Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Jordan B Peterson" channel.

  1. "There are millions of people dedicated to following me, hanging on my every word. It might be wise for you, the board, to take some care how you treat me. Perhaps 10% of my most dedicated million followers comprises a formidable activist army--that's 10000 devoted soldiers of my message. And we know where you live!" haahahaha...take a page out of antifa's playbook!
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  2. I'm polite...I'm compassionate...but I've never been called, "agreeable"! hahaha...
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  3. You can't know the truth unless you don't CARE what it is! Because, if it makes a difference to you, you'll find a way to make it what you want it to be! Only when you have no stake in the truth can you know what it is. The solution is to displace your desire for a particular "truth" with the pure desire to know the truth, whatever it happens to be, without reservation. That's the only desire that does not compromise the search for truth.
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  4. What do you mean, "It's not a just world"! How is that philosophically possible! Nature delivers perfect justice without fail! It's called, "physics"! Injustice is a human device--the "world" doesn't deserve that taint! What right do I have to "want" anything! But you can get Nature to cooperate, anyway.
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  5. The playground of psychological expertise is aberration. From the perspective of aberrant psychology everyone is suspect! Psychologists have trained themselves in this perspective; it's the microscope through which they view everyone. There may be more-comprehensive theories of human experience.
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  6. "Anger will suppress fear..."...it also mitigates pain.
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  7. "The indwelling spirit"...is the personal self-reflective awareness...the "spark of divinity" around which the being forms. The body of this awareness IS the IMAGINATION! The prerequisite for "existence" is "body", the great delimiter. My skin, for instance, is the barrier region formed at the furthest extent of the body which contains "me". This body reflects an image of my being...a presentation of myself to everything else...an announcement of my intention to be existent in physical matter. My emotional body, though, is made of a subtler, more energetic, grade of matter; the same with my mental body, formed of an even subtler grade of matter/energy. The skin of my spiritual body is the imagination, which always displays the truth of the just-previous MOMENT'S total state of being...which plants that moment into the universal substratum, the reservoir of all "memory". Through the imagination, spirit projects "leadings", "where you could/should go". However, that image is subject to instantaneous reformation, or even erasure, according to prevailing personal preferences. This distortion mechanism prevails generally by virtue of lack of self-knowledge and control. This is the point-of-attack for the psychic disciplines, like meditation, concentration, and imagination exercises--in a word, prayer. A calm imagination shows the smallest perturbations most accurately. When the waters of imagination are churning with desire, the delicate leadings of spirit are effectively swamped. So...there is "error"...
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  8. The talk about "consciousness", nature vs function, or, structure vs operation, as I prefer, is a little clumsy: the EXPERIENCE of "consciousness" is "AWARENESS"--they're not the same thing. Again...requirements of technical language...Consciousness, itself, is the universal tendency to association; awareness is the personal immediate experience of consciousness. I don't ascribe to ideas of a "subconscious", or "unconscious", for the related reason: they're clumsy. The so-called, "subconscious mind", refers to an area of autonomous complexes, or habitual memory operations, which remain below the level of casual awareness because they don't require attention..."set it, and forget it"...RIP, Ron Popeil...
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  9. If you think about it...Each installation of Grok, for instance, is the same, an un-inseminated ovum--a virgin birth! Clones...🤔
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  10. Dogma is dogma: A principle or statement of ideas, or a group of such principles or statements, especially when considered to be authoritative or accepted uncritically. Whether scientific, philosophical, or religious, it's the same thing. And Sam is immersed in it, as science is the religion of the atheist/materialist philosopher.
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  11. "Did it really happen?" Is the historical presentation true? Accurate? Verifiable?! Compared to all the "history" that actually happened, the proportion of it present in current recorded history is infinitesimal. The idea of verifying ancient history seems, therefore, ridiculous!
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  12. "Go up one level of meta..."!...hahaha..."well, that was easy"...
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  13. Nicely done, Mr. Peterson! I'm left with the conviction that twitter is incompetent to follow its own rules, those rules being impossible to follow, as their formulation is too incompetent to allow consistent enforcement. Failing consistency, enforcement must appear arbitrary and whimsical, so, utterly disrepectable. "Woooords, Mr. Wordsworth..."
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  14. Who is Franz Kafka? And why is he running the world?!
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  15. "Discerning truth from falsehood" is the ongoing process of living. The individual's standard of certainty, truth, is his experience. Everything else is compared to it, evaluating the "match" as resonating to some degree, or contradictory, which evaluates to some degree of falsehood. To the degree an "authority" is considered "trustworthy", its influence predisposes a "match", tentatively.
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  16. I've been fortunate to have experienced a massive religious upbringing--specifically, Protestant. In my appreciation of the Holy Trinity, the Father conceives and projects the plan of Creation, taken from His vision of the Chaos, the all-potential, which He maintains in Eternity, in a stare-down with the Chaotic Void which precipitated Him; the Son, as the One Universal Mind, executes that plan in existential manifestation by articulations of hierarchical complexification; and the Holy Spirit, as the Life Force, meters and modulates the force or influence of the Primordial Chaotic Void, Disorder, to power the Cosmos, through the Son's articulations of form. Chaos powers evolution through forms of Order, like steam powering an engine. The influence of Life keeps Order from becoming trapped in fixity, by appropriately valving the intrusion of the Chaos into the realm of Order.
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  17. "Intelligible order"...intelligibility is an order imposed by intelligence upon the "unknown", the disordered. The perception bears the mark of the perceiver on the unknown. We can only meet the unknown in terms of the known; that's how order propagates, transforming the unknown into the known as it goes. It's the RESPONSE to a stimulus that determines what the stimulus is.
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  18. "...and how can we not do it again...?" Such designs are inappropriate...the sentiment of the social engineer. Analysis strips our experience of its humanity. Sure, you can "make sense of it", theories can be formulated and applied to produce an accurate model. That's all neat, but it's an extra distance from the truth of the matter.
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  19. In modeling AI after human intelligence we are making an "idol", of ourselves, aren't we? 🧐
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  20. "We're in a battle for freedom between good and evil; our job is to fight!" Battle...fight...war...such aggressive terms evoke fear of disobedience to authority, promoting hatred of that authority...conflict ensues. "God" requires you to be "all in", else you are guilty, Guilty, GUILTY! We used to refer to this as "fire and brimstone" preaching. It is enervating in its oversimplicity--I wouldn't recommend it, but to each his own. I don't see "war in heaven"--I see Order utilizing the pressure of Chaos to power the Designs of Order. Nature makes sure that all that is is in agreement. There is no war, battle, or fight between Order and Chaos, but rather the navigation of the tension of the attraction and repulsion. The Cosmic Dance feels like war, battle, and fight to US in our entirely personal apperception of existence. We bear the guilt of our error solely for the purpose of its correction! God is all that is--your devils included! There is no malice in the operation of the universe except what you imagine there to be.
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  21. You embody your perceptions with reality, especially by extending your senses imaginarily to recapitulate the perceptions. Analogous to the yin and yang of the Tao, attention and intention, respectively, are the polar expressions or manifestations of awareness. Awareness is the instantaneous state of being oneself in the moment. Consciousness is the substance of the fabric of reality whose essential character is the capacity of responsivity. It is the basis of all memory, as it holds the impression of "events". The essential character of intelligence is association. There is only the One Mind, which we operate as best we are instantaneously able, calling it "our mind". The One Mind comprises the entirety of existence, as the active interface between Chaos, the primordial void, and Order, the Prime Creator. Chaos drives existence from below with a force of pure potential, and Order imposes its characteristic formative influence from above--Mind is caught between a rock and a hard place, as it were. Existence is the direct expression of this dilemma. Since the moment of birth: perception precipitates experience which embeds in the fabric of reality, forever remaining accessible by association. Memories provide authority, since they represent the source of true knowledge: experience. From authority proceeds conviction, certainty, validation. Preceeding experience informs proceeding experience through memory. The more memories, the greater the potential for association...
