Jordan Peterson: Alchemy, the Philosopher's Stone & Truth

I don't think that you would be interested in science if it wasn't pragmatically useful you see and that's that's exactly the point that I want to pursue in this lecture today it's like we are interested in things generally as a consequence of their perceived utility you know now the ends the framework within which you determine utility is quite malleable so for example if you're suicidal you might regard it how sharp a knife is as the primary object of interest but generally speaking you know we would assume that especially if you're a Darwinian thinker that your primary interests are something like survival and reproduction and you know I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption the terms are quite elastic so you can throw a lot of motivations in them without you know without having to think that rigorously about it but as a as a heuristic framework it's not that so and so part of the reason that Jung believed that science was embedded in a dream which was the alchemical dream fundamentally it was because he believed that the people who developed the symbolic precursors to science and so those would be the alchemists Newton was an alchemist by the way we're looking for something approximating the Philosopher's Stone which was a material object which would grant its bearers eternal life and good health and wealth and so the the alchemists were the first people in some sense deposit that if you systematically investigated the transformations of the material world which was regarded more or less as damned by the Catholic Church that you could extract out information that would be of substantial benefit to the things I just described health wealth and longevity and so you might say well why are we pursuing science like why are we motivated to do it why would you spend 10,000 hours looking through a microscope is a very weird thing to do and the Union idea as well if you go right down to the base of the of the of the hierarchy of motivation you're doing it to make the world a better place in some manner that's important to you so you can't science has to be net nested inside a motivational structure or no one would do it now you know you can think about that what you want but but it's not an argument that you can easily dismiss because you have to account for why people are interested in science you know and if you say well it's because they want to build a career that's fine because it just nests inside the same argument anyways okay so now so we kind of have a definition of reality from a materialist perspective now there's a few problems with that right one of the problems is is that when you get down to the fundamental elements of matter they turn out not to be very much like matter at all they turn out to be these weird quantum processes and entities that appear to be tangled up with consciousness in some way that no one can understand and certainly display all sorts of properties that aren't evident at the macro level so you know the formal job of reductionism which is you are one element of reductionism because there's many elements of reductionism is that you explain the complex by the simple and you know for a long time as we went deeper into the micro structure of things it did appear in some sense to be getting simpler but then when we went down to the quantum level it all of a sudden got incredibly weird and no one really knows what to do about that now I'm not gonna I'm not gonna introduce quantum thinking into this discussion because you know every weirdo with a crock-pot Theory immediately immediately does that and it's a very dangerous thing to do I'm just pointing out that we didn't expect for the nature of reality to qualitatively transform as we investigated the microstructure but that's what happened so okay all of that aside the idea that truth that there are facts about material reality and that those facts are true is a very very powerful idea however we don't pursue it because the rationale for pursuing that truth is based on truths that are different from the truths that the process itself reveals so you know and I think you know you might well agree hypothetically that perhaps investigating how to combine Ebola with smallpox is not really a good idea from a science perfect idea from a scientific perspective but there it seems not unreasonable to assume that there's a broader perspective from which that idea problem Polly isn't for the best you know now a pure scientist there isn't such a thing but if there was might say it doesn't matter because all facts are equal because facts don't have value you know they're they're not valence so all facts are equal but of course you can't live like all facts are equal because there's a trillion fact and if you don't have some mechanism to zero you in on a subset of relevant facts it's like you're immobilized you know you're just flooded by information I think something like that probably happens to people in the initial stages of schizophrenia so they can't distinguish everything becomes relevant that's a bad situation so so you know you're stuck with a subset of facts anyways and there are reasons that you choose the subset of facts that you choose and those reasons aren't grounded in a materialist philosophy and they can't be at least not in any simple way okay so maybe you know hopefully that's a coherent argument now the next part of it is kind of something interesting that happened in the late 1800s so in the late 1800s there were a group of philosophers on the East Coast of the United States that called themselves pragmatists and William James was one of those people and William James is of course regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology even though he was a he wouldn't be allowed on a faculty of psychology today because he he was like he was like the first hippy you know in some sense because he liked to experiment with things like laughing gas he was very curious about phenomena like religious experience and so forth so he was very philosophically minded psychologist and and had some very well he was brave I would say you know which sometimes being weird and being braver the same thing he was also unbelievably intelligent and he had a group of people around him including a guy named Charles purse who's one of the on one of the West's greatest relatively unknown philosophers anyways they set up a new field of philosophy which is classically regarded as the only American philosophy and that philosophy was pragmatism you know and when you call someone pragmatic you sort of mean well they're willing to do what works you know they're concerned with what works and that's kind of pragmatism in a nutshell in some sense except it's a lot more sophisticated the