Jordan Peterson sat down with Stephen Hicks in November, 2024 to
discuss epistemological outlooks and current takes on it, and I am an
open Objectivist like Hicks is so I want to note their current
epistemological thinking and then comment on their statements and
exchanges.
Below is the entire typed transcript of that interview, and I will
periodically comment on it where necessary or appropriate. It is
lightly edited for clarity and coherency. Here it is: “
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with
philosopher, professor, and lecturer Dr. Stephen Hicks. They discuss
their collaboration through the Peterson Academy, the case for
philosophy on the practical level, the evolution of human thought
across intellectual movements and waves, the notion that we see
reality through a story, and the danger of getting the story wrong.
Stephen Hicks’ writings have been translated into twenty languages,
including Portuguese, Spanish, German, Korean, Persian,
Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian,
Cantonese, French, Hebrew, Estonian, Urdu, Turkish, and Arabic. He
has published in academic journals such as “Business Ethics
Quarterly,” “Teaching Philosophy,” and “Review of
Metaphysics,” as well as other publications such as “The Wall
Street Journal” and “Cato Unbound.” In 2010, he won his
university’s Excellence in Teaching Award. He was Professor of
Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois; has been Visiting
Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington,
D.C.; Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University, Poland; Visiting
Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green,
Ohio; Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College at Oxford
University in England; Senior Fellow at The Objectivist Center in New
York; and Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great,
Poland. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the
University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. “
Jordan (J after this): “Today I had the
privilege of sitting down with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who’s a
philosopher um with such a stellar academic career, uh very good
author. And we talked about, well we talked about his contributions
to Peterson Academy first.
He taught five courses at this new online
university that some of you may be aware of, and the rest of you
should be as far as I’m concerned. He’s taught five courses
there, and we detailed out the structure of the courses. And more
importantly and more broadly I would say, describe the rationale for
studying philosophy, because he’s a professor, a professional as an
academic. So we discussed well the importance of a philosophical
education.
We discussed the nature of the philosophical
endeavor over the last 300 or 400 years as it shifted from modernism
to postmodernism, to whatever is dawning in this new age, that is
emerging.
And that constituted the bulk of our
conversation. And so if you’re interested in that and you should
be, and if you’re not, you should ask yourself why, then join us.
If the answer is no, it’s because you’re unconsciously under the
sway of some skeptical philosophy, and maybe you just shouldn’t be,
so join us anyways for that discussions.
So, Dr. Hicks, it is good to see you again.”
Stephen (S after this): “It’s a pleasure.”
J: “Yeah, thank you for coming in to
Scottsdale today, yeah much appreciated. So I thought we would start
by talking practically a bit about you’ve lectured. You’ve done
two lectures for Peterson Academy.”
S: “I’ve done five and two are out.”
J: “Okay, two are out. You’ve done five.
Excellent. Okay, so run through that a bit. Tell people what you’re
teaching and what the experience was like. And what you understand
the missions of this new enterprise, why you got involved, all that
if you would.”
S: “Right, well, I’m a philosopher by
training. So uh my, my intellectual interest in is in what the next
generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like. We got
technological revolutions that we are engaged in and education has
been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries, So in
one sense we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with
the new technologies, and obviously Peterson Academy is highly
entrepreneurial.
So, I’ve done many years of in-class
teaching, many years of lecturing. I had at my university a center
for ethics and entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting
with new technologies as things come on asking for what can be done
uh because in many cases people can learn very well without the
presence of a professor physically or and so forth.
So what I am interested in though primarily is
the courses I have taught over the course of many years, having them
in a vehicle that obviously going to be accessible to many people but
also in with better production value. And in a way that that can’t
in some cases be done even in a good in-person classroom.
In philosophy everything is controversial. (I
agree Ed Says,
And these
are opportunities, not obstacles to human advancement and knowledge
growth.) A big part of education in life is philosophical education.
(Ed Says
young people need to individuate, requiring each to have an
equivalency of a bachelor of arts education in philosophy, plus a
penchant to reason fearlessly and originally.)
How many beliefs do I have in my mind? How did
they get into my mind in the first place? Where did they come from?
What’s good for you? What do you like? What are your values? What
do you want your life to be?”
My response: Stephen has wonderful, abstract,
philosophical questions, questions without definitive, final answers,
but these fecund questions are to be raised by each young maverizer
if she is to know herself and grow intellectually.
S: “Philosophy has a reputation for just
being abstract. Philosophers love their abstractions, their general
principles. What we want is to be much more careful but what happens
in politics, economics, business, family and religion is because of
philosophical ideas.”
My response: Since philosophy is upstream of
everything, it would be wise and desirable for the young to become
amateur philosophers, an upper middle class citizenry of anarchist
individuating supercitizens as wise and understanding as Socrates
himself.
S: “John Locke, Frances Bacon, Rene
Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche—they were the great
geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world. We’re
philosophers for goodness sakes. What is philosophy all about? It’s
about a quest or coming to know reality.
Now my areas of expertise have been modern
philosophy and postmodern philosophy. When philosophers and
historians, we talk about the modern era, essentially we mean the
last 500 years, which has been you know extraordinarily revolutionary
not only in philosophy, but in how we do religion, how we do science,
how we treat women, getting rid of slavery, industrial.
All of that stuff. It’s been amazing, and
philosophy has its fingers in all of these pies, and is part of it,
so partly what I’m interested in is the giant names in philosophy,
right? And they are all giants for a reason.
They are all over the map intellectually from
Descartes to Kant to Hegel, Nietzsche, on into the 20th
century. And what role they have played in making the modern world
and then the postmodern world happened. And in some cases of course
resisting what is going on in modernity and in postmodernity.
So the first two courses that the un Academy
invited me to teach were on modern philosophy and essentially that
picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants,
Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke laying a new foundation
overturning medieval philosophy, again much sophistication. There had
been find of a dominant framework for a millennium and in a very
quick time things transformed themselves into the 1500s, 1600s, all
of these intellectual, cultural transformations that we study when we
do the history. And that course ends with the death of Nietzsche in
1900. So essentially 1500 to 1900: eight lectures but also
integrating the philosophers with what’s going on historically
because in some cases the philosophers are ones who make the
historical revolution happens as their, their, their theoretical
ideas are applied.
In other cases the philosophers are responding
to what’s going on in the culture, what’s going on historically,
trying to make sense of it, and either urge it on or retard it.
Now the second course picks up in 1900 and is
called postmodern philosophy and uh the main point of that course is
to say postmodern thinkers start to react against in a very
sophisticated way to much of what had happened intellectually in the
modern era.
And in some cases they were radicalizing it.
And in some cases working to overturn entirely what had occurred
culturally and intellectually in the modern era. And we started to
see in philosophy a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind
of a death of philosophy in the sense that philosophy has for
millennia tried to answer of of these important questions about the
meaning of life in a, in a culminating fashion. But from their more
skeptical perspective by the time we get into the 20th
century their verdict is that philosophy has become impotent, and
self-realizes that it can’t in fact answer any of these questions
so it should in effect, disintegrate.”
My response: Yes, the arising of postmodernism
led to the decline of speculative philosophizing.
S: “So I am concerned to lay out the
pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of
this. Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell who had a
strongly skeptical phase. John Dewey and some of the other
pragmatists—to some extent Martin Heidegger and various
others—culminating then in Michel Foucalt, and Jacques Derrida, who
take it, but, also, at the same time, since I don’t agree with any
of them, but I do give them a fair shot, and we’re trying to get
inside their framework, and see where they are coming from, and why
these arguments are so powerful, and that we have to take seriously.
Nonetheless, there have been many as I think of
them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions, some sometimes
the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions still have
some bite, and, and
be repackaged for this postmodern era who then or into.”
J: “I’ve probably fallen into that camp as
of late.”
S: “Well, I think to some extent yes, yes so
you would be an example of that. Others who think the Enlightenment
project has been a great success, even though it had some
philosophical errors.”
My response: The Enlightenment over all was
successful, so keep it, correct its errors.
S: “Those can be tweaked as an ongoing
scientific project. And so uh I’m interested in also thinkers like
Karl Popper, Ayn Rand and Philippa Foot who are not so skeptical in
fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.”
J: “Right, right, right.”
S: “And the idea at the end of that course is
that we have a sense of what the philosophical uh and philosophically
informed intellectual landscape looks at in our own time bringing it
right up to current time and characterizing it as in effect a
three-way debate between moderns, the pre-moderns and the
postmoderns.
And in one sense uh we’ve never lived in
better times philosophically because we have self-conscious,
articulate and very able representatives of all of those traditions
uh operating in our generation. So I bring all of them in an
8-lecture series to uh hopefully large international audiences. So
that’s, that’s been my intellectual mission there.”
J: “Okay, so I’d like to make a case for
everyone that’s watching and listening for the philosophical
enterprise at a practical level mean regardless in, in a way
regardless whether philosophy can address the larger questions of
life. And I think you have to be in some ways absurdly skeptical to
assume axiomatically that the answer is no. (Ed Says We
need philosophy, to study it, update it and live by it.)
It’s necessary in my estimation, very
necessary, regardless of who you are to understand the nuances of the
thinkers you describe because unbeknownst to you the thoughts you
think are yours are actually theirs. And so it’s people might
wonder you know what practical use it is to study history. And one
answer is to that is if you understand history maybe you won’t be
doomed to repeat the same catastrophic elements of it. But regards to
philosophy, if you don’t understand the thought of great
philosophers you have no idea why you that you think the way that you
do, why you think the way or do or what the consequences of that
might be.”
My response: Jordan is spot on, many
philosophers from the past shaped how we and you think today, so one
cannot learn to much about them and their philosophy.
J: “What is the idea that we’re all
unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher, or combination of
dead philosophers. And so we although we don’t understand it we
live within not only the conceptual universe these people have
established, but the perceptual universe that they’ve established.
Right, that they have actually shaped the way that we see the world
at a very profound level. And so if you don’t understand that you
are a puppet of forces beyond your comprehension and that unless you
want to be a puppet of forces beyond your comprehension, that’s not
a very good plan. So does that seem like a reasonable.”
S: “No, I think that’s exactly on track. I
think a lot of people in our era are more active-minded that people
were in previous eras.”
My response: I disagree that people are more
active-minded today, though they are better situated than people in
previous generations to individuate, be learned, be rational and very
philosophical and active-minded—should
they choose to lead an active-minded live personally.
S: “We have more media, more freedom, more
resources to be able to do so. But even the most active-minded
people, I think, as you as you are pointing out, even if you are to a
large extent independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is
illuminating in many cases to realize there has been a smart person
who thought that out before you in many cases in a more sophisticated
form, and integrated that with other ideas. So sometimes you can find
I think who has gone down the roads that you are going down.
And most do not have time to be active
intellectuals.”
My response: I insist that we have the time if
we choose to, or that we must take the time to become active
intellectuals. It is vital that we do; it is our duty, we all most do
philosophy well, and apply it routinely in our daily lives.
S: “We have our full lives. So anything we
can learn from the philosophers who fought through these issues can
accelerate our process down that road. And of course the other thing
is that to the extent that you don’t think about these things, what
you are saying is exactly right. In many cases we are unconsciously
guided in certain directions.
Sometimes I think an analogy to infrastructure
so that all of the roads you know and traffic lights, and lighting
systems, and so forth. And we grew up with them and you know we’re
like the fish in the water, We just take it for granted that we’re
surrounded by these things and we have automated operating inside the
certain, certain kind of infrastructure system.
But at the same time it is illuminating to step
back and think somebody thought through every aspect of that
infrastructure system. And in many cases I am being directed perhaps
in ways that are not healthy, and how can we make that infrastructure
better? That going to make people (Ed Says, Make
modernism even better, not replace it with postmodernism.) who are
aware that in many cases they are being guided by that
infrastructure”
J: “So that’s a good thing to focus in, on.
