 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Hey everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this, what is it? Tuesday, Tuesday night. I know you guys are all excited because the chat has been active for three, four hours in anticipation of Harry Benz wearing and joining us today. So I am particularly excited to have Harry on. Welcome, Harry. Thank you, I'm excited to be on. Good. So I think most of you know who Harry is, but since we do have a lot of people new to Objectivism on YouTube, Inran's ideas. Harry is an Objectivist philosopher. He is one of the few people still alive who had a relationship with Inran. A longtime friend, student of, and of course has been an Objectivist philosopher for many decades now, was my teacher in the Objectivist Academic Center in the 1990s. He has given dozens of lectures on the Objectivist philosophy on all kinds of aspects, primarily on the epistemology, but just recently he gave a talk on why regulations are never appropriate with an expanded definition of what regulations are in and I encourage you to watch that. I think the Inran Institute just posted that last week on on the Inran Institute channel. In addition, he is the author of How We Know. I don't have a copy of the book to show you because it's on my Kindle, but Harry does. So he is going to is going to raise it just say something because right now they can only see who's speaking. Oh, yeah, I have to get speaker view active. This is my book with a cover design that I love showing a jigsaw puzzle being put together. Harry has recently launched a, it's a few months ago now, launched a YouTube show on Inran Center UK's channel. So you have to go to Inran Center UK and then search Harry Vince Wanga. I think he's what episode are you on now? Almost 30, I think it's 29. 29. Any of those on Free Will, I'm just looking at it right now. We've got from two months ago, a show on Free Will, then episode 24 is Free Will, Inran versus Sam Harris. And then the mechanics of Free Will. And I mean, I think Harry's the only person I know who can actually talk about Free Will for one, two, three. And I think there were at least two or three other shows like five hours, five hours on Free Will. So I thought, A, I really encourage all of you to go sign up and start watching Harry's show. I think it's content you're just not going to get anywhere else. Nobody else is covering this material. Nobody else has Harry's knowledge in epistemology to cover this to the extent that he has and is now presenting it on a regular basis. Go on there. Do you take questions during the show? Yeah, a little bit at the end. Okay, so you can ask questions and interact. So I encourage you all to go to, don't look for, look for, again, Inran Center UK and it's HBTV or just search Harry. You'll find it, you'll find all the shows there and then you can watch. What day is it on? Is it on a regular day? Monday. Yeah, Monday at four Eastern. Four Eastern. All right. Excellent. So what we're going to do today is I'm going to start out with asking some questions, but I know a lot of you guys are eager to ask. We have the super chat open. As you know, $20 questions get priority. The more money you put on a question, the higher it jumps in the priority list. We have a regular thing where we're raising $600 a show. Catherine is here. Catherine Mendez is here to keep track of everything and to encourage you to ask the questions. I've already got four questions in the queue. Jonathan, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it. We've got four questions already in the queue. And then somebody emailed me six questions. And so keep them coming. Again, if you want to make sure that your question will be answered, it's $20. All right, there we go. All right. So let's get started. So I want to start with Free World because it seems like it's become over the last few years among public intellectuals an issue that a lot of people are talking about. And I think probably Sam Harris is the one who kind of popularized it as an important issue. So maybe it's an issue that came out of the whole new atheists movement. I'm curious what you think because they position the idea of free will is kind of mystical and on the side of religion. And I think a lot of the atheists are reject free will on that basis. So, you know, why do you think it's become such a big issue in recent times? And then I'd like to begin a kind of what is the mistake that they were all making? Well, I think that events have kind of put us face to face with our basic relation to reality. The not least of which is the COVID situation where we're facing our own mortality and their need to relate to our fellow man when we're isolating quarantine. Other than that, I really don't know what it is that it's cost the interest in free will. It's a good thing. Yeah, I don't think that most religions believe in free will. If you took a poll, so to speak, of religions through history, most of them have been determinists. God runs the show. Certainly Islamists are determinists. They're famous for fatalism. But some branches of Christianity do believe in some form of free will. But it's not like there's a monopoly of religion. Many philosophers, Aristotle, William James, and many others have advocated free will. The interesting thing that I want to stress is that none of them get to the fundamental. Aristotle is close, actually, but you wouldn't know it if you hadn't read, I ran to see where it really is headed. But the essence of free will, as I ran to identify, is the choice to think, the choice to use your mind, the choice to set a cognitive purpose, not your conclusions that you will reach or fail to reach, not what you do in action that depends upon what's going on in your head. And it's your control over your own mind that's the fundamental that only I ran just pointed out. So all these studies that Harvard relies on and others have, I don't know where they show that every time you click on a button to turn on a light or something like that, you acted before you actually, in a sense, made the choice to act, so therefore the choice, in a sense, is just your mind catching up to, or your conscious mind catching up to what you need a human to do. The Benjamin Libet experiment. Yeah, I read his paper, in fact, I've been to a talk by him, and he believes in free will. Yeah, I know. He calls it free won't, but he believes you have the ability to suppress the action that you might take. But it's all beside the point. It's because, again, the issue is not what you do. He had experimental subjects wiggle their finger. That's not directly volitional. It's whether you wiggle your mind, so to speak, whether you whether you're in mental focus or not. And there was no reason to, he told them, wiggle your finger at an arbitrary time. Don't look for a reason, just sometimes, just spontaneously wiggle your finger. Well, that's not free will. A friend in college calls it free whim. It has nothing to do with whether you control the functioning of your own mind and can activate it or are doomed to be a spectator or a passenger in your own life, watching it roll by helpless. Sadly, so many people are. So Harris argues things like, well, there is no you other than your mind. So how can you can control your mind? Where's the what is the you reside? Who is what is the you? Yeah, but it's the same you. It's the same you, whether you look at the external world or what just passed through your own mind. It's the same looking the same you. You have the ability to direct your awareness out in reality and you have the ability to monitor. It's like, I mean, we're looking at monitors right now, right? They're monitoring and those of us who are creating the image are looking at ourselves. Like I'm looking at me and I guess you're on you're looking at a little picture of you somewhere on the screen. So reflecting back on your own activity is not some metaphysical problem. We do it all the time, hopefully in our own minds, but also out in the world, you know, on zoom. So it's it's the same you. It's the same activity perception in the wider sense grasping something. And you know that some philosophers like Gilbert Ryle think you can't split your focus and both observe something and observe your activity of observing it. I'm not sure what I think about that, but it's not a slam dunk, but it doesn't matter because as Ryle points out, you can retrospect. What was I just thinking where just means one second ago. So whether there's a delay in inward focus or you can split and look at reality and look at how you're looking at reality doesn't really matter. So I mean, I want to give my self as an example of your own, if you don't mind. In 1962, 60 years ago, I went to here, I ran talk at MIT where I was a freshman. And she, in the course of the long lecture on the objective ethics, stated her theory of free will. And it stunned me. I was drifting through what she was saying about ethics. But then she got to the point where she said, man can focus his mind to a full active purposefully directed awareness of reality or drift in the semi conscious days. And I thought, Jesus Christ, I'm drifting in a semi conscious days right now at this lecture. I was until a second ago. This is the most important thing I've ever heard in my life. Surely everybody knows this. It sounds self evident, but I don't think anybody's ever said it. Never heard it before. And I strained to follow, you know, focus on it. But that's all of us can recognize. There is the ability to space out, let go, and just kind of react to whatever comes into view. And you have emotions and values. So some things you like and you go after some things to repel you. But you also have the ability to think, to take the reins to grab the steering wheel and say, I'm going to run my own mind. I'm not going to let things happen to me. And that's like undeniable. And that's not considered by Sam Harris or anybody else. So why aren't they considering it? It does seem once it's said. It's so hard. Because it's very abstract, even though it's very concrete in the same at the same time. And it requires that you are aware on the third level, you know, first you're aware of reality and then, oh, I'm aware of reality. That's the second level. But you have to stand back and say, hey, I'm aware that I'm aware of reality. You know, I am there controlling it potentially. So you have to be self aware to a phenomenal degree. Once it's stated, it's like obvious. But only Ein Rand has ever stated it. So somebody like Sam Harris says, well, none of that can be because it doesn't have a cause, right? There's nothing in physics that would explain this ability to be aware and this ability to be aware of being aware. So it can exist because it contradicts the laws of physics. Yeah. And the laws of physics are the laws of physics up to when? 2011, when he started this work, maybe? Yeah. 2020, 2021. I mean, is that means that nothing that we will ever discover in physics. And this is said after the quantum revolution and relativity theory, which turned both of them turned physics. Nothing that we will ever learn from here on out. Now we know