason and evidence.
	And I just wish people would be honest about that.
	That's all.
	I mean, honesty is the first virtue.
	Without that, no other virtues are possible.
	So just say, I believe things rejected and repudiated by science, reason, and evidence.
	That's all.
	I don't want to submit those things because I would rather have my beliefs than have the truth.
	That's all.
	Because everybody who says, well, there's a higher standard than reason and evidence and logic, the higher standard, it always turns out to be exactly what they believe that they don't want to submit to reason and evidence.
	That's all.
	So I get it.
	It's tough to give up ideas you treasure.
	Lord knows I've had to do it countless times.
	I may even have to do it today.
	So I completely understand.
	And I sympathize.
	I really do.
	It's tough in that, you know, we've got an angel on one side saying, seek the truth.
	We've got the devil on the other side saying, create whatever murky nonsense definitions you need to create in order to retain the beliefs you already like.
	Do you bend your ideas to reality and then gain the right to call them true?
	Or do you shred reality in order to retain your irrational beliefs and call yourself right?
	That is the angel of the devil.
	And I'm not kidding about this.
	If we shred reason and evidence, we end up at war.
	We do.
	We end up at war.
	I mean, there's a reason why for 300 years in Europe, there were these horrifying religious wars, killed massive sections of the population.
	There was a traveler in Germany during the Reformation who said, I have scarcely seen a tree without some heretic hanging from it.
	We give up on reason and evidence.
	There's a reason why there's religious warfare all over the place, but you don't see kidnappings and pitched mortar battles at scientific conferences.
	I mean, maybe you will if their funding gets threatened from the state, but mathematicians get together and argue and debate without needing to kidnap and torture hostages because they have an objective standard by which to negotiate their disputes, reason and evidence.
	Again, absent science, which creates these cyst bubbles of isolated thought that is simply dependent upon funding.
	Science grows around government funding in the same way that algae grows around shit dumped in a pond and with the same amount of intellectual honor and consistency.
	So those are my thoughts.
	I'm happy to have had the conversation today.
	I am thrilled to hear what people want to have to say.
	And there is an Arabic friend of ours who I'm not even going to try and pronounce this because I'm concerned that my furniture is going to start to float.
	But if you wanted to unmute, if you've been patient, and if there's anybody else that wants to talk, correct me on things, engage in disputation, provide counter-examples and counter-arguments.
	I'd love to hear them.
	So I'm just going to see if.
	All right.
	Looks like our Arabic friend is otherwise engaged.
	The real SSP.
	I think that's it.
	JSP, sorry, JSP.
	If you wanted to unmute, I'm all ears.
	I know I'm getting audio because I can hear the occasion.
	Can you hear me now?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Okay, very good, very good.
	We've spoken once before.
	I'm glad to talk to you again.
	I'm listening.
	I came in once again towards the end of your discussion.
	And again, I'm piqued and interested because we share similar backgrounds and knowledge of Rand and her critiques of Plato.
	I need you to get to, sorry, I do need to get to a question or comment.
	Yes, sir.
	Okay.
	I was going to basically, what I hear in your critique about science is Contra, the notion that we can have perfect knowledge and the counter is that knowledge is contextual and a process.
	Objectivity is a process, right?
	Do you agree that, or do you see the notion of rejection of 100% perfect knowledge as also a rejection of correspondence?
	Like, how do you respond?
	And I don't hold this view, but I'm curious, how do you rhetorically counter the notion that if we accept that knowledge is contextual and a process, that therefore correspondence is a fallacy, that somehow we defeat correspondence theory by understanding that knowledge is contextual.
	Okay, so define correspondence theory for the audience, please.
	Sure.
	So when the concepts in our mind are accurate identifications of exterior facts, such that the things that we think about the world are the way the world is.
	Is that good?
	So how would affirming science deny correspondence theory?
	And I'm well disagreeing with you.
	I just don't follow the logic.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	So there are those who would say that using the argument such as Rand's that knowledge objectivity is contextual and not intrinsic.
	It's not subjective.
	It's objective.
	That it follows from that that you cannot affirm correspondence because it would say you're conceding the fact that you don't have perfect knowledge.
	And if there's no perfect knowledge, there's no correspondence.
	And so I'm just wondering how you, what is your choice of rhetorical strategy against that?
	So in general, what I do is I break down what people are doing.
	Now, is language the best way for you to communicate your argument?
	You're asking me.
	Yeah.
	No, sure, of course.
	It's the only way, really.
	I mean, even if we're using the science, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So language is the best way to communicate knowledge, argument, perspective, or whatever, right?
	Because if there was a better way, we'd do that, right?
	So is language perfect knowledge?
	So I would say there's no such thing as perfection.
	And they would agree, but they would say that defeats correspondence.
	Okay.
	So language is the best way to communicate knowledge, but language is not perfect knowledge because language, we can have disagreements about definitions, right?
	So I'm not quite sure in the way in which you're using correspondence here, which is fine.
	I mean, that's part of the sort of challenge of language is to overcome differences or disparities in definitions and so on, right?
	So language, when people use language, they are saying that language is the best way we have to communicate knowledge.
	And language has challenges because people can have different definitions for the same things, right?
	Okay.
	So even when somebody communicates that language falls shorts of perfect knowledge, I would ask, well, then why are you using it?
	Now, this is not necessarily the case for you because you accept that language is the best way we have to communicate knowledge, but language is not perfect knowledge because perfect knowledge would be instantaneous, right?
	I mean, the fastest way to get to Vegas would be to teleport, right?
	It would be instantaneous travel.
	Sure.
	And so the fact that language is embedded in time, people sort of, I'm not saying you, but people forget that to some degree.
	So language is embedded in time in that you have to arrange your words in a sequence.
	You can't just put all of your words together.
	Like I remember a guy I knew at university.
	I shouldn't laugh, but it was pretty wild.
	So a guy in university I knew was really wired for his exams.
	And I was talking to a friend of mine who's got an exam coming up in a couple of months.
	And she's kind of stressed about it, which I understand because I was like, oh, yeah.
	It was like 10 years ago.
	I was still having exam drinks.
	So a friend of mine had an exam, and I won't talk about whatever pharmaceutical enhancements he tried to up his mark of the exam.
	But he was so high that what he did was he wrote a 20-page essay on one line.
	Okay.
	So he did, yeah, he didn't advance.
	And so what did the professor get?
	He opens up the book and there's like one totally black shredded line.
	So he tried to put 20 pages of words on one line.
	And what did the professor get out of that?
	Obviously nothing.
	Nothing, right?
	Right.
	He got maybe that this guy was tripping balls or whatever, but he so he tried to he tried to use language not in sequence.
	Does that make sense?
	Oh, yeah, sure, sure.
	And it's just nothing.
	So if you took all of your words and said them at the same time, if that was sort of possible, let's say you recorded them and then you just put all the words, all I would get is garbled nonsense, right?
	Nothing would make any sense.
	So language itself is not perfect knowledge because perfect knowledge would be the instantaneous perfect transmission of your idea, but we have to squeeze it through language.
	And that's the best we can do.
	Sure, trying to use language like the Omni notions, you know, all over the world.
	Yeah, or like in the matrix where he's like, I need to learn how to fly a helicopter, downloading now, right?
	I mean, that's not how things work.
	It takes a long time to learn how to fly a helicopter.
	So my point is that people who say that there's such a thing as perfect knowledge have to communicate that using imperfect knowledge.
	Sure.
	But if there is such a thing as perfect knowledge, you should use that.
	If there's imperfect knowledge, if language is the best we have, then having a higher standard is delusional.
	So if science gives us abstract principles that correspond to the objective behavior of matter and energy, right?
	If I say, if I let go of this ball held at arm's length, it's going to fall down, and it does, how does my theory not correspond to what happens in reality?
	Right.
	Okay.
	So I realized something that maybe modify the question then, because I'm realizing there's a side part that I'm really trying to get at, which is, can a processed knowledge, you know, an objective process lead to timeless truths?
	That is to say, can we affirm that knowledge is contextual and objectivity is a process which, of course, is not, doesn't meet a perfect standard.
	But can you, through a process, reach timeless truths?
	That is to say, we can know certain things with certainty and they will not change and cannot change, right?
	Absolutely.
	Yes.
	Absolutely.
	And I also wanted to ask you what you meant when you said, and when I ask you what you mean, it doesn't mean like, what the hell do you mean?
	I just mean that.
	No, no, of course not.
	When you say knowledge is contextual, what does that mean?
	Okay, so contextual meaning that there is a process by which we differentiate some things from other things and that that context creates a to and from thing that we form concepts with, right?
	So we unite things into a kind against a background of difference.
	All of that is a process of abstraction, right?
	And at the end of that process, we reach a certain category, right?
	And so if we divorce what we mean, semantic criterion, if we divorce what we mean by a concept from the context through which we abstracted it from, we begin to just talk nonsense, right?
	So like.
	Okay, so hang on.
	So if I say two and two make four, and somebody says, it is true that I find this sunset very pretty.
	Right.
	So those two statements would not be particularly related, right?
	Right.
	That's an example of contextual, not relation.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But contextual usually doesn't mean that.
	So if somebody says, hey, man, you're taking me out of context, what they're saying is you're separating part of what I said from the whole meaning and misrepresenting my views.
	Yeah, that's not what we're talking about.
	Well, so I'm talking about something like a more hierarchically prior sense of context.
	And like if we're like when we get into the concepts, not into just the sentences.
	So like, for example, Pekov would use when he exegetes an example of justice and how justice only has meaning in a certain context.
	I think the best way to illustrate this is there's a theologian who argues once with Alex O'Connor where he tries to say that if we define, oh man, I'm getting to read.
	He basically made a nonsensical straw man against what is reason by saying, well, then this book is reason because it doesn't meet that definition.
	So it was like a nonsensical straw man because a book isn't in the category of things by which I mean reason could correspond to.
	You see what I'm saying?
	Oh, so it's a category error.
	Like if I look at a fox hunting a rabbit and saying that fox is violating the non-aggression principle, I'm applying moral concepts to a fox.
	That would be a context.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Sorry.
	It's just that context has kind of largely been overtaken by people severing individual parts of speech from the general meaning.
	So, okay, so I understand that.
	So I just want to make sure I understood what you meant by knowledge is contextual.
	And it seems to me that that may not be a helpful thing to say.
	Okay.
	Because if you're talking about a dream that you had last night and a physicist says, no, no, no, that's not how the real world works.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, that would, I mean, well, of course not.
	We're talking about a dream, not about the real world, right?
	Right.
	Just when you say, of course not, we're talking about a dream.
	I would say that is an instance of saying that's a different context.
	But it's okay.
	Like, like, since we understand each other, we don't have to speak in those terms, right?
	I got you.
	Well, yeah, I mean, there are some.
	So one of the things I was thinking was in terms of like contextual stuff is to say, if I say, I'm playing with a fidget spinner, is that good or evil?
	Okay.
	Now, you could say, well, playing with a fidget spinner is neither good nor evil.
	However, if I just stabbed a guy and I'm playing with a fidget spinner while he's dying rather than calling an ambulance, maybe that's evil, right?
	So you can have these things.
	But I think in general, most people know what context you're talking about.
	I mean, if you take an engineering class, you know you're going to be taught the principles of engineering.
	You don't imagine you're going to be taking lesbian dance theory or whatever basket weaving stuff could be jammed into the curriculum these days.
	So I think in general, most people who are worth debating philosophy with wouldn't make fundamental category errors.
	Or if they do, they should be relatively easy to correct.
	So I just want to make sure, as I'm sure we have other callers, but I just wanted to make sure that we got to the answer in terms of correspondence theory.
	So concepts need to, if concepts claim to describe that which is real, that which is out there in the world that we get through the evidence of the senses, if a concept claims to describe that which is real, then it needs to correspond to what is real.
	Sure.
	And simultaneously, we can affirm that without saying it's perfect, but also how do we affirm that it can be timelessly true?
	That is to say, some one, you know, David Kelly, the philosopher, chooses the terms a contextual to refer to axiomatic truths, things that could not be otherwise, you know, things that could, that are, require retortion or reaffirmation through denial in order to try to defeat, right?
	So like existence and identity, or he would say that a good way to refer to those is a contextual because it's impossible that they could not be present in any context.
	See what I'm saying?
	Yeah, yeah.
	You think that's a bad language?
	Well, I would say that if somebody said to me, Steph, you don't exist, that would be a self-detonating statement, right?
	Because why would they be addressing me if they didn't think I existed, right?
	Right, sure.
	And so there's some things which are contradicted by the actions the person is taking, right?
	So if I were to mail you a letter saying that letters never get to their intended recipient, that would be a self-contradictory statement.
	Because if I genuinely believe that… Yeah, performative contradiction or self-detonating statement.
	So the moment somebody says you're wrong, there's an objective standard that they're comparing you to.
	So they can't say that there's no such thing as an objective standard and you're wrong.
	So the moment they say you're wrong, right?
	So I prefer to do what people are actually doing.
	Now, sorry, I prefer to analyze what people, the assumptions built into people's communication.
	So for example, how do we know that physics principles, the principles of physics, are eternally, universally true?
	Let's say gravity.
	Let's just say gravity, right?
	How do we know that gravity is true?
	Well, can we evaluate the truth statement of gravity is a property of matter?
	Can we evaluate that prior to human beings coming along?
	And I would say, yes.
	Yes, we can.
	How can we do that?
	You're asking me?
	Yeah.
	How can we evaluate the statement of gravity, but prior to human beings coming along?
	Yeah, definitely the right concept is prior in the question.
