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Hey, everybody, it's Stef. I hope you're doing well. I don't want you to panic, but we're
going to use a little bit more stunningly original and vivid graphics to go over the
last question around ethics. I'm going to be a hand model here, because I wanted to
go over some of the basics that we've talked about.
I'm throwing this one out as an audio podcast, but it's really not going to work very well
as an audio podcast, so you very much might want to come check out the video cast
at http://www.YouTube.com/freedomainradio.
Before we dive into the amazing world of politics, we are going to have a quick chat about some
of the things which we've talked about so far to see if we can make sense of them.
We started off with the nature of reality. There's a person here, and we will give him
form, although we're really most concerned with what's going on in the old gray matter
(let's color it in because it is full of blood, if I remember my House correctly). We've got
a person who is surrounded by what? What exists out in the real world? And we went through
the basics of epistemology, that there are a couple of choices: either there's some invisible
demon who's got him on a puppet string, and who is keeping all of the crazy little people
dancing in a vat of their own ignorance, and we erased that as a possibility; we also saw
that there could be some higher realm of Forms up here that the human being could have inhabited,
we got rid of that as well; and we know, or at least have made a strong case for, the
reality that between each human being is sensual, empirical reality.
There's me (the hair at least is accurate), and there's you and me. You and I can communicate
using our senses. You can see this dotted line between us. What exists in the realm
between us is tangible, material, objective reality. Birds, trees, and so on.
We also posited that because — I'm going to make a little tree here — something like
a tree exists in the real world, has atomic structures and matter and energy, and I'm
short of color so we'll make a kind of alien tree with a nice blue trunk here... We can
look at a tree and what happens is the light comes from the sun, and bounces off the tree
leaves, and then points them into our eyes. This is all pretty standard, I'm sure, you
can understand this. If we then have, as we do, an image of a tree — Oh boy, you might
need to zoom this in a little bit — inside your own mind. You have the reproduction within
your own mind of the tree that exists in the real world, because within your own mind,
the capacity for error exists that we can look at the world and think it's flat when
in fact it's round. Because the possibility for error exists, what comes through the senses
is always true. This is, of course, true with the five senses.
Five senses + logical consistency = true.
What goes on in our own minds, in around here, and for you here, this stuff is false if there's
a contradiction between what goes on in our own minds, and what we receive as sensual
evidence from the outside world. You can print this glorious picture out and hang it on your
fridge.
So how do we know that the image within our own mind is false? Either because of the five
senses or reason:
Contradictions between the five senses and reason means that what is within our own mind
always gives way to what is coming in through the evidence of the senses and validated by
reason.
Now what we do is let's move on from our wonderful description of the erroneous properties of
consciousness, and let's have a look at a brief overview (a "sprint" if you will) through
concept-formation.
Let's just say that we have these wonderful green trees in the world, let's make three
of them for those who are listening along, there are three trees now with blue trunks
(nice space alien trees). Here we look at the world and we see that there are similarities
between these three objects that are in the world, and we know that there are similarities
between them because each one of these is composed of particular atoms, is an organic
formation of cells, and has particular properties. Even within trees, we have deciduous, and
evergreen; deciduous ones drop their leaves in the fall, grow them again in the spring,
evergreens like the pine trees keep their leaves year-round.
If we're looking at similar kinds of trees subdivided into maple and birch, oak, etc.,
we can look at the trees and notice that there are lots of similarities. There are similarities
because atoms, matter, and energy are constant, the trees are composed of similar atoms. The
similarity of the atoms translates within our minds to conceptual similarity.
So what we can do is (let me introduce a radically new color here), why not? Red is the mind.
What we do is we say there are similarities between each of these trees in reality, and
so we cast a big conceptual net (the red dashes around our forest of alien trees here, our
Dr. Seuss trees), we cast a conceptual net so we have Tree 1, Tree 2, and Tree 3, and
we cast a conceptual tree around it called "Forest." ("Run! Forrest, Run!" ...Anyway.)
We have within our minds a conceptual aggregation of like objects called trees, which we aggregate
into something called a forest, which you can see beautifully depicted here in an Ansel
Adams type way.
I have drawn this dashed red line around the trees themselves to indicate a conceptual
aggregate called "Forest," but it's not like a big net or perimeter around the actual trees.
It is within our own minds, and I can't draw it that small and even if I could, you couldn't
see it, but this whole net exists within our own minds.
If we define a forest as an aggregation of three or more blue trees with green leaves,
then that is our description of "forest," and what I can't do then, is I can't put a
red dot in and say "This is now part of the forest," because I've defined a forest as
a conceptual aggregation within my own mind, and thus subject to error in any comparison
between the ideas in reality. I can't just sort of throw a red dot in and say that forest
now includes these blue trees and a red dot. I can say that blue trees and a red dot are
all things that I can draw on my whiteboard with a marker. Whatever, but it's not going
to be atomically the same as what is going on with these trees.
