Jordan Peterson - Maps of Meaning lectures 2016

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I was listening to Jordan Peterson's interviews with Gad Saad a few days ago on Bill C-16 (good interview) and Jordan mentioned a series of lectures he put together called Maps of Meaning based on lectures for a particular course he teaches at U of Toronto, possibly by the same name but I can't confirm that.

All I can say is wow. He does an excellent meta-analysis of everything from Darwinian evolution to sociology, instinct, cognition and neurology, religious traditions, and cultural archetypes. It seems like he's doing the same kind of thing that John Ralston Saul was known for in this regard (Voltaire's Bastards was a treasure-trove of western political history), similar degree of detail and he might be integrating an even fuller picture.

There's something like ten lectures, most of them are about 2 hours a piece (if you add together the ones that are broken into multiple parts). His first lecture is on the concept of malevolence in human nature and attempts to cope with it philosophically as well as ponder its neurobiological implications. I just finished part II of his 5th lecture - I'll have to go all the way through because while there's a lot here that I've heard there's also a lot of fascinating stuff he brings up with respects to the state of understanding of neurology, biology, and psychology that I'd never heard before and he brings them up in some fascinating contexts.

Came there via a similar route, watched all of them by now.
He's good in his analysis, personally, I don't like his presentation and at points abit inaccurate when he's talking about stuff from STEM-fields.
when he talks about what he calls "epigenesis", I find the term an appropriate freudian slip, as he goes on to express vague doubts on the nature of self-assemblage and evolution of dna. But apart from that he's safely in the darwinian camp, and expresses no creationist ideas.
when I say I don't like his presentation, I mean he's using colloquial language where I feel he should use more precise terms, and he appears quite emotional and undistanced at times.

I also don't fully agree with his conclusion that ancient myths are generally applicable today, in particular he seems to be advocating a rather- though definitely not wholly- conservative standpoint on a lot of things.
the fact that a chosen handful of interconnected early human civilizations chose to interpret the world in a certain way doesn't make it all useful in postmodern societies.
and I dislike that a lot of people studying myths are so dismissive about modernity and postmodenity, rahter than learning what there is to glean from those works and acknowledging a progression to newer and still valid forms of storytelling. It feels like a personal taste and preference for traditional patterns of storytelling is getting in the way of that.

That said, I also watched some of the SJW accusations against him and the fallout from that and afterthat I felt like I needed to readjust my orientation a bit.
I thought of myself as fairly liberal and leftist. But compared to these guys, I now feel I'm actually conservative, too, and not that far away from Peterson, when it comes to bis view on a balance between order and chaos.

But I'm European, where political correctness hasn't come to bear such fruit yet, so...
also, his defense of free speech turns angry and polemic when he proposes the pc pokemon game, and while I want to agree on his view of political correctness which I find correct, those childish things, in my opinion, leave a dent in the impression of him being a smart person to listen to- and who listens to what a person says nowadays, rather than judging from impression?
I'll keep watching a few more of his courses and see what I can get from them, there's definitely stuff to learn from. with some caveats.

I think one of the challenges with postmodernity is we still have a mainstream culture that's being weilded (at least here in the US) at the dumbest levels possible and forced to make choices between rather idiotic to the point of arbitrary collections of stances. I can't remember who was, probably Sam Harris, but I got a laugh recently when I heard someone say - quite deadpan - that someone's stance on global warming should tell you nothing about their stance on the 2nd amendment.

TBH I think our structures just really suck and so far we haven't had the mechanisms to raise the grade-level of the dialog from 2nd or 3rd grade to at least 8th - part of that is that it seems like our media has turned into an oligarchy and accordingly there's very little competition for integrity.

The point I guess I'm trying to get around to - we definitely need a story, what form that'll take I don't know just that I'd really hope it inspires integrity and side-steps barbarism. Post-modernism would probably have to be something like a cultural masters of PhD; while I'm sure the average person is a lot more informed now than they even were thirty or forty years ago I'm still not sure that the average person is quite up to the task yet of knowing how to live their lives based on it. Really that's part of why I do, when I think of it, like the idea of an exoteric and esoteric - just so long as the exoteric isn't so repressive or draconian that its an overall progress-stopper.