	In other words, we can establish that some things are the means by which some things come to be known while also recognizing that that which comes to be known is logically prior to the existence of the process, right?
	Right, but how do we prove that?
	Let's say gravity.
	How do we know that gravity was valid before human beings came along?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	This is technically, this is what I really wanted to talk to you about.
	Sounds really easy.
	I can give you my answer to that.
	You can tell me.
	Yeah, please.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Okay.
	So if you were to say to me, we can't prove that gravity existed before human beings came along and invented the concept of gravity.
	I would say, does life require an atmosphere?
	Yeah, yeah, sure.
	Can an atmosphere cling to a planet in the absence of gravity?
	Well, yeah, of course you're getting into the technical special science views of the relationship.
	But it's not that special.
	I mean, this is not quite right.
	So I'm not saying I don't want to know the answer, but yeah, I get where you're going.
	Yeah, so you would say, of course, that, of course, life needs an atmosphere, and an atmosphere cannot stay on a planet in the absence of gravity.
	And I would also say, do objects of a particular size tend to be like a large size?
	Do they tend to be spherical?
	Like the moon and Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and so on, right?
	I'm not talking about like series of phobos or like the little moons, but or the asteroids.
	But do objects above a certain size tend to be spherical?
	You say, well, yes.
	Okay.
	It's like, is the moon older than human beings?
	Yes.
	Does gravity explain why the objects are spherical?
	Well, yeah, it does, right?
	Because they're all trying to get to a central mass.
	And as that central mass accumulates, it tends to be evenly distributed.
	It's the accumulation of matter and so on, right?
	And also it'd say, can life exist in the absence of a heat source or an energy source?
	And we say, you have to say, no, of course, life can't exist in the absence of a heat source and an energy source.
	And would we have access to a heat source and an energy source like the sun?
	Would the earth have access to that heat source and energy source if it was not clinging to the sun through gravity?
	Sure.
	If there was no gravity, we would just, the earth would never have formed.
	The sun would never have formed.
	The earth would not be around the sun.
	There'd be no atmosphere.
	So all of the conditions necessary for human life to evolve require the perfect continuity of the property called gravity, right?
	Right.
	Yeah, you're parsing causal priority.
	Right.
	So we couldn't be here if there was no gravity, and therefore gravity did not come into being when we came along because we couldn't be here otherwise.
	Right.
	Does that make sense?
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So the fact that we exist proves gravity is eternal.
	Gotcha.
	Okay.
	So you would even use the technical science like what I would see hierarchically later knowledge in terms of logical priority of gravity and sphericity of large bodies and such.
	No, I would just prove that the fact that I would say your existence proves that gravity is eternal.
	Okay, okay, their particular existence in the full context of where it is and how it, you know, I get it.
	Yeah, like people say, people say, do you have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow?
	And it's like, no, I have an acceptance of the fact.
	Yeah, but causal expectation, right?
	Well, no, it's more than an expectation.
	Because what I say is in the absence of other interventions, the sun will absolutely rise tomorrow.
	Like maybe there's some spaceship, some big death star that is on the other side of the sun that's going to blow up the sun overnight, right?
	Right, right.
	Right.
	But that would all be in conformity with the rules of physics and the laws of reality, right?
	So in the absence of other intervening factors, the sun will rise tomorrow.
	Not it might, but it will rise tomorrow unless something intervenes.
	Like if I throw a rock off a cliff, it will fall to the bottom unless it lands on the back of a bird or on the some hang glider.
	Like all other things being equal, in the absence of other intervening energies.
	Okay.
	It will hate this language.
	Rand calls that a contextual absolute.
	Does that grate you?
	I think that contextual, and this, again, this comes out of my debating experience.
	It also comes out of being misquoted all the time by the nasty media.
	And it also comes out of just the way, and maybe the word meant something different in Rand's time, of course, she was writing in the 50s and 60s, but at least a lot of her nonfiction.
	So I would just call it an absolute.
	I wouldn't even say that it's contextual.
	It's just an absolute.
	To deny that gravity is eternal is to deny the very conditions that allow for your existence.
	And therefore, it would be to say, I am here and not here at the same time.
	I'm here because of gravity, but gravity didn't exist before I came.
	That would be just, that's just, that's a square circle, right?
	That's a logical contradiction.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	Can I ask you a side question that's definitely related to that?
	Because we got other people in the pipe and we've got to be sure.
	Well, I'll just leave this with you, and maybe one day we'll talk about it.
	But this relates to particularly in a debate surrounding what has priority, the laws of logic versus perception in terms of knowledge.
	Okay.
	So this apologist that I mentioned earlier, Turk, he recognizes and he inverts all of Rand's rhetoric almost identically.
	The necessity of retortion or reaffirmation through denial.
	We can't use what we intend to deny, right?
	But he then goes to argue that it doesn't follow.
	He places consciousness before existence in the form of an eternal creator, right?
	Sure.
	And says that in the terms of knowledge or reason, that the laws of logic have priority over perceptual content.
	And I would say that's because he doesn't have a theory of semantic criterion or concept formation, right?
	Like, how does he start before perception to get knowledge about laws, right?
	Well, yeah.
	And there was somebody on X who was arguing, and I asked them to break out the argument, but I haven't seen anything back yet.
	And that's no, I mean, they may just have not seen it or missed it or whatever.
	But it's the idea that reason exists in the mind prior to the evidence of the senses.
	And it's like, nope, nope, nope, nope.
	First of all, matter must behave in a manner that we call rationality for the mind to even evolve.
	Uh-huh.
	Sure.
	So it must have identity, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, if, again, if matter and behavior, sorry, if matter and energy behaved in random ways, we'd never have any kind of stability to develop as a species.
	There would be, you know, the planets would explode, the atmosphere would turn into a dragon.
	And then right, but he would say identity over time presupposes the mind that keeps it constant.
	And obviously, that's another thing.
	Sorry, that's what?
	I don't, you might not be able to do it.
	You rush past these things like everyone knows what you're talking about.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Right.
	So what you just described about the constancy of the pattern of things, right?
	Their identity.
	It's been called identity over time, which is what Hume tried to deflate, right?
	But they would say that it only could have identity over time if a mind had a law.
	The law is what keeps it in its identity.
	So it's a type of idealism, a conceptual idealism about God.
	Well, but so of course the question then, and it's sort of like saying that the laws of physics, and it's kind of unfortunate that we have to use the same word.
	So the laws of man come from the minds of men.
	Sure.
	Right.
	Right.
	I mean, jaywalking is illegal because people decide it's illegal and enforce it.
	And so those laws, there's nothing in the law of physics that says jaywalk, right?
	Right.
	And so the laws of physics are predate human consciousness, and they are the reason for our capacity for logic.
	So because matter behaves in a consistent, predictable, and non-contradictory way, I mean, nobody walks home if they're not on drugs or something.
	Nobody walks home and says, well, it could be my home, or it could be a giant space alien, the front door is a mouth.
	They're going to eat me.
	This might raise your ire, but they would say your own terminology of the laws is, you would say you'd have to, you know, some people try to like harsh a way to semantically describe this without using law because law presupposes the standards that men have made, or even if they discovered them, right?
	And so they would try to say that the identity of things or the facts that the laws state pre-exist the laws.
	So I don't know.
	The fact that the law is what?
	The facts that the laws identify or state are presupposed by the law.
	So that they are prior to the laws and the language.
	This is about language, of course.
	When you say the laws of physics, they'll say, well, but you just said laws are things that men discover.
	No, no, it's a shame that we have to use the same universe.
	So people say it's very hard to look at the universe without the anthropomorphic issues.
	So we are born and we die.
	And then people say, well, the universe is born and dies.
	And the eternity of matter, and we seek for meaning and we seek for virtue and we seek, but matter doesn't do any of that.
	Matter just is.
	And this is what I think Blaise Pascal was talking about in Pense.
	You know, the silent depths of these interstellar spaces fill me with dread because we are tiny little embers of consciousness that are actually bigger than the whole universe because we can encompass it in our minds.
	But with these tiny fleckers of consciousness in the midst of this giant, indifferent machinery of matter and energy that has no cause, has no beginning, has no end.
	And because it's very hard to look at the world and say it has no beginning and it has no end.
	Now you can say, I mean, in the same way, we have no beginning and we have no end because the atoms that are part of my body and my brain, when I'm dead, they'll just be released and go off and shuffle off and do something else, like a commuter is changing a subway train or something.
	They just go off and do.
	So I am eternal insofar as the atoms that go to make up me have been around since the beginning of the universe.
	I'm, you know, whatever.
	Sure, sure, sure.
	Yeah, beginnings and everything.
	But my consciousness is different, right?
	Consciousness lives and dies.
	The body lives and dies, but the atoms don't.
	And so the fact that we are, you know, like you can assemble your Lego pieces into just about anything that you want.
	And the house is assembled and disassembled, but the Lego pieces are constant.
	And so the fact that the atoms assemble themselves into consciousness is really cool and neat.
	The consciousness is born and lives and dies, but the atoms are eternal.
	And so I think a lot of people look at that eternality and say, well, that's consciousness.
	That's the God's consciousness or eternal consciousness and so on.
	But it's not necessary for the equation.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, the substance, you just described what I kind of refer to as a substance argument for the defeating the irreducible eternality in the form of a conscious God, because you need substance to create.
	So you had to have existence precedes beginning and end.
	So they, even theists, agree that there's an irreducible eternality in the form of God, even though their rhetoric is that you had to start somewhere.
	I'm like, well, okay, so we're talking about where we start.
	And then we're going to also talk about what we're coming up with after we start.
	And you need a substance to create anything.
	So if we have an irreducible eternality in the form of God and he's the only singularity, then how with what does he create with or it create with and the only substance is itself?
	Blah, blah, blah.
	You know, you end up with all of this.
	Well, and you know, I'm always fascinated by things that are not logically provable, but are almost universally believed are fascinating to me.
	And I'll close with this part and thank you for the patience.
	I'll get to the next callers.
	But what I find really fascinating is people just believe that the universe had to be created.
	There's an almighty consciousness behind it and so on.
	And I think one of the reasons why that is believable to people is because the concept of gravity did not exist before people.
	So if we think of gravity as the concept, then the concept comes into existence when people come up with it.
	Yep.
	That's the dropping.
	That's what I would say is a dropping of context because you have the ontological and the epistemological difference, right?
	Right.
	And so we have the law of gravity and it is created by people.
	And it describes something that is also, it's called the law of gravity.
	And so people say, well, our law of gravity is created by people, and therefore the law of gravity or gravity itself is created by a God.
	So if you're talking about the eternality of matter and energy and separating it from the concept that identifies that eternality, then because we come up with the law of gravity, we think that somebody must have come up with gravity itself, which is also called the law of gravity and so on.
	And so every rule, rules are invented by people.
	They don't exist in nature.
	There's no such thing.
	I mean, gravity is a property in nature, but the law of gravity as a concept didn't exist before people identified it.
	And so people think, well, if rules and laws and identifications and reality and science, if that's all real and we create it, which we do, then the properties itself that we describe, which the description of which we create, the properties themselves must also have been created.
	And it is, again, standing before this absolute blind, dumb, ridiculous, empty space void of the universe and recognizing how fundamentally different it is from what our consciousness experiences is very tough.
	All right, Lista, I appreciate that.
	Yeah, straightforward.
	Yeah, thank you.
	Good stuff.
	I appreciate that.
	Have a great day.
	All right.
	Devon, it is your turn to shine, your time to shine.
	What is on your mind?
	If you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear you.
	And we've got Draco and we've got Jonathan on deck.
	Going once, going twice.
	You know, your last name is.
	Oh, I thought it was right.
	It's weight.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Sorry.
	I just unmuted.
	No, no problem.
	Okay, so my basic contention is with the hidden context of time, because we talk about reality and science telling us about reality, but doesn't science assume everything it knows about time, and then we just have to proceed from those assumptions and time actually remains a hidden mystery.
	So I just need to break this down a little.
	So you're saying, doesn't science assume everything about time?
	Yeah, like that time is fungible, that time is regular, and that, you know, every second is the same as every other second, all those sorts of things.
	Okay, now you recognize that you are accepting time in the assemblage of language to communicate your idea.
	In other words, you're not randomly scrambling the words.
	You're not saying all the words at the same time.
	You are taking a specific sequence of words woven through.
	the absolute nature of time in order to communicate what your idea is.
	So you are already accepting cause and effect and the sequence of time in order to communicate your argument, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, no, I guess on some level, that's what I mean.
	I would say I haven't.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Sorry.
	Sorry to be annoying.
	I apologize.
	It's not on some level.
	You and I could not have a conversation if we rejected the concept of time, because words come before other words in order for a sentence to become sensible or understandable, right?
	So I don't know if you've ever had these things.
	They used to be popular, I don't know, a decade or two ago.
	I don't know if they still are.
	But you would get these magnetic words that would attach to fridges.
	And there'd be, you know, maybe some poetic words or, and then people would just kind of randomly assemble them and then other people would mix them up, right?
	Or an anagram, right?
	An anagram is when you take the letters in a word and you mix them up, right?
	And then you have to kind of unmix the words and put them in sequence so that you read them from left to right in sequence so that they become comprehensible.
	So if you and I did not accept the concept of time, we couldn't even have the conversation because we wouldn't know when to speak.
	We wouldn't know how to organize not only the words, but even the letters.
	Like if I took every letter from my previous sentence, mixed them up immediately and read them back to you, you wouldn't really know what the heck I was talking about.
	So we do have to have a concept and an acceptance, not in some context, but in the very act of communicating, we are accepting cause and effect and the sequence of time.
