The full transcript

Please put your hands together for Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris!

Thank you.

I guess we're in Vancouver.

Wow. All right. That is daunting. So I hope you'll indulge me here for a second. Jordan and Sam have given me the honor of moderating this debate or discussion, depending on how you view it. That actually creates a certain kind of responsibility, and I want to talk to you about my responsibility and how I see it, and my sense of how you all have responsibility in this as well. I suspect that what's going to happen tonight is actually historical, which doesn't necessarily make it good. There's lots of bad history. It could be good, though, and that's what I'm hoping will happen. So the reason I say I think it's historical is that we are existing in a moment where all of the systems that have helped us make sense are breaking down. The university systems are breaking down. Journalism is breaking down. And at that same moment, we have a network of people who are trying to make sense in an alternative way, and I have to say, I think beating the odds. For the moment. So, here's the problem. That network is not entirely in agreement with itself about some significant issues, and Sam and Jordan have some differences that have proved very difficult. So, what could happen tonight is we could have some sort of a failure where things get even more muddled. We could tread water where nothing gets clearer. Maybe it would be entertaining, maybe it wouldn't. But best-case scenario— I'm not sure. is that we figure out how to make sense of things that have gotten in our way before. And if that happens, then you all will leave here, and as you talk in your various networks, you will have something to say about in what way we upgraded our software so that we could talk more deeply about difficult issues. So, to that end, we would ask that you not film tonight's discussion. and broadcast it online. It's not that we want to hide this. In fact, we encourage you to discuss it. But we would like to have all of us feel maximally free to speak here, to try out positions that we haven't tried out before, in the hopes that we can get somewhere new. All right, so—

Thank you.

I think with that, we will just put Sam and Jordan to it and see if we can head towards some of the discussions that have proved difficult in the past. Sam? Jordan?

Yeah, yeah, thank you. Well, I think I'll just start by saying that when we first had the idea to do this, that was some months ago, I'm getting a little reverb here, so if you can dial down the— there's a little feedback. When Jordan and I first decided to do an event together, it was after we did those somewhat ill-fated podcasts, and I joked that we would probably need a safe word for this event. So that safe word, as will come as no surprise, is lobster. So, you'll know things are dire when one of us says that. But I just want to express my motive for helping to stage these events, because I reached out to Jordan, and it really was born of seeing him in conversation with people other than myself. I saw him do a podcast with Joe Rogan. I saw him speak to Dave Rubin. I saw him speak with Brett on Rogan's podcast. And I had so much admiration for him in those conversations. So, 90% of what he said in those conversations struck me as really wise and useful and well-intentioned. And 10% didn't. And I noticed that, I mean, it's clear to me that seeing these successful conversations with other people who I respect, I began to wonder that I might be the problem. And I think I am the problem. I think I— Well, before you applaud, maybe I didn't mean that quite the way you took it. I think it's a good sort of problem for Jordan to have, because it's what happens on those 10% moments and what doesn't happen that I think made our conversation so hard. And I think there is stuff to clarify between us. So I look forward to doing that, and thank you, Jordan, for agreeing to do this. It's an honor to share the stage with you. And needless to say, having Bret as a moderator is almost an obscene underestimation of the role he should be playing on any stage, because he— as you know, he's been on my podcast, and that was one of the best conversations I've ever had. So, Thank you for doing this, Brett.

Thanks, Tom.

All right. So I'm gonna jump right into it, I think. Here, so look, this is— I put up a poll a couple of days ago to find out what people broadly speaking, might want us to discuss. And I've been taking a look at that, and I took a lot of notes, which is why I have my computer here, by the way, and my phone. It's not to check my email while the debate's going on. The discussion— I thought what I might do is just lay out some places that I think Sam and I agree, and because there's lots of places we agree. And so, and then I want to figure out where we disagree, which I've been trying to sort out, and then I want to see if we can hash it out a little bit and, and move forward on that a bit. So I'm gonna lay out— see, one of the things that Carl Rogers said, this psychologist, was that one of the good ways to have a discussion with someone is to tell them what you think they think until they think that what you said reflects what they said. But look, this is a really useful thing to know if you're ever having a discussion with an intimate partner, for example, is that you have to put their argument back to them in terms they agree with. It's very difficult. So I'm gonna try to do that. And so, so the first thing is, I think, I think that partly what's driving you, if this is accurate, is that you want to ground a structure of ethics in something solid. And there's two— there's two things you want to avoid, two catastrophes, let's say. One is the catastrophe that you identified with religious fundamentalism, and the other is the catastrophe that's associated with moral relativism. Is that— is that reasonable?

+6 C-5.1 · Steelman of Harris's moral project · Jordan Peterson

Yeah, that's good.

↳ evidence for the P1 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-009

Okay, good, good. Okay, well, no, but just— okay, so it's crucially— it's crucially important that we get this right now. So, and that's something that I think we really agree on, because I've conceptualized that slightly different than you, and that might be relevant, but I think of that as a pathology of order and a pathology of chaos. So the terminology is slightly different, but I think we're working on the same axis. So, so, so that's the first thing. And then in order to do that, it seems to me that's your first priority. And then maybe your second priority is something like, you know, you see undue suffering in the world, plenty of it, and you would think that things would be better if that wasn't the case, and that this morality, whatever it's going to be, is at least going to ground itself in part on the presupposition that the less undue suffering in the world, the better. Is that also reasonable?

↳ P1 raised again here · first raised at U-009

Yeah, I would just add to that the positive side of the continuum as well. So, as you know, the phrase I use, or the word I use for this, is well-being. And I know from having— I don't think we spoke about this on my podcast, but from having seen you in other interviews, I think you think that phrase doesn't capture everything one could reasonably want, but I think it does. I mean, I've just, you know, it's an elastic suitcase term for a reason, and it's actually, in reading your book, I realized there's a point of contact here because you use the word Being, capital B Being, as though it were imbued with significant gravitas. And so for me, and I agree with you, that's an appropriate use of Being.

+3 C-2.1 · Common ground on Being and well-being · Sam Harris

Thank you.

And for me, well-being is simply just the positive side of being. You know, there's the negative side, the suffering we want to mitigate, but I think however good consciousness can be in this universe, that well-being for me subsumes all of those possibilities.

↳ P2 raised again here · first raised at U-012

Okay, well, so I focused on the suffering element, I think, as I've done in my own work, because I actually think it's easier to zero in on in some sense. Like, I think it's easier for people And I think you lay out the argument in The Moral Landscape kind of like this. I think it's easier, perhaps, to gain initial agreement between people on what might constitute a generalized ethic, to concentrate on what we don't want. I'm not saying that what we do want is unimportant, but it seems to me to be harder to get a grip on. We don't want Auschwitz. We don't want the Gulag Archipelago. So, and there are—

↳ P2 raised again here · first raised at U-012

↳ evidence for the P2 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-012

And those— and I would add, to just closing the door to moral relativism here, those who do want Auschwitz are wrong to want Auschwitz. I mean, it's obviously Auschwitz only happened because some people did want Auschwitz, not the victim side, but the perpetrator side. And so crucially for me is the claim that I'm a realist, I'm a moral realist, and what realism means is that it's— that there are right and wrong answers to questions of this kind.

Yes.

And you cannot know what you're missing. In fact, we almost certainly don't know what we're missing on questions of human value, and our job is to discover just how good life can be and just what variables are making it needlessly horrible and to mitigate all of that and live in a better and better world.

↳ P3 raised again here · first raised at U-016

Okay, well, so, okay, so that's a lot of points of agreement. So I also believe that There is a catastrophe of arbitrary moral injunction, and that there's a catastrophe of moral relativism, and that that has to be dealt with, and that there are genuine differences between the proper way of behaving morally and the improper way of behaving morally. And I think that they are grounded in human universals, even though there's a wide amount of variation. So that's a lot of points of agreement, right? So We know that there's 2 things we want to avoid, conceptually speaking, which is the moral relativism and this kind of moral absolutism that's grounded in an arbitrary statement of facts that you identify with religious fundamentalism. I would identify that with fundamentalism more generally, not with religious fundamentalism per se, because I see it also happening in secular states, let's say, like Nazi Germany.

↳ P1 raised again here · first raised at U-009

↳ evidence for the P3 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-017

Sure.

So it doesn't seem to be religious fundamentalism per se that's crucial to your argument.

No, it's not. So just to close the loop on that, the only reason why I would focus on religion in particular there is that religion is the only language game wherein fundamentalism and dogmatism— dogmatism is not a pejorative concept. Dogma is a good word, specifically within Catholicism. And the notion that you must believe things on faith, that is in the absence of compelling evidence that would otherwise cause a rational person to believe it, that in a religious context is considered a feature, not a bug. Elsewhere, we recognize it to be a bug, and that's why the unique focus on religion.

Okay, so is it reasonable to assume that the associate— we've already established, at least in principle, that there's an association between the totalitarian regimes, let's say, and dogmatism, and the dogmatism that characterizes religious belief. What do you think Although, at least in principle, the secularist totalitarian states and the religious fundamentalist totalitarian states do differ in one important regard, which is that the religious types ground their axioms in God, and the secular totalitarian types don't. And so there's got to be something about totalitarianism per se that's independent of— that's associated with religious belief in the manner that you just described, but that's not particularly associated with the belief in God. There's something that makes them that's a commonality between them. And so, do you have any sense of what that might be?

Well, I would— I think one has to acknowledge that there's something uniquely pernicious, at least potentially, about religious beliefs, because they have the otherworldly variable, the supernatural variable, the you're going to get everything you want after you die, so this life doesn't matter. issue, that allows for a kind of misbehavior that is especially—

Okay, so it seems that— so the claim would be that if you put forward axiomatically your claim that God exists, then you can use that claim to justify whatever arbitrary atrocities your system might throw off.

Yeah, I guess the only point I was making there is that not all dogmas are created equal. And some dogmas are, on their face, more dangerous and more divisive.

Right, but what I'm curious about specifically is, because it seems to me that the dogmas of the USSR and the dogmas of Nazi Germany were as pernicious as any religious dogmas, and they may also share important features with pernicious religious dogmas, but it isn't clear to me, from your perspective, what those commonalities would be.

↳ P5 raised again here · first raised at U-023

Well, so, I mean, in some ways you're recapitulating an argument I've made, and this is an argument that I would make against you were you to claim claim, as you have elsewhere, that atheism is responsible for the greatest atrocities of the 20th century. The idea that Stalinism and Nazism and fascism were expressions of atheism simply doesn't make any sense. I mean, in the case of fascism and Nazism, it doesn't make any sense because the fascists and the Nazis, by and large, were not even atheists. I mean, Hitler wasn't an atheist, and he was talking about executing a divine plan, and he got He had lots of support from the churches, and the Vatican did nothing to stop him. Fascism, as you know, coexisted quite happily with Catholicism in Croatia, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. But even in the case of Stalin, what was so wrong with that situation were all of the ways in which it so resembled a religion. You had a personality cult. You had dogmatism. that held sway to a point where apostasy and blasphemy were killing offenses. You know, the people who didn't toe the line were eradicated. And, you know, so to take an even more modern example, North Korea is a religious cult. It just doesn't happen to be one that is focused on the next life or, you know, supernatural claims of magic.

Okay, so what would be the defining characteristics of a religious totalitarian movement that would make it different from a non-religious totalitarian movement? Because there's aspects that are similar.

↳ P5 raised again here · first raised at U-023

↳ evidence for the P6 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-028

Yeah, they're very similar. The problem is dogmatism. The overarching problem is believing things strongly on bad evidence. And the reason why dogmatism is so dangerous is that it doesn't allow us to revise our bad ideas in real time through conversation. Dogmas have to be enforced by force or the threat of force, because the moment someone has a better idea, you have to shut it down in order to preserve your dogmas.

Okay, okay, so the commonality seems to be something like claims of absolute truth at some level that can't be— that you're no longer allowed to discuss. Yeah. Okay, and so, okay, so that's another point of agreement then, I would say, because part of the reason that I've been, let's say, a free speech advocate it, although I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it, is because I think of free discourse, like the discourse that we're engaged in, as the mechanism that corrects totalitarian excess or dogmatic excess.

