Scientific Truth VS Religious Truth - Dr Jordan Peterson on

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Beg to disagree...
The rape example misrepresents the true context to which Peterson was referring...
It was misrepresenting a premise of his argument...

In other words:
You do have a point...
But it is irrelevant to this particular discussion as is defined by the implied original context...
It may even be considered a "red herring", not that I am suggesting it was your intent...





<chuckle>
I anticipated this response, hence my inclusion of: *Simplistically*, on the surface:...

My context was a broader and more generalised one incorporating a bell curve criteria...
My focus was on the probability of most Mary uses not being a menace to society, but with the realisation that there are always exceptions to the rules...
We do not live in a perfect world the last time I looked...

Now consider someone with a religious stance/philosophy:
This could cause emotional grief to a parent who raised their child to be a pillar of society atheist...

My point?
There is virtually always someone who has a problem with someone else's actions/philosophy...

It has been argued by Peterson that the negative consequences of *not* legalising Mary are far greater...
I firmly agree with him at this stage...

While I haven't had any dalliances with Mary, my understanding is that people who indulge, *overwhelmingly* aren't violent...
It was once said to me by a user this way:
"When I am on marijuana, I may want to strangle someone... but I'll do it tomorrow..."
True story...

My point?
It is my understanding that Mary induces a state of lethargy/mild-blissfulness, not aggression which is typical with alcohol consumption or meth abuse...


Also consider:
Most people are aware that alcohol abuse is much more damaging to society and the individual than something like marijuana:


Yes, ideally people wouldn't use drugs, smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol (I do none of the three, by the way... )...
And yes all these substances do put enormous stress on the tax payer, etc...
But what can you to with this recalcitrant human species if it wants to self destruct and take other down with it?

You can't simply wish away destructive human psychology which evolved over 6 million years(?)...
I think pragmatism and objective rationality is a more realistic approach, so I fully agree with Peterson...

When I hear people talking about 'taking illicit drugs' it usually indicates that they're still running 5th grade DARE software and aren't familiar with any other applications of psychoactive substances aside from 'getting faced'. Up through high school I did have that outlook on drugs, I did have that DARE education, I have parents who strongly encouraged it, and it was in my late teens and early 20's, mostly in my early college years, where I did try most of the mid-level substances and came away with a very different take on what they are, what their value is, and how to use them. I still think for example that psychedelics are absolutely brilliant for processing your way through life jams or problems that are too abstract for you to just reason through discursively unaided (or at least they can take you to processing resolution decades sooner than you'd get there otherwise).

What's interesting to me is that the DEA is actually now attempting to ramp up medical marijuana in hopes that it can displace some of the opioid painkillers. The only challenge to really understanding marijuana at a rapid rate is the consideration of just how many active compounds are in it - we know some of the primary active chemicals and modifiers but there's probably still a lot to learn. What we do see is that if there are people who experience considerable negative effects they're perhaps in a longer distribution tail than what you find with alcohol. The concerns for legalization that I think are still quite valid are packaging, making it clear that an edible has hash compounds in it, and making sure you can keep it out of the hands of children. The predominant area of medical concern about marijuana use, from what I've been able to glean, is use under 25 and effects that can have on frontal lobe development. In time we may very well be able to grow different strains that have less of that particular effect.

The excessive tax issue is one that I'm sensitive to because I have seen where California has ramped up the charges high enough that the black market is still viable. I also consider that they're California and not a lot needs to be said about how they handle taxes. What will probably happen as each of the fifty states legalizes recreational marijuana is you'll have people practicing a bit of tax tourism to buy and will likely make keeping excessive state taxes high very difficult in the long run.

Science is studying to find real answers to life's questions, while religion is making up fake answers to life's questions.

Why do so many people refuse to believe things that have been scientifically proven to be true, but firmly believe in religious things that have never been proven to be true, like the existence of a god?

Scientists can makes mistakes because they're, like ya know, people, but religious people claim the Bible is never wrong, even though it was written by people as well.

Well ok, I'm prepared to accept that is possible, but you are going to have to explain what he really meant when he said "Once a certain number of people break a law, then it's not reasonable to have the law." If you are about to argue that he only thinks it for crimes he thinks shouldn't be crimes... prepare to think again.



I'm not so confident in this. There are concerning reports of a number of *horrifically* violent crimes that are committed "while high on cannabis", as the bylines tend to read, mostly by long term cannabis users. Pick your favourite recent terrorist attack. The killer is almost always on some form of mind-altering drug, half of the time they are long term cannabis users. Not proof of anything, but surely grounds for further investigation and holding off on legalisation. Maaaybee? As I said before, there are correlations to be found here, but not enough study to conclude or exclude causation. It could be the next tobacco or alcohol, only worse.



Is this not in a way saying "I smoked, found it relieved stress, increased my concentration and I didn't get lung cancer". There may well be interesting effects from all kinds of drugs in the world, I'm not too opposed to controlled experiments in a laboratory setting either for medical purposes or other lines of research. I don't accept it as a call for legalisation though. What you license for yourself, you license for others, who likely cannot handle it in the same controlled manner. What is freedom to experiment for you, often becomes a prison of instant gratification and mental decline for others lower down in society, not just the drug takers themselves but everyone around them.

Here's some quick google work looking for recent accounts of violence and cannabis. This is just a few pages of google news. I'll say it again, this is NOT PROOF or evidence of any causation. Some of them involve other drugs or alcohol. But it is a cause for concern and further investigation.

Billionaire playboy is sentenced to 20 years in prison for horrific drug-fueled murder of American heiress girlfriend who he strangled then mutilated in a luxury hotel suite in South Africa

Man beat partner with hammer and tried to suffocate her by stuffing underwear in mouth. High on cannabis.

Crazed cannabis user, 31, who gouged a seven-month-old boy’s eyes then threw him and his mother out of a window is jailed for life

THE 20-YEAR-OLD man accused of massacring his own family at Rundu appeared in the town's Magistrate's Court on a charge of murder yesterday. Police believe he was mentally challenged and high on cannabis.

Cruel thug BITES off his pet dog's nose while stoned - but avoids jail. This one is awful. Presumably some here believe he would have bitten off his dog's nose anyway, even if he hadn't been taking cannabis?

A TWISTED dad who spent the evening smoking cannabis before murdering his baby girl in a fit of rage has been jailed for a minimum of 18 years.

A man who murdered his girlfriend by stabbing her through the neck as she slept has been jailed for life. Billy White, 23, was drunk and high on cannabis and cocaine when he knifed Lucy Ayris at the home they shared in Pinkwell Lane, Hayes.

I left out most cases of drug-driving, but I might add that it doesn't seem to make users drive more passively.

Woman who mowed down mother and three children while high on cannabis is jailed

Banned driver, 31, high on cannabis who led police on a 115mph chase on a busy motorway in his brand new £55,000 BMW is jailed for 16 months

Speeding Mercedes driver was high on cannabis when he hit and killed student Charlie Heywood

A drug-affected L-plater who ran a red light in a stolen car and crashed into a shuttle bus in Perth, killing his teenage passenger, has been jailed for eight years. Steve Mason Mourish was 19 years old, unlicensed and high on cannabis in April when he led police on a chase, reaching more than 150km/h in a 70km/h zone before crashing into a bus in Kewdale at a speed of 130km/h.

The angel and demon arguing over the soul comes from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Not Freud. Though Freud said the poets got there before him, and he was most influenced by them. Particularly Shakespeare, who'd already illustrated what Freud systematized as psychoanalysis.



Freud and Jung's work has been accurately called art, not science. Unfortunately, they tried to make it science because they were doctors and seemed to feel they'd be taken more seriously if their work was seen as science. One of Jung's followers, James Hillman, said that the Greeks had mythology and no psychology, while we have psychology but no mythology. That's a good way to think of all this.



His archetypes, and his observation that our mind thinks in terms of archetypes, are pretty influential. Just look at how misapplied the word "archetype" is. What Jung observed isn't really very different from operant conditioning. Aren't the archetypes (mom, dad, etc.) just based on powerful associations we form at a young age? Jung described them in artistic terms, as opposed to the language Pavlov or Skinner would use.



Don't take Freud's theories literally. That was the mistake he too made. People attack him, but his metaphors are powerful and have greatly influenced over a century of life. It's his fault for trying to present his work as science, but people who dismiss him on literal terms are as misguided as the atheists who think all Christian's take the Bible literally. That critical stance just misses the point and the critic mistakes their perception for the other person's intention. Besides, science is really another word for reality, just like God is.

