I spent the better part of my Labor Day weekend listening to this conversation between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. I just couldn’t stop listening to them because the conversation was so interesting. I highly recommend listening to both day 1 and day 2. The moderator, Bret Weinstein, who I was unfamiliar with, did a really great job.
In the last 10 minutes of day 2, Sam and Jordan summarize their positions.
My commentary is included in brackets [Like this.]:
Jordan:
2:07:00
He agrees with Sam that we need to ground our ethical structure in something “solid and demonstrable”, but he’s not sure how we do that.
He’s not sure we can derive a value structure from YOUR experience of the observable facts. [He emphasizes the word “your”.] There are too many facts, you need a structure to interpret them, and there isn’t very much of you.
That structure is provided neurologically. You have an inbuilt structure. It’s deep. It’s partly biological its partly a consequence of your socialization.
It may be derived from facts over the evolutionary time frame, but it’s not derived from facts over your lifetime, and it can’t be.
There are too many facts in reality for us to make sense of all of them without some sort of structure. That structure is provided by evolution. We need some sort of “a priori structure”. [He used the term “a priori structure” over and over.]
[I still have my same initial criticism of Jordan on this point. Why does the world need to “make sense”? Why do we need to “make sense” of all those facts? As a Randian, I say it’s because I want to live, and if I want to live I need to deal with the facts as best I can. That provides me with a “fundamental frame work” of value -which is my life as a living organism and a human being. But, I don’t know that Jordan would accept that. So on what ground does Jordan need to have the world “make sense”?]
Sam:
2:11:00
The conversation is the point.
Making sense in a way that is consequential because these are issues are of great consequence.
It matters whether we converge on the most important issues in human life.
I’m worried that religion doesn’t give us the tools that we need to converge.
What gives us the tools is a truly open-ended conversation.
You have to look at anything that creates any obstacles to that conversation being truly open-ended.
Religion presents those obstacles first and most readily. Its the idea that certain things have been decided for all time and that there is no future evidence or argument that is admissible.
There is a section of the bookstore [Sam gives an analogy here]. In that section of the book store, we cannot say those books need revision. We can pick and chose what works of Shakespeare that we like. With religion, you have to find some “tortured” way to make the most of god’s “diabolical” [Sam’s word] utterances. [I would have preferred it if Sam hadn’t used the word “diabolical”, since I think that is unnecessarily inflammatory.]
Jordan’s style of talking about religion and narrative seems to let people off the hook on that point. [I agree. This is the biggest problem with what Jordan Peterson is saying. It lets people “off the hook” and appears to be an attempt to “shield” their religious belief from any analysis by me or others.]
No one has the “right” to their religious sectarianism at this point in history -we need to say that. [I don’t think Sam meant people don’t have a right in a political or legal sense to the free exercise of religion. I think he means they don’t have a right to say those things without their being questioned by anyone.]
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You can listen to these by going to either Sam Harris’ YouTube channel or Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel:
