https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RudKmwzDpNY
Music Now that you’ve had an opportunity to walk through a narrative, then hopefully some of the things that I’m going to say that are more technical will make more sense and so what we’re going to do today at least in part is to deal with to start to deal with Conceptualizing a solution to the fact that the world is too complex to properly perceive So what the problem fundamentally is is that there’s a lot more of everything else than there is of you, you know Especially if you include in that everything else all the parts of you that you also don’t understand and so I Want to walk you through how I think we solve that at least in part And we do that by essentially by simplifying the world, but I think mostly that we simplify it As a place in which to act rather than a place in which to perceive objects And I really believe that there’s a critical distinction between those two things I think that part of the reason that there’s been a continual that there’s been continual tension say between the claims of science and let’s say the claims of religion is because The idea that the world has a place of objects and as a place to act Have to be considered separately isn’t properly understood I don’t know So I’m going to try to straighten that up to the degree that that’s possible So I’m going to talk to you about stories and meta stories and the story is this I would say It’s the simplest unit of useful information With regards to action and perception that that you can be offered and then a meta story is a story about how a story like that transforms and I would say We’ll concentrate on the structure of the story and then we’ll get into the structure of the meta story and That’ll constitute today’s Today’s class so the first thing I want to show you I know many of you have seen this, but I’m going to show it anyways For the longest time It was presumed that The longest time say at least in the 20th century it was presumed that we make a pretty complete model of the world And then we act in the world and we compare what happens to that model and as long as our model and the world are Matching then roughly speaking We believe that everything is okay and our emotions Stay under control, but if that model mismatches, then we know that something’s up Now a lot of this work was done by Russians, especially in the early 60s by two Russian scientists Vinogradova and Sokolov who were students of Alexander Luria who was arguably the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century Luria spent a lot of time studying soldiers from World War two that had received head injuries and Of various sorts and because of that he could draw inferences about how the brain worked and some of what we’re going to talk about over the upcoming weeks With regards to brain function much of it is predicated on Luria’s work and Sokolov and Vinogradova were his students and They were interested in this phenomena. They were interested in Psychophysiological measurement right so as a as a way of inferring brain function and so psychophysiological measurement is measurement of those physiological parameters say like pupil width or or skin conductance or EEG That are in some ways directly reflective of how the brain works now if you measure skin resistance skin resistance changes with the amount that you sweat and that that can change very very rapidly and it changes in response to physiological demands placed on your body so for example if your body assumes that you’re going to leap into action for some purpose And it’s going to open up your pores to prepare you to keep yourself cool, and you can measure those Transformations quite accurately by measuring the electrical resistance of the skin and so what you see if you put someone in a Lab chair, and you expose themselves to different stimuli you find that for example if you expose them to something That’s threatening say like a picture of a snake then their skin conductance will decrease because they’re Or sorry their skin conductance will increase because they sweat a little bit more, and it’s quite a rapid response It’s it can be a very rapid response now one of the things that sokolov or Yeah, that’s right noted was that if he Is if I sat you down for example? I put some headphones on you, and I played a tone to you that repeated just exactly the same tone that repeated at Predictable intervals that the first time you heard the tone you’d produce quite a spike in skin conductance And the next time a slightly smaller spike and then the next time a slightly smaller spike until after maybe you’d heard it Three or four times you would not respond to it at all and that was often regarded as habituation and Habituation is the same thing that you can see in snails for example, and I’m using snails as an example because they have very very simple nervous systems So if you take a snail and you poke it then like it comes out of its shell and you poke it It’ll go back into its shell and then it’ll come out then if you poke it again It’ll go back into its shell and it’ll come out But if you keep doing that sooner or later the snail will just stop going in and you might think of that it has been Conceptualized as the simplest form of learning Habituation and the behaviorist tended to presume that if a human being manifested a Response that could be modeled by a simple organism Then the human being was using a response that was analogous to that of the simple organism and sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not so For example you have simple reflexes that you know if you put your hand on a hot stove You’ll jerk back And that’s a quite a simple circuit it you know you remove your hand back before the message gets to your brain Because the spinal cord is smart enough to Mediate reflex like that all by itself So you know your brain is actually quite distributed throughout your body It’s not just in your head like people tend to think and so we have conserved fast acting reflexes at various levels of our nervous system they they aren’t capable of Sophisticated response it’s it’s pretty much stimulus response Thinking about it from the behavioral perspective But they have as an advantage in credible speed because there just aren’t that many neural connections between the stimulus and the response and so We have layers of response at different time frames That help us match with the demands of of the external environment so Charles Darwin for example He used to go into the I think was museum in England. I don’t remember the name of it They had a snake in there I believe it was a Cobra And he’d stick his face up at the glass and the Cobra would strike at him And he’d jerk back and he tried many many times to master that reflexive response to the snake But there was no way every time that thing struck at him he he jumped backwards well You can imagine the survival utility in a reflex like that, but in reflexes in general Okay, so back to sokolov now What he decided thought if you took that tone and you did anything to it that was perceptible right because there are certain Gradations of tone that you’re not capable of perceiving But let’s assume you took the tone and you adjusted it enough so that it was perceptibly louder Or it was perceptibly a different frequency or something like that or even that the spaces between the tones because I said they were Predictably spaced even though if the spaces between the tones were changed Then when the change occurred the orienting reflex would be reinstated you’d respond to it again and Sokolov tried to vary the tone on many many parameters But no matter what parameter he varied it on as long as you could detect it Perceptibly you’d produce an orienting reflex so sokolov’s idea was that you must be producing a complex Internal model of the world that’s in concordance with the world across pretty much every perceptible dimension Because if you weren’t doing that how in the world would you know that? The tone had changed from what you had already learned about it And so for the longest time and this was also true for people who were investigating artificial intelligence We had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world and hold it in there in their mind So to speak and then they’d act in the world And they compare what they expected to happen in the world with the model and as long as there was a match then there was No orienting reflex now the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex It’s not merely an alteration in skin conductance what it is in essence is The manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown and the initial stages of that are very very quick But it’s hard to tell when the orienting reflex Stops and when more complex learning begins they sort of shade into one another so the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite Reflexive, but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex so for example Well I always think the example of betrayal is the best one because it’s so complex So imagine that you know you come home and you find evidence Lipstick or something like that Evidence that the person that you’re with is betraying you The first thing that’s going to happen is that you’re going to orient there’s going to be a real shock and that’s reflexive It’s very much akin to the response that you’re going to that you would manifest if you saw a predator or snake or something like that And so that’s very instantaneous you know And then that’ll prepare you for action you’ll get you’ll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next That’d be a very unpleasant thing, but then it might take you even years to fully manifest the learning that would be Necessary in a situation like that because there’s so many things that you have to reconsider First of all the person might now appear to you as a threat that’s pretty immediate so there’s a biological physiological response first your body reacts first then you respond emotionally That’s going to take a while and you know that emotional response might extend over days or weeks or months or even years And then as you’re doing that as well you’re going to try to start to resort out your interpretive schema So that it can adjust to the transformation that this this this error on your part say or this catastrophe Or this betrayal it’ll it has to adjust to whatever information that event contains And so the orienting reflex can can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time It’s best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process Now that was standard that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time that We created a detailed internal model of the world We watched how the world was unfolding we compared the two and the physiology the neurophysiology of this was even Understood to some degree even by the Russians in the early 1960s because they basically localized you could use Complex EEG electroencephalogram technology to localize where the orienting reflex is In the brain and basically it appeared to occur roughly speaking in the hippocampus And the theory arose that your brain your cortex let’s say produced a very complex model of the world An internal model and your senses were producing a model of the external world And the hippocampus was watching those two things to see if they matched and if they didn’t match there was a mismatch signal And that would be the orienting reflex And then your body would start to prepare would prepare itself for whatever that mismatch meant And then you would engage in exploratory behavior to try to update your model That was the standard theory it was very well accepted theory It has elements of cybernetic theory in it But it was well accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence That’s how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems They tried to make ones that would model the world and then act and then compare the changes in the world to that model But that didn’t go anywhere as it turned out because it turned out that it’s so it’s so difficult to see and model the world That people had people had no idea how complex that was It was impossibly complex as it turned out and so that’s part of the theory We don’t have robots wandering around doing apparently simple things like walking You know walking in an environment like this now when we look at the environment we think well It’s not that much different not that hard to look at it’s full objects, and they’re just self-evident there They are and we can just wander through it You know and we don’t even do that consciously to any great degree because so much of that perception is Presented to us by the human mind We don’t even do that consciously to any great degree because so much of that perception is Presented to our consciousness without effort in some sense But the AI guys learned pretty quick that perceiving the world was way more difficult than anybody had guessed And then this experiment really in some sense put the phenomenological Put a phenomenological punch behind that observation because one of the presuppositions of the Orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that you were very good at detecting changes That your nervous system would automatically detect change, anomaly, right? Any mismatch between your model and what you expected and then well the AI guys I think figured out first of all That that was a big problem that the problem of perception was much more complicated than that You know it’s actually it’s out of that same set of observations in some sense That postmodernism emerged in literature because in literary criticism because Well it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object like a chair and part of that is You know if you just do that to the chair it’s really different than it was before You can imagine how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions, right? And if you really got good at looking at it you’d find that even though if I asked you what color this is You’d say white, if you were actually painting it you’d find out that the colors of the chair when it’s in that location And the colors in the chair when it’s in that location just because of the difference in lighting are substantially different I think it was Monet I think who painted a very large series of haystacks in the French countryside, right? Under in different seasons and under different conditions of illumination Just because he was exploring how radically different the same object could be as it moved through contexts And so it isn’t even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it And the answer is something like well you can sit on it in both positions Which is not a description of an object by the way, right? That’s a description of something that’s useful, something that’s a tool, something that exists in relationship to your body It’s not an object And so if you think that just looking at something like a chair is almost impossibly difficult and subject to interpretation Then imagine how difficult it is to perceive something like a text, you know like a novel Because a novel obviously is subject to multiple interpretations And the interpretations are going to depend on, well at least in principle, on the intent conscious and unconscious of the author Of the time, of the place, of the culture, of the language Then that’s just on the side of the production itself But then there’s the reader, it’s like I’ve read books when I was 16 and then reread them say when I was 40 And the book was almost completely different as far as I was concerned Partly because I knew what was in it the second time and I didn’t know what was in it the first time And so the meaning that manifests itself out of a book is a consequence of all the complexity of the book Plus all the complexity of the reader And so you know if you’re reading Russian literature for example and you’ve already read 50 Russian novels You’re going to be in a much more different, you’re going to be in a different interpretive space Than you are if say the Russian novel is the first novel you’ve ever read And so the postmodernists were grappling with this as well as with many other ideas that I think contaminated their thinking And their conclusion was well you can’t extract out a canonical meaning from a text It’s so dependent on the situation that to say the text has an interpretable meaning is actually an error Now just because it’s difficult to do something doesn’t mean it’s impossible And there’s massive holes in the postmodernist view as far as I think it’s an unbelievably pathological view personally But the thing is that there are reasons why it emerged and the reasons were analogous to the reasons that the AI project initially failed And analogous to the reasons that this experiment turned out the way it did So I’m going to show you this, many of you have seen this already but as I said it doesn’t matter So the job, your job here is to count the time, see there’s a team of three people here dressed in white And there’s a team of three people here dressed in black And your job is to count the number of times the white team throws the basketball back and forth to the white team members Okay, so we’ll just run that Okay, well so obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, the number of times I believe that they threw it back They threw it back and forth, it was 16 if I remember this correctly But of course that’s not really the issue because what happens in the middle of the scene is that a guy wearing a gorilla suit comes out into the middle of the screen And pounds his chest three or four times and he comes out quite slowly as you saw How many of you, is there anybody here who didn’t see the gorilla? No, well you, and I presume all of you knew about this video anyways So Dan Simon who produced this video has got a couple of other ones where he shows that You know, even if you’re smart enough to see the gorilla, because you’ve seen the video before, you’ve heard about it If you make other changes in the background, you’ll count properly and you’ll catch the gorilla but you’ll miss the other changes in the background And they’re not trivial either, and it’s really quite remarkable He’s produced other short videos for example where you’ll be looking at a field And a road will grow in it, occupying about a third of the photograph space And you’d think, well yeah, you’re going to see that, it’s like, you don’t, you don’t So, okay, so this threw a big spanner into the works, this sort of experiment along with the AI failures And we could even say the postmodern dilemma, it’s like, well, hmm, everyone virtually, every psychologist would have predicted before this series of experiments That there’s no damn way you’d miss that gorilla Because your nervous system was actually attuned to change in the environment And like, that’s a big change, and it’s also a gorilla, it’s something you would really think that you couldn’t miss You couldn’t possibly miss, especially when it’s occupying the center of the visual field And so, well, this is part of a phenomena called change blindness and it helped psychologists who had been studying the visual system for a very long time Figure out, well mostly figure out exactly how blind human beings are, because we’re way blinder than we think And so we actually focus on much less of the world than we think And we do that partly, it’s not exactly obvious how we do it, it’s kind of like we hold a still picture in our imagination And then fill in the details by using our central foveal vision, which is always dancing around Like a pinpoint or a laser beam moving back and forth, and we’re assembling those little snapshots from the fovea into a relatively coherent picture Maybe what happens is that I look at you and then I look at you, and I’ve still got the information from looking at you So my brain can sort of infer that that’s remained stable But like if I look at you, and I pay it, I’ve tried to learn how to do this, because you can look at something and then pay attention to the periphery It’s annoying, but so if I’m looking at you, I really can’t make out your eyes I can more or less make out the fact that you have a head I can see that you’re, and especially if you move it, and so that’s what, your periphery is sort of like frog vision or dinosaur vision It’s much better at picking up movement than it is at picking up something that’s staying still, and that makes sense because Well, if it’s staying still and it hasn’t already hurt you, then it’s probably not going to hurt you But if it’s moving, then you know that’s a good thing that you might pay attention to And so if your periphery catches movement, then you’ll focus your fovea on it It’s like you go from really low resolution to really high resolution And so the center of your vision is incredibly high resolution But then it fades into low resolution as you move towards the periphery until it’s out here, which should say be about 170 degrees I really, if I concentrate on this hand, I can tell it’s a hand mostly when it’s moving I have no idea what color it is. This one I can’t see at all And then I can probably see my fingers now And then I can clearly see them if I look at them with my fovea And so your vision is a very, very strange thing, and it’s focusing on something very specific And so you’re pointing your eyes at something very specific, and that’s what you seem to see And so then that opens up a whole new universe of questions It’s like, how do you decide what to point your eyes at? That turns out to be an insanely complicated problem John Vervecky talks about that all the time as the problem of relevance And the issue is, well, there’s many, many things in the world There’s an infinite number of things, let’s say And you’re not going to be able to see them, that’s for sure Even if they happen to be changing, as it turns out And so, out of this mess, first of all, how do you pick what to look at? And second, even if you do pick it, how do you see it? Because it’s so crazily complicated So that’s the problem that we’re going to try to unpack Now, roughly speaking, what seems to have happened with the gorilla video is You have to take that first theory that you make a complete model of the world And then a complete model of the world, which is the objects in the world and how they’re interacting And you compare that to the objects in the actual world and how they’re interacting You have to modify that model, you say, well, no, you’re certainly not making a complete model And people should have known better anyways, even subjects to the limits of your perceptions Because there’s all sorts of things in the world that you can’t directly perceive But what you’re doing instead is, it’s something like You’re making a partial model of the world, but you’re only making a partial model of the world That you’re currently operating on that, on, on, with some goal in mind And you’re also comparing that to a model of the world as it’s currently unfolding Because the other thing that was implicit, this is really tricky, this is where you have to watch your implicit assumptions The other thing that was implicit in the original cybernetic theory was that You have a model of the world that’s complete And then what you’re watching is the actual world as it unfolds And that’s not a model, that’s just your perception of the objects But that also turns out to be wrong because Your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model And so what’s happening is, you look at the world, the world you see is a model And a very partial model at that, and then you compare it to the model that you expect or desire more accurately You have a model of the world that’s generated as you look at it You have another model of the world that’s something like the world that you desire Then you have a model of the world that’s generated as you look at it And you have a model of the world that’s generated as you look at it And you have a model of the world that’s generated as you look at it And you have a model of the world that’s generated as you look at it You have another model of the world that’s something like the world that you desire Then you compare both of them, and they can mismatch And they can mismatch in a way that upsets your current pursuit That’s the critical issue You don’t see the anomaly unless it upsets your current pursuit And you kind of know that too, because when you’re like, well I’m lecturing to you guys Mostly you’re sitting still, but people are moving their arms and they’re moving their glasses And they’re shifting their feet And generally, I don’t see any of that, because what difference does it make? You know, it’s not relevant to the ongoing… To the ongoing what? Ongoing contract, the ongoing series of interactions, it’s something like that So as long as you keep your movements bounded within a range that doesn’t interfere with whatever it is that we’re doing Then it’s going to be as invisible to me as the gorilla was when you were counting the balls And the cool thing is about the gorilla experiment, or one of them, is that The reason you were blind to the gorilla was because you were counting the balls And so, that’s so fascinating, because what it shows to a huge degree, an unfathomable degree To an unfathomable degree is that The value structure that you inhabit determines what you perceive It doesn’t just determine what you expect or want, it bloody well determines what you see And that makes the world a completely different place, no one really expected that And so, if you watch the basketballs, you see the basketball, you see the basketball If you stop watching the basketball, well then you see the gorilla And so, the first question that arises from an experiment like that is Well, just exactly what is it that you don’t see in the world? And the answer is, all of it You see so little, it’s unbelievable, you see that tiny amount that’s necessary For you to undertake the next sequence in your plotted movements, something like that But then that becomes very complicated too, because it isn’t obvious how you can conceptualize Or how you can determine what your next movement is Because it’s not like you just add up movements and make up your life It’s not that simple, and it’s related to the novel problem The problem of meaning in a literary work So imagine, you’re trying to specify the meaning of a literary work Well, there’s meaning in the word, but the word is dependent The meaning of the word is dependent on the phrase within which it’s embedded And then the meaning of the phrase is dependent on the sentence that it’s embedded in And then the meaning of the sentence in the paragraph, in the paragraph in the chapter And the chapter in the book, and the book in the corpus of books of that sort And then within the culture, and then within whatever your peculiar personal experience is All of those things nested are operative to some degree When you’re extracting out the meaning at any level of analysis They’re all operating simultaneously, so you might say Well, what are you doing in this classroom? Well, the answer is sitting in a chair But that’s, obviously, that’s a very short-term and context-independent answer But you’re also attending to what I’m saying, hypothetically And you’re attending to some of it and not to other parts of it You’re thinking about some parts of it and not other parts And you’re also attending a class, and the class is a sequence of lectures And that’s embedded within your desire to finish up the semester, and then to finish up the year And then to get your degree, and then you nest that inside whatever it is Whatever the reason is that you’re getting your degree And then maybe that’s nested inside your career goals And that’s nested inside your life goals And that’s nested inside your ultimate values Which you may or may not even be aware of And so I could say, well, you’re sitting here because it serves your ultimate values Well, that’s true It seems a bit abstract to be useful, right? It gets so vague out at the outermost levels that it doesn’t really have much specificity, right? So it seems to lack information But by the same token, if I said what you’re doing is sitting there It has the same problem of too-restricted meaning because of over-specificity And so there’s some level in there that you would interpret as meaningful God only knows why And that’s the level, there’s a natural level of perception for that sort of thing So for example, when children learn to name an animal, for example, they’ll name cat They don’t name the species of cat or the subspecies of cat And they don’t confuse cats with dogs Even though they’re both in the category of four-legged furry mammal So why not call a cat and a dog furry mammals? Well, children don’t do that They go to cat and dog and people who’ve studied the acquisition of language Have found that there are basic level categories that children pick up first And they’re often represented with short words And the words are short because they’ve been around a long time Because they seem to reflect the natural level at which people perceive the world But none of that’s obvious, you know It’s by, I mean, you could just lump all animals together for that matter And just call them animals, which we do sometimes So, anyway, so it’s very difficult to specify the meaning level And it’s not very easy at all to figure out how we do it And so that’s partly what I’m trying to unpack So, here’s part of the issue So, let’s say that you have a computer Yeah, I have a story for this So, one time when I was in Montreal, I was using my computer I was in my apartment And I was typing out an essay and it crashed And so what happens when your computer crashes? Well, you know, usually you utter some sort of curse And it’s interesting that you do that Because the circuit that you use to curse with Is the same circuit that monkeys use to detect eagles or leopards or snakes And so when there’s a bunch of monkeys together You know, they’re not all preyed on by eagles and leopards and snakes But, you know, there’s usually a predator in that category For every single monkey population And so when the monkeys are watching They have an emotional utterance that the most nervous monkey might utter first That basically says, you know, hide from the eagle Get out on a thin branch so the cougar can’t eat you And look the hell out for the snake But there’s a circuit that’s linked to emotions That produces an instinctive utterance that represents that category And that’s the same circuit that you use when you curse And it’s not the same circuit that you use for normal language And we know that because that circuit is activated in people who have Tourette’s syndrome Because they preferentially swear You think, well, why in the world would you have a neurological condition That makes you preferentially curse? Well, that’s the reason You don’t just have one linguistic circuit You have one for, oh my God, there’s a predator And that’s the one that will get activated When something happens like your computer crashing Because, you know, you’re an evolved creature And so those old circuits that were there, say, 30 million years ago To deal with exceptions Are the same circuits you’re using now to deal with your computer Why else would you want to hit it? Right, because that’s what you want to give it a whack It’s like, it doesn’t behave whack Aggression right away Aggression right away Well, that’s some clue as to the categorization Category system that you’re automatically using to encapsulate the event Okay, so fine, what do you do when your computer crashes? Well, first you curse and then you do the stupid things that idiot primates do When they’re trying to deal with something that’s way too complex Maybe you turn it on and off, right? And that doesn’t work, it didn’t work And so then I thought, well, maybe the power bar went So I checked the power bar I turned it on and off and nothing happened And so I brought a light behind the computer The light wouldn’t go on And so I thought, aha! I must have blown a fuse So I went to the fuse box and took a look But the fuses were fine And so I thought, oh, the power’s gone out So then I went outside and the power was out None of the street lights were working, the power was out everywhere And it was seriously out because this was the time that Almost the entire northeast power grid in Quebec collapsed And the reason it collapsed is because there was a solar flare That happens reasonably often And the solar flare produced a huge electromagnetic pulse Because it’s basically like a billion, million hydrogen bombs going off at the same time 93 million miles away Produces this tremendous electromagnetic pulse Passes through the Earth’s atmosphere Produces a spike in current in the main power lines and blows the whole system And so just so you know, an event like that happens about every 150 years And if we had one now, it would take out all of our electronics Like one of the big ones There was a big one back in the late 1800s Everything, satellites, computers, cars, everything, gone And so that’s a big problem And no one knows what to do about it One missed us by about nine minutes, I think, two years ago So that’s something else to worry about If you’re inclined to worry about those sorts of things Okay, so what did I conclude from that? Well, the function of my computer was dependent on the stability of the sun It’s not the first thing you check out when your computer crashes, right? You don’t run out and go, hey, well, yeah, the sun’s still there No problem, I can cross that off the list But to me, it’s an extraordinarily interesting example Of the invisible interdependence of things You know, and our tendency to fragment things What we seem to do is to look at things at the simplest level of analysis that actually functions So for example, when you’re interacting with your computer You’re not interacting with your computer at all, really You’re interacting with the keyboard, sort of one key at a time And you’re interacting with the symbols on the screen But as long as the computer is working, you don’t care about it at all You don’t give it a second thought And you certainly don’t care about the fact that it’s dependent on Well, the electrical power, for example And the electrical power is dependent on You know, I don’t know how many men are out there right now Or were out there last night when it was freezing rain Fixing power lines and freezing to death while they’re doing it So that your