When NOT to Change Your Mind

there are some cognitive bad habits that circulate and you know I recognize them as I encounter them right as they challenge me and there's one in particular where people feel entitled to demand of you that you modify your model based on what they claim is compelling evidence of blah blah blah blah blah so for example there's a group of people who have become convinced that there was no novel pathogen in the covid phenomenon now that's that's possible um in my opinion the covid phenomenon was mostly not about a biological fact of a pathogen it was mostly about propaganda and things that you know human things um but here's the here's the problem scientism gone mad something gone mad but yeah the idea many things perhaps many things many things yeah I think we still don't we don't we still don't have the explanation and we're working there we're working towards it painfully but the problem is that your model of the universe that allows you to function is let's just admit this is not a um a direct description of the world it is a construction that allows you to function cognitively in the world right and my absolutely it's that's this is what attracted me to the American pragmatists because they figured that out in like 1890 it's like your world model is a navigation tool perfect so yes the point is yeah it's a perfect metaphor man the point is I don't have to justify it in the same terms that I would have to justify a scientific claim right the components of my model are what I use to make my way in the world and what justifies my use of them is that they work and when somebody says to me oh you have to swap that out because you know nobody has nobody sequenced the pathogen or whatever it is that they say my point is I am very reluctant to take something out of that model that has allowed me to successfully predict and navigate where I was going and I don't what's more this this is the important part I don't owe anybody an explanation for why I'm not taking it out because it's not a scientific claim what it is is a piece of a structure that has to function and I'm absolutely interested in swapping it out when I have something I can swap in that makes my model more predictive but I'm not interested in pulling it out because somebody demands that I be able to justify it in terms that they recognize right that's not what it is and so in some sense I think this goes back to the conversation that we were having on the main uh YouTube channel where the way in which people hold these most fundamental structures that's really a very private question right it's not you know if I hold it in such a way that it results in my success and my uh restraining myself ethically in a in a proper way then the point is that's a good structure I'm not arguing there's no better structure but that's a good one and what I don't want to do is ruin it right I could upgrade it if I've got it that's for sure man yeah so anyway these cognitive that's also there's a corollary to that too which is that you're going to have a structure like that whether you know it or not right and it isn't an a description of the objective facts of the world partly because part of the problem with that as far as I can tell is that if you had a comprehens description of the facts in the world you would have as many facts at hand as there are things in the world and that wouldn't be helpful now you could object while you can segregate them to some degree on the basis of you know comprehensive theories but those comprehensive the theories aren't navigational tools at best they're descriptions of the landscape and I'm I'm not complain claiming that we don't need descriptions of the landscape because we do because I don't care how good your map is you know your your strategy for orienting if your map of the landscape is inaccurate you're going to foul up but those aren't the same they really aren't the same thing and part of what people like Dawkins for example really don't understand is that if you destroy a functional navigational tool or you alter a map or you burn the map there'll be subsidiary maps that or subordinate maps that pop up which are way more pathological that's a descent from a monotheistic into a paganistic plural potentiality and then you might say well the plur potentiality is worth the cost and that's the Multicultural claim but the objection to that is yeah well fair enough guys what about the chaos and the conflict all right so how are you GNA deal with that so I've been playing you know you said you said something about once uh a thought gets into your to your mind it's like a living being and I'm very cautious actually I have a way of holding things in a kind of agnostic halfway point where I can consider them without taking them on but I'm Purgatory yeah it is thought Purgatory maybe but yeah exactly exactly um I wonder increasingly about the following question it is wonderful in many ways to have a huge diversity of things you might read read or listen to um there's something marvelous about that but I also wonder about if you were to look at the tradeoff between having a diversity of things to listen to and contemplate versus a uh what would the term be quality man well not even quality I if you let's put it this way if you have if you have an infinite diversity of things that you could read then you are able to read the highest quality things you might seek it but my question is what is the value of us having the same stuff in common right if you imagine like just take a scientific laboratory scientific laboratory in which everybody has the same Basics is a fertile place to have discussions even if those Basics aren't perfect right whereas something in which everybody is specialized in their own little quadrant but they can't talk to each other is not such a fertile place the an