Your Mind is Not a GHOST! Listener Questions

Stefan Molyneux

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux answers shows that your mind is not a ghost — the brain produces consciousness, not magic. He also covers what can really exist, finding purpose by doing good and standing up to evil, responsibility even with mental illness, and parenting that works with a child's real personality instead of trying to change it.  0:00:00 Birthday Q&A Opens 0:02:53 Purpose Beyond Paychecks 0:07:24 Bipolarity and Accountability 0:15:52 Kant, Nietzsche, and Universals 0:20:20 Masculinity and Parenting 0:28:11 Marriage and Philosophical Differences 0:29:06 The Dyer Debate Revisited 0:34:35 Drugs and Self-Control 0:35:18 Prison, Labor, and Punishment 0:36:38 Qualia and Consciousness 0:43:45 Strength, Virtue, and Evil 0:57:29 Epistemic Foundations 1:01:13 Metaphysics of Matter 1:02:29 Managing Anger 1:03:28 Parenting in a Rush 1:05:43 Objective Art and Reproduction 1:10:33 Truth, Bravery, and Schooling 1:11:36 Objective Morality Debated 1:12:25 Rights and Dating 1:13:43 Object Permanence and Abortion 1:14:18 IQ and Freedom 1:14:54 Freedom, Technology, and Truth 1:15:27 Hostility Against Bad Ideas 1:17:01 What Could Convince God?  Support philosophy! https://freedomain.com/donate/  GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/FREEDOMAIN2026

Transcript

00:00:00Hello, hello, everybody. It's the family from FreedomAin, freedomain.com slash donate to help

00:00:05out the show. It's my birthday in two days. I'm going to do be a live stream at 7 p

00:00:11.m. on Thursday

00:00:11night on my birthday to spend time with y'all, and you can ask me anything. So I'm going to

00:00:18run

00:00:18through these. We've got quite a stack. So how should we treat existence claims versus non-existence

00:00:25claims when both can or are empirically untestable or unmeasurable? So the first thing you do with

00:00:34claims that x exists is, is it logically consistent? If x, square circle, and so on, a triangle with

00:00:46four sides or whatever, right? If it's self-contradictory, then it doesn't exist because

00:00:50self-contradictory things do not exist. Square circles do not exist. Something that is a giraffe

00:00:55and a rock and a cloud of vapor at the same time, under the same circumstances, does not

00:01:00exist. And so if something is self-contradictory, then it does not exist. If something is not

00:01:08self-contradictory and conforms with the properties of matter and energy, in other words, if somebody

00:01:14claims there's a gas that contracts instead of expands when it's heated, if somebody claims

00:01:18that something has mass but does not have gravity, then again that's self-contradictory. Or it's

00:01:26contradictory not to itself like a square circle, but it's contradictory between all of the known

00:01:31properties of matter and energy and the principles of matter and energy. Or matter has gravity, and if

00:01:40you claim that you have matter without gravity, then you have something that's not matter, right?

00:01:46It is immaterial. And so saying that something is matter but does not have the properties of matter

00:01:51is like saying something is a mammal and then has all the opposite properties of that which makes a

00:01:56mammal. So that is how you would work with that. So if something is self-contradictory or contradicts

00:02:03all of the known universal properties of matter and energy, then it does not exist. We don't know how

00:02:10many planets are around, if any, the star Betelgeuse or Alpha Centauri or whatever, right? We don't know

00:02:18how many planets there are around these stars, but there could be, right? So there are things that

00:02:24cannot exist, things that could exist, and things which do exist. The things which do exist are

00:02:29things that we can prove exist through reason and evidence. Things which could exist conform to reason

00:02:36and the principles of matter and things which cannot exist are either self-contradictory or

00:02:41contradict the principles of matter and energy. So that is how we evaluate these things. Great

00:02:50question by the by. How do you recommend one find a purpose outside of a job or earning money? How

00:02:58can

00:02:58or should a person identify oneself if not for their career? Well, you do good and you fight evil. I

00:03:08mean, have you never seen a superhero movie? Do you think Batman or Superman or I don't know, whoever,

00:03:15do you think they wake up, oh, what's the meaning and purpose of my life? Well, they have great meaning

00:03:18and purpose. And if you get up in the morning and you promote reason, virtue, non-aggression principle,

00:03:26property rights, and you fight the exploitive evildoers who are very successfully running the

00:03:32planet at the moment. And of course, you know, within reason, don't suicide yourself that way. But

00:03:41if you wake up and you, it doesn't have to be something universal, it can be in your environment.

00:03:46If you know corrupt people in your environment, you can call them out. If you know that there are

00:03:52people who are abusing their children, hitting their children, neglecting their children, pursuing

00:03:57money at the expense of their children's well-being, you can call them out on that, which is a good

00:04:01thing to do. You can create a happy family of your own. You can create a business that treats people

00:04:07well and is a meritocracy rather than some DEI whirlpool of incompetence. So yeah, you can do lots of

00:04:14great things in the world to promote virtue and to combat evildoers. And if you do that, right,

00:04:23virtue is that which is most human about us. And evil is that which is most anti-human about us.

00:04:30Because evil uses the principles of virtue to spread evil. And so it is the opposite of humanity to be

00:04:37evil. It is the essence of humanity. Since we are rational, universal, conceptual creatures,

00:04:43and virtue conforms to universal reason, as I've proven many times over in my book,

00:04:50Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. You can get that for free,

00:04:54freedomain.com slash books, or you can go to essentialphilosophy.com. The last third of that

00:04:58is a boiled down version or argument for UPB. So reason and virtue conform. They are like two trees

00:05:08that have grown together. And so that which most deploys or abstract reasoning in a consistent

00:05:14fashion is that which is most human. Because that is the one thing to differentiate humans from all

00:05:18other species is our capacity for abstract universal reasoning. Virtue is that which is most human.

00:05:24However, evil uses virtuous principles to subvert morality, right? So evil says,

00:05:32Hey, you know how you want to help people and be nice? Let's set up a welfare state where we

00:05:37borrow and

00:05:37print and take money by force to help the poor. Oh, see, look, now we help. So it uses your

00:05:43desire to do

00:05:44good, which could be in this case to help the poor, and instead uses it to subvert and destroy morality

00:05:51and your society. So it takes that which is most human about you and sets it against yourself and uses

00:05:59your

00:05:59desire for virtue to destroy you, which is about as evil a thing as can be conceived of. So yeah,

00:06:06do good, fight evil, and you'll never have to worry about meaning. Meaning, the questions about meaning

00:06:15are the existential angst that rushes in where cowardice has prevented you from promoting virtue and

00:06:25fighting evildoers, right? I mean, if you are promoting virtue and fighting evil, it's a very

00:06:34exciting life. I can tell you that for sure. It's a very exciting life and a very worthwhile life. I

00:06:39never

00:06:39have any problems or issues with meaning or purpose or anything like that. If you are fulfilling that

00:06:45which is the most human, that which is the most powerful, that which is the most universal, and that

00:06:48which is the most beneficial, how could you possibly worry about meaning? Meaning or, oh, what's the

00:06:56purpose, what's the meaning, what's the value of my life, and so on, is the natural vacuum that rushes

00:07:03in to fill a void of moral courage. And listen, I sympathize. I'm not trying to call you a coward

00:07:08or

00:07:08anything like that, but because we all have, you know, limits of what we can do and so on. But

00:07:12if you

00:07:13reasonably throw yourself into good versus evil, you will never have to worry about meaning or purpose

00:07:21or depression ever, ever again. Somebody says, I have bipolar disorder and during a manic episode,

00:07:27I did a lot of shitty things to my friends that I wish I could take back. I want to

00:07:31apologize and

00:07:32sorry, my nose hairs are itching. I want to apologize and rebuild my relationship with them, but the most

00:07:37important part of any apology is a promise that whatever happened won't happen again. I can't make that

00:07:43promise in good faith because I can't be, I can't account for what might happen if I have another

00:07:49episode. How am I supposed to ask for forgiveness if I'm incapable of making a promise that it won't

00:07:53happen again? Yeah, listen, I don't, I don't really know much about bipolar disorder. I'm really

00:08:02tripolar. But so, yeah, good, evil, and integrity. So, as far as bipolar goes, I will tell you my

00:08:10particular opinion about this kind of stuff. It's just an opinion, I'm not a scientist, you know, talk

00:08:16to your doctor, blah, blah, blah. My opinion is that with the exception of scannable brain degenerative

00:08:25disorders, it's just a matter of willpower. I'm just telling you this is my opinion, could be wrong,

00:08:30I just tell you this is my opinion. And people who say, I was out of control of myself, don't

00:08:42seem to

00:08:45ever yell verbal abuse at cops or, you know, take on security guards and so on. Like women with

00:08:52postpartum depression always end up bullying their own kids, right? They don't end up bullying

00:08:57being a cop. They don't end up taking a swing at a politician or somebody who has great power. They

00:09:02don't end up trying to choke the principal at the local school, none of which I'm recommending,

00:09:08of course. But they say, well, I'm out of control. But they always pick on the smallest, weakest,

00:09:13and most dependent people around them. It would be like some guy who says, oh, I was just so full

00:09:18of

00:09:19rage, I had to attack everyone. And then he steps around all the big burly guys, and then just

00:09:24punches the little girls, right? So that's not being out of control. So I guess my question would

00:09:29be, if you have bipolar, which is like high and low moods, if you have that, and you say

00:09:38shitty things to your friends, do you also say shitty things to your boss? Do you also say shitty

00:09:43things to a policeman? Do you also say shitty things to someone who has some kind of power over

00:09:47you? And if the answer is no, then you're not out of control at all, at all. And don't try

00:09:55and pull

00:09:56this stuff with me. Now, this is if this is the case, if you're, if you're currently writing to me

00:10:00from jail, because, you know, you verbally attacked a cop or did something crazy, like, you know,

00:10:06what's that song? Grab a cop's gun kind of crazy.

00:10:13If you can find your shitty outbursts, just to people who have no power over you, then guess

00:10:19what, bro? You're not out of control at all. You're just a bully. Now, you may be a bully with

00:10:25some biochemical thing, although, surprisingly enough, they can never find this biochemical

00:10:30thing in the same way that they can never find postpartum depression showing up in any kind of

00:10:34hormone changes. So, it's not that. So, my, you know, right or wrong, I have a lot of evidence

00:10:41for this, but right or wrong, crazy people are not crazy if they're not crazy all the time.

00:10:48So, I've said this before a million times. I'll keep it brief here, you know, just for the new

00:10:52listeners and new callers. My mother was very abusive and violent. However, bing bong, when the

00:10:57doorbell rang, she was all sweetness and light and so on, right? So, she'd be screaming at me and

00:11:03hitting me and then once or twice, she'd called the cops and with the cops, she wasn't screaming

00:11:08at anyone, she wasn't hitting anyone, she was perfectly sweet and reasonable and got the

00:11:11cops on her side. So, she's not crazy. She just lacks self-discipline. So, you know, my

00:11:19mother could be screaming, you know, full-on Klingon neck at me and then the phone would

00:11:23ring and if it was some guy she wanted to date, hi, how are you? You know, just kind of

00:11:28sweetness

00:11:28and light, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and so on. And so, that's not crazy. You know,

00:11:38somebody who's having a, like a full-on psychotic break or something like that, I mean, they'll

00:11:42just say anything to anyone. They have no sense of self-preservation and so on. So, if you're

00:11:46able to restrain it at all, then you're responsible for restraining it completely. If somebody's

00:11:53having an epileptic attack, they can't just not have the epileptic attack when the doorbell rings

00:11:57or the phone rings or something like that or they don't have an epileptic attack and

00:12:01then when they get on a motorcycle, they're perfectly fine, right? So, they have an epileptic

00:12:04attack and they're just having their seizures and it's really tragic and difficult but they

00:12:08have no control over it so we have great sympathy for that. If you can control your crazy, you're

00:12:14not crazy. If you can control your crazy, a lot of mental illness, again, my humble amateur

00:12:21opinion, a lot of mental illness is just a lack of self-discipline. Just imagine, like

00:12:29if you want to scream at someone or you want to say shitty things to someone, just imagine

00:12:33they're your boss and can fire you like that or imagine it's a policeman at your doorbell

00:12:40on your doorstep. You could just be pulled over by the cops. Are you going to say shitty

00:12:44things to the cops? Bet you won't. Bet you won't. So, a lot of times, mental illness is

00:12:51just a permission slip to be an asshole because you wouldn't do it with people who had power

00:12:56over you. So, it's just a particular perspective that I have that has a lot of empirical evidence

00:13:09behind it. I've seen a lot of people. I've talked to thousands of people over the course

00:13:13of 21 years doing this show. Oh, yeah, my mother was crazy. Oh, yeah, my dad was crazy. I'm like,

00:13:18wow, they were crazy. Boy, they must have gotten into a lot of trouble with their boss, with a

00:13:24policeman, with someone who had power over them, with somebody who could arrest them or, you

00:13:30know, my dad was just so violent. You know, he was just so impulsive and violent. It's like,

00:13:34wow, boy, he must have been randomly impulsively violent to six foot six guys who were

00:13:38250 pounds of pure muscle. No, no, he never got beaten up by a six foot six guy who's 250

00:13:44pounds

00:13:45of pure muscle. No, no, he was never just towards us kids. Then he didn't have a violence problem.

00:13:53He had a bullying problem. If all of these people who say, I'm so out of control, I just say

00:13:57shitty

00:13:58things to people because I have bipolar. It's like, okay, well, then you must have, you know,

00:14:05gone up to some six foot six guy in a biker outfit and so on and, you know, tears tattooed

00:14:12across his face and a big scar across the bridge of his nose and you must have gone up and

00:14:16said

00:14:16shitty things to him too. Your mother's a whore and so on, right? But miraculously, don't you know,

00:14:23it's really, it's an amazing thing. The saying shitty things to people only manifests with friends

00:14:30who aren't going to beat you up or throw you in jail or there's going to be something or fire

00:14:34you,

00:14:35right? Saying the shitty things, you always manage to restrain it as a whole. I'm not saying you in

00:14:39particular because I don't know your story in particular, but people who just like, well,

00:14:43I just have these impulses and they're so hard to control. It's like, well, then why are you able

00:14:47to control them when you would suffer more negative consequences from expressing them? And that's

00:14:54probably what your friends are sensing. If you are someone who just is going to say terrible things

00:15:00to his friends, regardless, then I'm sorry to say that your friends need to find better friends.

00:15:07I mean, in you, like your friend, your friends need to find a better friend than you are. Because if

00:15:11you just say, well, look, I have this thing called bipolar and therefore I have the permission to say

00:15:17terrible things to you, to say the most horrible soul-riving kind of stuff to you, then, I mean,

00:15:22I wouldn't want you as my friend. So what you need to do, if this is the case, if you

00:15:27just are

00:15:27going to be shitty to your friends, then you need to say to your friends, look, I genuinely can't

00:15:32control this, even though it never seems to happen with big, strong, tough guys, policemen, bosses,

00:15:36and so on. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and be friends with other bipolar

00:15:41people so

00:15:42that we can all call each other shitty names and we all understand it. And so you need to find

00:15:48people on your level. All right. Let's see here. What are your thoughts on moral maxims?

00:15:55For instance, the categorical imperative versus something like the Ubermensch. Yeah, so the

00:16:00categorical imperative is Kant's argument that says, act as if the principle of your action

00:16:05becomes a general rule for everyone. But why? But why? Why would you do that? I mean, if you're

00:16:14a thief and most people are honest and most people respect property rights, then you can make a very

00:16:19good living being a thief, right? Why should you act as if the principle of your action becomes a

00:16:25general rule for everyone? And the other thing too, if you are the biggest and strongest guy

00:16:30in a small village, you could say, well, my moral is that the biggest, strongest guy should win

00:16:39the fairest maiden or the most money or the biggest land or whatever it is. He'd have the most power.

00:16:43So as the biggest, strongest guy, I say the biggest, strongest guy should win every contest.

00:16:48That's a universal rule that benefits you. So it ain't it. UPB again.

00:16:54What do you think about fathers who enforce performative masculinity on their sons or who

00:16:59disallow perceived effeminate activities like dancing or singing or playing with dolls?

00:17:04There's nothing effeminate about dancing or singing, maybe playing with dolls, I guess you could say.

00:17:12But dancing and singing are very masculine coded and so on, right? So, I mean, women love singers and

00:17:20dancers have great physiques and great rhythm and male dancers were very much in demand. So,

00:17:28you know, being a man is interesting. It's very complex as is being a woman. It's interesting because

00:17:33you need to be masculine, but you also need to understand femininity just in the same way that

00:17:37to be a woman, you need to be feminine, but you also need to understand masculinity. So you don't

00:17:44want to be a caricature. Like, you know how some gay men have that voice and that way of walking

00:17:48and

00:17:49that. That's kind of, to me, that seems a little bit of a caricature. And it's the same thing with

00:17:53like

00:17:53super tough guys got to talk like this. You know, I remember being at a disco many years ago and

00:18:00seeing

00:18:00an Asian guy with the mirrored sunglasses across the dance floor looking super cool. And he walked

00:18:07straight into a pillar and then just groped his way forward. Would not take off his sunglasses,

00:18:10even though he couldn't see a damn thing. Just wanted to be super cool. And, oh gosh,

00:18:18Wim Wender's film. I can't remember what it was. There was a super cool Japanese guy in the movie.

00:18:23I had no emotions. And I remember him throwing up a lighter and falling into his shirt pocket. And I

00:18:32went to see it with a Japanese woman who was a friend of mine. And she said, oh, so many

00:18:35guys in

00:18:35the Japanese culture are like that. So to me, that's kind of a bit of a cliche. Try not to

00:18:40be

00:18:42like the cliche for a philosopher, this dust in the wind, you know, from Bill and Ted's Excellent

00:18:46Adventure, is to be kind of spaced out and distant and not have anything useful to say and be hard

00:18:52to

00:18:52understand and so on. Right. But I still very, very, I very deeply remember what it's like to

00:18:57start learning philosophy. So I always want to explain it in a way that makes sense to people

00:19:01who are just kind of waiting in. So if a man, let's say his son likes singing and dancing,

00:19:08and he's like, that does not fit into the category of my caricature of masculinity. I don't know. I think

00:19:15that's not good. You don't want to impose stereotypes, caricatures, and roles on your

00:19:22children from outside. You want to let them be who they are, express who they are, follow their

00:19:28own personality. Because here's the thing. Parenting has very little effect on personality.

