The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 502. Angry and Red： Color as Emotion ｜ Mark Changizi

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00:00:30.000 Hello, everybody. I'm going to start today with a couple of announcements.

00:00:38.460 The first is that I published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, Perceptions of the Divine.

00:00:43.680 It came out November 19th. It's number one on Amazon right now, which I'm pretty happy about.

00:00:48.640 And it's also the basis for a tour, which I started in November, continues through December, then January through April as well.

00:00:57.460 You can find information about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com.

00:01:01.940 It's about this new book, which is about biblical stories, but you should also understand that I'm doing the same thing with these stories that I did with the other tours that I had conducted before and the other books for that matter,

00:01:13.460 which is to take high-level abstract ideas, in this case foundational narratives, to explain what they mean, but also to explain why knowing what they mean can make a real practical difference in your life.

00:01:26.820 You know, I want to bridge the gap between the abstraction and the reality so that you can put into operation the principles that I'm discussing so that it does produce a tangible improvement in how you attend to things and how you act.

00:01:38.720 So come out to the lectures if you're interested in continuing with that.

00:01:42.440 Today, I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Canghisi, who is an author of this book, Expressly Human, and a number of other books.

00:01:51.620 And I wanted to talk to Mark for two reasons.

00:01:54.440 One was because we share an interest in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology,

00:02:00.320 especially with regards to perception, emotion, language, and mass group behavior.

00:02:08.200 And so I've been trying to wade through the literature on perception.

00:02:13.440 Mark is very interested, as an evolutionary biologist slash psychologist, in the function of evolved traits like perception.

00:02:22.140 And one of the hypotheses that we discussed, which is a very interesting one, was his explanation, rather unique explanation for the evolution of color vision.

00:02:30.220 And he believes, for example, that we have additional color vision, not so much so that we can detect ripe fruit, for example, which was one hypothesis,

00:02:39.340 but so that we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as a consequence of alterations in their circulation, especially displayed facially.

00:02:49.960 So we have color vision so that we're better at detecting signs of health or ill health as a consequence of skin tone, but also detecting and reacting to emotional displays.

00:03:01.940 And so join us if you're interested in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, emotion, language, communication, and the behavior of mass groups.

00:03:12.460 So I think we'll start our discussion by talking about perception, and you've studied visual perception for a long time.

00:03:21.200 And so I'd like you to outline, if you would, what you understand about visual perception, and then we can contrast our viewpoints and see where we can go with that.

00:03:31.500 And I think we'll segue into emotion and language from perception.

00:03:35.240 Yeah, I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics, and I went into cognitive science, and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist.

00:03:44.580 And so one of the areas that I worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision.

00:03:48.320 So I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruny fingers when you're wet.

00:03:56.120 They're actually optimized to be rain treads so that when you don't want a hydroplane, so they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible.

00:04:06.620 So these are the sorts of things that I was always dealing with.

00:04:08.420 We're very sneaky, us people.

00:04:09.600 That's right.

00:04:10.540 So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way.

00:04:20.320 So functional.

00:04:21.280 It's all about function.

00:04:22.020 And strangely, I mean, this is more of the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection.

00:04:36.100 They nod to it, but if you actually do a paper that argues, here's why it evolved to be this way, here's the functional reason for why it's this way, they'll say, you're doing a just-so story.

00:04:45.920 You're not allowed to make hypotheses about design.

00:04:49.740 That's a just-so story.

00:04:50.940 That's teleology.

00:04:52.420 I was like, you're missing the entire point of natural selection.

00:04:55.180 Darwin's discovery is that, yes, there's design.

00:04:58.540 That's not an issue.

00:04:59.860 Well, sexual selection also amplifies that.

00:05:02.540 Well, I mean, sexual selection has things that are not leading to perfect natural selection design, but let's set that aside for a moment.

00:05:09.060 The whole point is not that there's not design.

00:05:11.480 The whole point is that there need not be a master designer.

00:05:14.140 That is, you can explain all this design, all the seeming teleology, without a designer.

00:05:19.260 That's the whole point, right?

00:05:20.180 But what they want to reject is not just a designer, but they want to reject design itself.

00:05:24.840 And so there's an immense-

00:05:26.900 Reject teleology itself.

00:05:28.300 Reject teleology.

00:05:29.420 No, like my eyes.

00:05:30.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:30.980 That's weird.

00:05:31.780 It's bizarre.

00:05:32.840 And so it's a very small community, and it comes across as, you know, they attack sociobiology, EOE, and it goes on the same kind of basis.

00:05:40.300 You start wanting to be – it happens not just when you enter into human behavior and human psychology.

00:05:45.040 It happens even generally when you're talking about even rain treads, you know, rain tread pruning fingers like I did or any of the stuff that I do.

00:05:51.440 Okay, that is a just-so story, and it is not allowed, right?

00:05:55.000 Now, it's true that you can't study design the way that you study mechanisms.

00:05:58.720 You can't do a lab experiment in quite the same way.

00:06:01.040 You have to ask it in different kinds of ways.

00:06:02.240 You have to say, if this is really designed for what I'm claiming it's designed for, let's say, you know, if the pruning fingers are designed to be rain treads, well, then here's – let's derive what the optimal morphology would be.

00:06:13.980 What should the wrinkles actually look like?

00:06:15.320 So that's one kind of prediction, looking at the morphology or the shape.

00:06:18.160 Another might be, if it's really the case that it's for design, well, it should only occur in animals that, you know, have wet, dewy conditions, whereas certain kinds of animals that are never in wet, dewy conditions shouldn't have this, you know, this morphological feature shouldn't appear.

00:06:30.200 There's different kinds of predictions you can make, but they're often phylogenetic predictions, morphological predictions.

00:06:35.760 Sometimes you can do behavioral – they actually behave – perform better in wet conditions when they're wrinkly versus when they're not wrinkly and all the kind of combinations of these things.

00:06:43.060 What you don't – you can't typically do the mechanism kinds of experiments.

00:06:46.160 It's just a whole different kind of thing.

00:06:47.140 So you have to do it differently.

00:06:48.680 But the strange, weird thing in incredibly far-left communities as they are is that they somehow have thrown Darwin out entirely, and you can't talk about natural selection,

00:06:58.980 which was an incredibly bizarre thing.

00:07:01.640 So, okay, so I can think of a variety of possible reasons for that, and I'd like your opinions about those reasons.

00:07:08.800 I mean, you tangled together a couple of things.

00:07:13.000 You said that even as an evolutionary biologist, if you start to tread in the water of teleology or purpose, you receive pushback from your colleagues.

00:07:22.480 And then you mentioned that that was also a far-left phenomenon.

00:07:26.020 And so I'm curious about – it seems to me that the relationship with the far-left is likely the fact that the far-left political philosophy is predicated on a radical social constructionism, essentially.

00:07:42.100 That every single thing that everyone does, especially human beings, but to the degree that the same thinking paralyzes speculation about animal evolution, there's an insistence among those on the far left that there's no essential human nature.

00:08:00.400 Everything's infinitely malleable, and I see that as a reflection of an incredible intellectual arrogance because the reason for the insistence that everything is socially constructed is because that allows for the possibility for everything to be 100% modifiable by those, for example, who would like to modify human behavior and the image of their own philosophy.

00:08:24.260 Do you think there's – is there anything else do you think that's going on with regards to the rejection of purpose or so-called design?

00:08:32.920 I mean, my pet assumption has been that their hair stands on end or they get – they feel backed up against the wall.

00:08:41.720 When you get to human behavior, there's Stephen Pinker and Blank Slate arguing this as well, the idea that there's any notion of instinct or a human nature is against something – they really want to push back on that because they want to think of us as infinitely malleable and subject to socialism and whatever policies that they have where they can shape us however they wish.

00:09:03.380 And so even when we're in things like pruning fingers, it's as if they've taken that kind of prohibition of human psychology and pushed it into any realm at all and have a general admonition not to do any kind of design or research that concerns the design of animals and themselves.

00:09:23.460 So I'm not sure what else it could be.

00:09:25.480 But at any rate, it's a bizarre thing because the only way that –

00:09:28.880 There's something else to there.

00:09:30.140 Maybe it's something like – there's a lot of reasons for rejecting the idea of purpose.

00:09:37.340 One is to reject the idea of an ultimate designer.

00:09:40.380 So there's a religious argument, say, lurking at the bottom of that.

00:09:43.220 But it's also very convenient to reject the notion of purpose or meaning because it also allows you to reject the idea of any kind of implicit responsibility.

00:09:53.020 Like if nothing has any meaning, the disadvantage to everything being meaningless is that things are meaningless.

00:10:00.300 But the advantage to everything being meaningless and purposeless is that you can do whatever the hell you want.

00:10:07.220 And so it's a very good rationalization for like short-term hedonistic power-mad behavior.

00:10:12.680 And if you combine that with the problem of like infinite social constructionism, then you have a real problem.

00:10:17.980 But it's a weird thing that you would encounter that among – at least among hypothetically evolutionary biologists and thinkers.

00:10:24.700 Because why would they be concerned with evolutionary biology if they are going to toss out Darwin, for example?

00:10:31.140 But most of them don't really have to think about Darwin because they're doing mechanistic experiments.

00:10:36.020 They're not doing hypotheses about this design.

00:10:38.900 I'm one of the rare people – back in the 1920s, you had the ethologists who did a lot more thinking in terms of the design and the function,

00:10:44.880 really thinking about their evolutionary connection.

00:10:46.480 But that's gone way, way.

00:10:48.380 Everybody's dealing with really complicated experiments with mechanisms.

00:10:50.920 They don't have to think about it.

00:10:52.140 So they've somehow developed this knee-jerk reaction that you don't have to understand design and purpose.

00:10:56.700 But you cannot understand any machine without understanding what it's designed for.

00:11:00.860 So I often use an example.

00:11:02.420 If you were to find a stapler out of the middle of nowhere, natives find a stapler for the first time. 0.99

00:11:07.720 And they want to try to understand it.

00:11:08.980 There's not much to a stapler.

00:11:10.220 There's like four parts or whatever, six parts.

00:11:12.820 But you can't – you might work out all the mechanisms.

00:11:15.680 This opens this.

00:11:16.460 There's these – there's like seven things, let's say, and they do these sorts of kinds of actions.

00:11:20.220 Well, that's not an understanding of it.

00:11:22.220 You might start saying, well, maybe it's a weapon.

00:11:24.540 And you start shaking it around like nunchucks. 1.00

00:11:26.440 You open it up.

00:11:27.220 Well, now you can work out how does it break when you hit someone in the face?

00:11:30.440 Is it banned?

00:11:31.020 And maybe that's part of its – there's tons and tons of mechanistic behaviors that it has that have nothing to do with what it's in fact for.

00:11:36.780 How it deforms when this happens.

00:11:38.320 There's lots of infinite numbers of kinds of mechanisms that are involved with it that are completely irrelevant, right?

00:11:44.140 Only by understanding the mechanisms in the context of what the function is for.

00:11:48.580 This is for the computational hardware.

00:11:49.680 You've got function.

00:11:50.500 You've got the algorithm level.

00:11:52.000 You've got the mechanistic implementation level.

00:11:53.900 You have to understand all these systems by understanding it by all of these parts all cohering together in one.

00:12:00.180 In relationship to function.

00:12:01.360 In relationship to function at the top.

00:12:02.980 And so they're throwing out the very thing that allows you to understand, even if they are only interested in mechanisms, which my eyes glaze over with mechanisms, you can't understand mechanisms without inherently understanding the functions.

00:12:15.180 Okay, so that's a very interesting place to segue into perception itself because I got very interested, I don't know, probably 20 years ago in pragmatic philosophy, the pragmatic philosophy of William James and Peirce.

00:12:30.880 And they were all part of the metaphysical club in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th century.

00:12:39.480 And they were also extremely influenced by Darwin.

00:12:44.440 And the pragmatists have been deemed the only genuine American stream of philosophy.

00:12:51.860 And the pragmatists were very concerned with function.

00:12:54.980 In fact, their definition of truth was essentially function.

00:12:58.320 That we determine what's true by examining the concordance of a proposition even in relationship to its effectiveness with regard to purpose.

00:13:11.860 And they've made a case for that on the scientific side of things.

00:13:15.460 That things that we regard as true, we regard as true because they provide an effective means for us to move towards a desired end.

00:13:22.580 So for the pragmatists, there was really no separation of truth itself, even at the level of perception of fact.

00:13:29.440 There was no separation between that and functional purpose.

00:13:32.980 And I'm curious about your opinion in that regard in relationship to perception itself.

00:13:39.800 Because the best models of perception that I've encountered, the ones that seem to make the most sense in keeping with everything else I know about psychology, are pragmatic models.

00:13:49.620 And that they're predicated on the idea that what we perceive, and this is part of the thing that I've argued about, for example, with Sam Harris, is that the radical empiricists who believe that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts,

00:14:06.920 don't take into account the fact that when we perceive a fact, we're actually perceiving something much more akin to a function.

00:14:15.560 So, for example, I was very influenced by visual approach to ecological perception.

00:14:21.540 Gibson.

00:14:22.000 Gibson, yeah, yeah.

00:14:24.360 Not in all regards, but I found much of Gibson's work extremely useful.

00:14:28.100 That his sense is that when we're looking at the world, we're seeing something like, I've broadened it a bit, but pathways to a desired destination, tools that can facilitate our movement forward, obstacles that might come up in our path, and a vast domain of irrelevance around that.

