<h1>𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐩𝐬.𝐢𝐨 𝐯𝟎.𝟑𝟒</h1> > [! info] Preface > > This is a homebrew, best-effort, D.I.Y. attempt to understand *Maps of Meaning* from the philosophical perspective. This involves putting the book in context, making its assumptions more explicit, and consolidating it around a single golden thread. > > The structure is as follows: > > 1. Introduce the hidden assumptions framework, which is a tool to help navigate paradigm shifts. > 2. Provide a compressed, selective interpretation of the Western philosophical tradition, to establish background context for what follows. > 3. Explain the problems with the tradition's starting assumptions, and how they culminate in the frame problem. > 4. Provide an alternative set of starting assumptions, i.e., those which underpin *Maps of Meaning*. > 5. Retell the core ideas of the book, reorganized explicitly around the concept of *categorization*. > > I have no formal education in philosophy or psychology. No guarantees as to accuracy. > > A downloadable PDF version is available [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SwN0jd6TqJWSMyDqkkk3bx8f3CuS5e3s/view). > > For more information, see the [[About this project|about page]]. > > *Last updated: 10/11/2024* # Table of Contents - [[#Introduction|Introduction]] - [[#The world of meaning I|The world of meaning I]] - [[#The world of objects|The world of objects]] - [[#The frame problem|The frame problem]] - [[#The world of meaning II|The world of meaning II]] - [[#Chaos, Order, Logos|Chaos, Order, Logos]] - [[#Chaos, Order, Logos#Chaos: the unknown|Chaos: the unknown]] - [[#Chaos, Order, Logos#Order: the known|Order: the known]] - [[#Chaos, Order, Logos#Logos: the knower|Logos: the knower]] - [[#Archetypes of response to the unknown|Archetypes of response to the unknown]] - [[#Archetypes of response to the unknown#The hero|The hero]] - [[#Archetypes of response to the unknown#The adversary|The adversary]] - [[#Conclusion|Conclusion]] - [[#References|References]] # Introduction <h5>Hidden assumptions & reification</h5> We all have assumptions (presuppositions, preconceptions, beliefs, axioms) built into our everyday actions, perceptions, and thoughts, whether we realize it or not (Slife & Williams, 1995). Karl Jaspers (1951) said: > "There is no escape from philosophy. The question is only whether a philosophy is conscious or not, whether it is good or bad, muddled or clear. Anyone who rejects philosophy is himself unconsciously practicing a philosophy." **Hidden assumptions** are therefore invisible but dogmatic (implicit; unconscious; axiomatic; taken on faith as absolute truth) assumptions about "the way reality really is"; patterns that we ostensibly *must* search for in experience. This is the fallacy of **reification**, closely related to psychological projection. Jung called it the "spirit of the times": what's implicitly accepted by everyone is reified (hardened; made real) into what's really, actually right and true. To the extent that alternatives are even recognized, they are typically seen as "crackpot" or "crazy". Paradoxically, the deeper (more influential & important) an assumption is, the more invisible it tends to be. Wittgenstein (1953) said: > "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful." <h5>Critical thinking</h5> The method of **critical thinking** is the process of unpacking and challenging hidden assumptions that exist in our own action, thought, or perception (Slife & Williams, 1995). It comprises four steps: 1. Bring the hidden assumption to light by describing it (make it explicit; bring it into consciousness; un-abstract it). 2. Describe the problems with it. 3. Contrast it with at least one alternative assumption, and explain the implications of the alternative. 4. If we like the alternative, implement it in our own lives. If it works, then practice it until it is mastered (once again made implicit; re-abstracted into unconscious habit) — but this time, *chosen consciously*. <h5>Categorization: the meta-problem</h5> The current "meaning crisis" is a result of troublesome, reified, hidden assumptions. And the root cause is *so* fundamental that it's almost entirely invisible: our assumptions about ***categorization*** (or nearly the same thing, perception or abstraction). Categorization—what makes a thing what it is—is as fundamental as it gets. And *Maps of Meaning* is a book about categorization. # The world of meaning I Before the ancient Greeks, man lived in a much more fluid (uncategorized; unabstracted; undifferentiated) theistic universe in which there was limited or even no separation between subject & object. And the farther back you go, the more true this was. This is what Peterson alternately calls the **"world of meaning",** "world of value", "world of religion", "world of action", "world of experience", or "world of myth". Jung would associate it with unconsciousness. This was not a place of things. Rather, it was a place to *act*. Humans began to make sense of this chaotic world by representing it in primitive forms of abstraction. At first, non-linguistically (e.g., mimicry, image, ritual). Later, by telling *stories* about it. These symbols and myths functioned as pragmatic guides to action. The fundamental narrative structure that emerged from this process was the **hero myth or "monomyth"**. In a hero myth, a protagonist goes on an exploratory adventure, faces an antagonist, prevails, is transformed & transforms the world, and is rewarded. Peterson says that the oldest great story we know of is the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma elish — a hero myth. In this way, man's world gradually became more differentiated (categorized; abstracted). <h5>The sacred & profane</h5> In Mircea Eliade's book *The Sacred and The Profane*, Eliade describes a pattern that repeats in the mythology of primitive man. In this pattern, the **"profane"** is the non-religious realm of life in which man normally dwells — the everyday realm of the particular. By contrast, the **"sacred"** is a higher, religious realm, said to *break through when man is in the process of sacralizing/exploring new and unknown territory* — considered equivalent to repeating the original act of creation that brought the cosmos into being. The experience of the sacred is the experience of the numinous (mysterium tremendum et fascinans): awe and terror, simultaneously — the experience of the absolute. Eliade (1959) says: > ". . . religious man assumes a particular and characteristic mode of existence in the world and, despite the great number of historico-religious forms, this characteristic mode is always recognizable. Whatever the historical context in which he is placed, *homo religiosus always believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it* <u>real</u>." # The world of objects Ancient Greek philosophy (~626-322 BC) was the West's major transition point from myth to rationality. Or, as Jung would put it, a period of rapid growth of consciousness out of the unconscious (i.e., ability to categorize; abstract; differentiate; separate). The Greeks got the idea that the cosmos might be rationally comprehensible. Humans might be able to discover *reasons why* things happened, rather than chalking it up to the whims of the gods. It was the single greatest step out of the mythological "world of meaning" that had ever occurred. <h5>Plato & Aristotle</h5> **Plato** (424-348 BC), the father of Western philosophy, had a theory of metaphysics or ontology (theory of the fundamental categories, nature, or essence of the <u>real</u>; of reality; of that which exists; of that which *is*; of that which you explain everything else in terms of). Plato said that the changing natural world knowable by the senses—what he called the realm of *Becoming*—was too unstable to provide real knowledge. To overcome this problem, he proposed the existence of an unchanging (permanent; timeless) realm of *Being*, ostensibly filled with the universal categories of thought. These universals comprised a hierarchy of eternal Ideas said to be directly accessible by the mind. For example: the Idea of the Bird, the Idea of the Chair, the Idea of Justice, etc. Plato said that the actual objects and particulars here in the earthly realm of Becoming are only lesser, shadowy imitations of the real Ideas that reside in the otherworldly realm of Being. The absolute, abstract Ideas are what give particular things their conceptual identity, and thus to mentally apprehend the Ideas themselves is to *know the real*. Thus, Plato raised the classic philosophical question of appearance vs. reality: ![[Flammarion.jpg|400]] Plato claimed that we knew the Ideas in a past life, but upon birth we forgot them. One must therefore recall them by a sort of dialectical mental climbing up the hierarchy of Ideas (the theory of recollection). In the Parable of the Cave, Plato describes how the philosopher must turn away from the shadows on the cave wall (Becoming) and emerge to see the sun (Being) — and only then can he come to recollect the highest idea of all: the Idea of the Good. **Aristotle** (384-322 BC), Plato's #1 student, preferred the concrete, everyday realm of Becoming over the non-empirical realm of Being, but he still tried to account for both. He had a theory of four causes — factors that are responsible for making a thing what it is. For example, the causes of a house: - **Material cause:** the matter that the thing is made of, e.g., brick. - **Efficient cause:** the step-by-step creation of the thing over time, e.g., construction. - **Formal cause:** the essential pattern or identity of the thing, e.g., a blueprint. - **Final cause:** the purpose of the thing, e.g., a shelter. So, material & efficient causes pertained more to the realm of concrete actuality (Plato's Becoming), while formal & final causes pertained more to the realm of mind and conceptual identity (Plato's Being). Formal causes (essences or Forms) were thus Aristotle's version of Plato's Ideas — the universal categories of thought. For Aristotle, formal & final causes worked together: the formal cause or essence gives the thing its identity, and the final cause is what the thing behaves "for the sake of", because of what it is. This is **teleology:** the idea that everything has an inherent goal (telos) that it purposively tends toward. <h5>The Middle Ages</h5> During the Middle Ages (~476-1450 AD), Aristotle's theory of teleology was incorporated into Christianity and prevailed as a psychologically acceptable way of guaranteeing the objectivity of values. When applied to humans, a telos provides a certain way of "being in the world": goals or values toward which we understand we must strive. In other words, teleology provides an uncontroversial, collectively accepted **"built-in" human ought,** i.e., an answer to the question of meaning and purpose. That is, when people *really, truly* believe a teleological explanation, there is no separate problem of value (no is-ought problem, no fact-value problem). <h5>The Enlightenment</h5> During the Renaissance (~1450-1650), Scientific Revolution (~1400-1690), and Enlightenment (~1601-1800), the spirit of the times changed: intellectuals began to believe that during the Middle Ages they had been falsely interpreting reality through an artificial Aristotelian teleological overlay. Now they had stripped that illusion off, and discovered the "real facts", the bottom of everything — the mechanistic, mathematical basis of nature — the worldview of science, or what Peterson calls the **"world of objects"**. Formal & final causes were dispensed with, and material & efficient causes became the sole basis for explanation (theorizing). The **problem of value** thus arose as a separate problem. Teleological explanation was no longer universally, psychologically accepted. It was therefore no longer clear where values came from, how they were justified, or if they even existed. The humanities (studying the world of meaning or value) split from the sciences (studying the world of objects). Fact was split from value, data from theory, is from ought. René **Descartes** (1596-1650) reified this philosophical & psychological schism in his theory of metaphysical dualism. He claimed that reality *literally* consists of two entirely separate & different realms: res cogitans (mind; the mental) and res extensa (body & world; the physical). This was the origin of the modern mind-body problem. The more modern version of Cartesian dualism, which still thoroughly pervades our own "spirit of the times", is subject-object dualism. In this scheme: - the **objective realm** is considered the <u>real</u>, "higher" reality from which we get true knowledge — that is, unchanging, fundamental, and certain scientific knowledge that goes beyond opinion or mere belief. The objective realm is value- and meaning-free, i.e., context-free: objects are objects precisely because they remain the same regardless of their surrounding context. Put another way: the external world is thought to have an intrinsic, pre-existing structure *independent of anyone's subjective interpretation of it*. - by contrast, the **subjective realm** consists of our free will, personal opinions, feelings, memories, imagination, biases, identities, etc. In other words, this realm is about value, meaning, interpretation, and context. The subjective is considered "lower" than the objective. It is too changeable & idiosyncratic to be a source of true knowledge, instead functioning mainly as a wellspring of errors & biases that distort our perceptions of the objective realm. The scientific method is therefore how we overcome the subjective in order to more accurately know (represent) the objective. Enlightenment **epistemology** (theory of what & how we can know about the <u>real</u>) split along the forks of Cartesian dualism, in many ways recapitulating the difference between Plato (proto-rationalist) and Aristotle (proto-empiricist): - the **empiricists** focused on the world or object side of the dualism. They said that we know the world primarily through our objective sensory perception/observation of it. In other words, the *true* source of knowledge is the object causally impinging on the subject. The mind's contribution is only secondary to that. Empiricists tend to reason from the bottom up (particular → general; part → whole; data → theory). - the **rationalists**, on the other hand, focused on the mind side of the dualism. They said that the *true* source of knowledge is rooted in our objective thought or reason, e.g. in innate knowledge or innate concepts. Rationalists often emphasize, against empiricists, that the world of sensory perception (appearances) is too deceiving, changeable, illusory, or otherwise unfit to be the true source of knowledge. Rationalists tend to reason from the top down (general → particular; whole → part; theory → data). In short, **empiricism beat rationalism**. Because empiricism is the primary epistemology of science, it's safe to say that it's the primary epistemology of the West. We now generally believe that *to know* most fundamentally means *to scientifically know objective reality*. And we usually conceive of this reality as *really existing*, entirely separate from ourselves. <h5>The "Death of God"</h5> **Nietzsche** (1844-1900) would later describe the loss of value, cemented during the Enlightenment, as the "Death of God". He predicted that nihilism and mass social upheaval would necessarily follow. He said (1882): > "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" <h5>Key Enlightenment assumptions</h5> Today, we commonly reify the following assumptions (often entirely unconsciously), which are pretty much straight out of Enlightenment thought: - **metaphysical realism**: a "higher", knower-independent <u>real</u> reality or "true world" really exists, completely separate from all humans. In subject-object dualism specifically, the nature of this reality is physical or material, i.e. the objective realm. However, the distinguishing feature of realism is not the specific nature of the real, but rather its knower-independence. So, for example, Plato also counts as a realist, even though the nature of Being (i.e., the Ideas) was mental rather than physical. - **subject-object dualism**: the world is really, actually divided into the subjective and objective "realms". These realms are entirely independent of one another (i.e. fully understandable in isolation from one another) and they literally "exist". Therefore, the problem of skepticism (how the subject "in here" comes to know the object "out there", e.g., by representing it) is a genuine problem in need of a theoretical solution. Moreover, because the subject stands completely outside of the objects he studies, he has a privileged epistemological position from which he can know objects "as they really are". - **objectivism**: the objects that reside in the "real reality" or objective realm have pre-determined, fixed structures and properties. In other words, the way in which they are perceived or observed has absolutely nothing to do with their intrinsic essence (being) and qualities. - **representationalism**: thoughts are mirrors of objective reality, and the world is a picture to be observed by the subject. In this way, the subject is theorized to be radically separated from the object, standing "over and above" it, striving to internally represent it as it really is, by using a combination of his ostensibly value-free observation and value-free reason. The subject more clearly observes reality in direct proportion to his disinterest and distance from it. Scientific knowing is therefore thought to be the general model of knowing. Humans fundamentally *know the world* in the manner of scientists, even if we don't always live up to the scientific ideal in our everyday lives. - **propositional (knowing-that) theory of knowledge**: real knowledge is specifically restricted to *knowing-that* knowledge, i.e. inner propositional/theoretical conceptual representations of objective reality (e.g., justified true belief). Scientific knowledge is thus sharply distinguished from & privileged over pedestrian *knowing-how* (practical habit or skill), as well as from "mere belief" and opinion. - **correspondence theory of truth**: we know the truth when our inner conceptual representations accurately and literally reflect the state of affairs out there in objective reality. Peterson calls this "Newtonian truth". - **disembodied mind**: mind is completely unconstrained by the nature of our bodies & brains, and its essential workings do not depend in any way on the body's physical surroundings. Reason is transcendent (an objective feature of the universe that human minds participate in). Reason is