Transcript of Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth – Dr. Stephen Hicks

Yes, and you would be an example of that. Others who think the Enlightenment project has been a great success, even though it had some philosophical errors, that those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project. And so, I’m interested in also thinkers like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foot, who are not so skeptical. In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, right, right.

STEPHEN HICKS: And the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks like in our time, bringing it right up to current times, and characterizing it as, in effect, a three-way debate between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns. And in one sense, we’ve never lived in better times philosophically, because we have self-conscious, articulate, and very able representatives of all of those traditions operating in our generation.

So, bringing all of that in an eight-lecture series to a hopefully large international audience that can access them online. So, that’s been my intellectual mission there.

The Practical Value of Philosophy

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, so, I’d like to make a case for everybody that’s watching and listening for the philosophical enterprise at a practical level.

I mean, regardless, in a way, regardless of whether philosophy can address the larger questions of life, and I think you have to be in some ways absurdly skeptical to assume axiomatically that the answer to that is no, it’s necessary, in my estimation, very necessary, regardless of who you are, to understand the nuances of the thinkers that you describe, because unbeknown to you, the thoughts that you think are yours are actually theirs.

And so, people might wonder, you know, what practical use it is to study history, and one answer to that is, if you understand history, maybe you won’t be doomed to repeat the more catastrophic elements of it. But with regards to philosophy, if you don’t understand the thought of great philosophers, you have no idea why that you think the way you do, why you think the way you do, or what the consequences of that might be.

What is the idea that we’re all unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher or some combination of dead philosophers? And so, although we don’t understand it, we live within not only the conceptual universities these people have established, but the perceptual universe that they’ve established, right, that they actually have shaped the way that we see the world at a very profound level. And so, if you don’t understand that, then you’re a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension, and that, unless you want to be a puppet of forces that are beyond your comprehension, that’s not a very good plan. So, does that seem like a reasonable…

STEPHEN HICKS: No, it is exactly on track. I think a lot of people in our era are more active-minded than people were in previous eras. We have more media, more freedom, more resources to be able to do so. But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out, even if you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is illuminating many cases to realize that there has been a smart person who thought of that before you, and in many cases in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas.

So, sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down. And most of us don’t have time to be active intellectuals. We have our full lives. So, anything that we can learn from the philosophers who’ve thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road.

And then, of course, the other thing is that to the extent that you don’t think about these things, what you are saying, I think, is exactly right. In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions.

Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure. So, all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting systems and so forth, and we grow up with them, and we’re like the fish in the water. We just take it for granted that we’re surrounded by these things. And we have automated operating inside a certain kind of infrastructure system. But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system. And in many cases, I’m being directed perhaps in ways that are not healthy.

And how can we make that infrastructure system better? That’s going to take people who are aware that in many cases, they are being guided by that infrastructure. So, that’s a good thing to focus in on, I think, too, at the moment.

Postmodernism, Modernism, and What Comes Next

JORDAN PETERSON: And this is where we could have a discussion about postmodernism and modernism and maybe what comes next. So, let me lay out a couple of propositions for you and tell me what you think about this. This is maybe the nexus of what I was hoping to discuss with you.

So, I’ll give the postmodernist devils their due to begin with, and you can tell me what your opinion is about that. So, I think that we are on the cusp of a philosophical and maybe a theological revolution. And I think it’s in part because the postmodernists identified some of the flaws in Enlightenment thinking.

And so, the fundamental postmodernist insistence, as far as I can discern, is that we inevitably, we by necessity see the world through a story. And so, I’ve been trying to figure out what that means. And the large language model, emergence of the large language models have helped out with that.

So, imagine that, and I want you to correct me if I get any of this wrong. The rationalist presumption is that we do see the world through a framework. The empirist presumption is that we derive our knowledge of the world from a set of, in a sense, self-evident facts that emerge in the domain of perception. But there’s a problem with both of those notions.

The nature of the rationalist framework isn’t precisely specified, and it isn’t obvious at all that there’s a level of self-evident fact. In fact, I think the data, the scientific data on the neuroscience and the engineering side indicate quite clearly that that’s just not the case. That you can’t separate perception, let’s say, from motivation. You can’t separate perception from action, because all of your senses are active while they’re gathering so-called data. There’s no sense data.

And so, I’ve been trying to wrestle with what that means exactly, because one possible interpretation of the idea that there’s no base level of sense data is a descent into a nihilistic or relativistic morass, and I don’t think that’s a tenable solution either, not least for motivational and emotional reasons.

I think there’s a clue to the manner in which this problem might be solved in the fact of the large language models. So, what they essentially do is establish a weighting system between conceptions. And so, in the large language models, every word, let’s say, is associated with every other word at a certain level of probability.

The Relationship Between Perception and Story

JORDAN PETERSON: So, if word A appears, there’s some probability that word B will come next, and then if phrase A appears, there’s some probability that phrase B will appear, and the same with sentences and the same with paragraphs, and there’s literally hundreds of billions of these parameters in those models. And what they’ve done is map out the weight of data points. So, you know, if there’s five facts at hand, and I could, in principle, use those facts to guide my perception or my action, I still have to solve the problem of how I would weight the facts.

And you might say, well, you don’t have to weight them, and I would say, well, no, that just means you’ve all weighted them equivalently. There’s no – if you have more than one thing at hand, and you have to combine them in some manner, you have to weight them. There’s no option.

And you can weight them all one, but that’s also a decision, and it’s arbitrary. And so, instead, even to perceive, we have to weight the facts. And as far as I can tell, a story is a description of the structure that we use to weight the facts.

And so, that doesn’t mean that the facts – that doesn’t mean that our perceptions have no structure and that everything’s subjective, but it also doesn’t mean that the facts speak for themselves, like the empiricists would insist or the behaviorists, for that matter, you know, that there’s a stimulus, and then there’s an automatic response or something of that nature. So, I know that’s a bit of a scattershot, but I hope you can see what I’m aiming at. And I guess I’m wondering, what do you think of the proposition that we see the world through a story, for example?

Tour Announcement

JORDAN PETERSON: Hello, everybody. So, my wife and I are going back out on tour for my new book, “We Who Wrestle With God.” I’m going to be walking through a variety of biblical stories. Now, the postmodern types and the neo-Marxists, they think the story is one of power, and that is a dangerous story.

The fundamental rock upon which true civilization is built is encapsulated in the biblical stories. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand them. And the point of the tour and the book is to bring whatever understanding I’ve managed to develop to as wide an audience as possible.

Empiricism and Consciousness

STEPHEN HICKS: All right. Already, we’re into heavy-duty epistemology, neuroscience, history, psychology, value sets, including motivation issues and so on. Okay.

So, all right. Just hold on to that for a moment. So, I’m going to say you’re right.

Traditional empiricism has had problems. Traditional rationalism has had problems. And that we cannot, except in post-analysis, sort out all of the elements, and that’s a big part of what the scientific project goes on.

But let me start by defending the empiricists for a moment. So, what I just did on the table, right? Shocking. Was that Johnson who kicked the stone? G.E. Moore.

