The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 143. Jean Piaget (Constructivism)

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00:00:56.680 Peterson podcast. This episode is from the personality series and is available on YouTube as well.

00:01:03.000 It's episode 30, season three, called Jean Piaget, so you can guess who it's about. It's very informative.

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00:04:11.140 Diaget is generally regarded as a developmental psychologist, which is not what he thought of

00:04:29.800 himself. He thought that he was a genetic epistemologist, which is a term that I think

00:04:35.120 has ever only been applied to him. An epistemologist is someone who studies the manner in which

00:04:41.820 knowledge, who studies knowledge itself, and that's what Piaget thought that he was doing,

00:04:48.020 and he wanted to understand how it was that knowledge unfolded across time, and more importantly

00:04:55.760 than that, he wanted to understand how the cognitive structures that made up an individual developed

00:05:01.560 across time. So that's generally why he's regarded as a developmental psychologist, because of

00:05:06.560 course he also studied children. Now, I'm going to read you something that Piaget wrote to begin

00:05:13.920 this. He wrote an awful lot of books, and a lot of them haven't yet been translated, and

00:05:20.340 some of the ones that are translated are translated pretty badly, and I think this is probably an

00:05:25.620 example of a fairly bad translation, but regardless of that, the point that's being made is both valid

00:05:32.400 and interesting. So, the common postulate of various traditional epistemologies, which are theories

00:05:39.920 of valid knowledge, is that knowledge is a fact, say, or a set of facts, so that you would go to class

00:05:46.280 and learn a set of facts, and that is what would give you knowledge. Instead of a process, and if our

00:05:53.520 various forms of knowledge are always incomplete, as we know they are, because they're replaced

00:05:57.880 sequentially, for example, recently in the domain of physics, physicists revealed to us that they

00:06:04.540 really didn't understand what some massive percentage of the universe was made of. I think, I can't

00:06:09.360 remember, it's 75% or 95% made out of dark matter, which has never been detected, and we know nothing

00:06:15.680 about it. So that's a good example of how our fundamental assumptions can be challenged at any

00:06:20.520 moment, and how a fact can turn from a fact into a clear fallacy. If our various forms of knowledge

00:06:27.300 are always incomplete, and our various sciences still imperfect, that which is acquired is acquired,

00:06:33.760 and can therefore be studied statically. So, the proposition there is that you come and you learn

00:06:38.800 the facts, and the facts themselves are solid bits of information, and they don't change across time,

00:06:43.920 and so that once you have them, you have them. Now, of course, Piaget obviously doubts that.

00:06:48.360 Hence, the absolute position of the problems, what is knowledge, or how are the various types

00:06:53.820 of knowledge possible? As an alternative, under the converging influence of a series of factors,

00:07:00.000 we are tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process, more than a state.

00:07:06.880 Any being or object that science's attempt to hold fast dissolves once again in the current

00:07:11.740 of development. It is the last analysis of this development, and of it alone, that we have the

00:07:17.380 right to state, it is a fact. What he means by that is, the fact that human beings learn facts

00:07:24.200 is, in fact, a fact, right? So, you are capable of learning things. And he thinks that's sort of

00:07:30.180 the fundamental fact. People assimilate information, and they transform as a consequence of it.

00:07:36.280 And so, studying that, as he says, what we can and should then seek is a law of this process.

00:07:41.880 We are well aware, on the other hand, of the fine book by Kuhn on scientific revolutions. Now,

00:07:47.780 the reason Piaget throws that in at the end, how many of you know about Thomas Kuhn's book

00:07:54.040 on scientific revolutions? No one? One? Just three people? Okay, well, that's probably not good.

00:08:03.840 But Kuhn was one of the 20th century's foremost philosophers of science. And he made a distinction

00:08:12.140 between two different modes of scientific process. One he called normal science, and the other he

00:08:17.360 called revolutionary science. And normal science was the kind of science that you'll do as

00:08:21.820 undergraduates, unless you're incredibly lucky or unbelievably brilliant. Or probably unbelievably

00:08:29.840 brilliant and incredibly lucky. And so, normal science occurs when you generate knowledge

00:08:35.520 incrementally from within the confines of an already developed scientific theory. So, a normal

00:08:41.160 science would be, say, the application of big five models of personality to the prediction

00:08:46.580 of some other variable, like, say, relationship success. You're going to uncover something new,

00:08:52.140 but it's not going to shake the foundations of knowledge itself. Now, Kuhn observed that from

00:08:57.440 time to time, there were discoveries that were made that shook the foundation of knowledge

00:09:01.560 itself. There's some well-known revolutions in science. So, the Newtonian revolution was

00:09:07.320 a revolution in science. Einstein's work produced another revolution in science. Darwin's work,

00:09:14.000 Mendel's work. Those are the revolutionary transformations of thought that people often consider. Did I say

00:09:22.380 Darwin? I certainly should have said Darwin, because his was probably the most revolutionary of

00:09:26.320 all. Now, the reason that I wanted to tell you that, and the reason I kept it in here, even though

00:09:33.100 it seems like a funny little additional statement pinned to the end of Piaget's quotation, is that

00:09:40.440 Kuhn observed that science seemed to progress in accordance with the same mechanisms that Piaget

00:09:48.520 observed that the knowledge of children appeared to progress. Now, one of the things that you'll

00:09:53.780 learn about Piaget, which is generally all you learn if you learn about Piaget, is his idea that children

00:09:59.120 go through sequential stages of development, and usually people have you memorize those stages.

00:10:04.820 I should let you know that Piaget really didn't care that much about those stages, and when they

00:10:09.140 occurred, and how they could be sped up at exactly what they were. He was much more interested in deep

00:10:14.640 philosophical questions, and that element of his work generally goes unrecognized by the North

00:10:22.380 American psychologists who purport to understand what he had to say. Now, because he wrote dozens

00:10:28.180 of books, some of which are not yet translated, it's not surprising that people come away with a

00:10:33.580 partial view of Piaget when you're that prolific. He was so damn smart, he was offered the curatorship

00:10:40.200 of a museum when he was ten, because he'd published a scientific paper on, I think it

00:10:46.220 was on snails, and, but his parents requested that he turn it down. So, you know, Piaget was

00:10:53.360 a major genius, and if someone puts their mind, like that, puts their mind to work for an entire

00:10:57.620 lifetime, and he lived to be an old man, they could produce an awful lot of intellectual material,

00:11:01.440 and it's not necessarily, especially if it can't be summarized easily as a single, you know,

00:11:06.260 coherent theory that you could memorize in one page. It's pretty hard for people to keep up,

00:11:11.500 so it's not surprising that his thought gets reduced to, you know, a set of axioms, in a sense,

00:11:16.800 but the devil's often in the detail with great thinkers, and what that means is that to really

00:11:22.320 understand what they had to say, you actually have to read them, because a lot of the information

00:11:27.380 is at the sentence level of analysis and not at the summary level of analysis. You know, if you're

00:11:31.440 really smart, it's not that easy to summarize what you have to say, because most of what you have to

00:11:36.000 say is in fact informative, so you can't just throw it away, it's hard to compress it.

00:11:39.780 So, anyways, this initial paragraph opens up the world of constructivism to you. Now,

00:11:46.320 the constructivists are interesting people, because, you know, you often hear people ask,

00:11:51.940 is it genetic or environmental? Which is, it's not a good question, because it's a false dichotomy.

00:11:58.640 The genes formulate structures in accordance with environmental demand, right from the beginning

00:12:04.940 of the organism's emergence, and so there's a constant interplay between the environment

00:12:08.940 and genetics, but the environment isn't also just a thing that's out there that's like

00:12:14.440 made out of lions and tigers and moose and buildings and, you know, the sky. It's an information

00:12:19.580 field, and the constructivists point out rightly that partly what you're doing when you're

00:12:25.680 operating in the world is interacting with this field of information and incorporating its

00:12:32.100 structure into the structure of your mind and body, which is how you adapt. So, you could

00:12:36.380 say in some sense that you're built out of information and matter. That's a good way

00:12:40.140 of thinking about it. And the constructivists are very interested in how you go about acquiring

00:12:46.000 information and how you then transform that information into the sort of knowledge that

00:12:50.720 you can apply to the world. So, they're also very pragmatic, especially Piaget, because

00:12:54.640 Piaget regards knowledge as, like, the prerequisite for adaptive action. So, again, he's less concerned

00:13:03.920 about the facts that you know about the structure of the world than he is about how it is that you

00:13:09.260 modify and adapt your behavior so that you can survive in the world. So, that's the first

00:13:15.740 postulate. That's constructivism. And then the next postulate is that there are revolutions in this

00:13:21.600 internal structures that you construct that emerge as a consequence of you acquiring new

00:13:27.100 information. Sometimes that information can already be fit into a knowledge structure that

00:13:31.360 you possess, but sometimes the information is so anomalous or novel that it blows out

00:13:36.460 fundamental presuppositions that you've already established and forces you to not only add some

00:13:42.780 information to your repertoire of information, but to reconfigure the structure you use to represent

00:13:49.080 the information, you don't like that. People don't like it when that happens. It's too

00:13:54.120 dramatic and upsetting. So, which is often why revolutions in science or in any other field are

00:14:00.520 first resistant. I mean, it's very complicated. The reasons people are opposed to new ideas are very

00:14:08.320 complicated. There's lots of theories about why that occurs precisely, but I'll briefly outline a good

00:14:13.880 theory. There's a bunch of them, but I'll outline one. So, let's say there's already a scientific

00:14:20.120 theory, and it's instantiated in the world, so people accept it. And let's say that you are a

00:14:25.980 proponent of that theory. So, you might say, well, that theory, therefore, governs your worldview,

00:14:30.700 and if I threaten it, then your worldview is going to fall apart, and that's going to make you fall

00:14:34.620 apart. And that's not a bad theory. But here's a variant of that which is similar, but which I think

00:14:40.600 is better. So, I'm a professor. Let's say I have a theory. Now, what I'm doing with my theory is buying

00:14:48.520 my right to be a professor. So, I would come to the University of Toronto as a job candidate, and I

00:14:53.720 would say, here's my theory, and here's why I think the facts are important, and here's what it's good

00:14:57.840 for, and they'll say, okay, it looks like you know enough about what you're doing so that you can occupy

00:15:03.560 this position in this dominance hierarchy. Okay, and I'm pretty happy about that, because that position in

00:15:09.280 that dominance hierarchy is pretty permanent. That's one of the advantages to an academic job.

