https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RcmWssTLFv0
We’re going to review a proposition. Now if I ever tell you something in enough detail that you’ve already heard that you’re like you’ve heard it enough, please tell me because I can’t precisely remember what I told you. I know the line of the narrative throughout the entire course and we will return to some things fairly frequently. But I don’t want to tell you the same story three times, unless you’re particularly compelled by that story. So let me know. We’re going to start with a proposition. And the proposition is that in order to orient yourself properly in life, there’s two classes of information that you have to have access to. And one class of information is information about the nature of the objective world. The objective world is described in a manner, or the world when it’s treated objectively is described in a manner that strips all the subjectivity from it. That’s the technology, the philosophical technology that’s behind the scientific revolution involves stripping the subjectivity from the sense-mediated consequences of certain kinds of actions. Because when you lay out an experiment, you’re not just talking about what happened. You’re talking about what you did and then what happened. And you’re supposed to be able to do it in a way that ensures that if someone else followed exactly the same procedure, they would obviously observe the same consequences. And in some sense, we’re trying to establish a realm of knowledge that is universally applicable to people despite their individual differences. That’s one way of thinking about it. And obviously that works. Now whether or not it works in a Darwinian sense, we still have to determine because it could easily be that our development of the scientific method is what will make us go extinct. And under which circumstances you might consider it to have been an error. But it doesn’t really matter at the moment because so far so good, roughly speaking. So now people think that the world is an objective place because we can describe it objectively And that’s a much more debatable presupposition. It’s partly debatable because it’s actually based on a decision in some sense rather than evidence. Partly because your knowledge is finite in every direction in some sense. So what that means in a way is that no matter what you know about anything, you don’t know everything about that thing. And so you kind of ground out in ignorance at some point. So what that means is that you have to buttress your thinking with a set of assumptions that you don’t question or you just end up in an infinite regress. And one of those sets of assumptions is usually reality definition sets of assumptions or truth definition sets of assumptions. But the thing is generally no matter what your theory of reality is or what your theory of truth is, there are alternative theories of reality and alternative theories of truth that are equally rigorous and that have different domains of application. And it’s a very tricky business. So for example, if you’re a reductionist materialist, you’re going to make the presupposition that brain physiology is more real than emotional experience. And I suppose that’s in some sense because you can’t get access to anyone else’s emotional experience, at least not directly, whereas you can get universal access to the fundamental details of someone’s brain physiology. It’s something like that anyways. Now that’s still an arbitrary assumption because obviously the person and you as well are going to be acting all the time as if your emotions and your motivational states are real. And so then you run into a problem and the problem is well, how do you know what someone actually believes? Do you listen to what they say or do you take into account their explicit and well articulated theories, or do you watch how they act? And the answer to that is you make your choice and generally there are reasons for that. Now one of the conceptual tools that I have found helpful in my attempts to avoid confusion when dealing with the fact that there are very many ways of looking at the world is to start thinking about theories of reality as tools rather than as descriptions. And I find that extraordinarily useful as a metaphor because if you have a toolbox full of tools you don’t necessarily try to reduce the utility of one tool to another and you don’t actually complain because all the tools aren’t the same. A wrench isn’t a very good hammer, but that doesn’t mean you can criticize it on that grounds. You might not want to use it as a hammer, although you could I suppose, but it’s not justifiable criticism. And this is something a psychologist named George Kelly pointed out as well, although I think it’s also an element of pragmatic philosophy, is that one set of tools for one thing and another set of tools for another thing. And that’s helpful. And then you are also thinking about the sorts of problems that you might solve with different forms of tools. And one problem is what are things made of in an objective sense, let’s say. And then another problem might be, well what is the landscape of experience? And that’s more of a phenomenological problem. That’s the problem that phenomenologists set out. And then the other problem might be how do you and should you conduct yourself? And it could easily be that you can’t use the same tool to solve all of those problems. And I would say that’s particularly true technically when you’re dealing with science, because science by its very nature refuses to answer questions about what it is that you should do, apart from some implicit assumption that you should do science. Which is actually not, well that’s actually not a scientific assumption by the way, because it’s a moral assumption. And the moral assumption is that if you conduct yourself in a scientific manner, things will be better, right? Because why would you run around doing science to make things worse? Although you absolutely can. You absolutely can. And perhaps we are. And even if we aren’t, we still might. So that’s one of the things that I find quite interesting about the scientific endeavor. And this is something Jung observed, was that it has to be nested in something outside of itself to give it its mode of force. It has to be nested in a system of moral assumptions. And the fundamental moral assumption is the world will be a better place if we conduct ourselves along scientific lines, because otherwise why do it? And that’s a statement that cannot be analyzed from within the confines of the scientific worldview, because it doesn’t analyze those sorts of questions. Now you could say they’re not real, but that’s a stupid answer, because I think it’s a cop out. Maybe it’s not a stupid answer, it probably is. But at least it’s a cop out, because if you don’t take that question seriously, you can’t really justify engaging in the activity. And so you can refuse to answer it, but you’re basically answering it by engaging in the activity anyway, so even if you’re not saying it, you’re still justifying it. All right, so assuming that you can draw conclusions from people’s actions like you can from their statements, and it’s hard really to dispute that, I would say. If you’re wise, in fact, I think you derive more conclusions from their actions than from their statements. So okay, so that’s the underbelly of the first proposition, and the development of that is something like the means by which information is transmitted that is relevant to the domain of behavior is not the same means by which scientific information is transmitted. Now we kind of know that too, without any real debate, I believe, because how old do you think science is as a technical endeavor? What would you estimate? Hundreds of years. Maybe thousands of years if you’re willing to give the Greeks some credit. But really probably not, probably hundreds, because Aristotle wasn’t a scientist, like he wasn’t a bad observer, but he certainly was an empirical observer, and no one got science straightened out until it’s probably, what, Newton, Descartes, Bacon, and there’s a handful of other characters who were thinking around that period of time, and they sort of established the proper methods really, and also the philosophy that underlies. Not very old, 600 years, 500 years, man, that’s really nothing. It’s the blink of an eye. It’s yesterday, if that, it might even be like an hour ago. It’s nothing. But obviously people were transmitting information about how to act to each other for untold millennia before that, and it’s probably more like, it depends on what you’re willing to consider