Dr. Stephen Hicks is a philosopher with a stellar academic career. He has taught five courses at Peterson Academy, a new online university that some of you may be aware of, and we detailed out the structure of the courses. And more importantly and more broadly, we discussed the importance of a philosophical education.
00:02:40.460So my intellectual interest is in what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like.
00:02:50.980We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in.
00:02:56.120And education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.
00:03:01.640So in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies.
00:03:08.560And obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial.
00:03:12.660So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing.
00:03:17.460I had at my university a Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on,
00:03:31.320Because in many cases, people can learn very well without the presence of a professor physically or and so forth.
00:03:38.840So what I'm interested in, though, primarily, though, is the courses that I have taught over the course of many years.
00:03:45.960Having them in a vehicle that's obviously going to be accessible to more people, but also with better production values and in a way that can't, in some cases, be done even in a good in-person classroom.
00:04:02.260In philosophy, everything is controversial.
00:04:04.960A big part of education in life is philosophical education.
00:04:12.460How many beliefs do I have in my mind?
00:04:14.360How did they get into my mind in the first place?
00:04:22.480Philosophy has a reputation for just being abstract.
00:04:25.340Philosophers love their abstractions, their general principles.
00:04:28.320What we want is to be much more careful.
00:04:31.120But what happens in politics, economics, business, family, religion is because of philosophical ideas.
00:04:40.480John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, they were the great geniuses of philosophy who made the modern world.
00:04:50.700We're philosophers, for goodness sake.
00:05:46.220They're all over the map intellectually, from Descartes to Locke to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, on into the 20th century.
00:05:54.940What role they have played in making the modern world and then the post-modern world happen,
00:06:01.900and in some cases, of course, resisting what is going on in modernity and in post-modernity.
00:06:09.240So, the first two courses that the Academy invited me to teach were on modern philosophy.
00:06:16.240And essentially, that picks up right at the beginning of the modern era with the giants,
00:06:20.940Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, laying a new foundation, overturning medieval philosophy.
00:06:28.920Medieval philosophy, again, much sophistication there, had been a kind of dominant framework for a millennium.
00:06:37.540And in very quick time, things transformed themselves in the 1500s, 1600s.
00:06:42.900All of those intellectual, cultural transformations that we study when we do the history.
00:06:50.240And that course ends with the death of Nietzsche in 1900.
00:06:54.320So, essentially, 1500 to 1900, eight lectures, but also integrating the philosophers with what's going on historically.
00:07:03.220Because in some cases, the philosophers are ones who make the historical revolution happen as their theoretical ideas are applied.
00:07:12.060In other cases, the philosophers are responding to what's going on in the culture, what's going on historically,
00:07:19.240trying to make sense of it and either urge it on or retard it.
00:07:23.360The second course picks up in 1900, and it's called Postmodern Philosophy.
00:07:30.320And the main point of that course is to say that the postmodern thinkers started to react against, in a very sophisticated way,
00:07:42.120much of what had happened intellectually in the modern era.
00:07:46.260And they, in some cases, were radicalizing it, in some cases wanting to overturn entirely what had occurred intellectually and culturally in the modern era.
00:07:56.340And we started to see, in philosophy, a move to a more skeptical, relativized, even kind of the death of philosophy.
00:08:08.160The sense that philosophy has for millennia tried to answer all of these important questions about the meaning of life in a culminating fashion.
00:08:15.980But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions.
00:08:30.180So it should, in effect, disintegrate.
00:08:32.660So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.
00:08:42.120And here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase,
00:08:47.620John Dewey and some of the pragmatists, to some extent, Martin Heidegger,
00:08:51.360and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.
00:08:58.640But also, at the same time, since I don't agree with any of them, but I do give them a fair shot.
00:09:05.080And we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from
00:09:08.580and why these arguments are so powerful and that we have to take them seriously.
00:09:13.740Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions,
00:09:19.980sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions still have some bite
00:09:26.220and can be repackaged for this post-modern era.
00:21:58.380You had no behavioral preconditions to set for you.
00:22:02.660There was an experience, and you were aware of the experience.
00:22:05.700Now, what you then go on to do with that experience is going to be an extraordinarily complicated thing.
00:22:11.760And all of the things that you are laying out are exactly right.
00:22:15.340So, the empiricist commitment, I think, if it's going to be properly done, has to be that there are such things like the smacking on the table and various other sorts of things that ultimately, when we get all of the other things sorted out, and sometimes we have to do this in laboratories where we have isolated all of the variables, there is a residual direct contact with empirical reality.
00:22:38.120Right, something that's outside the subject.
00:22:39.560No, but even there, the language becomes very important because we don't want to say that it's subjective, at least as philosophers use the term, because that then is to say it's not in relationship to what is out there.
00:22:53.360So, again, we have to get into the technical epistemology very carefully.
00:22:59.080When philosophers talk about the subjective, sometimes they just mean anything that is happening right on the subjective side.
00:23:04.880But if we were doing epistemology or knowledge, then we say subjectivism means that the terms for what we are calling a belief or calling a knowledge or whatever it is, is set by the subject.
00:23:15.960And the external reality has nothing to do with it, the opposite position then is some sort of revelatory model, where the subject has absolutely nothing to do with it, and said just reality smacks that person in the face, and as you put it, the story doesn't need to be told.
00:23:33.360It wears on its face what the proper interpretation of it is.
00:23:36.960What I think is the proper starting point for any good epistemology is not going to be either of those.
00:23:44.400So, we have to understand consciousness as a response mechanism to reality.
00:23:49.440It's an inherently relational phenomenon.
00:23:53.540And you always have to talk about reality and the conscious response to the reality.
00:24:00.040What very quickly happens in so many philosophies is people think, well, if the subject is involved, then there's no way for us to be aware of reality.
00:24:10.040They retreat to some sort of representationalist model or they start going internal, and then they start talking about motivations and theory laden and other beliefs that you have.
00:24:19.940And once you make that divide, there is no way to get out of the subject and back to reality.
00:24:26.440On the other hand, if you try to react to that and say the subject can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge, then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject, right?
00:24:38.020To pretend the subject doesn't exist, to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject.
00:25:03.860In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem.
00:25:12.800And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism, centuries later, is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.
00:25:25.740So, what I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else, no matter how sophisticated it starts.
00:25:44.780But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind.
00:25:50.760You can't do the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to the other, to reality, rather.
00:26:07.760And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon, and that's a philosophy of mind claim.
00:26:33.460Yeah, I think we talk a lot about epistemology, and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.
00:27:05.300And just having been conditioned to do certain things.
00:27:07.440So, how do I really know that I know something?
00:27:10.240And when should I say that I don't really know something?
00:27:13.220And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.
00:27:18.000And this involves some reflection on sense perception as we're starting to talk about now.
00:27:22.280A good understanding of language and grammar, logic, and then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story.
00:27:34.400What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?
00:27:38.840So, we've been thinking through those things very systematically.
00:27:42.380Now, that, though, is where the language of empiricism and rationalism and various kinds of synthesis and skepticism that says we don't actually have any knowledge, all of that language is epistemological.
00:27:56.020But I think we can't do epistemology in isolation.
00:28:00.060We always have to do it in context with metaphysics.
00:28:04.020That is to say, we have to also be talking about the nature of reality.
00:28:14.880So, the question is, any time I want to say, you know, this is true or this is real or this is a fact, right, or whatever, that's to make a claim about reality.
00:28:24.500And then the follow-up claim always is, well, how do you know that?
00:28:28.160So, you're making the claim, but you're also making a justificatory claim.
00:28:31.380So, reality, and then broadly speaking, when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole, then we are doing metaphysics.
00:28:42.260You know, the special sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology.
00:28:46.100But if we can step back and say, are, for example, space and time features of the universe as a whole?
00:28:53.300Is the universe eternal or infinite in various dimensions?
00:29:02.960So, to come back to, and this is just one more point that I wanted to make, is that all of the things that we talk about when we start talking about sense perception and forming concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics,
00:29:14.020all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind, that is to say, what is this thing that we call the mind?
00:29:24.360And one of the things that early modern philosophy, now this is 1400s, 1500s, on into the 1600s, was simultaneously struggling with was understanding the human being.
00:29:36.320And if, for example, you have what was common for many centuries, let's say, a dualistic understanding of the human being, that the human being is a body but also a soul or a physicality plus a spiritual element,
00:29:52.760that these are two very different metaphysical things, right?
00:29:56.380One is subject to corruption and the other is, in principle, eternal.
00:30:00.460And that they have, you know, different ontological makeups, different agendas, different ultimate destinies.
00:30:07.300Then, on the metaphysics side, you know, how do those two come together?
00:30:14.620What's the proper understanding of those two?
00:30:17.680But that metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the get-go.
00:30:26.340So, if you are, say, an empiricist and you want to say, well, we start in, say, the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other.
00:30:39.940But somehow, I have to get that across this metaphysical gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that my mind, which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things, can confront it and then do various things that we think we're going to do with our minds, our reason and our emotions and so forth.
00:31:03.020And that metaphysical gulf, if you can't bridge that gulf metaphysically, is going to cause you problems epistemologically.
00:31:11.840And so, one reason why we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later, I think, is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had problems, the early rationalist theories had problems, various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth.
00:31:30.060It wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends, but at the same time, we were struggling with the metaphysical problem, as I'm thinking of it, the mind-body problem.
00:31:44.560And once we said, or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas are non-physical realities or stories are non-physical realities and they're in a mind and we're conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world, as a non-physical world,
00:32:02.780it's very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world.
00:32:09.600So, I would say in your field, for example, where you come out of professional psychology, it's interesting that professional psychology only came on board in the late 1800s.