JORDAN PETERSON: Moore. Okay. But also, yeah, earlier when he was talking about… I refute you thus.

STEPHEN HICKS: Isn’t that…

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Which is in the right track, but still too naive.

STEPHEN HICKS: Okay. But just reflect on that experience if we start to try to defend the empiricists for a moment. So, I smacked the table completely out of the blue.

But for anybody who’s listening, right, or watching, that was sense data. You had no motivational set. You had no story in mind.

You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you. There was an experience, and you were aware of the experience. Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing, and all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right.

So, the empiricist’s commitment, I think, if it’s going to be properly done, has to be that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality. Something that’s outside the subjective.

JORDAN PETERSON: No, but even there, the language becomes very important because we don’t want to say that it’s subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that then is to say it’s not in relationship to what is out there.

Subjectivity and Reality

STEPHEN HICKS: So, again, we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully. When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side, but if we were doing epistemology or knowledge, then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is, is set by the subject, and the external reality has nothing to do with it. The opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it, instead just reality smacks that person in the face and, as you put it, the story doesn’t need to be told.

It wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is. What I think is a proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those. We have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality.

It’s an inherently relational phenomenon, and you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality. What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there’s no way for us to be aware of reality. They retreat to some sort of representationalist model where they start going internal, and then they start talking about motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have, and once you make that divide, there is no way to get out of the subject and back to reality.

On the other hand, if you try to react to that and say the subject can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge, then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject, to pretend the subject doesn’t exist, to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what’s out there happens inside the subject, but that also is an impossible model.

The Empiricist Commitment

So, what I want to say is the empiricist commitment, and historically the empiricists have struggled to work this out. This is the ongoing project.

In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem, and I think as you rightly pointed out, post-modernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models. So, what I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it starts, but that as an epistemological claim has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can’t do the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to reality.

And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon, and that’s a philosophy of mind claim. Let me just say, it’s not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality. It’s not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself.

It’s a response mechanism, and all of these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. We talk a lot about epistemology, and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project, and I think that’s fine.

JORDAN PETERSON: Define that for people, epistemology.

Defining Epistemology

STEPHEN HICKS: The theory of knowledge. So we try to figure out, so the “ology” part is to give an account of something or an explanation of it.

In this case, it’s the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around. There’s a difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and…

JORDAN PETERSON: Falsehood.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right, and just having been conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know something, and when should I say that I don’t really know something, and developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge. And this involves some reflection on sense perception, as we’re starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language and grammar, logic, and then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do in some sense inform us, and we can really learn about the world through stories.

What’s the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework? So we’ve been thinking through those things very systematically. Now that, though, is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don’t actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological. But I think we can’t do epistemology in isolation.

We always have to do it in context with metaphysics. We have to also be talking about the nature of reality. That’s an ontological question.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s right. What’s the furniture of the universe, so to speak? What’s real and what isn’t real?

Metaphysics and Reality

STEPHEN HICKS: So the question is, any time I want to say this is true or this is real or this is a fact or whatever, that’s to make a claim about reality, and then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that? So you’re making a claim, but you’re also making a justificatory claim. So reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what’s true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics.

The special sciences say we’re studying physics or chemistry or biology. But if we can step back and say, are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole? Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions? Does a god exist or not? Those are all metaphysical questions.

So to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics, all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind.

That is to say, what is this thing that we call the mind? And one of the things that early modern philosophy, now this is 1400s, 1500s, on into the 1600s, was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being. And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let’s say a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul or a physicality plus a spiritual element. And that these are two very different metaphysical things.

The Mind-Body Problem

One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal. And that they have different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies. Then on the metaphysics side, how do those two come together? How do they work together? How do they fit together? What’s the proper understanding of those two? But that metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.

So if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there’s a causal story about how those interact with each other. But somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind, which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we’re going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth. And that metaphysical gulf, if you can’t bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically.

And so one reason why we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think, is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth. It wasn’t only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends, but at the same time we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I’m thinking of it, the mind-body problem.

And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities or stories are non-physical realities and they’re in a mind and we’re conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world, as a non-physical world, it’s very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world.

So I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it’s interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s. And so we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline. We have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.

And one of the things that they’re both trying to do is to say, well, finally we can start to study the mind scientifically. We can have a science of the mind. But what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the mind somehow didn’t fit into nature.

It was an extra-natural thing. It was a ghost in the machine. And the fitting of the ghost in the machine, we don’t have a theory that works this out.

The Integration of Psychology and Philosophy

JORDAN PETERSON: And both of them were, of course, reflecting on Darwin and Darwin’s more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being, that we’re going to see the mind not as a ghost that’s in the wetware or in the biological ware, but as some sort of emergent phenomenon or a byproduct. But it’s only when we stop thinking about the human being as a ghost plus a machine, to use that metaphor, or a spirit plus a body as two different things, as much more of a naturalist integrate, then we start to think that we can do psychology scientifically. Now, the Freudians and the behaviorists, I think they were both disasters in various ways.

STEPHEN HICKS: And useful. They were genius. But this is, again, the early steps of science.

JORDAN PETERSON: But what they are starting to do, though, is say we’re not going to study the human being. We are going to study the human being as part of the natural world. But notice that this is now into the 1900s, and psychology is a very new science.

And this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over, in a sense, by the epistemologists and had worked their way into a very skeptical form. So my hope is, if we’re talking about where the future has to go, psychology has been online for a century now, a little more than a century now. Extraordinarily complex stuff, as we all know.

But we’re making progress there. But I think it’s still early days. And what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology.

It has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition, the best from the rationalist tradition, and so on. So that’s my summary story of how we ended up where we are, and why I’m not a thoroughgoing skeptic on any of these issues. I see it as an ongoing scientific project.

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JORDAN PETERSON: I think the people that we’ve brought together on Peterson Academy too are at the forefront of that attempt to integrate. And so that’s one of our, you might say, one of our educational themes as we move forward is to continue that investigation. John Verveke, I would say, is somebody who’s on the forefront of that on the psychological and neuroscience side. So let’s go back to your demonstration of primary sensory input, right? Just hitting the table.

The Neuroscience of Perception

So I’ll outline a neuroscience approach to that. So, you know, you might think that you perceive, and then you evaluate, and then you think, and then you act, and that’s like the causal chain. But none of that’s exactly correct, because even when you’re responding to a primary stimulus like that, so to speak, there’s a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less simultaneously.

Now, I’d say more or less because you do have reflexive action. So I think the simplest way to understand this is to assume that what you’re detecting as a consequence of the slap that you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform. So let me just interrupt.

STEPHEN HICKS: Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case. And yours was a different passive surprise response.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, let’s get to that. Well, so exactly. So at one level of analysis, it’s the same stimulus, let’s say, insofar as it’s an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a phone recorder or something like that. But then, as you said, the fact that you come to that experience with different expectations colors it.

And so there is a way to think about that. I think the best way to start to understand it is to think about the pattern. So there’s a waveform pattern that propagates in the air, which is the delivery system, obviously, for the stimulus.