00:14:48.100 And that's true for every perceptual act.

00:14:50.520 It seems to be particularly evident in the case of vision.

00:14:53.840 A vision is something like a navigation aid.

00:14:56.440 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:14:57.600 So, I'm curious what you think about that, and, well, with any of those ideas, how those ideas might be related or not related to the manner in which you're conceptualizing object perception, let's say.

00:15:09.200 Well, I mean, ecological, capital E, ecological perception, ecological vision with Gibson, ended up biting onto a whole lot of philosophical baggage that I never bought into.

00:15:20.440 I consider myself, I consider myself a lowercase e, ecological vision person, in which case you can't understand what vision or any mechanisms are doing unless you understand what it was functioning for in the natural environment for all of those millions of years.

00:15:33.280 And so, let me just give you some specific examples.

00:15:37.140 So, one of the things that I had noticed was that people had talked about color for 100 years and color vision.

00:15:43.400 First of all, to back up, we primates, we and some other primates, have a third dimension.

00:15:48.560 Your dog just has grayscale.

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00:16:42.960 And yellow, blue, two dimensions.

00:16:45.060 All the bunny, rabbits, horses just have two dimensions.

00:16:47.820 But some of us primates have a third dimension, red, green.

00:16:51.280 And so for 100 years, they thought, well, maybe it has something to do with finding fruits in the forest.

00:16:54.440 Right, right.

00:16:55.080 And there was never any good evidence for this at all.

00:16:57.740 There's incredible varieties and variability in terms of the kinds of diets that they would have,

00:17:02.000 not to mention just even generation to generation, is going to experience radically different kinds of diets of fruits.

00:17:06.800 But they all have the same pegged, the exact same kind of color vision.

00:17:12.160 And it's a weird kind of color vision.

00:17:12.820 This is across primate groups?

00:17:14.260 Across all the-

00:17:14.840 Across trichromate primate groups?

00:17:16.420 All the old world trichromats have. 0.98

00:17:19.340 So dogs and bunny rabbits have one low-wavelength sensitive cone down in the 550s.

00:17:24.580 And then the other one, sorry, in the 400s, 450s or so, in that sort of blue cone.

00:17:31.680 And then the other ones, we have one in the 550s or so for the dogs that's around here.

00:17:36.440 So you've got two.

00:17:37.580 And then what you'd expect if you're going to have a third one would be that suddenly it may be over here.

00:17:42.040 You'd have the uniformly distributed like RGB.

00:17:44.340 For your cameras, they're uniformly distributed across the spectrum, which is sort of a poor man's spectrometer.

00:17:49.540 You've got three across the spectrum.

00:17:51.020 You put them uniformly.

00:17:52.360 But in fact, ours is this.

00:17:54.880 We ended up with another cone sensitivity right next to the other one.

00:17:58.020 They're exactly side-by-side in a really weird, peculiar way.

00:18:00.900 Why would you want to have a third cone sensitivity, the same part of the spectrum?

00:18:03.800 It's just like 15 nanometers away.

00:18:05.900 Right, because in principle, it wouldn't be detecting anything radically different.

00:18:09.340 No.

00:18:09.660 That's the problem.

00:18:10.320 Okay, so that's the problem you're trying to address.

00:18:12.180 All right, so I realized later that when you look, you know, I've noticed that one of the things that matters is blood under the skin, blushes, blanches, health modulations.

00:18:21.960 All of these kinds of motions, signals that humans and other primates are doing on bare skin is shown by virtue of the blood of the skin.

00:18:28.940 And it's by virtue in particular of the oxygenation, deoxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin.

00:18:35.380 And it turns out that when you're looking at the completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin, which is a bunch of – it has a little W in this one part.

00:18:44.500 So it goes like this, and there's a little W.

00:18:46.360 And when it's – that's when it's oxygenated.

00:18:48.240 And when it deoxygenates, that W in that little region turns into a U.

00:18:51.420 And so these little peaks right there in the W part, if you wanted to be sensitive to this oxygenation, deoxygenation, you actually have to have two cones right there.

00:19:01.580 So the little W peak in the middle as it goes down in terms of U and the other parts that go up, you have to sense it.

00:19:07.200 You have to have a peculiar spots of two cones in this exact spot.

00:19:10.320 So I was like, oh my god, exactly where you'd have to put cones to be sensitive to the only spot where you could tell that it's getting oxygenated versus deoxygenated is exactly in the spots where we have our cones.

00:19:21.180 Okay, so let me sum up that just so that I make sure I'm following you.

00:19:25.420 So the first – the objection you have to standard theories of trichromat perception is that the two of the color spectra that we see are so close together on the electromagnetic spectrum that there's no advantage to distinguishing them that's clear in the natural world as such.

00:19:46.060 And you're associating that with the enhanced ability to detect difference in oxygenation in the skin, and you're going to associate that, I presume, with emotional display.

00:19:55.540 Is that right?

00:19:55.780 So this is an empath sense.

00:19:57.340 In short, our color vision, our primate color vision is an empath sense.

00:20:01.380 It's only by virtue of that that we can see these blushes and blanches, and it's only by virtue of that that you can actually see veins at all.

00:20:07.840 The veins, of course, are the deoxygenated parts, and the more fleshy red parts are the more oxygenated parts.

00:20:13.200 This stuff is completely invisible if you're colorblind.

00:20:15.360 If you're a colorblind doctor, even going back to Dalton, he had complained about his complete inability to see if someone had infected in one eye versus the other.

00:20:23.480 No idea.

00:20:24.540 If they've got blood or stool on their pants, they can't tell the difference between whether it's blood or stool.

00:20:29.880 These things go back for a long ways.

00:20:31.520 As soon as you're color deficient, you're missing one of those.

00:20:35.380 Now it's just – you can't distinguish these things at all.

00:20:37.540 Do we know if people who are colorblind are deficient in facial emotional processing?

00:20:43.200 We – that has been very hard to test because – but what we do know is that there's a long history of medical doctors who have known problems in just detecting blood state-related diagnosis, symptoms that are recognizable by blood state.

00:20:57.680 Okay, so that's an evidence to that.

00:20:58.080 But actually doing controlled experiments where you're able to do this with – it has been very hard.

00:21:05.060 So no one has quite that data.

00:21:06.340 There's a lot of – my dad's colorblind and he's emotionally dense.

00:21:09.400 Even if you did rapid presentation of angry faces like almost at a subliminal level, do you think that people who were colorblind would be less able to detect the difference between angry and non-angry faces if – at least to the degree that that's signaled by facial flushing?

00:21:27.420 Well, I mean, you can certainly mimic on screen.

00:21:33.680 You could try to mimic the spectral difference in some sense so that – first of all, just to back up.

00:21:40.140 Yeah.

00:21:40.440 One of the interesting side effects of this is that your camera doesn't show you color vision.

00:21:45.100 Your TV doesn't show you color vision.

00:21:46.580 All the cameras that we use are still in some sense two-color vision because their third receptivity is way out – it's distributed way out there.

00:21:57.840 So none of those cameras that we take these pictures of are able to sense these oxygenation modulations.

00:22:02.380 Okay, so that's an experimental problem.

00:22:04.120 Yeah, so this is what makes it deeply difficult.

00:22:06.060 It also means that literally we're not seeing all of the states that we experience in real life.

00:22:11.600 The glow of youth, when you see glow of youth, you're talking about the glowing of oxygenated blood on the skin.

00:22:17.520 None of that's available.

00:22:18.420 Is that – okay, so you mentioned the glow of youth.

00:22:21.480 I mean, hypothetically, one of the markers that could drive transformation of color vision in the direction of emotion detection that was blood-related would be for picking up signs of fecundity.

00:22:38.600 And that would be a direct association.

00:22:41.020 And there is evidence that I think is quite compelling that one of the things that makes women attractive to men are signals of health that are associated with enhanced fertility.

00:22:53.080 All of those signals seem to be associated with what people conceive of as feminine beauty.

00:22:58.220 And you picked one that was cardinal there, which is that flush.

00:23:01.960 You call it the flush of youth.

00:23:03.620 Right, and it's not just on or off.

00:23:05.420 I mean, different motions will lead to different kinds of gradients on the face.

00:23:09.040 And, of course, it's not just the face.

00:23:10.240 The whole body can flush.

00:23:11.220 And the other primates, the rump, become so exaggerated that they literally – the UK would take some of these – the females when they were having estrus out because it was almost embarrassing for the kids to come and watch.

00:23:22.220 So, you know, there's – it's multidimensional.

00:23:25.560 It's certainly – it's color-related.

00:23:26.640 But it's not just red-green.

00:23:28.760 But there's actually – you know, where you have more – like if I squeeze my hand and let go, you get yellow-blue differences.

00:23:34.820 Now, it's not – because when it's squeezed out, it's more yellow.

00:23:38.620 When there's more blood, it's all things equal more blue.

00:23:41.100 But if it's oxygenated blood, then it's blue and red.

00:23:43.600 So, it's more purple.

00:23:44.400 If it's deoxygenated blood, it's green and blue and so bluish-green.

00:23:49.140 So, in fact, you end up – by virtue of concentration variations, blue-yellow, and oxygenation remodulations, red-green, you can get any possible hue at all.

00:23:56.980 Which is why if you're a painter and you're trying to actually paint human faces, when we go back and look at their paintings, which I could never do, you're like, oh, my God.

00:24:04.800 They're using all – they're using all the hues.

00:24:06.440 Yeah, right.

00:24:06.900 You know, because we don't typically consciously notice it.

00:24:08.560 We just look at the skin and we think of it as sort of this matte, you know, like a doll.

00:24:13.140 But in fact –

00:24:14.380 Yeah, some pink, but of course it's not.

00:24:15.880 And you're really seeing the blood.

00:24:17.820 You are not – skin is not – if you've ever – you know, if you get a bruise, the first thing you notice is that it's, of course, total discoloration.

00:24:24.720 And so, we – you're really seeing a dynamic view into the very state and function and health of the individual.

00:24:35.080 It's completely a highly transparent surface.

00:24:38.600 And we're not consciously aware of it, although we're certainly reading it all the time.

00:24:42.320 Hmm, hmm.

00:24:43.520 And so, how has that – so, that's a theory of color vision as health detection.

00:24:49.280 Is it a theory that –

00:24:50.260 Well, mostly – I don't know whether it's mostly health or mostly emotion.

00:24:53.640 It's certainly emotion, state –

00:24:55.100 Right, it wouldn't only have to be one of those things anyways.

00:24:57.700 Okay, well, could you make a separate case for emotion?

00:25:00.240 Okay.

00:25:01.220 So, one of the things that I've read – I don't know if you believe that this is true, but, you know, because everything turns out to be debatable among scientists, just like everyone else.

00:25:11.920 But, I've read that one of the things that shaped the evolution of our eyes is their shaping to be maximally visually evident to perceivers, right?

00:25:24.560 We're unbelievably good at determining exactly where someone's eyes are pointed.

00:25:29.280 So, even if someone is sitting across the room from you, you can tell if they're looking at your eyes or at the tip of your nose, which is such a tiny fraction of movement at the eye level or a fraction of angle that it's almost amazing.

00:25:43.220 It's amazing that you can detect it at all and that we have the white background and the colored iris and the black pupil partly because that maximizes the degree to which our eyes are salient.

00:25:54.120 The hypothesis being that anyone in our evolutionary history whose eyes weren't salient was someone whose intentions were very difficult to determine and was much more likely to be misunderstood, say, and killed in consequence or much less likely to find a mate.

00:26:11.880 And so, our faces have evolved at least at the level of our perception of the eyes of others to ensure that we can understand intent.

00:26:21.740 And we do that by inferring attention, by looking at eye gaze, and you're making a strong case in your work for the relationship between perception, color vision, and emotion perception.

00:26:35.060 So, we talked a little bit about cues of health that might be associated with skin coloration and cues of fecundity, but tell me about the emotional cues that are associated with differences in color.

00:26:47.840 So, you know, the first thing I think people think about with spectral skin signaling is blushes, right, and blanches and flushes.

00:26:56.920 But that's really just the beginning, you know, this barely touches the surface.

00:27:00.700 So, you can imagine someone's angry and they can get a red face, which is very different from when somebody blushes and they get it with embarrassment.

00:27:07.740 And people actually, if I'm in front of a stage and something happens that's slightly embarrassing, and the audience is over there and I'm looking this way, you actually blush more on the side that's facing the audience.

00:27:20.040 Oh, is that right?

00:27:21.000 Yeah, this is known.

00:27:21.620 This is a drum and some.

00:27:23.200 Wow.

00:27:23.820 Wow.

00:27:24.120 That's a very specific response.

00:27:26.020 So, these are strong arguments that these are signals, not just automatic side effects of, you know, some kind of implicit side effect with no purpose.

00:27:34.060 Well, that's so complex, too, eh?

00:27:37.080 Because it opens up the question, like, first of all, not everybody blushes.

00:27:42.420 And the issue is, well, what does the blush signify?

00:27:44.880 And it signifies something like self-conscious shame.

00:27:48.380 And then the question is, well, why would you want to signal self-conscious shame to people?

00:27:53.060 I mean, because it's a shameful signal.

00:27:54.740 But it does indicate that you're the sort of, one of the things that might indicate is that you're the sort of person who can't get away with, what, exactly, violating the social norm?

00:28:04.860 Something like that, right?

00:28:06.020 And it's an honest signal because it's out of your control.

00:28:09.060 So, honest signal, just in this context, is sort of a technical term of art.