everything. Nothing we learn as physicists will change our mechanistic view of physics. Well, let's suppose that's true. Choice is not an action of matter. Choice is an action of your consciousness. Consciousness cannot be consistently denied. I am not conscious is a self-refuting statement. So of course we're conscious and we're conscious that we're conscious. Now Sam Harris, I had a show on him. He's fascinating. I'm looking behind me for his book, which is somewhere in my vast collection of books over here, but he puts a point so boldly, so well. He says, you don't control the next thought you have anymore than you control the next thought I am writing here. And that's true. But you have indirect control because you control whether you think whether you're what comes up from your subconscious is in response to you setting a purpose or not. He doesn't consider that. So we're not saying, oh, you can now decide not to think about polar bears. I want you all out there not to think about polar bears for the next five seconds. You all thought, oh, I'm not supposed to think about polar bears. They're by thinking about them. Mary had a little. Now you all heard lamb six plus two is. You all heard eight. So what comes into mind in the next second is not under your direct control, but it's under your indirect control. So if you set a purpose, I'm going to think about guitar. What I'm going to ask myself, do I need another guitar? I have five. Do I need another guitar? Can I justify another guitar? Well, the exact words that come next are not under your control, but polar bear won't be among them. So you have it to indirect area of control by the purpose you set. And that's where the money is. That's where your control is. All right, Dave is asking a question for $400. I just have to give him priorities. Thank you, Dave. Yeah, it's very generous. So Dave says, suppose Captain Cook is in the teleprompter about to be beamed up to the enterprise. The teleprompter disassembles Coke atom by atom and sends the information, not the atoms back to the enterprise without them and the ships assembled into Captain Cook. Does the transported Coke have the same consciousness as the original? I'm so glad you asked that. Never step into a transporter. It's your death. No, to create somebody with the same molecular structure as you is not to create you. Just imagine that the transporter works this way. It scans you, leaves you alone and creates on the enterprise a duplicate of you. And somebody then punches that you in the face. You're not going to feel anything. You are not just a description of you. You are whatever stuff, whether it's a physics stuff or some as yet undiscovered stuff that is there with that organization. So no, absolutely no, it is not the same consciousness. Do not step into a transporter. That's terrible. I mean, of all the sci-fi, you know, inventions, given how much I travel, the one that I am more than any is the transponder. Oh, yeah. But we're going to have something like that. But it won't work that way. It won't work that way. No. All right. So Brian asks, is free will an axiom? He says in Opa Dr. Picoff says that axioms are perceptually self-evident. If it is perceptual, which senses or do we validate free will via some form of reasoning? No, that would be circular. Yeah. Because you have to have free will to have reason. I mean, you can have radiosynation. You know, you could do what a computer does. But to actually be conceptually rational, you have to have control over what you set your mind to do. If you're just fed stuff, like a computer, you know, is fed output, then you have no objectivity. Your mind is censored. So, but the sorry, my laryngeitis is acting up at the end of this cold. What was had the question begin Europe. Is it an axiom? And if so, an axiom. Yes, it's an act of special kind of action. It's an axiom of the conceptual level. Most there are actions like existence, identity and consciousness, which are the foundations of all of all cognition. But animals don't have free will and they are aware. The axioms hold for them. When they see something, the something is there. They see it and they see it, not something else. So, existence, identity, consciousness hold on the perceptual level. They are, they are true of the perceptual, but they don't have choice. So, it's only don't get hung up thinking, well, maybe my dog has some area of, think of a fish. You know, we're not trying to draw the exact line where the conceptual level starts. I'll fight that fight if you want, but this is a wider issue. Whatever is strictly perceptual, this axiom has no relevance to. So, it's an axiom of the conceptual level. Meaning, what is an axiom? It's self-evident primary standing at the foundation of knowledge. This is self-evident. You can't prove it because presupposes it. It's a primary because you can't say, well, what is free will consist of in the sense of what is it to turn on your mind? What does that consist of? Well, turning on your mind. What you do when you listen here. And it's at the foundation of all conceptual knowledge. So, to what extent is introspection equivalent to sense perception? Yeah, that's good. I can observe my choices. In, that's two ends. In introduction to objectivist epistemology. At crucial moments, Einren uses the term direct experience. And she uses that because she wants to cover both perception through the senses and introspection. Now introspection is a term that's used in two levels. One, I call self-observation or self-monitoring, which is just the awareness, hey, I just was confused here. Or, you know, this seems really clear to me. Or, I'm getting upset. Or, I'm thinking about philosophy, not about donuts. Okay? That is the equivalent of sense perception. Except if you say, if you identify it as philosophy, you're applying a concept to it. But the awareness of what your mind is doing, self-observation, is the level of introspection that's direct experience, infallible, like sense perception. But the introspection is also used a lot for the analysis. I introspect it and I found that I was making excuses because I was afraid to stand up for myself. That's not self-evident. You could be wrong about that. Maybe you wrink too hard on yourself. Maybe you haven't pinned it down. So, the conceptual identification of an internal state is not self-evident, is not direct experience, is not axiomatic. But, I know I'm awake, not asleep. Excuse me. I know this is confusing, or I know this is not confusing. And it is, I know I can turn my mind on and off. Yeah. So, that's... Yeah. I mean, we did a lot of experiments here. Mary had a little, not volitional, okay? Now, think about... I gave you the cute one, if I don't think about formulas. But think about what is the hardest math problem you can remember dealing with in school? Oh, my God, let's see. What was the highest class I took? Trig? No. That process, right? That purpose of digging is entirely different from Mary had a little and lamb comes to mind. So, we're just directly aware of the difference between effort and just passive reaction. So, walk us through how... So, reason in a sense, reason depends... The idea, the concept of reason doesn't make any sense without free will. Why is that? Because, again... Because there's such a thing as rational, huh? Somebody like Sam Hamas would argue he's an advocate for reason and rationality and yet he rejects free will. How do those... Yeah, because he hasn't considered the choice to think or not to think. He hasn't considered the possibility that you can canvas your own mind. He writes, I'm sure he's not this way, but he writes, well, things pop into my mind. He gave the example that I decided to take up, I think it was fencing, again, that I had studied in school. I mean, not studied, but participated in school. I don't know why I did it. Well, that's probably over. So you probably do know why, but you may be not in detail. But what occurs to you is not the issue. The issue is, can you imagine saying, I tried to figure out what was the hardest math problem I ever had. And I don't know why I did it. I don't know that I did it. Maybe I didn't do it. Maybe that was a dream. If you say that, your mind is, you're crazy. You said, I'm insane. You have to know the difference. Here's another example. Grass is green. Green is a color. So grass is a color. Really? I thought it was a plant. Grass is a color, because grass is green. Green is a color. Now, if you feel, huh, is it possible that you can't distinguish that, huh, from, oh, yeah. Two times five is 10, because five plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one is 10. I can count it out. Yeah, that's clear. But I thought I was confused, but I wasn't. Grass is green. No, I'm not confused. That was an illusion. I thought I was working to understand it, but no, I understood it from the beginning. You define yourself as a psychotic. And reason doesn't work for psychotics. Now, another way of putting it is there is a big field known as rationalization. I want to have that ice cream. I'm supposed to be on a diet, but I'm under stress. I can have it. Okay. Does that pass the giggle test? When you look back at it, you say, yeah, that's good reasoning. Yeah, under stress. Yeah. Now, maybe it will. Okay, but you know what I mean when you make up a phony reason to let yourself get away with what you know. You shouldn't. It's called rationalization, a phony reason. Right. If you can't tell rationalization from honest thought, you're, you're sunk. Your mind is invalidated. So it's, it's got to be not an inference. I'm being rational now because I reached so and so. Okay. You've got to know directly. I'm being clean and honest. I'm leveling with myself or, well, maybe I'm fudging a little. And when people rationalize, they smile, you know, if they do it out loud. Yup. Well, it's the weekend smile. Yeah. Because it feels wrong inside and you, but you don't have to be attention to that feeling. All right. We've got over 20 questions now. So let me, let's, let's run through some of these. Okay, I'm going to answer bang, bang, bang. All right. What was called Papa's main mistake? How do I know if I drop a ball and it falls a hundred times, it will still fall the hundred first time. So how do we know induction is, we can, we can, you know, the induction is knowledge. That's a good. Popper is the enemy. You're right on that. Popper is the mini Kantian who's destroyed the right wing. Like so many, you know, Marx and other Kantians destroyed the left wing because conservatives think he's great. He's evil. He's horrible. Actually, I'm not sure he's evil. He's under the spell of Kant. I'm not sure how volitional it is. I would have to read a lot more of him, but. And there were a number of, who are big Papa fans that think there's a lot of overlap between the two. So I had one on HBO. I had for a year. Yeah. Something. And he thought he could persuade us of subjectivist that Popper was a good guy on our side. We should embrace him and become Popperians. And he was reduced in the end. When I said, okay, enough is enough to saying, maybe plants and stones are conscious. How do we know they