Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tom Morgan's avatar

If you read this passage from Peterson’s Maps of Meaning through the hemispheric lens it takes on a significance that I think of practically weekly. Perhaps the censor is his right hemisphere, connected to the Tao, myth. And the left the analytical, articulate intellectual, but abstracted and confabulating. I believe that battle still wages on within him, and you can hear it in the two different ways he speaks.

He’s writing about a breakdown in his earlier life:

“Something odd was happening to my ability to converse. I had always enjoyed engaging in arguments, regardless of topic. I regarded them as a sort of game (not that this is in any way unique). Suddenly, however, I couldn’t talk - more accurately, I couldn’t stand listening to myself talk. I started to hear a “voice” inside my head, commenting on my opinions. Every time I said something, it said something - something critical. The voice employed a standard refrain, delivered in a somewhat bored and matter-of-fact tone:

You don’t believe that.

That isn’t true.

You don’t believe that.

That isn’t true.

The “voice” applied such comments to almost every phrase I spoke. I couldn’t understand what to make of this. I knew the source of the commentary was part of me, but this knowledge only increased my confusion. Which part, precisely, was me - the talking part or the criticizing part? If it was the talking part, then what was the criticizing part? If it was the criticizing part - well, then: how could virtually everything I said be untrue? In my ignorance and confusion, I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass unchallenged.

This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part. Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren’t real, weren’t true - or, at least, weren’t mine.

All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren’t my things, however - I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them - presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.”

Expand full comment
Dave Nadig's avatar

Brett,

Wonderful synthesis as always. In my own thinking I've been wrestling a lot with the " ... and thus" of these arguments, having spent a year or three in the well of incredible work that the authors you mention (yourself included) have been doing. Certainly John's "After Socrates" which I've been enjoying immensely is a very individual "... and thus." But to me the most interesting set of idea-meets-reality on this topic has been in AI. I would *love* to get your thoughts on how transformer-based LLMs have kind of reverse-engineered a bit of this -- quite literally improving their performance by learning how to tell what's important.

To my deeply ignorant and uneducated perspective (English major here), this seems to be right down the middle of the discussion. Everyone seems to be experiencing first hand the emergent properties of complex systems ... would love any connections your smarty-pants group of followers may be able to surface.

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts