Maps of Meaning

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson is a great prelude to "Saam Medical Meditation's" and "Saam Meditation: The Interpretation of Dreams" - Organ Centered Consciousness. In terms of consciousness what Jordan Peterson and Carl Jung are missing is that consciousness resides in the internal organs. Archetypes are formed and stored in the Spleen which represents the need for children to grow big (through nutrition), to counter the fears and threats that are likely to harm them due to their small size. The Kidney's, Liver, Heart, Lung, and the three levels of human needs associated with each organ represent Organ Centered Consciousness, which is what has eluded Peterson and Jung thus far.

I am also a former student of Professor Peterson's, taught on the manuscript of this book, and it made such an impression on me that here I am, tracking it down three years later to reread. There are many significant positives to this book, as you can guess from the other reviews here. My main complaint is that the 400-odd pages could be vastly condensed and more tightly organized without weakening the thesis. When the subject matter is this dense, there is some argument for restating important points, but I do think the author sometimes errs on the side of excessive restatement.
Another area where the book could have been improved is in the use of more anthropological data to support its various hypotheses. An interesting follow-up read to Maps of Meaning is Wandering God by Morris Berman, which spends more effort tying the factual aspects of human and societal evolution to the way modern-day society is organized and the way people relate to the world around them. He also has some very strong opinions about comparative mythology a la Jung and Campbell.
Overall, Maps of Meaning is highly original, thought-provoking, and very well worth reading. Expect it to make a permanent mark on the way you see the world.

Jordan Peterson is an amazing communicator. His caution concerning cultures’ current bipolarization and need for archetypes is helpful, but also limited.

The quest for meaning was the focus of Freud, Jung, the post-modern French philosophers that Peterson believes used a slight of hand to repackage Karl Marx for a new uncritical generation of insoutiants. Hence the need for charting like a navigator our progress toward life’s ultimate meaning in an ocean of cross-currents and fickle breezes.

Two cautions. Peterson is an apologist for heiarchy. The entire struggle of humanity has been a joust with heiarchy. Pyramidal structure from Paroah’s pyramids to the Aztec’s Apocolypto apex is an archetype fraught with tyranny. The Judeo-Christian map points down to earth and horizontally before it was inverted in a way that informed ALL other archetypes. The Joseph and Moses traditions are as juxtaposed as Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

Joseph was a pyramid climber, Moses was a pyramid flattened. King David was a last born interjected by Nathan as a critique of hereditary, primogeniture law of the human jungle of their time and even ours to a large degree.

Secondly, Peterson seems to believe that the Left has no markers that inhibit their proclivity for radicalism and decomposition. He is likely correct, but to believe that the modern Right is any less unbridled is dangerous.

Both right and left move their markers to gain advantage and as we have seen in the NeoCon/NeoLib embrace of endless wars for profit Calvin’s theological doctrine of “totally depravity” is clearly operative.

Peterson may note that U.S. conservative, William F. Buckley, drew a line at racism excluding the fringe right. David Duke’s kind were not welcome, but this assessment from Peterson, a Canadian and therefore a citizen of the British Commonwealth, may not be totally accurate. Listen to the 1965 debate between Buckley and James Baldwin and then decide.

Neither “Equality of opportunity” or “equality of outcome” would have produced a Cecil Rhodes whose right hand man was John Hays Hammond the nephew of John Coffee “Jack” Hays the Texas Ranger turned California sheriff and chief surveyor who defended the 45,000 acre land claim of John C. Fremont, son-in-Law of Thomas Hart Benton and the first Republican Presidential candidate whose land claim was also defended by Caleb Cushing, America’s leading opium trader whose product would be welcomed by the poor Chinese, Blacks, Irish, Italians and anyone else in grinding poverty and without the personal strength to resist Britain’s key empire builder as evidenced by the history of the British East India Company. That company was a leading progenitor of the free market system (don’t look too closely at their monopoly) that competes with the alternative (and soulless) Marxist model neither of which Solzynitzyn said he could embrace in his 1978 Harvard speech.

Peterson would do well to include Solzynitzyn’s Harvard speech and the Buckley/Baldwin debate in his required reading.

I am going to take Prof. Peterson's "personality and its transformation" class next semester......expecting and excited............

This is a brilliant book, thought provoking and challenging...challenging not in the sense that the language is hard to read, but the thinkings involved are profound and require an open mind to understand and appreciate. Great Work...

