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

  1. Information is the currency of conception. The prefixes mis- and dis- serve as banners tagging the information as somehow incorrect OR dangerous. The valuation of the information, itself, remains unaffected by opinions about its purpose or validity. The opinion that matters is that of the information consumer, who necessarily evaluates the information value in respect of his existing world view, adding to that conception, or modifying it.
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  2. This is a lot like the leftist gun control argument, targeting a minority of people with a peculiar weakness by trying to prevent that weakness from manifesting. Unfortunately, that means a great inconvenience to the majority who do not suffer from said weakness. It's like using a sledgehammer to squash a bug. The only way to eliminate "porn" is to eliminate interest in sex--and that's where we're headed with the saturation of the social sphere with sex. And eliminating interest in sex would make procreation problematic! There's no upside to that!
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  3. 1:36:00--Andrew states that watching porn (other people doing it) is "very different than being in a first-person sexual experience"...and therefore...Ehhh, really? "Very" different? There are some obvious differences, but the similarities still seem overwhelming, to me. From my point of view, in order to make the "connection", you have to identify what you are seeing and accept and vivify the association with YOUR PAST EXPERIENCE. Remembering the various sensations connected with what you are watching, you can, essentially, put yourself in the picture--through "imagination", you can participate in a way your BODY accepts as "real"! The real point is to discover imagination as a tool for controlling/influencing the body. No matter the context, that is what we are always DOING! And it is good. The value of the neurological perspective seems niche. We can control/influence our neurology, but not DIRECTLY; the manner of indirection is imaginative. You can create, in imagination, "objects" that interface with the neurological level...a layer of translation, effectively. This is what we are always doing, whether we realize it or not! But doing so deliberately, purposefully, in full awareness, promises to illuminate the psyche to the furthest degree.
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  4. The sword represents the discrimination of intellect; the flame symbolizes will/intent. This means the way back to "paradise" is through an intellect under complete control of personal will--or at least enough to get past the "guardians at the gates", accomplishing a "return to innocence".
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  5. The burden we all shoulder is our ignorance. Sacrificing one's ignorance on the alter of knowledge is an uncomfortable prospect for most, who are unfamiliar with the limits of their ability to suffer.
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  6. Get this guy together with Wal Thornhill and see what happens! Could be great!
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  7. "I want what I want now!" is the product of very early development of stimulus/response complexes, an urge to explore, to TOUCH things, to know the environment. This process satisfies the survival instinct and creates the proper linkage between the stimulus of the physical senses and the response of the body to the senses--"it's hot--move hand!"...stimulus/response. Once these complexes are firmly instantiated, they serve automatically. Taken together, they compose the "habit nature", the "subconscious/unconscious mind".
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  8. "Naming" IS "knowing"! The identification of perceptions constitutes the process of language development. It's also how awareness occupies itself, perpetually. It's the woof and waft of the inner world that is the context of awareness...and context creates meaning in identification. The "first" perceptual awareness is the birth experience--and it is formative; it provides the seed value for all further development: what is experienced can be known; and the known provides complexifying patterns of identification as it grows with accumulating experience.
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  9. So...there's four different types of memory? Semantic, procedural, episodic, and short-term? Why DO that!? Is it really different types of memory? Or is it different applications or functions of the same singular memory capability?
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  10. The Roman Catholic Church considers Protestantism to be heretical. No matter how nicely you respect Catholicism, It still wants to kill you for your heresy.
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  11. The opportunities you become aware of are the ones your nature needs to judge: every decision renders many other decisions impossible, unavailable to be made, trapping you in the direction you need to go. The road not taken may well have been the wrong road...
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  12. At one second into the video, I've heard, "Imagine the day you were born..."! I am, at one and the same time, excited and fearful of disappointment that this is going to be another lame "thought experiment", instead of an investigation of the cascading process we call "human psychology". Let's see how the video continues...