stupid computer doesn’t malfunction while you’re watching cat videos You know, I mean, there’s this incredibly dynamic living system That’s social and economic and political That has to remain dead stable in order for us to have access to functional And like pure, non-fluctuating electricity 100% of the time Because you also don’t think, well, the stability of your computer is dependent on the stability of the political system But of course it is, because if the political system mucks up and the economic system goes Then people don’t go out and work to fix things And things are breaking all the time That’s their normal state, is broken, not working And so, and that’s all in some sense Folded up, not only inside your computer But actually inside your tiny conceptions of the computer while you’re using it And you only get a glimpse of what the computer is really like when it doesn’t work Then it’s when it becomes a complex object, right? As long as it’s working, then your stupid perceptions are perfectly fine to get the job done And that’s another indication that what you’re using your perceptions for is to get the job done And how you specify exactly the level of resolution that you should be operating at I haven’t sorted that out, but it’s something like you default to the simplest level that moves you to the next step You know, so for example, and generally that is what you should do If you’re having an argument with someone that you have a long term relationship with You can start by arguing about what the little argument is about Or you can immediately cascade into whether or not you should have a relationship with this person at all Or even into whether or not you should even bother with relationships Which is, you know, every time there’s an argument, that question is a reasonable question to have emerge Or at least it’s in the realm of potential reasonable questions But it doesn’t seem useful to jump to the most catastrophic possible explanation Every time some minor thing goes wrong That’s what happens to people who have an anxiety disorder And that’s what happens to people who are depressed, right? They can’t bind the anomaly And so what happens is it tends to propagate up the entire system until it takes out their highest order conceptualizations You know, so if you’re seriously depressed Maybe you’ll watch a news article about something stupid and you’ll think, Jesus, why should I even be alive? You know, and I’m dead serious about that If you score like 60 on the Beck Depression Inventory Which puts you way the hell up in the depressed range Anything that happens to you that’s negative will trigger suicidal thoughts, roughly speaking And sometimes even positive things will do it Because there are very few positive things that happen that don’t carry with them some threat of change or transformation So, you know, one mystery, it’s a big mystery Is why don’t you fall into a catastrophic depression every time something little goes wrong? Because it’s not, the level of analysis is not self-evident And you see this with people who are high in neuroticism, too, you know Their trivial fluctuations at their workplace or in their relationships or in their health Will produce a disproportionate negative emotional response But it’s part of the range of normal emotional responses Some people are very, very high in neuroticism, so everything upsets them Some people are very low And the reason that whole range exists is because sometimes you should get upset when some little thing happens to you Because it’s an indication that the whole damn environment has got dangerous on you And sometimes you should just brush it off because, you know, its net consequence is low But how do you calculate that? Very, very difficult question So, you know, when your computer goes wrong, well, you have to pick the proper level of analysis to fix it And you could say, well, there’s something wrong with the circuit board And maybe, you know, there’s a crack in one of the, in one of the, somewhere that it’s soldered Or, you know, sometimes now when people are building microchips, they’ve run into a crazy problem You know, microchips keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller, right? And so the little wires now are down to atomic width or, you know, the width of maybe 20 atoms or something like that But really, really, they’re really getting thin And so that produces another problem which no one would have ever, no, no, you wouldn’t see No, no, you wouldn’t expect, and that is, you know, that at the quantum level There’s uncertainty about where electrons might be Normally that doesn’t matter, the degree of uncertainty about where your electrons are is small enough at your size So that it’s basically irrelevant But down at the subatomic level where these microchips are starting to be produced Sometimes the electrons will be outside the wires and that means that they’re getting so damn small that they’ll short circuit by themselves Because the electrons aren’t stable enough to be where they’re supposed to be in the wires And so, well, the reason I’m pointing that out is because a problem that exists in a system can exist at any of the multiple levels of that system And it isn’t obvious where to start And a lot of political arguments are like that, you know It’s like, well, maybe a company goes bankrupt and its shareholders get, or maybe a bank fails and so people can’t withdraw their money And one response is, well, that just shows you how rotten the capitalist system is It’s like, well, maybe that is what it shows But it seems like that might not be the most appropriate level to start And so again, it’s like Occam’s razor in the scientific world, right? You want to use the simplest explanation that it’s not that fits the facts Because you don’t organize your perceptions by facts It’s kind of like you want to use the simplest tool you can possibly manage to fix the problem So you don’t, when your car has a flat tire, you don’t buy a new car You fix the flat tire if you can figure out how to do it And so you go for the thing that will put the tool back together with the minimum involvement of time and effort It’s something like that And you care about that because you have limited time and you have limited resources And so it makes sense for you to conserve them And I’m telling you that partly for practical reasons too Because this is a very useful thing to know If you’re arguing with someone, you want to argue about the smallest possible thing that you could argue about that might fix the problem You want to really specify, it’s like, what’s going on at a micro level And what’s the minimum that I would require to be satisfied with the outcome And if you’re, this is especially true in intimate relationships It’s like, if someone’s bugging you and you want them to change, you think, well, how can I be minimally bothered by this And what’s the tiniest amount of change I could request that might satisfy me Because otherwise the argument will come unglued And every time you guys try to discuss a problem, you’ll start talking about whether you should even be together And then you’re done, because you’ll never solve a problem And then you won’t be together, because you’ll never solve a problem So, okay So, here’s a way to think about perception So, let’s say that this is the thing you’re trying to look at I called that the thing in itself Now, that’s a schematic of a thing in itself So the thing in itself, that’s an old philosophical concept And I think it came from Kant, but I’m not sure about that, it might be older than that And the thing in itself is what you could see if you could see everything about something, but you can’t So it’s a hypothetical entity And maybe, who knows, if I was looking at you like the thing in itself Maybe I could see every level of your being from the subatomic up to this level of perception And then beyond, I could see your family relationships I could see how they were nested in your societal relationships, economic relationships, political relationships The ecosystem as a whole, like I would see all these levels at the same time Of course, I don’t, because I can’t What I see instead is First of all, you’re radically simplified by my senses, because they’re just not acute enough to say, see you at a microscopic level And they’re not comprehensive enough to see your connections across time So my senses filter a bunch of you from me right away And then I’m also filtered from you by your willingness to act like I want while we’re together Because you could be doing all sorts of strange things at the moment, but you’re not And so you’re helping me simplify my perceptions of you by agreeing to play the same game that I’m playing while we occupy the same space And that’s basically politeness That’s the mark of someone who’s well socialized You walk in somewhere, you get the game, you play the game, and you don’t scare the hell out of everybody And that’s partly how we keep our emotions stabilized Because if you’re like a Freudian, you think, well, as long as your ego is well constituted, you can keep your emotions under control It’s like, yes and no, mostly no I like the Piagetian idea better, which is Which is, if you’re well socialized, you’re awake enough to identify the game that’s going on wherever you go And then you play that game immediately, and so do all the other socialized primates And so then you can just understand the game, you don’t have to understand them, thank God You can just understand the game, and as long as the game continues, you don’t have to be nervous Because you know, you at least know what’s going to happen, and maybe you even know how to get what you want in that game And so that, again, that’s really worth thinking about, because We talked about this before, about why people want to maintain their culture It isn’t just because their culture is a belief system that helps them orient themselves in the world It’s because a belief system is a game that everyone who shares that belief system is playing And the fact that everybody’s playing means nobody needs to get upset So it isn’t like the belief system is directly inhibiting the emotions That isn’t how it works So, and it’s not like the culture is just a belief system It’s only secondarily a belief system, man Mostly it’s a game that people are actively engaging in That’s way more important than the beliefs that go along with it You don’t even need the damn beliefs, you know, that’s why wolves can live with each other They don’t know what the… they don’t have a belief system, exactly Mostly they have a set of… They have a game, it’s the wolf game, roughly speaking, and all the wolves know how to play it And so, that’s that That’s how they keep themselves organized in their packs A lot of it’s externalized And so… Okay, so anyway, so… The thing in itself, that’s a very complicated thing It’s got multiple dimensions Multiple levels And it’s worse than that, because it doesn’t only have multiple levels But all of those levels move across time And every one of those levels shifts as it moves across time And so, I like to think of the thing in itself like a symphony I think that’s a good model, I think that’s why we like music, in fact Because music shows you a multi-level reality That unfolds and shifts across time within some parameters, right? Because it’s not just chaos The music has an element of predictability and an element of unpredictability And it has these multiple levels, and that’s sort of what everything in the world is like It’s what the world is like So, this is a… even that is just a conceptual model of the thing in itself First of all, that’s only got two dimensions instead of three Because it could be a cube And then it has… even a cube has three dimensions instead of four Because if that was a cube, adding the third dimension Then it would also be a cube that would transform and shift as it moved across time And that’s what the thing in itself is, but that’s too damn complicated So then the question is, when you look at it, what do you see? And the answer is, to some degree, it depends on what you want to use it for And so I would say, well, here, look at the different ways you can look at this You might say, what is this? And somebody could say, well, it’s a rectangle And would you say that’s correct? It’s like, well… It’s not correct, because there’s not a one-to-one correspondence But it might be a useful conceptualization If you think about that as a box It could contain that, and if you were carrying the box You’d only have to be concerned about the box, and so that would be fine That’s a good functional simplification That one’s a little higher resolution, because it says, well, yeah, it’s actually four rectangles And that one says, well, wait, think about that as an orchard that someone’s looking at from the top You want to figure out how to walk from south to north Well, you’ve got a little map there Because you can think of those as bars, instead of collections of dots Piaget showed that children will automatically do this So, for example, if you take six dots and put them in a row And you take the same six dots and you stretch them out, so the row is this much longer And then you ask the child where there are more dots The child will say that there are more dots where it’s longer Because they’re flipping in some sense between the perception of the individual dots And the perception of the shape that the array of dots makes And so the shape is longer, because you can see it as a rectangle And so they think, well, longer is bigger, bigger is more, there’s got to be more dots So, well, whoop And then there’s this one, which is sort of an amalgam of this one and this one And then that one, there’s that one, and that’s the highest resolution model of that And that’s the principle of simplification And, you know, what I like about this diagram is that You know, people say, well, the facts are the facts And what we’re disagreeing about is our opinion about the facts It’s like, no, yes, you have an opinion about the facts But the world is so horribly complex that you can actually disagree about the facts themselves And I think an ideology does that to people very, very commonly So I saw this movie once that Naomi Klein made If I tell you the same story, tell me, okay, because I don’t want to tell you the same story, but I might So she went down to Argentina after a bunch of money had gone out of Argentina because of a financial collapse And she went to a factory that had been padlocked And it was a heavy machinery factory And the workers had decided they were going to undo the padlocks and go build machines, you know To hell with the owner who shut it down And so she went down and made this movie and followed these workers around And, you know, showed how catastrophic their lives had been because they’d lost their livelihood in this big financial crash And so that was really interesting, but then she went and interviewed the guy who owned the factory And she treated him like he was like a cipher in some sense Instead of asking him how he got the factory, what he wanted to do with it, how it fit in with his life plans Why he shut it down instead of continuing it, you know She didn’t get the backstory on him She just left him in the evil capitalist box and went on with the film And it was like, it wasn’t like what she did wasn’t true But it was only half true, and it was half true because she could perceive the complexity of the workers having sympathy for them But as far as she was concerned, the enemy, the owner, had no complexity He was just bad capitalist, and that’s how it was left in the movie I found it profoundly unsatisfying because I wanted to know, okay It’s like, you know that these workers are suffering It’s not self-evident that you want your damn factory closed You’d think you’d want it open so you could be building things It’s like, who are you? What are you doing? Why is this justifiable? Have a question about it Well, you can take this infinite set of facts, and then you subject it to your filters And you let some of the facts through, and they’re facts But what about all the facts that you don’t let through? That’s the thing, and that’s what the Guerrilla video shows too It’s like, yeah, yeah, you got the basketball count right, but you missed the big primate And you might say, well, your priorities were a bit skewed in that circumstance Because you were rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic sank, you know, as the old joke goes And so it’s very much useful to think always, well, you’re It isn’t just your damn opinion that’s biased, although it is It’s your perceptions that are biased So Well, and with your words, it’s even more, so you say, well, you can’t see the thing in itself Because it’s too complex, so you perceive it simpler than it is And some of that perceptual simplification is dependent on your aims So that’s a vicious one, because it pulls the value structure that you’re ensconced within Into your perceptions, it pulls it into the realm of facts itself And then you do another, I think about this as a compression You know, you can compress a photograph by getting rid of redundant information That’s sort of what you’re doing here So you’re like, one of these squares, little black squares