unrelated to or even at war with bodily or subjective functions such as emotion, imagination, values, etc. When reason is operating correctly, it escapes the influence of subjectivity and operates according to objective, precise, logical, even mathematical rules. - **dyadic theory of meaning:** since the objective & subjective realms are completely separate and different from one another, meaning also has separate objective and subjective components. Objective meaning expresses a representational (correspondence) truth relationship between our internal concepts/propositions and external reality, or between our internal concepts. What a representation objectively "means" is therefore what it refers or corresponds to. This is the only *real* kind of meaning. On the other hand, subjective (personal) meaning is though to be completely arbitrary & idiosyncratic and therefore not really real (i.e. epiphenomenal). In both cases, meaning exists in a dyadic semiotic system, in which meaning is "all in the head" and is purely a matter of mental interpretation occurring inside a disembodied, isolated mind. - **faculty psychology**: we are made of discrete, nonoverlapping "faculties" that work together like a mini-society or even a factory assembly line. For example, sensation comes first, then perception, then cognition, then understanding, and finally action. All of these faculties are entirely self-contained & separate from one another, both psychologically and neurologically. - **naturalism**: the categories of natural science (informally, physical matter in the objective realm) are sufficient as opposed to merely necessary conditions to understand the world, including first-person subjective experience. Therefore, the epistemology of the hard sciences (empiricism) is also the correct epistemology for psychology. - **mechanism**: following from naturalism, the universe is fundamentally a Newtonian "billiard ball" physical system that operates purely on material & efficient causes. Formal & final causes are subjective overlays and therefore not really real. This would seem to logically imply *determinism* (necessary effects of necessary causes, essentially the opposite of teleology and free will), and therefore *nihilism* (there is no meaning and so nothing really matters). - **reductionism**: wholes are nothing but the sum of their parts, which means they can be fully understood by decomposing them and studying their parts in isolation. For example, you can understand situations, events, or activities by reducing them to their constituent facts or objects, and studying those parts independently. - **atomism**: the divisions between things are more real and objective than the relations between things. Relations are merely secondary, subjective add-ons to the objective. - **the classical theory of categories**: categories (kinds) are metaphorically conceptualized as abstract thing-like containers, which contain abstract thing-like objects, and therefore operate according to mechanistic spatial logic. They have sharp borders defined by necessary & sufficient conditions that strip away surrounding context, which means that things are either firmly inside or outside a category. They occur "inside" (after the fact of) experience. Mind, which is itself conceptualized as a container, contains thing-like representations (concepts) of the categories of objects that objectively exist out there in the external world. Science is therefore the process of studying these categories and their contents. <h5>Abstractionism</h5> We've now made explicit (made conscious) many of the most influential, yet often entirely implicit and reified, metaphysical & epistemological assumptions underlying our own "spirit of the times". Next, let's ask: **what single metaconstruct can we use to encapsulate the <u>entire</u> Western philosophical tradition?** That is, what is the *deepest* hidden assumption we can abstract out of it, in order to get more "psychological distance" from it, and therefore get a better grip on it? Here's one possible answer: - ***abstractionism***: the hidden meta-assumption that things are <u>most real</u> when they're *divorced from their surrounding contexts* (Slife & Ghelfi, 2019). That is, the assumption that self-sufficient abstractions (e.g. substances or entities) with either *fixed* meanings (on the mind side, e.g. Platonic Ideas, Aristotelian forms/essences, universals) or with *no* meaning (on the matter side, e.g. physical objects, the objective realm, scientific laws, facts, atoms) are more real than the concrete experience that they're abstracted from, and can therefore provide a metaphysical ground for explanation. (Here, "context" includes both objective context i.e. the surrounding situation, as well as subjective context i.e. goals/desires/wishes.) Put another way, we can summarize the Western philosophical tradition as: a search for certain, unchanging, universally correct ideas (abstractions) that represent or mirror the objective state of affairs out there in the "real reality", which ideally span all times and places (abstracted from, or independent of, all contexts), discovered by a knower with a fixed, disembodied (abstracted) self and mind, radically separated (abstracted) from the reality that is to be known. This is very similar to John Dewey's characterization of the Western philosophical tradition as a **"quest for certainty"**. He said (1929): > " . . . since action is always uncertain, certainty can only be attained by isolating knowledge from action." [i.e., radically splitting knowing-that (theory) from knowing-how (practice), and devaluing the latter] <h5>Problems with abstractionism</h5> What's the problem with the assumption of abstractionism? Here are just a few: 1. **No philosopher has ever proved metaphysical realism,** because there is no way to prove it even in principle. Realism posits an unparsimonious conceptual doubling or copying of reality. Just because we *can* construct conceptual systems that work "as if" an external reality exists, does not mean that it actually, literally does. 2. **No philosopher has ever proved that representations represent,** i.e., that phenomena are bona fide appearances, because there is no way, even in principle, to prove it. There is no conceivable property of mental representations that could ever prove that they actually represent an external reality. 3. **Subject-object dualism fails,** because if metaphysical realism fails, then there can be no objective realm that "really exists" independent of all knowers. And if the object side fails, so does the subject side: no self-sufficient objects necessarily implies no self-sufficient subjects internally representing those objects. 4. **No philosopher has ever successfully explained how facts & reason alone get us from is to ought in an objective (i.e. value-free) way.** David Hume's is-ought problem said that the facts do not tell you what to do with the facts, and it remains undefeated. All known arguments in some way presuppose what they purport to prove. Some prior value, which does not itself come from the facts, inevitably gets smuggled into the argument. 5. **The classical theory of categories is based on handed-down, implicit, reified philosophical assumptions — not empirical evidence.** What if there were a way to turn the tables and make categories themselves the subject of empirical study? 6. **Life is fundamentally lived concretely and subjectively, not abstractly and objectively.** Like it or not, first-person experience (the only kind anyone has ever had) is about contextualized subjectivity, knowing-how, action, meaning, and value — precisely what traditional philosophy excludes. In this way, philosophy becomes detached from life. 7. **Abstractionist assumptions leave the role of the subject's internal category/interpretive/perceptual/value structure hidden (unconscious) — and therefore projected into the black boxes of "objects" and "reason".** # The frame problem <h5>Structuralism & cognitivism</h5> Let's focus on #7. In the mid-20th century, **cognitivist** psychology adopted abstractionist assumptions including but not limited to: realism, subject-object dualism, objectivism, disembodied mind, and the classical theory of categories. Cognitivism was a descendent of **structuralist** psychology, which posited that mind is made of intrinsic mechanisms that can & should be studied independent of meaning, context, or evolutionary function. According to cognitivists, the mind is a computer (information processor) that stores and operates on inner symbolic representations of the objects & events in the world. The mind only secondarily adds subjective meaning to these objective representations by placing them into context provided by memory (stored past experiences). Cognitivism is often said to be a rationalist psychology because it posits that the mind operates on inner concepts using rules (algorithms; programs; akin to innate concepts). But, it's actually an **empiricist psychology**, and this is important. This is because in cognitivism the mind is not theorized to be integrally, actively involved in the processing of experience <u>from the start</u>. The rule-based processing only passively follows the perception of independent objects. So, it's still the impingement of the external objects that is fundamentally determinative for the mind's operation (Slife & Williams, 1995). Hence, empiricist, not rationalist. <h5>Adding subjective meaning: an infinite regress</h5> In the 1980s, cognitivists ran into the ***frame problem.*** Michael Wheeler (2010) describes the frame problem like this: > ". . . how is it that an intelligent agent, conceived as a purely mechanistic [i.e. efficient cause] system, is able to home in on just those aspects of all the things it senses, knows, or believes that are relevant to the present context of activity, while ignoring everything that is contextually irrelevant, and how is it that that agent is then able to revise or act on that information in a contextually appropriate manner?" In other words, for a computer to add "subjective meaning" (i.e. a context) onto a stored representation that contains only "objective meaning" (i.e. a descriptive model of some external physical object or event) — a rule (algorithm) is required. However, to put *that* contextualized representation into context, an additional rule is required...and so on...forever. This leads to **combinatorial explosion and an infinite regress of contexts**. It turns out there's simply no way to computationally add subjective context (meaning; relevance; significance) to inherently meaningless objects. The number of potential contexts you have to account for is unlimited. No final **stopping rule** is possible. <h5>Object perception: also an infinite regress</h5> However, AI/robotics researchers building artificial vision systems soon realized that the problem was even *more* serious: the frame problem doesn't merely occur when trying to add subjective context onto independent objects, but rather, <b>perceiving objects in the first place <u>already</u> presents the frame problem!</b> That is, when an artificial vision system tries to discriminate objects from their surroundings based on objective sensory properties, it's immediately faced with the question of which similarities & differences in the visual data are the currently relevant ones (a value judgment, which requires a specifying context). This merely pushes the frame problem one step backward. Importantly, this wasn't just a philosophical (conceptual) problem — it was a bona fide scientific (empirical) problem. Peterson & Flanders (2002) draw out the implication: > "The staggering and as-of-yet unresolved difficulty of solving the frame problem taught AI researchers a very profound lesson: even apparently simple events [or objects] are not bounded in any simple way. Events are simple and distinct **only insofar as their relevant features are framed, a priori, by the constraints of an operative [subjective] context.**" Writing about precisely the same issue in *Maps of Meaning* (1999a), Peterson explains how **nothing whatsoever can be understood in the absence of a subjective frame of reference**: > "Something is a table at a particular and isolated level of analysis, specified by the nature of the observer. In the absence of this observer, one might ask, what is it that is being apprehended? Is the proper level of analysis and specification subatomic, atomic or molecular (or all three at once)? Should the table be considered an indistinguishable element of the earth upon which it rests, or of the solar system, which contains the earth, or of the galaxy itself? The same problem obtains from the perspective of temporality. What is now table was once tree; before that, earth—before that, rock; before that, star. What is now table also has before it an equally complex and lengthy developmental history waiting in “front” of it; it will be, perhaps, ash, then earth, then—far enough in the future—part of the sun again (when the sun finally re-envelops the earth). The table is what it “is” only at a very narrow span of spatial and temporal resolution (the span that precisely characterizes our consciousness). So what is the table as an “independent object”—“free,” that is, of the restrictions that characterize the evidently limited human viewpoint? What is it that can be conceptualized at all spatial and temporal levels of analysis simultaneously? Does the “existence” of the thing include its interactions with everything it influences, and is influenced by, gravitationally and electromagnetically? Is that “thing” everything it once was, everything it is, and everything it will be, all at the same time? Where then are its borders? How can it be distinguished from other things? And without such distinction, in what manner can it be said to exist? Question: what is an object, in the absence of a frame of reference? Answer: it is everything conceivable, at once—is something that constitutes the union of all currently discriminable opposites (and something that cannot, therefore, be easily distinguished from nothing)." <h5><i>The</i> problem in research psychology</h5> Crucially, the frame problem is no mere academic curiosity or research sideshow. According to Peterson (2013b), it's *the* biggest problem in his field: > "This profound problem – the infinite search space for perceptual representation – *looms over all other current psychological concerns.*" <h5>Rationalist cognitive science</h5> The question therefore is: how do limited organisms like us continuously (and apparently effortlessly) solve a computationally intractable problem that even supercomputers can't handle? Since psychological models based on the abstractionist assumptions of realism, empiricism, objectivism, and disembodiment run headfirst into the frame problem, perhaps what's needed to make both conceptual and scientific progress is a ***rationalist* cognitive science**, in which the mind is theorized to meaningfully & actively process experience <u>from the start</u>. And perhaps this will *also* necessitate an alternative set of metaphysical assumptions about what mind and world are like in themselves. # The world of meaning II <h5>The Kantian a priori categories</h5> We can find the starting point of our solution back near the tail-end of the Enlightenment. Around this time, **Immanuel Kant** had tried to incorporate the strengths of empiricism into rationalism, while overcoming the weaknesses of each. Whereas virtually all previous philosophers had put the universal categories of thought (e.g., ideas, essences) into the object, Kant moved them into the subject. He said that the mind comes equipped with universal ***"a priori" categories of understanding,*** such as unity, plurality, possibility, necessity, etc. These internal categories shape incoming sensory data <u>from the start</u> and thereby make the world intelligible to us. Against Descartes, Kant said we don't, and can't, experience the independent object "as it truly is" (what Kant called the "thing-in-itself" or the noumenon), even for a moment. The only reality we can *ever* know — the totality of our phenomenal experience — is inescapably knower-dependent. This was Kant's rationalist "Copernican revolution". Kant called his philosophy "transcendental idealism". This was an investigation into what *must* be the case in order for human experience to be the way it is. In other words, **transcendental investigation was the philosophical method of attempting to make implicit (hidden) assumptions explicit** (that is: the very same thing we are doing in this document). However, Kant made a key abstractionist error: **he conceived of the a priori categories as decontextualized (self-sufficient, disembodied, ahistorical, etc).** That is, for Kant the nature of the body & brain (including meaning, value, emotions) and all other meaningful human contexts, played no determinative role in the construction of phenomenal experience. His original a priori categories were overly intellectualized, contrived, biologically/neuropsychologically implausible abstractions (again: plurality, necessity, etc). He also thought, at least on some readings, that the noumenal "realm" really, literally existed apart from all human subjects. Post-Enlightenment philosophers expanded on Kant's Copernican revolution in various ways. For example, the later German idealists focused on the social & historical dimensions of experience. Nietzsche had the loosely related theory of perspectivism (rejection of a single, objective, knower-independent god's-eye view of reality). But the biggest leap happened in the 20th century when philosophers (e.g., pragmatists, phenomenologists, existentialists) and psychologists (e.g., Jung, Piaget) added **meaning, embodiment, motivation, emotion, and function** back into the picture. <h5>Contextualism</h5> Although these fields and thinkers were by no means in lockstep agreement with one another, or even internally unified, Peterson recognized that they were all roughly pointing toward the "same thing". The commonalities between these fields provides the basis for a new philosophical meta-assumption. This is the perspective that underpins *Maps of Meaning*, and is an alternative to abstractionism: - ***contextualism***: the meta-assumption that what is <u>most real</u> are not "things" themselves (i.e., self-sufficient abstractions like objects, facts, essences, etc), but rather their *contextual meanings*. Contextualism can be considered **a return to the world of meaning, but 'on a higher level.'