Reality and the Sacred
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Reality and the Sacred ist eine mir wichtige Vorlesung von Jordan Peterson von der Universität Toronto. Hier anschauen: Flash auf TVO.org, hier runterladen: auf channels.com.
Ich werde hier zuerst die Niederschrift der Vorlesung in Englisch publizieren, dann, nach Möglichkeit, deutsche Zusammenfassung und/oder Übersetzung. --Fungusakafungus
Transcript of Jordan Peterson's Lecture on Reality and the Sacred
I want to talk to you today about what I think is a relatively new way of looking at your experience may be you can [...] broadly [...] on reality itself. You all come to UT University I suppose to make your conceptions of reality more sophisticated. And you want to do that because you have to live in the world, and the more sophisticated are your conceptions the less likely you will encounter tragic or harmful circumstances you will be unable to deal with. It really matters if you know what are you thinking and you know how to think.
00:00:43
Over the last twenty years I would say there has been a revolution in psychology, and the revolution has involved the transformation of the way we look at the world. And that is what I want to talk to you about today.
The title of this talk, "Reality and the Sacred", it is a strange title for a talk to modern people, because we don't really understand what the sacred means, unless we live within a world view that is essentially... I would not say archaic, but at least traditional. For modern, free-thinking, fundamentally liberal people the idea of the sacred is anachronistic or, if not anachronistic, at least incomprehensible.
00:01:24
I want to start with a story from the Old Testament. There is a scene in Old Testament, when the Ancient Hebrews are moving the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant is a device manufactured in order to contain the word of God, and there was a rule among the Ancient Hebrews which was: you were not to touch the Ark of Covenant, no matter what. There is a story in the Old Testament, where the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant -- they used to carry it -- and the bearers of the Ark trip, and a man reaches out to steady it and when he touches it, God strikes him dead.
00:02:01
And modern people at the story like that and the first thing they say is, that seems a little bit harsh on the part of God, given that the man was attempting to do something he believed was good. But what the story is designed to indicate, in my opinion, is that there are certain things that you touch at your peril. Regardless of your intentions. And those things that you touch at your peril, regardless of your intentions, most cultures regard as sacred, as untouchable. I want to make a case for you today, that those things exist and also why they exist and why it is necessary for you to know that they exist. I would also say that, if you are properly educated in a university, especially with regards to the humanities, which are in some conceptual trouble at the moment, what essentially happens to you is that you are introduced in a relatively secular way to the concept of the sacred. You are here in the university to learn about the eternal values of the human kind. And I think the people, who tell you that those values do not exist, or that they are [...] undebatable, do you an unbelievable disservice.
00:03:15 The old world
Now I am going to tell you how you think about the world, I think. So, this would be the Newtonian view of the world, Newtonian and deterministic. And it is a world view that dominated psychology, economics, anthropology, political science, you name it, for probably four hundred years. But it is come to a crashing hold in last fifteen years. And the consequences of that have been manifested in a number of domains. The old world presuppositions are something like this: the world is made out of the objects. When you look at the world, you see the objects. There they are, in front of you. As a consequence of seeing the objects you think about what to do. And after you think about what to do in presence of the objects, you act. Now, that seems self-evident, because when you look at the world, there the objects are. And it appears to you that, you see them, and than you think about them, and than you act. But there is a real problem with that. First problem is: you use your brain to see. Literally. [...] Visual cortex is a very large part of your brain. And the reason that the visual cortex is so large is that seeing is, as far as we can tell, actually impossible.
00:04:35 The new world
The fact that seeing, perception is impossible was not discovered by psychologists and it was not discovered by philosophers. It was discovered by people who were working on artificial intelligence and trying to make artificially intelligent machines. The presupposition of the people who were making intelligent machines was, the hard part of interacting with the world is figuring out what to do once you see the objects. But it turned out that making machines that could see objects was impossible. And the reason for that that boundaries between objects are not obvious. They are not obvious at all. In fact, it is very difficult to understand how we separate things up at all. Now let me give you an example. If you look in the mirror, you see yourself as an object, you see your eyes, you see your nose, you see your face, you see your body, and that is pretty much what you see, when you look at other people. But that is not all there is to you. In fact, that is hardly any of what there is to you. So you could say, for example, you exist at the level of quantum particle. You can not perceive that. In fact, people did not know that until 75 years ago. Above that level, you exist at an atomic level, and that on a molecular level, and than you exist on level of complex organs, and than the interactions between those organs. And than you, and than your family, and than the groups your family belong to, and than the ecosystem that all your groups belong to, and so on and so forth, until what it is what you are can expand to encompass virtually anything, Now when you look at yourself you do not see that, you see yourself at a certain level of resolution, when you look at the world, you see yourself at a certain level of resolution, but all those other levels are equally real an equally relevant. And we in fact have very little idea how it is, that you are only able to see what you see.
00:06:33
Almost nothing has obvious boundaries. And this has real-world consequences. It is not something that is merely abstract. The technical term for this problem -- the problem of how to bind your perceptions, to limit them -- is called "the frame problem". The frame problem is discovered about forty years ago, and the philosopher Daniel Dennet called it the most important philosophical discovery of the last fifty years. The frame problem emerges to cause all sorts of trouble for people.
00:07:03 Automobile example
So, for example, when Henry Ford invented the automobile, well, at least invented the modern procedure of building the automobile, what Ford presumed, that he was building [...] efficient means of transporting people from one place to the other. There are other, unintended consequences of Fords discovery. So for example Ford happened to be a great supporter of fascism. And the reason he was a supporter of fascism was because he regarded the fascist political structure as a logical extension of the efficient methods that he had used to assemble vehicles. So his mode of production was instantly manifested in a political philosophy. Furthermore, now, 2009, a hundred years after the invention of the automobile, we have discovered some other things, that the car was other than the place to move people from point A to point B. So for example it turns out that the automobile and the internal combustion engine are among the most effective technologies ever devised to transform the nature of the atmosphere and to heat up the world. Not only that, a car has completely transformed the nature of cities. And these were all unintended consequences of the fact that the car was far more than people thought it was.