transmission of information. But even octopi can imitate, you know, so they’re the smartest invertebrates, they’re quite bright those things, they’re not exactly sure how smart. They only live a couple of years so they can’t really get things going, you know. But they can problem solve, they can pull corks out of bottles to get like a crab in a bottle, and then if they watch an octopus, if an octopus watches another octopus pull a cork out of a bottle to get a tasty crab, then that octopus now knows how to do it, which is pretty impressive. And you can kind of see why octopi might be able to do that, because not only do they have a brain, but they have little tentacly appendages which allow them to manipulate things. Right? And one of the precursors to being able to be intelligent in any active way is that you have to have tentacly appendages so that you can manipulate the world, right? And at least for it to be anything resembling what we would consider intelligence, and that’s part of the reason that dolphins really aren’t as intelligent as people like to think, because what are they going to do? They can’t build cities with their flippers, you know. They’re kind of trapped in their test tube bodies, and the same thing applies to whales. So obviously they have very large brains, and they’re very social, and they can learn, but whatever their intelligence is, it’s not like our intelligence, because we run around tearing things apart and putting them back together, and we’ve got the body for that. So, okay. So anyways, long before we were practicing science, we were doing perfectly well, in a sense, without any real knowledge of the objective world at all, or at least not any scientific knowledge of the objective world. And so another thing that you might observe about that is that you can survive perfectly well without knowing any science at all in an articulated and developed manner. Of course, animals are in that category. So that also, I think, in some sense, undermines the claim of science to anything approaching a universal truth, because obviously life can get along perfectly well without it. Now it depends to some degree on whether you’re a Darwinian or a Newtonian. Perhaps the unwillingness to comment on what people should do is more a feature of modern science than it is of science in general, because I’m thinking someone like Clifford, I don’t know if you know his essay on the ethics of belief. I don’t, no. Okay. Well, his maxim is that basically it’s wrong always for anyone everywhere to believe anything on institutional evidence. And he sort of tries to prove that. He’s a mathematician. He tries to prove it on a moral basis. Of course, it’s still not scientific, because that kind of claim can’t really be scientific. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously the people who began the scientific revolution thought of it as part of a moral movement, right? I mean, it was part of the Enlightenment. It was part of bringing clarity to our conceptualizations of the world, and that was supposed to be a positive thing. But the only issue is that claim seems to be outside of the claim of science in some sense. So anyways, you get the picture with regards to the argument. Okay, so now the next step might be, well, if you need or can utilize or there exists information that is not strictly scientific, one might be, well, where did that information come from? That’s a good one. How is it transmitted? That’s another one. And the worst of it is, of course, is how might it be verified? You know, because one of the issues, one of the things that scientists have really got down, and it’s a major deal, is that they can lay forth a theory of truth and then they can operate within that theory of truth and pretty much everybody can agree on what it is. Now, and the more well established the science, the more that’s the case. So like, people don’t really doubt Einstein’s, people really don’t doubt quantum theory anymore. And you guys don’t doubt it because there you are using your computers and you wouldn’t be able to use your computers if quantum theory wasn’t right. So you know, it’s certainly right enough. But even more impressively than that, whenever someone has tried to prove it wrong in any way, even in its most bizarre predictions, over the last hundred and some years it’s passed every test with flying colours. So you know, you can make pretty damn solid truth claims from within a scientific perspective. Now the problem is it’s a lot harder to do that from within a moral perspective and there’s all sorts of reasons for that. And one reason might be that there is a certain amount of situational complexity related to every moral question that you can’t reduce. So for example, imagine that you’re a clinical psychologist and you’re listening, I’ve been in this situation, and you’re listening to two people who know each other very well, maybe a husband and wife, discuss their last argument. And you might say, well you might think, well let’s get to the bottom of this, let’s find out what this argument is about. And you might think, if you were scientifically inclined, that it is in fact about something. Which means that if you investigated long enough, you could actually figure out what the facts are. But I actually don’t believe that’s true. And the reason I don’t believe it’s true is this. So imagine you have, there’s this old joke about these two friends, like they’re like 85 years old and they’re sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons. And one friend says to the other, 64, and the other guy cracks up and laughs like mad about that. And then the other guy says, 83, and the other guy cracks up and laughs like mad about that. And somebody’s watching them and wondering what in the world is going on. And so the person comes over and says to these old guys, well what’s the scoop here? All you’re doing there is sitting there saying memories to each other and then you’re laughing uproariously. I mean, I just don’t get it. And they say, well we’ve known each other for so long that we’ve heard each other’s jokes at least a hundred times. And so we have them completely memorized. So a couple years ago we decided we’d just number the damn things and it would take a lot less time to tell them and we could laugh more that way. And so, okay, it’s an interesting little joke because it sheds some light on the nature of deep relationships. And if you have a deep relationship with someone, well here’s how you can think about it. Imagine you’re trying to analyze an essay. Now I’ve actually built an essay writing module which is on my Psych 230 website. I don’t remember which template it is but I’ll tell you in a while. It’s based on this theory of meaning, roughly speaking. And you should use it to write your essay because if you do it’ll be a way better essay. So here’s the issue. When you’re reading an essay, where is the meaning? Well that’s a hard one because first of all it might be in many places. So the question might be badly formulated in some sense because it might be in many places. But let’s think it through logically. Well you need the letters if it’s written in an alphabetic script. And so obviously some of the meaning is in the letters. And then the letters are combined in certain particular ways and that gives you some words and then the words are combined in some particular ways and that gives you phrases. And the phrases are joined together in sentences and then the sentences are strung together in some reasonably coherent manner. So they kind of go from start to end in a paragraph and then the paragraphs are strung together in a coherent manner to make up the totality of the essay. And then one of the things I’ve noticed when I’ve been trying to figure out how to grade essays and how to assess them is that you can do a good or a bad job at any one of those levels. So like a really bad essay, it’s full of spelling mistakes, right? The words are inappropriate because the person doesn’t actually understand them so they’re awkwardly used. The phrases are put together in a cliched manner. The sentence structure isn’t good. The sentences aren’t even in the right paragraphs, much less organized properly. The paragraphs don’t flow from one to another in what might be called the, that’s kind of where the skeleton of the story is. It’s sort of the most important level in some sense. And then even if that wasn’t all wrong, there’s actually no idea there anyways. And then you can also read essays that have one or more of those flaws or some combination of all of them. And so very frequently I read a student’s essay and this often