00:28:15.100 So, we mean by honest signal that you have no control over it and it wears its meaning on its sleeve in some sense.

00:28:21.540 Right, right. So, yeah, that's right. It's a signal of your intent beneath your conscious awareness.

00:28:27.320 Laughter, genuine laughter, seems to be a signal like that, too.

00:28:30.500 And there's some evidence that genuine smiles are like that, too, right?

00:28:34.600 Because if you smile falsely, your eyes don't smile.

00:28:38.740 Although I think you can train yourself to do that.

00:28:40.900 But generally speaking, if someone is...

00:28:42.860 Yeah, it's hard.

00:28:43.660 If someone is manipulating with a smile, they don't do it the same way they do when they smile spontaneously.

00:28:49.460 And so, those rapid onset implicit emotional displays are a signal about our genuine motivations.

00:28:58.880 And if those signals are obvious, it's, in principle, easier for people to read us and, therefore, in principle, easier for them to engage in trusting negotiations with us.

00:29:10.740 Right.

00:29:11.140 Because we wear our heart on our sleeve.

00:29:13.140 That's right.

00:29:13.460 And so, I mean, other predictions that come out of this, by the way, it should be the case that if this is true, then the primates with color vision, as opposed to the primates that didn't have three color vision, the primates with color vision should have more naked spots.

00:29:29.620 They should have bare faces.

00:29:30.940 And, in fact, when you look, the primates with color vision are the ones with the naked faces. 0.96

00:29:34.440 They often have naked rumps, you know, naked genitalia, which, because all of these things are signaling, the ones without color vision are furry face like your typical bunny rabbit, typical dog.

00:29:45.240 Nakedness and color vision, three-color vision, are opposite sides of the same coin. 0.98

00:29:50.300 Hmm.

00:29:50.720 Okay.

00:29:51.320 Okay.

00:29:51.920 Okay.

00:29:52.320 Does the theory that trichromate vision evolved at least partly or perhaps in the main as an aid to emotion detection contradict the frugivore theory?

00:30:07.420 Like, is it possible that color vision also gave us an edge, at least in some environments, with regards to the detection of higher quality food sources?

00:30:15.660 It's certainly possible, but it wouldn't have driven – there's no reason to think that fruit would have driven those particular wavelength sensitivities of the middle and long wavelength-sensitive cones.

00:30:27.860 Particularly given that they're so close together.

00:30:29.780 Right.

00:30:30.240 That's the crucial issue.

00:30:32.000 Yeah.

00:30:32.220 And there's all kinds of things where we leverage our color vision, which is peculiarly for empath kind of health senses.

00:30:39.820 But we obviously use it for lots of things, probably in nature beyond that, and in culture views all over the place.

00:30:46.560 But that doesn't mean that – that doesn't amount to an explanation for what drove it.

00:30:50.920 Yeah, well, I mean, part of the problem, I guess, that people have with evolutionary – functional evolutionary explanations for the purpose of any given human attribute is that there's no reason ever to assume that any given attribute is singular in its function.

00:31:08.820 It's sort of like asking what the hand can do.

00:31:11.680 What's the hand for?

00:31:12.640 Well, you know, the hand is for a lot of things.

00:31:15.960 What's the – is there a cardinal purpose to the hand?

00:31:18.820 That's a hard question to ask, but there's no reason to assume that evolution wouldn't operate so that a given biological phenomenon would be other than multipurpose.

00:31:33.300 Right, well, so everything might be multipurpose, but the odds of there being two competing or multiple competing decidirata that are determining the design, that they're close to one another, are going to be typically fairly rare.

00:31:50.020 Typically, one of them might be 10 times more important than the other.

00:31:52.800 Right, right.

00:31:53.060 Usually, in my experience, it turns out that one of these is the principal drivers.

00:31:58.000 It can explain first-order, even second-order properties of the thing.

00:32:01.720 And, yeah, there can be other third- or fourth-order stuff, but that's mostly irrelevant.

00:32:06.040 So you can get away with explaining – so, for example, another one, why we have forward-facing eyes.

00:32:09.920 Standard story, and the fun thing, all of these explanations, whether it's pruning fingers, it's still probably in the Wikipedia page.

00:32:16.120 It just says it's a side effect of osmosis or some bullcrap, right?

00:32:19.060 It's just – it's still there to this day, these old narratives.

00:32:21.380 And then for forward-facing eyes, it's always – it has something about predators want forward-facing eyes, except that every fish is a predator eating a smaller fish.

00:32:31.060 All the birds are predators.

00:32:32.320 Birds, yeah, right.

00:32:32.760 They all have sideways-facing eyes.

00:32:34.080 By our standards, they're all sideways-facing eyes.

00:32:36.440 Even all the carnivores, the paradigmatic mammalian meat-eaters, predators, have sideways-facing eyes relative to us.

00:32:45.020 I mean, they still have forward-facing eyes in terms of the big picture of things.

00:32:47.820 So there's a lot of variability in forward-facing eyeness across the mammals.

00:32:51.820 And the question is, why is there this variability?

00:32:55.140 And so there's been multiple kinds of – one is stereoscopy, a better stereoscopy.

00:33:01.860 But you even get stereoscopy in a bunny rabbit.

00:33:04.480 Bunny rabbit has a very thin binocular field, and it can see stereoscopy within a thin binocular field.

00:33:08.680 But it also gets the benefit of seeing everything.

00:33:10.980 It can see directly behind it, below it, above it.

00:33:12.840 So you've got this full panoramic vision, whereas we've chosen to lose half of our visual field or a lot of our visual field just to have better stereoscopy up in front.

00:33:25.160 Now, so one of the bad sorts of – you have these two currencies.

00:33:27.940 Like the standard argument is, oh, I've got this great wide stereoscopy field of better 3D vision up front at the expense of losing everything.

00:33:36.120 How do you balance those things?

00:33:37.240 How is that an argument that I would want more of?

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00:34:47.980 Of, you know, apples to have, while getting less adverbs in the back, and not even obviously comparable things that I can trade off.

00:34:56.460 So my argument was like, first of all, stereoscopy is not, it's like the least important 3D sense.

00:35:02.260 We have all of these, there's many, many three-dimensional senses.

00:35:04.960 One is just what kinds of objects they are, how far down towards the horizon are they.

00:35:11.660 How they overlap.

00:35:12.840 Things, yeah, occlusions in front of other things.

00:35:14.700 If I just do this with one eye, even with one eye, I'm getting amazing, much better than stereoscopy.

00:35:19.780 All of these things, when you do, if you're a perception psychologist who creates stimuli that have competing cues of two different kinds,

00:35:26.600 and they say, which one's Trump, stereoscopy loses always.

00:35:30.040 All of these other ones Trump, they win if there's competing.

00:35:32.140 Oh, yeah. Oh, I see. So that's a good way of testing what's the most cardinal element of the, oh, yeah.

00:35:37.420 And so none of, stereoscopy always loses.

00:35:39.060 And if you've played first-person shooter video games, you're, yeah, you have both eyes open, but you're being fed one image on screen.

00:35:47.200 And these things are so immersive, you never are confused as to where the guys are that you're shooting, right?

00:35:51.800 They're always really unambiguously in one particular spot, yet you're a cyclops, right?

00:35:56.280 So it had occurred to me back then, I said, I don't think it has anything to do with stereoscopy whatsoever.

00:36:01.260 And it turns out it's all about one currency.

00:36:04.300 This is, again, to this idea of why aren't there three, two or three or more equivalent kinds of functions that are all competing?

00:36:10.900 And then it's just some ugly mess, and it's not a good design hypothesis at all.

00:36:15.720 It's going to be sort of ugly kludge that happens to – it's almost never a kludge.

00:36:20.320 And so in this case, the reason that we have forward-facing eyes and the more forward-facing they are is to see better and clutter.

00:36:28.560 And so what I mean by that, animals that evolved with leaves all over the place.

00:36:31.900 When there's leaves, if your eyes are more widely separated than the clutter leaves, let's say.

00:36:36.660 So, for example, if you've played this game, if you just – if I hold my finger up in front of you, it's very thin, and I look at you, but not my finger, I see two – unless I've got a dominant eye.

00:36:44.860 But for those of you who don't have a dominant eye, you'll see two copies of your finger, and each will be semi-transparent.

00:36:49.220 Right.

00:36:50.240 Right?

00:36:51.120 Now, you're –

00:36:52.400 So, you can see through it.

00:36:54.000 Right.

00:36:54.340 So, what one eye is being blocked with, the other eye is seeing the world beyond that.

00:36:59.240 And so your brain has evolved to just create two copies of it, and you're not confused.

00:37:02.840 Like, oh, my God, I've got two figures.

00:37:04.020 No, you know what's going on.

00:37:04.900 It's just you have this perception that combines them and creates semi-transparency so that you can see beyond it.

00:37:11.600 Now, even my whole hand, I'm almost missing nothing even with my whole hand in front of me.

00:37:15.300 You know, there's a little bit of a core in the middle, but I'm capturing most of it.

00:37:20.140 So, for objects that are less – objects that are not as big as this interpupillary distance, the separation between my eyes,

00:37:28.300 then when you're an animal in – with those kinds of eyes in a forest with leaves that are typically smaller than that, you actually get – I call it x-ray.

00:37:36.500 Like, you actually can see – it's probabilistic summation.

00:37:39.360 You actually can see much, much more of the environment beyond than when you're a cyclops.

00:37:44.260 So, and in fact, I noticed this playing video games back 20-something years ago when I would be – you know, because you're a cyclops and you're hiding in bushes,

00:37:50.340 and I'd be trying to snipe people.

00:37:51.760 And then when you're in a bush, you can't see anything.

00:37:53.760 Of course, these are fake bushes.

00:37:54.820 I get it.

00:37:55.300 You can't see anything because you're just looking at these – but where in real life, you're in a bush, you pretty much see the entire world outside of it.

00:38:00.000 You can, you know, peek from outside of your bush.

00:38:01.620 Oh, yeah.

00:38:01.640 That's interesting.

00:38:02.280 So, you had to keep shaking to get different shots than someone shoots you because they see you wiggling in the bush.

00:38:06.080 In real life, you're designed to be in these cluttery environments and to see perfectly well beyond that.

00:38:11.540 Without having to move, too.

00:38:12.740 Without having to move.

00:38:13.680 And, yes, you're losing what's behind you.

00:38:15.540 But then you can start calculating how much of the environment can I see if I'm a forward-facing animal with this x-ray ability.

00:38:20.220 That is, my eyes are bigger than the leaves.

00:38:21.980 Versus a rabbit, let's say, effectively, you know, who has a full panoramic view.

00:38:26.820 Yeah, he can see entirely behind him.

00:38:28.920 But he can't – you can actually then calculate how much of the world outwards can you see.

00:38:34.400 He's actually – I can see up to – if you think about it two-dimensionally, I can see up to one, two, three, three and a half times better than him if you think about it as a two-dimensional grid.

00:38:42.340 But, in fact, it's more of a three-dimensional grid.

00:38:44.080 Then you have to sort of think about spheres, sphere-packing problem.

00:38:47.320 And so I can see only the front half of my little sphere, but if the little – the world is sort of built out of these spheres of these little – surrounded by lots of clutter, I can see the six spheres in front of me fully.

00:39:00.900 And I can't see beyond that and only half of mine, but I can see now six and a half times more of the – there's, like, simple models that you can build of simple models of forested kinds of environments where you can show that now you can see really almost an order of magnitude more.

00:39:14.520 It's see the most, right?

00:39:16.820 It's not a little bit more stereoscopy here, but a little bit less seeing – no, it's just see the most.

00:39:21.980 And so animals have – depending on their environment, they have more forward-facing eyes the more – the greater the extent to which they're in cluttered, forested kinds of environments.

00:39:31.420 And so one desideratum, see the most, suffices to explain all the variability that we find across mammals in terms of how forward-facing eyes evolve.

00:39:39.200 So does that mean that our forward-facing eyes evolved when we were still in arboreal – primarily arboreal environments?

00:39:46.260 And are chimpanzees still primarily in arboreal environments?

00:39:51.160 I guess they're – are they – yeah.

00:39:53.440 Yeah, okay.

00:39:54.000 I would say they are, yeah.

00:39:54.420 I think – yeah, yeah.

00:39:55.420 So the fact that we were on the African plain for some millions of years wasn't sufficient to –

00:40:01.540 Even there, even in the African plains – so even when you have animals in the same habitat, you have some animals that find micro-niches, for example, cats, who like to hang out in the clutter and just – and wait for their prey.

00:40:16.460 And then let's say the gazelles, who don't want to be anywhere near that clutter because they can't see crap when they're inside it.

00:40:21.000 So they will find micro-environments within even habitats that at first glance we kind of don't think of them as very cluttery.

00:40:27.080 But animals that are good at clutter will find those cluttery spots and leverage them. 0.77

00:40:33.360 Okay, okay, okay.

00:40:35.180 Well, that's an interesting account of binocular vision.

00:40:38.700 And let's – if it's all right, let's turn our attention back to emotion perception and then segue from that into the development of language.

00:40:46.820 In this book, Expressly Human, which was published in 2022, you talk about the evolution of language, which is a relatively new phenomenon.

00:40:57.880 You date it back several hundred thousands of years, and we could talk a little bit about that.

00:41:03.920 But you also make the case that our linguistic ability, although it's relatively newly evolved, is scaffolded on an understructure of emotional display and emotional language.

