Jordan Peterson on The Nature of Truth - Joe Rogan

Hello, freak bitches. I mean, it's... who the hell doesn't want to hear that? So we're treading kind of close to the argument you got into with Sam Harris about the nature of truth. And since I heard that, I've been sort of itching to have this conversation with you. Because I think there's a way of viewing this that will actually perhaps reconcile the two points of view. But there's a bitter pill that comes along with it. So here's my argument. We tend to think of intellect as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage. But there's actually nothing that says that the literal truth is where advantage lies. And so I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true. These are ideas that aren't true in the factual sense, but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they're not true. So let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial. Porcupines can throw their quills. Not true. However, if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills, you'll give them some space. If you don't, you may, realizing that they can't throw their quills, get really close to one and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill, which can be extremely dangerous because they are microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time and they can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection. So the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth. Another one might be people say everything happens for a reason. Well, unless you're talking about physics as the reason, everything doesn't happen for a reason. However, if you are the kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason and then some terrible tragedy befalls you, you may be on the lookout. Well, what's the reason that this happened? Maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was preoccupied with their misfortune would. So literal falseness but metaphorical truth is actually, I would argue, the category under which religious truth evolves. Now the problem, the bitter pill that I mentioned, is that I've heard you say that the truths that are captured in the religious version of things are basically like, you know, there's an individual truth and then there's a truth of your family and there's a truth of the population that you're living in and these things are all encoded in these doctrines, which is true. And you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population. The problem is, what I hear you arguing, and you tell me if I have it wrong, is that we should therefore expect the encoded metaphorical truths in these religious traditions to be morally right. But there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right because there are metaphorical truths that might in fact be reprehensible but nonetheless effective. And so, what I would argue, the overarching point here would be that you're right that the documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is not literal scientific truth nor was that their purpose. What isn't true is that those things are inherently up to date. See, I would, okay, I mean, first of all, the first thing about that is that a discussion like that, and this is also what happened with Sam Harris, takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability. And so, even in discussing it, I'm going to make all sorts of mistakes because it's treacherous territory. But I would say, my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it. So, one of the archetypes is that of the tyrannical father, which is the archetype, by the way, that possesses the minds of people who accuse Western society of being patriarchal. They're possessed by a singular archetype, and that's the archetype of the tyrannical father. They don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise king, because there is. You can't even point that out. But, anyways, in some of our oldest stories, there's a representation of the dead past. So, let me give you an example that everyone knows about. The story of Pinocchio is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio. He starts out as a puppet. He's a marionette. He's a wooden head. He's a liar. And he's pulled by forces that he does not understand. Right, okay, so, but he has a good father. That's Geppetto. And Geppetto wishes that he becomes a real individual. And he knows that that's an impossible wish. He wishes on a star that his son could become an actual individual, knowing full well that that's unlikely and impossible. So, Geppetto's a good king. But the story's also about Geppetto, because what happens is that when Geppetto loses Pinocchio, loses his son, which you could think about as the active, dynamic, attentive force of youth, then he ends up stultified in the belly of a whale, which is a symbol of chaos, at the bottom of the ocean. And then Pinocchio has to rescue him. So I would say, there is an instantiation of evolutionarily-accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past. But they're still dead. And it requires the union. This is why, in Christian theology, the godhead has a tripartite structure. This is part of the reason. There's God the father. But the father's dead. The father was right a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, and is still partly right, but he's dead. He can't participate in the updating of the process, so you need an active force. Now, the active force is the same thing that generated those stories across time. So it's the same thing, except it's also alive in the present. And so your moral duty, and this is another thing that happens in Pinocchio, is to rescue your dead father from the belly of the whale. And that's partly what I'm trying to do with these biblical lectures, because your objection is correct. The reason it's correct is because, even if the solution was correct, the landscape has changed. And it's changed incrementally, or in a revolutionary way, we don't know. And so those old truths are, at