happens with smart, creative students who are very badly educated. And that would be probably 50% of the people in this class, I would bet. And I say that for genuine reasons because I run a fourth year seminar where I have people write extensively. And so what they do is they write a four page essay and then I complain about it at all those levels of analysis and then they write the same essay again in six pages and then I do the same thing and then they write the same essay in eight pages. And half of the first essays are terrible. And you know, that’s partly because students do triage, they think, well do I really have to work in this course? I’ll work a bit and see what happens and if I get slapped then I’ll work a little harder. If I don’t then I can devote my time to other courses which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But some of it is just pure inability. But what’s really fascinating is that by the end of the course all the students are writing well. And it’s pathetic as far as I’m concerned because it meant that everybody could have been taught to write ten years ago but they just weren’t. So anyways, if you look at this template that I laid out then it will help you with this because it walks you through the process of writing properly. And that’s an extraordinarily useful thing to be able to do. So anyways, so now and then I’ll read an essay and everything is wrong about it but there’s a really smart idea in it. And then knowing this multi-level idea with regards to meaning I can say, look, you’re smarter than you can write. And so there’s really something here but here’s all the things that are wrong with it. And then you get a worse situation in some sense where everything about the essay is good but the idea isn’t. And so the words are good and the phrases, the sentences are right. It goes together but it adds up to nothing and those are tough to grade because you give them a C maybe or a B because I’d probably give them a B. And the person comes up and says, where did I make a mistake? It’s like, well you didn’t really make a mistake, you just didn’t do anything right. You know, and that’s a whole different problem. Anyways, okay so you think that’s pretty complex with regards to an essay. Where’s the meaning? But that isn’t where the meaning is. So here, let me give you an example. I was thinking about this the other day. So the ethnicity and the cultural backgrounds of my students have changed quite radically over the years. So when I started teaching this course, for example, and my personality course as well, which would have been 30 years ago, I could take it for granted that everybody in the room would know the basic biblical stories and they would know the Judeo-Christian version of them, not say the Islam version of them. Well that’s gone. And so that’s really made it difficult for me in some ways because there’s a bunch of collective knowledge that might constitute a shared set of cultural assumptions that I can no longer presume. And it means there’s all sorts of things that I either can’t talk about or if I’m going to talk about, I have to step way back and start from first principles, let’s say. And so that’s also made me think. Because let’s say you write me an essay, and let’s say it’s a psychology essay, okay. Now you’re going to presume that there’s a whole bunch of things I know about psychology that you also know. And the reason you’re going to presume that is because we come from, for the purpose of this conversation, we come from the same cultural background. And what that means is we share a set of assumptions and we don’t have to say what those assumptions are. We can assume them and then we can talk about the things that we disagree about. And of course that’s what you’re doing when you’re writing an essay or having a conversation, right? You’re saying, well obviously we don’t have to talk about what we know because we already know it. We want to push that a little bit so we start to talk a little bit about the things that we don’t know, but no more so than we both understand. So then you think, well damn it, the meaning of the essay isn’t in the essay at all. It’s in the interaction between the shared cultural assumptions of the writer and the reader and the essay. Well and then you think, well it’s worse than that even because the shared cultural assumptions are in their own sort of network. And then that’s nested inside of a very broad historical network and then that’s nested inside an extraordinarily broad biological network. And it’s like actually you can continue expanding the outer reaches of the essay without limit. And so part of that means it’s actually impossible to specify the meaning of the essay. It’s something that you both work at in combination as writer and as reader, but it’s very fluid and flexible. That problem is actually partly why the postmodernists got going because they sort of noticed this. I mean corrupt as they are, they did notice at one point that it was very, very difficult to say what any given phrase, paragraph, or even essay meant because it wasn’t there. It’s not in the book. It’s sort of in the book. But you know this too if you listen to a piece of music. So let’s say you had a favourite song when you were fourteen, and when you first heard that song maybe you didn’t like it that much but then you heard it four times and you think, man that’s one excellent song and then at some point you’ve heard it so many times you never want to hear it again. And that’s interesting too because it means the song has transformed in relationship to your historical interactions with it. You might say, well no, the song is the same. It’s like, well it depends on what you mean by the song. The notes are the same. Experience is certainly transformed. So anyways, back to the couple that are sitting there talking, they’re having this argument and they’re trying to sort out what this is about. The problem is, well it’s about everything that the argument is about plus everything that’s ever happened to them in their relationship. Because you know, if someone has told you the same thing fifty times, it is not the same thing as the thing they told you the first time, right? Not only knows how many transformations it’s gone through as it’s been continually repeated and how many different arguments it’s been embedded in and how many things you have to know to understand the shades of intonation and all of that, but basically each utterance that a couple produces, its meaning is determined by the entire history of interactions that those two people have had. So how are you going to specify that? It’s very, very difficult to specify it. And it’s also difficult to know when you’ve specified it enough. You know, so one of the things that’s interesting about training as a psychoanalyst is that it starts to become absolutely mind-boggling how much archaeology you can undertake underneath a single statement, especially if it’s delivered with a bit of an edge and some contempt. It’s like there are just levels and levels and levels and levels and levels of meaning underneath that. And you can tell that when you’re engaged in an argument like that because someone will trigger you, let’s say, for lack of a better word, and they’ll have broken a rule that you’ve established with them and you’re both in a pit. And the fight is about that pit, even though maybe it’s about some surface thing, and you’re just running around there like rats that are lit on fire and there’s nothing you can do about it. And it’s a consequence of all the issues that are lurking beneath the surface of that speech act that seemed to be something… you could capture it on video. You’d say, well, here’s what you said. There’s a videotape recording of it. It’s like, no, that’s not what you said because the videotape does not capture the context and it can’t. So you can’t even get an objective record of the meaning of a conversation because the meaning isn’t right in the conversation. So that’s one of the problems with trying to validate moral claims is that you’ve got this insane contextual complexity that’s almost impossible to dispose of. And so you could even say that if person A did action A in situation A, that would be right, and if person B did action A in situation A, that would be wrong. It would depend on the person. And so it’s very easy to slip from that into a kind of moral relativism because how in the world do you deal with the complexity and how do you make a truth claim? And so I would really say in some sense that’s the intellectual situation in modern universities. Now the other thing that’s kind of interesting