The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

So, I just finished a book which is going to be published in November.

And I walked through a sequence of biblical stories trying to explain what they meant psychologically.

And I spent some time on the book of Exodus for obvious reasons.

I read a book last year called Wake Up.

It's a wonderful theory but I think that from this deep framework that science is now moving into beyond space time all of evolutionary theory all of it is an artifact of projection it's not in other words if you're looking like from a spiritual point of view for some deep principles deep spiritual principles evolution I don't think is deep enough I think that it's all of it is an artifact of space time projection and if you're going to be thinking looking for deep principles about you know that spiritual traditions talk about Abraham and really thinking big I think that thinking inside space time is not big enough you've got to step entirely outside of space time space time has all these artifacts and we're so used to being stuck in the head so there isn't well there is an insistence upon that in in the Judeo-Christian tradition because God is conceptualized what would you say traditionally as being entirely outside of time and space and so like whatever works for human like the human landscape and the divine landscape they're not the same there's a relationship between them however but they're not the same okay so now okay so let me let me ask you about that now you have made the case not least in this interview that consciousness is primary now consciousness uses these projections so how do you reconcile the notion that consciousness is primary and I want to make sure I'm not misreading what you're saying that consciousness is primary but consciousness operates in the world with these projections see because this is the thing I grapple with is that if survival itself is dependent on the utilization of a scheme of pragmatic projections in what sense can we say that reality is something other than that like because see part this is something that person and William James wrestled with too it's like well why make the claim that there is a reality outside of the human concern with survival and reproduction and and if conscience is the primary reality and it's using projections to orient itself so that it can survive and reproduce in the biological sense how can you even begin to put forward a claim that there is a reality that transcends that like on what grounds does it transcend it in relationship to what right so so these are deep waters and the idea that I'm playing with right now is that this consciousness is there's one ultimate infinite consciousness and it what is up to knowing itself but how do you know yourself well there are certain theorems that say that no system can actually completely know itself right so right so if the if this one infinite consciousness wants to know itself all it can do is start looking at itself through different perspectives so putting on different headsets so spacetime is one one headset and from that perspective here's a so this is a projection of of the one infinite consciousness and in that perspective it looks like evolution by natural selection it looks like quantum field theory and so forth and and it looks like I need to play the game this way but this is a trivial headset but actually I think what a cheaper headsets okay that's very interesting okay so one of the things so while writing the book that I'm writing now I've been walking through all these biblical narratives and one of the things they do every single narrative provides a different characterization of the infinite there's no real replication it's like well here's a picture of the divine and here's another one and here's another one and here's another one now there's an insistence that runs through the text this unites the text that those are all manifestations of the same underlying reality but it is definitely the case that what's happening is that these are movies so to speak shot from the perspective of different directors and it does seem to me akin to something coming to know itself there's this ancient Jewish idea this is a great it's like a Zen cone it's a great little mystery says so here's the proposition so God is traditionally imbued the following characteristics omniscience omnipresence and omnipotence what does that lack and you know you think well that's a ridiculous question because oh by definition that lacks nothing but the answer is limitation that lacks limitation and that's that's actually the classical explanation for God's creation of man is that the unlimited needs the limited as a viewpoint and has something to do with the development of as you pointed out I believe it has something to do with the with the possibility of coming to it's something like conscious awareness you see this in T. S. Eliot too remember which poem where he talks about coming back to the point of origin which is like the return to childhood you know that that heavenly notion that to enter the kingdom of heaven you have to become as a little child it's like but there's a transformation there so that that return to the point of origin is accompanied by an expansion of consciousness it's not a it's not a collapse back into childish unconsciousness it's the reattainment of a what would you say it's it's the reattainment of the state of play that's a good way of thinking about it that obtained when you're a child but with conscious differentiated knowledge so there there is this tremendous narrative drive in the western tradition towards differentiated comprehensive understanding as a positive good and that seems tied up with the continual drama between God and man so and I do think the scientific enterprise is an offshoot of that that's what it looks like to me historically so okay so how in the world do you survive in psychology departments given what you're thinking about well I've got the mathematics so as long as if if I was just talking this stuff without any mathematical underpinnings to it it would be dismissed of course but but the you know we've in the case of the evolutionary stuff we've published papers and the journal theoretical biology for example and and elsewhere where we actually put the mathematics out there so it's peer reviewed and and I think that it's a bit surprising but and I you know I I'm in a minority a small minority but you know that's that's the way science progresses you it precedes one funeral at a time and yeah so it progresses by by minorities of one exactly right so so and and scientists understand that you know you you want to have independent ideas think out of the box make it mathematically precise most of our ideas will be nonsense including mine but you you got to put them out there and push them and and see see what happens I have I'll say in terms of I've gotten some stiff respect for example some philosophers have published papers recently where they give the following argument against my Darwinian theory they they'll say look Hawkeman uses evolutionary gain theory to show that space and time and physical objects and organisms don't exist well he's got himself what they say an uninvailable dialectical situation either evolutionary