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  13. "Mastering the art of transformation..." carries a different meaning for me than is evident in the phrase's usage in the video. Jordan paints a picture of literal transformation of being as the "art" alluded to in the phrase, as if being is a caterpillar (childhood) transforming into a moth (adult). Everything remains...including "the child" that "you" were. What changes is your CONTEXT. The "you" that you were as a child is the same "you" that you are now, and forever. "You" are the awareness of the moment, the ETERNAL NOW! In this timelessness, there is only the Godhead's awareness, the one awareness we and everything else in existence share. But, again, the matter of CONTEXT determines the manner of manifestation. While there exists only the ONE AWARENESS, the context of its manifestation determines the character of the body that it coagulates about it as a vehicle of expression.
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  14. I think we're mostly "moved", or "deeply moved", by recollection of intense experience. In awareness, perception triggers associations with experiential memory; the stronger the memory, the more intense the recollection. The depth of the recollection runs from the deepest, sensory level to the highest, least intense, mental level. The quickest trigger is at the deepest level. Observation quickly gives way to identification of the object observed. This is the process of "noticing". However, the identification elicits associations from experiential memory which aggregate to imply "value". The problem arises when, by an act of will, the imaginary senses are extended, projected to re-experience the object! This is "attachment", and it produces original sensation from the memory of it, but without the original context, but rather a new context, the context of the present moment. This may cause an inappropriate transference of value from the original experience to the experience of the present moment, whatever that might be.
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  15. 'Round about 42:00, Jordan says he approaches a problem "with humility". This may well be the proper posture for thinking about God, or praying, the solution coming, then, by divine inspiration. But all "problems" arise from our rooting in the physical world, the denizens of which have no special regard for human beings, and, in themselves, do not warrant your prostration before them. Exactly the opposite attitude is proper: insistent expectation in the style of a "demand". These beings of involutionary activity bear the one spirit of God into manifestation by differentiation in progressively greater densities--they are the cosmos construction workers. They are capable only of obedience to the spirit of God; their natures are pure and raw, but limited to their specific purposes. By virtue of our physical bodies, we have intimate intercourse with these beings as "natural influences" within us. We know ourselves by knowing them, as they govern sensation, emotion, and, partially, thought--the kind of thought that follows upon observation and identification, let's call it "articulation"; not the higher-level function that solves problems.
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  16. According to the idea of yin and yang comprising Tao, attention and intention comprise Awareness. Memory is an experience echo whose value is to maintain the availability of a value for comparison to a "current" value...like a register in a microprocessor. Constantly and continuously, at speeds determined by IQ, we climb the ladder of the past into the future. We learn how "cause" precipitates "effect"...from moment to moment.
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  17. "Concepts are generative models"; narratives are instances of the models' generations, then, I'd surmise. But didn't these generative models arise naturally and spontaneously from original experience?! The world organizes YOU, in the process of your experience of it, to match IT.
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  18. Oh, Milo's sour grapes is just personality expression. He's perennially abandoned...it's his style. But his contributions have not been majorly meaningful...the public political discourse will hardly miss him. The rebel mythos has become pedestrian.
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  19. Despite being helpful, the Ulysses contract is still a crutch; you're still avoiding the self-discipline that would render the crutch unnecessary. Worse yet is developing a HABIT of using crutches to avoid self-discipline! It's like nurturing your own weakness, which is fundamentally unnatural.
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  20. I'm right there with you, Jordan, until the very end, "the fallen world" thing. Did God lose His creation for relying foolishly upon the perfect obedience of two of His creatures?! Really?! Seems absurd to me. The development of self-conscious awareness was a crucial advance in human being, without which seed their could be no human spiritual growth and development--a mere animal, without individuality, tending someone else's garden.
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  21. Correspondence theory? It's definition uses "reality" as a measure! "Something is true if it comports with reality"! That makes everything true, since there is an imaginable "reality" in which any particular thing is true; everything is viewable as true from some perspective or other. Is that useful?! hahaha...To me IT IS logically correct that everything is true; that falsity is an illusion of the local validity of the logical principle of negation. Negation is only operative in very local contexts.
