Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Ethics! The UPB Debate

Nov. 27, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:26:56

Ethics! The UPB Debate

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	Yeah, no, thanks for meeting.
	Yeah, I guess what would be the best, what do you think would be the most efficient in our time?
	Because I mean, I could just randomly pose questions or things, but I wonder what would be like the best structure for our conversation.
	I think random questions is absolutely the way to go.
	The randomer, the better.
	All righty.
	Great.
	Well, even I have your book pulled up too with highlights.
	What would be the best thing?
	I guess, yeah, there's like high-level questions and specifics.
	Maybe the first time I see here is a specific.
	I'm just trying to connect with, okay, so in the ground rules, ground rule number one, where you outline the ground rules of UPB, which, by the way, let me even just say off the bat, right?
	Just cards on the table, right?
	I think it's a very meticulous, well-thought-out system that I would describe like if you see a beautiful skyscraper, right?
	And it has a functioning elevator.
	You got the HVAC, the plumbing.
	So the building works, and it's a better building than what other people construct.
	My questions mostly would focus on how the building makes contact with the foundational layer.
	And so just as a high-level kind of characteristic of where I'll be asking some questions, I think.
	But so, okay, in the ground rule one, right, the distinction between is ought, and then the fact that the human beings generally prefer to live cannot be the basis for any valid theory of ethics.
	So we have a ground rule there.
	So then I just wanted to clarify, because where I was a little confused was on one of the things in the, well, my pages won't correspond to the thing, but when you get to the section, universally preferable behavior, UPB five proofs, I wanted to clarify first on the syllogism, organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behavior.
	Man is the most successful organism.
	I just hear I just, even this concept of successful species, I just wanted to know when you use the word success here in what sense were you intending in the argument.
	Well, I mean, successful in terms of we are the unquestioned dominant species on the planet, and we possess characteristics that no other species possesses, right?
	So, you know, apes have rudimentary intelligence and so on, but we have conceptual abilities and language abilities not shared by any other creatures.
	So success is in terms of dominance over other species spread across the planet, ability to adapt to just about any environment.
	And the fact that we have this, you know, truly awesome conceptual ability would be that definition.
	Gotcha.
	Thanks.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, and I would agree with that.
	I've certainly can't dispute that.
	So I guess we're the dominant species and obviously we have these abilities.
	I mean, unmatched abilities, you know, reasoning, conception, conceptual, the will, the way we make decisions.
	But then I guess I'm thinking like which slice of that is the operative slice to make the UPB work.
	Because for example, if we were to say succeeding at, you know, reproducing and passing on genes, well, we could say the bacteria beats us on that dimension.
	We could say power, and in some sense, that's true.
	I mean, we dominate everything, but yet viruses still somehow can wipe us off.
	So there is some tension there, I suppose, from just pure power over all other life forms.
	And then obviously then when we have like, sure, the beauty of the arts, culture, intellectual proofs, I mean, just all the accomplishments of the intellect that we've done, certainly that's a thing.
	But I guess which one of those three slices, or is it kind of the aggregate of those three dimensions or others that are most relevant to making the with the UPB claim?
	Sorry, I didn't quite follow that last point.
	Could you give me a page reference?
	If we're looking at the same thing, that's probably a bit easier.
	Yeah, sorry, on the Amazon Kindle, the pages are so on the desktop view, it says page 31.
	That's not helpful, but the chapter is universally preferable behavior.
	And then you have the subsection UPB five proofs.
	And or if you do a control find, it's where you have the syllogism that says organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behavior.
	Okay, so let's see here.
	I'm just looking for which of the proofs is it?
	I don't see a number on it.
	There's five proofs.
	So there's, I mean, it's the sec, when I flip on my desktop, it's the second page before the section that says UPB optional and objective.
	All organisms require universally preferred behavior to live.
	Is that right?
	Organisms.
	Oh, well, actually, sorry, that's interesting too.
	It was the one in the following pages, but I did have that marked as well.
	So no.
	Oh, so organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behavior.
	Man is the most successful organism, therefore man must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behavior.
	Man's mind is his most distinctive organ, therefore man's mind must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behavior.
	Therefore, universally preferable behavior must be valid.
	And of course, another way of putting that is that someone cannot argue against universally preferable behavior if universally preferable behavior is required for them to live, to learn, to make an argument, to discuss, to debate.
	In other words, you can't get an is from an ought, but a debate is by its very nature an ought.
	So that bridge has already been crossed.
	So the ought doesn't, yeah, the ought doesn't exist in physics, of course, right?
	I mean, the fact that a rock falls down is simply a matter of physical properties and physical laws, for which there is no causality that we know of if we sort of take religion out of the equation.
	But if somebody says you cannot get an ought from an is, they are making an ought statement.
	Yeah.
	And so once a debate is not an is.
	A debate is an ought.
	Language is an ought.
	Conversation is an ought.
	Life is an ought because you can't achieve and sustain life without pursuing universally preferable behavior.
	Food, shelter, reproduction, and water, and so on, or liquid.
	And so it's true that there is no ought in existence.
	However, life is the result of following universally preferable behavior.
	A debate is an ought, and language is an ought by its very nature.
	So life, debate, and language are oughts by their very nature.
	And so to deny universally preferable behavior is to deny that which is required for life, which if you did in any consistent way, you wouldn't be alive.
	If you deny UPB, the effects would be you're not alive.
	You're no longer alive or you're not flourishing.
	You're not succeeding in the different dimensions if you deny UPB.
	Right.
	And of course, I think the premise behind that, which obviously I would agree with, is that it is good to be alive.
	It is good to succeed, That there's something good about that as opposed to not living, but not good in the abstract, good in the example of the person who is alive.
	Oh, sure, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, you look like you're in your third or fourth decade.
	Is that fair to say?
	Um, yeah, I'm 32, 32.
	32, okay.
	So, of course, universally preferable behavior was first pursued by your mother, right?
	Yeah, I mean, she ate enough and kept herself healthy enough that you grew in the womb.
	She gave birth to you, she got up three times a night to breastfeed you or to feed you in some manner.
	And so, your mother pursued universally preferable behavior in order to keep you alive, and then, of course, that burden slowly shifted from your parents to you as you grew.
	And then, once you became an adult, obviously, with some help, right, from your parents, you pursued universally preferable behavior.
	So, your very existence marks a 32-year chain of absolute, not relative, not subjective, not somewhat, but absolute conformity to universally preferable behavior.
	If you tell me that I'm wrong and I say, oh, so you agree that I'm right, you would be annoyed.
	So, even the language has to follow standard definitions that we both agree on.
	And of course, as you know, philosophy is a lot about defining terms.
	So, for somebody to say you can't get an ought from an is fine if you're looking at physics, but it is self-contradictory if you're looking at life.
	In other words, in the realm of physics, yeah, there's no ought, but in the realm of life, there is because physics operates independent of choice.
	In other words, there was physics around long before there was life in people, and so you can't get an ought from an is.
	If the is is physics, yeah, completely agree.
	But if somebody is sitting across from me as the pure result, and I'm not saying you, I don't mean this in any negative way, but if somebody's sitting across from me and their life and their reason and their words and their desire to get to the truth and their preference for reason over violence and their preference for good over evil says to me,
	you can't get an ought from an is, well, if they're looking at the bare atoms, yeah, I get that, but we're not looking at bare atoms, we're looking at life and reason and debate and language, all of which result from universally preferable behavior.
	Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, there's um so you see a couple of things that spark my thoughts, right?
	And then, yeah, all the all of which was so I agree.
	Um, yeah, I mean, just process because you said a couple of interesting things there.
	Um, so yeah, if I were to condense that, right, in some sense, right, any being that's alive, uh, comes, as you said, comes through a chain, and let's just say, without using the term for a moment, of decisions that were made whose effects were to promote, you know, life and all the good things, all the good successes.
	So, you know, being alive, having a lot, you know, I suppose not excessive suffering, that these are the types of high-quality choices that were made that have the effects of bringing us, you know, to where we are here, right?
	So, having a conversation, we're seeking the truth, we're discussing, and that comes from a chain of positive decisions made by the other humans that preceded us in some sense.
	Well, and they're universal, objective, and absolute.
	I mean, let's take a silly example, right?
	So, in order for you, or let's make it me, since it's a silly example, I don't want to use you because that's kind of prejudicial.
