Everybody, today we're invading Destiny's morality and we're starting right now. With an introduction of our speakers, we're thrilled to have them and want to let you know, folks, both Destiny and Brenton are linked in the description. So if you want to hear more, you absolutely can hear more from them. And with that, I want to say just quick hello, Destiny, glad to have you back. Hey, glad to be here again. And Brenton, glad to have you back as well. And also, folks, want to let you know, Brenton has a special link in the description. Want to give him a chance to share about that before we get started. Thanks so much, Brenton, for being back with us. The floor is all yours. Absolutely. Yeah, very excited to be doing this. Very excited to be locking horns with Destiny. He's someone that I've been very heavily influenced by. And yeah, I'm really excited about this. Anyway, for those of you who don't know me, I am an anarchist political commentator and author of Snow White Zombie Apocalypse. I'm a writer and go nominated comic series. And today it's a little different because a good friend of mine and a brilliant writer, his sister, who is younger than me, was fired from her job, unfortunately due to what later turned out to be a heart condition. And she needs bypass surgery. And due to being fired for that heart condition, she is, she does not have any insurance. And so they're trying to raise $75,000 to help pay for the procedure. So if anybody can, please click on the link, give whatever. Even $1 will help with the algorithm and help them hit that goal and make sure that she can get her surgery because, you know, honestly, that's a horrifying situation for anyone to be in. So yeah, thank you very much. And please do check that out. Absolutely. And those links are in the description at the very top of the description, folks. So I highly encourage you to check those links out in the description box. And with that, we're going to get started with Destiny's opening statement on his morality. So Stephen, the floor is all yours. Okay, so I have like some very basic stuff written down. And then this is, I imagine we'll be going over it. So this is kind of like the foundational ethics that I use that I kind of build all of my policy positions out of, and I build all of my applied ethics positions out of. So I broke this into two parts. The first part, I don't imagine we'll talk about much, but just epistemically, I would like to say that like the laws of thought exist. So for instance, I'm going to assert without proof that we believe in things like non-contradiction or we believe that non-contradiction can happen. We believe in the law of the excluded middle. We believe in the law of identity, stuff like that. And then for two and three, I'm going to say that like zero order and first order logic exist. So like if P then Q, you know, A is not not it, like stuff like this. I hope that we can just instantly move past that. I don't imagine that we'll get bogged down there, but just in case there's some ultimate skepticism lurking, that's just just very basic epistemic side stuff. Okay. And then moving past that. So the way that I kind of look at my moral stuff is branch this out into three sections with one and two being incredibly similar. So number one. So the first premise is I exist. Second premise is I have an experience. Third premise is I want to maximize my experience. And then I'll repeat the same three axioms for other people. Other people exist. Other people have an experience. Other people want to maximize their experience. And then the third part is I believe one, humans synergize to create a better experience. Two, if I help others maximize their experience, they will help me. And three, assuming we all share moral systems, we will all synergize with each other. So that's essentially kind of like the foundation that I build all of my policy positions and my applied ethics positions out of. Okay. And that's it. Thanks so much. I'll kick it right on over to Bretton. Sure. Thank you very much. And I want to really thank Destiny for this.  And so, you know, I just want to recognize that before we go into it. You may find that there are some slightly different phrasing. And this is because I based it on my criticism on a video that Destiny put out about six months ago. So if there's something that doesn't make sense, check out that video because I do reference it directly. So to begin, in the beginning was the word or was it? Now, you may think it quite odd that I, a practicing Buddhist and beginning a debate with about morality with a Bible quote, specifically John one one in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. All things were made by him and in him was life and that life was the light of men and it's shown in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not. And yes, I will admit that upon first inspection, this might seem particularly strange, especially considering the morality in question, which is to say the specific moral system that we are discussing tonight is one that has been professed by my esteemed interlocutor, a man who regards himself as an agnostic atheist, but bear with me because it will all make sense in the end. The thing is, most philosophical questions and discussions, if they go on long enough, ultimately become about God and the popular understanding of Christianity being one of the foundational political and philosophical pillars of the Western world has woven itself so thoroughly into the fabric of our increasingly secular society that its remnants are quite often impossible to dislodge. In short, if we take it as a given that indeed God is dead, we must also admit that the world we currently inhabit rests upon a scaffold constructed of his bones. Unless you think I'm being too presumptuous in drawing connections with this particular metaphor, let me remind the audience that Mr. Bonnell, known to many by the pen named Destiny, has himself actually acknowledged this to be the case when he stated on this subject, what I call internal happiness or maximized experience, which is the basis of his moral system, I think they call religion. Now, before we go any further, I want to make something abundantly and overwhelmingly clear. My criticisms of Destiny's professed moral systems are not criticisms of Destiny himself. And if you come away from this debate finding them adequate, it does not in any way suggest any such particular and notable moral deficiencies in Destiny as a person. Morality is an exceptionally tricky subject that has reliably confounded the greatest minds humanity has ever produced for the entirety of our species' existence on this planet and will likely continue to do so far into the future. Barring certain supernatural assumptions in all of human history, there has never been a perfectly moral individual nor a perfect moral system nor any kind of perfection whatsoever, which is to say that nothing within reality exists independent of its opposite. Everything that exists both in the objective material world and the subjective reality of the mind is inherently limited and contains within itself its own negation. And to quote a popular stereotype of an age-presbyterian minister to his vanity to think otherwise. The fact is, man is mortal, fallible, human. And as such, everything that man creates also bears the mark of his creation and thus carries within itself that same human fallibility. So it is no particular failing on Destiny's part if he is found to have spoken in error. And of course, the same holds true for myself. In a certain sense, we're all just hairless apes filled to the brim with a series of intense and often conflicting needs, drives, and desires who are nonetheless stumbling through an infinitely complicated and seemingly indifferent world for 90 or so years at a time, desperately clutching in the darkness for some kind of stability. As such, the correct response when one of us makes a mistake is almost always compassion. Ultimately, we're all just doing our best and it is a fact of life that often the handhold that seemed so solid just a moment ago will crumble in our grasp. The dialogue which we are now engaged in is simply one more in a long line of moral, ethical, and philosophical disagreements, reaching back no doubt to before recorded history. And in fact, I will come to argue that what we are doing here today, from a certain point of view, is the act of morality itself. So to begin, I have three primary objections to the moral system as it was proposed by Destiny. The first is a statement that if something is not consistent, it is meaningless. Consistency is something that we should strive for when constructing any worldview. However, this admirable instinct is philosophically treacherous to say the least. As the goal that Destiny has assigned for himself is ultimately a Sisyphusian task. Any time you try to roll the boulder of perfect consistency up the hill of reality, you may get very far, but you will inevitably hit a contradiction and that boulder will roll back down and the whole process will start over again. For proof, one only need to look to the logician and philosopher Kurt Gertl's two incompleteness which proved mathematically that all axiomatic systems are either incomplete or inconsistent, which means that if we are to take Destiny at his word, math itself is meaningless. We also see this reflected in Bertrand Russell's objection to set theory when he proved it impossible to create a logical set containing all truths due to the fact that such a set must necessarily both contain and not contain itself, thus rendering set theory once again meaningless under the strict interpretation proposed by my interlocutor. Even the physical laws of science that govern our natural world are not wholly consistent. The ideal gas law, for instance, breaks down at high pressures and low temperatures, but this contradiction does not render the ideal gas law meaningless. As such, I would remind Destiny that should is an extremely dangerous word. Contradictions are important and can point to serious flaws in any methodological framework, but their presence alone does not render that framework meaningless anymore than the presence of hypocrisy renders a particular statement false. If a doctor tells you smoking causes lung cancer, you need to stop, and then later you find out that said doctor is a smoker, well, that doesn't make the statement untrue. You should still stop and it still does cause lung cancer. Secondly, I reject the idea that any moral system can be based wholly or even primarily on what Stephen calls internal happiness or maximized experience. On its face, it sounds reasonable. One wishes to be happy and therefore one should advance an ethic centered around the fulfillment of this desire. And to Destiny's credit, he has avoided most if not all of the usual stumbling blocks that the more naive and myopic egoists usually fall into, but there is a fundamental problem when it comes to centering oneself as the primary beneficiary and source of ethics and morality and this can easily be discovered if we examine even enlightened selfishness. If you hold that the primary thing that you love is yourself and really dive into it with a full power of your imagination, you will quickly discover that everything that you love is in fact not yourself at all. If you love yourself and therefore devote yourself to fulfilling all of your needs and desires, then what you are really loving is that which is external to you or rather that which is external when it is added to yourself. An egoist who loves themselves and thus drinks only the best and most flavorful wine to their palate truly loves not themselves, but the wine or more correctly, they love the combination of the wine and themselves. When the egoist engages in a passionate love affair with one or more extremely attractive individuals, yet again it is not themselves that they love nor even necessarily the individuals. It is both together. It is the combination. Now to be certain that I do not straw man destiny, his brand of enlightened egoism to a certain extent makes gestures in this direction but there is still a huge gaping flaw and namely it is when he supposes that individuals who do not share his goals of maximizing his individual happiness and the happiness of others must necessarily be excised from his system either via banishment, imprisonment or death. Why? Because a necessary part of internal happiness is the presence of one's enemies. Now take a second with that because that's not how most people usually think about their enemies and it's not how we're used to approaching personal and social discord along with all of the unfortunate things which can befall an individual but don't reject it out of the pan. Think it through because the only reason we know that we exist that we can identify where we end and another begins is when we meet resistance. The principle is expressed in many subtle ways and it is why in the martial arts many advanced practitioners argue that in fact it is the an act of ultimate kindness for someone to agree to strike you and be struck by you because when we are hit with any kind of force the accompanying shock makes you feel alive in a way that few other experiences can deliver. The point is that one only knows the limits of one's body by the experience of coming into contact with that which is not their body which is to say resistance, resistance to our ideas, resistance to our will and the seeming resistance to our own happiness and well-being. In a way that's what love is. Someone who is not beholden to your will agreeing to forego that most of the time and of course as a lover we respond in kind offering both acceptance and resistance. In essence we only know pleasure because we know pain and thus to attempt to excise obstacles and enemies from our conscious experience is in reality an attempt to have a wave without the trough is an attempt to play chess without an opponent to knock all the black pieces off the board before beginning the game in order to enjoy a permanent victory for white. This of course is not only impossible but is ironically inadvisable as I'm sure destiny as a consummate gamer understands just how unfulfilling it can be to play a game that's too easy or to continue playing a game once victory is assured. In short, we must admit that enemies, misfortune and discord are as much a part of our overall happiness as harmony, fortune and friends and thus we cannot commit to a system that eliminates any of them at least not entirely at least if we expect that system to make us happy or maximize our experience which is as I have explained something of a fool's errand anyway. Chasing desire is fundamentally flawed for this and many other reasons not the least of which is because that frame causes you to evaluate others and your own external environment either as solely an impediment or a means to an end when in fact it is neither. It is instead simply another expression of you and as much as back is an expression of front and the South Pole of a magnet is an expression of the North and to attempt to excise it is like fleeing your own shadow.  Finally, I take issue with the fundamental assumption that a moral system any moral system functions as a mechanism into which we can feed data and by so doing come to a perfect or nearly perfect moral conclusion. In fact, when we look at how morality operates in the real world, I don't think we can necessarily conclude that morality even is a system in the strictest sense of the word and this brings me back, well, to the word, John 11.  