Jordan Peterson Psychological Significance of the Biblical S

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techstepgenr8tion
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04 Nov 2017, 9:40 am

shlaifu wrote:
Eventually, I'd like to stress, again, how invaluable Robert Sapolsky's 2010 lectures on behavioural biology from stanford are. Actual science, even adding the historical aspect to how this knowledge was arrived at, making it sound, even by Bruno Latour's standards.


Can you think of any of Sapolsky's lectures in particular that you'd recommend? I remember listening to at least a few he gave back in 2011 and there was a lot of good stuff in them. Also I'm curious if you're familiar with George Lakoff and what your opinion is on his work.

Back to Peterson though, if I have any bias toward his type of thinking it's possibly the two or three years of reading Manly P Hall's work and listening to his lectures - really wondering if anyone in our current times would bring themselves to broach the importance of philosophic concepts in the quality of human life in a similar manner rather than just treat thoughts as 'not real' or imaginary things (which makes no sense even from the pure reductive materialist standpoint). If anything though I feel like, with what he's brought up, he's raised the bar on the dialog and created a challenge that, ideally speaking, people who disagree with him can both pick apart his suggested construct and counter-propose one that has fewer holes in it.

In some way what you're saying might have been expressed in Sam Harris's second conversation with him when he accused Peterson of being something like the intellectual progeny of Joseph Campbell, playing an abstract symbol game that had no rules, and he proceeded to give his example of going to a Borders book store, to the cook books section, and finding in a Hawaiian cookbook a Mahi Mahi recipe that was really a sublime Eastern wisdom text at which point he interpolated all of the ingredients and preparatory directions into aspects of the human soul and internal processes of growth within the human endeavor. I don't think it's all quite that bad, or needs to be, just that there is a line between cogent hypothesis about the purpose of religious symbols vs. textbook illustrations of paranoid schizophrenia. Both can sit next to one another and look somewhat similar from the outside because they're both dealing with subconscious material which tends to have a much more hypnagogic and dream-like logic than the discursive logic that we normally use. I suppose then, from that standpoint, that there has to be a particular kind of filter that separates the universal 'crazy', of the sort that every sane and healthy person has lurking below the surface, vs. the type of crazy that goes far enough above and beyond that mark to be offering something useless in the broader context. The first type of crazy is critical to understand because it really does drive a lot of people's behaviors, rather than raw discursive logic, and the discursive logic usually comes after the fact as a person tries to rationalize behavior coming from themselves that they don't understand.

It is quite likely that the more JP gives lectures on things like the bible that he is taking this a few steps beyond what most people could agree with in plenty of cases and flooding his interpretation of these stories with anecdote, which is what any Sunday pastor does. I think if anyone's going to give him a run for his money in terms of a competing theory or set of idea they'd probably want to open the door that Brett Weinstein did further and follow these two lines of inquiry a) knowing what we know about the cruelty of natural selection and the amorality of genes, don't we want to draw a very clear distinction between not instantiating social systems that can't survive their attack on one hand versus holding them up as virtue on the other? b) Do we want to consider the possibility that our culture has hit a level of complexity, as well as a significant shift in what our existential threats are, to the point where the stories of the bible and other holy books skew our sense of that danger and don't help us arrange our moral and safety priorities optimally within the current system?

I still think that what Peterson's doing is helpful for religious funamentalists and the like for sorting their crazy out with respect to their books, but I do agree with Weinstein's criticism to the extent that these were subconscious myths that were primarily focused on helping people solve the problems of 500 BC and 1-100 AD. While I'm sure most of these problems do continue to some degree, it's not like we've completely rearranged our DNA through culture in the last 100 generations, in the way we've shaped our systems some problems have receded to the back burner, in some cases our forms of entertainment have actually drawn off a lot of steam and defused our violence, we'll have other forms of entertainment in the future I'm sure that will resolve other frictions, but at the same time we've had nuclear weapons for almost 75 years, we're heading up on AI, the possibilities for technology to dominate us or for authoritarian abuse of it to create dystopias on earth, and our focus probably should be more toward those problems rather than the question of who shares one's own particular religion or not.

