KOL272-2 | Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 274-2. This is the Q&A panel following my talk [KOL274 | Nobody Owns Bitcoin (PFS 2019)] for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sept. 12–17, 2019). For the four panelists' talks, see the Program, or the PFS 2019 YouTube Playlist. Transcript below. Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019) Unedited Transcript, with Guido Hülsmann, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Hans-Hermann Hoppe Sept. 15, 2019 00:00:09 M (Rahim Taghizadegan): Hans, congratulations.  Your speech was really good food for thought, and because I want to hear more of it, I’ll try to challenge you and just create a little bit.  You made it seem as if going from a state of more culture as human beings to a state of culture somehow was a conscious agreement between human beings to find tools or artifices to reach the purposes.  And to me it seems like too much of separation between nature and culture because we see among animals quite a lot of complicated languages. 00:00:43 I call them languages, of course nothing compared to the complexity of the human being.  We see tools used by animals, and of course by our ancestors.  So it looks more like a spectrum which emerged out of our nature, and of course then complexities or at some certain level of complexity you can call it a more interesting culture and a more complex culture.  But I think you focus too much on the gulf between the nature and culture. 00:01:14 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I would doubt that we can speak of animals using instruments.  We can give completely causal explanations for them doing certain things.  It has also never happened that animals were constructing something that they cannot do by nature.  Men can construct instruments that make him – enable him to do things that he could not do by nature.  We can construct a car.  We construct an airplane.  Yes, we have beavers doing – building dams, but no beaver has ever done anything else but building dams or come up with, oh no, we just divert the flow of the river or something of that kind. 00:02:00 So the explanation that we can give for animal behavior, we would not need any reference to human or teleological vocabulary of goals and means and ends and success and failure.  We can – we do that because sometimes we like animals and like to describe them in human terms, but we could easily explain all of that in causal terms just as much.  Also, when animals learn something that they didn’t know how to do before like circus animals or something like that, that we can – again, this learning we can describe in a causal way—reinforcement, repetition, beating them, or not beating them, giving them a piece of sugar and whatever it is.  We never need human terminology to explain their behavior, but in our case, we do.  That is – that would be my point. 00:03:06 GUIDO HÜLSMANN: Actually, the naturalistic position can also be challenged that there are many natural phenomena that we cannot truly explain without a teleological element, such as the function of an eye for example.  Whenever we talk of a function, an eye, a liver, any human organ, a cell, DNA, information content and so on, you cannot just – the old terminology cannot just explain this in terms of the material characteristics and the so-called efficient qualities so what came before, and then what came after.  You need to have a teleological argument. 00:03:45 [Audience member]: I want to ask whether you will agree and perhaps expand upon this idea that another couple of good examples besides language are law, in particular, complex legal systems that emerge spontaneously over time.  And I think that this argument actually was made by Hayek and Sudha Shenoy as well.  And also, as a second example, as a second additional example, religion, and in particular one aspect of religion, that is, liturgy, different liturgies that embody sophisticated meanings that are transcendent.  I think that these are another couple of examples that can work just as well as language. 00:04:36 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Of course I agree.  I only took language, so to speak, the most important meta institution that makes lots of other institutions possible.  So there’s no disagreement here.  I – last year I spoke here for two hours, and I thought that might have been a little bit too much, so this time I wanted to be short and sweet.  I don’t know if the sweet thing did occur, but short it was.  There’s no disagreement whatsoever.  I just didn’t have time to go through all other aspects of culture besides the aspect of language. 00:05:21 DAVID DÜRR: I would like to take your example of law, which interests me most.  By the way, I’m not that much on your line, as you know, concerning this question, nature versus culture or however you call it.  And I namely mean that the law could be an interesting example to make another viewpoint.  Many speak about natural law, and this means something.  This means that these are principles that have to be found, not created by man. 00:06:06 Often when one says human law is something agreed upon by man, things like that, but I would say it’s more convincing or more consequent to approach that subject by trying to understand the regularities that are there in nature, regularities of behavior that, in this situation, this reaction will come up.  Even though within – so to speak in the inner view of such a conflict, then there are arguments.  There are purposes.  There are normative goals, things you were mentioning. 00:06:52 Even though within these procedures, things like that happen, I would say from the outer view so to speak these are natural processes.  And they are highly – terribly high complex.  They are so complex that we never will have any chance to get them.  So I think there we are not in the argument or in the aspect.  You mentioned that maybe sometime, but that will be later, we will have the possibility to catch the whole picture or something like that.  I will say we never will reach that possibility.  It will always be beyond our capacity, brain capacity or so.  But nevertheless, or I would say it’s not a cause that it’s a natural phenomenon. 00:07:54 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: When we speak of natural law, we of course speak of something that has a purpose for purposefully acting individuals.  When we speak of something being a conflict, a conflict is something entirely different than banging this bottle against a glass.  We can, of course, metaphorically also say there’s a conflict between that bottle and the glass that it is – that we interpret certain events as conflicts has something to do that we do have purposes. 00:08:36 And one of our purposes is, of course, to overcome conflicts because conflicts are considered by us as some sort of problem that should be solved.  This is not something that either the glass or the bottle considers as something that should be solved in some way.  But, of course, I can say that.  But when I say that, that is just metaphorically speaking so. 00:09:07 M (Johann Gevers): I completely agree with the importance of purpose and teleology, and at the same time, I think I’m more Raheem and Dapheet about the continuum within complex systems, complex adaptive systems.  We see there’s the central concept of emergence, and that cannot be explained from the lower levels, so you have a qualitative shift, but it’s nevertheless a natural process.  And to get more specific, in animals, in the recent 10, 15 years, we’ve now discovered that they can not just use tools but actually even put together tools that are multi-stage tools so that they would have to see that if I do this plus this plus this, then it will enable me to get the banana off the tree. 00:09:57 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I think those are all metaphorical descriptions of things that can be fully explained in causal terms.  I think the most important philosopher who deals with this is Peter Janich.  Those people who can read – most of his books were only written in German, but those people who can read German I can recommend the book that deals most directly with this issue.  He has written many books that deal with it more indirectly.  It was called Der Mensch und andere Tiere, who also just shows that all of these interpretations, they use instruments.  And so this is all bull, to be drastic.  Yes, you can, of course, describe what they do in terms as if they make an instrument and then they make another instrument in order to reach some further distant goal. (( Update from Kinsella: See references to Janich etc. in Hoppe on Falsificationism, Empiricism, and Apriorism and Protophysics; also Hoppe, "My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher". )) 00:11:05 But you can also describe that in a completely different, simple way.  And what I said before, no animal of any species has ever constructed an instrument that was entirely new, never happened in that species before.  Mankind has constructed artifacts that did not exist ever, completely new things, which all of a sudden become common instruments with the example of cars and airplanes.  Men cannot fly by nature, but we can fly.  Men cannot run very fast, but we can move in a very fast way.  No animal has ever invented an instrument that made it do things that it couldn’t do by nature. 00:12:02 M (Gevers): One question for Guido and one for Stephan.  Guido, at one point you mentioned that primitive tribes have neither a concept of property nor a concept of gifts.  And I’m curious if this is really true, and this is kind of in a continuation of the previous thread because, in the 1960s, Robert Ardrey wrote this book, The Territorial Imperative.  He was an anthropologist, and he also studied animals, and the subtitle of the book is The Animal Origins of Property and Nations,