My Notes For Maps Of Meaning (2017) – Jordan Peterson

Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation

Jordan Peterson’s eighth Maps of Meaning (2017) lectures discusses the neuropsychology of symbolic representation (how our brain’s right and left hemispheres process the known and unknown differently), and the story of Mesopotamian myth of Marduk.

Categories

What are most real categories?

• Science: Protons, electrons
• Mythology: Darwinian truths (conducive to survival)

It’s unclear if abstract ideas are more or less real than material reality. Are numbers more real than what they represent or less real?

The materialist view is wrong according to Peterson. The most real category is not matter, the most real category is “what matters.”

It’s the mythological viewpoint that is able to represent what is most real.

The mythological hypothesis is: There is a knower, what it knows, and the unknown (what it needs to know). And the story is that your consciousness can work with nature and culture to bring itself forward. But all aspects have positive and negative elements. Unlike ideology – which states that things are uni-dimensional (for example: culture is bad, nature is good).

It’s important to understand the duality of these categories for self-protection. A naive person who encounters true evil becomes devastated.

What is beyond our understanding is the dragon hording the treasure. We use this idea to encounter unknown conceptually. We are both predator and prey. We can kill or be eaten by the unknown – but we know that it contains something valuable.

The Limitations of Our Categories

We can’t say our categories of the world is exhaustive – it’s constantly changing. The world is too unpredictable. For example, Henry Ford created the assembly line to build cars, but he had no idea what the repercussions were. Societies transformed, he brought about the industrial age. His efforts led to displaced populations, pollution, countless deaths, rapid progress etc.

A car also has individualistic presuppositions. You can choose to go from point A to B without anyone’s permission. This is counter to communal thinking. Soviet Russia could not adopt cars without accepting the underlying economic and political presuppositions. A mechanical invention led to not only material changes in its immediate environment, but conceptual, and social changes globally.

The Brain

The more different ways there are for discovering the same thing, the higher probability of its truth. Sensory input and motor output are inseparable. You don’t passively take in info from the world. You are active in doing so. Your brain is selective in parsing out what it wants to process. For example, you suddenly notice the fridge’s noise when the electricity comes back on. Otherwise, you are unaware of the sound.

Raw empiricists think that data imprints itself on you – and that you’re a blank slate. But this isn’t true. Kant recognized this in “The Critique of Pure Reason” – when he said that you cannot process sense data without a priori conceptions.

You use your pre-frontal cortex to generate an abstract map out the world, and then to plot out motor strategies before implementing them. That’s what abstract thinking is. It’s the hypothesis of abstract action, the analysis of the outcome, and the implementation of the outcome.

That’s something that separates intelligence from conscientiousness. The correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero. Intelligence defines the ability of abstraction – whereas conscientiousness defines the probability of implementation.

And those are different problems.

It takes willpower to transform abstraction into implementation. It’s easy to see why it’s tempting to do nothing. The body, in default mode, would only require food and expend the least amount of energy possible. You need a very good reason to force yourself to act.

Piaget discovered that children act out their behavior – they play games, but don’t articulate the rules. We act things out. Information is coded in behavior. That’s a major thing to understand. That helps explain how you can get information from dreams that are not fully articulated representations of your thoughts. It’s like how chimps understand the dominance hierarchy without being able to articulate it. It is how Moses – through spending thousands of hours as a judge who solved conflicts between his people – was able to finally articulate the best pattern of behaving through a set of rules.

The Hemispheres

A big debate politically is how modular vs integrated should the world be. The far-right movements argue that there should be more modularity while the left thinks there should be more integration. There can’t be too much of either, there has to be a balance – but it’s not clear what that balance is. That’s why this is an unsettled debate.

Peterson shows us a similar dichotomy between our left and right brain hemispheres.

Consider the characteristics of both brain hemispheres.

The Left Brain:

1. Operates in explored territory
2. Positive Affect
3. Active Behavior
4. Linear Thinking
5. Detail Recognition
6. Detail Generation
7. Fine Motor Action

The Right Brain:

1. Operates in unexplored territory
2. Negative Affect
3. Inhibition of Behavior
4. Image Processing
5. Holistic Thinking
6. Pattern Recognition
7. Pattern Generation
8. Gross Motor Acton

Peterson then goes to explain these in more detail. For example, Fine Motor action is associated with your left brain. You use fine motor action when writing, for example – if you’re a right handed male (for simplicity). And you use Gross Motor Action for actions that require more holistic thinking. For example, when opening a jar, a right-handed person will use their left hand to twist the lid (using their right brain).

You spend most of your live trying to stave off the unknown – suppressing right brain use. You do so to avoid becoming overwhelmed. You only expose yourself to new knowledge tentatively.

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If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.