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0:16 - Introduction to Essential Philosophy
24:22 - What is Philosophy?
33:43 - Philosophy and Conformity
43:25 - Philosophy and Reality
54:29 - Philosophy and Control
1:27:20 - Validating the Senses
1:45:51 - Philosophy and Subjectivity
1:59:38 - Materialism and Free Will
1:59:38 - Materialism and Free Will
2:00:35 - The Importance of Free Will
2:01:12 - The Argument Against Free Will
2:02:03 - The Challenge of Free Will
2:03:33 - Free Will and Responsibility
2:04:32 - The Nature of Free Will
2:09:41 - Causality and Determinism
2:10:58 - The Determinist's Perspective
2:15:07 - The Complexity of Human Behavior
2:19:21 - The Illusion of Free Will
2:23:16 - Emergence and Free Will
2:24:08 - The Hypothesis of Determinism
2:28:51 - The Limits of Determinism
2:30:25 - The Concept of Free Will
2:31:35 - Self-Reflection and Freedom
2:35:29 - The Work of Freedom
2:37:49 - Understanding Programming
2:39:00 - The Impact of Programming
2:42:10 - The History of Evil
2:45:21 - The Burden of Guilt
2:50:38 - The Path to Freedom
[0:01] Essential Philosophy by Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, freedomainradio.com Introduction Everything you do is philosophical.
[0:16] You wake in the morning, groan, stretch and open your eyes. What is happening? Everything that is happening is philosophical. How do you know you are awake? How do you know it is morning? How do you know your eyes are open? How do you know your dreaming has ended and your day has begun? How do you know your memories of yesterday or 10 years ago are valid? How do you even know you are the same person as the one who got into bed last night? It gets even crazier when you really think about it. How do you know that your experience is not in fact some elaborate simulation? Do you know for certain that you are not a brain in a tank wired up to some matrix-style virtual reality?
[1:11] Look at your hand right now. You see a hand, sure, but how do you know that the hand truly exists outside of your mind? Sure, you see the hand, but the image only shows up in your mind. It's the same with your sensations of your hand. They also only show up in your mind. Where is the hand itself? Last night, in your dreams, you also had hands or claws or tentacles or heaven knows what that did not exist or move in what you call the real world. In your dreams, you visited a floating island full of dragons that does not exist outside your dreamscape, or does it? Perhaps your dreams are the real world, and your waking life is the dream. How can you know for certain?
[2:08] Perhaps the people you live with are mere avatars, artificial intelligence simulations of human beings. Perhaps they were all real people at some point, but have been replaced by space aliens with perfect biological robots. When you went to a movie last night, perhaps the entire cinema complex was a form of elaborate theater. Perhaps you were in a movie, watching a movie. What if you are created anew, every day from scratch, but with a steady, if inconsistent series of progressive memories layered into your newly hatched brain? What about your memory? Is it real? Recalled events are gone, lost in time. Your memory only exists in your mind. What if you or something else is altering it over time?
[3:10] Think of your very first memory. Is it real? Think of other early memories. Could they have been created in your mind by stories you heard as a child? Try this on for size. Go and visit your childhood neighborhood. I guarantee you. That it will neither look nor feel exactly as you remember it, and sometimes not even approximately, even if little has changed.
[3:41] Look at a picture of yourself as a child. Where has that child gone? When you build a foundation for a house, the finished house still has that foundation. But what still remains of your childhood body and mind? You are not like some Russian doll with smaller versions of yourself remaining inside. The human body is replaced over time every seven years with little to nothing left from your past physical self. None of the brain cells that held your childhood memories exist anywhere in your body anymore. Where are they? Where are your memories? They have been passed from cell to sell over time what has been lost. Are your memories like the childhood game of broken telephone, irretrievably lost in endless translation?
[4:41] Invite childhood friends and siblings over for dinner and discuss shared past events. What perceptions do you all have in common? I guarantee you that others will have very strong memories that significantly differ from yours, sometimes even opposing them completely. What does this mean? You were all in the same place experiencing the same things, but you have very different memories. Nothing remains of the events except the memories, the interpretations, and everyone's story about the events. So tell me, what is real? If everyone has a different idea of what happened, what actually happened? Can anyone tell? If you have home movies of your childhood, sit down with your family and review them. What are the various interpretations of what is objectively happening on the screen? When your sister made fun of you, was it playful ribbing as she remembers or was it painful teasing as you remember? Even recorded objectivity rarely leads to objectivity.
[5:54] Even if you remember the same events as your siblings, you can each end up with entirely opposing interpretations. A father hits his children. One child remembers violent abuse. The other remembers stern but loving discipline. A sister believes it made her a better person. A brother believes it harmed him deeply.
[6:22] A mother has an affair. Her daughter sympathizes with her loneliness. Her son condemns her as selfish. You grew up poor. You resented. Your brother thinks it built character.
[6:43] One of your toddlers loves the noisy vacuum cleaner. The other screams and flees in terror. Is either interpretation the true nature of the vacuum cleaner? Is it a fun noisemaker or a terrifying monster. One mother loves cooking for her family. Another resents it as a repetitive chore. Let us go deeper, as we can always go deeper.
[7:14] Here is another challenge. You claim that you have an identity and that you are your own person, of course. But what does that really mean? Let us say that you are a Christian and you consider your religion a feature of your own personal identity. If at birth you had been adopted by a Zoroastrian family, you would surely have been brought up in that family's religion and you would now consider being a Zoroastrian part of your own personal identity. If you were brought up in a house of Democrats or liberals or leftists, you would likely be more willing to inherit that political perspective.
[7:57] How much of you is distinct from what you have inherited? If you merely inherited a trait, is it really you? How much of your personality is largely inherited, genetic, and beyond your capacity to change significantly? How much of yourself do you think you have chosen, earned, built with your own mental bare hands? How often do you condemn other people's personalities as if other people somehow magically just chose who they are? What if your judgmental nature is not completely your choice but partly genetic?
[8:45] You say that you are tall or short, but height is also a function of your genetics, not your own personal earned identity. You can take pride in parts of your personality and achievements. You may be hardworking or very honest, but significant aspects of your personality and achievements are genetic. Your intelligence is largely genetic, your conscientiousness, your level of social comfort, your charisma, these largely arise from unchosen biological influences. Though, we often take personal pride in that which we have biologically inherited. Thank you.
[9:26] Do you consider yourself a conservative, liberal, or something else? If you are a male conservative, did you know that trait is 64.5% heritable? For women, it is 44.7%. To describe yourself, you need language, of course. If English is your native tongue, you possess a unique set of words by which you may describe yourself, some of which do not even exist in other languages. Think of how much of your personal identity, that which you call a self, has been influenced by the work of others, writers and movie makers and actors and singers and teachers and so on. Your language, your culture, your family, your schooling, some of your accidental exposures to the thoughts and feelings of others, all of these influences have shaped you. But they did not originate within you.
[10:31] Even if you could accurately say, I was influenced by Bob, you have merely moved the chain of causality one step away. Who was Bob influenced by? How many of his capacities and perspectives were chosen? Were you influenced by Bob's thoughts or Bob's genetics? How can the things that influenced you or Bob be accurately separated? Perhaps we are all just predetermined dominoes falling on each other under the pretense of choice. So what does it mean to have an identity to be yourself, when so little of who you are was completely self-generated. Do you see what I mean? Everything we do is philosophical.
[11:34] When most people think of the word faith, they generally refer to a belief in God. But it is much more accurate to say that we have faith in reality. We have faith in ourselves, our existence, memories, or history, our relationships, the evidence of our senses, the virtue of our choices. We have few, if any, real philosophical certainties in these areas. We accept what we have to in order to survive, to get through the day to find shelter and food and love, hopefully.
[12:10] Your young son steals a candy bar from a store. You rebuke him, march him back into the store, perhaps punish him, but why? What objective, universal, moral principles did your son violate? How do you know that they are true or good? Where do they exist in reality? Do you punish your son because you fear the disapproval of others? Are you afraid that people will think you are a bad parent because you raised a thief? Do you punish your son because there is a subjective social convention against stealing? Is that how you describe it to him? No. Surely you will tell him that it is wrong to steal, that he is bad for stealing, that it is immoral and so on. But how do you know? If you are a Christian, you have a pretty good idea. One of the Ten Commandments is, Thou shalt not steal. But that exists in the realm of theology, not philosophy.
[13:14] If you are atheist or agnostic, how do you know that stealing is wrong? Because it makes people unhappy? That argument is scarcely philosophical. A lot of things make people unhappy without being immoral. A negative movie review makes the filmmakers unhappy and can cost them millions of dollars, but it is neither illegal nor immoral to write a negative movie review, if you write it honestly. Also, your son can argue that getting the candy bar without paying makes him happy, so it totally evens out. Perhaps you invoke the golden rule due unto others as you would have them do unto you, and ask your son if he would like it if others stole from him. However, he may just reply that he does not care. And then what could you say? Maybe he is the biggest kid around, and no one would dare. Relying on his empathy for his future self and for the feelings of others only works if he already has empathy.
[14:24] Most morality is like a diet book for slim people. If you are morally sensitive, then you will generally accept moral arguments. But then you tend to be the kind of person least in need of moral arguments. Morality needs to be powerful enough to overcome the indifference of truly selfish people. Morality that requires the leverage of self-criticism has virtually no power over narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths who have little to no capacity for self-criticism.
[14:57] If you care about others, you will most likely be good with or without moral arguments. If you do not care, moral arguments will have no real sway over you. When you start to explore definitions, the question of theft becomes even more complicated. If theft means taking property without permission or using force against the will of its legitimate owner, then what is taxation? If you try to legitimize taxation by appealing to the democratic will of the majority, aren't you just encouraging your son to get a few friends to go with him to the convenience store, where they will then outvote the owner on who gets the candy bars? Can immorality be legitimized by the majority? If two men vote to rape one woman, surely that does not make rape any less immoral. Surely our highest aspirations as moral instructors cannot be to teach our children to submit to or join the majority mob.
[16:00] Perhaps we teach our children that self-sacrifice is the highest universal moral ideal, that they should give up their own preferences and aspirations in order to serve the needs of others. But if self-sacrifice is a universal moral ideal, then it cannot possibly be applied universally. If Bob sacrifices for Doug, then Doug cannot simultaneously sacrifice for Bob. There are those who sacrifice and those who collect that sacrifice, those who pay and those who receive. If self-sacrifice is a universal moral ideal, then those who collect that sacrifice rather than provide it must be immoral, since they are profiting from other people's self-sacrifice rather than sacrificing themselves. But if the highest moral ideal requires other people to be immoral, how can it be universally good?
[17:01] Perhaps we should teach our children that they should obey authority figures, listen to your teacher, obey your father, etc. However, they then learned from history that horrifying atrocities were often committed by those obeying authority figures. Sometimes, perhaps, it is good to obey authority figures. Other times, it is a great evil to obey authority figures. How can we teach them the difference? Is there a moral authority higher than secular authority? How are morals justified? How do we know?
[17:39] The tortures of philosophy. We currently have a tortured relationship with philosophy. We need it to get out of bed in the morning and get anything done with our lives, but we cannot examine it too closely for fear of mental or moral disintegration. It is like the Aristotelian mean. Too little philosophy makes us animalistic, too much tempts impotent madness. We desperately need rules in society, but we recoil from examining our rules too closely for fear of unearthing something unholy in the empty heart of our coerced coexistence. Many who are drawn to philosophy become toxic to the majority. They drink deep the dizzying wine of skepticism, question the basic empiricism necessary for life, and end up absorbing and transmitting radical relativism and subjectivism. They cry out that there is no such thing as truth, thereby proclaiming that there is no such thing as philosophy, all spoken under the guise of philosophy.
[18:59] Most of us have every rational reason to avoid, fear, and deny the pursuit of truth, since it so often leads us with great momentum to the crumbling edge of a foggy cliff. There is great danger in the study of philosophy. It can feel like summoning a demon you can barely hope to control. A shallow study of philosophy is like a child's first brush with science. As a child, when I first learned that the sun would eventually burn itself out and that I was living on the side of a giant spinning ball on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, I felt depressed and disoriented. In the childhood of our species, when man believed he was the center of the universe, it gave him comfort.
[20:00] As a toddler, my daughter confidently told me that the lead hero in a movie could not die because he was the center of the story. Moving mankind from the center of the universe to the inconsequential periphery can be extraordinarily disorienting. But it does give us the capacity to navigate the globe, predict the path of the planets, fly between continents, and get to the moon and back. Seems like a reasonable trade-off. When I was younger, I had a lengthy recurring dream. The dreamscape would span the entire length of a semester or even a whole school year at university. Here's how it went. At the beginning of a semester, I sign up for an obscure class in an out-of-the-way building.
[20:55] Then, I simply don't go to class. I have strong intentions of going, so I don't drop the course, but I just never seem to get around to showing up. I forget the time and place of the course. I know I have it written down somewhere, and know I should dig up the information, attend the class, and get caught up on the course material. However, as the semester wears on, the growing backlog of work and the effort it would take to get caught up swells to the point where I avoid even looking up the class location. Preferring to attend more enjoyable classes, play frisbee in the quad, go on a romantic date, or, well, do anything but confront how far into the hole I have actually sunk. Over the course of the dream, I feel a growing sense of unease, knowing I am being irresponsible by avoiding something essential. I continually kick myself when my anxiety spikes for not dropping the course when I had the chance, before it became too late, because now the bad mark will show up on my transcript no matter what. This avoidance grows to the point where I have trouble enjoying anything, and I feel at war with myself.
[22:14] Later in the semester, I become petty and easily annoyed. I view the anxiety that is trying to help me as an enemy. Oh, come on, I tell it. There's nothing to be done now. Why are you interfering with my enjoyment?
[22:29] We all have this temptation, right? We all know we need to examine truth, morality, virtue, good, and evil, and compare our examinations to our existing life, the lives of those around us, and our societies as a whole. But so often we prefer to coast, to avoid, to resent the nagging feeling that we are drifting further and further away from where we ought to be as people, as families, as communities, as nations, as a species.
[23:02] Instead, we think, let me enjoy myself now and the future will sort itself out somehow. We believe anxiety is a form of instability, and we want to stay stable no matter the cost to our personal and collective futures. We busy ourselves with alcohol, drugs, video games, exercise, vanity, spending. We deploy every form of stimulant to distract ourselves from difficult but necessary wisdom. This book will bring you that wisdom. It will not make you crazy, I guarantee you that. If you listen, this book will make you painfully sane. We have drifted so far from sanity that reality now scalds us, but we have no other choice other than non-existence. We have become so lost that we fear maps, but maps are all that can save us. It is not too late as yet, but almost, almost.
[24:22] Let us begin.
[24:27] What is philosophy? Philosophy is the study of truth, which is a definition that raises almost as many questions as it answers. What is truth? How is truth differentiated from falsehood? Why is truth even preferable to falsehood? Truth is the accurate identification of facts and principles in objective reality.
[24:56] Our senses are our mind's only windows to objective reality. Our brain, our consciousness, is encased in a bony skull prison. It cannot send out tentacles or mind rays to map whatever exists outside the inside of our heads. It must rely on information received and transmitted by the five senses. As we grow, we create mental maps based upon our reception of sense data. When we feel the wind on our face, the treetops also move. When it rains, it is typically cloudy. When it is sunny, we feel warmer. We cannot breathe underwater nor generally jump higher than half our height. When we run, we get short of breath. It hurts when we do belly flops and mosquitoes are not our friends. Ladybugs are cute, but bees can be dangerous. An excess of courage often leads to injury, while an excess of cowardice leads to mockery and self-contempt.
[25:59] In childhood, we build maps not just of empirical reality, but of social reality as well. People of different personality types constantly goad or encourage us to become more like them, or they prodder others to satisfy their emotional requirements. The shy kids want us to restrain ourselves, while the outgoing kids mock our restraint. The fearful kids mock our courage, while the overconfident kids both help and endanger us by egging us on. The moral kids condemn our rule-breaking. The nihilistic kids mock rules. The nerds mock the jocks. The jocks roll their eyes at the nerds. The pretty kids don't eat. The fat kids learn the arcane rules of even more arcane games. The homely kids learn how to make jokes. The kids who don't take drugs scorn those who do. The kids who don't have sex scorn those who do, and vice versa, of course.