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  22. We are products of the universe, so we are modeled on universal principles. That modeling predisposes our perceptions to "match" the perceived, rendering it "intelligible".
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  23. It's not necessary to be so attached to your thoughts that you cannot have any and every possible thought. The artificial blockage of thought may well be convenient (though, later, problematic), but it's not necessary, given the relevant skills.
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  24. At 1:09:26 it seems that Dr. Keating considers "mind" and "brain" equivalent terms. Is this conflation merely a convenient linguistic device? I can see how a proper distinction might be considered unnecessarily difficult in the immediate context of the discussion. Perhaps he'll get a round to clarifying the distinction later on.
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  25. I think, eventually, he'll have to move away from the "positive" vs "negative" "emotion" binary. It's limiting, and misleading...
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  26. Symbol systems instantiate evaluations of experience. Languages are symbol systems. The learning and use of language imprints itself on the DNA: your body, even the individual cells, understands your language! Your body responds directly to your inner speech. A world of associations is available in each word you utter. The priorities of these associations depend on the developing character--it's up to you to decide what is most important. If an association is a bell, paying attention to it rings it, perhaps more or less strongly according to priority. In time, with repetition, a symbolic shorthand develops, so that the associations are abstracted, resulting in much greater speed of apprehension. But ALL of these associations are to experiential memory--your personal history! Memory fragments come as beckoned associatively, in the style of one's character.
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  27. "Deception" is built into human interaction: communication is necessarily erroneous, due to limitations of language in combination with individual idiosyncrasies conspiring to guarantee no communication goes undistorted.
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  28. Yes..."No better prize..."
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  29. Once upon a timelessness, the Chaotic Void non-existed alone, a continuously seething all-potential. "Then", the statistically improbable occurred: a particular state of the random seethe REPEATED, initiating a sort of reverberation within the Chaotic Void that produced the EXPULSION of the repeated seethe state, in order to preserve it's chaotic nature intact. This event birthed God, to seal the breach, as it were. God is one of Chaos's seethe states, which is the entirety of Chaos in one of it's possible arrangements. The conditions of God's "birth" requires Its Nature to be Order, with the inherent duty to express Himself, to express order, to manifest His essential being: the Chaotic Void, His origin. The ejection, the birth of God, produced a surge of the first manifestation of Order, "many of the same from One"--God moved over the Chaos, like a skin covering a globe, instantaneously, in the form of particles, slivers, or sparks of divinity, Spirit. The whole of God is in each particle of Spirit, including His plan of creation, so to speak...the one is the other, and the other is the one. At the opposite pole from the expulsion point, this initial wave of divinity cannot reenter Chaos--It will not tolerate Order. So the wave bounces back, meeting more of Itself coming down, creating TURBULENCE and slowing the travel of spirit particles, and, in the process, engendering "delay"...creating Time, and every other thing that could be said to "exist" in any wise. Some spirit particles make it through the turbulence, encountering a more rarified turbulence in the next stratification layer. One or two maybe make it all the way back to Source. At this point the Cosmos is temporally stratified and manifestation has begun as the sole purview of the One Universal Mind, the second Person of the Trinity, the Son. At the bottom pole, the interface to Chaos, the Life Force, the third Person of the Holy Trinity acts as a bulwark against the intrusion of Chaos at the fringes of Order; Chaos seeks to dis-Order, and the Holy Spirit acts as a pressure valve, utilizing Chaos to drive Order...hence the chaotic appearance of the operations of living things. At the top pole, God is in an eternal stare-down with the Chaotic Void, as in a mirror, one state of the Void looking at Itself across the abyss. When Order observes Chaos, It KNOWS that It (God) is Order, that experience defining, modeling, "certainty" for the entirety of Creation.
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  30.  @richardl.currier4052  <--That's pretty much what I said--except I said even more, but allegorically, instead of metaphorically, as you seem to prefer. Your use of the term, "incorrect", is...incorrect. hehe...My allegory is more elucidative than your five brief metaphors, drawn as equivalencies. You'll have to be more specific about what you think is "incorrect".
