0:05 - The Origins of Logic
0:58 - Inductive vs. Deductive Reasoning
2:24 - The Incentive Problem
4:13 - Mistaking Induction for Deduction
6:12 - Counterexamples and Validity
9:34 - Science vs. Humanity
12:03 - The Cost-Benefit Calculation
15:33 - Perception of Risk
17:28 - Media and Confirmation Bias
24:26 - Processing Reality and Probability
32:46 - Laws of Logic
39:34 - Instinctual Understanding of Physics
40:12 - The Validation of Logic
This lecture provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and validity of logic, presenting it as a central philosophical concern. The discussion centers around essential questions: How do we ascertain the reliability of logic? Why do we regard it as significant? The foundational premise established in this discourse is that logic signifies consistency, functioning like a linear sequence of dominoes following from a valid syllogism—an argument where the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. The classic illustration provided, that "all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal," serves to ground the conversation in a familiar context.
The lecture delineates the two principal branches of logic: deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning yields absolute truth, while inductive reasoning operates within the realm of probability, illustrating this through relatable examples. For instance, the probability of a neighbor’s 23rd cat being a black cat with a white face is high based on observation of the prior 22 cats' characteristics, thereby reinforcing the application of inductive reasoning in everyday judgments. The distinction is crucial, especially as it relates to human behavior and decision-making, which the speaker argues seldom allow for certainties similar to those found in the hard sciences.
Attention is drawn to the specific problems surrounding inductive reasoning, particularly as it applies to social and economic systems such as communism, which fail to account for human incentives. The disparity between deductive reasoning's certainties and the probabilistic nature of human behavior is examined, raising concerns regarding the public's perception. The speaker warns against conflating inductive reasoning with deductive reasoning, particularly in social media contexts where individuals often misconstrue generalizations by citing counterexamples, leading to misunderstandings and emotional responses rather than logical critiques.
The narrative progresses to elucidate the implications of misunderstanding logical frameworks in practical scenarios, employing examples to reinforce the necessity and functionality of logic for survival. From recognizing threats in the animal kingdom to assessing the probabilities concerning risks in human society—such as the dangers posed by swimming in waters that may contain sharks—the interplay of deductive and inductive reasoning is underscored. The discourse posits that while deductive reasoning deals with certainties, inductive reasoning requires weighing risks based on past experiences and patterns.
Further delving into the nature of risk assessment, the speaker discusses the inaccuracies often propagated by media influences, which can skew public perception of reality, particularly regarding crime and safety. He points out that the human brain processes information differently, leading to skewed interpretations of risk based on curated media narratives rather than direct experiences. This misalignment can have significant social implications, particularly in contexts where anecdotal evidence can distort collective understanding.
Towards the conclusion of the lecture, the articulation of logic's origins is connected to the stable properties of matter and energy, asserting that a solid grasp of these principles is fundamental for survival. Logic is portrayed as evolving from humanity's interaction with its environment, necessitating both syllogistical understanding and the application of probability in daily life. Ultimately, the speaker emphasizes that awareness of these logical frameworks is crucial for navigating complex human interactions and for fostering a sound interpretation of the world around us. The discussion encourages individuals to reflect on their reasoning processes, aiming for accurate comprehension of both deductive and inductive logic to enhance decision-making in uncertain situations.
[0:00] All right, so this is a discourse on the origins of logic.
[0:05] And this is a philosophical problem that is quite considerable, which is how do we know or why would we believe that logic is valid? How do we know that logic is important? How do we know that logic is valid? And so on, right? So, logic is consistency, and logic, of course, is the dominoes that fall from a valid syllogism. Sorry, this is all kind of technical stuff, but a valid syllogism is one where if we assume the premises are true and the reasoning is true, then the conclusion must be true. Classic example is all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. And there are two major branches of logic, inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is 100% truth.
[0:58] Inductive reasoning is probability. It is not absolutely for sure that someone who jumps out of a plane without a parachute is going to die, but we wouldn't put a lot of money on him surviving, right? So that's probability.
