The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 133. Maps of Meaning 5： Story and Metastory 1

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:50.980 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 20 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:01.200 I'm Mikayla Peterson, Jordan's daughter.

00:01:03.360 I hope you enjoy this episode of Maps of Meaning Part 4.

00:01:06.440 Sorry I haven't been around for the intros and wonderful ads from our sponsors for the last couple of episodes,

00:01:11.380 and I'm sorry I'm back if you were glad I was gone.

00:01:14.620 My family and my dad and I are still in Serbia, although I think we're planning to come home in the next month.

00:01:19.140 We're seriously missing Canada. Not looking forward to the 14-day quarantine, though.

00:01:24.000 Seems a little unnecessary given the fact we've all had COVID and have now been recovered fully for over a month.

00:01:30.140 If you guys didn't know about the COVID, now you know. He's okay. It really wasn't that bad.

00:01:35.520 I don't have much else to tell you, really. Life isn't easy. We're still waiting for Dad to recover more.

00:01:40.700 It's been very difficult, and it's still difficult.

00:01:42.460 It won't be hard forever, but it is right now.

00:01:45.440 If you're interested in staying up to date with what's going on, obviously I'll be updating you here as well periodically.

00:01:50.940 I have my own podcast.

00:01:52.600 I interviewed Representative Dan Crenshaw, and that episode is coming out Tuesday, which is exciting.

00:01:57.720 We talk about mental toughness, something I would argue isn't being taught well enough these days.

00:02:02.860 I got taught mine from Dad.

00:02:04.880 He taught me to never feel sorry for myself, and that was one of the most important lessons I've ever learned.

00:02:08.800 Probably the most important, actually.

00:02:11.740 It's been hard this year to stand by watching him recover.

00:02:14.600 Obviously, most of my feelings are empathy for him, but I think that's the only reason I've been able to help, really.

00:02:21.400 Anyway, enjoy the episode. Stay sane out there.

00:02:25.940 Sleep is really important for your health.

00:02:28.300 You know how awful you can feel with jet lag?

00:02:30.600 A lot of that is just sleep disruption.

00:02:33.360 Hopefully you've tried to improve your sleep.

00:02:35.140 If not, you should.

00:02:36.380 There are a few key things you can do.

00:02:37.860 Blackout curtains or a sleep mask, not using blue light a few hours before bed, sleeping in a cold room, and a quality mattress.

00:02:45.640 We spend half our lives on a mattress, so it should be tailored to your needs.

00:02:49.760 The most comfortable mattress I've tried is from Helix Sleep.

00:02:53.120 If you go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan and take their two-minute sleep quiz, they'll match you to a customized mattress.

00:02:59.960 A feature that's cool, too, is for couples.

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00:03:07.860 They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free.

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00:03:37.460 Season 3, Episode 20, Maps of Meaning, Part 4, a Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.

00:03:43.680 Now that you've had an opportunity to walk through a narrative, then hopefully some of the things that I'm going to say that are more technical will make more sense.

00:03:53.600 And so, what we're going to do today, at least in part, is to deal with, to start to deal with conceptualizing a solution to the fact that the world is too complex to properly perceive.

00:04:08.200 So, what the problem fundamentally is, is that there's a lot more of everything else than there is of you.

00:04:14.300 You know, especially if you include in that everything else all the parts of you that you also don't understand.

00:04:22.260 And so, I want to walk you through how I think we solve that, at least in part.

00:04:29.960 And we do that by, essentially by simplifying the world, but I think mostly that we simplify it as a place in which to act, rather than a place in which to perceive objects.

00:04:43.480 And I really believe that there's a critical distinction between those two things.

00:04:48.040 And I think that part of the reason that there's been a continual, that there's been continual tension, say, between the claims of science and, let's say, the claims of religion, is because the idea that the world as a place of objects and as a place to act have to be considered separately isn't properly understood.

00:05:07.860 I don't know, so I'm going to try to straighten that up to the degree that that that's possible.

00:05:15.700 So, I'm going to talk to you about stories and meta-stories, and the story is this, I would say, it's the simplest unit of useful information with regards to action and perception that you can be offered.

00:05:29.140 And then a meta-story is a story about how a story like that transforms.

00:05:32.600 And I would say, we'll concentrate on the structure of the story, and then we'll get into the structure of the meta-story, and that'll constitute today's, today's class.

00:05:49.400 So, the first thing I want to show you, I know many of you have seen this, but I'm going to show it anyways.

00:05:57.400 For the longest time, it was presumed that, the longest time, say, at least in the 20th century, it was presumed that we make a pretty complete model of the world.

00:06:10.400 And then we act in the world, and we compare what happens to that model, and as long as our model and the world are matching, then, roughly speaking,

00:06:26.400 we believe that everything is okay and our emotions stay under control, but if that model mismatches, then, we know that something's up.

00:06:38.400 Now, a lot of this work was done by Russians, especially in the early 60s, by two Russian scientists, Vino Godova and Sokolov, who were students of Alexander Luria,

00:06:52.400 who was arguably the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century.

00:06:55.400 Luria spent a lot of time studying soldiers from World War II that had received head injuries, and of various sorts, and because of that, he could draw inferences about how the brain worked,

00:07:06.400 and some of what we're going to talk about over the upcoming weeks with regards to brain function.

00:07:12.400 Much of it is predicated on Luria's work, and Sokolov and Vino Godova were his students, and they were interested in this phenomena.

00:07:20.400 They were interested in psychophysiological measurement, right?

00:07:23.400 So, as a way of inferring brain function, and so psychophysiological measurement is measurement of those physiological parameters,

00:07:30.400 say like pupil width, or skin conductance, or EEG, that are in some ways directly reflective of how the brain works.

00:07:40.400 Now, if you measure skin resistance, skin resistance changes with the amount that you sweat, and that can change very, very rapidly,

00:07:50.400 and it changes in response to physiological demands placed on your body.

00:07:55.400 So, for example, if your body assumes that you're going to leap into action for some purpose,

00:08:01.400 then it's going to open up your pores to prepare you to keep yourself cool, and you can measure those transformations quite accurately by measuring the electrical resistance of the skin.

00:08:10.400 And so what you see, if you put someone in a lab chair, and you expose themselves to different stimuli,

00:08:19.400 you find that, for example, if you expose them to something that's threatening, say like a picture of a snake,

00:08:24.400 then their skin conductance will decrease because they're, or sorry, their skin conductance will increase because they sweat a little bit more,

00:08:32.400 and it's quite a rapid response, it can be a very rapid response.

00:08:36.400 Now, one of the things that Sokolov, or, yeah, that's right, noted was that if he, if I sat you down, for example,

00:08:49.400 and I put some headphones on you, and I played a tone to you that repeated, just exactly the same tone that repeated at predictable intervals,

00:08:57.400 that the first time you heard the tone, you'd produce quite a spike in skin conductance, and the next time a slightly smaller spike,

00:09:04.400 and then the next time a slightly smaller spike until after maybe you'd heard it three or four times,

00:09:09.400 you would not respond to it at all, and that was often regarded as habituation.

00:09:14.400 And habituation is the same thing that you can see in snails, for example, and I'm using snails as an example because they have very, very simple nervous systems.

00:09:24.400 So if you take a snail and you poke it, then, like it comes out of its shell and you poke it, it'll go back into its shell,

00:09:30.400 and then it'll come out, then if you poke it again, it'll go back into its shell, and it'll come out.

00:09:34.400 But if you keep doing that, sooner or later the snail will just stop going in.

00:09:38.400 And you might think of that, it has been conceptualized as the simplest form of learning habituation.

00:09:44.400 And the behaviors tended to presume that if a human being manifested a response that could be modeled by a simple organism,

00:09:53.400 then the human being was using a response that was analogous to that of the simple organism, and sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's not.

00:10:00.400 So, for example, you have simple reflexes that, you know, if you put your hand on a hot stove, you'll jerk back, and that's quite a simple circuit.

00:10:07.400 You move your hand back before the message gets to your brain, because the spinal cord is smart enough to mediate reflexes like that all by itself.

00:10:17.400 So, you know, your brain is actually quite distributed throughout your body, it's not just in your head like people tend to think.

00:10:23.400 And so, we have conserved fast-acting reflexes at various levels of our nervous system.

00:10:32.400 They aren't capable of sophisticated response, it's pretty much stimulus response, thinking about it from the behavioral perspective,

00:10:40.400 but they have as an advantage incredible speed, because there just aren't that many neural connections between the stimulus and the response.

00:10:47.400 And so, we have layers of response at different time frames that help us match with the demands of the external environment.

00:10:57.400 So Charles Darwin, for example, used to go into the, I think it was, museum in England, I don't remember the name of it,

00:11:02.400 they had a snake in there, I believe it was a cobra, and he'd stick his face up at the glass, and the cobra would strike at him,

00:11:08.400 and he'd jerk back, and he tried many, many times to master that reflexive response to the snake, but there was no way.

00:11:15.400 Every time that thing struck at him, he'd jump backwards.

00:11:18.400 Well, you can imagine the survival utility in a reflex like that, but in reflexes in general.

00:11:24.400 Okay, so back to Sokolov, now, what he decided, he thought, if you took that tone and you did anything to it that was perceptible, right,

00:11:34.400 because there are certain gradations of tone that you're not capable of perceiving,

00:11:39.400 but let's assume you took the tone and you adjusted it enough so that it was perceptibly louder,

00:11:44.400 or it was perceptibly a different frequency, or something like that, or even that the spaces between the tones,

00:11:50.400 because I said they were predictably spaced, even though if the spaces between the tones were changed,

00:11:56.400 then when the change occurred, the orienting reflex would be reinstated, you'd respond to it again.

00:12:02.400 And Sokolov tried to vary the tone on many, many parameters, but no matter what parameter he varied it on,

00:12:09.400 as long as you could detect it perceptibly, you'd produce an orienting reflex.

00:12:14.400 So Sokolov's idea was that you must be producing a complex internal model of the world that's in concordance with the world across pretty much every perceptible dimension,

00:12:25.400 because if you weren't doing that, how in the world would you know that the tone had changed from what you had already learned about it?

00:12:32.400 And so for the longest time, and this was also true for people who were investigating artificial intelligence,

00:12:38.400 we had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world and hold it in their mind, so to speak,

00:12:44.400 and then they'd act in the world, and they'd compare what they expected to happen in the world with the model,

00:12:50.400 and as long as there was a match, then there was no orienting reflex.

00:12:54.400 Now the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex, it's not merely an alteration in skin conductance,

00:13:00.400 what it is in essence is the manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown,

00:13:07.400 and the initial stages of that are very, very quick, but it's hard to tell when the orienting reflex stops

00:13:14.400 and when more complex learning begins, they sort of shade into one another.

00:13:18.400 So the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite reflexive, but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex.

00:13:25.400 So for example, well, I always think the example of betrayal is the best one, because it's so complex.

00:13:33.400 So imagine that, you know, you come home and you find evidence, lipstick or something like that,

00:13:39.400 evidence that the person that you're with is betraying you, the first thing that's going to happen is that you're going to orient,

00:13:45.400 there's going to be a real shock, and that's reflexive, it's very much akin to the response that you would manifest

00:13:52.400 if you saw a predator or a snake or something like that, and so that's very instantaneous, you know,

00:13:58.400 and then that'll prepare you for action, you'll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next,

00:14:04.400 a very unpleasant thing, but then it might take you even years to fully manifest the learning that would be necessary in a situation like that,

00:14:14.400 because there's so many things that you have to reconsider.

00:14:17.400 First of all, the person might now appear to you as a threat, that's pretty immediate,

00:14:21.400 so there's a biological, physiological response first, your body reacts first, then you respond emotionally,

00:14:28.400 that's going to take a while, and you know, that emotional response might extend over days or weeks or months or even years,

00:14:34.400 and then as you're doing that as well, you're going to try to start to resort out your interpretive schema,

00:14:41.400 so that it can adjust to the transformation that this error on your part, say, or this catastrophe or this betrayal,

00:14:50.400 it has to adjust to whatever information that event contains, and so the orienting reflex can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time.

00:15:00.400 It's best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process.

00:15:07.400 Now, that was standard, that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time,

00:15:14.400 that we created a detailed internal model of the world, and we watched how the world was unfolding,

00:15:21.400 and we compared the two, and the physiology, the neurophysiology of this was even understood to some degree even by the Russians in the early 1960s,

00:15:30.400 because they basically localized, you could use complex EEG, electroencephalogram technology,

00:15:36.400 to localize where the orienting reflex was occurring in the brain, and basically it appeared to occur, roughly speaking, in the hippocampus,

00:15:43.400 and the theory arose that your brain, your cortex, let's say, produced a very complex model of the world, an internal model,

00:15:51.400 and your senses were producing a model of the external world, and the hippocampus was watching those two things to see if they matched,

00:15:58.400 and if they didn't match, there was a mismatch signal, and that would be the orienting reflex,

00:16:02.400 and then your body would start to prepare, would prepare itself for whatever that mismatch meant,

00:16:08.400 and then you would engage in exploratory behavior to try to update your model.

00:16:13.400 That was the standard theory. It was a very well accepted theory. It has elements of cybernetic theory in it,

00:16:20.400 but it was well accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence,

00:16:26.400 that's how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems. They tried to make ones that would model the world,

00:16:31.400 and then act, and then compare the changes in the world to that model. But that didn't go anywhere, as it turned out,

00:16:38.400 because it turned out that it's so difficult to see and model the world that people had no idea how complex that was.

00:16:46.400 It was impossibly complex, as it turned out, and so that's part of the reason we don't have robots wandering around

00:16:52.400 doing apparently simple things like walking, you know, walking in an environment like this.

00:16:57.400 Now when we look at the environment, we think, well, it's not that hard to look at, it's full of objects,

00:17:03.400 and they're just self-evident, there they are, and we can just wander through it, you know,

00:17:08.400 and we don't even do that consciously to any great degree, because so much of that perception is presented to our consciousness without effort, in some sense.

00:17:17.400 But the AI guys learned pretty quick that perceiving the world was way more difficult than anybody had guessed.

00:17:24.400 And then this experiment really, in some sense, put a phenomenological punch behind that observation,

00:17:33.400 because one of the presuppositions of the orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that you were very good at detecting changes,

00:17:42.400 that your nervous system would automatically detect change, anomaly, right, any mismatch between your model and what you expected.

00:17:49.400 And then, well, the AI guys, I think, figured out, first of all, that that was a big problem,

00:17:54.400 that the problem of perception was much more complicated than that.

00:17:58.400 But, you know, it's actually, it's out of that same set of observations, in some sense, that postmodernism emerged in literature,

00:18:06.400 because, in literary criticism, because, well, it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object like a chair.

00:18:14.400 And part of that is, you know, if you just do that to the chair, it's really different than it was before.

00:18:20.400 You could imagine how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions, right?

00:18:25.400 And if you really got good at looking at it, you'd find that, even though, if I asked you what colour this is, you'd say white,

00:18:31.400 if you were actually painting it, you'd find out that the colours of the chair when it's in that location

00:18:37.400 and the colours in the chair when it's in that location, just because of the difference in lighting, are substantially different.

00:18:43.400 I think it was Monet, I think, who painted a very large series of haystacks in the French countryside, right?

00:18:49.400 In different seasons and under different conditions of illumination.

00:18:53.400 Just because he was exploring how radically different the same object could be as it moved through contexts.

00:18:59.400 And so, it isn't even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it.

00:19:04.400 And the answer is something like, well, you can sit on it in both positions.

00:19:08.400 Which is not a description of an object, by the way. Right?

00:19:12.400 That's a description of something that's useful, something that's a tool, something that exists in relationship to your body.

00:19:18.400 It's not an object.

00:19:20.400 And so, if you think that just looking at something like a chair is almost impossibly difficult, and subject to interpretation,

00:19:28.400 then imagine how difficult it is to perceive something like a text, you know, like a novel.

00:19:33.400 Because a novel, obviously, is subject to multiple interpretations.

00:19:38.400 And the interpretations are gonna depend on, well, at least in principle, on the intent, conscious and unconscious of the author.

00:19:46.400 Of the time, of the place, of the culture, of the language.

00:19:50.400 Then, that's just on the side of the production itself.

00:19:54.400 But then there's the reader.

00:19:55.400 It's like, I've read books when I was 16, and then reread them, say, when I was 40.

00:20:00.400 And the book was almost completely different, as far as I was concerned.

00:20:03.400 Partly because I knew what was in it the second time, and I didn't know what was in it the first time.

00:20:08.400 And so, the meaning that manifests itself out of a book is a consequence of all the complexity of the book,

00:20:18.400 plus all the complexity of the reader.

00:20:20.400 And so, you know, if you're reading Russian literature, for example, and you've already read 50 Russian novels,

00:20:27.400 you're going to be in a much more different, you're going to be in a different interpretive space

00:20:32.400 than you are if, say, the Russian novel is the first novel you've ever read.

00:20:37.400 And so, and the postmodernists were grappling with this, as well as with many other ideas that I think contaminated their thinking.

00:20:47.400 And their conclusion was, well, you can't extract out a canonical meaning from a text.

00:20:52.400 It's so dependent on the situation that to say the text has an interpretable meaning is actually an error.

00:20:59.400 Now, just because it's difficult to do something doesn't mean it's impossible.

00:21:04.400 And there's massive holes in the postmodernist view, as far as, I think it's an unbelievably pathological view, personally.

00:21:11.400 But the thing is, is that there are reasons why it emerged.

00:21:16.400 And the reasons were analogous to the reasons that the AI project initially failed,

00:21:21.400 and analogous to the reasons that this experiment turned out the way it did.

00:21:25.400 So I'm going to show you this. Many of you have seen this already, but as I said, it doesn't matter.

00:21:30.400 So the, the, the job, your job here is to count the times.

00:21:34.400 See, there's a team of three people here, dressed in white.

00:21:37.400 And there's a team of three people here, dressed in black.

00:21:40.400 And your job is to count the number of times the white team throws the basketball back and forth to the white team members. 0.62

00:21:46.400 Okay? So we'll just run that.

00:21:49.400 Okay, well, so obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, the, um,

00:21:56.400 the number of times I believe that they threw it back, they threw it back and forth was 16, if I remember this correctly.

00:22:02.400 But, of course, that's not really the issue, because what happens in the middle of the scene is that

00:22:08.400 a guy wearing a gorilla suit comes out into the middle of the screen and pounds his chest three or four times.

00:22:14.400 And he comes out quite slowly, as, as you saw. How many of you, is there anybody here who didn't see the gorilla?

00:22:19.400 No, well, you, and I presume all of you knew about this video anyways.

00:22:23.400 So, uh, Dan Simon, who produced this video, has got a couple of other ones where he shows that, uh,

00:22:29.400 you know, even if you're smart enough to see the gorilla, because you've seen the video before, you've heard about it,

00:22:34.400 if you make other changes in the background, you'll, you'll count properly and you'll catch the gorilla,

00:22:39.400 but you'll miss the other changes in the background. And they're not trivial either.

00:22:42.400 And it's really quite remarkable. He's produced other, uh, uh, short videos, for example,

00:22:47.400 where you'll be looking at a, like, a field, um, and a road will grow in it, occupying about a third of the photograph space.

00:22:55.400 And you'd think, well, yeah, you're gonna see that. It's like, you don't, you don't.

00:22:59.400 So, okay, so this threw, this threw a big spanner into the works, this sort of experiment, along with the AI failures,

00:23:06.400 and we could even say the postmodern dilemma. It's like, well, hmm, everyone, virtually, every psychologist,

00:23:14.400 would have predicted before this series of experiments that there's no damn way you'd miss that gorilla.

00:23:19.400 Because your nervous system was actually attuned to change in the environment.

00:23:23.400 And, like, that's a big change. And it's also a gorilla. It's something you would really think that you couldn't miss,

00:23:29.400 you couldn't possibly miss, especially when it's occupying the center of the, of the visual field.

00:23:35.400 And so, well, this is part of a phenomena called change blindness, and it helped psychologists,

00:23:41.400 who had been studying the visual system for a very long time, figure out, well, mostly figure out exactly how blind human beings are.

00:23:50.400 Because we're way blinder than we think. And, and so we actually focus on much less of the world than we think.

00:23:57.400 And, um, we do that partly. It's not exactly obvious how we do it.

00:24:02.400 It's kind of like we, we hold a still picture in our imagination, and then fill in the details by using our central foveal vision,

00:24:09.400 which is always dancing around, like a, like a pinpoint or a laser beam, moving back and forth.

00:24:14.400 And we're assembling those little snapshots from the fovea into a relatively coherent picture.

00:24:21.400 Maybe what happens is that I look at you, and then I look at you, and I've still got the information from looking at you,

00:24:28.400 so my brain can sort of infer that that, that's remained stable.

00:24:32.400 But like, if I look at you, and I, and I pay it, I've, I've tried to learn how to do this,

00:24:36.400 because you can look at something, and then pay attention to the periphery. It's annoying.

00:24:41.400 But, so, if I'm looking at you, I really can't make out your eyes.

00:24:46.400 I can more or less make out the fact that you have a head. I can see that you're, and I, especially if you move it.

00:24:52.400 And so that's what, your periphery is sort of like frog vision or dinosaur vision.

00:24:56.400 It's much better at picking up movement than it is at picking up something that's staying still.

00:25:00.400 And that makes sense, because, well, if it's staying still, then, and it hasn't already hurt you, then it's probably not going to hurt you.

00:25:08.400 But if it's moving, then, you know, that's a good thing that you might pay attention to.

00:25:12.400 And so, if your periphery catches movement, then you'll focus your fovea on it.

00:25:16.400 It's like you go from really low resolution to really high resolution.

00:25:20.400 And so, the center of your vision is incredibly high resolution.

00:25:23.400 But then it fades into low resolution as you move towards the periphery until it's out here,

00:25:28.400 which would, say, be about 170 degrees.

00:25:31.400 I really, if I concentrate on this hand, I can tell it's a hand mostly when it's moving.

00:25:37.400 I have no idea what color it is.

00:25:39.400 This one I can't see at all.

00:25:41.400 And then I can probably see my fingers now.

00:25:46.400 And then I can clearly see them if I look at them with my fovea.

00:25:51.400 And so, your vision is a very, very, very strange thing.

00:25:54.400 And it's focusing on something very specific.

00:25:57.400 And so you're pointing your eyes at something very specific.

00:26:00.400 And that's what you seem to see.

00:26:02.400 And so then, that opens up a whole new universe of questions.

00:26:06.400 It's like, how do you decide what to point your eyes at?

00:26:10.400 That, that turns out to be an insanely complicated problem.

00:26:14.400 John Verveke talks about that all the time as the problem of relevance.

00:26:18.400 But, and the issue is, well, there's many, many things in the world.

00:26:22.400 There's an infinite number of things, let's say.

00:26:24.400 And you're not gonna be able to see them, that's for sure.

00:26:27.400 Even if they happen to be changing, as it turns out.

00:26:30.400 And so, out of this mess, first of all, how do you pick what to look at?

00:26:34.400 And second, even if you do pick it, how do you see it?

00:26:37.400 Because it's so crazily complicated.

00:26:39.400 So, that's the problem that we're going to try to unpack.

00:26:42.400 Now, roughly speaking, what seems to have happened with the gorilla video is, you have to take that first theory that you make a complete model of the world, and then a complete model of the world, which is the objects in the world and how they're interacting.

00:26:58.400 And you compare that to the objects in the actual world and how they're interacting.

00:27:02.400 You have to modify that model.

00:27:03.400 You say, well, no, you're certainly not making a complete model.

00:27:07.400 And people should have known better anyways, even subjects to the limits of your perceptions.

00:27:11.400 Because there's all sorts of things in the world that you can't directly perceive.

00:27:15.400 But what you're doing instead is, it's something like, you're making a partial model of the world, but you're only making a partial model of the world that you're currently operating on that, on, on, with some goal in mind.

00:27:29.400 And you're also comparing that to a model of the world as it's currently unfolding.

00:27:33.400 Because the other thing that was implicit, this is really tricky, this is where you have to watch your implicit assumptions.

00:27:39.400 The other thing that was implicit in the original cybernetic theory was that you have a model of the world that's complete.

00:27:48.400 And then what you're watching is the actual world as it unfolds.

00:27:52.400 And that's not a model.

00:27:53.400 That's just your perception of the objects.

00:27:55.400 But that also turns out to be wrong, because your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model.

00:28:01.400 And so what's happening is, you look at the world, the world you see is a model.

00:28:07.400 And a very partial model at that.

00:28:09.400 And then you compare it to the model that you expect or desire more accurately, desire.

00:28:14.400 Although the initial models were expectation.