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  31.  @richardl.currier4052  <--All "major religions" are in error to some degree necessarily--I shouldn't have to explain why that is. Your conviction that God and creation are identifiable "things" illustrates the depth of your religionism--obviously, a logical debility. I didn't speak of the colloquial "chaos", but, rather, a "Chaotic Void" comprising all potentiality, without the possibility of actuality. Of course, It's timeless and spaceless, otherwise It would be Order! You're right, I am "trying to describe things happening in a place where space and time do not exist", except, there are no "things", and nothing can "happen", in eternity. That's why my little story is an "allegory", a symbolic representation. The philosopher in me wonders about the purpose of existence. If the religionist in you objects to such activity, there may well be nothing for us to say to each other.
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  32.  @richardl.currier4052  <--I've got my religion, then, and you have...somebody else's religion. To each his own.
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  33. Desire provides the reason for self-deception. An undistorted understanding is only possible when you don't CARE what that understanding IS. But if you're very quiet you can "see" the desire's distorting effect on the congealing understanding taking place. Desire impels "attachment", so a practice of detachment lays bare to observation that desire.
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  34. "Why would any system destroy itself?", John asks. The obvious simple answer is an element of the system fails catastrophically, as in an engine that loses oil pressure for one of a variety of possible reasons. Perhaps a design flaw precipitated the failure. The question, though, suggests John was speaking about a system capable of possessing "desire" for "death" and having no reason for such desire. Can a "system" express "consciousness"? Could a system "know" that it's time to destroy itself?
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  35. So, tell me, Jordan, what, precisely, is "LOST" should the world destroy itself? Would the Universe be diminished? And...are you sure about that? Is someone who dies, "lost"? Being concerned with the fate of the world indicates a denial of the validity of spiritual evolution; if the spirit evolves then the fate of matter is of relatively minor concern. Else, the world is ALL THAT IS to you, the materialist's "God", so you fear its prospective "loss" very deeply. Interestingly, it's impossible to be both a materialist AND a spiritual evolutionist! Decide! hehehe
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  36. So...the guy bought the "universal applicability of logic" thing, eh? hehehe...understandable: that's where atheism leaves you. I still have no idea why I'm supposed to be impressed by F.N. I've found him to be proudly insensible, which, to me, is just obnoxious. Like the class clown who, instead of wanting to make you laugh, wants to piss you off! hahaha...
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  37. The "church", religion, as corrupt as humans can make it, serves a critical function: to promote noble aspiration in the common people through a conceptualization of "God". Once this is accomplished, the undercurrent of materialism loses some of its pernicious influence, allowing the evolutionary impulse freer passage. This avoids the dead-end of materialism/atheism. But, logic has to be rescued: the existence of God is deducible: Nature exemplifies the principle of hierarchy. Specify any hierarchy; the "god" of that hierarchy is the top-most point. GOD is at the top of the hierarchy of Existence. I don't have to BELIEVE God exists, I KNOW God exists, as certainly as ANY hierarchy exists.
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  38. "Subjective intellect", Jordan?! Ouch! Hard to grok that phrase. The serpents you learn to handle are your own proclivities. The Church prevents you from handling the serpent of "self as God", now, doesn't it! It seems to me we are continuously "creating our own values"--there must be a secret understanding to that phrase that I'm not familiar with, for the speakers to be denigrating the process as dangerous. You MUST create God! You must create a big-picture understanding of existence--it's the very drive of mentality! Every experience feeds this conception. Humans have always created God, usually as idols, physical objects. Science provides an expansive palette of colors by which to paint the most marvelous conceptions of ultimacy. Yes, since God is absolutely everywhere--meaning, nothing else can be anywhere--we are God, but not gods, though. It is important to avoid giving God form in imagination--that would be extremely disrespectful, and the beginning of all the problems of hubris hinted at by the speakers.
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  39. Exposure to cold has been shown to stimulate the immune system...Easy does it...
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  40. Eh...narrative is a story, or event sequence, that connects the larger world to the small, personal world, often illustrating a principle, especially social and cultural. But this talk of "through lines" doesn't connect with me..."thread of truth"? idk...fair bit of circularity going on...forcing correspondences...reign it in, Jordan...Too much clarification may produce obfuscation...