[1:12] And the example I give in my book, The Art of the Argument, is you have a neighbor, she's a kind of batty, crazy old woman, and your neighbor has, you know, she has 23 cats, and you've seen 22 cats in her backyard, and they're all black cats with white faces. Now, what are the odds that the 23rd cat is also a black cat with a white face? Well, you can't say 100%, but she seems to have a pretty strong preference for black cats with white faces. So you can say, of course, that it's pretty likely. And of course, we do this all the time, right? We do this all the time. If there is a fin in the water, in the ocean, by the beach, you're probably not going to go for a big old swim unless you figure out that it's a dolphin, not a shark, right? So, I mean, you can't know for sure without checking if you just see the fin, or at least it's pretty tough. So, we have syllogisms, we have inductive reasoning, probability, we have deductive reasoning, which is absolute certainty, and deductive reasoning is really along the realm of physics. Inductive reasoning is more to do with human beings, because we have.
[2:25] Free will. So, for instance, in communism, there is many, many moral and practical problems. One of them, of course, is the incentive problem, which is that people who work harder or smarter don't make any additional money. So, that's an incentive problem. And so, we can say in the economy as a whole, if people don't receive any rewards for working harder, they will tend not to work harder. Now, you can't, of course, say this with 100%, because there could be somebody who's just a crazed workaholic, or, you know, he hates going home, so he's just willing to put in extra hours at work, or whatever it is, right? So, you can't say 100%, right? I mean, physics is 100%, like, all gases expand when heated, right? All mass has the property of gravity.
[3:16] It's like 100%, there's no exceptions, and so on, right? So deductive reasoning tends to be in the realm of the hard sciences. Deductive reasoning tends to be in the realm of humanity, where there are general tendencies, but not absolutes, because human beings have free will, and there will always be exceptions, right? And of course people expect to some degree humanity and the decisions we make about humanity we expect them to follow the hard sciences because the hard sciences have so much prestige because they are fantastic and they're the foundation of most of what is comfortable in the modern world air conditioning electricity internal combustion engine and so on right so i mean if we turn our car and it doesn't start we don't say well i guess physics have changed or physics have changed in my car. Something's wrong with my car, right? So you go and get it fixed and so on. The problem is never physics, right?
[4:13] So one of the things that happens all the time on social media, as you know, is people mistake, and it sounds kind of boring, but it's really, really important and actually kind of annoying at times. So people mistake inductive reasoning for deductive reasoning. This is sort of the source of the famous chart where you have a bell curve, and you say most people are in the middle, and then you say, well, what about these outliers? And it's like, well, that's because people have free will. There's variability in human decisions in the way that there isn't in physics.
[4:46] And so when I say tattoos are strongly associated with mental health problems, or tattoos are associated with mental health problems, then what happens is people think, and this is a sort of psychological process that's based upon a lack of understanding of logic and, you know, just emotional reactivity. So what happens is people say, Stef, you're saying that tattoos are associated with mental health issues. I have tattoos and I don't have mental health issues. And that's because, I assume, people think I'm making an absolute statement about everyone, and therefore, they only need provide one counterexample, and my proof is disproven. Right? I mean, there's an example where I'm in the right, but there's an example where I'm in the wrong. So, I recently tweeted to someone, show me a very successful female entrepreneur, not in the sort of health beauty business, makeup beauty business. And people quoted, I think, Dolly Parton and J.K. Rowling and so on. And they're correct, right? I mean, they're not specifically in the, I mean, Dolly Parton's very pretty, but she's not in the beauty business.
[6:04] But they're correct in that what I should have said was, and I should have included the entertainment, right?
[6:12] Health, beauty, entertainment, right? So that's an area where I did not cast the net wide enough, and people are pointing out exceptions to the categories I put forward, which is perfectly valid, and I will tweet about that later. Today, I just want to collect more evidence in case there's another category I've forgotten to say, yep, you're right, I should have included entertainment. And, you know, I'm not entirely sure Or if people who make their money out of entertainment, like Dolly Parton and J.K. Rowling, and then they invest or they have a bunch of business managers, I'm not sure that they really count as entrepreneurs, but that doesn't. An entrepreneur is somebody who makes their money primarily out of a business, not out of a song and a book. Anyway, because people don't really get the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, and of course, they're not taught it, right, in schools, then they think that any counterexample is a disproof of the general principle, right? So you could imagine going to a bus stop at two o'clock in the morning in a shady section of town, and one night you go there, there's a guy dressed in a three-piece suit reading a computer magazine.
