I'm going to retract that statement and stick with this sentence as nonsense:
I went back and read what he wrote and may have skimmed too quickly, picking up his "Objective..." as not at the beginning of a sentence. The question of scientific objectivity isn't always a discussion of whether "Objective Reality" -- a world outside a perceiver exists.
Peterson is a fundamentalist, and like all fundamentalists, he is trying desperately to preserve religious doctrines which are regarded as weird nonsense by the vast majority of humanity.
Fundamentalists know that most people think their beliefs are absurd and false, and this angers them deeply because they've confused their fuzzy feelings with facts.
A traditional fundamentalist response to scientific or historical debunkings is to obsess about faceless "elites" and to cast themselves as avatars of "common sense" which, while completely unprovable, is nonetheless correct. And it will be vindicated someday in an act of divine apocalypse.
But for someone who has some exposure to rational inquiry, the traditional fundamentalist mien is unsatisfying. They have directly seen that rational inquiry is a true method and have used it for themselves. So instead of trying to discard reason, they instead try to reconcile it with belief. This neo-fundamentalist ideation inevitably fails, however, because religion is proto-science, humanity's attempt to explain natural phenomenon via pure reason rather than observation. No matter how many times they dig around in Israel, Turkey, or Mexico, the evidence for the fabled stories is never found.
There are two alternatives once this point is reached: 1) Separating science and faith and concluding that the stories may not actually be entirely true. This is the path toward enlightenment, or at least true tolerance. 2) Believing that rational inquiry is the culprit. But instead of utterly discarding it as a tool of "librul elitists," the neo-fundamentalist will instead take Peterson's route, which is to take postmodernism's tools of social analysis and employ them in the service of denigrating reason itself.
In this case, Peterson has intertwined his regular faux-postmodernist method with classic "quantum woo." These arguments he considers to be so completely profound here are routinely used to justify such obvious balderdash as astrology, crystal healing, and vaccine autism.
This is a good summary of Petersonite Mormonism. I suppose if one strains at gnats long enough one might be inclined they see God somewhere in there. Or not. Who cares? Like. What is truth anyway? Best to let a giant real estate conglomerate and its PR/correlation department posing as a church dictate to you what is and isn’t real enough. And if that doesn’t work you can always listen to some self-appointed Mopologist assholes who stare at gnats all day long tell you what is and isn’t truth. #dowsingisreal
- Doc
Last edited by Doctor CamNC4Me on Thu Dec 22, 2022 6:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hiring a part-time news entertainment anchor as SecDef, what could go wrong?
I'm going to retract that statement and stick with this sentence as nonsense:
I went back and read what he wrote and may have skimmed too quickly, picking up his "Objective..." as not at the beginning of a sentence. The question of scientific objectivity isn't always a discussion of whether "Objective Reality" -- a world outside a perceiver exists.
Peterson is a fundamentalist, and like all fundamentalists, he is trying desperately to preserve religious doctrines which are regarded as weird nonsense by the vast majority of humanity.
Fundamentalists know that most people think their beliefs are absurd and false, and this angers them deeply because they've confused their fuzzy feelings with facts.
A traditional fundamentalist response to scientific or historical debunkings is to obsess about faceless "elites" and to cast themselves as avatars of "common sense" which, while completely unprovable, is nonetheless correct. And it will be vindicated someday in an act of divine apocalypse.
But for someone who has some exposure to rational inquiry, the traditional fundamentalist mien is unsatisfying. They have directly seen that rational inquiry is a true method and have used it for themselves. So instead of trying to discard reason, they instead try to reconcile it with belief. This neo-fundamentalist ideation inevitably fails, however, because religion is proto-science, humanity's attempt to explain natural phenomenon via pure reason rather than observation. No matter how many times they dig around in Israel, Turkey, or Mexico, the evidence for the fabled stories is never found.
There are two alternatives once this point is reached: 1) Separating science and faith and concluding that the stories may not actually be entirely true. This is the path toward enlightenment, or at least true tolerance. 2) Believing that rational inquiry is the culprit. But instead of utterly discarding it as a tool of "librul elitists," the neo-fundamentalist will instead take Peterson's route, which is to take postmodernism's tools of social analysis and employ them in the service of denigrating reason itself.
In this case, Peterson has intertwined his regular faux-postmodernist method with classic "quantum woo." These arguments he considers to be so completely profound here are routinely used to justify such obvious balderdash as astrology, crystal healing, and vaccine autism.
I think this is very accurate. Attacking rationality seems to be the new approach of theistic apologetics. Random motions of atoms in the brain can't be trusted any more. After all they are random. Another relatively new approach is to claim that there is a truth that is truer. Or truths that are more true.
DCP and the like would take the fact that there are no blue photons only the interpretation of blue. This is the objective reality of the DCP cohorts. There is no objective reality only their interpretation of it. Spirits? Refined matter similar to the ghostly appearance of neutrinos. Stephen Smoot was trained well within this group. "I start with the assumption that the Book Of Abraham is true and any evidence I find I will plug it in". Any mystery in science is shoe horned into this paradigm. It is one thing to suspend belief during a movie but another to suspend the justification of belief for an entire lifetime.
Quantum spookiness, ergo LDS Church is true, does not work for me.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
I think this is very accurate. Attacking rationality seems to be the new approach of theistic apologetics. Random motions of atoms in the brain can't be trusted any more. After all they are random. Another relatively new approach is to claim that there is a truth that is truer. Or truths that are more true.
DCP and the like would take the fact that there are no blue photons only the interpretation of blue. This is the objective reality of the DCP cohorts. There is no objective reality only their interpretation of it. Spirits? Refined matter similar to the ghostly appearance of neutrinos. Stephen Smoot was trained well within this group. "I start with the assumption that the Book Of Abraham is true and any evidence I find I will plug it in". Any mystery in science is shoe horned into this paradigm. It is one thing to suspend belief during a movie but another to suspend the justification of belief for an entire lifetime.
