https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MDy2ClRQOPU
Welcome back everybody to the elucidate the nature and function of the self. I’m joined again in our ongoing three way deal logos by my good friend and colleague Christopher master Pietro co authored so many things with me and my good friend and colleague Greg Enriquez. We’ve also written stuff together but more recently we’ve done a series together called untangling the world knot which is the best attempt to give a naturalistic account of consciousness and it keeps intersecting with this series in powerful ways so very appreciative for that and very appreciative for both of these gentlemen. So welcome guys it’s good to see you. Wonderful to be here John. Yeah thanks John. So I want to do a quick recap because the argument is starting to get like it’s like when you’re reading Spillow’s ethics it’s like when you’re on proposition 38 how did I get here? I can’t keep all 36 and 37 propositions before in my head and then try and get a little bit of a quick recap of this what I consider we’re coming to a pivot point. I want to make you know two or three more theoretical moves in this ongoing argument and then I foresee that you know things are going to shift more to Greg because of his areas of expertise which some of you already know from untangling the world knot. I want to bring that out and we’re going to continue and so let’s remember what we’ve done so far. So we’ve got the idea of recursive relevance realization and it’s always relevance realization to an agent where an agent is understood in terms of an autopoetic autonomous adaptive entity. So we have relevance right relevance recursive relevance realization relevant to and remember that please because that comes up in the argument to an agent and then agent is defined by those the triple a so we have the triple r and the triple a eventually everything will just be triplets of repeated letters and so we got that idea there and what we’ve got was the idea that you can see relevance realization recursive relevance realization at different if recursive relevance realization to an autonomous adaptive autopoetic agent you can see it happening at three basic it’s a continuum but three points of analytic right distinction you can see a very online moment to moment recursive relevance realization to an agent in consciousness and that’s why you have consciousness is centered on you and you can see more about that if you go and look at untangling the world not we talk about how this qualitative features of centeredness and agency and unity and together and aspectualization are all are all there but what we’ve got is that recursive relevance realization to an agent at ongoing temporal scale very online then we have a more expanded agency within problem solvering especially being a general problem solver right and this is the relevance realization proper to your intelligence there’s lots of overlap and integration between consciousness intelligence especially through working memory so they’re integrated in an important way and then we’ve got something very long term where we’re talking about the more dispositional aspects of your recursive relevance realization to an agent when we’re talking about things like character traits or in personality traits and things like that and we remember what Greg’s right I think important caveats about how we should challenge I think I agree with him the way we’re sort of misusing the word personality today but anyway we have this more long-term level of virtues and traits more dispositional aspect of relevance realization and and so we can think we can see them all happening and then I brought up somebody who talks about relevance to an agent Reed Montague he talks about the fact that unlike computers we care we have to care about the information we’re processing I went over again about how relevance recursive relevance realization is affectively laden it deals with attention arousal emotion motivation etc and then what Montague said is we but we have this issue we call it the efficiency paradox in order to be a highly coordinated agent I have to get various parts of my brain to talk to each other so that I’m not acting at cross-purpose which would undermine my agency so I want to increase the inter module communication within my brain but the problem is efficiency also demands that I reduce costs as much as possible and all of that long more long distance communication is very metabolically expensive and so the brain is under you know under terrific metabolic constraints to reduce that connectivity as much as possible for those of you who did untangling the world knot that pushes us towards small world network formation etc etc for the rest of us we can just keep going what does that mean well Montague says he proposes a strategy and the fact that he uses an interpersonal strategy as it for an analogy I think it’s very fortuitous for us especially the argument that I had to in today and we remember he talks about the relationship between a husband and wife no no privileging of that just that’s that’s his example so one I know personally so I just use it from familiarity there’s no nothing else going on there but the idea is the husband and wife what they do is the husband has a model of the wife the wife has a model of the husband and they can communicate very short distance within their own internalized model and therefore they’re acting in a coordinated fashion without having to talk to each other so you get a resolution of the efficiency paradox to mutual modeling Montague says you can see this at many levels within the brain I didn’t mention last time you can see it evidenced even at a phenomenological level with how the different you know sense modalities model each other and some of the time that mutual modeling bleeds and things like synesthesia and other stuff like that and that would be another whole topic we could go into and so the idea is that this mutual modeling and he leaves it there and then I propose that what you actually have to have is a dynamically self-organizing process that’s also doing recursive relevance realization because these two machines can overlay on each other and what you’re doing is you’re cycling between the the internal models aren’t talking to each other right right what you’re doing is your task focus you’re coordinating your behavior without a lot of internal communication and then you pull back and you go into the default so this is task focus you go into the default mode network which is highly active when people are experiencing or thinking about their self themselves and in the default mode network what happens I propose is this is where like when the when the husband and wife you actually talk to each other and correct and notice that this is a tough correction process they correct each other’s model so that they don’t become progressively out of sync with each other and so we cycle back and forth we have this sort of cyclical process going on and then I propose that within that the way in which we can improve mutual modeling is we can take a notion from george herbert mead the generalized other and that what can form instead of having all these models have to always specifically model each other you can do a massive kind within this cycling you can do a massive kind of data compression and variation you can get a complexified generalized model of what how most models look and you only have you have to keep updating that but you only have to consult that in order to keep right all of the separate machines organized with each other and I argued that that plausibly marks maps on to aspects of working memory and the global workspace model of consciousness because the global workspace is exactly that it can take in information from any of the unconscious modules and it could broad it could manipulate that information broadcast back very much like your computer desktop and notice what we’re getting here we’re getting already something like a witnessing function that right can take in information from all of the you know the individual modules and broadcast back generally to them so that’s basically what I got sort of forward as a so sorry where we got that was I apologize about where we got and the idea is you have this recursive relevance realization mutual modeling and then within the mutual modeling is the mutual modeling afforded by the generalized complexified evolving mutual model