Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. I hope you're doing well.
This is part two of An Introduction to Philosophy, where we will be dealing with the gripping
topic of metaphysics. We'll start with a definition, just so you know that I'm not pulling these
answers out of my armpit.
Let's have a look at a definition of metaphysics, that goes something like this:
(Philosophy) The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including
the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.
Boy, now if that doesn't clear things up, I have no idea what would.
Let's just have a look at the basics around the questions of metaphysics. It's really
quite a lot simpler than it is often portrayed, or I guess it's possible that I'm a lot simpler
than many of the philosophers, but let's (laughs) just throw that one out there and see which
one might be the case.
This is the way I see it, and I think that this is a fairly accurate presentation.
There are basically three kinds of approaches to the questions of metaphysics, the nature
of reality:
The first one is, you could call it radical skepticism or Cartesian metaphysics, and it's
basically the idea that reality is a dream. Reality is an illusion; that nothing exists
but your brain, and everything else is a sort of theater of delusion or whatever you want
to call it; that everything outside your own consciousness is imagined by you or impressed
upon you by some sort of external force. This is a kind of radical approach to the question
of external reality. Everything is a dream, everything is an illusion, nothing is real
but your consciousness, and the entire point is to cease believing in external sensual
information and evidence, and so on. A sort of radical, skeptical approach. That's number
one. Number two is sort of a blend between number
one and number three. Number two, as far as metaphysics goes, could be called the Platonic,
or to some degree, the religious approach. In this approach, tangible, material reality
does exist, and the information that is provided to us by our senses is valid, but very, very
limited, not just in terms of content, but in terms of value. So in this approach, there
is a higher realm of reality that is not perceivable by the senses; this could be Heaven, the Platonic
realm of Forms, Kant called it the noumenal realm. Basically there's this idea that there
are two kinds of reality: there's the reality that you experience through sensual experience,
logic, rationality; matter, all the tangible stuff that's in your mind and life through
the evidence of your senses. There's that reality, and there's a higher, and more powerful,
more majestic, noble, important, benevolent, better, superior kind of reality that exists
in a non-empirical, non-sensual... People who are philosophers and who advocate this
(and there's quite a lot of them who do) don't generally say non-logical realm; they call
it a "higher logic" or a "universal spirit" or a "world spirit" or whatever sort of Hegelian
stuff you can come up with. That's the second realm. Yes, they say that sensual reality,
tangible, material, objective reality does exist and is valid, but is far less valid
and less important than this higher realm of perfect ideal Forms, and gods, and sometimes
it's translated into society, and so on. This idea you may not believe is that relevant,
but this is the dominant idea of philosophy. This is, by far, the most common view in philosophy;
that there is this higher realm that is much more important than the sensual, material
and empirical realm. (This is foreshadowing a little, but I'll give you a hint of where
we're going:) There are two systems of thought which radically oppose this; neither of them
can particularly be called systems of philosophy, though they are applications of philosophical
concepts. There are two systems of thought which oppose this; the first is the scientific
method, and the second is the free market, trade, uncoerced trade. The reason that we
know that the scientific method opposes this is, you don't see scientific papers that say,
"All of the material, experimental and reproducible evidence disproves my theory, but it's true
in a higher realm." You don't get a lot of papers published if that's your approach.
You may in theology, (laughs) you will in graduate philosophy, but not so much in the
scientific realm. We'll talk about the free market, the economic side of this equation,
a couple of podcasts from now. So those are the two realms; the first realm,
everything is an illusion, the second realm, things aren't really an illusion, but what
we see in our day-to-day life is much less important, valid, valuable, it's inferior
to what goes on in this higher realm of ideals. The third view of reality is what is generally
accepted as the scientific method, which is the evidence of the senses and physical, tangible
reality is all that exists. There is no higher realm of Forms, of ideals, there is no alternate
universe where ideas have life, where consciousness can exist without material form, any of these
kinds of things. Matter exists, energy exists, and that's really it; and that's really the
scientific method. As I mentioned before, there are some economic approaches which describe
this as being the approach of the free market.
When it comes to metaphysics, these are the three branches:
Nothing is real; things like sensual evidence are real but
unimportant and there's this higher world of enlightenment that you need to achieve
or that is valuable to achieve; nothing exists except matter and energy, simply
called radical materialism (we'll call it just materialism, or science).
