In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson talks about his journey to recovery from depression and anxiety. He discusses the importance of mental toughness and how it can be applied in everyday life. Dr. Peterson also talks about how to deal with the fact that the world is too complex to be solved by simplifying the problem, and how you can start to solve it. If you're struggling with your own mental health, or know someone who is, this episode is for you. Thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep, for making this episode possible. Get up to $125 off all mattress orders at helixsleep.co/jordanbpeterson and take their 2-minute sleep quiz to score a free, custom-made mattress. They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you want to try it out for 100 nights risk-free, and you'll even get it picked up for $125 if you love it. That's HelixSleep! That's helix Sleep! Get up-to-$125 off your mattress order with up- to $250 in total discount when you sign up for a 100-night trial with Helix, and get a 10-year warranty on your mattress for 99 nights free! Helixsleep is offering up to 100 nights of free with a $125 in total, and they'll even give you a chance to try out the mattress for a total of 100 nights for free. They'll also throw in an additional $125 when you order a mattress with a discount of $100 or more. Let me know what you think of the episode you're looking for. Subscribe to the episode of Maps of Meaning Part 4! Subscribe and review it on Audible! Subscribe to get a discount code: JBPodcasts! and get 10% off your first month of the entire month of your membership! JB Peterson Lecture, starting on the next month, and a discount on the first month! You'll get 20% off the entire course, plus free shipping, plus an additional 2-day shipping and shipping throughout the entire year, plus I'm giving you access to JB's next month of JB. JB is giving you an ad-free version of the podcast, JB gets an entire month, plus a $50 discount, plus you get an ad discount, and I'll get an additional discount on JB will get an extra $150 credit when you enter JB gives you a VIP discount when JB starts his first month.
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We 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.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:50.980Welcome to Season 3, Episode 20 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:03:37.460Season 3, Episode 20, Maps of Meaning, Part 4, a Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.
00:03:43.680Now 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.
00:03:53.600And 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.
00:04:08.200So, what the problem fundamentally is, is that there's a lot more of everything else than there is of you.
00:04:14.300You know, especially if you include in that everything else all the parts of you that you also don't understand.
00:04:22.260And so, I want to walk you through how I think we solve that, at least in part.
00:04:29.960And 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.
00:04:43.480And I really believe that there's a critical distinction between those two things.
00:04:48.040And 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.
00:05:07.860I don't know, so I'm going to try to straighten that up to the degree that that that's possible.
00:05:15.700So, 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.
00:05:29.140And then a meta-story is a story about how a story like that transforms.
00:05:32.600And 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.
00:05:49.400So, the first thing I want to show you, I know many of you have seen this, but I'm going to show it anyways.
00:05:57.400For 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.
00:06:10.400And 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,
00:06:26.400we believe that everything is okay and our emotions stay under control, but if that model mismatches, then, we know that something's up.
00:06:38.400Now, 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,
00:06:52.400who was arguably the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century.
00:06:55.400Luria 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,
00:07:06.400and some of what we're going to talk about over the upcoming weeks with regards to brain function.
00:07:12.400Much of it is predicated on Luria's work, and Sokolov and Vino Godova were his students, and they were interested in this phenomena.
00:07:20.400They were interested in psychophysiological measurement, right?
00:07:23.400So, as a way of inferring brain function, and so psychophysiological measurement is measurement of those physiological parameters,
00:07:30.400say like pupil width, or skin conductance, or EEG, that are in some ways directly reflective of how the brain works.
00:07:40.400Now, if you measure skin resistance, skin resistance changes with the amount that you sweat, and that can change very, very rapidly,
00:07:50.400and it changes in response to physiological demands placed on your body.
00:07:55.400So, for example, if your body assumes that you're going to leap into action for some purpose,
00:08:01.400then 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.
00:08:10.400And so what you see, if you put someone in a lab chair, and you expose themselves to different stimuli,
00:08:19.400you find that, for example, if you expose them to something that's threatening, say like a picture of a snake,
00:08:24.400then their skin conductance will decrease because they're, or sorry, their skin conductance will increase because they sweat a little bit more,
00:08:32.400and it's quite a rapid response, it can be a very rapid response.
00:08:36.400Now, one of the things that Sokolov, or, yeah, that's right, noted was that if he, if I sat you down, for example,
00:08:49.400and 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,
00:08:57.400that the first time you heard the tone, you'd produce quite a spike in skin conductance, and the next time a slightly smaller spike,
00:09:04.400and then the next time a slightly smaller spike until after maybe you'd heard it three or four times,
00:09:09.400you would not respond to it at all, and that was often regarded as habituation.
00:09:14.400And 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.
00:09:24.400So 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,
00:09:30.400and then it'll come out, then if you poke it again, it'll go back into its shell, and it'll come out.
00:09:34.400But if you keep doing that, sooner or later the snail will just stop going in.
00:09:38.400And you might think of that, it has been conceptualized as the simplest form of learning habituation.
00:09:44.400And the behaviors tended to presume that if a human being manifested a response that could be modeled by a simple organism,
00:09:53.400then 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.
00:10:00.400So, 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.
00:10:07.400You 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.
00:10:17.400So, you know, your brain is actually quite distributed throughout your body, it's not just in your head like people tend to think.
00:10:23.400And so, we have conserved fast-acting reflexes at various levels of our nervous system.
00:10:32.400They aren't capable of sophisticated response, it's pretty much stimulus response, thinking about it from the behavioral perspective,
00:10:40.400but they have as an advantage incredible speed, because there just aren't that many neural connections between the stimulus and the response.
00:10:47.400And so, we have layers of response at different time frames that help us match with the demands of the external environment.
