Why do we not discuss Sam Harris more often?
He is not only a top-tier mmodern philosopher, but a spiritual prodigy.
He absolutely stomped Jordan Peterson in their recent debates.
Where are Peterson's fanboys now? Why are they so afraid to speak of /our guy/ Sam Harris?
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Go back to 2008 reddit
Fuck off Jew shill
>a top-tier mmodern philosopher, but a spiritual prodigy.
Atheism is so 2008.
Ben Stiller thread?
>2018
>still not ambiturning
>ugh religion suuuuuuxxxxx :P
>why don't people just be cool?
literally sounds like a 12 year old girl.
>Atheism
Kek, he doesn't believe in a traditional, personal God, but he is very spiritual. He is basically Buddhist and studied meditation for 10 years with many Buddhist masters. He's not your average atheist.
Fuck off Sam, go pretend to be a "Neuroscientist" somewhere else.
>Spiritual prodigy
>Atheism
Buddhism has no concept of a soul. That's just more veiled Marxism trying to take property everyone accepts as theirs.
Did I ever imply it had a concept of .a soul? Spirituality is merely a word. We are stuck with it for now, until someone invents a word that actually fits.
He is a genius
I like him when he's speaking on his own but when he talks with Peterson it degenerates into dick waving. It's a shame because I like them both, but they suck together.
>jewish
>"/our guy/"
................
harris's arguments got thrashed hard in vox day's book and blog, it was sorta embarassing for harris. his rep's been in the dumps ever since
anyone remember the red state/blue state religiosity/violence fiasco? that shit was so retarded
at least he's intelectually honest enough to discuss racial differences in IQ.
i know he's a jew, but he's the least kike in "intellectual dark web".
>when he talks with Peterson it degenerates into dick waving
Really, what gave you this impression?
Harris and Peterson don't seem to do it, to me it just seems like their fans do that. It's alwayz ZOMG!1!1!! Peterson/Harris totally stomped that guy in the debate!
>in the end, Jow Forums turns on a Jewish liberal after embracing him
Imagine my shock
Gtfo sam...we dont like you here, cunt. In all fields.
Aaaaaaand, no one's willing to discuss the many ways Peterson stomped Jow Forums and Peterson.
Peterson tried to argue religious text and dogma has value to human life. Harris continually points out how religious belief simply feeds into psychopaths' narcissism, allowing them to claim their interpretation is right, leading to atrocities.
Harris body-slammed Jordan Peterson. Prove. Me. Wrong.
>crypto jew btfo'd by an athiest ethnic jew
Thinking this is an argument.
Those debates were very bad for Peterson. One would think an academic would be able to clearly articulate their own ideas. Nope, not Peterson.
>religious belief makes u hitler
wow really gets the marbles rolling
>He absolutely stomped Jordan Peterson in their recent debates.
No he didn't, it was two people talking past each other and not really addressing each others' points
>He absolutely stomped Jordan Peterson in their recent debates.
definetly not.
>crypto jew
hahahaha, you guys think Jordan Peterson is a jew?
Any evidence to support this claim? Wow WTF? Is everyone you disagree with suddenly a jew?
Jordan Peterson makes an absolutely terrible case of proving Christianity.
His whole argument basically boils down to "Believing in Religious Stories helps people, therefore God exists"
Most of the time in his debates is just him using very complicated terms to describe this, or him delving deep into the nitpicky details of the psychology of stories. Essentially confusing people and being as vague as possible. So Christians think he's very Smart, and atheists have no idea what he's even saying so they are kind of lukewarm towards him.
He also makes sure to mix in actual good psychological advice into his bullshit. So people who improve their lives will think "His psychology advice helped me, so his believe in God is probably correct too!"
I agree. I couldn't listen to the episode of his podcast with Peterson on as a guest.
Former neo-Nazi calls out Harris, Peterson, Molyneux.
m.youtube.com
>2018
>only turning right
>Click here
Boring fucking pseudo.
yeah, he's smart. but he's a cheap sucky version of Hitchens and Dennet and Dawkins. I'd rather listen to Rogan's pseudo-spiritual garbage than Sam Harris'. Smug without charm. No forgiveness for that.