This is another relevant reference where I can't remember whether I caught it between Sam Harris and Peter Singer or Gad Saad and Jordan Peterson - someone brought up John Stewart Mill's definition of liberalism and it seemed to be very much of the variety of people having maximal freedom for their own pursuit of happiness along their own lines, their own way, providing it did no harm to others and likely that those in need were looked after. In a lot of ways there seem to be people - like Sam Harris for example - that people try lump into the alt-right occasionally but the trouble is no, he and a lot of people like him (I'd also consider Jordan in this category) are more classic liberals in the literal sense; they're definitely not leftists but there are also scores of issues that I couldn't imagine them agreeing with neo-liberals/neo-conservatives on.



I take a similar attitude really with any of these guys. You can tell when someone's gone to great pains to make the most sound possible arguments they can on any issue and regardless of whether or not you agree with them it seems like every bit of it you learn something from. Where they're right and you were in agreement you find yourself even better informed and perhaps making connections you might not have thought of otherwise, if they hold a different opinion it's something you can either check or vet your own reality with depending on whether you ultimately decide they're right or wrong on the issue. Just by them putting in that much care and effort it turns into a great learning experience regardless.

Any which way touch base again if any other insights or criticisms come to mind as you watch the rest of the series.

he also consistently amalgamates the Hindu goddess Kali with the Tamil-Hindu goddess Periyachi, Kali being the incredibly scary 8 legged Woman standing on Shiva and representing the cahotic force or creation itself, with Shiva representing consciousness. Sort of what deGoya depicts in "the sleep of reason".
Periyachi is the one that eats the intestines- of the queen who has just given birth, while she's holding the (cursed evil) newborn up to keep it from touching the ground which would lead to the end of the world.
So.... these characters are both highly ambiguous, but in Peterson's interpretation of his amalgamate, he's .... plainly... getting it wrong, making me wonder what else he's mixing up to make his point.

I get his idea and what he tries to tell me about the idea of a representationf of a creature of absolute horror, and it seems valid, but I'm starting to doubt his precision even in his own field of expertise. Psychology is, however, not an exact science, so I'm not sure if that actually matters.....

I'm up through part 8 of the series and I think I was able to sort of tease out what kind of picture he's drawing with the details he's bringing up.

If I'm understanding him right he's saying at regular intervals that biological consciousness as well as collective social consciousness have a holographic structure. He seems to often liken societal structure and value pyramids in the outside world with similar value pyramids in how the brain deals with itself.

Another quite bold thing he brought up which if true has wide-reaching implications; the idea that there are (for the lack of a better term) molecular nanobots only a couple dozen atoms in size which are able to carry other small molecules and methodically move around obstacles in their activities of cell mitosis and regulation. What's particularly profound about that is there's no way for something that size, as far as we know, to carry any sort of internal coding - there aren't sufficient switches to hold the several bits, possibly north of a byte, of data that would be needed for computations like that. That would strongly suggest, walking this out with the holographic concept of conscious systems, that such small structures are on a remote control of sorts and, holding the results up against the results of cell differentiation, it would suggest further than the activities of the cell are running on the instructions of the DNA but that the DNA, rather than being the source of the activity, behaves something like a prism and/or receiver that articulates a type of force or energy that's powering the whole process. If that were the case it would bring us back full circle to an elan vital driving the processes of life. It would also suggest that any time you have heirarchies of structure - from cell components to a cell, to an organ, to an animal or person, to a culture of animals or people, etc.. that you'd have information flowing both upstream and downstream, that the individual's behavior shaping the culture would equally be met by something like the collective intelligence of the culture circling back to inform the intuition of and modify the behavior of the individual in a very tangible manner.

I hear a lot of people increasingly coming out in favor or panpsychism, equally I hear a lot of people talking about Heidegger. I don't know if Jordan Peterson would publicly describe himself as a panpsychist but almost everything he said seemed to carry that inflection in so far as what I mentioned above and the way he likes to handle self-organizing systems.