This is a dogmatic bulwark. The kind both Jung and Freud would laugh at. This man completely skews the work to his own narcissism and political beliefs. For a psychologist he has far fewer good things to add than bad. This and his newer book 12 Rules (lol) of Life are a disgrace to psychology. Archetypal panderer. Watch out young fanbois, this is not the ideal father you're needing so badly... apparently. Peterson is generally and internally not considered in the Jungian field, for good reason.

This book was a huge disappointment. It abounds with dense, often impenetrable, verbiage. Basic points are made repeatedly, but subtle ones occasionally appear in the middle of an argument and are never referenced again. Even worse, this text makes at least one statement that is factually wrong. This mistake is not a small oversight, either. It is one that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the topic being discussed at that part in the text, and throws into question the validity of other points made throughout the rest of the book.

I first encountered Maps of Meaning on TV Ontario as a lecture series with the same name. I found the lectures by Dr. Peterson fascinating, but, unfortunately, confusing in parts. There were details I wasn't able to fully grasp, and I wanted to know more. That led me to this book, in hopes of filling in the gaps and developing a better understanding of the topics that were covered.

One of the blurbs on the back cover says the book is "... exciting not just for the general reader ... ", suggesting that it should be accessible to the layman. Although I'm a layman in the area of psychology, I do have a graduate degree in computer science and took a handful of psychology and philosophy courses as an undergraduate. Dr Peterson teaches a course based on this text that only has a couple of second year psych courses as prerequisites, so I figured I should be well-prepared to study, and understand, the book's contents.

Things were slow-going from the start. There were repeated instances where the text could have said something simply, or at least with more clarity, but instead chose to obfuscate. Try this passage on for size (from page 13): "Active apprehension of the goal of behavior, conceptualized in relationship to the interpreted present, serves to constrain or provide determinate framework for the evaluation of ongoing events, which emerge as a consequence of current behavior." Now imagine 400+ pages in this style.

But I soldiered on. I took my time and tried to understand the details Dr. Peterson was presenting. In fact, there were parts of the book that I found genuinely fascinating and well-written. Unfortunately, these parts were overshadowed by a slowly growing feeling that I was having the wool pulled over my eyes.

It was when I reached the middle of the book that this feeling fully crystallized. On page 235, Dr Peterson writes: "A moral system -- a system of culture -- necessarily shares features in common with other systems. The most fundamental of the shared features of systems was identified by Kurt Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem demonstrated that any internally consistent and logical system of propositions must necessarily be predicated upon assumptions that cannot be proved from within the confines of that system."

Whoa. First of all, Kurt Godel was a logician, and his work on his Incompleteness Theorem was related to axiomatic (formal mathematical) systems. Simply extrapolating results on axiomatic systems to "moral systems" or "systems of culture" as a self-evident fact has the whiff of charlatanry. Even worse, the statement of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem given above is completely wrong! I'd like to say that Dr Peterson merely provided a naive oversimplification of the theorem, but that's not even the case. What Dr. Peterson stated is a total misrepresentation of Godel's work. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem has nothing to do with proving the "assumptions" (axioms) of the system from "within the confines of the system."

Dr. Peterson hammers on this mistake a page later when he describes the five postulates of Euclidean geometry. He writes: "What constitutes truth, from within the perspective of this structure, can be established by reference to these initial postulates. However, the postulates themselves must be accepted. Their validity cannot be demonstrated, within the confines of the system."

I can't give a proper exposition of Godel's Incompleteness theorem in one or two paragraphs, so if you're interested in details I direct you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available online and totally free), which has a fairly readable description of what Godel actually proved.

This is where the book broke down for me. If the text so egregiously misrepresented Godel's Incompleteness theorem, what else had it oversimplified, misrepresented, or gotten plain wrong? And how much of its dense rhetoric was simply fancy word play to hide vacuous arguments?

To quote David Hume, "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." This is perhaps too harsh a verdict for Maps of Meaning. As I mentioned, there were parts that I found well-written and interesting. But taken as a whole, it's not worth the time investment required.

Before I start my long and critical review let me state some facts. I don't read much philosophy and as a scientific thinker, I believe philosophy is just mostly unjustified word masturbation for the brain. So my critic is going to be not philosophical, but science-oriented. Also, I have just read the first few pages, and the amount of misunderstandings that Jordan had abounded too much that I thought I will review this right away and perhaps edit it later as I get time. Also, having read a bit about the author and having watched it lectures, I must say I do agree to many of his positions, and I think we need more such intelligent people in this world.
The following points have the part of the book I am referring to in quotes, followed by my thoughts.

1) "I could not rationally accept the premises of religion as I understood them. I turned, in consequence, to dreams of political utopia, and personal power. The same ideological trap caught millions of others, in recent centuries."

I do not understand why the urge for a political power or a political utopia must be a consequence of not accepting religion. At best, I can ask why does the author think it is exclusive to atheists (if it did exist). Even a religious person can aspire for political power (say, to impose his religion directly or indirectly) and aspire for a political utopia (which would be having a specific definition for him). However, if the author meant that this was his consequence, then it is alright though the very next sentence doesn't seem to support it. He calls this consequence as a trap that many fall for.

2) "I did not admire many of the individuals who believed the same things I did."

This concluding statement is the summary of the above few lines in which he observes that the right had educated, economically stable,confident and outspoken people (but with not sharing his ideas) while the left had people who had unaccomplished lives such as no career, no family, no completed education (but sharing his ideas). While I think that current data will dispute this, if this is a motivation to think that the leftist ideas are wrong, then it is indeed a shame. An idea's usefulness/truthfulness is not based on the idea-bearer's social status.

3) "Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich"

This seems to be true in practice, but then, people don't practice what they preach, and Jordan must know that.

4) "What could possibly justify the threat of total destruction?"

Well, I am not being sinister, but, this is apparently easy to answer: Total destruction becomes justifiable to oneself when one's own destruction is confirmed.

5) "They held or tied him down and pulverized one of his legs with a lead pipe. I was taken aback, once again, but this time I tried something different. I tried to imagine, really imagine, what I would have to be like to do such a thing. I concentrated on this task for days and days—and experienced a frightening revelation. The truly appalling aspect of such atrocity did not lie in its impossibility or remoteness, as I had naively assumed, but in its ease. I was not much different from the violent prisoners—not qualitatively different. I could do what they could do (although I hadn't)."

While a worthy conclusion, it definitely isn't a scientific conclusion. Morality can be vaguely as the degree with which two qualities manifest in us in reaction to coming in contact (through, eyes, ears, nose, etc) with something- sadness and happiness. These are produced by well-documented chemical molecules in the brain in varying levels person to person. It is therefore subjective and evolutionary. This is a more rational and scientific explanation that enables one to at least theoretically predict the moving zeitgeist.

6) "At the same time, something odd was happening to my ability to converse. I had always enjoyed engaging in arguments, regardless of topic. I regarded them as a sort of game (not that this is in any way unique). Suddenly, however, I couldn't talk—more accurately, I couldn't stand listening to myself talk. I started to hear a “voice” inside my head, commenting on my opinions. Every time I said something, it said something— something critical. The voice employed a standard refrain, delivered in a somewhat bored and matter-of-fact tone: You don't believe that. That isn't true. You don't believe that. That isn't true. The “voice” applied such comments to almost every phrase I spoke."

This, I think, is normal. This is why resort to the scientific method. It doesn't matter what you think of the truth value of a statement, but what matters is the evidence, the data. That is how science has been so successful by letting go of the imaginary voice that insists one to be tied in the world of what we have evolved to perceive. I hate quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology but it doesn't matter. What matters is what the data suggests and where the evidence leads us to.

7) "I couldn't understand what to make of this [his inner voice]. I knew the source of the commentary was part of me, but this knowledge only increased my confusion. Which part, precisely, was me—the talking part or the criticizing part? If it was the talking part, then what was the criticizing part? If it was the criticizing part—well, then: how could virtually everything I said be untrue? In my ignorance and confusion, I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass unchallenged. This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part. Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren't real, weren't true—or, at least, weren't mine."

This is embarrassing. The experiment, one must agree, is not designed to find the truth but to find out whether stating something as truth what you think is true in your head will give you satisfaction (and of course, it would and it did!)

8) "All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren't my things, however—I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them—presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned."

No one is asking to steal ideas but to understand it and accept it if you find it acceptable. I agree with the author that irrefutable ideas aren't necessarily true (or false and that is why we ignore such things in science because any statement must be falsifiable for science to consider it seriously). As the author indirectly claims that this is the reason he leftist principles , I hope he also knows that this is also applicable to God. "God exists" is an irrefutable argument.

This book is ghastly and unreadable. the store algorithms recommended it to me over a decade ago. I once said that the film Tree Of Life is what happens when a man gets his head so far up his own ass that he mistakes his bowels for the cosmos. This book is the philosophical literary version of that phenomenon. I had no idea until about a week ago that Peterson had been adopted by the alt-right, but it’s a perfect match.

This book was a huge disappointment. It abounds with dense, often impenetrable, verbiage. Basic points are made repeatedly, but subtle ones occasionally appear in the middle of an argument and are never referenced again. Even worse, this text makes at least one statement that is factually wrong. This mistake is not a small oversight, either. It is one that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the topic being discussed at that part in the text, and throws into question the validity of other points made throughout the rest of the book.

I first encountered Maps of Meaning on TV Ontario as a lecture series with the same name. I found the lectures by Dr. Peterson fascinating, but, unfortunately, confusing in parts. There were details I wasn't able to fully grasp, and I wanted to know more. That led me to this book, in hopes of filling in the gaps and developing a better understanding of the topics that were covered.

One of the blurbs on the back cover says the book is "... exciting not just for the general reader ... ", suggesting that it should be accessible to the layman. Although I'm a layman in the area of psychology, I do have a graduate degree in computer science and took a handful of psychology and philosophy courses as an undergraduate. Dr Peterson teaches a course based on this text that only has a couple of second year psych courses as prerequisites, so I figured I should be well-prepared to study, and understand, the book's contents.

Things were slow-going from the start. There were repeated instances where the text could have said something simply, or at least with more clarity, but instead chose to obfuscate. Try this passage on for size (from page 13): "Active apprehension of the goal of behavior, conceptualized in relationship to the interpreted present, serves to constrain or provide determinate framework for the evaluation of ongoing events, which emerge as a consequence of current behavior." Now imagine 400+ pages in this style.

But I soldiered on. I took my time and tried to understand the details Dr. Peterson was presenting. In fact, there were parts of the book that I found genuinely fascinating and well-written. Unfortunately, these parts were overshadowed by a slowly growing feeling that I was having the wool pulled over my eyes.

It was when I reached the middle of the book that this feeling fully crystallized. On page 235, Dr Peterson writes: "A moral system -- a system of culture -- necessarily shares features in common with other systems. The most fundamental of the shared features of systems was identified by Kurt Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem demonstrated that any internally consistent and logical system of propositions must necessarily be predicated upon assumptions that cannot be proved from within the confines of that system."

Whoa. First of all, Kurt Godel was a logician, and his work on his Incompleteness Theorem was related to axiomatic (formal mathematical) systems. Simply extrapolating results on axiomatic systems to "moral systems" or "systems of culture" as a self-evident fact has the whiff of charlatanry. Even worse, the statement of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem given above is completely wrong! I'd like to say that Dr Peterson merely provided a naive oversimplification of the theorem, but that's not even the case. What Dr. Peterson stated is a total misrepresentation of Godel's work. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem has nothing to do with proving the "assumptions" (axioms) of the system from "within the confines of the system."

Dr. Peterson hammers on this mistake a page later when he describes the five postulates of Euclidean geometry. He writes: "What constitutes truth, from within the perspective of this structure, can be established by reference to these initial postulates. However, the postulates themselves must be accepted. Their validity cannot be demonstrated, within the confines of the system."

I can't give a proper exposition of Godel's Incompleteness theorem in one or two paragraphs, so if you're interested in details I direct you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available online and totally free), which has a fairly readable description of what Godel actually proved.

This is where the book broke down for me. If the text so egregiously misrepresented Godel's Incompleteness theorem, what else had it oversimplified, misrepresented, or gotten plain wrong? And how much of its dense rhetoric was simply fancy word play to hide vacuous arguments?

To quote David Hume, "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." This is perhaps too harsh a verdict for Maps of Meaning. As I mentioned, there were parts that I found well-written and interesting. But taken as a whole, it's not worth the time investment required.

Before I start my long and critical review let me state some facts. I don't read much philosophy and as a scientific thinker, I believe philosophy is just mostly unjustified word masturbation for the brain. So my critic is going to be not philosophical, but science-oriented. Also, I have just read the first few pages, and the amount of misunderstandings that Jordan had abounded too much that I thought I will review this right away and perhaps edit it later as I get time. Also, having read a bit about the author and having watched it lectures, I must say I do agree to many of his positions, and I think we need more such intelligent people in this world.
The following points have the part of the book I am referring to in quotes, followed by my thoughts.