00:10:57.400So Charles Darwin, for example, used to go into the, I think it was, museum in England, I don't remember the name of it,
00:11:02.400they 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,
00:11:08.400and he'd jerk back, and he tried many, many times to master that reflexive response to the snake, but there was no way.
00:11:15.400Every time that thing struck at him, he'd jump backwards.
00:11:18.400Well, you can imagine the survival utility in a reflex like that, but in reflexes in general.
00:11:24.400Okay, 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,
00:11:34.400because there are certain gradations of tone that you're not capable of perceiving,
00:11:39.400but let's assume you took the tone and you adjusted it enough so that it was perceptibly louder,
00:11:44.400or it was perceptibly a different frequency, or something like that, or even that the spaces between the tones,
00:11:50.400because I said they were predictably spaced, even though if the spaces between the tones were changed,
00:11:56.400then when the change occurred, the orienting reflex would be reinstated, you'd respond to it again.
00:12:02.400And Sokolov tried to vary the tone on many, many parameters, but no matter what parameter he varied it on,
00:12:09.400as long as you could detect it perceptibly, you'd produce an orienting reflex.
00:12:14.400So 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,
00:12:25.400because 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?
00:12:32.400And so for the longest time, and this was also true for people who were investigating artificial intelligence,
00:12:38.400we had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world and hold it in their mind, so to speak,
00:12:44.400and then they'd act in the world, and they'd compare what they expected to happen in the world with the model,
00:12:50.400and as long as there was a match, then there was no orienting reflex.
00:12:54.400Now the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex, it's not merely an alteration in skin conductance,
00:13:00.400what it is in essence is the manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown,
00:13:07.400and the initial stages of that are very, very quick, but it's hard to tell when the orienting reflex stops
00:13:14.400and when more complex learning begins, they sort of shade into one another.
00:13:18.400So the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite reflexive, but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex.
00:13:25.400So for example, well, I always think the example of betrayal is the best one, because it's so complex.
00:13:33.400So imagine that, you know, you come home and you find evidence, lipstick or something like that,
00:13:39.400evidence 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,
00:13:45.400there's going to be a real shock, and that's reflexive, it's very much akin to the response that you would manifest
00:13:52.400if you saw a predator or a snake or something like that, and so that's very instantaneous, you know,
00:13:58.400and then that'll prepare you for action, you'll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next,
00:14:04.400a 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,
00:14:14.400because there's so many things that you have to reconsider.
00:14:17.400First of all, the person might now appear to you as a threat, that's pretty immediate,
00:14:21.400so there's a biological, physiological response first, your body reacts first, then you respond emotionally,
00:14:28.400that's going to take a while, and you know, that emotional response might extend over days or weeks or months or even years,
00:14:34.400and then as you're doing that as well, you're going to try to start to resort out your interpretive schema,
00:14:41.400so that it can adjust to the transformation that this error on your part, say, or this catastrophe or this betrayal,
00:14:50.400it has to adjust to whatever information that event contains, and so the orienting reflex can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time.
00:15:00.400It's best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process.
00:15:07.400Now, that was standard, that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time,
00:15:14.400that we created a detailed internal model of the world, and we watched how the world was unfolding,
00:15:21.400and 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,
00:15:30.400because they basically localized, you could use complex EEG, electroencephalogram technology,
00:15:36.400to localize where the orienting reflex was occurring in the brain, and basically it appeared to occur, roughly speaking, in the hippocampus,
00:15:43.400and the theory arose that your brain, your cortex, let's say, produced a very complex model of the world, an internal model,
00:15:51.400and your senses were producing a model of the external world, and the hippocampus was watching those two things to see if they matched,
00:15:58.400and if they didn't match, there was a mismatch signal, and that would be the orienting reflex,
00:16:02.400and then your body would start to prepare, would prepare itself for whatever that mismatch meant,
00:16:08.400and then you would engage in exploratory behavior to try to update your model.
00:16:13.400That was the standard theory. It was a very well accepted theory. It has elements of cybernetic theory in it,
00:16:20.400but it was well accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence,
00:16:26.400that's how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems. They tried to make ones that would model the world,
00:16:31.400and then act, and then compare the changes in the world to that model. But that didn't go anywhere, as it turned out,
00:16:38.400because it turned out that it's so difficult to see and model the world that people had no idea how complex that was.
00:16:46.400It was impossibly complex, as it turned out, and so that's part of the reason we don't have robots wandering around
00:16:52.400doing apparently simple things like walking, you know, walking in an environment like this.
00:16:57.400Now when we look at the environment, we think, well, it's not that hard to look at, it's full of objects,
00:17:03.400and they're just self-evident, there they are, and we can just wander through it, you know,
00:17:08.400and 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.
00:17:17.400But the AI guys learned pretty quick that perceiving the world was way more difficult than anybody had guessed.
00:17:24.400And then this experiment really, in some sense, put a phenomenological punch behind that observation,
00:17:33.400because one of the presuppositions of the orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that you were very good at detecting changes,
00:17:42.400that your nervous system would automatically detect change, anomaly, right, any mismatch between your model and what you expected.
00:17:49.400And then, well, the AI guys, I think, figured out, first of all, that that was a big problem,
00:17:54.400that the problem of perception was much more complicated than that.
00:17:58.400But, you know, it's actually, it's out of that same set of observations, in some sense, that postmodernism emerged in literature,
00:18:06.400because, in literary criticism, because, well, it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object like a chair.
00:18:14.400And part of that is, you know, if you just do that to the chair, it's really different than it was before.
00:18:20.400You could imagine how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions, right?
00:18:25.400And 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,
00:18:31.400if you were actually painting it, you'd find out that the colours of the chair when it's in that location
00:18:37.400and the colours in the chair when it's in that location, just because of the difference in lighting, are substantially different.
