Name: Jordan Peterson's Realization About the Bible
Uploaded: 2022-01-25T18:17:50.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson's Realization About the Bible' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson's Realization About the Bible' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-25. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience if categories just dissolve especially fundamental
ones the culture
is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category that's what it is
so and in fact
culture is a structure of category that we all share so we see things the same
way well that's
why we can talk I mean not exactly the same way because then we'd have nothing
to talk about but
roughly speaking we have a bedrock of agreement that's the Bible by the way
so I just walked through the museum of the Bible in Washington that was very
cool it's a very cool
museum so the structure that's what the yeah it's what I figured out I've been
I just figured this
out this week so it was a cool it was a cool thing to walk through because it's
it's chronological
they have one floor which is the history of the Bible but it's not exactly that
it's really what
it is is the history of the book now in many ways the first book was the Bible
I mean literally
because at one point there was only one book like as far as our western culture
is concerned there's
one book and for a while literally there was only one book and that book was
the Bible and then before
it was the Bible it was a you know it was scrolls and it was writings on papyrus
and but it was we
were starting to aggregate written text together and it went through all sorts
of technological
transformations and then it became books that everybody could buy the book
everybody could buy
and the first one of those was the Bible and then it became all sorts of books
that everybody could buy
but all those books in some sense emerged out of that underlying book and that
book itself the Bible
isn't a book it's a library it's a collection of books and so what I figured
out was partly because
I was talking to my brother-in-law Jim Keller who's the world's greatest chip
designer and has now designed
a chip that's as powerful as the human brain which is optimized for artificial
intelligence learning by
the way and so I talked to him about that he said you heard of the internet I
said yeah Jim I've heard
of the internet he said this is way more revolutionary than that so in any case
we were talking about
meaning in text because we were talking about translation and the problem of
understanding text and Jim said
the meaning of words is coded in the relationship of the words to one another
and the postmodernists
make that case that all meaning is derived from the relationship between words
that's wrong because
well what about rage that's not words and what about moving your hand that's
not words so it's wrong
but but part of it's right because the meaning we derive from the verbal domain
is encoded in the relationship between words
so so now then you think well let's think about the relationship between words
well some words are
dependent on other words some ideas are dependent on other ideas the more ideas
are dependent on a given
idea the more fundamental that idea is by depth that's a definition of
fundamental so now imagine you have an
aggregation of texts in a civilization you say which are the fundamental texts
and answer is the texts upon which most
most other texts depend and so you put Shakespeare way in there in English
because so many texts are dependent on
Shakespeare's literary revelations and Milton would be in that category and
Dante would be in that category at least in translation
fundamental authors part of the Western canon not because of the arbitrary dictates
of power but because those texts influenced more other texts and then you think
about that as a hierarchy
okay with a bible at its base which is certainly the case now imagine that's
the entire corpus of linguistic production all things considered now how do you
understand that like literally how do you understand that the answer is you
sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk you
sample that whole domain you build a low resolution representation of that in
your inside you
and then you listen and see through that and so it isn't that the Bible is true
and so it isn't that the Bible is true it's that the Bible is the precondition
for the manifestation of truth which makes it way more true than just true it's
a whole different kind of true and I think this is I think this is not only
literally the case factually I think it can't be any other way it's the only
way we can solve the problem of perception
Thank you.