It is one of the most well-known pivotal and influential statements in all of the English language. And sadly, it is also something of a mistranslation or perhaps not to put it so strongly an unfortunate way of phrasing the idea which has caused untold confusion for centuries. The word in this sense is logos from the Greek and has been translated in much the same way as I have previously stated in nearly every edition of the Bible. That is with the exception of one Erasmus of Rotterdam whose 15th century translation of the book of John roughly begins such Lee. It all arose out of a conversation, a conversation within God and in fact, the conversation was God. So God started the discussion and everything came out of this and nothing happened without consultation. This was the life, life that was the light of men shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity. Now, do you see the difference there? And do you understand why I told you that all serious philosophical and moral debates ultimately become a conversation about God? Suddenly, we in the West are not subject to the word, something complete, immutable, unchanging given from on high. We are the conversation which means our relationship to the divine is participatory and to rephrase this, our relationship to each other and to reality itself is also participatory. This has a number of incredible implications not the least of which is that morality is not a matter of finding the proper system and comporting ourselves to it just like life is not a matter of finding the proper God and bending ourselves to his will but rather we're it, we are God. We are morality, we are life itself. We are the universe experiencing itself as an individual. Morality is something that we do which can be best understood in terms of aesthetics. Morality is a dance, it is a song and the point of it is not to achieve some specific material end. The point of the dance is the dancing just as the point of the song is the singing. There are certain rules and themes and recurring motifs but to look at morality for these things or for its supposed outcome is to attempt to make the tail wag the dog and to miss the forest for the treats. In short, we are doing morality right now because it all arose of a conversation and thus I am very excited to continue this one. Thank you. Gotcha and thank you very much, Brendan for that opening statement. We will now be going into the open discussion section. Wanna let you know though if it's your first time here at Moderate Debate we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you're from and last, you guys at the bottom right of your screen we are going to have an epic debate next Tuesday with Jengles and T-Jump as they are debating the super straight debate and so that should be a lot of fun. Hit that subscribe button and that notification bell so you don't miss that one live. Thanks so much everybody and gentlemen, the floor is all yours for that open dialogue. Well, do you wanna start right at point number one? Sure, we can start at point, I think I probably threw a lot at you. So is there anything that you wanna latch on to right there? Let's just go in order. We can start right at point number one, I believe was you challenged, I think you challenged me on an epistemic level almost the idea that we shouldn't strive for a contradiction and any particular theory or that we shouldn't strive to avoid contradiction in any particular theory or framework. I would disagree, I think we should strive for it. I just don't think it's a possible goal. Like essentially we should always strive to eliminate as many contradictions as possible but I don't think it's possible to eliminate all of the contradictions and I don't think the presence of a contradiction necessarily makes what we have done up until that point you know, worthless or completely unreliable. So what would your argument be against something incredibly basic like the principle of explosion? How would you argue against something like this? The principle of explosion. Meaning that like, so I think that most people who understand formal logic would say that if you have any contradiction then from any contradiction in a system we can prove anything. I would say on a certain level that works but I think like, I mean, Isaac Azimov like you can prove anything with logic you just have to pick your postulates. I'm not throwing logic out. It's just logic is something invented by humans to accomplish specific goals and eventually it will break down at the highest levels. Okay, so I'm gonna try. Okay, so I ever say anything that's unclear. You can stop me immediately. Try to be very clear with every single thing I say. So my assertion is that if we accept contradiction we have essentially abandoned all logical statements. I don't think we can ever do that. I don't think it's possible that we can say like, oh, you know, well, there's contradictions. Like that's okay. Because as I said before from any contradiction we can prove any statement to be true or false. I'd say again, that's totalizing because and we have plenty of evidence that it is not true. Again, I mentioned- What do you mean by that? Well, Goodell's or Gertl's incompleteness theorem. Sure, so to be clear on that. So Gertl's incompleteness theorem basically just said that any axiomatic system is going to have some limitations. More specifically, there might be true statements that any particular set of axioms can't prove, but it doesn't say that contradictions are acceptable. No, and again, I'm not saying that contradictions are acceptable. I'm just simply saying that they're inevitable. Because again, any axiomatic system is either contradictory or incomplete. Okay, well, incomplete is way different than contradictory. I can acknowledge that there's probably some incompleteness around any system, but that doesn't make it contradictory. And it also doesn't make it not contradictory. Because again, we can't know for a fact that we've eliminated every contradiction because you don't know a contradiction until you find it. Sure, but what I would argue is that any set, any type of theory that contains a contradiction is I think necessarily becomes invalid. So if we find a contradiction, we have to seek to resolve that as soon as possible. It has to be resolved. We can't just accept a contradiction and say, well, that's okay. Well, again, I'm not so much saying we accept the contradiction. Obviously we would work to move around in much the same way that like with special gas laws, like the gas laws function under certain conditions, but then when the conditions change, the laws no longer become useful. We don't throw the law out in much the same way that we don't throw out set theory because we know that it's still limited and has a direct contradiction within itself. So, okay, so to be clear on, so, okay. Okay, so I know that a lot of these things get kind of like tossed around, but they don't think that these are ever quite as people say them. So for Russell's Paradox, Russell's Paradox was a challenge that was like in the 1920s, I think, to naive set theory. 1900 or maybe 1930. In 1921, 1920s it was resolved. So it was resolved over a hundred years ago by Zermelo Frankel set theory. So Russell's Paradox is the thing of the past. Nobody, we don't care about that anymore. That's a hundred years old. No, I mean, Russell's Paradox is still important, but the thing is, is that set theory has grown beyond it because they found a contradiction and they built a new system based upon that. Like, yeah, exactly. But so what I'm saying is Russell's Paradox is a challenge to naive set theory, but mathematics doesn't deal with naive set theory anymore. We don't do anything with naive set theory. So Russell's Paradox is not. Yeah, I would disagree with that. I'm pretty sure naive set theory is still used, but you know, again, I'm not a math guy, so you'll have to talk to a math guy for that. Gotcha. If any mathematician ever wants to challenge me or claim that I'm wrong, my understanding is that virtually all forms of mathematics start from, is it Zermelo Frankel set theory or Zermelo Frankel theory with the choice axiom, ZFC or ZEF. These are like every mathematician and every math theory basically starts with these places. Nobody uses naive set theory anymore. As for like the ideal gas laws, I'm not as well read on these, but my understanding is that like ideal gas law is it's not necessarily like a, I don't think it's a law. I think that it's more just like, this is kind of like a simplistic equation that we can use to kind of get an idea for things. And as conditions change, the way that we view things might change, but I would say that that's similar to how for Newtonian mechanics, we can use these kind of up to a point, but that's not really our current understanding of the universe. And as things approach like certain sizes or relativistic speeds, then we have to appeal to like the theory of relativity. We've got to refer to special or general relativity and that these things are going to be more consistent. I think what you're doing here though is you're kind of conceding my point in that, yeah, certain things work to a point and then we reach a point where either the contradiction can't be resolved and we have to abandon them in favor of something else. It doesn't mean that we don't ever use that thing again. So we have to be careful when we talk about like, if you're going to ask me if we use some shortcuts in the existence of our day-to-day life that we don't know, like I couldn't have somebody sit down and write a formal proof for, then yeah, of course I'll agree with that, but we're not arguing about like, well, what does an engineer like that use, right? What we're arguing about is like, what should we strive for and like our theories that we have. So like, nobody, no, like our current theories I think you and I agree on what we should strive for. I'm not saying we shouldn't strive for consistency, but what I'm saying is, is that I think by overemphasizing the fact that we need consistency, what happens is, is that you seem to naturally go from that to you look at another moral system that works most of the time, you find someone is in consistency, you catch someone as a hypocrite and what winds up happening is that you're like, okay, so that moral system doesn't work and you throw it out. In fact, it probably does work. The thing is though, these systems are not perfect. So there needs to be exceptions to every rule. Okay, so I would say we have to be very careful. So the discussion of any particular ethical system exists only in an idealized form. It is not a person's behavior. Just because a person adheres to a particular set of ethics and they are a hypocrite or they do something wrong, doesn't invalidate or cause a contradiction to arise in those set of ethics. Contradictions that arise within any formal theory should be able to be proven by deduction, not proven by behavior. So for instance, if you wanna challenge any ethical theory, you would have to show me the two statements within that ethical theory or contradictory or cause a contradiction. You can't just say that this person tries to appeal to that theory and they did something wrong, therefore that theory is bad. That would be similar to saying somebody did two times three equals 10, therefore multiplication or arithmetic is bad. Just because somebody makes a mistake on a behavior doesn't disprove the actual underlying rationale or the system. Yeah, I mean, again, I don't disagree with that, but I wasn't speaking specifically about someone not living up to their moral system. I was talking specifically about moral systems that may contain contradictions within themselves. Okay, I understand that you're saying that. Well, I understand you're saying that, but the word you very specifically used was hypocrite and it is impossible for a moral system to be hypocritical. Hypocrite implies you advocate for one thing while you do another thing, which is an individual to exhibit a behavior. I don't think you can get a hypocrisy in a moral system. No, I get what you're saying. My point with using the phrase specifically hypocrite is I think there's ways for essentially the halo effect to creep into how we talk about systems by essentially attaching it to a person or to a person's behavior or to a person's perceived, I guess, inconsistency. I think- But we have to agree that we're separating, for the purposes of this conversation, we're absolutely separating any system or theory from a practitioner of said system or theory. Sure, at least as far as the dealing with contradictions goes. I mean, I don't think you can necessarily completely divorce a system from how it is practiced within reality, but that's different than what you're saying. So I just wanna make that clear. Does that make sense? For sure, we can attack the practice of certain systems, but that doesn't invalidate the system itself. So for instance, every single Christian on the planet could turn into a ravenous murder and that wouldn't disprove the system of Christianity or wouldn't disprove the morals or the ethics of Christianity. It would show that all Christians are horrible people. Whereas if I could demonstrate a contradiction in the Bible or in one of the 10 commandments, I would be disproving the whatever system of ethics Christianity purports to have or specific sex Christian purports to have, even if all individual Christians were good, holy people, whatever. There's a fundamental difference between behavior and any particular theory or system that we've constructed. I'm not 100% sure I'm sold on that. I take your point. I think it's a good one, but I have actually and if you've seen my other religious debates on here, I've sort of argued that the real test of a religion is its effect on its followers. And if it does promote them to live happy, productive, harmonious lives. Yeah, but when you say the real test of a religion, what are you testing? What do you mean by that? The test of the religion? The test of the, if it does what it purports to do for people. I take, I don't really, I'm a Buddhist. I don't really believe in a God and I focus heavily on humanistic elements. So when I look at a religion, I look at a religion in the same way I might look at an exercise routine. So if you do the one punch man workout, are you going to gain the powers that Saitama gains? If you don't gain those powers, it obviously, that's an anatomy, but like let's just say, it turns out it's a bad workout and you aren't able to build muscle as effectively, then we've got a problem there. So in much the same way that a workout might not do what it purports to do, a religion might not do what it purports to do within reality. Sure, so it's possible that some particular theory or some particular system in one practice will come up short somehow, but I don't think that's not really a knock to the consistency or the validity of said theory or system, unless it's making just demonstrably untrue empirical claims. I mean, I would say that it might have, so it's the idea of framing that putting a certain frame on something will create a specific relationship with it within the mind of the person who adheres to it. So kind of like what I talked about with the word and the use of the word, word in the English language Bible, creating a frame in which we are relating to ultimate reality and God as though it is a settled thing that is separate from ourselves as opposed to conversation. They're really the same idea being expressed, but because of the word used, it creates a different, I guess, it colors it differently through a different frame. Another example of this, I just had it flew out of my head. I'll get it back in a second, you can respond. Yeah, I mean, any of that may or may not be true. I just, I think that it's really important that to establish from the start that any particular theory or system we have, we cannot accept contradiction within that theory or system. If we do, then everything necessarily becomes absurd that we can prove the statement or the negation of literally any statement, assuming that we subscribe to like really basic tenants of. I feel like you're being very totalizing here. And again, there's a difference between accepting a contradiction and accepting that contradictions are inevitable. I would say. Yeah, I have to be totalizing here because if I don't totalize this particular thing, then we immediately fall into a pit of absurdity or epistemic nihilism or something. Can you explain that to me exactly why? Sure, so if we allow any theory to exist and we allow some contradiction to exist within that theory, assuming that we believe in like, it might even be like zero order logic, assuming that we believe like in any incredibly basic system of logic, if we allow a contradiction to exist and we say that we've proven both or we accept is true the contradiction or the two, I'm sorry, let me be more clear. If we say that we accept as true two proponents of a system that are contradictory from that particular contradiction, we can literally prove anything to be true. I could read through it like an example of this, but it might be a little bit complicated, but I think this is pretty well accepted for most, like people that practice for any kind of logical stuff. I mean, I can look at it, hang on for just a second though, because I did remember what I was gonna say, my other example of like a system, this is pulling us back a little bit, but so Hegel had this concept called inframing. And essentially it is when you look at the world in a scientific manner, because the Greeks did not consider science to necessarily be technology, but more a way of thinking. So sorry, not scientific, technological technique. So the way that like a sculptor like looks, Michelangelo looks at a big slab of marble and he sees the David in it. It's a way of looking at the world, not for what it is, but what it can do or what it could be. And it's a good means of thinking, but if you totalize that kind of thinking, and you let that machine sort of take over and become the frame for your reality to become your ideology, which you wind up doing, is seeing everything in the world as a collection of resources to be exploited, seeing human beings as essentially meat puppets to accomplish tasks. And so like things that are not necessarily stated in the text, but may be, that may go unsaid as subtext, as sort of background radiation for particular ideological ways of looking at things. A big example that I might give is like the sort of ANCAP philosophy of self ownership, wind up having huge problems, not necessarily because of what they say, but because of how they say it and the frame that this creates. Whereas if you begin thinking of yourself and your body in terms of self ownership, suddenly you're seeing yourself as a piece of technology and as opposed to something that exists for its own right. And thus you will inevitably begin to neglect yourself and treat yourself as you would any other kind of property or possession. So you are in a way diminishing yourself by believing in self ownership. So does that make sense? I don't think, I don't know how that responds to the problems of contradiction. No, no, it didn't. I just, I wanted to go back to finish because remember I forgot what I was going to bring up. So as far as the problem of contradiction, you had mentioned that... Yeah, real quick, just to take a second. We're like, we're purely in the world of the epistemic right now. So I don't care about any moral stuff. I don't care about real life behavior. I don't care about, we're purely in an epistemic world right now. All I'm saying is that we must have, we must accept that any coherent system we use a necessary part of that coherence is that it doesn't contain within itself a contradiction. I mean, sure. But again, when you're talking about coherence, you're kind of begging the question, you know? Well, yeah, because this is like literally like axiomatic like a system just can't contain a contradiction. It can't. How do we even decide which contradictions a system could contain? Yeah. I mean, essentially what we're dealing with here is unknown known. So as we know, every axiomatic system is either incomplete or contains a contradiction. We cannot know like how many contradictions there are in there because we cannot know what we don't know. We just have to go as far as we can and try to eliminate, try to identify and eliminate as many contradictions as possible. It's a circadian task. It is rolling the boulder up the hill. We will never succeed, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it, nor does it mean that what we discover while engaging in this process is necessarily worthless. That's the main thing that I wanted to say about that. And it's largely because what it, the totalizing statement at the beginning, what it really worried me in was it wasn't just an error, but it made me feel like it might lead you and people who embrace this particular ethic to throw out ethical systems because of a perceived contradiction. When a contradiction doesn't destroy the system entirely. Well, that, but okay. So I mean, I would advocate that if there is a perceived contradiction that the system is necessarily bonk and should be thrown out. I think that's how all systems should work. We could move on. It's a dangerous word, but yeah, if you want to. I mean, having no logical coherency or abandoning all epistemic norms I think is probably more dangerous, I would argue. Yeah, but nobody's doing that. Well, by saying that we accept contradiction, we're essentially abandoning all epistemic norms. We're basically becoming like epistemic anti-realists. I mean, are you going to, do you abandon again, this is math, but like, do you abandon math because there are limits? Like a limit always approaches a point but never actually reaches it? Like no, that idea of the limit is still very effective. So I think- For math, so for math, if there exist contradictions in math, we don't accept those. We'd seek to resolve those as soon as possible. So Russell's paradox, I believe, did demonstrate a contradiction. That's why we abandoned naive set theory. That's why we left that, we don't use that anymore. It's completely gone. No one, it's done. People might practice- I'm pretty sure that's not it, but whatever. About my life on it. It's like, in practice we might use it, like people use Newtonian calculations, but nobody's seriously working in the field of mathematics. Unless you're doing like elementary stuff or basic, like, like ZMC or ZFN Twitter. Oh yeah, but Z right there. That's exactly what I mean.  You're talking to like people who are dipping in to see your hot takes on things. Yeah, and I understand that. But again, I'm separating out like behaviors versus just like our idealized system. Like I understand behaviors. We can try to move on from this. And then, but if this disagreement comes up later, then we're gonna- I mean, we're gonna keep jumping into it. I think the diff, if I would say to resolve this, I think the difference here is, I'm a little more comfortable with the presence of hypothetical contradictions or inevitable hypothetical contradictions than you seem to be. I think you're very driven to find these contradictions and remove them, which I will applaud you for. That is a great attitude. I just, again, I think it's a bit of a fool's errand and I think that you may be overstating the problem there. And that's- But I think for instance, like, could you ever say that like A is not A? Would you ever say that? Could you ever accept like that? Or plus two plus two equals five? Like are these things that- I mean, I don't know about two plus two equals five. I could, I think I did- Well, like A equals not A or like- Yeah. Because it feels like we just- Well, A equals A, that's like a Randian thing, isn't it? No, this is like a foundational, this is like the laws of thought. There's like one of three things, like the law of identity. Yeah, a thing is itself. I mean, I might have a slight objection to A equals A, not in the equation form. I know for a fact, like the objectivists were really big about saying A equals A. You argue with any of them. It's one of the things that- But again, I'm not working on objectivism anymore. I'm only looking, we're only in the land of the epistemic right now. I don't care about any of the moral stuff. Absolutely. So what I would say is there is inherently a problem with identity. And this has been figured out in Eastern and Western philosophy like for quite a long time. It's the same thing of the problem of the river. Like do we all walk into the same river? Or in other words, like you can look at something like the ship of Theseus. If you replace the rotted boards on the ship of Theseus, is it still the ship? Or is the ship of Theseus the idea? Or is it the rot? Or another great way of looking at it is the sun. How big is the sun? What do we actually say that is the sun? Is the sun the extent of its light? Is it the extent of its heat, the extent of its fire? And the answer is all of them. So the idea of A equals A is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything because the fact that something is something, like that it has an identity, is in part constructed by our minds. Okay, we'll move on from this and we'll see if contradiction comes up later I guess. Sure. Okay, we're moving out of the land of the Epistemi. Nobody likes this place anyway. All right, what was the next point too? My next objection, let me pull back up my thing. So my first objection, this one I think, there's a reason I put it in the middle. So have fun coming after it. So I reject the idea that any moral system can be based wholly or even primarily on what you call internal happiness or the maximizing of your experience. I think it's that. Well, I think it sounds reasonable on the face of it, but I think the big problem is, is that one, if you center yourself and your ego, like at the center of your morality, what you're realizing is you're not really loving yourself, that you actually are more interested in everything else or the combination of yourself and everything. So, if your goal is to maximize your experience to go and you go and drink some great wine, it's, you don't care about yourself really, you care about the wine or the wine that is added to yourself. Yeah, exactly. But why do you care about the wine? Well, this is the thing. You've got this split into essentially two different parties, the internal and the external world. And I think that these appear to our common sense as very much the same, but I think in reality, they absolutely are not very different, but in reality, they are absolutely the same. Let me propose a hypothetical. Let's say that a person exists. Let's say that there exists a perfect glass of wine somewhere that would quench this person's every single facet of his experience. But let's say that that person cannot ever gain any information about that wine. Perhaps it exists in another star system and the person will never live long enough to travel to that. What does that particular thing of wine do to that person? Or how does that person relate to that particular thing of wine? I mean, if they don't know about it, they don't. So it does nothing for them. Okay, I agree. So I would argue that any type of external thing that you talk about as sustaining or providing happiness to our experience is all done relationally to ourselves. And then I would appeal back to my third axiom that I want to maximize my own experience. So things existing external of me don't matter insofar as if I can never interact with it or never know anything about it. Like the function of that thing is going to be whatever pleasure or happiness I can derive out of that thing. Right, I'm not going to disagree with you on that. But what I'm going to say is nothing actually exists outside of you in much the same way that we don't know how far the sun actually extends. We don't know how far destiny is. You don't end at your skin any more than I end at my skin. I'm gonna have to say, yeah. So yeah, that could also be something that just flows from some axiomatic statement. I would assume that we would have to assume that things exist external ourselves otherwise I don't know. I mean, things exist external ourselves in a certain sense, but not ultimately. Like evolution doesn't favor organisms that experience reality directly. It favors organisms that experience reality in a way that is most conducive to their survival and or reproduction. And this is really a very important point because human brains really like to break things down into lists and patterns because that helps us as organisms survive. But that's not reality. That's our interface with reality in much the same way that the computer screen is not, it's not the computer itself. It's how you interact with it. Still important, it still exists. But ultimately the computer is much more than just the screen. I understand that. So in some sense, reality is constructed in the brain. That seems to be true. But I mean, I would still appeal to, I would still say that we ought to act in a way that there exists an external world. Otherwise again, we fall into at the very least ethical absurdity. For instance, I could walk up to 20, or here's a question for you. I could walk up to 20 people and murder every single person. Is that actually wrong? If there is no external reality, it's all just stuff in my head. What would be your argument against murdering people and discrimination? Well, I would say in a certain sense. So, and this is actually a big question like in the Buddhist. So the sutras bring this up a lot.  And oh, it's a watch because we're all the great Brahmin, the Godhead, whatever. But that I would still say, it's not a good idea to do that because those 20 people are also you. Okay, wait, so to be very clear, I want to talk in terms of like moral rights are wrong. So I don't care like what wouldn't be a good idea or would be a good idea, right? I kind of want to be able to say like, this is something that we ought to do or ought not to do. So if we believe that there is no external world if none of those things exist by what you've said.  Like what would stop you or how would you condemn a person on those grounds? You say, hey, don't do that.  