Who is he? In short, he used to teach at Harvard, then he moved to U of T. His Maps of Meaning university course spanned a book
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Here are some quick notes on his latest lecture. You can find more below.
- you come to university to make your conceptions of reality more sophisticated
- the more sophisticated your conceptions, the less likely you’ll encounter tragic or harmful circumstances
- over the last 20 yrs there’s been a revolution in psychology about the way we look at the world
- “Reality & the Sacred” is a strange title for a talk to modern people because we don’t really understand what “the Sacred” means unless we live in a world view that is – I wouldn’t say “archaic” but at least “traditional”
- for modern, free-thinking, fundamentally liberal people the idea that the Sacred is anachronistic at least incomprehensible
- Old Testament: Ark of the Covenant – can’t touch this – God strikes man dead
- implication: there are certain things that you touch at your peril, regardless of your intentions – i.e., the Sacred
- Humanities are in some conceptual trouble at the moment but through them you get at the Sacred in a secular fashion
- Newtonian / deterministic worldview has dominated science for the last few hundred years but it came at a crashing halt around 50 years ago
- the world is made out of objects: you see them, you think what to do and you act – largest part of the brain, the visual cortex dedicated to processing it
- seeing is impossible – discovered by AI people; reason: boundaries between objects are unclear
- we exist at levels we cannot perceive (quantum, subatomic, atomic, .. , groups, communities) but we only perceive at a fixed resolution
- The frame problem: how to bound your perception to your limits – discovered 40 yrs ago
- Ford’s automobile + fascism; unintended consequences – GW, TV -> news, internet –> music – fascism, a logical extension of mass production
- fundamental modes of being that characterize reality: 1) absolute (sum of everything)
- in Islam, no representation of Mohammed – ancient Jews, similar
- the Absolute is always something that transcends the finite frames that you place around your perceptions; when you make representations of it, you lose your connection to the Absolute, because you turned it into something understandable and concrete
- you should always be aware of what transcends both your understanding and your perception & that it exists
- most of the debate about religious reality – is God a being? – but the idea that there is an absolute that is outside your perceptual capacity
- reality has multiple levels and in order to perceive it you have to stand within multiple frames
Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you ze lecture:
Two years ago, he spoke on Chaos and the Orienting Response: A neuro-psychologically predicated model of why you might be Christ:
Find more in part II, Discovering Jordan Peterson.Sources / More info: vic-peterson, jp-psych-uoft, blip, wiki-frame-problem, chaos-video, mc-solzh, harvard-ccc, peterson-mp3, peterson-linkedin, ons-utism2010, mind-manual, mtroyal-peterson, yt-Jordan-Peterson