The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Mon, 24 Mar
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Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall. They discuss the vertical dimension, proper orientation within the hierarchy of values, the normative versus the ethical, and what makes something more “real” in a pragmatic and philosophical sense. John Vervaeke is an associate professor of psychology & cognitive science at the University of Toronto. John publishes and conducts research on the nature of intelligence, rationality, wisdom & meaning in life emphasizing relevance realization, non-propositional kinds of knowing & 4E cognitive science. Jordan Hall, previously known as Jordan Greenhall, is an entrepreneur and systems thinker with a focus on the intersection of technology, culture, and governance. Hall co-founded DivX, Inc., a pioneer in digital video technology, where he served as CEO and Executive Chairman through its early growth and IPO. Prior to that, he was a key figure at MP3.com, helping to revolutionize the digital music space. His early career also includes a brief stint as a lawyer, having earned his law degree from Harvard before transitioning into technology leadership and investment. This episode was filmed on December 27th, 2024. | Links | For Jordan Hall: On X https://x.com/jgreenhall?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMzT-mdCqoyEv_-YZVtE7MQ For John Vervaeke: On X https://x.com/drjohnvervaeke?lang=en On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke Website https://johnvervaeke.com/ Find John Vervaeke on Lectern http://lectern.teachable.com/
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative. And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially. I'll challenge you.
I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice. I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.
I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically. One of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.
I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception. So if at the heart of evil is self-destruction, why would any system destroy itself?
That does in fact have an inevitable collapse, a downward spiral into chaos.
This goes back to the idea of conscience, you know. So maybe once you get your goals set, the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation?
Well, that's a very hard question.
Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder. Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had, most particularly, I would say, with John Vervaeke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Paggio. And those conversations really center on
specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche, that's a decent way of thinking about it, or specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value And that's a very complicated set of problems, and so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress. But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan.
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Chapter 2: How does self-sacrifice relate to social unity?
Well, yeah, and so there's something also that's fascinating about that because if you two have a dispute that you can't settle, you're lacking a superordinate structure that unites two different narratives, let's say. And if I impose a narrative structure on you, if it's an imposition, it's gonna be fragile.
I'm going to have to feel my way between your dispute and find a superordinate principle that you can't better, right? And unless you accept that is valid, And that would be, unless it's in accordance with your conscience and your calling maybe, it's going to fragment the first time it's stress tested. Well, that's what I...
I think this is very close to the point I wanted to make, was that for me, the normative, it doesn't just encompass the moral. Because, for example, for you to get the common thing between Jordan and I, you have to get, first of all, a shared meaning structure. Yes. And I don't mean just semantic meaning. I mean... Embodied. Embodied meaning.
Yeah, because otherwise you're going to fight still.
Right. And so you could think of a life... right, that is very ethical and yet is quite meaningless. Somebody who is leading a very, these are tropes in literature, the person who is very honest and very kind, but is lonely.
That's the rich man in the gospels parable.
Right.
Because he's followed all the rules and things aren't good yet.
Right, so the reason why I think of normativity as a broader notion is it includes this idea of connectedness to what's real, meaning that I think is actually more foundational than our moral decisions. Our moral decisions, I think, are ultimately regulated by what we find meaningly most real. I think that's what ultimately orients us.
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Chapter 3: What is the vertical dimension in human consciousness?
The wages of sin or death. That's what you just said. The wages of sin or death.
Well, as soon as you can abstract, you can lie. Right? Because you can build a representation. Like, you can build multiple representations. That's really the... Or multiple worlds, for that matter. That's the essence of the capacity to abstract. Well, then, there's no reason that you can't falsify those.
I think even animals... I agree they don't lie. I think lying requires a reflective commitment to the truth of what you state. But I think animals can deceive themselves because they can be deceived. So one organism can mislead. Like chimps do this to each other all the time. And my capacity to deceive you is dependent on your capacity for self-deception. Okay, fair enough.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one more step along that line, and then I'm going to ask you, Jordan, if the discontinuities that you saw when you were a kid how you feel that they might be related to this issue of both deception and self-deception. Because you talked about lies, the lies that were being promulgated.
You talked about the desecration of this play space that you had, which is not precisely a lie, although the erection of the ugly buildings might veer in that direction to some degree. So I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like a lot.
Yeah, it has crossed multiple times.
Yeah, yeah. And so it seemed to me that It's akin to Freud's notion of repression, but there's an important difference because as far as I can tell, repression is like a sin of commission. It's something you do. Whereas most self-deception looks to me like- Omission.
Yeah, it's omission. That's what I was just saying. Yeah, exactly. I omit. So I think- Yeah, I fail to explore.
Okay, so lay out your theory of omission in relationship to self-deception.
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Chapter 4: How do conscience and values interact?
Well, anomaly in the sense that for the most part, again, everything is actually functioning reasonably well. You know, this notion that we talked about at the very beginning of being able to have values aligned with purposes and being able to make choices that land with a sense of, yep, this is landing. And I mean, in a physical sense.
So when the anomalies, anomaly in this case would be an experience that throws an error in that category of huh. I have set now a new purpose. My new purpose is to cajole my parents into taking me to McDonald's to get a Happy Meal. I have noticed that in the act of doing that, I'm creating dissonance with my own relationship with my parents who are not happy about this thing.
I get the Happy Meal, the experience sucked, and I made my family mad. Anomaly, purpose of value alignment. Right, against the center.
Oh yeah, so that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had multiple dimensions of success, and I mean qualitatively distinct dimensions, so that's important, such that when you were introduced to the abstracted digital world, so to speak, and you saw that it was faulty, that didn't shake your face, so now we're in a situation, you know,
One of the things I noticed when I was a parent, this was a lot of little kids. This is almost 25 years ago. I'd often take my little kids over to see other people with little kids. And the first thing they do is put on a movie and put the kids in the basement and put on a movie. And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement.
and let them amuse themselves, right? They have to do that. They have to learn to play. They have to learn to get along with strangers. And that's an excellent, and you just short circuit that. But now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital and they come to that realization, you know, that they're being deceived in multiple ways.
The question then is like, what the hell's their center?
They have one.
Do you think that's true? Yeah. So there's data coming out. I'm interested in your response to this, John. So I read recently that six, many times, by the way, and I think Jonathan Haidt details this, 60% of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness. Now that's self-reported, you know, and so there's problems with that. But I'm wondering to what degree,
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