Jordan Peterson: Q&A at Cambridge

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Always seems strange to ask for questions after something like that, but that's where we're at now, very much so. Am I taking questions or is there someone pointing out? Shall I do it? Yes? Okay, all right, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for this passionate, for this passionate defense. Reason for those of you, for those of us who are on your side. I'm just curious, do you have any forward-looking views on where we’re going full debate? You know, this whole, I mean what you've been going through for the last few years, every argument you've had. Do you have any sort of midterm to long-term view of where we're going, or if you don't, that's fine.

Yeah, well, we're going in many directions at once, you know, and the question is, is the fundamental trajectory downhill or uphill? And I would say that depends on you. Western society, in particular. What's that? Western society? Yes, yes. No, and more globally.

I mean, I worked on the UN Secretary General's report on sustainable development for about two years and read a very large number of texts on environmental problems and opportunities and economic development. What happened to me was that I got way more optimistic than I was before I started reading those books.

I mean, so many things have happened in the last 40 years that are so good you just can't believe it. I mean, we've lifted more people out of abject poverty in the last 15 years than in the entire course of human history in terms of sheer numbers of people. You know, starvation except for political reasons is now pretty much absent across the world.

There hasn't been any wars in the Western Hemisphere for about a decade. That's really something, you know, and no major wars plague us at the moment. That's quite something, given that there are seven billion of us, and there's only going to be nine billion by all appearances. It's going to peak out at about nine billion.

My suspicions are, in 100 years, one of the biggest problems we'll face is that there's just not enough people. And you never hear that, but I really do believe it's likely to be the case. We can certainly carry nine billion people without doing the planet undo environmental damage.

People who claim otherwise—I think a lot of things about that, but one of the things I don't think is that that's an accurate viewpoint. I mean, we're doing far better than we were 40 years ago feeding people, and we can certainly pack in another two billion.

It turns out that if you want to control population, though I wouldn't really recommend that as an occupation, all you have to do is educate women, and that's the end of that problem. Then you also have educated women, and we know that's very annoying, but it seems to be working out.

It's a great predictor of general economic development. It's actually, I think, the best predictor of society's future economic development is the attitude that they hold towards the education of women, and luckily it's in the positive direction. So that's very cool.

It certainly seems to be the case that the fastest way out of a given environmental conundrum is to make absolutely poor people richer as fast as you possibly can because then they do things like, well, they don't burn wood anymore. Maybe they burn coal, and I know coal is evil, but it's not as evil as wood.

And I don't know if you know this, but 1.6 million children die every year because of the indoor pollution that wood burning causes. It's like if the nuclear industry had a record like that, that would be all over the newspapers, but they're just third-world children after all.

So, you know, the planet has too many people on it anyways, and so there's all sorts of things I see that are so radically positive that it beggars description. I mean, India and China alone have greened an area, because of agricultural transformation, the size of the Amazon.

Partly as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide levels, a semi-arid area—it's either the size of the Amazon or Alaska, I don't remember which—has greened in the last 15 years. And so these are things you never hear; you have to ferret them out.

But as far as I can tell, if we got our act together and actually wanted it instead of wanting to burn everything to the ground in an orgy of guilt-ridden self-destruction, we could set up a world in 15 years where absolutely everyone had plenty to eat, and where obesity would be the primary problem.

It's a good problem, actually. It's like, oh no, you know, we have too much food. What are we going to do? That's a good problem, and where everyone was educated because the cost of education is falling precipitously.

We could do that in a way that was actually beneficial to the environment, whatever that is. So, I would say fundamentally I'm optimistic, but if we want hell, we could certainly have that.

And you might say, well, you don't want hell. It's like, yeah really, eh? You might want to ask your quest to yourself that question real seriously because there's a party that would wreak vengeance on God for the catastrophic suffering of being, that's for sure.

And that's, that's Cain, right? So, no, I'm optimistic because I also don't believe that our fundamental motivations are that of a corrupt will. I think that's wrong. I think it's wrong factually, and I think it's an appalling claim philosophically, and it's a radically destructive claim.

Ethically demoralizing, a terribly demoralizing claim, and demoralizing enough to really hurt people. I've seen many, many people, maybe thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people, hurt by that claim, hurt to the deep recesses of their soul.

