Unofficial Transcript Sam Harris Waking Up Podcast What is True? A Conversation with Jordan B. Peterson January 21, 2017 Transcript created with Watson and lightly cleaned up for readability. This is by no means a 100% accurate rendering, and should not be quoted or cited as such. (starts 25:05) Sam Harris: But we we have bigger deeper, more perennial fish to fry. I think we need to talk about religion and science and atheism and the foundations of morality. Things like meaning, your interest in mythology, your fear of nihilism. Let's get into all that. I think you and I share some fundamental concerns, and we feel a similar kind of urgency, I think it expresses itself in slightly different ways and different ways of talking, but we we feel an urgency that our fellow human beings get certain questions right. But I think we probably disagree about some fundamental matters and whether those will be in the end the matter of semantic difference that can be pushed to the periphery or not I think that remains to be seen, but I think it will be interesting to talk about these things Jordan B. Peterson: Yeah, well you know one of the things that I thought I might do is pursue the tack that you're not enough of a Darwinian, which I thought would be quite comical, because I've often thought the same about Richard Dawkins, but I would like to point out some of the things - cause I've read a fair bit of what you’ve written now, not by no means comprehensively, but I think I've come to understand your central claims, and of course they're very powerful because you're an advocate for materialist rationalism, essentially I would say, with a bit of spirituality on the side, and you know that materialist rationalism is an unbelievably powerful tool and it's very coherent, and so, you know, I addressed the topic with trepidation because, you know, it was certainly the case that this philosophical doctrine to which you adhere has transformed the world and has posed an unbelievably potent threat, let's say, that's one way of, challenge that’s better, to traditional views of the world. But there are some things that we share in common that maybe we could start with, so you tell me if I’ve got any of this wrong. Harris: I think a good starting point is this, it actually leads directly into this claim about not being Darwinian enough, but it is the concept of truth. I've heard you say in a variety of ways that religious truth isn't scientific truth, and that the difference here is that science tells you what things are, and that religion tells you how you should act. So let's talk about that, I think that does connect to this Darwinian concern of yours. Peterson: Yeah that's a good - I’m going to approach that obliquely to being with. So let me throw a couple of propositions at you, and I know that you don't accept Hume’s distinction between an “is” and an “ought,” and that you're willing to challenge that, and fair enough. It's a reasonable thing to try to challenge although it is quite difficult, but but that doesn't mean it's impossible. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the essential philosophical contradiction between a Newtonian world view, which I would say your view is nested inside, and a Darwinian world view, because those views are not the same, they’re seriously not the same. I mean the Darwinian view as the American Pragmatists recognize, so that was William James and his crowd, recognized almost immediately was a form of Pragmatism. And the
Pragmatists claimed that the truth of a statement or process can only be adjudicated with regards to its efficiency in attaining its aim. So their idea was that truths are always bounded because we’re ignorant. And every action that you undertake that is goal directed has an internal ethic embedded in it, and the ethic is the claim that if what you do works, then it's true enough. And that's all you can ever do, and so what Darwin did, as far as the Pragmatists were concerned, was to put forth the following proposition, which was that it was impossible for a finite organism to keep up with a multi dimensionally transforming landscape, environmental landscape let's say, and so the best that can be done was to generate random variance, kill most of them because they were wrong, and let the others that were correct enough live long enough to propagate, whereby the same process occurs again, so it's not like the organism is a solution to the problem of the environment, the organism is a very bad partial solution to an impossible problem. Okay, and the thing about that is that you can't get outside that claim, and I can't see how you can get outside that claim if you're a Darwinian, because the Darwinian claim is that the only way to insure adaptation to the unpredictably transforming environment is through random mutation, essentially, and death. And that there is no truth claim whatsoever that can surpass that, and so then that brings me to the next point, if you don't mind, and then I'll shut up and let you let you talk. So, I was thinking about that, and I thought about that for a long time, so it seems to me there's a fundamental contradiction between Darwin's claims and the Newton deterministic claim, and the materialist objective claim that science is true in some final sense. And so I was thinking of two things that I read: one was the attempt by the KGB back in the late part of the twentieth century to hybridize smallpox and ebola and then aerosol it so it can be used for mass destruction, and the thing is that that's a perfectly valid scientific enterprise, as far as I'm concerned, it's an interesting problem, you might say “well you shouldn't divorce it from the surrounding politics,” well that's exactly the issue, is how much you can be divorced, and from what. And then the second example is, you know a scientist with any sense would say, well you know our truths are incontrovertible, let's look at the results, let's look at the hydrogen bomb, if you want a piece of evidence that our theories about the sub atomic structure of reality are accurate, you don't really have to look much farther than a hydrogen bomb, it's a pretty damn potent demonstration. And so then I was thinking well imagine for a moment that the invention of the hydrogen bomb did lead to the outcome which we were all so terrified about during the Cold War, which would have been, for the sake of argument, either the total elimination of human life or perhaps the total elimination of life. Now the latter possibility is quite unlikely, but the former one certainly wasn’t beyond comprehension. So then I would say that the proposition that the universe is best conceptualized as subatomic particles was true enough to generate a hydrogen bomb but it wasn’t true enough to stop everyone from dying, and therefore from a Darwinian perspective it was an insufficient pragmatic proposition. And was therefore in some fundamental sense wrong, and perhaps it was wrong because of what it left out. You know, maybe it's wrong in the Darwinian sense to reduce the complexity of being to a material substrate, and forget about the surrounding context. So, well, you know, those are two examples and so you can have away at that if you want. 33:27 Harris: Yeah okay, so there are few issues here that I think we need to pull apart. I think that the basic issue here and where I disagree with you, you seem to be equivocating on the nature of truth here you're using truth in two different senses and finding a contradiction that I that I don't in fact think exists. So let's talk about about Pragmatism and Darwinism briefly for second, I spent a lot of time in the thicket of Pragmatism because I was a student of Richard Rorty at Stanford, and I took every class he taught and just basically did nothing but argue with him about Pragmatism, so I'm very familiar with this way
viewing the concept of scientific truth. I'm not so sure our audience is deeply schooled in this, so briefly let me just add a little to how you describe Pragmatism. And this is you know Rorty was one of the leading lights of Pragmatism, as you know, so his view may be slightly idiosyncratic, but it was fairly well subscribed among Pragmatists and he was influenced by Dewey, and he linked his view in some similar ways to a Darwinian conception of truth, but not quite the way you're doing it seems to me. In any case, the idea is that we can never stand outside of human conversation and talk about reality as it is, or truth as it is, we never, we never come into contact with naked truth. All we have is our conversation and our tools of augmenting our conversation, scientific instruments and otherwise, and all we really have, the currency of of truth, is whatever successfully passes muster in a conversation, so I say something that I think is true and it seems to work for you we have a similar, playing a similar language game, and some people disagree they criticize what we are are claiming to be true and we go back and forth, and all we ever have is this kind of ever expanding horizon line of successful conversations that allow us to do things technologically that are very persuasive, so as you say we can build hydrogen bombs and so the conversation about the structure of the atom, at the very least the conversation about the amount of energy hidden in the otherwise nebulous structure of an atom, that becomes very well grounded in facts that we all can agree are intersubjective true. Peterson: Yeah well that seems to weaken the claim that it's just within the language, you know, which is kind of a postmodern claim too because it's very difficult for me to believe that the hydrogen bomb is what it is just because we agree what it is in conversation, you know… Harris: Absolutely Peterson: …It immediately reflects a world outside of language. That doesn't mean we we get permanent and omniscient access to that world, but it's more than language, so maybe I'm misunderstanding Rorty, or… Harris: I think you're you are understanding him, he will say that again all we ever have is our effort to organize the way the world seems to us with concepts and language, and we just have successful iterations of that, and unsuccessful ones, and a hydrogen bomb explosion, no matter how big, assuming we survive it, still falls within this empirical context of an evolving language game. And I agree with you that this does, it does connect with postmodernism in a way that is decidedly unhelpful, and Rorty was a fan of Derrida and Foucault and I remember walking out of Derrida’s lecture at Stanford - I literally had to it to climb over the bodies of the credulous who were sitting in the aisles listening to the great man speak, and he didn't speak a single intelligible sentence as far as I recall. Peterson: Well that's obviously just because you don't have the profundity to understand a postmodern French neo Marxist intellectual. Harris: I don’t. But to get back to some of your claims here, there’s this claim you're making about the Darwinian basis of truth and knowledge that there really is just survival, right, there's biological change, selected against by an environment, and there is what works in that context, what is pragmatic in that context biologically, and there's what doesn't - and what doesn't get you killed. Peterson: Yeah