Mm-hmm.

And so I also think that systems of governance that are laying themselves out properly have to evaluate— have to elevate the process by which dogmatic errors are corrected over the dogmas themselves, which is why I think the Americans are rights, say, with regard to their First Amendment, is the process of free speech is the process by which dogmatic errors are rectified, and so it has to be put at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of values, something like that.

↳ evidence for the P4 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-031

+4.5 C-2.1 · Common ground on primacy of free speech · Jordan Peterson

Yeah, yeah, I think you and I totally agree about the primacy of free speech.

Okay, okay, good. Okay, so that's another—

fine.

Okay, so then—

Wait, there's one point that we should just lock in our gains here. It sounds like what you're saying is that the reason to fear religious dogma is really on the dogma side and not the religion side, which at least leaves open the possibility that something could exist over on the religion side that doesn't have that characteristic, right? That often they travel in tandem, but that the thing to fear is not the religious belief, it is the dogmatic nature of the way it is communicated. Is that fair?

↳ P4 raised again here · first raised at U-030

Oh yeah, the other way to say that is the only thing that's wrong with religion is the dogmatism. If you get rid of the dog— I've got no problem with the buildings and the music and the paintings and—

↳ P4 raised again here · first raised at U-030

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption to rebut · Jordan Peterson

Wait, wait, no, that— wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not a trivial point, and it's not just a joke, because the buildings and the music are very important parts of the religious process. And so I know there's a humorous element to that, but it's not like— Sam is throwing out the baby with the bathwater there.

+3 C-2.1 · Grants value in religious phenomenology · Sam Harris

And to go further than that, I've got no problem— in fact, I'm deeply interested in the phenomenology of spiritual experience. So whatever experience someone like Jesus had, whoever he was historically, or any of the other matriarchs and patriarchs of the world's religions, that phenomenology is subjectively real. I mean, it's diverse. I'm not saying everyone's had the same experience, but there are changes in consciousness that explain both how religions have gotten founded by their founders and the experiences people have had in the presence of those people or by following their methodologies that seem to be confirming of the dogmas that grew up around those traditions. And my issue is that that whatever is true about us spiritually, whatever opportunity being born into this universe actually presents as a matter of consciousness spiritually, that truth has to be deeper than accidents of culture and just mere historical contingencies. The fact that somebody was born in Mesopotamia and not in China and got a different language game So, whatever is true there has to be understood in universal terms about the nature of human psychology and the human mind.

Okay, so another thing that I wanted to just point out obliquely, and then I want to return to outlining maybe where we agree, is that one of the things that was really shocking to me, I would say, was my reading of what was originally Jane Goodall's discovery about chimp behavior, you know, because there was this idea that was really rooted in Rousseauian thinking that the reason that people committed atrocities in the service of their group identity, let's say their tribal identity, was because culture had corrupted us. So it was a uniquely human thing. But then of course Goodall showed in the 1970s that the chimps at Gombe— I think that's— I'm pronouncing that correctly—

Yeah.

Would go on raiding parties, right? And so there'd be like 4 or 5 adolescent chimps, usually males, sometimes with a female in there. They would patrol the borders of their territory. If they found an interloper on the border, near the border, from another troop, even if it was a member of their troop that had emigrated, so to speak, and that they had had some history with, they would tear them to pieces. And of course, that was shocking to Goodall, but— and my understanding is she had some trepidations about publishing it, although she did. But then that's been noted repeatedly in other forms of chimp behavior. So, see, I've been really interested in the commission of atrocity in the service of belief, and it's tempting to pin that, say, on dogma, and then to associate that with religious dogma. I think that's all tempting, but the fact that chimps do it shows that it can't be a consequence of something like religious belief, unless you're willing to say that the reason that chimps commit atrocity in the service of their troop and their territory is because chimps are religious. And so, they're not religious, and they don't really hold a secular totalitarian viewpoint, but they act out— they still act out the atrocity element that's characteristic of human behavior. And so, to me, that makes the problem deeper than one of mere, let's say, surface statements— surface statements about metaphysics. Yeah, yeah.

Obviously, the problem of primate aggression, which we've inherited along with the chimps, is deeper, or at least different, than the problem of religious violence or totalitarian political structures that get the worst out of people.

+3 C-2.1 · Agreement that group violence predates religion · Sam Harris

Okay, good.

So, I mean, we have these primate capacities that we have to correct for, and we're busily trying to correct for almost everything that we've been evolved to do. I mean, we're not— you know, we don't like the state of nature for good reason, and virtually everything that's good about human life is born of our, I would argue, culture-based and highly intelligent and necessary effort to mitigate what is in fact natural for us. And there's nothing more natural than tribal violence, which is of the sort that you're describing in chimps.

Okay. that it also seems like we agree that the core element of tribal alliance, which would have its roots, say, in the chimpanzee proclivity to— or its analog in the chimpanzee proclivity to identify with the dominance hierarchy of the troop— is something that's a source of the proclivity for human social aggression that's independent of its— at least independent of any obvious religious substrate. So there are other reasons for group belief and the commission of atrocity that can't be directly attributed to religious dogma.

↳ P7 raised again here · first raised at U-044

Yeah, but I mean, and what most worries me about religion, I would say, obviously religion can channel these primate urges in unhappy ways. So you can get tribal violence that gets amplified by religious dogmatism, and that should trouble everyone. But it's not unique to religion. It's also nationalism, and it's racism, and it's all other kinds of dogmatism. But what most worries me are those cases where clearly good people who are not necessarily captured by tribalism per se are doing the unthinkable based purely on religious doctrines that they believe wholeheartedly without good evidence. So you have the person who joins ISIS who wasn't even Muslim before or they converted, you know, 16 months ago, and they go all the way down the rabbit hole to the most doctrinaire, most committed, most uncompromising view of just how you have to live in this world if you're going to be Muslim. And they join ISIS based on the idea that salvation only goes one way, and that dying in defense of the one true faith is the best thing that can happen to you. There's no question that there are individuals who have made that journey. In fact, there are individuals by the thousands who have made that journey. There are far more benign versions of that. There are people who just waste their lives, I would argue, converting to whatever the belief system is and just wasting a lot of time worrying about hell or worrying about the fact that their child is gay and the creator of the universe doesn't approve of that. There are all kinds of suffering. That strike me as truly unnecessary, born not of, again, ape-like urges, but ideas that any rational person would, if believed, would follow to that same terminus. I mean, the thing is, if you buy the fact, again, to take Islam as a current example, if you buy the claim that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe, never to be superseded by anything humanity does now or 1,000 years from now, that commits a rational— then the exercise of human reason is bounded by this, I would argue, pathological frame, which leads to certain outcomes that should really worry us.

Okay, so let's take that claim apart for A minute, because that's not your claim specifically, the claim that you were describing. See, because that's, that's really not the claim that religious fundamentalists make. The claim they make is worse than that, because they claim that the Quran, say, or the Bible for that matter, is the literal word of God. But more than that, they claim that their understanding of that word is correct.

Yeah.

Which means they conflate 2 things. Like, because you could imagine a situation where you had a book— and I'm not saying this is the case, it's an imaginative exercise— where you had a book that had all the answers, that was extraordinarily complicated, and so that when you read it, it wouldn't be obvious that you understood it. Or perhaps it wouldn't be obvious that you didn't understand it either. But you're not going to be able to— you can't get an uninterpreted version of the book. And so, the fundamentalist claim is far worse. It's that not only is there an absolute reality, truth, embedded in the book, but that their particular take on that absolute reality is the absolute take on that book. And so, they conflate their own— they make an assumption of their own omniscience, and then pass that off onto God, so to speak.

↳ P9 raised again here · first raised at U-050

↳ evidence for the P8 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-050

Yeah, except, in their defense, and I don't often rise to the defense of fundamentalists, It's very easy to get there because some of the claims in the book are not at all hard to parse. In fact, many of them can only be honestly interpreted one way. So to take, again, an example that will be not inflammatory to you but makes the point, it just says that the remedy for theft in the Quran is to cut the hands off a thief. I mean, that is the unambiguous injunction. It's not an allegory. It's not— so the— you have to indulge some kind of tortured interpretive scheme to avoid the shocking fact that the Creator of the universe thinks you should live this way for all time.

Right.

And people like ISIS, I mean, this is my claim, is just that most of what is in these books, and this is what worries me about those books because they can't be edited, most of what's in the books is clearly not the best that humanity is capable of in the ethical domain. Or in the— So, and so clearly, and this is true for morality, you know, most pressingly, but it's true for science, it's true for economics, it's true for anything else that we are wise to pay attention to. It's like slavery is condoned in the Bible, in both testaments, and in the Quran. There's no getting away from that. Now you can say, well, it's not the central thrust of any of these books. But if you go to the books and try to figure out what the creator of the universe wants with respect to the owning and needless immiseration of other people, right, he expects you to keep slaves, and he's told you how to do it. You know, don't knock out their eyes and their teeth. Don't take— if you're a Muslim, don't take other Muslims as slaves. But it's not an accident that the people who joined ISIS thought that it was absolutely kosher to take slaves, to take sex slaves. And I mean, they were even— their use of their sex slaves was conducted as a sacrament. And that's not an accident. I mean, they were praying over the Yazidi girls before they raped them. So, this is not unlike What many people expect. It's not that this doctrine is being used as a pretext for people who would otherwise do terrible things, like take sex slaves and rape them, and so there's no net damage being done here by this belief system. No, these are, I would argue, in many cases, psychologically normal people who are simply convinced of the absolute veracity of these ideas. And in this case, the perfect example of Muhammad as the most self-actualized human who's ever existed. And what did Muhammad do? Muhammad took sex slaves. So, and then once you grant that, and this is where there's a tension between how we pursue the same goals, like as we've just established, we have many of the same goals. But insofar as you make religion look palatable, insofar as you suggest to your audience that they can have their religious cake and eat it too, they can have their reason, they can have their respect for science, they can have a 21st-century worldview, but they can also hold on to everything they love in Christianity or fear to lose— and it's undoubtedly mostly Christianity, but but whatever, any religion. My concern is that it keeps us shackled to these Iron Age philosophies and these Iron Age conversations where we should be having a 21st century conversation about everything, ethics included.

↳ P10 raised again here · first raised at U-053

↳ P8 raised again here · first raised at U-049

Okay, okay, so— So, but I want to ask you a little bit about your feeling about—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Moderator cuts in to advance own argument · Bret Weinstein

Wait, wait, before you move on, I want to get each of you to clarify something so that we know where we are. So, Sam, you said the problem here is that the dogma can't be updated, right? That slavery is with us permanently because it's written into the dogma. But clearly, most of the traditions in which it's written into the holy book don't practice slavery, and the people who who adhere to these belief systems wouldn't defend slavery. So clearly there is the capacity for an update mechanism.

Well, no, but not really. I mean, they've been forced, they've had it beaten out of them, right? I mean, we fought a civil war in the US to get rid of slavery.

It was Christians who abolished slavery in England, though.

↳ P11 raised again here · first raised at U-057

What was that?

It was Christians who were at the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery in England.

Well, yeah, I mean, there are Christians on either side of everything. I mean, there's no one else to do the job.

No, right, but that's the update mechanism.

↳ P11 raised again here · first raised at U-057

Yes, but it was specifically Christians who were using their Christian belief as a justification for eradicating slavery.

Yes, but the problem was they were actually on the losing side of a theological argument, and it would be much better, I think you would agree, if one of the Ten Commandments had been, don't keep slaves.

You know?