	Yeah, I was going to just say that I have some peculiar beliefs about time.
	You know, I don't believe that the future as a category sort of exists.
	I believe that there is something like sequencing of the past.
	Hang on.
	I'm so sorry.
	Again, I never, I always try to be humble in conversation.
	So I don't know what you mean by exists.
	So when you say the future doesn't exist, I need to know what you mean by the word existence, first and foremost.
	Well, I mean, I believe the present exists, and we live in the present, and we can talk about the past, but thinking that sort of the future is the inverse of the past, I think we just kind of...
	Okay, you still haven't Sorry.
	What was my question?
	No, well, I mean, I just think the future is imaginary.
	So, I mean, I don't know how to explain.
	Hang on.
	What was my question?
	What is the future?
	No.
	What was my question?
	Oh, I thought it was what is the future.
	Okay, so listen, bro, if we're going to have a conversation, you do need to listen.
	Now, just because I ask you for a definition doesn't mean you have to provide it, but it's a little bit rude to not even listen.
	They just go off on a speech, right?
	My question was, what do you mean by exists?
	You said the future doesn't exist.
	Okay, so you've got a category called existence, which you deny to the future, but I don't know what the category is.
	What is the category?
	How do you define the category called exists?
	So, I mean, I would just conflate the existence with reality or the present.
	Well, no, but that's short or logical.
	So if you say, I define reality as the present, sorry, I define existence as the present, then you have just defined existence as the present and thereby denied the concept of existence to the future.
	But you still haven't told me what existence is.
	How do you define?
	I mean, you can't say it's just the present, right?
	Well, that's how I think about it.
	I don't know.
	So I guess I don't have a deepest question.
	But you're saying that there's some truth.
	It's not just your particular subjective irrational belief.
	You're saying there's truth in it.
	Okay, let me ask you.
	And again, I'm sorry for asking so basic questions, but I really want to understand where you're coming from.
	Okay, so tell me an object that you see where you are right now.
	A chest of drawers.
	Chest of drawers.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Now, do you believe in the conservation of energy that matter and energy are two sides of the same coin?
	That matter can only be converted to energy and cannot be destroyed.
	Do you accept that sort of scientific principle?
	Sure.
	Okay, good.
	Sure.
	So the atoms that are in the chest of drawers are eternal.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	Well, no, no, not the atoms, but the energy or something like that.
	Let's just say, because right now, like it's not on fire, right?
	So it's not being converted into energy.
	So right now, the atoms are eternal, absent some other intervening force, like a nuclear bomb turning them to ash or something like that, right?
	So the atoms are eternal insofar as they're either atoms or they're converted to energy.
	Do we sort of agree on that?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	So absent further intervention or absent any change of the chest of drawers from matter to energy, assuming it stays in the matter form.
	Will it exist tomorrow?
	Probably without, yeah, yes, without intervening forces.
	Okay, absolutely.
	It will exist tomorrow without intervening forces, right?
	Now, and again, we can say there's some general entropy.
	You know, maybe it's in the sunlight and that the paint fades over time or, you know, you brush past it and the edges get a little more blunt.
	But the chest of drawers will exist tomorrow, right?
	Okay.
	No, I mean, if we assume that matter is eternal, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So existence means the presence of matter and energy.
	That's what existence is to me.
	Right.
	So if there's a door, then there's a door and I can't walk through the doorway.
	If I open the door, I can go through the doorway because the door is no longer there.
	And so the presence of matter and energy is existence.
	Now, if the presence of matter and energy is existence and matter and energy is eternal, then your chest of drawers will exist tomorrow.
	Okay.
	So existence in the future is a guaranteed state.
	So you can't say the future is not real because you know for certain that the chest of drawers will exist in the future.
	I would have added a condition to what you were just saying, though, is that it exists in the present.
	That's what makes it real.
	Well, no, because you can't say something only exists in the present if it's composed of atoms and we've already accepted that atoms are eternal.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I guess that's sound.
	I mean, now, your consciousness will not exist in the future if we take a long enough, right?
	That's that old line from Fight Club on a long enough timeline, everybody's chance of survival drops to zero.
	So your consciousness will not exist in the future.
	But the chest of drawers is a different thing entirely.
	Your atoms will exist in the future, right?
	The atoms that compose your consciousness, your neurons and the electrical and biochemical activity of your brain, they will exist, but you won't.
	Like you as a conscious entity will not exist in the future.
	Your life will not exist in the future.
	And so this is sort of what I was talking about.
	It's very hard to look at the non-living and non-conscious aspects of the universe and not project consciousness onto them.
	So in the future, like, and the past, we forget things or we get things wrong.
	Like, I absolutely know if I were to go back to the childhood home I grew up in or the childhood neighborhood I grew up in, it would not look like how I remember.
	It wouldn't be totally dissimilar, but it wouldn't look like it.
	Like our memory is not a documentary.
	Our memory has a lot to do with our, I mean, particularly prior to, you know, photographs and social media.
	So things in the past we can get wrong.
	We predict things about the future that we get wrong.
	But if existence is the presence of matter and energy, then the future is very real because the atoms are eternal.
	But we'll die.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	But you just said the presence of matter and energy.
	And I believe that the presence of something only occurs in the present.
	No, no, no, we're back to this because we already said that matter and energy are eternal.
	So they exist past, present, and future.
	Because if existence only speaks in by definition, aren't you only speaking by definition, therefore?
	Because by saying that it's eternal, then you've already given yourself everything that the future is ontologically there.
	No, sorry.
	I thought we had agreed that matter and energy are eternal.
	This is a conservation of energy is a basic principle of physics.
	And by basic, I don't mean like it's obvious that I'm trying to insult you, but it is a foundational principle of physics that matter and energy can't be like matter can't be created or destroyed, only transferred to energy and back.
	Well, no, no, I get that it's foundational in physics, but I just think that that's by assumption.
	No, no, that's by proof.
	They've tried six million different ways to destroy this, that, or the other, and they can't do it.
	And it's ontological in the existence of atoms that atoms simply cannot wink out of existence, that that which is present can't just vanish.
	You can't despawn things and so on, right?
	So there is no construction of matter that's ever been theoretically or practically, theoretically conceived of or practically achieved.
	I'm just denying the whole category of the future.
	Okay, if all you want to do is deny something, then it's not a philosophical discussion.
	You're just telling me what your particular prejudice is.
	If you're just saying, well, Steph, it's nice to have all of your recent arguments, but I just deny this.
	It's like, okay, well then, I like cheese.
	I haven't heard, I don't think I've heard that much recent argument.
	You've defined matter as being eternal and therefore inclusive in the present.
	No, come on, bro.
	It wasn't a few minutes ago.
	I remember the past, even if you think it's not real.
	It was a few minutes ago.
	No, no, no, no.
	I believe you're not.
	It was a few minutes ago where we went through the whole argument, and it's recorded.
	You can go back and listen to it again, but where I said, Do you accept that matter and energy is eternal?
	And you said yes.
	And I said the chest of drawers being composed of matter with no other intervening thing.
	Will it exist tomorrow?
	It's like, yes, then existence occurs in the future.
	So we went through this whole argument, which you accepted.
	And there was a long pause.
	And I guess now what cognitive dissonance is kicking in and you don't like the idea that you agreed to, which is fine.
	I mean, we all have that, but let's not pretend we didn't have the debate.
	No, no, I agree with the belief that tomorrow it will be there, but tomorrow will be the present.
	And well, in tomorrow, when we arrive there and it's there, my belief will be confirmed.
	My belief that I had in the past, which is today, right?
	But it's not a belief in like its faith, because if matter cannot be destroyed, then in the absence of intervening destructionary forces or destructive forces, the chest of drawers will be there tomorrow.
	100%.
	Like it's not, it's not because matter can't be destroyed.
	So unless it's transferred or changed or nuked or irradiated or I don't know what, right?
	Turned into mush with some sort of cosmic ray, the chest of drawers will be there tomorrow.
	And even if the chest of drawers isn't there tomorrow, either the matter will be there in some floating thing or it will have been transferred into energy, right?
	So even if you were to take the chest of drawers tonight and set fire to it and use it to keep warm, all of the atoms that compose your chest of drawers will still exist or will have been transferred to energy, but will not have ceased to exist.
	Yeah, no, I'm not disagreeing with the conservation of energy in order to accept that.
	Fantastic.
	That existence in the future is a certainty.
	Well, I'm talking about existence of the future.
	In the future, in the future, we will be in the present.
	Will we not?
	Well, okay, but the future by definition is not the present.
	So if your scintillating addition to philosophical discourse is to say that something that is defined as something different is not the same, then sure.
	Yeah, tomorrow is not today.
	The future is not the present.
	I absolutely concede that.
	I just think that it's not a particularly helpful thing to say that the future is not the present, because if the future was the present, we wouldn't call it the future.
	Well, we talk about the future in the present, but I don't think that that makes it like an epistemological category.
	That's real.
	Well, it does.
	If matter is eternal, then the matter will exist in the future as it exists in the present.
	Maybe not in the exact same configuration.
	Maybe you set fire to your chest of drawers, but we know for certain that the atoms will exist in the future.
	So we know some things about the future.
	Well, we know the atoms will exist in the future for sure.
	I don't know if I'll be alive tomorrow.
	I could get hit by a bus or something, right?
	I don't know if I'll be alive tomorrow, but I know that the atoms that compose my body will still exist 100%.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I just think that this bulldozer's philosophy of time to it just steamrolls it.
	Because what science assumes about time just becomes baked into your epistemology.
	And I think that that's a bit sloppy.
	I don't know what any of that means.
	I mean, sloppy and baked into and destroys the velocity.
	I mean, that's all just a bunch of noise.
	Like you have to provide a counter-argument, or you're just making a bunch of syllables, right?
	Well, I think whenever we talk about the future, we're imagining things.
	We're imagining things that happen in a sequence, which is the present moving forward and leaving behind a sequence of events behind it.
	Okay, let me ask you this, because this is too abstract to be a value, certainly to me and to the audience, which is not to say it's not a value.
	I just want to make things a bit more comprehensible for myself and for people.
	Okay, so you and I have been debating for about 20 minutes, right?
	Okay.
	Is that fair to say?
	Something like that.
	Let's say 20 minutes, right?
	Okay, so when you embarked upon the debate, did you know that the conclusion of the debate would be in the future?
	No, I thought it would be in the present.
	No, no, but when you, that's why I said, bro, you've got to listen.
	When you started the debate, did you assume that the conclusion of the debate would be in the future?
	No, I believe the conclusion of the debate would happen in the present.
	Okay, I don't know why this is tough.
	I could imagine the future.
	I could imagine that.
	When you started the debate 20 minutes ago, of course, the conclusion of the debate as we move forward in time is in the present.
	I get that because we can't exist in the past, so to speak.
	We can't exist in the future.
	get all of that like in terms of like our consciousness is on it you're asking me if i What I'm asking is when you started the debate, let's say what time is it now?
	It's one is 2.15.
	No, 3.15.
	Oh, nice long old chitty chat.
	Okay, that's good.
	Okay, so let's say we started the debate at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
	You started the debate knowing that the debate was going to move through time and conclude in the future from when you started.
	I mean, you didn't start the debate at 3 o'clock and imagine the whole debate would occur at 3 o'clock in an infinitely small time slice, right?
	You knew that the debate was going to occur over a time slice that involved the future, right?
	We weren't going to mind merge and conclude the debate in an atomic split second or something like that, right?
	So in terms of the conversation that you're engaging with me, when you started it, you knew that the conclusion of the debate would be in the future from when you started, right?
	Now, of course, I understand it's always the present.
	I would say it's easier to say that it would have concluded in the past.
	What?
	Wait, we're going to conclude the debate before you even start it?
	I mean, I just can't have a conversation with you.
	I can't.
	I can't have a conversation with you if you can't accept that you started this debate knowing the conclusion was going to be in the future.
	Like, my daughter could understand that at the age of three.
	Otherwise, you're just being obstructionist.
	Like, I can't have a conversation with you if you can't accept and acknowledge that when you started the debate, the conclusion of the debate was going to be in the future.
	I could imagine the future.
	Okay.
	I could imagine the future.
	Okay.
	So, yeah, this is somebody who's not interested in a rational conversation.
	So, yeah, sorry about that.
	I don't think it's a waste of time, but I think it's also important to know when you can't have a rational conversation with someone.
	Like, if somebody can't say, I started the debate at three o'clock, knowing that the debate would be concluded in the future.
	If somebody can't accept that, that's like somebody saying to me, you don't exist.
	All right.
	No problem.
	Hey, sometimes it's good to fail, right?
	All right.
	Let's go with somebody we haven't talked to before, Unity.
	Unity.
	Great video game platform development tool and a fine caller for me.
	What's on your mind?
	Don't forget to unmute.
	Going once, going twice.
	Hello, hello, hello.
	Yes, no?
	Yes, no?
	No, no, no.
	All right.
	Are you talking to me?
	Well, do you see a lot of other people with the word Unity in the title of there?
	Take one minute break.
	I'm in the fridge.
	Take a one-minute break and breathe.
	Okay, I don't know what that's all about.
	Joseph, if you want to let me know what's on your mind.
	I'm happy to hear your thoughts, my friend.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I don't know what the other guy was saying.
	He's in the fridge and I need to take a breath.
	I don't know what that means.
	Maybe having a seashore.
	I hope he gets to the hospital in time.
	Okay, what's on your mind?
	There's about a five to ten second delay, by the way.
	Yeah, no, I know.
	I know.