right it’s the generalized one and so what we’ve got is we’ve got the capacity to coordinate a mutual model at all these different temporal levels and what we’ve got is we get an ongoing enhancement of relevance agent and then we talked about the self-relevancy machinery how you know the work of suey and humphreys that relevancy relevance to the agent is the glue of perception and cognition so and so you’ve got all this self-relevance on all of these levels being mutually modeled and there’s something and there’s sort of a hierarchical arrangement in which you’ve got a generalized evolving complex mutual model that all of the ones all the other ones can interact with in order to improve their capacity and that’s why you often go you often go into working memory when you’re daydreaming things like that great so that allowed me to pose this question at the end we’ve got very sophisticated very complex and self-organizing self-relevance and I was asking can we get from this very complex self-relevance which is the recursive use of self to relevance to a self which is the antique notion of a self and I want to start to move towards how I think that can happen but I first want to give Greg and Chris a chance to you know you know probe or press or extend any of the material from the review so far anything comes up for you guys that was a nice summary okay I’d be interested John so one question I have we don’t have to answer this right now because it might just be orthogonal to the course of the argument sure but so you’re talking about this process by which sort of this mutual modeling which is combined of both integration and differentiation which is how it helps for relevance realization right right as being sort of the preconditions for recursive relevance realization and it reminds me of from a sort of an ontogenetic view the way that in something like so in something like Jung’s archetypal model of the way the like the parturition of the ego the way in which it emerges by differentiation from the self and then in virtue of that is then able to recursively with in a cultivated fashion relate and refer itself back to itself exactly so I’m wondering how like just I’m interested in harkening over to that model for a second because I want to know it’s not exactly like I can see some some pretty clear correspondences but it’s not clear exactly how what you described maps onto that or not so we can maybe leave that hanging if you want to address it now or later but let me sort of top of mind for me at the moment no that’s good let me let me do a foreshadowing and we’re going to come back to these deeper questions especially when the three of us tackle the deeper questions about the ontology of the self and soul and spirit amen yeah so there’s a lot to be said there definitely yep so so this is this is preliminary and foreshadowing but I think if we’re talking about something like the self we’re going to talk about and we’re going to get into this when we go back into the debate around the self as illusion we want to talk about something like a comprehensive model this is called the self model of your agency as a whole and so its job is to basically try and coordinate all of this stuff and I think that could plausibly map onto the the Jungian or the internal family systems theory notion of the self I think what’s happened what how things are going in and out of working memory and that’s attached more to things like our self image I think that’s getting us closer uh to the the notion of the ego because and I think that’s a justified move because Jung defined the ego as the archetype for consciousness it’s it’s the it’s and his archetypes are are are basically virtual engines on on dynamic self-organization because his model is an organic model rather than a mechanical model so I think you could plausibly map ego onto that and then when we’ve talked about it a bit I’m alluding to it that there’s going to be this more comprehensive self model now the thing about the self model is is it’s typically not something of which we are self-aware and that’s part of where Metzinger and others get their argument and I think that also maps on uh at least it could map on into Jung’s claim about you know the self is ultimately something that we can’t become fully aware of that we’re always uh there’s always a degree which to which it’s transparent to us Metzinger goes so far as to say that it’s completely and permanently transparent to us and therefore there is no entity behind it there is no thing behind it that’s part of his no self ego tunnel model is that enough to get a sort of preliminary connection going uh for you Chris yeah there’s just a lot of stuff I can build off of that down the road yeah we just wanted to foreshadow it to flag it ahead just to make sure that I think it’s right and and I want to do a lot with you guys to try and map this into um you know therapeutic existential ontological issues around the self because the self isn’t just another thing it’s right um it’s it’s it’s a different uh it’s it’s it’s a different kind of entity um that uh we specific it’s it’s that of which we care and that from which we care in some bizarre fashion which we’re trying to work out um okay so thanks for that Chris I think that gives us some some useful stuff to talk about uh down the road and hopefully people are starting to see how a lot of the the theoretical machinery built together has has an elegance to it it has the has the possibility of going into many different areas and giving an integrated and hopefully insightful those are the two things you want for elegance integration and insight account of many of the features that we typically talk about in a fragmented fashion within the folk model of the self great all right so I want to now point out that uh so we’ve got all of this self relevance at multiple levels that are being coordinated it’s recursive self-relevance it’s dynamic it’s cycling it’s doing all this complex uh self-organization enhanced relevance realization enhancement of the problem solving capacities of agency and what I want to point out is that what that means is you’re going to get the generation of something like roles you’re going to get you’re going to get functions within us particular ways in which self-relevance is occurring at a particular scale but particular set of functions and processes and what I want to call these is our proto-me’s little m right because the me is that again you can’t you can’t it’s it’s what you’re aware of and you’re saying well what’s aware of the role and and greg is going to pick up on this especially we get into social social and eventually social cultural organisms we have working memory is solved having to deal with what it deals with which is very very complex novel situations that have a high degree of uncertainty and that’s picking up on other the minds of other creatures and knowing what your appropriate role is given the role or status notice the connections between role and status right they’re not the same but they’re deeply connected so you’re getting proto little me’s and then they are being properly coordinated by the generalized me we’ve already talked about this the generalized me and then we have the function so the generalization is is that global workspace function but we also have the reflective function given to us by consciousness not typically very well explained by bars’s theory by the way but go see untangling the world knot for that so what you’ve got is you’ve got the eye the eye is the the level at which the capacity for working memory to right reflect on the processing of the me and how it’s coordinating all the individual mes that reflect your online remember we talked about demonstrative indexicality how things are here now to me and that’s what i mean what’s my role right now or what are my roles right now and then how are they coordinated with my generalized me and then how can i witness that right the eye remember the eye is not something you’re aware of is that is your awareness of it’s your ongoing function from your working memory consciousness of the me and all the mes okay so what we’re getting is we’re notice we’re getting roles we’re getting a proto me you know you can integrate it and then we’re getting the i-me relationship that we said was you know an important feature remember there was a consensus that that’s a a central feature so then what i wanted to say is we have the capacity to