In terms of philosophy, as distinct from religion — there's lots of systems of thought (we
call them "systems;" I would say that philosophy is really the only system of thought, and
that everything else is really just semi-organized opinion, I guess you could say) — the question
then becomes, Which one of these three views is valid? And, if none of them are valid,
is there another view that could be valid?
Well, let's take the first one and look at some arguments against the idea that everything
is an illusion.
The very interesting thing about arguing or debating with somebody is that there are a
number of premises that you're going to have to take into account, to accept as valid if
you're going to engage in an argument with someone.
If I walk up to you one day and I say, "Hey, remember me from... videos? I had a dream
about a sparrow last night," is there any way that I can prove to you objectively the
truth value of that statement? "I had a dream about a sparrow last night."
I would say no. I could be telling the truth, I could be lying to you for whatever reasons,
but there's no objective way to determine whether what I'm saying is true or false.
You would have to either believe me or not believe me, but your belief or non-belief
would not be based on any objective, rational criteria; it would only be based on whether
you thought I was an honest or trustworthy person, whether I'd "had a history." But in
the realm of telling you about my dreams, I may have had a history about telling you
about all these dreams, but you would never know whether or not the dreams that I'm telling
you about are true or just made up.
In that particular example, there's no possibility of a true or false statement; it's just a
matter of opinion, you could say it's a matter of faith. If I generally tell the truth about
everything, and there's no particular motive for me to lie about these dreams, then it
would probably not be too rational to believe that I'm just up and starting to lie about
these dreams for no particular reason. This may be further (laughs) evidenced by some
other criteria that you could bring to bear on the case; something like if I'm in a therapist's
office telling the therapist about my dream, and I'm paying for the dream interpretation,
my motive to lie about the dream would probably be a little bit less, because I wouldn't be
getting my money's worth, which I probably want, out of my therapist.
When we look at debate, there are certain things which are taken for granted if you're
going to debate with somebody. You wouldn't really understand what would be occurring
logically if you saw two people arguing about whether one of them had a dream about a sparrow.
I could come to you I did, and you say, "No you didn't," and I say, "Yes I did," and we
go on in this Monty Python kind of way. That wouldn't really be an argument that would
make any sense, because there would be no way of proving either side of the position.
So when you get into a debate with somebody, there are certain things that you are going
to take for granted as being intrinsically part of that debating process, and that's
something very important to understand. To debate with another human being requires the
acceptance of certain axioms without which, if you don't accept those axioms, then the
act of debating itself becomes a contradiction.
When we look at this first principle, which says "Everything is an illusion," let's say
that I come up to you and (say your name is Sue) I say,
"Sue, gotta tell ya. Everything that you perceive is merely an illusion."
It's an interesting statement. What I would say to that (I don't have my "Sue" wig with
me, but (laughs) let me switch sides for a second) if I were Sue, I would say:
"OK. Is it true that everything is an illusion for you, or is everything an illusion for
everyone?"
An interesting question, because if everything is an illusion for just one person, then really
the very act of debating with an admitted phantasm of that person's imagination, or
with a manipulation of that person's senses, is completely illogical.
So If I come up to you and say, "Sue, everything is an illusion," I think you'd be justified
in responding to that, "Well, am I an illusion within your mind, then? Because if I am an
illusion in your mind, then why are you debating with me? That would be an indication of some
severe mental dysfunction. And in fact, people who have these kinds of mental dysfunction,
who engage in arguments with illusions, only engage in arguments with those illusions because
they believe those illusions are true."
If you've seen the movie A Beautiful Mind, then you saw the Russell Crowe character having
debates with the bald guy (the other bald guy! ;)), Ed Harris's character. He only had
debates with Ed Harris's character because he believed that the Ed Harris character really
existed and was asking for help, CIA kind of scenario. Then later in the film, somebody
walks up to Russell Crowe's character and says, "Hi," and Russell Crowe turns to somebody
else and says, "Do you see that person?" Like, "I'm not going to engage in a debate with
somebody who's purely imaginary, because I am then acting in a pure contradiction."