I think too at the moment that this is where we could have a
discussion about postmodernism and modernism, and maybe what comes
next. So let me lay out a couple of propositions for you and tell me
what you think about this as maybe the nexus of what I was hoping to
discuss with you.
So I will give the postmodern devils their due
to begin with, and you can tell me what your opinion is about that.
So, I think we are on the cusp of a philosophical and theological
revolution. (Ed Says, I agree.) And I think it’s in part because
the postmodernists identified the some of the flaws in Enlightenment
thinking. And so the postmodernists—there is a, the, the
fundamental postmodernist insistence, as far as I can concern—is
that we inevitably by necessity see the world through a story.”
(Ed Says, Yes we do see the world through a
story or narrative especially a metanarrative or metanarratives which
allow people to build a picture, an account of how the world works,
that provides people with meaning, critically essentially to their
being able to esteem themselves, establish a moral code, and then
work to meet their selected ethical
standard.)
J: “And so I have been trying to figure out
what that means. And it’s and the large language model of of
emergence which has helped out with that, so imagine that, the, and,
I want you to correct me if I get any of this wrong.
The rationalist presumption is that we do see
the world through a framework. The empiricist presumption is that we
derive our knowledge of the world through a set of inner self-evident
facts that emerge in the domain of perception.
But there’s a problem with both of these
notions, it is that the nature of the rationalist framework is
precisely specified, and it isn’t obvious at all that there’s a
level of self-evident facts. In fact I think the scientific data on
the neuroscience and the engineering side indicate quite clearly that
that’s just not the case. That you can’t separate perception from
motivation.”
My response: I initially agree with Jordan that
the rationalist framework, which brackets our perception of external
stimuli from reality and its objects, cannot be precisely specified,
but that does not make me skeptical, because the
goal of pure, total epistemic certainty
is epistemologically impossible an immoderate goal, demanding
epistemic perfection or certainty, an unrealistic goal, thereby not
to our epistemological goal, too high an impossibly high standard of
precise understanding, or that all perceptions thereby are to be
discarded as worthless and meaningless, neither able to be
conceptualized or linguistically termed.
So if our innate ideas provide us with a
subjective, perspectival framework through which we filter and shape
incoming stimuli, it is by no means obvious or inevitable that we
cannot, as largely, naturally direct realists, that we as individual
perceivers, generally cannot get it right. Our perceptions of what
our senses feed us, generally get it right, corresponding
realistically and accurately to what the external world is feeding
and sending us.
I agree with the Objectivists that our
perceptions of incoming worldly stimuli do provide us with reliable,
validated percepts which can be cognitively, meaningfully,
intelligibly, realistically and verbally translated into concepts
which reflect how the world is as it is objectively. Of course our
biases, values, motivations and perspectives color how we cognitively
conceptualize the sense data which the world sends us, but the
carefully, truth-loving, impartial perceiver seeking to discover what
is and what is true and what is false, most of the time, will get it
right about what is going on out there in the world, or if he
occasionally errs, then he is open to accepting correction from
others or what his subsequent experiencing reality has alerted him to
his previous misconceptions about stimuli which he earlier received
and conceptually processed.
J: “You can’t separate perception from
action because all of your senses are active while they’re
gathering so-called data. There’s no sense data. And so I’ve been
trying to wrestle with what that means exactly because one possible
interpretation of the idea that there’s no base level of sense
data, so this triggers a descent into a nihilistic, or relativistic
morass. And I didn’t think that is a tenable solution, either not
least for motivational and emotional reasons.”
My response: I believe there is epistemological
hope; the good news is that sense data are sensory messages from
external reality delivered to human consciousness, conveying
information from objects and events out there in the world, as
objects are and as events occur in the world, not just some illusory
appearance of some things-in-themselves ever cut off from human
consciousness.
J: “I think there’s a clue to manner in
which this problem may be solved in the fact of the large language
models. What they do essentially is establish a weighting system
between conceptions so in the large language models every word is
associated with every other word at a certain level of probability so
if word A appears, there’s a probability that word B will come
next. And if Phrase A appears there is some probability that Phrase
B will appear and the same with sentences, and the same with
paragraphs. And there’s literally hundreds of billions of these
parameters in those models.
And what they’ve done is map out the weight
of data points. So if you know there are five facts to guide my
perception of my action, I still have to solve the problem of how I
would weight the fact. And you might say well, you don’t have to
weight them, and I would say no that just means you’ve weighted
them equivalently.”
My response: My assumption is that we need to
weight, measure and rank all facts and percepts into a hierarchy if
we are to be able to construct a cognitive narrative of the world and
our place in it.
J: “There’s no, no if you have more than
one at hand and you combine them in some manner, you have to weight
them. There’s no option. And you can weight them all as one but
that is also a decision. And it’s arbitrary so instead even to
weight the facts, and as far as I can tell a story is a description
of the structure we use to weight the facts. And so that doesn’t
mean the facts, that doesn’t mean that our perceptions have no
structure and that everything’s subjective.”
My response: Ayn Rand always, clearly asserted
that consciousness is active, so it’s engaged consciousness in
each active-minded perceiver—and
through the engagement of the nature or identity of that
consciousness--interaction with incoming sense data is cognitive and
rational, relational and participatory, but not creative (I think it
is in part but that that creativity can be objective not not just
whimsical.) or distorting, but sending percepts to the conscious,
rational, volitional mind-state for conceptualizing and abstracting,
and such cognitive processing renders such percepts objectively not
subjectively available to the perceiver/conceptualizer. As ideas and
terms, which delivered as propositions do tell a story, a realistic
story about mind-independent facts, relations, persons and objects.
J: “But it also doesn’t mean that our
perceptions have no structure, and that everything’s subjective.
But it also doesn’t mean that the facts speak too for themselves,
like the empiricists would insist—or else behaviorists for that
matter, that you know that there is a stimulus, an automatic
response, or something of that nature.
So I know that’s a bit of scattershot but,
but I hope you can see what I am aiming at, and I guess I’m
wondering what do you think of the proposition that we see the world
through a story, for example?”
S: “Already we’re into heavy duty
epistemology, right, neuroscience, history, psychology, value sets,
including motivation issues and so on. Okay. (Stephen slaps the
table.) So right, just hold that for a moment.”
My response: When Jordan expresses is
frustration with and dismissal of both rationalist and empiricist
accounts of how humans produce knowledge, or claim to do so, he
offered up this large language model theory as an epistemological
substitute for the other two accounts which are hopelessly flawed and
unscientific. He is an epistemological middle-of-the-roader—as I am
though I fall more on the objectivist side and Jordan lands more on
the subjectivist side with antirealists, relativists and
Perspectivists. Stephen the realist, epistemological optimist—not
dogmatist—and Objectivist
will seek to remind Jordan that thought comes before language, and
objective reality should not be rendered as an epistemic story about
the nature of the world by camping entirely one’s account inside
the linguistic, constructive camp as Jordan is introducing. Stephen
slaps the table to remind Jordan that that
performance is real, the action was
real, that Stephen the actor is real and that the sound made by the
collision between the hand and the table is real, and this is reality
outside of private or communal worlds of linguistic structures,
offered by Jordan empirically to provide a story that explains
reality plus Perspectival inputs shaping the story fabricated and
expressed.
S: “Right, so I’m going to say you’re
right. Traditional empiricism has had problems. Traditional
rationalism has had problems. And that we cannot expect in
post-analysis to sort out all of the elements. And that’s a big
part of what the scientific project goes on. But let me start by
defending the empiricists for a moment.”
My response: Roughly, both thinkers accept that
human consciousness has identity and brings structure to the process
of the mind receiving sense data inputs from the external world. Both
accept that traditional rationalist and empiricists accounts had
flaws, but here they diverge. Jordan is leaning to the subjectivity,
antirealist side of things that human consciousness will interpret
and respond to external stimuli via his large language model through
which the self tells a story of how reality operates and reveals
itself to the perceive, but it is an internalistic account of
reality, almost Kantian and a priori, rationalist or subjective
rendering of how the self filters and shapes what it receives from
the objects in existence outside the perceiver’s mind.
Stephen the realist is reminding Jordan, but
slapping the table, that all of that goes on independent of and prior
to being heard and reacted to by Jordan with all his impressive,
antirealist account of how we acquire knowledge and weave a story of
how the world works’
S: “So what I just did on the table, yeah
whacking”
J: “Was that Johnson who kicked the stone,
okay.”
S: “Right. Uh G.E, Moore, okay, yeah, and but
also yeah earlier when he was talking of that.”
J: “I refute you thus.”
S: “That, that’s right, which is, is it’s
in the right track but still too naive. So just reflect on that
experience. If we start to try to defend the empiricists for a
moment. So I smacked the table. Completely and out of the blue, but
for anyone who is listening, right, or watching, that was sense data.
You had no motivation and set, no story in mind. You had no
behavioral preconditions to set for you.
There was an experience and you were aware of
the experience. Now what you then go and do with that experience is
going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing.”
My response: Stephen the realist and
objectivist insists that sense data stimulus experienced by the
perceiver is from external reality and is prior to the Perspectival
filtering which Jordan the subjectivist and antirealist seeks to
introduce as the perceive being prior to incoming stimulus, and that
his writing the epistemic story, describing the interaction between
conscious perceiver and incoming sense data.
Stephen the realist, like Ayn Rand, holds that
existence is prior to consciousness, and Jordan the Kantian and
idealist, anti-realistically maintains that consciousness is prior to
existence of perceived objects from external reality encountered by
the self.
S: “And all the things you are laying out are
exactly right. So the empiricist commitment I think if it is going to
be properly done, has to be that there are such things like smacking
the table, and various others sorts of things, that ultimately when
we get all the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do
this in laboratories, where we have all isolated, all the variables,
there is a residual, direct constant empirical reality.”
J: “Something that’s outside the
subjective.”
S: “No, but even there language becomes very
important because we don’t want to say it’s subjective—at least
as philosophers use the term because that then is to say it’s not a
relationship to what is there. So, again, we have to get into the
technical epistemology very carefully when philosophers talk about
the subjective. Sometimes, they just mean anything which is happening
right on the subjective side.
But if we’re doing epistemology or knowledge
then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling
a belief or calling knowledge or whatever, it is set by the subject,
and the external reality has nothing to do with it.
The opposite then is some sort of revelatory
model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Instead, just reality smacks that person in the face, and as you put
it, the story doesn’t need to be told. It wears on its face what
the proper interpretation of it is.”
My response: I suggest that an empirical
account of what is realistically being presented to us as perceivers
of incoming sense data from objects in the external world is a story
or narrative, objectively described, woven and told, but a story
nonetheless.
S: “What I think is the proper starting point
for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those so we
have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality.
It’s an intentionally relational phenomenon, and you always have to
talk about reality, and the conscious response to reality.
What very quickly happens in so many
philosophies is people think well, if the subject is involved , then
there’s no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some
sort of representational model, or they start going internal. And
then they start talking about motivations and theory-laden and other
beliefs that you have. And once you make that divide there is no way
to get out of subjectivity, out of the subject and back to reality.
On the other hand if you try to react to that
and say the subject just has, or can have nothing to do with it,
because we, we really think there is such a thing as knowledge. Then
you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject.
Right, to pretend the subject doesn’t exist:
to turn the subject into some sort of super, shiny mirror that just
reflects things on some diaphanous incorporation of exactly what’s
out there happens inside the subject. But that’s also an impossible
model so what I want to say is that the empiricist commitment and
historically the empiricists have struggled to work with this out.
This is the ongoing project.
In the early modern era I think they had very
weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of, part of the
big problem. And I think as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism
centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very
subtle weaknesses in those very early, those very early models. So
what I would say is the first project or empiricists is to argue that
there is a residual, right, base-level contact that can serve as a
basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how
sophisticated it starts.