best, partial, and at worst, blind. But that doesn't mean you can just say, like Mao did during the Cultural Revolution, well, let's just destroy the past. It's like, no, that would be like saying, well, you don't need a body anymore. Because your body is the collected wisdom of the evolutionary process across three and a half billion years. I absolutely agree. Because the stories are not literal, it's impossible to know whether they, well, not impossible, but very difficult to know whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant, if it's been inverted and it's now absolutely false, or... So Carl Jung talked about this a lot. And one of the things he said was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the confines of your own life. And so you say, well, there's an archetype of perfection that pervades the West, and for the sake of argument, I'm going to call that Christ, the Christ image. It's something like that. That's the archetypal image. Now, we have a story about what Christ's historical life was like. Well, you can't have that life, because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2,000 years ago. That's not your life. But what you can do is take the archetype, and you can manifest it within the confines of your own life. And what that does is force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom. And you don't just forego it. You can't, or you can, but you'll pay a massive price. And part of that will be social disintegration, because the past is alive enough so that those of us who inhabit its corpse aren't clawing each other to death while we're feeding, right? That's the critical issue. Now, it's not alive enough, because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment, and we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained. Well, not only that, but the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts. And that's my biggest concern, is that if we take Dawkins dismissing religion as mind virus, this is very dangerous, because it neglects the truth that you're talking about. And it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about the fact that religious texts, religions, are not mind viruses. They are adaptationists to past environments. They do contain a kind of truth that isn't necessarily literal, and is in general not literal. But none of them, no ancient religion, is up to date for Google's algorithms being the hazard to civilization that it probably is. We need to figure out how to navigate where the ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current challenges. Okay, so let me modify that slightly, because I think it's true and not true. The stories are erroneous in detail and right in pattern. So, for example, there's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does is stand up against the tyranny of the state. Now, you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of the state in order for that to be a truth that's applicable across different contexts. And I would say what's happened with the great religious myths is that they operate at a level of abstraction, such that the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment. I'll give you an example of that. It is extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order. That works in every single environment for every person. And so the domain of order, I can describe it technically. You're in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire. And you're in the domain of chaos when they don't. And then I could say, well, your task is to straddle the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing is working because you don't learn anything. And you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming. You want to be stable and dynamic at the same point. And the Daoists do that very nicely because they have a chaos-order conceptualization of the phenomenological landscape. And their claim is the point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between chaos and order. And I think that's true across contexts. So I don't think that truth ages. Some of them don't. But the question really is one of at what point is there so much legacy code that taking the package is more harmful than it is beneficial? If God were writing today, I'm pretty convinced the first commandment would be thou shalt not enrich uranium. It would make sense as the number one commandment. It's not there because uranium wasn't a concept at the point that the thing was written nor was the hazard of enriching it obvious. And so the fact that it isn't mentioned tends to de-emphasize it as a risk. And so I guess the question is is it possible that by recognizing that these traditions carry huge amounts of ancestral wisdom forward but that that wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions that we can be liberated to move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here but to recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more potent and up-to-date which is not easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and implement it. A lot of it isn't even right. Yeah, it's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale. Some of these fairy tales that people are trying to rewrite in modern times are perhaps 15,000 years old and people think, well, we can just update that so that the modern version will be better. It turns out that that's very, very difficult. And there's another. I'm going to play devil's advocate against my own position here because I say, well, the religious texts encode profound and evolutionarily determined truths that are universal. Okay, which religious texts? Right, they contradict each other. And you might say, well, all of them, but then that means that obscures the important differences between the traditions and I'm by no means certain that all of them do. So I'm going to stick my neck way the hell out because why not? It isn't obvious to me that Islam does because it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam doesn't make