This
is an interesting discussion and a great example of the scripture- Where is the
wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God
made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the
world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to
save them that believe.- 1 Cor.1:20-21 Now it must be acknowledged that both
men are exemplar in their respective fields and highly intelligent. This
qualifies them to serve as examples that “the world by wisdom knew not God”.
The audience has high hopes that these sorts of free flow discussions will
unlock wisdom wherewith economic, social, ethical and political problems will
dissolve and the next stage of evolutionary enlightenment will sweep over the
world overrunning the ignorant (bible believers included) freeing the world
from superstition (like traditional Christianity) to the next great stride
toward societal salvation. The disagreement between the two men are in regards
to how to perceive ancient religious texts.
Jordan Peterson's point is that religious
stories encode wisdom acquired through millennia of evolutionary changes and
should be reverenced by the individual trying to orient himself in life and
ignoring them could imperil us. We don't know what all is necessary in the
stories to discard them recklessly. The individual needs an a priori structure
to interpret reality which we have built into us neurologically by evolution as
well as by socialization. This value structure was developed over the evolutionary
period and cannot be assimilated in the individuals own lifetime. Jordan says
there is overwhelming evidence for this evolutionary a priori value structure
in the scientific literature and this needs to be further explored. He
criticizes Sam for being too quick to dismiss this orienting compass in the
religious traditions on one hand and yet needing to replace it with his own
stories and values on the other. He presses Sam on his abandoning ancient
tradition for his 'transcendent rationality' asking what that is exactly and
pointing out the a priori framework which we must apply to the innumerable
objective facts and variables in the world to produce in our minds a manageable
subset within which we can operate. (Not Jordan’s example, but something along
the lines of seeing a field of grass and stating that the grass is green. There
are a million blades of grass and other weeds mingled in with perhaps hundreds
of shades of green and other colors throughout the field. You communicate the
idea of grass and the predicate green and eliminate the innumerable variables
such as the sizes of each individual blades, the angle of the sunlight,
position of the sun, the shadows, the wind, smells, time of year, the number of
clouds etc. to be able to communicate efficiently. We use the universal ‘grass’
to apply to the millions of blades of grass, otherwise we could not communicate
about millions of things at once. This is the ancient ‘one and many’ or
‘universals and particulars’ problem of philosophy.)
Jordan's
conception of God is a "complicated" group of different things. A
transcendent conscious reality only observable over the longest of time frames
(3.5 billion years from our evolutionary standpoint). God is that which creates
habitable order out of chaos of being. God is the conceptions of reality
metaphysically and biologically built into us over vast expanses of time. God
is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit the higher being and
truth, the highest value in the hierarchy of values, that reason for which we
sacrifice now for a better future. The voice of conscience and eternal call to
adventure; the source of judgment, mercy and guilt, the expression of truthful
speech. That principal which selects among men the better qualities giving them
a rise to power guaranteeing their posterity. It sounds like Jordan's idea of
God- is logic, science and morality. (Jordan says he lives as if God exists,
I’m sure God is flattered- Rom.1:19-22.)
Sam Harris' issue is that there are two
extremes that society can fall into- religious fundamentalism and
totalitarianism on one side and nihilism on the other. We must escape these 2
with a value system based upon empirical facts not arbitrary or from revelation (e.g. the bible).
A good life and bad life is distinguished with reference to undue (who decides that?) pain,
suffering, early death, anxiety, etc. and these can be measured empirically.
This is the basis of ethics and the direction we should move towards is a good
life. Sam believes Jordan pays excessive homage to these religious stories and
they are too subject to bias interpretations and abuse being used to manipulate
people as well as destructive to science and enlightenment, our saviors as
evidenced by our societal and technological development over the last couple
hundred years. Sam believes the religious texts are more dangerous than helpful
and we should dispossess ourselves of superstitious thinking while we
(presumably scientists like himself) distill empirical generalizations from
experience to guide society. Religions, he cavils, decide certain truths for
all times that cannot be amended anytime in the future. This is unscientific
since new ideas and things arise continually and we must outgrow this
childishness and not dignify these religious stories.