Kill yourself, OP
(((He's))) overrated.
>Uses phrases like "Judeo-Christian" when referring to his faith/principles
>Claims to be friends with several Jews
>Has a Jewish wife
If he isn't, he may as well be.
>Peterson stomped Jow Forums and Peterson.
To be fair, Ameribro, your country has been PROFOUNDLY influenced by der power uf der judenmench.
The 'jews' are supposedly behind 'everything'.
In some cases they actually might be.
I forgive 'burgers for this on some level, the post war jew influx really changed how your society interacts.
Naturalist philosophy is a joke.
>jewish feminist
>philosopher
pick one
Join for some cards against humanity faggots:
We have 9 players so far.
Harris is a retard with little to non knowledge about real philosophy. The whole Jow Forums knows it.
Harris cannot really into ontology, morality and pretty much anything you can imagine. His arguments are weak.
Seriously, if you have any knowledge about philosophy and theology, you'll see he is in most cases atacking a strawman, a very obvious one.
Peterson secretly wants to embrace the truth, but he is just scared to do so. He continuously says how deeply the notions of the Bible are written inside us, but he never makes the step to say that God exists.
I think that a lot of work on psychology is mostly true - just exchange the idea of subcontious with soul. This trick should work in most cases
They both fuckin' suck. Harris is a Jew and says that White identity politics is disgusting. And Peterson is also disgusted with White identity politics. Fuck them both.
Sam's an atheist and Jow Forums likes to larp as DEUS VULT. There is no response to his points and there never will be, so we'll instead be treated to seething bouts of ad hominem.
Thats because it is disgusting. Western culture as a whole takes takes takes. When that slows down its not their fault; it's someone elses fault. It's absolutely disgusting.
>17 mins to listen to a "former neo-nazi" trailer park dweller's thoughts on those three
nah
Holy shit, American education isn't just a meme.
>spiritual prodigy
spiritual atheism hahahaha it's retarded go and read bhagavad gita there is no spiritual text yet that beats it.
>"Believing in Religious Stories helps people, therefore God exists"
Fittingly, a defense for religion that you can find Sam mentioning in his earliest talks and thoroughly dismantling.
>my jew is better than your jew
>my jew beat your jew in talking
>i win when my favorite jew wins
Really? It just takes and produces no output?
Perhaps you should have paid attention in school.
Are you really in Malta? I've been thinking of visiting.
>allowing them to claim their interpretation is right, leading to atrocities.
This can happen with nonreligious texts just as easily, but no one thinks this would be an adequate excuse for dismissing legal texts.
He does seem very scared, he dances around the topic constantly when somebody asks him things like "Do you believe in a Literal God?" or "Do you believe that Jesus Christ was literally resurrected"
It's one thing to say that the fictional made up stories of the Bible are useful or resonate with people's subconscious.
It's a whole other thing to say that the Bible is literally true (Miracles are real, Jesus was resurrected in real life, Jesus literally turned water into Wine) and in reality there is an invisible ghost called God that can see you and everything you do and judges you based on the Bible
How is God a ghost in any context?
In the sense that he is an invisible being that perceives everything you do and knows everything supposedly.
I'm not too particular on the terminology, I just use ghost as shorthand for "invisible conscious being", feel free to replace it with any term you like
The claim that Christianity makes is That God, very specifically, is a conscious entity that exists in real life and that watches you every second of every day and judges your actions based on the Bible.
The idea that God is only a "subconscious archetype" and not an actual conscious entity or whatever Jordan Peterson claims it is is an extremely fringe belief that 90%+ Christians would completely disagree with and be against.
Marxism, for example. Perhaps the most materialist and secular ideology to have emerged in the last couple centuries. How many tens of millions (or more) of deaths have been justified by those texts. I generally respect Harris, but this is a facile, myopic argument.
Nice bait
This. People seem to assume that because someone is smart and knowledgeable in biology/psychology/science, they must also be smart and knowledgeable about philosophy. (Same thing applies to Peterson). Harris just has a very poor understanding of philosophy. Edward Feser makes him look like a drooling retard.