But that as an epistemological claim has to
work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can’t
do epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of
neuroscience, some sort of understanding of the psychology, the
relation of the mind to the body, and the both of them to each other,
to reality rather.”
My response: Stephen is spot on: all these
scientific fields of specialization and research conducted with
sophisticated theories have or are in danger of making
epistemological pronouncements while severed and divorced from
confirmation and interaction with everyday existence in the real
world, and that pure segregating research and theorizing from living
in the world, largely lessens or discredits these anti-realistic
theories and “evidence”, assumed to be the final answer to all
epistemological puzzles.
S: “And I think the important point here is
to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon. And that’s a
philosophy of mind claim. It’s not”
J: “It’s not just”
S: “Just let’s say it’s (It, Ed Says and
Adds, is Consciousness, left unsaid by Stephen.) not a shiny mirror
that simply reflects reality. It’s not a pre-existing entity that
has its own nature, and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for
itself.”
My response: I do not agree with Stephen here:
Consciousnesses in each human is at birth a free-willing, rational,
psychic entity with its own nature, its own innate ideas, biological
drives, and personality traits: it has the makings of a particular
personality or personal identity, Still, this non-blank slate will be
written on by reality, and that is where much or most of its nature
and identity will be shaped by. Stephen is more right than wrong on
this point but babies are born with an identity and innate ideas
which Objectivists are wrong to deny that they exist in each infant.
S: “It is a response mechanism. And all of
these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more
thing. I think we talk a lot about epistemology and epistemological
concerns have really dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology,
the modern scientific project. And I think that’s fine too.
J: “You should define that for people,
epistemology.”
S: “The theory of knowledge/ (Ed Says,
Stephen defines epistemology for Jordan.) So we try to say, figure
out, so theology’s part is to give an account of something as an
explanation of, in this case, it’s the Greek word episteme, right,
for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of
beliefs kicking around where the difference between imagination and
fantasy and perception and”
J: “Falsehood.”
S: “That’s right. And just having been
conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know
something? And when should I say I don’t really know something, and
I am developing self-consciously what the standards are for good
knowledge. And this involves some reflection on sense perception as
we are starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language
and grammar and logic.
And then when we start talking about stories,
and we say stories do in some sense inform us, and we can really
learn about the world through story, What’s the place of narrative
in a proper epistemological framework, so we been thinking through
those things very systematically.
Now that though is where the language of
empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and
skepticism that says we don’t actually have any knowledge—all
that language is epistemological. But I think we can’t do
epistemology in isolation. We always have to do it in context, with
metaphysics, that is to say, we also have to be talking about the
nature of reality we want.”
J: “That is ontological.”
S: “Yes, that is right. Yeah, what’s what’s
furniture of the universe so to speak. What’s real and what isn’t
real? And then the question is every time I want to say you know this
is true, or this is real there, this is a fact. Right, whatever
that’s to make a claim about, about reality. And then the follow-up
question always is, well, how do you know that? So you’re making a
claim but you’re also making a justificatory claim.
So reality then, broadly speaking, when we try
to say things about what’s true about reality as a whole, then we
are doing metaphysics. You, the special sciences, say we’re
studying physics or chemistry or biology. But if we can step back and
say, are, for example, are space and time objectives of the universe
as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various
dimensions? Does a God exist or
not? Those are all metaphysical, metaphysical questions.
So to come back to, this is just the one more
point that I want to make is that all of the things we talk about.
When we start talking about sense perceptions and forming concepts,
and grammar and logic and stories and statistics—all of that has to
work right from the beginning with some philosophy of mind that is
to say: What is this thing we call the mind? And one of the things
that early modern philosophers –now this is in the 1400s, 1500s on
into the 1600s—was simultaneously struggling with was understanding
the human being. And for example you have what was common for many
centuries, I say, a dualistic understanding of the human being—that
the human being is a body but also a soul. Or a physicality plus a
spiritual element and those are two very different metaphysical
things. One is subject and corruption and the other in principle is
eternal.
And they have you know different agendas,
different ultimate destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, you know
how do these two come together?”
My response: I am something of an dualist who
accepts that mind and body interact, though I cannot prove they
interact, or how they interact—but they do—that is reality.
S: “How do they work together? How do they
fit together? What is the proper understanding of those two.
But that metaphysical understanding of what it
is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology,
right, from the get-go. So if you are say an empiricist and you want
to say well, we start in say the physical world and I have a physical
body with physical senses.
And there’s a causal story about how those
interact with each other but somehow I have to get that across this
metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual. So my mind
which I think of as being on the spirit side of things can confront
it. And then various things that we that we think we are going to do
with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth. And that
metaphysical gulf, if you can’t bridge that gulf metaphysically, it
is going to cause you problems epistemologically.”
My response: This puzzle of how humans as
dualistic creatures, how our bodies and souls interact and influence
each other, is still a mystery, but they do and that is how humans
are made, and that is how the world works and is. If
this puzzle blocks doing successful epistemological investigation—and
it does—well what is is what we must try to study, not our
physicalist preconceptions about the nature of reality.
S: “And so one reason we end up in
postmodernism a few centuries later I think is not only going to be
because the early empiricist theories had problems. The early
rationalist theories had problems. The various attempts to overcome
them, like Kant, led to problems and so forth.
It wasn’t only that there were
epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead
ends. But at the same time we were struggling with the metaphysical
problems. I’m thinking of it, the mind-body problem. And once we
said or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are
non-physical realities or stories are non-physical realities, and
they’re in a mind, and we’re conceiving of that as something
separate from the physical world, as a non-physical world, it’s
very difficult to try to find out how that relates back to that
physical world.
So I would say in your field for example, where
you come out of professional psychology, it’s interesting that
professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s. And so
we say you know this my potted history of your discipline, we have
the early Freudian and the early behaviorists, both coming on board
in 1900. And one of the things they ‘re both trying to do is to
say, well finally we can plan to study the mind scientifically. We
can have a science of the mind, but what they were reaching against
was still in the 1800s, was still the idea that the mind somehow
didn’t fit into nature.
It was an extra-natural thing. It was a ghost
in the machine (Ed Says The
mind is still the ghost in the machine.). And the fitting of the
ghost in the machine, we don’t have a theory that works this out.
And both of them were of course reflecting on Darwin and Darwin’s
more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being, that
we’re going to see mind not as a ghost that’s in the wet wear or
in the biological wear, but is some sort of emergent phenomena (Is
Stephen a property dualist, Ed Says?), or a biped. But it’s only
when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a
machine, to use that metaphor, or a spirit plus a body, two different
things, as much more a naturalist integration then when we start to
think that we can do psychology scientifically now. The Freudians and
the behaviorists—I think they were both disasters in various ways.”
My response: I am a dualist, full stop. The
mind-body, dual human nature cannot be whitewashed away as just some
emergent, intelligent, evolved creature emerging consciousness that
is still only material at bottom, for that is wrong, false and
minimizing what a complex, rich creature humans are, even if science
epistemologically, psychologically and metaphysically still cannot
and likely never will be able to give a scientific account which
capture what humans are and what is their role in the universe.
Notice how Stephen takes a sharp jab at Jordan,
dismissing the contributions of early psychologists, and that seems
inaccurate and a little snide. It is apparent to me that Stephen is
telling Jordan that Stephen will not apologize for his views, or be
dominated by Jordan.
J: “And useful.”
S: “They were geniuses but they you now this
is the early steps of science. But what they are starting to do
though is say we’re not going to study the human being. We are
going to study the human being as part of the natural world. And but
notice this is now into the 1900s and psychology is a very new
science.”
My response We cannot ever discover human
nature unless we reinvigorate study of their dual natures, animals in
the natural world, but individuating angels inextricably linked to
the natural world and the same time.
S: “And this is already 300 years after
modern philosophy has been taken over in a sense by the
epistemologist, and had worked their way into a very skeptical form.
So my hope is if we’re talking about where the future has to, know
psychology has been online for a century now, a little more than a
century now.
Extraordinarily complex stuff as, as we all
know, but we’re making progress there. But I think it is still
early days, and what the psychologists work out, has to be integrated
with newer and better epistemology. (Ed
Says, I like that Stephen the Objective empiricist insists that the
improved 21st
century epistemology must take the best from both the rationalist and
empiricist tradition if new thinkers would get epistemology right
going forward.) It has to be an
epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist traditions,
the best from the rationalist tradition, and so that’s my summary
story of how we ended up where we are, and why I’m not”
J: “Well, I think”
S: “a thorough-going skeptic on any of these
issues. I see it an an ongoing scientific project.”
My response: I agree with Stephen’s optimism,
that truth and knowledge can be discovered and harvested in defiance
to all the epistemological pessimists, the postmodernist, skeptical,
subjectivist, relativistic, anti-realistic nihilists and naysayers. I
like that Stephen is hopeful that we can grow knowledge and truth
about humans and their place in the world with new science, new
reasoning, new epistemology, the best of developing empiricist and
rationalist projects, but it will not be fully revelatory until we
study and worship and love God with the spiritual side of our
consciousness too. Studying only our naturalistic, materialistic
modes of being will not give us a complete picture as to what a
fantastic, potentially remarkable existence can be unfolding if
humans live, learn, study and explore as living, individuating angels
in the service of the Mother and the Father. Still,
any research on the naturalistic side will enlighten.
J: “I think the people that we’ve brought
together on Peterson Academy too are at the forefront of that attempt
to integrate so that’s one our, you might say, one of our
educational themes as we move forward is to continue that
investigation. John Veri I would say is somebody on the forefront
that on the psychological and neuroscience side.
So let’s go back to your demonstration of
primary sensory input in hitting the table. So, I’ll outline a
neuroscience approach to that. So you might think that you perceive
and then you evaluate, and then you think, and then you act. And
that’s like the causal chain but none of that’s exactly correct
because even when you’re responding to a primary stimulus like that
so to speak, there’s a hierarchy of neurological that are operating
more or less simultaneously. Now I say more or less, because you do
have reflexive action, so I think the simplest way to understand this
is to assume what you’re detecting as a consequence of the slap you
delivered to the table is a patterned wave form.”
S: “Okay, so just let me interrupt. Are you
talking about my experience of that or your experience of that?”
J: “Both.”
S: “Because I came in with a pre-intention in
that case and yours was a different pattern.”
J: “Well, let’s go to that. So at one level
of analysis it’s the same stimulus, let’s say insofar as it’s
an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a, with
a phone recorder, or something like that, but, as you said, the fact
that you came to that experience with a different expectation, colors
it.
And so there is a way to think about that. I
think the best way to start to understand it is to think about the
pattern. So there’s a wave form pattern that propagates in the air
which is the delivery system, obviously for the stimulus. And then
there’s an auditory pattern.
Now when your nervous system receives that
pattern, it doesn’t go to one point, place, and then another place,
and then another place, and then another place in a linear
progression. There’s some of that but what happens is that the
pattern is assessed simultaneously by a multiple different levels of
the nervous system.
Right. So the most primary level would be
spinal and there are very few connections between the auditory system
and the spinal response systems and so for example if I was on edge
or uncertain about you, or about this circumstance, and you hit the
table in that manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle
reflex.
And a startle reflex is a variant of a predator
response. It’s, it’s a response to predation, and it’s
basically auditory signal onto spinal cord mapping, and, and the
initial phase of the startle response is you could say it’s
preconscious and it’s pre-emotional. And the reason it is pre is
because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto the spinal
receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to
propagate even to the emotions. And you need that so for example if
you’re walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye
you detect a snake—and you have really good snake detectors in the
periphery, in the bottom part of your vision.
In the top part by the way cuz there are more
snakes on the ground than are in trees. If you take time to move your
eyes, the center of your eyes, so you can see the snake, and then you
evaluate the snake emotionally. By the time you’ve done that the
snake’s already bitten you. It’s too, it’s too long a time,
whereas if you use these peripheral receptors that map right onto
your spine, you can jump before the snake strikes, hopefully. Cat’s
can do it by the way about 10 times as fast.”