I mean, there's certainly one we could swap out for that one, and so that way it would have been much easier for Christians to have fought against slavery. And it's much harder for Muslims, frankly, to fight against it now. The problem is that— there's a point I made, I think, in my first book— is that the doors leading out of this kind of fundamentalism don't open from the inside. They get bashed open from the outside. And it's humanism, and it's secularism, and it's scientific rationality. that has exerted such pressure, such winnowing pressure on Christianity, you know, now for multiple centuries, that that's why we're not encountering the Christians of the 14th century on a daily basis. And we are essentially encountering Muslims of the 14th century, not only in the Middle East, but in our own societies, in terms of their intuitions about how we should all live, right? I mean, the fact that 0% of UK Muslims think homosexuality is acceptable, right? 0%. There's almost no question you can come up with where we could poll this society and say, you know, I mean, do you think that a lizard king is living in the Oval Office? You know, that— you never get a 0% response to any poll question, right? But If you ask Muslims on the streets of London, is homosexuality morally acceptable, apparently you can find no one who says it is. That's shocking, and it's not an accident, right? And it would be much easier if the book actually said, actually, you can love anyone you want, and it's not a problem.

↳ evidence for the P11 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-058

It is shocking, but I think there's a reason that you keep finding yourself at Islam. which may be the slowest to update for reasons that may be ancient. But I wanted to—

Well, that is a useful—

Well, I can't do it for Christianity. I just want to make the point as cleanly and as undistractedly as possible. But yeah, I mean, it's true. I have the same kinds of concerns about Christianity or Mormonism or Scientology or anything else. And the point is they're all different, and there's no reason to be— Because Islam, to take the case where it's fine, Islam doesn't represent any impediment to stem cell research, right? Because they just don't think that the fertilized ovum is immediately ensouled. They wait 40 days or 80 days or 120 days depending on what hadith you believe. So it's just that never came up when we were all complaining about how religion, in this case Orthodox Judaism and Christianity, in the States was posing an impediment to embryonic stem cell research.

Okay, hold on. I wanted to ask you a clarifying question too.

Yeah, sure.

Same level. Would you agree that there are things written into these religious texts that are unambiguously unacceptable viewed through a modern lens, and not because the texts are so complicated that we have misunderstood something, but there are things that are just written in there that we now understand to be wrong?

+5 R-4.2 · Deferral of the moderator's direct question · Jordan Peterson

Okay, so, so the first thing— the first thing I would say is that we have to be very careful about equating all the religious texts, and I do actually think that you are careful about that, but that's something we can have a discussion about a little bit later.

Yeah, I agree with you there.

So, so, because, you know, for a lot of my life, I was, I would say, more interested in the universal truths expressed in religious belief across different cultures, but I've become more and more aware of the important distinctions between the religious cultures, maybe in the last 10 years. So it isn't clear to me that you can just throw all religious dictum— dicta in the same bucket, and there may be— there's complex reasons for that. So, you know, and one question which you kind of sent at Sam already is, do you see a hierarchy of unacceptability between different religious doctrines. I mean, and I would say you acted— okay, fine, fine, fine. So, okay, now, but here, here's an interesting issue, and, and I think we're starting to zero in on— we've covered what we agree on, a lot of it, but there's another—

Did you answer Brett's question? Because I think—

Oh, sorry, sorry, I answered the first half of it, but the second part is I think that— this is where I'm going to sound like a postmodernist, which I really hate. I would say sentence by sentence, yes, you're correct. Paragraph by paragraph, perhaps. But here's the problem with complicated texts, especially ones that actually constitute narratives. So, imagine this. So, imagine you're at a movie, and it's a movie with a twist at the end. And so, the entire movie is set up to make you think one particular way, and to have one set of experiences, but when you put the twist in at the end, it changes the entire structure. And so, this is the— one of the complex problems that actually led to the rise of postmodern interpretations of literature, which is that if you take a complex narrative, there's a very large number of ways of interpreting it, and it isn't self-evident which of those are canonically correct. And we can deal with that horrible issue later, but, but it's a good objection, and it's true. And what it does is it makes these sorts of things quite complicated, because in the— the Bible is a series of books, and they had influence on one another, and they were sequenced with a very complex editorial process. And And there's actually a developmental narrative that links all the chapters together. And what that means— this is at least— I'm going to speak from the perspective, or in terms of analysis of the Christian Bible. What it means is that you have to read the beginning as if it's also influenced by the end, which is what, by the way, and in case you think that I'm weaseling around here, And I'm not, is that that's exactly what you do every time you read any story, any work of fiction. You say, well, you're not claiming that the Bible is a work of fiction. It's like, don't, don't— that's just a cheap objection. That's not my point. My point is that it's a narrative, and everything in a narrative is conditioned by all the rest of the things in the narrative. And it is well known, like if you're a screenwriter, for example, there's an old dictum I don't remember who generated it. It was one of the great Russians, that if there's a rifle lying on a table in the first scene, that it better be used by the end of the second scene, or it shouldn't have been there at all. So there's this coherence.

↳ evidence for the P13 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-074

I'm looking for the rifle in your answer to this question, though, because I want it to be used.

My point is, is that it isn't reasonable to take a single sentence out of a coherent narrative and say that stands on its own, or it's rarely reasonable Because you have to interpret the word in the sentence, and the sentence in the paragraph, and the paragraph in the chapter, and the chapter in the context of the entire book. You have to do that. Now, you could object, and reasonably so, that there are some sentences that are so blatant that you can't use context to— to, what, paraphrase them, let's say. But I think you also have to give the devil its due. The Christian Bible is a developmental narrative. And the beginning has to be read in light of the end. And that's a— is it a fact?

↳ P14 raised again here · first raised at U-078

Well, so what does that do to Moses's laws of war? This is not a narrative. This is instructions about what to do when you invade a foreign land. If you intend to take over that land, you kill everybody, right? There are other rules in there about killing husbands and taking the wives for themselves.

+3 C-1.2 · Concedes the Old Testament is brutal · Jordan Peterson

Yeah, the Old Testament's a brutal document.

Absolutely brutal. And so my point would be, I don't know that reading that portion in light of the end, even if you call the end the New Testament, I don't know that it changes Moses's laws of war and their acceptability when you know what the context is.

↳ P15 raised again here · first raised at U-081

↳ evidence for the P14 verdict on Bret Weinstein · ruling prints at U-081

Well, hypothetically, if you take the New Testament seriously, it does, because it's a document that supersedes it. And I think there's actually technical reasons why it supersedes it.

But it doesn't supersede it on every point. I mean, this is the problem. Slavery is a very straightforward case because clearly the Bible thumpers of the South who were defending slavery with reference to the text felt they were on firm ground. And I would just— I would invite anyone to read what the New Testament and the Old Testament say about slavery to see that they were on fairly firm ground, that the balance of the honest reading was on the side of clearly we can keep slaves.

↳ P12 raised again here · first raised at U-067

↳ P15 raised again here · first raised at U-081

Well—

Jesus never envisioned a world without slavery, and he admonished slaves to serve their masters well and to serve their Christian masters especially well.

The English Protestants wouldn't have agreed with that because, like I said, they were at the forefront of the fight against slavery.

↳ evidence for the P12 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-061

Okay, but this is clearly influenced by something outside the text. And this is— again, you're making this harder than it is, and my concern is why?

Well, I don't think I am, Sam, because I think that the fundamental message in the New Testament, for example, is that—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption to press a point · Sam Harris

So then you're acknowledging the Old Testament—

if we—

so Jews are in possession of a book that has some diabolical passages that would be better left out? You're not going to offend me, I'm Jewish.

No, it's not like— look, in the Old Testament itself, in the Jewish Bible, there's also the seeds of the same tension. So, for example, there's a tension, and this should be a tension that's of interest to you, because you've stated quite clearly in your book, in The Moral Landscape, that you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater with regards at least to religious phenomenology. You said that, for example, I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but now I understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble. Well, I'm trying to find the important psychological truths in the rubble. And so— but we have to decide also if we agree about that. Like, are there important psychological truths to be found in the rubble?

Oh, absolutely.

Okay, so then we can't—

But the problem with revelation, this notion of revelation, this notion that some books weren't written by smart people, they were written by God, allows you— confines you to taking the whole text, even though the this text was cobbled together over centuries, and some— for whole centuries, some books were in the New Testament, and then they got thrown out centuries later. And some books weren't in and then got put in. So it's like— it's an all-too-human process that got us these books in the first place. But once they were set, the believers imagined that you're stuck with every passage. And there are passages in the Old Testament that tell you to stone a girl or a woman who's not a virgin on her wedding night, take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death, right? And— or you find—

↳ P10 raised again here · first raised at U-053

+4.5 C-2.1 · Agreement that stoning passages are wrong · Jordan Peterson

We can probably agree that those are wrong, so there's another point of agreement.

↳ P13 raised again here · first raised at U-073

Yeah, but you don't have to read the book to the end to know that it's wrong. I mean, you can get that from the paragraph.

↳ evidence for the P13 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-075

Yeah, but that is what I said. I didn't say you had to read to the end of the book to know that it's wrong. Well, wrong is one way. I said that you needed to end— you needed to read to the end of the book to contextualize those statements within the whole. I didn't say that you need to believe—

↳ P14 raised again here · first raised at U-078

↳ evidence for the P10 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-098

But there's no exculpatory context to those kinds of statements, and that's a problem.

Well, there is in the Old Testament. There's a real tension, and this is, I think, the tension that would be of interest to you, is there's a tension between the dogmatic and the prophetic traditions. And I think to the degree that you're interested in religious phenomenology, you find yourself on the side of the prophetic tradition. And the prophetic tradition has implicitly in it what would you call it, an implicit damnation of those dogmatic, those cruelly dogmatic rules. You see that emerge all the time in the prophetic tradition.

Well, arguably in Christianity. I think—

No, in Judaism. It's clearly there in the Old Testament with the distinction between the moral—

Okay, I was going once again to Islam, but every prophetic— I mean, the notion of prophecy is dangerous and worth worrying about. I mean, the idea that any ancient book contains in it a perfect description of— rightly interpreted, however difficult to interpret it, if you're only smart enough, you could extract from this text a perfect window onto the future, right? And that whole generations of people have lived by the lights of this cockamamie idea, right, that the world is going to end and its ending is going to be glorious.

Hmm.

This is at the center of most eschatologies. It's just that when the wheels come off totally, right, that's on some levels the best thing that's ever going to happen because it's showing you that in this case Jesus is going to come back and throw the sinners into a lake of fire. I've read to the end of the book. It's pretty scary at the end as well. I mean, Revelation is—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no kidding. That's a really good objection, but you know, like, when I did my lectures on the Bible last year, I said that they provided a psychological take on the biblical lectures, and that's what I'm going to attempt to maintain here, because I don't believe that I'm qualified to make fundamental metaphysical statements. But, but you know, that, that, that, that, that, that scene that's, that's delimited out at the end of Revelation, that's a very interesting book read psychologically, because what it—

it's very complicated. I mean, this is— we should talk about—

Well, let me just address that. It'll only take a minute to do it, and I'll try to be succinct. So there's an idea that's expressed in that book, is that it's something like things are always falling apart in a fundamental manner. It's part— it's built into the structure. There's an apocalyptic element to human life. We fail in small ways, and we fail in catastrophic ways. And everything that we have, we lose, and we die. So there's— and societies come to an end. There's an apocalyptic element built into the structure of human reality. And part of what's revealed in that strange book at the end, which is like a hallucinogenic nightmare in some sense, is that the hero is born at the darkest point in the journey. And it's a psychological truth, and it's very, very apt, because at the darkest point. This is also why Christ is born near the darkest time of the year, from a metaphysical perspective. There's an idea there that when things fall apart, that's the time for the birth of the hero. And the hero in Revelation is also the place where free— where truthful speech most clearly manifests itself, because in the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with truthful speech. And so the notion there is that redemption under apocalyptic conditions is to be found in the revelation of truthful speech, which is something that you actually believe.

Well, I believe in truthful speech, but I also believe that you can play this kind of interpretive game with almost any text. This way of thinking—

↳ evidence for the P14 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-085

But then you could do it with the world, Sam, and that wreaks havoc with your value from facts argument.

No, actually, I didn't hear what you just said. What was that?

Well, I said you can make exactly the same objection. with the world of facts is there's an infinite number of facts, and there's an infinite number of potential interpretations. And so tracking the pathway from the fact to a value is actually impossible. It's the same argument with regards to biblical interpretation.