here, black rectangles Compresses all of those, it’s like, we’re going to treat those as if they’re greyish black Same thing happens here So we’re blurring across them So we have a much less higher, much less high resolution image here So you take the thing in itself, you perceive it as a low resolution representation And then you take that low resolution representation, and you replace that with a word And so the word is a two-fold compression And then when someone tosses you the word, you unpack it into the low resolution perception And then maybe into the world itself, if you can do that, but probably not So that’s what we’re doing, we’re taking the complex world, we fold it into a simple perception We fold that into a word, we throw the word to someone else, and they unpack it And the only way you can unpack it, of course, is if you’ve had enough similar experience So that you have the reference for the word already in your experience Which is why you have to use simplified language with children, right? Because there’s no point tossing a child a concept that he or she can’t unpack So we compress a very complex reality through a very, very small keyhole That’s basically our cognitive processing Okay, so then here’s the next kind of argument This goes along with the science religion argument that I was making earlier Which I want to unpack a little bit more I think that fundamentalists and atheistic scientists have the same problem The fundamentalists, so we could say the Christian fundamentalists in the US Make the proposition that biblical stories, we’ll call them mythological stories Are literal representations of the truth But, and that might be true depending on what you mean by literal But what they mean by literal, or what they attempt to make literal mean Is that they’re in the same category as scientific facts Because they don’t have the idea that there are different ways of approaching truth And that truths can serve different purposes They don’t have a sense that your definition of truth is actually something like a tool Rather than an ontological statement about the reality of the world And so the fundamentalists basically make the proposition that The idea that God created the world in six days, five thousand years ago Is literally true And they get the five thousand year estimate, by the way By going through the genealogies in the Old Testament and adding up the hypothetical ages And figuring out how long before Moses, Adam lived And some bishop did that back in the, I think it was in the mid-1800s I might be wrong about that, but it was somewhere back about that time And more or less that’s been accepted as canonical fact ever since And then the scientists say, well yeah, those are empirical truths, they’re just wrong See, and that’s the only difference there is between the fundamentalists and the atheist scientists The fundamentalists say, those are fundamental scientific truths, and they’re right And the scientists say, well they’re scientific truths, they just happen to be wrong Well, I think that’s a stupid argument, personally I mean, for a bunch of reasons, one is that The people who wrote the ancient stories that we have access to Were in no way, shape or form scientists You know, modern people tend to think that you think like a scientist And people have always thought that way First of all, you do not think like a scientist Even scientists hardly even think like scientists But if you’re not scientifically trained, you don’t think like a scientist at all So one of the things, for example, that characterizes your thinking is confirmation bias And so if you have a theory, what you do is wander around in the world looking for reasons why it’s true And a scientist does exactly the opposite of that In the little tiny narrow domain where he or she is actually capable of being a scientist And what they have is a theory and look for a way to prove it wrong But believe me, you don’t run around doing that I mean, you can train yourself, so now and then you can do that You know, you can learn to listen to people, for example, on the off chance that you might be wrong But that is by no means a natural way of thinking And of course, the fundamental philosophical axioms of the scientific method Weren’t developed until Descartes and Bacon and who else? Descartes, Bacon There’s one more Anyways, the name escapes me at the moment But you can argue about when science emerged But it certainly emerged in its articulated form within the last thousand years I think you could say even more specifically that it emerged in the last 500 years Now you might argue with that and say, well, what about the Greeks and other people who were fairly technologically sophisticated Or who invented geometry or that kind of thing, but yeah, yeah Bare precursors to the idea of empirical observation Aristotle, for example, when he was writing down his knowledge of the world It never occurred to him to actually go out in the world and look at it to see if what he assumed about it was true And it certainly never occurred to Aristotle to get 20 people to go look at the same thing independently Write down exactly how they went about doing it, compare the records and then extract out what was common And that seems self-evident to us to some degree, but you know, it was by no means self-evident to anyone 500 years ago And people still don’t do it So it’s not even, it’s not plausible If you know anything about the history of ideas, it’s not plausible to posit that stories about the nature of reality that existed before 500 years ago Were scientific in any but the most cursory of ways So why we have that argument continually is somewhat beyond me Part of the reason is though that everyone, fundamentalists included, really believe in scientific facts Even though they hate it, they’ll use computers, they’ll fly, computers wouldn’t work unless quantum mechanics were correct Like the fact that you use a high tech device indicates through your action that you actually accept the theories upon which it’s predicated Right, the same as flying, same as anything you do in a complex technological society You’re stuck with it, you’re reading by the lights, do they work? Yeah, they work Well, so it’s really hard for people who are trying to hold on to a way of looking at the world that appears to contradict the scientific claims When everything they do is predicated on their acceptance of the validity of the scientific claims It’s really problematic for people It’s problematic in a real way, I think, because one of the problems with the scientific viewpoint is it doesn’t tell you anything about what you should do with your life It doesn’t solve the problem of value at all In fact, it might make it more difficult because one of the fundamental scientific claims, roughly speaking, is that every fact is of equal utility At least from a scientific perspective, right? There’s no hierarchy of facts, it’s not exactly true because you can think of one theory as more true than another But that boils down to saying that it’s more useful than another, so I don’t think that that’s a really good exception Okay, so fine, you got the scientific atheists on one end and you got the religious fundamentalists on the other The thing that they both agree on, whether they like it or not, is that there’s so much power in the scientific method that it’s difficult to dispute the validity of scientific facts And they seem to exist in contradiction to the older archaic stories if you also accept them as fact-based accounts So what do we do about that? If you’re on the scientific atheist end of things, you say, well, those old stories are just superstitious science, second-rate, barbaric, archaic forms of science You just dispense with them, they’re nothing but trouble And if you’re on the fundamentalist side, you say, well, we’ll try to shoehorn science into this framework and really that doesn’t work very well It doesn’t work very well with the claims of evolution, for example In fact, it works very badly, and that’s a problem because evolutionary theory is like, it’s a killer theory It’s really, really hard, and it’s not a complete theory, and there’s lots of things we don’t know about evolution But, you know, trying to hand-wave that away, that’s not going to work without dispensing with most of biology So that’s a big problem So here’s another way of thinking about it You don’t just need one way of looking at the world Maybe you need two ways of looking at the world, and I’m not exactly sure how they should be related to one another Like which should take precedence under which circumstance But one problem is, what’s the world made of? You know, what’s the world conceptualized as an objective place made of? Another is, how should you conduct yourself while you’re alive? And there’s no reason to assume that those questions can be answered using the same approach I mean, physics has its methods, and chemistry has its methods, and biology has its methods So a method for obtaining the truth can be bound to a domain So why would we necessarily assume that you could use the same set of tools to represent the world as a place of objects to represent it as a place in which a biological creature would act Anyways, I’m suggesting that we don’t view it that way That we have two different viewpoints Maybe they can be brought together, although it’s not obvious how But that it’s not a tenable solution to get rid of one in favor of the other And I think the reason for that is that You need to know how to conduct yourself in the world You have to have a value system You can’t even look at the damn world without a value system It’s not possible Your emotional health is dependent on a value system The way you interact with other people is dependent on a value system There’s no getting away from it And you say, well, there’s no justification for any value system from a scientific perspective You’re going to draw that conclusion that no value system is valid Where the hell does that leave you? There’s no down, there’s no up There’s no rationale for moving in any direction There’s not even really any rationale for living And so people say things like that Well, why the hell should I care what happens in a million years? Who’s going to know the difference? It’s like, yeah, yeah, true, stupid, but true And the reason I think it’s stupid is because it’s just a game I can take anything of any sort and find a context in which it’s irrelevant It’s just a rational game It’s like, who cares if a hundred children freeze to death in a blizzard? What difference is it going to make in a billion years? Well, what do you say to someone who says that? You say, well, seems like the wrong frame of reference, bucko That’s what it looks like to me You know, because at some point you question the damn frame of reference Not what you derive from it And it certainly seems to me that situations like that Don’t allow you to use that kind of frame of reference There’s something inhumane about it And that trumps the logic, or at least it should And if it doesn’t, then all hell breaks loose And that doesn’t seem to be a good thing Okay, so I have this quote from Shakespeare here He says, all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts Well, it’s the sort of thing that you’d expect a dramatist to pen But that’s how he looked at the world And we still watch Shakespeare’s plays some hundreds of years later Because there seems to be something essential captured in them Something about how people do act But more importantly, I think, how people should and shouldn’t act Because what fun is it going to a play that doesn’t outline How someone should and how someone shouldn’t act? You want a good guy? Or a couple of them? Maybe they can be complex interminglings of good and bad You know, that makes it more sophisticated And you want a bad guy or a bad… You know, you always want to see that contrasted Either within a character or between characters And it’s because you want to know how to live properly That’s how to be a good person And you want to know how to live improperly How to be a bad person So you can watch out for people like that Or so you can figure out what that means for yourself It’s compelling And that’s another thing that’s worth thinking about Why is it compelling? And it’s compelling to everyone That’s the thing that’s so cool is that There aren’t that many phenomena that you can point to That are compelling to everyone Music is close It’s a very rare person who doesn’t like at least some genre of music No matter how narrow But the other one is stories You’re hard pressed to find someone Especially if they’re younger, who doesn’t like stories Why? Is it a waste of time? Or is there something going on? Well I think it’s not only not a waste of time It’s actually the most fundamentally important thing you can possibly do Because there’s no difference between understanding stories And figuring out how to get along in the world So… And there’s a tight relationship between The story that you inhabit that structures your behavior And the games that Piaget talked about That organize people’s behavior To some degree The reason that we can all sit in this room together Like this Is because a huge chunk of the value system That guides our behavior Is shared So I’m lecturing and you’re sitting in the classroom And that distinguishes us to some degree But you know that that’s partly merely a consequence of the difference in our age It’s the same trajectory We just happen to occupy different positions In a value hierarchy that we both accept And so as long as you feel that that’s fair and just Then you’re not going to object to it But I’m here in the classroom for many of the same reasons that you’re here in the classroom If you look at the higher order parts of the value structure And maybe right out at the end of that Because I’ve tried to figure out If you push why you’re doing what you’re doing right now To its ultimate limit So you can’t get a story that’s superordinate to that It’s something like, well you believe that The investigation of the world to acquire knowledge is worthwhile Otherwise what the hell are you here for And even if 80% of your motivation is to get a good stable job Fair enough There’s still something outside of that Because the whole culture says, well you’re more likely To be able to function properly in a good stable job If you’re the sort of person who knows how to go out in the world And forage for information usefully And I think that’s very much analogous to the hero story It’s like you go out and you search the unknown To find something of value And so fundamentally that’s what we’re doing in the classroom And the reason we can all organize our behaviors Because we accept that framework Consciously would be we know how to articulate it Unconsciously it’s, well it doesn’t matter We know how to act out the patterns Whether we know that we can say the rules or not Doesn’t matter Same as a wolf pack We know the damn, we know the procedures And you could describe them with an articulated value structure Let’s take a break Okay, so let’s go back to the complexity problem See I actually think it’s the In some sense it’s the fundamental problem When you read about the terror management theorist types And they think that death is the fundamental problem And that’s a good argument Because it’s definitely a fundamental problem But I think it’s a subset of the complexity problem And the reason I think that is because Sometimes people’s lives become so complex That they’d rather be dead So, and the reason they seek death through suicide Is to make the complexity go away Because complexity causes suffering if it’s uncontrolled You know, things just get beyond your control And that can happen You know, if you’re hit by three or four catastrophes at the same time You know, maybe you have Oh, the political system collapses, there’s hyperinflation You lose your job and you have Someone that you love or two people die And maybe you get cancer, something like that Like those things happen to people And they just think, well, there’s no getting out of this Like, it’s just too much And you know, one of the things that’s very interesting about being a psychologist is that What you learn if you’re going to be a psychologist is that People come to you with mental illnesses And that’s almost never true People come to you because their lives are so damn complicated They cannot stay on top of them in any way That doesn’t make it look like they’re just going to get more complicated And so then that causes symptoms, you know It’s like, it’s this old idea It’s sort of a metaphor for genetic susceptibility Take a balloon and blow it up until it’s beyond its tolerance It’s going to blow out at the weakest point Well, that’s sort of what a genetic susceptibility is If I just keep adding complexity on top of you At some point you’ll blow out at your weakest point You know, maybe you’ll get physiologically ill Maybe you’ll start drinking, maybe you’ll develop an anxiety disorder Maybe you’ll get OCD, maybe you’ll get depressed Whatever, there’ll be something about you that’s the weakest point And if I just push, that’s where you’ll blow out So that’s a mental illness But those things almost never just happen Sometimes, but not very often