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.”
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