[7:25] Waiting for the bus too. And another time, there's a guy, you know, dressed as a real thug with lots of tattoos on his face and stuff like that. And you'd say, well, gee, I'd feel more comfortable with the guy in the three-piece suit reading a computer magazine rather than, you know, the young man dressed as a complete thug in his prison garb and face tattoos, right? Now, is this absolute proof? Nope. It could be that the guy in a three-piece suit reading a computer magazine is a serial killer. It could be that the young guy dressed as a thug is a highly sophisticated professional actor researching a role by pretending to be a thug. Sure, sure, but we still have to work with our probabilities. A stereotype threat, sorry, stereotype threat's a different psychological thing. But stereotype is real. It's one of the most validated things in the social sciences, is that stereotypes generally tend to be quite accurate. Again, tons of exceptions. So, to sort of understand that you can't take trends associated with free will and turn them into the kind of absolutes that only science would provide is irrelevant. it. Now, in a scientific theory, a theory dealing with matter and energy, one single disproof is enough to overturn the entire system.
[8:53] Because if you're saying all matter behaves in this way, then if even one piece of matter, one example of something that you can record, works in the opposite way, then your theory is disproven. So, you know, a sort of silly example is everything falls down. Okay, that's a theory, right? But then if you say, well, what about balloons? What about clouds? What about whatever, right? Then you'd have to sort of refine your theory to include that sort of basic fact, right? So, in the realm of science, a single counterexample disproves the theory, right? We can understand that, right?
[9:34] And that's in the realm of science. Now, in the realm of humanity, though, we are looking at trends as a whole, right? So, again, this sort of example is women tend to be shorter than men. Well, I know a very tall woman. Now, that is in the realm, of course, of science, but it is also in the realm of variability. Variability, of course, is either free will or it can be genetics, right? Short parents tend to give birth to short children, but there are exceptions because there's a variability in, I guess, in biology, which is related to the question of genetic combination and the unpredictability thereof. So, deductive reasoning tends to be for physics.
[10:21] And physics is absolute, and it works on the syllogistical format. The syllogistical format is all matter has gravity. X, whatever that is, is matter, therefore X has gravity. It's 100%. All gases expand when heated. It's not sometimes or maybe in Philadelphia on a Tuesday or anything like that. It is absolute universal. So one counterexample disproves the conjecture or the hypothesis. But syllogism's deductive reasoning is for physics, chemistry, and things like that. But for biology, biology generally operates on a combination of deductive reasoning and also on inductive reasoning or weighing probabilities. Let me give you an example. So a zebra that sees a lion getting close knows that it's a lion and absolutely is a lion, right? So that's the deductive reasoning, right?
[11:22] Lions eat zebras. There's a lion nearby. Therefore, the lion might eat me. I can't say for 100%. Can't say because of probability, right? In the same way, if you're by the ocean and you see a dorsal fin in the water, you might not go in, you shouldn't go in until you determine whether it's a shark or a dolphin, right? Sharks eat people. If I go into the water with a shark, I might get bitten. Therefore, I'm not going to go into the water, right? However, dolphins do not eat people. Therefore, if it's a dolphin, I'm going to go into the water because swimming with dolphins would be kind of cool. Now, you can't say for sure that the shark is going to eat you, but the cost benefit is the calculation you're working with.
[12:03] You can't say for sure that the dolphin is perfectly safe, right? It might headbutt you, it might do any number of things. Dolphins are kind of rapey. So you can't say for sure, but on the balance of probabilities, that's sort of what you're going to do. Like if you go swimming in the ocean, I guess there could be a clear jellyfish that would sting you, but generally that's not really the case. So people go into the ocean. So the zebra uses deductive reasoning in its mind, right? Instinctually, right? It uses deductive reasoning to say that is a lion, lions eat zebras, therefore that lion might eat meat. Lions might eat zebras, therefore that lion might eat meat. That's syllogistical reasoning. Now, the might is the interesting part, right? The might is an interesting part.
[12:51] So, the zebra then does a calculation based upon probabilities, and the calculation based on probabilities is around evolution, and it goes something like this. Well, if I run away from where the lion is, then I'm much more likely to survive any potential lion attack, and if I move far enough away, I'm going to survive almost for sure. So, maybe it costs me 25, 50, 100 calories, or whatever it is, to trudge off or gallop off to where I'm safer. However, if I stay here and the lion is about to attack, then it's pretty likely that I'm going to get grievously injured or die, which means my entire investment goes up in, well, not exactly smoke, but goes into the lion's belly and the hyenas and the jackal's bellies and so on, right? So that is sort of the calculation. What's the cost-benefit?
[13:42] So if we understand that, then we understand that in order to detect a threat, an animal needs to use deductive reasoning, right? That is a fin in the water, that is a lion in the grass. That's a fact, right? That's not, maybe there's a fin in the water, maybe there's a lion in the grass, right? I mean, once you see the lion in the grass, once you see the fin in the water, that's a fact. And then, you have to weigh your probabilities, right? Is that a shark, and will the shark attack me? If it's a nurse shark, I mean, I'm no expert, but I think I've swum with nurse sharks before. They seem pretty safe. If it's a great white shark or a tiger shark, carcaridon, carcarious or something like that, then you're probably, well, you're going to be less safe as a whole, which is why you can swim freely with nurse sharks, but you need a cage for great white sharks.
[14:37] And of course, we do the same all the time, all the time. If we are being followed by someone in a sketchy section of town, and it turns out that it's a priest leading a group of nuns, you're probably okay. If it's a bunch of thugs, you might not be okay. We make these probabilities, right? Now, I mean, it could go the other way, theoretically, but we don't work with these probabilities, because the cost-benefit is too high, right? And of course, a lot of society these days is about saying that all of your pattern recognition is blind, ugly prejudice and bigotry, right?
[15:16] And that, of course, is exactly what you would want predators. You would expect predators to do that. You would say, I mean, if the lion could speak to the zebra who was edging away from the lion, the lion wanted to eat the zebra, the lion would say, hey, you know, I just ate this morning. I'm not hungry. I'm just stretching my legs.
[15:33] There's no reason to be alarmed. But he would do that so he could get closer and eat the zebra, right? So that's kind of what's going on in them. And this happened recently. I posted, was it yesterday? I think I posted, saying like in 40 years, I've asked countless people about the drug use and asked for the insights they say they get from using drugs, and I get nothing. I get nothing. No insights, no particular wisdom back, right?
[16:00] And somebody said, well, that's not a scientific study. And it's like, why would I need some corrupted government bought and paid for turbo nerd in a lab coat to tell me about the validity of my, pattern recognition over the course of 40 years, right? I mean, if zebras could talk to each other, right, the zebra would say, hey, that's a lion, right? And lions are dangerous. And then the zebra who was in league with the lion for some reason would say, source, I don't see any science, There's only peer-reviewed studies on that, and that's just to disarm you, right? Stereotypes are quite accurate in many ways. This is a pretty robust finding in psychology and the social sciences that stereotypes are quite accurate. And so that's sort of important, right, to understand.
[16:55] So deductive reasoning is to give you the absolute presence of a potential threat, and inductive reasoning, probability reasoning, is there to have you weigh and assess that threat. And of course, everybody knows that you can die in a car crash. Like 35,000, 40,000 people in America alone die in car crashes every year. That's a fact. Now, we then weigh our probability of dying when we want to go to the store, to drive to the store to pick up some milk.
[17:29] And, you know, one of the unfortunate things about the media is that it presents things to us and our sort of reptile brain thinks they're real. So, you know, your odds of dying in a school shooting are very low, but because every time there's a school shooting, it's splashed all over the media, well, often, then you think they're more common than they are. Your deep down brain, right? It's the same thing I talk about with the men's rights community or the MGTOW community, which is, yes, there are women who you can marry who will tear your life apart, right? They'll try to get you thrown in jail, accuse you of terrible things with the kids, take off your stuff, have your living in a car. Absolutely. And there are women who wake up the next day and regret sexual activity and falsely accuse men of rape, right? It happens. But of course, when you are in these kinds of communities, these stories are shared back and forth to the point where the limbic system, like the deep brain, the lizard brain, thinks that they're far more common than they are.
[18:32] And that's a problem. It's a huge and genuine problem in that we did not evolve for selected transmitted media at all. And so, of course, if, you know, let's say that there are five school shootings a year that are broadcast on the media, well, deep down in your brain, your brain simply recognizes, I saw five school shootings this year. Not in different countries or different states or, you know, it doesn't see all the ones that didn't, you know, all the schools that had a day without a school shooting. Your brain says, I saw five school shootings this year. And it doesn't know that it's distant and it did your deep brain, right? It just gets the stimuli.
[19:18] And so, of course, if you were in a town where there were five school shootings in a year, in, let's say, I don't know, two schools or whatever, right? Right? It's two and a half school shootings a year. So if you had two schools in your neighborhood and there were five school shootings in a year, then the odds of your kids getting killed would be enormously high, right? Like very high, like Snoop Dogg high, right? And so this is the problem that happens with our perception of risk. And this is one of the things I'm sort of battling with people on X, which is their perception of risk based upon confirmation bias. So let's say that there's a certain number of people whose lives get destroyed in the marriage court system, and there are, right, of course, right? It's a terrible system. But it doesn't tell you how to reduce your risk, and it also fools you into thinking that's someone you know. Right. So if you read, and these are terrible stories, of course, where a woman has sex with a man, say on college campus. And then she says, I had a great time. Next day, she texts him. I had a great time. Let's do it again. He's a jerk and ghosts. And then she says, I was raped. Right. And then his life is, you know, significantly harmed. He goes through a lot of stress and probably gets kicked out of university and just absolutely terrible stuff. Absolutely terrible stuff. But you do have to ask yourself, do I personally know anyone this happened to?
[20:47] It's not to say that it's not terrible. It's not to say that it doesn't happen or anything like that. But you have to remind yourself that that which is transmitted to you is not people you know, and your brain is designed for people you know. And so if you read, you know, 20 of these stories every year, your brain interprets that, that this happened to 20 people you know. Now, if these kinds of false accusations and life-destroying witch hunts, if they happen to 20 people that you know, that's an entirely different matter. Than you read 20 reports of it from around the world in a year, right? Everything in your brain is translated to this, like at the bottom level, in terms of your calculation arts, everything in your brain is calculated to this happened to someone I know, because of course we evolved without media, without the transmission of these kinds of things, and therefore everything that you see, your deep brain assumes is happening to someone you know, which is why you have to be really kind of strict with this kind of stuff. And remember that, you know, there was this sort of old joke when I was a kid, Channel 7, Cheek Tawanga, Buffalo, and we've turned Buffalo Auditorium into a mud pit. And the joke was everything's on fire all the time. Because there's a fire in Tonawanga or whatever it was, a fire in Buffalo. And so the joke was like, it's just like London 1666. It's just a constant hellscape of conflagration and fires and so on, right?
[22:12] And it's the same thing, of course, with the sort of women are crazy meme or the men are jerks. Are they crazy women? Sure, sure, sure. But if you just keep reading stories about crazy women, your brain translates that into the crazy women are all around me.
[22:29] And that's dangerous. And it's not rational, but it is empirical because you are genuinely seeing and reading stories of crazy women, or selfish, lying, jerky men, right? So, I just want to sort of point that out. So, with regards to logic, in order to survive, an organism, any organism, needs to successfully process reality. No organism is self-sustaining. A living organism is self-sustaining. And therefore, it needs to gain its nutrients from its environment. It needs to correctly process. this now again i'm missing single cell organisms i'm really talking about that kind of stuff let's just talk animals right where there's a choice there's an evaluation right and you've had this right if you have kids they love to feed wild animals because every kid loves to think they're dr doolittle and animals love them because blah blah blah and so you see this right a squirrel they it wants the little bit of food you've got but it's hesitant am i going to get caught and all that kind of stuff right so you can see the squirrel making that choice, So, all animals, let's say, have to correctly process reality and probability.
[23:43] Reality and probability. So, if you're a zebra and there's a particularly tasty looking clump of grass next to a pride of lions, well, you're going to weigh that and say, well, that really does look like good grass, which means it's going to have a lot of nutrients in it for me. But on the other hand, there's a pride alliance right there. So, right, I mean, I remember being in Florida many, many years ago, leaning over to look into an alligator enclosure, sort of swamp enclosure, and my glasses fell off, sunglasses fell off, and fell into the alligator enclosure. And I could have, of course, not that I ever would have, but I could have physically gone over to retrieve my sunglasses.