aren't so poppers? What interesting question. What is Popper's main mistake? I think he wants to reduce deduction. Induction to deduction. I think the only model of knowledge that he has is the syllogism. Syllogism is great. Ayn Rand praises it. Aristotle's the father discovered it, named it. But induction comes before deduction. And Popper doesn't realize it. None of his testing would be possible without induction. Without induction, which he's using, which he's challenging as not verifiable. It's falsifiable, he says, but it's not verifiable. But if it's not verifiable, you couldn't falsify anything. But what's his main mistake? I think being a Kantian. But if you ask me how exactly, I really don't know off the top of my head. Yeah, it's, I've said this before, it's worth somebody in Objectivism doing a deep dive into Popper. Because you're right, he's so influential among libertarians, among kind of free market types, among conservatives, but also on the left. I mean, George Soros is a huge Popper. Really? George Soros books are full, you know, the Civil, what is it, Civil Society? Yeah, he's a huge Popperian. So, and then of course, scientists, most importantly, more important than any of those are the fact that he dominates the philosophy of science in terms of what the scientific method is. And Milton Friedman had, I mean, I remember reading this in grad school and going, he has this whole methodological article and epistemological article. And it basically is completely Popperian, you know, Friedman says, we basically come up with hypotheses from where it doesn't matter, we just come up with hypotheses and then if they're falsifiable or if they have predictive power, then they're right. And if they're, you know, and if they don't, then they're not, and, you know, nothing's absolute, they're correct until the next random hypothesis comes about. It was just awful. So it's infected economics. Yeah. Let me summarize what Popper's wrong position is for the audience. He says we can never prove all S is P about anything, like all swans are white, outside of maybe mathematics, about empirical facts. We can never prove that price controls create shortages or that the initiation of physical force will make the mind not function or that a blow will fall when you let it go. Because all we have is statistics and from the statistics we don't know what will happen next. But at least we can falsify things. And he originally put forward what he called the line of demarcation to distinguish meaningless statements from scientifically meaningful ones. And his point was, if something is not falsifiable, it's meaningless. If you can't think of what would disprove this, then it's me. It's not scientific. Maybe it's religious. Maybe it's for some platonic speculation, but it's not hard fact. It's not science. And of course that statement is not falsifiable song, but he had a good, there's certain good motives for this because the Marxists interpret every no matter what happens. You know, ah, Marx was right. And Freud, oh, you don't love your mother. You're reacting against. It's a reaction formation against fear of your Oedipus complex. And now who the cherry on the cake is climate change. Climate change is not falsifiable. You know, we predicted global warming for a year ago. Can I hold up this for your audience? Newsweek magazine, 1970, 71 years ago, talking about global warming as a scientific hypothesis. 51 years ago, it didn't happen. Right. They try and tell you it happened. That's falsifiable because they change the climate change. Yeah, climate change. If it gets colder, if it gets windier, if it gets drier, if it anything that happened, and you're guaranteed, you know, it's like nothing in astronomy, you know, in the world remains exactly as it in the state that it was. It's always moving around. So they're guaranteed to be right. Ah, climate change. So that's the latest proper, proper target of popularism. It isn't falsifiable. Okay, so he starts with this idea. I'm going to shoot down these self protective theories like Marxism, Freudianism. He sets up this criterion that rules out everything. And he says nothing universal can be proved. No all statement can be proved outside of mathematics. And again, if you can't induce an all, you can't deduce. Let me just give you the principle of logic. Aristotle going back to Arizona is not contested. No syllogism is valid. Unless at least one of its premises is universal is an all statement. So the syllogism, this theory predicted X, not X instead of X was observed. Therefore, this theory is falsified out the window. You can't do that without a universal premise, which is all theories that contradict observation are falsified. Where do you get that? Induction is the basic means of knowledge, even in philosophy. And how good is the understanding of induction in the world out there in terms of among philosophers, logicians. Is there a good understanding of induction or even scientists that the scientists understand that scientists have a partial understanding of it. If they didn't, there wouldn't be any science going on. But philosophers have very little. And what was the other category you asked about logicians? Logicians who are part of philosophy, they have the least. There are a few. I can name one guy, maybe two. Larry Wright, the University of Riverside, University of California at Riverside writes well, Stephen Naylor Thomas has a good book on natural language, logic and natural language which discusses induction. But basically up until, you know, 30 years ago, there was no understanding. That's due to you and the his followers. All right, let's see. Robert asks regarding character, can a good man with a solid history of choosing to be focused in focus. Nonetheless, in any given moment, transcend this character and decide to do something truly evil. Is that choice harder in quotation marks for such a man to make? Well, it depends on what you mean by truly evil. Any act of blanking out is truly evil. So what maybe the his act is, I really should be doing my taxes now. I don't want to think about that. That's truly evil in principle, but it's not one of your major sins. So the way I put it is this. Your free will choice and therefore your moral responsibility is to use your best considered judgment, not your snap judgment. Okay, not sure. When we talk about going about your emotions, we really mean your snap judgment. Oh, I hate that. I love that. I'm going to do it. Oh, I want I want cake. I'm going to have cake. Maybe you should. Or maybe you should. But anyway, if you're a person of certain caliber, your snap judgment is not going to be. Oh, I want to take heroin. Oh, I want to go murder someone. Your snap judgment might be I'm not I'm not going to work on my taxes now. Or I don't I want to have this extra slice of pie. So there's a very narrow range. It goes back to this thing we started with. You control your level of awareness, not the content, not what comes in except indirectly by setting goals. If you have a good person, there's a lot of good content in there. There's no desire to rape and murder and take drugs and cheat and lie. That's not in there. So regardless of whether he's using the best querying of his database or not, there's a very narrow range of things he will even want to do irrationally. So even if you go out of focus, yeah, you're not going to do something completely crazy because it's not the content for that is not in in there. Yeah, and it's well automatized that what you want is the opposite. So, however, I have to make two points that for the bad person is very hard to reach a good conclusion and take a good action. Because everything, you know, even when he looks around at the full context and is not just going to blind or saw what he sees are anti values, threats, negative bad stuff. Now that has to be some glimmer of goodness in there for him to look at, but there'll be a lot of crap coming up regardless of what he looks at. That's point one of the two. The second is you have a moving average. So if you have that extra pie, then the range of action possible to you, it goes a little worse action. You might be rude to a friend. And then if you're rude to a friend and you don't think about it, because you could might be rude to a friend. You think, Oh, God, why did I do that? I'm not going to do that again. But you have aid that now you capable of still worse. So it's not fixed. It's the moving average of your past choices. You stock your own subconscious. Yeah. So Robert says some motor is not even on the menu. Right. But it could be if you evade enough. Yeah. Because even if you build up a character and then you start a policy of evasion, for instance, for instance, now, how far can we go? I know someone who used to be an object of us who I think murdered his wife. Yeah, I know who you mean. Yes. All right, let's see. Shay asks, seem to be two problems in conveying the idea of free will. What it actually is and whether it exists. Have you ever seen anyone change their mind on the ladder? Whether it exists once they have once they get the former. Yes, absolutely. Although I think the guy had real strong mental problems. Okay. So yes, I know a guy who was a very outstanding object of us in the 60s. You don't know him. I could tell you his name. You wouldn't recognize him. Who wrote an article against the student rebellion that I ran liked and told him so. Yeah. Who decided determinism was true. And he left. And within a few years, he was chanting mantras, promoting astrology and really flipped out. But he was always very strange. But have you seen it go the other way around? Particularly? Yes. And have you seen it? Same graduate school. Someone who is now, I won't name it, probably would be fine with me naming him. But someone who began as a determinist, thought about it, thought about it, thought about it. Later in the graduate school, looked at the objectivist position. He is an objectivist. And this became very firm, advocate of free will. He's like, for decades, he's been an extremely vocal advocate of free will. And he saw the errors in the determinist view. But basically, the thing that, you know, I asked I ran about this privately once. What is the issue about reconciling causality with free will? Yeah. And she said, all the errors of thinking that causality rules out free will come from taking the materialist view that all there is, is matter in motion and not realizing that free will is an attribute of consciousness. Now that is not exactly the quote. If you read my book, How We Know, I give the exact quote. But that's the idea. Choice is not something your body does. It's something that you do with your mind. And that's why it's not relevant what happens when a stone is thrown through a window. Those are not conscious actions. So this relates to Liam. Liam asks, how is consciousness different than matter? How do we know consciousness is only based on the physical and not physical itself? It sounds mystical otherwise. Well, I'm quite familiar. I'm pausing because I want to know what to say not because I haven't heard that a thousand times before, meaning no disrespect. Mystical