00:15:13.600 It's like, once you have it, as long as you're relatively confident and relatively ethical,

00:15:19.120 then you can maintain it across time. So, it's a big deal to be granted that slot. And then,

00:15:27.400 being in that dominance hierarchy is not only a matter of what you believe, obviously. The fact

00:15:32.160 that I'm in that dominance hierarchy means I get a certain salary, and that's not hypothetical. That

00:15:37.020 allows me to eat, so I'm happy about that. It's not only psychological, and I can pay my housing

00:15:41.580 payments with it, and so on. So, it protects me from the cold, and offers me something to eat, and

00:15:46.600 it gives me a certain public status. And so, if some other joker comes along, say they're young,

00:15:52.900 and they say, well, I have a different theory that makes your theory look stupid, then I'm not 0.97

00:15:57.300 going to be very happy about that, partly because it upsets the way that I configure my understanding of 0.97

00:16:02.220 the world. And that's a drag, but I might recover from that. But it also undermines my claim.

00:16:09.080 It undermines the validity of my claim to that position in the hierarchy. And so, it sort of

00:16:14.160 makes me an imposter. Say the guy turns out to be right. It's like, poof, I'm an imposter,

00:16:18.900 and I no longer really have the right to occupy that position. Someone might even point that out,

00:16:23.980 although it doesn't happen very often in the case of professors. You know, it happens fairly

00:16:27.580 infrequently in other sorts of occupations. You know, all of a sudden, your position is made useless 0.93

00:16:31.960 because somebody figured out how to automate you, and poof, you're gone. And, like, that's hard on your

00:16:37.240 worldview, but it's a lot harder on your salary. So, a lot of the reasons that people cling to the validity

00:16:42.140 of their theories is because it gives them a claim to a certain kind of, what would you call, skill set

00:16:47.820 and utility that then gives them a claim to occupy a certain position in the dominance hierarchy,

00:16:52.820 and that protects them from, you know, all the horrors of reality. Not completely, but, you know,

00:16:58.960 I mean, I have health insurance, for example, and sometimes that's really, really helpful.

00:17:04.200 So, I don't want some joker coming along and pointing out that my theory isn't right.

00:17:09.800 Anyway, so far, that hasn't happened. So, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

00:17:14.000 So, Piaget concludes and says,

00:17:18.620 If all knowledge is always in the state of development, and consists in proceeding from one state to a more

00:17:23.200 complete and efficient one, evidently, it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it

00:17:28.040 with the greatest possible accuracy. Okay, so, Piaget figures you're a information foraging machine,

00:17:36.360 so to speak, and the process that you engage in while you're foraging for information and then figuring out

00:17:42.960 what to do with it is typical to human beings, and there's some constancy of structure across human

00:17:48.920 beings. Okay, so that's the first idea. It isn't that we all do it in a different way, even though there's

00:17:54.540 individual variation, obviously. The other sort of fundamental postulate of constructivism, especially

00:18:00.440 the Piagetian version of constructivism, is that you sort of build yourself from the bottom up,

00:18:05.600 starting with your body. So, Piaget, this is one of the things about Piaget's theory that's

00:18:11.620 unbelievably sophisticated, I think. So, when people were first developing models of artificial

00:18:16.400 intelligence, they thought they'd be able to develop machines that sort of modeled the world,

00:18:21.240 and then figured out how to act in the world, sort of abstractly, and then would, after they figured

00:18:25.700 out how to act in the world, would then act in the world. But that proved to be impossible,

00:18:30.300 as you can tell, because we don't have, you know, ambulatory robots that could, like, bus

00:18:35.140 tables at a restaurant, which turns out to be, by the way, a very complex job. Fast mathematical

00:18:41.560 operations? Computer can handle that easily, or easily, but bussing a table? It's like, no computer's

00:18:47.780 smart enough to do that. So that's pretty peculiar. But it turned out, after, like, 40 years of

00:18:52.820 investigation, that you couldn't build computers that would operate as independent robots by teaching

00:18:59.940 them to model the world, and then by having them model the potential action that they were

00:19:04.500 going to undertake, and then by implementing it. That did not work, partly because modeling

00:19:09.240 the world is way more complicated than anybody ever suspected. It's, like, infinitely more

00:19:14.260 complicated. And so, some robotics engineers, such as Rodney Brooks, who worked at MIT, started

00:19:19.600 building robots from the bottom up. He made these little mindless robots that really didn't

00:19:23.620 even have a central processor that were action-oriented. So, like, the first things he built were

00:19:29.820 these little insect-like things that could skitter away from light. That's all they could do.

00:19:34.320 If you turn a light poof, they'd go find some dark. And it's as if... So, imagine the world to that

00:19:41.220 robot was a binary place. It was either a light place or a dark place. And then you might say, well,

00:19:46.840 what did light or dark mean to this little robot? And then you have to ask yourself, well, what does

00:19:52.420 meaning mean? And that's a very good question. It's one that Piaget answers. Meaning means, to that

00:19:59.160 little robot, move to a different place. So, light to that robot meant move to a different place. So,

00:20:07.380 what the robot, in a sense, was doing was transforming one form of information, light versus

00:20:12.900 dark, into another form, which was skitter away. And so, I love that, because it's not easy to understand

00:20:19.440 what meaning means until you relate it to the body. And so, Piaget's fundamental proposition is that

00:20:25.520 the elements of your understanding are not perceptual abstractions. In fact, there's even elements of

00:20:32.800 understanding that underlie your perceptual abstractions that are more fundamental. And

00:20:37.640 what those are, essentially, are sensory motor skills. Things you do with your body. It's a lovely

00:20:45.340 idea. It's extremely profound. And I think it's absolutely correct. It does wreak havoc with the

00:20:52.640 idea of disembodied intelligence, however. Because for Piaget, and also for Rodney Brooks, who is

00:20:59.220 responsible, by the way, just so you know, some of you have seen Big Dog. Have you seen Big Dog?

00:21:04.760 Look up DARPA, D-A-R-P-A. How many of you have seen Big Dog? How many of you are terrified by Big Dog?

00:21:11.000 Yes. Big Dog is this robot that's being developed by the U.S. Army that is about this big. And it's

00:21:17.620 four-legged. It's got a head. And it can run, like, faster than you. And it can run in snow, and it can

00:21:23.280 run on ice, and it can run up hills. And if you kick it, it balances and stands back up. And hypothetically,

00:21:30.160 it's going to be used to transport, like, the heavy things that soldiers have to carry. But, you know,

00:21:36.360 don't believe that. That's a stupid idea. Once these things can ambulate by themselves, 1.00

00:21:42.660 and they can already follow each other, because now they have visual systems,

00:21:46.080 um, arming them is going to be a very simple matter. And so, the probability that we'll have

00:21:51.980 unbelievably super-fast robots that can shoot you in ten years is, like, to me, as far as I can tell

00:21:57.320 from the development, is absolutely certain. I have a friend who's a computer engineer, and he's a really

00:22:02.360 good one. And he said, you know how in science fiction movies, sometimes when those robots shoot

00:22:06.580 at you, they miss? He said, when the robots shoot at you, not only will they shoot at where you are,

00:22:11.380 but they'll shoot at the six places that they calculate you're most likely to dart to,

00:22:15.260 and they will never miss. So, that's a lovely thing to think about. So,

00:22:19.980 hopefully that won't come to pass, but you probably will.

00:22:25.860 So, here's the sort of thing that Piaget was interested in. These are very fundamental

00:22:32.520 questions. And he was a very deep intellect, so he tried to go right to the bottom of the

00:22:38.320 structures of knowledge to find out what was down there. Upon what does an individual base

00:22:44.380 his judgments? That's a good one. How do you know whether you do A or B, or what the difference

00:22:49.540 is between right and wrong? How is that instantiated in your being? What are your norms?

00:22:57.520 How is it that those norms are validated? What's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of

00:23:03.480 science in general? Which is a question like, well, there's a consensual reality that we all share,

00:23:09.600 to some degree, which is why we can communicate, but there's not a one-to-one relationship between

00:23:14.240 that consensual reality and the categories of science. So, Piaget was interested in the similarities

00:23:19.300 between our consensual viewpoint and the scientific viewpoint and the differences. So, for example,

00:23:24.800 people used to hypothetically assume that the world was flat. And you could say, well,

00:23:29.520 the reason they assumed that was because it looks flat when you look at it. So, it was an

00:23:33.280 empirical observation. But obviously, there were other observations that we managed to produce

00:23:37.740 that indicated that the world wasn't flat, and then our scientific conceptions and our interpersonal

00:23:43.580 consensual norms became divorced from one another. And that's become a really serious problem,

00:23:51.320 say, with branches of science like quantum mechanics, which, you know, they're absolutely,

00:23:57.220 completely incomprehensible from a pragmatic perspective, even to those who formulate them

00:24:02.340 mathematically. And Piaget would say the reason for that is that, well, when we interact with objects at

00:24:08.220 the phenomenological level, which is the level that we can most easily perceive, they act Newtonian,

00:24:15.820 you know, so, can I take your pen? So, you know, you can sort of predict what this pen will do,

00:24:20.600 because it acts like other objects of about its size and shape with mass. And so, your understanding

00:24:27.820 of this is actually based upon your knowledge of what will happen if you manipulate this thing with your

00:24:33.740 body. You know, it's solid. You'd be very surprised if you could, like, put your fingers through this

00:24:38.200 pen. You'd be surprised if it broke, because you expect a certain hardness. You do expect it to

00:24:42.980 write, although pens often don't. You expect it to be pointy. You know that you can take it apart

00:24:48.080 into many objects, even though, like, you could ask, how many objects is this? Well, it's one pen,

00:24:57.180 right? But you could take it apart, you know? And now it's two objects, and then you can see that

00:25:04.200 there's other objects in here, and sometimes you can put it back together, and it'll still work.