My own bias again as a practicing esotericist and one who studies the philosophy, I do think there's a painful and really arbitrary divide in human knowledge that really wouldn't be there if it weren't for politics having such a hand in how we deal with information. Peterson just seems to be touching on the kind of thing that Jung brought up in the first half of the 20th century and part of why Jung got mowed down by behaviorism is that the Victorian tendency toward addressing everything in the most Newtonian manner possible and the moral obsession with beating the animal out of us to where we became good rational robots was highly allergic to a guy talking about archetypes, unconscious forces in the human being, or even shared pools of impulse that we all had to deal, acclimate, and accept to some degree rather than billy-club out of ourselves - which was continental Christian way of doing things for nearly two millennia and in some ways our secular society still kept that habit of revulsion.

What I'm also glad of is that it's finally hitting the public sphere level of consciousness, also thanks to Peterson, that the woo-woo and the question of whether archetypal stories and impulses drive us are two completely separate concerns. Before that, to say much of anything about abstract thought, internal forces, etc. quite often tripped the woo-woo alarm prematurely and this unfortunately had a lot of our national politics operating in something almost like concrete operational mode, ie. pre-pubescent levels of complexity in thought. IMHO that's a dangerous place to be because the world we live in is not cut and dry, it's way more complicated than people want it to be and they tend to dogmatically cling to simple stories, almost all of them pernicious and all of them wrong, because it gives an easy-pass for evading responsibility for engaging with that complexity.


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shlaifu
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08 Nov 2017, 1:41 pm

I finished Bruno Latour's "we have never been modern". I highly recommend it, but it was painful to read. it took three quarters of the text, before I could follow his ideas- meaning, I had to read it almost all the way through- trusting, hoping blindly it would make sense eventually- to understand what he was talking about in the beginning.
... not ideal in the way of conveying complex ideas, to say the least.
enlightening, nonetheless.


