In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks at Lady Mitchell Hall at the University of Cambridge about his new series, 12 Rules for Life: A Guide to Life in the 21st Century, a new series Dr. Peterson has created that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients with similar conditions, Dr Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. P.V. Peterson is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999. He s the author, most famously perhaps, of the popular work, 12 Rules For Life in 2018, that has sold many millions of copies and topped bestsellers lists in bestseller lists in Brazil, the Netherlands, the US, and Australia. And in the ruins of the old university, he is building a movement that is doing nothing less than widening the horizons of the modern world. He is part of a multiverse, and building a multitudes of people who are mesmerizing millions of leaders, academics, journalists, intellectuals, and journalists. And in doing so, he s a part of the multiverse. . I believe that he is doing a job that no one else can do better than he does, and in doing less less than a week after all of us can do, and do less than that, and he s doing more than enough to do more than that in a better job than we can do well enough to help others do better, and that s an even better than we could do better. Thank you very much for the kind and it s an unbelievable privilege to be here in Cambridge, and it's a privilege, and so much more, thank you for welcoming me to be there, and thank you so much for being here, it's such a wonderful place to be so well, and an unbelievable place to do so, so much better than you can do that. I hope you enjoy this podcast, ladies and gentlemen. - Mikayla Peterson
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.000We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:19.000With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.000If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.000Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.000Welcome to episode 242 of the JVP podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson.
00:01:00.000In November 2021, Dad and I traveled to the UK for his series of lectures at Oxford and Cambridge,
00:01:06.000and a debate on eating meat that I took part in at Oxford Union.
00:01:11.000I put the debate online, one of the women I faced off with literally uttered,
00:01:15.000every hamburger is served with a side of misogyny, and I think my dad died a little inside.
00:01:20.000This podcast episode's lecture was given at Lady Mitchell Hall at the University of Cambridge.
00:01:27.000Dad spoke about orienting reflexes, artificial intelligence,
00:01:31.000how perception narrows things from an infinite pool of possibilities,
00:01:35.000dominance hierarchies, the influence of postmodernism in neurophysiology,
00:01:40.000which was very interesting, and the relationship between imitation awe and the divine.
00:01:45.000He finished the lecture with a really thought-provoking Q&A.
00:07:25.000Five decades ago, I suppose, the problem made itself explicitly manifest at a deeper level than it ever had before.
00:07:35.000Although philosophers had wrestled with this problem for a very long period of time.
00:07:39.000And part of the problem was how much do we bring to the act of perception and imagination and thought.
00:07:48.000And how much is revealed to us by what we perceive.
00:07:56.000We thought we understood that, I would say, well enough to make practical progress after the Second World War.
00:08:04.000But there were doubts that bedeviled people operating in all sorts of disciplines that became, as I said, increasingly explicit in those decades.
00:08:13.000And I think for me, the most remarkable revelation of the problem probably occurred in the world of artificial intelligence.
00:08:22.000I learned about this when I was studying models of cognitive processes that were initially generated by Russian investigators like Sokolov and Vinogradova,
00:08:34.000who were very well known names in the Russian neuropsychological literature, which is a very academically impressive literature.
00:08:41.000They were students of Luria, I think both Vinogradova and Sokolov were students of Luria, who was perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist of the last mid part of the 20th century.
00:08:53.000They were convinced to some degree that we built internal models of the world and then compared what was going on in the world to those models.
00:09:03.000Sokolov discovered a phenomenon called the orienting reflex, which was an electrophysiological response to error detection or a response to novelty.
00:09:15.000That's another way of thinking about it.
00:09:16.000And he should have won a Nobel Prize for that because discovering the instinctual basis of the response to novelty, that's no small thing.
00:09:23.000There's a lot of novelty in the world.
00:09:25.000And Sokolov really mapped that, in some sense, mapped that onto the body and onto the nervous system in a way that superseded what philosophers had done before that.
00:09:35.000Because it made it much more concrete and tied it down to the underlying neural architecture.
00:09:39.000So, for example, if you're walking down the road and there's a loud noise behind you and the noise is of indeterminate meaning, so perhaps a car has jumped a curb, that's a possibility.
00:09:52.000You'll go like that and stop and turn and orient towards the place in the space-time continuum where your stereo vision has localized the noise.
00:10:06.000And you do that, really, without thinking.
00:10:09.000I would say it's an act that occurs outside the domain of free will.
00:10:12.000And the reason you do that is because you might die if something unexpected happens, right?
00:10:18.000Something that's outside your framework of expectation.
00:10:22.000Now, you know your framework of expectation.
00:11:26.000We can't even know as much as we need to know.
00:11:28.000And that means, in some sense, we have to be able to deal with the fact that we don't know enough.
00:11:32.000And one of what Sokolov outlined, at least in part, was the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms that made this orienting reflex possible.
00:11:43.000One way you can measure it, for example, is if you put a gadget, a galvanometer, on someone's finger, and you play them a sequence of tones.
00:11:57.000When you play them the first tone, they'll show quite a response.
00:12:02.000And after that, lesser, until finally it'll flatline.
00:12:05.000And people thought about that as habituation.
00:12:07.000But the more sophisticated cognitive scientists regarded it as the building of an internal model of the stimulus in all its variety of parameters.
00:12:16.000Interesting word, stimulus, will return to that.
00:12:19.000And then if you play someone a different tone after habituating them to that sequence,
00:12:24.000the electrophysiological response will reinstantiate itself.
00:12:27.000Or even if you alter the spacing between the tones, the same thing will happen.
00:12:33.000And that's all part of this response to novelty and then the mapping of novel territory.
00:12:38.000This is unbelievably important, this discovery, because you don't learn anything except by encountering it as novelty first.
00:12:47.000So it's fundamentally the initial processes of everything you do to learn, everything there is to learn, everywhere, all the time.
00:12:56.000And so, like I said, he should have won a Nobel Prize, but people really didn't understand the fundamental significance of this discovery.
00:13:03.000And a very influential line of English-British neuropsychology emerged out of that.
00:13:09.000Because a gentleman named Geoffrey Gray, who was the most outstanding student, I would say, of Hans Isaac,
00:13:15.000who was the most cited psychologist, research psychologist in the world for pretty much the last half of the 20th century.
00:13:22.000Geoffrey Gray wrote an incredibly brilliant book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety,
00:13:26.000where he integrated the work the Russians had done, which very few people knew about, apart from Gray, who read absolutely everything.
00:13:34.000The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, I think, cited 1,300 scientific, deep scientific papers,
00:13:40.000neurophysiological papers, animal behavioral papers, like hardcore psychology, because there is such a thing.
00:13:46.000And he actually read all those papers, and he actually understood them.
00:13:50.000And then he integrated that with Norbert Wieners, who was one of the fathers of cybernetics and computer science.
00:13:56.000He integrated that with Norbert Wieners' cybernetic theory, and with, well, a raft of animal experimental material.
00:14:04.000And laid out the neurological basis for the establishment of the orienting reflex, and also for the establishment of memory itself.
00:14:11.000It's a tour to force, that book. It was written in 1982, and psychologists have really only begun to digest the material in that book.
00:14:19.000So, I read it when I was, well, back in about 1982, very soon, when I was 85, I guess, very soon after it was published.
00:14:28.000It took me like six months to read it, because, well, I had to learn animal physiology, and neuropsychopharmology,
00:14:36.000and animal behavioral science, and cybernetic theory, and just along the way to understand what he was talking about.
00:14:43.000You know, it's a profound work of philosophy, I would say, and it's probably a necessary work of modern philosophy,
00:14:49.000because we're starting to understand the underlying physiological substructure of many of the processes that have been discussed in the philosophical realm forever.
00:14:58.000And so, okay, so what does this have to do with this problem?
00:21:46.000Now the canon of texts, the fact that there's a canon of texts, roughly speaking, we can, we have agreed in the past to some degree on the boundaries of that category.
00:21:56.000Although there's plenty of cognitive activity around the edges trying to decide what would fit in and what wouldn't.