00:19:35It's really hard to find the effect of parenting on most life outcomes. I mean,

00:19:39single parenting abuse and so on, single motherhood abuse, these things have an effect. But in terms of

00:19:45parenting as a whole, you know, like if you starve your kids, God forbid, right? If you starve your kids,

00:19:51they're going to grow up shorter, but you don't have much to do with how tall your kids turn out.

00:19:58So it's the same thing with a lot of personality structures. People, all you can do is suppress

00:20:03your child's natural personality. You can't really change it, so to speak. So it'd be like trying to

00:20:09parent so that your children change their eye color or something like that. So yeah, try not to impose

00:20:16cliches and caricatures on people. All right, especially your kids. Next question,

00:20:21do you have a materialist take on the mind-body problem? The only direction that makes any sense

00:20:25to me is the universal theory of consciousness, that the essence of experience emerges from any

00:20:32sufficiently complex system. Yeah, so the mind-body problem is how does the physical brain produce

00:20:38the mind? I mean, in terms of actually understanding the physical and biological

00:20:48processes, nobody knows yet. And I talked about this before, of course. Yeah, nobody knows, but it's

00:20:53definitely something which we should continue to look into. Our brain is the most complex thing in

00:20:57the known universe. It's the most complex thing in the universe, I imagine, since all of our consciousness

00:21:02would be similar to ours because we all inhabit the same universe. So our brain is by far the most

00:21:08complex thing in the universe that we know of. And so it makes sense that the most complex thing

00:21:14that is trying to understand itself will take a bit of time to understand itself. I mean, if you look

00:21:19at the advancements of brain science that have occurred just over the last 100 and 150 years,

00:21:23it's truly staggering. So, you know, we're continuing to work on the problem of how the physical brain

00:21:28produces consciousness, but it does. Of course it does, right? And we know it's biochemical,

00:21:35electrical energy, and so on, because when that's all gone, somebody's dead and generally don't come

00:21:39back. And we know that there's no consciousness without a brain. And we know that there's no

00:21:44functioning brain that is healthy, I mean not deficient, that does not produce consciousness.

00:21:49So the brain produces the mind as an effect of itself in the same way that gravity is produced by

00:21:56mass

00:21:56as an effect of itself. So on the mind-body problem, yeah, consciousness is produced by the

00:22:02physical brain. Like, of course it is, right? Consciousness, I'm not speaking to you from my

00:22:06elbow here, right? Can you kiss your elbow? I don't think you can. So I don't have an answer as

00:22:16to how

00:22:16it all happens in detail, but of course religious people don't have an answer either. Religious people

00:22:21are just saying magic, it's magic, and it's like magic is not an answer. Saying God is just saying

00:22:26I don't know plus magic. And I don't know plus magic is a contradiction. Because saying I don't

00:22:32know, and then saying I do know but it's magic, magic is another way of saying I don't know. So

00:22:40it's a, it's saying I don't know and I'm pretending to know. I don't know and I do know, and

00:22:45the answer

00:22:46that I do know is it's magic, which means it's incomprehensible. So I don't know how the brain

00:22:52produces consciousness. Wait, I do know how the brain produces consciousness and it's incomprehensible

00:22:59magic. The soul, God, right? So that's not, I would rather just say I don't know. It's a fascinating

00:23:06problem. We should keep working on it. It's very interesting. But, you know, of course the brain

00:23:11produces the mind. We don't exactly know how. We're making great strides in that direction. And I just

00:23:17refuse, like it's an ego thing to me. And what I mean by an ego thing is I refuse to

00:23:25pretend to have

00:23:26knowledge that I don't have. Like why would I bother to pretend to have knowledge that I don't

00:23:30have? Because I'm afraid of something, you know, like, like if you're a kid and you didn't do the

00:23:33homework and then the teacher says, oh, come up little Billy and do the homework on the board.

00:23:39Show your hope. Well, you go up and you pretend you've, you faked some stuff and then you say, oh,

00:23:43this is, this is as far as I got before the dog got sick with rabies and I had to

00:23:47flee Cujo,

00:23:48whatever it is, right? So I view it as a humiliating submission to power and dominance and brutality

00:23:57and hostility to pretend to know something I don't know. Because like, you know, in the debate with Jay

00:24:05Dyer, his question made no sense to me. And I've talked to a whole bunch of audience members because

00:24:10I went and canvassed the audience afterwards and I said, what did Jay mean by this? And of course,

00:24:14the audience said, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what he meant by that, right? So when I

00:24:17said,

00:24:18I don't know, I was not alone in that. So because I'm not going to pretend to understand something I

00:24:23don't understand because that submission to fear, that submission to power, that submission to

00:24:28brutal authority or a dominance, right? You know, like if, if you're, if you have an abusive parent

00:24:36and they say, where's the flashlight? You had it last. You'd say, no, no, I didn't, I didn't have the

00:24:39flashlight. Even if you did, right? You pretend, oh, I don't know where the flashlight is. Oh,

00:24:42I didn't have it. You're just because they're brutal and powerful and can harm you. So to me,

00:24:47if I don't know something, I will say, I don't know. I will also say the answer isn't a pretend

00:24:55answer like magic, right? Like magic. So it is an act of subjugation and humiliation

00:25:06to pretend to know something that you don't. And by far the most common way of pretending to know

00:25:10something you don't is to claim the magic of God. It's nonsense. All right. Um, what draws me to

00:25:19Christianity is my sense of evil in the world, Satanism, PDF files, et cetera. And the fact that

00:25:23these are, uh, evildoers hate Christianity, plus the reverberations of all this good versus evil

00:25:28battle over millennia. It seems to me the common denominator of existence. How to explain this?

00:25:33Um, yeah. Yeah. Evildoers hate every system of virtue. I mean, I have a system of virtue

00:25:41called universally preferable behavior that is hated by evildoers. Evildoers hate all systems of

00:25:49virtue. It's just that they can hate an irrational authority system of virtue. Like God commands it.

00:25:54Magic commands X is not a system of virtue. It's a system of domination. So, um, if you doubt

00:26:01that evildoers hate rational systems of virtue or only hate Christianity, then bring a rational

00:26:08system of virtue to your family and friends. Like if your family and friends are harming their children

00:26:16or want to circumcise their kids or spank their kids or neglect their kids, then you say, uh, you know,

00:26:23here's the science, reasoning, and evidence behind why you shouldn't, uh, do these things and,

00:26:29and see how they react, right? They'll react with great hostility. I have lost friendships over the

00:26:34years, long time ago now. I've lost friendships over, uh, people who wanted to circumcise their

00:26:40kids as a genital mutilation is evil. Don't do it. It's wrong. And they wanted to go ahead with it

00:26:47and they went ahead with it and I don't, I'm not friends with them anymore. So if you think that

00:26:53evil only hates Christianity, just take it for a spin, try giving evil moral rules, not from God

00:27:01and, uh, just see how, how that goes. All right. Um, and of course, I mean, the big problem with,

00:27:07with Christianity is when, when men had most of the resources, because women were busy having children

00:27:13and running the household prior to labor saving devices, when men had most of the resources,

00:27:18Christianity catered to men. But then when through inheritance, through the welfare state, through

00:27:24various other government programs, through alimony and, and so on, women now have control of a lot

00:27:30of resources. Christianity has pivoted to please women and has become highly feminized. And I mean,

00:27:36I went to a church service here in Canada, which was wildly feminized. And so, yeah, the church just

00:27:43pivots. It doesn't have any foundational principles. Uh, and you know, I mean, one of the foundational

00:27:48principles is the man is the head of the household and the woman should obey the man. That's sort of

00:27:52foundational to Christianity. And you, you can't, you, you can go the length and breadth of Christendom

00:27:58and hear this almost never talked about. So what are the foundational principles of Christianity?

00:28:07They change. They change. All right. Um, how do you handle philosophical disagreements with your

00:28:14daughter or wife? What is the biggest disagreement between you? What do you do if you can't convince

00:28:19one another? Do you keep talking about an issue for years? Um, I don't really have any foundational

00:28:26disagreements with my wife that I can recall. Um, other than she wants to redo the kitchen. It's not a

00:28:32moral disagreement. So I don't really have any disagreements with my wife about anything

00:28:37foundational. Uh, with regards to my daughter, um, there's things that I've taught her. There's

00:28:41things that she's learned from outside the household and so on. But, um, with regards to

00:28:46my daughter, since I was responsible for educating her, um, and my wife, uh, I can't have any foundational

00:28:53disagreements with her because that was my job to teach her. I mean, yeah, we have some disagreements

00:28:59for sure. And she has some good perspectives. She's changed my mind about some things. I've

00:29:03changed her mind about some things and it's a really good exchange of ideas. All right. I'm a

00:29:07subscriber. I'm trying to figure out the dire criticism. Can you seal me on his arguments?

00:29:11Like the number seven versus seven coconuts argument. What was he trying to get at with asking about what

00:29:18an arm is? I just want to understand what their criticism is. Yeah. So very briefly, where do we get

00:29:25universal absolute concepts from? Now, my argument is from universal absolute properties of matter and

00:29:32energy. That's where we get them from. And if we get, uh, numbers, mathematics, abstract, logic,

00:29:38reasoning, and so on, universal concepts, if we get them from matter or energy, there's no need for

00:29:42God, right? In fact, God is a deranged additional layer to that which is real and true. It's crazy.

00:29:50I mean, as I said in the debate, it's like saying, where's gravity? Well, gravity is an innate

00:29:54property of matter and, uh, thousands of, uh, atomic angels flapping their wings and pushing

00:30:01matter closer together. Like you don't need the angels. In fact, they're counterproductive.

00:30:06So Jay has to dislodge the idea that concepts come from matter and energy

00:30:14because if concepts come from matter and energy, you don't need God. If concepts, if universal concepts

00:30:19that we have in our minds that are true everywhere, he even says sometimes in all possible universes,

00:30:23as if he knows what any of that means. So if Jay can say, our universal concepts don't come from

00:30:29matter and energy, then he's made the case very strong for there being a God because they have

00:30:32to come from a mind. I mean, the concepts, universal concepts come from a mind. They exist within the

00:30:38mind. And so if they don't come from our material universe, they have to come from something outside

00:30:43of our material universe that would be a mind, right? So that's a transcendental argument for God.

00:30:48And the way that you counter that is to say reason and evidence come from matter and energy. And matter

00:30:54and energy are universally stable and predictable, and therefore reason works with that. So, I mean,

00:31:00the counter. So, so what he's trying to say is we have different brains, but we both have the number

00:31:05seven. Now I say that we both have the number seven in our brains because we live in a world

00:31:12of

00:31:12discrete objects that we can count. Like we both live in the same universe of discrete objects,

00:31:17things, right? Coconuts or marbles or fingers, phalanges, right? That we can count. So that's

00:31:24where we get the number seven from. Whereas he says, how do we share the number seven if we have

00:31:29different brains? Magic, God, right? Outside the universe in some incomprehensible manner, these

00:31:37concepts land in our brains through a mechanism we will never be able to understand, right? It's not an

00:31:40answer. It's not anything. It's just, but it's just a way of propping up the trillions of dollars a

00:31:45year that get transferred in the name of religion. It's just a, it's a way to prop up the con

00:31:52and the

00:31:52scam and so on, right? Why did you struggle so much articulating how concept formation works

00:32:00in the mind in your debate with Jay Dyer? I know he was yelling in your ear the entire time,

00:32:05but I've seen you crisply articulate this in the past. I was disappointed it didn't land

00:32:10this time. Well, I mean, he would ask me a question and immediately start shouting over the

00:32:16answer. I mean, that's a cowardly, pathetic, bullshit debate tactic. Look, if I get something

00:32:23wrong, if I misquote him, then of course he should interrupt me for sure. But asking someone a question,

00:32:27they start to answer it and then you start shouting over them. I mean, that loses the debate.

00:32:33Really? I mean, that just loses the debate. That's like, it's like serving a ball in tennis

00:32:42and then like you serve and then right after you serve, you serve again and you serve again

00:32:47and then say, well, he can't hit the balls back. Therefore I win, right? I mean, if you serve once

00:32:51and the guy can't hit the ball back, then you win the point. If you serve three times in a

00:32:56row

00:32:56or you serve three balls at once and the guy can't hit all the balls back, you haven't won. You've

00:33:00just

00:33:00lost the game of tennis because you've broken the rules, right? So I did say how concept formation

00:33:07works in a variety of ways. I said, here's how it works philosophically, right? A reason is derived

00:33:13from the stable properties of matter and energy. I said, here's how it worked evolutionarily. And I

00:33:17talked about the growth of three times the brain volume from Australopith forward from six or seven,

00:33:23or three million years ago, the split from chimpanzees six or seven million years ago.

00:33:26So I talked about it philosophically. I talked about it from a sense data perspective. I talked

00:33:31about it evolutionarily speaking. And I also talked about it from an individual person. We can see how

00:33:37reason is developed in the mind through constant interaction with sense data. And I pointed out

00:33:42that blind people can't reason spatially and deaf people can't hear sarcastic tones and so on. And

00:33:48they don't have a theory of mind that includes that very easily. And they can't process auditory

00:33:53cues and so on. And I pointed out that Jay was relying on the stable properties of matter and

00:33:58energy to communicate a rational argument, which means he's hoping that reason comes from matter

00:34:02and energy. And therefore he can't say reason doesn't come from matter and energy. If he's using

00:34:06matter and energy to transmit reason, I pointed out that we have, we both have arms, even though

00:34:12they're not the same arm. So we have, so anyway, I mean, I don't know when people say that I

00:34:18struggle

00:34:18with something. It's a bit of a bullshit move. I mean, if people aren't playing by the rules and,

00:34:25you know, if somebody starts chewing on my bishop and says they've taken the piece, right, they just

00:34:31grab the bishop and it's like, well, you seem to struggle with, it's like, but they're not playing

00:34:34by the rules, right? All right. How to drive myself? Hope, skills, people, God, I mentioned that,

00:34:41pursue virtue, spread virtue and fight evil and begin. Have you had any personal experience with LSD and or DMT?

00:34:47No. I view my brain as a collective good of mankind because I didn't earn my brain and my

00:34:54ability to communicate, my ability to reason, my ability to debate. I did not earn that. I was just

00:34:59born with it. Now I've refined it and all of that, but that's like saying if you're born with a

00:35:02great

00:35:03singing voice and you take singing lessons to preserve it, it doesn't mean that you, the singing

00:35:07lessons gave you the singing voice. So I view my brain as a collective good that mankind has that

00:35:14were produced by four billion years of evolution. So I can't mess with it. So I don't do drugs.

00:35:18All right. Should we allow life sentence prisoners the chance to do hard labor instead of rotting in

00:35:22a cell, assuming it isn't forced? I don't know the right way that prisoners should be dealt with

00:35:31in a free society. I don't know. I think that people would experiment with a wide variety of ways.

00:35:37I think that society as a whole will work with economic ostracism in the future so the people

00:35:43who do wrong and don't submit to any kind of punishment or any kind of restitution, that those

00:35:48people will be ostracized from the society. Nobody will want to do any business with them. So they

00:35:52basically have to leave the society if you can't get electricity, water, you can't use anyone's roads

00:35:56and so on. So maybe it would be good to do hard labor. I don't know. Do you want to

00:36:01give people

00:36:02who are very violent hammers to break things with? I don't know. I don't know. So the point is that

00:36:08everything should be peaceful, reasonable, and voluntary, particularly parenting. It's sort of

00:36:14like saying when slaves picked all the cotton, should we use labor or should we use automated cotton

00:36:22pickers or should we use, you know, some other or should we just give up using cotton or whatever it

00:36:26is? I don't know. I don't know how things happen when society is less evil. Like I don't know what

00:36:33everyone should do when they're not slaves. I just know that slavery is evil. All right.

00:36:38How does one reconcile non-local, non-spatial qualia with the matter from which, isn't it qualia?

00:36:45Didn't she show up in the Tarantino movie with Brad Pitt offering to do unspeakable things to him

00:36:52in a car? How does one reconcile non-local, non-spatial qualia with the matter from which

00:36:57it ostensibly depends, brains short of saying, in a cop-out fashion that is itself a reflexive

00:37:04effect on the physical processes within said matter, i.e. imminent emergence. So qualia are

00:37:10the subjective qualitative experience of conscious, aspects of conscious experience. What is it like to

00:37:17feel pain, see red, taste wine, or experience any sensation? So how does one reconcile non-local,

00:37:25non-spatial qualia with the matter from which it ostensibly depends? Yeah. So some people like

00:37:31peanut butter. Some people don't like peanut butter. It's the same peanut butter. We have the same cells

00:37:35or the same atoms in our, similar atoms in our taste buds and so on. Some people like it. Some

00:37:41people

00:37:41don't. Some people like red wine. Some people like white wine. Some people don't like wine. I'm not a

00:37:46wine guy at all. I don't like it at all. So I don't know what you mean by reconcile.

00:37:53We don't know how, like we don't know all of the sequences and mechanics by which objective

00:38:02sense data produces subjective mental states. We don't know that. The brain is unimaginably

00:38:10complex. And it's not just the brain. We have sensations from the body. Everyone thinks the five

00:38:15senses. Well, there's balance. There's hunger. There's sort of other senses. We have a second

00:38:18brain, which is a gut brain, which has neurons as well. You know, your gut sense and all of that.