00:18:43.400I think it was Monet, I think, who painted a very large series of haystacks in the French countryside, right?
00:18:49.400In different seasons and under different conditions of illumination.
00:18:53.400Just because he was exploring how radically different the same object could be as it moved through contexts.
00:18:59.400And so, it isn't even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it.
00:19:04.400And the answer is something like, well, you can sit on it in both positions.
00:19:08.400Which is not a description of an object, by the way. Right?
00:19:12.400That's a description of something that's useful, something that's a tool, something that exists in relationship to your body.
00:21:49.400Okay, well, so obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, the, um,
00:21:56.400the number of times I believe that they threw it back, they threw it back and forth was 16, if I remember this correctly.
00:22:02.400But, of course, that's not really the issue, because what happens in the middle of the scene is that
00:22:08.400a guy wearing a gorilla suit comes out into the middle of the screen and pounds his chest three or four times.
00:22:14.400And he comes out quite slowly, as, as you saw. How many of you, is there anybody here who didn't see the gorilla?
00:22:19.400No, well, you, and I presume all of you knew about this video anyways.
00:22:23.400So, uh, Dan Simon, who produced this video, has got a couple of other ones where he shows that, uh,
00:22:29.400you know, even if you're smart enough to see the gorilla, because you've seen the video before, you've heard about it,
00:22:34.400if you make other changes in the background, you'll, you'll count properly and you'll catch the gorilla,
00:22:39.400but you'll miss the other changes in the background. And they're not trivial either.
00:22:42.400And it's really quite remarkable. He's produced other, uh, uh, short videos, for example,
00:22:47.400where 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.
00:22:55.400And you'd think, well, yeah, you're gonna see that. It's like, you don't, you don't.
00:22:59.400So, okay, so this threw, this threw a big spanner into the works, this sort of experiment, along with the AI failures,
00:23:06.400and we could even say the postmodern dilemma. It's like, well, hmm, everyone, virtually, every psychologist,
00:23:14.400would have predicted before this series of experiments that there's no damn way you'd miss that gorilla.
00:23:19.400Because your nervous system was actually attuned to change in the environment.
00:23:23.400And, like, that's a big change. And it's also a gorilla. It's something you would really think that you couldn't miss,
00:23:29.400you couldn't possibly miss, especially when it's occupying the center of the, of the visual field.
00:23:35.400And so, well, this is part of a phenomena called change blindness, and it helped psychologists,
00:23:41.400who had been studying the visual system for a very long time, figure out, well, mostly figure out exactly how blind human beings are.
00:23:50.400Because we're way blinder than we think. And, and so we actually focus on much less of the world than we think.
00:23:57.400And, um, we do that partly. It's not exactly obvious how we do it.
00:24:02.400It'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,
00:24:09.400which is always dancing around, like a, like a pinpoint or a laser beam, moving back and forth.
00:24:14.400And we're assembling those little snapshots from the fovea into a relatively coherent picture.
00:24:21.400Maybe 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,
00:24:28.400so my brain can sort of infer that that, that's remained stable.
00:24:32.400But like, if I look at you, and I, and I pay it, I've, I've tried to learn how to do this,
00:24:36.400because you can look at something, and then pay attention to the periphery. It's annoying.
00:24:41.400But, so, if I'm looking at you, I really can't make out your eyes.
00:24:46.400I 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.
00:24:52.400And so that's what, your periphery is sort of like frog vision or dinosaur vision.
00:24:56.400It's much better at picking up movement than it is at picking up something that's staying still.
00:25:00.400And 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.
00:25:08.400But if it's moving, then, you know, that's a good thing that you might pay attention to.
00:25:12.400And so, if your periphery catches movement, then you'll focus your fovea on it.
00:25:16.400It's like you go from really low resolution to really high resolution.
00:25:20.400And so, the center of your vision is incredibly high resolution.
00:25:23.400But then it fades into low resolution as you move towards the periphery until it's out here,
00:25:28.400which would, say, be about 170 degrees.
00:25:31.400I really, if I concentrate on this hand, I can tell it's a hand mostly when it's moving.
00:26:39.400So, that's the problem that we're going to try to unpack.
00:26:42.400Now, 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.
00:26:58.400And you compare that to the objects in the actual world and how they're interacting.
00:27:03.400You say, well, no, you're certainly not making a complete model.
00:27:07.400And people should have known better anyways, even subjects to the limits of your perceptions.
00:27:11.400Because there's all sorts of things in the world that you can't directly perceive.
00:27:15.400But 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.
00:27:29.400And you're also comparing that to a model of the world as it's currently unfolding.
00:27:33.400Because the other thing that was implicit, this is really tricky, this is where you have to watch your implicit assumptions.
00:27:39.400The other thing that was implicit in the original cybernetic theory was that you have a model of the world that's complete.
00:27:48.400And then what you're watching is the actual world as it unfolds.
00:28:09.400And then you compare it to the model that you expect or desire more accurately, desire.
00:28:14.400Although the initial models were expectation.
00:28:17.400Because if you're in the lab listening to tones, it's not like you desire anything.
00:28:21.400But mostly when you're acting in the world, you have desires.
00:28:24.400And 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.
00:28:36.400Anyways, you have a model of the world that's generated as you look at it.
00:28:40.400You have another model of the world that's something like the world that you desire.
00:28:52.400You don't see the anomaly unless it upsets your current pursuit.
00:28:56.400And 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.
00:29:08.400And generally, I don't see any of that.
00:29:23.400So 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.
00:29:36.400And 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.
00:29:44.400And 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.
00:30:00.400It doesn't just determine what you expect or want. It bloody well determines what you see.
00:30:06.400And that makes the world a completely different place. No one really expected that.
