Video Creator’s Channel Jordan B Peterson

So I Want To Continue Talking About

this basic story or sub-personality or game or map. SO what I ve discussed with you so far is that there are different ways that you can construe the objects and territories that you inhabit, and that modern people generally think that the world they inhabit is one that’s defined by science, but I would say-I would say actually it depends on which scientist you mean because I don’t believe that the worldview that emerges as a logical consequence of Darwinism is the same worldview that emerges as a logical consequence of Newtonian presuppositions and you know the reason I m bringing Newton into it is because we still think in Newtonian terms and it s been more than a hundred years or about a hundred years.

I Guess, Since Newton

s model was expanded by quantum physics, but no one thinks that way. way because you can’t think that way and besides that, the reason you don’t think that way is because at the level of resolution that you exist, things behave in a Newtonian manner so it s in accordance with some of our natural perceptions. .

Now, I Started Thinking This Way

for a variety of reasons. But I was influenced later by a guy named Gibson-NK] Gibson, who wrote a book calledNK] Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. And. He made the case, quite strongly, that what you directly perceive is the implication of situations and objects.

So, For Example,, I Suppose Youve

all seen the famous visual cliff experiment with Babies where if you put a piece of glass across an open space and the space is evidently deep, the baby wont cross the glass and so there’s some evidence there for relatively innate, not only depth processing. It s. Processing.

It

s not just depth processing, right, because in order to not crawl off that, you also have to perceive that-well. Gibson would say that it s a falling off place, and he would say that’s actually what you perceive is a falling off place and then maybe you can extract out the idea of cliff, but that isn’t what you perceive and you know, the sense you have when a bear is chasing you that s dangerous, that doesn’t seem to be merely psychological in a sense like it

S Not Merely, In A Sense, Not-It

s not less real than perceiving the bear as an object. An object that eats you is not the same object as an object that remains neutral to you or positive, and it seems quite clear, and this is where the Darwinian issue I think arises, that you have to evaluate with your. with your perception because otherwise you’re too slow. SO anyways, I developed this diagram as a consequence of thinking about these things for a long time.

, And The Diagram Is Predicated On The Idea

that when you begin to act in the world, you’re inside a motivational frame, lets say, and that motivational frame can be instantiated or put into practice or put into place by any number of underlying motivational systems, some of them the more basic motivational systems that we share with animals going far back down the evolutionary chain and some of them. More complex mixtures of emotional or motivational drives that been organized across lengthy periods of times in social circumstances. . SO, for example,, if you’re at a bar and you’re looking for someone, it

S Not Really Reasonable To Say-We

ll take the simple case. . It s not really reasonable to say that your behavior is.

Is Motivated By Sex Because Thats

what happens only if you’re actually in a sexual act.. Before that, the motivations are multiple and they have to be because otherwise you wouldn’t have the sophistication to begin a conversation with anyone. SO to think of that as driven in some sense by sexuality means either to consider a much more expanded notion of sexuality or to not consider it driven in that manner. .

Now, I Think It

s reasonable to make the presumption that you’re motivated to move ahead and we know that for a variety of reasons. Partly that s because if you look at the brain at the level of the hypothalamus, which is a very, very archaic and primordial subsystem in the brain, then it s roughly divided into two parts and one part is responsible for a lot of the things.

We Consider Basic Motivations, And The Other Part

is. responsible for exploration. So the dopaminergic tracts whose operation underlies movement forward and incentive reward and what you generally experience as the sorts of positive emotion associated with hope, and excitement, and curiosity, that system is instantiated in the hypothalamus, and a lot of the hypothalamus is devoted to it. . So, as a very primordial system whose operation appears to be a default.

.

It s a default operation if none of the other motivational systems need current attention. Well the other default I suppose is sleep or rest, and you can certainly see that in animals because, you know, if you have a cat you ll notice-of course they

• things behave newtonian
• bringing newton think newtonian terms
• clear darwinian issue think arises
• think world inhabit defined science
• logical consequence darwinism worldview

Re Nocturnal, But Theyll Sleep A Large Part Of

the day and so do dogs. So, Dogs. So, you know, if you’re not looking for a partner, if you don’t want to play, if you’re not hungry, not thirsty, and so on, not under the grip of any direct biological necessity. Let s say, then your default position is to rest or sleep or to explore, and the thing about the exploratory circuit is it

S Really Old.

It s as old as pain. It s as old as lust.

It

s as old as Anger. It s as old as hunger. It

S As Old As Thirst.

Like It s a really, really old system. It s a very primordial system, and human beings are quite hyper-exploratory, at least collectively as you can tell because we keep inventing new things and exchanging new modes of being.

