jbp

Dear Dr. Peterson

Hello, I hope you are yours are doing well and that the continued fame is not
draining you too badly. You're doing such a fantastic job. Keep up your spirits and
I'm sure this good fortune will continue for you.

My name is Dustin and I am writing you to present an idea that I have had rolling
around for a while. I am in no way a trained academic and I appologize for any
conflations or inconsistencies that follow. I am not a trained academic, just someone
who is interested in Philosophy and Science. I have come to know your work through
the compelled speech fiasco and have since then read Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for
Life, and watched many of your lecture series including the Biblical lectures and
your 2017 Maps of Meaning series.

To give you some idea where I'm coming from, I was once young and atop a mountain,
around a camp-fire, accepting Jesus into my heart as my lord and saviour. Over time,
I became interested in the sciences and computation and lost my belief in the
supernatural and God. I became an atheist and came to love Hitchens, Dawkins,
Dennett, and Harris. I particulary like Harris as his book in discovering your own
lack of free will by introspecting that you have no access to the authorship of your
thoughts or actions was revolutionary for me.

Years into that modality, I noticed that I was not very spirtually fulfilled, despite
really attempting to have practiced Harris-style mindful meditaiton and really coming
to appreciate The Moral Landscape. That said, I am still a very anxious person with
shameful habits and struggle to grapple with existentialism but also things just like
starting a family and so on. Then I discovered your work and really began to find a
middle ground in my dispotion. This middle-ground led me to the following idea that I
earnestly believe might help you come to terms with what your beliefs regarding the
supernatural are.

I have started to use the word "Panlogism" to describe an idea that aims to describe a
physicalist compatibalism with the main themes of what I believe you are trying to
communicate.

One thing I have come to appreciate about your messaging regarding the Western
philosophical tradition is the endowment of rationality to the world itself. That the
mechanisms that move the world are principled and causally depend on each other. That
one of the great insights of Christianity was that man, too, is endowed with
rationality, and through this shared property, man can come to know the world.

I want to suggest that, the specific universal metaphysics one considers bears out in
what's possible in that universe. A materialist take here would be, whatever specific
material metaphyiscs you take, bears upon what kind of material formations are
possible in that universe. In other words, in the consideration of, say, of "all
possible arrangements of matter", that set is determined by the properties of the
underlying metaphysics that you take. A more concrete example would be something like
"all possible protiens or molecules". Change the underlying metaphysics you are
considering and these domain sets also change. The point here is not to favor any
given metaphysics or any specific conclusions that you can arrive from them, but to
establish the idea that since we presume the world embodies rationality that those
domain sets of possibility in a given universe are dependent non-arbitarilly upon
it's underlying metaphysical presuppositions. I really hope this is mostly intuitive
and not controversial as far as you're concerned.

Even if one takes a material monism, you immediately run into all sorts of things
that can be said about the given universe that are not actually material constituents
in the universe itself. A really quick example I like to use is: if you have one
thing, that universe is probably boring and not worth talking about. So you might
have two things (material constituents). If they are truly two things, in order to
avoid an identity problem, resulting in just one thing again, they must be
qualitatively distinct somehow. An easy one to imagine is position. If the only
property of things is their position, then it is not useful to consider a universe in
which both things in it have the same position, since they will always have the same
position, since whatever force upon them will act upon them exactly the same, always
resulting in the same outcome for them, making it meaningless to talk about the thing
at that position as being two things. You might as well say there are an infinite
number of things there. If you add velocity and so on, you can see how this remains
true.

So if the two objects are truly distinct, then they have different
positions. Immediately from this arises a relational property between them,
Proximity. But where is proximity? Which particle is proximity? Even though you try
to take a monism, there is a qualitative ontology that also arises. This qualitative
ontology is just like that material ontology composed of all the possible
arrangements of the matter. A more concrete example of this is something like the
Prisoner's Dilemma. It seems to be an intrinsic part of the emergent ontology of the
universe, in the part of that ontology that bears upon agents in that universe. It
isn't socially constructed, it is intrinsic. It seems built in. But also it is not
part of the material itself.

Basically, I hope to have established the following things so far. 1, the world being
rational means that the characteristics of that universe are resultant from the
underlying universal metaphysics one takes, in non-arbitrary ways. 2, an example of
that rational relationship is when taking a materialist metaphysics and considering
the resultant domain of possible arrangements of matter in that universe 3, changing
the underlying metaphysics you consider, bears out in varying resultant universal
characteristics (such as a different set of possible material arrangements) 4, even
if one takes a determined or stochastic material monism, there arises an immaterial
qualitative ontology that characterizes the constituents of the materialism, which is
affected rationally also by the underlying metaphysics one takes. Basically, even
though there might be some problems you see with this presentation, I hope that you
could see where I'm aiming for here.