00:28:17.400 Because if you're in the lab listening to tones, it's not like you desire anything.

00:28:21.400 But mostly when you're acting in the world, you have desires.

00:28:24.400 And so the experimental constraints skewed the data in some sense by making people assume that what people were doing when they walked through the world was expecting instead of desiring.

00:28:36.400 Anyways, you have a model of the world that's generated as you look at it.

00:28:40.400 You have another model of the world that's something like the world that you desire.

00:28:43.400 Then you compare both of them.

00:28:45.400 And they can mismatch.

00:28:46.400 And they can mismatch in a way that upsets your current pursuit.

00:28:50.400 That's the critical issue.

00:28:52.400 You don't see the anomaly unless it upsets your current pursuit.

00:28:56.400 And you kinda know that too, because when you're, like, while I'm lecturing to you guys, you know, mostly you're sitting still, but people are moving their arms and they're moving their glasses and they're shifting their feet.

00:29:08.400 And generally, I don't see any of that.

00:29:11.400 Because what difference does it make?

00:29:13.400 You know, it's not relevant to the ongoing, to the ongoing what?

00:29:19.400 Ongoing contract?

00:29:20.400 The ongoing series of interactions?

00:29:22.400 It's something like that.

00:29:23.400 So as long as you keep your movements bounded within a range that doesn't interfere with whatever it is that we're doing, then it's going to be as invisible to me as the gorilla was when you were counting the balls.

00:29:36.400 And the cool thing is about the gorilla experiment, or one of them, is that the reason you were blind to the gorilla was because you were counting the balls.

00:29:44.400 And so, that's so fascinating because what it shows to a huge degree, an unfathomable degree, is that the value structure that you inhabit determines what you perceive.

00:30:00.400 It doesn't just determine what you expect or want. It bloody well determines what you see.

00:30:06.400 And that makes the world a completely different place. No one really expected that.

00:30:10.400 And so, if you watch the basketballs, you see the basketball. If you stop watching the basketball, well then you see the gorilla.

00:30:19.400 And so, the first question that arises from an experiment like that is, well, just exactly what is it that you don't see in the world?

00:30:27.400 And the answer is, all of it. You see so little, it's unbelievable. You see that tiny amount that's necessary for you to undertake the next sequence in your plotted movements?

00:30:40.400 Something like that. But then that becomes very complicated, too, because it isn't obvious how you can conceptualize or how you can determine what your next movement is.

00:30:51.400 Because it's not like you just add up movements and make up your life. It's not that simple.

00:30:57.400 And it's related to the novel problem, the problem of meaning in a literary work.

00:31:03.400 So you imagine, you're trying to specify the meaning of a literary work.

00:31:07.400 Well, there's meaning in the word. And then, but the word is dependent, the meaning of the word is dependent on the phrase within which it's embedded.

00:31:16.400 And then the meaning of the phrase is dependent on the sentence that it's embedded in.

00:31:20.400 And the sentence in the paragraph, and the paragraph in the chapter, and the chapter in the book, and the book in the corpus of books of that sort.

00:31:28.400 And then within the culture, and then within whatever your peculiar personal experience is.

00:31:34.400 All of those things nested are operative to some degree when you're extracting out the meaning at any level of analysis.

00:31:40.400 They're all operating simultaneously. So you might say, well, what are you doing in this classroom?

00:31:46.400 Well, the answer is sitting in a chair.

00:31:49.400 But that's, obviously, that's a very short term and context independent answer.

00:31:57.400 But you're also attending to what I'm saying, hypothetically, and you're attending to some of it and not to other parts of it.

00:32:04.400 And you're thinking about some parts of it and not other parts. And you're also attending a class, and the class is a sequence of lectures.

00:32:12.400 And that's embedded within your desire to finish up the semester, and then to finish up the year, and then to get your degree.

00:32:18.400 And then you nest that inside whatever it is, whatever the reason is that you're getting your degree.

00:32:24.400 And then maybe that's nested inside your career goals, and that's nested inside your life goals, and that's nested inside your ultimate values, which you may or may not even be aware of.

00:32:34.400 And so I could say, well, you're sitting here because it serves your ultimate values.

00:32:39.400 Well, that's true. It seems a bit abstract to be useful, right?

00:32:46.400 It gets so vague out at the outermost levels that it doesn't really have much specificity, right? So it seems to lack information.

00:32:54.400 But by the same token, if I said what you're doing is sitting there, it has the same problem of too-restricted meaning because of over-specificity.

00:33:02.400 And so there's some level in there that you would interpret as meaningful. God only knows why.

00:33:09.400 And that's the level, there's a natural level of perception for that sort of thing.

00:33:14.400 So for example, when children learn to name an animal, for example, they'll name cat.

00:33:21.400 They don't name the species of cat or the subspecies of cat.

00:33:25.400 And they don't confuse cats with dogs, even though they're both in the category of, you know, four-legged furry mammal.

00:33:32.400 So why not call a cat and a dog furry mammals?

00:33:37.400 Well, children don't do that. They go to cat and dog.

00:33:40.400 And people who've studied the acquisition of language have found that there are basic level categories that children pick up first.

00:33:48.400 And they're often represented with short words.

00:33:50.400 And the words are short because they've been around a long time because they seem to reflect the natural level at which people perceive the world.

00:33:58.400 But none of that's obvious, you know.

00:34:00.400 I mean, you could just lump all animals together for that matter and just call them animals, which we do sometimes.

00:34:08.400 So anyway, so it's very difficult to specify the meaning level.

00:34:12.400 And it's not very easy at all to figure out how we do it.

00:34:15.400 And so that's partly what I'm trying to unpack.

00:34:19.400 So here's part of the issue.

00:34:22.400 So let's say that you have a computer.

00:34:26.400 Yeah, I have a story for this.

00:34:29.400 So one time when I was in Montreal, I was using my computer.

00:34:35.400 I was in my apartment.

00:34:37.400 And I was typing out an essay and it crashed.

00:34:42.400 And so what happens when your computer crashes?

00:34:45.400 Well, you know, usually you utter some sort of curse.

00:34:48.400 And it's interesting that you do that because the circuit that you use to curse with is the same circuit that monkeys use to detect eagles or leopards or snakes.

00:34:59.400 And so when there's a bunch of monkeys together, you know, they're not all preyed on by eagles and leopards and snakes.

00:35:05.400 But, you know, there's usually a predator in that category for every single monkey population.

00:35:10.400 And so when the monkeys are watching, they have an emotional utterance that the most nervous monkey might utter first that basically says, you know, hide from the eagle.

00:35:20.400 Get out on a thin branch so the cougar can't eat you and look the hell out for the snake.

00:35:25.400 But there's a circuit that's linked to emotions that produces an instinctive utterance that represents that category.

00:35:32.400 And that's the same circuit that you use when you curse.

00:35:36.400 And it's not the same circuit that you use for normal language.

00:35:39.400 And we know that because that circuit is activated in people who have Tourette's Syndrome because they preferentially swear.

00:35:46.400 You think, well, why in the world would you have a neurological condition that makes you preferentially curse?

00:35:51.400 Well, that's the reason. You don't just have one linguistic circuit. You have one for, oh my god, there's a predator.

00:35:58.400 And that's the one that will get activated when something happens like your computer crashing.

00:36:04.400 Because, you know, you're an evolved creature and so those old circuits that were there, say, 30 million years ago to deal with exceptions are the same circuits you're using now to deal with your computer.

00:36:15.400 Why else would you want to hit it?

00:36:17.400 Right, because that's what you want to give it a whack.

00:36:20.400 It's like, it doesn't behave whack. Aggression right away.

00:36:23.400 Well, that's some clue as to the categorization category system that you're automatically using to encapsulate the event.

00:36:32.400 Okay, so fine. What do you do when your computer crashes?

00:36:35.400 Well, first you curse and then you do the stupid things that idiot primates do when they're trying to deal with something that's way too complex. 1.00

00:36:41.400 And maybe you turn it on and off, right? 1.00

00:36:44.400 And that doesn't work. It didn't work.

00:36:45.400 And so then I thought, well, maybe the power bar went, so I checked the power bar and I turned it on and off and nothing happened.

00:36:52.400 And so I brought a light behind the computer and the light wouldn't go on.

00:36:55.400 And so I thought, aha, I must have blown a fuse.

00:36:58.400 So I went to the fuse box and took a look, but the fuses were fine.

00:37:02.400 And so I thought, oh, the power's gone out. So then I went outside and the power was out.

00:37:07.400 None of the street lights were working. The power was out everywhere.

00:37:11.400 And it was seriously out because this was the time that almost the entire northeast power grid in Quebec collapsed.

00:37:19.400 And the reason it collapsed is because there was a solar flare.

00:37:22.400 That happens reasonably often.

00:37:24.400 And the solar flare produced a huge electromagnetic pulse because it's basically, you know, like a billion, million hydrogen bombs going off at the same time.

00:37:33.400 93 million miles away.

00:37:35.400 Produces this tremendous electromagnetic pulse.

00:37:38.400 Passes through the Earth's atmosphere.

00:37:40.400 Produces a spike in current in the main power lines and blows the whole system.

00:37:46.400 And so, just so you know, an event like that happens about every 150 years.

00:37:53.400 And if we had one now, it would take out all of our electronics.

00:37:56.400 Like one of the big ones. There was a big one back in the late 1800s.

00:37:59.400 Everything. Satellites, computers, cars, everything. Gone.

00:38:03.400 And so that's a big problem. And no one knows what to do about it.

00:38:06.400 One missed us by about nine minutes, I think two years ago.

00:38:10.400 So, so that's something else to worry about if you're inclined to worry about those sorts of things.

00:38:15.400 Um, okay, so what, what did I conclude from that?

00:38:18.400 Well, the function of my computer was dependent on the stability of the sun.

00:38:25.400 It's not the first thing you check out when your computer crashes, right?

00:38:29.400 You don't run out and go, hey, well, yeah, the sun's still, the sun's still there.

00:38:33.400 No problem, I can cross that off the list.

00:38:35.400 But, but it, it, to me, it's an extraordinarily interesting example of the invisible interdependence of things.

00:38:43.400 You know, and our tendency to fragment things.

00:38:45.400 What we seem to do is to look at things at the simplest level of analysis that actually functions.

00:38:51.400 So, for example, when you're interacting with your computer, you're not interacting with your computer at all, really.

00:38:57.400 You're interacting with the keyboard, sort of one key at a time.

00:39:01.400 And you're interacting with the symbols on the screen.

00:39:04.400 But, as long as the computer is working, you don't care about it at all.

00:39:09.400 You don't give it a second thought.

00:39:11.400 And you certainly don't care about the fact that it's dependent on, well, the electrical power, for example.

00:39:17.400 And the electrical power is dependent on, you know, I don't know, how many men are out there right now or were out there last night when it was freezing rain. 0.99

00:39:27.400 Fixing power lines and freezing to death while they're doing it so that your stupid computer doesn't malfunction while you're watching cat videos.

00:39:34.400 You know, I mean, there's this incredibly dynamic living system that's social and economic and political that has to remain dead stable in order for us to have access to functional and, like, pure non-fluctuating electricity 100% of the time. 0.99

00:39:52.400 Because you also don't think, well, the stability of your computer is dependent on the stability of the political system.

00:39:58.400 But, of course, it is, because if the political system mucks up and the economic system goes, then people don't go out and work to fix things and things are breaking all the time.

00:40:07.400 That's their normal state, is broken, not working.

00:40:11.400 And so, and that's all, in some sense, folded up, not only inside your computer, but actually inside your conceptions of the, your tiny conceptions of the computer while you're using it.

00:40:25.400 And you only get a glimpse of what the computer is really like when it doesn't work.

00:40:29.400 Then it's when it becomes a complex object, right? 1.00

00:40:32.400 As long as it's working, then your stupid perceptions are, are perfectly fine to get the job done. 1.00

00:40:40.400 And that's another indication that what you're using your perceptions for is to get the job done. 0.99

00:40:46.400 And how you specify exactly the level of resolution that you should be operating at, I haven't sorted that out, but it's something like you default to the simplest level that moves you to the next step.

00:40:58.400 You know, so for example, and generally that is what you should do.

00:41:02.400 If you're having an argument with someone that you have a long-term relationship with, you can start by arguing about what the little argument is about,

00:41:09.400 or you can immediately cascade into whether or not you should have a relationship with this person at all,

00:41:15.400 or even into whether or not you should even bother with relationships.

00:41:19.400 Which is, you know, every time there's an argument, that question is a reasonable question to have emerge,

00:41:26.400 or at least it's in the realm of potential reasonable questions.

00:41:29.400 But it doesn't seem useful to jump to the most catastrophic possible explanation every time some minor thing goes wrong.

00:41:37.400 That's what happens to people who have an anxiety disorder.

00:41:40.400 And that's what happens to people who are depressed, right?

00:41:42.400 They can't bind the anomaly.

00:41:44.400 And so what happens is it tends to propagate up the entire system until it takes out their highest-order conceptualizations. 0.99

00:41:51.400 You know, so if you're seriously depressed, maybe you'll watch a news article about something stupid, 0.94

00:41:56.400 and you'll think, Jesus, why should I even be alive? 0.99

00:41:58.400 You know, and I'm dead serious about that.

00:42:01.400 If you score like 60 on the Beck Depression inventory, which puts you way the hell up in the depressed range,

00:42:06.400 anything that happens to you that's negative will trigger suicidal thoughts, roughly speaking.

00:42:12.400 And sometimes even positive things will do it, because there are very few positive things that happen

00:42:17.400 that don't carry with them some threat of change or transformation.

00:42:21.400 So, you know, one mystery, it's a big mystery, is why don't you fall into a catastrophic depression every time something little goes wrong?

00:42:31.400 Because it, it's not, that level of analysis is not self-evident.

00:42:35.400 And you see this with people who are high in neuroticism, too, you know.

00:42:39.400 They're trivial.

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00:46:47.400 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 20 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you enjoy this episode of Maps of Meaning Part 4.

00:47:01.400 Sorry I haven't been around for the intros and wonderful ads from our sponsors for the last couple of episodes, and I'm sorry I'm back if you were glad I was gone.

00:47:09.400 My family and my dad and I are still in Serbia, although I think we're planning to come home in the next month. We're seriously missing Canada. Not looking forward to the 14 day quarantine though.

00:47:19.400 Seems a little unnecessary given the fact we've all had COVID and have now been recovered fully for over a month.

00:47:25.400 If you guys didn't know about the COVID, now you know. He's okay. It really wasn't that bad.

00:47:30.400 I don't have much else to tell you really. Life isn't easy. We're still waiting for dad to recover more.

00:47:35.400 It's been very difficult, and it's still difficult. It won't be hard forever, but it is right now.

00:47:40.400 If you're interested in staying up to date with what's going on, obviously I'll be updating you here as well periodically.

00:47:46.400 I have my own podcast. I interviewed Representative Dan Crenshaw, and that episode is coming out Tuesday, which is exciting.

00:47:52.400 We talk about mental toughness, something I would argue isn't being taught well enough these days.

00:47:57.400 I got taught mine from dad. He taught me to never feel sorry for myself, and that was one of the most important lessons I've ever learned.

00:48:03.400 Probably the most important, actually. It's been hard this year to stand by watching him recover.

00:48:09.400 Obviously, most of my feelings are empathy for him, but I think that's the only reason I've been able to help, really.

00:48:15.400 Anyway, enjoy the episode. Stay sane out there.

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00:49:29.400 Season 3, Episode 20, Maps of Meaning, Part 4, a Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.

00:49:39.400 Now that you've had an opportunity to walk through a narrative, then hopefully some of the things that I'm going to say that are more technical will make more sense.

00:49:49.400 And so, what we're going to do today, at least in part, is to deal with, to start to deal with conceptualizing a solution to the fact that the world is too complex to properly perceive.

00:50:04.400 So, what the problem fundamentally is, is that there's a lot more of everything else than there is of you, you know.

00:50:10.400 Especially if you include in that everything else all the parts of you that you also don't understand.

00:50:16.400 And so, I want to walk you through how I think we solve that, at least in part.

00:50:24.400 And we do that by, essentially by simplifying the world.

00:50:28.400 But I think mostly that we simplify it as a place in which to act, rather than a place in which to perceive objects.

00:50:38.400 And I really believe that there's a critical distinction between those two things.

00:50:43.400 And I think that part of the reason that there's been a continual, that there's been continual tension, say, between the claims of science and, let's say, the claims of religion.

00:50:53.400 Is because the idea that the world as a place of objects and as a place to act, have to be considered separately, isn't properly understood.

00:51:03.400 I don't know, so I'm going to try to straighten that up to the degree that that's possible.

00:51:10.400 So, I'm going to talk to you about stories and meta-stories.

00:51:14.400 And the story is this, I would say, it's the simplest unit of useful information with regards to action and perception that you can be offered.

00:51:24.400 And then a meta-story is a story about how a story like that transforms.

00:51:28.400 And I would say, we'll concentrate on the structure of the story, and then we'll get into the structure of the meta-story.

00:51:38.400 And that'll constitute today's class.

00:51:44.400 So the first thing I want to show you, I know many of you have seen this, but I'm going to show it anyways.

00:51:49.400 For the longest time, it was presumed that, the longest time, say, at least in the 20th century, it was presumed that we make a pretty complete model of the world.

00:52:05.400 And then we act in the world, and we compare what happens to that model.

00:52:12.400 And as long as our model and the world are matching, then roughly speaking, we believe that everything is okay and our emotions stay under control.

00:52:27.400 But if that model mismatches, then we know that something's up.

00:52:33.400 Now, a lot of this work was done by Russians, especially in the early 60s, by two Russian scientists, Vino Godova and Sokolov, who were students of Alexander Luria, who was arguably the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century.

00:52:51.400 Luria spent a lot of time studying soldiers from World War II that had received head injuries of various sorts.

00:52:59.400 And because of that, he could draw inferences about how the brain worked and some of what we're going to talk about over the upcoming weeks with regards to brain function.

00:53:07.400 Much of it is predicated on Luria's work.

00:53:10.400 And Sokolov and Vino Gradova were his students, and they were interested in this phenomena.

00:53:15.400 They were interested in psychophysiological measurement, right, so as a way of inferring brain function.

00:53:21.400 And so psychophysiological measurement is measurement of those physiological parameters, say like pupil width or skin conductance or EEG, that are in some ways directly reflective of how the brain works.

00:53:36.400 Now, if you measure skin resistance, skin resistance changes with the amount that you sweat, and that can change very, very rapidly.

00:53:46.400 And it changes in response to physiological demands placed on your body.

00:53:50.400 So for example, if your body assumes that you're going to leap into action for some purpose, then it's going to open up your pores to prepare you to keep yourself cool.

00:54:00.400 And you can measure those transformations quite accurately by measuring the electrical resistance of the skin.

00:54:06.400 And so what you see, if you put someone in a lab chair, and you expose themselves to different stimuli,

00:54:14.400 you find that, for example, if you expose them to something that's threatening, say like a picture of a snake,

00:54:19.400 then their skin conductance will decrease because they're, sorry, their skin conductance will increase because they sweat a little bit more.

00:54:27.400 And it's quite a rapid response. It can be a very rapid response.

00:54:32.400 Now, one of the things that Sokolov, or, uh,

00:54:38.400 Yeah, that's right.

00:54:40.400 Noted was that if he, if I sat you down, for example, and I put some headphones on you,

00:54:46.400 and I played a tone to you that repeated, just exactly the same tone that repeated at predictable intervals,

00:54:53.400 that the first time you heard the tone, you'd produce quite a spike in skin conductance,

00:54:57.400 and the next time a slightly smaller spike, and then the next time a slightly smaller spike,

00:55:01.400 until after maybe you'd heard it three or four times, you would not respond to it at all.

00:55:07.400 And that was often regarded as habituation.

00:55:10.400 And habituation is the same thing that you can see in snails, for example.

00:55:14.400 And I'm using snails as an example because they have very, very simple nervous systems.

00:55:20.400 So if you take a snail and you poke it, then, like it comes out of its shell and you poke it,

00:55:24.400 it'll go back into its shell, and then it'll come out.

00:55:27.400 Then if you poke it again, it'll go back into its shell, and it'll come out.

00:55:30.400 But if you keep doing that, sooner or later the snail will just stop going in.

00:55:34.400 And you might think of that, it has been conceptualized as the simplest form of learning habituation.

00:55:40.400 And the behaviorists tended to presume that if a human being manifested a response

00:55:46.400 that could be modeled by a simple organism, then the human being was using a response

00:55:50.400 that was analogous to that of the simple organism.

00:55:53.400 And sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's not.

00:55:55.400 So, for example, you have simple reflexes that, you know, if you put your hand on a hot stove,

00:56:00.400 you'll jerk back, and that's quite a simple circuit.

00:56:03.400 You move your hand back before the message gets to your brain,

00:56:07.400 because the spinal cord is smart enough to mediate reflexes like that all by itself.

00:56:13.400 So, you know, your brain is actually quite distributed throughout your body.

00:56:16.400 It's not just in your head like people tend to think.

00:56:19.400 And so, we have conserved fast-acting reflexes at various levels of our nervous system.

00:56:28.400 They aren't capable of sophisticated response, it's pretty much stimulus response,

00:56:34.400 thinking about it from the behavioral perspective, but they have as an advantage incredible speed,

00:56:38.400 because there just aren't that many neural connections between the stimulus and the response.

00:56:43.400 And so, we have layers of response at different time frames

00:56:48.400 that help us match with the demands of the external environment.

00:56:53.400 So Charles Darwin, for example, used to go into the, I think it was museum in England,

00:56:57.400 I don't remember the name of it, they had a snake in there, I believe it was a cobra,

00:57:00.400 and he'd stick his face up at the glass, and the cobra would strike at him, and he'd jerk back,

00:57:05.400 and he tried many, many times to master that reflexive response to the snake, but there was no way.

00:57:10.400 Every time that thing struck at him, he'd jump backwards.

00:57:13.400 Well, you can imagine the survival utility in a reflex like that, but in reflexes in general.

00:57:19.400 Okay, so back to Sokolov.

00:57:22.400 Now, what he decided, he thought, if you took that tone and you did anything to it that was perceptible,

00:57:29.400 right, because there are certain gradations of tone that you're not capable of perceiving,

00:57:34.400 but let's assume you took the tone and you adjusted it enough so that it was perceptibly louder,

00:57:39.400 or it was perceptibly a different frequency, or something like that,

00:57:43.400 or even that the spaces between the tones, because I said they were predictably spaced,

00:57:48.400 even though if the spaces between the tones were changed, then when the change occurred,

00:57:53.400 the orienting reflex would be reinstated, you'd respond to it again.

00:57:58.400 And Sokolov tried to vary the tone on many, many parameters,

00:58:02.400 but no matter what parameter he varied it on, as long as you could detect it perceptibly,

00:58:08.400 you'd produce an orienting reflex.

00:58:10.400 So Sokolov's idea was that you must be producing a complex internal model of the world

00:58:16.400 that's in concordance with the world across pretty much every perceptible dimension,

00:58:21.400 because if you weren't doing that, how in the world would you know that the tone had changed

00:58:26.400 from what you had already learned about it?

00:58:28.400 And so for the longest time, and this was also true for people who were investigating artificial intelligence,

00:58:34.400 we had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world

00:58:38.400 and hold it in their mind, so to speak, and then they'd act in the world,

00:58:42.400 and they'd compare what they expected to happen in the world with the model,

00:58:46.400 and as long as there was a match, then there was no orienting reflex.

00:58:49.400 Now the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex,

00:58:53.400 it's not merely an alteration in skin conductance, what it is in essence is

00:58:58.400 the manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown,

00:59:03.400 and the initial stages of that are very, very quick,

00:59:06.400 but it's hard to tell when the orienting reflex stops and when more complex learning begins.

00:59:12.400 They sort of shade into one another, so the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite reflexive,

00:59:18.400 but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex.

00:59:21.400 So for example, well, I always think the example of betrayal is the best one, because it's so complex.

00:59:28.400 So imagine that, you know, you come home and you find evidence, lipstick or something like that, evidence that the person that you're with is betraying you,

00:59:38.400 the first thing that's going to happen is that you're going to orient, there's going to be a real shock, and that's reflexive.

00:59:43.400 It's very much akin to the response that you would manifest if you saw a predator or a snake or something like that.

00:59:50.400 And so that's very instantaneous, you know, and then that'll prepare you for action.

00:59:56.400 You'll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next, a very unpleasant thing.

01:00:01.400 But then it might take you even years to fully manifest the learning that would be necessary in a situation like that,

01:00:09.400 because there's so many things that you have to reconsider.