S: “If your’e a cat.”
My response: Stephen is skeptical and weary of
Jordan’s highfalutin new examples, and though Jordan can be pompous
and windy, and loves doing the talking, it is dangerous to dismiss
what he proposes, without careful weighing of his proposals.
J: “Well we’re pretty good too as it turns
out. Yeah, but not as fast as cats. But often fast enough to escape
from the snakes. And so you get this, this first level response that
almost entirely reflexive. That’s what the early behaviorists were
discovering too when they were talking about stimulus response. Like
there are like somewhat automatic response systems that are very
primordial and basic that do an almost one-to-one mapping of sensory
pattern on the behavioral output, very few in very neural
interconnections.
And the disadvantage to that is a rather fixed
response pattern, and the advantage is it’s super fast. Okay, so
now the same pattern propagates down on your spine and you can react
very quickly. Another part of it propagates into the auditory cortex
or the visual cortex. And that’s what you see with. And those are
actually dissociable, so there are people who have a phenomenon, a
condition called blindside. So you ask these people if they can see.
They tell you no but they still respond.”
S: “But they still respond.”
J: “Well,
if you hold up your hand, for example, you know when you see
something for the first time it’s got this flow of novelty. And
what happens is that you and that’s complex and difficult to
process. And then as you become accustomed to it and you build an
internal mental model.
You replace the perception with the memory
because that’s faster. The problem is that the memory that you see
is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena that is relevant to
the encountering that you had of it. It shuts everything off and it
takes the magic out of the world. As you replace raw perception with
memory you take the magic out of the world. That is a reasonable way
of thinking about it.
That’s why there is a novelty kick for
example and so the reason I’m bringing this up is because even that
relatively straightforward demonstration that you made, that sound,
that, that seems self-evident. It’s you said right of the bat that
there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite
differently. You experienced it differently because you knew you were
going to do it. It came as a surprise to me.
That surprise was moderated by the fact that I
know you. I know your profession. I know your professional status. I
know the purpose of what we are doing here. Yeah, I know the
probability that what I know about you would do something surprising
or dangerous, which is very, very low. So even though it’s
unexpected, it’s bounded in its significance by al of that
knowledge. And you might say that’s independent of sense data, but
it’s not like that’s a very tricky thing to establish to get that
independence, to figure out what’s the raw sense data and what’s
the interpretation.
It gets worse than this. You can train dogs to
drag their tail when they receive an electric shock. They’re happy
about it and so you think electric shock, that’s pretty basic data.
That it’s like yeah, yes and no if you reliably pair a shock. Now
it depends on the magnitude of the shock. Obviously there are some
boundaries around this, but you can train a dog to be excited the
receiving of an electric shock if you reliably pair it with a food
reward, because the a priori significance of the electric shock might
be pain response indicative of the potential for physiological damage
because that is approximately what pain is.
But if you associate it with the receipt of a
reward, it takes on a dopaminergic cast which means the shock becomes
indicative of the receipt of a reward. And that’s a positive
emotional phenomena, and it can override the shock.
It’s also the case that if you take animals
like rats that are pretty intelligent, and you put them in a cage
they’ll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly because they
are bored. And so horses will do that as well. As, as I said, it’s
magnitude dependent too yeah.”
S: “Humans too..”
My response: I don’t like animals being
shocked, and then varying the level of pain inflicted in a magnitude
dependent manner, not ethical, period.
J: “Yes, well of course. People do that.
People do that par excellence. And so all of these, it’s very
difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn’t an
interpretive framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data
makes itself manifest.
Now I mean your demonstration was very, what
would you say, cut right to the chase, because a sound like that is
you might say not subject to an infinite number of interpretations.
Right, there’s something there. But it’s always nested—it seems
to be that it’s nested inside a hierarchy of interpretations, a
very high level of interpretation.”
S: “Let me say all of that is just great. All
of it is beautiful. All of that is directly relevant to tie back into
what our philosophical, intellectual predicament is. Now we want to
say, right, postmodernism as a skeptical project that has given up on
versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project, that we’re
learning more and more that’s going to give us a better and better
epistemology.
I am a kind of empiricist but what I would say
is everything you have said was in the early days of empiricism, not
known only of the empiricists. So in many cases they had a very crude
understanding of what memory would be, what reflex, what emotions
would be.”
J: “Perception.”
S: “Yeah, perception and so forth. And so
naturally it makes sense that they’re trying to. I insist that we
already are in contact with reality at a basic level, but the very
quickly they are speculating about what is going on in all these
other areas. And their theories are faulty. And it’s the weaknesses
of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well,
empiricism is a failed project rather than an ongoing project.”
My response: Stephen is observing and
complaining that early, crude empiricists like psychologists did not
provide scientifically validated theories, experiments, evidence and
conclusion about research strong enough to impress and convince
skeptical and postmodernist philosophers and scientists by 1950
onward, who erroneously dismissed empiricism as an ongoing project of
worth and productivity, downgrading it to being bu a failed project
to be abandoned for good, with only subjectivity and relativity
within the realm of human consciousness as worthy of epistemological,
psychological or scientific and philosophical investigating.
S: “The other thing I would say, or actually
there are two other things. One thing is you know as you described
the process, you say, out there. There’s the slap, there are sound
waves. We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There
really are structural energy patterns. And we really do have in our
ears, or in our hands, receptors that are in place that respond to
some energy patterns, and don’t respond to other energy patterns.
And in all of that we are making reality
claims. And then we are saying that there, there are causal processes
that go on inside the physical system of the human being. And some of
them you say are operating in parallel. They have a feed back loop
and so forth.
I think I am a minimal empiricist on this to
say that empiricism only insists that there really is a reality.
There, well there is a reality.”
My response: Like Stephen, I too am a
Objectivist realist, there there is a reality that stimulates all of
this psychological and physical response complexities operating as
introduced by Jordan.
J: “A nexus.”
S: “And it has these patterns that we are
making up those patterns and we’re not imposing those patterns on
reality. Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is you know an
area of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they
will respond, but they are not making up those structures in reality.
So my nose, for example,”
J: “Sometimes they’re not making up those
structures in reality.”
S: “Okay but sometimes comes later.” Okay,
we can come to that. So my nose for example has all kinds of chemical
structures out there but it doesn’t have a preexisting theory that
out there in reality there are dead rotting things.”
My response: Jordan is more of an subjectivist
than Stephen is epistemologically.
Jordan barely acknowledges that Stephen’s hand slapping reality is
just raw reality, the collision of hand and table occurring
in the external world, experienced both by Jordan and Stephen as
actual.
Jordan’s complicated examples seem to boil
down to being Kantian categories of the understanding, or mental
structures bracketing and organizing and filtering incoming raw data
to fit within the mind’s preexisting
innate ideas, though I do not know if Jordan accepts the
non-Objectivist ontological claim that consciousness precedes
existence, but Jordan does seem Idealist in his thinking here.
Stephen the realist is just positing that the
two men saw and heard Stephen’s hand slap the table, that the slap
was real, that both men perceived that action almost directly, and
whatever biological or mental structures in their minds which
processed the whole even, did so objectively more than subjectively
as Jordan is hinting.
S: “Right, it’s just if I to encounter
dead, rotting things then certain chemicals will be wafting. Things
will happen in a certain way. That’s an important whether you say
what our noses are, do is kind of important: a structure or an
unstructured used reality. And that takes you down the skeptical
road. Yeah, the road is”
J: “That’s a particularly good example.”
S: “Right, versus saying that the structures
are there and what we have are just latent reception structures, that
if those structures happen to be present, they will be responsive.
And that thing is all the empiricists are saying.
Now the other, other stuff, where we say okay
the background set. You came to it with a different background set.
We start to say what all goes into that background set?”
J: “That’s where philosophy starts to
become”
S: “Well, no that’s well I think that’s
where philosophy is important and we can as philosophers I think
articulate well we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory. And
there is something that physiologically goes on. You know I have a
body and it’s all worked out. And that it’s going to articulate
the main faculties or the main capacities. But I think at a very
general level, and I think the philosophers have to work hand in hand
with the neuroscientists and the psychologists because, and this is
my complaint about early modern philosophy. It’s not a very strong
complaint but they were trying to do philosophy of mind and
epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience,
and 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.
So it’s a lot of failed experiments along the
way, or failed theories along the way. The other thing I would like
to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better
understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically
is that we stop turning values into vices as I think of it.
So to say for example you know what we have
that and then you talk about the base level. You know that the stop
happens, or you there something moves low to the ground, and there’s
a direct, automated something you didn’t think about, didn’t
feel a connection to the spine, and you react in a certain way.
I want to say that’s a good thing that
happens to human beings. That we have evolved certain automated
physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather
than turning that into a vice, right, or a bad thing And seeing that
as, oh well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in
place that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that
we’re not really responding to reality and so forth.”
My response: I believe Stephen is admonishing
Jordan that natural mental structures do exist and the consciousness
of each perceiver has identity, that evolutionarily evolved automatic
responses exist and influence our responses, but, at the end of the
day, we still are conscious beings responding to and counter-acting
and counter-influencing reality and happenings out there in the
world. It is not all solely an
internal, subjective, solipsistic, mental game.
S: “If we regard
our responses to sense data incoming from the world as just a
subjective, distorting encounter, then our perceptions become vices,
not natural virtues which can lead us to knowledge and accumulating
scientific truth.
Or if we say we have emotions—which we do
have emotions—and I think emotions are positive. They serve
certainly an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring
into our overall understanding of life.
And we also know we can sometimes use our
emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of us using them. So
emotions come with pitfalls but rather than as many early
epistemologies had done,
it said, well, we have emotions and emotions are on the subjective
side of things so the”
J: “The enemy of reason.”
S: “That’s right. And so yeah that’s so
they’re irrational so we turn something that is a very valuable
tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.”
J: “You see that a little bit with
evolutionary psychologists who claim that because we evolved for a
substantial period of time on the African plains, that our emotional
systems are no longer adapted to the modern world.”
My response: That may be true for shell-shocked
endurers of modern upheaval, we are often reduced to reacting as
emotional true believers and misfits, quite unable easily and always
nonviolently cope with disturbing, fast-paced modern change.
Again Stephen is warning Jordan not to be so
Idealistic/Subjectivistic lest reason and emotion be converted from
being epistemically virtuous, inverted by the postmodernists into
being epistemically vicious, that the products of our minds can give
us not truth, reality or understanding about anything—all is mere
whim or opinion.
J: “It’s like I find that’s a variant of
the argument you just laid out and it also has the echoes of that
rationalist, some of rationalism, that proclamation that emotion is
the enemy of reason. It’s like emotions are unbelievably
sophisticated. They’re low resolution and they’re quick. They’re
not as quick as say spinal reflexes but they’re faster than
thought, and they also enable us to evaluate.”
My response: I as a moralist encourage people
to think more than they feel when making decisions because if one is
only emotional and irrational, then one is more inclined to sin, do
evil, to make immoral, poor choices.
It is likely that emotions so some degree are
the enemy of reason, so right thinking and right choosing and right
living require that one feel, but that it be guided by a cool,
prudential intellect, logical and of sound judgment.
J: “And they’re also broader than thought,
and they also enable us to evaluate when we don’t have enough
information to think. And they have their pitfalls like everything
human because nothing human is omniscient.”
My response: Yes, human intellect is fallible
and prone to error, but, with modesty, a love of the truth, and a
fearless willingness to adjust ones thinking when proven wrong or
misguided, we can reason well and successfully.
J: “And so we’re going to make errors but
the idea that there’s a fundamental antipathy between the
emotional, the id, and the, in the ego, right, that ‘s because
that’s a variant of that psychoanalytical theory that the nervous
system is integrated, okay.