And then there’s an auditory pattern. Now, when your nervous system receives that pattern, it doesn’t go to one point, place and then another place and then another place and then another place in a linear progression. There’s some of that.

But what happens is that the pattern is assessed simultaneously by multiple different levels of the nervous system. So the most primary level would be spinal. And there are very few connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system.

And so, for example, if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance and you hit the table in that manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle reflex. A startle reflex is a variant of a predator response. It’s of a response to predation.

And it’s basically auditory signal onto spinal cord mapping. And the initial phase of the startle response is, you could say, it’s pre-conscious and it’s pre-emotional. And the reason it’s pre is because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto the spinal receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to propagate even to the emotions.

Survival Mechanisms and Perception

And you need that. So, for example, if you’re walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye you detect a snake and you have really good snake detectors, especially in the periphery in the bottom part of your vision. It’s different in the top part, by the way, because there are more snakes on the ground than there are in trees.

If you take the time to move your eyes, the center of your eyes, so that you can see the snake and then you evaluate the snake emotionally, by the time you’ve done that, the snake’s already bitten you. It’s too long a time. Whereas if you use the peripheral receptors that map right onto your spine, you can jump before the snake strikes, hopefully.

Cats can do it, by the way, about 10 times as fast.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, we’re pretty good too, as it turns out.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, but not as fast as cats, but fast enough to often escape from snakes. Nice. And so you get this first level response that’s almost entirely reflexive. That’s what the early behaviorists were discovering too when they were talking about stimulus response.

There are somewhat automatic response systems that are very primordial and basic that do almost a one-to-one mapping of sensory pattern onto behavioral output. Very few neural interconnections. And the disadvantage to that is that it’s a rather fixed response pattern, and the advantage of it is it’s super fast.

Okay, so now the same pattern propagates up. So imagine the pattern propagates down on your spine, and you can react very quickly. Another part of it propagates into the auditory cortex or the visual cortex, and that’s what you see with.

Blindsight and Perception Beyond Consciousness

And those are actually dissociable. So there are people who have a phenomenon, a condition called blindsight. So if you ask these people if they can see, they tell you no.

But they still respond. Well, if you hold up your hand, for example, they can guess with more than 90% accuracy which hand is up. And it seems to me because it’s their visual cortex that’s damaged and not their retina.

And a lot of the vision pathways into the brain are still intact, but not the one that mediates conscious vision, which is dependent on the visual cortex. But they still have kinetic perception with their eyes. So one of the things I’m doing when I watch you is that I’m picking up where your body is located, and I’m mapping that onto my body.

And so if I’m seeing you with blindsight with your hand up like this, I’ll have a sensation in my body that corresponds to your body position, and I can read off that. So it’s not exactly vision because I’m not seeing you, but it is a form of vision, and it’s even more sophisticated than that. So if you take these people with blindsight and you show them faces that are angry or afraid, and you assess their galvanic skin response, which is a change in sweating, basically, that’s associated with emotional arousal, they’ll respond differentially to emotional faces, even though they don’t know that.

That’s blindsight. That’s part of blindsight. And so when you hear or see something, that pattern is being assessed at multiple levels of a very complex hierarchy.

Perception and Memory

And it’s not just bottom up, because that hierarchy also feeds backwards. So, for example, by the time you’re an adult, most of what you see is memory. You just use the sensory input as a hint to pull up the memory.

That’s also how you get habituated to things. You know, when you see something for the first time, it’s got this glow of novelty, this numinous glow of novelty. And what happens is that you, and that’s complex and difficult to process.

And then as you become accustomed to it, and you build an internal mental model, you replace the perception with memory, because that’s faster. The problem is, is that the memory that you see is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena that’s relevant to the encounters that you had. It shuts everything off, and it, what would you say, it takes the magic out of the world.

As you replace raw perception with memory, you take the magic out of the world. That’s a reasonable way of thinking about it. That’s why there’s a novelty kick, for example.

And so, the reason I’m bringing this up is because even that relatively straightforward demonstration that you made, that sound that seems self-evident, you said right off the bat that there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite differently. You experienced it differently because you knew you were going to do it. It came as a surprise to me.

That surprise was moderated by the fact that I know you, I know your profession, I know your professional status, I know the purpose of what we’re doing here, I know the probability that what I know about you indicates that you would do something that was surprising or dangerous, which is very, very low. So, even though it was unexpected, it’s bounded in its significance by all of that knowledge. And you might say, well, that’s independent of the sense data, but that’s a very tricky thing to establish, right? To get that independence, to figure out, well, what’s the raw sense data and what’s the interpretation?

The Malleability of Sensory Experience

It gets worse than this. You can train dogs to wag their tail when they receive an electric shock. They’re happy about it. And so, you think electric shock, that’s pretty basic sense data.

It’s like, yeah, yes and no. If you reliably pair a shock, now, it depends on the magnitude of the shock, obviously. So, there are some boundaries around this, but you can train a dog to be excited about the receipt of an electrical shock if you reliably pair it with a food reward because the a priori significance of the electric shock might be pain response, right? Indicative of the potential for physiological damage because that’s approximately what pain is.

But if you associate it with the receipt of a reward, then it takes on a dopaminergic task, which means that the shock becomes indicative of the receipt of a reward, and that’s a positive emotion phenomena, and it can override the shock. It’s also the case that if you take animals like rats that are pretty intelligent, you put them in a cage, they’ll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly just because they’re bored. And horses will do that as well.

Now, as I said, it’s magnitude depends.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yes, well, of course, people do that. People do that par excellence.

JORDAN PETERSON: And so, all of these, it’s very difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn’t an interpretive framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data makes itself manifest. Now, I mean, your demonstration was very, what would you say, cut right to the chase because a sound like that is, you might say, is not subject to an infinite number of interpretations, right? There’s something there, but it’s always nested. It seems to be that it’s nested inside a hierarchy of interpretations, a very high-level hierarchy of interpretations.

Connecting Neuroscience to Philosophy

STEPHEN HICKS: Let me say, all of that is great. All of it is beautiful. All of that is directly relevant.

So, to tie that back into what our philosophical, intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say post-modernism, as a skeptical product that’s given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we’re learning more and more, that’s going to give us a better and better epistemology, all of that is great. So, I’m a kind of empiricist. But what I would say is that everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.

So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be. Yeah, perception, right, and so forth. And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they’re trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level.

The Philosophical Foundations of Empiricism

STEPHEN HICKS: But then, very quickly, they are speculating about what’s going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it’s the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project instead of seeing it as an ongoing project. The other thing I would say, or actually, there’s two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say, out there, there’s a slap, there are sound waves.

We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There really are structured energy patterns.

And we really do have, in our ears or in our hands, receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don’t respond to other energy patterns. And all of that, we are making reality claims. And we’re saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being.

Some of them, as you say, operate in parallel. They have feedback loops and so forth. I think I’m a very minimal empiricist on this, to say that empiricism only insists that there really is a reality.

Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns, that we are not making up those patterns, and we’re not imposing those patterns on the reality. Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond. But they’re not making up those structures in reality.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, or at least sometimes they’re not making them up.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah. We can come to that. So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there. It doesn’t have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead, rotting things.