>top-tier mmodern philosopher
Hes literally a case study of Cognitive dissonance and he's a manlet. You can tell when he has no argument because h jumps straight to "WELL YEAH BUT RELIGION PEOPLE DID A BAD THING ONE TIME" which is almost all the time. I hate his ugly face and I hate how he never wears a tie.
I actually disagree. Marxist doctrine can be reasonably said to have been faithfully upheld in all those cases.
The argument sam is making is simple. If the logical conclusion of following an ideology or religion to its reasonable conclusions results in many deaths that is simple evidence that the ideology is dangerous.
he's written a few nice articles but those haven't got much to do with Jow Forums
I've watched the first 3 Vancouver/Dublin/London events from start to finish, I don't think anyone stomped anyone else. Jordan went for a more philosophical approach in the first 2 lectures and made a somewhat fragmented case, in the 3rd lecture he mainly focused on the science which I think is a more compelling case at least to fans of Harris who tend to be very science centric.
Peterson's arguments make more sense if you watch the science behind what he's saying, it's in his UofT lectures online, there's hundreds of hours of talks and he talks about human perception a lot, how we necessarily need a value system to even be able to perceive the world and what our sensory systesms do is rapidly discard vast swaths of information to filter down to what specific facts we care about.
But that necessarily requires a value system to begin with, the facts as we discover them are based on a foundation of values. We don't get values from facts. But you'd need to watch a lot of his videos to understand just to what degree that is true, his maps of meaning and personality lectures are free if you care to actually get a better handle on his arguments.
Meditation has nothing to do with the soul.
The vast majority of Jow Forums since the election are 40 year olds who are so set in their ideology they would not be able to understand Harris, or probably not fully understand Peterson either for that matter. Since the election this place has just become the headquarters for tribalist ideologues who are incapable of critical thought.
I can't believe we would reach a point where I'd have to say that Jow Forums of all boards was once better.
>His whole argument basically boils down to "Believing in Religious Stories helps people, therefore God exists"
He's literally never claimed this. If he has, then cite your source. He's made the argument that god is a distillation of essentially all the hero myths, that god is essentially an archetype. He's never said "god exists" but rather that he acts in a way as if god exists.
If you think he's using language to make sure that atheists don't even understand what he's saying then you're ignorant. I've been an atheist long before it became trendy and the nu-atheists flooded in, and I've always liked Sam. But what Peterson had to say on the first Joe Rogan podcast drew me into his work becuase it was a whole perspective for me that I'd never even considered and instead of fobbing off language that I didn't understand I actually studied his lectures.
I think I've watched the 2017, 2016 and 2015 variants of his lectures at the UofT that's something like 150 hours of content, some of which I've watched several times to get a handle on it.
So you have to compress 150+ hours down into a 2 hour discussion of which 50% or less of that time goes to you. You can't do it, it's far more complicated than it first appears. So when he says things like you can't even find the facts without an a priori value system, that's a hugely complicated argument that's based in science and you can go learn that in his videos, he cites all the relevant literature. It's all free and add free on his YT channel if you care to understand what he's saying.
harris represents the zenith of the rational materialist atheism that 16 year old me thought was the tits
peterson is what you get when that 16 year old has had 40 years to contemplate the problems of that position
Regardless of the validity of what you’re saying, very well-formulated response. It’s uncommon to see someone conduct themselves respectably on 4chinz
>Peterson: "things like morality would have evolved over history because they had to be first learned."
>Harris: "Yeah but it's still bad LOL!"
Harris is an absolute fucking dickhead.