	That's why I give a little bamping and give people a little bit of a pressure.
	Yeah, so I could comment about two things just based on your past, your previous conversation about the.
	No, no, it didn't exist, man, because it's in the past.
	Yeah, right.
	Right.
	So I mean, the conclusion of our conversation will be in the future.
	I accept that it could be in the future.
	It could be.
	Yes.
	Well, yeah, no, of course, a conclusion of some kind, but that doesn't mean that it is an ontological existent.
	Like, it's an abstract existence.
	Okay, do you accept, I don't want to overcomplicate things, right?
	Philosophy is about simplifying because you see, the more we overcomplicate things in the realm of philosophy, the more free will we take away from people.
	Right.
	Right?
	Because we expect children to be moral.
	And so if we're ontological and complicated and the future doesn't exist, the past is, then we can't expect children to be moral, which means we have to try and what?
	Teach them morality when they become 25 and are graduate students in philosophy, which means people can't be moral, which means society falls apart.
	So I ask again, do you accept that the conclusion of our conversation will be in the future from now?
	Yeah, I accept that there will be a conclusion by some means or another, but that doesn't mean that it is existing right now in the moment.
	You know what I mean?
	No, see, that's not helpful.
	It would be a function.
	No, no, hang on.
	Development.
	Hang on.
	Did I say, do you accept that the future is the present?
	I didn't say that.
	Right.
	So if you say, well, I accept that our conclusion will be in the future, but the future is not the same as the present.
	It's like, that's why it's called the future.
	No, but are you familiar with the two?
	What are the two theories about time?
	There's like the block universe model, and then there's the, what's the other one called?
	Oh, tense, tense versus tenseless time.
	Yeah, I think I neither know, and I sound vaguely interested, but I don't particularly care because, I mean, as a parent, when my daughter was very little and she'd say, can we do this now?
	And I'd say, well, let's do it in five minutes.
	She kind of knew what I was talking about.
	Or let's do it later.
	Or if she said, can we go to the zoo and the park all at the same time?
	Well, she never said that because she knows we can only go to the zoo, then the park or the park, then the zoo, but there's cause and effect.
	If she's hungry, she eats something.
	If she's thirsty, she drinks something.
	There's cause and effect.
	There's time.
	So children completely in fully understand time and fact and so on.
	So the theories are interesting.
	But again, I'm a moral philosopher.
	So we have to accept that people understand what time is.
	Yeah, that's not what I wanted to discuss, actually.
	Clearly, there's an abstract concept of past and future.
	The question is if it's like block time universe tensed versus tenseless.
	Anyway, whatever, if you don't want to talk about that.
	Yeah, let's not get on that.
	It was just because you were talking about the eternity of matter.
	And I was just thinking, well, matter is not eternal because it was obviously created at some point.
	Sorry, sorry.
	Hang on.
	Yeah.
	How do we know it was obviously, what proof do you have that it was obviously created?
	I think physicists don't know.
	Well, just from just from cosmology, from the Big Bang, like the Big Danger.
	No, no, Big Bang is not.
	Big Bang is not.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Big Bang is not certainty.
	Big Bang is a theory.
	Right, sure.
	Yeah.
	I'm just saying that's the current theory, right?
	No, no, no.
	It's not proven.
	It's not proven.
	Right.
	So people don't know.
	So you, yeah, but by that means you can either claim, you cannot claim that matter is eternal either then, right?
	Well, I know I can claim that matter is eternal insofar as it has not been ever disproven that matter can be created or destroyed, only transferred to energy and back.
	And the theory and the practice of matter has affirmed that.
	And as principles, it's eternal.
	It's like saying, well, do you believe that gravity is universal and eternal?
	I was like, well, yeah, because the way that this works is that when I'm talking, unless I get something or misstate something that you've said, you have to let me finish, right?
	Like, this is a time thing, right?
	So if we both talk at the same time, does that help the audience understand what's going on?
	So you have to restrain your response to the future to when I'm finished.
	And I have to do the same to you, right?
	So it's an equal rule.
	So if we both talk at the same time, in other words, if you take your future response and layer it onto my current response, people don't understand what we're saying, right?
	Yes, you overtalked to me as well.
	I wasn't finished my previous point either, but in any case.
	Okay, so this is like a tit for tat thing.
	No, no, no, no.
	I'm just saying, like, we both sort of did that to each other.
	It happens.
	Okay, so in what did I over talk you?
	Well, I was finishing the explanation that you're simply making the assumption that matter is eternal based on the senses.
	But if we go to science, science does not indicate that matter is eternal.
	But if you want to say, well, we can discard that theory from science because right now my senses are telling me it's eternal.
	Well, then that's just like I claim the senses.
	But that actually enrolled.
	Hang on.
	And so this is where I'm interrupting you because you got something wrong.
	So you said we know that matter is created.
	Now, if you start, let's say I start something by saying, well, we know that two and two make five.
	Is it okay to interrupt me?
	I'm sorry.
	I'm not see what point you're making.
	No, no, I'm not.
	I'm just asking you a question.
	I'm just asking you a question.
	You're just asking me questions that matter.
	If I start off a statement by saying, well, we know that two and two make five.
	Right.
	Is it important to say something about eternal?
	Hang on.
	You see, again, you're doing this over-talking thing, right?
	I'm trying to make a point here and you keep overtalking me.
	Now, if you're going to do an over-talking thing, that's fine.
	We can shake hands and part way.
	Don't do that.
	So if you say, well, we know that matter was created, that's not a true statement in science.
	Right.
	I think I didn't say we know.
	I would change that then to say that the theory indicates that matter was created after the Big Bang.
	A theory, not the theory, a theory.
	But it's one of many competing theories and a big veil of knowledge that's lacking and so on, right?
	And so your personal theory is that matter is eternal, which has rude cosmology.
	No, no, no.
	See, that's rude.
	It's not rude.
	It's just stating all the ways.
	It's absolutely rude.
	Have you ever heard of the law of the conservation of energy?
	Of course I have, yes.
	Okay.
	Is that my theory?
	No, it wouldn't be.
	Okay, so why would you call it my theory if it is established scientific fact?
	Well, if you like scientific fact, and in your monologue earlier, you were discussing how we must listen to science.
	Science also indicates that matter did not always exist and even energy did not always exist and at some point appears to have come into existence when it did not exist before.
	And so while currently we find these things conserved in mass and energy, it has not always been so because at some point they didn't exist at all, as far as we can see, according to the scientific theory, which you say that we should accept because they produce things like computers and internets.
	Okay, so now you're just kind of being a douchebag, frankly, and you're not listening.
	I didn't say we shouldn't accept it.
	I said it's one of competing theories and it's not established.
	It's not true.
	It's not been proven.
	So I do really enjoy debating with people in good faith.
	But when people just misrepresent what I'm saying, that's just rude.
	And it is rude.
	It's rude to personalize things and call things my theory.
	It's rude to overtalk me when I'm still trying to make my point.
	Assuming I haven't misrepresented something that you've said.
	Like if somebody says the future exists and then they keep going, I need to know what they mean by the word exists.
	Because if they say anything after that and I don't know what they mean by exists and they're basing their argument on what existence means, and I don't know what they mean by existence, that something exists, then I can't follow the argument.
	So it's worth interrupting people if they don't define their terms.
	So anyway, let's go to I don't know the guy, Jonathan.
	Jonathan, what is on your mind, my friend?
	Let's make this perhaps the last call.
	It's been a good old long chit chat.
	What is on your mind, my friend?
	How can I help?
	I know there's a bit of a delay.
	We'll survive.
	We will survive.
	All right.
	Jonathan, are you with me?
	Don't forget to unmute.
	You will need to do that.
	That's for sure.
	That's for sure.
	Hey, Stefan, you can hear me now all the way from Bulgaria.
	Hey, boy, all that talk about the future got me thinking about your book, The Future.
	That's my favorite audiobook of yours.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	Tell me what you like.
	Okay.
	So I first listened to it while my wife and I were doing a wedding anniversary in this little town called Velika Ternava, which is the old capital of Bulgaria.
	And I loaded up that audiobook.
	And in the center of this town, there's this monument to the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire, where there's this giant sword that soars about 50 meters into the air.
	And then there's a bunch of statues.
	There's kind of like a mountain behind it.
	And I hyped this mountain.
	There's a bunch of like Orthodox churches around there.
	And it was, it was around this time of the year, actually.
	It was like fall.
	And I like hyped this mountain looking at looking all around the beautiful parts of Bulgaria while listening to, it was the part of the book where there's, okay, I think his name was Stanton, the guy who was the president of the United States.
	And he's emerging from his cryogenic coma.
	And he kind of has this ego reconstitution that occurs via his, via his history and the political heights of power that he arose to.
	Yeah, that was a good hike.
	Yeah, it's a very interesting book.
	And also it talks about how you can, through technology, achieve peaceful parenting in the character of the angels and so on.
	So yeah, I mean, I love the book myself.
	It's my first real try at science fiction.
	And I really enjoyed creating in my mind the perfect world.
	Like I figured, what was the world I would love for me, my friends, my family to wake up in?
	Like, wouldn't it be great to just wake up in a world like the one portrayed in the future?
	And of course, the future is in science fiction is generally portrayed as dystopian or negative or destructive and so on.
	And that certainly could happen.
	But I do think also that the idea that we could have a great...
	I remember reading Thomas More's Utopia when I was in my teens, and it just never struck me as particularly utopian.
	I just I just want a society that respects property rights and doesn't initiate the use of force.
	And so I really did enjoy writing it.
	And I'm glad that you liked it.
	And also, I did pour quite a bit of effort and energy into the vocal acting for characters like Roman and so on.
	So I'm glad that you liked it.
	And for people who want to get it, it's free.
	You can read it, of course, ebook, PDF, HTML.
	You can also listen to the audiobook, which is my recommended way.
	It's like Shakespeare.
	My books are generally better as audiobooks than just plain text.
	Unless, of course, you like creating the character's voices in your own mind, which case, just read it.
	But I'm glad that you enjoyed it.
	And I'm glad to hear that it has some meaning and power for you.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah, I recommend that one often when people are interested, when people are talking about utopia, because everyone is kind of trying to figure out like, how can we get to a better future?
	And when you look at science fiction or popular TV shows portraying the future, they do it in this stupid way where they portray the future as basically being like basically being,
	okay, so the sci-fi future is going to basically be like about three years before the Russian Revolution, where we've got a bunch of little peasants that are being taken advantage of.
	And then we have some rich, rich, rich aristocrats.
	But we have like flying spaceships and explosions in space or whatever.
	And it's just wildly unrealistic because to get to a science fiction future of empires in space, we need to not have the government.
	We need to not have these statist interventionist layers in between innovation.
	And I think that your science fiction book, that was like one of the few science fiction books that was like a realistic portrayal of how utopia could be reached.
	Well, thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	And I hope that people will check out the book and, of course, my other novels, which I'm also very happy and proud of.
	All right.
	Drago, let's take us home, take us into the future of a great ending to the show.
	If you want to unmute, I'm certainly happy to hear your thoughts.
	Stefan, hello, hello.
	Thank you for your patience, brother.
	What's on your mind?
	Thank you, Stefan.
	It's funny.
	I just figured that, you know what, the last guy was going to be the last guy.
	And so I started to write a comment on the post, but no, I appreciate it.
	I guess since, you know, I feel like, yeah, I would love to talk with you at length at some point.
	I know, you know, we come in a couple of times as the show ends.
	And I thank you for letting me speak.
	I guess I'll just ask this question.
	If based on the conversations here, would you recognize a distinction between these two categories?
	If category one, we would say, you know, measured regularity or predictive consistency and category two, you know, let's say a metaphysical or ontological necessity.
	Do you recognize a distinction or do you think that that's essentially kind of this one category and it's an artificial distinction?
	Can you give me an example of categories in each?
	Make sure I understand what you mean.
	Yeah, well, so measured regularity, I mean, right, this is, of course, with the census, even law of conservation of matter and energy.
	You know, every observation we have, you know, follows a certain pattern of behavior.
	You know, things are behaving as we expect and, you know, the data maps to, or excuse me, our theory maps to the to the sense data.
	Whereas when we talk about ontological necessity, it's more of like a must, like where it's, it's, there, there must be a persistence in theory, you know, that these laws wouldn't collapse.
	It just has to exist in every possible world.
	And maybe I'm not explaining it correctly, but there, I guess, again, I'm trying to point the difference between something that we measure to be regular versus something that must necessarily exist.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So I think this sort of like we were talking earlier about gravity, that we couldn't exist if there was no gravity.
	And the question is, why do self-contradictory entities not exist?
	Right.
	So why do square circles not exist?
	Because matter and energy have consistent properties and matter and energy cannot contradict their own natures or the laws, right?
	So, you know, there's an old saying goes over like a lead balloon, right?
	That I think was the foundation of Lead Zeppelin.
	Like they had, it goes over like a lead balloon.
	Lead Zeppelin was originally L-E-A-D, like the metal, but then they everybody would call it lead balloon, like the one-eaters, right?
	Lead balloon.
	And so they changed it to L-E-D, lead balloon, right?
	And so lead is always going to be heavier than air.
	And we could not exist if so, if you say, well, I have a proposal to make a flight device with lead and no propulsion.
	Like it's lead and it's going to fly.
	That could not happen.
	It will never happen.
	Now, and it's interesting.
	So I'm obviously not an expert on the origins of the universe theories.
	I kind of gave up on modern physics after the nonsense of string theory.
	But To the previous caller's comment, which would have been fun to examine, but I just felt very passive-aggressive and didn't really enjoy the conversation.
	And, you know, it's funny because when you want people to chat with you, you know, they kind of have to enjoy the conversation.
	And if people aren't enjoying the conversation, like I clearly said, like, this is kind of rude, right?
	Really, like, why are you calling it my theory when it's a general scientific theory?
	And I'm not enjoying the conversation.
	I mean, I was giving indications, I wasn't enjoying the conversation.
	I always find it weird to me.
	You know, if I really want to go out with a girl and she's on the date and she's like saying, I'm really not having a good time on this date.
	And I'm just like, I just keep doing what I'm doing.
	Like, what do I expect to happen?
	Is she going to want to go out with me again?
	No.
	I mean, other people have to enjoy the conversation.
	And if you're just kind of douchey or bitchy or passive-aggressive or manipulative, or it's like, why would I continue with that?
	Like, I'm not sentenced to do philosophy with everyone who calls.
	Anyway, so I just, but if let's say that matter did pop into existence 14 billion years ago in some mechanism, I mean, some people would call it God, but let's just say there's some mechanism by which matter came into existence 14 billion years ago.
	It still doesn't mean that matter is going to despawn tomorrow, right?
	I mean, we still know after matter came into existence, it can't be created or destroyed.
	And the mechanism by which it came into existence 40 billion years ago has no effect on whether you're a chest of drawers, to speak to the earlier caller, the chest of drawers will exist tomorrow.
	And the reason I say all of this, and the reason why I kind of hammer these points, is that radical skepticism is incredibly isolating.
	And honestly, you can see, and this is something I've noticed continually, and I think there's a good explanation.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to hijack.
	I'm going to get to your point, but I think it's important.
	So, people who are radically skeptical exist in the solipsistic universe of just them because they can't agree on terms with other people.
	They can't agree on basic human experiences like the passage of time.
	They can't admit basic things like, hey, when you started this debate at three o'clock, did you assume that it would conclude?
	Did you know that it was going to conclude in the future?
	That's not complicated.
	And if people can't accept common definitions and they can't share in the universal experience of other people, they are incredibly isolated.
	And we are not built for isolation, right?
	It's the old Aristotelian argument: anybody who can live alone is either a beast or a god.
	We are social creatures.
	And how do we socialize?
	We socialize based upon agreed-upon definitions.
	Not kidding.
	I'm not kidding about this.
	This is foundational.
	Our social life is based upon agreed-upon definitions.
	And if you can't agree on reasonable definitions with other people, your life will be incredibly isolated and you will get progressively weirder.
	I'm not kidding about that either.
	The people I've known who've been subjectivists, and I've seen them over the course of their whole life now, I'm pushing 60.
	I've seen the arc of 50 years almost of people living directly.
	It does not end well for the radical subjectivists.
	And you can see sort of the lack of social skills, the annoyance, and to some degree, the narcissism.
	It's like, well, you're not understanding what I'm saying.
	It's like, no, no, maybe you're not making sense.
	Like, maybe your definitions don't make sense.
	Maybe, but they're just absolutely certain that they're in the right.
	And so this radical skepticism about reality comes with this incredibly vainglorious assumption of being right personally, which is kind of a contradiction, right?
	If you can't even, like, like the guy who's like a couple of weeks ago, he didn't even believe that rocks exist.
	Yeah, let's start my speaker conference.
	Like, the last thing I heard is a guy who didn't believe rock exists.
	And then I cut out.
	All right.
	Hang on.
	Yep.
	All right.
	So that's Friday.
	All right.
	Let me know if I'm back.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's back.
	That's fascinating.
	My headset just powered off.
	Why?
	I don't know.
	I figure it's supposed to, I don't know.
	I don't think it's out of power.
	I'm supposed to have like 16 hours or something.
	Anyway, so I will just keep it plugged in and keep chatting.
	So sorry, just remind me of the last thing you heard.
	You said, like a guy who says rocks don't exist, or you're making a point.
	I'm not certain that rocks exist, but he's certain that I was being rude.
	Right.
	So that lack of certainty in reality is not combined with the same lack of certainty in being right.
	So people who are subjectivists will not concede shared upon definitions with other people, but also believe that they're in the right.
	And so the reason I work so hard on shared definitions is shared definitions are our social connection.
	And I'll give you a tiny example and then we'll get back to your question.
	I appreciate you letting me do the minor hijacking.
	So if you get married, then you have a shared definition of what marriage is.
	That's what the marriage vows are.
	You have a shared definition of what marriage is.
	So let's say that your marriage vows include the word monogamy, right?
	And your wife says, okay, well, monogamy means that you're not going to cheat.
	You're not going to cheat on me.
	And then you go out and buy a lovely wooden desk and sleep with the woman who sold it to you.
	And you come home and you say, Yeah, I picked up this lovely wooden desk and I slept with the woman who sold it to me.
	And your wife would get outraged and say, Hang on, hang on.
	We're supposed to have monogamy.
	And you say, monogamy?
	I thought you said mahogany because this is the wooden desk made out of mahogany.
	And then you have you don't have the same shared definitions of what monogamy means.
	And therefore, your marriage is probably over, right?
	Like it's a huge disaster for the marriage as a whole.
	So shared definitions are essential for human contact, for friendship, for certainly for love, because you have to have the same definitions of virtue and love in order to have that.
	Like, you know, my wife and I have a shared definition of virtue, which includes honesty, right?
	And so we are honest.
	We'll be strive for honesty.
	I think we're honest with each other.
	I have a definition of philosophy, the pursuit of moral virtues through reason and evidence and through the path of metaphysics and epistemology.
	And so, but we need definitions, right?
	So when people start saying stuff, and it's not you, but when people start saying stuff, well, the future doesn't exist.
	Like, I don't know what they mean by exist.
	I have an idea what they mean about the future.
	I think that's pretty clear.
	But I don't know what they mean by exists.
	So how can we have a meeting of the minds if we don't share definitions, if we don't have agreed upon definitions, which is why I terminated the conversation after I stepped him through the logic of if matter is eternal, then your chest of drawers will exist tomorrow.
	You know that for certain.
	And he's like, well, I don't know that for certain.
	And he agreed with that, but then later retracted, didn't seem to notice.
	So that's just somebody who's making stuff up in the moment and then saying, well, you haven't really made any arguments.
	It's like, no, no, I mean, you may not agree with the arguments, but I certainly made them.
	And so there is no definition then of the purpose of a debate.
	The purpose of a debate is to come to the truth.
	Or people who say, well, but the future is not the present.
	It's like, I know, that's why we have different words.
	Like, you don't need to tell me that, right?
	That's, that's we even hear.
	And even in the sentence, right?
	Even in the sentence, you start a sentence and you have a logical sequence of words in order to establish some sort of thought and get it across to someone else.
	So even the sentence itself involves time.
	And so, and I was going to go because we didn't get that far because I bailed because of the irrationality, but it would be like, so you knew at three o'clock that the conclusion of the debate was going to be in the future.
	So you have to accept that the future exists, right?
	If you start, this is why he wouldn't concede that point, right?
	He had an instinct for that, right?
	People have a good instinct for when they're going to be disproven.
	And if they're vain, then they will just avoid it, right?
	So the debate was going to go.
	So at three o'clock, you accept that the conclusion of the debate is going to be in the future.
	So the reason he wouldn't say yes to that is then, so you accept that the conclusion of the debate is something that is going to occur in the future.
	The conclusion of the debate is something that is going to exist in the future.
	And therefore, you only started this debate on the premise or on the understanding that something was going to exist in the future called the conclusion of the debate.
	So that's why he wouldn't give me that point because he knew that was coming next.
	And so that's a real shame.
	And I listen, I apologize.
	Please get me back on track.
	I just had these thoughts floating around that were interfering with my ability to talk with you directly.
	So please, please remind me and I'll get back on track.
	I appreciate your indulgence.
	Well, I appreciate the necessity of a purge, you know, to get the noise purged out, you know, so we can do that.
	So actually, well, you know, it's funny because these conversations are always so interesting and the questions you provoke that, you know, I come in with one set of questions, but then it's like I want to react to the prior thing.
	So briefly, if I may, I'm even just thinking about this three o'clock thing.
	I guess in my conceptions or worldview, I would say that currently at this moment, I have a belief that we will, you know, reach the end of the space.
	And, you know, and I can process that through my faculty of imagination.
	I can imagine that you are going to say some words and then the user interface on X will close.
	And in the moment, I'm kind of, that's how I'm processing that belief.
	And I have a belief that it will happen now.
	You know, maybe something will disrupt that.
	Maybe, you know, lightning will strike me before then.
	Who knows?
	But at least I have a belief right now.
	And then, you know, let's say high probability just based on some association of identity and similar circumstances in the past.
	You know, I've done X spaces before.
	And so now I have a pattern that X spaces usually end.
	And so now I'm forecasting into the future.
	And, you know, and you could say I have good reason to believe that that's what's going to take place.
	But interrupt you, but we can go even shorter than that because the closer we can slice the time, the easier it is to follow.
	So can, and this is a very interesting question.
	Can you have a sentence without believing in the future?
	In other words, can you even organize the words in your sentence if you have no idea what you're going to say next?
	Yeah, that's very interesting.
	So, right.
	Yeah.
	Because I have an imagination.
	And for me to convert my imagination into reality, which is to move the concept from my mind into our current discussion.
	It goes, yeah, through some sort of implementation in time.
	Sorry, you disagree with that on the background.
	I mean, we've all had this, there's a sort of funny meme about a kid telling a dream.
	It's a little kid telling a dream.
	I think it was about Star Wars or something.
	And the dream is, and this, and then, and this, and none of it hangs together.
	None of it makes any sense because that's just a kid learning how to put sequences of words together.
	But, you know, really good communicators plan ahead what they're going to say so that as their words unfold, they hopefully come in a sequence that brings an argument forward or brings some definitions or some clarity to the conversation.
	So what I would argue is that if you don't believe in the future, you can't even organize a sentence.
	Yeah.
	No, I mean, I would agree.
	If I organize this, if I don't even organize a sentence, in other words, I don't know if you've ever played this game.
	And I'm sorry, I'll keep it brief because I know you've got stuff to talk about.
	But there's a game that little kids play.
	And the game is a story time where you can go.
	So you've got a bunch of kids sitting in a circle.
	It could be young people.
	It could be kids, sometimes early teens or whatever.
	And each person has one word to add to the story.
	So you start once upon time there was, and it always devolves into fork jokes, at least when it comes to me, right?
	So nobody knows what the next sentence is going to be.
	And that's kind of the funny part.
	Now, it still has to somewhat make sense, but nobody knows what the next word in the sentence is going to be because each word that is spoken is spoken by somebody new who's striving for some effect of comedy or whatever it is, right?
	And they can be actually very, very funny the way that they work, right?
	So that's an example of a story that very quickly becomes nonsensical because the sentence can't be planned.
	Now, if we're in control of our own sentences, then we can plan what we're going to say next.
	If I didn't know the thought that I wanted to get to and how to organize my words and even down to that, my phonemes, my letters, if I didn't know how to organize my words to get the argument across, then everything I said would be, I would sound like a fax machine or the dial-up tone from the 90s or something.
	Like it wouldn't make any sense.
	So even not when the space ends, but even in the conversation that we have, if we don't accept the existence of the future, we can't even speak sentences that are comprehensible.
	So sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, I would agree.
	And I would say maybe that we maybe we said we hope we hope in the continuity of time and we have belief and we will act as if, as you said, it's impossible to act as if you don't believe that you don't hope that the future will continue.
	Because if you truly thought that everything ends one second from now, and we wouldn't even be able to exercise any process of cognition, like you're saying.
	And I mean, yeah, right.
	It's like, I guess the planning exercises, in my mind, I can plan a journey.
	Let's say if I have a map from New York to Florida, and that necessarily entails some sort of passage, which involves time in my mind.
	And then for me to execute and make that happen to actually start the journey from New York to Florida, I then hope I can make that journey happen.
	And of course, I'm going to, you know, the fact I planned it in the first place means that I have some belief that the journey is possible.
	So in this sense, the journey of a sentence, by planning the sentence of here's what I want to say, I'm hoping that I'm actually going to be able to implement it in reality, which is to say this conversation with you right now.
	Well, that's a really good point.
	And I think it comes down to two little syllables.
	So I'm not sure when people talk about the future, are they talking about the future or their future as an individual?
	Right.
	So this is why I was trying to sort of point out the difference between the atoms and the consciousness.
	So I am absolutely 100% certain that all the atoms that compose me will be around tomorrow or be converted into energy.
	Now, I can't 100% say that my consciousness will be around tomorrow.
	And I can guarantee you it's not going to be around in 50 years because I'm sure as hell I'm not going to live to be 130.
	Right.
	So that's why I'm way closer to the end than the beginning, right?
	So when people talk about the future, it's hard for people to differentiate between my future and the future.
	Right.
	So my future is uncertain.
	Your ability to plan a trip for Vegas is not 100% certain.
	You don't know.
	Vegas could get a giant chasm could open up.
	Could be with lasers from space or something.
	Or maybe all the flights will be grounded or who knows, right?
	Or maybe the bank that you have will have issues and you can't pay for anything.
	Who knows, right?
	So your trip to Vegas is uncertain, but the continuity of matter and energy is absolutely certain.
	And that's when people talk about existence in the future.
	Do you mean the existence of your consciousness?
	Yeah, that's uncertain.
	Do you mean the existence of the atoms that compose you?
	Yeah, no, that's certain.
	That's certain.
	And so that's where it's really tough when you're talking to people about the universe.