[26:55] Perceptive children quickly understand that society is an ecosystem of warring personalities and mental structures, not just horizontally, but vertically as well. The teachers, the curriculum, the entire educational structure attempts to impose a certain mindset upon the children. Many succumb without question, while others push back as much as they dare, often hopelessly and helplessly, or they withdraw completely, ghosting through the painted brick hallways. The children are constantly commanded to be moral, but morality is never defined in a way that captures immorality on the part of their elders. Ethics becomes like an inverted fishing net that only catches the minnows while letting the sharks swim free. We can further imagine a legal system that punishes a sailor taking a photograph in a submarine while excusing a powerful woman who bypasses required security by setting up a home-brewed server in a barn.
[28:06] When children blurt out an uncomfortable truth, they are told that keeping quiet is moral. When adults want information from kids, speaking up becomes moral. Children are told not to use force to get their way, but they are typically spanked at home and punished in school. Children are told to respect the property of others by teachers who use the power of the state to compel parents to pay their salaries through property taxes. Children are told to save their money to avoid frivolous debt and to be responsible. Only to be justly shocked when they learn about the trillions of dollars in national debts that governments take out in their names. Children are told they have free will and that they are responsible for their choices but they are generally compelled to go to school and to obey the commandments of their teachers.
[29:08] Children are constantly told that they owe society allegiance, because society really cares about the well-being of children. They're told that all the harshness heaped upon them arises out of that concern for their young and tender well-being. As they age, however, the children find out that they will be taxed for decades to pay for old-age pensions that they themselves have no chance of receiving. Their elders voted for government benefits but not for the tax increases necessary to pay for those benefits, resulting in catastrophic debt and unfunded liabilities. Children are told not to harm others, while many boys have a third of the skin of their penises sliced off shortly after birth without anesthetic for no medical necessity. Among the more intelligent children, a suspicion begins to arise that moral rules are a form of psychological control rather than universal absolutes that everyone must follow. When children begin to read the news and discover that those in power regularly get away with atrocities a thousand times worse than anything any child could imagine, this suspicion expands.
[30:32] Exponentially. The pursuit of truth and the efficacy of truly universal moral rules quickly become a dangerous occupation when pseudo-philosophy is used as a weapon to subjugate society to the whims of the powerful. If your response to the question, what is truth, is not what your elders tell you, then you may soon find your elders can rapidly turn on you.
[31:01] When societies are growing and expanding, at least it's a highly profitable subjugation to submit to the dictates of one's elders, obey social norms, get a good job, raise a family, save for your retirement, live well. However, when societies begin to contract and fail, elders rapidly lose the power of economic bribery necessary to control the youth. The young graduate under a mountain of student debt and face dim or non-existent job prospects. They realize that criminal bankers get debt forgiveness, but young people cannot discharge their student debt even through bankruptcy. Then the young can no longer be bribed and social norms begin to fall apart. Seldom do a criminal enterprise or a pirate captain face mutiny when the gold is flowing in, cold fingers close on hilts when the victim ships are scarce.
[32:09] To wipe away all of these complications, all of these confusions, all these manipulations from our mental maps of the world and its inhabitants requires an act of philosophy. It requires that we truly start from a blank page, with the innocence and ignorance of an infant, assuming that nothing is true, but the truth is possible. We must willfully forget all we have learned, and especially all we have been taught, and view our existing histories, cultures, societies, and beliefs as mere tangled rubble and undergrowth that need to be cleared away completely before we can start digging the foundations of a true and permanent home.
[32:59] When you are walking and someone gives you bad directions, sending you in the wrong direction for hours, you get angry when you realize you've been misled. You did not start lost. You were made lost. So it is with truth. Bad ideas often lead to bad actions, and bad actions create the need for compounding lies to cover them up. Without philosophy, power and the resulting entropy reign supreme in the human mind and heart, and cultures continually fall away from reason, virtue, and happiness.
[33:44] Philosophy and Conformity, When we are children, rules continually come flying at us like a swarm of locusts, seemingly without end. We do not need philosophy in order to conform to the expectations of others, particularly if they hold power over us. That comes naturally. If virtue is obedience, our path to goodness is simple. Find the authority figure with the most power to harm or reward us, and then merely conform to whatever that authority figure desires. However, this choice rarely manifests so starkly. Authority figures do not like to present themselves as mere agents of physical strength for the simple reason that they inevitably weaken with aid. A parent has an advantage of near-infinite size and power over the child, but as the child grows, the parent weakens. If physical size and strength alone determine who wins, the parent who dominates his child later ends up dominated by his adult child.
[34:56] Concepts of gods and virtues were originally summoned to infuse authority figures with credibility over and above mere physical presence. A king is merely a man who can be easily slaughtered in his sleep, as Macbeth showed. However, if the king is infused with the divine right of monarchy and is placed by an all-loving and all-powerful god to rule over a sinful mankind, then opposition to the king is opposition to God. You may kill the king, who can then no longer. Do you any more harm, but God will get the king's revenge by robbing you of sleep and sending you to hell forever. Moral concepts were generally invented, or they evolved, to hide the aging mortality of merely empirical power relationships. You are not obeying me, says the king. You are obeying God who placed me to rule over you. You must obey the king because he represents God. But the king himself does not have to obey God because the king prays for instructions from God. And whatever the king does is informed by that mysterious and unverifiable interaction.
[36:18] The chieftain represents the elders, or the world spirits, or the ghosts of champions. Such representation infuses him with an authority that transcends his mere mortal and physical presence. Totalitarianism is a dungeon patrolled by ghosts. However, banish those ghosts, and the dungeon breaks wide open.
[36:47] It is impossible to avoid philosophy, even if one only wishes to pursue conformity to authority. What constitutes authority? Why and when is authority valid? How should we respond to an authority that contradicts itself or acts against the moral values it imposes on its subjects? We can say that no irrational abstractions can legitimize authority, that authority is merely the power to punish and reward, usually through force. We can say to ourselves that we have no respect for our teachers, for example, but we recognize their ability to pass or fail us. We can say to ourselves that we have no respect for tyrannical laws, but we recognize the judge's ability to punish us. This perspective may trigger conformity to rules, but we will not internalize those rules as ideal standards. Ruling us profitably will be impossible since we refuse to rule ourselves and we are eager to break whatever fake rules we safely can.
[37:56] There is an old saying, that morality is whatever we do when no one is watching. This is not a philosophical argument, but it is an interesting observation. Do you respect property rights because it is moral, or do you avoid stealing another's property because you fear jail? In a situation of societal breakdown, such as after a natural disaster, would you loot because you no longer feared jail? When rules are not idealized and internalized, the cost of enforcing them becomes increasingly high, often to the point of unsustainability. If you wish to destroy a society, teach its citizens that rules are mere exercises of power. A thief who approaches a house and hears a large dog barking inside will probably choose another house, not because he has a sudden attack of conscience, but because he fears a sudden attack of dog. The fear of consequences, of punishment, is like a stream pouring down the side of a mountain. If the stream hits a big rock, it will part, and the water will find another way down. If the stream hits a lake, or a dam, or a reservoir, its progress will stop. This is how the mind of an amoral man in pursuit of a goal works. If he runs into a guard dog, or a policeman or an alarm system, then he will change his course. But he won't give up his goal.
[39:24] Traditional philosophy empowers to evil those who most need its guidance toward the good, while it appeals most to those who need the least guidance. If you care about being good, you will listen to morality. But you also already possess the essential virtue of empathy, so you will most likely be good anyway. If you don't possess empathy, you can easily use traditional philosophy to manipulate those who do into serving your needs.
[39:56] Conformity to authority cannot be universalized, however, and universality is the very essence of philosophy. If I conform to an authority, who does the authority conform to? Of course, some would say that the authority conforms to God, or to the wishes of the ancestors, or to the world spirit, or to the will of the people. But even these cannot be universalized and are scarcely objectively measurable. Also, if one man can conform to God and I am a man, then why can I not just conform to that God? Why do I need a secular authority to order me around? If every man needs another man to obey, then who does the ultimate authority figure obey? This is the problem of infinite regression. We can abstract the concept of obedience to say that a citizen obeys something called the law. But the law either represents abstract moral virtues or it is the mere will of the legislature. If the law represents abstract moral virtues, then I am not obeying the law. I am merely conforming to those virtues which are superior to the law and which render the law invalid if it deviates from the virtues.
[41:17] Saying that the law is a mere shadow cast by the perfect statue of virtue severely curtails the will of the ruler, as King George found out during the American Revolution. If the moral law is, thou shalt not steal, then a government that steals or legalizes its own act of theft is acting against morality. And moral people would have no innate reason to obey it. In fact, their respect for property rights would instruct them to challenge the law or perhaps even disobey it. If the law represents the mere will of the legislature, then it has no foundational moral content to speak of. It is merely the compulsion used in the pursuit of power. This approach expands the will of the ruler, either in a democracy or in a more authoritarian system, but contradicts his moral legitimacy. It exposes a coercive oligarchical hierarchy as a mere exercise of, do it because I have more guns than you, which turns the enforcement of legality into a dangerous game of whack-a-mole, since citizens feel no universal moral obligation to obey the law. Thus, they get away with whatever they can. This, in turn, triggers the rulers to raise the penalties for disobedience, which increases the cost of enforcement and inflames the cynicism of the population, leading to economic and social collapse.
[42:46] Thus, rulers need morality. but fear morality as well. It is like desperately needing a bodyguard, but being terrified that he will stab you in your sleep. If rulers can cloak their exercise of power in morality, then people will be more likely to obey them. But the innate universality of morality limits the power of the ruler. This tension will exist as long as governments exist, with the same inevitable outcome every time.
[43:25] Philosophy and Reality, Truth describes verifiable and objective principles and experiences. If I say that I had a headache last summer while camping alone, there is no way to verify my statement. But if I say that the sun is 8.3 light minutes away from the earth, there are ways to verify my statement. Subjective experiences do not fall in the realm of philosophy any more than nightly dreams fall in the realm of physics. Saying that something feels true makes about as much sense as saying that imagination proves scientific hypotheses.
[44:08] The conflation of subjective experience with objective truth is one of the great curses of human history. If I speak a truth that others find inconvenient or offensive. They imagine that their emotions somehow rebut the facts. The idea that being upset trumps examining objective facts is an example of just how far we have drifted from the tough-minded and empirical philosophy that founded our civilization.
[44:40] In order to value truth, we must first establish the existence of an objective reality. Its existence is easily testable. For instance, I have two realms of experience. One in which impossible things happen, and another in which impossible things do not happen. The first realm is my dreams, or perhaps a very vivid video game. The second is reality. I once had a startling dream wherein an alligator propelled itself backwards a distance of 50 or 60 feet, landing near me. This cannot happen in reality, absent the invention of reptilian jetpacks. Impossibility is a hallmark of subjectivity. Fantasy novels contain magic, and magic is defined as mental effects on nature that cannot be explained or achieved in reality. I can buy a taser if I want, but I cannot shoot lightning bolts from my fingertips, dungeons and dragons style. I cannot cast a sleep spell, but I can shoot a tranquilizer dart. I cannot move forward by pushing a W key, which is one reason I know that my computer monitor is different from my eyeballs.
[45:56] Impossibility is, at least partly, defined as objects or processes with self-contradictory definitions. A square circle, for instance, it is impossible for matter to both attract and repel other matters simultaneously, for a gas to both expand and contract when heated, for the world to be both flat and spherical, or for objects to be moving closer together and further apart at the same time. Thus, there are two realms of experience. The realm of impossibility and self-contradiction, or the realm of possibility. In one realm, the dream realm, there are no consistent laws of physics or identity. Objects and entities have a variety of properties that change all the time. But we usually wake up in the same bed we fell asleep in. If I'm curious, I can hook up a video camera to record myself sleeping, and then compare my subjective experience of dreaming to my objective experience of lying in a bed. I may dream that I am flying, but when I observe myself, I see I am only twitching under the covers. There is, also, an intermediate realm, which can be confusing for some, but which is easy to explain philosophically. And that is the realm of manipulation.
[47:21] Let's say your friend Bob is lying on the couch, and he really wants a peach from a tree in the garden. Bob can ask you to go pick one for him, and perhaps you will. Or Bob can beg, wheedle, bribe, cajole, bully, or manipulate you into getting him a peach, and perhaps you will. But he only tries because you're human. There is no other living entity in the universe that we know of, that Bob can manipulate into getting him a peach. He can manipulate other human beings. He cannot manipulate peach trees or physics or gravity.
[48:04] If I have to jump from a high wall, I can beg you to catch me. I cannot rationally beg gravity to suspend itself, even for an instant. If I'm lying in a sunny hammock, I can ask you to get me sunscreen. I cannot ask the sun to refrain. From burning me, or if I do, the sun will not obey.
[48:26] If you have a job or hobby that involves manipulating and controlling people, then you spend a lot of time in a fairly subjective frame of mind. Please understand, I'm not saying that manipulating and controlling people is innately bad. It can have very positive outcomes, such as your doctor scaring you into losing weight and exercising, or a salesman helping you overcome your fearful resistance to a beneficial purchase. If you are in sales, politics, the media, or academia, then your primary focus is not on objective reality, but on other people's minds, their perceptions, and thoughts, and feelings. If you wheedle, cajole, bully, manipulate, encourage, and inspire, then you are like a farmer whose primary crop is future human actions. Of course, the hope is that you bring objective principles to people's subjective experience with the goal of helping them make rational decisions. But often, of course, this is scarcely the case. If you are in academia, you might bring to people's pre-existing prejudices the facts that deny the sexism of the supposed male-female wage gap. Or you might stoke those prejudices and provoke the plethora of resentments, alienations, and frustrations that lead people to bitter, barren lives.
[49:56] Those who spend significant amounts of time attempting to influence other people's thoughts and actions are often in grave danger of falling prey to the subjective universe hypothesis, which is one reason it spreads so rapidly. Since most of their mental energies are spent trying to change other people's minds, the objectivity of the universe easily becomes obscured. When I was a kid, spoon-bending, telekinesis, and all other sorts of mental gibberish were enormously popular. And I remember open-minded young tyke that I was experimenting with controlling objects through my mind. My very first music LP was The Things We Do for Love by 10CC. Back in the day, you had to put a needle on the record to play it, and when the song was over, the needle would just keep clicking against the label. I clearly remember, at the age of 11, lying on my bed, listening to the music playing in another room, and working my mind feverishly to lift the needle and put it back in its holder.
[51:05] I tried a number of other approaches to this hypothesis that telekinesis could work, all of which failed completely. Another time, my mother took me to a spoon bending class where I was supposed to be taught how to bend spoons with my mind. This turned out to be mere mental manipulation combined with continually rubbing the metal of the spoon to make it softer. You then imagined yourself easily twisting the spoon by the time you actually twisted it, the metal was softer and you were mentally psyched up to more easily do it. I also got interested in mind reading, UFOs, pyramid power, and all other sorts of mental detritus that clogged up the brainpower of the late 1970s, but none of it ever panned out. In hindsight, I'm sort of glad that this nonsense was everywhere, and I'm very glad that I gave it all an honest try, because it taught me two important things. First of all, empirical verification is the key to truth. And second, society seems more than willing to regularly swan dive into sophisticated vats of utter mental garbage.
[52:19] Moving objects with your mind violates the basic laws of physics. It is, in effect, without a cause. In other words, movement without prior movement. And it also denies basic evolution, in that if we could move things with our minds, we would scarcely have developed arms and hands. It's the same with telepathy. Any human group with the capacity to transmit thoughts would have had such an enormous evolutionary advantage that such a skill would have spread like wildfire among the population. Imagine the advantage in war and hunting alone.
[52:54] Similarly, our emotions are good at helping us read people, but not as good at helping us understand objective reality. Throughout history, human predators were our greatest danger, and they live among us in the greatest disguise of all, since they often look just like us or people we love. Those who developed strong and accurate gut instincts about dangerous people avoided or at least minimized such predations. As we became more civilized and lived in towns and cities, non-human predation fell away, and so people tended to focus their fight-and-flight mechanisms on dangerous people rather than on predatory animals. These dangerous people, in turn, developed language skills designed to blunt people's capacity to sniff out human danger. Lions creep in the tall grass, and human predators hide in baffling and manipulative syllables. Rational philosophers bring truth and pain now, but freedom later. Sophists bring ease and relief now, but tyranny later. The human herd vacillates from greed to necessity and back again, like a weak man torn between a good wife and a dangerous mistress.