>vox day's book and blog
I looked into that. Vox is a chronic dickwaver no substance desu, i watched his anti-peterson videos expecting legitemate arguments and got mostly an over philosophized and eloquent adhom which for better or worse came across less as intending to reveal the truth around the areas where peterson was wrong and more to undermine his authority by criticizing his choices. Which feels both entitled and pathetic. Entitled because he thinks that peterson or any of his ilk should pay attention to him whilst offering little to nothing of value by means of discussion or critique, and pathetic because while combat like this is interesting for die hard fans of his, he totally lapses on an excellent chance to not act the hypocrite by presenting actual historical facts and information which would educate the masses and earn him genuine points.
the guy is a neoliberal neocon who hates Trump, we should kill him
Kill yourself kyke
>Edward Feser makes him look like a drooling retard.
care to link an article where feser discusses harris? im interested. If you mean he trounces him in general expertise by contrast yourself, then i am sad
It happens from time to time, there are some alright people here who are prepared to discuss things openly. What I noticed in the talks between Peterson and Harris is that they pointed out the split int he audience, those fans of either of them, but when they pointed out that what everyone had in common was seeking the truth, everyone went nuts.
As far as I can see this is probably the only place in the west where you can see a genuinely intellecutally honest debate about what are essentially traditioncon vs liberal arguments, it's unheard of elsewhere, and for it to be civil and the people mostly care about getting to the bottom of this stuff.
All I can say to people who don't really understand what Peterson is saying, is watch his lectures, they're free. You can start with maps of meaning which goes into belief, human biology, perception, ideology, good/evil and loads of really interesting areas.
Sam Harris the Fraud
rhizzone.net
Already developing his trademark narcissistic and computer-like style of discussion, Sam was compelled to indulge himself in further study. According to the same interview, after re-enrolling and completing his diploma, Sam began writing at length about his philosophical views: “but nothing was published.” Whatever Sam was producing at this stage, it wasn’t of any interest to actual philosophers. The best way to get around this problem was to bypass them and publish for a lay audience, and thankfully for Sam this wasn’t an insurmountable problem: coming from a TV family he had already developed the ability to find an audience – rubes who will buy what you’re selling.
After spending his 20s in some kind of haze of middle class ennui searching for spiritual truth Sam finally found the more fundamental, bourgeois truth: New Age spiritualism has nothing on getting filthy rich and famous. The essays he had tried to send off to philosophy journals for publications were later amalgamated into material for “The End of Faith”, and its publication opened up a whole new world of connections and media attention.
In 2004, after the success of “The End of Faith”, Harris was introduced to David Samuels, media heavyweight, who lauded him as the next Voltaire. The friend who introduced Harris to Samuels? A mysterious “writer for the Simpsons”. Atheists and libertarians began crawling out of the woodwork to latch onto this rising star. The connections begin to come thick and fast. In more recent years Harris has found equal success in enlisting the support of New Atheists like Dan Dennett & Richard Dawkins.
Not an athiest, but essentially i did the same thing. I am a devout catholic, and the interesting thing to me is the work with symbolism.
Language is just one type of representations to which archetype is the deepest and least able to insert into language without story. Rationalists are addicted to using words to make their points when the larger picture is always looming behind their words.
Peterson always points to this exact picture and gives exact tools to manipulate it, interpret it, and work within this space. To be perfectly fair however as a catholic i find his tools somewhat limiting since he has only dug so deelply into a few issues and concepts.
But take the eucharist. Christ died on the cross, a sacrifice for us. The passover was to celebrate the gift of manna from god to the jews. christ came as the bread of life (manna). So the transubstantiation is the acknowledgement that christ 'became' the passover, thus the bread is flesh.
A symbol is typically a representation that is not self referential. That is, it is not 'the thing' which it represents. But the eucharist IS. This goes very high up theologically.
The way i frame it is, peterson says life is not one game, or a championship of games, it is a series of championships to the day you die. The level of Sams biblical analysis is winning a game, or in rare cases, winning a championship. But petersons is winning the series.
The bible instead says there are better ways to win the series, the lowest of which is good, and the highest of which is holy. Holy is ALWAYS good but it is a much much better than good (which is where most atheists settle themselves and most religious people should aspire to meet atheists). Because even in a series of championships the entire set of all games are flawed and can be improved along with the character of the individual.
At this same juncture in his life Sam decided to dive into the world of neuroscience, and what a career move it turned out to be. For the broader middle class yokelry who fawn over Sam, it gives him some kind of insight into the “inner workings of the mind”, which neuroscience does not actually involve. A small aside, let me tell you what neuroscientists do: data entry. The neuroscientist title turns out to be a lie, a bit of performance art from an accomplished performer. It’s true that Harris completed a PhD in neuroscience, yet the story of how he got this qualification casts some doubt on his bona fides as a so called “neuroscientist”.