take all of that machinery and start to get an account of how self-relevance that now has roles and a proto me and an eye right and all of this here nowness all the way up to the the eye and in between the mes that are coordinating all these different temporal scales and mutual modeling all of that we can take all of that machinery and i think it’s enough to explain how we get the emergence from this very sophisticated and complex and complex self-relevance into relevance to itself yep so i want to propose one i’ll get first i’ll stop so uh you guys could ask me some questions and then i want to propose one other big piece of theoretical machinery from cognitive science and then i want to turn things over to greg so first of all any questions about the move we got to so far i’ve been trying to go very step by step very carefully on how we’re getting some of the fundamental machinery in place i think that’s tight john i mean i think that that summarizes and just adds a consolidating picture that feels like the puzzle pieces are are nicely juxtaposed at this juncture for me thanks thank you like we’re not done no i mean this is the we’re we’re building we problematized and now the puzzle pieces at a big section are sort of coming together and that’s laying a very for me solid ontological foundation of the argument good good um just to make sure i understand something john sorry go ahead i need to cut across you there um so the to make sure that i understand the distinction you’re making here between the sort of the the proto-mes that are sort of adapted to particular sets of constraints that maybe are introduced by as a consequence of a particular encounter in a particular agent arena dynamic the i mean so the relation between i and the generalized other that that that actually composes the most consistent me that endures across time and across situations that central relation then governs the the emergence and the placement of these proto-mes as they adapt to yeah exactly ongoing ongoing right there there you’re on ongoing situations yeah for lack of a better word there they are particular online configurations of agency and all of this machinery we’ve been talking about for solving a problem or sets of problems and then what you’ve got is you’ve got reliable sets of skills and orientations and blah blah blah functions for types of problems these are the little tiny proto-mes but they have to mutually model and coordinate right and so that is being done by the generalized me and then the generalized me can be observed by the eye which is not a thing but is that process that reflective process right of stepping back and doing a transparency opacity shift within working memory consciousness of that of the the and and you and you can also do right the the eye can also look at the generalized me it can look through the generalized me at the particularities of you know me here now and you can get all of that explained in this machinery and this all this layering of the phenomenology of the self from my my sense of self as a presence indexically demonstratively indexically here right now my sense of an ongoing history of such presencing and then my sense of being aware of all of that how’s that good yeah and and go ahead um and in relationship to so we’re then we can extend this back into long-term memory in relationship to a yeah i mean we can do some tolving connections of semantic episodic factual and then yeah perspectival and then it’s like oh here i am and or here’s the me in this role here’s the me in this role exactly i’m bringing this past me and then what is the what’s the reference point that i’m making and then this becoming oh what was relevant to self relevance that is emerging in a particular schematic exactly and and that and the ongoing evolving complexification of the me and the mes you know helps to explain you know sort of the the goffman stuff about you know the presentation of self in everyday society being very fluent very fluid i should say and nevertheless the sense we have the tolling sense the auto noetic sense that we somehow form an integrated something right and what i’m trying to say is well we can actually see that adaptively about the coordination between these various levels we’ve been talking about yes various functions we’ve been talking about right and so then the adaptivity of that central fulcrum relation determines the adaptivity of all of the the proto-egoic entities that determine our the the the skills we bring to bear on any given problem right so what one of the things we can do with working memory and what we do in daydreaming is we pull back and we take all these models and we get them to play with each other to make sure they’re running as smoothly as they should and it seems like completely useless to everybody else because we’re not doing anything what we’re doing is what we’ve talked about before right and so that it really increases the capacity for the self-correction of all of this multi-level mutual modeling that is also itself functioning to in multiple temporal temporal spatial scales improve and enhance our agency so notice we’ve got agency we’ve got roles and we’ve got uh you know this complex i-me relationship now taking place i still not sufficient for a self but we’re getting a lot of uh of important machinery we’re getting there we’re getting there so so one point i want to make and then i’ll go to the major theoretical point of trying to explain the emergence uh one point i want to make it and i want to go back to the fact that notice and it just struck us as completely natural that montague used an interpersonal uh model i guess a model to explain an intra-psychic even interpersonal capacity and that’s no coincidence remember we talked about the vagatsky how we develop itself the social construction remember we’re not we have not abandoned that principle at all and here’s the idea we can talk about you know the way we have to and this is mead’s actual work the way we do mutual modeling between each other and mead’s example was people playing on a baseball team you can’t keep a very clear model of all of these people and so you form a generalized model a generalized other that you relate to in order for the team to coordinate so there’s external mutual modeling and there’s internal mutual modeling and we know from vagatsky that they are cycling and there’s cycling i propose you know in a way that coordinates with the cycling between being focused outward and focused inward so there’s deep connections uh between external mutual modeling and internal mutual modeling and that goes towards if that it’s convergent with a seagull’s idea about he talks about how human connections build neuronal connections that build human connections that build neuronal connections and we get this mind site resonance between each other we get this we get this complex developmental mirroring mirroring and internalization capacity and i want to bring that in because what we have to do is take everything we’ve talked about so far and then say the the brain doesn’t make really hard line distinctions between external and internal mutual modeling this explains why you can do things with fiction and avatars so profoundly you can watch people on a tv screen trying to right model each other and you identify with that you identify with one of the characters and you and you you treat that think about how amazing that is and we could give a computer to do that that person would get fame immeasurable but we just take it as oh yeah of course i can do that of course i could do i can read this story i can i watched troy again uh not that long ago the brad pitt movie not terribly good but one of the themes i like about is how we’re still telling this story 3000 years later and how we somehow how is it how is it that we find a capacity to identify with these bronze age people from mycenaean civilization and take up roles it’s because right the brain uses its capacity to generate to recognize in the external world and it uses its capacity to recognize in the external world to help it generate in the internal world and it’s constantly doing that and so what we now want to do is say okay we are inherently social organisms and we’ll and and then we’re going to say we’ve got an extra thing on we build a shared mutual model of our mutual model in which we call culture and so we’re going to be we’re going to be social cultural beings and that’s where greg’s going