https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=N4lVitJ_ono
There are kind of two ways of looking at the world. There’s more, but we’ll start with that. One is that all of your knowledge comes from outside sense data. Okay, and that’s kind of a behaviorist claim, and before that, it’s an empiricist claim. And then, the other idea is, no, that can’t be right, because you have internal structures that enable you to look at the world and interpret it. And some of those might be implicit, axiomatic. Like the fact that you have two eyes, and you look outward into the world, and that you can hear and that you can touch. It’s like, the fact of those senses isn’t dependent on the empirical reality for those senses to manifest themselves. They’re already built into you. And people like Kant, for example, made the proposition that we had a priori knowledge structures, and that we used them to interpret the world. And so, it’s different than empiricism. And so, what Piaget is saying, well, neither of those are right exactly. It’s not like you will learn everything from the world through your senses. And it’s not as if you project everything onto the world as interpretation. It’s something in between, and it’s a dynamic. It’s a dynamic. And so, it’s like bootstrapping. That’s the right way to think about it. You know, when your computer boots up, that means bootstrapping. It’s off, and then a bunch of simple processes occur, and then out of those simple processes, some more complex processes emerge, and then out of those, some more complex processes emerge, and all of a sudden your computer is there. Well, that’s kind of what Piaget thinks happens to you. You bootstrap yourself. And so, you have got a couple of reflexes to begin with, like the sucking reflex, for example. And you’ve got some proclivities, like maybe you can sort of flip your hand, or you develop that, and you have reflexes. So, you know, if you blow on a baby, for example, the baby will go like this. It’s built into it. It’s like a, it’s a startle reflex, essentially. So, that startle reflex is there right from the beginning. It’s a whole body reflex. And, you know, if you stroke the bottom of their feet, their feet will sort of curl up, and if you put your finger in their hands, even a newborn, if you put your finger in their hands, you can lift them right up. And it’s sort of, well, clinging ape thing, you know, because chimpanzee infants cling to their mother for like five years. And so, that reflex is still there. So, the kid comes into the world born with these simplistic, low-resolution procedures that enable it to get a foothold on the world. And then out of that, the child emerges. And that’s, so the constructivist idea is that, well, it isn’t like you have your heads full of fully developed axiomatic structures. And it isn’t that you get all your knowledge from the world. It’s that you have a bit of structure there to begin with that gives you a toehold on the world. And then you act in the world. And as you act, you generate information, and out of that information, you make the structures inside of you, and you make the world. That’s a constructivist idea, is that you take whatever’s there, this tremendous complexity, and you sort it into you and the world. And so, that goes back to that William James idea about that initial chaos. It’s a hard, hard concept to grasp, because that isn’t really how we think. You know, we think that there’s an objective world, and there’s a subjective world, and that the objective world is just there. And the subjective world is maybe a subset of that. But that is not Piagetian presupposition. It’s not a presupposition of phenomenologists in general, who we’ll talk about later. But, so here’s one example of how to think about this in a sense. It’s like, you know, you think, as Piaget said, you kind of think that your representations of the world are fixed. So, we’ll go back to the, you’re in a long-term relationship, and the person betrays you scenario, right? So, you’ve been with this person 10 years, you assume fidelity and faithfulness and honesty and all of that. You weave a shared narrative, you both inhabit that, it structures your existence and regulates your motion. Then you find out that the person has not only betrayed you once, but multiple times. It’s like, okay, what you thought isn’t what happened. But here’s the weird thing, you see. Because you interpreted the world, obviously, within the confines of that relationship. And you had, you know, obviously you had an interpretation. But there was also a world. That’s the world you thought you lived in. It’s like, those were facts. Well, all of a sudden, those aren’t facts. They’re not at all facts. And so what happens, that’s that descent into the underworld. It’s like, all of a sudden, what happens is that past that you thought was fixed. Now becomes this weird mixture of fantasy. Because you’re wondering, what is it that happened then? And you’re going to run through all sorts of fantasies. Some of them are going to be really dark, you know, really dark about what happened in the state of the world and all that. And those are unconscious fantasies. And that’s mangled inextricably with the world. Right? Because you don’t know the facts anymore. Which kind of suggests that maybe you never did know them. And that’s a pretty strange thing, because you’re operating as if you’ve got this factual representation of the world. But it can be upended like that. And so that makes you think, well, what about these facts? Like, they’re kind