0:00 - Philosophy and Creation
2:59 - Animals vs. Hedonists
6:04 - The Hedonist's Downfall
8:04 - Purpose of Pleasure
9:10 - Substituting Joy
10:18 - Aiming at the Effect
12:40 - Creating Free Will
In this episode, we delved into the realm of philosophy and how it intertwines with the concept of free will. I discussed how philosophy not only identifies elements but also has a role in creating them. Just like how understanding physics leads to the creation of various tools and technologies, philosophy, particularly Universal Preferable Behavior (UPB), plays a crucial role in shaping morality. Morality is not just a set of rules; it is the result of having the right information and standards to make meaningful choices.
We explored the idea of hedonism and whether hedonists truly possess free will. By analyzing the hedonistic approach to life, we discovered that pursuing pleasure without aligning it with higher standards can lead to a lack of meaningful choices. Animals, driven by instinctual pleasures and pains, don't possess free will in the same way humans do. A hedonist's constant pursuit of immediate pleasure can ultimately lead to a collapse when the pleasure centers burn out.
Moreover, we dived into the concept of pleasure as an incentive mechanism for achievement. Pleasure is designed to encourage individuals to strive for goals and achievements. Pursuing permanent happiness or pleasure can lead to stagnation, as true fulfillment comes from the pursuit of meaningful endeavors. The hedonic treadmill illustrates how constantly seeking pleasure without real achievement can be detrimental to personal growth and happiness.
In conclusion, I emphasized the importance of defining ideal standards of behavior in philosophy to cultivate free will. By providing a framework of integrity, consistency, and virtue, philosophy creates a path for individuals to make conscious and meaningful choices. It is not just about identifying moral principles but also about empowering individuals to act in alignment with them. This episode sheds light on the intricate relationship between philosophy, free will, and the pursuit of genuine fulfillment.
[0:00] So I think it's important to understand that philosophy doesn't just identify, it also creates, right? So physics doesn't just identify, it also creates. So when you understand, say, the principle of gravity, you can create acceleration in a spaceship by using the slingshot effect where you go around a big gravity well and use it to accelerate, right? So when you understand physics, then you can create a boomerang, you can create a bow and arrow, and eventually a gun and so on. And so philosophy doesn't just identify things. Philosophy is not just passive.
[0:43] So as I sort of mentioned in a recent show about UPB, UPB doesn't just identify morality. UPB, in a very real sense, creates morality. Now, I don't mean out of thin air or out of whole cloth, but UPB creates morality because morality is that which we can choose, but we have to have a motive or incentive to choose. So if we are fed bad information, our choices diminish. If, for whatever reason, we believe that lying around and eating cheesecake cake is the best way to lose weight and get ripped, and we believe that, then we don't have a functional choice to lose weight and get ripped because we have bad information. So if free will is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, without those ideal standards, we don't really have free will. So does a hedonist have free will in a practical and an exercisable fashion. And we can talk about the theory and the potential and so on, but bad information means that the potential can't be actualized. So does everyone have the ability to lose weight? Yeah, pretty much.
[2:01] But if you have bad information, do you have any practical capacity to lose weight? So if we look at someone like a hedonist, a hedonist says, I will do what is most pleasurable in the moment.
[2:13] Well, that, of course, is living like an animal. Animals, in general, do what is most pleasurable in the moment. And you say, well, animals make sacrifices. The birds fly all over the place to get food for their offspring, for the baby birds. But the reality is that they're programmed to do that and feel terrible if they don't. So even the quote self-sacrificial animals are still hedonistic and i would hesitate to call them hedonistic because hedonism is the description of an approach to life when there's an alternative i mean even bacteria anyway let's just talk about i don't know single cell organisms or whatever right they pursue food and avoid that which makes them experience something negative right so they They pursue food and they avoid hot surfaces or, I don't know, vinegar or whatever it is, right?
