https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nsZ8XqHPjI4
So I guess the case that I was making last time, at least in part, was that you’re one of one way of conceptualizing the fundamental problem that human beings face is to conceptualize it as an ongoing struggle with complexity and complexity emerges as a consequence of the sort of finite boundedness of individual consciousness and Incredible excess of the unbounded everywhere else, even including underneath that consciousness because of course your individual consciousness depends on the function Or is related to the function of things that are so complex you can’t even understand it. So there you are surrounded by some things that you understand in an in an ocean of things that you don’t understand at all and including things about yourself and it’s not obvious at all how people solve that problem because In some sense it’s not solvable the fact that you don’t have the cognitive resources Or the conceptual resources to understand everything that you need to understand in order to properly orient yourself in the world Now obviously partly the way we deal with that is that we cooperate with other people and so that radically multiplies our resources incredibly multiplies our resources so And it’s all it’s something to consider always when You know so much of the political dialogue that surrounds us now consists of a critique of of cooperative societies and an Analysis of their oppressive nature and of course that’s true because any cooperative system That specifies a certain end point and and produces a value hierarchy of some sort also simultaneously forces things into that value system and then rank orders people according to the value structure and so there’s an oppressive element to it, but compared to being naked in chaos Generally it’s better Now it doesn’t always have to be because it can get murderous, but generally speaking well look we’re social animals It doesn’t matter our evolutionary pathway has already taken us here, and so we’re individuals, but we’re unbelievably Social and so that’s that so as far as I can tell we’d have to be completely different creatures not to fall Not to take advantage of and fall prey to the problems with social being all right, so I Think the way that The problem of complexity has been solved and this is the best argument. I know of for The truth of the Darwinian notion of evolution now I don’t think that our models of evolution are complete by any stretch of the imagination I know they’re not partly because of recent work done in epigenetics which suggests that you can Acquire you can inherit acquired traits Right and when I went to university when I started going to university in the 1980s that was That was heresy really like no you cannot Inherit acquired traits, but actually you can inherit acquired traits. That’s the field of epigenetic studies that and that That’s a radical shift in perspective because we also don’t know exactly what that means across any length of time And when you’re thinking about evolutionary lengths of time you’re thinking about three and a half billion years because that’s the span of time over which life evolved and so even things that don’t have a Overwhelmingly market Potency for one generation can be unbelievably powerful across time and then there’s also the issue of sexual sexual selection because You know you’ll hear Darwinists continually describe the world and the evolutionary world as a place of randomness And that’s not true, and I don’t know why they make that statement The mutations are random or quantum The mutations are Random or quasi random because we don’t understand mutations that well yet either and most mutations are deadly right most mutations are deadly There’s a set of them that are harmful, but not deadly and then there’s a tiny tiny proportion that could in principle Produce some benefit to the next generation assuming environmental environmental shift say in the direction of the mutation so And that’s there’s a randomness element to that we know that I mean part of the reason that you mutate or your cells mutate your DNA mutates is because of Background levels of radioactivity and a lot of that’s a consequence of solar activity right so cosmic rays come zipping through the atmosphere And they nail your DNA and produce minor Alterations and that’s a mutation and if you crank up the background radiation rate like say around Chernobyl then the mutation rate rises, and there’s definitely a random element to that and it’s necessary for there to be a random element because As far as I can tell the only way you can beat a random environment is by producing random changes right so You know the idea basically the the environment isn’t some static place That’s selecting for higher and higher levels of fitness or not in any not in any It’s certainly not doing that in any static way, and so it’s shifting around randomly and then you know you have a structure Your species has a structure That’s a consequence of this immense evolutionary journey And it’s moderating itself randomly within certain parameters the parameters being that most mutations will kill you like Alterations in your fundamental form generally tend to kill you so they’re incremental and so the mutations are random and they match Hopefully they ratchet the randomness in the environmental shift, and so you can more or less keep up that way But then there’s additional complicating factors, and they’re not trivial and one of them is whatever epigenetics does We don’t know anything about that yet, but the second one is sexual selection and sexual selection is no joke It could be the primary thing it’s certainly one of the primary things that’s driven human evolution, and I think you can say that You think about the environment again, let’s think about the environment so You have a dominance hierarchy, and that’s really an old structure the dominance hierarchy 300 million years old Because it emerged pretty much whenever there was whenever there was a nervous system emergent nervous system And whenever animals had to occupy the same territory they automatically organized themselves into something approximating a dominance hierarchy So it’s a very very very very old structure. It’s older than trees. It’s older than flowers It’s old and as far as real goes from a Darwinian sense Permanent is real and so when you you can say well You know our burial ancestors adapted themselves to trees and so the tree was long Around long enough to be a feature of the environment But the dominance hierarchy has been around a lot longer than trees And you can think of the dominance hierarchy both as an adaptation to the environment Because you’d kind of think about the dominance hierarchy as a cultural construct But if a cultural construct lasts long enough Then it becomes part of the environment and so the dominance hierarchy is part of the environment and what seems to happen Roughly speaking and this is an oversimplification, but we’ll go with it is that males have a dominance hierarchy and There’s a relatively small number of males that are relatively successful and those successful males have preferential access to female reproductive capacity either because the females actively choose the more dominant males Which is very very common or because the more dominant males chase all the less dominant males away so that Even if the females don’t exercise choice which they often do then the only males left around that can serve as reasonable mating partners are the more powerful ones and so you think you get two really radical determiners of evolution as a consequence of that one is that each I’m not talking about female dominance hierarchies at the moment, but I can talk about them That’s why this is an oversimplification But what happens is that the males obviously are selected for their ability to move up dominance hierarchies? Obviously because the ones that are at the top of the dominance hierarchy reproduces preferentially and so that means the male dominance hierarchy becomes a method of selection, but then Allied with that is the female proclivity for choice on whatever dimension the dominance hierarchy happens to be arranged And so then female sexual selection also becomes a radical non random selector of What what genetic material is going to move into the next generation? and so I I fail to see how any of that can be separated from the emergence of Complex nervous systems and mind over the course of evolution because people aren’t creatures aren’t making random choices. They’re not random at all so We even know such things like Imagine a peacock’s tail, you know It’s covered with eyes which is quite interesting because eyes of course attract attention and lots of animals have evolved eye like Markings like moths there’s moths that when they unfold their wings They have two big eyes on the back of them and that’s to keep birds from eating them right because the birds don’t like being stared At so they stay away from the moths But so a peacock’s tail is nothing but eyes and so it’s very attractive and it shimmers and there’s something about it That’s beautiful, which is quite interesting too the females have obviously been selecting the male peacocks for beauty They have this insane tail well so the evolutionary biologists have thought well what possible Utility could that tail be is it just maybe the females got fixated on tail so to speak and you know You got a Baldwin effect loop going there and the male peacocks just got bigger and bigger tails And it’s just like an evolutionary dead end. It’s you know It’s a positive feedback list system That’s gone out of control, but they have done things that like look at the symmetry and and and breadth say or the symmetry and size and Overall quality of the male peacock’s tail as a marker for physical health so reduced parasite load for example And it does turn out that the healthier male peacocks have better tail display And so the way what the females seem to be doing is using some marker or some set of markers as a proxy indicator for for for health and I think I think you could say with with reasonable you could say reasonable that Reasonably that female human beings do the same thing to male human beings and there’s some of that vice versa too like we Evaluate each other for example for symmetry which is one of the elements of beauty Because healthier people tend to be more symmetrical and lots of animals use symmetry butterflies if Butterflies won’t mate with another butterfly if it deviates from symmetry by the tiniest amounts you can imagine So symmetry is a marker and there’s other markers like shoulder width to waist width is one and waist width to hip width There’s another that’s usually what males use that to evaluate females in part, so there’s lots of markers of health But it also looks to me like that the data worldwide seems to indicate that women so imagine that Women mate across dominance hierarchies and up Socio-economically speaking and on average across cultures women go for men who are about four to five years older You know it varies in the Scandinavian countries that shrunk a little bit, but not that much and in other cultures It’s bigger I would say that depends to some degree on difficulty of establishing economic independence right because in richer countries It’s easier to have enough economic independence if you’re a male to be to be a useful participant in the process of having children But it doesn’t matter cross-culturally. It’s still across and up where men mate across and down They don’t care much about socioeconomic status doesn’t seem to be part of their selection method generally speaking so so I Think that part of that is also that the ability of women to select for for male health It’s something like that because it isn’t that only that because if you’re healthy and energetic You’re much more likely to be successful because it’s very hard to be successful if you’re ill obviously I mean so because the competition is just too high and both both genders both sexes select each other for attractiveness both select for intelligence both that select for personality although the the different there are differences there in terms of what’s what’s stressed, but So so so I think you can derive a couple of things out of out of this and this is where I think people are different than Than other animals importantly different is that so you imagine that there’s tremendous selection pressure to Towards the production let’s say of men who are good at climbing male dominance hierarchies or Climbing the male dominance hierarchy, but the thing that’s so interesting about people is that we’ve multiplied our dominance hierarchies You know if you take an animal that’s got a rather static behavioral pattern Then there’s there’s a single hierarchy elephant seals are a good example of that so elephant seals the males are absolutely massive they’re way way bigger than the females and they basically have harems roughly speaking and They they use physical prowess as their marker of status essentially and obviously Size is a huge part of that because otherwise the male elephant seals wouldn’t be as they’re massive these things are absolutely enormous And so it’s just power Slash health you know maybe aggression something like that. It’s whatever makes them more Suitable for the kind of physical combat that elephant seals engage in so and The degree to which power is associated with dominance Status in those sorts of situations seems to be associated with the size differential between males and females So the more power is an issue with regards to male competence the larger the males are compared to the females and the more likely The males are going to have a harem relationship with the females and you see that a little bit in human beings because men are bigger Than women they’re not Overwhelmingly bigger that sexual dimorphism, and you know there’s some men that are smaller than some women But on average men are taller and they have more upper body strength and so forth so there is a power element to male Competition but it’s not as extended as it would be among animals say like like elephant seals So in the elephant seal you see maybe there’s one Stable set of traits that’s being selected for that makes the males more likely to reproduce But human beings were very weird creatures because we’re so Conceptually flexible and so what seems to have happened maybe we started They all started selecting each other for in dominance competitions for something like cognitive flexibility and and Conscientiousness it’s something like that so that would be The ability to abstractly represent the world and then the ability to operate Effectively within it to represent yourself socially in a way and then to carry through with that because that enables people to trust you So it’s something like that and so that produced Cortical expansion and then women were selecting men who were good at that and that produced cortical expansion and then There’s an arms race between women and men with regards to intelligence so the women kept up or they certainly kept up with with intelligence as the evolutionary cycle continued, but one of the consequences of selection for Cortical expansion and increased cognitive flexibility was that the number of dominance hierarchies that human beings could produce started to multiply Right because there’s all sorts of ways that you can be successful There’s you think about how many ways you can be successful in a modern culture and and you can be successful in dimensions that aren’t really even Associated with each other so you can be successful socially that that’s what an extrovert would do you could be successful in terms of intimate Relationships that’s what a agreeable person would do a disagreeable person would be more successful with regards to competition person who’s high in neuroticism would be would be trying to protect themselves and to establish some sort of security an Open person would be looking for a flexible creative environment, and so there’s this multiplicity of of Ways that you can establish a dominance hierarchy and be successful in it And if you’re creative you can come up with your own damn dominance hierarchy Which is exactly what you’re doing if you’re creative right you you spin up a game That’s your game, and then you you make the rules and that’s hard because if you make a new game with new rules It’s hard to monetize it But you could be the best at playing that game and so that’s a huge advantage to being creative if you can pull it off so then you think well what’s happened among human beings is the multiplication of the set of possible dominance hierarchies It’s become very broad and then you could say well What’s what’s driving selection now is the ability to be successful across multiple sets of dominance hierarchies? And that accounts at least in part for our cognitive flexibility And so that’s really what a human being is a human being is a creature that has high potential for Succeeding across a very wide range of potential human dominance hierarchies, and so that gives us our transformative Psyche that’s the niche that that’s the niche that we’ve both produced and occupy And I think it’s out of that the hero mythology emerges fundamentally because I think what the hero is the mythological hero is a Representation of that part of the psyche that’s particularly good at being successful across sets of dominance hierarchies It’s a very very biological way of thinking about it, and I I thought about this for a long time I can’t see any way that that just can’t be the case and how else how else could it work if? If we had a fixed behavioral pattern like beavers, you know you were the most successful beaver if you build the best dam It’s like fine, then you know what’s going to be selected for but that isn’t what people are like and it’s also why we’re so Multipurpose you know we have hands what what’s a hand for? What’s the evolutionary function of a hand? Well, you can’t specify that you could say it’s something like well a hand is useful for doing a whole bunch of different things with Well and Mouth tongue same thing what are words for well? It’s the same thing therefore very therefore communicating a very wide range of information It’s something like that, so we’re these weird general-purpose animals You know we’re not great at any one thing, but we can swim better than most terrestrial animals You know we can run faster than most animals And we can certainly run longer like a human being can run a horse to death over the course of a week if they’re in good shape So like we’re really good at Being a multi-purpose entity like a rat you know where they call rats weedy species because they can be anywhere They don’t have a specific niche like you know there’s animals down in in The Amazon that they’re specialized for like one tree you know or one type of tree in one tiny little area That’s not what human beings like is we’re we’re like cockroaches or rats which is a nasty comparison but we can go anywhere and thrive and so and So being particularly good at that being particularly good at being able to go anywhere and thrive Also seems to me to be a canonical element of the hero mythology, so So okay all right now I I Started to introduce all those topics because I was trying to address the issue of how it is that we’ve come to deal with the fact that things are so complex that we can’t deal with them and So a huge part of the answer to that is the Darwinian answers one is While you keep up with things you can’t keep up with by changing unpredictably, so there’s here’s an example You know sometimes if you’re driving down the road, and there’s a deer on the road Maybe you’ll run into it, and it’ll instead of jumping out of the way It sort of jumps randomly, and then you run into it you think well. That’s a pretty stupid strategy. It’s like Natural selections that work there, but it turns out the deer jump randomly when wolves are chasing them well Why would you do that well because you can’t predict it right if? Something horrible is after you acting unpredictably is actually a pretty good strategy, and that’s basically what mutation does means The horrible thing that’s after you always is the rapid transformation of the environment And the only thing you can possibly do in that in the case in that case is capitalize on chance, okay? So that’s one thing so that’s partly why the Darwinian story. I think has to be right because the environment does move unpredictably and The only way you can keep up with something that’s unpredictable is to generate variance and hope that one of them has Drawn the lucky lottery card, but then there’s these additional issues which is that we’re also we also seem to be tightly selected for The capacity to cooperate and compete so that multiplies our cognitive ability That’s a huge part of it And then we’re also we also seem to have constructed ourselves so to speak through sexual choice Into these general problem general purpose problem solving creatures, and so we’ve internalized some of the Darwinian process so you think well Most animals will produce a variance of themselves physically and then most of those variants die but human beings have built a lance built a Mechanism let’s say that’s like a game engine I think that’s a really good you know how there are game engines now that people have devised their their computational Devices, and you can take a game engine, and you can generate games with it like computer games so The game engine is a mechanism for producing games Well, that’s what our brains are like our brains are game engines for producing games And so what happens is that when you think you produce an avatar of yourself? You produce a fictional world in that that avatar inhabits and maybe you produce multiple fictional worlds and multiple avatars That’s the you that could be tomorrow which is what you’re doing when you’re planning and you walk the avatar through its potential roots and Those that look good you keep and those that don’t look good you kill and so you can Then you can embody the ideas that you keep and act those out and hopefully the idea is that when you embody them You’re successful, and you don’t get killed and so we’re select We’ve also so that when we’ve been selecting each other for cognitive prowess We’ve been selecting ourselves for the ability to generate avatars out of ourself and kill them instead of dying It’s unbelievably brilliant and and that’s really akin to the human discovery of the future The future is a place where variants of you could exist It’s something like that and other animals don’t seem to be able to do that so We’re very sneaky and well so far. It doesn’t seem to be working too badly although. We haven’t been around for very long right I mean human beings of our particular subspecies about a hundred and fifty thousand years something like that which is from an evolutionary Time frame it’s like It’s nothing you know it’s two thousand eighty year old men. It’s not very long. You know if you think about it that way Okay so Now what I want to do is draw a Relationship between that developmental process that evolutionary process and the emergence of these underlying motivational systems It’s something like this so you imagine you go back in time to the emergence of the development of nervous systems so there’s their cells that creatures use to To produce motor output and their cells that creatures use to map the patterns around them Onto themselves and so those are that sensory that’s the sensory layer so to speak imagine sensory layer nervous layer Motor layer in simpler animals you just have sensory motor cells Then they diversify sensory layer nervous layer motor layer in fact That’s actually what you consist of when you’re first developing in utero after the blastocyte stage when your cells differentiate That’s the differentiation sensory layer nervous layer motor layer, so then you think there’s a sensory layer Now what’s that sensory layer doing? I Think about the world as consists consisting of patterns of all sorts like maybe there’s an animal in the ocean And it’s being subjected to wave motion and so it’s sensory systems map the wave motion onto the motor output So if you look at a sponge for example sponges are good examples because they’re sort of half unicellular animals and half multicellular animals you can take a sponge and Run it through a colander and separate it out into cells Say in salt water, and it’ll assemble itself back into a sponge, so it’s sort of at the yeah amazing Hey, it’s kind of what you do in utero That the cells somehow know enough to communicate with another to want another to organize themselves into an organism It’s unbelievable We have no idea how people do that because when you’re in the initial form blastocyte form all those cells are identical genetically And then all of a sudden they differentiate and they move to the places. They’re supposed to go We have no idea how that how the hell can that happen these cells are all identical except for their position So they’re obviously communicating with one another in some unbelievably complicated way and saying well You you’re this sort of cell and so you’re going to differentiate that way God only knows but anyway sponges can do this now a sponge Isn’t complicated enough to have the sensory layer and the nervous layer and the motor layer It’s just sensory motor cells if I remember correctly, but what the sponge is trying to figure out is It wants to get water through its pores inside because that’s how it eats and so there’s wave motion Constantly and so what’s happening is the wave motion is a pattern and the sponge is reacting to that in a patterned way That’s a really it’s really useful to think about What you’re responding to as patterns instead of objects because we think we react to objects But objects are actually a specific subcategory of pattern and so because it also helps to explain perception It’s like what does it mean for you to see something well? It means a bunch of things, but one of the things it means is When I look at that thing it manifests itself to me as a grippable object I Mean that that’s built into the way I see it so if you think about the way that you see that on the surface there You can tell that it’s separate from the surface because it has a bit of a shadow And it’s a different color and it’s obviously shaped for a hand and so that thing tells you when you look at it That it’s a grabbable object Well, it’s hand-shaped like a stone tool would be and so and the things around you in the world Manifest themselves as patterns of utility that that’s the appropriate way to think about it You say well, what does this thing mean because that’s a hard question well One of the things that your eyes do it’s like imagine you’ve got this representational surface at the back of your retina It’s made out of pixels roughly speaking right those are the cells and what it does is Map that pattern onto your retinal pattern and then the retinal pattern propagates itself as a nervous pattern along your optic nerve and then that manifests itself as a neurological pattern and That neurological pattern manifests itself as an action pattern and so the meaning of the object is the action pattern that is mapped onto the onto the percept and so What does this mean? This is what it means you think this is a Piagetian observation. It’s like one or many One right because I’m acting like it’s one, but if I do this Then it’s many why One two right there’s separately manipulable entities and so the concept of number is in fact predicated at least in part on the idea of Singular usability, but you’re mapping. It’s like well. What is this? It’s a key well. What does that mean? Well, I’m mapping that shape into this motion for that action say well. It’s not just a key. It’s a weapon Right and so that’s because I’ve mapped it onto a different output pattern But if you think about perception as the matching of patterns onto patterns it makes it makes way more sense You can really start thinking about how perception works because then you can also start thinking about unconscious perception so you know the the blind side experiments show for example that If if you’ve had cortical damage, so you think you’re blind you can’t see objects anymore But I show you a picture of a frightened face you’ll show a sense skin conductance response to it You think well how the hell can that happen? It’s like I have to see the face in order to infer the emotion in order to have the reaction It’s like no you don’t you don’t need that at all you need a pattern recognition System that maps that right onto an amygdala output that produces physiological readiness You don’t need the perceptible entity because you know you think you see something And then you think about the thing and then you evaluate the thing and then you act it’s like you do do that But there are parts of you that don’t do that at all Way faster parts more primordial parts and so another example would be Darwin’s Trick with the snake that I told you about he’d go to this museum that had a cobra In a glass cage and the cobra he’d put his face up to the glass cage and the cobra would strike at him And he’d go like this and there was no way he could control that well. It’s because The part of him that saw the snake wasn’t the part that was doing this There’s a part of him that does this to snakes That’s what it does and it’s it’s way faster than the figure the to see the snake you have to the image is obviously the image the pattern is Portrayed on the retina it propagates backwards to see it It has to be elaborated up through a very complex set of neurological connections that takes time and so you’re dead Well the thing that snake means this that’s like three neurons Super fast and so what is a snake at that level of representation? It’s like a snake is that which makes you do this and then you could also say that at that level of representation Everything that makes you do this is the same thing Right because the same would be defined by the pattern that you manifest in response to that entity So then your nervous system is layered very very that’s sensory layer neurological layer motor layer As you become more complex the sensory layer differentiates into the different sensory systems and the neurological level multiplies in terms of its potential number of connections so what happens is that you can map Patterns that manifest themselves in multiply different ways in multiply different ways to multiple motor outputs So you start with a fixed action pattern, which is just like this this the the sponge reflex What’s the world to a sponge the world is what makes you go like this or like that? That’s it That’s the whole world the sponge has compressed the entire world into pores open pores closed. That’s that’s it two states and And then well once the nervous system gets differentiated and the senses get differentiated So there’s specialized kinds of cells then You can detect more forms of patterns You can produce more patterned output to that but even more interestingly and this is where the nervous system Starts to come into play the the mapping of the pattern onto the output is no longer one-to-one You can use the same pattern roughly speaking to produce all sorts of different outputs that are context dependent because you might say well So Okay, I picked that up you say well he picked that up. It’s okay. Well what about that? You think well he picked it up. Well. Yeah, I did except The the pattern of musculature that I used to do this is by no means identical to the pattern of musculature that I used to do that Right I mean the fact that the orientation is different is actually extraordinarily important, so So well my point is is that With sufficient nervous complexity You can take the same thing so to speak and map at all sorts of different ways and human beings are Unbelievably good at that okay, so now go back to when things were simple So there’s single-celled organisms will say and then they start to differentiate to some degree and they start to propagate And so then there’s then the environment starts to shift because the fact of the prevalence of all of these competitors Means the environment isn’t exactly the same as it was when that system first evolved new problems emerge And so then there’s selection pressure on those creatures to diversify to some degree and then the diversification produces a transformation in the environment And then there’s pressure on those new Entities to diversify some more and so you get a little bit of a different kind of So then there’s pressure on those new Entities to diversify some more and so you get this weird bootstrapping process Maybe the environment is one thing when there’s ten of you, but a completely different thing when there’s a thousand of you Right so just sheer multiplication is going to transform the environment and so then the the Because the environment has now become more complex than it was there’s selection pressure to produce Diversification in the underlying organisms and that took a long time to get off the ground like there were single-celled organisms for a huge Span of history I mean if you look at evolutionary history The amount of time that there were single-celled organisms is far longer than the time that there’s been since there were multi-celled organisms It’s like it’s like Moore’s law You know the law that governs the the increase in computational power you can trace that back to about the year 1400 something like that So it’s been going on for a very long time and maybe you can make the same case from an evolutionary perspective It’s like the flat part of the curve is really long But once it starts to move up it starts to move up really fast and obviously that’s the position that we’re in now So single-celled organisms for a long time then they started to diversify, and then you could imagine well From the single-celled organism you start getting multi-cellular organism, and then it ends up with this tripartite structure sensory layer nervous layer Motor layer and then that starts to differentiate and every time there’s a differentiation that’s conserved and That’s these systems the motivational systems They emerged a long long time ago as Emergent solutions to emergent problems, and you’ve conserved all of them I mean you’ve conserved your snake reflex which is like three neurons long So that’s really really primordial, but you’ve conserved you’ve conserved function at almost every temporal level so there’s parts of you that are quick and dirty and parts of you that are slow and sophisticated and A lot of the contents of consciousness is slow and sophisticated So it can’t help you out in an emergency, but it can do what consciousness seems to do is take your structure It analyzes the world’s for let’s say mismatches between what you want and what’s happening And then it either helps you alter the world so those mismatches go away, or it turns inward and Modifies the structures that you’re using so if you’re playing the piano You’ve got this automatized routine has very little to do with consciousness if you’ve practiced enough, and you make a mistake you stop and you Note the mistake you stop And then you slow it down, and then you re you practice the the new thing Then you speed it up Then you speed it up Then you speed it up as you’re doing that the neural representation Shrinks until you’ve developed this little