00:30:10.400And so, if you watch the basketballs, you see the basketball. If you stop watching the basketball, well then you see the gorilla.
00:30:19.400And 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?
00:30:27.400And 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?
00:30:40.400Something 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.
00:30:51.400Because it's not like you just add up movements and make up your life. It's not that simple.
00:30:57.400And it's related to the novel problem, the problem of meaning in a literary work.
00:31:03.400So you imagine, you're trying to specify the meaning of a literary work.
00:31:07.400Well, 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.
00:31:16.400And then the meaning of the phrase is dependent on the sentence that it's embedded in.
00:31:20.400And 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.
00:31:28.400And then within the culture, and then within whatever your peculiar personal experience is.
00:31:34.400All of those things nested are operative to some degree when you're extracting out the meaning at any level of analysis.
00:31:40.400They're all operating simultaneously. So you might say, well, what are you doing in this classroom?
00:31:46.400Well, the answer is sitting in a chair.
00:31:49.400But that's, obviously, that's a very short term and context independent answer.
00:31:57.400But 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.
00:32:04.400And 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.
00:32:12.400And that's embedded within your desire to finish up the semester, and then to finish up the year, and then to get your degree.
00:32:18.400And then you nest that inside whatever it is, whatever the reason is that you're getting your degree.
00:32:24.400And 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.
00:32:34.400And so I could say, well, you're sitting here because it serves your ultimate values.
00:32:39.400Well, that's true. It seems a bit abstract to be useful, right?
00:32:46.400It gets so vague out at the outermost levels that it doesn't really have much specificity, right? So it seems to lack information.
00:32:54.400But 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.
00:33:02.400And so there's some level in there that you would interpret as meaningful. God only knows why.
00:33:09.400And that's the level, there's a natural level of perception for that sort of thing.
00:33:14.400So for example, when children learn to name an animal, for example, they'll name cat.
00:33:21.400They don't name the species of cat or the subspecies of cat.
00:33:25.400And they don't confuse cats with dogs, even though they're both in the category of, you know, four-legged furry mammal.
00:33:32.400So why not call a cat and a dog furry mammals?
00:33:37.400Well, children don't do that. They go to cat and dog.
00:33:40.400And people who've studied the acquisition of language have found that there are basic level categories that children pick up first.
00:33:48.400And they're often represented with short words.
00:33:50.400And 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.
00:34:37.400And I was typing out an essay and it crashed.
00:34:42.400And so what happens when your computer crashes?
00:34:45.400Well, you know, usually you utter some sort of curse.
00:34:48.400And 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.
00:34:59.400And so when there's a bunch of monkeys together, you know, they're not all preyed on by eagles and leopards and snakes.
00:35:05.400But, you know, there's usually a predator in that category for every single monkey population.
00:35:10.400And 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.
00:35:20.400Get out on a thin branch so the cougar can't eat you and look the hell out for the snake.
00:35:25.400But there's a circuit that's linked to emotions that produces an instinctive utterance that represents that category.
00:35:32.400And that's the same circuit that you use when you curse.
00:35:36.400And it's not the same circuit that you use for normal language.
00:35:39.400And we know that because that circuit is activated in people who have Tourette's Syndrome because they preferentially swear.
00:35:46.400You think, well, why in the world would you have a neurological condition that makes you preferentially curse?
00:35:51.400Well, that's the reason. You don't just have one linguistic circuit. You have one for, oh my god, there's a predator.
00:35:58.400And that's the one that will get activated when something happens like your computer crashing.
00:36:04.400Because, 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.
00:36:17.400Right, because that's what you want to give it a whack.
00:36:20.400It's like, it doesn't behave whack. Aggression right away.
00:36:23.400Well, that's some clue as to the categorization category system that you're automatically using to encapsulate the event.
00:36:32.400Okay, so fine. What do you do when your computer crashes?
00:36:35.400Well, 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.
00:36:41.400And maybe you turn it on and off, right?
00:36:44.400And that doesn't work. It didn't work.
00:36:45.400And 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.
00:36:52.400And so I brought a light behind the computer and the light wouldn't go on.
00:36:55.400And so I thought, aha, I must have blown a fuse.
00:36:58.400So I went to the fuse box and took a look, but the fuses were fine.
00:37:02.400And so I thought, oh, the power's gone out. So then I went outside and the power was out.
00:37:07.400None of the street lights were working. The power was out everywhere.
00:37:11.400And it was seriously out because this was the time that almost the entire northeast power grid in Quebec collapsed.
00:37:19.400And the reason it collapsed is because there was a solar flare.
00:37:24.400And 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.
00:39:11.400And you certainly don't care about the fact that it's dependent on, well, the electrical power, for example.
00:39:17.400And 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.
00:39:27.400Fixing 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.
00:39:34.400You 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.
00:39:52.400Because you also don't think, well, the stability of your computer is dependent on the stability of the political system.
00:39:58.400But, 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.
00:40:07.400That's their normal state, is broken, not working.
00:40:11.400And 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.
00:40:25.400And you only get a glimpse of what the computer is really like when it doesn't work.
00:40:29.400Then it's when it becomes a complex object, right?
00:40:32.400As long as it's working, then your stupid perceptions are, are perfectly fine to get the job done.
00:40:40.400And that's another indication that what you're using your perceptions for is to get the job done.
00:40:46.400And 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.
00:40:58.400You know, so for example, and generally that is what you should do.
00:41:02.400If 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,
00:41:09.400or you can immediately cascade into whether or not you should have a relationship with this person at all,
00:41:15.400or even into whether or not you should even bother with relationships.
00:41:19.400Which is, you know, every time there's an argument, that question is a reasonable question to have emerge,
00:41:26.400or at least it's in the realm of potential reasonable questions.
00:41:29.400But it doesn't seem useful to jump to the most catastrophic possible explanation every time some minor thing goes wrong.
00:41:37.400That's what happens to people who have an anxiety disorder.
00:41:40.400And that's what happens to people who are depressed, right?
00:41:44.400And so what happens is it tends to propagate up the entire system until it takes out their highest-order conceptualizations.
00:41:51.400You know, so if you're seriously depressed, maybe you'll watch a news article about something stupid,
00:41:56.400and you'll think, Jesus, why should I even be alive?
00:41:58.400You know, and I'm dead serious about that.
00:42:01.400If you score like 60 on the Beck Depression inventory, which puts you way the hell up in the depressed range,
00:42:06.400anything that happens to you that's negative will trigger suicidal thoughts, roughly speaking.
00:42:12.400And sometimes even positive things will do it, because there are very few positive things that happen
00:42:17.400that don't carry with them some threat of change or transformation.
00:42:21.400So, 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?
00:42:31.400Because it, it's not, that level of analysis is not self-evident.
00:42:35.400And you see this with people who are high in neuroticism, too, you know.
00:42:42.400Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:42:48.400Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:42:56.400In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:43:01.400Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:43:05.400you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:43:10.400And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:43:13.400With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:43:20.400Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:43:24.400Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:43:28.400That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
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00:46:47.400Welcome 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.
00:47:01.400Sorry 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.
00:47:09.400My 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.
00:47:19.400Seems a little unnecessary given the fact we've all had COVID and have now been recovered fully for over a month.
00:47:25.400If you guys didn't know about the COVID, now you know. He's okay. It really wasn't that bad.
00:47:30.400I don't have much else to tell you really. Life isn't easy. We're still waiting for dad to recover more.
00:47:35.400It's been very difficult, and it's still difficult. It won't be hard forever, but it is right now.
00:47:40.400If you're interested in staying up to date with what's going on, obviously I'll be updating you here as well periodically.
00:47:46.400I have my own podcast. I interviewed Representative Dan Crenshaw, and that episode is coming out Tuesday, which is exciting.
00:47:52.400We talk about mental toughness, something I would argue isn't being taught well enough these days.
00:47:57.400I 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.
00:48:03.400Probably the most important, actually. It's been hard this year to stand by watching him recover.
00:48:09.400Obviously, most of my feelings are empathy for him, but I think that's the only reason I've been able to help, really.
00:48:15.400Anyway, enjoy the episode. Stay sane out there.
00:48:20.400Sleep is really important for your health. You know how awful you can feel with jet lag?
00:48:25.400A lot of that is just sleep disruption. Hopefully you've tried to improve your sleep. If not, you should.
00:48:31.400There are a few key things you can do. Blackout curtains or a sleep mask, not using blue light a few hours before bed, sleeping in a cold room, and a quality mattress.
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00:49:29.400Season 3, Episode 20, Maps of Meaning, Part 4, a Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.
00:49:39.400Now 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.
00:49:49.400And 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.
00:50:04.400So, what the problem fundamentally is, is that there's a lot more of everything else than there is of you, you know.
00:50:10.400Especially if you include in that everything else all the parts of you that you also don't understand.
00:50:16.400And so, I want to walk you through how I think we solve that, at least in part.
00:50:24.400And we do that by, essentially by simplifying the world.
00:50:28.400But I think mostly that we simplify it as a place in which to act, rather than a place in which to perceive objects.
00:50:38.400And I really believe that there's a critical distinction between those two things.
00:50:43.400And 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.
00:50:53.400Is 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.
00:51:03.400I don't know, so I'm going to try to straighten that up to the degree that that's possible.
00:51:10.400So, I'm going to talk to you about stories and meta-stories.
00:51:14.400And 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.
00:51:24.400And then a meta-story is a story about how a story like that transforms.
00:51:28.400And I would say, we'll concentrate on the structure of the story, and then we'll get into the structure of the meta-story.
00:51:44.400So the first thing I want to show you, I know many of you have seen this, but I'm going to show it anyways.
00:51:49.400For 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.
00:52:05.400And then we act in the world, and we compare what happens to that model.
00:52:12.400And 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.
00:52:27.400But if that model mismatches, then we know that something's up.
00:52:33.400Now, 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.
00:52:51.400Luria spent a lot of time studying soldiers from World War II that had received head injuries of various sorts.
00:52:59.400And 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.
00:53:07.400Much of it is predicated on Luria's work.
00:53:10.400And Sokolov and Vino Gradova were his students, and they were interested in this phenomena.
00:53:15.400They were interested in psychophysiological measurement, right, so as a way of inferring brain function.
00:53:21.400And 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.
00:53:36.400Now, if you measure skin resistance, skin resistance changes with the amount that you sweat, and that can change very, very rapidly.
00:53:46.400And it changes in response to physiological demands placed on your body.
00:53:50.400So 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.
00:54:00.400And you can measure those transformations quite accurately by measuring the electrical resistance of the skin.
00:54:06.400And so what you see, if you put someone in a lab chair, and you expose themselves to different stimuli,
00:54:14.400you find that, for example, if you expose them to something that's threatening, say like a picture of a snake,
00:54:19.400then their skin conductance will decrease because they're, sorry, their skin conductance will increase because they sweat a little bit more.
00:54:27.400And it's quite a rapid response. It can be a very rapid response.
00:54:32.400Now, one of the things that Sokolov, or, uh,
00:58:10.400So Sokolov's idea was that you must be producing a complex internal model of the world
00:58:16.400that's in concordance with the world across pretty much every perceptible dimension,
00:58:21.400because if you weren't doing that, how in the world would you know that the tone had changed
00:58:26.400from what you had already learned about it?