	Are they talking about themselves, their consciousness, their existence, or are they talking about matter and energy?
	And there's a lot of blurred lines for people.
	Most people, when they look at the universe, and I do too, right?
	But most people, when they look at the universe, they have a very tough time not anthropomorphizing everything.
	So this guy said, well, we know that matter was created.
	It's like, well, no, we don't.
	You can say matter winked into existence.
	That's not the same as saying it was created.
	Now, if we look at our own lives, yes, we were created.
	Our parents had sex.
	We went through the birth canal.
	We came to life and so on.
	So we, we were created.
	But even if the atoms from the Big Bang theory, let's say that they proved that the atoms winked into existence, that doesn't prove that they were created.
	That just means some unknown event caused existence to come into being or for matter and energy to come into being.
	But when somebody says we know for certain that matter and energy were created, well, created is a human characteristic.
	We create life.
	I write novels.
	I create novels.
	I create this podcast, create conversations.
	But if matter and energy winks into existence, let's say that the Big Bang turns out to be true and matter and energy winked into existence, we still can't say it was created because created is an anthropomorphical concept, if that makes sense.
	Can I ask quickly a clarifying question?
	And this is not meant to be pedantic at all.
	This is very serious.
	So when you say we have absolute certainty in the continuation of matter, do you mean literally, you know, 100% or like 99.999999?
	100%.
	100%.
	So then let me ask this.
	How is it empirically?
	So we agree that there's currently we've observed a lot of law of conservation of mass and energy.
	Now, how do we know with absolute certainty that whatever law, whatever cause is holding that relationship, the relations between matter and energy that we observe and we've observed 100% of the time thus far, we've never seen an exception, right?
	We see this.
	How do we know that that principle will continue to hold and that there couldn't be some other cause underneath that could be disrupted that we just haven't seen yet?
	How can we be 100% that there's nothing left to uncover?
	Well, okay, so we have both the theory, empirical observation, universal practice, and it's all required for life, right?
	So we know that matter and energy have to have been consistent for the entire length of everything we know about the universe, because if it wasn't consistent, life could never ever come into being.
	It would like be trying to build a house on matter that turned from lava to air to water to rock.
	Like you couldn't build that house, right?
	So if matter and energy weren't stable, 100% stable, then the entire delicate operation, not just of life, but of human consciousness, which is like the pinnacle of complexity, could not have come into being if matter and energy were not stable.
	Is that fair to say?
	Well, if they hadn't been stable, because I said they have been stable thus far, but does the current stability get?
	Oh, got it.
	Okay, yeah.
	So I did hear what you're saying.
	Oh, got it.
	Got it.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	We accept that they have been stable.
	Yeah, as far as we can tell, sure.
	Yeah, I accept.
	Well, no, no, not as far as we can tell.
	If matter and energy were not stable, could human life have evolved?
	Within the relevant time horizon we're discussing, yes, they must have been stable for life to have happened.
	No?
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Let me ask you then this.
	What is the relevant timeline?
	Well, so here's where it's like, okay, right now, we're existing in this current moment.
	And yes, we trace back, you know, we try to look back in the past.
	What caused this?
	What caused this?
	we try to kind of, right, billions of years ago, et cetera, and we were trying to continually kind of pave the frontier of the past until we, you know, it's fine, as you said with the other guy.
	Either there's a big...
	Can you just give my, I've been talking for a long time, give my slightly tired brain I'm sorry.
	We anchor relevant.
	Human evolution.
	Are you talking about life evolution?
	So human evolution, maybe a million years based upon the latest data from China.
	Life evolution, 4 billion years.
	Oldest latest thing we can find in the universe, say 14 billion years.
	So what timeframe are we talking about for the stability of matter to be required for human life to evolve?
	I guess what I'm saying, and not to be tautological, but the relevant time horizon is that which humanity cares about, which is to say whatever humans are trying to answer.
	And so, yes, at this point, we care about going all the way to the beginning, right?
	Big bang, whatever the first instance is.
	That's what humans have been obsessed with.
	So, that is the relevant time horizon.
	It's as far as our questioning has taken us.
	So, maybe you weren't here at the beginning of the combo, which is totally fine.
	Could human life exist if there was no stable principle called gravity?
	Based on what we know human life to be, no, I don't think so.
	No, okay, what do you mean?
	Well, I don't understand what all these qualifications are.
	No, fair enough, fair enough.
	Based upon what we know human life, meaning because sorry, I'm complicated about that.
	No, because one of the fundamental questions of philosophy is what does it mean to be human, right?
	So, that I'm saying, yes, given what it means to be human, I said human life.
	Well, could human life have evolved if there was not a stable property called gravity?
	No, because we have bodies and bodies require gravity in their formation, right?
	Yeah, I mean, we the planets wouldn't have formed, right?
	The sun wouldn't exist, yes, see no atmosphere, right?
	We wouldn't stick to the ground, like life could not possibly exist as we know it, yes, yes, in the absence or inconsistency of gravity.
	Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	Okay, so for human life to exist, for us to be having this conversation, gravity has to be universal and absolute.
	Uh, sure, yeah, I think that's right, yeah, I don't see an exception to that, so yeah, yes, okay, so the timeline is as far as we know, forever and ever, amen.
	I mean, whatever, big bang.
	I mean, I'll maybe I'll look more into that, but but so the relevant timeline for the stability of matter and energy is eternity, all of time, yeah, all of time, unless yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
	So, when you say, How do we know that it's eternal?
	It's because we exist, because we exist, it has to be eternal.
	Yes, sorry, Michael Second.
	So, how do we know because we exist, therefore, well, what does that have to do with the future?
	I guess I'm trying to understand that I know that the path.
	So, I'm sorry, I think my son.
	No, you listen, you never have to apologize for the sounds of children.
	That is a we are very prone to list here.
	Yeah, that is very clear.
	There's no apologies for children, yes.
	Well, I guess so, uh, in the right, since the beginning, whatever the beginning is, I mean, if we can even talk of that, right?
	But the time and gravity has existed, right?
	But that does that, it's a different step to say that there's an intrinsic property that will persist forever going forward, necessarily so that it can't just because it has been, what guarantee is there?
	There absolutely is guaranteed that gravity exists forever and ever, amen.
	Uh, because in order for something to change, something must affect it.
	You have like potency to act, sure.
	Just lying there on the carpet and nobody touches it, nobody kicks it, nobody like no force effects on it.
	Does it move?
	Right, yeah, no, right, not moving, yep.
	Okay, so for gravity to change, something would have to affect the entire universe to produce the exact opposite, which would not be caused by anything within the universe.
	So, there'd have to be something outside the universe that came in and somehow, magically, across the entire universe, reversed or interfered with the property called matter and energy, the property called gravity, let's say, right?
	So, let's say that gravity was somehow reversed, right?
	Now, the amount of energy it would take, even if it's inconceivable, to take the property of matter called gravity and reverse it, the amount of energy it would take would be greater than the amount of energy in the entire universe.
	It would have to come from outside the universe, which is impossible because there's nothing outside the universe.
	So, there is no reason to believe, given that gravity has been an absolute constant for eternity, and the only way to change the properties of something is to apply some sort of external force or energy to it.
	And there is nothing that could come into the universe that could translate into a reversal or interruption into the property of gravity.
	There is no possible way that gravity would change at any point in the future.
	It's never changed in the past, and it would require such a massive intervention from outside the universe, which is a self-contradictory concept.
	It would require the universal application of property change across every atom and piece of energy in the universe, which couldn't even be achieved because you can't travel faster than the speed of light.
	So, you can't change everything instantaneously across the entire universe.
	So, it's impossible.
	Well, yeah, the only thing that would be, I wouldn't even call it a greater category or superset, but the only thing bigger than the universe would be, you know, being itself, right?
	You mentioned earlier, like existence, like is like the, you know, the actual being itself is the only thing that we could say is bigger than the universe itself.
	So, what would it mean for being fundamentally to go into non-being and therefore make the universe collapse?
	What do you mean by?
	I don't know what you mean by being.
	Sorry.
	Well, I mean, do we have time to go into the, I can be brief about it, the essence versus existence though mystic distinction?
	I just, I don't know what you mean by the word.
	Do you mean because being could refer to something that exists.
	Sure.
	Well, let me, okay, I'll try to a hang on.
	Sorry.
	It could refer to something that exists to bring into being, right?
	It could refer to a super consciousness or a God of some kind that's outside the universe and is a being like a conscious being.
	So I just don't know what you mean by being.
	The act to be like literally like, so, okay, there's a difference between what something is and that it is.
	So like you mentioned to another person, look at an object in front of you.
	Okay, I see a cup.
	What is the cup?
	That's a question of essence.
	So, you know, a cup is, and we can give a definition.
	It has a, it's a container, it has a handle.
	But then that it exists is a separate, is a separate thing.
	And that it exists is not contained within the essence of the cup.
	Because I can imagine a cup in my mind and doesn't necessarily mean it exists.
	Similarly, I can understand the essence of a unicorn, which is just to say it's a horned horse creature.
	And then, you know, but it doesn't exist.
	So everything has an essence, but not necessarily has an existence.
	But then there needs for any of this stuff to make sense.
	There has to be at least one thing whose essence is its existence.
	We're literally the fundamental act of to be.
	Last guy, because I know this is absolutely the last thing is the cup in front of me.
	Okay, we might say, well, what is it doing?
	We could say, well, nothing.
	It's sitting still.
	It's not doing anything.
	It just is.
	Well, actually, yeah, on that deeper reflection, it is doing, it is busy existing.
	It is actively committing the action of to be.
	And so what I mean by being.
	Hang on.
	Yeah, sure.
	Are you saying that the cup is willing itself?
	Not that it is willing itself as its own principle, but it is getting existence because the cup doesn't have existence within its own essence.
	Existence has to be received for the cup to exist.
	Existence has to be received from someone.
	It makes any sense at all.
	I mean, I'm just curious.
	I'm not saying you're wrong, but in the way in which you're describing things, do you think it's communicating anything objective to someone else?
	Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it's easy, but yes, I think it's fundamental reality.
	I don't know.
	The harder it is, the harder you have to work to explain it.
	Right, right, yes.
	For sure.
	Do you think that you're doing a good job of explaining what you're talking about?
	Well, it depends on the audience, right?
	But I'm not going to claim I'm the best at explaining this.
	No, I don't know what the threshold of good is, though, right?
	I mean, if it's not being understood, maybe I can change the metaphor.
	I can change it.
	I don't understand what you're talking about.
	I don't know whether you're talking about something willing its own existence, or I don't know that the cup is somehow maintaining its own existence through like teeth gritting willpower.
	I don't know what.
	And yeah, so you say thomistic, right?
	So, but why would you listen to anything anybody says about existence prior to the modern theory of atoms and the law?
	I'm just giving you a prosperous bro, last chance.
	Let me fucking finish, okay?
	Okay, because it's really annoying.
	I'm really trying to formulate thoughts here, and you're just driving right through my parade, okay?
	Can we try this again?
	Yes, I just felt like I was misunderstood, but I'll let you finish.
	I understand.
	I understand you're trying to.
	No, no, I wasn't talking about anything you said.
	I was talking about prior to the modern theory of atoms and the law of conservation of energy, people didn't understand that the existence of the cup is not its form, but its atoms.
	And therefore, they thought that if you take a bunch of small sticks of wood and you burn them and they turn to ash, they thought they had destroyed the wood.
	They didn't realize that they had simply turned the wood into ash and energy and atoms that float through the air.
	They didn't realize prior to the law of conservation of energy and prior to the understanding of atoms and E equals M C squared, they didn't understand that the cup, the cup that you're talking about, its existence is the atoms, not the form in which they take.
	I'm not saying the cup doesn't exist.
	It exists as something that we create in order to bring liquid to our mouths.
	But existence is not understood by thinkers prior to modern understanding of science, relativity, conservation of matter and energy, atoms, and so on.
	Because the atoms are eternal.
	And so the existence of the cup really is the existence of the atoms.
	And atoms just are.
	They don't will their own existence.
	Then out that the cup is willed into existence because you need something to bring the liquid to your mouth.
	So you will the cup into existence.
	So the manifestation of the atoms in the shape of the cup, that's a willed thing, but the atoms are not willed into existence.
	Neither can they be destroyed or willed into unexistence, if that makes sense.
	Oh, well, can I?
	I just want to can I guess react or ask a question about what you just said.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So, yeah, it's interesting.
	So I'm trying to bridge the gap here because if okay, fine.
	Back off a bit from the mic.
	I'm getting a lot of breath noise.
	Oh, sorry.
	That's my, that's my baby on my chest.
	I apologize.
	Let me back up back here.
	So if the cup is just reducible in some sense, as far as existence, that it's just the atoms.
	The only thing that exists about the cup is the atoms.
	But I guess it seems, does that mean I now have, if I agree, let's say the only thing that exists is the atoms of the cup, does that not destroy the intelligibility of me using the word cup where I say a cup exists?
	Or is do you view my label of cup as purely just a symbolic language vehicle that doesn't necessarily describe an actual like category of things like cups?
	Well, so the only thing that exists is atoms and energy.
	Now, I did say, though, that the cup is willed into its shape for the utility of bringing liquid to the lips.
	And you can break a cup, but you cannot destroy the atoms.
	Right?
	So just yesterday, I was wandered into the car.
	I was still holding a coffee cup.
	And I put the coffee cup on the floor in front of me.
	And then when I got out of the car, I swung my legs out, knocked the coffee cup out.
	It fell out of the car and it broke.
	So it was no longer useful as a coffee cup.