It’s just that if I happen to encounter dead, rotting things, then certain chemicals will be… And then my nose will respond, and things will happen in a certain way. And that’s important. Whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on unstructured reality.

And that takes you down the skeptical road versus… You know, the nose is a particularly good example. Right, versus saying that the structures are there, and what we have are just latent reception structures, that if those structures happen to be present, we’ll be responsive. And that thing is all that the empiricists are saying.

Now, all of the other stuff where we say, OK, the background set. I came to this lab with a background set. You came with a different background set.

And we start to say, what all goes into that background set? That’s where philosophy starts to become… Well, I think that’s where philosophy is important. And as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory. And there is something that physiologically goes on.

You know, I have a body, and it’s all worked out. And that it’s going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties. But I think at a very general level, I think the philosophers have to work hand-in-hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s clear. And this is my complaint about early modern philosophy. It’s not a very strong complaint, but that they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience.

And 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology. So it’s a lot of failed experiments along the way or failed theories along the way. The other thing, though, I would want to say is as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.

The Value of Automated Responses and Emotions

STEPHEN HICKS: So to say, for example, that we have, and then you talk about the base level. There’s the slap happens, or there’s something moves low to the ground, and there’s a direct, automated, something that you didn’t think about, didn’t feel about, connection to the spine, and your body reacts in a certain way. I want to say that’s a good thing that has happened to human beings, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice or a bad thing and seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we’re not really responding to reality and so forth.

Or if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive. There’s certainly an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life, and we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them. So emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, and said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things.

JORDAN PETERSON: The enemy of reason.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right. So they’re irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.

JORDAN PETERSON: You see that a little bit with the evolutionary psychologists who claim that because we evolved for a substantial period of time on the African plains, that our emotional and motivational systems are no longer properly adapted to the modern world. It’s like, I find that, that’s a variant of the argument that you just laid out, and that it also has the echoes of that rationalist, some variants of rationalism, that proclamation that emotion is the enemy of reason.

It’s like emotions are unbelievably sophisticated. They’re low resolution and they’re quick. They’re not as quick as, say, spinal reflexes, but they’re faster than thought, and they’re also broader than thought, and they also enable us to evaluate when we don’t have enough information to think, and they have their pitfalls like everything human, because nothing human is omniscient, and so we’re going to make errors, but the idea that there’s a fundamental antipathy between the emotional, the id, let’s say, and the ego, because that’s a variant of that psychoanalytic theory, that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nervous system is integrated.

Memes and Evolutionary Frameworks

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, so let me run something else by you. Since we’ve laid out this, I want to run a proposition by you, and it’s sort of a variant of the meme theory, although it takes into account the idea that so-called memes, abstractions, compete across historical and evolutionary times. So imagine this.

This is the memes in the Dawkins sense. Yeah, yeah, so imagine that there is this level of sensory input that is as close to corresponding with objective reality as we can manage, and then imagine that that’s interpreted within this hierarchical framework that we described, levels of abstraction that rise up to ineffability, essentially. That would be something like the meaning of the fact that you hit the table in this particular context, right? Okay, so now imagine you’ve got this.

Imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of the hierarchy competes across evolutionary time. So one way of grounding our thinking in data is to assume that all of what we know emerges from raw sense data, but there’s another way of thinking about it, which is that the data is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that’s full of feedback loops, right? And there’s varied forms of those, those upper-level hierarchies, but those forms compete across time, and the more successfully they compete across time, the more they become instantiated physiologically. That’s a Baldwin effect selection mechanism.

The higher-order interpretive structures that produce the best reproductive outcome across time are more likely to become automated at an instinctual level. Emotions would be like that. They’re not as automatized as spinal reflexes, but they’re quite automatized because the sets of emotions that human beings have are very similar.

Anger, fear, surprise, joy, etc. Everyone feels those. When and where is different, but the fact of the emotions is the same.

So then imagine that this is something like the domain of iterable and playable games. So imagine that there’s a variety of different interpretive frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory data, but that a relatively small subset of those interpretive frameworks has the capacity for sustainable improvement. So you can think about this.

Think about this in the context, let’s say, of a marital relationship, right? There’s a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong. Like an indefinite number of ways that your marriage can go wrong. But then there’s a constrained number of ways that it will go right, and that’s because it’s a difficult target.

Imagine that the specifications are something like for your marriage to be successful, the micro routines and the macro routines have to be such that you’re voluntarily okay with them and your wife is voluntarily okay with them, and they bond you more tightly together across time, and this would be the optimal situation. As you lay them out together, they improve. Okay, and so you can imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual relationship of any form.

But then you can also imagine that the number of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met would be low. There’s a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across large spans of time that improve as you play them. Okay, so then you get an evolutionary pressure as well on the domains of possible philosophy, right? That they fill up something like a space, and that seems to me to be reflective.

It’s weird because that’s also reflective of an empirical reality, but it’s not the reality that’s associated with basic sense data. It’s more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and that improve, and that’s also a fact, right? I mean, and that would be, I think that’s partly why there are patterns of ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures, even independently, right? And that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism. It’s like, it’s not the value space, the philosophical space isn’t relativistic because there’s a finite number of interpretive frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive seeing power, and that is reflective of something like the structure of reality.

It’s more sophisticated reflection than the basic sense data. And so, see, I’m saying this because I’m trying to mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative, which I think that’s true. I think all the neuroscience data points in that direction.

And then you might say, well, any old story goes there. It’s like, no. Just because we see the world through a story doesn’t mean that the stories themselves aren’t constrained by empirical reality in its most sophisticated sense.

And it also doesn’t mean that the stories, even though they’re stories, fail to correspond to reality.

Narratives and Reality

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s extraordinarily rich, everything that you’re laying out there. Let me just start with one thread to pull.

I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative. I understand the attraction of it. I can make a more technical description.

JORDAN PETERSON: No, no, no. If we just start with that formulation. I think that’s a dangerous formulation.

STEPHEN HICKS: I do think the postmoderns are on board with that. But notice what it says. It says there’s a we.

There’s a me. And then there’s a narrative. And then there’s reality out there.

And that I have to go through this narrative to get to reality.

JORDAN PETERSON: Like a screen.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right. And it might have some chinks in it. It might be opaque. But also what this narrative is is that there’s a huge amount of stuff built into it.

All kinds of background expectations and theories and slippery turns and so forth. What I would say is, to use this language, is that narratives are things that we use to see reality if the narrative is true. So sometimes narratives get reality right.

Sometimes narratives are wildly unfaithful.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s in keeping with this idea of competition across time. That’s for sure.

STEPHEN HICKS: But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary, it itself is a tool. It’s a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality. That’s if we get it right.

But if we mess it up, then it does become something that we try to see reality through and we are in a problematic situation.

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, so let me reformulate the description. And then let’s see if that rectifies that problem.

And then let’s see where we can go with that problem. Because I’ll object to your objection and see where that goes. So I would say a narrative is a description of the structure through which we see the world.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s a different claim. Because it’s not a narrative until I tell it to you.