00:38:23So

00:38:24we are unbelievably complex. And it's kind of a bullshit question to say. So this is, I'm not saying

00:38:33this is you, but this is generally what happens, right? So people will ask a question that we don't

00:38:39have the answer yet. And they'll say, well, they forgot. Right? So, you know, when Jay was asking,

00:38:48well, how do we have the same number in our mind despite having different brains? I mean, I can

00:38:54answer that question from a general philosophical standpoint. But the reason I don't ask, I don't,

00:38:59I don't understand the question is, is he saying he has an answer? If he's saying he has an answer,

00:39:05then the answer is the magic of God. But then I would say that's not an answer, right? But Jay

00:39:09likes staying interrogatory. He likes basically barking questions at people and yelling at them

00:39:13that they're creating, that they're, to God, to God, right? That they're making logical fallacies,

00:39:18which I wasn't anyway. But like, if you say to me, what's your answer to this? I haven't, if Jay

00:39:25says

00:39:25to me, Steph, what's your answer to this? I have an answer. Right? And he says, when I start

00:39:31telling my answer, he says, that's not valid. That's a storytelling. That's, that's, what else

00:39:36did he say? Filibustering and so on. Right? I'm like, okay, well, what's your answer? Right? Because

00:39:42I also want to be in the position of critiquing Jay's answer. Right? So if he says to me, what's

00:39:47your answer? And then he interrupts my answer. And he keeps drilling me on questions, which I know he

00:39:51has a habit of doing because it keeps him in the driver's seat, keeps him in a position of

00:39:55control or dominance, which appeals to fools. So of course, I have the right to say, well,

00:40:01what's your answer? And if his answer is God, then I can critique that answer is okay. So if you

00:40:06say

00:40:06to me, well, Steph, you can't explain every single physical, biochemical, neurological, and, and DNA step

00:40:15of how the brain produces consciousness or how similar sense data produces similar concepts, and

00:40:22then say, and then I have the right to ask, well, if you consider my answer deficient and you have

00:40:29an answer, then you need to tell me your great answer. Right? Like your answer that works. But

00:40:34Jay doesn't like that. Right? He doesn't, he doesn't like if I were to say, well, how do you explain

00:40:38it?

00:40:39And he says magic. Well, he says God. Right? I said, okay, well, you needed me to explain every

00:40:43sequence about how it happens and kept interrupting me. So tell me how it happens. How does God do it?

00:40:48Tell me the exact processes by which God does things. People say, well, how is the universe was created

00:40:52by God? It's like, okay, so the fact that we don't know what's going on in the couple of

00:40:56billionths of a second after the Big Bang, and still math sort of fails at that area.

00:41:00Okay, that's an interesting thing, you know, keep working on it and so on. It doesn't really have

00:41:03anything to do with virtue, morals, and ethics in the here and now. It's an interesting origin story.

00:41:08But then people say, well, I have an answer, and the answer is God, because people are saying to me,

00:41:12like, well, you show me how matter started at the Big Bang or something like that. And I'm like,

00:41:16okay, that's, that's fine. So you claim to have an answer. And my answer requires a deep

00:41:22amount of knowledge, which, of course, it's a, nobody has that knowledge. Nobody knows exactly

00:41:27how the brain produces the mind or how concepts go from raw sense data into universal abstractions.

00:41:33Again, nobody knows, I mean, philosophically, we know, and from a general evolutionary and

00:41:38child development psychology, we can sort of see it happening. But nobody has a fun, a fundamental

00:41:42answer, you know, every single conceivable step as to how we go from raw sense data to abstract

00:41:47universal concepts. So, of course, it's kind of a bullshit question, because it's like,

00:41:51it's a way of saying, when somebody says, I don't know, right? So, because it's, you can always find

00:41:57gaps, right? So I say, here's how it works developmentally, here's how it works philosophically,

00:42:01here's how it works from a sense data perspective, here's how we can show the development of it,

00:42:07evolutionarily speaking, and so on. So then people say, well, there's something missing there,

00:42:11right? And therefore, you can't answer the question. And then to stymie the materialist by saying,

00:42:17well, you can't answer every possible detail about how we go from sense data to universal

00:42:21concepts. But the implication is that the person asking you the questions that he's finding you

00:42:32can't answer every conceivable level of it, they claim to have an answer, right? They claim to have

00:42:39an answer. But Jay, or people like him, they don't like the question being turned back on them,

00:42:48right? So when I said, do you not understand how basic biology works? Do you not understand how

00:42:52sense data works with the mind? But that's a fair return question. And if he's going to say, yes,

00:42:57I do understand that, then I'll say, okay, then explain to me how it happens. And if he's going to

00:43:01say, no, I don't understand it, then I say, well, then you can't accuse me of having gaps in my

00:43:05knowledge if you have gaps in your knowledge. So he just, he wants to stay in a position of

00:43:09dominance. So he wants to keep interrogating me. And then when I turn around and try and ask him

00:43:13questions, because what's going to happen is he's going to say, well, you can't explain how we get

00:43:17the same numbers despite having different brains, even though I can in a very general developmental

00:43:23and evolutionary sense. And certainly in a philosophical sense, we can understand it.

00:43:27But he has an answer, but he doesn't want to give his answer. And this is why it was confusing

00:43:31to

00:43:31you, because you don't know why he was talking about that kind of stuff. Because his answer is

00:43:35that the magic of God creates these concepts in our mind. And I get to interrogate him on that,

00:43:41but he doesn't want that, right? Which is why nobody understood. He didn't want to answer those

00:43:44questions. All right. Let's see here. If goodness, is goodness still a virtue if it comes at the

00:43:50expense of strength? This question sits at the intersection of Nietzsche and Christ. Nietzsche might

00:43:54ask whether goodness is an expression of strength or merely justification for weakness.

00:43:59Christians might challenge the very definition of strength.

00:44:10virtue in the modern sense, because we still have significant freedom of association in the world

00:44:17as it stands. So virtue in the modern sense allows you to disconnect from corrupt people who resist

00:44:25reason and evidence. This has been my mission for 21 years, being called all kinds of names under the

00:44:30books for just stating this basic, simple reality. So I do not have corrupt evildoers in my life.

00:44:40I don't have them. So is that strong? Is that weak? I mean, I suppose it takes some strength to

00:44:48even tear away all historical relationships if they fail the test of virtue. So I don't know about strong

00:44:54or weak or anything like that. I do not associate with evildoers as a whole. All right. Do you still

00:45:03believe AI is fake? My tester drives me. It's boring. I never said AI is fake. All right. If there

00:45:09was no

00:45:09God or purpose of the universe and someone is suffering and miserable every day, would you find it acceptable

00:45:16for somebody to self-delete? Religious folks say no. I don't know. I mean, I couldn't possibly make that

00:45:23decision to someone else. So self-deletion, we could all understand. There are situations where you're

00:45:30facing unbearable pain with no cure in sight for months and months. I mean, I can understand it.

00:45:36Or maybe your disease is incurable and it's destroying your entire family's finances.

00:45:41I don't know. I do know that others who self-delete tend to be very destructive and it is an

00:45:46absolute

00:45:47atom bomb on the happiness of others. It's a final act of rage, which cannot be answered. So I have

00:45:52very little respect for people who self-delete as a whole, but there can be circumstances where

00:45:57we could understand it as an option on the table. All right. Somebody says, how can a man with your

00:46:03intellect who rejects Catholicism and don't create enough offspring to replace themselves

00:46:09be convinced to embrace it before it's too late, considering that UPB is not a realistic goal,

00:46:15while Christianity is a realistic goal with a proven history of global success?

00:46:22So, I mean, listen, I get where you're coming from. Atheism is a bit of a psyop so that intelligent

00:46:27people don't find as much meaning in life, so they're less likely to reproduce. I get all of that.

00:46:33But I just have to lash. I've lashed myself to the mask of truth for almost half a century now.

00:46:39Almost half a century now. It is the reality of everything that I've done. I've sacrificed

00:46:43things for it. Now, of course, there's a fallacy of sunk costs. If I've sacrificed everything

00:46:47for the sake of truth, and it turns out it's not the truth, whoopsie. Slight error. Should

00:46:53have taken a left. But I am into all of that. So you're arguing from consequences, and I get where

00:47:02you're coming from. Maybe I oppose religion to the point where communists take over and destroy

00:47:08everything that I love. Yes, that certainly is a possibility, but it is very important for me

00:47:15that I just focus on the truth as a whole. And Christianity, you know, much respect for a lot

00:47:23of Christianity, absolutely, but Christianity has been unable to hang on to countries. It is a sort

00:47:30of sad fact of history that the cultures that give their women the fewest rights grow and spread,

00:47:39and the culture that gives their women the most rights tend to fade and die off. We can go into

00:47:46sort of various reasons why, but it is kind of an incontrovertible fact. I don't necessarily think

00:47:50it's rights or not. I think what it is, is that when you give women rights in a status society,

00:47:55right, when you give women voting rights in a status society, which is a society where the government

00:47:59can transfer wealth from one group to another. When you have a status society and you give women

00:48:10the right to vote, women play a much higher stakes game than men do as a whole, because a man

00:48:16can faff

00:48:16around till his 30s or even his 40s and then sort of lock in and buckle down and make something

00:48:23of his

00:48:23life. Women run out of their fertility in their mid to late 30s to a large degree, and certainly there's

00:48:29not much point starting a relationship with a woman in her late 30s if you want to have a couple

00:48:32of

00:48:32kids. It's just not going to happen. And of course, if a woman gets pregnant by the wrong man, then

00:48:37she

00:48:38is locked in and dependent on someone or something for the next 20 plus years. So the reality is that

00:48:45women are just playing a higher stakes game. They have a shorter fertility window. They have less time

00:48:50to, I was going to say screw around, although that doesn't seem to be the case that much anymore.