So if I come up to you and say, "You are a figment of my imagination," then I'm trying
to change your mind. I'm recognizing that your mind exists in the exterior world, that
you have perceptions, that you can be argued with. So I'm basically affirming your existence
as an independent consciousness, as a consciousness or mind independent to my own perceptions,
because if I really believed that you were a phantasm of my imagination, I wouldn't bother
debating with you. It'd be like me having a debate with a hand puppet, which isn't 'till
episode four.
When somebody comes up to you and says everything is an illusion, then they are saying that
you are an illusion, and that you don't exist. But if you don't exist, why are they arguing
with you? This is a very obvious logical problem or question. It's related in another way,
we've been talking in our previous conversation about the evidence of the senses.
There are lots of people who will come up — believe it or not, if you [plan to] grad
school work in philosophy, because you will get these kinds of opinions — and they will
say that the evidence of the senses is invalid. It really is quite astounding. They'll have
long debates with you about how the evidence of the senses are not valid. Fantastic! Because
(laughs) of course, they're using your ears to talk to you! These are the kinds of basic
questions that, when you see this stuff going on, your jaw just drops.
If I'm walking up to you and saying, "Sue!" (I'm gonna pick on Sue all of this video today)
"Sue, the evidence of your ears is completely erroneous!"
"...But..." (laughs)
I'm talking to her, I'm using the efficacy of her ears to communicate that her ears have
no efficacy. That's like saying to someone, "Here, get into my car. I'm going to take
you for a drive in order to prove to you that cars don't exist." (laughs) I mean, it's kind
of bizarre intellectual madness.
If I go up to somebody who's completely and totally blind, and I'm 50 yards from them
and I'm making subtle little hand gestures designed to indicate to them that their eyes
work, then I'm obviously not doing something that makes a whole lot of sense. I'm assuming
the opposite of what I'm arguing. When you get into debates with people about philosophy,
this is one of the fundamental errors, and it confuses people an enormous amount.
So if I don't believe that other human beings exist, and everyone's a figment of my imagination,
then when I argue with them to tell them that, I then have to assume that they do exist and
have a consciousness independent of mine, and I have to use language and debate and
so on to communicate my ideas to them to get them to change their mind. In other words,
I'm assuming that their mind exists, and I'm trying to convince them that they don't exist.
The assumption is opposite to the action. That invalidates the action.
If I'm using sign language to convince a blind person that his eyes don't work, I'm not doing
something very logical, because if he can see my sign language (in other words, if he
can understand that his eyes don't work), then his eyes do work. And if he can't see,
then why am I sign languaging to begin with? I'm relying on his eyes working to convince
him that his eyes don't work.
So whenever you hear people talk about "the senses are not valid," "the senses are limited,"
"the senses make all kinds of mistakes," and this that and the other, they are already
using the evidence of your senses in order to convince you that your senses are erroneous.
If it's true that your senses are erroneous, then there's no reason to believe that you've
accurately interpreted or heard any of the arguments that they're putting forward. So
you can say to somebody who says that your senses are invalid, "Oh, well I just heard
you say that. What part of what I've heard is invalid? Because if I've accurately heard
your idea, then my senses are valid. And if I have inaccurately heard your idea, then
I can't respond to it."
This is like a mental trickery. I'm not saying that people wake up consciously with this
Lex Luther metaphor, like "Ahh, I'm going to twirl my evil mustache and convince people
that their minds don't work, or they don't exist, while assuming that they do exist,
and I'm gonna convince them that their senses aren't valid while using their senses." It's
just that people haven't been taught much about this basic stuff, and so there's quite
a lot of confusion in the realm of philosophy around these basic ideas.
In the first realm, we could say that anybody who puts forward the argument that nobody
else exists has automatically invalidated that argument. Something you don't even need
to invalidate. Again, not to overly use this kind of thing, but it's something wherein
I say to you, "I have no capacity to make sound," and I'm telling you this, then I've
completely invalidated it. You just have to say to somebody like that, "I'm sorry, I can't
really debate with you, because you have rejected your own premise in teh action of arguing.
Arguing requires that you exist, the senses work, that language makes sense, that there's
some sort of objective reality between the two people who are debating that transmits
this information from my mind to your mind, (in other words, sound waves travel from my
mouth into the microphone, across the Internet). There's some sort of objective, sensual material
reality between us. All of these things have to be accepted by the very nature of entering
into a debate.