00:41:17.100 And so this is in keeping with the notions of perception that you put forward, that our faces, our skin surface, but primarily our faces, our emotional display mechanisms.

00:41:28.480 And that we can read a tremendous amount about the intent of others, intent and desire of others, merely as a consequence of reading off emotions.

00:41:41.160 And that language evolved with that as its underlying axiomatic – set of axiomatic presumptions.

00:41:51.920 I mean, one of the things that – I can't remember even where I read about this, but it's the problem of infinite regress in language, you know, if I – and how we solve it.

00:42:02.380 If I tell you, I was angry this morning, your likely question is, what made you angry, not, what do you mean angry?

00:42:11.180 And the reason that you don't ask, what do you mean angry, is because you know what it's like to be angry.

00:42:16.700 And so we share the underlying psychophysiological platform and all of the experiences that are part and parcel of that platform, and then we can use words to refer to those.

00:42:27.140 That's a situation where you can think of emotions, and I think object perceptions are the same, by the way.

00:42:32.740 Emotions are the axioms of the linguistic – of our linguistic capacity.

00:42:36.940 And you seem to be making an argument that's analogous to that in your book.

00:42:40.140 Well, way before there were social animals, every animal would have had emotions, right?

00:42:48.240 So these are just rough and ready.

00:42:51.860 One way to think about emotions is just states that you're in that feel like something that motivates you to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, right?

00:42:58.320 And none of the – they would have all been dead-eyed shark-like creatures that have – they're filled with lots of emotions, filled on the inside with emotions.

00:43:05.960 But they're not social animals, so they never had to signal to anybody anything.

00:43:10.380 So what – really what Darwin was concerned about, I was like, okay, that's great.

00:43:13.320 There's all these animals with all these emotions, and it feels like something to be them, and there's like all this internal stuff.

00:43:17.460 And there's no reason for them to tell anybody.

00:43:19.000 So why are all these social animals signaling so much to one another?

00:43:22.400 What's the point of it?

00:43:23.120 What does this language mean?

00:43:24.100 So what we do here is just ask – if you're social animals and you don't have a language of any kind that we can – that we're so used to, you need to have – what is the optimal language stimulus signaling system such that you can carry out negotiations and compromises?

00:43:44.020 And you can negotiate, and someone can back down, or someone can raise, and someone can do – so let me give you an example where we do – where people can come to a decision and come to an agreement without ever saying a word.

00:43:57.280 We do this when we play poker.

00:43:58.940 So I know something, and you know something.

00:44:01.040 I've got cards at a certain hand.

00:44:02.220 You've got cards at a certain hand, and we don't know, and imagine that we can never talk about it.

00:44:05.740 Like it turns out I could say, actually, it's – but imagine I've got these things that I know in the world, and you've got these things, and we're arguing over – zucchini bread keeps it.

00:44:11.680 We're arguing over some particular thing that we want to split, and here we want to split the pot, whatever, the ante.

00:44:17.380 There's the ante in there, and we want to get the ante out, and I can't talk, and we can even play online where we can't even talk, right?

00:44:25.060 There's not even any emotional expressions there.

00:44:27.280 But what I do to make my case is I just slide in a certain amount of stake.

00:44:32.160 I stake something, and then you stake something, and it could be that after a while I go, okay, I think he's – Jordan's pretty confident.

00:44:38.760 I'm going to – I'm going to fold.

00:44:39.960 That is, I'm agreeing, okay, your hand is stronger than mine.

00:44:42.640 We've come to an agreement.

00:44:43.980 I never signaled anything.

00:44:45.340 I never spoke.

00:44:46.980 But we nevertheless managed to solve a potential conflict because it could call. 0.99

00:44:51.420 Call would be to say, screw you.

00:44:52.600 I'm going to – like we're going to go all in, and that means in this – in the case of poker, just laying down to see whose cards are better. 0.97

00:44:57.060 And so figuring out whose cards are better in real life might be, oh, yeah, I'm a better fighter than you or whatever it might have come to, blows or whatever it might be,

00:45:05.040 or something that we don't want to have to get involved with all the time.

00:45:09.020 We'd like to make our lives much smoother in terms of the utility area.

00:45:12.260 The path to negotiation.

00:45:13.100 Right.

00:45:13.560 So poker is how you do it.

00:45:15.600 And so what we're able to show is that you need to have the ability – you need to have a signal that says, I think I'm really confident or really, really confident.

00:45:23.780 And you do this by shoving in social capital chips, shoving in reputation.

00:45:27.420 So when you signal pride or I also signal that I don't think you're confident at all, I have disdain for you.

00:45:33.980 So either I'm signaling that I'm really confident or that your claims are not very – you've got a bad hand.

00:45:38.160 Either of those things amounts to a certain amount of stake or betting social capital.

00:45:43.160 But I can also show humility, and now I'm sort of pulling off chips.

00:45:47.320 I say, okay, I'm not so great.

00:45:49.360 Or I show respect to you.

00:45:50.420 I'm also pulling out chips off the table.

00:45:52.440 So you can't do that in actual poker.

00:45:54.480 But you can just start working out.

00:45:56.100 You need to be able to both make claims strong and weak or pride and sort of humility about my own confidence and also respect or disdain concerning yours.

00:46:05.720 And then you can start to work out.

00:46:06.700 I also need to have the ability to acknowledge what you just claimed.

00:46:09.540 Okay, you're saying that you're really confident that I'm – and I'm not confident.

00:46:13.320 Well, given that, that also is a particular signal, and it has something to do with happy versus –

00:46:19.020 That confidence too.

00:46:19.900 You know, that confidence must be something like the end result of an internal Darwinian competition between different competing motivational states, right?

00:46:28.800 Is that – because you might ask yourself, why should I accept your confidence as a signal of your competence?

00:46:37.460 Right?

00:46:37.680 And one answer to that would be, I know something about you and know that you can do things.

00:46:41.660 And so that would be a consequence of me actually knowing you in a social circumstance.

00:46:45.680 But another would be that if your evaluation of the situation is sufficient so that the emotion of moving forward and dominating isn't being challenged by a number of other potential emotional states like anxiety,

00:47:02.800 I'm going to be able to read that on your face.

00:47:05.100 And so I'm going to know that you undertook the internal computations that were sufficient to at least convince you that you're correct.

00:47:13.520 Well, I mean, I think you're overthinking – here for this argument, we don't even have to – we don't have to think about it being honest signals like for color vision.

00:47:22.080 Even if we were – I mean, and we're not consciously doing these.

00:47:25.620 We have evolved to just do these signals often implicitly without really – and that's really when we're good is when we're not consciously thinking it through.

00:47:33.300 But the reason that you're willing to believe me when I show confidence that I'm the one who should get most of the cake that mom laid out, let's say, and you're my brother,

00:47:44.660 is because we're part of a social community and I'll get humiliated if it turns out that mom tells people that I'm wrong.

00:47:50.580 The reason that it works is because I care about what I staked.

00:47:53.960 I care about the reputation.

00:47:55.360 They're at risk.

00:47:56.340 And the social community is always watching and gossiping, and I'll lose reputation.

00:48:00.860 The reason –

00:48:01.440 Yeah, okay.

00:48:01.880 It's all about these reputations.

00:48:03.680 Okay, so you're building in – I think you're building in something like appreciation for the fact that the reputational exchanges that we're making are cumulative across time in a social community that's actually continually interacting.

00:48:19.820 So it's never a one-off game.

00:48:22.040 And so that means –

00:48:22.860 It sometimes manages – somehow with humans, it seems to sometimes work even with one-offs, right?

00:48:26.580 Like, because we're so instinctively doing – but, you know, we've been instinctively designed thinking that we're part of a single community that we're – we seem to get off – you know, we get on pretty well and we're all nice to the baristas and everybody's nice to whatever.

00:48:39.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.98

00:48:39.780 Even though we could be real jerks, right? 0.99

00:48:41.540 Yeah, definitely. 0.98

00:48:41.780 So it seems to hold over pretty well.

00:48:43.420 But, yeah, it definitely brings up more troubles in bigger cities where there's fewer interactions with the same people.

00:48:48.300 Sure.

00:48:48.420 Yeah, well, I've also been – well, I'm curious about what you think about this as well because I've been working out the idea – it's not only me, obviously, but many people work on this idea that – and I think it's associated with the – it's the same idea as the idea of natural law in more pure philosophy is that there's a pattern of ethos that emerges as a consequence of the fact of iterated exchange.

00:49:15.500 You know, like if it – so I'll give you an example of this from the animal literature.

00:49:22.240 So when animal behaviors first started studying rat play and were trying to understand it physiologically and functionally, one of the things they would do was match juvenile rats together so that they could wrestle.

00:49:40.120 But they do one-offs and what they found was invariably that if one of the rats had about a 10% weight advantage over the other rat that he could win the vast majority of times.

00:49:52.160 And so the idea of play was something like – you put two animals into a ring, they compete with one another, the larger animal can dominate the smaller animal, and the purpose of the play bout is to establish dominance without damage.

00:50:11.360 But the problem with that hypothesis was that rats don't play with each other once, they play repeatedly.

00:50:20.900 And it turned out that if you put rats together, juveniles repeatedly, the big rat has to let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, or the little rat won't play anymore.

00:50:37.220 And so this is – it's a remarkable discovery.

00:50:39.800 This is Jak Panksepp's discovery.

00:50:41.220 It's an absolutely brilliant discovery because it shows, first of all, that the purpose of play is not dominance.

00:50:46.500 It also implies that the social hierarchy order isn't dominance-related, but even more importantly, it shows that reciprocity is the basis for social organization, even among rats, and not the expression of power.

00:51:03.840 And that's – like, that's a radically different idea.

00:51:06.020 Now, Franz DeWall has found something like that, as far as I'm concerned, found something very similar with his studies of chimpanzees because it was thought for the longest time, I think, by Marxist-oriented evolutionary biologists fundamentally, that the –

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00:51:46.180 Substructure for dominance with regard to the alpha chimps was the physical expression of power.

00:51:53.000 But what DeWall showed was that that happens now and then.

00:51:56.380 You get a chimp troop where the major alpha is a bully and a successful one. 1.00

00:52:01.280 But he tends to get torn to shreds as soon as he has a weak moment by, like, two subordinates have had enough of being pushed around.

00:52:08.740 The stable alphas are often smaller males, although that's irrelevant in a sense.

00:52:14.860 What they are is extremely good at continuous reciprocity.

00:52:18.520 And they tend to rule over much more harmonious social troops and have a much longer reign.

00:52:23.120 So, the reason I'm asking about this is because you talk about the importance of staking social capital when making a claim for confidence.

00:52:37.600 And I'm curious.

00:52:38.940 I'd like to have you elaborate on that more.

00:52:41.440 You used the poker game analogy.

00:52:44.080 You said, I'm staking something and you implied that, well, if I'm wrong in my confidence and word gets around, it's going to damage my reputation.

00:52:53.120 Which means that the next time I act confidently, no one's going to believe me.

00:52:58.280 So, the implication is that if you're reciprocating with people across a long span of time,

00:53:06.480 then you're only going to make confidence claims where you're relatively certain that being wrong isn't going to damage your long-term reputation.

00:53:14.320 That's basically the…

00:53:15.520 Right.

00:53:16.000 Okay.

00:53:16.480 So, and I haven't…

00:53:17.460 There's two different…

00:53:18.420 This is a…

00:53:19.220 And here we work out the, in some sense, argue it.

00:53:23.500 Here's the fundamental and minimal signaling system that is absolutely needed for two creatures to engage in these kinds of staking conversations.

00:53:33.040 You have to have exactly the 81.

00:53:34.660 It's a four-dimensional signals.

00:53:35.820 Now, the optimal way to use it is like asking what's the best way to play poker.

00:53:40.440 Now, there's more than one way to play poker.

00:53:41.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:42.140 It's deeply complicated.

00:53:43.080 This is one of the most complicated…

00:53:44.120 It's the most complicated game that exists as long as there's no limits of poker.

00:53:48.500 Super complicated.

00:53:49.640 So, there's certainly more than one way to play.

00:53:52.320 One way is to say, no, you go first.

00:53:54.580 No, you go first.

00:53:55.600 And you're always being…

00:53:56.860 You never go…

00:53:57.700 You're never more confident than your actual levels of confidence.

00:54:00.680 You're not blustery.

00:54:01.600 Yeah.

00:54:01.960 And that kind of…

00:54:02.520 You can build up a reputation over time.

00:54:04.680 And you probably are helping your friends also build up their reputations, which is kind of what reciprocity is.

00:54:11.140 As opposed to the blustery kind of…

00:54:13.100 He just bluffs his way to the top and is just mean to everybody around.

00:54:15.960 And he's a chip bully, right? 0.98

00:54:16.980 He's a chip bully. 0.95

00:54:17.640 He's got a big stack of chips and poker. 0.71

00:54:19.520 And he's just pushing everybody out.

00:54:21.340 Yeah.

00:54:21.460 They bet something he's shoved and then they just fold out of fear.

00:54:24.460 There's other ways.

00:54:25.220 And you can rise to the top that way as well.

00:54:26.860 Right.

00:54:27.100 But it's probably fragile.

00:54:27.760 The question is for how long.

00:54:28.640 Yeah, it's fragile.

00:54:29.180 Exactly, exactly.

00:54:30.080 So, but key here is what is the language that you need?

00:54:34.820 And it turns out the language, once you work it out, it's exactly the space of emotional expressions that we have.