The second problem was potentially more difficult. Sam had no history in neuroscience and he had never conducted an experiment in his life. It’s hard to imagine the UCLA neuroscience department accepting his PhD proposal, until you remember that Sam was by this stage highly connected, filthy rich, and becoming famous. He was given the red carpet treatment by UCLA. Sam got to pretend to do science while the professionals got to work. The various research jobs were passed to his co-authors: conducting the experiments, recruiting participants and designing the entire study were taken off Little Lord Fauntleroy’s hands. Ultimately Sam’s sole responsibility was the final write-up, which is less the account of a scientific experiment and more a screed about his personal views on religion, and a narcissistic flexing of his intellectual cred.
Harris’ desire to sleaze his way through a doctorate in neuroscience in particular was motivated by his instincts as an arch-careerist. “The End of Faith” was already on the shelves – he was already a Somebody in the public sphere, and he already had a topic that he knew would play. His PhD would investigate the differences in brain activity between Christians and non-Christian people when asked various factual or non-factual questions. The goal was to find some kind of neurological correlate of religiosity, showing how religious people think less rationally than atheists. He could then use this as a stick to beat religious people – presumably Muslims – with: “your brains work differently to ours”. These findings would tie everything up in a neat bow: Muslims are irrational and crazy, and here are the brain scans to prove it! Fortunately for Sam, and unfortunately for the credibility of neuroscientists generally, it’s pretty easy to produce whatever results you like with a little bit of methodological tilting of the scales.
Two equally interesting questions arise from the tale of Sam’s PhD thesis. Firstly, where did he get the money? MRI machines are expensive pieces of equipment, and are often rented for short periods at great expense. By now we should be able to guess the answer: Sam naturally had this covered through personal wealth and connections. Right around the time he was beginning his thesis Harris founded “The Reason Project”, later to become “Project Reason”, a “charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society”. The Reason Project was apparently feeling particularly charitable about Sam, and provided the funds for his PhD, including use of facilities and an MRI machine. Once again, mum to the rescue.
>The idea that God is only a "subconscious archetype" and not an actual conscious entity or whatever Jordan Peterson claims it is is an extremely fringe belief that 90%+ Christians would completely disagree with and be against.
yes, it is one of the few major disagreements i have with peterson on faith. But oddly when thinking in terms of adaptive fitness, it is possible and indeed reasonable that our biology comports to belief in god, whether true actually or otherwise. I am fully convinced its true, but that does not mean that there is not a god archetype neural architecture.
After all, religious belief has its own unique circuitry in the brain.
The second problem was potentially more difficult. Sam had no history in neuroscience and he had never conducted an experiment in his life. It’s hard to imagine the UCLA neuroscience department accepting his PhD proposal, until you remember that Sam was by this stage highly connected, filthy rich, and becoming famous. He was given the red carpet treatment by UCLA. Sam got to pretend to do science while the professionals got to work. The various research jobs were passed to his co-authors: conducting the experiments, recruiting participants and designing the entire study were taken off Little Lord Fauntleroy’s hands. Ultimately Sam’s sole responsibility was the final write-up, which is less the account of a scientific experiment and more a screed about his personal views on religion, and a narcissistic flexing of his intellectual cred.
The PhD predictably ended up a huge mess seeing how its lead author, Sam, was not a scientist but rather an anti-religious ideologue with no idea about how to design a study of this kind. Plenty of scientists during this period were swept up by the excitement of probing the activity in people’s brains to locate the regions or areas responsible for different mental behaviours. The emerging field of fMRI seemed to give us a special insight into the mind, but the methods involved are often rudimentary or extremely questionable.
Participants are routinely asked to “do nothing” or “think about nothing” while their “baseline” brain activity is recorded by the MRI machine. This baseline is then compared against their results during the experimental task, often in a very crude way. Researchers will simply subtract the baseline activation from the task activation, assuming that this will leave them with only the task activation, removing all the background noise. Researchers also frequently use mathematical tweaking to produce results that look good on a “heat map” by removing data that are “noisy” and don’t cluster neatly on the hotspots of activation.