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  22. In distinguishing right and wrong, you must moralize. Similarly, if you would eschew moralizing, you'll have to avoid identifications of "right" and "wrong". "Good" and "evil" are human conceptualizations/attributions, NOT to be found in the natural world. Many people rely on such ideas to relieve them of their responsibility for their THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS..."the devil made me do it"--Flip Wilson
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  23. "We can be really bad. We should do something about that." Why? How! "Society" is the collective result of individuals doing just that already--because...efficiency! Nothing can be DONE by SOCIETY! Society is an abstraction, without real-world agency. The underlying problem is lack of respect for the individual especially in his efforts to be "less bad", or better. Advice to do it this way, or that, may be helpful, or confusing. Each individual has to find his own way--shortcuts may turn into detours..."quick and easy" will run you in circles...
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  24. A guy was naked in a women's locker room. He was acquitted because he was too fat for his genitalia to be visible! What!?!?! The offense was NOT in the women seeing HIM! The offense to the women was in HIM seeing THEM! How this perspective was missed I would have to blame on the attorneys not making this crucial distinction clear! And because it's such an obvious distinction, I suspect collusion to promote injustice by the attorneys in their roles as "officers of the court".
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  25. The great value of humans for planet Earth is as a mechanism allowing the planetary being, Earth, to accelerate its evolution and development! But...the spiritual realm is more vast than Christianity, or any religion, can admit, and that understanding is dawning quite naturally upon greater and greater proportions of people, for a number of reasons that aren't important to this point. The religions' limited perspectives don't serve well in the face of the greater knowledge available to people. The old religions are dying, as they should when they've outlived their applicability. "Community" doesn't propagate well from generation to generation when half a community's people leave to conduct their lives elsewhere. And the traditional benefit of the church was community integration; so it's easy to see how the church has lost relevance.
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  26. The word, "training", surfaced at 34:00! Jordan wonders, "To what degree do you think you're directly suppressing that with the prefrontal cortex and to what degree are you spinning up an alternative self that if embodied wouldn't require that physiological response." I'M wondering about this spinning up of alternate selves! What a curious conceptualization! Self-schizophrenia? hehe...Seriously, though, is it necessary to jump through all these hoops? I think this "spinning up" business is a clear reference to "imagination". What happens neurologically when you imagine?!
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  27. Your "psyche" is the constitution of your total being. As awareness develops, psyche grows in vitality and workability. Task performance and management, trains us in virtually every moment of an active day in the psychic details of movement, the attention/intention seesaw by which a task is accomplished motivationally. How's your "cooking kung fu"?!
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  28. "Is the unconscious in the world striving to make itself conscious?" Yes! Via "evolution"! Self-consciously aware intelligence, the pinnacle of that evolution enables the consciousness of the planet Earth to accelerate ITS OWN development! You don't have to live in a tiny universe...Everything evolves, and intelligence is the metric of that evolution...
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  29. At 1:23:00, "the sea of probability"...the philosopher's "Primordial Chaotic Void"... We are frozen in a cosmic moment of recognition/realization belonging to the Primordial Void, that chaos of all-potential that provides the backdrop of existence. In the beginning--literally--, It recognized the impossible: repetition in the state of the Void. Being utterly chaotic, only random organizational states should be possible. But the impossible happened: all tied up in this instantaneous recognition are principles of "reflection", then "memory", then "multiplicity/unity", then BANG, God (consciousness) is "born", from an error in cosmic nature, a mistake that explained itself in terms of "time". WE and our entire existence IS the process of experiencing to resolution this frozen stare-down of the Void and God, as they grapple with the incongruous state of recognition precipitated by the error. Time was, both, the manifestation of the error, and the mechanism of its solution; it had to be...contained. Existence is how Time contains the Error. We are an integral part of the resolution of this cosmic error. As loci of consciousness, we are agents, witting or unwitting, of the universe as it evolves to contain, and then absorb the Error. This cosmic maturation process is the purpose of ours and all existence--but NOT selfishly, not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of the Void. "Correction" of the Error is by the integration of consciousness, which is essentially the nature of the Error. But there's still no going back; no going back to an insensible Void comprising the totality of existence. In some form or manner or other, we're "here" to stay. Order/God manifests/actualizes the Void/All Potential. That actualization harkens to the potential of it still in the Void. The Void responds characteristically with an influence of disorder that has the effect of powering the manifestation, from the inside out! That's what I think of as "God's Grace"...