In any contradiction between concepts that we form based on our observations of material
reality, and material reality, the concepts always have to give way.
We don't know that this is a forest because we've seen some perfect forest up in the sky
before we were born. We know that this is a forest because the atoms strike our senses
the same way, we validate the roughness of the bark, we've been around them long enough
to know whether the leaves fall in winter, and so on.
So we have this forest within our own mind, and if we suddenly say that we're going to
include a red dot in our idea of forest, then we are stone incorrect. The concept always
has to give way to the instance, as we have talked about.
Then we started going on to knowledge. We talked about the stability of matter within
the world, and that this gives rise to the concepts of fundamentally Aristotelian logic
within our own minds, but basically just what you call common sense. From there we began
to move into the delineation of true and false, we went through all that stuff, that true
is the concepts within the mind that are validated according to the evidence of the senses, and
the rigors of reason. Then we began to move into ethics, and there is no ought from an
is. We were all very comfortable with that, or at least I was. There is no ought from
an is, that ethics do not exist in reality. Yet, if we do decide to put forward an ethical
proposition, if we do start to talk about ideal, universal human behavior, universally
preferred human behavior, then we can't just make things up.
If we've got some guy in our ethical theory, and he's got a bomb, and in our ethical theory
he's allowed to throw this into a house. (See how the house looks kind of startled? That's
the kind of artistic genius that you'll get to expect from Freedomain Radio.)
If we say that morally, the ideal human behavior is to throw a bomb into a house, then every
human being must.
Every human being must throw a bomb into a house, there can be no exceptions to this
rule, because we can't just make up rules and shoulds, and say that it applies to this
human being, but not this human being. You can't say that human beings as a whole have
a preferred behavior of throwing bombs at houses, and then say that only one human being,
or this human being, or on Saturdays they should do it but on Sundays they shouldn't,
etc. If you're going to create any kind of ethical theories, you do need to create them
in a logical, consistent and universal manner. Otherwise they're just opinions and, frankly,
pretty useless.
From there, we began to talk about what some definitions of universally preferred human
behavior might be, and we're staying with the structures that you can't just make things
up, you can't have a physics theory that says Rock A falls down whereas Rock B in exactly
the same circumstances, falls up. You can't have that physics theory, because then what
you have to do is say, within your theory of physics that Rock A falls down but Rock
B falls up, you have to say what is the difference between Rock A and Rock B? You can't just
make these things up and say that you like Rock A so it falls down, and you don't like
Rock B so it's going to fall up. You can't just make up these arbitrary distinctions
because you really are fundamentally describing things around reality. You can't say on one
day the rock falls down... You can say all these things, but there's no truth value in
any of the things that you're coming up with from that standpoint.
Basically, we talked about countries and the non-existence of conceptual entities, and
now we're absolutely able to start talking about the transition between individual ethics
— and we've put some forward here, although I haven't gone through every single one of
them, that will probably withstand some pretty strong rigor.
The ones that we put forward are: No violence. This is also known as the Non-Aggression Principle.
The NAP. The NAP is that you don't start fights, you... end them, or something like that. No
initiation of violence. As a subset of no violence, we had: No ***, No ***, No assault,
etc. We're not coming up with stuff that's massively weirdly strange... yet. But we have
all of these things subsumed under our general Non-Aggression Principle.
We also had property rights. "Rights" is a complicated word and I'm not gonna expect
that you accept the whole definition of it just on my say-so, but basically human beings
possess self-ownership, because only I can make my voice work and you can't. Yes, you
could hold a gun to my head and make me do this, that and the other, but you still can't
directly control my body in the way that I can. So because I have self-ownership, I have
ownership for the products of my actions, both in a positive and negative way. You can't
have ethics if human beings are not responsible for the products of their actions.
If I walk up to you in the street an I strangle you, and then I say I'm not responsible for
that, that wouldn't make much sense. If nobody was responsible for anything. But if I'm responsible
for the effects of my actions in terms of ethics, in terms of strangling or raping or
killing someone, then surely I'm also responsible to have ownership of [them]. If I have ownership
of my actions in a moral sense, I surely have ownership of my actions in a product or property
sense. If I go, as I think Adam Smith or John Locke says, you strip a piece of wood from
an unowned tree and you make a bow, then you have created something and it's the effect
of your actions, so you have the right to dispose of it.
We'll not so much talk about the property rights of sea urchins just now. Fundamentally,
because property rights are that which are associated with human beings... we've got
a bunch of people (of slightly descending size), so either each of these people is subsumed
under the concept of property rights, or they each have self-ownership, and they get to
own the products of their actions, and so on.
