Thoughts on the Jordan Peterson and Lawrence Krauss podcast

[Carl-Richard]

Lawrence Krauss does a good job bringing out his ideas. You might get to see a side of him that you didn't know about, and most of you might have underestimated how holistic of a thinker he is. It's much more interesting to see a discussion between two people on the same level who can challenge each other in good faith compared to interviews with journalists.

I think I understand more now what his book Maps of Meaning is about, and a lot of it lies in the title. His definition of meaning goes far beyond the traditionalist Christian sense of meaning, and it must be understood in relation to making maps. It's a deeply metaphysical concept that ties together real systems (the objective) and abstract systems (the subjective). It's a concept that refers to the structure of relative reality and how the mind is constructing it ("the architecture of belief").

From the objective lens, meaning is the way that organisms orient themselves in the survival game (evolution), and we do this by molding our behavior according to survival-salient information (sensory input). At the most basic level, this manifests itself as movement through the environment in search of pleasant stimuli (pro-survival markers) and avoidance of noxious stimuli (anti-survival markers). An organism that is engaging in meaningful behavior would for example gather nutrition when it's hungry and mate when it's sexually mature.

From the subjective lens, this sensory input is represented within our minds as internal experiences (perceptions). At the most basic level, these experiences are simple, direct and concrete (e.g. sense of touch, smell, hearing etc.). They may be reconstructed independently of live sensory input in the form of mental images (cognition and imagination), and virtually all animals are thought to be capable of this to some extent.

Humans have an elevated sense of meaning, which comes from the ability to abstract out symbolic/iconic representations from a set of concrete experiences. At an even higher level, this ability is expressed through an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling). This is what distinguishes humans from animals: we create narratives that try to explain ourselves and our environment. From here, complex language, culture and an individual identity is born (self-awareness).

Further on, narratives of a higher-order of complexity like the Christian dogmas likewise reflect the underlying survival-drives of our species. The point that JP is trying to make, which Lawrence Krauss is struggling to understand (even granted good faith), is that on the most fundamental level, even science is a narrative that humans are constructing, and that by recognizing how narratives are at the base of "reality" so to speak, he claims that studying narratives of all types and abstracting out meta-narratives is a very useful way (in fact the only way) of understanding how reality is structured, not just in a descriptive sense ("how things are"), but in a normative sense ("how should we act?").

The thing that Krauss gets stuck on is his materialistic worldview (which is not surprising coming from a theoretical physicist), and consequently he holds science and the objective realm in higher favor than the subjective and normative realm. The reason I think JP is at a level above Krauss in this respect is that he reconciles both worlds by conceding that some narratives like science are better as descriptive tools than other, and that other narratives are better as normative tools. His theory of meaning is therefore in my estimation an attempt at going beyond materialistic science, not by contradicting it, but by integrating it, and in that sense, he is a Tier 2 thinker (construct aware, theory pluralist, "transcend and include" etc.). Does that mean he has fully extended this understanding into other domains like society and politics? Not necessarily, but maybe he could surprise us there as well.

[Preety_India]

Wasn't Lawrence Krauss accused of something? 

 

[Carl-Richard]

9 hours ago, Preety_India said:

Wasn't Lawrence Krauss accused of something? 

He allegedly grabbed a boob.

[Carl-Richard]

Bumping because I added some thoughts