What's so funny is that Peterson et al. think they're being deep and profound by slinging quantum woo, even though astrology believers and self-help cults like NXIVM have been making these faulty comparisons since at least the 1970s. Religious fundamentalists are behind the times even with their pseudoscience.
Do you mean to say that people are literally using the word "truer?" That would be straight-up vintage Stephen Colbert, if so.
PG wrote: So God drank a whole case of Jolt and came up with a quick and dirty software solution that scraps the whole idea of maintaining a logically consistent microscopic infrastructure for reality, and does something else that is cheaper, instead. Like one of those procedurally generated role-playing games where you think it's simulating a whole world down to high resolution, but all it's really tracking is one array of 8-bit data. It all looks so real that you just can't believe it's being made up that simply, but if you happen to look really closely at the hallway corners, then you can see how it glitches.
In the 80s, he might have drank Jolt to get around the WoW on a technicality, but he'd probably drink Red Bull or Monster today. I think this is an important point, how might the non-intuitive seem more intuitive when looking at the bigger picture (cue DCP saying the same thing for the plates). If matter got finer and finer as you cut it down as expected, then you'd run into a direct correlation with all those infinity and arrow paradoxes.
As for the Bell's theorem weirdness, what was the essential insight that got Bell past all the mental blocks others had? As I understand it, All he really did was show what had been shown a thousand times before that the equations describing quantum waves are different than those describing classical waves. Respecting the same equation over entangled pairs separated by large distances directly implies that there can't be an encoded algorithm before the fact that will explain their behaviors, they have to communicate faster than light.
"if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person then it's probably, you got a problem." -- Lindsey Graham
2) Believing that rational inquiry is the culprit. But instead of utterly discarding it as a tool of "librul elitists," the neo-fundamentalist will instead take Peterson's route, which is to take postmodernism's tools of social analysis and employ them in the service of denigrating reason itself.
How does this help his apologetics that relies on reason and people with Phds? What are we to make of the fact that our observations directly influence reality? In the case of the plates, that means the witnesses by observing some 'x' have changed 'x' into 'the gold plates'. Either the power of positive thinking has turned blood into wine, which if true means that all kinds of things Peterson doesn't want to be true can be true by sheer will power of people he doesn't like, or that 'the gold plates' instantiated randomly from some 'x' as an accidental creation from our minds, there being no fundamental gold plates in reality. Or he might admit it doesn't affect the gold plates, but then, why would it affect anything in the world of the critics either?
"if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person then it's probably, you got a problem." -- Lindsey Graham
I follow Massimo Introvigne on Facebook. He is a fascinating and urbane character who is deeply committed to religious freedom. He recently posted a comment on his wall that I think applies nicely to this thread. I provide Facebook’s English translation:
In the French department of Doubs, in the commune of Les Grangettes, lies one of the most famous "rolling stones" (pierres qui virent). The legend is probably older than Christianity, but for centuries it was believed to rotated three (or five) times during the Midnight Mass in the village, when Jesus' genealogy was read. The rotation of this stone was just the beginning of a phantom dance of more stones, small lakes, rocks opening to reveal fantastic hidden treasures. Some claimed to have seen the treasures, but the miraculous opening never lasted long enough to get them, and the good Christians were at Mass anyway.
The lesson of the story is that at Christmas we all see hidden treasures, a different world, a possible happiness, a better life. We can't just grab them and make them ours. Those among us who have seen treasures at least for a short moment can consider themselves lucky.
May this treasure of happiness shine for us at Christmas, even if only for a brief moment, and may the memory of this beauty accompany us all year long. Until it's Christmas midnight again, and the stone will spin again.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
The stone was rotated or did it rotate by itself? And are we talking about some large rando rock in a forest or is this stone a crafted stone that sits in the town square? It’s hard to visualize what he’s describing.
- Doc
Hiring a part-time news entertainment anchor as SecDef, what could go wrong?
The stone was rotated or did it rotate by itself? And are we talking about some large rando rock in a forest or is this stone a crafted stone that sits in the town square? It’s hard to visualize what he’s describing.
- Doc
The text accompanied a picture of a large, flat boulder in the woods, and I assumed that was the stone about which he was writing.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
2) Believing that rational inquiry is the culprit. But instead of utterly discarding it as a tool of "librul elitists," the neo-fundamentalist will instead take Peterson's route, which is to take postmodernism's tools of social analysis and employ them in the service of denigrating reason itself.
How does this help his apologetics that relies on reason and people with Phds? What are we to make of the fact that our observations directly influence reality? In the case of the plates, that means the witnesses by observing some 'x' have changed 'x' into 'the gold plates'. Either the power of positive thinking has turned blood into wine, which if true means that all kinds of things Peterson doesn't want to be true can be true by sheer will power of people he doesn't like, or that 'the gold plates' instantiated randomly from some 'x' as an accidental creation from our minds, there being no fundamental gold plates in reality. Or he might admit it doesn't affect the gold plates, but then, why would it affect anything in the world of the critics either?
The larger point is to say that "reality" is not real, it's only a construct. That's particularly useful in regards to the Book of Mormon witnesses because Peterson can claim that their "spiritual eyes" encounter with the plates is just as real. It also is a way of saying that whatever mysterious "spiritual experiences" he believes to have had are actually proof of that God exists and is a Mormon.
It's all a defense mechanism, however, because as far as I know, Peterson has never actually said what these alleged events were so no one can scrutinize his narrative about them. This would suggest that deep down, Peterson does not actually believe what he tells himself about them.