And the guy is like, why they don't real? Like the whole external world is fake. So that's the kind of the problem of inflation that people see, you know, and sometimes when somebody like slips into the sort of oceanic consciousness, especially if they're coming from a Western perspective, they start to think they're God, you know, or you get like really heavy solopsism where, you know, I am the only person that exists. Well, you've essentially, you've purported solopsism, haven't you? No, no, I definitely have not. There's a very subtle difference here. So what we're talking about with regard, it's not so much that the external world doesn't exist. It's that the external world and the internal world are ultimately two sides of the same coin. They can't be separated. So you can't- So we do acknowledge that there does exist some external content, right? There is some content in the world. There is something external ourselves, right? There is something external our consciousness, our ego. But I agree with that. But then why would we say, so then I guess I don't understand your second point of nothing exists outside of yourself? How is this a challenge to anything outside? Nothing exists out because yourself is everything. It's the totality. It's the ground of being, the dream of Brahman. Are you familiar at all with Hinduism? I'm not, but so I agree with everything you're saying, but I feel like all three of my axioms play into that very well. So I exist, I have an experience and I want to maximize my experience. You've told me that there is some internal being that every single thing external is relational to that internal being. So yeah, I mean, I agree with you, but it feels like your, that statement could just as easily flow from my three axioms. I don't understand how that contradicts anything I've asserted so far. The issue, in that sense, it doesn't. The issue is the quest to maximize something for your internal being. And that- If you're not maximizing something for your internal being, what are you maximizing it for? Well, again, I don't think you necessarily should look to maximize. What should you, why not? Well, because that's essentially the world of hungry ghosts. Like that's- Wait, that's not an argument. So my question- No, no, it is, it sounds like it's not, but continue. Well, so a person has an experience, a person exists and they have an experience. It seems like they should seek to maximize their experience. They want to do what makes them happiest or what purports at least to fulfill their desires as maximally as possible. Why shouldn't a person do that? Well, think about that for a second. Think about the people who are able to fully maximize and fulfill every desire. They don't actually find it all that fulfilling in much the same way that if you go into a video game with invincibility codes, you're eventually going to get really, really bored of it. I mean, the fact is that we have this idea that we, especially in the West, that we get some kind of technological omnipotence and get everywhere in an instant, avoid every bad thing that could happen to us. And you know- Well, I think to be clear, I understand what you're saying, but this is like, this is a very, very naive assumption of what it means to maximize one's experience. So I like to maximize my experience playing games. That doesn't mean I turn on cheap with everything. I'm the exact opposite.  But I'm still maximizing my experience.  And now I'm floating in the universe alone because I'm too dumb to know what I meant by maximizing. Right? Like we can be a little bit more charitable to that. Maximize my experience axiom. And we could say like, maximization of your experience doesn't necessarily mean being invincible in all video games, right? Yeah. And I think my opening statement said that specifically because you have, and I think I acknowledged that, yeah, I don't think you have a naive idea of egoism. I just think your enlightened egoism still has really, really serious problems because what you're essentially doing is you're building a framework around chasing and fulfilling desires around hedonism essentially. And you can do that, but like evolution again did not build our brains to do that. Every time we get what we want, we just want something else. And then something else and then something else. And suddenly, you're essentially running the rat race. You're living in Samsara chasing the desire, chasing the want. And there are probably forms of desire that are relatively fulfilling that don't leave us wanting more and more and more. I can appeal somewhat to history. Like a lot of people profess that they have a great and intense happiness in raising children, but very rarely do you see somebody produce child after child after child after child. You don't see a mom that's like, I love my kids. That's why I have 45 of them, right? Like I think that there are certain forms of pleasure or happiness that we can pursue that doesn't mean we're gonna do it like a million times over, right? I've known some quiverful weirdos. There was a guy I met on the Appalachian trail. He was a priest and he was one of the 18 kids. So some people do do that. Sure, I'm sure there's gonna be the... Yeah, I mean, I'm Catholic. So in Catholic families, those tend to be quite large. Oh yeah, yeah, no, my family is Catholic as well. So yeah, so I don't think that we necessarily have a contradiction here. I mean, I would agree that we have to be careful what we talk about in terms of maximizing our experiences, but I think that you have to give a very naive reading of that to get to bad places. So like, I don't think that the theory or the framework is broken. I think that it's just the interpretation might be bad. So for instance, somebody might take said system and say, oh, well, I'm gonna go and kill 30 people because that's a lot of fun and that's gonna make me happy.  And it's like, okay, well, it seems like this wasn't really a good idea. You had a very bad application of the theory, but that doesn't challenge the theory itself, right? Whereas people that try to do well to others, people that live lives and do charity service and have happy families and friends, like they tend to have a much more maximized experience than the person in jail rotting for attempted manslaughter and murder. I mean, I won't 100% disagree with that because I do like that you have a more totalizing view of this, but also keep in mind, you're communicating with millions and millions of people and like YouTube and Twitch skew young. So in much the same way that we saw that there was a problem with translating in the beginning, there was the word as opposed to, it all began with a conversation. Just the way that you're phrasing that, let's assume that you are correct in chasing desire, which I don't 100% accept, but let's assume that just the way that you're phrasing that when you communicate to people is naturally going to create that frame for the people that listen to you. Yeah, so while I understand this might be the case, this is a conversation on my particular system of ethics, not my rhetoric or not how effective it is that I can communicate the system of ethics from one person to another, right? Sure. So because I'm gonna argue that Buddhism or Christianity or literally any other religion has been communicated in poor ways in the past as well that have led to demonstrable harms too. Okay, well, we can agree to disagree on that. So what I can say is... Wait, agree to disagree? What part of that would we disagree with? Well, I was probably just using that as a phrase to, we can put a pin in that. Would you disagree that almost every religion has been used? Oh, definitely every religion has been used. The only reason I would even say almost is maybe there's some religion that I haven't ever encountered. Sure, that has like five people. Yeah, so yeah, so I think that, and then fundamentally this is a conversation on the soundness I think of my moral system, not necessarily like have I communicated it in the best way or can somebody take it and do something bad with it? Like those are, I think, completely separate discussions. Fair enough, so let's dive in, that sounds good. So let's dive into this because, obviously if I misunderstood you and saw like the going after maximizing experience or internal happiness is essentially like the rat race running on the wheel of samsara, can you explain a little bit more into it like what you mean by that? And hopefully we can, because it seems like we are close to agreeing on this point actually, which is great. Sure, so I mean like I usually, anytime I bring up the maximizing experience thing, I almost always segue that into some form of altruism because it seems to logically follow based on any type of reasonable person or their interpretation of how to apply this to your life. So there are several examples that I'll bring up.  Even if that was the case, I would still want to advocate for black people to do better in my city because it would mean less money wasted on police departments arresting them. It would be more potential customers for my business. It would mean less money wasted on like bad infrastructure projects. It would mean a higher educated base by which I could generate wealth right. That basically like the idea is that as long as you're maximizing the experience of other people around you and as long as humans synergize with each other's experiences, which we seem to, that you should be advocating maximally for everybody's happiness and experience because doing so will in a roundabout way or sometimes even in a direct way help yourself. So a very direct example that I've given a million times is let's say that you go into a room with four friends, let's say that there's five candy bars on the table. If you want, you can walk up to the table and eat all five candy bars and maximize your enjoyment there.   You all have a better experience and people seem to be better for that. For whatever reason humans seem to be socially designed creatures and it seems like we enjoy each other's company. So having other people that are doing well applies like this very big synergistic effect where everybody like kind of like synergizes with each other's experiences and we all kind of like drive each other to do better and be better, yeah. Sure. I'm not going to disagree with any of that like on its face but I will still say that this seems to be like a highly technocratic approach. It's a good argument. I will point out- Can I, I'm just asking for a definition. What do you mean when you say technocratic? It seems to be that like the argument that you are making is an effective one within the framework that you've constructed here. So what I'm saying- I would hope so because I'm arguing from my framework so of course it should be effective assuming it's a valid and sound, yeah. Yeah. So when I'm saying it's technocratic it's more like you're thinking of society within this framework as happiness machine, if that makes sense. So you gave the impression that even a racist should and we know they don't because racism distorts their thinking and makes them not realize this very obvious fact but they should realize the obvious fact that if everyone does well in society it's going to come back and benefit them as well because they are a member of society. I feel like that argument appeals to a specific kind of thinking and there's definitely like a lot to be said for it. The only caveat I'd give you is I'm just following that through to its logical conclusion I don't think that you're going to get as much out of it as you might otherwise assume. What do you mean by get as much out of it? Get what out of what? Well, because chasing something external as far as happiness goes is again running on a hamster wheel because of how our brains react. So wait, but there must be some there. We can, okay. So I guess we can talk about this hamster wheel thing. Do we acknowledge that there are different types of happinesses? Sure, yeah. So there might be. So I'm going to use Reddit versus a book as an example that we can browse Reddit for 48 hours and we can read through every meme post for, you know four days straight or whatever or we could read a book and we could get a different type of more satisfying long-term happiness out of it than we might out of just browsing memes. We've got like low effort, high effort types of happiness, right? Sure, yeah. I would agree 150% there. Okay, so there are probably forms of fulfilling long-term happiness that can lead us to a certain contentedness in life. Like fulfilling happiness or maximizing existence doesn't necessarily mean like participating in sent incessantly in the commodification of every single aspect of our lives where we have to buy the best cars and have the best clothes and have the coolest shoes and have the best computers, right? There are probably more fulfilling forms of happiness that we can attempt to maximize, right? Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. I would just say that I don't think we will ever fully succeed at it. Okay, sure. Maybe, maybe not. So I'm just saying that like, I don't think that just because I say that I'm trying to maximize our happiness means that we're committed to running a rat wheel. I think that there are some forms of very fulfilling long-term happiness that we can achieve within our lives. Sure, so I will agree with you on that. Though I do think it definitely, if you're going to communicate that in the future, it needs to be much more specifically said than the way I've seen it communicated in the past. Sure, and I would challenge, I'd be very interested to see how I've seen that said in the past because I've talked about all of these things a great number of times, that there are a lot of temporary happinesses in the world that commodification is a really bad thing, that we've sold people on really bad ideas of what it means to be happy, that the greatest forms of happiness all have to start with a foundation of self-love and that everything past that is literally pointless. These are all things I've talked about like a million times on my screen before, usually in the context of discussing seven wall system.  Yeah, and it's not a part. Maybe I just missed it. Okay, so I think we've pretty much come to an agreement there. So that's exciting. There is one other point to it that I still have an objection. And again, it comes with centering individual happiness like at the center of a moral system because a big part of moral rules, if you're using moral rules, they're not simply there to, I guess, to serve a person, but oftentimes they are there to forbid a person from doing something that they want to do at a time and then what otherwise do if they were not within a moral system. So I agree. That's why so I've got like my two, three parters. So the number one is I exist. I have an experience. I want to maximize my experience. And then I say, other people exist. Other people have an experience. Other people want to maximize their experience. And then the third part is humans energized to create a better experience than otherwise possible on their own. I think that between those rules, between those seven statements, necessarily some actions are going to be restricted. So for instance, if you want to maximize your experience by murdering people, well, that's going to be contrary to their desire to maximize their experience and it's going to cause you not to maximize your own because as soon as you start murdering people, people are going to minimize your experience.  