Babble or Truth?

People like Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra and Sadhguru speak in a way that is alien to the scientific-minded person. It is almost as if there are two separate languages used for describing the world. The owner of skeptic.com, Michael Shermer, once had a debate with Deepak Chopra, where they tried to discuss the nature of reality.

Chopra would fire out a few sentences that sounded profound, but ultimately, Shermer replied, usually with a smirk, that everything Chopra had said was nothing but a fancy word salad. There was nothing substantial underneath. While there are a minority of physicists that do corroborate Chopra’s worldview, and clearly, a large audience that was highly receptive to his ideas – they are far from being the main stream position in the scientific community.

Are all these people stupid and delusional, or is there something else going on?

The down-to-earth precise language that Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, and others use when they debate more right-brained thinkers, would reverberate with one section of the audience but not the other. It is as if half the people think like Shermer, and the other half think like Chopra.

I noticed this occur several times as I tuned in to these kinds of discussions.

There was a debate between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, where they both discussed the notion of ‘truth’ for over two hours. An infuriating discussion, to be sure, but in some ways, it was rather interesting.

Harris defined ‘truth’ the way we all colloquially use the term – an accurate representation of reality, or what really happened. If a scientific theory makes a prediction about the future and the prediction occurs, and this happens repeatedly, then the scientific theory, for all intents and purposes, is true.

But Peterson pushed back, and decided to engage in a word game, where he chose to describe ‘truth’ differently. His definition of truth was: anything that advanced the flourishing of the human species. So, if a scientific theory was predictive, but ultimately, that same theory led to the development of a weapon that obliterated the population of the world, then the theory wasn’t ‘true’ because it wasn’t taking into accounts all the variables. That is, the theory is merely provisionally true.

Peterson chose to impose a new criterion to consider when thinking about the notion of truth. And Harris refused to partake in this redefinition. What ensued was over two hours of argumentation about this very idea.

You may think that this kind of argument is only something that would occur between two academically minded people who have a strange infatuation with definitions, but it is far more common than you think. Harris adopted the left-brained perspective and Peterson adopted the right-brained perspective.

Peterson was comfortable with redefining an important word because he was trying to make a deeper point – that it was important to consider the moral implications of propositions and ideas before we consider them to be ‘facts’ or ‘true’. Truth is not concerned with what is objective or verifiable, but what is evolutionarily adaptive. The underlying presupposition is that as limited thinking beings, we have no idea what constitutes objective truth. The best that we can possibly do is have some inkling about what helps us survive and propagate. He chose a Darwinian definition of truth.

But Harris refused to acknowledge this new definition, because in his worldview, we do have access to objective knowledge, and indeed objective morality, so ‘truth’ has an unambiguous definition, and there is no point in arguing about it in the first place.

This is ultimately the point that McGilchrist was making. The right-brained perspective is highly suspicious of certainty, is open to reinterpretation and playing around with certitudes, expresses itself through metaphorical, poetic language. It is often mysterious, and its intuitions are deep.

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Related posts:

1. The Medium is the Message Summary (7.4/10)
2. Amusing Ourselves to Death Summary (9/10)
3. The Discipline of the Will (The Obstacle is the Way)
4. William James (A History of Western Philosophy)