JORDAN PETERSON: Then you drop reality out of the picture.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, that’s exactly why I want to have this discussion. Because I don’t want it. I think it’s very dangerous.

It’s kind of obvious to drop reality out of the situation. But you’re right that the danger of the postmodern formulation, which is that we see the world through a narrative, let’s say, is exactly that. It’s that the reality drops out of the equation.

There’s nothing but the text, let’s say. If there’s a competition between narratives for their functionality, let’s say, reproductive and otherwise, that would go some way to addressing that problem. Because there’d be a Darwinian competition between narrative structures that would prioritize some over others.

But the description part, the idea that it’s a description is relevant. So imagine that wolves in a pack. At a perceptual level, the wolves distinguish the rank order of the wolf that they’re seeing.

The Perception of Hierarchies and Stories

JORDAN PETERSON: They do that extremely rapidly. Highly social animals are unbelievably good at that. And so the story of the hierarchy of the wolves is implicit in the perception of the wolves.

And if you describe that, it’s a story. But it’s not a story before it’s described. It’s whatever a story is before it’s described.

But it seems to me like it’s something like the weights in a neural network, returning to that idea, is that there are certain facts, let’s say, that present themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted. And that’s axiomatic. It’s built into the system.

And those would be facts we would imagine that evoke emotional response very rapidly. They’re weighted, and that weighting has a biological element and a cultural element. That’s not a story.

But if you describe that, that’s what a story is. The scientist who’s studying the wolves is creating a story.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right.

JORDAN PETERSON: No, not creating, I want to say constructing a story.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yes. Or it’s a story about something that’s not happening, mediated through stories in the wolves.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes, right. For the wolves, it’s a pattern of behavior and a pattern of perception.

Attention and Perception

JORDAN PETERSON: So imagine this, when you go to see a movie, you take on the weighting, the value structure of the protagonist. Now, human beings are very good at that. We look at each other’s eyes, and we see what people are attending to, and we watch their patterns of attention, and we infer their valuation and their motivation.

We’re unbelievably good at that. And that’s what you’re doing when you’re going to a movie. We watch how the protagonist prioritizes his attention and his action.

What his priorities are. And you infer from that the perceptual structure that, well, that’s the question. Does it bring some facts to light and make others irrelevant? And if so, is it a screen? Like, most of the world we don’t see.

Most of the world is screened out from our perception. Some of that’s biomechanical. I can’t see behind my head.

But some of it is, I’m looking at you, so I can’t see the faces of the cameramen right now. So that’s a choice that’s dependent on my determination of how to focus my attention. Now, the fact that I’m prioritizing you, I can see your face, I’m using the foveal center of my vision, and I can’t see these guys because they’re in my periphery.

That’s kind of like a screen, right? The place where it’s most open is the central point of vision. Over here it’s obscured, and over here it’s just gone completely. So now, you objected to my characterization because you said, you know, observer, screen, reality, and you didn’t like the proposition of the intermediary screen.

And I know the screening idea isn’t exactly right. But on the counter side, we have this problem. Some things are central to our perception, and other things are peripheral.

And that’s dependent on our values and our patterns of attention and our actions. So, well, I’m curious about what you think about that.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, I think you’re putting two kinds of examples out on the table.

They’re going to be related. I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person’s shoes and reading all sorts of things. Reading the world.

I think that’s very extraordinarily complicated. And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned because it does seem to be a highly fallible process. I know I don’t want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I’ve been in social circumstances, and I think I’m pretty savvy about reading people.

But I’ll be with my wife, and she will say, after we’ve had a conversation with someone, boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.

JORDAN PETERSON: Women and their interpersonal perceptions.

STEPHEN HICKS: So there may be sex, gender differences.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, they’re better at reading.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, that are going on. But also, at the same time, it’s not to say that I couldn’t learn how to do that.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

STEPHEN HICKS: So when we say people are very good at that, I think that’s true. But we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that.

And I think that’s going to be a very sophisticated story. But then the other example takes us back to perceptual cases where you’re talking about, are you looking at me, or me looking at you, and we’re also aware that we’re in a room, that there are other people in the room who are feeling, and so on. But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus on one thing, then it is true that everything else goes pale by comparison.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s right. And pale is metaphorical. So if we’re going to try to unpack the metaphor, I think we would say we focus and unfocus.

And then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of focus is. And I would prefer using that language to the language of screen, because screen really is something that is in the way. It’s a thing itself.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s another obstacle. So if there’s a dressing screen between the two of us, and I’m dressing for privacy, the whole idea of the screen is that it’s blocking.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, so the metaphor is too simple.

STEPHEN HICKS: Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter. And I think sometimes our sensory apparatus are engaging in filter. They’re just attending to some things and not attending to other things.

But a filter is different from a screen. But also, just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and unfocus, I think, is not a filter either.

The Tabernacle as a Metaphor for Perception

JORDAN PETERSON: I have a metaphor for you. Tell me what you think about this. Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been studying Old Testament stories. And I think the tabernacle in the Old Testament is a model of perception.

Okay, so tell me what you think of this as an analogy. Better than screen and better than filter.

STEPHEN HICKS: Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle…

JORDAN PETERSON: I will, I will. I’ll lay it out. Okay, so the tabernacle, at the center of the tabernacle, is the Ark of the Covenant, right? So there’s a center point, and it’s sacred. Okay, and if I remember correctly, in the early ceremonies that were associated with the tabernacle, the high priest was only allowed to go into the Holy of Holies, the center, once a year.

So there’s a center. Then there’s a structure of veils around it. Like, so that there’s a center, and then it’s veiled, and then outside of that is the community.

And so that’s the sacred central point of the community, and the center is the, what would you say, the point of focus, the fundamental point of focus, and then the significance of the periphery is proportional to the distance from the center. Now, the reason, there’s a variety of reasons that I think this is the right metaphor. It’s partly because…

STEPHEN HICKS: So it’s a metaphor for what?

JORDAN PETERSON: For object perception.

STEPHEN HICKS: Okay.

JORDAN PETERSON: For any perception, for any perception. So, and here’s partly why.

So I was referring to the visual system, for example. So the way your visual system is constructed is that at the very center, every cell in the center of your vision is connected to 10,000 neurons at the fundamental level of analysis. Okay, and then each of those 10,000 is associated with 10,000.

It spirals up exponentially, very rapidly, but the foveal tissue in the center of your vision is very high cost. It takes a lot of neural tissue to process it, and it takes a lot of energy, a lot. If your whole retina was foveal, your head would be like alien cell.

Eagles have two fovea, by the way. They have extremely sharp vision. And so now you’re… Because high-resolution vision is expensive, you can move your eyes, and you dart this very high-resolution center around.

And so every time you move your eyes, and you do that unconsciously, because they’re always vibrating, and consciously, because you can move them, and in consequence of emotion as well. So if you hear a noise off to the side that startles you, you’ll look, and that’s unconscious. Lots of things direct your visual attention, but everything you look at has a center, dead center, where everything is extremely high-resolution, and then it’s surrounded by lesser and lesser spheres of resolution until at the periphery, there’s nothing.