00:22:03.000Which is exactly what happened, for example, when people were trying to aggregate the biblical corpus across time.
00:22:08.000Because the Bible is, of course, a library of books.
00:22:10.000What's in and what's out? Why is it in? Why is it out?
00:22:13.000Well, the answer to how we answer that is we don't know how we answer that.
00:22:18.000And there's this process of deliberation, let's say, that is part and parcel of the process that gives rise to the aggregation of a library of texts into a corpus.
00:22:30.000But we don't really understand the mechanism. We don't understand the mechanism at all.
00:22:35.000And that's actually all fine, except that we don't have general purpose robots yet.
00:22:39.000Although they probably are more or less around the corner in about five years.
00:22:45.000But that's anistine we don't can tell you that exactly what a library ofraisers or inquiet
00:23:13.220little object, but not really, because it can sort of move around your house without falling down the stairs, and your two-year-old can't do that, so the Roomba isn't nothing, right? And Brooks was one of the first people who really recognized that to solve the problem of perception, we would have to duplicate the process of evolution in hardware, and so he started building these little machines that pretty much all they did to begin with was scoot away from light, and well, eventually that became the Roomba,
00:23:43.140which is a pretty useful gadget, and you see variants in some sense of what he's done with self-driving cars, because they're embodied systems as well, right, because the car is actually a body that moves from place to place, and it turns out that a lot of our perceptions require embodiment, and it turns out that one of the philosophical consequences, implications of that is that the way we solved the problem of perception was through 3.8,
00:24:13.1405 billion years or thereabouts of evolution, and also that there was no other way of possibly solving it, and so that's a testimony to the power of evolutionary thinking, I would say, but even more a testimony to the power, to the power of the process of evolutionary development, and you might think that that reduces human cognition to something sterile and mechanistic, because many of the proponents of the notion of natural selection
00:24:43.140natural selection, and we're going to talk about natural selection, and we're going to talk about that a little bit tonight, too, I hope, if I can manage to tie all these things together, so,
00:24:55.140So, no perception without embodiment, that's pretty interesting, that, and so, I could tell you, I'll tell you a little side neuropsychological story, so, you know, we tend to think that when we see the world, well, there the world is, and then we see the world, and we see the objects, and there the objects are, but that isn't how it works, and I've tried to explain why, because there's an infinite number of ways of perceiving, even though,
00:25:25.120in the simplest of visual scenes, and then there's auditory scenes, and then there's the problem of smell, and there's the problem of touch, I mean, these are hard problems, which is why it took, you know, three billion years to solve them.
00:25:38.580There's a condition called utilization behavior, it's kind of an interesting neuropsychological condition, and generally, if it is affected right-handed people, that's relevant here, because of lateralization, if you have left prefrontal damage,
00:25:54.500you sometimes will engage in utilization behavior, and what happens if you're afflicted by this neuropsychological condition, is that you lose the ability to inhibit your motor response to the presentation of an object.
00:26:07.440Now, that's worth thinking about, even though it doesn't sound like it's something that's necessarily worth thinking about, because, what do you mean, motor response to an object?
00:26:17.420Because, we think, object, thought, motor response, but that's not how it works.
00:26:24.300The object itself announces its utility in the perception.
00:26:30.240And so, what that means is that your eyes, which map, let's say, patterns of arrays, that's a good way of thinking about it.
00:26:38.240They map that onto your visual system, but part of your visual system is actually your motor output system.
00:26:45.620And so, when I look at, let's say, this bottle, you think, I think, bottle, hand, grip, drink, but seeing bottle is hand grip, and hand grip is drink.
00:27:00.680And so, if you have a utilization behavior, you lose the ability to inhibit the motor response to the object, and so, if you had this condition, I put a cup in front of you, you would pick it up and drink from it.
00:27:09.680And if you walk down a hallway, and there's a door open, you will go through the door.
00:27:14.840And it's not because you see the object door, and think door, and then think walk through, and then walk through, even though that's what you think you think.
00:27:24.880It's that door is a walkthrough place, and if you lack inhibition, you can't stop acting out the perception.
