Posted on by Kyle Roques

How To Approach The Bible


This is summary of a comment Jordan Peterson made in regards to “atheistic type people”, in so far as they have a type. He thinks that they don’t approach the Bible with enough respect. (And I’d argue most don’t even approach the Bible at all).

My approach to the Bible is the same as his, and he stated that he approaches it with the presupposition that “there’s probably more to this than I know”, and tries to understand the Bible from that perspective. Rather than to think that this is just a collection of superstitions we’ve outgrown – which isn’t a deep enough analysis.

That thinking has some truth but it doesn’t take into account the fact that the propositions in the Bible still stand at the foundation of our culture. It doesn’t take into account Nietzsche’s central concern, that if you blow out the notion of God, the entire structure crumbles. The “atheist types” haven’t wrestled with the real issues.

Posted on by Kyle Roques

Better Thinking

Reasoning aside, we know that people often acquire their beliefs about the world for reasons that are more emotional and social than strictly cognitive. Wishful thinking, self-serving bias, in-group loyalty, and frank self-deception can lead to monsters departures from the norms of rationality. Most beliefs are evaluated against a background of other beliefs and often in the context of an ideology that a person shares with others. Consequently, people are rarely aa open to revising their views as reason would seem to dictate.

There are some things that we are just naturally bad at. And a mistake people tend to make across a wide range of reasoning tasks are not mere errors; they are systematic errors that are strongly associated both within and across tasks. As one might expect, many of these errors decrease as cognitive ability increases. We also know that training, using both examples and former rules, mitigate many of these problems and can improve a person’s thinking.

On this front, the internet has simultaneously enabled two opposing influences on belief: on the one hand, it has reduced intellectual isolation by making it more difficult for people to remain ignorant of the diversity of opinion on any given subject. But it has also allowed bad ideas to flourish – as anyone with a computer and too much time on his hands can broadcast his point of view and, often enough, find an audience. So while knowledge is increasingly open source, ignorance is, too.

Sam Harris
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Out-Group Hostility – In-Group Altruism

A very interesting theory to contemplate. I feel this helps make sense of our current state of tribalism and morality.

Territorial violence might have been necessary for development of altruism. The economist Samuel Bowles has argued that lethal, “out-group” hostility and “in-group” altruism are two sides of the same coin. His computer models suggest that altruism cannot emerge without some level of conflict between groups. If true, this is one of the many places where we must transcend evolutionary pressures through reason – because, barring an attack from outer space, we now lack of proper “out-group” to inspire us to further altruism.

Sam Harris

Explains why it seems that we are constantly looking for a “they”, “them”, or “other” to transgress upon, contradictory to the altruism we show “our” own group.

Posted on by Kyle Roques

The Moral Landscape

My new book by Sam Harris

There are facts to be understood about how thoughts and intentions arise in the human brain; there are facts to be learned about how these mental states translate into behavior; there are further facts to be known about how these behaviors influence the world and the experience of other conscious beings. We will see that facts of this sort exhaust what we can reasonably mean by terms like “good” and “evil.” They will also increasingly fall within the purview of science and run far deeper than a person’s religious affiliation. Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, we will see that there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. Indeed, I will argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.

Sam Harris
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Sterilized Christianity – Alchemist Redemption

This final value, the goal of the pursuit of the alchemist, is discovery and embodiment of the meaning of life itself: integrated subjective being actively expressing its nature through manipulation of the possibilities inherent in the material / unknown world. This final goal is the production of an integrated intrapsychic condition – identical to that of the mythological hero – “acted out” in a world regarded as equivalent to self. Production of this condition – the lapis philosophorum – constitutes the antidote for the “corruption of the world,” attendant upon the Fall [attendant upon the emergence of “partial” self-consciousness.] The lapis is “agent of transformation,” equivalent to the mythological redemptive hero – able to turn “base metals into gold.” It is, as such, something more valuable than gold – just as the hero is more valuable than any of his concrete productions. The “complete” alchemical opus – with production of the lapis as goal – is presented schematically in figure 66.

Alchemy was a living myth: the myth of the individual man as redeemer. Organized Christianity had “sterilized itself,” so to speak, by insisting on the worship of some external truth as the means to salvation. The Alchemist (re)discovered the error of this presumption, and came to realize that identification with the redeemer was in fact necessary, not his worship; that myths of redemption had true power when they were incorporated, and acted out, rather than believed, in some abstract sense. This meant: to say that Christ was “the greatest man in history” – a combination of the divine and mortal – was not sufficient expression of faith. Sufficient expression meant the attempt to live out the myth of the hero, within the confines of individual personality – to voluntarily shoulder the cross of existence, to “unite the opposites” within a single breast, and to serve as active conscious mediator between the eternal generative forces of known and unknown.

Jordan Peterson
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Meaning of Myth

The myths of a culture are its central stories. These stories provide a dramatic record of the historically predicated transformation of human intent, and appear to exist as the episodic/semantic embodiment of history’s cumulative effect on action.