But I would say, like, it depends. Depends on what you choose to do. Really depends on what you choose to do. You know, I read once—I think this was in the Solzhenitsyn novel, although it might not have been, and it's certainly not his idea—it's an idea from one of the church fathers that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Nice mathematical model of God, I like it a lot. But there's something about it that's really true, you know. We interact with one another as if there's a spark of the divine within us.

You say, well, no we don’t. It's like, well, if you don't then no one likes you. So, you know, that'll be its own punishment because we certainly do interact with the people we value when we're acting in a manner that we regard as appropriate, as if there is something about them, this transcendent and in some sense eternal value.

You might say, well, you don't believe that. It's like, well, do you believe in natural rights? Because the notion of natural rights is predicated on that underlying presupposition or observation. And you don't believe in natural rights? Well, then again, where are you exactly, and who are you exactly? And those are questions very much worth posing.

And so I think that truth is more powerful than deceit by a large margin, and I think love is more powerful than hate by a large margin. I don't mean naive love, and I'm not naive about people. I don't mean that at all.

But I think it is possible for us to rise above the resentment of our suffering and to wish the best for all things, and I think we can participate in that. And you do that well by extending your hand to your enemy to the degree you're capable of doing that because who needs enemies? Or maybe you do, but it'd be better not to have them.

I think even if they're convenient targets to defeat. And then truth, well, that's the handmaiden of love, and that's something everyone can practice at every moment if they desire that. And that's an adventure, you know.

If you're acting deceitfully, you already specify the outcomes of your actions and you pursue that. But the problem with that is it's predicated on the acceptance of your own authoritarian completeness. It's like, what the hell do you know about what you should have?

So what do you do instead? You just do your best to not lie and see what happens. And what happens are wonderful things, although perhaps not at the beginning when there's a lot of mystical claw-through.

So sorry for the lengthy answer, but it was a complicated question. Does consciousness die with the body, and is meaning doomed like the universe? Well, I don't know.

I would say, I mean we don't understand consciousness. We don't really understand its place in the cosmos, let's say, but I'm not qualified to answer such questions. I would say, though, that you know, no one stops listening to a symphony because they know it's going to end.

And so I think, in some sense, our proper task is to find the meaning within the finite. When I had clinical clients who were consumed with such questions, because you know, you can pick a timeframe of evaluation that makes all your efforts futile, right?

Well, the sun is going to envelop the earth. I think it's four billion years, so like get ready. It's like, well, what's the point of stopping this baby from crying when the sun is going to envelop the earth?

And for, well, yeah, you all laugh right, but that laughter, you see, that's a sign of wisdom, you know? That's preposterous. Why? I mean that's the existential question, right? It's like, well, if we're all doomed to ashes and decay, why do anything?

Well, I used the baby crying for a reason. Who in the world is going to use that argument to not feed their baby? Well, why feed that thing? In four million years, the sun's going to envelop the earth.

It's like wrong time frame, folks. And so what I would say—and I did say to my clinical clients—if you're adopting a timeframe that makes what you're doing appear trivial, the problem isn't necessarily what you're doing, although it might be, and you have to ask yourself that question because perhaps you are engaging in something that's more trivial than you should be.

The problem is that your mind, which is capable of leaping across evaluative frameworks, has picked a timeframe inappropriate for the task. So quit doing that instead. You could say, well, why don't you practice adopting the timeframe that imbues your properly oriented action with the deepest possible apprehended meaning?

And why would you not think that the fact that that meaning manifests itself with the proper choice of timeframe? Why wouldn't you accept the fact that's indication of a valid choice? It certainly feels like it. You know what it's like. You get engaged in something—a deep conversation, a piece of music, a piece of art, something you love doing, someone you love being with.

You get engaged in that, you lose your sense of temporality, and you don't pop out of it and think, "Oh my god, I wish I would use the timeframe that made everything irrelevant because of my cognitive brilliance." You think, "Hey, we could do that some more. How about all the time?"

And that's a good goal. It's like, yeah, how about that all the time? And then you've got time right when you're engaged like that.

And I would say that's a profound neurophysiological signal that you're in the right place at the right time, right? Because it's accompanied by a sense of deep well-being, and that's literally an antidote to suffering. I mean that literally.

