I noticed that the Jordan Peterson vs Sam Harris debate have been released by the producer though as unlisted, so only those who have the links can watch it.
Thanks, that was a very interesting discussion. I haven’t really followed Sam Harris (aka Ben Stiller
) and only knew that he was really anti-religion and an atheist. The article posted by Hi_Henry was interesting but I haven’t read enough about Sam Harris to substantiate some of the claims. However, after watching the discussion I think there might be some truth to it. I also took a look at a few other videos and they didn’t offer much more insight into his "atheology" for lack of a better term. Strangely even his fan “top 10” moments didn’t provide anything particularly meaningful except for superficial statements on why religions (and in particular Islam) were bad.
As for the discussion, JP opened up by putting forth Sam’s claim as he understood it to be, which was that Sam wanted to ground a structure of ethics into something solid, based only on fact and to stay away from dogmatism or moral relativism and compares it to his order vs chaos. He goes on to say there is undue suffering in the world, it would be better to have less suffering and this morality is grounded on the premise that if it does this it’s good.
Sam interjects that it will also be grounded on well-being , the positive side of things. To which Peterson explains that he only focuses on suffering (or “what we don’t want”) because it’s something that can be much more easily defined vs what we want. While Peterson doesn’t devalue his claim and says it’s “not unimportant” he goes back to stating that we can get a better grip on where "not to go".
Here’s where I think Sam is showing some of his naiveté or at least it seems he hasn’t really thought too deeply about it. He places the same value on ‘well-being’ as that of suffering, but how can one arrive at a valuation if we don’t have a clear way of measuring it in order to compare it? What would be a sufficient measure of well-being? Is it just having enough food/clothing/shelter for every single person in the population? Or do we need more? I think until something like that can be clearly defined, I don’t know if using that aspect as a grounding is really going to work. People vary greatly when it comes to ‘good’ things compared to ‘bad’ things that lead to suffering. So in this instance I think Peterson is right to say that we can much more easily see where we
don’t want to go than where we do.
The overarching theme running throughout mostly revolved around what Peterson outlined: trying to lay down a foundation for a system of ethics/morality that can guide humanity towards progress. Peterson’s argument is that stories (in particular the ones in the bible) provide a context for connecting our long standing structures with our experience of reality which can overtime extract basic truths about the correct mode for living.
Harris says we don’t need religion for that and stories can be used as an aide but they can’t contain any absolute truths since what we get is filtered through our own biases and interpretations of it. (To which Peterson contends the same could be said about ‘facts’). He keeps coming back to his examples of fundamentalism and dogmatism to support his claim (however those traits are not a failing of religion only and are present in the sciences and medicine as well). I actually find it kind of funny because his assertion itself has undertones of fundamentalism/dogmatism.
One question that Peterson kept asking him throughout the talk was (paraphrasing) “how do you extract value from facts without an a priori structure; what is this structure that transcends that?”
However he seems to avoid the question or rather, doesn’t offer any real explanation on that. His answers to me seemed vague and underdeveloped and he meandered around it without ever really answering (or if he did, it was rather ambiguous) before moving on to another talking point. And anytime he did start to get anywhere he’d be
taking elements from religion to try and describe it.
This question is to me a crucial point – his answering it in a more detailed manner would have given a whole lot more weight to his rationalistic (or rather materialistic) view and I was a little disappointed that he couldn’t describe that in more detail or without resorting to some parallel with religion.
There’s no doubt that Harris is a very smart guy – but something about his proposal and his mental ability reminds me of Ouspensky in a sense. He can’t or won’t accept that in order to make progress, he has to let go of his ‘identification’, though in Harris’s case, I would say it's with the rational materialistic viewpoint.
Anyway, that was my overall impression of the talk. There’s a lot more that can be said about that (and the talk) but I think I'll leave here for now.
Note: The videos have been uploaded by Peterson on his channel, with improved audio.
Part 1
Part 2
He also put in the description a couple of links to his blog regarding the talk, which outline in much better detail what I was describing above.
Facts and Values/Science and Religion: Notes on the Sam Harris Discussions (Part I) | Jordan Peterson
Facts from Values? Not without an intermediary: Notes on the Sam Harris Discussions (Part II) | Jordan Peterson