So let me run something else by you since we’ve
laid out: This I want to lay out, I want to run a proposition by you
though it takes into account the idea that so-called memes
(abstractions) compete across historical and evolutionary times. So
imagine this meme, I mean in the Dawkins sense.”
S: “The Jordan”
J: “So imagine that there is this level of
sensory input that is as close to corresponding with objective
reality as we can manage. And then imagine that’s interpreted
within this hierarchical framework that we described: levels of
abstraction that rise up to ineffability essentially. This would be
something like the meaning of a fact that you hit the table in this
particular context, right. So now imagine you’ve got this,
imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of that
hierarchy compete across evolutionary time.
So one way of grounding our thinking in data is
to assume that all that of what we know emerges from raw sense data.
But there’s another way of thinking about it which is that the data
is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that is full of
feedback loops.
And there’s variant forms of those, those
upper level hierarchies. But those forms compete across time and
only, and the more successfully they compete across time, the more
they become instantiated physiologically. There’s a Baldwin effect
selection mechanism, the higher order interpretive structures that
produce the best reproductive outcome across time, are more likely to
become automated at an instinctual level.
Emotions are like that. Like they are not as
automated as spinal reflexes but they’re not quite automatized
because the set of emotions that humans have are very similar: anger,
fear, surprise, joy, etc.
Everyone feels those. When and where is
different but the fact that this is something like the domain of
iterable and playable games. So imagine that there’s a variety of
different interpretive frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory
data, but that relatively small subset of those interpretive
frameworks has the capacity for sustainable improvement.
So you can think about this, think about this,
in the context of a marital relationship. Right, there are a very
large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong. Like an
infinite number of ways. Like an infinite number of ways your
marriage can go wrong. But then there are a constrained number of
ways that it will go right, and that’s because it’s, it’s a
difficult target.
Imagine that the specifications are something
like for your marriage to be successful, the micro-routines and the
macro-routines have to be such that you’re voluntarily okay with
them, and your wife is voluntarily okay with them, and they bond you
more tightly together across time. And, and this would be the optimal
situation.
As you lay them out together they improve okay,
so you could imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual
relationship of any form. But you could also imagine that the number
of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those
conditions to be met would be low. There’s a, there’s a very
small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across
large spans of time that improve as you play them.
So then you get an evolutionary pressure as
well on the philosophy, on the domains of possible philosophy, right,
that they’d free up something like space. And that seems to me to
be reflective. Its weird because that’s also reflective in an
empirical reality.
But it’s not, it’s not the reality
associated with, with basic sense data. It’s more the fact that
there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary,
playable, and that improved and that’s also a fact, right. I mean
and that would be I think that’s partly why there are patterns of
ethics that tend to emerge in men’s different cultures, even
independently, right.
It’s and that also makes a mockery of a
really radical relativism. It’s like, it’s like not the value
space, the philosophical value space isn’t relativistic because
there’s a finite number of interpretive frameworks that actually
have anything approximating productive staying power. And that is
reflective of something like the structure of reality.
It’s a more sophisticated reflection than the
basic sense data a so I’m, I’m,, I’m saying this because I’m
trying mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world
through a narrative which I think, I think that’s true. All the
neuroscience data points in that direction.
And then you might say any old story goes. That
it’s like no just because we see the world through a story doesn’t
mean that the stories themselves aren’t constrained by a physical
reality in its most sophisticated sense. And it also doesn’t mean
that the stories even though they are stories fail to correspond with
reality.”
S: “That’s extraordinarily rich—everything
that you’re laying out there. Let me uh just start with one thread
to pull. I do not like the language that says we see reality through
a narrative. Uh understand the attraction of ”
My response: This gets tricky to comprehend and
interpret but I believe Stephen is not really against Jordan’s
examples from psychology and neuroscience, but he wants Jordan to use
his common sense to appreciate that the external world exists, and
that we encounter objects as they are or appear to us, and then we
apply all of these complex, mental processes and structural
hierarchies of the mind to incoming stimuli, once the image is
received in the eye and in the mind. We
narrate a story an account of our interactions and experiencing of
reality, after the act of encounter reality itself and its presented
objects.
This makes the perception process more
objective than distorted by consciousness, though the spiritual world
exists, and some of our ideas are innate, thus shaping our take and
conclusion about what sense data the world is hitting us with.
J: “Make it a more technical description.”
S: “No, no, no, no. If we just start with
that formulation, I think that is a dangerous formulation. I do think
the postmoderns are on board with that, but notice what it says. It
says there’s a we, there’s a me, and then there’s a narrative,
and there’s reality out there. And I have to go through this
narrative to get to real life.”
J: “Like a screen.”
S: “That’s right. And it might, it might
be, know it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque, right.
But also what this narrative is, has got a huge amount of stuff built
into it, right, all kinds of background expectations and theories and
such slippery terms, right, and so forth.
What I would say is to use this language, is
that narratives are things we use to see reality if the narrative is
true. So sometimes the narratives get reality right. Sometimes
narratives are wildly off basis.”
My response: Narratives help us make sense of
what the world is telling us, sending us, but if we are
illusion-suffused, our narrative may be quite wide of the mark. A
screen may distort.
J: “Yeah, that’s in keeping with this idea
of a competition across time.”
S: “Okay, that’s for sure but rather than
seeing the narrative as a screen or an obstacle or an intermediary,
it itself is a tool. It’s a state that our psychological conscious
apparatus in, in when we are relating to reality. That’s if we get
it right. Okay but if we mess it up, then it does become something
that we do try to see reality through and we are in a problematic
situation.”
J: “Okay, so let me reformulate the
description. Okay, and then see if that rectifies that problem, and
then let’s see where we can go with that problem. Because I’ll
object to your objection, and see where that goes. So I would say a
narrative is a description of the structure through which we see the
world. Right, that’s a different claim. So, so because it’s not a
narrative until I tell it to”
S: “But then you’ve dropped reality out of
the picture.”
My response: If a narrative is a description of
a structure through which we see the world, then the perceiver never
connects perceptually or conceptually with the world directly, this
is Stephen’s objection.
J: “Well, that’s exactly why I want to have
this discussion. Because I don’t want it, I don’t think it’s
very dangerous. It’s kind of to drop reality out of the situation,
but you’re, you’re right that the danger of the postmodern
formulation is that we see the world through a narrative. Let’s say
it is exactly that, is that the reality drops out of the equation.
There’s nothing but the text let’s say. Like if there’s a
competition between narratives for their functionally reproductive
and otherwise that would go some way to addressing that problem
because there’d be a darwinian competition between narrative
structures that would prioritize some over others.
And so but the description part, that the idea
that it’s a description is relevant. So imagine that wolves in a
pack at a perceptual level, the wolves distinguish the rank order of
the wolf that they’re seeing. They do that extremely rapidly,
highly social animals are unbelievably good at that. And so the story
of the dominance, the story of the hierarchy of the wolves is
implicit in the perception of the wolves.
And if you describe that is a story but it’s
not a story before it is described. It, it seems to me like it’s
something like the weights in the neural network returning to that
idea is that there are certain facts let’s say that present
themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted. And that
weighting has a biological element and a cultural element. Now that’s
not a story. But if you describe that, that, that’s what a story
is.
The story is the scientist who’s studying the
wolves is creating a story. No, I want to say constructing a story,
yes.”
S: “It’s a story about something that’s
not happening mediated through stories in the wolves.”
J: “Yes, right in for the wolves it is a
pattern of behavior, and a pattern of perception. It’s not a so
imagine this is when you go to see a movie you take on the weighting
the value structure of the protagonist. Now human beings are very
good at that. Like we look at each other’s eyes, and we see what
people are attending to. And we watch their patterns of attention,
and we infer their valuation and their motivation. We’re
unbelievably good at that.
And that’s what you’re doing when you are
going to a movie. We, we watch how the protagonist prioritizes his
attention and his action, what his priorities are. And you infer from
that perceptual structure that well, that’s the question.
Does it bring some facts to light and make
others irrelevant, and if so is it a screen-like most of the world we
don’t see. Most of the world is screened out from our perception.”
My response: Stephen is not going to accept
that most of the world is screened out from our perception, that it
is a biomechanical, intermediary screen.
J: “some of that’s bio-mechanical. I can’t
see behind my head. But some of it is I’m looking at you so I can’t
see the faces of the camera men right now, right. So that’s a
choice that’s dependent on my determination of how to focus my
attention. Now the fact that I’m prioritizing you, I’m using the
focal center of my vision.
And I see all these guys because they’re in
my periphery. That’s kind of like a screen, right. The place where
it’s the most open is the central point of vision. Over here it’s
absurd and over here it’s just gone completely.
So now you, you objected to my characterization
because you said you know observers, so to screen reality, and you
didn’t like the proposition of the intermediary screen.”
S: “Yes.”
J: “And I know the screening idea isn’t
exactly right. But on the counter-side we have this problem. Some
things are central to our perception and other things are peripheral.
And that’s dependent on our values and on our patterns of
attention, and our actions. So I’m curious what you think about
that.”
S: “Well, I think you’re putting two kinds
of examples out on the table. They’re going to be related. I think
the first one where we are looking at a human being say an actor on a
screen, right, putting ourselves in that person’s shoes and
reading”
J: “Reading the world.”
S: “I think that’s very extraordinarily
complicated um. And I think the interesting thing there is going to
be how much of that is learned, because it does seem to be a highly
fallible process, because I know I adjust.
I don’t want to get too personal here but
there will be lots of times I’ve been in social circumstances, and
I think I am pretty savvy about reading . But I’ll be with my wife
and she will say after we’ve had a conversation with someone, boy,
did you notice how you know upset that person was about blah, blah,
blah.”
J: “Women and their interpersonal
perception.”
S: “Okay, that so there may be sex, gender
differences.”
J: “They are better at reading verbal
communicating.”
S; “that are going on but at the same time
it’s not to say I couldn’t learn how to do that. So when we say
people are very good at that—I think that’s true—but we still
have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into making us
good at being able to do that. I think that’s going to be a very,
very sophisticated story.
But the other example takes us back to
perceptual cases where you’re talking about are you looking at me
or me looking at you. And we’re also aware that we’re in a room,
that there are other people in the room, who are filling and soon.
But getting right down to issues of if I choose to focus right on
thing, then it’s true that everything else”
J: “pales by comparison.”
S: “Yeah, that’s right, and pales is
metaphorical so uh if we’re not, if we’re unpacking the, the
metaphor, I think we would say focus and unfocus. And then we can
give descriptions of what the state of unfocus is and what the state
of focus is.
And I would prefer using that language to the
language of screen because screen really is something that is, is in
the way. It’s, it’s a thing itself that is another obstacle
right. So if you know”
My response: Stephen
does not like the language of screen because it stands between the
perceiver and the object being perceived, so he would rather use
language of prioritizing what to focus on and what to leave
unfocused, for that need not have a subjective connotation attached
to it. He rejects screen as a metaphor but below will accept our
sensory apparatuses filter in and out different things.
J: “How about hierarchy?”
S: “So
if there’s a dressing screen between the two of us, and I’m
undressing for privacy, right. The whole idea of the screen is that,
that it’s blocking right so”
J: “The metaphor is too simple.”
S: “That sorry, that would be different from
un I think. A better metaphor would be to say to filter. And I think
sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter. They’re
just attending to some things and not attending to other things. But
a filter is different from a screen.
And also but also just to stay on this one
issue here the issue of focus and unfocus are not a filter either.”
My response: Stephen seems to regard as
focusing and unfocusing our sensory apparatuses is more a complex
operation of direct perceiving, neither perspectivally screened or
filtered.
J: “I have a metaphor for you. Tell me what
you think about this. Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot
because I’ve been studying Old Testament stories.”