** Whereas the abstractionist paradigm eventually narrowed down Aristotle's four causes to only material & efficient causes (the two types unrelated to meaning), the contextualist paradigm brings back formal & final causes. And it does this through the construct of ***contexts* or *wholes***, to which the Kantian a priori categories were the precursor. Importantly, **contextualism does not simply discard or reject the abstractionist worldview**. Rather, the abstractionist worldview is theorized to be nested inside (a part of) the contextualist worldview (the whole). Peterson (1999a) puts it this way: > "The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things . . . No complete world-picture can be generated without use of both modes of construal." <h5>Key contextualist influences</h5> Here's a brief summary of each field Peterson draws from that will be relevant to our philosophically-oriented approach: - **pragmatism** (Peirce, James, Dewey): The key idea in pragmatism is that all thinking and ideas ultimately only matter in terms of their practical effect (i.e., their meaning when cashed out in action). In other words: "you will know them by their fruits". Pragmatism is a nondualist philosophy focused on re-conceptualizing traditional dualisms as contingent, instrumental abstractions rather than reified ontological dichotomies. It is Darwinian (evolutionary), in that it denies a radical gap between animal and human cognition, and in that it views all cognition (including scientific inquiry) as embodied and fundamentally devoted to practical problem-solving (adaptation) rather than objective representation for its own sake. - **phenomenology** (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty): Phenomenology is the philosophy of first-person experience & meaning. Essentially, it dispenses with the Kantian noumenon and focuses only on the phenomenon. It therefore inverts the traditional focus on the objective, instead starting from the premise that life is fundamentally lived subjectively (although phenomenologists tend to reject the term "subjective" because they wish to undermine the entire subject-object dichotomy). Like pragmatism, phenomenology is skeptical of explanatory abstractions and instead redirects attention to concrete action & perception. Heidegger's phenomenology, ontological hermeneutics, specifically emphasized that the deepest ground of existence is a *contextual/interpreted relational matrix of meanings*, not a world of physical matter. He said objects are more like "equipment in order to", i.e., tools. Merleau-Ponty was known as the phenomenologist of embodiment. He rejected the Cartesian cogito ("I think therefore I am"), and instead suggested that human beings are characterized by something much more like *'I am because I can'* — a focus on action over detached cognition. - **existentialism** (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger): Existentialism aimed to close the gap between philosophy and life. It critiqued the traditional fixation on the abstract and unchanging (e.g., the realm of Being, essences, subject-object dualism, substances, mechanisms), instead pointing out that the allegedly "lesser", changing realm of Becoming (existence) is actually the fundamental setting in which we live. Philosophy should therefore not be an attempt to mentally escape into a hypothetical "true world", but rather an investigation into concrete existence to help us live more meaningful lives. Existentialism emphasizes particularity over universality, and shares with phenomenology a general emphasis on first-person experience. - **philosophy of language** (Wittgenstein): In the first half of his career, Wittgenstein advocated an extreme abstractionist, dyadic picture theory of meaning: words get their meaning through direct mappings onto empirically observed reality. But in the second half of his career, he renounced this view and instead said that the meaning of words is their *use*. In other words, to understand the meaning of words, you have to look at the *everyday practices or contexts in which they're used*. - **analytical psychology** (Jung): Carl Jung hypothesized that there is a relationship between meaning and psychological health. He studied the history of collective (cultural) symbolic productions (dreams, religion, art, fantasy, ideas, etc., and especially myths), all of which are expressions of what humans historically found to be valuable. In other words, Jung studied unconscious fantasies of value, cross-culturally, over time, in an attempt to find the highest value (the highest meaning) common to all cultures & times. The central symbol that emerged from Jung's research was the hero myth. - **cybernetics** (Wiener, Miller, Luria, Sokolov, Vinogradova, Gray, etc): the cybernetic hypothesis is that "the fundamental building block of the nervous system is the feedback loop" (i.e., learning from error, or as Peterson (2013b) puts it, "the assumption that goal-directed, self-regulatory systems constantly compare what is to what should be, while attempting to reduce mismatch"). - **narrative psychology** (Sarbin, Bruner): The narrative psychologists argued that our fundamental kind of internal representation is not propositional or objective, but rather *story*. Further, stories aren't descriptions of reality that occur after the fact of experience, but rather they *constitute* experience, <u>from the start</u>. - **ecological psychology & enactivism** (Gibson, Rosch): J.J. Gibson was an ecological psychologist influenced by the pragmatists and the phenomenologists. His key insight was that our perceptual systems are evolutionarily adapted not to the micro-level described by the categories of physics, but rather the middle ("basic") level defined by body size and features. This level is made of action opportunities (affordances; tools; meanings; objects viewed relative to subjects' embodiment and desires). He argued that perception is not primarily for objective representation but rather for adaptive action, and therefore that perception & action are tightly coupled. The enactivists had similar ideas, but started more from the perspective of the subject/animal rather than the object/environment. - **process philosophy** (Whitehead): Process philosophy, like existentialism, views becoming (change) as the default state of affairs, and being (permanence) as only provisionally established within that broader matrix of change. Process, change, events, and relationships are its preferred categories of analysis, rather than structure, substance, essence, object, etc. - **4E cognitive science** (Rosch, Lakoff, Johnson etc): As we've seen, first-generation cognitivism was based on abstractionist assumptions that ran straight into the frame problem. Second-generation "4E" (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science brings the body, action, meaning, and the environment back into the scope of study. <h5>Key contextualist assumptions</h5> Here are the key assumptions of Peterson's contextualism (derived from the above-mentioned fields), contrasted with their abstractionist foils. Note that many of these assumptions overlap one another. - **constructivism** (an alternative to metaphysical realism): what appears to be a pre-given, independent reality is actually already a co-creation of the knower. In other words, the only reality we can ever hope to know is the raw phenomenal experience that we construct or interpret — and it is precisely our participation in this construction that allows us to know. The terms "subjective" and "objective" therefore no longer imply an absolute ontological Cartesian dichotomy. Rather, they become shorthand ways to focus attention on (provisionally abstract out) the *relative* contributions of one side or the other. Because as soon as you talk about one side, you are also necessarily talking about the other — and to an ultimately unknown degree. - **embodied mind** (an alternative to disembodied mind and faculty psychology): Descartes reified mind as a disembodied inner realm, but mind—body dualism is false. Mind is evolutionary, embodied, cultural, historical, enactive, emotional, & motivated. The way we think, and the categories we have, are shaped by our bodies and the meaningful contexts we inhabit. In other words, abstract thought is built on sensorimotor and perceptual capacities. Essentially, mind is more abstract body, *not* a separate and different ontological kind. Nor is mind made of discrete "modules". For example, sensorimotor abilities and perception are not two completely separate and different "faculties". Rather, they overlap one another, and are processed in the same areas of the brain. - **goal-directedness**: whereas the abstractionist viewpoint portrays us as primarily occupying a detached, disinterested stance in which we collect objective facts for their own sake, contextualism conceives of us as always perceptually oriented toward some motivated goal. Peterson says: "It is an accepted axiom of neo-psychoanalytic, cybernetic, behavioral, cognitive, psychobiological, narrative and social-psychological theories that human behavior is goal-directed, rather than simply driven." In other words, we are always already applying some way of 'being in the world'. - **pragmatic (knowing-how) theory of knowledge** (an alternative to the propositional theory of knowledge): since contextualism rejects metaphysical realism in favor of constructivism, knowing is no longer a matter of an isolated and self-contained subject passively observing and propositionally 'mirroring' a pre-formed and independent object. Instead, our most fundamental relationship with the world is theorized to be nondual and action-oriented. (Very similar to Heidegger’s “ready-to-hand”, a mode of being in which we are at one with our environment, and interact with the objects around us not as targets of detached, scientific observation, but rather as tools available for fluid use in the activities & practices we are involved in, as if they were natural extensions of our bodies). Knowing is therefore a practice or activity of adaptive problem solving. We know when we can successfully act to transform our experience in desired ways, and correctly anticipate the meanings of things for future experience. "Knowing" thus means an ongoing mutual reconstruction of knower and world (i.e., an activity or process). The problem of skepticism in Enlightenment thought — how the subject "in here" comes to know the world "out there", and how that gets guaranteed through rational epistemological arguments (e.g., foundationalism) — was never a genuine problem in the first place. - **instrumentalism/anti-representationalism** (an alternative to representationalism): ideas are abstract tools rather than mirrors of reality. The referents of abstract concepts are not primarily objects, but rather actions & perceptions. The purpose of abstraction is therefore not to produce objective representations as ends in themselves, but to produce desired, adaptive transformations of experience. In other words, the purpose of abstraction is ultimately the same as the purpose of action. - **pragmatic theory of truth**: (an alternative to the correspondence theory of truth): truth is not primarily a matter of how well a proposition or other internal representation corresponds to the objective state of affairs in the external world, but rather how well it works to achieve a desired goal (predicting & controlling). In other words, an idea is true to the degree that it functionally 'fits' the world (in the same sense as Darwinian 'survival of the fittest'), as opposed to how well it 'matches' in a picture-like manner (Von Glasersfeld, 1984). The typical concern with a pragmatic theory of truth is that it's nothing but a fancy way of saying "ends justify the means". We will discuss later why this is not necessarily the case. - **action—abstraction "dualism"** (an alternative to subject-object dualism): given the primacy of knowing-how in contextualism, the fundamental "dualism" of interest is no longer subject—object, but rather action—abstraction (that is, action—perception/cognition). Dualism is in scare quotes to emphasize that these are just relative and provisional poles on a continuum of experience, not separate, literal realms. And this is not a static dualism, but it is a _dynamic cybernetic loop:_ action is the application of current beliefs in pursuit of goals, whereas abstraction is a pause when error is encountered to rework the presuppositions that guide action. This is Piagetian assimilation & accommodation. (The same pattern is also evident in Dewey's need-search-satisfaction, Heidegger's ready-to-hand → unready-to-hand → present-at-hand → ready-to-hand, Merleau-Ponty's intentional arc and maximal grip, J.J. Gibson's direct perception, etc.) - **triadic theory of meaning** (an alternative to the dyadic theory of meaning): in contextualism, meaning is not fundamentally linguistic, cognitive, theoretical, representational, nor "all in the head". Any of those things *can* be meaningful, but they are not what meaning most fundamentally is. Rather, meaning is a property of a triadic semiotic system, which means that it cuts across subject & object (that is, it's a property of experience as a whole, not just of a disembodied inner mind) and is therefore inseparable from action. We will conceptualize meaning as follows. It is: - *pragmatic*, in that it is implication for action, or re-configuration of implication for action (i.e. re-configuration of the a priori interpretive / perceptual framework) - *existential*, in that it matters subjectively (motivationally & emotionally) and makes life worth living - *normative*, in that it provides a moral ought - *ontological*, in that it is the fundamental "stuff" of experience - *relational*, in that it depends on a mutual relation or interaction between subject & object, as opposed to being a 100% subjective overlay - *teleological*, in that it is leading you toward some end - **value-ladenness and theory-ladenness** (alternatives to objectivism): - *value-ladenness*, closely tied to goal-directedness, means that there is no value-neutral stance toward the world, not even through the scientific viewpoint. Science is sometimes said to be a "value-free" endeavor involving value-free observation and value-free reason, but even though scientists try to strip away their own subjective (idiosyncratic) values, they are still collectively applying a certain, consistent scheme of action & perception (selective attention to the intersubjectively apprehensible aspects of perception, i.e. the epistemology of scientific empiricism). Thus, the scientific method does not escape values. It is value-laden and therefore ideological (the ideology of science = scientism). - *theory-ladenness* is the recognition that because of value-ladenness, the ostensibly raw facts we collect are always, at least to some degree, already filtered and interpreted. There is no such thing as completely objective, uninterpreted facts. This is a Kuhnian (post-positivist) and therefore Kantian viewpoint. - **narrative** (an alternative to naturalism and mechanism): whereas naturalism and mechanism attempt to explain subjective experience (i.e., value and meaning) using the third-person material & efficient cause perspective of physics, the assumption of narrative instead says that life can only be understood through the first-person structure of story. - **purity criticism** (an alternative to reification): purity criticism is map-territory criticism, and it is sought in at least two ways. First, there is a skepticism of received categories (abstractions; interpretations; assumptions), and specifically, a persistent attempt to ground them in concrete action & perception. Second, there is an attempt to constrain philosophy through science. Traditionally, it has worked more the other way around, but it's also possible to critique philosophical abstractions using our best scientific knowledge of evolution, the brain, body, and nervous system. - **holism** (an alternative to reductionism): wholes are more than the sum of their parts, which means they *cannot* be fully understood by decomposing them and studying their parts in isolation. - **relationality** (an alternative to atomism): the relations between things are just as real, and in fact prior to, the divisions between things. Relations are not secondary subjective add-ons to pre-existing, fixed objects, but rather, objects are abstractions from whole situations/events. Put another way, process precedes structure. This also means that there is no attempt to identify any abstracted feature of experience as exclusively (absolutely) an object, stimulus, response, etc., *outside of a defined context*. Where you choose to draw boundaries depends on your goals. It may be useful to consider something a stimulus (cause) from one perspective, but a response (effect) from another. - **the natural theory of categories** (an alternative to the classical theory of categories): Second-generation cognitive science research in the 1970s-1980s discovered—empirically—that our "natural" categories (i.e., the categories that we rapidly and unconsciously use) have a fuzzy structure (with a margin and center) and are not defined by formal logic (Lakoff, 1987). Natural categories are instead based on central tendency primarily related to contextual (functional, goal-directed) meaning & emotional valence, and only secondarily on objective sensory property. For example, if a fire starts in your kitchen, you will immediately start looking around for anything that could put it out (e.g., fire extinguisher, jug of lemonade, pot lid to smother the flames, open window to throw the burning item out of, etc). None of these things are objectively similar, but they all work the same way relative to your current goal, and thus all stand out in your field of attention. Wittgenstein called this "family resemblance". From this perspective, scientific (classical) categories are a *derivative* kind of category, not the fundamental kind. <h5>Meaningful contexts: fundamental frames of reference</h5> Although we could endlessly elaborate on these fields and assumptions, let's instead cut the knot with the following claim: the *one single idea* that ties all of this together is: the primacy of <b><u>meaningful contexts</u></b>. Earlier, I said that Peterson noticed many different fields were all pointing toward the "same thing". More specifically, what he noticed is that all the following constructs are approximately the "same thing" (or slightly different aspects of the same thing) (?): **contexts, parts/wholes, stories, narratives or myths, acts or activities, natural categories, affordances, tools, means/ends, and what the Kantian a priori categories anticipated.