00:58:28.400And so for the longest time, and this was also true for people who were investigating artificial intelligence,
00:58:34.400we had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world
00:58:38.400and hold it in their mind, so to speak, and then they'd act in the world,
00:58:42.400and they'd compare what they expected to happen in the world with the model,
00:58:46.400and as long as there was a match, then there was no orienting reflex.
00:58:49.400Now the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex,
00:58:53.400it's not merely an alteration in skin conductance, what it is in essence is
00:58:58.400the manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown,
00:59:03.400and the initial stages of that are very, very quick,
00:59:06.400but it's hard to tell when the orienting reflex stops and when more complex learning begins.
00:59:12.400They sort of shade into one another, so the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite reflexive,
00:59:18.400but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex.
00:59:21.400So for example, well, I always think the example of betrayal is the best one, because it's so complex.
00:59:28.400So 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,
00:59:38.400the 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.
00:59:43.400It's very much akin to the response that you would manifest if you saw a predator or a snake or something like that.
00:59:50.400And so that's very instantaneous, you know, and then that'll prepare you for action.
00:59:56.400You'll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next, a very unpleasant thing.
01:00:01.400But then it might take you even years to fully manifest the learning that would be necessary in a situation like that,
01:00:09.400because there's so many things that you have to reconsider.
01:00:12.400First of all, the person might now appear to you as a threat, that's pretty immediate.
01:00:16.400So there's a biological, physiological response first, your body reacts first, then you respond emotionally.
01:00:23.400That's going to take a while and, you know, that emotional response might extend over days or weeks or months or even years.
01:00:30.400And 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.
01:00:46.400It has to adjust to whatever information that event contains.
01:00:50.400And so the orienting reflex can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time.
01:00:56.400It's best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process.
01:01:02.400Now, that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time, that we created a detailed internal model of the world.
01:01:13.400And we watched how the world was unfolding.
01:02:13.400It has elements of cybernetic theory in it, but it was well accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence,
01:02:22.400that's how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems.
01:02:25.400They tried to make ones that would model the world, and then act, and then compare the changes in the world to that model.
01:02:31.400But 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.
01:02:41.400It 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.
01:02:50.400You know, walking in an environment like this.
01:02:52.400Now, when we look at the environment, we think, well, it's not that hard to look at.
01:02:57.400It's full of objects, and they're just self-evident.
01:03:00.400There they are, and we can just wander through it, you know.
01:03:03.400And 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.
01:03:12.400But the AI guys learned pretty quick that perceiving the world was way more difficult than anybody had guessed.
01:03:19.400And then this experiment really, in some sense, put a phenomenological punch behind that observation,
01:03:28.400because one of the presuppositions of the orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that you were very good at detecting changes,
01:03:38.400that your nervous system would automatically detect change, anomaly, right?
01:03:42.400Any mismatch between your model and what you expected.
01:03:45.400And 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.
01:03:53.400You know, it's actually, it's out of that same set of observations, in some sense, that postmodernism emerged in literature,
01:04:01.400because, in literary criticism, because, well, it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object like a chair.
01:04:09.400And part of that is, you know, if you just do that to the chair, it's really different than it was before.
01:04:15.400You could imagine how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions, right?
01:04:20.400And 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.
01:04:26.400If you were actually painting it, you'd find out that the colours of the chair when it's in that location,
01:04:32.400and the colours in the chair when it's in that location, just because of the difference in lighting, are substantially different.
01:04:38.400I think it was Monet, I think, who painted a very large series of haystacks in the French countryside, right?
01:04:44.400In 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.
01:04:55.400And so, it isn't even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it.
01:05:00.400And 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.
01:05:07.400Right? That's a description of something that's useful, something that's a tool, something that exists in relationship to your body.
01:05:15.400And so, if you think that just looking at something like a chair is almost impossibly difficult, and subject to interpretation,
01:05:23.400then imagine how difficult it is to perceive something like a text, you know, like a novel.
01:05:29.400Because 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,
01:05:41.400of the time, of the place, of the culture, of the language, then that's just on the side of the production itself.
01:05:49.400But 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,
01:05:59.400partly because I knew what was in it the second time, and I didn't know what was in it the first time.
01:06:04.400And 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.
01:06:16.400So, 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,
01:06:25.400you'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.
01:06:33.400And so, and the postmodernists were grappling with this, as well as with many other ideas that I think contaminated their thinking,
01:06:43.400and their conclusion was, well, you can't extract out a canonical meaning from a text.
01:06:48.400It's so dependent on the situation that to say the text has an interpretable meaning is actually an error.
01:06:55.400Now, just because it's difficult to do something doesn't mean it's impossible.
01:07:00.400And there's massive holes in the postmodernist view, as far as, I think it's an unbelievably pathological view, personally.
01:07:07.400But 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,
01:07:17.400and analogous to the reasons that this experiment turned out the way it did.
01:07:21.400So I'm going to show you this, many of you have seen this already, but as I said, it doesn't matter.
01:07:25.400So the, the, the job, your job here is to count the times, see there's a team of three people here, dressed in white,
01:07:32.400and there's a team of three people here, dressed in black.
01:07:35.400And your job is to count the number of times the white team throws the basketball back and forth to the white team members, okay?
01:07:44.400Okay, well, so obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, the, the number of times I believe that they threw it back,
01:07:55.400they threw it back and forth was 16, if I remember this correctly.
01:07:58.400But, of course, that's not really the issue, because what happens in the middle of the scene is that,
01:08:04.400a guy wearing a gorilla suit comes out into the middle of the screen and pounds his chest three or four times,
01:08:10.400and he comes out quite slowly, as you saw.
01:08:12.400How many of you, is there anybody here who didn't see the gorilla?
01:08:15.400No, well, you, and I presume all of you knew about this video anyways.