00:32:19.860And so, we say, you know, this is my potted history of your discipline, we have the early Freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900.
00:32:30.960And one of the things that they're both trying to do is to say, well, finally, we can start to study the mind scientifically.
00:35:45.260But none of that's exactly correct, because even when you're responding to a primary stimulus like that, so to speak, there's a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less simultaneously.
00:36:03.140Now, I'd say more or less, because you do have reflexive action.
00:36:06.400So, I think the simplest way to understand this is to assume that what you're detecting as a consequence of the slap that you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform.
00:36:35.160So, at one level of analysis, it's the same stimulus, let's say, insofar as it's an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a phone recorder or something like that.
00:36:49.040But then, as you said, the fact that you come to that experience with different expectations colors it.
00:36:55.700And so, there is a way to think about that.
00:36:57.940But I think the best way to start to understand it is to think about the pattern.
00:37:03.480So, there's a waveform pattern that propagates in the air, which is the delivery system, obviously, for the stimulus.
00:37:14.900Now, when your nervous system receives that pattern, it doesn't go to one point place and then another place and then another place and then another place in a linear progression.
00:37:25.360There's some of that, but what happens is that the pattern is assessed simultaneously by multiple different levels of the nervous system, right?
00:37:37.720So, the most primary level would be spinal.
00:37:41.400And there are very few connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system.
00:37:47.320And so, for example, if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance and you hit the table in that manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle reflex.
00:38:00.000And a startle reflex is a variant of a predator response, of a response to predation.
00:38:09.060And it's basically auditory signal onto spinal cord mapping.
00:38:14.180And the initial phase of the startle response is, you could say, it's pre-conscious and it's pre-emotional.
00:38:22.900And the reason it's pre is because the time it takes for the signal to propagate onto the spinal receptors is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to propagate even to the emotions.
00:38:36.580So, for example, if you're walking down a pathway and out of the periphery of your eye, you detect a snake and you have really good snake detectors, especially in the periphery and the bottom part of your vision.
00:38:48.060It's different in the top part, by the way, because there are more snakes on the ground than there are in trees.
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00:39:38.300If you take the time to move your eyes, the center of your eyes, so that you can see the snake, and then you evaluate the snake emotionally, by the time you've done that, the snake's already bitten you.
00:39:58.280It's too long a time, whereas if you use these peripheral receptors that map right onto your spine, you can jump before the snake strikes, hopefully.
00:40:08.420Cats can do it, by the way, about 10 times as fast.
00:40:11.300Well, we're pretty good, too, as it turns out.
00:40:13.260Yeah, but not as fast as cats, but fast enough to often escape from snakes.
00:40:18.200And so you get this first-level response that's almost entirely reflexive.
00:40:22.760That's what the early behaviors were discovering, too, when they were talking about stimulus response.
00:40:27.600Like, there are somewhat automatic response systems that are very primordial and basic that do almost a one-to-one mapping of sensory pattern onto behavioral output.
00:41:16.660Well, if you hold up your hand, for example, they can guess with more than 90% accuracy when your hand is up.
00:41:22.400And it seems to be because it's their visual cortex that's damaged and not their retina.
00:41:29.420And a lot of the vision pathways into the brain are still intact, but not the one that mediates conscious vision, which is dependent on the visual cortex.
00:41:39.140But they still have kinetic perception with their eyes.
00:41:43.680So one of the things I'm doing when I watch you is that I'm picking up where your body is located, and I'm mapping that onto my body.
00:41:51.460And so if I'm seeing you with blindsight with your hand up like this, I'll have a sensation in my body that corresponds to your body position, and I can read off that.
00:42:02.140So it's not exactly vision because I'm not seeing you, but it is a form of vision, and it's even more sophisticated than that.
00:42:07.720So if you take these people with blindsight and you show them faces that are angry or afraid, and you assess their galvanic skin response, which is a change in sweating, basically, that's associated with emotional arousal, they'll respond differentially to emotional faces.
00:42:25.780Even though they don't know that, that's blindsight, that's part of blindsight.
00:42:29.560And so when you hear or see something, that pattern is being assessed at multiple levels of a very complex hierarchy, and it's not just bottom-up, because that hierarchy also feeds backwards.
00:42:44.040So, for example, by the time you're an adult, most of what you see is memory.
00:42:49.660You just use the sensory input as a hint to pull up the memory.
00:42:53.040Right. That's also how you get habituated to things.
00:42:56.060You know, when you see something for the first time, it's got this glow of novelty, this numinous glow of novelty.
00:43:02.340And what happens is that you, and that's complex and difficult to process.
00:43:07.460And then as you become accustomed to it, and you build an internal mental model, you replace the perception with memory, because that's faster.
00:43:15.460The problem is, is that the memory that you see is only the fractional meaning of the phenomena that's relevant to the encounters that you had.
00:43:27.740And at D, what would you say, it takes the magic out of the world.
