https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DmpUQEDRIKA
So, I want to talk about some more attributes of this structure. Okay, now, broadly speaking, what we’re going to say is that a motivation sets up one of these frameworks. I’m going to call this framework a story. Now, there’s lots of things you could call it. You could call it an expectancy model. You could call it a game. I’m going to call it a story, and we’re going to say, well, what you do is you have a life story and your life story is composed of nested sub-stories. You could also think of it as a personality, but a story is like a personality in action. So we’ll just stick with story. The story has a starting place, that’s where you are, and the story has an end point, that’s where you’re going. And you’re always in one of those stories, or you’re asleep. So you’re either pursuing something in the real world that is of value, that’s directly motivated, or you’re pursuing another situation where the reason you’re pursuing it is because it fulfills a bunch of motivational states now and into the future. So that’s what you’re doing, say, when you pursue a career. And if you’re not doing that, then your mind is wandering, and what it’s doing is it’s wandering through the space of hypothetical worlds where you can play hypothetical roles. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re asleep. So you’re in one of these all the time. Now they shift, and that’s one of the things that’s quite interesting about them. The shift can take place on all sorts of levels. You can differently conceptualize the way where you are. You can differently conceptualize where you’re going, and you can differently conceptualize how you’re going to get there. Now, I won’t go into that for the moment. So let’s say you’re going from point A to point B, and at the highest level of resolution that means that you’re acting. And then other things that happen is not only are you acting, you’re configuring your perceptions. We already talked a little bit about this. You know what you should highlight, what you should bring your high resolution thinking to bear on, and you know what you should ignore. And what you should ignore is those things that are likely to remain constant as you pursue this set of transformations, or that aren’t going to interfere with what you’re doing. And so you just have to concentrate, especially if you set your environment up properly. And that’s another thing. Part of the way that people deal with the complexity of the world is by just not having it around. So for example, even if you look in this room, a lot of things are radically simplified so that you don’t get overwhelmed. How many of you have computers here? Okay. Now what does your computer look like? Keyboard, screen, what about the rest of it? Flat, shiny, aluminum. Why? Because you want to act like that’s one thing. You don’t want to act like it’s… how many transistors are on a chip now? Like a billion or more. A lot. Like they’re down to molecular size, those things. They’re so small now. This is really funny. They’re so small now that… so imagine electrons running along a wire. Now the weird thing about an electron is it might be there and it might be somewhere else. So it’s got this vague non-locality about it. You know, like maybe it’s supposed to be there but it’s actually over there. That would happen now and then. But the wires are so damn thin now that there’s some good probability that the electron will be outside the wire. And that causes short circuits. So that’s quite… well, so you’ve got quantum level complexity mucking up your circuitry in your computer. But look, the computer is designed this way, right? It’s designed so you can ignore it. The outside of it is a flat shell. It’s a low resolution image. And not the keyboard because you have to move it, not the screen, but everything else is like flat. The designer, the primate designer of this computer does not want your poor primate brain to be overwhelmed by the fact that this thing is incomprehensibly complex. Cars are the same. They have that nice shiny shell on them so that you can just sort of low resolution it and that’s good enough. The wall is painted roughly the same colour. Like we’re doing a lot of things around us to reduce the sensory load. Plus, there are people beadling away at the background like mad, making sure the lights stay on, making sure the heat stays on, you know, making sure that you have air in here, the place isn’t burning down. There aren’t crazy people wandering around here with shotguns and rifles. There’s a lot going on so that you can sit here and pretend that you know enough to stay alive. So we’re also removing a tremendous amount of complexity as a consequence of social cooperation. So these are all parts of the way that you simplify the world. You’re in a radical simplification structure. That’s the external society. Then within that there’s only certain things you want. And then within that there’s only certain things you can detect. And then within