https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mhz8ekbDhQ8
I had a chance to talk to Franz de Waal about his work with chimpanzees. You know, when chimpanzee alpha males are often parodied as dominant, in a sort of Marxist sense, power-driven. And it’s the most dominant male chimp, so the one with the most physical prowess, the biggest tyrant in some sense, who gets to dominate all the other chimps, and who, in consequence, has preferential reproductive access. And so it’s a theory of power and social structure and reproduction all tangled up into one. But the problem with that is it’s not true. So de Waal has shown very, very clearly that, first of all, sometimes the alpha chimp, so to speak, can be the smallest male in the troop. Frequently, he’s allied with a powerful female, and he is generally the most reciprocal individual in the troop, very concerned with the long-term maintenance of social relations, and very good at making peace, not war. Now that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have, let’s call it power, at his disposal, especially in coalitions, if necessary. But de Waal has shown very clearly that the alpha chimps who rely on power and force are very likely to rule over an unstable polity and to meet an extremely violent end in the relatively short term. And so if your fantasy about the future, let’s say, is motivated by an underlying motivational state, it could be hunger, it could be thirst, it could be sexual need, it could be rage, it could be the desire to make anxiety decrease, then you can imagine that there are ways of interacting in the world that satisfy multiple motivational states simultaneously. And then you could imagine that those modes of being satisfy multiple states of motivation simultaneously in a social context, so also for other people. And then you could say, and that make that occur as it iterates forward into the future. And then you could say, well, you want to extract out a representation that allows you all those advantages simultaneously. And it looks to me like something maybe that’s marked. Here’s some hypotheses. It’s marked by the sense of active engagement that you might have in a good conversation. It’s marked by the sense of the emergence of the spirit of play. And Jaak Panksepp has detailed out the psychophysiological structures underlying the play circuit. It would underlie something like maximal, no, optimized stress. So you talked about minimizing predictive error. But here’s a variant. What if you optimize predictive error so that you lay out a fantasy on the future and then work so that there’s just enough predictive error so that you encounter something you don’t expect at a micro level, small enough that you can manage it, but large enough so that it expands the confines of your hierarchical presuppositions. And maybe you do that. See, I was thinking about that relationship to play, because if you’re on a team and you’re playing against a well-matched opponent, the opponent pushes you right to the limit of your skill, not past it. So it’s not too stressful. But it isn’t exactly in that situation that surprises minimize. It’s more like a little entropy is allowed to enter the system at just enough rate and intensity so that you can push your development in a manner that doesn’t stress you too badly physiologically. Yeah. So you’ve brought in about four really important themes here. The two key things that you’ve brought to the table there were putting sentient creatures together. So you’re talking about social interactions now and social hierarchism and sense-making when the thing I’m making sense about is also trying to make sense of me. I think that’s a really important and challenging move there. You’ve also highlighted this paradox that we might be in the game, or we might be seen as in the game of trying to minimize our surprise, to minimize our prediction errors, and yet we seek out novelty. So I think there’s a fundamental paradox there that needs resolving. I think you’ve, in your setting up of the issue, I think you’ve implicitly resolved it. There is, I think, a very simple way of resolving that, and it comes back to this sort of isomorphism between expected surprise and uncertainty. And I notice you also use the word angst and anxiety. To my mind, uncertainty just is a state of, or recognized as a state of angst or anxiety. So that sort of imperative to minimize expected surprise just is choosing or can be complied with by choosing those plans that minimize uncertainty. And what would that look like? It would basically look like responding to epistemic affordances that resolve that uncertainty. So I think that’s the kind of surprise that we aspire to. It’s the novelty that affords the opportunity to resolve uncertainty and thereby resolve angst. And if that’s true, then taking it to your context, how would I do that if I was in a social hierarchy or chimpanzees or I was in any social setting? In one sense, the simplest way to resolve my surprise and make the world as predictable as possible would initially be to resolve my uncertainty about you by asking you the right kinds of questions that allows me to sort of put you in a particular category in one of my narratives, in one of my pro-social narratives about the kinds of people that I can talk about. But also, ultimately, I’m going to try and make you like me or make me like you. Because the closer we are, if we can share the same narratives and the same language, then together we’re mutually predictable. So that mathematically would be sort of like a generalized synchrony from a social neuroscience perspective on Dalek interactions. It’s basically aligning ourselves. So that we come to know each other and that we can dance and synchronize and exchange. And after a while, I don’t need to ask you any more questions. You don’t need to ask me any more questions. We are now on the same page, singing from the same hymn sheet, the same generative model, the same world model, the same kinds of narratives. Having said that, of course, there is also in the background the putative or potential novelty of finding out what somebody’s not like me like. So I think asking questions about the right kinds of narrative that resolve uncertainty, responding to epistemic affordance, novelty-seeking, information-seeking, whilst at the same time still avoiding those surprising states of loss or physiological extremists, put that into a social context. And I think you’ve got some really interesting questions and possibly a structure and a framework to understand social organization and sort of information exchange and self-organization, not at the level of just the individual negotiating with his or her body, but negotiating with another individual with a very similar kind of body.