Right? Okay, so like out here, if I just hold my hand steady, I can’t see it except as a blur. If I move it, I can see the fingers. So out here, I can detect movement.

That’s how dinosaurs saw, by the way. Dinosaurs, frogs still, they can’t see anything that isn’t moving. They have vision like our periphery.

So out here, because the tissue in the periphery of my vision isn’t very highly innervated, I prioritize movement, because my assumption is, if it isn’t moving, I don’t have to pay attention to it. You know, it’s a default assumption about what’s the norm of the world. You live in a dynamical environment.

STEPHEN HICKS: Right, exactly.

JORDAN PETERSON: And so if you’re going to prioritize peripheral vision, the priority is, if it moves, look at it. Otherwise, ignore it.

Okay, so every perception has a center, and then a gradation of resolution until it fades out into nothing. And that tabernacle, as far as I can tell, is a model of the perceptual center. It’s a model of the community center as well, but it’s a model of perception as such.

So that’s different. That’s different than the screen, obviously.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, you do have these veils that you construct.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. You see, the veil idea is an interesting one, because the perceptions we have in the periphery are nowhere near as intense as the perceptions that we have in the center.

And so these perceptions, one way of thinking about them, is these perceptions, peripheral perceptions, are veiled. Out here, behind me, they’re veiled so intensely you can’t even see them, but the veils are graduated. So it’s, well, so tell me what you think about that.

The Field of Perception

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, let me try a different, I don’t want to use the tabernacle example, I’m not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let’s say you’re walking through, this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you’re walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood at night, and you think it’s a slightly dangerous neighborhood. And so what you’re trying to do is take in as much as you can.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

STEPHEN HICKS: And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field. It’s like a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, the phenomenologist is like that idea.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yes, that’s right. And in that case, what I’m trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular, like I might when I’m reading. Then I’m using my visual attention and I’m focusing on this particular thing.

Or I’m an artist and I’m trying to catch, do the glint on the eyeball for the finishing touch. So my eyes are wide open and I’m concentrating and I’m trying to do this and everything else is in the field. But that I think is coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works is if I am in the bad neighborhood at night and what I’m trying to do is just expand my attention to encompass the whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.

Predator and Prey Perception

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, so that’s a good objection. That’s a good objection. I guess I could make that initial analogy more sophisticated because I would say then that the tabernacle structure, center and periphery is characteristic of explored and familiar territory.

You’re making a case that there’s a different perceptual mode in unexplored territory and there is. So birds have a prey eye and a predator eye. And the predator eye acts like the painter that you described who’s focusing on one thing because you zero in on the thing you’re after.

The I’m prey eye, so that would be the bird’s, the other eye is scanning in exactly the way that you described, deprioritizing the center, amplifying the input from the periphery because that maps onto the hemispheres. So the left hemisphere does the perceptual mapping that you just, this is in right-handed people, the left hemisphere does the focal perception that you described that’s detail-oriented and that deprioritizes the periphery and the right hemisphere does the opposite. And you know, that’s I suppose you could say at a biological level, that’s because it’s eat or be eaten, right, in the most primal possible way.

And so there’s a perceptual system for things you’re going to eat and there’s a perceptual system for you might be on the menu.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, exactly. Right, right, right.

The Perception of Order and Chaos

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, so that’s, see, the thing that’s so curious about that and that you just highlighted is that the ceremonies for taking possession of a territory that are anthropologically specified, it’s usually driving a stake or a central point, a flag, a standard, a staff into the ground that signifies camp, right, or it signifies the possession of that territory. That establishes the center with a set of peripheries and with foreignness at the edge of the periphery. And that does establish a certain kind of perception that’s associated with security.

The tabernacle style of perception would be the perception that’s associated with explored territory. That’s exactly right. That’s the perception of order.

Like order is where the things you want are happening. That’s a good way of defining order. And chaos is where you don’t know what will happen when you act.

And there are two different perceptual mechanisms for those. And so the second one, the danger one, the unexplained one, the foreign territory one, is there’s less filtering and there’s less specification of center. Because you don’t know what’s important, right? You’re walking through that dangerous neighborhood.

It’s like you’re on alert and you don’t know what’s insignificant. That’s part of being on alert. So there’s no identifiable center.

And that’s a high-stress situation.

Automatic vs. Volitional Perception

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, okay. Now where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.

Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I’m focused or whether I’m diffused attention, I’m aware of reality in some direct sense. It is true that in either of those cases, if I’m the artist focusing on the particular dot and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s been quite mapped out neurophysiologically, right? The Russians did a very good job of that starting in about 1960.

Sokolov was one of them and a woman named Vinogradova, and they were students of a neuropsychologist named Luria. They mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex, and that’s exactly what that is. It’s like you’re focused on a task and something of pragmatic…

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, of implicit significance distracts you from your goal, and you do.

JORDAN PETERSON: So there’s a hierarchy of gradated responses that are part of that orienting reflex. But then even another interesting case would be you’re the artist and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you’ve given yourself a signal. I’m angry at my kid right now.

He’s been a brat. I’m going to ignore him when he screams. So I’m focusing.

Exact same scenario. Kid screams. I register it, but my reaction is quite different.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, that shows you how malleable even those relatively low-level instinctual responses are.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s right. That’s going to be a back-feed loop.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, exactly.

JORDAN PETERSON: And that’s part of the consequence of the higher-order brain centers feeding. Like, there isn’t a primary level of perception that has no top-down modification.

Even the primary visual cortex, say where your fovea meets the visual cortex for the first time, is tremendously innervated by multiple… Well, so here’s an example. So when you look at an object, when you look at a pen, for example, let’s say that constitutes a visual pattern. It’s represented on the retina as a pattern.

It’s propagated along the nerves. Then it branches out. One of the places that information ends up quite quickly is the motor cortex.

So when you see… Almost all the objects that you see in the world you see because they’re definable in terms of the action you take in their presence. So like, when you see this pen, the grip motion that you would use to use it is directly disinhibited by the sight of the pen. And that’s part of the perception.

It’s not like you see the pen and think about its use. That isn’t how it works at all. You see its use directly.

And so that’s another thing that’s very strange about object perceptions. Like, you don’t actually see objects in the world. What you see are tools and obstacles.

And, well, then there’s all the things you don’t see. And the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your goal. So, you know, your goal, for example, the example you used is you’re not happy with your child.

So the goal there has shifted from respond to distress cries. It’s shifted from that, which might be the default, right, to certain probability that distress cry is false, right, or manipulative, therefore ignore. Very different interpretive framework.

Very different social landscape. And capable of modifying even almost the base level perception, you’ll still hear the cry. I mean, I guess that would be even curious.

Like, if your child is highly probable, if your child is likely to emit distress calls that are false, my suspicions are you’d be less likely to hear that, to actually hear it. Not only not to respond to it, right, because you’d have built an inhibitory structure that says, well, despite the instinctual significance of that, it’s irrelevant.

STEPHEN HICKS: Right. Highly likely.

Perception and Learning

STEPHEN HICKS: To come back to, like, your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the… The perception.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, I’m going to put that in quotation marks right now. Yep.

