LOGOS: Bringing it all together

[sgttomas]

This is a transcript I made of the last 15 minutes of podcast 220 from Bryan Callen's show (it starts at ~58min if you would rather listen to it). It features professor Jordan Peterson.

This brings together conversations we are having about:

Symbols and interpretive structures
The meaning of "God" and RSA encryption
Derrida and Foucault
The Logos
Earlier stuff I've posted about how I construct my beliefs
And even, ironically, the non-conversation that we experience with every Pixie interaction. (no citation necessary)

Peace,
-sgttomas
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{ed: we join in the middle of a conversation about how this explosion of gender identities "isn't rational" and the co-host, Hunter Maats, brings in the argument that rationality doesn't exist; it was a relic from a time when simplified notions allowed the illusory nature of rationality to go undetected, but that we no longer can live in that illusion}

Hunter Maats) That’s the whole point, what we’re reaching; we’re reaching the end of an idea of the brain that was made up from the same period when witches were being burned. Like, this is an idea that, you know, that Descartes propagated in the 1600 which is that reason and emotions are separate. And the problem is that what you end up with, is you end up with a lot of people, like the social justice warriors on campus, who have all these emotions of which they are not aware, they’re screaming all these random things, and they think that because their beliefs make sense to them (naïve realism, what Jon Haidt talks about) that they’re being rational.

Jordan B. Peterson) The “rational” issue there is an interesting one, because I think this is part of what points to the importance of public discourse. It’s very difficult not to have your articulated utterances colored by your emotions and your motivations; they’re nested inside them. But public discourse can un-nest them in some sense because if you have a discussion between ten people, each of whom is bringing their own personal perspective to the table, the discussion (if they’re all listening to each other) the discussion can spiral upwards (so to speak) and you can come up with a solution that both accurately represents the world so you can operate in it like a tool using animal, and it promotes a reasonable sort of consensus. So I don’t think rationality is impossible, although it may be the net-outcome of public discourse. And that’s why free speech is so important because free speech helps strip articulated positions of their pure, idiosyncratic foundation. And we have to protect that. I mean, that’s how we live together as social animals, right? We manage to come up with a consensus that actually functions in the world and the way we do that is by communicating with each other freely and correcting each other’s excessively idiosyncratic perspectives. It does work; it DOES work!

HM) Well I think firstly what we’re all sort of dealing with (what HM0BC6 has been all about) is that this idea of rationality and people I think are really questioning it now. There’s just a lot of things that people are doing that they’re thinking is rational but is not. And, y’know Doc, a large part of what I’ve done working with students is that I would hear these students say that, “I didn’t get the math gene”. And that was a weird cultural artifact. Why were they saying this? And basically then I ended up going through all the scientific literature, reading the work of: John Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky, the Damasio’s at USC {ed: Antonio and Hanna}, {Paul} Ekman. And I think that the conclusion that comes out of all that is that, y’know, this idea of this “state of pure reason”, where anybody sees anything clearly, where there’s a state that you’re not being affected by your emotions, or your by learned culture is a myth!

Bryan Callen) Yes, but you can accept that that’s a part of being a human being and move in the direction of rationality.

HM) No, no! You’re not moving towards rationality. I think the point is that, what ruins, what prevents that sort of “upward spiral” that Dr. Peterson is talking about, *is* the fact that, it’s y’know; I keep on coming back to the story of the blind men and the elephant, right? You have these blind men, they come along, they try and figure out the elephant, right? One feels the tale and thinks that it’s a rope, another feels the trunk and they think it’s a snake, right? They all draw these ridiculous conclusions based on limited amounts of information. But always versions of the story there’s injected this idea of the King. And the King is cited and he comes along and he sees that it’s an elephant. And the problem of rationality is that it creates the idea of a King in the conversation.

JBP) Okay, so I need to comment on that because {struggling for words}…I’m familiar with all the people that you read. And I would also recommend, if you would be so kind, to take a very hard look at some of the deeper psychoanalysts, because I think Jung (for example) actually solved that problem. Let me give you an example. So, imagine that your discourse is inevitably colored by your emotions and motivations, right? And it is! You know Dan Simon’s famous experiments with the invisible gorilla.

HM) Yup!

JBP) Okay, so what Simon showed is that what you see depended on what you were aiming at; fundamentally. So imagine that what most fundamentally colors your cognitive output is your goals. And the goals are a consequence of an agreement that’s reached between your emotional and motivational systems, roughly speaking. So you posit a goal; okay! So now the question is, what goal should you posit so that you orient yourself properly with regards to your discourse. Now, let me give you an example. Do you remember the movie Pinocchio?