Analyzing ancient gods and goddesses is definitely a place where people can get carried away, in a similar manner to trying to analyze a lot of Kunrath, Valentine, Meier, etc.'s alchemical emblems which are often said to hold both laboratory process instructions and their esoteric implications. One of the reasons I really enjoyed a lot of Manly P Hall's work was for similar reasons though - ie. he attempted to shed light on what he believed to be the embedded knowledge in the ancient mysteries, pantheon myths and narratives etc. etc.. just that where Jordan has a way of reducing most of these narratives to the preservation of societies Hall liked to reduce all of this to being about the relationship of consciousness to subconsiousness, ancients trying to map early astronomy to human behavior and growth (which to his credit the bible and many other books of that time are loaded with it), and narratives of birth being symbolic of death, death symbolic of birth.

With all of that kind of speculation, even if and when it does get carried away by an overenthusiastic thinker or philosopher it still usually seems like it's worth analyzing. On one hand they have a way of opening new ways of thinking about religious mythos and human history, on the other there's a good chance that in different ways, and to different people who were in charge of shaping and creating those mythologies through the centuries that they were being enlarged upon - they probably had just as much conjecture on these, had just as many of the same ideas when they stacked up their symbol sets, and they'd probably agree with both Hall and Peterson on the same symbols for equally tenuous reasons at times if they were available for comment.

Overall these symbols seem to quite often be very broad and applicable across many different contexts which in one sense makes them fodder for many different kinds of thought but at the same time it's almost impossible (if impossible) to pin down any one exact meaning.

that's funny- the way you're talking about the behaviour of molecules. I don't mean that to insult you, but Peterson uses some old cartoons at some point in one lecture (I watched A LOT of them by now) to illustrate an animistic, animated world view.
But molecular biology is not animated. the Proteins don't "do" things, in the form of acting as an informed agent.
The language we use makes them appear alive, but DNA, ribosomes, proteins- thy are not, themselves, alive.
To get molecular biology right, you have to think about it in terms of a clockwork.
Things don't "check" for mistakes in the replication mechanism, they just float along and get entangled if they fit into the right hole. Electromagnetic potentials shift from one side of the molecule to the other, and the only way to disentangle the piece is to apply a similar shift of electromagnetic charge in the opposite direction- if that doesn't happen, it means there's no exact corresponding part around, meaning the copy process was faulty.
There's no remote control, no bits to hold.
Think of it as mechanic, but on a subatomic level, where all the forces of nature work differently.

And Peterson knows that, he talks about it, different layers of viewing and explaining te world, and that all these myths are attempts to explain the workd on a human scale, in terms we know from our social lives.
- and the huge discovery of science, only 500 years ago, and only in europe. It spread from there, but still hasn't reached all corners of the world, - or all corners of the human mind.
And he says it would beimpractical of it did reach through all layers of human understanding.Love would be reduced to pheromones and visual patterns making neurons fire in the right rhythm.
Yes, that's there, but we can't live in a world that works like that- we'd be nihilistic. To see yourself as a random variation of a pattern of how to arrange molecules isn't a way to go through life.
but if you zoom in into individual cells, than that's the right way to see it.

I might have to see if I can read up on that a bit more - mainly in that hearing as big a claim as he made is the kind of thing I'd want to vet or debunk for the integrity of my own worldview. The example he made caught me off guard because one of two things are happening, either a) small molecules are behaving in ways that we can't explain or b) he's missing something so obvious or rudimentary that for him to miss it - gauging his intelligence and depth of analysis on other topics - is puzzling to say the least. He also made another side claim, either in the same lecture or perhaps one before or after, where he suggested that by the time we chase consciousness down to its root that we're going to have a much different attitude toward how we regard matter and our relationship with it. To me a lot of this taken together really suggests that he's a somewhat-in-the-closet panpsychist and that he's putting one foot out to test the waters in these lectures or at least see if people can get where he's coming from with that without fully exposing his name in connection with panpsychism publicly.


Yeah, his lectures seem to really hammer the idea that he sees us blowing through very important zones of relevance and confusing them in dangerous places. That could be said just as much for categorical errors in political ideology as for trying reduce subjective life to strict observance of Newtonian principles (I'm not in L&D very often for example but the word 'limerence' tends to give me the Churchland chills).

Yeah, I mean, that bit about the DNA replication confused me a bit as well.... I, too, thought: he should know this/understand this on the biological level, unless he wants to deliberately say something differnt, ... I mean, it sounds like he stops abruptly before saying something "stupid"....