[54:15] These days, we live in such a social world that we tend to confuse our instincts about people with facts about reality.
[54:29] Philosophy and Control, If you hold a toy airplane, you can maneuver it to fly directly. If you fly it through remote control, you can maneuver it indirectly. If your friend flies it through remote control, you can tell him to turn the plane left or right. If you watch an old video of a toy airplane flying, you cannot control it at all. We inhabit several layers of diminishing control. The first is over our own mind, our own thoughts. Our thoughts are largely autonomous, but subject to our control. If I ask you to think of an eagle, you can think of an eagle. It is unlikely you will continue to think of one for long since the human mind is self-generating, absent-minded, and easily distracted. Something more important will soon grab your attention. This type of mind control has limits. If I tell you not to think of an eagle, is it even possible for you to do as I ask?
[55:42] Thoughts within us are constantly churning, arriving, disappearing. Our minds are beehives of continual activity. They initiate internal action constantly, and equally constantly they remain in motion. Controlling thoughts is initially like trying to ride a barely trained horse, But it is the most direct layer of control that we have, Our bodies can be externally controlled We can be handcuffed, for instance Our minds cannot be so directly controlled, The second layer of control is over our own bodies I can tell my right hand to scratch my eyebrow and it will obey I can manage my own thoughts, and I can initiate actions in my body, at least in my limbs and external body. I can't do much to control my digestion or blood flow, nor can I stop my heart with my mind. I can stop my arms from moving, but cannot stop myself from aging.
[56:47] My mind is in constant motion. The aspects of my body I can control tend to be inert. My arm does not move until I tell it to. We manage our minds while we move our bodies. The first level of control is over our own minds. The second is over our own bodies. The third layer of control is over objects we can manipulate beyond our own bodies. I can pick up a peach and eat it. I cannot blow a cumulus cloud away. Other people can also pick up that peach. They cannot directly control my arm. After this, our control trails away quickly. I can choose to drink a glass of water. I cannot decide water. It's poisonous to me. I can choose to crank up a Queen's song on my headphones. I cannot choose whether high volume damages my hearing. I can choose to drink arsenic. I cannot What will it to be good for me? We can control our own thoughts to some degree, we can control our own bodies to some degree, and we can manipulate proximate entities, but we cannot change physical laws or properties at will.
[58:04] That which we cannot choose to change falls under the definition of what we will call objective or external reality. Science generally measures what we cannot choose to change, as does engineering, logic, mathematics, and other objective disciplines. If an engineer builds a bridge and that bridge falls down, no one blames the engineer's willpower or sartorial preferences. He may have made a mistake in his calculations, or the materials may have been defective, or some extremity of weather may have overtaken the parameters of his design. but his will is not what is at fault. On the other hand, if I ask you to hold my delicate computer tablet and you drop it in excitement when your phone rings, clearly you have been deficient in some manner of concentration, focus, or willpower. You certainly had the strength to hold my little tablet, but you got distracted and excited and dropped it. You had the power to hold the tablet and therefore you own your failure to do so.
[59:17] If I get a sunburn, I am irrational if I blame the sun. Rather, the fault lies with my own lack of preparation. I can alter whether I put on sunscreen, and I can alter whether I stay in the shade. I cannot change whether the sun produces ultraviolet rays or the effects those rays have on my skin. That, which we cannot change, is the foundation of objective reality. The challenge is that the human brain exists within objective reality, but the mind is changeable. We will get to more on this later. To summarize, the four levels of control. We have the mind, which controls itself. We have the body, which is to some degree controlled by the mind because the body references the brain. We have manipulatable objects, which cannot be directly controlled, unlike the body, but which can be controlled by the body secondhand, so to speak. The fourth level is where we have zero control, and this is where we find objective, empirical, uncontrollable reality.
[1:00:32] You may disagree with me that the fourth level is the foundation of objective reality, but you cannot disagree with the definition. You can think of an elephant in your mind. You cannot magically summon an elephant to appear in reality. When you think of a peach, your mouth may water but you cannot eat one without finding some way to put an actual peach in your mouth. You can control your thoughts. You can initiate movement in your hand. You can pick a peach, but you cannot alter physical laws, gravity, or the properties of atoms.
[1:01:10] There is an old saying, which applies as much to engineering as to science. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. This is the foundation of objective philosophy, of the fourth level of control, or lack of control.
[1:01:28] In order to build a bridge, you must accept the properties of nature that are beyond your control. You can build a stronger bridge, you cannot diminish gravity. You can build a bridge that opens. You cannot build a bridge that disappears and reappears at the push of a button. You can build a glass-bottomed boat, but you cannot build a boat with no bottom or top and expect it to float. These metaphysical differences are how we begin to differentiate between our minds and our bodies, that which we can control and that which we cannot control. We can think of these layers as an inverted pyramid of prevalence. We have absolutely no control over most of the universe. We cannot will the galaxy of Andromeda to change its course. Just about everything is made of hydrogen, and just about everything lies beyond our control. Only a tiny subsection of that which exists is within our control. Everything that exists could theoretically be controlled, but that which we can actually affect is but a tiny subsection of all that is.
[1:02:42] Think of yourself. Most of the universe is beyond your control, including all of its laws and most of its properties, but you can affect a tiny minority of objects and properties within your direct sphere of control.
[1:02:59] Think of your body. Billions of people live in the world, but no one except you can directly will your right hand to scratch your eyebrow. Only you have direct physical control over your own body. Someone else can force you to do something, but they cannot directly control your body in the same way that you can. Stealing a car does not transfer its rightful ownership. Forcing your body does not transfer your natural will.
[1:03:31] Your mind, which is really you, more or less, is not only under your control, it is the very source of the control that you exercise over your body and over the objects in your vicinity that you can control. Imagine you are walking by a road in flip-flops, and you stub your toe hard on a broken piece of sidewalk. You cry out in pain, bend over, rub your toe, and check for damage. If asked, you would surely say that stubbing your toe was a negative event. Suddenly, a bus comes careening off the road and crashes into the sidewalk just a few feet in front of you. Ah, immediately, your perspective on the entire sequence changes. The broken piece of sidewalk, formerly your enemy, now becomes your salvation. Stubbing your toe, formerly a negative event, now becomes a wonderful, life-saving happenstance. Nothing has changed in reality, of course. You did stub your toe, it did cause pain, and the bus did crash up onto the sidewalk. But your perspective on the sequence of events has altered enormously.
[1:04:46] Your mind can change. This does not change reality, but events in reality can change everything within your mind. Your mind can be ambivalent. You can have two opposing opinions about an idea or argument, but you cannot move your arm in two opposing directions at once. You cannot go north and south at the same time. However, you can be both happy and sad at the same time. We cannot categorize these capacities as identical.
[1:05:21] Here is how we can begin to establish the existence of an external objective reality. Once we understand that there are things we can alter directly, things we can alter indirectly, and things that we cannot alter, then we truly begin to understand how the foundation for an acceptance of objective reality begins to take shape.
[1:05:48] Radical skepticism. It is possible to construct a scenario wherein all the above divisions still remain within our own mind. Perhaps we are just a brain in a tank manipulated by a Cartesian demon who externally divides our mind and experiences into the multiple categories defined above. If our mind exists in some sort of virtual reality, then there's no reason why this demon could not provide us stimuli we could change and stimuli we could not change. In a video game, you can move your character around an environment, but you typically cannot change the physics of that environment. However, both the movements, what you can change, and the physics, what you cannot change, are equally products of the designers and programmers of the game. For instance, they have programmed it so you are unable to redesign your environment. Only their decision results in an unchangeable environment as you play.
[1:06:51] To think of it another way, if you are directing a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, you are generally not allowed or encouraged to alter the text. Fidelity to Shakespeare's source material requires, that the actors memorize and repeat the bar to words. You can change the staging, the environment, the costumes, even cut some scenes, but you are not supposed to alter the language itself. However, this is merely a convention of the theater. There is no absolute reason why you cannot monkey around with the text as much as you want. Shakespeare chose the words he put down and convention encourages us to follow them, but there is nothing absolute in any of these decisions. If you are directing a more contemporary play, the playwright might not allow you to change the text at all.
[1:07:47] Exercising the Cartesian demon. Can we escape this logical possibility of being nothing more than an externally controlled brain? While it is possible to examine any number of scenarios that could support the brain-in-a-tank hypothesis, it is also fairly easy to push back against this proposal to the point where it topples right over. To begin, we must examine the standard of the null hypothesis. If you have a hypothesis that cannot possibly be disproved, then you have added nothing whatsoever to the sum total of knowledge, truth, understanding, or perception, or to anything for that matter. If I say that I have an invisible friend named Bob and then steadfastly reject and refuse any standards or criteria by which the existence of Bob can be established, what am I doing except wasting everyone's time? Often annoyingly, that is precisely the point. Another way of approaching this problem is to remember that anything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
[1:09:03] There is a kind of intellectual black hole that fools and trolls deploy to entrap the unwary. They propose a ridiculous hypothesis and then deny all attempts to disprove it. I remember a young man once putting forward the thesis that the Soviet wall in Berlin was actually designed to keep Westerners out of the paradise of East Berlin. His mother and I railed against this hypothesis, but of course the goal posts kept moving and nothing could ever be established with any certainty. If we peered over the wall and saw a dingy dystopia, well, that was just a hallucination projected by the benevolent rulers of the communist paradise. When we pointed out to the young man that the machine guns were pointed inwards, he said that this was just to make it look bad so people would not break down the wall trying to break into the utopia and so on. Arguing with fools is not always a completely useless exercise, but taken to extremes and applied consistently, all it produces among the intelligent is intellectual paralysis and self-destroying radical skepticism, which again, is often the point.
[1:10:15] Remember, if a hypothesis cannot possibly be disproved, it can be irrefutably dismissed. The reason is that a truth proposition must be compared to something in order to find out whether it is true or not. Truth cannot be entirely self-referential. Otherwise, it cannot be the truth at all. Truth is a standard that we apply to propositions that reference something other than their own principles or arguments. For instance, if I say that there are two bananas on the table, is that a true statement? Well, if a pair of bananas is sitting on the table, then yes. If there is only one banana, or no bananas, or three mangoes and an elephant, then it is a false statement. If you are not allowed to look at the table, is my statement true or false? It cannot be verified, so it doesn't matter. If I say that I dreamt about two bananas last night. However, there is no way to objectively verify my statement. You may believe me if you think I am an honest person, but it cannot be established as true in any rational or empirical fashion.
[1:11:32] Personal subjective statements are not part of philosophy any more than they are part of science or math. It is not mathematics to say that you like the shape of the symbol for the number two. If I say that a coconut was spontaneously created and simultaneously destroyed on the far side of the Andromeda galaxy 12 million years ago, will you say that the statement is true? Will you say that it is false? I would lean towards false for the simple reason that matter cannot be created and destroyed, and coconuts generally don't exist in a vacuum, but Who really cares? No proof is possible, no disproof is necessary, and the statement has no relevance to anything whatsoever.
[1:12:18] I would also need to explain how I know about the mysterious coconut in the first place. If I cannot explain how it was proved to me, how can I expect other people to believe me? An important standard in philosophy goes something like this. Who cares? If a proposition has no practical value or benefit, changes no particular behavior, or cannot be disproved, then we can definitively file it under the category of well who cares.
[1:12:53] Philosophy is like medicine in general doctors should study the most dangerous and prevalent diseases since human desires for health are infinite while medical resources are most definitely finite, sure you could write a proposal for grant money in order to study the possibility that once every thousand years someone may get dizzy from biting their thumbnail but who cares? When evaluating a philosophical hypothesis, one essential question is, what behavior might change if people accept this viewpoint? If I convince you that honesty is a virtue, that would bring you love and happiness, then I certainly hope that you would begin to tell the truth more often. If you accept the argument that courage is necessary for virtue and virtue is necessary for happiness, then if you want happiness, presumably, you will try to be more courageous.
[1:13:53] An argument that cannot be disproved can be dismissed. This is our first salvo against the idea that all reality is subjective. I prefer victory to stalemate, however, so let us destroy the argument once and for all.
[1:14:13] The Infinite Simulation Hypothesis What if we lived in a simulation so perfect and complete that it was indistinguishable from the common sense perspective that we live in an objective and empirical reality? This could be called an infinite simulation. The infinite simulation hypothesis generally denies and defies any disproof, so it can have no rational change upon a person's behavior. If believing in this hypothesis resulted in the ability to go without food and air, since our requirement for both is a mere illusion, then this would lend support and value to the hypothesis. However, anyone who believes in such a hypothesis still has to breathe and eat, so nothing changes there. As you pursue this infinite simulation hypothesis, you will find no practical difference between accepting the hypothesis and rejecting it. In other words, no requirements, standards, or necessities change if you believe you are living in a simulation versus living in objective reality. It is reasonable to ask, what changes if I accept this assertion? If the answer is, nothing really, then surely more important things need to be done.
[1:15:36] Naturally and logically this does not automatically disprove the hypothesis but it does bring to light the question of whether it is important at all, another approach is needed to disprove the hypothesis, the question of infinite regression is important here.
[1:16:00] If you think of the concept of biological evolution, it cannot be arbitrarily cut off after a certain number of generations. If evolution is a valid hypothesis, then it must extend all the way back to the origins of life itself. One central aspect to the theory of evolution is that no gods are needed for the development and progression of life. It would have done Charles Darwin little good to say that evolution was a universal principle that went back 5,000 years. But before that, life required a God. In fact, this would have put him squarely in line with most theologians who fully recognize local adaptations to species such as the domestication of wild animals for human purposes, but who believe that the beginning of life required God.
[1:16:50] The underlying axiom of the infinite simulation hypothesis is that consciousness inhabits a simulation imposed from outside. Now, this simulation cannot be autonomous in and of itself, but rather must be imposed by another consciousness which exists outside our own.
[1:17:12] The existence of a prisoner implies the existence of an imprisoner. If you have been hypnotized, this implies the existence of a hypnotist. If you exist in an infinite simulation, then someone or something must be imposing that simulation upon you. Think of putting on a virtual reality mask. Someone created the mask. Someone created the program you'd view and so on. The existence of virtual reality presupposes the existence of at least one other consciousness that encases you in that virtual reality. If you are locked in a basement, someone made the basement and locked you in. Do you see the problem yet? If consciousness exists within virtual reality, then all conscious beings must exist within virtual reality. This is inescapable. If you are a brain in a tank, then someone grew your brain in the tank, attached the electrodes that give you the simulation of experience, and supplied the necessary energy and stimulation.
[1:18:25] Furthermore, in your waking illusion, you continually interact with people smarter and more experienced than yourself, and read books supposedly written thousands of years ago, some in other languages, so you must be consuming the products of other consciousnesses. Let's call you Bob. And let's call the super being who controls your experience, Lord Doug. For some unfathomable reasons of his own, Lord Doug grows a human brain called Bob, puts it in a tank, attaches electrodes, and supplies Bob with an external objective reality as well as an internal subjective experience.
[1:19:11] I'm sure you see the problem by now. If the argument is that Bob is in an infinite simulation, then why does the argument not equally apply that Lord Doug is also in an infinite simulation? If consciousness exists within a perfect simulation, then Lord Doug must also exist in a perfect simulation, since Lord Doug possesses consciousness. Lord Doug's infinite simulation experience also requires an external consciousness that applies this simulation. Let's call this other consciousness Sir Jim. Naturally, Sir Jim also exists in a simulation which requires an external consciousness to... Well, you get the idea. The problem of infinite regression destroys the validity of the hypothesis. If all consciousness exists in an infinite simulation, and consciousness is required to create an infinite simulation, then there can be no logical end to the upward progression of infinite simulations. Mind A is wrapped in an infinite simulation by mind B. Mind B is wrapped in an infinite simulation by mind C, and so on.
[1:20:32] You can, of course, say that Sir Jim exists in the ultimate reality beyond which no creator of the simulation is required because Sir Jim does not exist in a simulation.