Usually people have just been hammered like two or three different ways And then they collapse in the direction of their biological weakness And then maybe you put them back together But it’s almost always a complexity-related phenomena Rather than a mental illness-related phenomena Not always, but almost always So, okay, so now You got this complexity problem And you think, well, you deal with it conceptually And that’s sort of akin to the idea that it’s belief systems that Protect you from death anxiety The ideas are roughly comparable But again, that’s wrong It’s the sort of thing only a psychologist could think up Because psychologists think that everything about you happens inside your head So to speak, in your psyche, but that’s not true There’s a huge chunk of you that’s outside of you completely And so, this is a really good example Like, you know, we know the oldest cities This is a medieval city in France Beautiful old city Old cities were walled And the reason for that was because They were places of wealth And if you didn’t put walls around them Then other people would come in and steal everything and kill you So, like, having some walls was a good idea Like, the same as having walls in your house is a good idea Walls between your rooms are a good idea Or borders between categories are a good idea And so, part of the way you simplify the world is by building walls Walls around your space Because then a whole bunch of things can’t come in And so you don’t even have to think about them It’s not conceptual, it’s practical And so, and you know, one of the things I think I figured out recently Is the fundamental political difference between people And it looks to me like the fundamental political difference is How many walls should there be around your stuff? And the ultimate liberal answer is zero And the ultimate conservative answer is Bring on those walls, man And what’s interesting about both those perspectives First of all, is that there’s temperamental contributions to them And second, that they’re both valid So, one of the mysteries, I believe, that permeates psychometric psychology right now Is why the temperamental factors that influence politics are those particular temperamental factors So there’s five, let’s say, right? This classic big five, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness Well, the biggest predictors of political allegiance Forget about the politically correct types for a minute But on the liberal to conservative axis Is that the liberals are low in conscientiousness and high in openness And the conservatives are high in conscientiousness and low in openness And so then you think, well, why those two traits? That’s the first question And the second question is, why those two traits together? Given that they’re not very highly correlated, right? They’re really quite independent So why do they covary along the political axis? And I think this is the reason, I think it’s exactly that Is that open people like to live on the periphery of boundaries And they like to break boundaries between things Because interesting things happen when you think a different way When you think outside of the box, so to speak That’s what open people do They always think outside of the box No matter what box you put them in You know, and sometimes you meet people that are so open That they’re completely disorganized Their thought process is almost completely associational Like a dreamer, they just jump from one thing to another They’re very interesting to talk to It’s very hard for those people to get their lives together Because they’re interested in absolutely everything And their attention just flits all over the place And so they’re open And that actually does go along with higher intelligence, generally speaking So, and then if they’re low in conscientiousness They don’t see any utility in order And order, like orderly people Because that’s part of conscientiousness And the biggest determiner of political belief in the conscientious domain The orderly people like to have everything in its separate place And properly structured And so, you know, their world is box inside a box Inside a shelf of boxes And then that shelf of boxes is inside another box And all those boxes are nice and neat and tight Nothing inside them is touching And everything in every box is the same thing And you know, you can see that that You can see the utility in that And that, as far as we’ve been able to tell Is also associated with disgust sensitivity And disgust sense, people are disgusted, generally speaking When things that shouldn’t be touching are touching Like something horrible stuck to you, for example That produces a very visceral sense of disgust And it’s a boundary violation Because that’s what disgust is It indexes a boundary violation And you can How separate people should be from one another As individuals or in groups Is an entirely debatable issue Because there’s huge advantages When people mingle and mix And there’s huge dangers when people mingle and mix And so At some point you say, well, the dangers are overwhelming the positives And at another point you say, well, the positives are overwhelming the dangers And you have a continual argument about that With yourself, but more importantly With people who have different temperament than you You know, and the terrible temptation is to assume That only those people who have your temperament are correct And that’s just Those other temperaments wouldn’t exist if that was true I mean, if you look at it from Just say if you look at it from a strictly biological perspective So anyways, one of the things we do To simplify the world is to frame it Physically, and so you look at this You’ve got wall number one, and then you have wall number two But then inside the walls you have walls around everything All these houses are walls, and inside the houses There are walls as well And so everything is And what you do when you put walls around things Is you make part of the world simpler, right? Constantly, if the reason you have a house is so that Every buddy and his dog isn’t in your house You just want those few people that you can barely tolerate in your house And not all those other strangers, and God only knows what they’re going to do You’ll still invite people in now and then Because maybe you’re sick and tired and bored of the people that are in your house And so you want a little bit of new information But you want those barriers to be there so that you can Voluntarily modulate the information flow Okay, so that’s the first thing you do And then you set up rules with everybody else That says, well, I’m going to have some walls so you can’t come in But what I’m going to do is pay you for that privilege By letting you have some walls where people can’t come in And so I think that’s analogous I was thinking about the issue of discrimination in relationship to sex Because I’ve been thinking a lot about discrimination lately Because everybody thinks discrimination is a bad idea Which is a very stupid proposition Because you’re discriminating all the time And the most fundamental form of discrimination is choice of sexual partner And so you might say, well, why should that even be allowed? Because it is the most fundamental form of discrimination So for example, almost everyone is racially prejudiced when it comes to sexual partners So you think, well, is that right? Is that a… What about… Do you use age as an exclusionary criteria? Probably. Do you use physical attractiveness? Only insofar as you’re able Right? You use it completely if you could get away with it Roughly speaking, but you can’t because the most attractive people aren’t going to be anywhere near you So you can’t do it, but you’d like to Health, yes. Strength, yes. Wealth, yes. Education, definitely So it’s unbelievably discriminatory And so you might say, well, why is that justifiable? And it seems to me that it’s something like… Well, you get to say no to me if I get to say no to you It’s something like that We’ve agreed that everybody gets to discriminate on that basis And because everybody can do it, then it’s fair It’s something like that It’s very much worth thinking about You know, I don’t know if you know this, but in Huxley’s book, Brave New World Where the family had been completely demolished, right? And children were conceived in bottles and given and produced in factories So the whole idea of the relationship between sex and procreation had become a taboo One of the mantras, the slogans of the society was Everyone belongs to everyone else And so it was actually a social faux pas to refuse to sleep with someone Just as it was a social faux pas to have any exclusionary relationship Because another thing that you might notice is that there’s nothing more discriminatory than falling in love with someone It’s like, you’re special, and all the rest of you? Ma-ha-ha-ha, no So it’s the ultimate exclusionary act, right? And yet we presume that that’s an acceptable… not only acceptable, we demand that as a right And, well, that’s worth thinking about A lot Anyways, okay, so what you’re doing is By agreeing to this segregation and boxing, what you’re doing is Carving off little bits of the world that are simple enough So that someone like you can live for some amount of time there without too much danger And everyone agrees to do that, roughly speaking, because everybody needs to engage in that process of simplification And safety provision And so we have towns, and the towns are nothing but boxes, but inside boxes So there’s a good, you know, a good schematic of a little house And you can see that even inside the same place we segregate off rooms for different purposes And then what’s interesting too is that we set up those rooms as little dramatic spaces, right? So you furnish them, and you furnish them with things that tell you how to behave in that room So a table and chairs tells you that’s where you’re going to eat, and that’s where people are going to sit And they’re roughly going to… they’re going to sit facing each other That has certain implications, because the chairs don’t face the walls, they face each other And you have a living room where it’s comfortable, and there’s a fire, and you know, you’re setting up little stages, basically So that, just like kids do when they pretend, you know, they all assign each other roles And then they lay out a little drama, and that’s what you do when you invite someone over Well, let’s sit in the living room Well, you’ll probably get a drink if you sit in the living room, and hypothetically you’re going to have some conversation And so it’s a bounded place, there are rules that apply, and then you get to have a little exploration inside that set of bounded rules And if you’re open, you’re going to discuss all sorts of things, and if you’re conservative and closed, then you’re going to discuss a very, very small subset of things And so hopefully everyone will agree on that So that’s one form of binding And then another is, well, we put boxes around each other when it comes to groups And so this is a, I think this is a picture from the Democratic convention when Obama was elected, if I remember correctly But anyways, what happens is that people segregate themselves into little micro-groups, like Democrats and Republicans And they basically do that on temperamental grounds, right, fundamentally And then they produce these games that everyone knows how to play, and that’s another form of simplification So when you bring all these people together at a political convention, it’s not like they all have the same ideas, they don’t And it could degenerate into chaos, and sometimes that happens, you get big demonstrations at these places, and sometimes people throw tear gas and all of that But mostly speaking, it’s pretty peaceful, and the reason for that is that there’s a set of procedures in place That have some historical justification, that are embedded within a shared cultural and belief system And everybody goes there and agrees to play by the rules, roughly speaking And so then they can elect a candidate, they can kind of flip it down to a binary choice for the election, right? Yes or no, something like that, and nobody gets killed, usually So hooray for that! That’s a hell of a thing to pull off, to be able to generate out of 300 million people, two people to run for the highest office Then let everyone play a game to determine who they’re going to be, and then to have the bloody thing function stably through power transitions Like, that never happens, right? That’s a complete bloody miracle, and hardly any societies have ever pulled it off The power transition being the really important thing Because a tyrant can be stable for a while, but usually what happens is he dies and all hell breaks loose So, I think George Washington, I think it was George Washington that said, or had said about him The reason that he was a great leader wasn’t because he was president, but because he stopped being president And that’s really worth thinking about So then, the next thing that sort of simplifies your world is actually your physiological structure, right? We talked about that a little bit Well, you can only see things that are in front of you, not things that are to the side or behind you You know, you can only see a very narrow… You can only see a very narrow chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum Roughly that chunk that enables you to see by sunlight and to detect ripe fruit and that sort of thing So it’s very evolutionarily determined And… You see things of a certain size quite easily because they’re handy, right? So, objects manifest themselves to you as things because they have some relationship to your capacity to use them as tools And that’s dependent on your size You have a certain strength and not a different strength You have a certain degree of articulation There’s some things you can represent in language So you have limitations that screen out from your consideration all sorts of things And that’s bad because, for example, before people discovered germs, there was a lot of them zipping about killing people And the fact that we couldn’t see them wasn’t such a good thing But by the same token, we’re also not as overwhelmed with complexity as we might be if we could detect everything And, you know, one of the problems with being connected so much is that it’s easy to drown in information And that’s rough for information foragers You can’t stay off your damn computer because it opens up your senses far beyond their normal limitations And so where should you stop? Well, you don’t, you know, you’re on the damn thing like a pensioner on a slot machine And for many of the same reasons So your body also filters out the world for you and provides you with access to some information and not access to others And then the same thing is the case with your nervous system And I do read, I put the first picture there of the, this is the central nervous system that controls voluntary movement, for example I put it there because people like to think that their brain is in their head But it’s a stupid way of thinking about it as far as I’m concerned Because you have an awful lot of neurological tissue distributed through your body And like your autonomic nervous system, if I remember correctly, which is mostly distributed through your body Has more neurons in it than your central nervous system And so you aren’t a brain in a body, you know, your brain is really, really distributed through your whole body And I think the idea that you have a brain in a body is kind of a holdover from the idea that you have a soul in a body And not that I’m necessarily criticizing that idea But I think they kind of got grafted onto one another And so, but the problem with that is that it, and this is that, so it’s the soul body, brain body, mind body, dichotomy Which I think is the same dichotomy And the problem with that is that it’s easy to think of thought as something that’s abstracted away from the body And I think that was an enlightenment idea, you know, that just like the soul shouldn’t be contaminated by the demands of the body If you were going to be pure spiritually So your thought shouldn’t be contaminated by your subjectivity and your emotions and your motivations and all of that It should, your abstractions should be independent of your subjectivity And rationality and emotion are construed in that manner as enemies You know, the purpose of rationality is to dispense with the irrationality of emotion and motivation And that’s Freud’s idea of the properly functioning ego is something like that too Because the id is this place of compulsion and drive And the ego has to basically suppress that in the service of the superego There’s no idea of integration really in Freud Now, I don’t want to be rough on Freud And I think part of the reason that he thought that way is because the patients he had were precisely those who weren’t very well integrated because of their pathological past And so they didn’t know how to get those subsystems up into the overarching game And so their only alternative was something like suppression or repression Because if you don’t know how to be aggressive in a sophisticated way You’re still going to be aggressive, but you’re going to have to inhibit