is this was actually discovered in a number of different fields simultaneously. So just as the literary theorists started to discover, say, after World War II that it was really… it wasn’t enough to say that a book has meaning in it, that there’s something wrong with that, and that there isn’t a single meaning, there’s a multiplicity of meanings, and it’s not even a stable multiplicity of meanings. People were finding that out in other domains as well. For example, in artificial intelligence, where it became very, very obvious very rapidly that perceiving a simple object was not simple because objects aren’t simple, and the border between one object and another is in some sense arbitrary. Right? When I look at each of you, I sort of see you as entities, right? But that’s because I see you at this level of resolution. You know, your cellular masses at a different level of resolution, your molecular composites at a different level of resolution. You’re made up of ten times as many bacteria as cells at another level of resolution. So really you’re more like an ocean than you are like an entity. And then, well, is it you or your family that’s the real? Or is it you, your family, and your culture? What about your species? Or are you a mammal? It’s like all of those things and any of those things at the same time. So when I look at you, what am I supposed to see? You know, do I see individual with name, or do I see ethnicity, or do I see… Well, you get the picture. So object perception turns out to be extraordinarily difficult because things aren’t just simple objects even if they’re relatively simple. Alright, so you throw up your hands, you think, well how can there ever be any harmony? How can you draw any sense out of that? Okay, so that’s the argument against drawing any sense out of it. But then let’s try the other tack. Let’s see if we can make a case for there being some sense to the claims of… that moral claims can be validated. Okay, so here’s a question for you. If you took a bunch of chimpanzees that didn’t know each other and you threw them in this classroom, what you would have is a war. Right. Now you’re roughly in that situation. Not exactly because, A, you’re not chimpanzees, but you know, your genetic material is quite reasonably related. I mean, you only split off your common ancestor seven million years ago, and that seems like a long time, and it is, but it’s not 300 million years ago, you know, it’s still relatively recently from the evolutionary perspective. Here you all are, you don’t really know each other. You obviously share important elements of identity, so you’re all students, but you can come in here and all of a sudden you all know what to do and no one fights. Or if they do fight, there are very constrained rules around the fighting and everyone accepts them. And it seems hard to say that that’s not better than the alternative. So you know, unless you want to come in here and have an abstruse, chaotic war. So somehow we’ve managed to figure out how we can at least bring relative strangers together in a relatively high pressure situation because we’re learning about complicated and challenging things and everybody gets along and everybody’s kind of happy about that. So it looks like we can figure out patterns of behaviour that, well, then the question is are they correct? Are they morally correct? Are they right or do they work? And then you might also ask yourself, well what’s the difference between all of those claims? Is there similarity or difference between those claims? And then you might ask yourself, okay, so here’s something else you might think about. So let’s say you’re playing Monopoly. How many of you have played Monopoly in your life? Okay, is there anyone here who hasn’t played Monopoly? Excellent. A cultural universal. So obviously in some ways it doesn’t matter if you get all those little hotels, right? But on the other hand, if you act like it doesn’t matter while you’re playing Monopoly, then people hit you with things and they should because part of the rule is you’re going to act like this matters because if you don’t then it’s not any fun. So you have to act like it matters and then it turns out that when you start playing it matters, right? And people will actually, they’ll get angry, especially if you cheat, you know, but people will play Monopoly so they’ll act as if the end point matters. And you might say, well what is the end point? One answer is to get all the hotels and all the money. So to enter the 1% so you have all the wealth and no one has any and you win and you feel happy about that, even if you’re a radical left winger. So that’s kind of interesting. And then you say, well that’s not really the point. The point is to enjoy the game. And you think, yeah, okay, that’s probably the point too. And then you might say, well that’s not really the point either. It’s like you want to hone your negotiating skills, you want to spend some time with your friends, there’s lots of things going on at once. But it doesn’t really matter because Monopoly is a game that you’ll play. Now imagine instead that Monopoly, here’s the new rule for Monopoly. All the people you’re playing with can randomly steal your hotels and houses and your money whenever they want. You can steal it back. So then you think, well, no one’s going to play that game. And then you think, well why not? Well, the first surface answer is that’s a stupid game. And you know that somehow, you think that’s a stupid game. But then you’re starting to think about, well why is that a stupid game? Or you might say it’s an unplayable game, which would be a little bit more sophisticated. Why would that not work? And you might say, well what’s the point in getting the hotels if someone can just take them? But you might say, well what’s the point in getting the hotels anyways? Who cares about the damn hotels? So it’s a bit tricky. There’s something about the randomness of what’s now allowed, and the unpredictability of it, and the arbitrary nature of it, and its lack of a relationship with your own actions that takes all the motivational impetus out of the game. So one thing we might think about to begin with is there’s a difference between a good game and a bad game. And there’s also a difference between a game and no game. And we don’t know what the difference is exactly, but there is a difference. And then we might even say, well not only are there good games and bad games, but some good games are better than other games. How many of you have played Settlers of Catan? Okay. Is that better than Monopoly or worse? It’s better. Does anybody think it’s not better? Okay, why is it better? What’s better about it? Yeah, there’s a robber. You can mess with people. So that’s fun. It is fun. It is. It’s like, I’m going to get you with this robber. It’s more akin to real life, I think. Like in Monopoly. No, that’s reasonable. That’s reasonable. That’s reasonable. It’s also got a strategic element. How many of you have played Risk? Okay. Settlers of a Catan or Risk? Settlers? Who says Risk? Okay, two Risk diehards. What about the rest of you? How many for Risk? Two. How many for Settlers of Catan? Okay, okay. So, well, Settlers of Catan is quite a bit like Risk because it has a strategic element, right? And there’s a territorial expansion that goes along with it. And there’s also trading, which is one of the things that’s nice about Monopoly and about Risk. Okay, but so you can see that you have intuitions about what constitutes a better game. And part of the way that you develop those intuitions is not exactly philosophically, because I doubt if you’ve really thought through why Settlers of Catan is a better game, say, than Risk or Monopoly, for those of you that think it is. But you watch your own reaction. And your own reaction is something like, well, I’d rather play Settlers of Catan. And you might ask yourself why, but you don’t have to. You can just rather play it. And then you think, well, what does it mean that you’d rather play it? You say, well, it’s more fun, it’s more enjoyable. If asked voluntarily, that’s the one I would pick. But you don’t really know why, apart from those reasons. But obviously those are complex, that’s a complex social engagement, those games. They’re complex. And in fact, they’re so complex that you can have preferences and not even know why. Now that’s interesting. And I think the idea that there are games, good games and bad games, and games and non-games is a nice way of starting to conceptualize what the difference might be between moral systems. Because a game is actually a moral system. It has a point, it has an end. You