to have a lot to say but before we go there i want to make one more move which is okay we’re going to talk about how we’re moving from the biological ecological arena of agency into the social cultural arena and this is one more piece theoretical piece to help explain the emergence of a self from self-relevance which is michael anderson’s notion of neural reuse also called cognitive exaptation also called the circuit reuse because in psychology and cognitive science we give things multiple names for no clear reason so what’s and what’s michael anderson’s idea what’s anderson’s idea first of all the biological notion of exaptation my standard example is this the tongue okay lots of creatures have tongues lots of organisms have tongues frogs have tongues right and like but we as far as we can tell are the only organisms that do this with our tongue language speech now what exaptation is is this idea evolution doesn’t have to build from scratch tongues evolve to do other things that’s why other organisms have them tongues evolve to detect poison of taste bud right to detect really good stuff all the date buds right and it’s also for moving food around in your mouth to help mastication i said mastication by the way uh in order to move food around in your mouth to improve digestion and it just happens because evolution often clutches things together to be also in the air passageway it didn’t have to be we could breathe through a hole in our chest but that’s not how things evolve okay so it can interrupt airflow it it’s highly flexible very highly flexible and it’s very sensitive because of all these nerve receptors which means it’s got a lot of precursors there’s a term that’s used it’s pre-adapted for speech it gives you a lot of the functions ready to go so when you build a machine to do these other things it has side effects it has other functions that are there in real potential that all evolution has to do is go oh of course it’s evolution isn’t a concentration but oh i can use the tongue for speech i don’t have to build a machine from scratch now anderson’s theory and he’s getting increasing evidence for this i think his theory it’s going to his and thomas sallow’s theory are going to be the two big theories going forward in developmental psychology that’s my that’s one of my strongest predictions so and anderson’s idea first he was talking more across species and now he’s more and more talking about with within an individual the hain has done the same thing the hain is also the person who’s done the neurological model of the global workspace none of these connections are coincidence by the way none of them are coincidence okay so what anderson anderson is saying the brain will derot use some of our language it creates a particular functional role for a part so this part of the brain is really good for dexterity in the right hand and handedness is with an issue we could talk about we’re not going to talk about it now okay so it’s doing all this stuff it turns out that when you when you build a machine for doing that and you’ve got to do it because you’ve got to model remember the the the self-modeling robots you got to model the hand it turns out that that machine is also really already well designed for syntactic articulation of speech this is typically also why we tend to gesture especially with our right hand for those of us who are right-handed when we’re speaking as this area is also in the left hemisphere which is associated with sydda so there’s multiple examples of exaptation right and so here’s the idea that when you have machinery that evolved to do all this complex multi-level mutual modeling right yep for a biological agent it is already well designed to be exacted in a certain way the social cultural arena that that exaptation process can help to explain how this very complex evolving recursive role realizing self-relevance to an agent can ultimately become a self any questions about that proposal gentleman um do you want to say a little bit more about just okay so yes there’s this cognitive ex-adaptation process where we can transpose particular models can we then how do we then add that to our modeling of the self or how does that all of a sudden sort of explode the potential for self-modeling or those kinds of areas so you’ve already got the the idea that all of these systems are complexifying and complexification itself produces emergence so you know my standard biological example you take a zygote it integrates and differentiates when something is integrating and differentiating in parallel and we’ve already talked about that with agency and roles and the eye and the meat if it’s simultaneously differentiating and integrating it’s complexifying because i’m complex i can simultaneously do many different things in an integrated fashion so i can do things that i couldn’t do when i was a zygote because i’ve gone through a process of complexification complexification itself produces emergence and but what we can do is we can even speed up that process of emergence by saying what the complexification does is it also can exact functions that are already in existence it doesn’t have to it doesn’t have to create functions from scratch so the that complexification process which is an emergence process can also be an exaptation process by which new functions so let me give you an example okay we already talked about how caring and affect and you know selective attention and arousal are bound up in recursive relevance realization and the system is taking care of itself and it’s modeling itself and so that affect is also bound into that taking care of itself and the modeling of itself and then we said but we the internal and external mutual modeling right they can reinforce each other so we can take the machinery of agency and it can be exacted into sociality yep right okay because what i’m doing is i’m taking the mutual modeling machinery and then getting it to exact between individuals i can jump off of that for yeah that’s perfect okay but i wanted to wait one more point and then yeah no no i think this will help you we can see the emergence of affect that is like directed to the agent but vectored through social modeling we can see the emergence of things like guilt and shame and embarrassment which start to indicate how the caring about the self is being vectored through recursively vectored through the right the modeling of other minds who are modeling me beautiful great that answered my question very nicely thank you you’re welcome so i what i think is we’re to a place where we’ve got right what i want to propose and what i want right i think greg is he can say this better than i can but i want to propose that as we move into the social cognitive arena and we start to exact this cognitive emotional machinery this mutual modeling machinery we get into another kind of process and that is going to bring about personhood and then i think when we have personhood integrated with i-me which is integrated with self-relevance which is integrated with uh agency we now right so we’ve got personhood i-me relationship roles agency we’ve got a self we’ve got a self excellent so like i said great i think this is where i’d like to turn things over to you because i mean you have a phrase for this and i know it’s in stages so i’m not meaning to condone with the phrase that it’s a one move but you have this thing about we move from being primates to being person and you have some stages about how that happens and i’d like to now turn things over to you and if you can integrate it with what we’ve been talking about that’d be great absolutely absolutely so let’s let’s pick up where we are we have but we’ve constructed an agent which now has this capacity for integrating sub-me’s beginning to model and then x-act off of particular kinds of modeling and then it’s building this relevance to self modeling system and we i often like to put this both in terms of if i think about human development across the lifespan but also phylogenetically so we would definitely want to create a phylogenetic history here and i want to then what i’m going to then pick the ball up mostly what we’ve been talking about is agent arena relations and now i want to agent agent arena relation excellent excellent so i want to drop it into this social relationality okay and then this capacity to drop in so i want to then bring in the another r which we talked about at some level relational recursive relevance