Maps of Meaning #8

Study Notes
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Discussion thread for 2017 Maps of Meaning - Lecture #8

study group discussions

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

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my notes for Maps of Meaning #8

  • 0:00 - what are the constants of experience?

  • 10:00 - ontology - are abstractions any more real than what they represent? are numbers any more real than the things they represent?

  • 15:00 - being is - the individual (the unit of agency that fights the other two), who is aware of the territory they know (structure, society, culture - nurture-determinism) and don’t know (chaos, mother nature - nature-determinism) - a story is the development of an individual (including of their agency/consciousness) across time through encounters with culture and nature

  • 18:00 - environmentalists eliminate some characters from their narratives - the 3 negative characters we must be aware of to avoid naive perceptions destroying frame of reference (human malevolence), the dragon of chaos and potential (the category contains that which is beyond our understanding / safe societies) - complex entities are paradoxical in their structure, and we must know that to survive - we must develop a category for the things we don’t know, to know how to approach it and work with it (a paradox)

  • 22:00 - how do you prepare yourself against getting what you want from the realm of dangerous chaos - this is the question of life - how to deal with that which is beyond your understanding, that is constantly manifesting itself in the world - this occurs every time you categorise something and then it escapes from the category

  • 22:00 - you do not exhaust relationships nor the world with your perceptual categories

    • << SJWs do this: we’ve categorised you into a box, DO NOT JUMP OUT OF THE BOX WE’VE PUT YOU IN! - which is why they still call Milo a racist homophobe, because they can’t accept he is outside the box they’ve made for him, because they cannot deal with the complexity of the world - religion and marxism and ideology seem to offer people the illusory escape from complexity with overly simplistic rhetoric that fails to handle the everyday exceptions - then their correlating temperamental agreeableness, uses their empathy viciously against those they consider the enemy against whom they consider protected >>

    • << agreeableness provides comfortable environments where competition/challenge is eliminated for amiability, to provide an in-group, that is then hostile to the out-group, this is fine and dandy and local levels, but their desire for holistic and expansion drives it to macro globalism, which is not compatible, as it has no respect for other temperaments to exist simultaneously, only homogeneity - it is the belief that two people only disagree because they have not been argued with enough, with the goal for holistic integration, into a homogeneousness solution. >>

  • 23:00 - henry ford, assembly line, a machine is always driven by an idea - there are snakes in every idea, that may never present themselves for years - even god himself could not get rid of the snakes in the garden

  • 27:00 - female chimps are not selective matters, only human females are

  • 28:00 - there is no better definition of nature, than ‘that which selects’

  • 29:30 - if you are to determine what is true, you must be able to detect the system of categories, by utilising multiple methods - multi-method multi-trait process - how do you determine if something actually has an existence - you must be able to measure it in multiple ways, and get convergent information that purports its existence

  • 31:30 - evolutionary, neurologically, conceptually all purport to what Peterson believes, as there are 3 different systems that converge, it makes it hard to disbelieve

  • 33:00 - slide - perceptions, filtering, constantly active in our filtering selection, never unbiased - Kant - **a blank slate cannot process information, as it has no bias - the more differential abilities you have, the better you are at understanding the world **- the logos, the knower, is what is doing that harvesting - it begins in a nascent low-resolution form - low-resolution knower, low-resolution world, low-resolution category-system (and low-resolution sensory system?) which all develop over time

  • 38:00 - brain systems - abstract thought and its role - intelligence and conscientiousness - intelligence is an indicator of the effectiveness of abstraction, and conscientiousness is an indicator of the probability of application - this separation must occur, as if they were the same, then there would be no thinking, it would just be action - it seems to take something like willpower to connect the two, and we don’t understand that very well

  • 40:50 - slide

  • 44:00 - brain surgery only happens when you are awake

  • 46:00 - that’s why plastic guns and other fake weapons work so well on the back!

  • 47:40 - slide

  • 48:30 - our hands are what makes us what dolphins aren’t

  • 48:40 - with our hands, here is what I took apart (chaos), here is what I made of it (order), here’s how I did it (education) << the fountainhead

  • 49:40 - slide

  • 50:00 - you teach the children micro strategies, that evolve into macro strategies, even if they and you cannot articulate the representation - children can only play with themselves at the start, then they learn around 2-4 to unite the games

  • 52:00 - how can you have dreams that tell you things they don’t know - how can people tell stories with information they don’t understand - information is encoded in behaviours that we do not understand

  • 53:40 - facesnap and another moments later

  • 53:30 - story structure - similar to the video I shared to the study group

  • 55:50 - people fight within themselves / against themselves when there is no higher authority

    • << people innately and always fight authority, when there is no authority, they fight each other, when each other is not authority, they fight themselves - this is the postmodernists, they dismantle authority, so they always fight everything >>

  • 56:00 - english common law creation, the invention of laws from the patterns of ways of being

  • 57:18 - facesnap

  • 59:30 - as a parent you a model for emulation, what you say doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you do, the ideal is to do what you say - because rules are vacuous unless they are practical when acted out in behaviour - is you don’t do as you say, then you are confused, and if you are confused, it makes them anxious and annoyed, and they will go after you - consistency, and if you can’t provide it, you will drive them crazy - bringing your words and your actions into alignment, that is part of the development of wisdom

  • 1:00:00 - human’s motor neurones, purport, that all humans are, are things that take the world apart, and talk about it