+4.5 R-4.5 · Analogy restated rather than defended · Jordan Peterson

No, we'll talk about that. We should talk about that, but I don't think that's a good analogy. There are more and less plausible interpretations of any situation, any data, and any text, arguably. But the problem is that you can read into any story some apparently meaningful set of psychological insights, which—

But you can do that with any set of facts too.

Well, no. I mean, there are certain things you can't over-interpret to your heart's content and come out any way you choose. My point is that First of all, there are— this is why fundamentalism always has an edge over more sophisticated theology, because the sophisticated theology is, in most cases, inspired by a more and more modern recognition that, well, we can't read it literally because it either makes no sense or it makes barbaric sense, right? So we have to get away from the literal. And the more you get away from the literal, the more you are unconstrained by the text, and you can just broadcast on it anything you want to put there. And so, you know, the literal— there's no question that most generations of Christians who read Revelation expected the world to end in some literal sense of this kind of phantasmagoria. I mean, there was going to be a beast, And it was— I mean, this is, you know, undoubtedly they thought this was going to happen in their own time, you know, under Rome. But this is a, you know, if you're going to go purely literary on any of these texts, you are— on some level, you're playing tennis without the net. You're just— you're unconstrained by the text, and you can do with it more or less anything you want.

But isn't that— Isn't that argument working at cross purposes with your other argument about dogma?

Well, no, because it's always tempting. First of all, there are lines that do not announce that they're susceptible to that interpretation. I mean, yes, you can. You can say, listen, Allah does not want us to cut the hands off of thieves. He just, you know, he meant cut the hand of their volition rather than their actual hands, right? So you're constraining them rather than cutting. Now, sure, undoubtedly there was some Muslim somewhere who wants to interpret it that way, but it gets harder and harder the clearer the line is. And the problem with all of these texts is that there are so many principles. Again, I mean, read Revelation any way you want, it is still a problem that it is perfectly rational on the basis of reading that text to expect the world to end, and for Jesus to be the only savior of it. Therefore, if you happen to be born a Hindu, or born a Muslim, or born a Jew who doesn't recognize Jesus to be the Messiah, you are screwed for all eternity.

Well, you know what, it's a funny thing though. I mean, it's a strange thing, let's say, that one of the things we already agreed on, as far as I can tell, is that The antidote to pathological dogmatism is free, truthful expression, something like that. Is that—

↳ P4 raised again here · first raised at U-030

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Well, but one of the things I would say that's absolutely crucial to Christianity in particular is the notion that the thing that's redeeming is exactly that, and it doesn't matter, so it's universal truth. Now, if we both agree on that, the idea that the free expression of truthful speech is the antidote, let's say, both to nihilism and to totalitarianism, then the notion that that might be embodied in something like the Word, which is truly, I think, the deepest of Christian ideas— how is that not the same claim? Now, let me elaborate it more, a little bit more completely. So here's the strange thing. First of all, I agree with you, by the way, about the danger of flying off the text, right? About as you move away from the text, your interpretation gets less and less constrained. And I think it's also the same danger as move— of moving away from the facts, which is, I think, why you want to ground values in facts. So I get that argument, and I think it's accurate. But here— but here's— here's something strange, is that this notion that redemptive— that redemption is to be found in truthful speech is actually embodied in Christian mythology, let's say, as a personality and not as an idea. It's actually something that you embody and act out. It's not just an idea. And that's why there's an emphasis on the idea of the embodiment of the Word in flesh. It's a very sophisticated idea. I mean, it's an insanely sophisticated idea. So—

Okay, well—

And there's one more thing. Okay, so, look, you've made the case, and I hope we can really get to this, because this is the really tough part of our discussion, I think, is that you want to ground the world of values in something that's true. We could say objectively true, but let's just say true for a minute. And I share that desire, but the problem is, is that I can't see— and you actually state this in your book— I can't see how you can interpret the world of facts without an a priori interpretive structure.

Right.

And this is an old philosophical claim. It's not unique to me. It's the claim of Kant, for example, that you can't get directly from the fact to the value because there's an interpretive framework that mediates between you and the facts. And so, first of all, I'd like to know if you accept that proposition. And then the second question would be, if you do accept the proposition, then what's your understanding of the nature of the interpretive framework? Because I think it's best understood, at least in part, as a personality, or as a story for that matter. So—

↳ P17 raised again here · first raised at U-124

Well, I think our intuition of truth, the intuition that there's a difference between fact and fiction, or fact and fantasy, the intuition that we are in— we live in relationship to a common reality about which our understanding can converge provided we're looking in the same direction with the same tools. I think that is— it's certainly deeper than religion. It's not best captured by stories.

It's—

even if it— even if you could, as a matter of historical fact, point to its roots in story and myth and religion, that's not an argument that it's now, in the 21st century, best captured by story and myth. than religion. I think it is a fundamental intuition to which our sanity, both personally and intersubjectively, is anchored. I mean, to lose a sense of objective reality is to lose the platform on which you can communicate with anyone.

Anyone.

Or rationally expect anything to happen a moment from now. To think that your memory represents something about a prior state of the world and your beliefs represent something about a possible state in the future, all of this is anchored to a sense that there's a difference between knowing something really and just imagining it, right? There's a difference between perception and hallucination. All of these distinctions are born of this intuition. I think we do have— Clearly, we have fundamental intuitions which are either impossible to analyze or can be analyzed with respect to only other intuitions, which we deem more rudimentary, upon which everything else we do as a matter of knowledge gathering and sense-making is built. So the intuition that 2 2 plus 2 makes 4, right? You know, at some point you learn basic arithmetic and you learn what addition is and it's demonstrated to you with objects and you're shown— you take 2 apples and you take 2 more apples and then you have 4 apples. Look, just count them. The intuition that that can be generalized to any 4 objects, right, that it's not just a fact about apples. Right? This is something that we are clearly designed to have. There are places where it might break down, right? It might break down at the quantum level. It might break down in areas where our intuitions fail. We recognize those failures in science and mathematics by recourse to other intuitions, which again are unanalyzable. But so there is just this fact that we do pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and that's not embarrassing.

Okay, so what's the difference between— and I'm not trying to trap you here, seriously not. So there might be mathematical intuitions, a prioris, let's say. Kant identified time and space as a priori intuitions. But I think there's a third category of a priori intuitions that are in fact stories, or their personalities are stories. So let me give you an example. So I'm going to do a quick rereading of the moral landscape. So, because, see, you talk about G.E. Moore's argument of infinite regress. If you claim that something's good, and you equate it with something, you can also ask infinitely why the thing you're equating it with is good. Now, it seems to me that the way that you step out of that argument— and correct me if I'm wrong here— is you tell this— you tell us— you tell a story.

Yes.

I'm not trying to be smart about that. You tell 2 stories. You tell a story about someone who has an absolutely terrible life. They're in a jungle where nature is trying to kill them all the time. And while they're trying to be killed by nature— while nature is trying to kill them all the time, horrible barbaric thugs are making their life miserable in every possible way. Okay, so that's one pole, let's say. And then another pole you identify— and these are hypothetical— Hypotheticals, so I guess they're fictions. That's one way of thinking about it, even though they're extracted from real situations. They're meta-fictions, they're meta-truths. That's another way of thinking about it. You contrast a good life, and, you know, that's a life where the person has enough to eat and enough shelter, and, you know, they have the things that you would expect people to want. You say this is a bad life, and you say this is a good life. And so, and then you say that's— and then you make a side move, which I I would say is that that's an objectively verifiable fact. I would say I don't think it is an objectively verifiable fact. I think it's a fundamental moral claim, and I think that's where you put your stake in the ground. And I would say, when I read that, I thought, well, if you take your jungle story, which you've extracted from a bunch of horrors and compiled, and you take your positive story, which you've extracted from a bunch of horrors, Or a bunch of quasi-utopias, let's say, and compiled, you're 2/3 of the way to a landscape of hell and heaven.

Right.

Well, so then why not continue the abstraction and say, look, what we're really trying to avoid here is hell.

Oh yeah.

What we're really trying to move towards is heaven. Yeah, but— oh yeah, but as soon as you do that, you're in a religious landscape.

No, but my name for hell is— This is very interesting, because, like, you and I were talking about this at dinner. We were talking about this at dinner and how the overlap or lack of overlap between our audiences. And so, like, I just heard from your audience there, and—

You might have heard from the odd convert.

But what's amazing to me is So like, I have to do some work to figure out what point they think you made, because—

Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.

Wait, wait, no, no, hold on.

I said if you're going to produce a fiction, why not go right to the end? Because you did produce a fiction.

You can tell stories by way of communicating certain ideas. I mean, that's obviously— I'm not saying stories aren't incredibly powerful and useful and inevitable, right? It's like we—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption to take the floor · Jordan Peterson

Wait, I think you are. You might not be saying that they're not inevitable, but you are debating their utility and power because you said that you don't need the story as an intermediary.

↳ P20 raised again here · first raised at U-134

So now we have a few doors open here, which I think we should extract the most out of these areas. areas that we've touched and not run on to something else. So, I think there's— to talk about the utility of story, right, which is obviously a fact about the world and about human psychology that you're reading a lot into and more into than I'm reading, right? And the people we just heard from love that you—

↳ evidence for the P20 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-145

Well, maybe I'm reading more into it than you are. I'm not sure about that.

But you talk a lot about the primacy of story. stories, and you are trying to get me to admit that they are— that even I helplessly resort to storytelling to make my points, right?

↳ P20 raised again here · first raised at U-134

Well, you did there.

I think this is a good place for us to— and I don't want us to get bogged down, but I think it's a good place for us to touch this topic of the distinction between literal and metaphorical truth, which you—

I mean, you might want to introduce it, but I mean, because that, in my mind, that covers this Okay, briefly, but we are at 60 minutes, and we had agreed to go an hour and 15 before we start Q&A. So, I agree that metaphorical truth is relevant here. Metaphorical truth is my argument that there are some things which are literally false, but if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you would if you behaved according to the fact that they are false, and so that these things hover in a kind of intermediate space. To call them false is incorrect.

Right. And I hear Jordan wanting to call them true because they're so useful.

↳ P33 raised again here · first raised at U-152

Right.

But you also call— look, this is what happens in the moral landscape, I think. Tell me why I'm wrong, because I'm really trying to understand it. See, I think you dealt with with G.E. Moore's problem of infinite regress by staking a moral proposition. And your moral proposition was, look, here's a way things can be horrible, and here's a way things can be good. Can we accept that this is horrible and this is good, and that we should move towards good? And if the answer is, yes, we can accept that, then we can proceed. And maybe we can even proceed with extracting values from facts. But we have to accept that a priori presupposition first, and you insist that we have to accept it because it's objectively true, and I don't think that's correct.

So let me just get the proposition clear. So my argument is that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad.

That's hell.

Okay, that's— so hell is the religious version of that, but I'm just— you can forget about religion or whether there's a God or anything else. We live in a universe that it admits of the possibility of experience. I'm asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious mind, every mind that can have an experience, is tuned to the worst possible experience for that mind for as long as possible. So there's no silver lining, there are no lessons learned. Everything that can suffer suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can. Now that includes human beings, it includes animals, it includes future AI that we might build that can suffer. It includes beings that we'll never know about, right? So my argument is that's bad. If anything is bad, that's bad.

↳ P18 raised again here · first raised at U-156

Okay, we don't disagree that hell is bad.

If the word bad is going to mean anything, that's bad.

And you can't say That's fine, but it's not a factual claim.

↳ P19 raised again here · first raised at U-155

No, it is. It's a claim about— so I would argue to you, and again, it's hard to impart this intuition if someone doesn't share it, but if someone doesn't share this intuition, I have no way of interpreting any other word that comes out of their mouth after they admit they don't share this. So just imagine someone saying—

But even that doesn't make it a factual claim.

↳ P19 raised again here · first raised at U-155

So again—

So you guys are going to get stuck here, and I think you're going to—

Yeah. No, give us one more minute.

Okay, one more minute.

One more minute, because I don't think we'll get stuck here. Every claim we make about anything, at a certain point, if you trace all the tools we're using down to, you know, turtles all the way down to something that we can't explain and justify, right? This is true of physics. It's true of mathematics. I just said it was true of arithmetic. Gödel proved it's true of arithmetic. I mean, we have intuitions of truth that can't be cashed out by recourse to the system itself. And it's true morally, I would argue, in this sense, that yes, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. And if you're going to say, well, okay, who knows, maybe it's good.

