Roy Sebag
Roy Sebag
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Hi Matt, Thank you for this comment. I can’t say I am well versed in Peterson though someone close to me is so I will need to speak to them about it and maybe respond in due course. Here is what I can say based on reading the excerpt, hopefully I am not botching the logic….

It appears to me that Dr. Peterson is debating a concept in philosophy relating to mind over matter, or the object vs. the form. If something can be abstracted in mind, a thought, a form, well why isn’t that less “real” than an element I can touch or pick up. So that seems to be the line of thinking right?

My issue with that general ontology is I don’t believe it to be true, I never believed it to be true when I read Plato and I don’t believe it to be true according to Kant or others. I subscribe to a theory of mind that is heavily built on the work of Henri Bergson, JJ Gibson, and David Bohm. Under that theory, there are no abstractions. Everything we conjure in the mind is an “image” that we have redintegrated as a composite of other images. Here the term “image” doesn’t denote what you see on a computer screen but rather an image as an invariant but concrete dynamic. An image can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic.

If you begin to subscribe to that mode of being and that ontology, the concept of physical matter fits very neatly and even reconciles well with my piece here. In essence, there is our conscious being (whatever that may be) operating within a matter field. That matter field has concrete rules and our own conscious perception have concrete possible actions within that field of matter. Every “abstraction” is really just a composite of actions or images from within field.

I don’t proclaim to be ready to make any of these proclamations yet and even as I type I wonder whether I should have even responded to this, but hopefully this helps.

The bottom line to me is that as Einstein once said: “to get closer to the eternal riddle-maker you have to focus on the matter, on the physical” and I think it is when we begin to deduce abstractions and supposed qualia from abstractions squared (mathematics) we enter the world of infinite regress and unprovable axioms.

    Roy Sebag

    Written by

    Roy Sebag

    Contrarian thinker and wisdom-seeker in the realms of economics, history, philosophy, and physics. Founder: Goldmoney Inc and CEO: GoldMoney Inc.@goldmoney