00:54:39.840 The emotional expressions that we have are exactly what's needed to engage in exactly the kind of generalized poker game that social animals that don't have language need to actually communicate and stake things and carry out.

00:54:51.200 Okay, so that would be the basis for establishing cooperative endeavors over the medium to long run, but also properly regulating competitive endeavors so that they don't end in catastrophe.

00:55:04.820 Both of those.

00:55:05.460 That would be the negotiation landscape.

00:55:08.540 Okay, so why don't you tell us why you think that our emotional displays are optimized for solving the problem of cooperation and competition?

00:55:17.860 Oh, they probably are.

00:55:19.600 All I'm saying is that my ability to, I didn't try in this book to work out what are the, what would be nice to be able to say, and here's the optimal way to use this.

00:55:29.040 Or here's, let's say, several optimal strategies.

00:55:31.100 That's the study of ethics in general, right?

00:55:33.380 The optimization of strategy.

00:55:35.840 I mean, the philosophy of ethics is exactly that study.

00:55:39.880 And it does have something, I think it has something to do with, it's something like optimization of reproductive strategy, but over the largest possible number of environments and timeframes.

00:55:53.240 It's something like that, right?

00:55:54.920 Because one of the things you pointed out with the poker example is the strategy that you use while you're playing poker is going to be dependent to some degree on how many times you're going to play poker with these people.

00:56:04.060 No, that's true.

00:56:04.500 Right, right, right, right.

00:56:05.400 So that's like-

00:56:06.740 But less so, because in poker, when you earn currency money in poker, it's spendable anywhere, right?

00:56:12.860 But social currency is inherently often spendable only within the particular community that you're involved.

00:56:18.680 Right, so the rules there are even more constrained.

00:56:20.980 Yeah.

00:56:21.080 Yeah, well, so this is a very cool thing to understand, and I think it's one of the things that's very powerful about your book, is that I have thought for quite a while that the analysis of reciprocal interactions, this is something economists did very badly for a very long period of time, because they thought of people as rational maximizers.

00:56:40.380 But their notion of the timeframe across which you maximized rationally was one interaction.

00:56:45.960 Yeah.

00:56:46.120 And that's just absolutely 100% not true, and it's also not how people behave, right?

00:56:50.640 There's that famous behavioral experiment where you can take two people, and you can say to one of them, you can make one offer to your partner, you get $100, you can make them one offer, you have to give them some money.

00:57:02.160 If they reject the offer, neither of you get anything.

00:57:05.280 And across cultures, the standard offer is 50-50.

00:57:08.920 And if you take poor people, they're even more likely to make a 50-50 offer rather than less, which is not what they should do if they're rational self-optimizers. 0.75

00:57:18.440 But it doesn't take into account something you alluded to, which is we're very, very cognizant of the manner in which our decisions propagate reputationally across our social space.

00:57:31.080 Right.

00:57:31.340 Because I think there isn't anything that, it seems to me that for social animals, there actually isn't anything more important than reputation.

00:57:37.600 I know, for example, among hunter-gatherer hunters, there are rules for how you conduct yourself if you're a successful hunter.

00:57:46.020 The rules are very interesting, and they're quite stable across different cultures.

00:57:49.200 So imagine that you're the best hunter in the group.

00:57:52.700 You still fail most of the time, and you would fail almost all the time alone.

00:57:57.100 So even if you're the best hunter, you need all the other hunters.

00:57:59.880 And so, and even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a lot.

00:58:04.800 So you can't only rely on your own skill.

00:58:07.460 Now, the problem with being the best hunter is that you can provoke jealousy and disruption in the group.

00:58:13.020 And so people will be jealous of you, and they won't cooperate with you properly.

00:58:18.140 And so even if your skills are optimized, if you disturb the skill set of the group, you're all going to fail.

00:58:23.560 And so one of the rules, for example, if you're a good hunter in a hunting community,

00:58:28.500 is that you don't take the best cuts of meat for yourself.

00:58:31.380 You distribute them if you're the guy responsible for the kill, and you also downplay your contribution.

00:58:37.820 Yeah, oh, this old thing.

00:58:38.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, you know, you were very, very helpful.

00:58:43.940 And the idea, it's quite straightforward, I think, once you understand it properly, is that you're storing the results of your current hunt,

00:58:56.220 where you've actually brought down an animal that's larger than you can consume or that your family can consume.

00:59:00.960 You're storing that in your reputation among the other hunters.

00:59:04.260 And that's by far the best way to store it.

00:59:06.480 And you can think about that as a, I think you can think about that as the basis for something like natural law.

00:59:11.560 It's like, because I was thinking about that, there's an injunction in the gospel accounts about storing treasure up in heaven,

00:59:19.420 rather than on earth where it can rust or where moths can consume it.

00:59:23.280 And I have thought recently that that's what, a reference to the utility of storing your treasure in reputation.

00:59:32.840 Because that's the best possible currency.

00:59:35.740 If you have a stable social group and people think highly of you, they know that you've contributed generously in the past.

00:59:41.980 If you hit a rough patch, the probability that you're going to invite reciprocity on the part of people you've aided in the past is extremely high.

00:59:50.960 Okay, now, your concept of the relationship between emotion and language is that we're using, we need to bridge that gap.

01:00:00.220 We're using emotion to signal our, to signal our strategies in reciprocal interactions so that they're structured optimally.

01:00:08.220 How do you see language emerging out of that?

01:00:10.760 We've got this emotional under structure.

01:00:13.560 I mean, language is a whole other story.

01:00:15.360 But, you know, one thing this does is, and I'll get to language in a second.

01:00:19.940 The way that often we think of language is that you've got this really, you know, rigorous grammar, you know, these propositions.

01:00:26.480 And then emotions are these little colors that they've added to, like, there's a little bit of flavor and color.

01:00:32.020 Or something that's interfering with rational discourse, right?

01:00:35.480 Right.

01:00:35.960 But really, I think it's the other way around.

01:00:37.600 The real language that we speak, even on Twitter, even when it's just text, is ultimately, it's all of this stuff.

01:00:43.260 It's all of these emotional expressions being done in very complicated ways.

01:00:47.540 Nowadays, and nowadays with GIFs, and, you know, GIFs, if you look at the GIFs that we use, the animated GIFs that you use, they're all deeply, there are ways and memes.

01:00:55.340 These are all ways of getting across your emotions.

01:00:57.140 They're archetypal emotional expressions.

01:00:58.760 Yeah.

01:00:59.340 Really, it's all emotional expressions sprinkled with propositional-like content attached to it.

01:01:06.520 Rather than propositional content sprinkled with emotions.

01:01:08.760 This is the wrong way to think about it.

01:01:09.740 Most of what we're doing, all of these things are amounting to pushing in chips because I've said that I'm so right about something for these reasons, or I think you're so wrong for these reasons, I'm pushing in chips, social capital chips, when I tweet.

01:01:21.840 Or I'm saying, I'm not really sure, but maybe it's this, so I've pushed in one tiny little chip.

01:01:26.260 So it's a betting market on the validity of propositions using social capital as the-

01:01:30.500 That's exactly what I said.

01:01:31.840 It's a market.

01:01:33.080 It's a marketplace.

01:01:34.280 And that's what the-

01:01:34.920 This is how-

01:01:35.900 That's why free speech is necessary.

01:01:37.260 Free speech is really a marketplace of ideas.

01:01:39.100 Literally, because one of the interesting things about social capital is a decentralized currency, right?

01:01:48.760 Now, most of us didn't know anything about decentralized currencies until Bitcoin came along, and now we've got all these cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized currencies.

01:01:55.900 And one of the interesting things about decentralized currencies is because there's no bank with some boss looking at the ledgers of who sent money to somebody else.

01:02:05.120 And so that's not going to work, because the whole point of a decentralized currency is that it's not in any one person's hand.

01:02:11.280 Instead, it's spread across many, many-

01:02:13.060 It's an unfalsifiable ledger.

01:02:14.660 That's right.

01:02:15.280 So this notion of a blockchain, and a blockchain is just like, okay, today, Doug sent Susie 0.3 Bitcoin, and it's just a list of all the Bitcoin transactions that occurred.

01:02:24.260 And it's in everybody's computers everywhere.

01:02:26.020 And when there's a new block added to the chain, there's some particular work that has to be done called proof of work, or there's proof of stake.

01:02:32.480 There's different kinds of ways of adding it such that once you've built up, let's say, years worth of these sort of Bitcoin, let's say, transfers, it's impossible, practically impossible to go back and mess with the history of it.

01:02:46.900 And the reason it has to be like this is because it's decentralized, and there's no other way to do it.

01:02:51.460 So, well, reputation is another decentralized currency.

01:02:55.540 How do you get it so that within a community, a social community, you can make sure that when I had an argument with you and you won, I don't go around later and say, oh, actually, I won that argument.

01:03:05.380 I totally humiliated Jordan.

01:03:07.320 I could just start lying about the past, about what happened.

01:03:10.300 It's like me saying, no, actually, you gave me the Bitcoin.

01:03:12.680 I didn't give you the Bitcoin.

01:03:14.180 And we call it double spending.

01:03:15.540 Like, I give you Bitcoin, but I still have the Bitcoin because the ledger's not keeping track of the fact that I gave it to you.

01:03:19.920 This would undermine a currency.

01:03:21.100 Nothing would work.

01:03:21.840 So the same problems that decentralized currencies have that lead to blockchain is why we end up with social narratives.

01:03:29.400 Social narratives are the answer that we already had up and running.

01:03:32.460 Social narratives are the human social group's way of remembering, okay, this week Mark lost social capital to Jordan and Susie lost it to Betty.

01:03:42.520 And we keep track of these little stories. 0.87

01:03:44.820 The most stories that we remember are, one, stories about the argument that we had and Mark was being a douchebag.

01:03:50.060 But it's also really about the Mark lost social capital to Jordan because of those things. 0.53

01:03:54.320 And those things are helping me remember how much social capital that I lost.

01:03:58.200 So – and there's, like, often people that are good at gossip.

01:04:01.700 These are the people, like, that are good at minors.

01:04:04.100 These are, like – or proof of – well, one is proof of stake.

01:04:07.600 They own a lot of – they're already high-reputation people in the community.

01:04:11.280 These are, like, people who own a lot of Bitcoin, say, or some other currencies.

01:04:14.320 And then they can say, we have a higher vote as to whether a new block comes onto the chain.

01:04:19.040 And they're worthy of listening to it because they care about the validity, you know, whether that currency stays good.

01:04:24.940 So gossipers are typically high-ranked reputation people in the community.

01:04:29.380 And they spin stories about what happens, taking – sort of accumulating.

01:04:32.960 Say, oh, yeah.

01:04:33.500 They come up with simpler versions of whatever happened that helps it – remember, it gets added to the chain.

01:04:39.300 And often, gossip is really easy to check that it's preserving what actually happened in the community.

01:04:47.120 But it's really hard to come up with good gossip.

01:04:48.860 Good gossip that elegantly explains the happenings of the week.

01:04:52.820 It's like a condensed narrative.

01:04:54.480 Like a really condensed narrative.

01:04:55.560 Easy to verify.

01:04:56.540 Hard to come up with.

01:04:57.340 Only certain kinds of individuals are good to come up with.

01:04:59.080 So these are a lot similar to what's called proof of work.

01:05:00.940 Proof of works are things that are really hard to do this work to glue one block to the next.

01:05:05.240 But they're really easy to verify that it's a correct solution.

01:05:08.000 So you end up with these sort of analogies that we've already been using for hundreds of thousands – well, millions of years.

01:05:13.880 Well, at least hundreds of thousands of years that we ended up with these social narratives that in order to have a reputation currency that is preserved over time and we can't muck with, build these blockchain-like social narratives.

01:05:27.940 And that's great.

01:05:28.960 But the downside is that once a narrative gets up and running, just like once a blockchain gets up and running, you can't muck with it.

01:05:35.140 And so if it creates something false, you're stuck with it for generations potentially.

01:05:40.300 So this is one of the things that I talk about a bit here and I'm trying to work into the next book.

01:05:45.140 Taking seriously some of these kinds of emergent phenomena that you have to deal with when you have decentralized currencies like these blockchain-like properties, which are what social narratives are, have these downsides of being almost unalterable.

01:05:58.340 Right, right.

01:05:58.840 Permanent mistakes.

01:05:59.860 Permanent mistakes that go on and on forever.

01:06:02.640 You know, the Jews deal with this.

01:06:03.700 I think the Jews got added to as being the evil, you know, goblin-type group that's controlling and puppeteering everyone 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and it just never goes away. 0.99

01:06:13.780 You know, it just keeps on and it just keeps getting added to the same kind of narratives, keep moving on.

01:06:19.720 So there's all these terrible things, but it's also all these great things because you wouldn't have reputation systems that work.

01:06:24.680 None of our social, none of the public square would work.

01:06:26.920 None of the social interactions would work at all without it.

01:06:29.160 So let me ask you, one of the things that I've been concerned about for whatever that's worth is online anonymity.

01:06:38.200 We know there's an endless number of, I think, valid social psychology studies, which is a very small proportion of social psychology studies, by the way, that show that when people are shielded from the reputational consequences of their actions, they're much more likely to misbehave.

01:06:56.180 And that's why, for example, you know, if someone steps in front of you while you're walking down the street, you're very unlikely to curse, whereas if they cut you off in your car, you're very likely to curse.

01:07:07.080 So anonymity facilitates a more psychopathic and impulsive style of responding.