  • 1:00:30 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enûma_Eliš

  • 1:02:00 - people’s faces constantly broadcast their faces - someone who has had too much plastic surgery, are uncanny

  • 1:03:00 - if you are transparent, then people can trust you - if you are not, then people don’t trust you, and won’t cooperate with you, they will compete with you, as you will be evil predator in no time flat

  • 1:03:47 - slide - brain hemispheres - right-handed males have a simpler brain - dreams - if you are dealing with things you don’t know, you have too much around with your category structures, this is what dreams do - process of learning - turning low-resolution representations of what is frightening, into high-resolution representations that can be used into tools to create amazing things - basics of ethics and morality, uniquely human

  • 1:13:30 - dominance hierarchies

    • << perhaps that is why we don’t consider James Bond to be a role model, as he plays one game well, whereas Remington Steele attempts all the games and does fairly well at them and learns - dominance hierarchies and social parties, negative judgements, looking down means you are no threat >>

  • 1:17:30 - look at what is not going right, as it is where you get the most valuable information of what you need to know, which is why it is so important to discuss with your enemies, as they know what you don’t know

  • 1:19:45 - facesnap

  • 1:23:00 - positive emotion is associated with moving forward - people who are happy all the time, are impulsive and make mistakes - the people who push happiness as the key, are so ill-informed - you need a balance of positive and negative emotions

    • << this section covers a friend I know >>

  • 1:27:00 - slide

  • 1:35:00 - development of ethics

  • 1:37:00 - to play a game multiple times, you need to develop mutually rewarding rules - psychopaths just play the game once, then play with another, if you play a game once, you can do whatever you want regardless of rules

  • 1:39:00 - development of values - honesty, caring, power - different ethics and values emerge depending on the prevalent situations, which are then manifested in different stories according to where they are relevant

    • << our demotion from god to myth, is our demotion of the relevance of the story in our current situation >>

  • 1:42:00 - a good story must have motivational power and keep uncertainty at bay

    • << perhaps this is what the great youtubers do, pewdiepie’s story is incredibly motivational, and his content of the videos keep uncertainty at bay - just the same with Jordan Peterson! >>

  • 1:43:00 - the gods of abstractions compete in the manifestations of the tribes

    • << the tribes that succeed, have the best abstractions, the best gods, their gods win, as their gods manifest more successful representations of the world - in the new secular world, we are destroying the gods, and such destroying our abstractions, and thus destroying what has made us successful… Nietzsche’s Superman >>

    • << the best philosophers had incredible observation and discrimination abilities, they were able to take in the widest breadth of observation, and distil it with pristine discrimination, into the purest forms of truth, which lasts aeons >>

    • << with only observation, you overload yourself and never enter into creativity to solve the problem in practice, you only see the dragon and never able to formulate the plan and put it into action to kill it >>

    • << with only discrimination, you can only understand the small subset of things you do filter, and never able to discover anything from the unknown, you never fight a dragon or even your own dragons, as you were too busy dismissing their existence >>

    • << this is the SJWs, chaos scares them, so they never venture into it, they just keep the low-resolution category of one big dragon, and never formulate a practical plan to kill it, as they are cowards, they other-ise the evil from their perceived immaculation, failing to see the dragon of the outside also exists within the inside, failing to see their own dragons, and all the characters that must manifest inside themselves to also manifest outside of themselves >>

    • << the hero is the one who is able to observe all the possible dragons, then discern through discrimination the pattern of the nature of dragons, then with humility discover the dragon within themselves, and with courage tame their inner dragon, then to test the assertion in the world by using their progress to attempt to conquer the outside dragon with their tamed inner one, which they may fail, and thus revise, or they may succeed, in which case they should then teach, so the world can too conquer the dragons and make progress together >>

    • << however the charlatan, the cynic, who sits on the bench and never conquers their own dragon, never tames it, is useless to everyone, and can only be used as a bad example >>

    • << which is why the hero is the one who got up again, after each failure, learning how to play each game better - and the failure is the one who deemed all games as rigged and stop playing all of them >>

    • << which is why Peterson says if you want to change the world, sort yourself out first, and start by cleaning your room >>

  • 1:43:00 - the space of argumentation and conflict is where the meta-stories emerge

  • 1:44:00 - reminds me of

  • 1:48:00 - things like hunger, rage, are primordial emotions - which is why the greeks thought humans were the playthings by the gods

  • 1:50:00 - many mythological stories involve the death of gods - Nietzsche just brought this to the western world

  • 1:53:00 - when humans bring too much chaos, nature’s chaos comes back and wipes them out, and those who kept their morality (Moses) survive and start anew

  • 1:57:00 - Marduk - the first god of theirs that had the power of words - words were magical - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoPRL60cA70 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enûma_Eliš

  • 1:58:00 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomological_network

  • 2:00:00 - humans are the only beings capable of deception - not true - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEYCjJqr21A - Peterson changes it to malevolence

  • 2:03:00 - the role of a king

  • 2:03:00 - news years eve

  • 2:06:40 - slides

  • 2:08:00 - you have to voluntary confront the things that scare you - there doesn’t seem to be a limit to this - christ and snakes

  • 2:09:00 - dreaming, daydreaming, using dreaming as psychotherapeutic treatment - do not lead the witness

  • 2:14:00 - motherly, fatherly trust and encouragement

  • 2:18:00 - Egyptian myths applied to government - leading to individual sovereignty in western world