[24:27] But the cost benefit just didn't make it worthwhile. Well, so I had to correctly process that I dropped my sunglasses, that there were alligators nearby, and then I had to process the odds, right, the cost-benefit of going to get my sunglasses and maybe getting chomped by a gator, right? I remember joking with Joe Rogan about the gator roll in the first show that we ever did together in Toronto.
[24:50] So you have to first process reality, and then you have to correctly process probability, right? Ecorned animals will, mammals anyway, will certainly, will usually turn and fight, even if you're like way bigger than they are, because they might as well fight, because if they can't run away anymore, their best chance of survival is to turn and fight and startle you into jumping back, so maybe they can escape. Now, the correct processing of reality is science, physics, That's syllogistical reasoning, right? Human beings can eat deer. That's a deer. Therefore, I can eat that deer. As opposed to human beings cannot eat rocks. That's a rock. I cannot eat that. I mean, you can't a little bit eat a rock and get nutrition from it.
[25:36] Of course, again, I get it's biology. There are exceptions. I mean, there's no mammal that can eat rocks and get nutrition from them. Although I think there are some mammals that eat rocks to aid in digestion. I think my daughter was telling me something to do with that. But, oh, maybe it was lizards or something like that. Like they eat rocks and it helps them with digestion, whatever. But they don't gain nutrition from the rocks directly. Of course, you know, maybe there's a mammal, a human being that is allergic to meat. But that does not invalidate the syllogism because human beings survive on being able to correctly identify food sources. Now, again, someone's allergic to the food source. Of course, there's a lot of East Asians and other races in particular that are allergic to milk, lactose intolerance, not really allergies, but lactose intolerance. Okay. But they get their food in other ways, right? So all human beings have to be able to correctly identify food sources. All animals need to be able to correctly identify food sources in order to live. And those who accurately assess risk survive the best. In other words, those who use deductive reasoning to identify food sources, human beings can eat meat. Deers are made of meat, therefore I can eat that deer.
[27:00] So you have to be able to syllogistically reason and identify food sources. And then you have to correctly assess probability.
[27:09] And we all do this from time to time. You know, you pick up something in the fridge that's in one of those Tupperware things. And you're like, ooh, I kind of want to eat this, but is it good or is it bad? I have this with deli meats from time to time. I give it a sniff. And of course, we cut off in my household, we cut off the little best before dates and put them in with whatever we're storing. And you know, most times you get it right every now and then. Spit out, right? So to survive, animals need to accurately identify food sources and then correctly process the cost benefit of getting that food source. Every time you go out to hunt deer, you might turn and twist an ankle, which is very bad. But if you don't go out and hunt deer, you don't get enough calories to live, so you take the lesser of two risks, you take the lesser of two evils. Every...
[28:05] That predator, right, some panther or a cheetah or a puma or a lion or whatever, a tiger, they expend huge calories and take on fairly significant risk in chasing their prey, right? The zebras or the other prey animals kick out and might smash you in the face, break your jaw, you might trip, you might stumble, you might break a leg or turn an ankle or something like that, which is, you know, pretty fatal in some situations. And of course, we've all seen those videos where a lion, say, is chasing an antelope, and the antelope basically is pulling away or gets away, and the lion gives up. In other words, the lion has done a cost-benefit calculation and said, I'm going to expend more calories than I'm likely to get by continuing to chase. Maybe the lion's a little older and the deer is very young, or the spring bark or the antelope is very young, but not too young, right? This is why the animals, the cats, the big cats, the predator species, they tend to maybe go for the old and the sick and the lame and maybe the very young. Now, if you go for a sick zebra, then it's easier to catch the zebra, but it's also, I assume, easier to catch whatever sickness it's got, which may or may not be transferable and may or may not take root.
[29:21] But if you're really starving, you kind of got to eat it and you'll take the risk, right? So, we see this with animals all the time, right? Especially wild animals. Can you feed them? they're weighing the cost benefits. They say, well, I really want the food, but I don't want to get caught. So you can see them hesitating and weighing those odds and that risk, right? At least the sort of more cognitively advanced animals.