	So, let's take my silly example, right?
	So, I just inhaled.
	Now, if I wish to say something, and Lord knows I've been known to go on and on, but if I wish to say something, I must inhale, right?
	I cannot, I cannot simply exhale and continue the conversation.
	Yes.
	And that's not subjective, because, of course, I need air passing by my vocal cords in order for me to be able to make sound, right?
	And so even in the act of saying something, I have to pursue universally preferable behavior for two reasons.
	One, if I don't breathe, I can't say anything.
	And number two, if I don't breathe, I'm going to die, right?
	What's it?
	Three, three, three, right?
	Three minutes of air and you're dead.
	Or three minutes of no air and you're dead.
	Three days of no drink and you're dead.
	Three weeks of no food and you're dead.
	So if I don't breathe.
	So everybody knows that you have to breathe in order to live.
	And it's not subjective.
	It's not a preference.
	It's not cultural, right?
	It is biology rooted in physics.
	And again, the is-ought dichotomy applies to physics.
	It does not apply to biology.
	Or biology.
	I was like nodding my head, but then he said, it is biology rooted in physics.
	That's why I was like, oh, well, so our needs, but our need for oxygen is rooted in physics in that oxygen is not alive.
	It's for us to be alive.
	Yeah.
	Well, not oxygen, but yeah, air, like air, the nitrogen, the oxygen, and the apparently, apparently fatal levels of CO2 these days.
	But it is, our biology is rooted in physics in that if you even just think of calories in, calories out, that's sort of energy consumption versus how much we burn, we need H2O.
	We need water, we need liquid.
	So that's physics, right?
	We don't just like, obviously to reproduce, we can't mate with a rock, right?
	What was that?
	That's an old poem.
	In days of old, when knights were bold and women weren't invented, they put their cocks between two rocks and walked away contented or something like that.
	But because you can't, I mean, I remember having a debate with a guy.
	I think his name was Thaddeus Russell.
	He was a professor who said he genuinely believed that it was possible that a woman could mate with a tree and have a baby.
	He was an odd fellow, to put it mildly.
	And then he's saying universe, that would be the end of his teaching career, but we don't.
	You would have to deny distinct natures between beings.
	Okay.
	So to reproduce, we need people, but to eat, we can live off.
	Well, I guess we live off organic stuff as a whole, but for air, we need to breathe the air.
	The air itself is not alive.
	And the absolute nature of energy in and energy out, the absolute nature of us needing to oxygenate our cells and muscles, the absolute nature of needing air and water in order to survive.
	I mean, you can live without reproducing, but you can't live without air.
	And that's what I mean when I say biology rooted in.
	Right.
	Okay, got right.
	I just, yeah, right.
	In that example, Brianna, I just know that the, I mean, right, when we start talking about other moral rules or preferable behaviors, it goes a little, obviously, your degree goes a little more than just the physics, but I agree with you.
	So I think what I would say there, because I agree with the method of performative self-contradiction.
	So right.
	I mean, just like the relativist who says there's no truth is asserting a truth.
	So it's just kind of nonsense, right?
	Yeah, so if somebody were to say, sorry to interrupt, if somebody were to say to me, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, then I would say continue the debate without inhaling.
	Right.
	And would they be able to do that?
	Of course not.
	Right.
	So exactly.
	So, which to me is another way of highlighting that there's an underlying structure that we rely upon.
	So, as soon as we engage in the act of conversation, seeking the truth, you know, all this stuff, it presupposes the norms.
	It presupposes the ought, as you're saying, that there is, for example, that it is good to pursue truth and to remove falsehood, right?
	We cannot help because as soon as we engage in the activity, as you said, I mean, we are presupposing the ought.
	We are presupposing the norm.
	And so, the only distinction I make is that we're not necessarily deriving it directly from an is in the sense that like we're just observing things like I'm watching some beings, some animals, or even humans and humans chatting.
	It seems to me, I would use the language that we're presupposing it.
	Just like with logic, right?
	You can't prove logic, but anytime you speak and make a proposition, you're presupposing the condition of logic because that's what makes the whole thing work.
	Sorry to interrupt, and sorry if I missed something.
	Why can't we prove logic?
	Because logic is a self-evident, like non-contradiction.
	It's impossible to falsify non-contradiction because the act of falsification itself relies on the principle of non-contradiction.
	And so, it's one of those things where you can't pull yourself out of it and then falsify it because any act of cognition is bound by logic.
	Like it's something we just rely on.
	It's impossible to falsify it.
	I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I'm sorry to be annoying.
	I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't agree with that.
	Because for me, it would be the experiment.
	It would be the experiment.
	But for me, logic is derived from the non-contradictory behavior of matter and energy.
	So, actually, I'm glad you brought soaks we could explore that because I think that that's I noticed that language there.
	So, I mean, let's just break that down.
	So, I'm observing matter and energy.
	So, right, let's say I'm observing, and whatever, I mean, if you want to pick what we're seeing, maybe we're looking at some electrons spinning or we're looking at- No, let's at the level of sense data because that's where logic came from, right?
	So, let's say we're looking at a bird.
	Can something be both a bird and a rock at the same time?
	I mean, let's not go with silly statue, you know, it's a statue of a bird, right?
	Can something, yeah, can a bird be both a bird and a tree at the same time?
	And of course, the answer is no.
	Can something be both a tree and a cloud at the same time?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	Can something be both a circle and a square at the same time?
	Of course, the answer is no.
	Can two and two equal five?
	If there are two rocks, can you turn them into five rocks, you know, just without touching them or just like just moving them around without splitting them or anything funky like that, right?
	And so, logic is derived from the empirical, objective, non-contradictory nature of reality.
	And so, I think that logic is entirely provable because it is, in a sense, the shadow in our minds cast by the universal objective behavior of sense data and sense data of universal matter and energy transmitted by sense data.
	So, logic is provable because it accurately describes the nature of, and I say sense data because we don't want to get all kind of funky with quantum physics and because that was long after logic was defined.
	And quantum physics all cancels out long before you get to the level of sense data.
	So, you know, something cannot be both a table and an elephant at the same time.
	And, you know, an object is either itself or it is something else.
	It can't be both itself and something else.
	A is A and Aristotle's three basic laws.
	So we get logic out of the non-contradictory and consistent behavior of matter and energy.
	So I think that logic is proven by its concordance with the stable properties of matter and energy.
	Yeah, so the words that I would use agree with the print, because I agree with the underlying principle, but I think when we say derive, so what I would say is that we have the pre-existing faculties, the capacities to recognize identity, non-contradiction.
	But until we have the content that the sense data provides, then we can't really be aware of it.
	Because to your point, it isn't until I see the bird that my intellect can recognize as, oh, a bird is not a rock.
	A bird is.
	So in that sense, I agree that you need content to evaluate and see the principles in action.
	With no content, there's nothing to evaluate.
	I mean, I can't have a thought if I have no content.
	I'm sorry, I'm not agreeing.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by content here.
	Content, which in this case could be like a sense data, you know, a thing that I'm thinking about.
	So, in that sense, right, if I've never had sensory experiences, I wouldn't have any content to think about because I have a lot of things.
	I'm sorry to, I don't, it seems like a bit of a cart before a horse thing because our senses evolved to serve our survival.
	So, if you didn't have any sense data, you wouldn't ever have evolved, you wouldn't be alive.
	I mean, so life itself is founded upon the accurate transmissal of objective reality through sense data.
	Because if you think you can hunt a cloud and eat it, you're going to die.
	You're going to run off a cliff and you won't get any nutrition.
	So, saying, well, what if I didn't have any senses?
	It's like, well, there wouldn't be any organisms.
	There wouldn't be any life, certainly not human life without at least a bunch of senses that corroborate each other and lead us to food and away from danger and help us figure out where the water is through hearing and feeling and taste and so on.
	And the sense of smell to make sure that we don't eat rotten food or at least not too much.
	So, when you say content, as if we can somehow take the human mind out of sense data, but the human mind has evolved off prior evolutionary earlier ramifications or permutations of sense data.
	So, we wouldn't have a mind without sense data.
	We wouldn't be alive.
	Well, yeah, yeah.
	So, I mean, I see the point you're making as far as like our anthropology and like the history of what, you know.
	But I think, you know, even in that narrative, right, I think if we, if you would agree that we both have to concede a little bit of humility and like the spark of consciousness, right?