00:08:18 The unbound or absolute
You can say it about any technological structure. No-one knew what would TV do to the news, for example. No-one knew what the Internet would do to the music industry. Everything you interact with is far more complicated than you see. The most ancient ideas we have about the nature of reality are predicated on a certain presupposition. And the presupposition is this: there is two fundamental modes of being that characterize the reality. One is the Absolute. And the Absolute is the sum [and?] total of everything. So if you thing about things in their most unbounded possible form, if you think of the things in their infinite number of potential variations, you can think about that as one pole(?) of reality. It appears classically that people have regarded their encounters with the Absolute, which is all those multiple levels of being that are beyond your perceptual capacity as an equivalent to the encounter with God.
00:09:15
Now you know, that in the Islamic religion it is against the rules to make a graven image of any sort of Muhammad. The idea is that you are not supposed to make an image. And among the ancient Hebrews the idea was very similar. The daoists say that you should not confuse the moon with the finger pointing to the moon. And what all that means is that the Absolute is always something that transcends the finite frame that you place around your perceptions. So as soon as you start talking about it, representing it, making statues of it or idolizing it, you loose your connection with the Absolute, because you have turned it into something that is understandable and concrete.
00:09:50
Part of the wisdom traditions that the world still maintains [make the] constant moral presupposition, that you should always be aware of what it is that transcends both your understanding and your perceptions. And you should keep firmly in mind that that exists. When people talk about God in the modern world, they tend to think about something that has more the characteristics of a being. I suppose that is where the most of the debate about religious reality comes in. But the idea that there is an absolute that is outside of your perceptual capacity seems to be merely a statement of fact, especially given what we know now about the nature of perception, that the phenomena always transcends the matter in which you frame it. We have also come to understand that normally [does?] reality has multiple levels of existence, but in order to perceive it you have to stand inside multiple frames.
00:10:49
This a picture of a French city. It is a walled city. The walls are there to keep the people in, and the walls are there to keep what is not in the walls out. You can think about that as protective structure. I want to tell you, how it is that you still inhabit a walled city and exactly what that means. For example, you think about this room and I am going to tell you how it is that this room allows you to see what it is that you see. When you are interacting with a computer you actually do not interact with the computer. You interact with the keyboard and the screen. If the computer crashes, than you interact with the computer. And you find it as a general rule very annoying, because you do not really understand the computer very well and you do not actually see, how complex it is until it stops working.
00:11:40
Most of the time when you are interacting with the world you are doing things with the world. You are interacting with it in a way that some consequences that you want, and that means in part that your perception is always framed by what you want. And that is actually one of the reasons why the world is not just made out of objects. The world is made out of things you use and things that get in your way. You are always applying a frame like that to the world in order to simplify it enough so you can understand it. And you are aided in this process by all sorts of processes you really do not notice. Because when you look at the world, you think: well, there are the objects. But there are thousands of things going on before you make that judgment.
00:12:19 This room
So, we will look at this room. When you walk in here, the room tells you what to do. The reason it tells you what to do is that all the seats are pointed in the same direction. They are all slanted in a particular way. When you walk in here, there are people sitting. You can see, that all their faces point to the front. People's faces point towards what interests them. The room is set up to make you face the front. The theory behind the room is that the thing that's interesting in the room is happening at the front. It's a theater. What's happening in the front is a drama. Because theater is there to promote and undergird drama. A lecture is a dramatic act. The room tells you what to do. So you don't have to think about what to do when you come into a room like this, you can just do it, because the room tells you what to do. And than you can think: you can sit here, in relative comfort and listen to this lecture. Why can you sit here in relative comfort? The people around you have been relatively carefully selected. As a consequence of analysis of their twelve years in school, university has made a determination, that they know how to sit down and listen. That hypothetically they are intelligent enough to understand the lecture and they are very unlikely to disrupt the proceedings with any unexpected outburst of emotion or motivation. Now, if anybody broke one of those rules, you can be sure that your eyes would move very rapidly away from me and directly to the person who is causing the trouble. Because that would take center stage.
00:13:49 invisible processes
This room is actually supported by a million invisible processes, so, for example, while you are sitting in here, you don't have to worry about whether it's raining. Because there's a roof. And you don't have to worry whether the roof is going to fall in, because you make a presumption, that the people, who built the roof are competent. And the electricity works, because the utility is run by the people who are competent, so it's almost always on. Buildings hardly ever burn down. The electricity hardly ever fluctuates. There's thousands of people out there working as hard as they can, diligently, to make this environment constant enough, so that you can ignore all the thousands of things that you are ignoring, so you can concentrate well enough to attend to the few things that you are attending to [value?] in this room. You are in the walled city. There are multiple walls and those walls protect you from what's outside the walls.
00:14:37 daoist image of reality
You can think about it this way. This is a daoist image of reality. People think about this as a metaphysical symbol. But it's not a metaphysical symbol. It's an unbelievably practical symbol. The daoists believe that the world, reality, is made up, essentially, of chaos and order. Chaos is all those things you don't understand, so I would say that chaos is all those things, that exist outside of your perceptual preconditions. Order is all the things you do understand and all the places you go, where the things, that you do produce the results, that you intend. And a daoist would say, everywhere you go is like that. Everywhere you go has things, that you understand, that are orderly, and has things, that you don't understand, that are chaotic. And the chaotic things attract your attention, because you already understand the orderly things. If something unexpected happens, your nervous system automatically reacts to [...] towards it.