00:48:54But women have a tougher time. They have higher stakes game with pregnancy. They have a shorter

00:48:59fertility window. And so when you give women the vote, what happens is they vote for old age pensions,

00:49:07so they'll be taken care of when they're old, and so their own parents will be taken care of when

00:49:10they're

00:49:10old, because that generally falls to women. They vote for the welfare state as a whole. They vote for

00:49:16alimony. They vote for child support. They vote for child benefits. And they vote for socialized

00:49:23medicine, because women use more health care resources than men do. And they vote for government

00:49:28education, so they don't have to pay for their own kids' education directly, and so on. And so they just

00:49:32vote to replace the husband with the state. And the state is more reliable, and so on. And women can't

00:49:39afford love. They have to feed their kids, right? So they vote to replace the duties of a husband with

00:49:46the powers of the state, which turns the society into a semi-fascistic, very well-armed mechanism for

00:49:55extracting as many resources as possible from men in order to provide them to women, in order to

00:50:02buy the votes of women, and so on. And so I don't think it's giving women, quote, rights. I think

00:50:07it's

00:50:08in a state of society, it's always going to be the case that women vote to replace

00:50:19husbands with the government. And then what happens is, because they don't rely on a man

00:50:22to provide for them, the women don't rely on men to provide for them when the women are pregnant and

00:50:28raising children, and so on. Then what happens is, being freed of the need for a provider, women tend to

00:50:36angle and cluster towards the 10% of alpha males, and then become promiscuous, because a woman's

00:50:42instinct is always to mate with the highest quality man that she can get a hold of, right? This is

00:50:47basic

00:50:48monkey branching or hypergamy. And so a woman's desire is to mate with the highest quality man, and freed

00:50:53from the need for the man to provide for her, in other words, for the man to commit back to

00:50:56her, when women

00:50:58turn to the government, then women simply become a harem of top-tier men, which I guess is kind of

00:51:04fun

00:51:04for the top-tier men, but not so much fun for any of the other men. And then when men

00:51:09realize, like,

00:51:11man's motivation is driven by a dating sex, marriage, fatherhood, and children, right? That's

00:51:17maybe necessarily in that order. And so when a lot of men can't get a hold of women, because the

00:51:23women

00:51:23are all subsidizing, getting top-tier men with sexual offers, then men lose their motivation, right?

00:51:31They lose their motivation, in the same way that slaves lose their motivation. If you don't get

00:51:36a family, if working hard and buckling down and obeying social rules doesn't get you a wife and

00:51:41kids, and regular sex, and commitment, and love, and all that, then, you know, you're born in video

00:51:47games, and all that sort of nonsense, they'll just take it over, right? This is sort of the mass utopia

00:51:51experiment, where, you know, the females end up killing their young, and the men end up grooming

00:51:57themselves into oblivion, the beautiful ones they were called, so the clivicular kind of stuff that

00:52:01looks maxing. So that is, I get all of that. We have to get to a society that is free

00:52:08of

00:52:09institutional violence. I mean, we just have to get to that society. In the same way we had to get

00:52:13a

00:52:13society that was free of slavery, we just have to get to a society that is free of institutional

00:52:17violence, but people just accept it as the norm, and as the standard, and they believe it's necessary

00:52:22for the survival of the society, so we just have to keep chipping away at that. But it certainly is

00:52:28true that Christians have very little problem at the birth rate. It is the secularists, atheists,

00:52:32the leftists, and so on, who are not particularly breeding, which is why they want to import voters,

00:52:37because they don't, they're not having voters, they're not giving birth to voters. All right,

00:52:40somebody says, my wife is a feminist, not a militant one, and when I play with our daughter,

00:52:47sorry, so when I play with our one-year-old daughter, my wife would completely ignore her

00:52:52as if she wasn't there, even if she cries for a mama. When a baby plays with mama and grabs

00:53:03her

00:53:03face, wife would forcefully push her away. I've been having nightmares lately. Yeah, I'm very sorry

00:53:08about that. It is, it is very, very important to understand that women had to survive constant

00:53:19back and forths of violent men taking over throughout human history. So women have a very fierce bond

00:53:28with their offspring, but it is very easy to change that, right? So not to anthropomorphize lions,

00:53:35of course, but you know that if a male lion is killed who has a family, then if a new

00:53:40male lion

00:53:40comes along, he will kill all of the previous lion's offspring before mating with the, actually,

00:53:45the female rather forcefully mates with the male, demands that he have copulate with her multiple

00:53:49times a day, even biting at his testicles to get him to do it. So, and the females have to

00:53:54bond

00:53:55with the new male, right? So you think the Genghis Khan situation where, you know, the Eurasian hordes,

00:54:03the Mongolian hordes, you know, come streaming across the steppe, they kill all the men, and they

00:54:07take the women as concubines. And they will kill the offspring of the women who were from the previous

00:54:13men, right? Often that would happen in history. And so, again, this is a brutal fact of history. It's not

00:54:20anything positive or negative. I mean, obviously morally negative, but it's simply a description,

00:54:25not a prescription. And so, just genetically or evolutionarily speaking, the women who were able

00:54:32to cut the bonds with their existing children because a new man had taken over, they would be

00:54:41the ones who would reproduce, right? The women who, you know, when their children get disappeared or

00:54:48whatever, if they were like, go down with the kids and fight tooth and nail against the new dominant

00:54:55males, they just wouldn't reproduce, right? They would just get sold into slavery or killed themselves

00:55:00or something like that, right? So, women both have a very strong bond. If there is stability in the

00:55:06society, if there's a change in society, then women drop that bond. And at least there's a strong

00:55:16evolutionary tendency for women to do that. So, my guess is that your wife is a very dangerous thing

00:55:24in a relationship as a whole. Like, to me, when you commit, you say, like when you get married,

00:55:28you have kids, you say, this is the best person that I could possibly be with. There's nobody better

00:55:34to be with, and that's it, right? You can't look upwards at what could have been or what might have

00:55:41been or what could be. And so, my guess is that your wife is not satisfied with you as a

00:55:52husband

00:55:53and provider. This doesn't mean you're not satisfying. I'm just telling you what I would guess

00:55:56if I had to. I don't have to guess, but I choose to guess about what's going on. Because why

00:56:01would

00:56:01she be rejecting her own child unless there was something in her mechanism that was pointing her

00:56:11towards some other dominant male? Now, it could be that she's working and she's got a dominant male

00:56:16boss or something like that, in which case her instincts might be to reject her own current

00:56:20offspring. Because, you know, women didn't evolve with husbands and then, in particular, male bosses

00:56:29that ordered them around. I mean, obviously, males and females were slaves throughout a lot of human

00:56:34history and so on. But women didn't really evolve to have an outside male authority that was far more

00:56:41dominant than her husband. And that is really messing up a lot of pair bonding. This is why women are

00:56:47told to have careers and be boss babes, because it messes up with their pair bonding. For a woman to

00:56:54have

00:56:55an outside boss who, quote, orders her around, it's the equivalent of a man having a mistress

00:57:00on the side, in terms of marital stability. So, why is she rejecting her own child? It's a big

00:57:11question. And evolutionarily speaking, there's good reasons for women to reject their own children

00:57:16when a new dominant male comes along. I could be completely off about any of this, right? So,

00:57:20you know, if it doesn't fit, write to me again and we'll tell you. Or you can do a call

00:57:24and show

00:57:24a call.freedomain.com, but that would be my first guess. All right. What is your solution to the

00:57:31epistemic regress problem? And if you don't currently have one, then why do you think of

00:57:35any of your beliefs irrationally justified? So, he said, every belief system, you can think of them

00:57:43as, wait, that's not an inverted pyramid. Oh, no, this is some Illuminati symbol, isn't it?

00:57:47Right. So, every belief system, sorry for those who are just listening, this is me making a triangle

00:57:52with my fingers, the fingertips here. Every belief system rests on self-evident absolutes.

00:58:00Every belief system, because you can always go on questioning and, well, why is there matter?

00:58:04Or, well, maybe it's God. Or, why is there God? Well, no, it just ends there, right? So,

00:58:08every belief system rests on axioms or self-evident,

00:58:17a self-evident acceptance of things that are true by their nature. A self-evident acceptance of

00:58:23things that are true by their nature. Now, some people say that's God, but that's not rational,

00:58:28because God is neither rational nor empirical. In fact, God is anti-rational. There's so many

00:58:32contradictions. I went over them in my debate with Jay Dyer, and I've done them a billion times before,

00:58:37but there's so many contradictions in the conception of God that God is self-contradictory,

00:58:40and God nowhere shows up in evidence, right? There's no empirical evidence for God,

00:58:46and God is self-contradictory. Matter, right? Like, we're literally composed of matter. I wouldn't

00:58:51deny God if I was literally composed of being a God. If I was a God, I wouldn't deny God.