00:27:33.080And so, what that implies is that at some direct level, and this is the science, not the philosophy, you don't see objects and infer meaning.
00:27:49.540You can think about that for like 40 years, because it looks like it's true factually.
00:27:55.220And that's a strange thing too, right?
00:27:57.260It's a very strange claim to say that the facts support the notion that the primary object of perception is meaning, not objects.
00:28:06.920And I actually think that's an interpretation, though I won't go into that tonight, that's more in keeping with evolutionary logic than the idea that you perceive objects and infer meaning.
00:28:17.800And so, the stripping away of meaning metaphysically from the world of apperception, that's a consequence of scientism, is actually predicated on something approximating bad science.
00:28:31.940And that's become increasingly evident, I would say, in the neurophysiology of perception.
00:28:36.120And that's an important field, given that the problem of perception is the problem that has bedeviled both the sciences and the humanities, and also engineering, for that matter, for the last 50 years.
00:28:49.840And it has not only done that, it's produced this rivening of culture that's occurred within the universities, partly because of the postmodernist claim.
00:28:58.960And so, fundamental postmodernist claims.
00:29:02.060Now, the first claim is that there's no canonical interpretation that's self-evident.
00:29:10.400That might be a claim emerging from literary departments, English literary departments, under the influence of French continental thought, let's say.
00:29:19.320I don't think you can take issue with that.
00:29:21.300I think it happens to be the case, because the notion that there is a multiplicity of potentially valid interpretations is true.
00:29:28.020What isn't true is the idea that we use power and domination to solve that problem, primarily.
00:29:35.940And there's no excuse, philosophically, from leaping from a mystery that's utterly profound, which is the problem of perception, to the conclusion that some pathological, socially constructed process is therefore at the basis of the act of perception and categorization itself.
00:29:54.420I think that's, I think it's unforgivable, cognitively, and it's cynical beyond belief.
00:30:06.780And it's corrosive, beyond our capacity to deal with it.
00:30:11.760I mean, you think about what that claim means, is that the way you solve the, and that's like an implicit bias argument, by the way, just to make that clear as well.
00:30:21.340That you solve the problem of categorization by imposing your will to power on the world, in some zero-sum, winner-take-all game of dominion and, and, and, and oppression.
00:30:35.240It's like, you could not, if you tried, you could not come up with a more cynical view of the mechanism that makes order, habitable order, out of chaos.
00:30:48.780And, but what's sort of delightful about that, in some sense, is that it's just not true.
00:30:53.560I, it's, literally, we could say scientifically, if we take scientifically to mean literally, we can say, it's not true.
00:31:05.220It actually turns out that even in the animal kingdom, you know, you might think, the hierarchies that we use to orient ourselves in,
00:31:13.000that's part of the strategy that we use to guarantee our survival.
00:31:16.380You know, we fight tooth and nail, with nature red and claw, to climb the hierarchies of dominance, as a consequence of our will to power.
00:31:26.820It's like, no, actually, that isn't how it works.
00:31:31.860And so, we all have this image, or many of us, I would say, have an image of chimpanzee troops, let's say, our closest primate relative.
00:31:40.320We split from them in evolutionary terms, about seven million years ago, something like that.
00:31:45.380You can calculate that quite accurately, by looking at the mutation rate of genetic material that we share with chimps,
00:31:53.800and calculate the average mutation rate, and look at the propagation of mutations, and the separation of them.
00:31:59.800You can get a pretty accurate estimate of the split.
00:33:21.260And so, that is exactly what happens in chimpanzee troops, is that the males who rise to a position of authority
00:33:27.980as a mere consequence of their psychopathic will to power,
00:33:31.820rule very unstably over very unstable troops and have a very short ruling period.
00:33:38.640Whereas the males that manage to, because in chimps, the fundamental hierarchy is male-dominated.
00:33:44.900It's less obvious in another set of very close primate relatives, the Bonnebos.
00:33:49.860They're, they're more female-dominated, interestingly enough.
00:33:53.080And it isn't obvious which of those two species were more like.
00:33:59.100So, but I'll concentrate on the chimps now because we're talking a little bit about will to power.
