https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UiRHDDBRcaM
It was interesting, you know, when you listed out things that could be good, the things that came to mind first for you were, some of them were tool-like, a good wheel, a good axe, even a good machine gun. And I like that. I like that. And I think we have some commonality of conception there too, because there’s a pragmatic definition of good. It’s something like something that’s good fits its purpose. And well, that would be in a hierarchy as well. So that purpose would have to be good as well, right? There’s a functional element to that. And so, okay. And so, the way that I’ve been conceptualizing perception, and I think this is a neurophysiologically informed conceptualization, is that once we establish our aim, the world arrays itself around us into something like pathways and tools and obstacles. That’s associated, that concept I derived in part from J.J. Gibson’s conceptualization of perception. Exactly. Affordances. Right, exactly. Okay. So, and so what do you think of Gibson’s ideas? I think most of them are excellent. I’ve been writing about affordances for some time. And what I think Gibson was weak on is he didn’t talk about how affordances are actually tracked in the brain. He sort of threw up his hands about that and said, the information is in the light. Well, yeah, but how does the information in the light get into our heads and do what it does? That’s the part that he was weak on, but we’re making great progress on that today in the neurosciences. Yeah, okay. Okay. So, let me elaborate a little bit on the Gibsonian model. And I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and I’ve specifically thought about some elaborations on it recently. He talked a lot about affordances, essentially tools and obstacles. Okay, so I’m going to lay out a schema and you tell me what you think about this. And I’m hoping that it matches the underlying neurophysiology. I believe that it does. So imagine that we establish a name. This would be with every act of perception. We establish a name and then what we see in the world, our perceptual systems, our navigation tools. And once we establish a name or a destination, we see a pathway to the destination. We see tools that we could use to afford us movement towards the destination. We see obstacles that could get in the way. So far, that’s pretty Gibsonian. We see markers of progress. We see markers of failure. We see allies and foes. That would be more on the human scale. And we see agents of transformation. And the agents of transformation would shift our aims. Because as you said, what’s good changes to some degree situationally. Like it partakes in a hierarchy. Absolutely. But it switches situationally. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. And so I like the expansion because a human being doesn’t really fit the tool category. But then we can perceive human beings who are useful and on our side, so to speak. And we can perceive human beings that are who operate in a manner that’s intent. Exactly. So allies and foes seems to be a nice way of conceptualizing that. Okay. So then I think you can, I spend a lot of time on assessing the neuropsychology of emotion. I was particularly influenced by Jeffrey Gray’s work and also by Jak Panksepp. Right. I know their work quite well. Well, so that fits quite nicely in the Gibsonian model, as far as I’m concerned, because it looks to me like the tools and obstacles, for example, the Gibsonian affordances. While tools produce, the apprehension of a tool produces positive emotion. The apprehension of an obstacle produces negative emotion. And it’s the same with allies and foes. It’s the same with markers forward and markers of progress and markers of failure. So the emotions become calibration systems that mark deviation from the pathway forward. Now, I talked to Carl Friston. Here’s something cool. I talked to Carl Friston about this. So I wrote a paper with some of my students about 10 years ago, where we tried to relate anxiety to entropy computation. So anxiety seems to mark the multiplication of pathways to a destination. So if you’re right, right. So it’s an marks an increase of entropy. And Friston worked on a model like that. But he added a dimension that I hadn’t conceptualized. He said that the reason that dopamine marks positive affect is because positive affect marks a decrease in entropy as you move forward to a destination. So he you can actually conceptualize both emotional systems from an entropy perspective. I think this is fine. Not obvious, but on the right tracks all the way along. In my work, I’ve come to the view that all control is done by emotions in the brain. There’s no operating system. The brain is a computer, but it doesn’t have a rigid operating system the way a digital computer does. All control is done by resting control in a war or a battle, a conflict between different emotional states that arise in our brains. And that’s why life is difficult, is because easy things are things that are emotionally closer to hand. And they lure us away from the better answers. This is whether you’re doing science or making a moral decision or trying to solve a math problem. Self-control is the arena of consciousness. And emotional valence is what does all the pushing and pulling. Okay, so let me ask you about that. And that’ll bring us back to the religious question to some degree. So you characterize the landscape of consciousness. Correct me if I get any of my summaries of your ideas wrong, because I don’t want to do that as a battleground between emotions. And so I would say, do you mean a battleground between emotions or do you mean a battleground between emotions and motivations? Well, motivation is emotion too. Okay, okay, fine. So we’re going to put those in the same bin. I mean, sort of conceptualizing the difference. To me, it seems practically useful to conceptualize motivations as systems that set aims and emotions as systems that track movement towards aims. Because there’s a bit of a difference. It seems to me there’s a well, you know, it’s not a perfect separation. They interact. They interact. I know, I know. I know. And some emotions seem to set aims, like anger, for example, does.