Drugs: Jordan Peterson's Philosophy of Mind.

in the aftermath of a losing battle
regardless of how aggressively a bobster has behaved it becomes unwilling to fight further even against another previously defeated opponent philosophers are first and foremost normal human beings just like you and I the ideas they write down in books are sometimes their response to political conditions unfolding in their own era there's sometimes a response to personal problems in their private lives and sometimes historically we know what those problems were and sometimes they weren't recorded for history and often all too often philosophers are people who get excited about new ideas emerging from the sciences they take little fragments of information from the sciences and they get inspired and just kind of run with it kind of make up a bunch of new stuff one of the most extreme examples of this is Descartes so if you're not a fan of Rene Descartes you might at least recognize the adjective form of his name Cartesian you have to be very famous in philosophy to have your name used as an adjective in case um Descartes you know he saw some black-and-white diagrams of the structure of the brain and he just got massively inspired by what he saw as literally the central organ of the brain the pineal gland which is also pronounced the pineal gland whatever you know he just had no idea what this thing did its biological function its structural significance its role in cognition or anything else he had absolutely no idea but I mean the guy saw some diagrams he got some ideas he ended up creating but we could frankly call like a new religion a totally fictitious bunch of biological and psychological claims with the brain you heard about some new discoveries in the sciences and he just took those ideas and ran with them I mean you know in that sense philosophy sometimes more resembles the creative arts or even resembles science fiction I think people have really overlooked the extent to which the philosophy of mind presented by dr. Jordan Peterson likewise is his response to some little fragments of scientific knowledge that he read about lobsters about crayfish he read them he didn't really understand them and then he he got inspired and made a whole bunch of things up and he made those things up he came up with those ideas I think transparently in response to personal problems he was struggling with and partly yes in response to political and social preoccupations that we see throughout his writing a vanquished competitor loses confidence sometimes for days sometimes the defeat can have even more severe consequences if a dominant lobster is badly defeated its brain basically dissolves then it grows a new subordinates brain one more appropriate to its new lowly position its original brain just isn't sophisticated enough to manage the transformation from King to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth anyone who has experienced painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the one successful crustacean one citation for a whole lot of statements of fact well let's look at reference eight side note I am getting incredibly lucky on finding the PDFs for these things online the quick version is I don't know where Peterson got some of the ideas he talks about because it sure as [ __ ] isn't in this paper after reading its brain basically dissolves I came into this paper expecting some like magical butterfly transformation here like crustaceans aren't really far removed from like other creepy crawlies so maybe it's able to somehow just dissolve its brain this paper says nothing about brains dissolving this paper says nothing about brains dissolving this section begins with a discussion of reference 9 you only know this if you actually have reference 9 in front of you because Peterson's reference placement is practically random anyways basically lobster Dom's have more serotonin pumping through them from reference 8 you win you get a higher level of serotonin if you're a submissive lobster you have a higher ratio of October mean to serotonin but if you give lobster subs more serotonin they start acting da me then if you give lobsters Prozac the effects of the serotonin shot are reduced so in this experiment giving the lobsters Prozac kept the serotonin out in the goo basically and not in the tissues and why the [ __ ] is Pierson talking about this he says that prozac has much the same chemical and behavioral effect in depressed people as Prozac a performance-enhancing drug I hadn't realized is that on their warnings for the drug commercial so we've already established that dr. Jordan Peterson is fundamentally the same as Rene Descartes in that he's a non specialist who stumbled upon some scientific anecdotes in another field he got inspired and as we say in English he ran with it he started making up new ideas in response to this inspiration it remains for us to question why why was he so inspired by this why did it matter so much to now in the case of rena d card there's an explanation you can look at what were his religious and psychological assumptions what was that he was looking for consciously or unconsciously that made him respond so dramatically to this diagram of the brain and thinking yes yes that's it you can put the pieces together okay he had an idea about the soul being a material and there must be a gateway between the body and the soul somewhere in the brain he had an agenda and he took some bits and pieces of science to suit his