specialized machine And then you run that a few times and now you can ignore it You can look at the notes and just play and away you go and that’s kind of what consciousness is doing all the time you’re laying out an automatized routine and then if that doesn’t produce the Intended outcome you stop you become conscious really because nothing like an error to make you conscious Then you do a high resolution analysis of the space in which the error emerged you Rematch your motor output your perceptions and all of that to make that error go away And away you go and so your consciousness is continually your consciousness seems to be continually building your unconscious Your procedural unconscious and so to some degree the purpose of consciousness is to make you functional unconsciously Right because that’s way better You don’t want to be conscious of most things because it’s just what are you going to do be conscious of your digestive processes? It’s like no There if you’re good at something you hardly have to be conscious of it at all so consciousness is something like an error detection and rectification system something like that and So you say well you could practice being conscious because what that means in some sense is you’re always attending to your errors That seems to be a really intelligent thing to do if you don’t take it too far and collapse yourself Because if you’re always attending to your errors you’re always improving your Automated adaptability something like that right pay attention See if things are working out the way that you want them to and if they’re not modify Your your your approach your perceptions, okay, so you’ve conserved these systems and the systems emerge to To solve the problems of emergent complexity and you end up at birth with all of these conserved systems and so those would be proclivities that would enable you to Manifest necessary realm of behaviors in the social natural human environment something like that So you’re basically prepared for that and I told you we went through what those were last time and you can break them down into self maintenance motivations and self propagation motivation something like that so Okay, now the question is how do those manifest themselves and that’s where we get That’s where we can make a shift say from evolutionary ideas and biological ideas to narrative ideas so I’ve made the case for you that you exist within this thing I’ve never figured out exactly what to call it because you can call it a game or you can call it a frame of reference It’s pretty good one or you can call it a story Or you can call it a unit of perception, but it that’s not exactly right because it’s more than perception It’s really this it’s a really what it is is a micro personality It’s it’s your it’s your personality as it manifests itself at it at the highest possible resolution That’s what this is and so if I’m You know say I set myself the task of moving those keys from there to here so my my perceptual frame is It’s this thing. I think well. What’s the world? Everything else can be ignored. I need to make an object out of my hand and these keys that tiny spot on the table and and my goal is to transform this pattern into that pattern and It’s a pattern because it maintains itself across time right it’s not like smoke or a cloud it persists So there it is there it is there it is there it is that’s a pattern. That’s extending across time, so I Have this goal which is the transformation of this into that and that goal so that would be Roughly speaking the goal is point B, but you can’t just think about this as something That’s a goal because it isn’t just a goal There’s a goal Which is the end what which is the end state? of this entire process the end state is I’ve moved the thing from here to here I’ve I’ve transformed this into this and I’ve done it using action, and that’s so that’s a useful thing to know too I have an abstract notion that’s my Decision that I’m going to get the world to manifest this pattern instead of this one Okay, so that gives me my target That’s an abstraction But when I actually do the transformation that’s not an abstraction because now I’m using actual action actual behavior, and so I take this abstract Micro-personality this is the part that’s operating on this tiny little section of the world I make the transformation and as soon as I do that another thing happens Which is I don’t need that anymore right I move to the next one of those whatever it happens to be and so one of The things we’re going to have to figure out is what is the relationship between these things? Because you’re always in one of them, and they’re scalable. It’s like when you’re doing a specific action It’s really high resolution, and that’s kind of where you want to be operating When you know what you’re doing. That’s where you want to be operating roughly speaking When you’re trying to do something new, but it’s scalable and so the framework which is Constructed in part from these motivational systems that emerged over evolutionary history the framework specifies the current condition the desired condition and and the behavioral manifestations that are necessary to make the transformation and So you can’t think about it as a drive because it’s instincts are often thought about as drives or as a goal It’s not correct because the thing actually Determines your perceptions it determines what objects manifest themselves to you in the world or what patterns that’s another way of thinking about it It’s like when I’m looking at this it’s hard to watch your own perceptions But when I’m looking at this I Really I can see that chair, but if I didn’t know it was a chair I wouldn’t be able to tell by looking by by my visual input. I can kind of see this one Although I really can’t tell what color it is That one’s slightly clearer. This is pretty blurry here like I can’t see my fingers if I’m looking at the keys I can’t see my fingers unless they move and And I’m very very focused on that so what happens is that all the rest of the world turns into a low-resolution Representation that vanishes on its periphery the resolution increases as as I move towards the central part of my visual field and Here it’s sharp enough so that I can actually see the letters on that key So so my desire Which I’m indicating by the point of my eyes is specifying the objects that I see and specifying their level of resolution So you can’t just call that a drive or a goal. It’s it’s that’s not right It’s it’s the mechanism that makes the world manifest itself to you, so that’s that’s a Unbelievably crazy thing is that the world manifests itself to you in keeping with your goals now that doesn’t mean that you can Make the world do any old thing because it pushes back right it objects to you So but still it’s it’s very strange thing Okay So fine so it specifies your perceptions your target the current reality and the likely Procedure that you’re going to use to make all of that interrelated, but it does more than that So let’s we’re gonna. We’re gonna look at it from a couple of different perspectives so the classic And Archaic way of thinking about perception is the world’s full of objects you see the objects you think about them you evaluate them Then you act on them It’s like no that isn’t how it works first of all the world is not made out of objects the world is made out of I think the world is made out of tools and obstacles and It’s because you can’t not perceive the world in relationship to you and what you perceive actually are the meaning of objects You perceive the patterns and a tool is something like a meaningful pattern or a useful pattern It’s something like that and so look look again you look at I might say To someone describe this room Now you’re gonna pick You’re going to pick a level of description. That’s very particular You’re gonna pick one that other human beings could understand so it’s going to be predicated on your size for example And so you’re going to be predicated on your knowledge that that other person is a lot like you and has a lot of the same Underlying structures and motivations so and that’s an implicit predicate of your description, so we’re going to say well It’s kind of an ordinary classroom. It’s got 20 rows of tables that each have five chairs at it and Each of it does has five chairs. There’s some posts that hold them up There’s a couple of speakers. There’s a podium. There’s a screen. There’s some additional chairs. There’s a scattering of people There’s some electronic equipment, and so you know of course that there’s an infinite number of things I could be describing in this room right like I could be describing There’s a lot of color variation in that tile So if I look at it I can see that it’s unlike the other tiles because the light is reflecting off it so it’s got a shiny white element There’s about God only knows a million different scratches in it each of which are unique I can’t even really tell what color it is it kind of looks like an off grayish green, but if I was painting it To get a reasonable representation. I’d had to have to have at least Six or seven shades of green ranging from quite dark to almost white and That’s only if I look at it from here if I look at it from here Well, then you get the point right I mean there is an infinite number of details in this room There’s an infinite number of facts in this room. That’s also why I don’t believe that you can derive an ought from an is It’s like you know that’s the old humie in that issue right you cannot derive ethical guidelines from factual knowledge And I think the reason for that is which facts are you going to pick? How are you going to select them? There’s there’s an infinite number of them even in a constrained situation so Merely by attending to some and not attending to others you’re already using an ethic Because you can’t attend to one thing and not another without being ensconced in one of these value structures Because the value structure is what determines the direction of your attention And so you can’t make the argument that you’re using the the Infinite number of facts that are available at your disposal to govern how you’re looking at the facts You’re not that isn’t what you’re doing. It’s not possible to do that. So what do you do well? You describe the things in the room that would be relevant to other people otherwise you’re going to bore them to death Or they’re going to think you’re insane You know so or an artist maybe because an artist might do the kind of concentration on a detail that I just Described, but he’s obviously or she’s obviously trying to paint the thing or represent it somehow so it’s still tool-like well Why do you want to know that there are tables? Well because you sit at them Why do you want to know if there are chairs because you sit in them you know what about the screen or the camera equipment? Well, they’re all usable tools, and so that’s what you describe you describe the world at the level of usable tool Or you might also say You know look out for that girl who’s third in the third row. She’s trouble And so you might call out someone if you’re describing the room because there’s Somewhere in that room that if you go you’re going to get into trouble And so and so those are sort of the things that seem to me to be relevant there are tools that move you along your way Facilitators that’s another way of thinking about them, and there are obstacles that get in your way and There’s a tiny set of those otherwise you get overwhelmed. You’re not going to go anywhere where it’s all obstacles Right you don’t even want you you don’t want to be in that place you want to be in a place where it’s mostly this And then then there’s a the biggest category though. This is what’s cool This is and this is so important is the biggest perceptual category is that which is not relevant at this time? Because it contains everything you know like when you’re when you’re writing on this on this pad You assume the entire world around you is constant and therefore you can ignore it Everything out there all the transformations that are taking place you turn to zero And you just focus on maybe the space that’s occupied by a single letter The whole world shrinks down to just that single letter and everything else is ignored Well, what happens if something goes wrong? This is the thing this is why this is so important What happens if something goes wrong an? Indeterminate set of those irrelevant entities has now become relevant That’s the problem is the invisibility disappears and so for example You’re all treating each other in this room right now as ignorable entities roughly speaking you could all be blobs From a perceptual perspective, and if you look at how you see the room Except for the person that you’re focusing on everyone else is a blob and some of them are virtually invisible blobs And that’s fine because they’re you’re adequately represented as a blob unless you do something that disturbs the ongoing Flow of goal-directed action just like the gorilla thing right? So the damn gorilla was invisible because it didn’t get in the way even though you’d think of course you’d see a gorilla It’s like everything that doesn’t get in the way is invisible Except for that small fraction of things that you can use for your purpose, and that’s how you perceive so It’s so mind-boggling that because it puts perception into the realm of ethics It isn’t what you’d expect you see what you’re aiming at and you know that you know that You’re standing on a street corner, and you look up and soon. There’s ten Advanced chimpanzees like you right beside you looking up to see what the hell It is that you’re aiming at because they assume just by watching you that if you’re focusing your perception on Something and and you’re fixated on it that it’s relevant and important. It’s tool-like or maybe obstacle-like it’s relevant for some reason and So we live in a landscape of relevance And that’s a mind to me that’s an absolutely mind-boggling idea because that is way different than living in a landscape of facts It is not the same thing even a little bit and there are philosophers who pursued that idea quite Well, I would say to quite an incredible Degree Heidegger is probably the one who’s done that more than anyone else But the 19th century pragmatists were very interested in that as well But the because you think you know the the classic scientific idea is something like you perceive a universe of facts and derive Conclusions and act it’s like no you don’t you perceive a lot of landscape of pre Categorized relevance that’s dependent on your ethic Jesus It’s so peculiar that and so that brings up real questions like what ethic best Structures your perceptions well that is an interest that is the interesting idea As far as I’m concerned okay, so so then we can make this a little bit more Interesting I think is the right way of thinking about it, okay? Well, so you’ve got tools and obstacles, but they’re not dead That’s the other thing because we’re in an ethical landscape because we’re in a motivated landscape Whether something is a tool or an obstacle actually matters to you, and we can actually define matter Matters a weird word because there are There’s matter and then there’s the things that matter and you could say the world is made out of matter Or you could say that the world is made out of things that matter and I would say you act like the world is made out of things that matter you might say I don’t believe that I believe it’s made out of matter, but no you don’t because that’s not how you act It might be what you say you do, but it is not what you do So why do things matter well first of all irrelevant things don’t matter and thank God for that right? Because if everything mattered it’s well, you’re either You’re either in the midst of an LSD trip or you’re schizophrenic or you’re in real serious trouble So you want most things to be irrelevant now? That’s kind of dull and it takes the glory and the glamour out of the world, but from a cognitive perspective It’s definitely an advantage so Irrelevancy man that’s critical and a huge amount of what you have done is learned Irrelevance it’s the basis of your cognitive knowledge is learned irrelevance what to ignore Okay fine, so that’s that zeros things out you turn most of the world into zero Well, then you have this small subset of things that are beneficial to you that you can use for the purposes of your current operation Which will define in more detail you can use that for the purposes of your current your current? Endeavor and then you have obstacles and so for example If I’m in if I’m late for class So I’m in a particular state of mind and I walk in here and I see that I’m gonna get a little burst of Negative emotion its irritation and the reason for that is that is not a recycling bin then It’s an obstacle that some dimwit left there just to annoy me And I mean you know you know what I mean that’s how you react to the world in a situation like that It’s like it’s not a recycling bin if it’s here And I don’t want to stand there, then it’s a recycling bin if it’s there It’s an obstacle and as soon as I look at it. It isn’t that I see it and then get annoyed It’s that annoyance is part of the perception because it’s an obstacle in my pathway That the emotion comes along with the perception. It’s not laden on top of it. It’s not oh, that’s a I Don’t think that’s a recycling bin. That’s in the wrong place now. It’s in my way I should be annoyed that isn’t what happens is the annoyance my suspicions are that the damn annoyance is faster than the object perception because it’s a more primordial circuit So you actually that’s now. There’s a great book if you’re interested in this sort of thing. There’s a great book called an Ecological approach to visual perception which was written by a guy named Gibson back in the 70s, and it’s brilliant He his fundamental conclusion is I think wrong, but it doesn’t matter the book is not only brilliant because see he was the guy that came up with the idea of affordance and An affordance is something that affords some utility and that can be positive or negative And he thought about the world as being full of furniture roughly speaking something like that and that what you saw what you perceived Directly was the affordance and so he imagined the visual cliff experiment so Let’s say I put a piece of glass Over top of this the space between these two tables no chair there And I take a duck and I put the duck here and the duck walks out on the glass the duck doesn’t care It’ll just walk out on the glass well It’s an aquatic animal and so if there’s depth underneath it it doesn’t really bother a duck But if you put a human infant on there Old enough to crawl the human infant will look over and that’s not going on that glass and you might say well what does it see and you could say it sees a space between the Two tables and Infers that it might fall, but it’s like eight months old like what the hell it’s inferring that no It’s not it sees a place to fall off of and that’s that’s Gibson’s fundamental point Is that you don’t see a cliff you see a falling off place? And of course why wouldn’t you see that because if that isn’t what you saw you wouldn’t be here because one of your dopey Ancestors would have wandered off the cliff and died the ones that saw a falling off place They just stayed away from that and you know if you have vertigo and even if you don’t If you’re up on the 35th floor of an apartment building and you walk out onto the balcony. It’s really interesting to notice your perception because you might think while you see the The space and you become afraid. It’s like no you don’t you walk closer to it in your body Your you perceive the damn thing with your body you can also see it, but you perceive it with your body It’s like don’t go there. Don’t go any closer And your whole there’s an automatic mapping of that place on to do this go away from there, and that’s underneath and faster than the the actual quote conscious object perception So anyways the other thing about Gibson’s book that I love is he is so clear that guy such a good writer Because he takes you through a very complex argument. That’s just a pristine example of reasoning. It’s the whole book is reasoning It’s brilliant brilliant, so anyway, so if you want some background on that idea the idea of perception of utility Let’s say That’s a great place to look, but it’s also worth thinking about it from a biological perspective because of bloody well Of course you’re going to see the world as what matters because you’re the sort of creature that cares about what matters Mostly because you don’t want to die so you can’t Remove the fact that you don’t want to die from your perceptions well if you did well you can imagine what would happen if you did You know you you do something like wander off a falling-off place, and that would be the end of you So it’s built into your damn perceptions And so it’s built into the facts that you see because there’s an infinite number of facts And so even just selecting the facts. That’s an ethical issue, so It’s actually matters Practically too because one of the things that I’ve come to understand about political arguments is Well say people say well They you know the the person on the other side of the ideological continuum has different opinions than I do It’s like no they don’t or maybe they do, but they don’t see the same facts Because the filter they use to select from among the infinite number of available facts Preferentially presents them with the facts that are relevant to them, and that’s already built into their ethic And so one of the horrible things about political discussions Is that you’re actually having a discussion about what the facts are you say well the facts are the same for everyone? It’s like yeah, it’s like saying I have an infinite library of books and You can come into it. It’s like well. You’re going to pick out the same book seems highly improbable, and that’s the problem with facts It’s like There’s there’s a lot of them. You know you try to do something like like untangle the Israel-Palestine conflict I mean one of the things you just to start with is like okay. How far back you’re going to go Well, I would say it depends on what argument you want to make You know if you want to make argument a you go back a hundred years if you want to make argument B Go back three thousand years, and then you could have an argument about which time scale you should use But it’s not like it’s obvious You know is it ten years is it one year is it six months like is? It’s not three thousand years is it two thousand nine hundred and ninety nine years like where are the borders of relevancy? When you’re laying out the landscape of the argument God only knows it’s intractable And you know partly the way your temperament solves that problem Because it does is say well create a creature like you with your temperament preferentially attends to this set of facts and that’ll work because Attending to that sort of facts is likely to produce a reasonable outcome for you in most circumstances And it’s a way that you simplify the world and make a tremendous amount of it irrelevant Apriori filters Okay good now the next cool thing What happens when you see a tool? You’re happy what happens when you see an obstacle you’re unhappy and there now you understand emotions And that’s so but that doesn’t take much that’s once you’ve got this initial framework. It’s like okay. Well. What’s an emotion for positive? Move forward negative get away Indeterminate stop that’s anxiety stop. You’re not know you’re not where you think you are your map Isn’t producing the desired outcome. It’s wrong. What should you do? You don’t know stop because if you don’t know where to go There’s no point going anywhere, and then what prepare that’s anxiety stop prepare Well people hate that because well for obvious reasons prepare for what? everything Yeah very very Demanding Psychophysiologically and and that’s also something that’s really worth knowing it’s like anxiety isn’t just a psychological state. That’s unpleasant it’s like you’re revved up and You’re burning resources like mad and you’re in a biochemical state such that That’s optimized for quick action, but that’s toxic if you inhabit it for any length of time So not knowing what to do that is not good And it isn’t just that it makes you feel bad it hurts you it damages you it can kill you it’ll make you age It’ll make you fat. It’ll give you diabetes. It’ll suppress your immune system, so you’re more likely to develop cancer It’ll damage your brain your hippocampus. It’ll increase the probability that you have Alzheimer’s. It’s like it’s no joke that It’s you’re running your machinery faster than you can replenish it So it’s not a state that you can be in it. It’s not a state you can tolerate because it’s anxious anxiety It’s anxious, but it’s also not a state you can live in and so I don’t know where I am means Everything’s relevant, and I have to ramp up my Capacity for action to deal with that bad people do not like that We do not like not to be where we think we are We really really really don’t like that and we structure almost all of our environments constantly so that never happens You know we’re all dressed the same with tiny tiny variations. You know we all follow the same traffic laws Everybody’s behaving according to the proper code in this room and everyone in this building is doing the same thing It’s like we’re doing everything we can to make sure that everyone knows exactly where they are and what they’re doing all the time and That’s because when we’re in that state We can advance cautiously using positive things and maintain a modicum of positive emotion That’s what we’re great basically trying to do okay, so you want to set up your world so that? You’re surrounded by things that move you along your way That the obstacles are minimized and that almost everything can be ignored okay, so emotion positive emotion. That’s dopaminergic That’s incentive reward you experience it in relationship to a goal because you know most of the time when you talk to behavioral Psychologists they’ll tell you rewarding reward is a satiation consequence. You’re hungry you get a piece of food. That’s rewarded It’s like that’s that’s consummatory reward And that shuts down the motivational system It’s say it’s satiating it makes you satisfied That’s not the same as incentive reward Incentive reward says come this way come this way good things are over here good things are over here And that’s dopaminergic, and that’s the kind of reward people really like we live for that So when you talk about positive meaning in your life This is an oversimplification, but a tremendous amount of that is incentive reward. You’re in a goal-directed structure It’s a value structure. It’s let’s say it’s fairly well developed because you’re sophisticated Everything you do is linked to something else you move ahead it works. Yes, you move ahead it works Yes, and it’s that constant Moving ahead and the validation of the frame that makes your life meaningful and so that also means No value system. No positive emotion, which is another thing that’s so much worth knowing you know The postmodernists complain about value systems constantly and they say well the problem with a value system Is that it includes some people winners and excludes other people losers sick yes? That’s true. What’s the answer? Flatten the value system so there’s no losers fine no winners either And if there’s no if the value system is flat. There’s no point B What the hell are you going to do? Where’s your positive emotion? You have nothing to you’re going to wander around being happy that the value system is flat. It’s like no you’re not Because when you flatten out value systems you don’t get rid of suffering because you can’t all you get rid of is the possibility of Positive emotion and that is not a good solution, so then you leave people with nothing, but negative emotion It’s so naive Okay, so good so now we know you’re going from point A to point B You’re doing that with an action if if things are working out if you see facilitators along the way that you can utilize your Part you you get a kick of positive emotion You know and you can you can even see that calibrated like let’s say you do better than expected on a test Yes, it’s like That’s better than doing as well as you expect it Because what the message is is that not only am I moving towards my desired goal? But I’m moving along faster and with less effort than I thought it’s like bang positive reinforcement Right you think yes Well, that’s it. That’s meaning. That’s a big chunk of meaning and so a really meaningful event is one that gets you to the next step and Simultaneously increases the probability that you’re going to get to all the steps after that that’s like a maximally meaningful event So you know you get? You’re opening an envelope about whether or not you got into medical school. It’s like you’re going like this right? Why why are you shaking? It’s an envelope No, it’s not it’s a portal right it’s a portal and What’s in that envelope either puts you that way into one world or that way into another and you think you’re looking at it You think well, that’s an envelope. It’s like your body isn’t thinking that not for a bloody second It knows perfectly well that that’s a portal and you open it up. It’s like collapse the whole What would you call it that whole avatar related future just goes ashes or Bang it springs into reality and you perceive that and that you perceive all of that almost instantaneously and that produces that Radical transformation in emotion You’re not reacting to the envelope or maybe the envelope isn’t what you think it is or maybe the envelope isn’t what you see and That’s more accurate. That’s way more accurate the envelope is way more than what you see Okay Good let’s break for 15 minutes. Okay, and then we’ll we’ll go ahead with the next part of this Well, so that’s just a transformation of the previous diagram While you’re moving around long from what is to what should be will say As long as things are working out well, then you’re mildly happy and if they don’t work out well, then you’re That’s that that’s another problem you see these are different sizes there’s a reason for that and that’s because Negative emotion has more potency unit for unit than positive emotion does and so what that means is that people are more reactive People hate a small loss more than they like an equivalent gain. And so we’re tilted to some degree towards A bias for negative emotion and that is also dependent on temperament because somebody who’s very very low in neuroticism That’s basically anxiety and emotional pain susceptibility something like that So that would be the threshold for experiencing a certain level of anxiety or emotional pain But also the length of time that would take to recover. It’s something like that. And so but For the standard human being loss hurts more than gain Rewards and so Well It’s useful to know that because it helps you it helps you understand yourself and other human beings Even if you’re trying to motivate someone to do something Loss avoidance is often a powerful motivation as well as gain. So alright prevention fundamentally Okay, so now here’s another way of thinking about this and this is a more abstract way of thinking about it so we talked about the idea that the world might be divided into tools and and And obstacles and irrelevant things most of which and irrelevant things. That’s a huge category And it’s the one you don’t want to have disrupted And also that the obstacle category produces more emotion than the tool category But here’s another way of thinking about it And this is thinking about it more from a purely emotional perspective when you think about the world as tools It’s it’s dead practical and it’s sort of grounded in the idea of motor usage in some sense but you can you can think in an analogical fashion About the same system in a slightly different manner You’re in the situation that you’re in right now and that’s not good enough. And so that’s another thing That’s kind of interesting about people is there a chronically dissatisfied with the way things are Well, that’s okay because you wouldn’t be motivated to move forward if you weren’t chronically dissatisfied with the way that things are But it’s kind of annoying, you know, because you might think well Why aren’t you just happy with what you have and the answer to that is generally because I don’t know if it’s going to last And so that’s part of it. And the other is well if the situation shifted a bit Maybe I’d have more options and some of that would be It would last longer be more stable. It’d be more promising and so you can say well You should be satisfied with what you have But it’s kind of really a stupid thing in some sense to tell human beings because no matter what you have It isn’t going to solve your fundamental problem So the problem isn’t going away and you can’t just fool yourself into saying well what I have is great You could say I could have a hell of a lot less and that would be bad and most people have a lot less than me And I should be grateful for what I have. That’s fine. That’s perfectly reasonable But you’re stuck in this you’re stuck with this chronic sense of unfinished business and the reason for that is well You’re permanently vulnerable. So how else would you? How could it be otherwise and even if you’ve got your problem solved then there’s three or four people in your family that by no Means have got their problems solved. So the problem of problems never goes away That’s an existence. That’s a that’s a good thing to know existentially too because it helps you calibrate your life properly Because you might be thinking well if I just got everything together You know I’d hit some plateau of satiation and stability and and then I would just be there It’s like no that’s never gonna happen. It’s never gonna happen So you might as well just forget about that what you can it’s a Sisyphus Issue you know the guy who pushes the rock up the road and it up the hill and it rolls back down I think it was Nietzsche who said we must presume Sisyphus to be happy something like that Well, maybe you want to push your damn rock up a hill, you know, it’s gonna roll down again It’s like what are you gonna do just sit there by the rock? It’s okay to be active even even if the problem you’re trying to solve is not fundamentally solvable That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to solve so Although people can despair about it and it’s not surprising Okay, so another way that I should have really said instead of predicted outcome here. This is like an old model This would be a model that I derived from work that was done at least initially in the 60s or even in the 40s but And that still underlies the thinking of I would say the vast majority of psychologists It isn’t that you’re predicting outcomes and and and failing it’s not that it’s that you desire outcomes And sometimes you get an undesirable outcome and it’s really important to get that distinction correct because if you’re thinking about expectation It’s just a cold cognitive model. It’s like a rational model. I know the world. I understand its relationships I can predict what’s going to happen next If and that’s what I’m trying to do is predict it. It’s like no you’re not you’re not trying to predict it You’re trying to get what you want from it, and there’s a prediction element to that which is well You know I’m gonna pick that up, so that’s a prediction and there that work verifying my prediction, but but what’s missing there is I want to pick that up and You can’t throw that out of the equation because as soon as you throw motivation out of the equation Then you’re stuck with the mystery of perception right how do you organize your perceptions unless you want something? Well, you can’t so you don’t get to get rid of the want and just substitute cold expectation It’s a sleight of hand and the cognitive behaviorists do that They almost always do that. That’s how they Well, it’s not like a conspiracy or anything It’s perfectly reasonable to have a simplified model for the way that people act But you don’t want to throw motivation and emotion out of the equation because obviously there’s or embodiment. They’re so important Okay, so Forget predicted and unpredicted think desired and undesired okay So I come walking in here, and I have this low level desire Which is to make my way to my podium with the least amount of effort necessary, and I see that that Chairs in the way, and it’s mildly annoying and so there’s something undesired there So the desired outcome produces positive emotion. It’s promise. What’s technically speaking you could also think about it as hope It’s related to the attainment of a goal it indicates the potential attainment of a goal That’s what hope is or what promises hope is I can probably attain this goal promises Promises if something is promising it indicates to you that you can probably attain the goal or if someone makes a promise to you Then they’re telling you that they’re going to facilitate movement towards a goal And so that’s the emotional level that the dopaminergic system works on again. It’s promise or hope or or technically It’s called incentive reward that that’s the technical term, but it’s the indication that something good is going to happen Well, so when I see a clear pathway Then I know I can make my goal Pretty efficiently and so it’s going to produce just a well. It’s going to produce enough positive emotion to make me walk forward That’s that’s the right amount so and so it’s interesting so you can actually use this when you’re thinking about room design or house design It’s like so you’re in a room you think well. What am I going to use this room for it’s like okay? You sort that out well Then you want to make the pathways to that use as clear and pristine as possible unless you want to put in some interesting variation just for you know decoration But fundamentally what you’re trying to do is to set up the environment so that it facilitates the actions you intend to Pursue there if you go into your room, and it’s all covered with stacks of paper And they’re all messy you know and and you know the bed isn’t made and there’s rubbish everywhere By your definition of rubbish then what you’re doing basically is walking into a room of snakes And it’s the same system that’s responding to all of those undone things that would respond to snakes you know Not like a cobra that’s right beside you, but it’s the same damn circuitry It’s the circuitry that responds to chaos It’s the recent circuitry that responds to the dragon of chaos that makes you uncomfortable in a room like that It’s it’s not explored territory. It’s not a place where you can easily See the proper relationship between the tools and the obstacles. It’s not a place that you can make things irrelevant not at all in fact It’s a place full of obstacles. How are you going to be comfortable in a room like that? It’s full of things that get in the way of your goals. You’re going to be nervous in there all the time, so It’s like it’s full of envelopes that you haven’t opened and most of them have bad news in them You’re not going to be comfortable in a room like that you think well. Can’t you just ignore those envelopes. It’s like well It’s a stupid way of looking at it so promise produces hope slash pleasure Curiosity all the incentive reward related emotions sort of fit in that box and then Undesired outcomes produce threat their threats and they produce anxiety, but that’s not even exactly right. That’s in an elementary discussion of The role of comparator systems in the brain which we’ll talk about in more detail the General notion is is that the violation of an expectation produces anxiety And that that’s a pretty good model and you it’s got some support from the Psychophysiological pharmacological literature because if you give animals Anti-anxiety agents like benzodiazepines or alcohol or barbiturates they do respond less To the violation of quote expectancy it does dampen the response, but But it’s an oversimplified model and to get understanding of human behavior correct you have to expand it a bit It isn’t precisely that Unpredicted outcome is a threat and it produces anxiety It’s that unpredicted outcome makes the irrelevant relevant, and it produces an undifferentiated emotional and motivational state It’s a better way of thinking about it because it isn’t just that you you don’t just get anxious for example if something goes wrong You get anxious you get angry you get curious you get frustrated you get depressed like it’s a whole bursting forward of emotions and motivational states and that’s because When something doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to even when you just encounter an obstacle it means that you’re the way that you’re construing the landscape is wrong in some manner and You don’t exactly know what you’re going to have to do in order to fix that unless it’s a very trivial trivial Violation and you know it’s one that you know immediately how to redress like if I’m again So I come around the corner And I look at that chair, and I’m annoyed because it’s in the way you might think well How annoyed should I get and the answer should be something like your annoyance should be in proportion to the amount of time and energy It will take to move that chair right because that’s kind of like a proper perception So it’s like I should be that annoyed. I should be annoyed enough so that I’ve indexed doing that Because that does actually take some time and energy and that actually has a cost and the fact that I have to pay that cost Should be signified by something because otherwise I wouldn’t be sensitive to costs and so the annoyance if it’s in proportion to the effort is Exactly indexed properly now often unfortunately. You don’t know how to index So you have an old car you’re driving to work Someone bumps you from behind and then your car doesn’t work It’s like well how annoyed should you get you don’t know That’s a problem and so then all of a sudden a bunch of things that were irrelevant Which is the whole damn car poof become relevant plus you have to deal with this person that just ran into you And what are they like well? They’re stupid enough to run into you So you don’t know what else might be wrong with them and maybe they’re going to be a bunch of trouble and you have to Get their insurance information and now you’re on the side of the road And you don’t know if you’re going to go to work and so that’s when your emotions can unravel because they’re trying to compute The effort and time you’re going to have to take in order to rectify this and the span this What we call the domain that is opening up as a consequence of the problem isn’t easy to map And so you get stressed and you go home You say I had a stressful day and the person says what happened well someone hit me on the highway They go. Oh, that’s terrible. They figure that out. It’s like well. I was in this little map It was only this long. I was just going from here to here and all of a sudden poof I didn’t know where I was or how many places I was going to have to wander around in before I could get that map working again But the car is an invisible predicate of multiple potential future maps as well, right? It’s an axiom you make the map Presuming that you have the car and the car isn’t a metal thing with wheels the car is a conveyance for moving you from point a to point B and The fact that you have all these maps of moving from point a to B that are Predicated on that conveyance means that when it turns into a car instead of a conveyance Poof all those maps become extremely complicated as well, and so your body goes well. I’m my Landscape is way more complex than I thought up goes the heart rate up goes the cortisol all of that right and you’re more Paralyzed and you can like if you’re a neurotic person Let’s say something like that can just paralyze you you’re done You have to phone someone for emergency help which means you’re in a map that you cannot put your map back together You have to call on outside help in order to do it so and you might not even know how to do that Okay, so that’s another way now. Here’s another way of thinking about it You want to stay inside this little map because it’s working you want to get from point a to point a would be and this is Good this indicates that you are moving forward That’s the first thing it indicates and the second thing it indicates which is even more important And you’ll never hear this from behavioral psychologists is that your map is correct So every time you move a little bit forward and something that you want happens it says oh the game I’m playing is the right game, and so not only does the reward Indicate progress it indicates that the frame within which progress is being calculated is the right frame And that’s good because it’s the frame that makes things irrelevant, and you want them to stay irrelevant So if you don’t move forward and you start to question the frame that’s way worse than merely not moving forward you get a bad Exam grade what you think what the hell am I doing in university anyways? It’s like probably that’s not the first place you should go with that piece of information, and you think well. Why why is that worse? Well as far as I can tell Your map of you as university student is a comprehensive representation It tells you what you should do every day it kind of tells you where you’re going in the future And if something emerges as an anomaly you get worse grade than you expected and you blow that whole map It’s like okay. What have you been doing for the last four years? What kind of high school student were you how clueless are you about how you’re arranging your future? What’s your identity going to be if you’re not going to be a student? Where are you going to end up in five years? It’s like so it’s like a that little grade that bad grade is like a portal through which snakes can crawl And that’s exactly how you respond to it, especially if you open the door too much Well, maybe this means that I shouldn’t be in university Well one of the rules is don’t you want to you want to constrain the anomalous event to the minimal necessary domain? It’s really really important you want to do that when you’re arguing with your partner Which you’ll do all the time we have an argument well I should never have married you it’s like no no that’s not the first response. That’s a bad response or here’s a really good one You’ve always done that sort of thing and you always will it’s like oh good great It’s like the only answer to that is to hit someone because like you’re done right you’re you’re like that You’ve always been like that there isn’t a chance that you could be repaired and none of it is acceptable It’s like the person is going to fight with you right away because what else are they going to do? So what you want to do is you want to minimize it isn’t Rationalization you want to say okay this person did something that disrupted our joint map Okay, what’s the smallest possible thing they could do to put it back together, and you have to know? Well, we need to make a plan So you don’t do it again, or we need to have a discussion so that you know that it wasn’t a good thing to do But I’m not going to go after your whole character. I’m going to say when I come home and And you’re watching TV Just come to the door and say hello Not don’t you love me or something like that? It’s like no no you just have to walk to the door and like give me a hug or something and then that’s good enough And so then the other person might be able to tolerate that much corrective information Maybe if you’re kind of nice about it And you also understand that they’re probably going to have something equally horrible to say about you in the next 15 minutes Because you’re going to do something stupid so So you don’t want to you don’t want to open the door so that every possible snake comes crawling through Because that’s a pathway to depression and you actually see that happening in depressed people is that every small event? produces a cascade through their entire value system And they end up saying well That’s just another reason that I should jump off a bridge and they really see it that way It’s really awful because they’ve got no defenses. It’s like well If I didn’t do so well in this course It’s like I’m going to get a bad mark in the or in the exam. I’m going to get bad mark in the course That’s going to screw up my ability to finish my degree. I’m never going to get into the field of my choice It’s just another piece of indication that I’m useless and that life isn’t worthwhile bang I’m going to jump off a bridge and if you’re really depressed. It’s like each of those things hits you with the certainty of truth It’s really not good And so you want to be careful you want to be careful about walking down that pathway when you make a mistake you think okay? What’s the narrowest framework of interpretation within which I can I can? Understand this that will require minimal behavioral change to decrease the probability that it will happen again It’s mental hygiene fundamentally yes Yeah We’ll get to that we’ll get to that that is the next question. It’s because they don’t exist in isolation So and that’s another thing frequently when you when you hear behavioral accounts of cognitive processes they generally only focus on Is as if it’s an isolated thing it’s not it’s scalable. It’s scalable a bunch of ways It’s scalable temporarily because what you do now is associated with what you’ll do tomorrow and that with what you’ll do next week And so forth so it has to be scalable temporarily, and it’s also scalable socially Right so it has an effect on you that has an effect on your family that has an effect on the community and so forth and so You don’t want to take It’s very difficult to think through the effect of your action and all those scaling levels simultaneously, but But you have mechanisms that allow you to do that and will see I think that the sense of let’s assume that you’re not lying to Yourself constantly so your head isn’t full of chaos and garbage, and you have reasonable relationships with people in the world I think that this is leaping way ahead I think that your sense of meaningful engagement with what you’re doing is the Psychophysiological marker that you’re acting in a way that takes all of the stacked representations into account simultaneously Because you’re you’re you’re like you’re trying to figure out where you are and you might think well that means where I am in this room, but look This room is not a simple thing Right it’s nested. It’s it’s a subset of the university. That’s a subset of society It’s a subset of your life the room is a complicated thing and you need to figure out where you should be in the room And you can’t do that sheer surely with perception because all you see is Me and some of the wall right it’s you got this little narrow This little narrow portal and so you can’t really rely on your perceptions to orient you But you do orient yourself, and I think what you do is you it’s engagement It’s like does this seem meaningful and deep and engaging yes, then it’s an indication that it’s serving multiple Masters simultaneously so both maybe both socially and also temporally and so I think the sense of meaning is actually an instinct That orients people in time and space it’s not an epiphenomena It’s the most fundamental form of perception, and that’s the only optimistic thought that I’ve ever been able to derive from psychology Is that that actually could be true it could be that the sense of meaning is an orienting reflex and That would be wonderful if it was true because it would make it real you know and it’s one of the you know the One of the devastating elements of nihilism is something like well who the hell cares what you’re doing What difference is it going to make in a million years? It’s like your sense of meaning is just an illusion You know you’re you’re a limited creature in a limited place and nothing you do really matters It’s like that’s a powerful argument especially if you’re an objective materialist and a reductionist It’s a killer argument, but it looks to me like it’s wrong It’s actually wrong because meaning looks to me like it’s an actual phenomena. It does say that you’re you’re positioned properly Between Chaos and order or something like that. It’s real so well, so we’ll see we’re going to develop that argument because if If it’s real you want to know that because it gives you something to stand on you know Maybe it’s as real as pain, but it’s not pain It’s something positive and you need something positive that you can rely on all right, so We’re concentrating now on the unpredicted outcome or the undesired outcome because we said well That’s like a portal right it it’s a portal through which doubt can pour and it’s the thing that makes the irrelevant Relevant to get and so that’s why I use this little Diagram it’s like oh, oh, that’s a that’s a fear face roughly speaking And I put all those stripes on it to indicate that it’s not just fear. It’s preparation for all sorts of different For all sorts of different perceptions and all sorts of different Motivational states so imagine what happens when something knocks you back on your heels It’s like not only does your body prepare But simultaneously with all that preparation all sorts of fantasies are generated like and what they are is all sorts of alternative worlds well Why did this happen you go back into your past and you say well? Here’s one route well? Here’s another route Here’s another route. Here’s another route. Here’s another route like I don’t know what I did wrong I don’t know what anybody did wrong, but there’s something back there that someone did wrong It can take people years to sort that out and so those fantasies are all generated and then the same thing happens with the future It’s like well. What does this mean? Well could mean this it could mean that it could mean I’m getting divorced it could mean I’m losing my house it could mean I’ll never talk to my kids again It could mean that my career is going to collapse Right or maybe I’ll get be able to get out of this stupid job that I’ve always hated and something better will happen All at the same time so that’s that’s the response to anomaly and The reason you respond that way is because you’re no longer where you thought you were Okay, so there’s a simple way of looking at it So what what does an unpredicted or anomalous event mean and I think this is this is maybe the most important thing The most important theme of the entire class might be what does an un predicted or undesired? Outcome mean the only thing that would be equally important is what should you do about it? But we’ll start with what it means and the answer is well You don’t know what it means it could mean anything and that’s a strange category right the category of anomalous events Contains indefinite possibility, so what the hell do you do about that? Well you prepare to do a variety of things you can simplify it and say well. It’s half threat Because something bad might happen and it’s half promise because something good might happen Okay, so that’s a good way of thinking about it’s a portal all of a sudden instead of the thing being irrelevant the thing is ambivalent It contains some slice of all possible meanings positive and negative okay, so you’re trying to sort that out That’s partly why it’s so stressful too And anger is a good response to that because anger is partly a it’s partly an advanced emotion So it’s got a positive emotion element, which is why anger can be righteous You know, but it’s got a negative element to its negative emotion and positive emotion at the same thing same time So it’s like the canonical stress emotion So but it’s very hard on people anger. It’s very psychologically demanding So I started with that model, and then I developed it into this model, which I like better so You’re moving from you haven’t seen this because it’s not in the book Moving from point a to point b and you’re using your actions your known actions to get there Okay, and what happens you you run into an anomaly and it’s like a hole. It’s a hole through the map It’s like a hole is burned in it or something like that and the map’s no longer relevant And so what happens while your positive emotion systems are activated or disinhibited? that’s a better way of thinking about it and your Negative emotion systems are disinhibited and what might those be well in positive emotion you have hope and interest in exhilaration and curiosity and confidence and in the negative emotional space you have anxiety and fear and hurt and Anger and guilt and shame and disappointment and disgust like there’s quite a stacking of emotions And you don’t know which of those is going to be useful and relevant and so It all emerges at the same time Now one of the Questions that was being begged. Let’s say by this discussion was the idea of The relationship between these frames of reference to one another I’m going to describe that relationship Because one of the things that I want to Describe to you is how you determine how upset you should be when something anomalous happens because it’s really hard to figure out Right so because well you see this often, especially if you’re unsophisticated in in dispute settlement with an intimate partner Every little bump in the relationship is the potential dissolution of the entire relationship. That’s actually why people get married You know just so you know Because this is built into marital vows I’m not leaving Ever no matter what it’s like okay Well that definitely puts a boundary around our arguments right because I can’t say every time you manifest one of your flaws Which you’re likely to do just as often as me well enough of this It’s like that’s horrible man if your whole life is well every time you get out of line. I’m out of here It’s like how the hell are you first of all you’re not going to admit to ever doing anything wrong Second you’re going to be on your You’re like a like a scared cat the entire relationship because well who knows it could just come to an end at any moment It’s like you know people say well if you’re if the possibility of divorce is open it makes you free It’s like yeah, that’s what you want. You want to be free. Eh really really So you can’t predict anything. That’s what you’re after It’s a vow and it says look And it says look I know that you’re trouble Me too So we won’t leave No matter what happens well, that’s a hell of a vow, but that’s why it’s a vow right That’s why you take it in front of a bunch of people. That’s why it’s supposed to be a sacred act It’s like what’s the alternative? What’s the alternative? Everything is mutable and changeable at any moment Well go ahead you live you live your life like that and see what you’re like when you’re 50 Jesus it’s dismal two or three divorces your family’s fragmented. You’ve got no continuity of narrative It’s and it’s not good for the kids not by any stretch of the imagination and so it’s a form of Voluntary enslavement I suppose but it’s also equivalent to the adoption of a responsibility and there’s more to it than that If you can’t run away, then you can solve your problems because it might be okay. Well, i’m stuck with you So how about we fix things? Because the alternative is we’re going to be in a boxing match for the next 40 years That’s the alternative So and you think you’re going to fix problems without something like that hanging over your head There isn’t a chance you’ll just avoid them because that’s what people do It’s really hard to solve problems, especially in a relationship We’re having a fight and I find out that it’s you know, because you’re you were abused by your uncle when you were five or some Goddamn thing, you know, it’s like It’s very frequent that that sort of thing happens you there’s the partner your partner is You know manifesting some weird anomalous behavior. You just can’t make heads or tails of it It doesn’t seem related to what you’re doing at all. They don’t want to talk about it And so as soon as you bring it up, they get mad And then you bring it up again They even get madder and they tell you that you’re not going to talk about that or they’re going to leave And so maybe you’re really really persistent because you’re kind of a son of a bitch and then they break down and cry You know and then they have this horrible memory that comes flooding forward that’s completely you don’t know what to do with it And then you have to sort it out. So you think you’re going to do that unless there’s a good reason You have to know we better sort this out and we’re going to be carrying it around for the next 40 years That maybe is enough motivation. So you’ll actually try hard to solve a problem. It’s a lot easier to say well Sorry, we’re not going there. But then good. You’ll have it every day every day every goddamn day for the rest of your life Anyways back to this. All right, so What’s the relationship between your frames of reference? Well, we can we can Well, we let’s do it this way. Let’s see if I can think of a good of a good example Why did you get up this morning? Okay, why why did you want to come to class? To This class, okay. So why do you want to come this is a serious question. Why did you want to come to class? to To get the knowledge that is going to be That is something i’m going to be tested on. Okay. Okay. Is there is there any Reason other than the testing that you came to class? It’s okay you can stand this is not a trap you can say whatever you want i’m just they’re just they’re just straight questions um Okay, so let’s say no for the time being or not for reasons that you can immediately bring to mind, okay Why does the test matter? For the degree. Okay. Why is why do you care about the degree? To get a job. Okay, whose decision was it that you took the degree that you’re taking? Yours, okay. Did your parents have any influence on that? No, no, okay. Okay. What job are you after? Clinical clinical psychologist, why do you want to do that? Again, you don’t i’m gonna question you till you run out of answers. You will run out of answers So if this is the time that’s fine. Why do you want to why do you want to do clinical psychology? To help people to help people. Okay. Okay. Why is that more important to you than making money? Because it helps me enjoy how I’m doing. It sort of makes me happy to see other people get over their problems. Okay. Okay. All right. Good. Good Well, that’s pretty good. You you had lots of answers. So sometimes you can run people out of answers with about three questions so, all right, so Small action Perception nested in larger action perception nested in larger action perception all the way out to Well till you run out of answers fundamentally, right? So and that’s where at the edge where you run out of answers, that’s where metaphysics takes over Because there’s you’re not in a rational domain anymore. You’re in a metaphysical domain at that point And so you have implicit assumptions that you don’t even know about that are working on on on the fringes And we’ll talk about that a little bit. Okay, so so then We could take a category like We’ll do a micro analysis the same way so you’re at home And you’re uh tickling the baby All right. So we’ll note first that’s not an abstraction, right? There’s an actual baby and you’re moving your fingers. And so that’s not Just an abstract conceptualization. It’s it’s also where your consciousness ends You’re tickling the baby, but you don’t know how you’re doing it. You don’t know the musculature You don’t know how to manipulate the little organs and everything you can just do it So bang you’re out of the perceptual domain at that point it grounds out in voluntary action All right, so you’re tickling the baby What are you doing when you’re tickling the baby? Well, you’re making the baby laugh. Okay, that’s one way you’re playing with the baby Okay, so fine That’s a subset of the activity play with baby and you can play peekaboo with the baby You can tickle the baby you can clean the baby those and all of that can be part of playing And you might say well, what are you doing when you’re playing with a baby and you say well, i’m taking care of my family And fine and then you think well what what are you doing when you’re taking care of your family and you might say well I’m being a good parent and then you might say well, what am I doing when i’m being a good parent? You might say well, i’m being a good person And then you could say well, why should you be a good person? But we won’t go any farther than that. It’s sort of because you can see that that’s sort of the in some sense That’s an ultimate level of abstraction Okay, so You could what do you do? Someone comes up to you and you’re tickling the baby and you say well i’m being a good person they ask What are you doing? I’m being a good person. It’s like it’s a bit Dis disjointed it isn’t what the person would expect as an answer they’d expect something more local But it’s still true. And so what’s interesting is that when you’re doing something That’s What well I would say worthwhile That’s probably the right way of thinking about it. You’re doing a whole bunch of things simultaneously And you’re not really aware of all those things But you are in some sense, you know, because if the person someone might come along and say well What kind of idiot tickles a baby like that? It’s like well, what have they said? Well, they’ve kind of nailed you here down on the micro tickle level, but they’re sort of also Taking a pretty good crack at this high level system as well now and that’s a problem So let’s say well good parent is a subset of being a good person, but there’s all sorts of other maybe you have to be a good Partner maybe you have to be a good daughter. Maybe you have to be a good niece you know there your your your ability to function as a good person is composed of a very large number of Hierarchically nested subsystems and so when the person goes only an idiot would tickle the baby like that And they go after that you might think well how upset you should should you get and the answer is well How valid do you think their complaint is? So let’s say maybe only an idiot would tickle a baby like that and you happen to be that idiot And so well, maybe you’re not a good person And so what does that mean? It means that the map that consists of all these nested subsystems has now become unreliable And so how upset are you going to get about that? Well, you know Maybe you had a bad day at work and you’re kind of hypoglycemic and you had too much to drink the night before and so Someone says, you know, that’s not how you tickle a baby you idiot and you cry Well, why? Well, it’s a pretty high level blow And so it’s the sort of thing you want to do if you want to do if you want to hurt someone It’s not a good way to teach someone Because you teach them down at the smallest possible level the micro. No, no, you don’t tickle a baby like that You tickle a baby like this and you’re doing a good job on everything else But if you’re going to tickle a baby, this is how you go about it and the person thinks well You know, i’m doing a fairly good job But i’ve got this little thing I have to work on and maybe I can manage it and so that works And that works and you can have some sympathy for the person at the same time because you might say well I used to tickle babies like an idiot too, but you know, it’s it’s fixable and most of you is okay And that’s a nice thing to do when you’re arguing with someone you say look Here’s a bunch of things you’re doing right that are related to this that are important Here’s a small thing that maybe you could alter slightly and it would make me happy and maybe i’ll return the favor at some Point and they think oh well Uh, oh maybe oh maybe i’ll do that maybe and then they practice doing it You can give them a pat on the head and then you’re both happy about that. That really works with people it really works so Okay, so What you see is that these high-level abstractions, let’s call them ethical abstractions Are related to actions They’re related and so You can see that relationship from the good person to doing something like tickle the baby properly and then you can You can conceptualize it this way that you have this massive overarching map, which is something like the story of your life this including its extension into the future and then it consists of these Subordinate maps which can be broken down all the way down to the level of actions And so then that explains to you to some degree how you can do the impossible job of calibrating your emotional response Because roughly speaking your emotional response should be proportionate to the level that’s being assaulted by the anomaly Right if it’s way up here You you wrote your mcat because you want to go to medical school, right? And so now the envelope comes and you’re shaking away and you open and it’s like you got 25th percentile Just like a quarter of the people who take the test Well, what what does that mean? well This is sir all blown to hell that’s for sure And so god only knows how many of these things are going to go to maybe your study habits really need to be You know, you have to reconstitute yourself all the way down to the level of your habits It can be devastating news now one of the ways to protect yourself against something like that is like Don’t have one plan Right if you’re going to stake yourself on something You should throw a couple of alternative scaffolds up beside you so that you have somewhere to go you want to be a doctor Okay. Well, you could be a nurse. It’s like it’s not a doctor, but it beats cutting your throat You’re still doing 80 percent of what you wanted to do So you want to and you want to think about this during your whole life man if you’re going to take a high risk You want to scaffold yourself in other areas so that if it fails you don’t bottom doesn’t drop out and you die And it’s also very much worth thinking about with regards to setting up your life in general. It’s like If you concentrate solely on your career You can get a long way in your career And I would say that that’s a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do That that’s all they do they work like 70 80 hours a week. They go flat out on their career They’re staking everything on the small probability of exceptional status in a narrow domain But it’s it’s hard on them. They don’t have a life. It’s very difficult for them to have a family They don’t have a life. It’s very difficult for them to have a family They don’t know how to take any leisure activity like they get very one-dimensional now It may be that that unidimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at one thing Right because if you’re going to be something like a genius level mathematician and you want to do that for or a scientist say It’s like you’re in your lab. You’re in your lab all the time. You’re working 70 hours a week or 80 hours a week You’re smart. You’re dedicated. You’re Unidimensional and that’s how you get to beat all the other people who are doing that. It’s the only way But the problem is you don’t get a life now if you love being a scientist and you have that kind of Focus of mind. Well, first of all, you’re a rare person and second you’re going to pay for it but fine more power to you, but but it’s a It’s a risky business to do that you sacrifice a lot for it, you know, and I would say most often If you’re speaking about having a healthy life, that isn’t what you do You spread yourself out more so, you know, you have a family You have some things that you do outside of work that are meaningful to you and useful You you have a network of friends um That that those three things alone are four things alone are plenty to keep you well oriented and then if one of those things collapses You know everything doesn’t go now the the price you pay for that is the more you strive to optimize that The less likely you are to be fantastically successful at any single one of them But you might have a very you know, if you consider your life as a whole That might be a winning strategy. One of the things Carl Jung said I really like this He thought that men Went after perfection and when women went after wholeness. So they’re different. They’re different Value they’re different. There’s something different at the top of the value hierarchy So perfection would be Stake it all on one thing and look for radical success Not all not that all men do that because they don’t but we’re talking about extremes At least with regards to the men that do that the wholeness idea is more like well, I want I want it’s like I want one thing in my life to be 150 percent Or I want five things in my life to be 80 percent well There’s a lot more richness in a life where you have five things operating at 80 percent But you’re not operating in any of at any of them at 150 percent so and I really believe this because i’ve watched men and women go through their careers now for a long period of time and one of the things that There’s lots of things that produce this But one of the things that i’ve noticed is that mostly women in their 30s bail out of unidimensional careers They won’t do them They won’t they won’t put in the 80 hours a week that they would have to put in in order to dominate that particular area and it isn’t the reason that they won’t do it is because they decide it’s not worth it and no wonder because Why would that be worth it? You have to ask yourself that It’s like well, you want to be an outstanding scientist. It’s like, okay Really? Really? That’s what you want because that means that’s what you do You know, you’re competing with other people, you know, they’re smart. They’re hard working And if you want to be at the top you have to be smarter and work harder than any of them and working hard means Working long hours. I mean it also means working diligently, but in in the final analysis It’s also an additive issue If i’m smart and hard working and I can crank out for 70 hours a week and you do it for 30 It’s like in two years. I’m so far ahead of you. You will never ever catch up so so Anyways, and I think partly maybe part of the reason too that women are oriented that way more than men I think there’s two reasons is one is Socio-economic status does not make women more attractive on the mating market But it does make men more attractive and the second is women’s time frame is compressed Right because guys can always say well i’ll have kids later and they can say that till they’re like 80 Whereas women it’s like no way man You got to get it. You got to get it together by the time you’re let’s say 40 But really probably by 35, but definitely by 40 because otherwise it ain’t happening and that’s bloody dreadful Like the most unhappy people you ever see No No One of the common routes to extreme unhappiness is to want children and not have them. I wouldn’t recommend that You know you see couples who were in their 30s one couple in three over the age of 30 has fertility problems That’s defined as an inability to conceive after one year of trying One in three So it’s worth thinking about because people are very very unhappy if they want to have kids and then they can’t man You’re in the medical mill for 10 years if that’s if that’s what happens to you. So, okay. So anyways back to this I think what i’ll do What time it is it is it because i’d have to open up a whole new can of worms So to speak to do the next part So I think actually what i’m going to do is just recap what we did and then stop or maybe we can have some questions Or maybe we can call it an early day. Okay. So what what is the fundamental issue here? What did we discuss today? All right, so you’re in a frame And we’ve laid out its characteristics. It has a goal in it. It has a current position in it It has rules for operating within it it governs your perceptions, which is a really critical thing to understand and While governing your perceptions, it’s it tells you what’s useful to you and what gets in your way But most importantly it tells you what you don’t have to pay attention to it So as long as your damn frame is functional You can ignore most of the world and that means your stress level is way lower than it would normally be Okay, so Perception motivation all of that’s integrated into those frames and then the emotional element comes out in that with when you’re within a frame things that move you forward and validate the frame are positive and things that get in your way and Invalidate the frame are negative and then the next issue is well If your frame is invalidated exactly what does that mean? And you can’t answer that without thinking about the hierarchy of frames because if you’re lucky it just means your frame needs a minor Alteration that would be equivalent to Piagetian assimilation in some sense right you can stay in the frame. You just make a small adjustment I think the piagetian distinction between assimilation and accommodation Is Technically inaccurate because it’s a continuum right I mean if I if I want to grab your pen I have a little frame that will enable me to do that you say well I’m staying within the frame to move that out of the way But actually I’m not what I’m doing is doing a very I’m doing a small micro revolution in the frame Moving that to pick that up and so It’s I think accommodation. There’s no Hard distinction between assimilation and accommodation. It’s a continuum So you’d say well if the top end of your map gets blown out that requires accommodation And if it’s just a little micro change at the bottom that’s assimilation But there’s no there’s no real difference between this except for scale and there’s kind of a continual scale not an absolute dichotomy so okay, so anyways back to the back to the emotion Something happens and it isn’t what you wanted And it isn’t what you wanted what does that mean well? It could mean anything what you do is you start trying to micro adjust the frame at the highest level of resolution But then you might find that you can’t do that so you have to jump up to the next one You have to jump up to the next one you have to jump up to the next one And each time you do that the psychophysiological cost increases so Okay, so so we talked about the cost end of the spectrum and then we also talked about the engagement end of the spectrum and so the idea would be well if you’re If you’re very much engaged say in Let’s go to that again If you find it very engaging to play with your baby Then you might be doing it in a way that’s indicating that you’re taking good care of your family That you’re being a good parent and that you’re being a good person all simultaneously When there’s rich meaning in that and you’re the systems that orient you with regards to meaning are saying look you’re doing this Microaction in a way that benefits the maintenance and maybe even the expansion of all the frames that exist above it And that’s that’s that’s exactly what you want you want to be doing that all the time if you can and so that implies that you want to delineate out a pretty Well developed value system so that you’re not acting at odds with yourself And you also want to have that integrated within the broader society so that society isn’t existing towards you as A continual obstacle in making your life miserable so Okay Good questions Any of that not make sense or do you have any objections to it? I don’t know It’s funny we It’s funny. I mentioned the word matter, you know, because things are made out of matter or maybe they’re made out of what matters But the word object is the same thing You could say that the world is made out of objects or you could say that the world is made out of what objects? and Both of those both of those weirdly enough are they’re equally true in some sense question um Yes No, it’s the serotonin system in all likelihood so serotonin seems so the question was Positive emotions mediated by dopamine When you’re advancing towards something say or when you have a cue that something good is about to happen What is the system that mediates positive emotion at the satiation level? Yeah What is the circuit for that? Yep, okay. Okay. Well, let’s start with the satiation Issue that seems mostly regulated by serotonin The opiate issue is there are other forms of specific reward that don’t seem to be merely motivated or merely underpinned by Dopamine and the opiate system would be one of those there’s an oxytocin system as well so There are other biochemical systems that are involved in more specific forms of reward but the thing that’s common among Instances that make it appear that you’re moving forward is the dopaminergic element roughly speaking and then One of the things that happens if you’re higher in serotonin because you’re more dominant is that you’re more satiated all the time That’s why people who are low in the dominance hierarchy with decreased levels of serotonin Are more impulsive and also more emotionally dysregulated. They’re more impulsive because Hey, you take your positive thing when you can get it And so they’re they’re more dissatisfied they’re more looking for anything that will produce a positive Outcome and then they’re also more likely to experience Diffused negative emotion Partly because their serotonin systems are lower indicating their tenuous status in the dominance hierarchy Meaning that everything they do that’s uncertain is far more dangerous So this is also why it’s very difficult often when you’re trying to treat someone who’s depressed because you could say there’s not much difference between being depressed And existing in the biochemical state that being at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy would produce In fact, they’re the same thing Well, then the question is are you depressed or are you just at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy? Because those are not like the the symptomatology is Very very similar, but the cause and the cure are not the same You know because you might be at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy because you’re just everything about your life is ruined So and of course you’re suffering are you depressed sir, no not exactly you just have nowhere to go So Other questions yes I’m wondering why people pursue motivations that don’t produce this resonance of meaning in this hierarchy that you talked about Okay, so the question is why don’t why do people pursue rewards that don’t produce this resonance? They don’t have a value hierarchy. So pleasure island It’s a good example Those kids that were brought there were lost So they didn’t they didn’t have anywhere to go they didn’t have an identity so they default to local pleasure And that’s better than none. Although the problem with local pleasure well as the narrative made clear is that You better look out if you’re impulsive because it’s going to kick back on you hard. And the reason is You’re only considering the immediate time frame And the problem is is that things propagate across all the time frames And so just because something works really well this second cocaine for example Doesn’t mean that it’s a tenable solution to the class of all problems so usually often people pursue Local pleasure because that’s the best they can imagine. It’s the best they’ve been taught. They don’t see another alternative So it could be ignorance. It can be they don’t want to adopt the responsibility because part of the problem with Working at every level of the hierarchy simultaneously is that it’s it’s Well, it’s like dancing to a very complex waltz. Let’s say You have to be paying attention to a very large number of things simultaneously and doing things right. It requires responsibility and so you know that’s It’s a pain It’s a weight part of the reason people drink alcohol is to get rid of their responsibility. I mean that’s well, you know You hear people drink because they have problems. It’s like yeah. Yeah, no Some people drink because they’re anxious and alcoholics drink because they’re in withdrawal But young people drink because they’re sick and tired of being responsible because it’s annoying It’s like so i’ll drink enough. I won’t care about the medium to long-term consequences because alcohol that’s exactly what alcohol does It doesn’t make you ignorant of the medium to long-term consequences But it makes you not care about them and partly it’s because it dampens anxiety So it dampens anxiety leaves your positive emotion circuits intact So then you can go out there and do stupid fun things and that’s like that’s a party really. Let’s go do stupid fun things That’s a party but The medium to learn long-term consequences are It’s risky It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it’s risky So yeah, they don’t know better That’s the answer I would say so yes, I can’t fully well you’re talking about responsibility It seems like that Bounds a person to a certain frame And that’s why conservatives and liberals don’t get along Because conservatives do bind themselves to a particular frame They’re conscientious and low in openness And the liberals say doesn’t that just bind you to a particular frame and it’s like yeah, that’s it does and that’s a problem so yes But in terms of being aware of the multiple levels It takes within a frame it takes a certain amount of tolerance of the unbearable present For that to like reach the edge of that frame to force a person to see a different frame. Is that something that Yes, and that’s that’s actually where I stopped today Because that’s that’s exactly right so you’re it’s good because both the questions you asked indicated that you’re sort of at the next step in the In the logic process because you asked about the relationship between these frames with with you know in relationship to one another And that is the next issue. It’s like something about responsibility and individuality that i’m curious about like responsibility implies A connection to other people. Okay. Well, what are the things one of the things we are going to talk about in the class is Is how you address the problem that you just described which is that? This is the peter pan story roughly speaking is peter pan is this magical boy Pan means pan is the god of everything roughly speaking, right? And so it’s not an accident that he has the name pan And he’s the boy that won’t grow up and he’s magical. Well, that’s because children are magical. They can be anything They’re nothing but potential And peter pan doesn’t want to give that up. Why? Well, he’s got some adults around him, but the main adult is captain hook Well, who the hell wants to grow up to be captain hook? First of all, you’ve got a hook Second you’re a tyrant And third you’re chased by the dragon of chaos with the clock in its stomach, right the crocodile. It’s already got a piece of you Well, that’s what happens when you get older time has already got a piece of you and eventually it’s got a taste for you And eventually it’s going to eat you and so hook is so traumatized by that that he can’t help But be a tyrant and then peter pan looks at Traumatized hook and says well, no, i’m not sacrificing my childhood for that. So that’s fine except he ends up king of lost boys In neverland well neverland doesn’t exist and who the hell wants to be king of the lost boys And he also sacrifices the possibility that help a real relationship with a woman because that’s wendy, right and she’s kind of conservative middle-class London dwelling girl. She wants to grow up and have kids and have a life. She accepts her mortality. She accepts her maturity Peter pan has to content himself with tinkerbell She doesn’t even exist. She’s like She’s like the fairy of porn She doesn’t exist She’s the substitute for the real thing and so but the dichotomy that you’re talking about it’s very tricky because There’s a sacrificial element in maturation right, you have to sacrifice the pluripotentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame And the question is well, why would you do that? Well, one reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not. You can either choose your damn limitation Or you can let it take you unaware when you’re 30 or even worse when you’re 40 and then That is not a happy day You see I see people like this and I think it’s more and more common in our culture because people can put off mat maturity Without suffering an immediate penalty, but all that happens is the penalty accrues And then when it finally hits it just wallops you because when you’re 25 you can