Meaning is a Jumper that you have to Knit Yourself

One of the great things about working in the arts is the amount of time that it affords (requires?) for contemplating deep questions of truth and meaning in the universe.

I came across a lovely video talking about just that:

I've long believed it was a mistake to think that any kind of meaning can come from the universe itself. The universe doesn't care about us, wouldn't miss us if we were gone and doesn't even know we're here in the first place. Meaning has to come from things with brains. But that means there's a way to think about meaning that most people have never considered before. 

The Magic Show that Wasn't

Earlier this year, I bought a ticket for the Toronto performance of the Matt Dillahunty "Magic & Skepticism World Tour" put on by Pangburn Philosophy.  

It's hard to be a magician and a skeptic at the same time. What most often comes out of that combination is a show which is dripping with disclaimers. The parental "Just make sure you remember none of this is real magic, these are tricks, but still... try to enjoy yourself." There's a reason disclaimers are always in fine print, as well hidden at the bottom of the page as possible. They burst the bubble and kill the mood.

Being an intellectually honest person who lies for a living is a tough knife edge to walk on. But that's what's required to do magic for grownups in 2018. So I was really interested to see how one of the internet's more respected skeptics managed to pivot into a magic show. 

That's essentially the image that was on my tickets, what was on display at the theatre. So I was rather surprised to sit down and discover that what appeared to be a magic show was actually a 2-hour conversation with Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson

That has got to be one of the top WTF moments of my life to date. A delightfully cruel bait and switch if ever there were one. (Although in fairness to whoever it is I should be annoyed with, clearly this was not a secret to everybody; Peterson clearly had a huge cheering section in the audience and they all seemed to have better seats than me. And I bought a couple of days after the tickets went on sale. Perhaps there's a disclaimer woven into the beard hairs in the poster.)

I've been aware of Matt's work for a number of years and even supported it through much of his stint on Patreon. He is an incredibly articulate and informed critic of religion in the US and in general. And he's a powerful personality on stage as part of a debate, so I thought a magic show could have been great. Turns out a magic show with no tricks... not so great.

I suppose what leaves me annoyed is knowing that I gave money to see Jordan Peterson live. Which I almost but don't quite regret doing because in a perverse way I kind of like him.

Quick back story. Jordan Peterson is a UofT Psychology Professor who rose to internet stardom a year and a half ago for criticizing a piece of Canadian legislation, Bill C-16, which related to the human rights code and how gender pronouns needed to be used. Once you get over the fact that he's an utter asshole and not shy about calling people he disagrees with names, (post modernist neo marxist seems to be his favourite,) he can make a lot of sense and sound like a very insightful person. But he also believes a lot of stuff which is clearly nuts.

And unfortunately, the evening was spent on the nuts parts... and how!

The problem I have with Peterson is that he lives in two worlds. As a clinical psychologist, he speaks the language of empirical science, citing data and studies and offering up what appear to be evidence-backed methods for making your life better. (Everything I've read about his most recent book, 12 Rules for Life, suggests that it's reasonable in this way.)

But the other world is one of metaphor and myth. This is the world where you might be able to say something like even if everything sprang entirely out of a man's imagination, "Shakespeare contains Truth." (In Peterson's case, it seems to be a obsessive reverence for Dostoyevsky.) And if that's what your definition of "true" is going to be, you cease to be a reliable source of insight about the world. Matt tried very hard to get yes/no answers to specific questions about what he believed was "real" and got a mixture of evasion and word salad. This is why he has been called the "Deepak Chopra of Christianity". 

And I'm conflicted, because I seem to agree with what he has to say, but his body of output as a whole is so inconsistent that I could never responsibly say to someone "Go Check out what Jordan Peterson has to say about this," for fear they got lost down the rabbit hole of myths and dragons. There are better sources for that kind of insight. 

But one this is clear. On a Friday night, I really would just have rather watched card tricks.  

Update April 30, 2018

Matt Dillahunty has posted his own (lengthy) response to the conversation on his YouTube Channel: 

Update May 4, 2018

Pangburn Philosophy has posted the entire conversation (or perhaps just the audio) from that evening. 

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

I woke up this morning to the news that legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had passed away.

Hawking held an undoubtably important place in modern culture. Through his improbable battle with ALS (he was diagnosed at 21 and given two years to live) he became uniquely recognizable. "That guy in the wheelchair" brought the arcane and abstract world of cosmology to a wider audience.

I was first exposed to him in the season six finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I would have been about eight years old.

L to R, Albert Einstein, Data, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton... go figure.

My family happened to have a copy of his New York Times bestseller, A Brief History of Time, on the shelf. It was one of those books that lots of people bought but few actually read. I tried to read it and it wasn't that difficult. That book contained a lot of important lessons for a young person!

The idea that runs through the book is that the universe is explicable. Not necessarily explainED but explicABLE. (At that point our current best estimate for the age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, was still about a decade away.) While the world might be complicated, the explanations aren't forever hidden over the horizon of human knowledge. Sometimes, we actually have too many possible explanations and are waiting for a way to tell between them. He also spent most of his time talking about Black Holes and the beginning of the universe; pretty cool stuff. Once you start thinking in those terms, it's hard to turn back. 

More recently, he has made guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory and had an Oscar nominated feature film about his early life on his way to his PhD, The Theory of Everything. So I hope I'm not the last generation to be inspired by his life and work.

The World's Greatest Stevens

What could be better than waking up on Monday morning and finding out that there is a clip of two of your favourite thinkers chatting for an hour? The fact that both are named Steven. 

Stephen Fry and Steven Pinker are two of the most eloquent speakers and writers I've ever come across. They're talking about Pinker's new book Enlightenment Now. You can see it sitting on the table between them as they chat. It's quite large and I'm about a third of the way into it. So far it's amazing. The thrust of the book is simply that the world is not actually going to hell in a handbasket. Things are getting better... much better... shockingly fast... and for some reason, nobody wants to notice. More importantly, we can understand why it's happening, and try to do more of it.

So if anyone needs me for the next little bit, I'll be watching this:

The History of the Universe in Ten Minutes

One thing almost everyone is genuinely terrible at is thinking about large numbers. Any time you can take huge numbers and make some more comfortable comparison, it's a huge help. Here someone put together a history of the known universe (13.8 billion years is the current best estimate) and condensed it down into ten minutes so you can get a sense of the relative timescales.

Don't hold your breath looking for humans. We don't show up until the very last frame.

On the Ethics of Conjuring

It's a strange feeling to stop and consider that you lie for a living.

Magic is make believe, but there's something that separates it from other forms of pretend, like watching a movie or a play. In a movie, you can get swept away in emotion and feel that you're watching the real-time reactions of real people (who just happen to be reading from a script all the way through.) But in magic, emotion isn't enough; I need to bring my audience on intellectually. They need to know what they're seeing and know that it can't happen. The lie is more real.

Seeing a behind the scenes look watching your favourite Stark Trek alien getting into makeup doesn't detract from your enjoyment of Star Trek. But watching a magic show set up and seeing where all of the bits and pieces secretly went would seriously undermine your experience.

If I were trying to be absolutely intellectually honest, and admit that lying is wrong, it's not easy to defend my particular brand of lying.

One person who thought about this a lot is the famed magician and skeptic (and Canadian) James Randi. He was recently interviewed on the podcast of Penn Jillette (who has also thought deeply about this). They chat about this and other things for the better part of an hour. Gave me an intellectually satisfying warm fuzzy feeling: