Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Jordan Peterson \u0026 Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On | EP 408" video.

"Beauty, truth, love, and gratitude...?", Jordan wonders. "There could be possibilities...we can't imagine because we don't have the requisite minds", Sam says, while justifying imagining the worst: "so we can avoid it". Gratitude is the posture of worship; love is the universal tendency of association; truth is the certainty of experience; and beauty is the appearance of Order. I also take exception with the commonly-held conceptions of "mind" and "imagination", never DIFINED, and so often mentioned...as if "everybody knows" what they are! Note the inherent appeal to nebulous authority.
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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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"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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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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So, to understand consciousness we have to measure suffering?! Sam thinks we can build machines that suffer? Again, without defining "suffering", of course, since "everybody knows" what THAT is! Buddha's "existence is suffering" is kind of a backwards definition. Not defining central terms carefully renders ensuing conversation confusing. Sam should scrap the term "consciousness" in the most basic sense in favor of "awareness". That God is everywhere and everywhen present as points of awareness. This notion is fantastically extensible: form is the prerequisite of existence; a point of awareness exists at the center of every form/thing, as a sort of cosmic handle by which that thing is "known", contacted and manipulated, utilized.
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Pain is a higher good than pleasure--that's the lesson of life! But pleasure is what we prefer to experience, even though pain lines every path to accomplishment, one of the greater pleasures. The apparent contradiction is endlessly unsettling, producing distraction, novelty.
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