gain theory faithfully represents Darwin's ideas or it doesn't they say okay so if it doesn't then you can't use it to say that organisms and resources are not fundamental it's based on and if it does faithfully represent Darwin's ideas well Darwin's ideas are that space time is fundamental in their organisms and resources so so it couldn't possibly contradict that so either way Hawkeman is screwed right he there's nothing he can do so so and and so and that's been published actually in high high value of floss materials and my response is it's quite simple it misunderstands science completely every scientific theory has when you write it down mathematically it has a scope and its limits and the mathematics tells you both the scope and the limit so for example just to be very concrete Einstein's theory of gravity right and I think 1907 or so he had this the big idea if I was standing on a weighing machine in an elevator and all of a sudden the chord was cut and now it was some freefall the I would all of a sudden be weightless that was his big idea for his theory of gravity it took him years seven or eight years to actually make the mathematics but he wrote wrote down his field equations so so those field equations are Einstein's mathematics to capture his idea that space time is fundamental and has certain properties well a year after he published it a Schwarzschild German scientist discovered that they entailed black holes and we've eventually found out that the Syrian tales that space time itself has no operational meaning beyond 10 to the minus 33 centimeters so we could use the same argument that's been used against me against Einstein now look okay Einstein's field equations either they're faithfully representing Einstein's ideas or they're not but so we can use the same argument you know against Einstein yet they've been used against my theory now either Einstein's field equations capture his ideas faithfully or they don't if they don't then we couldn't use them to show that space time is in fundamental and if they do they couldn't possibly show that space time is in fundamental that last step is the wrong one the equations are there to show you the limits of your concepts they give you precise and that's so that's what these philosophers have missed is that the equations that we write down tell us not just the scope but the limits of our theories and that's that's why science is so valuable because it tells us your theory your assumptions go this far and no further so that's all I've done with Dr. Wings theory of evolution is to say this story is that also okay man but that also sounds to me very much like a vindication of the fundamental claim of the pragmatists which is that we accept something as true without noticing that what we mean is true in a time frame with certain implications for for instantiation it's something like that and so true true is a lot more like does the bridge stand up when 100 cars goes go across it it's not some final comprehensive all encompassing definition of the truth for all time and you've already made the case that it can't be because that truth is never receding goal it's always bounded okay so when I came across that I thought okay well bounded by what and it's well it's bounded by our aim and and then that's bounded by our motivation and then that's inested inside a Darwinian world okay now let's go after the game theory let me just say one thing about that sorry yeah yeah I would just say that the very deep deep spiritual traditions really say that up front like the touted chink starts off that says the touted that can be spoken of is not the true tout once you understand that then we're going to have to read the rest of it right that's a good example because that's a great book yeah that's a great book and I think that that's also the way we should think about our science the science that can be spoken of is not the final reality but but given that it's a wonderful thing to do science and we should do science and we should do it very very rigorously but we should always understand that if we're talking about a theory of everything it should be with a wink and a nod because there is no theory of everything that we can write down this the every the theory of everything that we've discovered so far maybe but it will never be the final theory of everything right and it might have a broader broader range of potential applications as well but that doesn't mean that we've exhausted the landscape of comprehensive theories right okay so now the philosophers that you described as objecting to your theory said that if evolutionary game theory is correct and it models Darwin's propositions appropriately then well so game theory is extremely interesting to me although I wouldn't say I'm an expert in its comprehension but I understand it's just I believe and it seems to me to be something like this is that if you iterate interactions and ethos of one form or another emerges so for example if you play tit for tat simulations you find out that the best trading strategy is cooperate but slap when necessary and then forgive something like that and so what it points to very interestingly is something like a concordance between objective reality in so far as objective reality is an emergent pattern up coming out of iterative interactions and something like an ethos so the first question I have is like why are you interested in evolutionary game theory and why do you think that it is a valid representative a more differentiated representative if I've got the language right of Darwinian theory oh well I'm interested in it because that's within the field of evolutionary theory itself evolutionary game theory is taken as the of the prize mathematical tool for really understanding things so that's okay just the framework of the science itself as far as you're concerned yeah I mean of course there's always debate but by the vast subs but there this you know it's it's the received opinion so if I wanted to as a scientist if I wanted to analyze Darwin's theory for this issue of about truth and I wanted to do it rigorously the the tool was evolutionary game theory that was that was the tool to use and that's not because I think it's the final word or or that or the truth is just our current state of play in the field right now that's the best we have and I wanted to use the best tool we have and and that's the way we're always pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps in science right we always say these are the best theories we have and the best tools we have so far of course our goal is not to prove that we're right our goal is to find the limits of our current theories and transcend them so we're looking for are the best tools that will say aha Darwin goes this far and no further space time goes this you know high energy theoretical physics line science wonderful theories they're they're incredible gift they go to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and they stop that gift stops right there and now we have to go entirely outside and and that will be the never ending pattern of science is that whatever the scientists are finding outside of space time that will just be our next baby step and we'll analyze that and then say okay what's beyond that and beyond