Prompted by the points raised here – viewtopic.php?f=2&t=147018&p=2760014#p2760014 – I googled jordan peterson and sam harris. Among the links was this one:
My Analysis of the Disconnect Between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson
How two great thinkers continue to miss each other, and how they can fix it
By DANIEL MIESSLER in PHILOSOPHY
The first thing noted is something that also happens all the time here. An exchange between two or more intelligent and articulate ILP members goes on and on and on and on. Yet try as we might, we are not successful in communicating ideas about things and relationships that seem really, really clear to us. How can they not get it? For me of course they revolve around dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. For you, your interests. For others, theirs.
But the fact that others don’t grasp my points doesn’t surprise me. After all, it took me years of new experiences and new relationships and access to new ideas to reconfigure “I” from a moral/political objectivist to a moral/political nihilist.
Why?
Because those points revolve subjectively and subjunctively around ever accumulating things and relationships out in the is/ought world. Interactions rooted existentially in the extremely complex reactions we have as individuals to a particular world around us.
And these worlds can be profoundly varied. The social, political and economic variables are problematic to each individual. Different indoctrination as children. Different genetic and memetic interactions. Different traumatic experiences. Different epiphanies given extraordinary circumstances that others will never be able to fully understand.
Still, because there are so many things in the either/or world that we are able to communicate objectively to each other, some don’t make the distinction that I do in regard to moral and political values. For them [through one or another God or No God font] the is/ought world is just an extension of the either/or world.
And I argue as well that this is often predicated on the extent to which believing in the “real me” in sync objectively with “the right thing to do” is derived from the psychological comfort and consolation one sustains on this path. Thus:
It’s not what you believe is right and wrong but that you believe that what you believe is true.
And here’s the part where I insist on taking value judgments as intellectual contraptions out into the world of conflicting goods.
Out into a specific context pertaining to behaviors we are all familiar with.
All of this predicated on the assumption that we have at least some measure of free will.
You all know me here:
What facts? In what set of circumstances? Out in what particular world historically, culturally, experientially? Useful to who and for what reason? Then: what are we able to demonstrate to others when our reaction to those facts precipitate behaviors that come into conflict?
Okay, but what if it is useful for you to believe that God becomes the transcending font for distinguishing between good and evil on this side of the grave? What if it is useful for you to believe that God becomes your passport to immortality and salvation on the other side of it?
And how on Earth is Sam Harris able to definitively demonstrate that religion is not true? That beyond all doubt there is no God?
What difference does it really make what Peterson believes. For me, he is in the same boat with Harris and you and I…the one that embodies the gap between what we think we know about things like this and all that we would need to know about existence itself in order to demonstrate that what we think we know is in fact true.
more later…