01:08:19.400So, Dan Simon, who produced this video, has got a couple of other ones where he shows that, you know,
01:08:25.400even if you're smart enough to see the gorilla, because you've seen the video before, you've heard about it,
01:08:30.400if you make other changes in the background, you'll, you'll count properly and you'll catch the gorilla,
01:08:34.400but you'll miss the other changes in the background, and they're not trivial either.
01:08:37.400And it's really quite remarkable, he's produced other short videos, for example, where you'll be looking at a, like a field,
01:08:46.400and a road will grow in it, occupying about a third of the photograph's space.
01:08:51.400And you'd think, well, yeah, you're gonna see that, it's like, you don't, you don't.
01:08:54.400So, okay, so this threw, this threw a big spanner into the works, this sort of experiment, along with the AI failures,
01:09:01.400and we could even say the postmodern dilemma.
01:09:04.400It's like, well, hmm, everyone virtually, every psychologist would have predicted before this series of experiments
01:09:12.400that there's no damn way you'd miss that gorilla, because your nervous system was actually attuned to change in the environment,
01:09:18.400and, 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,
01:09:24.400you couldn't possibly miss, especially when it's occupying the center of the, of the visual field.
01:09:30.400And 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,
01:09:39.400figure out, well, mostly figure out exactly how blind human beings are, because we're way blinder than we think.
01:09:48.400And, 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,
01:09:57.400it'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,
01:10:04.400which is always dancing around, like a, like a pinpoint or a laser beam, moving back and forth,
01:10:09.400and we're assembling those little snapshots from the fovea into a relatively coherent picture,
01:10:16.400maybe what happens is that I look at you, and then I look at you, and I still got the information from looking at you,
01:10:23.400so 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,
01:10:29.400I've tried to learn how to do this, because you could look at something, and then pay attention to the periphery, it's annoying,
01:10:36.400but, 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,
01:10:44.400I 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,
01:10:51.400it's much better at picking up movement than it is at picking up something that's staying still, and that makes sense,
01:10:57.400because, well, if it's staying still, then, and it hasn't already hurt you, then it's probably not going to hurt you,
01:11:03.400but if it's moving, then, you know, that's a good thing that you might pay attention to,
01:11:07.400and 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,
01:11:15.400and 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,
01:11:24.400which 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,
01:11:33.400I have no idea what color it is, this one I can't see at all, and then, I can probably see my fingers now,
01:11:42.400and then, I can clearly see them if I look at them with my fovea, and so, your vision is a very, very strange thing,
01:11:50.400and it's focusing on something very specific, and so you're pointing your eyes at something very specific,
01:11:56.400and that's what you seem to see, and so, so then, that opens up a whole new universe of questions, it's like,
01:12:03.400how do you decide what to point your eyes at? That, that turns out to be an insanely complicated problem.
01:12:10.400John Verveike talks about that all the time as the problem of relevance, but, and the issue is,
01:12:16.400well, there's many, many things in the world, there's an infinite number of things, let's say,
01:12:20.400and you're not gonna be able to see them, that's for sure, even if they happen to be changing, as it turns out,
01:12:26.400and 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?
01:12:32.400because it's so crazily complicated. So, that's the problem that we're going to try to unpack.
01:12:38.400Now, roughly speaking, what seems to have happened with the gorilla video is, you have to take that first theory,
01:12:44.400that 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,
01:12:52.400and you compare that to the objects in the actual world and how they're interacting, you have to modify that model,
01:12:58.400you say, well, no, you're certainly not making a complete model, and people should have known better anyways,
01:13:04.400even subjects to the limits of your perceptions, because there's all sorts of things in the world that you can't directly perceive,
01:13:10.400but what you're doing instead is, it's something like, you're making a partial model of the world,
01:13:17.400but you're only making a partial model of the world that you're currently operating on that, on, on, with some goal in mind,
01:13:24.400and you're also comparing that to a model of the world as it's currently unfolding,
01:13:28.400because the other thing that was implicit, this is really tricky, this is where you have to watch your implicit assumptions,
01:13:34.400the other thing that was implicit in the original cybernetic theory was that,
01:13:39.400you have a model of the world that's complete, and then what you're watching is the actual world as it unfolds,
01:13:47.400and that's not a model, that's just your perception of the objects, but that also turns out to be wrong,
01:13:52.400because your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model, and so what's happening is, you look at the world,
01:14:00.400the world you see is a model, and a very partial model at that, and then you compare it to the model that you expect,
01:14:07.400or desire more accurately, desire, although the initial models were expectation,
01:14:13.400because 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,
01:14:18.400you have desires, and so the experimental constraints skewed the data in some sense by making people assume that
01:14:27.400what people were doing when they walked through the world was expecting instead of desiring,
01:14:31.400anyways, 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,
01:14:39.400then you compare both of them, and they can mismatch, and they can mismatch in a way that upsets your current pursuit,
01:14:45.400that's the critical issue, you don't see the anomaly unless it upsets your current pursuit,
01:14:51.400and you kinda know that too, because when you're, like, while I'm lecturing to you guys, you know, mostly you're sitting still,
01:14:58.400but people are moving their arms, and they're moving their glasses, and they're shifting their feet,
01:15:03.400and generally, I don't see any of that, because what difference does it make?