00:43:31.760As you replace raw perception with memory, you take the magic out of the world.
00:43:37.320That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.
00:43:38.880That's why there's a novelty kick, for example.
00:43:41.400And so, the reason I'm bringing this up is because even that relatively straightforward demonstration that you made, that sound that seems self-evident,
00:43:55.280it's, you said right off the bat that there was a level at which both of us experienced that quite differently.
00:44:02.800You experienced it differently because you knew you were going to do it.
00:44:16.040I know the purpose of what we're doing here.
00:44:18.340I know the probability that what I know about you indicates that you would do something that was surprising or dangerous, which is very, very low.
00:44:27.080So, even though it was unexpected, it's bounded in its significance by all of that knowledge.
00:45:01.020If you reliably pair a shock, now, it depends on the magnitude of the shock, obviously.
00:45:06.700So, there are some boundaries around this.
00:45:09.100But you can train a dog to be excited about the receipt of an electrical shock if you reliably pair it with a food reward.
00:45:16.260Because the a priori significance of the electric shock might be pain response, right?
00:45:23.600Indicative of the potential for physiological damage, because that's approximately what pain is.
00:45:28.160But if you associate it with the receipt of a reward, then it takes on a dopaminergic cast, which means that the shock becomes indicative of the receipt of a reward.
00:45:39.840And that's a positive emotion phenomena.
00:45:44.520It's also the case that if you take animals like rats that are pretty intelligent, you put them in a cage, they'll deliver electric shocks to themselves randomly just because they're bored.
00:45:54.480And so they'll, and horses will do that as well.
00:45:56.620Now, as I said, it's magnitude-dependent.
00:46:06.580And so, all of these, it's very difficult to specify a level of analysis where there isn't an interpretive framework simultaneously active as the raw sense data makes itself manifest.
00:46:22.580Now, I mean, your demonstration was very, what would you say, cut right to the chase, because a sound like that is, you might say, is not subject to an infinite number of interpretations, right?
00:46:37.380There's something there, but it's always nested.
00:46:40.800It seems to be that it's nested inside a hierarchy of interpretations, a very high-level hierarchy of interpretations.
00:46:51.440So, to tie that back into what our philosophical intellectual predicament is now, if we want to say postmodernism as a skeptical project that's given up on everything versus those who see it as an active, ongoing project that we're learning more and more that's going to give us a better and better epistemology, all of that is great.
00:47:16.960So, I'm a kind of empiricist, but what I would say is that everything that you have said was, in the early days of empiricism, not known to any of the empiricists.
00:47:30.260So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.
00:47:39.560And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.
00:48:06.860Right. The other thing I would say, actually, there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say, out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves.
00:48:18.260We are making realist claims. There really was a slap, there really are structured energy patterns, and we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns.
00:48:35.860And all of that, we are making reality claims, and we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being.
00:48:46.940Some of them, as you say, are operating parallel, they have feedback loops, right, and so forth.
00:48:52.100I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that there really is a reality.
00:49:03.040Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns, that we are not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.
00:49:10.840Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that, if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond.
00:49:21.500But they're not making up those structures in reality.
00:49:34.320So, my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there.
00:49:38.420It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead, rotting things, right?
00:49:45.680It's just that if I happen to encounter dead, rotting things, then certain chemicals will be laughing, and then my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way.
00:49:56.380And that's important, whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality, and that takes you down the skeptical world versus...
00:50:08.540Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.
00:50:09.920Right, versus saying that the structures are there, and what we have are just latent reception structures, that if those structures happen to be present, we'll be responsive.
00:50:20.920And that is all that the empiricists are saying.
00:50:25.120Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set.
00:50:30.700I came to the slap with a background set.
00:50:32.600You came to the slap with a different background set.
00:50:36.280And we sort of say, what all goes into that background set?
00:50:39.260That's where philosophy starts to become.
00:50:41.160Well, no, I think that's where philosophy is important.
00:50:44.700And we, as philosophers, I think, articulate, well, we have reason, we have emotions, we have memory, and there is something that physiologically goes on.
00:50:53.960You know, I have a body, and it's all worked out.
00:50:57.360And that it's going to articulate the main capacities or the main faculties.
00:51:04.300But I think at a very general level, and I think the philosophers have to work hand-in-hand with the neuroscientists and with the psychologists.
00:51:13.120Because, and this is my complaint about early modern philosophy, it's not a very strong complaint, but that they were trying to do philosophy of mind and epistemology 300 years before we knew anything about neuroscience.
00:51:28.140And 300 years before we really knew anything about psychology.
00:51:31.400So, it's a lot of failed experiments, right, along the way, or failed theories along the way.
00:51:37.600The other thing, though, I would want to say is, as we go on to develop what I think will be a better understanding of the mind, both epistemologically and metaphysically, is that we stop turning virtues into vices, as I think of it.
00:51:51.900So, to say, for example, that we have, and then you talk about the base level, you know, the slap happens, or there's something moves low to the ground, and there's a direct, automated, something that you didn't think about, didn't feel about, connection to the spine, and your body reacts in a certain way.
00:52:12.860I want to say, that's a good thing that has happened to human being, that we have evolved certain automated physiological responses to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, rather than turning that into a vice, right, or a bad thing.
00:52:29.900And seeing that as, oh, well, if the human being has certain automated reflexes in place, that means we have to go down the road of subjectivity, that we're not really responding to reality, and so forth.
00:52:43.600Or, if we say we have emotions, which we do have emotions, and I think emotions are positive, they certainly have an important role in our evaluative structure, figuring into our overall understanding of the meaning of life.
00:52:57.980And we also know that sometimes we can use our emotions the wrong way, let them use us instead of using them.
00:53:05.540So, emotions come with pitfalls, but rather than, as many early epistemologies have done, it's said, well, we have emotions, and emotions are on the subject side of things.
00:53:16.320That's right. And so, yeah, so they're irrational, and we turn something that is a very valuable tool in human psychology into the enemy of human psychology.
00:53:27.880You know, you see that a little bit with the evolutionary psychologists who claim that because we evolved for a substantial period of time on the African plains,
00:53:43.340that our emotional and motivational systems are no longer properly adapted to the modern world.
00:53:47.920It's like, I find that that's a variant of the argument that you just laid out, and that it also has the echoes of that rationalist, some variants of rationalism, that proclamation that emotion is the enemy of reason.
00:54:07.920It's like, emotions are unbelievably sophisticated.
00:54:10.360They're low resolution, and they're quick.
00:54:12.320They're not as quick as, say, spinal reflexes, but they're faster than thought, and they're also broader than thought, and they also enable us to evaluate when we don't have enough information to think.
00:54:24.420And they have their pitfalls like everything human, because nothing human is omniscient, and so we're going to make errors.
00:54:31.680But the idea that there's a fundamental antipathy between the emotional, the id, let's say, and the ego, because that's a variant of that psychoanalytic theory,
00:54:41.840that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nervous system is integrated.
00:54:51.280Since we've laid out this, I want to run a proposition by you.
00:54:55.560And it's sort of a variant of the meme theory, although it takes into account the idea that so-called memes, abstractions, compete across historical and evolutionary times.
00:55:44.480Imagine that every level of that hierarchy and the totality of the hierarchy competes across evolutionary time.
00:55:52.420So, one way of grounding our thinking in data is to assume that all of what we know emerges from raw sense data.
00:56:03.340But there's another way of thinking about it, which is that the data is interpreted within a hierarchical framework that's full of feedback loops, right?
00:56:11.380And there's variant forms of those, those upper level hierarchies.
00:56:15.720But those forms compete across time and only, and the more successfully they compete across time, the more they become instantiated physiologically.
00:56:27.560There's, that's a Baldwin effect selection mechanism.
00:56:30.720The higher order interpretive structures that produce the best reproductive outcome across time are more likely to become automated at a instinctual level.
00:56:41.600Emotions would be like that, like they're not as automatized as spinal reflexes, but they're quite automatized because the sets of emotions that human beings have are very similar.
00:56:58.420When and where is different, but the fact of the emotions is the same.
00:57:01.800So, then imagine that this is something like the domain of iterable and playable games.
00:57:09.780So, imagine that there's a variety of different interpretive frameworks that we lay upon more basic sensory data, but that a relatively small subset of those interpretive frameworks has the capacity for sustainable improvement.
00:57:27.800So, you could think about this, think about this in the context, let's say, of a marital relationship, right?
00:57:32.760There's a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong, like an indefinite number of ways that your marriage can go wrong.
00:57:40.900But then there's a constrained number of ways that it will go right, and that's because it's a difficult target.
00:57:48.740Imagine that the specifications are something like, for your marriage to be successful, the micro routines and the macro routines have to be such that.
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00:58:21.500Anyway, you're voluntarily okay with them, and your wife is voluntarily okay with them, and they bond you more tightly together across time, and this would be the optimal situation.
00:58:35.660As you lay them out together, they improve.
00:58:38.940Okay, and so you can imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual relationship of any form.
00:58:44.300But then you could also imagine that the number of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met would be low.
00:58:55.560There's a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across large spans of time that improve as you play them.
00:59:03.980Okay, so then you'd get an evolutionary pressure as well on the domains of possible philosophy, right, that they'd fill up something like a space.
00:59:14.780And that seems to me to be reflective.
00:59:17.260It's weird because that's also reflective of an empirical reality, but it's not the reality that's associated with basic sense data.
00:59:25.440It's more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and that improve, and that's also a fact, right?
00:59:35.840I mean, and that would be, I think that's partly why there are patterns of ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures, even independently, right?
00:59:47.140It's, it's, and that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism.
00:59:52.720It's like, it's not that the value space, the philosophical space isn't relativistic because there's a finite number of interpretive frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive staying power.