01:00:12.400 First of all, the person might now appear to you as a threat, that's pretty immediate.

01:00:16.400 So there's a biological, physiological response first, your body reacts first, then you respond emotionally.

01:00:23.400 That's going to take a while and, you know, that emotional response might extend over days or weeks or months or even years.

01:00:30.400 And then as you're doing that as well, you're going to try to start to resort out your interpretive schema so that it can adjust to the transformation that this error on your part, say, or this catastrophe or this betrayal.

01:00:46.400 It has to adjust to whatever information that event contains.

01:00:50.400 And so the orienting reflex can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time.

01:00:56.400 It's best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process.

01:01:02.400 Now, that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time, that we created a detailed internal model of the world.

01:01:13.400 And we watched how the world was unfolding.

01:01:16.400 We compared the two.

01:01:17.400 And the physiology, the neurophysiology of this was even understood to some degree, even by the Russians in the early 1960s,

01:01:25.400 because they basically localized, you could use complex EEG, electroencephalogram technology,

01:01:31.400 to localize where the orienting reflex was occurring in the brain.

01:01:35.400 And basically it appeared to occur, roughly speaking, in the hippocampus.

01:01:39.400 And the theory arose that your brain, your cortex, let's say, produced a very complex model of the world, an internal model.

01:01:46.400 And your senses were producing a model of the external world.

01:01:49.400 And the hippocampus was watching those two things to see if they matched.

01:01:54.400 And if they didn't match, there was a mismatch signal, and that would be the orienting reflex.

01:01:58.400 And then your body would start to prepare, would prepare itself for whatever that mismatch meant.

01:02:04.400 And then you would engage in exploratory behavior to try to update your model.

01:02:09.400 That was the standard theory.

01:02:10.400 It was a very well accepted theory.

01:02:13.400 It has elements of cybernetic theory in it, but it was well accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence,

01:02:22.400 that's how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems.

01:02:25.400 They tried to make ones that would model the world, and then act, and then compare the changes in the world to that model.

01:02:31.400 But that didn't go anywhere, as it turned out, because it turned out that it's so difficult to see and model the world that people had no idea how complex that was.

01:02:41.400 It was impossibly complex, as it turned out, and so that's part of the reason we don't have robots wandering around doing apparently simple things like walking.

01:02:50.400 You know, walking in an environment like this.

01:02:52.400 Now, when we look at the environment, we think, well, it's not that hard to look at.

01:02:57.400 It's full of objects, and they're just self-evident.

01:03:00.400 There they are, and we can just wander through it, you know.

01:03:03.400 And we don't even do that consciously to any great degree, because so much of that perception is presented to our consciousness without effort, in some sense.

01:03:12.400 But the AI guys learned pretty quick that perceiving the world was way more difficult than anybody had guessed.

01:03:19.400 And then this experiment really, in some sense, put a phenomenological punch behind that observation,

01:03:28.400 because one of the presuppositions of the orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that you were very good at detecting changes,

01:03:38.400 that your nervous system would automatically detect change, anomaly, right?

01:03:42.400 Any mismatch between your model and what you expected.

01:03:45.400 And then, well, the AI guys, I think, figured out, first of all, that that was a big problem, that the problem of perception was much more complicated than that.

01:03:53.400 You know, it's actually, it's out of that same set of observations, in some sense, that postmodernism emerged in literature,

01:04:01.400 because, in literary criticism, because, well, it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object like a chair.

01:04:09.400 And part of that is, you know, if you just do that to the chair, it's really different than it was before.

01:04:15.400 You could imagine how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions, right?

01:04:20.400 And if you really got good at looking at it, you'd find that, even though, if I asked you what colour this is, you'd say white.

01:04:26.400 If you were actually painting it, you'd find out that the colours of the chair when it's in that location,

01:04:32.400 and the colours in the chair when it's in that location, just because of the difference in lighting, are substantially different.

01:04:38.400 I think it was Monet, I think, who painted a very large series of haystacks in the French countryside, right?

01:04:44.400 In different seasons and under different conditions of illumination, just because he was exploring how radically different the same object could be as it moved through contexts.

01:04:55.400 And so, it isn't even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it.

01:05:00.400 And the answer is something like, well, you can sit on it in both positions, which is not a description of an object, by the way.

01:05:07.400 Right? That's a description of something that's useful, something that's a tool, something that exists in relationship to your body.

01:05:14.400 It's not an object.

01:05:15.400 And so, if you think that just looking at something like a chair is almost impossibly difficult, and subject to interpretation,

01:05:23.400 then imagine how difficult it is to perceive something like a text, you know, like a novel.

01:05:29.400 Because a novel obviously is subject to multiple interpretations, and the interpretations are going to depend on, well, at least in principle, on the intent, conscious and unconscious of the author,

01:05:41.400 of the time, of the place, of the culture, of the language, then that's just on the side of the production itself.

01:05:49.400 But then there's the reader, it's like, I've read books when I was 16, and then reread them, say, when I was 40, and the book was almost completely different as far as I was concerned,

01:05:59.400 partly because I knew what was in it the second time, and I didn't know what was in it the first time.

01:06:04.400 And so, the meaning that manifests itself out of a book is a consequence of all the complexity of the book, plus all the complexity of the reader.

01:06:16.400 So, you know, if you're reading Russian literature, for example, and you've already read 50 Russian novels, you're going to be in a much more different,

01:06:25.400 you're going to be in a different interpretive space than you are if, say, the Russian novel is the first novel you've ever read.

01:06:33.400 And so, and the postmodernists were grappling with this, as well as with many other ideas that I think contaminated their thinking,

01:06:43.400 and their conclusion was, well, you can't extract out a canonical meaning from a text.

01:06:48.400 It's so dependent on the situation that to say the text has an interpretable meaning is actually an error.

01:06:55.400 Now, just because it's difficult to do something doesn't mean it's impossible.

01:07:00.400 And there's massive holes in the postmodernist view, as far as, I think it's an unbelievably pathological view, personally.

01:07:07.400 But the thing is, is that there are reasons why it emerged, and the reasons were analogous to the reasons that the AI project initially failed,

01:07:17.400 and analogous to the reasons that this experiment turned out the way it did.

01:07:21.400 So I'm going to show you this, many of you have seen this already, but as I said, it doesn't matter.

01:07:25.400 So the, the, the job, your job here is to count the times, see there's a team of three people here, dressed in white,

01:07:32.400 and there's a team of three people here, dressed in black.

01:07:35.400 And your job is to count the number of times the white team throws the basketball back and forth to the white team members, okay? 0.71

01:07:42.400 So we'll just run that.

01:07:44.400 Okay, well, so obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, the, the number of times I believe that they threw it back,

01:07:55.400 they threw it back and forth was 16, if I remember this correctly.

01:07:58.400 But, of course, that's not really the issue, because what happens in the middle of the scene is that,

01:08:04.400 a guy wearing a gorilla suit comes out into the middle of the screen and pounds his chest three or four times,

01:08:10.400 and he comes out quite slowly, as you saw.

01:08:12.400 How many of you, is there anybody here who didn't see the gorilla?

01:08:15.400 No, well, you, and I presume all of you knew about this video anyways.

01:08:19.400 So, Dan Simon, who produced this video, has got a couple of other ones where he shows that, you know,

01:08:25.400 even if you're smart enough to see the gorilla, because you've seen the video before, you've heard about it,

01:08:30.400 if you make other changes in the background, you'll, you'll count properly and you'll catch the gorilla,

01:08:34.400 but you'll miss the other changes in the background, and they're not trivial either.

01:08:37.400 And it's really quite remarkable, he's produced other short videos, for example, where you'll be looking at a, like a field,

01:08:46.400 and a road will grow in it, occupying about a third of the photograph's space.

01:08:51.400 And you'd think, well, yeah, you're gonna see that, it's like, you don't, you don't.

01:08:54.400 So, okay, so this threw, this threw a big spanner into the works, this sort of experiment, along with the AI failures,

01:09:01.400 and we could even say the postmodern dilemma.

01:09:04.400 It's like, well, hmm, everyone virtually, every psychologist would have predicted before this series of experiments

01:09:12.400 that there's no damn way you'd miss that gorilla, because your nervous system was actually attuned to change in the environment,

01:09:18.400 and, like, that's a big change, and, and it's also a gorilla, it's something you would really think that you couldn't miss,

01:09:24.400 you couldn't possibly miss, especially when it's occupying the center of the, of the visual field.

01:09:30.400 And so, well, this is part of a phenomena called change blindness, and it helped psychologists who had been studying the visual system for a very long time,

01:09:39.400 figure out, well, mostly figure out exactly how blind human beings are, because we're way blinder than we think.

01:09:48.400 And, and so we actually focus on much less of the world than we think, and we do that partly, it's not exactly obvious how we do it,

01:09:57.400 it's kind of like we, we hold a still picture in our imagination, and then fill in the details by using our central foveal vision,

01:10:04.400 which is always dancing around, like a, like a pinpoint or a laser beam, moving back and forth,

01:10:09.400 and we're assembling those little snapshots from the fovea into a relatively coherent picture,

01:10:16.400 maybe what happens is that I look at you, and then I look at you, and I still got the information from looking at you,

01:10:23.400 so my brain can sort of infer that that, that's remained stable, but like, if I look at you, and I, and I pay it,

01:10:29.400 I've tried to learn how to do this, because you could look at something, and then pay attention to the periphery, it's annoying,

01:10:36.400 but, so, if I'm looking at you, I really can't make out your eyes, I can more or less make out the fact that you have a head,

01:10:44.400 I can see that you're, and I, especially if you move it, and so that's what, your periphery's sort of like frog vision, or dinosaur vision,

01:10:51.400 it's much better at picking up movement than it is at picking up something that's staying still, and that makes sense,

01:10:57.400 because, well, if it's staying still, then, and it hasn't already hurt you, then it's probably not going to hurt you,

01:11:03.400 but if it's moving, then, you know, that's a good thing that you might pay attention to,

01:11:07.400 and so, if your periphery catches movement, then you'll focus your foveal on it, it's like you go from really low resolution to really high resolution,

01:11:15.400 and so, the center of your vision is incredibly high resolution, but then it fades into low resolution as you move towards the periphery until it's out here,

01:11:24.400 which would, say, be about 170 degrees, I really, if I concentrate on this hand, I can tell it's a hand, mostly when it's moving,

01:11:33.400 I have no idea what color it is, this one I can't see at all, and then, I can probably see my fingers now,

01:11:42.400 and then, I can clearly see them if I look at them with my fovea, and so, your vision is a very, very strange thing,

01:11:50.400 and it's focusing on something very specific, and so you're pointing your eyes at something very specific,

01:11:56.400 and that's what you seem to see, and so, so then, that opens up a whole new universe of questions, it's like,

01:12:03.400 how do you decide what to point your eyes at? That, that turns out to be an insanely complicated problem.

01:12:10.400 John Verveike talks about that all the time as the problem of relevance, but, and the issue is,

01:12:16.400 well, there's many, many things in the world, there's an infinite number of things, let's say,

01:12:20.400 and you're not gonna be able to see them, that's for sure, even if they happen to be changing, as it turns out,

01:12:26.400 and so, out of this mess, first of all, how do you pick what to look at, and second, even if you do pick it, how do you see it?

01:12:32.400 because it's so crazily complicated. So, that's the problem that we're going to try to unpack.

01:12:38.400 Now, roughly speaking, what seems to have happened with the gorilla video is, you have to take that first theory,

01:12:44.400 that you make a complete model of the world, and then a complete model of the world, which is the objects in the world and how they're interacting,

01:12:52.400 and you compare that to the objects in the actual world and how they're interacting, you have to modify that model,

01:12:58.400 you say, well, no, you're certainly not making a complete model, and people should have known better anyways,

01:13:04.400 even subjects to the limits of your perceptions, because there's all sorts of things in the world that you can't directly perceive,

01:13:10.400 but what you're doing instead is, it's something like, you're making a partial model of the world,

01:13:17.400 but you're only making a partial model of the world that you're currently operating on that, on, on, with some goal in mind,

01:13:24.400 and you're also comparing that to a model of the world as it's currently unfolding,

01:13:28.400 because the other thing that was implicit, this is really tricky, this is where you have to watch your implicit assumptions,

01:13:34.400 the other thing that was implicit in the original cybernetic theory was that,

01:13:39.400 you have a model of the world that's complete, and then what you're watching is the actual world as it unfolds,

01:13:47.400 and that's not a model, that's just your perception of the objects, but that also turns out to be wrong,

01:13:52.400 because your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model, and so what's happening is, you look at the world,

01:14:00.400 the world you see is a model, and a very partial model at that, and then you compare it to the model that you expect,

01:14:07.400 or desire more accurately, desire, although the initial models were expectation,

01:14:13.400 because if you're in the lab listening to tones, it's not like you desire anything, but mostly when you're acting in the world,

01:14:18.400 you have desires, and so the experimental constraints skewed the data in some sense by making people assume that

01:14:27.400 what people were doing when they walked through the world was expecting instead of desiring,

01:14:31.400 anyways, you have a model of the world that's generated as you look at it, you have another model of the world that's something like the world that you desire,

01:14:39.400 then you compare both of them, and they can mismatch, and they can mismatch in a way that upsets your current pursuit,

01:14:45.400 that's the critical issue, you don't see the anomaly unless it upsets your current pursuit,

01:14:51.400 and you kinda know that too, because when you're, like, while I'm lecturing to you guys, you know, mostly you're sitting still,

01:14:58.400 but people are moving their arms, and they're moving their glasses, and they're shifting their feet,

01:15:03.400 and generally, I don't see any of that, because what difference does it make?

01:15:09.400 you know, it's not relevant to the ongoing, to the ongoing what? Ongoing contract, the ongoing series of interactions,

01:15:18.400 it's something like that, so as long as you keep your movements bounded within a range that doesn't interfere with whatever it is that we're doing,

01:15:27.400 then I'm, it's going to be as invisible to me as the gorilla was when you were counting the balls,

01:15:32.400 and the cool thing is about the gorilla experiment, or one of them, is that the reason you were blind to the gorilla was

01:15:38.400 because you were counting the balls, and so, what, that's so fascinating,

01:15:43.400 because what it shows to a huge degree, an unfathomable degree, to, to, to, an unfathomable degree, is that 0.86

01:15:53.400 the value structure that you inhabit determines what you perceive, it doesn't just determine what you expect or want,

01:15:59.400 it bloody well determines what you see, and that, that makes the world a completely different place, no one really expected that,

01:16:06.400 and so, if you watch the basketballs, you see, or the basketball, you see the basketball, if you stop watching the basketball,

01:16:13.400 well then you see the gorilla, and so, the first question that arises from an experiment like that is,

01:16:19.400 well, just exactly what is it that you don't see in the world, and the answer is, all of it, you see so little, it's unbelievable,

01:16:27.400 you see that tiny amount that's necessary for you to undertake the next sequence in your plotted movements, something like that,

01:16:37.400 but then that becomes very complicated too, because it isn't obvious how you can conceptualize, or how you can determine what your next movement is,

01:16:47.400 because, it's not like you just add up movements and make up your life, it's not that simple, and it's, it's related to the,

01:16:54.400 to the novel problem, the, the problem of meaning in a, in a literary work, so you imagine, you're trying to specify the meaning of a literary work,

01:17:02.400 well, there's meaning in the word, and then, but the word is dependent, the meaning of the word is dependent on the phrase within which it's embedded,

01:17:11.400 and then the meaning of the phrase is dependent on the sentence that it's embedded in, and the sentence in the paragraph, and the paragraph in the chapter,

01:17:19.400 and the chapter in the book, and the book in the corpus of books of that sort, and then within the culture, and then within whatever your peculiar personal experience is,

01:17:29.400 all of those things nested, are operative to some degree, when you're extracting out the meaning at any level of analysis,

01:17:36.400 they're all operating simultaneously, and so you might say, well, what are you doing in this classroom?

01:17:41.400 well, the answer is, sitting in a chair, but that's, obviously, that's a very short term, and context, independent answer,

01:17:52.400 but, you're also attending to what I'm saying, hypothetically, and you're attending to some of it, and not to others,

01:17:58.400 parts of it, and you're thinking about some parts of it, and not other parts, and you're also attending a class,

01:18:05.400 and the class is a sequence of lectures, and that's embedded within your desire to finish up the semester,

01:18:11.400 and then to finish up the year, and then to get your degree, and then you nest that inside whatever it is,

01:18:16.400 whatever the reason is that you're getting your degree, and then maybe that's nested inside your career goals,

01:18:22.400 and that's nested inside your life goals, and that's nested inside your ultimate values, which you may or may not even be aware of,

01:18:29.400 and so, I could say, well, you're sitting here because it serves your ultimate values, well, that's true,

01:18:37.400 it seems a bit abstract to be useful, right, it gets so vague out at the outermost levels that it doesn't really have much specificity, right,

01:18:47.400 so it seems to lack information, but by the same token, if I said what you're doing is sitting there,

01:18:52.400 it has the same problem of too-restricted meaning because of over-specificity, and so there's some level in there that you would interpret as meaningful,

01:19:02.400 God only knows why, and that's the level, there's a natural level of perception for that sort of thing,

01:19:09.400 so for example, when children learn to name an animal, for example, they'll name cat,

01:19:16.400 they don't name the species of cat, or the subspecies of cat, and they don't confuse cats with dogs,

01:19:22.400 even though they're both in the category of, you know, four-legged furry mammal,

01:19:27.400 so why not call a cat and a dog furry mammals? Well, children don't do that, they go to cat and dog,

01:19:36.400 and people who've studied the acquisition of language have found that there are basic level categories that children pick up first,

01:19:43.400 and they're often represented with short words, and the words are short because they've been around a long time,

01:19:49.400 because they seem to reflect the natural level at which people perceive the world, but none of that's obvious, you know,

01:19:56.400 it's by, I mean, you could just lump all animals together, for that matter, and just call them animals, which we do sometimes, so,

01:20:04.400 anyway, so it's very difficult to specify the meaning level, and it's not very easy at all to figure out how we do it,

01:20:10.400 and so that's partly what I'm, what I'm trying to unpack, so, here's, here's part of the issue, so, let's say that you're, you have a computer,

01:20:21.400 yeah, well, I have a story for this, so, um, one time when I was in Montreal, I was using my computer,

01:20:30.400 it's in my apartment, and I was typing out an essay, and it crashed, and so, what happens when your computer crashes,

01:20:41.400 well, you know, usually you utter some sort of curse, and it's interesting that you do that, because the circuit that you use to curse with

01:20:49.400 is the same circuit that monkeys use to detect eagles, or leopards, or snakes, and so, when there's a bunch of monkeys together,

01:20:58.400 you know, they're not all preyed on by eagles, and leopards, and snakes, but, you know, there's usually a predator in that category

01:21:04.400 for every single monkey population, and so, when the monkeys are watching, they have an emotional utterance

01:21:10.400 that the most nervous monkey might utter first, that basically says, you know, hide from the eagle, get out on a thin branch

01:21:17.400 so the cougar can't eat you, and look the hell out for the snake, but there's a circuit that's linked to emotions

01:21:23.400 that produces an instinctive utterance that represents that category, and that's the same circuit that you use when you curse,

01:21:32.400 and it's not the same circuit that you use for normal language, and we know that, because that circuit is activated in people who have Tourette's Syndrome,

01:21:39.400 because they preferentially swear, you think, well, why in the world would you have a neurological condition that makes you preferentially curse?

01:21:46.400 well, that's the reason, you don't just have one linguistic circuit, you have one for, oh my god, there's a predator, and that's the one that will get activated

01:21:56.400 when something happens like your computer crashing, because, you know, you're an evolved creature, and so those old circuits that were there, say, 30 million years ago

01:22:05.400 to deal with exceptions are the same circuits you're using now to deal with your computer

01:22:11.400 why else would you want to hit it?

01:22:13.400 right, because that's what you want to give it a whack, it's like, it doesn't behave whack, aggression right away

01:22:19.400 well, that's some clue as to the category system that you're automatically using to encapsulate the event

01:22:28.400 okay, so, fine, what do you do when your computer crashes? 1.00

01:22:31.400 well, first you curse, and then you do the stupid things that idiot primates do when they're trying to deal with something that's way too complex 1.00

01:22:37.400 maybe you turn it on and off, right? 0.99

01:22:40.400 and that doesn't work, it didn't work, and so then I thought, well, maybe the power bar went, so I checked the power bar

01:22:45.400 it, I turned it on and off, and nothing happened, and so I brought a light behind the computer, and the light wouldn't go on

01:22:50.400 so I thought, aha! I must have blown a fuse, so I went to the fuse box, and took a look, but the fuses were fine

01:22:57.400 and so I thought, oh, the power's gone out, so then I went outside, and the power was out

01:23:03.400 none of the street lights were working, the power was out everywhere

01:23:06.400 and it was seriously out, because this was the time that

01:23:10.400 the, almost the entire northeast power grid in Quebec

01:23:14.400 collapsed, and the reason it collapsed is because there was a solar flare

01:23:18.400 that happens reasonably often, and the solar flare produced a huge electromagnetic pulse

01:23:23.400 because it's basically, you know, like a billion, million hydrogen bombs going off at the same time

01:23:29.400 93 million miles away, produces this tremendous electromagnetic pulse

01:23:34.400 passes through the Earth's atmosphere, produces a spike in current in the main power lines

01:23:40.400 and blows the whole system, and so just so you know, an event like that happens about every 150 years

01:23:49.400 and if we had one now, it would take out all of our electronics

01:23:52.400 like one of the big ones, there was a big one back in the late 1800s

01:23:55.400 everything, satellites, computers, cars, everything, gone

01:23:59.400 and so that's a big problem, and no one knows what to do about it

01:24:02.400 one missed us by about nine minutes, I think two years ago

01:24:05.400 so, so that's something else to worry about if you're inclined to worry about those sorts of things

01:24:10.400 um, okay, so what, what did I conclude from that?

01:24:13.400 well, the function of my computer was dependent on the stability of the sun

01:24:20.400 it's not the first thing you check out when your computer crashes, right?

01:24:24.400 you don't run out and go, hey, well, yeah, the sun's still, the sun's still there

01:24:28.400 no problem, I can cross that off the list

01:24:31.400 but, but it, it, to me, it's an extraordinarily interesting example of the invisible interdependence of things

01:24:38.400 you know, and our tendency to fragment things

01:24:41.400 what we seem to do is to look at things at the simplest level of analysis that actually functions

01:24:47.400 so, for example, when you're interacting with your computer

01:24:50.400 you're not interacting with your computer at all, really

01:24:53.400 you're interacting with the keyboard

01:24:55.400 sort of one key at a time

01:24:57.400 and you're interacting with the symbols on the screen

01:25:00.400 but, as long as the computer is working

01:25:03.400 you don't care about it at all

01:25:05.400 you don't give it a second thought

01:25:06.400 and you certainly don't care about the fact that

01:25:09.400 it's dependent on

01:25:11.400 well, the electrical power, for example

01:25:13.400 and the electrical power is dependent on

01:25:15.400 you know, I don't know, how many men are out there right now

01:25:19.400 or were out there last night when it was freezing rain

01:25:22.400 fixing power lines

01:25:24.400 and freezing to death while they're doing it 1.00

01:25:26.400 so that your stupid computer doesn't malfunction while you're watching cat videos 1.00

01:25:30.400 you know, I mean, there's this incredibly dynamic living system 1.00

01:25:34.400 that's social and economic and political

01:25:37.400 that has to remain dead stable in order for us to have access to functional

01:25:42.400 and, like, pure, non-fluctuating electricity 100% of the time

01:25:48.400 because you also don't think

01:25:49.400 well, the stability of your computer is dependent on the stability of the political system

01:25:53.400 but, of course it is, because

01:25:55.400 if the political system mucks up and the economic system goes

01:25:58.400 then people don't go out and work to fix things

01:26:00.400 and things are breaking all the time

01:26:03.400 that's their normal state

01:26:05.400 is broken, not working

01:26:07.400 and so

01:26:08.400 and that's all

01:26:10.400 in some sense

01:26:11.400 folded up

01:26:12.400 not only inside your computer

01:26:14.400 but actually inside your conceptions of

01:26:17.400 your tiny conceptions of the computer while you're using it

01:26:20.400 and you only get a glimpse of what the computer is really like

01:26:23.400 when it doesn't work

01:26:24.400 then it's when it becomes a complex object, right?