In one famous example of the flaws of fMRIs, researchers used a dead salmon as their fMRI subject. The salmon was shown a series of images of various human social situations, designed to evoke an emotional response. The researchers found that, using the standard methods employed by neuroscientists and psychologists, the dead salmon responded to the images, illustrating the insanely high false-positive rate of fMRI research.
On a deeper theoretical level, it is rarely assumed anymore that discrete brain regions “do” any particular task. More and more evidence is emerging that distributed networks, graphical and topological features of the whole brain, and other kinds of non-localizable processes are what actually drive our mental life.
Harris’ research manages to hit every single note of bad neuroscience design, and reveals an ignorance of theoretical issues on the part of the scientists involved. The statistician William Briggs, having studied the thesis, points to numerous flaws in its design. The researchers recruited a hugely biased population sample that skewed their data, and did not record whether the non-Christian participants were Muslims, Atheists, Buddhist, or whatever else (I guess the folks round Stanford are white enough to rule other religions out). They also didn’t include the details of the questions asked, and we simply have to assume that the questions were valid. Harris’ team also discarded data that did not suit their desired results: 7 out of 40 participants were not included in the results “because their responses to our experimental stimuli indicated that they did not actually meet the criteria for inclusion in our study as either nonbelievers or committed Christians”. How was this decided? They never say. In addition, since some participants didn’t answer consistently enough according to Sam’s reckoning he excluded “subjects who could not consistently respond “true” or “false” with conviction.”
Briggs summarises:
“During the course of my investigation of scientism and bad science, I have read a great many bad, poorly reasoned papers. This one might not be the worst, but it deserves a prize for mangling the largest number of things simultaneously.”
Yet the thesis was accepted and Sam received his PhD anyway. Doubtless the connection to his thesis supervisor Mark S. Cohen, a pioneer in MRI scanning techniques, helped carry him over the line. And thus Sam, a man who knows virtually nothing about neuroscience, who has never conducted or designed an experiment, is the proud holder of a PhD.
Unfortunately I had this book in mind, which does broadly address Harris (+ Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett).
One way to address this issue is to actually ask why the whole evolutionary process guided by the rules of nature led to a human believing in God, and in some cases believing harder than in the value of his own life (overwrites the whole self-preservation basic instinct which originates with life born billions of years ago)
Watched the debate. Literally couldn’t see it as anything but two Jews, Harris and Weinstein, trying to devalue western culture.
Stiller probably has a higher IQ than that cunt really
>he denies the biological origins of morality
AA-AATSS- J E W
True. The whole NPR soft monotone whisper shtick is absolutely disgusting.
So, when do you get to the part where harris is a fraud?
You can say his dissertation wasn't particularly good or groundbreaking... it doesn't make him a fraud.
You can say that journals didn't publish his philisophical work... it doesn't make him a fraud.
Just because a journal doesn't publish something doesn't mean it has no value. Clearly.
It's just slander to say that he's a fraud.
No need to get assblasted over banter. Nice reddit spacing you got there.
Sounds like you are the assblasted one.
Debunking a lie is the whole point of Jow Forums.
And that's not reddit spacing.
This is.
He's a fraud by manipulating his audience. Basically, he attacks anyone who doesn't agree with him by making them of 'lower knowledge and intellect'. His main force is charisma, or rather overblown ego. He's like a cancer in the field of philosophy as he isn't really a philosopher but public may mistake him for one.
He's a fraud because he is taken for what he is not.
>He's a fraud because people like him but i disagree with them.
No, that's not what fraud means.
>
>Basically, he attacks anyone who doesn't agree with him by making them of 'lower knowledge and intellect'.
This is another lie. Harris has a pretty strong track record of addressing the arguments of his critics.
>His main force is charisma, or rather overblown ego
Based polack. I'm surprised he's able to do podcasts at all in those relatively small studios.
(You)
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Sorry Sam, you ARE a fraud
Sorry, user. You are a liar.