	We don't really know and can't definitively say like what exactly happened, what that was like, you know, how the intellect arose.
	You know, we could like like, right, like let's say the, yeah, I mean, I'd say the hard problem of consciousness.
	Sorry, I don't think, you know, it's kind of impossible to say exactly what it was like to go from non-conscious to conscious and then, you know, describe in details that experience, right?
	No, but we know, sorry, but we certainly know that pre-human conscious creatures rely almost entirely on their sense data in order to survive.
	And so we know that we know that senses precede human consciousness.
	And so human consciousness, to me, we became conscious when we thought about sense data.
	I know that doesn't really say that much, but dogs don't really think about sense data.
	They just sort of react.
	But when we can think about sense data, we can start to abstract principles from them in the way we can get math from balls being thrown around, but dogs can't.
	They just sort of follow the balls.
	But we know for sure that there was sense data before there was human consciousness.
	And of course, you and I are relying on sense data to have the conversation.
	And we're relying on the objectivity and universality of sense data, with some exceptions for our eyes are slightly different shapes, our ears are slightly different levels of acuity.
	You would be younger than mine, so you'd have slightly better hearing and so on.
	So, but yeah, we know for sure that human consciousness evolved out of sense data and still relies on it for the principles that we call reason.
	Yeah, I guess that's because I'm nodding my head, and then there's a couple of phrasings that get in there why correct away.
	I'm not going to try and claim that I've solved the whole problem with one little speech.
	So, yeah, go ahead.
	So, where we could say it's right, which is true, right?
	The order of events as we understand it, as you said, there's sensors, there's beings that are exposed to senses.
	And right, if we go with the whole narrative of like the primitive eye, where the worm just sees, you know, binary, you know, light receiving light sensing cells and so on.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	If we buy into that, um, and then somehow it proves, you know, into like more specificity, but then there's still the mystery of like an actual aware being that is now abstracting, like the function of abstracting and thinking.
	Because this is, and this is kind of tricky, but a lot of when we get into the narrative storytelling of like, you know, our origins, there's a risk of hindsight bias where because I know that I'm here and I'm conscious, I'm doing everything, then therefore, then we kind of apply that in reverse.
	So, so what I mean to say, sorry if I'm not being clear, what I mean to say is that ex ante, if I didn't know, right, if I didn't know that this is how the story is, that consciousness would emerge and that we're doing these things that we're doing now.
	I mean, here we're talking on a computer and we're, you know, universally preferable behavior.
	If I didn't know that that's how the story would turn out, a priori, before all that, it seems inconceivable to even predict that, you know what, you just throw enough atoms and light waves at some eyeball, and then eventually the magic's going to happen and conscious processes.
	And that's just what's it's inevitable.
	That's what needs to happen.
	Like without us knowing the end of that story, it just seems to be from an ex ante beginning of the story.
	That no one, there would be absolutely no reason to predict that, that you just shoot enough matter and energy at something and then thoughts will happen.
	Like, well, I completely agree with you there, but that wasn't the topic at hand.
	The topic at hand was you said that we can't prove reason.
	And I said, well, yeah, reason is derived from the objective, rational, and universal behavior of matter and energy.
	So we can prove reason.
	In other words, we say there are these basic laws of consistency and non-contradiction.
	Where do they come from?
	Well, they come from the rational, consistent, objective behavior of matter and energy.
	And of course, we couldn't have life if matter wasn't stable, right?
	We just, I mean, we couldn't have life because there wouldn't be enough predictability to eat, drink, rest, reproduce, right?
	There'd be no stability in.
	I mean, we wouldn't even have planets.
	We wouldn't have suns.
	We wouldn't like behavior is universal and absolute and objective and non-contradictory and so on, all of which are coincidental, not coincidentally, the properties of reason.
	So I would say that reason is the shadow cast by the stable properties of matter and energy.
	And if there was matter and energy at the sense level, at the sense data level, that contradicted reason, we would be insane.
	Like that, that's how we know someone is insane.
	Because if somebody says that tree is both a tree and a cloud at the same time, we would know that that person was psychotic.
	They had lost reason.
	That's how we know the difference between our nightly dreams and our waking experiences.
	So nightly dreams are self-contradictory.
	And our waking lives, we inhabit a universe that is not.
	I mean, people could be self-contradictory, but the universe cannot be.
	So I would say that reason is the extrapolation into universal principles and rules that follow the rules of physics to a T, that matter is stable and predictable and generally inert.
	And there's, you know, centrifugal forces, there's forces of momentum and inertia, and objects are stable and less change, right?
	I mean, a tree is a tree until it dies and then maybe it falls over or something like that or it burns.
	But things are what they are until some outfireside force acts upon them, which is an object is itself and nothing else.
	And of course, we couldn't live if that wasn't the case because our kidney is our kidney.
	It doesn't suddenly turn into a ferret and chew its way out.
	So all of our life requires air doesn't nourish us and then poison us from minute to minute.
	So there's all this stable stuff.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	No, there's no objection for me as far as describing the intelligibility and the order that's found in an external world that even without human beings, like the world itself has an intelligible order, as you said, that doesn't self-contradict itself, right?
	There's a stability, there's a consistency.
	So I have no dispute in that.
	But that's the proof of reason.
	The proof of reason is that there are principles derived from the stable and predictable and non-contradictory behavior of matter and energy.
	That's a proof of reason.
	Reason that's stable or derived.
	I think, yeah, I mean, maybe we just have to.
	No, I'm not going to agree to disagree on this one.
	I'm happy to tell you.
	It's not even it.
	No, it's just a different with the language because, I mean, you have a good choice in words, but I still feel like I'm not elaborating what I'm trying to say.
	So I'm trying to think of a better way to say what I would.
	I think sorry, but do you agree that reason corresponds to the objective and non-contradictory behavior of matter?
	And we could say energy, but let's just say matter for the sake of simplicity.
	That a rock is a rock and not a rock and a tree at the same time.
	I just think it's more than that.
	Of course, I agree.
	That's part of it.
	The reason is reason is what lets me see that a rock is a rock and a rock is a tree.
	No, no, because animals know what rocks are before they have reason.
	Right, instinctively.
	They just can't define them.
	But they have to, because they have to know the difference between a hole in a tree and a hole in a vagina where they can reproduce or something like that, right?
	But no, so it is not that reason identifies things in the world.
	We only have reason because of the stability of things in the world.
	So an animal knows the difference between food and not food.
	And a dog knows the difference between a ball and an elephant.
	And so, and if you were to put gravel, if you put gravel in a dog's bowl, it may sniff it for a moment, but it's not going to eat it.
	It knows the difference between gravel and food, though it would not be able to define those things in any abstract way.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, I was going to say, sorry to be a pain, but for a lot of this, right, when we use words, I'll kind of so we don't equivocate, because I agree in one sense, right?
	The animal knows the difference, but certainly when I say knows, when we say a human knows, we mean a kind of a different phenomenon.
	We don't mean it in the same way.
	No, no, I'm sorry to be so contradictory.
	I mean, okay.
	No, no, both.
	Because have you, have you been, are you a father?
	I'm the father.
	Yeah, okay.
	Okay.
	So do your kids, do your kids, did your kids like something before they had language?
	Did they like something before they had language to express it?
	Sure.
	Or to understand it.
	Right.
	I mean, we know that when a baby is born, if you brush its cheek with a nipple, it would turn its head towards a nipple.
	We know that babies are born recognizing their father's voice if they've heard their father's voice in the womb because the deeper voice penetrates the amniotic sac and so on.
	And of course, nobody would say that a newborn baby has any conceptual understanding of anything because it's basically a raw piece of human putty starting the journey.
	So human beings, and of course, there are people who have significant cognitive deficiencies, which might put them at the level of monkeys or apes or something like that.
	They still have preferences.
	They still like things.
	They still like going out when it's sunny and not when it's raining, though they could never describe things in those ways.
	So human beings, we start with a non-language understanding and animals, in a sense, or a pre-animals understanding or instinctual response to the world.
	And then we grow into our conceptual abilities over time.
	So I wouldn't say that there's a huge, there is, of course, between you and I, we're having a conversation that monkeys could never do, but we also grew out of having understanding and knowledge and preferences.
	My wife was a mental health professional.
	She practiced psychology for many decades and she studied child development.