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  41. That pastel green color is very...calming...
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  42. "Pleasure" is the body's judgement of "the good". At 50:50 Jordan mentions "systems of ideas working in the background" as sources of psychological influence. I think the seeds of the development of these systems were sown in the traumatic experience of the person's birth event. This trauma forms the model of existential TERROR going forward! In accommodating a fantastic flood of sensational experience, the infant's sensory system is maximally stimulated. The infant went from a life of constant temperature, humidity, pressure, darkness, and quiet in the womb to sudden and drastic changes of temperature, humidity, pressure, illumination and sound, and the dawn of the temporal sense--one moment is no longer so much the same as the last as was the experience in gestation. Accommodation means adjustment, and the body quickly establishes sensory-emotional complexes as habituations...and the terror of birth, thereby, subsides, though always lurking in experiential memory, ready to offer pertinent associations as "possibilities", perhaps eliciting fears we don't understand...concerns and trepidations.
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  43. The Snake, or whatever it represents, could just as well have been an expression of the Grace of God in leading His new creation to Development. And God is the Model of that Development, whatever guise it might adopt. But it doesn't happen in the absence of defiance of authority, in which we find incontrovertible evidence of selfhood--a selfhood unsuspected by slaves of the collective, content to tend the Garden continuously.
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  44. The positive vision of conservative types is one of efficiency!!! Fixing the corrupt election system would be a HUGE EFFICIENCY! If you don't think the election system is corrupt, you're not paying attention to hundreds of years of history! Naughty, naughty...
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  45. The "ground of being" is the universal substratum which "records" "relationally" all experience, as "memory". If the "divine being lacks only limitation" It would naturally seek out limitation as a completion of Itself, and, in so doing, manifest all possibility--existence! The primary duality is "God as wave vs God as particle". In producing manifestation, God differentiates into every smallest thing, or particle. In producing "evolution", God integrates into ever greater things, in the manner of a wave. The totality of God is the unity of all the particles. I prefer the word, "awareness" to "consciousness", as the latter is heavily overloaded. The nature of God is awareness; each particle is a point-awareness--a "spark of divinity". The point-awareness at the center of a form is the awareness belonging to that form, the name by which it is known and handled. There is only the one awareness, everywhere and -when, the same, in essence, differing only in expression, or context. It is memory that allows us to "reflect" upon ourselves--we are aware that we are aware. It's this self-reflective awareness that makes humans unique--AND infinitely troublesome! 🙃
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  46. Problems don't arise out of thin air--they depend from previous solutions. So I see nothing wrong with understanding the current problem by understanding the previous solution that has precipitated the current problem. The underlying influence is manufacturing costs and timing. There would be resistance to abandoning a previous solution entirely due to existing investment in tooling and material supply.
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  47. Jordan says at 1:39:26, "Once you start making improvements, the improvements feed back upon themselves." I understand the sentiment, but the expression supports an inaccurate conceptualization: "feed-back". The term doesn't fit the context as well as "accentuation", for instance. "Improvement" begins with something and makes it better. This is done by a mechanism of accentuation of what is there. By intention through imagination, symbolically amplify the desired "good", which automatically squelches the less desirable by robbing it of the energizing effect of attention. "Nature abhors a vacuum"...don't try to "eliminate" anything--always REPLACE it...with the symbol of your intention that fits best.
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  48. Nature proves God: the primary feature of Nature is hierarchy; and the essential nature of hierarchy is top-down organization. We're familiar with the "down" side, the area of great diversity. But, hierarchy demands a unitary "top", which is our best sense of what "God" is. If there is hierarchy, there must be "God"...that's the logic of it...
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  49. Does the Canadian "constitution", or document of founding principle, allow it to be a communist government? The US constitution guarantees a republican form of government, to every state, as a matter of fact. I would hope Canada has a statement of founding principle floating around, somewhere...
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  50. The old TV series, "Person Of Interest", painted a compelling picture of the possibility of surveillance AI--looking prophetic in the process!
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