that and and science will continue to so as long as you recognize that that's the game you you'll realize that there's no theory of everything in science and then the question is who am I who are we that are able to do this game and that's an apparent trust in question well you know there's lots of things i'd like to ask you about but that's a pretty good place to stop and we're damn near at an hour and 30 so um i hope i have the privilege of furthering my discussion with you at some point in the not new not too dear future i would like to say is there anything in closing that you would like to bring to the attention of the listening audience the watching audience that you think that we needed to cover to make what we have covered comprehensible or is that also in your estimation a good place to stop i'll just say one little thing i guess and that is some people might think well he's got the theory of consciousness outside of space time so what who cares and the and i would agree with that unless i did something more so what what we're trying to do now is scientists to say we have this mathematical model of consciousness outside of space time um we we just published a proposal for how to actually test it so we're gonna have a projection into space time we're working on that projection we'd like to model the the inner structure of the proton we'd like to have a dynamics of conscious agents that projects down and gives us what's called the um the momentum distributions of quarks and gluons inside a proton of all the york and x and q squared the different spatial and temporal resolutions that particle physicists have studied so and and the reason we're going there is not because i think that's the most important application of a theory of consciousness it's the most accessible one that's the simplest part of our science right now ultimately of course the brain has the the nice neural correlates to consciousness we want to understand that but that's really complicated so we're gonna go after if we can model the proton and get it exactly right get the momentum distributions to several decimal places those in my theory is right but it does mean it can't be dismissed out of hand and so that's that's what our goal is to take a theory of consciousness not just in a very wavre hands and the uh but to actually get in there and predict the structure of the uh the inner structure of the proton with great detail if we can do that then i would say we then construct and move up you know to molecules and and then ultimately to neural systems and the brain i tried to understand the neural correlates to consciousness but not the neural correlates the brain does not cause consciousness on this model the brain is merely a symbol inside the headset right so it's so and in fact i would say this neurons do not even exist when they're not perceived neurons cause none of our behavior and yet i'm i'm a cognitive neuroscientist and i think that we we should study you know we uh we neuroscience is wonderful and we need more funding for it because yeah it's more complicated than we thought we thought we look inside the brain we see neurons that's because that's the reality there are neurons no that's that's the interface description of something that's much more complicated we have to reverse engineer neurons to this network of consciousness outside of space time so we need more funding for neuroscience it's much more complicated so so i would just a little break and of course as you can imagine i'm talking about something that could take hours to go into detail but but just to to put those out there and say these are objections and people might have so we're headed okay well i do i do have one okay i do have one other question then i guess i do have to throw it out so you have a very radical conception of consciousness what has that done for you existentially do you think i mean you're obviously thinking about the place of consciousness while you're thinking about it existentially you're thinking about the place of consciousness in the cosmos and you regarded as a fundamental reality so what has that done to the manner in which you contemplate your own say mortality or the purpose of your life and what what's that done for you on that on that side of things quite a bit it's really hit me in the face because i'm intuitively as much a physicalist and a materialist as anybody else really night right my i'm wired up to to believe all that and so it's it's come as a terrible shot to me my my whole self image has had to change and it says and i what direction in what direction your self image changed what changed well i thought of myself as little object in space time right right right and the death of the body is ultimately the death of me and now it's well the our best science says that this is you know my body is just an icon in a headset so in some sense it's just an avatar this body is just an avatar is not and so death is more like taking off headset so but my emotions don't agree with that so i've got this really interesting yeah well that's probably just as well right exactly so so it's so it's it's so i do spend a lot of time in meditation and my father was a Protestant minister a fundamentalist Protestant minister i was so i was raised on the Christian church and so i i look at those points of view i look at the eastern mystical stuff i meditate myself and my my ultimate thinking about this is as i said we can never have a theory of everything that includes of who i am so the question about who i am my best guess right now is at the deepest level i and you are in fact the one consciousness just looking at itself through different avatars so it's really the one using a Jordan avatar to talk to the one in a Hoffman avatar and that's that's what's what's what's going on here and in that sense are you responsible for being the best possible avatar you can be so to speak well in some sense within this projection within this headset morals of a certain kind are are the rules of the road but my guess is that when we take the headset off we'll just laugh that was that was that was what we had to do in this headset but that was i am not this avatar i am the consciousness that's far that transcends space and time well you know with the next time we talk maybe that's a road we should wander down sure we didn't we didn't get into the metaphysics of ethics let's say during this conversation and there's plenty of that's obviously a whole other area okay okay well that would be good all right well so to everyone watching and listening thank you very much for tuning into this podcast i as most of you know i'm going to talk to doctor Hoffman for another half an hour behind the daily world plus platform and i'm going to see if i can find out where in the world his interests stemmed from and how they initially manifested themselves and developed across time we'll do that as much as we can in half an hour thank you to the crew here up in northern Ontario for uh journing up here to do this podcast thank you doctor Hoffman very much for your time today to the daily world plus people for making this possible that's also much appreciated and uh we'll see all of you watching and listening hopefully on another podcast thank you very much sir thank you jordan