	And when my daughter was growing, she's like, oh, here comes object constancy, where the ball rolls under the couch and the kid does, oh, the ball's still under the couch, right?
	And dogs know that too.
	If you've ever seen a dog sort of sniffing for its ball under the couch, it knows it can't see it, but it knows it's still there.
	And so children go through these sort of animal stages of understanding before developing abstract language and then hopefully rationality.
	So again, sorry to be a nitpicker, but I wouldn't say that it's a clear line of demarcation between humans and animals.
	Yeah, well, okay.
	Yeah, fair, right?
	I guess that does have to go into what is a human right and what's just the animal, if there's a meaningful distinction.
	Well, yeah, we grow out of sense data.
	Animals don't in general.
	Yeah.
	So what I, okay, maybe I wonder what you think about it if we phrase if it's an experiment like this.
	Like, let's just even start.
	Okay, so I'm sorry I have two thoughts pumped in my head.
	No, it's time.
	The first, because I've thought about this, I thought about this.
	What would be, let's say, what would the first moment of consciousness look like where you're aware of things and you can abstract?
	So in my mind, without a pre-existing faculty of logic, which I, again, I know this people, if you could just let me run with it for a sec, it would just be chaos and everything would be a sludge mess of stimulation.
	It's just like non-stop stimulation.
	But the fact I can perceive a form of a rock and recognize it as such, and that's different than the tree.
	And I can acknowledge that, like recognize that, not just data, but I can interpret the data.
	There is an interpreter mechanism on the data.
	It's not just data, but I have a judgment layer on top of the data.
	And to me, like that judgment faculty, you know, is a distinctive operation that's beyond just like raw observation, but rather there's like a judgment interpretive layer that would have to, it's like it's just a precondition for making sense of anything.
	If I didn't have that interpretive later, I couldn't make sense of anything.
	Well, and of course, but animals have that same too.
	I mean, the wolf has to differentiate between a rock and a rabbit, otherwise it can't survive.
	Well, right.
	So, okay, so the, I mean, one, one form of conception would call that the, what is it, the cogitative power, like the instinctual, because I mean, in one sense, we know what humans think and we know under the box what it's like to do a syllogism, you know, premises, conclusion.
	When we look at other animals, we just speculate and we look at their external behaviors and we try to make assumptions about what's going on underneath the hood.
	But, you know, in some sense, it's inaccessible.
	I mean, so the wolf does react like, you know, ouch, like hot fire.
	Any animal, you know, they experience neurological stimulation, pain, runaway.
	You know, so that we see that behavior, you know, but to what extent is that just some reflexic, reflexes, mechanistic kind of instinctual thing versus a higher order level of analysis and deliberation, you know, evaluating the pros and cons, you know, like a discursive operation of the intellect.
	Yeah, no, I mean, for sure.
	I mean, the senses are evolved in order to differentiate food from non-food, in order to differentiate predators from non-predators, in order to differentiate mating opportunities from non-mating opportunities, which is why, you know, female dogs give off a smell and they're in heat and so on, right?
	So the senses evolved to serve survival.
	And so what human beings do, I would argue that's different.
	And this is a huge topic, but just sort of to take a brief swing at it.
	So we have the ability to extract essences from sense data that exist independent of specific items.
	So we have a definition of a tree that is not required.
	It's not required to be a specific tree.
	Now, but of course, when a wolf is hunting, it doesn't see a rabbit running and say, oh, that rabbit is slightly taller or wider or a slightly different shade.
	So it has a definition of a rabbit, but the definition of the rabbit is based upon patterns, instinct, and movement, which is what its senses have evolved to have it do.
	But it does not have an abstract conceptual definition of what a rabbit is, because that would not actually serve its survival.
	It only needs to get to the level of, that's a rabbit, not a rock.
	I like to eat them, and I'm going to chase it until I get a hold of it.
	But it does not, it does not serve the wolf's brain in terms of hunting the rabbit to have a definition of a rabbit.
	But for humanity, we have taken that leap to have the definition of a rabbit that exists for all rabbits rather than, well, this is an instinct that has the rabbit kind of like the rabbits I've seen before, so I'll chase it and eat it.
	Yeah.
	So that's okay.
	It's interesting.
	I just have to probably just think about it more, but I'm just curious, at least to put the bow on this point, would you say if we, let's say, the wolf and the human, would you say that both have the same substance of senses, but the human is like a supercharged version of the same thing?
	Or would you say that the human has extra senses that are just categorically distinct from the wolf?
	Or again, is it just what the wolf has, but just like max, you know, turn it up by 100, you know, just supercharge the wolf, and then you get the human's size.
	Yeah, I wouldn't say so because from what I think biologists have talked about quite consistently is that there are, of course, animals that have vastly superior senses to humans, right?
	I mean, as you know, the bloodhounds that are used to sort of chase criminals who don't cross rivers or something like that.
	So there's just about every sort of kind of animal has some senses that are superior to humans.
	If I were to, and again, nobody knows this sort of bicameral mind explosion thing, but I would say that there was some human being somewhere in the distant past who decided to stop being reactive.
	And when you, so to be proactive is not to hunt animals, but to domesticate them.
	It is not to go around looking for random fruit.
	It is to plant and grow crops of your own.
	And going from reactive to proactive was really the foundation of civilization, because then once you've gone from reactive to proactive, then the quicker you can define and understand things, the more effectively you can harness the goods and energy and resources and so on of domesticated crops.
	And of course, the other thing, too, is that there is a way that this all spreads, right?
	So whichever person or group or tribe first figured out the sort of proactive, don't just react to nature, but proactively, you know, fence it in and plant it and harvest it and so on.
	Well, they could have a much bigger army, right?
	Army marches on its feet, right?
	They can have better weapons.
	They can have bigger armies.
	And so they will generally go around and kill the men, rape the women, and spread the sort of more advanced genetics that way.
	And that's sort of been the step upwards.
	It's a pretty bloody business.
	What war didn't do, winter finished, right?
	In that if you have to plan for winter and you haven't planned for winter, you tend not to make it.
	So I think that this going from reactive, wolves generally are reactive.
	So wolves will go hunt for sure.
	And so, but they will not build a fence to keep the rabbits in and then feast at their leisure, right?
	But human beings do.
	And I think that was going from reactive to proactive.
	Whoever came up with that bright idea was the founding of us all.
	Yeah.
	No, I think that's a really powerful frame.
	It's just a nice way to say it from reactive to proactive.
	But I suppose, right, even in that snapshot story that there's someone who decided to be proactive, it's still to me, and maybe that's just part of the mystery, right?
	That's why we're still or if they just had the genetics, right?
	I mean, they just had some random gene that amped up their intelligence.
	Because we know genes like this, IQ, as we know, is highly hereditable.
	And I think that somebody just had a mutation that just gave them relative to everyone else, just a giant brain.
	And they managed somehow to circumvent the primitive.
	Because, you know, once you get a tribal narrative, once you get ancestors, you get a god, so then you get a lot of cohesion and people are willing to die for their beliefs in a way that animals aren't.
	And so it's a very powerful thing to spread.
	But I would imagine it was just some, you know, nature's just rolling the dice and someone happened to get, you know, 2020s in a row on 20-sided dice and got the high IQ and then sort of were able to organize their society.
	And maybe they had more wives because they had more resources because they first figured out to domesticate the animals.
	And why don't we just build a fence and keep the cows here rather than just go and wander all over Hell's Half Acre trying to find them?
	And I would assume that that gave that person and then eventually that tribe higher reproductive capacities and you'd spread that high intelligence that way.
	Yeah, well, certainly, yeah, the skill provide and propagates itself through all those advantages you mentioned.
	I just, yeah, it still just seems mysterious.
	Oh, it is.
	And we'll never know.
	Yeah, we'll never know.
	I'll say the step to go from reactive to proactive is not just like go from IQ of 10 to 11 or 12, right?
	It's like, it's like advanced planning and future, you know, it's just a whole categorically like different thing.
	Like it's a new ability.
	It's like, it's like, it's like being born with wings all of a sudden when you're, when your dad didn't have any wings and you're like, well, I don't.
	Yeah, I'm sorry, because wings are a whole like, it's just more of the same.
	Wings are a whole different thing, right?
	So I used the gross, yeah, it's a gross, but I mean, like, cause it's not just extra neurons.