[29:44] Course, there are creatures that mimic, right? Mimic all the time. There are creatures that mimic. So a tiger that's drinking has spots on its back that makes it look like it's staring up. And there's lots of mimicry that goes on in creatures because they, right, this is why you can never say to atheists, why shouldn't you lie? Well, they get their morals from evolution and evolution is about falsehood a lot of times, deception. So as far as evolution goes, animals that were unable to identify food sources died out. Animals that were unable to accurately process risk tended to die out. I mean, the obvious example is the dodos that grew up without people around and therefore weren't nervous of people and got taken for their food pretty quickly and easily.
[30:38] And animals that were too cautious didn't survive. Animals that weren't cautious enough didn't survive. So you have to find that balance and risk. And of course, a lot of propaganda is about substituting your direct experience with manufactured experience or transmitted experience in the aforementioned sort of school shooting or, you know, back in the days of the COVID stuff. I mean, you saw every other news article was about some guy, a MAGA guy, a conservative guy with a red hat. And he just refused to take the vaccine. And then he was dying of COVID. And he just regretted it so much. And he kissed his children as he died. Like, that makes you think that's someone you know. Because again, we're not evolved for transmitted or curated experience. We're born and evolved to see things directly, not to have things curated, which is why curation tends to push people more towards, we could say extremism, but I would say more towards.
[31:37] Inaccurate processing of risk, right? It's a 50% divorce rate. It's an inaccurate processing of risk. It's like taking only the very old zebras as your base and saying, you know, I mean, half the time a lion chases a zebra, 50% of the time it catches it. It's like, but you're taking it by a sample group, right? So logic evolved for the identification of, and I'm just using food, right? I mean, obviously, you have to also identify mates, right? You have to be able to reproduce, so you have to be able to accurately identify the opposite sex of your species, you have to be able to mate, you have to get food, and so on, right? You have to recognize you're young.
[32:24] So, there's a lot. I mean, I'm just using food source as a proxy for just about everything else. So, you have to have an interaction with reality as a whole that is accurate. And then you have to accurately assess probability, which is why we have both syllogistical reasoning and inductive reasoning.
[32:46] Now, reason says that it's the art of non-contradictory identification of information. So, for example, it is not possible for any organism or anything, Again, atoms is a whole different thing. We're talking about the way that logic evolved. It is impossible for one object to occupy two spaces at the same time, right? And if you don't get that as an organism, you can't survive. And this is why we have alibis, right? In law, right? If you can prove that on the night of the murder, you were in a different country, then you didn't commit the murder because you can't be in two places at the same time. To accurately get food, you can't say, if you're a lion, the zebra is both a zebra and a termite mound at the same time. It is not both a zebra and a cloud and a rock at the same time. It is a zebra. And if you doubt that, then you can't survive.
[33:49] I mean, a zebra can't be in two places at the same time. So if you're chasing the zebra as a lion and the zebra suddenly turns left, it can't also continue in the straight line and go right. So you have to bear left. It can't split itself in two and be in two places at the same time. So you have to follow where the zebra is, anticipate where the zebra is going to be on a certain knowledge that it can't be in two places at the same time. So these are basic laws of logic. A zebra is a zebra, A is A. A zebra is either a zebra or it's not a zebra. and a zebra. Something has to be either a zebra or a non-zebra. Again, these are just basic, you've got to know your food source and so on, right?
[34:30] Laws of logic arise out of the stable and predictable behavior of matter and energy. The laws of physics are so logistical. The laws of organic matter, both in terms of genetics, in terms of choice or free will, those are probabilistic for the most part. I mean, a man knows he cannot have children without a female to mate with, right? That he knows, right? You're not going to get a baby Kleenex, right? A man knows that he has to have a female in order to reproduce with. Now, that he knows for sure. That's syllogistical reasoning, right? All babies come from sperm and egg and womb and whatever it is. You need those things. You need those ingredients. So he knows that for sure. Now, he doesn't know for sure every time he goes and talks to a woman, whether, assuming he does so with a woman who's of childbearing age, he doesn't know for sure whether he's going to get children and out of that woman, he doesn't know if the woman's going to like him or they're going to be compatible or whatever it is, right? So the absolute sociological reasoning is he doesn't get a kid if he doesn't approach women. The probability is, well, I need to approach women who are likely to say yes and who I want at least reasonably to say yes, right? I mean, I guess everybody wants the IQ 180 supermodel or whatever, but you, you know, we don't always get everything we want, neither do other people in our lives, so we settle, right? I mean, everybody has to settle.
