(Jun 19, 2019 03:14 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ]Looks like Jordan Peterson has finally made his way into Rational Wiki.
I don't think that Rational Wiki has any more credibility than Peterson.
Quote:Wow! Pretty nutty, eh?
Why?
Quote:The story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation.
Sure, that's obvious. According to the Christian spin on it, it's where sin entered into human life, disrupting the ideal reality of Eden. Human beings were forever different afterwards, according to the story, having fallen out of our original relationship with God and oneness with God's creation.
Quote:So the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an abstraction across trees, and it's trying to say: "Here's something that's common across trees, it's a fruit that's common across trees. The fruit that's common across trees is something that you might call food, fair enough. But here's something that's even more cool; food that's stable across the entire domain of food, isn't food, it's information.
That's seemingly written in an impressionistic style (sorta-literary perhaps, where allusion is more important than literal precision), hence like poetry harder to interpret. But Peterson is seemingly making the familiar analogy between the Biblical Tree and the equally ancient Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And he's also making an analogy between the fruit of the tree and with the appearance of our human powers of abstraction. (Knowledge of good and evil involves a huge abstraction from knowledge of particular events.) The appearance of the power of abstraction may or may not be Peterson's version of sin, in the sense that it uproots us from our preceeding simpler lives as animals participating in the state of nature. (Hard to say from just this out-of-context snippet that we are all supposed to laugh and sneer at.)
Quote:We use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information that animals use to forage for information.
That would make more sense if the second 'information' was replaced with the word 'food'.
Literally, I think that even interpreted my way it's probably false, not least because brains probably don't have "circuits" (they are more likely networks). But read more impressionistically, I think that it's likely correct. Our cognitive abilities probably are elaborations on the simpler cognitive abilities of our ancestors, the animals that we evolved from. Follow each of our family trees back generation by generation, and we arrive at animals that weren't abstractly theorizing, classifying and trying to explain everything at all, they were just looking for food, while trying to avoid predators and trying get laid. Right here, right now, no theorizing.
Quote:Why is that? Because we figured out knowing where the food is, is more important than having the food. ... That's why we're information foragers.
Yes. We have gotten to the point where we are more interested in searching for information than merely for food. We are concerned with recognizing what is and isn't food, classifying food into kinds, and figuring what it costs and new strategies for producing it. The whole idea of producing food instead of constantly foraging for it is almost unique to humans. In order to make that leap, which marks the end of the paleolithic and the beginning of the neolithic, we had to think in new ways.
That's my take on this little excerpt. I can see an interesting idea there, but I can't say that it looks all that convincing. Or even particularly original. I don't see the 'state of nature' as particularly Edenic, even if adherents of today's so-called "deep ecology" seem to. (Oneness with nature!) I most emphatically don't see mankind's evolving human cognitive abilities are a Biblical style "fall".
That may or may not be the idea that Peterson intended readers to take away. This little excerpt is too out-of-context to say. It's my reading.
Quote:"Although Peterson frequently makes morally questionable claims and engages in pseudoscience, his statements are notoriously incoherent, vague, jargon-laden, and ambiguous, which allows him to handwave criticism as mere misrepresentations of his babbling gibberish."
That description sounds like a description of much of academic writing in the humanities and social-"sciences" today, pretty much all of literary theory, anything with the prefix "feminist", and anything labeled 'post-modern'. Attacking Peterson for the same faults that other more politically-correct writers are celebrated for and win them tenure at "top" universities is another example of the hypocrisy that infests contemporary intellectual life. If you are "woke" you can write almost anything and it will be celebrated as 'brilliant', and if you are politically incorrect, nothing you write can ever be satisfactory. We are entering a new dark age...
I think that if people want to engage with Peterson, they probably should address his ideas, instead of trying to trash the man himself. The latter merely comes across as
ad-hominem.