Each of these people are subsumed in exactly the same way as the individual blue trees
were subsumed in the concept "forest," and you could not have something which had the
opposite characteristics of a forest. You couldn't have a forest composed of the blue
trees, and then just throw a red dot in and still call it part of the forest. Forest is
derived from what is similar between these objects, not complete opposites.
Anything that you say about human beings must be common to all human beings, just as everything
that you say about a forest must be what is common between all of the trees within it.
If property rights, the Non-Aggression Principle, any ethical theory that you come up with,
can't include that Person A should do X, and Person B should not do X, and Person C can decide for him
or herself whether or not to do X. If you say "Property rights exist for human beings,"
you have to say it for all human beings. You can't just say it for one and then say "Oh,
but they don't exist for the other person." You have to say if property rights exist for
Person A, then they automatically exist for Persons B and C. You can't have complete opposites.
If Person A is not allowed to shoot people on a whim, then automatically, because we're
talking about what is common to human beings, Person B is not allowed to shoot people on
a whim, Person C is not allowed to shoot people on a whim. This is the kind of consistency
within ethical theories that good philosophy strives to attain, in my opinion. You don't
just make up things.
You wouldn't be a biologist and say, "Person A has one head, and two arms, and two legs,
and Person B has six arms, and 99 legs, and two heads, and a tail, with a fork on the
end, and 69 eyes, and yet they're still [both] human beings." That would be something else,
something quite different from a human being, this guy in the middle. You can't just say
in a biological sense that all of these are human beings, because in the middle you have
something, the characteristics of which don't conform to what you define a human being as.
When you come up with something like property rights, or the Non-Aggression Principle, which
are the two founding principles of a rational theory, and both of these are interrelated,
they're two sides of the same coin, you can't have the Non-Aggression Principle if human
beings don't own their own bodies. If you stab me, you are invading my property, which
is my body, with your knife. If I don't own my own body, there's no such thing as the
Non-Aggression Principle.
Property rights really are the foundation of all rights and all ethics within society.
They really are two sides of the same coin. If you have property rights, then you own
the effects of your actions, and so it's bad if you go stab someone, and if you go and
make a bowl, it's yours. Property rights and the Non-Aggression Principle are two sides
of the same coin. We're just differentiating them for the sake of conceptual understanding.
If a woman doesn't own her own body, then *** is not a crime. It doesn't mean anything.
Basically, property rights — this is the one you really want to focus on. Because we
all think property rights is like, "Hey, that's my bike!" and that's fine, but that's really
a long-term effect from the basic, initial property right, which is to say that I own
my kidney, so if you need a kidney of mine, you can't just club me over the head and gouge
them out and leave me in a bathroom stall somewhere.
That's a very important thing to understand, that whenever you come up with preferred behavior,
it has to be for all human beings. Of course, we already went through quite a lengthy discussion
about how UPB must exist, because you simply can't argue against it without bringing UPB
to bear on the question.
The last thing that we'll talk about here, in this massively whip-through overview, is
we're gonna start talking about the question of politics. We're just gonna sort of touch
on it just to whet your appetite. The question around politics is actually quite simple;
the question around aggregates or groups, etc.
Let's go back to our handy-dandy "Blue Man Group." We've got guy A over here, so he has
certain properties, certain rights, certain preferred behavior, which must be common to
everyone. If I prefer to go to art school rather than engineering school that's preferred
for me, but it's not universally preferred behavior, that everyone has to go to art school
and not engineering school. Because then, who would build the arts buildings?
There's personally preferred behavior, a.k.a. aesthetics, or ambition, or personal taste
or whatever, and then there's universally preferred behavior, which is common to all
human beings.
You can make up things where they're biological differentiators. To take a silly example,
you could say that it is universally preferred that all human beings who don't have hands
should not try to become professional javelin throwers. I'm no javelin thrower, but I would
assume that hands would be somewhat central to the sport.
If you can find a difference between Person A and Person B that's objective and biological,
etc., in other words, Person A has hands, Person B doesn't, you can create preferred
behavior. But, of course, if somebody wants to create artificial Luke Skywalker hands
stitch them on, and go javelin throwing, that's up to him. To optimize your life, that might
not be the best thing to do, to become a javelin thrower if you don't have hands. But when
we're talking about UPB, we're talking about this kind of stuff.
The question of politics only really comes in when we have two guys or more.
Here we have a person who has a definition, this is old Person A, and Person B.
Whether they're standing on opposite sides of the planet, whether they're standing 100
yards from each other, whether they're standing nose-to-nose, does not change their fundamental
physical characteristics. Yes, there are some slightly tiny gravitational forces that they
apply on each other — or not so tiny if you are Pavarotti, say — but the nature
of a human being does not change based on proximity.
Proximity is not a causal factor for what creates change in a human being's nature.
You can say that getting beheaded is a causal factor that will change a human being's nature
from alive to not-so-much alive, but proximity is not one of the things that changes a human
being's nature.
No matter how many human beings you get together in a group, it does not change a human being's
nature. Let's put some of that stuff that we've derived from all of our earlier theories
[together].
Here's where the challenging stuff is gonna come up. I promise you, whether or not you're
religious, the challenging stuff is really going to come up in the next couple of video
casts, so I just want to emphasize (not to sound mean or bullying): if you've come this
far and haven't found substantial logical problems with the formulations that we've
been working with, your intellectual integrity is really going to be put to the test as we
start moving forward, because there's probably gonna be a bunch of things coming up that
are gonna make you pretty uncomfortable, not only from a political standpoint, but from
a social and possibly even familial standpoint. The challenge that you have to accept if you
want to be logical and have intellectual integrity is that if you don't disagree with the premises
or the reasoning, and you can't find fault in them, then you can't not agree with the
conclusions.
If I say Socrates is a man and all men have testicles, then you can't object to Socrates
having testicles. I mean, you can, but then you've just abandoned intellectual integrity,
which is actually not a very good thing to do in terms of making sure that you stay a
happy human being. [Transcriber's Note: The old argument is that all men are mortal. This
would have been a better choice, and is what Stef meant by what he said here, since it
could very well be that Socrates doesn't have testicles; that premise is not universal,
nor does it concern man's nature].
Let's say we've got a big cloud of people. I've made this look kind of like a bacterium.
You've got a big crowd of people. This is 100 million people. (If you zoom in, you can
see them all!) The Crowd
And then we have uno dude-a-rooney. Person A:
The Crowd and Person A
The proximity of these 100 million people to each other, and the proximity of this person
to the 100 million people does not change their basic nature, does not change their
fundamental, atomic structure, their neurological or biological structure, their definitions
of what it is to be human is not changed in any way, shape or form by whether you're in
a group or whether you're alone. 1,000,001 People looking at a tree
Let's say that we have this tree in between Guy A and 100 million people, and they're
all looking at the tree. Does the one person looking at the tree change the nature of that
tree? If I look at a tree and say it's a lollipop, have I changed the nature of the tree in any
fundamental way? Of course not. All I've done is rearranged the things within my own mind
which are supposed to be describing this tree. When a lot of people look at reality and say
this, that or the other, it has absolutely no effect on external, tangible, material,
objective reality itself. This is why the scientific method always means testable, reproducible
and objective and measurable, and this kind of stuff.
This idea that somehow a crowd has an aggregate, which has different rights, which is a conceptual
grouping which we call "a crowd," you could also call it a "country" or a "party" or a
"race" or a "community" or a "tribe," or whatever it is. This idea that a crowd can somehow
have an aggregate nature or aggregate identity or aggregate set of properties that somehow
contradict the properties of each individual person within that crowd is just as crazy
and irrational as saying that a forest can be composed of a whole bunch of blue trees
and also can include a green dot. Let's get rid of the green dot [erases dot].
It's as crazy, as well, as saying a conceptual aggregate of blue trees called "the Blue Forest"
can also include trees that float upside down in midair. If you have trees that are floating
upside down in midair, they're probably not going to be part of the Blue Forest — and
they're red to boot, or whatever.
You can't have an aggregation of anything, a conceptual grouping of anything that is
material and within reality, which has different or opposing properties from any one of those.
We talked about [how] you can't have a conceptual aggregation of rocks which are things that
are heavy and rest on the ground, and include within them helium balloons, which go up to
the sky. When we have humanity, we have a crowd, looking at objects within reality does
not affect those objects within reality, and everything which is preferred behavior for
person A is preferred behavior for everyone, and it doesn't matter how many people you
put together in a group, you do not change their moral nature.
Doesn't matter whether you have 1, 10, 1000, a billion people. Putting them in a group,
putting them in a geographical area, putting them at a fixed point in time, does not change
their fundamental biological, physical properties, does not change the desired behavior that
is moral, the UPB. If it applies to one person, it applies to everyone, and you can't layer
over a crowd and say the crowd has different moral properties.
I'm going to leave it at that, because we need to start talking about politics, so that
we can really begin to make sense of all this stuff and really have the work that we've
done in metaphysics, epistemology, concept-formation, true/false, logic, all of the stuff we've
been working on for the past little while is going to bear fruit in some ways that are
probably gonna be a little startling to you, at least they certainly were to me when I
first started working them out. But I hope that it will make good sense to you, and as
always I just have one thing to say: [writes "Thank you!" on the whiteboard] and I will
talk to you soon. Thank you so much.