individual may may get somewhere new so what really wondering is how much is lost in the fact that you know in a in a room full of students um I had a hard time finding a single song that they all liked in common enough that they could sing it around a campfire having a VPN you trust is extremely important I can confidently say that expressvpn is the best VPN on the market and here's why expressvpn doesn't log your online activity many cheaper free vpns make money by selling your data to advertisers but expressvpn doesn't do this they even developed a technology trusted server that makes their VPN servers incapable of storing any data at all expressvpn now also uses lightwe a new VPN protocol engineered to speed up user speeds we've tried many vpns in the past and they can sometimes slow your connection but expressvpn is always blazing fast and lets me stream videos in HD quality with zero buffering at all plus I love how easy it is to use all you got to do is fire up the app and tap one button to connect it's not just me saying this either CNET The Verge and many other Tech journals raid expressvpn is the number one VPN in the world so protect yourself with the VPN that I use and Trust visit expressvpn.com jordant toay and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package expressvpn.com Jordan that's expressvpn.com Jordan to learn more okay so it became impossible for me as the years progress to teach my maps of meaning course is that right because it presumed knowledge of the biblical stories M okay so here's a hypothesis for you Brett tell me tell me what you think about this all right so the collective unconscious is the relationship between Concepts and the relationship between images and the relationship between behaviors the statistical relationship as they're manifested in the broad culture okay those are implicit structures now your unconscious is a reflection of that a low resolution reflection okay now imagine that to organize your unconscious properly you need a structure embedded within you that's isomorphic with the deepest parts of the culture otherwise you have no place to put things you have no way of ensuring a concordance between your orientation and the orientation of the world I think what the biblical Corpus did was provide a network of memorable stories that were places where information could be put so it's not a filing system exactly it's it's it's a foundation that's a good way of thinking about it and so and then it also facilitated communication because it provided the grounds for the use of such things as poetic illusion you know you made illusion to uh something striving to be born now that was understandable to me because I knew TS Elliot's poem well increasingly we can't understand each other because we don't have a shared narrative framework and that's the basis for understanding but it's worse than that it's the basis for the concordance between you and your culture and that's also part of the problem of bringing people in through the Darian Gap it's like we don't share the same implicit presuppositions now sometimes that's good you even see Illusions to this in the biblical narrative because it's very frequent in the Old and New Testament that the most moral person is a foreigner the most moral and necessary person so there's some true appreciation for the fact that novelty and diversity of opinion especially when the current culture is pathological is absolutely vital but by the same token there is this necessity to master so when the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers and even his own parents come up against Christ and and cast him as a heretic for example the first thing he says essentially is no you don't understand I was a P of the tradition long before I was a revolutionary right my whatever is revolutionary about me is embedded it's the fullest manifestation of the spirit of that tradition it's not something randomly revolutionary this would also be true I would say of a proper shamanic tradition is that that the tradition that's experimental in the highest possible sense is actually the fullest man manifestation of the spirit that gave rise to the sacred tradition what you see in the Gospels for example is when Christ goes after the Pharisees this is actually the insult I think that gets him crucified he says to them you are the same people that would have killed the prophets whose Dogma you now worship right that's a deadly criticism right because he's going after their it's a deadly deadly well and especially because it lands hard because it's more or less self-evidently true so you can imagine that in that in the sacred there's a spirit right this in the Sacred by your terminology there's a spirit that gave rise to the sacred the spirit that gave rise to the sacred is identical to the shamanistic that's why the word of God is embedded in God the father that's a good way of thinking about it that's why to give you a popular example that's why you have Pinocchio who's striving to become an individual and jepetto in the whale at the same time it's exactly the same idea you know that there's a paternal spirit that represents stability but the deepest part of that spirit is actually the investigative process that gave rise to the emergence of the Sacred to begin with right and it has to be held as Paramount this is why the Egyptians for example the Egyptians worshiped the eye the attentive eye because they knew that that was associated with Consciousness right they knew that that careful and humble attention had to be regarded as the highest possible manifestation of the proper spiritual path they portrayed it as that literally that which resurrects the the dead Osiris their their tradition [Music]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: W0ZSj6aoXyI

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024