My response: I think Jordan is irritated that
Stephen the realist and objectivist rejects metaphor after metaphor
or example proffered by Jordan who favors antirealism and
subjectivist epistemology to a large degree. He now offers a metaphor
based on the Old Testament just to tweak Stephen the atheists and
secularist.
J: “And un I think the Tabernacle in the Old
Testament is a model of perception. Okay, so tell me what you think
of this as an analogy better than screen and better than filter.”
Stephen: “Okay, remind me what element of the
Tabernacle will”
J: “Okay, I will lay it out.”
S; “Good.”
J: “So the Tabernacle. At the center of the
Tabernacle is the Ark of the Covenant. Right, so there is a
centerpoint, and it’s sacred, okay. And if I remember correctly, in
the early ceremonies, which were associated with the Tabernacle, the
high priest was only allowed to go into the holy of holies, the
center, once a year.”
My response: Once again I ask if Jordan is
providing a metaphor in all seriousness, or is he out of revenge for
being rebuffed continually by Stephen, or if he is just tweaking
atheist, realist Stephen for refuting so resolutely, the legitimacy
of Jordan’s examples that perception is a filter or screen theories
about how perceptual epistemology operates.
J: “So there’s a center; then there’s a
structure of veils around it like so that there’s a center, and
then it’s veiled. And outside of that is the community. And so
that’s the sacred centerpoint of the community, and the center is,
what would you say, the point of focus, the fundamental point of
focus.
And then the significance of the periphery is
proportional to the distance from the center. Now the reason, there’s
a variety of reasons, I think this is the right metaphor. It’s
partly because so to say”
My response: For Jordan the Tabernacle is a
sacred metaphor for the centerpoint of attention that is focused upon
and appears to our eyes largely as reality represents to us, and as
we go from the center of focus to the periphery of focus, away from
the centerpoint, then the perception is more and more veiled by being
an unfocused stimulus to the eye or our sensory apparatus. In a
social metaphor, Jordan suggest community is the centerpoint of
reality and accuracy, less so the individual as an Objectivist might
insist.
Stephen: “It is a metaphor for what?”
J: “For, for, for object perception. For any
perception, for any perception. It’s so, and here’s partially
why. So I was referring to the visual system for example. So the way
your visual system is constructed is that is at the very center of
every cell in the center of your vision, is connection to 10,000
neurons at the fundamental level of analysis.
Okay, and then each of those 10,000 is
associated with 10,000. It spirals up exponentially, very rapidly,
but the folial tissue in the center of your vision is very high cost.
It takes a lot of neural tissue to process it, and it takes a lot of
energy, a lot.
If your whole retina was folial, your head
would be like alien-size. Eagles have two folials, by the way. They
have extremely sharp vision.
And so now, you’re, your’e because high
resolution vision is expensive. You can move your eyes and you dart
this very high resolution around. And so every time you move your
eye—and you do that unconsciously—because they’re always
vibrating, and consciously because you can move them. And in
consequence of emotion as well. So if you hear a noise to the side
and it startles you, you’ll look and that’s unconscious.
Lots of things direct your visual attention but
everything you look at has a center, a dead center where everything
is extremely high resolution. And then it’s surrounded by lesser
and lesser spheres of resolution (Like veils around the Tabernacle,
Ed Says.) until at the periphery there’s nothing.
Right, okay. So like out there if I just hold
my hand steady, I can’t see it except as a blur. But if I move it I
can see the fingers. So out here I can detect movement. That’s how
dinosaurs saw, by the way.
Dinosaurs-frogs, still they can’t see
anything that isn’t moving. They have vision like our periphery, so
out here because the tissue in the periphery of my vision is very
highly enervated, I prioritize movement because my assumption is if
it isn’t moving, I don’t have to pay attention to it. You know
it’s a default assumption about what is ignorable in the world.”
S: “A dynamical environment.”
J: “Yeah, right exactly, and so if you’re
going to prioritize perceptual vision, the priority is if it moves,
look at it. Otherwise, ignore it. Yeah, okay so every perception has
a center and then a gradation of resolution until it fades out into
nothing.
Yeah, and, and that Tabernacle as, as far as I
can tell, is a mode of the perceptual center. It’s a model of the
community center as well, but it’s a model of perception as such.
So that’s different, that’s different from the screen obviously.
And well you have these veils that you constructed.
That’s true, that’s true, that’s true,
and it’s you see and the veil, the veil is an interesting one
because the perceptions we have in the periphery are nowhere near as
intense as the perception that we have in the center. And so these
perceptions: One way of thinking about them is the perceptions,
peripheral perceptions, are veiled so intensely (Veiled as out of
focus? Ed Says.) that you can’t even see them, but the veils are
gradations. So it’s, it’s, well so you tell me what you think
about that.”
S: “Yeah, let me try a different—I don’t
want to use the Tabernacle example.”
My response: Stephen might work for Peterson
Academy but he is not owned by Peterson, nor will he bend the knee to
Peterson as Peterson is commanding, so Stephen rebuffs Peterson
abruptly, promptly and assertively by checking him right now,
rejecting the religious example of how to do epistemology, rather
than keeping it non-controversial by providing secular scientific
examples, or metaphors, less baiting of a secular intellectual,
which Stephen is, and Jordan the manipulator knows just how to goad
him. Stephen quickly slaps him down. If both men were religious, then
the religious metaphor is appropriate, but because they are not
religious, neither of them should use religious examples, and Jordan
knows better. It is not wise to provoke the good deities as Jordan
repeatedly does, using their sacred texts to advance his career, all
the while disavowing them. As Jesus said, be hot or cold, or I will
spit you out of my mouth.
S: “I’m not as familiar with it, but
suppose you think of the difference between a place, say you’re
walking through.
This is an example I heard of from another
philosopher. You’re walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood,
right, at night. And you think it’s a slightly dangerous
neighborhood, right. And so what you’re trying to do is take in as
much as you can.”
J: “Yeah.”
S: “And so the language that comes to me more
naturally (No irritating, funky Tabernacle example presented to
Stephen, Ed Says, this is Stephen’s view.) is the language of a
field. It’s a magnetic field or an electric field.”
J: “Yes, the phenologists like that idea.
(Jordan seems snide, irritated here, Ed Says.)”
S: “Yes, that’s right uh and in that case
what I’m trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular,
uh like I might when I’m reading. So then I’m using my visual
attention. I’m focusing on this particular thing. Or I’m an
artist, and I’m trying the ____, the glint on the eyeball for the
finishing cut, so my eyes are wide open.
And I am concentrating, and I’m trying to do
this and everything else is in the field. But that I think is
coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works—as, as if
I’m in the bad, bad neighborhood at night. And what I’m trying to
do is just to expand my attention to encompass this whole field so if
anything moves in that entire field then I can zoom”
J: “So that’s a good, that’s a good
objection, that’s a good objection. I guess I could make the that
initial analogy more sophisticated because I would say then that the
Tabernacle structure center and periphery are characteristic of
explored and familiar territory.
You’re making a case that there’s a
different perceptual mode in unexplored territory, and there is. So
birds have a prey eye and a predator eye. And the predator eye acts
like the painter you described who focusing on one thing because he’s
zeroed in on the one thing you’re after, the
I’m the prey eye. That would be the bird’s,
the other eye is scanning in exactly the way you described,
deprioritizing the center, amplifying the input from the periphery.
Because, yeah and that maps onto the hemispheres. So the left
hemisphere does the perceptual mapping that you described.
This is in right-handed people. The left
hemisphere does those focal perception that you describe. That is
detail-oriented, and that deprioritized the periphery. And that right
hemisphere does the opposite. And, and you know that’s, that’s I
suppose you could say at a biological level, that’s because it’s
eat or be eaten. Right, in the most primal possible way. And so there
is a perceptual system for things. You’re going to eat and there’s
a perceptual, a perceptual system for you might be on the menu.”
S: “Yeah.”
J: “Right, right and yeah so that’s okay.
See the thing that’s so curious about that that you just
highlighted is that the ceremonies for taking possession of a
territory that are anthropologically specified.
It’s usually driving a stake or a central
point, a flag, a standard, a staff into the ground that signifies
camp or signifies the possession of that territory, that establishes
a center with a set of peripheries and formness at the you know, at
the end of the periphery that does establish a kind of perception
associated with security.
So the Tabernacle style perception would be the
perception that’s associated with explored territory. That’s
exactly right, that’s, that’s the perception of order like order
is where the things you want are happening. That’s a good way of
defining order.”
My response: It seems that the two thinkers are
haggling over but defining what is an objective, clear-eyed
perception: it must be in focus, and a centerpoint of intention and
observational experiencing, and it typically is explored territory
that one is accustomed to.
J: “And chaos is where you don’t know what
will happen when you act and there are two different perceptual
mechanisms for those.
And so the second one, the danger one, the
unexplained one (Chaos, Ed Says.), the foreign territory one, there’s
less filtering, there’s less specification of center because you
don’t know what is important, right.
You’re walking through that dangerous
neighborhood. It’s like you’re on alert, and you don’t know
what’s insignificant. That’s part of being on alert, so there’s
no identifiable center. And that’s a high stress situation, yeah,
yeah, okay, okay.”
S: “Now where I it immediately gets more
complicated. And you psychologists know more about this that I do.
Even if we stay with these examples um the question about what
happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is
another dimension which has to cut across even if we grant in both
cases whether I am focused or I am diffused attention, I am aware of
reality in some direct, direct sense. It is true that”
My response: Then Stephen adds another
dimension or layer, that a direct, objection, clear perception of
reality and the objects presenting themselves, one is directly aware
of reality in one’s automatic perceptions, and conceptually is
indirectly in contact with reality if one volunteers cognitively to
pay attention to and not distort one’s automatic, directly
perceived sense data.
J: “Yeah.”
S: “if uh in either of these cases, I’m the
artist focusing on the particular dot, and my child suddenly screams,
right, the I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus, and
go, go to attend, to attend”
J: “Yeah, that’s been quite mapped out
neurophysiologically.”
My response: Does Jordan not seems snooty and
dismissive here?
S: “Right.”
J: “The Russians did a very good job of that
starting about 1960. Sakarov was one and a woman named Vina Grova.
And they were students of a neuropsychologist named Leria. They
mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex, and that’s
exactly what that is. It’s like you’re focused on a task and some
of pragmatic”
S: “import.”
J: “Yeah, yeah of implicit significance,
distracts you from your goal. And you do so there is a hierarchy of
graded responses that are part of the orienting reflex.”
S: “But the even I think another interesting
case would be you’re the artist and you know that sometimes your
kid cries out and screams. But you’ve given yourself a signal: you
know I am angry at my kid right now. He’s been a brat. I’m going
to ignore him when he screams.
I’m focusing the exact same scenario: kid
screams, I register it while my reaction is quite different. I stay
focused.”
J: “That shows you how malleable even thought
that’s relatively low level instinctual responses.”
S: “Exactly. That’s going to be a back feed
loop,”
J: “Exactly. That’s and that’s part of
the consequences of the higher order brain centers feeding like there
isn’t a primary level of perception that has no top-down
modification. It’s even the, the primary visual cortex, say, where
your folial meets the visual cortex for the first time is
tremendously innervated by multiple.
Well, so here’s an example. So when you look
at an object—when you look at a pen for example—let’s say that
constitutes a visual pattern. It’s represented on the retina as a
pattern. It is propagated along the nerves. Then it branches out.
One of the places that information ends up
quite quickly is the motor cortex. So when you see almost all the
objects that you see in the world, you see because they’re
definable in terms of the action you take in their presence.
When you see this pen, the grip motion you
would use, it is directly disinhibited by the sight of the pen. And
that’s part of the perception. It’s not like you see the pen and
think about its use. That isn’t how it works at all. You see its
use directly. And so that’s another thing that is very strange
about object perceptions. You don’t actually see objects in the
world.”