have to cooperate and compete to run through the game. So, a while back, a psychologist actually started this. And it’s reprehensible. But psychologists have done lots of reprehensible things, and this is one of them. This psychologist, whose name I don’t remember at the moment, was reviewing the literature on the difference in aggression between boys and girls and men and women. Boys and men are much more aggressive, depending on how you define aggressive, than girls and women. Now, that tends actually to be mostly true with physical aggression. So you might say kicking, hitting, biting, punching, stealing. Two-year-old boys, for example, the ones who do most of that are boys. Now, the two-year-old girls are cutting each other up behind their backs, but no one measures that. So you find, for example, with female aggression, it tends to be relationship savaging. And you see that in the playground, you see it in junior high, you see it in high school, and you see it on the net. It’s always the same thing. So whether men are more aggressive than women is, depends on how you define aggression, but men are more physically aggressive anyways. A while back, there was this idea that maybe we could dampen down the male aggression by socializing little boys more like little girls. And one of the offshoots of that was the idea that we should only allow children to play cooperative games. Now, the first thing you might notice is that anything you’ve ever done that was a game was not cooperative. Right, like it’s not a game if it’s just cooperative. But then the other thing you might notice is that the distinction between a cooperative and a competitive game is far more sophisticated than people who come up with those dim-witted theories about how to improve the world would ever appreciate. So here’s an example. Is hockey a game? Yes. Is it an aggressive game? Yes. Is it a competitive game? Yes. Is it a cooperative game? Sure. Aha! Why? Why is it a cooperative game? Because they don’t work together. Right! So there’s the team, right? Yeah. So you’re obviously cooperating with your team members, but you’re also maybe trying to be the best player. Yes. But you’re also trying to be the best player in a way that doesn’t irritate the hell out of your team players. Right? Because that’s actually… there’s something about that that’s counterproductive. Like, even if you’re a good player, if you’re a prima donna and you hog the puck, say, and you know, maybe you’re not interested in the development of your other team members, like, you’re not a good player, even if you’re the most talented. So there’s definitely a cooperative element. Is there a cooperative element beyond that? Well, yeah, you have to all agree to cooperate in so much as agreeing to the rules of the game and playing within it. Right! You don’t bring a chessboard or a basketball. Right! No matter if you’re on different teams. Right! Because you’re all there to play hockey. So just to play hockey is a cooperative endeavour, because think of all the other things you could be doing instead of playing hockey at that time. You could be doing an infinite number of other things. So, really, if you look at the relationship between cooperation and competition in any collaborative human affair, things are usually competitive at one level, cooperative at another, competitive at another. Like, there’s this continual interplay between competition and cooperation, and you can’t disentangle them. Now, one of the things that Piaget said, which Piaget, for those of you who don’t know, and you probably all do know, was perhaps the foremost developmental psychologist of the 20th century, even though he didn’t think he was a psychologist. Piaget actually made the claim, the radical claim, that two-year-olds, for example, and this isn’t Piaget’s claim, but it’s associated. If you put groups of people together and their age matched, so you’ve got a group of nine-month-olds, say, one-year-olds, two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds, all the way up to 18, and you just throw them in a room, maybe with some things for them to do, and then you count the number of violent acts, which is kicking, hitting, biting, or stealing. Two-year-olds, they’re the most violent human beings. Most of them actually aren’t violent. There’s a subset of them that are violent, about five to ten percent of them. Now, almost all of those are boys. Then if you track those boys across time, over the next two years, most of them become civilized. The ones that don’t never become civilized. They’re kind of antisocial throughout their childhood, and then when testosterone kicks in at about 14, and all the boys get antisocial again, they catch up to the always antisocial boys, and then the normal boys taper off quite dramatically at around 19 and flatten right out by about 27, but the antisocial boys, they just keep being antisocial. So, now, Piaget noted that there was a dramatic transformation in individual behavior in relationship to the social world between the ages of two and four. If you watch two-year-olds play together, he said that what they did fundamentally was like a parallel play. So maybe there’s one two-year-old there, and another two-year-old there, and that two-year-old is playing truck, and this two-year-old is playing ambulance or something, or maybe playing doll, and they’re sitting with each other, and maybe they interact a little bit, but they’re not playing the same game. Okay, so what they’re doing in some sense is they’re engaged in a goal-directed activity, and it has a point, and they’re sort of integrating all their interior sub-personalities, in a sense, in a way that allows them to play a single game with themselves. That’s pretty complex from a cognitive perspective, right, because it means they’re not fractionated, and they’re not being pulled out by hunger or anger or sadness or fear or any of those things, and they’re doing something that’s highly complex cognitively, and they can organize themselves well enough to do it for a substantial period of time, so it’s like it’s a major developmental advance, but they can’t do it with another person. Now one of Piaget’s hypotheses was that they couldn’t play the same game with another person, without actually setting up a competitive structure, so that actually competition was a prerequisite to cooperation, and so the idea was, okay, so if you watch how kids do this, you can get a sense of it. I mean, on the one hand, maybe they all get together and they decide to play tag, okay, and everyone knows the rules for tag, and you can win at tag, but without the point, the point in some sense is the construction of a dominance hierarchy of competence, right? Someone wins, and then there’s the people who are sort of second best and third best, and everybody’s really into doing that. You all have to get together if you’re kids, and you say, well, what should we do, and then you decide we’re going to play tag, and then you set up the rules, because there’s infinite variations of tag, and then everyone goes off and plays, and so it’s a competitive game, because only one person can win, or maybe one at a time can win, but once you’ve all agreed on that, well, then you’re cooperating, so that’s quite interesting, and PSJA regarded that as a necessary stage in the development of the ability to act like a social creature. And so here’s something that happens if you’re not a very popular kid. Let’s say four kids are playing jacks. Good enough. I don’t think kids play jacks anymore, but whatever. They were playing jacks. They were sitting there playing jacks, and when you play jacks, you bounce a ball, and you pick up a jack, and if you manage that, and the ball. If you manage that, then you drop the ball, and you pick up two jacks, and you grab the ball, and you keep going up to like eight jacks, or whatever. So now another kid wants to play jacks, and we’ll say this is a relatively popular kid, and so the kid sidles up to the group that’s playing and sits down, because they’re all sitting down, and then watches, and then maybe starts making jack playing motions, or a couple of comments about how the jack game is going, and then maybe the other kids don’t have to disrupt what they’re doing very much, and they can kind of open the circle and let that kid scoot in, and then he gets to, or she gets to play jacks too. Whereas a kid that doesn’t, and that often doesn’t happen, even if it’s a popular kid, sometimes the little group that’s already formed won’t open and let them in. You’ve been at cocktail parties. It’s exactly the same thing. Right. It’s exactly the same thing. So