00:58:55I am

00:58:56composed of matter. I require the stability of matter in order to live, right? I mean, just take an

00:59:02example. When I married my wife, she has a particular character, personality, integrity, and set of

00:59:06virtues that I accept is just part of her personality, part of her brain, part of her

00:59:12character, and she has the same with me. And I don't wake up every morning saying, gee, I wonder

00:59:17which personality my wife has. Now, you think of the complexity of the brain, you know, trillions of

00:59:22neurons and connections and Lord knows what, and new experiences and things that influence us and so

00:59:26on. Yet, my wife is pretty much the same person every day. I mean, we've grown, we've changed and so

00:59:31on. Like, when I went back to my high school reunion after 20 years, everyone was like, man,

00:59:35you're like the same guy. It's like, it's true. I remember seeing something, there was this girl who

00:59:39was shy in my high school, and I saw her down at the end that she still had the same

00:59:43shy posture,

00:59:43she was still the same shy person. And that's something as flexible as personality or character

00:59:49or something like that. You know, the stability of matter, the fact that it's required for your

00:59:55brain to function, for your heart to function, for your cells to replicate, we couldn't possibly

00:59:59function. If matter was unstable, we would never have evolved, we'd never be here, and so on. And so we

01:00:04are composed of stable empirical matter. We're literally looking out from inside matter, using

01:00:10matter and energy to get all of our sense data and to build our concepts of universals from.

01:00:16So we stop where the origin of knowledge is, right? You go north until you get to the North Pole,

01:00:26you can't go further north. That's it. There's no further north. That's it. And the stability and

01:00:30universality and properties of matter and energy are that with which reason is built from. And

01:00:37therefore, reason can't be used to question them, because that's why reason exists in the first

01:00:41place, if that makes sense. So asking what's the cause of reason is like asking if your mother is

01:00:49a virgin, like this is a nonsensical question. So reason is the shadow cast by the stability of

01:00:56matter. And so saying, what is the cause of the shadow is whatever's blocking the light. That's

01:01:04it. There's no further question. I mean, there's a light, and that's what's blocking it, and then the

01:01:08shadow. So hope that makes sense. All right. Why is it that philosophers seem to reject explaining

01:01:16themselves in pure metaphysics? Metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality. We are composed of

01:01:22matter. We interact with matter. We can't transfer information without using matter. You know, all the

01:01:26people who say, well, you can't, as I said before, you can't get reason from matter and energy. They

01:01:31always use matter and energy to transmit their rational arguments. So metaphysics, which is the study of

01:01:37the nature of reality, we are composer of matter and energy. And we can only be alive because of the

01:01:44stability of matter and energy. We can only reason, we only learn because of the stability of matter and

01:01:49energy. I mean, why would you bother learning how to play piano if your brain just reorganized itself and

01:01:54forgot that, you know, every fifth night or something like that? Like you learn a skill. It's called this

01:01:58muscle memory, right? You learn a skill. Like I, there have been years I haven't ridden a bike. I get

01:02:03on a

01:02:03bike. I can ride a bike. There's muscle memory, all of that stuff. All of it is stable. Language is

01:02:07stable in our brains. Again, absent injury or disease or something like that. So we are literally

01:02:13composed of stable matter. And we reason because of the stability of matter. And so the metaphysics

01:02:20is that matter and energy are constant, universal, external for the most part, and they are stable.

01:02:28So how do you either compartmentalize or integrate anger? I get so pissed off for a variety of

01:02:34reasons, some legit and some not, and it's eating me alive. So go and listen to my podcast called

01:02:39The Joy of Anger, right? So in the debate with Jay, I started off like, hey, you know, convince me,

01:02:45I'd love to be convinced. I'd love to live forever with loved ones and so on. So tell me about

01:02:49how all

01:02:50of this, how God can be proven and all that kind of stuff, which is a pretty polite and positive

01:02:54way.

01:02:54And after he kind of interrupted me and began mocking me in this, you know, kind of really

01:02:58stupid way, then yeah, at some point I'm going to get angry. So anger is like the immune system.

01:03:03And it's the Aristotelian mean. You don't want no immune system or you have to live like bubble boy.

01:03:08And you don't want an overaggressive immune system that attacks healthy cells. Otherwise,

01:03:12you have an autoimmune disorder. So it's easy to be angry. It's easy to not be angry, to just defer.

01:03:17And to be angry in the right way at the right time to the right effect is a challenge.

01:03:21And I go into this, you can just do a search at fdpodcast.com. Do a search for anger.

01:03:26There's tons of podcasts on that. Let's see here. How do you maintain the principles of

01:03:32peaceful parenting under time-sensitive circumstances? I have a three-year-old son and

01:03:36he likes to put himself in his car seat, but it was raining really hard. So I just picked him

01:03:40up

01:03:40and put him in his seat and he was screaming. What do you care if you get rained on? I

01:03:49mean,

01:03:49what are you, the wicked witch of the West, like from, follow the yellow brick road, from the

01:03:55Wizard of Oz? Like, what do you care if you get rained on? So you get wet. So your kid

01:03:59gets wet. Who

01:03:59cares? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Getting wet. You know, these things don't matter.

01:04:07You know, I mean, a stupid example, I had a, I noticed there was a little bit of a jagged

01:04:13thing

01:04:13on one of my teeth. So, you know, I called the dentist, I got to come in. And he's like,

01:04:16oh yeah,

01:04:17one of your fillings has partly come out. So he, you know, drilled it, put another filling in.

01:04:20And it's like, what does it matter? You know, it just, I went and did that for an hour or

01:04:24whatever

01:04:24it was. Over the course of my life, it doesn't really matter. It certainly is better than

01:04:27having a tooth problem. So, so what happens is you, you get it. And look, we all do this,

01:04:33right? So I say this with great humility. We all do this. So what happens is in your head,

01:04:39you're like, it becomes this absolute, like I have to get my, my son in the car because it's raining.

01:04:47But why? Only thing we got to do is die. So why, why do you have to, why do you

01:04:53have to do that?

01:04:53And I, listen, I have to disassemble this myself as well. I've got to do this. And it's like, do

01:04:59I,

01:04:59do I? And in general, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to eat. You don't have

01:05:05to get out of bed. You don't have to go to the bathroom to pee. You can just pee wherever

01:05:09you want.

01:05:09But I'm not suggesting that, right? So if I don't feel like exercising and I say, look, I don't have

01:05:16to exercise. And generally, then I have a life of choice rather than have to. So compulsion. So if

01:05:21I were you, I'd look into your history and say, well, these kind of absolutes, I can't get, my kid

01:05:25can't get wet. He'll dissolve. He's made of candy floss. So why? I mean, again, maybe there's time

01:05:31pressure, you know, like you've got to catch a plane or something like that. But that's very rare

01:05:34in life as a whole. So don't give yourself absolutes where absolutes don't exist. Do not

01:05:40give yourself absolutes where absolutes do not exist. All right. Can art be objectively good?

01:05:45Yes. Art that encourages virtue is objectively good. Art that encourages happiness, appreciation

01:05:52of beauty, consistency, uniformity, and rationality, and joy where good people are rewarded and bad

01:05:59people are punished. Yes. Art can be objectively good and objectively moral. Atheists all have

01:06:04one thing in common. Affluent upbringings in Christian nations. Tell us, Levan, what did your

01:06:09parents do for a living? My mother was a secretary for a while and has been unemployed for 40 years.

01:06:14My father lived in Africa and was a geologist. But I grew up wretched poor. All right. In your early

01:06:2130s, is it a real mistake to date a woman in her mid-30s? No. No, not at all. Unless

01:06:26you want kids.

01:06:27If you want kids, then it may not. If you want a bunch of kids, it may not be wise.

01:06:31If there is no God, to whom or why are we obligated to have kids? So the Soviet, like the

01:06:39communist thing, is the idea that you can create a new man, right? New NEP, new economic policy under

01:06:43Lenin. So you can create a new kind of man, right? So you can create a man, you can create

01:06:49an economic

01:06:49agent who doesn't care about profit or productivity. They'll work harder even if they can't possibly get

01:06:55a raise. They'll stay late even if you don't pay them more. And you'll just create someone who's

01:07:00just like a dray horse, just whipped and pushed. And not even whipped, they will just become a

01:07:04different kind of human being. Because, you know, two foundational premises of economics. One,

01:07:08all resources are finite, all desires are infinite. And number two, people respond to incentives.

01:07:13People do respond to incentives, right? There was a famous store which was operated for centuries

01:07:17in Canada called Eaton's. And then I think four brothers or whatever it is of the Eaton family took it

01:07:22over. And they got rid of sales, which is everyday low pricing. And, you know, for that and other

01:07:26reasons, it went out of business, right? And it's the same thing as a whole with incentives, right?

01:07:37You know, you get those emails, you know, 50% off, oh, 50% off, right? This is on sale.

01:07:41So people respond

01:07:42to incentives. So the idea, of course, under communism was people would just be like worker bees or ants or

01:07:48something like that. And they will work massively. And they won't need incentives, right? They won't need

01:07:56pay and the incentive of doing what you want for a living or anything like that. And of course, even

01:08:02if that

01:08:02had been achieved, communism can never work because you cannot efficiently allocate resources without the

01:08:08price system. Without the price system, you cannot efficiently allocate resources. There's no central

01:08:13planning, nothing like that. The price system is the most amazing, finely tuned thing in the known

01:08:19universe. Like I was saying to my daughter, you know, most businesses, you know, in a free market,

01:08:22most businesses end up around 3% to 6% profits. Because if it's 10% profits, everyone goes into

01:08:27that business and then drives the profits down with competition and so on. So you can't efficiently

01:08:34allocate resources without the price system. And the price system requires the free market. And every

01:08:38interference in the free market sends bad price signals, which is inefficient allocation of

01:08:44resources, which has been increasing, of course. And this is why male wages have not really increased

01:08:49over the last half century, like since I was 10 years old. Male wages have really not budged upwards

01:08:57because there's been too much interference in the free market. So the idea behind that is the default

01:09:04state of nature is to want to reproduce. We default take delight in babies. In default,

01:09:09we take delight in families. And we take great joy at having a lot of people at the table and

01:09:13the chaos and fun and so on. Our default position is to have children. And that doesn't mean everyone

01:09:19has to have children. But it does mean that our default... And you go against your default position

01:09:24at your risk, right? You go against your default position at your risk.