So, You Can Say In Some

sense that you have a drive to engage with the world and to expand your domain of knowledge. And And the reason that you have that is because the human race has gambled on that as a sufficient means of ensuring adaptation into the future, you know, and it s a strange one because most animals are very, very conservative. . In fact, most human societies are very, very conservative, so it

S Certainly Possible For Even Relatively Modern Human

societies-so lets say those that have arisen in the last fifty thousand years-to remain relatively unchanged for periods during that time of up to ten thousand years. That seems to be what happened, for example,, with regards to the original inhabitants of Australia and so it s statis that s the norm, not transformation, and you know, even societies that we feel were very dynamic like let

S Say Ancient Egypt Still There Are Indications In

the archaeological records of relatively unchanged customs and practices for periods that you would count. would count in the thousands. SO, most animals and many societies bet that just doing the same thing over and over is gonna do the trick, and human beings-well that isn’t what we re like man. God only knows how that originally came about, you know.

It Was The Conjunction Of Many, Many

processes and forces, and it would be very, very difficult to tell a complete causal story, but anyways here we are. Now, it s reasonable to think of us as motivated to move forward and motivated to explore, and so that’s the fundamental motivation for engaging with the world apart from anything that s a strictly lower level biological. And while we

Re Doing That, It

s also customary for us to look at the world in terms of its utility. , and I would say with human beings that it s a very tool based utility because you know, our brain. brain is part of our body.

Our Brain Is Adapted To Our Body And

our body is adapted to our brain. Obviously they coevolved and so the kind of brain we have is the sort of brain that a creature that stands upright and can manipulate the world has, and we ll see some evidence of that later. But Ebcause we re so handy, we can speak with our hands and we can manipulate things with our hands and we can transform things with our hands and we can tear things apart and we can hunt and we can plant and there’s an endless number of possibilities for hand.

Utilization.

The world appears to us arrayed out as tools, roughly speaking, and a tool would be something-it s hard to get the word exactly right because I like tool because tool implies something that you can use, whereas Gibson would have. have talked about-what did he call it? I can t remember.

It

ll come to me in a minute. . The word reflects the fact that the world is presenting itself to you as something you can use. Let me just look that up for a second.

That

s very annoying. Oh well, whatever. So naturally when you lay out the world, it lays itself out into things that are going to be useful for you. , things that are going to get in your way, and then things that have neither property.

Under.

Most circumstances, the things that have neither property are the overwhelming majority, and that’s partly how you manage to process the world in all of its complexity with your relatively narrow processing capacity. . Most capacity. Most things have no significance, and they have no significance within this very very focal frame, which is if you remember the hierarchy diagram, it

S Like In That Hierarchy Diagram, Most Of

the time youre operating at the level of motor interaction with the world. You re actually engaged with the world either through articulation, but forget about that for now, or you’re actually engaged moving in the world and moving it around and interacting with it. It

S As If Youre Viewing The World Through A

series of concentric lenses and those concentric lenses exclude and then the highest resolution lens, the one that enables you to focus. Closest, is the one that helps you highlight those few things in the vast perceptual world of nothingness that seem to be critical for that particular operation. SO now, you can see that. I mean the most dramatic example of that-I was really personally thrilled about Dan Simon s Gorilla experiments because I

D Been Thinking About This For A Long Time

before that experiment came out and it was the clearest demonstration I had seen. I mean, there’s a lot of demonstrations like that now, but it was the clearest demonstration I d ever seen that indeed most of what you’re perceptual systems do is exclude. Now what that means-this is the tricky thing is that what that means is that wrapped up in what you exclude is the entire-is all of being, virtually and that’s a very tricky problem because when you’re excluding all of being, in some sense you’re setting its value to zero. You say, UK except for those few things that I

M Concentrating On Now, Everything Else Is

zero and its zero and unchanging. And. The and unchanging.

And the problem with that is that lots of times that s not right. Now.

It

s right enough, luckily enough, and I suppose this is a consequence of evolution too. We re fast enough or slow enough, depending on how you look at it so that we can assume constancy across some span of time under some conditions.

• darwinism
• darwinian
• newtonian
• newton
• evolution

.

Now, from a philosophical perspective that’s inadequate. Some of you might have heard of the phrase UK scandal of induction.

Well, It

s a pointer to a very profound philosophical problem and the philosophical problem is how do you know the same thing that happened before is going to happen Next And the answer to that is generally you don’t know, and it s a very tricky issue to come to terms with you.

Summary

Modern people generally think that the world they inhabit is one that’s defined by science, but I would say-I would say actually it depends on which scientist you mean because I don’t believe that the worldview that emerges as a logical consequence of Darwinism is the same worldview . So, for example, I suppose you’ve all seen the famous visual cliff experiment with Babies where if you put a piece of glass across an open space and the space is evidently deep, the baby won&t cross the glass and so there’s some evidence there for relatively innate, not only depth processing, not just depth processing . But I was influenced later by a guy named Gibson-NK] Gibson, who wrote a book calledNK] Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.& He made the case, quite strongly, that what you directly perceive is the implication of situations and objects. He would say that it&s a falling off place, and he would say That’s actually what you perceive is a falling…. Click here to read more and watch the full video