So if somebody enters into a debate to try to convince you that any of these things are
not valid, then they've completely contradicted themselves. You don't even have to say that
much. "Well, you're assuming that which you are arguing against. You're accepting it as
true in order to argue against it; that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You really need
to go back to the drawing board, with all due respect." And you can say it nicely.
When people start debating, they're going to end up in a situation where they have to
assume a whole bunch of things in order for the debate to be rationally possible, and
they can't then reject those things. So that's the way that I would approach it to begin
with.
There were two possibilities under "umbrella 1″ of everything is an illusion, everything
is subjective:
The first was that everything is an illusion and there's only one mind in the universe.
That's me, and you are all illusions. Of course, that doesn't make any sense that I would go
on and try and change the mind, assume that the existence of an independent consciousness
I can debate with, in order to convince that independent consciousness that it didn't exist.
That wouldn't make any sense; that we can throw aside as just silly. If somebody really
does believe that everything is an illusion, you really don't have to worry about them
debating with you; they're not going to do that, because if they understand that the
hand puppet is just a hand puppet, they're not going to engage in a vociferous and violent
debate with their hand puppet creation (unless they're mentally ill, in which case you don't
debate with them, or they're doing it for your entertainment, in which case you simply
applaud and tip them). The second possibility is that it's the Matrix
scenario. That there are all these consciousnesses for all of which reality is an illusion. Of
course, that one becomes problematic as well; if our consciousnesses, our minds, are separated
from each other, and everything is then an illusion (the space between them; this mind,
this mind, and my head)... Let me use some very effective props here; for those who are
listening on the audio side, I've got my fists up against my head. So here's a mind, here's
a mind, and my head represents reality, or the "illusory reality" between them. But if
every way of communicating and connecting between the minds is an illusion, then there's
no possibility of communicating between the minds, and therefore there is no possibility
of having a rational debate, of using sound waves to transmit from vocal cords to ear
to be interpreted by the mind, etc.
We may believe if we choose (I don't think it's rational) that everything's an illusion,
that it's the Matrix, etc. As I mentioned in the last video cast, there's no null hypothesis
for that. There's no way of disproving it. Every single thing that occurs within reality,
whether consistent or otherwise, is a methodology for proving this. So because there's no null
hypothesis, there's no way to disprove it, then it is intellectually equivalent to the
argument that I dreamt of a sparrow last night. There's no way of proving it or disproving
it, so why would you even debate it? But the moment you do debate it, you're breaking the
conventions of what it is you're trying to prove; you're automatically disproving the
premise that everything is an illusion by arguing with another human being.
We can completely logically dismiss all arguments that everything is an illusion, with the exception
of those who never argue with us, in which case, who cares? They're just doing their
thing, not talking to anyone about this belief, because why would they? Everything's an illusion.
So they're not part of the intellectual debate of the times. But the moment somebody enters
into the intellectual fray of debate, they can't say that everything is an illusion.
I think we can put that aside — the radical skepticism as well as skepticism towards the
efficacy of the senses — and let's look at a trickier proposition, which is number
two, and we'll get to number three, I would imagine, given the limits on the stuff I can
upload, maybe tomorrow.
Number two is the idea that, yes, empirical sensual reality does exist, is objective,
has value, but is a far lesser value than the higher realm, we'll just call it the "Platonic
realm." The reason that I use that phrase is not to show off any kind of education I've
received, but rather because Plato was the first philosopher who really quantified and
codified and made a strong, consistent case (I wouldn't say logical, but consistent) for
this higher realm. Plato used the metaphor of a cave (you may have heard this before,
I'll just mention it briefly).
He said that when we look at the evidence of the senses, we are like somebody who is
sitting in a cave, and in the middle of the cave is a flickering fire. Walking around
the fire are some animals or some objects, and when we look at physical material reality,
we're actually looking at the shadows cast upon the cave wall by the animals in front
of the fire. It's inconsistent, it's flickering, it's a shadow, it's not the thing itself.
What we want to do is not look at the shadows and think that we're seeing the real world;
we want to start looking at the animals, and then at the fire, and the greatest of all
steps for Plato is to emerge from the cave into this brilliant sunlight, see the world
for what it is, and so on.
It's quite fascinating when you think about it that Plato was using the metaphor of the
senses to invalidate the senses, because the one thing that is always true about this higher
realm: it is not accessible to the senses. If it is accessible to the senses, it's no
longer part of the higher realm. The higher realm includes things like collective concepts
(and I'll get to those in a minute), gods, devils, leprechauns, concepts as real things.
For instance (I talked about this in conceptual development, so we're going to make the prop.
It's an interesting prop; it can either make you look happy, or it can make you look sad,
but we'll just work with the happy side of things).
We have this banana. The question always arises, "How do we know that it's a banana?" There's
no banana-ness, there's no essence of banana that's a material object within this. This
is just a collection of atoms and energy wrapped in a conceptual idea we call the banana. But
"banana" as a concept does not exist in the real world. "Banana" is just an idea within
our own minds.
The real question always becomes, "How do we get the idea of a banana?" The way that
those who are into the scientific method (the third one: that everything is matter and energy;
no higher realm exists) work is, you see banana, you see banana, you hear it called banana,
you learn what banana is, what it tastes like, etc. So if you pick up a banana that's made
of wax and you try to eat it, and it tastes waxy and provides you no nutrition and makes
you sick, never decomposes, or anything like that, then you know it's an imitation-banana,
something made to look like a banana. If you see a painting of a banana, you don't try
to reach in and eat the canvas, because you recognize it as a representation, not the
thing itself.
The question is, "How do we come up with the idea of banana?" The empiricist or scientist
will say, "You see banana, banana, banana, you get it fed to you, you hear what it's
called, you learn its properties, and then you come up with the idea of banana." In other
words, that the idea of banana is derived from each individual instance of bananas that
we encounter in our life, which we then abstract to make something far more generalized.
That's the one approach. In that approach, everything we define as a banana has to have
all of the properties of all existing bananas. So I can't say that a banana also includes
a banana with wings. A banana with wings that flies around will be some completely different
(possibly CGI) character. Boy, if I had a bigger budget (or any kind of budget), wouldn't
I be putting that in right now? Yes, I think I would.
That's the one way in which we come up with the idea of "banana." There's lots of ramifications
for this; I know it sounds kind of esoteric and abstract, but there's huge ramifications
for all of this when it comes round to understanding things like ethics and so on.
What I'd like to talk about in terms of the second realm, in the realm that we have reality
that is sensual, empirical reality that is lesser or less important, versus a reality
that is higher or more important, I would like to talk about in the realm of the second
type of people's thinking. The way that works is — (laughs) this is a pretty well-respected
position in philosophy, so bear with me for a moment — Plato says, "OK, we've got this
banana. How do we know it's a banana?" Well, the way that we know that it's a banana — according
to Plato and lots of other thinkers as well, who use different kinds of approaches to this
problem — is: Plato says, "We know it's a banana, because before we are born..." (I
know, just stay with me for a moment. This is important, because it's very common!) "...before
we are born, floating in the ether of perfect Forms, of perfect concepts, of perfect ideas,
is this magical, perfect, ideal, magnificent, flawless, indivisible banana. We know the
perfect banana before we are born. Now, when we're born, we forget all this world of perfect
bananas and ideal Forms and everything, and yet we retain an intellectual or emotional
residue or hint of magic banana land when we begin to develop conceptually, or in our
cognitive natures as children, we then look at this yellow smiley thing (or frowny thing)
and we say, 'Ahh.. Yes... I vaguely remember, before I was... Not exactly before I was born,
but I vaguely remember seeing this giant perfect banana in the womb or the pre-womb... and
so vaguely I connect back, and I see then this real banana... and that's how I know
that it's a banana.'"
And I totally understand that that seems rather crazed when you put it this way. The reason
that people argue this position has got nothing to do with bananas and everything to do with
things like gods, devils, governments, and so on, which we'll get to a little bit later.
This is why this is all done. The question is, Do we get the concept banana from individual
bananas, or do we understand the concept of banana, and then apply it to the individual
things that we encounter in the real world?
The first thing that you need to do when you encounter somebody who makes this kind of
argument, or maybe the first thing that you can examine in yourself if you make this kind
of argument, is to say, "How do we know whether that's true or not?" It's relatively simple
to know whether a banana exists or not, again assuming we toss out crazy, Matrix, number
one fantasy. Because it's got a smell, it's got a taste, it's got a logo (and we know
it's real because it's got a logo), you can feel it, it has object constancy (it's not
turning into a phoenix in my hands and attacking me, although what a great video that would
be!).
We know that it has reality and material existence because it's confirmed by all the evidence
of the senses. We could look at it under infrared and see it, we could watch it decompose, we
know where it comes from, we could see like objects, etc. We know that this banana exists
in the real world because there are falsifiable tests to bring it about. If I hold the cup
up (do you see the kind of expense that we go to for props in this show?), and I say,
"This is a banana," and there's going to be certain problems. It's not organic, it wasn't
grown from a tree, it was, maybe, not imported from South America or wherever this came from,
it's not edible, it's not curvy (there's a little curvy thing here, but not quite the
same as a banana).
So there are falsifiable statements when it comes to conceptual organizations in the real
world. They have properties, and I can't put coffee into this [banana] and drink out of
it (even decaf, though, because I'm generally hyper enough).
There are true and falsifiable statements when it comes to dealing with physical objects
in the real world. The same thing is true, of course, of scientific theory. If you put
forward a scientific theory, then it has a true or falsifiable statement because it has
to be predictive to some degree of future behavior of matter or energy. If you then
perform the experiments, and other people perform the experiments, and you get the data,
and you run them through the statistical analysis, it turns out to be true or not true, etc.
There's truth value because there's falsifiable possibilities, there's a null hypothesis,
it could be disproven (Let's just see if I can say the same thing a number of different
ways again).
The question around this idea of the "higher realm" is, How do we know? This is in the
realm of the next thing we'll talk about, which is epistemology, the study of truth
and falsehood. How do we know something's true versus false? Believe it or not, we will
actually get to ethics at some point; it's a fascinating topic, but let's lay the groundwork
and do the basics to begin with.
When we think about this second possibility — the physical world exists, yes, yes, but
there's a superior higher realm that exists — the question is, How do we know that?
Right? What would be the criteria by which we would know the statement "a higher realm
exists" is not true?
The statement "this banana exists" is falsifiable (maybe not for you, because this could be
a wax banana or something (laughs)... "A banana-shaped, yellow thing exists"). It's falsifiable because
if I, let's just say, there are those goofy machines which create those illusions of things
on glass, so you have an illusion, a visual trick of banana, and you reach for it and
it doesn't exist, then it's a falsifiable statement. This banana exists, I reach for
it, it turns out to be a trick of the light on one of those machines; versus, I pick it
up and I eat it.
There's falsifiable statements when it comes to the real world. E=Mc2, true versus false.
You can have a truth value: the sun is the center of the solar system, the earth goes
around the sun, the moon goes around the earth, etc. That is all falsifiable. When we went
from Ptolemaic to Copernican astrology, or astronomy rather (and there's another non-falsifiable
thing, astrology) then it was more accurate, more predictive, simpler. You have Ockham's
Razor, the simplest explanation, all other things being equal, is probably the best.
The question for us with people who talk about, "Yes, this realm is valid, but there is a
higher realm," is, how do we know? And how would we know if it weren't the case? If people
can't answer that question, if people can't say to you, "The idea that I'm putting forward
that the higher realm exists is not true if the following conditions are met..." then
you're not actually engaged in a debate with someone. What someone is doing, then, is saying,
"Believe me because I say it." And Plato himself said that you can't communicate the higher
realm. You can communicate it, as he talked about in The Symposium, as a kind of metaphor,
as a kind of experience — and this is very close to something like religious faith, which
we'll get into in the next video cast.
The real question is, Is it true, or is it false, and how would we know? So when someone
puts forward a proposition, and says, "It's falsifiable is X, Y and Z happens..." This
was the amazing thing about Einstein, that every time he put forward a proposition, he
also listed all the criteria by which it could be disproven, or by which you would know that
his proposition or his theory would be false.
The question is, How would we know if this higher realm existed or not? What would be
the indications that would let us know, yes or no, this higher realm exists? Of course
you really can't get an answer; it comes back to the whole thing, "If you have to ask...
Those that understand don't have to ask, and those that have to ask will never understand."