So then, Panlogism to me would be the realization that within that holistic qualitative
ontology of what's is possible in that universe is also contained "what works" and
"what doesn't work". For any given domain if you could visualize the truly
hyper-dimensional space that would qualitatively describe variants within it, you
could draw a line within that space partitioning the strategies or manifestations
within that domain between those that work and those that don't. And this is also
taking into consideration that the number of ways you could compare variants in the
domains is nearly infinite. There would still be a matching partition in that space
delimiting points in the space representing variants that would "good" and those that
were "bad" with regards to that arbitrary metric system in the infinite space of
metric systems.

Let me take a really dumb example before moving onto more important ones. Take an
ontological consideration of "toaster". Define it however you want. Define like
"material devices possible in this universe, which toast bread sufficient to my own
personal satisfaction". That metric can now be applied to every variant in the whole
domain of objects actually physically possible in a given universe. Some will produce
toast that you find acceptable, some will burn the toast, some wont even offer
toasting as a function, such as spoon and black-holes. But there is that qualifying
partition, and it isn't arbitrary insofar as as devices ourselves, we are not
arbitrary (if very very complex).


I want to argue that this is what you've meant by the Logos all along. That in the
domain space of possible societal structures and personal lifestyles that there
exists a non-arbitrary partition between those that work, and those that don't. And
we might even say, that whether one works is up to those making the
consideration. For example, there might be no universal morality, per se, but each
individual reflects a non-arbitrary metric against all possible personal life-styles,
such that, if lived out, they could self-report whether their live had meaning and
was fulfilling. That in the possible domain space of possible societal structures,
that if played out, individuals would express an aggregate report of whether they
approved of their society or not. You could also use any number of other
non-subjective metrics. But for each societal structure, it would lay somewhere along
the spectrum established by a given metric. This is all with full consideration that
different societal and personal life strategies might have different outcomes for
different metrics, including subjective ones, if implemented at different times in
history, or by the same person at different points in their life.


I want to argue that this what you aim to reveal to be the true value of
archetype. That man has, over time, discovered, bit by bit, little bits of the
surface of the Logos, that non-arbitrary predefined qualitative partition among
domain spaces that specifically bear upon human life that "work". That religion is
the experimentation through action and serialization in allegory of humans trying to
work out, using their shared rationality of the world, the true texture and shape of
this partition. And that knowledge of bits of that partition have been found through
much tribulation (to say the least) and must be rescued from their allegorical
serializations.

I want to offer the idea that there is no supernatural forces in the universe. There
are just very complex systems. And part of the ontological emergence of complex
systems is agency through biological life (in whatever form it might arise), and that
through agency there is goal-seeking and from goal-seeking you have evaluation and
from evaluation you have non-arbitrary rationally-associated domain partitions that
reflect evaluation.

I want to offer the idea that this is the bridge between you and Harris and perhaps a
way for you to come to terms with your indecision with regards to things like the
existential status of deities and the revival of Christ. Take Harris's Moral
Landscape. What he's saying is that there is a landscape that reflect the evaluation
functions that you can use with regards to the happiness of conscious devices in the
universe. That if you could some how come up with an evaluation function that
aggregated the self-report of each conscious creature that would create a landscape
representing evaluation against all actual possible brain-states (instantatneous, or
overtime) those creatures could be in.

A problem with the Moral Landscape is that it doesn't tell us how to move up the
peaks, or whether we are climbing the highest peak. And I think that's where your
insight comes in as the other half the story. If you were to come out as describing
the Logos as the non-arbitrary partitions in ontological space that are predetermined
at the outset of the universe for mapping strategy to evaluation, and said that the
history of human religion is the application of the rationality within man, to the
rationality of the world, to come to know the surface of this partition as it bears
out on human life that you would find yourself in actualizing agreement with Harris
and Dennett.

To me, this doesn't seem to diminish religious phenomenology at all, while totally
validating the scientific aim to understand the underlying rational mechanisms of the
universe holistically. I feel like when I go through and listen to your biblical
lectures and read the things you've said about the metaphor of religious allegory in
12 steps, with this conceptualization of Panlogism in mind everything fits in a way
that is very exciting in unifying way.

Thank you Dr Peterson for reading my letter.
With a sincere gratitude I don't have the command of English to express,
Dustin Lacewell
[email protected]