Potential : Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

I found this enriching in a thoughtful sort of way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o83Q61ewlg


What do you all think ?

Thank you Alex - I think this is a wonderful talk Thank you for sharing

I think it might also be worthwhile investigating some of Peterson's other work. He has a book coming out called "Do not Bother Children while they are Skateboarding: 18 Rules of Life" which sounds brilliant! On another tangent, his 'self-authoring' courses look interesting: http://selfauthoring.com/

I really liked this thank you Alexandre. Though I will admit that the Harry Potter nerd in me screamed when he was talking about the golden Snitch. I was like noooooo you dont win if you get it, you just get 150 points which USUALLY assures victory but not always. Also only ONE snitch held the stone and that was only due to Dumbledores magic. Sorry for the off topic rant, I just love HP and went a little batty there.
I will also repost what I wrote about this in my journal here just so that everyone can see it as just a link would block some from seeing the post:
This video was a very interesting one as it seems to even connect to my military experiences. You start out as a specialist with just your job or even just your particular skill with a particular system in your job. Then as you move up in rank/experience you tend to take on collateral duties rounding out your skills as a sailor. So this is something even can be seen with practical applications of training in the professional world.

What can this video teach us? Well the first lesson that leapt out for me is mindfulness or focus. This is likely due to my recently completing my project with Leah and then doing the lesson. That we focus on the limited skill and if we do this as a moment to moment thing we will find that we acquire a vast array of skills and knowledge rounding us out as a person. However viewing too broadly can lead to missing details so the momentary focus can help us in the short term while a broader goal or awareness can be said to be best long term.

The second is that that without our own goals or ideas in mind we can fall prey to extremes of thought or ideology as we face the harsher realities of this world. So it is better to take on your own systems of thought or even healthy thoughts of the society or religion that you live in. However that second taking on should be done after examining the ideologies to ensure they are indeed healthy ones. It shows that we need a bigger goal then mere survival or material things for most people to be happy. I think this is why there are so many self help books out there. That people are always looking for that next small thing to give themselves meaning but failing to take a second to step back and look for a broader meaning.

However this leaves me with the questions: What is my own broader meaning? What broader meanings does one find in the Jedi path?

Thank you for this thread!

Prof. Peterson has become a huge influence on me in the last couple of years

ive been an avid reader all of my life, ive been "inspired" by a lot of authors and ideas, philosophers and gurus, but in all honesty, it has been a very small few which have resulted in tangible behavior changes

- j peterson is one of those few who have taught me things which have actually improved my life, my decision making processes, and relationships with other people

i started with Personality and it's Transformations

and then went to Maps of Meaning

he updates those every year i think, because they are both ongoing classes that he teaches at UO

after going through both series, especially if you go through two years of either/both, youll find that many of his other talks and presentations are mostly based on the two classes

i really enjoyed this a lot also
its the most recent thing i have seen from him, and there is a lot more original stuff because he is taking questions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6CsGY8wpGw

Oh, I remember this guy. His stuff came up here before, I recall...

Anyway, I'm two minutes in and already he is lying straight out of his behind. Right at the beginning he declares that we assume materialism in science. We don't. Especially not back when the age of science started, which is his dating, when a bulk of the pioneers of science were also creationists. Then he says that we have "no account at all" for consciousness, which is a lie. I call it a lie, because the man is a PhD psychologist, so it stands to reason he knows better but puts it like this nevertheless, in an effort to deceive. Then he complains about how our models of consciousness are not a part of classical physics, as if this was to be expected - one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science, he calls it. Then he went on about nihilism and the struggles of last century and I frankly was out of patience by the time he began proposing his "alternative"...

Gisteron wrote: Oh, I remember this guy. His stuff came up here before, I recall...

Anyway, I'm two minutes in and already he is lying straight out of his behind. Right at the beginning he declares that we assume materialism in science. We don't. Especially not back when the age of science started, which is his dating, when a bulk of the pioneers of science were also creationists.

the first thing i would say is that its not only inaccurate to claim someone is lying simply because you dont agree with them but that it is also counter-productive to the betterment of culture, generally speaking, to regard all divergent views as being deliberate deceptions

he is a practicing clinical psychologist for many years and an extremely well educated person -as well educated as yourself or probably any of your personal heroes- and while you might find logical refutation to some or other of his specific claims, to begin the discussion with accusation of deliberate deception is inappropriate if for no other reason than that it distracts from the actual conversation

http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/philosophy/scientific-materialism.php

"This common underlying worldview is known as "scientific materialism" or "scientism." As defined by twentieth century philosophers William James and Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, scientific materialism is the belief that physical reality, as made available to the natural sciences, is all that truly exists [Haught2010, pg. 48]. It is clear that there is little room for religion in this philosophical system, since religion involves faith in unseen and presumably empirically untestable entities."

from http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Materialism

"Methodological materialism is neither a belief nor an assumption but a restriction on method. Briefly stated it holds that a non-material assumption is not to be made. Science, for example, is necessarily methodologically materialist. Science wishes to describe and explain nature. Diversion into the "supernatural" begins to describe and explain matters that are not natural and obfuscate the natural.
Methodological materialism is a defining characteristic of science in the same way that "methodological woodism" is a defining characteristic of carpentry. Science seeks to construct natural explanations for natural phenomena in the same way that carpentry seeks to construct objects out of wood. In operating in this manner neither discipline denies the existence of supernatural forces or sheet plastics, their usefulness or validity. The use of either supernatural forces or sheet plastics is simply distinguished as belonging to separate disciplines."

given the well documented role of "materialism" in science from other sources, and that the maxim most oft repeated by those who count themselves as "pro science" goes something along the lines of "if you cannot repeat it in a laboratory, then you cannot claim it to be real/true" i would say that he probably not just making all of this up out of nowhere (or lying)

it seems to be a rather well accepted proposition that science is materialistic, and i cant help but think that you know this

Gisteron wrote: Then he says that we have "no account at all" for consciousness, which is a lie. I call it a lie, because the man is a PhD psychologist, so it stands to reason he knows better but puts it like this nevertheless, in an effort to deceive.

i think you also know very well he is referring to this , which is the second instance in very few words of you deliberately avoiding the truth because of your own bias - you throw around the word "liar" rather than acknowledge what you already know to be the context of his statements

tell me again who is deliberately trying to deceive?