00:25:08.200 And so, so Piaget's point is that what we regard as understanding, to say that you understand

00:25:22.540 something, is to indicate that you can predict what is going to occur if you interact with that

00:25:28.900 object with your body. Okay, and that's, that gives you your intuitive understanding of things.

00:25:34.420 And so, because this is material, other, you already know something about other things that

00:25:40.420 are material, right? And you can transfer it from place to place. And that's, again, an embodied

00:25:44.860 knowledge, because material things are those things through which you cannot put your hand,

00:25:50.260 right? You get some weird things like smoke or clouds, and it's like, well, are they, what are

00:25:54.560 they? Are they objects? Is a cloud an object? Well, no, not really, because an object is one of these

00:25:59.820 things that you can sort of manipulate as a unit. Now, the categories of quantum mechanics,

00:26:04.560 of course, which deal with these incredibly tiny things that are really not particles and

00:26:11.020 are really not waves, they're incomprehensible to us because we never manipulate anything at

00:26:16.060 that scale. And so, because we can't play with it, we have no real way of understanding

00:26:22.160 it, because our understanding is based on the mapping of objects onto our body. So, any object

00:26:27.860 we can't map onto our body is, therefore, fundamentally incomprehensible. It's a very

00:26:32.360 cool theory, you know, and a very body-centric theory. So, how does the fact that children think

00:26:38.300 differently than we do affect our presumption of fact itself? That's a very interesting question,

00:26:42.500 too. It's like, so you've got three-year-olds, and of course, they're pretty clueless about the

00:26:46.440 world, but, and you know more, but there's the three-year-old is alive in everything,

00:26:51.500 and functioning. And so, then you have to ask yourself, well, if their conception of

00:26:55.460 the world is qualitatively different than your conception, how is it that you can both

00:26:59.960 survive in the same world? And what does that mean about, about what knowledge means and

00:27:04.860 about the limits of knowledge? I mean, I, you know, I could say the same thing about you

00:27:09.680 that you might say about a three-year-old, which is, well, if I took you from this place

00:27:13.380 and dropped you in the jungle, you know, soon you'd be dead. First you'd be miserable, then 0.79

00:27:18.500 you'd be dead. And so that's sort of like the three-year-old's state of being if you,

00:27:23.960 you know, if you were supposed to take care of them and you disappeared. So, obviously,

00:27:27.280 even your knowledge of the world is limited by what? It's limited in its necessary generality

00:27:33.560 by the context. But that also has something interesting to say about the validity of your

00:27:37.860 knowledge itself. They're context-dependent. So, okay, so that's the sort of thing that

00:27:42.480 Piaget was interested in. Here's some other ones. What do you mean by number?

00:27:46.500 So, that's an interesting one. So, you know how they say you can't compare apples and oranges?

00:27:52.000 Well, you can. So, if I said, well, what's two oranges plus two apples?

00:27:57.980 Four fruits. Who said that? Sam, very good. So, the way you solved that was by generalizing

00:28:02.880 up a level, right? So, if I said, uh, um, what's two desks plus two rocks? What would you

00:28:09.880 say? Yes, ma'am. You're very good at this particular stuff. That's an IQ. Those are IQ

00:28:16.440 questions, by the way. So, if you didn't get them now, you could feel disappointed, depressed.

00:28:20.460 So, if you got them, well, then you can cut yourself them back. So, that's good. Yeah.

00:28:24.900 So, number is a funny thing because, well, as I pointed out with the pen, well, one can

00:28:30.380 become many very rapidly and many can become one. And, well, the whole idea of a number is

00:28:36.060 extremely difficult to understand, you know? Like, what is it in common between singular

00:28:43.360 entities that allows you to represent all of them with one? Well, animals don't do

00:28:48.920 that. They can, in a sense. They can sort of intuit three or four, which is about all

00:28:53.560 we can intuit, too. But once we get the nomenclature done properly, man, we can use numbers like

00:28:59.260 crazy. And then they enable us to manipulate reality like mad. So, whatever it is we're extracting

00:29:04.980 from the commonality between objects seems to be something that gives us incredible power.

00:29:10.900 So, that's a problem. What do you mean by space? Since we know, for example, from Einstein's

00:29:16.220 work that, you know, space, space is not an absolute in any sense. It is at the speeds

00:29:23.240 we move. So, what do you mean by time and speed? When is an object permanent and when isn't

00:29:29.180 it? And when do you learn that? What does it mean that an object is the same across time?

00:29:33.400 That's a good one. So, you know, I don't know if there's a single molecule in your body that

00:29:38.700 was there, you know, five months ago, six months ago. There's some, I don't remember

00:29:42.500 what the turnover duration is, but it's fairly, it's fairly quick. So, it's weird, eh? Because

00:29:48.840 there you are, and you were there two years ago, but none of your constituent elements are

00:29:53.520 the same. So, how is it that you can be the same? Now, the physicist Schrodinger, of the

00:30:00.580 Schrodinger's cat fame, solved that by claiming that you were a dissipative structure. It's

00:30:05.300 a very interesting way. That's what he thought life was, dissipative structures. A dissipative

00:30:09.380 structure is the same as a, you know, when you, when you pull up the, the, uh, you call

00:30:14.900 that at the bottom of the sink? Stopper. You, I think so, stopper? If your sink is full of

00:30:20.640 water and you pull up the stopper, you know you get a whirlpool, right? And it, all the water

00:30:25.240 spins as it, as it goes down the drain hole. And you'll notice that that whirlpool looks

00:30:31.840 sort of the same across time, even though, obviously, the water molecules that make it

00:30:35.500 up are different. He called that a dissipative structure. It was a pattern that maintained

00:30:40.260 itself in spite of the movement of matter through it. And that's what you are, by the way.

00:30:45.380 So, it requires energy to keep a dissipative structure, um, intact. But, um, you take in energy.

00:30:53.080 So, thanks to the sun.

00:30:58.260 What do you mean by chance? Um, why do you have moral concerns? And what does it mean

00:31:03.140 that you have moral concerns, that you have ideas about how people should behave and how

00:31:07.280 they shouldn't behave? And, and you have a very deep understanding of that, and it's

00:31:11.940 characteristic of all human beings and many, many animals. So, where does that come from

00:31:16.040 and is a developed form of knowledge? What are children doing when they're playing? What

00:31:20.900 are people doing when they're dreaming? And, uh, what's the significance of the fact that

00:31:26.480 you can imitate other people? Now, I'll start with the last one, briefly. Um, you know,

00:31:33.460 you might think that one of the things that really distinguishes us from other creatures,

00:31:37.300 animals, is the fact that we have a thumb. And that's a big one. We've got very good functional

00:31:41.780 thumbs, and hooray for that. And we stand up on two feet, so we get a chance to use our

00:31:46.380 thumbs and hands to carry things around and to break things and to take them apart and

00:31:49.720 to swing sticks and so on. But there are other animals who can do that to a limited degree.

00:31:54.680 And then there's our ability to talk. That's a major one. But one of the other things that

00:31:59.120 really differentiates people from other animals is, you know, you hear monkey see, monkey do,

00:32:04.480 right? Well, that's wrong. Monkey see, that's the end of that. Um, monkeys really can't imitate

00:32:11.500 one another, and they certainly can't imitate any even randomly generated novel behavior that

00:32:19.640 another monkey produces. Think about it this way. You know, you hear these claims that chimpanzees

00:32:23.920 have culture? It's like, well, no, they don't. Not really. And the reason for that, it's easy to

00:32:29.580 figure out that they don't have culture. I mean, let's say chimps have been around, roughly

00:32:33.660 speaking, for 15 million years. Which is not a bad estimate, because we diverged from them

00:32:38.840 about 7 million years ago, and the evidence is pretty clear that the thing that we diverged

00:32:43.180 from looked a lot more like a chimp than it looked like us. So, like, we've been booting 0.99

00:32:47.400 it ahead madly, developing like mad, and the chimps have been laying back and eating leaves.

00:32:52.080 You know, so, so, do they have a culture? Well, they've had 15 million years. You know,

00:32:59.540 they haven't even built a hut yet. And the reason I'm telling you that is because

00:33:03.240 if you're a culture-generated creature, and you only imagine, you only manage, say, one

00:33:10.460 discovery every 100 years between all of you, if you have 15 million years to get your act

00:33:16.500 together, that's a lot of 100-year segments. And so, even if the chimpanzee was building

00:33:21.900 culture at the rate of 0.0001% a year, if you compound that over 15 million years, you

00:33:28.940 have the Empire State Building. And there are the Empire State Buildings that chimpanzees are 1.00

00:33:32.680 living in, and so, therefore, they don't have culture. Now, they might be able to recognize

00:33:37.040 their peers in the dominance hierarchy. They can do that. And they can use, maybe they can

00:33:43.160 use simple tools. But the tools they use seem to be dependent on the environment that they

00:33:48.080 inhabit. You know, because some people say, well, some chimps use one tool and some chimps

00:33:52.080 use another. But, you know, if you're going to live in a rocky place, then you might use

00:33:56.720 rocks. And if you're going to live in a place that has sticks, you might use sticks. But

00:34:00.220 that's not because you're different, it's because the environment's different. So, anyways,

00:34:05.080 chimps can imitate one another very much. But humans, man, we're ridiculous. Like, we're 1.00

00:34:11.260 so imitative, it's absolutely crazy. You know, and that's so cool, because what it means is

00:34:16.340 that once you get a pattern of behavior, you know, you whip up a new pattern of behavior,

00:34:22.000 I can watch you and I can just instantiate it in my own body, you know, maybe a bit awkwardly

00:34:27.020 to begin with, although maybe sometimes better than you can. And bang, I've got that. And

00:34:31.840 so we're always looking around at each other, seeing what we're up to, and as soon as we

00:34:35.480 see someone who's up to something interesting, then we can do the same thing. Children do

00:34:39.800 that because they imitate, right? But they're even better at it, man. They generalize across

00:34:44.780 instances of imitation. So, for example, remember when you're a kid, and you're playing, maybe

00:34:49.900 you're playing house, and you're the mom, or maybe you're, I don't know, maybe you're

00:34:52.940 the house cat, because children will certainly do that. And so let's say the child is being

00:34:57.380 the house cat, so he or she is down on, you know, all fours, zooming around like a cat,

00:35:02.060 maybe meowing and, you know, rubbing up against their mother's leg and looking for a milk in

00:35:06.140 the bowl. They're not exactly imitating their cat. Because if they were exactly imitating their

00:35:13.360 cat, they would be moving exactly the same way the cat moved. But no, they're not. What

00:35:17.920 they're doing is they've observed the cat across a wide variety of environments. They've

00:35:22.500 abstracted what constitutes generalized cat behavior from all of those instances, and

00:35:28.640 then they can instantiate the spirit of the cat, which is sort of the movements that make

00:35:33.620 up catness. And then you, because you're so smart, you can watch them zooming around on

00:35:38.760 the ground, and despite the fact that they don't have a tail or ears or fur, you're going

00:35:43.040 to figure out pretty quick that that is now a cat. And children do the same thing with their

00:35:48.280 parents. Like, if they're playing house, and they imitate their father, you know, they may,

00:35:52.740 to some degree, try to imitate the sound of his voice, and maybe even use a couple of his favorite

00:35:57.800 phrases. But basically, what they're doing is trying to act like a father, rather than imitating

00:36:04.340 their father. So it's like, it's meta-imitation, right? It's like, I watch you, I watch you, I watch

00:36:10.160 you, I watch you. There's commonalities across all those instances. I extract the commonalities,

00:36:15.300 I embody it, and then when I play, that's what I'm doing. I'm figuring out how to embody

00:36:19.880 the commonalities across multiple exposures. And that's, that's, you're doing that when

00:36:24.220 you're like three. You're so smart. And then even if you're asleep, you're doing it, because

00:36:28.980 you're doing it in your dreams. And so, human beings do that, no other animals do. So, when

00:36:34.760 you're thinking about the ways that we're weird, you want to put imitation way up there

00:36:38.880 on the list, because you can, you know, think about deaf people, like congenitally deaf people.

00:36:44.600 They don't have much access to language, you know, say they don't learn sign language, because

00:36:47.860 that used to happen in the past. It's like, they can still wander around in the world and

00:36:52.580 fit in. Well, why? Well, because they're so good at imitating, you know? They get all the

00:36:57.360 nonverbal stuff, and that's a lot. So, language is, you know, great and all that. Language actually

00:37:05.800 enables you to imitate across space and time. That's what it's for. Because, you know, maybe

00:37:11.400 you whip up a new action, and then you write it down in words, and then you send it to someone,

00:37:15.880 and they, those are instructions, by the way, because that's what instructions are. You send

00:37:19.780 that to someone, and then they read your code for behavior, and then they act it out. And so,

00:37:24.520 language enables you to move imitation across space and time. And that's a really good way of

00:37:29.840 conceptualizing language, because it's a Piagetian way, because sometimes we might think that language

00:37:34.820 is there to describe the world, you know, in a scientific sense. George Kelly kind of thinks

00:37:40.340 that, that thought that, that human beings are sort of like natural scientists. But natural

00:37:46.800 scientists are much more concerned with what is than with how to act. So, Kelly's wrong. What human

00:37:52.620 beings are more like is natural engineers, because we're always, you know, zooming around trying to

00:37:56.900 figure out how to fiddle with things much more than what they are. And as I mentioned to you

00:38:02.200 earlier, a pragmatist would say, well, it's an artificial distinction, because things are

00:38:07.540 what they are when you fiddle with them. That's, in fact, what they are. So, that's pretty smart.

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00:42:22.760 He also says, this is part of the constructivist notion, because constructivism is a philosophical school.

00:42:29.100 He says, knowledge does not begin in the eye, and it does not begin in the object. It begins in the

00:42:35.180 interactions. There's a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand, and the

00:42:40.420 object on the other. There is no structure apart from construction, either abstract or genetic.

00:42:46.000 I really like that. I showed you some of the symbolic categories in a couple of, you know,

00:42:51.560 previous lectures, and I mentioned, for example, that one of the symbolic categories is the great

00:42:55.240 father, and the great father kind of stands for cultural structure, whereas the great mother stands

00:43:00.420 for novelty and sometimes the terrifying. Anyways, back to the great father.

00:43:09.460 There's a precondition in constructivism that there has to be three things that exist, and they map right

00:43:15.780 on to that symbolic structure. One is culture. So when you look at something, or really when any

00:43:21.040 creature looks at something, there's an inbuilt structure that characterizes the creature, some of

00:43:26.720 which would be biological, built in, and some of which would be acquired, that they must have in

00:43:31.700 order to structure their perceptions of what they're looking at. So you don't come to the

00:43:36.140 situation blank. You know, for example, you have two eyes, so you're going to have stereo vision most

00:43:41.840 of the time, you know, and you have five senses, and they're the same senses, and there's more than

00:43:46.120 that. You have snake detection circuits, for example, so you're sort of primed to respond to a certain

00:43:51.000 class of predators. You like sweet tastes and sour tastes, but you don't really like bitter tastes,

00:43:56.480 and so on and so forth. Like, right from the beginning, you bring a landscape of interpretive

00:44:02.460 structures in order to frame and simplify the world that you are exposed to. Now, the world itself is

00:44:15.200 this sort of amorphous thing. It's amorphous because it's so multidimensional and complex. There's so much

00:44:20.480 of it. It's like a fog that contains everything, and so unless you can frame that and simplify it and

00:44:26.360 narrow it, it's very difficult for you to understand and interact with it at all. I mean, you know, you

00:44:32.520 just can't deal with everything at once. It's hard enough to deal with one little thing at a time,

00:44:37.380 and, you know, this internal structure is partly what enables you to deal with one little thing at

00:44:41.740 a time. And then, so there's you, and there's the source of all information. There's the structure of

00:44:48.280 you and the source of all information. And then there's the process that's you, and the process

00:44:52.660 that's you is you using your appendages, fundamentally, and your senses to interact with

00:45:00.140 things and to make them manifest new properties, right? And so those are properties that they might

00:45:05.640 not manifest without you there. And it's very difficult for you to tell when you're interacting

00:45:10.080 with the world, even at a perceptual level, how much of what you observe wouldn't be there

00:45:15.300 if you weren't there? Now, so, because one of the big philosophical questions is, well,

00:45:21.080 what's there when you're not there? And that is a much more complicated question than you

00:45:25.660 might imagine. The Taoists would say, well, what's there is so much an amalgam of everything

00:45:34.460 at once that it might as well be nothing at all. And it's sort of a, I can give you a way

00:45:39.900 of understanding that. So let's say you took every symphony that was ever written, recorded,

00:45:45.080 okay? And then you took all those recordings together, and you laid one on top of the other.

00:45:50.120 And you'd say, well, now I've got, like, every symphony at once on a tape, and then you played

00:45:55.600 the tape. What would it sound like? It would sound like white noise. It would sound like shhh.

00:46:01.820 And so you could say, white noise is functionally equivalent to every single symphony that's

00:46:09.560 ever been written, every piece of music that's ever been written, all being played at once.

00:46:13.480 Well, so what? You know? So, and the Taoists would also say, you have to remember that what

00:46:19.400 something is, is just as dependent on what it isn't, as it is dependent on what it is.

00:46:24.620 So, that's a tough one, but it's very, very smart. So the constructivists would certainly

00:46:29.780 agree with that. Now, Bruner, who is a constructivist of sorts, put a little twist on Piaget's idea,

00:46:37.740 which I'm going to borrow, because I think it makes explaining Piaget easier, at least it

00:46:41.260 makes it easier for me, and since I'm explaining it, that's, that's what we're going to have

00:46:45.000 to go for. Bruner said, we seem to have no other way of describing lived time save in the

00:46:51.460 form of a narrative. Now, the reason I think this is a Piagetian constructivist claim is because

00:46:57.000 Piaget is concerned with knowledge as it emerges from action, and action is clearly represented

00:47:03.600 in narratives, right, because a narrative is about what the characters are doing. So, narrative

00:47:07.820 is the way that we represent information about doing. So, and knowledge for Piaget is about

00:47:13.480 doing, so I just put the two together, and that, and that, there's other reasons for it

00:47:17.640 too, and that makes it simpler to explain. So, here's, here's a way of thinking about how

00:47:22.820 we put a structure on the world. So, and I've mentioned, I've kind of introduced you

00:47:26.900 to this idea before. So, you're headed somewhere, wherever that happens to be, because you're

00:47:32.260 an active organism, and so you're, you know, even if you're, don't have any immediate needs,

00:47:37.500 you're going to poke about at things just because you're curious. Turns out that your

00:47:41.200 dopaminergic system, which is the system that drives curiosity, fires at a certain constant

00:47:45.880 rate, even if you're not hungry, or tired, or thirsty, or, you know, even if no primary

00:47:50.680 needs are clamoring for your attention. So, your, your default comfortable state is mildly

00:47:56.500 curious about everything. And so, that's part of what makes you an information forager,

00:48:00.740 because when you have nothing better to do, so to speak, you'll just poke around and see

00:48:05.420 what happens, because you never know that knowledge might come in useful in the future.

00:48:10.080 So, anyways, you're always going from point A to point B, because you're active. And the

00:48:15.000 way you get from point A to point B, even if point B is an abstraction, because it often

00:48:20.020 is, you know, I'm going towards a better future. Well, that's kind of a weird abstraction. How

00:48:25.020 are you going to get there? Well, you can be sure that at the base, it's going to involve

00:48:29.000 movement, right? Because to get to that future, there's, there's movements you're going to

00:48:33.120 have to make. So, start with an abstract philosophical concept. I want to be a good person.

00:48:41.260 Well, you might debate forever about what the good means, right? It's the sort of philosophical

00:48:48.400 conundrum that you can fall into, because you can think in abstractions. And then you

00:48:52.760 might think of it as a property of the world, and it's something that's subject to a kind

00:48:56.380 of the base, which is exactly what's happened in the history of mankind. But there's another

00:48:59.740 way of looking at it that's actually probably more accurate, and I would say also more useful.

00:49:05.140 And this is the way. It's like, so you're going to try to be a good person. Well, the

00:49:09.420 Piagetian view would be being a good person. It's not a state of mind. What it is, is an

00:49:16.280 abstraction that represents, well, first, other associated abstractions, because we could

00:49:23.320 say, well, being a good person is a multidimensional problem, right? You can't just be good and

00:49:28.360 then it's done. It's like, being a good person might mean being good at. Well, what? Well,

00:49:34.140 good at being a friend, good at being a lover, good at being a parent, good at being a child,

00:49:39.980 good at being an employee. You know, you could say, well, good is what's the same across all

00:49:44.780 those things, and Piaget would call that a scheme, just so you know, because a scheme is

00:49:49.120 what's the same across multiple different things. So, and the scheme is the basis of abstraction

00:49:55.080 for Piaget. So, good person is the sum total, or the commonalities between being a good teacher,

00:50:05.440 student, employee, etc., okay? So then we'll say, okay, so now we can move the problem of analysis

00:50:11.700 one level down, and we can say, okay, well, what does it mean to be a good parent? And then you'd

00:50:17.500 say, well, maybe you have to have a good job, because, you know, otherwise you and your child

00:50:21.300 starve, but we'll forget about that one for a moment. And then you might say, well, you have to do a good

00:50:25.920 job of taking care of your family. Okay, so you notice we're zeroing in on an element of the good

00:50:31.900 here, and it's still an abstraction. Care for your family, that's an abstraction. So then you might say,

00:50:38.920 well, one of the things you would do if you cared for your family is play with the baby, and another

00:50:42.880 might be complete a meal. So we'll take the play with the baby example, and then there's three

00:50:48.240 things you can do with your baby. You can peek at it, they like that. That's object permanence, eh?

00:50:53.120 There's nothing more thrilling to a baby than discovering that you're still there when you

00:50:58.360 disappear. Like a baby, you can amuse a baby for hours with that discovery, because it's by no means

00:51:03.500 self-evident to the baby. That's a Piagetian notion. They lack object permanence. So as far as

00:51:08.680 they're concerned, it's a hell of a shock when you disappear, because they were just appreciating you

00:51:13.440 being there, and then they're just as shocked when you reappear. And you can, it's so interesting to

00:51:17.800 watch them, because when a baby gets startled, like when you get startled, you know, you might go like

00:51:22.580 that. If you're really startled, a baby, it's like its whole body is startled, right? Like it makes a weird

00:51:28.700 face, and it moves its arms and its legs, and then it takes it like five seconds to recover. You know,

00:51:33.640 they really have a startle reflex, so, and they'll often laugh. I'm sure you've seen the laughing

00:51:38.620 babies on YouTube, because of course there's like two billion views of laughing babies, which is a

00:51:44.180 good thing. It shows that we like babies. I think there's one that's very famous, where a baby is

00:51:48.600 reacting to his mother either sneezing or coughing. You know, God, it's absolutely hilarious. This baby just

00:51:55.180 has a fit. And what's basically happening is, its mother coughs, I think it's coughs, or maybe

00:51:59.840 sneezes. It blows her nose. Oh, okay. Oh yeah, she blows her nose. So she makes this weird elephant-like 1.00

00:52:05.100 noise, and the baby is like shocked that mother could do this. And then it gets surprised at its

00:52:10.600 own startle, and that makes it laugh. And so that's a really interesting phenomena from a Piagetian

00:52:16.260 perspective, because one of the things that Piaget noticed that children did, because they could

00:52:20.480 imitate, was imitate themselves. That's how they got to know who they were. So for

00:52:25.120 example, if a child, say a child would accidentally knock that off when they're eating, well that's a

00:52:32.080 hell of a thing to discover. You know, if you move your arm just a little bit, that'll fall off. That's

00:52:39.240 cool. So then maybe you can do that 60, 70 times while you're supposed to be eating. And the other thing

00:52:46.660 that's really cool about doing that is that mom will immediately rush over and pick that up and put it back.

00:52:50.960 This is an excellent game. You can entertain yourself with that for like a month. And basically what

00:52:56.740 you're discovering is the relationship between your movements and gravity, right? It's like this is a

00:53:00.820 major discovery. It's no wonder you're obsessed with it. So, so anyways, the point with regards to

00:53:08.300 imitation is maybe the baby does this accidentally to begin with. That startles them. And then it's put

00:53:15.300 up again and then they think, well that was cool. I wonder if we can do that again. And then they're

00:53:21.960 pretty happy about that. And then they'll keep practicing that until they get like expert at

00:53:27.000 doing that. So instead of using like gross body movements to do it, which is how they'd start,

00:53:31.800 they get developed finer and finer and finer body movements until they've got the whole knock a light

00:53:37.040 thing off a table down. And it's, it can even be fascinating as an adult. Some of you have probably

00:53:42.840 played table hockey, you know, with a quarter. You know how to do that? Put a quarter on a table.

00:53:47.320 It's not very complicated. You make a little goal. Your, your job is to flick the thing so that it

00:53:53.160 just sits that far over the table end so that the opponent can flip it up. That's a, that's like

00:54:00.000 your opportunity to score a goal. My point is playing with how things move in relationship to

00:54:05.000 friction and gravity is so engrossing to human beings that you can even make a game out of it 1.00

00:54:08.980 if you're, you know, a relatively bored and stupid adult. 0.98

00:54:14.660 I played that game all the time with my son, by the way, so I put myself in that category as well. 0.99

00:54:19.560 Now, what the child is doing is it'll accidentally, in some ways, bumble into something interesting.

00:54:26.860 And then it recognizes that it's interesting in a sense because that's a reflex action on its part.

00:54:31.640 And then once it recognizes that it's had that reflex action, which is kind of,

00:54:36.000 it's pleasurable as long as it's not too intense, it's at least interesting, then they'll try to

00:54:41.480 imitate what they just did. So part of the way you master yourself is by imitating yourself

00:54:47.020 after you've accidentally done something interesting. It's so smart. So that's a Piagetian

00:54:51.800 notion. So anyways, you're playing with the baby and you can play Pete with the baby. That's a good one.

00:54:56.940 You're teaching it that you're still there even though you went away. And you can tickle the baby,

00:55:01.520 which is best done in moderation, because it's not exactly clear that babies enjoy that.

00:55:06.520 They just laugh when you do that so that you like them and don't throw them out the window

00:55:09.640 when they're being annoying. And then you can clean the baby, too. Those are elements of the

00:55:15.520 care of a baby. I know that's not very sophisticated, but, you know, those are some of the basics.

00:55:19.520 Now, the thing that's different about play with baby and tickle baby is that play with baby

00:55:25.340 is an abstraction, whereas tickle baby is an action, right? And so when you're trying to

00:55:30.640 solve the mind-body problem, this is how you solve it. The mind is those abstractions.

00:55:35.740 The body is the actions that those abstractions ground themselves in.

00:55:40.160 So it's not like the mind is attached to the body. It's the mind is a sequence of

00:55:44.360 hierarchically arranged abstractions, the bottom level of which are not abstractions.

00:55:49.200 They're actions. There's a qualitative transformation. At the bottom of the hierarchy,

00:55:53.100 at the highest resolution level of the hierarchy, it's action. Now, you can understand Piaget very,

00:56:00.620 very easily if you understand that the way a baby develops as far as Piaget is concerned

00:56:05.980 is from the bottom up. So the baby starts with, it's lying in its crib. It's a useless thing.

00:56:13.340 It's laying there. It can't even focus its eyes. You know, it's just barely getting going. 0.71

00:56:18.140 So it's sort of floating in space, trying to figure out what's going on. You know, and it doesn't even

00:56:23.540 know that it has arms, really. It just sort of detects these things off to the side. You'll often

00:56:28.120 bonk itself in the face with its arms, or scratch itself, because you have to cut baby's nails 0.82

00:56:33.940 really short, because otherwise they scratch themselves, because their arms are just, you know,

00:56:38.180 wandering around randomly. And the baby sorts of, from a Piagetian perspective, the baby starts to

00:56:43.820 learn that, learn what its body is capable of doing. And some of that it just discovers by accident.

00:56:50.680 Now, there's no doubt some natural neurological progression that's going on. So the baby is

00:56:56.080 learning along the path that babies can learn. But still, from a Piagetian perspective, the baby

00:57:02.420 is doing quite a bit of exploring to facilitate its neurological development. And more complex animals

00:57:08.380 may be doing that in the womb, you know, trying out their legs and so on, so that they can run as

00:57:12.960 soon as they, you know, as soon as they get up. So it's not even obvious that all that sort of thing

00:57:17.040 is reflexive and automatic in an animal that is more active when it's born.

00:57:23.760 So the baby is, begins by, basically, it sort of develops from the middle outward.

00:57:29.320 So, what's the baby got when it first pops into the world?

00:57:33.300 Well, it can't see very well, although it can focus on about 12 inches, which conveniently is

00:57:37.680 about the distance that its head is from its mother's eyes if it's breastfeeding.

00:57:40.800 So that's good for social communication. So the mother can gaze at the baby, and the baby can gaze 0.98

00:57:46.360 at the mother, and for some reason they both find that fascinating. So, baby's also very wired up

00:57:52.620 around the mouth. So it can use its mouth quite a lot, and it can use its tongue. Those, those come

00:57:58.100 pre-wired. So, and this is kind of a Freudian observation. So at the beginning, the baby really

00:58:03.100 is oral, because that's all that works. Like, it can smell, too, you know. But, but it's, it's, it's,

00:58:10.880 it's voluntary capacity for action is really centered around its mouth. And you'll notice

00:58:16.420 that babies, infant, or toddlers even, love to put things in their mouth. My son, when

00:58:21.660 he was a kid, he used to go in the backyard. We did feed him, so that wasn't the reason.

00:58:25.800 He'd go in the backyard and pick up acorns, and stuff his cheeks with them, just like a chipmunk. 0.61

00:58:30.360 And so, you know, then we'd take him up to the bath, and we'd have to, like, dig all

00:58:35.020 the acorns out of his cheeks, and he did that for, oh God, way longer than you'd expect

00:58:39.860 any sane child to do it. So, but the reason that he would put things in his mouth, and

00:58:44.860 you think about this, is there's nothing that's a better exploratory organ than your tongue.