realization which now all of a sudden it’s basically going to create a whole other self other agent arena relation okay so now we’ve got a triangular relation exactly to the arena exactly right so we get an i me i thou i it okay emerging juxtaposition we can put this in the context of our i would say we’re primates i often say we’re animals mammals primates and persons okay so we’re talking about animals basically and the emerging animal agency of a land animal with a decent cognitive capacity for extension now we get into the let’s talk mammals in particular because one of the things i mean certainly birds do this some but mammals create a fundamentally new kind of self other relation with maternal offspring right hunting yes okay and you mentioned dan seagal and dan seagal is an interpersonal neurobiologist who’s written very interesting things and he’s very much influential in my work as a clinician as well and talks very much about the foundation of attachment okay the foundation of attachment then really gets into our mammal core self okay and so when a mother has to take care of their offspring the capacity to respond to that to differentiate her needs from the offspring’s needs to differentiate model its needs relative to other care that she might be engaged in this is a very very profound capacity and it sets the stage for richer i believe richer self-modeling because it’s self in relationship to others could i could i intervene right here because it seems like that there’s a really that i think that point should be extended i think that’s a very that movie made is brilliant because notice with what i hear you saying is all all along we’ve been talking about self-relevance relevant to the agent but with maternity what and i think of socrates and midwife we get an inversion we get not relevance to me not how are things relevant to me but how i how am i relevant to this we get a fundamental inversion which is an important novelty a very important qualitative novelty to the relevance realization machinery how am i relevant to how am i relevant to the child rather than how are things relevant to me i just wanted to flag bring that because that’s it’s just this huge move totally if we talk about bio energetic evolutionary economics and our real world i’ll put it in my real world experience i have three children okay um and i tell the story i mean my wife is very archetypally maternal and and she just and so when she gave birth to our first daughter sydney i’ll tell the story as soon as sydney laid on her breast i was number two in her life i mean no doubt if she had to choose sorry one of you guys are gone yeah i’ve done that too and i’ll say for my own self it’s like god that was kind of a mess you know you know i love my daughter love my wife it’s a radically different frame that happened to her entire psychic structure as soon as that other it really just became self and her projected self calculation was this becomes a dyadic unit an extension of self and the recursive relational relevance realization oh yeah is radically shifts and and you can just see it you know nature’s it’s an archetypal natural moment of the relational world of mammals uh in that in that embodiment so so that so now what you have to do is you have to model with the point of motherhood means that we start to build the machinery of modeling the self other dynamic in very intimate ways because essentially from a genetic perspective it’s an extension of the cell but it’s also different than the self it lives it has different needs and all of this so this really that’s the first move i wanted to make it’s the mammalian move that has lots to say if we get clinically later but i just had a basic and of course uh balby you know from a more human level talks about internal working models we will get our so then that’s what i want to do is now move it into the mammal line so it’s the first move is attachment i’m going to make three more moves and then we’ll be in three relational moves and then a cultural move to get us into the human space okay so now we’re going to then now we’re social mammals okay and what do i mean by social mammals i mean we don’t just move as herds but we get engaged in complex cooperative and competitive relational world dynamics okay so if you look at like uh so palsky’s work on baboons or any number of primatologists work uh we’re in the field of complex social relations okay and what you see in the uh in this complex social mammal world and this does a this applies to a wide variety of mammals but i’ll stay mostly in the primate world um is a capacity to track one’s place in the troop as it were okay and what you’ll do is you’ll map a sense of alliance and an enemy you’ll map a sense of vertical relation now notice what i just did there i said you’ll map this distancing connection and then you do this vertical right right that’s odd in some ways because they actually don’t get taller or smaller at least not you know but what happens you talked about x adaptation yes what’s pretty clear is that the mind then creates actually a social self other map that draws on its spatial relations with the way it maps an inanimate environment it creates a dimensional space okay so the navigational space is being exacted into social space exactly in fact they can demonstrate this that the same basic architecture of being yourself as basically upstairs or downstairs is very similar to seeing yourself as up above or down right upward and downward social comparisons you rank yourself i look up to him i look down to him and we actually are exactly in the same basic three-dimensional world environment the spatial world environment to the social space environment excellent excellent that’s an example of how we can then take the you know anderson was talking about hey how do we we have this and actually i think the human capacity to do this is pretty remarkable in relation but this is we’re still at the primate level and i develop what’s called the influence matrix right this is important and the input i just want to point out that greg also gave an extensive discussion of this and untangling the world knot right right and we can put a link to what it looks like but basically for our purposes right now what it says what it’s a map of is it maps the relational process dimension okay what do i mean by that i mean we track ourselves and this is by the way it’s all pre-verbal well i haven’t gotten into any verbal we can see this another and i’ll give you primate example a primate example so we track ourselves in relationship to our social influence and relational value which means how much can we move another and how much do we feel like others value us okay and then we track it on three dimensions one’s this vertical dimension of rank status or power like am i above or down and in primates this turns into basically dominance and submissive relations okay and then you have cooperative allyship which can be forms of kin or reciprocal relationships whereby do you share food what is your position and then how connected to you are you in terms of how much engagement do you engage in so high engagement versus distant engagement okay um and what the influence matrix shows and it maps the human process but you can certainly see echoes of these and others is that we basically are constantly positioning ourselves in relationship to the treatment of that we expect and we compare to others and then we reference what does it mean about this particular relation okay let me that’s a that’s a lot of abstraction let me give you a really concrete example so franz de wall has a great you can you can google this google cucumber grape experiment okay and basically what you’ll see is two macaque monkeys it’s a two-minute experiment it’s great and what you have in this cage and really the macaque monkeys will form a clear relationship with each other and actually these are new so they didn’t have a clear dominance of relationship relation and then they’ll have a relationship with the experimenter so the experimenter has taught them both separately to hand over a rock and they will get a cucumber in return okay and as franz de wall will say they’ll do this as a re-inferno investment easily for however okay but then what the experiment is is they give them one one of the monkey then does it and gets a grape okay now grapes are more desirable than cucumbers okay and if the other one monkey sees the other monkey getting a grape