[3:00] So we wouldn't call an animal a hedonist because the animal has no choice but to pursue its pre-programmed pleasures and avoid its pre-programmed pains. Oh, there's a tongue twister for you. But a hedonist has the choice to not live like a hedonist which is why you have a separate category called hedonist.
[3:19] So does a hedonist have free will? Well, if the hedonist generally and genuinely accepts that to live for the pleasure of the moment, avoiding all pain, is the best possible life, then the hedonist does not have an ideal standard to compare his proposed actions to.
[3:44] He looks at cheesecake and says, I would enjoy eating that cheesecake. Doing what you enjoy is the best. Therefore, I will eat the cheesecake. There is no ideal standard or higher standard to compare proposed actions to because it's all about pre-programmed pleasures and pains. When you surrender to instincts, when you surrender to pleasure and pain, you are surrendering to pre-programmed preferences, right? So, of course, we are programmed by nature or by evolution, really, to like bright, sugary things, right? This is why candy always has this sort of really bright colors and they're sugary and so on, because bright, sugary things meant fruit. And fruit was essential to our survival. And fruit was sometimes difficult to get. Or honey, which is sort of a very dense source of energy. You've got to love honey to get past the bees, right? because you don't have a bear's hide to protect you from the stings, right?
[4:46] So this is all pre-programmed. And because it's pre-programmed, it is not comparing proposed actions to ideal standards. It is comparing proposed actions to that which is pre-programmed into our bodies, into our tongues, into our minds, into our physiology, right?
[5:06] Sexuality, sexual desire, lust, is pre-programmed into our bodies. And because lust is pre-programmed into our bodies and kicks in around puberty the pursuit of lust is to follow your biological programming it is to follow you and that's what this is the npc meme is characters who are pre-programmed in video games they have pre-programmed responses they don't have free will and so the fact that we are programmed by nature in our pleasures and our pains means that when we are pursuing a life of pleasure, fetish, and pain avoidance, we are NPCs because we are programmed for pleasure and pain. It's evolved. So a hedonist does not have free will because the only way he's going to ever end up abandoning hedonism is if the hedonism life as a whole becomes painful, as it generally does.
[6:05] I mean of course it's more pleasurable to eat cheesecake in the moment but when you end up overweight your life becomes worse I mean you've got joint pain you've got back pain you've got maybe diabetes you've got fatty liver you've got you know it's hard to clean yourself and you can't play any sports really and you can't run around and like your life just gets worse right and fertility issues in particular for women but also for men erectile dysfunction you name it right.
[6:30] So, a hedonist will generally only give up his hedonistic lifestyle when he's burned out his joy centers.
[6:39] So, our happiness centers or joy centers are designed as goalposts, not as continuums. So, the reason that we feel happy when we achieve a victory is so that we will continue to try to achieve more victories. stories, right? So a tennis player who wants to become a great tennis player or has the capacity to become a great tennis player or, sorry, to be more accurate, experiences fierce joy at winning a tennis game, well, that joy is there to incentivize you to become better at tennis, right? The joy is not there for you to keep it going in a perpetual way because if you keep the joy going in a perpetual way, then you don't win any more tennis matches, right? Because the fierce joy that you have in winning a tennis match is designed to have you train and work hard so you can win another tennis match. And you have to have the risk of losing a tennis match in order to feel joy in winning a tennis match. If you've ever taught someone, and I have taught a number of people racquet sports over the years, you don't feel any victory or thrill of excitement and so on, when you beat somebody who's new to the game. Like I've been playing tennis for like 50 years, right? So when you beat somebody who's new to the game, you don't feel any pleasure. In fact, you're really not supposed to beat them. You're supposed to just teach them. So the purpose of pleasure is as an incentive mechanism to make the pain worthwhile.