mysticism is a claim to an automatic unerring deterministic form of knowledge. So free will mystical is to empty the term of all meaning. Now that's a little polemical jab, but read the beginning of the question again. How is consciousness different than matter? How do we know consciousness is only based is only based on the physical and not physical? Only based on the physical. Right. We know consciousness is based on the physical because if you're shot in the head, you stop being conscious. Or if you take certain chemicals, your consciousness changes. Or you press on your eyeball. Here's an interesting experiment. Press on the edge of your eyeball as I am. If you can see me now, you'll see a round light at the opposite side because the nerves cross. And the right nerve here governs what you see on the left and vice versa. So there you are physical push creating God or physical motion created consciousness. But we know that the brain and the nervous system widely is the organ of consciousness. But how do we know it's not just that because it has attributes that matter doesn't have. Matter can't be confused. Matter can't be happy. Right. Matter can't be confident. Matter can't be vague. But consciousness can be all those things. Yeah. Is there a philosophical principle that would preclude the development of non biological free will? So here they use a computer becomes conscious and has. Yes. Yeah. Where there is. Yes. Context holding is the thing. Consciousness is an attribute of living organisms of a certain complexity. Living organisms are fundamentally different from computers because they engage in self generated and self sustaining action. So first you'd have to build a living organism. Then you'd have to endow it with whatever gives rise to consciousness, which we assume are, you know, neurons doing certain things. But we really don't understand that. Yeah. But someday we will. And so you'd have to build that. But then what you'd have is a little organism, not a machine. A machine is that which is not alive and not conscious. So the philosophical principles context holding you can't think, well, there's consciousness. Maybe it could come about here. Consciousness is an attribute of you that you inferred to be in other similar entities that are alive and with a nervous system. That's the context. Can you imagine a conscious computer that did not have biological matter that was not? No. No. It couldn't because the basic form of consciousness, what is the basic form of kind from which all else derives sensation. And the two bodily sensations that are essential are pleasure and pain. There's also, you know, brightness and loudness and dryness and wetness. But pleasure and pain are what give rise to the whole affective valuing side of human beings. So first build me something that feels pleasure and pain. Then we can talk. And I think, you know, there's no reason this is the first. I can tell a story, but maybe I should present. One time I'll tell a story that me and I ran. Tell it. Okay. So as I got to know, I ran, you know, better and she got to like me better. This is towards the end of her life as after, you know, 10 years of slow, to my presence. We talked about how I began. How she first became aware of me. And she said, I thought you were the perfect linguistic analyst. I was really taken back. I came out of MIT trained by linguistic analysts at age 21, but I thought I had shed all that. And I said, why? And she said, do you remember the first question you asked me? Strangely, I did not because I would think I would, but I said, no, what was it? She said, you asked me if scientists in the lab built something that exactly resembled man in every respect. Would it have free will or would it have rights? I forget which, which I asked. And I said, what did you answer? And she said, I said, if it exactly resembled a man in every respect, it would be a man. And I then said to her, and what did I say? And she said, you seem very impressed. As I had no doubt was because that's a great answer. So I sympathize with the question and I don't sympathize with the question at the same time, but in different respects. All right, let's see. Colt asks, he says, when I was in fifth grade, I had a fully integrated philosophy in my epistemology was that I believed knowledge was innate. And if I just thought long enough, I could extract knowledge. How did I come to this conclusion giving my age? How old was he? Fifth grade. So 1112. Did you have Mrs Gardner for fifth grade? I think she was a Platonist and she put that into you. Or maybe you got that idea from before birth. I don't know how to answer that. I don't know where you got that. You have to introspect. Incidentally, do you know how to introspect? I mean, that's kind of insulting, but the level of introspection where you analyze, not where you just say, oh, so that's what's going on in my mind. You do mills methods speaking of induction. So like on that one, when did I first come to that idea? What was I like before I had that idea? Would I have been open to that idea in the fourth grade if I'd heard it? Suppose it was the idea, not that knowledge is innate, but that knowledge begins much earlier than we think of it, you know, in early childhood. Is that really what I meant? So you run thought experiments just like you would do experiments in the lab. And that's the best way to determine what is the nature of what's going on in your mind. And it's particularly helpful with emotions. So for instance, I don't want to do my taxes. Okay, let me introspect that. Would I want to do it if there were voluntary contributions in a free society? Yes. Would I want to do them if I thought it would only take a half hour? Probably not. You know, so you ask yourself a whole bunch of questions you get at what it means to you and why you feel what you feel that may be an easy one. I don't like having to pay something for nothing. You know, I don't like being drained. I don't like being a victim. But other things, you know, I just don't like that guy. Why? Well, would I like him better if he didn't remind me of my brother? Yeah, yeah, probably would, you know, or or no, and you keep probing, but it's an active conceptual experimental process. Yeah. Capitalist Nick asks, younger objectivists can easily fall into rationalism because of a lack of life experience. Is there any safety checks in your thinking process that one can make to ensure when it's not rationalistic? Yes, and I regard rationalism as a high class melody. Everybody is rationalistic before they know enough to give the real rational proof. Rationalism is dealing with floating abstraction. My voice is going floating abstractions and floating deductions, deductions from hanging in the air, from premises hanging in the air, not valid. But the best check is examples, examples. Not as an academic exercise, but like the mind won't function under force. What about 8, 10, 15 examples of that? Some from your own life and others from history and others from the headlines. And at the end, you have a much more concretized view. My view is that, you know, I ran and talked about thinking in principles. My view is that thinking in principles entails thinking in examples. I always do the kind of Mills method experiment that I was talking about. Alright, let's see. Ian asks, do you think that the reason many scientific educated people fall into modern skeptical perperian falsifiability viewpoint is that they mistake certainty for infallibility? Yes. Yes. And I know it was a surprise to me when I concluded, no one told me this, but I concluded, to say you're certain does not mean it's impossible that you're mistaken. It means there's no reason to think you're mistaken. To say you're mistaken be arbitrary. There's no grounds for any other position other than the one you have. But it's not to say certainty, as Leonard Pickoff explains, is an epistemological assessment. This idea grades out at A plus. It doesn't have to be true. It will be true almost all the time. But if new information comes out that shows that it was false and it won't always be contextual. Ian Rand thought certain people were heroes who were villains. Now, she didn't have contextual truth. She was mistaken, as she would say. So, yes, there are things where people think there's two kinds of things. Expansion of knowledge, which sometimes people look at as if it were mistakes made, but it isn't. Einstein expanded Newton. He didn't correct Newton. He added what happens beyond the scale that Newton could have theories about. But if you think somebody is really, really good and they're really, really bad, you've made a mistake. That's not contextual truth. Expansion is one thing. That's contextual. Mistake is something else. That's where you didn't know, but you were wrong. I'm not sure that gets to the first part of the question again. The reason why people are so attracted to that. Yeah, they think that if you say you're certain, you are saying nothing that will ever happen will ever refuse. I'll never have to change my mind. And that, of course, is wrong. And people go through experiences where they feel, God, I was so sure. I was so sure and I was wrong. So I'm never going to be sure again. That's not the answer. That's not the answer. You do the best you can. So Daniel asked on this issue, how do you claim certainty? If the answer is tracing the abstraction back to the perceptual level, how would you respond to someone that rebutted, what about schizophrenics? If you're not sure that you're not a schizophrenic, nothing I can say would do anything. Get a medical test. So sanity is not on the menu for things we're going to consider as possibilities. It's like, maybe I'm dreaming now. Okay, well, wait, I can disprove that because no, you can't. Because if you're dreaming and I've had this damn dream. I dream that I just in my dream, I disprove that I'm dreaming. And then I wake up. I've even dreamt that I've woken up when I hadn't woken up so. I mean, knowledge pertains to waking reality. That's the axiom. So we don't consider, how do I rule out the possibility? You can't do anything unless you're awake. You're not thinking when you're asleep. So you're not doing philosophy. So we're doing philosophy here. Okay, but again, I've lost the beginning of the question. How do you claim certainty? How do you claim certainty as they answer tracing the abstraction back to the perceptual level? Well, yeah, but that's pretty damn abstract and difficult. All the evidence you have points in one direction. There's no evidence and you've looked. There's no evidence that you can find pointing in any other direction. It's the legal standard beyond a reasonable doubt. Now that sounds like, well, then it's not certainty. But what is left? An unreasonable doubt, right? So we don't want to do what's unreasonable. An unreasonable doubt is ruled out. So if you're beyond a reasonable doubt, you're beyond doubt for a reasonable person. A reasonable person doesn't doubt what's beyond a reasonable doubt. So all the things that lead you, all the evidence and steps that lead you to say this is beyond all reasonable doubt is what gives you the