Why do you have a problem with that? And why is that wrong? Your mind is what is called the soul or spirit. You have a mind, hence a "core spirituality."

Did Jung say that? In his memoir he talks about he we don't know if there is an afterlife or ghosts, but he felt it was important to investigate because those ideas are so common among people and cultures.



Peterson is nowhere near the thinker that Freud, Jung, or Marx were. No one will remember Peterson in 10 years, let alone 100.

Delusional new-ager? All Jung really tried to do was bring meaning back to people's lives, because he felt things like communism and the worship of science had decreased the quality of living for people by taking meaning out of their lives (read his paper The Undiscovered Self). It's like this Oscar Wilde quote: "A conservative is someone who understands the cost of everything, and the value of nothing." Yes, scientific truth has value, but being able to measure things doesn't mean you understand them. And what is scientific truth really worth? Life has no objective meaning. Nothing that exists has objective value. We give those things value, and Jung explored why that's necessary and how we can do that. He accepted that our experience is subjective and that this is the road to meaning. Those who fight the subjective experience aren't pro-science, they're anti-reality.

I don't think he literally said that. I just summed up my impression from his autobiography (which may be the same as his memoir....). He seemed to refuse to dismiss any random thought as random, and any random synchronous event as just that - hence his idea of "synchronicity" as equal to causality.

When I read about Jung's trip to some Arabian country, where he saw men holding hands and armas around each others shoulder and concluded "clearly, homosexuals", I broke out in laughter. After all, he was just a man with a 19th century attitude and temporal lobe epileptic character.



Temporal lobe epilepsy. Jung was obsessed with spiritual life, past lives, some concept of a ralger thing that every man fits into. For Jung, this was objective! Also: communism took meaning out of people's live? I didn't read that paper yet, but ... usually, it's capitalism that's accused for putting a price tag on everything, while communism is a sort of "pernicious worldy replacement" for religion...

At a minimum you'd need to decriminalize use - otherwise you still have a big mess, one the police increasingly don't want to get stuck enforcing and one where the dustpan picks up the 'dirt' and puts it behind barbed wire. With any substance we keep illegal we'd need to do whatever possible to minimize incarceration surrounding it, especially when it's a price paid in the interest of equal rights for all.

I've had the thought occur to me in the past, and it may still be quite valid, that strong substances that have upside such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or various DMT preparations, should be legalized on a similar model to how CCW's are licensed - ie. a set amount of mandatory courses, testing, signed waivers, and acknowledgment by the license-holder that they alone will be using it and that if they are found to sell it or even have other people sneaking it from them that they have heightened legal ramifications as a license holder if they're found to be distributing it. Its that big of a deal in my opinion, ie. what people lose out on who can and would gain significantly from these substances, that we should at least exploit some type of licensing and responsibility model that we already have precedence for. If at some point in the future marijuana was also seen as similarly dipole in its benefits/hazards similar efforts might need to be taken up there as well.

The First Amendment guarantees separation of Church and State, not Science and State.

To bad the Religious Reich ignores (and wishes to abolish) both the First Amendment and Science.

The only pass I have to give Marx is that he had no idea what his philosophy would look like in practice.

The thing I found most interesting about Gulag Archipelago wasn't even necessarily the gulags, the nazi-style tortures and mental games, but something that got emphasized a lot more in Solzhenitsyn's writing which was a dark comedy of absolute ineptitude and stupidity. The one thing the soviet system had going for it was a monumental prison-industrial complex. If you weren't in prison you were in a situation similar to Salem during the witch trials where base human kleptomania reigned supreme, where we tend to mock or persecute our first-principles thinkers here they were guaranteed gulag over there. The government and government papers ran on conspiracy theories that might make Alex Jones blush and it was to cover for all the ways their flawless and impeccable technocratic logic was running aground against all kinds of unanticipated natural roadblocks - you had to postulate people deliberately wrecking things and they took that not just to the work microagression level but to the level of someone doing something right rather than doing it on the cheap or really just punishing someone who did it on the cheap if it fell apart but punish the competent profession for certain if they actually order what's needed to get a job done right.