With many of my clients who were suffering, what we would strive to do was not so much make them happy because sometimes that was impossible—they were so crippled in so many ways, often physically and in pain—but something meaningful that would keep them going and keep them from straying and keep them from thinking homicidal and genocidal thoughts—all of that.

And meaning, that's the antidote to suffering. And the question is, well, how's that best to be found? Well, that's an empirical question. You have to look in your own life and see where meaning glimmers and then pursue that, right?

That's what Harry Potter is doing, by the way, when he's chasing the snitch. I just thought I'd let you know. And you know, you win the game if you catch that thing.

Well, that's not exactly right. You get 100 points, but it'll do. So, another question. How about you?

Hi, thank you very much for the lecture. Um, you talked a lot about, you talked a lot about meaning, both from perception and in music and art. What do you mean by meaning? What is meaning, and where is its source?

Meaning is implication for action or for reorganization of the perceptual frames that frame action. So there is—and is that the sole aim of what you— is that what you find in art and music?

Yes, in complex ways. I mean in music you find this demand that the music lays upon you to orient yourself in relationship to this harmonious interplay of patterns. And you might say, well, why is that meaningful?

Well, that's a good question. Well, it's because you're acting out something like the adaptation of your soul to the structures of reality itself. Now, it's done very abstractly because the patterns of music are not precisely the actual patterns of the world, right? They're abstractions.

But it's play and representation, and it's art. And so you're acting out the process of optimal adaptation at a very high level. When you think, what people are doing, imagine a Viennese waltz; you know, so you have this unbelievably well-trained orchestra.

They're all emitting patterns like mad, and they're playing while they're doing that, putting little twists on the pattern so that a little novel, a little interesting—even if you've heard the music many times. You have the conductor who's keeping all these specialized subsections operating in harmony and then you have the couples dancing.

They're trained to do that, but they're cutting the rug, you know, in the same way. They have their moves, and they're trying to impress each other. And there's a mating aspect of that, and they're all doing that harmoniously.

It's a complete vision of an ordered society, right? From the subatomic realm, let's say, all the way up to the cosmic realm, that's all taking place in the dance. And people don't know that, but, well, they do know it too, you know.

And they know it in that they're acting it out, and there isn't anything in some sense that you know more deeply or believe more deeply than that which you act out. And you're not smart enough to understand the full totality of your actions.

I mean, we're not transparent to ourselves. We act out all sorts of things that are stunningly brilliant without realizing it, and it takes, in some sense, often untold centuries for us to figure out what we were doing and why. And so that happens to you, you know, in your own life when you have a flash of insight into your own behavior.

That's why I was doing that. It's like, while you were doing it, why didn't you know? Well, you're complicated. You're really complicated and certainly not transparent to yourself.

And so I have a paper called Three Types of Meaning; you could look that up if you wanted a more technical answer. But the music answer, by example, is a good one, and I think people can really relate to it because, you know, the only person you ever hear who says, "Well, I don't really like music" is like, no.

That's just a posture, you know. You like music; you just want to be, you know, kind of interestingly different and controversial. And it's really something, right?

And it's also interesting that music has this non-propositional structure that's completely opaque to rational argumentation. Said, I used to like to watch punk rockers, especially the ones who did mosh pit punk rock.

You know, I went to a Ramones concert once; it was quite comical. I was on the second floor. Ah, so loud I couldn't hear for three days after this concert because it was a pretty little theater.

We sat about 800 people, and they had their stadium speakers in there. It was like a sonic wall of sound, and we were above this mosh pit. And there's all these like nihilistic punk rockers down there smashing into each other and throwing themselves off the stage.

And I thought, for all this talk of nihilism, there you are, dancing to the harmonious patterns of life. It's like, you know, smash this state and all of that. It's like, that's, that will groove to that.

Yeah, it's very comical. So even among the most, the most propositionally nihilistic, they still fall in love with music. It might be harsh and grating to some ears, but you start where you can.

And you know, I like the Ramones, so that was fine with me. So maybe, yes? Yes to brain damage? Yes, and heaps and heaps of neuroscience all seem to suggest that we are merely—that consciousness is merely an app running on a biological machine.

The thing that, without being the decider really, the thing that John Haidt calls the elephant and the rider. Yeah, and how does this—my question is how does this grim dark materialist view of existence square with looking for meaning imitating the divine?