and then he gives it and gets a cucumber he gets pissed i mean you can see it you know you can’t help but he grabs the shade he throws the cucumber back and bangs the rock on the thing okay so he gets ballistic and and everybody laughs because our our primate empathy can totally see that the monkey’s pissed now how do we understand that well from an influence matrix perspective the monkey’s modeling itself in relationship to other and it’s modeling its social influence and relational value and it tracks the cucumber relative then it’s fine when it’s just the cucumber but if i see you get a grape hey you know the analogy i would use is hey if i if i said john hey you can mow my lawn and i’ll give you 30 bucks and you’re like you’re real happy and i say okay and then chris comes along and say hey chris i’ll give you 50 bucks right and all of a sudden you’re pissed you’re like what’s up that’s a parable by jesus by the way yeah exactly so the point of it is is that we are constantly imputing we have general models and then specific models of self in relationship to others that were constantly getting active and what that does is it allows you to map the game relational recursive relevance realization of the social space right right right amazing all right so now and you absolutely you can every pine mythologist will tell you that you absolutely need this to navigate the cooperative and competitive relations of a primate troop okay right all right so that’s step two now we have this whole social self other relational field that’s interpsychically okay so perspectively we have access and then we have participatory access in between so we get to see ourselves and then we get to see their reaction and we get them do all of this modeling and relation all right so that’s what we share now i’m going to jump into tomasello and now i’m going to get into the hominid line so we’re primates here actually and we can see that i’ll make an intro because we mentioned this in the in the before we started that of these useful we can show animal capacity for self an emerging self model that’s significantly more sophisticated by viewing what gordon gollop did what’s called mirror self recognition task okay actually it’s a really fascinating experimental task in 1972 and he basically we were asking the question well what what self awareness do animals have okay and a pretty clear uh test uh at least for one for the absence of one kind of self-awareness would be if you can’t see yourself in the mirror that’s indicative of the of some absence i would argue okay so if an animal can never recognize and by with practice over days we’re talking can it ever recognize uh and what gordon gollop did is he grew a very straightforward like a good empirical scientist very straightforward test where he put monkeys in front of mirrors as well as say chimpanzees uh and what he realized is the chimpanzee could then pay attention to itself and so you get a behavioral functional awareness indicator and then he tested that by anesthetizing them and putting a red dot on their forehead right okay monkeys and the chimps and the chimps what the monkeys never and then they wake up and what the chimp does goes over and does this he doesn’t point at all to the mirror or doesn’t ignore it at all the monkeys ignore it or possibly look at it but never look at it the chimp comes over here so in other words the chimp has tracked that this reflection is some level that’s the self modeling that that’s relevant to me and i actually have some degree of self awareness that that is me right i i can carry that model and they’ve shown this on higher social mammals like elephants dolphins uh some people argue that that you can train other creatures even skinner i think argued a pigeon can do it but anyway that’s a technical and debatable argument but in relationship to what most uh sort of cognitive pathologists would agree is that this that social high level social animals demonstrate this okay so now we’re getting into this really proto self-awareness you know capacity uh and but we’re going to a procedural metacognition is something that is perspectival and beautiful right so now the system can use the mirror and say wait a minute what’s that perspective what’s my perspective let me shift perspective let me see the dot okay so now we can see that saying a chimpanzee now let’s go to 500 000 years ago in our hominid primate line okay because what michael tomasello is a primate researcher um and he what he shows is there’s a foundation of super advanced social cognition that’s pre-linguistic yes that we humans demonstrate yes okay so what did we look at i want to just say for chris i think we fundamentally tap into it when we’re getting into the ologos we’re getting into that that union that makes communication right possible absolutely uh and if we think about a hunter-gatherer this is really you know what are we looking at the cooperation structures of early hominids are just radically different so a million years ago we’re making stone tool axes and we’re living in groups and we’re engaged in serious hunting exercises by about half a million years ago we’re clearly starting to control fire so you can think about behaviorally the amount of coordination that that goes and you go look into a troop of bonobos or chimps or elephants or any other animal and the level of cooperation that be required to run a hunt to manage a fire to take care of is radically different so what are we actually seeing we can see now if we go to the developmental lifespan of children we can see a fundamental capacity for intersubjective sinking up a theory of mind a capacity for mind reason shared attention a classic example and there’s lots of them but one is pointing okay yeah very early on a child will see when you point the child looks to where you’re pointing they they instantaneously recognize that you have intention and that you have attention and they can model that and differentiate their perspective in relationship to your perspective and follow your attention and also engage in things like play and repeat it and of course little kids you know we’re talking about 18 months here 12 months you go back and forth you mimic you mirror and they will get in sync with the self-other modeling of the individual and they will track and there’s lots of unique experiments that he’s run to show that they will have some intuitive sense of the perspective of the other and their intention okay part of his argument is this actually affords language learning well this is right exactly and this is would be my argument too and it’s and the other thing is so a two-year-old here one and a half to two-year-old on several of these tasks will be a fully grown chimpanzee okay quickly so that’s pretty and obviously we got a lot more growth to go after too so by the time we’re if we’re able to do this so and then what i would argue is essentially this happens so now if we have a shared intersubjective coordinating space now we have a particular kind of field that affords mutual modeling and then if we have an x-adaptated capacity for sound making okay and some cognitive flexibility for pairing particular kinds of symbols with activity that engage then all of a sudden you get basically you get the potential for rhythmic musicality and symbolic word indicate broken symbolic word indication which i think is happening you know half a million to 250,000 years ago and and that is an enormously rich coordinated structure so could i could i add one thing in here of course yeah no this is a pretty fast pace you’re doing it eloquently you’re doing it eloquently i want to bring in our beads idea that one of the things we can do and you can also see it beginning with with children because pointing because pointing is a gesture and and and let’s let’s get clear how much and this is the work of susan golden meadow how much gesture platforms and make real makes make speech available now what what rb argues is what you can do remember how he said we use the generate to recognize or to communicate so we can use the actions we can use the movements by which we act and what we can do is we can change them from being action to me communicating with you about action and this is pantomime and pantomime he argues is really interesting because it goes from like it’s not the same as a closed communication system animals communicate they make noises but they can’t they can’t do displacement but i can