[1:20:46] Ah, by doing this, you have accepted that consciousness can exist in an objective reality. If this is true for Jim, then why is it not true for Doug, or Bob, or for yourself? By inventing Doug and Jim, all you have done is add additional useless layers of complexity and unbelievability, without even the intellectual integrity of a null hypothesis, to the simple statement that consciousness exists in objective reality. Also, since your simulated reality includes the contents and productions, books, movies, and conversations of billions of other minds, then the simulation cannot possibly be the product of one single mind. Those who advance this theory may try to get around this problem by claiming that the manufacturer of the simulated reality is omniscient, but appeals to magical non-restrictions are not an argument. The label omniscient is not a concept, but an anti-concept. All consciousness is limited. Removing limitations removes the very definition of consciousness. Likewise, all life is mortal. The word immortal is not a concept, but an anti-concept, since it simply removes one of the definitions and restrictions of life itself. A house is a house, not the destruction of a house. A concept is a concept, not the destruction of a concept.
[1:22:14] Also, we generally accept that knowing everything would include knowing everything about morality. Omniscience, by definition, would involve some relationship to virtue, and in particular to empathy, since an all-knowing being would know exactly how much pain immoral actions would cause others. Therefore, an omniscient being would also be perfectly moral, which would mean unwilling to lie. However, since a simulated reality is a metaphysical falsehood inflicted upon a helpless and unaware victim, it is the worst conceivable lie and manipulation. Omniscience would thus equal terrifying and demonic sadism, which would also mean that increases in knowledge would be increases in evil. An increase in empathy would be an increase in sadism, and greater knowledge would provoke greater immorality.
[1:23:12] If someone advances such a theory to you, he is clearly trying to increase your knowledge. However, since the theory requires an omniscient being to be utterly evil, he is arguing that increasing knowledge increases evil. And so you can reject him on the grounds that he is trying to make you more evil by giving you more knowledge. If he replies that more knowledge does not make you more evil, then he cannot claim that your consciousness is manipulated by an infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely sadistic being.
[1:23:47] If he replies that more knowledge makes you more virtuous, then he cannot claim that your consciousness is manipulated by an infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely sadistic being, since infinite knowledge implies infinite virtue, and lying to innocent victims is not virtuous.
[1:24:06] Also, there is the general problem of why an omniscient being would bother creating such a ridiculous laboratory. Why would it spend its entire energies and efforts manipulating one mortal creature? If the omniscient being is virtuous, it would never create such a lie. If the omniscient being is evil, despite all the contradictions outlined above, how could it possibly profit from creating such a delusion? Certainly there could be no material prophet the only prophet could be watching suffering, however if the omniscient being has created the simulation for the sole purpose of taking sadistic pleasure in watching suffering then why do so much joy and pleasure exist within the simulation why are there love and sex and the thrill of victory and none of it makes any sense of course.
[1:24:59] Even if we bypass the problems of omniscience, virtue, and motive, we still face the problem of infinite regression in causality. If you say that all consciousnesses live in a simulated reality controlled by an external consciousness, then you have not solved the problem of causality. If every consciousness is manipulated by an external outsider, then no one is causing anything. Everyone is just bouncing off the random stimuli provided by their external mental jailer, who then decided to set all of these events and experiments in motion. It's like the argument that says, if consciousness exists, it must have been created. Whoever created the consciousness also has a consciousness and therefore must have been created. This is the problem of infinite regression, and it cannot be solved by ignoring it. although that is often attempted.
[1:26:01] If consciousness can exist in objective reality, then the simplest and most rational explanation is that your consciousness exists in objective reality. You don't even need the principle of Occam's razor that the simplest explanation is usually the best. Just some basic common sense. If you accept that consciousness can exist in objective reality, then you don't need non-falsifiable pseudo-explanations of additional layers of manipulated unreality and hidden external consciousnesses and so on. You either face the problem of infinite regression, meaning infinite universes, infinite energy, and no original causality whatsoever, or you accept that we do not exist in a simulation. We exist in objective reality, you and I and everyone else, and that's all there is to it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to mess with your head, inject you with crazy talk, and possibly ruin your life. Argue back, try to save them, and if they steadfastly resist, run for your very life!
[1:27:20] Validating the senses. One reason why the infinite simulation hypothesis is so seductive is because there is an element of truth in the formulation. We are brains in a tank. The tank is just our skull. Our minds have no direct contact with the empirical reality external to our brains. When we really think about this, it's easy to start feeling weird. Everything we perceive is at least secondhand. Our brain cannot squeeze itself out of our nose and vacation in the land of objective reality like a jellyfish feeling up a tree. Everything we perceive about reality is delivered to us through the senses and the emotions, of course. If you lived in a cave without a clock, how long would it take you to lose track of day and night? After a couple weeks, how much would you be willing to bet whether it was day or night? If you are one of those lucky people, with a strict biological clock of diurnal schedules, going to bed and waking up at about the same time, you would have a pretty good idea. But for most of us, our sleep would drift to the point where we wouldn't have any idea whether we were sleeping during day or night.
[1:28:44] Imagine being born blind in a village of sightless people, isolated from the world. Imagine all the things you wouldn't know about. You wouldn't know about the moon or the stars. You wouldn't know what a distant mountaintop looked like, or even that it existed. You may not have any clear idea what the tops of trees looked like, and would have no idea about the structure of clouds. You would notice that it rained sometimes, but you wouldn't know anything visual about high stratospheric cloud formations. You would, hopefully, never experience meteors, and the occasional airplane flying high above may only register with your ears, not your eyes. This list could go on and on, but the point is to recognize how many of our concepts require the evidence of the senses. If you were deaf but not blind, you would look at a distant airplane and have no idea whether it made sound or not. Since the flight of high-flying birds is inaudible, perhaps the same would be true of airplanes as well. How would you know?
[1:29:53] Most of what goes on in our mind is derived from electrical impulses delivered by the senses. Reality is a consistent electrical storm imprinted on our minds by nerve endings in our bodies. In a sense, we are like a king locked in a castle with no windows, who learns about his kingdom only through a constant stream of messengers entering his prison through secret doors. The mind generally receives, it does not transmit. Centuries ago, some thinkers argued that the eyes sent out rays or beams like radar and received visual echolocation back. However, our eyes only receive, they do not transmit. We can reach with our hands to manipulate reality, but our senses operate as inputs only. Our ears only receive. We can receive sensations through our skin. We cannot send sensations through our skin.
[1:30:54] Naturally, a central question of epistemology, the study of knowledge, is whether the information we receive from our senses is valid. Now, valid is just another word for accurate or true, which brings us back to the basic question. What is truth? Truth. As discussed before, truth is a statement about objective reality that conforms with the nature and principles of objective reality. If I say that there is a cloud overhead, my statement is true if there is, in fact, a cloud overhead. This requirement for objective reality as a standard of truth can be challenging for some who believe that their own internal states have a truth or falsehood about them. It is true, for example, that I felt sad yesterday. It is true that I feel happy today. It is true that I love my wife, that I study the truth, and that I hate evil.
[1:31:59] It is worth spending a few moments to deal with this question of internal states before moving on to the validity of the senses, because emotions are an essential aspect of how we effectively process and deal with reality. Knowing you feel strongly about something is essential for focus and motivation, as long as you know that experiencing your feelings is not the same as knowing the truth. Wanting to diet is not the same as actually dieting, though it is an essential first step. It is important to know when you are angry at someone, and it is equally important to know that your anger does not automatically make that person wrong or bad. In the modern world, emotions are often perceived as accurate judgments, a belief that unleashes a feral mob more often than not. Emotions are usually expressed as all-important accusations, but the conclusions drawn from them need to be proved in the court of reason before being accepted as valid. Philosophy without emotions is random and inconsequential. Emotions without philosophy are wayward and destructive.
[1:33:15] The question of love is fascinating. Emotions do not exist outside the body in the objective alternative external world. A man's love for learning may cause him to build a school. The school certainly exists outside his body, but his love for learning does not. That feeling lives within him and dies with him, though the school survives him. This is not to say that love is an entirely subjective state, as was established in my earlier book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love. What we call love is merely our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous. The experience of love releases certain endorphins in the mind and body which can be objectively measured. We have a subjective experience called lust, which also provokes measurable biological responses in our body. If a man says he is not sexually attracted to a certain image but his body manifests an erection, we have reason to doubt his protestations.
[1:34:22] Also, it is reasonable to accept that the emotion of love does not produce random behaviors in the person experiencing it. If I say that I love a restaurant but never want to eat there, what does that mean? If I say that I love playing sports but sit on the couch every spare minute I have, am I being honest? If I say that I love my wife but divorce her for no particular reason, do my actions support my use of the word love?
[1:34:50] Of course, we can always construct scenarios wherein I love a restaurant, but never want to eat there because it is too far away, too expensive, or I am allergic to the food. But assuming that I have the means, motive, and an opportunity to eat at a restaurant I claim to love, yet I never want to do it, something is wrong with my claim. Remember, empirical evidence trumps conceptual hypotheses every time. If I say I love spending time with a particular friend, but I shudder and recoil every time he proposes a get-together, surely we understand that there is a contradiction between my claimed feelings and my measurable actions. Think of two professional wrestlers engaged in a public trash-talking hate fest who are later seen amicably eating dinner together after a match, giggling and cleaning out the buffet? Would we say that their hate is genuine or that it is part of an entertaining show put on to sell tickets? In other words, there are ways to objectively measure the empirical effects of subjective experiences. If love is claimed, but hatred or indifference is objectively measured, then it is reasonable to question the sincerity of the claim.
[1:36:13] Our judgments should work the same way our bodies work. Our bodies process deeds, not words. If I want to lose weight, I can say the word diet over and over again while chewing my way through a cheesecake, but my body will only respond to what I eat, not what I say. Repeatedly yodeling the word exercise works little but my lungs. Actually, going to the gym will affect my body. If someone pulls out your fingernails, you experience pain. Perhaps you are a masochist who enjoys the feeling, but it is pain nonetheless. Its physiological effects can be objectively measured in your body. Thus, while emotions are somewhat subjective, the effects of them can often be measured objectively.
[1:37:06] On the senses. Regarding our five senses, it is certainly true that each individual sense can be misinterpreted. This does not invalidate the senses as a whole. There is a reason we evolved to have five senses rather than just one or two. Judging reality via only one sense is like looking at 20% of the night sky and decisively determining whether the moon is out or not. When you put a pencil into a glass of water, it looks disjointed. However, it is important to remember that our eyes do not provide us with conclusions, merely information. Our eyes do not inform us about the straightness of the pencil. They merely provide the light waves to our brain. Our sense of touch can tell us more. If we run our finger down the pencil past the waterline, we can feel that it is not disjointed, and we realize that the water is merely bending the light waves where the surface meets the pencil.
[1:38:09] Similarly, we may believe that a distant image of water in the desert is not a mirage, but a real lake. Our eyes do not tell us whether a lake exists in the distance. They merely transmit light waves to our brain. If we run forward through the blinding heat and find no actual lake, we understand that we have been subject to an illusion, which is another way of saying we came to the wrong conclusion about the evidence gleaned from only one sense, in this case, our eyesight. Our eyes are not to blame for the error, but our mind. Not the raw data, but our refined conclusions. However, if we walk forward and find a lake that we can swim in and drink from, then we no longer have any reason to believe that the lake is a mirage, for the simple reason that all of our five senses confirm its existence. In other words, the consistent properties of a lake.
[1:39:08] One of the reasons we have more than one sense is that it takes our senses acting in concert, reinforcing each other, to establish facts about objective reality. We've all had the experience of walking through a room in the darkness and banging our shin on a table. We walk confidently, thinking we are avoiding obstacles, but our confidence is disproved by the sudden pain in our leg. Here, our eyes do not transmit any indication of the table, but our sense of touch and of pain gives us the truth.
[1:39:45] There are three distinct classes of sense perception. The perception of absence, as in an open door. The perception of inconsistency, as in a mirage. And the perception of consistency, as in a lake. In other words, things are either not there, they are perhaps there, or they are really there. When you look ahead in the desert, you either see sand, a mirage, or a lake. Sand is the absence of a lake, the mirage is the possibility of a lake, while the lake is the thing itself. These perceptions, no impression on the senses, inconsistent impression on the senses, or consistent impression on the senses, are the differences between absence, illusion, and presence.
[1:40:36] When I look ahead, on a hot road while driving, I can say that the road ahead is wet and full of puddles. But as I drive closer, they all disappear and no water sprays from the sides of my tires. Because my original claim that the road ahead was wet did not match additional sense details as I got closer, the wetness disappeared. My original hypothesis was false. It was false because I claimed to be making an objective statement about external reality, not about my own subjective perception. If I say, the road ahead looks wet to me, then I'm not making a claim about external reality that the road is actually wet, but rather reporting my own subjective experience of looking down the road.
[1:41:31] This transition between the description of personal experience and the identification of objective fact is the difference between anecdote and data. Women are generally shorter than men. Reporting the fact that you know a tall woman just throws static into the music of math.
[1:41:54] Objectivity and Honesty Saying that something looks wet to me, if it really does, is an honest statement. Saying that something is wet just because it looks wet to me is a hypothesis. If I see water drops on my window and I say that I see water drops on my window, I'm telling the truth. However, if I see water drops on my window and I say that it is raining, that is a hypothesis. It may have finished raining or my window may have been hit by water from a sprinkler or a car wash, or from just about anything else for that matter.
[1:42:31] The failure to understand or act upon the difference between personal experience and objective hypothesis is catastrophic. But people mistake their personal feelings for objective facts all the time. Someone feels offended and they assume the offender is offensive. Feeling offended is the experience. Someone being offensive is a hypothesis that needs to be proved. The chasm between feeling and proof is fertile ground for manipulative sophists. Someone makes you angry, so you assume that the instigator is aggressive. You fall in love, and you assume that the object of your affection is wonderful, virtuous, and trustworthy. A politician offers you something for free. You assume he is a generous statesman.
[1:43:25] Feelings transmit from person to person when we pretend they are objective. This turns them into a form of virus that spreads by mimicking reality. If I can get you to jump to the same conclusions that I have come to about reality, based upon my own subjective experiences, then you are much more likely to experience the same emotions than I do. If I am afraid of red-headed people and can convince you that they are objectively dangerous, then you will also become afraid of red-headed people. My irrational fear has camouflaged itself as objective fact and thus transmitted itself to you.
[1:44:09] Ideologies also spread this way. They primarily transmit themselves through emotions rather than reasoned arguments and evidence. If I can convince you that rich people only have money because they have stolen it from you, then you will resent rich people and support using the power of the state to take money from them and give it to you. With me as the highly profitable arbitrator, of course. If you can convince women that they have been oppressed, beaten, raped, and controlled throughout history, then they will inevitably feel anger and resentment towards men. One individual woman's potentially just anger Against one individual man, perhaps her father Gets transmitted throughout the culture Using the medium of other susceptible women, Then claims of sexism end up being reproduced As very real sexism against all men.
[1:45:07] If you say, I am angry at a man Then that is an honest and accurate statement, However, if you say, I am angry at all men because all men are oppressive, then that is a dishonest and inaccurate hyperbole. This is how anger spreads like a virus. You own your feelings, which are often highly susceptible to your perceptions. Since perceptions can very easily be wrong, assuming your feelings are mere reflections of perfectly accurate perceptions is a highly shaky stance to take and very dangerous. Should you prove to be wrong.
[1:45:51] Philosophy and Subjectivity Philosophy is the methodology that helps you determine the difference between subjective experiences and objective facts. We need philosophy precisely because mistaking our subjective experiences for objective facts is so easy. A tree cannot be incorrect. Sunlight cannot be erroneous. Water cannot take a wrong turn. And fungus cannot be immoral. Truth and falsehood exist as distinct states in only one entity in the universe that we know of, the human mind. Truth is a state that results when a concept matches an entity or a hypothesis matches the facts of reality. Truth always refers to concepts or language and the degree to which they match what exists and occurs in objective reality. If I point at a mug and say, it is a telephone, we cannot fix my statement by replacing the mug with a telephone. If I call the mug a telephone, I am incorrect because my word does not match what I'm pointing at.