Harris: Now obviously that picture of of how we got here is something that I agree with… Peterson: Right Harris: … but our conception of truth, and our conception of truth in general and scientific truth specifically and even of Darwinian evolution within that subset of truth claims, that is not functioning by merely Darwinian principles, and this just goes to… Peterson: Right - but that that could be an objection to its validity. Like, there's no reason to assume, and don't get me wrong, but I'm perfectly happy with science, I'm a scientist, but there's no reason to assume that our view of the world our current scientific view of the world isn't flawed or incomplete in some manner that will prove fundamentally fatal to us. Harris: As a working assumption we can decide not to worry too much about that and that's fine, but yes I agree and more fundamental than that I think this is the accurate version of the claim you're making. This is something that I spoke about another podcast with Max Tegmark, the physicists from MIT, there is just the fact that within the Darwinian conception of how we got here there's no reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have evolved to put us in error free contact with reality, that's not how they evolved, we did not evolve to be perfect mathematicians or perfect logical operators, or perfect conceivers of scientific reality at the very small, subatomic level or at the very large cosmic level or at the very old cosmological level. We are designed by a happenstance of evolution to function within a very narrow band of of light intensities and physical parameters. The things we are designed to do very well are, you know, recognize the facial expressions of apes just like ourselves and to throw objects in parabolic arcs within 100 meters and all of that and so the fact that we are able to succeed to the degree that we have been in creating a vision of scientific truth and the structure of the cosmos at large that radically exceeds those narrow parameters, that is a is a kind of miracle. It is an amazing fact about us that seems not to be true, remotely true, of many other species we know about and that's something to be celebrated and it's a lot of fun to see how far we can get in that direction, but I will grant you that there are no guarantees as we move forward in that space. In fact, we should be skeptical about how easy we can have it in this space. Peterson: Yes. Harris: One thing that Max Tegmark said, which I thought was fascinating, he goes one step further than I had tended to go along these lines where he said that we should expect as just based on accepting the logic of evolution we should expect that we will have our common sense intuitions frequently and really incessantly violated by what we discover to be true about the nature of reality through science. Peterson: Yes, what we discover scientifically to be true about the nature of reality. Yeah, so partly I made the case that I made to indicate to you and the listeners where I'm starting from some, in some sense, so I think it's not unreasonable to assume that you're making the metaphysical claim in some sense that Darwinian truth is nested inside Newtonian truth. Harris: I wouldn't call it Newtonian. Let me just change your words a little bit. It maybe a distinction without a difference here, but I would oppose Realism, Scientific Realism, and even moral realism. I consider myself a moral realist, I think they're right and wrong answers to moral questions. I would
oppose Realism with Pragmatism and the core tenet of Realism for me is that it’s possible for everyone to be mistaken. It's possible for there to be a consensus around truths that are in fact not true. It's possible to not know what you're missing, there's a horizon of cognition beyond which we can't currently see and we may be right or wrong about what we think exceeds our grasp at the moment and so that's something that the Pragmatist can't say - the Pragmatist has to locate truth always within the context of existing conversations, existing consensus. And in this Darwinian conception of truth you are saying that there's just what works for us biologically, pragmatically as apes on earth now and there is nothing there's no larger context of truth claims that we can make that situates that in a larger sphere where you can intelligibly say that everyone is wrong about something. 43:09 Peterson: Well it is complicated, and I wouldn’t say I'm saying exactly that. I certainly don't agree with the language game part of it. See, if you think of the Darwinian process as something you can't escape, like there's no outside of it, and partly the reason for that is that you're just too damn ignorant to get outside of it in any in any transcendent manner. Now you might say well you can do that to some degree with science and I'm not gonna argue with that… Harris: But before you move on let me just understand the claim, because it seems to me we are outside of it in every respect where you want to emphasize the Darwinian component of it. So we’re outside of the implications that, your know, certain phenotypes would have killed you out right five thousand years ago whereas now we have a civilizational mechanism to protect those people, so if you’re wearing eyeglasses and you are able to function just as well as your neighbor who's got perfect vision - you're out of a Darwinian paradigm there, it doesn't matter that you're wearing eyeglasses, right, on a thousand points we can make that same observation, and therefore more or less everything we care about has followed along those lines. So just the fact that we are one of the greatest gains we are attempting to make, although we we have done it imperfectly thus far, is to out grow tribalism in all its forms, right, so we we recognize the tribalism is not the best moral bedrock and yet in a Darwinian paradigm tribalism is really the only game in town and so we stand outside of Darwinian logic both morally and intellectually all the time now. Are you denying that? What am I confused about? Peterson: I'm calling that into question. I'm not necessarily denying it and I'm certainly not presuming that what I'm saying is right. I'm trying to solve another problem at same time, but you see the thing about the scientific viewpoint is that it leaves certain things out. And it leaves out what it doesn't know, obviously, although the same might be said for any other system of belief and should be. But it also looks at the world in a particular way - for example it strips the world of its subjectivity. And it may be that that's a fatal error, now that doesn't mean that it stops science from being unbelievably useful as a tool. But I think of science as a tool rather than as a description of reality. And that's where we differ and it’s fair that we differ. It isn't obvious which of those two positions could be held to be correct, because you know you could say that the more we learn about the objective world in your realist manner, the higher the probability that we’ll survive. And it's conceivable that those things are aligned in that manner. But it's also it's conceivable that they're not. I am wary of that because radical changes produce unintended consequences. And you know we've lived relatively successfully as primates for a couple dozen million years and we're transforming things pretty damn rapidly. One potential outcome is that in five hundred years we’re more machine than human. And that we're not really human at all in any realistic sense and I
can't necessary see that as a…you know you could claim that that's a positive outcome, but it isn't necessarily a positive outcome. So you're assuming that there is an alignment between the two. Harris: No I'm not doing that. Peterson: Okay Harris: I’m getting a little confused about what you're claiming, so let me just go over that ground you just sketched just to to get myself on track. So it seems to me that you're saying that the reductio ad absurdum of a Darwinian conception of knowledge would be if we ever learned certain truths that got us all killed, well then that would prove that these things weren't true or that this was an intellectual dead end… Peterson: Yes, they weren’t true enough, I would say. Harris: There are two things here: one is that there's nothing about my conception of science that discounts the reality or the significance of subjectivity, so I understand what you're saying when you say that science or materialism leaves out subjectivity, and I’ve ridden that same hobby horse against that conception of science myself, so you won't find a friend of eliminative materialism in me, that's just not how I think about the human mind. Peterson: Well do you think that that's true of your views on consciousness? Because that's another place where I would say we radically disagree. Harris: Yeah why I don't know that you would understand my views on consciousness if you think that, but we can get there. I think there is a subjective dimension of reality that is undeniable, in fact I’ve said for instance that consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. It's the only thing that you can be absolutely sure exist at this moment in the sense that… Peterson: I actually like another claim that you make better that's related to that. I think the one thing, and this is I think part of your fundamental ethical metaphysics and it’s a point on which we agree, I believe. You are very concerned with, let's call it pain, for lack of a better word, and you know one of the conclusions that I've reached which is, I think in keeping with what you just said, because it it it necessarily involves consciousness, so let's call consciousness a reality, but then I would say that the most undeniable form of consciousness is acute agony, because no one doubts that, not if you watch them act, and that’s one of the criteria by which I judge whether not someone believes something. So if people act out something uncontrollably, then I am convinced that they believe it, regardless of what they think they believe, so I think it's for that reason that so many religious systems start with the same metaphysic, which is life is suffering. That's the ultimate reality and that’s associated with consciousness, certainly, but it's more precise than that, you know, because maybe you can doubt whether you're happy but it's very difficult to doubt that you're in agony and have that actually work. Some people act as if that's the most real thing and part of your ethical metaphysics, as far as I can tell, is you take that as bedrock in some sense and then say well, whatever we do we shouldn't go there. There's a way that parallels that - except that you posit well being as the opposite, let's say, of suffering and this is something I really want to talk to you about because I think there's a there's a paradox in your thinking. I could be wrong, but tell me what you think.
