Seeing Things Differently -DanP the apologist excuse.

[hauslern]

Dan quotes a passage from a book by David Brookes. I regular watch him on Newshour and he comes across as a moderate conservative:

"Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you. (61)
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... erson.html

In other words, there are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.” (61)

An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who’s been trained as a security specialist. The therapist Irvin Yalom once asked one of his patients to write a summary of each group therapy session they did together. When he read her reports, Yalom realized that she experienced each session radically differently than he did. She never even heard the supposedly brilliant insights Yalom thought he was sharing with the group. Instead, she noticed the small personal acts—the way one person complimented another’s clothing, the way someone apologized for being late. In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we’re each having our own experience of it. Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” (61)

People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life. (63)

Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” (64)

Is this a new way Dan is coping with any cognitive dissonance with the Book of Abraham? We both look at the "slave" in facsimile 3. I notice it only has one ear protruding on his head. Does that matter to Dan?

[Philo Sofee]

Yep, that's exactly what it means. I rather like your post and have great empathy with it because it rings so true. Cosmic Buddhism, my next documentary, deals exactly with this in most marvelous ways! Thanks for sharing.

[drumdude]

The Book of Abraham is objectively a fraud, but the more important subjective faithful Mormon lens allows you to see it as a revelation from God.

This works really well to turn any falsehood into a truth. No evidence that COVID vaccines kill people? Well my subjective truth tells me it does.

Like I’ve said many times, Dan is a postmodern relativist. He doesn’t believe in objective truth or reality. Those get thrown under the bus constantly to protect his fragile belief in his cult. “Follow the brethren” is his ground truth.

[Philo Sofee]

The Book of Abraham is objectively a fraud, but the more important subjective faithful Mormon lens allows you to see it as a revelation from God.

This works really well to turn any falsehood into a truth. No evidence that COVID vaccines kill people? Well my subjective truth tells me it does.

Like I’ve said many times, Dan is a postmodern relativist. He doesn’t believe in objective truth or reality. Those get thrown under the bus constantly to protect his fragile belief in his cult. “Follow the brethren” is his ground truth.

I doubt he actually believes in follow the brethren much at all. Sure he pays lip service to it, but to actually follow their instructions and do what they say? No. The prophet said start being peaceful and nice. Peterson fails. Seniors go on missions for the Lord. Peterson fails. More examples are available such as being honest. Peterson plagiarizes most of what he writes. That's a fail also. So while I get where you are coming from, I suspect you are wrong on Peterson in that regard.

[Moksha]

Is this a new way Dan is coping with any cognitive dissonance with the Book of Abraham? We both look at the "slave" in facsimile 3. I notice it only has one ear protruding on his head. Does that matter to Dan?

I'm guessing that Dr. Peterson knows that Shulem was right in his assessment that the "slave" was an alteration of the Egyptian God Anubis. The Code of Apologetics would prevent him from acknowledging this truth.

[Gadianton]

when all else fails and they know they can't win, the apologists always go for a stalemate via relativism.

[Philo Sofee]

when all else fails and they know they can't win, the apologists always go for a stalemate via relativism.

Perhaps they then feel they can punt to possibilities and save themselves......eventua.............lly................. just give it time, a Nephite ruin WILL be found..........

[Physics Guy]

It's true and important that people with different histories experience things differently. It can even extend to elementary perceptions. A lucid conversation in an unfamiliar language sounds like gibberish; you can't even tell where words stop and begin. Someone who does know the language, on the other hand, doesn't have to think at all about the meaning of those same sounds.

It's not just that having the right training lets you hear or see things that the untrained don't perceive. A big part of training, for example in hearing language, is learning not to perceive the things that aren't supposed to matter. Your brain actively ignores sounds that lie between phonemes used in your native language; it decides which phoneme is closest to the actual sound, and it gives you that phoneme. You can find it hard to imagine what kind of sound could possibly be in between.

This is a pain if you try to learn a language with different phonemes. You'll keep failing to recognize important differences, and mixing them up when you try to pronounce them. Yet it is this automatic filtering that lets you clearly understand your own native language even through quite a lot of background noise.

Training lets you recognize things others don't—and also not see things that others do see—and both those effects are entangled together. For apologetics this is a double-edged sword. Just because you see something, or don't see a problem, doesn't mean that the thing is really there, or that the problem isn't serious. It could just be your training. Training works so well that it can still work even if it is wrong.

[High Spy]

when all else fails and they know they can't win, the apologists always go for a stalemate via relativism.

Perhaps they then feel they can punt to possibilities and save themselves......eventua.............lly................. just give it time, a Nephite ruin WILL be found..........

Only if they quit believing in fairytales and look in the right place.

[Imwashingmypirate]

It's true and important that people with different histories experience things differently. It can even extend to elementary perceptions. A lucid conversation in an unfamiliar language sounds like gibberish; you can't even tell where words stop and begin. Someone who does know the language, on the other hand, doesn't have to think at all about the meaning of those same sounds.

It's not just that having the right training lets you hear or see things that the untrained don't perceive. A big part of training, for example in hearing language, is learning not to perceive the things that aren't supposed to matter. Your brain actively ignores sounds that lie between phonemes used in your native language; it decides which phoneme is closest to the actual sound, and it gives you that phoneme. You can find it hard to imagine what kind of sound could possibly be in between.

This is a pain if you try to learn a language with different phonemes. You'll keep failing to recognize important differences, and mixing them up when you try to pronounce them. Yet it is this automatic filtering that lets you clearly understand your own native language even through quite a lot of background noise.

Training lets you recognize things others don't—and also not see things that others do see—and both those effects are entangled together. For apologetics this is a double-edged sword. Just because you see something, or don't see a problem, doesn't mean that the thing is really there, or that the problem isn't serious. It could just be your training. Training works so well that it can still work even if it is wrong.

<3