	It's not like we went from like a million neurons to a million and one and then all of a sudden proactivity happened, right?
	There's something like that.
	I'm sure you know this, that they can trace back blue eyes to one guy.
	You know, like one guy had the blue eye mutation and he was, you know, so hot, baby, that, you know, he just produced a whole bunch of people with blue eyes and then they were considered very attractive.
	And they were so it just take like one mutation, like blue eyes.
	And, you know, there's now millions and millions of blue-eyed people across the world.
	So, I mean, we know that if it's if it's attractive and appealing enough or provides enough resources, and certainly going from reactive to proactive would.
	I mean, gosh, I mean, just look at like more reactive tribes like the indigenous population of North America.
	I mean, they did some farming and so on, but they still basically just wandered around after the buffalo and attacked each other randomly.
	But the more proactive Europeans, you know, I mean, came and kind of kind of won, right?
	So that's a way that those genes would kind of spread throughout history.
	But sort of going back to the original point of like, yes, you can prove reason by saying reason is derived from the objective properties of matter and energy.
	Every law of reason, every law of reason follows the behavior of matter and energy or is derived from the behavior of matter and energy.
	So if I were to say, write up a business plan and say, I'm going to both expand in China and shut down my operations in China so that I can both make and lose money simultaneously, the investors would wonder how I managed to get past security to have my mad ravings in their boardroom because those are impossible.
	And in the same way, if you were a physicist and you were to say that gases both expand and contract when heated and that water both raises and lowers when you put an object in it, that person would be considered insane because those two things are the same principle.
	So all of the laws of logic follow the behavior of matter and energy, and that's how logic is validated because otherwise logic is just something, it's just basically a convenient lie that we agree on.
	And it's not that.
	Yeah, or it's part of our operating system, which is a good thing.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess, and because I do, and actually, sorry, do you have maybe like 15 more minutes?
	I just want to check because I love this convo, man, and I really appreciate these arguments.
	And I think we're having a good brain spark.
	So yeah, let's do it.
	Oh, thank you.
	Okay, yeah.
	Cause, oh, my gosh, it's like I have so many things, but I know we could just have to, you know, we can't eat the full elephant all in one go.
	Yeah, we can do it again, though.
	No worries.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	Awesome.
	What I would say is.
	Okay, so when we say reason is derived from stable matter energy, to me, right, I would say, because I would say humans use reason to make the claim that reason is derived from matter energy.
	Like to me, like I can't even to even process what you're saying or even to believe it, to say, hey, reason is derived from matter and energy.
	I'm using reason.
	So, you know, to me, like a proper, let's say, empirical or scientific thing, you always have the null hypothesis and the counterfactual, the control group, but there's no control group and like, you know, the opposite of reality, right?
	No, there is.
	Sorry, sorry to be so annoying, and I could be wrong.
	Right.
	Well, because a rock is not a tree.
	That's what I'm saying.
	I mean, that's a rock is never a tree.
	Like, that just cannot be.
	If you find self-contradictory behavior in matter, then you invalidate reason, but you can't and you won't.
	If you find self-contradictory, because we don't find self-contradictory behavior in matter, yeah, well, because, but could we even recognize what would it even look like in theory?
	How could I imagine?
	No, it's like imagine.
	It's easy.
	It's easy because you, I'm sorry to be annoying, but it's easy because it happens every night.
	Every night you go to sleep and dream crazy things.
	I had a dream last night about my father.
	I was chatting with my father.
	The man's been dead for four years.
	Yeah.
	So there's a self-contradictory entity, right?
	My father is worm food and my father is sitting across in an armchair chatting with me.
	It's like those things are impossible.
	You can't have, but he cannot be both dead four years ago and talking with me in an armchair.
	So there's an example of contradictory behavior of matter and energy.
	And so I know that's how I know it's a dream and not real.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, well, that's how you know it's not a dream and not real.
	So you said, well, I can't conceive of contradictory behavior.
	It happens every night.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say, to me, that's like a specificity and definition.
	So if it's the general claim of my father is dead, my father is alive, then that, yeah, those can't be true at the same time.
	But of course, the reality, as you just described, right, is like, I have a dream state, you know, of a, I perceive and interacting with my father, but then I've also perceived his gravestone.
	I have memory of burying him, you know, so therefore my dream, my other thing must have been a dream, right?
	Because my father can't be alive because I saw him die.
	Yes.
	And my point is that when you say I can't conceive of contradictory things, so that is a dream that contradicts reality.
	But I'm sure you've had a dream where, I mean, I'll just think of one I had a while ago.
	So I'm walking down a hospital corridor.
	I open it up and it's the kindergarten that I first went to school in.
	Okay.
	Now, the kindergarten was not in a hospital, right?
	And of course, we've all had it where, you know, you pick a flower and it turns into a candle or you jump off a building and suddenly you can fly.
	But then when you think about flying, suddenly you can't fly and you fall.
	And right.
	So here's all of the contradictory behavior of matter and energy.
	We experience it every night.
	We can, and of course, if reality were that chaotic, we wouldn't have any laws of logic because nothing would have any stable consistency in behavior.
	Yeah, that's well, like I said, if I just stick with even this in my mind, what you said, like the flower turning into a candle or vice versa.
	And so does that, would that falsify logic or would that just falsify?
	Like let this hypothetically, right?
	If I was, if I had this thing and let's try it's a candle and then it turns into a flower, would it violate logic or is it violating my understanding of what the physical laws are?
	Because my understanding of the physical laws would be like, that should be impossible.
	No, it would violate logic.
	But the reason that it can't happen is that the behavior of matter and energy is not arbitrary or random.
	And objects don't just magically change their own properties and behaviors, right?
	I mean, you think of Medusa, right?
	She turns and looks at someone with her snake hair and he turns into stone.
	Well, flesh cannot turn into stone, right?
	Even if we look at it, like, well, it's not flesh and stone at the same time.
	Flesh cannot turn into stone.
	I assume that this was just a myth that came about because they came across a bunch of statues of warriors somewhere, and then there was a woman with wild hair nearby, and they just said, oh, man, she turned them into stone.
	You know, sort of superstition stuff that happens.
	But if I'm holding a flower and it turns into a candle, then I have been dosed with a drug.
	Because flowers do not turn into candles and vice versa.
	They do not do it.
	It will never happen.
	It can never happen because we couldn't be alive if it ever did.
	There could be no universe.
	There could be no planets.
	There could be no suns.
	There could be no stable kidneys.
	There could be no evolution for 4 billion years.
	If matter and energy randomly changed its properties, then we would not.
	So the fact that we're here proves that matter and energy is stable.
	And therefore, it proves that logic is universal.
	And logic describes the behavior of matter and energy that vastly predates human consciousness.
	So when you say we can't prove logic, it'd be like our existence proves logic because logic is the abstraction of the stable properties of matter and energy.
	And that's the magical way that we wake up every morning and we don't think we're going to sleep, right?
	We wake up and you say, wow, that was a crazy dream and all of that, right?
	Because in our dreams, things do change properties.
	You know, we are old and then we are young.
	We are tall and then we are short.
	We can fly and then we can't fly.
	Objects, you know, we pick up a frog and it turns into a bunch of rose petals and then we throw it and it turns into a dove.
	And right.
	And this is what magic does, of course, you know, magicians and so on, they just mess with our sense of reality and so on, which is fun, but the reason it's fun is because we know it's impossible.
	So trying to puzzle it out is interesting.
	But yeah, logic is validated by our existence.
	I mean, we couldn't, if matter that energy weren't stable, the sun wouldn't be burning for 10 billion years and we wouldn't have had the chance to evolve.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, because you said at different points, right?
	And then it's like from a minute ago that I was thinking about that.
	And I mean, because then, right, so then I'm trying to think which one to respond to.
	But I mean, I guess I did want to ask you something else, but I guess just to land the play on this, this one.
	Yeah, I think the reason why I know a candle can't turn into a flower is one, I've never observed anything like that.
	Plus, the totality of the body of knowledge and all the science we've done, you know, we've done millions of experiments, and even though the experiments are on different topics, you know, maybe someone's studying a bird, maybe someone's studying water molecules, maybe someone, even though the specifics are different, the common thread in all those experiences are right, that there's at least some stable property to manner in general because everything is composed of matter.
	Well, and I would also add to that, the universe is 13 billion years old.