Harris: Let's wait to get there because this is a different topic, I definitely want to get into morality with you. Peterson: Okay. Harris: And that's all ripe for discussion, but this conception of truth I think we have to nail down because it just seems to me undeniable that there are facts whether or not any of us, any existing population of human beings are aware of those facts. So before there was any understanding of the energy trapped in an atom the energy was still trapped in the atom, right, and the Trinity test proved that beyond any possibility of doubt. So prior to the bomb going off at Alamogordo, you had some of the world's best physicists, not entirely sure what was going to happen, they had a an educated guess about what was going to happen, I think there was a betting pool on the question of of just how big the detonation would be, some people who thought that nothing would happen that would actually fail to initiate a chain reaction. The point is that there was a kind of a probability distribution among the smartest people over the the range of possible outcomes there. So this was a linguistically mediated conception of what was true at the level of a very very small in physical reality, and we got more information once we saw that bright light and mushroom cloud, and now the conversation continues. But it seems to me that a realistic conception of what's going on there, and really the only sane one if you look long enough at it, is that our language didn't put the energy in the atom, it’s not because we spoke a certain way about it that that determined the character of physical reality, no physical reality has a character whether or not they're apes around to talk about it. 52:28 Peterson: Okay. So look everything you said there I agree with. I guess my one objection to that is the, well “is it true enough?” objection. In order to establish an objective fact, we have to parameterize the search we have to narrow the search we have to exclude many, many things. And I think sometimes when we do that we end up generating a truth, and I would say it's a Pragmatic truth, that works within the confines of the parameters that have been established around the experiment, but then when launched off into the broader world, much of which was excluded from the theorizing, the results can be catastrophic. And I would say that’s akin to the problem of… there's operationalization where where you reduce the phenomena to something that you can discover and discuss scientifically and then there's generalization back to the real world. And one of the things that you see happen very frequently is that the operationalization succeeds, but the generalizations is a catastrophe. That is very frequently the case with the application of social science theories to the world, because they leave so much out. Harris: Okay, so let's just focus on this claim or this concern about certain forms of knowledge or certain descriptions of the world leading to catastrophe. Now, I completely agree that that's possible, but it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means here. So it's possible for there to be scientifically correct, realistically true, conceptions of the world that are bad for us. There are not many examples of that. Peterson: Right, right. Harris: I think the utility of knowing what's going on is usually so high that it's better to know what's going on, but for instance the example I occasionally use is there is a right way to synthesize the smallpox
virus right now. Is this knowledge good for anyone to have? Well perhaps at the CDC, or in certain labs we want to have this knowledge because it allows us to develop an innoculation against smallpox, it allows us to to understand viral properties in ways that perhaps we wouldn't otherwise, I don't know I don't do that work, but it seems to me to be objectively dangerous to play around with synthesizing smallpox and this is not the kind of knowledge you want to spread as far and as wide as possible. Peterson: Right, right, exactly. That's the parametrization and the generalization problem that's precisely it. Harris: Yes, but to point out that this is dangerous, to point out that it would be irresponsible to spread this knowledge to, point out that in the wrong hands this could be catastrophic and in fact could end the human experiment, right? The career of the species? Peterson: Yes. Harris: So it could be very anti Darwinian to use your framing in a local sense, with respect to homo sapiens, because this could be the thing that kills all of us right? Peterson: Right. Harris: Yes catastrophic, fine - but that doesn't undermine the scientific truth value of… Peterson: But it undermines, I agree, but it does it does undermine the claim that scientific truth is the ultimate truth that's the claim that it undermines. 55:47 Harris: No it doesn't undermine it epistemologically, it undermines it as something you want in your life right? It undermines it in terms of its value to us as a species, if knowing what is true got you all killed, well then that would be a truth that wouldn't be worth knowing, but it wouldn't make it less true. Peterson: Okay, so that's okay. So let's imagine for a moment, I understand what you're saying and I don't see that there's any logical problem with it, but I would say that we're actually starting from different fundamental axioms. The fundamental axiom that I'm playing with is something that was basically expressed by Nietzsche and its a definition of truth. And so I would say if it doesn't serve life, it’s not true. But what we're arguing about… Harris: Jordan, I have to pull the brakes there. I agree morally, ethically, given my concern about the well being of humanity. I agree with that as a moral starting point. We want to know what is worth knowing, we don't want to know everything, and we certainly don't want to know truths that will get us all killed or make us all needlessly miserable. Peterson: Okay Harris: We want good lives right?
Peterson: Okay, so then I would say that you, by making that proposition you've accepted the claim that scientific endeavor should be invested inside a moral endeavor. Harris: Yes, absolutely, I accept that claim but… Peterson: Well then the moral endeavor can’t be grounded in the scientific endeavor because the inside thing can't ground the outside thing. It’s logically not possible. Harris: I would disagree there, but let's talk about that when we talk about morality, because I thinks that's a great conversation have… Peterson: Okay Harris: But here was still we're getting bogged down on the concept of truth. I think you can't have a concept of truth that is subordinate to well being. You want well being, I will grant you that, and and my definition of well being is quite expansive and it just remains to be discovered what in the end will conduce to that the greatest flourishing of minds like our own, and minds beyond our own, as you say when we integrate ourselves with our supercomputers who knows what beauty we’ll experience and what meaning will be available to us. I'm interested in all of that, and I want us all to survive and I don't want to be annihilated by true facts that were dangerous to know. Peterson: Okay, so but it seems to me then - correct me if I'm wrong - but it seems to me and, believe me, this point I’m pushing is part of the reason that I got to where I got, it's exactly this issue. Because I realized that it was necessary for our attitude toward science to be nested in something else which was a higher moral conception, and if I'm not mistaken, you just made the claim that if there are scientific things that we could mess with that might destroy us all, it would be better if we didn’t. Harris: Yes, but… Peterson: Then by what standard? Harris: We will get there, but they will be no less true. You clearly have to have a conception of facts and truth that is possible to know that exceeds what anyone currently knows and exceeds any concern about whether it is useful or compatible with your own survival even to know these truths. Peterson: Okay, well then I would say that I don't think facts are necessarily true (laughs). So I don't think this scientific facts, even if they're correct from within the domain that they were generated, I don't think that that necessarily makes them true. And I know that I am gerrymandering the definition of truth, but I'm doing that on purpose, because I'm trying to nest truth within the Darwinian framework which I think is a moral framework and I think that your, the logic of your argument about morality is going to push you in the same direction inevitably. Harris: You’re choosing, following Nietzsche here, you're choosing to use the word true, you're choosing to freight it with some moral concerns that will make it very difficult for people to understand what you mean and for you to understand what they mean when you use “truth” as a synonym for, as you just said, “correct.” A fact may be “correct” but it's not “true.”
Peterson: Right. Harris: It seems to me this is this is counterproductive, and you lose nothing by granting that the truth value of a proposition can be evaluated whether or not this is a fact worth knowing or whether or not it's dangerous to know. Peterson: No, but that's the thing I don't agree with, because I think that that's the kind of conception of what constitutes a fact that does in fact present a moral danger to people, a mortal danger to people. And I also think that's partly why this scientific endeavor as it's demolished the traditional underpinnings of our moral systems, has produced an emergent nihilism and hopelessness among people that makes them more susceptible to ideological possession. I think it's a fundamental problem and I do believe that the highest truths, let's put it that way, the highest truths are moral truths. I'm thinking of that from a Darwinian perspective. 1:01:13 Harris: I want to get there with you, because I think that that's the center of the bull's eye, but we we have to nail down some epistemology here so I will state… Peterson: Or even some ontology. Harris: Yes, so I just wanna make a few claims which I think are unobjectionable and I can see whether we're on the same page here. Peterson: Yes Harris: I'm gonna probe you from my epistemology to yours. It seems to me that I can make statements about reality, which neither of us can judge to be true, we just don't have the tools or we're not going to take the time to do it, but we know there is a fact of the matter whether or not we can get the data in hand. So I can say for instance you have an even number of hairs on your body. Right, now I don't know that's true, but I know I have a fifty percent chance of being right about that and, this is not a non binary possibility, this is a binary one assuming you have any hair on your body. Peterson: I'm not going to tell you, either! Harris: So presumably you don't know this about yourself, I don't wanna envision what it would take to know that about oneself, all the time, in any case it's susceptible to change. Now, what do you think about that? We don't know whether you have an even or odd number of hairs on your body. Peterson: Well I would agree with that, but I would say that the reason for that is that the definition of truth that you're using to make that statement true is nested inside the question itself, and I’ll accept the definition and the question for the sake of pursuing that…
Harris: We’re outside of any kind of Darwinian imperative here, there's no reason to know this, you wouldn’t be better off knowing this one way or another, you can do nothing with this knowledge - this is one reason you wouldn't seek the knowledge but… Peterson: Right, but it won't hurt or kill me. Harris: And it's no less a true. Peterson: And it puts me inside the Darwinian framework, and so I'm willing to go along with it. Harris: Okay, but let's say could hurt or kill you, let's say that you know now you're a hostage and your hostage takers have a bizarre religion of their own invention where they they will kill people who have odd numbers of hairs on their body, and they will venerate people who have even numbers of hairs. So now your life depends on which is true about you. And perhaps if you have an even number of hairs you want to find out if you have an odd number you don’t, or you want to find out and surreptitiously pluck one so that you can be now a safe member of this moral emergency. So, nothing has changed with respect to truth value about the claims one might make about the hair on your body right? It's just a different situation. Your concept of truth can't be hostage to these superficial changes in context. Peterson: I think it's inevitably hostage to them. I don't think you can help it but be hostage to them. I think that even the choice of what you're interested in as a scientist is subject to contextual factors that are part of the parameters within which you, when you ask the question. Harris: Jordan, what does that mean in this context? So I’m talking again, this is a bizarre example that just…it may seem strange to talk about for any length, but I think it reveals, at the very least, an awkward commitment to revising our language. Peterson: I think what it means technically is that the only final way of sorting out whether a scientific claims is sufficiently true is through Darwinian means. Because I think that the Darwinian process is the only way of adjudicating truth. Now you don't accept that, and that's fine, I mean it's not like what you're doing isn’t coherent. Harris: I'm just confused at this point. It's not that I don't accept, it is just I don't see how you can accept what you sound like you want to accept here. So you just agreed that if I were to assert that you have an even number of hairs on your body I would be making a truth claim which one I'm clearly not qualified to make but it's basically a coin toss bet that’s analogous to my saying, the coin you just flipped and haven't revealed to me came up heads. It's a importantly similar claim to that. If I'm a rational person it's a truth that I would assert only probabilistically, I have a fifty percent confidence that I'm right here. I will not be surprised to be right, I won't be surprised to be wrong, and it seems to me that you're now claiming that this changes totally if someone comes into your office with a gun and says I'm gonna kill you if the coin came up heads or I'm going to kill you if you have an odd number of hairs on your body - you’re situation is changing. Peterson: No, what changes there is that in the one situation it’s a really stupid game to be playing. And I'm not being dismissive making that argument. It's like, see what you're doing is that you're taking a way of looking at the world, and you're making are a micro example out of it, and you're saying that
within the context of that micro example, truth is not malleable by situation. Okay, I'm buy it, but the problem is is that micro example isn't separate in the actual world from the macro examples, which would be let's call it the scientific method, as such. And there may be local applications of the scientific method where the local facts generated are sufficiently context independent so that you can’t make any contextual claims, but I can say “Well it turned out in a thousand years that that entire empirical game was fatal.” So then I would say well the micro parts of it were fatal too, you just couldn't see it. Harris: I agree about the the non-utility of plain fatal games. So we we don't want to play games that will get us all killed, reliably. Certainly if there's no huge benefit on the other side. Peterson: Well, from a scientific perspective, why not? Harris: But then you're just saying that it's very scientific reason to want to exist or to want your kids to live happy lives as opposed to die in their sleep tonight. Peterson: Yes, that is partly what I saying, yes. Harris: Well, we can talk about that - but sees me we can't just skip over this question of truth because it anchors everything else we, any other claim… Peterson: Well but another thing to do… look, fair enough. And we can argue about it for quite awhile and I think the dangerous is that we’ll side track the entire conversation doing this and that that won't be so useful, so what I would recommend is, that we could recognize for the moment that were starting with different claims of truth… Harris: But I don't think we are. I think you're simply deciding at the end of the day to say that any truths that led us down a path where we suffered unnecessarily or died weren't true. Peterson: Right. You have to choose what you mean by true. You have to. And I’m not accepting the same definition of truth that you operate under because, and it's partly because I believe that Darwin trumps Realism let's say, I believe that Pragmatism trumps Realism. Harris: But even the truth of Darwinism is not anchored to a Darwinian conception, in your view, of truth is anchored to a realistic one. So Darwinism will not prove to be false if knowing about Darwinism get us all killed. That's entailed in your claim. Darwinism would bite its own tail there and disappear. Peterson: Well not necessary, not necessary because our conception of Darwinian evolutionary processes could be flawed as well, and probably is, I mean the recent developments in… Harris: That goes without saying, yes, we do not have a complete scientific picture of reality but if evolution is true in any sense, if cosmic rays initiate point mutations in genomes and you get genetic diversity on the basis of that and things get selected for based on irregularities in the environment and you get speciation. If any of that is true. If D. N. A. has any connection to heritability, we have good reason to believe that we are on unusually solid ground there. Modulo all of that the things we don't yet know about biology. If any of it's true, it's not true in this sense that you are describing Darwinian truth. Let's just stipulate that knowing all that about ourselves, knowing about evolution, knowing about molecular
biology. In twenty five years that will allow us based on perverse social changes that are kindled by that self knowledge, and technological breakthroughs, synthetic biology that are empowered by it, we will annihilate ourselves. If Martians came down and had to assess what went on here, the honest description of what happened is we have a species of apes that understood something about evolution, and it was fatal to them. 1:10:43 Peterson: Yeah Harris: Let's just say that's true, okay, if that's true on your analysis we would then have to say that evolution wasn't true… Peterson: No, we’d have to say our theory of evolution wasn't true. Harris: But if you then went ahead to look at the ways in which it was false, you wouldn't be able to find any way it was false up until the moment it killed us. Peterson: Oh, that's possible. I think you're making a subtle and and useful point. I mean, because you're playing with the idea of nesting again, it’s like Darwinian theory nested in a realistic worldview or is it the other way around. You're making the claim that the Darwinian theory is a variant of Realism theories, it’s a good claim. Harris: But it has to be this way because that just imagine to counter factual situations… Peterson: Well, okay here's a way that it might not be true, it might be that the world of select - let’s call reality “that which selects.” And so let's say that our scientific theories bear some approximation to a description of that which selects, and that then informs our Darwinian theory. Those can all be insufficient error so that they're fatal. You think of reality, this is what I meant by the Newtonian view, you think of the world of reality like a materialist realist, and I think of reality as that which selects. And those things aren’t the same, because the materialist realist description of that which selects is very insufficient. And that insufficiency undermines the accuracy of our Darwinian knowledge. So I guess the only way I can respond to what you said, is that I would say that if our knowledge of Darwin (laughs) of the evolutionary process was true then it wouldn't be fatal. Now that's (laughs) that's a strange claim but I'm not sure that is true. But - I think it might be. I think that because it's let's say that our theory of the genesis of life and the genesis of the world and all of that became comprehensively accurate. Comprehensive accurate. I would say that we would find that would give us a place in the world that would bolster our probability of surviving rather than undermining. And I guess that's partly because, this is another claim of faith I suppose, but we know when we're starting to mess around with the definition of fact and true you get down to the place where you have to make axiomatic presuppositions. You know I would say that reality is not opposed to our existence. Harris: I need to break in here Jordan because I just think you’re not noticing the price you're paying for redefining a word like truth and you know, ironically it's probably even a steeper price then what these gender pronoun maniacs are attempting to pay for asking that everyone use their favorite word to describe
their identity. Truth is a bedrock conception, it’s not just a scientific one, it's a journalistic one, it's a an interpersonal one, and it is a… Peterson: Okay good good. Well let’s flip to that. Harris: …it’s that too which are very sanity is anchored. Peterson: Well, okay Harris: and I think you tug at the anchor at your peril. Peterson: Right, definitely, believe me I'm perfectly aware that, it's put me in peril many times, but I would also point out that people were getting along just fine without an empirical conception of the world for millions and millions of years, and animals still manage it. So they're obviously operating on some level of representation of reality that doesn't require articulated empirical investigation. Harris: It's possible to survive without having a clear notion of truth, but it's probably not possible to be reliably understood in a conversation about scientific reality, or the relationship between mind and matter, or anything else that we’re trying to talk about here. So let me just point out a few things. It seems to me what you're doing here is you are marrying the concept of truth, which is a an epistemological one, also the concept of goodness and maybe when I freight it even more with the concept of beauty, you're gonna fuse truth and goodness and perhaps even beauty together as this kind of jewel that can't be spoken about it its terms of its separate parts, because they are fused now. But this creates a few problems, if you're going to talk about truth as being inseparable from goodness, and goodness being in a matter of what happens in the end, but we never really reach the end necessarily, we just we're just moving forward in time. So what happens here is we’ll have all of these descriptions of reality and ways of talking it, about and things we can do technologically on the basis of this advancement in our conception of things, all that can be going forward quite nicely, all of that can seem true and beneficial in tending toward the good, but then something happens which on the basis of what we know and what we perhaps only dimly understand just winds up killing us right? And then what you now have to do is go back in time and say all of the things we had good reason to believe were true weren’t because of this fatal episode at the end. And then if you had another separate population of people who believe all the same things but because of some contingent difference in their situation those “truths,” now in scare quotes, those “truths” didn't wind up killing them but they went on to flourish perfectly by their light. Peterson: Well then I would say that the contingent difference that you're describing would be significant. Harris: It's clearly significant for their survival, but how could be significant for the truth? It could be just as… Peterson: I don't accept the proposition that a contingent event that wasn't related to definitions of the truth could produce the divergent outcome that you propose. Harris: But I just gave you one, granted its a cockamamie example, but it’s..