Jordan presses Sam when he dismisses as an
"interpretive game" the distilling of wisdom from the bible as
himself being committed to the same game trying to derive value judgments from
brute facts in the world of experience. Noting that the excessive amount of
facts in the world with the extensive number of interpretations cannot be
connected without a Kantian type of a priori structure which Sam is mirroring
while at the same time is criticizing. Sam thinks that he is not mirroring
Jordan's "reading into any story some apparently meaningful set of
psychological insights" when he is reading into empirical facts some
apparently meaningful set of psychological insights. Jordan caught his
inconsistency as moderator Bret Weinstein seemed to point out as well
mentioning that its “working across purposes with your other argument”.
The most important part of the discussion is
when Jordan asks Sam to elucidate his idea of an a priori structure, or
perceptive apparatus. Sam says our intuition of truth and common reality is
deeper than religion; it's a fundamental anchor of our sanity and knowing the
difference between knowledge and hallucination. These intuitions are either
impossible to analyze or must be compared to other more rudimentary intuitions
like mathematics; which apparently is like a generalized counting (worked out
by people over generations) of 4 apples into an abstract idea of the number 4.
Or as 2 dimensional geometry was the standard until someone realized
intuitively you could bend a triangle along a 3 dimensional curve and its
angles would exceed 180 degrees. Jordan incorporates into the a priori
framework the use of religious stories as a reduction of innumerable
experiences to a manageable framework to help us live our life using wisdom
that is impossible to acquire in our lifetime; we don't get interpretation from
raw facts, we supply it. The raw facts don't tell us as Sam does that we should
"act in a way, which means to embody a mode of being, which means to be a
personality, which moves us from hell to something approximating heaven. That's
not a fact!" This is a result of Sam applying an a priori framework to
objective facts.
It is evident during this discourse that
Jordan Peterson pays closer attention to philosophy than does Sam Harris, but
not close enough. This is the issue; epistemology. And this is exactly what
both men must presume and take for granted to be able to scale their
philosophies to a grand system. They both fail to appreciate in this discussion
their own concept of an a priori structure or perceptive apparatus and the
basis for which it produces accurate information and truth. The question is not
do they perceive truth but can their philosophies account for how perception is
at all possible? Is this rationally consistent with their grand system? Not,
are they able to count, but can they account for their counting? The answer is
NO!
Both men assume there is an external world,
although as philosophers have pointed out we are only acquainted with our sense
data and not the actual world; we infer its existence as the cause of the sense
data. You can never experience the external world you can only experience your
sense data, thus the material world is unknowable along with any
"apparently meaningful set of psychological insights" they might be
verbalizing. Both men assume cause and effect, i.e. my sense data is the effect
of the external world. Causation is another problematic assumption in their
philosophical system as David Hume consistently demonstrated. Jordan referenced
Immanuel Kant regarding this perceptive apparatus that we all use to make sense
of the world of experience. Kant believed he solved the rationalists and
empiricists dilemma over against each other after Hume properly pointed out
that given their worldview cause and effect was not logically necessary rather it was psychological (more precisely that causation was not analytic as previously believed, rather it was synthetic- not known by logical deduction alone). Hume concluded
causality was just a habit of association, provoking Kant to find an answer to
this. Causality in Hume’s case would be like Pavlov’s dogs deducing that food
is produced by certain chimes- cause and effect would actually be nothing more
than conditioning, leading to the conclusion that we have no logical basis to
expect any one thing over any other in the next 5 minutes. You couldn’t even
say that causation, or the inductive principle is probably true because
probability assumes the uniformity of cause and effect in nature.