The mythical narratives that accompany retention of historically determined behavior constitute non-empirical episodic representation of that behavior and its method of establishment. Myth is purpose, coded in episodic memory. Mythic truth is information, derived from past experience – derived from past observation of behavior – relevant from the perspective of fundamental motivation and effect.

Myth simultaneously provides a record of historical essential, in terms of behavior, and programs those historical essentials. Narrative provides semantic description of action in image, back translatable into imaginary episodic events, capable of eliciting imitative behavior.

Mythic narrative offers dramatic presentation of morality, which is the study of what should be. Such narrative concerns itself with the meaning of the past, with the implications of past existence for current and future activity. This meeting constitutes the ground for the organization of behavior.

Myth has come to encapsulate and express the essential nature of the exploratory, creative, communicative psyche, as manifested in behavior, as a consequence of observation and representation of that behavior, in the temporally summed, historically determined manner beginning with imitation and ending with verbal abstraction.

Jordan Peterson
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Cyclic Creation of Morals (How Morals are Created)

Moral presumptions of society emerge first in procedural form, as a consequence of individual exploratory activity, which is the process that generates novel behavioral patterns. These behavioral patterns are then hierarchically structured as a consequence of quasi-Darwinian competition, in accordance with the constraints noted previously (appeal to the imagination, self-sustenance, etc.)

The episodic memory systems map procedure, and outcome there of, and thereby come to contain similar paradigmatic structure – imagistically, and then more purely semantically. Over time, the unknown, nature, thereby comes to be represented mythically as the effectively bivalent Great Mother, simultaneously creative and destructive. The known, culture, becomes the Great Father, tyrant and wise king, authoritarian and protective personality, adapted to the unknown. The knower, man, becomes the hostile mythic brothers, sons of convention, hero and anti-hero, Christ and Satan – eternal generator and destroyer of history and tradition.

Semantic cognition, feeding on narrative – the bridge between the episode and the pure verbal extraction – derives “rules” from behavior. Application of the rules alters the environment, including procedural and episodic representation thereof. Thus the cycle continues.

Jordan Peterson
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Foreign Viewpoint

This means essentially that to give serious consideration to another’s viewpoint means to risk exposure to indeterminate uncertainty – to risk a rise in existential anxiety, pain and depression; to experience temporally indeterminate effective, imagistic and cognitive chaos. It is much more likely, in consequence, that a foreign viewpoint will appear evil or will come to be defined as such (especially during times rendered unstable – unbearably novel – for additional alternative reasons).

Once such definition occurs, application of aggression, designed to obliterate the source of threat, appears morally justified, even required by duty. The alternative or foreign viewpoint is in fact reasonably considered evil (although this consideration is dangerously one-sided), when viewed in terms of its potential destructive capacity, from within the strict confines of the historically determined social-psychological adaptive structure. It is only within the domain of meta-morality (which is the morality designed to update moral rules) that the strange may be tolerated or even welcomed.

Jordan Peterson
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Understanding Morality

It is still the case, however, that description of the domain of morality tend to exceed the capability of declarative thought, and that the nature of much of what we think of as moral behavior is still, therefore, embedded in unconscious procedure. As a consequence, it is easy for us to become confused about the nature of morality, and to draw inappropriate, untimely and dangerous “fixed” conclusions.

Moral behaviors and schemas of valuation arise as a consequence of behavioral interaction undertaken in the social world: every individual, motivated to regulate his emotions through action, modifies the behavior of others, operating in the same environment. The consequence of this mutual modification, operating over time, is the emergence of a stable pattern of behavior, “designed” to match individual and social needs, simultaneously. Eventually, this behavioral pattern comes to be coded in image, heralded and narrative, and explicitly represented in words.

Myths of the “knowledge of good and evil” and the “fall from paradise” represent emergence of this representational capacity, in the guise of a historical event. The consequence of this “event” – that is, the development of “self-consciousness” – is capacity to represent death and understand that the possibility of death is part of the unknown.

These complex systems of action and belief are religious. They are the traditional means of dealing with the shadow cast on life by the knowledge of mortality. Our inability to understand the religious traditions and our consequent conscious denigration of their perspectives dramatically decrease the utility of what they have to offer.

We are conscious enough to destabilize our beliefs and our traditional patterns of action, but not conscious enough to understand them. If the reasons for the existence of our traditions were rendered more explicit, however, perhaps we could develop greater intrapsychic and social integrity. The capacity to develop such understanding might help us use our capacity for reason to support, rather than destroy, the moral systems that discipline and protect us.

Jordan Peterson
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Archetypal Reality

I feel this is a very accurate description of what’s going on with our world culture currently. More specifically with politics and social justice.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however – myth, literature and drama – portray the world as a forum for action.

The world as forum for action is composed, essentially, of three constituent elements, which tends to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory – the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinant things. Second is explored territory – the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory Word and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this world of divine characters, much as to the objective world. The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in reality a forum for action, as well as a place of things.

Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of ritual imitation of the Great Father- as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. The Restriction of adaptive capacity dramatically increases the probability of social aggression.

Jordan Peterson

As Jung has stated, group identity eliminates individuality to the detriment of the individual.