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  30. No, it doesn't matter what you elevate. Elevating anything promises to be about the same as elevating anything else; the point is the imposition of privilege being immoral. Utopia is ridiculous! "Growing up" is realizing that perfection is a delusion of logical inconsistency: the logical principle of negation is a conceptual workaround of a technical impossibility.
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  31. "Realization is always a comparative judgement"?! The human experience of "realization" is a state-awareness of perfection/flawlessness; it's the sense of a new understanding; and the sense of "rightness" and "correctness" in context that characterizes "beauty". However, "good" and "evil" are value-judgements imposed on a neutral Nature by people as they objectify projections of the subjective sense of the apparent abject futility of existence. In their objectification, "good" and "evil" become quite real--as real as the person creating them.
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  32. Religious academics!..."How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
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  33. Hierarchies form as an organically-precipitated expression of the organization needed to maintain identity integrity.
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  34. 22:18--"wrestled with the idea of how God could become man...Because God, of course, is infinite and everywhere", Jordan says with a flurry of his arms, as if everybody understands that perfectly well! But what does it MEAN for God to be "infinite and everywhere"?! I conceive of reality to be composed of "point-awarenesses", given that God IS Awareness--the only Awareness, everywhere and always the same. Every thing that can be said to exist does so by virtue of embodiment in a form, from subatomic particles to galaxies. The point-awareness that finds itself at the "center of gravity" of a form assumes the focal role of identity for that form. The so-called "spark of divinity" is the point-awareness located at the center of "mind", the spiritual man, the "Christ consciousness", which manifests a more subtle degree of matter/energy than the physical. Macrocosmically, there are density regions corresponding to the molecular, the atomic, the subatomic, and the quantum levels of the physical complexity hierarchy. These regions are analogous, microcosmically, to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels of psyche. What you experience as "mental", for instance, is the character of the subatomic; and the character of the atomic IS, after a fashion, what you experience as "emotion". Specific linkage is possible by precise correspondence, so that your feelings may directly affect atoms. Makes sense to me, anyway. 😊
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  35. Psychologically speaking, you can't eliminate anything--you can only replace it! Nature abhors a vacuum...
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  36. "What is the opposite of these views?" is no simple matter to determine, despite the apparent alacrity of the guest! Too great a generality is too inclusive to be useful--when everything is the same thing you can't say anything about "thingness"! I found the guest curiously evasive. Idk...maybe it's just me today...
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  37. 4:27--"If your psycho-physiological system assumes that all the danger you were subject to once is still present in the environment, it will set you on edge as if you are walking on dangerous territory." Would it be inaccurate to say, "psyche", instead of, "psycho-physiological system"? Sure would be more efficient! hehehe...The "environment", as a term, has problematic resonances; "the external world" is more unequivocal of a term. But, "set you on edge as if you are walking on dangerous territory", describes "awareness" rather well! I don't see any reason for the psyche to "assume" that all the dangerous experience you've ever had is on the verge of being re-had, so to speak. That's the operation of "fear". The memory of dangerous experience previously encountered is a living thing in a practical sense, in that it is available to "ping", to recall into being resonantly. The choice available to awareness is to recall or not recall, knowing recollection would require the psyche to reenact the experience, to whatever degree necessary or possible. As recollection plays on the screen of imagination, the body responds as if the recalled experience is occurring presently! "On edge" is a description of an emotional state of acute readiness, which, in itself, is not undesirable. However, the attendant tension is rather less desirable, especially as it tends to increase. There is an implication, here, that if you deeply reexperience a memory while being completely--COMPLETELY--physically relaxed, the connection to the body in the memory may be reduced to a degree...so it doesn't "ping" too forcefully, too easily, too quickly.
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  38. Everybody "thinks" visually, but some may lack specific awareness of the process. I disbelieve Jordan's assertion that he poses himself a question in words then devises the answer with words. I think he's just glossing over the underlying visual thinking. All thinking is "associative"--the tendency to associate found everywhere in Nature is the very love of God, itself! But in attempting any kind of value-judgement one must perform a visually symbological treatment of the relevant elements, as if directing the judgement step-by-step. The "vision" might be as simple as a sequence of lines and shapes, which taken by themselves have no special value--but you "know" exactly what they mean in the moment. To the degree you are able, you may articulate that meaning verbally.
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  39. I confess to not understanding the relationship between the Canadian government and the College of Psychologists of Ontario. But...every license I've ever had has remained the property of the issuer, subject to surrender upon request. So, I'm thinking Jordan's license belongs to the College, and, so, the College has the privilege of recalling the license at any time. If the College board is appointed by the government, as Jordan seems to say, then it's the government that's responding to a risk it perceives in Jordan's actions. Is the risk to government itself, or to the people served by government? Ostensibly, the latter, but actually the former, I suspect.
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  40. Evil is "what produces needless human misery", Sam says! "Mental or emotional unhappiness or distress" is the definition of "misery". I doubt anyone can determine, certainly, what is needful and what is needless mental or emotional unhappiness or distress! But it's still a good start on the path to defining terminology. In the case of "evil" we have two different senses of the meaning. The atheist conceives of "evil" as "extremely bad". The religionist projects a spiritual being as the source of evil, and therefore the enemy of the good (god), the politics of which is "the war in heaven" apperception. "Evil" is the HUMAN face of the pressure of Chaos, disorder.
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  41. Existence is hierarchically structured; hierarchy is "legality". Hierarchy operates in both directions, top-down (differentiation), and bottom-up (integration). By the universal tendency of association, everything complexifies, or "entitizes". Psychological patterns are composed of, mostly social, memory complexes. What's most important to consider is the birth event's initiation of this patterning.
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  42. I don't know if we need "enchantment" to explain "racism". "Group dynamics" does a thorough job all by itself! Everyone is racist to the extent they identify with their racial group. Duh. The rest of it is mindless excitement...
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  43. Miranda sticks Trump with the "isolationist" label! <raspberry>...still a leftist...
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  44. Keep thinking about "movies", Jordan! How movies changed the character of human experience and precipitated modern behavior! It's a really big deal...
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  45. When the intelligent master their "guilt" button, the little-intelligent will have lost their advantage. It's the social duty of the intelligent to manage the unintelligent. And, in a previous era, they would. But developing conscience has precipitated a transitional deficit of comprehension. As that transition advances, duty will rise to the fore...
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  46. "Space/time is just a headset", doesn't make much sense as a refutation of Jordan's idea of successive levels of translation. Each level is just a headset--so what! In saying it's a headset, does he mean it's not real, or something like "not useful"? The "mathematics of consciousness" looks like more trouble than it's worth. If you accept your own consciousness as real, you are in intimate contact with the subject of interest--what better perspective is there from which to investigate consciousness. You are the laboratory, your experience, the data; and your intent, the experiment. I do appreciate the guest's deprecation of "entropy", though.
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  47. "Internet content" is something of a misnomer, since "the internet" is a euphemism for the connectability of individual computers in a network, the "internetwork". The internet as such doesn't exist in the real world; individual computers exist in the real world. That clarification should help...
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  48. Nice mention of the great interviewer, David Frost. Brilliant advice on keeping silent, as a television interviewer, but not only because the interviewee with fill the void, but also because the CAMERA EYE is the great revealer.
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  49. When you are the master of your Attention, there can be no "distractions"; when you are the master of your Intention, there can be no "obstacles". The Way is made clear by this mastery.
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  50. When you're confused, you pray for a revelatory thought?! Literally, "pray"? I can see how this would be a religionist's perspective, though, I hadn't expected it to be Jordan Peterson's.
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