you’re supposed to hang around the edge of the conversation, and maybe if you’ve got something that isn’t too stupid to say, you can offer it, and maybe they let you in. Right. So, okay, so now if you’re not very social, what you do is you stand out there, and you don’t notice what the hell’s going on, and you don’t start to match your body to what’s happening, and maybe you say, I don’t want to play jacks. That’s a stupid game. Let’s go do something else. In which case the kids are not happy with you, and you’re unpopular, and that’s that. You’re stuck with it, because if you got that by the time you’re four, about the time the other kids are going to leave you so far in the dust, you’re never going to catch up. Okay, so what have we concluded from that? We might conclude that people play games, there’s lots of different games, there’s lots of different playable games. There might even be an infinite number of playable games. There’s a lot of non-playable games, those are the ones that aren’t any fun, and there’s a lot of interactions that aren’t games. Okay, so we can all accept that. And then we’ve added to that the observation, or the presupposition, that the ability to play games is a prerequisite for being socialized, so being able to operate together with people, and that that operation has elements of competition and elements of cooperation. Reasonable? And then you might say, well, everything people do communally has a game-like aspect. And you might say, well, that’s actually why kids like to play games. Because kids play games because games are a simplified analog of life. And if you get good at playing games, well, what happens is the games you play become increasingly complex and more and more real-world-like until they’re actually indistinguishable from acting in the world. But even then, there’s still games in a sense because the rules could be different. But then you might think, well, are there things that couldn’t be different? And yeah, there are some things. It’s going to be cooperative. It’s going to be competitive. There’s going to be rules. Everybody needs to agree on the rules. People have to want to play. This is something else Piaget observed. It’s bloody brilliant. He thought, well, how could you decide if one game is better than another? And that’s a moral claim in a sense. But he wanted to narrow it down so that it was possible that it could be answered. And what he said was, okay, well, imagine you have group A that are attempting to attain a goal and group B that are attempting to attain a goal. Both groups have agreed that attaining the goal is valuable. We don’t have to argue about the value of the goal. We’ve settled that. Okay, now we’re going to make a further assumption, which is all things considered, getting towards the goal with less effort, more enjoyment, and less trouble would be better. Okay, you have to take that as a given because it might not be. Sometimes something difficult is better. Well, then you might say, okay, would people working voluntarily or involuntarily be more likely to reach that goal with less misery, faster, and more effectively? And Piaget’s answer was, if you can get people to play the game voluntarily, you don’t have to waste effort on enforcement. No one kicks back, so the system is going to be more efficient across time. Now that’s smart because he’s got a way of conceptualizing what might constitute a better system. Now it’s grounded in subjective experience to some degree, less misery, more enjoyment. But there’s also a way of measuring it, which is it’s also more efficient, you know, or it does what it’s supposed to do with less noise and grief, less cost, let’s say, something like that. So that’s pretty smart. Okay, so then let’s make another… well, how old do you think kids’ games are? And I don’t know what’s happened to kids in recent years because their culture in some ways has been seriously disrupted by television and computers. But you guys are a lot younger than me. Did you play hide and go seek? Okay, do you know Ring Around the Rosie? You know that. Do you know what that is? You don’t know Ring Around the Rosie. How many people don’t know that Ring Around the Rosie, Pocket Full of Posies, Hush-a-hush-a, We All Fall Down? Okay, how many know that? It’s an English nursery rhyme. It’s about the plague. It’s about the black plague, by the way. And so that piece of dog roll, that piece of rhyme has been around, transmitted by the oral culture of children since the time of the black plague. So a lot of children’s tradition is an oral tradition, and a lot of the games that children play are passed along by children. You know, adults might also teach them, but kids learn how to play hide and go seek. And how many of you play tag? Right, anyone never play tag? Right, so everyone plays tag. How would you conceptualize tag if you were a biologist? What do you think children are doing? They’re hunting. Right, they’re chasing things down, obviously. They’re chasing things down. Now hide and go seek, well that’s a tougher one, but it’s certainly exploration. They’re exploring a landscape, right? And they’re matching wits against one another, and they’re also trying to see if, you know, do people like you enough to actually find you, which is a helpful thing to know if you’re four years old. So anyways, children pass these games down across, let’s say, across the centuries. And maybe tag is one of those games that you wouldn’t even have to pass down. Children might just invent it spontaneously with every generation, because you can more or less play tag with a dog. You know, I mean, the dog doesn’t quite get it, but it’s close. Okay, so there are some games that are enjoyable enough so that they’re either transmitted and everyone learns them very rapidly, or they’re so close to our nature that we can just reinvent them. And tag, I think, is the classic example of that. So that’s interesting too, because what it means is that there are certain types of competitive and cooperative behavior. Those are elementary moral systems that look like they’re integral to our nature. Now, you could even say they’re built right in, or you could say they’re so close to built in that it doesn’t take much of an introduction to the rules of the game before everybody’s pretty happy with it. You see this with a lot of things. You play peek-a-boo with a baby. Okay, so what are the rules? What are the rules of peek-a-boo? What’s that? You cover your eyes. Yeah, okay, so that’s right. So you go like this. Okay, then what’s the next rule? You reveal your eyes. That’s right, you reveal your eyes. You don’t just sit there like this. Now, you know, you can play a trick on a baby if you want, and babies will laugh about this sort of thing, which is really, I think, really quite amazing. A baby’s laugh is something remarkable to me. So you can go like this, and then like this, and then like this, and then like this, and then like this, and then you can do this, and the baby will laugh. That’s a little variation, eh? Or you can go like this. Right, and then the baby, well, that’ll even make you guys laugh. So that’s good. You can see how deeply rooted this is. So, you know, but eventually, what will the baby do? They’ll grab your hands, right, pull them down, because you’re breaking the damn rules. And the baby knows the rules, even though you’ve never established any rules, and you can get the rules going with about five reps, right? You say, okay, this. Maybe no one’s ever played peek-a-boo with a baby. The baby figures it out right away. This, this, and then you vary that. Maybe do that. That baby thinks that’s a hell of a good joke, you know, because he went up instead of down. And so it’s variations within this rule-bound theme. It’s kind of like musical in a sense, right? It’s variations within the theme. Now, what you don’t do is go… Raa! Because the baby, that’ll just short it right out, you know? So you don’t do that, unless you’re, you know… Unless you have an evil streak in you. So there’s certainly ways of violating the baby’s expectations. And what the baby will do if you do that is startle, and they startle with their whole bodies, and then look at you, and then probably they’ll burst into tears. But some babies will just laugh like mad if something like that happens. And you can find those babies all over YouTube, right? Because you get the baby that the mother sneezes, and the baby has a fit laughing for like ten minutes, you know? But it’s quite interesting. One of the things about babies I’ve never been able to understand is the staggering sophistication of their senses of humour. And it’s deep, eh? Because