it, control yourself Because you can’t just be aggressive around people, it just won’t go well for you So even if you can’t do it in a sophisticated way, you’re going to repress it Or you’re going to get in trouble, those are the options So, okay, but if you start thinking about the brain, the nervous system as part of the body As an inseparable part, well then the function of thinking starts to become something different It’s not so much the objective abstract representation of the world Which is kind of what you’re pursuing if you’re a scientist, it’s more like It’s more like conceptualization of and practice of the proper way of being in the world And I think that’s what you’re more interested in anyways I don’t see how you can’t be since you’re a living thing And you’re overwhelmingly motivated to successfully manifest those actions that a living thing has to manifest in order to continue And it’s complicated, like you can boil it down to survival and reproduction It’s a good overarching simplification But there’s nothing simple about survival and reproduction I mean, all sorts of complex monsters emerge out of that Even simple conceptualization But it’s not unreasonable to assume that one of the things that people generally want to do is to continue living in as pain free manner as possible It’s something like that, although that’s a simplification So now the reason I’m making that case is because the fact that you have a body And yet the fact that you have a nervous system is another set of limitations on how it is that you’re going to interact with the world Okay, so now we’ve got the nervous system, we can go to higher resolution, we say, well you have a brain And the brain, let’s see if I can, so that’s the frontal cortex there And that’s the temporal cortex there, and that’s the parietal cortex there, and that’s the sensory cortex there And these were, if I remember properly, these were divisions that I think were first, well they were first thought through in the late 19th and early 20th century They’re slightly specialized, so this cortex back here does a lot of the elaboration of vision And that one there helps you with your sense of embodiment and your knowledge about where your body actually happens to be localized And then that one helps, for example, in some elements of language output And then the frontal cortex, especially the prefrontal part, which is up here, is concerned with the organization and implement the organization of motor action And that’s a good way of thinking about it, you’ve got part of your brain that deals with the sensory world And the integration of the sensory world, which seems to happen about there, where these places meet And the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex, the motor cortex helps you plan out voluntary actions The prefrontal cortex grew out of that in the course of evolution So you might think, well there’s reflex actions, and they happen when something happens to you, you respond And then that elaborates up into the motor system, and that enables you to act voluntarily in the world And then that elaborates up into the prefrontal motor system, which helps you plan how you might act in the world So it’s the prefrontal cortex that’s the home of, let’s call it, its complex, sophisticated, voluntary thought Which you could think about as a way of representing the world, but which is more accurately a way of generating avatars of yourself in hypothetical worlds To figure out how they would survive if you did implement them into action And so I think that’s why, so one of the weird things that you discover psychometrically is that there’s no correlation between conscientiousness and intelligence And that’s a weird one, you know, because people think about intelligence as planning and forward thinking and all of that But that’s also how they think about conscientiousness, as planful behavior and the consideration of future possibilities But intelligence and conscientiousness have zero correlation And so you think, well why is that? Well I guess it has to be that way, because you couldn’t think abstractly if you were prone to act out what you thought You just go and act it out And that, like, I mentioned this to you before, when you dream, you’re paralyzed And you can take that little part of the brain that produces that paralysis out of a cat, or out of a person, but we haven’t done it with people, out of a cat And then when the cat falls asleep and hits REM sleep it’ll run around until it runs into something and then it’ll wake up Well, so, the dream thinking is so tightly allied with action that there’s no separation between them, so there’s no real abstraction there If you couldn’t abstract, you wouldn’t be able to think, and the fact that you can abstract means that you can separate your thinking from your action So that’s why, as far as I can tell, there’s very little correlation between conscientiousness and intelligence It’s like it has to be that way, because you have to be able to think about things that you wouldn’t do if you’re going to think So, and in general we think of people who act as soon as they think as impulsive So, okay, well, so, there’s a huge part of the brain that’s devoted to sensory processing And there’s a huge part of the brain that’s devoted to planning And the whole prefrontal part of the brain is devoted to planning And that’s, and again, so what that indicates is that in large part, as far as your evolved body is concerned, the reason that you think is so that you can act better And of course that makes sense, and you can think about memory from that perspective too Because if you think scientifically, you think that your memory of the world is something like an objective record of events, of objective events But it’s really not very much like that at all And besides, who cares? You don’t need an accurate representation of all the facts about this room In fact, all it would do is weigh you down Who cares what colour the walls are, what colour the ceiling is, or what colour the paint is, all of that’s not worth remembering Partly because it has no relationship whatsoever to what you need to do in order to continue to act And so what you’re doing when you remember, as far as I can tell, is that you’re mining your experience for information that you can bring forward into the future It’s purely pragmatic And so, you know, I treat people who have post-traumatic disorder or symptoms of post-traumatic disorder And so let’s say they got post-traumatic stress disorder because, again, because a relationship collapsed on them suddenly Which is quite common You know, they get betrayed or someone leaves them suddenly And then they don’t know what to do Because, especially if they’re conscientious, because then they just tear themselves into pieces trying to figure out what they did wrong to bring about that event And the reason they’re doing that is because they want to retool their perceptions and their actions so that the probability that they’ll have the same experience, again, is minimized And their mind won’t leave them alone until they do it And no wonder, right? Because if you fall into a big pit and you get really hurt The first thing you should figure out is how to not fall into big pits anymore And your mind is set up exactly for that And so what you do with someone who’s having problems like that, so maybe they’re waking up at the middle of the night obsessing about what went wrong Is you walk them through it You do a situational analysis first Because one of the oversimplifications that people make, and this is especially true for conscientious people Is if something bad happened to me, I must have done something to deserve it Now that’s actually a pretty functional idea Because it suggests that there are things about your behavior that you could change that would make the future better But the problem is, is that say if it’s the collapse of a relationship and you’ve been with that person for eight years or longer Well, you did so many things with them that the idea that you did something wrong pretty much extends to every single thing you ever did with them And that’s, how are you going to fix that? And so that’s part of the trauma actually, the trauma is 80 million snakes all at the same time It’s like, well, forget it You don’t have time to go through all that material And so, partly what you do is with people, and this is what you should do with yourself too Is you do a situational analysis It’s like, don’t be assuming necessarily that the thing that happened to you only happened to you because of what you did or didn’t do There’s all sorts of factors at play So, one of the things that sometimes I do with clients is if they were in a relationship And I can get some reasonable personality information about both of them I can point out where they were temperamentally incompatible You know, like if you’re a highly conscientious person and your partner is very very low in conscientiousness It’s like, well, good luck to you two How the hell are you ever going to work that out? Because you want everything to be exactly where it’s supposed to be and you’re working all the time And your partner could care less whether things were where they’re supposed to be and they’re not going to work And you can butt heads about that forever The probability that you’re going to shift it, you know, except to some minor degree is very very low And so sometimes you end up with someone with whom you get along very well on one temperamental dimension And you’re an absolute catastrophe on the other four And the probability that you’re going to be able to mediate a huge temperamental difference is extremely low You wouldn’t expect yourself to mediate a huge intellectual difference Right? You’re going to make the other person smarter Or maybe you smarter depending on who you’re with It’s like, no, probably not A bit maybe So you do a situational analysis And so what you’re trying to do is to extract out information from your past and your present That will enable you to conduct yourself properly into the future And so that’s another example of the pragmatic element of thought Well then, within the brain itself, apart from the major subdivisions which we just described There are minor subdivisions and here’s a bunch of them listed The caudate nucleus, the cerebral cortex, the huge newest part of the brain That’s about a square meter if you unfold it, it’s all folded up And most of the processing occurs right on the surface That’s the idea anyways The thalamus, that’s a place where a lot of the information in the brain appears to be integrated The cerebellum helps you with balance and the sequencing of complex motor activities The hippocampus, that’s the one we talked about before One of the things that the hippocampus does, seems to do, is compare your model of the world as it’s unfolding With the model that you desire to be occurring And then keeps track of mismatches And if it detects a mismatch, then it disinhibits other emotional and motivational centers And that’s the beginning of your response to the unknown So, one of them is the hypothalamus I’m going to concentrate on it for a bit It’s a little tiny part of the brain that’s pretty much at the top of the spinal cord See, it’s really small compared to the rest of the brain Now, it turns out that, imagine this is a cat brain for a minute And you take off the whole cat brain, except for the hypothalamus Which people do, you take off the whole cortex, for example And then the cat’s still alive if you do it carefully But it doesn’t have much of a brain So you might think, well that cat would just do nothing But the cat’s actually pretty functional if it’s reduced just to its hypothalamus And that’s because the hypothalamus is an incredibly important part of the brain And it provides, what I would say, constitute the major psychological frames And so, a decorticate cat can still eat and drink And regulate its body temperature And engage in defensive aggression And if it’s female it can still mate Male can’t, because the male mating behaviour is more complicated And as long as you keep it in a bounded environment It can function reasonably well It’s hyper curious though Which is very weird, because you wouldn’t expect a cat with no brain to be curious about anything But a cat with no brain is curious about everything And that seems to be because Part of the reason that you aren’t curious about something anymore Is because you’ve investigated it And you’ve built a representation of it that’s functional And that functional representation then stands for the thing itself And then you can ignore it, and so you learn to ignore things They’re interesting to begin with, and then you learn to ignore them And so, one of the things that I think artists do, if they’re great artists Is remind you that there’s more to things that you see now that you’ve learned to ignore them So you get a kind of hallucinogenic painting of flowers, like Van Gogh might produce Like his famous irises, which I think sold for like 220 million dollars or something, outrageous It’s like what Van Gogh is trying to show you is what those flowers looked like before you thought you could see them Because now you flower, and you walk by, you know You don’t see it at all, because you’re off to get a peanut butter sandwich or something You don’t have time to glory in the wonder of the world, you know You’ve got something practical to do So, alright, so we’re going to zoom in on the hypothalamus here And what you see, of course, when you zoom in on the hypothalamus is that it’s not a thing It’s a whole bunch of things, and then it’s one of those horrible whole bunches of things That are made out of even more bunches of things, and they’re made out of more bunches of things And what’s really interesting about going down the body from an analytic perspective Is it doesn’t seem to get less complex as you go farther down, you know Like some of the… I should actually show you that I haven’t showed you that little video of DNA fixing itself, eh? Oh, I better show you that It’s so cool, it’s ridiculously cool, so you definitely need to see it Until I encountered the artworks of David Goodsell Who is a molecular biologist at the Scripps Institute And his pictures are all… everything’s accurate, it’s all to scale And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside of me was And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like So this is a transection through blood In the top left-hand corner you’ve got this yellow-green area The yellow-green area is the fluids of blood, which is mostly water But it’s also antibodies, sugars, hormones, that kind of thing And the red region is a slice into a red blood cell, and those red molecules are hemoglobin They are actually red, that’s what gives blood its color And hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs And then carry it to other parts of the body I was very much inspired by this image many years ago And I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world What would it look like? And that’s how I really began So let’s begin This is DNA in its classic double helix form, and it’s from X-ray crystallography So it’s an accurate model of DNA If we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands You see these things that look like teeth Those are the letters of genetic code, the 25,000 genes you’ve got written in your DNA And they typically talk about the genetic code, this is what they’re talking about But I want to talk about a different aspect of DNA science And that is the physical nature of DNA And it’s these two strands that run in opposite directions for reasons I can’t go into right now But they physically run in opposite directions, which creates a number of complications for your living cells As you’re about to see, most particularly when DNA is being copied And so what I’m about to show you is an accurate representation Of the actual DNA replication machine that’s occurring right now inside your body, at least 2002 biology So DNA is entering the production line from the left-hand side And it hits this collection, this miniature biochemical machine That are pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy So DNA comes in and hits this blue donut-shaped structure And it’s ripped apart into its two strands One strand can be copied directly, and it can be seen spooling off down to the bottom there But things aren’t so simple as the other strand because it must be copied backwards So it’s thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time Creating two new DNA molecules Now you have billions of this machine right now wearing it right way inside you Copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity It’s an accurate representation, and it’s pretty much at the correct speed for what’s occurring inside you But I’ve left out error correction and a bunch of other things This was work from a number of years ago, thank you This was work from a number of years ago But what I want to show you next is updated science, it’s updated technology So again we begin with DNA, and it’s jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding super molecules Which are stripped away so you can see something DNA is about two nanometers across, which is really quite tiny But in