Yeah, well, I think the grim dark view and the biologically deterministic view is just wrong again. And so consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon of matter and not that we know what that would mean anyways.

Like, what the hell does that mean? It's something we don't understand. Matter, we might think we understand it, but all you have to do is familiarize yourself a little bit with quantum theory to understand that you don't understand matter at all.

It's like, what is that stuff? And obviously, consciousness is implicit in it in some sense, because here it is, and we're all conscious and we have no idea how that managed itself.

And then the thing about—but more, more specifically, I would say, you know, when Darwin wrote his great tracks on evolutionary theory, he stressed two elements of the selection process: natural selection, fair enough.

And you could make a deterministic argument for natural selection. It's not easy because nature is really complicated, and the idea that nature is selecting—that's from, you know, from a random array of potential traits, let's say—although I'm not convinced that that's entirely random, by the way.

But we won't get into that. Nature selects from this random array of traits, and I think that capitalization on randomness in that manner is necessary to solve the complex process problem of perception over a very long span of time.

But there's sexual selection. Now, it's a scandal in scientific history, as far as I'm concerned, for almost 100 years after Darwin published his great works on sexual selection, biologists tended to pretty much ignore it.

It's like, yeah, no, natural selection. And that was because I think it was easier to maintain a strict determinism by concentrating on natural selection. The tricky thing about sexual selection is, how is that not conscious choice?

I mean, what, you don't make a conscious choice when you sell? Well, maybe you don't if you've had enough alcohol, but I wouldn't recommend that as a long-term mating strategy.

But you tell me that the conscious choice of women specifically—it's more complex in the case of men because we don't have as much at stake and so we're not as choosy. Women are exceptionally choosy, and certainly, it's like a truism among evolutionary biologists that part of the reason we had such rapid cortical expansion is because of sexual selection.

It's like, how is that not the action of consciousness on matter? And you might say, well, that's only been operating since Homo sapiens because nothing was conscious before then.

It's like, you ever see that BBC clip of the puffer fish making the mandela? Oh, well, you could look that up. This little puffer fish—he's like this long, he's just a puffer fish, you know? He doesn't have any hands, which is kind of hard if you—hard problem if you want to be a sculptor.

He makes this sculpture that's like 20 feet across; he's this big, 20 feet across, at the bottom of the ocean, and it's a perfect circle and quite complexly undulated and wavy. It's not the sort of mandela you would see in a great cathedral, but he's just a fish, man. It's not so bad, you know?

And he spends like a week building this thing, and it's so funny watching him in the film because he goes down there, and he like—maybe there's a stray piece of shell, and he grabs that, he spits it out because no shells in the damn sculpture; it has to be clean.

And then he pops up and he turns one eye like a bird and he looks at it, and then he goes down and waves a little sand into place. He's making these dunes that are like a foot high, and there's like 400 of them.

And then you see an aerial shot of it's this really—it's the size of this stage. And then the female puffer fish comes along and, you know, checks it out, sees if he's got what it takes.

And if he does, the way they go, it's like it isn't obvious to me at all that that puffer fish isn't conscious. And I would say you say, well, you're anthropomorphizing. It's like, okay, let's have that discussion.

So I'm pretty familiar with the animal experimental literature, and the greatest animal experimentalists, especially those that study motivation and emotion—so they're the ones that are delving very deep into the neurophysiological apparatus. Their basically rule of thumb is, you anthropomorphize except when there's a reason not to.

I think we share like 85 percent of our genes with yeast. It's like rats, they're pretty complicated. They play, they laugh—you can tickle them. They die without love. You know, puffer fish, they make sculptures.

Here's a story about spiders; this is a fun story if you like stories about spiders. So there's these spiders, and the female won't mate with the male unless the male offers her a gift.

And so he has to find some dead fly or something that's particularly delicious to a female, then wrap it really nicely in the web and present it to her. And if she likes it and it's a good fly, then maybe she'll gain to mate with him.

But the damn spiders, it's so funny—some of them will wrap up dirt and present that. It's like they tend not to get away with it, you know, but sometimes they do.

So that's pretty funny, but what's also funny is sometimes the female will eat the fly and leave the guy, you know? It is in this agitated state, let's say. It's like, you know, those behaviors? Those are complex, man.

And it isn't obvious to me at all that consciousness doesn't exist way down the phylogenetic chain. I mean, maybe it emerges in some form with a differentiated nervous system. We don't know.

But Franz de Waal, who's a great primatologist, just wrote a book called "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" And the answer to that could well be no. I mean, octopuses, for example, man, those things are smart, and they can do all sorts of things we can't do.

You know, they can transform the texture of their surface as well as the color to match an underlying rock. It's like they'll clamp onto a rock and then poof, they're exactly like the rock. It's like, that's hard, and it's hard to imagine how something like that is possible even without the intermediation of something like consciousness.

And I cannot see at all how you could be a biologist and believe in sexual selection and think that only random factors determine evolution. It's like, what about mate choice?

Well, yeah, no, no, really! What about mate choice, really? And you might say, well, that's not aiming at some determinate end. And that's complicated, and that's worthy of discussion.

But it's not obvious to me at all that in the human case it's not aiming at some idealized end. I mean, we certainly look for something approximating an ideal in a mate; we want that and we want to encourage it if we don't have it to begin with, unless we're, you know, bitter and resentful and jealous.

And so we are pushing towards an ideal that's at least implicit, and it governs us at every level of our social interactions. And so I don't think that it is a dark reduction of consciousness to an underlying, say, ultimately real material state, and that's the final answer.

I don't think that's true. And there's lots of people who aren't foolish who don't think it's true. It isn't obvious to me that Roger Penrose thinks it's true, you know, and he's no lightweight.

So he thinks consciousness is irreducible in some sense, and I think the biblical idea that consciousness calls forth shape from a material substrate—there's something to that. And that's certainly not an idea that's limited in religious texts to the biblical stories in Genesis.

If you look at religious texts all over the world, there's always this insistence that there are two primal factors that work. One is the matrix out of which things emerge, and another is something that calls forth structure from that matrix.

And it's a chicken and egg problem, you know, to use a terrible cliché, but it's an extraordinary widespread fundamental theological idea.

So I think I have to stop; I'm getting messages from people that I'm doing my best to ignore. So thank you very much for the great welcome and for attending the talk tonight, and you have a wonderful—

Well, Jordan, thank you so much for a terrific, exciting, perceptive talk. I'm sure we could all have discussed this all night long, but I'm afraid we shall have to wrap up now.

So I just want to say a few words. I'm sorry, my name is Araf Ahmed. I'm a professor of philosophy in the university. I just want to say a couple of things.

The first thing is just to say very briefly, this event does, does mark, I hope, the close of a disgraceful chapter in the history of this university. For too long, we have labored under the absurd idea that words are a form of oppression or that speech is a way of perpetuating harm, when the opposite is true.

Words are instruments of liberation, and speech is an alternative to harm. And it was under those false ideas, as you will know, that when Jordan was invited in early 2019, the university canceled that invitation.

Not because of anything he said, not even because of anything he thought, but because of somebody he stood next to. Some of us have been fighting back, not just because of that, but because of the creeping regulations on our speech.

And not only in the university, but especially perhaps in universities. Things have been improving; we've started to win a few things. And so I was delighted when I heard in this autumn that Jordan will be coming back to Cambridge, and it represents something of a victory that he is speaking, that he has been speaking here.

So, as well as being obviously a brilliant talk from which we've all learned so much, it represents, as I say, an important victory—not a final victory because when you fight for freedom of speech, there's never a final victory, but an important victory in this battle to get back this institution, this ancient institution which has played such a great role in the history of this country and in freedom in this country.

Now, I want to thank—I want to have several thanks. First of all, to all of you for making this such an excellent occasion, to those of you who asked such brilliant questions, and in fact to all of you for coming—even the lobster.

And I want to thank Stephen Blackwood, David Butterfield, Douglas Headley—those of us who are involved in this from the start and for whom this does represent the culmination of months and months of work.

And of course, I want to thank the speaker for visiting Cambridge, for everything you've done so far. We've had some brilliant seminars; we've had this terrific talk, the excellent talk last night. You've really brought so much excitement to the university and really livened us up here, and we've had so much fun. It's been brilliant.

So we've got some presents for you. We have here an edition, first edition of a work by someone you mentioned tonight, which is Darwin's Descent of Man. This is the first edition of that. But as well as mental food, you also need real food, so in addition, we've got an enormous slab of meat.

So thank you very much. [Music]