01:07:15.760 And one of the problems we have on the net now is that anonymity, I wouldn't say reigns, but it's very, very pervasive.

01:07:23.940 And that means you can say whatever the hell you want with absolutely no reputational consequence.

01:07:28.880 And so my view of the online world, this might be particularly relevant on X, is that anonymous signaling facilitates a psychopathic and sadistic form of social interaction.

01:07:50.060 Yeah, I hear that a lot.

01:07:53.520 I've argued against that often.

01:07:55.700 And the reason I don't think that's right is every day you have countless encounters with folks in real life at the coffee place or wherever it is, cars signaling to one another.

01:08:04.380 And we emotionally signal them in our cars all the time.

01:08:06.720 And you don't know any of these folks.

01:08:09.120 And you know that you don't know these folks.

01:08:11.860 And what's usually, though, there that's not there on the web is full, rich socio-emotional interactions that are allowing you to go through your day.

01:08:21.400 Yeah, it's embodied.

01:08:21.920 Yeah, you're really able to get along well, I think because all of your emotional expressions are there.

01:08:27.120 I think that online—

01:08:28.540 Well, and your habits, too.

01:08:29.980 I mean, because it's an embodied environment, you're running on the habits that are a consequence of the fact that you are in something approximating an intact social environment.

01:08:40.340 No doubt, no doubt.

01:08:41.820 But then—and let me give you an example online where things work terribly.

01:08:45.780 Unlike X or Twitter, where we typically don't know people in real life.

01:08:50.060 In Facebook, you kind of know who they are, like at least back in the day.

01:08:54.360 You know that that's Doug's friend, whatever.

01:08:56.700 You kind of have some idea who these people are in real life.

01:08:59.340 And people are even meaner on Facebook.

01:09:01.980 It's one or other than these little comment arguments.

01:09:03.880 They're just vicious and vile.

01:09:05.760 And they're so mean, even though they know each other.

01:09:07.540 I think that what's—and to the—I think that really what matters in both of these worlds is having some notion of identity that extends over time.

01:09:18.040 Yeah.

01:09:18.420 And allows you to—and you need to be able to socially—socio-emotionally express yourself as best you can.

01:09:24.640 So on Twitter, I think really what matters is pseudonyms are fine.

01:09:30.980 You know, I can't say pseudonymity.

01:09:32.300 Because they're stable?

01:09:33.300 They're stable.

01:09:33.800 You know, there's some of the best accounts of these folks, they've—once you've built up 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000, it takes years to get to this point.

01:09:41.600 You've got a voice.

01:09:42.620 No one knows who they are, but they don't want to lose their account.

01:09:44.020 Well, then you're not exactly—I see.

01:09:45.260 You're making a distinction between—

01:09:47.320 They're an individual in that world, yeah.

01:09:48.740 High reputation anonymous is not the same as low reputation anonymous.

01:09:51.700 And that's true, right, yeah.

01:09:53.140 Yeah.

01:09:53.460 They're real people as far as they're concerned.

01:09:55.200 They really have something to do.

01:09:56.000 Well, it might even be that their pseudonymous identity is actually trumping their genuine identity if they have like 500,000 followers online.

01:10:03.520 Yeah, they had all—often these people are nobodies in real life.

01:10:06.240 And they—I mean, they could well have—be jobless living in their parents' bay.

01:10:10.120 Who knows?

01:10:10.500 No one knows.

01:10:11.360 But they've got something really good to say as far as their followers are concerned.

01:10:15.380 And they care.

01:10:16.680 And they have a lot to lose if they were to start saying things that ruin their reputation and they lose their followers.

01:10:22.360 So I think that what's important is that continuity over time and pseudonyms are fine.

01:10:27.260 It's the anonymous folks.

01:10:29.340 It's not anonymity that's fine.

01:10:31.100 Okay, well, that's a good objection.

01:10:32.460 That's a good objection because you're basically pointing out that stable pseudonyms that extend across time and that accrue reputation then become subject to the same regulating forces as a genuine identity.

01:10:47.360 Okay, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

01:10:50.200 And there are anonymous accounts or pseudonymous accounts that I follow in X that I think are of high quality.

01:10:55.300 So I don't think there's a necessary relationship between the use of a pseudonym and pathology.

01:11:01.760 And frankly, 99% of the people who have their real names are—I don't really know if it's real names.

01:11:06.540 I'm never going to meet them in real life.

01:11:08.220 It's so abstract that it's academic.

01:11:10.800 Really what matters is their identity there.

01:11:12.940 Even their real name there amounts to a pseudonym, as far as I'm concerned, practically speaking.

01:11:19.080 Yeah, well, there's always the lurking possibility that they'll be discovered.

01:11:22.900 Possibility of cancellation, but yeah.

01:11:23.800 But I get the—okay, fair enough.

01:11:26.040 Okay, so let's leave out the more reputationally significant pseudonymous accounts and concentrate on the non—

01:11:35.940 And so a lot of the—I read a lot of comments, partly because I find that's a very useful way of, first of all, evaluating how people are actually responding to the material that I'm putting up.

01:11:47.120 And that's very necessary if I'm going to be communicating with a very large number of people.

01:11:52.800 But it also gives me a good sense of the tone of the social world at any given moment around any given topic.

01:11:59.660 Now, there are a multitude of accounts that are anonymous that are low reputation, no followers, no postings, right?

01:12:08.060 Yeah.

01:12:08.200 And they're often exceptionally vitriolic.

01:12:11.560 And I guess one of the concerns that I've had is that the lack of consequence that they experience because of their derisive and pathological utterances polarizes the social discussion in a manner that's genuinely counterproductive.

01:12:30.140 So tell me what you think about this.

01:12:32.080 So imagine that there's a distribution of attitudes around any given concept, right, or any given topic.

01:12:39.280 And the more extreme attitudes are rarer.

01:12:42.320 But if the extreme attitudes are emotionally amplified and there's no punishment that's consequential to that emotional amplification,

01:12:50.320 in fact, perhaps the reverse, because if it's pithy and striking, even if it's derisive and denigrating,

01:12:58.020 it's going to pick up more influence than it would under normal circumstances.

01:13:02.040 So I've wondered if the political polarization that characterizes our time is partly a consequence of the exaggeration of long tail distribution opinions

01:13:15.200 in a manner that would never occur in face-to-face social interaction.

01:13:20.400 Yeah.

01:13:20.780 I mean, the folks that have, you know, let's just say a dozen followers,

01:13:26.800 and they certainly have very little to lose because they can just restart a new account.

01:13:30.280 And for some reason, if those 12 followers stop following, then it's like, screw it, I'm going to start over again.

01:13:35.660 Sure.

01:13:36.200 Or they might have two dozen accounts to begin with.

01:13:37.900 They're a lot like the town drunk, for example.

01:13:40.440 You know, they don't, they could cause a lot of havoc and they can enter into conversations to sort of cause havoc.

01:13:46.680 But no one really would be listening to them.

01:13:49.620 I suppose you could argue that they're getting their, they're, they're getting to say something with the same status as somebody else with a lot of followers right there in the stream.

01:13:59.520 Yes.

01:13:59.880 Whereas in real life.

01:14:00.580 Yes, that's the issue.

01:14:01.500 And that may not even be true.

01:14:02.580 It could be that, that Musk has it so that often when they're, they're just not even visible and say there's more and you got to click it and then it opens up some others that it, it is suspicious whether you even want to hear.

01:14:11.720 So they may be doing some mechanisms that hide the very low reputation, low follower count folks, which is probably a good idea at some point because you need to have these people earn their, earn your way to being listened, worth listening to, right?

01:14:24.880 Of course.

01:14:25.640 Yeah.

01:14:26.080 Of course.

01:14:26.620 Otherwise you'd have to have 7 billion people in your house all the time.

01:14:30.700 Right, right.

01:14:31.800 Yeah.

01:14:32.580 So I, I, I think there's, there's, there's that and a thousands of other issues in terms of how to optimize social networks and public squares, given that it's no longer, you know, a hundred people in your, your village or you may be 500 people in your village or kind of, or high school.

01:14:48.960 Well, there's also not face-to-face emotional display as we've been discussing.

01:14:53.320 So there's been an evolution towards that.

01:14:54.920 Like, you know, now in the last three or four or five years, you can do different kinds of emotional expressions on Facebook.

01:14:59.100 You can choose to laugh or smile.

01:15:01.000 There's a lot of these, you can just respond, not just with a like or not like, and even a like is, is effectively an emotional expression, expressive response.

01:15:08.260 And we manage just, just in the pros that we use, of course, we're using constantly emotional responses that amount to an emotional response.

01:15:15.000 Even if you don't think of it as much, you're either, you're either showing confidence in yourself or disdain in the other, these are emotional expressions as far as, because you're staking or pulling off stake.

01:15:23.040 Almost at all times, that's how you show confidence to real people, not, you know, not P values. 0.96

01:15:28.760 We do it through staking stuff.

01:15:30.780 That's how we do it.

01:15:31.760 So the way that, that hope, hopefully the designers don't need to, to, to, to fix it.

01:15:39.520 In real life, the public square has local spots where people, let's say in their local village argue, and then maybe the best couple of them go to the bigger city and they argue with other people from different villages in the big city.

01:15:50.780 And these are just basically, and then those, some represent, it ends up hierarchical, the public square in the old days.

01:15:57.000 And in, in principle, if you look at the hierarchy that happened organically through, through something like Twitter, I, I think you're going to see similar kinds of hierarchies.

01:16:06.120 Well, I think you do.

01:16:06.920 I think you do already.

01:16:08.080 So it self-organizes so that it's not just a bunch of everybody talking to everybody, right?

01:16:11.780 It ends up self-organizing into a kind of representative democracy kind of way so that you, you end up dealing with this.

01:16:19.300 Yeah, well, Musk is gambling with X that that's what will happen organically as well.

01:16:23.840 You know, I guess part of the problem there is that we don't exactly know what the algorithms that operate behind the scenes, how they're weighting the discourse in manners that we might not understand.

01:16:32.340 Well, you, you ran afoul of that, which is something that we're going to talk about more on the Daily Wire side of this.

01:16:37.740 So, yeah, so you, so you're not, you don't seem to be as concerned as I am potentially with the pervasive polluting effect of the anonymous troll demon types amplifying viewpoints that under normal circumstances wouldn't come, wouldn't rise to the top.

01:16:57.080 Well, I'm skeptical of their ability to do any amplification because they, they have no followers.

01:17:01.760 So no one is seeing them.

01:17:03.400 Now, you may not, sometimes I see them just because even though I don't follow them, I do go through my comments as well.

01:17:08.900 So I do end up seeing some of them to the extent that they're not themselves de-boosted, but they in principle should have very little effect.

01:17:15.180 Right.

01:17:15.540 Okay.

01:17:15.740 Unless the algorithms are somehow accidentally augmenting their comments.

01:17:19.900 Could they make up for their effect in volume what they lack in specific following?

01:17:25.200 Like the anonymous troll types, there's a pattern to their communication and they're relatively interchangeable.

01:17:31.480 There's a lot of resentment and derision that characterizes the landscape of that kind of communication.

01:17:37.000 And so.

01:17:37.500 Well, you certainly have to be, I mean, someone like Musk has to be aware of bot farms that create bots that can then leverage and hack, you know, some diagonalize against whatever their systems are.

01:17:48.560 So that they, it turns out when you have tens of thousands of comments in the right way, it ends up, ends up doing something to the algorithm that ends up boosting the wrong, not yet.

01:17:58.140 It ends up allowing them to boost things on just on the basis of a whole bunch of no follower bots.

01:18:02.340 You can imagine having the wrong kinds of algorithms.

01:18:04.040 So those are the kinds of things they have to be aware of.

01:18:05.620 And no matter what they do, it could be that I haven't thought about this kind of problem.

01:18:09.180 It could be there's ways of, of sort of always finding some new crack and they've got to come up with new measures.

01:18:14.000 Well, it's going to be an evolutionary arms race, obviously.

01:18:16.400 And whether the rules can keep up with the most creative trolls is, it's unlikely, I would suspect.

01:18:23.120 I guess so.

01:18:23.620 Because they never do.

01:18:24.640 I mean, we wouldn't have criminals in the real world if people couldn't gain even well-established reputational systems.

01:18:31.540 Yeah.

01:18:31.820 So, and, but, you know, it's weird.

01:18:34.320 I guess we can think about this from an evolutionary perspective because a lot of online activity is criminal or quasi-criminal.

01:18:43.040 Probably half of it, right?

01:18:44.180 It's about 25% pornographic and about 20% outright criminal.

01:18:48.680 So that's 45% right there.

01:18:50.760 Then there's a periphery of pathological troll types that's got to add at least another 5% or 10%.

01:18:57.040 And so one of the things we might ask ourselves is, like, is that a devolution to the standard form of human interaction?

01:19:05.840 Because before there were well-established, free, rule-abiding, law-governed societies, it was probably something like a quasi-criminal Wild West.

01:19:15.920 And it looks like, to me, like we're duplicating that at least to some degree online.

01:19:19.980 I wonder if the fact that we've removed so many of the cues that help us regulate social behavior by abstracting up our communication patterns so intensely, like narrow channeling them, these 144-character tweets, for example, whether we've lost a lot of the systems that allowed us to regulate social interaction.

01:19:44.040 Like, we've stepped out of our evolutionary landscape, so to speak.

01:19:46.440 So that, to me, is more important than pseudonyms are fine.

01:19:51.320 To me, a lot of these small accounts that walk up with all this attitude out of the blue, if I saw them in real life, I guarantee you they would have a different behavior toward me in real life.