each one of your cells, each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long So to keep the DNA organized, to regulate access to the genetic code It’s wrapped around these purple proteins, I’ve labeled them purple here It’s packaged up and bundled up All of this field of view is a single strand of DNA This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome And we’ll come back to chromosomes in a minute We’re pulling out, we’re zooming out, out through a nuclear pore Which is sort of the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA called the nucleus All of this field of view is about a semester’s worth of biology And I’ve got seven minutes, so we’re not going to be able to do that today No, I’m being told no This is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope And it’s been filmed under time-lapse, which is why you can see it moving The nuclear envelope breaks down, the sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes We’ll focus on them They go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots When the cell feels it’s ready to go, it rips apart the chromosome One set of DNA goes to one side, the other side gets the other set of DNA Identical copies of DNA, and then the cell splits down the middle And again, you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you Now we’re going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes And look at its structure and describe it So again, here we are at that equator moment The chromosomes line up, and if we isolate just one chromosome We’re going to pull it out and have a look at its structure So this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have At least as far as we’ve discovered so far inside of us So this is a single chromosome, and you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome One is bundled up into one sausage, the other strand is bundled up into the other sausage These things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side Are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell They’re called microtubules, but name’s not so important But what we’re going to focus on is this red region I’ve labeled it red here, and it’s the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes It is obviously central to the movement of the chromosomes We have no idea really as to how it’s achieving that movement We’ve been studying this thing called the kinetic core for over 100 years with intense study And we’re still just beginning to discover what it’s all about It is made up of about 200 different types of proteins, thousands of proteins in total It is a signal broadcasting system It broadcasts through chemical signals telling the rest of the cell when it’s ready When it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes It is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules It’s transiently involved with the growing of the microtubules And it’s able to transiently couple onto them It’s also a tension sensing system It’s able to feel when the cell is ready, when the chromosome is correctly positioned It’s turning green here because it feels that everything is just right And you’ll see that there’s one little last bit that’s still remaining red And it’s walked away down the microtubules That is the signal broadcasting system, sending out the stop signal, and it’s walked away I mean, it’s that mechanical It’s molecular clockwork This is how you work at the molecular scale So with a little bit of molecular eye candy We’ve got kinesins, which are the orange ones They’re little molecular courier molecules walking one way And here are the dynein They’re carrying that broadcasting system And they’ve got their long legs so they can step around obstacles and so on So again, this is all derived accurately from the science The problem is we can’t show it to you any other way Exploring at the frontier of science, at the frontier of human understanding, is mind-blowing Discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science But most medical researchers This is just discovering this stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals Which are to eradicate disease, to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes And to lift people out of poverty Thank you So that’s just so ridiculously mind-blowing It’s almost unbearable I mean, to think about that as clockwork even is a pretty strange idea Because all those little things walk over obstacles It’s like, how the hell does that happen? They’re just molecules So it’s so cool because when you go down you’d think simple But, you know And he said at the beginning when the little machines were taking that DNA apart That he didn’t show the error correcting There’s other little machines that go along and see if everything’s okay And if it isn’t they cut it out and put a right piece in It’s like, yeah, things we don’t understand There’s no shortage of them, that’s for sure Okay, so What I’m doing in some sense is walking you through a psychophysiological representation of Piaget’s developmental process, I would say So I wanted to zero in on the hypothalamus because it seems to me the thing that sets the most basic frames And so we’ll go ahead with that So you see that it’s made up of all these little parts And so it’s called the hypothalamus more for convenience than because it’s a homogenous set of structures Because it’s not a homogenous set of structures This is something to consider very carefully when you’re thinking about the terminology that psychologists use Or that you might use to describe your own behavior Because you know, you can roughly, there is a psychology of motivation And there’s a psychology of emotion And you might think, well, emotion and motivation are categorically different entities But they’re not In fact, there’s no such thing as a uniform set of motivations And there’s no such thing as a uniform set of emotions And the distinction between a motivation and an emotion is unclear, to say the least And that’s partly because the physiological substructures that subsume what we call motivations and what we call emotions And it’s not like there’s a motivation center that’s homogenous The closest is the hypothalamus, but it’s made of structures that are qualitatively different And then the emotions, because I have to use that descriptive terminology because we have to communicate it about it somehow There’s all sorts of different structures in the brain that contribute to emotional expression And they’re not even in the same place, much less composed of identical structure or function So you know, we have these shorthands that we use to divide up the world But they’re awkward and untenable as the level of resolution increases But anyways, I’m still going to go with motivation and emotion because it’s a useful simplification But you can see with the hypothalamus that there’s all these complicated little subsystems in there And I showed you that video to show you just how complicated the subsystems are All the way down to the, really to the molecular level How those little machines manage what they do is completely beyond me You know, to call it clockwork when those little things that walk can walk over obstacles It’s like clockwork does one thing, you know, only Click, click, click, click, that’s all it does No exceptions This thing walks over obstacles to get where it’s going It’s like, who knows what’s going on down there But it works well enough, so here we are, weirdly enough So, motivation seems to me to be the initial framing process And you come into the world with the motivational systems roughly ready to go You know, babies are hungry, babies get cold, babies want something to drink You know, so the world already comes, in some sense, they come into the world with pre-packaged categories for existence And those are the categories that are going to aid their survival And you know, they’re not simple either, it’s not so simple It’s, well, hunger, thirst, pleasure, pain, anxiety You know, the classic sort of, and the classic emotions, sadness, joy, and so forth Those systems are already there, but babies have more complicated systems too Like the system for exploration is already in place, and the system for play, which is really complicated It’s already in place, and so, you know, you come into the world with a human nature And the nature seems to be distributed across these subsystems That’s one way of thinking about it And it’s also useful to think about the operation of those subsystems as something like You could think about them as games, with an aim You could think about them as stories, you could think about them as frames of reference You could think about them as action patterns All of those, and you can think about them as sub-personalities Which I actually think is maybe the best way to think about them Because if you’re hungry, it’s not a deterministic drive It’s a sub-personality that has a goal And then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal It has a bunch of perceptions that suit that goal And it organizes your emotional responses around that goal And so to think about it as a personality is a much It’s a much more intelligent way to look at it One other thing about Skinner’s rats, you know, Skinner could get rats to do almost everything And he would reward them with food And so he had a simple rat model But his rats were starved down to 75% of their normal body weight So not only were they not social gregarious rats, like rats are, because they were isolated They were genetically altered from wild rats But they also weren’t as complex as a real rat because they were starving And so, but you know, a starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat And a rat is a pretty good model of a person But a lot of our models of simple behavioural learning were based on starving, isolated rats So, anyways How to think about motivation We’ll think about it from the hypothalamic perspective So we could say, one thing that motivation does is set goals We could say that emotions track progress towards goals And I’m going to use that schema, even though it’s not exactly right So you say, well, motivation determines where you’re going to aim So if you’re hungry, you’re going to aim at something to eat And then that will organise your perceptions So that you zero out everything that isn’t relevant to that task Which is almost everything You concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward When you encounter those things, that produces positive emotion As you move through the world towards your goal And you see that things are laying themselves out That facilitate your movement forward Those things cause positive emotion And if you encounter anything that gets in the way Then that produces negative emotion And it can be like threat Because you’re not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way It can be anger so that you move it away It can be frustration, disappointment, grief Those would, if you had a response that serious to an obstacle It would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence You know, so you walk downstairs and, I don’t know The contracting company has set a wrecking ball through your kitchen It’s like, that’s going to be disappointing You’re not going to keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble That little frame is going to get punished out of existence And some new goal is going to pop up instead And, you know, one of the things we’re going to try to sort out is How do you decide when you’ve encountered an obstacle that’s so big That you should just quit and go do something else Because that’s not obvious You know, and you can get into counterproductive persistence pretty easily So we don’t know how people solve that problem It’s a really complicated one So anyways, we’re going to work on that scenario Your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival That produces a frame of reference So it’s not a goal, it’s not a drive And it’s not a collection of behaviors It’s a little personality And the personality has a viewpoint It has thoughts that go along with it It has perceptions It has action tendencies, all of that You can see this in addiction Most particularly So one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time And that’s because when they’re… They’ve built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves Or a big one, maybe it’s 90% of their personality And one of the things that consists of Is all the rationalizations that they’ve used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people And so the addiction has a personality And so when the person is off, maybe they’re addicted to meth or something like that Where we know the addiction is more short term powerful than I would say than an alcohol addiction They’ll say anything And the words are just tools used to get towards the goal And if they happen to be deceptive, whatever, it doesn’t matter They’re just practical tools to get towards the goal And then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that You reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug And then the next time you’re even a better deceiver and liar So okay, so we’re going to say motivations One way of thinking about it is they set goals But it’s not the right way of thinking about it They produce a whole framework of interpretation And so we’re going to think about that framework of interpretation And then emotions emerge inside of that So the world is framed, motivation set goals You could say the world has to be framed So motivation sets that frame Goals, emotions, perceptions, and actions And then actions track progress So positive emotion says you’re moving forward properly towards your goal And if you encounter something you don’t expect, you stop That’s anxiety It’s like, oh, we’re not where we thought we were And so we don’t know what to do So we should stop because we don’t know where we are or what we’re doing Stop, frozen And then the more powerful negative emotions like pain, they might make you get out of there So emotions, forward, stop, reverse That’s your emotions within that motivated frame So, and that’s another example of how your mind is embedded in your body Your emotions are like, they’re offshoots of action tendencies That’s the right way to think about it Because action is everything, fundamentally So what are some basic motivations? Most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus, by the way And that tells you just how important a control system it is The other thing that’s useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it That are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grapevines So you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it’s not on too much But if it’s on in any serious way, it’s like it wins So partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the dominion of your hypothalamus Is to never ever be anywhere where its action is necessary Right? You don’t want to go into a biker bar Because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked, defensive aggression is immediately necessary You probably don’t want that You don’t want the panic, you don’t want the terror You don’t want the frenzied fight, you don’t want any of that You don’t want to have to run away in absolute panic So you just don’t go there And a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them And so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control And everything to do with staying where you belong So, okay So, basic motivations Hunger, thirst, pain Pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus, that’s a different circuit Anger slash aggression, thermal regulation Panic and escape Affiliation and care, sexual desire, exploration, play And you can kind of break those into the classic Darwinian categories too And say, well there’s a set of motivations that go along with self-maintenance That would be your survival Ingestive and defensive See, I’ve sort of coded them there So the self-maintenance There’s an ingestive set of basic motivations that go with self-maintenance You say that’s hunger, thirst There’s a set of defensive motivations Pain, anger, thermal regulation, panic and escape And then there’s motivations that are associated with reproduction Affiliation, care and sexual desire And then I put exploration and play sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally So, what I tried to do is take the basic motivations and then nest them inside a fundamental Darwinian framework So that you could see how the biological process of evolution has manifested itself And then sort of differentiate it into these fundamental biological systems So Okay, so this is a rat brain flat map And so it’s basically what you would see of a rat’s brain if you flattened it out, unrolled it, flattened it out And then made it two-dimensional And you can see here So this is the hypothalamus And you can see that it’s made out of these different nuclei, that’s what they’re called And they sort of correspond to those shapes that I showed you in the human hypothalamus earlier And you see that there’s different systems The system for eating and drinking is outlined in green And the reproductive system, there’s two of them, and they’re outlined in, I think it’s red, is that right? Yeah, reproductive