right to claim certainty. Because certainty just means that. That means this is the fully rational position to take and there's no reason to pursue doubts. If I see some new evidence, okay, but going out and looking for it because I can't act yet because I haven't looked in every corner of the universe, that's not required. So readjust your idea of certainty. That's what I'm saying. Certainty means fully rational and all doubts at this point will be irrational. So Abten asks, do you think developing a vehicle to teach concept formation to young kids based on ITOE and how we know would be a worthwhile endeavor? It's already been done. Maria Montessori. It's already been done. That's what the Montessori materials, they're perceptual training but they're also conceptual because she arranges things in degrees like blocks that get bigger and bigger, okay? And you get the idea of size from that, from varying measurements. So, you know, it's a little flippant because it's only been after the very first starting concepts. I would be against in the current context any attempt to teach children how to conceptualize because the same people who are anti-conceptual would be teaching it. But in an ideal society, yes. That's what a proper education is doing all along implicitly. See, Johnny, here are all the characteristics of A and here are the characteristics of non-A. So you see the difference. A is the thing with these characteristics. And this is what teachers used to do when I went to school in the Dark Ages. You know, so many millennia ago. And it can be done again. Here's what I would like to see in schools. I don't think it's dangerous. I'd like to see schools teach early in early life psychoanpistemology in the simple sense of helping kids become aware of what's going on in their minds. Now, we have a lot of games that do that, right? Simon says, Simon says, put your hands on the head. Kids love this. Simon says, take your hand off the head. Put your hand back on your head. Oh, Simon didn't say it. So what they don't tell you is you have to re-say over and over again in your mind. Did she say Simon says first? Did I hear Simon says? Wait for Simon. You have to rehearse it. You have to keep that active in your mind. There's all kinds of very simple things like that that Lee Pearson and I are thinking about, you know, once a year, which we talk about doing this, that could help children take control of their own minds. All right, Harry, let's see. Why do you believe there's a likelihood humanity will wipe itself out? I never said that. I don't know where you're getting that. Why do you believe that? All right, let's see. There's a possibility, but everybody thinks that. Have you considered reviewing the movie, the film, Bicentennial Man on HBTV? It's the Robin Williams robot film. Your view of it could help us concretize issues about how life values and goal direction relate. Thank you. I think I've seen a little bit of that. I think there's rows and rows of robots, but one of them is a conscious sentient being. But I will look at that. Thank you. Bicentennial Man, from Roger. Thank you. All right. Do your senses come before science? Yes, of course. Yes. How would you do science if you weren't conscious? Your senses come before everything. Nick asks, what do you think future objectives philosophers have to address in epistemological and philosophical domains? Are there gaps that need to be filled or knowledge expanded upon the Aristotelian Objectivist tradition? There was, until Leonard Bicott solved the problem of induction, there was a big hole. Maybe that's... There was a big thing needed being done, and he did it, which is solving the classical philosophical problem of induction. And he did it through taking the hierarchical approach, which had never occurred to me. I mean, I thought about induction all my adult life. And I always started with, well, water boils at 212 degrees. And his first revolution is to say, no, rain wets the streets, wets the ground. When I'm thirsty and I drink water, I'm not thirsty anymore. I push a ball and it moves. Those, the first level of inductions or those, you can't plunge it. It would be like a theory of concept formation the way moderns do it. Well, how do we get the concept of jealousy? Let's start there. Jealousy or a bachelor. A bachelor is an unmarried man. That's one of their favorites. So we know the definition. People. Dog. Yep. Okay. So that was, yeah, so that was one, but that, you know, there's more to be said. And I've heard his theory criticized wrongly because it doesn't give scientists day-to-day guidance in the lab, but that's not what he set out to do. There was Hume's problem of induction and he solved it. So that was when I would say another is causality. Did you know in the workshops on objectivist epistemology, which they had extra, which weren't epistemology. I ran was meeting with just three or four people. I wasn't one of them, but I've heard the tapes. And one of them asked, what does the term cause mean? Not causality, but cause. And she didn't know. And she tried a few things and he didn't work out. And I'm not saying that she thought it was important, but there are, I think it's important. And I'm working on that. So I think, and I think it would help with free will too. Yeah. So I would like to see more on causality. She was working on propositions. Wasn't she? And she was staying. Yeah. Yeah. I think I did that. And how we know. I wish to God I'd asked her. I mean, I used to visit her all the time and ask philosophical questions. And I never asked her the question I knew. In general, was the next question to ask. What is the proposition? You told us what a concept is. What is your, cause she was going to write volume two. That's what she called it. Volume two. She was going to write of objective histology, but she died before she could write it. I mean, she had other things going, but I never answered. Tell me in a sentence, you know, how do you define proposition? I think I got it in how we know I have a chapter on it. It's probably not as good as what she would have had, but I think I made a step. And so I would say that is yes, definitely connected to induction and causality. And what else? I think in politics, which everyone is interested, what is an objective threat? Now, I bet she could have told us right off. Yeah, I have my ideas on that. But I would like, because everything depends on that. Like, for instance, do you have to wear a mask? You have no reason to believe you've got COVID. You've been vaccinated. Maybe maybe you haven't. Some number of people in your area haven't. You're going to a bar. You're going to whatever. Are you threatening people? Or we could have gun control. Now, it doesn't actually work in my experience, but let's say that by putting everyone in prison, we could lower gun crimes by 90%. That doesn't strike me as a good thing to do, right? But it's just that everybody has the ability to buy a firearm. Is that a threat to someone, to whom? So I would like to see when is the government justified in saying, hold on there. You can't own a nuclear bomb or whatever it is. What are the standards? I think that's an important question. And I deal with that in the talk that Yaron mentioned. All regulation is over regulation. But I don't think I said the last word on it. So we still have a lot of questions. So let's try to do that. I'll be quicker. Ian says there's an interesting book about how to think like Sherlock Holmes. Do you think you could write a book? How to think like Ayn Rand seems like an invaluable tool. Not one worthy of her. Yeah, I could write a book, but Leonard has already written my 30 years with Ayn Rand where he did that in an article. I could say some things, but I don't think it would be good enough. Yasha asks, if the fundamental choice is to focus, that is turn on conceptual consciousness or not, how can we make this choice before being conscious? You are already conscious. It doesn't come up that way. It's not like you're asleep and bang, I'm in focus. There's an article on this in the Objectivist newsletter which I call Dear Attention. It doesn't want to have to be thinking in order to choose to think. And the author is someone we no longer endorse, but the article is good. It says, at a low level of awareness, you can sense dimly the need to raise your level of awareness and your choice is to answer that alarm or not. I mean, the alarm is my term. I get it in terms of signals. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What's going on? So your subconscious is sending you signals like it did when I said grass is green. You get signals like this doesn't make sense or hey, this is really good. I need more of this. And you don't have to answer it. So what you do is pay attention to whether your level of awareness is appropriate to what's going on. Now maybe you're sitting here easy chair at the end of the day, more or less, you know, resting. And it is appropriate. There's nothing going on. You're resting. You're not going to sleep yet, but you're taking 10 minutes to kind of just let go. Dagny on the train did that. Remember the first scene? That's when they grabbed me when I read Atlas as a pre-object. It's okay, drop the controls for once. And I thought, oh, she has controls. I like that. I like that. So you regulate the level of your awareness, how much hard thinking you're doing, how abstract you're functioning, how much you're querying your database, according to what you sense is required. And the choice is not to move from unconsciousness to consciousness, but to heed the alarms and the good alarm, you know, green arrows too, to heed the signals from the subconscious that you should do X with your mind now. Yes, says he loved the answer. Michael asks, is evil epistemology where we have depression, mental illness, and school shooting problems in this country? Is the enemy of happiness disintegration? Well, the enemy of happiness is disintegration, but only about 99.9% of the bad things you talk about are due to bad epistemology. There is mental illness that's physically caused. I mean, I don't think there's any doubt of that. And I wouldn't make the mistake that a lot of psychiatrists are saying, if a crazy person, we're not allowed to say, if a troubled person is shown to have a different state of his brain than an untroubled person, then it's physically caused. Maybe his choices led to us having that brain condition. We know that the choices you make change your brain. But I do think that the fear in the culture regarding, for instance, COVID, like the Omicron, which is very mild. My own doctor here said it's overblown, fears are overblown about this one. People under the guidance, misguidance of horrible philosophy have put themselves in a state like a Woody Allen character. Life's absurd, and then there's death. I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. You got that from Grautjo Marx, the malevolent universe, really horrible, frightening, bad. Life's a bitch, and then you die. That viewpoint comes from bad philosophy. The founding fathers didn't have that viewpoint. People in the 19th century in America didn't