[1:47:05] The standard of truth refers not only to the relationships between concepts and objects, but also to concepts about the relationships between objects, such as gravity or magnetism. If I say that gravity repels, then I am incorrect. My language does not match the true relationship between mass and gravity. If I say that magnetism can pull down a tree, then I am equally incorrect. The relationship between concepts in the mind and matter or energy in the world is the relationship we refer to as truth.
[1:47:48] Concepts, and entities. As we grow from infancy, we notice that certain objects in our world exhibit consistent characteristics. Chocolate is sweet, water quenches our thirst, carpets are softer than hardwood, and crayons taste terrible. We are able to develop accurate conceptual nets to cast around similar objects, so to speak, because those objects have similar or identical characteristics.
[1:48:20] The stability of objects and properties in the world is the foundation for the accuracy of our concepts. If you tried to develop a physics of dreaming, you would quickly realize what an impossible task that would be. When we dream, objects, their properties, and the physical laws that govern them change continually and, sometimes, it would seem, randomly. Can you imagine trying to play a game of chess where the rules for your various pieces changed continually and the pieces shifted shape as well? What would it mean to play such a game, let alone win it? In debates there is a logical fallacy known as moving the goalposts wherein your opponent demands you prove x and when you do, he then demands that you prove why instead, or in addition. You cannot win such debates because the rules keep changing. The only way to win is not to play.
[1:49:20] Objects in the world are consistent for two basic reasons. The first is the existence of atoms, and the second is the existence of stable physical laws. The atoms that make up a feather possess different characteristics than the atoms that make up a bowling ball The atoms that make up water are different from the atoms that make up arsenic Atoms are subject to stable physical laws which result in consistent object behavior information about which our senses then transmit to our brains, Milk that looks fair may taste foul Our eyesight says it is healthy our taste buds report its danger. The skin of a shark feels smooth rubbing from head to tail. Going the other way reveals the direction of its tiny barbs. In other words, we have valid concepts because of the consistency of both atomic behavior and physical laws. This will be referred to as atomic consistency from now on for efficiency.
[1:50:26] Since our concepts describe the behavior of matter and energy, and the behavior of matter and energy is consistent, our concepts, to be valid, to be true, must also be consistent. Empirical reality is not self-contradictory, at least at the realm of the senses where philosophy operates. The realm of quantum mechanics is interesting, of course, but does not impact the realm of philosophy because quantum phenomena cancels out long before we get to the aggregate realm of sense perception. A rock is a rock and not a cloud, fire, or the concept of rock. An elephant is not its shadow, the letter E or a lizard. An entity cannot be both a living animal and a fossil at the same time. Relations between entities also cannot be self-contradictory. Gravity and magnetism cannot both repel and attract at the same time. A car cannot move both north and south at the same time, and a ball cannot simultaneously fall towards the ground and rise away from it.
[1:51:41] Thus the properties and relations of entities in reality cannot be self-contradictory. If they appear so, this is due to an erroneous conclusion in our mind. A colorblind man may report that a rainbow is composed of differing shades of gray, but he would be incorrect because of a deficiency in his eyes. A deaf woman may wonder why people are dancing to mere vibrations, but of course the silence only feels real because of a deficiency in her ears. Reality is rational and consistent, and valid concepts describe reality. Therefore, true and valid concepts must be rational and consistent. A tomato cannot be both a tomato and a beach ball at the same time. Thus, any concept that requires such a contradiction is naturally invalid. Science, which describes a consistent, universal, and rational reality, must itself be consistent, rational, and universal. Philosophical arguments, which establish truth regarding objective and rational reality, must themselves be objective and rational.
[1:53:02] Concepts and Validity In relation to truth, there are three categories of concepts. Valid, potentially valid, and invalid. A valid and true concept is one that has been verified and established both by its internal rational consistency and by its consistency with empirical observations. The idea that the earth is a sphere rather than flat is not internally self-contradictory, No one is saying that the Earth is both a sphere and flat at the same time. And its roundness has been consistently verified through empirical observation, both on the surface of the Earth and in space. The concept that airplanes can fly is validated by the laws of physics, as well as by the empirical observation available every day that airplanes do indeed fly.
[1:53:58] The concept that human beings are mortal is validated by the laws of biology, as well as the empirical observation available every day that all human beings eventually die. These are valid concepts. Potentially valid concepts are those for which there is no empirical evidence but no internal self-contradiction either. For instance, the idea that silicon rather than carbon could be used as the basis for a living organism is not internally self-contradictory but there is no evidence as yet of a silicon-based life form. The position that intelligent life could exist on other planets is not internally self-contradictory but no evidence as yet exists to prove this hypothesis.
[1:54:49] Invalid concepts are those that are self-contradictory and thus can never accurately describe atomic consistency. One example of a self-contradictory concept is the square circle, which cannot exist because the characteristics of squares and those of circles contradict each other.
[1:55:08] Another example of a self-contradictory entity is the concept of consciousness without matter. We never directly encounter consciousness in the absence of a brain. Empirically, no evidence exists to support the idea that consciousness can exist without matter, and all the evidence supports the reality that consciousness is an effect of matter, specifically the matter and energy that composes the human brain.
[1:55:37] Could consciousness exist without matter somewhere in the universe? Certainly not, for the following reasons. Consciousness is an effect of matter, since it requires the physical structure of the brain. Since consciousness is the effect of a physical brain, requiring consciousness without matter would be to require an effect without its proximate cause. Gravity is an effect of matter, of mass. This is, by definition and proof, not mere observation. Can we have gravity in the absence of matter? Of course not. Again, by definition, hypothesis, and empirical observation. Since gravity is an effect of matter, it therefore cannot exist in the absence of matter. Another way of looking at it is to think of a shadow. A shadow is an effect of opaque mass and light. can we have a shadow with neither light nor a mass to block it? Of course not. Can we have sound without a source of that sound? Can we have light without a light source? Of course not. Consciousness is an effect of matter of the physical brain specifically and therefore cannot exist in the absence of a brain.
[1:56:59] Philosophy, discomfort, and decisiveness. Such decisiveness in philosophy makes many people uncomfortable. Their immediate mental objective becomes to find some break in the rule, some exception to disprove any and all proposed objective standards. This is entirely natural because we often feel that we can release ourselves from obligations to obey or disseminate a rule if we can find even the tiniest exception to its commandments.
[1:57:33] This is the realm of foggy boundaries that confuses even the most consistent thinkers. If you are drawn to imagining some scenario in which consciousness can exist without matter, even to the point of imagining alternative universes, this is because it provokes emotional anxiety within you to understand that the argument could be so simple. We can certainly make the unsupported statement that consciousness can exist without matter and dismiss the argument above, but this lacks intellectual honesty and integrity. When we feel anxious, the most honest statement we can make is that we feel anxious, making the anxiety go away by inventing some anti-rational magic to dispel the uncomfortable feeling brought about by an assertive argument is dishonest and destructive. It is entirely understandable, of course, both historically and biologically. Human tribes have always been full of the most anti-rational nonsense, the contradiction of which often provoked either physical or genetic death. Rational thinkers are often targeted for murder, ostracism, or deplatforming.
[1:58:57] The moment that a dangerous rational idea enters our mind, our anti-rational immune system often attacks it as a foreign, dangerous object in order to protect our capacity for tribal cooperation and genetic reproduction. Thus, it is entirely natural for you to feel anxiety, and perhaps even hostility, towards a rational argument that may put you in conflict with tribal prejudices. However, let us at least be honest enough to admit that we are anxious and not pretend that the proposed argument is magically invalid.
[1:59:39] Materialism and Determinism, The great danger of a materialistic approach to the senses and to objective reality is the hollowing out of free will. Traditionally, the question of free will has been answered theologically rather than philosophically. According to most theology, there is an immaterial seat of consciousness within the body called the soul, which is immune to mere physical restrictions. And it is the soul that generates consciousness and free will within the mind. Creating an immaterial repository of consciousness that is unaffected by the physical domino causality of matter and energy has generally allowed for the maintenance of the free will position. However, this proof of free will remains philosophically unsatisfying.
[2:00:36] Why is this so important?
[2:00:41] Without free will, there is no such thing as philosophy. We do not attempt to cultivate wisdom in inanimate objects. This proves nothing about free will, of course, but clearly reveals the stakes. Without free will, there is no such thing as personal responsibility, no need or capacity for ethics, and no possibility for loving virtue or opposing evil, since virtue and vice remain delusions.
[2:01:13] When we stop believing in ghosts, we stop worrying about haunted houses and no longer fear the vengeance of the dead. The idea of vengeful ghosts was a desperate attempt by more primitive cultures to limit murders, as was the concept of hell, by implanting a fear of consequences that had no relationship to actually being caught by secular authorities.
[2:01:37] In general, the determinist position runs as follows. Free will is a superstition left over from more religious mindsets. Before we understood the Darwinian origins of the species, we imagined that a god breathed life into clay. Before we understood astronomy, we imagined that the stars were distant fireflies that wheeled around a static earth.
[2:02:04] The idea that blind matter and energy can somehow coalesce into a consciousness that defies all the restrictions of matter and energy is ridiculous. A rock does not have free will. The sun does not have free will. Your arm does not have free will. Only your brain apparently magically does.
[2:02:23] Alone in the universe, an infinitesimally small fraction of the matter and energy contained in the universe, the human brain, is able to overleap and escape the inevitable restrictions of matter and energy that apply to every other single atom in the universe.
[2:02:41] If those who believe in free will wish to create a magical exception for the human brain and make it exempt from the laws of physics that apply both to the human brain and everything else, then they are making an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and none have been provided by those with a mad faith in the magic of free will. In primitive times, mankind felt special because an all-seeing God oversaw an unmoving earth. The earth was the exception to everything else in the universe because everything else moved. How is the idea that our brains are magically different from everything else in the universe any different from the idea that the earth is magically different from everything else. How exactly does the brain exempt itself from physical laws?
[2:03:33] The only answer appears to be a bottomless thirst for imaginary choice, a desperate need to feel special, and a darker desire to punish people for their imaginary transgressions. You had a choice and you made the wrong choice, so you must be punished.
[2:03:53] These arguments certainly have the ring of consistency to them. How could it be rational to create an exception to the universal laws of physics just for the human brain? We do not see or experience even the idea of free will among animals, among nature, among inanimate objects. How are we so different? The answer that we possess a soul is not satisfying to those who reject immaterial explanations for material causes. If a child denies stealing a cookie and claims that his imaginary friend ate it instead, few parents would accept such an explanation.
[2:04:33] However, it remains entirely possible to reject the hypothesis of determinism without providing a purely scientific solution to the question of free will, although some such solutions appear to be emerging. Free will. An introduction. If I snap a man and ask him for directions, and he tells me to go east and west at the same time, I do not need to compare his directions to a map in order to know that he is wrong. If a man sends me an email containing the argument that emails never get delivered, I do not need to know anything about how emails are delivered in order to reject his hypothesis. If a woman tells me that she does not think I exist, I do not need to know any metaphysical proofs for my own existence in order to reject her hypothesis. Since she addresses her words to me, she cannot rationally claim that I do not exist.
[2:05:38] In other words, we first examine the rational consistency of the argument before comparing it to empirical evidence. A self-contradictory argument can be dismissed without the requirement to appeal to contradictory empirical evidence. If I tell you that you cannot trust the evidence of your senses and that language is meaningless, these can be positions consistent within themselves, but they are not consistent with my actions. If I say you cannot trust the evidence of your senses but I rely upon the trustworthiness of the evidence of your senses in order to communicate my argument then my argument contradicts its own hypothesis. If I use language to convey to you the idea that language is meaningless then my methodology contradicts my hypothesis. If language is meaningless, then I cannot use it to convey any idea to you, let alone an idea about language. If language is not meaningless, then I can use it to convey an argument to you. I just can't use it to convey that language is meaningless because then my hypothesis contradicts my methodology.
[2:06:56] Testing the hypothesis of an argument against the methodology of communicating the argument is a powerful method for rejecting irrational arguments. You cannot argue that the senses are invalid, since you must use the senses to communicate, the ears for hearing the argument, the eyes for seeing it, and so on. You cannot use logical arguments to disprove the value of logic. You cannot use empirical arguments to disprove the value of empiricism.
[2:07:32] Before embarking on the task of repudiating a particular hypothesis, it is essential to examine the arguments embedded in the hypothesis. Sophists, in particular, always want to drag you into disproving a hypothesis when, nine times out of ten, the disproof is embedded in the methodology of the way they communicate the argument. Embedded in every attempt to use the senses to communicate reason and evidence to prove an argument are a number of unshakable assumptions. Reason is infinitely preferable to unreason. Empirical evidence is infinitely preferable to conceptual hypothesis. Truth is infinitely preferable to error. Truth requires rational consistency and empirical evidence. The person communicating the argument and the person receiving it both exist independent of each other within an objective and empirical universe. The senses are valid enough to accurately transmit and receive an argument. Language is meaningful enough to accurately transmit and receive an argument.
[2:08:55] The person communicating the argument assumes that those receiving the argument have the capacity to change their minds based on reason and evidence. Rational argument is superior to physical force. This list goes on for a long time, but you get the general idea. The very act of engaging in debate reveals a packaged list of accepted assumptions and axioms that really need to be examined before everyone goes around chasing the conclusions and debating the surface arguments.
[2:09:30] One of the main problems people have with debates is that implicit assumptions are not made explicit but become horrifyingly clear over the course of a disastrous conversation.
[2:09:41] If a man wants to debate you and he openly states that he considers truth equivalent to error, reason equivalent to screaming, that he will never, ever change his mind, and if you refuse to submit to his argument, he will kick you hard in the shins, would you agree to debate him? So often, people pretend to debate when they are really seeking to dominate, justify themselves, or frustrate others.
[2:10:12] Causality and Determinism The determinist position states that the human mind is not magically exempt from the general laws of causality in the universe. If determinists really accept this position, then clearly they should not treat the human mind any differently from any other object in the universe.
[2:10:37] If you owe me ten dollars and I say, I don't care which ten dollar bill you give me, then I have no rational right to object to any one ten dollar bill. If you ask me whether I would prefer pasta or fish for dinner, and I tell you I have no preference whatsoever, does it make any sense for me to rage at you for serving me fish and throw the plate out the window?
[2:10:59] If I do such a crazy thing, then clearly I was lying to you when I said I had no preference. To go even further, and trust me, even this isn't going far enough, if your wife tells you she doesn't care whether you both go to Florida or California for vacation and you choose Florida, and then she tells you only a truly insane person would ever vacation in Florida, and she thinks you are mentally ill for even suggesting it, what would you think of her behavior? You would think that she was crazy, right? To say that she has no preference, and then to scream that you are insane for choosing one thing over the other only reveals her own instability, hypocrisy, and dangerously manipulative nature.
[2:11:49] The determinist position is that the human brain is exactly like everything else in the universe. The brain contains no special magical capacity for free will, and believing it does is akin to believing that the last domino in a stacked line chooses to fall over when it is bumped by the previous falling domino. Very well. Let us take determinists at their word. The human brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, and therefore should be treated no differently from anything else. The human brain has no free will, just like a television, a blade of grass, a cloud, a clock, or a water tower. A sports fanatic may very well encourage his team by yelling at the television, but he does not believe that his team is able to hear him and change their behavior based on his ranting. A gambler may cheer for a lucky roll, but he does not think his cheering encourages the dice to do what he wants.
[2:12:54] People will vent at inanimate objects a golfer may throw his club in frustration, but we recognize this as immaturity. When questioned, the angry golfer does not argue that his club has grown a brain and free will and works viciously to thwart his desire for a good swing. It is an irrational eccentricity to treat inanimate objects as if they have a human brain. When people do, we do not believe their tantrums are philosophically sound, and neither do they, we hope, after they calm down.
[2:13:30] If a man stabs a woman, we do not blame the knife for dragging the poor man's hand towards her flesh. We do not blame his hand. We do not blame his arm. We blame his consciousness, if we blame anything at all.