Peterson: Yeah, I know, but that's the problem. Harris: Take my terrorist. We could put you in a situation where knowing something or not knowing something would get you killed, and yet the fact that it would get you killed doesn't reach into the truth value of the statement. If there's someone going around Toronto killing people for not being able to name all the U. S. presidents in sequence - and let’s say he's wrong about what the sequence is, so if you give him a sequence that is in fact inaccurate, that is untrue, but it works for him and you survive, it doesn't make it true. Right? And you need a concept of truth… Peterson: It makes it true enough to survive. Harris: Yes, it makes it useful, it's a good thing you got the wrong sequence, but we still… Peterson: Yes, well, I did tell you at the beginning that I was a Pragmatist nested in Darwinism. And look, one more thing here, you drag me down this pathway claiming that are going to run into all sorts of trouble by conflating truth and beauty and goodness. but you're doing exactly the same thing when you claim that there could be a scientific basis for morality, you're just inverting the causal order. I'm doing it from a Pragmatic perspective and you're doing it from a scientific perspective. Harris: But it is not Pragmatic. 1:18:39 Peterson: Well I think it is - because I don't think that you can come up with a moral conception that isn’t Pragmatic. You think you can, but I don't think you can. So it's not like you don’t put your arguments forward with power and coherence - they are powerful arguments. And I'm not saying that I'm right. Harris: You are saying that you're right in the sense that you're not persuaded by the argument here. It seems to me that you have to grapple with this - or at the very least I need to move forward knowing exactly what you're claiming here, and I don't believe that I do. So I just want to come back to this example that I just stumbled upon which seems to me to get at the issue nicely. If you're in a situation where someone asked you to rattle off the sequence of US presidents, and you rattled it off, swapping the order of a few, but that were the perfect order to keep you alive because now you're in the hands of some evil genius who himself is confused about the order of U. S. presidents, and he will kill you if your orders diversion from his, well then it seems to me that you have to be able to say that was useful, right, you’ve survived. But in fact the order you have of U. S. presidents is wrong, it was wrong but useful. The flipside is also true. Peterson: I’m perfectly willing to say that. But I said already that you can set up micro examples where the claim that you're making is valid, but I'm not concerned with the micro examples, I’m concerned with the macro examples. The totality of the of the theory of fact and truth. Harris: The macro example is no different. So if we have a, if we take the macro example where you take all of molecular biology and all of science, and all of human history summating to a moment where some nefarious person synthesizes small pox on the basis of an accurate understanding of how to do that, not an inaccurate one right, accuracy here is just a fudge word…
Peterson: Then I would say that our science was insufficient in so far as it didn't manage to deal with the fact that we have nefarious scientists. Harris: Sure Peterson: Right but that’s a big problem. Harris: It’s the biggest problem. Peterson: You can say that’s factually true, in so far as it goes, but it wasn't sufficiently true to solve a fatal problem -which would be the problem of the nefarious scientists. So it was deeply flawed despite its local upper applicability. Harris: Deeply flawed in its, let's say the way we used it, morally we didn't know enough to correct for human stupidity. Peterson: Yes, exactly Harris: So we want to know more, but none of its falsity migrates back to the biology that described smallpox. You can’t then say.. Peterson: Well sure I could, I could say well you shouldn't be looking at the biology of smallpox, you should have been solving the problem of the nefarious scientists. Harris: Okay but that's just to say that certain truths weren’t worth knowing, or they were dangerous to know or dangerous in the wrong hands. But what you seem to have been saying, and now I feel like we may be seeing dry land here, what you seem to have been saying, what I think you probably are not saying or don't want to say, is that the conception of truth local to the smallpox virus has to be rewritten there because it turned out not to be useful. It turned out to be fatal to us. Peterson: Yes it's partly because of the narrowness of the, this is the point I was making with damn KGB, it’s like, they managed to synthesize ebola and smallpox, thus demonstrating the scientific truth of their effort. Well okay fine, but how about if we take the context into account? Perhaps we’re ignorant, even scientifically, but more so morally, in such a profound way while we go chasing those contingent scientific truths we missed something really large and obvious like: true or not, generating a hybrid of smallpox and ebola is, let's call it ill-advised. So you see this is the point that I'm making. Harris: Everything turns on that, let's call it ill advised. I'm with you there, right, so again there are things that are not worth knowing, there things that are dangerous to know, there are things that will never know and wish we could know but we could be surprised about the consequences of knowing them and they could turn out to kill us in the end. So every variant of that is possible to say, which is to say true, but our concept of the truth value of any given statement can't be held hostage to its ultimate result for the survival of the species in the end.
Peterson: Yes I think it can. That's where we disagree. I could be sitting in a room in my house and say well there's no fire in this in this room and the rest of the house could be on fire. And its factually true that there's no fire in this room, but as a theory it's a pretty stupid one. Harris: That's just an incomplete and a consequentially incomplete description of your situation. Peterson: But that's exactly my point though, that's exactly my point. Harris: But it was still true to say that there was no fire in your room. The fire was outside your room. It’s a truth that doesn’t get you anything. Peterson: It was true nested in a larger truth or falsehood, because the relevant issue is - is there a fire around that's going to kill me? If I say well there's no fire in this room, well I suppose that's trivially true, but I would say I certainly adopted a dopey framework of reference within which to ask that question. Harris: So again this is this is something we can understand, you're asking the wrong question? Or there was a better question to ask? Peterson: That’s the issue well. So I would say look here's another way of thinking about it. Insufficiently moral people will ask deadly scientific questions. Harris: Sure okay, but Jordan, honestly, that is a different topic. I mean, I completely agree. The reason why your conception of truth here is so unhelpful is because you will you will continually be buffeted back and forth between good and bad outcomes, and your notion of scientific truth will be rewritten and overwritten and rewritten again in the process needlessly. So again to take small pox as an example, this same conception of smallpox, true or not, let's say true to get a first approximation, allows us to cure babies who get the disease or stop other babies from getting it, and it also allows us to synthesize it and kill everyone. It’s the same description of reality and so you have to say in the one case your epistemology requires you to sit around counting dead babies. Peterson: No, no it doesn’t. It requires. So let's say: fine I'm perfectly willing to go along with that particular example, then I would say well that's a very dangerous tool, and then we should bloody well make sure that the people who are wielding it have the wisdom to do so. So like one of the things that I learned from reading Carl Jung for example, was that his claim was that we’re technological giants and moral infants. And that’s a really bad, what would you call it, combination. Harris: Sure 1:26:09 Peterson: And so the moral issue starts to become paramount. And of course you also believe that to some degree… Harris: Of course. Peterson: Yes exactly.
Harris: But don't you see how that's a different topic? That's the thing that I just can't get past here, because if we were to say that smallpox is not a virus, it's a multi celled organism that’s getting people sick right? That's our conception of it. Right? And presumably we would be quite wrong at any point in human history to have formed that conception right, but it was certainly possible to have thought that for a good long time. That is, we can make that distinction whether or not we, a hundred years from now annihilate ourselves with a proper understanding of the smallpox virus. Peterson: (pause) Well, I already admitted as far as I can tell that you can make micro claims that justify that viewpoint, but that’s not what I’m talking about, precisely. Harris: Okay, but it is all just micro claims until the end of time. Peterson: No, no it’s not, it’s not at all micro claims because there's a, the scientific materialist realistic perspective is a kind of ethnic and it governs how people look at the world. It’s a philosophy, it's a massive philosophy. It's a framework of reference, it's not an aggregation of micro events - although it is also that. And I would say that part of the problem with the scientific worldview as it's currently constituted is that it doesn't provide a reliable guide for the development of the kind of wisdom that would allow us to use our technology like grown ups. Harris: You had me at wisdom of course that is true… Peterson: Okay the next thing I would say… Harris: That is an enormous problem, but again in my view that is a change of topic. I think we should get on to that topic. Peterson: Well it is a change of scale anyways. Harris: But it's not really because, so again this is why I say it's all micro claims, we have all of these micro claims about reality and this extends to every branch of science and mathematics, but also extends to just ordinary facts like the fact that you and I are talking on Skype now. That is true as far, as I can tell, is the only way I was attempting to talk to you, and I see the Skype logo on my computer, but this is a claim about which I could be right or wrong and the rightness or wrongness of the claim is not going to be adjudicated by whether or not we survive another million years as a species, and you take the functionally infinite number of micro claims like that and you carry them forward in time, and you build technology on their bases and, yes this whole effort can be wisely guided or not. But whether it's wisely guided or not does not change the factual legitimacy of any one of those claims that has preceded yours. Peterson: Yes, it might. Because it might highlight what they left out. Because your claim about Skype is a local claim, you know, and as a local claim I would say as a Pragmatist that it's directly the case, but it's also grounded in a metaphysic. And so is the technology. And so… Harris: But Jordan whether you leave something out, there are all kinds of things we can leave out. First of all we will always be leaving something out, but second of all, we can leave things out that are worth knowing; that would add to our well being and survival; we can leave things out that have absolutely no
value one way or the other negative or positive but are still none the less true; and we can leave things out that we should leave out because they would be dangerous to know. Now we need a concept of truth that allows us to make statements like that, but your concept of truth is collapsing everything back to whether we survive. Peterson: Right! That’s what it’s doing. Harris: Right? Presumably whether we survive happily, right? Peterson: No, just whether or not we survive. Harris: There are things are worse than not surviving. We could survive in a way where everyone has a life that’s not worth living. Peterson: Okay, well that would be bad too, I would agree. Harris: We could create a kind of prison planet for ourselves, where everyone gets tortured as long as possible even the torturers. And nobody likes it. Peterson: Yes, well I would say that the probability that that game would sustain itself for very long is low. You know it would probably degenerate, hell, you know why hell is a bottomless pit, right? It's because no matter how bad it is you can always make it worse. And so I would say a situation like that would either improve or it would spiral down to the ultimate end which would be fatal. Harris: My point is that survival isn't the only value, right, it’s certainly not, you could argue it's not even the deepest value. And then the moment you form a conception of a life that would be worse than not living at all, it seems to me that you've trumped mere survival. You can easily imagine a situation where you would say of the person you love most in the world that they would be better off dead, right. That I think a morally and factually an intelligible claim given the possibilities of human suffering and given that there are certain situations where there is no remedy other than death. So even survival as an anchor here seems a somewhat whimsical one, but it's one that granted it has a direct connection to Darwinian evolution, because the survival of an organism is crucial, at least up to a certain point, is crucial to whether or not it gets its genes into the next generation. But again I just think it's so obvious that you need to be able to say, you need to be able to use the word true and false and not continually have to dance around this freighted meaning and swap in synonyms like accurate or correct, and you just have to acknowledge that something can be true and dangerous. Peterson: I would say it’s objectively true as far as our scientific theories are accurate at this time in this local context. Harris: Okay Peterson: And that’s as far as I'm willing to go. And you know there are other reasons for this, like I’m perfectly aware of the pit that this produces and all of the complexities that it entails, but I'm not so sure that you're aware, and and I don't mean this as an insult by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not so sure that you're aware of the consequences of the rational, Realist ethic that you're putting forth in your books.