01:09:31It's going against 4 billion years of evolution. So in general, you'll be happier if you have kids.

01:09:35And statistics are very clear on that. The people who have kids are, on average,

01:09:40significantly happier, particularly women, than if they don't have kids. But, you know,

01:09:44you're not obligated to have kids other than you don't want to be a selfish a-hole, right? Like,

01:09:48if you enjoy your life, then you should want to have kids because your parents sacrificed quite a bit

01:09:54to give you the gift of life, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and sleepless nights and worry and

01:09:57concern and driving and, like, all kinds of stuff. So your parents, quote, sacrificed a lot in order

01:10:03to have you and to raise you. And if you enjoy your life, then you should pay it forward. And

01:10:08you

01:10:08shouldn't just be the guy who inherits, you know, $10 million from the last 10 generations and then

01:10:14just blows it all on his own hedonism. No, you should, just out of a sense of gratitude and enjoying

01:10:20life and so on, you should pay it forward and not take the accumulated gifts of suffering and

01:10:24struggle and reproduction of 4 billion years and then just squander it on your own hedonism. That

01:10:29would be pretty sad. And I think you pay a big price for that psychologically. All right. What

01:10:35should a young man focus on to live a life of truth and bravery, specifically free of people pleasing?

01:10:41Yeah, I mean, in order to be happy in the long run, you have to please your own conscience.

01:10:44And if you don't please your own conscience, it really doesn't matter what,

01:10:47what else you do. So just focus on truth and honor and reasonable degrees of courage.

01:10:54How do you know when your life has peaked? I wouldn't know. I mean, I think I'm continually

01:10:59doing better work as a whole. Physically with athletes, of course, it's one thing. But for

01:11:03people who work with their minds, you can just keep going. All right. I have a three-year-old daughter.

01:11:09She is already writing all letters, uppercase, reading all, including lowercase. Her first

01:11:16read with 15 months, I'm not sure what that means, numbers and other symbols too. She even draws musical

01:11:22notes and names them. She starts reading words too. What school should we aim for? Homeschooling.

01:11:26Yeah, I'm sorry. Just homeschooling on vast. Almost all the schools have to follow government

01:11:32curricula, but make sure she has some options post-secondary. I've seen many people struggling

01:11:38with the question, what makes this proposition moral? And they don't want to accept the objective

01:11:42answers that come out of logic, truth, and reason. Right? Yeah. Sorry, that's not a question. Yes,

01:11:50they do. They do. Because once the question of morality is answered in an objective way,

01:11:55then see, with religion, you can pick and choose, right? If you happen to be a mild person and a

01:12:01maybe

01:12:01not particularly courageous person, then you can turn the other cheek. And if you happen to be an

01:12:06aggressive person, you know, spare the rod, spoil the child, and an eye for an eye. Religious texts have

01:12:11evolved to appeal to just about every personality type and every combination of the big five

01:12:15personality traits. But if morality is objective and proven, then you can't pick and choose based

01:12:20upon your personality type. And you have to do the right thing, even if it goes against the grain,

01:12:23which people don't like to do. Are there any positive rights that you do believe in? There are

01:12:27no unchosen positive obligations. If you choose an obligation, like you choose to buy, to get a cell

01:12:33phone contract, then you got to pay the contract and so on. But I don't believe in positive rights.

01:12:38Do you have tips for ugly people in this dating market? Sure. Date other ugly people.

01:12:44It's not complicated. Ugly people exist because our ancestors who were ugly dated ugly people.

01:12:50So, I mean, you can say, well, but even the ugly women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I get

01:12:55that.

01:12:55But you, you know, it's just, it's just a brutal fact of life that men as a whole, we start

01:13:01at the top

01:13:01and we work our way down until we find a woman who we want, who wants us, and we'll stay

01:13:07with us,

01:13:07right? So, I remember when I was first starting to date, I dated the very, I asked out, so I

01:13:12didn't

01:13:13date, I asked out the very most popular girl in high school, like the absolute queen bee goddess,

01:13:18and she wouldn't go out with me. So, then I moved one tier down and those, she was a 10,

01:13:24maybe I was

01:13:24a 9, so I couldn't date the 10s, I dated the 9s. And then you just, you date on your

01:13:32level. And if you

01:13:32have to even dip below your level because of female vanity, you just find the most sensible

01:13:37person who understands that you need to provide value in a relationship and lock them in as quickly

01:13:42as possible. Have any philosophers argued against object permanence? How strong are their arguments?

01:13:47It's pretty rare to have a philosopher argue against object permanence because they would, I mean,

01:13:53in history, they would have to write down their arguments and therefore they would be requiring the

01:13:57object permanence of their book, so it's self-contradictory. Is it objectively wrong to

01:14:02premeditatively terminate an innocent human life regardless of dependency, location, degree of

01:14:06development, or burden? Well, yeah. Yeah. Your wit is only exceeded by your charm, sir. Thank you for

01:14:14your contributions to what is left of Western civilization. Thank you. I have a son and a daughter.

01:14:20What should I say to them? How to find a good wife and a husband? I've talked about that in

01:14:24my show.

01:14:25Uh, what is your IQ? Uh, I, I've studiously avoided getting tested, uh, because, uh, if my IQ is very

01:14:31high, then I wouldn't want people to accept what I say because of my high IQ. And if my IQ

01:14:38is, you know,

01:14:38Einstein had an IQ of like 130 or something like that. So, um, obviously smarter physicist than Einstein.

01:14:44Uh, so you wouldn't want to judge people by their IQ. My wife has a psychometrician and psychologist.

01:14:50She's done thousands of IQ tests. She estimates mine at 170, but we'll never know. All right.

01:14:54In your opinion, are we getting closer to a free society? If not, what is the greatest obstacle

01:14:58remaining? Uh, no, we are not getting closer to a free society. It's going the other direction,

01:15:02but the counterweight is peacefulparenting.com. In my view, says someone, technology is pushing,

01:15:07pushing us closer to a peaceful society. People now have access to decentralized currencies and

01:15:11artificial intelligence, which is getting people better informed. In many respects, we are already free.

01:15:20Yes, uh, you can get free, uh, in your personal life as well through crypto and all of that.

01:15:26Ah, what if our greatest obstacle to truth isn't our ability to reason, but our willingness to pay

01:15:31the emotional cost of being wrong? How much human irrationality is simply the mind protecting identity,

01:15:36belonging, and certainty from the, from information it's perfectly capable of understanding.

01:15:40So, uh, sure. Yeah. I mean, uh, people with bad ideas use, um, hostility and aggression,

01:15:48J Dyer, people with bad ideas use hostility and aggression to inflict those ideas on children.

01:15:54Uh, this is a blasphemy and shaming and so on. And so, uh, you know, people who believe in the

01:16:00blank

01:16:00slate are a theory that all human beings are just clay in different shapes and the clay has no

01:16:05difference from each other in any foundational way. Uh, people who are blank slate, uh, delusional

01:16:11blank slate theories. So they have to say if there are any differences in group outcome, it's, uh,

01:16:15prejudice, racism, sexism, whatever it is, right? They have to, uh, and they don't have particularly

01:16:19good arguments because, I mean, there are good reasons why there's a pay gap in, um, Western society.

01:16:28And so, um, what do they do if, if you point this out there? Oh, you're sexist, right? So aggression

01:16:33is how

01:16:34bad ideas transmit themselves. So you conform because if you don't conform, uh, you will be

01:16:39attacked and ostracized and shamed and humiliated and bullied and all of that sort of stuff. And

01:16:44that's the left in a nutshell, right? As a whole, Christians do it too with the promise of heaven

01:16:48and the threats of hell and so on, as to other religions, of course. So, um, when we teach children

01:16:54reasonable and rational things, we don't need to use aggression to do it. So that's why philosophy

01:17:00brings peace. All right. I do not think what evidence would you be, would be sufficient for

01:17:06you to believe in a God. Uh, it's impossible because a God is an all-knowing, all-powerful

01:17:11being outside of space and time who created, sustains and controls the universe and will end

01:17:14it usually at some point. Um, by definition, anything that is anti-rational and does not exist

01:17:22in the universe doesn't exist by definition. Now we could find some super intelligent, uh, being

01:17:27out there who can do things that we would perceive as magical, but that wouldn't be a God. So

01:17:32freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Thank you so much for I guess this last show I'll

01:17:36do before my birthday tomorrow. And I really do appreciate, I mean, more than two decades of

01:17:42public philosophy is a great, deep and humble joy from me. I thank you so much. Freedomain.com

01:17:47slash donate. Talk to you soon. Bye.

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