STEPHEN HICKS: Right, and then the action that’s going to be embodied in that use also, in many cases, seems to be built into the perception.

I think if we unpack that more, there’s still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system at birth and how much of it is learned.

JORDAN PETERSON: Definitely.

STEPHEN HICKS: Because I don’t think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century where we come into the world born with kind of a pre-cognized understanding of pens.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. We probably have a pre-cognized understanding of tool. I don’t even know if we have that.

We have a certain physiological structure, that, and a certain conceptual structure that’s built on that, such that, and it’s going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, a lot of that… So let me just try another example to get to, because I like the earlier movie example and the male-female difference. One thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other’s voices and the sound of their own voice.

So couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party, and they would be talking to each other.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s a really good example.

STEPHEN HICKS: And, you know, there’s just noise, and it’s a big decibel level, right? But then once they become couples, and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party, separated across the room, right? And the guy’s wife says, Stephen, right? And he can pick that out of that incredible…

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, exactly.

STEPHEN HICKS: …room of sounds.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, that’s what you do if you’re in a restaurant that’s bustling with conversations.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: What’s so remarkable is, if you’re sitting with someone, and there’s conversations everywhere, you can tune yourself so that you hear the person that you’re sitting beside, you hear them, but then you can turn your attention to a conversation beside you, and you’ll prioritize that, or you can turn your attention to your own thoughts, right?

And I would say that’s something like the imposition of that tabernacle-like structure on that plethora of potential interpretations. That’s what the postmodernists would point out.

There’s an infinite number of potential interpretations in a restaurant that’s bustling with conversation. It’s like, fair enough, but you prioritize one. That’s what it means to pay attention to it, right? Is that you prioritize it.

You make something a center. You make everything else a periphery. Then you learn to do that automatically, right? With practice.

I think maybe the best example of that for literate people is the fact that you can’t see a word without reading it, right?

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, because you’ve automated certain behaviors.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s right. You’ve automated that.

Postmodernism and Subjectivity

STEPHEN HICKS: So that center is now built into the perception. What the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right? That we can automate all of these things, and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing, all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives.

They turn them into vices. So what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes in their language, because they’ve already got a epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective. And the idea for them then is that somehow if we were going to be actually aware of reality and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions.

Or what they will then do is to say, you know, I can choose to prioritize this, right, over that in my visual field. They will say, and they’re right to say this, but that’s a value judgment. I think this is more important now, and this is more important over there.

But then by the time they start using the words values, they’re coming out of very sophisticated negative evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality. Well, maybe it’s worse than that. So for both of them, it’s on the cognition side and on the evaluative side that they’re deep into subjective territory, and so those then become negative words for them.

Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project, just attending to the language that we’re using at the foundations of cognition. All of these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on. That’s where we have to get that sorted out because if we don’t get those foundations correct, then we’re going to be messed up.

Power and Postmodernism

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, well, so two things there. So you pointed to the fact that the postmodernist description of the subjective, but tell me what you think about this. See, the postmodern insistence, despite the fact that they claim that there’s no uniting metanarrative, which is a specious claim in my estimation, because I don’t know where the uniting ends.

If everything’s a narrative, there’s uniting narratives at every level of analysis. But more than that, their proposition, at least implicitly, has been that the narratives that we do utilize are predicated on power. That’s part of the reflection of the subjective.

It’s like, I’m prioritizing in keeping with my desire to exercise power. And by power, I don’t mean ability to maneuver in the world, I mean force and compulsion. And that what we have in the postmodern world is a battleground between different claims of power, and that’s all there is.

I think the weakness in that, first one weakness is that it’s a confession rather than a description. But the other one is that power games are not iterable and productive and improving across time. They’re self-defeating.

And so you can play a power game, and you can win short-term victories with a power game, but it’s not a sustainable, iterable, medium-to-long-term viable strategy. You know that Franz de Waal, for example, the primatologist, studied chimpanzees. So, you know, we have this trope, and I think it’s a consequence of Marxist influence on biologists that the hierarchies of chimpanzees, for example, which are masculine hierarchies in the main, are predicated on power.

You know, the alpha chimp is the most powerful tyrant, and he dominates all the others. That’s why he’s reproductively successful. De Waal showed very clearly that there are alphas who use power, but they have short range, fractious communities, and they’re extremely likely to suffer a premature, violent death.

Right, so it is a niche in that you can force compliance, but the stable alphas that de Waal studied were the most reciprocal male chimpanzees of the troop. They made the most lasting friendships. And so that’s a whole different model of the mediation of attention, let’s say, than one that’s predicated on power.

So do you think it’s fair when you’re assessing the postmodern philosophical corpus, you talked about this objective element, where do you think the postmodern claim that power is essentially the dominant narrative, where do you think that fits in with this claim with regards to subjectivity?

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s a good question. I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice. Power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

STEPHEN HICKS: And our cognitive powers, right, if we have a good, healthy epistemology, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world. Even cooperatively.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s exactly right.

STEPHEN HICKS: But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology, all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training. It’s a striking fact, the big name postmoderns, so we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others, they are all PhDs in philosophy.

They’re all doing heavy-duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral-level work. And that does come to become the foundation. And because of the time that they are working in, the middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy, the prevailing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time, so they came with age.

The Philosophical Implications of Postmodernism

JORDAN PETERSON: Now, what that then is to say is if you don’t think that human beings can know the world as individuals, then you don’t think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding is the most important thing about human beings. So what then is it to be a human being? To the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps. And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world are going to become more predominant, or even lower than chimps, baboons.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, it’s more of a baboon model. It might then be. Fractious fascists.

I think this, though, shows the absolute importance of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively. Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that it is competent, that our brain-mind is an enormously powerful tool, and if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals, and socially we’ll start to work out the win-win, positive, some social things. Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of levels.

JORDAN PETERSON: So then that regression becomes the use of power as the metanarrative that the postmodernists hypothetically abandoned.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right, they’re all left with it. That’s what they’re left with.

You’re getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing. Then you ask, well, what’s left? If it’s not the case that I think my human cognition, my mind, puts me in touch with reality, and that I can work out reality, and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality, and that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things, to do the experiments, to, you know, I can visit what you’ve experienced. To take each other’s position.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s right. In service of some higher goal.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right.

And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed-upon understanding of the nature of reality. Then, if that’s not what’s going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture. And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality.

That’s what’s going on here. Or some of them are more passive. All of the influences of more environmental, deterministic understandings of human beings.

What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your social upbringing, and so on. So, again, we don’t have an economy that’s…

JORDAN PETERSON: The dominant patriarchy.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, or it could be any sort of social structure from their perspective.

But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships. It’s not me in relation to reality, and other people are part of reality, so I have to work that out. But rather, the assumption is that I am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality.

And so the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be. And the word there that becomes most important is the power word. It’s a kind of social power.

JORDAN PETERSON: And that tilts them towards that social constructionism.

STEPHEN HICKS: Oh, yeah. It’s the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power.

