Exploring the intricate relationship between philosophy and free will, we discussed how Universal Preferable Behavior shapes morality. Hedonism was scrutinized, noting that pursuing pleasure without aligning it with higher standards can limit meaningful choices. Additionally, we examined pleasure as an incentive mechanism and highlighted the importance of defining ideal standards of behavior to nurture free will. This episode underscores how philosophy plays a pivotal role in guiding individuals towards conscious and meaningful decision-making for genuine fulfillment.
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
NOW AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING' - AND THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI AND AUDIOBOOK!
Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, the interactive multi-lingual philosophy AI trained on thousands of hours of my material, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
NOW AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING' - AND THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI AND AUDIOBOOK!
Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, the interactive multi-lingual philosophy AI trained on thousands of hours of my material, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00So I think it's important to understand that philosophy doesn't just identify, it
00:03also creates. So physics doesn't just identify, it also creates. So when
00:13you understand, say, the principle of gravity, you can create acceleration in a
00:19spaceship by using the slingshot effect, where you go around a big gravity well
00:24and use it to accelerate, right? So when you understand physics, then you can
00:30create a boomerang, you can create a bow and arrow, and, you know, eventually a gun
00:36and so on. And so philosophy doesn't just identify things, philosophy is not just
00:41passive. So as I sort of mentioned in a recent show about UPB, UPB doesn't just
00:50identify morality, UPB in a very real sense creates morality. Now I don't mean
00:57out of thin air or out of whole cloth, but UPB creates
01:02morality because morality is that which we can choose, but we have to have a
01:07motive or incentive to choose. So if we are fed bad information, our choices
01:16diminish. If for whatever reason we believe that lying around and eating
01:20cheesecake is the best way to lose weight and get ripped, and we believe
01:23that, then we don't have a functional choice to lose weight and get ripped
01:29because we have bad information. So if free will is our ability to compare
01:35proposed actions to ideal standards, without those ideal standards we don't
01:41really have free will. So does a hedonist have free will in a practical and
01:48exercisable fashion? And we can talk about the theory and the potential and
01:51so on, but bad information means that the potential can't be actualized. So does
01:57everyone have the ability to lose weight? Yeah, pretty much. But if you have bad
02:02information, do you have any practical capacity to lose weight? So if we look at
02:06someone like a hedonist, a hedonist says, I will do what is most pleasurable in
02:11the moment. Well, that of course is living like an animal. Animals in general
02:17do what is most pleasurable in the moment. And you say, well, animals make
02:20sacrifices. The birds fly all over the place to get food for their offspring,
02:23for the baby birds, but the reality is that they're programmed to do that and
02:27feel terrible if they don't. So even the quote self-sacrificial animals are still
02:32hedonistic. And I would hesitate to call them hedonistic because hedonism is the
02:38description of an approach to life when there's an alternative. I mean, even
02:43bacteria, let's just talk about, I don't know, single-celled organisms or
02:48whatever, right? They pursue food and avoid that which makes them experience
02:54something negative, right? So they pursue food and they avoid hard surfaces or, I
02:58don't know, vinegar or whatever it is, right? So we wouldn't call an animal a
03:03hedonist because the animal has no choice but to pursue its pre-programmed
03:09pleasures and avoid its pre-programmed pains. Well, there's a tongue twister for you.