be an idiot It’s no problem even when you’re out in a job search Out in a job search. It’s like well, you don’t have any experience and you’re kind of clueless. It’s yeah Yeah, you’re young, you know, it’s no problem. We can that’s what young people are like, but they’re full of potential Okay. Well now you’re the same person at 30 It’s like people aren’t so thrilled about you at that point It’s like what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, i’m just as clueless as I was when I was 22. It’s yeah, but you’re not 22 You’re an old infant Right, and that’s an ugly thing an old infant so The part of the reason you choose your damn sacrifice because The sacrifice is inevitable But at least you get to choose it and then there’s something that’s that’s even more complex than that in some sense is that The problem with being a child is that all you are is potential and it’s really low resolution You could be anything but you’re not anything So then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship Roughly speaking and then you become at least you become something And when you’re something that makes the world open up to you again, you know, like if you’re a really good plumber Then you end up being far more than a plumber, right? You end up being a good employer not not that plumbers i’m not putting plumbers down. It’s like more power to plumbers They’ve saved more lives than doctors so hygiene, right so You know if you’re a really good plumber Well, then you have some employees you run a business you you you make you you train some other people you Enlarge their lives you’re kind of a pillar of the community you you have your family it’s you can once you pass through that narrow Training period which narrows you and constricts you and develops you at the same time Then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hell at hand And jung talked about that. He thought that the proper Part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to rediscover The child that you left behind as you were apprenticing And so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time very very smart. Well, he was very very smart So that’s very wise Very wise thing to know so Yep sacrifice We’ll talk more about that too. You get to pick your damn sacrifice That’s all you don’t get to not make one You’re sacrificial whether you want to be or not That’s a good thing to know as well so even though it’s rather you know, it’s a rough thing to figure out but other questions I have one if no one else. Okay that thing you just said about noticing it more and more and people make it into their 20. Yeah What do you think about that? Where do you think that comes from in terms of Culture we live in? I think universities facilitate it Because you can go to university to not be something Instead of going to university to be something and and that’s it’s pleasure island And the price you pay for it, especially in the u.s is debt And you’re enticed into it because the administrators can pick your pocket So they they rob your future self while allowing you to pretend that you have an identity right Very nasty and you can’t declare bankruptcy with your student loans in the u.s. It’s indentured servitude And it is pleasure. It’s precisely pleasure island. It’s exactly that And so tuition fees have shot way out of control And part of the reason that universities don’t make more demands on their students And let them get away with all the things they let them get away with is because they’re basically why the hell would you chase them out? They’re a hundred thousand dollars or more So they can do whatever they want as long as you get to sell them to the salt mines right So and you know It’s not the only reason because the other thing that’s happened is that the rate of technological transformation is so fast now And the rate of turnover of things is that it’s it is genuinely harder for people who are say 18 to 20 When I was a kid roughly speaking the kind of rough patch for for for life was probably 14 to 17 something like that Now it’s I think it’s 18 to 25 something like that and I I think the reason for that is is that All the jobs that the bloody hippies complained about being doomed to in the 1960s have now disappeared their problem was oh my god I’m going to go have to work for a corporation and get a salary for the rest of my life You know and then i’ll just end up in it with a pension and that’ll be my whole life It’s like well, it seems like a lot better deal than an endless round of part-time starbucks jobs so You know some of it is that it’s it’s just it’s it’s there’s a space now in our culture that That is lacking for people to make that transformation from from adolescence into adulthood and so it’s just It’s it’s the cost of that is forestalled. It’s not a good thing It’s not a good thing Well the there’s a couple of problems with the degrees is that everyone has one that’s the first one Which is so because scarcity matters, obviously The second thing is is that the match between the degree in the workplace has become less and less self-evident You know what should happen when you go to university is you should learn how to think and formulate arguments You should learn to think speak and write that’s what the humanities are for they’re to make you dangerous Right because if you can think and speak and write you’re deadly in a complex job You’re exactly what’s necessary, but if you don’t have that it’s like what the hell good is the degree So, I mean degree in english literature doesn’t prepare you for a job It could make you think write and speak which prepares you for any complex job and that’s what’s supposed to happen but Increasingly, I think That doesn’t happen And the employers are waking up to this very rapidly So and they’re I mean they’ve already known that most for most complex positions. They have to train their people Now they’re thinking well Why do I have to bother with the degree if i’m going to train them if it isn’t bringing anything of value You see this in even in fields like law when I went to do a debate at queens university three weeks ago I think they couldn’t get anybody to debate me You know they the guy had to play devil’s advocate. We were talking about bill c16. I thought Jesus that’s so pathetic I’m talking about legal matters and I meant the one greatest in one of the greatest universities in the west You know, I mean it’s in the top 200. Let’s say Um, I couldn’t get someone to argue with the stupid psychology professor about law Had to get a devil’s advocate. And so one of the things that was really disheartening talking to the students was They told me four or five of them. They’re not learning a damn thing in law. It’s all social justice nonsense it’s like well Good, that’ll do in the profession. It’s being done in any ways because lawyers are being replaced by automation And so a lot of what they do is dig up information It’s like well, you can do that on your own and forms are proliferating like mad So the law school should be teaching you to be a monster You better be But you come out you’re concerned with social welfare. Oh god It’s like well, there’s just nothing to that It’s like you come out and say you’re you want to be nice to people. Well, that’s nice. Good You go right ahead it’s like i’ll go find someone who can do something and you can go be nice to people and see How effective that is? so It’s a lot of things that are conspiring in the same direction People don’t have to get married to have sex So we have no idea what that’s going to do although we know one thing it’s done is the only people to get married now are rich Right, which is another thing that’s really comical because the feminist idea in the 60s was that marriage was an oppressive Oppressive patriarchal institution. It’s like okay fine. Then why do only rich women get married now? Because that is the case and so for poorer women the dissolution of marriage has been an absolute catastrophe They are so screwed Because they have kids So they’re working they’ve got their 90-hour work week man. That’s for sure They’re much less attractive to potential mates so they get low quality men often parasitical and predatory so They often have like jobs in retail for example, which are just dreadful You don’t even know what your schedule is going to be you get paid hardly anything You know, it’s really but if you know most of the women who who who are outspoken feminists are on the Successful end of the socioeconomic distribution their university students or people like that. They don’t even know any poor women So they have no idea what their lives are like and you would never know because they’re at home working You know, they’re either at their horrible job or they’re at home slaving away with their kids So it’s not like they’re out there telling you what’s wrong with them so It’s a way to fix this like ita so sometimes I see my students a lack of Critical thinking like when you teach a language. It’s almost like it’s like a mathematical problem in a logic Association with contribution of verbs and I feel sometimes they’re locking in this basic knowledge of how to put two and two together You know two and two is four. The best way the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write And I made this little thing that I put online. It’s I don’t know if maybe it is it in the psych 434 website Did I post that rubric for essay writing? But I don’t think I actually went through I think but it is still on 430 that’s how I is it not on 434 Is that not working? Oh, yeah, but I still found it. It’s still in 430. Oh, okay. Well, there’s an essay. Oh, that’s too bad It’s not on the psych 434 website even Because I updated it. Anyways, I have this guide to writing that’s that if it isn’t on the 434 website it is definitely on the 430 website and It steps people through the process of writing Because what’s happened now? it’s very hard to teach people to write because it’s unbelievably time intensive and Like writing marking a good essay. That’s really easy. Check a You did everything right right marking a bad essay. Oh my god, the words are wrong. The phrases are wrong The sentences are wrong. They’re not ordered right in the paragraphs. The paragraphs aren’t coherent and the whole thing makes no sense so Trying to tell the person what they did wrong. It’s like well you did everything wrong. Everything about this essay is wrong well that’s not helpful either you have to Find the few little things they did half right and you have to teach them what they did wrong. It’s really expensive and so what I did with this rubric was try to address that from the production side instead of the grading side But the best thing you can do is teach people to write because there’s no difference between that and thinking And one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that No one ever tells students why they should write something. It’s like well you have to do this assignment Well, why are you writing? Well, you need the grade. It’s like no You need to learn to think Because thinking makes you act effectively in the world thinking makes you win the battles you undertake and those could be battles for good things If you can think and speak and write you are absolutely deadly Nothing can get in your way So that’s why you learn to write it’s like When I can’t believe that people aren’t just told that it’s it’s it’s like It’s the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with and I mean I know lots of people who’ve been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life I mean those people you don’t want to have an argument with them. They’ll just slash you into pieces And not in a malevolent way It’s like if you’re going to make your point and they’re going to make their point you better have your points Organized because otherwise you are going to look like and be an absolute idiot You are not going to get anywhere And if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation if you can speak to people if you can lay out a proposal God people give you money they give you opportunities you have influence That’s what you’re at university for and so that’s what you do is you that’s you’re in you’re in english, right you’re Yeah new languages anyways, it’s like yeah Teach people to be articulate Because that’s the most dangerous thing you can possibly be So and that’s motivating if people know that it’s like well, why are you learning to write because you’re here’s your sword Here’s your m16 right? Here’s your bulletproof vest Like you learn how to use them But It’s just it’s an endless mystery to me why that isn’t made self-evident So that’s the sort of thing that can drive you mad trying to sort out It’s like people are there’s a there’s a conspiracy to bring people into the education system to make them weaker so I guess that keeps the competition down Maybe that’s one way of thinking about it if your students are stupid. They’re not going to challenge you So other questions Disagreements I mean it’s a pretty harsh indictment of the university system When you were talking about marriage You kind of made a point that If you stay Which is Of course a really good point you you have more probabilities to get to a solution. Yeah But that is also like if it’s also assumed that you will always get to a solution yes true Yes, and some and yes, yes True well, you know there used to be before the divorce laws were really liberalized there were there you could sue for irreconcilable differences And and sometimes people do find themselves in that situation. It’s like one person wants children and the other person doesn’t It’s like that’s a tough one It’s a tough one to negotiate so I’m certainly not saying that Just because you lock yourself into a like two cats in a barrel that That will make you solve your problems because problems are hard to solve and sometimes you can’t solve them I was just pointing out what the cost of of leaving the back door What the cost of leaving the back door open is and it’s a big cost And you know one of the things I see too is that people’s identities fragment Increasingly across time, you know one of the things that you have as you age Is something like the continuity of your life? You know you you have someone that you’re with you’ve tied your story together with theirs You have children maybe they have children it’s like there’s this continual payoff so to speak in quality that you obtain from staying within that Frame and you can jump out of that and I suppose to some degree that that provides freedom But it isn’t obvious to me that it does that for people but you’re assuming that One specific relationship it’s uh high quality In many of them no, but but but it’s also the case that sequential relationships are unlikely to be that So look i’m not i’m not making i’m definitely not making a utopian case for marriage So I would like to hear the case for divorce From you because it’d be really interesting right? It’s a strong point But at the same time I think there are relationships that are really low quality Yeah, and if we If that’s the case then insisting on them Uh cannot be good. Yeah. Well, that’s that’s definitely the alternative argument and of course There are strong things to be said on both sides but See there’s some there’s some additional problems with divorce that people don’t really grasp When they’re young Like the idea that you can be divorced once you have children. That’s kind of a stupid idea because you can’t You can you can you can find? a limited substitute for your initial freedom But if you if you have kids and you try to get divorced the probability that that’s going to demolish your life is very very high First of all, it’s incredibly expensive So one or both of you is going to come out of that poor and Your market value has declined let’s say you’re the woman who takes the kids Your market value has declined radically you’re going to be poorer The man he’s just a scroot Because he is now an indentured servant and there’s no escape from it so it’s and it’s not so bad if you can negotiate a peaceful separation and some people can but Lots of times if you have a terrible relationship, it’s not like negotiating a peaceful separation is all that easy But if you’re at each other’s throats Good luck to you. I think it’s roughly equivalent to having non-fatal cancer It is not pleasant. It’s a 10-year process 15-year process It’ll cost you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it’ll tear a big chunk out of your life And also it will really disrupt your relationship with your kids And you know you you bring kids into a step-parent family they do not do as well Step-parents are not as good parents as biological parents and the data on that is clear now Obviously there are exceptions because there are terrible biological parents and there are wonderful step-parents, but if you look in aggregate It’s not that easy to care for children You need everything You can binding you to them and if they’re someone else’s children Mostly they get in the way of the person that you love right Well, if i’m let’s say you have a child i’ll be right out. Let’s say you have a child and I want to go out with you Every second you spend with that child is the second you don’t spend with me And and there’s going to be a price for that I’m not going to be happy about that and and if I have a child you’re going to feel exactly the same way You might say well, no, I love children. It’s like yeah. Yeah, sure Sure you do I doubt it you might love your child And and you know, it’s pretty specific the way that people love children So and the rate of abuse for kids in step-parent families is way higher than it is in biological families. There’s not even any comparison so anyways