01:26:27.400 as long as it's working

01:26:29.400 then 1.00

01:26:30.400 your stupid perceptions are 1.00

01:26:32.400 are perfectly fine 1.00

01:26:34.400 to get the job done

01:26:36.400 and that's another indication that what you're using your perceptions for

01:26:40.400 is to get the job done

01:26:42.400 and

01:26:43.400 how you specify exactly the level of resolution that you should be operating at

01:26:48.400 I haven't sorted that out

01:26:50.400 but it's something like

01:26:51.400 you default to the simplest level that moves you to the next step

01:26:54.400 you know, so for example

01:26:56.400 and generally that is what you should do

01:26:58.400 if you're having an argument with someone that you have a long-term relationship with

01:27:01.400 you can start by arguing about what the little argument is about

01:27:05.400 or you can immediately cascade into whether or not you should

01:27:08.400 have a relationship with this person at all

01:27:10.400 or even into whether or not you should even bother with relationships

01:27:15.400 which is

01:27:16.400 you know, every time there's an argument

01:27:18.400 that question

01:27:20.400 is a reasonable question to have emerge

01:27:22.400 or at least it's in the realm of potential reasonable questions

01:27:25.400 but it doesn't seem useful to jump to the most catastrophic possible explanation

01:27:30.400 every time some minor thing goes wrong

01:27:32.400 that's what happens to people who have an anxiety disorder

01:27:35.400 and that's what happens to people who are depressed

01:27:37.400 right, they can't bind the anomaly

01:27:40.400 and so what happens is it tends to propagate up the entire system

01:27:43.400 until it takes out their highest order conceptualizations

01:27:46.400 you know, so if you're seriously depressed 1.00

01:27:49.400 maybe you'll watch a news article about something stupid 1.00

01:27:52.400 and you'll think, Jesus, why should I even be alive? 1.00

01:27:54.400 you know, and I'm dead serious about that

01:27:56.400 if you score like 60 on the Beck Depression inventory

01:27:59.400 which puts you way the hell up in the depressed range

01:28:01.400 anything that happens to you that's negative

01:28:03.400 will trigger suicidal thoughts, roughly speaking

01:28:07.400 and sometimes even positive things will do it

01:28:09.400 because there are very few positive things that happen

01:28:12.400 that don't carry with them some threat of change or transformation

01:28:16.400 so, you know, one mystery, it's a big mystery

01:28:21.400 is why don't you fall into a catastrophic depression

01:28:24.400 every time something little goes wrong

01:28:26.400 because it's not, that level of analysis is not self-evident

01:28:30.400 and you see this with people who are high in neuroticism too, you know

01:28:34.400 their trivial fluctuations at their workplace

01:28:41.400 or in their relationships or in their health

01:28:43.400 will produce a disproportionate negative emotional response

01:28:47.400 but it's part of the range of normal emotional responses

01:28:50.400 some people are very, very high in neuroticism

01:28:53.400 so everything upsets them, some people are very low

01:28:55.400 and the reason that whole range exists is because sometimes you should get upset

01:28:59.400 when some little thing happens to you 0.98

01:29:01.400 because it's an indication that the whole damn environment has got dangerous on you 0.97

01:29:05.400 and sometimes you should just brush it off 0.98

01:29:07.400 because, you know, it's net consequence is low

01:29:11.400 but how do you calculate that?

01:29:13.400 very, very difficult question

01:29:15.400 so, you know, when your computer goes wrong

01:29:18.400 well, you have to pick the proper level of analysis to fix it

01:29:22.400 and you could say, well, there's something wrong with the circuit board

01:29:26.400 and maybe, you know, there's a crack in one of the, in one of the, somewhere that it's soldered

01:29:33.400 or, you know, sometimes now when people are building microchips

01:29:40.400 they've run into a crazy problem

01:29:43.400 you know, microchips keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller, right?

01:29:46.400 and so the little wires now are down to atomic width

01:29:50.400 or, you know, the width of maybe 20 atoms or something like that

01:29:53.400 but really, really, they're really getting thin

01:29:56.400 and so that produces another problem, which no one would have ever

01:30:00.400 you know, you wouldn't expect

01:30:03.400 and that is, you know, that at the quantum level

01:30:06.400 there's uncertainty about where electrons might be

01:30:09.400 normally that doesn't matter

01:30:11.400 the degree of uncertainty about where your electrons are

01:30:13.400 is small enough at your size so that it's basically irrelevant

01:30:17.400 but down at the subatomic level where these microchips are starting to be produced

01:30:21.400 sometimes the electrons will be outside the wires

01:30:24.400 and that means that they're getting so damn small that they'll short circuit by themselves

01:30:28.400 because the electrons aren't stable enough to be where they're supposed to be in the wires

01:30:32.400 and so, well, the reason I'm pointing that out is because

01:30:37.400 a problem that exists in a system can exist at any of the multiple levels of that system

01:30:43.400 and it isn't obvious where to start, and a lot of political arguments are like that, you know

01:30:47.400 it's like, well, maybe a company goes bankrupt and its shareholders get

01:30:53.400 or maybe a bank fails and so people can't withdraw their money

01:30:56.400 and one response is, well, that just shows you how rotten the capitalist system is

01:31:00.400 it's like, well, maybe that is what it shows

01:31:03.400 but it seems like that might not be the most appropriate level to start

01:31:10.400 and so again, it's like Occam's razor in the scientific world, right

01:31:14.400 you want to use the simplest explanation that

01:31:17.400 it's not that fits the facts, because you don't organize your perceptions by facts

01:31:22.400 it's kind of like you want to use the simplest tool you can possibly manage to fix the problem

01:31:26.400 so you don't, when your car has a flat tire, you don't buy a new car

01:31:31.400 you fix the flat tire if you can figure out how to do it

01:31:35.400 and so you go for the thing that will put the tool back together

01:31:40.400 with the minimum involvement of time and effort, it's something like that

01:31:44.400 and you care about that because you have limited time and you have limited resources

01:31:49.400 and so it makes sense for you to conserve them

01:31:53.400 and I'm telling you that partly for practical reasons too, because this is a very useful thing to know

01:31:59.400 if you're arguing with someone, you want to argue about the smallest possible thing that you could argue about

01:32:05.400 that might fix the problem

01:32:07.400 you want to really specify it, it's like, what's going on at a micro level

01:32:11.400 and what's the minimum that I would require to be satisfied with the outcome

01:32:16.400 and if you're, this is especially true in intimate relationships

01:32:20.400 it's like, if someone's bugging you and you want them to change

01:32:23.400 you think, well, how can I be minimally bothered by this

01:32:26.400 and what's the tiniest amount of change I could request

01:32:29.400 that might satisfy me

01:32:31.400 because otherwise, the argument will come unglued

01:32:34.400 and every time you guys try to discuss a problem

01:32:37.400 you'll start talking about whether you should even be together

01:32:39.400 and then you're done, because you'll never solve a problem

01:32:42.400 and then you won't be together, because you'll never solve a problem

01:32:45.400 so, okay

01:32:49.400 so, here's a way to think about perception

01:32:52.400 so, let's say that this is the thing you're trying to look at

01:32:56.400 I called that the thing in itself

01:32:59.400 now, that's a schematic of a thing in itself

01:33:03.400 so the thing in itself, that's an old philosophical concept

01:33:07.400 and I think it came from Kant, but I'm not sure about that, it might be older than that

01:33:11.400 and the thing in itself is what you could see if you could see everything about something

01:33:15.400 but you can't, so it's a hypothetical entity

01:33:18.400 and maybe, who knows, if I was looking at you like the thing in itself

01:33:23.400 maybe I could see every level of your being from the subatomic up to this level of perception

01:33:30.400 and then beyond, I could see your family relationships

01:33:33.400 I could see how they were nested in your societal relationships, economic relationships, political relationships

01:33:39.400 the ecosystem as a whole, like I would see all these levels at the same time

01:33:43.400 of course, I don't, because I can't

01:33:46.400 what I see instead is

01:33:48.400 first of all, you're radically simplified by my senses

01:33:51.400 because they're just not acute enough to say, see you at a microscopic level

01:33:55.400 and they're not comprehensive enough to see your connections across time

01:33:59.400 so my senses filter a bunch of you from me right away

01:34:02.400 and then, I'm also filtered from you by my, by your willingness to act like I want while we're together

01:34:12.400 because that's, because you could be doing all sorts of strange things at the moment

01:34:15.400 but you're not

01:34:16.400 and so, you're helping me simplify my perceptions of you by agreeing to play the same game that I'm playing while we occupy the same space

01:34:24.400 and that's basically politeness

01:34:26.400 that's the mark of someone who's well socialized

01:34:28.400 you walk in somewhere, you get the game, you play the game, and you don't scare the hell out of everybody

01:34:34.400 and that's, that's partly how we keep our emotions stabilized

01:34:39.400 because, you know, if you're like a Freudian, you think, well, as long as your ego is well constituted, you can keep your emotions under control

01:34:47.400 it's like, yes and no, mostly no

01:34:52.400 I like the Piagetian idea better, which is, if you're well socialized, you're awake enough to identify the game that's going on wherever you go

01:35:01.400 and then you play that game immediately, and so do all the other socialized primates

01:35:05.400 and so then you can just understand the game, you don't have to understand them, thank god

01:35:11.400 you can just understand the game, and as long as the game continues, you don't have to be nervous

01:35:15.400 because you know, you at least know what's going to happen, and maybe you even know how to get what you want in that game

01:35:22.400 and so, so that again, that's really worth thinking about, because

01:35:27.400 we talked about this before, about why people want to maintain their culture

01:35:31.400 it isn't just because their culture is a belief system that helps them orient themselves in the world

01:35:37.400 it's because a belief system is a game that everyone who shares that belief system is playing

01:35:43.400 and the fact that everybody's playing means nobody needs to get upset

01:35:47.400 so it isn't like the belief system is directly inhibiting the emotions

01:35:51.400 that isn't how it works

01:35:52.400 so, and it's not like the culture is just a belief system

01:35:56.400 it's only secondarily a belief system, man

01:35:59.400 mostly it's a game that people are actively engaging in

01:36:02.400 that's way more important than the beliefs that go along with it 0.97

01:36:06.400 you don't even need the damn beliefs, you know, that's why wolves can live with each other 0.97

01:36:12.400 they don't know what the, they don't have a belief system exactly 0.99

01:36:16.400 mostly they have a set of

01:36:18.400 they have a game, it's the wolf game, roughly speaking

01:36:23.400 and all the wolves know how to play it, and so, that's that

01:36:26.400 that's how they keep themselves organized in their packs

01:36:29.400 a lot of it's externalized

01:36:31.400 and so

01:36:33.400 okay, so anyway, so

01:36:35.400 the thing in itself

01:36:37.400 that's a very complicated thing

01:36:39.400 it's got multiple dimensions

01:36:41.400 multiple levels

01:36:43.400 and then, it's worse than that, because

01:36:45.400 it doesn't only have multiple levels

01:36:47.400 but all of those levels move across time

01:36:49.400 and every one of those levels shifts as it moves across time

01:36:53.400 and so, I like to think of the thing in itself like a symphony

01:36:57.400 I think that's a good model

01:36:59.400 I think that's why we like music, in fact

01:37:01.400 because music shows you a multi-level reality

01:37:03.400 that unfolds and shifts across time

01:37:06.400 within some parameters, right

01:37:08.400 because it's not just chaos

01:37:10.400 the music has an element of predictability

01:37:13.400 and an element of unpredictability

01:37:15.400 and it has these multiple levels

01:37:16.400 and that's sort of what

01:37:18.400 everything in the world is like

01:37:20.400 it's what the world is like

01:37:21.400 so this is a

01:37:22.400 even that is just a conceptual model of the thing in itself

01:37:26.400 first of all, that's only got two dimensions instead of three

01:37:29.400 because it could be a cube

01:37:31.400 and then it has

01:37:32.400 even a cube has three dimensions instead of four

01:37:35.400 because if that was a cube

01:37:37.400 adding the third dimension

01:37:39.400 then it would also be a cube that would transform and shift

01:37:42.400 as it moved across time

01:37:44.400 and that's what the thing in itself is

01:37:46.400 but that's too damn complicated

01:37:47.400 so then the question is

01:37:49.400 when you look at it, what do you see?

01:37:51.400 and the answer is

01:37:52.400 to some degree it depends on what you want to use it for

01:37:55.400 and so I would say

01:37:56.400 well here, look at the different ways you can look at this

01:37:59.400 you might say, what is this?

01:38:00.400 and somebody could say, well it's a rectangle

01:38:02.400 and would you say that's correct?

01:38:05.400 it's like, well

01:38:09.400 it's not correct

01:38:10.400 because there's not a one-to-one correspondence

01:38:12.400 but it might be a useful conceptualization

01:38:15.400 if you think about that as a box

01:38:17.400 it could contain that

01:38:19.400 and if you were carrying the box

01:38:21.400 you'd only have to be concerned about the box

01:38:23.400 and so that would be fine

01:38:24.400 that's a good functional simplification

01:38:26.400 that one's a little higher resolution

01:38:28.400 because it says, well yeah

01:38:29.400 it's actually four rectangles

01:38:31.400 and that one says, well wait

01:38:33.400 think about that as an orchard

01:38:35.400 that someone's looking at from the top

01:38:37.400 you want to figure out how to walk from south to north

01:38:40.400 well, you got a little map there

01:38:42.400 because you can think of those as bars

01:38:44.400 instead of collections of dots

01:38:47.400 Piaget showed that children will automatically do this

01:38:50.400 so for example, if you take

01:38:52.400 six dots and put them in a row

01:38:54.400 and you take the same six dots

01:38:57.400 and you stretch them out

01:38:58.400 so the row is this much longer

01:38:59.400 and then you ask the child where there are more dots

01:39:02.400 the child will say that there are more dots where it's longer

01:39:04.400 because they're flipping in some sense

01:39:07.400 between the perception of the individual dots

01:39:10.400 and the perception of the shape

01:39:12.400 that the array of dots makes

01:39:14.400 and so the shape is longer

01:39:16.400 because you can see it as a rectangle

01:39:17.400 so they think, well longer is bigger, bigger is more

01:39:19.400 there's got to be more dots

01:39:21.400 so

01:39:22.400 well, whoop

01:39:24.400 then there's this one

01:39:26.400 which is sort of an amalgam of this one and this one

01:39:29.400 and then that one

01:39:30.400 there's that one

01:39:31.400 and that's the highest resolution

01:39:32.400 model of that that's still a simplification

01:39:35.400 and you know, what I like about this diagram is that

01:39:39.400 you know, people say, well

01:39:41.400 the facts are the facts

01:39:43.400 and what we're disagreeing about is our opinion about the facts

01:39:46.400 it's like, no

01:39:47.400 yes

01:39:48.400 you have an opinion about the facts

01:39:50.400 but the world is so horribly complex

01:39:52.400 that you can actually disagree about the facts themselves

01:39:55.400 and I think an ideology does that to people very very commonly

01:39:59.400 so

01:40:00.400 I saw this movie once that Naomi Klein made

01:40:03.400 if I tell you the same story, tell me, okay?

01:40:05.400 because I don't want to tell you the same story, but I might

01:40:08.400 so

01:40:09.400 she went down to Argentina

01:40:11.400 after a bunch of money had gone out of Argentina

01:40:13.400 because of a financial collapse

01:40:15.400 and she went to a factory

01:40:16.400 that had been padlocked

01:40:18.400 and it was a heavy machinery factory

01:40:19.400 and

01:40:20.400 the workers had decided they were going to

01:40:23.400 undo the padlocks and go build machines, you know

01:40:26.400 hell with the owner who shut it down

01:40:29.400 and so

01:40:30.400 she went down and made this movie

01:40:31.400 and followed these workers around

01:40:33.400 and you know, showed how catastrophic their lives had been

01:40:35.400 because they'd lost their livelihood in this big financial crash

01:40:38.400 and so that was really interesting

01:40:39.400 but then she went and interviewed the guy who owned the factory

01:40:41.400 and

01:40:42.400 she treated him like he was

01:40:44.400 like a cypher in some sense

01:40:46.400 instead of asking him

01:40:48.400 how he got the factory, what he wanted to do with it

01:40:50.400 how it fit in with his life plans

01:40:52.400 why he shut it down instead of continuing it

01:40:55.400 you know

01:40:56.400 she didn't get the back story on him

01:40:58.400 she just left him in the evil capitalist box 0.99

01:41:01.400 and went on with the film

01:41:03.400 and it was

01:41:04.400 it was like

01:41:05.400 it wasn't like what she did wasn't true

01:41:07.400 but it was only half true

01:41:09.400 and it was half true

01:41:10.400 because

01:41:11.400 she could perceive the complexity of the workers

01:41:13.400 having sympathy for them

01:41:15.400 but as far as she was concerned

01:41:17.400 the

01:41:18.400 the enemy, the owner, had no complexity

01:41:20.400 he was just bad capitalist

01:41:22.400 and that's how it was left in the movie

01:41:24.400 I found it profoundly unsatisfying

01:41:26.400 because I wanted to know

01:41:27.400 okay, it's like

01:41:28.400 you know that these workers are suffering 1.00

01:41:30.400 it's not self-evident that you want your damn factory closed 0.98

01:41:34.400 you'd think you'd want it open so you could be building things 0.98

01:41:36.400 it's like

01:41:37.400 who are you? what are you doing?

01:41:38.400 why is this justifiable?

01:41:40.400 have a question about it

01:41:42.400 well

01:41:43.400 you can take this infinite set of facts

01:41:46.400 and then you subject it to your filters

01:41:49.400 and you let some of the facts through

01:41:51.400 and they're facts

01:41:53.400 but what about all the facts that you don't let through?

01:41:56.400 that's the thing

01:41:57.400 and that's what the gorilla video shows too

01:41:59.400 it's like, yeah, yeah, you got the basketball count right

01:42:01.400 but you missed the big primate

01:42:03.400 and you might say

01:42:04.400 well your priorities were a bit skewed in that circumstance

01:42:07.400 because you were rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic sank

01:42:11.400 you know, as the old joke goes

01:42:13.400 and so it's very much useful to think always

01:42:17.400 well your... 0.99

01:42:18.400 it isn't just your damn opinion that's biased 1.00

01:42:20.400 although it is 0.99

01:42:21.400 it's your perceptions that are biased

01:42:24.400 so...

01:42:26.400 well, and with your words it's even more

01:42:30.400 so you say, well, you can't see the thing in itself

01:42:33.400 because it's too complex

01:42:34.400 so you perceive it simpler than it is

01:42:36.400 and some of that perceptual simplification is dependent on your aims

01:42:42.400 so that's a vicious one

01:42:44.400 because it pulls the value structure that you're ensconced within

01:42:48.400 into your perceptions

01:42:50.400 it pulls it into the realm of facts itself

01:42:52.400 and then you do another

01:42:54.400 I think about this as a compression

01:42:58.400 you know, you can compress a photograph by getting rid of redundant information

01:43:03.400 that's sort of what you're doing here

01:43:06.400 so you're like

01:43:07.400 one of these squares

01:43:08.400 little black squares here

01:43:10.400 black rectangles

01:43:11.400 compresses all of those

01:43:13.400 it's like

01:43:14.400 we're going to treat those as if they're greyish black 0.99

01:43:16.400 same thing happens here

01:43:18.400 so we're blurring across them

01:43:20.400 so we have a much less higher

01:43:23.400 much less high resolution image here

01:43:25.400 so

01:43:26.400 you take the thing in itself

01:43:27.400 you perceive it as a low resolution representation

01:43:30.400 and then you take that low resolution representation

01:43:32.400 and you replace that with a word

01:43:35.400 and so the word is a two-fold compression

01:43:39.400 and then when someone tosses you the word

01:43:42.400 you unpack it into the low resolution perception

01:43:46.400 and then maybe into the world itself if you can do that

01:43:49.400 but probably not

01:43:50.400 so that's what we're doing

01:43:51.400 we're taking the complex world

01:43:52.400 we fold it into a simple perception

01:43:54.400 we fold that into a word

01:43:55.400 we throw the word to someone else

01:43:57.400 and they unpack it

01:43:58.400 and the only way you can unpack it of course

01:44:00.400 is if you've had enough similar experience

01:44:03.400 so that you have the reference for the word already in your experience

01:44:06.400 so

01:44:07.400 which is why you have to use simplified language with children

01:44:09.400 right?

01:44:10.400 because there's no point tossing a child a concept that

01:44:13.400 he or she can't unpack

01:44:15.400 so

01:44:16.400 we compress a very complex reality

01:44:22.400 through a very very small keyhole

01:44:25.400 that's basically

01:44:26.400 that's basically our cognitive processing

01:44:29.400 okay, so then here's the next kind of argument

01:44:31.400 this goes along with

01:44:33.400 the science religion argument that I was making earlier

01:44:37.400 which I want to unpack a little bit more

01:44:39.400 I think that fundamentalists 0.98

01:44:43.400 and

01:44:44.400 atheistic scientists

01:44:47.400 have the same problem

01:44:49.400 the fundamentalists

01:44:51.400 so we could say the Christian fundamentalists in the US

01:44:54.400 make the proposition that

01:44:56.400 biblical stories

01:44:58.400 we'll call them mythological stories

01:45:00.400 are literal representations of the truth

01:45:03.400 but

01:45:05.400 and

01:45:06.400 that might be true depending on what you mean by literal

01:45:09.400 but what they mean by literal

01:45:11.400 or what they attempt to make literal mean

01:45:13.400 is that they're in the same category as scientific facts

01:45:15.400 because they don't have

01:45:17.400 the idea that

01:45:19.400 there are different ways of approaching truth

01:45:22.400 and that truths can serve different purposes

01:45:24.400 they don't have a sense that

01:45:26.400 your definition of truth is actually something like a tool

01:45:29.400 rather than an ontological statement about the reality of the world

01:45:33.400 and so the fundamentalists basically

01:45:36.400 make the proposition that

01:45:38.400 the idea that God created the world in six days 5,000 years ago

01:45:42.400 is literally true

01:45:44.400 and they get the 5,000 year estimate by the way

01:45:47.400 by going through the genealogies in the Old Testament

01:45:49.400 and adding up the hypothetical ages

01:45:51.400 and figuring out

01:45:52.400 you know, how long before Moses, Adam lived

01:45:55.400 and some bishop did that back in the

01:45:57.400 I think it was in the mid-1800s

01:46:00.400 I might be wrong about that

01:46:01.400 but it was somewhere back about that time

01:46:03.400 and more or less that's been accepted as canonical fact ever since

01:46:07.400 and then the scientists say

01:46:09.400 well, yeah, those are empirical truths

01:46:11.400 they're just wrong

01:46:12.400 see, and that's the only difference there is between the fundamentalists and the atheist scientists

01:46:16.400 the fundamentalists say

01:46:17.400 those are fundamental scientific truths

01:46:19.400 and they're right

01:46:20.400 and the scientists say

01:46:21.400 well, they're scientific truths

01:46:22.400 they just happen to be wrong

01:46:23.400 well

01:46:24.400 well 1.00

01:46:25.400 I think that's a stupid argument 1.00

01:46:27.400 personally 1.00

01:46:28.400 I mean, for a bunch of reasons

01:46:30.400 one is that

01:46:31.400 the people who wrote

01:46:33.400 the ancient stories that we have access to

01:46:35.400 were in no way, shape, or form scientists

01:46:39.400 you know, modern people tend to think that you think like a scientist

01:46:43.400 and people have always thought that way

01:46:44.400 first of all, you do not think like a scientist

01:46:47.400 even scientists hardly even think like scientists

01:46:49.400 but if you're not scientifically trained

01:46:51.400 you don't think like a scientist at all

01:46:53.400 so one of the things, for example, that characterizes your thinking is confirmation bias

01:46:58.400 and so if you have a theory

01:47:00.400 what you do is wander around in the world looking for reasons why it's true

01:47:03.400 and a scientist does exactly the opposite of that

01:47:06.400 in the little tiny narrow domain where he or she is actually capable of being a scientist

01:47:11.400 and what they have is a theory and look for a way to prove it wrong

01:47:14.400 but believe me, you don't run around doing that

01:47:17.400 I mean, you can train yourself, so now and then you can do that

01:47:20.400 you know, you can learn to listen to people, for example, on the off chance that you might be wrong

01:47:25.400 but that is by no means a natural way of thinking

01:47:27.400 and of course

01:47:29.400 the

01:47:31.400 the

01:47:32.400 the fundamental philosophical axioms of the scientific method

01:47:35.400 weren't developed until Descartes and Bacon and

01:47:39.400 who else? Descartes, Bacon

01:47:42.400 there's one more

01:47:44.400 anyways, the name escapes me at the moment

01:47:46.400 but you can argue about when science emerged

01:47:48.400 but you

01:47:50.400 it certainly emerged in its articulated form within the last thousand years

01:47:55.400 I think you could say even more specifically that it emerged in the last 500 years

01:48:00.400 now, you might argue with that and say, well, what about the Greeks and other people who were

01:48:04.400 fairly technologically sophisticated

01:48:06.400 or who invented geometry or that kind of thing

01:48:09.400 but, yeah, yeah

01:48:11.400 bare precursors to the idea of empirical observation

01:48:14.400 Aristotle, for example

01:48:16.400 when he was writing down his knowledge of the world

01:48:18.400 it never occurred to him to actually go out in the world and look at it

01:48:21.400 to see if what he assumed about it was true

01:48:23.400 and it certainly never occurred to Aristotle

01:48:26.400 to get twenty people to go look at the same thing independently

01:48:30.400 write down exactly how they went about doing it

01:48:33.400 compare the records and then extract out what was common

01:48:36.400 and that's a

01:48:37.400 that seems self-evident to us to some degree

01:48:41.400 but, you know

01:48:42.400 it was by no means self-evident to anyone 500 years ago

01:48:45.400 and people still don't do it

01:48:47.400 so

01:48:48.400 it's not even

01:48:50.400 it's not plausible

01:48:51.400 if you know anything about the history of ideas

01:48:54.400 it's not plausible to posit that

01:48:57.400 stories about the nature of reality that existed before 500 years ago

01:49:01.400 were scientific in any but the most cursory of ways

01:49:05.400 so, why we have that argument continually is somewhat beyond me

01:49:09.400 part of the reason is though that

01:49:12.400 everyone, fundamentalists included

01:49:15.400 really believe in scientific facts

01:49:17.400 even though they hate it

01:49:19.400 they'll use computers, they'll fly

01:49:21.400 computers won't work, wouldn't work unless quantum mechanics were correct

01:49:25.400 like

01:49:26.400 the fact that you use a high-tech device

01:49:29.400 indicates through your action that you actually accept the theories upon which it's predicated

01:49:34.400 right

01:49:35.400 same as flying

01:49:36.400 same as anything you do in a complex technological society

01:49:39.400 you're stuck with it

01:49:40.400 you're reading by the lights

01:49:41.400 do they work?