Because I would say that they produce cognitive complexities that are at least as serious as the ones that you pointed out with my position. Harris: Let's move on there with the proviso that I think we are impressively capable of of misunderstanding one another moving forward, but Peterson: Well we're definitely disagreeing. I think you understand and I think… Harris: I don't think we are disagreeing. I think you are committed to elevating the concept of truth, or what you imagine to be elevating it, into the moral stratosphere where it it it entails goodness… Peterson: Yes, that is precisely and exactly what I'm doing. There's no doubt about it. Harris: But the problem with that is that then it makes it very difficult to talk about ordinary truth claims and to acknowledge that now you have a situation where your conception of factual accuracy either has to completely break apart from your conception of truth, or it itself is continually vulnerable to changes in human history which could happen in a million years, when we finally get to cash this check, epistemologically? Let's say we survive for a million years. Peterson: I don't know if we ever get to cash it, that's the problem with the Darwinian perspective is that you're never right, you’re only sufficiently right to go ahead. Harris: Okay, but all of those differences in sufficiency matter hugely right? So if your kid gets sick and you go to the hospital and the doctor says we have no idea what's wrong with your child, that's one situation, just a stark confession of ignorance, right? Now for most of human history there's obviously no hospital go do and if you had gone to anyone and said why is my kids sick, you would get either a stark confession of ignorance, or some crazy idea the utility of which, psychologically we might want to debate, but it would have nothing to do with the biological reality of why your kid was sick. Now, that ignorance through a lot of hard work gets overcome, in a very piecemeal way and to no one 's real satisfaction yet, but there is no question that we have made progress in our conception of human disease, for instance, the germ theory of disease, knowing something about that has been very useful. Peterson: Sure, but along with that has come our ability to produce the hydrogen bomb and the birth control pill… Harris: Of course Peterson: …and all sorts of other things that could easily be fatal. Harris: If somebody writes down a hundred digit number in front of you and it ends in a one, and they say this number is prime and what is more it's the largest prime number any human being has ever consciously beheld. Right? That is either true or false, and it's truth or falsity has absolutely nothing to do with the ultimate survival of the species or your personal well being. Peterson: I know that's what you think. I understand that perfectly well but I don't agree. (laughs)
Harris: But your are non -agreement hasn’t… Peterson: I would say it's perfectly sufficiently true for all likely contexts that are to arise in the next while. But the problem is is that it's based in a metaphysics that might be fundamentally flawed in a way that we don't know that would turn out to be extraordinarily dangerous. Harris: Jordan it could continually change because, again this check never gets finally cashed unless everyone dies. Peterson: I know. Well that's part of the Darwinian problem. Harris: Imagine riding these waves where this society becomes better and worse and better and worse and much much better and much much worse, all with this prime number claim running right through it, right? On the upslope you'll say “oh it’s looking more and more true, it's looking more and more sufficient” and then on the down slope you’ll say “oops it’s fatally flawed, there’s a lot we weren’t considering.” Peterson: No, no you’d have to draw causal connection between the two, like the relationship between that tiny little claim and the total underlying metaphysic is pretty tenuous. And so I'm not going to, you know, act as if a claim about a particular prime number is the causal fact in, you know, rising civilizations up and down, I'm not making that claim. I’m making the claim that there's a metaphysic underneath that claim, and it could well play a causal role in those rises and falls. Harris: Okay, but it doesn't play a causal role in adjudicating the question about whether or not that number is prime. Peterson: Well that's where I suppose that's where we get back to some degree to the problem of Rorty and these language games issues. It’s like there's some rules that the game of prime numbers follows, we’ll call it a game. And according to the rules of the game, that is a reasonable move. You know, and that's kind of how Wittgenstein conceptualized the meaning of words, you know, he thought about those as tools, and so I would say, well, if I accept the underlying claims of the mathematical game in which that’s a reasonable proposition, then yes that's true. Harris: It’s the only way you can talk about a prime number… Peterson: Sure that's fine, and it might be useful to talk about prime numbers. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're true in the way that I am finding truth, which you already pointed out is associated with something like wisdom or goodness. Like it might not, it's possible that it's not the sort of game a wise person would play. Now I'm not saying that, I’m not saying that’s not necessarily the case… Harris: No, but again, I just don't see how that could be relevant. That is a separate claim which is intelligible to me and it's perfectly worth talking about, in fact it's essential to talk about because there's an infinite number of things we could be paying attention to, and some will get us killed. Peterson: That’s it, that’s it, there we go, that’s part of the problem. So why are we paying attention to the things that we're paying attention to?
Harris: Great Peterson: And that puts you in the moral domain immediately. Harris: Exactly, but Peterson: One other question is: why do scientists choose to study the things that they study? And then you might say “well because it attracts their interest.” And then you might say why? And I would say uhoh, now you're back in the dimension of the morality that surrounds science. Harris: But your concern about the misappropriation of human intelligence and science and culture, albeit totally valid and a concern I share, what you're doing with it based on, what sounds like Nietzsche, is causing you to engage in a kind of potlatch with your scientific tools. You are now vitiating in the utility of being able to say things like a prime number is prime whether or not any of us have figured that out, and in fact whether or not there are people around who even understand the concept of prime numbers. 1:40:03 Peterson: Well I would say that that's true within the set of implicit axioms, it's true within a set of underlying presuppositions. If you accept the presuppositions, then it's true. Harris: Sure, but Peterson: But the presuppositions go really really really really deep. Harris: Yes, but you have to accept that presupposition whether or not we all die next Tuesday. Peterson: No I don’t. Harris: You can't wait around for next Tuesday on the cusp of death to finally make your epistemology indelible. Peterson: We do that all the time. There's a scientific theory that everybody says “oh, it's true, it's true.” The theory of ether, that's a good one, “it's true, it's true,” uh-oh didn't account for this, well I guess it wasn't true, even though we thought it was all along, that happens all the time. Harris: Of course, but it doesn't happen on the basis of a single variable, which is whether or not enough people survive. Forget about the fact that this Darwinian criteria… Peterson: No, we’re willing to rewrite the history of what's true based on far less evidence than that. And that's a good thing. But you know you say yourself, well science is always prone to correction by the discovery of errors in the future. So I don't see why that's any more radical than what I'm claiming.
Harris: The errors have to be relevant and causally connected to the thing you're talking about. Our mere survival, and again, that they're vagaries here then the question is, as I said before, survival for what if you're surviving only to be a immiserated, we could call that into question, but then there's the question of whether enough people survive, like how many deaths would begin to erode our confidence in the primeness of a given number right? Five hundred years ago. You're forced to rewrite our intellectual history based on a single criterion whether it terminates in bliss or death. That just doesn't make any sense, I mean we're going around and around on this topic. Peterson: I don't see I don't really see how that's any different than your claim that science should be nested inside the search for well being. Harris: Now we will move on to that because I know you wanna get there. Peterson: Okay (laughs) Harris: But I just need to plant a flag here, because I think many people listening to this, I'll be interested to see if people have a similar reaction here, but I would expect many people will share my frustration that you're not granting what seem to be, just fairly obvious and undeniable facts, and now we were having to use this concept of truth in a pretty inconvenient way, right, because it’s, I don't see how anyone is going to think that it makes sense that… Peterson: You know, look, fine, of course it's going to be controversial. I mean, the claim I'm making is that scientific truth is nested inside moral truth. And moral truth is the final adjudicator. And your claim is no, moral truth is nested inside scientific truth, and scientific truth is the final adjudicator. It’s like, fine, you know, those are both are coherent positions. Harris: But yours actually isn't coherent. Because you're then your having to, once we get into the fine print, you're having to say well of course all of those micro instances, the billions upon billions of which can be cited, don't get changed based on whether or not we survive. You seem to be having a both ways. I point you to a micro instance and you say well that's just a micro instance isolated from everything else, but the moment I connect it to everything else you seem to suggest that it’s going to change, but the mechanism by which you would change, I mean there is no causal connection between… Peterson: Well, let's look at it this way, look at it this way. So let's take the Irish elk as an example. So one of the things that happened to the Irish elk, we think, because he went extinct, was that sexual selection sort of got out of control and the female fixated on antler width, and the poor damn elk ended up with like a 12 foot rack, and that didn’t, you know this is obviously a post-hoc theory, but sexual selection can account for runaway transformations like that. And the poor elk got a rack so big that it really wasn't commensurate with their survival, although I guess we might say “well I guess there was something wrong with what the female elk decided to focus on” but we didn't really know that so we went extinct, and I see that is precisely analogous to the point that I'm making right now. We're concentrating on certain things in a certain way and it's a scientific way, let's say, which is flawed and insufficient, although very powerful. And it it needs to be subordinated to something else. It must be, or it will be fatal. Harris: Of course. I can grant all of that, again, there's certain ways of paying attention that are dangerous right? There certain things that we shouldn't be doing which we are tempted to do.
