Peterson And Free Will

 

I am copying and lightly editing notes I took on a 5-minute (5.05 minutes) video on youtube.com from seven years ago. It was a college lecture by Jordan Peterson and the clip is entitled Determinism vs. Free Will.

 

Here is the introductory statement: “Dr. Jordan Peterson is a Professor of Psychology, a clinical psychologist, a public speaker and a creators of Self Authoring. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?”

 

Jordan (J after this): “Well then, Geppetto shows up and he’s a kindly old guy. And that is pretty much exactly what you would expect. You know he’s a careful craftsman and he likes kittens, and that’s always a good thing. And he has some fish, you know, and he and he is good at making things and he’s got a sense of humor and he’s kind of playful.

 

He is the Good Father, fundamentally. He is the Wise King, the Positive Archetype of the masculine. So that is what he is: he is culture in its positive manifestation.”

 

My response: I agree with Jordan that culture, the unnatural/human/artificial reality, outside of nature, is the masculine realm. This is where people live, work, operate, live, and die.

 

I believe, if one goes upstream metaphysically from this view of culture, one will discover that God, the Father Sky deity outside of the natural world, which De created, it is not too much of stretch of the imagine that culture represents that rational, masculine, vital forces operating on humans.

 

J: “He gives rise to this creation, which is his puppet, which is what culture does, because you are a puppet, a marionette, of our culture.

 

And so maybe you could be more than that. And that’s the other thing that is strange about this movie.”

 

My response: The movie referred to is Pinocchio, though I am not sure which version and year of this movie which is referred to by Jordan in this clip.

 

J: “It is strange if you think about the mythological way of looking at the world. This is so because scientifically, deterministically, there is nature and there is culture. And you are the deterministic product of the interaction between nature and culture. There is nothing else to you than that.”

 

My response: Jordan the Jungian psychologist, who interprets human nature and its drives and inclinations from a comparative study between archetypal mythology and how human act in the world, is insightfully revealing to the viewer, when he posits that two origins of human determinism (nature, represented by the blue fairy gives Pinocchio the gift of life) and Geppetto (the human/divine inventor and creator of the wooden boy): this latter depiction represents the human world of nurturing, an unnatural world wherein humans devise technologies and perhaps new life forms to reify their vision of things into the world.

 

Jordan insists that these seemingly opposing forces, which likely are contraries archetypically represented in this story as nature versus nurture, are on the same side, though they remain competing sources of deterministic power both influencing the wooden boy who lacks free will of his own. Arranged against them is indeterministic free will, their real polar opposite, and perhaps their contradictory pole.

 

Mythologically and archetypically speaking, it seems that the archetypes bubbling up into consciousness in the imagination of the storyteller indicate that these clashing, deterministic forces, natural and unnatural, really are very similar, though not identical, similar in that they regard Pinocchio or any human for that matter as a marionette, but nought of free consciousness.

 

Now below Jordan will introduce a third element, that of human consciousness as a self-determining free will. Now no one knows for sure what a will is, let alone what a free will is. No one definitively can say how free will is knowable, defended or defined. You, for example have an easily, accurately named and defined right-hand thumb. By contrast, one cannot psychologically and biologically identify an organ in the head that is literally the geographic center of one’s free will; nonetheless it exists, and we need to exercise it to lead wholesome, fulfilling, godly and meaningful lives as individuators.

 

I roughly define having a free will is that state of consciousness as a consciousness which each human is and wields as is his right, privilege, and obligatory telos, and that is all that I can come up with to approximately define free will. It is obvious that we have it and can approximately identify it ostensively by pointing to ourselves: we have it and it is us and it is indispensable for us to live and even to live life extending into the future.

 

This existential state or psychological/epistemological faculty embedded in each person is both real and mysterious, and perhaps we will never be able to explain or deny that free will exists (it does) or that each of us fields a free will (we do). That reality is dualistic is my presupposition: that subjects/minds/souls exist as well as do objects, events, and relationships out there in the world. I believe and accept these preconditions for as critical to and basic to the flourishing of each human being, and I accept these preconditions on faith and then proceed to build a moral world for people based on them.

 

J: “But the mythological world doesn’t say that. It says something different. It says there is nature and culture and there is you. And the you that is in there had choice and a destiny so you actually affect the interplay of nature and culture in determining your own character.”

 

My response: Jordan has uncovered that mythological, archetypal characters, portrayed in those ancient stories, and emphasizing the heroic individual as building his own life, are recognized by early storytellers as one way that early humans realized that nature and nurture working on them were necessary conditions for being free willing and free but not sufficient conditions: people are also as consciousnesses with free will, acting out their preferences out there in the world, with their choice and destiny growing out of their initial efforts, so they actually, actively affect the interprlay of nature and culture in determining their character and future roles assumed.

 

Now I have been reading some online philosophical articles on free will, and it seems to be accepted in the literature that hard determinists are incompatibilists that deny any free will  in people at all, and that is nonsense (my take, not the philosophers whom I read about) but that non-hardcore incompatibilists, soft determinists or compatibilists, and metaphysical libertarians accept various degrees of free will.