01:49:42.400 yeah, they work

01:49:43.400 well

01:49:44.400 so

01:49:45.400 it's really hard for people who are trying to hold on to

01:49:48.400 a way of looking at the world

01:49:50.400 that appears to contradict the scientific

01:49:53.400 claims

01:49:54.400 when everything they do is predicated on their acceptance of the validity of the scientific claims

01:49:59.400 it's really problematic for people

01:50:01.400 it's problematic in a real way, I think

01:50:03.400 because

01:50:04.400 one of the problems with the scientific viewpoint

01:50:07.400 is it doesn't tell you anything about what you should do with your life

01:50:09.400 it doesn't solve the problem of value

01:50:12.400 at all

01:50:13.400 in fact, it might make it more difficult

01:50:15.400 because

01:50:16.400 one of the fundamental scientific claims, roughly speaking

01:50:19.400 is that every fact is of equal utility

01:50:22.400 at least from a scientific perspective

01:50:24.400 right

01:50:25.400 there's no hierarchy of facts

01:50:27.400 it's not exactly

01:50:28.400 it's not exactly true

01:50:29.400 because

01:50:30.400 you can think of one theory as more

01:50:32.400 true than another

01:50:34.400 but that boils down to saying that it's more useful than another

01:50:37.400 so I don't think that that's a really good exception

01:50:40.400 ok, so fine

01:50:43.400 you got the scientific atheists on one end

01:50:45.400 and you got the religious fundamentalists on the other

01:50:47.400 and what they both agree on

01:50:48.400 whether they like it or not

01:50:49.400 is that

01:50:51.400 there's so much power in the scientific method

01:50:53.400 that it's difficult to dispute the validity of scientific facts

01:50:56.400 and they seem to exist in contradiction

01:50:58.400 to

01:50:59.400 the older

01:51:00.400 archaic stories

01:51:02.400 if you also accept them as fact-based accounts

01:51:05.400 so what do we do about that?

01:51:07.400 well if you're on the scientific atheist end of things

01:51:10.400 you say

01:51:11.400 well those old stories are just superstitious science

01:51:13.400 second-rate

01:51:14.400 barbaric, archaic

01:51:16.400 forms of science

01:51:17.400 you just dispense with them

01:51:18.400 they're nothing but trouble

01:51:19.400 and if you're on the fundamentalist side

01:51:21.400 you say

01:51:22.400 well we'll try to shoehorn science into this framework

01:51:25.400 and really that doesn't work very well

01:51:27.400 it doesn't work very well with the claims of evolution for example

01:51:29.400 in fact it works very badly

01:51:31.400 and that's a problem because

01:51:33.400 evolutionary theory is like

01:51:35.400 it's a killer theory

01:51:37.400 it's really really hard

01:51:40.400 and like it's not a complete theory

01:51:42.400 and there's lots of things we don't know about evolution

01:51:44.400 but

01:51:45.400 you know

01:51:48.400 trying to hand wave that away

01:51:50.400 that's not gonna work

01:51:52.400 without dispensing with most of biology

01:51:54.400 so

01:51:55.400 so that's a big problem

01:51:57.400 so

01:51:58.400 here's another way of thinking about it

01:52:01.400 you don't just need one way of looking at the world

01:52:05.400 maybe you need two ways of looking at the world

01:52:07.400 and I'm not exactly sure how they should be

01:52:10.400 related to one another

01:52:11.400 like which should take precedence

01:52:13.400 under which circumstance

01:52:14.400 but one problem is

01:52:16.400 what's the world made of?

01:52:18.400 you know

01:52:19.400 what's the world conceptualized as an objective place made of?

01:52:23.400 another is

01:52:25.400 how should you conduct yourself while you're alive?

01:52:27.400 and there's no reason to assume that those questions

01:52:31.400 can be answered

01:52:33.400 using the same approach

01:52:35.400 I mean

01:52:37.400 physics has its methods

01:52:39.400 and chemistry has its methods

01:52:40.400 and biology has its methods

01:52:42.400 so

01:52:43.400 a method for

01:52:45.400 obtaining the truth can be bound to a domain

01:52:48.400 so why would we necessarily assume that you could use the same set of tools

01:52:52.400 to represent the world as a place of objects

01:52:55.400 and to represent it as a place in which a biological creature would act

01:53:00.400 I mean

01:53:01.400 anyways

01:53:02.400 I'm suggesting that we

01:53:04.400 that we don't view it that way

01:53:06.400 that we have two different viewpoints

01:53:09.400 maybe they can be brought together

01:53:11.400 although it's not obvious how

01:53:12.400 but that it's not a tenable solution to get rid of one

01:53:16.400 in favor of the other

01:53:18.400 and I think the reason for that is that

01:53:21.400 you need to know how to conduct yourself in the world

01:53:26.400 you have to have a value system 0.98

01:53:28.400 you can't even look at the damn world without a value system 0.96

01:53:31.400 it's not possible 0.99

01:53:32.400 your emotional health is dependent on a value system

01:53:35.400 the way you interact with other people is dependent on a value system

01:53:38.400 there's no getting away from it

01:53:40.400 and you say well

01:53:42.400 there's no justification for any value system from a scientific perspective

01:53:46.400 you're going to draw that conclusion that no value system is valid

01:53:49.400 where the hell does that leave you?

01:53:51.400 there's no down

01:53:52.400 there's no up

01:53:53.400 there's no rationale for moving in any direction

01:53:56.400 there's not even really any rationale for living

01:53:58.400 and so people say things like that

01:54:00.400 well why the hell should I care what happens in a million years

01:54:02.400 who's going to know the difference?

01:54:04.400 it's like

01:54:05.400 yeah yeah

01:54:06.400 true 1.00

01:54:07.400 stupid 1.00

01:54:08.400 but true 1.00

01:54:09.400 and the reason I think it's stupid is because 0.98

01:54:11.400 it's just a game 0.99

01:54:12.400 you know

01:54:13.400 I can take anything of any sort

01:54:14.400 and find a context in which it's irrelevant

01:54:16.400 it's just a rational game

01:54:18.400 it's like

01:54:19.400 who cares if a hundred children freeze to death in a blizzard

01:54:23.400 what difference is it going to make a billion years

01:54:25.400 well what do you say to someone who says that?

01:54:27.400 you say well

01:54:28.400 seems like the wrong frame of reference bucko

01:54:31.400 that's what it looks like to me

01:54:33.400 you know 0.99

01:54:34.400 because at some point you question the damn frame of reference 0.99

01:54:36.400 not what you derive from it 0.97

01:54:39.400 and it certainly seems to me that situations like that

01:54:42.400 don't allow you to use that kind of frame of reference

01:54:45.400 there's something inhumane about it

01:54:47.400 and that trumps the logic

01:54:49.400 or at least it should

01:54:50.400 and if it doesn't then all hell breaks loose

01:54:52.400 and that doesn't seem to be a good thing

01:54:54.400 okay so

01:54:55.400 I have this quote from Shakespeare here

01:54:58.400 he says

01:54:59.400 all the world's a stage

01:55:00.400 and all the men and women merely players

01:55:01.400 they have their exits and their entrances

01:55:03.400 and one man in his time plays many parts

01:55:06.400 well it's the sort of thing that you'd expect a dramatist to pen

01:55:10.400 but that's how he looked at the world

01:55:12.400 and we still watch Shakespeare's plays

01:55:14.400 some hundreds of years later

01:55:16.400 because there seems to be something essential captured in them

01:55:19.400 something about how people do act

01:55:22.400 but more importantly I think

01:55:23.400 how people should and shouldn't act

01:55:25.400 because what fun is it going to a play that doesn't outline

01:55:29.400 how someone should and how someone shouldn't act

01:55:32.400 you want a good guy

01:55:33.400 or a couple of them

01:55:34.400 maybe they can be complex interminglings of good and bad

01:55:37.400 you know that makes it more sophisticated

01:55:39.400 and you want a bad guy or a bad

01:55:42.400 you know

01:55:43.400 you always want to see that contrasted

01:55:46.400 either within a character or between characters

01:55:48.400 and it's because you want to know how to live properly

01:55:51.400 that's how to be a good person

01:55:52.400 and you want to know how to live improperly

01:55:54.400 how to be a bad person

01:55:55.400 so you can watch out for people like that

01:55:57.400 or so you can figure out what that means for yourself

01:56:00.400 it's compelling

01:56:03.400 and that's another thing that's worth thinking about

01:56:05.400 why is it compelling?

01:56:10.400 and it's compelling to everyone

01:56:12.400 that's the thing that's so cool

01:56:14.400 is that there aren't that many phenomena that you can point to

01:56:17.400 that are compelling to everyone

01:56:18.400 music is close

01:56:19.400 it's a very rare person who doesn't like at least some genre of music

01:56:24.400 no matter how narrow

01:56:25.400 but the other one is stories

01:56:27.400 you're hard pressed to find someone

01:56:29.400 especially if they're younger

01:56:31.400 who doesn't like stories

01:56:32.400 why?

01:56:33.400 is it a waste of time?

01:56:35.400 or is there something going on?

01:56:37.400 well

01:56:41.400 I think it's not only not a waste of time

01:56:43.400 it's actually the most fundamentally important thing you can possibly do

01:56:46.400 because there's no difference between understanding stories

01:56:49.400 and figuring out how to get along in the world

01:56:52.400 so

01:56:54.400 and there's a tight relationship between

01:56:56.400 the story that you inhabit that structures your behavior

01:56:59.400 and the games that Piaget talked about

01:57:02.400 that organize people's behavior

01:57:03.400 you know, to some degree

01:57:05.400 the reason that we can all sit in this room together

01:57:08.400 like this

01:57:09.400 is because a huge chunk of the value system

01:57:13.400 that guides our behavior

01:57:15.400 is shared

01:57:16.400 so

01:57:17.400 I'm lecturing and you're sitting in the classroom

01:57:19.400 and that distinguishes us to some degree

01:57:22.400 but you know that that's partly merely a consequence of the difference in our age

01:57:26.400 it's the same trajectory

01:57:28.400 we just happen to occupy different positions

01:57:30.400 in a value hierarchy that we both accept

01:57:32.400 and so

01:57:33.400 as long as you feel that that's fair and just

01:57:35.400 then you're not going to object to it

01:57:37.400 but I'm here in the classroom for many of the same reasons that you're here in the classroom

01:57:41.400 if you look at the higher order parts of the value structure

01:57:43.400 and maybe right out at the end of that

01:57:45.400 because I've tried to figure out

01:57:47.400 if you push why you're doing what you're doing right now

01:57:50.400 to its ultimate limit

01:57:52.400 so you can't get a story that's superordinate to that

01:57:56.400 it's something like

01:57:57.400 well you believe that the investigation of the world to acquire knowledge is worthwhile

01:58:02.400 otherwise what the hell are you here for

01:58:04.400 and even if you know 80% of your motivation is to get a good stable job

01:58:09.400 fair enough

01:58:10.400 there's still something outside of that

01:58:12.400 because the whole culture says

01:58:13.400 well you're more likely to be able to function properly in a good stable job

01:58:17.400 if you're the sort of person who knows how to go out in the world and forage for information usefully

01:58:22.400 and I think that's very much analogous to the hero story

01:58:25.400 it's like you go out and you search the unknown to find something of value

01:58:30.400 and so fundamentally that's what we're doing in the classroom

01:58:33.400 and the reason we can all organize our behavior is because we accept that framework

01:58:37.400 consciously

01:58:39.400 consciously would be we know how to articulate it

01:58:42.400 unconsciously it's

01:58:44.400 well it doesn't matter we know how to act out the patterns

01:58:46.400 whether we know that we can say the rules or not

01:58:49.400 doesn't matter

01:58:50.400 same as a wolf pack

01:58:51.400 we know the dam

01:58:53.400 we know the procedures

01:58:55.400 and you could describe them with an articulated value structure

01:58:59.400 let's take a break

01:59:02.400 okay so let's go back to the complexity problem

01:59:06.400 see I actually think it's the

01:59:08.400 in some sense it's the fundamental problem

01:59:11.400 when you read about the terror management theorist types

01:59:16.400 they think that death is the fundamental problem

01:59:19.400 and that's a good argument because it's definitely a fundamental problem

01:59:23.400 but I think it's a subset of the complexity problem

01:59:26.400 and the reason I think that is because sometimes people's lives become so complex that they'd rather be dead

01:59:33.400 so

01:59:35.400 and the reason they seek death through suicide is to make the complexity go away

01:59:39.400 because complexity causes suffering if it's uncontrolled

01:59:43.400 you know things just get beyond your control

01:59:45.400 and that can happen

01:59:47.400 you know if you're hit by three or four catastrophes at the same time

01:59:50.400 you know maybe you have

01:59:52.400 oh the political system collapses

01:59:55.400 there's hyperinflation

01:59:56.400 you lose your job and you have

01:59:58.400 someone that you love or two people die

02:00:01.400 and maybe you get cancer

02:00:02.400 something like that

02:00:03.400 like that those things happen to people

02:00:04.400 and they just think well

02:00:06.400 there's no getting out of this

02:00:07.400 like it's just too much

02:00:09.400 and you know one of the things that's very interesting about being a psychologist is that

02:00:13.400 what you learn if you're going to be a psychologist is that people come to you with mental illnesses

02:00:19.400 and that's almost never true

02:00:21.400 people come to you because their lives are so damn complicated

02:00:24.400 they cannot stay on top of them in any way that doesn't make it look like they're just going to get more complicated

02:00:29.400 and so then that causes symptoms

02:00:31.400 you know it's like this old idea

02:00:34.400 sort of a metaphor for genetic susceptibility

02:00:37.400 take a balloon and blow it up until it's beyond its tolerance

02:00:40.400 it's going to blow out at the weakest point

02:00:42.400 well that's sort of what a genetic susceptibility is

02:00:45.400 if I just keep adding complexity on top of you

02:00:47.400 at some point you'll blow out at your weakest point

02:00:50.400 you know maybe you'll get physiologically ill

02:00:52.400 maybe you'll start drinking

02:00:53.400 maybe you'll develop an anxiety disorder

02:00:55.400 maybe you'll get OCD

02:00:56.400 maybe you'll get depressed

02:00:57.400 whatever

02:00:58.400 there'll be something about you that's the weakest point

02:01:00.400 and if I just push that's where you'll blow out 1.00

02:01:03.400 so that's a mental illness

02:01:05.400 but those things almost never just happen

02:01:07.400 sometimes but not very often

02:01:09.400 usually people have just been hammered like two or three different ways

02:01:12.400 and then they collapse in the direction of their biological weakness

02:01:17.400 and then maybe you put them back together

02:01:19.400 but it's almost always a complexity related phenomena

02:01:22.400 rather than a mental illness related phenomena

02:01:24.400 not always, but almost always

02:01:26.400 so, okay, so, now

02:01:29.400 you've got this complexity problem

02:01:31.400 and you think, well you deal with it conceptually

02:01:34.400 and that's sort of akin to the idea that it's belief systems that

02:01:38.400 protect you from death anxiety

02:01:41.400 the ideas are roughly comparable

02:01:43.400 but, again, that's wrong

02:01:45.400 it's the sort of thing only a psychologist could think of

02:01:48.400 because psychologists think that everything about you happens inside your head, so to speak

02:01:51.400 in your psyche, but that's not true

02:01:53.400 there's a huge chunk of you that's outside of you completely

02:01:57.400 and so, this is a really good example

02:01:59.400 like, you know, we know the oldest cities

02:02:01.400 this is a medieval city in France

02:02:02.400 a beautiful old city

02:02:04.400 old cities were walled

02:02:07.400 and the reason for that was because

02:02:09.400 they were places of wealth

02:02:11.400 and if you didn't put walls around them

02:02:13.400 then other people would come in and steal everything and kill you

02:02:17.400 so, like having some walls was a good idea

02:02:20.400 like, the same as having walls in your house is a good idea

02:02:24.400 walls between your rooms are a good idea

02:02:26.400 or borders between categories are a good idea

02:02:29.400 and so, part of the way you simplify the world is by building walls

02:02:33.400 walls around your space

02:02:34.400 because then a whole bunch of things can't come in

02:02:36.400 and so you don't even have to think about them

02:02:38.400 it's not conceptual, it's practical

02:02:41.400 and so, and you know, one of the things I think I figured out recently

02:02:45.400 is the fundamental political difference between people

02:02:48.400 and it looks to me like the fundamental political difference is

02:02:52.400 how many walls should there be around your stuff

02:02:55.400 and the ultimate liberal answer is zero

02:02:59.400 and the ultimate conservative answer is

02:03:01.400 well, bring on those walls, man

02:03:03.400 and what's interesting about both those perspectives

02:03:06.400 first of all is that there's temperamental contributions to them

02:03:09.400 and second, that they're both valid

02:03:11.400 so, one of the mysteries, I believe, that permeates psychometric psychology right now

02:03:19.400 is why the temperamental factors that influence politics

02:03:24.400 are those particular temperamental factors

02:03:26.400 so there's five, let's say, right, this classic big five

02:03:29.400 extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness

02:03:32.400 well, the biggest predictors of political allegiance

02:03:35.400 forget about the politically correct types for a minute

02:03:38.400 but on the liberal to conservative axis

02:03:41.400 is that the liberals are low in conscientiousness and high in openness

02:03:44.400 and the conservatives are high in conscientiousness and low in openness

02:03:47.400 and so then you think, well, why those two traits?

02:03:50.400 that's the first question

02:03:51.400 and the second question is, why those two traits together?

02:03:54.400 given that they're not very highly correlated, right?

02:03:56.400 they're really quite independent

02:03:58.400 so, why do they co-vary along the political axis?

02:04:01.400 and I think this is the reason

02:04:02.400 I think it's exactly that

02:04:04.400 is that open people

02:04:06.400 like to live on the periphery of boundaries

02:04:09.400 and they like to break boundaries between things

02:04:11.400 because interesting things happen when you

02:04:13.400 when you think a different way

02:04:15.400 when you think outside of the box, so to speak

02:04:17.400 that's what open people do

02:04:18.400 they always think outside of the box

02:04:20.400 no matter what box you put them in

02:04:22.400 you know, and sometimes you meet people that are so open

02:04:24.400 that they're completely disorganized

02:04:26.400 their thought process is almost completely associational

02:04:29.400 like a dreamer, they just jump from one thing to another

02:04:32.400 they're very interesting to talk to

02:04:34.400 it's very hard for those people to get their lives together

02:04:36.400 because they're interested in absolutely everything

02:04:38.400 and their attention just flits all over the place

02:04:41.400 and so they're open

02:04:42.400 and that actually does go along with higher intelligence, generally speaking

02:04:45.400 so, and then if they're low in conscientiousness

02:04:48.400 they don't see any utility in order

02:04:50.400 and order, like orderly people

02:04:52.400 because that's part of conscientiousness

02:04:54.400 and the biggest determiner of political belief

02:04:56.400 in the conscientious domain

02:04:58.400 the orderly people like to have everything in its separate place

02:05:02.400 and properly structured

02:05:03.400 and so, you know, their world is box inside a box

02:05:06.400 inside a shelf of boxes

02:05:08.400 and then that shelf of boxes is inside another box

02:05:11.400 and all those boxes are nice and neat and tight

02:05:13.400 nothing inside them is touching

02:05:14.400 and everything in every box is the same thing

02:05:17.400 and you know, you can see that that

02:05:19.400 you can see the utility in that

02:05:21.400 and that, as far as we've been able to tell

02:05:23.400 is also associated with disgust sensitivity

02:05:26.400 and disgust sent

02:05:28.400 people are disgusted, generally speaking

02:05:30.400 when things that shouldn't be touching are touching

02:05:33.400 like something horrible stuck to you, for example

02:05:36.400 that produces a very visceral sense of disgust

02:05:39.400 and it's a boundary violation

02:05:41.400 because that's what disgust is

02:05:42.400 it indexes a boundary violation

02:05:45.400 and you can...

02:05:47.400 you...

02:05:48.400 how separate people should be from one another

02:05:50.400 as individuals

02:05:51.400 or in groups

02:05:52.400 is an entirely debatable issue

02:05:54.400 because there's huge advantages

02:05:56.400 when people mingle and mix

02:05:58.400 and there's huge dangers

02:05:59.400 when people mingle and mix

02:06:01.400 and so

02:06:02.400 at some point you say

02:06:03.400 well the dangers are overwhelming the positives

02:06:06.400 and at another point you say

02:06:07.400 well the positives are overwhelming the dangers

02:06:09.400 and you have a continual argument about that

02:06:11.400 with yourself

02:06:12.400 but more importantly

02:06:13.400 with people who have different temperament than you

02:06:15.400 you know, and the terrible temptation

02:06:18.400 is to assume that only those people

02:06:20.400 who have your temperament are correct

02:06:22.400 and that's just...

02:06:24.400 those other temperaments wouldn't exist

02:06:26.400 if that was true

02:06:27.400 I mean if you look at it from...

02:06:29.400 just say if you look at it from a strictly biological perspective

02:06:32.400 so anyways, one of the things we do

02:06:34.400 to simplify the world is to frame it

02:06:37.400 physically

02:06:38.400 and so you look at this

02:06:39.400 you've got wall number one

02:06:40.400 and then you have wall number two

02:06:42.400 but then inside the walls

02:06:43.400 you have walls around everything

02:06:45.400 all these houses are walls

02:06:46.400 and inside the houses

02:06:47.400 there are walls as well

02:06:49.400 and so everything is...

02:06:50.400 and what you do when you put walls around things

02:06:52.400 is you make part of the world simpler

02:06:54.400 right?

02:06:55.400 constantly

02:06:56.400 the reason you have a house is so that

02:06:58.400 every

02:07:00.400 buddy and his dog

02:07:01.400 isn't in your house

02:07:02.400 you just want those few people that you can barely tolerate

02:07:05.400 in your house

02:07:06.400 and not all those other strangers

02:07:07.400 and God only knows what they're gonna do

02:07:09.400 you'll still invite people in now and then

02:07:11.400 because

02:07:12.400 maybe you're sick and tired and bored of the people that are in your house

02:07:15.400 and so you want a little bit of new information

02:07:17.400 but you want those barriers to be there

02:07:19.400 so that you can

02:07:20.400 voluntarily modulate the information flow

02:07:23.400 okay, so that's the first thing you do

02:07:25.400 and you know, then you set up rules with everybody else

02:07:28.400 that says, well

02:07:29.400 I'm gonna have some walls so you can't come in

02:07:31.400 but what I'm gonna do is pay you for that privilege

02:07:34.400 by letting you have some walls where people can't come in

02:07:37.400 and so I think that's analogous

02:07:39.400 I was thinking about

02:07:41.400 the issue of discrimination in relationship to sex

02:07:44.400 because I've been thinking a lot about discrimination lately

02:07:46.400 because everybody thinks discrimination is a bad idea 1.00

02:07:49.400 which is a very stupid proposition 0.99

02:07:51.400 because you're discriminating all the time 1.00

02:07:53.400 and the most fundamental form of discrimination is choice of sexual partner

02:07:58.400 and so you might say, well why should that even be allowed?