have that viewpoint. Go listen to the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave. You can find it on YouTube. Yeah, at Stanford. Stay hungry, stay foolish. I don't like the foolish part, but what he means is don't conform. And he talks about all the opportunities and positives in life. And there's a good one by Warren Buffett, too, that I found on YouTube. The same kind of thing, that you can really succeed. And you can do incredible things. And that used to be everybody's attitude, pretty much. Now, under the influence... Proof, who has this attitude most? Truck drivers or PhDs? Truck drivers by far. No. Abton asks, what do you miss most about Ayn Rand? The sense that anything could happen. The sense that she could do something that would change the world. Now, I don't think that's what you mean. You mean about her as a person, probably. And I would have to say the full focus, the intensity of that mind. Not its brilliance. She wasn't always brilliant. I used to play Scrabble with her. I'm as good a Scrabble player as she was. She was good, and I'm good. But I know people are better than both of us in objectivism. But every now and then she come out with something to make my jaw drop. I'm not in any way sliding her intelligence. But the riveting power of those eyes looking at you and at the world. I've never seen that in anybody else. And that's what I miss most about her as a person. Michael asks, what's the difference between the brain and the mind? The brain is the physical stuff that can be cut out of your head and put in alcohol and displayed in a jar. The mind is your activities of thinking, hoping, remembering, imagining it's your consciousness, your yourself, not the physical stuff. Malcolm asks, did Randy ever talk about self acceptance? Or is that an idea developed by Brandon after the split? Do you think self acceptance is important to developing self worth? It depends on what you mean. If you mean the valid sense of, I've got what I've got now. I'm going to get better. But I've got assets and liabilities in my skill set. And I'm not going to pretend that I'm better than I am or be humble and say, oh no, not for me. So if it means realism about yourself, plus the commitment to become better and better. Yeah, that's even an Aristotle. But if it means determinism, well, that's me. Take it or leave it. No, that's not. Ayn Rand's not objectivism. Nick asks, do you have any projects you're working on now? Your wisdom and knowledge is second to none in objectivism. Have you considered building your social media platform so a lot of younger audience can hear your views? Now you're making me feel guilty. I just said two weeks ago, I'm going to tweet a lot more. And I've only treated like three times in the two weeks. It's just I'm not used to doing it. I think it's a good medium for me, Twitter, because I have these one-liners. Yeah, you do. And I like putting them out there. I'm just, I'm not social enough for social media. You know, I just say I was social distancing before social distancing was cool. Now, actually, I'm very gregarious. I'm a very gregarious person, but I do treasure my privacy too. No, I'm going to do more. I'm going to do more. I don't know about Facebook. I don't under, I don't know how to. Yeah, Facebook. You shouldn't do Facebook, do Twitter. And look, there's the YouTube channel. I mean, this is new. Yeah. I think this is exactly how we're going to reach. How he's going to reach younger people. So share it when you go on what something of Harry's that you like, share it. That's, that's how you, how we expand the network is share, share, share, share. I mean, objectives are pathetic. They don't even share Iran. Never mind, you know, all the other material that's out there. We have a huge social media presence as a movement. If the material was shared by the objective assault. I could put in a plug for what you just said that I did a survey of objectives in 1965. When I had a little newsletter of 200 subscribers and about 10 years ago on HPL, my website, what was it? You think the number one way that people got introduced to Iran's thinking and writing. And gave it them the Atlas Rock door book. Yes. Personal recommendation. You've got to read this book. Personal recommendation. I mean, we surveyed many, many times at AI. That's always been the case. Even the, in the broad public, we surveyed people. It's a recommendation for a friend or relative gets people engaged. If you, and that's what social media is built for. You know, we could really exponentially grow exponentially by you guys sharing the content that's out there. And it's content. It's relevant when, when Harry does something about. I knew it versus Sam Harris. I mean, that is super relevant to so many people out there, but they will never find it unless you guys help. Populate the world with it. That's a great point. And let me say that in terms of the recommendation. You don't have to look at it as I'm going to get the guy to read this book. A lot of the people told stories like this. Well, three years before I picked up Atlas Shrugged, a friend had mentioned that I would really go for the heroes of Atlas Shrugged. And that stuck with me. And when I saw in a bookstore three years later, I thought maybe I ought to take a look. So it isn't like you have to do a hard sell. I love this book. I bet you would too. And it sticks somewhere. Or two people tell him that. And now it's a movement. So Jeffy asks, my friend is easily influenced by anyone with a strong personality. How can I help him see the importance of thinking for himself? Give him the fountain head. Yeah, people read. Michael asked, would I know and have complied with lockdowns if she had owned a business? I really can't tell. She was in favor in a free society. You know, like semi free like today of law and order and obeying the law. Right. But she also praised speakeasies in prohibition. She said Americans broke the law on principle and she was very admiring of that. So I can't tell how that would have come down. Daniel asked, how does the premise knowledge is contextual, not slip into pragmatism? I think I know, but I'd like to hear it from you. I'm trying to think of the one liner. Because within a context, there's only one answer. Given the facts on the ground, so to speak. The answer is set by how the principle applies to that, those facts. It's the facts plus the principle that give you the answer. For instance, you shouldn't lie. Okay. But the real principles, you should be honest. You shouldn't fake reality. So if somebody is holding a gun at your head, you have perfect right to lie. Not because, oh, well, different circumstances, different things. But because he is making it impossible for you to live in accordance with your judgment of reality. He's the one who's faking reality. You're retaliating. So it's within the context is only the values of the variables. The equation remains the same. Malcolm asked for pragmatism. I've always had trouble with the concept of central purpose. Shouldn't life, your survival be your central purpose as it is the standard of value? Several errors in that. Central purpose is not your only purpose. Life is your only purpose. For instance, no one's central purpose should include their love life. Because for the reason Rourke says, before you can say, I love you, you first have to know how to say the I. You have to be somebody and do something. So you can't make another person, even your loved husband or wife, into your central purpose. But it's certainly part of the purpose in living is a big value. It's huge. It's not your central. Central doesn't mean total. It means the middle, right? That to which the most number of other things are connected. So as Leonard Pico puts it, the primary claimant on a man's resources, time and effort. So it's not the only thing. Life is not the standard value. Man's life, a man's life, a rational being is the standard value. Your life is your ultimate purpose. Not your central purpose. Your central purpose in all your peripheral, that's a secondary collateral. That's it. Your central purpose and your collateral purposes together form your life. And that's your ultimate purpose. You're living to have these things, right? But your central purpose is not all of that. It's the organizing, time claiming priority within that. Okay, Michael asked, is it rationalistic for Einstein to talk about time dilating or space time curving? Does relativity treat attributes as entities? Yes, yes, and yes. Now, you know, on the other side, you could say, well, that's really just a metaphor. He doesn't, although I don't think you say that about time dilation, which I'm opposed to. And yes, I know that the Mue Masons decaying at a different rate. But curved space and all that could be taken as a metaphorical, picturesque way of saying something mathematical. So Einstein, you know, as much as I have arguments with Einstein, he's a lot better than a lot of the others. He was opposed to what he called the spookiness of quantum physics. So there's worse than Einstein. Heals four, for example. Michael asks debunk the claim against the enlightenment industrial revolution from the rights thought leaders that it leads to the same place of isolation atomization of society and material addiction in the same way communism and nihilism will. Before you got to the last two parts, the same way communism and nihilism do, let's take that up for a minute, because then I got a good answer. Could you read it again, dropping the communism and nihilism debunk the claim against the enlightenment and industrial evolution from the rights thought leaders that it leads to the same place of isolation and atomization of society. And material addiction, your bet your life it does. It absolutely does. It leads to the celebration of material prosperity. It leads to beautiful cars, beautiful buildings, beautiful guitars, everyone getting rich medicine prolonging our lives. And I hope making us young again before too long because I haven't got that much time. And atomization absolutely every individual is an atom. That's what free will is. It's you are not controlled by other people. You are an island. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Just be glad it doesn't toll for the that could go on Twitter. So, yeah, these are religious puritanical self hating guys who don't want you to be rich and happy and enjoy material objects. So, no, communism claimed it was going to do that. And instead it gives you what conservatives want. It gives you poverty, humility, downcast eyes. And nihilism doesn't give you anything. Yep. Zero. I don't know how much. How are you in terms of time Harry we've gone and on 40 minutes. There's still a ton of questions. You have the energy to keep going. Oh, yeah, I'm renewed by questions. All right. So James asked this motion required displacement to occur. How is displacement in a tight packed universe possible. It's no solution just deposit mega energy puffs or some such nonsense. Well, meta energy pops is just a word acute phrase not it's not intended to solve any physical issue. Well, you're coming at it with a lot of assumptions. The microscopic scale doesn't have to be like the macroscopic scale. Maybe it is maybe it isn't so in the macroscopic scale. My hand can't go through my mouse. But in microscopic scale, why can't one wave go through another or one energy standing wave go through another. So we don't even know what entities with the stuff is. Is it an entity? Is it a particle is a wave? Is it some something we don't know yet? So you can't say well since one bill your ball has to push the other one away then on if the universe is densely packed. How could there be motion that that's rationalistic that's writing rewriting. No writing a script for reality for the mic for what science is going to discover. And you know that waves can pass water waves and sound waves can pass through each other because their processes and some underlying stuff. So it's a non starter. Gail says that her mother used to say all the time life's a bitch and then you die. So this is quite a common phrase unfortunately. It's better what my mother said. What did your mother say? You, you, you, that's all you think about is you. You weren't put on this world just to live for yourself. You know, life is with people. That's pretty standard Jewish mother stuff. Yeah, there's a book they all read. Yeah, I think so. There's a rabbi who wrote the book a long time ago or something. Travis says at six years old that came to the idea. Life is easy. I just have to figure it out and do it. When I came upon that, I repeated it at least 10 times. That's good. I mean, in the succeeding years, I assume. Yeah, I mean, I think life is easy. If you stop fighting yourself and stop listening to other people trying to make you think it's hard. Yeah, I think it's pretty easy. It's not short. You know, it seems short. What's left is short, but life is long. Right. It's going to be long because the life extension people are going to do their job. Is the validity of one's rationality rooted in the reliability of introspection? If someone denies the reliability of his introspection to explain a way free will, does that implicitly deny the validity of their reason? Yes. However, be aware that when people say, well, free will is an illusion like Sam Harris does. That's his main thing. What they have in mind is the crude sense of free will where it's your choice of actions. Now, you do choose your actions, but not directly. The action, you choose your actions in exactly the same way that you choose where your car ends up. So you're at best buy. Now, the car didn't take you there, but on the other hand, all you did was turn the wheel. Right. What then happened was not directly under your control. Just turning the wheel was what you did. So Sam Harris is saying, well, if you're introspect, you'll see that you're at best buy because there's a road and there are lanes. But yeah, that's all true. But that's not why I'm at best buy. So being aware that when people say, oh, it's an illusion, they're not, they don't mean necessarily be denying what we're saying. They're denying a wrong theory, which says, oh, you want to have free will. I mean, you could choose to now be on rant. But I've heard Sam Harris also deny the existence of you. That is, he says, there is no I. You know, there is no thinker. There is no chooser. There is no. But that's bad. It's hard to understand what we're talking about. Because he has to talk about choices, right? He claimed our choices and yet he claimed people make choices and he's trying to teach people to be better human beings. But if they don't have free will and there's no them there, if there's no they're there, who's he teaching? Yeah, but that's just, he's just under the influence of David Hume who said there is no self that just a sequence of experiences. And that's just bad philosophical analysis. I mean, I wouldn't, there are philosophers who deny the self because they believe society is ultimate. And those are bad guys. He's not like that. No, he has said that when he takes an LSD trip, he can, he can, he experiences the fact that he doesn't exist. I'm sure he does. I mean, I'm sure he does experience that. And that's the truth. Not, not as conscious, you know, that's the truth. And when I go to sleep. Exactly. I experienced the fact that it won't exist. Okay. And Nick asks, who in your mind are the younger generation of objectivist that could make important contributions to movement, especially in philosophy? Is there anyone out there other than Salmieri and on Kogate to follow and look for? Yes. But those are the top two. You did name the top two. I think all of them are pretty good. I like Ben Baer. I don't want to slight anyone because there's none of them that I think don't have talent. There's some foreign ones that I don't know. But I've heard really excited Greg Salmiere, for instance. So I'm hopeful. And you know, we're now, thanks to the internet, and I'm going to digress for a second. You know how sports records are always being broken. More home runs, more touchdowns, more control of the ball. It's because there's a larger and larger population to draw from. So baseball up until, you know, Jackie Robinson was exclusively white people and largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But once you bring in the whole world playing baseball, you're going to get more exceptional people. And the same thing is true in philosophy and in objectivism. Now that we draw on six billion people, we're going to have more outstanding philosophers than we did when we could only count on the United States and Canada. So I'm very optimistic. Very optimistic about future geniuses, including in the close sciences, like physics. Yeah, I agree completely. I think opening up eight billion people on the planet to these ideas or to good ideas generally to have eight billion people thinking is just astounding. And it's going to just that is going to generate really positive results. Let's see. Philip asked, based on the biological basis of teleological concepts, Harry Benzweig's first book, biological functions are goal directed. Would this apply to emotions? And if so, are there only two fundamental emotions, one driving us towards a goal and one restraining us from that goal? Restraining us? Yeah, so one positive emotion moving us towards a goal and one holding us back from that goal. Well, I was with you up until that last phrase. Yes, the emotions are naturally selected to be the impetus to take actions that help us survive, right? And the origin of the emotions is a pleasure pain mechanism, which is attuned to survival. And this has been known for a long time that even before it was identified, it hurts to jab yourself with a knife. It tastes good to eat nutritious food when you're hungry to drink when you're thirsty. So if it didn't, any organism who's and there have been such, you know, his wiring is wrong, they die because they like. Oh, yeah, I mean, I mean, that's a parody, but the equivalent eating things that are bad for them, for instance. So yes, the whole affective side of man is naturally selected. In man, his free will governs how he judges the value to him to his life of various things. And most people get a lot of mistakes in there, but they also have a lot right, but they get a lot of mistakes. But now there's two fundamental emotions approach and avoid. Go after flea, not restraining. There's no, there's no, what would that be? There's only love and fear in effect. There's aversion run away. And what's a positive one called engage the love, the love emotion, fancy word for attraction, attraction and aversion are the two fundamentals. And you can find that those are components in all the other emotions. I gave a talk, a really good talk on emotion. So you can find on YouTube from ARI. Michael asked, can I ever be certain that a coin is fair simply by repeatedly flipping it? If so, how many tosses do I need after 100 heads in a row? I might be practically certain. But can I logically be certain? There's no difference. Yes, you would be certain if you got 100 heads in a row, it's a two headed coin. It's not just bias, you know, bias would mean I flipped it 100 times and it came up 42 tails and 58 heads. That would make you wonder. But then suppose you flip it a million times. Mathematical probability will tell you the odds of it being within a given range. It's not going to be 500,000 and 500,000. The odds of that are about zero, close to zero. And you asked about books that I'm writing. I'm writing one on the philosophy of mathematics. And the central concept is nil, nil. That which is computable but is smaller than any purpose that you could have for it. It's effectively zero. It isn't zero, but it's too small to matter or to detect, detect. And that's an extremely important concept. For instance, those of you who know calculus, you can see that the theory of limits takes something to where it's nil. The delta x approaches nil. And that solves the problem of, well, how can it really be zero? And so we have to have a theory of limits. Yeah, you have to have the understanding that you can make something too small to matter. And that no matter how small does matter, you can get to that smallness. That's what the theory of limits. You can exceed it in smallness. You can exceed in smallness. So yeah, I wonder, but I'm writing a book on that. Daniel asks, do you think we'll see authoritarianism in the U.S. and or a new dark age or are there enough good guys to save us? 50 years ago, a woman who had escaped from the Nazis told me and her friend, don't worry about dictatorship in America for another 50 years because we were damn worried at that time. It looked like it was here, but it is 50 years later now. And you do have to worry. The reason that I'm worried is that people younger than about 40 have been disminded. They cannot think in principles. Most of them in America, not abroad, John Dewey's progressive education. So what holds us to reality is those who do think and there's a smaller and smaller number every year. On the other hand, I do see a lot of positive signs. So are we going to beat the decline? I think so, but it's scary. It's scary. How many times do you have to verify a statement to be certain it is true? Is once enough? Yes, until new evidence comes up. Because verify means show that it's true. I mean, what you really mean is how many times do you have to test it? Try to verify it before you can know that it's true. There's no one answer to that. It's different, different sciences for different cases. However, let me say in great enthusiasm and anger, the damn statistics and clinical tests that they did before letting us have the vaccine and now before letting us have the treatment, the therapeutic is way ridiculous, way ridiculous. Let us have the damn stuff and you'll get your clinical trials through what we do. Or go ahead and do the clinical trials while we're getting vaccinated if we want to. And I wanted to. Absolutely. But then they might sneak that chip into you and they would control it that way. I had a guy who was working in my car tell me last night, they vaccine is a way of population control. And I thought he meant dictatorship. And I was saying, yeah, no, he