 

I am likely a metaphysical libertarian, and perhaps Jordan is too, but as metaphysical moderates, we also know neither pure free agency strong (metaphysical libertarianism) nor pure robot status for humans (strong determinism) is the human situation, so we seek middle ground, but it would have to be a special type of compatibilism, sort of a compatibilism which is a halfway mark between pure nomological determinism and radical existentialist free will posited per individual by Sartre.

 

If I understand popular compatibilism among philosophers, it is that all our actions are determined but that we can make some free choices if we choose to do what our unconscious orders us to do, or if we stay in line with our wishes or desire, but this is weak-tea, pettifogging version of free will. We are born with a soul and some free will, which a committed individuator can make robust and resolute, though she still remains much bounded and fenced in by deterministic nature and nurture.

 

If we grow up, become rational and think for ourselves and individuate, then our emerging individual consciousness grows with our knowledge, wisdom, understanding and experience so when most of us become living angels, then we will be  o self-determining that our natural deterministic forces, internal or external though shaping and informing our decisions, do not ultimately dictate what we individuated individual choose to do.

 

I am likely naïve and not a professional logician, but the little that I have read in the literature where there is some support for the strong determinist line that if determinism holds in the world, the idea of human free will contradicts determinism as a logical contradiction and as an ontological contradiction, so free will cannot exist, and nor is it true. As a modest dialetheist I maintain that both are compatible in some way, though they contrast and may contradict each other. Free will in humans and any conscious intelligent life form is likely endemic to them, and that such a living paradox is unfortunately problematic, about impossible to define and handle decisively with a sense of finality. This paradox is true and exists.

 

 The extremes in the Pinocchio story are that the contradictions or contraries built in can be made complementary in humans as free willing individuators, the moderate, free, truthful, moral solution to running the universe right so humans have a critical role to fulfill.  Nature versus nurture are not the only functioning forces at work in one’s soul: there we will find the enslaved, determined, and unfree opposites can be used by the agent’s free soul and mind, as this will in the narrow middle between deterministic contraries, is where life civilization advancement and goodness arise as the individual makes wise choices between alternative goals.

 

If God is all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, how can evil exist in the world, how can we be free? If God has foreknowledge of all we will do in 18 years, how can we be free or are we robots predestined, or mechanistically, biologically, logically determined with no independence as if there is only the material world?

 

It seems to me that God and the good deities are kind, loyal, steadfast, trustworthy, and haters of deceivers and betrayer, which they condemn and punish. It is inconceivable to me that any kindly, virtuous truth-loving and promise or covenant-keeping good deity could create human robots and then threaten to or actually send them to hell for being sinful and rebellious when they are born wicked, live in a wicked world ruled by evil deities, and practice the devil’s morality by instinct and universal social and legal reinforcement, and then let these sinners burn in hell when they are not morally responsible for their actions. This take on free will is so monstrously cruel and absurd that my commonsense revolts against such a possibility being so at all.

 

I am going to plead agnosticism because I do not know and likely will never know in this world, but I am willing to cut God some slack on faith that the Mother and Father and Satan and Lera are nearly all-powerful and all-knowing, while Fate is all-knowing and all non-knowing at the same time.

 

I will believe in free will, human souls, human choice, moral responsibility and the need for God, goodness, and morals in the world, that we are called to choose to be free, responsible, moral, and godly. This is the only conclusion I can reach, accepting that we have free will, that our choices are real and matter, and that God is square with us and non-deceiving that we really have free choice, and yet God and Satan have almost pure foreknowledge of the future--Fate certainly does and certainly does not. Perhaps as is said in the theological literature, we live subjectively in time, while God has foreknowledge only of the macro-universe, the Purely Objective or Absolute which are outside of time. Who knows?

 

I know God exists, but I cannot conclusively, finally demonstrate or provide evidence that God exists or does not exist. I know that we have free will, but I cannot prove it nor disprove hard determinism’s denial of free will.

 

J: “And it insists upon that, the oldest stories we have. There is always a hero and the archetype mother and the archetype father.”

 

My response: The hero is the free-willing individual rises to the occasion, and the mother, deterministic archetype is nature, and the father archetype is society and perhaps the supernatural realm.

 

J: “There’s always those three things. There is never just two. So, from the narrative’s perspective, there is always the implication that there is something autonomous that about the hero of the story, and you know you can’t account for that. We do not have a good way of accounting that, from a scientific perspective.

 

I was having a discussion with Sam Harris the other day which was, what would you say—he said we got wrapped around an axle. Sam Harris is one of the four famous atheists, along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett.

 

Yeah, we were having a discussion and um, he is a determinist right down to the bottom. You’re determined, you’re determined. There’s no free will. You’re a deterministic machine.

 

You know, if you are a coherent scientist and Newtonian roughly speaking, you don’t really have much choice other than to think that way but that isn’t how it seems to people.”