[2:13:47] This is, then, the central question for those who hold the determinist position. If human consciousness is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, then why do you treat human consciousness so differently? This is really the heart of the matter. A determinist believes that the human mind has no more free will than a television set, but a determinist would look at someone arguing with the television set and say, that person is crazy. In the Shakespearean drama King Lear, the mad king rages at a storm. This is considered a sign of insanity. But why? The weather is a highly complex system whose behavior can only be predicted in the short term and in general. Even determinists admit that a group of human beings is a highly complex system and human behavior can only be predicted in the short term and in general, as in the basic economic premise that human beings respond to incentives. Raging at a man who has done you great evil is not insane. Raging at a storm clearly is. But for a determinist, what is the difference?
[2:15:07] The man has no more free will than the storm. So raging at the man is exactly the same as raging at the storm.
[2:15:17] If you are injured by the side of the road, you may choose to flag down a passing motorist in the hope of getting help. If a tumbleweed is blowing down the road, would any sane person try to flag it down to beg for help?
[2:15:33] If you park your car at the bottom of a hill, go for a hike, and then return to see a large boulder has fallen on your car, you will no doubt be upset, but you will scarcely drag the boulder to court and demand it pay reparations for damaging your car. However, if someone runs up to you and says that they saw a man pushing the boulder down the hill, then you have a very different situation. If you can find that man, you can get angry at him and demand that he pay reparations for damaging your car. Why? What's the difference? Suppose that a hard rain had loosened the foundations keeping the boulder in place, causing it to roll down the hill and crush your car. These are mere acts of physical determinism. No choices are involved. No free will is involved. It is just matter and objects obeying inevitable physical laws. However, if it turns out that a man purposefully dislodged the boulder that ended up rolling down the hill and crushing your car, is it really that hard to understand that we have an entirely different.
[2:16:48] Situation? If it turns out that the man who dislodged the boulder has a grudge against you and pushed it on purpose to crush your car, perhaps with the hope that you were inside it, then it is not even an accidental occurrence. When I was a little boy, I liked throwing rocks. Once, when I was walking with my mother by the side of the road, I threw a rock in the air, and it ended up landing on the expensive hood of some man's sports car, leaving a white spider web of divots. I was very young, so the man mostly got angry at my mother for letting me engage in such risky behavior. The first situation is where the rock dislodges on its own, in which case the crushing of your car is no one's fault, except possibly yours for parking in a place where that could happen. In the second case, a man dislodges a rock just for fun, crushing your car by accident. He acts carelessly and dangerously and therefore is responsible for the car being crushed, but not responsible for willfully crushing your car. A reasonably just solution would be to have him pay for repairs, but not to put him in jail for trying to cause you harm.
[2:18:05] In the third case, the man dislodges a rock with the intention of crushing your car. He is then responsible for willfully damaging the car, and therefore he should face sanctions over and above merely paying to have it repaired. If the man's actions were careless, the financial consequences of his carelessness should teach him to be more careful. If the man's actions were malevolent, then mere financial consequences would not likely be enough to prevent him from trying to hurt you in the future, which is why further punishments are needed to keep you and society safe. Thus we have accident, carelessness, or malevolence. If you are a determinist, these different situations are exactly the same, because there is no difference between a boulder and a human being. The boulder has no free will, and the human being has no free will either. If one boulder crashed into another boulder and the second boulder crashed into my car, we would not hold the first boulder responsible because it was just obeying the blind laws of physics. Why would it be any different if you are a determinist with a man?
[2:19:21] A man is just a boulder, no different at all.
[2:19:27] If from the bottom of the hill you look up and see a man pushing at a boulder that could fall on your car, you would surely call out for him to stop. If he has already dislodged the boulder, do you think you would call out for the boulder itself to stop in its tracks?
[2:19:46] If you are a parent and you see your child running too fast down a hill, you will most likely call out for your child to slow down. If you are a parent and you see a boulder rolling downhill, does it make any sense to call out for the boulder to slow down?
[2:20:04] If you are a determinist, you need to explain why you call out to the child, but not to the boulder, since both are identical in your worldview. The child has no free will, and the boulder has no free will. Determinists reply to this objection by saying that the child has an input and can change his behavior based on external stimuli, such as a parent calling out for the child to slow down. But that's the point, isn't it? The child can change his behavior.
[2:20:44] The determinist would reply that the child can change his behavior just as a dog can change its behavior and come running towards you if you call its name. Are we saying that the dog also has free will and that its free will is equivalent to that of a human being? Furthermore, you could program a robot to respond to your voice commands and the robot would change its behavior based upon what you say. Are we then saying that the robot has free will? Although this may seem like a compelling argument, it actually works against the determinist position. Referring to a mechanical device such as a robot in lieu of a person does not solve the problem of human consciousness and choice, because it takes a human being to create a robot. It's like saying, I have superhero hearing because I can hear someone talking from thousands of miles away when all I have done is use a phone. Saying a robot is like a human being is ridiculous because a robot is created and programmed by human beings. Do we often mistake a radio for a person or an mp3 for the band? If a friend of yours stands at the bottom of a canyon and calls back every word that you shout down, is he exactly the same as an echo?
[2:22:09] If a robot is like a human being, then the argument is that entities that can respond to spoken commands must have been created by an external intelligence. Do determinists really want to make the case for God in that manner? You cannot have a robot without an external non-robot living intelligence that created it. Thus, by this logic, you cannot have a human being without an external non-human living intelligence that created it.
[2:22:38] If determinists want to compare humans to robots, they subsequently create a logical avenue proving the existence of God. Once God's existence is established, or at least allowed, then determinism becomes falsified because you have a consciousness in the form of God that is not bound by any known physical laws or properties. Once you allow for the existence of consciousness without a material basis, then you open up the possibility of the soul. This disproves determinism because then choice can be made immaterially, unbound by any material constraints.
[2:23:17] In this scenario, if every material action is triggered by a prior material action, the only chance to escape this inevitable causality must be for an immaterial cause to intervene. If reality unfolds like dominoes falling against each other, then the only chance for choice must be something that is not a domino, not material, such as the soul. If God exists, then immaterial consciousness exists. Since determinism is bound only by the material, immaterial consciousness escapes the inevitabilities of determinism.
[2:23:57] No. Determinism cannot be proved with reference to anything other than human consciousness. If free will is valid, then a man can choose to create a robot.
[2:24:08] The deterministic nature of the robot tells you nothing about the choices of the man. I can choose to throw a rock off a cliff. The fact that the rock's path is then determined tells you nothing about whether my brain is determined. Referencing the effects of free will to disprove free will is like using a statue's shadow to disprove a statue.
[2:24:32] I would sooner say that an elevator allows a man to defy the laws of gravity than I would say the existence of a robot disproves free will. Regarding the dog example, yes, a dog can come when you call him, but that does not support the determinist position. A dog's brain is more complex than a worm's brain, and we can expect a dog to come when we call him but not a worm. We can train a dog, but not a worm. Thus, this argument supports the concept of free will, since a more advanced and complex brain is used as an example rather than a simpler and less complex brain. The capacities of a dog are invoked, but not the capacities of a worm. It's not so much that dogs come when you call them, but rather that human beings recognize that dogs have a sophisticated enough brain to be trained to come when you call them. No one tries to train a boulder to come when you call it, for obvious reasons. Since a more complex brain is required for the argument against free will, it supports the argument for free will, since the human brain is the most complex of all.
[2:25:51] Arguments, and uniqueness. Ask yourself this. Can you imagine debating with any known entity other than a human being? I don't debate with the television because the television has no free will and will not change. I understand when the behavior of an entity is predetermined and so do not pretend that I can have any effect on its behavior. I do not debate with clouds, watches, robots, or heating ducts. I only debate human beings, and only some human beings to be more precise.
[2:26:34] Because I deal with human beings as the only entities I can debate with, I cannot then put them in the same category of every other conceivable entity that I will not debate with. If I consider it sane to debate with a human being, but consider it insane to debate with a television, as surely it is, then it would be insane for me to treat these two entities as the same. It is hard to think of any categories as singular and oppositional as the difference between entities you are willing to debate with and entities it would be insane to pretend to debate with. Try it. Try and think of a category that small and that oppositional to everything not in that category. It is virtually impossible.
[2:27:22] Determinism, and uncertainty. You do not have to be able to explain a phenomenon in order to accept it. You also do not have to be able to explain a phenomenon in order to reject irrational pretend explanations of it. I do not have to be able to explain the origins of the universe in order to accept that the universe exists. I do not know the incontrovertible facts about the origins of the universe, but I reject that it was created by a giant space turtle, that it was both created and destroyed simultaneously, or that it expanded and contracted at the same time, and so on. A baseball pitcher does not need to know the detailed equations of air resistance to be able to throw a ball, nor to understand that he cannot throw a ball in opposite directions at the same time.
[2:28:19] Determinists will often demand that those who accept free will provide an incontrovertible explanation of the origin and process of free will. This is a silly form of intellectual baiting, similar to theists who demand that atheists provide an incontrovertible explanation of the origin and process of the universe, or supply the details of every conceivable stage of evolution. I cannot explain free will. I cannot describe and provide incontrovertible explanations of its origins and processes, but so what?
[2:28:52] Before Darwin, no one had any idea how complex life came about. Does that mean that they had no right to believe in horses or people or the value of selective breeding? Because I cannot accurately describe the development and evolution of my eyes, does that mean I cannot open them and see?
[2:29:11] All knowledge is preceded by ignorance. That is the entire point of knowledge. Knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know but could know is the entire progress of human thought. Admitting you don't know something is not a confession of impotence, but of possibility. The fact that we don't yet know all the biological underpinnings of free gives us something to explore, to examine, a goal to pursue. It is not a bad thing. It is a wonderful thing. It is not a failing. It is an opportunity.
[2:29:48] Demanding that we not accept or believe in something before we can explain everything about it is truly putting the cart before the horse. I must believe in a stable phenomenon before I can examine its underlying causes, which is one reason why I am interested in the physics of objective reality and not in the physics of nightly dreaming. I must believe that something exists before I will set aside time to find and examine it. I don't believe in ghosts, so I don't spend any time trying to find and examine them. I don't believe in telepathy, so I don't check out my prowess in the field.
[2:30:25] I'm not trying to find investors to fund a dragon zoo either, since that involves fiat currency, which is even less real than fire-breathing lizards. I must believe in something before I invest my scarce and precious resources to investigate it. I have written this book based on the belief that I can achieve truth. You are reading it because you believe Philosophy has value, and you are willing to hear original proofs for complex positions.
[2:30:54] Demanding that I be able to prove everything about free will before I can accept free will is ridiculous. If ultimate proof were required for any acceptance, then no patient hierarchy of knowledge building would be possible. No one could have any theories on physics before atoms were discovered, and all current theories would be invalid and useless because no unified field theory has yet been developed. However, the stability and predictability of matter and energy were accepted long before atoms were discovered, and such stability is accepted by lower and less complex life forms as well, down to and including jellyfish.
[2:31:35] Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we can't know some things. It is a cheap and silly way to tell people to shut up. And it is fundamentally anti-scientific in nature.
[2:31:51] What is free will? The definition of free will is challenging and complicated because it must be something unique to the human mind. Therefore, it cannot be anything as simple and tautological as choice. One unique capability of the human mind is to compare proposed actions to abstract standards. A beaver will build a dam, but a beaver does not use a blueprint to design the dam. A bird will fly, but a bird does not plot out a flight course on a map ahead of time.
[2:32:29] One defining aspect of human consciousness is our capacity for morality, which is basically comparing proposed actions to ideal standards. When we think of the big four evil actions, theft, rape, assault, and murder, moral responsibility requires that we have the capacity to compare proposed actions to abstract standards. If we want to steal something, we can compare our action to a standard such as stealing is wrong. Please understand that this is not a proof of morality, which will come later in this book, but an example of commonly accepted moral reasoning. Free will does not mean that we can do anything we want that would be omnipotence we are not free to fly unaided or jump to mars but it does mean that we have the capacity to compare our proposed actions to abstract standards ideal standards generally some of these ideal standards are pure abstractions platonic almost such as a universal respect for persons and property, Others are more personal, reciprocal, and empathetic. How would you like it if someone stole from you?
[2:33:45] Children, who don't want to eat their dinner, are sometimes informed of the existence of starving children in the third world. Challenges, sometimes referred to as first-world problems, are generally marked as being silly and unimportant relative to the survival challenges of living in a poverty-stricken landscape. We may refrain from stealing because we accept that stealing is universally wrong, or we may refrain from stealing because we empathize with the upset and anger that our potential victim would doubtless experience. We also may refrain from stealing because we fear punishment by an all-knowing and all-seeing God, but such cause and effect has little place in a book on philosophy. I refer you to any number of theological works for more information on this perspective. The comparison of potential actions to abstract rules falls into the category of direct moralizing. The comparison of such actions to negative emotions falls into the category of empathy or indirect moralizing. In the first case, the principle is that stealing is wrong. In the second, it is that actions that cause negative emotions are wrong, and stealing just happens to be one of those.
[2:35:07] I fully understand that the phrase, stealing is wrong, is not satisfying philosophically, and I will strive to satisfy you philosophically later in the book. I also understand that the supposed principle called, don't make people feel bad, is even less satisfying for a variety of reasons we will get into later.
[2:35:30] However, we certainly must accept that human beings have the capacity to develop universal abstractions. Abstractions that have a positive obligation. If you want to learn truths about the physical world, you need to use the scientific method. If you want to build a bridge that stands up efficiently, you need to use principles of engineering. If you want to sell medicine that makes people better, you need to use the principle of medical research, in particular the double-blind experiment, to stave off the inevitable possibility of mistaking the placebo effect and other false positives for an imaginary cure.
[2:36:10] Given that we have the capacity to develop universal abstractions with positive obligations, abstractions that we need to use to objectively achieve a particular end, we must also accept that we have the capacity to compare our proposed actions to those universal abstractions. When we ask a child to accept that two and two make four we are not asking the child to believe this truth for any particular instance but rather for all instances of that equation, it's not just that these two coconuts and two coconuts make four coconuts but rather that two and two of anything make four when we ask the child to write the number four on an answer sheet, we are asking the child to compare his proposed action, writing a number, with the ideal standard of writing the correct number.
[2:37:05] With regards to criminal guilt, we generally think of punishing a man because he knows what he was doing at the time was wrong. If a man is insane, has a brain disease, or is mentally retarded to the point that he does not have the capacity to know the immorality of his actions, then we may decide to confine him, not as a moral punishment, but rather just to keep everyone else safe. We may decide to put down a dog that keeps biting people, not as a moral punishment, and certainly not as any kind of ethical instruction to other dogs, but rather just to keep people from being bitten. Thus, we do not judge a man morally if we decide that he is unable to morally judge his own actions.
[2:37:49] In other words, if he is unable to compare his contemplated actions to an ideal moral standard, then we do not judge him to be in possession of free will. We do not expect a rabid dog to understand that the initiation of the use of force is immoral, And so we do not call such dogs evil for biting. A raccoon that steals her food is not dragged off to court and tried as a thief. If we do not have the capacity to compare our own potential actions to some idealized standard, then we can never be held morally responsible for failing to conform to that standard.
[2:38:30] Imagine that a thief steals a wallet and then has that wallet stolen from him in turn the thief cries out in frustration at the violation of his property rights, we can clearly see the hypocrisy here the thief violates his original victim's property rights and then in turn has his own rights violated as another thief takes off with the stolen property, Can we imagine applying this judgment of hypocrisy to any other animal in the world?
[2:39:01] If a squirrel steals a nut from another squirrel and in turn is stolen from, would we call the first squirrel a hypocrite for chasing the second thief? Of course not! Because we recognize that the squirrel does not have the capacity to compare a potential theft to the concept of universal property rights.
[2:39:24] We were all asked when we were children, if we hit another child, how would you like it if another child hit you? The endless repetition of this empathy programming, along with other factors, helped us develop a sense of responsibility for the feelings of others as we grew up. The golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is a reflection of this basic understanding. As human adults, we are generally expected to recognize that other human beings have feelings and preferences, just as we do, which need to be taken into account when considering potential actions.
[2:40:03] Another mantra we hear as children is, you should have known better. In this context, better means having higher standards of behavior. When you were a child, you doubtless attempted to avoid punishment for bad behavior by saying that your friends told you to do something. At which point, adults doubtless asked whether you would jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or Toronto CN Tower if your friends told you to do that as well. Of course you wouldn't, which means that you had the capacity to judge the value of your friends' suggestions. You were increasingly required to use your own judgment rather than blame your friends. The entire purpose of civilizing children is to get them to compare their proposed actions to ideal standards. In a philosophical society, this means reason and evidence. In Christian societies, the ideal standard is the Ten Commandments combined with, what would Jesus do?