** Here are even more "synonyms": the universal categories of thought, the innate concepts the rationalists were looking for, a frame, a structure of mind, a discrimination, a differentiation, a distinction, a unity, a representation of the thing-in-itself, a model, an understanding, an interpretation, a pattern, a chunk, a black box, a Jungian complex or archetype, the Heideggerian "Dasein", a presupposition, an assumption (as in "hidden assumptions"), an action-oriented representation, an object that the subject is already 'in', a theory, a perspective, an axiom, a cybernetic unit, a system, a triadic semiotic unit, a desired expectancy/prediction, an element of self (identity), a hypothesis, a plan, an event, a paradigm, a gestalt, a functional simplification of complexity, a habit, a structure that intermediates between fact and value, a belief, a game (i.e. a shared belief), a motivation-action-perception (MAP) schema, a map of meaning, or a ***sub-personality.*** In other words: a ***fundamental frame of reference.*** <h5>Meaningful contexts: functional categories</h5> What we've called abstractionism is the traditional philosophical search for context-independent, i.e., decontextualized, self-sufficient explanatory abstractions. In response, contextualism says that decontextualized abstractions (e.g., objects, facts, essences) are neither the most fundamental nor the only kind of abstraction. Instead, **categorization or abstraction is most fundamentally about selecting what matters (is meaningful) for a certain goal-directed purpose** (what's contextually relevant), while excluding what doesn't matter (what's contextually irrelevant). When you think about what something *means*, you necessarily think about it in relationship to some larger objective situation and/or your subjective goals — that is just how meaning works. This "natural" kind of categorization is ***functional or context-dependent categorization***. Unlike the abstractionist attempt to pin down meaning as either fixed or nonexistent, under contextualism the key feature of meaning is its **context-dependent mutability**. And notice that another word for context is "whole". Thus, in contextualism ***the fundamentally real are parts of larger (functional) wholes.*** Peterson (2013b) says: > "The objects and categories we use are neither things nor labels for things. Instead, “objects” are entities bounded by their [contextual] affective relationship to a goal. *We perceive meaningful phenomena, not the objective world.*" This perspective has roots in William James's and John Dewey's pragmatic school of psychology (as well as in Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics). The pragmatists' psychology was called **functionalism,** and is an alternative to structuralism, of which cognitivism was a descendent. The starting assumption in functionalism is that psychology (mind and behavior) have to be studied from the perspective of evolutionary, adaptive function, *not* from the assumption that mind is fundamentally made of context-independent mechanisms or modules. This is a contextualist psychology concerned with triadic meaning (what actions the organism should take) over dyadic meaning (objective reference). To emphasize the importance of context for the functionalists: Dewey (1925) said that **viewing the knower in all its contexts is *the key* to doing philosophy**: > " . . . to see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy." And Dewey (1931) even went so far as to say that **neglect of context is *the* philosophical fallacy**: > "Thinking is always thinking, but philosophical thinking is, upon the whole, at the extreme end of the scale of distance from the active urgency of concrete situations. It is because of this fact that neglect of context is the besetting fallacy of philosophical thought . . . I should venture to assert that . . . *neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur*." <h5>Meaningful contexts: ontological categories</h5> Meaningful contexts or functional categories are therefore groups of phenomena (patterns of experience) segregated out through selective attention, i.e. formed by a co-constitution of "subject" & "object" (or knower/known, interpreter/interpreted). To be more specific, the category would be the perceptual or conceptual experience that results from the superimposition of the subject's top-down goal-bounded concept (motivated expectancy) upon the world's (metaphorical) bottom-up object or "thing-in-itself". (i.e., the Kantian constructivist formula: phenomenal experience = subject X noumenon). The key idea here is that **contexts aren't "contained inside" or "after the fact of" experience like classical categories, but rather they *constitute* experience <u>from the start</u>.** Peterson & Flanders (2002) describe this from the Heideggerian perspective: > "Heidegger argues . . . that the phenomenological or experiential world is subjectively constituted, from the onset of perception – argues that the “object,” which appears simply given, already contains the subject. We bring our psychological constraints and motivations to the world from the very beginning of the perceptual process. Heidegger expresses this insight by describing the human being as “the Dasein” (the “being there”) – by describing the individual as an organism that is always and already “being-in-the-world.” The Dasein, primarily motivated and goal-directed, brings a priori constraint to the world. Our specific goals provide us with a certain [interpretive] disposition or orientation. When we are hungry, therefore, we do not “see” the infinite complexity of being. Instead, objects in the world manifest themselves to us in categories associated with our desire to attain food [i.e., affordances]. Our goals therefore determine not only what we do with the world, but how the world appears to us, from the beginning. In consequence, the world is “always and already” meaningfully, subjectively structured, for the conscious subject." > [! note] The ontological difference > Heidegger distinguished between **"Being" vs. "beings"**. What he called **beings** (plural) or "entities", are essentially the same thing as what we've called decontextualized or self-sufficient abstractions. On the other hand, **Being** (singular) is the underlying existential 'clearing' (underlying matrix of contextual or relational meaning) that makes beings (entities) intelligible to us in the first place, and out of which *both* "subjective" and "objective" experience emerges. (notice that this in many ways resembles the Kantian a priori interpretive structure.) > > Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings the **ontological difference**. He said that the Western tradition starting with Plato had wrongly taken beings, plural, to be the metaphysical ground of existence. In doing so, he says that we lost sight of Being, singular. > > When we attempt to explain Being with beings, we are trying to explain the concrete with the abstract. When we do this, we have an **"ontic"** understanding of Being, essentially based on the container logic of classical categories. Ontic understandings of Being (e.g., Plato's Being or "objective reality") reify Being itself as an abstract thing-like container that 'contains' entities, and those entities are then posited as explanations for Being itself. > > He contrasted ontic understanding with **ontological** understanding, which is the perspective that recognizes that beings can never explain Being, but rather that **Being is structured as *meaningful, nested contexts or wholes* <u>from the start</u>.** Peterson (1999a) in fact explicitly claims that **story (i.e. meaningful context or functional category) *just is* the structure of knowing-that memory, neuropsychologically** (i.e., of our frames of reference — of our most fundamental representations): > ". . . [knowing-that (representational) memory constitutes] . . . a permanent but modifiable four-dimensional (spatial and temporal) representational model of the experiential field, in its present and potential future manifestations. This model, I would propose, is a *story*." and Peterson (2018b) says, in the same vein: > "For Jung, the Kantian a priori categories were personalities. The importance of this can hardly be overstated. Jung and the psychoanalysts insisted that the structure intermediating between facts and values was *alive*." <h5>A contextual standard of value</h5> Functional categorization (instrumentalism) implies a ***contextual standard of value*** (which is essentially also the "same thing" as a pragmatic theory of truth): if ideas and objects are tools, then they can be judged as good or bad only relative to goals: **is this thing good enough to act *as-if* it's the tool you're using it as, for this particular task?** For example: is this brick good enough to hold the screen door open while we load the car? Crucially, having a goal (end, desire, wish, purpose) means that you now have a pragmatic (satisficing) way to judge relevance, and therefore a **stopping rule** for categorization. This is a solution that works for finite creatures like us. A contextual standard of value is basically a **quasi-Aristotelian teleological morality in a new pragmatic form**, which flips around Aristotle's original perspective: instead of the formal cause (essence) defining the final cause (purpose), it's now that *the final cause (goal) defines the formal cause (functional category)*. Of course, the problem for contextualist morality then becomes: if a thing is good insofar as it achieves it purpose, what does that purpose have to be to make the thing intrinsically good? We will return to this question later. <h5>The frame problem, generalized</h5> This fundamental equivalence of "meaningful context", "functional category", and "human frame of reference" lets us reframe the frame problem in a much more general way. That is: **the frame problem *just is* the problem of categorization or abstraction of experience <u>from the start</u>.** Peterson says: > "I should say this over and over and over: ***a value system is the precondition for perception itself***." This means that the frame problem is the meta-problem lurking behind *all* of these more specific philosophical problems: - **The One & the Many:** how a multiplicity becomes a unity; what makes things be of the same kind; what makes things similar or different to one another. - **Being & Becoming:** permanence among change (structure among process) - **The problem of induction:** the future will not necessarily be like the past. - **The fact-value problem:** how should facts be turned into values, i.e. how should relevant facts be selected from the infinite sea of facts? - **David Hume's is-ought problem:** the facts don't tell you what to do with the facts. - **The problem of morality:** how to act - **The problem of perception**: how perceived objects should be segregated from one another - **The problem of postmodernism:** potentially infinite ways to read a text or interpret a situation. - **The quest for certainty**: the impossible wish to transcend the anxiety inherent to human existence once and for all (i.e., to finally categorize experience once and for all). # Chaos, Order, Logos Peterson argues that we are biologically & neuropsychologically adapted not to the objective world as defined by the categories of science (e.g., atoms), or even by the categories of traditional philosophy (e.g., mind and matter), but rather to the natural (meaningful; functional; ontological; experiential) categories of the ***known (order)***, ***unknown (chaos)***, and ***knower (Logos)***. He calls these categories the "constituent elements of experience". To understand what this means, we need to know something about symbols & metaphor, which are the "language" of myth. <h5>Symbol & metaphor</h5> Jung distinguished between signs and symbols. A sign is a representation that has a fixed, accepted, non-controversial meaning, at least from the perspective of the person interpreting it. For example, a no smoking icon. A **symbol**, on the other hand, is a partial representation of something not yet fully understood — a "best effort" attempt to understand something beyond one's current level of comprehension. In Jungian psychology, a symbol is said to be a bridge between the unconscious and consciousness. In other words, a symbol is new knowledge coming to light. A symbol can be expressed in words, but it can also be expressed in image, art, dance, ritual, myth, etc. The reason symbols can be represented so many different ways is because the instrument of symbol is **metaphor**, and metaphors can be expressed & understood in nearly *any* cultural representational medium, not just language. Metaphors in their simplest form are pragmatic as-if comparisons: a resembles (acts like) b; in other words, “a” is in the same natural category as “b” and therefore has the same functional meaning as “b”. When you're trying to understand something new, first you compare it to things you already understand, and then you effortfully differentiate it from there (i.e., solve et coagula). This is symbolic understanding or analogical cognition. Even something as primitive as a caveman acting out an animal's behavior to his fellow cavemen can be a symbol from this perspective, because it's an attempt to (pragmatically; functionally) understand something better by metaphorically representing it. <h5>The constituent categories of experience</h5> Jung's cross-cultural research (his "comparative method") found that the hero myth, the universal mythological template, tends to have **four universal symbolic (i.e., metaphorical) characters**. Three of these characters are bivalent (i.e., they have both good (+) & evil (-) aspects). The fourth is an ambiguous "background" character, from which the other three initially arise: 1. **The Great Mother** 2. **The Great Father** 3. **The Divine Son** 4. **The Dragon of Chaos** ![[7 characters.jpg|350]] Consider that our most immediate and longest-lasting evolutionary surroundings were social hierarchies populated by men, women, and children. **Man, woman, and child are therefore the three oldest natural categories built into our nervous systems.** Peterson says that these social-cognitive categories are the underlying presupposition of the nervous system. He says: "The social categories that we use aren't tools that we voluntarily use, they are *pre-conditions for understanding*". Suppose that as we explored outside the immediate environment of the tribe, and as we developed an increasing ability to abstract, we applied the social-cognitive categories we already had in an attempt to **symbolically (metaphorically) represent the fundamental ontology of phenomenal experience.** In other words, we projected human personalities onto our experience of the nonhuman world, to try to make sense of it (to functionally categorize it). We applied what we already understood to what we did not yet understand. This is *exaptation*: evolutionary recruitment of an existing structure for a new purpose. And since this was long before the development of the scientific method, suppose these categories were representing ontology from the perspective of **raw (i.e. first-person "subjective") experience,** *not* from the scientific, objective perspective. In other words, suppose that myth was phenomenological, pragmatic philosophy. - Suppose we metaphorically represented the functional category of **"all experience we don't understand"** (the unknown as it is encountered in actuality; chaos) using images of the feminine and of nature (the Great Mother), because they are pragmatically apt symbols of creation (the Good Mother) as well as destruction (the Terrible Mother). That is, the unknown is intrinsically threatening, but simultaneously the source of all creation that renews the current known (the existing order), and therefore must be continually approached and conquered for life to continue. - Suppose we metaphorically represented the functional category of **"all experience we *do* understand"** (the known; order) using images of the masculine and of culture (the Great Father), because they are pragmatically apt symbols of well-ordered experiential/categorical structure (the King) as well as oppressively-ordered structure (the Tyrant). That is, humans need the protection and adaptive capability of individual & collective category systems (tools), but those structures are in constant danger of becoming either too rigid (too "conservative") or too experimental (too "liberal"). - Suppose we metaphorically represented the functional category of **"that which understands"** (the knower; the Logos) using images of the child (the Divine Son), because it is a pragmatically apt symbol of "that which unites the old (the known) with the new (the unknown)". That is, the self or individual (each one of us, but especially men) is the active conscious spirit that continually builds and rebuilds the Great Father (order) out of the Great Mother (chaos). The individual either acts righteously (the Hero; bringing forth the (+) aspect of order and the (+) aspect of chaos) or demonically (the Adversary; bringing forth the (-) aspect of order and the (-) aspect of chaos). - Suppose we metaphorically represented **"that which existed prior to everything else"** (the uroboros; the absolute unknown *in the absence of any knower or frame of reference whatsoever*) using the image of a self-devouring serpent, because something completely indiscriminable is a thing and its opposite at the same time. Essentially, the uroboros is the symbol you inevitably end up with when you pile on more & more metaphors attempting to make sense of the absolute source of everything (the beginning of the cosmos; the ultimate human origin; what an object is like in the absence of a subject; etc). The concept of the Kantian noumenon (the unknowable thing-in-itself), as well as Peterson's analysis of what a table is in the absence of human consciousness, are both "archetypal manifestations" of the uroboros pattern. This style of symbolic representation is the Jungian unconscious at work. Peterson (1999a) says: > "The unconscious may . . . be considered as the mediator between the unknown, which surrounds us constantly, and the domain that is so familiar to us that its contents have been rendered explicit. *This mediator, I would suggest, is those metaphoric, imagistic processes, dependent upon limbic-motivated right-hemispheric activity, that help us initially formulate our stories*." <h5>The cerebral hemispheres</h5> Crucially, Peterson further argues that **the two hemispheres of the brain both morphologically *and* functionally reflect these mythological categories of known (order) and unknown (chaos)** (1999a): > "One set of the systems that comprise our brain and mind governs activity, when we are guided by our plans—when we are in the domain of the known. Another appears to operate when we face something unexpected—when we have entered the realm of the unknown." > . . . > "The **left hemisphere** . . . seems at its best when what is and what should be done are no longer questions; when tradition governs behavior, and the nature and meaning of things has been relatively fixed . . ." > . . . > "The **right hemisphere** appears to come “on-line” when a particular situation is rife with uncertainty . . . [it] appears integrally involved in the initial stages of analysis of the unexpected or novel—and its a priori hypothesis is always this: this (unknown) place, this unfamiliar space, this unexplored territory is dangerous, and therefore partakes in the properties of [i.e. is in the same functional category as] all other known dangerous places and territories, and all those that remain unknown, as well." And Iain McGilchrist (2019) helpfully elaborates on the same theme in *The Master & His Emissary*: > ". . . each hemisphere brings into being a world that has different qualities. These could be characterised in the simplest possible terms something like this." > > "**In the case of the left hemisphere,** a world of things that are familiar, certain, fixed, isolated, explicit, abstracted from context, disembodied, general in nature, quantifiable, known by their parts, and inanimate." > > "**In the case of the right hemisphere,** a world of Gestalten, forms and processes that are never reducible to the already known or certain, never accounted for by dissolution into parts, but always understood as wholes that both incorporate and are incorporated into other wholes, unique, always changing and flowing, interconnected, implicit, understood only in context, embodied and animate." > > "The left hemisphere is a world of atomistic elements; the right hemisphere one of relationships. Most importantly the world of the right hemisphere is the world that presences to us, that of the left hemisphere a re-presentation: **the left hemisphere a map, the right hemisphere the world of experience [territory] that is mapped.