https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XUAwyM4XFd8
Hello everyone. I’ve been wondering for a while whether or not I should weigh in on the whole debate which happened between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris on the question of truth. Though I’m sure that for those who’ve been following me, you can surmise what I think about this already. Maybe at some point I’ll put something together, but in the meantime, I wanted to give you a short comment which is moving in that direction, let’s say. So a few weeks ago now on the Joe Rogan podcast with Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein, they had a discussion commenting on the whole Harris-Peterson conflict about truth. And just like Sam Harris, Weinstein and Joe Rogan just couldn’t grasp the extent of this question. And that’s really a problem. There really is a kind of blindness to consciousness and blindness to the extent to which the scientific truth that they love so much is embedded into religious structures, embedded into language, embedded into patterns of being. I mean, I don’t want to go into the argument too much. And if you want a more detailed description, please watch my video, How Scientists Nested in Religion. What I’m about to show you will suffice to demonstrate to all of you how inescapable all of this is. Now the first thing I have to say is that I have the utmost respect for Brett Weinstein. I think that he acted forthrightly. I think that he acted heroically in standing up to the politically correct bullies. And I wish that there would be more professors like him in the North American university system. And honestly, I hope that this difficult moment for him will become an opportunity to do much more than what he’s had to leave behind. So let’s start with the basic argument. I’m going to play a little clip of his attempt to reconcile the two positions which were presented by Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. We tend to think of intellect as having evolved because knowing what’s true gives you an advantage. But there’s actually nothing that says the literal truth is where advantage lies. And so I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true. These are ideas that aren’t true in the factual sense, but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they’re not true. So according to Mr. Weinstein, there are these factual truths which correspond to scientific truth, I guess, which he opposes to metaphorical truths which are factually untrue, but contain a form of wisdom which can be useful. So I think that his categories are inadequate. But obviously we would say that symbolic truth contains the wisdom, the usefulness, but does not necessarily have to be non-factual. But at least for now I’m willing to go with him on this. Let’s just follow through and see where it goes. So after he gives a few examples of how these two truths relate to each other, and then Jordan gives a few points, Weinstein then goes on to say this. There is this overarching truth, the one that Sam Harris was pointing to, the one I think you’re pointing to also, and the one I’m imagining we all subscribe to. There is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory or in a careful experiment in the field. And that really is the top level truth. But now, did you notice what just happened here? So beyond the slightly condescending tone of wanting to attribute his opinion about scientific truth to everyone in the room, as if obviously we all agree that scientific truth is the top level truth, is the overarching truth. I mean, it’s so obvious that he would not dare to think one so simple-minded as to consider anything else. And then it’s funny because he kind of does a double take looking at Jordan because that is exactly the point Jordan has been arguing against with Sam Harris. But beyond that, can you spot the supreme irony? Because the only way he can make his point about the superiority of testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory is by using a metaphorically true but factually false, using his own structure to say it. So he has to say that this testable truth is top level truth. But you know, I looked for hours on that top shelf and I couldn’t find it. But the second one is better because he says that factual truth is the overarching truth, which reaches sublime levels of irony and contradiction because, well, number one, obviously, if you look over your head, you will not see this testable factual truth. And number two, if we even look at what that means, how an overarching truth is precisely a truth in which other truths are embedded. It’s not just truth, but it’s the truth of truth, let’s say, or the structure in which other truths are contained. And then in his very statement, he embeds factual truth within the metaphorically true but factually false language of hierarchy, which is by using the language of up and allusions to heaven and transcendence, it is the very language of religion. But number three, which in my opinion is the most maddening, because 99% of your life, of your decisions, of your constituting your worldview, your representation of the world, you do not have access to those laboratory tested truth that you are so keen upon. In fact, we barely ever have access to those tests. What we have access to are the retelling of those tests and the results by other people. That is the overarching truth, even for scientists. It is not the tested experiments, which almost no one has done themselves in order to know them, but rather it is our trust in a community of people to accurately represent the experiments that they have done. So it’s really important to see this, because there is this idea that faith or that trust is something which necessarily is giving away of reason or giving away of empirical knowledge, whereas in truth, it is the basis of our existence. That is 99% of the decisions you make, 99% of the information that you believe is based on trust, because you have not done the experiments yourself and you could not do the experiments yourself. You trust a community of scientists that they are being forthright with you and that they are representing the facts accurately. So this is not as simple as many of the new atheist types would have us believe. [“The New Atheist”]