My response: Jordan denies we see objects like
the pen directly for we see them but automatically assign to them a
classification
like use, so the direct perception is not so simple after all, or is
it?
J: “What you see is are tools and obstacles.
And well there’s all the things you don’t
see. And the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your
goal. So you know your goal for example, the one, the example you
used is you’re not happy with your child.
So the goal there has shifted from response to
distress cries, it shifted from that which might be the default,
right, to certain probability that the distress cry is fake, right,
or manipulative, so ignore. Very different interpretive framework,
very different social landscape, and capable of modifying even the
almost base level perception.
You’ll still hear thee cry. I guess that
would even be curious is like if your child is, it is highly
probable: if your child is likely to emit distress calls that are
false, my suspicions are you’d be less likely to hear that, to
actually here that. Not only to respond to it, right, because you’d
have built an inhibitory structure that says despite the er the
instinctive significance of that, it is irrelevant, yeah, right,
right, highly likely.”
S: “Yeah. To come back to your pen example,
the issue of as sophisticated cognizers when we are perceiving the
world that we have their use (function) kind of built into the”
J: “Perception.”
S: “Yeah, I’m going to put that into
quotation marks. Right. And then the uh the action that’s going to
be embodied in the at use also in many cases seems to be built into
the perception. I think uh if we unpack that more there’s going to
be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what uh
is build into the physiological system, and the psychological system,
right, at birth, and how much of it is learned because”
J: “Definitely.”
S: “Yeah, I don’t think we want to say you
know in the 21st
century where we come into the world born with a precognized
understanding of pens.”
J: “Right.”
S: “And how to use”
J: “We probably have a precognized
understanding of tools.”
My response: Jordan definitely is pushing
Kantian categories of understanding as he accepts precognized, innate
categories of understanding of tool
function for humans, and Stephen emphatically refutes this notion.
S: “I don’t know if we even have that.
Instead I just think we have a certain physiological structure that,
and, and, and a conceptual structure built on that such that, and
it’s going to be very flexible uh and amenable to different
environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things
whatever their intrinsic properties as potential tools.”
My response: Thesy
are disagreeing. Jordan is pushing Kantian categories of the
understanding and a capacity to frame the world with innate ideas,
and Stephen remains the objectivist, asserting tabula rasa, no innate
ideas, direct perception of reality.
J: “Yeah, well.”
S;: “A lot of that. So let me just, just try
to another example to get because like the earlier movie example and
the male-female difference. One thing that comes up in couples is how
they learn to be tuned to each other’s voices and the sound of
their own voices. So couples who, who before they met each other,
would go to a loud party. They would be talking to each other.”
J: Yeah, that’s a really good example.”
S: “Yeah, that’s right and uh you know
there is just noise and it’s a big decibel level. Right. But then
once they become couples and they have heard each other say their
name—I say Jordan, Steve or whatever—they can be in a relatively
loud party separated across the room”
J: “Right.”
S: “And the guy’s wife says Stephen, right,
and he can pick out of an incredible excess of sounds.”
J: “Well, that’s what you do if you’re in
a restaurant that is bustling with conversation. What is remarkable
is if you’re sitting with someone, and there’s conversations
everywhere, you can tune yourself so that you hear the person you’re
sitting beside. You hear them but then you can turn your attention to
your own thoughts. Right, and it is this, and I would say that’s
something like the imposition of that Tabernacle-like structure on
that plethora of potential interpretations.
That’s what the postmodernists would point
out. There’s an infinite number of interpretations in a restaurant
that’s bustling with conversations. It’s like fair enough, but
you prioritize one. That’s what it means to pay attention to it,
right, is that you prioritize it. You make something a center. You
make everything else a periphery. Then you learn to do that
automatically, right, if with practice. I think maybe the best
example of that for literate people is the fact that you can’t see
a word without reading it, right.”
S: “yeah, because you automated it.”
J: “That’s right. You automated it.
Exactly, so that the center’s now”
S: “Now what the postmodernists do right is
they take what I think is a virtue, right, that we can automate all
these things. And we can learn to detect various things and focus on
this, that and the other thing—all of which are great strengths of
the human consciousness.”
My response: I will think about this more but
it may be that the conscious reaction to, the emotional and
conceptual conclusions to automated responses from raw stimuli, as
automated, serve as one of the grand narratives which people need to
live by, and the postmodernists undermine that strength and virtue by
dismissing the truth, validity and value of metanarratives.
S: “And they turn them into negatives. They
turn them into vices. So what they say is right. An interpretation
then becomes, in their language, because they’ve already got a
negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily
subjective. And the idea for them then is that somehow if we were
going to be actually of reality and through this interpretation (This
interpretation is sensing the world and characterizing it through a
subjective lens, Ed Says.)
We would have, not to have any interpretation
at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our
minds without any intermediary actions. Or then what they then do is
to say to you, I can choose prioritize this over that in my visual
field, they will say. And their right to say that’s a value
judgment. I think this is more important now, and this is more
important over that, but then and by the time they are starting using
the words value, they’re coming out of very sophisticated negative
valuative theories that say values are just subjective, and have
nothing to do with external reality.”
My response: Yes, we voluntarily choose to
select what we will value and focus on, but that need not be a
subjective choice per se.
J: “Maybe it’s worse than that.”
S: “For both of them, they are, on the
cognitive side and on the evaluative side, that they’re deep into
subjective territory, so those then become negative words for them.
Instead, I think, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think
philosophers have a very small part of this just attending to the
language we are using at the foundations of cognition. Right, all
these metaphors of screens and filters and Tabernacles and yeah
visual fields”
My response: Stephen is not against the use of
metaphors as insightful into how a conscious human interprets,
conceives of and tells a story about sense data from objective
reality but he is uncomfortable with over-reliance upon linguistic
metaphors, wrongly applied, leave us knowing nothing, floundering in
a subjective morass.
J: “Fields.”
S: “and so on. That’s where we have to get
that sorted out because if, we don’t get those foundations correct,
then we’re going to be messed up.”
J: “Well so two, two things there. So you
pointed to the fact that postmodernist description of the subjective
but tell me, tell me what you think about this. See the postmodern
insistence despite the fact they claim there is no uniting
metanarrative, which is a specious claim in my estimation, because I
don’t know where the uniting ends if everything’s a narrative.
There’s uniting narratives at every level of analysis.
But more than that, they, their, their
proposition at least implicitly has been that the narratives that we
do utilize are predicated on power (The negative power of
powerlessness sought after and wielded by groupists and collectivists
of all stripes, Ed Says. Power at the base of reality is the
postmodernist metanarrative though they deny having one and believing
fervently in it, and serving it.).
That’s part of the reflection of the
subjective. It’s like I’m prioritizing in keeping with my desire
to exercise power, and by power, I don’t mean the ability to
maneuver in the world. I mean force and compulsion.”
My response: The ability to function or do work
in the world in a neutral power mode. When that power is used to
force by compulsion and violence others to do what they do not want
to do, to force them to obey, to deprive them of life, liberty,
independence and property, that is the negative power of
powerlessness unfolded in reality, and this is what Jordan means by
force and compulsion.
J: “That’s what we have in the postmodern
world is a battle ground between different claims of power, and
that’s all there is. I think the weakness in that: First, one
weakness is that it is a confession rather than a description, but,
but the other one is that power games are not iterable and productive
and improving across time.”
My response: Amen.
J: “They’re self-defeating and so you can
play a power game, and you can win short term victories with a power
game. But it’s not a sustainable, iterable medium to long-term,
viable strategy. You know Frans DeWaal, for example, the
primatologist, studied chimpanzees. So you know we have this
influence on biologists that the hierarchies of chimpanzees, for
example, which are masculine hierarchies in the main, are predicated
on power.
You know the alpha chimp is the most powerful
tyrant, and he dominates all others, and that’s why he is
reproductively successful. De Waal showed very clearly that there are
alphas who use power but they have short reigns, fractious
communities. And they’re extremely likely to suffer an early, a
premature, violent death. Right. So it is a niche in that you can
force compliance.
But the stable alphas that De Waal studied were
the most reciprocal male chimpanzees of the troop.”
S: “Right.”
J: “They made the most lasting friendships.
And so that’s a whole different model of the mediation attention,
let’s say then are the one’s predicated on power.”
My response: This power model which De Waal
uncovered is the same as the power of powerfulness model of fair,
democratic, respectful, reciprocal mutual treatment and
interrelating, the positive model of power, which I often allude to.
They are iterable and productive across time.
J: “So do you think it’s fair when you’re
assessing the postmodern corpus, the philosophical corpus you talked
about the subjective element. Where do you think the claim that the
postmodern claim that power is the essential, the dominant narrative?
Where do you think that fits in with this claim with regards to
subjectivity?”
My response: My hunch is that those who
function according the power of powerlessness model are subjectivist
consistently in their epistemology and are consistently
noncognitivist and nihilistic immoralists ethically. Tyranny,
hierarchies, elites, constantly warring, violence lawlessness,
violent revolution, civil war and elite oppression of others, rivals,
the masses.
Those with the positive power of powerfulness
model as their functioning social and political narrative are more
rational and objective epistemologically, and ethically and
politically cooperative, nonviolent, law and order oriented, peaceful
and coexisting, liberty loving liberty enjoying and allowing others
to do their own life liberty and happiness without subjugating
others, or allowing others to subjugate them.
S: “That’s a good question. I think the
postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a
virtue into a vice (I agree, Ed Says.). Power properly conceived
could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done, un right.”
J: “ yeah, yeah.”
S: “And our cognitive powers, right, if we
have a good healthy epistemology, right uh should be augmented to
enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.”
J: “Even cooperatively.”
S: “That’s yeah, no that’s exactly right.
Um uh but then but if you however are skeptical, if you do start with
an epistemology, all the postmoderns do come out of an
epistemological training. It’s um a striking fact you know the by
name postmoderns, so we mention Derrida, Lyotard, Foucalt, Rorty and
the others.
They are all Ph. Ds in philosophy. They are all
doing heavy duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral
level work. And that does come to be the foundation, and because of
the time that they are working (middle part of the 20th
century) was an extraordinarily skeptical for philosophy, the
revealing uh that theories and paradigms that everyone had been
excited about, had collapsed at that time.
So they come of age. Now what that then is to
say is if you don’t that human beings can know the world as
individuals, then you don’t think of developing you reason,
developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for
understanding, is the most important thing about human beings.”
My response: There is nothing more vital for
human survival and happiness then for each individual to think for
herself, and to think deeply and all the time.
So then what is it to be a human being? And to
the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we
are going to become closer to chimps (Stephen’s unfortunate but
deliberate slap at Jordan for comparing chimps to humans, a
comparison I find credible and useful, Ed Says.).
And then the social models that are prevalent
about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world, are
going, are going to become even more predominant, or even lower than
chimps, uh baboons who are even”
J: “Yeah, who are even more of a baboon
model.”
S: “Yeah, it might be.”
J: “But fractious fascists.”
S: “So I think this though shows the absolute
importance of these cognitive issues.”
My response: I agree with Stephen
wholeheartedly: He believes the modernists with their rational,
optimistic, good model of epistemology made the world a better place,
where each individual can think for herself and should be encouraged
to think for herself.
The postmodernists, on the other hand, field
and propose an irrational, skeptical, nihilistic and bad model of
epistemology, which converts the world into an altruistic. Skeptical
hellhole of group versus group tribe versus tribe fighting war,
violent competing for power, territory, resources. Stephen seems to
say that bad or poor ill-conceived epistemological models have grave
ethical and political repercussion down stream for people out in the
world, and I believe that too. It is a moral fact that one’s
philosophy will play out ethically in the world for good or ill.