it unique among religions. So now, good. So, well, there's that out on the table. If you don't mind, but isn't the issue using the word truth? Because we can use tradition and wisdom and we're okay, but as soon as we start saying truth, then we run into problems. I mean, and even when you're talking about porcupines, when you're talking about, would you say metaphorical truth versus... Look, it's not true. It's real simple. Just don't go near the porcupine. Teach the kid to not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous. They get stuck in you. They're really dangerous. Can they throw it at you? No, they cannot. But just stay clear of them because you don't want them to somehow or another get in touch with your body. There's no truth in that they can throw their quills at you. You benefit from being particularly aware of the dangers of their quills. But if you tell a kid that they can throw their quills and so therefore the kid stays clear of them, he has a faulty assumption in his head. You're lying to them for their own protection. That's not good. I wouldn't do it. I think the same thing can be said of everything happens for a reason. Well, here's the problem. We don't know if everything happens for a reason. Maybe when you die, you go to some auditing room and they go, well, you know, it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're impossible. It's impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the human brain. You're dealing with some simian sort of complex geometry that's really just designed to keep your body moving and keep you alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to the point when you're a god. Well, first of all, I have kids. I wouldn't tell them that a porcupine can throw its quills. I'm sure you wouldn't, but why use the word truth though? Well, the question is why do people tell you that a porcupine can throw its quills? I don't think they do. Oh, they do. Well, if they do, they don't know any better. Right. Or they're liars. Right. And so all I'm saying is that actually that is likely to be the product of selection. In other words, that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage. It's not the way I would do it. And for exactly the reason that you point out, which is, if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine, I don't know whether a porcupine is liable to be the gateway to some more important question, but if it were, you've just steered the kid wrong. Well, it's something. Here's part of the problem, and this is part of, and this is a really big problem. There's two things, I guess, that were brought up by what you described, and the first is the terminology of truth. Now, Harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that I was absconding with the definition of truth and in false manner, but he was wrong because the idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth. And the original notion of truth wasn't objective true. It was like the arrow flies straight and true. And it meant something like reliably on its way to the appropriate destination, something like that. And when Christ said, I am the truth and the way, well, I can't remember the other one. Yes, yes. The truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth. So Sam's idea that I had somehow, you know, taken the idea of truth that was actually objective all along and done something crooked with it is just wrong. It's wrong. Well, so truth can have multiple definitions. Well, that's the issue, and that's exactly what we're trying to get at here. It's like, to me, there's two kinds of truth. And they may be commensurate. You may be able to stack them on top of one another, but now and then they dissociate. And this is actually what Brett was referring to as well. So, and this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it. There's the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which you act. And there's the truth that manifests itself as a representation of the objective world. And sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other, and sometimes they're not. So, like, I could give you a piece of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out, that carried within it an inaccurate representation of part of the objective world. And you could say, well, maybe that's actually the case with the biblical stories, because if you read them as science, they don't read well. So let's take malaria as a good example. Malaria. The root of the word is mal-area. Bad air. Right? Malaria is not transmitted by bad air. It's transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where you might think the air is bad. So the point is, it's part of the way there. Yeah, that's a good one. And that also gets... See, there's another weird distinction here that I was trying to draw with Sam, but it's a really tricky one. And we augured in because we started to talk about pragmatism. But there's also something like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool. And my sense is that people's fundamental truths are tool-like. We use them to function properly in the world. And you could say, well, a sharp axe is more true than a dull axe. And actually, you can use the word true in that sense. That actually is an appropriate use of the word. There are tool truths and there are objective fact truths. Now, in the optimal circumstance, those map onto each other. But we're not smart enough often to make them map onto each other, because we just don't know enough. And there are lots of truths that we have that portray the objective world improperly that are still true. Is the problem using the term true when sometimes you should use the term fact? Yes. one plus one is two, that is a fact. One plus one is two is also true. You throw some water on a match, that is, and it will go out. That's a fact. Yes. Well, as I see it, at least, there is this overarching truth, the one that Sam Harris was pointing to, the one I think you're pointing to also, and the one I'm imagining we all subscribe to. Sure. There is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory or in a careful experiment in the field. And that really is the top-level truth. But then there are the truths you can't speak yet. So, let's take the word filth from the Old Testament. Okay? Filth means ----. Right? You're not supposed to ---- in camp because God finds it offensive. Now, the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written. That truth keeps you from infecting people long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in human ---- that are a particular danger to your population. So the point is, would you rather be held back to the place where you can actually describe the literal underpinnings of what's going on, or do you want to be liberated to say something that actually results in an improvement in health before, you know, literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that it was microbes at the root of this? Yes, and you need to figure out, so an elaboration of that would be something like human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could understand the nature of the world well enough to justify that. Right, and you'd be crazy now that we do have the germ theory of disease to amplify that original crude version of the truth or that crude approximation of what you need to believe in order to behave safely. There's no reason for that truth to be promoted. In fact, you don't hear people describing this part of the Old Testament anymore because it's not relevant. And this is probably all why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well. Shellfish, red tide, eating pigs, trichinosis, there's a lot of issues that go along with that. Yeah, well there is some intermingling perhaps of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups. Right, because you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions. So, back to your point about terminology, you know, we could do something like fact and wisdom. You know, you say truth, that's the overarching category, and then that divides into fact and wisdom. And what you want, optimally, is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one to one, but often they're not. And if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out, you don't just get to throw away the wisdom, which is what I think happens in the case of people like Dawkins and Harris. And Harris makes another sleight of hand move which I don't like, which is that he thinks, so let's say, except for just a second, the wisdom-fact distinction, he would say, well, the fact is the thing, and the wisdom is a second order derivation of that. You can ground the wisdom in the fact, and I don't believe that. And I don't think that he has any, I don't think that he has any real justification for that claim. And this is something I never got. What do you mean by grounding the wisdom in the fact? He thinks if you know the facts clearly enough, you'll know how to act. Well, that's not necessarily true. that's a huge... There's ways to act that are within your best interest, and then there's ways to act that are within the interest of all the people around you that might not serve you that well. And that whole distinction is where ethics come in. Right, or where the consequences are delayed for some number of generations or something like that. Yes, well, that's a big problem. So, Sam acts as if the process of mapping facts onto action is simple if we just got the facts right. it's the weakest part of his argument, and we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons. But, part of the reason it's weak is, okay, well, there's like an infinite number of facts, man. So, let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field. The field does not tell you how to walk through it. There's a million ways through the field. And no matter how many facts about the field you aggregate, you're not going to be able to determine the appropriate path by aggregating those facts. So, that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously. well. Well, I think there are two problems tangled up here. One of them is, there's a question of, is one individual supposed to have all of the facts and navigate based on that, sort of the rationality community version of things, or does, you know, the practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything and so we have to go along with, you know, guides to our behavior that are approximate and that's inherent. And then there's a question about civilization. Civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what's actually true, but with an understanding that we don't have a complete map of a lot of stuff. And so, I think what you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us that is not such that we can just simply say, oh, here's the nugget at the center of it and we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing, which is, you know, this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable. Well, and think about, let's look at the wisdom end of things for a minute. And you alluded a little earlier to like iterations and about the fact that things are iterated across time and that something that works now might fail dreadfully in a month or two months. So here's what something has to be like to be wise, let's say. Well, first of all, let's say it would be good if it was in accordance with the facts, but we'll leave that aside for now. It has to work, if you operate according to the wisdom principle, whatever it is, it has to work in the world. But then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your relationships with people in the world, right? So it's all of a sudden, this wisdom thing is something that's not only constrained by, let's call it objective reality, but it's constrained by the necessity of a social contract, a functional social contract. So you're only able to, you're only allowed to put forward actions in the world that would be of benefit to you if they simultaneously don't undermine the structure within which you live. Okay, and then there's a game theory element to that, which is, well, if it's wise, then it works in the world, so that'd be the constraint of objective reality. But then it works for you now, and the you that'll be in a week, and the you that'll be in a month, and it works for you and your family, and it works for you and your family and society, and it works in a way that those things all line up to be iterated across time. And so this is actually also the solution, and I'd really like to hear what you think about this. I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum, because the postmodernists, bless their hearts, so we'll give the devil his due, say, well, the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts, and the right response to that is, uh-oh, that's true, that's true, that's not good, and that's why the postmodernists say, well, you can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a great piece of literature, because the number of potential interpretations are infinite. And so then they say, well, why should we settle on any one interpretation then? Why should we privilege one over another? And then they say, well, that's all power games. And so that's a you've got to take that seriously, but what they missed, and this is a big deal, it's a big deal, I think, is this idea of ethical constraint. It's like, yes, there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations, but hardly any of them will work in the real world, and hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get you killed by other people or doom you because of your own stupidity to failure across time. And so the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite, but the landscape of applicable interpretation, functional interpretation, is unbelievably constraint. And I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics. It's something like that. Well, at some level, stories continue through time for a reason. Good stories continue for a long, you know, the Odyssey is with us for some reason. So there is a scientific reason or scientifically investigatable reason why the Odyssey has been durable. We may not know it, but in principle, it's a question you could investigate. So I guess at the end of the day, the problem with the postmodernists is that they have a point. The point is perception gets in the way of anything we wish to do objectively, but that point only takes you so far. That's why they turn to Marxism, as far as I can tell, because what happens with the postmodernists is they say, oh, there's an infinite number of interpretations. And then the human part of them goes, okay, well, what am I supposed to do next then? Since there's an infinite number of choices. And the postmodernist says, well, my theory can't account for that. And then they say, well, back to Marxism. And so that's why I think there's this unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists, because postmodernism is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom. It leaves you bereft and nihilistic. And that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose. And so they sneak the Marxism through the back door and jump into this power landscape for the reasons that we discussed earlier. You really think that it's because of an infinite number of possibilities interpreting things? Because I've always felt that it was really just a response to capitalism. They feel that capitalism is a very negative aspect of our culture and society and that there's got to be some sort of an alternative. Marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people have subscribed to in the past. You can point to it. It's a structure that's already set up. And it's romanticized. And I think they adopted it for that reason. Because it has the socialist aspects attached to it, and they looked at socialism as some sort of a thing that regards equality and some sort of an egalitarian approach. Well, okay, so we'd have to take two things apart. We'd have to take Marxism slash Neo-Marxism and Post-Modernism apart. So we could do that historically. And I would say that although there is a reason for Post-Modernism, which is the reason we just discussed, the landscape, the infinite number of real problem. If you look at it historically, Post-Modernism actually grew out of Marxism. And so what happened is that the Marxists laid out their theory about the human social environment being composed of a power struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, right? The rich and the poor in its initial phases. And that's a story that's partially true. And it's got a lot of motive power, like the motive power of the oppressed. I get to be a warrior for what's right. There's the resentment element, which is, that son of a bitch has more than me, so let's cut him off at the knees, which manifested itself brutally in the Soviet Union. And then there's the ideological totality issue, which gives people a sense of security. That took a vicious hit by the late 1960s because the murderousness of Marxism had been clearly laid out as a doctrine. And that opened the door to this move by mostly French intellectuals to develop the postmodern philosophy, which has these advantages which we described, but also to use that as a screening tactic for allowing Marxism to transform into identity politics. And so, like, it's hard to disentangle all the motivations that are going on in there, but there's something about it that's truly intellectually pathological because you don't get to be a postmodernist and a Marxist. You actually technically get to both of those things at the same time. And the fact that most people are both of those things at the same time raises the specter of just exactly what their motivation is. And then I would say it's this resentment-driven anti-capitalism. There's reasons to criticize capitalism, obviously, but it's this underground resentment-driven anti-capitalism that I think is one of the fundamental motivators.