01:00:07.480And that is reflective of something like the structure of reality.
01:00:11.300It's more sophisticated reflection than the basic sense data.
01:00:14.620And so, see, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm saying this because I'm trying to mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative, which I think, I think that's true.
01:00:27.420I think all the neuroscience data points in that direction.
01:00:30.420And then you might say, well, any old story goes that it's like, no, just because we see the world through a story doesn't mean that the stories themselves aren't constrained by empirical reality in its most sophisticated sense.
01:00:43.500And it also doesn't mean that the stories, even though their stories fail to correspond to reality.
01:03:12.860It's kind of obvious to drop reality out of the situation.
01:03:16.180But you're right that the danger of the postmodern formulation is, which is that we see the world through a narrative, let's say, is exactly that, is that the reality drops out of the equation.
01:03:27.660There's nothing but the text, let's say.
01:03:30.500Like, if there's a competition between narratives for their functionality, let's say, reproductive and otherwise, that would go some way to addressing that problem because there'd be a Darwinian competition between narrative structures that would prioritize some over others.
01:03:45.960And so, but the description part, the idea that it's a description is relevant.
01:03:50.400So imagine that wolves in a pack, at a perceptual level, the wolves distinguish the rank order of the wolf that they're seeing.
01:04:03.520Highly social animals are unbelievably good at that.
01:04:06.120And so the story of the dominance, the story of the hierarchy of the wolves is implicit in the perception of the wolves.
01:04:15.820And if you describe that, it's a story, but it's not a story before it's described.
01:04:22.840It's whatever a story is before it's described.
01:04:25.140It seems to me like it's something like the weights in a neural network, returning to that idea, is that there are certain facts, let's say, that present themselves to us that are much more heavily weighted.
01:05:14.360It's not a, so imagine this, is when you go to see a movie, you take on the weighting, the value structure of the protagonist.
01:05:25.260Now, human beings are very good at that.
01:05:26.700Like, we look at each other's eyes, and we see what people are attending to, and we watch their patterns of attention, and we infer their valuation and their motivation.
01:06:09.080But some of it is, I'm looking at you, so I can't see the faces of the cameramen right now.
01:06:13.520Right, so that's a choice that's dependent on my determination of how to focus my attention.
01:06:20.200Now, the fact that I'm prioritizing you, I can see your face, I'm using the foveal center of my vision, and I can't see these guys because they're in my periphery.
01:06:32.020The place where it's most open is this central point of vision.
01:06:35.260Over here, it's obscured, and over here, it's just gone completely.
01:06:38.160So now, you objected to my characterization because you said, you know, observer, screen, reality, and you didn't like the proposition of the intermediary screen.
01:06:50.160And I know the screening idea isn't exactly right, but on the counter side, we have this problem.
01:06:56.280Some things are central to our perception, and other things are peripheral, and that's dependent on our values and our patterns of attention and our actions.
01:07:03.980So, well, I'm curious about what you think about that.
01:07:06.400Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table.
01:07:10.800I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say, an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.
01:07:22.020I think that's very extraordinarily complicated.
01:07:24.380And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned.
01:07:37.320Because it doesn't seem to be a highly fallible process.
01:07:41.700Because I know, I just don't want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances, and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people.
01:07:50.700But I'll be with my wife, and she will say, you know, after we've had a conversation with someone, boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.
01:08:00.400Women and their interpersonal perception.
01:08:02.440Well, okay, so there may be, you know, sex, gender differences that are going on, but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that.
01:08:11.940So when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that.
01:08:23.620And I think that's going to be a very, very sophisticated story.
01:08:26.820But then the other example, it takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about, are you looking at me or me looking at you?
01:08:35.640And we're also aware that we're in a room, that there are other people in the room who are filling and so on.
01:08:40.660But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus on one thing, then it is true that everything else goes.
01:10:25.060Okay, so the tabernacle, at the center of the tabernacle is the Ark of the Covenant, right?
01:10:31.580So there's a center point, and it's sacred, okay?
01:10:35.040And if I remember correctly, in the early ceremonies that were associated with the tabernacle, the high priest was only allowed to go into the Holy of Holies, the center, once a year.
01:10:48.460Then there's a structure of veils around it.
01:10:51.900Like, so that there's a center, and then it's veiled, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil, and then outside of that is another veil.
01:11:01.120And then outside of that is the community.
01:11:03.880And so that's the sacred central point of the community, and the center is the, what would you say, the point of focus, the fundamental point of focus, and then the significance of the periphery is proportional to the distance from the center.
01:11:26.980Now, the reason, there's a variety of reasons that I think this is the right metaphor.
01:11:42.260So I was referring to the visual system, for example.
01:11:44.700So the way your visual system is constructed is that at the very center, every cell in the center of your vision is connected to 10,000 neurons at the fundamental level of analysis.
01:12:29.280And so now you're, because high resolution vision is expensive, you can move your eyes and you dart this very high resolution center around.
01:12:40.860And so every time you move your eyes, and you do that unconsciously because they're always vibrating, and consciously because you can move them, and in consequence of emotion as well.
01:12:50.760So if you hear a noise off to the side that startles you, you'll look, and that's unconscious.
01:12:54.700Lots of things direct your visual attention, but everything you look at has a center, dead center, where everything is extremely high resolution.
01:13:03.460And then it's surrounded by lesser and lesser spheres of resolution until at the periphery, there's nothing.
01:13:31.100So out here, because the tissue in the periphery of my vision isn't very highly innervated, I prioritize movement because my assumption is if it isn't moving, I don't have to pay attention to it.
01:13:45.540You know, it's a default assumption about what's ignored in the world.
01:13:48.500And we live in a dynamical environment, yeah.
01:14:31.520And it's, you see, and the veil idea is an interesting one because the perceptions we have in the periphery are nowhere near as intense as the perceptions that we have in the center.
01:14:44.840And so these perceptions, one way of thinking about them is these perceptions, peripheral perceptions, are veiled out here behind me.
01:14:53.180They're veiled so intensely you can't even see them, but the veils are graduated.
01:14:58.500So it's, well, so tell me what you think about that.
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01:15:50.880Let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through,
01:16:00.740this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night, and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood, right?
01:16:12.840And so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.
01:16:17.520And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field, okay, it's like a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.
01:16:26.100Yeah, the phenomenologists like that idea.
01:16:29.240And in that case, what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular, like I might when I'm reading, right, so then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing.
01:16:43.820Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to catch the, do the glint on the eyeball.
01:16:50.100So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field.
01:16:57.300But that I think is co-extensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works is if I am in the bad neighborhood at night and what I'm trying to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field.
01:17:13.240So that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.
01:17:21.500I guess I could make that initial analogy more sophisticated because I would say then that the tabernacle structure, center and periphery is characteristic of explored and familiar territory.
01:17:35.660You're making a case that there's a different perceptual mode in unexplored territory and there is.
01:17:42.060So birds have a prey eye and a predator eye and the predator eye acts like the painter that you described who's focusing on one thing because you zero in on the thing you're after.
01:17:52.760The I'm prey eye, so that would be the bird's, the other eye, is scanning in exactly the way that you described, deprioritizing the center, amplifying the input from the periphery.
01:18:10.240So the left hemisphere does the perceptual mapping that you just, this is in right-handed people, the left hemisphere does the focal perception that you describe that's detail-oriented and that deprioritizes the periphery.
01:18:24.120And the right hemisphere does the opposite.
01:18:26.620And, you know, that's, I suppose you could say at a biological level, that's because it's eat or be eaten, right, in the most primal possible way.
01:18:34.640And so there's a perceptual system for things you're going to eat and there's a perceptual system for you might be on the menu.
01:18:43.100And, yeah, so that's, see, the thing that's so curious about that and that you just highlighted is that the ceremonies for taking possession of a territory that are anthropologically specified,
01:18:56.440it's usually driving a stake or a central point, a flag, a standard, a staff into the ground, that signifies camp, right, or it signifies the possession of that territory.
01:19:08.720That establishes a center with a set of peripheries and with foreignness at the, you know, at the edge of the periphery.
01:19:17.340And that does establish a certain kind of perception that's associated with security.
01:19:22.220So the tabernacle style of perception would be the perception that's associated with explored territory.
01:19:36.460And chaos is where you don't know what will happen when you act.
01:19:39.880And there are two different perceptual mechanisms for those.
01:19:42.620And so the second one, the danger one, the unexplained one, the foreign territory one, is there's less filtering and there's less specification of center.
01:19:55.620Because you don't know what's important, right?
01:19:57.240You're walking through that dangerous neighborhood.
01:19:58.960It's like you're on alert and you don't know what's insignificant.
01:20:14.600Now where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.
01:20:30.740Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention, I'm aware of reality in some direct sense.
01:20:39.440It is true that if in either of those cases, if I'm the artist focusing on the particular dot, and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.
01:20:55.740Yeah, that's been quite mapped out neurophysiologically, right?
01:20:58.960The Russians did a very good job of that starting in about 1960.
01:21:03.600Sokolov was one of them and a woman named Vinogradova, and they were students of a neuropsychologist named Luria.
01:21:10.040They mapped out what they described as the orienting reflex, and that's exactly what that is.
01:21:14.800It's like you're focused on a task, and something of pragmatic...
01:21:21.000Of implicit significance distracts you from your goal, and you do.
01:21:28.260So there's a hierarchy of gradated responses that are part of that orienting reflex.
01:21:32.660But then even another interesting case would be you're the artist, and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you've given yourself a signal.
01:22:04.840Well, and that's part of the consequence of the higher-order brain centers feeding.
01:22:09.480Like, there isn't a primary level of perception that has no top-down modification.
01:22:15.220It's even the primary visual cortex, say where your fovea meets the visual cortex for the first time, is tremendously innervated by multiple...
01:22:27.460So when you look at an object, when you look at a pen, for example, let's say that constitutes a visual pattern, it's represented on the retina as a pattern, it's propagated along the nerves, then it branches out.
01:22:41.460So one of the places that information ends up, quite quickly, is the motor cortex.
01:22:46.940So when you see almost all the objects that you see in the world, you see because they're definable in terms of the action you take in their presence.
01:22:55.320So, like, when you see this pen, the grip motion that you would use to use it is directly disinhibited by the sight of the pen.
01:23:14.500And so that's another thing that's very strange about object perception.
01:23:18.460It's like, you don't actually see objects in the world.
01:23:21.420What you see are tools and obstacles and, well, then there's all the things you don't see.
01:23:28.880And the tools and obstacles are defined in relationship to your goal.
01:23:32.080So, you know, your goal, for example, the example you used is you're not happy with your child.
01:23:38.200So the goal there has shifted from respond to distress cries.
01:23:43.100It's shifted from that, which might be the default, right, to certain probability that distress cry is false, right, or manipulative, therefore ignore.
01:23:55.200Very different interpretive framework, very different social landscape, and capable of modifying even the, almost the base level perception.
01:24:08.040I mean, I guess that would be even curious.
01:24:09.840It's like, if your child is, it's highly probable, if your child is likely to emit distress calls that are false,
01:24:20.500my suspicions are you'd be less likely to hear that, to actually hear it, not only not to respond to it, right, because you'd have built an inhibitory structure that says,
01:24:32.280well, despite the instinctual significance of that, it's irrelevant, right, right, highly likely.
01:24:39.240Yeah, to come back to, like, your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the…
01:24:58.100Right, and then the action that's going to be embodied in that use also, in many cases, seems to be built into the perception.
01:25:07.280I think if we unpack that more, there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system, right, at birth and how much of it is learned.
01:25:23.940Yeah, because I don't think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century, where we come into the world born with kind of a pre-cognized understanding of pens.
01:25:43.680Instead, I think we just, we have a certain physiological structure that, and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that, such that, and it's going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.
01:26:29.520And, you know, there's just noise, and it's a big decibel level, right?
01:26:33.360But then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, Stephen, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party, separated across the room, right?
01:26:44.960And the guy's wife says, Stephen, right?
01:26:47.860And he can pick that out of that incredible…
01:26:57.900What's so remarkable is if you're sitting with someone and there's conversations everywhere, you can tune yourself so that you hear the person that you're sitting beside, you hear them, but then you can turn your attention to a conversation beside you, and it'll prioritize that.
01:27:15.220Or you can turn your attention to your own thoughts, right?
01:27:17.880And it is this, and I would say that's something like the imposition of that tabernacle-like structure on that plethora of potential interpretations.
01:27:30.180That's what the postmodernists would point out.
01:27:32.680There's an infinite number of potential interpretations in a restaurant that's bustling with conversation.
01:27:38.020It's like, fair enough, but you prioritize one.
01:27:42.780That's what it means to pay attention to it, right, is that you prioritize it.
01:27:46.200You make something a center, you make everything else a periphery, and then you learn to do that automatically, right, with practice.
01:27:53.000I think maybe the best example of that for literate people is the fact that you can't see a word without reading it, right?
01:27:59.960Yeah, because you've automated certain…
01:28:03.640So that centers now building into the perception.
01:28:05.860Yeah, what the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right, that we can automate all of these things, and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing.
01:28:15.020All of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives.
01:28:22.420So what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.
01:28:36.900And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality, and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions.
01:28:55.280Or what they will then do is to say, you know, I can choose to prioritize this, right, over that in my visual field, they will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment.
01:29:07.600I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that.
01:29:10.980But then by the time they start using the words values, they're coming out of very sophisticated negative evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality.
01:29:24.420So for both of them, it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side, that they're deep into subjective territory, and so those then become negative words for them.
01:29:34.580Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project, just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition.
01:29:45.940Right, there's all these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on.
01:29:52.320And that's where we have to get that sorted out, because if we don't get those foundations correct, then we're going to be messed up.
01:30:01.600So you pointed to the fact that the postmodernist description of the subjective, but tell me what you think about this.
01:30:10.520See, the postmodern insistence, despite the fact that they claim that there's no uniting metanarrative, which is a specious claim in my estimation,
01:30:18.500because I don't know where the uniting ends, if everything's a narrative, there's uniting narratives at every level of analysis.
01:30:25.820But more than that, their proposition, at least implicitly, has been that the narratives that we do utilize are predicated on power.
01:30:35.580That's part of the reflection of the subjective.
01:30:38.440It's like, I'm prioritizing in keeping with my desire to exercise power.
01:30:44.940And by power, I don't mean ability to maneuver in the world.