that there’s only certain features that pop out as necessary to contemplate in the realm that you’re dealing with. Now one thing you might ask is, well what time span are you usually dealing with? You know, because what the world’s made of depends on the time span. And that’s a tough one. We know that it’s more than one tenth of a second. But you can think years into the future, right? So I might say, well why are you going to university? Or I might say, what are you doing right now? And then the answer would be, well I’m sitting in class. And then the question would be, well why are you sitting in class? And the answer to that would be, well because I want to take this course. And why? Well it’s because I want to get my degree. Why? Well because I want to be prepared for a career and a productive and high quality life when I get out. Well why? Well you know, you can keep saying why pretty much indefinitely. And as you answer, you go farther and farther out in time scales. Now it’s a tricky thing because one of the things I might tell you, this is a very complex cognitive problem, is where should you stop? So for example, I could say to you, do you want 100 now. Well how about 200 years? It’s like, well I’m not going to be there. I’ll take the $100 now. So obviously thinking out 200 years is not that helpful. Now you might think, well no, you should calculate the effects of your actions on the vastest time span possible and include the largest number of people if you’re really going to equilibrate it. But the problem is you can’t do the computations. Because you get this thing called combinatorial explosion happening, which is like a chess board. You make one move, okay fine. But then you could make four, and then with each of those you could make four more, and then with each of those you could make four more. And soon if you’re looking 20 moves ahead, it’s like there’s so many moves that the other person could possibly make that looking that far ahead is pointless. You can’t do the computations. And so we don’t know how far you should look into the future. It depends on how stable your environment is. But one month seems okay. A year, yeah. Three to five years, that’s what I’ll have you do when you do the future authoring program. Twenty years? Hmm. Probably not. And the reason for that is the margin of error in your prediction grows so large that your prediction isn’t worth anything. And you can really see how that’s the case now. Because like, what’s it going to be like in 20 years? When I was a kid I used to read science fiction. It was like plausible accounts of the potential future. It’s like, now? Who knows? Anything could happen. Anything could happen. You know, you could be three quarters robot in 20 years. You could have a lifespan of 10,000 years. We just do not know. We could be living in caves again with everything in ruins. We don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. So 20 years span, I would say get friendly with computers. So 20 years span is too long. So okay, anyways, what I’m pointing out is that you have to calculate what you’re doing across multiple spans of time and in combination with many, many people. And that makes things very complex. But that’s how you’re building the structures that you live with. Alright, so back to this. You’re at point A, you’re going to point B. So you are somewhere. Now that’s interesting. You are somewhere. Now generally what people think about when they think about being somewhere is that they’re in a place. But you’re not just in a place. You’re in a place at a time. And I really want to stress that. We know that the universe, we know that the environment is four dimensional, not three dimensional. And that’s important because you can be in the same place and in the next second you’re still where you were but you’re in a completely different place. So for example, if someone walked in here with a pistol, this would not be the same place. Okay, so there’s a reason I’m telling you that. And then there’s the future. And that’s also a place in time and a place in space. Okay. Now you’re getting from one point to the other. And you’re going to do that by implementing certain behaviours. Now you might say, what can happen while you’re doing that? Well here’s three things that can happen. The thing you want, that can happen. Something you don’t want but that you understand, and something you don’t understand at all. Something completely beyond your comprehension. And that would generally be a traumatizing event of some force. So you can either know what’s going to happen or you can not know but still be able to cope with it or you can not know and not cope with it. And of the negative ones, they correspond to that hierarchy. If it’s a little thing that you don’t understand, you just modify a little behaviour. If it’s a big thing that you don’t understand, well then what? Well then everything falls apart. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going, and all the behaviours you have are not helpful. And that’s when your world falls apart. So generally that doesn’t happen. So I want to walk to the, let’s say I set my target on the door, I’m going to walk to the door. So here’s what happens. Instantly I’m slightly, I have slight negative emotion about the fact that any of you people in the way exist. Because what my brain is doing is reconfiguring the world to chart a straight path and anything that’s in the way is going to make me uneasy, frustrated, disappointed, anxious. And you can think about this when you do house design, by the way. So when you’re setting up a room, what you want to do is figure out what the room is for. Then you want to clear the paths for that. Because then when you walk into the room, the room will say, welcome, you can do the things you want to do here easily. And if you don’t do that, it’s all cluttered up. It’s like there’s no difference between that and being confused mentally. It’s exactly the same thing. So okay, so let’s say now I stand up and that works and then I walk that way and that way and that way. I keep my eyes on the door and I’m getting towards the door. Well I’m moderately positive about that because I’m getting where I’m going, but I’m also moderately positive about it because the fact that I’m getting where I’m going validates my whole theory. So one of the things that the behaviorists didn’t get right when they were thinking about punishment, if an animal lays out a behavior and you punish it, it’ll stop manifesting that behavior. But that isn’t all that happens. You think about punishing a human being. They stop manifesting the behavior. But the behavior isn’t the whole damn thing. The thing they’re in is this. It’s the whole thing. It’s a conception of where they are. It’s a conception of where they’re going and it’s all the behaviors that they might need to get there. So maybe they’ll try to circumvent the punishment, walk around it. Maybe they’ll try a few more behaviors. But what happens? So I’m tied by a chain and I don’t know it. I’m tied by a chain to the wall. I start walking that way and I figure out that I’m chained. Well so much for that stupid theory. I’m not getting to the door. I’m going to let that view of the world disintegrate. I’m going to be very upset about that. And then I have to come up with another one which might be, well how do I get rid of the chain? So when you fail, two things happen. The behavior that you’re manifesting doesn’t work. That’s the whole behaviorist routine. But it’s worse than that because the whole little personality that you’re using to construe the world falls apart. And the more important the thing is that has fallen apart, the more of a catastrophe it’s going to be for you. Okay so let’s say you’re going to medical school. That’s what you want to do. All right so you’re taking the course to write the exam, to pass the course with an A, to apply to medical school, to get into medical school, to become a doctor. You fail the test. What just happened? Well did your whole future fall apart? Or did you just fail the test? Well who knows right? Maybe your whole future just fell apart. Now you have a GPA of 3.3. It’s like nope, you have to go to the Caribbean to a private medical school. You’re not going to get in anywhere in Canada or the United States. It’s like okay, is your life over? Do you jump off a bridge? Well sometimes people do. And it’s because the little sub-personality that they created, which is the me that will be a doctor, it’s one of these things, the little story, it’s so integral to their entire identity that when it collapses, they’re done. And people get suicidal when that sort of thing happens. Okay so what are you supposed to do when that happens? Well that’s something that we’ll talk about. From the perspective of mental hygiene, one of the things I would recommend is that when things go wrong for you, you start at the highest level of resolution in your hierarchy and work upward. You don’t say, well God, now everything’s over. You might say, okay, what can I do to ensure that I do better on the next test? So then you could analyze your sub-routines, your micro sub-routines. How much do you study a day? Well sometimes people will tell me, I study six hours a day. It’s like no you don’t. You sit in front of what you’re supposed to be doing for six hours a day, but if you actually study for more than three, I would be shocked. Because I’ve met almost no one in my entire life who can sustain high level concentration for more than three hours, for more than six days a week, for more than a year. So just burn yourself to a crisp. So no, you’re diluting yourself into thinking that you’re studying for six hours a day. You’d be way better off to cut it down to two and a half and actually do it. There’s micro-routine analysis that you can do. So that might be helpful. Then you can implement that and run it. That’s what you do if you’re a behavioral psychologist. Someone comes and says, my life’s over. And you say, well let’s go for the micro-routines. What do you mean? Well they say, well I can’t be a doctor. Well okay, could you be a nurse? Would that work? Could you be a medical technician? You know, could you be a social worker? Et cetera. Okay, so your domain is helpful medical type of person. Well one element of that is doctor, but it doesn’t exhaust the entire realm of possibilities. So I’d say like, flex up a bit. It’s not the only path. And so that would be a more high level adjustment. That would be more cognitive adjustment if you were in cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s like, let’s check out your sub-routines, make you more effective at studying, but you know, let’s loosen up your top level abstractions. You should be a good person, let’s say. Whatever you decide that means. One element of that is be productively employed in a way that doesn’t make you bitter and nasty. Okay, doctor might be one way of solving that, although I wouldn’t be so sure about that. But it’s not the only way of solving it. So, alright, you go from point A to point B, and things can happen along the way. Things you like, positive emotion. You’re getting there, plus you’re right. Things that produce negative emotion. You’re not getting there, okay. You can either solve them easily, small behavioral adjustment, or you have to go up the hierarchy of value and adjust it with the least possible damage, generally speaking. Because that’s another rule of thumb in therapy. It’s like, I can’t be a doctor so I’m going to be an engineer. It’s like, well, no. You’ve got three years behind you. Don’t just throw it away. Use what you’ve already got. Make a minor course deviation if you can do it. Maybe we could talk about broader scale transformations, but they’re costly. Take as close to the path as you can while altering it enough so that you proceed on to your final goal. And that leads us, and I think this is where we’ll stop today, that leads us to the next part of the story. So, here’s the kind of story that someone can tell. I was at point A and I went to point B and here’s how I did it. And you’re pretty happy about that story. Maybe you go on YouTube, and I found this a year ago. I had this old car and I wanted to put a stereo in it. And so I typed in how to put a stereo in X old car and there was some helpful retired southern guy who made a YouTube video out of it. And I was interested in his little story because he put a car stereo, he didn’t have a car stereo in his car, and he wanted one, and I didn’t have a car stereo in my car, and I wanted one. So his little story about how to do that was very interesting to me. So I ran the little tape and I did it. Great. Not particularly transformation, but good enough. Good enough. I got some information. Alright, so that’s an alright story and you’re running around all the time interfacing with other people and you’re telling them your little story and they’re telling you their little story. But, you know, so that’s one thing that interests people, how to do something successfully. But a lot of what people talk about is something different, which is I was trying to get from point A to B and it didn’t work and now I’m at a place where it didn’t work. And so it’s a problem, right? It’s like the world’s opened up around me, I don’t know what to do. And the reason you talk to people about that is because they have brains, and so do you. And you might as well have two brains working on the problem if you can. And if you’re reciprocal, you know, you’re in trouble, you come to me and we talk it out and maybe I can help. And then because we’re playing an iterative game, now you owe me a favour. Now you know, I’m not going to be too restrictive about that, but you know, socially intelligent people are reciprocal. Ben Franklin once said, you’re new in a neighbourhood, what should you do to get integrated? He said ask a neighbour for a favour, a small favour. Like, don’t, will you build me a new house? It’s like no, that’s not going to work. But you know, would you watch my, here’s my dog’s on the lawn, would you watch him for two minutes while I run down to the corner store? It’s like okay, they can do that. Well why would you do that? Well it opens up the possibility of reciprocal exchange. It’s very, very smart, because now they can ask you for a favour. So you get the trade thing going. People who are highly social are really good at identifying and maintaining reciprocal obligations. So we use each other as problem-solving resources. And a lot of our communication is exactly that. And so basically the story you’re telling isn’t I was at point A and I went to point B and everything worked. The story is this instead. It’s half of this. Okay, I was at point A, that’s the top left hand corner. I was at point A and I was going to point B, but something didn’t work. And then things collapsed, you know, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the severity of the event. And the closeness of your friendship, say you’re telling this story. You’re not going to tell catastrophic stories to someone on a bus that you just sat down beside unless you have a mental illness. And sometimes, well really it’s the truth, sometimes you’ll sit down on a bus and someone who has a mental illness will come and sit beside you and they will immediately tell you horrible things about their life. And the reason for that is they have to. They don’t have anyone to talk to, they can’t sort out their brains. They’re so desperate, they’re so ruined, they’re in chaos. They’re so ruined that the proclivity to proclaim the chaos absolutely overwhelms them. And you just can’t deal with someone like that most of the time because the magnitude of the problem they’re facing you with is way beyond your capacity to solve. So it’s just awkward, it’s not good. Anyways, you say I was going from point A to point B, didn’t work. Now I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I’m going, and I’m lost. And you say, well I know I experienced when I was in a situation like this, I did this and I know someone else who in that situation did this, and maybe you could try those. Or maybe you just shut up and you let the person talk. And that’s often extremely useful. And the reason you do that is because they’re thinking. Because people think they think, but they don’t. They talk. Thinking is hard, right? It’s a very complex, abstract, cognitive operation. And I don’t think that there are many more people who can think than there are people who can really read. And that’s probably 2-5% of the population at most. And so most of the way that people deal with that is that they talk. And that’s their thinking. And so they have some ideas about what might be going on, but they’re mixed and muddy. So they’re basically thrown out these ideas. Did this happen? Is he like this? Is she like that? Did I do this? And then they watch you. If you’re nodding about one, they think, oh well, that seems plausible. And they lay out another and you go, you don’t even notice. And they think, no, that’s off the table. I didn’t think that was a very good idea. But now I’ve got some social validation. And soon they talk it out. And instead of having 60 vaguely defined problems, now they have five fairly tightly defined problems. They’re feeling a lot better about that, right? Because it’s five snakes instead of 60. And maybe they can deal with five snakes. So you’ve already helped them a whole bunch just by listening. And then maybe you can be an active listener. They lay out their story and you say, well, you said something here that doesn’t make any sense with this thing that you said, so how would you reconcile those? It’s this dialectical process. And so the person collapses into chaos and they come and tell you about it. And then you rescue them, if you can, out of the chaos. And then they pop back up the other side. Social practice is actually a formalized version of an ideal relationship. So the ideal, you think, what’s an ideal relationship? Well, I would say an ideal relationship is where both of you are trying to get better than you are and you’re helping each other do it. It’s something like that. And the lines, because if I have a good relationship with you, I would rather that you’re the best you you can be. And vice versa, I would assume that you would also like that for me. Things interfere with that because you might say, well, given how horrible I am, if my partner all of a sudden got a clue, they’d leave, so I’d better interfere with that as much as I possibly can. And people do that all the time. One of the things they’ll do is make sure their partner isn’t too attractive. It’s like, well, you’re so attractive, why are you with someone like me? It’s like, I’ll criticize you when you look attractive and that’ll fix that. So people do that sort of thing all the time. This is the revolutionary story. This is the real story people tell. I was here, I got bloody well knocked off my perch, and then for a while things were not good. And then I reconfigured myself, I learned some things, I did some exploration, I made some changes, and poof, off the other side I come. And I’m a better person for it. And if you listen to the way people talk about their pasts, especially with regards to traumatic events, they’ll often tell you that. They’ll say, well, you know, in retrospect that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Those are the people who come out the other side, I’ll tell you. Because lots of people, they fall into the belly of the beast and they never come out. You see that in fairy tales sometimes, so there’ll be a hero and he’ll conquer some sort of dragon or some sort of monster and when he cuts it open a bunch of people will come out. It’s like, yeah, they’re the ones who got swallowed by the thing. And it isn’t until that person comes along and solves the problem that all those other people get to come out. So that’s a revolutionary story. It’s the archetypal revolutionary story and it’s the story of human progress. Socially, politically, economically, psychologically. And you see that reflected, for example, one of the things I could tell you about Christianity is that it’s a revolutionary narrative. At the beginning, so if you look at the Bible structured as a piece of literature, at the beginning there’s a fall, everyone was doing fine, then they wake up and they find out that the bottom has dropped out. And then the whole rest of this book is about, okay, how do you get back there? And actually, it is in this, I’ll tell you partly what the Bible is, is the attempt by, broadly speaking, Western civilization, so that would be all the way from the Middle East West, it’s the West’s attempt to figure out what’s wrong with life and how to fix it. And it’s the collaboration of thousands of people over thousands of years. Of course you can say that about any ancient moral tradition. So the question is, well is there an answer to the question? Well that’s one of the next things we’re going to try to figure out. Well let’s say, okay, you’re driving down the 401, your car breaks down, you’re off by the side of the road, it’s like, that’s not, maybe it’s snowing. It’s like, how bad is that? Well you don’t know, like maybe someone slides on the snow and runs over you, you’re scared, it’s really bad. So you’re freaking out, maybe your phone isn’t working. So you check your phone, that’s not working. It’s like all of a sudden things have got worse. So this person drives up behind you and they stop, you’re a bit nervous about them because what are they up to? And they come up, they open the hood and they say, well this thing’s loose, and they put it in there. It’s like, are you happy? Well yes, because what’s happened to you is, imagine, so first of all you’re not in a car as soon as it stops working, by the way. It’s only a car when it’s working. When it’s not working, it’s a bag of snakes. It’s like, uh oh, this car isn’t working. What could be wrong with it? Oh, an infinite number of things, none of which I understand. And then those things are all attached to people who are going to fix the car. And like, can I trust them? Do I even know who they are? Are they going to empty my wallet? Do I need to have a new car? So you don’t know, and then well, your day’s gone. And then, so all of a sudden what happens is your environment complexifies, radically, and you get all nervous because there’s a lot of paths in there that you might have to traverse to get back to where you’re going. Someone comes along and goes, tap! It’s like, you’re happy, it’s all the complexity has collapsed into one path and poof, your poof, your story is now implementable again. And you’ll pay people for that. You do it all the time. It’s like, you’ve got a problem, you take it to an expert. And they say, well, it’d take you an infinite amount of time to traverse all these possible paths, so you’re basically screwed, but if you give me a hundred dollars I can tell you how to do it in five minutes. I think, yes, that’s worth it. So of course it’s efficient, that’s why we trade. It’s exactly why we trade. It’s like, things are going to go wrong with you, then I could help, and vice versa. What a deal. That’s partly why we’re social and why we maintain it. Like as a collective, we’re way more intelligent than we would be as one person. So alright, that’s a revolutionary story. That’s a collapse into the underworld and a rebirth. And so as soon as you know that, it’s so cool to know that, because now whenever you read a classic story of any sort you can think, oh, that’s a voyage to the underworld. I’ve been there, and you have. Everyone’s been there. The underworld is where that’s chaos. It’s chaos. It’s where you go when your life falls apart. It has a structure. And what’s even cooler about that is, once you know this, there’s actually guides through it. Your world fell apart. What do you do about it? Well, dying of stress is a bad idea. You don’t have to do that. So I was talking to one of the students during break, and we were talking about character. And I said, well, the best thing you can do is build your character. Here’s a test of character. It’s like, a family member is dying. Okay, are you useful or useless? That’s the first question. And then a deeper question is, do you make it as good as it can be? Which isn’t going to be that good, by the way. Or do you turn it into hell? Because you can. And lots of people do. So one of the tests of character is, okay, there’s a crisis. Like really. How are you going to respond? Are you going to be helpful or are you going to be useless? Or even worse, are you going to make it worse? I would say helpful. And the thing that’s so cool about human beings is that we can do that. People are so tough, it’s insane. As long as they put themselves in the position. My sister-in-law works as a palliative care nurse. All she does is work with people who are going to die in two weeks. She’s a happy person. Partly because she goes home and thinks, hey, this isn’t a palliative care ward. Well, really, man. Things can be worse. And she knows that and she’s reminded of it every day. That’s a person who does not take things for granted.