And then I guess the final thing is, is that the presence of enemies, specifically the presence of challenges, you talked in a very totalizing way about, I think you said something like if there was somebody that didn't accept your system, there's nothing to do there, there's conflict. Depending on the type of conflict, the person would have to be eliminated from the system somehow. Absolutely, of course. But I think this isn't, I don't think this is very controversial. I think almost every single system will purport the same statement as what I'm saying here. I'm, a lot would purport the same statement and I think a lot would be wrong because again, we need enemies. We need like murderers and rapists in society. I mean, to a certain extent, we need bad things to be able to happen so that good things can happen. Like- Why do we need murder and rape in society? So the idea, and again, I'm not gonna say on camera those exact words because that could be clipped out of context and taken in a- Okay, why do we need M&R in society? Why do we need any particular, why do we need children starving? Why do we need people dying of Alzheimer's disease or cancer? Why do we need people committing suicide? Have any wrong? Why do we need these- So your question is, why does evil exist? No, that's not my question at all. That seems to be the question. No, that's a very, very, very different question. That is a very meta level way. That's like a very off ontological question. My question is- So why do we need evil? Why is evil required? No, no, no, hold on. Let me be very specific on the question, okay? Why is it that in order for me to have a maximized experience, why do I need other people to suffer? Or why do I need other people's experiences to not be maximized? You don't just need other people to suffer. You need to suffer to have a maximized experience. Okay. In what ways? How do we quantify or qualify? What types of suffering are required? So the issue is that we can't really experience high highs if we don't have low lows to contrast them with. So for instance, a good example would be eating a wonderful meal after a really difficult day of hard work where you've exerted yourself as opposed to having a day where you sit on the couch all day and then you go and have the exact same meal. It will taste better specifically because of the contrast. So for us to be happy and to advance, we have to engage with obstacles. We have to be resistant. Okay, I'm gonna try to reformulate this in the strongest version possible. I agree that there are some forms of challenging things, that there are some sorts of obstacles. Hold on, let me just think for like five seconds, okay? Okay, okay. I think that there are some forms of challenges that can exist in society such that if these challenges exist, they cause a higher maximal experience than if they didn't exist. Can we agree with that? Okay, I agree that there are some forms of suffering in life that exist, that we must endure in order to reach higher highs. A really good example of this is working out, right? Yeah, exactly. Okay, I will acknowledge that these exist. However, I will claim that these are subsumed within my idea of maximizing an experience. So for instance, if I say part of my maximal experience is enjoying like a very healthy relationship with my fiance or wife, right? Part of that requires some amount of, sometimes what's not fun work, but that's necessitated in part of that experience. So I think that that's true, but I mean, I would say obviously, that's gonna be part of maximizing any type of experience. I don't think that sticking yourself full of heroin and inject yourself till you die, that that's like maximizing your human experience or whatever, like I wouldn't say that like, oh, that's not what I'm aiming for when I talk about like maximal experience. I think that any type of maximizing my experience is going to subsume within that, like there might be some struggle related to achieving like certain good ends.  That's really fun for me.  Oh yeah, yeah, I've played the whole solo series and drives me freaking crazy, but... But I will say that there are forms of suffering. However, I don't think that just because we need some forms of suffering, that that all of a sudden allows us to justify all forms of suffering. I think that we can divide suffering into two categories. I would say we would have one category that I would call necessary suffering. And necessary suffering is some obstacle that must be overcome or some challenge that must be met in order to maximize your experience. And then I will have another category called unnecessary suffering, where I will say the unnecessary suffering produces no good for society. And I would say that we should all probably seek to eliminate the unnecessary suffering.  I think that these forms of unnecessary suffering should be eliminated because they don't maximize human experience. I will agree with you on that. And our task as humans would be to do our best to eliminate them. I don't know if all of them could be eliminated. Sure, whether or not something can or cannot be eliminated is irrelevant to the question. The question is just what ought we do? What ought we, what are we in that doing? And our eventual goal, I would imagine is to eliminate all unnecessary suffering in the world. I don't know if we can ever achieve that, but that's a matter of practicality, not a matter of the theory. The theory is that what we ought to do, the prescription is we ought to be eliminating all forms of unnecessary suffering. Sure. And I think from a human perspective, because we are humans and we are partisan to that, that's absolutely our task. So if we're talking about human morality, I think you're 100% on it. Now expanding that out to the entire universe, that it becomes a bit less practical in the sense that like, you run into the problem of, do you wipe an entire species out simply because it causes suffering for humans? Maybe, I can't speak for alien civilism. I don't even know. That might break every possible understanding I have. Maybe they exist on like seven other dimensions. I can't even fathom that. But literally might exist outside of like my epistemic understanding of the world. Maybe there are things that exist that have contradictory properties or that both are and are not, or things that have, yeah, I can't really address that. So I guess my point being though in that we bring it out is, I think what a lot of people really want essentially, because most of us, and I'll go down to it and I'll say, I don't think we as individuals can ever fully truly know what we want. Like there's stuff that we think we want and there's certain themes that we go after it. But the more you go down that route of, I'd like this, I'd like that, the more you start to realize, I don't know if that's really it. So the one thing that I think that we do definitely want is a pleasant surprise. But the problem is that to have pleasant surprises, you must also have unpleasant surprises. You must have rude shocks. And this is why I brought up martial arts and the philosophy that, when you get into kumite with someone, when someone has agreed to hit you and to be hit by you, it's actually a very intimate and kind thing because the force of being hit with, the shock gives you a sense of being alive that few other things do. So I think to a certain extent, if we do put this out that we are all Brahma, we're all the dreaming Godhead, where God experiencing itself in infinite varieties. The fact is, is that evil and suffering and even suffering the humans would consider bad or unnecessary suffering as opposed to suffering is still part of that entire process. And I would argue that it's, from a certain vantage point, even though it is discord at one level, it's harmony at a higher level in much the same way that the patterns and ways. Yeah, I don't necessarily maybe disagree with this. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with these statements. Like we can't know what we want. I don't know what that commits me to. Like I would have to assume that we're the best understanders of what we want. And for things that we aren't 100% sure on, we're gonna use, hopefully we use scientific tools to investigate these things. So for instance, in the realm of psychology, we might do investigations to figure out, like what makes us happier? We might collect a bunch of data and say, oh, we'll look at this, like people that work in these types of jobs, report less happiness or something. So we can investigate our experience as much as possible to try to figure out what makes us happy, doesn't make us happy. But in terms of like a statement, like we can't know what we want. Like I don't know what I can meaningfully do with that statement. It's not like just because I don't know what I want doesn't mean I can just turn to someone else, have them tell me, right? That responsibility to investigate that desire is up to me as much as possible. Sure, yeah, I agree with you 100% there. But I just kind of think that again, with centering the want can lead to other problems like this. But I think we're coming to a pretty good understanding here. So I'm excited about that. Yes, so like basically just in case, just to put a capper on this. And I think you've already agreed with this to a certain extent, but the example of in one of Christopher Hitchens debates, I think it was, he like asked a pastor like who was saying like everything is God's plan. He was like, well, what's God's plan about this worm that eats children's eyes and blinds them. And the obvious answer to that is, well, that's terrible for us, it's good for the worm. So, essentially that's kind of my answer to the problem of evil. Wait, God create worms that can only survive by eating the eyes of children. Yeah, well, there aren't worms that only survive, it's just that that's what they do. And again. I think if we take a religious centered approach to this God create like animals and the planet is the domain of humans that exists to serve humans, right? So why would he create things that are necessarily predatory towards humans or only exist to cause damage or harm to humans? So I have a huge problem with the idea of God as the sovereign as the thing that is intelligently in charge of society and builds and designs everything. I think that's actually a really bad way of looking at God or Brahman or ultimate reality. So God, it's like omnipotent or? No, God that is the, well, omnipotent in the sense that like is literally everything in the universe. So I think Spinoza's God is probably the closest Western thing that I can put it into. And then God is literally just nature than we're talking about. Yeah, nature, existence, humanity, it's all one process, one flux. And we're just the universe experiencing itself. I think Alan Watts kind of compared it to like the conscious experience. Imagine you've got a light covered by a black ball and in the ball are pinholes and each pinhole is a aperture through which the light comes out. So each of us and all animals and everything else that has conscious experience are the pinholes but we're also the light underneath it which is existence itself. That would be what I would refer to as God. So in the sense of God being associated with a king or a craftsman who went and made the universe I would think of it more in the sense that God is the deep down stuff that is the universe, the ground of being as it's usually put.   One of the things that it will do is it will go after whatever kind of protein that it can get a hold of. In the same reason that a gull eating a fish it's the fact that the gull isn't evil or rapacious. It's just being a gull is the same thing as eating fish. Do you acknowledge that there is like a fundamental difference between a gull or a chicken and a human? I mean, yeah. I would say there's no, in the sense of the problem of identity, we are all the gull and the fish and the chicken and the human. Wait, what I'm asking is like, do you think there's the same level of moral responsibility or culpability? Certainly not. No, humans have a much higher level of responsibility and culpability because we understand morality. And in fact, I would say that- Yeah, so my question is, how do you draw a distinction then between humans and chickens if the whole universe is just the universe itself? If I'm having a hard time understanding like whether or not you recognize there are distinct entities that exist or whether it's all just the same thing to you. And if it does all just the same thing to you I don't know how you describe different properties to different things or what the process by which you do that is. I mean, I would say I recognize both simultaneously. In one sense, we are the direct conscious experience of these beings. And then in the other sense, there is another sort of higher self underneath that. And that would be the totality of existence. Yeah, so yeah, the answer is both simultaneously. And I guess since I'm saying both, I could also say both and neither. That sounds pretentious enough. All right, well, I think that was all three of the big points, unless you think there's any- That was two actually. Oh, I thought that third one was, okay, that was a sub point to do. Okay, what was the third one? So the third point, and this one was my shortest, but I also think it's one of the stronger ones. And that's why I chose to end on it. Let me find it here. Is I take issue with the fundamental assumption that a moral system, any moral system functions as a mechanism into which one can feed data and by so doing come to a perfect or nearly perfect moral conclusion. Essentially, this goes back to what you had said in your video on morality, when you had kind of used some graphics and stuff and you were like, if then, you basically feed data or hypotheticals into this moral system and then out comes the answer, essentially. And I sort of tied that into and why we've kind of been talking around God. I feel that this is heavily influenced because you are a Westerner who grew up in a Catholic family, much like I did. You're heavily influenced by, even though you have rejected Christianity, you're still heavily influenced by Christian ideas and that has come to have you see morality in this way.  So God started the discussion and everything came out of this and nothing happened without consultation. This was the life that was the light of men shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity. So the idea is that morality, at least the way I'm looking at it, is not so much a set of systems or a machine that we use as it is a physical process that we do in the same way that we dance or that we sing. And you could say, I don't know if anyone else has ever advanced in aesthetic theory of morality. I think they probably have. But I feel that aesthetic or kinesthetic is a better way to look at what morality is, moral disagreements, moral progress, than necessarily something that we build so that we always know the right answer. I don't think being a moral person is a question of finding the right moral system and comporting yourself to that moral system in much the same way that I don't think being a good human is a matter of finding the right God and comporting oneself to the behavior of that God expects. Does that make sense? Kind of, but I don't know how that was any challenge to any part of my system like this. Other than it sounds like you have some belief for morality, but I don't understand. I don't think a contradiction in my system has been demonstrated or some conclusion that I otherwise would reject has been demonstrated in my system, which are the two things that I'm looking for. So- I mean, you essentially said in your system that what morality should do is, and maybe I took this wrong. It was like right at the beginning of your video, that what morality should do that most people like either think what, how do I immediately respond to a given hypothetical or how does my group expect me to respond to a given hypothetical? And so you had essentially made the argument that moral systems go beyond that to something that someone should use to understand how to act in a specific situation. Oh yeah, so what I'm saying is that like, so what I would hope is if we have different levels of different abstractions of thought, we have different levels of thought that I would hope that we have investigated our own beliefs and desires and thoughts enough that we've reached some foundational level of understanding for what it is that we want in life. So somebody would have asked me, hey, there's a homeless guy over there, he's passed out and there's like 20 bucks laying on the side, didn't we should steal it from him? And if somebody would have asked me that, I feel like a lot of people, their first thought is if I do this, like what are the consequences? You know, how will my friends see me? Will people judge me? Will I get in trouble? And that this is generally the level that most people function at when it comes to thinking whether or not something is right or wrong or more specifically if we ought to or ought not to do a particular thing. What I advocate for is I would hope that somebody has investigated their own personal feelings enough to have a more fleshed out moral system that would deliver them better answers than will I get in trouble for something or will there be a negative consequence or something? I would want people to be a bit more moral or a bit more strictly adherent to some internal like philosophy or internal ethical system rather than just doing, you know, the least that's expected of them from the people around them is essentially what I was saying there. But okay, no, this is actually really fascinating. So thank you for sharing that because that puts some things in a slightly different light. So first off, it's very interesting because my immediate response to that was make sure that that $20 bill gets tucked back into that guy's thing and maybe add some money to it or make sure that, you know, you can help him in some way. Like that was my instant moral intuition. So this sounds a little bit like the, are you familiar with like the six stages of morality? Oh, I think I've seen this at one point before. Yes. I have to look this up. But I know we've, it has to do with like, how do we consider like things and I think isn't like stage the first stage or something is like, nevermind, just go ahead, explain to me, I'm not gonna try to. So, well, I'll probably get it wrong if I try to do each of the six, but it's basically the six stages of moral development starting from- Okay, yeah, I got it. I looked up real quick. Yeah, okay. So it's like, number one is like avoiding punishment. Number two is self-interest. Number three is good for attitude. Number four is law and morality. Number five is social contract. And the number six is principle. Yeah. So like I strive for principle and then as a parent, you know, even if you have a kid, you know that like working at that bottom level of avoiding punishment, that even that's like the worst way to discipline a kid, that you should be striving more for the self-interest level than just the avoiding punishment. That like having like positive rewards is a more successful form of, of unconditioning than punishing people, right? Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, exactly. So it sounds like what you're concerned about is people who are like in the third or fourth stage or maybe the second with avoiding punishment with regard to that. And that the most people will ever make it to is like that third stage of good boy attitude is like the highest most people ever make it. Well, yeah, that's a possibility. I would have to see how people are polled. I would really hate to think that that was would be where they get stuck. And this actually might, this might go back to our different opinions basically like with regard to riots and that kind of thing, civil disobedience because we've spoken before and we have slightly different opinions on that. You know, with regard to the violation of specific social norms, for instance, like I think I asked you this one, like the guy's wife is dying of cancer. There's a drugist in town. He's the only one that can sell the cure. He refuses to sell the cure. Is the guy justified in stealing it or attacking it? How should it be dealt with? Like somebody at stage five might say something like along the lines of yes, he's justified in stealing it or attacking the guy to get it because he's trying to save his wife's life. Someone at stage six might say something to the effect of yes, he's justified in stealing it but then he needs to turn himself into the police and suffer whatever consequences would occur from it. So, you know, as people move along in their moral development, it would be nicer to see people move towards the higher levels. What I can tell you as a parent what's very interesting for me at least seeing my son develop, he's two right now. And more than even rewards oftentimes or the avoidance of punishment, what seems to really motivate him actually is compassion in the sense that I will sit there and tell him like I'll be like, do you want another bite of dinner? And he will instantly reject the bite of dinner because data is asking him to do it. To which point then I will puppet the dinner and I will have the piece of food ask to be eaten by him. And he instantly agrees every time when the food asks him. And similarly, when his clothes ask him to put them on, when his potty asks him to use it, this really pushes him along. So I think, you know, and I don't see that reflected necessarily in the six stages of morality. But my point is that I think people undervalue the persuasive power of compassion itself. And this goes back to something that I wanted to say but didn't work into my opening statement. One of the other things that has worried me about the way in which you phrase your moral system is that it does leave compassion outside of the equation somewhat or at least it is understated compared to the more basic stuff that I've seen you put out. Yeah, so the reason why I don't try to make compassionate arguments or more specifically arguments of empathy is because I believe that those arguments will fail a great deal of time. And I believe that there's a lot of special and fascist side of things. There's a lot of arguments there that heavily rely on compassion or empathy. But the thing is, is that they're very selective of who they apply that compassion to. I think that my moral system should work with literal robots to some extent in terms of they have zero empathy or compassion for other people. I'm a relatively dispassionate unempathetic person, I would say, compared to most people, but I still think that I act in ways that's more, I think that more people would broadly characterize my behavior as generally more moral than other people that claim to be very empathetic or very compassionate. Just because I recognize the benefit of having other people around me that are happy, healthy, being treated well, et cetera. So I typically, I avoid compassion for a couple of reasons, for two main reasons. So as I said before, one is that it's just not part of my system. I don't need compassion to come to what I consider to be morally righteous answers ever. And then two, I believe that appeals to compassion are highly subjective and will get you to very bad places, depending on whose compassion you're appealing to. So for instance, as a really good example of this, brown people are invading our country and they're stealing our culture and they're erasing our ways and they're invading and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. These are appeals to compassion to some extent. Compassion for white people that have white culture or Western culture, whatever. The one I mean to. It's more appeal to fear, but I take your meaning. It's an emotional appeal is what you're telling me. I mean, you can argue it is one of compassion, right? When you let certain types of immigrants go into countries and erase those cultures, you're lacking compassion for the people that are already there, you know? Like that's what those people would claim. Now you might disagree with that because you personally find that to be non-compassionate, I would agree. However, those other people find those arguments to be highly compassionate. Compassionate is a very subjective emotion that hinges on a lot of other stuff, which is why I just totally avoid it.  Yeah, so again, I don't think it would work in the way that you're saying it would, with regard to a racist. As I pointed out, the problem with racism is it literally distorts your thinking. So I don't think a racist would be capable of seeing the benefit as long as they are, as heavily racist as they are. I think it would super depend on the type of conversation, but I think that there are ways that you can appeal to that racism, believe it or not, I think to get people to certain answers that just kind of make sense. In terms of like, this is something that will benefit all of us, even when it comes to DACA kids, do you really like the idea that we spent so much money educating all these kids and now we're gonna send them back from Mexico to take them from us? These are arguments that I think are relatively effective on even a racist person, and they look at that maximizing the outcomes of everybody there. Whereas like just trying to- But are they effective? Cause think about it, think about how many Republicans actually voted for DACA. These seem to be arguments that Democrats and progressives think will move people on the right, but they don't seem to actually move people on the right. I mean, I don't have an international platform by which I can talk to every single Republican, but I think that I would have an easier time, and I guess I can cite myself. I mean, I do radicalize quite a bit of people on the right and the left. So I think that I would argue that my arguments are relatively convincing even for people that disagree with me, but I will say for sure that arguments that just demand compassion or empathy, I would say are wholly ineffective because they seem to be completely incapable of penetrating somebody that just doesn't have empathy or compassion for a certain group of people. Sure, but I'll point out, do you seem to see the problem when you're making moral arguments and you're making them as if you're talking to a robot? Like- Well, it really depends on like, who I'm talking to, what type of argument I'm making. So within the context of this conversation, we're having a robotic debate on morality, right? This is literally just a framework, like a system that we're having a conversation on. None of this is supposed to be like rhetorically effective. I'm not like deploying logos, pathos, or ethos to try to convince you of one thing or another. We're literally, in my mind, we're just running through the logic to see if it works. We're testing this theory for validity and soundness is what I'm doing. If I was having an argument where I was trying to convince somebody of something, then I would employ different rhetorical tools depending on the person in order to make them believe what I want them to believe. But that's not what we're doing right now. So yeah, of course. Okay. That's not how I'm interpreting the conversation, but also, again, I, this is the fascinating look into your mind. Wait, what do you mean by when you say that's not how you're interpreting this? Well, I mean, well, again, I don't think you can, I don't think you can ever take logos, pathos, and ethos out of an argument. You can never just focus on like the nuts and bolts of it because humans are not, we're not robots specifically. Well, yeah. So the reason why I would say this is because I don't think I have tried to convince you of my system at all. I've merely provided my system as is. I've tried to support my system as is. And then I've tried to defend it from any attacks. But I haven't made any claims that you should believe my system. And I'm not attacking you or your credibility or any system that you've put out there. I'm just asking a few questions to defend my own. Whether or not we want to call a rhetorical or not, I guess we could say everything. If you want to argue, we could say everything is slightly rhetorical by just practicing pure logic. You could argue that you're doing an exercise in logos, but my goal here isn't really to convince or persuade anybody. I'm just demonstrating my system and then defending it from attacks. Okay, yeah, I mean, my goal I think is, I would say it's not so much to convince or persuade. I don't expect you to come in and agree with everything that I have to say right now. I would like to influence you dialectically in the sense that hopefully from this conversation, you may be more effective in dealing with certain people and may be able to avoid certain pitfalls when talking about morality. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation because you're a very famous person and you have a very large reach. Sure, and I can understand that, but there's like three potential ways to do this. So two of these ways would be attacking my system. So one is to show a contradiction. Hey, if you believe this thing, you can also believe this thing. Now everything falls apart. That would be one way to do it. The second thing is to say, hey, from these axioms, I can generate this conclusion and I bet you don't like that conclusion.  And I'd be like, okay, I don't really like that. Fuck, now I have to reconsider, right? So if you can either demonstrate a contradiction or illustrate a conclusion that I just at least intuitively dislike, then that would cause a reformation of my system. And then for the third thing, in terms of like rhetorical strategy for fighting people, I guess I would need examples of or a conversation that I've participated in where it seems like I was just unable to communicate said moral values to a person, which I feel like doesn't really happen. I feel like I'm pretty able to communicate my moral system pretty effectively. It's very rare that I actually have an ethics debate with somebody.  Well, it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you on this. Like a lot of the time when I'd watched your stuff and we're getting off topic for the debate right now, but a lot of times when I watched your stuff, I either had trouble finding stuff that I disagreed with or it was something that you'd already argued to death. So again, that was one of the reasons why I was so eager to have this conversation. So yeah, this is really fascinating though to see what arguments you personally find very persuasive. So it seems to me like the ones that you're particularly persuaded by are what's ad absurdum arguments, which is a good one. That's very, very persuasive one. And you also really don't like finding... I don't know the... I can't think of the Latin term for this, but basically you really don't like contradictions. Yeah, so I would call that, I would just call that term logic because all systems of logic rely on non-contradiction. My understanding is, aside from some very exotic forms of para-consistent logics or something, like nobody in any discipline whatsoever will accept any sort of contradiction. It's just if the contradiction is best, then we seek to resolve that immediately because again, through logical contradiction, at least on paper, we can literally prove or disprove any idea whatsoever. Sure, I will just say to a certain... I think that works in a lot of situations, but again, in certain levels, it breaks down. And also don't forget that like the first time I got really familiar with somebody talking like really specifically about like the law of non-contradiction, it's a preacher trying to trick me into becoming a Christian again, you know? There's a lot of people that... How is that supposed to be a compelling argument? I don't understand. It's supposed to be a compelling argument, but I don't know, I guess different people respond to different arguments in a different way. And you have spent a lot of time dealing like arguing with fascists. And I would say you've been very, very effective in that. So thank you for your service there. I will also point out, however, that fascists make up a very, very tiny part of your audience. And at least in my experience, it's very difficult to have any moral system without a component of compassion in much the same way that the Golden Rule, which was developed by Bronze Age Desert Nomads, is still a superior system to say, the non-aggression principle, the NAP. Yeah, but the problem is that like fascists will argue that leftist lack compassion, the same way that leftists argue, fascist lack compassion. So like compassion just doesn't get anything off the ground. That's like so down the road from any moral system. I just don't know how... I mean, but yeah, but you notice you're choosing two groups of very committed radicals. Literally, any type of compassion can be weaponized or used in a certain way, or would be wholly subjective on some individual. But anything can be weaponized in any way in much the same way that... I'm okay with somebody weaponizing logic. If you wanna give me a logically consistent statement, like I'll listen. It's not gonna rely on me already. The problem is that compassion oftentimes, in my opinion, arguing via compassion, unless we're gonna go the hardcore propaganda route and like show you videos of like dying horses or something to make you a vegan, right? Compassion oftentimes is just begging the question. It's the reason why I like avoiding compassion so much. Wait, how was it begging the question? Begging the question is assuming the answer in the formulation of the question. So for instance, if I say like, don't you have compassion for illegal immigrants? Like they're people just like you, right? Well, if somebody believed this, that they were people just like us and they just sort of think, well, then of course they would have compassion for them, right? That any compassion or argument is almost necessarily circular because the person making the appeal to compassion already has the compassion for those groups of people. And the people they're arguing with probably already doesn't have that compassion. That's why I just don't like compassion as an argument. So when I debate against Republicans or conservatives for immigration.  I don't know how that's like reaction to anything I've said. No, what I'm saying is I feel like the, because it seems to me that your distaste for compassion and your distaste for connecting with somebody else emotionally may be less reasonable than you think it is. I'm not gonna say that it wouldn't be effective tactics because also you're dealing with other dudes who were brought up in our society. So you try to talk about compassion to a neo-Nazi they will laugh at you for your weakness because they're afraid to show that kind of emotion. But they are comfortable being manipulated by their emotions in other ways because usually it deals with aspects of like toxic masculinity where they, the only emotions that they allow themselves to feel are like anger and self-righteousness because these are manly masculine powerful emotions. And so like they're very persuaded by those kinds of arguments and will reject out of hand arguments that are couched in compassion because they see it as more feminine and weak. But I don't think your average person that you're talking to is somebody who's that far gone. And I think- I'm not saying, I'm not trying to make a, I don't know how any of that connects to anything. I'm not trying to make a statement on like whether or not we should or shouldn't, like it'd be great if everybody was compassionate. What I'm saying is that if somebody already had compassion for a certain group of people probably wouldn't have to argue with them much about how they treat that group of people. It's hard for me to imagine that there exists some person that has a lot of compassion for Hispanic people.  If they did, we'd probably already be on the same side. Sure. And you would need to essentially that what the person has is that they have a very small circle of what they consider people worthy of compassion. And they, those, they're okay with doing that to the DACA kids because they view them as outsiders. And therefore- Yeah, that's my issue is that compassion seems to be something that we dole out. We don't dole that out indiscriminately. It seems like there is a lot of qualifiers to that.  Right. And for the record though, I do have compassion for a rich person that commits suicide. I mean, again, this is a Buddhist thing, but we- Sure, I wasn't, I wasn't bringing up you. I don't, I actually don't even know if you're a lefty or not, I'm not bringing up yours. I'm just saying that in general, I'm saying that we can have a lack of or a amount of compassion for widely different groups of people depending on where we come from. That's why I just don't appeal to compassion. Sure, but if you're setting up a system that you're arguing that other people should embrace, one of the major issues is that compassion is important in making those same moral judgments. So- Well, that's what I'm arguing is for you to make that statement. I can't just assume that's gonna be true. You have to demonstrate to me what, like you have to demonstrate to me what conclusion would I want to arrive at that I can't arrive at with my moral system that I need a compassion to get to. And I don't know if I need compassion to get to anything of this. Yeah, so, I mean, I have an example that I can go, that I started to go into and then I can see if I can attach it to your actual argument. Maybe we can continue this afterwards because I'm actually really enjoying this, but so essentially with regard to compassion, that compassion is the reason that the golden rule is a better moral system, a better moral heuristic than the non-aggression principle. The non-aggression principle simply says do not be aggressive, essentially. And it ignores a number of big problems. For instance, oftentimes both parties claim self-defense and both are actually right. A great example being like Israel and Gaza. So you can't take the NAP and go and solve that problem with the NAP. The issue with, and there are problems with the golden rule but treat other people as you would like to be treated or the Confucius version of that, which is don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated. Yeah, so I think that even that rule fails fundamentally. I wouldn't agree with the golden rule. Well, I'm not saying it fails and we can go into maybe why it fails. Well, I would argue that if it fails because it relies on some kind of compassion and I would argue that that compassion is subjective. So two really great examples of this is I would like to be treated, I treat others as they'd like to be treated.  Like of course, so like I should be treated in this particular way. Or for a man and a woman who believe where man says woman is subservient to man, right? A man might say like, oh, well, if I was a woman, I would want to be treated as a subservient. Because that's my job as a woman, right? That's my job.  Well, you say go wrong, but I'd like to be clear, these haven't gone wrong at all. They're just using compassion in different ways that you are. Which is why, again, why I don't like compassion. I don't think it's gone wrong. I think they're all using compassion just in ways that we would disagree with. No, I don't think they're using compassion at all in that sense. What I think they're doing is they're projecting their own wants onto that person in an effort to excuse what they already want to do. If you're engaging in compassion and empathy, what's happening is, is that you are actually taking the action of putting yourself into somebody else's head, seeing the world through their point of view. And certain people are better at it and men are highly discouraged from ever doing it. But it's essentially compassion might be the reason why if I was trying to persuade you specifically, if I was a, the more I am able to project myself and see the world through the eyes of destiny, I will then know what arguments are going to be most effective for you. It's the difference between like compassion and empathy as a difference between like, I guess more emotional caring and things. It's like, what you're giving me essentially is, it's the monkey lifting the fish out of the water, saying like, oh, get out of the aerial drown and putting it safely up a tree. The monkey's doing what's good for the monkey, but it doesn't have compassion. It doesn't have empathy. It doesn't understand. It wants to help the fish, but doesn't really understand the fish because it's incapable of putting itself into the fish's mind and the fish's body to a certain extent. And I think that as a result, that evolved ability of humans to be compassionate towards others and to place ourselves into the shoes of other beings to the point to where some people like throw out their old Game Boy and feel bad about it, even though the Game Boy has no feelings. I think that is one of the key evolutionary strengths and abilities that we have. And I think it's also really important for debate and rhetoric. So- I don't necessarily disagree, but again, I'm gonna argue that I would say that you're talking around this a lot in that all of your every single statement you're here is, I think, begging the question. I think it all presupposes what a person means. Like, for instance, so when you say like, first of all, we have to acknowledge we can never truly see through the eyes of another person. That's literally impossible. We say that what we really mean is we're trying to assume as many situations are ahead so we can write.  I consider myself to be inferior to the white man. And yeah, if I'm a slave, you know, that's just the natural world that God's giving me to fill. And that person could be exercising compassion.  And you have no way to argue with each other. That's my point. Your two views are incommensurate with one another. You have no way of communicating past your disagreements of compassion. Whereas I would argue that with my system, at the very least, now rhetorically, I would approach it differently. But if we were to just sit down and write it out, I would win a debate and logics against him. I would say, well, for my position, I think that I can demonstrate better worlds for both of you that you could both exist in. Whereas for anyone else to rely on compassion, the other guy would be like, oh, I have compassion for people just as God intends to. And blacks are here to serve whites. That's my compassion. Right, and you would just be totally lost. You'd have no way to communicate with that person. Well, again, I don't think people are primarily motivated by logic. Like, it's a big part of it. I agree with that. That's not relevant to what we're saying, but I agree with that. Yeah. But yeah, so I guess what I'm talking about, though, as far as like any moral system that you have, I feel like if you completely remove compassion from the system itself, you can often get yourself into very serious problems.  And then the person comes in again and that the old man would be justified in shooting him. And I feel like that's the kind of conclusion one can come to if they have a moral system in which compassion does not factor in. Yeah, well, the problem is that I could weaponize compassion to literally argue both ends of that conversation. I guess we ought to have compassion for the person that hops over friends to go to the yards. You might have a number of reasons to do so. Like it would be ridiculous to condemn this person to death or to punish this guy when he's just a guy that wants to wander through yards. And then much the same on the other end as conservative, I could weaponize compassion and argue it's crazy that we would expect this man who owns some piece of property literally like a cornerstone of the American dream to have a piece of land that you call your own in the United States to subject himself to the intrusion of another person repeatedly over and over again without him being able to exercise his most fundamental right and just protecting his small corner of the world that he calls his own right. I can use compassion on either end of that argument. And this is why compassion just doesn't work as a motive. But the moral system isn't being used by someone outside of this. It's being used by the people within the actual disagreement. So regardless of who's utilizing a particular moral system, I'm just saying that compassion there can argue. I can literally, I can literally, you can give me any possible problem you want hypothetically and I could show you how you could use compassion to argue both ends of that, which are totally unsatisfactory. Whereas I think on my moral system, if you give me any question, I can show you, I can demonstrate what I would say should be right or wrong in every circumstance, not from both ends, but I should be able to determine somebody who is more morally in the right versus somebody who's morally in the wrong. I mean, you may be able to do that. But again, I think the point here is that it's important when people are making moral decisions and trying to use a system to make moral decisions that they actually engage their empathy to a certain extent for the person that they are dealing with. Yeah, but then I just demonstrated to you that like, I think you can use that compassion in ways that- Yeah, but you can literally weaponize absolutely anything. You can weaponize- Then I would ask you to demonstrate that. So that was one of the two initial points I gave you. If you can show me, so either one is a contradiction or two, you can demonstrate to me a conclusion that I intuitively just don't like that stems logically from my moral system. It would force me to reconsider. Okay, can you give me an example? Well, no, if I had an example, I wouldn't follow my moral system. Of course not. I don't believe that there are any more examples that cause either a contradiction to appear in any of my fundamental beliefs or generate like some belief that I don't like.  So for instance, when we talk about like stealing a blade of grass from somebody's yard when they've been put on notice, there might be like extreme ends but for like 99% of cases I'm okay. And for those extreme ends that I get a little bit uncomfortable for, I would be more uncomfortable with the extreme ends of a contradictory system. For instance, one that would let you to infinitely steal small amounts of property from another person that you never be able to, right? So yeah, so like, yeah, so I would just need, that's why I gave the example earlier. If you could demonstrate to me that like, oh well, if you say that this is true, guess what? If you, you know, right? So let's say that I assume all of your actions are true, okay? Here's premise, premise, premise, premise.  If you could demonstrate something like, okay, yeah, sure. That does logically follow from my axioms, right? So if you can demonstrate to me a valid argument that I don't like, then you're attacking the soundness of my argument because I wouldn't be forced to change your premise or abandon my structure or system. Okay, so for instance, we'll do the blade of grass or I think as you've faced it, like the stick of gum, essentially. I mean, I think there's a number of huge practical problems that come with that. Namely, the fact that you're justifying essentially infinite aggression against someone for something that's simply not worth it, just simply because- Hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay, wait, we have to be really, okay. So I'm gonna challenge you to be incredibly precise with your language. I'm not gonna let you say something like, it's not worth it. You're gonna have to define what that worth is. You're gonna have to be very precise here if you say, it's not worth it to do that when we're having like moral arguments, I would say. I'm saying there is no proportionality in if someone- Does there need to be proportionality when you're defending yourself from an aggressor? Yes.  I think murder is worse. Okay, do you think that if a woman is about to be sexually assaulted by a man and the only way she can defend herself is by murdering the person or killing them, do you think that's acceptable or should she allow herself to be assaulted? I think that it would be acceptable in the sense that because she doesn't know what else that person is going to do- I would say that she knew 1 million percent. It was a person that he actually says it. And he said he commits himself. He's a logical machine.  This man can never tell a lie. So this magical man that doesn't exist.   I'm not gonna harm you or any other way. Like I'm just gonna do this. Is she forced to submit herself to that because she can't proportionally respond? So I'm not going to answer for a woman on this because I don't know what women deal with, but I can't- Yeah, well, I'll answer for myself. And- No, no, no, wait, wait. I don't accept an answer for yourself because I don't care, because now we're moving away from a moral framework to, well, what would I personally do? Which is, remember earlier in this debate, we are separating out behavior from systems of ethics. I don't care about like an individual's behavior. For instance, I would probably never kill somebody that would steal almost anything of mine because I'm wealthy, I can just replace it.  Even if I subscribe to a moral system where I say, well, maybe I have the right to do this, I would never do it because it's just not worth the trouble. Even in the legal system, none of that is worth it. So I'm not talking about your personal behavior. All I'm getting at- This is what I'm gonna say. I don't think someone who is raped is justified in killing. I would understand if they did, I wouldn't condemn them, but I don't think it's, if you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you will not die, you will only be violated for a certain amount of time, then killing to prevent that, I think is a greater wrong. I think it's out of proportion. Now that does not mean that you can't fight back. That does not mean that you cannot injure them. Well, but you might incur further damage to yourself by doing that. But so like, yeah, so that's like a type of conclusion. So I wholesale reject that. I would not place that more responsibility on a person that's being aggressed on, on a victim. I wouldn't argue that a victim can only respond proportionally to somebody else that's violating their autonomy. That's like a conclusion that I just wholesale reject. I feel like you're, I feel like you're unfairly and ironically, you're unfairly appealing to compassion there. No, actually, so, so again, if I ever make a moral statement, I will run it all the way back. So we can run this all the way back to my moral system. Okay, so.  No, no, wait, wait, wait, hold on. I have to respond because you just accused me of basically just word vomiting out like some appeal to emotion. I'm not. So morally I exist. I have an experience and I want to maximize my experience. Okay. Other people exist. They have an experience and they want to maximize their experience. Part of me maximizing my experience is not being raped. Okay. Or being sexually assaulted. Okay. So on the other system, human synergize to create a better experience. And if I help others maximize their experience, they will help me, assuming we all share moral systems who will all synergize with each other. If this person is trying to violate my autonomy, they've demonstrated to me that they fail to adhere to those three principles. They're not worried about the synergism of humans working together. They're not trying to maximize other people to help their experience. And they're not sharing a moral system with me where we synergize each other's experience. So I can go ahead and exclude them from my moral system and I would be able to practice some form of lethal self-defense if I needed to because of their rejection of my moral system. Nothing that I've said here whatsoever requires any appeal to compassion or anything like that. This fully follows, I believe, from my moral axioms. Well, okay. But again, you didn't use that exact argument. You specifically went and appealed to the situation of the victim when you made that argument. And the fact that it was as strong and as charged in an argument you, like as it was, is because inherently compassion for the victim comes into the equation. I don't care about compassion. If someone demonstrates that they are not functioning within your system, again, I don't think that just because they have rejected the social construct that you have projected onto the world through these logical suppositions, I don't think that means that you are justified in ending their life, even if they are violating that. There was a great debate, actually, on your decision tonight. Just to be ultra, ultra, ultra, ultra clear, okay? I'm not saying, I'm not arguing whether or not you should or shouldn't kill somebody. That was the example. That's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing against is, you seemed to give me this qualifier saying that if you respond to something, it must be proportional. I disagree with that. And I think that most people intuitively would also disagree with that, even if they haven't explored their fundamental moral system. I think that most people intuitively would not agree that these types of responses need to be proportional. I would argue intuitively, most people feel as though the aggressor probably deserves some level of disproportionate response. Oh, I should disagree entirely. Our whole justice system is based on the idea of proportionality. What I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about justice system in terms of retribution or in terms of rehabilitation or any of that. I'm not talking about justice.   Like... Okay, and I will argue that your system will end up with a bunch of people killing and sexually assaulting people because they know that they're not going to be punished heavily for it. If the person they're attacking is sufficiently small enough or disarmed and they know that nothing really bad is going to happen to them. Look, I'm going to say right off the bat, I think that that's a very limited way of looking at this. We also know that stuff like, for instance, the death penalty is not a deterrent. Death penalty is not talking about the prevention of a crime, that's the punishment of a crime. With my form of justice, I don't believe in retribution or justice at all. I only believe in rehabilitation. That's something completely separate. I'm talking about looking at somebody, we can call it the nap if we want, the non-aggression in terms of whatever. I'm talking about if you have a victim or a potential victim. If you've got somebody being aggressed on by another person, that person can respond with whatever means necessary to protect themselves from being aggressed on. They don't have an obligation to meet it with proportional force. They should be able to do whatever they need to keep themselves safe. Yeah, I think that this has very serious implications with regard. Like, if we take that as our operating principle, you essentially allow infinite retribution for any perceived crime. To be clear, one more time, I'm not talking about after the fact, I'm not talking about retribution. I'm talking about the prevention of something. Okay, so any level of force is... So again, let's take Israel and Gaza. Couple rockets get fired into Israel. Nobody dies or maybe there's some stuff.  That's retribution. I'm not talking about retribution.  I would say if the only way that victim can protect themselves is the lethal force, they can kill the person. But if that person sexually assaults them, then walks away, I don't think you can kill the person then in retribution. That's a different, that's totally different. Let's go for the line then. We don't need to use sexual assault. Let's go down to someone's coming at you to take your wallet.  If you tell them not to, if they're going to aggress on you and if you want to defend that wallet, yeah, I think so. Okay, so why is their life worth like your wallet? Your wallet, you've got- You'd have to ask the aggressor. They're the one making that decision. No, they're not making the decision to die. They're making the decision to violently ask for your wallet.  No one would necessarily believe that because people say, I'm going to kill you all the time and they don't mean it. Well, that sounds like their problem. Why do they feel like it was worth taking the risk? Again, I don't think people think through it that much. I don't think that- Okay, that might be true, but I'm not going to place the onus on the victim to determine the mental state of the aggressor. I don't think that's a victim's responsibility. I'm not doing, again, the issue, I wouldn't put the onus on the victim either. But you are. Not because- No, no, keep in mind- They're hard-working. They're restricting what they can do to protect them. I absolutely am not because, again, they don't know what's going to happen. So then it sounds like in practice, your system would collapse into mine anyways.  It sounds like what I would say is, she can defend it with lethal force. And then what you would say is, well, she can defend her purse with lethal force, but she doesn't know if the guy is going to kill her. So she can defend her purse with lethal force and all act-locable situations anyway because she can never determine if he's going to attack her or not. These would be very similar situations. I grant you. But the fact is that the undergirding, what seems to undergird your end of it, is the problem is a person is not upholding their end of the social contract and therefore they make themselves fair game for any level of violence against them. Well, preventative violence, but yeah. Yeah. I'm rejecting the idea that, because one, as far as the social contract goes, I mean, I don't know about you.  And nobody actually signed it. I think you do. I think you're compelled to, so long as you participate and reap the rewards of society, I think you necessarily have to find that. If you're compelled into a contract, then the contract itself is null and void. Absolutely not. As long as you continue to reap the rewards of said contract, you are compelled by force to adhere to that contract. So for instance, when the federal government comes... That's a very Hobbesian way of looking at it. It may or may not be. But if the federal government comes to me and they say, you need to pay tax, I go, huh, well, I didn't consent to any taxes in the system. Well, of course not. But I live in a society where I reap the rewards and benefits of all the systems that the government has created around me. So if I'm going to continue to reap the rewards of living in said system, then I need to do whatever that system demands or compels me to contribute back to that system, such as paying my taxes. Yeah, so I'm going to disagree with that fundamentally. I think that, you know, and I will go as far as to say, yeah, they're right when they say taxation is theft. Property is theft. All property is theft. But taxation is as well. Now, do they get a say in it? No, because guess what? The state controls everything.  I also think that taxes are good, generally. And it's actually better that we are compelled to pay them than they wouldn't be, because if you look at like failed states in Latin America, voluntary taxation ironically makes the government worse. Wait, how do we say that? Involuntary taxes. How can you have a position where you say theft is good? Theft is not what why theft is good, because theft is opinion. It's not. It's not. Theft is completely subjective. Like what do we do? OK, wait, let's just go there. What? How do you define theft? What is theft to you? I mean, theft is the unlawful or immoral taking of some property. Yeah, OK. Well, you're begging the question. Theft is the immoral taking of some property. Why is it immoral? That's what I'm asking for. Well, that because that's the definition of theft. Well, but as far as why is theft immoral? Or do you have a reason why you feel that theft is immoral? The only thing that I could say, I would personally speaking for me, I would say theft is immoral because it harms the person having something stolen from them in ways that not just being deprived of the property, but also the psychological harm of being put in that situation. So was that only immoral in cases then where it harms the other person or? I mean, arguably, yeah, pretty much. If it doesn't harm anybody, I don't see it being immoral. OK, but just for I guess for the record, so I would consider theft to be taking something by which someone else has the right to without their consent. That's what I would say. That's a perfectly fair definition. The issue is that it's entirely subjective who has a right to what like. Well, but I wouldn't say that. So for instance, in society, right, money is literally created by the government. The government through its democratic means has processed an established process by which they have the right to collect taxes. So when the government comes to me to quote, unquote, steal my money, it's not theft at all. The government has a right to that money because the government has laws by which it can collect. It can levy taxes against me and collect taxes from me. So I can't call that theft. It's not taking something. Right. But the only reason the government has the power to do any of that is it conquered this territory with its military and is able to. The reason why I have the right to do that is because it provides services and everything to me because I exist in a society where I have that agreement set up with the government. I exist. We should definitely argue about the state sometime because this is this is great. But I will say that the fact that it provides services is simply to make it appear more justified and therefore maintain its monopoly on the justified use of force. I think the force came first and the services came later. And I think historically we've also seen that. Now, again, I don't think it's bad. I like that the government provides services. I think it should provide more services. But at the same time, I don't think that the states, the fact that the state conquered a territory and its laws are based on violence and. I understand, regardless of any of that, I think the foundation just doesn't matter. I would argue that if you exist in some state and you withhold paying your taxes, I would argue that you're the one stealing. Like you're the one that's committed theft at that point. Because you're existing in some system where everybody has some buy-in. Like for instance, let's say that there exists some commune.  Where these people run a farm, they doled out their responsibilities to everybody. They have divvied out all of their high, all of their, oh god, what was the word Michael Albert used? For work that is fulfilling, for work that is. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Ornerous work. Ornerous work. The ornerous work. And then there's like a high fulfillment work. Fuck, I don't remember what it is. But some work is very fulfilling. Some work is not fulfilling. They doled it all out. They've created a commune. Let's say that somebody else moves in next to that commune. Oh, empowering work. Yeah, somebody moves in next to the commune and they see that there's like a whole bunch of fruit that exists there. Well, let's say they move in. They set up like their little house and everything and they're cool. And let's say that they just walk over every day and they start picking some of those fruits. I think that the people in that, in that commune can look at that person like, wait, what the fuck? You're literally stealing from us. What do you mean? The guy's like, well, no, it's fruit. It exists in the land. It's like, well, no, hold on. All of us are allowed to take of those fruits because we all have a shared agreement with one another that allows us to, you know, put in some amount of work in society and then reap some benefit from society. You can't come and just reap the benefits of society without putting anything in. That's not fair. That's not part of the agreement that we have here. Yeah. What you're essentially saying is that the ownership there is generated by possession and use, which by the way, most anarchists myself would agree in a human term. However, let's just zoom that out a little bit and imagine an alien race came here and watched that happen. They don't know anything about human custom with regards to what belongs to one person and what doesn't. All they see is, oh, those people are eating the apples and now that other human is eating the apples. Interesting. Because again, theft is subjective. It doesn't exist within reality. It only exists within human minds. Super depends on