One of the amazing lectures thrown at us by TVO's Big Ideas is Prof Peterson's lecture on Reality and the Sacred. Truly amazing..
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