[36:00] So, those organisms that could not identify accurately, 100% reality, now, again, it's not all sense data. You could just see a slight hump, a slight tawny hump in the tall bushes, tall, tall grasses. Maybe that's a rock, maybe it's a termite mound, maybe it's a lion, right? So that's probabilistic. It's not like everything that comes directly through the sense data is 100%, right? Sometimes we don't know. Of course, when I was a kid, the first time you're driving on a hot road and you see the mirage of the head, you think, well, geez, why the heck would there be water on a road, right? And I remember in Africa when I was six, driving and seeing lights way down the highway, and it was a big cat's eyes looking at the headlights, reflecting back. Wild. so because matter and energy behave like non-organic non-alive matter and energy behave in perfectly stable and predictable ways, and sorry let me just amend that if you have enough data right.
[37:05] Data. Now, of course, you don't, weather, right? You can't predict the weather down to 100% accuracy. To a large degree, I mean, the weather may be dependent upon human activity, which means that there's a free will or choice involved. But we can't predict, I'm sorry, just to reaffirm that, sorry, or to revise that slightly, we can't predict everything about matter. But the syllogisms that are tied into what we need to survive are based upon the stability of matter and energy. So you could probably jump off a one-foot ledge and not be injured. You cannot judge. You cannot jump off a hundred-foot ledge and not be injured. Somewhere in the middle. Sorry, I just got a bite of something on my heel. Look at that. Talking about nature and its dangers and I get a sting of something on my heel. Anyway, not the end of the world. It's just pain. And so, what did it, what did it, what got me? What's in there? What is that? Can I see it or did it go?
[38:08] I cannot tell. But something crawled in there and gave me a good old sting. Oh well, it's fine. So, the origins of logic are on the stable properties of matter and energy. And of course, we know that matter and energy has to be stable because all biological life rests on the substrata of matter and energy. And if matter and energy were unstable, there would never be a stable enough environment for life to develop. If matter behaved in some sort of random chaotic fashions, or if gravity reversed itself once in a while, and the sun produced frigid cold instead of warmth on earth, then life could not survive, right? I mean, it would be like saying, I want you to paint a realistic portrait of.
[38:50] While on a randomly moving canvas. You couldn't, right? You couldn't. And you can't create life without the absolute stability of matter and energy. So, matter and energy, perfectly stable, that's the physics, that's the syllogism, and then we have to be able to process probabilities in order to survive, which is why you get deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. So, the origin of reason is the universal absolute non-contradictory properties of matter and energy. That's where, correctly identifying those principles of matter and energy, the instinctual understanding of physics, right? Which is what animals do as a whole. Like a dog doesn't understand the equations, but it can catch a frisbee. You throw the frisbee, it'll figure it out where it's going to land and catch the frisbee, right?
[39:34] The lion doesn't understand the physics, but it knows how to catch the zebra. So there's sort of an instinctual understanding.
[39:42] So the fact that we're the most successful life form in the world, in that there's not even a close second to our greatest attribute, which is consciousness. So, the most successful, arguably, I mean, you can get back and forth, but in general, right? I'm not talking about numbers, but in terms of like, there's no close second to our rational capacities. So, we are the most successful, and we also have the greatest capacity to abstract and understand both syllogistical, deductive, and inductive reasoning.
[40:12] And so, that's where our logic comes from. That's how logic is validated. Logic is principles derived from the stable behavior of matter and energy extrapolated into conceptual form.
[40:23] And some enemies of mankind attack deductive reasoning, but most enemies of mankind attack inductive reasoning, your sort of probability, and say that all of your padded recognition is a horrible prejudice. Why do you hate lions, man? They're not all bad. Well, true. You don't know for sure that that lion's going to attack you. It's like, yeah, it could have just eaten. But I'm still not getting my sunglasses from the alligator pit anyway. All right. So, freedomain.com slash donate. If you find these kinds of conversations helpful, I would really, really appreciate your support. freedomain.com slash donate. And don't forget, tomorrow morning we're going to do... Well, this is going to be... I don't know if this is going to go out today. Sunday mornings, we are going to do donor-only shows at freedomain.locals.com. Subscriber-only shows. I hope you'll join us for that. Lots of love. Bye, everyone. Take care.
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