agenda that's exactly what happened with dr. Jordan Peterson when he stumbled upon this anecdote about lobsters and crayfish okay he had no sincere interest in the details of these scientific studies the points already been made I quoted another YouTube channel there Cass Eris the point has already been made that if you were to take his scientific claims seriously they would be irresponsible and false I would go further I wouldn't you say it's invalid I'd say it's somewhat surreal and dreamlike I think Jordan Peterson responded to these scientific sources in the same way some people respond to poetry or a quotation from the Buddha or something he just treated this like a literary trope he got all worked up about it and then he ran with it and he ran and ran and ran this is a huge deal yeah what why what does it mean to him well the idea that unequal levels of serotonin in the brain correspond to your dominance in society the idea that serotonin has like a dollar value in the economy of social inequality that's a very very powerful symbol friend it links his political philosophy to his psychological philosophy okay and it also links his public message of improve your posture stand up with your back straight be a dominant personal time it links that to his own family's private tragic struggle in a very emotionally powerful way until quite recently until just a few months ago Jordan Peterson lived with the delusion that his daughter had a form of hereditary depression that she had inherited depression from him no scientific basis for that belief he imagined he convinced himself and he felt guilty about the notion that he had a mysterious autoimmune disease that made him depressed an autoimmune disease with depression as a symptom and that his daughter had also inherited this disease now the symptoms were real the symptoms were real and it didn't take a genius to write in and say hey you know what your symptoms sound a lot like Lyme disease this person this is one of the fans of Micheli of Peterson Burton said hey you know Jordan Peterson symptoms sound a lot like Lyme disease and yours do too so yeah it was it was always possible for people to guess that you know um early onset arthritis having arthritis when you're still a child that sounds like Lyme disease what miquellee appears had actually had was Lyme disease and then she had a whole long list of side effects from the irrelevant drugs that she was taking because her Lyme disease went undiagnosed or you might say was misdiagnosed okay so that's a real tragedy I'm not ridiculing him for that I'm not really killing his daughter for that it's a tremendous tragedy that they had this disease in the family it was not correctly diagnosed it went untreated and then they interpreted the symptoms of that illness as if it were a hereditary mysterious undiagnosed illness that dr. Jordan Peterson was responsible for himself okay so you have Peterson developing dependence chemical dependence on antidepressants SSRI antidepressant and coming up with a justification for that you have dr. Peterson's daughter developing dependence on SSRI antidepressants and coming up with a justification okay you have a whole family making excuses and trying to philosophize about their tragic private struggle to get along in society to compete to be part of that dominance hierarchy when they have quote/unquote a serotonin deficit know what Peterson did here is based on a very cursory reading even of the research into the significance of serotonin for lobsters what he's saying is really false even about lobsters it's also false as it is applied to human beings it'd be a long video forgotten the details okay Peterson never took a sincere interest in what the chemical effects of SSRI drugs are he seems to know much less about it than I do I'm not a specialist in the field so that's really saying something okay what Peterson was interested in was a justification for his own sense of inferiority as someone who he considered himself to have been born with with low serotonin with the serotonin deficit so you can see he claims here that he claims is that prozac has the same effect on humans as it has on on these lobsters in this particular study and both are false that's not the effect prozac has on humans as even cast makes fun of them should make some jokes that this doesn't make sense this novel prozac does the people it also actually doesn't make sense with what the studies are saying about lobsters three different species of crustacean are dealt with it's a little bit complicated with those studies there's no sincere interest in the science on either side of the equation what there is is a profound commitment to self justification in dealing with his own sense of inadequacy as a relentless social climber and as someone who has this conservative competitive view of society as a bunch of dominus arrogance and also for him dealing with his sense of guilt when he looks at his daughter chronically sick on a long list of medications barely able to get at a bed all these horrible side effects right and he feels looking at that that it's all his fault so we have a misdiagnosed int illness Jordan imagines his family has hereditary depression Jordan invents a philosophy that justifies his family's reliance on SSRI drugs thus the lobsters thus the theory of serotonin levels as the currency in the economy of dominance and then plot twist his daughter is diagnosed with Lyme disease that's what explains the symptoms she had it [Music]