Listening to Jordan Peterson's recent podcast 'From the Moore Theatre in Seattle, WA.
I wrote this tweet:
@jordanbpeterson #facts & #values I understand @SamHarrisOrg to argue that facts become values and @jordanbpeterson to argue that you need a story to focus the interpretation of the facts so that the values can emerge, both are missing the #semiotic definition of #meaning
My understanding is that facts lead towards values, yet there will always be a gap between the two, what is the distance between facts and values? How do we jump across that gap?
I think Maimonides (following Haham Jose Faur explanation in Homo Mysticus), addresses some of these questions in the opening chapters of The Guide, facts he calls Truths/Falsity and values he calls Good/Bad. And this is precisely the problem Adam and Eve faced, prior to eating from the tree of knowledge everything was a fact (true/false) after eating they were faced with the need to pronounce judgement on their actions, were they good or bad.
My insight came via Umberto Eco's description of Open Works and the relationship to Information Theory. Our ability to increase the amount of Information in a system shortens the gap and makes it easier for us to jump across.
Stories are an efficient method for increasing Information (that has to do with dependencies created in narratives).
So I think @jordanbpeterson and @SamHarrisOrg actually agree. Where they both seem to stop is linking the question 'where does meaning come from?' to the discussion of facts and values. The semiotic definition of meaning I think provides that link, semiotics defines the creation of meaning as: the mapping of two systems to each other.
So, facts that are intertwined through a story provide a lot of Information enabling us to jump the gap to a value judgement, this creates meaning as we link the system of facts to the system of values.
We do this when we create a word to communicate an abstraction of a set of facts. Hence, Maimonidies says that we bridge the world of truth/falsity to the world of good/bad when we publish ideas in the community.
Living in a community is meaningful since we communicate, which requires mapping between the two systems.
