Jordan Peterson on the Sam Harris Waking Up Podcast

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I'm really stoked these two guys got together. I've been anticipating this one for a month. I think Sam Harris tends to be very astute on politics and has some very good ideas, mostly Buddhist influenced, with respect to inner cultivation and subjective hygiene. Jordan Peterson is nearly identical on those last two points although he heads western, more in something like an existentialist analysis of Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Jung.

They both agree that cultural software and sociology is incredibly important stuff. The main difference is that Sam's historically been known as one of the Four Horsemen of modern antithesim, lately he's tilted more exclusively toward radical Islam and with his book Spirituality Without Religion he seems to be more against institutionalized dogma rather than the use of helpful subjective tools. Jordan Peterson actually seems to argue directly against that and, from the Jungian and evolutionary psychology perspective, sees organized religion as extremely important. No doubt I think Jordan would be vehemently opposed to the kinds of dogmas that crush civil liberties, particularly those who the Pentateuch came down hard on for what were likely regional and circumstantial reasons, just that I think he sees myth as having a very important place in our culture.

To that end I have to agree with Jordan - most of what runs us and initiates our action in the world is not logical; it's largely subconscious and much of what is subconscious is atavistic in nature. From Sam Harris's short exchange with Doug Murray over the value of institutional non-dogmatic religion as a cultural organizer I didn't sense Sam shooting back to vehemently, and I think they had some agreement on a statement that Jurgen Habermas had made about funerary rights feeling hollow if they weren't culturally symbolic.

Either way I haven't listened to this all the way through yet but again - two of my favorite thinkers treading some potentially uncomfortable waters. Should be fascinating!

Some of the Reddit follow-ups which were really good:
https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comm ... m-comments

I could follow Harris easily, but found Peterson confusing.

Peterson seemed to be demanding that people adopt an idiosyncratic definition of "true" that includes various value judgments that don't seem to have to do with truth.

That really doesn't make sense to me.

I was struck that at one point Peterson said he was gerrymandering the definition of truth. That doesn't seem helpful to me. It seemed that he would be better off using another word to convey this expanded meaning.

THe discussion with Harris was not very fruitful, I thought, but the reddit conversation makes me want to explore Peterson's ideas about mythology further.

Yeah, I think the reddit conversation fleshed out what was happening in the conversation pretty well.

My sense of it was that Peterson was suggesting that there's a greater importance in a set of truths that are, the best way I can put it, emergent over the set of individual datum that constitute individual established facts and that it was these higher assemblies that we had to pay even more attention to. There were a couple reasons for that - first being that if we devote ourselves too slavishly to the internal significance of granular facts we can easily enslave ourselves to our own destruction, second being that the higher assemblies are where we're able to judge what's good for the ongoing project of humanity and follow that. I think Sam agreed with him on every point except going out to separating truth out as a subsect of facts rather than the field of all facts.

I think what they were having was really a saliency argument. Jordan felt that the distinction between dry facts vs. the information we need to order them properly is such a big deal that they needed some kind of terminology divide. I also don't know that he's had the kind of debate thus far with other people that he's had with Harris and I think they'll sharpen each other's positions a fair amount.

Also, for getting into Jordan Peterson's take on myth and religion this is a pretty good launch point and I think it hits at least a few of the key items in his Maps of Meaning courses:

I don't think what Peterson is talking about is "Truth" as typically defined and used in, for example Boolean logic.

The idea of a Darwinian impact on truth seemed to really obscure the discussion.

Knowing that E=MC² may threaten our survival, but that doesn't make it not true.

To obscure that because of either the negative moral impact or danger of death in some knowledge is to destroy the possibility of a certain level of meaningful discussion of truth. It may open an interesting discussion at another level, but I think this conversation won't get very far because that first level is so deeply ingrained in our thinking, so often necessary to our survival, and so important for our ability to plan, cooperate and understand.

Suppose the pilots are discussing the situation after a total engine failure over a dense urban area. The Captain asks, "Do we have enough energy to reach the nearest airport?"
The answer is either true or false.
The sense of the truth of the answer really needs to be independent of any other consideration.

Then again, this may be like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How can the knowledge be deadly? On a mythological level, this myth has a kind of truth. People have discovered or created truths in it on poetic, metaphorical and allegorical levels. It's not a true story about the origins of man, though.

Muddying the waters between these ideas about truth is a primary source of conflict among religions and between the religious and non-religious, I suspect.

Jordan Peterson has posted a useful follow up:

Sam Harris posted this to his blog as well in response:
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/spe ... .-peterson

He brings up a lot of points that Peterson needs to clarify, no doubt, but I think these would be answered something like this:
- The aim is really to subordinate logic in such a way to put sentient life at the center of the universe.
- Evolutionary psychology and wiring needs to be engaged directly, not necessarily obeyed in all of it's nastier details, and harnessed correctly if one is going to have coherent ideas of government, economic, and political systems. Short of that anything you'll come up with looks great on paper but devolves into barbarism or logic pointing machine guns, jails, and yes, gulags, at its problems.

The point on religion is a more delicate one and I'm not even sure I fully agree with Peterson aside from saying that there needs to be some kind of organized program in culture where people learn about this wiring and how to harness it in a productive way for society - that a few biology classes won't be enough, that ritual, symbol, value statements, etc.. should be somehow to a greater or lesser extent included.

Waking Up Podcast 67: Round 2!