It's that kind of irritating, backwards-forwards Zen nonsense that says, "If you believe it,
then you believe it and you already believe it, and you don't need to be convinced, and
if you don't believe it, I can't find any way to convince you." That's not really an
argument of any kind, that you believe what they already believe; it's not a matter of
convincing someone, it's not a matter of changing their mind, it's not a matter of applying
logic or rationality or evidence, or anything like that. It's just a matter of, dare I say
it, a bald assertion, without any supporting evidence or criteria for disproof. Not a logical
argument, and I would say that Plato would probably agree with that: it's not a logical
argument because it can't be.
If you say that something exists that is contrary to sense evidence, rationality, empiricism,
science, etc., then the onus is on you to prove that it does exist, and also, the onus
is upon you to provide a criteria by which it can be disproven. So if you put forward
a mathematical proposition, and at the basis it rests on 2+2=5, you have a criteria by
which it will be proven or disproven. 2+2=4, we're good, 2+2=5, we're not so good.
If somebody's debating with you, it's very important in my view to ask them what is the
criteria for disproof for what they're proving. The best way to understand that, and we'll
get into number three, which is really not that complicated: Number three, that the only
thing that exists is matter and energy; there's no higher realm; nothing's an illusion; reality
exists and only tangible, material, objective, sensual reality exists, and yes, this includes
things like infrared. "Oh, we can't see infrared, but infrared exists." Yeah, but we can see
infrared; we just have to translate it into a spectrograph.
I'll touch on this once we get into epistemology, which will come next, number three, the scientific
one in epistemology. People will always say to you things like:
"Well, everyone sees a different color. Stef's wall is, to some people it's gonna be red,
to some people it's gonna be rusty, to some people it's gonna be gray if they're color
blind, etc."
So everybody sees things really differently, and so consciousness is somehow divorced from
reality and this and that. But color is a subjective term. Saying that everybody's going
to see a different color against the back wall here doesn't mean anything as far as
objective reality goes. The objective term for color is wavelength. So if you bounce
the right scientific machinery or sensory apparatus off that wall and get it back on
a particular spot, the wavelength of that color is going to be the same for everyone.
That's the whole point behind the idea of wavelength; that's why we have the term wavelength;
it is a way of differentiating from the subjective criterion of color. Wavelength exists in an
objective way. Our eyes, based on their size and whether we have the right rods and cones,
are going to interpret that as different and transmit that to our brain; our brain will
interpret it its own ways, maybe call it a different name. Wavelength is something that's
objective. The fact that people see different colors has nothing to do with whether objective
reality exists, because we have this term called wavelength.
This occurs in every other field. Somebody who's completely deaf, if they're going to
see wavelengths of sound put out on a graph, will be able to see those wavelengths, even
if they can't hear them, and understand that sound exists, even if they can't hear it directly
themselves.
To sum up in the realm of these three areas of metaphysics:
Everything is an illusion. I think we can discard that one.
Physical reality is not an illusion, but it is subordinate and inferior to some higher
reality. I think that's something that's a little bit more difficult to argue, but fundamentally,
there's no criterion for disproof, there's no proof of it existing, it is something that
you have to kind of accept on faith (and we'll get to faith a little bit later), and therefore
it can't be called "true," a "true statement," because there's no criterion for disproof
and there's no physical, material, objective proof that any of that sort of stuff exists.
As for the third one, the one that is matter and energy exist and nothing else does, we'll
get to that when we start to talk about epistemology, the study of true and false, because it's
very, very relevant and important to the question of true and false whether reality exists and
nothing but matter and energy exist.
As always, thank you so so much for listening. I hope that it wasn't too quick. (laughs)
Maybe I had one too many coffees before I started. I just switched to decaf, but you
never know. Thank you so much for listening as always, I hope that you're enjoying this.
I find this a magically fascinating realm of inquiry, and it really does lead to some
very powerful places when you start to talk about this in the realm of ethics, and particularly
in the realm of politics and economics.
These foundations we are laying here will prove, I think, to really clarify the questions
of politics and ethics and morality, etc., which is the most important thing that philosophy
has to offer you. This is all the building blocks. The most important thing that philosophy
has to offer you is happiness, which can really only be obtained by living an ethical life,
but it's kind of important to know what ethics are if you want to do that. Again, thank you
so much for listening. I will talk to you soon.