even a nine-month-old baby can play tricks on you. So, you know, they’re baby tricks, but still they’re tricks, and they laugh, and they’re quite comical, and they like variation. So anyways, the point is, one of the points of all this is, this understanding of game-like structures is really, really, really, really, really, really deep inside of us. And it’s way before articulation. You know, it’s way before we can say the rules. Babies can pick up the damn rules right away. And it’s kind of a dance in some sense. And a dance is also a rule-bound structure. Like if you’re dancing with someone well, there’s rules, like don’t step on their feet. But you also set up a set of expectations in the dance, and then you violate them in tandem. And if you can do it gracefully, then it’s fun, you know? And maybe the person you’re dancing with can figure out if you’re an absolute klutz and, you know, so autistic that you can’t even get outside of yourself, and might make a half-reasonable partner, or if it’s just hopeless. So, but the dance is the same thing. It’s not negotiated verbally. It’s negotiated bodily. And unless we were able to imitate, and imitate insanely well, because human beings can imitate like mad, we wouldn’t be able to do that. And so babies are the same way. You basically start, you don’t actually, peek-a-boo doesn’t have rules. Because a rule is a stated description of a set of expectations. What peek-a-boo has is expectations and repetition. And you can violate the expectations, but that doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rule. Because an expectation is not a rule. It’s not a rule until you observe the expectation. You describe what it is and maybe you even write it down. And you can play games long before, long before you can follow rules. And one of the things Piaget observed is if you take kids, if you watch a bunch of kids playing a complicated game like marbles, and they’re like six, and you take them out of the game and you ask them what the rules are, they can’t tell you. Or they maybe get some of them right and a bunch of them wrong. Maybe if you interviewed every child that was playing and you looked at the commonality of description, you could extract out the underlying rule structure of the game. But the kids don’t know the rules. What they know is how to play with other kids when they’re playing marbles. And a lot of that’s non-verbal hints and eyebrow raises and no, you can’t do that and so forth. And it isn’t until much later that they can tell you the rules, if ever. So, like you know, you guys can’t tell me the rules for dancing successfully with someone. You can tell me some stupid things you shouldn’t do, but you imagine how complex it is. It’s very, very difficult to articulate out the whole structure. But you can sure tell when it’s happening and you can sure tell when you’re not doing it or maybe your partner isn’t. So partly what that also means is you know how to do things that you don’t know how you know how to do. And you know how to do all sorts of things that you don’t know how you know how to do. In fact, most of what you know is like that. And so that also means that we can be playing games that are extraordinarily sophisticated and that maybe are rooted way back in history that we don’t understand. But that doesn’t mean, like that we can’t describe at least. We don’t have an articulated knowledge of the structure. But we can still play them. Now, I don’t know if you know this or not, but you might know it. A while back, 20 years ago, about that, those massive online multiplayer games started to become popular. And you know, some of them, I think, although I don’t know this for sure, some of them lasted a long time and maybe some of them were still being played, like the early ones. You know, so they developed entire worlds in there. And you know, there was an economist who became quite famous because of those games, Castroneva. I think his name was Edward Castroneva. I think that’s right, but it’s close. Anyways, he tried, he thought, hey, look, man, those aren’t games. Those are countries. And so one of the things he tried to do was to calculate their gross national product. And you know, you can trade items in those little worlds, right? And you could sell them on eBay, for example. And for a while, in this one game, and maybe this still happens, there were young people in the Philippines who were working inside these games making artifacts that they were selling on eBay to other game players because they could make more money doing that than they could actually working in the actual world. Well, and so Castroneva, I think was his name, said, well, you don’t get it, that is the real world. Like, that’s not a game. Or if it’s a game, it’s so much like the world that it’s part of the world. And so he calculated the gross national product of some of these massive games. And they were like the 30th richest country in the world. It was insane. And so that’s interesting, because that also shows you that the line between a game and reality is not clear. So here’s another example of that, something worth thinking about. Some of you have no doubt played very well, but I think you’ve probably seen a lot of people Some of you have no doubt played very complex multiplayer online games. And I suppose those, most of those are adventure games or quest games, and you have to communicate with other people, and you have to solve problems, and you have to, you know, maybe you have to defend yourselves. It’s like you’re an exploratory party in a new world, something like that. And so it’s pretty sophisticated. Now, okay, and some of you have worked at McDonald’s or another fast food restaurant. How many of you have worked at a restaurant? Okay, how many at a fast food restaurant? Okay, would you say that an online game is more like the world, or less like the world, than your job at a fast food restaurant? More. It’s more. Okay, anybody disagree? Okay, why is it more like the real world? Because you do more complex stuff. What are you doing? You’re exploring, you’re thinking, you’re getting out of situations, because you always have new situations coming up, and you’re dealing with them, and you’re learning. Fast food is like, you’re doing the same thing online. Right, you’re a real cog in a fast food machine, right? Yeah, but it’s in the real world. Is it a game? You’re more like a machine in the fast food world. Right, right, right. So does that mean that McDonald’s is less real than a multiplayer online game? It’s less cognitively complex. Well, it’s a tough one, eh, because when you’re trying to think about what real means, you might think, maybe I phrased that wrongly, maybe I could say, is McDonald’s a worse model of the real world than a multiplayer online game? And it’s hard, because it’s hard to say that McDonald’s isn’t part of the real world. So, like a priori, the claim is kind of absurd. It’s like, well, you’re in a building, people actually come there, they give you money, it’s real. But then, well, you think about these complex games, and you think, well, you’re practicing extraordinarily sophisticated forms of social and intellectual behaviour, and we actually don’t know what that does to people. Maybe it makes them extraordinarily sophisticated and social. I do think that it helps with introverts quite a lot. You know, because introverts, it’s harder for introverts to become extremely socially fluid, because people wear them out. But a lot of introverts do a lot of heavy-duty socialising on the net, in my experience, in my experience, is being that it’s, you know, all things considered, it’s probably a plus rather than a minus. With regards to your use of computational devices, because you grew up with them, one of the things I used to see my kids doing is they would sit together in a group. They were teenagers. And there’d be a bunch of their friends that weren’t there, and while they were interacting with all their friends who were there, they were also interacting with all their friends who weren’t there. Is that a common thing for teenagers to do? Texting your friends that aren’t there and so forth. Is that reasonably standard behaviour? How many of you have done that? Okay, how many of you have done that regularly? Okay, how many of you haven’t done that? Okay, okay, so most people have done it, but not everyone. For those of you who have done it, is that more advanced or less advanced social behaviour? Okay, you think more. Why? Because you’re keeping your friends in the room while they’re not there. So it’s like they have a conceptual idea of what you’re doing, and they understand