pantomime about events that have not yet occurred or about things in the past or things i would like you to do and i can string various sequences of pantomimes together so i can get displacement i get compositionality it’s open-ended and i start to get a lot of the features that are going to make something like spoken spoken language possible but pantomime depends on the thomas sulliv stuff that greg is talking about it depends on that we have developed sophisticated shared right shared communication and a sophisticated capacity to internalize and mimic and imitate each other and so and the interesting thing about it is when doing it right now we and this is the work of susan golden meadow we’re always gesturing because we’re at it because gesture helped to bridge between action and language because gesture is just simultaneous gesture is weird because we are simultaneously pantomiming to ourselves as if we were pantomiming to others but we also end up communicating to others with our gesture it’s this massive convergence of everything we’ve been talking about and greg’s point also about how we exact the spatial stuff into much more abstract stuff i just wanted to throw that in there is another way of helping to to get this bridging that greg is so beautifully building for us right now 100 we actually can quickly then just go down if anybody’s ever heard of polyvagal theory okay polyvagal theory basically is your embodiment of whether or not you check that it’s an open safe reciprocal participatory environment or a defensive environment where there’s going to be threat you feel it right into your so we have this very very embodied sense to determine whether the social arena is something that’s open threat and reciprocity giving in relation or wait a minute competitive defensive and worried in a particular way so radically different set so we actually can check the system pulls back into the embodiment all the way down to the model all the way down all the way down to the model all the way so so so now we have this intersubjective space where we’re like hey there antelope sphere or axe you know you do all these kinds of you know uh processes and i also believe that musicality would be huge here like rhythmic boom boom boom getting a sink in relationship to it and it really creates this implicit intersubjective space which by the way i believe that if we get into religio and some of the things that we need to actually revitalize in relationship to our spirituality add it from a bottom-up perspective i think this is a huge point in relationship to what we need to cultivate so now what i want to basically say then gets into the actual the first basic insight i had that launched me into the unified theory which was that something fundamentally happens when we transition from boken symbols to symbolic syntactical propositional statement yeah exactly so what what is that basically what it is is it’s the idea of their antelope yes that actually transports us across time it does a number of different features but what there are the antelope does the propositional statement and in fact you know linguistic analysis what’s the fundamental unit of meaning making the proposition why is it a union of meaning making it’s because it actually makes a truth claim right it’s a truth claim that can then be challenged okay it then and then so explicitly so what it does is it opens up a factual and then it also opens up negative counterfactual space around it in a particular way okay so now you have what then i argue is what the proposition did next was a cognitive adaptation on the negative space which then became the question right why brilliant brilliant what yeah who said why don’t we hunt the gazelles over there okay so now with by once you activate activate a factual now you can activate counterfactual and then you have basic one word things that open up vacancies around the why what when where and all of that then creates a combinatorial explosion right that now has to be modeled all right and then i say that that question answer dialogue system created the problem of justification all right so now the problem of just each one of these in real world every proposition is an investment it has influence implication it has accuracy implication okay and actually we can then divide the problem of justification three different fundamentals one is the analytic side like is it true that their antelope over there okay so there’s an analytic component that would say no it doesn’t correspond how do you know all right and evidence-wise and then there’s the utterance from the individual this is what i call the personal dynamic i’m emphasizing their analog over there for a reason my investment is saying that hey that and then it intersects with whoever the listener which creates then the social dynamic of justification which is hey is this something we should be paying attention to who says who benefits and how do we analyze this from a group perspective okay so that that problem this oh it’s a combinatorial explosion of a whole new set of worlds that basically is like propositional truth claims question and answer and this entire dynamic problem of justification at the level of analytic personal and social so we have to exact the relational recursive relevance realization into this new combinatorially explosive problem space total exactly and that happens between i think you know maybe 150 000 years ago you know they always push it back certainly by 50 000 years ago we know this thing is in full swing and many people call it the human i should emphasize human minds big bang okay and i believe that then basically what you get is an entire nut this is really the mind that dakart was interested in basically i mean it was anchored to the perspective of mine but it’s always this rational what am i and you know here’s another point and then i’ll see what we want to fill in so what was my key insight where i was i was anchored in an evolutionary view and this point about justification meant that there was a highway that was opened up so i’m going to say hey the antelope are over there and then you john say well how do you know or should we okay and this problem of justification then meant that you now through the question and through the fact that the way information propositional information has direct access okay notice that the rest of our perspectival knowledge is pretty well contained i can never see you know this is one of the hard problems i see what you see but i can ask you how why do you like red i can’t see your red but i can ask you and i can tell you why is it your favorite and the content of your thought is exactly the same i mean the propositional structures go right through the same valuation it’s the nature of your content we can’t do how good right but but it means that now i have if i can ask you questions why did you do what you did okay so i use the example of alpha and beta all right so let’s say you’re alpha all right and i’m beta and you go off on a hunt but you’re pair bonded to sarah all right and i start hanging around sarah all right and then you come back and you say why are you spending so much time with her okay all right now what if i were to say what if i access my thoughts and i said well i hope is to separate the two of you and take her as my mate all right oh you’re done okay so notice what if i say well she’s helping me plant seeds okay notice both of those are potential explanations for what it is that i’m doing but have radically different social consequences right right right so now all of a sudden the fact that you have access to my reasons for why i do what i do through the proposition and i have access but i have access in a different way than you do creates a totally different kind of justification dynamic right and your modeling of yourself has now moved to another level of recursion recursion specification a qualitatively shift yes exactly now i’ve got the public what did you say i said it’s qualitative oh yeah it’s dialectical yes yes yes it’s dialectical dialogical i have the public self out here i’ve got my private narrator and then the private narrator has to check in with why okay and now you get into the whole issue and this is where i’ll you know bring it to sort of a close but what is the human ego right you know and freud certainly noted that the end young and all the whole psychodynamic insight is this self-consciousness thing it seems to be basically a