BC & HM) Yes

JBP) Okay, do you remember at the beginning, um, Geppetto is hoping that Pinocchio will become a real individual, right? He doesn’t want him to be a marionette. He doesn’t want to have to pull his strings. So the entire movie is about this puppet who is learning to be an individual and not have someone pull his strings. Well, when Geppetto first formulates his intent he wishes on a star. Now, what that means, there’s a very deep meaning to that, a very deep symbolic meaning. It means he lifts his eyes above the Earth and picks the most transcendent value that he can speak to, which is his paternal wishes for the best possible outcome for his son. And it’s that wish that catalyzes Pinocchio’s individual development. And so that idea that there’s a King is actually an accurate idea. The “King” is the proper King of the motivational and emotional systems. And one of the things that you see emerging in archetypes, for example, in the archetype of the Hero; the Hero is the King of the values that are put forth by the motivational and emotional systems. And the Hero is the person (for example) who goes out to slay the dragon and to get the gold. And that’s the matter of courageous exploration and willingness to learn; that’s part of it. So this idea that there should be something that the mixture of emotions and motivations is subordinate to, that’s already been solved from an evolutionary perspective and it’s incorporated in religious symbolism. And, like, psychologists don’t know this because they know the literature that you just described, which I know very well by the way. I’ve been studying those guys for 30 years. But those people do not know the deep psychoanalytic literature and they know nothing about mythology, or archetypal psychology, or religion! And that’s a big problem, because the problem of who should be King has already been solved. And it’s been solved from an evolutionary perspective.

BC) With the idea of “God”, or what have you?

JBP) Well, in Western culture it’s more the idea of the Logos. So the Logos, it’s a Christian idea fundamentally, although its roots are much older than Christianity. And the Logos is the, uh communicative, it’s communicative action essentially. And the Logos, so that’s the “word” that generated order out of chaos at the beginning of time. It’s identified with Christ in Christianity in a very strange psychological twist. So, imagine that when you’re facing chaos, which is what we’re doing now {ed: they were previously talking about the chaos of gender distinction being eliminated} what you do is you utilize your logos capacity (logos being the root word of logic, although logos is much broader than logic) and you articulate yourself out of the chaos. And you do that by orienting yourself properly from a moral perspective, which is to say you adopt the archetypical role of the Hero roughly speaking. And then you speak forth what you see. When I started talking about Nietzsche and Jung at the beginning of this discussion I did it for a very particular reason. There’s extraordinarily deep thought on this matter! And so the emergence of the archetype of the Hero is actually an evolutionarily determined solution to the problem of the conflict of motivations and emotions. And we have Hero stories going back, well God only knows how old the oldest Hero stories are.

BC) I’ve read my Joseph Campbell, indeed.

JBP) Yes, yes. And well, there isn’t; Joseph Campbell knew nothing that he didn’t learn from Jung. And Joseph Campbell only scraped the surface; the wellspring is Jung.

BC) I gotta read Jung

JBP) Yeah, well he’s a very difficult person to read. And of course, most biologically predicated psychologists think of him as a mystic. But that’s just because they don’t understand what the hell he was talking about. He was trying to solve problems they didn’t even know existed! Like the one we’re just discussing, which is who should be King of the discourse. That problem has been solved. And the solution in Western culture is it’s Logos that’s the King of the discourse and properly so.

HM) And yeah isn’t that a solution, I mean, to connect it back to Richard Nisbett, I mean that is the solution of Western culture. And I think what emerges from you know, at least my reading, is that a lot of these mindsets we think of are actually complementary. The point is the atomistic and holistic, or the optimistic and the pessimistic perspective, you know, you emerge with some sort of decent understanding by switching between the two.

JBP) Yeah! Well, that’s a dialog between the two. The dialog between the two…

HM) So doesn’t a dialog between…

JBP) …the truth emerges from the dialog.

HM) And then doesn’t a dialog between the cultures of East and West; isn’t the solutions that emerge from that dialog between East and West better than the solution that either East or West would come up with on their own?

JBP) Well I think it would be more complete. But it’s more like, it’s fleshed out in some sense. So that a lot of the solutions to this sort of problem {ed: the King of the dialog} that were generated (I would say in an evolutionary process) by Christianity and its precursors, are not very well articulated. So for example, if you look at the dome that covers a Byzantine cathedral you’ll see Christ up against the sky, basically. So he’s viewed as a cosmic figure; that’s Christ as pantocrator or Creator of the World. So that’s Christ as Word. There’s an idea there and the idea is that there’s a cosmic significance to consciousness because consciousness, through speech, generates order out of chaos. It’s an unbelievably profound idea!