But the power for them cannot be the positive sum kind of power that we’re talking about, because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world a better place and empower ourselves. We can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful. I can understand that you’re a rational person, and you can understand that I’m a rational person, so I have to treat you a certain way conversationally, socially, and so forth.

So all of the positive sum social stuff is going to come out of that, but the postmoderns have cut all of that away. All you’re left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world. And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language, that are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially constructed themselves.

JORDAN PETERSON: And tools of power.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right. And so it becomes then necessarily a zero sum socially influencing and controlling game, and they reinterpret everything in terms of that.

Concluding the YouTube Section

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay. Okay, so I think what we’ll do is stop there. We’ve come to the end of the time for the YouTube section.

I’d like to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side, but what I would like to talk about with you there is power in service of what? Right, because there has to be, I mean, you could hypothesize that power in itself is a desirable good, but then you have to define power in a way that would make the desirability of itself evident. Alternatively, you have to say that you want power for a reason. So I want to talk to you about that, your thoughts on that.

You can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses too.

STEPHEN HICKS: Okay.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, you, maybe we can close with that too. You’ve taped three additional courses.

STEPHEN HICKS: I’ve done five courses, yes. Three are in post-production.

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, and what are the three that are coming up?

STEPHEN HICKS: One is on modern ethics. So what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse, more global, more multicultural, and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us.

So it’s a much more wide-open world. What’s interesting about the modern world is how little we have what I think of as kind of a homogeneous culture where everybody is by and large on the same philosophical religious right.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s the collapse of that meta-narrative.

STEPHEN HICKS: Yeah, that particular meta-narrative. And so we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good, what is bad, what’s right, what is wrong, what’s the meaning of my life, how should we organize ourselves socially. So what I did was chose eight completely different but extraordinarily influential modern moral philosophers and devoted a lecture to each of them.

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, okay.

STEPHEN HICKS: So it goes back to people like David Hume wrestling with the is-ought problem and Immanuel Kant with his strong duty focus, John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, and so on in through the 20th century up to very contemporary times. So that’s one course, Modern Ethics.

And all of these people are giants. They all disagree with each other, but that’s the contemporary landscape within which people who are doing serious thinking about morality need to position themselves. The other two courses are 16 lectures in total, but it’s called The Philosophy of Politics.

And here what I’m interested in is obviously we have political science, we have political theory, political ideology, practical day-to-day understandings of politics, but what I’m interested in is the philosophers’ contributions to those debates. And one of my background assumptions is that a lot of times when people disagree about politics, they’re not actually disagreeing about politics, they’re disagreeing about something more fundamental.

JORDAN PETERSON: I think that’s become evident to everyone.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s right. And in many cases, it doesn’t get brought to the core. So I don’t want to talk about the recent election, but really it’s about culture, more fundamentally, and not about many particular issues and underlying culture.

JORDAN PETERSON: And both the other courses are dealing with that.

STEPHEN HICKS: Right. So one though picks up with the French Revolution, which is perhaps the landmark event in European or at least continental European history, why that political revolution happened, and there’s a lot of philosophy that matters there, but then also an important theoretician, Edmund Burke, and a launching of a kind of modern conservatism in response to that.

But then we go through all of the big-name philosophers who have pronounced influentially on politics. So we go through Hegel and Marx, and as we get into the 20th century, we talk about the fascists, Mussolini and Gentile, who was a PhD in philosophy, and Heidegger and the National Socialists, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, and that one ends with World War II. So French Revolution to the World War II.

The next course picks up at the end of World War II in the Cold War, and it starts with Rand and Robert Nozick. At the height of the Cold War, how can we defend some sort of robust liberal capitalism in this context? So it starts with them, goes on to John Rawls. We also talk about James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for Public Choice Economics.

We also do some international, because we’re living in a global society, that cliche and so on. But the Islamist revolutions and the philosopher, the Egyptian philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, whose brother was the professor of Osama Bin Laden, extraordinarily influential. Ayatollah Khomeini had Qutb’s works translated into Farsi before he became Ayatollah.

We go to Russia and the rise of Putin and the role of the thinking of Alexander Dugin in that framework as well. And then we end that course with a contemporary version of conservatism, Roger Scruton’s meaning of conservatism, which came out a few years before he died. So the idea here is to say, these are the big name political theories you need to know, but they’re all big name ones because they have philosophical bite behind them by some very deep people and integrating that with the history in each case, how some of them are urging history in a certain direction or trying to make sense of major events like French Revolution or the Cold War or the attacks.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, so if people watch all the courses that you have offered, so all five of them, they’re going to get a pretty decent overview of the major thinkers of the last 500 years in the philosophical, ethical and political realms.

STEPHEN HICKS: That’s my ambition.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s a good deal. That’s a good deal. I want to watch those courses. There’s lots of things that you’re lecturing about that I don’t know about. I’d like to know the nuances. I’d like to know the details. So yeah, so I’m very much looking forward to that.

STEPHEN HICKS: Well, thank you very much for coming to Scottsdale. A real pleasure.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, it’s great. And it’s great to have you on board on Peterson Academy too. And I think we’ll talk too on the Daily Wire side a little bit about the perils, pitfalls and opportunities of online, highly produced online education because I’d like to get some of your opinions about that too.

STEPHEN HICKS: All right, so we’ll do that.

Jordan Peterson’s New Book

JORDAN PETERSON: Thank you very much, sir. Oh, I should give this to you too. So yeah, this is my new book, which is coming out on the 19th. And so we wrestle with God. And so I’m making a case in this book fundamentally that, well, we talked about the relationship between story and perception, but I’m trying to explain in this book why the notion of sacrifice is the central story in the biblical corpus, making the case that sacrifice is equivalent to work and that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of the community, that those two things are so tightly associated that they’re equivalent. There’s no difference between sacrifice and community. They’re the same thing. So anyways, I’d like to get that to you.

STEPHEN HICKS: All right, I will dive into it. Thank you.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, I’d certainly be interested in your thoughts on it as well. And so it’s coming out very soon. And I tried to make sure that everything that I wrote in it was hopefully justifiably theologically and traditionally, but also scientifically. Like I wanted the stories to make sense at both levels of analysis at the same time. So that’s a tight triangulation, so to speak, and who knows if it’s successful. But that was the rule of thumb. So anyways, very good to talk to you today. A real pleasure.

So yeah, and I’m looking forward to our continued collaboration on the Peterson Academy side.

STEPHEN HICKS: Me too.

Closing Remarks

JORDAN PETERSON: All right, so all of you watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side. We’re going to talk about two things. We’re going to talk about the practical and hypothetical future of online education. We’re going to talk about the relationship. What would you say? The value of power from the postmodern perspective. Why would people be interested in power? You might think that’s self-evident, but lots of things that appear self-evident aren’t at all on more detailed analysis. So you can join us for another half an hour of that discussion if you would.

Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today and my producer, Joy Holm, for putting this together. She’s been working extremely hard on the set side and the production side, and the podcast is improving in quality quite dramatically in consequence. We’ve got all sorts of new things lined up for you in the very near future. There’ll be some announcements on that front very soon. Thank you very much for your time and attention today. Thank you.

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