00:58:50.660 I mean, check out one of your teeth. Bloody thing feels like it's about this big to your tongue,

00:58:56.500 as you'll notice if, you know, you ever get a tooth removed, it's like the Grand Canyon

00:59:00.040 was just instantiated inside your mouth. Then, of course, your tongue will work like

00:59:04.500 mad, of its own accord, to investigate every tiny little crevice in that new hole, because

00:59:11.140 your brain wants to know what's your mouth and what isn't, so that if there's something

00:59:14.720 in your mouth that either should or shouldn't be, A, it can tell it from you, and B, it can

00:59:19.900 tell whether or not it's supposed to be there. Turns out to be very important, right?

00:59:23.320 Because, well, there's tooth decay, that's a problem. But, you know, there's also insects

00:59:28.280 and poison and all sorts of other things that you shouldn't put in your mouth. So, don't

00:59:33.120 underestimate the degree to which you can zoom around the world like a, you know, Hoover

00:59:37.000 vacuum cleaner and pick up a god-awful amount of information. And, of course, you also feed

00:59:41.940 that way, obviously. And so, you know, you're checking out your mother with your mouth and

00:59:47.360 your tongue in a very meaningful way, too. And while you're feeding at the breast, you're

00:59:51.940 establishing the basis of social relationships. Now, this puts a bit of a warp into the Piagetian

00:59:56.780 hypothesis, because Piaget sort of assumed that the baby builds himself from the bottom

01:00:03.680 up, right? But one of the things you have to understand is that the baby is always picking

01:00:08.920 up how to behave and see in a very, very, very social context, even when it's so young

01:00:14.440 that Piaget would regard it as primarily egocentric, because what the hell does a baby know about 0.81

01:00:19.240 you? You know, but the mother is teaching the child how to act right from the time it's

01:00:25.600 a little tiny thing. Like, if it's going to breastfeed, it has to do it in a relatively 0.95

01:00:29.080 civilized manner. Because if it bites his mother or her mother, which a baby can do, they can

01:00:35.020 really chomp you a good one if their minds are made up to do that. It's like unpleasant

01:00:39.560 consequences are going to ensue. At minimum, the mother is going to startle and, you know,

01:00:44.660 stop feeding the baby, and, you know, maybe she'll put the baby down, or God only knows. 1.00

01:00:49.940 One time, when my son was very young, I guess he was about 13 months, he had just learned

01:00:55.360 to walk. And he walked up to my wife, who was wearing shorts, and he bit her right here. 0.99

01:01:01.960 And a good chomp, he was just teething, eh? And she reflexed. Her leg shot out as a reflex, 0.99

01:01:09.540 and he, like, he must have flown six feet. It's like, that's how you socialize children

01:01:15.180 against sudden bites. You know? So, it's, even the smallest alterations of their behavior

01:01:22.000 take place within an intensely social context. So, even at this level, society is helping

01:01:28.260 guide and restrict the development of the child's motor activities. Now, children tend

01:01:34.640 to develop, as I said, they develop gross body movements first, so they kind of learn

01:01:40.180 to fling their arms. So, maybe you put a mobile in the crib for your baby to look at. By the

01:01:46.740 way, most mobiles, you'll notice, maybe they're fish. So, you're a parent, you're standing here,

01:01:52.400 and this is the side of the fish, and this is the bottom of the fish. And that's what the

01:01:58.600 baby is looking at. It's like the baby is looking at lines, because the fish are there

01:02:03.180 for the adults. It's like, that's a stupid mobile. You get the fish turned over, so the 1.00

01:02:07.980 baby can see the fish, and then you make them out of, like, black and white, because babies

01:02:12.760 are very good at picking up high contrast, and that's a baby mobile rather than a mother

01:02:17.200 mobile. So, you gotta decide whether the mobile's for you or for your baby. So, anyways, you

01:02:21.960 put the mobile above the baby, and you kind of want to put it within limb length, and then

01:02:27.180 the baby will watch this thing. Who knows, maybe it's annoyed to death by this thing. We all

01:02:31.720 know, it's like, you know. And then it'll, it'll sort of flail about like it does in

01:02:38.380 a not very well-controlled manner, and maybe it'll flail an arm or a leg, and now and then

01:02:43.180 it'll get lucky, and it'll nail one of those fish. And now it'll startle the day. And so,

01:02:48.680 usually, it'll, that, it might cry then, because that might have just, if it's a neurotic

01:02:52.980 baby, it'll cry. It's like, that's too much for today. Take it a little while away.

01:02:57.420 But if it's a, kind of a outgoing, exploratory baby, then the next thing it's really going

01:03:03.280 to want to do is to figure out how to make that fish move again. And then it'll sit there

01:03:07.480 and practice flailing its leg. It's like it's throwing its leg at the fish. And if it gets

01:03:12.140 lucky, it'll nail it a good one, and then that'll make it laugh. And then, you know,

01:03:15.920 it'll practice doing that over a sequence of, babies are persistent, man. So when my daughter

01:03:20.700 was little, she was about 18 months old, we bought her this little cardboard box that

01:03:25.520 had little cardboard Disney books in it. You know, and she didn't care what the Disney books 0.95

01:03:31.360 were. What she was really interested in is getting those three books out of the Disney

01:03:35.140 box, and then trying to get them back in. Because it turned out that was quite difficult,

01:03:39.580 because they fit tightly. So this was a great puzzle for her, because, you know, she was

01:03:43.080 still getting the whole coordination thing going. And she'd sit for, like, three hours

01:03:49.660 getting those books in that box. And that was like a toy for a week, until she figured

01:03:56.200 it out. And then she was on to bigger and better things. But that's a big deal, right? You

01:04:02.780 can imagine what you're doing neurologically when you're doing that. It's like, first of

01:04:06.880 all, you've got to grip that book properly. Second, you've got to orient it precisely.

01:04:11.880 Third, as you add the additional books to the box, the shape changes, because the books

01:04:17.880 flop over, you know, because they'll flop over diagonally. So the shape changes, so

01:04:22.040 you've got to figure out how to adjust that. And then the book itself will open, and that

01:04:26.760 will get in the way. So you've got to keep the book closed. And, you know, the tolerances

01:04:30.260 are like an 18th of an inch. So you want to master that. And, like, some people don't.

01:04:36.640 I had a client once who had a very low fluid intelligence, probably 75, 80. You wouldn't

01:04:42.800 have known it by looking at him. But he couldn't find employment. Surprise, surprise. There's

01:04:49.140 no jobs in our society for people who are at that end of the cognitive distribution.

01:04:53.860 I got him a volunteer job at one point, and his job was to put paper in envelopes. He had

01:05:00.260 to fold it up in three, because that's how you fold up a piece of paper, and then you have

01:05:04.100 to put it in an envelope. But that actually turns out to be hyper-complex. I probably

01:05:08.500 trained him for 28 to 30 hours to do that. And because when you do it next time, or you

01:05:16.460 could do it now, you just think about what you're doing. First of all, merely by observing

01:05:20.600 the piece of paper, you have to figure out how to make the first fold. And it better be

01:05:24.800 damn close to one-third. Because if it isn't, when you make the second fold, you're going

01:05:28.480 to compound your error, and then you're going to find, to your chagrin, that the piece

01:05:32.720 of paper does not fit in the envelopes, because the envelope is exactly the same size as the

01:05:36.940 piece of paper. So if you're out by your estimate, say, a quarter of an inch in your

01:05:41.120 first fold, you're out by a half inch in your second fold, it's like it's not going

01:05:44.400 in there. Or if you don't fold it completely at 90 degrees, you know, so the edges line

01:05:50.520 up, say you're out by a sixteenth of an inch, and then you do that again, so now you're

01:05:54.780 out by an eighth, it won't fit in sideways. So then you have to mangle the envelope to get

01:06:00.100 the paper in there, and then by the time you're done mangling the envelope, not only

01:06:03.940 does it look ugly, but it will not go through an automatic sorting machine. So, and then

01:06:09.000 added to that was the problem that on these pieces of paper, there were often photographs

01:06:13.360 stapled, because he was working for a charity, so then, and, but the photographs weren't

01:06:17.220 always stapled at exactly the same place on the piece of paper. So then he'd have to

01:06:21.200 look at the piece of paper, and he'd have to figure out where the photograph is, and

01:06:24.760 then he'd have to figure out how to fold the piece of paper so that he didn't bend the

01:06:28.000 photograph so that it would still fit in the envelope, and that just used to, he'd

01:06:32.280 just sweat himself to death trying to solve that problem, because there was time pressure

01:06:36.160 too. So, and then, there's an added level of complexity on top of that, and the reason

01:06:41.640 I'm telling you this is because it'll give you some sense of how, you know, simple actions

01:06:47.140 are aggregated into increasingly complex operations. Some of the envelopes were French, and some of

01:06:52.220 them were English, because it was Canada, and so you couldn't put a French letter in an

01:06:56.060 English envelope, the French ones had to go in a separate pile, and then there was a

01:06:59.900 huge stack, say, of English letters, and a huge stack of English envelopes, all of which

01:07:05.100 hypothetically had been stacked so that each one corresponded to the other, but now and

01:07:10.420 then, one of them would be out of alignment. So then you had to figure out whether it was

01:07:14.280 the letters that were out of the alignment, or the envelopes. Well, that's a, that's a high

01:07:18.840 complexity working memory problem, and that'd just bring them to a standstill. So, anyways,

01:07:25.560 you know, during typical development, you develop those incredibly fine motor skills

01:07:29.940 early, which is part of the reason why it's kind of nice to have your baby, toddler, infant do

01:07:36.720 something by itself, you know, like, sit there with a box till it gets a little bored, and then

01:07:41.360 it'll start to figure out what to do with the box, and that's part of play, and that's part of the

01:07:46.060 development of its embodied conceptual structure. So, okay, so, so, you basically chain these

01:07:53.980 things together. Now, the way that Piaget, he thought, well, what's the motivation for

01:07:58.740 doing this? So, the motivation essentially is that, well, sometimes it can be sort of

01:08:05.880 random, you accidentally do something interesting and then try to repeat it, but as you sort of

01:08:10.400 develop, the number of times that you do something accidentally that results in something interesting

01:08:14.720 starts to decline. Now, what, part of what happens to you as you mature is that the opportunities

01:08:21.100 that are provided for you by your body as you exercise and develop it start, you know, start to

01:08:27.080 really ramp up and develop, so that you can do a lot more interesting things with your body by the

01:08:31.520 time you're two than you can when you're nine months old. For example, you can zoom around, which

01:08:36.100 just opens up a whole universe of things to pull over and dump over and pull off tables and, you know,

01:08:41.000 and there's things lying around that you can write on walls with and you can pull out cupboards and

01:08:46.260 it's like, it's, it's, it's, you know, paradise for an exploratory baby, baby. So, but what happens is

01:08:54.380 that as the child puts himself or herself together physically and develops additional skills, then

01:09:00.660 they can elicit additional manifestations of novelty from the world. So, for example,

01:09:06.360 all right, well, here's a good example. So, the child finally manages to get itself upright, which

01:09:11.720 is like a colossal, colossal, amazing accomplishment, you know. I mean, first of all,

01:09:19.000 that's hard to do, you know. Like, no, there aren't two-legged creatures in the world except for us,

01:09:25.040 you know, and we're so good at this, you can even, isn't that wonderful? I learned that when I was two.