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08 Nov 2017, 3:56 pm

I've Been Keeping up with the work of Jordan Peterson and I do enjoy his
interpretations of the Poetic Mythological Stories of the Bible and how that relates
to Jungian Archetypes but it's true as even Science shows now in more material
reductionist view; still, we come to create our life more in abstract
constructs that relate to our emotional and sensory feeling
experiences of life in however those symbols
come from others or symbols we
create to best illustrate and share
and give a potential consensual reality
with others now. Thing is though with Peterson
as it goes with many folks who lean toward more extreme
ways of seeing the World in Words rather than Visualizing Abstract
Symbols and Creating Visual Symbol Constructs to better Navigate a Multi-Universe way of Seeing
their own Personal reality too; the reality of Math and Statistics and other potential intelligences
Suffers at the expense of Living too much within the parameters of more one way Word thinking
Measures of Life. For me, not speaking until Age 4, I was much more a Visual Thinker than a Word
Thinker with an inner voice most of my life. The only Reason I really started this Word Business
and Do Write a 5 Million Plus Word Long Form Poem now in close to 51 Months continuing
with this too is effective loss of sight and hearing for 66 Months; withstanding
Type Two Trigeminal Neuralgia, 33 Months, into that real Hell on Earth with that
Science assessed worst Pain understood in associated Literature to write that
First Word on this Website like a Mountain of Pain back on November 25th
Thanks Giving Day, 2010, in my time zone; such a challenge one word three
inches close to a dimly lit screen that was then, for Prescription
Lenses only exacerbated Dentist Drill like Pain in my right and ear
then without even the Feelings of Complex Emotions including the Feelings
associated with Empathy Beyond the Cognitive Empathy I earned working with tens
of thousands of People in 33 years of Paid Work Mostly with the General and Military
Public then. Anyway, as I digress some here; the reason mostly we have Jordan Peterson at
Hand sharing his Philosophy of Religion and Psychological Science too, Free online is he couldn't Understand
why he had to bend to the rules at hand at the University he worked at that said he had to call outlier Transgender
Folks by the Pronouns that made them comfortable as a rule then extended that potential rather rare circumstance
that he would have to do that when following the rules to some kind of Liberal Newer Age Marxist take over of the
Free World now. Anyway, he lost his Job over that for that was his inkblot view of life; whereas, most people
would take the general rarity of having to change some words for a very small demographic of the World
He lived in just to please what made their pursuit of Happiness a greater way of life then. It's almost like
he didn't do the math. Math is my thing; my really big thing; Numbers are second Nature to me and
I can see Pieces of Pies of Statistics in my Mind and figure out Income taxes in my Head. I appreciate
Mr. Peterson's work and he is not too proud to admit that he has issues with Depression throughout
his life; but it's true too, there are so many more potential intelligences other than Word Intelligence
in ways of seeing the World and Jung was more of a symbolic visualizing thinker too as
we all can share and give our particular other greater strengths in intelligences now.
One thing I know; well, two things for sure is Specialization in any one
type of Human Intelligence whether that be Word Thinking,
Visual Thinking, Pattern Thinking, Physical Thinking,
Emotional and Sensory Thinking and the list
goes on as far as even greater Human
Potential Intelligences with the addition
of Technology to make new ways of thinking
and Intelligences possible as well as Neuroplastic
Change of Mind and Body too. The best part of all is change
and unlocking Epigenetic Potential according to New Environmental
Challenge and Positive Adaptation more along with seeking and finding new
ways of 'Mental', Physical, Emotional, and Existential Intelligences never explored before;
The worst thing as block to achieving greater human potential is discount any opinion as totally
wrong or not worth a listen to now no matter how different that ink blog test view of life may be different
than ours for it's true the more we diversify our input the more potential we create to synthesize new ideas
of Creativity to add another Verse to the Multi-UniVerse we all see same and different too and Jordan Peterson
is one of those voices I enjoy listening to now and then and I do agree with some of the interpretations of
Biblical Poetry he brings; but it's also true that Human Archetypes are ever changing Poetry
Lines of Meanings now too, depending on the eyes of Multi-Universe Human eyes that
and who are Looking now; it's part of Evolving
Change and it's
sad when
some
folks
simply do not want
to pursue more fully their
Epigenetic Potential and Neuroplastic
Potential Change more in just one lifetime now
but hehe; who has the time and or focus now where Science
Suggests the Average Human has the Attention Span of less than a Gold
Fish about the Breath of an Old Twitter max of before in 140 Characters or less;
Thing is don't multi-task and don't specialize either too much in either way as always
a Balance
a Sweet
Spot and how
that works out depends
on the make of the model and general life experience mileage too.
We live in interesting times for those not afraid to branch out and pay attention too;
No way i could do that now without a Physical Daily Practice of Free Style Martial Arts
and Ballet-like Dance too for regulating my Emotions and Integrating my senses for greater
Cognitive Executive Functioning in short-term working memory and even greater laser focus now too.
Once again, sadly, it is the issue of one type of intelligence verses another kind that is potential most important
in existential intelligences too; One View of Culture with Standard IQ Tests that measure mostly crystalized intelligence
accumulated in Data Down Load School Mind and the other Fluid Intelligences that if exercised continue to grow over
the Life Span now; no doubt in part why physical Measures of Einstein's Brain after Death showed a Brain still
Young In Healthy Tissue way. Exercising all pArts of our potential intelligences both figuratively
and literally bring greater Blood Flow of living in all Quadrillion or so Connections from
Head to toe and when it all feels good in positive flow in zone the essence
of Real Heaven comes alive now real within; but it's true it can never be
filled up
all the way
in words in a textbook
or lecture now for the experience
of Heaven within; Bliss and Nirvana;
Satori and stuff Like Kundalini Rising
as Essence is real as so many potential Housings
of Metaphors and Symbols both words and visual vehicles and vessels
to express this potential consensual reality more; branch out and see
wake up
always
more in
Mindful and
Body FuLL Awareness now
to make this now an eternal one now
with nothing more to gain but eternal more now.

Anyway; the Journey Grows Paths never ending when real.

SMiLes and Have a Nice Day; it doesn't hurt when real within
Making this Heaven real alWays now that's a practice that now
must never end when real too now for lost, seek, and found TRuE iN Positive LiGHTForce Real..:)


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