02:08:01.400 because it is the most fundamental form of discrimination

02:08:04.400 so for example, almost everyone is racially prejudiced when it comes to sexual partners

02:08:09.400 so you think, well is that right?

02:08:11.400 what about

02:08:12.400 are you

02:08:13.400 do you use age as an exclusionary criteria?

02:08:16.400 probably

02:08:17.400 do you use physical attractiveness?

02:08:19.400 only in so far as you're able

02:08:21.400 right?

02:08:22.400 you'd use it completely if you could get away with it

02:08:24.400 roughly speaking

02:08:25.400 but you can't

02:08:26.400 because the most attractive people aren't gonna be anywhere near you

02:08:29.400 so you can't do it, but you'd like to

02:08:31.400 health? yes

02:08:32.400 strength? yes

02:08:33.400 wealth? yes

02:08:34.400 education? definitely

02:08:36.400 so it's unbelievably discriminatory

02:08:40.400 and so you might say, well why is that justifiable?

02:08:43.400 and it seems to me that it's something like

02:08:45.400 well you get to say no to me if I get to say no to you

02:08:51.400 it's something like that

02:08:52.400 we've agreed that everybody gets to discriminate on that basis

02:08:56.400 and because everybody can do it, then it's fair

02:08:59.400 it's something like that

02:09:00.400 it's very much worth thinking about

02:09:02.400 you know, I don't know if you know this

02:09:04.400 but in Huxley's book Brave New World

02:09:07.400 where the family had been completely demolished, right?

02:09:09.400 and children were conceived in bottles

02:09:12.400 and given and produced in factories

02:09:15.400 so the whole idea of the relationship between sex and procreation

02:09:19.400 had become a taboo

02:09:21.400 one of the mantras, the slogans of the society was

02:09:26.400 everyone belongs to everyone else

02:09:28.400 and so it was actually a social faux pas

02:09:31.400 to refuse to sleep with someone

02:09:34.400 just as it was a social faux pas

02:09:36.400 to have any exclusionary relationship

02:09:38.400 because another thing that you might notice

02:09:40.400 is that there's nothing more discriminatory

02:09:42.400 than falling in love with someone

02:09:43.400 it's like, you're special

02:09:45.400 and all the rest of you?

02:09:47.400 ha ha ha, no

02:09:48.400 so it's the ultimate exclusionary act, right?

02:09:51.400 and yet we presume that that's an acceptable

02:09:53.400 not only acceptable, we demand that as a right

02:09:58.400 and, well, that's worth thinking about

02:10:00.400 a lot

02:10:02.400 anyways, ok, so what you're doing is

02:10:04.400 by agreeing to this segregation and boxing

02:10:09.400 what you're doing is

02:10:10.400 carving off little bits of the world that are simple enough

02:10:12.400 so that someone like you can live for some amount of time there

02:10:15.400 without too much danger

02:10:16.400 and everyone agrees to do that, roughly speaking

02:10:19.400 because everybody needs to engage in that process of simplification

02:10:23.400 and safety provision

02:10:25.400 and so, so we have towns

02:10:27.400 and the towns are nothing but boxes but inside boxes

02:10:31.400 so there's a good, you know, a good schematic of a little

02:10:35.400 little house

02:10:37.400 and you can see that even inside the same place

02:10:39.400 we segregate off rooms for different purposes

02:10:42.400 and then what's interesting too is that we set up those rooms

02:10:45.400 as little dramatic spaces, right?

02:10:47.400 so you furnish them

02:10:49.400 and you furnish them with things that tell you how to behave in that room

02:10:52.400 so table and chairs tells you that's where you're going to eat

02:10:55.400 and that's where people are going to sit

02:10:57.400 and they're roughly going to sit facing each other

02:11:00.400 that has certain implications

02:11:01.400 because the chairs don't face the walls, they face each other

02:11:04.400 and you have a living room where it's comfortable

02:11:06.400 and there's a fire

02:11:07.400 and, you know, you're setting up little stages, basically

02:11:09.400 so that, just like kids do when they pretend

02:11:12.400 you know, they all assign each other roles

02:11:14.400 and then they lay out a little drama

02:11:16.400 and that's what you do when you invite someone over

02:11:18.400 well, let's sit in the living room

02:11:19.400 well, you'll probably get a drink if you sit in the living room

02:11:22.400 and hypothetically you're going to have some conversation

02:11:25.400 and so it's a bounded place, there are rules that apply

02:11:28.400 and then you get to have a little exploration inside that set of bounded rules

02:11:32.400 and if you're open, you're going to discuss all sorts of things

02:11:35.400 and if you're conservative and closed

02:11:38.400 then you're going to discuss a very, very small subset of things

02:11:41.400 and so hopefully everyone will agree on that

02:11:44.400 so that's one form of binding

02:11:47.400 then another is, well, we put boxes around each other

02:11:51.400 when it comes to groups

02:11:52.400 and so this is a, I think this is a picture from the Democratic Convention

02:11:58.400 when Obama was elected, if I remember correctly

02:12:03.400 but anyways, what happens is that people segregate themselves into little micro-groups

02:12:08.400 like Democrats and Republicans

02:12:09.400 and they basically do that on temperamental grounds, right?

02:12:12.400 fundamentally

02:12:13.400 and they, and then they produce these, these games

02:12:18.400 that everyone knows how to play

02:12:20.400 and that's another form of simplification

02:12:23.400 so, when you bring all these people together at a political convention

02:12:28.400 it's not like they all have the same ideas

02:12:30.400 they don't

02:12:31.400 and it could degenerate into chaos

02:12:33.400 and sometimes that happens

02:12:34.400 you get big demonstrations at these places

02:12:36.400 and sometimes people throw tear gas and all of that

02:12:38.400 but mostly speaking, it's pretty peaceful

02:12:40.400 and the reason for that is that

02:12:42.400 there's a set of procedures in place

02:12:44.400 that have some historical justification

02:12:47.400 that are embedded within a shared cultural and belief system

02:12:51.400 and everybody goes there and agrees to play by the rules

02:12:54.400 roughly speaking

02:12:55.400 and so then they can elect a candidate

02:12:58.400 they can kinda flip it down to a binary choice for the election, right?

02:13:01.400 yes or no, something like that

02:13:03.400 and nobody gets killed, usually

02:13:06.400 so hooray for that

02:13:08.400 that's a hell of a thing to pull off

02:13:09.400 to be able to generate out of 300 million people

02:13:12.400 two people to run for the highest office

02:13:15.400 then let everyone play a game to determine who they're going to be

02:13:19.400 and then to have the bloody thing function 0.89

02:13:21.400 stably through power transitions

02:13:23.400 like, that never happens, right?

02:13:25.400 that's a complete bloody miracle

02:13:27.400 and hardly any societies have ever pulled it off

02:13:29.400 the power transition being the really important thing

02:13:32.400 because a tyrant can be stable for a while

02:13:34.400 but usually what happens is he dies and all hell breaks loose

02:13:37.400 so...

02:13:38.400 I think George Washington

02:13:40.400 I think it was George Washington that said

02:13:42.400 or had said about him

02:13:44.400 the reason that he was a great leader wasn't because he was president

02:13:47.400 but because he stopped being president

02:13:50.400 and that's really worth thinking about

02:13:52.400 so then

02:13:54.400 the next thing that sort of

02:13:56.400 simplifies your world is actually your physiological structure, right?

02:13:59.400 and we talked about that a little bit

02:14:01.400 well, you can only see things that are in front of you

02:14:04.400 not things that are to the side or behind you

02:14:06.400 you know, you can only see a very narrow

02:14:14.400 you can only see a very narrow chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum

02:14:17.400 roughly that chunk that enables you to see by sunlight

02:14:20.400 and to detect ripe fruit and that sort of thing

02:14:23.400 so it's very evolutionarily determined

02:14:25.400 and

02:14:29.400 you see things of a certain size quite easily because they're handy, right?

02:14:34.400 so

02:14:36.400 objects manifest themselves to you

02:14:38.400 as things

02:14:40.400 because they have some relationship to your capacity to use them as tools

02:14:44.400 and that's dependent on your size

02:14:46.400 you have a certain strength and not a different strength

02:14:49.400 you have a certain degree of articulation

02:14:52.400 there's some things you can represent in language

02:14:54.400 so you have limitations that screen out from your consideration all sorts of things

02:14:59.400 and that's bad because

02:15:01.400 for example, before people discovered germs

02:15:03.400 there was a lot of them zipping about killing people

02:15:06.400 and the fact that we couldn't see them wasn't such a good thing

02:15:08.400 but by the same token

02:15:10.400 we're also not as overwhelmed with complexity as we might be

02:15:14.400 if we could detect everything

02:15:15.400 and you know, one of the problems with being connected

02:15:18.400 so much is that it's easy to drown in information

02:15:21.400 and that's rough for information foragers 0.98

02:15:24.400 you can't stay off your damn computer because there's 0.96

02:15:27.400 you know, it opens up your senses far beyond their normal limitations 0.99

02:15:31.400 and so where should you stop?

02:15:34.400 well, you don't 1.00

02:15:35.400 you know, you're on the damn thing like a 1.00

02:15:37.400 like a pensioner on a slot machine 1.00

02:15:39.400 and for many of the same reasons

02:15:41.400 so

02:15:42.400 your body also filters out the world for you

02:15:45.400 and provides you with access to some information and not access to others

02:15:48.400 and then the same thing is the case with your nervous system

02:15:52.400 and

02:15:53.400 I do

02:15:54.400 I put the first picture there

02:15:56.400 of the

02:15:57.400 this is the central nervous system

02:15:59.400 that controls voluntary movement for example

02:16:02.400 I put it there because people like to think that

02:16:05.400 their brain is in their head 1.00

02:16:07.400 but it's a stupid way of thinking about it as far as I'm concerned 1.00

02:16:10.400 because you have an awful lot of neurological tissue distributed through your body 1.00

02:16:14.400 like your autonomic nervous system if I remember correctly

02:16:17.400 which is mostly distributed through your body

02:16:19.400 has more neurons in it than your central nervous system

02:16:21.400 and so

02:16:22.400 you aren't a brain in a body

02:16:24.400 you know, your brain is really, really distributed through your whole body

02:16:29.400 and

02:16:30.400 I think the idea that you have a brain in a body

02:16:33.400 is kind of a holdover from the idea that you have a soul in a body

02:16:37.400 and not that I'm necessarily criticizing that idea

02:16:40.400 but I think they kind of got grafted onto one another

02:16:42.400 and so

02:16:44.400 but the problem with that is that

02:16:46.400 it

02:16:47.400 it

02:16:48.400 and this is that

02:16:49.400 so it's the soul body

02:16:51.400 brain body

02:16:52.400 mind body

02:16:53.400 dichotomy

02:16:54.400 which I think is the same dichotomy

02:16:56.400 and the problem with that is that

02:16:58.400 it's easy to think of thought as something that's abstracted away from the body

02:17:02.400 and I think that was an enlightenment idea, you know, that

02:17:05.400 that

02:17:06.400 that

02:17:07.400 just like the soul shouldn't be contaminated by the demands of the body

02:17:11.400 if you were going to be pure spiritually

02:17:14.400 so your thought shouldn't be contaminated by your subjectivity and your emotions and your motivations and all of that

02:17:20.400 it should

02:17:21.400 your abstractions should be independent of your subjectivity

02:17:26.400 and

02:17:27.400 and

02:17:28.400 rationality and emotion are

02:17:31.400 are construed in that manner as enemies

02:17:34.400 you know, that

02:17:35.400 the purpose of rationality is to dispense

02:17:37.400 with the irrationality of emotion and motivation

02:17:40.400 and that's

02:17:41.400 Freud's idea of the properly functioning ego is something like that too

02:17:45.400 because the id is this place of compulsion and drive

02:17:49.400 and drive

02:17:50.400 and the ego has to basically

02:17:52.400 suppress that

02:17:53.400 in the service of the superego

02:17:55.400 there's no idea of integration

02:17:57.400 really

02:17:58.400 in Freud

02:17:59.400 now, I don't want to be rough on Freud

02:18:01.400 and I think part of the reason that he thought that way is because

02:18:04.400 the

02:18:05.400 patients he had

02:18:07.400 were precisely those who weren't very well integrated

02:18:10.400 because of their pathological past

02:18:12.400 and so they didn't know how to get those subsystems up into the

02:18:16.400 overarching game

02:18:17.400 and so their only

02:18:19.400 alternative was something like

02:18:21.400 suppression or repression

02:18:23.400 because if you, you know

02:18:25.400 if you don't know how to be

02:18:27.400 aggressive in a sophisticated way

02:18:29.400 you're still going to be aggressive

02:18:31.400 but you're going to have to

02:18:33.400 inhibit it

02:18:34.400 control yourself

02:18:35.400 because

02:18:36.400 you can't just be aggressive around people

02:18:38.400 it just won't go well for you

02:18:40.400 so even if you can't do it in a sophisticated way

02:18:42.400 you're going to repress it

02:18:43.400 or you're going to get in trouble

02:18:45.400 those are the options

02:18:46.400 so

02:18:47.400 ok, but if you start thinking about the brain

02:18:51.400 the nervous system as part of the body

02:18:53.400 as an inseparable part

02:18:55.400 well then

02:18:56.400 then the function of thinking starts to become something different

02:18:59.400 it's not so much the objective abstract representation of the world

02:19:03.400 which is kind of what you're pursuing if you're a scientist

02:19:05.400 it's more like

02:19:10.400 it's more like conceptualization of and practice

02:19:14.400 the practice of the proper way of being in the world

02:19:18.400 and I think that's what you're more interested in anyways

02:19:21.400 I don't see how you can't be since

02:19:24.400 you're a living thing

02:19:26.400 and you're

02:19:27.400 you're overwhelmingly motivated

02:19:31.400 to

02:19:34.400 successfully manifest

02:19:36.400 those actions that a living thing has to manifest in order to continue

02:19:41.400 and it's complicated, like

02:19:43.400 you can boil it down to survival and reproduction

02:19:45.400 it's a good

02:19:47.400 overarching

02:19:49.400 simplification

02:19:50.400 but

02:19:52.400 there's nothing simple about survival and reproduction

02:19:55.400 I mean

02:19:56.400 all sorts of complex monsters emerge out of that

02:19:59.400 even simple conceptualization

02:20:01.400 but it's not unreasonable to assume that one of the things that people generally want to do

02:20:05.400 is to continue living in as pain free manner as possible

02:20:09.400 it's something like that

02:20:10.400 although that's a simplification

02:20:12.400 so now the reason I'm

02:20:14.400 I'm making that case is because

02:20:17.400 the fact that you have a body

02:20:19.400 and yet the fact that you have a nervous system is another set of limitations on

02:20:24.400 how it is that you're going to interact with the world

02:20:26.400 okay so

02:20:27.400 now we've got the nervous system

02:20:28.400 we can go

02:20:29.400 to higher resolution

02:20:30.400 we say well you have a brain

02:20:31.400 and the brain

02:20:33.400 let's see if I can

02:20:34.400 so that's the prefrontal

02:20:35.400 that's the frontal cortex there

02:20:37.400 and

02:20:38.400 that's the temporal cortex there

02:20:40.400 and that's the parietal cortex there

02:20:42.400 and that's the sensory cortex there

02:20:44.400 and these were

02:20:45.400 if I remember

02:20:46.400 properly

02:20:47.400 these were divisions that I think were first

02:20:49.400 well they were first

02:20:51.400 thought through in the late 19th and earlier

02:20:53.400 early 20th century

02:20:55.400 they're slightly specialized

02:20:57.400 so

02:20:58.400 this cortex back here

02:21:00.400 is

02:21:01.400 does a lot of the elaboration of vision

02:21:03.400 and that one there

02:21:05.400 helps you

02:21:06.400 with your sense of

02:21:07.400 embodiment

02:21:08.400 and your knowledge about where your body actually happens to be localized

02:21:11.400 and then

02:21:12.400 that one helps

02:21:13.400 for example

02:21:14.400 in some elements of language

02:21:16.400 output

02:21:17.400 and then the frontal cortex

02:21:19.400 especially the prefrontal part

02:21:21.400 which is up here

02:21:22.400 which is up here

02:21:23.400 is concerned with

02:21:24.400 the

02:21:25.400 organization

02:21:26.400 and implement

02:21:27.400 the organization of

02:21:28.400 motor action

02:21:29.400 and that's a good way of thinking about it

02:21:31.400 you've got part of your brain that deals with the sensory world

02:21:34.400 and the integration of the sensory world

02:21:37.400 which seems to happen about there

02:21:39.400 where these places meet

02:21:40.400 and

02:21:41.400 the prefrontal cortex

02:21:43.400 grew out of the motor cortex

02:21:45.400 the motor cortex

02:21:46.400 the motor cortex helps you

02:21:48.400 plan and

02:21:49.400 plan out

02:21:50.400 voluntary actions

02:21:51.400 the prefrontal cortex grew out of that in the course of evolution

02:21:54.400 so you might think

02:21:56.400 well the

02:21:57.400 there's reflex actions

02:21:58.400 and

02:21:59.400 they happen when something happens to you

02:22:01.400 you respond

02:22:02.400 and then

02:22:03.400 that elaborates up into the motor system

02:22:05.400 and that enables you to act voluntarily in the world

02:22:07.400 and then that elaborates up into the prefrontal motor system

02:22:11.400 which helps you plan how you might act in the world

02:22:14.400 right, so it's the prefrontal cortex that's the home of

02:22:17.400 let's call it complex sophisticated voluntary thought

02:22:20.400 which you could think about as

02:22:22.400 a way of representing the world

02:22:24.400 but which is more accurately

02:22:25.400 a way of generating avatars of yourself in hypothetical worlds

02:22:30.400 to figure out how they would survive if you did implement them into action

02:22:35.400 and so

02:22:36.400 I think that's why

02:22:38.400 so one of the weird things that you discover psychometrically

02:22:41.400 is that

02:22:42.400 there's no correlation between conscientiousness and intelligence

02:22:46.400 and that's a weird one, you know, because

02:22:48.400 people think about intelligence as planning and forward thinking and all of that

02:22:52.400 but that's also how they think about conscientiousness

02:22:55.400 as planful behavior

02:22:57.400 and

02:22:58.400 and

02:22:59.400 the consideration of future

02:23:00.400 possibilities

02:23:01.400 but

02:23:02.400 intelligence and conscientiousness have zero correlation

02:23:05.400 and so you think, well, why is that?

02:23:07.400 well, I guess it has to be that way

02:23:09.400 because

02:23:10.400 you couldn't think abstractly if you were prone to act out what you thought

02:23:13.400 you just go and act it out

02:23:15.400 and that, like

02:23:16.400 I mentioned this to you before

02:23:18.400 when you dream, you're paralyzed

02:23:20.400 and you can take that little part of the brain that produces that paralysis

02:23:25.400 out of a cat

02:23:26.400 or out of a person

02:23:27.400 but we haven't done it with people

02:23:28.400 out of a cat

02:23:29.400 and then

02:23:30.400 when the cat falls asleep and hits REM sleep

02:23:32.400 it'll run around until it runs into something and then it'll wake up

02:23:35.400 well, so

02:23:36.400 the dream thinking is so tightly allied with action

02:23:40.400 that there's no separation between them

02:23:42.400 so there's no real abstraction there

02:23:44.400 if you couldn't abstract

02:23:46.400 you wouldn't be able to think

02:23:48.400 and the fact that you can abstract means that you can separate your thinking from your action

02:23:52.400 so that's why, as far as I can tell, there's very little correlation between conscientiousness and intelligence

02:23:57.400 it's like it has to be that way

02:23:59.400 because you have to be able to think about things that you wouldn't do if you're going to think

02:24:03.400 so, and generally we think of people who act as soon as they think as impulsive

02:24:10.400 so

02:24:12.400 okay, well, so

02:24:15.400 there's a huge part of the brain that's devoted to sensory processing

02:24:19.400 and there's a huge part of the brain that's devoted to planning

02:24:23.400 and the whole prefrontal part of the brain is devoted to planning

02:24:26.400 and that's

02:24:27.400 and again, so what that indicates is that in large part

02:24:30.400 as far as your evolved body is concerned

02:24:34.400 the reason is that you think is so that you can act better

02:24:38.400 and of course that makes sense

02:24:40.400 and you can think about memory

02:24:42.400 from that perspective too

02:24:44.400 because if you think scientifically

02:24:46.400 you think that your memory of the world is something like an objective record of events

02:24:50.400 of objective events, but it's really not very much like that at all

02:24:54.400 and besides, who cares?

02:24:56.400 you don't need an accurate representation of all the facts about this room

02:25:01.400 in fact, all it would do is weigh you down

02:25:04.400 who cares what color the walls are, what color the ceiling is, or what color the paint is

02:25:08.400 all of that's

02:25:10.400 not worth remembering

02:25:12.400 partly because it has no relationship whatsoever to what you need to do in order to continue to act

02:25:18.400 and so what you're doing when you remember, as far as I can tell, is that you're mining your experience for information that you can bring forward into the future

02:25:25.400 it's purely pragmatic

02:25:27.400 and so

02:25:29.400 you know, I treat people who have post-traumatic disorder

02:25:33.400 or symptoms of post-traumatic disorder

02:25:35.400 and so let's say

02:25:37.400 they got post-traumatic stress disorder because

02:25:41.400 again, because a relationship collapsed on them suddenly

02:25:43.400 which is quite common

02:25:45.400 you know, they get betrayed or someone leaves them suddenly

02:25:47.400 and then they don't know what to do

02:25:49.400 because

02:25:51.400 especially if they're conscientious

02:25:53.400 because then they just tear themselves into pieces

02:25:55.400 trying to figure out what they did wrong

02:25:57.400 to bring about that event

02:25:59.400 and the reason they're doing that is because

02:26:01.400 they want to retool their perceptions and their actions

02:26:03.400 so that the probability that they'll have the same experience again

02:26:07.400 is minimized

02:26:09.400 and their mind won't leave them alone until they do it

02:26:11.400 and no wonder, right?

02:26:13.400 because if you fall into a big pit

02:26:15.400 and you get really hurt

02:26:17.400 the first thing you should figure out is

02:26:19.400 how to not fall into big pits anymore

02:26:21.400 and your mind is set up exactly for that

02:26:24.400 and so

02:26:25.400 what you do with someone who's having problems like that

02:26:27.400 so maybe they're waking up at the middle of the night obsessing about what went wrong

02:26:31.400 is you walk them through it

02:26:33.400 you do a situational analysis first

02:26:36.400 because

02:26:37.400 one of the oversimplifications that people make

02:26:40.400 and this is especially true for conscientious people

02:26:42.400 is

02:26:43.400 if something bad happened to me

02:26:45.400 I must have done something to deserve it

02:26:47.400 now that's actually a pretty functional idea

02:26:50.400 because

02:26:51.400 it suggests that

02:26:52.400 there are things about your behavior that you could change that would make the future better

02:26:56.400 but the problem is

02:26:58.400 is that

02:26:59.400 say if it's the collapse of a relationship

02:27:01.400 and you've been with that person for eight years

02:27:03.400 or longer

02:27:04.400 well

02:27:06.400 you did so many things with them

02:27:08.400 that the idea that you did something wrong

02:27:11.400 pretty much extends to every single thing you ever did with them

02:27:14.400 and that's

02:27:15.400 how are you going to fix that?

02:27:17.400 and so that's part of the trauma actually

02:27:19.400 the trauma is

02:27:21.400 80 million snakes

02:27:23.400 all at the same time

02:27:24.400 it's like

02:27:25.400 well

02:27:26.400 forget it

02:27:27.400 you don't have time to go through all that material

02:27:29.400 and so

02:27:30.400 partly what you do is

02:27:31.400 with people

02:27:32.400 and this is what you should do with yourself too

02:27:34.400 is you do a situational analysis

02:27:36.400 it's like

02:27:37.400 don't be assuming necessarily that

02:27:39.400 the thing that happened to you

02:27:40.400 only happened to you because of what you did or didn't do

02:27:42.400 there's all sorts of factors at play

02:27:44.400 so

02:27:45.400 one of the things that sometimes I do with clients

02:27:47.400 is if they were in a relationship

02:27:49.400 and I can get

02:27:50.400 some reasonable personality information about both of them

02:27:52.400 I can point out where they were temperamentally incompatible

02:27:57.400 you know like if you're a highly conscientious person

02:27:59.400 and your partner is very very low in conscientiousness

02:28:02.400 it's like

02:28:03.400 well good luck to you two

02:28:04.400 how the hell are you ever going to work that out?