What does bad mean?

What bad means— bad means that—

Okay, again, you guys are going to get stuck.

0 R-6.3 · Procedural cut-off · Bret Weinstein

Let me let you back out. It's okay, it's okay. What does bad mean?

What does—

I agree with you. Hold on. I really think that we're going to go down a rabbit hole here, and we're not going to get out. It's okay.

This is a crucial issue, though. It's an absolutely crucial issue.

This is why you get stuck.

All right, so we're— now we're— we have a mutiny here. We're at war with our moderator. Give us 2 more minutes, because it is crucial.

2 more minutes? Okay. Well, so let me—

I mean, honestly—

By the way, I have a prediction that in 2 minutes we won't be any farther than we are now.

Okay, let's bet. I'll bet you a dollar. You're literally playing devil's advocate here because you don't believe that hell might be good.

+6 R-2.2 · Ad hominem (contesting sincerity) · Sam Harris · low confidence: excluded from score

No, of course not. I didn't say that for a second. I agree that it's bad by definition.

I would argue that anything you would say— if you're going to use the the word bad and good, or better and worse, or anything— make any value judgment about anything, implicit in those judgments will be an acknowledgment, whether you're going to acknowledge it or not when I put the question to you, that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. You can't use the word bad unless you're going to acknowledge that.

↳ P18 raised again here · first raised at U-156

I'm not disagreeing in the least about that. Not a bit.

Okay, so it's built into your good and bad in with respect to every other situation in life.

Fine, I agree.

You know, if you're going home tomorrow and you're— you know, a bus drives by and cuts your hand off, and you say, well, that was bad, it only makes sense with reference to this underlying claim. Well, it would be worse if the other hand got cut off too, and everyone's hands got cut off.

You're beating a dead horse here, man. I agree with you.

So, I'm saying that everyone assumes this. whether they claim to or not.

Okay, okay.

And so to say— and this is how I bring G.E. Moore's argument to end.

Yeah, right.

He says his argument depends on it being intelligible at that point to say, well, is that really bad? Is it really bad? Okay, well, what would really bad be if the worst possible misery for everyone didn't get you there, right? There's no other space to occupy.

I'm also not disputing the utility of your move to bring G.E. Moore's infinite regress to an end. I'm disputing something very specific. I'm disputing the issue that that's a factual claim. That's all. Hell is bad, we should avoid it, it brings Moore's infinite regress to an end, all of that, I agree.

↳ P19 raised again here · first raised at U-155

↳ evidence for the P18 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-161

+4.5 C-2.1 · Common ground · Jordan Peterson

It's deeper than a factual claim. It's just a claim about It's a claim that is required to make any value judgment intelligible.

↳ P18 raised again here · first raised at U-156

Right, any value judgment.

So it's like, it's not an arithmetical claim. So an arithmetical claim about addition in this case is— Now you could say the same thing. You could say, when I say 2 2 makes 4, you could say, but is that a factual claim? there's some way of jiggering the way you talk about facts with respect to mathematics where I could say, well, it's not a factual claim, but it's an arithmetical claim. It's a mathematical claim.

↳ evidence for the P19 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-195

Well, I'm also not trying to say—

I just don't see a need to bonkernize our claims in this way.

Yep, fine. What I'm trying to do is to— what I'm really trying to do, we need— see, the problem I have with your argument, and this isn't— I don't mean that you're wrong. I see what you're doing, and I see why you're doing it, and as far as I can tell, it's laudable. But the problem is, is that as far as I can tell, there's problems it doesn't solve, and there's other problems it leaves unaddressed that don't have to be unsolved or unaddressed. And so, one of the problems is this problem of the intermediary interpretive structure. And you already said we need intuitions to guide our interrelationship with facts. Okay, so we've already agreed on that. So the question is, what are the nature of these intuitions?

↳ P17 raised again here · first raised at U-124

Yeah.

And I'm saying some of those intuitions take the place of stories, take the form of stories. But even more than that— so I'm gonna go after the hell thing again, okay? Because you said, well, it's bad, and you made sure that I also agreed with that, which I do. I agree with that. And then it's a point of profound agreement between you and I. Like, I've spent my entire life trying to understand why people did the worst things they could possibly imagine in the service of their dogmatic beliefs. And so I think that that's not good, seriously. And I'm no fan of moral relativism, so we're on the same page there. Now, but what I noticed when you wrote The Moral Landscape is you tell it— and I'm not trying to trap you— you tell a story about— it looks to me like it's a story about heaven versus hell, essentially. Let me use that language momentarily. But it's also a story about good versus evil.

Yes.

And this is why, is because the question is, what's bad about hell? Now you say the suffering. It's like, fair enough, man, true enough, but not true enough. So in Dante's vision—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Sam Harris

What's also bad about hell, in addition to the suffering?

The actions that put you there, the malevolence that generates it.

Well, sure, okay, but that's part of the suffering. suffering.

No, no, it's not. No, it's not. It's not the same as the suffering. It's not— it's not the having your hand cut off. It's the pleasure that's derived by the person who cut it off. And that is a different thing.

↳ P21 raised again here · first raised at U-206

↳ evidence for the P21 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-206

+3 C-2.1 · Common ground · Sam Harris

That's more— so, but that's part of my picture.

Well, but wait, it's important. The distinction— the distinction is important.

So, for example— But Jordan, my picture of the moral landscape includes all of this. It includes everything I think that— and this is why I don't readily answer to the name of utilitarian or consequentialist, because the way those views tend to be taught, they tend to take as— in the tally of consequences, you leave out the psychological implications of being the sort of person who would have sought those consequences or behaved that way.

↳ P21 raised again here · first raised at U-206

Right.

Right? So I would grant you, and this— I'm explicit about this whenever I talk about this, that part of the picture of any consequentialist discussion of well-being are— it's everything about the human mind and social relationships and societies born of all the individuals living together, everything there that leads to different states of consciousness. So it's like you having having negative intentions towards other people that give you— that produce certain negative actions in the world, those intentions themselves are part of the consequential picture. Those intentions themselves lead— close the door to certain kinds of positive mental states that you don't have. Let's say you don't have compassion because you wake up every morning just trying to figure out how to manipulate people. Well, not being able to feel compassion for other people is a bad thing for many reasons we could adduce. And yet the usual consequentialist picture just looks at what's happening out in the world in terms of the body count, and that's not— it's all part of this picture. We're all talking— Anything that can possibly affect a conscious mind anywhere is part of the picture that I'm painting that I'm calling the moral landscape.

↳ P21 raised again here · first raised at U-206

Okay, so you'll—

Okay, I want you to let me step in. I think I can—

We need to bring you guys—

I can get us somewhere. All right, I'm going to start with you, Sam. Let's swap out the idea of metaphorical truth for something a little harder-headed: heuristics, right? We have heuristics. We use them to perceive the world. They're often highly reliable. In fact, almost everything that you believe that lets you operate has to be a heuristic of some kind. I mean, if you decided to learn to drive, and you got into the car, and they said, okay, well, it's all quarks out there, right? You need to understand how quarks interact with each other to—

Not useful.

Right, not useful, right? What you need are some heuristics in which you can stipulate that there's something called a vehicle out there, and you don't have to be overly precise about what it is, and you learn to avoid it. The heuristics vary a lot in quality. Some of them are really good. The periodic tables are really good, okay? The idea of gravitational potential energy is kind of crappy, right? If I have a phone on a table here, I can tell you how much potential energy it has by measuring its mass and its distance from the ground, but if I've got a hole at one depth on one side of the table and another depth on the other side of the table, I can't calculate it because it's a crappy heuristic. heuristic. Works well enough in regular stuff.

Right.

Now, here's the question: what if these religious texts are heuristics through which most people simplify calculations that they are in no position to do based on the limited amount that they are capable of perceiving, the amount that they understand about the things that are in play? So, they're deploying these heuristics maybe to reduce things that degrade well-being. If it were true that religious heuristics increased well-being by allowing people to actually, on average, operate in the world in a way that increased well-being, what would you say about them then?

+4 C-3.1 · Direct answer to a hard question · Sam Harris

Well, I would worry much less about them, obviously. And that's why I don't treat all religions equally. There are religions I literally never think about because I'm not seeing the daily casualties of those belief systems. So—

But you say that as people get away from fundamental versions of these things, and I'm not advocating for fundamentalism here, but you say yourself, as people get away from the fundamental versions of these things, things tend to go haywire. And so, in essence, what you're saying is that as people—

Well, they tend to go haywire in what sense?

Oh, I thought I was interpreting—

Multiplicity of interpretations.

Right.

Well, yeah, but so people are in search of better heuristics. I think the pressure is some of these heuristics are obviously so bad that there's civilizational pressure to find better interpretations. Better ones, yeah.

But you said that the fundamentalists have an advantage. What is that advantage?

Because if you just go back to the text, and say, listen, I just want to understand what these words mean, right, you get at the first pass the literal interpretation, right? And you're not bringing any armamentarium you've got from the outside, from other parts of culture, to parse the text. You're just trying to— if it's in English and you speak English, you're just trying to decode the words, right? And when it says, if the girl's not a virgin on her wedding night, take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death, that— you know what stone means, you know what girl means, you know what father means, and you're 90% there to an obvious atrocity.

↳ P10 raised again here · first raised at U-053

↳ P16 raised again here · first raised at U-117

I get the horror of it, and we'll get to that in a second here. But the basic point is to say that the fundamentalists have an advantage is to acknowledge something functional about those stories, which I'm claiming are going to be some kind of evolutionary heuristic for living a life? Doesn't make them defensible.

↳ P22 raised again here · first raised at U-221

They have, you know, they have an advantage. It's not an advantage that— it's an advantage, it's a memetic advantage. It's an advantage— ISIS has the advantage when the people who share their interpretation of Islam It's why someone like Anwar al-Awlaki could make YouTube videos that so many people found compelling. It's because it's totally straightforward. The advantage is, listen, there's a lot of people spending a lot of time lying to you about what these books mean and what the Prophet and how he lived. You know in your heart that my interpretation of this is correct. You just read the words, right? And there's a strength in that. There's an honesty in that. There's a— it's just, it's clear when it says sacrifice a goat, goat means goat, right? Like, you don't have to do something else to make goat mean having nothing to do with goat, right?

↳ P16 raised again here · first raised at U-117

It's simplified.

And so it's an asymmetric war of— if you're going to try to make your dog dogmas more and more palatable by importing stuff that clearly was never even in the worldview of anyone who birthed these religions, you're playing— you're not doing that because you want to live even more by God's Word. No, you found some of God's words unacceptable, right? And that's— and every fundamentalist can sniff that out, and they're right to sniff it out because in fact, it is in fact the motivation.

↳ P12 raised again here · first raised at U-067

↳ P16 raised again here · first raised at U-117

Okay, good. So, I think we have— we've got a tenuous kind of agreement that there might be some kind of utility, that that utility might be morally questionable sometimes, but that there is some reason that people would resort to a fundamental, simple interpretation, because as they depart from that interpretation, things get more difficult and it creates some kind of disadvantage.

Well, part of the problem with that would be that as you move away from the text, you fractionate the moral belief system, and you end up with a nihilistic situation. So, as you move away from dogmatism, you move towards the parallel danger, which is moral relativism and nihilism. And so, hopefully you can find some balance. So, let me ask you—

No, no, I want to ask you a question.

Oh, yes, okay. And also, what time do we actually stop this part?

Because it's 10. I just missed the time card, but I think we have another couple of minutes.

Okay.

There's no objective reality to time, I think.

Actually, it's a pretty good conversation we could have. But, okay, so here's my question for you, is if we agree that there is some way in which religious texts carry some kind of value because they allow people to figure out how to navigate their lives in ways that might reduce suffering, reduce the complexity of the choices that they have to make. Presumably, you will agree that that would be consistent with an evolutionary interpretation, that the fact that the stories themselves are functional would provide an advantage to those who were deploying them.