is red and the defensive ones are in magenta And so those are the, you can think about those as the three fundamental value systems Of living creatures with complex nervous systems as far as the hypothalamus is concerned And then given what I told you about the hypothalamus, which is You hardly need the rest of your brain at all As long as you have a hypothalamus It’s worth thinking that those are very fundamental to value per se Now, you might think if you only need the damn hypothalamus, why bother with the rest of the brain at all? Which is, that’s a very useful question Especially because most creatures don’t have much of a brain So, but it seems to be something like Well, you’ve got your eating and drinking system, your reproductive system, and your defensive system But the problem is, is that those things, first of all, can conflict You know, are you too hungry to sleep or too sleepy to eat? So that’s a pretty simple kind of contradiction, you know Are you more angry at your partner or do you want sexual relations more? So they can conflict in the present But then they can conflict with other people doing the same thing And they can conflict across time And so partly the reason that you need the rest of your brain is to solve the problems That emerge from the solutions that the hypothalamus offers And so because you don’t want to just eat and drink and reproduce and defend yourself You want to eat now, later, tomorrow, next week, and next month While you’re able to engage in reproductive activity and defend yourself In multiple contexts with a whole bunch of people for as long as you can possibly manage it And so you need the rest of your brain to calculate that And so what the rest of your brain has to do, roughly speaking, is regulate these And also elaborate them up into something that’s integrated inside you Which might roughly be your personality And then so that that personality is integrated with the personality of other people And so you can think about it as an emergent process This is one of the things I really like about Piaget He’s so damn smart because Piaget is the only thinker I know, really Who really addressed the problem of the evolution of value systems Like he never nailed it down to the physiology Because there wasn’t enough known about physiology when he did his work But it maps really nicely onto the physiology But, you know, he said, well, but he got it right anyways He said you come into the world with a handful of pre-established reflexes Okay, we’re going to complicate that up a bit No, you come into the world with a handful of micro-personalities That are centered around these fundamental motivational axes Okay, and then that gets you started And that has motor output as well as perceptions and all of that That’s associated with it And then as you interact initially, let’s say with your mother You start to learn how to integrate those things in some sort of social context Because you form a relationship with your mother right off the bat And so you’re starting to figure out how to produce patterned and stable interactions Between those motivational systems on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis And one of the things you do with kids, it’s really important to do this with kids Is you want to get them onto some sort of a routine Because what the routine is actually is the beginnings of the system that integrates All of these underlying biological systems into some sort of unity Because they have to sleep and wake up So you want to nail that down so it’s predictable They have to eat, they have to stay warm And they need to do that in a manner that’s stable And so it’s to your great benefit as a parent that you get islands of stability planted in the life of your kid So that some of this gets simplified So that the kid isn’t constantly preoccupied with domination by these different motivational systems And so it’s a useful thing to know because you might think, well, you don’t want to impose any structure on your baby It’s like, no, wrong You don’t want to be a tyrant about it But there’s no difference between that structure and the emergence of the child’s adaptation to the world And to some degree what you’re trying to do is free them up from arbitrary domination by these underlying motivational systems You know, because if a baby gets too tired, it’s a horrible little thing It’ll just scream at you nonstop and it’s not happy about it It’s like it’s not good for anyone for that to happen And so the faster you have to do it in relationship with the child Some will sleep right away in a schedule almost immediately And other kids are harder to get their circadian rhythms regulated So you have to attend to the individual differences that characterize the child But you’re still trying to establish some stable harmony out of this mishmash of initial systems So… All right, so that’s sort of a physiological look at it This is more of a conceptual look at it So I said that each of these systems you can think about in a bunch of different ways You can think about it as something that sets a goal I’m hungry and I don’t want to be hungry Point A, point B So the hunger and the vision of the satiation of the hunger are all part of the same frame And so if you’re hungry, you go into the kitchen You know that already, that’s part of your procedural knowledge about how the world works And then what you’re going to look for are only those things that are relevant to what you’re trying to do in the kitchen Everything else is zeroed out, you won’t even really see it, and why would you? You want to see the things that are relevant to the task at hand And so that’s the thing that’s so cool, I think, because what it means is that you see the things that are relevant to the task at hand And so here’s something to think about Let’s say that you see a whole bunch of things in the world that you don’t want to see You know, that make you constantly miserable and unhappy One thing you might ask yourself is, are you sure that your goals are proper? Because your goals determine what you see, now not 100% obviously You can be thinking about the homework you’re going to do and step off a curb and be hit by a van It’s like, you’re going to get hit by the van regardless of how you’ve oriented your perceptions, likely, in all likelihood So I’m not trying to argue for pure solipsism, but it is very interesting to consider that since you see In relationship to what you want, that a very large amount of what you see is dependent on what you’re aiming at And so one issue is, if your life is wretched and miserable, one thing to think about is whether or not what you’re aiming at is the right thing to be aiming at And nothing is exactly the wrong answer to that, I’m aiming at nothing So, okay, you’re going to experience a tremendous amount of misery and not very much joy So anyways, you’ve got this little frame You’re somewhere, and it’s not good enough, and you’re going somewhere else that’s going to be better And what better depends upon is the state of these underlying biological systems And then more complexly, as those biological systems get integrated into a personality and into the social world Then the frame and the goal is going to be dependent on that more complex, hierarchical organization So you’re not in here because you’re hungry You’re in here because if you get a degree, maybe you don’t ever have to be hungry So the hunger is properly incorporated into your… you don’t want to be cold, you don’t want to freeze to death in the winter, you don’t want to be on the street So your higher order goals are long term, socially negotiated solutions to the problems that are implicit in your being That might be one way of thinking about it So, and the micro elements of this, so you could say I’m hungry, that’s a physiological state and a conception I have a vision of how I’m going to solve that, but then… and that’s an abstraction But what you do to transform point A into point B is not an abstraction, you act So if you’re hungry, you actually move your body, say down from the second floor into the kitchen And you arrange things so that there’s transformations in the world And that’s a good way of thinking about the relationship between the mind and the body Your hypothetical solution to your problem, that’s the mind But the manner in which you incarnate that solution, that’s no longer abstract So, you know, people are always trying to solve the mind-body problem And that’s, as far as I can tell, that’s how you solve it, is you have abstractions, but they’re not abstractions that are representations of the world They’re abstractions that are representations of action patterns And the way those are implemented in the world is that you act them And so, it’s strange, because you’ve got this weird level of control, you know, I can move my arm, and I seem to be able to do that voluntarily But I really have no idea how I’m doing it, like I don’t have conscious access exactly to the musculature, except technically And I certainly have no idea what I’m doing chemically to make those muscles transform But, so, my abstraction is ground out in this movement And I can observe the movement and modify it, but I have no conscious access whatsoever to the microprocessors that are making that possible I have no idea why that is, probably because I’m not smart enough That would be my guess, right? Evolution is only going to allow your mind to control those elements of your being that you’re smart enough to control And so you don’t get voluntary control of your heartbeat, for example, because you’d just forget You’d be wandering around, and then you’d forget to beat your heart, and bang, you’d be dead, so you don’t get to do that So, alright, so, all these different, I classify these again as self-propagation and self-maintenance motivations And so, if you’re too hot, well, you want to go somewhere cooler, and if you’re too cool, you want to go somewhere hotter Same if you’re thirsty and hungry, and for self-propagation, well, you get lonesome and maybe, you know, you have some sexual desire And each of those different systems competes for access to this central frame And that’s something like the contents of your consciousness at any given time So, up pops a desire, but it’s the wrong way of thinking about it Because the desire sounds like something that’s pushing you forward, but the desire is goal, framework, emotion, perception, action, pattern, all at the same time It’s a little personality, or it’s a little story Actually, when you describe the operation of one of these things, that’s when you’re telling a story So, I was somewhere, I needed something, I went and got it It’s a boring little story, but that’s the basic unit of a story Right? Because I don’t care to hear what you’re doing unless you had a reason for doing it I just say, what’s the point of the story? And the point of the story is the point, it’s directional, right? It says, I went from here to there, that’s the point, here’s how I did it, that’s the point And you’re interested in that because maybe you want to know how to do it too And you won’t have to struggle through it like I did, you could just listen And so we’re always throwing these little units of information back and forth to each other And for good reason, I want to know what your point is Because better I learn it from you than make all the mistakes that you had to make when you were learning it And human beings, we got that figured out, that’s for sure So… Okay, I’m going to just explain this, and then we’ll stop Alright, so we’re in one of those frames now And we’re going from point A to point B And so the question is, how does the world lay itself out? Okay, so the first thing to understand, and this is partly the reason I showed you the gorilla video Is that the first thing a frame does for you is make almost everything irrelevant And that’s so great because that’s what you want, you want almost everything to be irrelevant Because otherwise you’re going to be so flooded with information that you… That’s what hallucinogens do, at least in their initial stages Is they take away that filter and make everything relevant You can read about that in Huxley’s Doors of Perception He does a great job of describing the initial stages of a mescaline experience And what happens is that all of the memory, in some sense, that regulates his perceptions is stripped off And so he sees everything glowing and alive and magical Like he’d never encountered it before, which is exactly how you would see something If all your memory about it was gone And so he sees things as way more complex and interesting than he normally sees them Well, that’s fine, but you know, if you’re like that all the time, then you end up in a ditch starving to death or something Like it’s not commensurate with normal life, that’s what it looks like And so your perceptions are just shrunk and restricted to the bare minimum necessary to keep you moving in the direction that you’re moving Alright, so the first thing you want to do is you want to make things irrelevant Now, if you’re with someone in a relationship Partly what you want them to do is to help you continue making most of their possibility irrelevant It’s polite Because one of the things, so you say, well we have a friendship, let’s say, we have a friendship, okay So that means you’re going, you’ve agreed to act in a friendly manner towards me and to support me There’s all sorts of other ways you could act Like a myriad of them And I’m going to do the same for you, so we’re simpler to each other than we would normally be And then you go and do something that betrays me, it’s like bang, that whole simplification is gone And all those parts of you that were supposed to be irrelevant, because we were playing the same game They’re dead relevant and I don’t know who the hell you are And so that’s really rough and people do not like that It’s this emergent mismatch between their desires and the way the world is manifesting itself So one of the issues of complexity is that when you hit an obstacle Everything that you have agreed with other people to make irrelevant is irrelevant And that’s generally a disconcerting experience Now you can, you know, you might want to toy a little bit with that in a relationship, you know So maybe you encourage your partner to dress differently or you go do different things or something Because you don’t want to be stuck in exactly the same old rut And so what you’ll agree is how you can both deviate an interesting amount But that’s voluntary and controlled, it’s not the same at all as having that little mess of 80 million snakes Pop up right in front of you, which is the last thing you want to have happen And so it’s so weird because one of the things that we’re striving to do constantly is to keep most of the world irrelevant And our cultural systems are designed precisely for that purpose And part of what you do when you disrupt them is you force people to consider a far more range of relevance Than they are even vaguely comfortable or vaguely competent to manage And it just burns them to a crisp because what your body does is if all of a sudden everything around you is irrelevant Like I could say, you’re stripped naked, I take you in a helicopter, jump, drop you right into the middle of a jungle at midnight It’s like you’re not bored Standing there, frozen, paralyzed, everything is interesting Well, too bad for you Because too interesting is very little different from terrifying And so your heart rate is going to be at 160 for like two days and then something will eat you and your problems will be over So this diagram basically suggests this This is how you break up the world when you’re going from point A to point B It renders almost everything irrelevant, hooray And then what happens is the rest of the world is broken up into obstacles that get in your way And tools that facilitate your movement forward And that’s actually what you see when you come into a place Like when you come into this room, these are obstacles in so far as you can’t walk through them And those are tools in so far as you can sit on them and watch the class This is a tool And these are tools And this is a tool And I’m a tool for, although I’d never admit it, but anyways I’m a tool because you need to take this class in order to advance towards your degree And so basically what you see in the world are entities of functional significance And those are not objects, they are not the same thing And that’s very much worth considering because we’re trying to build up a case, at least in part, for analyzing the nature of the structures within which you organize your perceptions And we tend to think that those are predicated on object perception It’s not true It’s not true And they’re predicated on relevance conception Does it help you? Does it get in your way? Or is it irrelevant? That’s what you want to know If it helps you, you’re happy about it If it gets in your way, you’re negatively predisposed towards it If it’s irrelevant, it’s invisible And so if your little scheme is functional, your little frame is functional Then most of the things that you encounter are mildly positive And that’s how you know that you know what you’re doing That’s how you validate the entire frame So, okay, good