[2:41:11] Morality itself is the comparison of proposed actions to ideal standards. Criminal judgment is the comparison of past actions to ideal standards. In other words, criminal judgment occurs when there has been a failure of moral judgment, which manifested in illegal action. A baby who urinates on you has no capacity to compare his urination options to ideal standards. The average teenager who urinates on you is committing an egregious action.
[2:41:48] When we think of a speeder on a highway, we condemn that person, we assume. The driver has the capacity to compare his current speed with the ideal standard, the speed limit, and has chosen to exceed it. If the speeder turns out to be drunk, we recognize that he is making decisions with diminished capacity. But this does not, of course, let him off the hook.
[2:42:10] The ideal standard in this situation is not make good decisions while you drive drunk, but rather do not drive while you are drunk. It is a simple fact that people make poor decisions when drunk, not to mention having slower reaction times. Every driver knows this, so he is responsible for the decision of getting drunk and then driving, but not for making bad decisions while driving drunk. If a man ties a blindfold over his eyes while he is driving, we do not blame him for hitting a garden gnome, since he cannot see. Instead, we blame him for tying the blindfold over his eyes. The ideal standard here is not don't hit garden gnomes, but rather do not drive if you cannot see.
[2:42:56] Similarly, if a driver hit a garden gnome because his brakes failed, and it turns out he had not maintained his brakes, we blame him not because his brakes failed, but because he chose to avoid necessary maintenance. On the other hand, if his car was well-maintained but someone sabotaged his brakes, then, of course, the person who tinkered with his car is to blame.
[2:43:22] This can get quite complicated. If you set events in motion that produce a particular outcome, even if you do not anticipate and do not want that outcome, you can still be responsible. A fascinating example arises out of common law, wherein if a robber runs into a store and the cashier shoots at him to prevent the robbery and accidentally hits and kills another customer, it is the robber who is charged with murder, not the cashier. The robber set the events in motion that resulted in the death of the customer. Although the robber doubtless did not want the customer to die, in this case, the ideal standard is don't rob, one reason being that highly random and uncertain events may be set in motion.
[2:44:09] Another example is a simple barroom brawl that results in one man dying because he falls and hits his head on the edge of the bar. The man brawling with him probably did not want to kill him, but is still responsible for the death. He would be charged with a lesser offense than first-degree murder, but the charge would be more than simple assault. Everyone who gets into a bar recognizes that entirely unanticipated and even unwanted injuries can occur, just as every robber understands the same thing. Violence is almost always a form of Russian roulette. No matter where we look in the realm of ethics or free will, we understand that there is ideal behavior, and someone who has knowledge of that behavior can choose to behave in non-conforming ways. If I go to a foreign country where I do not understand the customs, I can be forgiven for acting in ways that may otherwise be considered offensive because I am not aware of the ideal standards, and therefore I am not consciously deviating from them.
[2:45:18] If I fail to study for a test, I am deviating from an ideal standard.
[2:45:22] If I exercise or train to the point of injury, then I am deviating from an ideal standard. If I am attracted to an available woman and I do not ask her out, I am deviating from an ideal standard of courage. If I ask her out every day for a year, I am also deviating from the ideal standard of consideration. Sometimes the ideal standard is an absolute, thou shalt not kill. Sometimes the ideal standard is more relative, like the Aristotelian mean. Too much courage is foolhardiness, too little courage is cowardice. Where the ideal standard is an absolute, there we generally find morality. Where the ideal standard is relative, there we generally find aesthetics, culture, politeness, or other forms of social standards enforced by disapproval and ostracism rather than through retaliatory force. You can shoot someone who is attacking you. You cannot shoot someone for being rude.
[2:46:28] There are entities that conform to ideal standards, but which do not have a choice. Computers fall into this category. I can program a robot to kill people, Terminator style, and that robot will conform to the ideal standards of my programming, but it has no choice. I could throw a random algorithm in the air so that 10% of the time the killer robot will show mercy and let its victim live, but we would not assume I had given the robot any free will. Randomness is not the same as choice.
[2:46:59] If we understand this definition of free will, our human capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, then the debate between determinism and choice becomes much easier to resolve. With this definition in hand, we can clearly see that when a determinist tries to argue you out of your free will position, the determinist is asking you to compare your position that free will is true to an ideal standard called determinism is true. However, by asking the supporter of free will to compare the contents of his mind to an ideal standard, the determinist is already supporting the free will position. If a man attempts to correct a woman's position, he is asking her to compare the contents of her mind to the ideal standard of truth. And if the contents of her mind do not conform to the ideal standard of truth, then she should discard them and accept the truth.
[2:48:04] Such a man accepts free will because he accepts that human beings have the capacity to compare the contents of their mind to the ideal standard of truth. And free will is defined as our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards. I realize that I may be seen to have switched the definition a little bit from comparing his proposed actions to an ideal standard to comparing the contents of his mind to an ideal standard, but the two are really one and the same. The contents of the mind can only be discerned through actions such as speaking or writing.
[2:48:45] Change your mind, change your behavior.
[2:48:50] If I were able to convince you that the world is a sphere and not flat, I would attempt to do so only because I would expect you to no longer speak about supporting the flat earth model and instead support that the world is in fact a sphere. If you continued to support the flat earth hypothesis, I would be confused and annoyed. it, I would say, but you admitted that the world was a sphere. If you replied, yes, the world is a sphere, I accept and admit that, but I'm still going to publicly talk about the world being flat, well, that wouldn't make much sense, would it? Changing your mind without changing your behavior makes no sense at all. It might happen for occasional reasons. Think of priests who lose their faith but continue in their occupation, but overall, it is both strange and rare for such contradictions between thought and action to manifest. In general, a conflict between belief and behavior only occurs when generally selfish incentives exist, a desire to continue drawing a salary, maintain a marriage, or avoid hostility, or even attack from an ideological or religious group, for example. Most of us would have sympathy for a person keeping secret thoughts separate from public actions out of fear of consequences, but that is not what I'm talking about.
[2:50:18] We strive to change people's minds because we hope to alter their future actions. And conversations and debates and arguments are all potential future actions.
[2:50:33] Determinism. What changes?
[2:50:38] Imagine that I used to be deeply religious. I went to church, prayed, baptized my children, donated 10% of my income to the church, volunteered, did charity and missionary work, all in the name of my faith. Now imagine that one day I tell you I have become an atheist, what would you expect in terms of my behavior? Surely you would expect me to stop going to church, stop praying, stop donating to the church, and so on.
[2:51:13] What if I told you I was an atheist, but nothing about my behavior was going to change? I was going to continue attending church, praying, and so on. Surely you would be confused about my change of mind. Wouldn't it be strange if I said I no longer believed in God, but I continued exactly the same behavior as when I did believe in God? Let us go one step further in terms of strangeness. Imagine that when I was religious, I spent countless hours converting other people to my religion. Surely you would expect this behavior to change when I claimed to have lost my faith and become an atheist. It's one thing to pursue something you don't believe in personally. It's quite another to pour enormous energies into convincing other people of something you no longer believe in.
[2:52:10] However bizarre this behavior may appear, however, incomprehensible and contradictory it is, it still falls far short of the irrationality of the determinist. If I have a mental illness and believe that the President of the United States is speaking directly to me through my television set and I spend an enormous amount of time talking back to him, engaging in imaginary conversations and debates, all with the deluded belief that I am profoundly altering public policy in America, surely this is something I should be cured of, not indulged in. So, what exactly do I need to be cured of? What exactly is the nature of my delusion? Well, I am confusing an inanimate object, a television, with a conscious human being. If I were actually teleconferencing with the President of the United States, and we were having actual conversations, this would not be a delusion to be cured, but perhaps a position of influence to be envied. However, if, in reality, I am merely yelling at a television, then clearly I need to be disabused of the fantasy that I am having a conversation, since the television is a mere mechanical object that possesses no free will of its own.
[2:53:37] Are you beginning to see the problem? The reason I should stop debating with my television is that my television does not possess free will. We can imagine a similar and more understandable situation where you think you are debating a real live person on the other side of an internet chat program when it turns out the program is an automatic bot response system.
[2:54:08] Decades ago, there was a little program for primitive computers called ELISA that mimicked the neutral passive responses of a stereotypical psychiatrist. If you poured your heart out to this program and it prompted you to be more open, speak more honestly, and say more, it would be easy to imagine the computer had developed curiosity and empathy.
[2:54:33] If you think you are talking to a person and it turns out you are talking to a robot, you would probably give up on the conversation since you would recognize that the robot does not possess free will. If I stop believing in ghosts, it makes sense for me to stop ghost hunting. If I say that I have switched from being a Democrat to a Republican, but I continue to vote Democrat and convert other people to Democrat positions, what does that mean? I'm a staunch empiricist, which means I judge people not by their words, but by their deeds. As the old biblical saying goes, by their deeds shall you know them. I care what people say, but I really care what they do, since the truth of the mind is found in actions, not words. If someone claims to have learned better, but continues to do worse, I know they have not, in fact, learned better. As Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do.
[2:55:39] If I am hiking through a thick forest with someone and she claims she wants to get to a certain distant destination and knows how to get there but refuses to check our direction with a map, a compass, or a GPS, I know that she is far more interested in being right than going in the right direction. We are all generally raised with the personal responsibility of free will. As a child, if I took another child's toy, I was told to give it back, and I learned the virtue of sharing or respecting other people's property. If I took another child's toy, no one ever said about me well little Stef is just a machine he has no free will he's just doing what he does and there's no point blaming him any more than there is any point blaming a cloud for raining on you.
[2:56:32] If a boy deliberately drives a remote-controlled toy car into a dozing cat, we blame the boy, not the toy. But for a determinist, there is no difference between the two. Does the determinist refrain from assigning any responsibility to the boy? Somehow, I doubt it. We are all raised embedded in the notion of free will, personal responsibility, and ethics. In this sense, we are all raised religious. At some point, determinists discard the idea of free will, just as some religious people discard the idea of God. My eternal question to determinists is, now that you have given up on the idea of free will, what changes? What does change? I have had countless public debates with determinists, and have never once received a straight answer. Determinists call into my philosophy show aiming to change my mind about free will. They bring arguments and evidence and empiricism and science to bear on the question in the hopes that I will accept their perspective and change my mind. They want me to use my power to change my mind to give up on the idea that I can change my mind.
[2:57:53] Once I accept that an entity does not have free will a robot, for instance, then I no longer invest time and energy debating with that entity.
[2:58:06] In video games, there are often pre-programmed enemies that attack you. I have never heard of any sane individual trying to reason these computerized avatars into pacifism or trying to get the two-dimensional robots to accept the non-aggression principle and learn how to debate rather than fire giant rockets at their digital opponent's head. Computer enemies in a video game have no free will of their own, so no one tries to reason with them. In massive combat games, no one ever offers up treaty conditions to the computerized opponent, assuming this option is not programmed into the game somehow, because the computer opponent is just following its predetermined script.
[2:58:49] To put it another way, imagine that you woke up tomorrow with certain proof that everyone around you was a pre-programmed robot with no free will of their own. Surely this would be a shattering experience and would change your behavior in countless fundamental ways. Would you bother continuing to follow politics if you knew you could have absolutely no impact upon the outcome? Do you currently campaign to change the outcome of past elections? Furthermore, imagine if you woke up the day after tomorrow with certain proof that you yourself were also a pre-programmed robot with no free will of your own. Would you give up trying to debate the other robots? Would this knowledge change your behavior in any way?
[2:59:40] It seems to me impossible to imagine that such a shattering revelation would have no impact on how you felt, what you thought, or what you did. In the science fiction movie The Matrix, one character decides he wishes to return to the artificial delusions created by the master robots, but the only way he can do that is by erasing his knowledge, that his prior life was in fact a delusion. A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original shape. And morally and philosophically speaking, what is more important than the question of free will versus determinism?
[3:00:21] If I accept certain absolutes, they must change my behavior. That is how we know I accept them. If I think I can fly unaided, I am cured when I no longer try to fly unaided. As long as I continue the attempts, I am not cured no matter what I say. If I truly accept the idea that everyone, myself included, is just a robot with no capacity for choice, free will, morality, preferring any particular state over any other state, or the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, then I will stop trying to change people's minds. I must stop debating people. I must stop trying to improve the world. I must stop pretending to prefer truth over falsehood, and they must give up on the ideas of morality, personal responsibility, or any preferred state such as freedom over any other state such as tyranny.
[3:01:14] I must also give up on the idea of punishment. If a man uses a phone to call in a bomb threat, we don't put the phone in jail because the phone has no free will. If the man also has no free will, then it makes about as much sense to throw him in jail as it does to throw the phone in jail. Of course, determinists respond that human beings receive inputs and you can change their behavior to which I say, sure. That's what I believe as well, since I accept free will. This is the boringly repetitive pattern of debating with determinists. You point out the logical consequences of their beliefs, and they deny those logical consequences. I say the logical consequence of accepting determinism is refraining from debating people. They say they can be determinists and still debate people. I say the logical consequence of accepting determinism is giving up on the idea of morality. They say they can be determinists and still believe in morality. I say the logical consequence of accepting determinism is giving up on the idea of truth. They say they can be determinists and still believe in truth. In other words, they accept all of the consequentialist results of accepting free will while calling themselves determinists. This is quite literally insane. Here is the equivalent.
[3:02:41] If you no longer believe in God, it doesn't make any sense to continue going to church. Oh no, I can stop believing in God, and it still makes perfect sense to go to church. If you no longer believe in God, you no longer believe in heaven. Oh no, I can stop believing in God, but I can still totally believe in heaven. Ditto for praying, trying to convert other people to your faith, putting your trust in a higher power. All these and more should logically be eliminated in your mind, along with your belief in God. But determinists wish to keep all the fruits of free will while denying free will. Once you accept that the television set is not the president, it makes no sense to continue pretending to have a conversation with the television. Oh no, I totally accept that it's just a television set, but that in no way prevents me from having a conversation with the president. What can one do in these situations? Walk away. Fixing that mess is a job for mental health professionals, not philosophers.
[3:03:52] Determinism and Emergent Properties Reducing objects to their mere material properties is truly a reduction to absurdity. Wood is partly composed of carbon atoms, and tables are made of wood. Thus, because I cannot put my plate on a carbon atom, I cannot put my plate on a table either. Atoms are mostly space, therefore I can walk through a wall. Carbon is the basis of life. However, no carbon atom can be alive. Therefore, there is no such thing as life. Carbon atoms are found in dead things and inert things, as well as living things. Therefore, there is no difference between dead things, inert things, and living things. No individual player can win against a professional soccer team. Therefore, 11 individual players can never win against a professional soccer team. Metal cannot float, therefore a ship made of metal cannot float. You get the idea.
[3:04:57] Life is an emergent property of matter. If you get enough particular kinds of matter together with the right configuration of energy, you get life. A pregnant woman is a wonderful mechanism for converting celery into consciousness. Atoms in a piece of celery end up among the atoms of a growing brain Where, in conjunction with a wide variety of other factors, they achieve consciousness, No individual celery atom gains consciousness, of course And no celery is conscious But through the process of a woman's pregnancy Each atom in the food she consumes contributes to consciousness Celery is not human, but it can contribute to and become part of a human being. No individual atom is alive, yet life exists. No individual atom or cell is conscious, yet consciousness exists. No life exists in the absence of atoms, yet no individual atom is alive. No consciousness exists in the absence of atoms, yet no individual atom is conscious.
[3:06:16] Remove one individual atom from a life form, and it continues to live. Remove one individual atom from a brain consciousness continues. Remove enough, up to some biochemical tipping point, and both life and consciousness cease to be. Thus life is an emergent property None of its individual components possess it Yet in combination life comes into being, Consciousness is also an emergent property None of its individual components possess it Yet in their combination we start to think, Life and consciousness are shared by a wide variety of other creatures, but free will is a uniquely human phenomenon. No other organism that we know of can consciously compare proposed actions to ideal abstract standards.