02:28:06.400 because you want everything to be exactly where it's supposed to be

02:28:09.400 and you're working all the time

02:28:11.400 and your partner could care less whether things were where they're supposed to be

02:28:14.400 and they're not going to work

02:28:16.400 and you can butt heads about that forever

02:28:19.400 the probability that you're going to shift it

02:28:21.400 you know except to some minor degree is very very low

02:28:25.400 and so sometimes you end up with someone

02:28:27.400 with whom you get along very well on one temperamental dimension

02:28:31.400 and you're an absolute catastrophe on the other four

02:28:33.400 and the probability that you're going to be able to mediate a huge temperamental difference is extremely low

02:28:39.400 you wouldn't expect yourself to mediate a huge intellectual difference

02:28:43.400 right you're going to make the other person smarter

02:28:46.400 or maybe you smarter depending on who you're with

02:28:49.400 it's like no probably not

02:28:51.400 bit maybe

02:28:52.400 so

02:28:54.400 you do a situational analysis

02:28:56.400 and so what you're trying to do is to extract out information from your past and your present

02:29:01.400 that will enable you to conduct yourself properly into the future

02:29:04.400 and so that's another example of the pragmatic element of thought

02:29:09.400 well then within the brain itself

02:29:12.400 apart from the major subdivisions which we just described

02:29:16.400 there are minor subdivisions

02:29:18.400 and here's a bunch of them listed

02:29:20.400 the caudate nucleus, the cerebral cortex

02:29:22.400 the huge newest part of the brain

02:29:24.400 that's about a square meter

02:29:26.400 if you unfold it, it's all folded up

02:29:28.400 and most of the processing occurs right on the surface

02:29:31.400 that's the idea anyways

02:29:33.400 the thalamus, that's a place where a lot of the information in the brain appears to be integrated

02:29:38.400 the cerebellum helps you with balance and the sequencing of complex motor activities

02:29:44.400 the hippocampus, that's the one we talked about before

02:29:46.400 one of the things that the hippocampus does

02:29:48.400 seems to do is compare your model of the world as it's unfolding with the model that

02:29:52.400 that you desire to be occurring

02:29:56.400 and then keeps track of mismatches

02:29:58.400 and if it detects a mismatch then it disinhibits other emotional and motivational centers

02:30:03.400 and that's the beginning of your response to the unknown

02:30:06.400 so

02:30:08.400 one of them is the hypothalamus, I'm going to concentrate on it for a bit

02:30:12.400 it's a little tiny part of the brain that's pretty much at the top of the spinal cord

02:30:15.400 see, it's really small

02:30:17.400 compared to the rest of the brain

02:30:20.400 now, it turns out that if

02:30:22.400 imagine this is a cat brain for a minute

02:30:24.400 and you take off the whole cat brain

02:30:26.400 except for the hypothalamus

02:30:28.400 which people do, you take off the whole cortex for example

02:30:32.400 and then

02:30:34.400 the cat's still alive if you do it carefully

02:30:36.400 but it doesn't have much of a brain

02:30:38.400 and so you might think, well that cat would just

02:30:40.400 do nothing

02:30:41.400 but the cat's actually pretty functional if it's reduced just to its hypothalamus

02:30:45.400 and that's because the hypothalamus is an incredibly important part of the brain

02:30:49.400 and it provides what I would say constitute the major frames

02:30:53.400 the major psychological frames

02:30:55.400 and so

02:30:56.400 so like a decorticate cat

02:30:59.400 can still eat and drink

02:31:01.400 and regulate its body temperature

02:31:03.400 and engage in defensive aggression

02:31:05.400 and if it's female it can still mate 0.91

02:31:07.400 and male can't

02:31:08.400 because the male mating behavior is more complicated

02:31:11.400 and as long as you keep it in a bounded environment

02:31:14.400 it can function reasonably well

02:31:17.400 it's hyper-curious though

02:31:19.400 which is very weird

02:31:21.400 because you wouldn't expect a cat with no brain to be curious about anything

02:31:24.400 but a cat with no brain is curious about everything

02:31:26.400 and that seems to be because

02:31:28.400 part of the reason that you aren't curious about something anymore

02:31:31.400 is because you've investigated it

02:31:33.400 and you've built a representation of it that's functional

02:31:36.400 and that functional representation then stands for the thing itself

02:31:40.400 and then you can ignore it

02:31:41.400 and so you learn to ignore things

02:31:43.400 they're interesting to begin with

02:31:45.400 and then you learn to ignore them

02:31:46.400 and so one of the things that I think artists do

02:31:49.400 if they're great artists

02:31:50.400 is remind you that there's more to things

02:31:53.400 than you see now that you've learned to ignore them

02:31:56.400 so you get a kind of a hallucinogenic painting of flowers

02:31:59.400 like Van Gogh might produce

02:32:01.400 like his famous irises

02:32:03.400 which I think sold for like 220 million dollars or something outrageous

02:32:06.400 it's like what Van Gogh is trying to show you

02:32:09.400 is what those flowers looked like before you thought you could see them

02:32:12.400 because now you flower and you walk by, you know

02:32:15.400 you don't see it at all

02:32:17.400 because you're off to get a peanut butter sandwich or something

02:32:19.400 you don't have time to glory in the wonder of the world

02:32:22.400 you know, you've got something practical to do

02:32:24.400 so, alright, so we're going to zoom in on the hypothalamus here

02:32:28.400 and what you see, of course, when you zoom in on the hypothalamus

02:32:34.400 is that it's not a thing

02:32:36.400 it's a whole bunch of things

02:32:38.400 and then it's one of those horrible

02:32:40.400 whole bunches of things that are made out of even more bunches of things

02:32:44.400 and they're made out of more bunches of things

02:32:46.400 and what's really interesting about going down the body

02:32:49.400 from an analytic perspective

02:32:51.400 is it doesn't seem to get less complex as you go farther down

02:32:54.400 you know, like some of the...

02:32:56.400 I should actually show you that

02:32:59.400 I haven't showed you that little video of DNA fixing itself, eh?

02:33:04.400 Oh, I better show you that

02:33:06.400 it's so cool, it's ridiculously cool

02:33:08.400 so you definitely need to see it

02:33:10.400 until I encountered the artworks of David Goodsell

02:33:15.400 who is a molecular biologist at the Scripps Institute

02:33:17.400 and his pictures are all... everything's accurate, it's all to scale

02:33:21.400 and his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like

02:33:26.400 so this is a transection through blood

02:33:28.400 in the top left hand corner you've got this yellow green area

02:33:31.400 the yellow green area is the fluids of blood

02:33:33.400 which is mostly water

02:33:34.400 but it's also antibodies, sugars, hormones, that kind of thing

02:33:37.400 and the red region is a slice into a red blood cell

02:33:40.400 and those red molecules are hemoglobin

02:33:42.400 they are actually red, that's what gives blood its color

02:33:44.400 and hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs

02:33:48.400 and then carry it to other parts of the body

02:33:50.400 I was very much inspired by this image many years ago

02:33:53.400 and I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world

02:33:57.400 what would it look like?

02:33:58.400 and that's how I really began

02:34:00.400 so let's begin

02:34:02.400 this is DNA in its classic double helix form

02:34:05.400 and it's from x-ray crystallography

02:34:06.400 so it's an accurate model of DNA

02:34:08.400 if we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands

02:34:11.400 you see these things that look like teeth

02:34:13.400 those are the letters of genetic code

02:34:15.400 the 25,000 genes you've got written in your DNA

02:34:17.400 this is what they typically talk about

02:34:19.400 the genetic code, this is what they're talking about

02:34:21.400 but I want to talk about a different aspect of DNA science

02:34:24.400 and that is the physical nature of DNA

02:34:26.400 and it's these two strands that run in opposite directions

02:34:29.400 for reasons I can't go into right now

02:34:31.400 but they physically run in opposite directions

02:34:33.400 which creates a number of complications for your living cells

02:34:37.400 as you're about to see

02:34:38.400 most particularly when DNA is being copied

02:34:40.400 and so what I'm about to show you is an accurate representation

02:34:44.400 of the actual DNA replication machine that's occurring right now inside your body

02:34:48.400 at least 2002 biology

02:34:51.400 so DNA is entering the production line from the left hand side

02:34:54.400 and it hits this collection, this miniature biochemical machines

02:34:57.400 that are pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy

02:35:00.400 so DNA comes in and hits this blue donut shaped structure

02:35:04.400 and it's ripped apart into its two strands

02:35:07.400 one strand can be copied directly

02:35:08.400 and it can be seen spooling off down to the bottom there

02:35:11.400 but things aren't so simple as the other strand

02:35:13.400 because it must be copied backwards

02:35:15.400 so it's thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time

02:35:19.400 creating two new DNA molecules

02:35:22.400 now you have billions of this machine right now

02:35:26.400 whirring the right way inside you

02:35:27.400 copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity

02:35:30.400 it's an accurate representation

02:35:32.400 and it's pretty much at the correct speed for what is occurring inside you

02:35:35.400 but I've left out error correction and a bunch of other things

02:35:38.400 this was work from a number of years ago

02:35:42.400 thank you

02:35:45.400 this was work from a number of years ago

02:35:46.400 but what I want to show you next is updated science

02:35:48.400 it's updated technology

02:35:50.400 so again we begin with DNA

02:35:51.400 and it's jiggling and wiggling there

02:35:52.400 because of the surrounding soup of molecules

02:35:54.400 which are stripped away so you can see something

02:35:56.400 DNA is about 2 nanometers across

02:35:58.400 which is really quite tiny

02:36:00.400 but in each one of your cells

02:36:02.400 each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long

02:36:05.400 so to keep the DNA organized

02:36:08.400 to regulate access to the genetic code

02:36:10.400 it's wrapped around these purple proteins

02:36:12.400 I've labeled them purple here

02:36:13.400 it's packaged up and bundled up

02:36:15.400 all of this field of view is a single strand of DNA

02:36:18.400 this huge package of DNA is called a chromosome

02:36:21.400 and we'll come back to chromosomes in a minute

02:36:23.400 we're pulling out, we're zooming out

02:36:26.400 out through a nuclear pore

02:36:28.400 which is sort of the gateway to this compartment

02:36:30.400 that holds all the DNA called the nucleus

02:36:33.400 all of this field of view is about a semester's worth of biology

02:36:38.400 and I've got 7 minutes

02:36:39.400 so we're not going to be able to do that today

02:36:41.400 no, I'm being told no

02:36:43.400 this is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope

02:36:48.400 and it's been filmed under time lapse

02:36:49.400 which is why you can see it moving

02:36:51.400 the nuclear envelope breaks down

02:36:52.400 the sausage shaped things are the chromosomes

02:36:54.400 we'll focus on them

02:36:55.400 they go through this very striking motion

02:36:57.400 that is focused on these little red spots

02:37:00.400 when the cell feels it's ready to go

02:37:03.400 it rips apart the chromosome

02:37:05.400 one set of DNA goes to one side

02:37:07.400 the other side gets the other set of DNA

02:37:09.400 identical copies of DNA

02:37:11.400 and then the cell splits down the middle

02:37:13.400 and again you have billions of cells

02:37:15.400 undergoing this process right now inside of you

02:37:17.400 now we're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes

02:37:21.400 and look at its structure and describe it

02:37:23.400 so again here we are at that equator moment

02:37:26.400 the chromosomes line up

02:37:28.400 and if we isolate just one chromosome

02:37:30.400 we're going to pull it out and have a look at its structure

02:37:32.400 so this is one of the biggest molecular structures

02:37:35.400 that you have at least as far as we've discovered so far

02:37:38.400 inside of us

02:37:39.400 so this is a single chromosome

02:37:42.400 and you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome

02:37:44.400 one is bundled up into one sausage

02:37:46.400 the other strand is bundled up into the other sausage

02:37:49.400 these things that look like whiskers

02:37:50.400 that are sticking out from either side

02:37:51.400 are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell

02:37:53.400 they're called microtubules but names not so important

02:37:56.400 but what we're going to focus on is this red region

02:37:58.400 I've labeled it red here

02:37:59.400 and it's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes

02:38:03.400 it is obviously central to the movement of the chromosomes

02:38:07.400 we have no idea really as to how it's achieving that movement

02:38:10.400 we've been studying this thing called the kinetochore for over a hundred years

02:38:13.400 with intense study

02:38:14.400 and we're still just beginning to discover what it's all about

02:38:17.400 it is made up of about two hundred different types of proteins

02:38:21.400 thousands of proteins in total

02:38:23.400 it is a signal broadcasting system

02:38:26.400 it broadcasts through chemical signals

02:38:28.400 telling the rest of the cell when it's ready

02:38:31.400 when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go

02:38:34.400 for the separation of the chromosomes

02:38:36.400 it is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules

02:38:39.400 it's transiently

02:38:40.400 it's involved with the growing of the microtubules

02:38:42.400 and it's able to transiently couple onto them

02:38:44.400 it's also a tension sensing system

02:38:47.400 it's able to feel when the cell is ready

02:38:49.400 when the chromosome is correctly positioned

02:38:51.400 it's turning green here because it feels that everything is just right

02:38:55.400 and you'll see that this one little last bit that's still remaining red

02:38:58.400 and it's walked away down the microtubules

02:39:02.400 that is the signal broadcasting system

02:39:05.400 sending out the stop signal and it's walked away

02:39:07.400 I mean it's that mechanical

02:39:09.400 it's molecular clockwork

02:39:11.400 this is how you work at the molecular scale

02:39:13.400 so with a little bit of molecular eye candy

02:39:16.400 we've got kinesins which are the orange ones

02:39:19.400 they're little molecular courier molecules walking one way

02:39:22.400 and here are the dynein 0.98

02:39:23.400 they're carrying that broadcasting system

02:39:25.400 and they've got their long legs

02:39:26.400 so they can step around obstacles and so on

02:39:28.400 so again this is all derived accurately from the science

02:39:32.400 the problem is we can't show it to you any other way

02:39:34.400 exploring at the frontier of science

02:39:37.400 at the frontier of human understanding is mind-blowing

02:39:40.400 discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science

02:39:47.400 but most medical researchers

02:39:49.400 this is just discovering this stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals

02:39:54.400 which are to eradicate disease

02:39:57.400 to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes

02:40:00.400 and to lift people out of poverty

02:40:02.400 thank you

02:40:03.400 so like that's just so ridiculously mind-blowing

02:40:08.400 it's almost unbearable

02:40:11.400 I mean to think about that as clockwork even is a pretty strange idea

02:40:15.400 because

02:40:17.400 well those little things walk over obstacles

02:40:19.400 it's like how the hell does that happen

02:40:21.400 they're just molecules

02:40:22.400 so it's so cool because when you go down you'd think simple

02:40:25.400 but

02:40:26.400 you know

02:40:27.400 and you know he said at the beginning when they were taking that

02:40:30.400 when the little machines were taking that DNA apart

02:40:32.400 that he didn't show the error correcting

02:40:34.400 you know there's other little machines that go along and see if everything's okay

02:40:37.400 and if it isn't they cut it out and put a great piece in

02:40:40.400 it's like

02:40:41.400 yeah

02:40:43.400 things we don't understand

02:40:44.400 there's no shortage of them that's for sure

02:40:46.400 okay so

02:40:48.400 what I'm doing in some sense is walking you through a psychophysiological representation of

02:40:55.400 Piaget's developmental process I would say

02:40:58.400 so

02:40:59.400 I wanted to zero in on the hypothalamus because it seems to me the thing that sets the most basic frames

02:41:05.400 and so

02:41:06.400 we'll go ahead with that

02:41:08.400 so you see that it's made up of all these little parts

02:41:14.400 and

02:41:15.400 so it's called the hypothalamus more

02:41:17.400 for convenience than because it's a homogenous set of structures

02:41:20.400 because it's not a homogenous set of structures

02:41:22.400 because it's not a homogenous set of structures

02:41:24.400 and this is something to consider very carefully when you're thinking about the terminology

02:41:28.400 that psychologists use or that you might use to describe your own behavior

02:41:31.400 because you know you can roughly

02:41:33.400 there is a psychology

02:41:35.400 of motivation and there's a psychology of emotion

02:41:37.400 and you might think well emotion and motivation are categorically different entities

02:41:41.400 but they're not

02:41:43.400 in fact there's no such thing as a uniform set of motivations

02:41:47.400 and there's no such thing as a uniform set of emotions

02:41:50.400 and the distinction between a motivation and an emotion is unclear to say the least

02:41:55.400 and that's partly because the physiological substructures that subsume what we call motivations

02:42:02.400 and what we call emotions

02:42:03.400 and it's not like there's a motivation center

02:42:05.400 that's homogenous

02:42:07.400 the closest is the hypothalamus

02:42:08.400 but it's made of structures that are qualitatively different

02:42:11.400 and then the emotions

02:42:13.400 because I have to use that descriptive terminology

02:42:16.400 because we have to communicate about it somehow

02:42:18.400 there's all sorts of different structures in the brain that contribute to emotional expression

02:42:23.400 and they're not even in the same place

02:42:25.400 much less composed of identical structure or function

02:42:30.400 so you know we have these shorthands that we use to divide up the world

02:42:34.400 but they're awkward and untenable as the level of resolution increases

02:42:40.400 but anyways I'm still going to go with motivation and emotion

02:42:43.400 because it's a useful simplification

02:42:45.400 but you can see with the hypothalamus that there's all these, you know, complicated little subsystems in there

02:42:50.400 and I showed you that video to show you just how complicated the subsystems are

02:42:54.400 all the way down to the, really to the molecular level

02:42:57.400 how those little machines manage what they do is completely beyond me

02:43:01.400 you know, to call it clockwork when those little things that walk can walk over obstacles

02:43:06.400 it's like, clockwork does one thing, you know, only

02:43:09.400 click click click click, that's all it does

02:43:11.400 no exceptions

02:43:13.400 this thing walks over obstacles to get where it's going

02:43:16.400 it's like, who knows what's going on down there

02:43:19.400 but it works well enough so here we are, weirdly enough

02:43:23.400 so motivation seems to me to be the initial framing process

02:43:28.400 and you come into the world with the motivational systems roughly ready to go

02:43:33.400 you know, babies are hungry, babies get cold, babies want something to drink

02:43:38.400 you know, so the world already comes, in some sense, they come into the world with pre-packaged categories for existence

02:43:46.400 and those are the categories that are going to aid their survival

02:43:49.400 and you know, they're not simple either, it's not so simple

02:43:53.400 it's, well, hunger, thirst, pleasure, pain, anxiety

02:43:58.400 you know, the classic sort of, and the classic emotions, sadness, joy, and so forth

02:44:03.400 those systems are already there, but babies have more complicated systems too

02:44:07.400 like the system for exploration is already in place, and the system for play

02:44:11.400 which is really complicated, it's already in place

02:44:13.400 and so, you know, you come into the world with a human nature

02:44:17.400 and the nature seems to be distributed across these subsystems

02:44:21.400 that's one way of thinking about it

02:44:23.400 and it's also useful to think about the operation of those subsystems as something like

02:44:27.400 you could think about them as games

02:44:29.400 with an aim, you could think about them as stories

02:44:32.400 you could think about them as frames of reference

02:44:35.400 you can think about them as action patterns

02:44:37.400 all of those, and you can think about them as sub-personalities

02:44:40.400 which I actually think is maybe the best way to think about them

02:44:43.400 because if you're hungry, it's not a deterministic drive

02:44:47.400 it's a sub-personality that has a goal

02:44:50.400 and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal

02:44:54.400 it has a bunch of perceptions that suit that goal

02:44:58.400 and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal

02:45:01.400 and so to think about it as a personality is a much

02:45:04.400 it's a much more intelligent way to look at it

02:45:07.400 one other thing about Skinner's rats, you know, Skinner could get rats to do almost everything

02:45:11.400 and he would reward them with food

02:45:13.400 and so he had a simple rat model

02:45:15.400 but his rats were starved down to 75% of their normal body weight

02:45:19.400 so not only were they not social, gregarious rats like rats are

02:45:23.400 because they were isolated

02:45:24.400 they were genetically altered from wild rats

02:45:28.400 but they also weren't as complex as a real rat because they were starving

02:45:31.400 and so, but you know, a starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat

02:45:36.400 and a rat is a pretty good model of a person

02:45:38.400 but our, a lot of our models of simple behavioral learning were based on starving isolated rats

02:45:43.400 so, anyways

02:45:45.400 how to think about motivation?

02:45:48.400 we'll think about it from the hypothalamic perspective

02:45:50.400 so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals

02:45:53.400 we could say that emotions track progress towards goals

02:45:57.400 and I'm gonna use that schema even though it's not exactly right

02:46:00.400 so you say, well, motivation determines where you're gonna aim

02:46:03.400 so if you're hungry, you're gonna aim at something to eat

02:46:05.400 and then, that will organize your perceptions

02:46:08.400 so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task

02:46:11.400 which is almost everything

02:46:13.400 you concentrate on those few things that are gonna facilitate your movement forward

02:46:17.400 when you encounter those things, that produces positive emotion

02:46:20.400 as you move through the world towards your goal

02:46:22.400 and you see that things are laying themselves out

02:46:25.400 that facilitate your movement forward

02:46:27.400 those things cause positive emotion

02:46:29.400 and if you encounter anything that gets in the way

02:46:31.400 then that produces negative emotion

02:46:33.400 and it can be, like, threat

02:46:35.400 because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way

02:46:38.400 it can be anger, so that you move it away

02:46:40.400 it can be frustration, disappointment, grief

02:46:43.400 those would, if you had a response that serious to an obstacle

02:46:46.400 it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence

02:46:50.400 you know, so, you walk downstairs and, I don't know

02:46:54.400 the contracting company has set a wrecking ball through your kitchen

02:46:57.400 it's like, that's going to be disappointing

02:46:59.400 you're not gonna keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble

02:47:02.400 that little frame is going to get punished out of existence

02:47:05.400 and some new goal is gonna pop up instead

02:47:07.400 and, you know, one of the things we're gonna try to sort out is

02:47:10.400 how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big

02:47:14.400 that you should just quit and go do something else?

02:47:16.400 cause that's not obvious

02:47:18.400 you know, and you can get into counterproductive persistence pretty easily

02:47:24.400 so, we don't know how people solve that problem

02:47:26.400 it's a really complicated one

02:47:27.400 so anyways, we're gonna work on that scenario

02:47:29.400 your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival

02:47:36.400 that produces a frame of reference

02:47:38.400 so, it's not a goal, it's not a drive

02:47:41.400 and it's not a collection of behaviors

02:47:43.400 it's a little personality

02:47:44.400 and the personality has a viewpoint

02:47:46.400 it has thoughts that go along with it

02:47:48.400 it has perceptions

02:47:50.400 it has action tendencies, all of that

02:47:52.400 you can see this in addiction

02:47:54.400 most particularly

02:47:56.400 so, one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic

02:48:00.400 is they lie all the time

02:48:01.400 and that's because

02:48:02.400 when they're

02:48:04.400 they've built a little

02:48:05.400 alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves

02:48:08.400 or a big one, maybe it's 90% of their personality

02:48:11.400 and one of that

02:48:12.400 one of the things that consists of

02:48:15.400 is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years

02:48:18.400 to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people

02:48:21.400 and so the addiction has a personality

02:48:25.400 you know, and so when the person is off

02:48:27.400 or maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that

02:48:29.400 where we know the addiction is more

02:48:31.400 it's more short term powerful than I would say than an alcohol addiction

02:48:36.400 they'll say anything

02:48:38.400 and the words are just tools used to get towards the goal

02:48:42.400 and if they happen to be deceptive, whatever, it doesn't matter

02:48:45.400 they're just practical tools to get towards the goal

02:48:47.400 and then when you get towards the goal

02:48:50.400 and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that

02:48:52.400 you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug 1.00

02:48:56.400 and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar 0.96

02:48:59.400 so, okay, so we're gonna say motivations 0.55

02:49:02.400 one way of thinking about it is they set goals

02:49:04.400 but it's not the right way of thinking about it

02:49:06.400 they produce a whole framework of interpretation

02:49:08.400 and so we're gonna think about that framework of interpretation

02:49:11.400 and then emotions emerge inside of that

02:49:13.400 so that's it, so the world is framed

02:49:16.400 motivation sets goals, you could say the world has to be framed

02:49:19.400 so motivation sets that frame

02:49:21.400 goals, emotions, perceptions and actions

02:49:23.400 and then actions track progress

02:49:25.400 so positive emotion says

02:49:27.400 you're moving forward properly towards your goal

02:49:30.400 and if you encounter something you don't expect, you stop

02:49:33.400 that's anxiety

02:49:34.400 it's like, oh, we're not where we thought we were

02:49:36.400 and so we don't know what to do

02:49:38.400 so we should stop, because we don't know where we are or what we're doing

02:49:41.400 stop, frozen

02:49:43.400 and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain

02:49:47.400 they might make you get out of there

02:49:49.400 so emotions forward, stop, reverse

02:49:53.400 that's your emotions within that motivated frame

02:49:56.400 so, and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body

02:50:01.400 you know, emotions are, like they're offshoots of action tendencies

02:50:04.400 that's the right way to think about it

02:50:06.400 because action is everything fundamentally

02:50:08.400 so what are some basic motivations?