	The Earth is, I don't know what, 6 billion years old, and life is 4 billion years old.
	And we could never have evolved.
	We could never have evolved to understand the universe if the universe were not stable.
	I mean, just think of everything that occurs at the cellular level, at the genetic level, at the double helix level, everything has to be stable.
	Yeah, so we don't have to look at it's not, well, all the scientists and this and that.
	We can simply look at the fact that there's no, there's absolutely zero possibility that we would be here if the universe wasn't stable.
	So it is all of our own personal experiences, our collective experience.
	But the fact that we're having these experiences or these questions at all must be certain proof that the universe has been stable since its origins.
	Think of all the stable ages of matter and energy that were required to form the solar system and the sun and the planets and so on.
	So we know that it's stable and universal.
	And reason is hooking into the most fundamental properties of the universe.
	And the reason could be invalidated if matter behaved in self-contradictory or arbitrary manners.
	But it will never be that way because we could never have evolved if that was even the remotest possibility in reality.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, I completely agree.
	I mean, you definitely don't need to persuade me on the stability of the universe and all that for sure.
	I agree.
	And I suppose other people might phrase it as that our sense of logic is a participation in the higher, the logical structure of reality itself.
	It's not a participation.
	Sorry, it's not a participation because we can't change it.
	We cannot will.
	It can't be.
	I don't mean participate in a voluntary sense.
	I'm saying that we in here, we somehow, like you're saying, we're kind of attaching to that.
	I don't mean like I'm choosing to participate.
	I don't mean it like that way at all.
	I mean more like the moon participates in the light of the sun, right?
	Like that's what I mean.
	The moon isn't making a goal.
	Okay, so yes, but it is not willed.
	It is not voluntary.
	It's not arbitrary.
	Logic is.
	And so, yeah, logic is, I mean, logic literally is life because if the universe did not behave in a logical fashion, we could never have evolved.
	So the fact that we exist is the most foundational proof of logic, but we can also go to our empirical experiences as well.
	Yes, got it.
	Well, okay, I guess, yeah, it's funny.
	I wasn't even anticipating we would dive into this, but I guess maybe unprovable.
	I had to.
	You know, yeah, right.
	Wouldn't be a philosophy discussion then.
	Oh, man.
	Okay.
	Well, I guess maybe last thing for tonight.
	I mean, like Sat could go forever, but I just know it's late for you.
	But I did.
	So back with UPB, one thing I would love to hear your thoughts on.
	And if I could first elaborate, is this is connected.
	I'll get to the exact question.
	But so first of all, I think what's interesting is the idea of using, like, I see what you're doing as far as you have physical laws, and you can go back to the rock falls.
	It doesn't go up.
	The rock doesn't go up, it goes down.
	And then in some sense, you know, by metaphorical equivalence, in some sense, are you saying, well, you know, let's, we should see that with moral laws.
	And so, and then you get into kind of the synchronous performance test for universality, which in physics, right, that that's what you would do.
	But so I wonder, so I guess, first of all, I wonder if there's to what extent can we would that be an appropriate one-to-one reference or is it a category error?
	Because what I mean is that with a physical law, it's what must happen.
	The rock must fall.
	It doesn't matter if I want it to do something differently.
	It must happen.
	Whereas when we get in the category of moral norms and things, it's what you should do, what you ought to do.
	But people can obey or disobey the rule.
	If someone murders someone, they still murder them.
	I mean, it's not like with the rock, I can't make the rock fly up.
	The rock will go down.
	So, yeah.
	And what, so A, that this thing should curious your thoughts, and B, specifically in your tests, because you run through all the kind of core, you know, murder, theft, rape.
	And it seems like the experiment you kind of simulate is that if you can't perform this simultaneously, then therefore it's not universal.
	So it's like a universality in terms of synchronous performance.
	I was just curious what was the basis of that, that kind of method that you were applying.
	Okay, so to differentiate between, and it's a great point, between physics and free will.
	If a man pushes a giant rock off the top of a hill and it bounces down and crushes your car, obviously you're not angry at your car.
	You're not angry at the rock.
	You're not angry at the hill.
	You're angry at the man who pushed the rock.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	If, on the other hand, it's a terrible storm and the wind blows the rock, then you might be annoyed that you parked your car where the rock happened to land, but you would not be angry at any particular individual because that would be the simple operation of physics with all of the sort of chaos and unpredictability of weather.
	It's still not conscious or volitional.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes.
	And just for me to kind of elaborate, thinking through this out loud.
	So the difference is that on the one hand, I say it could have been otherwise.
	Now, you could say that with the storm too, but at least with an agent with an intellect, he had an idea, he had understanding in some sense, like pushing rock, whatever.
	So, yeah, the category of blame or anger, responsibility, culpability, all that stuff assumes agency and action and choices and thoughts and deliberation.
	Whereas a storm, I mean, be angry, this seems nonsensical.
	There's no decision-making behind the storm.
	So what's there to be right?
	So saying that there is preferred behavior is indicating that we have the capacity to choose something that is preferred versus unpreferred.
	Yes.
	Unlike the rock that's just bouncy down because the wind pushed it over or something like that.
	It doesn't have any preferred or unpreferred behavior, right?
	And so saying that morality is not physics, I mean, obviously, is perfectly correct because it's a different category.
	Physics describes that which is non-volitional and is not preferred, but simply is.
	Whereas morality describes things that are volitional and it's the examination of what can be universally preferred.
	The fundamental job of philosophy is morality because it's the one thing that philosophy does that no other discipline is centered on, right?
	Biology is just centered on life, geology on rocks and minerals and so on, and physics on matter and energy and so on.
	But philosophy is moral philosophy is the foundation of it.
	Now, of course, there's philosophical elements to those other things, particularly the scientific method, because it's an epistemological approach.
	But it's morality that philosophy is focused on.
	Science will not provide you with morality.
	It will provide you cause and effect.
	Biology will not provide you with morality.
	It will only talk about genetic success and failure.
	But it is philosophy that talks about that which is universally preferable.
	And it can't talk about universally preferred because that would be past tense, right?
	And not everybody prefers everything all at the same time.
	So it's preferable as in the future tense.
	What should we prefer in our virtue?
	So the question at the beginning of the book is: people will say, well, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, which is why I sort of proved that your existence and you engaging in a debate and you're using the correct language all accepts that there is universally preferable behavior.
	So then the only question is not is there such a thing as universally preferable behavior, but what is it?
	And if people say, well, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, they're actually acting on universal preferable behavior.
	You should not say that there is things that are true, that are false, and so on, right?
	So then the question is: okay, well, what is universally preferable behavior?
	And it cannot be something that just people like to do, because if everyone already liked to do the same thing, you wouldn't need a system of morality, right?
	You have to be for things where people can choose badly.
	So then we look at the traditional categories of ethics.
	These are my categories, but they're pretty common in ethical systems: rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	So then we say, okay.
	Can rape, no, let's take theft.
	It's a little less volatile.
	Can theft be universally preferable behavior?
	And if the proposition that theft can be universally preferable behavior immediately self-contradicts, then we know it's false.
	I mean, any proposition that immediately self-contradicts, we know is false, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, no, listen.
	If there's something you wanted to add to that, I'm not monologue myself here.
	I just want to make, can you repeat that exact sentence last time you said any proposition or argument that immediately self-contradicts is invalid?
	Yeah, if it, right?
	And in this sense, when we reply to morale, in what sense does a moral rule self-contradict?
	But yeah, yeah.
	Any proposition of logic where you sure yeah, so if I say all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, but Socrates is immortal, then that's a self-contradiction and therefore it's invalid, right?
	Yeah.
	So can theft be universally preferable behavior?
	Well, theft, of course, is the unwanted taking of someone else's property.
	Can we agree on that?
	Because there's times when you want people to take your property.
	Please take my garbage away.
	I've got this old couch.
	I've left it on the front lawn with a sign that says, take me.
	So there's times when we want people to take our property and that's not theft, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So, and of course, for a woman or for a man, there's times when we want to make love and it's not rape.
	Rape is when we really don't want to and we're forced, right?
	So, right, right.
	So, if we say theft is universally preferable behavior, stealing is universally preferable behavior, we have an immediate self-contradiction, which is this.
	If stealing is universally preferable behavior, then everyone must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
	Because stealing is universally preferable behavior.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	You're saying that if you want to steal to be consistent, you should be okay with others stealing from you.