01:20:02.900 Absolutely, 100%.

01:20:04.620 Not to mention that I'm probably twice their age, and I've got a little bit of gray, and just younger men typically just behave a little differently to older guys.

01:20:11.900 There's just something that happens in normal life when you see someone.

01:20:14.600 Yeah, well, you never have an interaction like that in normal life, ever.

01:20:17.980 Yeah.

01:20:18.300 Like, I don't think anybody has ever spoken to me once in my life the way people speak in the troll comment sections, right?

01:20:25.860 So I don't know whether there's some way to, you know, I've thought a lot about how can you allow much more full expressive, you know, because I don't know what full expressive capabilities are.

01:20:36.340 How can you add them so that you can actually, for example, not just like or not just happy, but you actually pull up a two-dimensional, like, array and actually just pick from at least a two-dimensional, there's a full four-dimensional space.

01:20:46.700 But at least a two-dimensional quick space to give you a much more exact, you know, but still it's not going to be the same.

01:20:53.320 It's going to be still some technical.

01:20:54.220 Well, it's also not the same partly because, you know, you talked about the way that young men react to you or men in general. 0.98

01:21:02.040 I mean, one of the things that regulates male communication, at least in the public space, is the probability if you say something sufficiently stupid, you're going to get smacked.

01:21:10.720 And so, and that's definitely not something that happens online. 0.86

01:21:13.420 And you might think, well, that's good because we've abstracted ourselves away from the violence.

01:21:17.600 It's the risk of a fight.

01:21:19.600 Yes, definitely.

01:21:20.460 Always there's the call, and without the call, poker wouldn't exist.

01:21:24.400 Right?

01:21:25.580 Poker wouldn't exist if I knew that you couldn't call.

01:21:27.620 There was a risk of us turning our cards over.

01:21:30.640 The entire game of emotional expressions is trying to avoid the call.

01:21:34.760 Yeah, right.

01:21:35.180 But the fact that the call is there is an ever-present, that we could fight about it.

01:21:39.760 And lawyers are involved.

01:21:40.700 The entire game of lawyers is each of them potentially willing to call and let's go to court.

01:21:46.200 But, you know, they're all trying to bluff that they're totally willing to go to court, but no one wants to go to court.

01:21:49.880 Yeah.

01:21:50.060 They all want to pretend like they are.

01:21:51.600 That's all emotional signaling to avoid the fight, to hopefully settle and come to an agreement without having to go to court.

01:21:58.660 Yeah, well, that's another kind of stake.

01:22:01.000 It's like there's hierarchies of stakes, right?

01:22:03.260 So to begin with, you signal your willingness to potentially sacrifice your reputation.

01:22:11.000 So it's sacrificial signaling.

01:22:12.140 Well, it's not sacrificial because I'm saying that I'm really confident or I think I show disdain for you.

01:22:16.580 Right, but you'll take the risk.

01:22:17.860 Well, yeah.

01:22:18.160 That's the value of the signal is that you think that you're right enough so that you'll take the risk that you might have to sacrifice something.

01:22:25.700 Yeah.

01:22:26.020 Right, right, right.

01:22:27.220 Which shows that I think I'm going to win.

01:22:29.040 Right, right.

01:22:29.840 Or that you're, well, not only win the immediate argument, but win in a manner that sustains your reputation across time.

01:22:35.780 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:36.120 Well, when you jump out of that domain, you're in another domain of stake because when I move from reputational fighting, let's say, to physical fighting, what I'm putting online is my psychophysiological integrity, right?

01:22:51.860 I'm willing to say, no, I'm going to stake myself on this particular proposition even if it's at risk to my physiological integrity.

01:23:00.660 And so we try to avoid that, obviously.

01:23:03.980 I mean, anxiety is one of the things that helps us avoid that.

01:23:07.040 Pain signifies actual physical damage and anxiety, just the threat of that.

01:23:12.020 But it's interesting that just as language grounds out in emotion, negotiation grounds out in something like willingness to contend physically.

01:23:22.260 Yeah, or signaled willingness.

01:23:25.540 You know, a lot of us, of course, bluff.

01:23:27.260 Of course, of course.

01:23:28.120 With anyone with any sense, it's bluff until that's absolutely impossible.

01:23:34.480 But it's not, it's a pointless bluff if the reality isn't there at some level.

01:23:40.540 And people are always checking each other out to see whether or not that bluff is pointless as well.

01:23:45.160 Yeah.

01:23:45.640 So, yeah.

01:23:47.900 So what are you working on next?

01:23:50.020 Well, I was going to quickly, we sort of skipped language.

01:23:53.180 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:23:53.900 But the real, and this is not just language, it's writing language and music and all of the things that make us human 2.0s, as I call ourselves.

01:24:01.080 So, in my second book, Vision Revolution, in addition to some of these, you know, color and forward-facing eyes and why we see illusions, which we didn't talk about, the reason that we can read at all.

01:24:12.680 So if you think about it, reading, we didn't evolve to read.

01:24:15.060 You know, it's just 2,000 years old at best.

01:24:16.860 Often, our great-grandparents didn't even read.

01:24:18.980 Most of us have illiterate or great-great-grandparents.

01:24:22.000 Reading is much too recent, and yet we seem to have visual word form areas.

01:24:26.160 I mean, neuroscientists know that we didn't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains even, you know, basically reading areas.

01:24:31.240 And we know that they're not actually reading areas.

01:24:32.840 So how did that happen?

01:24:34.040 In fact, we read so well, it really is like an instinct.

01:24:35.960 We read often more than we listen to all day long.

01:24:40.180 Reading is, and we're so amazingly good at it.

01:24:42.040 Even children are great at it by four years old, and they're barely being read to.

01:24:46.200 That is, they're not having much practice compared to being spoken to, right?

01:24:49.400 So it's almost as if it's an instinct.

01:24:51.960 So how is that possible?

01:24:53.060 And so what I argued 20 years ago is that over time, cultural evolution itself shaped the look of writing to look like nature.

01:25:02.600 So we already have visual systems that are incredibly good at processing natural scenes, object recognition.

01:25:08.900 And so all that culture had to do was invent writing systems that looked like nature.

01:25:14.320 In our case, so for example, you've got L junctions, just whenever there's some kind of contour in the world, meaning the tip of another contour.

01:25:21.960 You've got T junctions, whenever something goes behind something, there's my contour here, goes up against this contour.

01:25:26.820 Those are the two main ones.

01:25:28.500 There's X junctions, but X junctions don't happen in a world of opaque objects.

01:25:32.640 It's very rare, in fact.

01:25:33.700 And then you can look at all the different kinds of junctions that have three contours, let's say Y junctions and K junctions.

01:25:39.800 And it turns out there's 32 of these different kinds of topologically distinct junctions with three contours.

01:25:45.440 And then you can ask, well, how commonly do these things happen in natural scenes of just opaque objects?

01:25:49.900 Either you can look at like different kinds of varieties of scenes as well.

01:25:52.980 It just turns out it doesn't really matter where you look.

01:25:54.600 It's all the same as just a world with opaque objects strewn about.

01:25:57.520 It's basically that drives the same relative probability of which of these junction types happen.

01:26:03.700 And then you can just ask, well, if this idea is right, then you should find that across human writing systems, writing tends to have the junction types that are found in nature.

01:26:12.600 In those proportions?

01:26:13.920 In those proportions.

01:26:14.640 And is that the case?

01:26:15.640 And that's the case.

01:26:16.220 In those proportions.

01:26:17.220 Right.

01:26:17.460 And this is a 2006 paper.

01:26:18.720 Oh, that's cool.

01:26:19.440 In American Natural.

01:26:20.180 So the idea is that we read, we can only read, which is part of what we take to be central to our human nature, even, is the ability to be literate, right?

01:26:28.020 I mean, of course, it's not part of our human nature.

01:26:29.540 This is culture which is harnessed.

01:26:31.420 Especially silent reading.

01:26:32.560 That's right.

01:26:33.380 Not to mention silent.

01:26:34.380 This is a cultural evolutionary process which has harnessed a visual object recognition brain for reading by tricking it.

01:26:42.580 Not because we've evolved for it, but instead of evolving writing to fit us.

01:26:46.900 Now, the same idea, I argued in the next book, in Harnessed, that spoken language is like this as well.

01:26:53.060 So spoken language, instead of writing evolving to look like nature, it's spoken language evolved to sound like nature, in particular, sound like solid object physical events.

01:27:03.880 When there's solid objects.

01:27:05.000 That's a consonant?

01:27:08.280 That's a consonant.

01:27:09.000 Well, a plosive in particular.

01:27:10.320 There's a plosive like puh, duh, cuh. 0.98

01:27:12.600 And then you've got fricatives.

01:27:15.960 Sliding.

01:27:16.840 This doesn't make any sound at all.

01:27:18.140 Right.

01:27:18.400 You've got sliding sounds.

01:27:20.060 And then you have, when either of those things happen, the things vibrate.

01:27:22.920 They ring.

01:27:24.060 And those are like the sonorants.

01:27:25.840 Sonorants are things that ring.

01:27:27.140 Vowels and any kind of like ya and wa.

01:27:29.860 Oh.

01:27:30.080 And also just a, e, i, o, u.

01:27:31.640 These are, the basic notion of a syllable is a hit and a ring.

01:27:35.260 It's either, you know, sa is a slide and those objects are vibrating.

01:27:39.140 Or a ba is, there's a collision.

01:27:41.720 Like a bell.

01:27:42.280 Yeah, it's like a bell.

01:27:43.120 Something hits and something, they're ringing thereafter.

01:27:45.380 And then this is just, what you can then start working out when I do the book is like,

01:27:48.400 look, there's all these grammars of what solid object events do.

01:27:53.360 So you can actually work out, they typically are going to start with a consonant or a plosive

01:27:57.600 or a fricative because those are just the, more often with a plosive because that's what

01:28:01.840 starts the event.

01:28:02.700 And it'll typically end in certain kinds of ways because that's what physical events

01:28:06.080 among solid objects do.

01:28:07.780 And you can, you can start working out all of these many dozens of kinds of regularities

01:28:11.820 and then ask whether across human languages, you find the same morphemic regularities

01:28:17.600 at that level.

01:28:18.080 So a pool, pool ball, the white ball hits the black ball, the black ball hits a yellow

01:28:23.880 ball, that black ball, yellow ball hitting is something like kuk, right? 0.99

01:28:29.360 Starts with a consonant, ends with a consonant.

01:28:31.500 In that case, because the rolling, maybe you can't hear, but if you're imagining sliding

01:28:34.940 bricks, it could be b-ba-shh. 0.98

01:28:39.160 Right, right.

01:28:39.840 Say bosh. 0.97

01:28:40.940 Right, right.

01:28:41.420 Like bash, like bash.

01:28:42.220 Right, and if it ran into something else, there'd be another consonant at the end of

01:28:45.080 it.

01:28:45.100 And there'd be a consonant at the end, right?

01:28:46.500 And so when you work out, but you can work out many kind of mathematical regularities

01:28:50.020 that happen in exactly in those systems and are peculiar, and then across humankind, you

01:28:54.000 can show that, oh my gosh, over and over again, these same regularities of solid object

01:28:57.820 physical events are found as universals across human life.

01:29:00.800 So the story in both these cases, and then music, let me, before I make that kind of

01:29:04.780 summary thing, music also sound like speech, but of course it's fundamentally different.

01:29:11.520 It's utterly evocative.

01:29:12.700 We could listen to music all day long in the car, in our houses, my music is on literally

01:29:17.060 all day long.

01:29:17.740 We just enjoy it so much.

01:29:19.580 Why would I enjoy listening to these weird sounds that some people have thought, well,

01:29:23.120 they're like mathematical things from Plato's realm. 0.97

01:29:26.180 This is always bullcrap.

01:29:27.100 This doesn't make any sense. 0.94

01:29:27.680 We don't evolve to like mathematically beautiful things.

01:29:30.980 We evolved to like things that are human.

01:29:35.120 Those are things that we want to touch and be with, and the humans are the most important

01:29:38.660 stimuli in our lives, which is why colors are so important.

01:29:41.960 Colors are ultimately emotional and evocative because they're about human skin and bodies

01:29:45.340 and emotion and health, so forth.

01:29:47.200 And the sounds of music, I hypothesize, and this was, I guess, 15, 20 years ago, are the

01:29:53.940 sounds of humans moving in your midst.

01:29:55.780 In fact, this has been an old idea, even since the Greeks, that music has something

01:29:58.420 to do with movement or, you know, some sounds of, but trying to make it rigorous, so working

01:30:02.340 out, okay, what do humans sound like when they move?

01:30:04.740 Well, one of the most basic things is there's a gate.

01:30:07.480 There's the footsteps.

01:30:08.860 Sure.

01:30:09.320 And that's just the beat.

01:30:10.840 And then, of course, there's loudness modulations, which is the fortissimo down to pianissimo,

01:30:16.720 and there's the scales at which those things change, and you can work out what are the

01:30:19.860 scales at which those things change.

01:30:21.540 There's also the dop.

01:30:22.420 There's also...

01:30:22.680 We wouldn't be able to dance to music if that wasn't the case.

01:30:24.960 So it's not like some accidental side effect that you're able to dance to it.

01:30:28.700 No, it's literally designed to be the sounds of a human mover moving evocatively in your

01:30:32.260 midst.