of hard to get a handle on. You know, and you see this a lot in courtroom situations. Because, of course, what the court decides is what happened. And the answer is, we don’t exactly know. Because you can keep making the context of interpretation wider and wider. So, you know, maybe you bring your partner to court because they’ve betrayed you. Let’s say you’re trying to get a divorce settlement predicated on that. But then they tell a bunch of stories about how you were just as miserable as you could possibly be. And that anybody with any sense would have betrayed you and never told you about it. Because, you know, that’s just what a normal, sensible person would do. And so then the question is, well, were you actually betrayed? And if you were, well, who was it that betrayed you? Was it your partner or was it you? Or was it your bloody mother or your father who taught you to act that way? Or who didn’t teach you? It’s like, it’s a hell of a thing. Because you can just keep altering the interpretive context. And within it, the facts shift around. And then you might say, well, they’re not facts. It’s like, yeah, yeah, you can say that. But it’s more complicated than that by a large margin. Anyways, so Piaget’s notion is essentially that, well, this is how I interpret it. This is sort of, this is my thinking in some sense. But I’m offering it to you as a scheme for helping you understand Piaget. It’s like, Jerome Bruner, famous cognitive psychologist, said, we seem to have no other way of describing lived time except in the form of a narrative. And a narrative, as far as I could tell, I think this is the same thing as one of Piaget’s knowledge representations. As far as I can tell, there’s a representation of you and there’s a representation of the future. And there’s behaviors that you use to transform one into the other. And so when Piaget talks about, so this is kind of where the mind meets the body. That’s how it looks to me. It’s like, you have a conception of you and you have something you’re aiming at, you want to have happen. Those are both representations. But when you act in the world, those aren’t representations anymore. Those are actually actions. And so mind transforms into body when you act out your notion. And that’s sort of how the mind is linked to the body, as far as I can tell. And so what Piaget says is that the behaviors are built before the representation. And so we’re going to take a look at that. So here’s Piaget’s notion of assimilation and accommodation. Whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing their species. That’s through Darwinian means, right? So what happens is a bear is a kind of solution to a set of problems. And they’re the problems that the bear’s environment presents. And the bear is just a bear. So it’s sort of like bears were 10,000 years ago. And the only way the bear can solve a new problem, basically, is by generating new random bears. Which is what it does when it reproduces. And hoping that one of those more random bears is a better fit for whatever random change might occur in the environment. That’s the whole Darwinian issue, right? You can’t predict which way the environment is going to go. And so what you do is you take your structure and you vary it. And you throw those out into the world. And some animals do that expensively. So they have infants that they have to program to that specific environment. But it takes a lot of investment. And some creatures do that cheaply. Like mosquitoes. It’s like they don’t care for their kids but they have a million of them. So like who cares if 999,998 die? There’s still twice as many of you as there were. So those are two different reproductive strategies. And you could think about all those mosquito offspring as new mosquito ideas in embodied form. And most of them are bad ideas. And so the environment just wipes them out. Well Piaget’s point is we do the same thing with our cognitive structures. And that’s the thing that’s so interesting about people. In some sense that we’ve internalized the Darwinian problem. And so when you think about the future, what you’re doing is generating a multiplicity of potential environments. And then you’re generating a sequence of avatars of yourself to live in those fictional futures. And then you watch what happens as that avatar lives in each of those fictional futures. And if the avatar fails, you don’t act that out. It’s bloody brilliant. It’s brilliant. That’s what our brain does. It’s like it hypothesizes potential futures. It runs simulations and it kills them. And that can be really painful but it beats the hell out of dying yourself. Or maybe sometimes you won’t think so because it really can be painful. But it’s something that as far as we know only human beings can really do, right? We invent possible futures and invent possible future selves and kill them off in our imagination. And that’s what you’re doing in an argument. That’s what an argument is. It’s like well here’s an avatar. A representational avatar. You know, that’s based on certain axioms and all articulate it. You articulate yours. And we’ll have them have a fight. And whichever one survives, we’ll accept as true. And we’ll move forward and act that out. And you know, arguments can be pretty damn intense. But hypothetically they’re not as intense as acting out a stupid idea. That’s the thing, right? Better to have some conflict and reach resolution in an abstract sense than to embody your stupidity and die. And so, you know, it’s sort of a trade-off between anxiety and annihilation or pain.