↳ P22 raised again here · first raised at U-221

Yes.

So, here's the problem. Isn't it then also true that those stories are responsive to past environments? And so the claim that these things might be timeless would be suspect.

+3 C-1.2 · Partial concession · Jordan Peterson

Yes.

And in fact, you would expect a spectrum of durability. Some stories would be right in a brief moment and—

Yes.

Okay.

All that's true.

All that's true.

So far, so good.

Well, so far, so good. This is actually, I think, quite excellent then because what we have is a recognition that there is something to these belief systems that has to do with practical realities in the past, and we also have an acknowledgment that we cannot trust in these things based on simple faith, because even if they are— can be certain to have worked at some point in the past, we don't know what their relevance is to the present.

↳ P23 raised again here · first raised at U-244

Right. Okay. Fair enough.

↳ evidence for the P23 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-245

All right.

Okay. So, okay. So, so I That's— and I would say that's, that's 2 things about that. That's exactly why we're having this discussion. And you see, what happens in the most profound of such texts is the idea that the process by which your knowledge is updated has to occupy a position in the hierarchy of values that supersedes your reliance on dogma is the fundamental claim. That's why, for example, in Christianity, the notion is, is that the Word is the highest of values, and that's the embodied Word, and that's the thing that mediates between order and chaos, and everything else has to be subject to that. And I would say that's not a claim that's unique to Christianity. So, for example—

↳ evidence for the P16 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-236

Okay, no, I think, I think because we're being told we're out of time here, so I want to give Sam his reaction to that as well, and then we'll move on to Q&A.

Well, I'm tempted to just ask Jordan a question here. I mean, this— it's hard to know what to save for tomorrow night, but I feel like we've got 3,000 people sitting here who would really like an answer to this question. You say you believe in God. You have been—

No, I say I act as if he exists.

↳ P24 raised again here · first raised at U-288

You say what?

I say I act as if he exists, which is a much more precise claim.

Okay, so then what— but in this case, what— so you act as though God exists, and in addition, I've heard you say that I act as though God exists, that I can't really be atheist.

Well, so far it seems that way. We'll see.

The night is young.

Yeah.

So, in that sense, I'm not really an atheist. I've heard you say this.

↳ P32 raised again here · first raised at U-261

Well, some of you is.

Well, if I were really an atheist, I would be far more poorly behaved than in fact I am, right? I would be like Raskolnikov committing murders and assuming there was nothing wrong with it.

↳ P32 raised again here · first raised at U-261

It would be more likely, yes.

Yeah, okay. So—

That's a big distinction.

I need to know—

You would versus it would be more likely.

What was that?

It's a big distinction. That you would is very different than it would be more likely. Taking the safety off the gun is not the same thing as shooting it, right?

↳ P32 raised again here · first raised at U-261

Yeah.

The temptations laid open to Raskolnikov would be more at hand, just as they were to him.

So, what in that— so, in what sense do you mean What is the God that you act as though he, she, it exists? And what is the God-shaped thing I must have in my life to prevent me from being a real atheist?

↳ evidence for the P32 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-267

Well, okay, first of all, I have to point out that there's no possible way I can answer both those questions in 2 minutes.

Well, it's the same question. I mean, what do you mean by God?

+6 C-3.1 · Direct answer to a hard question · Jordan Peterson

Okay, well, I'm going to tell you some of the things that I mean by God.

↳ P24 raised again here · first raised at U-288

Uh-oh. We do have to get to questions.

Maybe we're going to do this tomorrow.

Yeah, maybe this is where we start. Oh, God. Well, that was a pretty resounding no.

It seems like that constitutes an audience question, wouldn't you say?

All right.

I tell you what. I tell you what.

Let's— Let's do this, but let's be deliberate about time.

Okay, okay, okay. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm going to read some things that I wrote because it's so complicated that I'm not sure that I can just spin it off the top of my head, and so you'll have to excuse me. So, and what I'm going to do is sort of paint a picture by, by, by highlighting different things. So now, I already made one point here. I made the point that part of the conception of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that whatever God is, is expressed in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. And that isn't all it does. It also confronts the chaos of being itself and generates habitable order. That's the metaphysical proposition. And that that's best conceptualized as at least one element of God. And so I would think of about it as a transcendent reality that's only observable across the longest of time frames, the longest of iterated time frames, to your point. So, so, okay, so here's, here's some propositions, and they're complicated, and they need to be unpacked. So I'm just going to read them, and you're— that'll have to do for the time being. So, God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time, as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest of time frames, but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now. So, what that means, in some sense, is that you have conceptions of reality built into your biological and metaphysical structure that are a consequence of processes of evolution that occurred over unbelievably vast expanses of time, and that structure your perception of reality in ways that That it wouldn't be structured if you only lived for the amount of time that you're going to live. And that's also part of the problem of deriving values from facts, because you're evanescent, and, and you can't derive the right values from the facts that portray themselves to you in your lifespan, which is why you have a biological structure that's like 3.5 billion years old. So, God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth. That's a fundamental element of hero mythology. God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values. That's another way of looking at it. God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure. God is the voice of conscience. God is the source of judgment and mercy and guilt. God is the future to which we make sacrifices, and something akin to the transcendental repository of reputation. Here's a cool one. You're an evolutionary biologist. God— God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men. So, you know, men arrange themselves into hierarchies, and then men rise in the hierarchy, and there's principles that are important that determine the probability of their rise, and those principles aren't tyrannical power. They're something like the ability to articulate truth, And the ability to be competent, and the ability to make appropriate moral judgments. And if you can do that in a given situation, then all the other men will vote you up the hierarchy, so to speak, and that will radically increase your reproductive fitness. And the operation of that process across long expanses of time looks to me like it's codified in something like the notion of God the Father. It's also the same thing that makes women— men attractive to women, because men— women peel off the top of the male hierarchy. And the question is, what should be at the top of the hierarchy? And the answer right now is tyranny as part of the patriarchy, but the real answer is something more like the ability to use truthful speech in the service of, let's say, well-being. And so that's something that operates across tremendous expanses of time, and it plays a role in the selection for survival itself, which makes it a fundamental reality.

Jordan, if I— can I just cut in here with one question?

Stop with that for now. What—

so I was not hearing in that list of attributes a God who could care if anyone masturbated. I was not hearing a God who—

Depends on what else it's stopping you from doing, Sam.

Well, sorry, I missed that.

I said it depends on what else it's stopping you from doing.

Well, okay, so it's important to live. It's important to do something other than masturbate.

Yes, yes, which actually constitutes a problem for many people.

Which is harder than it sounds. I'm not hearing a God, a personal God who can possibly hear anyone's prayers, much less answer them, right? And so I'm just wondering what percentage of religious people who would say, oh yeah, I believe in God and it's the most important thing in my life, what percentage of those religious people do you think have in mind a God of the sort you just described?

+3 C-4.1 · Acknowledged uncertainty · Jordan Peterson

I don't know, Sam. It's a good question, because when I go talk to people, when I talk to people online and use exactly this terminology, millions of people listen. So it's not so obvious which— what percentage of people see it this way. It may be that they have the intuitions, but they haven't been articulated well.

I mean, this is the problem. This is what worries me about this. So, I mean, you could do the same thing with the idea of ghosts, right? So people traditionally have believed in ghosts. It's an archetype, you might say, the ghost. Survival of death is certainly an archetype. And we know what most people most of the time mean when they say they believe in ghosts. And I say, I don't believe in ghosts, and you say, no, no, you do believe in ghosts. Ghosts are your relationship to the unseen. That's a ghost. So you have a new definition of ghost that you're putting in the place provided, which I have to say, well, of course I have a relationship to the unseen, so I guess I do believe in ghosts. You know, you win that argument. But that simply isn't what most people mean by a ghost.

↳ P25 raised again here · first raised at U-297

+4.5 R-4.5 · Analogy substitution · Sam Harris

Most people mean— Yeah, but you can't use that simplified argument about my conception of ghosts as an analogy for the propositions that I just put forward.

This is what I see you do. I mean, maybe you have more to say I don't know what you want to say on the topic of God, but this is what I hear you doing with God. You have defined the God that most people believe in, and we know this is the God that most people believe in.

↳ P25 raised again here · first raised at U-297

I was asked what God I believed in, not what most people believe in.

Yes, no, but I'm asking you what percentage— yes, but you, by shifting the definition, you have robbed the noun, the traditional noun, of its traditional meaning, and you're giving— you're imparting to people a sense—

Hey, wait a second. Wait a second, people. What do you mean by traditional meaning? Look, it's one of the elemental claims in the Old Testament is that you're not even supposed to utter the name of God, because by defining it too tightly, you lose its essence. And so, let's not be talking about what the classical definition of God is here, okay? It's a historical non-starter. And there's plenty of religions that make it—

↳ evidence for the P25 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-302

Okay, hold on. Can I check in with the audience? Is the audience all right with us continuing down this road.

Okay. Okay.

Okay. So, can I jump in here?

You're sacrificing your Q&A.

So, yeah, it is at the expense of Q&A. That's what you're giving up, but I think it's probably worth it. So, let me say, Sam, I do not believe in a supernatural God, but the God that I heard Jordan just describe I do not have any difficulty understanding why he might care if you masturbate, and I also don't have any trouble figuring out how he might answer prayers.

Well, tell me more then.

Well, I can tell you. I can tell you how a prayer might be answered.

Okay, but these are—

Well, it's specific, so you could let me do that.

So it'll be interesting. So, I'm not Jordan. We've not talked about this. If I heard an answer from him that actually would satisfy me as to what the mechanism of action might be, that'd be pretty interesting. And if he can tell me what I heard, I think it would suggest that we're not just making up stories here.

↳ P26 raised again here · first raised at U-309

+4 C-3.1 · Direct answer to a hard question · Jordan Peterson

Okay, so, you might like this, maybe not, but, well, it's possible. Okay, so imagine that— okay, so let's imagine that hellish situation. that you laid out. Okay?

Uh-huh.

But let's put the extra twist in it, because one of the things that we both decided, I think, was that you also have to build in the intent into that. So let's say the hell that we're talking about isn't the victim of the terrible massacres that you laid out in the jungle story, but a perpetrator. Okay, so someone who's actually acted in a malevolent manner, truly malevolent manner. Okay? Or maybe perhaps we wouldn't have to take that extreme case, we could say, well, perhaps you've decided that— any of you— you've decided that you've seriously done something wrong. Okay, and that you, you want to get away from hell. You want to make things better. Okay, so here's, here's an exercise you can try. So what you do is, is, is you sit on the edge of your bed, and you say, okay, what I did was wrong. And you have to really believe this, right? So you've thought about it. It's killing you.

↳ P26 raised again here · first raised at U-309

Yeah.

It's killing you. So now you're penitent, and you're confessing, let's say, and you're confessing to yourself as much as to anyone, and you say, I really want to know what I did wrong, and I really want to know what I could do to put it right, and I'm willing to accept any answer that will manifest itself to me. Try that. See what happens.

↳ evidence for the P26 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-317

Well, I—

That's a prayer that will be answered, and it won't be answered in the way that you want it to be answered. I can I can bloody well tell you that.

Okay, but that—

Well, what are you communicating with? What are you communicating with when you do that?

↳ P26 raised again here · first raised at U-309

No, no, that is something that— that is a process that I'm familiar with. It doesn't require any supernatural explanation, and it certainly doesn't require that we imagine that any of our books were dictated by the Creator of the universe.

I didn't say that it requires that. required any supernatural intervention, or that it required the Bible. I was asked to provide an instance of prayer that worked, and that's what I did. I didn't do anything other than that.

That's fully understandable in terms of human psychology and—

It's not understandable, because we don't know where the answer comes from.

Well, we don't know where anything comes from.

+3 C-2.1 · Conceded shared limit of knowledge · Jordan Peterson · low confidence: excluded from score

That's true.

Yeah, okay, so, yeah, but that doesn't open the door. One thing we can know with absolute certainty is that whoever wrote the Bible didn't know either, and there's many other things he or she didn't know, like everything else we know scientifically, right?