pragmatists would say look you've got a problem and the problem is you don't know everything and what that means in some sense is that all of your knowledge about anything is limited even about the things that you think you know about it's limited and so you can never be sure you can never be certain that what you're dealing with is what you think you're dealing with or that when you deal with it what you expect to happen will happen and so you know you might think well I understand my you know I understand this can of coke sufficiently I can drink it and so on and so my knowledge is as close to absolute as it needs to be but you know this has aspartame in it and everybody thinks aspartame is dangerous but it's probably not but probably it's not you know and so who knows if I drink a hundreds of these things that might be the end of me and wouldn't that be stupid so the point is is that because you're surrounded by a cloud of ignorance that you cannot get rid of none of your judgments about what constitutes truth can be final and so one of the things the pragmatists were trying to figure out is well given that how can you even act because you can't compute well and this came up again in the 1960s and has really bothered people since then in the guise of the frame problem is you cannot compute all the consequences of your actions so how can you act how can you feel that you have enough knowledge to act so well it's a very difficult problem unbelievably difficult problem it's actually one of the problems that has made developing intelligent machines much more difficult than anyone thought it would be because it turns out that not only are there an infinite number of things that could happen as a consequence of a given action there's also a virtually infinite number of ways to look at a situation to perceive it we look at a situation and there it is and so we just think it's given but it turns out that that's just seriously wrong and the only reason that when we look at the world that it's given is because our psyche our consciousness which we still think of as sort of a soul is actually something that is grounded deeply in the biological processes of our body and that all of those biological processes that were created over evolutionary time struck to our perceptions before we even know it and just deliver this world to us so it looks obvious but you know it took well we've been evolving for like 3 billion years or something like that so it took a lot of tinkering around to get this perceptual system to do what it does so ok so they're very interested in you know in how you came up with ideas of truth and what they what they settled on roughly speaking is something like whenever you can whenever you conduct an action you setup the criteria for determining whether what you're doing is is reasonable or factual based on the outcome that you want to attain and so for the pragmatists it was more like things were true enough and so if my goal in interacting with this coke can is to have a drink and when I do what I am going to do and I get a drink then not sufficiently true and I can go on to the next thing so but it's still tenuous because it leaves open other questions like should I be drinking this or something else or you know whatever it leaves open all sorts of questions but doesn't matter as far as the pragmatists are concerned now when Darwin published his theory the pragmatists got on it right away they were really interested in Darwinian theory because they regarded it as a version of pragmatism which is quite cool and they did this within I think within five years of its publication you know it caused quite a quite a stir people were sort of ready for the theory but the pragmatists were really all over it because they thought of the mechanism that Darwin described to count for evolution as a pragmatic mechanism now that's an interesting idea so think about it this way so how much do you need to know well from a Darwinian perspective there's an answer to that you need to know enough so that you can last long enough to pass your genes to the next generation that's it and the Darwinian would also say well obviously your knowledge is faulting incomplete because you know your ability to transmit your genetic material the next generation is somewhat limited you know you have a limited number of partners plus you die and the fact that you die indicates that you as a solution to the problem of of maintaining your own life and reproducing your like a partial solution you're a good enough solution you'll do for like the 30 years or the 35 years of the 40 years that you're likely to be active in a you know you know functionally reproductive sense so you're a good enough answer and but you know the Darwinian and the pragmatists also said something else or implied something else which is you're good enough and also not only is that as good as it gets it's also as good as it can get so they put some really stringent restrictions on what would what you could regard as a sufficient solution to a given problem and the reason for that was that well that your knowledge is limited and that things transform unexpectedly and so the best thing you could do is run along and try to keep up and you'll never really do much better than that in some sense because things are unpredictable and because they change in an unpredictable way so now the final part of the argument is this so then what are we to regard as truth now leave the materialist claims aside I'm perfectly willing to say and I think it would be ridiculous not to that that's a form of truth that at least is very useful so fine it's a tool it may be more than that it may may be it is saying something about the absolute nature of reality I don't care about that at least it's a useful tool for us it's made us more powerful but then we have this other problem which is well what about the nature of the system that it's embedded in like how do we determine its utility or how do we determine the utility of anything or how do we determine how to act or how do we determine what to value and those questions can't be asked using this answer using the same methodology that science uses to answer its questions

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 78,400

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Essential Truth, alchemy, the philosopher's stone, truth, bite-sized philosophy, Dose of Truth, science, ScienceNET, PowerfulJRE, Manofallcreation, TheArchangel911, Psyche Matters, Intense 5, Ramble, Mulliganbrothers, Evan Carmichael, Clash of Ideas, Jocko Podcast, H3 podcast, psychology, philosophy, William James, Carl Jung, Pragmatism, MagiCal HD, Ideacity, Gravitahn, Transliminal, M Czerna, Bearing

Id: Foflhr_-O60

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2018