[3:07:16] Accepting that life and consciousness are emergent properties of matter and energy, but denying free will on the basis of physics is a ridiculously self-contradictory position. No carbon atom can comprehend science, yet human beings can. Using a discipline that is itself an emergent property to deny the existence of an emergent property such as free will is beyond foolish. No carbon atom can walk, eat, reproduce, or die, yet carbon-based life forms exhibit all these characteristics. No individual atom can see, but our eyes could see. No individual atom can get cancer, but we certainly can. Reducing the human mind to mere empty matter and energy denies the reality of the very emergent properties that give us the capacity to commit such a logical fallacy. To make an error, we must be alive and conscious. To deny emergent properties is to deny the very capacities that give rise to our ability to get arguments so spectacularly wrong.
[3:08:25] Please understand that this is not definitive proof of free will. However, it is a strong repudiation of the idea that we can judge consciousness on the basis of its merely material components. While it is true that all atoms are subject to the iron laws of physics, this does not tell us anything about their capacities under emergent properties. Carbon atoms cannot initiate their own movement, yet when aggregated as an animal, they can.
[3:08:57] If you prefer a more physical example, no individual atom can arrest the direction of light. However, if you get enough atoms together and compress them enough to form a black hole, then light cannot escape such a gravity well. Or, no individual atom gives off light, yet the sun, which is composed of atoms, gives off light. Reducing the complexities of consciousness, life, and free will to mere empty materialism, is ridiculous and an intellectual embarrassment, to be perfectly frank. To see how ridiculous the position is, all you need to do is remember this basic fact. No individual atom can possess a theory of determinism, therefore no theory of determinism exists.
[3:09:48] If you wish to argue against the proposition that free will can be an emergent property of consciousness, specifically human consciousness, you are more than welcome to do that, but then you need to explain why free will is different from life or consciousness itself. Both life and consciousness are emergent properties of matter, so you already accept that new properties emerge from aggregations. You cannot then draw some imaginary line in the sand and say, well, life and consciousness are emergent properties that possess characteristics that none of their individual components possess, but free will must be judged outside the bounds of emergent properties and can never be justified because no individual atom in the human mind possesses free will. You cannot have it both ways. If you accept the emergent properties of life and consciousness, you cannot then arbitrarily deny the emergent property of free will.
[3:10:47] A Hypothesis of Determinism all this is elementary logic not particularly complicated in any way so why is the deterministic position so prevalent it would be silly to watch a biologist denying the existence of life or a psychologist denying the existence of consciousness or a physicist denying the existence of matter and energy so why do so many determinists try to convince others that changing minds is impossible.
[3:11:17] Many studies show that human consciousness sometimes engages in what is called ex-post-facto reasoning, justifying prior decisions after the fact, using reasons unconnected with the decision. Brain scans can sometimes detect a decision in the mind before the subject becomes consciously aware of having made a decision. The subject later creates reasons for that decision. For more information on this, as well as detailed sources, please check out my presentation, The Death of Reason, available on YouTube. All this is held up triumphantly by the determinants who say, Aha! People only think they make a choice, therefore free will is a delusion. It certainly is true that people can nimbly navigate through challenging conceptual mazes using their instincts. Think of a prisoner being interrogated by the police, or a family member being confronted about some past immorality. The levels of obfuscation and misdirection can be truly powerful in such situations.
[3:12:23] These manipulative instincts arise from deep within the brain and are not often explainable by the conscious mind. If you have ever watched a really good jazz quartet, you've witnessed when they decide to improvise. No individual musician knows exactly what note they are going to play next yet the music all works together beautifully.
[3:12:49] If you know how to fluently read a second language that you learned as an adult and you glance at some text in that language you automatically or instinctually comprehend what you are reading, would the determinist then say that you have no choice regarding your comprehension Of course you do, because you made a choice to learn to read that second language. While it is true that it is hard to look at the text of a language you know and not understand it, you might say impossible, this is not where free will resides. If I am playing a top-seeded tennis player, I do not have the capacity to will a victory, since his skill and training vastly exceeds my own.
[3:13:40] However, if I have been training hard for 15 years, then my will might come into play. If I decide to grit my teeth and push through some exhaustion. Do you see? I don't have the choice to swim to shore if I don't know how to swim. I don't have the choice to sing Mozart's Requiem if I have never studied the music or I lack the voice. Sure, it is true that some people lack choices in life. But that is often, or at least sometimes, due to their prior choices. If I have practiced running for many years, I may have the choice to outrun a fast mugger. If I have spent most of my time sitting on the couch, I don't have that choice. If I saved my money in the past, I have the choice to spend it in the present. If I did not, I don't.
[3:14:34] This is not to argue that prior choices provide omnipotence, but prior choices either expand or narrow our range of opportunities in the future. If I exercise regularly, I can play sports relatively easily, and that gives me more choices. However, while I am exercising, I am not able to play the cello, and therefore my choices are reduced. Some diminished choices in the present create expanded choices in the future, and indeed all choices in the present diminish other present choices or eliminate them. Some choices in the present, such as not learning the guitar, reduce choices in the future. Playing guitar.
[3:15:16] A series of choices combined with happenstance may lead you to having only one real course of action. Let us say that you are a drug addict and a dangerous criminal sees you stealing his drugs. I think it's fair to say that in such a situation your plethora of choices is somewhat reduced. Run like mad, get someplace safe, or get out of town. As you pant down the alleyway, your heart pounding, you may believe you have no free will. and in the moment it's hard to argue that you have a lot of options. However, your narrowed opportunities in the present, at least in part, result from your bad choices in the past. The choice to take drugs, the choice to keep taking drugs, the choice to steal the drugs and so on. If you jump out of a plane, you don't have the choice not to fall. Your choice to jump has reduced your other choices considerably.
[3:16:14] Pointing out that some people have few if any choices does not disprove the concept of free will any more than pointing out that some people are sick disproves the concept of health. In fact pointing out that some people have reduced choices only reinforces the concept of free will just as pointing out that some people are sick only reinforces the concept of health. We only know they are sick because we have the concept of health. Sure, some choices reduce future choices, but that does not deny free will. It actually makes our examination of our choices all the more important. Some health choices, such as smoking, also reduce future choices. This does not mean that choices do not matter, but that they are actually more important than we sometimes think.
[3:17:05] Self-knowledge versus determinism. Generally, it is not enough to disprove a common belief. We must also find a way to explain its prevalence. Determinism is not a valid position, but it certainly feels true to a great number of people, and that is something well worth examining. A famous first commandment in philosophy, often attributed to Socrates, is, Know thy self. What is meant by this, and why is it so important? We are creatures of reason and self-reflection, to some degree. But we are, more specifically and more importantly, creatures of action. If you have ever played a sport or an instrument at a very high level, you know the importance of trained instincts. To be able to think something and then achieve it virtually instantaneously. A tennis player wants to place a ball in a particular place, at a particular speed, with a particular spin, and he has mere milliseconds to achieve this. A pianist jams with a group of experts they must all think and breathe and play as one.
[3:18:28] Anyone can hit a ball with a bat or pound away noisily on a piano. The question is, how well? Becoming an expert first requires understanding that you are not an expert, and then understanding how long it takes to become an expert. The enormous difference between being ignorant and competent. Then countless hours and years of practice are required to achieve expertise. To observers, the feats that experts can achieve often seem miraculous. A golf pro digs a ball out of a sand trap and sinks the putt. Musicians nod at each other and change the entire key and beat of a song. It all seems amazing. Some feats involve achieving expertise from a neutral starting place and others involve achieving normalcy from a negative starting place a man with a healthy body may become a gold medal runner and a man with a broken body may become a regular walker both endeavors may take as much time blood sweat and tears the broken man struggles for years to get to the place that the expert runner started from.
[3:19:45] If we were raised rationally, the feats we would be able to achieve with our minds, bodies, and spirits would be beyond the comprehension of the world as it stands. However, we are generally not raised rationally. We are raised anti-rationally. So many of us are deprived of the maternal care, proximity, and comfort we deserve and desire as babies. So many of us are dumped in daycare and raised without fathers. We are frightened, bullied, and dumped down in government schools, propagandized in universities, lied to by the media, and programmed by superstition, guilt, rage, and shame. It is remarkable that we emerge as adults with the capacity to put one foot in front of the other.
[3:20:38] We have no capacity to return to our original, unharmed humanity, any more than a man who struggles for years to get out of a wheelchair can be the same as a man who was never in a wheelchair. Recognizing how broken we were, and often are, by culture, control, coercion, and circumstance is a necessary prerequisite for the beginning of wisdom. A three-year-old pounds on a xylophone and turns in pride at the music he has created and we clap perhaps too indulgently. One of the turning points in parenting is recognizing when our praise is no longer generating enthusiasm but delusion. We praise our toddler for walking because the toddler could not walk before. We clap relative to the child's lack of ability in the past, but if we continue clapping, we strip the enthusiasm for achievement in the future. What originates as a form of motivation becomes a form of paralysis.
[3:21:38] Returning to rationality is an arduous, multi-year, painful process. The benefit is that you become a friend to yourself and to the truth, but a stranger to your society. Achieving sanity reveals the insanity of your environment. it. The light of reason illuminates the madhouse around you. You are programmed, as I was programmed, to serve the needs of those who rule us. You are raised by the government to praise the government and to fear freedom. Government schools teach you that the danger in your life comes from your peers, not the school itself, even though you are generally forced to be there. If you are unjustly put in a dangerous prison. The true source of the danger is the corrupt legal system, not your fellow inmates. They are a side effect, not the first cause.
[3:22:35] By placing you in age-segregated confinement among a subset of traumatized and aggressive children, schools teach you, very quickly, that peers are dangerous and that teachers are needed to control bullying. Thus, we grow up with the perception that we must fear our peers most of all and run to authority for salvation and protection. We must fear our peers even as they grow into adults. However, it doesn't take a lot of logical analysis to ask the basic question, if the government is so good at educating children, why must we fear our peers as adults?
[3:23:15] We are constantly told by the government that we are in danger, not from the state, of course, which taxes and conscripts us, starts wars and buries us in national debts, but from our fellow citizens. Without the state, we are told we will be overrun by the insanity and evil of those around us. But the state is also somehow legitimized by the votes of the insane and evil around us. If you do not explore and understand how you have been programmed, you are little more than a machine. You have no free will of any real consequence. You remain a useful idiot, serving as an empty soldier in the baying, brain-dead army of the masses. The mob clamors for temporary free stuff at the expense of permanent freedoms and attacks anyone who suggests that real freedom and moral responsibility are infinitely better than the soft enslavement of state dependents. If you lack self-knowledge, if you lack the basic understanding of how you have been turned into a machine that serves the state into a, subspecies of tax livestock that serves politicians, then how can you claim to have any real understanding of freedom, let alone free will?
[3:24:34] If you were raised badly, then you were conditioned by your parents to serve their dysfunctional needs rather than the truth, integrity, honesty, or any of the other basic virtues in life. When you are asked to judge the ethics of those in authority, or the ethics of authoritarianism in general, you recoil from the task for fear of offending the dangerous inner alter egos implanted in your mind by your parents. You were punished for approaching the truth as a child, and so you avoid the truth as an adult, just like any trained animal, just as a puppy avoids pooping inside because it fears the rolled-up magazine. If you live your life in compliance to internal programming, to avoidance of disapproval, and in fear of the laughable crime of giving offense, then you have no real freedom at all, no capacity to make choices independent of or in opposition to your programming. You are little more than a useful robot running around in pre-programmed spirals, spewing polysyllabic nonsense designed to prop up the gallows of power. If you don't examine your programming, your programming becomes your physics, as absolute and unchangeable as the laws of material reality.
[3:25:56] This is true if you are from what is called the left, or what is called the right. This is true if you are religious or an atheist. This is true if you are a Buddhist or a Zoroastrian. If you inherit pre-printed ideologies without reference to philosophy, you have no free will to speak of. Do you think you are free because you have the right to speak and to vote? You can be consulted only because your responses are determined in advance. You are allowed to vote only because your vote is almost completely predictable. You are allowed the illusion of freedom only because you will most likely never exercise the real thing. If you live in a primitive village at the bottom of a volcano and you are told that an angry fire god lives at the top of the volcano who will destroy anyone who approaches his home and you believe this with all your heart, are you free to climb the volcano? If you believe that society will collapse without a particular government program, are you free to rationally evaluate that government program? If you believe that holding a particular moral position will ensure that you never get a date, are you really free to publicly hold that moral position?
[3:27:24] If you believe that the poor will starve and the sick will die without government, health care and welfare, are you really free to examine free market solutions to charity and health care? If you believe that only evil people believe X, are you free to believe X? Are you free to even dispassionately examine and evaluate X?
[3:27:51] If you are told that it is healthy and right for an abused woman to leave her boyfriend, do you think that is a reasonable and good position? If you are told that it is healthy and right for the adult victim of child abuse to leave his abusive parent, do you think that is a reasonable and good position? If you are told that you live in a rape culture where rape is minimized or denied, and then later you are told that the FBI did not even classify rape against men as a crime until 2012, what do you say? Are you beginning to see just how fenced in you really are?
[3:28:33] At some deep level, we all know this, which is why we avoid the topic of freedom, and in particular philosophical freedom, which is the reality, possibility, and opportunity of true free will. True free will must be earned because it has been stolen. When someone says you have free will, but you know you have not done the necessary work to escape your programmed delusions, what they say often seems both outlandish and humiliating to you. It seems outlandish because you know it is not true for you. And it feels humiliating because you know deep down that you should have done that work. The work needed to become free. The work to undo your programming. The work to shatter delusions and to move from livestock to human, from robot to free mind. Also, if you become free, what happens to your relationships with your surrounding slaves?
[3:29:42] Determinism, and a history of evil. There may be other, more sinister reasons why somebody might be emotionally invested in the position of determinism. Imagine you have done some truly vile deed, something illegal, or at least deeply immoral. If you believe you had a choice and involuntarily did evil, how do you live with yourself? Christianity has a lot to say about this, as do many other religions. You must first admit that you chose to do the evil. You must accept your guilt. And finally, you must strive with all of your might to make amends. You must beg for forgiveness. You must pay restitution. You must make the person you wronged whole again. If this means going broke, if this means confessing to the authorities, If this means accepting a prison sentence, then this is what you must do.
[3:30:43] However, what if you really, really don't want to do any of that? In that case, you have a number of psychological strategies at your disposal to avoid the unpleasant but necessary task of humbling yourself before your wrongdoing. You can tell yourself that your victims deserved it. If you stole, well, a fool and his money are soon parted. If you assaulted someone, he picked the fight. If you sexually assaulted someone, well, she was just asking for it. The list goes on and on, in dismal, descending repetition. You can tell yourself there is no such thing as right and wrong, that everyone takes what they want, and only fools and weaklings deny the full manifestation of their own desires. You can console yourself with Nietzsche and thoughts of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and other world-striding malefactors. You can become an angry will nihilist, charging through life in search of diminishing dopamine and scorning any who deny the full scope of their lusts. You can read the novel Crime and Punishment and sympathize with the murderer. If you are a sadist, you can take a giggling pleasure in the discomfort, upset and pain you cause others, viewing life as a fun game of extracting giddy agony from idiots.
[3:32:07] If you are psychotic, you can believe you are sent on a mission by disembodied voices aiming to heal some catastrophic world divide with the regretfully necessary brutality of your actions. Or you can become a determinist. If you are a determinist, there can be no preferred states in your worldview. you. Determinism is not the establishment of truth, but the destruction of the very concept of truth. Truth is a preferred state, preferable to falsehood, however. If everyone and everything is a machine, there can be no preferred states, since no alternative possibilities can exist. A rock lands where a rock lands. The rock has no preferred state. Everything is the inevitable clockwork unrolling of mere physics. There is no right and wrong, no truth and falsehood, no good and evil. These are all primitive superstitions akin to a belief, not in the geological reality of a volcano, but the imaginary superstition of a volcano god.
[3:33:18] I've had countless debates with determinants over the course of my career as a public intellectual and every single time. I've had the feeling, and yes, this is not an argument, that we are really only dancing around the core issue, which always remains unspoken. The titanic amount of emotional resistance I receive from determinists when exploring these issues is a tragic force of nature.
CONTINUED IN PART 2: https://freedomain.com/essential-philosophy-part-2/
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