It's not so obvious what people know and what they don't know.

No one even knew the brain was involved in any of this, right?

Yeah, but they probably knew about as much as we do about how the brain was involved in it.

But we've already established in some tenuous way that things that nobody understands could have evolved into these stories in some way that would be useful, but nobody knew what they were writing when they wrote it, right?

The problem is that you can— so again, this has been focused through the lens of your attachment to Christianity largely, but Hinduism is a completely different set of stories, right? And many of them the logic, the emotional logic, the psychological import, many of them have the opposite valence from any Christian story you would tell. What are the techniques? The whole notion of, like for instance, the whole notion of good and evil, right, which has such primacy. I mean, you talk about religion being deeper than ethics because ethics just deals with right and wrong, and religion deals with good and evil, right? Bedrock, okay? Good and evil do not have the same meaning in the East. Buddhism and Hinduism do something very different with good and evil.

I'm willing to accept your definitions of good and evil for the argument.

+3 C-2.1 · Accepted opponent's definitions for the argument · Jordan Peterson

No, but I like this. The truth is there's just not even— evil is just ignorance on some level. It's just evil is just—

+4 R-2.2 · Attack on opponent's experience in place of the argument · Jordan Peterson

You haven't met any real evil people if you believe that.

Well, okay, so then all the Hindus and Buddhists are wrong about this. That's a possible claim. I'm just saying that there's over a billion people who have a religious system of stories from which they derive all kinds of meaning—

Yeah.

—to which they're mightily attached, to where we could play the same game of archetypal interpretation and valuing, and yet the cash value with respect to good and evil is irreconcilable. with what you get from Christianity.

↳ P27 raised again here · first raised at U-335

Well, look—

But it doesn't have to be interoperable, right?

Well, but the point— my point is we live in a reality— presumably Hinduism is also useful as a set of heuristics for Hindus. And if Hinduism as a matter of doctrine and as a matter of the interpretations of the heuristics by the devout in both systems if Hinduism and Christianity are irreconcilable, right, then there must be a deeper level of reality that explains why they both work, that can't be reducible to Christianity being true or Hinduism being true, right?

Yeah, that's a— look, Sam, that's a— there's absolutely nothing wrong with that objection. Like, so So, this is one of the immense problems, obviously, that actually leads down the road to the kind of nihilism that you were objecting to in The Moral Landscape. It's like, one of the things that Nietzsche said was— that's very much apropos to this— is that, you know, it's one thing to have your belief system shattered by the observation that there are other belief systems that are incommensurate, that seem to have equal utility. So that's— but it's even worse, is that once you make the observation that there are other belief systems that have equal utility, then it can shatter your belief in belief systems themselves. And then you're in the postmodern nihilist landscape, and that's a big problem.

+3 C-1.2 · Validated the force of the opponent's objection · Jordan Peterson

Or you could just be in a more fundamental landscape that subsumes both of those belief systems.

Well, that's fine. That's fine. Let's hope that that can happen. But that— I would say that's the landscape that I'm trying to pursue. You said that this is— that I've been approaching this, say, from a Christian perspective in this dialogue, and to some degree that's true, but there are reasons for that. But I would also say I'm also doing what you recommend doing, because in Maps of Meaning, for example, because you said, well, what about this problem of multiple interpretations of the text?

You wrote Maps of Meaning.

What's that?

You wrote Maps of Meaning. I wrote The Moral Landscape.

Oh, sorry, I must have missed it.

Sorry.

I must have missed— I misspoke. I'm starting to get tired. But what I tried to do— well, I tried to address that problem seriously. Like, it's a really big problem. It's the problem of multiple interpretations. It's the postmodern problem, is that there's an infinite number of potential interpretations. Okay, so, oh, so what do we do about that? And the answer is, it's something you allude to— I'm sorry— in The Moral Landscape.

Mm-hmm.

And it's part of the basis of your argument why these things need to be grounded in facts. So, because that is part of the answer to the problem of an infinite number of interpretations. In Maps of Meaning, I tried to do what E.O. Wilson recommended, but this was before he wrote his book. I tried to use a consilience approach. So, I looked at multiple religious systems. I looked at Christianity. I looked at evolutionary biology. I looked at philosophy. I looked at neuroscience. And I looked at the literature on emotion and motivation, and, and the literature on play that was very nicely delineated by Piaget, and I tried to see where there was a pattern that repeated across all dimensions of evaluation, which is exactly what you do, for example, when you use your 5 senses to detect something real in the world. And that's what Wilson recommended, was a consilience approach. And so my proposition was, if it manifests itself here, and here, and here, and here, and here, 6 places, and it's always the same pattern, then the probability that that pattern exists independent of my delusional interpretation is radically decreased.

Yeah, my claim, however, is that many of these things don't repeat. In fact, they're flipped around completely based on different religious assumptions in different cultures. And again, I mean, I would just argue I mean, this is— we can table this for another discussion.

↳ P27 raised again here · first raised at U-335

But I was trying to dispense with those.

So, but I'm just saying something as fundamental as evil doesn't run through all these cultures and all these religious traditions.

↳ P27 raised again here · first raised at U-335

↳ evidence for the P28 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-356

Then how can you make the claim that everyone would agree with your description of what constitutes bad in the beginning of the moral landscape?

Well, yeah, no, it would be— it's just not evil in the sense that it's— there's bad and good. There's better and worse. There's better and worse.

No, there's neither universe nor—

So, can we—

There's either universal moral intuitions, or there aren't, which is—

Yes, no, but are some moral intuitions universal? Yes, no, I would think— listen, we are just human beings, right? We're human beings first before we're Hindu or Buddhist or Christian. We all get indoctrinated into the religion of our parents. This is an artifice that's laid on top of something far deeper. That should be obvious, right? So, we're trying to get down to what's deeper.

Okay, so there may be some moral universals.

Sure, I think—

Okay, Jordan.

No, but—

Is it possible that there are some moral intuitions that are highly specific to particular traditions and wouldn't translate over to others?

Yes. It's highly probable because there would be environment-specific adaptations, like the environment-specific tool use of chimpanzees.

Right, right.

Or maybe it's not even the environment. Maybe it's the self-consistency of the belief pattern in question. So I'm—

Sure, I would put that in the broader environment. It might be a consequence of the particularities of that culture. There would be things that— look, think about it like languages. Like many— and this is kind of an answer to the problem that you laid out, which is a real problem. I'm not trying to deny the problem. If you look at— there's a lot of languages, lots of languages. Look at how different they are. It's like, yeah, at some levels of analysis, they're fundamentally different, and at other levels of analysis, they're fundamentally the same, which is how we know that they're languages. And you could say, well, there's a very large number of stories. It's like, yes, there are, but the fact that there's enough commonality across the class of stories, the set of all possible stories, so that we can identify what constitutes a story. And I would say that there's enough commonality across the set of all possible good stories that we can say, well, here's a canonical good story, which is, by the way, what you do at beginning of the moral landscape. Because you say, this is horrible, this is good, we should move from what's horrible to what's good. Say, yes, you've taken a fragment of the universal story, and you've made it the axiom of your moral system, which is what you should do. But the claim that I think is not helpful, even though I understand it, is that that's purely a claim of like, of unmediated fact. It's like, no, there is no unmediated fact.

↳ P20 raised again here · first raised at U-134

↳ P28 raised again here · first raised at U-355

↳ evidence for the P27 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-336

+4.5 C-1.2 · Partial concession that facts are interpretively mediated · Sam Harris

Well, there is, yes. Even facts aren't unmediated facts. I mean, you can't judge something to be factual without presupposing the validity of certain intuitions, like that causes precede events, you know, or causes precede their effects. And those intuitions could be wrong. I mean, we could live in a teleological universe where everything's getting pulled into the future by some kind of attractor, right? And our notion of causation is totally backwards. That remains to be discovered, and we have— we would use other intuitions to make that discovery.

↳ evidence for the P17 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-127

Okay.

So, but again, you do pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that— there's no branch of science or mathematics or anything fundamental, logic, Right.

Well, that's another place we go.

But given that picture, that doesn't render all intuitions equally respectable.

Absolutely.

Someone says, I happen to have an intuition that Joseph Smith saw those golden tablets, and Mormonism is true. That's not the sort of intuition we're talking about here. Your intuition doesn't grant you insight into history.

What we could say, and this would be an elaboration of Brett's point, is that, like, moral intuitions of the sort that you're describing have different zones of relevance. So there's some things that would only work as an intuition in very delimited areas of time and space, let's say. There's a hierarchy of moral intuitions, and the more profound the intuition, the more it works as a universal truth across contexts, just like In a scientific truth. So, scientific truth is more profound. This is why the postmodernist readings of Thomas Kuhn are wrong, is that—

↳ P28 raised again here · first raised at U-355

Mm-hmm.

The idea that protons are real is really fundamental, because no matter what span of time and space that you pick, you're going to encounter protons. It works everywhere. And then, with moral intuitions, let's say, or moral a prioris, you have the same issue, is some of them are so delimited that they only work here and now. And those are sort of impulsive, low-level intuitions, a whim even. But some of them are really, really deep. The ones, for example, the one that orients you to make the claim that you made in The Moral Landscape, that the hellish story is bad and the heavenly story is good.

Right.

I would say that's one of the deepest, most context-independent moral intuitions, which is kind of the claim you make, except you claim that And again, back to my fundamental concern here in the difference—

with respect to the difference with how we talk about these things. To call that thing God is fine. That's a God I have no problem with, right? But that's not how most people most of the time are using the word, and there's something misleading about that, and that worries me.

↳ P25 raised again here · first raised at U-297

↳ evidence for the P24 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-291

Yeah, well, if the claim that you're making is that we're all deeply confused about the nature of divinity and ultimate reality. It's like, yeah, yes, clearly.

+3 C-2.1 · Named a genuine agreement · Sam Harris

+3 C-2.1 · Acknowledged shared confusion about divinity · Jordan Peterson

Well, another thing we agree on.

I also don't disagree with— I don't disagree. Look, I've never said— I've never made the claim that what I'm talking about is like what other people are talking about. I mean, it is in some ways, but I've not made that claim, so I don't see why that's a justifiable criticism.

↳ evidence for the P25 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-302

It's like Well, no, it's a criticism in the— with respect to the very likely effects of communicating in that way, because I see the results of that communication. It's a little bit— I mean, this is going to sound more invidious than it is, but this is the kind of thing that I get into with Deepak Chopra. Deepak and I agree about a lot.

↳ P25 raised again here · first raised at U-297

I think it's more invidious than it sounds, actually.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you're not wearing rhinestone glasses. So if you graduate to that, we'll have more of a problem. But it's— Deepak clearly wants to let his audience believe that everything they're into is on some level justifiable by his reading of quantum spookiness, right?

↳ P34 raised again here · first raised at U-390

Yeah.

So, you know, if you want to go out and just buy a lot of crystals and think they're going to heal you. It has something to do with quantum nature of reality.

That sounds absolutely nothing like me.

No, no, but I think Deepak could say, if I got his back to the wall, Deepak could say, honestly say, listen, I've never said anything about crystals. I'm not selling crystals. I've never said they work. But it's the way in which he's failing to make the clear differentiation. The fact that it takes you 20 minutes to admit that there's— that a lot of the Bible is filled with barbaric nonsense.

↳ P34 raised again here · first raised at U-390

I don't think it took me 20 minutes to admit that.

Yeah, well, yeah. We'll go to the tape on that.

Well, these things matter. These things matter. And—

I'm just saying, it's like you own it.

Look, if you're saying that there's a danger—

If you're in a parish of Yeah. Or in a parish of 1,000, or a parish of 100,000, but not in the parish that has anything in common with the Bible thumpers in my country who think that Jesus is very likely coming back in their lifetime because he never died, and he's going to judge the living and the dead, and there will be a resurrection, and hellfire, and all the rest. If that's not the game you're playing at all, Own it. Why?

↳ P34 raised again here · first raised at U-390

Why are you? Why are you? Why are you all applauding about that? It's like what? What do you mean own it? It's like I already made my claim. It's like I'm not playing a religious fundamentalist game. So what's all the applause about? So I don't understand that. And own it. It's like I was just listen. I was as clear as I possibly could be when I delineated my answer to the question. People say, well, what do you mean by God?