Gisteron wrote: Then he complains about how our models of consciousness are not a part of classical physics, as if this was to be expected - one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science, he calls it. Then he went on about nihilism and the struggles of last century and I frankly was out of patience by the time he began proposing his "alternative"...

its too bad, you might have learned something

actually no, you would only see an enemy to attack, rather than recognizing another human being with intelligence and perspective worthy of consideration, which would make any positive intellectual maturation very unlikely

Scientific materialism is a position people may or may not hold. It is not a necessary part of science. It is true that since only the natural world is available to our observation, science has nothing to say about what lies beyond it, if anything does. It is false however that therefore science says or that people say because of science that nothing lies beyond nature. That is especially false of the early people of science he refers to when he talks of the time "since the scientific age began".

As for the quote from rationalwiki, I'd say that it is simply incorrect. By their definition of methodological materialism, it depends on what we mean by science if we can identify science in general as materialist in that sense. Enter history. Assumptions about decisions or motivations of influential individuals or peoples are technically non-material, but they are testable against available records and thus not necessarily non-scientific. Enter behavioural zoology. Assumptions about patterns of behaviour or the evolutionary reasons for their preponderance are non-material and yet this is almost all that entire field of science ever does. As a psychologist, I have no doubt Dr. Peterson understands this, too.

On to the consciousness thing. I for one do not know that he is referring to the hard problem of consciousness when he says that we - and I quote "can't account for it at all" (emphasis present in original tone). To me, this sounds a lot like he is saying that we have no account at all for consciousness and the article you link to says otherwise. Speaking of that article, I'm not positive that "Why is it conscious?" is a question "we can still meaningfully ask" "even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind". It is not self-evident to me that there is anything more to it. But regardless, by saying that we have no account at all for consciousness, I am left to believe that Dr. Peterson means that we basically know almost nothing substantive about this and because of his credentials I think he probably knows better and could, nay, should have worded it in a less obviously false way. At best one could argue that it was not intentional, not scripted, but then that's not my responsibility. I am left to respond to what he said, not what he meant.

Until there is a direct line between us, I am not dealing with another intelligent human being to interact with or to learn from, but with a recording. If he is still alive now and if I wish to converse with him or get clarification on some of the points he makes, I am of course free to search for ways to contact him. I'm sorry if he is a brilliant man otherwise and if you feel like I blasphemed your idol. I was just asked, like all of us, to comment on what he says in this specific video and so I did.

Very interesting. I like that he essentially says we get beyond being a "good citizen" to be a good person. The idea of being a good citizen doesn't really appeal to me. I think I should be a good person first then worry about my impact on society. I think being a good person will necessarily mean I am a fairly good citizen. I don't care about being a good citizen though. It seems to me that striving to be a good citizen is fairly restrictive. We should not be slaves to society's wishes but find out for ourselves what makes us a good person. I'd rather be a good person than a good citizen.

Thank you for sharing this, Alex.

Gisteron wrote: On to the consciousness thing. I for one do not know that he is referring to the hard problem of consciousness when he says that we - and I quote "can't account for it at all" (emphasis present in original tone). To me, this sounds a lot like he is saying that we have no account at all for consciousness and the article you link to says otherwise. Speaking of that article, I'm not positive that "Why is it conscious?" is a question "we can still meaningfully ask" "even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind". It is not self-evident to me that there is anything more to it. But regardless, by saying that we have no account at all for consciousness, I am left to believe that Dr. Peterson means that we basically know almost nothing substantive about this and because of his credentials I think he probably knows better and could, nay, should have worded it in a less obviously false way. At best one could argue that it was not intentional, not scripted, but then that's not my responsibility. I am left to respond to what he said, not what he meant.

It's a psychology lecture, not a neuroscience lecture! He likes to go into depth but this format doesn't allow it... so he is stacking abbreviated concepts to keep it short. His topic seems to be an alternate way to understand reality (by looking at looking at it), and he makes the point we don't have universal knowledge, and that the very experience of consciousness, awareness, sentience itself falls within that domain of ignorance. I really cannot see that his point is to indicate the degree of maturation in neuroscience, and so I think its unrelated to the video to blame him for not doing so. Same thing with his use of materialism.

I think he is just talking about perception, how it can limit us if we don't actively improve it.

Personally, I tend to view it as a tensor field initially, and then ascribe structure by defining 3 types of gauges. That is how I like to perceive feelings, and on top of that as thought becomes more abstract I populate it with a more complex structure which ends up at a decision making matrix modelled around virtue ethics of self, deontology of society with a final pass of higher order effort to consequentialism.

I think his point is having a relationship with perception, we can redefine our experience of it. He compares that to the normal approach of being indoctrinated into using scientific knowledge to unnecessarily limit out potential in that field of perception.