So it was pretty much a land of no accountability, a banana republic, and integrity was by all intents and purposes illegal which meant that the schizoid bipolar cousin most people have who always thinks people are talking about them or scheming, or the cousin who inflicts some variant of Munchhausen's on her sons and daughters and wrecks their future, these were the types of people who were running the show and shaping the country.

I know no one is pro-communist here so I didn't say all of that with any notion in mind that you were defending it, but I think some of these angles are the ones very few people tend to put forward when they think out loud about it.

I did watch the GQ interview a few days ago and I thought he brought up some good points:

I am open minded...
Please give me an example of what you are saying/implying/suggesting...



I was under the impression that a link had been established between cannabis usage and lethargy. Please re-read the link I previously supplied...
And it was specifically stated that long term use could cause an erosion of motivation, generally speaking...

However, while there seems to be a link between cannabis use and schizophrenia, I do have to wonder if the incidences of psychosis-induced crimes are statistically significant relevant...
If you can supply a link it might be helpful...

Could you provide evidence of your assertion that 50% of terrorists "are long term cannabis users"...
Or is this simply your guesstimation?

Cannabis use is well established in many westernised countries...
I believe the consequences are pretty well known already...
Are you referring to tax considerations, etc, or social changes, due to legalisation?

BTW, you seem to be ignoring Peterson's argument about the drug trade industries destroying social cohesion, etc...

And once again, isn't it an established fact that alcohol, heroine, meth, etc is much more detrimental to social cohesion than cannabis?

There are no perfect solutions...
It is a matter of weighing the pros and cons and finding a workable pragmatic solution, surely...
Peterson does this beautifully, imo...

P.S.
Just found this which might support your position...
You might like to follower through with this:

Last edited by Pepe on 03 Nov 2018, 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Now you are cooking...

yeah.... have you seen "the lives of others"? it's a stupid film - set in communist germany, some guy wants the woman of another, and uses his powers in the corrupt system to get rid of that other guy, so he can get to the woman. it's supposed to illustrate how the system was horrible and allowed vile people to do vile things - which is true, but all sorts of systems did that. the point of really existing communism was not that it allowed a lerverted kind of freedom to some to get what they want - but that thy system was set up in a way that you didn't have to have a wife that is being desired by some vile officer - even if you had nothing, you were not secure of absurd torture and whatever. there was just no way of an individual to "play it safe" - by not owning too much, being modest, whatever.
you didn't have to make someone jealous, or make a mistake.

.... just wanted to complain about what a stupid film that was.


anyway. But the point here being: from my vaguely leftist, confused standpoint, science and capitalism started to erode social order, and while increasing individual freedom, and allowing people to pick their own meaning in life, the value of meaning was decreased. If "meaning" is what you're ready to kill for, than a liberal society can have none of that, except, maybe, liberal values.
Then Marx observed the changes and tried to make some predictions, figure out the best outcome (the robots do all the work, the robots are collectively owned and the products of their labour are being distributed equally... sound familiar?) and move towards that.
The fascists tried the opposite: rather than react to the social changes by trying to accelerate the way it was going to go anyway (according to Marx), they tried a conservative approach - how to make tight, happy societies that withstand the forces of modernity/capital by having a sturdy, traditiknal value system and an official enemy of those values.
Both approaches failed miserably for a handfulof reasons, and it's good they did - but that didn't stop the unravelling of social structures under capitalism. The neoliberal global order was a good idea to create yomething llike a global framework of rights and ways to trade with each other - but is also giving way more rights to capital thatn it is giving to humans, undermines democracy (Hayek wrote some scathing things about electoral democracy - and preferred the kind of democracy where you vote by chosing one commodity over another. he still called it democracy, but in his view, it was explicitely possible to have a dictatorial democracy (a dictator running the state, and freedom of choice in the store... like Lee Kuan Yew or Xi Jinping)) - and eventually has no mechanisms to factor in external costs, i.e. environmental costs.

what I'm trying to say is: Marx thought capitalism is creating the people who want socialism. Hayek thought that all democracy eventually leads to socialism. Aristotle thought that democracy leads to socialism. So why is someone like JP talking about resentful neo-marxists?
Maybe because he's a psychologist, and therefore prone to see everything through a framework of individual motivations and healthy or unhealthy personality traits?
Is that a good lense to view history and mass movements through?