	We picked up all the pieces, threw it in the garbage, and moved on with my life.
	And you will never see that cup showing up again.
	So the cup is destroyed as a useful container for bringing liquid to my lips.
	So the cup is gone as a valuable entity, but the atoms, of course, still exist.
	The atoms are now in the garbage by the Tim Hortons or whatever, right?
	So you can certainly talk about a cup, for sure.
	A cup is willed into existence for a particular purpose, like a chair or the aforementioned chest of drawers that the fellow was talking about earlier.
	So all of those things exist, for sure.
	And we have to talk about them intelligibly because we can't see atoms.
	We can only see aggregates of atoms at the level of sense data.
	So, but in terms of existence, well, the cup no longer exists as something that is useful to bring liquid to my lips, but the atoms all exist in perpetuity.
	So, yeah, for sure, you can talk about the cup.
	You don't, if you, if you want somebody to pass you, hey, can you pass me my coffee cup?
	You don't say, can you pass me some atoms?
	Because they wouldn't know what you're referring to.
	So, yeah, for sure.
	Things are willed into existence all the time.
	I mean, everything that I see around me, like I can see the ceiling and I can see my legs are willed into existence in a way because my parents had sex.
	And I guess I keep exercising my legs.
	I don't waste away.
	I got some curtains.
	But then also there are these things out there, trees.
	The trees are not willed into existence.
	The clouds are not willed into existence and the sun is not willed into existence.
	So, yeah, there are things that are willed into existence and things that aren't willed into existence, but the atoms are eternal in both contexts.
	Okay, so if I have a cup and I have a cat, we would agree that there's meaningful organizations of the atoms that are differ, right?
	They create some distinction.
	But do we say that those meaningful organizations are real or just something will?
	I'm just trying to understand, I guess.
	So willed, like, like for us to say the sentence, the cup is atoms, or the atoms of the cup are all that exist.
	For me to process your sentence, the reason it's not just sound waves, just like just buzzing, the reason I even understand your sentence is because there is a form I can grasp, which is, you know, the atoms mean something, cups mean something, exist.
	So I guess those forms, are they not real?
	But if they're not real, how is our communication or organizing of the material even making sense?
	I guess I don't.
	I'm just a little confused.
	Okay.
	So you know that it's a cup, right?
	I know that it's a cup.
	Okay.
	Do you agree?
	Well, yeah.
	What does it mean to know?
	But sure, yes, I know it's a cup.
	Sure.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	You can't use the word cup and then say you don't know what it is.
	Well, I believe I'd know it is.
	Yeah, sure.
	I believe.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	So hang on.
	So if we're in the realm of radical skepticism that you're not even sure what a cup is, then we can't have a conversation because you brought up the cup as an example.
	And then I say, you know that the cup, you know what the cup is, and you say, I don't really know what the cup is, then we can't have a conversation because we can't have any shared definitions.
	If we can't even just decide on what a cup is, how can we decide on anything else?
	I agree.
	And actually, when you said earlier with your commentary about radical skepticism, if I may add, because I agree with you, we have to both agree we're dealing with objective things.
	But I think what happens in philosophy between good faith people, and I hope you think I'm good faith, and I think you're good faith, what we're trying to do is say, by putting on radical skeptical hat, it's not to say that I'm a radical skeptical.
	It's to say, hey, what if the assumptions or axioms in your worldview or my worldview lead to other logical inconsistencies?
	So for me, by being, I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I'm trying to, I don't want to assume the things are trying to prove because I agree with you that we are operating under the fact that, hey, I can say what a cup is, but my point is, why can we even say what a cup is?
	That requires a grounding principle.
	So you brought our cup, right?
	Yes.
	Okay, you used cup as an example, and now you're saying you don't know what a cup is.
	No, no, that I'm using cup as an example under the assumption that we both operate under a grounding principle that establishes a coherent shared reality of cup.
	And that there exists a grounding principle.
	When I say you know that the cup exists, and you're like, well, I don't know for sure.
	Oh, no, the cup exists.
	No, no, sure.
	Yes.
	No, no, the cup.
	Sorry, the cup exists.
	Yeah, sorry, I didn't, I don't think I said the cup doesn't exist.
	No, you said you weren't sure.
	I said, you know, you know, the, you know, that the cup exists, right?
	Oh, I thought you said you know that as a cup.
	Depending on blah, blah, blah.
	Maybe I missed her.
	I'm sorry.
	I thought you said, do you know that that is a cup as opposed to that the cup exists?
	Sure.
	That is a cup.
	I label that thing as a cup.
	It's a cup.
	Okay.
	So you know that the cup exists, right?
	Yes.
	Do the atoms know that the cup exists?
	I would say category error of atoms not knowing.
	So no, the atoms cannot know things.
	No.
	Okay.
	And I agree with you.
	It's a category error, right?
	So the cupness is not in the atoms.
	The cupness is in your mind, but it's also not arbitrary.
	Like you wouldn't look at a barbell and say that's a cup, right?
	Yes.
	You might look, I guess, at a bra.
	But anyway, so the cupness is not in the atoms, right?
	Because the atoms don't know that they're part of a cup.
	They're just doing their thing and vibrating and doing their electron and neutron and proton and blah, blah, blah, right?
	So the atoms don't know that they're in a cup.
	The cup is assembled for a particular human utility.
	So we can look at the cup and know that it's a cup, but the knowledge of the cup is in our mind.
	The category of cup is in our mind.
	It's not in the atoms, right?
	I'll say yes to continue the dialogue.
	I'd have to think about that one more, but sure.
	Well, there's no cupness in an atom, right?
	Well, yeah, I mean, because cupness is a qualitative feature.
	So, of course, it's like, is there a qualitative thing in the physical?
	You know, I think, right, it's just like it's like a different category of being.
	It's like, is the banana happy?
	I mean, yeah, happiness is not in a banana.
	A cupness is not in.
	No, no, no, we're not talking about emotions.
	We're talking about existence.
	Sure, sure.
	But even I'm just using an analogy, but right, the qualitative, the intellect, the abstract universal form of cupness is not in an individual atom, no.
	Nor is it in a, you know, right.
	Within an atom, no.
	And yeah, okay, so I'll say no, the cupness is not within an atom.
	Right.
	And in fact, the cupness isn't even in the cup because you can use other things.
	So, of course, I'm sure as a kid, right?
	You, I mean, I did this all the time when I was a kid.
	Probably one of the reasons I'm fairly healthy is that you get a hose and maybe you cup your hands, right?
	You cup your hands, or you do this if you, you know, you're drinking from a tap in the sink, right?
	You cup your hands and you drink from your hands.
	So you turn your hands into a cup, right?
	Yeah.
	But nobody looks at your hands and says that's a cup, but you can cup your hands and turn it into the equivalent of a functional cup.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes.
	So the cupness is in the definition of that which is bowl-shaped and useful for conveying liquid to your mouth.
	Okay, sure, yeah, sure.
	Yep.
	From a utility, you're saying, because I see it.
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	And so, and for other things, we would have like the definition of a mammal, which I talked about earlier in the show and so on, right?
	So cupness is bowl-shaped and used for conveying liquid to the mouth.
	And it can be something that's formally designated.
	It could be something that you're using, right?
	I mean, you can use things that aren't a cup as a cup.
	So for instance, if you have a big measuring spoon, you could fill it with water and drink from it and use it as a bowl-shaped thing for the conveyance of liquid, blah, blah, blah.
	You could even use something that's not bowl-shaped.
	You could use something that's a square or so.
	It's basically a container for conveying liquid to the mouth or something like that.
	That would generally be what the cup is.
	So it exists in terms of its utility in conveying liquid to the mouth.
	And the cupness, and now something that's specifically designed for that, like a cup with a handle because it's hot and you've got hot stuff or whatever, right?
	So you don't want to grab the outside for fear of burning your fingertips and so on.
	So something that's defined, something, sorry, something that is designed as a cup is, by definition, it has the quality of cupness because that's what it's designed for.
	Can we agree with that?
	Yep.
	Yeah.
	It's ends.
	It has a certain ends that it's directed towards, which, as you said, the end of a cup is to hold a beverage and ultimately transfer it into something else.
	So yeah.
	Yep.
	Yeah.
	I mean, everybody's had this situation where you're building something, you need to hammer a nail.
	You can't find a hammer.
	So you just use something else, right?
	You know, your wrench or whatever it is, right?
	And so a wrench is not a hammer, but it can be used to be, to drive in a nail and so on, right?
	So you can use it in a hammer-like way, but it's not a hammer, right?
	Yeah.
	And so on, right?
	So something which is designed for a particular utility has the essence of it in the design itself.
	Other things you can use as substitutes and so on, but that would be a redirection of the purpose.
	So you can use your hands as a cup, but your hands are not cups.
	Now, a cup you could use for other things, right?
	Everybody's done this thing where you want to water your plants and the only thing around is a clean coffee mug.
	So you just fill it with water and you don't use it to convey the liquid to your mouth, but you use it to convey the liquid to the plant or whatever it is.
	So again, a lot of repurposing and all of that.
	So the essence of the cupness is in the design of the cup and it's used to convey water.
	But the atoms themselves, so the atoms themselves don't know anything about the cupness.
	The atoms that were in my cup from last night that broke in the parking lot of the Tim Hortons doesn't know.
	Almost like I was going to have this conversation.
	So those atoms don't know that they're in a cup.
	They don't know that they're in a cup.
	They don't know that they broke.
	They don't know that they're sitting in the garbage.
	They have no clue.
	They're just doing their atomic thing and existing with no cause, no purpose, no start, no end, no goal, no plan, no anything, right?
	And so at the sense level, the essence of the thing is either identifying its essential properties or if you're looking at a human created thing, understanding its purpose, right?
	So you can use a chest of drawers to store a bunch of things.
	Usually people use a chest of drawers to store their clothing, but you could use it to store any bunch of things.
	In fact, I've even seen stories of people who would put their babies in a chest of drawers and leave it open a little bit, let them sleep there if they were short a crib or something like that.
	But that's generally not what they're made for.
	So they can be repurposed.
	But the purpose of the chest of drawers is for efficient storage of usually clothing and so on.
	So you can open it and see what's there in the same way that I guess people have used coat hangers for various nefarious things in the past, but generally coat hangers are there to keep your clothes hanging vertically so that they don't wrinkle and they're easy to find when you're looking for them.
	So the essence of the thing is either the property of itself, such as a tree, right?
	Which is not human created.
	I mean, you could say it's planted, but it's still not human created.
	It has a particular essence and a definition.
	But a cup, for instance, which is a human-created thing, has the essence of cupness in the purpose for which it's created, but neither the tree, like the atoms don't know that it's in a tree.
	The atoms don't know that they're in a cup.
	And so when you're talking about things existing versus not existing, if you're talking about the cup, yeah, my cup last night broke in the parking lot is no longer functional as a cup and has been thrown out, but the atoms cannot be created or destroyed, which is why for me, to our earlier point, when we're talking about creation and destruction and existence and non-existence, in the past, people thought that stuff could be created and destroyed until they had the modern understanding of the perpetual nature of atoms and energy.
	And I wouldn't listen in particular to people about existence versus non-existence before people understood the perpetual nature of matter and energy any more than I would take the navigation advice of anybody who thought the world was flat, if that makes sense.
	So if I had a tree, which I can recognize based on some perception of its form, whatever that, even though, like you said, I didn't create the tree in that category.
	And someone bulldozes the tree, makes it into paper, we would say the atoms persisted.
	I mean, right, the atoms are still there.
	They were rearranged into some other different form.
	But in some sense, can I say that, you know, that tree, that tree no longer exists.
	The atoms that compose of the tree continue to exist, but the tree that was there, I mean, it's gone.
	It doesn't exist anymore.
	Can I say, can I use that?
	Because the tree is alive in particular, right?
	So when I am dead, all of the atoms that compose my body and all of the energy that compose my body, they still exist in the universe.
	Maybe The neurons that produce my best thought will be wending their way through a worm's ass or something like that, right?
	Because they'd be eating me up in the ground or whatever.
	But I will no longer exist for sure.
	This is part of the difficulty of looking at bare atoms and space nature of the universe versus the richness and complexity and life and death of our minds.
	But when I am dead, all of the atoms that compose me will still exist.
	And maybe some of them will be energies, maybe some of the energy be converted back in a batter and stuff.
	But all of the atoms that compose me will still exist, but I will not exist as a conscious entity.
	My consciousness will no longer exist because it's been in the same way that all the atoms that compose the tree, you turned it into paper, all the atoms are somewhere in wood shavings or converted to energy or heat and the chemical process or whatever, but they've been combined with other things to produce the paper.
	So the tree no longer exists as a living entity, as a structure that turns sunlight and CO2 into oxygen.
	So yeah, the tree no longer exists for sure, but the atoms still do.
	Got it.
	Okay, well, I guess final question.
	I appreciate your discussion.
	I'm having joy.
	I hope it's been a good, good stimulation for you as well.
	I would, okay, with cupness is not in the atoms.
	And I guess just lastly, if we replace cupness with something like wetness or elasticity, where, you know, if I have something like, and I say, well, yeah, there's a wetness there, but if I look at the individual atom, there's no wetness.
	There's no wetness on the atom itself.
	There's no elasticity in the atom.
	So can certain things, like real things, emerge in the composites of matter and form, let's say.
	We can't just reduce it down to the parts, right?
	Like at what point is reducing things to the parts, do we end up taking, you know, chopping something off like a little too much?
	Like, can we acknowledge something existing in its composite form, but not within the parts?
	Or does that create like a problem?