where the group dynamics are moving towards without them actually having to be there. Okay, do you think that you paid a price for it in the decrease of the intensity of the social interactions you were having with the people who were actually there? You don’t think so? You think so? Okay, how many people think they do pay a price for it? Okay, how many people think they didn’t? Okay, so let’s start with you guys then, because you’re in a minority. So why do you think you didn’t pay a price for it? Okay. Okay, so you’re kind of taking a multitasking rationale for it in some sense, although assuming also that you have to heighten your attention to manage that. So there’s people who didn’t think that you did pay a price for it. Who thought that? Okay, what sort of price? Okay, so they certainly lose something. What about you while you’re interacting with your actual present friends? So for example, if they’re talking about something, then you can go and have a text with them, and then you text them, and then you come back and miss some part of it. Yeah, so it’s like, start-stop. I don’t think you can 100% commit yourself to doing that. Well, and one of the things you suggested was that some of that can be mitigated by doing it properly, which implies that there’s an emergent norm for doing this sort of thing, and that if you’re good at complying with the norm, then you’re not going to be irritating people, and maybe you can handle both things at once, something like that. Well, I guess one answer to that would be that’s up to them to determine. Like, if they don’t want to be part of it, then they can go do something else. And the reason I’m saying that specifically is because you can imagine that that’s how the norm develops. It’s like, obviously, if a successful norm is going to develop that allows for text conversation and real-world conversation to occur at the same time, everybody has to want it to happen. And so that means that if you can’t do it in the manner that everyone wants, it’s going to die out. Now, see, that’s another example of how you can start thinking about how moral structures might, I think, evolve is the right way of thinking about them, because I think moral structures evolve. And I think they’re just as real as anything else that evolves. Now, evolved things can be staggeringly complex, right? I mean, just think about how many life forms there are, and how many different niches there are for those life forms. And so you have, in some sense, an infinite variety, but it’s not infinite. And it follows patterns. Not just any old thing can be alive, and not just any old thing can be social. So here’s an example. And I found this out a while back. I did a lot of neurobiological research, some of it hands-on, a lot of it conceptual, especially in the early days of my graduate work. I got really interested in the function of serotonin. You all know, undoubtedly, that one of the things antidepressants do is decrease the rate at which serotonin is pulled back up into the neurons that deliver it, and that seems to help stabilize people’s negative emotion. Makes them less volatile, less anxious, less likely to withdraw. Or you could say it makes them more confident. Now, we also know that if you look, say, at a chimp hierarchy, if you take bottom chimp and you give him antidepressants, then he starts acting a lot more like top chimp. Because the bottom chimp’s world is a very dangerous place. It’s very uncertain. He doesn’t have a very good place to sleep. He doesn’t have high quality mates. He doesn’t have good things to eat. He’s stressed, man. It’s bad down there. And so maybe that’s part of the reason his nervous system is tuned so that he’s more anxious and upset by everything, because everything actually is more dangerous. Part of that’s modulated by serotonin. Okay, so here’s a rough rule. If there’s a hierarchy in an animal kingdom, as you move up the hierarchy, your serotonin levels increase, and as you move down the hierarchy, your serotonin levels decrease, and that’s somewhat independent of your absolute wealth. So here’s a famous experiment. It’s called the Whitehall experiment. And it was done on English bureaucrats. And the thing that’s so cool about the Whitehall experiments is they were done 50 years apart. And so what they showed basically was, so imagine you take an English bureaucracy, and you stratify it by position, you know, Englishmen are hierarchical, and so you stratify it by position, you have the top people and the bottom people, and then you look at the death rates, and what you find is the bottom people die faster and more often. Now you might say, well that’s partly because if you’re not that healthy, you end up at the bottom, fair enough, but there seems to be an effect over and above the effect of just general health. It’s worse to be at the bottom than at the top. Okay, that was true 70 years ago, and then the study was done again 50 years after that. Now the thing that’s so cool is that by that time, from a material perspective, the people who were at the bottom of the modern hierarchy were at least as wealthy, roughly speaking, as the people who were like two-thirds of the way up 50 years before, right? Because, you know, everybody had running water. That’s a good thing. Everyone had enough heat for the winter, you know. Everyone had shelter and so on. So, you know, and you figure with regards to wealth, once you’ve got running water, reliable shelter, heat, and maybe air conditioning if you live in the desert, and you’re not hungry, it’s like you’ve got 90 percent of what wealth can deliver. Really, all things considered. The rest of it is status and luxury items. But the relationship between positional status and death rates remain constant. So that’s very interesting, and we know that that’s true from a lot of other studies as well. It’s like control for absolute wealth, there’s still a problem with hierarchy, and that seems mediated at least in part by serotonin, and serotonin regulates negative emotion. And the more negative emotion that you experience, the more cortisol you produce, and cortisol in high levels is toxic and it suppresses your immune system, so your brain gets damaged and you gain weight and you get diabetes, and maybe you develop Alzheimer’s disease and you’re more prone to cancer and heart disease and all of those things, and so that’s just not so good. Now that that serotonergic mechanism is really old, and so you can give serotonin injections to unhappy lobsters, and it cheers them right up, at least behaviorally speaking, if they’re defeated in a fight, and you give them a serotonin injection, they’ll stand up tall, confident, and they’ll fight again. Now, I’m telling you that for a very specific reason, because one of the things we’ve been asking about is, well, how might you conceptualize moral systems, and then how might you conceptualize their evolution? And one of the propositions was, there are playable games and non-playable games. Well, here’s a playable game, Dominance Hierarchy. We’ve been playing it for 400 million years. It’s stable. Now, it’s so stable that even lobsters have them, but even worse, it’s so stable that the biochemical systems that the lobsters use to act within the Dominance Hierarchy and react to, it’s the same as it is in us. And so, not only is that stable, it’s, well, it’s ridiculously stable. So, one of the things we could say is, well, one of the games that seems emergent and real is the Dominance Hierarchy. Well, and then we might ask, well, what exactly constitutes a Dominance Hierarchy? And then we might also ask, well, what constitutes a highly functional Dominance Hierarchy versus a dysfunctional Dominance Hierarchy? And even what does highly functional versus dysfunctional mean? Well, we have to define all those terms, but we will as we move forward. But you see, the point I’m making is that there, and this is a bit of a contradiction with the initial statement I made that there is a tight distinction between the scientific world and the objective world, because I’m also talking about the evolution of games, and, you know, evolution, the study of evolution is obviously a scientific study. And the Dominance Hierarchy is a biological phenomena, but in some sense it’s also a game, and it’s also a moral structure. So there are levels of analysis where these things start to get tangled together, and that’s partly what we’re going to try to sort out. So, we’ll do that in the future, because it’s very, very complicated. Alright. Now we’re going to step back a little bit. In fact, we’re going to take a break, because this is a very important topic.