YouTube – On Jordan Peterson & The Hidden Epidemic, Rebel Wisdom
[ 13/7/20 ]
Mostly great – but I have a real issue with the parting comment, about the problem being the reductionist world view.
I would say that the problem has been an overly simplistic reductionist world view, combined with a value system based in scarcity (market value) where anything abundant has zero value by definition.
When you actually look deeply into biology or strategy or mathematics or computation or cosmology, then you find irreducible complexity, eternal unknowns, fundamental uncertainty, systems that cannot be predicted, and perhaps even true randomness.
Once someone starts to appreciate how profoundly complex people and the wider reality within which we exist actually must be, and how simplified and simplistic any experience or understanding we may have of it necessarily is; then the only response is one that demands a certain level of humility, as one comes face to face with complexity beyond the capacity of any mind to comprehend. That seems to be a reasonable approximation to the notion of an ineffable deity. And to be 100% clear, I have been a confirmed skeptic for about 60 years.
We need to have profound respect for just how amazing human level agency can be. As anyone seriously into the AI community can attest, it is really complex, and almost certainly subject to levels of evolutionarily selected subtlety that we have barely begun to explore. Many of the old mythic ideas are almost certainly wrong in detail, and many of them are a very close metaphorical approximation to something that takes decades of work to begin to glimpse.