1) "I could not rationally accept the premises of religion as I understood them. I turned, in consequence, to dreams of political utopia, and personal power. The same ideological trap caught millions of others, in recent centuries."

I do not understand why the urge for a political power or a political utopia must be a consequence of not accepting religion. At best, I can ask why does the author think it is exclusive to atheists (if it did exist). Even a religious person can aspire for political power (say, to impose his religion directly or indirectly) and aspire for a political utopia (which would be having a specific definition for him). However, if the author meant that this was his consequence, then it is alright though the very next sentence doesn't seem to support it. He calls this consequence as a trap that many fall for.

2) "I did not admire many of the individuals who believed the same things I did."

This concluding statement is the summary of the above few lines in which he observes that the right had educated, economically stable,confident and outspoken people (but with not sharing his ideas) while the left had people who had unaccomplished lives such as no career, no family, no completed education (but sharing his ideas). While I think that current data will dispute this, if this is a motivation to think that the leftist ideas are wrong, then it is indeed a shame. An idea's usefulness/truthfulness is not based on the idea-bearer's social status.

3) "Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich"

This seems to be true in practice, but then, people don't practice what they preach, and Jordan must know that.

4) "What could possibly justify the threat of total destruction?"

Well, I am not being sinister, but, this is apparently easy to answer: Total destruction becomes justifiable to oneself when one's own destruction is confirmed.

5) "They held or tied him down and pulverized one of his legs with a lead pipe. I was taken aback, once again, but this time I tried something different. I tried to imagine, really imagine, what I would have to be like to do such a thing. I concentrated on this task for days and days—and experienced a frightening revelation. The truly appalling aspect of such atrocity did not lie in its impossibility or remoteness, as I had naively assumed, but in its ease. I was not much different from the violent prisoners—not qualitatively different. I could do what they could do (although I hadn't)."

While a worthy conclusion, it definitely isn't a scientific conclusion. Morality can be vaguely as the degree with which two qualities manifest in us in reaction to coming in contact (through, eyes, ears, nose, etc) with something- sadness and happiness. These are produced by well-documented chemical molecules in the brain in varying levels person to person. It is therefore subjective and evolutionary. This is a more rational and scientific explanation that enables one to at least theoretically predict the moving zeitgeist.

6) "At the same time, something odd was happening to my ability to converse. I had always enjoyed engaging in arguments, regardless of topic. I regarded them as a sort of game (not that this is in any way unique). Suddenly, however, I couldn't talk—more accurately, I couldn't stand listening to myself talk. I started to hear a “voice” inside my head, commenting on my opinions. Every time I said something, it said something— something critical. The voice employed a standard refrain, delivered in a somewhat bored and matter-of-fact tone: You don't believe that. That isn't true. You don't believe that. That isn't true. The “voice” applied such comments to almost every phrase I spoke."

This, I think, is normal. This is why resort to the scientific method. It doesn't matter what you think of the truth value of a statement, but what matters is the evidence, the data. That is how science has been so successful by letting go of the imaginary voice that insists one to be tied in the world of what we have evolved to perceive. I hate quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology but it doesn't matter. What matters is what the data suggests and where the evidence leads us to.

7) "I couldn't understand what to make of this [his inner voice]. I knew the source of the commentary was part of me, but this knowledge only increased my confusion. Which part, precisely, was me—the talking part or the criticizing part? If it was the talking part, then what was the criticizing part? If it was the criticizing part—well, then: how could virtually everything I said be untrue? In my ignorance and confusion, I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass unchallenged. This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part. Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren't real, weren't true—or, at least, weren't mine."

This is embarrassing. The experiment, one must agree, is not designed to find the truth but to find out whether stating something as truth what you think is true in your head will give you satisfaction (and of course, it would and it did!)

8) "All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren't my things, however—I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them—presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned."

No one is asking to steal ideas but to understand it and accept it if you find it acceptable. I agree with the author that irrefutable ideas aren't necessarily true (or false and that is why we ignore such things in science because any statement must be falsifiable for science to consider it seriously). As the author indirectly claims that this is the reason he leftist principles , I hope he also knows that this is also applicable to God. "God exists" is an irrefutable argument.

This book is ghastly and unreadable. the store algorithms recommended it to me over a decade ago. I once said that the film Tree Of Life is what happens when a man gets his head so far up his own ass that he mistakes his bowels for the cosmos. This book is the philosophical literary version of that phenomenon. I had no idea until about a week ago that Peterson had been adopted by the alt-right, but it’s a perfect match.