	No, no, I think that's entirely right.
	In fact, consciousness is an emergent property of matter.
	And so emergent properties, no individual carbon atom is alive, but you put enough of them together in particular combinations and then you get a living creature.
	And so emergent properties, absolutely, none of the individual atoms within my brain and body have free will.
	But I, as a consciousness, have the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	There's no individual atom that can talk, yet I can talk.
	So emergent properties is the essence of life.
	When I paint the wall of my room, I'm not actually changing the colors of any atoms, right?
	And so there is no, at the atomic level, there is no wet atom, but there is a combination of atoms and H2O that makes it wet, right?
	So you can't have wetness without the H2O because it requires some liquid, or at least let's just say water for the moment.
	So if there's no H2O, then it's not wet.
	If there's enough H2O, then it's wet.
	But each individual atom is not wet, but you get an emergent property called wetness when you have enough H2O combined with whatever else that you're wetting, if that makes sense.
	So yeah, emergent properties are all over the place.
	No individual carbon atom in a tree is alive, but the tree is alive.
	So yeah, emergent properties are all over the place and that life is consciousness, free will, virtue.
	These are all emergent properties and these are the things that make life worthwhile.
	But yeah, no individual atom possesses these characteristics.
	So to close the loop, could cupness be considered under that framework an emergent property as well?
	Or not?
	That's just kind of a different thing.
	Well, I wouldn't say so because the emergent property, no, you know what?
	Let me let me, I was sorry, I was just thinking about human consciousness, but then trees existed prior to human consciousness.
	So that's not a fair, a fair comparison.
	So cupness, is it an emergent property?
	Cupness is an emergent property.
	I don't have a good answer for that.
	It's a great question.
	I don't, I'm trying.
	I'm coming up with like, I get this rapid fire, like, you ever see these, like the ducks, the ducks come up and then you shoot them down.
	It's like a blitzkrieg assault in the brain where you get like five ideas.
	So all of these ideas are popping up and I'm just knocking them down right away.
	Cupness as an emergent property.
	I tend to think, and this could be just my limitation of thinking, but I tend to think of emergent properties as within themselves.
	So the tree has an emergent property called life, which is contained within the tree.
	My brain has an emergent property called consciousness that is contained within the brain.
	Life is an emergent property that is contained within the properties of the living organism.
	Does that make sense?
	So, like a hylomorphic thing where there's like inside the atom, there has this potential to do something.
	And then we combine the atoms in a certain way, that potential is actualized.
	Let's say when brain becomes consciousness, tree becomes life.
	Yeah, but it's within the thing itself.
	There's an emergent property called life that is within the tree itself.
	It's contained within the tree.
	The tree is alive or it's dead.
	Like a friend of mine's wife had a father.
	It's an odd little thing that I just, a friend of mine's wife had a father who was a tree surgeon.
	So he knew when a tree was alive or dead, right?
	And we've all seen these like sad ash-gray trees in the middle of nowhere.
	They're dead as doornails, right?
	So the tree has an emergent property called life that is contained within the tree.
	My brain has an emergent property called consciousness that is within my brain, or it's contained within my brain and so on.
	So I think when we're talking about emergent properties, it is something new that is contained within the thing itself.
	Like sort of take a silly example from fiction, like Frankenstein, right?
	So Dr. Frankenstein creates this monster, shocks it with electricity, the monster comes to life, right?
	So the monster now has an emergent property called life, but it's contained within the monster.
	Does that make sense?
	Well, yes.
	And to understand this, so if I take the sentence, the tree contains the property of life within it.
	Can I replace tree with bundle of atoms and maintain the meaning of the sentence?
	Or is there something about the treeness?
	Like, can I just say the bundle of atoms contains a property of life within it?
	But then, of course, if bundle of atoms is substitutable with anything, I could, my t-shirt could be a bundle of atoms.
	So really, we're saying something more specific than just the bundle of atoms.
	We're saying something about the particular arrangement of those atoms.
	And then, yeah, our recognition of that being a tree at a higher level of abstraction.
	So I'm just trying to say, like, when we say it's in, in the tree, you know, because there's physically in, like when I say what's in, well, the water is in the cup.
	You know, the, if I peel back, if I open the chest, in the chest, there are coins in.
	But then in this case, we're not really saying in, in a physical sense, the life is in the tree.
	I mean, that sounds like a metaphysical thing.
	Well, I don't want to overcomplicate that aspect of things, but we know that a living tree has a property called life that is a property of the tree that differentiates it from a dead tree.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So what I'm trying to say is that there are emergent properties that are contained within the thing itself.
	I don't think that cupness is an emergent property contained within the cup because it requires human consciousness to define it.
	Because cup is just a shape.
	So when you take a bunch of atoms, let's say we could make a tree, right?
	So you take a bunch of atoms, you make them into a tree, then you have created something called life, that the tree is now alive.
	And so the tree now has another property called life that is an emergent property.
	I don't know that when you assemble something into a cup, you assemble the clay or the china or whatever it is into a cup.
	I don't think you get a new emergent property in the same way that other, like life and consciousness and so on, is contained within the entity itself.
	But I don't think that there's a new emergent property that the cup possesses that none of its individual atoms possess.
	Whereas if you get a tree, there is an emergent property called life that is within the tree that none of the individual atoms contain.
	But I don't think you get a new emergent property from the cup.
	You know, that's interesting.
	That's really interesting.
	So as I'm thinking, because I haven't thought about this before, if we emerge, if we talk about what it means to emerge the atoms to get a tree, practically, well, what does that look like?
	Because in reality, right, in observable reality, the only arrangements of atoms we can do to produce a tree is to arrange pre-existing bundles of atoms, like composites, you know, dirt, water, you know, whatever seeds, like that, that's the level of zoom that we can manipulate.
	But as far as I can tell, I guess the question is theoretically, could we actually organize atoms one atom at a time where instead of mixing dirt, water, and seed and make a tree, could I, in theory, take an existing tree and scatter all the atoms and then one by one piece it together and I'm holding it still, they're going to bounce around.
	And then as soon as I put the 100th atom or whatever, the trillionth atom of the tree, then poof, you know, the tree now instantiates.
	Whereas if I only had 99 atoms as opposed to 100 atoms, we still don't have a tree yet.
	Which so again, just to reiterate, it seems like there's some relevance in the means of bundling where as humans, we never truly arrange atoms on a one part at a time basis.
	We always arrange bundles of atoms.
	And is that, does that matter?
	Does that have implications that we can't truly arrange?
	I mean, we try with these colliders and shooting one electron into another.
	Like, we do try to do things at the very single instance level.
	But yeah, I just wonder if there's a limitation there, the fact that when we arrange atoms, quote unquote, we're always arranging composites of atoms.
	We're never arranging individual atoms piecemeal.
	Okay, well, there's two things.
	One is more negative than the other for me.
	So the positive one is like you have a baby on your chest, right?
	Yes, well, which I actually just handed off to my wife, but I did.
	I didn't have a baby.
	Right.
	So you and your wife have created life.
	Right.
	Through the sperm and egg is our composite matter that had to be combined.
	Yes.
	I don't need biology one.
	Sorry.
	I understand.
	Sorry.
	Sperm and an egg.
	I get that.
	I didn't, I'm not saying you splice together you and a space alien in a tree, tree length.
	Okay, so you have created life out of something that was not going to be alive.
	So your sperm live for a certain amount of time, and then I guess the eggs are dumped every month and so on, right?
	So there's a very short lifespan.
	Certainly sperm don't live for 100 years.
	Eggs don't live for 100 years, but a baby can live for 100 years.
	So you've created something new.
	So that's a plus side.
	The minus side is some minor irritation.
	Doesn't mean you're wrong.
	I'm just honest about my emotional experience.
	Minor irritation in that we were talking about emergent properties.
	And I said, well, there's life in a tree.
	There's consciousness in the mind.
	There's life in an animal that's walking around.
	And those are emergent properties that are within the creature, within the object, within the entity itself, right?
	Whereas I don't think, because you said, is there an emergent property in a cup?
	And I said, I don't think you get a new property called life or consciousness or something like that with a cup.
	And then you just completely skid it away from that.
	And it's like, well, what if we could assemble a tree?
	Oh, sorry.
	No, it's because I had two thoughts.
	I'm sorry, no.
	Yes.
	No, you're right.
	So I sort of feel, hang on, hang on.
	So I sort of feel like there's no point answering the questions if you don't acknowledge any answer or object to it, but you just race along with a new hypothetical, then I just don't feel like we're getting anywhere.
	Yeah, you're right.
	No apologies, because like your brain, sometimes I have three things or more that pop in and then I just pick one of those.
	But you're right.
	The cupness, you're right.
	That wasn't fair to not directly acknowledge what you said about the cupness.
	So, yeah, I suppose is life a distinct category of, I guess, what does it mean to be an emergent property?
	And we say, well, life, you could say, is an emergent property, but cupness is different than life.
	It's not consciousness.
	So can we, in a non-arbitrary way, say that cupness doesn't have the weight?
	It doesn't deserve to be called an emergent property.
	And, you know, maybe because cupness is just a shape, but it doesn't have this extra special force of life force.
	So I suppose if we restrict emergent property to purely out of necessity, referring to this kind of life stuff, then yes, a cup doesn't have any of that life stuff.
	No, no, sorry.
	I sorry to interrupt.
	I'm not.
	These are examples of emergent properties.
	I could give others, right?
	So another emergent property would be light can escape a gravity well except if the gravity well is so big like a black hole that light cannot escape.
	So after a certain amount of compression of matter, the gravity well gets so great, you get this event horizon, light cannot escape the black hole.
	So there's an emergent property.
	Light can escape gravity unless it's so compressed and so concentrated, blah, blah, blah, that the photon can't escape the gravity.
	So we could have an emergent properties, you know, an emergent property called a stable orbit requires a certain size.
	Like an individual atom is not going to orbit the sun, right?
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	Because it's just not enough of a gravity well to affect it, right?
	Comets, I guess comets, some do order, but some will just fly through.
	So, or Saturn's rings orbit Saturn, not the sun, because it's more approximate gravity well.
	So there are emergent properties called an orbit.
	No individual atom orbits the sun, but if you get a large enough entity, I guess Pluto being sort of on the outside side, right?
	I know it's not a planet anymore, but it still orbits the sun 240 years or whatever it is.
	So you get an emergent property called an orbit, which is not life, but is something that requires an aggregation of atoms in order to achieve to be subject to the gravity pull of the sun at such a momentum that you get that sweet spot combination of momentum,
	centrifugal force, and gravity well so that we orbit the sun, which is not a property of any individual atom, but it's a property of an aggregation of atoms is called an orbit, which is, of course, why we're alive, because we need continual light and heat source, which you can only get by being in the Goldilocks sweet zone of the orbit.
	So we can talk about things like life.
	There's sort of one example.
	We can talk about black holes.
	We can talk about orbits.
	And these are just off the top of my head.
	I'm sure we could come up with a zillion more.
	Wherein a property now exists that changes what happens to the atom that is not contained within every individual atom.
	Again, no individual atom can walk, but an aggregation of individual atoms can walk as a tiger padding along through the jungle.
	No individual atom will orbit the sun, but you get enough of them together in a planet and you can orbit the sun.
	It's going to change their behavior.
	But I still don't think a cup aggregates to something which changes the nature, position, or properties of the cup.
	That's interesting.
	Yeah, if I were to reflect back, because maybe this is one way we can handle it is if on the table of examination here we put orbits, we put life.
	Earlier I said wetness and then cupness, we could say that, you know, orbit, life, wetness, those types of properties meaningfully interact and create change and motion or something within physics.
	You know, the orbit, there's movement.
	The wetness creates an interaction effect with a nearby substance.
	So that has an impact.
	But a cupness doesn't necessarily, you know, that kind of property doesn't move the physics around it.
	It's not doing anything to its surrounding atmosphere.
	It's just is there.
	So the only thing that cupness does is it does things to our intellect.
	You know, it does, it affects our thoughts.
	So in that sense, you know, the cupness does things to my mind, but it doesn't do things to the physical, you know, the matter and stuff.
	So would that be a fair kind of separation of these things?
	Yeah.
	And I would, I would, I think, supplement what you're saying.
	It's a great point.
	I think what, to supplement what you're saying is to say that the cupness does change the behavior of the atoms and that we pick it up and drink from it, but that's only because of an external thing, not because of its own nature.
	Like the tree grows on itself on its own, and the planet orbits without human intervention.
	So it being created as a cup means that the atoms change because we fill it with coffee and bring it to our lips.
	But that's only because of human beings, not because of the cupness itself.
	Yeah, very interesting.
	Well, I mean, if it's good with you, and I know you got a lot of stuff to do, we've talked a while.
	So if we've established some further grounding on the property of cupness that hasn't been explored before, then I'll take that as a very nice conversation.
	No, great chat.
	Great chat.
	Go enjoy your kids.
	And thanks, everyone.
	I really appreciate your chats today.
	A wonderful, enjoyable afternoon of, good Lord, we do.
	Anyway, it's almost four hours, three hours.
	So, no, gosh, one to four.
	Yeah, almost three hours.
	So almost four hours.
	So I appreciate that.
	Have yourselves a wonderful evening.
	We will speak to you Wednesday night for Wednesday night live.
	Lots of love up here, my friends.
	Freedomain.com slash tonight to help out the show.
	It's nice to be doing some core philosophy.
	Absolutely juicy.
	Have yourselves a lovely afternoon.
	James, have yourself a lovely trip.
	Be safe.
	Keep me posted.
	And we'll talk to you soon.

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