	No, no, not just okay with it.
	It's universally preferable.
	You should think that it's good.
	It's good that other people steal from you.
	If it's good for you to steal from others, it must be good for others to steal from you.
	Okay.
	Is it possible to want to be stolen from?
	No, because the definition of steal is unwanted.
	Right.
	So it is impossible for stealing to be universally preferable behavior because that would mean that everyone was about to steal and be stolen from, but the moment you want to be stolen from, it's no longer stealing.
	It's no longer theft.
	So it's impossible to fulfill.
	And in this case, because right, because we have to assert, rightly so, an equality of person.
	So I can't have a special rule just for me because that's not a right, that's not a universal.
	That's the U in the UPB, is it has to be universal.
	And if we look at murder, is it possible that you want someone to kill you?
	Do you want?
	I'm trying to think, well, I'm just trying to think in the non-suicidal sense if you want someone to kill you, not while remaining alive.
	Well, no, it can be possible because there are people who sign up for euthanasia.
	Oh, well, yeah, that's what I'm right.
	That's what I mean.
	That's what I'm thinking, but it sounded like you were, sorry, maybe I was just assuming what the answer was.
	No, want someone to murder you is different.
	Murder is unwanted killing.
	Oh, okay.
	But it is possible to want someone to kill you.
	Is it possible to want someone to assault you?
	Because assault also has an unwanted component in that word, right?
	You might be some weird, kinky guy who likes someone to thrash you with the beat me licorice whip.
	I don't know, or whatever.
	It's an S and M, 50 Shades of Gray nonsense or whatever, right?
	And of course, there are other times where you go into a situation where you have fully accept that you will be beaten, such as the boxing ring.
	Right.
	So assault is the unwanted physical violence against someone else.
	Right.
	So basically, your question is, is it possible to want an unwanted behavior?
	And it's really the formula, right, that you're behind all these things, right?
	Is it possible to want an unwanted behavior?
	If it is impossible for rape, theft, assault, and murder to be universally preferable behavior, then they have to be wrong, both logically and therefore morally, since we're talking about morals.
	Logically and therefore morally.
	Because a rule, a moral rule, like, oh, go murder people.
	No, no, no.
	It would be, can murder be universally preferable behavior?
	No.
	Anything that is asynchronous, in other words, one person wins and the other person loses is impossible.
	In other words, if I were to say it is universally preferable behavior for everyone to give everyone else a dollar, well, but you'd have to be receiving a dollar as well.
	So that's asynchronous, right?
	One person has to be on the receiving side.
	So where you have asynchronous behaviors, they cannot be universalized.
	In other words, for one person to do the behavior, the other person has to do the opposite or at least not do that behavior.
	And therefore, it cannot be universalized.
	So rape, theft, assault, and murder cannot be universalized because they're asynchronous.
	They are unwanted by the recipient.
	And therefore, they cannot be universally preferred.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes, it does.
	And I wanted to look at with the word universal, I remember I was just because I agree with that.
	Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you just said here.
	Just with the synchronous thing, where did I put it?
	Let me give you another example.
	Do you play any racquet sports?
	I used to do table tennis kind of thing.
	Table tennis.
	Okay.
	So in table tennis, we have one in my basement.
	My wife and I love to play.
	So in table tennis, one person serves and one person receives.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Can both people receive at the same time?
	No.
	Right.
	Obviously.
	Right.
	So that's asynchronous, right?
	One person has to serve and the other person has to serve.
	Well, I understand the definition.
	I'm just wondering why I'm still trying to get back to why, like, again, in physics, I understand, but in a rule, like, why does for me, universal is like the rational applicability of a rule, you know, where a person understands the terms of the rule and then applies it as opposed to an action.
	No, because all we're doing is judging a theory.
	Okay.
	Right, so if somebody gives you a scientific hypothesis or a mathematical hypothesis or something like that, they give you a scientific hypothesis, then the first thing you would do to see if that scientific hypothesis could potentially be true is to look for self-contradictions.
	And if there are self-contradictions in the scientific hypothesis, it is invalid by definition, right?
	Right, which let's just give an example of an immediately self-contradictory hypothesis.
	Well, I mean, if I let go of the wall, they're going to fall down and up at the same time.
	Yeah, Exactly.
	Or the gas is not.
	You just cannot do them before any observation.
	You can't even get off the ground with doing the experiment because the hypothesis is incoherent.
	Yeah, or it's just self-contradictory.
	So if there was a mathematical theorem that said, okay, if we assume that one equals two and go from there, you wouldn't read any further, right?
	Right.
	Because one does not equal two.
	And so everything that you get from that is downstream from an invalid conjecture and therefore is all going to be incorrect, right?
	And so with, so I hate to say with morality, forget about the people because, of course, it's people-centric.
	But a philosophy must first evaluate a moral theory to see if it is self-contradictory.
	We don't think about what people do or don't do or what they like or they don't like or anything like that because we have to first evaluate the moral theory.
	Right.
	So if somebody was an engineer and came to you and said, I want to build the bridge out of clouds, spit, and balsa wood, would you go any further and evaluate their blueprints?
	Well, of course, in that exact, yeah, and in that right.
	So I guess can we apply that analogy with the moral rules?
	So if somebody says theft is universally preferable behavior, we would look at it and see if it self-contradicts, and it does.
	And therefore, we would say that's an invalid theory.
	Now, if somebody were to say some people should steal and other people should not steal, then that breaks universality.
	Because you have a category called people for which you have opposite rules, which would be like a biologist saying that mammals are both hot-blooded, have hair, give birth to live young, and the exact opposite of that as well.
	There's some mammals that do that and some mammals that do the opposite.
	They're cold-blooded, have no hair, and lay eggs.
	And you would say, of course, hang on, if the definition of mammal is warm-blooded, has hair, gives birth to live young, then why would you divide some mammals into that definition and then the opposite definition?
	That wouldn't make any sense, right?
	Right.
	What basis do you have for making a distinction in the ecosystem of the shared nature?
	And then human beings, right?
	We have a shared nature.
	So why separate the categories of humans?
	Well, especially to separate them into diametrical opposites.
	Now, we can say that human beings should not eat human beings, but human beings can eat animals.
	And the reason for that would be that human beings are capable of moral reasoning and animals are not.
	Human beings are capable of negotiation and animals are not.
	Human beings are capable of ethical understanding and animals are not.
	So we can, there's an objective set of distinctions that we can have different rules for.
	But you can't just say we have a category called Homo sapiens that have opposite moral characteristics based on, oh, based on what?
	Based on what?
	And there's no particular answer, therefore, the artificial categorization into opposites is invalid.
	Okay.
	Now, we can say, and again, this is just to show how the theory works in sort of more practical application.
	We can say that people who have an IQ, say, of 40 or 50, are not capable of processing abstract reasoning and moral principles.
	And therefore, we may want to confine them because while they are still human, and maybe there'll be a cure at some point, they're not operating at a level of moral reasoning that would hold them to be responsible.
	They would sort of be acting as animals in a way.
	And again, through no fault of their own, it's just sort of bad luck.
	But so the human is not just the DNA, but it would be foundationally the capacity for moral understanding, which most human beings have.
	Yeah.
	No.
	Okay.
	No, I appreciate that.
	Yeah.
	I'll have to chew more on that.
	Because, yeah, I mean, I agree with, I mean, I like how you're framing that.
	So I'll just have to think about that more.
	If I may ask, last question.
	And maybe if this is a quick one, great.
	If you think it opens up a can of worms and we can just punt it till later.
	I live for the worms like my father.
	Anyway, sorry, go on.
	So I'm curious in the UPB framework, like, okay, there are certain things which ultimately boil down to the non-aggression principle and certain things you say if you're wrong.
	But then as far as like positive things where enforceability or aggression might not necessarily be operating things, for example, right, let's say, like what you've done, you've spoken truth when it had consequence.
	And so you exemplified a virtue of courage, let's say.
	And there's a certain virtue there.
	So in the UPB, let's call it courage, not foolhardiness, though.
	I appreciate the maybe a little bit blending towards the latter, but okay, go ahead.
	Let's call it courage for the sake of the argument.
	Yeah, whatever.
	Even just in general, the idea of speaking truth when you might get fall out is, you know, right?
	So when bad things happen, but you speak the truth.