rationalizing function at least that’s a okay now that’s the observation but freud never actually really explains why does the rationalizing interpreter function evolve okay now it just basically says oh that’s that’s sort of the design of it well why is it the design of it well the problem of justification that emerges with propositional language gives you a crystal clear evolutionary reason why an evolved egoic interpreter function would appear on the scene and it would have the design features that it does to manage public and navigate private in a very complicated and shall we say psychodynamic and interpersonal fashion that’s beautiful that’s an impressive summary great right we’re just amazing and so what i’m hearing from you is we get we get you know we’ve got this agency and then we’ve got all that machinery that you know i was discussing and then it’s getting taken up into the social social and then socio-cultural the social cognitive and then socio-cultural we’re getting all the shared we space that tomasello talks about right can i actually i’ll put in a point there about when thank you for making this cultural because the other piece is that i didn’t emphasize but it’s very important is that what then happens is to coordinate us or the emergence of systems of justification exactly exactly okay great that then are the networks of what is our shared understanding of our roles of our place our worldview our ideology what we are now all of a sudden the whole narrative that coordinates us as what were primates to become peoples as it were now becomes networked into these systems and that’s what i call culture with a capital c are these networks of systems of justification so is it fair to say that what we see is agency being exacted into socio-cultural justified agency which is i think that what manages our roles and manages the various identities we assume within status and other cultural divisions that you’ve talked about that to me sounds like what we mean by a person that’s what a person a person is actually a social cognitive social cognitive justified kind of entity that’s why we so that it has a moral status it has a normative status for us it’s not just a functional or phenomenological it’s a socially culturally justified normatively sanctioned kind of agency that’s what i’m hearing you say that’s brilliant yep i’d often call it the culture person plane of existence right and so now what we have is we have agency we have all of the mutual modeling and how everything is affording and platforming everything we’ve got roles we’ve got ime and then the imes go from being proto to being fully fledged being culturally discussed culturally modeled we have and we’ve got all the way up to personhood it seems to me without what we have is we have a lot of the dimensionality both vertically and horizontally horizontally meaning developmentally through time we have a lot of the machinery for a cell especially because this and we’ve mentioned this kind of agent is not only how things are relevant to it but how it is relevant to others in a justifiable way within a social cultural system that it belongs to and within which it has its agency that to me sounds like we’ve gone from relevant we’ve gone from self-relevance to relevance to a self and that’s what we’re now talking about here because when i’m justifying myself that is a totally different thing because it is dependent on how much i matter to you and how much i can make myself relevant to you but nevertheless it is being interjected back into me on terms of how i understand myself and that’s where we get as i said we get the acceptation of the emotions into these social cultural normative emotions of guilt and shame pride honor esteem etc etc absolutely those self-conscious emotions which act you know act as self-reference to particular kinds of to others to particular kinds of ideals absolutely so what i think we’ve done is we’ve given a very plausible account for the emergence of relevance to a self from self-relevance and we have woven that i thanks to you greg very nicely with the whole stuff you’re talking about earlier about the social construction of the cell and now this now it needs two things have just converged together so i want to introduce what i want to talk about next time but then we’ll open it up for you know reflections on what’s happened because this has been a really pivotal and i like the way it was something i’ll do a little foreshadowing just to leave it okay and then certainly go so what also this means is that we get this interpreter function now stuck on top of because this is evolutionary and then it explodes i will many times i connect with people clinically who have parts of themselves that seem to be recursively realizing some aspects of this environment and then they’ll have narrators that are like huh they’ll be in conflict with whatever other parts are so we’ll come back to this and the argument is actually there’s models of self that extend in time at the level of personhood there’s models of embodiment that seem to be modeling seeing other things as recursively relevant and then the conflict of the self when it’s like damn it why can’t we all get along in here um as well that’s what i do a lot in the world of psychotherapy is tracking those kinds of breakdowns as it were or disintegrated conflicts and that sticks us back to the platonic tradition of the psyche and interpsychic conflict in the republic and i i’m going to foreshadow that i’m going to propose that part of what we mean by soul is that capacity to take you know these different levels of self-modeling and get them appropriately coordinated so we get optimal flourishing of the individual so and that will get us into soul and spirit itself the three assets and how do they belong together and how do they belong within a naturalistic worldview given this machinery that we’ve been talking about but what i also wanted to do before we get to there so that’s great for with foreshadowing thank you great i want to go now that we’ve really fleshed out how we see this emerging and we’ve got this dynamical developmental massively recursive autoproetic self-organizing socially constructed socially platform and socially exactly socially culturally exacted entity the self we can come back to the question does the self actually exist if it’s so socially constructed and this is where the debate i want to return now to the debate in depth that’s that sort of the cutting edge now of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience about the self is well does the self really exist or is it ultimately a very sophisticated social fiction by which we maintain our social cultural agency and so that’s where i want to turn to in our next beautiful session i think we’re set up for that but we have down the road the the discussion of the triangulation of the essence soul spirit himself chris we greg and i have talked a lot this time and i wanted to give i i think that’s okay with you greg i want to give of course sort of the final word for us today anything he wants to say any reflections he wants to bring to bear uh thanks yeah that’s okay i i kind of knew that would be that would be what today was and i was absolutely fine with that um i don’t know that i do to be quite honest i think that i might just hold everything in abeyance until we actually talk about those three s’s i think i’ll have a lot to say about that yeah i expect that we’re going to at some point turn things over to you when we turn to the three s’s so i foresee that as being but you you you asked some very good pivot points and questioned the redirection throughout today so i appreciate that no no that was good it was good i mean it was good i think that that sort of very very comprehensive phylogenetic account that you gave greg that was very impressive and i think that that yeah i i know that that needed to happen before we could venture into the into the territories that we’re going to venture into so and i like the way the ontogenic argument i was giving and the phylogenetic argument greg was giving just i mean greg did this wonderful job of just meshing them like this they just they they just fit together beautifully beautifully they are very intertwined thank you yes okay well that’s it for today and so i want to thank everybody for their time and attention and we’ll see you next time on the elusive eye the nature and function of the self goodbye everyone take care