**" <h5>Not matter, but what matters</h5> Peterson argues backwards from this convergence ("consilience") of evidence regarding myth, the brain hemispheres, and functional categorization, "reverse engineering" the implication for ontology—the fundamental metaphysical categories of the <u>real</u>. And the implication is this: **the reality we are evolutionarily adapted to is not matter (the world of objects), but rather *what matters* (the world of meaning).** He says (1999b): > "What if it were the case that human beings were adapted to the significance of things, rather than to “things” themselves? Wouldn't that suggest that the significance or meaning of things was more “real” than the things themselves (allowing that “what is adapted to” constitutes reality, which only means accepting as valid a basic implicit axiom of evolutionary theory: that the “organism” adapts to the “environment”)." <h5>The hero myth: a meta-categorization scheme</h5> The upshot is therefore that the hero myth is not a pre-rational, childlike, unscientific coping mechanism, but rather an **entirely abstract, meta-functional categorization scheme that works as a pragmatic guide to action & perception <u>in all contexts</u>,** regardless of particular situations, goals, problems, times, or meanings. That is, the hero myth is the one and only *complete* story. What's more, the fact that our ancestors *really lived by it for nearly all human history* (far before anyone could afford "luxury beliefs"), means that it is <u>evolutionarily vetted</u>. That we're alive now is powerful evidence, if not outright proof, that *it worked*. <h5>Axiomatic categories</h5> Peterson (2007) says that chaos, order, and Logos are ***the* most fundamental (archetypal) categories of experience, on which <b><u>all</u></b> particularized narratives and philosophies are based:** > ". . . these [three] domains are fundamental to instinctual religious thought . . . these categories of experience are not derived from anything more fundamental. Instead, they are the axiomatic entities from which everything else is, in turn, derived." As examples, he provides Heidegger's Umwelt, Mitwelt, and Eigenwelt, Freud's Id, Superego, and Ego, and Jung/Neumann's Great Mother, Great Father, and hero/Son (Peterson, 2007). The Greek realms of Being/Becoming, the Enlightenment realms of the subjective/objective, and the conceptualization of time as past/present/future would also be (even if incomplete) exemplars of this scheme. <h5>Two philosophical archetypes</h5> Finally, we can directly relate this to the philosophy discussed previously. Essentially, **abstractionism is the worldview of the left hemisphere, and contextualism is the worldview of the right hemisphere.** Roughly, the LH (the "emissary") sees order (being; stability; objectivity; deductive reasoning; literalness; etc) as prior to chaos (becoming; change; subjectivity; inductive/abductive reasoning; metaphor; etc) — and the RH (the "master") sees things exactly the other way around. ## Chaos: the unknown For our specifically philosophical approach, Peterson's most useful definition of chaos is the following (2007): > "***Chaos*** is the manner in which anomaly or the complexity of the world manifests itself before it can or has been perceived or conceptualized. It is what there is when what there is is as of yet unknown. It makes itself known in the absence of an expected outcome (a situation that is registered by a system of dedicated nervous system components). It signals the unspecified inadequacy of one or more currently explicit or implicit axioms (generally the latter) [i.e., inadequacy of current order]. Finally, it is processed sequentially by unconscious motor, affective and motivational systems. By the time an anomaly is perceived, or partially perceived—let alone conceptualized, which implies a more abstracted level of processing—it has already been transformed in large part into order." <h5>A priori, bivalent meaning</h5> Chaos is therefore **anomalous, bivalent (+ and -) a priori meaning that must be functionally categorized** (perceived; abstracted; contextualized; filtered; actualized; understood) in order to constrain it to something particular & usable, for some purpose, for some limited period of time (Peterson, 1999a). This meaning is "a priori" because it is always true of everything that is unknown, and cannot be ignored or ever gotten rid of once and for all. ![[The Ambivalent Nature of Novelty.jpg|400]] <h5>Chaos and the frame problem</h5> ***The mythological category represented by the Dragon of Chaos is therefore the "same thing" as the frame problem in modern cognitive science.*** That is: the frame problem is the re-emergence of the unknown. Since psychological models fail when they start with the abstractionist assumptions of realism, empiricism, objectivism, and disembodiment, let's flip all that around. Let's instead adopt the metaphysical assumptions suggested by the hero myth, and a rationalist/contextualist epistemology in which experience is theorized to be interpreted by the knower's a priori internal structure <u>from the start</u>. That is, let's assume that *meaning (potential)* — not objects or facts — is the ontological "stuff" of the frame problem. The frame problem is therefore no longer the computationally impossible challenge of discriminating objects and then adding meaning onto them using algorithms/rules, but oppositely, how to functionally categorize (reduce) the a priori meaningful whole (the totality) into functional parts/wholes (the particular, the actual). Peterson says that **a <u>structure</u> and a <u>process</u> evolved to solve the frame problem** (to confront chaos). ## Order: the known Suppose that the ***structure*** that answers the frame problem (that turns facts into values) is not the disembodied mind or the narrow Enlightenment faculty of reason, but rather, the entire evolved human body, brain, mind, & nervous system that undergirds consciousness, additionally grouped into functional hierarchies and enmeshed in culture & evolutionary history. In other words, suppose that **the human being in <u>all</u> its contexts *just is* the hierarchy of frames that solves the 'infinite regress'** that the cognitivists ran into. Call this structure ***order (the known).*** Peterson (2007) says: > "***Order***, as contrasted to chaos, is the current domain of axiomatic systems, hierarchically ordered. It is the explicit and implicit superposition of this domain onto the underlying chaotic substrate that allows for perception, conception and action. Being itself [including both "objective" and "subjective" experience] is a consequence of this superposition." <h5>Hierarchy</h5> The interpretive structure is hierarchical because it mirrors the hierarchy of social status (hierarchy of valued personalities) that it evolved in. Peterson (1999a) says: > "Our stories—our frames of reference—appear to have a **“nested” or hierarchical** structure. At any given moment, our attention occupies only one level of that structure. This capacity for restricted attention gives us the capability to make provisional but necessary judgments about the valence and utility of phenomena. However, we can also shift levels of abstraction—we can voluntarily focus our attention, when necessary, on stories that map out larger or smaller areas of space-time." The following figure depicts just a limited portion of an individual belief hierarchy: ![[nested stories.jpg|500]] Or (Carver & Scheier, 1998): ![[cybernetic system.jpg|400]] <h5>The elements of a single frame</h5> Each individual story (category; context; whole; frame; belief; etc) comprises the following: ![[JBP what is vs what should be.jpg|350]] - **starting point**: point a; our interpretation of present sensory experience; what is - **motivated goal**: point b; end; desired future; a more highly valued frame; what should be - **7 +/- 2 sub-stories (chunks)**: 1st part of means; currently relevant tools/obstacles - **actions (plans)**: 2nd part of means - **ground:** the other 99% of the world currently being ignored; everything except the current "figure" - **emotional evaluation**: whether the means are working to achieve the end <h5>Part-whole (means-ends) structure</h5> Each story is thus the same in kind as all others, but different in content and size. This is mereological **part-whole, or means-ends structure**. That is, each story has sub-stories and super-stories, i.e., is a whole with parts, and a part of other wholes. Or, put another way: each story is an end in itself, as well as a means to other ends. This is why Slife & Hopkins (2005) say: > **"[The parts of a whole] are the classical definition of a dialectical relationship: *they are one and they are many, simultaneously*."** [i.e they allow for both separability and inseparability] <h5>Chunking & levels of abstraction</h5> We can use our attention to **"zoom in"** to a lower level of abstraction (higher level of resolution) and break a frame down into its component parts (make explicit; make conscious; un-abstract). Or oppositely, **"zoom out"** (i.e. "go meta" to a lower level of resolution) to view things in a wider context, i.e., collapse parts into a whole. Phenomena that are abstracted away are chunked; implicit; folded; hidden; outside of awareness; packed up; simplified; unconscious; ignored; not perceived; become "ground" as opposed to "figure". When we focus our attention on any given level of experience, all other levels (both "inside" and "outside" the 7 +/- 2 currently relevant objects) are collapsed in this manner. Each level of belief is therefore a pragmatic hypothesis that all its constituent parts will behave, for the current task, as the functional whole (tool) you've modeled it as. In other words, each larger whole provides an ideal value (a functional constraint) for all levels below it. Peterson & Driver-Linn explain: > ". . . a belief is a presupposition that diverse elements [i.e. parts] of experience may be treated for the purposes of current activity as if they were functionally equivalent [i.e. a whole]." and Peterson & Flanders (2002) provide an example: > ". . . a “car” has constituent elements: motor, transmission, body; as the motor, transmission and body are pistons and valves, gears and shafts, windows and doors) all packed up into a “unity” whose structure as a unity is violated whenever something that is not desired occurs." Which is why Peterson (2001) says: > "The complexity of the world is nested inside our concepts." [i.e., our categories are the solution to the frame problem] <h5>Mind meets body hierarchically</h5> Categories are most fundamentally motor actions (embodied in procedure; least abstract; least explicit; highest level of resolution); however we can unpack them (to a degree) using our attention, and then abstractly represent them in image (more abstract) or in word (most abstract; most explicit; lowest level of resolution) (Peterson & Flanders, 2002). This means that *knowing-that* knowledge is ultimately made of, and cashes out in, *knowing-how*. Carver & Scheier (1998) depict this nicely: ![[cybernetic system 2.jpg|400]] This means that mind & body are not two separate ontological categories (dualism), but rather, mind is more abstract body (monism). Peterson (2001) says: > "The mind meets the body in hierarchical fashion . . . a large-scale plan [category; context; story] consists of smaller plans, which consist of even smaller plans, which eventually grounds out in muscle movement . . . abstraction [mind] thus turns into embodiment . . . [this is a] tentative, engineering-based solution to the age-old “mind-body” problem." > [! note] Dewey & Piaget > This reconciliation of mind & body is consistent with Dewey's (1938) principle of continuity: > > > " . . . there is no breach of continuity between operations of inquiry and biological operations and physical operations. ‘Continuity' . . . means that rational operations grow out of organic activities, without being identical with that from which they emerge." > > . . . and Piaget's developmental theories. About this, Peterson (1999a) writes: > > > ". . . the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget [had a] notion, with regard to child development, that adaptation at the sensorimotor level occurs prior to—and lays the groundwork for—the more abstracted forms of adaptation that characterize adulthood." > [! note] The theory of conceptual metaphor > George Lakoff & Mark Johnson explain further implications of embodied mind for cognition & philosophy in their (great) books *Metaphors We Live By* and *Philosophy in the Flesh*. > > In short, Lakoff & Johnson argue that **metaphor is not just a matter of words, but of thoughts**. It is the bridge between action & abstraction (body & mind). In other words: metaphor is implicit (hidden) in abstract thought. > > Metaphorical reasoning is a form of pragmatic analogical reasoning, i.e., *as-if* reasoning that compares the goal-relevant similarities & differences (resemblance of pattern) between a source domain and a target domain, ultimately for the purpose of making successful inferences in action. These metaphors are ultimately rooted in the body (e.g., affection is warmth, important is big, similarity is closeness), but get chained into more complex metaphors like "love is a journey". > > Some of the most influential conceptual metaphors that are implicitly reified in abstractionist philosophy include: "mind is a container", "knowing is seeing", "knowing is object manipulation", "concepts are objects", and "categories are containers". These are all left-hemisphere style metaphors based on mechanism and container logic, closely related to the classical theory of categories, reification, and what Heidegger calls "ontic" conceptualizations of Being. > > Also: although Lakoff & Johnson never explicitly discuss myth, one might hypothesize that the more simplistic "a is b" metaphorical processing involved in symbolic representation differentiates into conceptual metaphor as cognition develops. <h5>The control structure</h5> The cybernetic/neuropsychological control structure that undergirds this hierarchy is itself hierarchical, as is the outer social structure that provides ideal constraints at the individual and group levels. It looks like this, from bottom to top: - **Reflexes** directly map "facts" (sensory patterns) onto values (actions). Simplistic organisms don't develop past this point (they don't have psychology or perception). In developing animals & human children, reflexes are integrated into (hierarchically "solved by") motivational systems. Goals are initially embedded in reflexes. - **Motivation** is the baseline psychological strategy. It non-deterministically influences current desire (current good; what is currently valued). In this way, it influences our goals [final causes] and directs our attention, thus providing the fundamental organizing principles [formal causes] for our perceptual & cognitive categories. In other words, motivation parses up a world (a category; a story) that is functionally organized according to current desired expectations. Motivation is qualitatively multi-dimensional: e.g., hunger, thirst, lust, aggression, joy, loneliness, playfulness, exploration, resentment, envy, fear of the unknown, etc. This means that the perceptual sequence is not object → cognition → action, but rather, complexity (frame problem) → motivated goal → functional category (tool/obstacle) → "object". Perception is motivated (value-laden) and therefore "objects" are constructed / interpreted ("theory-laden") *from the start*. - **Emotion** hierarchically solves (abstracts) the multi-dimensionality of motivation into just two dimensions (positive or negative valence; is the current motivated goal getting closer or further away? is the situation promising or threatening? should you approach or withdraw?) - **Cognition** lets us set abstract goals, thus separating motivation & emotion from immediate surrounding context. This lets us pursue ends that are distant in space & time, to more effectively satisfy emotional criteria by making more intelligent sacrifices. (This is why Peterson says information is "meta-food".) In this way, cognition neither invents nor escapes values, but rather presupposes and instrumentally implements values. Basically, motivation & emotion set the target (make the decision) and then cognition works to rationalize the choice and intelligently implement plans to attain it. This means that cognition is ultimately for contextualized action (knowing-how), not decontextualized formal/logical reasoning (knowing-that). Our bounded rational & empirical models always