BC) Wow! So consciousness, through speech, creates cognitive understanding.

JBP) It creates order; it creates order out of chaos. Just, because, that’s what you do when you make sense of the world. You know, you face a chaotic situation like the one we’re facing right now; which is a mish-mash and jumble of all sorts of issues: emotional, motivational and….

BC) And we have a discourse on the meaningful difference between these different concepts, and sort of what {struggles for words}…and you take into account sort of everything that’s worked in the past and everything else to arrive at the best conclusion, right?

JBP) Yes, that’s right! And so what you’re doing is you’re differentiating the issues, using articulation, and then you’re producing a synthesis, and so. And look look! This is unbelievably deep. So let me give you an example. I think the three of us can agree that at the moment this has been a meaningful conversation.

BC & HM) {in unison} Yes!

{the host BC interjects to point out that his allotted time slot for the recording studio is about to run out but that he needs professor Peterson to come back on the show because he is “loving this” conversation}

JBP) Okay, so let me close with this. Alright, look the Daoists know that the deepest of meaning is to be found in the space – in the optimized space – between chaos and order. That’s the space between ying and yang. That’s the Dao. That’s meaning! Okay, now modern, especially neurobiologists, especially the atomistic kind, think of meaning as a mere epiphenomena and it’s not! Meaning is how your nervous system signifies to you that you’re in the place where information exchange is optimized; it’s a real place. And so you feel engaged and outside of time in some sense and excited and interested because you’re actually in the place and the time where adaptation is being furthered. And that’s what human beings experience as meaning! It’s not epiphenomena; it’s not subjective. It’s the deepest reality that we have.

HM) Isn’t that the experience of flow?

JBP) Well I’d say that flow is weakly, secularized version of the manifestation of Logos.

{BC& HM laughter}

JBP) It’s far deeper than flow. It’s the most significant of religious experiences, of genuine religious experiences. It’s that absolute immersement in the process of meaning and in the process of the generation of chaos out of order (and sometimes the reverse, which we don’t have to get into). But you have an instinct for meaning and you can tell when you’re engaged in a genuine dialogue because it’s exciting and gripping.

BC) Well yeah, and by the way we are in the {struggles for words}…we just hit the best, most exciting part of it and we’ve got to wrap it up! I need you back. When can we continue this because I need the rebuttal for the Ekman’s and the like.

HM) Well it’s really a rebuttal against secularism.

BC) I’m very much about that idea

JBP) I have a video online called, there’s two of them, one’s called The Necessity of Virtue and the other is called Reality and the Sacred and they’re on my YouTube channel…
…the Reality and the Sacred is about my attempt to lay out the metaphysical landscape. And I’ve developed that in part to inoculate my students against ideological possession.

BC) {expressions of joy} …this is one of those conversations that’s opened my mind toward a new possibility. You’re articulating something that I hadn’t really heard before.

HM) And well, it goes to a larger issue that I think both of us have been struggling with from different directions about the New Atheists.

BC) Yeah!
JBP) Yes.
~~~END OF TRANSCRIPT~~~

[met]

(To contextualize, here's a poster on the wall at "the Center", a hangout place for disabled people where I volunteer, facilitating a jam on Fri aft's......)

[met]

st, yeah, that is amazing. Thx for transcribing it, that was a lotta effort for us on your part. I have now listened to the entirety of all his links.

....there's been some really productive convo's going on here lately, IMO

[Jim B.]

Yes, great conversation. Peterson looks at things a bit more through an evolutionary lens that I probably would, but he sounds like an interesting guy. I'll check him out on YouTube!

[met]

Hmmm....deconstructing some of the binaries here, st & applying a bit of suspicious hermeneutic... I'd wonder if you'd think asking for "a dialog between East and West" is a bit too general?"


Where do you (eg) fit into that schema?

Also, the big question, who get to speakfor each side?

So that seems to demonstrate the opposite side of the problem, here, i.e. not acknowledging ENOUGH difference? Or not acknowledging enough complexity?

(I think the real problem Dr Peterson is pointing out here is "legislated harmony" .... the existence or not of non-binary gender/sex categories being a secondary issue. So, as I bet Judith Butler I, the notorious gender theorist of the 90's, would be first to point out, the sign from the Center just recommends replacing "false" (for some) "binaries" with some equally or more false assumptions of "some underlying unity"?)