↳ evidence for the P34 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-395

Someone once asked you if Jesus was present.

You want a 1-second answer?

But no.

Well, forget it, man. That's not going to happen.

Jordan, Jordan, Jordan, wait a minute, wait a minute. Hold on.

I think we can actually—

this is a complicated point.

One second. No, I mean, I don't want to end on a note of acrimony, but someone once asked you, whether you thought Jesus was literally resurrected, and you said, it would take me 40 hours to answer that question. Okay, that's the kind of thing I'm responding to here. You don't need to do that if you have a clear-cut answer to that question. I don't have a clear-cut answer to that question. And if you don't, that connects with many other things that we still have to talk about.

Yes, definitely. Yeah, because that It isn't obvious in the biblical account that Christ was literally resurrected, so it's not simple. This is not simple.

No, no, no, but if the question is, do you think he— well, let's put it probabilistically. I mean, anything's possible. I'll tell you that it's possible that he was physically resurrected. I mean, it's even possible—

↳ P29 raised again here · first raised at U-411

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Jordan Peterson

Wait a second. I didn't say he was.

With respect to quantum mechanics. The point is—

+0.5 R-6.1 · Interruption · Jordan Peterson

I said it would take me 40 hours to answer the question. I didn't say that he was.

Okay, how's this for an answer? Almost certainly not. What's wrong with that answer?

↳ P29 raised again here · first raised at U-411

You want—

I think I know what's wrong with that answer.

It's a fine answer, and people have been giving that answer for a very long period of time, but the idea doesn't seem to go away.

Okay, but that's evidence of what exactly?

I don't know. Well, I can tell you one thing it's evidence of. It's a deep idea.

All right. Well, let this be the doorway to our next 3-hour conversation. Sure. Sure. Sure. Because it clearly was.

So, we have 10 minutes left.

Okay. Oh, well then, let's answer that question in 10 minutes.

So, wait. I want you to trust me here. You, for For whatever reason, decided I should moderate, so I want you to trust me. For one thing—

You have been doing yeoman's work.

Sam, I really would like to answer that question, like, but I'm trying to figure out— people seem to think that I'm trying to evade the question. It's like, I'm not evading the question, I'm trying to figure it out. It's a really— people have been arguing about this for 2,000 years. It's like, it's not simple.

↳ P29 raised again here · first raised at U-411

↳ evidence for the P29 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-412

But that's a symptom of the effect of religious dogma No, it's not.

It's partly a symptom of that. It's also partly a symptom of the idea—

The resurrection of Jesus is clearly an important question, but you've raised a much bigger and more pressing question for the audience, which is whether or not God cares whether they masturbate. So I actually think if we pursue that answer, that we will actually wrap this up in a a way that—

You want to end this on masturbation?

I think we owe it to them to. So give me a little leash.

The floor is yours.

Okay, great. How did I end up here? All right, so here's the question. Let's just figure out if we can determine why God might care if you masturbate, right? So let's suppose that we have a story, a heuristic of some kind that stands in for something, and the story is God is watching, he sees you always, he doesn't want you masturbating, so don't you dare. What happens?

↳ P30 raised again here · first raised at U-456

What happens? Yeah. Well, it's— it's a rather ineffectual idea.

You sure?

Yeah. Well, I mean—

You don't think that story prevented lots of people from masturbating?

Well, no, but I think the reality was that you had people masturbating and feeling terrible about it, and you had a whole layer of sexual neurosis that got grafted onto human psychology unnecessarily. Christianity has a certain typology of sexual hang-upery, which You know, the tantrics don't have.

So if I understand you correctly, you are agreeing that a certain amount, a certain number of people will have masturbated.

Yeah, some of them joined the priesthood and raped little boys. I mean, that's all of a piece.

No, let's not go there. Let's stick with the topic. So a certain number of people will have masturbated. They will have thought—

Honestly, it's the same topic. I mean, the taboos around masturbation, the taboos around Sexuality prior to marriage, the taboo around divorce, all of the taboo around out-of-wedlock birth, the ideal of celibacy in the priesthood, all of that is just a diabolical machine of needless sexual conflict and misery.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

But yes, okay.

You have to take diabolical out of there.

How's the whole flood of pornography thing working out for you?

I will grant you that there is some interpretation that takes supernatural principles and magic and otherworldliness out of the equation here that gets you some wisdom in the heuristic. Yes, if you're masturbating all the time, you're not satisfying your monogamous relationship with your wife or husband.

↳ P30 raised again here · first raised at U-456

+3 C-1.2 · Granted wisdom in the religious heuristic · Sam Harris

We don't even need to go there. Let's just—

You're not procreating, and we want children.

Let's just agree that a certain amount of masturbation Masturbation was prevented by that story, which made people fear the consequence of them engaging in it, which would result in, I'm pretty sure—

Less.

Less masturbation, which means that in seeking a release, which we are physiologically programmed to seek, one might end up looking in a more urgent fashion for a mate.

Right. So it's— are we going to enforce monogamy?

No. So look, I'm trying to take you somewhere. I think there is a way that we can rescue some important part of what both of you are saying that can now be reconciled, and then there's a bitter pill for each of you. I mean, that's just the way this looks to me. So if we can agree that this makes sense actually as a fitness-enhancing adaptation, that this story would result in people behaving in a way that might result in them marrying early, might result in them reproducing earlier than they would otherwise, right? Then we can understand it as mechanistic, and we can understand what you said, that, you know, maybe God would care about whether or not people masturbate, because God is a metaphor for some set of stories that gets you to behave in an adaptive fashion. But the point for you then would be that Sam is arguing with reason we can decide whether or not to employ this story at this moment, whether it's a good idea for us to urgently reproduce as quickly as possible, which, for example, increases the size of the population of the planet, whereas delaying reproduction keeps the rate of population growth down and might be a better choice for a moment in history when we have 7.5 billion people on the planet. So in some sense, what I think I see is the religious story itself makes some kind of If you adhere to it in a manner that you are obligated and have no tools with which to question it, then you will miss the fact that at this moment you might want to throw that story out.

+1.5 C-2.1 · Sought to reconcile the core of both positions · Bret Weinstein

But the problem is it doesn't make— and this is a problem with these heuristics in general— it doesn't make sense for the right reason, and that's why it's not a reliable guide given other changes in the world. With everything changing, you want to be making sense for the right reason. You don't want it like— so useful fictions have to be retired at a certain point. Useful truths stay true. I mean, if you're— because they're based on your engagement with reality. And so to take your point about pornography, which I think is totally valid, you could have a completely rational conversation in terms of human psychology and sociology and what you want society to look like about the corrosive nature of pornography. Pornography, right? That's not— you don't have to be a Victorian prude to worry that there might be something wrong with the infinite availability of pornography to 13-year-olds and above, right? I mean, that's— I don't know what generation of human beings we're raising in the current environment. It's, you know, it's quite worrisome, actually. But again, you don't have to invoke mythology to do that, and I would say the temptation to invoke mythology is to say, well, you actually, you know—

↳ evidence for the P30 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-449

↳ evidence for the P33 verdict on Sam Harris · ruling prints at U-153

So how do you do it?

Poseidon really gets pissed off when you masturbate.

↳ P31 raised again here · first raised at U-475

How do you do it? How do you do it? We don't have a mechanism. We have no mechanism for controlling that.

You talk about the effects on human relationships and your own mind and your own intention and the way you view other people and what you're doing.

Sam, that barely works for sex ed. It barely works for condom education.

What was that?

It barely works. Like, those sorts of educational interventions to stop that kind of fundamental behavior have very little effect. People aren't nearly as amenable to behavioral changes as a consequence of rational educational interventions as you might hope. I mean, and that's part and parcel of a very broad clinical literature.

↳ evidence for the P30 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-460

They're not as amenable to dogmatic intrusions either. I mean—

Yeah, they are, and that might be a problem, and there are problems with that.

Well, no, because they're— again, This is just—

Like the terror of God and the 6 ways.

This is all going in— the problem is that this— even if you could make the case that a dogmatic attachment to one or another religion was better, all things considered, than being secular, truly secular and truly rational, right? vulnerable. It's vulnerable to every next thing we find out. I mean, that's why it's like you could have said, if you go back, you know, 200 years before the germ theory of disease, you could have said, well, all of these dietary taboos and taboos around, you know, hand washing and foot washing, it's actually very wise. The wisdom of the germ theory of disease was sort of built into our scripture, and people were surviving. There was a kind of differential level of survival based on those who really adhered to these practices and those who didn't, okay, but it— one, it's blind to the actual variables, like there's nothing special about shellfish necessarily, or there's nothing special about pork necessarily, or whatever the example is. And once you get the actual variables in hand, then the whole edifice comes crashing down, and then you really just want to understand the variables that work.

↳ P31 raised again here · first raised at U-475

Right. But look, I don't know if the whole edifice comes crashing down, and it isn't clear to me that you want to claim that, because one of the things you did say in The Moral Landscape, and I think this is associated with your interest in spirituality, is that there is some baby mixed in with the bathwater. And the question is, how do we distill that out?

Yeah.

And the objections that you're raising are the objections that are, look how difficult it is to do the distillation. It's like, yeah, absolutely, man. And it's not like I'm a foe of the Enlightenment. I think you Enlightenment types, and I put Pinker in the same camp, radically overestimate the degree to that was a cause à suivre. It's like everyone was barbaric and superstitious until 1750, and some miracle occurred, and now we all became enlightened. Like, there was a lengthy developmental history of that.

+7.5 R-1.1 · Caricature of the rationalist position · Jordan Peterson · low confidence: excluded from score

Clearly, we all haven't. I mean, hence our complaining about the problem. Most of the world hasn't had the Enlightenment yet on some level.

True. Look, I'm no foe to the Enlightenment, but I think that it had a lengthy developmental history that is radically underplayed by the people who ground it purely in rationality.

It's clearly still developing. My point is we should be able to agree that having a worldview guided by a continuous honest engagement with reality, insofar as we can apprehend it, is better than having a worldview solidified or anchored to unchanging ideas that were born of people who had none of our present tools, none of our present insights into anything?

+4.5 C-1.2 · Conceded reality-tracking applies in some cases · Jordan Peterson

Well, it depends on the principles. It depends on the principles. Just like I would say, there are situations where that clearly applies, but I think there are broad principles, and again, we should probably stop with this, I think.

Yep, we're about there.

Because I'm starting to get tired. I'm sure everyone else in here is starting to get tired. Well, I'm starting to get tired anyways. And I mean, there are principles, there are higher-order principles of the sort that I described that you also appear to rely on in the moral landscape, the idea of these profound moral intuitions.

Yeah.

And so that's what I'm after, is what are these profound moral intuitions and what is their source? And like, I'm also perfectly willing to make the claim, and have in fact in detail, that these moral intuitions— see, this is a place where we differ a little bit. It's like, and maybe we can go here tomorrow night. See, it seems to me that You— for you, for you, your argument is the facts are laying out there, and you can extract out value from them. And, and we already described why you want to do that, because you want to at least not move into the nihilistic direction, and you want to ground them in some sort of reality. It's like, fair enough. But the thing is, is that the facts as they are have been around for a very, very, very, very long time, right? Let's say 3.5 billion years.

Yeah.

the entire expanse of life. And it's the operation of those facts on life that has produced the a priori implicit interpretive structures that guide our interaction with the facts. And those a priori implicit structures that have emerged out of this evolutionary course have a structure that mediates between us and the facts that cannot be derived from the facts at hand. And so, so then the question is, what is that structure? And it's in both of our interests to get that right, because you use that as the source of moral intuition. It's like, right, agreed. That's the source of moral intuition. So—

↳ P17 raised again here · first raised at U-124

↳ evidence for the P31 verdict on Jordan Peterson · ruling prints at U-476

Clearly, we need to table this for tomorrow night, but that's a good— Yeah, guys, I'm just gonna interrupt you. You guys, let's give Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Bret Weinstein a huge hand. Let's go!