01:09:29.880 So, you know, you can do these amazing things with your body, but the child is, like, trying to put

01:09:35.600 itself together neurologically, and it's a hell of an operation to get this column of bone, it's like

01:09:41.000 jellyfish on a bone, you know, or stacked bones, and you've got to get the thing to stand up upright.

01:09:47.740 God, ridiculously difficult. So, the child manages that. There's a lot of pain and anguish associated

01:09:53.120 with that, right, because those little creatures, they just fall down, you know, and they've got these

01:09:57.960 little short arms, so they're not much good at protecting themselves from impact, they're just

01:10:01.980 bouncing off the walls like mad in the floor when they're trying to learn to walk. Then they finally

01:10:07.060 get themselves upright and totter along and fall and so on, but then, you know, then the world turns

01:10:12.760 into a different place because all of a sudden now you can stand up underneath a table. That's the,

01:10:18.460 that's a fun thing to do for the first time. It's like, whack! So, now, your new body has taught you

01:10:24.660 something about the world that you did not know. So, what Piaget would say is, well, you've got this

01:10:30.400 scheme worked out, which is the standing up scheme, and it turns out that that works pretty well if

01:10:36.340 you're in an empty space, but if you're in an enclosed space with a low ceiling, the whole standing up

01:10:42.920 thing is just not going to produce the results intended. So, you stand up and whack yourself, and

01:10:49.240 that's a sign that it's time to update your representational structures. And so, you can think

01:10:54.340 of that technically as the emergence of anomaly into what would have otherwise been a conceptually

01:11:01.360 protected space. Now, Piaget has this idea of equilibration. So, let's say your baby crawls,

01:11:07.820 and let's say it's an equilibrated crawler, which means it's kind of an expert, and babies get pretty

01:11:15.080 expert crawlers by about, say, 12, 13 months. They can zoom around, and they know how not to bump into

01:11:22.160 things, and, you know, how to crawl around without hurting themselves. So, when they crawl around,

01:11:27.320 only the things that they want to have happen, happen, most of the time. And they're equilibrated

01:11:32.480 at that point, because their actions and their conceptions of the consequence of those actions

01:11:39.400 match. They've got no problem. What they expect or want to have happen when they crawl is what

01:11:45.480 happens. That baby's at, has mastered a developmental stage. So, that's the stage idea. And that's the

01:11:53.340 equilibrated stage idea. Equilibration is a brilliant idea, and I'll tell you why in a minute. But then,

01:11:57.760 all of a sudden, the baby learns to stand up. It's like, uh-oh, an advance? But it's like a revolutionary

01:12:05.360 advance, right? It's equivalent to a revolution in science, which is why Piaget mentioned Kuhn. It's

01:12:11.380 like, well, now I'm a standing creature. The whole crawling expertise is hardly worth it at all. You

01:12:19.320 know, there's some transfer of knowledge, but the new universe that's made accessible to the baby by

01:12:25.320 its now dawning ability to stand, forces it to revolutionize its entire cognitive structure. Now,

01:12:33.200 I'll give you, I want to tell you a very quick story, because it's a very good one. So, this is a good

01:12:40.160 indication of the function of dream and play. So, when my daughter was three, she couldn't talk very

01:12:46.780 well. She, she learned to speak late. And we lived in Boston, and when she learned to speak, she developed

01:12:52.260 a Boston accent, which we were completely flabbergasted by, because we didn't have a Boston

01:12:57.440 accent, and neither did any of our neighbors. Turns out there's a speech impediment that sounds

01:13:02.340 just like a Boston accent. But, anyway, she was, it usually goes away, except in Boston. 0.80

01:13:13.600 So, anyway, she, she was, she was three, and when her brother was born, there's always the possibility

01:13:19.080 of sibling rivalry, right? Because, and for good reason, it's like, time to get rid of that thing.

01:13:24.340 All it's doing is taking up all of mom's attention, you know? Like, that's a hard reality for a child

01:13:29.260 who's under three to manage, because they're still pretty dependent, and it's like, well, what, why

01:13:34.660 should they be liking this horrible, noisy, attention-grabbing interloper? So, we tried to,

01:13:41.040 we tried to teach her right from the time he came home, her, her brother, that the idea was she was

01:13:48.640 going to lose something, which was some parental attention, especially from her mother, but she

01:13:52.620 was potentially going to gain something, which was maturity, independence, and the possibility

01:13:58.120 of a new relationship. Now, we couldn't tell her that. Some parents will tell their three-year-olds

01:14:02.180 that. It's like, and your three-year-old has learned to look at you when you talk, but they're

01:14:06.680 actually hearing, you know how dogs in cartoons hear people talk? It's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, that's how children hear you

01:14:14.640 talk when you're talking about something like independence, like, what the hell do they know about that?

01:14:18.680 That's way up there on the hierarchy. But we tried to teach her to interact with the baby in such a way

01:14:24.480 that she would elicit positive feedback from him, and so that they could be friends, and then we also

01:14:29.540 taught her that she should take care of the baby, and that gave her something to do. So, that worked.

01:14:33.380 We also didn't let them tease each other. Not much. You know, they're going to tease each other a bit,

01:14:38.600 because siblings often bloody hell hate each other when they're, when they're young, and sometimes that

01:14:43.360 just destroys the relationship for their whole life. It's like, you don't want that, because you're stuck

01:14:47.440 with your damn brother until he dies, hopefully, or until you do. So, anyway, so, my daughter was 0.99

01:14:55.360 taking care of this little guy, and, you know, she used to watch him on the steps and sort of

01:14:59.360 shepherd him around, and she was pretty good at it. And then, um, one day he started to walk, and

01:15:05.900 she kept talking about her baby, and we told her that, well, he wasn't really a baby anymore.

01:15:11.380 And we didn't realize that this was setting off a cognitive revolution of the Piagetian sort,

01:15:16.560 because, of course, she'd kind of grown attached to this baby, just like mothers do. And mothers

01:15:20.840 sometimes get so attached to their babies that they really don't want them to stop being babies,

01:15:24.840 and so they end up living in their house until they're 55, you know, plodding in the destruction

01:15:28.440 of the world. So, you don't want to have that happen. So, but it was happening in a microwave

01:15:33.300 with her. It's like, well, there's this baby, and I spent a lot of time getting used to it, and

01:15:38.520 figuring out what to do with it, and now it's not a baby anymore. What the hell is it? So, she had

01:15:44.080 this amazing dream, and it ties back to the shamanic stuff that I taught you guys about earlier. So,

01:15:48.420 this is the dream. She dreamt that the baby crawled into a hole in the backyard. Now, the way the hole

01:15:54.600 got there was that a tree from the park beside us had moved into our backyard, and then it had burned

01:16:00.500 down and left this hole, and then the hole was full of water. And so, the baby crawled into the

01:16:05.120 water, and it reduced him to a skeleton, and then there was a bug in the water, and the bug pulled

01:16:09.500 him out, and when he came out, he was a new creature. So, it was perfect. Like, she came and told me

01:16:16.180 that, I don't know, like two in the morning, in her little three-year-old voice, and I got it all

01:16:19.800 typed down. It was absolutely spectacular, because it was a straight shamanic dream. Like, the tree burned

01:16:24.800 down, and so that's a transformation motif, and then water is the place of rebirth, and, you know, the kid

01:16:29.780 was dissolved into a skeleton, and the little bug that pulled him out is like a representation of

01:16:34.640 the underlying process that guides transformation. Her own brain was, like, working like mad, trying

01:16:39.740 to figure out continuity over change. That's a tough one, right? Because it's almost like a butterfly

01:16:48.140 emerging from a cocoon. It's a big deal. Baby to toddler, that's a big difference. You know, she's

01:16:53.340 supposed to figure out, well, that's the same thing. Well, no, it's not. So, underneath her

01:16:59.280 unconscious mind, you know, three-year-olds are not stupid, even though they can't talk. 0.99

01:17:03.520 They've got this brain that's like 3.5 billion years old. It's not stupid. So, anyways, now, 1.00

01:17:11.300 why was I telling you that? There was a specific reason.