[8:05] So the purpose of orgasm is to make the pain of pursuing a partner and rejection and loss and breakups is to make all of that worthwhile. Now, of course, if you were to exist, God helped you in a state of perpetual orgasm or perpetual joy of victory, you would not excel at all. You would not excel at all because your positive experiences would no longer be incentives that make it worthwhile. They would be a permanent state of celebration, right? So you win and you You celebrate, right? Maybe you drink some alcohol and you have a celebratory piece of cheesecake or whatever it is, right? You celebrate. And then the celebratory feeling, the fierce joy, whatever it is, goes away. And then you start working hard to achieve it again, right? This is why it's called the hedonic treadmill. Everything that you achieve goes away in order to spur you to achieve more. It's how we got to the top of the food chain.
[9:07] So people who look for permanent happiness are looking for stagnation.
[9:11] And it's well known, of course, that drug addicts substitute the pleasure of drugs for the pleasure of actual achievement. And people do this with video games and other things, right? They substitute artificial joy for true joy. And the demotivated stoner, like the guy on weed who's just demotivated and doesn't achieve much and so on, well, that makes perfect sense. Right? Because he's getting the happiness reserved for achievement, struggle and strife and work and achievement. He's getting that happiness without actually having to achieve. And so since we achieve in order to be happy, if we try to exist in a state of permanent happiness, we stagnate, right? Like we drive to get home. Once we're home, we stop driving because we've achieved our goal. And so the hedonist tries to make pleasure his goal when pleasure is there to serve non-pleasure goals, right? The orgasm is not there to serve the orgasm. It's there to serve pair bonding and reproduction. The thrill of victory is not designed to serve itself, but to serve further pursuits of victory.
[10:19] So the hedonist, by aiming at pleasure instead of the achievement which brings pleasure, the difficulty and the achievement that brings pleasure, the hedonist is aiming at the wrong thing. He's aiming at the effect, not the cause. And since at some point your body picks up on the lie, right?
[10:36] At some point your body and your brain picks up on the lie. Like the guy who only has his achievement through video games, at some point he gets it's that thrill of, wow, I've achieved something and that's good. I still remember in Quake 3, winning a couple of matches and feeling pretty good, feeling pretty good. But what happens is at some point your body's like, well, hang on, we have all of this achievement, but what do we have in reality? And that's the same thing with the hedonist, right? the hedonist pursues sex say and sex is an intense positive experience designed to serve hair bonding and child raising and when the hedonist pursues sex without love without children and without the raising of children then the hedonist is aiming at the effect without the cause and if you get the effect without the cause at some point your body is like whoa whoa whoa oh, well, hang on, this doesn't, this is not working. This is not, sex is there to pair bond with a quality mother for your children and to produce children. Where's the quality woman? Where's the children? So at some point, your body figures this out and turns on you. You can call this a conscience or whatever, but there's a normalizing factor. It turns on you.
[11:57] And then you have a choice. You can either give up your pursuit of pleasure and instead aim at achievement, which will give you pleasure and in a sustainable way, because you can always continue to achieve more and work for more.
[12:09] Or he doubles down on the pursuit of hedonism, but now his body's onto him, his unconscious is onto him, and knows that he's hijacking pleasures designed for achievement, for his own personal pleasure, and it will just take away his pleasures, and hedonism always ends up in this kind of collapse. So then the hedonist might change, but he's only going to change because hedonism doesn't work anymore. It's still not, you know, it's like saying that there's a drug addict who's reformed because he can no longer access the drug. Well, that's not a reform. form, that's just not being able to get high.
[12:40] So by saying that there are ideal standards of behavior, philosophy aims not just to identify free will, but to create the capacity for free will by giving you something to aim for, integrity, consistency, virtue. If these things aren't defined, you can't choose them, just as if there's not a particular medicine isn't available, a doctor can't prescribe it, right? So philosophy is not passive. It doesn't just identify things, it creates things as well. And really, that's its purpose. It's not the identification of morality, but the creation of free will through the definition of universal morality. So I hope that helps, and I appreciate your time, care, and attention. And I dare say, affection, freedomman.com slash donate if you could help out the show. I would truly, truly appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
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