Now, he's a psychologist, and a Jungian... Psychologists have always tended to encounter so many similarities in human problems, they tended to infer some collective unconscious.
Personally, I believe there is a very specific, evolved way of humans to preceive the world, and regardless of how the world changes, people always interpret it in the same ways, because their brains haven't changed, meaning, the human experience is similar over millennia. But I think Peterson is on about a similar idea, - I'm just not sure how.... scientific his world view is.

Is Panpsychism a similar concept to a collective unconscious- ah, don't worry, I'll google myself.
- okay. it is not.
hmm. panpsychism sounds like an scientifically unfounded belief that appears very... natural to how human brains interpret the world.
Petersen mentioned in an interview that he's deeply relligious, but obviously not into one of the organized religions.
I wonder where exactly he's coming from.

In academia that's a very wise stopping point. Thankfully I don't think panpsychism carries quite the same degree of stigma as intelligent design or being an all out new-ager entails; ie. it would lump him in more with Chalmers, Penrose, or someone like that more than it would Sheldrake or Hancock. Particularly its safety mechanism is that it's a criticism of emergence that's been contemplating outliers and breakdowns in the predictions of physicalism for a while and considering that conscious experience may either be below the level of neurons (such as with single-celled organisms with complex behavior) or even the idea that complex molecules and compounds way may carry some degree of this themselves. At the extreme end of it some people might consider the possibility that every fleck of matter might have an active seed of awareness in it but that's usually something that most people supportive of panpsychism tend to avoid - partly that they don't see any way to really validate or invalidate that. The other safety valve is it's considered an exploratory hypothesis that some well respected philosophers in academia are considering for the sake of generating testable hypotheses rather than attempting to drive a political hard-sell.


I do think the idea of an unified unconscious is a very difficult thing to prove and it's partly what you said - especially in today's culture we have symbols and sets of symbols washing over us all day long and the variety of core human crises probably isn't nearly as broad as the permutations of how they resolve out. I wouldn't say it's a foregone conclusion that there's no interconnectedness just that if there is we're still a ways away from having consistent/credible evidence of that.

Admittedly I'm one of those people who regularly meditates on the major trump of the tarot (I've been in BOTA for about three years now) and I've had a fascination with understanding the sort of Golden Dawn/Hermetic approach to Kabbalah because I do think they and groups like them are on to something with respect a cultivated means of finding one's way past the usual barriers between conscious and subconscious processes. Regardless of what's found down there, and part of why I really want to do this stuff, I think it's critical that it be explored because I agree with Jordan Peterson strongly on the notion that we're far too powerful and technologically advanced to survive being this stupid and also that much of this stupidity has to do with strategies for litmus testing mates or establishing social dominance hierarchy along evolutionary lines that were practical when we were in caves, planet destroying when we have nukes and hydrogen bombs. I also don't think this is something best solved by language policing, giving boys dolls or girls trucks; it's a project that everyone needs to take up with themselves. About all we can do to curb our more destructive habits IMHO is to sublime them in some way and one of the more direct routes on that is to turn our targets of conquest inward.


To get the flavor of it you'd probably want to check out David Chalmers, Christof Koch, and Neil Theise (although he's somewhat one-issue with self-organizing systems), and while I'm not quite sure Sir Roger Penrose's ideas of fundamental Platonic values quite fits that frame he's still got an interesting and rather unconventional theory of consciousness that he's working jointly with Stuart Hameroff and Anirban Banyopadhyay to try and flesh out further.



Yeah, that I can't say. Toward the end of his interview with Gad Saad he brought up the human being as happiest and growing the most by experimentation when they had one foot on the known and predictable, the other on the unknown or chaotic - perhaps from my studies I instantly thought that what he was saying rang very consistent with Key 17: The Star, but then again I won't deny that these emblems are a bit like coat racks or idea buckets with certain declared ground rules that can stack a lot of different kinds of data together that fit the same criteria (the same trap one can fall into when appraising ancient pantheons - at least if you take your conclusions too seriously).

My guess is that he very well could be religiously agnostic but similarly he could be quite well read with and practicing some form of eastern or western mystical system in his private life. Not impossible that he could be following some of the more contemplative eastern orthodox traditions as well. Regardless of what his faith is I'm sure it has to be something that's able to compare a wide and exploratory net, such as mysticism, with an equal invitation to skepticism. Stuff like that is out there but, as you said, it's not usually something found on the surface of most well-known religions.