Quotes
“Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.” (Peter Singer)
"A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of others, or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can, in Popper’s formulation, let our ideas die in our stead. Then the essential part, the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by comparison, with error. Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself." (Peterson, J. (2018) .12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
“The reason to adopt a really strong position is not because it’s my position and I want to bring people over to it. I see rhetorical, almost didactic, value in adopting positions that are stronger than you might even personally believe. because they stake out a position that, if you can crystalize it sufficiently, allows other potentially more reasonable positions to be produced in relationship to that one. In other words, in particular, when it comes to models, I don’t see models as literal descriptive statements of how the world works or how cognition works or whatever. The models, when they are good, are tools for thinking, and they are part of an intellectual dialectic that will eventually produce better models, which are better tools for thinking about some problem domain. And, of course, along the way, you’ll produce models that are better descriptively, but I don’t really see that descriptive goal as the primary goal of modeling. So that’s why I’m willing to make stronger arguments than I would personally advocate it. I think, in general, we have to approach our theoretical arguments with a sense of humility and not believe them too literally. Treat them more as parts of conversation pieces than literal statements about the world." (Gershman, S. (2022). Episode #80 on the "Cognitive Revolutions" Podcast by Cody Kommers)
"A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of others, or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can, in Popper’s formulation, let our ideas die in our stead. Then the essential part, the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by comparison, with error. Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself." (Peterson, J. (2018) .12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
“The reason to adopt a really strong position is not because it’s my position and I want to bring people over to it. I see rhetorical, almost didactic, value in adopting positions that are stronger than you might even personally believe. because they stake out a position that, if you can crystalize it sufficiently, allows other potentially more reasonable positions to be produced in relationship to that one. In other words, in particular, when it comes to models, I don’t see models as literal descriptive statements of how the world works or how cognition works or whatever. The models, when they are good, are tools for thinking, and they are part of an intellectual dialectic that will eventually produce better models, which are better tools for thinking about some problem domain. And, of course, along the way, you’ll produce models that are better descriptively, but I don’t really see that descriptive goal as the primary goal of modeling. So that’s why I’m willing to make stronger arguments than I would personally advocate it. I think, in general, we have to approach our theoretical arguments with a sense of humility and not believe them too literally. Treat them more as parts of conversation pieces than literal statements about the world." (Gershman, S. (2022). Episode #80 on the "Cognitive Revolutions" Podcast by Cody Kommers)