in 5, 10, 15, 20 years, Jordan Peterson will remember 2018 as the year he peaked

What you just wrote is basically a concise summary of the intended meaning of my original post. He's basically affirming the consequent here.

Since he's reasoning backward from a mere example of an axiom: uh, yes, God's existence can be an axiom, but don't you think you might be forgetting that there might be some other axioms out there, Dr. Peterson? This is just embarrassing.

Yeah, and it has a name: it's called bull****.

I always thought Toronto was like the cold San Francisco. In any case, Peterson only got in probably due to his wishy-washy anti-science humanities degree got him in.

A more charitable reading of what he wrote:

We can't get any systems complex enough to be interested without creation of axioms, so it's impossible for everything to be evidence based. Now here's a deductive reason I think God is the metaphysical force behind things.

Axiom 1: If things exist, God exist.
Axiom 2: Things exist.
Proposition 1:

oh no the humanities are evil and unserious waah

I think 30 Rock got Toronto right: it's like New York, except without all the stuff.

I'm only joking, I actually think the humanities are deeply unappreciated, I have dedicated a good deal of my life to studying and understanding Nietzsche, and ~in fact~, I'm certain that's why Jordan Peterson is so popular. You see, Jordan Peterson is popular with a certain subset of the population who don't read. Moreover, if they do, they only read technical ****, things far removed from gay media like literature or philosophy. What are we, figure skaters? What Jordan Peterson does is open up a new world to these people in a safe space, where political ideas they have aren't confronted. He takes literature and philosophy, and works it into life narratives wherein, who knows the "truth" of it? It can be very insightful. So he exposes these people to humanities, and guess what, they really love it, but I guess they just.. won't go seek out that stuff unless it's spoonfed by a reactionary.

I think his argument hangs on the implicit assumption that God is more axiom-like than any other axiom. Here's what I mean by that. He's assuming that the defining feature of an axiom is that it is an underived truth. That is, an axiom is a premise that does not presuppose any other premise in order for it to be true. Rather, it is true by itself (i.e., it is self-evident). God more than any other first principle does not presuppose the existence of something else, whereas even the geometric definitions of Euclid, somehow, still presuppose God, even if only implicitly. (They are, therefore, less axiom-like than God.) So God, more than anything else, exhibits the defining trait of axioms.

So if proof is possible (the assumption, of course, is that it is), all proof must rely on some axiom that does not presuppose any other axiom. Because God is the only axiom that meets that description, God must exist.

That's still not quite right, because the purpose of the argument isn't to prove the existence of God. But it's closer.

Epistemological bootstrapping has always seemed a bit desperate to me. You can't really prove anything all the way down. May as well learn deal with it.

I can't tell from just a tweet, but it seems like Peterson is referencing some enlightenment era discussions about whether certainty was possible in principal. There were some who argued that it was impossible barring some sort of revelation from a divine omniscient being. IIRC, those who proposed this did not believe in a divine omniscient being. I tend to agree with that position. Even in purely abstract cases, you can't have absolute certainty that your own mind is working correctly. If you have ever tried to do math in dreams, for example, you can end up with some pretty ridiculous stuff that seems completely straight forward.

But even then, certainty from revelation isn't really rigorous certainty. I think of it more of a description of a state of confidence in a particular axiom, which if true, implies many other commonly held axioms.

And of course, Peterson seems to have no idea what the incompleteness theorem is about, but that's twitter users for you. I expect he just heard some stuff fourth hand and sort of mushed it into a tweet.

Peterson might be an excellent psychology professor. The trouble is professors are frequently morons outside their fields, but somehow think that a PHD gives them expertise in general knowledge. Richard Dawkins writes embarrassingly ignorant things about religion and philosophy, and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't all that great at history. Or hiring people to fact check his history. However, I'd listen to them talk about their respective fields.

Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't a particularly good astrophysicist, I'd rather listen to anyone else in the field really.

This is just about as dumb as reasoning that scientists who call evolution a "theory" must be admitting that they don't have confidence that it's most likely true, and therefore any other competing "theory" is potentially just as valid.

The only charitable explanation of Peterson's argument is that God is everywhere, not just in axioms, but everything else as well: the rock, the x-wing, your boner on the subway, etc. At which point the word God becomes completely meaningless, which is probably about as close to the truth these kind of discussions are going to get you anyway.

That's not a ridiculous belief, though. Or, at least, it's no more ridiculous than what any religious person might believe about God. The omnipresence of God is a boilerplate religious doctrine.

Sure. But using the omnipresence of God as part of an argument in order to endow some earthly object with divine properties? We might as well be talking about holy water.

If Peterson wants to argue that mathematics is divine, he wouldn't be the first. Not sure how this is an argument about anything, though.

wouldnt all the water be holy

Pretty much. So then what's the point of talking about it if it applies to everything.

All water is holy

All axioms are divine

All life is made of energy

etc.