Peterson: Right. And I think one of those things is defining the world as in a materialist realist terms. I happen to think that. And I have my reasons. Harris: But this clearly, the utility, the pragmatism of behaving in certain ways or spending our time in certain ways, or thinking in certain ways, has to break free of the conception of whether or not certain things are true. That's the only way you can make a claim that there's certain things that are in fact true that are dangerous to know. There's no way for you to say that, on this Darwinian conception you just have to say well no then they're not true, if they're dangerous to know they're not true. But there's so much that is terribly inconvenient about framing it that way. Peterson: Yeah, I know, it’s true, of course there is. There are equal inconveniences with framing it the opposite way, we're not going to get rid of inconveniences. It's like, you know, you're criticizing my perspective, and you're doing it quite effectively, although I don't think fatally because I think my distinction between the micro situation and metaphysics stands, but I would say that's not exactly the issue. The issue is: can you offer an alternative that has fewer metaphysical problems? And I would say no, I would say that your counter position produces just as many annoying paradoxes and complexities as my position does.
Harris: Certainly that remains to be discovered. But it’s, again, I just, this is no doubt a I flaw of mine as an interlocutor, but that's the kind of thing that does just drive me nuts, and I just wanna make one… Peterson: Well, it should. (laughs) It drove me nuts too. Harris: For the philosophers in the audience I'll make one more pass, just entertain this example: so you have two labs... Peterson: Okay Harris: …that are studying the smallpox virus. And they both have the same conception of the smallpox virus in hand. They both are working with the same tools that. they got same physical tools, the same intellectual tools. One lab weaponizes it and kills five hundred people based on some motive that we would obviously want to criticize. And the other lab creates a vaccine and immediately saves the same number of lives. Now they both have the same description of smallpox rattling around in their brains. Peterson: No they don't because otherwise one wouldn't weaponized it. You're expecting me to assume the initial propositions which is these labs are identical except for the outcome. It’s like no they're not identical, because the outcome would be identical then. So you know it's kinda like Joshua Green’s moral story… Harris: I can fix this, I can fix this. Let's just not go to Green yet. Then the difference between the two labs is not a difference in their motives right, we're not just good people in one lab and the opposite in another, there's just some trivial difference in their equipment or just good and bad luck which causes one to accidentally let this virus leak out and kill people, and causes the other to successfully produced a
vaccine. Whenever you ask members to of these labs what smallpox is and what they're trying to do they say the exact same sentences, but we have a different outcome. Peterson: Okay, well that's a whole different issue though, because they're not weaponize it, and they just made a mistake. Harris: Yeah, they made a mistake, but if they were playing around with smallpox and it was highly unpragmatic given the fact that people immediately died. And if the other lab hadn't produced its vaccine, everyone could have died. So here we got two linked to conditions that share the same epistemology, they got the same truth claims about smallpox, one is inadvertently killing people, highly non Darwinian non pragmatic on your account, the other is saving people, and in fact is the only bulwark against the consequences of the ineptitude in the first lab, right? Peterson: Okay well fine. First of all I don't think it's a very good example because it only causes the death of a few people, but let me let me counter with a real world example. Harris: No no no don't change the example - scale it up. Peterson: Okay Harris: Let's say they're killing half of humanity and the other labs saving as quickly as they can, the remaining half of humanity. Peterson: Okay well what would happen… Harris: Give me your conception of truth to describe what's happening here. Peterson: See you’re binding it again and because you say well one is exactly the same as the other except there's a there's a snake in one. Harris: There’s a hole in somebody's glove right, whatever, you can make trivial as you want. Peterson: Sure how about if we make it that the engineers didn't check the damn O-rings carefully enough so the space Challenger blew up. Okay so what would happen in a situation like that? Well what would happen would be that there would be a tremendous investigation into the cause of the error. And there would be moral, ah, part of that investigation would be a moral investigation. Were people being blind? Were they being careless? Were they following proper procedure etcetera. So, the first thing that would happen is that people would assume that there were genuine reasons in motivation that might have caused it. Now they wouldn't have been among the scientists necessarily they might have been among the equipment suppliers, and so we might say well maybe that piece of equipment happened to be made by slaves in China, and they weren’t too concerned with its quality. So then we might say well you know maybe that's throws the whole moral validity of the Chinese system into doubt. So that little mistake in the lab that you're describing that has this horrible consequence ends up tied up into all sorts of other things.
Harris: But it need not be. Grant me the possibility of a little mistake that allows for smallpox to get carried home on somebody's briefcase and spreads an epidemic. It's obvious that this is possible. This is the kind of thing well intentioned people guard against working in those labs all the time. Peterson: Well then I would say that that was evidence that the moral notion about mucking about with smallpox was a bad idea. Harris: Except in this case you can't say that, and you certainly can't link a bad idea to the epistemological truth value of our understanding of smallpox. Peterson: Well I think you can. Harris: We have the other lab on the other side of the earth by the only possible method available to us producing the vaccine that will cancel the negligence of the first lab and save humanity. Peterson: Okay, a reasonable person would look at that situation and say well how about we don't muck about smallpox anymore, despite the fact that we got really lucky and the errors and the benefits cancelled one another out, it seems to anyone sensible that that was pure damn fluke, roughly speaking, and the idea that we should be delving into that particular bit of knowledge is ill advised. That's what would happen, and that's what I think about that example. Harris: Okay but it was it was a fluke in both directions right? Peterson: Sure but that just shows that messing about with the substance to begin with was ill conceived. Any, like, any logical investigator would immediately conclude that, it's like you're saying from a utilitarian perspective the net consequence was basically zero. Harris: Not that, but to say that it was ill conceived is a perfectly intelligible and defensible thing to say, but that doesn't at all suggest that anyone in either lab was wrong about the physical character of smallpox. Peterson: Right. Harris: And we need a conception of truth… Peterson: They were wrong in a more profound way. They were right about rearranging the chairs on the Titanic but they were pretty damn wrong about the fact that it might sink. Harris: Okay but that has nothing to do with the truth value of any statement about smallpox. It has nothing to do with if someone says “is this a a retrovirus?” We're gonna wait… Peterson: It does the way the way that I define truth. Harris: We’re going to wait to see if everyone dies or not before we answer that question. We can't think about scientific truth in that sense again for many reasons but certainly because we can't wait around to see if everyone dies to find out if we're making sense in the present.
1:53:08 Peterson: The thing is, Sam, we do think about it that way already. We think about it that way all the time. We think, well, messing around with smallpox, is probably a bad idea because it might be fatal, anytime we have any inkling that the outcome of a scientific experiment might be catastrophe on the broadest possible scale, we immediately decide that that's a bad idea. Harris: Well, of course, but then again that's not, that has nothing to do with epistemology, that has to do with danger and survival and risk and things that worry us. Peterson: Right, which I would say are higher truths. So it does have something to do with epistemology. Harris: You can call them higher values but they're not they're not truth in the sense that, when it comes time to have an honest conversation about the factual accuracy of any statement about whether or not something is likely to be true, when you’re talking about probabilistic truth, there you're not talking merely about the risk of species annihilation. Peterson: I know that's because you leave that question out of the, you leave that question out of the realm of consideration. Harris: And for good reason. Peterson: Well, for good proximal reason, but maybe for bad distal reason. Harris: But for most things we want to talk about there is no implication of danger on that scale at all. And yet we still have to make strong truth claims. We can make this is prosaic or as weird as you want, if someone says that your wife is cheating on you, presumably that's within the realm of possibility, provided that you have a wife. And you're going to want evidence, and what would constitute evidence? Well here's here's evidence: “I saw it in a dream” well that's bad evidence. Well here's evidence “I hired a private investigator and here are seventeen pictures of her at various locations with a man you've never seen before and he looks like Brad Pitt.” Now all of a sudden presumably you're interested right? Now the claim about whether or not she's cheating on you is an intelligible claim, we can drill down on what it might mean, does she have to be having sex with this person to be cheating on you? Let's say yes, she does, okay so that is a claim about what she's actually doing with this person in a locked room somewhere when you're not around. That's a claim that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you wind up killing yourself based on your reaction to this unhappy truth. If you then wind up killing yourself, we could say at the end of the day well it would be better if he hadn't known that. It would certainly be better if she hadn't done that. It would've been better if he had married a different woman, surely we want to say that.
Peterson: It might have been better if he had paid attention to his damn marriage. And to attribute the cause of his demise to the existence of the photographs, this is why I brought up Josh Green is that investigations into this kind of morality always frame it such a way….
Harris: Jordan you have to grant one thing here, there is one piece that doesn't get moved here. We cannot move the piece that because you killed yourself it's not true that she was having an affair. That move is not open to you, and yet you're acting like it is. Peterson: (pause) Well. You know, I think we've been going down this road for so long that I’m not exactly capable of them at the moment of making the micro example - macro example leap because you're making a case there that’s sort of quasi-associated with science, that’s the photographic evidence, and the Realism that's associated with that, and then you're making the claim that, you know, it's not true that she wasn't having an affair, I’d have to take that apart more. He killed himself, like you're throwing a lot of things in that example that I believe are contextually important to my unpacking the ethics behind it. You know, because you're equating the fact that she had an affair to him committing suicide which, you know there's a whole backstory there. And it also depends to a large degree precisely on what you mean by an affair, which was something that you brushed over. So you know you're acting, that's the problem with these damn micro examples, is that and this is why I don't trust Josh Green’s work, because you set up a narrative that's completely fictional and you act as if each of the subcomponents of the narrative are isolated truths that have no external context. You say well the external context has no bearing on the issue at hand, and that’s just generally not true. It has a lot of bearing on the issue at hand. Harris: Well it bears on some of it and there's other parts which it obviously can't bear on. I’m just asking that you distinguish those two. Peterson: Well here’s an example man, I've been in courtrooms. I've been in courtrooms lots of times with divorce cases. You know and, the the issue of what constitutes an affair, which you brushed over, you know, when you said it may depend on what kind of sex is going on whether on its technically an affair. It's like, the photographic evidence of her in bed with another man would not necessarily be enough to convict her of having an affair in a court. You're assuming that photographic evidence is prima facie evidence of the affair. And the way you're doing that is by circumscribing the definition of affair such that it fits with your notion of factual evidence. You might say well it's certainly the case that she was having sex with another man. Harris: Jordan I'm just using it to demonstrate that it doesn't make sense to subordinate our conception of truth, or the factual accuracy of any given description of reality to what happens, perhaps in some distant future, vis a vis the survival of anyone. Now we can talk about the survival of people and of the species as our primary concern, that's a totally valid thing to care about. Peterson: Why? Why is it valid? If it isn’t up at the top of the hierarchy of truth claims why the hell would you border subordinating science to it? Harris: As you point out there are there things that are more important than understanding reality scientifically. Peterson: Hey great! That's exactly my point. Harris: You're not making that point by using this Nietzschean conception of truth. Peterson: Not yet.
Harris: What you're doing is making it very difficult to talk about facts. Peterson: It’s more of a Darwinian conception of truth then a Nietzschean. I mean Nietzsche just referred to it obliquely, but you just admitted that there are… Harris: But the truth is not even a Darwinian conception of truth, it is certainly not a Darwinian conception of Darwinism because the truth value of a Darwinian description of biology is not predicated on any harms that may come on the basis of people thinking in those terms. That's an additional thing we can be concerned about. Peterson: Sure sure but there's a claim inside Darwinian thinking which was recognized by all the Pragmatists, who were very very smart people that there is truth metaphysic nested in Darwinian theory, which is that you don't have access to the truth, even if you think you have, the best you have are the truths that support the probability that you will continue with your existence and the existence of the species and there is no truth outside that. And you’re saying yes there is. Harris: No, that is not the Pragmatic conception of truth. The Pragmatic conception of truth is not merely anchored to the Darwinian logic of evolution and survival. Peterson: No they considered it a subset of Pragmatic thinking. As soon as Darwin published his work the American Pragmatists, particularly Dewey but also William James, jumped on it instantly and said well yeah, well there's an example of the work, of the generalizability of our claims about Pragmatic truth, it’s even the case in the biological world. And there's no way outside of that, and that's not my invention or my particular interpretation, that drove the fundamental American philosophy, Pragmatism. Harris: Again, I've been very close to Pragmatism because I was just endlessly haranguing Richard Rorty in person about these things. But most of what we talk about, most of the statements we want to make about reality that have some truth value, or not, however dimly we can see that the basis of it, or not, most of this content has no obvious connection and may in fact, as a matter of the history the species, have no actual connection to our survival. Peterson: Why do you care about well being then? To me you’re making two paradoxical moral claims at the same time. On the one hand here… Harris: You're wanting to move on to another topic, which is totally understandable at this point, but. Peterson: Well it's partly because when you're talking about the other topic, I think that you will necessarily end up in the position that I just described if you if you pursue it far enough. Harris: Not if I can't make your position make sense when talking about terrestrial reality, or even fictional reality. I could say for instance that in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Hamlet was the prince of Denmark. Right. Now that is a factually true statement about a fictional world. Peterson: You talked about white lies, right?
Harris: Jordan please… Peterson: I'm not not skipping off the topic - I'm directly addressing it. Something can be true at one level of analysis and not true at another. That happens all the time, that's what a white lie is. It happens all the time. The reason we're stuck on this discussion is because you won't allow me to make a distinction between provisional factual truths, which I don't want to dispute because it's self evident that they're correct, but that isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that there's an underlying metaphysics that at question here. Harris: There are two different claims you could be making it when you call them provisional, one of which is obviously valid and which every sane scientist makes, which is to say that that we are working within a set of theories and a set of tools which don't give us ultimate confidence that our current description of reality is true and will never be falsified. We're making falsifiable claims about the world, in a Popperian sense, many of which have not yet been falsified and which therefore are still in good standing. Peterson: Okay, would you say that one of those falsifiable claims is that the work that we're doing in the lab is beneficial to mankind? Harris: No you need not make that… Peterson: Are you sure? Because that is what scientists claim. Harris: But Jordan, you need not make that claim. You could make that claim, or claim that it was harmful, or you could make the claim that it is neither beneficial or harmful, yet it is still intelligible in that context to say that what I’m doing in the lab is no less true. Peterson: Yeah, but people don’t do that in the real world. They always claim what they are doing is of benefit. Because they recognize the fact that whether or not it's of benefit trumps whether or not it's factually true. Harris: Okay, but Jordan now we've been doing this for two hours, and my only claim is that you have to be able to distinguish these variables. It is intelligible to say that in one lab they have a true theory, factually accurate which is allowing them to do all kinds of things that they wouldn't be able to do if they were mistaken about what they believed, but they're doing things that are harmful because they're bad people, right, or negligent people. That is unfortunately an all too common situation that we are in… Peterson: Then their theory about what they're doing is wrong. You think that you can take their theory of smallpox independently of their nefariousness. And I would say no you can’t. You can’t. Because you're willing, there's an archaeological dig that's going on here, we’ll say there's a proximal claim and then there's a claim underneath that, and then there is a claim underneath that, and then there's a claim underneath that which might be a moral claim, which I would say it's something like at the bottom, and I would say well nefarious people can't have a truthful view of the smallpox virus, it's not possible. Harris: But wait a minute Jordan
Peterson: But if you just parse out the little empirical description, it's identical to the empirical description of the benevolent person, and I would say well then you're just drawing your border lines around your truth claim inappropriately. It's a matter of depth. Harris: We could make it even worse for you than that, we could make the lab of good people fundamentally confused about the nature of small pox right, so they're good people, we need to be able to talk about their goodness because they have good intentions, but when you actually look at what they believe about smallpox it's wrong. Wrong by what standard? That standard can not be their goodness, it can't be the survival of the species, it has to have to do with the details of molecular biology. If you put them in opposition to the lab of bad people who have an accurate, that is true understanding of smallpox, again the concept of truth floats free of anyone's intentions here and it seems to me you have to grant that. Peterson: They just have an error at a different level of the archaeological dig. So they're good people, we’ll say, but they're proximal definition of smallpox is wrong and that’s also not from the Darwinian perspective, I didn't say that good people necessarily always make good decisions. I never said that, or that being good necessarily provides you… Harris: Let’s make these the perfectly good wise people who would make good decisions with an accurate understanding of smallpox, it just so happens however that they're bad biologists. Again the crucial thing is that you it you need the conceptual tools to be able to make these distinctions. Peterson: Okay then I would say that the probability that they're perfectly good people, and they’re biologists, and they're starting smallpox is so negligible that the example doesn't make sense. This is the problem I have with these toy moral conundrums is that you get to define the contents of the conundrum and leave out what you want and that makes it easier to win the argument. But they're not real. Harris: Well no 2:08:25 Peterson: I’ve dealt with people in real world conundrums a lot, like a lot, and the first problem with the real world conundrum is it's damn near impossible to define it. You have to dig and dig and dig and dig. So you have pictures of your wife having an affair. Okay so fine, no problem. So then I spend like two years digging into the situation, and I find out that, you know, to call what she did an affair given your behavior in the entire ten years beforehand hand is such a perversion of the truth, that it makes your photographic evidence not only irrelevant, but positively malevolent. So it's not that easy. Harris: So again, you are seizing upon superficial features of my example that don't actually change the significance of the example, at least from my point of view. Jordan, this is what I am tempted to this point, we have because now I'm as a podcast host and I'm worried about the the end product here, and about the patience of our listeners. A vast number of whom really want us to talk about these things. I think what we should do here is pause. You and I have had a two hour plus conversation about epistemology where we seem to differ. I honestly, I still can't convince myself that when push comes to shove we really have a different conception of truth here. I feel like you are a committed to playing a language game by certain rules of your own design here which are not helping you achieve clarity with an interlocutor like me or or anyone else on this topic. It's gonna be hard to talk about the connection
between scientific truth and moral truth, which I know you want to talk about and I want to talk about, but I'm not gonna be as good as I should be going forward if we just start from this place, and log another two hours and I know we're not gonna have an audience that wants to listen to a four hour podcast when we’re at the two hour mark here. So what do you think about this plan. We break here we release this conversation. One thing we will be interesting for me is if anyone can point out to me what I am missing about your argument thus far. 2:10:45 Transcript Ends.
