“Reality is not objective, nor are the elements of reality protons, neutrons and electrons. Rather, reality is subjective. And the elements of reality are chaos, order and consciousness.”
TL;DR: I used to believe that reality was objective and was made of protons, electrons and neutrons. Not according to Dr. Jordan Peterson. He believes Consciousness is one of the fundamental elements of subjective reality.
What is Consciousness?
Jordan Peterson’s12 Rules for Lifehas been my constant companion this last month. I’ve never read anything so thick with ideas. I don’t think he wasted a word, let alone a sentence.
Today, while listening to chapter 2 for the 3rd time, I heard this stunning thought for the 1st time:
“Reality is not objective, nor are the elements of reality protons, neutrons and electrons. Rather, reality is subjective. And the elements of reality are chaos, order and consciousness.”
I don’t want to lay out his entire argument here. If you want to understand it, get the book. I find his argument compelling enough and interesting enough that it warrants exploration.
Order, Chaos and the World in Between
Peterson posits that long before we’d developed the rigorous techniques collectively known as “science,” humans understood reality primarily as stories and personalities.
Chaos is the name we gave to everything unknown and unexplored. Order is the name we gave to everything known and explored.
Both Chaos and Order each have a distinct personality. Or – to be more specific – we experience Chaos as having one kind of personality and we experience Order as having a different sort of personality.
Both of these personalities are bigger, stronger and longer lasting than any human. Yet we humans – small and frail as we are – must straddle the border between these two titans.
It’s an entirely different way of viewing the world. Yet it makes sense. Peterson insists that our brains – millions of years in the making through the slow, irresistible power of natural selection – evolved to perceive the world this way – subjectively.
The idea of science – the idea of perceiving the world as objects – is less than 500 years old. Not nearly enough time for evolution to do its work on our cognition and perception systems.
So what is consciousness?
That’s one of the biggest questions in science, and one that no one has an adequate scientific answer to.
Yet suppose we view the world as a collection of subjects rather than objects.
Suppose the fundamental elements are Order, Chaos and Consciousness rather than Protons, Neutrons and Electrons.
The question What is consciousness is an objective question.
It presumes that consciousness is a thing we can examine and measure and quantify.
Yet if consciousness is subjective, then the question itself is meaningless. Consciousness is the label we apply to our subjective experience as we balance on the knife edge between the experience of Chaos and the experience of Order.
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