Peterson and Shermer on Myth and Truth

[AshvinP]

I would say it's best to start around 1:15:00 on this interview between Michael Shermer and Jordan Peterson, unless you are interested in some current political-cultural commentary. Not to be too harsh, but I think Shermer is really out of his depth when the discussion turns towards mythology, religion, subjective vs. objective truth, etc. Nevertheless, I found Peterson's remarks regarding ancient mythology, Christianity, the Bible, materialism-rationalism, etc. to be as powerful as ever. He says, "we should approach this topic from within science because we are scientists" and therein lies so much of JP's intrigue. He has a way of seamlessly connecting a scientific 'Darwinian' perspective with very deep spiritual narratives.

For ex., he points out that the way to combat the possibility of imposing new meanings on mythological narratives, as opposed to discovering existing meaning, is to approach any given phenomenon of that mythology from multiple independent methodologies and look for evidence of that phenomenon in each method. The more number of methods support a given meaning, the more confident you can be that it was discovered rather than imposed. That is one reason he starts with a neuropsychological approach in his book, Maps of Meaning. He also points out that we are in "explored territory" (roughly corresponds with 'order' and left brain) when "what you do produces what you desire". It not only gets you what you want, but it "validates the conceptual schema in which you operate".

That is also what Steiner argues is true spiritual freedom in his Philosophy of Freedom. It is not doing whatever you want, but truly wanting to do everything that you actually do. "Your emotions are regulated when your behavior produces the results you desire, because you know your axiomatic presuppositions, many of which are invisible, are operative in that situation. We are tying to solve the problem as a human race of how we make explored territory as stable as possible, and what to do with the fact that we eternally don't know things. The answer isn't to make everything hyper-predictable or let everything dissolve into chaos because we don't know everything; the answer is to adopt a mode of being that allows us to maintain a beneficial interplay between both".

I remember Shermer also brought up Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception in his first interview with JP a few years ago. I was hoping that would come up again, but it has not so far and I have about 40 minutes left.