01:30:32.820 And another thing that happens when things move through the world is you actually hear

01:30:35.420 they're Doppler shifts.

01:30:36.600 Now, Doppler shifts, you know, ee-ow, right?

01:30:39.680 And the faster it is, it's ee-ow, bigger Doppler shifts are faster moving things.

01:30:42.880 Now, even the movements of humans, which are a little bit, they're much smaller kinds

01:30:46.600 of Doppler shifts.

01:30:47.200 But my claim in that book was that the kinds of patterns that you end up with the Doppler

01:30:51.000 shifts, which are exaggerated Doppler shifts as if it's moving faster, still have the fundamental

01:30:55.300 signature of human movement.

01:30:58.840 And so, for example, if you're moving faster, there's a bigger difference between high pitch

01:31:04.960 and low pitch because of the Doppler shift.

01:31:06.880 But also, if you're moving faster, the tempo of the song is going to be faster.

01:31:11.340 It's going to be a higher, faster tempo, right?

01:31:13.460 Those two, the faster moving things will have a bigger difference between top and bottom.

01:31:18.580 And in music, that's called the tessitura, the difference between the top and the bottom.

01:31:22.260 But also, so the prediction here is that faster tempo things correlates with higher, bigger

01:31:26.960 tessitura, sort of in real world movement.

01:31:29.640 Is that true in music?

01:31:30.860 Do higher, bigger tessitura songs actually tend to be more bigger, faster in tempo or in vice

01:31:36.840 versa, which is not what you want when you're the piano player.

01:31:39.740 When someone says, hey, here's a much faster song, you're like, great, hopefully it's a

01:31:42.560 really small tessitura because I can just, no, no, no.

01:31:45.020 No, in fact, the faster the song, the tessituras get wider and wider, for example.

01:31:49.780 So these are these kinds of predicted regularities between these different kinds of patterns

01:31:53.780 of modulations of loudness, beats, and rhythmic things that are connected to time lock to the

01:32:03.620 beat, as well as to, so that there's like 80 something different kinds of regularities

01:32:08.160 you can show.

01:32:08.860 For example, how fast do humans turn?

01:32:11.360 And so we got data from soccer players, how many steps do they take to turn 90 degrees?

01:32:16.780 And so at the top of the high pitch is when it's coming directly toward you.

01:32:21.060 Low pitch is when it's moving directly away from you in a tessitura.

01:32:24.300 So typically people, when they turn 90 degrees, take about two steps to do it on average.

01:32:29.600 They can go, obviously, faster if they just go one way real quickly.

01:32:32.880 And so it's 100, you know, to go from toward you to away from you quickly would still be

01:32:36.980 about four steps.

01:32:38.120 And so that would be about four beats.

01:32:39.600 It typically takes a measure.

01:32:40.840 So you can actually look across thousands of songs and ask, is it usually the case that

01:32:44.280 you move a half a tessitura in about two beats?

01:32:47.880 And in fact, you can show you that these are where, these are how, these, in fact, determine

01:32:52.520 the baseline time ranges of how quickly melodies move through the tessitura, things like that.

01:32:58.340 So you're mapping the basic structure of music onto the kinetics of human movement.

01:33:02.280 That one makes, like I said, if that wasn't the case, the dance wouldn't work.

01:33:06.780 That's right, exactly.

01:33:07.520 And music is very evocative of motion.

01:33:09.940 It's very weird that we sit in concert halls, like in classic music concert halls, sit still.

01:33:14.800 No one wants to sit still.

01:33:15.960 We want to move our body in time.

01:33:17.780 And not only that, it's interesting too, because music unifies us socially as well.

01:33:22.260 Because when we're moving in time to the music, we're all music moving in the same way.

01:33:26.240 Exactly, yeah.

01:33:26.520 So it's evocative of a pattern of movement that unites everyone.

01:33:31.640 Right, right, right, right.

01:33:33.120 Right, well, and there's also the emotional display element.

01:33:35.720 I mean, you can see in musical compositions argument, there'll be a proposition and then

01:33:40.640 a counter proposition or a dialogue.

01:33:42.760 Yeah, that's right.

01:33:43.040 It's not always just one guy or gal walking.

01:33:44.920 It's often complicated, the duets and different things are going on.

01:33:47.800 And in some sense, what I work out in the book is sort of the baseline, boring, you know,

01:33:55.540 here's the baseline kind of things that humans do.

01:33:58.500 Any good composer is deviating from that baseline to create interesting stories, right?

01:34:03.720 Sure, of course.

01:34:04.200 So I'm not the artist type.

01:34:05.980 I'm trying to like, here's the typical baseline.

01:34:07.620 That's what determines the average across all these songs, none of which would be potentially

01:34:11.020 very good if they actually stuck to the average that I'm finding, right?

01:34:13.320 Right.

01:34:13.460 So they're all deviating from that.

01:34:14.380 Right, right.

01:34:14.880 But the bigger story about this, these kinds of cultural harnessing of us, I call this

01:34:20.560 harnessing by looking like nature, sounding like nature, is that it, you know, we often

01:34:26.600 think of ourselves as the speaking animal, right?

01:34:30.860 Or as the music animal or the artistic animal.

01:34:33.060 This is what often we define what it is to be human by a lot of these things, the arts and

01:34:38.440 the ability to talk, the ability to be literate.

01:34:40.840 But up until just a couple hundred thousand years ago, it's exactly unclear, we didn't

01:34:45.780 have language at all.

01:34:46.580 We certainly didn't have writing.

01:34:47.680 We didn't have music.

01:34:48.540 We may have had some vocalization stuff that people did, but probably a million years,

01:34:51.680 we may not have even had that.

01:34:53.580 All of the things that we mistakenly think of ourselves as human aren't human 1.0 at all.

01:34:58.600 All of the stuff that we take to be human today are really human 2.0s.

01:35:02.180 These are things that are products of cultural engineering that now is harnessing us and

01:35:08.140 giving us all these modern powers.

01:35:10.000 So, you know, it always was remarkable that you've got chimpanzees with their encephalization

01:35:13.940 quotient, you know, and it's a little bit bigger than these other great apes and so forth. 0.97

01:35:19.080 And then you've got us.

01:35:20.180 Again, it's a little bit bigger on the log scale.

01:35:22.300 So, but it's not, you're not looking at it and you're going, oh, this totally explains

01:35:25.480 the difference between us and chimpanzees. 0.96

01:35:26.440 No, chimpanzees are like super dumb compared to us because look at all the stuff that we could 0.90

01:35:30.400 do, we can ride, drive cars and we can like do math and all the crazy stuff that we can 0.90

01:35:34.060 do in our real lives makes us seem like we're literally off the page and, you know, miles

01:35:37.940 away.

01:35:39.100 So how can you make sense of the fact that we're only just a little bit higher and yet

01:35:43.520 we're, it's because biologically our human 1.0 selves are just this little bit higher,

01:35:47.840 you know, when in this world, you know, but just expressions, we're just a little bit

01:35:51.320 smarter, you know, but what we have is all this.

01:35:54.020 Which is why we can understand other animals.

01:35:55.780 Right.

01:35:55.940 We emote very, very directly.

01:35:58.340 That's right.

01:35:58.760 And dogs and we get along great.

01:36:00.980 It's the cultural technology that's fundamentally changed who we are.

01:36:05.080 So the first big one, of course, was the language, which has made us the language ape, but we're

01:36:09.700 not the language ape per se at all.

01:36:10.960 This is a cultural product of this evolution, cultural evolution, co-evolving, not co-evolving,

01:36:16.700 just evolving for us to plug into our brains and give us language when we never had one.

01:36:23.000 Harnessing object event systems to make it so that we can suddenly communicate with one

01:36:28.280 other.

01:36:28.440 And then music is evolving to the sounds of human movement recognition systems.

01:36:32.740 And then much more recently, writing evolving, culturally evolving, just to look like natural

01:36:38.260 objects allowing us to read.

01:36:39.740 All of these things are exactly who we take to be human today, but none of this is our human

01:36:43.420 1.0 selves.

01:36:44.700 Right.

01:36:45.000 But you draw a continuum because you're pointing out that even these abstract capabilities are

01:36:51.160 grounded at a perceptual level in our ability to perceive phenomena that were real world

01:36:57.000 phenomena.

01:36:57.500 That's right.

01:36:57.820 That's very cool.

01:36:59.320 I never thought about consonants as collisions, but of course, that makes perfect sense. 1.00

01:37:04.340 Right.

01:37:04.540 And I like the idea of vowels as the ringing element.

01:37:07.640 That's right.

01:37:08.520 Right, right, right.

01:37:09.460 So I feel like this is a...

01:37:11.780 So for example, typically for language, you've got two sides.

01:37:15.560 You've got, and they're gorillas, like Steven Pinker and Chomsky. 0.98

01:37:18.780 Chomsky's been on and off of this for years.

01:37:20.400 But roughly, you've got the language instinct folks that we've evolved over millions of years

01:37:26.640 or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to really have a language instinct.

01:37:29.400 There's part of our brain that's designed for language.

01:37:30.680 And I think that's wrong.

01:37:31.920 And the other side, all these years was like, no, we're infinitely classic, infinitely malleable.

01:37:35.880 We do all these things we never evolved to do, like riding horses, whatever.

01:37:38.660 Like there's millions of things we do.

01:37:39.660 We're just infinitely classic.

01:37:40.520 Well, that's totally wrong as well.

01:37:41.480 And in fact, Pinker is one of the best people that argues against that.

01:37:44.280 Neither of these are right, right?

01:37:45.520 So my view is like completely...

01:37:46.900 It's like, no, this is a kind of zoocentrism in my opinion, because each of these are violating

01:37:52.560 zoocentrism.

01:37:53.740 Zoocentrism is the hypothesis that we're animals, for God's sakes.

01:37:58.200 We're not special having a language.

01:37:59.640 Right, you assume continuity.

01:38:00.420 There's just continuity.

01:38:01.020 We're not special and have a language instinct that makes us human like nobody else's language

01:38:05.060 instinct, but we do.

01:38:06.440 And we're not special in the blank slate, like all these other animals, they're filled

01:38:10.940 with instincts, but we, we're blank slates.

01:38:13.280 We're like totally have all these general plastic mechanisms.

01:38:15.740 No, that's just another violation of zoocentrism.

01:38:18.200 We are just animals.

01:38:20.520 And to the extent that we now seem to be something fundamentally different is because of cultural

01:38:24.760 evolution.

01:38:25.260 Another blind designer, blind watchmaker that has got up and running several hundred thousand

01:38:31.840 years ago, mildly, that's been designing all this tech for us and giving up all these

01:38:36.320 new powers.

01:38:37.400 And the fun, you know, of course, language is a big one.

01:38:39.420 Writing is another huge one.

01:38:40.440 But all around us right now, there's so much more we can't even put our, like, you know,

01:38:44.380 the phones, all of these things are constantly evolving to raise us to be becoming more and

01:38:49.640 more intelligent and farther from the other great apes.

01:38:52.360 Well, that's probably a good place to stop, as it turns out.

01:38:55.480 That wraps things up quite nicely.

01:38:57.320 You are making, in a way, a modified language instinct argument.

01:39:00.600 It seems to me, although what you're doing is pointing out that the instinctual elements

01:39:05.040 of language have to do with the fundamental elements of language and their ability to,

01:39:10.760 what would you say, abstract out of a substrate that's associated with our evolved perceptions

01:39:16.820 of the natural world.

01:39:18.120 Right.

01:39:18.320 So it's not language per se that is the instinct.

01:39:21.360 But it preserves zoocentrism, it would be the way I'd like to say it.

01:39:24.460 It makes, so I'd like to think of this, if you really want to be the Galileo of biology,

01:39:28.420 like, and say, look, no, there's nothing special about the earth.

01:39:31.680 You know, the world doesn't move around the earth.

01:39:33.140 The earth is just one part of the, you know, same thing for us.

01:39:35.660 We're not special.

01:39:36.580 Then you have, then this allows you to say it.

01:39:38.440 Like, there's no language instinct.

01:39:39.580 It's really, we're just animals.

01:39:41.700 And this, to the extent that we seem not to be, it's because of culture.

01:39:45.580 But we're truly a zoocentric creature.

01:39:48.040 Right, right, right.

01:39:48.800 All right.

01:39:49.300 So look, for everybody watching and listening, we're going to switch the topics up when we

01:39:54.120 switch over to the daily wire side, because Mark is also somewhat,

01:39:58.420 famous, I would say, for running afoul of the internet censors in a very interesting

01:40:02.840 way.

01:40:03.360 I follow him on Twitter.

01:40:04.780 That's where I've discovered him and his work.

01:40:08.340 And I had two reasons for inviting him as a guest today.

01:40:11.220 And one was because we share an interest in the evolution of perception and cognition and

01:40:16.460 language, for that matter, and art, for that matter.

01:40:19.500 And so I wanted to have that discussion, which I thought was very productive.

01:40:22.380 But there's another element to Mark, too, which is his conflict with the powers that

01:40:27.920 be behind the scenes at the social media networks.

01:40:30.240 And he was subject to relatively draconian censorship in the COVID era.

01:40:35.700 And we're going to talk about that on the daily wire side.

01:40:38.340 So join us there.

01:40:39.960 Thank you very much, sir, for coming in today.

01:40:42.020 Pleasure.

01:40:42.260 Yeah, very good talking to you.

01:40:43.460 Thank you, everybody, for your time and attention.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 28, 2024

502. Angry and Red： Color as Emotion ｜ Mark Changizi

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