01:17:17.540 Oh, well, it's another indication of how—so, the transformations of cognitive structure are

01:17:23.240 forced upon a child, at least in part by the development of increasing physical ability,

01:17:29.160 right? Because as you increase in physical ability and capacity, then the world transforms,

01:17:33.440 and then your cognitive processes have to transform to keep up with that, and sometimes that's

01:17:37.640 a radical transformation. So, Piaget's fundamental hypothesis is that part of the reason that people

01:17:44.380 are motivated to undergo cognitive transformations and learning, per se, is because as they mature,

01:17:49.720 they automatically come into contact with anomalous information, information that they cannot process

01:17:57.240 from within the confines of their current world model. And because they can't process it,

01:18:01.520 it interferes with them getting what they want, and so they're motivated to keep their cognitive

01:18:05.600 structures updated. So, and sometimes the revolutions occur at a micro level, and that might be like

01:18:11.420 when you're learning the difference between this and this, you know, it's like, it's a major

01:18:16.500 difference, but it doesn't, you know, disrupt the whole fabric of your conceptual universe,

01:18:22.500 whereas a divorce might, the baby transforming into a toddler might, puberty does, it's because,

01:18:29.080 like, you just finally got used to your body, you're 12 years old, eh? So, you're sort of at the

01:18:34.020 pinnacle of childhood, you're like an adult child, you know what you're doing. And 11 and 12 year olds

01:18:39.360 are often lovely creatures, because they're pretty mature, and they've got their act together, and then

01:18:43.200 all of a sudden, bang, sex hormones kick in. It's like, you are no longer the same thing, and neither is

01:18:49.800 anyone you interact with, and so it's like turbulence for 3, 4, 5, 20, 30 years, until you sort of

01:18:57.500 sort that out, which you never really do. And so, you can see how the physiological transformations

01:19:05.720 that are attendant on development, some biologically predicated, and some an emergent consequence of

01:19:11.040 learning, disrupt the cognitive structures that people use to orient themselves in the

01:19:16.760 world, and that some of those disruptions are sort of low-key, equivalent to normal science,

01:19:21.940 that would be assimilation, and some of them much broader, and that's equivalent to accommodation.

01:19:29.620 Assimilation means you learn something new that you can already handle using the constructs and

01:19:34.720 schemas that you have at hand. You know, so maybe you have to pick the thing up like this, instead of

01:19:41.520 like this, but you already know this, and you know that, so who cares? It's like a little minor alteration.

01:19:46.060 And sometimes, well, no, you have to readapt your whole body in order to handle the next level of

01:19:52.860 complex problem-solving. Learning to drive is like that, learning to ride a bicycle is like that,

01:19:57.500 and you can see that there's sort of a, there's not really normal versus revolutionary transformations,

01:20:03.380 there's sort of a continuum that map themselves onto that hierarchy I showed you. You know, so at the

01:20:09.760 very highest levels of resolution, it's minor transformations, and at the higher levels of

01:20:13.700 abstraction, you can blow out whole huge chunks of yourself. So it's a continuum. But Piaget and

01:20:21.000 Kuhn sort of conceptualized it as a dichotomy. All right. Oh yes, this is the, this, this, this is the

01:20:27.780 thing I really want to get at too. This is, it's so brilliant. And so, Piaget was concerned about

01:20:33.580 morality, and he's one of the few psychologists, I think, who like, he nailed it. It's, this is like

01:20:39.200 the most important thing Piaget discovered, and maybe it's one of the most important things that a

01:20:42.860 psychologist has ever discovered. It's like, how do you become moral? Well, we already mentioned

01:20:48.120 that when you acquire a behavior, you inevitably acquire it in a social context. So what that means

01:20:53.900 is that right from the time you're little and learning things, the demands of society are encoded

01:20:58.660 in the behaviors that you're allowed to manifest. And so science, to some degree, by the time you

01:21:03.720 behave the way you do behave when you're three, if you've been properly socialized, you already

01:21:09.320 act out the embodied moral structure of your entire community. So, you know, when you talk

01:21:17.060 about laws, you say there's a body of laws. And the body of laws used to be the king, so

01:21:21.840 you had to do what the king said. But now the body of laws is an abstract, conceptual representation.

01:21:26.660 But those representations are actually semantic representations of allowable and not allowable

01:21:33.140 behavior. And so by the time you're three, and you're a law-abiding three-year-old, which

01:21:38.080 means you're well-socialized, you're already acting in accordance with the law. The patterns

01:21:43.180 that characterize your being, the behavioral patterns that characterize your being, have

01:21:46.840 already been molded into the patterns that you manifest. And so what that means in some

01:21:50.720 sense is you're already, as Nietzsche would say, an unconscious advocate of your culture,

01:21:56.020 because you're acting it out. Now here's an example of how that can be transformed into

01:22:00.640 actual moral knowledge. So he actually goes and studies kids playing a game. So here's an

01:22:05.820 example. So there's a bunch of kids, and they're standing around in the playground, and they're

01:22:08.840 all playing helicopter. Maybe they've just got sticks, and they're all going, you know,

01:22:13.220 when they're flying their helicopters around, and they're all doing this, and maybe they're

01:22:16.180 diving at each other. So what's happened is, each kid wants to have a helicopter, and each

01:22:20.840 kid wants to be a good helicopter pilot, but each kid wants to be a good helicopter pilot

01:22:25.220 in the way that other kids appreciate, well, they're being good helicopter pilots. That's

01:22:30.660 tough, eh? So not only do you have to figure out how to coordinate your behavior, you have

01:22:34.880 to figure out how to coordinate your behavior with other people coordinating their behavior

01:22:40.320 in such a way that the shared activity not only does not come to a stop, but proceeds

01:22:46.780 in an enjoyable way. Jesus, that's really tough. Now, if your kid can play well with other

01:22:51.940 kids, that's what they've managed. Okay, so you've got four kids doing this. And there's

01:22:56.160 rules. Actually, there's not. There's rituals that the children are embodying that they've

01:23:00.500 agreed upon while they set up the game. They've just sort of bashed the ideas against each

01:23:05.420 other, and they came up with a solution, and you can tell that because the game is continuing,

01:23:09.320 and everyone is having fun. It's like, is everyone playing nice? Yes. That's an equilibrated

01:23:14.320 play state. And it's a moral organization because all the children are participating voluntarily

01:23:18.760 towards a shared end. And Piaget, that was the model of a functional society. That's so

01:23:24.640 smart. So now imagine that a kid comes along, and maybe he's a popular kid, so he has a reasonable

01:23:30.440 chance of getting into this playgroup. He'll still be rebuffed like 50% of the time. Whereas

01:23:35.540 if he's an unpopular kid, it's like, forget. They're just not going to let him into the

01:23:39.240 little helicopter circle. And it's probably because he's developmentally delayed, or in

01:23:44.060 some other way, he doesn't understand how he has to configure his behavior so that he can

01:23:49.400 enter this complex, dramatic scene without disrupting it. Or maybe he's one of those kids

01:23:54.060 who says, I don't want to play helicopter. We should play something else. It's like,

01:23:58.200 no. Unless you're, unless you're like a creative genius. That's a really bad idea.

01:24:05.320 So what the popular kids do is they sort of side left to the group. Maybe they find a stick

01:24:09.680 because they watch what they're doing. And maybe they find a stick, and they sort of start

01:24:12.820 going zzzz with the stick. And they're sort of looking to see if that stick helicopter behavior

01:24:19.480 is acceptable to the peers. And maybe, you know, one of their friends sort of notices

01:24:23.820 that they're playing helicopters, and they open up the circle, and that kid gets to come

01:24:27.040 in and play helicopters. But he might fail at that, even if he's popular. Because once

01:24:31.560 the little play thing is going, it's like a play, right? It's got a dramatic structure.

01:24:35.620 You can't just come in there and, you know, start playing basketball or something.

01:24:39.180 So now, what Piaget noticed was that when children were playing a game, maybe they were

01:24:46.700 playing marbles, and that's a rough game, because you can win and lose at marbles. And you might

01:24:51.660 say, well, children shouldn't play competitive games. But if you say that, that's a sure sign

01:24:56.020 that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Because all games are competitive and

01:25:00.220 cooperative at the same time, if they share a single goal. And it's really not a game unless

01:25:05.480 there's a goal. Because games have goals. And so what the children do is they organize

01:25:10.540 themselves so they all decide what constitutes an acceptable goal. And the goal with marbles

01:25:15.460 is win some marbles. And lose some marbles without whining about it. That's another goal.

01:25:19.920 And that's an important thing to learn. So the children say, well, here's the foundation

01:25:24.180 of our local moral universe. Here's the rules that we're going to abide by. And a lot of those

01:25:29.000 are ritualistic. They might have learned them from other kids. So they play marbles. You extract

01:25:33.860 out a kid and you say, what are the rules for marbles? And if the kid's like seven, they

01:25:38.400 don't know. They can't tell you. But if you put them in with a bunch of other seven-year-olds,

01:25:42.040 they can play marbles perfectly well. So what that means is the morality is coded in their

01:25:46.440 behavior. Or in the behavior of the group, like a bunch of bees, you know, because there's

01:25:50.620 knowledge in a hive of bees, or maybe a school of fish. So it's embedded in the child's behavior

01:25:55.540 and in their patterns of action across time. And then if you pull them out, they can only

01:26:01.140 give, like, a partial account of it. They're not conscious of the morality. It's like you

01:26:05.780 pull a wolf out of a wolf pack and say, well, you know, what's up with the wolf pack? And

01:26:10.000 the wolf, you know, bites you because that's how it answers questions. It's not going to

01:26:14.120 tell you about the rules. It's only later in development that the children become conscious

01:26:18.440 of the rules. And then they become very irritated if people break them. And then only much later

01:26:23.900 do they start to understand that the rules can be adjusted by mutual agreement. And that

01:26:29.660 is associated with the Piagetian development of higher order morality. It's brilliant.

01:26:34.760 You learn your actions. The actions are conditioned by other people. The actions are integrated into

01:26:41.080 a voluntary game. Then the actions are integrated into a series of voluntary games. That's social

01:26:47.060 interaction. Then you learn the descriptions. Then you learn how to manipulate the descriptions.

01:26:53.660 Brilliant. Movement up the higher order. So that's Piagetian theory in a nutshell. Constructivism

01:26:58.440 in a nutshell. See you on Thursday.

01:27:01.040 Thank you.

01:27:03.040 Thank you.

01:27:05.640 Thank you.

01:27:06.640 Thank you.

01:27:07.640 Thank you.

01:27:08.640 Thank you.

01:27:11.240 Thank you.

01:27:12.240 Thank you.

01:27:34.240 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 01, 2020

143. Jean Piaget (Constructivism)

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