 

My response: Now Ayn Rand and the thinkers who follow her are atheists and physicalists, but they are firm believers in free will. I would invite Stephen Hicks or David Kelley or a professor from ARI to debate Sam Harris or Robert Sapolsky—or write dueling white papers on the subject at hand—do humans possess free will?

 

Rand and her followers indicate that atheists and physicalists can believe in the material and biological world without denying creatures like humans, with high intelligence, language, and the powers of conceptual formation, wield free will.

 

I wonder if Rand would herself would not be a metaphysical libertarian, that is strangely compatibilist at the same time, without being self-contradictory, that humans recognize, live under and must live under the natural and social forces controlled by natural law, while retaining the cognitive capacity, ability and power to self-cause, self-direct, and choose to do otherwise no matter preceding, prodding internal desires, unconscious commands or social pressures to the contrary.

 

Rand like me, likely is some sort of compatibilist—yet a proponent of near pure metaphysical libertarianism wielded by the advanced, sophisticated individuators—stating that determinism is alive and well operating softly in the world and upon as emerged, willful humans, and these other-influenced by self-directing individuators (an advanced state of being accessible to any human willing to work towards to goal of individuating or actualizing her potential) and determinism are both true, real and both exist in the natural world and the supernatural world, both apart and blended together in a bewildering mishmash.

 

Today, 3/22/25, I copy and paste the following paragraph from Wikipedia concerning Hitchens’s razor, which I will comment on and tie back to what Peterson said above that it does not seem to billions of people every day in the world that they do not have free will.

 

Here is the Wikipedia quote: “Contents

 

Hitchens's razor

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states:

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence".^[1][2][3][a]

The razor is credited to author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, although its provenance can be traced to the Latin Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.^[4] It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.^[3]: 258 “

 

My response: Now when Peterson points out sociologically that most people feel that they choose freely, and they act as if they are free and morally responsible for their choices and actions, and treat others the same way repeatedly generation after generation in over 200 countries, that seems to me to be an overwhelming mountain of empirical evidence that people believe in free will, practice free will, and treat each other as if each other chooses freely.

It would amaze me if this was a mass delusion of free will, and I challenge the incompatibilist determinist to offer counter-evidence in the world, where how people conduct themselves, that people are robots and not free agents.

And applying Hitchen’s razor, which Jordan seems to be implicitly doing also, I challenge atheists and determinists to prove via worldly evidence that people are sophisticated, thinking robots. I will live as if I can just dismiss their claim, due to the flimsy paucity of their evidence.

 

H: “We don’t treat each other that way. And our entire legal system is predicated on the idea that you do in fact have free will. So, well, can we account for it? Well, no. But then I would also say we do not have a scientific model for consciousness. We don’t know a damned thing about consciousness which is why Dan Dennett’s book, which is called Consciousness Explained, which was referred to by its critics Consciousness Explained Away, which is exactly right as far as I am concerned because he took a mechanistic approach.

And I don’t think you get to do that because there is something really weird about consciousness. I mean the phenomenologists like Heidegger tried to radically transform Western society from the bottom up, basically said you can treat the world as if consciousness is primary and human experience is reality. That is reality and it doesn’t exist independently of consciousness in any explicable way.”

My response: It seems that existentialist gives pride of place to the Subject (subjective individual)/personal consciousness/existence over the Object (things out there as they are)/the world out there/essence.

I have always considered that Jordan was an existentialist, and, if he agrees with Heidegger above, and he seem to, then he is an existentialist: The world out there, ruled by natural law is reality, but, the story is not complete unless one agrees with Heidegger that creatures like humans of advanced consciousness, wielding free agency, are empowered and may well be necessitated by God to work upon the world out there, so reality is the complex interaction of free agent and mechanistic natural world, and no dualist as I am can deny that that seems to be how the world works, though I would describe the interaction differently from Heidegger and Jordan, but that is too much of a digression to offer here.

 

J: “Like, what is out there if there is nothing to experience it? Well, everything at once, something like that. It is not really comprehensible without a subject, a subject to define it and make it real.

 

You don’t have to believe that but at least I am telling you there are fully coherent philosophical positions that make that case, very strongly, and allow consciousness to exist as a phenomena.

 

They take it seriously, and you certainly act like you take it seriously. You act like you are the you, and you make choices. You certainly treat other people that way. Deterministic or not, you are still going to get angry when others are rude to you, and you are going to act as if they have some choices and some say in the manner.

 

Well, maybe that is an illusion. Possibly, but maybe it’s not. And I would say the oldest stories  that we have always include that not only as a fundamental element, but as the fundamental element.”

 

My response: I agree that individual belief in free will is universally experienced consciously and accepted by each human, as a personal, psychic reality of self-apperception, so that subjective self-recognition is backed up by universal belief and acceptance of personal agency, and moral, social and legal, and religious codes are built upon a universal belief in free agency, personal accountability, personal moral responsibility with merited punish for lawbreakers, evildoers and transgressors.