00:34:03.640The males who manage to maintain a relatively stable coalition, let's say, are actually very affiliative.
00:34:11.800In fact, they groom other males more than any other males in the troop.
00:34:18.220And so, they're doing, they're using reciprocal altruism, at least in part, as the basis of their claim to dominion.
00:34:24.620Now, they do have preferential mating access to females.
00:34:28.540And that, there's, there's some analogy in that with what happens in the human case, but it's more complicated in the human case.
00:34:36.540In any case, they also tend to spend a fair bit of time attending to the females in the troop in a positive way and to their infants.
00:34:43.420And so, the more benevolent, but still physically able males seem to establish a stable social hierarchy that's quite unlike the social hierarchy that's produced by the, you know, more psychopathic, straight, you know, raw will to power.
00:34:58.380And, well, and here's another fact for what it's worth.
00:35:04.200If the hierarchy that we use to aggregate the canon is fundamentally predicated on oppressive power, which is the claim,
00:35:16.540then why do psychopaths only constitute 3% of the population?
00:35:23.620And so, there are good evolutionary biology, psychology, models of psychopathy.
00:35:30.460Its emergence has been modeled quite, emergence and stability has been modeled quite nicely in computer simulations.
00:35:36.640And such simulations can be used as appropriate models.
00:35:40.000If the psychopath prevalence falls below 1%, there's so few of them that people get complacent in relationship to the possibility of malevolence.
00:35:49.240And so then they can flourish a bit, right?
00:35:51.060And their prevalence can rise in the population.
00:35:53.620But if it gets up to 5%, it's like everybody wakes up and it's not such a good day for the psychopaths when they do.
00:36:00.920And, yeah, and somebody has to keep the malevolent types down, you know.
00:36:06.920And that's probably, possibly, possibly, we'll say, why women like men who are less agreeable than they are, you know.
00:36:16.300And women have to solve this very complex mating problem in relationship to men, which is, there are bad men.
00:36:26.980And they're a minority of the population.
00:36:29.320And they tear their way through overly agreeable populations.
00:36:33.800And to keep them from dominating, you need good men who are also capable of being quite terrible.
00:36:42.180And so that appears to be the conundrum that women face when they're choosing male partners, one of the conundrums.
00:36:51.440They want someone who's strong enough to resist what's truly terrible, but benevolent and generous enough to, and productive enough to be productive and useful, but also agreeable and empathic enough to share.
00:37:06.840And you can see that that's a terribly tight line, right?
00:37:09.420And women are always, well, young women tend to overshoot the mark on the malevolent side.
00:37:15.300So the psychopathic Machiavellians who mimic competent male behavior, they ape it, so to speak, are differentially attractive to young and inexperienced women.
00:37:30.480Whereas women who've had some experience get better at distinguishing the psychopathic Machiavellian pretenders who often manifest a certain confidence and a certain bravado, they get good at distinguishing them from the real thing.
00:37:46.420And so it's a tricky thing for women to manage.
00:37:48.540And men can use deceptive strategies to mimic competence, which is exactly what deceptive strategies are for, obviously.
00:37:55.200And that's also a pathway to short-term mating success under some circumstances.
00:38:01.520And it's viable enough to propagate itself in the population, but it's not a good medium to long-term strategy.
00:38:09.280And the question might be, well, what is a good medium to long-term strategy?
00:38:14.560And it looks like something, well, that is the question that's actually at the bottom of this entire talk,
00:38:19.840because it's also the same question as, what is the process that gives rise to perception itself?
00:38:30.560And this is an attempt to integrate across a whole variety of complex questions.
00:38:35.700So you might ask yourself, this is where it gets difficult to tie all these things together.
00:38:41.420Yes, there's no evidence, as far as I can tell, that the proposition that the fundamental motivation for categorization itself is the expression of power.
00:40:48.080And you have to be so cynical that it beggars description and so envious of what's great to reflexively identify that with the will to power.
00:40:58.320And really, that's what you think when you enter one of the great cathedrals or chapels that grace your campus?
00:41:06.560You think nothing but will to power erected that?