In summary of Hume’s doctrine Russell points out the objective and subjective parts. “The objective part says: When we judge that A causes B, what has in fact happened, so far as A and B are concerned, is that they have been frequently observed to be conjoined, i.e. A has been immediately, or very quickly, followed by B; we have no right to say that A must be followed by B, or will be followed by B on future occasions. Nor have we any ground for supposing that, however often A is followed by B, any relation beyond sequence is involved.” “The subjective part of the doctrine says: the frequently observed conjunction of A and B causes the impression of A to cause the idea of B. But if we are to define ‘cause’ as is suggested in the objective part of the doctrine, we must reword the above… ‘It has been frequently observed that the frequently observed conjunction of two objects A and B has been frequently followed by occasions on which the impression of A was followed by the idea of B.” (History of Western Philosophy- pg.640) Hume reduces objective scientific laws and uniformities to psychological habit that offers no guarantee of the same effects any time in the future. Even our perceptions which are caused by external things (well... ok, there is no causation so I guess our thoughts are random episodes) can’t be expected to be the same- so that we should abandon all expectations of any uniformity if we are going to be rationally consistent. Perhaps Russell’s apple will taste like roast beef the next time (pg.641). This would render sanity and insanity as equally logical alternatives in the expectation of any future events. Kant thinks he solved Hume’s challenge by making causation a necessary part of our perceptive apparatus; he psychologizes science. Science is now subjective. Sort of anticlimactic, right? Ultimately acquiescence to metaphysics is the only solution (Maybe the bible has something to offer us after all!). Sam by his own admission can’t know any of this to be true unless chemical reactions governed by physical laws in his brain randomly cause this thought to lodge into his head- in which case he wouldn’t ‘change’ his mind, his mind would just change on its own. Who needs the Marx brothers when we have this material!?! (Sam denies any free will as a naturalistic determinist; he decrees that it is an illusion.)
Another subjective dilemma with science is also the result of starting with man as the basis of knowledge and not God (Job 12:1,2, 13, Prv.2:6). Einstein referred to “naïve realism” as an illusion where things ‘are’ as they are perceived by us through our senses. He further states this “illusion dominates the daily life of men and animals”. Einstein went on by quoting Russell working away from naïve realism- “The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will.” (Ideas and Opinions pg. 20) His conclusion leads to the rejection of naïve realism based upon physics, indicating that our initial perceptions need logic and theory applied to them. Perceptions with conceptions. Kant said concepts without percepts are empty and percepts without concepts are blind. So these conceptions in our perceptive apparatus are transcendentally necessary to make our experience intelligible, as Jordan acknowledged. But we don’t just accept our perception alone, we look to some number of others to validate it with the same percepts. The understanding is the lawgiver to nature, but whose understanding, God’s or mans? It’s assumed your abstract thoughts are accurately related to material things; the ancient ‘one and many’ or ‘deduction vs induction’ or ‘universals and particulars’ dilemmas again. The problem further is that conceptions and perceptions are from different worlds, contradictory worlds.
The
conceptual world of logic and math is perfect, unchanging, universal, abstract-
the opposite of our perceptions which are imperfect, fluctuating, particular
and physical. The empirical method of reasoning from perceptions involves a
formal fallacy in logic of affirming the consequent instead of the antecedent.
If you deny a law of logic or math you end in contradiction (A is not A; 2
+2=5). But to deny an empirical fact involves no self-contradiction (All birds
do not fly; the earth does not revolve around the sun). If logic and math are
generalized from experience then they are only probably true, and might change
tomorrow. To apply infinite mathematics to the physical world involves infinite
regress errors (You couldn’t have infinite points of division between two
measurable points in space- Zeno’s arrow paradox; were there an infinite number
of past causal events we could never arrive at the present). Or also
Russell’s class paradox (class of all classes that is not a member of itself-
is a member of itself and therefore not a member itself at the same time).
Numbers appear to be abstract objects, not in a location and no causal
interaction with other objects. Or the law of identity (in logic) would prohibit us from expecting any change in nature- for if A is A it will not also be something else.
You can’t under estimate what Hume has done to Jordan and Sam’s evolutionary philosophies, but he utterly destroyed their basis for science at all. They have nothing left in the aftermath of Hume. Russell affirms concerning induction "that without this principle science is impossible."(pg.647) They are ignorant of this fact or choose to ignore it so they can continue thinking! But as it stands they cannot explain how thought or knowledge or science is possible apart from the Creator whom they do not like to retain in their knowledge. If they cannot justify thinking they must relinquish the use of it.
Because
that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful;
but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools… Rom.1:21-22