meant it makes you for infertile so you can have children. He doesn't know that our problem is declining population, that the birth control has made the problem in the future be an imploding decreasing population. So action Jackson asked, how do you know that what you claim to be true is valid and in nature? That read my book. That's exactly how do I know that's valid because I can prove it because it's either self evident like I exist. This is here. Or it's derivable by a rational process. Inductively and or deductively from what I perceive. I think what you need is a chapter and you the questioner is a chapter and perception where I should the perception is infallible. It cannot ever be mistaken ever, ever, ever. So I'm going to ask the question you're suggesting. But what about the stick in the water that looks crooked? I mean, that's not true, right? My perceptions are mistaken. Well, Aristotle answered that to a pretty good level. I ran one further, but there's no error in the perceiving a camera would photograph the same look. Right? The water reflects, refracts the light and the camera captures the light. The camera's not making a mistake. Do you think the camera makes a mistake? The mistake comes when you judge this is a bent stick. When you apply the concept bent to the stick. It's an understandable mistake, but it isn't bent. It looks bent. It looks like a bent stick looks. But when you pull it out of the water, you see it isn't a bent stick. So Aristotle made the point that errors are errors in conceptual identification. He didn't use those words, but that's what he called a judgment. Not in the seeing. Seeing is fine. If you didn't see it as bent, you should have some kind of corrective lenses. So just a suggestion in terms of one of your HBTV shows. There's a newer scientist by the name of Donald Hoffman, who is very, very, very popular out there among Silicon Valley types and on the TED Talk circuit. You can find it a number of his TED talks who claims that we evolved not to see reality. And that gives us a survival advantage. But it's worth commenting on. How does he know we evolved? Yes, I know. I mean, I have the same questions. But I think it's worth, you know, generally, I think the way you gain viewership is you engage with issues that people are out there following. Or something like the Sam Harris video you did has more views than others because you use Sam Harris. That's right. So see if you can. I think Donald Hoffman is another one that you could probably leverage for that purpose. I'll look him up. Thank you. Well, Adam asks, will there be a translation of how we know into Chinese? How am I to know that? Are you doing anything to promote? How do we know that? I'm not doing anything with the book at all. I wrote the book so that what I discovered during my lifetime wouldn't end with me. I didn't write it for a mass market. But I'd be happy if you were translating into Chinese. Of course, then there's a question which Chinese because there's different dialects and languages. But yeah, that would be great. You do it, Adam. Get somebody to do it. Well, he mentioned the publisher published my books in Chinese and I think right now the situation in China is such that it would be very difficult to publish anything right now in China. But we can certainly try. Adam says, thanks for a great show, Yuan and Harry. Ashley says, HB, your joy in living is one of the few infectious things I'm glad to be exposed to. And, okay, so we've got a thank you. Thank you. I do. I do enjoy myself. We've got, I think, 10 quick, quick questions. So quick answers. Okay. Some of these are just comments. Thank you so much for your intellectual work, both of you. It's changed my life. You are Titans. Kirk writes, thank you both Yuan and Harry for doing a show today and all of your amazing work. I've learned a lot from how we know. Oh, good. Dan again asks, is the Silicon Valley fake it until you make it business philosophy model? It depends on how it's interpreted. Yeah, and whether there is such a thing as fake it to you. I mean, everybody knows using that term, but is it real? Is that really helpful? I just saw on SquawkBox today that the decision against Elizabeth Holmes is going to curb that saying in the Valley. Yes. You're not going to get that saying anymore because of her, right? Because she did fake it and went over the line clearly to where it was fraud. Dave says, why is altruism more effective abstractly and politically than it is interpersonally? Well, I think he means why are there more people who vote for someone else to pay than who will give of themselves? Yes. Because it doesn't hurt as much. But be aware that some people like to say, oh, the reason why this legislation is passed is because the Democrats will gain power by it. But no legislation can pass without a moral justification. People have to support it and they always support it if they think it has a moral justification. And altruism is almost always with substituting for real moral justification. All they seem to have. Michael asks, Harry, do you agree with you Ron's assertion that consciousness is only a biological phenomena, not a digital one? I think you earlier said yes. Yeah. I probably got that from Harry. Yeah, probably. I had it in the course you took, yeah. I'm pretty sure. Andrew asks, was Ainu and a warm person? Yes. Very warm. In fact, I remember Alan Gotthelf criticizing the statement of Brandon that's in who was I ran, that she's Mrs. Logic. Yeah. You know, saying she is, but what about Mrs. Warmth? Yeah. Every time I left her apartment at night, she would look at me concerned and say, be careful. Be careful out there. It's dangerous, you know. And I said, I'm not going to rob anyone. You don't have to worry. And she didn't enjoy that. Yeah. She was really, she was a very warm, caring person. Chris asks, what do you think were Freud's positive and negative impacts on psychology? Do you think Peacock was too uncharitable towards Freud? Well, I would have said yes. But my wife's in psychology and she has come to question when I thought was Freud's contribution. First of all, I think Freud is basically a fraud. I mean, he's basically a ridiculous irrationalist destroyer, meaning no disrespect. But I always said what was kind of standard of objectivism, that his identifications of the defense mechanisms were correct and helpful. Things like rationalization, localization, obsessive behavior. There's a list of about 12 of them. And his understanding of the dynamics of that, that you're defending yourself against anxiety. I always thought that rang true. But my wife, who's a psychologist, is moving in a different direction and said, no, even that stuff's wrong. I'm rethinking it. Can you compare in contrast to Rand's version of egoism versus Mark Steiner's version of egoism? Oh, yes. Max, isn't it? Max Steiner. Steiner. Yeah. Yes, I've read him. He thinks murder is good. He has a praise of murder in the ego and its own. He's an irrationalist. Yes. Yes, Ein Rand was a hero worshiper and a mind worshiper and so the two is the same thing. Yep. And Steiner is a dark, like Nietzsche, a dark irrationalist who thinks force is a good thing if you're using it selfishly. Frank says, please say something or tell a story about John Redpeth. Oh, here's a story. I don't know if this, I have to tell this one. Okay. First of all, John was a great story master. He told fabulous stories about his life. About 10 years ago, we used to winter in LA. He wanted to escape Toronto winters and he wanted to escape Manhattan winters. Didn't spend all winter there, but a good. We went to a car dealership on Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Hills. It was one of these dealerships that has fabulous, you know, Maserati's, Bugatti's and Corvettes from the Golden Era. And we went into the gift shop. They had a little gift shop where you check out at the cash register and I pull up a book. This is a potato book. It's Sebring. John and I both car aficionados. Sebring. You know, there's a 24 hour race at Sebring. It used to be anyway. Paul Newman used to race in it. And I'm kind of thumbing through it. And I say, John, is this you? And yep, it was John. John was with the racing team of Roger Penske. Before he discovered objectivism. This is the kind of thing that would be so typical of John. He's like far scum in that way. He would show up. You know, Penske hurts Penske now. That's Roger Penske. He was a personal friend of John's. And John was in the pit crew of some of the races that were done by Roger Penske. Penske's team. And this picture, I just fucked open this book on Sebring. And that was John. Did you know that John climbed Mount Everest with Hillary? Was Sir Edmund Hillary? Really? Yes. Hillary's return in 1980 something. John talked his way in to being on that trip. And it just so John was such a life loving, gregarious person who could chat up anyone. He once got in to talk to President Sukarno of Indonesia when he was just a high school graduate. Now Sukarno was a communist, but this was before John knew what was what politically. But he actually got, he and a friend got an audience with President Sukarno, the dictator of Indonesia on around the world trip. So John, I wanted John to write the story of his life. And the title I had picked out for it was Go For It. Because that's what he did. He seized the opportunity to seize the Carpe Diem. That was John. And that plus a really genuine love of objectivism, objectivist values. John was a great friend of mine, ran, which made him, of course, a dear friend of mine. Well, that is, there's a great way to end. Thanks, Harry. This has been a real delight. And, you know, because of you, we've raised a lot of money on the show. So that's good. Good. Yeah. And so Ron is a national treasure too. So, I mean, I shouldn't say too. He is some along with, let's take that as along with John. Both of them love America, but didn't, weren't born here. So, yeah. John never made it into, I mean, he never became an American citizen. He never became an American. He had a lot of ties to Canada. Too close to America to, I guess. The 51st state, yeah. Yeah, it was right, right, right. He used to fly the American flag every 4th of July. Even when that got him hated, he used to do that. And he did the best 4th of July events ever. He had, you know, his, his reading, readings from the founders and things like that on 4th of July, which is terrific. Yeah. Good. So thanks, Harry. We should do this again. This was really good. Lots of questions. I'm sure we could have gone on for another couple of hours. So we'll definitely have to do it again. Speaking of that. Yes. Once with John, I did a three and a half hour event. Wow. We took, we took questions for two and a half hours after one hour lecture. All right. So, so next time when you don't have laryngitis, we will shoot for beating that. Okay. Thank you, Iran. Thanks, Harry. Thanks everybody. We'll have a live stream on on Sunday. We'll have a live stream on on Thursday. At 7pm East Coast time. And you can catch Harry on, I'm in center UK. Monday's, Monday's at 4pm East Coast time. Good night everybody. Bye.