03:14But a hedonist has the choice to not live like a hedonist, which is why we have a
03:17separate category called hedonist. So does a hedonist have free will? If the
03:23hedonist generally and genuinely accepts that to live for the pleasure of the
03:30moment, avoiding all pain, is the best possible life, then the hedonist does
03:38not have an ideal standard to compare his proposed actions to. He looks at
03:45cheesecake and says, I would enjoy eating that cheesecake. Doing what you enjoy is
03:50the best, therefore I will eat the cheesecake. There is no ideal standard or
03:56higher standard to compare proposed actions to because it's all about
03:59pre-programmed pleasures and pains. When you surrender to instinct, when you
04:06surrender to pleasure and pain, you are surrendering to pre-programmed
04:12preferences. So, of course, we are programmed by nature, or by evolution
04:20really, to like bright sugary things. That's why candy always has
04:27really bright colors and they're sugary and so on, because bright sugary things
04:31meant fruit, and fruit was essential to our survival, and fruit was sometimes
04:35difficult to get. Or honey, which is sort of a very dense source of energy. You've
04:40got to love honey to get past the bees, right? Because you don't have a bear's
04:44hide to protect you from the stings, right? So this is all pre-programmed, and
04:49because it's pre-programmed, it is not comparing proposed actions to ideal
04:55standards, it is comparing proposed actions to that which is pre-programmed
04:59into our bodies, into our tongues, into our minds, into our
05:04physiology, right? Sexuality, sexual desire, lust, is pre-programmed into our bodies.
05:11And because lust is pre-programmed into our bodies and kicks in around puberty,
05:16the pursuit of lust is to follow your biological programming. It is to follow
05:23your... and this is the NPC meme, is characters who are pre-programmed in
05:27video games, they have pre-programmed responses, they don't have free will. And
05:32so the fact that we are programmed by nature in our pleasures and our pains
05:39means that when we are pursuing a life of pleasure, fetish, and pain avoidance, we
05:45are NPCs because we are programmed for pleasure and pain. It's evolved. So a
05:52hedonist does not have free will because the only way he's going to ever end up
05:58abandoning hedonism is if the hedonism life as a whole becomes painful, as it
06:04generally does. I mean, of course, it's more pleasurable to eat cheesecake in
06:07the moment, but when you end up overweight, your life becomes worse. I
06:12mean, you've got joint pain, you've got back pain, you've got maybe diabetes,
06:16you've got fatty liver, you've got, you know, it's hard to clean yourself and you
06:20can't play any sports really and you can't run around and like your life just
06:24gets worse, right? And fertility issues in particular for women, but also for men,
06:27erectile dysfunction, you name it, right? So a hedonist will generally only give
06:33up his hedonistic lifestyle when he's burned out his joy centers. So
06:40our happiness centers, our joy centers, are designed as goalposts, not as
06:45continuums. So the reason that we feel happy when we achieve a victory is so
06:51that we will continue to try to achieve more victories, right? So a tennis player
06:56who wants to become a great tennis player or has the capacity to become a
07:00great tennis player or, sorry, to be more accurate, experiences fierce joy at
07:05winning a tennis game, well, that joy is there to incentivize you to become
07:11better at tennis, right? The joy is not there for you to keep it going in a
07:17perpetual way because if you keep the joy going in a perpetual way, then you
07:21don't win any more tennis matches, right? Because the fierce joy that you have in
07:26winning a tennis match is designed to have you train and work hard so you can
07:30win another tennis match and you have to have the risk of losing a tennis match
07:33in order to feel joy in winning a tennis match. If you've ever taught someone, and
07:37I have taught a number of people racket sports over the years, you don't feel
07:41any victory or thrill of excitement and so on when you beat somebody who is new
07:47to the game, like I've been playing tennis for like 50 years, right? So when
07:51you beat somebody who's new to the game, you don't feel any pleasure. In fact,
07:53you're really not supposed to beat them, you're supposed to just teach them. So
07:57the purpose of pleasure is as an incentive mechanism to make the pain
08:03worthwhile. So the purpose of orgasm is to make the pain of pursuing a
08:11partner and rejection and loss and breakups is to make all of that
08:14worthwhile. Now, of course, if you were to exist, God help you, in a state of
08:19perpetual orgasm or perpetual joy of victory, you would not excel at all. You
08:27would not excel at all because your positive experiences would no longer be
08:32incentives that make it worthwhile. They would be a permanent state of
08:37celebration, right? So you win and you celebrate, right? Maybe you drink
08:42some alcohol and you have a celebratory piece of cheesecake or whatever it is,
08:46right? You celebrate and then the celebratory feeling, the fierce joy,
08:51whatever it is, goes away and then you start working hard to achieve it again.