Generally because an intuitive experience of all things being divine is not our default mode of experience, and most spooky types want to have the experience of universal divinity/interconnectedness, and you won't ever know you want that unless someone explains the philosophy to you. Now, talking about it isn't particularly useful in generating those experiences, which is why these discussions are generally philosophy to back up some sort of practice. For example, stealing from the Aghori page on wikipedia:

[quote=not a real source]Aghoris base their beliefs on two principles common to broader Shaiva beliefs: that Shiva is perfect (having omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence) and that Shiva is responsible for everything that occurs – all conditions, causes and effects. Consequently, everything that exists must be perfect and to deny the perfection of anything would be to deny the sacredness of all life in its full manifestation, as well as to deny the Supreme Being.[/quote]

So they engage in all sorts of taboo breaking (living in charnel grounds, covering themselves in human ashes, drinking out of bowl made from skulls etc.) to try to bring their philosophy into their direct experience. Peterson is the worst kind of mystic/occultist though, which is to say he wants to talk **** about stuff like that without doing any of the fun stuff like self mutiliation or getting ****ing drunk and stoned in an open air cemetery.

I would actually love to see him do those things though. I think that would resolve a lot of the pent up tension and anger that his videos seem to evoke.

I think it's kind of lame to use this 'spooky' stuff to make some asinine rhetorical point like he seems to be doing. Well maybe he doesn't see it that way, but to the rest of us it looks like a parody. I agree that the more comprehensive worldview you mentioned is probably totally different and wouldn't necessarily look so ridiculous.

At some point there needs to be a Jordan B Peterson parody twitter bot that generates fake Jordan B Peterson sounding quotes.

Because I used to live in Sherwood Park.

It really doesn’t matter where you get your undergraduate degree, fyi. The material isn’t deep or sophisticated enough for researcher or university prestige to become relevant. A startup founded by a degree snob might pass on you, but I’ve never had an established company not call me for an interview if they got my resume. And you don’t want to work for degree snobs anyway, for a lot of other reasons.

To be clear, though, UofA has excellent academics. It punches well above its weight in many fields, including emerging high tech ones like games and deep learning. The problem with the UofA is toxic provincial politics and a corrupt and wasteful administration. I could go into more detail but it’s not really the thread for it.



The most charitable explanation I can think of is the belief in some form of irreducible fact about realty, some underlying truth, and therein lies God. Whether the Christian God, or the philosophic God.

Someone else brought up Euclid’s axioms. Which, of course, are wrong. We do not exist in a Euclidean space. We exist in a manifold, a small region of space time that locally resembles a Euclidean space, but is in fact curved. Euclid’s axioms seemed true when they were invented, and for the purposes of useful geometry they might as well be, but in reality there is no such thing as a Euclidean plane.

The danger of this kind of thinking is that, if one believes there is an irreducible fact somewhere, and that God is responsible for it, then we might stop looking when we find something that we can’t obviously reduce. Even if our observation is false, or incomplete, or if there is a whole universe of complexity underlying it. This has happened again and again throughout our scientific history.

In other words, this guy is a moron.

I don't think he's making that move.

Agh, I'm don't like what I've become. The devil's advocate who tries to make Peterson's views more defensible than they are. Yikes.

It's definitely lame, and he is looking for anything he can get to give his half assed mysticism some weight. I really want some famous satanist to get famous and go on Oprah like Michael Aquino and quote all of Jordan Peterson's stupid individualist mumbo jumbo that sounds almost exactly like satanism but with a bunch of useless moralizing on top of it that ****s the whole thing up.

Jon`C's post makes things incredibly clear in my mind.

I would posit that there may be a Moron Uncertainty Principle, which makes it impossible to pin down a badly formulated idea. I've seen Peterson squirm a lot when asked to more precisely formulate just wtf he is saying in definite terms.

In other words, Peterson needs to shut his trap and get off Twitter. Well actually maybe that's just where he belongs....

Actually, I would suggest that perhaps Peterson's own obsession with Jungian psychology and some kind of frontier into the apparently murky world of our inner psychology might simply be a result of his own confusion about life in general.

Yes, there are a lot of things that we humans do a bad job at understanding, but maybe you are more confused than the rest of us.

That's definitely why I'm into this stuff.

Don't worry, he's not, I'm just being a Reidtard and inferring it using logic and my own philosophical framework. Of course I feel like I'm justified in doing so, so.

-___-

banned

I love you Reid

Upon further reflection, I have concluded that I should at least try not to be rude and obnoxious.

Ruderend Jones, more liek it

Thanks, I was trying to think of a self-deprecating mutation of my name to save face.

Actually, I think it's high time for somebody to stick a custom title onto my account in order to remind people that I'm probably about to apologize for the content of my post, since I seem to be doing this so often.

And it better not be about me being some kind of beta male.

I think what Peterson meant to say was far more sensible than what he actually said.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Axioms can't be wrong. They, like all of mathematics, live in a world of pure abstraction, we don't care about physics. As it turns out though, hyperbolic geometry is a more accurate model of space than Euclidean geometry, but that doesn't make Euclidean geometry a priori weaker.

In practice, actually, Euclidean geometry is a better model than hyperbolic geometry, because within constraints it's easier to work with, so you might say it's a better approximation given the constraints of nearly all practical science. Unless you're doing really work in astrophysics or mathematical physics, which are definitely as useless as pure mathematics.

Nice