Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Q\u0026A 05-22-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson" video.

  1. Are our subconscious drives essentially biological? I mean, not in the trivial sense that all neuroscience is biological. Are our subconscious drives all based on "base" biological urges (hunger thirst lust)? Is conscience, conscious or subconscious? Are intuitive leaps on highly abstract matters conscious? (No, practically by definition.)
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  2. On empathy - The birth of my first child was not only new to me (and therefore alarming), but technically difficult, and it is only thanks to medical attention that he is alive today. The birth of my second was alarming because of my experience with the first, but it went comparatively smoothly. It was only during the birth of my third child that I calmed down a great deal. By then I had internalized, that even if things went terribly wrong, I was not going to be the one suffering the physical effects of that, and that was a good thing. This could be considered a "lack of empathy". However, the fact that this allowed me not to be at loose ends, and to perhaps be a source of calm in a situation where others were going through difficulty, made me more of an asset than I'd been in previous situations. Similarly, I found myself in a situation where one of my group of friends had betrayed the trust of other members of that group, because he was in a significantly worse position than he had ever let on. He hadn't screwed me over, so I was not personally wronged; this allowed me to be more empathetic and helpful to him, than any of the others could be. They were ready to abandon him to his difficult situation, and understandably so. Just as there is a thought that cancels thought, there is also empathy that cancels empathy. Whatever degree of empathy you have, can be put to good use. By the way, you're more likely to be useful at your uncle's funeral, if you're not falling apart yourself.
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  3. One complication with the idea of an "Islamic Reformation" that put things on a more secular footing, is they already had one over a thousand years ago (~835 AD), and it didn't go well. It was known as "Al Mihna" where the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun persecuted / imprisoned / tortured / killed any religious scholars who did not conform to the more secular humanistic "Mu'Taliza" movement. Basically, imagine if Dawkins and Hitchens ran the Spanish Inquisition, what kind of a reputation atheism would have today.
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  4. Is China Marxist?
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  5. Regarding Islam, women's rights, and economic prosperity: Are women's rights a leading or trailing indicator of economic well-being? "Women's Rights" tend to mean flexibility for women outside of their traditional role of "produce as many babies as possible because at least half of them are going to die, and devote yourself to taking care of the rest of them to make sure the survival rate doesn't drop below half, because our tribe / culture / civilization will absolutely not survive without a youthful and strong generation to prevent us from being killed or enslaved by the other cultures out there, or starve to death when we're too weak to work." It's not clear to me at all, that at the time they were doing it (most of human history, in literally every inhabited place on the globe) women were not on board with the idea that there wasn't anything more important they could be doing with their time, than having babies and doing everything they could to prevent them from dying. From the data I've seen, women's rights track with infant mortality. We saw women's suffrage once we started seeing vaccines and sewer systems take hold -- long before "the pill" was available.
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