01:15:09.400you know, it's not relevant to the ongoing, to the ongoing what? Ongoing contract, the ongoing series of interactions,
01:15:18.400it'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,
01:15:27.400then I'm, it's going to be as invisible to me as the gorilla was when you were counting the balls,
01:15:32.400and the cool thing is about the gorilla experiment, or one of them, is that the reason you were blind to the gorilla was
01:15:38.400because you were counting the balls, and so, what, that's so fascinating,
01:15:43.400because what it shows to a huge degree, an unfathomable degree, to, to, to, an unfathomable degree, is that
01:15:53.400the value structure that you inhabit determines what you perceive, it doesn't just determine what you expect or want,
01:15:59.400it bloody well determines what you see, and that, that makes the world a completely different place, no one really expected that,
01:16:06.400and so, if you watch the basketballs, you see, or the basketball, you see the basketball, if you stop watching the basketball,
01:16:13.400well then you see the gorilla, and so, the first question that arises from an experiment like that is,
01:16:19.400well, 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,
01:16:27.400you see that tiny amount that's necessary for you to undertake the next sequence in your plotted movements, something like that,
01:16:37.400but 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,
01:16:47.400because, 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,
01:16:54.400to 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,
01:17:02.400well, 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,
01:17:11.400and 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,
01:17:19.400and 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,
01:17:29.400all of those things nested, are operative to some degree, when you're extracting out the meaning at any level of analysis,
01:17:36.400they're all operating simultaneously, and so you might say, well, what are you doing in this classroom?
01:17:41.400well, the answer is, sitting in a chair, but that's, obviously, that's a very short term, and context, independent answer,
01:17:52.400but, you're also attending to what I'm saying, hypothetically, and you're attending to some of it, and not to others,
01:17:58.400parts of it, and you're thinking about some parts of it, and not other parts, and you're also attending a class,
01:18:05.400and the class is a sequence of lectures, and that's embedded within your desire to finish up the semester,
01:18:11.400and then to finish up the year, and then to get your degree, and then you nest that inside whatever it is,
01:18:16.400whatever the reason is that you're getting your degree, and then maybe that's nested inside your career goals,
01:18:22.400and 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,
01:18:29.400and so, I could say, well, you're sitting here because it serves your ultimate values, well, that's true,
01:18:37.400it 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,
01:18:47.400so it seems to lack information, but by the same token, if I said what you're doing is sitting there,
01:18:52.400it 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,
01:19:02.400God only knows why, and that's the level, there's a natural level of perception for that sort of thing,
01:19:09.400so for example, when children learn to name an animal, for example, they'll name cat,
01:19:16.400they don't name the species of cat, or the subspecies of cat, and they don't confuse cats with dogs,
01:19:22.400even though they're both in the category of, you know, four-legged furry mammal,
01:19:27.400so why not call a cat and a dog furry mammals? Well, children don't do that, they go to cat and dog,
01:19:36.400and people who've studied the acquisition of language have found that there are basic level categories that children pick up first,
01:19:43.400and they're often represented with short words, and the words are short because they've been around a long time,
01:19:49.400because they seem to reflect the natural level at which people perceive the world, but none of that's obvious, you know,
01:19:56.400it's by, I mean, you could just lump all animals together, for that matter, and just call them animals, which we do sometimes, so,
01:20:04.400anyway, 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,
01:20:10.400and 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,
01:20:21.400yeah, well, I have a story for this, so, um, one time when I was in Montreal, I was using my computer,
01:20:30.400it's in my apartment, and I was typing out an essay, and it crashed, and so, what happens when your computer crashes,
01:20:41.400well, 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
01:20:49.400is the same circuit that monkeys use to detect eagles, or leopards, or snakes, and so, when there's a bunch of monkeys together,
01:20:58.400you know, they're not all preyed on by eagles, and leopards, and snakes, but, you know, there's usually a predator in that category
01:21:04.400for every single monkey population, and so, when the monkeys are watching, they have an emotional utterance
01:21:10.400that the most nervous monkey might utter first, that basically says, you know, hide from the eagle, get out on a thin branch
01:21:17.400so the cougar can't eat you, and look the hell out for the snake, but there's a circuit that's linked to emotions
01:21:23.400that produces an instinctive utterance that represents that category, and that's the same circuit that you use when you curse,
01:21:32.400and 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,
01:21:39.400because they preferentially swear, you think, well, why in the world would you have a neurological condition that makes you preferentially curse?
01:21:46.400well, 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
01:21:56.400when 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
01:22:05.400to deal with exceptions are the same circuits you're using now to deal with your computer
01:22:13.400right, because that's what you want to give it a whack, it's like, it doesn't behave whack, aggression right away
01:22:19.400well, that's some clue as to the category system that you're automatically using to encapsulate the event
01:22:28.400okay, so, fine, what do you do when your computer crashes?
01:22:31.400well, 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
01:34:26.400that's the mark of someone who's well socialized
01:34:28.400you walk in somewhere, you get the game, you play the game, and you don't scare the hell out of everybody
01:34:34.400and that's, that's partly how we keep our emotions stabilized
01:34:39.400because, 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
01:34:52.400I 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
01:35:01.400and then you play that game immediately, and so do all the other socialized primates
01:35:05.400and so then you can just understand the game, you don't have to understand them, thank god
01:35:11.400you can just understand the game, and as long as the game continues, you don't have to be nervous
01:35:15.400because 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
01:35:22.400and so, so that again, that's really worth thinking about, because
01:35:27.400we talked about this before, about why people want to maintain their culture
01:35:31.400it isn't just because their culture is a belief system that helps them orient themselves in the world
01:35:37.400it's because a belief system is a game that everyone who shares that belief system is playing
01:35:43.400and the fact that everybody's playing means nobody needs to get upset
01:35:47.400so it isn't like the belief system is directly inhibiting the emotions
02:25:12.400partly because it has no relationship whatsoever to what you need to do in order to continue to act
02:25:18.400and 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
03:06:31.400and so your perceptions are just shrunk and restricted to the bare minimum necessary to keep you moving in the direction that you're moving
03:06:38.400alright, so the first thing you want to do is you want to make things irrelevant