It greatly depends on the context and the truth you are seeking.

Someone once said that humans are evolved to reason and solve problems in an environment where medium sized objects move at medium speed, in a relatively short time span (human life).

So in that context intuition could be lifesaving. But when it comes to evolutionary biology, for example, our intuitions about “how much is 1 million years?” are simply useless most of the time.

I’ll give you an example I’ve heard in some podcast: picture your family in the past, like 15 generations ago. You’ll see the same humans but with very different habits, so different that you could be shocked. Now go back 30 generations more: even more differences, and it seems crazy!

Now realize that if you go back enough time, enough generations, what you see in your genealogical tree is a fish. Does that sound strange when your read it?

That’s because your intuitions about evolutionary timescales are useless.

Same applies for other fields of human knowledge. Try “understanding” the fact that your atoms were formed inside a star, hence you are literally made of stardust.

Does that sound ok to you? It doesn’t because in The Life of Primates there’s no environmental pressure to grasp such concepts, or knowledge.

Of course I don’t think that we are the exact same thing as a single organic cell. From a certain point of view we are completely different thing (in fact a cell is not made up of billions of cells).

I was just trying to show that from another point of view, cells show complex behavior as a whole, but you wouldn’t say that the single cell has free will.

We are not just the sum of our cells because emergent properties exist, and those always show complex behavior that are not intrinsically present in the individual cell.

Much like an ant: she doesn’t own the whole knowledge needed to run a colony, but sure as hell the whole colony does.

You could easily see that if you just google “all roads lead to Rome” and then you google “circulatory system of a rat”.

Regarding the first one: it took millennia to build, the efforts of perhaps millions of people, with different ideas, objectives, needs, in different times and for different reasons (commerce, love, power, money, craziness, etc).

Also, you could draw a similar map for pretty much every major city in the whole world, it just depends on which road you select and why. You could say that it’s the product of the free will of millions, so it should be unpredictable.

The second one (the rat) we think is just the product of biology, chemistry and physics. No free will at all, in fact it is predictable (it’s the same in every mammal, in every leaf, in every hydrographic system, etc).

So…millions of “free people” were able to recreate a pattern that does not require free will, and they did it without even knowing it, across millennia.

My point being: our brain runs a sophisticated software that gives us a very bright and realistic illusion. We are just organic cells with shoes.

I’m not sure what you were trying to say with your last sentence, but somehow I agree with you.

Could you expand a little?

“Religion or spirituality thus becomes your truth rather than a reflection of the truth and the extent to which we can actually connect with its forms of truth leaves us with a kind of uncertainty we cannot overcome unless we give up the insistence of analytics, reasoning and empiricism as the only way to reality.”

This sentence sounds like a dogma on its own, in my opinion.

In reality it just depends on whether religion makes claims about subjects that can be verified with science. If that’s the case, then the scientific truth is in fact in direct contrast with the religious truth, and it cannot possibly be that they are both right at the same time.

An old example from religion: the earth is 6,000 years old. Nope! So in this case you are not free to “look for your own truths”. You either accept the facts or you are delusional.

When it comes to people like Jordan Peterson, I believe they cannot simply reply something like “I believe / I don’t believe in god” because it would be clear that they are delusional.

It’s a form of intellectual dishonesty and some of them (like JP) absolutely know that. For example when he’s asked whether he believes in god or not, he says something along the lines of “it would take 4 hours for me to explain what I believe”.

No it wouldn’t, unless you want to take the definition of god given by the Bible and change it to fit your agenda. The Bible is really clear about what god is, what he does and why he does it.

You either accept it or not. You cannot change the meaning of something that was written 2000 years ago. You are not 100% free to INTERPRET the scriptures while “forgetting” the context in which the scriptures were produced.

Those people 100% believed what they were writing, so they were either right or wrong. If you allow yourself to interpret the Bible in any possible way, then are you not allowing yourself to interpret the words of a omniscient being?

On the one hand “God did that” and on the other “…yes but I (a “stupid” human being, far from Being omniscient) can the change the meaning of it!”.

The question is: is there a limit to how much you can interpret and how much you should keep as is? It seems that the limits is being changed based on the needs of the culture, which is in fact intellectual dishonesty.

If the limit is not clear (and in JP it is not clear at all and it seems that anything is up from grabs) then you’ll just adapt the “interpretation” to what you already think and feel, which of course is just a sophisticated variant of confirmation bias.

Lots of smart words from smart people who desperately need to confirm their feelings, which is the opposite of intellectual honesty and integrity.

This article screams strawman argument from top to bottom. A couple of examples:

“Say my wife is feeling tired and irritable. I can either, as a good Stoic, try to feel good about that, or I can get up from the lounge and bring her a glass of wine and some crackers with Taramasalata.”

Nowhere in the Stoic philosophy does it suggest to “feel good” about someone you love being angry or sad. Realizing that you are not in control of something outside of your own person does not mean to feel good of be happy no matter what.

A good example would be your wife being sad and you not pretending you can control that by PRETENDING she stops, say because you are also tired. A good stoic would only focus on his own reaction, maybe by being a good person/husband and being supportive, instead of implicitly pretending that she should not do that “because you are my wife!!!”.

A good stoic would not get to the point of being too tired to NOT be supportive for his wife.

“This leads us to the passivity problem. If we focus only on our character, reactions, and actions, as Stoicism proposes, and put no effort into things that lie beyond our direct control, it seems to me that a practising Stoic will remain passive in the face of major problems like climate change or social inequality.”

Realizing you are not in control of climate change does not mean you are automatically allowed to simply don’t care about it, or contributing to making it worse, as the author implies.

It could mean to take the situation seriously enough to decide to change your own person and habits based on what society demands, but not seriously enough as to think that YOU have the power to change it personally.

The latter will grant you the feeling of impotency because, as we know, no single person is in charge of fixing climate change. No single person SHOULD even being in charge of that, even if it was possible.

Thinking that you have the power to fix things outside of your control is one of the most frequent and potent traps in human cognition. Recognizing this could lead you to maximize your positive impact, because you would focus on yourself without “wasting” energy fixing what you cannot possibly fix.

So focus on yourself and then have the biggest positive impact in the world.

Realizing that you cannot control what you cannot control does NOT mean “who cares!!!!!”.