S: “that the psychologists and the
philosophers are trying to work out positively, because to the extent
that we can show that we have cognition that is efficacious, that it
is competent, that our brain/mind is an incredibly powerful tool; and
if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as
individuals and socially, we’ll start to work out the win-win,
positive some social things. Otherwise we will start to regress
socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kind of levels.”
J: “The, that regression becomes the use of
power as the metanarrative”
My response: Yes, the postmodernists were
always lying or willfully blind: they were somewhat skeptical about
modernist metanarratives, but more so expressed that there were no
metanarratives so the masses lost faith in modernist metanarratives
in the West, so the frustrated masses could be panicked and stampeded
into Marxist-postmodernist holy causes as part of a mass movement,
and the metanarrative of the revolutionaries, intellectuals and
malcontents the elite running this holy cause, really just wanted to
accumulate absolute power over their people if not the whole world so
they could impose the absolutist Leninist ideology upon all people
everywhere.
If they could deprive the masses of their
noble western metanarratives, then they could gain totalitarian
control of the masses in every aspect of their lives, their bodies,
their mines, their rights, their wealth their property, and with
absolute power goes the fanatical ideology or metanarrative of the
elite of the Communist Party that will run the world going forward
into perpetuity if they can succeed as they plan to.
J: “that the postmodernists hypothetically
abandon.”
S: “That’s right, they’re all, they’re
all, yeah they’re all left with it so”
J: “That’s right, that’s what they’re
left.”
S: “You’re getting rid of, right, human
cognitive power as a positive thing. Then you ask what’s left if
it’s not the case that I think my human cognition, my mind, puts me
in touch with reality, and that I can work out reality and that your
cognition put you in touch with reality.
And of course maybe we’re initially focusing
on things—we have different frameworks but that we nonetheless have
the cognitive tools to talk about these things to do the experiments
so I can visit you, what you have experienced.”
J: “Take each other’s position in service
of some higher goal.”
S: “That’s right. And that we can work all
of these things out to in effect have an agreed-upon understanding of
the nature of, of reality. Then, uh if that’s not what going on
that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand
reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture.
And then what the postmoderns then do is either
say well I make up my own reality.”
My response: The postmodernist, the
subjectivist, claims he makes up his reality, his truth, which is not
what is real or true.
S: “That’s what is going on here. Or some
of them are more passive, uh, all of the influences of more
environmental, deterministic understanding of human beings. What we
call learning and cognition is just being, is just being conditioned
by your environment, or your social upbringing and so on. So again we
don’t have”
J: “A dominant hierarchy.”
S: “Yeah, or there could be any sort uh of
social structure from, from, from, from their perspective. But then
that means that what we are interested in is primarily social
relationships. It’s not me (As an individual or individualist, Ed
Says.) in relation to reality. And other people are part of reality
so I have to work that out. But rather the assumption is I am
inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality. And so the
dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be. And the
word there that becomes most important is the power word but it’s a
kind of social power so”
My response: The negative power of
powerlessness which postmoderns advocate, gravitate towards and are
addicted to is a collectivist way of interrelating with tyrannical
interrelationships being the norm.
J; “So that tilts them towards that social
constructionism.”
S: “Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, no it’s
a social construction that leads them to have that social
understanding of power. But the power for them cannot be the positive
sum, kind of power we are talking about, because that understanding
of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world
works. And we can do science and technology and make the world a
better place, and empower ourselves.
We can learn better nutrition to make our
bodies more powerful I can understand, and your are a rational power.
And u you can understand I am a rational person, so I have to treat
you a certain way conversationally, socially and so forth.
Uh so all of the positive sum social stuff is
going to come out of that, but the postmoderns have cut all of that
away. All you are left with is beings who are conditional, and trying
to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social
world.
And what they call power just is the, the
influence or tools, including the tools of language that are now
understood as having nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as
being socially constructed themselves.”
J: “And tools of power.”
S: “That’s right so it becomes then
necessarily a zero sum socially influencing and controlling game. And
they reinterpreted everything in terms of that.”
J: “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. So I think what
we’ll do is stop there. We’ve come to the end of the time for
the YouTube section, I’d like to continue this discussion on The
Daily Wire side. But what I would like to talk about with you there
is power in in service of what.
Yeah, right because there has to be unless you
I mean could hypothesize that power in itself is a desirable good,
but then you have to define power in a way that would make the
desirability of it self-evident.”
My response: Power is the ability to do work,
and power qua power is neutral, it becomes evil or negative power of
power-hungry altruists seek to dominate all via the power model, the
power of powerlessness.
Power become moral or good if it is used in the
hands of rational egoists or individuators of deep personal integrity
that seek their share of power only personally, and seek to steal
none of it from others, or allow others to steal their just powers in
quantity and focus, so these individuating supercitizens are using
power within the guidelines of their positive power model, the power
of powerfulness.
J: “Alternatively you have to say that you
want power for a reason. So I would like to talk to you about that,
get your thoughts on that.”
S: “That can take us back to the Peterson
Academy courses too.”
J: “Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you
that, maybe we can close with that too. You’ve taped three
additional courses?”
S: “I’ve done five courses, yes. Three are
in post-production. Two are”
J: “Okay, and what are the three that are
coming up?”
S: “One is on modern ethics uh, so what has
happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse, more
global, more multicultural, and more critical in some ways of
traditional models that have come down to us. So it’s a much more
wide open world.
What is interesting about the modern world is
how little we have uh what I think of as a kind of homogeneous
culture where everybody by and large are on the same philosophical
page.”
J: “That’s the collapse of the
metanarrative.”
S: “Yeah, that, that particular (That
particular metanarrative Ed Adds and Says for clarity’s sake, the
Judeo-Christian, Great Western metanarrative.) went away. So we have
a large number of people trying to work out what is good, what is
bad, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s the meaning of my life?
How should we organize ourselves socially? So
what I did was uh choose uh eight uh completely different but
extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers, and devoted a
lecture to each of them.
So it’s goes back to uh goes back to uh
people like David Hume who wrestle with the is-ought problem., and
Immanuel Kant with his duty focus. John Stewart Mills’s
utilitarianism and so on, through the 20th
century up to the very contemporary times.
So that’s one course on modern ethics. And
all these people are giants. And they all disagree with each other,
but that’s the contemporary landscape within which people are doing
serious thinking about morality need to position themselves.
The other two courses are 16 lectures in total.
But it is uh called the philosophy of politics. And what I’m
interested in obviously we have political science, political theory,
political ideology, uh practical day-to-day understandings of
politics.
But what I’m interested in is the
philosopher’s contributions to those debates. And one of my
background assumptions is a lot of times when people disagree about
politics”
J: “They are disagreeing about something more
fundamental. Yeah, yeah, I think that has become evident to
everyone.”
S: “And in many cases if it’s, it’s not
(Evident, Ed Adds and Says.), it doesn’t get brought to the core.
So I don’t want to talk about the recent election but really it’s
about the culture more fundamentally and not about many particular
issues And underlying culture”
My response: Yes, philosophical assumptions and
adopted or spun metanarratives, selected and lived under by a people
will shape the mainline culture, and philosophical positions and
quarrels flow out from these sources of input.
J: “And underlying culture.”
S: “Both the other courses I’m dealing
with, right, so one though picks up with the French Revolution which
is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental
European history. Yeah, why that political revolution happened. And
there’s a lot of philosophy that matters there. But then also an
important theoretician Edmund Burke and a launching of a kind of
modern conservatism in response to that.
But the we go through the big name philosophers
who have pronounced influentially on politics. So we go through Hegel
and Marx. And as we get to the 20th
century we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, who was a
Ph D in philosophy. And Heidegger and the National Socialists,
Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, so that one with World War II,
so French Revolution to World War II.
The next course picks up at the end of World
War II and the Cold War, and starts with Rand and Robert Nozick at
the height of the Cold War. How we can defend some sort of robust
liberal capitalism in this context.
Uh so it starts with them, goes to John Rawls.
Uh, uh we also talk about James Buchanan who won the Nobel Prize for
Public Choice economics. Uh, we also do some international (Study
Ed Says and Adds.). You know we’re living in a global society. You
know that cliché, and so on, but the uh Islamist revolutions, and
the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Sayyid Qutb (Kuba), whose
brother was a professor of Osama Bin Laden. The extraordinarily
influential. (Ed Says, Kuba was extraordinarily influential in the
Islamist revival in the last 50 years.) The Ayatollah Khomeini had
Kuba’s book works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.
We go to Russia and the rise of Putin, and the
thinking of Alexander Dugan in that framework as well and then we end
that course with a version of contemporary conservatism. Uh Roger
Scruton”s meaning of conservationism came out a few years before he
died.
So the idea here is to say these are the big
name political theories you need to know, but they are all big-named
ones because they all have philosophical bite behind them by some
very deep people. And integrating that with the history each case how
some of them are urging history in a certain direction, or trying to
make sense of major events like the French Revolution or the Cold War
or the attacks of 9/11.”
J: “So if people watch all the courses that
you have offered, so all five of them, they’re going to get a
pretty decent overview of the last 500 years in the philosophical,
ethical and political reading.”
S: “That’s my ambition.”
J: “That’s a good deal. That’s a good
deal. I want to watch those courses. There’s lots of things that
you’re lecturing about that I don’t know about. I’d like to
know the nuances. I’d like to know the details.
So, yeah, I’m very much looking forward to
that. So well, thank you very much for coming to Scottsdale today.”
S: “It was a real pleasure.”
J: “Yeah, it’s great and it’s great to
have you onboard on Peterson Academy too. So, and I think we’ll
talk too on The Daily Wire side a little bit about the perils,
pitfalls and opportunities of online, highly produced, online
education. Because I’d like to get some of your opinions about that
too. All right, so we will do that. Thank you very much sir. Oh, I
should give this to you too. Yeah, this is my new book which is
coming out (We Who Wrestle With God; Jordan B Peterson) on the 19th.
And so We Who Wrestle With God (Jordan tweaking
Stephen, the atheist, Ed Says.). Um, I’m making the case in this
book fundamentally that well we talked about the relationship story
and perception. But I’m trying to explain in this book why the
notion of sacrifice is the central story in the biblical corpus,
making the case that sacrifice is equivalent to work and that
sacrifice, that sacrifice by necessity is the foundation of the
community, that those things are so tightly associated, that they’re,
they’r equivalent. There’s no difference between sacrifice and
community. They’re the same thing. Anyways, I would like out to
you”
S: “I will dive into it.”
J: “Yeah, yeah. Well, I will certainly be
interested your thoughts on it as well. And so it’s coming out very
soon. And um I tried to make sure that everything I wrote in it was
hopefully justifiably that way and traditionally but also
scientifcally.
Like I wanted the stories to make sense at
both levels of analysis at the same time. So you know that’s a
tight triangulation so to speak. But who knows if it’s successful,
but that was the rule of thumb. So anyway, it’s very good to talk
to you today.”
S: “A pleasure.”
J: “So, yeah, I’m looking forward to our
continued collaboration on the Peterson Academy side.”
S: “Me too.”
J: “So all of you watching and listening: you
can join on us the Daily Wire side. We’re going to talk about two
things. We’re going to talk about the practical and hypothetical
future of online education.
And we’re going to talk about the
relationship, what would you say, the, the value of power from the
postmodern perspective. Why would people be interested in power? You
might think that’s self-evident but (We want power because we want
more of everything that is to be had or grasped—be it for good or
evil, we chase ever after more of what we choose to prioritize—Ed
Says) lots of things that appear self-evident aren’t at all on more
detailed analysis. So um you can join us for another half an hour of
that discussion if you would.
Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale
and my producer Joy Hahn (sp.?) for putting this together. She’s
been working extremely hard on the set side and the production side.
And you know the podcast is improving in
quality quite dramatically in consequence. We’ve got all sorts of
things lined up for you in the very near future. There’ll be some
announcements on that front very soon. Thank you very much for your
time and attention. Okay.”