work *within* motivated perceptual frames, never outside of them (Agnew & Brown, 1989). Cognition or rationality is value-laden, 'all the way down'. - **Identity** solves the problem of cognition by providing higher-order (more integrated) goals. Identity is the context of an individual's entire life story (a belief hierarchy, contextualized by a past and oriented toward some future trajectory). The self is implicit in identity, which is why Peterson says that reorganizing your frames is literally 'dying micro-deaths'. - **Intermediary functional hierarchies** into which individuals organize themselves to solve the problem of individual identity (e.g., families, workplaces, industries, organizations, communities, cities, governments, etc — i.e. games). These hierarchies integrate individual effort into higher-order social goals, ideally conforming to the principles of downward delegation and least authority. - **Meta-identity**, i.e., the ideal human personality, solves the problems of personal identity & functional hierarchical unity by providing a single transcendent unifying value, so that fighting among individuals & groups is unnecessary, and civilization as a whole can productively encounter the unknown (confront chaos). ## Logos: the knower Suppose that the ***process*** that updates the structure that solves the frame problem *just is* what we now call **consciousness (the knower; agency, free will, subjectivity; etc)**. Peterson (2006a) says: > "***Logos***, one of the most remarkable of all the ancient philosophical or theological conceptions, is a word with an extraordinarily broad range of meaning. It means everything our modern word consciousness means and more. It means mind, and the creative actions of mind: exploration, discovery, reconceptualization, reason and speech . . . Logos is, further, something whose relationship to the mere material is so fundamental that the material does not really exist at all in its absence. Finally, it is something whose workings are essentially redemptive, continuing and perfecting the process of creation. It is generally transcribed, in the Christian tradition, as the Word, and is closely identified with the transcendental being of Christ, as well as with the original creative force of God." Logos normally inhabits the **mundane (profane) everyday realm of particulars & actuality: the Being that is continually becoming** (the totality of our phenomenal, interpreted experience). In a formula: Being = Order (current hierarchy of interpretive categories) X Chaos (the absolute unknown substrate). <h5>Categorization & recategorization</h5> Logos is that which **predicates new goals (final causes) to teleologically perceive & act "for the sake of"**, and is therefore the selector and creator of categories (formal causes; abstractions; interpretations). In other words, Logos is that which **continually categorizes & recategorizes experience** (continually builds & rebuilds functional order out of chaos; continually encounters the unknown; continually solves & re-solves the frame problem). ***Recategorization of experience could in fact be considered the essence of human consciousness itself.*** Without the ability to categorize (to parse future experience through the lens of the past), every experience would be absolutely new and unique — undifferentiated chaos. This is why Jung (1951) says: > "Consciousness and understanding arise from discrimination, that is, through analysis (dissolution) followed by synthesis, as stated in symbolical terms by the alchemical dictum: “Solve et coagula” (dissolve and coagulate)." and why Peterson (1999) says, likewise: > "The capacity to create novel behaviors and categories of interpretation in response to the emergence of the unknown [i.e. the emergence of the frame problem] might be regarded as the primary hallmark of human consciousness—indeed, of human being." <h5>Logos is a specifically dialectical process</h5> This imperative to continually recategorize means that Logos is not only a demonstrative process, it is also and even more fundamentally a ***dialectical*** process. To contrast the two styles: - **Demonstrative reasoning** is about drawing out the consequences of already-fixed premises (deductive reasoning; Piagetian assimilation; Kuhnian normal science; analysis or differentiation into parts; the abstractionist style; the viewpoint of the left hemisphere). - **Dialectical reasoning** is about recategorization or tendency to question assumptions (inductive or abductive reasoning; Piagetian accommodation; Kuhnian paradigm revolutions; synthesis into new wholes; creativity; the contextualist style; the viewpoint of the right hemisphere). Joseph Rychlak (1981b) puts it this way: > "No matter how much our tough-minded, empirical psychologist would like to claim that the empirical findings of his or her experiments are immutable facts, the truth is: *There are N (unlimited) potential theories to explain any fact pattern.*" This means that Logos is an ***active* spirit—*which includes the potential to become conscious of its own hidden assumptions.*** That is, Logos is capable of making explicit its own implicit contexts in Kantian transcendental fashion, criticizing them, and adapting by predicating alternative assumptions. This is what computers can't do. Importantly, however, Logos must at some point have ***consciously predicated the assumption that its nature is to predicate assumptions.*** In other words, it must adopt the Kantian, Heideggerian, Kuhnian, Jungian, mythological, or pragmatic insight: that theory is always prior to data (values are always prior to facts; ought is always prior to is). Otherwise, Logos is forever doomed to unconsciously project its own highest value into the black boxes of objects and/or reason. # Archetypes of response to the unknown **We are creatures with a front and a back, one consciousness, and one motor output system. Fundamentally we move either forward or backward**: - forward, when in the domain of order (or on the border of order & chaos), applying & tuning our current representations as we go, or; - backward, when we encounter chaos and our categories no longer work to achieve desired goals. In the latter case, we are faced with **two choices,** per our fundamental 2-D nature: 1. **Confront chaos** (explore) and repair our category systems such that they are once again functional, or; 2. **Flee from chaos** in a necessarily self-defeating attempt to maintain our no-longer functional categories. These are the two **archetypes of response to the unknown**: the story of Abel vs. Cain, Christ vs. Satan, hero vs. adversary, or the upward spiral vs. the downward spiral. ## The hero The first archetype of response to the unknown is the path of the hero. <h4>Error & exploration: the central pattern</h4> In contextualism, the fundamental "dualism" of interest is not subject—object, but rather the thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern of action—abstraction. Peterson describes this cycle as **exploration → error → exploration**. This is the ***central pattern of human action*** (the hero archetype; the process of continually solving the frame problem by recategorizing experience). In other words, the embodied pattern of Logos. <h5>Error</h5> Error is the **re-emergence of the frame problem**, i.e. the re-emergence of chaos (the unknown). Error means that some belief(s) are no longer functional i.e. no longer successfully work to attain their self-defined goal(s). In other words, when we encounter error, it means that we have **categorized something incorrectly**. Error is first signaled by ***anxiety,*** which is provisional re-categorization of a phenomenon as unknown (i.e. bivalent: threating but potentially promising). Anxiety makes us pause and withdraw, before cautiously approaching to explore. This is the orienting reflex in action, which can itself be considered a sub-personality: the exploratory personality whose goal is to functionally recategorize experience. However, although anxiety signals error, it does *not* tell us the magnitude or location of the error. It may be means *or* ends that are wrong (which are the "same thing", because ends are always means to further ends). And it may be any part of motivation, action, perception, or cognition that is wrong—and potentially at any level of analysis. To discover the true magnitude and location of the error, we have to explore the anomaly. > [! note] Proof of the objective world > Error is proof of—metaphorically speaking—the objective world: what cannot be interpreted away is <u>real</u> (it *matters*, because we must deal with it). I say "metaphorically" because objective reality is a reified metaphor for "what is constant in intersubjective perception". No separate & different "realm" literally exists. > > However, there are certainly real *constraints* (limitations) imposed on us by what is conventionally conceptualized as the objective. And those constraints are not subject to our individual or collective wills. Most goals can't be reached by social constructionist gerrymandering or linguistic manipulation. Regardless of what radical postmodernists may say, it is possible for us to be collectively wrong. <h5>Exploration</h5> Exploration is the process of **investigating an anomaly, locating the source of the error, and then repairing relevant beliefs (recategorizing; re-solving the frame problem)**. Exploration thus involves an abstractive backpedaling in which we divorce ourselves from our habitual beliefs in order to rework them. It can happen concretely in the physical world, or abstractly in thought (e.g., as we are currently doing using the hidden assumptions/critical thinking framework). Whether done concretely or abstractly, recategorization is a process of **un-chunking** (un-abstracting; making explicit; making conscious; unfolding) relevant categories, updating them, and then **re-chunking** them (re-abstracting; making implicit; making unconscious; making hidden; re-folding; automatizing) through practice. (Of course, this happens on multiple levels of resolution at once, and consciousness does not attend to all of them.) Depending on the depth of the error, the reworking may occur near-instantaneously and unconsciously (e.g., catching something you dropped before it hits the ground), or, at the opposite extreme, years of conscious thought may be necessary (e.g., traumatic experiences). That is, minor mistakes can often be resolved in an online flow manner, whereas more serious or novel error situations call for effortful, offline, abstract thought. Importantly, **the end of exploration (the stopping rule for recategorization) is contextual <u>emotional re-regulation</u>**, i.e. reduction of anxiety, *not any absolute, objective (correspondence) knowledge criterion*. This pragmatic, functional condition is met when means once again work to achieve ends, or when ends have been altered to be more realistic. And this had better be the case, because truly objective rather than functional categorization is not possible: - because no stopping rule is possible for purely objective categorization. - because the world is too complex to objectively perceive or internally model. - because cognition is action-oriented and value-laden (motivated) from the start. - because perception of the facts is value- and theory-laden (motivated) from the start. Simply put, we are never privy to objective, literal truth in the first place—so it just cannot be the standard. > [! note] Emotional dysregulation > What's emotionally dysregulating isn't the failure to reach any particular (e.g., objective) goal, but rather the gap between desired expectation and actual result (Peterson & Driver-Linn). Therefore, a gap can be reduced by altering means *or* ends. <h5>Learning</h5> Learning is the outcome of exploration. Against the abstractionist viewpoint, learning is not primarily a process of collecting thing-like propositional facts held "inside" the mind for offline rational thought (*ontic*), but rather the education of attention or the education of perception (i.e., *ontological* alteration of the a priori interpretive framework). That is: learning is integration of information, i.e., getting informed, i.e., *changing the form of the mind*. The new learning simply shows up in perception as a more finely discriminated situation with new action possibilities (affordances) available to us. In other words, learning results in a changed self and therefore a changed world. <h5>Expertise</h5> Expertise is mastery of a category. The more you practice a belief, the more automatic (hidden; tacit; implicit; unconscious) it becomes. You incrementally learn to perceive and manipulate the formerly diverse parts of experience as an automatically chunked whole. The category is now automatized or integrated. Depending on the complexity of the skill, this may take anywhere from a few seconds to a lifetime (e.g., knocking a pencil off a desk vs. playing concert-level piano). <h5>Core presuppositions</h5> It is by continually attending to error signals, exploring the unknown, learning/refining categories, automatizing categories, and passing down categories through the filter of evolution that we (individually and collectively, over all time scales) build up hierarchies of **core presuppositions** (practices; culture). Peterson (1999a) says: > "The group is the current expression of a pattern of behavior developed over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. This pattern is constructed of behaviors established initially by creative heroes—by individuals who were able and willing to do and to think something that no one had been able to do or to think before." and Alfred North Whitehead (1911) says: > "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." Inculcating this cumulative canon of belief into young people is the process of **apprenticeship**. This means that **everything we effortlessly perceive now was hypothetically at one time completely indiscriminable from everything else** (completely unknown; pure chaos). Everything had to be effortfully explored and categorized by our ancestors (which was then fed back into evolution), and now we simply take it all for granted. We come to believe, for example, that objects really exist out there independent of us, ready to be perceived 'off the shelf'. Extremely deep presuppositions in the hierarchy correspond to what Jung called the **collective unconscious**. And the deepest presupposition of all is the very highest frame of reference: the **ideal personality**. <h4>The chain of abstraction</h4> The central pattern of action, repeated endlessly in a cooperative + competitive social environment characterized by a hierarchy of desirable (valued) personalities, drove the evolution of the interpretive structure itself. That is, the interpretive structure was **naturally and sexually selected for in the direction of the human ideal**, the (hypothetical) personality at the very pinnacle of the universal value hierarchy who best embodies the hero archetype (the embodiment of Logos). What Peterson calls the **chain of abstraction** is the iterated historical process of humans honing in on and symbolically representing *what matters most* (the context of contexts; the story of stories; the meta-identity; the deepest presupposition; the greatest whole; the highest category; the ideal personality). This is the process of endlessly distilling the heroes of all particular functional hierarchies into a **meta-hero**. This is the pursuit of wisdom, or of religion. This is the process of representing the ideal, acting it out, then updating the representation, ad infinitum. This is a negative feedback loop. Peterson (1999a) writes: > "We act appropriately before we understand how we act—just as children learn to behave before they can describe the reasons for their behavior. It is only through the observation of our actions, accumulated and distilled over centuries, that we come to understand our own motivations, and the patterns of behavior that characterize our cultures (and these are changing as we model them). **Active adaptation [knowing-how] precedes abstracted comprehension of the basis for such adaptation [knowing-that].**" > . . . > "**[The action—abstraction loop] feeds the development of explicit “consciousness” itself: procedure [action] is established, then represented, then altered in abstraction, then practiced;** the procedure changes, as a consequence of the abstracted and practiced modification; this change in turn produces an alteration in its representation, and so on, and so on, from individual to individual, down the chain of generations." > . . . > "The knowing what [memory] system, declarative (episodic and semantic), has developed a description of knowing-how activity – procedure – through a complex, lengthy process of abstraction. Action and imitation of action developmentally predates explicit description or discovery of the rules governing action. Adaptation through play and drama preceded development of linguistic thought, and provided the ground from which it emerged. **Each developmental "stage" – action → imitation → play → ritual → drama → narrative → myth → religion → philosophy → rationality – offers an increasingly abstracted, generalized and detailed representation of the behavioral wisdom embedded in and established during the previous stage.**" > . . . > "As the process of abstraction continues and information vital for survival is represented more simply and efficiently, **what is represented transforms from the particulars of any given adaptive actions to the most general and broadly appropriate pattern of adaptation—that of creative exploration itself.**" > . . . > "Actions that satisfy emotions have a pattern; abstraction allows us to represent and duplicate that pattern, as an end. **The highest-level abstractions therefore allow us to represent the most universally applicable behavioral pattern: that characterizing the hero,** who eternally turns the unknown into something secure and beneficial; who eternally reconstructs the secure and beneficial, when it has degenerated into tyranny." > . . . > "**This process of increasing abstraction and representation is equivalent to development of “higher” consciousness** (especially if the ever-more enlightened words are in fact—utopian wish—transformed back down the hierarchy to the level of action)." ![[abstraction of wisdom.jpg|450]] > [! note] In individuals > An analogous abstraction process occurs in the individual psyche when new knowledge is brought to light. Something more like: action → dreams → fantasies → practice → expertise → rules. This is knowledge progressing "upward" from the unconscious into consciousness. In mythology, the chain of abstraction is represented concretely as **the battle of the gods: the development of monotheism out of polytheism**. This is the sorting of competing internal motivations, represented symbolically as external gods that must be served. The monotheistic figure of the exploratory hero is what emerged from this iterated symbolic process: the One God that integrates and subsumes all other gods (i.e., reconciles all motivations within & between individuals into an integrated hierarchy). Historically, the most psychologically effective symbolic output of the chain of abstraction was ***Christ***. Because creative exploration is the capstone solution to every problem, the hero pattern is the ***solution to the meta-problem*** (the solution to the problem of problems), i.e. the ***meta-identity***, the ***meta-ethic***, or the ideal player of the ***meta-game***. This means that the hero myth is also the ***meta-story*** or ***meta-myth***: the story about how stories themselves transform when that becomes necessary: paradise → encounter with chaos → fall → redemption. That is to say: exploration → error → exploration, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, confronting chaos, or solving the frame problem. It is all the same thing. Most importantly, what all this means is: **reason and moral philosophy don't discover, invent, or prove values, but instead <u>presuppose</u> values.** To say it again: *any* argument about how facts or reason get us from is to ought in an ostensibly value-free (objective) way <u>presupposes what it purports to prove</u>. What moral philosophy *actually* does is re-express implicit, embodied knowing-how wisdom on the more explicit (more abstract) knowing-that level. Moral philosophy is therefore a low resolution representation of our high-resolution central pattern of action. <u>It's values all the way down, and all the way up</u>. This is why Peterson can say: ![[JBP_tweet_morality_mythic.jpg|350]] > [! note] Plato's theory of recollection > Peterson (2014) comments on the similarity between the chain of abstraction and Plato's theory of recollection: > > > "The proper expression of unconscious Being [i.e., making the implicit explicit] teaches people what they already know. It's kind of like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering." > > Essentially, Plato's Idea of the Good (located at the top of the hierarchy of Ideas) was an over-intellectualized, rationalized, ontic, left hemisphere version of the archetypal ideal personality. <h4>The highest value</h4> <h5>All action, perception, & cognition is 100% value-laden</h5> Let's further specify the concept of value-ladenness. In the abstractionist paradigm, values—like ideas in general—are metaphorically conceptualized as (reified as) thing-like abstract objects that exist "inside" the mind. Values are "held" (e.g., philosophical or religious principles). In other words, values are thought to exist "after the fact of" perception & cognition. This is an *ontic* conceptualization of value. By contrast, value in the contextualist paradigm pertains to the *whole* knower <u>from the start</u>. This is an *ontological* conceptualization of value. From this perspective, consider that: 1. perception is motivated, selective (value-laden) abstraction from experience; 2. action is motivated, selective (value-laden) transformation of experience; 3. higher cognition (reason) is built on top of, and for, action & perception. Therefore, from the contextualist perspective, ***all perception, action, and cognition is 100% value-laden***. This means that another word for a frame of reference (context; functional category; schema of action & perception, sub-personality; etc) is: a ***value***. <h5>The esse-in-anima</h5> **Because action & perception are 100% value-laden, merely living & acting already implies a value structure.** That is, whatever we move toward—consciously or unconsciously—is what we value. The end point of every story is, by definition and by logical implication, more highly valued than the starting point. If it were not more highly valued, then we would not have moved toward it. Further, because belief is hierarchical, each of us is *necessarily* moving toward some highest goal—whether we know what it is or not. Therefore, ***each of us inescapably has a highest value—whether we are conscious of what it is or not.*** Jung (1921) describes the "esse-in-anima" (highest psychological value): > "The esse in anima, then, is a psychological fact, and the only thing that needs ascertaining is whether it occurs but once, often, or universally in human psychology. The datum which is called “God” and is formulated as the “highest good” signifies, as the term itself shows, the supreme psychic value. In other words it is a concept upon which is conferred, or is actually endowed with, the highest and most general significance in determining our thoughts and actions. In the language of analytical psychology, the God-concept coincides with the particular ideational complex which, in accordance with the foregoing definition, concentrates in itself the maximum amount of libido, or psychic energy. Accordingly, the actual God-concept is, psychologically, completely different in different people, as experience testifies. Even as an idea God is not a single, constant being, and still less so in reality. For, as we know, the highest value operative in a human soul is variously located. There are men “whose God is the belly”, and others for whom God is money, science, power, sex, etc." Peterson (2018b) puts it like this: > "Here’s a [psychological definition of God] : God is the mode of being you value the most as demonstrated or manifested in your presumption, perception and action." To summarize: **the 100% value-ladenness of action, perception, and cognition means that the deepest pattern of personality (highest category) that you act out is the "same thing" as your highest value—and also the “same thing” as your god.** This is necessarily true, <u>no matter what you say about yourself</u> (e.g., even if you say you are an atheist). These concepts only appear to be separate & different things when prior abstractionist assumptions have been reified. <h4>Darwinian truth & subsidiary identity</h4> Consider, further, that **your highest value or god in this ontological sense is *also* the "same thing" as your theory of truth**. In the abstractionist paradigm, truth is reified as the correspondence theory of truth. This is what Peterson calls Newtonian truth. But from the contextualist standpoint, although objective correspondence can certainly be a *means to a greater end* (a part; a necessary condition), it can never be the whole story by itself (the whole; a sufficient condition). As I mentioned before, the problem for instrumentalism (i.e., a contextual standard of value or pragmatic theory of truth) is that if a thing is good insofar as it achieves its purpose, then what does that purpose have to be to make the thing *intrinsically* good? If good or bad (true or false) can only be judged relative to context, then what stops the theory from degenerating into an ends-justify-the-means mercenary morality, in which what's true is simply whatever works in the moment? This is where Peterson's concept of **Darwinian truth** comes into play, which is almost the same thing as what Peterson & Pageau (2023) recently called **subsidiary identity.** Basically, the OG pragmatists *did* have problems with normativity: they could never quite explain what prevents pragmatic truth from sliding into relativism, subjectivism, or a short-sighted utilitarianism. Peterson says that what they were missing is that **"what works" has to be nested under the hero pattern (i.e. the <u>meta-context</u>), across the dimensions of both space & time**. That is, a thing or fact is intrinsically good (true) in the sufficient-condition (Darwinian) sense **just insofar as it fits into the subsidiary hierarchy**. When this constraint is added, instrumentalism no longer degenerates into relativism. As you ascend levels of abstraction in the category hierarchy, or move forward into the future, goals become more comprehensive: lower level stories (parts; means) serve higher level stories (wholes; ends), all the way from the tiniest unconscious actions & perceptions, up through everyday tasks, projects, careers, individual lives, families, functional hierarchies, societies, civilizations, humanity as a whole, and then hypothetically all the way up to the cosmic level (the greatest whole). **The greatest possible truth condition is therefore when the entire cosmos is ordered truthfully in this functional part/whole manner, bottom to top.** This is Darwinian truth or subsidiary identity. This psychic & cosmic (micro & macro; "as above, so below") hierarchy of value—this hierarchy of subsidiary identity—is what the people of the Middle Ages were intuitively apprehending, as was everyone who historically felt that teleological explanation was compelling. The correspondence theory of truth is therefore **nested under (subsidiary to) Darwinian truth** in precisely the same manner that the abstractionist paradigm (world of objects) is nested inside the contextualist paradigm (world of meaning), or that the ontic is nested inside the ontological, or that fact is nested inside value, or that the left hemisphere (emissary) must not usurp the right hemisphere (master). It's all the same pattern. If you get this pattern backwards, e.g., if you're a materialist whose highest god is objective reality, then *of course* you will reify the correspondence theory of truth and believe that truth is something entirely separate & different from ethics. In fact, to posit objective reality as a highest value *just is* an archetypal manifestation of the religious tendency to posit a "higher" realm—that is, the pattern of the sacred & profane (e.g., Plato's Being & Becoming, appearance vs. reality, subjective vs. objective, etc.). Eliade (1959) even explicitly associates the sacred with the modern concept of 'objective reality': > "Religious man's desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a <u>real</u> and effective world, and not in an illusion." On the other hand, if your god is the ideal personality (which is the correct God to have), then the correspondence theory instead takes its rightful place as one powerful tool at your disposal *in service of the highest truth*—but not itself the highest truth. **The only *truly sufficient* condition of truth is embodying the hero pattern.** Simply put, correspondence is just not enough for something as important as a theory of truth. Truth can only be the <u>whole</u> truth when it includes ethics (action & perception) in addition to objective representation. Therefore, against Peterson's critics, to say something is "true" in the Darwinian sense is actually a much *stronger* (not weaker) claim than to say it's true in the correspondence (Newtonian) sense. To put this all a slightly different way: science is a method for developing tools (means) to help us pursue our goals (ends), i.e., pragmatically predicting & controlling. That's all it is. It's only when we expect science to be capable of making truth claims (i.e. when we reify scientism and/or the correspondence theory of truth) that the correspondence theory seems to be so important (Slife, 2004b). When we recognize that science is just a method for making tools, then we no longer need to expect a method to produce truth for us. Truth doesn't come from repeatable method, but rather from *active spirit*—Logos's dialectical ability to predicate and re-predicate new values (categories) to act & perceive "for the sake of". <h5>The quest for certainty, reconceptualized</h5> This perspective on value brings new meaning to John Dewey's characterization of the abstractionist tradition as a "quest for certainty" (interpreted psychologically, an antidote to anxiety). If anxiety is eternal, because the frame problem is eternal, then the solution to the quest cannot be a consciously-created, left-hemisphere, thing-like, self-sufficient, reified abstraction ontically contained in mind (e.g., Plato's Idea of the Good or the objective realm), but rather *the ideal personality, as acted out*. After all, a quest for certainty *just is* a search for a highest value—something to place ultimate faith in, i.e., that which puts us in touch with the <u>real</u>—the *sacred*. <h4>Meaning: the telos of life</h4> Consider, even further, that **the hero pattern, the highest value, God, subsidiarity, truth, and the sacred are all *also* the "same thing" as the <u>real</u> (what matters)**. That is: the way you faithfully identify with the hero is by *following meaning without any self-deception*—thus staying on the narrow path and continually bringing about *even deeper meaning*. This is the upward spiral. Peterson's claim is that **meaning is our fundamental guide for how to perceive & act (i.e., how to categorize experience).** He says: > "Meaning appears to exist as the basis for radical functional simplification of an infinitely perceivable world." In other words: **meaning *is* the built-in human "ought", in Aristotelian final cause (teleological) fashion.** Meaning is what directs our attention to those aspects of the unknown that we are personally best suited to confront, because everyone has different interests & talents ('gifts of the spirit') and is oriented toward solving different problems. Meaning, in the hands of an apprenticed individual, when not distorted by chronic or acute self-deception, is the pointer toward both 1) personal interest (the symbolically feminine aspect of meaning; the Jungian "anima") and 2) personal responsibility (the symbolically masculine aspect of meaning; conscience). Therefore, meaning is what makes life worth living (the antidote to nihilism). Peterson (1999a) says: > "**Interest is meaning. Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path.**" > . . . > "Interest manifests itself where an assimilable but novel phenomenon exists: where something new hides in a partially comprehensible form." [i.e. a symbol] > . . . > "**Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero . . .**" > . . . > "The problems that grip you are the portal to your destiny." **The highest form of meaning therefore emerges on the border of order and chaos**, when we are exploring the unknown (recategorizing experience; solving the frame problem; identifying with the hero) in the correct manner (voluntarily and without deception) at the optimal rate (flow state), where interest & responsibility are balanced (on the narrow path). The emergence of *mysterium fascinans* (the positive aspect of numinous mystical or religious experience), at a tolerable level, signifies that the current order is being optimally renewed, i.e. that the (+) aspect of bivalent chaos is being encountered at the ideal rate. This is the experience of the **sacred** breaking through, as opposed to the everyday profane that Logos normally dwells in. As Peterson (2013b) says, this is the "redemptive chaos shining through the damaged structure of our current schemas" that renews the cosmos. This is why Peterson (1999a) says the secret of successful adaptation is the ability to "'restrict the appearance of the Terrible Mother' (-), and 'foster the realization of her Benevolent Sister' (+)". (This is also the "same thing" experienced during a positive psychedelic trip, except the latter occurs at an unsustainable level.) **None of this can be cognitively, computationally, or algorithmically calculated**. Instead it's all packed into our embodied sense of meaning, our oldest instinct, which takes *all* contexts into account. Meaning, in the ideal case, keeps each individual and therefore the whole collective (in emergent fashion) on the Tao (the Way): ![[yinyang2.png|500]] A society in which everyone's individual identity is nested under the meta-identity is therefore an **equilibrated** society: all levels of order are harmonized with one another, within individuals and between individuals, within hierarchies and between hierarchies, and transforming in a way such that the system keeps getting more harmonious over time. In other words: ordered such that the self, family, community, country, civilization, and world spiral up. In such a world, everyone is transforming (hierarchically differentiating & integrating on the border of chaos & order) at the optimal rate, and everyone's lives keep getting more and more meaningful. There is maximal diversity of interest, thought, and talent, nested under minimal necessary similarity. The frame problem gets solved in the best possible way, for everyone, over every time scale. Mandala symbolism depicts equilibration of order: ![[mandala.jpg|350]] <h4>The "same thing" as . . .</h4> All of the above is ***ALSO*** the same thing as: <h5>All true religions</h5> The religious question is what *must* be the highest value. Since the unknown must be continually encountered for the cosmos to endure (i.e., the frame problem must be eternally solved and re-solved), true religion must therefore be faith in the process of creative exploration. Living a truly religious life is thus the "same thing" as identifying with the hero. <h5>Psychotherapy</h5> Peterson says: > "Jung . . . believed that psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort". And Jung (1958b) said: > "Religions are psychotherapeutic systems . . . A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning." Discovering the meaning of your life by ceasing self-deception and embodying the hero pattern *just is* undertaking a "supreme moral effort". This is what Jung called wholeness, aligning the ego with the Self, "living the symbolic life", the quest of the Holy Grail, "individuation", etc. They are all the same thing. Hence, the structure of Jung's analytical psychology *just is* the meta-story: confession, elucidation, education, transformation. As Peterson says, the curative mechanism of psychotherapy is the truth: helping the client get his life story straight and showing him that he is capable of incrementally facing what he fears or rejects (confronting chaos). **Logos *is* the psychotherapeutic cure. Being healthy and being ideal are the "same thing."** <h5>Alchemy</h5> The alchemists fantasized about the existence of the *lapis philosophorum*, an image of "perfect matter", and the process that would be required to create it. They believed that the lapis would be capable of "turning lead into gold" and of granting immortality to its owner. Edinger (1985) says: > ". . . [the lapis is] . . . a transcendent, miraculous substance, which is variously symbolized as the Philosophers' Stone, The Elixir of Life, or the universal medicine." Symbolically, the lapis was an integrated union of all conflicting opposites, i.e., a representation of the highest monotheistic value. In other words, it was symbolically equivalent to Christ, but in the form of matter. The alchemists broadly agreed that a four-stage process was necessary to produce the lapis: Nigredo → Albedo → Citrinitas → Rubedo (decomposition, purification, dawning of light, integration). That is: they fantasized that it was first necessary to return the constituent material into an undifferentiated state of chaos before it could be reconstituted at a higher level of order. This is the meta-story, psychologically projected onto the blank screen of pseudo-chemistry. Peterson (1999a) says: > "Jung essentially discovered, in the course of his analysis of alchemy, the nature of the general human pattern of adaptation, and the characteristic expression of that pattern, in fantasy, and affect." And Edinger (1985) explains why alchemy is such a useful body of evidence for any philosophers or psychologists who are interested in doing purity criticism: > "If we are not to submit psychic phenomena to the Procrustean bed of a preconceived theory [a reified assumption], we must seek the categories for understanding the psyche within the psyche itself . . . This is what we do when we try to understand the process of psychotherapy in terms of alchemy." <h5>Ethics</h5> Traditional normative ethical theories cut along the good vs. the right: - **consequentialist** theories account for the moral relativist component (context; value; subjectivity; ends/goals; individual motivation or desire; interest), whereas; - **deontological** theories account for the moral absolutist component (context-independence; rules; objectivity; means; collective demands; responsibility). Each one lacks what the other accounts for, because what each theory does is abstract out just one (necessary condition) part of the ideal personality and then declare that the part can represent the whole (sufficient condition). Mimicable story (myth) is what unites the good & the right, the absolute & the particular, subjective & objective, past & future, means & ends, all into a whole in the present moment, on the narrow path. Meaning ties everything together. And the one absolute rule is: *no self-deception* (Peterson & Driver-Linn). This is, essentially, virtue ethics. In other words, narrative is specifically the kind of abstraction or universal category that does *not* abolish the particular. A myth or archetype is an abstraction that has representation *and* value/ethics, and thus gets us from is to ought. They are contextualized, embodied, evolutionarily-vetted abstractions. On the other hand, Plato's Ideas and the abstractionist tradition that followed, took abstractions to far greater left-hemisphere extremes by decontextualizing, devaluing, & disembodying them, thus splitting fact from value with no way to put the two back together again. This is why Jung (1961) said: > "Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science." <h5>The telos (?) of evolution</h5> The ideal was both naturally and sexually selected for. Naturally, because the hero pattern is the most generally adaptive solution to every problem. Sexually, in the manner that Peterson (2018d) describes: > ". . . the men all get together and vote on the good [i.e. heroic] men, and the good men are then chosen by the women, and those are the people who propagate. And so it’s like men are voting on which men get to reproduce, and women are going along with the vote, and being even more stringent in their choices. Then what you get is the consciousness that, through its acted expression, transforms the potential of the world into actuality and also selects the direction of evolution . . . And that’s where the meme—Dawkins's term—turns into the biological reality." <h5>Many other philosophical & psychological ideas</h5> For example: - Dewey's need-search-satisfaction - Heidegger's ready-to-hand & present-at-hand - Merleau-Ponty's maximal grip and intentional arc - Piaget's assimilation & accommodation - Gibson's direct perception - Socrates's dialectical method - the dialectic of deduction & induction (i.e., abduction) - the dialectic of top-down rationalism & bottom-up empiricism - the dialectic of analysis & synthesis ("solve et coagula"; recategorization; self-organization through differentiation & hierarchical integration) - the dialectic of dialectical & demonstrative thought - the dialectical interplay of the left and right hemispheres - the hypothetico-deductive method of science - the hermeneutic circle of interpretation - the dialectical relationship of science & philosophy - Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions - predictive processing - relevance realization - **the hidden assumption/reification/critical thinking framework, i.e., the structure of this project.** ## The adversary The second archetype of response to the unknown is the path of the adversary. This is the path of deception (lying), and particularly **self-deception**. This is the process that exists in absolute opposition to Logos. Self-deception means refusing to undergo the emotionally demanding, exploratory descent into chaos when the frame problem re-presents itself (i.e. when you fail to attain your goals). In other words, it means **continuing to impose no-longer-functional categories on the world**. Peterson (2001) says: > "Category systems that impose themselves on the world, regardless of the world, do not make the world conform, merely because of their imposition – at least not for long." **As categories crumble, the self-deceptive archetype creates a positive feedback loop that spirals *down:*** error → self-deception → categorical instability → difficulty of correction increases → incentive to continue self-deceiving increases → reification of existing assumptions is reinforced → repeat. In other words, "doing what already failed but even harder this time." (This is the opposite of the *negative* feedback loop of the hero pattern, which instead spirals *up* and binds ever more tightly onto the narrow path.) In this way, it eventually becomes necessary to use manipulation and force on others to artificially prop up the collapsing situation. Since your category system constitutes your very thoughts and perceptions, **automatizing self-deceptive beliefs (i.e. habitual lying) gradually reconfigures your value structure in a way that you can't detect** — because you cannot stand radically apart from yourself. This means that if you continually lie to yourself, you will eventually corrupt your ability to detect your own corruption. Peterson argues that **not knowing your telos necessarily (inevitably) leads to adoption of the adversarial personality**, because life without meaning is intolerable. When the self-deceptive archetype gains control over a whole society or civilization, the result is a demonic rebellion against God, a descent into hell, and a flood. <h5>Ideology: abstract idolatry (reification)</h5> The hero myth depicts human experience as composed of three constituent elements, each with a good (+) and an evil (-) side. If you're missing a category, or even one side of a category, you no longer have a complete myth, but rather an **ideology**. An ideology essentially declares that you only need to pay attention to certain portions of experience, rather than to potentially *anything* that announces itself as important (meaningful). This implicitly gives you permission to ignore certain kinds of error, and inevitably necessitates an external scapegoat for whatever you left in the ideology's shadow. In this way, **ideology is systematized self-deception**. **Ideological possession is therefore abstract idolatry:** worshipping the wrong god (modeling yourself after a personality other than the exploratory hero). That is, an ideology is an incomplete system of selective categorization reified as "<u>real</u>", i.e. a set of categories that you *must* search for and explain experience in terms of. The result is a "procrustean bed" situation: you begin to teleologically perceive & act "for the sake of" the ideology just as you would a concrete idol e.g., the Golden Calf. In other words, you start serving values other than the truth. And this is necessarily the case: if you renounce the process of seeking truth, you are guaranteed to start reifying idols and succumb to some other inferior belief system, because you can't not have a highest value. This is why William James (1890) called abstractions (pre-conceived categories) "teleological weapons of the mind". Even the Buddhists understood this — the concept of "maya" (illusion) is a warning about ideological reification of categories. About this, Peterson (1999a) says: > "**The final emergent process of the developmental chain of abstraction can be applied to undermine the stability of its foundation.** The modern and verbally sophisticated individual is therefore always in danger of sawing off the branch on which he or she sits. Language turned drama into mythic narrative, narrative into formal religion, and religion into critical philosophy, providing exponential expansion of adaptive ability — while simultaneously undermining assumption and expectation, and dividing knowledge from action. Civilized Homo sapiens can use words to destroy what words did not create." > . . . > "The modern educated individual . . . [still] “acts out” [Judeo-Christian presuppositions] but does not “believe.” It might be said that the lack of isomorphism between explicit abstract self-representation and actions undertaken in reality makes for substantial existential confusion—and for susceptibility to sudden dominance by any ideology providing a “more complete” explanation." Peterson describes ideology as the **archetypal weakness & temptation of reason** (i.e., the left hemisphere), Satan's "highest angel". And Jung (1958b) said: > "Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!" # Conclusion **To summarize all this as plainly as possible:** - The good is the true, and the true is the good; they are the same thing. - The battle between good & evil is the battle between truth and self-deception (both commission & omission) in one's own psyche. - The primary reasons for mental illness and its collective equivalent are self-deception and nihilism. - The choice between hero & adversary is the choice between 1) remaking the self according to the ideal vs. 2) deconstructing the ideal to avoid remaking the self. Peterson (2007) says: > "If the world of experience is made of chaos and order, then the choice between the path of Cain and the path of Abel is the most important choice that anyone can ever make. If everything is merely material, by contrast, the choice does not even exist." <h5>The implicit meta-context</h5> If we're really operating in the evolutionary/mythological/religious context, and if the ideal is really built into us at every level of our being, then Logos is necessarily the ***meta-context* (context of contexts)** against which all perceptions, value judgments, thoughts, and actions are implicitly made, *no matter what you say you're doing*. This is true even if you're an atheist, a secularist, a neo-communist, an empiricist putting it into the black box of "objects", or a rationalist putting it into "rationality". *Everything* depends on prior value judgments, all the way up the hierarchy of contexts. The only reason we don't notice this is because our deepest presuppositions are the most invisible. <h5>Making the implicit explicit</h5> On the first page of *Maps of Meaning*, Peterson quotes the Bible verse Matthew 13:35: > "I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world." This is not some grandiose statement, but rather very seriously what the book does. The hero myth is the deepest, most implicit context by which we do & must live, and *Maps of Meaning* makes it explicit. It brings to light the nature of the a priori interpretive structure. It brings our self-representation further up the chain of abstraction, on par with our current level of consciousness and scientific knowledge. It makes the invisible, visible. Jung would call this "making the unconscious conscious." <h5>Abstractionism vs. contextualism: summary</h5> The contextualist worldview essentially reverses all the normal assumptions of our abstractionist "spirit of the times". To recap some important examples: - the contextualist worldview is prior to the abstractionist worldview - natural categories are prior to classical categories - the mythological or religious paradigm (the world of meaning) is prior to the scientific paradigm (the world of objects) - the right hemisphere (master) is prior to the emissary (left hemisphere) - dialectical reasoning is prior to demonstrative reasoning - knowing-how is prior to knowing-that - action is prior to abstraction - meaning/value is prior to objects/facts - theory is prior to data - uncertainty & becoming (chaos) is prior to certainty and being (order) - Darwinian or pragmatic truth is prior to Newtonian or correspondence truth - the subjective perspective is prior to the objective (i.e., the objective is an intersubjective abstraction from the subjective) - our representations are fundamentally lived maps, not inner possessions - the relations between things are prior to the divisions between things - in Heidegger's terms, Being (ontological) is prior to beings (ontic) - in Lakoff & Johnson's terms, you can't explain Being by metaphorically mapping the whole onto a lesser, more well-understood part of experience - in Peterson's terms, you can't live by an ideology, only by the one complete myth - any attempt to solve the frame problem once and for all amounts to an attempt to forever encapsulate the unknown in terms of the current known - you cannot explain consciousness with abstractions of consciousness - etc. Do you see how this pattern is the "same thing" depicted by the positive mythological constituent elements of experience? ![[The Positive Constituent Elements of Experience, Personified.jpg|350]] <h5>Idealism</h5> All of this implies that **both metaphysical and epistemological idealism are true.** - **Metaphysically,** all reality is <u>made of</u> consciousness. There is only one ontological primitive (the <u>real</u>), alternately called: experience, meaning, mind, subjectivity, story, the unknown, chaos, the absolute, the sacred, the totality, the One, the cosmic whole, psyche, God, etc (?). (Because the other two constituent elements of experience—knower & known—originally arise *from* the unknown, they are therefore ultimately the same in ontological kind.) So, no matter what word you use, you're talking about the "same thing." As Kastrup (2014) says: ". . . God is the unifying experiential field at the ground of all reality, including ourselves." - **Epistemologically,** there is a qualitative transition between the absolute and *how we as limited beings <u>perceive</u> the absolute* (knower dependence). This is akin to Kant's transcendental idealism, except in this case, *the noumenon is also phenomena* (i.e. the metaphorical "thing-in-itself" is also made of consciousness). The transition is in the qualitative nature of consciousness, *not* in ontological kind (Kastrup, 2014). That is to say: "matter" is *not* a separate & different reality on par with, and dualistically opposed to, mind. As Kastrup (2019a) points out, matter is not on the same level of explanatory abstraction as mind. Rather, matter is an intersubjective abstraction *from* mind. This means that the "hard problem of consciousness", explaining mind in terms of matter, was never a genuine problem to begin with (Kastrup, 2014). Importantly, this kind of idealism does *not in any way* mean that what is conventionally conceptualized as the objective is a mere fantasy or can be gerrymandered or socially constructed away. What it *does* mean is that: - Our experience is inescapably embodied and therefore knower-dependent (which is *not* the same thing as "purely idiosyncratic" or "purely at the whims of our individual subjective wills"); - Just because we can conceptually reify abstractions of consciousness as self-sufficient entities like an "objective realm" or "matter" and make useful pragmatic inferences using those metaphors, does not mean that they *actually* have a literal, separate existence; - And it also means that when physicists believe they are studying an independent physical reality outside of themselves, what they are actually studying is *their perceptions of the shared portions of experience that we don't identify with*—and leaving the implications of that implicit (unconscious; unaccounted for; projected) (Kastrup, 2019a). <h5>Rule #8</h5> In my opinion, Peterson's rule #8: "Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie" is the cornerstone of his (and Jung's) ideas. This is the rule that ultimately subsumes everything else. The person "telling himself the truth" (the *whole* truth) *necessarily just is* confronting chaos, *is* solving the frame problem, *is* acting out the hero pattern, *is* balancing interest & responsibility, *is* pursuing the meaning of life, *is* aligned with the highest value, *is* encountering the sacred, *is* participating in subsidiary identity, *is* "living his life as Christ lived his", *is* on the narrow path, *is* working for the good, *is* rescuing his father from the belly of the whale, *is* curing himself. It is all the same thing. This is the deepest assumption (highest value) that we must all consciously predicate and act & perceive "for the sake of". This is the pattern that reconciles all dialectics. This is the true "categorical imperative". When you figure out what Jung & Peterson are circumambulating, it is an epiphany experience and a mental revolution. Peterson (2014) says: > "[A] hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say that: 'It's as if things were coming together in my mind.' It's like, well, that's what archetypes do. Archetypes glue things together." The revolution is understanding that the secret of life is simply *not lying*, following meaning, and honestly re-evaluating means & ends when your categories fail. In this way, you will find out where meaning takes you in the cosmic part/whole hierarchy (the adventure of life). This is your telos. This puts you in touch with what is <u>most real</u>. The truth is not some impenetrable academic idea. Scholars and scientists don't have privileged access to it. Living in truth simply means telling the truth to others, and especially to yourself, as best you can. Anyone can do it. This is the one narrative that unifies in a bottom-up manner without any top-down coercion, and reconnects us to the source of our civilization. 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