John very did a terrific job on the guy who wrote men are from Mars woman are from Venus he did a terrific job on preventing and reversing ADHD without using drugs

I'm sure you have heard or you're familiar with the fact that there are progressives who have labeled Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery as a fiction, a work of fiction.

His second book, Don't Burn This Country, Surviving and Thriving in our woke dystopia is published by Penguin Random House on April 12, 2022.

One of their favorite books is Boethius' Consolation to Philosophy. It's an utterly unoriginal book. It's a synthesis of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoic, the Guston and they find it astonishingly original because they haven't been taught this stuff. The same as True of Augustine's Confessions. It's a blockbuster book. It hits it in the heart. It's not a perfect book. It's a messy book and there's an obscurity in it, but it feeds their unconscious hunger. So all I do is I give them the stuff that's on the shelves that have been neglected. I'm not an original philosopher I'm a bridge builder, a matchmaker. Joe, Joan meet Augustine. Augustine meet Joan. First time I ever taught Augustine's Confessions, my class asked me can we do journals instead of taking tests? And I said yes and there were about a dozen people in the class and we went through nothing but Augustine's Confessions. Not even the whole of it. We stopped at book 10 and they all wrote journals that every single one of them was longer than the Confessions itself. That's how deeply Augustine touched them and one common note to all of them is I never knew Augustine was that interesting. I took this course on a whim and it feeds me. It makes me strong.

Dave's first book, Don't Burn This Book, thinking for yourself in an age of unreason was a New York Times bestseller.

I was just rereading Ordinary Men and it was a story about a police battalion in Poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into the fields and and shoot them in the back of the head.

"Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It" (book) https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805

And it's described in detail in my books.

And it's described in detail in my book.

very good book on that called Red Famine where six million people were starved to death by the communists

where women were shot if they went out into the fields that had already been harvested to glean individual kernels of grain by hand to feed their children

if they didn't turn over those individual kernels of grain then they were then they were summarily executed

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is quite the piece of work and he what he wrote one on the hell's angels and one about the campaign trail they're all great books right really iconic sixties works and

I mean you mentioned David Charmers as you say here and this brilliant young philosopher who in 1994 published his PhD thesis The Conscious Mind which brought back in on to the table that what he called the hard problem of consciousness and he passed that in different ways that there's something absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience but the problem that then opens up that he that then I think leads him towards taking panpsychism very very seriously this is just really in the last 10 years I think is the idea well okay we've got consciousness it's a hard problem we just can't get rid of it and yet we can't get rid of matter either we can't get rid of the the truths of the physical sciences and we but we can't work out how enough these fit together they couldn't be laws of nature they couldn't be psychoanalytic or psychological laws the laws of thought are fundamentally different from the laws of nature so how do we fit these two together and panpsychism at that point though it might seem crazy to the person on this treat suddenly starts to seem quite an attractive an attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality

In fact I think James Charles Taylor has a very interesting book revisiting James The Varieties of Religious Experience and he talks about this idea that James looks at people who have religion in this sanguine sense.

He went into the books of Nicolo Machiavelli who's an advisor to politicians way back when and he took the statements and ministered them to undergraduate students and simply asked them how much do you agree with these statements like you have to get to know important people.

And always be prepared for the worst in people and the amazing thing was the huge variance in the responses.

I remember having this argument with John Cleese of all people some years he's a great lover of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gil Brown and people like that and and I've always found them slightly hard to take and he talked about he I think the phrase he used was a high level of consciousness and I said I don't and again this is my empiricist thing it sounds cynical and skeptical it's not meant to be but what level who's at what a describer level what is a higher mode why higher what's higher than another