02:50:12.400 most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way

02:50:15.400 and that tells you just how important a control system it is

02:50:18.400 the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus

02:50:20.400 is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks

02:50:23.400 and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines

02:50:28.400 so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much

02:50:32.400 but if it's on in any serious way, it's like, it wins

02:50:38.400 so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the dominion of your hypothalamus

02:50:43.400 is to never ever be anywhere where its action is necessary

02:50:47.400 right? you don't want to go into a biker bar 1.00

02:50:50.400 because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary

02:50:56.400 you probably don't want that

02:50:58.400 you don't want the panic, you don't want the terror

02:51:00.400 you don't want the frenzied fight

02:51:02.400 you don't want any of that

02:51:03.400 you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic

02:51:05.400 so you just don't go there

02:51:07.400 and a huge part of how we regulate our emotions

02:51:11.400 is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them

02:51:15.400 and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control

02:51:18.400 and everything to do with staying where you belong

02:51:22.400 so, okay

02:51:25.400 so, basic motivations

02:51:27.400 hunger, thirst, pain

02:51:28.400 pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus, that's a different circuit

02:51:31.400 anger slash aggression

02:51:33.400 thermal regulation

02:51:34.400 panic and escape

02:51:36.400 affiliation and care

02:51:38.400 sexual desire

02:51:39.400 exploration

02:51:40.400 play

02:51:41.400 and you can kind of break those in

02:51:42.400 you can kind of break those into

02:51:44.400 the classic Darwinian categories too

02:51:47.400 and say well there's a set of motivations that go along with self-maintenance

02:51:51.400 that would be your survival

02:51:53.400 ingestive and defensive

02:51:54.400 see I've sort of coded them there

02:51:57.400 so the self-maintenance

02:52:01.400 there's an ingestive set of basic motivations that go with self-maintenance

02:52:05.400 you say that's hunger, thirst

02:52:06.400 there's a set of defensive motivations

02:52:09.400 pain, anger, thermal regulation, panic and escape

02:52:12.400 and then there's motivations that are associated with reproduction

02:52:16.400 affiliation, care and sexual desire

02:52:19.400 and then I put exploration in place sort of outside of that

02:52:23.400 I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally

02:52:29.400 so, what I tried to do is take the basic motivations and then nest them inside a fundamental Darwinian framework

02:52:35.400 so that you can see how the biological process of evolution has manifested itself

02:52:40.400 and then sort of differentiated into these fundamental biological systems

02:52:46.400 so

02:52:48.400 ok, so this is a rat brain flat map

02:52:51.400 and so it's basically what you would see of a rat's brain if you flattened it out

02:52:56.400 unrolled it, flattened it out and then made it two dimensional

02:52:58.400 and you can see here

02:53:00.400 so this is the hypothalamus

02:53:02.400 and you can see that it's made out of these different nuclei

02:53:06.400 that's what they're called

02:53:08.400 and they sort of correspond to those shapes that I showed you in the human hypothalamus earlier

02:53:12.400 and you see that there's different systems

02:53:14.400 there's the system for eating and drinking is outlined in green

02:53:18.400 and the reproductive system 0.97

02:53:20.400 there's two of them and they're outlined in

02:53:22.400 I think it's red

02:53:24.400 is that right?

02:53:26.400 yeah, reproductive is red and the defensive ones are in magenta

02:53:31.400 and so those are the

02:53:32.400 you can think about those as the three fundamental value systems

02:53:36.400 of living creatures with complex nervous systems as far as the hypothalamus is concerned

02:53:41.400 and then given what I told you about the hypothalamus which is

02:53:44.400 you hardly need the rest of your brain at all

02:53:48.400 as long as you have a hypothalamus

02:53:50.400 it's worth thinking that those are very fundamental to value per se

02:53:54.400 now 0.99

02:53:56.400 you might think if you only need the damn hypothalamus 0.99

02:53:58.400 why bother with the rest of the brain at all? 0.98

02:54:00.400 which is, that's a very useful question

02:54:03.400 especially because most creatures don't have much of a brain

02:54:06.400 so, but it seems to be something like

02:54:09.400 well you've got your eating and drinking system

02:54:11.400 your reproductive system and your defensive system 0.99

02:54:13.400 but the problem is is that those things first of all can conflict

02:54:18.400 you know, are you too hungry to sleep or too sleepy to eat?

02:54:22.400 so that's a pretty simple kind of contradiction, you know 0.86

02:54:26.400 are you more angry at your partner or do you want sexual relations more?

02:54:30.400 so they can conflict in the present

02:54:33.400 but then they can conflict with other people doing the same thing

02:54:37.400 and they can conflict across time

02:54:39.400 and so partly the reason that you need the rest of your brain

02:54:42.400 is to solve the problems that emerge from the solutions that the hypothalamus offers

02:54:46.400 and so because you don't want to just eat and drink and reproduce and defend yourself

02:54:52.400 you want to eat now, later, tomorrow, next week and next month

02:54:57.400 while you're able to engage in reproductive activity and defend yourself

02:55:02.400 in multiple contexts with a whole bunch of people for as long as you can possibly manage it

02:55:06.400 and so you need the rest of your brain to calculate that

02:55:09.400 and so what the rest of your brain has to do, roughly speaking, is regulate these

02:55:14.400 and also elaborate them up into something that's integrated inside you

02:55:21.400 which might roughly be your personality

02:55:23.400 and then so that that personality is integrated with the personality of other people

02:55:27.400 and so you can think about it as an emergent process

02:55:30.400 this is one of the things I really like about Piaget

02:55:32.400 he's so damn smart because Piaget is the only thinker I know, really

02:55:37.400 who really addressed the problem of the evolution of value systems

02:55:42.400 like he never nailed it down to the physiology

02:55:45.400 because there wasn't enough known about physiology when he did his work

02:55:48.400 but it maps really nicely onto the physiology

02:55:50.400 but, you know, he said, well, but he got it right anyways

02:55:54.400 he said, you come into the world with a handful of

02:55:57.400 of, uh, pre-established reflexes

02:56:00.400 okay, we're gonna complicate that up a bit

02:56:02.400 no, you come into the world with a handful of micro-personalities

02:56:06.400 that are centered around these fundamental motivational axes

02:56:10.400 okay, and then that gets you started

02:56:13.400 and that has motor output as well as perceptions and all of that that's associated with it

02:56:18.400 and then, as you interact initially, let's say, with your mother

02:56:22.400 you start to learn how to integrate those things in some sort of social context

02:56:26.400 because you form a relationship with your mother right off the bat

02:56:29.400 and so, you're starting to figure out how to

02:56:32.400 to, to produce patterned and stable interactions between those motivational systems

02:56:38.400 on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis

02:56:41.400 and one of the things you do with kids, it's really important to do this with kids

02:56:44.400 you want to get them onto some sort of a routine

02:56:48.400 because what the routine is, actually, is the beginnings of the system that integrates

02:56:53.400 all of these underlying biological systems into some sort of unity

02:56:56.400 because they have to sleep and wake up

02:56:59.400 so you want to nail that down so it's predictable

02:57:02.400 you know, they have to eat, they have to stay warm

02:57:05.400 and they need to do that in a manner that's stable

02:57:09.400 and so, it's to your great benefit as a parent

02:57:12.400 that you get islands of stability planted in the life of your kid

02:57:18.400 so that some of this gets simplified

02:57:20.400 so that the kid isn't constantly preoccupied with domination by these different motivational systems

02:57:26.400 and so it's a useful thing to know because you might think

02:57:28.400 well, you don't want to impose any structure on your baby

02:57:30.400 it's like, no, wrong

02:57:32.400 you don't want to be a tyrant about it

02:57:34.400 but there's no difference between that structure and the emergence of the child's adaptation to the world

02:57:41.400 and to some degree, what you're trying to do is free them up from arbitrary domination

02:57:46.400 by these underlying motivational systems

02:57:48.400 you know, because if a baby gets too tired

02:57:51.400 it's a horrible little thing

02:57:53.400 it'll just scream at you non-stop

02:57:55.400 and it's not happy about it

02:57:56.400 it's like, it's not good for anyone for that to happen

02:57:59.400 and so the faster... you have to do it in relationship with the child

02:58:03.400 some will sleep right away

02:58:05.400 in a schedule almost immediately

02:58:07.400 and other kids are harder to get their circadian rhythms regulated

02:58:13.400 so you have to attend to the individual differences that characterize the child

02:58:16.400 but you're still trying to establish some stable harmony out of this mishmash of initial systems

02:58:24.400 so...

02:58:28.400 alright, so...

02:58:30.400 so that's sort of a physiological look at it

02:58:32.400 this is more of a conceptual look at it

02:58:34.400 so...

02:58:36.400 I said that each of these systems you can think about in a bunch of different ways

02:58:39.400 you can think about it as something that sets a goal

02:58:42.400 I'm hungry and I don't want to be hungry

02:58:45.400 point A, point B

02:58:47.400 so the hunger

02:58:48.400 and the vision of the satiation of the hunger are all part of the same frame

02:58:53.400 and so...

02:58:54.400 if you're hungry, you go into the kitchen

02:58:56.400 you know that already

02:58:58.400 that's part of your...

02:59:00.400 procedural knowledge about how the world works

02:59:03.400 and then what you're gonna look for

02:59:06.400 are only those things that are relevant to what you're trying to do in the kitchen

02:59:09.400 everything else is zeroed out

02:59:11.400 you won't even really see it

02:59:12.400 and why would you?

02:59:13.400 you wanna see the things that are relevant to the task at hand

02:59:17.400 and so that...

02:59:18.400 that's the thing that's so cool

02:59:20.400 I think

02:59:21.400 because what it means is that you see the things that are relevant to the task at hand

02:59:25.400 and so here's something to think about

02:59:27.400 let's say that you see a whole bunch of things in the world that you don't wanna see

02:59:30.400 you know, that make you constantly miserable and unhappy

02:59:34.400 one thing you might ask yourself is

02:59:36.400 are you sure that your goals are proper?

02:59:39.400 because your goals determine what you see

02:59:42.400 now not 100% obviously

02:59:44.400 you can be thinking about

02:59:45.400 the homework you're gonna do and step off a curb and be hit by a van

02:59:49.400 it's like

02:59:50.400 you're gonna get hit by the van regardless of how you've oriented your perceptions

02:59:54.400 likely, in all likelihood

02:59:55.400 so I'm not trying to argue for pure solipsism

02:59:58.400 but it is very interesting to consider that

03:00:01.400 since you see

03:00:03.400 in relationship to what you want

03:00:05.400 that a very large amount of what you see is dependent on what you're aiming at

03:00:09.400 and so one issue is 0.79

03:00:11.400 if your life is wretched and miserable

03:00:13.400 one thing to think about is whether or not what you're aiming at is the right thing to be aiming at

03:00:17.400 and it's...

03:00:19.400 and nothing is exactly the wrong answer to that

03:00:21.400 I'm aiming at nothing

03:00:22.400 so okay

03:00:23.400 you're gonna experience a tremendous amount of misery and not very much joy

03:00:27.400 so anyways, you've got this little frame

03:00:29.400 you're somewhere

03:00:31.400 and it's not good enough

03:00:32.400 and you're going somewhere else that's going to be better

03:00:35.400 and what better depends upon is

03:00:38.400 the state of these underlying biological systems

03:00:42.400 and then more complexly as those biological systems get integrated into a personality and into the social world

03:00:48.400 then the frame and the goal is going to be dependent on that more complex hierarchical organization

03:00:55.400 so you're not in here because you're hungry

03:00:57.400 you're in here because if you get a degree maybe you don't ever have to be hungry

03:01:01.400 so the hunger is properly incorporated into your...

03:01:06.400 you don't want to be cold, you don't want to freeze to death in the winter, you don't want to be on the street

03:01:10.400 you know, so your higher order goals are long term, socially negotiated solutions

03:01:17.400 to the problems that are implicit in your being

03:01:21.400 that might be one way of thinking about it

03:01:23.400 so...

03:01:24.400 so...

03:01:25.400 and the micro elements of this

03:01:27.400 so you could say I'm hungry

03:01:28.400 that's a physiological state and a conception

03:01:31.400 I have a vision of how I'm going to solve that

03:01:33.400 but then...

03:01:35.400 and those are... that's an abstraction

03:01:37.400 but what you do to transform point A into point B is not an abstraction

03:01:42.400 you act

03:01:43.400 you know, so if you're hungry you actually move your body

03:01:46.400 say down from the second floor into the kitchen

03:01:49.400 and you arrange things so that

03:01:51.400 there's transformations in the world

03:01:53.400 and that's a good way of thinking about the relationship between the mind and the body

03:01:57.400 your hypothetical solution to your problem, that's the mind

03:02:01.400 but the manner in which you incarnate that solution

03:02:05.400 that's no longer abstract

03:02:07.400 so, you know, people are always trying to solve the mind-body problem

03:02:10.400 and that's, as far as I can tell, that's how you solve it

03:02:13.400 is you have abstractions, but they're not abstractions that are representations of the world

03:02:17.400 they're abstractions that are representations of action patterns

03:02:22.400 and the way those are implemented in the world is that you act them

03:02:26.400 and so, it's strange, because you've got this weird level of control, you know

03:02:30.400 I can move my arm, and I seem to be able to do that voluntarily

03:02:33.400 but I really have no idea how I'm doing it

03:02:36.400 like, I don't have conscious access exactly to the musculature, except technically

03:02:42.400 and I certainly have no idea what I'm doing chemically

03:02:45.400 to make those muscles transform

03:02:47.400 but my, so, my abstractions ground out in this movement

03:02:53.400 and I can observe the movement and modify it

03:02:58.400 but I have no conscious access whatsoever to the microprocessors that are making that possible

03:03:03.400 I have no idea why that is

03:03:05.400 probably because I'm not smart enough

03:03:07.400 that would be my guess, right

03:03:09.400 you're only going to, evolution is only going to allow your mind to control those elements of your being

03:03:15.400 that you're smart enough to control

03:03:17.400 and so you don't get voluntary control over your heartbeat, for example

03:03:20.400 because you'd just forget

03:03:21.400 and then, you'd be wandering around 0.99

03:03:24.400 and then you'd forget to beat your heart and bang, you'd be dead 0.97

03:03:27.400 so you don't get to do that 0.99

03:03:28.400 so

03:03:30.400 alright, so

03:03:32.400 all these different

03:03:34.400 I classified these again as self-propagation and self-maintenance motivations

03:03:39.400 and so, if you're too hot, well, you want to go somewhere cooler

03:03:42.400 and if you're too cool, you want to go somewhere hotter

03:03:45.400 same if you're thirsty and hungry

03:03:46.400 and for self-propagation, well, you get lonesome

03:03:49.400 and maybe, you know, you have some sexual desire 0.55

03:03:51.400 and each of those different systems competes

03:03:55.400 for access to this central frame

03:03:57.400 and that's something like the contents of your consciousness at any given time

03:04:01.400 so up pops a desire

03:04:03.400 but it's the wrong way of thinking about it

03:04:06.400 because a desire sounds like something that's pushing you forward

03:04:10.400 but the desire is goal, framework, emotion, perception, action, pattern

03:04:14.400 all at the same time

03:04:15.400 it's a little personality

03:04:17.400 or it's a little story

03:04:18.400 actually, when you describe the operation of one of these things

03:04:21.400 that's when you're telling a story

03:04:23.400 so, I was somewhere, I needed something

03:04:27.400 I went and got it

03:04:28.400 it's a boring little story, but that's the basic unit of a story

03:04:32.400 right, because I don't care to hear what you're doing unless you had a reason for doing it

03:04:37.400 I just say, what's the point of the story?

03:04:40.400 and the point of the story is the point

03:04:43.400 it's directional, right

03:04:45.400 it says, I went from here to there, that's the point

03:04:48.400 here's how I did it, that's the point

03:04:50.400 and you're interested in that because maybe you want to know how to do it too

03:04:53.400 and you won't have to struggle through it like I did, you could just listen

03:04:56.400 and so we're always throwing these little units of information back and forth to each other

03:05:00.400 and for good reason, I want to know what your point is

03:05:03.400 because better I learn it from you than make all the mistakes that you had to make when you were learning it

03:05:08.400 and human beings, we've got that figured out, that's for sure

03:05:12.400 so, okay, I'm gonna just explain this

03:05:16.400 and then we'll stop

03:05:18.400 alright, so

03:05:20.400 we're in one of those frames now

03:05:22.400 and we're going from point A to point B

03:05:24.400 and so the question is, how does the world lay itself out?

03:05:28.400 okay, so the first thing to understand

03:05:30.400 and this is partly the reason I showed you the gorilla video

03:05:33.400 is that

03:05:34.400 the first thing a frame does for you is make almost everything irrelevant

03:05:37.400 and that's so great because that's what you want

03:05:39.400 you want almost everything to be irrelevant

03:05:41.400 because otherwise

03:05:42.400 you're gonna be so flooded with information

03:05:45.400 that you, that's what hallucinogens do

03:05:47.400 at least in their initial stages

03:05:49.400 is they take away that filter

03:05:51.400 and make everything relevant

03:05:53.400 you can read about that in Huxley's

03:05:55.400 Doors of Perception

03:05:57.400 he does a great job of describing the initial stages of a mescaline experience

03:06:01.400 and what happens is that

03:06:02.400 all of the memory, in some sense, that regulates his perceptions is stripped off

03:06:07.400 and so he sees everything glowing and alive and magical like he'd never encountered it before

03:06:13.400 which is exactly how you would see something if all your memory about it was gone

03:06:17.400 and so he sees things as way more complex and interesting than he normally sees them

03:06:21.400 well that's fine, but, you know, if you're like that all the time

03:06:24.400 then, you know, you end up in a ditch starving to death or something

03:06:27.400 like, it's not commensurate with normal life

03:06:30.400 that's what it looks like

03:06:31.400 and so your perceptions are just shrunk and restricted to the bare minimum necessary to keep you moving in the direction that you're moving

03:06:38.400 alright, so the first thing you want to do is you want to make things irrelevant

03:06:43.400 now, if you're with someone

03:06:46.400 in a relationship

03:06:48.400 partly what you want them to do is to help you continue making most of their possibility irrelevant

03:06:55.400 it's polite

03:06:57.400 because one of the things, so you say, well, we have a friendship, let's say, we have a friendship, okay

03:07:02.400 so that means you're going, you've agreed to act in a friendly manner towards me and to support me

03:07:07.400 there's all sorts of other ways you could act

03:07:10.400 like a myriad of them

03:07:12.400 and I'm going to do the same for you

03:07:13.400 so we're simpler to each other than we would normally be

03:07:16.400 and then you go and do something that betrays me, it's like, bang!

03:07:20.400 that whole simplification is gone

03:07:22.400 and all those parts of you that were supposed to be irrelevant

03:07:25.400 because we were playing the same game 0.95

03:07:27.400 they're dead relevant and I don't know who the hell you are

03:07:30.400 and so that's really rough and people do not like that

03:07:33.400 it's this emergent mismatch between their desires and the way the world is manifesting itself

03:07:38.400 so one of the issues of complexity is that

03:07:41.400 when you hit an obstacle

03:07:43.400 everything that you have agreed with other people to make irrelevant

03:07:48.400 is irrelevant

03:07:50.400 and that's generally a disconcerting experience

03:07:53.400 now you can, you know, you might want to toy a little bit with that in a relationship

03:07:59.400 you know, so maybe you encourage your partner to dress differently

03:08:02.400 or you go do different things or something

03:08:04.400 because you don't want to be stuck in exactly the same old rut

03:08:07.400 and so what you'll agree is how you can both deviate an interesting amount

03:08:12.400 but that's voluntary and controlled

03:08:14.400 it's not the same at all as having that little mess of 80 million snakes pop up right in front of you

03:08:20.400 which is the last thing you want to have happen

03:08:23.400 and so, it's so weird because one of the things that we're striving to do constantly

03:08:27.400 is to keep most of the world irrelevant

03:08:30.400 and our cultural systems are designed precisely for that purpose

03:08:35.400 and part of what you do when you disrupt them is

03:08:38.400 you force people to consider a far more range of relevance

03:08:41.400 than they are even vaguely comfortable or vaguely competent to manage

03:08:46.400 and it just burns them to a crisp

03:08:48.400 because what your body does is

03:08:50.400 if all of a sudden everything around you is irrelevant

03:08:52.400 like I could say, you're stripped naked 0.78

03:08:54.400 I take you in a helicopter, jump, drop you right into the middle of a jungle at midnight

03:08:58.400 it's like, you're not bored

03:09:01.400 standing there, frozen, paralyzed

03:09:05.400 everything is interesting

03:09:07.400 well, too bad for you

03:09:08.400 because too interesting is very little different from terrifying

03:09:12.400 and so, you know, your heart rate is going to be at 160 for like two days

03:09:17.400 and then something will eat you and your problems will be over

03:09:19.400 so, alright, so this diagram basically suggests this

03:09:23.400 this is how you break up the world when you're going from point A to point B

03:09:27.400 it renders almost everything irrelevant

03:09:30.400 hooray

03:09:31.400 and then what happens is the rest of the world is broken up into obstacles that get in your way

03:09:37.400 and tools that facilitate your movement forward

03:09:40.400 and that's actually what you see when you come into a place

03:09:42.400 like, when you come into this room

03:09:44.400 these are obstacles in so far as you can't walk through them

03:09:47.400 and those are tools in so far as you can sit on them and watch the class

03:09:51.400 this is a tool

03:09:53.400 and these are tools

03:09:55.400 and this is a tool

03:09:56.400 and I'm a tool for, although I never admit it

03:09:58.400 but anyways

03:10:00.400 I'm a tool because you need to take this class

03:10:03.400 in order to advance towards your degree

03:10:07.400 and so basically what you see in the world are

03:10:10.400 entities of functional significance

03:10:12.400 and those are not objects

03:10:14.400 they are not the same thing

03:10:15.400 so, and that's very much worth considering

03:10:18.400 because see, we're trying to

03:10:20.400 build up a case at least in part for

03:10:23.400 analyzing the nature of the structures within which you organize your perceptions

03:10:28.400 and we tend to think that those are predicated on object perception

03:10:32.400 it's not true

03:10:34.400 it's not true

03:10:35.400 they're predicated on relevance conception

03:10:38.400 does it help you?

03:10:40.400 does it get in your way?

03:10:41.400 or is it irrelevant?

03:10:42.400 that's what you want to know

03:10:43.400 if it helps you, you're happy about it

03:10:45.400 if it gets in your way

03:10:46.400 you're negatively predisposed towards it

03:10:49.400 if it's irrelevant, it's invisible

03:10:51.400 and so, if your little scheme is functional

03:10:56.400 your little frame is functional

03:10:57.400 then most of the things that you encounter are mildly positive

03:11:00.400 and that's how you know that you know what you're doing

03:11:02.400 that's how you validate the entire frame

03:11:04.400 so, okay, good

03:11:08.400 if you found this conversation meaningful

03:11:10.400 you might consider picking up dad's books

03:11:12.400 maps of meaning, the architecture of belief

03:11:14.400 or his newer bestseller

03:11:16.400 12 rules for life, an antidote to chaos

03:11:18.400 both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast

03:11:22.400 see jordanbpeterson.com for audio, ebook, and text links

03:11:26.400 or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller

03:11:28.400 remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com slash personality

03:11:32.400 for information on his personality course

03:11:34.400 and if you want to listen to a different podcast

03:11:37.400 like I said, the Michaela Peterson podcast is on YouTube

03:11:40.400 or wherever you listen to podcasts

03:11:42.400 I hope you enjoyed this episode

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03:12:30.400 from the Westwood One Podcast Network

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 23, 2020

133. Maps of Meaning 5： Story and Metastory 1

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