Reducing Agents

Jordan Peterson : Star Wars Is Interesting

Star Wars, for example, is naturally interesting; 

and people just take that for granted, 

but the fact that people will line up to to engage voluntar voluntarily in a ritual activity of that sort is a manifestation of something that's very deep in the human psyche that we do not comprehend well we're not really smart enough to understand why people would line up for four nights for 10 blocks to watch Star Wars you know I mean they won't do that for a lecture and they wouldn't pay money 

One of the things that your brain 

is very concerned with 

is relative status —

That's wired-in, by the 

way, which is partly why 

relative poverty is often 

such a social problem —

People hate being Low in status, especially Men. 

Well, the male status hierarchy is a bit different 

than women and Women are 

pretty sensitive to Status, too, 

but they use different markers , 

anyways part of what happens when your status goes up is your brain serotonin levels go up and when your brain serotonin levels go up you're less irritable and and you experience less negative emotion per unit of uncertainty or threat and so when you you know when you demean someone and you interfere with and you lower the their presumed status as far as a very primordial circuit is concerned you alter the system that regulates their emotions and they hate that people hate that more than anything and it's an unbelievably archaic circuit you can kind of tell this because depressed people basically act like their low status and depressed people are depressed about everything now it's not easy to be depressed about everything right and so the fact that that's the case means that what's ever gone astray has to be very primordial because it affects everything anyways people often use anti-depressants to cure depression hence their name um and anti-depressants decrease the rate at which serotonin is taken back up by the neurons that produce it well 300 million years ago Crustaceans emerged and Crustaceans live in dominance hierarchies even though they're not particularly social and if one Lobster fights with another and gets defeated then he won't fight with another Lobster even when he beat for 20 minutes unless you give man depressants in which case he'll fight again right away the reason I'm telling you this is because the status structure that underlies your being not just your brain but your being is is so old you share it with Crustaceans it's necessary for you to look at the world through a limited frame of reference your Consciousness can only handle about four bits of information per second it's not not very much given that the number of bits of information coming at you from the external world are for all practical purposes infinite you're like eldis Huxley suggested your brain seem to be primarily a reducing agent your body's a reducing agent as well because there are lots of things that you just can't detect and then the room that you're sitting in is a reducing agent because it's keeping all sorts of things out that you would otherwise have to deal with and the stability of this city is a reducing agent because we're not going to be stamped by barbarians with any luck at every moment or any moment we we deal with the complexity of the world in part by inhabiting a sequence of reducing structures until the world is reduced enough so that we can actually deal with the minute elements of it that we can comprehend at any one moment and those elements we comprehend um are not the familiar objects of objective reality in fact animals and people included aren't much interested in objective reality um we're interested in pragmatic reality and pragmatic reality is the reality that you act on not that you perceive and because we're embedded in bodies and because we're biological organisms and because we're concerned with survival and reproduction among other things how to act is a much more important much more important question for us than what is the world constituted of so the world that we inhabit given that we're alive and given that what selected us selected us to act is actually a pragmatic world and the objects of pragmatic worlds aren't objects they're tools and obstacles and they have veilance a priority they're they have value a priority from the Newtonian perspective you look at the world and then you think about world that you see the objects of the world that you see and then you evaluate them and then you act and that is not how your brain works it's just wrong um you might see the value of things before you see the object itself I mean there are people for example who are blind they have blind sight they can recognize emotions on faces without knowing they can see so that's partly because their retinas are attached to the amydala your retina is attached a lot of your body not just your vision ual cortex it's attached to your spinal cord it's attached to your nervous system at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously and so you can use your eyes to detect things that you don't know you're seeing so and what in in some sense what you often detect under those circumstances is veilance value so you're very good for example at detecting teeth and predatory eyes and the reasons for that are self-evident fundamentally this