08:56This is why it's called the hedonic treadmill. Everything that you achieve
09:01goes away in order to spur you to achieve more. It's how we got to the top
09:05of the food chain. So people who look for permanent happiness are looking for
09:10stagnation and it's well known, of course, that drug addicts substitute the
09:15pleasure of drugs for the pleasure of actual achievement and people do this
09:19with video games and other things, right? They substitute artificial joy for
09:27true joy and the demotivated stoner like the guy on weed who's just demotivated
09:33and doesn't achieve much and so on. Well, that makes perfect sense, right?
09:37Because he's getting the happiness reserved for achievement, struggle and
09:41strife and work and achievement. He's getting that happiness without actually
09:47having to achieve. And so since we achieve in order to be happy, if we try
09:53to exist in a state of permanent happiness, we stagnate, right? Like we
09:57drive to get home. Once we're home, we stop driving because we've achieved our
09:59goal. And so the hedonist tries to make pleasure his goal when pleasure is there
10:07to serve non-pleasure goals, right? The orgasm is not there to serve the orgasm,
10:12it's there to serve pair bonding and reproduction. The thrill of victory is
10:15not designed to serve itself but to serve further pursuits of victory. So the
10:19hedonist, by aiming at pleasure instead of the achievement which brings pleasure,
10:24the difficulty and the achievement that brings pleasure, the hedonist is aiming
10:28at the wrong thing. He's aiming at the effect, not the cause. And since at some
10:34point your body picks up on the lie, right? At some point your
10:38body and your brain picks up on the lie. Like the guy who only has his
10:43achievement through video games, at some point he gets that thrill of, wow,
10:48I've achieved something and that's good. I still remember in Quake 3 winning a
10:53couple of matches and feeling pretty good. Feeling pretty good. But what
10:58happens is at some point your body's like, well hang on, we have all of this
11:03achievement but what do we have in reality? And that's the same thing with
11:07the hedonist, right? The hedonist pursues sex, say, and sex is an intense positive
11:16experience designed to serve pair bonding and child raising. And when the
11:21hedonist pursues sex without love, without children, without the raising of
11:28children, then the hedonist is aiming at the effect without the cause. And if you
11:33get the effect without the cause, at some point your body is like, whoa, hang
11:37on, this is not working. Sex is there to pair bond with a
11:42quality mother for your children and to produce children. Where's the quality
11:47woman? Where's the children? So at some point your body figures this out and turns on
11:52you. You can call this a conscience or whatever, but there's a normalizing
11:55factor. It turns on you and then you have a choice. You can either give up your
11:59pursuit of pleasure and instead aim at achievement, which will give you pleasure
12:03and in a sustainable way because you can always continue to achieve more and work
12:07for more. Or he doubles down on the pursuit of hedonism, but now his
12:12body's onto him. His unconscious is onto him and knows that he's hijacking
12:16pleasures designed for achievement, for his own personal pleasure, and it will
12:21just take away his pleasures and hedonism always ends up in this kind of
12:24collapse. So then the hedonist might change, but he's only going to change
12:28because hedonism doesn't work anymore. It's still not, you know, it's like saying
12:31that there's a drug addict who's reformed because he can no longer access
12:35the drug. Well, that's not a reform, that's just not being able to get high. So by
12:41saying that there are ideal standards of behavior, philosophy aims not just to
12:45identify free will, but to create the capacity for free will by giving you
12:48something to aim for. Integrity, consistency, virtue. If these things aren't
12:52defined, you can't choose them. Just as if there's not a particular medicine
12:56isn't available, a doctor can't prescribe it, right? So philosophy is not passive.
13:00It doesn't just identify things, it creates things as well. And really that's
13:04its purpose. It's not the identification of morality, but the creation of free
13:08will through the definition of universal morality. So I hope that helps and I
13:12appreciate your time, care, and attention. And I dare say, affection
13:16freedomand.com slash donate if you could help out the show. I would truly, truly
13:20appreciate it. Thanks everyone. Bye.