	So we would say, well, that's a good thing.
	That's a virtuous thing.
	I guess if it's an easy answer, if it's a longer one, we can save it for later.
	But yeah, in the UPB, how can I say, yeah, that is a virtuous, that is virtuous because, you know, because UPB passes the test of UPB, I can say that is a virtuous thing going on.
	Sure.
	So in UPB has five, and I wish I could shave him down, but let's say five categories of action.
	And they're really only two, but there's good and evil, right?
	Good and evil is sort of two sides of the same coin.
	There's one coin, but two sides.
	So there's UPB compliant, right?
	So can theft ever be universally preferable behavior?
	No, it cannot be because of the aforementioned self-contradiction that immediately manifests.
	Now, can respecting property rights be universally preferable behavior?
	In other words, is there an immediate logical self-contradiction in the proposition of a respect for property rights being UPB?
	No, there is not.
	Everyone can simultaneously, without contradiction, respect everyone else's property rights.
	So if we imagine everybody falls asleep and coincidentally, all the billions of people across the world have a nap at the same time.
	No one is stealing from anyone else.
	They're all respecting each other's property rights.
	And there's no innate self-contradiction in the way that there is if we say that theft is universally preferable behavior.
	Does that sort of make sense?
	Right.
	We pass that it doesn't, it doesn't fail before launch.
	The rocket doesn't collapse before we even launch it.
	Actually, build the rocket, you know, and it passes the first stage of coherent theory.
	Right.
	So there are behaviors which are generally considered negative, and we'll take a less controversial one, such as being late.
	I don't know if you've ever had that.
	Yeah, and I saw, sorry, just because I did read your distinction, like the aesthetic things and like rudeness.
	Okay, so I am familiar with your categories, and I can go back this section.
	I mean, sorry.
	No, but just for those who haven't read the book, just very, very briefly.
	So there's UPB, and then there's APA, aesthetically preferable actions, you know, being reasonably polite, being on time, being honest, and morally virtuous, speaking truth to power, being courageous.
	These are all positive actions.
	And the question is, why are they not UPB?
	Well, because they can't be universalized.
	So when I'm asleep, and this is what I call the coma test, right?
	Can a man in a coma be evil?
	And we would have an instinct to say, well, no, he can't be virtuous, but he sure as heck can't be evil, right?
	But if I'm asleep, I'm neither raping, assaulting, murdering, or stealing from anyone.
	And so I'm at least not doing evil, if that makes sense.
	I'm not doing ugly harm to others.
	And so I am not inflicting on other people.
	So evil generally is when an unwanted violence is inflicted upon someone else.
	And the violence is almost by definition unwanted.
	Otherwise, it's role-playing or something weird like that, or boxing, which is not unwanted, but accepted as the sport.
	So unwanted violence inflicted on others requires that someone be acting to inflict the violence and then he have a victim who is receiving the violence.
	Like nobody would shoot anyone if immediately they got shot themselves or almost no one, right?
	And so there's an actor and a victim, which is why it's asynchronous, which is why it cannot be universalized.
	Now, if somebody is late, and most of us have had that friend, or maybe you've been that friend who's just late all the time, and it's really kind of annoying.
	You can't plan anything and you got to cross your fingers and hope for the best.
	And usually eventually this just kind of peters out because it just feels kind of rude and disrespectful after a while.
	So, but being late can't be universalized because in order to be late, someone has to be waiting for you.
	And therefore, you have somebody who's acting to be late and someone who's the victim or reacting.
	And the being lateness is inflicted upon them.
	So it's asynchronous and therefore can't be universalized.
	However, it's still better to be on time because it's like keeping your word, keeping your promise.
	It generally is better to tell the truth.
	But I'm not a Kantian in that if somebody asks me where my wife is, so they can go kill her.
	They can go take a long walk off a short period.
	I'm going to lie my ass off because I do not owe honor and virtue to the evil and violent and murderous.
	So there are aesthetically preferable actions that are beneficial, but the reason you can't shoot someone who's late is they haven't violently inflicted it upon you.
	An assault where somebody jumps out of the bushes and beats you around the head with a baseball bat.
	I'm sorry, I'm getting flashbacks to my Australian speaking tour.
	But if somebody just jumps out of the bushes, hits you with a baseball bat, they have violently inflicted their will upon you.
	Somebody who says, I'm going to be there at seven and doesn't show up till eight, they've not violently inflicted their will upon you.
	And therefore, it's not asynchronous, the asynchronous domination of violent will from one person to another.
	So it's better to be on time, but you can't shoot people who aren't on time.
	It's better to be honest, but you can't shoot people who lie.
	It's better to be morally courageous, but you can't shoot cowards.
	But you can shoot a rapist who's about to assault you or your wife or your husband, if that's the way that it's going.
	So there are virtues which we should strive towards, and they generally are much more important in our lives than UPB.
	I generally have not wanted to murder anyone over the course of my life, a few exceptions, but mostly in debates.
	But I have never wanted to rape anyone.
	I've never wanted to, I guess when I was younger, I shoplifted a little bit, but that was, you know, I was very young.
	It's not the right thing, learned better.
	I made my restitution where I could.
	But I don't want to assault people.
	So I don't go through my life holding back these seething, feral pit bulls of wanting to do all of this evil.
	But, you know, moral courage takes a little bit of talking yourself into, and sometimes it's a bit of a strain to be on time and so on.
	So those are more of the things that I think most of us focus on in our life is not the great evils that would be criminal, but the generally positive behaviors that tend to edify and inspire hopefully others, just as we've been inspired in turn.
	So aesthetically preferable actions, they are positive and they are good.
	It's better to be on time.
	But they're not subject to UPB because they're not asynchronous and they're not, but they are asynchronous.
	No, are they?
	No.
	So being on time is asynchronous because there's the being late and then there's the person who's having the being like this.
	The person who's being late, the person who's inflicting on moral courage is not asynchronous because it's just a sort of singular action, but neither of them are violently enforced upon the other.
	And you can't have a UPB compliant anything that's violent enforcement of will because that's asynchronous.
	One person gets their way, the other person gets subjugated or beaten or is acted against, and therefore it's asynchronous.
	But APA would be the general virtues that this is better to do, but it is not in the same, it's not in the category of good and evil.
	It's the category of better and worse or nicer or less nice or yeah, I think better and worse.
	It's better to be morally courageous, but not too much.
	But it's always good to not rape.
	The APA is subject to the Aristotelian mean rather than the black and white of good and evil.
	So as you know, Aristotle says a deficiency of courage is cowardice and excess of courage is foolhardiness.
	And so the things that balance, you know, being on time is good.
	Being early is probably kind of a waste of time.
	Being late is kind of rude.
	And so you want to be just at the right time.
	And even honesty, right?
	I mean, I can tell you this from a grave personal experience.
	I'm sure you've had the same experience.
	It is very easy to be too honest in this world and to be too blunt.
	And, you know, the little kids who say, why is grandma so fat?
	You know, like they're, oh, shh, you know, like there's a certain amount of decorum and maybe overly British politeness or whatever that's sort of necessary in this world.
	You can't just be blunt with everyone and so on.
	And so even honesty can be subject to the Aristotelian mean.
	So those are the things that sort of delicate balancing acts in life as a whole, but there's no Aristotelian mean between rape and not rape.
	There's no sort of sweet middle in the middle.
	Like they just don't rape, if that makes sense.
	So the APA is more the virtues that are subject to excess and deficiency and are better, but have to be balanced, if that makes sense.
	We'll be in the APAs.
	Got it.
	Well, Stefan, I appreciate you having a conversation with me.
	Thank you for having me on.
	I mean, look, I could go forever because I enjoy this so much, but I suppose it's like eating a good meal at some point.
	I just have to say, you know, I'll let this digest and this is delicious.
	Hey, Aristotelian meat again.
	Yeah.
	I think you're right.
	Aristotelian mean in action right now.
	Yeah.
	Well, I appreciate it too.
	And listen, man, anytime you want to do it, I do a lot of stuff that's not hardcore philosophy stuff.
	And so this was my original motivation to get into the public square.
	So anytime you want to talk about it, just shoot me a message and we'll do it.
	And I'm sure people will really enjoy this convert.
	Right on.
	Thanks so much for the fun.
	Have a great day.
	Thanks, brother.
	Have a great night.
	Bye.

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